Thinking about the new use of "curated."

Last month Green Mountain Daily reported the Burlington Free Press VTBuzz blog "is curating (their word) a six part exploration of the gubernatorial candidate websites."



Not so fast, BFP. The use of the word is not as "newfangled" as you thought, and you certainly didn't coin it. As I read today on JEREMIAH'S VANISHING NEW YORK:--

I like thinking about how words are used and how they travel virally through groups of people. Words like "Doucheoisie," and prefixes, too, like "Celebu-." And now, thanks to a few blog posts about the opening of Mast bookshop on Avenue A, I'm thinking about the word "curated" and what it means these days.

[...]

The Times actually did a whole story about this word in 2009. They wrote that curate:

- "has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting."
- "is code for 'I have a discerning eye and great taste.'"
- is "an innocent form of self-inflation."
- "can be good for one’s image and business."

"Pretentious?" asked the Times, "Maybe. But it’s hardly unusual for members of less pedigreed professions to adopt the vernacular of more prestigious ones."

So the use of "curate" is aspirational, which does put it in the same league as "artisanal." And that makes some people nervous because it signals to consumers something very specific. It signals "exclusivity" and is meant to attract people who yearn to be in the club. It may also repel people who find the use of such words pretentious and exclusionary.

In addition, museum curators really aren't happy about it.

Photo: source
via Jeremiah's.

VERMONT: Burlington's "Disneyfication"

SEVEN DAYS BLURT blog:

A proposed ordinance being reviewed by Burlington City Councilors could ban people from sitting on the sidewalks of five key downtown streets that feed onto the Church Street Marketplace.

The ban would also extend to sandwich board signs or other types of advertising, though it would allow any existing licensed "encumbrances" to continue until their license expires.

The Burlington City Council Monday night agreed to send the proposed ordinance to its Ordinance Committee for review. The three-member committee is chaired by Councilor Joan Shannon (D-Ward 5), and includes Councilors Sharon Bushor (I-Ward 1) and Bram Kranichfeld (D-Ward 2).

Ain't this in a kick in the pants! Indeed, the public spaces in Burlington have now become white bread fucking elitist and the city council has turned itself into a class(ism) act!

Then, there's this appalling NIMBY resolution:

On Monday, too, the council voted 10-4 to oppose the issuance of an Act 250 permit to Phoenix House to operate a 20-bed transitional house on Elmwood Avenue, just a half block from the top of Church Street. The opposition to the proposal was fueled, in part, by downtown business concerns that it would add more "undesirable people" onto the Marketplace and detract shoppers from coming to the pedestrian mall.

Here - contact your city councilors.

Photo: credit Andy Bromage/Seven Days.

The Peace Tree

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace."

The Peace Tree, a blog devoted to social justice and peace activism, and to which I was graciously invited by Mark Prime as a contributor, has stopped publishing.

Mondoweiss: NPR report on West Bank expulsion order makes horror a she-said/she-said story

From Mondoweiss: "NPR report on West Bank expulsion order makes horror a she-said/she-said debating point" Here's a bit but I recommend you read the whole post.

... nowhere does Garcia-Navarro grapple with the terrible inhumanity of a regime that has kept other people stateless for 60 years, depriving them not just of civil but human rights. A military occupation that arbitrarily defines the legitimate owners of a land as "infiltrators" is unspeakable. Why is "our" U.S. government paying for the illegal expulsions?

To do Garcia-Navarro justice, the on-air report gives details curiously absent from the transcript, but holes nevertheless remain. NPR’s transcript changes many terms and the order of the actual Garcia-Navarro report that aired this morning.

I've included choice bits of the actual broadcast that were not included in the online transcript of the story below. Why were they removed? They smooth over the ugly facts of the original broadcast. I guess we should also ask Lourdes Garcia-Navarro about the alterations.

Real News Video: Training that makes killing civilians acceptable

This is Your War on Drugs

Megan McArdle in THE ATLANTIC:--

"This is our nation's drug enforcement in a nutshell. We started out by banning the things. And people kept taking them. So we made the punishments more draconian. But people kept selling them. So we pushed the markets deep into black market territory, and got the predictable violence . . . and then we upped our game, turning drug squads into quasi-paramilitary raiders. Somewhere along the way, we got so focused on enforcing the law that we lost sight of the purpose of the law, which is to make life in America better."

20 Gallons

In the time it takes to read this short sentence, another 20 gallons of crude oil will have escaped from the wrecked Deepwater Horizon well into the Gulf of Mexico.

Lena Horne 1917-2010

Surveillance Cameras: You Are Never Alone

If George Orwell were alive, what would he write?

"It’s hard to adjust to the idea that cities — New York in particular,and Times Square most of all — are now places where unseen watchers canmonitor your every move." - City Critic, New York Times

And... who knew? The Burlington school board's Policy and Advocacy committee

"is currently writing the district’s policy on the use of surveillance cameras in schools."

(I've not seen any local media coverage about this.) Your tax dollars at work indeed, treating children as criminals. But hell, it's business-as-usual in our schools. The little buggers are groomed anyway, to be passive and unquestioning automatons, to accept being monitored by the surveillance cameras of businesses on Church Street (the major pedestrian shopping district in Burlington).

Look at this ACLU link (my emphasis in bold):

Camera surveillance systems also inevitably raise issues of racial profiling and voyeurism. Everyone has heard of the camera operators who zoom in upon women's breasts or police officers who used infrared video surveillance equipment to watch a couple engaged in romantic activity.

The bottom line is: Are cameras worth the cost in terms of money and civil liberties? Cities and states are still wasting limited security budget dollars on camera surveillance systems. In the last five years, the US Department of Homeland Security had handed out about $300 million in grants for camera surveillance systems. These funds could have gone toward hiring more experienced police officers, improving equipment for first-responders so that they can be ready to help in cases of emergency or other such security needs.

And consider the civil liberty costs of video surveillance systems. Video surveillance technology will only grow more sophisticated. There will come a day when the cameras will be routinely linked with other technologies in attempt to instantly identify you and me via face recognition, RFIDs, or other technologies. Do we want a society where an innocent individual can't walk down the street without being considered a potential criminal? Do we want a society where people are comfortable with constant surveillance?

Recommended video (Quicktime): Its Eyes, filmed on location in New York's Chelsea Market and Harlem - treating "surveillance cameras as a biological organism slowly taking control of our urban space."

Real News Video: "Dead end for New Labour"

Good analysis on The Real News Network from Leo Panitch. I like his style and he has no pretensions. It's far better than what you'd hear on PBS or NPR or read in the US corporate media.

"Labour Party will have to split before it can be renewed":

Feast of Julian of Norwich, Contemplative

Lord God, who in your compassion granted to the Lady Julian many revelations of your nurturing and sustaining love: Move our hearts, like hers, to seek you above all things, for in giving us yourself you give us all; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Today is the Feast Day of Julian of Norwich, one of my most favourite spiritual writers and saints. She celebrated God and Nature. If you don't know much about her, why don't you read a bit.

Her book is a tender meditation on God's eternal and all-embracing love, as expressed to us in the Passion of Christ.

She describes seeing God holding a tiny thing in his hand, like a small brown nut, which seemed so fragile and insignificant that she wondered why it did not crumble before her eyes. She understood that the thing was the entire created universe, which is as nothing compared to its Creator, and she was told, "God made it, God loves it, God keeps it."

She was concerned that sometimes when we are faced wiith a difficult moral decision, it seems that no matter which way we decide, we will have acted from motives that are less then completely pure, so that neither decision is defensible. She finally wrote: "It is enough to be sure of the deed. Our courteous Lord will deign to redeem the motive."

A matter that greatly troubled her was the fate of those who through no fault of their own had never heard the Gospel. She never received a direct answer to her questions about them, except to be told that whatever God does is done in Love, and therefore "that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

And you can read more about her here!

Firsts in the British Parliament

At least something positive from yesterday's British elections:

Caroline Lucas won the Green Party's first seat.

Two Labour candidates, Shabana Mahmood and Yasmin Qureshi became the first women Muslim MPs.

Otherwise, Richard Seymour/Lenin's Tomb says "Oh, what the fuck?" Oh, and George Galloway was trounced by the Labour candidate.

That Remembrance Day Disruption

I think the idea of a bomb attack crossed everybody's mind in the flash of a second at that moment, and I didn't even hear that "bom, bom". It's also neglected that the one part of the crowd got frightened by the panic of the other part of the crowd. My initial fear was getting trampled and trapped in this "stampede" as well as what was going to happen next...
Terrifying. - a witness to the Remembrance Day disruption

It's not as if people were in a moving crowd initally. They were still, silent, in an almost meditative state on what was happening in front of the monument. Just look at the Remembrance ceremony at about 01:13:32 on this (Silverlight) video.

Then bam! A mass exodus, but to where? I'm sure there are psychological studies of crowds that would confirm what happened was real.

Many people, of course, had the tragic attack at last year's Queen's Day celebrations in Apeldoorn on their minds.

I recall feeling the terror in the mid 1990s, when I was in Amsterdam for Queen's Day. My Dutch friend and I ventured into the center of the city - what was to be our first and last time. We were nearly crushed by a crowd that was moving along the Reguliersbreestraat (between the Munt and Rembrandtplein), packed like sardines. I was never so scared in my life; got separated from my friend and could not see his head (he's taller than I am). In the middle of all of this was a man in a wheelchair, pleading to be taken away. This was just across the street from the famous Tuschinski cinema. It was stifling, I could hardly breathe. I never even thought of a bomb attack. What if... !! I was afraid that I would lose my footing, fall down and get trampled. Fortunately we eventually got out of that narrow strip of street and made it to the Rembrandtplein, which was just as crowded, but had more room. From there we recovered to the quieter Amsterdam-Zuid residential district.

UPDATED: Remembrance and Liberation

UPDATE: Panic during Remembrance Day ceremony

Dozens of people were injured after panic broke out during the Remembrance Day commemorations on Amsterdam's Dam square on Tuesday evening when a man began shouting during the two minutes silence.

The man has been arrested but the motive for his actions is still unclear, a police spokesman told Nos tv.

Most of the injured had either broken bones or scrapes and bruises received when parts of the crowd began moving following the shouts. At least one safety barrier fell during the crush.




_____________________________


This year marks the 65th anniversary of the Liberation in the Netherlands after WWII by the Canadian, Polish, British and US soldiers.

This is the week of Herdenking en Bevrijding - Remembrance and Liberation - and of my birthday, on May 5th. Yesterday, Her Majesty Queen Beatrix, HRH Princess Margriet and Pieter van Volenhoven will attend the Remembrance ceremony at the Canadian War cemetery in Groesbeek, where more than 2,300 young Canadians have found their final resting place. This evening, HM and TRH The Prince of Orange and Princess Máxima will attend the Remembrance service for the people who have fought and died during World War II at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, after which HM and The Prince of Orange will lay a wreath at the National Monument on Dam Square.

About 16 years ago, I think it was. I was on holiday in Holland. On May 4th, my cousin's then-boyfriend (a pilot) took Agnes and me up in his plane as a birthday gift. (She celebrates her birthday two days after mine.) We took off from Lelystad airport and flew over the Ijsselmeer, over Marken and Volendam and down over the woods of 't Gooi to Hilversum and over the Loosdrecht lakes and back to the airport. As soon as we landed it was nearly 8 o'clock and time for the two minutes of silence observed throughout the country.

So there we were, on the tarmac, quietly sitting in the small airplane - windows open - and all I felt and heard was the soft, free wind blowing.

Kent State Murders - 40th Anniversary

Dead: Allison Krause - Age: 19, William Schroeder - Age: 19, Jeffrey Miller - Age: 20, Sandra Scheuer - Age: 20. They were the four students killed on the Kent State campus in Ohio on May 4, 1970, during a Vietnam war protest. The National Guard opened fire.

90210

LOS ANGELES TIMES: - Two members of Congress, Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), called on Halliburton on Friday to provide all documents relating to "the possibility or risk of an explosion or blowout at the Deepwater Horizon rig and the status, adequacy, quality, monitoring, and inspection of the cementing work" by May 7.

Today is World Press Freedom Day

May 3rd is World Press Freedom Day, with special focus on freedom of information and the right to know. Here's Jonathan Groubert's conversation on Radio Netherlands' program, The State We're In, with Mike Bonanno (real name Igor Vamos) of the Yes
Men, the culture jamming duo who pull elaborate, funny and sometimes
disgusting stunts on international corporations to draw attention to
injustices.

PHOTO OF THE WEEK

A lovely photo that captures Queen's Day 2010.

"Koningin Glimlach!" ["A queen's smile"], sent into PZC by Jos Zanders.



"U heeft ons en het land Koninginnedag teruggegeven." ["You have given back Queen's Day to us and the country."] - Queen Beatrix to all the people in Zeeland after the completion of the festivities in Middelburg on Queen's Day, April 30th.

Hedges: No One Cares

"The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military... And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families..." - Chris Hedges

Nanosilver Migrates Out of Fabric in Study

Beyond Pesticides, May 3, 2010:

Researchers have found that silver nanoparticles can migrate out of fabrics that have been treated with the particles for its antibacterial properties when it is exposed to simulated perspiration, raising concerns about human exposure to nanosilver through skin absorption. This is the first study to use artificial sweat to mimic the conditions of human skin, however it is not clear if the silver materials in sweat would be absorbed through human skin.

Silver has long been used as an antiseptic to reduce bacterial growth on skin, however recent advances in nanoscience (the science and manipulation of chemical and biological materials with dimensions in the range from 1-100 nanometers) led to the development of silver nanoparticles. Due to their small size, these nanoparticles are able to invade bacteria and other microorganisms and kill them, and silver nanoparticles (or nanosilver) are now widely impregnated into a wide range of consumer products, including textiles such as socks, sportswear, underwear and bedding, vacuums, washing machines, toys, sunscreens, and a host of others.[...]

The researchers conclude that as nanotechnology becomes increasingly prevalent in consumer products, the potential for exposure to nanoparticles increases. Yet, little is known about how these silver materials may interact with people’s bodies. There is concern that the the tiny particles may be more toxic than other, larger-sized and more traditional types of silver compounds, as the smaller particles could be more easily absorbed and distributed throughout the body.

... MORE