Joan Jeanrenaud

“What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.” - W.J.T. Mitchell. Picture Theory (1994).
Labels: Animal RIghts, Food Politics, Rebecca Solnit
"The rites of Tantric cults, while often steeped in symbolism, could also include group and individual sex. . . .How is that for a description of a practice being disciplined? Talk about docile bodies!
Hatha originated as a way to speed the Tantric agenda. It used poses, deep breathing and stimulating acts — including intercourse — to hasten rapturous bliss. In time, Tantra and Hatha developed bad reputations. The main charge was that practitioners indulged in sexual debauchery under the pretext of spirituality.
Early in the 20th century, the founders of modern yoga worked hard to remove the Tantric stain. They devised a sanitized discipline that played down the old eroticism for a new emphasis on health and fitness.
B. K. S. Iyengar, the author of “Light on Yoga,” published in 1965, exemplified the change. His book made no mention of Hatha’s Tantric roots and praised the discipline as a panacea that could cure nearly 100 ailments and diseases. And so modern practitioners have embraced a whitewashed simulacrum of Hatha."
Labels: Church Lady, Foucault, yoga
Labels: embedded, photojournalism, War
Labels: Obituaries
Labels: euphemism, Legal, Shepard Fairey
Labels: Media Politics, Occupy the SEC, OWS, Reading
Labels: Obituaries, photojournalism
Labels: Local Event
Labels: poetry
Labels: Fashion Photography, Obituaries, Women in Photography
PLAYBOY: Many complain that the Occupy Wall Street movement doesn’t have a clear message. What do you think?KRUGMAN: I think OWS has done a great service. We didn’t need 10-point proposals. We needed someone to declare that the emperor was naked. The conversation has shifted since the protests began, and that’s good.
Occupy the SEC is a group of concerned citizens, activists, and financial professionals with decades of collective experience working at many of the largest financial firms in the industry. Together, we make up a vast array of specialists, including traders, quantitative analysts, compliance officers, and technology and risk analysts. Like much of the 99%, we have bank deposits and retirement accounts that are in need of protection through vigorous enforcement of the Volcker Rule. Our experiences working inside the financial industry have informed our answers to the questions proposed, making us well-suited to understand and anticipate how the proposed implementation, should it stand, will affect us and the rest of the general public.What follows is a detailed, expert commentary on the rule-making process. It is not, as Krugman suggests, a 10-point proposal. It does, however, attempt to inject expert knowledge and commentary into an especially opaque the democratic process in a particularly important way. This is impressive. (Sure, there may be room to criticize, but that is not the point here.) And it is a shot across the bow of those who dismiss OWS as a bunch of naive, undisciplined nutters.
The United States aspires to democracy, but no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.4 Accordingly, Occupy the SEC is delighted to participate in the public comment process for the implementation of Section 619 of the Dodd-Frank Act by the SEC, Federal Reserve, OCC and FDIC (“the Agencies). This country’s intention to protect the people from the widespread banking abuses and excesses of the recent past. We believe the Volcker Rule is important to the future of the banking industry and, if strongly enforced, will help move our financial system in a more fair, transparent, and sustainable direction. Prohibiting banking entities from engaging in proprietary trading and banning their sponsorship of covered funds are key elements to regulating the financial system and giving force to the Dodd-Frank Act. At its core, the Volcker Rule seeks to make sure that if a banking entity fails, it does not bring down the whole system with it. We appreciate the momentous challenges that the Agencies continue to face in effectively implementing the Rule, and we present these comments to assist them in their task.
Labels: ACT UP, Krugman, Occupy the SEC, OWS, political economy
"With Saturday’s ceremony, there are now 125 cardinals under the age of 80 and thus eligible to vote for the next pope.* As a result of the new appointments, the group of cardinal-electors is now more than half Italians and Europeans, strengthening the Western voice at the church’s highest levels even as it grows most rapidly in the global south. Only three of the new cardinals hailed from newly industrialized nations, from Brazil, India and Hong Kong."In other words, Catholics have a hierarchy reinforcing itself, with the Pope elevating voting members who will surely elect someone as his successor who is old, pale and male to impose moral and political standards on a constituency that primarily is none of those. I find all that stunning and am glad I escaped when I did. All I can do is repeat variations on questions I've posed before: Does this doubling down Sound like a reasonable plan to you? Is there any wonder why the 'morality' the Catholic church preaches to its own flock and pushes on others is so exclusionary and oppressive?
Dear jazz musicians and listeners,
We need your help. Our country has recognized jazz as a "national treasure", yet in many cases, prominent and well-established jazz artists spend their retirement in poverty -- or never retiring at all.
Two years ago in New York, Justice for Jazz Artists! (a project of AFM Local 802) succeeded in getting a tax break passed, benefiting NYC jazz clubs like Birdland, the Blue Note, Iridium and the Jazz Standard. The savings were supposed be directed into pension payments for the musicians that perform at these clubs.
In other words, at NO COST to the clubs, musicians can receive pension contributions for retirement.
Unfortunately, despite early support for the tax break, the club owners have since refused to even discuss the issue with the J4JA! campaign.
Visit the website below and SIGN OUR PETITION to force the clubs to sit down and discuss how to put this money to its proper use -- pension payments to jazz musicians.Dear jazz musicians and listeners,
We need your help. Our country has recognized jazz as a "national treasure", yet in many cases, prominent and well-established jazz artists spend their retirement in poverty -- or never retiring at all.
Two years ago in New York, Justice for Jazz Artists! (a project of AFM Local 802) succeeded in getting a tax break passed, benefiting NYC jazz clubs like Birdland, the Blue Note, Iridium and the Jazz Standard. The savings were supposed be directed into pension payments for the musicians that perform at these clubs.
In other words, at NO COST to the clubs, musicians can receive pension contributions for retirement.
Unfortunately, despite early support for the tax break, the club owners have since refused to even discuss the issue with the J4JA! campaign.
Visit the website below and SIGN OUR PETITION to force the clubs to sit down and discuss how to put this money to its proper use -- pension payments to jazz musicians.
http://justiceforjazzartists.org/
Thank you,
"There is nothing wrong with using sex, shock, or footballers' balls in a marketing campaign per se. The key, however, is to maintain an optimal effectiveness/offensiveness ratio. This requires a degree of intelligence, and is thus difficult to achieve when your marketing department is populated by people with tofu for brains. . . . Honestly, Peta's ads make me so angry I could stamp on a kitten. While eating a Big Mac and wearing chinchilla."The tone is deserved - prompted by the unsubtle reference in the current PETA ad campaign to how becoming Vegan gives boys so much sexual prowess that they inflict physical damage on their girlfriends. Stupid. Period.
Labels: advertising, Animal RIghts, PETA, Political Not Ethical
Labels: Conservatives, CPAC, Republicans
Labels: economists, political economy, Republicans
Labels: Conservatives, Legal, politics, religion, Republicans
"Taking photographs of things that are plainly visible from public spaces is a constitutional right – and that includes federal buildings, transportation facilities, and police and other government officials carrying out their duties."
Labels: Legal, Rights of Photographers
Labels: exhibition, OWS
"This blog is about the Health and Social Care Bill which will return to the House of Lords next week. It is produced by people who aren’t medical or political specialists as there are plenty of excellent blogs and outlets out there which have that expert knowledge. We don’t. Instead, this blog is produced by artists, a curator and an arts journalist.
Many people are concerned that the Health and Social Care Bill will irrevocably change the NHS, turning a tax-funded service that is publically provided and publically accountable into a market-driven service. And those feelings of deep misgiving are shared by amongst others, the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Nurses, the Royal College of Midwives and the majority of GPs in this country. It’s also shared by us.So over this month, this blog will feature contributions from a number of artists. And it will have bits of text that hopefully look at the Bill in a way that doesn’t involve two middle-aged blokes shouting at each other on the Today Programme about PCTs."
Labels: Great Britain, health care reform, politics
"I can't stand the kind of news photography that's coming out of Afghanistan - photographs of 'our boys' bravely defending our interests despite the fact they don't have enough helicopters. It makes me really angry. The thing I love about photography is that it gets me out of the house and looking at the world, but that's the thing I hate about it too - it makes me look at the surface of things and how they look.I couldn't give a stuff about how things look, I want to know why things happen, and why they happen again and again. The photojournalists who go to Afghanistan may be very brave, and their photographs may be very good, but I think their politics suck." ~ Simon Norfolk
Norfolk won third place in the "portrait" category of the World Press Photo competition for his series Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke & Simon Norfolk in which, as he points out in the same interview from which the above remarks are drawn, he is "trying to make people think about British Imperialism." He pursues this by contrasting his own images of Afghanistan with images made of the same country by the 19th Century British photographer John Burke. A quick look at Norfolk's larger project will make one wonder how, at least absent Procrustean measures, it falls within the "portrait" genre. This is terrific work, giving revised meaning to the notion of collaboration.
Labels: imagination, Patrick Maynard, Photography, politics, Simon Norfolk, World Press Photo
Labels: Conventions, grief, Pietà, Samuel Aranda, World Press Photo
Labels: Local Event
Labels: Best Shots
Labels: health care reform, politics, religion
"Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats to the left in the contemporary period."
"President Obama is the most moderate Democratic president since the end of World War II, while President George W. Bush was the most conservative president in the post-war era."
Labels: Conservatives, Democrats, ideology, polarization, politics, Republicans
Labels: Obituaries, photojournalism, Women in Photography
Labels: Obituaries, poetry, Szymborska