Friday I went to see the Summer of Love exhibit with Lolita, Michelle & Delano, and Ace of Hearts. Photography wasn’t allowed in the exhibit, but I snuck these shots, using available light. People had varying reactions. For some it was too much pop culture. Lolita sang and danced her way through the exhibit. For me, it was one long nostalgia trip. The show ends 9/16.
culture
The book Kabul Beauty School has given millions of readers a window on the lives of women in Afghanistan. But it has also exposed the women to risks. And they are upset with author Deborah Rodriguez, who has since left the country.
Kabul Beauty School deals with some of the strictest taboos in Afghan society. In it, Rodriguez describes how she helped one of her students fake her virginity on her wedding night. And she writes of how some of her students were forced into loveless marriages, one of them when she was barely 14.
Although the book isn’t available in Afghanistan, word of it has leaked out there.
The book, currently No. 28 on The New York Times bestseller list, made an overnight sensation of Rodriguez, a flamboyant beautician from Michigan, when it was published by Random House in April. The book is also slated to become a movie, with Sandra Bullock playing the lead.
But back in Afghanistan, the subjects of her book say Rodriguez and her newfound fame have put their lives in danger. They say they’ve seen none of the money or help to get them out of Afghanistan that Rodriguez promised them in exchange for having their stories appear in the book. (more. . .)
By: Michael Washburn
“It’s not the cheating, it’s the lyingâ€â€”or so goes our national post-affair mantra. But of course, it’s the cheating. The cheating is the lying, as much as it’s the sex. (If you aren’t lying, you’re not cheating: You’re swinging.) We know the distinction between the physical act of sex and the illocutionary act of lying is false, yet this is the first line in the last act of every American domestic tragedy. It’s what betrayed spouses are supposed to say when confronted with their wayward partners, and it sets the stage for scenes filled with apology, contrition and, oddly, the detailed recitation of each liaison. It’s like this everywhere, right?
Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee, former Wall Street Journal reporter Pamela Druckerman’s witty, engaging exploration of comparative infidelity, answers this question with an emphatic No. Every country has its adulterers—some more than others—but each culture’s cuckoldry has a flair all its own.
“Infidelity,†Ms. Druckerman writes, “isn’t just ubiquitous, it’s revealing.†From the status-anxious cafés of the Upper East Side to Moscow’s bureaucratic institutes of sexology to the stimulacra of Tokyo’s “pervert trains,†she exposes styles of infidelity as varied as the names used to describe them—“going strange,†“pinching the cat in the dark,†“a tied-up mare eats, too,†“standing in two boats at once.†Ms. Druckerman dramatizes the desire-driven lives of, among others, Williamsburg’s frustrated Hasidim, Indonesia’s bored wives and the torpid yi lais who inhabit China’s concubine villages. (more…)
