Ruminatrix
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Tuesday, May 06, 2003
Lilya & Lucia
Saw Lilya 4 Ever after seeing several disparate reviewers praise it highly. It is very powerful, with a go-for-broke performance by Oksana Akinshina in the title role of a Russian teen in a dead-end city (filmed in Tallinn, Estonia). Lilya, left behind by her mother who's chasing the American dream and an aunt who just wants her apartment, first gets involved in prostitution to survive, then is lured to Sweden by traffickers. Not to give too much away, it's a pretty tough story, with feral adults preying on teens. The children of the projects see no future in Russia and believe that "life is elsewhere", across the sea. But if Malmo, the Swedish city in which Lilya becomes trapped, is slightly cleaner than Tallinn, it's no less hellish for being free of weeds and broken windows.
Comparisons to Bresson, Lars Von Trier, Wenders and others have been made, but at the end the film feels somewhat one-dimensional. There's no letup, no love -- only sexual exploitation and violence. More important, no laughter or hope -- only glue-sniffing and vodka binges. Soundtrack: Rammstein meets Tatu. Still, it does make me want to see the director Lukas Moodysson's earler film Together, a comedy about commune-dwellers in seventies Sweden. At least, I think so.
Several women at one of my workplaces recommended Lucia y el Sexo (Sex and Lucia), now out on DVD/video. The title is misleading (Lucia isn't as central a character as Lilya, and although there is quite a bit of carnality (both "real" and in the imaginations of all the characters -- they are Spanish, after all), Lucia is also about story-telling, parenthood, time, chance and destiny, the restorative power of sea. It features circular plotlines, Oedipal moments and a pinch of magical realism -- as in Lilya the dead are a continuing presence to the living.
So Julio Medem's Lucia is as different in temperature from Lilya as the Baltic from the Balearics. Women are their own agents of desire here, unlike in Lilya's world of relentless exploitation. This makes for a much richer movie -- I thought of Kieslowski's Red, of Y Tu Mama Tambien and a wonderful flick from Macedonia Before the Rain. As in the movies of Almodovar -- one of the actors plays the crazy nurse Benigno in Talk to Her -- tragedy and comedy are never far apart. Worth a look.
Monday, May 05, 2003
Cow-Tipping, Anyone?
"We are at the tipping point with spam. But with the bills before us now, I fear we will be on the wrong side of the cow."d
-- David Sorkin, Associate Professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, quoted in NYT story "Finding a Solution to the Secret World of Spam". (05/05/2003)
Got the Gladwell regerence, but what's the cow thing? Inquiring Ruminatrices want to know......
Urformen (1928) and Kunstformen (1899-1904)
Saw these plant plates the other day -- I can't recall where -- and bookmarked'em. Then Cory posted a link. So I wasn't going to. But I changed ny mind, perhaps because there's a kinship with these Haeckel plates -- from which the image at the head of this page comes.
Saturday, May 03, 2003
The letters of the alphabet give birth to man and woman
Francois Bizot's memoir The Gate tells of the author's life as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge during 1971. Fluent in Khmer and married to a local woman, Bizot was doing ethnographic research on Cambodian Buddhism when he was captured in an ambush and held under suspicion of being a spy. Striking details -- the beauty of the peasant girls who come to spit on the freakishly tall farang, the feeling of the stocks being shut on his ankles in the evening, personal hygiene, his emotional breakdowns -- are interspersed (intertwingled?) with wry observations on the all parties to the conflict. He's arrogant but very lucid:
I could not bear to be taken for an American... Not because of the events in Vietnam; for many of the local peasantry, attached to their traditions and resistant to the new ideologies, the Communist revolution was a disruption of their age-old way of life.But that's nothing compared to his observation of the KR themselves. When a group of prisoners from the Lon Nol army arrive in the camp, one tries to give Bizot a prayer-cloth covered with magical letters and diagrams -- an amulet for his protection. A KR guard takes it away, telling him that such counter-revolutionary materials are being confiscated and remade into underwear "before the material could get bloodstained." Bizot drily notes:
Rather it was the Americans' uncouth methods, their crass ignorance of the milieu in which they had intervened, their clumsy demagogy, their misplaced clear conscience, and that easy-going childlike sincerity that bordered on foolishness. They were total strangers in the area, driven by cliches about Asia worthy of the flimsiest tourist guides, and they behaved accordingly.
[This] shows just how far the KR revolution was willing to go to debase a traditional system of values.To place letters of Buddhist doctrine in contact with regions of the body considered "impure" was an absolute sacrilege, one no peasant would risk commiting. Only town dwellers would be capable of such iconoclastic radicalism.Then Bizot's chief KR interrogator engages him in a series of long conversations...It's a stunning, deeply humane work and beautifully written.
The majority [of the KR] were poorly integrated Sino-Khmer, the sons of shopkeepers or frustrated employees. Having replaced the traditional village structure with the fraternal solidarity of the resistance, motivated by sincere idealism, and appalled by the gap between rich and poor, they had shared an existence outside of the rural world, which they knew nothing about. None of them had ever tended rice fields. The way they roamed through the countryside proved they had no respect for crops, gardens, trees or pathways....
Paradoxically, these city folk, who loathed the plow, the soil, the palm groves and domestic animals, who disliked the open, rustic life of the villagers, idealized the Khmer peasants as a stereotype of perpetual revolution: a model of simplicity, endurance, and patriotism, the standard against which the new man would be measured, liberated from religious taboos. In this contradictory scenario, Buddhism was to be replaced by objectives dear to the Angkar [i.e. the Organization] in order to ensure the triumph of equality and justice. The Khmer theorists had substitiued the Angkar for Dhamma, the personification of Teaching, the Primordial Being at the beginning of the world, whose body, composed of the letters of the alphabet, gave birth to the first man and woman.
Friday, May 02, 2003
Off, Over and Out
A day off, no work, just some domestic chores -- painting some shelves, laundry, throwing out old stuff -- and a walk in the sun. Three film trailers that had been parked in our back yard for close to a month (guys were sometimes moving gear at three a.m. right outside our uncurtained windows) vanished last night, opening up our little space to the sun.
Now it's just sparrows I can hear. It's a beautiful spring afternoon and I'm going to pick up a paycheck. Even knowing that thunder-showers have been forecast for later today can't ruin the calm. Arcadia in the city.
Thursday, May 01, 2003
Let's Make a Deal
This week marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States. The LP deal (background to the negotiations here) covered all land from the Mississippi to the Rockies except for the Red River Basin (acquired 1818) and the Texas Territory (annexed 1845). The price: 828,000 square miles for a mere $15 million.
The French were weakened first by defeat of their Navy at the hands of the Royal Navy, then by the uprising of Toussaint L'Ouverture against the sugar planters in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Vast fortunes were lost in this revolution, among the planters and the traders of the French Atlantic ports of Nantes, La Rochelle and Bordeaux -- as a child I saw quaint watercolours of the Haiti plantations in La Rochelle's "Museum of the New World."
This bloody war was to grind on until 1804 at a frightful cost on both sides, with tens of thousands dying either in punitive massacres or of yellow fever. Only 7,000 French troops of an army of 60,000 led by Napoleon's brother-in-law General Leclerc survived to surrender in 1804 (Leclerc died of the fever). Among the casualties were 4,000 members of the 5,000-strong volunteer Polish Legion, who must have wondered why the hell they had been to repress the values of Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite in this faraway island.
So France had to sell sooner or later and preferred to get something rather than lose sovereignty altogether, as happened to Spain in 1898. Was the LP more significant than the much cheaper Seward's Folly of 1867 ($7m to Russia for the 598,000 square miles of Alaska)? Sure. For better or worse -- and for the Indian tribes things were about to get irreversibly worse -- without LP the great expansion westward under Andrew Jackson would be unimaginable. We won't see that sort of population influx into Alaska any time soon.
But France also sold because Napoleon, still titular "First Consul" of a quasi-Republic, was planning to invade Britain and to attack other European powers. Although France was at peace in 1803, the future Emperor sold the Louisiana Territory to finance these wars. Despite the defeat at Trafalgar, at first Napoleon was spectacularly successful, defeating Austria (1805) Prussia (1806) and Russia (1807) in turn. Then came the long slow haemorrage of Spain and the catastrophic Russian campaign of 1812.
Military campaigns cost money, wars are very expensive to fight. And the debts which fund them can lead to the fall of empires.
And a happy May Day to one and all...
Tuesday, Apr 29, 2003
Flogging Frogs
Monaco attacks Nice in exchange for a jump-seat on the Security Council?
"American, British and Monaco forces land in France," the front-page headline screams. "Chirac calls for resistance and disappears ... Pro-American uprising on Left Bank in Paris."More here.
Among the 16 pages of reports are some on American troops seizing the Louvre museum, mistaking it for the nearby City Hall, while Kurds proclaim an autonomous state in eastern Paris.
According to The Monde, President Bush dubbed the operation "Big Spanking," much to the delight of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but Secretary of State Colin Powell blocked its use out of concern for world reaction....
...At the invasion's start, the paper depicts a groggy and unshaven Chirac delivering a rambling television address to the nation before fleeing to an underground tunnel. "It's our duty to fiercely resist our American friends," he says.
Al Udeid
The announcement that the US military's Central Command will move its air operations center out of Saudi Arabia to Qatar means probable reductions in US personnel in Saudi Arabia, one of the key demands made on the US by Osama bin Laden.
American military commanders, especially Air Force officials, have long favored moving the air command post to Al Udeid from Saudi Arabia. United States commanders have chafed at restrictions the Saudis have placed on the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Senior Bush administration officials sought to emphasize that shifting the location of the command center should not be interpreted as an indication that the United States was ending its military relationship with Saudi Arabia, which has involved efforts to train Saudi forces, as well as the use of Saudi air bases.
"We are not leaving Saudi Arabia," a senior administration official said today.
I say we are, quietly, after a decent interval.
Laibach and Think of Lublajana
This week's New Yorker has a profile of Slavoj Zizek, but it's not (yet?) available on their site. I first heard of him when my sister emailed me Welcome to the Desert of the Real a few days after its publication in 2001. Its irreverent tone was like a slap in the face back then, but it still has some weight to its analysis of America's own shock and awe. A fuller bibliography shows Zizek's much wider interests, including pop culture. He's a philosopher-theoretician who ran for the Presidency of Slovenia and lost, who was offered a cabinet position but refused to consider anything but Minister of the Interior or Chief of the Secret Police. He (a Lacanian) says that:
The great battle in Slovenian politics is between the Lacanians, who run the civil service, and the Heideggerians, who dominate the military.Maybe Slovenia won't be such a bad place to live when Americans all live in permanent anticipation of terror alerts.
Sunday, Apr 27, 2003
Political or Personal?
(title suggested by Theo, who wants me to stop now so we can go cycling)
Being out of the loop this week, I got to the lively dmt thread about what's appropriate weblog material way too late to have anything useful to contribute. Yes, it's important to record our personal experiences, not just to pass along news or "meta-news" analysis, but the two don't have to be mutually exclusive.
I'm acutely aware of how easy it is to become dependent on a narrow range of sources for information (especially during a geopolitical crisis) -- even if that problem existed way before the Internet. And I know of the limited value of linking to sites such as the NY Times, which charges to read any article over one month old. Its policy offends my sense of how a "newspaper of record" should handle its archives, particularly since the storage costs of electronic material are so small compared to paper. Does that mean one shouldn't link to NYT? I don't think that's a logical conclusion. But that's another topic.
But as for this site: It looks like we've got room enough here for poetry and wordplay and sensory explorations and art and aesthetics and foodtalk and politics and technical expertise and stream of consciousness and much else besides, so let's each get on with what we like to do, or want to do or just do best.
I'd like to see more input from more contributors, and with a little less testosterone quotient in the mix too. In any case, some feedback helps keep us from isolation while we get stuff made -- be it art or writing or anything else. It makes life a little easier, a little livelier.