Paglia on Elizabeth Taylor

Camille Paglia on Elizabeth Taylor:

To me, Elizabeth Taylor's importance as an actress was that she represented a kind of womanliness that is now completely impossible to find on the U.S. or U.K. screen. It was rooted in hormonal reality — the vitality of nature. She was single-handedly a living rebuke to postmodernism and post-structuralism, which maintain that gender is merely a social construct.

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Dissenting from π

Do protest songs change anything?

The Telegraph on protest songs:

When Van Morrison released an album called Hard Nose The Highway in 1973, at the time of the 'Troubles', he was even praised for showing solidarity with Irish nationalism by including a song called Bein' Green. The song was never likely to make it into Dorian Lynskey's excellent book about protest songs, not least because composer Joe Raposo had actually written the song for Kermit the frog. 

Morrison had watched Sesame Street with his daughter and recorded Bein' Green simply because he liked Raposo's lyrics. It goes to show that people sometimes desperately want a message in their music [...]

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