One Smart Cookie

I guess it’s still tough being a woman with an opinion

THE author and activist Naomi Klein sees recent history collectively: “At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly outsources the running of the ‘War on Terror’ to Halliburton and Blackwater. After a powerful tsunami devastates the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts. New Orleans’s residents, still scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened.”
In the seven years since Klein wrote the anti-globalisation bible No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, she has found a much more sinister enemy to expose: disaster capitalists. John le Carre calls Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, “scary as hell”.
I went to the New York Society for Ethical Culture to hear Klein talk about how governments use disasters to spread the American version of “free market” capitalism. She’s not accusing them of creating the disasters, but rather of pushing through agendas that the public would never usually allow were they not reeling from post-disaster shock. Shock, she says, reduces us to a childlike state.
The idea for a book came after Klein spent time in Iraq in 2000, researching how the invasion was supposed to have laid the psychological groundwork for (Bush’s Iraq envoy) Paul Bremer’s extreme country makeover.
“By shock therapy I’m referring to the economic policies that were really seen by many Iraqis as a continuation of the war, like the huge layoffs in the public sector, the dismantling of the army, the opening up of the country to unrestricted free trade,” she said. “It was an extraordinarily unfair way for Iraqis to enter the free market.”
Klein told Time magazine that she first used the phrase “disaster capitalism” when she saw something very similar to Iraq happening in Sri Lanka. “Just days after the tsunami hit, the government started pushing a very unpopular agenda of water and electricity privatisation.”
What I found most fascinating was Klein’s recounting of her hostile reception from the international press (Klein hails from Canada). A German journalist kicked off the interviews thus: “I explained your thesis to my wife and she said: ‘Has Naomi Klein lost her mind?’” The publicity tour, Klein said, turned into “one big therapy session”. Another journalist ventured: “Your book made me depressed. The forces you describe are so strong and we are so weak.”
To which Klein gave this excellent answer: “If your job is to report on how to change the grim and horrific things that exist in the world and you simultaneously believe that this is undoable, and you use your power and platform to spread futility and powerlessness, then, yeah, when confronted by the need for immense change, I would get depressed too.”

Worth checking out online is the short film about The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which Klein made with Children of Men director Alfonso Cuaron. Google it.

By Nadine Rubin. A version of this appeared as my Made in Manhattan column in the South African Sunday Times

On Writing

"If I'm doing my job, I'm reading the culture. I'm reading the world we're living in." ~ Author A.M. Homes at the 2nd annual Brooklyn Book Festival, in conversation with Francine Prose.

The Brooklyn Book Festival

I went to hear Dave Eggars, the editor of the literary journal McSweeney's Quarterly Concern in conversation with the Nigerian-born author, Chris Abani. Eggars most recently wrote What is the What, a novel based on the life story of a Sudanese Lost Boy, Valentino Achak Deng. All author proceeds to the Lost Boys of Sudan.
Achak Deng, 26, wasn’t at this talk – he’s studying international diplomacy at a college in Pennsylvania. “It’s strange for him,” said Eggars. “One day he’s a sophmore, but next week he’ll come to New York to speak at the Clinton’s Global Initiative.”
Eager to take any money made from the book to Marial Bai in Sudan to build a primary school, Achak Deng waited patiently for four years for Eggars to finish the book. Now he has started the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation in Sudan. He’ll take it over once he has completed his studies.
Eggars’ slide show showed the village of Marial Bai, razed to the ground during the war, now rebuilt as a returnee camp. “We went to see what could be done,” explained Eggars. “It was a listening tour.”
Achak Deng is particularly concerned with assisting young women in getting a secondary education. “Eventhough attitudes in Sudan are changing, it is still the tradition to marry off 13 and 14 year olds.”
One slide showed Achak Deng talking to two fourteen year old girls. One wanted to be a doctor; the second, a nurse. “Valentino who is usually very optimistic, told me that they will not reach their goals, not in this generation, but in the next,” said Eggars. “The men are becoming open to change and to women’s empowerment. The returnees like Val have brought with them a more progressive attitude from their time in the West.”
After taking in the needs of Marial Bai, Achak Deng has changed his original plan. “We realised that there are enough primary schools. So everything was adjusted according to the community’s needs,” explained Eggars. “Now he’ll set up a teacher training college, a secondary school, and a micro loan program for single mothers who are entrepreneurs.”
Eggars and Achak Deng are also working on another book that will form part of the McSweeney’s Oral Histories collection. They are telling the stories of women who survived the war. While listening to the stories, Eggars said that many times he and Achak Deng had to stop and ask the women if they were OK to continue. “They would say, ‘I’m not afraid. Let’s keep going’,” says Eggars. Many Sudanese girls were kidnapped and sold into slavery or to men who they would be forced to marry. They often endured horrific beatings and rape.

By Nadine Rubin. A version of this appeared as my Made in Manhattan column in the South African Sunday Times.

On The Box

A review in The New York Times this past February described The Box thus: "A pedigreed crew is behind this surrealistic dinner-theater on the Lower East Side. Owners include Simon Hammerstein, the 28-year-old grandson of Oscar;
Randy Weiner, the “Donkey Show’’ writer; and Serge Becker, the night life impresario. The actors Jude Law and Rachel Weisz sit on the board of the opera house-cum-concert saloon. The entertainment will be eccentric: Thai fighters one night and opera singers in Mexican wrestling masks the next."

Dinner and a table from which to watch the nightly show that begins at 1am costs $125, or you can stand for a more affordable $25.

Currently on at the Box, however, is the rather uninspired and cliched show called Pandora. It’s hosted by a former Cirque Du Soleil star, MC Raven O, and boasts variety acts that are billed to be in the spirit of Ziegfeld and Busby Berkley. All that translated into rather average burlesque interspersed with a magician, a lasso champion, and a fire eater. And then there was this: overly raunchy, S&M-style acts thrown in, I would imagine, to shock. I’m no prude, so trust me when I say that they were simply not sexy even though they featured full male and female nudity. One saw MC Raven O, wearing nothing but a pig’s snout and a white blood-smeared butcher’s apron, masturbate (yes, really) and snort like a pig as a trapeze artist did the splits above his head. In another, a large woman in a leather waist-corset -- and nothing else -- pulled out a butcher's knife and ran it through her lips, spattering fake blood onto her fetish-sized breasts. The rowdy and rather drunk crowd roared their approval leaving me to wonder about the American psyche.
When it comes to sexual violence or humiliation – even if it’s make-believe – I’ve discovered I’m a Mother Grundy. If instead of Dita von Teese spinning about in a cocktail glass there’s going to be a bloody Marilyn Manson-style scene, shouldn’t there be some sort of disclaimer?

By Nadine Rubin. A version of this appeared as my Made in Manhattan column in the South African Sunday Times.

Biko Chic

It looks like Steve Biko has become South Africa's Che Guevara (following Nelson Mandela, of course, who was given the Che treatment for the first ten years after apartheid ended). In a story for the Associated Press, writer Celean Jacobson reported that T-shirts bearing the image of Steve Biko, the symbol of black resistance worldwide who was killed by apartheid police, can be found for sale at flea market stalls and exclusive boutiques across South Africa.

She asks an interesting question:

"Is [the new trend] a sign the post-apartheid youth culture is embracing Biko's message of racial pride and African unity, or just crass commercialization of one of the most important figures in South African history."

Jackie Radebe, 23, who bought a Biko T-shirt after reading "I Write What I Like," sees him as a selfless leader whose politics of brotherhood are still relevant to South Africa.

"He had genuine compassion for the plight of the people, genuine concern about poverty, crime and loss of pride," Radebe said.

While Biko would celebrate the "breakthroughs this young democracy has achieved," Radebe believes his hero would be disappointed in the country's leaders.

"As far as morals, integrity and principles ... contemporary political leaders seem to be driven by money and self-interest," he says.

Read the full article here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070911/ap_en_ot/south_africa_biko;_ylt=AjsordfrfaK_E7_DpsXbHSgE1vAI

Steve Biko Foundation:

http://www.sbf.org.za

Mashups are the New Black

Today at the Peter Som fashion show, amidst gorgeous metallic flowers, brocades galore, and corn and rasberry patent leather on skinny belts and towering pumps, this mashup made me sit up and take notice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltKyaedTDUU

Call me a romantic, but in my opinion it stole the show.

It is The Police Vs. Snow Patrol, humorously but appropriately renamed "Every Car You Chase."