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16th Aug 2019

The British Fashion Council has announced that brands House Of Holland and Self-Portrait will be joining London Fashion Week’s inclusive new format, which facilitates both a public and trade audience. Opening their doors to the public, House Of Holland and Self-Portrait will stage a number of public-facing shows in September 2019, so be sure to secure your tickets to one of the industry’s most famous fashion weeks here. [Vogue inbox]

Sydney-based designer Mariam Seddiq has released her debut bridal collection, Capsule 01. The collection, which features structured tailoring, fluid drapery and hand-embellished details, is designed to reflect the signature Mariam Seddiq woman. Seddiq’s bridal approach aims to offer a custom bridal process with minimal drama. Customers can select a design from the capsule collection to be custom-made to their measurements, which reportedly cuts the fitting process time in half. The collection can be viewed in full via private appointment at Seddiq’s Alexandria atelier. [Vogue inbox]

Calvin Klein’s global underwear campaign, #MyCalvins IRL, is a study of the different perceptions of sexy. The autumn/winter ‘19/‘20 line places an emphasis on removing your filter and features a wide cast of celebrities, including Naomi Campbell, Diplo, Bella Hadid, Jacob Eldori and Lay Zhang. The campaign, in an effort to demonstrate how both vulnerability and confidence can be alluring, captures both posed and raw images of the stars. Lensed by Daniel Jackson, the campaign’s aim is to encourage self-expression and ultimately rebrand the idea of sexiness. [Vogue inbox]

New Zealand fashion designer Karen Walker has launched her very first bridal collection, coined Karen Walker Atelier. Boasting bespoke wedding day ensembles and jewellery, the brand’s dress collection will consist of 12 designs, from ballgowns to fitted suits. The designs are inspired by the Karen Walker archives, with references to her most well-known pieces. Appointments, viewings and fittings will all take place in the Karen Walker Atelier suite, where clients can expect to meet and greet the designer herself. Walker’s jewellery collection, featuring 14 designs that can be worn as a standalone or stacked, can also be viewed at the same time. What’s not to love? [Vogue inbox]

Continuing to break the mould, Allbirds has announced it has now launched socks made from from Trino, a home-grown yarn that sees the brand’s silky Tree material combine with Merino for a cooling, breathable product that promises to keep your feet comfortable and dry. Considering Allbirds lists the likes of Yara Shahidi, Sarah Jessica Parker, Barack Obama, and Ansel Elgort as fans, there is no doubt the brand is doing something right! [Vogue inbox]

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The new comedic drama “Blinded by the Light” feels designed to be heartwarming, and does a depressingly good job of defining by example that innocuous quality. The movie tells a classic tale of immigrants seeking economic opportunity for their children, who, in turn, pursue precarious careers in the arts and make personal choices that conflict with family traditions. But fear not: nothing is irreconcilable, since all is bathed in the universal solvent of pop culture, specifically, American pop culture, embodied by the music and the persona of Bruce Springsteen.

“Blinded by the Light” is set in the U.K., mostly in the academic year 1987-88, mostly in the industrial town of Luton, where Javed Khan (Viveik Kalra), a sixteen-year-old high-school student whose parents emigrated decades earlier from Pakistan, is an aspiring writer. Since childhood, Javed has been filling notebooks with diary entries and sheets of looseleaf paper with poems—which also include lyrics for his best friend, Matt (Dean-Charles Chapman), a neighbor and an aspiring rocker, who’s white. Javed’s father, Malik (Kulvinder Ghir), works in a nearby Vauxhall car factory; his mother, Noor (Meera Ganatra), takes in sewing. Malik is the unchallenged head of the family whose word is law (though Noor’s behind-the-scenes influence on him is exerted quietly but decisively at critical moments), yet Javed secretly defies him from the start, studying English at school rather than an economics course that his father mandates.

Javed is both oppressed by his father’s rigid rules and cowed by the aggressions of local neo-Nazi youths, who chase him home, spit on him, and menace him and other people of color, daubing houses with slurs and swastikas. “Blinded by the Light” offers sharply crafted details of the Khan family’s life in England, depicting many forms and displays of hostility and casual insult that the Pakistanis face—including a National Front riot against a local mosque, white children peeing through a Pakistani family’s mail slot, a pig’s head stuck on a minaret, and a middle-aged man offering Javed a glass of wine (“I won’t tell if you won’t,” he says). It depicts the Pakistani community’s warm bonds, as in the mutual assistance provided at the mosque, and the joy and charm of a wedding ceremony, while also suggesting, glancingly, the oppressiveness of some of those customs, such as arranged marriages. The patriarchal control exerted by Malik on Javed falls even more firmly on Javed’s younger sister, Shazia (Nikita Mehta), who struggles for a margin of freedom while avoiding any overt challenges to her father’s authority. Above all, the movie sketches the politics of the time lightly but starkly—in particular, the devastating effects of Thatcher-era policies, such as high unemployment, which, when it affects Javed’s father, shakes his foothold of confidence in the future and puts increasing pressure on Javed to bear some of the family’s financial weight.

Yet what’s heartwarming about “Blinded by the Light” is its pursuit of easy unanimity, which it achieves by borrowing plot elements that have the ring of authenticity and then sweetening and contrivedly assembling them so as to denature them. Javed’s life is changed one day at school, when a classmate named Roops (Aaron Phagura), who’s Sikh, approaches him and, in an encouragingly friendly gesture, offers him cassettes of two albums of his musical hero: “the Boss.” Javed is puzzled. Roops clears up the mystery: “The Boss of us all.” When Javed listens to Bruce Springsteen, the lyrics swirl around him on screen and he is transformed. What’s odd about the way that the movie handles Javed’s awakening is that its result is a monomaniacal fixation on Springsteen. Javed’s discovery of the Boss’s music doesn’t unlock the door to music for him, or to rock music, or to personal poetic rock at large, the way that a discovery of Beethoven might open up a world of classical music, or a discovery of François Truffaut might spark the discovery of cinema, or that of Virginia Woolf might ignite the discovery of novels. Rather, the movie looks benignly, even beatifically, at Javed’s cult of personality, as he fills his room with Springsteen posters, imitates Springsteen’s way of dressing, and seemingly listens to nothing but Springsteen’s albums. Far from sparking Javed’s curiosity, Springsteen sparks his incuriosity.

At the same time that Javed has his sensibilities awakened by Springsteen, he has the benefit of receiving attention from a devoted and understanding teacher, Ms. Clay (Hayley Atwell), who discerns his nascent literary ambition, asks to read his poems, and pushes him in the direction of writing personal essays, recognizing his talent. Emboldened both by Ms. Clay’s practical enthusiasm and by Springsteen’s words, Javed writes an essay about Springsteen for the school paper (after contending with the racism and the snootiness of its editor); then Ms. Clay helps him get an internship at a local newspaper and submits his writing to a literary competition. Along the way, he manages to chat up a classmate named Eliza (Nell Williams), a young political activist whose parents are genteel-racist Tories, and the two begin an innocent romance. (He also gets crucial validation from a crusty old neighbor, a tight-lipped Second World War veteran who literally gets wind of one of Javed’s poems—on a sheet of paper that’s carried to his door by a gale.)

The movie, written by Gurinder Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges, doesn’t have much to do with musical enthusiasm in itself, but it does find dramatic ways of positioning Springsteen—and Javed’s Springsteen fever—within the world of music: namely, down the middle, between the glam rock of Matt’s aspirations and the proto-poptimism of school-d.j. rock intellectuals. Springsteen’s music isn’t Javed’s gateway to the Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, or Public Enemy; Springsteen, here, represents a rock musician who doesn’t scandalize or defy the elders of the previous generation but embraces them. The longing for belonging that drives Javed is represented by Springsteen’s preëminence, his centrality, his respectability. The most important symbolic aspect of Springsteen in the film is his success. Though Springsteen may sing about working-class struggles, family conflicts, the challenge of maturing, the weight of moral responsibility, and the drive for freedom, above all, in Javed’s eyes, the Boss has succeeded, has risen from his obscure background and straitened circumstances to become rich and famous, to do his family proud. Similarly, it’s no spoiler to say that the strait-laced young man rises quickly and prodigiously to prove to his parents that a career in writing can be quite as respectable—and as lucrative, if not more so—than the path that they’ve set out for him in business or law. It’s a dream of inclusion that feels narrow, a vision of liberation that feels constrained, a view of progress that feels like a lockstep into the future. The universal solvent turns out to be not culture but celebrity and money.

I saw Marianne Williamson speak on Independence Day. In Washington, D.C., crowds gathered in a rainstorm to see tanks roll and to cheer on Donald Trump. In Concord, New Hampshire, a group of about seventy people convened at a performing-arts space called Phenix Hall to consider the politics of love. The Phenix is a majestic nineteenth-century theatre awaiting renovation and, perhaps, air-conditioning. It was a hot day for Concord, sunny and ninety degrees on Main Street, with its stolid Yankee Doodle Dandy red-brick buildings. The sidewalks were mostly deserted. The people of New Hampshire were out barbecuing, or setting up for fireworks, or up at a lake house listening to the call of the loons.

Inside the Phenix, the wooden floors were scratched and worn. The afternoon sun poured through the arched windows and the round portals above the wraparound balconies. In the absence of an HVAC system, the rush of fans filled the air. The hall was decorated as if for a wedding rehearsal: rental chairs, fairy lights, cocktail tables draped in white tablecloths and scattered with Marianne Williamson donation envelopes. Women in flowing batik dresses and thin men in shorts and sandals snacked from a platter of fruit and a platter of brownies; volunteers dispensed ice water from the bar. Pretty campaign volunteers handed out buttons that depicted Williamson’s face in wispy watercolor. Williamson’s portraitist, the British fashion illustrator David Downton, had emphasized the shadow of her cheekbones, the soft sweep of her bangs to one side, and the intensity of her smoky-eyed gaze. The look is reminiscent of the album cover of David Bowie’s “Scary Monsters.” The Marianne 2020 logo is as pink as a glass of Zinfandel.

Williamson, a nondenominational psycho-spiritual leader, who mixes references to Christianity with quotes from philosophers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Deepak Chopra, has based her Presidential candidacy on an unspoken premise: that the country might be experiencing an epidemic of mental illness. Actually, it’s not that unspoken: “We have a problem with the psychological fabric of our country,” a section on her campaign Web site, titled “The Issues Aren’t Always the Issue,” says. “A low level emotional civil war has begun in too many ways to rip us apart.”

If you were a therapist and America were your client—if it were your mandate to display forbearance and empathy in the face of insanity—you would attempt to discern the country’s trauma at its roots. Much has been made of Donald Trump as an insulting, mocking, narcissistic patriarch. Some children reject the mean dads in their lives; others, when Trump coos that they are “very fine people” and “incredible patriots,” feel a warm blanket of withheld acknowledgment. Trump has been on tour for most of his Presidency, and, for those who love him, his in-person gatherings are more than just political rallies, they are intense experiences of human connection, which offer a remedy for a culture of isolation. This sense of belonging is generated, in part, by the denigration of immigrants, the news media, Democratic politicians, women, and other people Trump perceives as his enemies. What Williamson presents is an alternative channelling of America’s id: instead of a politics of fear, a politics of love.

For her supporters, Williamson offers a spiritually inflected movement that could rival Trump’s in the realm of emotion—unlike the Democratic Party, whose political gatherings tend to carry about as much communal purpose as an elementary-school assembly. If the Republican Party is an abusive father, as Williamson once argued, in a blog post titled “An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton,” the Democratic Party is the mother who stands by and lets the abuse take place. The broad movement from which Williamson emerges has had many names: New Age, New Thought, New Spirituality, Human Potential, Higher Consciousness. It’s also a movement that has mostly been politically agnostic (probably because, in addition to purporting to help people, it is a profitable industry, with books, seminars, audio recordings, videos, and world tours). Even if Williamson is polling at less than two per cent, she represents something that feels new: the entrance of this spiritual movement into electoral politics. It’s like the time Bill Clinton went on “The Arsenio Hall Show” and played the saxophone and all the baby boomers went wild, but this time this audience is fans of Oprah’s “SuperSoul Sundays” who perhaps never thought of themselves as belonging to a demographic in search of political representation, until Williamson stepped in.

Williamson made her first big impression on the American public in the Democratic debates. In an interview after the second debate, Anderson Cooper compared her to an omniscient narrator in a play. He suggested that she resembled the stage manager of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”; she suggested that she was playing the part of a Greek chorus. She vibrated at a frequency that was different from her opponents’. Eyes flashing, she evoked the spectre of false gods and dark psychic forces, narrating a dire portrait of America as a country co-opted by multinational corporations, ignorant of the “dark underbelly” of its own history, forgetful of its “moral core,” and at the mercy of a President who has “reached into the psyche of the American people and harnessed fear for political purposes.” She looked into the camera and said, “Only love can cast that out.” Her performance made her the most-searched candidate in the country.

The esoteric lecture circuit has always held a place in American culture as a proving ground for experimental ideas, both good and bad. At times, watching Williamson, I thought of Henry James’s assessment of the feminist lecturer Verena Tarrant, in “The Bostonians”: “If it had been much worse it would have been quite as good, for the argument, the doctrine, had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was simply an intensely personal exhibition, and the person making it happened to be fascinating.”

Much of Williamson’s work has been addressed specifically to members of her own generation. She recalls boomer activism and reprimands boomer self-absorption. But younger people are drawn to her open references to spirituality. “For a lot of people around my age, there’s something unironically enchanting about Marianne Williamson’s rhetoric,” said Arshy Azizi, who was not quite yet a declared Williamson supporter but had come to the event at the Phenix to see what she might have to say. He was twenty-five years old and the recent recipient of a master’s degree in comparative literature from Dartmouth, in Hanover, New Hampshire. His cute Fourth of July outfit—a tank top with red piping, black wire-rimmed glasses, bluejeans, and white sneakers—would not have been out of place at a bar in Bushwick.

I asked Azizi to explain the nature of Williamson’s enchantment. “From the history of the founding of this nation, there’s a firm separation between church and state—which I don’t think any of us wants to meddle with—but I think that has made us think we don’t have to care for others on a moral basis at all,” he said. He was a student of German idealist philosophy. Hegel was on his mind. He told me that American political arguments often lack “a shared recognition of our moral responsibility to each other as a nation, and also to our environment.” Perhaps, in recent history, there was once some consensus about that moral responsibility, but it seems to have fallen away.

“We’ve always seen, historically, Presidents and politicians invoke God in the abstract sense,” Azizi continued. “They’re not talking about, per se, that specific sect of religion that they believe in but a kind of universal spiritual consciousness that we should all have, and I think that Marianne has taken that to a little more of an explicit grounding in her rhetoric. I think a lot of us are finding it a little bit more palatable than maybe we would have expected.”

“It’s all about love,” a retired teacher named Judi Lindsey said. “It’s all about changing from within, and then that changes everything.” Lindsey had become a follower of Williamson’s after reading three of her books and then seeing her speak at the Omega Institute, a retreat center in Rhinebeck, New York. She described herself as a spiritual person and said she was “one hundred per cent” behind Williamson’s candidacy. “It’s simple: people want to feel connected and valued and appreciated, and that’s what love is. And then all those other things fall into place, like the economy, and families.”

While we spoke, Williamson arrived. New Hampshire is not a state known for its glamour, and she cut a distinctive figure in the room. Williamson speaks with a Howard Hawks-movie accent and favors blazers in muted colors and shimmery eyeshadow. When Vogue excluded her from a photo shoot of female candidates, it was not only a slight of her politics but an oversight of the fact that she is, with the possible exception of Kamala Harris, the only fashion-forward candidate. For the first Democratic debate, Williamson wore a gauzy Armani blouse. In New Hampshire, the most eye-catching part of her wardrobe was a pair of two-toned harlequin-style silver-and-black stiletto heels. She wore these with fitted black pants, a black shirt, and a lilac blazer.

When Williamson first enters a room, she begins by making a gracious circle through the gathering, like a good hostess. She paused at each row of chairs, reaching out to hold hands and embrace people. It was impossible to know who was a friend and who was a reader of her books who had simply assumed an immediate intimacy. I spoke with a woman named Debra Smoller, a music teacher in her fifties, after she had gone up to Williamson and had a conversation that ended in an embrace. She wiped tears from her eyes.

She had first seen Williamson on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in 1992, when Smoller was young and living in Burlington, Vermont. She was at a low point in her life, and Williamson’s message about love had overwhelmed her. She went out and bought Williamson’s book “A Return to Love” that same day. I asked Smoller what was different about Williamson’s candidacy. Was Bernie Sanders not also a humanitarian?

“We need to look at ourselves,” she said. “We need to look at our morality, and children, and how we’re treating them in this country. She’s talking about that very thing: morality and love and ethics. Bernie’s talking about it, but almost like he’s just assuming that we would want better treatment of children and better treatment of students and their loan debt. He’s not asking us to look at our morality.”

I asked what Williamson had said to her just then, during their hug.

“I just was overcome when she came into the room,” Smoller said, her face still flushed with emotion. “I felt like I was seeing an old friend. I walked over and gave her a hug, and I told her that. I told her that she helped me a lot in a dark time. I loved what she said to me back, she said, ‘So here we are, we’ve grown up together, look what love can do.’ ”

You can’t get that from Joe Biden!

Marianne Williamson was, by her own recounting, a late bloomer. She grew up in a Jewish family, in Houston, and attended Pomona College for two years before dropping out. Her college roommate, the Hollywood producer Lynda Obst, remembers her as impressionable, enthusiastic, badly dressed, a little needy, and struggling to make friends. “She was a middle-class girl from Houston who was lost and wanted to be an actress,” Obst said. “I often say I regret having taught her to throw the I Ching.”

Williamson has often described participating in antiwar protests, but Obst doesn’t recall her doing so in college. Despite an interest in metaphysics, Williamson “had no hippie in her, and she wasn’t radical during the late sixties and seventies, when it was totally wonderful to be a radical,” Obst said.

But Williamson may have found the counterculture eventually, and memories of the time are hazy. Obst lost contact with her roommate after Williamson dropped out of Pomona and moved to New Mexico.“I left school to grow vegetables, but I don’t remember ever growing any,” she writes in “A Return to Love.” Obst recalls that Williamson showed up at her wedding, in 1974. (“I’m not sure I invited her.”)

Williamson was aimless in her twenties, moving from city to city, working temp jobs, and moonlighting as a cabaret singer. She began her journey as a spiritual leader after reading a 1976 text called “A Course in Miracles,” a three-volume “self-study program of spiritual psychotherapy” written by a psychologist named Helen Schucman, who believed she was channelling the voice of Jesus. In the early nineteen-eighties, Williamson began to teach the course the way that a professor of Russian literature would teach Dostoyevsky (as she once put it to Charlie Rose), showing people how to “relinquish a thought system based on fear and accept instead a thought system based on love”—words that one audience might find empty of meaning and another profound with possibility.

In 1984 or 1985, Obst’s friend, the producer Howard Rosenman, invited her to a church in Los Angeles to see a speaker who had begun ministering to the gay men of West Hollywood in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Obst was riveted by Williamson’s transformation, which she described as a hundred-and-eighty-degree difference from the person she had known. “She swept into the room like Indira Gandhi,” she recalled. “I couldn’t believe that my lounge-singer lost roommate was speaking to the entire gay community of Los Angeles.” As Williamson walked down the aisle to the pulpit, Obst says Williamson took her hand and said, “I always knew you would come.” (Williamson’s campaign said she does not recall this.)

It is gay men of a certain age who have the earliest memories of Williamson’s career as a spiritual leader. “We were in our twenties, like club kids, and then everybody got AIDS, and at that time it was a death sentence,” a retired San Francisco publicist named Stephen Kenneally told me. “It was really hardcore back then. People forget this stuff, but it was, like, ‘Hello, Mom, I’m gay and I have AIDS and I’m dying.’ That’s kind of how things went back then.”

Kenneally went to the Course in Miracles only once, to help a friend get there, in the early nineteen-eighties. Williamson was “talking about loving yourself, I mean, stuff that nobody talked about back then, but more specifically she was talking to people who were told that they weren’t loved by their family and friends, employers, politicians, hospitals.” He remembered that everyone was sick and staring at each other, and that Williamson commanded the stage. “I don’t remember that much, except that people were really uplifted,” he said. “It was more about that feeling of hope that she gave to all these people, and they all died.”

I asked if he went back, but he said he was not of Williamson’s demographic at the time. I asked him what that demographic was.

“People that had no hope,” he said.

“I see her in my mind’s eye like the Pietà, that’s how I see her,” Rosenman, the movie producer who took Obst to see Williamson speak, recalled. “We called it H.B.R.—handsome boys’ religion. Hundreds of boys, most of whom were affected but didn’t know it, really, would go to Marianne.” Rosenman went on to help Williamson create Project Angel Food, a nonprofit founded to serve meals to housebound AIDS and H.I.V.-infected patients, whose donors included Elizabeth Taylor, Barry Diller, and David Geffen. “Marianne was in Fire Island with the best of us in the seventies, playing tambourines and dancing,” Rosenman said. “She spoke in the argot of our talk; she knew the whole gay underground, how gay people talked. We felt that she was one of us.” When the men started falling ill, he said, “it was a living, walking Hell, and Marianne was at the center of it, helping everybody without regard.”

In time, Williamson’s demographic expanded. “I remember there was a rumor going around New York that a lot of models were attending her speeches,” the playwright Paul Rudnick told me. “I especially liked the idea of someone being a spiritual leader to models.” Rudnick, who wrote a character similar to Williamson in his 1994 play “Jeffrey,” saw her speak in the nineteen-nineties at Town Hall, in midtown Manhattan. A model sitting in front of him wore a tiny Prada backpack and took diligent notes.

“She really knew how to work the room,” Rudnick said. “The only part that bothered me was she did seem to be blaming people for their own illness, and, remember, this was at the height of the AIDS epidemic in America. She may have been well intended, but what she seemed to be saying was that a lack of love could lead to illness.”

Williamson’s prescription for sick people in her 1992 mega-best-seller, “A Return to Love,” includes writing a letter to one’s illness, and a response from the illness; she advises visualizing the AIDS virus “as Darth Vader, and then unzip his suit to allow an angel to emerge,” and “seeing the sickness as our own love that needs to be reclaimed.” She describes illness as “loveless thinking materialized” but says that the sick person cannot be blamed personally, since “the lovelessness that manufactures disease is systemic; it is laced throughout racial consciousness.” She encourages people to trust doctors and their medications, but adds, “Many of us believe that the doctor in the white coat can heal us with that pill he’s giving us. Therefore, says the Course, we should take the pill. But the healing doesn’t come from the pill. It comes from our belief.”

“When you start to turn illness beyond medical fact, when you start saying there is a spiritual and emotional component to a virus, you can start to do harm,” Rudnick told me. “The last thing you wanted was people to feel additionally stigmatized for not somehow having a large enough soul to resist a disease.”

Others are more blunt about Williamson’s philosophies. “Just because they deluded some person who was about to die doesn’t mean they should be listened to on the Presidential stage,” Michael Goff, the founder of Out magazine and co-owner of the Web site Towleroad, said. He has also criticized Williamson’s suggestions that illness could be affected by positive thinking. “I don’t know what people were responding to in that debate, because I didn’t hear anything specific,” he added. “This philosophy really found fertile ground in West L.A., where they’re desperate to be both progressive and selfish.”

“If somebody just goes up and becomes a self-invented guru based on not finishing anything and reading the ‘Course in Miracles’ and then wants to be President, that’s genuinely astonishing and scary to me,” Obst said. “When everything is filtered through a closed belief system—like the ‘Course in Miracles’—all conclusions easily come from applying that framework. So the ideas are never deeply examined.”

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Reading her in retrospect, Williamson was never an apolitical person, but her forays into politics got mixed results from her audiences. Her book “The Healing of America,” from 1997, was a critique of the excesses of self-help culture and a call to apply some of the lessons of the New Age to civics. Its appendices had copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, which Williamson urged her followers to read with the same reverence and hope for guidance that they would a devotional text. In the late nineteen-nineties, she took over the leadership of the Church of Today, a Christian congregation in the Detroit area, which was known for running a plethora of twelve-step programs. A 2001 article in the Detroit Metro-Times described Williamson requesting, one Sunday, that the white people in the church turn to apologize to their African-American neighbors for historic wrongs. (“I think it makes white people feel better,” a skeptical African-American parishioner told the newspaper.)

In her book “A Politics of Love,” published this year, Williamson lays out her political theories. She describes a political establishment that ignores “psychological pain” in favor of ‘hard’ political facts” and a population indoctrinated in theories of self-love, writing that “a generation that has become so sensitive to its own pain is often desensitized to the pain of others.” The government, for its part, has become “a system of legalized bribery, less concerned with deep issues of humanity’s purpose and more with shallow questions of money and power.” The main organizing principle of American society is no longer democracy, she writes, but “short-term profit maximization of huge, multinational corporate entities.”

“I know what it feels like when groups of people experience collective trauma,” she writes, recalling the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, the Vietnam War, and the violence of the nineteen-sixties. “In many ways, the political situation in America today seems like those times.” Williamson’s platform includes a policy of “Racial reconciliation and healing,” the centerpiece of which is a two-to-five-hundred-billion-dollar reparations program, to be distributed over twenty years. The money would be directed toward educational and economic projects determined by “an esteemed council of African-American leaders.”

“She has been helping and working with people for thirty-five years to deal with the consequences of bad public policy,” Patricia Ewing, a spokesperson for Williamson’s campaign, said. In 2014, Williamson ran to represent California’s Thirty-third District in Congress. Her supporters included Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry. “As we revive this Constitution / from sure disintegration / live out this revelation / today,” Alanis Morissette sang, in a video recorded for the campaign. Williamson lost to Ted Lieu in the Democratic primary, despite spending almost two million dollars on her campaign.

Williamson sees herself as part of a political lineage that dates back to America’s founding, in which the Declaration of Independence was a document that proposed that all people “would simply have the possibility of thriving,” as she put it during the second debate. When it came time to begin her speech at the Phenix, which would be live-streamed online, Williamson stood before a giant American flag, a pamphlet copy of the Declaration in her hands. It was a speech framed as an inquiry into our founding principles (“I’ve often said that instead of being a mindless holiday it should be a mindful holiday”), and about how every generation of Americans has had to reassert the promise of American democracy for itself (“As my dad used to say, ‘The bastards are always at the door’ ”). She talked about the fact that many of the Founding Fathers were also slaveowners, and how at the heart of the United States is a “polarity”—“that, on the one hand, we are founded on, at our best aspire to, and in some cases even actualized the most enlightened, the most illumined, the most aspirational principles that have ever been found at the core of a nation, and we have also been, at times, the most violent transgressors against the principles on which we purport to stand.”

Williamson talked, as she does in almost every speech she gives, about the abolitionists, the suffragists, and the civil-rights movement. She ends her evocation of history with the line “And now it’s our time,” but it’s not clear how she would be the leader of the next major adjustment of our political establishment—just how, as she put it in a meme she posted on Instagram, she will navigate “the looming human evolutionary bottleneck.” Marianne Williamson’s career has not been one of political organizing. Her work on behalf of AIDS patients was certainly not apolitical, but it was focussed more on charity than on direct confrontation with pharmaceutical companies and a lethally uncaring government. Her campaign cites her as a kind of spiritual diplomat, called to speak at God-inflected occasions around the world, but it’s very hard to place her in the pantheon of international religious busybodies. There have been sufficient tragedies in recent years that have called for a religious but politically minded figure to make a profound political statement that went beyond accurately describing the nation’s problems, but, if she made one, I somehow missed it. In 2018, Williamson went on the seventy-five-city “Love America Tour,” speaking to her flock.

She has tried to turn this following into a political movement, but only some of her followers have heeded the call. On July 5th, Williamson was speaking at Shilo Farm, a retreat center in southern Maine. The speech was given outdoors, in the shade of a maple tree, behind a shingled barn that held goats and a yoga studio. Chairs were set up next to a chicken coop, and a plump red hen picked her way along the grass between the rows of chairs. There was a table with popcorn and watermelon and hibiscus iced tea. Abraham Lincoln had once delivered a speech at the Phenix; at Shilo Farm, upcoming events included workshops on mantras and ecstatic dance.

While waiting for Williamson to arrive, I met a mother named Elizabeth Vigue and her son, John Buys, both of them educators who had driven two hours, from central Maine, to hear Williamson speak. They had seen Williamson in the first debate, and had discussed how her message could be conveyed in their classrooms. “With education, there’s always been this philosophy of ‘Know thyself,’ ” Buys, who is twenty-seven and teaches American literature to high-school students, said. He quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson: “ ‘Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string’—that sort of thing.” But since 2016, he continued, he had felt compelled to share another lesson, “this need to teach what it means to love one another.”

At Shilo, Williamson gave a different kind of speech from the one she delivered in New Hampshire. The message was mostly the same, but now she spoke as if she were amid a gathering of her familiars.

“Anyone who’s drawn to places like this is already part of an emergent culture,” she said to her audience, who nodded and smiled. “You know, one of the things that’s been very funny for me, in terms of my political campaign, is that the political establishment thinks of itself as mainstream and thinks of those who are more concerned with religion, spirituality, health and wellness, psychotherapy, personal transformation, yoga, A.A., as almost like some fringe over there,” she continued. “When, really, if they ever want to awaken from 1987, they will find this is America today. That’s obvious. If you look at all the books that are best-sellers, that’s obvious. If you look at all the business seminars. That’s obvious. If you look at integrative medicine today.” Williamson sometimes refers to what she does as “integrative politics.” The world of self-help and New Age spirituality, she emphasized, were the new mainstream.

Williamson’s voice rang resonant and sure. When she delivered an applause line, her voice dropped into a deeper register, and she delivered her most emphatic points like the strike of a velvet mallet on a gong. Her campaign was a reminder that the founding principles offer moral and philosophical guidance, that they are not, as she put it, just words carved into a marble wall or protected under glass. But I’m not sure I understood her charisma, which seemed directed at the America that takes its sermons at SoulCycle. It may have been a different channel, but it was broadcasting from the same machine that transmits Donald Trump—the machine that pacifies and moves and soothes us, where Judge Judy is the Supreme Court, and Kim Kardashian is the Legal Aid Society, and Oprah is church, and Tucker Carlson is blinking in disbelief, and somewhere deep in my memory Sally Struthers is standing in a slum pleading for the children. It's a machine whose inhabitants—as much as we might pretend that they know and care about us—exist at a remove from the places we actually live.

Marianne Williamson looked around at her people. “We have proven now that what we touched transforms,” she continued. “What do you call all those yoga mats? That’s from our crowd. What do you call all that mindfulness stuff? Our crowd. And the only reason politics hasn’t transformed is because”—and her voice dropped into its deepest register—“we haven’t been there yet.”

Si svolgerà a Campitello, in Val di Fassa, dal 29 giugno al 1 luglio 2017 il Campionato Europeo di Arrampicata Sportiva delle discipline Lead e Speed. L’evento è organizzato dalla associazione Fassa Climbing. È solo la seconda volta che questa prestigiosa competizioni si svolge in Italia.

Dopo tanti anni nell’organizzazione di gare d’arrampicata a livello nazionale, il piccolo comune di Campitello di Fassa nella splendida Val di Fassa ospiterà a fine giungo ed inizio luglio 2017 una delle gare d’arrampicata più importanti del vecchio continente: il Campionato Europeo delle discipline Lead e Speed.

Il percorso che ha portato a questo prestigioso traguardo è stato lungo, a volte anche complicato, e parte dal 1997 quando un piccolo gruppo di amici ha dato vita all’associazione Fassa Climbing che, l’anno successivo, ha organizzato la prima gara nella appena realizzata struttura d’arrampicata. Dal allora, ogni anno queste pareti hanno ospitato il “Dolomiti Master” e diverse tappe della Coppa Italia Lead, Boulder e Speed, diventando un punto fisso nel calendario agonistico di molti climber. Nel 2010 invece tutto si ferma bruscamente, quando un incendio distrugge completamente la struttura ponendo uno stop alle attività. L’associazione però non si è data per vinta e, nel 2014, è stata inaugurata una enorme e bellissima nuova struttura coperta, in zona Ischia nei pressi della funivia del Col Rodella. La nuova grande parete è stata chiamata ADEL per ricordare i quattro soccorritori appartenenti al Soccorso Alpino della Val di Fassa che hanno perso la vita sotto una valanga il 26 dicembre 2009 in Val Lasties: Alessandro Dantone, Diego Perathoner, Erwin Riz e Luca Prinoth.

Con la nuova struttura l’associazione ha subito ripreso ad organizzare competizioni a livello regionale e nazionale, ma ora arriva quella più importante di tutti. Il Campionato Europeo che si svolgerà dal 29 giugno al 1 luglio 2017 ospiterà due discipline, la difficoltà (lead) e la velocità (speed). Per quanto riguarda la Lead, gli enormi strapiombi daranno sicuramente vita a delle competizioni spettacolari, mentre la parete Speed è soltanto una delle 16 al mondo omologate per il record mondiale di velocità.

L’annuncio del Campionato Europeo, che a partire dal 1992 si svolge con cadenza biennale, è ovviamente una ottima notizia per il movimento arrampicata italiano, e non solo. Ricordiamo che oltre a numerose tappe di Coppa del Mondo, già in passato l’Italia ha ospitato altre importanti manifestazioni: nel giugno 2004 a Lecco si sono disputati il Campionato Europeo Lead, Speed e Boulder, mentre nel 2011 Arco ha ospitato il Campionato del mondo delle tre discipline. Ora questo IFSC Climbing European Championships2017 di Campitello promette, con un occhio particolare verso la prima partecipazione dell’arrampicata sportiva alle Olimpiadi di Tokyo 2020, di essere sicuramente molto importante e avvincente.

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Live streaming da Nanjing in Cina della terza tappa della Coppa del Mondo Boulder 2017 e la seconda tappa della specialità Speed.

136 atleti si sono spostati verso est, da Chongqing verso la vecchia capitale della Cina Nanjing dove oggi è iniziata la terza tappa della Coppa del Mondo Boulder che ha riservato non poche sorprese: esclusi il #1 Aleksei Rubtsov, insieme ai suoi compagni di squadra Rustam Gelmanov e Dimitrii Sharafutdinov, come d’altronde anche altri fortissimi come Domen Skofic, Jakob Schubert, Martin Stranik e Michael Piccolruaz. Tutto regolare invece nella qualificazione femminile, che è stata rinviata per qualche ora a cause del grande caldo. Occhi puntati su Riccardo Piazza che si è aggiudicato un posto in Semifinale che verrà trasmessa in live streaming alle 03:30 ore italiane, mentre le finali verrano trasmesse alle ore 12:30. Alle 09:00 invece va in onda la seconda tappa della Coppa del Mondo Speed.

IFSC Climbing World Cup Nanjing 2017 – Bouldering – Semi-Finals – Men/Women

IFSC Climbing World Cup Nanjing 2017 – Speed – Finals – Men/Women

IFSC Climbing World Cup Nanjing 2017 – Bouldering – Finals – Men/Women

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Il video del ‘dietro le quinte’ della fotografia diventata virale dell’eclissi solare scattata da Ted Hesser il 21 agosto 2017 a Smith Rock, Oregon, USA.

Il 21 agosto 2017, per oltre due minuti, centinaia di milioni di persone tra America, Europa e Africa si sono fermati per osservare la spettacolare eclissi solare. Miliardi di fotografie e video documentano questo straordinaria evento astronomico, ma alcune in particolare hanno catturato l’immaginazione del web e sono subito diventate virali. In particolare quelle scattate alle 11:35 al climber Tommy Van Smith sulla famosa parete Monkey Face dal 31enne fotografo Ted Hesser nella storica falesia di arrampicata Smith Rock, Oregon, USA.

Per ovvi motivi il tutto richiama un po’ la celebre Moonwalk di Dean Potter sulla highline a Cathedral Peak in Yosemite che, se non l’avete ancora visto, vi consigliamo di vedere dopo aver gustato questo “dietro le quinte” della foto virale di Hesser.

Best view in the house… it took 4 days of planning and hard work to capture this shot. My girlfriend @martinatib and good friend @thistommysmith climbed the route twice, in scorching heat, to nail the positioning. But we nailed it!

A post shared by Ted Hesser (@tedhesser) on

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Silvestro Franchini parla del concatenamento delle vie Orion, Psycobar e Gatto Silvestro sullo Scoglio di Boazzo in Valle di Daone, descritto come ‘ l’arrampicata libera più bella’ di questa mini-Yosemite dei bresciani e dei trentini.

Scoglio di Boazzo in Val Daone is known as the mini-Yosemite for climbers from Brescia and the Trentino region of Northern Italy. Famous for the aid climbs put up by Ermanno Salvaterra, in 1997 Rossetti and Rivadossi forged their way up Morange and, in doing so, established Italy’s first A5 aid climb.

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Over the years I’ve repeated many of the sports climbs and alpine undertakings here and, teaming up with various partners, I’ve always been inspired to work a beautiful route and subsequently free it. One of the routes which attracted me most recently was Psycobar (Rivadossi Zipponi 1998 7b/A1 230m) located on the steepest section of the Scoglio. I repeated it twice but, alas, on the lower section I had to make a pendulum and aid another. Not the best for a free climb.

I decided therefore to look at the crack to the right, taken by an aid climb called Orion (110m A3). I tried to climb it with my brother Tomas, the first pitch has two smooth sections that discouraged him but seemed to suit me perfectly. The topo indicated a pendulum leftwards on pitch 2 and although I noticed some pegs that led up a narrow crack, I decided to follow my instinct and continue straight up. I called this new variation Variante del Gufo, the owl variation; naming it after the landlord seemed the least I could do (at this point I’d like to take the opportunity and apologise to him for having woken him twice).

Fantastic, the new project seemed feasible and so on 27 September I teamed up with Mirko Corn to redpoint pitch 1… That Wednesday was one of those low gravity days and, completely unexpected, I freed the pitch on my first attempt.

Having nothing else planned for the day I suggested Mirko try the Owl variation. Banking on all his Yosemite experience and motivated by the beauty of the climbing he sent this straight off. A further pitch then led us to Psycobar, meaning that we’d found a free variation to Orion!

It was still early and I wanted Mirko to try some of the upper pitches. Things ran smoothly for a few pitches but then as expected, I fell at the overhang. I lowered off and Mirko gave it a go, discovering a spectacular foot hook… It was my turn and suddenly there I was, stretched out fully horizontal, reaching for the jug before controlling an epic swing. Luckily today was a low gravity day! The topo indicated a variation called Gatto Silvestro, Sylvester the cat which recalls my first name, and so there was no doubt which line I’d follow. Some delicate but well-protected climbing led us to the final belay, without every having hung off a single bolt…

I reckon this link-up is undoubtedly the most beautiful free climb combination up the Scoglio.

Silvestro FranchiniMountain Guide

Silvestro Franchini thanksLa Sportiva, Beal, BlueIce, Calze GM, MT Sport

Alpinismo e rischio

August 16, 2019 | News | No Comments

L’alpinismo e la libertà di assumersene consapevolmente i rischi. Di Vinicio Stefanello.

L’alpinismo ha un posto in questa società? O meglio, come viene interpretato da chi alpinista non è? Di certo l’alpinismo non è più – come agli inizi – “giustificato” dalla ricerca scientifica. Oppure, come negli anni ’30, funzionale ai regimi fascisti e nazisti e al loro strumentale mito dell’eroe. E più in là, nel secondo dopoguerra, con la corsa agli Ottomila, simbolo del riscatto di intere nazioni. Non che tutti gli alpinisti accettassero questo sfruttamento della loro passione, anzi.

Volendo semplificare molto l’alpinista in fondo è sempre stato un po’ “anarchico”, o per meglio dire un “anarchico – individualista”. Anche per questo ha sempre difeso la sua assoluta libertà di scelta in montagna, aldilà dei rischi anche altissimi che questo può comportare (un atteggiamento spesso letto all’esterno come egoismo tout-court).

Di sicuro però in epoche passate anche chi era esterno al mondo dell’andar per montagne, cioè la stragrande maggioranza, almeno aveva dei parametri, seppur manipolati, per dargli un significato, per collocarlo in una casella. Ora, invece, sembra esserci uno scollamento, una sorta di quasi assoluta incomprensione sul significato e il senso dell’alpinismo. Forse anche per questo bisognerebbe chiedersi come si rappresenta l’alpinismo e che senso dà di sé ai nostri tempi.

Una risposta, c’è da scommetterci, è quella di sempre. Quella che, anche in tempi non così vicini, l’ha sempre definito come la ricerca dei limiti e di se stessi. Una nobile e sempre valida motivazione. Che sembrerebbe assumere un valore alto ed insieme inclusivo: ogni esperienza di alpinismo, grande e piccola, dovrebbe avvicinare ad una maggior conoscenza di sé e del mondo. Ed è proprio per questo suo valore intrinseco e assolutamente personale che l’alpinismo e gli alpinisti rivendicano giustamente il diritto, e con esso la loro sacrosanta libertà, di assumersi consapevolmente i rischi che l’andar per montagne sempre comporta.

C’è un però: storicamente questa esperienza personale è stata da sempre misurata dagli stessi alpinisti con il metro della difficoltà strettamente legato al rischio, anche di morte, che ci si assume per superarla. Ergo: più la salita è difficile e più ci si espone al rischio, più l’impresa è grande. Ciò comporta un problema, se non proprio una contraddizione: anche il valore dell’esperienza umana è legato implicitamente al rischio e alla difficoltà della salita?

Tutti gli appassionati risponderanno che no, che l’alpinismo va aldilà del mero grado di difficoltà e della quantità di rischi a cui ci si espone. Anzi, aggiungeranno anche, che in alpinismo non può esistere competizione. Vogliamo crederci…

Resta il fatto che gran parte della storia e delle storie di alpinismo raccontano e celebrano proprio questo: il superamento delle difficoltà e dei rischi che comporta una salita. Così che le prime salite di una cima, di una parete, del versante più lontano, più difficile, più alto, insomma quelle anche più rischiose, sono sempre state valutate come un plus e un punto di arrivo dagli alpinisti.

Ma se ciò è perfettamente comprensibile dal loro punto di vista. Dall’altro può creare un vero e proprio corto circuito di comprensione per chi è all’esterno o si avvicina a questo mondo. Forse bisognerebbe fare un po’ di chiarezza per recuperare il senso primo dell’andar per montagne. Un senso inclusivo, più aperto all’esperienza di tutti, anche aldilà del grado di difficoltà e dei rischi. Ribadendo all’infinito che la sicurezza assoluta in montagna, come nella natura tutta, non esiste. Puntando prima di tutto sulla conoscenza e sulla consapevolezza del rischio a cui ci si espone, che non potrà mai essere slegato da una motivazione personale, forte e sincera e dall’assunzione completa di responsabilità per le possibili conseguenze.

Forse così ci avvicineremo ad un libero alpinismo che riesce a trasmettere di sé un’immagine comprensibile. E che, a ragione, pretende per sé quella libertà (e felicità) a cui ogni uomo e donna ha diritto.

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di Vinicio Stefanello

pubblicato suIl Manifesto In Movimento(maggio 2016)

Il ritratto video del climber statunitense Alan Watts, una delle forze trainanti della falesia di Smith Rock ed uno dei protagonisti assoluti dello sviluppo dell’arrampicata sportiva negli USA.

Smith Rock, la bellissima falesia nel parco dell’Oregon, è considerata una delle culle dell’arrampicata sportiva statunitensi. Alla metà degli anni ’80, quindi agli albori dell’arrampicata sportiva, era sulla bocca di tutti i climbers che, vestiti di colorato lycra, accorrevano da ogni angolo del mondo per provare le vie di Alan Watts che – andando assolutamente contro l’accettata etica arrampicatoria del paese – aveva spittato sistematicamente le vie nuove con la corda dall’alto e provato i singoli passaggi per poi liberarle. Due pratiche assolutamente assodate nel nostro sport, ma che all’epoca avevano creato disaccordo e scompiglio. Dopo la nostra intervista del 2009, ecco l’intervista video con uno dei protagonisti indiscussi dell’arrampicata sportiva statunitense e non solo.

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Il Rumore Bianco di Mattia Felicetti

August 16, 2019 | News | No Comments

La prima puntata della serie video Mammut Elements che vede protagonisti Mattia Felicetti, Martin Dejori, Alex Walpoth, Filip Schenk e Michael Piccolruaz. Nel primo episodio intitolato Rumore Bianco, ovvero White Noise, il maestro di sci della Val di Fiemme e atleta del Freeride World Qualifier Mattia Felicetti racconta il ‘suo’ elemento: la neve.

Gli atleti italiani Mammut raccontano il proprio rapporto con il “loro” elemento. Mattia Felicetti, Martin Dejori, Alex Walpoth, Filip Schenk e Michael Piccolruaz saranno i protagonisti di questa mini serie, divisa in quattro episodi.

Il primo episodio “Rumore Bianco” (White Noise in inglese) racconta l’atleta Mattia Felicetti, maestro di sci della Val di Fiemme e atleta del Freeride World Qualifier. Anzi forse sarebbe più corretto dire che è lo stesso Mattia a raccontarci il suo elemento, fondendosi in esso, nello stesso modo in cui i fiocchi di neve si sciolgono nell’acqua che una volta che vi si appoggiano. Scientificamente il White Noise identifica una certa frequenza dell’udibile, una frequenza talmente particolare da collegarsi per una frazione di tempo e spazio con la stessa con la quale la neve cade e dipinge il paesaggio a proprio piacimento. È chiamato bianco per analogia con il fatto che una radiazione elettromagnetica di simile spettro all’interno della banda della luce visibile apparirebbe all’occhio umano come luce bianca, come la neve appunto.

Lo stesso Mattia dice: “Ho iniziato a sciare a tre anni e a fare gare a sei. L’amore per lo sci in neve fresca è scattato immediatamente, tanto che il mio maestro di sci di allora faceva fatica a tenermi a freno. La passione per la montagna è andata ad evolversi in altri sport come l’arrampicata e highline, ma lo sci è sempre stato parte inscindibile del mio essere.”

Mammut Elements è un progetto 100% made in Italy. Il tutto viene raccontato con la voce di Ivan Pavlovic e le immagini del filmmaker Matteo Pavana e del fotografo Thomas Monsorno.

Info:www.mammut.ch