My new PowerBook is already in the shop, so I’m back on a Windows desktop. The Airport Extreme card wasn’t working properly.
It’s no fun to have a wireless network in your apartment if you can’t leave the room where the base station is located.
That seems to be the reaction of the Catholics to the Nobel Peace Prize going to Iranian activist Shirin Ebadi rather than the Pope. Via James we read the Vatican had this to say:
Many researchers say that the pope’s opposition to birth control, pre-marital sex, homosexuality and female priests seemed intolerant to many Norwegians, especially women, despite a 25-year-reign devoted to peace and religious reconciliation [on his own terms].
Three of the five Nobel committee members are women. One Vatican official sniffed: “I thought this was a peace prize and not a prize in sexual ethics.”
There is some talk that the Pope might win the Nobel Peace Prize. Given the Church’s continuous attacks on people trying to prevent AIDS or unwanted pregnancies, or its enslavement of young Irish women, I would think the Pope belongs in The Hague for crimes against humanity. The latest outrage is the Church telling people in the developing world that condoms cannot prevent AIDS, so they should not use them.
The Catholic Church has been accused of telling people in countries with high rates of HIV that condoms do not protect against the deadly virus.
The claims are made in a Panorama programme called Sex and the Holy City to be screened on BBC One on Sunday.
It says cardinals, bishops, priests and nuns in four continents are saying HIV can pass through tiny holes in condoms.
The World Health Organization has condemned the comments and warned the Vatican it is putting lives at risk.
The claims come just a day after a report revealed that a young person is now infected with HIV every 14 seconds.
According to the United Nations Population Fund, around 6,000 people between the ages of 15 and 24 catch the virus every day.
Half of all new infections are now in people under the age of 25 and most of these are young women living in the developing world.
…
But according to Panorama, the Church is now telling people that condoms do not work.
In an interview, one of the Vatican’s most senior cardinals Alfonso Lopez Trujillo suggested HIV could even pass through condoms.
“The Aids virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon. The spermatozoon can easily pass through the ‘net’ that is formed by the condom,” he says.
The cardinal, who is president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, suggests that governments should urge people not to use condoms.
“These margins of uncertainty…should represent an obligation on the part of the health ministries and all these campaigns to act in the same way as they do with regard to cigarettes, which they state to be a danger.”
The programme includes a Catholic nun advising her HIV-infected choir master not to use condoms with his wife because “the virus can pass through”.
The Archbishop of Nairobi Raphael Ndingi Nzeki told Panaroma that condoms were helping to spread the virus.
“Aids…has grown so fast because of the availability of condoms,” he said.
In Kenya, one in five people are HIV positive.
Christian Holstad by Joseph Maida
While some people have written justifiably snarky things about the Times Magazine’s neo-70s issue, it has its moments, including the selection of artists in the photo essay, beginning with Christian Holstad as a 70s roller disco kid.
Christian Holstad, 31
His art consists of knitting, quilting, collage, drawing, sculpture and, here in the foyer of Studio 54, himself, in full roller-disco regalia. In group and one-man shows this year, Holstad exhibited the following works: an installation of all the images he found filed under the label ’’homosexual’’ in the New York Public Library’s picture archives; photo collages based on White House interiors (one is of a faunlike nude boy peering out from behind a sofa in a reception room); and, at the Daniel Reich gallery, a plastic-enclosed bedroom, which was an homage to David Vetter, the ‘’bubble boy’’ whose weakened immune system required him to live in a germ-free plastic bubble. Holstad, whose work will be included in the next Whitney Biennial, says:
‘’When I came to New York City from Minnesota, I cried. I’d found my home, and I knew it. I got involved in the Williamsburg scene right away, and it was great.
There were these events where everyone would show up dressed in costumes; people would come with cardboard on their heads. And then it all died, and I left. Now I live in Greenpoint. Recently, I’ve gotten interested in the disco era, a time, like now, when New Yorkers were not afraid of darkness, and when the music was so inclusive everyone was dancing to it.’’ </blockquote>
The same literary agent represents Britney Spears, Jayson Blair, and the Pope.
I forgot to mention a couple of other items in my earlier post on our trip to Chinatown and the Lower East Side to see art. There is a cool show of almost photo-realistic oil on plastic paintings by Dan Colen at Rivington Arms — the gallery that disdains the idea of a website. I once asked whether they were going to get one, and they said, “that’s not really the audience we’re aiming for.” This comes from people who were chatting with trucker-hatted visitors who were explaining that one simply cannot live comfortably in NYC with an apartment worth less than $1 million.
The other thing: there was a street fair on lower Crosby that was a real one — not one of those awful fried dough and sausage cart things that pass for most street fairs. There were quite a few artists who also do work with clothing there. I bought a scarf made by Emily Noelle Lambert.
View of sign from Maccarone window (Kunst is German for art)
My work projects are keeping me too busy to write much, but I wanted to mention two shows I saw today in Chinatown that are very much worth seeing.
The first is Phil Collins (the brilliant young English artist I last saw at Apex Art, not the musician) at Maccarone on Canal Street in Chinatown. Their web site is barely there, so check out their e-flux announcement. They now have all three floors of their building, formerly occupied mostly by Kunst Electronics. The first floor has large photographs of the Britney Spears poster that appeared in the subway stations in late 2001, only to be immediately defaced, plus a video of the BBC arriving to photograph a family of Kosovar refugees in Kosovo — including having a 15-year-old boy take off his shirt to show his bullet scars.
The second floor has photographs of his lover, his circle of friends, and people in Palestine, Belfast, New York, Belgrade, and various places in England. The third floor consists of photos from a project called “real society”, where he placed an add in San Sebastian, Spain to ask people to come be photographed naked in a luxury hotel suite.
It is a very powerful show.
The other show is a solo exhibit of (mostly) abstract paintings by Wallace Whitney at Canada on Christie Street. I don’t think the images on the web site do it justice, so you’ll just have to go. Think a young Louise Fishman.
The Guardian has a great interview with Michael Moore. He has a new book coming out, titled Dude, Where’s My Country?
Also, do not miss his op-ed in the LA Times on the California recall.
