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Angelo Rizzuto – New York ac. 1950. "Far right — No. 319 Bdwy."

[Photo: Shorpy/Angelo Rizzuto]

Looks like Sunday morning. Wrong decade for Lou Reed, though.

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Press release from Reclaim These Streets:

Statement from Reclaim These Streets on tonight’s vigil in Clapham pic.twitter.com/9EA20GWAi6

— Reclaim These Streets (@ReclaimTS) March 13, 2021

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As has been pointed out, the police kept their distance in the summer with all the Black Lives Matter protests. But a peaceful vigil by women – in a situation where you'd think some sensitivity might be in order given that it's a Met officer who's been charged with Sarah Everard's murder – nope, they couldn't resist.

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Downtown Guiyang, a secondary Chinese city often crossed by defectors on the way to Thailand.

Erenhot Gate, on the border of China & Mongolia in the middle of the Gobi Desert.

Kim Cheol-woong

A doorway indicating the entrance of Chiang Khong near the Mekong river at the border between Laos & Thailand.

Gangnam district in Seoul

Get the book here.

here of, shall we say, a particular view of female sexuality? A particularly misogynistic view of female sexuality?

Grace Lavery, remember, is a trans associate professor at Berkeley University and an editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly. Apart from encouraging her Twitter followers to burn copies of Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, she believes that George Eliot was an early transgender pioneer – because, you know, Mary Ann Evans took a male name to get herself published.

Genevieve Gluck at The Glinner Update has read this great trans realist novel, and is not impressed:

Detransition, Baby is riddled with misogyny from start to finish. It is an inherent flaw; its main tenets are constructed from the flattening of women’s humanity. The problem is not cherry-picking, as feminists are so often accused of doing, but of an overabundance of examples. Within the first few pages the protagonist, Reese, is introduced to the reader while engaging in an impregnation fetish with a man who is HIV positive.

The risk, the thrill, that they might get pregnant—a single fuck to fuck up (or bless?) their lives. For cis women, Reese imagined, sex was a game played at the precipice of a cliff. But until her cowboy, she hadn’t ever had the pleasure of that particular danger. Only now, with his HIV, had she found an analogue to a cis woman’s life changer. Her cowboy could fuck her and mark her forever. He could fuck her and end her. His cock could obliterate her. […]

Peters offers up shallow platitudes as though they were spiritual discoveries: “It’s a mark of prudish inexperience to think that being fetishized and objectified isn’t the hottest thing going in the bedroom,” and truly seems to believe he’s uncovered what it means to be a woman and is reporting back to the world: “Until she transitioned, until she met women into rape-play, she couldn’t actually think of a single argument to counter the undeniable orgasm-certified evidence of her unpardonable misogyny."

And a quote from Peters' earlier book The Masker:

"He slapped me as I had seen women slapped in movies… he could treat me as a vulnerable woman… The thought turned me on. His slap had been the most feminizing thing that had ever happened to me, the most pure forced feminization of my life."

Reminds me of the Crystals' song "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)", produced by Phil Spector. From another time, you'd think. But apparently not – if it comes with the correct packaging.

e Name of Shame) has made her a figurehead in the struggle that is being waged by Macron’s government to perpetuate the French model of integration.

Koc, who grew up on poor council estates in Brittany and Strasbourg, recounts the animosity of her relatives when she obtained French citizenship in 2008 and announced that she was changing her name from Cigdem to Claire. “I wanted to espouse my country, and not that which my parents had left,” she says.

“Claire? Are you serious? What a disgrace!” her brother said when she told him, she writes.

In the work, which has attracted widespread media interest in France, she explains that as a child she was sent to a Turkish school, where she had to repeat every morning: “Let my existence be a gift to Turkey”, despite the fact that she felt French; where she was forced to learn Turkish songs when she really wanted to sing Au clair de la lune; and where Turkish classmates hit her regularly because of her refusal to go to mosque.

Koc, who has become a journalist at TF1, the private television channel, criticises her father for having failed to learn French, for continuing to live in his new home as he had done in Turkey and for claiming to be the victim of racism when he was turned down for a job.

“How is it possible to live for 40 years in a country without mastering the language and to think . . . that a boss will take you on if you have made no effort to integrate?” she writes.

Koc argues that it is not entirely the fault of her parents but that left-wing antiracist associations were to blame for encouraging them to think that they could live off benefits and to believe that anyone who failed to give them a job was racist….

She argues that when her parents arrived in France in 1984 they made some initial attempts to adopt French customs. That changed with the installation of a satellite dish in the family home in the 1990s, after which her parents watched Turkish football, followed Turkish politics and spoke to her “all day long about marriage, honour and the dignity of my crotch”.

Koc says such attitudes are common among Turkish immigrants in France. “[They] don’t mix, or rarely. They marry compatriots, often from their own village. If it’s a cousin, it’s even better.”

She says associations and mosques financed by President Erdogan’s regime encourage Turkish immigrants to keep a distance from mainstream society while still considering Turkey as their true home.

Russell Lee – April 1942. "Santa Anita reception center, Los Angeles County, California. The evacuation of Japanese and Japanese-Americans from West Coast areas under United States Army war emergency order. Japanese family arriving at the center."

[Photo: Shorpy/Russell Lee for the Office of War Information]

One of the more shameful episodes in recent American history.

anyone caught importing or distributing South Korean movies, music or published works face a lifetime of forced labor or execution, according to materials obtained by Daily NK.

The teenage children of the couple have been sent to South Pyongan Province’s Bukchang 18 concentration camp, which is run by the Ministry of Social Security.

Punishment of family members is standard practice – hereditary taint, which must at all costs be expunged to maintain genetic purity.

e girls of my age were going ‘I want boobs’, I was thinking yeah me too. But I couldn’t say it. They talk about penis envy, and I believe some women suffer penis envy. I cannot for the life of me get my head around this. But yes, I’ve always had breasts envy.”

We’re coming to the end of our time. As she talks, I’m thinking how she has grown into her face over the years. Her features seems softer and more feminine these days. I ask if she is taking hormone pills. She smiles and, for once, declines to answer. “I’m very happy to transition and I feel I have been transitioning,” she says. “But I do feel I’ve told everybody everything in my life, so I’m going to keep a certain amount of privacy.”

Many are not amused.

Meanwhile I'm keeping my fingers crossed about Grayson Perry.

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[Photos: Mimi Mollica]