ZETEO

Salsa’s Living Lyrical Legend

December 9, 2014 by William Eaton

Last Saturday I went to see Rubén Blades play live. Blades may very well be the greatest salsa music composer still playing today. This is due, in large part, to the fact that he is a healthy salsa musician, far removed from the late night excesses of his contemporaries, many of which have passed away. Blades even served as Minister of Tourism for his native Panama in 2004 and holds a degree in International Law from Harvard University. His songs rank among […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: books, music, poetry, reading, salsa, writing

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Dirty Cookies

December 8, 2014 by William Eaton

Dust, Dialogue and Uncertainty, an exhibition at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York, includes Julia Mandle’s piece Dirty Cookies, a version of a project first conceived in 2008. The Pratt Gallery piece might quickly be described as a long dinner table mostly covered with a large pile of dirt, with, down at one end, some place settings, a bit dirty and offering dirt food. I quote from Mandle’s “Project Summary“: Like many of Mandle’s projects, the inspiration for Dirty Cookies was a news article and […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: art

Ronald McDonald and Boy, arms spread, Christ-like

McDonald “inspires” through magic and fun

December 8, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

How the food industry limits children’s healthy choices I first heard about Fed Up—a documentary about obesity in the United States—when a review by The Huffington Post made it to my news feed last week. In the article, Corinna Clendenen addresses the documentary’s stories of children’s struggles to lose weight. She is not entirely convinced about the health facts in it, but she shares concerns about the manipulative strategies of the food industry. For example, Clendenen explains: The film takes a hard look at the post-war food industry and […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiLL • Tags: capitalism, childhood, children, Erik Ravelo, Fed Up, film, McDonald's, Michelle Obama, politics, The Huffington Post

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The Meter of Contemporary Poetry

December 7, 2014 by William Eaton

“Meter,” Paul Fussell writes, “is what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that pattern—which means repetition—emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance.” This from Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (first published in 1965), which tempers its fundamental conservatism with excellent pages on Whitman, which form part of an excellent chapter on “free verse.” I was reminded of this book and of these passages during an e-mail dialogue with a professor of […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: New Yorker, poetry

Feminist Hacker Barbie “Fixes” Mattel’s Vision

December 6, 2014 by William Eaton

The holiday season is always a chilling time for me, witnessing the mad rush of consumerism that now blatantly supersedes any pretense of familial bonding. On this topic, I was amused to hear of Mattel’s timely release of a new book entitled Barbie: I can be a Computer Engineer. Sounds great, or as good as we can expect from a toy giant like Mattel that thrives on creating a gendered toy market! But alas, apparently (somehow!) they fell short of the mark on […]

Categories: Caterina Gironda, ZiR • Tags: children, technology, women

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The Dreyfus Affair in a great political thriller

December 5, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link][email_link] One hundred and twenty years ago, in December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty of selling French military secrets to the Germans. He was sentenced to life in exile on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. Politicians and journalists used the fact that Dreyfus was a Jew to whip up a massive wave of anti-Semitic feeling among the population. Nevertheless, a campaign to prove Dreyfus’s innocence was organized by his brother Mathieu and the journalist Bernard […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: French, literature, politics

Lonely Places

December 4, 2014 by William Eaton

In Falling Off the Map, renowned travel author Pico Iyer says “Lonely Places are the places that don’t fit in; the places that have no seat at our international dinner tables; the places that fall between the cracks of our tidy acronyms (EEC and OPEC, OAS and NATO).” Published in 1993, Iyer’s essays capture “moods [of countries he visits] that would not change with history’s tide.” A few examples: North Korea, for all its anonymity — its air of Everyplace — […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

Thomas Struth on The Lure of Technology

December 4, 2014 by William Eaton

It isn’t often that one sees at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art an image that shocks. When I first viewed Thomas Struth’s photograph Figure II, Charité, Berlin 2013 (further reproduction not authorized by the subject), no text, except the title accompanied the image, and I spent a lot of time contemplating its subject: a person in a hospital, wrapped and entangled in myriad tubes and machines. Was she alive was? my question. And was all this stuff the result […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz • Tags: art, photography, Thomas Struth

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Iconic, but of what?

December 3, 2014 by fritztucker

[print_link] [email_link] If a tree falls in a forest and six different news channels capture footage of it, does it matter? The Internet has changed, ever so slightly, the definition of mass media. Major networks still create most of it. Now, however, anybody has the potential to create iconic images if they get enough retweets and ‘Likes’ on Facebook. Recently, a photo of a crying Afro-American boy embracing a compassionate, Euro-American cop at a Ferguson solidarity protest in Portland, Oregon has gone viral, typically accompanied […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: African-Americans, art, children, civil rights, ethics, New York City, politics, race, technology

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