Meryl Streep, “The Devil Wears Prada” herself, on the Size Zero debate, on the ridiculous pressure on actresses to look “just the right way,” and why, in the end, women must take responsibility for whatever they do with their lives.

Motivational speakers, in the spotlight this morning, as memorably portrayed by the late Chris Farley.  

Each Saturday we highlight a humorous and sometimes poignant video, interview, comic, or skit concerning different professions, past and present.  From W.C. Fields to Rowan Atkinson, classic cartoons to Monty Python, secret tapings of Candid Camera to contemporary videos from CollegeHumor.com—all and everything will be tapped for this light-hearted look at the way popular culture has viewed various careers in recent history. 

Some of the clips will carry a message, many are plain silly, and while most of them are obvious creatures of their time, all will share a common interest in making us laugh (and occasionally think).

Series to Date:

Engineers

Encyclopedia Salesmen

Motivational Speakers

Some notes on my background and art: 

I was born in Soverato, Italy, lived and studied in India for two years, and now work in Milan.  I’ve done commissions for major corporate advertising campaigns, in both print and for TV commercials.  In 2000 I began my very popular “Handimals” series of body painting (hands painted as animals), an example of which is seen above.  I’m pleased to highlight one of my artworks each week at the Britannica Blog.

For more information on and examples of my art, visit my Britannica author page and professional website.

Posh

Footballer David Beckham and his wife Victoria Adams Beckham launched their new matching fragrances (Signature For Him/Signature For Her) at Macy’s Herald Sqaure this fall.

Victoria (a/k/a/ Posh Spice) arrived wearing some rather eccentric footwear: black thigh-high $6,000 PVC boots from designer Antonio Berardi. They’re part of his spring 2008 collection.

The boots have a long sole for support and are five inches off the ground - WITH NO HEELS.

“Having a heel is really just psychological,” remarked Mr. Berardi. “They’re graceful and they have a ballerina nature about them.”

I’m glad he thinks so. I’ve seen similar footwear on “ladies of the evening.” Both on and off the silver screen.  

Madonna

Though Madonna and Victoria are both huge stars in the music industry that generate untold amounts of publicity, that’s basically where the similarities end. Except, perhaps, for their respective tastes in remarkably odd fashion-forward clothing and accessories, footwear in particular.

Madonna has always been about controversy for controversy’s sake: savage manipulation of audiences and the media, her lovers (both male and female), the way she exploits sex for her own benefit (and NOT the other way around), how she effectively maps out a PR spin on EVERYTHING related to her.

Twenty years ago I’m sure all of that seemed fresh as a daisy. She gained legions of fans who adore the way she effortlessly pushed the envelope.

Now she’s 50, and though I know she’s going through a difficult time currently, the game has lost its lustre.

Which brings us to her pistol-packing shoes . . .  

Chanel’s creative director Karl Lagerfeld thought that producing a shoe with a gun for a heel was a flash of inspirational genius. Madonna wore the Chanel gun heels to the New York premiere of her directorial debut Filth & Wisdom.

Frankly, it’s more than a bit ridiculous. Those shoes are nothing more than a tired gimmick to stir up some madly desired newspaper, television or Internet coverage. They’re definitely not functional. One wrong move and those heels will break right off.

The only women that would consider footwear like this (or actually pay for them) are - excuse the expression - “attention whores.”

And some may ask, what two words in the English language are more representative of Madonna?

Today Americans will pause to celebrate their oldest, and quite possibly most beloved, of holidays — Thanksgiving.  Despite annual statements by the less-than-informed that Thanksgiving is “uniquely American,” it is not … at least not exactly. 

Thanksgiving Day comes from ancient traditions culminating in European harvest feasts, and its modern form is indeed celebrated in other countries (most notably, perhaps, Canada).  It is nevertheless hard to refute the argument that there is something uniquely American about this special thing we call Thanksgiving Day.  It is a day that exemplifies the Melting Pot, and blends polity and piety in nearly equal measure.

Everyone knows the basic story — how the Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation celebrated a harvest feast in 1621, inviting the American Indian neighbors who had so benevolently helped the settlers survive their first year in the New World.  After being recreated periodically across the land for years and years, Abraham Lincoln cemented the tradition with his Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863.  Every U.S. President since has emulated his example by proclaming a Thanksgiving Day in late November.  In 1941, Congress made the holiday an official law of the land.

In modern times, Thanksgiving has given Americans more than enough opportunity for naval gazing, as we agonize over such disparate issues as the mass deaths of Native Americans from disease and war to the extreme commercialism of the infamous “Day After Thanksgiving” sales.  However, I would like to focus — or refocus — upon the meaning of the day itself, and just what this “holiday” should mean to people of faith.

Thanksgiving Day is often described as a “secular” holiday.  Perhaps it is better described as “non-sectarian.” 

Proclamations notwithstanding, Thanksgiving Day is not like the Fourth of July.  It is a day which necessarily presupposes a higher power, and our responsibility as part of creation to give thanks, in our own tradition’s way, for all that higher power provides us.  Without that framework, the holiday is little more than a farce.

As such, the beauty of Thanksgiving for a plural people is that it binds individuals of widely disparate beliefs together for one purpose on one special day.  No one religious tradition can claim ownership over the act of giving thanks, and none can lay claim to Thanksgiving Day.  In fact, though it is sometimes marked by corporate worship, it is mainly a day for families to give thanks in the context of the home, each in their unique way.

In 1967 sociologist Robert Bellah formulated the concept of “civil religion,” a common set of beliefs, values, and rituals which have historically represented “normal American” culture, against the backdrop of an otherwise very pluralistic society.  In many ways, Thanksgiving Day is an excellent example of Bellah’s civil religion.  It allows people of disparate faith backgrounds to share a heritage related to their citizenship that is nevertheless in the framework of their faith.  I have Jewish friends who celebrate Thanksgiving.  I have Amish friends who celebrate Thanksgiving.  In a land where common threads can be few, Thanksgiving acts as an important tie.

But it can be, and often is, so much more than that.  For most Americans Thanksgiving is already a holiday.  For a few it is, indeed, a holy day as well, a day of meaningful introspection, and outreach to others.  Thanksgiving Day can be an opportunity not only for consciously examining what one should be grateful for, but also a moment for renewing our commitment to those around us, to spend the coming year giving of ourselves and sharing our blessings.

If you celebrate Thanksgiving Day, may yours be enjoyable and, even more importantly, meaningful.  I, for one, will hope to join the poet George Herbert in asking:

Thou that hast giv’n so much to me,

Give one thing more, a grateful heart.

[Editor’s note: About this time last year, longtime blogger and Encyclopaedia Britannica contributor Gregory McNamee offered up these musings about Thanksgiving movies. In the spirit of the season, we thought the post, and the movies it mentions, not a turkey among them, merit a fresh viewing.]

Though an official holiday for just about as long as Hollywood has been in business, Thanksgiving hasn’t inspired quite the same body of movies as Christmas or even Halloween. Those films that do touch on Thanksgiving tend, in the main, not to be especially festive; many turn on the pathology of neurosis-making encounters with family and the dark possibilities of what happens when tryptophan mixes with long-suppressed memories, which usually does not result in happy times.

Jodie Foster, who has gone on to specialize in playing imperiled single mothers, took a nicely dark view of the season with a film she directed in 1995, Home for the Holidays; its tagline—”On the fourth Thursday in November, 84 million American families will gather together… And wonder why”—says it all. Robert Downey Jr. was in a difficult patch during the filming, it’s said, and it shows to useful effect; there’s a reason people suffer for art. There’s a reason people suffer through dinner-table conversations, too, and some of the exchanges in this film are excruciating. Watch Foster’s worthy if glum film, and the chances are good that your own table talk will seem bright and cheery by comparison.

Steve Martin doesn’t always mug for the camera, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from John Hughes’s Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), which is as much a road film as a buddy film and a sentimental ode to family and the holidays—even though it is all those things as well. Christopher Walken almost always plays weird, however. (For a six-degrees-of-separation moment, see Walken and Martin together in the exceedingly strange film Pennies from Heaven.) Walken had one of his finest weird moments in a just-beyond-cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall, in which social worlds and mindsets collide over a Thanksgiving meal whose every clatter of crockery and scrape of the knife is pure torture.

The mood gets even darker with Ang Lee’s majestic 1997 film The Ice Storm, set in the well-to-do Connecticut suburbs in 1973. The talk is all Watergate, the behavior all desperate efforts to be au courant (or au Hartford Courant, perhaps) with open marriage, casual drug use, and other hallmarks of the era. No one in the movie can be said to be well adjusted, but certainly anyone who was around at the time can vouch for the characters’ authenticity. Bart Freundlich’s 1997 film The Myth of Fingerprints, similarly, puts generational talking-past-one-another and various other species of dysfunction at center stage, though without the key exchange.

Given such filmic moments, you might well wonder what there is to be thankful about about this time of year. For a happier take on the holiday, there’s the affecting 1986 made-for-TV film The Thanksgiving Promise, which answers the question very nicely. And there’s A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, with its ever-joyous music by Vince Guaraldi—though, a new biography tells us, Peanuts creator Charles Schulz was a glum fellow himself. Sigh. . . . But it could be worse. We could be eating our turkey in the slammer in upstate New York, the setting for the documentary Sing Sing Thanksgiving, a concert film from 1972 featuring Joan Baez, B. B. King, and Mimi Fariña.

Or we could be starving to death in the Far North, which is just as we find Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush. To have anything at all to eat for his Thanksgiving feast, Chaplin’s character, a starving prospector, is forced to cook up his own boot in a large pot. Cabin fever gets the better of his partner, who contrives to get the bigger portion and the choicest nails and laces. Much jollity ensues. The same film features Chaplin’s famous dancing dinner-roll scene, lest the boot leave you wanting more, as it surely will.

Finally, there’s another classic film, Casablanca (pictured above). And what does it have to do with the feast? Only that Michael Curtiz’s cynical, smart, funny, and endlessly problem-plagued movie debuted on Thanksgiving Day, 1942, in New York. It’s been pleasing audiences for 66 years now, and anyone who loves films can cite it chapter and verse. Now there’s something to be thankful about.

On November 8, less than a month after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) contacted the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) about Ned, an emaciated elephant “owned” by circus-trainer Lancelot Kollmann (a/k/a Lance Ramos), the agency confiscated the elephant and had him transferred to The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee.  This was only the second time that the USDA has ever seized a mistreated elephant.

Ned, an emaciated 21-year-old Asian elephant and one of the few born in captivity to survive into adulthood, will live in a private facility at the sanctuary until he regains his strength; he will then be moved to a permanent home at the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in California. Ned’s permanent home is being built there right now.  

Here’s a video of Ned’s arrival at the sanctuary. 

Ned is underweight by nearly a ton; his ribs, spine, and shoulder blades are protruding. Carol Buckley, the founder and president of The Elephant Sanctuary, described him as “a bag of bones,” but she is hopeful that he will recover. Ned has been eating pumpkins, broccoli, corn, and other vegetables—a much more nutritious diet than the one he had previously received, which likely consisted of little more than hay.

Ned was born at Busch Gardens in Tampa on October 10, 1987, to two elephants captured in the wild in Southeast Asia. At age 2, Ned was sold to a circus trainer who forced him to perform in the Big Apple Circus. When elephants were cut from the circus’s lineup, Ned wound up in Kollmann’s hands. Ned recently performed in the Royal Hanneford traveling circus. Thankfully, he will never again be starved or forced to entertain circus crowds.

A Repeat Offender by Any Name

It’s Kollmann’s turn to rot in a cell. PETA has asked the USDA to permanently revoke his exhibitor’s license and pursue criminal charges.

A spokeswoman for the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service said that Kollmann was warned several times to take better care of the elephant.

It wasn’t the first time that Kollmann was warned about mistreating animals. His abysmal animal-care record includes USDA citations for failure to provide veterinary care to injured animals; causing trauma, harm, and lesions to an improperly restrained jaguar; unsanitary conditions; and failure to provide adequate shelter and clean water. In July 2000, the USDA initially denied a permit to Kollmann, stating, “You were responsible for or participated in violations that resulted in the revocation of [your father’s] USDA license.”

In 2007, whistleblowers reported that two tigers who were being trained by Kollmann for use in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus allegedly died after they were unnecessarily anesthetized for microchipping.

To read more about Ned and Kollmann, see the St. Petersburg Times exposé or visit Circuses.com.

Circuses Must Share in the Blame

If Ringling Bros. and other circuses cared about animal welfare, they would stop using tigers, elephants, and other animals—or, at the very least, they would stop using animals from a known violator of the Animal Welfare Act.

People can help abused and neglected animals like Ned by attending only animal-free circuses. The success of modern, animal-friendly circuses like Cirque du Soleil shows that the public is turning away from outdated animal acts. People just aren’t interested in seeing sad, mistreated elephants and tigers perform silly tricks under the threat of punishment.

To follow Ned’s progress, make a donation towards his care, and read more about The Elephant Sanctuary, see Elephants.com.

Last Friday, November 21, Abraham Biggs, a 19-year-old community college student in Florida, committed suicide on a live webcast with a virtual audience of over 1,500 viewers.

Reports from the Broward County medical examiner’s office state that some members of his audience encouraged him to do it, while others tried to talk him out of it. A third group of viewers is noted to have weighed in on whether Biggs was taking a dose of pills large enough to actually kill himself. Once police officers were seen on the video camera entering into Biggs’ room, Internet responses are reported to have ranged from “Oh my God” to “LOL” and “Ha-ha-ha.”

Biggs is said to have died from a lethal combination of opiates and benzodiazepines, which his family assert were prescribed for his bipolar disorder. His suicide suggests that all of us need to understand more clearly the malevolent nature of mental illness. In addition, his public death begs the question:

What is our ethical responsibility as members of a virtual world where people let us in on their most intimate thoughts and actions?

In order to answer the question, we must first understand how depression (especially bipolar) can insidiously affect the well-being of its sufferers. Bipolar disorder is often misunderstood, and even more often under-recognized. The age of its onset varies, but it most often occurs in late adolescence to the early 20s. People with this disorder appear fine much of the time, with no single symptom that could raise suspicion. However, sufferers will eventually exhibit a manic or hypo-manic episode in which their mood and energy are persistently elevated, euphoric or irritable (usually lasting for a minimum of one week).  This is followed by a depressive episode serious enough to cause significant problems in relationships, combined with a loss of hope and possible suicidal tendencies.

Most viewers of a live Internet video or YouTube feature may be unaware of the clinical signs and symptoms listed above. But a public announcement of a planned suicide, with a posting of an actual time and date, as Biggs is reported to have done, forces us to ask ourselves how such a declaration can be ignored, under-challenged or, even worse, provoked.

Has our over-exposure to Internet trauma and intimacy dulled our human trigger to provide help and support? Or do we naively assume that “someone else will call for help”? Regardless of the answer, Biggs’ death, and many others like his, hastens us to reflect on our own sense of responsibility to the suffering of fellow humans, be it on the Internet or in the real world in which we live.

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Dr. Fried is the author of The Angel Letters: Lessons That Dying Can Teach Us About Living.  For his video discussions of assorted related topics, click here.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day. As children we Americans all learned about the first Thanksgiving, when the Pilgrims expressed their gratitude to God and to the local Indians for their survival in a harsh New World. The Pilgrims had come, we were taught, because they were not allowed to practice their religion freely in England. In the Europe of 1621, memories of heretics burned at the behest of the Church and massacred by mobs egged on by politicians were still fresh. And so, the story went, thanks to those hardy Pilgrims we now have freedom of religion.

Well, not quite. The story turned out to be a little more complex in high school, when it was admitted that the freely practicing Pilgrims took a dim view of anyone else freely practicing in a different way. They had no qualms about banishing a Roger Williams or an Anne Hutchinson and few about hanging the occasional Quaker, all for the sin of daring to differ on points of theology. It was some time before “freedom of religion” came to mean more than “freedom for my religion, probably not for yours,” and it didn’t come about easily.

Some decades ago the satirist Stan Freberg wrote a song about the first Thanksgiving. In it one of the Pilgrim settlers makes this suggestion to his companions:

Take an Indian to lunch this week.
Show him we’re a regular bunch this week.
Show him we’re as liberal as can be;
Let him know he’s almost as good as we.

The whole song can be heard here:

“Toleration” is the name we give to the practice of acquiescing publicly in difference. Whatever his private opinions, the tolerant person accepts that persons of different appearance, heritage, viewpoint, and so on have exactly the same claim to the public space, to justice, to civility as he. Toleration is paid at least lip service as a good and necessary thing if a diverse society is to have both liberty and peace.

Freberg’s lyric nicely illustrates half of what I want to make note of: that there are two sorts of toleration. One, which we might call induced toleration, is a sort of behavior adopted in order to make a point or to avoid a penalty. Freberg’s Pilgrim is making a point: He’s parading what he believes to be his virtue. “See me? See me be tolerant? Aren’t I fine?” (Could there be a finer example of McHenry’s First Law?)

Another person might be induced to act in a tolerant way in order not to be criticized for being intolerant. He, too, wishes the good opinion of his neighbor and is willing to suffer a little in order to get it.

Induced toleration may, depending on the circumstances, require a little or much effort. As experienced by the dissimulator, the burden of effort may range from grin-and-bear-it at the easiest, through lip biting and muttering, to teeth-grinding determination at the most difficult. However hard it may be, we do it when we must. The “must” is the key word here.

But there is toleration of a different kind, the kind that arises from principle. Toleration in principle, it seems to me, grows naturally from humility. It is humility that enables a person to be skeptical even of his own beliefs, however dearly held, and to entertain the possibility that someone else’s contrary or merely different belief just might be equally or even more true or laudable. This sort of humility is hard to come by – as hard as any true virtues are said to be – and it requires tough-mindedness and daily exercise.

Some people would not rob a bank even if assured that they would not be caught or punished in any way. Others would, however; they don’t, on any given day, because they fear the consequences. In a well-run society, those consequences are sufficiently likely, even if not certain, that most of these pragmatists are successfully deterred. What happens to the few who aren’t and are subsequently caught serves to reinforce the fear that holds back the majority. We can agree, I think, that not robbing a bank is, for these people, simply a prudent choice.

Prudential or, as I have called it, induced toleration is a civic good but not a personal virtue. Genuine toleration, rooted in humility, is a virtue. Either will do for keeping the peace, though the former does so with a certain visible tension, and it is ever in danger of being jettisoned as soon as the coast seems clear.

Toward the end of Freberg’s Thanksgiving song are these lines:

We know everyone can’t be
As American as we.

Which notion the singer then amplifies in a spoken expostulation:

After all, we came over on the Mayflower.

Freberg here is spoofing the social pretensions of old New England families. The Lowells who spoke only to Cabots, who in turn spoke only to God, and their ilk are no longer figures of fun, but the underlying sentiment lingers on in nearly all of us. Most lately it emerged in the presidential campaign, when certain people were flattered when it was suggested to them by a candidate that they were somehow more truly American than certain unspecified others. So blatant an invitation to intolerance befouls the political process and ought to yield contempt rather than votes.

Thanksgiving is a time when we consider the abundance with which we are blessed. One form of abundance for which it may not occur to us to be thankful is the wealth of private voluntary associations to which we may choose to belong. These are the clubs, fraternities, service organizations, churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, ashrams, communal farms, charitable groups, veterans’ groups, bowling leagues, and on and on, that weave the web of sociability that makes for a peaceful and productive nation. Each of us can choose to belong or not to belong to any of them that will have us. And if they won’t have us, we are free to create our own and keep everybody else out. Hence “private” and hence “voluntary.” It is in this private and voluntary space that intolerance is permitted to express itself. You don’t like one-eyed non-veteran non-religious former editors from Missouri? Fine. No problem. Bar me from your clubhouse. And you can’t come into mine.

Sometimes, however, a private voluntary association loses its humility and begins to believe that its charter of principles is not only binding on the members but ought to be on everybody else, too. It ought to be, the reasoning goes, because – quite unlike the charters of other groups – it comprises the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The impulse to carry the truth outside the clubhouse is more often than not amplified by another human weakness, the desire to exercise power over as many other people as can be reached. The rationale is dazzling in its perversity: We are saving them from sin and error. It’s for their own good.

Over the millennia a terrible lot of people have been killed for their own good. The excuse ought to have worn thin by now, but it’s still being used to clothe quite base impulses. Most recently, just as a random example, we’ve seen this in the campaign for Proposition 8 here in California.

When the private voluntary association moves as a body into the public sphere, the rules change. Intolerance is no longer a privilege. One’s formerly private beliefs and behavior become matter for public and perhaps hostile discussion. And the public space becomes a little less sociable.

For this, no thanks.

Isabella I of Spain, also known as ‘Isabella of Castile’ or ‘Isabella the Catholic,’ died this day in 1504.  Born into the royal family of Castile in 1451, her eventual marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon helped unite Spain, and they supported each other with their joint motto of equality: “They amount to the same, Isabella and Ferdinand.”

Financially supporting Columbus’s journey to America, Isabella brought Spain into a Golden Age of exploration and colonisation, creating a wealthy nation and the first modern world power. However, the dark side of Isabella presided over the notorious Spanish Inquisition, whose intolerant treatment of religious minorities was harsh and cruel. Pope Alexander VI named Isabella and Ferdinand ‘The Catholic Monarchs’. Isabella’s ‘Book of Revelation’ promised salvation to the godly, the Spanish claiming to be the new Israel. Her illustrated Bible ‘Book of Hours’ helped Spain to become the great Catholic power as it appealed to the non-literate classes.

“Isabella of Spain - The Catholic,” my composition above, depicts a cathedral in Toledo, Spain, originally sponsored by Isabella. The original painting in the background has been digitally replaced with a painting from 1490, and the significance of this painting is in its contents. The figures include the Virgin surrounded by Isabella and family and the key figures of Isabella’s governing forces.

Every object in this composition is symbolic. Isabella, ‘the Catholic’, kneels beside a stack of Bibles, highlighting her fanaticism. Resting upon the Bibles is a blood red quill, signifying the Inquisition and the deaths that resulted. The pages of the Bible sitting on Isabella’s luxurious gown are from the original ‘Book of Hours’. This pose combines both her religious fanaticism and the journey of Columbus as her gaze is fixed and her hands are cupped upon a crusade ship. Chillies symbolise the return of Columbus from the New World with rich treasures such as spices and Inca gold. Scattered throughout the artwork are the original coins pressed from Inca gold and displaying the embossed heads of Isabella and Ferdinand.

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Alexia Sinclair (right) is an award-winning Australian photographer and digital artist.  Her digitally montaged work has been described as dark and sexy, baroque and magical, mixing avant-garde fashion and her work with contemporary fashion models with exotic European landscapes. 

She’ll highlight the women in her acclaimed “Regal Twelve” series on the Britannica Blog at various times throughout the year.  “Each character’s portrayal,” she says, “is approached through the eyes of a contemporary woman and, as such, is influenced by contemporary notions of beauty and power.” Learn more about Alexia and her artwork at alexiasinclair.com.