Chanpon.org on Caroline Pover's book "Being A Broad"
Pover says she woke up one morning in 1997 with the idea to start a magazine for foreign women living in Japan. She placed an ad in the Tokyo Classifieds, a free paper, asking for women to share their experience. In September 1997 she published a 16 page black & white photocopied magazine called "Being A Broad." "I used to carry it around in my backpack," Caroline smiles, "and hand it to foreign women on the trains: 'Here! Read this!'"
"Being A Broad" grew from a black and white photocopied 'zine into a glossy 56 page distributed magazine. Publishing costs were driving her into debt so she gave it up. In the quiet phase after publishing the magazine, Pover was a hub for Foreign Women coming to Japan, regularly fielding questions over email. She had an immense rolodex of women living in Japan and a large collection of relevant resources. She figured she would pull these together and write a book.
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"The overwhelming majority of foreign women who were single in Japan, or who talked about their experience about being single here, they were not happy about the fact they were single, and they felt that it was very difficult to change that status."
So how does she advise women who are single? "If she's a single woman and she finds Japanese men attractive, it's usually a matter of understanding that that the vibes coming from the Japanese man are not going to be the vibes coming from the Western men that you might be used to dating. You need to understand that a Japanese man is probably very interested in you but probably is not showing it, in a way that you're used to." She continues, "You'll likely have to make the first move, and you might have to do that for quite a long time."
doh!
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Long, (after-the fact, not so) interesting article on fasion in Japan in the New Yorker.
Other Japanese designers address international affairs, including Kosuke Tsumura, the creator of a line called Final Home. For the past few years, a mainstay of the Final Home collection has been a long coat made from transparent nylon which looks like a quilted down coat with all the down removed. The coat is designed to serve as a final home in the case of a natural or man-made disaster, Tsumura explained to me when I went to his studio, in a far-flung commercial district of Tokyo. For warmth, you can stuff its many pockets with newspapers, or with the floppy nylon teddy bears which Final Home also sells.
"Each customer customizes the number of bears, according to the weather," Tsumura told me. "In my own coat, I wear maybe ten bears. And if you have children, they can also play with the bears and not be scared of the disaster." After the Kobe earthquake, Tsumura sent ten of his coats to the disaster-relief efforts. When I saw him in November he was contemplating making a coat-and-bear donation to the Afghan refugees. Another item available from the Final Home store is a peculiar toy machine gun, made from floppy stuffed nylon. "It is a criticism of war, because the gun is not usable," Tsumura told me. "It is an expression of a yearning for peace."
That is a bunch of crap.
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Confessions of a former celibate
A former priest, now married, thinks celibacy should no longer be an absolute condition for the priesthood.
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NYTimes: Connecticut Report Revisits Egan's Role in Settling Abuse Cases
The documents cited by the newspaper appear to support what victims and their lawyers had long publicly maintained: during his tenure as bishop, Cardinal Egan had allowed priests accused of sexually abusing children to continue to work in the Bridgeport diocese by moving them to new assignments, typically after receiving some counseling or treatment. In certain instances, the documents suggest, he removed priests only when lawsuits were filed or new reports of previous abuse were received.
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Though there appears to be no evidence to date that the accused priests committed additional acts of child sexual abuse in their new assignments, the documents suggest that Cardinal Egan and his predecessor, Bishop Walter Curtis, failed to aggressively investigate priests who had multiple complaints against them. He even returned some to work that directly involved children.
They also indicate, as had long been all but conceded, that Cardinal Egan never took the allegations of abuse to law enforcement officials, even though there has been a law in Connecticut since at least 1971 requiring members of the clergy to report cases of abuse of minors. Finally, the documents show that he did not believe many of the abuse claims and that he displayed little confidence in, or sympathy for, the people who reported them.
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NYTimes: Former Altar Boy Describes Years of Abuse, Then Years of Silence
"These people, they've been able to survive through secrecy," Mr. Serrano, 37, said. "The truth is so important and secrecy is so damaging. Not just for the people who have experienced abuse, but everyone needs to see this horrific truth for what it truly is."
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Often, though, legal experts say, victims cannot file criminal charges because statutes of limitations, which vary from state to state, have expired by the time victims are able or willing to discuss what occurred.
"That's the travesty," said Stephen C. Rubino, a lawyer from Margate City, N.J., who has represented victims in more than 300 cases of sexual abuse in about 50 dioceses.
Over the past week and a half, Mr. Rubino said, he has kept a tally of those who have telephoned his office. "Two hundred callers," he said. "And not a single one under statute."
"I'm being crushed," he said of the volume of calls. "It has broken down psychological barriers, decadeslong shells in people who now say, `I'm going to talk about this.'
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"I was talking to someone I know who's Catholic Û I mean, a dyed-in- the-wool, beat-your-chest Catholic," he said. "I asked him what he thought about what was happening in Boston. He said, `Isolated incident.' Then I told him about my situation.
"When I finished, I got up to leave. He took my hand. Said he was sorry," Mr. Serrano recalled. "I said, `Don't be sorry. Just be aware. Just be aware.' "
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MACHINE SOUL: A History Of Techno
If there is one central idea in techno, it is of the harmony between man and machine. As Juan Atkins puts it: "You gotta look at it like, techno is technological. It's an attitude to making music that sounds futuristic: something that hasn't been done before." This idea is commonplace throughout much of avant-garde 20th-century art --early musical examples include Russolo's 1913 Art of Noises manifesto and '20s ballets by Erik Satie ("Relâche") and George Antheil ("Ballet méchanique"). Many of Russolo's ideas prefigure today's techno in everything but the available hardware, like the use of nonmusical instruments in his 1914 composition, Awakening of a City.
