Kwtia

Some news:

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An asylum seeker in the UK who was going to be deported back to Angola hanged himself so that his son would not be deported back with him -- A Nation piece called Left Behind: Bush's Holy War on Nature is worth a read--- There is an article in NYRB about Hugo Chavez called "Don't Cry For Me Venezuala", which has some more on his TV appearances ... a topic I just can't seem to get enough of...it is something for a president to 'talk' to the country so often and invite guests etc..strange but true and kinda beautiful in this world where leaders hide behind ghost writers and glossy images or just plain hide like some big guys out there---

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MP George Galloway and Christopher Hitchens had a debate last week moderated by the indefatigable Amy Goodman (this is some lady)...it was called things like the "grapple in the Apple" (debate was in NYC) or simply "Galloway v. Hitchens" and they both wiped the floor with each other...who did it better or worse depends on personal opinion...but here are some highlights..
And by highlights I mean the down and dirty..for the more polite fare you'll have to listen to the rest of the show..

Galloway: "What you are... What you have witnessed since, is something unique in natural history. The first ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug...the one thing a slug does leave behind it, is a trail of slime....with your Goebbelian leaflets, full of selective quotation, half-truth, mis-truth, and downright untruth, and the comments you made in your last two minutes of this speech.... People like Mr. Hitchens are ready to fight to the last drop of other people's blood, and it's utterly contemptible, utterly and completely contemptible ..but you're not ashamed of yourself at all. It's true, I praised you. You were a butterfly. You're now a slug. You did write like an angel, but you're now working for the Devil, and damn you and all your works....You know, Hitchens, you're a court jester. You're a court jester...Not a, not at Camelot, like other ridiculous other former liberals before you, but at the court of the Bourbon Bushes."

Hitchens: "There are probably some people among you here who fancy yourself as having leftist revolutionary credentials, as far as I can tell that you do from the zoo-noises that you make... And the scars that you can demonstrate from your long, underground, twilight struggle against Dick Cheney. But while you're masturbating in that manner..." .From Seixon

To watch the whole thing go here (almost 2 hours) to watch an excerpt go here

Arts:
An article about Munch called "The Devil Inside"

The Nation has a scathing review of Zadie's new book..I haven't read anything by her yet..I don't want to judge either way..but the review is a refreshing hammering of a novel that has so far been very boringly praised in exactly the same way by everybody..."oh, homage to Howard's End"..blah blah..I still want to read one if not all her novels...But reviews like this remind you that writing is not easy.

An interesting article on gender/feminism/pop-culture..called " What We Owe Xena"..since a new planet is even going to be named after the hero..and if you have Showtime there is no way you didn't watch Xena at least once...they played the show non-stop for much of 2004..Read it, you'll learn a little more than just about Xena.

Xena" is credited by many, including "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" creator Joss Whedon, with blazing the trail for a wave of female action heroes: Buffy, Max of "Dark Angel," Sydney Bristow of "Alias," Starbuck in SciFi's new "Battlestar Galactica" (in which Lawless guest-starred last week) and the Bride in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill." (Tarantino is an enthusiastic "Xena" fan: He talks about his love for this "really cool show" in an interview on the DVD of "Double Dare," a recent documentary about Hollywood stuntwomen featuring "Xena" and "Kill Bill" double Zoë Bell.) Salon