See You Next Tuesday

Jane Fonda is again effectively stirring up trouble, this time for women's rights and the free use of language. Cracks me up. Here's an excerpt about the latest "incident" from the British Times Online:

NBC, the American television network, has been forced to apologise to viewers after the veteran actress and political activist Jane Fonda used the C-word on a live show.

Fonda made what the network called "a slip" when she appeared on the Today Show with the playwright Eve Ensler to discuss her ground-breaking play The Vagina Monologues, in which women talk about their sexuality using frank language about their bodies and references to genitalia.

The play has spawned a movement called V-Day that campaign[s] to stop violence against women and is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Fonda, 70, is one of the leading lights in that movement.
On yesterday's show, Fonda explained how she first heard of The Vagina Monologues.

“I was asked to do a monologue called ’C***’, and I said, ’I don’t think so. I’ve got enough problems,” she said. “Then I came to New York to see Eve and it changed my life” . . . . .

US broadcast standards and practices bar the use of the C-word and NBC, which is owned by General Electric, was quick to disassociate itself from Fonda's use of it, despite an appeals court ruling tossing out an indecency finding for "fleeting obscenities".

(Source: Times Online, "NBC says sorry for Jane Fonda C-word 'slip,'" 2/15/2008)


Ms. Fonda is no stranger to controversy. Here she is in North Vietnam during the Year of the Rat, 1972. Detractors quickly labeled her "Hanoi Jane."


Fonda has two Academy Awards to her name -- one for Klute (1971) and one for Coming Home (1978).


Fonda (b. 12/21/1937) has written a memoir -- My Life So Far (2005).

The dynamic trio from Nine to Five (1980).

Glad to know individual words still have magical power. Haha.

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.

Something Sweet

1. We seem all too aware this year of higher gas prices, petrodollars gone wild, and fat energy bills, but there have been wars over other basics, too. Take sugar, coffee, tea and spice, for instance. Empires have risen and fallen on these daily staples (formerly luxuries), which reminds me to mention an excellent little 1985 book by Sidney Mintz -- Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. A quick read through certainly gets one to thinking about commodity fetishism and raw power. Mintz takes it to the limit, showing how sugar expanded slavery and how ultra-refined "white sugar" became prized over rawer (and healthier) "brown sugar." Race, sugar and economics intertwined, whoah! Great stuff, even if one hasn't heard about the recent exploding sugar factory incident in Georgia (not incidentally named Imperial Sugar).

Oil for autos, sugar for tea and coffee, empires for elites. Let's also not forget what a delicacy chocolate was and still is.

My friends, the more one looks, the stranger the world becomes.

As far as salt goes, there are huge depositories of the stuff below Detroit. Don't look too hard at reality, though -- remember the fate of Lot's wife . . . Just toss some over your shoulder next time your shaker keels over . . .


2. Valentine's Day did not go well for everybody this year. Certainly not for 37-year old actress Bai Ling, who was rudely busted at LAX airport and charged with stealing $16 worth of goodies -- two magazines and two packs of batteries for her flight out of LA. She attributes such pitiable behavior to an abrupt breakup with some bad-timing cad . . . More, no doubt, will be revealed -- for those who really must know.

Meanwhile, I'll finish my cup of Latin American coffee. Straight, no chaser . . .

Today's Rune: Harvest.

A Sunday Kind of Love

Happy Valentine's Day, everybody! On this culturally fraught and freighted day, the only bad experiences I've had were thanks to a shrewish, ungrateful wife -- now ex-wife -- who thought flowers "too funereal" and trips to a city like Chicago "too tiresome." Those years are long out, replaced by much more fun Valentine's dates. Indeed, as the song goes, "each day is Valentine's Day." I hope readers have a simple, no-stress time of it because in the end, that's better than the alternative. Especially to the young dramatic 20-somethings -- good luck to y'all! As Dorothy Parker quipped, "I've been rich and I've been poor. Rich is better." She also sagely noted: "Brevity is the soul of lingerie."


Debbie Harry back in 1978: bring on the night . . .


Treat her well, for hell hath no fury like a woman scorned . . . Honor Blackman as Ms. Cathy Gale in The Avengers.


Dig: Diana Rigg as Ms. Emma Peel . . .

Today's Rune: Flow.

Things Fall Apart at Fifty

The river of human time keeps flowing, marked by rituals, disbelief, and wild flailings about. Last year ushered in the fiftieth anniversaries of Sputnik, On the Road, and On the Beach; this year, to the latest cycle add Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe's classic first novel (1958). Set in Nigeria and using both Western and African narrative techniques, Things Fall Apart follows the tragic arc of local leader Okonkwo as he struggles under the blows and stresses of colonialization, missionary activity, and internal conflict.

Here we are, just fifty years later, experiencing comparable pressures from -- if not outright colonization -- globalization. In the intervening time, Michigan (where I live but am not from originally) has become a socio-economic disaster where things have fallen apart and will never be the same because everything changes. Like Okonkwo, we must adapt, seek refuge, or go under.

There's much more to say about Achebe and his writing -- at some point. The Nigerian-born writer, now 77, teaches at Bard College in New York.

Yesterday's Rune: Harvest. Today's: Breakthrough.

Novel Without a Name

In one riveted sitting over the weekend, I read Duong Thu Huong / Dương Thu Hương's excellent Novel Without a Name (1995, translated into English by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson). Set in Vietnam, it shows the war through the eyes of Quan, a North Vietnamese infantry captain. The immediate narrative takes place just before the capture of Saigon in April 1975, but through memory flashes, the narrator dips back to childhood and to various episodes of his past ten years' experience as a soldier; through dreams/nightmares, it gets at the psychic and physical costs of protracted trauma. As befits the narrator's condition and the overall context, Novel Without a Name often seems hallucinatory, surreal, and horrifying -- yet is sometimes beautiful, too.

What this work gave me was a better feel for the Vietnamese and wartime deprivations. Little details stick with me -- soldiers hunting and gathering food on an almost constant basis, having to eat anything from orangatang soup (which grosses Quan out as much as it would me) to lichen. Survivors of frequent American and South Vietnamese aerial bombing, the VC and North Vietnamese are always diving for shelter in underground bunkers and rubble. They are almost always tired, hungry, sick and shell-shocked. But they keep fighting, tapping into an ancient primal resilience and a long tradition of driving out foreign invaders. Their memories are long; their endurance, mind-blowing.


This pie chart (source: http://www.rationalrevolution.net/) gives an idea of the disparity in casualties for the 1964-1975 war cycle. In the USA, we hear plenty about American casualties and very little about the Vietnamese side. This wild disparity is also reflected in books and movies released in the States. But the Vietnamese were/are not yowling faceless hordes coming out of the jungle like demons -- they were and are, believe it or not, every bit as human as anyone else. Novel Without a Name helps begin to redress the balance, and as with Yin and Yang, we do need that.

Duong Thu Huong (n. 1947), by the way, is a woman and veteran of the Vietnam-American War and the Sino-Vietnamese War. Because of her candor and independence of mind, Novel Without a Name has been banned by the Vietnamese government. In the United States where we are free to publish and read just about anything, Novel Without a Name is mostly just ignored or unheard of.

Time Out for Amy Winehouse

Had the Grammy Awards on in the background last night until Amy Winehouse appeared via London satellite broadcast. Zowie, was she worth watching . . . Won five awards for "Rehab" and Back to Black, which I first heard less than a year ago (released in the UK in 2006, in the US in 2007). First heard about her through music mavens, not radio play -- I rarely listen to FM radio anymore. Still blown away by three songs from the album: "You Know I'm No Good" (which was reinforced in the teasers for Mad Men), "Rehab," and "Back to Black." Instant classics right up there with Billie Holiday and Nina Simone standards. Hot damn, some excitement in new pop music! Am I dreaming? Hard to believe she's younger than Britney Spears . . .


With new albums, I tend to listen over and over to the songs that first grab me and only eventually get to the other tracks. Back in Black is strong all the way through, but I can't shake the powerhouse songs quite yet . . . Meanwhile, the jazzier Frank (released in the UK in 2003) was just released in the States last November. Strange how things happen like that with authors and musicians and artsits of all types . . .

Meanwhile, it's been colder than five hells in Detroit the last couple of days.

RIP to Roy Scheider (1932-2008). His acting tour de force: All That Jazz (1979).

Today's Rune: Fertility. Yesterday's: Flow.

Viva Amy Jade Winehouse!

Bonus March on Washington, DC: 1932

Great War veterans during the Great Depression want their promised "bonus pay" asap! Instead, General Douglas MacArthur goes in to clear them out with bayonets, tear gas and tanks . . .