It's Friday. Last Boogie Before Xmas!

Camera Obscura - French Navy

While the Iron is Hot . . . Do the Ironing

Justifiably angry piece by Andrew Flood over at the Irish Left Review.

WSM Press release here.

Management Go-Slow

In chaotic times, an executive’s instinct may be to strive for greater efficiency by tightening control. But the truth is that relinquishing authority and giving employees considerable autonomy can boost innovation and success at knowledge firms, even during crises. Our research provides hard evidence that leaders who give in to the urge to clamp down can end up doing their companies a serious disservice.

Although business thinkers have long proposed that companies can engage workers and stimulate innovation by abdicating control—establishing nonhierarchical teams that focus on various issues and allowing those teams to make most of the company’s decisions—guidance on implementing such a policy is lacking. So is evidence of its consequences. Indeed, companies that actually practice abdication of control are rare. Two of them, however, compellingly demonstrate that if it’s implemented properly, this counterintuitive idea can dramatically improve results.

. . .

Furthermore, we’ve found that contrary to what many CEOs assume, leadership is not really about delegating tasks and monitoring results; it is about imbuing the entire workforce with a sense of responsibility for the business. This applies mainly to knowledge organizations, but even production-oriented companies can benefit from having employees who feel more empowered and engaged.

If abdication of authority is to yield value for the corporation, however, individuals must be self-motivated. CSC Germany does this by allowing employees to work on the one of five topics that best utilizes their talents and excites their interest. This involves joining a topic community, such as the one focusing on strategy and innovation. Issues are discussed in these groups until all participants come to an agreement, and leadership within the groups shifts frequently, settling on individuals who have the most competence in the areas of focus and are accepted by others as leaders.

We call such practices “mutualism.” It involves measuring workers not against revenue or other numerical goals, which we have observed to be ineffective as motivational tools, but against qualitative values such as trust, responsibility, and innovation. And it implies that leaders don’t dictate vision or strategy; instead, they enable employees to create a common vision through, for example, off-sites for discussion of strategic issues and regular feedback and education. Hitting numerical goals has been the natural outcome.

From "To Be a Better Leader, Give Up Authority," by A.D. Amar, Carsten Hentrich, and Vlatka Hlupic, in the December 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

"No modern factory could function for twenty-four hours without [the] spontaneous organization of work that groups of workers, independent of the official business management, carry out by filling in the gaps of official production directives, by preparing for the unforeseen and for regular breakdowns of equipment, by compensating for management's mistakes, etc."

From "The Proletarian Revolution Against the Bureaucracy," by Cornelius Castoriadis, in the December 1956 issue of Socialisme ou Barbarie.

Reverse Psychology

"This is not a book you want on your coffee table," says Michael Pavletic in an interview with Reader's Digest about his latest work, Atlas of Small Animal Wound Management & Reconstructive Surgery (Third Edition).

It's already on my Amazon Wishlist.

Sixty-Nine and Eighty-Seven

What filthy minds you have.

These are the categories of interest in this year's Grammy Awards as far as we at C&S are concerned. Neko Case's fantastic album Middle Cyclone has been nominated for the Best Contemporary Folk Album, and she and Judge have received a nomination for Best Recording Package for the same album. Fingers crossed.

Nearly as good as a Children's BAFTA.

Blogroll Alert

New addition to the blogroll (left): Enclosure of the Commons

We Love Charlize Theron #2

"Sometimes No Comment speaks louder than words."

Theron tonight upon France's name being drawn out.

It's Friday. Let's Wrestle!

Let's Wrestle - We Are The Men You'll Grow To Love soon

We Love Charlize Theron

Charlize Theron détend l'atmosphère

L'actrice sud-africaine sait suivre les modes, et se moquer gentiment de la France en est devenue une. Lors d'un répétition préalable à la cérémonie, en tirant la boule "France", Charlize Theron a volontairement prononcé "Irlande". "Oui, c'est ce qu'elle a fait mais ça n'était qu'une blague", a assuré Jérôme Valcke, secrétaire général de la FIFA, cité par lequipe.fr.

Translation.

Thank God for Low Achievers

Ever Google your old mates from university to see what they're up to these days? One of my closest friends from back then, it transpires (scroll down), was earlier this year appointed head of communications for the International Olympic Committee after serving as managing director and head of media and communications for the World Economic Forum.

The article even mentions that:

A 2005 profile of Adams in PR Week takes note of his days in Manchester as an "Old Labour activist" and as radio disc jockey.

This is the only previous connection I've had with Lausanne. I think it had best stay that way.

Which Side Are You On?

This could be interesting. The first police union in France (the CRS are the riot police, IIRC) is organizing protests today to express its members' great dissatisfaction with government cutbacks.

I wonder who will be policing it. And what if it turns ugly? Who should I support?

Either way, one thing will be for sure: The police started it.

He's Making It Up as He Goes Along!!!

France miss out on seedings in the World Cup finals due to the decision to use the October rankings rather than past performances in World Cups combined with rankings:

Had the old formula been used, France would have been one of the top seeds and Holland would have missed out. The Guardian tells us:

Jérôme Valcke, Fifa's general secretary, insisted there was no agenda against France as a result of the play-off controversy. He said: "In the past the seedings have been determined by a mixture of world rankings and performances in past World Cups but this time the feeling was the October rankings most closely represented the best teams in the tournament."

Had November's rankings been used, England would have missed out and France seeded.

Valcke added: "We made the decision last month that the October rankings would be used because they were fairer. Countries who had been involved in the play-offs would have had an unfair advantage because they would have played more games and that affects their ranking.

"This is not a case of wanting Holland to be seeded instead of France, just that the feeling was the October seedings represented the best teams."

The best teams that will be in South Africa, anyway. Le Monde, however, believes that France and Ireland are now united in suffering an injustice:

Alors s'est posée la question du mode de désignation de ces têtes de série. On pensait l'équipe de France protégée par son statut de finaliste du Mondial 2006. Mais le doute existait. Pourquoi ? Parce qu'à la FIFA les règlements sont faits au jour le jour, semble-t-il. La commission d'organisation de la Coupe du monde se réunissait mercredi pour fixer les modalités du tirage au sort, deux jours seulement avant celui-ci, et a décidé d'établir une nouvelle règle : "Par le passé, [la répartition des équipes] s'était faite en fonction à la fois du classement mondial et des performances dans les précédentes Coupes du monde ; il est apparu cette fois que le classement du mois d'octobre donnait une photo assez fidèle la hiérarchie mondiale."

In other words, you'd expect France to be seeded by virtue of the fact that they made it to the last World Cup final. Why aren't they? Well, apparently because the rules of FIFA are being invented on a daily basis.

That'll be thanks to Sepp "loose cannon" Blatter, no doubt.

I dunno. Maybe France should ask FIFA to designate them as the ninth seed. Just this once.

"Cowen, You Bastard!"

Irish National Public Sector Strike on Tuesday 24th November 2009

Thanks to Conor at D.O.

I'll Scratch Your Back . . .

Tuesday's New York Times is always good for one or two evolutionary psychology-type articles in the Science section. Today's looks at Michael Tomasello's research into humans' innate desire to help others:

When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.

“It’s probably safe to assume that they haven’t been explicitly and directly taught to do this,” said Elizabeth Spelke, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. “On the other hand, they’ve had lots of opportunities to experience acts of helping by others. I think the jury is out on the innateness question.”

But Dr. Tomasello finds the helping is not enhanced by rewards, suggesting that it is not influenced by training. It seems to occur across cultures that have different timetables for teaching social rules. And helping behavior can even be seen in infant chimpanzees under the right experimental conditions. For all these reasons, Dr. Tomasello concludes that helping is a natural inclination, not something imposed by parents or culture.

This bit in particular I thought interesting:

An interesting bodily reflection of humans’ shared intentionality is the sclera, or whites, of the eyes. All 200 or so species of primates have dark eyes and a barely visible sclera. All, that is, except humans, whose sclera is three times as large, a feature that makes it much easier to follow the direction of someone else’s gaze. Chimps will follow a person’s gaze, but by looking at his head, even if his eyes are closed. Babies follow a person’s eyes, even if the experimenter keeps his head still.

Advertising what one is looking at could be a risk. Dr. Tomasello argues that the behavior evolved “in cooperative social groups in which monitoring one another’s focus was to everyone’s benefit in completing joint tasks.”

This could have happened at some point early in human evolution, when in order to survive, people were forced to cooperate in hunting game or gathering fruit. The path to obligatory cooperation — one that other primates did not take — led to social rules and their enforcement, to human altruism and to language.

But then so was this:

The division of labor between men and women — men gather 68 percent of the calories in foraging societies — requires cooperation between the sexes. Young people in these societies consume more than they produce until age 20, which in turn requires cooperation between the generations. This long period of dependency was needed to develop the special skills required for the hunter gatherer way of life.

The structure of early human societies, including their “high levels of cooperation between kin and nonkin,” was thus an adaptation to the “specialized foraging niche” of food resources that were too difficult for other primates to capture, Dr. Kaplan and colleagues wrote recently in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. We evolved to be nice to each other, in other words, because there was no alternative.

Feck it, read the whole thing.

And the Price of Everything

The November 16 issue of Publishers Weekly has a too-brief interview with Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing (£8.59 at Amazon):


Is the confluence of the economic crisis with the climate and food crises an auspicious moment for change?

This is one of the last moments ecologically where, if we make a profound change now, we will be able to leave a world to our children and grandchildren that is roughly familiar to what we have today. But there's nothing inevitable about us doing the right thing. The last time we went through a depression, the politics that came out were not at all progressive. Part of the motivation behind this book is to point out the dangers that lie in wait at a time like this, but also the solutions that are already being practiced, which we need to learn from in a hurry.


You describe a “countermovement” that seems more pragmatic and less rigid than neoliberalism.

It's ironic, right? The idea of the free market is that everyone can do whatever they like, and yet the dogma for the free market is profoundly centralized, whereas the movements that I point to have political principles about equality, inclusion, and human rights, [but] beyond that, the everyday politics of how to figure things out is done in a very democratic way. The Zapatistas have rotating citizens' courts that effectively act as a municipal council. They've been so successful in resolving disputes and dealing with economic planning that regular Mexicans will come to these courts because they're much fairer and more just than the Mexican legal system.

You distinguish between consumer-choice democracy and a more fully participatory version. What's the difference and how do we get more of the real thing in the U.S.?

We need to shun the idea that the only way we can shape the world is through our consumption choices. In terms of “the real thing,” I don't want to set up any imaginary perfect democracy because there's never been one. But in every courtroom in the U.S., 12 people deliberate the cases of their peers. You can see people actively engaged in building substantive change everywhere from communities of the homeless in New York to the farm workers of Immokalee, in Florida—who just had their salaries increased by 70% as a result of their organizing. As the book went to press, Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for Economics for her work on community governance. So the theory and the practice are very much alive in this country; it's one of the reasons that I'm applying to become an American citizen right now. If there's one country where it's possible to make these changes, and make democracy work best, it's going to be here.

Unfinished Muslim Business

Ian Brown launches his career on an unsuspecting Middle East.

(File under Signs of the Apocalypse #2)

Signs of the Apocalypse

The moral high ground just got a bit closer to the flood waters.

"Fair Play": Just a Suggestion

Head of FIFA says players are under no obligation to play by the rules.

In other news, FIFA has announced that it will be introducing a new card for cheating to go with the yellow and red: the carte blanche.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

Geoff Berner - Official Theme Song Of The Vanvouver Whistler 2010 Winter Olympic Games (The Dead Children Were Worth It)

Marx on My Lenin, or just Seaman Stains?

Art in America magazine has a couple of particularly entertaining reviews in its November issue. Here's some of Sarah Valdez's piece on Genesis P.Orridge's show at Invisible Exports:

P-Orridge’s work often contains an odd but compelling mixture of playfulness, the paranormal and radical erotica. English Breakfast (2002-09) consists of a head shot of the Queen—her visage replaced by a fried egg with red beans, tomatoes, bacon, sausage and a mushroom, the food (an English breakfast) contrasting nicely with her many jewels. A sort of “E” with the vertical line running down the middle, the insignia for Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth—an occult organization P-Orridge founded but has since dissociated h/erself from—embellishes several compositions, including the psychedelic Electric Newspaper, Issue Two (1995), which served as album art for P-Orridge’s still-operative band Psychic TV. A 1989 series of illustrations for Terrence Sellers’s classic underground book The Correct Sadist blends what look like historical etchings of variously suffering nudes, snakes, tigers and demons with present-day fetish erotica. In a striking self-portrait, Flowering Pain Give Space (1998), P-Orridge appears enthroned, bound and blindfolded, wearing a corset, red stilettos and nipple clamps, with weights hanging from h/er shackled penis and a catheter running to h/er mouth—surrounded by a repeated image of yellow flowers in a gold vase.

and here's Brian Boucher's review of Mary Reid Kelley's work at Fredericks & Freiser:

In her first solo show, Mary Reid Kelley combined animation and live action in two pungent and funny videos. Both feature the artist alternately reciting and singing original verse inspired by WWI-era patriotic doggerel. In each black-and-white video, she wears period costume and thick makeup, outlining and obscuring her features, lending a cartoonish appearance. In one video, she wears black ovals that cover her eyes; for the other, she dons bulbous prosthetics with eyes drawn on them, making her face, in both cases, masklike. Reid Kelley’s punning libretto, her sly references to Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and her unified esthetic made for a convincing debut.

Sadie, the Saddest Sadist (7 minutes, 23 seconds), 2009, is set in Great Britain in 1915, according to a free booklet that includes the video’s lyrics (one is provided for each piece). The title character, a munitions worker, wants to learn a trade “so [she] could be a traitor.” She meets Jack, a sailor (played by Reid Kelley in drag), and with “passions inflamed,” she requests rousing war stories. His sung reply: “Calm down sweetheart / Britannia rules the waves.” In pledging herself to him, she offers her “surplus devotion,” and after their off-camera tryst, she sings, “The stains on my sheets / will come out with some lemon / I know that you care / by these Marx on my Lenin.” Live action alternates with stop-motion animation in which dancing refrigerator magnet-style letters spell out the dialogue or toy with it, as when “surplus devotion” is anagrammatized into “spurs devolution.”

More somber, The Queen’s English (4 minutes, 20 seconds), 2009, features a nurse who observes the demise of a soldier at the Western Front in 1915. She speaks in front of a drawn backdrop of a ward where soldiers are represented as primary shapes in beds, alluding at once to Analytical Cubism and to contemporary descriptions of men as interchangeable cogs in the war machine. The nurse’s monologue is marked by sad allusions to Humpty Dumpty and grisly references to decomposing flesh, and also by anachronistic humor, as when she professes to love the soldier “the way a Dutchman loves a dike / the way a woman needs a man / that needs a fish that needs a bike.” When he died, she explains, “I laid him, gently / in a Marquee piece of sod.”

One might want to read these pieces as sardonic commentary on current wars, but Reid Kelley’s interest seems to be primarily in historical material, expressed in details such as the patriotic flyers that hang on the walls behind Sadie and Jack when they meet, which urge citizens to conserve food and to fight for king and country. Her fine ear for popular verse makes Reid Kelley’s work rich fun for those who are, as Jack describes himself, “verbally inclined.”

Philistine that I am, I can't make out if they're meant to be funny or not.

An Adult's Christmas in Wales

Or "When The Red Robins Meet The Red Red Robins"

Saturday Dec 12th Wrexham v Altrincham (FA Trophy)

Saturday Dec 26th Wrexham v Altrincham (League)

Friday Jan 1st Altrincham v Wrexham (League)

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

Trashcan Sinatras - Only Tongue Can Tell

Folk Devils and Moral Panics (for Reidski)

The Staines News reports on the widespread panic on Wheatsheaf Lane over the impending match between Staines and Millwall.

One Wheatsheaf Lane resident, who didn't want to be named, said: "I am concerned because of the history of the club. I will have no hesitation in ringing 999 if there is any trouble.

"One of my neighbours has said they will board up the front windows of the house."
Jenny Hutt, of Wheatsheaf Lane, said: "I will be putting my car in my garage, because you never know what might happen."

. . .

Rana Yewer, who lives nearby, said: "We are quite near the town centre here, so the fans could have a few drinks. I am a bit concerned.

Another resident said: "I wasn't concerned until I heard about the Millwall and West Ham fight recently, so I am going to hide my car around the back."

Of course, the Comments section has attracted the usual scurrility:



mark my pants said:

The residents of Staines are to blame for this.
You have been flaunting the trappings of capitalism and treading down the working classes for too long.


Superintendent Duncan Greenhalgh said:

I'd just like to remind residents in Wheatsheaf Lane that parking any kind of vehicle in your rear garden is a breach of the road traffic act 1966 and would result in a fixed penalty notice. I personally will be attending a grenade diversity training course that weekend but our community officers will be available to give commendations for the best use of weapons of mass destruction, and geraniums.


Carl Blainey said:

This is the chance I've been waiting for for years. I really hate the people of Staines. I'm going to disguise myself as a Millwall fan and mingle with them then set light to whatever I can find.

What colour do Millwall play in?


danny dyer said:

make no mistake this one is gonna be pwoper pwoper nawty. so nawty that i am turning up wiv me mate woss kemp. he is pwoper ard and wont take no nonsense from any tweatment or f twoop i tell yer.



Private Parts said:

My mate Charlie Bright is in the army and based at Aldershot just down the road from Staines. Anyway he is a Millwall supporter and is proper loony tunes. He's gone AWOL and I hope it is no coincidence that a box grenades from under his bed and a sniper rifle have gone missing. Please please let there be no grassy knolls down Wheatsheaf Lane.....


Concerned Resident said:

I hope none of the above is true. I live in Wheatsheaf Lane and we held a community meeting last night to voice ouur fears & concerns. The police seemed to play down the fear of violence but having looked at Millwall on youtube this morning and the comments above, I'm very worried, especially as we have just bought a new car and got new windows.


Steve from Egham said:

Let's not forget that the people of Staines aren't exactly angels themselves. A lot of us think they've had this coming for a long time.



I think we've been here before, haven't we?

You Know What to Do

Vote Here.

You Are (Not) the Ref

Q: Many Irish people are going to say that France qualified because they cheated.

TH: I am not the referee. The ball touched my hand. I am honest, there was a hand.

I am not a cheat. I am honest. I cheated.

COCK SHITTING FUCK BOLLOCK WANK #2

Now in glorious RTE-o-vision

Cock Shitting Fuck Bollock Wank

OFFSIDE. HANDBALL. YOU CHOOSE.

Ireland's Investment Strike

A very interesting article here by Michael Burke on the current shambles that is the Irish economy and the government's rescue plans (although the term "shambles" obscures the fact that the government knows exactly what it's doing):

The crisis of the economy and of the banking sector, as well as a potentially looming crisis in the balance of payments all have the same primary source. Bank lending to private sector developers and other speculators has brought about a ruinous situation for the Irish economy, its banks and the level of its foreign debt. These issues need to be confronted head-on, and any policy prescriptions which do not are sure to end in failure.

Irish Government's Response to the Crisis

The coalition government of the Irish Republic, comprised of Fianna Fail and the Green Party, has set out its policy response to the economic and banking crisis. Perhaps it is the catastrophic scope of recent of events which has led policy in a Biblical direction. Whatever the cause, the government's stance is summarised in Matthew 4:25, "For whoever has, to him more shall be given; and whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him."

The thrust of policy is to bail out bank shareholders and large-scale property developers by using taxpayer funds. This represents a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, on a very large scale. The two planks of the policy have been an austerity Budget and the proposed establishment of the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA). This Agency will purchase banks' bad debts owed by property developers and speculators, paid for by issuing bonds, ultimately covered by Irish taxpayers.

The two aspects of the government's stance are clearly linked. Their main aim is to rescue the greatest possible amount of private capital from the economic and financial wreckage, with Irish taxpayers picking up the bill. At the same time, the enormous levels of debt associated with NAMA (at least Euros 54bn in bond issues have been suggested) are offered as justification for large-scale cuts in government spending, including on social welfare and other provisions.

Austerity Budget

The Emergency Budget unveiled in April focused on reducing social spending in a series of measures that included a raid on state employees' pensions, pay cuts, job losses and reductions in welfare spending. At the same time, taxes were also increased. As outlined above, the automatic increase in government spending was one of the few bright spots on the economic horizon.

Now, to replace that with an austerity budget in the depth of recession is, at least, a high risk strategy. According to Finance Minister Lenihan, the combined total of spending cuts in the Emergency Budget and previous public sector pay cuts amounts to Euros 3.3bn. In addition, tax increases announced in April amount to an estimated Euros 1.8bn [10]. This represents a fiscal tightening of 3% of GDP. Given that the economy is already contracting at double digit rates, this represents a gross overreaction, effectively ensuring that the 'cure' is as bad as the disease. Worse, the tax increases are not progressive ones, aimed at higher income groups or the wealthy, but aimed at the poorest in society (along with a halving of the jobseekers' allowance, which is explicitly aimed at young workers).

While these policies could easily be criticised in terms of morality or justice, they also make no economic sense. If it is accepted that taxes have to rise at some point to stabilise government finances, it is imperative now that these do not fall on the poor, as they have a far greater propensity to consume their income, which is precisely what is needed during recession. By contrast, sheltering the rich from tax rises merely increases their ability to save, or to purchase luxury goods.

NAMA

The leadership of the FF/Green coalition government has argued that the austerity budget is a necessary measure to stabilise government finances. But the proposed NAMA legislation threatens to overwhelm government finances entirely.

The outline of the plan is reasonably straightforward. At the time of writing the proposed legislation is being debated in the Dail. The government intention is that NAMA will be established in order to purchase up to Euros 77bn in bad debts from the banks, relieving them of this burden on their balance sheets. For reference, Euros this is over 42% of Ireland's 2008 GDP, and, given the contraction in the economy, will be a greater proportion of 2009 GDP. The government will issue at least 54bn in bonds to pay the banks for these bad debts, that is, the debt will owed by Irish taxpayers. The government claims that this discount or 'haircut' represents a potential bargain for taxpayers, while admitting that it is overpaying for the assets by at least Euros 7bn. Of this Euros 54bn total, the government admits that Euros 9bn will be eaten up by loans where the borrowers have already defaulted. The plan is highly controversial because many commentators expect the eventual losses to be much greater, leaving the bill with taxpayers. It has also been suggested that the resources of the National Pension Reserve Fund be used in part to fun NAMA.

Yet, as we have previously shown, it would be possible to restore a function banking system and to alleviate the worst effects of the downturn by taking control of the leading elements of the property and construction industries. In this way it would be wholly unnecessary to compensate either bankrupt property developers or bank shareholders in order to revive economic activity and restore the provision of credit to viable businesses. As even the big home builders have pointed out, NAMA does nothing even to ensure that builders have any working capital over the next 6 to 9 months. NAMA is a gargantuan error, completely missing the main transmission processes which could restore economic and financial stability.

Very Interesting

A multipage article by Pedro Sánchez and Gord Westmacott in Canadian magazine The Walrus discusses the problems facing leftist governments in South America. After a five-page nation-by-nation account, they conclude:

So, despite an undeniable rise in popular political expression across the region, nothing in Latin America is certain. “What’s happening,” argues Larry Birns, director of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, “is that the poor — which was an inert political factor, an inert sociological factor — has become a hotbed of rising expectations. What you’re seeing in Latin America is a kind of new political law emerging from the street — if you defraud us on running on a campaign agenda, if you use your platform to simply get into office and then dismiss it, then the people have a right to recall the election by hitting the streets.” For now, the populist wave has cast its lot with the democratic left. But populist movements have a long history of flying any number of flags of political convenience, from doctrinaire Marxism to military dictatorships. Such movements also show a persistent and problematic willingness to blindly deliver their collective power into the waiting hands of a caudillo, the archetypal and charismatic strongman, the father figure who is not always benevolent.

In Macondo, the residents fought valiantly against the hundred years of solitude that threatened to engulf their town. They experienced blissful moments, moments of magic and miracle, but all was ultimately lost. Today, in Caracas and Montevideo, in Buenos Aires and Brasília, the people are demanding a different ending to their own story.

What made me laugh, though, was the lone, anonymous comment.

Poor Taste or Modern Ballet?

The November issue of Dance magazine reports on Stephen Mills's Light/The Holocaust & Humanity Project, performed by Pittsburgh Ballet Theater as the centerpiece of its 40th-anniversary season. The work deals directly with the Holocaust, which is presented from the perspective of the victims, according to Mills. Mills, who is not Jewish and has some misgivings about creating Light, believes that there is an urgency to the project because soon there will be no more survivors with firsthand accounts.

Yes, from the perspective of the victims. As you can see above.

Bloody Prima Donnas

Birmingham's just not good enough for some people.

In the highly competitive upper echelons of the ballet world, what Clara Blanco did several years ago is almost unheard of.

In 2006, the San Francisco Ballet corps member quit the company and headed for England’s Birmingham Royal Ballet. A year later, she was eager, if not desperate, to return to San Francisco.

. . .

The Birmingham year did afford Blanco the opportunity to perform in major ballets by Ashton and MacMillan, who are rarely represented in SFB’s repertory. But she hated the weather in the English city (“I think it rained 300 days that year”) and the touring, and wasn’t prepared for the rigid casting system. (“You are not permitted to do roles until dancers with more seniority have performed them first.”)

Since when was ballet performed outdoors, you whining prancer?

Good news for Sookie Stackhouse

French woman marries her dead fiancé.

The Burning Question

Will Britt Ekland be dancing nude at his cremation?

Which Is Why Channel M Gave Him His Own Show

Congratulations to John Robb and the students of Salford University.