Dialogic

The Ruts: Babylons Burning

2012-01-29T20:09:00.001-05:00

Law and Disorder Radio -- Jon Burge, Former Chicago Police Commander Sentenced to 4 ½ Years; Bill Goodman: State of Democratic Rights; Sara Hogarth: Post Coup Aftermath – Honduras

2012-01-27T07:47:00.000-05:00

Law and Disorder Radio (WBAI: New York City)

Jon Burge, Former Chicago Police Commander Sentenced to 4 ½ Years

Here on Law and Disorder we’ve reported on the ongoing developments of the Chicago Torture case and former Chicago police commander Jon Burge. Burge has been sentenced to 4 and a half years in prison for obstruction of justice and lying about torturing prisoners to obtain coerced confessions. The People’s Law Office brought the case in 2005 and the city of Chicago refused to settle while pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the case. Attorney with the People’s Law Office Flint Taylor says the city has spent over the 10 million dollars in aiding the defense of former Commander Jon Burge. Mr. Burge, who is 63 and in ill health, was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993. Attorney Flint Taylor’s Statement on Burge sentencing.

Guest – Attorney Flint Taylor, a graduate of Brown University and Northwestern University School of Law and a founding partner of the Peoples Law Office. More bio

—-

State of Democratic Rights – Bill Goodman

We’re joined today by attorney Bill Goodman former legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights. Bill has been an extraordinary public interest lawyer for more than 30 years he’s served as counsel on issues including post-Katrina social justice, public housing, voting rights, the death penalty, living wage and human rights work in Haiti. Bill delivered a speech recently titled the State of Democratic Rights, defining democracy as we now understand it. Everyone of these defining points has been attacked or undermined and very little has been done to repair them under the Obama Administration.

Guest – Bill Goodman, former legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights has been an extraordinary public interest lawyer for over 30 years, and has served as counsel on issues including post-Katrina social justice, public housing, voting rights, the death penalty, living wage, civil liberties, educational reform, constitutional rights, human rights work in Haiti, and civil disobedience.

—

Post Coup Aftermath – Honduras: Sarah Hogarth

Today we are joined by legal worker Sarah Hogarth who has recently returned from a human rights delegation to Honduras through the Friendship Office of the Americas. We talk with her about her observations on the post coup human rights crisis in that country. As listeners may know On June 28, 2009, the Honduran military ousted the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. Former Parliamentary speaker Roberto Micheletti was sworn in as Zelaya’s replacement. Repressive tactics were used immediately after the coup–people on the front lines who oppose this regime have been beaten and illegally detained by the state. Journalists and LGBT activists were among the first to be targeted and killed. Dr James Cockcroft joins interview.

Guest – Sarah Hogarth, human rights activist in New York City. She is a freelance legal worker and writer and has recently returned from a human rights delegation to Honduras through the Friendship Office of the Americas. The delegation met with activists to learn about the human rights situation in Honduras in the one year since the elections in November 2009. In June 2009, democratically elected President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was removed in a military coup d’etat.

Guest – Dr. James Cockcroft, historian and activist, Jim has written 45 books on Latin America. He’s a professor at the State University of New York and is a member of the International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban Five.

To Listen to the Episode

Claudia Springer: Taken by Muslims -- Captivity Narratives in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and Prisoner of the Mountains

2012-01-27T00:13:00.000-05:00

Taken by Muslims: captivity narratives in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
and Prisoner of the Mountains
by Claudia Springer
Jump Cut

Prisoner of the Mountains does not simply reverse the terms of typical Muslim captivity narratives and naively assert that all Russians are destructive and all Chechens are kindhearted. Quite the contrary: there are trigger-happy Chechens eager to kill the two captive soldiers, and a Chechen man shoots his own son for the offense of working for the Russian police. Their violence, though, is shown in the context of their motivations, not as resulting from sadistic impulses. On the Russian side, even the Commander seems to have a change of heart and indicates that he may be ready to trade Abdoul-Mourat's son, an event that is foiled when the son tries to escape and is shot. Rather than paint a simplistic picture, the film suggests that empathy becomes possible when people learn about the realities of others' lives.

In Vanya's friendship with Dina, we see the film reject Orientalist divisiveness and replace it with what philosopher Martin Buber calls an "I and thou" relationship based on nonjudgmental respect. Vanya and Dina overcome inherited cultural myths that would make them enemies and learn to perceive each other as individuals, not symbols. This is the type of connection called for by Czech theorist Vilém Flusser, who critiques the insularity of people who identify too strongly with their homelands—their heimats—to the point that they reject foreigners and anyone with unfamiliar customs. Flusser offers as a solution to intolerance the condition of the migrant, a person who is not anchored to any one place and who "carries in his unconscious bits and pieces of the mysteries of all the heimats through which he has wandered" (14). The migrant, Flusser writes, works on "the mystery of living together with others" and poses the following challenge to all of us:

"how can I overcome the prejudices of the bits and pieces of mysteries that reside within me, and how can I break through the prejudices that are anchored in the mysteries of others, so that together with them we may create something beautiful out of something that is ugly?" (15).

Prisoner of the Mountains gives us a glimpse of two people—Vanya and Dina—who break through prejudices and briefly create something beautiful. Their friendship develops awkwardly and tentatively, initiated by curiosity and followed by small acts of generosity, leading up to her secret visits to the deep pit within which Vanya is chained after his failed attempt to escape with Sacha. In addition to lowering bread and water to him on a rope, Dina informs him of his fate, standing above him at the edge of the pit: "My brother is dead. You have one more night to live." Her elevation indicates her power over him, but their conversation reveals mutual respect, she by acknowledging that he has a right to know what lies ahead, and he by responding patiently. Their cultural differences are apparent, because her idea of being helpful originates in her beliefs about the afterlife, which are meaningless to him, but his responses, while indicating his despair, avoid undermining her. She says, "Usually they throw the enemies' bodies to the jackals. But I will bury yours." He asks her to bring the key to release him. She says, "No. I will dig a wide grave for you. And you will see the Angel of Death. I'll put my necklace in the grave as your wedding gift. Maybe your soul will find a bride in heaven." He responds with a gentle smile: "I don't think so."

Later, she does bring him the key to his leg shackle after finding it hidden in a box while the film crosscuts to her father returning to the village with his son's body in the back of a truck. Before she throws the key to Vanya, she says to him, "Don't kill any more people, promise?" Her request represents a significant shift away from her former acculturated hatred for Russians as well as an attempt to break the cycle of revenge that has trapped both sides in the conflict. She has learned through her friendship with Vanya to respect life—everyone's life. Vanya responds in kind when he refuses to leave in order to protect her from punishment. Her father, Abdoul-Mourat, finds the two of them together at the edge of the pit and sends her home after scolding her for being more concerned about Vanya than about her own dead brother. But even Abdoul-Mourat—perhaps following his daughter's example—rejects vengeance when he lets Vanya go after marching him into the mountains.

Vanya's respect for Dina extends to the film's refusal to eroticize her. Even when she dances for him, she is not objectified; her dance is grave and earnest and shot from a respectful distance. She wears a headscarf and boots and an ankle-length red dress with a dark jacket. Her dance is accompanied by wailing diegetic music from a funeral procession winding its way through the village. She and the other Chechen women—most of them weather-beaten and wearing headscarves—are frequently seen at work. It is their labor, not their sexuality, that defines them. Dina is seen working with donkeys, preparing food, cleaning up, knitting—preparing for life as a village woman—and she calmly explains her future to Vanya before she dances for him. He asks her, "Did you get married yet?" She replies, "No." He says, "I would marry you." She says, "We cannot get married. I can get married next year. We marry early here." Later, when she returns to the pit to tell Vanya that he has one more night to live, she is dressed entirely in black to show that she is in mourning for her brother but also suggesting that she is preparing to mourn for Vanya, taking on the role of his widow although they have never even exchanged a kiss. She stands above him in her black robe, embodying the Angel of Death as well as the bride she speculates he might find in the afterlife. Their union is symbolic, impossible in the world they inhabit but indicative of the connection they have made.

The film also treats the Chechen landscape, customs, and music, all initially strange and unfamiliar to the Russian captives, with respect. Perched on rocky cliffs, the village is both precarious and solid, built of stone to withstand the ferocious winds. A song sung by the village children tells of the longevity of the Chechen culture and the inability of visitors to tolerate the wind. The film was shot on location in the Russian Republic of Dagestan, neighboring Chechnya, just twenty miles from where fighting was taking place at the time. (Ironically and sadly, the region's harsh conditions proved fatal for the actor Sergei Bodrov Jr. a few years later when he returned to direct a film and was killed by an avalanche.) The music, cinematography, and editing combine to emphasize endurance. But it is all obliterated at the end with the offscreen Russian assault. Vanya's inability to conjure up the villagers in his dreams symbolizes the military attack's total erasure of their existence, eliminating their history along with their future. Instead of exalting military might—as does The Lives of a Bengal Lancer—the film raises questions about the morality of bombing raids on civilian targets as a military strategy.

The final crucial element that sets this film apart is its slow, deliberate pacing, counteracting the speed with which the Bengal Lancers engage in their adventures. Unhurried panning shots linger over the mountains and valleys and the village's worn cobblestone streets. It takes time to overcome enmity, and Prisoner of the Mountains measures time very slowly. Its choices provide a cinematic model for relinquishing Hollywood's tired anti-Muslim clichés.[2]

To Read the Entire Essay

Open Culture: Alain de Botton Wants a Religion for Atheists -- Introducing Atheism 2.0

2012-01-26T22:53:00.000-05:00

Alain de Botton Wants a Religion for Atheists: Introducing Atheism 2.0
Open Culture

Last summer Alain de Botton, one of the better popularizers of philosophy, appeared at TEDGlobal and called for a new kind of atheism. An Atheism 2.0. This revised atheism would let atheists deny a creator and yet not forsake all the other good things religion can offer — tradition, ritual, community, insights into living a good life, the ability to experience transcendence, taking part in institutions that can change the world, and the rest.

What he’s describing kind of sounds like what already happens in the Unitarian Church … or The School of Life, a London-based institution founded by de Botton in 2008. The school offers courses “in the important questions of everyday life” and also hosts Sunday Sermons that feature “maverick cultural figures” talking about important principles to live by. Click here and you can watch several past sermons presented by actress Miranda July, physicist Lawrence Krauss, author Rebecca Solnit, and Alain de Botton himself.

If Atheism 2.0 piques your interest, you’ll want to pre-order de Botton’s soon-to-be-published book, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion.

Link

Dan Ariely: The Upside of Irrationality

2012-01-26T19:17:00.000-05:00

Dan Ariely: The Upside of Irrationality
FORA TV

Dan Ariely is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT Sloan School of Management. He also holds an appointment at the MIT Media Lab where he is the head of the eRationality research group.

He is considered to be one of the leading behavioral economists. Currently, Ariely is serving as a Visiting Professor at the Duke University, Fuqua School of Business where he is teaching a course based upon his findings in Predictably Irrational.

Ariely was an undergraduate at Tel Aviv University and received a Ph.D. and M.A. in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Ph.D. in business from Duke University. His research focuses on discovering and measuring how people make decisions. He models the human decision making process and in particular the irrational decisions that we all make every day.

Ariely is the author of the book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

Dan Ariely: The Upside of Irrationality from Booksmith on FORA.tv

The Corporation (Canada: Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Balkan, 2003/2005)

2012-01-23T17:06:00.003-05:00

[ENG 102 students this is the post for the class screening of The Corporation -- in the comments below this post, feel free to ask questions, provide responses, or introduce information]

The People Featured in The Corporation

The Official Website

Image by Austin Kleon

To Watch The Corporation (with commercials) online

Wild Flag: Glass Tambourine

2012-01-23T13:28:00.001-05:00

Left, Right and Center: Third Party Politics/Remembering Tony Blankley

2012-01-22T19:35:00.000-05:00

(Dialogic is very sorry to hear that conservative critic and long time Left, Right & Center co-host Tony Blankley died recently. To hear the shows memories about/of Tony check out their episode Remembering Tony Blankley)

Third Party Politics
Left, Right & Center (KCRW: Santa Monica, CA)

Does America need a third political party? The backlash against Obama on the left and the tepid support for Romney (the "anyone but Romney” vote has gone from Bachmann to Perry to Cain to Gingrich...) would seem to make this a fine time for an independent party to emerge. But it's also the year of $1 billion campaigns and Citizens United funding schemes. Indeed, the only grass roots getting fed by cash are Republican friendly Tea Partiers. Aren't they an example of just how strong a stranglehold the two party system has on American politics?

To Listen to the Episode

Javier Ruibal: La Flor De Estambul

2012-01-22T14:27:00.001-05:00

Erik Satie: Gnossienne n 1

2012-01-22T13:38:00.002-05:00

Raj Patel: Feeding Ten Billion

2012-01-21T18:58:00.001-05:00

Feeding Ten Billion
Ideas (CBC: Canada)

The world just got its seven billionth citizen, and the population explosion shows no signs of stopping. In a Saskatoon lecture, writer and activist Raj Patel argues that the only way to feed everyone is to completely rethink agriculture.

To Listen to the Episode

Hassan Ghedi Santur: On Being A Muslim In The West, Part 1 and 2

2012-01-19T19:58:00.000-05:00

Ideas (CBC: Canada)

On Being A Muslim In The West, Part 1

Amid continuing tension between Muslim and non-Muslim populations in many western countries, the question keeps coming back: Is Islam compatible with western values? Hassan Ghedi Santur asks if someone can embrace the secular, pluralist democratic values of the West and still be a "good" Muslim?

To Listen to the Episode

On Being A Muslim In The West, Part 2

It is said that there is a struggle for the soul of Islam; a jihad for the hearts and minds of the 1.6 billion people who profess Islam as their faith. Hassan Ghedi Santur explores the intersection between religion, spirituality, and politics in the lives of Muslims, particularly Muslim women. He presents the portrait of an activist, an academic and a writer who are in their own way, changing the face of Islam.

To Listen to the Episode

Crime: Frustration

2012-01-19T15:05:00.001-05:00

Fall 2012 ENG 282: International Film Studies

2012-01-19T10:44:00.007-05:00

(In Development)

In a globalized world it is imperative that we begin to develop a broader awareness of the interconnected cultures and societies that influence and shape world events. Anyone remotely aware of the American social landscape must recognize that many of our citizens are unaware of the broader relations and connections of the world in which they live in. Many Americans tend to have a narrow understanding of world history, filtered as it is through ethnocentric American textbooks and mediatized narratives filtered through the lenses of the dominant center, which effectively ignores the realities of the margins (culturally, economically and socially). Many concerned citizens struggle to carve out meaning in the contemporary data stream and suffer the neglect of a mainstream media that limits itself to predigested dualistic positions. In this simplified media environment, vast regions of the world are presumed to be unable to speak for themselves and rarely, in the mainstream corporate media that serves as the news for a majority of American citizens, do we receive sustained and in-depth critical analysis of issues through the voices and experiences of multiple interested parties.
--Michael Benton, 2006

"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated egos."
-- Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)

What are “thoughts,” and what are “things”? and how are they connected?… Is there a common stuff out of which all facts are made?… Which is the most real kind of reality? What binds all things into one universe?
-- Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011)

"The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness."
-- Turner in the film Performance

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward path had been lost.
--Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy: Inferno, Song 1

Anyone who believes that every individual film must present a "balanced" picture, knows nothing about either balance or pictures.
--Edward R. Murrow

Democracy is a great conversation, a community defined by the scope and substance of its discourse.
--James David Barber

"Believing is seeing and not the other way around."
--Errol Morris

"There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.”
--Raymond Williams

"Art and humanities research begins with a desire to understand the human condition."
--Masoud Yazdani

Film matters because film is us. We as a society use the filmic form to tell stories about who we are and our society - they are a record of what makes us human and what concerns us in the everyday. ... The film form, narrative and styles with which we are so familiar, from Hollywood blockbusters to the avant-garde, shape our own personal narratives. Film offers us a language to speak to each other across national, class, economic, and racial lines - film is a phenomenon that allows us to understand cultures and people.
--Lincoln Geraghty

Until lions have their own historians, histories of the hunt will glorify the hunter.
-- African proverb

"So you lie to yourself to be happy. There's nothing wrong with that. We all do it."
--Teddy in Memento (2000)

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.
-– Michael Haneke, “Film as Catharsis”

The question isn’t “how do I show violence?” but rather “how do I show the spectator his position vis-à-vis violence and its representation?”
-– Michael Haneke

As a scholar of transnational/eco-critical cinema, it is increasingly clear to me that cinema is one of the most efficient ways to debate political and cultural issues in a global society. This is especially the case with cinema's potential to visually capture the transnational and even global scale of ecological problems, and engage with them in a way that reaches wide global audiences. Cinema is not only a communicator of ideas and an essential component of the culture industries. It is also a crucial pedagogical tool that facilitates efficient learning and motivates participation from new generations of audiences. It can help audiences, 'old' and 'new', to rethink their place in the world, and crucially, it can also motivate them to do something about the injustices and exploitation to which they are witness.
--Pietari Kääpä

Openness exists . . .not only for the person to whom one listens, but rather anyone who listens is fundamentally open. Without this kind of openness to one another there is no genuine human relationship. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another.

--Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method (Source)

Our human existence is rooted in sex. .... It lies at the very heart of love. Though conservatives reject the very idea as dangerous, I would say that the way to save us from our own perversity is by confronting sex courageously. ... Sex brings relief from tension and enmity and leads to harmony in human relationships--husband and wife, [friends] and strangers. (109)

Kaneto Shindō, qouted in McDonald, Keiko. "Eros, Politics, and Folk Religion: Kaneto Shindō's Onobaba (1963)." Reading a Japanese Film: Cinema in Context. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006: 108-121.

‘We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten’
Narrator of Chris Marker's film Sans Soleil (1983)

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is not the exception, but the rule.”
--Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

"What is focus, and who has the right to say what is legitimate focus?
-- Julie Margaret Cameron, late 19th Century Photographer

"Death is never the end of the story, it always leave tracks."
-- Notary Jean Label in Incendies (2010)

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."
-- Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 4 (1971)

"Power fears poetry... Poetry resides somewhere else, somewhere inaccessible to power; it evokes sentiments, touches being, and speaks in a strange tongue." (163)
--Andy Merrifield, Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination (2011)

"Like religion, a good movie really does answer the only three questions worth asking in life: who you are, where you come from, and what you should do. In its essential narrative arc, a movie gives you clues as to your ultimate identity, the nature of how the world really is, and your mission in life. And if you learn the basics of screenplay writing, you discover very quickly that almost every film script follows a dramatic formula identical to the formula of the standard religious sermon. In the screenplay, the writer’s task is to create an emotionally sympathetic character who is nevertheless guilty of some form of misbehavior, who then must, through an escalating series of forced crises, confront his or her misbehavior and overcome it. Likewise, in your standard sermon, the preacher’s art is to describe, through personal, historical, and anecdotal evidence, the universal sin (read: misbehavior) of the human species, and how God alone can solve this basic problem, and happily, how he does. Both sermons and movies (in America at least) thus, have the same theological bias that favors a happy ending."
--Read Mercer Schuchardt, "Cinema: The New Cathedral of Hollywood" (2001)

Unlike other forms of artistic expression, cinema is an "industrial form of art": in order to express itself fully, it needs ever-greater financial investments. This means that the author's artistic expression is conditioned right from the start--and it would be hypocritical not to admit this--by the capital invested. These capital sources can be motivated not just by the simple and legitimate desire for expression, but also by power groups, concentrations and lobbies of all sorts and backgrounds, who can use cinematographic media in instrumental way to advance particular interests that that have little or nothing to do with the noble--and general--principle of the freedom of expression.
--Vittorio Giacci, "Cinema, Responsibility, and Formation" (2007)

In the end, confusion is not a lack of understanding. It's more understanding. Mainstream reporting and some people in power want to make everything clear to people--at the expense of the very issues and people they deal with. They can't. If it's complicated. leave it as complicated. Give people a chance to think.
--Kal Kim-Gibson, "Dreamland and Disillusion." (Film Quarterly: Fall 2011)

Film is often just business -- I understand that and it's not something I concern myself with. But if film aspires to be part of culture, it should do the things great literature, music and art do: elevate the spirit, help us understand ourselves and the world around us and give people the feeling they are not alone…
--Krzysztof Kieslowski, "Kieslowski’s Three Colors." (Salon: June 10, 2002)

"When a morally compromised author claims the field of aesthetics as a value-free area it should make his readers stop and think."
--W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (1997)

“In an age when reality is insufficiently real, how much reality can a fictional story possess?”
-- Haruki Murakami (2011)

"In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form."
-- Haruki Murakami (2011)

"I think the whole point of OWS is encouraging people to reinvent democracy from different angles and from their own terms," he says. "On one hand, it's a very communal project and on the other hand, it's about individuals who are not necessarily in agreement finding ways to see things anew."
-- Chris Marker, quoted in Steve Dollar's Occupy This (2012)

“Why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality.”
— John Berger, Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing (1960)

"How can I overcome the prejudices of the bits and pieces of mysteries that reside within me, and how can I break through the prejudices that are anchored in the mysteries of others, so that together with them we may create something beautiful out of something that is ugly?"
-- Vilém Flusser, The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism (1994)

Film List

John Berger: Why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us?

2012-01-19T10:35:00.000-05:00

“Why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality.”
— John Berger, Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing (1960)

Rebel Diaz: Libertad

2012-01-19T10:12:00.001-05:00

Peeping Tom: We're Not Alone

2012-01-18T18:52:00.001-05:00

Paul Tassi: PIPA Weakens as SOPA Gets Hypocritical

2012-01-18T18:11:00.000-05:00

(via Nathaniel Hall)

PIPA Weakens as SOPA Gets Hypocritical
by Paul Tassi
Forbes

Two internet censorship themed posts in one day today, as the issue is starting to snowball, and the tide almost seems like it might be turning. There’s been a new development about PIPA, the Protect IP bill that is the House version of the Senate’s SOPA initiative.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), who co-authored the bill with Sen .Orin Hatch (R-Utah) has said he is willing to remove the most controversial portion of Protect IP, which would empower courts to demand that ISPs block access to certain foreign sites, effectively censoring them.

Leahy credits his constituents for giving him “insight” into the issue, but it’s also likely he changed his mind because many of the big name ISPs were not in favor of that section of the bill. A similar sort of provision still exists in the Senate’s SOPA however.

The second item of note is that SOPA author Sen. Lamar Smith (R-Tx) has himself been found guilty of violating copyright. The issue at hand is pointed out on VICE.com, where it juxtaposes this screenshot of Smith’s website from before his SOPA days.

To Read the Rest of the Commentary and Access Hyperlinked Resources

Billy Bragg: Power In a Union

2012-01-18T17:32:00.001-05:00

Robert Alpert: The Social Network - The Contemporary Pursuit of Happiness through Social Connections

2012-01-18T10:15:00.000-05:00

The Social Network: the contemporary pursuit of happiness through social connections
by Robert Alpert
Jump Cut

The United States’ myth of opportunity holds that those who work hard may achieve, and that history is a progressive, forward movement in which the country betters itself through such hard work. Yet such optimism has consistently been tempered by a sense that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” inadequately define a satisfied life. Thus, the myth of individual success also frequently becomes a story about loss and failure. For example, based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, the owner of a nationwide chain of “yellow journalism” newspapers, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) portrays Charles Foster Kane as having achieved material success at the cost of a life of dissatisfaction. Forcibly exiled from his childhood home, he remains consistently angry and alone as an adult. Even that champion of historical progress, John Ford, late in life enunciated the myth’s failure in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” grandly announces the newspaper editor. The successful lawyer, governor, senator and ambassador to Britain, played by James Stewart, is ashen-faced, however, when he realizes that the material progress he has cultivated on behalf of his country has masked the fact that Vera Miles, the love of his life whom he married, has never loved him. The myth maker Ford eulogizes instead the primitive John Wayne who has died penniless and alone in order to make way for that dream of “progress.”

This same disillusionment also runs through U.S. literature. For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) is the story of Jay Gatsby, who believed in the myth of achieving material success and thereby the promise of a better future only to learn the futility of his quest and his loss of a more Edenic past. Thus, the novel concludes:

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”[2]

The Social Network deals with that myth of material success and an historical shift in values in which that myth has come to be accepted as fact. It is a bleak portrayal of a male, adolescent-dominated world in which connections, not relationships, are all. The director, David Fincher, has worked with different screenwriters on all of his movies, and his movies prior to The Social Network — such as Se7en (1995), The Game (1997), Fight Club (1999), Zodiac (2007) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) — have in common that nearly all have at their center a young man lost and wandering through a series of episodes in which he seeks to define a place for himself. For each of these characters the search is obsessively personal, and in each the character is mistakenly confident that his skills will enable him to triumph. For example, the newly married Brad Pitt as Detective David Mills in Se7en taunts killer Kevin Spacey only to become Spacey’s seventh victim. Michael Douglas, a wealthy financier in The Game, remains certain that he can outsmart those who run the Game only to “succeed” by the grace of those who control the game. Fincher’s characters are lost and angry, adolescents in the bodies of grown men. Even Panic Room (2002), whose main character is played by Jodie Foster, focuses on her illusion that she can acquire security through her ex-husband’s money. Aaron Sorkin, the creator of the TV series West Wing and the screenwriter of The Social Network, places Fincher’s central character in an historical context. As such, he elevates the individual failure of Fincher’s character to a cultural failure.

The Social Network bases its story on Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), who, while an undergraduate student at Harvard University, developed Facebook. Through deposition testimony in two lawsuits brought against Mark — by Eduardo Savarin (Andrew Garfield) and by the Winkelvoss twins, Cameron and Tyler (both played by Armie Hammer) — the movie recounts how what is today a worldwide phenomenon began in Mark’s dorm room. Like other Fincher characters, Mark is no less brainy, no less confident that he can outsmart those around him, and yet he fails in the end to find any personal satisfaction in his seeming success. The Social Network is especially bleak in that Mark’s personal failure gain him financial rewards in a world in which Facebook is everywhere, including Bosnia where, as a young associate at the law firm defending Mark remarks in disbelief, there are not even any roads.

Mark’s obsessive creation of Facebook results in a worldwide network of “friending,” an exchange of electronic data by persons who are physically and emotionally at a distance from one another. As such, this kind of friending offers a parallel to Mark, who becomes increasingly isolated from those physically surrounding him. Mark Zuckerberg’s contemporary success in business, measured in billions of dollars, results in his personal failure to achieve anything of value. Ironically, it was never about the money for Mark; as a high school student, for example, he uploaded for free his idea of an application for an MP3 player, notwithstanding an offer from Microsoft. Later, in his quest for success, he is oblivious to and uncaring about the consequences to others of his commercial success. As a result, by the end of the film, his success has cost him personal growth, his friendship with his one friend, and the loss of an idealized love of his life. While inventing an online “social network,” Mark is consistently visually framed as a young man alone, whether in his law firm’s large conference room on the night that a settlement will be reached in the two lawsuits or in the loft-like space of the Facebook office on the night Facebook achieves one million members and its entire staff is out celebrating.

The Social Network deals with male adolescents, such as Mark, who should be in transition to manhood but never progress beyond their adolescence. Taught that individual achievement of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is all, they lack any genuine empathy with others and hence any sense of social obligation or responsibility for its own sake. While Harvard University has long been co-ed, the movie portrays the college as an historic relic: the exclusive domain of its male students. It equates the exclusivity of its “final clubs,” fraternity-like clubs, with the busloads of women brought in by those clubs to Animal House-like parties. Mark’s failed quest was to become a member of a final club at Harvard, which, in Mark’s view, would lead to a “better life,” the contours of which, though, were unknown to him. Likewise, both in Facebook’s early stage when housed in a rented, suburban home in Palo Alto and later when ensconced in its high tech office space, adolescent males run the organization plugged into their computers with women as sexually available and often intoxicated or drugged objects. Women exist solely for the pleasure of these male adolescents who feel nothing beyond themselves and who thereby are inevitably alone in the midst of their noisy, crowded clubs.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Truth/Authenticity

2012-01-18T09:23:00.002-05:00

"Authenticity." To the Best of Our Knowledge (June 13, 2010)

Benton, Michael. "Review: Exit Through the Gift Shop." North of Center (March 2, 2011)

Billings, Andrew C. "Biographical Omissions: The Case of A Beautiful Mind and the Search For Authenticity." The Film Journal #1 (May 2002)

Curley, Melissa Anne-Marie. "Dead Men Don’t Lie: Sacred Texts in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai." Journal Of Religion & Film 12.2 (October 2008)

Daston, Lorraine. "How To Think About Science #2: On Paradigms and Objectivity." Ideas (January 2, 2009)

"The Documentary Real: On the ambiguous relation between documentary film and reality." KASK [Symposium that is recorded in video segments online of all the presentations: October 21, 2010]

Menon, Anil. "It's basically a framing problem." (excerpt) The Beast with Nine Billion Feet. Young Zubaan, 2009.

Sampson, Benjamin. "Layers of Paradox in F for Fake." Mediascape (Fall 2009)

Tofts, Darren. "In My Time of Dying: The Premature Death of a Film Classic." LOLA #1 (2011)

Tracy, Andrew. "Genuine Class: All the Real Girls and All the Right Moves." Reverse Shot #29 (2011)

Andrew C. Billings: Biographical Omissions -- The Case of A Beautiful Mind and the Search For Authenticity

2012-01-18T09:18:00.002-05:00

Biographical Omissions: The Case of A Beautiful Mind and the Search For Authenticity
By Andrew C. Billings
The Film Journal

On March 24, 2002, the Academy Awards concluded with a Best Picture statuette awarded to Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind, a biopic of the schizophrenic mathematician John Forbes Nash. While Nash's real-life story is remarkable, another story of "overcoming the odds" has been built: the story of how A Beautiful Mind survived a whirlwind of negative publicity to gain the Best Picture award. The controversy stemmed from perceptions that Nash's life has been whitewashed for the silver screen, including the omission of (a) Nash's alleged anti-Semitism, (b) his homosexual leanings, and (c) his divorce and ultimate remarriage to current-wife Alicia Nash (Bunbury, 2002; Lyman, 2002; Mcginty, 2002). Detractors argued that A Beautiful Mind was being irresponsible to omit such large issues, yet Universal Pictures stood behind the film, arguing that no one's life can be portrayed in its entirety and that A Beautiful Mind had been as accurate as possible. The studio went on to say that there was clear evidence of an "orchestrated campaign" against the film that had more to do with winning an Oscar than achieving authenticity (Seiler, 2002, p. 4D). Film historian Pete Hammond argued that this was one of the nastiest campaigns in recent memory, stating that "to accuse the subject of a film of being Anti-Semitic when you know that a lot of the people who will be voting on the Oscars are Jewish, well, that's really down and dirty" (Lyman, 2002, p. 1A).

Within the entire battle over A Beautiful Mind, one can extract a larger question prevalent within the debate concerning the responsibility of a film to portray a historical person or event in an accurate way. How far must a director go to ensure authenticity? In the case of Howard's film, the questions became quite complex. Take, for instance, Nash's homosexual leanings. Giltz (2002b) writes that Nash was frequently referred to as a "homo" in college and also was arrested for public indecency in a men's restroom, ultimately losing his job at the Rand think tank because of the arrest. In fact, the book in which screenwriter Akiva Goldman adapted the movie contained over thirty references to homosexuality, yet all thirty instances were omitted for the movie (Giltz, 2002a). Thus, while no one was arguing that A Beautiful Mind was telling outright lies, they did argue the film was guilty by omission. Contrast this with the equally ugly controversy surrounding the 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi, chronicling the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and the subsequent trial to exact justice thirty years later. Critics all agreed that Ghosts of Mississippi was "85 to 90 percent true", but, as Medgar Evers' brother Charles states, "the bigger problem is that other 'true' facts are shunted to the background" (Wiltz, 1997). In the case of A Beautiful Mind, some were even arguing that the film was 100% true, but that the majority of the whole truth was left out. In the case of Nash's homosexuality, it was not even an overt choice, as Brian Grazer and Ron Howard were forced to sign a contract that guaranteed the omission of such leanings. Thus, A Beautiful Mind becomes not a case of a director making choices of what to keep and what to leave on the cutting room floor; instead, A Beautiful Mind can be equated with the television journalist who agrees to requests to keep certain topics "off-limits" before interviewing a major public figure.

Hardt (1993) states that the "question of authenticity remains one of the major issues underlying the critique of contemporary social thought" (p. 49). Yet, one must wonder: could anyone, even Nash himself or his wife Alicia, tell a story that is 100 percent true? More succinctly, is authenticity attainable? The latter question must be answered in the negative, as authenticity is an ideal that is unreachable and that American society should implement a new standard for measuring the "accuracy" of historical film narratives. A Beautiful Mind is just the most recent in a long line of films criticized for not being "accurate enough." The debate has been waged for decades.

It is a common notion within academia that nothing we ever say is truly authentic; everything is borrowed directly or indirectly from someone else. In essence, every story we tell is someone else's depiction or at least someone else's language that has been instilled within us through maturation. For instance, if a person were to tell the story of how their first day of school was, it would be their own story, yet their language would be influenced by their background and through other students' perceptions. Clearly, it is likely that a thousand people could each live the exact same day and still render a thousand different authentic stories. Thus, the moral contact with self that Trilling (1969) describes does not really make a story authentic, but it can make a story true. For instance, people who were present at the assassination of John F. Kennedy would all have a true story to tell that would depict their version of the true happenings. Still, as evidenced in the past 30 years, there were many different sides to the same "Truth", making absolute authenticity impossible, even for eyewitnesses of the assassination.

As a result, Visker (1995) argues that the "subject" of any story should be dropped from any argument pertaining to authenticity; the only important aspect of the story is the author/storyteller's ability to recall or retell the story to the best of his or her collective memory. So, in response to the question proposed in the introduction, Visker would argue that who tells the story in Schindler's List is not important; what is of vital importance is that the person telling the story has the ability to tell the story as closely as possible to collective memory found from witnesses and research. In the case of Spielberg's Holocaust epic, this proved to have obstacles of its own, as critics subsequently learned that key scenes, such as Liam Neeson's great "one more person" monologue, were inserted for dramatic effect rather than for historic accuracy.

Yet, beyond the question of the "right to tell a story" comes the larger question of the need to tell the story accurately, another historical Holy Grail. As previously argued, there is no way any director or film producer can tell a story that somehow is or becomes a historical event. Three hundred factually accurate films about the JFK assassination could be made; still they would have three hundred different contexts, equating to three hundred different stories.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Jason Shawhan: "Qui Est Sylvie Braghier?" -- Identity and Narrative In Olivier Assayas' Demonlover

2012-01-17T08:40:00.000-05:00

"Qui Est Sylvie Braghier?": Identity and Narrative In Olivier Assayas' Demonlover
By Jason Shawhan
The Film Journal

"I'm not in charge of anything." -Diane de Monx

Idealized human family relationships, at least in the time of the modern global economy, are a façade. The business world's model is not the proto-nuclear family, but rather that timeless combination of family structure and capitalist motivation: the mafia (1). Underlings enter a closed system, work their way up the ladder by seizing opportunity (and making their own, whether by action or omission of action), and if they manage to stay alive and useful for long enough, they are rewarded with largesse, respect, and the status of an elder. It's just like any established and powerful industry, but the similarities to filmmaking and its star system are particularly fascinating, especially considering some of the thematic ties I feel Olivier Assayas' Demonlover shares with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2). If the industry is done with you, where do you go?

There is an unsettling relevance for the casual American viewer of the film. Given the disassociative relationship that many Americans feel with regards to their government (especially over the past two years) and the shifting political environments which time and again cede power to corporate expansion (Halliburton, etc.), what serves as an experimental meditation for some becomes all-too real and ominous for even the most insular of Americans. There is something about Diane de Monx's relationship to her job that speaks to any single person; with neither spouse or children, the world sees you as an expendable source of more tax dollars. "No pain, no gain," we are told, the risk encouraged, the loss devalued.

Much of Demonlover deals with pornography, but not just the glimpses of hentai we see at the TokyoAnime offices or the film that fascinates both Diane and Herve seperately in their respective Tokyo hotel rooms. The world that Volf and Mangatronics inhabit is fetishized with the porn of success: private jets, the freshest fruit, limo rides with stocked bars, the latest breed of cell phones, palm-sized DV cameras, and so very many screens of input (3). It isn't a new thesis that power and money, in extreme doses, lead to extreme habits. Pasolini delivered a fairly definitive statement on the subject with Salo, as did good old Aristide (Joe d'Amato) Massacessi with Emanuelle in America. And Emanuelle in America, so the legend goes, begat Videodrome (4), and from there we dabble in some of David Lynch's pair of psychogenic fugues (Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive), and we have the skeleton around which Assayas' film grows. An intersection between the degradation of the individual by an established industry and a vast conspiracy intertwined with the depiction of sadistic violence.

But it is not only pornography that gives us a key into the world of Demonlover; the influence of video games cannot be understated. This seems most readily apparent after Diane's Tomb Raider-ish infiltration of the hotel room of and catfight to the death with level boss Elaine (5). She kills Elaine, yet is herself taken out, only to awake on that same level with all traces of the battle gone. It is very fortunate for Diane that she had an extra life or two remaining at this point, a feeling which recurs throughout the film as it careens between its spheres of action. This also opens up the disturbing relationship that female icons are subject to in the vast spaces of the internet: Lara Croft, Emma Peel, Wonder Woman, and Storm from The X-Men are all icons of female power degraded at Hell Fire Club for the fantasies and delectations of countless faceless viewers (6).

Assayas' technical skill (along with his dynamic cinematographer Denis Lenoir) is undeniable, never delivering an unengrossing frame, fascinated with patterns of movement and concentric action. Before Elise's dramatic delivery of Karen's message to Diane, there is a stunning moment of the multicolored lights of the Paris streets, diffused through a misty windshield, and it is breathtaking (7). The surfaces which so readily proliferate in the world of the film often create refining subdivisions of the image, accentuating the delicious claustrophobia of the cinemascope frame in the enclosed offices, suites, studios, cars, and torture chambers of the film.

Having read Mark Peranson's interview with Assayas in the Spring 2003 issue of CinemaScope, I am grateful, as it gave me the tools with which to get to the heart of what happens with the story. As an example of the fragmented nature of modern life, it is spot-on, illustrating the way that much of modern thought moves in expansive leaps rather than in linear progression (much like the difference between analog and digital sound), and it is certainly one of the first films to comment on the way that DVD has changed the relationship between film and audience, as anyone with a remote can now unmake aspects of films, dive deeper into them, reshape its context, or just leave it sitting on the shelf in its appropriately fetishized box like the lovely ladies currently featured on Hell Fire Club. Accordingly with Assayas' expressed wishes, Demonlover is eerily relevant to how life is right now. It haunts, thrills, and acquires you; a shiny baubled collection of snapshots from right now, and, miracle of miracles, a film that digs into the soft flesh of the brain and stays there in the hippocampus, where nightmares live and fever dreams flourish.

To Read the Rest of the Review

Roderick Heath: A Dangerous Method (2011)

2012-01-17T05:58:00.003-05:00

A Dangerous Method (2011)
By Roderick Heath
Ferdy on Films

I tend to blow hot and cold on David Cronenberg’s oeuvre, filled as it is with works such as Videodrome (1982), Naked Lunch (1991), and A History of Violence (2004) that strike me more as catalogues of interesting moments and ideas rather than completely coherent films. But it’s impossible to deny that the Canadian auteur has been one of modern mainstream cinema’s most consistently visceral, intelligent, and original fountainheads, and at his best, can be a fearsome artist of psychological straits and the overflowing id. Cronenberg’s reputation is still often immediately associated with his early, overtly horrifying essays in body distortion and corruption; thus, A Dangerous Method, his latest and one of his most subtle films, seems, in abstract, like an outlier. But A Dangerous Method’s guardedly realistic approach to character and historical setting revolves around some very Cronenbergian motifs, not the least of which is the strange and often perverse manner the inner self and the outer self relate.

The film’s early scenes are fixated on Keira Knightley’s unhinged performance as Sabina Spielrein, a young Russian Jewish woman who suffers from an overwhelming, physically manifest neurosis. Sabina, dragged out of the carriage that brings her to the Burghölzli Clinic in Switzerland in 1904, is placed into the care of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), a young, brilliant doctor at the clinic. He decides to employ Dr. Sigmund Freud’s theoretical and almost untested “talking cure” on her. Sabina, in the extremes of her disease, contorts and buckles and twists, her jaw elongating as things push about inside her, looking as if she’s about to explode like a character out of Scanners (1980) or undergo a transformation similar to Jeff Goldblum’s in The Fly (1986).

Sabina’s pathological pain and rage prove to have two sources: her hatred for her father, the kind of authoritarian who’d make her and her siblings kiss his hand after he struck them, and her powerful masochistic urges, partly imbued by that cruelty, that she can’t assimilate in any form other than as a kind demonic aberration. As Jung works with her, she slowly begins to return to a functioning state, and as part of her therapy, is encouraged to pursue her interest in studying medicine. Two male figures overtly and covertly influence her fate: Jung and his medical field’s unchallenged leader and guru, Freud (Viggo Mortensen). Not long after Sabina becomes Jung’s patient, the peculiarities of her case and Jung’s success in putting Freud’s method into practice becomes a catalyst for the two men to meet, form an initially powerful accord, and then slowly but surely break apart.

Freud, proud and fully aware of his virtually imperial position in a nascent realm of medicine, is actively searching for heirs apparent, and he soon declares Jung one. He entrusts to Jung’s care another of his potential heirs, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassell), a cocaine-sniffing libertine who begins to preach total liberation from traditional familial and social forms, and who is considered insane by his own authoritarian father. His egocentric arguments coincide with a time in Jung’s life when his rich wife Emma (Sarah Gadon) is pregnant, and their marriage is strained, leading Jung to capitulate to his attraction to Sabina.

We live in a world where the catchphrases and oversimplified versions of psychoanalytic theory have gone through phases of utter disdain, near-religious acceptance, and back again. A Dangerous Method sets out to portray a window in not-so-distant history when ideas of the self and society seemed set for a radical change, and the consequences of that change were still potentially inexhaustible, but the people offering the change were still irrevocably tethered to the world as it was. Freud and Jung are portrayed as men caged by their worldly concerns. It’s not the first film to look at the formative years of psychiatry and its figures: John Huston’s amazingly undervalued Freud (1962) pitched the tale of Freud’s speculative development as an expressionist detective story where the younger hero fights through his own neuroses to uncover experiences and epiphanies that he converts into his classic theories. Cronenberg’s film takes a calmer tack and comments wryly on the way Freud, Jung, and Spielrein each in their way turn a fierce personal intelligence in on itself with analytical daring, and yet still constantly give in to bad judgment and behaviours they would reject and criticise in others. Freud proves a fascinating mixture of wisdom, moral rectitude, and a powerful circumspection, even timidity, in the face of disrupting social assumptions and straying beyond immediate scientific rationales.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Tereza Kuldova: Lookism -- Why we don't want to be perceived as "ugly" or "different"

2012-01-13T05:42:00.003-05:00

Lookism: Why we don't want to be perceived as "ugly" or "different"
Book review of The Power of Looks. Social Stratification of Physical Appearance by Bonnie Berry, Ashgate 2008
By Tereza Kuldova
Antropologi

“When we consider the disparity in what we spend our money on, we find the depressing fact that, in the US, more money is spent on beauty than on education or social services. This fact shows the vacuousness of our society, but also may explain why we persist in the mainly pointless behaviors of buying beautifying products and services. If we are not educated, we may believe that physical appearance is more important than being learned, and we may rely on looks to accrue power instead of using our brains” (p.69).

The book The Power of Looks deals with one of those topics that impact all of us in our everyday lives every single day, one way or another. Namely our prejudices and conceptions of beauty and attractiveness and the ways in which we act on those and discriminate people based on their looks.

Bonnie Berry calls this phenomenon ‘lookism’, which is one of the many ‘isms’ we have to deal with in our world, such as racism, or colorism.

The book shows very clearly how the bias towards attractiveness and beauty creates profound social inequalities and determines our access to both social and economic power. It is not news that people who ‘look better’ have better chances to succeed, get jobs, pass oral exams and so forth. In the same way in which beautiful people are positively ‘discriminated’, those not beautiful enough are negatively discriminated.

This appearance bias, the beauty ideal created and supported and perpetuated by the media, advertising and cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies, creates a feeling in ourselves, a feeling of ‘not being good enough’, the result is anxiety (p. 57). We tend to constantly fix ourselves, be it through make up, clothes, plastic surgery, liposuction, teeth whitening (and more), in order to be perceived as ‘acceptable’ or ‘normal’, if not beautiful. Being perceived as ‘ugly’ or different often leads to social exclusion, isolation, economic, social and romantic discrimination as well as lack of access to social and economic power.

What distinguished The Power of Looks from other popular books on this topic, such as the Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf or Beauty Junkies by Alex Kuczynski, is that it has a distinctively sociological take on the topic. This is a great advantage over the book Bonnie Berry published earlier, Beauty Bias, which was much more ‘popular’ and part of the same discursive realm as the books mentioned above. The Power of Looks has even two chapters on theory, method and possible approaches to the problem of social stratification based on our looks and to what she calls ‘social aesthetics’, from functionalism to symbolic interactionism. It is no doubt that this book can serve as a great introduction into the topic for students of sociology and anthropology.

For greater awareness about lookism

The most important aspect of this book in my view is however not its originality or its bravado of writing, but it is its message and the aim to build awareness about social stratification and discrimination based on looks. This is a message of acute importance in our world that is too often driven by media images of what is beauty and what it means to be beautiful, messages that fuel our continual sense of inadequacy and force us to recreate ourselves according to these images through consumption of products that often do very little to improve our looks. In the worst cases, these images, ideals and messages drive us under the scalpel where many have died. (See for instance this ABC news story Mother’s Death Highlights Dangers of Plastic Surgery).

The book is important in its focus on and analysis of these phenomena. And since it adopts a sociological approach, it not only builds our awareness about appearance bias and the way it shapes hierarchies and inequality, but it also gives us a conceptual apparatus to grasp these phenomena, to be able to conceptualize them, pinpoint them and talk about them. This is what I consider the greatest contribution of the book. And in line with the message of the book, I wish to draw your attention, in this review, to certain issues that the book raises and that I feel are interesting to think through and reflect about.

The topic of discrimination based on skin color is going through the whole book and it is interesting to think in this respect of the work of Nina Jablonski – Skin: A Natural History, which is a more evolutionary take on the topic of skin, yet definitely interesting – particularly the fact that from a biological perspective, white skin which is considered socially superior is in fact biologically inferior, in that it is easily prone to cancer and other environmentally caused damage.

To Read the Rest of the Essay and To Access Videos/Hyperlinked Resources

FORA TV: Debate -- The Internet and Democracy (Andrew Keen, Farhad Manjo, Micah Sifry, Paul Solman, Jimmy Wales)

2012-01-12T16:41:00.000-05:00

Debate: The Internet and Democracy
FORA TV

Participants:

Andrew Keen is a Silicon Valley author, broadcaster and entrepreneur whose provocative book Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture was recently acclaimed by The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani as "shrewdly argued" and written "with acuity and passion."

Keen is a prominent media personality who has appeared on the Colbert Report, McNeil-Lehrer Newsnight show, The Today Show, Fox News, CNN International, NPR's Weekend Edition, BBC Newsnight and many other television and radio shows in America and overseas. He has written for The Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the London Guardian, The San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, The Weekly Standard, Fast Company and Entertainment Weekly and has been featured in numerous publications including Time Magazine, The New York Times, US News and World Report, BusinessWeek, Wired, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, the Independent & MSNBC.

Keen is also a Silicon Valley media entrepreneur, having founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a well known first generation Internet music company. He was educated at the universities of London and California.

Farhad Manjoo is an author and a staff writer for Salon.com.

Manjoo graduated from Cornell University in 2000. While there, he wrote for and then served as editor-in-chief of the Cornell Daily Sun student newspaper. Before taking a staff position at Salon.com, he wrote for Wired News. Manjoo frequently writes on new media, politics and controversies in journalism.

Manjoo is the author of the book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, published in March, 2008.

Micah Sifry is co-founder and editor of Personal Democracy Forum, a website and annual conference that covers the ways technology is changing politics, and TechPresident.com, an award-winning group blog on how American politicians are using the web and how the web is using them.

In addition to organizing the annual Personal Democracy Forum conference with his partner Andrew Rasiej, he consults on how political organizations, campaigns, non-profits and media entities can adapt to and thrive in a networked world. In that capacity, he has been a senior technology adviser to the Sunlight Foundation since its founding in 2006.

He is the co-editor of Rebooting America, an anthology of writing on how the Internet and new technology can be used to reinvent American democracy, co-author of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? Washington on $2 Million a Day (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), author of Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of The Iraq War Reader (Touchstone, 2003) and The Gulf War Reader (Times Books, 1991). His personal blog is at micah.sifry.com.

Paul Solman has been a business, economics and occasional art correspondent for PBS NewsHour since 1985. He answers viewer questions on The Business Desk. He is also the presenter for and author of "Discovering Economics with Paul Solman," a series of videos distributed by McGraw-Hill.

Solman is part of a national consortium to teach "Financial Literacy" to Americans at every educational level. His work has won various awards, including several Emmys, two Peabodys, and a Loeb award.

Jimmy Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as the founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, the charity which operates Wikipedia.org, and as the co-founder of Wikia.com.

Wales received his Bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University and his Master's in finance from University of Alabama. He was appointed a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School in 2005 and in 2006, he joined the Board of Directors of the non-profit organization Creative Commons.

In January of 2001, Wales started Wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and today Wikipedia and its sister projects are among the top-five most visited sites on the web. In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida, to support Wikipedia.org. The Foundation, now based in downtown San Francisco, boasts a staff of close to thirty focusing on fundraising, technology, and programming relating to the expansion of Wikipedia. Wales now sits on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, and as founder continues to act as a key spokesperson.

In 2004, Wales co-founded Wikia.com, a completely separate company that enables groups of people to share information and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Wikia's community-created wikis range from video games and movies to finance and environmental issues. Wikia's network is now ranked in the top 75 of all websites according to Quantcast.com, and strong growth continues.

Wales has received a Pioneer Award, the Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize in 2011, the Monaco Media Prize, the 2009 Nokia Foundation annual award, the Business Process Award at the 7th Annual Innovation Awards and Summit by The Economist, The 2008 Global Brand Icon of the Year Award,and on behalf of the Wikimedia project the Quadriga award of Werkstatt Deutschland for A Mission of Enlightenment. In 2007, The World Economic Forum recognized Wales as one of the 'Young Global Leaders.' This prestigious award acknowledges the top 250 young leaders for their professional accomplishments, their commitment to society and their potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world. In addition, Wales received the 'Time 100 Award' in 2006, as he was named one of the world's most influential people in the 'Scientists & Thinkers'

To Watch the Debate

Spring 2012 ENG 102 Discussion Prompts

2012-01-12T16:34:00.004-05:00

"Debate: The Internet and Democracy"

Global Voices

Alain de Botton Wants a Religion for Atheists: Introducing Atheism 2.0

Democracy Now

On Being a Muslim in the West, Pt 1 and 2

Jeremi Szaniawski: Sokurov Waltz: Faust (2011)

2012-01-12T07:21:00.002-05:00

Sokurov Waltz: Faust (2011)
by Jeremi Szaniawski
Tativille

Alexander Sokurov’s Faust (2011), a free adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s eponymous book, tells the story of Heinrich Faust (German TV actor Johannes Zeiler), an impoverished middle-aged scientist and scholar on a quest for absolute knowledge. Led to pawn off some of his belongings, he meets the local usurer, Mauricius Muller (Derevo troupe founder Anton Adasinsky), a mysterious and grotesque figure who seems to possess magical talents. Starving and depressed with the apparently unsolvable problems posed by the mysteries of the human soul, Faust asks his assistant, Wagner (Georg Friedrich), to provide him with a sleeping potion to kill himself. Instead, Mauricius, who pays Faust an impromptu visit, drinks up the potion and survives its lethal effects. From that moment on, the two men become inseparable, Faust constantly challenged by Mauricius and probing the usurer’s mysterious knowledge in turn. During one of their walks through the medieval town where most of the film’s action takes place, Faust accidentally stabs Valentin Emmerich (Florian Brückner), a young soldier leading a dissolute life. Following the accident, he becomes fascinated with the beautiful Marguerite (Isolda Dychauk), Valentin’s younger sister, whom he escorts home following the funeral. Through Mauricius’s intercession, Faust manages to provide Marguerite’s mother (Antje Lewald) with money, but when he confesses to having killed Valentin, it seems as though the young woman is lost on him forever. Mauricius seizes this opportunity to offer a night with Marguerite to Faust, in exchange for his soul—a contract the scholar must sign with his own blood. Following the fateful night, in the course of which Marguerite’s mother is killed with a sleeping potion, Faust and Mauricius flee to an unknown and strange land, where they meet the ghost of Valentin, and marvel at a geyser. Ready to move on, Faust quickly grows irritated with this spectacular but repetitive geophysical phenomenon. When he finds out that Marguerite will most likely be accused of her mother’s murder, he tears his contract to pieces, throws Mauricius down a ditch and casts heavy stones at him. Although Mauricius survives the ordeal, Faust is now left to fend for himself alone in a sublime and barren land of snowy mountains and glaciers, led by his unquenched thirst for knowledge and the voice of Marguerite, which may (or may not) be the calling of love.

Ever since the coming to power of Vladimir Putin in Russia, the cinema of Alexander Sokurov, once such a private chamber auteur, has grown bigger and bigger, both in scope and ambition. This was much in evidence in his ideologically questionable but technically admirable tour de force Russian Ark (2002), as well as in the ‘tetralogy of power’, begun in Moloch (about Hitler, 1999), Taurus (about Lenin, 2000), The Sun (about Hirohito, 2005), and brought to a close by Faust (which was awarded the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival).

In fact, it is not as though Sokurov went through some dramatic transformation with the coming to power of Russia’s new Czar: his cinema was always rife with grand, important topics and motifs (Death, the question of existence, the human soul and its destiny). But under the financial and ideological constrictions of the dying Soviet Union or the early, troubled post-Soviet years, the Russian auteur could not give them their fullest, most spectacular expression, opting instead for a sublime, if sedate cinema of decay, of slow and contemplative temporalities. With Faust, however, his most expensive (and expansive, in many ways) project, Sokurov not only crowns the tetralogy and its exploration of the nature of power and the price of the human soul, but also his career as a whole.

At first look, Faust does not really resemble Sokurov’s earlier cinema. To be sure, the perpetuum mobile nature of the steadycam evokes Russian Ark, and the Russian director’s trademark distorting anamorphic filters are much in use here. But his earlier films were generally characterized by slower, more static compositions. Nevertheless, Faust can be readily viewed as an magnum opus, a sum of all that has preceded, from the fairy tale environment of Mother and Son (1997) and late medieval imagery found in Hidden Pages (1993) to the apocalyptic considerations of Mournful Insensitivity (1987); from the obsession with death and funerary rituals (e.g. The Second Circle; 1990) to the pessimistic celebration of life and beauty (the ‘star child’ from Days of Eclipse; 1988); from the idiosyncratic literary adaptation and appropriation (Platonov, Shaw, Flaubert, the Strugatsky Brothers, and now Goethe) to the minimalistic original script (Stone, 1994), and for its profound investment with the grotesque and animal imagery.

As everywhere else in Sokurov, the film is strongly preoccupied with death, and presents a strong dialectic of body and spirit: following an opening aerial shot of the city, the film reveals a close-up of a corpse’s tumid penis. Faust and Wagner are trying to locate the human soul in the dead body, which instantly evokes early surgical works painted by Rembrandt as well as Mantegna’s dead Christ. As the body is lifted vertically on its slab, its innards gushing out through the open abdomen, the physicality of the cadaver, its sheer lack of spirituality and its banal, heavy presence are reminded to us in all their materiality. And whereas in Goethe’s book Faust was saved from committing suicide by an Easter procession, here the merry celebration is replaced not by one, but two funerals. In each case, the hearse and score of mourners in black are accompanied by the mysterious figure of Agathe (Hannah Schygulla), a sibylline cameo and an alleged Death figure who also claims to be the wife of Mauricius.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Girish: Difficult Cinema

2012-01-11T10:20:00.001-05:00

Difficult Cinema
Girish

I've been wondering: What does it mean for a film to be difficult? Are there multiple ways in which films can be difficult? To put the question to myself in a more personal and subjective way: What are some films or filmmakers that I find difficult? And why?

I recently watched Andrei Rublev (1966), a remarkable and quintessential work of cinematic modernism. It can be called difficult for many reasons: it's three and a half hours long; the narrative is episodic and discontinuous; the film is structured in the form of chapters but often there is little idea of how much time has elapsed between them; there are dozens of characters, and the relationships between them are not always clear; to complicate matters, the same actors turn up in multiple roles through the film; Tarkovsky frequently drops narrative and character in order to focus on the elements (earth, air, water, fire) in an immersive, tactile way. In and beyond matters of plot, action, character and psychology, Tarkovsky poses challenges to interpretation, especially given the central theme of the spiritual -- the non-material, the intangible -- that runs through the film.

Robin Wood has a wonderful passage on the subject of difficult cinema in a 2004 essay on Claire Denis' I Can't Sleep. It appears in a section he titles "Confessions of an Incompetent Film Critic." Let me quote it at some length:

For people of my generation, who grew up in the 1940s/50s on an exclusive diet of classical Hollywood cinema (with the occasional British movie), the European ‘arthouse’ cinema always presented problems which linger on even today, a simple basic one being that of following the plot. This is not because the plot is necessarily complex or obscure, but, frequently, because of the way in which the characters are introduced and the action presented. When I grew up there was remarkably little serious criticism available (not much beyond the weekly reviews), and film studies courses in schools or universities were not even thought of. I was seventeen when I saw my first foreign language film (Torment/Frenzy [Hets, 1944], by Alf Sjöberg, from an early but already characteristic screenplay by Ingmar Bergman). I knew from the reviews that it would carry me far beyond anything I had seen previously, both in style and subject-matter, and my hand was trembling when I bought my ticket. I believe I had great difficulty following it (my first subtitles, not to mention extreme psychological disturbance). Fifty-five years later I still have the same problem when confronted with the films of Claire Denis (or Michael Haneke, or Hou Hsiao-Hsien…). The habits acquired during one’s formative years are never quite cast off; when I showed I Can’t Sleep to a graduate film group last year, my students corrected me over a number of details and pointed out many things I hadn’t noticed, although this was their first viewing of the film and I had already watched it three times. A classical Hollywood film – however intelligent and complex – is dependent on its surface level upon ‘popular’ appeal and its action must be fully comprehensible to a general audience at one viewing, covering all levels of educatedness from the illiterate to the university professor. (The same was of course true of the Elizabethan theatre – see, for example, the conventions of the soliloquy and the aside, wherein a character explains his/her motivation, reactions or thoughts to the audience). One of the cardinal rules was that every plot point must be doubly articulated, in both the action and the dialogue; another was the use of the cut to close-up that tells us ‘This character is important’; yet another, the presence of instantly recognizable stars or character actors. All of these Denis systematically denies us. It is a part of her great distinction that her films (and especially I Can’t Sleep, arguably her masterpiece to date) demand intense and continuous mental activity from the spectator: we are not to miss a single detail or to pass over a gesture or facial expression, even if it is shown in long shot within an ensemble, with no ‘helpful’ underlining and no 'spelling out' in dialogue.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

J. Michael Arrington and David Kirkpatrick: The Facebook Effect

2012-01-11T08:10:00.000-05:00

David Kirkpatrick: The Facebook Effect
FORA TV

Author David Kirkpatrick traces the story of the most powerful social networking tool of our day from its humble beginnings to its role as an international phenomenon. He is in conversation with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington.

The Facebook Effect is the only book written with the full cooperation of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Started only six years ago, Facebook can now claim more than 400 million users and a potential valuation of $100 billion by 2015.

To Watch the Conversation

Gogol Bordello: Immigraniada (We Comin' Rougher)

2012-01-10T09:55:00.000-05:00

Dialogic Word-of-the-Day: Sapiosexuality

2012-01-10T09:37:00.002-05:00

Definition of sapiosexuality :.
(sā-pē-ō-sĕk-shü-ăl'ĭ-tē)

1. (n.) A behavior of becoming attracted to or aroused by intelligence and its use.

Origins: From the Latin root sapien, wise or intelligent, and Latin sexualis, relating to the sexes.

Example:

Douglas P. Fry: Peace In Our Time -- Steven Pinker offers a curiously foreshortened account of humanity's irenic urges

2012-01-10T07:34:00.000-05:00

Peace in Our Time: Steven Pinker offers a curiously foreshortened account of humanity's irenic urges
by Douglas P. Fry
Bookforum

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, psychologist Steven Pinker stakes out a boldly optimistic view of the world, at a time when his readers are no doubt processing all kinds of bad news. Straining at the bigger picture of the trends afoot in human history, Pinker argues that violence is at an all-time low today—and human rights, social equality, and gender egalitarianism are at all-time highs.

With apologies to Shakespeare, we might say that Pinker, who has helped spell out the more arcane findings of his field in best-selling studies such as How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002), writes not wisely but too well. He is a very clever wordsmith on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but in this newest work, serious problems arise with his central story line.

These shortcomings are especially unfortunate here since Pinker’s basic claim is itself largely on target: Physical violence has been decreasing over recent millennia. But the operative words in this formulation are physical violence and recent, and the chronology that Pinker adopts in The Better Angels of Our Nature deftly elides this recent progress with the bulk of the human story—chiefly by his simple failure to acknowledge much of that story’s earlier chapters. In essence, Pinker’s fable of steadily more peaceful human self-improvement starts not at the raising of the curtain, and not even in the middle of the play, but only in the final act.

This brings us to what readers of The Better Angels of Our Nature might call Pinker’s Big Lie—or what he leaves out of the human saga. For most of humanity’s existence, humans lived in nomadic bands and did not suffer from the chronic warfare, torture, slavery, and exploitation that Pinker, trailing Thomas Hobbes, imagines to be our species’ nasty and brutish natural state. For one thing, the very nature of nomadic-band social organization makes warfare, slavery, or despotic rule well-nigh impossible. The small social units lack the ability to engage in large-scale slaughter—and since positions of authoritative leadership are also lacking, there is nothing to plunder, tools and weapons are rudimentary, and population density is extremely low. For another thing, the archaeological facts speak clearly, showing for particular geographical areas exactly when war began. And in all cases this was recent, not ancient, activity—occurring after complex forms of social organization supplanted nomadic hunting and gathering. Pinker ignores this evidence. He also makes a big deal about the recent rise in gender equality and human rights, but turns an unaccountable blind eye to the highly demotic character of nomadic hunter-gatherer societies.

There’s a well-established body of literature chronicling early humanity’s egalitarian and peaceful past. In The Foraging Spectrum (1995), for instance, Robert Kelly offered this summary of the salient features of hunter-gatherer social life: “small, peaceful, nomadic bands, men and women with few possession[s] and who are equal in wealth, opportunity, and status.” Richard Lee and Richard Daly have likewise observed, in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers (2000), that nomadic-band dwellers

have lived in relatively small groups, without centralized authority, standing armies, or bureaucratic systems. Yet the evidence indicates that they have lived together surprisingly well, solving their problems among themselves largely without recourse to authority figures and without a particular propensity for violence. It was not the situation that Thomas Hobbes, the great seventeenth-century philosopher, described in a famous phrase as “the war of all against all.”

What this means, in practical terms, is that Pinker’s foundational narrative—holding that humans have lately emerged from a prehistory of widespread carnage into an era of comparative social peace and equality—badly truncates the actual story. Contrary to Pinker’s thesis, the incidence of warfare and mayhem actually describes an n-shaped curve, rather than a steep drop-off all at once with the advent of recent millennia. War was absent to nonexistent over the vast majority of human existence—off to the left of the n curve. But with a gradual worldwide population increase, the shift from universal nomadism to settled communities, the development of agriculture, a transition from egalitarian social structure to hierarchical pecking orders—and, very significantly, the rise of state-level civilization five thousand to six thousand years ago—the archaeological record is clear and unambiguous: War developed, despots arose, violence proliferated, and the social position of women deteriorated. This comparatively recent explosion in state-based violence is represented on the rising left side of the letter n in the curve.

Pinker’s conviction that he has uncovered a recent quantum shift in human behavior doesn’t exactly make him humble. “This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history,” he boldly asserts, and then continues: “Violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.”

This is bunk. Pinker is only able to make his sweeping claims seem plausible by omitting everything that occurred before the agricultural revolution (circa 10,000 BCE). He is sneaky about this, too, arguing, for instance, that reports of violence from his own self-selected “nonstate” societies from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would somehow reflect levels of violence prior to ten thousand years ago—i.e., a time when all of humanity lived as nomadic foragers.

The worldwide archaeological record contradicts the presumption that early humanity lived in a Hobbesian war of all against all. There is no evidence of warfare anywhere on the planet older than the ten-thousand- to twelve-thousand-year mark. In addition, numerous archaeological sequences show the birth of war on a regional scale occurred within the last ten thousand years.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Monthly Review: Notes from the Editors -- "The Occupy Wall Street movement has ushered in a new dialectic of world revolt"

2012-01-10T04:56:00.002-05:00

Notes from the Editors
Monthly Review

In a little more than two months at this writing (December 3, 2011) the Occupy Wall Street movement has ushered in a new dialectic of world revolt. Occupy movements now exist in more than 2,600 cities across the globe. The response of the system has been increased repression. Yet, everywhere the movement has come up with new means of revolt. Had we tried in early October to predict how things would be at the start of November we would never have succeeded. Likewise we cannot predict now at the start of December how things will look even at the start of January. And it is precisely this quality of emergence, i.e. of not being predictable from the current state of affairs, which suggests that we are at a turning point. This global rip in the cloth of imperial capital’s supposed inevitability is irreversible; that we are fully ready to predict. Looking back it will be clear that as of late 2011, we are much closer to the start of a great global revolt against the plutocracy, the “one percent,” than to its end.

A select chronology (following up on what was provided in this space last month) points to the Occupy movement’s continuing momentum. Nov. 2 General strike called by Occupy Oakland shuts down fifth busiest port in the United States, protestors estimated in the tens of thousands, over a hundred arrested. Harvard students engage in a mass walkout in Gregory Mankiw’s Econ 10, protesting narrow outlook of orthodox economics and supporting Occupy movement. Nov. 3 Police fire tear gas and flash-bang grenades at Occupy Oakland demonstrators, arrest over a hundred. Five Seattle occupiers arrested in Chase bank. Nov. 4 Occupation of Paris financial district. Nov. 5 Bank transfer day, over half a million people in the United States transfer bank accounts to credit unions. Nov. 6 Twelve thousand protesters ring White House in human chain protesting Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta tar sands to the Gulf. Police arrest twenty at Occupy Atlanta. Nov. 9 Occupy Cal protesters encamp at bottom of Mario Savio steps, Sproul Hall, Berkeley. Nov. 12 Occupy Denver evicted, twenty-three arrested. Occupy St. Louis evicted, nineteen arrested. Occupy Salt Lake City camp cleared, nineteen arrested. Occupy Frankfurt protest against the European Central Bank. Nov. 14 Twenty arrested in Occupy Oakland eviction. Nov. 15 At 1:00 A.M. NYPD clears Zuccotti Park at orders of Mayor Bloomberg. Long Range Acoustic Device (“sound cannon”) best known for its military use in Iraq employed against Occupy Wall Street protesters. Four hundred students occupy UC Davis administration building. Occupy Seattle marches downtown, police use pepper spray, arresting six. Occupy Zurich protesters evicted, thirty-one detained. Occupy Paris camp destroyed by police. Nov. 16 Occupy Paris rebuilds camp. Nov. 17 Occupy Wall Street rally in New York draws a crowd of 30,000, three hundred arrested. Police use pepper spray on Occupy Portland protestors on Steel Bridge, arrest twenty-five. Twenty-three Occupy Los Angeles protesters arrested at Bank of America Plaza. Police tear down tents at Occupy Cal, Berkeley, two arrested. Occupy Dallas evicted, eighteen arrested. Seventeen taken into custody as hundreds engage in bank protests at Occupy Eugene. Occupy St. Louis blocks entrance to Martin Luther King, Jr. Bridge, fourteen arrested. Twenty-one arrested at Occupy Las Vegas. Occupy Boston wins legal victory allowing it to remain encamped. Nov. 18 Police pepper spray students at Occupy UC Davis while they sit arms intertwined. Occupy London takes over empty UBS investment bank building, establishes “Bank of Ideas.” Nov. 21 Occupy Oakland evicted from Snow Park in an early morning police raid, six arrested. Nov. 23 Occupy Columbia encamps on Statehouse ground in South Carolina. Nov. 25 Tens of thousands pack Cairo’s Tahrir Square in “Last Chance Friday” rally demanding the immediate end of military rule, capping a week of struggle that claimed the lives of forty-one protestors, and wounded 2,000. Nov. 30 Police dismantle Occupy Los Angeles camp, arrest two hundred. Occupy Philadelphia evicted from camp at City Hall, fifty arrested. Public Sector workers in Britain begin biggest strike in a generation, with two million workers engaged in one-day work stoppage.

To Read the Rest of the Editorial

Mother Love Bone: Man of Golden Words

2012-01-09T10:45:00.001-05:00

Emily Manuel and Miguel de la Torre: Dumping Satan -- It’s Time to Let Go

2012-01-09T10:29:00.000-05:00

Dumping Satan: It’s Time to Let Go
By Emily Manuel
Religion Dispatches

The history of Christianity, as atheists are fond of reminding us, is one that has been drenched in blood. Whether religious war, inquisition, or colonial violence, there’s been great evil committed in the name of God. What role has the idea of Satan played in the development of this culture? Theologian Miguel De La Torre, with co-author Albert Hernàndez, has just published a book, The Quest For the Historical Satan, that takes this question by the tail.

I spoke recently with De La Torre about the disastrous legacy the idea of Satan has bequeathed to Christianity, the dark side of God, and about the persistence of that Obama-as-Antichrist campaign.

What’s the general idea behind this new book?

God’s portrayal as a character of absolute goodness is the result of a theology that is read into the Christian Scriptures, yet which is not necessarily supported by a close reading of the texts.

Not only is this theology challenged by the Bible, it is also challenged by existentially and morally comparing such a theology of absolute Good versus absolute Evil with the realities of life. All have faced, or will face, tragedy, misery, illness, and death—events will occur that appear unfair, leading most of us to question if any sense of cosmic justice and mercy truly exists.

When we consider the billions of senseless deaths, tragedies, and atrocities which define human history, it would seem that history denies more than it confirms the paternal love of a caring and merciful father God. One is forced to ask, Where is God?

In a very real way, the search for the historical Satan is an attempt to justify God’s grace while legitimizing the reality and presence of evil in human history. It appears that the development of Satan was, to a certain extent, trying to save God from appearing as the source of evil that is so much a part of the reality of human suffering and death.

One of the fascinating things about the book is the way you trace the changes in conception across language, as with the Greek word daimonion which simply meant “god” or “spirit.” Did you think that shifts across languages reflect some of the later themes in terms of demonization of Otherness?

That was one of the things that we immediately discovered, that making the Other the demon or the representation of evil allowed those defending truth and honesty and righteousness to commit all types of horrors upon that they had defined as monstrous. That led us to thinking about how can we rethink Satan in such a way that will not lead us to demonize others.

You conclude with the idea of Satan as a trickster figure. Is that idea something you imagine contemporary Christians will be drawn to?

Quite frankly, the image of the trickster was always there, specifically in the Hebrew Bible; it’s a tradition of re-interpretation that makes Satan into the figure of absolute evil. My co-author and I look to the Hebrew Bible with an understanding of the ambiguity of goodness and evil. How will Christians today accept that? I don’t think that people are going to be waking immediately to this understanding, because we’ve had over two thousand years of conditioning. But I’m hoping it will at least begin a conversation.

You suggest that the personified Satan emerges as a solution to the central question of what theologians call “theodicy”—how can God be good when evil exists?

The book definitely wrestles with the whole theodicy question: how can an all-loving all-powerful God allow such evil to occur? But when we looked at the Hebrew Scripture, we really noticed that there’s a dark side to God. Even in Judaism today, there is this recognition that God does have a dark side.

What the creation of Satan has done is really save God from how the scripture understood God. Amos reminds us, “If there is evil in a city, has Yahweh not done it?” (Am. 3:6). The prophet Isaiah understands God to say, “I form light and create darkness, make peace and create evil, I Yahweh do all these things” (45:7). This is a God who sends evil spirits to torment, as in the case of Saul (1 S. 18:10) or Jeroboam (1 K. 14:10). We take those texts very seriously in trying to ascertain the very character of God.

To Read the Rest of the Interview

David HGB Giles: Dumpster-Divers and the Smoothies of Wrath

2012-01-09T05:52:00.000-05:00

Dumpster-Divers and the Smoothies of Wrath
by David HGB Giles
Food Anthropology

My favourite Dumpster is locked.

I’ve been coming here for a few years, but now the lid is closed, and there’s a cable lock threaded through it to keep scavengers out. Scavengers like me.

Until now, I’ve poked happily about in the soggy detritus without obstacle. Hiding in plain sight at the end of a gravel driveway, outside the chain-link fence of a warehouse in Seattle’s industrial district, the Dumpster always promised at least a few unopened bottles of top-dollar organic fruit smoothies to the intrepid Dumpster-diver. Mango Madness. Orange Carrot. Hermetically sealed and conserved by Seattle’s frigid night air, they were nonetheless too close to their sell-by dates to be worth shipping, so they ended up here. On the right night, there were hundreds of them. There probably still are.

So why lock them up? My research with Dumpster-divers and grocers in Seattle and other cities around the US, Canada, and Australasia, explores the politics and the cultural economy of waste—particularly food waste. It echoes John Steinbeck’s dry observation of depression-era surplus and scarcity in The Grapes of Wrath: “The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price.” According to the USDA, for example, 5.4 billion pounds of unspoiled food are discarded by US merchants each year. A simple thought experiment and some rudimentary economics suggest that, if these edible surpluses were given away indiscriminately, the principles of supply and demand would undercut food prices. To paraphrase Steinbeck: Who would pay five dollars for a smoothie when they could pull ten of them out of the trash for nothing? In other words, what we throw away remains significant in its absence.

Of course, Dumpsters are not locked out of sheer Machiavellian cunning. Nor is food discarded with a calculating twirl of the capitalist’s moustache. Rather, food is wasted because it circulates according to its exchange value rather than its use value. Eleven perfectly good eggs and one cracked one are no longer legible in the way an intact dozen is, for example. And a bruised apple merely takes up space on a shelf next to another perfect one. A thing’s exchange value is, by definition, reckoned through comparisons. The apple that won’t sell, or won’t sell quickly enough, disappears from the shelves to make room for newer stock. So right up until the point of sale (or disposal), its value is virtual. Like Schrodinger’s cat, its fate waits upon one decisive moment.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Randall McGuire: Archaeology as Political Action

2012-01-09T05:25:00.001-05:00

Introduction to his 2008 University of California book:

Archaeology as Political Action

Anthropology Blog Newspaper

2012-01-09T05:04:00.002-05:00

Anthropology Blog Newspaper (Attempt to list and provide as a news feed -- all existing anthropology related blogs: ongoing)

Timothy Garton Ash: The Stasi On Our Minds

2012-01-08T09:51:00.002-05:00

The Stasi on Our Minds
Timothy Garton Ash
The New York Review of Books

The Lives of Others
a film directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Das Leben der anderen: Filmbuch
by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 216 pp., Ä8.50 (paper)

One of Germany’s most singular achievements is to have associated itself so intimately in the world’s imagination with the darkest evils of the two worst political systems of the most murderous century in human history. The words “Nazi,” “SS,” and “Auschwitz” are already global synonyms for the deepest inhumanity of fascism. Now the word “Stasi” is becoming a default global synonym for the secret police terrors of communism. The worldwide success of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s deservedly Oscar- winning film The Lives of Others will strengthen that second link, building as it does on the preprogramming of our imaginations by the first. Nazi, Stasi: Germany’s festering half-rhyme.

It was not always thus. When I went to live in Berlin in the late 1970s, I was fascinated by the puzzle of how Nazi evil had engulfed this homeland of high culture. I set out to discover why the people of Weimar Berlin behaved as they did after Adolf Hitler came to power. One question above all obsessed me: What quality was it, what human strain, that made one person a dissident or resistance fighter and another a collaborator in state-organized crime, one a Claus von Stauffenberg, sacrificing his life in the attempt to assassinate Hitler, another an Albert Speer?

I soon discovered that the men and women living behind the Berlin Wall, in East Germany, were facing similar dilemmas in another German dictatorship, albeit with less physically murderous consequences. I could study that human conundrum not in dusty archives but in the history of the present. So I went to live in East Berlin and ended up writing a book about the Germans under the communist leader Erich Honecker, rather than under Adolf Hitler.1 As I traveled around the other Germany, I was again and again confronted with the fear of the Stasi. Walking back to the apartment of an actor who had just taken the lead role in a production of Goethe’s Faust, a friend whispered to me, “Watch out, Faust is working for the Stasi.” After my very critical account of communist East Germany appeared in West Germany, a British diplomat was summoned to receive an official protest from the East German foreign ministry (one of the nicest book reviews a political writer could ever hope for) and I was banned from reentering the country.

Yet this view of East Germany as another evil German dictatorship was by no means generally accepted in the West at that time. Even to suggest a Nazi–Stasi comparison was regarded in many parts of the Western left as outmoded, reactionary cold war hysteria, harmful to the spirit of détente. The Guardian journalist Jonathan Steele concluded in 1977 that the German Democratic Republic was “a presentable model of the kind of authoritarian welfare states which Eastern European nations have now become.” Even self-styled “realist” conservatives talked about communist East Germany in tones very different from those they adopt today. Back then, the word “Stasi” barely crossed their lips.

Two developments ended this chronic myopia. In 1989 the people of East Germany themselves finally rose up and denounced the Stasi as the epitome of their previous repression. That they often repressed at the same time—in the crypto-Freudian sense of the word “repression”—the memory of their own everyday compromises and personal responsibility for the stability of the communist regime was but the other side of the same coin. After 1990, the total takeover of the former East Germany by the Federal Republic meant that, unlike in all other post-communist states, there was no continuity from old to new security services and no hesitation about exposing the evils of the previous secret police state. Quite the reverse.

In the land of Martin Luther and Leopold von Ranke, driven by a distinctly Protestant passion to confront past sins, the forcefully stated wish of a few East German dissidents to expose the crimes of the regime, and the desire of many West Germans (especially those from the class of ‘68) not to repeat the mistakes made in covering up and forgetting the evils of Nazism after 1949, we saw an unprecedentedly swift, far-reaching, and systematic opening of the more than 110 miles of Stasi files. The second time around, forty years on, Germany was bent on getting its Vergangenheitsbewältigung, its past-beating, just right. Of course Russia’s KGB, the big brother of East Germany’s big brother, did nothing of the kind.

After some hesitation, I decided to go back and see if I had a Stasi file. I did. I read it and was deeply stirred by its minute-by-minute record of my past life: 325 pages of poisoned madeleine. Helped by the apparatus of historical enlightenment that Germany had erected, I was able to study in incomparable detail the apparatus of political intimidation that had produced this file. Then, working like a detective, I tracked down the acquaintances who had informed on me and the Stasi officers involved in my case. All but one agreed to talk. They told me their life stories, and explained how they had come to do what they had done. In every case, the story was understandable, all too understandable; human, all too human. I wrote a book about the whole experience, calling it The File.

It was therefore with particular interest that I recently sat down to watch The Lives of Others, this already celebrated film about the Stasi, made by a West German director who was just sixteen when the Berlin Wall came down. Set in the Orwellian year of 1984, it shows a dedicated Stasi captain, Gerd Wiesler, conducting a full-scale surveillance operation on a playwright in good standing with the regime, Georg Dreyman, and his beautiful, highly strung actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland. As the case progresses, we see the Stasi captain becoming disillusioned with his task. He realizes that the whole operation has been set up simply to allow the culture minister, who is exploiting his position to extract sexual favors from the lovely Christa, to get his playwright rival out of his way. “Was it for this we joined up?” Wiesler asks his cynical superior, Colonel Anton Grubitz.

At the same time, he becomes curiously enchanted with what he hears through his headphones, connected to the bugs concealed behind the wallpaper of the playwright’s apartment: that rich world of literature, music, friendship, and tender sex, so different from his own desiccated, solitary life in a dreary tower-block, punctuated only by brief, mechanical relief between the outsize mutton thighs of a Stasi-commissioned prostitute. In his snooper’s hideaway in the attic of the apartment building, Wiesler sits transfixed by Dreyman’s rendition of a piano piece called “The Sonata of the Good Man”—a birthday present to the playwright from a dissident theater director who, banned by the culture minister from pursuing his vocation, subsequently commits suicide. Violating all the rules that he himself teaches at the Stasi’s own university, the secret watcher slips into the apartment and steals a volume of poems by Bertolt Brecht. Then we see him lying on a sofa, entranced by one of Brecht’s more elegiac verses.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Drugs

2012-01-08T07:12:00.003-05:00

Acker, Caroline. "Talking Drug Policy and Addiction." History for the Future (January 29, 2010)

Bigger Stronger Faster (USA: Christopher Bell, 2008)

Business Behind Getting High (Canada: Brett Harvey, 2007)

Campbell, Howard. "The Drug War Zone." History for the Future (February 15, 2011)

Conroy, Bill. "More Fast and Furious / Did Cele Call it?" The Expert Witness Radio Show (December 14, 2011)

Critical Art Ensemble. BioCom. (Online art installation: 1997/1998)

Friedersdorf, Conor. "Rick Perry Wants to Send the Military into Mexico to Fight Drugs." The Atlantic (October 3, 2011)

Mate, Gabor. "More Compassion, Less Violence Needed in Addressing Drug Addiction. Democracy Now (June 6, 2011)

---. "Obama Admin Should Heed Global Panel’s Call to End "Failed" U.S.-Led Drug War." Democracy Now (June 6, 2011)

Max, D.T., et al. "David Foster Wallace." To the Best of Our Knowledge (September 12, 2010)

Nichols, Michelle. "Global war on drugs a failure, high-level panel says: A high-profile group of global leaders declared the "war on drugs" a failure on Thursday and urged governments to consider decriminalizing drugs in a bid to cut consumption and weaken the power of organized crime gangs." Reuters (June 2, 2011)

"Psychedelics." To the Best of Our Knowledge (June 6, 2010)

Bill Conroy: More Fast and Furious / Did Cele Call it?

2012-01-07T19:30:00.000-05:00

More Fast and Furious / Did Cele Call it?
The Expert Witness Radio Show

Those who have been listening to us for any length of time have heard our broadcasts on Fast and Furious and the House of Death. What we increasingly run into is the fact that, no matter who’s in office, the same kind of boneheaded policies stay in place – that result in death and mayhem. Why?

Iran/Contra-Era Whistleblower Cele Castillo Alleged in 2008 That Federal Agents Were Helping to Smuggle Guns into Mexico

Cele Castillo, a former DEA agent who blew the whistle on the CIA-backed arms-for-drugs trade used to prop up the 1980s Contra counter-insurgency in Nicaragua, is now sitting in a federal prison for what may well be another act of whistleblowing in this century.

Plus: The criminal case of accused Sinaloa drug organization leader Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla is straying even further into the path of a cover-up under the guise of national security, if pleadings filed by his attorneys are to be believed.

Tonight, we delve into these subjects and more with Bill Conroy.

About the Guests:

Bill Conroy has worked as a reporter or editor for the past eighteen years at newspapers in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota and Texas.

His investigative reporting over the past five years has focused on corruption and discrimination within federal law enforcement agencies.

He is also a journalist for Narco News. His investigative pieces, particularly those on the House of Death, have made him our most-favored guest.

Show links:

Bill Conroy: Was Former DEA Agent Jailed for Exposing ATF Arms Trafficking?

Bill Conroy: US Prosecutors Seeking to Prevent Dirty Secrets of Drug War From Surfacing in Cartel Leader's Case

To Listen to the Episode

H. Samy Alim: What if We Occupied Language?

2012-01-07T10:18:00.000-05:00

What if We Occupied Language?
By H. Samy Alim
The Opinionator (The New York Times)

When I flew out from the San Francisco airport last October, we crossed above the ports that Occupy Oakland helped shut down, and arrived in Germany to be met by traffic caused by Occupy Berlin protestors. But the movement has not only transformed public space, it has transformed the public discourse as well.

Occupy.

It is now nearly impossible to hear the word and not think of the Occupy movement.

Even as distinguished an expert as the lexicographer and columnist Ben Zimmer admitted as much this week: “occupy,” he said, is the odds-on favorite to be chosen as the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year.

It has already succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate, taking phrases like “debt-ceiling” and “budget crisis” out of the limelight and putting terms like “inequality” and “greed” squarely in the center. This discursive shift has made it more difficult for Washington to continue to promote the spurious reasons for the financial meltdown and the unequal outcomes it has exposed and further produced.

To most, the irony of a progressive social movement using the term “occupy” to reshape how Americans think about issues of democracy and equality has been clear. After all, it is generally nations, armies and police who occupy, usually by force. And in this, the United States has been a leader. The American government is just now after nine years ending its overt occupation of Iraq, is still entrenched in Afghanistan and is maintaining troops on the ground in dozens of countries worldwide. All this is not to obscure the fact that the United States as we know it came into being by way of an occupation — a gradual and devastatingly violent one that all but extinguished entire Native American populations across thousands of miles of land.
Dread Scott and Kyle GoenCLICK TO ENLARGE

Yet in a very short time, this movement has dramatically changed how we think about occupation. In early September, “occupy” signaled on-going military incursions. Now it signifies progressive political protest. It’s no longer primarily about force of military power; instead it signifies standing up to injustice, inequality and abuse of power. It’s no longer about simply occupying a space; it’s about transforming that space.

In this sense, Occupy Wall Street has occupied language, has made “occupy” its own. And, importantly, people from diverse ethnicities, cultures and languages have participated in this linguistic occupation — it is distinct from the history of forcible occupation in that it is built to accommodate all, not just the most powerful or violent.

As Geoff Nunberg, the long-time chair of the usage panel for American Heritage Dictionary, and others have explained, the earliest usage of occupy in English that was linked to protest can be traced to English media descriptions of Italian demonstrations in the 1920s, in which workers “occupied” factories until their demands were met. This is a far cry from some of its earlier meanings. In fact, The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “occupy” once meant “to have sexual intercourse with.” One could imagine what a phrase like “Occupy Wall Street” might have meant back then.

To Read the Rest of the Commentary

Selin Gulgoz: The Politics of Art -- Middle Eastern Women in Fiction and Film

2012-01-07T09:28:00.003-05:00

The Politics of Art: Middle Eastern Women in Fiction and Film
By Selin Gulgoz
The Millions

The four-and-one-half-hour evening train ride from Ann Arbor, Mich., to Chicago marks the beginning of my occasional, brief getaways. I’ve devised my own routine: as soon as the conductor checks my ticket, I head to the food car to pick up a small bottle of Cabernet and a frozen pizza — something I’d hardly eat if it were elsewhere — to accompany the film I’ve already picked out. One time, the film I had chosen was The Stoning of Soraya M. It describes the real story of an Iranian woman named Soraya, who is stoned to death as required by the rules of Shari’a, when she is (wrongfully) accused by her husband of having committed adultery. It is a powerful and moving film — less because of its cinematography, and more due to the plot.

As I watched, I could tell that the woman sitting next to me was taking sneak peaks at the film every now and then. When I finished, she told me that she found the film to be really interesting, and asked me what the title is. At times like this, I find myself caught in a dilemma — a feeling I suspect many Middle Eastern women get. On the one hand, I too am enraged and have my feminist blood boil at how cruel certain Middle Eastern practices can be toward women. Yet, on the other hand, I worry about the tendency that people may have of succumbing all too easily to culture blaming, perceiving these practices as abstract and independent of historical and global relations. I struggle with the fine balance of condemning violations of human rights without accidentally submitting to contemporary extensions of Orientalism.

I was reminded of this dilemma during Nobel Laureate Tawakkol Karman’s speech at the University of Michigan on Nov. 14. Karman is a Yemeni feminist activist who played active roles before and during the Yemeni uprising, considered part of the Arab Spring. Throughout her speech, you could see Karman’s determination to bring democracy and gender equality to Yemen emanating from her whole being. She touched upon issues like how, during President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s rule, women were trapped in their homes under the veil of religion; whereas now, they were out on the streets, not only taking part, but leading the revolution in many aspects.

In popular culture, Middle Eastern women are rarely depicted as such — willful and agentic. Instead, we see them as a category, rather than individuals, that is surrounded by inhuman (male) oppression. We often receive depictions of Middle Eastern women as submissive and helpless, forced to hide their bodies, and we hardly ever discuss their determination as individuals. Indeed, as Turkish writer Elif Şafak mentions in her TED Talk of July 2010, when Middle Eastern women in literature do not fit these descriptions, they are found not to be “Middle Eastern enough.” Thus, it might surprise some that Karman, who stood strong as she chanted her slogans of peace to the auditorium, with her hands forcefully shooting high up in the air, still chooses to wear the headscarf.

Craig Thompson’s latest graphic novel Habibi, and Denis Villeneuve’s 2010 film Incendies are two recent narratives that I’ve very much enjoyed, which endorse counter-stereotypical portrayals for their respective Middle Eastern female protagonists, Dodola and Nawal. Both Dodola and Nawal are illustrated as determined individuals, who survive through hardships unimaginable to most of us. And while both women are strong, at a closer glance, there are subtle differences in terms of the perspectives these two depictions provide on Middle Eastern women. This is seen most vividly in the relationships the two women have with their own bodies.

cover Thompson’s Habibi takes place in a country named Wanatolia (a somewhat cheesy play on the word Anatolia). Wanatolia is portrayed as a timeless Middle Eastern country characterized by a water crisis surrounding a spectacular dam, with contrasting skylines of modern skyscrapers and neglected shantytowns, ruled by its insatiable sultan, constantly on the lookout for new gems to be added to his harem.

Dodola is one of the women kidnapped by the sultan’s guards for the harem. Being part of the harem means giving up ownership of one’s own body, readying it for service of the sultan’s lustful urges; whenever and wherever they may emerge. In contrast to the plump and outright unattractive sultan, Dodola is beautiful and skinny. Yet, in spite of how attractive she may seem to others, Dodola feels a strong disconnect with her own body. This feeling of disconnect is further enhanced when she’s impregnated by the sultan with the heir of Wanatolia, and as her body begins to accumulate fat. While it seems here that Thompson has yielded to the contemporary pressures of the slim and tender female body image, there is many a reason for Dodola to feel a disconnect with her body. As a nine-year-old girl, Dodola is sold into marriage by her parents, in order to survive the drought. And at 12, her husband is murdered by thieves, and Dodola is sold into slavery.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Entitled Opinions: A conversation with Stanford professor of German Adrian Daub about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his heirs

2012-01-06T23:36:00.000-05:00

A conversation with Stanford professor of German Adrian Daub about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his heirs.
Entitled Opinions (KZSU: Stanford University)

Adrian Daub is Assistant Professor of German at Stanford University. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 2003 and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008.

He is the author, among other things, of a German-language study on the cultural reception of four-handed piano playing, "Zwillingshafte Gebärden - Zur kulturellen Wahrnehmung des vierhändigen Klavierspiels im neunzehnten Jahrhundert," published in 2009.

His current research focuses mainly on 19th- and 20th-century German literature and culture, as well as philosophy, sexuality and literature, the philosophy of music, German film, German Idealism, Romanticism, and Frankfurt School Marxism.

His second book, "Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in Early German Idealism and Romanticism," is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in January 2012.

To Listen to the Episode

Der Spiegel: The Brown Army Faction -- A Disturbing New Dimension of Far-Right Terror

2012-01-05T15:59:00.000-05:00

The Brown Army Faction: A Disturbing New Dimension of Far-Right Terror
Der Spiegel

Frühlingsstrasse in the Weissenborn neighborhood of the eastern German city of Zwickau is a street lined with renovated old houses, manicured front gardens and sidewalks that look swept clean. It would be an idyllic residential neighborhood, if it weren't for the house at number 26.

The windows are smashed, a section of the front wall has collapsed onto the lawn, and there is a gaping black hole on the right side of the second floor. An incendiary bomb exploded at this house a little over a week ago. But the real nature of the bomb that exploded there was not clear until last Friday. As it turned out, the reverberations from the explosion rocked not just the nearby houses on Frühlingsstrasse, but the whole of Germany.

Beate Zschäpe, who was renting an apartment in the building, left the house shortly before flames burst from the windows at 3:05 p.m. on Nov. 4. She dropped off her cats with a neighbor, and then she did what she has been doing time and again for almost 14 years: She disappeared.

Three hours earlier, a fire had also been set in a parked camper in Eisenach, a city 180 kilometers (110 miles) away. The two men inside, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, had just robbed a bank. They had ended up in Eisenach after being on the run for 14 years. The two men shot themselves before a police patrol could reach the burning vehicle.

Shocking Discoveries

It didn't take investigators long to see the connection between the two incidents. Then they began digging through the wreckage in Frühlingsstrasse, looking for clues. The deeper they dug, the more astonished and shocked they were by what they uncovered.

At first, it seemed that they had just hit upon a gang of bank robbers that had blown up their hideout.

They dug deeper.

Were the two men and one woman a neo-Nazi trio that had built pipe bombs in the eastern state of Thuringia in the late 1990s and had gone into hiding in the Zwickau area?

The investigators dug even deeper.

Was the trio a group of cold-blooded murderers who had gunned down police officer Michèle Kiesewetter in the southwestern city of Heilbronn four years ago? The investigators found Kiesewetter's service weapon, a Heckler & Koch P 200, and that of her severely injured fellow police officer in the burned-out camper, while the presumed murder weapon was found in the rubble in Zwickau. But that wasn't the end of the story.

Were they members of a right-wing extremist terrorist organization that had randomly shot and killed nine men throughout Germany since 2000, eight of them of Turkish origin and one from Greece? That was the point at which the investigation had arrived by the end of last week, when police found a weapon in the pile of rubble that had become synonymous with what was probably Germany's longest, most brutal and most mysterious series of murders. The weapon was a Ceska, model 83, 7.65 caliber Browning.

The Pink Panther's Terror Tour

Although the authorities had not yet completed their analysis of the pistol when SPIEGEL went to press, they are almost completely convinced that it's the same Ceska that was used to commit the so-called "doner killings," named after two of the victims, who sold doner kebabs, between 2000 and 2006. Next to the weapon lying in the fire-blackened rubble in Zwickau, police found four DVDs that had already been placed into envelopes. A 15-minute film by a group calling itself the "National Socialist Underground" (NSU) had been burned onto the disks. In the film, which SPIEGEL has viewed, the authors call themselves a "national network of comrades whose principle is to value action above words. As long as fundamental changes do not occur in politics, press and in freedom of opinion, the activities will continue."

To Read the Rest of the Report

Entitled Opinions: A conversation with Stanford archaeologist Patrick Hunt about the Rosetta Stone

2012-01-05T08:45:00.000-05:00

A conversation with Stanford archaeologist Patrick Hunt about the Rosetta Stone.
Entitled Opinions (KZSU: Stanford University)

Patrick Hunt earned a Ph.D. from the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, University of London in 1991. He has been teaching humanities, the arts, archaeology and mythology at Stanford University since 1993. His Hannibal Expedition was sponsored in 2007-2008 by the National Geographic Society’s Expedition Council. He is Director of the Stanford Alpine Archaeology Project 1994-2011.

To Listen to the Conversation

Roger Ebert: "Nobody has the right to take another life"

2012-01-04T23:29:00.002-05:00

"Nobody has the right to take another life"
by Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times

Yesterday I read this in an article in the British Guardian newspaper:

"Twelve of the last 13 people condemned to death in Harris County, Texas were black. After Texas itself, Harris County is the national leader in its number of executions.

"Over one third of Texas's 305 death row inmates - and half of the state's 121 black death row prisoners - are from Harris County.

"One of those African Americans, Duane Buck, was sentenced based on the testimony of an expert psychologist who maintained that blacks are prone to violence. In 2008, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal resigned after sending an email message titled 'fatal overdose,' featuring a photo of a black man lying on the ground surrounded by watermelons and a bucket of chicken."

I could pause at this point, type "case closed," and consider this a blog entry. But that would be too simple. White people are also executed at an efficient pace in Texas. The odds of being given the death penalty in that state are fearsome, and the chances of having your sentence overturned on appeal are dismaying. So far in his two terms in office, Rick Perry has declined to commute the sentences of 235 condemned prisoners. During George W. Bush's time in office, Texas executed 152 prisoners, more than any other governor in modern American history before Perry.

Bush commuted the death sentence of one prisoner, Henry Lee Lucas, who had been charged with murder in 189 cases and "was once listed as America's most prolific serial killer." (Wikipedia.) His decision was recommended by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, based on evidence that on the day of the specific murder Lucas was convicted of, he was not in Texas. Perry has commuted the death sentences of two prisoners, both also on the recommendation of the Board of Pardons and Paroles. It would appear that if the board rejected your appeal, your chance of having the sentence overturned by Bush or Perry was zero.

In 2000, Illinois Governor George Ryan, a Republican, declared a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois. In one fell swoop he commuted 160 death sentences to life sentences. Ryan explained that he believed execution was appropriate in the case of "heinous crimes," but noted that during his first year in office "Thirteen people were released from jail after appealing their convictions based on new evidence." (Wikipedia) I was at a dinner party with Ryan at about that time, and he told us, "The possibility that we would be executing an innocent man made it impossible for me to sleep at night."

To Read the Rest of the Commentary

Steve Dollar: Film of the week -- Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

2012-01-04T18:47:00.003-05:00

FILM OF THE WEEK: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
by Steve Dollar
GreenCine Daily

Time's up, cinema aesthetes. Ring out the old, ring in the new. Stop looking at those 10 best lists and get on with your lives. The calendar has flipped over into 2012 and... I've already got a new #1. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which opens today in New York, will have plenty of competition throughout the coming year. Guaranteed, though, you will see very few films as masterfully designed and executed, or so heavy with thought that the extended silences that suspend the characters in time and space make even the most seemingly mundane interludes of dialogue (and there's a ton of dialogue by Ceylan's minimalist standard) feel loaded with quietly devastating significance. Imagine, for the sake of cultural transliteration, the banal, jocular nature of—say, a traveling salesman joke—shared between two gruff men, strangers yoked together by professional duty, breaking the boredom of a marathon overnight detail that threatens not to end with the dawn. On one level, it's just a little rough humor to pass time, break ice. But in this scenario, lines that might be throwaway someplace else turn resonant, the lure of hidden meanings plunged like an anchor against the elliptical drift.

Ceylan proposes a mystery, even though the crime has been solved. Much as in his 2008 Three Monkeys, there's a dead body to kick the story into motion. In that earlier film, a tragic accident and a cover-up set the stage for a domestic meltdown. Here, the corpse is the focus of an arduous search. As the film opens, a tiny caravan of cars winds slowly along an isolated road that curves through the Anatolian steppes. Dusk settles into night, the yellow glare of headlights illuminating a tall tree that divides the purple horizon, limbs rustling in the breeze. The stationary camera sits far enough away from the action that the entire scene unfolds against a painterly tableaux, the dialogue and slamming car doors close-miked so that you hear the terse, impatient voices before matching them to any faces.

To Read the Rest of the Review

Dennis Lim: Satellites of Love -- Realities split and merge in Haruki Murakami's new cosmic romance

2012-01-04T18:09:00.000-05:00

Satellites of Love: Realities split and merge in Haruki Murakami's new cosmic romance
by Dennis Lim
Bookforum

Haruki Murakami’s stories are forever slipping from one plane of existence to another. Whether it happens at the bottom of a well (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) or atop a Ferris wheel (Sputnik Sweetheart) or through a television screen (After Dark), most of his characters at some point find themselves transported from what they thought was reality to a strange new unreality. But Murakami, for one, would argue that, amid the confusion of our new world disorder, those concepts are not exactly what they used to be. Writing in the International Herald Tribune last year, he wondered, “In an age when reality is insufficiently real, how much reality can a fictional story possess?” Spinning out a thought experiment, Murakami calls our actual world Reality A and the hypothetical world we might have had if 9/11 never happened Reality B. Could it be that Reality A has a “lower level of reality” than the “more rational” Reality B? Is our world less real than an unreal world? And if our sense of reality has fundamentally changed, how does that affect the stories we tell?

The characters in Murakami’s massive new novel, 1Q84, spend a good deal of time puzzling over the relationship between two realities. One is the Tokyo of 1984. The other is not exactly a parallel world—“You’ve been reading too much science fiction,” an oracular figure scoffs when someone raises that possibility—but a subtly and ominously tweaked variation, the new reality that materialized when the old one “switched tracks.” One of the book’s two main characters calls it 1Q84, “a world that bears a question.” (It’s also a pun: Nine in Japanese is pronounced “kyu.”)

An apotheosis of sorts for Japan’s most popular living novelist, 1Q84 combines the distilled melancholy of Murakami’s short stories and slimmer novels (Norwegian Wood; South of the Border, West of the Sun) with the grand unpredictability of his epic, more self-consciously serious works (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore). Three books in one totaling 944 pages, it is Murakami’s most elaborate and sustained riff yet on themes he has reworked for thirty years: solitude, thwarted desire, Japan’s (and humankind’s) latent violent streak, the shadow of mortality, the shape of time, the elusiveness of the self, the malleability of reality. His detractors fault him for repeating himself, but repetition and (its flip side) defamiliarization are vital tools in this obsessive author’s arsenal. Transmigrating characters and enigmas, rearranging leitmotifs into new patterns, his stories are paradigms of the uncanny, premised on the peculiar coexistence of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Déjà vu is both the dominant mood and the organizing principle of his work.

The protagonists of 1Q84, Aomame and Tengo, whose stories are told in alternating chapters, are versions of the “ordinary lonely girl” and “ordinary lonely boy” of one of Murakami’s best-known short stories, “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning,” who knew from a young age they were meant to be together and somehow lost each other. As with the adolescent soul mates of South of the Border, it is a single moment that seals their fate as ten-year-olds. Responding to a kind gesture by her classmate Tengo, the bullied outcast Aomame, shunned for uttering prayers out loud (her parents belong to a fanatical Christian sect), reaches out and clutches his hand. This electric, tactile connection marks them indelibly. And then, without exchanging a word, they disappear from each other’s lives for years.

Murakami’s romantic quests are typically first-person accounts of a forlorn male narrator, pining for a girl who has pulled a disappearing act. But in the third-person 1Q84, the quest is mutual: doubled, mirrored, and amplified to cosmic proportions. Tengo and Aomame’s initial attraction is so profound that their long-deferred reunion—at age thirty—calls for nothing less than the course correction of the universe. And while Tengo recalls any number of diffident Murakami everymen, the poised, pensive Aomame is a somewhat surprising creation for an author who has often positioned women as narrative catalysts or male projections: a fully imagined female character with complex desires and a rich inner existence.

Aomame’s and Tengo’s lives have apparently evolved in concert. Both left home and severed ties with their tyrannical families in their early teens, and although hardly celibate (Tengo is seeing an older married woman, and Aomame frequents singles bars), both shy from romantic attachments. Their orbits begin to overlap when Tengo, a math teacher and aspiring novelist, is hired to rewrite Air Chrysalis, a novella by a withdrawn seventeen-year-old girl named Fuka-Eri. This surreal tale of a young girl who lives on a commune and encounters a possibly malevolent tribe of Little People turns out to be inspired by actual experience. Fuka-Eri’s father is the leader of a cult called Sakigake, from which she escaped a few years ago. The book, which becomes a best seller, also takes on a life of its own, and some of its weirder details have a way of leaping off the page and showing up in the physical world of 1Q84, where both Tengo and Aomame have ended up without quite knowing how.

To Read the Rest of the Review

Entitled Opinions: A conversation with Susanna Braund about the poetry of Virgil

2012-01-04T17:46:00.000-05:00

A conversation with Professor Susanna Braund about the poetry of Virgil
Entitled Opinions (KZSU: Stanford University)

Susanna Braund is Professor of Classics at Stanford University, where she has been since 2004. Professor Braund's interests include Imperial Latin literature, the reception of Roman antiquity, translation studies, and the interfaces between literature, rhetoric, and philosophy. Virgil is among her favorite Latin poets. She has published on Juvenal, Lucan, and Latin literature. Some of her publications are Beyond Anger: A Study of Juvenal's Third Book of Satires (Cambridge, 1988), a verse translation of Lucan's Civil War (Oxford, 1992), and Latin literature (Routledge, 2002). She is currently working on Seneca and the Loeb editions of Juvenal and Persius. Professor Braund was educated at King's College of Cambridge and, before coming to Stanford, taught at Exeter, Bristol, Royal Holloway, and Yale. Outside of academia she is interested in music, animals, and ecological issues.

To Listen to the Episode

The Black Keys: Too Afraid to Love You

2012-01-04T00:28:00.001-05:00

Julian Ross: The Art Theatre Guild of Japan

2012-01-03T19:22:00.002-05:00

The Art Theatre Guild of Japan
Electric Sheep Magazine

Virginie Sélavy talks to Julian Ross about the summer’s seasons of experimental and independent Japanese cinema of the 1960s and 70s. In the 60s, the Art Theatre Guild of Japan (ATG) in Tokyo became the centre of a vibrant independent filmmaking scene, encouraging bold experiments and innovative collaborations with other artists. The discussion focuses on the ATG, its related space Theatre Scorpio, and the films the ATG helped produce or distribute, including works by Nagisa Ôshima, Kôji Wakamatsu and Shôhei Imamura.

Julian Ross is a commissioning editor at Vertigo Magazine and the programme coordinator for the Theatre Scorpio season at Close-Up Film Centre and the Art Theatre Guild season at the BFI Southbank.

To Listen to the Episode

Jackson Lears: A History of Disappointment

2012-01-02T21:04:00.000-05:00

A History of Disappointment
by Jackson Lears
The London Review of Books

To those of us who hoped that Barack Obama’s election marked a departure from right-wing rule, the president’s failure of leadership has been stunning. Seldom have insurgent expectations – even sceptical, guarded ones – been deflated so swiftly. From the moment he announced his staff and cabinet appointments (Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates et al) it was clear that Obama meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W. Bush. Obama had retreated into politics as usual. He never looked back. One did not have to be a sentimental utopian to be disappointed.

In domestic affairs, Obama’s obeisance to the Washington consensus led him to abandon the bold approach he articulated during the campaign in his Philadelphia ‘speech on race’, when he attacked the manipulation of racial hostilities to divide the black and white working class. No one running for high office in America had done that since the 1890s. But once in power, Obama soon abandoned any pretence of promoting social democracy. After pushing through a stimulus package, he quickly (and illogically) embraced the gospel of austerity preached by Tea Party ranters and ‘centrist’ pundits. Indeed, the president played a critical role in legitimating this corrosive creed, which despite its tendency to exacerbate recession has now become orthodoxy on both sides of the Atlantic. In his first State of the Union address, given in January 2010 when his party still had control of both houses of Congress, Obama announced a three-year freeze on non-defence discretionary spending – a move he had called an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008.

In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions,’ he said. ‘The federal government should do the same.’ His puzzling timidity culminated in his supine response to ‘deficit hawks’ during the debt ceiling crisis of the summer. Recently, Obama’s spine has begun to stiffen in response to the Occupy movement. He has finally started to make a populist critique of systemic inequality, but it remains to be seen how sustained or effective this new stance will be.

Obama’s deference to established power has been even more striking in national security affairs. Yet this was the area where he had promised the most. Having opposed the Iraq War ‘not just in execution but in conception’, he seemed to harbour a healthy scepticism toward interventionism. And he assured civil libertarians that he would reverse the Bush administration’s drive towards executive tyranny. He would renounce torture and the ‘extraordinary rendition’ of prisoners to CIA ‘black sites’ where torture took place. He would close Guantánamo, and end indefinite detention and warrantless surveillance. So we were led to believe.

But in practice President Obama has been far more committed to continuity in national security policy than candidate Obama promised. Despite fitful rhetorical displays of dislike for torture, the Obama administration has continued extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention and warrantless surveillance, while expanding the doctrine of state secrets used to conceal those practices from public view. Guantánamo is still in business, beyond the reach of civil law. Though the phrase ‘war on terror’ has fallen into official disuse, the carte blanche it provided for foreign military interventions remains intact. Providentialist assumptions still lend US imperial adventures an aura of sanctity. Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech dragged out all the old tropes, including a familiar set-piece: the United States on the frontiers of freedom, fighting a 60-year war against tyranny that culminated in the battle for Afghanistan. Apart from the echoes of Reinhold Niebuhr – the furrowed brow, the feigned reluctance to use force – the words could have been spoken by George W. Bush.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Sarah Leonard: Occupy Wall St. and the Downfall of the Smartest Guys in the Room

2012-01-01T23:54:00.000-05:00

OWS and the Downfall of the Smartest Guys in the Room
by Sarah Leonard
Bookforum

The problem with Occupy Wall Street, an investment banker wrote to me, is that financial mechanisms are very complicated, and the protesters don't understand them. On the day that the New York occupation of Zuccotti Park spread to Washington Square, another visitor from finance looked out over the milling malcontents: "Things definitely went wrong, but you have to understand how the system works. Looking at these signs doesn't give me a lot of confidence."

And it was certainly true that, by themselves, the signs bobbing through the crowd urged a panoply of measures: Abolish the Fed! Tax the rich! Bail out the people! Lloyd Blankfein's head on a pike! Now! All this hectic sloganeering lent a sort of poignant sweetness to a placard that pointed out, reasonably enough, that "the economy could be more fair." But the mood got more rancorous the closer one got to the center of the action at Zuccotti Park, with anarchists, union folks, frustrated reformers, and hard-line anti-capitalists making up the bulk of the crowd. This was a far cry from a sensible policy luncheon at the liberal Center for American Progress.

And for some liberal critics of the Occupy movement, that's precisely the problem. The New Republic's first article on the movement by Mark Schmitt cautioned glumly, "Our Tea Party has come. And so all the good work and focused protests are tossed aside as liberals gravitate to the thing that looks and feels most like the early days of the Tea Party." The essay might have been called "Remember the Think Tanks!"

In a similar vein, consider the testimony of Peter Orszag, Obama's former budget director, darling of both the Democratic establishment and a media consensus uncritically accepting of his youthful good looks as telltale evidence of a fresh and creative interior. Rather than scolding the unruly masses at Zuccotti Park, Orszag hailed the virtues of the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street as generative of those experts who would provide the real solutions to economic crisis. After Orszag had left the OMB for the far grander emoluments on offer at Citibank he announced a paradigm shift in the making. "I am getting exposed to lots of different issues and problems, and that will then better inform my thinking and public writing," he informed New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman. "Direct experience need not undermine one's intellectual integrity; sometimes it can even bolster it."

If anything, Orszag was understating how our professional-managerial caste views the organic union that binds pelf and knowledge. Across the ideological spectrum, responsible adults agree that one must work in finance to understand it well enough to regulate it. As a former Goldman Sachs partner told Sherman, "If you think that someone's past work on Wall Street disqualifies them from playing a role in something as complex as government, you'll essentially have people who have no understanding how financial markets operate . . . . That's a dangerous and scary thing." Lest anyone mistake where the tacit logic of such positions lead, Orszag himself graciously spelled it out in the New Republic, when he baldly announced that when it comes to the management of economic matters "certain aspects of representative government can end up posing serious problems. And so, we might be a healthier democracy if we were a slightly less democratic one."

There are at least two obvious objections to raise here. First, of course, there's the means-and-ends issue of abdicating the expansion of the democratic experiment to ensure that the finance sector can go about its business more smoothly, regulated by regulators who have spent their careers cultivating a deep understanding of its needs and wants. But more concretely, Orszag's argument advocates the empowerment of a set of experts who have already compiled an atrociously bad track record on their own terms. Rendering our political economy less democratic for their sake would be akin to putting Herbert Hoover in charge of the Civil Works Administration because he knew so much about unemployment.

After all, the whole Occupy Wall Street movement wouldn't exist in this time and place were it not for the handiwork of our financial betters (or bettors, if you prefer). The whole American economy is now reaping the whirlwind after fastidiously ensuring that policy makers, regulators and our representatives in Washington all lavished extra solicitude on the lords of Wall Street for being "smart." The first thing that anyone in finance will tell you about their choice to enter the sector, is that it's a way to be surrounded by the smartest people. Not the most famous or honorable, not even the richest; the smartest. Karen Ho, in her marvelous book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (2009) depicts a recruitment process wherein finance representatives convince Ivy League students that finance is the only intellectually challenging, fast-paced atmosphere suited to their superior minds. Wall Street shares the same basic estimation of its stature that Princeton does: a place where nobody is stupid or slow. Later on in their careers, finance workers use this "smartness" to justify the inherent "rightness" of what Wall Street does. Take a merger that results in cashiering of a hundred or so low-level employees who now can't feed their families, as well as the gradual selling off of a once functional business enterprise into sub-securitized assets designed principally to hoover up broker fees. This sounds bad all around, right? Wrong! It is, don't forget, a creation of our smartest people, who are able to discern what the market demands.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Electric Sheep Magazine: Kim Newman on Nightmare Movies

2012-01-01T22:43:00.002-05:00

Kim Newman on Nightmare Movies
Electric Sheep Magazine

Kim Newman discusses the new, updated edition of his essential book Nightmare Movies: Horror on the Screen since the 1960s with Electric Sheep‘s Virginie Sélavy. Nightmare Movies is published by Bloomsbury.

To Listen to the Pocast

Aryeh Kaufman: A Study of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, Part 1 ~ What it Means to Live ~

2012-01-01T20:40:00.003-05:00

A Study of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, Part 1 ~ What it Means to Live ~
by Aryeh Kaufman
Offscreen

1. Introduction to Ikiru

Ikiru, meaning “to live” or “living,” was directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1952 under Toho Productions. Kurosawa, with the help of Hashimoto and Oguni, wrote the screenplay for the black and white film at age 42. The film, widely recognized as one of Kurosawa’s masterpieces, must be understood within its historical and cultural contexts. Ikiru emerged during Japan’s postwar reconstruction, as the country sought to adapt to its newly inherited capitalism and democracy. Calling for forms of cultural upheaval and self-scrutiny, the film may be viewed as political cinema. Specifically, Ikiru affirms the pride and power of the individual. It promotes breaking traditional ties to larger social groups, such as family and company, for the sake of personal achievement.

Kurosawa’s first postwar film, No Regrets for our Youth (1946), similarly dealt with the national process of recovery and cultural transformation. In that film, Yukie, the daughter of a professor, is groomed for marriage, studying the arts of piano and flower arrangement. Such a passive existence fails to satisfy her, however, and she seeks alternative outlets for her passions that take her beyond the bounds of class and gender associations. [1] Kurosawa’s work, therefore, seeks to prepare audiences for the spiritual process of Japan’s recovery on the individual level by promoting a more Westernized view of the self.

In general, Kurosawa draws upon numerous sources and texts to inform his films. Ikiru is no exception, combining Western elements from Dostoevsky’s works and Goethe’s Faust with Eastern visions of Zen and the samurai code of Bushido. In terms of Ikiru’s specific origins, Kurosawa explains, “Sometimes I think of my death. I think of ceasing to be…and it is from these thoughts that Ikiru came.” [2] Furthermore, Fumio Hayasaka, musical composer for several Kurosawa films and the director’s close friend, was consistently ill with tuberculosis, then considered terminal, at the time of Ikiru’s production. In a letter to Kurosawa, Hayasaka openly declared that “for a man, dying for one’s job is one way of showing one’s spirit.” [3] Such real life inspiration may have shaped Ikiru’s development.

Ikiru is the story of Kanji Watanabe, who, when facing death, finally realizes that he has led a meaningless life—that he has not lived at all. In fact, Watanabe has crafted his life to avoid passion and action. The film often depicts Watanabe, played by Takashi Shimura, in an office environment that emphasizes his physical and emotional absence. Watanabe’s death sentence, presented through an advanced stomach cancer, shocks the protagonist and leads to his despair. After disavowing his prior existence and accepting a search for means to live to the fullest, Watanabe experiments with various approaches to living, each with different moral implications. He explores the immediate fulfillment of the senses in a wild scene of night revelry. He attempts to rely on family bonds and relationships for the support and closeness he needs. And he is driven to live through a youthful coworker who appears to know the secret to his desperate search for aliveness. Finally, in a moment of enlightenment, Watanabe realizes he may in fact bring meaning to his life. By championing a proposal to build a children’s playground in a slum, and by dedicating his remaining days to its fulfillment, Watanabe finds peace and tranquility. The tragedy has turned into an uplifting model of affirmation.

The film presents a unique binary structure that utilizes multiple character perspectives and non-linear time. The first division, covering two-thirds of the film, begins with an omniscient narrator’s presentation of an X-ray of Watanabe’s stomach and the knowledge that he has terminal cancer. This part demonstrates Watanabe’s progress from the discovery of his cancer to the realization that he can proactively impart meaning to his life. The second division of Ikiru also begins with the narrator’s instruction, though this time he informs the audience that Watanabe has passed away. The remainder of this part presents the main character’s wake ceremony at which he is eulogized and remembered, often hypocritically. This second division is characterized by a unity of time and space, unlike the freer narrative structure of the first. At the wake, flashbacks serve to fill in gaps and are presented as literal reconstructions of events. Ironically, viewers are never presented with specific flashbacks in which Watanabe successfully achieves either approval or acceptance of the playground proposal—a key moment for viewers. The mourners fail to present such moments. We merely observe his dogged determination in putting pressure on colleagues, pleading with the Deputy Mayor, painfully crawling down office hallways, and quietly resisting the threats of gangsters.

In passing from the first to second divisions of the film, viewers are forced to consider why it is that the film has not ended with Watanabe’s death. Equipped with recent observation of Watanabe’s suffering, experiences, and ultimate enlightenment, we engage with the mourners of the wake scene in their deliberations. They question why Watanabe behaved the way he did, whether he knew he was approaching death, and whether he in fact brought the playground to fruition. Here we observe how he is perceived and misunderstood by others. Most importantly, through character recollections, we perceive both that Watanabe ultimately found happiness and meaning in life before death and also that his chosen actions led him to such accomplishment.

Ikiru presents infinitely more than an idealism centered on the individual as hero and agent for social change. It presents more than a prescription of “good deeds” for the sake of enlightenment and transformation in modern society. Ikiru proposes that healing one’s spirit is always possible, that a Faust-like search for meaning in earthly and spiritual realms has an answer. Kurosawa answers the existential question posed in Rashomon (1950): how should one live in a meaningless world, where death is certain, individuals are selfish and self-serving, and God does not exist? In that film, Kurosawa altered the original story of Akutagawa to present the woodcutter, also played by Shimura, as redeemer of the world through his final act of taking an orphaned baby into his home. Despite the importance of self-sacrifice and altruism in such a feat, Ikiru and Watanabe demonstrate that of primary importance to the individual, to the rebirth and empowerment of one, is the creative deed. Through the purpose and act of creation, Watanabe proves to resolve many tensions presented through the film, such as the shallowness and insufficiency of immediate satisfaction of the senses contrasted with the need to live a youthful, passionate existence, and the difficulty communicating one’s thoughts and feelings to those supposedly closest to one despite the isolation and loneliness of the individual.

To Read the Rest of Part 1

To Read Part 2

Swan's Japanese Horror Reviews #23: Horrors of Malformed Men

2011-12-30T12:25:00.004-05:00

Democracy Now: In Exiting Iraq, U.S. Military Discards Trove of Found Documents on 2005 Haditha Massacre of Iraqis

2011-12-29T13:36:00.000-05:00

In Exiting Iraq, U.S. Military Discards Trove of Found Documents on 2005 Haditha Massacre of Iraqis
Democracy Now

As the U.S. military leaves Iraq, the New York Times has recovered hundreds of pages of documents detailing internal interrogations of U.S. Marines over the 2005 Haditha massacre of Iraqi civilians. The documents, many marked "secret," were found among scores of other classified material at a junkyard outside Baghdad as an attendant used them as fuel to cook his dinner. The documents reveal testimony of Marines describing killing civilians on a regular basis. "In some ways, this is one of the most grotesque episodes of the entire war in Iraq. And I’m afraid to say, this is part of our legacy," says Time magazine contributor Tim McGirk, who first broke the story of Haditha in 2006. It was November 19, 2005, when a U.S. military convoy of four vehicles driving through Haditha was hit by a roadside bomb, killing Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas. The next night, Marines burst into several homes in the neighborhood, killing 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man and women and children who were still in their night clothes when they died. "Nobody is behind bars for this," McGirk notes. Charges from the episode were dropped against six of the accused Marines, one was acquitted, and the final case is set to go to trial next year.

The Black Keys: Lonely Boy

2011-12-28T20:11:00.001-05:00

Power (Keywords)

2011-12-28T19:59:00.001-05:00

Burke, Barry. "Antonio Gramsci, Schooling and Education." Informal Encyclopedia of Education (2005)

Chomsky, Noam. "Activism, Anarchism and Power." Conversations with History (March 2002)

Ullman, Sharon and Gus Stadler. "ICPR H 290 INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON GENDER:
POWER, PERFORMANCE, AND IDENTITY." (Fall 2008: Course Syllabus)

Žižek, Slavoj. “The Spectre of Ideology.” The Žižek Reader. ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999: excerpts.

Hegemony (Keywords)

2011-12-28T19:55:00.002-05:00

Burke, Barry. "Antonio Gramsci, Schooling and Education." Informal Encyclopedia of Education (2005)

The Encyclopedia of Informal Education: Antonio Gramsci, Schooling and Education

2011-12-28T19:45:00.000-05:00

Antonio Gramsci, Schooling and Education
The Encyclopedia of Informal Education

...

By hegemony, Gramsci meant the permeation throughout society of an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs and morality that has the effect of supporting the status quo in power relations. Hegemony in this sense might be defined as an 'organising principle' that is diffused by the process of socialisation into every area of daily life. To the extent that this prevailing consciousness is internalised by the population it becomes part of what is generally called 'common sense' so that the philosophy, culture and morality of the ruling elite comes to appear as the natural order of things. [Boggs 1976 p39]

Marx’s basic division of society into a base represented by the economic structure and a superstructure represented by the institutions and beliefs prevalent in society was accepted by most Marxists familiar with the concepts. Gramsci took this a step further when he divided the superstructure into those institutions that were overtly coercive and those that were not. The coercive ones, which were basically the public institutions such as the government, police, armed forces and the legal system he regarded as the state or political society and the non-coercive ones were the others such as the churches, the schools, trade unions, political parties, cultural associations, clubs, the family etc. which he regarded as civil society. To some extent, schools could fit into both categories. Parts of school life are quite clearly coercive (compulsory education, the national curriculum, national standards and qualifications) whilst others are not (the hidden curriculum).

So for Gramsci, society was made up of the relations of production (capital v labour); the state or political society (coercive institutions) and civil society (all other non-coercive institutions).

Gramsci's analysis went much further than any previous Marxist theory to provide an understanding of why the European working class had on the whole failed to develop revolutionary consciousness after the First World War and had instead moved towards reformism ie tinkering with the system rather than working towards overthrowing it. It was a far more subtle theory of power than any of his contemporaries and went a long way to explain how the ruling class ruled.

Now, if Gramsci was correct that the ruling class maintained its domination by the consent of the mass of the people and only used its coercive apparatuses, the forces of law and order, as a last resort, what were the consequences for Marxists who wished to see the overthrow of that same ruling class? If the hegemony of the ruling capitalist class resulted from an ideological bond between the rulers and the ruled, what strategy needed to be employed? The answer to those questions was that those who wished to break that ideological bond had to build up a ‘counter hegemony’ to that of the ruling class. They had to see structural change and ideological change as part of the same struggle. The labour process was at the core of the class struggle but it was the ideological struggle that had to be addressed if the mass of the people were to come to a consciousness that allowed them to question their political and economic masters right to rule. It was popular consensus in civil society that had to be challenged and in this we can see a role for informal education.

Overcoming popular consensus, however, is not easy. Ideological hegemony meant that the majority of the population accepted what was happening in society as ‘common sense’ or as ‘the only way of running society’. There may have been complaints about the way things were run and people looked for improvements or reforms but the basic beliefs and value system underpinning society were seen as either neutral or of general applicability in relation to the class structure of society. Marxists would have seen people constantly asking for a bigger slice of the cake when the real issue was ownership of the bakery.
Organic Intellectuals

This brings me to my second theme. Gramsci saw the role of the intellectual as a crucial one in the context of creating a counter hegemony. He was clear that the transformation from capitalism to socialism required mass participation. There was no question that socialism could be brought about by an elite group of dedicated revolutionaries acting for the working class. It had to be the work of the majority of the population conscious of what they were doing and not an organised party leadership. The revolution led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 was not the model suitable for Western Europe or indeed any advanced industrialised country. The Leninist model took place in a backward country with a huge peasantry and a tiny working class. The result was that the mass of the population were not involved. For Gramsci, mass consciousness was essential and the role of the intellectual was crucial.

It is important at this juncture to note that when Gramsci wrote about intellectuals, he was not referring solely to the boffins and academics that sat in ivory towers or wrote erudite pieces for academic journals only read by others of the same ilk. His definition went much further and he spread his net much wider.

Gramsci’s notebooks are quite clear on the matter. He writes that "all men are intellectuals" [and presumably women] "but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals". What he meant by that was that everyone has an intellect and uses it but not all are intellectuals by social function. He explains this by stating that "everyone at some time fries a couple of eggs or sews up a tear in a jacket, we do not necessarily say that everyone is a cook or a tailor". Each social group that comes into existence creates within itself one or more strata of intellectuals that gives it meaning, that helps to bind it together and helps it function. They can take the form of managers, civil servants, the clergy, professors and teachers, technicians and scientists, lawyers, doctors etc. Essentially, they have developed organically alongside the ruling class and function for the benefit of the ruling class. Gramsci maintained that the notion of intellectuals as being a distinct social category independent of class was a myth.

He identified two types of intellectuals - traditional and organic. Traditional intellectuals are those who do regard themselves as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group and are regarded as such by the population at large. They seem autonomous and independent. They give themselves an aura of historical continuity despite all the social upheavals that they might go through. The clergy are an example of that as are the men of letters, the philosophers and professors. These are what we tend to think of when we think of intellectuals. Although they like to think of themselves as independent of ruling groups, this is usually a myth and an illusion. They are essentially conservative allied to and assisting the ruling group in society.

The second type is the organic intellectual. This is the group mentioned earlier that grows organically with the dominant social group, the ruling class, and is their thinking and organising element. For Gramsci it was important to see them for what they were. They were produced by the educational system to perform a function for the dominant social group in society. It is through this group that the ruling class maintains its hegemony over the rest of society.

To Read the Entire Essay and Access More Resources

Films We Want to See: The Interrupters (USA: Steve James, 2011: 125 mins)

2011-12-28T17:48:00.002-05:00

Democracy Now: "Worker-Owners of America, Unite" -- Will Cooperative Workplaces Democratize U.S. Economy?

2011-12-28T16:21:00.001-05:00

"Worker-Owners of America, Unite": Will Cooperative Workplaces Democratize U.S. Economy?
Democracy Now

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to protest record levels of wealth and income inequality, we turn to an author who says the U.S. economy might be becoming more democratic. Gar Alperovitz argues in an op-ed in today’s New York Times that we may be in the midst of a profound transition toward an economy characterized by more democratic structures of ownership. Alperovitz finds that 130 million Americans are members of some kind of cooperative, and 13 million Americans work in an employee-owned company. He says the United States may be heading toward something very different from both corporate-dominated capitalism and from traditional socialism. "I think we’re seeing a change in attitude, both increasing doubts about what’s now going on in the economy, deep doubts, very deep doubts—thanks to Occupation, it’s crystallized—but this other trend of saying, 'What do you want? Where are we going?' in some ways to democratize the economy in a very American way," Alperovitz says.

Gar Alperovitz, professor of political economy at the University of Maryland. His op-ed, "Worker-Owners of America, Unite!" is published today in the New York Times. A new edition of his book, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy, has also just been published.

Democracy Now: Wave of Restrictive Voting Laws Prompts Federal Probes, Grassroots Activism Ahead of 2012 Elections

2011-12-28T12:56:00.000-05:00

Wave of Restrictive Voting Laws Prompts Federal Probes, Grassroots Activism Ahead of 2012 Elections
Democracy Now

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is vowing to ensure the protection of voting rights in more than a dozen states that have recently enacted controversial laws. Supporters of the laws, backed largely by Republicans, say they are meant to stamp out voter fraud. "When people move on their fears, they make bad law," says NAACP CEO Ben Jealous, co-author of a new report that argues the new laws amount to a coordinated and comprehensive assault on minorities’ voting rights at a time when their numbers in the population and at the ballot box have increased. Students, former felons and elderly voters may also be impacted. On Saturday, the NAACP helped organize a voting rights march in New York, starting at the offices of Koch Industries in order to highlight how billionaire conservative financiers David and Charles Koch have financed the push for voter ID laws. We also speak with Bob Edgar, a former Pennsylvania congressman and the president and CEO of Common Cause. He supports pending legislation, the Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, as a way to reaffirm the nation’s commitment to voting rights and free and open elections. "We’re the only nation in the world that has federal elections without federal rules for election," Edgar says.

Guests:

Bob Edgar, president and CEO of Common Cause and a former Pennsylvania congressman.

Benjamin Jealous, president and CEO of NAACP. He’s the co-author of a new report, "Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America."

Robert Scheer: There Goes the Republic

2011-12-27T16:37:00.000-05:00

There Goes the Republic
by Robert Scheer
TruthDig

Once again the gods of war have united our Congress like nothing else. Unable to agree on the minimal spending necessary to save our economy, schools, medical system or infrastructure, the cowards who mislead us have retreated to the irrationalities of what George Washington in his farewell address condemned as “pretended patriotism.”

The defense authorization bill that Congress passed and President Obama had threatened to veto will soon become law, a fact that should be met with public outrage. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth, responding to Obama’s craven collapse on the bill’s most controversial provision, said, “By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in U.S. law.” On Wednesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney claimed “the most recent changes give the president additional discretion in determining how the law will be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law, which are at the heart of our country’s strength.”

What rubbish, coming from a president who taught constitutional law. The point is not to hock our civil liberty to the discretion of the president, but rather to guarantee our freedoms even if a Dick Cheney or Newt Gingrich should attain the highest office.

Sadly, this flagrant subversion of the constitutionally guaranteed right to due process of law was opposed in the Senate by only seven senators, including libertarian Republican Rand Paul and progressive Independent Bernie Sanders.

That onerous provision of the defense budget bill, much discussed on the Internet but far less so in the mass media, assumes a permanent war against terrorism that extends the battlefield to our homeland. It reeks of a militarized state that threatens the foundations of our republican form of government.

This is not only a disaster in the making for civil liberty but a blow to effective anti-terrorist police work. Recall that it was the FBI that was most effective in interrogating al-Qaida suspects before the military let loose the torturers. Under the newly approved legislation, that bypassing of civilian experts will be codified as a routine option for a president.

To Read the Rest of the Commentary

Democracy Now: Ex-Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson, Former Democrat, Launches Third Party Presidential Bid Against Obama, GOP

2011-12-26T15:17:00.000-05:00

Ex-Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson, Former Democrat, Launches Third Party Presidential Bid Against Obama, GOP
Democracy Now

A new political party has entered the fray as an alternative to Democrats and Republicans ahead of the 2012 elections. On Monday, former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson announced he will run for president with the newly formed Justice Party. Although hailing from a solidly red state, Anderson has been known as one of the most progressive mayors of any major U.S. city in recent years. During his two mayoral terms from 2000 to 2008, Anderson was an outspoken champion of LGBT rights, environmental sustainability, and the antiwar movement in opposition to the Iraq War. Vowing to fight the influence of money over politics, Anderson kicked off his campaign on Monday with a pledge to limit individual donations to $100 a person. Anderson and the Justice Party say they hope to build a grassroots movement heading into the November 2012 elections. "We launched the Justice Party because the entire system is so corrupt," Anderson says. "It’s so diseased. We know that the public interest is not being served by anyone in the system right now, particularly the two dominant parties who have sustained this corrupt system and who are sustained by it."

Matt Taibbi: A Christmas Message From America's Rich

2011-12-26T15:11:00.000-05:00

A Christmas Message From America's Rich
by Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone

...

Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?

Doubtful. But then again, people like Jamie Dimon aren’t really citizens of any country. They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.

Just look at how banks like Chase behaved in Greece, for example.

Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase “helped” countries like Greece and Italy mask their debt problems for years by selling a similar series of swaps to those governments. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs (who were also major purveyors of those swap deals) to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.

In other words, banks like Chase and Goldman knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.

Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?

Operations like the Greek swap/short index maneuver were easy money for banks like Goldman and Chase – hell, it’s a no-lose play, like cutting a car’s brake lines and then betting on the driver to crash – but they helped create the monstrous European debt problem that this very minute is threatening to send the entire world economy into collapse, which would result in who knows what horrors. At minimum, millions might lose their jobs and benefits and homes. Millions more will be ruined financially.

But why should Chase and Goldman care what happens to those people? Do they have any skin in that game?

Of course not. We’re talking about banks that not only didn’t warn the citizens of Greece about their future debt disaster, they actively traded on that information, to make money for themselves.

People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It's called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you’d at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.

To Read the Entire Essay

Dispatches: Comitan, Mexico, Paris, New York, China

2011-12-26T13:22:00.000-05:00

Dispatches (CBC)
From Comitan, Mexico - Paris - New York - China

The misplaced love of Marvin Pinto. A story of obsession with the culture of the cockfight

Stove Camp; the "hippie Manhattan Project" hoping to save millions of lives through cleaner cooking.

As China goes, so goes the world, according to an author who says Chinese consumers are transforming...everything.

And, conflict in the catacombs. Hard-core crypt crawlers, take exception to the teen tomb tourists partying in their playground under Paris.

To Listen to the Episode

Santa spreads coal message with a little humor_Frankfort_KY

2011-12-25T21:42:00.000-05:00

Monaela

Will Potter: FBI Says Activists Who Investigate Factory Farms Can Be Prosecuted as Terrorists

2011-12-24T12:50:00.000-05:00

FBI Says Activists Who Investigate Factory Farms Can Be Prosecuted as Terrorists
by Will Potter
Green is the New Red

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force has kept files on activists who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms and recommended prosecuting them as terrorists, according to a new document uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act.

This new information comes as the Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a lawsuit challenging the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) as unconstitutional because its vague wording has had a chilling effect on political activism. This document adds to the evidence demonstrating that the AETA goes far beyond property destruction, as its supporters claim.

The 2003 FBI file details the work of several animal rights activists who used undercover investigation to document repeated animal welfare violations. The FBI special agent who authored the report said they “illegally entered buildings owned by [redacted] Farm… and videotaped conditions of animals.”

The animal activists caused “economic loss” to businesses, the FBI says. And they also openly rescued several animals from the abusive conditions. This was not done covertly in the style of underground groups like the Animal Liberation Front — it was an act of non-violent civil disobedience and, as the FBI agent notes, the activists distributed press releases and conducted media interviews taking responsibility for their actions.

Based on these acts — trespassing in order to photograph and videotape abuses on factory farms — the agent concludes there “is a reasonable indication” that the activists “have violated the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, 18 USC Section 43 (a).”

The file was uncovered through a FOIA request by Ryan Shapiro, who is one of the activists mentioned. The file is available for download here. [Please note that this document has additional redactions in order to protect the identities of the other activists, at their request.] Shapiro is now a doctoral candidate at MIT.

“It is deeply sobering to see one’s name in an FBI file proposing terrorism charges,” he said in an email. “It is even more sobering to realize the supposedly terroristic activities in question are merely exposing the horrific cruelty of factory farms, educating the public about what goes on behind those closed doors, and openly rescuing a few animals from one of those farms as an act of civil disobedience.”

When I testified before Congress against the AETA in 2006, one of the primary concerns I raised is that the law could be used to wrap up a wide range of activity that threatens corporate profits. Supporters of the AETA have repeatedly denied this, and said the law will only be used against people who do things like burn buildings.

So how do we explain that such a sweeping prosecution was being considered in 2003, under the law’s somewhat-narrower precursor?

One possibility is that FBI agents lack training, education, and oversight. They are spying on political activists without understanding or respecting the law.

Another explanation is that this document is no mistake, nor is it an isolated case. It is a reflection of a coordinated campaign to target animal rights activists who, as the FBI agent notes, cause “economic loss” to corporations.

To Read the Rest of the Report and to Access Hyperlinked Resources

Films We Want to See: Sound of Noise (Sweden: Ola Simonsson & Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, 2010)

2011-12-24T08:09:00.001-05:00

Sound of Noise. This imaginative comedy follows a band of outlaw musicians who wreak havoc on an unsuspecting city. The sonic outlaws devise a plan to take their percussion-based, avant-garde music to the streets. The group’s opus is titled “Music for One City and Six Drummers.” The outlaws consist of the band’s leader—a spunky heroine named Sanna Persson—and five percussionists who invade four of the city’s civic or corporate institutions to make music with whatever tools, machines, or equipment they find.

An example of their musical activism is the first movement of their opus titled “Doctor, Doctor Gimme Gas (In My Ass).” They invade a hospital, kidnap a flabby patient with gastric issues, and then lock themselves in an operating room. There they proceed to play music using scalpels, the heart machine, ventilators, and other operating equipment as their instruments. They even “play” the patient, a well-known television personality whose problems with gas make him a good percussive instrument with just the right resonance as one of the drummers pounds on his rotund belly. There are four musical movements all together, each of them funny, awe-inspiring, and politically provocative. The group’s assaults on a hospital, bank, symphony hall, and power station amount to acts of anarchy against civic and corporate institutions that play a role in lulling the masses into lives filled with the unimaginative routines of the status quo.

[link]

Richard Wolff: Eurozone Woes Result from Mating of Our "Dysfunctional" Political, Economic Systems

2011-12-23T18:43:00.000-05:00

Richard Wolff: Eurozone Woes Result from Mating of Our "Dysfunctional" Political, Economic Systems
Democracy Now

European leaders are preparing to unveil their plans for addressing the sovereign debt crisis that’s threatened to tear apart the eurozone. Both France and Germany are expected to push for changes to the eurozone treaty, including centralized oversight of national budgets and tighter reins on debt. In a speech on Thursday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said radical changes are needed in order to save the euro. Sarkozy’s address came after central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, took coordinated action to prevent a credit crunch among European banks. For more on the developing crisis in Europe and its implications worldwide, we are joined by economist and professor Richard Wolff. He is the author of several books, including "Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It." "The Fed is recognizing that another bailout is needed," Wolff says. "All the steps taken over the last few years to try to cope with this crisis of our capitalist system haven’t worked, and so we’re now again on the brink of a crisis, and again public money and public institutions are bailing out a private banking system and a private enterprise system that is not working and is not solving its own problems." Wolff continues, "The fundamental question is, you’ve got to deal with an economic system that isn’t working... You’ve got to take big steps that change the way this economic system works, or find a new system... It’s as though we have a dysfunctional economic system coupled to a now dysfunctional political system, and instead of fixing each other, these two systems are making each other in a kind of a spiral downturn."

Guest:

Richard D. Wolff, Emeritus Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and visiting professor at New School University. He is the author of several books, including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.

To Watch the Episode

Democracy Now: "Hancock 38" Defendants Found Guilty for Bold Army Base Protest Against U.S. Drone Attacks Abroad

2011-12-23T12:27:00.000-05:00

"Hancock 38" Defendants Found Guilty for Bold Army Base Protest Against U.S. Drone Attacks Abroad
Democracy Now

Thirty-one of 38 accused activists were found guilty on Thursday for their role in a protest against U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The activists were arrested on April 22 at the New York Air National Guard base at Hancock Field near Syracuse, New York, after trespassing to protest the MQ-9 Reaper drones, which the 174th Fighter Wing of the Guard has remotely flown over Afghanistan since late 2009. The protesters draped themselves in white clothes splattered with blood-red pigment and then staged a "die-in" at the main entrance to the base. They said their act of nonviolent civil disobedience aimed to visualize the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan by drones operated by personnel sitting in front of computers thousands of miles away. The group calls themselves the Hancock 38 Drone Resisters. Following the guilty verdict, four of the activists were sentenced to 15-day terms in prison while a number of others were given fines and community service. We speak to Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general turned outspoken human rights activist, who testified at the trial that the drones violate international law. We’re also joined by Harry Murray, one of the Hancock 38 and a co-defendant in the trial. "Having a drone control center established at Hancock Air Base has really brought the war home to central New York," Murray says. "Having people who are actually killing human beings in Afghanistan working right in Syracuse really makes Syracuse and upstate New York a war zone." Clark says drones are "a weapon of extreme provocation and extreme danger, extreme inaccuracy... International law, I believe, does prohibit the use of drones."

Guests:

Ramsey Clark, lawyer and former U.S. attorney general.

Harry Murray, one of the Hancock 38 Drone Resisters and a co-defendant in the trial. He is professor of sociology and anthropology at Nazareth College, where he also serves as director of the peace and justice studies major.

To Watch the Episode

David Cay Johnston: The corporations that occupy Congress

2011-12-23T10:42:00.000-05:00

The corporations that occupy Congress
by David Cay Johnston
Reuters

Some of the biggest companies in the United States have been firing workers and in some cases lobbying for rules that depress wages at the very time that jobs are needed, pay is low, and the federal budget suffers from a lack of revenue.

Last month Citizens for Tax Justice and an affiliate issued “Corporate Taxpayers and Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-10″. It showed that 30 brand-name companies paid a federal income tax rate of minus 6.7 percent on $160 billion of profit from 2008 through 2010 compared to a going corporate tax rate of 35 percent. All but one of those 30 companies reported lobbying expenses in Washington.

Another report, by Public Campaign, shows that 29 of those companies spent nearly half a billion dollars over those three years lobbying in Washington for laws and rules that favor their interests. Only Atmos Energy, the 30th company, reported no lobbying.

Public Campaign replaced Atmos with Federal Express, the package delivery company that paid a smidgen of tax — $37 million, or less than one percent of the $4.2 billion in profit it reported in 2008 through 2010.

For the amount spent lobbying, the companies could have hired 3,100 people at $50,000 for wages and benefits to do productive work.

The report – “For Hire: Lobbyists or the 99 percent” – says that while shedding jobs, the 30 companies are “spending millions of dollars on Washington lobbyists to stave off higher taxes or regulations.”

These and other companies have access to lawmakers and regulators that are unavailable to ordinary Americans.

CALL CONGRESS

Doubt that? Dial the Capitol switchboard at 1 (202) 224-3121, ask for your representative’s office and request a five-minute audience, in person, at the lawmaker’s convenience back in the home district.

In more than a decade of lectures recommending this, I have yet to have a single person email me (see address to the right) about having scored a private meeting with the representative called.

Corporations have vast resources to pour into ensuring access — resources that expand when little or no taxes are paid on profits thanks to rules they previously lobbied into law.

Companies form nonprofit trade associations, hire former lawmakers and agency staffers, and have jobs to dole out to lawmakers after they leave office and to friends and family while they’re in office. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, corporations can now pour unlimited sums into influencing elections. So can unions, but they are financial pipsqueaks compared to companies.

Then there are political action committees, or PACs, to finance campaigns as well as donations by executives and major shareholders.

Combine all this and you have a powerful formula for making rules that favor corporate interests over human interests, something that the framers of the U.S. Constitution understood more than two centuries ago.

James Madison wrote disapprovingly in 1792 of “a government operating by corrupt influence, substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty” where eventually “the terror of the sword, may support a real domination of the few, under an apparent liberty of the many.”

FEARS COME TRUE

The late U.S. president’s fears have come to life. For swords, just substitute police with rubber bullets, batons and pepper spray at Occupy demonstrations, including perfectly peaceful ones.

To Read the Rest of the Commentary

National Education Policy Center: What Are They Thnking? -- New Report on Corporate Commercialism in Schools Finds Sponsorships and Corporate Marketing Threaten Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

2011-12-23T09:20:00.001-05:00

What Are They Thnking?: New Report on Corporate Commercialism in Schools Finds Sponsorships and Corporate Marketing Threaten Students’ Critical Thinking Skills
by Jamie Horwitz, Alex Molnar and Faith Boninger
National Education Policy Center

Partnerships between schools and for-profit companies are a growing trend in cash-strapped school districts but may cause harm to schoolchildren, according to new research by an international team of scholars.

The potential damage goes beyond the immediate health threat posed by the school-based marketing to children of soft drinks and other junk foods. Corporate commercializing activities in schools undermine the teaching of critical thinking skills essential to a good education, according to Alex Molnar and co-authors Faith Boninger and Joseph Fogarty.

The report, The Educational Cost of Schoolhouse Commercialism: The Fourteenth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercializing Trends: 2010-2011, was released today by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Lead author Molnar, a research professor at CU Boulder and publishing director at the NEPC, has studied and written about commercialism in U.S. schools for nearly two decades and is one of the nation’s top experts on the subject. Faith Boninger is an NEPC research associate with an academic background in psychology, and has researched this topic over the past five years. Joseph Fogarty, a school principal in County Sligo, Ireland, also has written extensively on commercialization trends.

The new report on schoolhouse commercializing trends considers how commercializing activities in schools directly and indirectly undermine the quality of the education children receive. Molnar, Boninger, and Fogarty observe that corporate commercialism in schools directly harms children by, for example, marketing candy and soft drinks on school premises and thus effectively undermining the schools’ nutrition curriculum and children’s learning about healthy eating.

Another harm is due to the shifting of school time toward activities promoted by commercial sponsors. Such business-sponsored activities in recent years include product demonstrations and contestslike the “ASA School Tour.”The pretext for the tour is to show children that it’s cool to be tobacco-free, but when the Tour arrives at a local high school, classes aresuspended for a mandatory assembly that includes an action sports show and exposure to sponsors’ branding, with on-site promotions and sampling. When Microsoft sponsored the tour, for example, new Xbox games were a featured attraction.

Finally, a less obvious but significant educational harm associated with school commercialism involves the threat posed to critical thinking.Research shows, Molnar and colleagues write, that critical thinking skills are best fostered in an environment where students are encouraged “to ask questions, to think about their thought processes and thus develop habits of mind that enable them to transfer the critical thinking skills they learn in class to other, unrelated, situations.” Yet, as they point out, “…it is never in a sponsor’s interest for children to learn to identify and evaluate its points of view and biases, to consider alternative points of view, or to generate and consider alternative solutions to problems.”

“Corporate sponsors want their story to be accepted uncritically,” Molnar says.

The report references the coal industry’s collaboration with children’s book publisher Scholastic Inc.. Scholastic produced materials for the American Coal Foundation’s “The United States of Energy” 4th grade curriculum. Classroom materials in this program were written to emphasize many states’ use and production of coal.

This coal curriculum caught the attention of a coalition of advocacy groups in the spring of 2011 and led to a campaign that culminated in Scholastic’s July decision to halt distribution of the coal-related materials and to reduce its production and promotion of other sponsored content. Yet Scholastic Inschool, the publisher’s marketing arm for corporate clients, has launched numerous in-school marketing campaigns in recent years for companies such as Brita water filters, Disney and Nestlé.

Similarly, energy companies such as Chevron and Shell Oil (another Scholastic Inschool client) have spent heavily on classroom materials. Shell’s sponsored school curriculum describes the multi-national corporation as a leader in alternative energy rather than as chiefly a petroleum company.

“These materials are designed to place a halo over the sponsoring company, not to promote a critical understanding of complex issues,” said Molnar.

After reviewing these and other corporate-sponsored materials, the authors conclude that “Instead of promoting … higher-level thinking, sponsors promote their message and encourage activities” that may appear to forward children’s education, but never risk “touching on anything that might lead to thinking inconsistent with that message.”

Molnar, Boninger, and Fogarty point out: “This is the natural, unsurprising course of action for a corporation. It does not, however, promote the intellectual development of students or serve the broader interests of society.”

The authors argue that corporations’ interest is the profit motive, not educating children or promoting the general welfare. They conclude:

“Corporate involvement with schools necessarily bends what students learn, how they learn, and the nature of the school and classroom environment in a direction that favors the corporate bottom line. These corporations attempt to shape the habits of mind that children internalize and carry with them, to the detriment of us all.”

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Tim Hjersted: The Top 10 Films that Explain Why Occupy Wall St. Exists

2011-12-21T12:57:00.002-05:00

The Top 10 Films that Explain Why Occupy Wall St. Exists
by Tim Hjersted
Films for Action

One of the most entertaining yet unsurprising aspects of Occupy Wall St has been the response from traditional media. Whether intentionally playing dumb or genuinely clueless, the mainstream media has failed to inform the public and substantially address the key issues. But why are tens of thousands of people risking arrest all over the world, setting up encampments and protesting the status quo?

For everyone who has been following independent, alternative media, the answer is obvious. People who have been clued in to what's been going on in this country for the last decade are responding: Finally! A movement to match the scale of the problem is taking root here in America!

A new cultural zeitgeist is growing increasingly more visible in the shadow of the old - one that is steadily zeroing in on the root problems that are paralyzing the prosperity of our future: corporate personhood, an undemocratic system of government, a centralized fractional-reserve banking system, neoclassical economics and capitalism itself.

Seen in this light, it's understandable that the press would feign confusion. Unlike the now co-opted Tea Party movement, which has sadly only served to bolster the corporate welfare state and the interests of the 1%, the problems OWS are exposing are too threatening to the established powers to critically examine. Our demands are too big to be mentioned. And so from the media: We have no demands. We do not know what the problem is. We want handouts from government and simply want a free ride. However, as more people get tuned into alternative media and see the disparity between the reality and what the pundits have to say, the comical theater of the mass media only ingrains its own irrelevance.

Of course, for all the people who still get informed by the mass media, there is much work to do. To combat the misinformation, we need to become the media ourselves, and we have ample tools at our disposal. The biggest memes behind OWS - the ideas and analysis of the problem that gives the movement its inspiration - have been amply documented in several amazing documentaries that are freely available online.

So, following, are the top 10 films that capture the spirit and motivation of the movement. They are the heavy-weight truth bombs which provide the intellectual backing and substance to the slogans and chants. Watch these films. Share them with friends. By breaking the bottleneck the mass media holds on the flow of information and turning people on to alternative channels, we'll be able to build the collective understanding necessary to realize the ambitious goals of OWS.

To Read About the Films

Marina Sitrin: Ruptures in imagination -- Horizontalism, autogestion and affective politics in Argentina

2011-12-18T21:21:00.000-05:00

Ruptures in imagination: Horizontalism, autogestion and affective politics in Argentina
by Marina Sitrin
Policy & Practice

In this article, Marina Sitrin will explore a new social creation in Argentina, sparked by a popular rebellion which began in December, 2001. Different from so many social movements of the past, this rebellion rejected political programs, opting instead to create directly democratic spaces. This new social relationship has become commonly known as horizontalidad.

Introduction

A mass demonstration sings collectively ‘Oh, que se vayan todos, que no quedan, ni uno solo’ (oh, that they all must go, that not even one remains). Public art reads, ‘Ni Dios, Ni Patria’, ‘Autogestion’, ‘La Solución: Autogestion’, ‘Nuestro Suenos no Caben en Sus Urnas’, ‘La Verdadera Democracia Esta En Las Calles’, ‘Nunca Mas, No Te Metas’ and ‘Ocupar, Resistir, Producir’ (translated as ‘Neither God nor Country’, ‘Self Management’, ‘The Solution: Self Management’, ‘Our dreams do not fit in your Ballot Boxes’, ‘The True Democracy is in the Streets’, ‘Never Again will I not be Involved’, and ‘Occupy, Resist, Produce’).

These are expressions of grassroots mobilization and direct democracy from hundreds of thousands of middle class and recently declassed urban dwellers who have organized themselves into neighborhood assemblies in Argentina. This article will consider some of the stirring and enduring changes that have taken in place in Argentina in recent years, particularly in the period after December 2001 when a total economic collapse precipitated millions of people taking to the streets. Within two weeks, this popular response to macro-economic mismanagement resulted in the collapse of five consecutive governments, while simultaneously creating new horizontal assemblies designed to meet local community needs. The interview selections in this article are drawn from the oral history I published in Spanish and English (Horizontalidad: Voces de Poder Popular en Argentina, Chilavert 2005, and Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, AKPress 2006). The vast majority of interviews are based on relationships that I established, and maintain with participants in autonomous social movements and collectives throughout Argentina. Most interviews were conducted between 2002 and 2005.

These new assemblies rejected and reject hierarchical government and instead adopt forms of direct democracy and horizontalism. They enabled workers to take over and run hundreds of workplaces, from clinics and supermarkets, to print shops and daily newspapers. In addition, indigenous communities have been supported in reclaiming their land and unemployed workers have protested successfully in order to demand unemployment subsidies, while working together in their neighborhoods to feed the community through communal bakeries and kitchens, provide popular education and schools, and other essential services. These movements of resistance and solidarity relate to one another on a fundamental level, as they are not trying to take state power, but instead seek to create alternative ways of living.

Throughout history people have looked to one another when formal institutions are laid bare by reorganizing and reshaping their lives and communities. This is usually done in a way that is more caring and mutually respectful than was evident before. For example, in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001 in New York, individuals looked to one another for help and solidarity rather than looking to institutions. Parks were transformed into spaces for public conversations, and this form of mutually supportive behavior has repeated itself frequently throughout history (Solnit, 2005).

I am sure that each person reading this can think of instances when we have looked to one another for mutual aid and support in the absence of formal institutions. This is not how we are taught to behave, but this break between the perception and reality of human interaction can shift people’s imaginations and ways of being so that they begin to organize differently as was the case in contemporary Argentina. For most people here it was not only the economic crisis that produced fundamental grassroots change, but a rupture in their relations with the state, and a period of reflection and understanding in which they viewed each other differently and helped to develop a new society. Severe economic troubles had affected the vast majority of Argentines for years before the period of total collapse. While the freezing of their bank accounts in January 2002 was a key moment for the middle class, workers in both the unemployed and indigenous communities had felt the effects of economic crisis for years, even lifetimes. The economic crisis served as a process of rejecting structures of power and antiquated ways of relating to one another. When people in Argentina spoke of what had so profoundly changed their society, most pointed to altered personal connections, or horizontalidad, rather than increased economic distress. Similar processes of societal change have taken effect in other parts of the world over the last decade and they are considered in the next section.

Contemporary rise of prefigurative politics

Over the past ten years the world has been witnessing an upsurge in prefigurative revolutionary movements: movements that create the future in the present. These new movements do not create party platforms or programs. They do not look to one leader, but make space for all to be leaders. They place more importance on asking the right questions than on providing the correct answers and resolutely reject dogma and hierarchy in favor of direct democracy and consensus.

Where are these new social movements located? They can be found in the autonomous Zapatista communities of Chiapas, Mexico, where indigenous communities organize autonomously from the state, working to meet their basic necessities while using consensus-based decision making to create themselves anew. They are also in the mass organizations in rural Brazil, where the landless movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra - MST) has been reclaiming the land and reconstructing their communities. They are in the shanty-towns of South Africa, where ‘poor’ women and men use direct action and direct democracy to take back electricity, housing, water, and other resources denied them by corporations and government. They are in India too, where thousands of people are coming together to protect the environment and prevent the construction of dams, using mass direct action and participatory decision making. They are the indigenous groups in Ecuador and Bolivia that are resisting privatization and helping to prevent environmental destruction through mass blockades and mass democracy. They are in the social centers in Italy, providing direct services and meeting spaces for those involved in direct democracy projects. They are in the many direct action groups in Eastern Europe, working to abolish borders on the principal that no person should be considered illegal. They are also in the autonomous groupings around the USA and Canada, groups that begin with the assumption of consensus decision-making, anti-hierarchy, and anti-capitalism. These new movements are part of an international trend toward popular democracy and direct participation and yet operate at community levels.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Greg Tate: Fight for rights, will to power -- The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

2011-12-18T19:08:00.000-05:00

Fight for rights, will to power: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
by Greg Tate
Sight and Sound (British Film Institute)

...

The Black Power Mixtape Remixed 1967-1975 is an exotic document of this turbulent, extremely violent transitional moment in American race history. Exotic because it’s the culmination of the near-decade an intrepid Swedish TV news team spent interviewing prominent Black American radicals of the day – Stokley Carmichael, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Elaine Brown and Angela Davis. All were dramatic, eloquent, charismatic figures of their time who, except for the still-active Davis, are today hardly household names to the average black American under 40.

Like Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan, they all seem incredibly well-prepared in their mid 20s to set the world aflame intellectually and dominate the media – but far less prepared than the Viet Cong or Fidel Castro to withstand the withering, brute and constitutionally illegal attacks directed at them and theirs by the US government, especially the FBI’s fascistic overlord J Edgar Hoover.

Time has not diminished their critiques of American power or racism, nor their undeniable star power – any of them and their radical histories could easily sustain a documentary or narrative feature film of its own. Mixtape captures most of them in the short period before they would be tried, convicted or exiled by Hoover’s stated and manically implemented obsession with preventing the “rise of another black prophet” after King.

The footage of Carmichael and Davis is the most poignant and illuminating. Though the film doesn’t say so, it was Carmichael who brought the phrase ‘Black Power’ into vogue, famously goading King to give it airtime near the end of the two-week-long march to Selma, Alabama. The film demands that those who don’t know these figures investigate them afterwards for more background and context. On film the jocular Carmichael proves so at ease in his own skin that he could have given Sidney Poitier competition as a leading man, and challenged Bob Marley as a lyrical protest balladeer.

Carmichael invites himself to take over an interview the news crew had wrangled with his mother in the Chicago-projects apartment in which he was raised. He then patiently extracts from her the pained admission that his Trinidadian immigrant father, a skilled carpenter, was a lifelong victim of employment discrimination.

As noted by progressive hip-hop MC Talib Kweli in his voiceover, Carmichael emerges here as a “regular guy” who also happened to be a incendiary and mesmerising speaker – one still so provocative that Kweli recalls being accosted by FBI and TSA agents at an airport after 9/11 for merely listening to a 40-year-old Carmichael speech. Some may take Kweli’s intimation of wiretaps as conspiratorial and apocryphal, but no-one familiar with Hoover’s paranoia and surveillance of black progressives will be among them. (The biggest laugh in the film comes from Hoover’s claim that the most dangerous threat to the internal security of the United States was the Black Panther party’s free breakfast program. But Hoover was not joking.)

The progress of the film is also a tacit record of the Panther’s off-screen dismantling by Nixon and Hoover’s COINTELPRO conspiracy against black leadership. The Panther’s demise by exile, imprisonment and judicial malfeasance is presented at a glance, but the Panthers expended all their political capital on the campaigns to Free Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Angela Davis.

Davis’s prison interview here offers the most astute and moving rationale for extreme black retaliation to American racial extremists. When asked to justify the advocacy of black violence, Davis recalls her childhood experience of her Birmingham, Alabama community being routinely bombed by Klansmen at the behest of notorious county sheriff Bull Connor. Davis recalls this motherfucker using local radio to promote and direct such violence on a weekly basis. The extreme close-up of her angry, watering eyes when she speaks of the discovery of four classmates’ body parts after the infamous 1963 Birmingham church bombing provides all the justification for retribution any rational person should need.

To Read the Rest of the Commentary

Mhairi Guild: The Skin We Live In -- The Mad, Bad World of Pedro Almodóvar

2011-12-18T17:15:00.002-05:00

The skin we live in: the mad, bad world of Pedro Almodóvar

Remaining spooked and preoccupied, Mhairi Guild still appreciates density and creativity of Almodovar's latest grotesque fairytale of not-only-gender identity, desire and power

by Mhairi Guild
The F Word

We staggered out of Pedro Almodóvar's latest offering somewhat shell-shocked. There is a huge amount to get out of The Skin I Live In but goodness, is it profoundly dark. Generally well received, the film has nonetheless split critics, some seeing it as a fetishistic mess or empty stylistic exercise, others as a stunning horror of the mind. I think that your reception of the film is likely to depend on your prior relationship with Almodóvar and on how willing you are to go on this particular journey with him.

A dark alpha male Antonio Banderas plays the brooding, obsessive surgeon Robert Ledgard, bunkered in a grand Toledo mansion which offers a lush set for his initially unexplained experimentation on the beautiful captive Vera, played by the porcelain doll-like Elena Anaya. The perfection of Vera's flawless, synthetic skin and the charged secret of her relationship with Ledgard is the central riddle of a plot that weaves back and forth between earlier stages of the narrative and gradually takes us down to depths scarcely imaginable at the outset.

Despite not being familiar with Almodóvar's whole canon, his 2002 Talk To Her has long been one of my favourite films. I have also enjoyed - in different ways - All About My Mother (1999), Volver (2006) and some earlier works like 1990 Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (his last project with Banderas before the latter's defection to Hollywood).

One of the most striking things about The skin I live in is how it pulls together tropes and preoccupations from a number of the director's past films - being a sort of culmination of Almodóvar's body of work. A few of these themes were particularly resonant as the story developed.

Firstly, in Almodóvar's world there is normally an inherent brutality to the male sexual impulse, and it is present to such an extent that I was already squirming uncomfortably within the first half an hour of the film (little was I to know what Almodóvar had in store for me yet). The representation and frequent victory of this type of male sexuality, which is oft accompanied by casual violence, suggests that it is somehow a 'true' manifestation of male sexuality. Together with a forceful masculine possession of the female body, his male characters often exhibit an unreflective ignorance of the coercion present in their seductions. In the three central male figures in the film we get the full bleak spectrum: the boy (Vicente), the man (Ledgard) and the animal (Veco - the 'Tiger'). In this film Almodóvar more than insinuates the notion that heterosexual sex veers precipitously close to rape -, a particularly pessimistic and troubling theme.

More fundamentally, though, Almodóvar's work seems to suggest an impossibility of meaningful communication between the sexes within a certain society. This chasm between man and woman that can never be truly bridged lies at the centre of Talk To Her, where the one-sided relationship between the young coma patient Alicia and her besotted, delusional nurse Benigno is mirrored by the real relationship between Marco and injured bull-fighter Lydia. Almodóvar's men can only ever desire, fetishise and project onto their relations with women; women, in turn, in the male gaze are literally living dolls whose internal lives may be as real as theirs, but can never be truly apprehended. Women remain, as Simone de Beauvoir suggests, men's eternal 'others': an inherent mystery, in sharp distinction to the knowable Self of the male individual. This communication gap between the sexes - which after all has some undeniable, socialised roots - speaks in Almodóvar's work in dark and sometimes terrifying tones. It presents one of the most compelling and intriguing challenges posed by his films, seemingly portraying a gender dystopia we are prompted to remain ever-vigilant against.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Slavoj Zizek: Actual Politics

2011-12-18T13:49:00.000-05:00

Actual Politics
by Slavoj Zizek
Theory and Event

Don't fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap - the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work - we are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not leave in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions - questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The twentieth-century alternatives obviously did not work.

So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not "Main Street, not Wall Street," but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, we see that for a long time we were allowing our political engagements also to be outsourced - we want them back.

They will tell us we are un-American. But when conservative fundamentalists tell you that America is a Christian nation, remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love.

We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols.

They will tell us we are violent, that our very language is violent: occupation, and so on. Yes we are violent, but only in the sense in which Mahatma Gandhi was violent. We are violent because we want to put a stop on the way things go - but what is this purely symbolic violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

We were called losers - but are the true losers not there on the Wall Street, and were they not bailed out by hundreds of billions of your money? You are called socialists - but in the US, there already is socialism for the rich. They will tell you that you don't respect private property - but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if we were to be destroying it here night and day - just think of thousands of homes foreclosed.

We are not Communists, if Communism means the system which deservedly collapsed in 1990 - and remember that Communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism (in China). The success of Chinese Communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons - the commons of nature, of knowledge - which are threatened by the system.

They will tell you that you are dreaming, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely they way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. We are not dreamers; we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything; we are merely witness how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What we are doing is just reminding those in power to look down.

So is the change really possible? Today, the possible and the impossible are distributed in a strange way. In the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is becoming increasingly possible (or so we are told): "nothing is impossible," we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions; entire archives of music, films, and TV series are available for downloading; space travel is available to everyone (with the money); we can enhance our physical and psychic abilities through interventions into the genome, right up to the techno-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by transforming our identity into a software program. On the other hand, in the domain of social and economic relations, we are bombarded all the time by a You cannot ... engage in collective political acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), or cling to the old Welfare State (it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), or isolate yourself from the global market, and so on. When austerity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be done. Maybe, the time has come to turn around these coordinates of what is possible and what is impossible; maybe, we cannot become immortal, but we can have more solidarity and healthcare?

In mid-April 2011, the media reported that Chinese government has prohibited showing on TV and in theatres films which deal with time travel and alternate history, with the argument that such stories introduce frivolity into serious historical matters - even the fictional escape into alternate reality is considered too dangerous. We in the liberal West do not need such an explicit prohibition: ideology exerts enough material power to prevent alternate history narratives being taken with a minimum of seriousness. It is easay for us to imagine the end of the world - see numerous apocalyptic films, but not end of capitalism.

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair - the only thing unavailable is red ink." And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants - the only thing missing is the "red ink": we "feel free" because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict - "war on terror," "democracy and freedom," "human rights," etc. etc. - are FALSE terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. You, here, you are giving to all of us red ink.

Link to the Essay

Spring 2012 Bluegrass Film Society Schedule

2011-12-18T00:49:00.001-05:00

(in development)

Chocolat (France/West Germany/Cameroon: Claire Denis, 1988: 105 mins)

The Black Power Mixtapes 1967 – 1975 (Sweden: Göran Olsson, 2011: 100 mins)

The Wave (Germany: Dennis Gansel, 2008: 107 mins)

Trollhunter (Norway: André Øvredal, 2010: 103 mins)

Lebanon (Israel/France/Lebanon/Germany: Samuel Maoz, 2009: 93 mins)

The Navigators (UK/Germany/Spain: Ken Loach, 2001: 92 mins)

Barking Dogs Never Bite (South Korea: Joon-Ho Bong, 2000: 106 mins)

Sin Nombre (Mexico/USA: Cary Fukunaga, 2009: 96 mins)

The Virgin Spring (Sweden: Ingmar Bergman. 1960: 89 mins)

April's Captains (Portugal/Spain/Italy/France: Maria de Medeiros, 2000: 123 mins)

Strike (Poland/Germany: Volker Schlöndorff, 2006: 104 mins)

Land of the Blind (UK/USA: Robert Edwards, 2006: 110 mins)

Le quattro volte (Italy/Germany/Switzerland: Michelangelo Frammartino, 2010: 88 mins)

The Strange Case of Angelica (Portugal/Spain/France/Brazil: Manoel de Oliveira, 2010: 97 mins)

Leanne Bibby: Perfume: the Story of a Murderer: The film adaptation of Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume is a stunning indictment of society's attitude towards women

2011-12-17T22:17:00.002-05:00

Perfume: the Story of a Murderer: The film adaptation of Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume is a stunning indictment of society's attitude towards women.
by Leanne Bibby
The F Word (United Kingdom)

A film about a killer on a mission to murder women and harvest their scents might seem like a rather obvious choice of subject for a feminist review. Nonetheless, there are two reasons why I decided to write this and why I'd like to encourage you to see Tom Tykwer's 2006 adaptation of Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume: the Story of a Murderer. First of all, it's one of the most unusual and inventive films to appear in some time, in cinemas and DVD retailers currently glutted with sequels, prequels, remakes and other somewhat unimaginative fare.

The second reason I think it deserves our attention is its graphic and unflinching yet sophisticated representation of violence towards women. This struck me as having appeared at an ideal time, as debates on this and related issues rage on. Having not read Süskind's original novel, I'm in no position to comment on it and so this review is concerned exclusively with the film.

Ben Whishaw plays Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan born in 18th century Paris and possessed of a supernatural sense of smell. The film's early scenes, as sensuously fantastical as they are grim, follow him from a childhood of unimaginable poverty and social isolation up to the day his unique talent leads him to become apprentice to struggling perfumer Giuseppe Baldini, played to the hilt by a bewigged Dustin Hoffman. Having already suffocated to death a young woman with whose scent he'd become intoxicated, Grenouille embarks on a quest to create the ultimate perfume by infusing the essences of beautiful women - that is, their scents. To everyone outside his reclusive, amoral world, of course, this is a killing spree and nothing more.

Oblivious to this, Grenouille single-mindedly preys upon women for the "sublime beauty" of their scents. Their lives, personalities and, interestingly, their sexual attractions are inconsequential to him. By way of an omniscient narration, we are made privy to his thoughts and fixations as he commits his shocking acts, but I was intrigued to find that this is only one feature of a multi-layered film experience. The restrained and largely off-camera violence is at the tale's core, but ultimately secondary to our view of the women themselves.

Tykwer's dreamlike storytelling emphasises Grenouille's reveries of smell in the presence of doll-like women with uniformly porcelain skins and shining hair. In doing this, it also shows us a culture that holds women to be just that: dolls. Lovely, guileless and almost voiceless, they appear doomed to slip into the death-destiny planned for them and remain largely unchanged afterwards: their physical appeal - the only valued part of them - captured in scent.

To Read the Rest of the Review

Lindsay and Francesca Levy: On the harrowing Lilya-4-Ever, directed by Lukas Moodysson

2011-12-17T14:49:00.000-05:00

The harrowing Lilya-4-Ever, directed by Lukas Moodysson.
by Lindsay and Francesca Levy
The F Word (United Kingdom)

This is the latest reproduction of email exchanges between two American friends living apart. This time they disagree on their topic of choice; the film Lilya 4-Ever by director Lukas Moodysson. Lindsay saw the film in London on Tuesday 29th April as part of the Women's Library film and debate at the Barbican Centre. Francesca Levy saw the film on 15th May, at Cinema Village, in New York City.

From Francesca

I saw Lilya 4-Ever last night and walked out before the last half-hour because it was so revoltingly violent, gratuitous, and one-dimensional. The fact is, there were redeeming things about it, points it was trying to make, but it all washed away behind the half-dozen rape scenes and at least a dozen other sexual exploitation scenes. I fail to see what the critics do: that the movie is not exploitative, but rather shames the victimizers in the film as well as the viewer. Sure it's an unflinching look at the child sex trade but really it isn't, because that aspect of it is swallowed up by the same recurring scene, and the whole movie occurs in one tone, without any need to add dimension to any characters besides the angelic protagonists. As far as I'm concerned it's only distinction from the billion other movies with horrible rape scenes is that in Lilya 4-Ever there are so damn many of them, and they're so graphically filmed.

From Lindsay

I'm afraid I completely disagree with you. I thought the film was really powerful and not gratuitous at all considering the way so many rape and exploitation scenes focus on nakedness and the sexual act. My perception was partly influenced by seeing the film as part of a debate put on by the Women's Library with a panel of people who work directly with women who have been trafficked into the sex industry saying it was absolutely true to the life experiences they have heard over and over again. I also don't see how the protagonists were unquestionably angelic. Lilya was disrespectful to adults, didn't go to school or work (until she started sex work), sniffed glue and hung around other kids who did the same. She is not a good kid in most people's eyes and a lot of adults would consider her to be deserving of some of the neglect she receives. She is the poster 'problem child' that our entire society deems in need of an adult to set her straight and make her contribute to the world.

The main thing I felt the film addressed was the absolute lack of responsibility adults take for young people who need their help or even those they think need 'sorting out'. Her parents and family didn't give a shit about her and social services, when blatantly informed that she had no other guardian, failed to provide her with even the most basic support. There were so many points at which an adult could have intervened and saved her from her fate. But they didn't. Day after day I deal with 16-year-olds whose parents are fed up with them and willing to make them homeless because they think they've done their part and that someone else will take care of them.

I think that was why the film really hit home with me and I was relieved that something that will be seen by a wide audience was able to express the desperation and fear young people feel when they are neglected and thrown out into the world before they are ready. Mostly I hope it will be a reality check for people as to how it is almost inevitable that someone will be there to exploit them when they are.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Bruce E. Levine: How Ayn Rand Seduced Generations of Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation

2011-12-17T14:19:00.001-05:00

How Ayn Rand Seduced Generations of Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation
by Bruce E. Levine
AlterNet

...

How Rand’s Philosophy Seduced Young Minds

When I was a kid, my reading included comic books and Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There wasn’t much difference between the comic books and Rand’s novels in terms of the simplicity of the heroes. What was different was that unlike Superman or Batman, Rand made selfishness heroic, and she made caring about others weakness.

Rand said, “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible....The choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.” For many young people, hearing that it is “moral” to care only about oneself can be intoxicating, and some get addicted to this idea for life.

I have known several people, professionally and socially, whose lives have been changed by those close to them who became infatuated with Ayn Rand. A common theme is something like this: “My ex-husband wasn’t a bad guy until he started reading Ayn Rand. Then he became a completely selfish jerk who destroyed our family, and our children no longer even talk to him.”

To wow her young admirers, Rand would often tell a story of how a smart-aleck book salesman had once challenged her to explain her philosophy while standing on one leg. She replied: “Metaphysics—objective reality. Epistemology—reason. Ethics—self-interest. Politics—capitalism.” How did that philosophy capture young minds?

Metaphysics—objective reality. Rand offered a narcotic for confused young people: complete certainty and a relief from their anxiety. Rand believed that an “objective reality” existed, and she knew exactly what that objective reality was. It included skyscrapers, industries, railroads, and ideas—at least her ideas. Rand’s objective reality did not include anxiety or sadness. Nor did it include much humor, at least the kind where one pokes fun at oneself. Rand assured her Collective that objective reality did not include Beethoven’s, Rembrandt’s, and Shakespeare’s realities—they were too gloomy and too tragic, basically buzzkillers. Rand preferred Mickey Spillane and, towards the end of her life, “Charlie's Angels.”

Epistemology—reason. Rand’s kind of reason was a “cool-tool” to control the universe. Rand demonized Plato, and her youthful Collective members were taught to despise him. If Rand really believed that the Socratic Method described by Plato of discovering accurate definitions and clear thinking did not qualify as “reason,” why then did she regularly attempt it with her Collective? Also oddly, while Rand mocked dark moods and despair, her “reasoning” directed that Collective members should admire Dostoyevsky, whose novels are filled with dark moods and despair. A demagogue, in addition to hypnotic glibness, must also be intellectually inconsistent, sometimes boldly so. This eliminates challenges to authority by weeding out clear-thinking young people from the flock.

Ethics—self-interest. For Rand, all altruists were manipulators. What could be more seductive to kids who discerned the motives of martyr parents, Christian missionaries and U.S. foreign aiders? Her champions, Nathaniel Branden still among them, feel that Rand’s view of “self-interest” has been horribly misrepresented. For them, self-interest is her hero architect Howard Roark turning down a commission because he couldn’t do it exactly his way. Some of Rand’s novel heroes did have integrity, however, for Rand there is no struggle to discover the distinction between true integrity and childish vanity. Rand’s integrity was her vanity, and it consisted of getting as much money and control as possible, copulating with whomever she wanted regardless of who would get hurt, and her always being right. To equate one’s selfishness, vanity, and egotism with one’s integrity liberates young people from the struggle to distinguish integrity from selfishness, vanity, and egotism.

Politics—capitalism. While Rand often disparaged Soviet totalitarian collectivism, she had little to say about corporate totalitarian collectivism, as she conveniently neglected the reality that giant U.S. corporations, like the Soviet Union, do not exactly celebrate individualism, freedom, or courage. Rand was clever and hypocritical enough to know that you don’t get rich in the United States talking about compliance and conformity within corporate America. Rather, Rand gave lectures titled: “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business.” So, young careerist corporatists could embrace Rand’s self-styled “radical capitalism” and feel radical — radical without risk.

Rand’s Legacy

In recent years, we have entered a phase where it is apparently okay for major political figures to publicly embrace Rand despite her contempt for Christianity. In contrast, during Ayn Rand’s life, her philosophy that celebrated self-interest was a private pleasure for the 1 percent but she was a public embarrassment for them. They used her books to congratulate themselves on the morality of their selfishness, but they publicly steered clear of Rand because of her views on religion and God. Rand, for example, had stated on national television, “I am against God. I don’t approve of religion. It is a sign of a psychological weakness. I regard it as an evil.”

Actually, again inconsistent, Rand did have a God. It was herself. She said:

I am done with the monster of “we,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: “I.”

While Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United State’s dehumanization of African Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans’ guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it “moral” for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she “liberated” millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children.

The good news is that I’ve seen ex-Rand fans grasp the damage that Rand’s philosophy has done to their lives and to then exorcize it from their psyche. Can the United States as a nation do the same thing?

To Read the Entire Essay

Vanessa Richards: Occupying Army

2011-12-16T15:29:00.001-05:00

Global Post: Why Indonesian kids are crazy for punk

2011-12-15T13:27:00.003-05:00

Chomsky on Corporate Personhood

2011-12-14T16:19:00.001-05:00

Natalie Merchant: Ophelia

2011-12-13T18:14:00.001-05:00

Hardcore History: The Death Throes of the Roman Republic, pts 1 - 6

2011-12-12T16:40:00.002-05:00

Show 34 - Death Throes of the Republic I

The wars which elevate Rome to superpower status also sow the seed for the downfall of its political system. Money, slaves, ambition, political stalemate and class warfare prove to be a toxic, bloody mix.

Show 35 - Death Throes of the Republic II

Disaster threatens the Republic, but the cure might be worse than the disease. "The Dan Carlin version" of this story continues with ambition-addict Marius dominating the story and Plutarch dominating the sources.

Show 36 - Death Throes of the Republic III

Rome's political violence expands in intensity from riots and assassinations to outright war as the hyper-ambitious generals Marius and Sulla tear the Republic and its constitution apart vying for power and glory.

Show 37 - Death Throes of the Republic IV

Sulla returns to Rome to show the Republic what REAL political violence looks like. Civil war and deadly partisan payback will pave the way for reforms pushed at sword point. Lots of heads will roll...literally.

Show 38 - Death Throes of the Republic V

The last great generation of the Roman Republic emerges from the historical mists. The dynamic between Caesar, Cato, Cicero, Crassus and Pompey forms the axis around which the rest of this tale revolves.

Show 39 - Death Throes of the Republic VI

In a massive finish to the "Dan Carlin version" of the fall of the Roman Republic, conspiracies, civil wars, beatniks of antiquity and a guy named Caesar figure prominently. Virtually everyone dies.