Loving Day

Mildred Delores Loving, née Jeter (1939-2008) and Richard Perry Loving (1933-1975) first met when she was 11 and he was 17 years old. Their "friendship blossomed into romance" and they married years later, on 2nd of June 1958 (via). On 11th of July at 2 a.m. - about five weeks after getting married - the county sheriff and two deputies burst into their bedroom and arrested them for being married to each other (via).
Only in 1967 - on 12th of June - did the United States Supreme Court decide to struck down all "anti-miscegenation laws" that had so far survived in 16 US states (via). 12th of June is dedicated to Mildred and Richard Loving and the right to love and marry the person you love.



"Loving for All" by Mildred Loving, prepared for delivery on 12 June 2007, the 40th anniversary of the Loving vs. Virginia Announcement (via)

"When my late husband, Richard, and I got married in Washington, DC in 1958, it wasn't to make a political statement or start a fight. We were in love, and we wanted to be married.
We didn't get married in Washington because we wanted to marry there. We did it there because the government wouldn't allow us to marry back home in Virginia where we grew up, where we met, where we fell in love, and where we wanted to be together and build our family. You see, I am a woman of color and Richard was white, and at that time people believed it was okay to keep us from marrying because of their ideas of who should marry whom.



When Richard and I came back to our home in Virginia, happily married, we had no intention of battling over the law. We made a commitment to each other in our love and lives, and now had the legal commitment, called marriage, to match. Isn't that what marriage is?
Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the "crime" of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed.




The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.




We left, and got a lawyer. Richard and I had to fight, but still were not fighting for a cause. We were fighting for our love. Though it turned out we had to fight, happily Richard and I didn't have to fight alone. Thanks to groups like the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, and so many good people around the country willing to speak up, we took our case for the freedom to marry all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men," a "basic civil right."



My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God's plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation's fears and prejudices have given way, and today's young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry.



Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don't think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the "wrong kind of person" for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.



I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about."  Mildred Loving



"The short picture essay that appeared in LIFE was not so much the story of a legal battle, but a love story. And that is in many ways, still the heart of the Lovings’ tale. In every frame the photos taken over a two week visit to their home by Grey Villet make it plain that the couple are a unit, tightly bound by love, mutual respect and friendship. It is fitting therefore that they became a symbol of love as an inalienable right." (via)



"For the first time, I could put my arm around [Mildred] and publicly call her my wife."
Richard Loving



- warrants to arrest Richard Loving and Mildred Jetter: here and here
- Mildred and Richard Loving on YouTube

- photographs via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via 

Quoting Frank Zappa (and his mother)

"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."
Frank Zappa



"The thing that makes me mad about Frank is that his hair is curlier than mine - and blacker."
Zappa's mother on Zappa



The photographs of Frank Zappa (1940-1993) with his parents were taken for the 24 September 1971 issue of LIFE by John Olson (via).

"Everyone had told me that Frank Zappa was going to be really difficult, and he couldn't have been more professional."  John Olson

- photographs of Frank Zappa with his parents via and via and via
- Fisher Lowe, K. (2007). The Words and Music of Frank Zappa. Bison Books

High Heels & Serial Killer Barbie

In 2015, a key theme of many films presented at the Cannes film festival was gender equality. In 2015, the Cannes film festival faced controversy and caused a backlash because women were barred entry for not wearing high heels - a dress-code policy that was denied by Cannes' director who later apologised for the "over-zealousness" of his security guards (via). One of the women was Valeria Richter who had been stopped four times by officials before she was finally allowed in (and who cannot wear high heels for medical reasons) (via). Asif Kapadia's wife had also been stopped before she was eventually let in, others were rejected and could not enter at all (via).



"I've taken my heels off as a feminist statement really, because why do we wear them? They're so painful. And pointless, really. You know, I really would like to urge everyone to stop it. Just stop it. Don’t wear them anymore. You just can't walk in them, and I’m so comfortable now."
Emma Thompson at the National Board of Review awards gala 2014

"I just wanted you to know, this red, it's my blood."
Emma Thompson about her Louboutins, barefoot and with martini in hand, at the Golden Globes 2014




And Barbie? She will finally be able "to walk without teeter-tottering on feet that are permanantly arched." The new line "Barbie Fashionistas" (a more diverse collection with 14 different skin tones, 18 eye colours, and 23 hair colours) features ankles that allow her to have flat feet ... and shoes, i.e., the ankles can be adjusted to accomodate both flats and heels. Apart from flat shoes being en vogue at the moment, "freeing her of the tyranny of permanent stilettos might be the most powerful symbolic move". In the past 56 years, Barbie stayed away from flatforms. With her new feet, she can also be more athletic, comfortable and strong (via). But will she be able to get into Cannes next year?



Asking Mariel Clayton who turned Barbie into a psychopath: "Why Barbie?"

"Because I hate Barbie. I intensely dislike the stereotype that the “ideal” female fits no current authentic female form. You can’t get to be Barbie without an ocean’s worth of peroxide, 27 plastic surgeries and a complete lack of intelligence, so it irritates me immensely that this is the toy of choice women give to their daughters to emulate.
At least with boys’ toys like GI Joe and Action Man, these were characters that had personality, depth and purpose, worthy of real imaginative storytelling. Barbie has nothing except clothes and “being a girl,” but what is being a girl? Being a vapid shell (...)? Playing in your kitchen or changing outfits for the umpteenth time so “Ken” will think you’re pretty?
My first picture with Barbie was actually of her committing suicide in the tub, after Ken had dumped her for another man — my wishful thinking on the end of evil influence. I’m not sure why it ended up being Barbie killing Ken, if I am to be honest — I think it’s because I find it really damn funny. Behind the vacuous perpetual lipsticked-smile and soulless eyes lurks the black heart of the true sociopath, just like in real life. I think it finally makes the doll interesting, and I like that contrast between saccharine sweet and pure malevolence."
Mariel Clayton



Related posting: Barbie & Ethnic Marketing




photographs via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via

Born this day ... Gwendolyn Brooks

"Not only has she combined a strong commitment to racial identity and equality with a mastery of poetic techniques, but she has also managed to bridge the gap between the academic poets of her generation in the 1940s and the young black militant writers of the 1960s."
George E. Kent on Gwendolyn Brooks



Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) was the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the first black woman to hold the position of a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Her works included themes such as "the transformation of African American identity from denigrated to dignified, and the search for happiness despite the oppression of racism and poverty". By giving her characters a female voice, she described discrimination against black women in both a racist and sexist society (Ud Din, 2008).
Brooks' later works took a more political stance. And particularly during the 1960s, her poems reflected the civil rights activism of that time. In 1967, after a gathering of black writers at Fisk University, she noticed that the poets there were committed to "writing as blacks, about blacks, and for black audience". Her desire to nurture black literature made her leave the well-known publisher Harper & Row in favour of new black publishing companies - a decision she never regretted (via).



"I - who have 'gone the gamut' from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sun—am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now. New consciousness and trudge-toward-progress. I have hopes for myself. . . . I know now that I am essentially an essential African, in occupancy here because of an indeed 'peculiar' institution. . . . I know that Black fellow-feeling must be the Black man's encyclopedic Primer. I know that the Black-and-white integration concept, which in the mind of some beaming early saint was a dainty spinning dream, has wound down to farce . . . I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black. . . . In the Conference-That-Counts, whose date may be 1980 or 2080 (woe betide the Fabric of Man if it is 2080), there will be no looking up nor looking down."
Gwendolyn Brooks

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- Ud Din, K. (2008). Mother Utters: Struggle and Subversion in the Works of Gwendolyn Brooks. Pennsylvania: Dissertation
- photographs via and via

Selection of Brooks' poems:
- Primer for Blacks
- Young Afrikans
- Riot

Miss Piggy & The Sackler Center First Award

"Moi is thrilled-but frankly, not surprised to be receiving this Sackler Center First Award. It is truly wonderful to be celebrated and share this honor with fellow legends, role models, and pioneers of female fabulosity. We rock!"
Miss Piggy



"I am a Diva, which is exactly like being a feminist, only with less marching and carrying signs. What does feminism mean to moi? That women are equal to men…except when we’re better than they are."
Miss Piggy



"The 2015 Sackler Centre First Awards honors performer, actor, writer, and icon Miss Piggy, for more than 40 years of blazing feminist trails with determination and humour, and for her groundbreaking role inspiring generations the world over." (via)

Today, Miss Piggy will receive the "Sackler Center First Award" at the Brooklyn Museum for being one of the most famous feminists. The Sackler Center First Awards are an annual event - presented by philanthropist and art collector Elizabeth Sackler and feminist/journalist/social activist Gloria Steinem - that honours "extraordinary women who are first in their fileds". Among the previous winners are Julie Taymor (director), Anita Hill (attorney and professor) and Sandra Day O'Connor (first woman appointed to the US Supreme Court) (via and via). Since Miss Piggy sounded less feminist in the past, not everybody is sure if she deserves the award (via). Perhaps her different attitude is a sign of having become more critical and mature - a development that would certainly deserve an award. Congratulations, Miss Piggy!



photographs of Miss Piggy with Frank Oz, Jim Henson, Roger Moore, George Hamilton, and John Ritter via and via and via and via

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Update (7 June 2015):

"This week moi is being honored — and deservedly so — with a Sackler Center First Award from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it about time?

Now for those who haven’t been paying attention to moi’s massive media blitz about this accolade: the prestigious Sackler Center First Award is presented to women who have broken barriers and charted changes in all disciplines and areas. (...) I am thrilled to be in such esteemed company. And needless to say, they are thrilled to have moi!

Some Internet opinion givers may question whether moi deserves such an honor. After all, some might say moi is just a mere Hollywood celebrity who cares more about her appearance, her star billing and her percentage of the gross than about women and women’s rights.

To which I can only respond: “Oh yeah!?!” By which, of course, I mean that moi is now and has always been an ardent feminist and champion of women’s rights.

I believe that any woman who refuses to accept society’s preconceived notions of who or what they can be is a feminist. I believe any woman who is willing to struggle, strive — and if necessary learn karate — to make their mark in the world is a feminist. And, yes, I believe that any woman, who cares about her appearance, her star billing and most especially her percentage of the gross, is a feminist.

Moi is all of these things.

As a young woman born on a farm, I was told that my life would be nothing but mud, sweat and tears … and the occasional trip to the 4-H fair. Now that may have been enough for some, but not for moi. I refused to accept someone else’s definition of my life and my future. I knew there was something bigger and better out there — and that I could achieve it if I never, ever gave up. Thanks to grit, fortitude, perseverance, the inspiration of other great feminists and the aforementioned karate, I did in fact achieve those dreams. (...)

Another reason some refuse to consider moi a feminist is that I do not fit the popular image of a feminist.

It’s true, I did not march in women’s-rights parades down Fifth Avenue in the early 1970s. (That was long before I was born.) However, today, in solidarity with my feminist foremothers, I go shopping on Fifth Avenue whenever possible.

And it is true, I did not burn my bra. Was this a political statement? No, it was simple common-sense economics. When one pays top dollar for intimate apparel like moi does, setting it ablaze is wasteful, improvident and highly incendiary.

And yes, it is true that I am a Porcine American. How can a … ahem, pig … be a feminist? After all, the p word has long been associated with the very antithesis of feminists “male chauvinist.” This, alas, is a vestige of latent “species-ism.” Sure, there are male chauvinist pigs, but there are also male chauvinist humans and, on very rare occasions and at their own peril, male chauvinist amphibians. Let us not besmirch an entire species because of the sins of a few.

So, now that I have dispatched the naysayers, moi can accept this Sackler Center First Award with my head held high and my feminist bona fides affirmed.

Yet one last question remains: What is the future of feminism? The answer is obvious — feminism’s future must be proud, positive, powerful, perseverant, and, wherever possible, alliterative. It must believe in itself, share its triumphs, overcome its setbacks and inspire future generations.

I (sic) must, in other words, be a lot like … moi."

Miss Piggy

He, She, God, and the Church of England

"Orthodox theology says all human beings are made in the image of God, that God does not have a gender. He encompasses gender – he is both male and female and beyond male and female. So when we only speak of God in the male form, that’s actually giving us a deficient understanding of who God is.”
Rev Jody Stowell



"Women and the Church" is a group within the Church of England that advocates for female bishops (Right Reverend Libby Lane was consecrated as the first female bishop last January, two more followed in March) and now recommends that church liturgy refers to God as both "He" and "She" since exclusively using "He" instead of a "more expansive language and imagery" would give worshippers a "deficient understanding" (via) and suggest that men are closer to God (via). The debate is not a completely new one in the church, the shift to gender-equal language has made clear progress in some sections of the church where "[q]uietly clergy are just talking about God as 'she' every now and then.'" Rev Jody Stowell explains that it is not an attempt to make God a woman but to create "proper, Biblical images of God" (via).

“It’s just the church moves slowly. [The debate] caught the imagination now because we’ve got women bishops so in a sense the church has accepted that women are equally valued in God’s sight and can represent God at all levels. We want to encourage people to be freer, and we want to get the Liturgical Commission to understand that people are actually quite open to this and there is room for richer language to be used.” Rev Emma Percy

“In the last two or three years we’ve seen a real resurgence and interest in feminism, and younger people are much more interested in how gender categories shouldn’t be about stereotypes. We need to have a language about God that shows God can be expressed in lots of diverse terms.”
Rev Emma Percy

"Will it make a difference having women serve as bishops?
Only if it means more women in the church are more confident to challenge the kindly benign paternalism that continues to keep us quiet, and without having to soothe the ruffled feelings of those, mainly men, whom we challenge.
Only if God is she as often as she is he – because this is such a formative aspect of our church life, and a real bastion of sexism.
Only if laywomen are better enabled by our church life to live more godly lives – everyday lives – not usually by being ordained or by helping the vicar, but in our calling to be a role model for girls of thoughtful leadership wherever that may be: as generous administrators, as alert police officers, as really skillful engineers, as vigorous MPs, as campaigners on homelessness, climate change and modern slavery. Our religious institutions need to affirm and encourage us all in our work as women of faith in a God-filled and God-unnoticing country.
I hope our three women bishops, with more to come, I trust, will carry some of these yearnings with them."
Hilary Cotton (Chair of Women and the Church)

"We have images of God as a mother bear, so very ferocious, protecting her cubs. We have God as a woman baking and kneading the bread, so this forming God. We have God as a nursing mother. We're not restricted to understanding God with one gender. I would encourage people to explore those kinds of images. They're wholly Biblical. They're wholly traditional within the Christian faith."
Rev Jody Stowell

"Most people think of God as a bearded man in the sky... probably white himself. This is not just a gender discussion. I think if [young people] are seeing people saying that God is not an old, white man in the sky and that God is inclusive of everybody, then that will interest people, especially if they've got the idea that Christianity is male, pale and stale. If we're debunking that myth... of course that's going to bring people to explore faith more."
Rev Jody Stowell



photograph, circa 1955: Jesuit priests hear confessions at the Martyr's Shrine, near Midland, Ontario. The shrine is dedicated to the first Jesuit missionaries who arrived in 1626 in the Huron country to convert the Iriquois. (Photo by Berni Schoenfield/Three Lions/Getty Images) via and by John Gutmann (The Confessional, Mexico, 1960) via and by Eliott Erwitt (Czestochowa, Poland, 1964) via

The Tokyo Beatles, Culture, Odd and Even Numbers

While Westerners show a tendency to prefer even numbers, Japanese prefer odd numbers - with few exceptions such as "eight" ("increasing property) and "nine" ("suffering"). In the Seven-Five-Three Festival, for instance, boys and girls at the age of three, boys at the age of five and girls at the age seven celebrate their growth at shrines. According to a custom, festivals are held on odd numbered days in odd-numbered months. At weddings, there is the tradition to give gifts of 10.000, 30.000 or 50.000 yen, never 20.000 or 40.000 yen.



Even numbers, on the other hand, generally do not have positive associations. "Two" means separating, "four" is associated with death and "six" means "good-for-nothing". At funerals, condolence payments are entirely in odd numbers. Hospital sickrooms avoid the number "four" as it sounds like the pronunciation of the word meaning "death".




The clear roles of odd and even numbers can be traced back to the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang (Nishiyama, 2004) - literally meaning dark and bright - which describes the complementary, interconnected and interdependent character of apparently opposite or contrary forces (via).



The Tokyo Beatles were a Japanese cover band, "a group of skinny, mop-topped Japanese rock and rollers" that drove their fans wild borrowing their name of "a group of skinny, mop-topped British rock and rollers". The band was most popular for some time and had "highly energized fans" but broke up after seven years in the 1960s "without too many people noticing they were gone" (via).

::: "I want to hold your hand" in Japanese: Dakishimetai 




Michael Rougier (1925-2012) was a LiFE Magazine staff photographer for 24 years (via) and an accomplished sculptor. He was recognised as a "stellar photojournalist" and won the "Magazine Photographer of the Year" award from the National Press Photographers Association in 1954 (via). In 1964, he was on assignment in Japan where he did not only take photographs of the Tokyo Beatles and their fans but "an astonishingly intimate, frequently unsettling portrait of teenagers hurtling willfully toward oblivion" (via).

- Nishiyama, Y. (2004). The Cultural History of Numbers. Studies in Economic History, 8, 146-174.
- photographs by LIFE photographer Michael Rougier (1964) via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via