Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
Washington Post In the course of praising his own Goodwill Games, held this year in St. Petersburg, Russia, the spectacularly laid-back Ted Turner coolly depicts the 1972 massacre of eleven Israeli...
...If a system that exists under such severe economic restraints can manage such achievements, there is surely a lot it can teach us...
...The "girls" who were camping it up in drag were wonderful, and the one float was great...
...They are affectionate and caring, with a real sense of unity and an honest reverence for Fidel Castro...
...than they are in Germany, where the resurgence of hate groups has gotten a good deal of international press...
...So, is hate ebbing or swelling...
...This most likely will be the first and last Gay Pride Parade for all of us...
...If one is allowed to use a searchlight to attract customers shouldn't every other business be given the same right...
...Seduction and repulsion, excitement and fear, eroticism and the need to control...
...Yes, we did protest when the [sic] President Reagan tried to call ketchup a vegetable on school lunch menus, but so did George Will...
...It has almost 100-per-cent literacy...
...We heterosexuals would never do such a disgusting thing in public, and if we did, we'd be arrested on the spot...
...In the morning, I would see clusters of volunteers—government ministers, white- and blue-collar workers—heading out into the countryside to work in the fields...
...In fact, most of our staff probably don't know what the letters mean, much less what Students for a Democratic Society stood for during the 1960s...
...The reality was altogether different...
...For myself, I felt there was no horizon I could not get above or beyond in Cuba...
...the nation will need a few years' worth of statistics to answer that question...
...The news media are a giant version of National Public Radio staffed by radical feminists and balding SDS refugees calling for government action on everything from free lunches for unemployed blank-verse poets to national health insurance...
...What amazed me was how quickly you could fall in love with the economics of less...
...I mean, how many glitches did the Israelis have in Munich...
...Yet something about these tomatoes is different: Red and ripe and peeled to expose their heavily veined flesh, engorged with juice and seeds, they seem about to explode out of the confines of their black oval frames...
...There's glitches at the Olympics too...
...At first encounter with three paired works titled "Leaking"—each featuring an extreme close-up of a single luscious tomato, along with a second shot of a woman devouring one—Dunning seems to be pondering summer's bounty...
...Clearly these are no ordinary berries...
...I expected to see beautiful costumes, wonderful floats, singing and dancing reflecting the many artistic, talented members of the gay community, whom I have known and shared much of my life with...
...Nor were they intended to lure viewers to the nearest fruit stand...
...By any measure, Dunning's nude tomatoes—her human nudes notwithstanding—are the most seductive images in her show...
...The author contends that modernity has produced "the prostitute" as the other within the categorical other woman...
...But even then the answer might be a guess on account of squishy numbers...
...R. Summer is actually Eleanor Roosevelt awakened from decades of stony slumber: Last week was my first Gay Pride Parade and I was really excited to attend, because I have always had genuine respect for gays and lesbians...
...July 21, 1994] Bradenton Herald What happened in the editorial offices of a fabulous Florida gazette when the lithium ran out: We can't let this one pass...
...Glitches...
...The threat that Cuba poses to Western business interests is that it is a society that knows how to live without excess, without consumerism or commercialism...
...What costumes some did decide to wear were in very bad taste...
...If this starts a trend, I could imagine a typical Santa Barbara night in a few months where the night sky would look like a cross between Las Vegas and London during the Blitz...
...We received this week a six-page offer from publisher Ronald E. Burr to subscribe to The American Spectator, a magazine that says its mission is to print the truth...
...Congress wisely sought to measure some dimensions of the ugly, smelly river of intolerance coursing through American life when it passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990...
...They made total fools of themselves in front of tens of thousands of people...
...I am angry and very upset...
...We attended to show our respect, and in return were slapped in the face with disrespect, insulted...
...The other day the FBI issued its first report under the law...
...We have few balding persons let alone alumni of SDS...
...October 1993] Empire State Report Thus conclude two pages of idiot vaporing from someone by the name of Haywood Burns, a dean and professor at CUNY School of Law at Queens College writing for a series magisterially named "21st Century Essays": In meeting the challenge of diversity, New Yorkers must neither accentuate nor submerge our differences...
...We need to learn to accept and respect them, with an acceptance and respect that goes beyond mere tolerance, to an appreciation and even a celebration of both the riches and strength we all bring one to another, and of the great unity that is possible in diversity...
...Boy...
...It's too early to say...
...August 2, 1994] Santa Barbara News-Press How one of business's "selfish monsters" elicited Visions of Hell in the mind of William R. Noack, stargazer: The other night the entire sky of Santa Barbara was lit up for hours by four enormous searchlights advertising one small private business south of the freeway...
...July 19, 1994] Tatler The madness of economic growth soundly debunked by Anita Roddick, a staunch defender of the Great Depression, the Carter economy, and the coming Clinton recession: Since "the special period" when Soviet investment was suddenly withdrawn, Cubans have lost an average of 20 pounds each...
...Were we shocked and surprised...
...Everybody seems to be working for public good rather than private greed...
...Even wild animals scurried about with fear in their eyes from this heavenly disruption by one man's advertising decision...
...July 9, 1994] The American Spectator October 1994 93...
...That is the revolution America fears...
...Lifted the fig leaf, one might say...
...July 6, 1994] Indiana University Press A semi-literate advertisement from a Hoosier house of publication booms another primitive tome written by a feminist primate for other inhabitants of the zoo: Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body Shannon Bell Bell shows how the flesh-and-blood sexual female body engaged in sexual interaction for payment has no inherent meaning and is signified differently in different cultures or discourses...
...The Bradenton Herald newsroom must be anomaly [sic], according to the [sic] Burr's definition...
...I'm certainly not going to let the gay men off the hook either...
...In fact, far outside the city limits in Montecito and in Mission Canyon the night sky was disturbed by strobing flashes of light...
...Not only were the children shocked, but we adults were ashamed for telling the kids how exciting this was going to be and what a great way for children to learn equal respect for homosexual members of our society...
...Hate crimes are likely a bigger problem in the U.S...
...There are no ads, no billboards, no graffiti, no shops, no cars...
...or any day for that matter...
...Petersburg, Russia, the spectacularly laid-back Ted Turner coolly depicts the 1972 massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics: But on the whole, in a country where just about nothing runs smoothly, Turner characterized the multi-sport competition as "a smash success...
...It is the wobbly, tremulous line between these ambivalent feelings and forces that Dunning sets out to explore...
...How did they get permission to do such a thing...
...But what right do they have to parade around half-to-totally naked...
...And what a horrible way to introduce the gay and lesbian community to our children...
...What a shame...
...Something a little different...
...The fact itself reads like the stuff of propaganda...
...July 1, 1994] 92 The American Spectator October 1994 San Francisco Chronicle Surely a practical joke penned by one of Limbaugh's espionage agents, or perhaps Mrs...
...Nor do we ever remember editorializing for free lunches for unemployed blank-verse poets...
...But, who the hell gave those others the right to parade around with their genitals hanging out and flopping around...
...I want an apology to all of us who attended the parade...
...Let's cut right to the nitty grit...
...But this is a seduction with an edge, designed to yank you from a sensuous mood to one of revulsion as you contemplate a laughing woman holding a punctured tomato in her teeth, its innards running like drool down her vampirelike chin...
...People perch on the sea wall in couples, in groups, and talk...
...On page two we found the following sentence...
...What selfish monster would force man and beast alike for many miles in every direction to watch his light show...
...One went so far as to mention Utopia...
...the agency said 7,700 hate crimes were reported to it for last year...
...What Dunning has done, however, is turn traditional artistic practice upside down: In a refreshing change, she has subjected the male anatomy (or its equivalents) to the lascivious female gaze...
...I remember with such affection waking up and thinking, "Here I am where I ought to be, because here I could belong...
...That is, until the parade...
...April 1994] Milwaukee Journal Editorial musings on "ugly smelly rivers" that ebb and swell and on numbers that squish: How wide and deep does hate run in the United States...
...248 pages, paper $12.95 (also in cloth $35.00) [July 1994] Washington Post A Jo Ann Lewis reviews the esoteric pics of the esteemed Jeanne Dunning to the twitters of feminists—or is Jo Ann Lewis a pseudonym for one of the guys, say Ralph Nader...
...In public, on Sunday, in daylight, in the center of downtown San Francisco . . . on Father's Day...
...It has the best healthcare system in the world, with one doctor to every 196 citizens (the States manages a 1:405 ratio...
...They all do it for 10 days each month...
...One thing that really struck me was the enthusiasm of the foreign diplomats I encountered...
...My husband, myself and four of our children attended what we expected to be a wonderful afternoon and memorable Father's Day...
...Nonetheless, the 7,700 reported crimes are worrisome—a point dramatized by the presence of FBI Director Louis Freeh in Germany as the report was released...
...Beautiful views of the stars were obliterated...
...By what right is one business allowed to disturb the peace and take away the rights of everyone else...
...Dykes on Bikes" is a wild and exciting sight normally...
...Yuck...
Vol. 27 • October 1994 • No. 10
