This doll, Maya, has nothing to do with barbiturates or sex or any of the other adult themes that washed right over me in the movie. Nor do her companions, who I discover are part of a series called Inspiring Women. I have rushed to the Barbie website, and tennis star Billie Jean King is here, along with astronaut Sally Ride, artist Frida Kahlo, NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, and activist Rosa Parks.
Richard had humanity, but he deliberately discards it, death by death. And while I cannot excuse his bleak, inexorable decision, I find myself mourning it with an empathy today’s politics have not engendered.
We have just broken a 4,000-year-old tradition that began with the ancient Babylonians.
After centuries of art and ritual, color symbolism is so richly layered that we can pick what we like, impose our own symbolism. Maybe Kamala Harris has ascended to our version of royalty, and the purple was her robe, sans ermine trim. Maybe she was preparing for a brazen old age, as clubby women do. Or bracing to be wounded in battle.
Empiricists love buffets, because they can peer at all their options, maybe even spoon something up and study it before deciding whether to take more.
Screen capture from NBC’s coverage of the Inauguration. Inaugural Day was bright and cold, with 200,000 small flags replacing an audience on the Mall, and the capital an occupation zone. The number of deaths from Covid passed 400,000, more than our WWII dead, as the sitting President winged…
Nearly everything in our culture, including companies and music and social media sites, is now forced to choose sides. I am right there keeping score and applauding, because too much damage has been done to talk fatuously of unity.
To those of us not playing, QAnon feels like the nightmarish but logical conclusion to the gradual realization, in valid disciplines, that all truth is subjective and relative; that the observer can alter the situation; that facts can be bent to support a false narrative.
Screen shot of photographer Greg Williams at work. There are online classes or sessions of all kinds these days, such as The Great Courses (“Learn at your own pace with no schedule, while exercising, commuting, or just relaxing. Just you and the world’s greatest professors!”); TED…
Soul may be a children’s movie, but two weeks later, I am still trying to figure it out. Granted, I overthink everything. But I like director (and Pixar creative chief) Pete Docter’s willingness to tackle abstract concepts (Up, Inside Out) so I want to know what he is saying.