I just now saw the American headlines about the gay marriage ruling in California and I’m overwhelmed and elated. I can think of only one or two moments in my life when I was this pleased with political developments. This decision will allow me and many of the people I care about most in the world to marry the men and women we love.
Marriage is the ultimate social sanction of a relationship, and I felt that immediately upon reading the headlines. How can anyone now look down on gay and lesbian relationships as somehow inferior when they have not just the same legal rights but the same status as heterosexual relationships? How can anyone look down on gay families?
I’m optimistic that California voters will support gay marriage in November, even though they didn’t in 2000. And even though I believe the governor is a slimey, opportunistic, misogynistic *******, I am incredibly grateful that he is supporting gay marriage. Please help spread the message to everyone you know to support full equality for all Californians this November.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
A very silly weekend
This was a very silly weekend.
On Sunday, the whole crew (Me, Vero, Udai, Marcelo, Lauren, Zach and James) went to brunch at this cute European cafe nearby. We joked that is was a Mother's Day celebration in absentia. "Brunch" is a very American concept, and it was fun to deconstruct: etymologically a combination of breakfast and lunch, but in fact a very leisurely weekend meal with lots of people you love in which you're allowed to eat anything you want. Afterwards, we headed over to the park because it was unseasonably warm day. Vero and I did some really goofy interpretative dancing to make the boys laugh, and then we went to see Iron Man and Vero was inspired to dress up as the anti-offensive odor super hero (see videos below.)
Udai: "I don't understand why women kiss men. Men are disgusting!"
Marcelo (in Spanish): "Katy, teach me English! What is this?"
Katy: Those are dishes.
Marcelo: Hmmm. . . like fishes, only dishes.
Katy (to Marcelo, in Spanish): "You're not 24? I always thought you were the same age as me."
Marcelo: Katy, you're 23.
Katy: Oh, yeah.
Interpretive dance in the park
Vero the Superhero
Zach, napping contentedly on my couch
James and Vero
Ydai getting ready to go out
Vero, Me and Marcelo in the park
On Sunday, the whole crew (Me, Vero, Udai, Marcelo, Lauren, Zach and James) went to brunch at this cute European cafe nearby. We joked that is was a Mother's Day celebration in absentia. "Brunch" is a very American concept, and it was fun to deconstruct: etymologically a combination of breakfast and lunch, but in fact a very leisurely weekend meal with lots of people you love in which you're allowed to eat anything you want. Afterwards, we headed over to the park because it was unseasonably warm day. Vero and I did some really goofy interpretative dancing to make the boys laugh, and then we went to see Iron Man and Vero was inspired to dress up as the anti-offensive odor super hero (see videos below.)
Udai: "I don't understand why women kiss men. Men are disgusting!"
Marcelo (in Spanish): "Katy, teach me English! What is this?"
Katy: Those are dishes.
Marcelo: Hmmm. . . like fishes, only dishes.
Katy (to Marcelo, in Spanish): "You're not 24? I always thought you were the same age as me."
Marcelo: Katy, you're 23.
Katy: Oh, yeah.
Interpretive dance in the park
Vero the Superhero
Zach, napping contentedly on my couch
James and Vero
Ydai getting ready to go out
Vero, Me and Marcelo in the park
Monday, May 5, 2008
Pesach in Santiago
The weekend before last, I hosted a Passover seder at my apartment in Santiago. Passover is one of my favorite holidays, and I was sad to miss out on it, so I decided to do it myself.
I'd never hosted a seder before but I had a great time putting everything together. I created my one liberation haggadah by combining elements of the original Civil Rights Seder, the Women's Seder and the Labor Seder (if anyone wants a copy, just let me know and I'll send it to you.) I really enjoyed the process of going through the different haggadahs and thinking about what Passover means to me.
The weekend felt just like Thanksgiving at home. It was chilly but clear and the city felt quieter than usual. Udai got into Santiago in the morning and he and Zach helped me do the grocery shopping. I spent all day chopping vegetables and marinating the chicken and making charoset --it was a lot of fun. Having grown up in a family of great cooks (who love to be in the kitchen), I never got to do much of that stuff when I was a kid. In fact, I only really started cooking last year when I lived on my own in San Francisco and it turns out that I really love to cook. I'd never cooked for so many people before (there were ten of us) but it all turned out great.
Zach and James and Lauren came a bit early to help out and James made homemade matzoh, which was very impressive. Then Genaro and Eduardo and Marcelo and Javiera got there. With the exception of Marcelo, Lauren (and Udai, of course) we all live within a few blocks from eachother. Only Zach and James had been to a seder before, so it was new to everyone else. And we were quite a cosmpolitan crew: Chilean atheists and Catholics, a Venezuelan, an American Catholic, American Jews, and an Indian Hindu. Pretty cool. Not so different from doing a seder in Berkeley, I guess.
As always, there were lots of jokes about the length of the haggadah, the amount of wine we're obligated to drink and whether we'd ever get to eat! But we made it through the haggadah, sang Solidarity Forever, Study War No More, and We Shall Not Be Moved, talked about when liberation meant to each of us, talked about the war and the day after pill and class and racism, drank a lot of wine and ate a lot of food and laughed and laughed. In other words, it was exactly what I hoped it would be.
Enjoy the photos and (though Passover is over), Chag Sameach!
The crew
Zach and James
Me and Marcelo
Udai and Javiera
Eduardo and Genaro
Lauren
Vero
The chicken (at last!)
Dinner
Yum, yum
L'chaim! The second cup of wine (or is it the first?)
And if you want to read more, my friend Lauren wrote an article on the seder for her internship at the Santiago Times:
I'd never hosted a seder before but I had a great time putting everything together. I created my one liberation haggadah by combining elements of the original Civil Rights Seder, the Women's Seder and the Labor Seder (if anyone wants a copy, just let me know and I'll send it to you.) I really enjoyed the process of going through the different haggadahs and thinking about what Passover means to me.
The weekend felt just like Thanksgiving at home. It was chilly but clear and the city felt quieter than usual. Udai got into Santiago in the morning and he and Zach helped me do the grocery shopping. I spent all day chopping vegetables and marinating the chicken and making charoset --it was a lot of fun. Having grown up in a family of great cooks (who love to be in the kitchen), I never got to do much of that stuff when I was a kid. In fact, I only really started cooking last year when I lived on my own in San Francisco and it turns out that I really love to cook. I'd never cooked for so many people before (there were ten of us) but it all turned out great.
Zach and James and Lauren came a bit early to help out and James made homemade matzoh, which was very impressive. Then Genaro and Eduardo and Marcelo and Javiera got there. With the exception of Marcelo, Lauren (and Udai, of course) we all live within a few blocks from eachother. Only Zach and James had been to a seder before, so it was new to everyone else. And we were quite a cosmpolitan crew: Chilean atheists and Catholics, a Venezuelan, an American Catholic, American Jews, and an Indian Hindu. Pretty cool. Not so different from doing a seder in Berkeley, I guess.
As always, there were lots of jokes about the length of the haggadah, the amount of wine we're obligated to drink and whether we'd ever get to eat! But we made it through the haggadah, sang Solidarity Forever, Study War No More, and We Shall Not Be Moved, talked about when liberation meant to each of us, talked about the war and the day after pill and class and racism, drank a lot of wine and ate a lot of food and laughed and laughed. In other words, it was exactly what I hoped it would be.
Enjoy the photos and (though Passover is over), Chag Sameach!
The crew
Zach and James
Me and Marcelo
Udai and Javiera
Eduardo and Genaro
Lauren
Vero
The chicken (at last!)
Dinner
Yum, yum
L'chaim! The second cup of wine (or is it the first?)
And if you want to read more, my friend Lauren wrote an article on the seder for her internship at the Santiago Times:
Sunday, May 4, 2008
A nice week
We had a very fun houseguest this week, Udai, who is a friend of my friend Joyojeet from Berkeley. (Udai and Joyojeet worked together on a research project for Microsoft in which they designed computers with multiple mice to be used for collaborative learning in elementary school classrooms in developing countries.) Udai, who is from Delhi but was living in Bangalore, is traveling around the world -- he started in London and he's planning to travel through the Americas and into Asia. He got in last Sunday, just in time for our liberation seder, which I will write about in another post, and left yesterday for Easter Island. We watched Hindi film clips on Youtube, had a "Leaving on a Jetplane" sing-a-long and talked about our favorite places to travel in India. Udai was dying for Indian food (after months of the relative bland South American diet) and we managed to find a great Indian restaurant nearby (I was thrilled). Altogether, it was a cozy week -- my friends kept popping by and it seemed like, in addition to Vero and Udai, Lauren or Marcelo or Zach or Genaro was always around. Actually, it felt like being back in Berkeley, like home.
Udai and Vero at my apartment before their jam session.
Udai and Vero at my apartment before their jam session.
Pastillas, pastillas, pa' todas las chiquillas!
On April 22, I went to an amazing protest against the Supreme Court decision on the Day After Pill (see earlier postings for more information on this decision and sexual politics in Chile.) The protest began at 7:00 at night, when it's already dark out, in the Plaza Italia, the traditional starting point for major demonstrations in Santiago. Apparently, it is quite common to hold marches and protests at night in South America -- the Chileans got the idea from the Argentinians -- and I have to say that it's about 100 times better than holding a protest during the day.
Aside from candlelight vigils and the occasional guerrilla Christmas carol action, I'd never been to a protest at night, and certainly never to one of this magnitude. Estimates of the size of the crowd ranged from 10-20,000 people. Many of us had expected the crowd to be mostly women, but were happily surprised by the gender parity. There were people of every age and social extraction.
One of the best things about the march was that everyone was focused on both the gender equality and class issues of the Supreme Court decision at the same time: they were outraged that the government was dictating what women could or could not do with their bodies (and essentially saying that all sex must be for procreation), but were equally or perhaps even more outraged that this decision would really effect poor women, while women of the middle and upper classes would continue to have greater access to contraception and abortions.
Because of the late hour, the size of the crowd, the music and chants, it felt more like a street party or carnaval than a protest. I was there with my collective, who played drums through the whole march, and we made up chants as we went along. My favorite was: "Pastillas, pastillas, pa' todas las chiquillas, Condones, condones, pa' todos los hueones" (The pill, the pill, for all the girls; condoms, condoms, for all the dudes, but it sounds a lot funnier in Spanish.)
Nearly everyone I know was there: my roommate, my friend Lauren, my friend Eduardo -- my friend Genaro watched the whole thing from his balcony. My friend Marcelo was coming from his apprenticeship graduation which happened to be held at the Universidad Catolica on the Alameda. Since the crowd thought the students were from the Catolica (the wealthy, prestigious, and conservative university), rather than construction workers, they yelled all kinds of obscenities at them, poor guys.
The march ended across the street from La Moneda, the presidential palace. There was a huge police presence to keep the crowd in check, but I don't think there were any problems. The march ended with a free outdoor concert and rally. Despite the enormity of the event -- many people said it was the largest protest in Santiago since the Pinguinos -- it got barely any press coverage. (And remember, this is a country where traffic accidents make headline news.) Though of course, it's unclear what, if any effect, this will have on public policy. Hopefully, we'll be able to keep the momentum up and see a change.
My collective
Me, at the end of the march
Concert across the street from La Moneda
La Moneda at night
360 degree video of protesters chanting "UDI, escucha, andate a la chucha" (UDI -- the right wing party - go f*** yourself) in the Plaza Italia on the Alameda
Aside from candlelight vigils and the occasional guerrilla Christmas carol action, I'd never been to a protest at night, and certainly never to one of this magnitude. Estimates of the size of the crowd ranged from 10-20,000 people. Many of us had expected the crowd to be mostly women, but were happily surprised by the gender parity. There were people of every age and social extraction.
One of the best things about the march was that everyone was focused on both the gender equality and class issues of the Supreme Court decision at the same time: they were outraged that the government was dictating what women could or could not do with their bodies (and essentially saying that all sex must be for procreation), but were equally or perhaps even more outraged that this decision would really effect poor women, while women of the middle and upper classes would continue to have greater access to contraception and abortions.
Because of the late hour, the size of the crowd, the music and chants, it felt more like a street party or carnaval than a protest. I was there with my collective, who played drums through the whole march, and we made up chants as we went along. My favorite was: "Pastillas, pastillas, pa' todas las chiquillas, Condones, condones, pa' todos los hueones" (The pill, the pill, for all the girls; condoms, condoms, for all the dudes, but it sounds a lot funnier in Spanish.)
Nearly everyone I know was there: my roommate, my friend Lauren, my friend Eduardo -- my friend Genaro watched the whole thing from his balcony. My friend Marcelo was coming from his apprenticeship graduation which happened to be held at the Universidad Catolica on the Alameda. Since the crowd thought the students were from the Catolica (the wealthy, prestigious, and conservative university), rather than construction workers, they yelled all kinds of obscenities at them, poor guys.
The march ended across the street from La Moneda, the presidential palace. There was a huge police presence to keep the crowd in check, but I don't think there were any problems. The march ended with a free outdoor concert and rally. Despite the enormity of the event -- many people said it was the largest protest in Santiago since the Pinguinos -- it got barely any press coverage. (And remember, this is a country where traffic accidents make headline news.) Though of course, it's unclear what, if any effect, this will have on public policy. Hopefully, we'll be able to keep the momentum up and see a change.
My collective
Me, at the end of the march
Concert across the street from La Moneda
La Moneda at night
360 degree video of protesters chanting "UDI, escucha, andate a la chucha" (UDI -- the right wing party - go f*** yourself) in the Plaza Italia on the Alameda
Thursday, April 24, 2008
'Not what he actually saw but what his age thought it natural to see. . .'
I just finished reading Marc Bloch's famous essay, The Historian's Craft, a meditation on historical method. It's a dense but highly readable piece of finely articulated and incisive observations on the difficulties of objectively studying the past and studying it on its own terms. For example:
"Clouds have not changed their shapes since the Middle Ages, yet we no longer see in them either magical swords or miraculous crosses. The tail of the comet sighted by the great Ambroise Pare was probably very little different from those which occasionally sweep across our skies. yet, he thought he saw in it a full suit of curious armor. Compliance with universal prejudice had bested the habitual accuracy of his gaze; and his testimony, like that of so many others, tells us not what he actually saw but what his age thought it natural to see." (emphasis added)
He delves into the question of historical origins (particularly the tendency of European modernists to locate single origins for phenomenon which have multiple causes stretching over long periods of time); the value judgments and simplifications inherent in periodization (which Bloch was particularly alert to as a historian of the "Middle Ages", the often cast-aside thousand years between the Christian/Roman Era and the Modern Era); the difficulties of analyzing historical evidence and the prejudices of long-dead witnesses; and the temptation to write history in order to justify or criticize the social order of the present.
Reading the essay, its author often peaks through the lines. A French Jew, Bloch wrote the incomplete piece between 1941-42, following the German blitzkrieg, and shortly before he joined the French Resistance. He mentions several times that the Dreyfus Affair (the framing of a French Jewish army officer at the turn of the century), was the formative event of his youth. He also touches on the Protocals of the Elders of Zion (the influential Russian-forged anti-Semitic pamphlet which still refuses to die, aledging that Jews control the world) and the forced confessions and torture of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition.
Considering the overwhelming anxiety of the times, it's remarkable that Bloch wrote this piece in the early '40s. It reminded me of something that Victor Frankl says in Man's Search for Meaning: that counterintuitively, it was, in his experience, often the intellectuals who survived best in Auschwitz because they could escape to a world in their minds.
"Clouds have not changed their shapes since the Middle Ages, yet we no longer see in them either magical swords or miraculous crosses. The tail of the comet sighted by the great Ambroise Pare was probably very little different from those which occasionally sweep across our skies. yet, he thought he saw in it a full suit of curious armor. Compliance with universal prejudice had bested the habitual accuracy of his gaze; and his testimony, like that of so many others, tells us not what he actually saw but what his age thought it natural to see." (emphasis added)
He delves into the question of historical origins (particularly the tendency of European modernists to locate single origins for phenomenon which have multiple causes stretching over long periods of time); the value judgments and simplifications inherent in periodization (which Bloch was particularly alert to as a historian of the "Middle Ages", the often cast-aside thousand years between the Christian/Roman Era and the Modern Era); the difficulties of analyzing historical evidence and the prejudices of long-dead witnesses; and the temptation to write history in order to justify or criticize the social order of the present.
Reading the essay, its author often peaks through the lines. A French Jew, Bloch wrote the incomplete piece between 1941-42, following the German blitzkrieg, and shortly before he joined the French Resistance. He mentions several times that the Dreyfus Affair (the framing of a French Jewish army officer at the turn of the century), was the formative event of his youth. He also touches on the Protocals of the Elders of Zion (the influential Russian-forged anti-Semitic pamphlet which still refuses to die, aledging that Jews control the world) and the forced confessions and torture of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition.
Considering the overwhelming anxiety of the times, it's remarkable that Bloch wrote this piece in the early '40s. It reminded me of something that Victor Frankl says in Man's Search for Meaning: that counterintuitively, it was, in his experience, often the intellectuals who survived best in Auschwitz because they could escape to a world in their minds.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo
Pictures from the art museum across the street from my house. . .
Main hall
Sculpture
Main hall
Sculpture
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