From Sheila O’Malley, a depressing picture of Marilyn Monroe — or rather, of her position in the world:

Many of these movies were interested in demeaning or humiliating her, punishing her for the fact that she elicited desirous feelings in men. The Seven Year Itch, while mostly famous today for the skirt-blowing-up scene, is a nasty piece of work which puts Monroe in the unenviable position of being portrayed as a circus freak of sex appeal. Tom Ewell plays her ogling downstairs neighbor, and the way he views her shows the attempt to turn her sexiness into something dirty and lewd. She is so “hot” that she has to keep her underwear in the freezer.

O’Malley, though, has her usual admiration for actors who bury their problems under fanatically workaholic commitment to getting the job done:

It is commonly known that Monroe was victimized and abandoned as a child, leaving her with an abyss of need inside of her, but she took that victimization and turned it into a weapon and a strength. As an actress, she did not hide her need for love; instead she willingly let it flood out of her eyes into the camera and into the eyes of her co-stars in a way that is still startling to witness today

I always enjoy seeing specialist, professional media outflank the mainstream, and agree with the angry ranters. Much of my joy in reading the Financial Times, for example, comes from seeing them offer critiques of markets and capitalism which the Guardian would flinch from publishing.

Case in point: Australian marketing magainz B&T rips into the Olympics. They describe a photoshoot with Sally Gunnell, interrupted by fanatical brand policing by the Olympic organizing committee:

Raising the national flag over her shoulders was deemed to be too reminiscent of Gunnell’s triumphant gesture after winning the 1992 400m Hurdles Olympic Gold for Great Britain in Barcelona. The photoshoot was halted, the Union Jack removed and Gunnell forced to change from her white tracksuit deemed too reminiscent of the British national strip and into a more acceptable orange T-shirt.

The New Statesman profiles Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. Among other things, it paints him as embodiment of the shift away from economic politics, towards London-centric cultural and arts:

“what happened in the late 1980s was a changing of the guard from people interested in politics to people interested in culture. Rusbridger’s not politically engaged, but nobody else is, since it doesn’t make any difference who’s running the country. He has been very successful at retaining a Guardian persona that keeps in touch with the zeitgeist”

It’s true, and it’s possibly what has kept the Guardian doing so well. I just wish it didn’t have to be that way.

Shiv Malik in the Guardian:

A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.

A particularly horrendous case, this, but not an aberration. It’s mindblowing how much of the grunt-work of running big occasions is now turfed over to the exploited unemployed. The government and private sector have figured out how to get work at only the cost of unemployment benefits. And however much they are described as ‘volunteers’, there’s a strong element of coercion:

Both stewards said they were originally told they would be paid. But when they got to the coach on Saturday night, they said, they were told that the work would be unpaid and that if they did not accept it they would not be considered for well-paid work at the Olympics.

That promised paid work is hardly utopian, by the way:

Close Protection UK confirmed that it was using up to 30 unpaid staff and 50 apprentices, who were paid £2.80 an hour, for the three-day event in London. A spokesman said the unpaid work was a trial for paid roles at the Olympics, which it had also won a contract to staff. Unpaid staff were expected to work two days out of the three-day holiday.

The Moscow gay pride parade happened a week ago, as usual. Or rather, didn’t happen as usual. LGBT demonstrations, Described as ‘satanic’ by one former mayor, have never been allowed in Moscow.

Drugoi (Rustem Adagamov), one of Russia’s most popular bloggers, was there this time, and reports that everything followed the pattern established over the past 7 years of abortive parades. The organizers apply for a permit. They are denied, on dubious grounds (“a provocation, causing moral harm”). A few of the brave and foolhardy turn up anyway, ready to be either arrested or attacked by counter-demonstrators.

A few dozen journalists waited at the city council building and opposite the mayor’s office on Tverskaya Square, waiting for the appearance of LGBT activists…What happened today couldn’t be called a parade nor even an action — a dozen people with assorted rainbow logos, or without them, turned up to the city council. One one ground or another they were all arrested and taken away by the police.

And if you think wearing the rainbow flag is shaky grounds for arrest, you should look at St. Petersburg. There, “homosexual propaganda” has been banned since March, by a law which forbids “

propagandising sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism, and transgenderism among minors

“. There are moves in progress introduce a similar law on a national level. So all in all, gay rights in Russia are growing weaker, rather than stronger.

ETA

: after writing it I discovered that, wonder of wonders, an LGBT demonstration has been allowed in Moscow. Maybe my pessimism was unjustified — or perhaps this is a one-off, because assorted EU politicians are in town

What’s strange about guitarist Erik Mongrain isn’t his skill or the beauty of his music. It’s the novelty of his style — something I thought would be impossible by now. The guitar is the most ubiquitous of instruments — how could there exist a technique which hasn’t been explored a thousand times before?

Mongrain calls it ‘lap tapping’, reasonably enough. A few other people play percussive guitar — Dominic Frasca, Andy McKee — but with a far more traditional guitar sound. And there doesn’t seem to be any tradition of this, though presumably history has some lone virtuosos. So Mongrain is all alone in innovation.

Chinese poet Lin Zhao is gradually making a posthumous name for herself, mainly among the cliques of dissidents and intellectuals.

She was executed in 1968, after spending the last 8 years of her life in jail for publishing critical articles. Over that period she managed a stunning output, even by the standards of people committed enough to choose jail and death on the basis of principle. 200,000 words. Written in blood. On the paper provided so she could free herself by writing a confession.

I’ve not managed to track down much of her poetry — there are a couple of pieces here and here. Neither is particularly memorable in English, but then I doubt they are easy to translate.

It does, of course, fit uncomfortably well into tropes of martyrdom, religious or political. You could doubtless find a direct counterpart of Lin in the lives of the Catholic saints. And it doesn’t make complete sense: why would the jailors would provide paper but no ink?

For all that, it’s a story that brings you up short. And, apparently, it’s becoming easier to talk about Lin in China:

In 2004, the Beijing Youth Daily published a feature about Lin while Southern Weekly has also run several articles about her.

Lin’s poems are also becoming more widely circulated. People are starting to see the value in her writings as a complement to Cultural Revolution literature, which is virtually non-existent.

“So many people kept silent during those years, but she was still speaking up,” said Hu. “She represented the most beautiful quality of mankind, its conscience.”

Issandr el Amrani is pessimistic about the Egyptian presidential election, saying the process “

appears to have been rigged to put an end to a transformation of Egyptian politics that was the hope of the January 25 revolution

“. He points out that parliament passed a law which would have exluded leading candidate Ahmed Shafiq, and were then ovverruled by the Presidential Election Commission.

el Amrani also has a helpful chart to show roughly the positions of the candidates:

In Counterpunch, Esam Al-Amin argues that the US is backing Amr Moussa as a safe continuity candidate.

The beats are my not-really-guilty pleasure. However much I know I should feel bad about my enthusiasm for them, I just can’t bring myself to. Sure, they’re long-winded, self-satisfied, sexist, blind to their own privilege. Sorry, just this once, I don’t care.

Two beat sacred texts,

Howl

and

On The Road

, have recently been transposed to film. Howl, in the form of a documentary, was premiered in Berlin while I was living there. I’d just spent a manic winter treating the poem as some kind of talisman, mouthing it to myself as I dashed about through the snow.

Nonetheless, I never saw the film. I didn’t want to jinx my euphoria, and besides, I’m not good at seeing films I care about. Sitting through too-slow hours of footage is inherently painful, doubly so when I care about the subject. I’d much rather admire the ripple-effect of the film on culture, as it moves through the media propelled by PR. I’m glad it’s there, and glad to have it nudging us all in a particular direction. Still, I’ll leave it to others to actually watch the film.

Now comes the film version of

On the Road

— Kerouac’s novel of bums drifting across the US, the countercultural cliche that’s simultaneously so American it hurts. The cultural ripples are already showing their effect among my friends, winkling out people who I never would have imagined having an interestin Kerouac.

On the Road

has been showing at Cannes, with the result of this entertaining article in

Le Monde

. OK, OK, partly because of how I started cackling to myself at encountering the phrase “

l’American way of life

“.

But then we hear about the ‘monastic discipline’ of the director preparing to shoot the film. It’s on one level ludicrous — learned exegesis of a text on drifting. Cue awkward self-recognition; I’m the kind of person who would write a PhD on how to chill out, only to emerge tenser than ever. But sometimes you

need

to try to hard, especially when it’s the only tool you’ve got. And the same tension between working and experiencing was certainly present for Kerouac, Kesey, Ginsberg — eulogizing the wildness of Neal Cassady and others, while retaining enough distance from the party to write and create. So maybe the correct remembrance of them is an earnest film in praise of carelessness.

The Economist has what seems at first to be a gloomy outlook on antisocial Britons staying at home:

The decline in visiting friends and family at home is harder to explain. Inflation-busting petrol prices may have deterred people from making social trips, whereas they have to keep shopping and going to work. Because new cars are more fuel-efficient than old ones, and because their price has risen less than other items, the cost of motoring has actually fallen in real terms. But, since many people focus on the cost per litre of petrol, rather than the cost per mile, rising pump prices may have had some effect on travel patterns.