SOF Observed

Les Femmes du Maroc
Trent Gilliss, online editor

Fresh photography. Taking the old, the classic. Reinventing the established. Masters become mentors. Absorbing and recreating. A Western form made modern and reinterpreted for all to imagine. That’s what I absolutely have fallen for in this series of photographs by Lalla Essaydi:

“In photographing women inscribed with henna, I emphasize their decorative role, but subvert the silence of confinement. There is a very different space I inhabit in the West — a space of independence and mobility.”

That henna is composed of Arabic script. Use of calligraphy in this way keeps with traditional inscriptions one might see in the simplest of mosques or in the Alhambra; it also gives deeper meaning to these poses modeled after 19th-century European and American paintings. Even the title of the series, Les Femmes du Maroc, is a play on Delacroix’s Les Femmes d’Algiers.

I’m not versed well enough in art history to immediately understand the many subtexts going on in these photographs. But, I don’t have to; and you don’t have to either to enjoy the magnificence of these women and the tender beauty of those who inhabit the many worlds we all transect in one way or another as creative, working, sentient beings. Essaydi creates a dialogue about ourselves and eventually with the stranger seated at the table next to you:

“In my art, I wish to present myself through multiple lenses — as artist, as Moroccan, as Saudi, as traditionalist, as liberal, as Muslim. I invite viewers to resist stereotypes.”

(image, top: “Moorish Woman” + bottom: “Grand Odalisque” - courtesy of the Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York and Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston)

[h/t Mona Eltahawy]

Permalink (February 3, 2010 - 3:17 pm)

“ The problem was not a shortage of sincerity but an excess of zeal in which self-belief overrode objective judgment.

— —Jonathan Aitken, commenting in The Guardian on former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and his role in the lead-up to, and the aftermath of, the Iraq war. Aitken says that “once the Chilcot inquiry establishes the truth about Iraq, we should be quick not to judge, but to forgive.”

Trent Gilliss, online editor

Permalink (February 1, 2010 - 7:40 am)

Asking Questions about “Patient Capital” and Social Entrepreneurship: A Video Interview with Chris Farrell
Trent Gilliss, online editor

Producing programs on the ethics of foreign aid and international development can be challenging and fortifying, particularly our shows on the subject — or my interview with Patrick Bellegarde-Smith about the state of Haiti. Not everything a guest says will ring true to the listener’s ear. It’s in the very nature of individuals like Jacqueline Novogratz and Binyavanga Wainaina to penetrate the bubble of our own preconceived notions, or at least play on that elasticity.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t clarify and ask follow-up questions that might round out, or downright challenge, these ideas. It’s good to listen but also to have a good healthy dose of skepticism and the willingness to check it out.

While producing this week’s program, we did just that. I asked Krista if she would sit down again with Chris Farrell, our chief economics correspondent, whom you probably hear most often on Marketplace and Marketplace Money.

Personally, I wanted to better understand some of the terms that Jacqueline Novogratz was using — sometimes as points of differentiation and, at other times, interchangeably. Terms like “donor” and “investor” or even ideas like “venture capital” and “return on investment.” I also wanted to get a lay of the land, a broader view about what “patient capital” (which, Chris says, applied to dot-com startups like Google at one time) means to the larger financial and investment sectors.

Chris gives a helpful history of the origins of social investing, addresses some of this prevailing skepticism, and tells us that he thinks of markets as “chat rooms” as much as “listening devices.” This interview is well worth your while if you want to better understand social entrepreneurship and how we might help others in need.

Permalink (January 31, 2010 - 10:14 am)

“ Salvation somehow seemed closer — yet we also knew that we could be killed at any moment. The goal was to hang on a little longer. … The fury of the Haitian earthquake, which has taken more than 200,000 lives, teaches us how cruel nature can be to man. The Holocaust, which destroyed a people, teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man when he loses his moral compass and his reason.

— —Samuel Pisar, from an excellent Op-Ed in The New York Times titled “Out of Auschwitz”

Trent Gilliss, online editor

Permalink (January 30, 2010 - 4:36 am)

“ …unfortunately, society does not generally invest enough in innovation—especially in areas where it would help the poor (who aren’t an attractive market) and where there isn’t an agreed-upon measure of excellence. In the U.S., that means we have not invested nearly what we should in innovation for education.

-from “My Turn: Bill Gates on Education and Innovation” in the recent edition of Newsweek.

This brief commentary by Bill Gates’ nicely accentuates a point made by Jacqueline Novogratz for our show to be released this Thursday (via podcast). She sees an opportunity for social investors to take risks in these unattractive markets abroad that actually might serve as new models for how we operate here in the States.

Perhaps this experimental work is going on now in more places than many of us realize. It’s just not funded properly or recognized. More directly, I’m thinking of two recent conversations we’ve had with Adele Diamond and Mike Rose. Both are challenging the stagnation in the U.S. education system that Gates’ later mentions — Diamond couples scientific knowledge of the brain with observations of children in classroom settings; Rose pairs his decades of teaching and education at all levels with his conversations with folks in all parts of the country.

Are we really listening and paying attention to what’s going on in our backyard (including Canada)? And, how are we willing to give those ideas a fighting chance of going mainstream?

Trent Gilliss, online editor

Permalink (January 25, 2010 - 10:40 am)

“ …I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

—from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (translation by M.D. Herter Norton), which was cited by Jacqueline Novogratz in her interview with Krista for next week’s program, “A Different Kind of Capitalism.”

Trent Gilliss, online editor

Permalink (January 20, 2010 - 1:47 pm)

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Manifestations of the Living Earth
Trent Gilliss, online editor

“Why, then, turn to a God who seems to be absent at best and vindictive at worst? Haitians don’t have other options. The country has a long legacy of repression and exploitation; international peacekeepers come and go; the earth no longer provides food; jobs almost don’t exist. Perhaps a God who hides is better than nothing.”

The closing paragraph from Pooja Bhatia’s op-ed in today’s NYT courses with the pain of helplessness and suffering brought about by the recent earthquake that decimated this small island country. Bhatia’s questioning of God’s possible vindictive participation, or His absence, in nature’s destruction of human lives is a classic theological question.

Displaced Haitians gather on Place Boyer in Petion-Ville to spend the night.
(photo: Frederic Dupoux/Getty Images)

Five years ago, the massive tsunamis that killed thousands of people, and displaced thousands more living in the low-lying areas of the South Pacific and Indian Oceans had struck. This question of “Where was God?” was being asked by many. We attempted to get at this issue with our show on the morality of nature — by looking at the history of seismic activity and its impacts through the field of Earth Sciences.

To this day, Jelle de Boer’s account of the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 sticks with me, particularly his assessment of the aftereffects of the event and the musical tradition of fado. You can hear the show in the audio player above (or download here). Obviously, we can’t answer the theodicy question. But, hopefully, these scientific perspectives can both challenge and illuminate such religious questions as you read the latest news in Haiti.

Permalink (January 14, 2010 - 1:03 am)

“ I look back at the fork in my road and often wonder if I should have, could have, taken the vocational, farming route. But, at the time, nobody valued that route. Everyone valued ‘education.’

— Michael Sanchez, a chemical engineer living in upstate New York who grew up on a farm in east Texas, in his lovely reflection on “The Meaning of Intelligence.”

Trent Gilliss, online editor

Permalink (January 11, 2010 - 11:41 am)

A Rare Chagall "Crucifixion" Painting Surfaces

Trent Gilliss, online editor

Saw this over the weekend in the London Times and thought it was worth sharing for those of you who missed it.

Quite some time ago, we chose Marc Chagall’s “La Crucifixion Blanche” (1938) as the lead image for our program, “The Jewish Roots of the Christian Story” with our guest, Joel Marcus. “White Crucifixion” is the first in a series of Chagall’s major crucifixion paintings in which he focused on the persecution of his fellow Jews by Hitler and the Nazis through depictions of Jesus dying on the cross and his essential Jewish nature. (Ziva Amishai-Maisels’ exploration of Chagall’s painting is a good starting point for better understanding the nuanced detail and subtle narrative devices used in “White Crucifixion.”)

Chagall’s series has been pretty thoroughly documented and well-catalogued — until October of last year.

A previously unknown 1945 gouache painted by the French-Russian artist while living in New York surfaced in a recent auction in Paris. Keeping it on the down-low, the London Jewish Museum of Art purchased “Apocalypse in Lilac, Capriccio” for the relatively paltry sum of 30,000 euros, about $43,000. The small museum kept it quiet so that major museums and other collectors wouldn’t bid up the price.

And, now, after all these years in hiding, the painting will be displayed in London this coming week. What a treasure for the public to behold.

(“White Crucifixion” courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, a gift of Alfred S. Alschuler)

Permalink (January 5, 2010 - 9:44 am)

More Than Two Million in Two Days

Trent Gilliss, online editor

Tony Blair, David Harris, and Rick Warren at the annual meeting
of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2008.

We’ve all read the stories about how the economic collapse has left no institution or business untouched. Rick Warren, a close friend of business management and leadership guru Peter Drucker, and his Saddleback Church of 22,000 members are no exception.

A couple of days before the end of 2009, Warren sent an “urgent letter” to his church members trying to raise $900,000 before the end of the calendar year:

“With 10% of our church family out of work due to the recession, our expenses in caring for our community in 2009 rose dramatically while our income stagnated. Still, with wise management, we’ve stayed close to our budget all year. Then… this last weekend the bottom dropped out.

On the last weekend of 2009, our total offerings were less than half of what we normally receive - leaving us $900,000 in the red for the year, unless you help make up the difference today and tomorrow.”

The response: more than $2.4 million in donations from thousands of folks from te megachurch in southern California.

Permalink (January 3, 2010 - 5:05 pm)