For The Old Mole July 14 2008, we review WALL-E, the latest Pixar animation, also brought to us by Disney.  

for the Old Mole 23 June 2008

The Marq’ssan cycle consists of five feminist science fiction novels by L. Timmel Duchamp.  The first four novels—Alanya to Alanya, Renegade, Tsunami, and Blood in the Fruit—are already available through the Multnomah County Library, and by the time you’ve read those, they should have the fifth, Stretto, officially to be released in July 2008, but already available from the publisher, Aqueduct Press. 

for The Old Mole 9 June 2008

Certainly both groups have faced legislative attacks. Richard Fricker on Consortium News is only one of several recent writers to note what he calls a “surge of theocracy tinged with white racialism,” which he sees in a series of recent measures in Oklahoma.

But of course it’s not just Oklahoma.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and by some counts it was the one-hundredth anniversary of Mother’s Day in the US . In 1870, social activist Julia Ward Howe wrote her Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament, a call to unite women to organize against war.

Here on the Old Mole we try to be uplifting; we like to focus not just on political critique, but also on the ways that  ordinary folks can make a difference, the ways that even when the gardens of Versailles seem undisturbed, the mole of revolution is digging away underground.   Sometimes this  feels harder than others, and just lately there’s been what Jaques-Alain Miller calls a “surge on depression” –emotional, economic, and heavily medicated.

Joe Bageant diagnoses pandemic “rage fatigue” as the root of what he calls “the audacity of depression.” 

Many progressive commentators have observed that Barak Obama’s rhetoric and supporters seem quite progressive, but his policies and record are much less so.

When the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan, one of the prominent justifications was liberating the people George W Bush called “women of cover” from the Taliban.  Laura Bush told us in 2002  that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women."  Similarly, in March 2003, shortly after the United States and its allies invaded Iraq, women's rights and gender equity  were mentioned as symbolic issues for Iraq's new national agenda.

 Girls Rock!  the movie about Portland’s Rock and Roll Camp for Girls  which has inspired other girls rock camps opens March 7 at Cinema 21.

Be there!

Reviewed on the Old Mole Variety Hour 3-3-08.

Born in Trinidad in 1901, CLR James was a leftist writer and social theorist until his death in 1989. In the 1930s, he worked for West Indian Independence, and moved to Britain, where he wrote a number of novels, and was the cricket reporter for the Manchester Guardian. In the 1940s and early 1950s, he lived in the United States, and wrote about politics, film, literature, and literary criticism.

Deported in 1953, he was much influenced by the 1957 revolution in which the former British colony of the Gold Coast became Ghana, and by the ensuing anticolonial and Black Power struggles of the 1950s and 60s.

Denise Morris and Frann Michel review Persepolis on the Old Mole Variety Hour 1-25-08.