Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Harvard Hypocrite

Here's an unintentional commical profile of Fred Ho, from the Harvard class of 1979 in Harvard Magazene. He's a marxist, saxophone jazz player who recently helped train security forces for the king of Cambodia.

The Volokh Conspiracy points out an interesting juxtapostion of two paragraphs from the article. There first one says:

Ho is an uncompromising Marxist. He currently believes that the capitalist patriarchy should be replaced with its opposite -- a matriarchy -- as a necessary transition stage toward true communism. His music and radical politics, both discovered by the age of 14, are inseparable and dominate his life. "All music is political," he explains, "whether the artist is conscious of it or not. I subscribe to the interpenetration of ideas and material life. I talk the walk."

Later towards the end of the article:

Ho earns a moderate living making music because he has only himself to support and because he is a well-organized businessman who competes in the open market for arts funding, frequently winning awards, commissions, and artist-in-residence positions at schools or art colonies. (He recently returned from working with musicians in Alaska as part of the CrossSound Festival.) He cannot apply for grants because his company, Big Red Media Inc., is a for-profit venture.

Here's a few other interesting tidbits from the article:

He has not even stepped into a clothing store in more than 12 years because he designs his own apparel, though he generally prefers to be naked. “What I create is better than Armani, better than Ralph Lauren, better than these boring mass marketers,” says Ho, whose signature piece is a fire-engine-red silk duster patterned with white cranes, made from a recycled Japanese wedding kimono. “I am not a Luddite and I don’t subscribe to purist positions regarding consumer capitalism. I just choose to consume something better.”

...Ideologically, he was a “yellow nationalist” until the summer after his freshman year, when he joined the I Wor Kuen, an Asian-American radical group, initially modeled after the Black Panthers, that morphed into the League of Revolutionary Struggle.

I'm assuming Harvard profiled this guy because he's supposed to be admired?

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