Friday

All This Time by Sting. Album: The Soul Cages. Label: A&M, 1991.



Soul Cages, as a concept album, has running through it the thematic clothesline of death at the hands of the sea or death in the choke hold  of a life spent building and mending ships. Sting's father had just died and according to his bio the old man had dreamt of being a sailor. 

The problem with Sting's videos, however, with the exception of his pop love songs, are that his lyrics are so riddle with stark visuals, philosophical rabbit trails and labyrinths that it becomes difficult to translate the weight of it all to the screen.

...Two priests came round our house tonight
One young, one old, to offer prayers for the dying
To serve the final rite
One to learn, one to teach
Which way the cold wind blows
Fussing and flapping in priestly black
Like a murder of crows...

And all this time, the river flowed
Endlessly to the sea
If I had my way I'd take a boat from the river
And I'd bury the old man,
I'd bury him at sea

And all this time the river flowed
In the falling light of a northern sun
If I had my way I'd take a boat from the river
Men go crazy in congregations
But they only get better
One by one

Above, the "All this time" video stuck with the song's jolly track and tried to defuse the weight of the lyrics and the surreal landscape they evoke by going for a Melies type of surreal and turning the whole visualization into a parody of itself.

It seems they were going for the surreal via some sort of psychedelic chaos, but if their goal was the surreal then their failure can be attributed to the same misunderstanding avant garde artists like Man Ray and Germaine Dulac had in translating surrealist poems to the screen at the dawn of the century (watch all the vaseline smeared on the lens in Ray's L'etoile De Mer (1928) or the dissolves in Dulac's 1928 La Coquille et le clergyman). 

It wasn't till 1929 when Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali made Un Chien Andalou that the puzzle of surrealist film was finally solved -- one can't directly evoke the surreal, rather one assaults the mind and reason by using already established editing techniques to undermine the logic of the real world.

Nigeria: The Revolution Will Be YouTubed

U Be Thief by Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Album: Authority Stealing. Polygram Records, 2000 (CD).

In Sub-Saharan African cultures, call and response is a pervasive pattern of democratic participation -- in public gatherings in the discussion of civic affairs, in religious rituals, as well as in vocal and instrumental musical expression. It is this tradition that African bondsmen and women brought with them to the New World and which has been transmitted over the centuries in various forms of cultural expression -- in religious observance; public gatherings; sporting events; even in children's rhymes; and, most notably, in African-American music in its myriad forms and descendants including: gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz and jazz extensions -- wiki

Briefs, ganja, band practice, call-and-response Fela style:

Accuser: You be thief / Accused: I no be thief.
You be rogue/ I no be rogue
You dey steal/ I no dey steal
You be robber/ I no be robber
You be armed robber/ I no be armed robber

I no be thief/ You be thief
I no be rogue/ You be rogue
I no dey steal/ You dey steal
I no be robber/ You be robber
I no be armed robber/ You be armed robber

I've always thought the flip in the chorus was ingenious; rather than switch places, Fela, as the accuser, just appropriates the responses of the accused, aware that as long as the accuser is standing on the grounds that he is not what he accuses the other of being then accusations and their disavowals are one and the same.

The part that always makes me laugh though is after replying you are not a robber then let me clarify, perhaps, you are an armed robber? lol

Abami Eda -- R.I.P

Zimbabwe: The Lancaster House Excuse

The Lancaster House

In his January 16th column, Bob Herbert reminded his readers that there was a cholera epidemic laying waste to Zimbabwe. With the current health crisis in Mugabeland and with Mrs. Mugabe busy beating up photographers in Hong Kong, now is definitely not the time for a nuanced discussion about what ails Comrade Bob.

Rather, now is the time, as Herbert's column presumes, to simply dismiss him as the mad man he is, further demonize the demon, and hope the international community finally grows a pair and remove him and his acolytes from power.

Herbert couldn't have drawn a more truthful picture of the health situation or a more hackneyed caricature of Uncle Bob:

If you want to see hell on earth, go to Zimbabwe where the madman Robert Mugabe has brought the country to such a state of ruin that medical care for most of the inhabitants has all but ceased to exist. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe is now the lowest in the world: 37 years for men and 34 for women. A cholera epidemic is raging. People have become ill with anthrax after eating the decaying flesh of animals that had died from the disease. Power was lost to the morgue in the capital city of Harare, leaving the corpses to rot.

Most of the world is ignoring the agony of Zimbabwe, a once prosperous and medically advanced nation in southern Africa that is suffering from political and economic turmoil — and the brutality of Mugabe’s long and tyrannical reign.

Mugabe signed a power-sharing agreement a few months ago with a political opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, who out-polled Mugabe in an election last March but did not win a majority of the votes. But continuing turmoil, including violent attacks by Mugabe’s supporters and allegations that Mugabe forces have engaged in torture, have prevented the agreement from taking effect. The widespread skepticism that greeted Mugabe’s alleged willingness to share power only increased when he ranted, just last month: “I will never, never, never surrender ... Zimbabwe is mine."

Okay, point taken: Uncle Bob is crazy as a loon. But since the the rest of the world can't simply napalm him out of existence, politics require we decipher some method to his madness, and hear his side of the story. Yes, even horror stories have 2 sides to them. Come to think of it, have people on Elm street ever thought to ask Mr. Kruger what his side of the story is?

So I went looking for someone--anyone--that offered Mugabe's story or, at least, a logical defense--emphasis on "logical"-- for what Uncle Bob is doing to the country he helped liberate from the British.

Maybe it's a Charles Manson syndrome but even after you weed out the staff of the Zimbabwean Herald, there are still a lot of Uncle Bob sympathizers out there. The following was "helter skeltered" on the comments wall of Herbert's column:

Yes, Herbert, Zimbabwe is a "hell on earth" today, no doubt about it. Not because Mugabe is a mad man, but because Tony Blair was determined that the Lancaster House Agreement, which was signed by his predecessors and Mugabe at Zimbabwe's independence, was unfair to white farmers. He consequently succeeded is convincing the West, including yourself, to punish Mugabe for insisting on implementing the agreement like it was written. If those farmers were blacks Blair would not have cared "two pence" about them.

Blair's strategy was to generate global economic sanctions against Zimbabwe to make life impossible for its citizenry, who in turn would turn against their leadership. Well, he succeeded. BBC executives who tried to tell the truth in the early days of the Blair plan were silenced with threats of losing their jobs.

It was the same Blair who still insists that the Iraq War was justified, a position that forced him out of 10 Downing Street.

Surprisingly, none of the western and even African journalists who write about Zimbabwe ever try to study the Lancaster House Agreement and find out how Mugabe implemented it. They rely entirely on what the Zimbabwe opposition who are funded by the West say. Morgan Tsavaringai and Buthalezi were planted by the West to show that blacks could not govern in themselves in Zimbabwe and South Africa, respectively. Buthalezi and his Zulu movement failed in South Africa. Which explains why southern African countries have been reluctant to condemn Mugabe--they know the truth.

So, Mr. Herbert, I would suggest that you find and read the Lancaster House Agreement before you write again about Zimbabwe (Percy, Dallas, Texas)

Let's for a moment say Uncle Bob nudged Zimbabwe off a cliff edge when he and Zanu-PF ditched land redistribution and resettlement plans, and to placate his political base (war veterans) he started a $20 million farm invasion policy, using government trucks to transport gangs with axes and pangas to take over white-owned farms. Percy from Texas seems to be arguing that these land invasions was just Uncle Bob implementing the Lancaster House Agreement.

Alright. I have no idea what the Lancaster House Agreement is. But I didn't just google it, I actually went ahead and "stole" my flat mate's copy of Martin Meredith's Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe. Now, according to Meredith:

During the Lancaster House negotiations, the land issue was one of the most difficult to resolve. The whites, backed by the British government, insisted that land rights were entrenched in a Bill of Rights in the new constitution. [...] The compromise that Mugabe was forced to accept meant that for 10 years the government could only purchase land against the owners' wishes if it was "underutilized" or required for a public purpose, and only then if the owner was provided with prompt and full compensation in foreign exchange. In other words, land transactions could only be conducted on a "willing seller-willing buyer" basis. This provision effectively restricted the government to purchasing limited and often poor quality land that was voluntarily offered for sale. Britain agreed to help finance a land redistribution programme, but within a strict budget. (118)

But even to buy back the "poor/underutilized land," where would the Zimbabwean government get the "foreign exchange"? And if the British were not forthcoming with funds, what then?

To put things in context, Meredith provides some background about a long, long, time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, when Uncle Bob was actually the good guy heading the rebel alliance and the British were the Galactic Empire:

When the pioneer Column of white settlers arrived in Mashonaland in 1890, their main hope was to find gold. [...] The gold rush soon proved disappointing. The small white community therefore turned to the next available prize: land. [...] Within ten years of the arrival of the Pioneer Column, nearly 16 million acres--nearly one-sixth of the entire land area of 96 million acres--had been seized by whites. [...] The division of land between white and black was formalized in 1931 with the introduction of the Land Apportionment Act [which] stipulated that no African was entitled to hold or occupy land in white areas. [...] The consequence of the Land Apportionment Act, which remained in force for nearly 40 years, was that the black population, which numbered 1 million in 1931, was allocated 29 million acres, whereas the white population, numbering 48,000, of whom only 11,000 were settled on the land, awarded 48 million acres. In the boom years that followed the second World War, white farmers benefited increasingly from technological advances made with improved machinery; new crop strains; and the use of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. By switching to Virginia tobacco production, they found a reliable and highly profitable cash crop [...] With more land needed for production, thousands of Africans were evicted from white farm areas and forced into reserves that were already overcrowded. During the 1950s the African population rose from 2 to 3 million. African grievances over land swelled into nationalist protest.

The rhetoric of gaining back land fueled the 2nd Chimurenga fought in the 70s. The "cease fire" brought Mugabe, ZAPU, ZANU and Abel Muzorewa and the British to the round table to hash out terms at the Lancaster House in 1979. 

Mugabe in 1979 knew the Lancaster deal was flawed because it meant, to get seized Zimbabwean land back from the whites he would need the financial help of the whites. Tanzanian journalist Ben Mabula writes that Mugabe "was eventually pressured to sign by the frontline state leaders, especially Mwalimu Nyerere, who told him to accept political independence first and all would follow. It was reported then that Mugabe was staying with a British friends during the talks, and he was almost in tears when it became inevitable that he had to sign the agreement without securing a foolproof arrangement for land transfer."

So, according to the agreement, Mugabe could not seize land for 10 years (and he did not), and, according to Annie Schleicher, the 47 million pounds pledged by Britain was "spent up" --cough!-- by 1988 even though the funding pledge didn't expire till 1996, which leap frogs us right over Maggie Thatcher and John Major's Britains into 1997 and the beginning of Tony Blair's Britain, and thus Zimbabwe and Uncle Bob become Blair's problem. So, what happened?

Well, if you are willing to go by this 2007 IPP media article then Mugabe's side of the story has to do with Tony Blair's government rescinding on the Lancaster House Agreement. Ben Mabula writes:

For one to understand Zimbabwe and form a judgement on its current political state, it is vital to go back to the Lancaster House Agreement. The background to the Lancaster House Agreement was the realization by both Britain and the minority regime of Rhodesia led by Ian Smith that the battleground had been lost to ZANU guerillas, who were now striking targets in Salisbury (now Harare) at will. The leadership of ZANU was now in the hands of Robert Mugabe, a brilliant and astute strategist, after he was freed from ten years detention without trial for fighting the racist minority rule.

To facilitate the Agreement, both the British and American governments offered to buy land from white farmers on willing buyer/willing seller basis for re-distribution to the majority blacks. This did not happen for all those 10 years. It was only the first phase of the programme in the 1980s which was faintly accomplished after Britain partially funded the settling of 70,000 landless people. When Tony Blair took over, his government refused to accept its Lancaster House obligations and the foreign cooperation minister Clare Short wrote a no-nonsense letter to the government of Zimbabwe disclaiming any responsibility for funding the land reform.

Mugabe told Britain that he would take over the land by force and this is what he did. Soon after the land seizures began, trade union leaders in Zimbabwe soon became the darling of the British government and took a radical political tone. These are the ones who formed the purely foreign funded and controlled MDC, which is enjoying full Western media support. The battle in Zimbabwe is between the old oppressive system of the settlers and those who brought the change through armed struggle.

Several leaders and top advisers of the MDC belonged to the racist Selous Scouts special armed regiment, which was responsible for a lot of atrocities committed against black people, including poisoning wells and infecting communal water sources with viruses of epidemics like cholera. These are now the heroes of democracy in Zimbabwe and are fighting to bring about regime change by hooks and crooks.

Maybe all this sheds some light into why Uncle Bob is hell bent on killing Zimbabwe before going down from a sucker punch he definitely saw coming as far back as 1979. As far as Uncle Bob is concerned, the 70s never ended; the 2nd Chimurenga goes on; he is still a guerilla soldier in Rhodesia, fighting Ian Smith and the British.

Yes, no doubt about it, the injustices perpetrated on Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans by the British through land seizure and apportionment is second only to trading in slaves. But built on that injustice, whether Uncle Bob likes it or not, was and is the Zimbabwean economy.

Yes, an injustice was done but Uncle Bob went about "correcting it" in the wrong way. For at the end of the day, justice, just like injustice, doesn't feed anyone; capital investment, knowledge based technologically driven industries do. It is part of a larger developmental problem, which reminds me of something i wrote about before: 

...when the world technologically shifts and a peoples' skills set, whether they are hunters or gatherers, become obsolete, they become unplugged from the global economic trajectory; in other words, they remain 4 pin plugs unable to fit into a world now filled with 3 pin sockets. The Masai may be the best hunters and the Bushmen may be the greatest gatherers on the planet, but none of that matters squat when the technological paradigm shifts. That is why a people must elect a government and that government must make sure its people gain new skills sets -- it is the fundamental duty of a government to make certain that as the world shifts, its people are not rendered obsolete.

Africa and Africans are held hostage by capital and technologies we don't marshall in a world that's propelled by technology and owned by those who own or can lend you capital. A leader who ignores that fact in pursuit of justice, does so at his or her nation's peril. There are ways to constructively do both.

This Lancaster House Agreement/excuse, in the epic scope of what Uncle Bob has let befall Zimbabwe, is too small a peg for him to hang the hat of blame on. 

This Lancaster House Agreement, in chess terms, was a check, not a checkmate.

Yes, it was seriously flawed but, perhaps, if Uncle Bob had worked on program of knowledge and technology transfer from white to black and not just physical land transfer then, perhaps, he would have been able to implement the gradual ascension of black farmers and black owned businesses, who, by today, would either have partnered up with white farmers or brought them out. 

Perhaps, if Uncle Bob had stemmed the tide of corruption in his own ranks, then, perhaps, he wouldn't have resorted to seizing land from whites and giving it to blacks in order to placate his political base or to scare the white farmers from funding an opposition to run against him. 

Perhaps....

Kenya: Binyavanga's "Dictatoring" for Dummies

We might all have a ribaldrous uncle inside each of us. He only comes out when the beer tanks are full and present company isn't sheepish about language or correctness of any kind. Binyavanga Wainaina seems to have found his inner tipsy avuncular muse and he is channeling his wisdom in a column for South Africa's Mail & Guardian Online.

His column on the "aspiring dictator's guide" now seems prescient considering DRC would-be-dictator Laurent Nkunda's recent arrest. 

Guess Nkunda wasn't up on his reading. Future would-be tyrants take heed: you need to keep up with your reading or newly discovered rules in dictatorship, dictatoring, or in simply being a dick might pass you by.

Some of Binyavanga's rules worth a chuckle/remembering:   

Rule 2. Find poor, stupid and brutal men from every corner of your country and make them rich. Do not give them money. Give them a place to steal from. Stupid people do not save money. Give all women's church groups money. They are the most powerful groups in your country.

Rule 4. Be very, very nice to your army. Be mean to your police.

Rule 5. Allow all international NGOs and donors free access to starving rural people, so that they vote for you because they got food aid (most African countries).

Rule 6. Colonial countries expected little of Africans. Maintain this illusion. Keep your citizenry ignorant and unproductive. For their food needs, see Rule 5 above.

Rule 11. Do not send all the money you steal to Switzerland and do not give it to your wife. Buy US treasury bonds and hide them in your children's library. They will never use it. Why should they read? Daddy is rich. Do not have businesses in your wife's name. Or in your children's names. Deal in euros, Krugerrands and diamonds. [More]

File this new guide under the Binyavanga "how to" section.

Friday

Another Friday on Saturday. Oh, well...

Royal Garden Blues performed by Branford Marsalis. 

Label: Sony, 1986. 

It's hard to believe this was back in 86, but it makes sense because Spike was still all militant back then. Word on cyber-street was this Brandford video was a Spike Lee joint. 

He shot it in the Bronx Botanical Gardens, submitted the first cut to record label CBS and they didn't like it. So after a short creative struggle Spike walked out & it was re-cut into what we see today.

Aww.. Spike.

Rwanda: We Are Sorry We Did Not And Still Do Not Believe You

Ms. Kaliza Karuretwa Ines -- Commercial attaché, Embassy of 

the Republic of Rwanda

I took that picture of Kaliza last fall at a USIP forum in Washington, DC. She was sent by her embassy to try to explain Rwanda's non-involvement in the then ongoing pogroms by despot-in-the-making Laurent Nkunda and his CNDP rebels in Nord Kivu, an area of the DRC that shares an often non existent border with Rwanda. 

She tried to explain that Kigali, Kagame and Rwanda were not sponsoring their fellow Tutsi, Nkunda, to destabilize Eastern Congo so Rwanda can continue to pursue 1) mineral interests inside the Congo and 2) hunt down Hutu rebels who make up the FDLR.

Of course no one in the audience or on the panel--which included a former DRC ambassador to the United States--believed her. 

But then the news broke this morning that Rwandan forces have captured Nkunda (just a week after a 1000 or so Rwandan soldiers crossed the border into the DRC to help the FARDC with the FDLR), and are holding him in Gisenyi, ready to extradite him to the DRC, or even -- gasp!-- to the Hague!  

So I guess we all owe Kaliza an apology, right? Everybody I ask says, "in a pig's eye."

Nobody is buying the story that Kigali wasn't pulling Nkunda's strings. In fact, at a VOA panel last fall, VOA correspondent Ferdinand Ferella said there have been reports that Rwandan prisoners were being shuttled across the border and used to mine minerals in Eastern Congo; he said you could tell they were Rwandan prisoners by their prison uniforms. 

So, as much as I will like to believe Kaliza was on the level, she must also understand that it's just naivete run amuck to believe that some of the finger prints all over the crime scene in the Kivus are not Rwanda's. For now, everyone is going with the theory that a big factor in what just transpired was due to building world pressure over the rapes and killings by the FDLR, FARDC, PARECO, Mai Mai, CNDP, (LRA), take your pick or combinations. And Nkunda right in the middle of it all and soaking up all the media attention highlighted the Tutsi connection and placed Rwanda in a tight spot, made tighter as the flow of funds via the foreign aid and assistance pipeline to Kigali might be developing some pressure problems of late, thus forcing Kagame's hand: 

Few expected the Rwandan troops to go after General Nkunda. Not only is he a Tutsi, like Rwanda’s leaders, but he had risen to power by fighting these same Hutu militants. Several demobilized Rwandan soldiers recently revealed a secret operation to slip Rwandan soldiers into Congo to fight alongside General Nkunda. He had been trained by the Rwandan Army in the mid-1990s and was widely believed to be an agent for Rwanda’s extensive business and security interests in eastern Congo. But it seems that the Rwandan government abruptly changed its tack, possibly because of the international criticism it has endured for its ties to General Nkunda. Several European countries recently cut aid to Rwanda, sending a strong signal to a poor country that needs outside help. Rwanda may have figured the time was ripe to remove General Nkunda, analysts said. [more]

In addition to the money theory there is also the theory that the split in the CNDP ranks hastened Kigali's decision to break ties with Nkunda. Henri Boshoff over at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa tells Al Jazeera:

The CNDP chief of staff had indicated that he didn't agree any more with the policies of General Nkunda. The possible split in the CNDP had given an indication to the Congolese government that this is the time, maybe, to address the Nkunda issue. We also know that last Friday an agreement was signed between the government of the DRC and the breakaway faction under the leadership of chief of staff General John Bosco [Ntaganda] and all military commanders. Within three days, the Rwandans were crossing the border and were in the DRC. The Congolese government started talking to the Rwandan government on December 4 last year and agreed to carry out a joint operation against the FDLR.

Gentleman adds that many analysts believe Ntaganda's motivation might be "that the Congolese government promised to try to protect Mr. Ntaganda from being sent to The Hague." 

Who knows, maybe the Bemba's extradition and trial is scaring the living daylights out of the African chapter of the Tyrants-in-Waiting Social Club, and maybe--a lot of "maybes" on this one--this will encourage the DRC, Sudan, and Uganda to scour every inch of the Garamba jungle to find Joseph Kony and the LRA. And, by the way, Amanda and Kate over at wronging rights are wondering why no one is asking after poor Betty or what has become of her.

But whatever the politics maybe, kudos has to go to Rwanda for doing the right thing and taking out their fellow Tutsi. I pray Kaliza passes the message along.

-- DRC: Three Theories

Film: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Some Parodies of Masculinity

In A Man and his Dog (2008), a remake of Victorio De Sica's 1955 Umberto D, Jean Belmondo plays the role made famous by the non professional actor prof. Carlo Battisti in what is arguably De Sica's best attempt at distilling neo-realism to its pure essence -- and probably the closest De Sica ever got to realizing his writer's, Cesaire Zavattini's, brand of neo-realism.

Anyway, Belmondo, who is now 75, is reported by Elaine Sciolino to have suffered a stroke in 2001, which left the right side of his body paralyzed and so he now walks with a limp.

Jean-Paul Belmondo. Photo: NY Times.

I can totally see how his condition serves as an asset in depicting the crumbling pride of Umberto Domenico Ferrari and his dog. According to Belmondo, he only agreed to play the role:

only if it showed him as the old, disabled man that he is. “It’s me,” he said, “without any special effects.” [...] “I hope,” he said, “to be an example for all. I hope.” [...] So the film makes no effort to disguise Mr. Belmondo’s physical limitations. He is shown walking — slowly and with a cane — in only one scene. He has little dialogue. The deep lines creasing his face are made more dramatic with shadows; the nose squashed decades ago in a boxing ring gives him an oddly broken look.

So if Belmondo plays Umberto D, he doesn't only play the crumbling pride of a dignified, learned retiree made irrelevant in a post war city, but like Peter O Toole in Venus, he also portrays a persona that must seek the less familiar tropes of behavior when it comes to how masculinity is depicted in narrative cinema. However, such a portrayal, on the part of Belmondo, also foregrounds itself as an act of reflexivity, reminding us that Belmondo' very own filmic persona as always been useful to cinema as a tool of masculine deconstruction and reflexivity.

Belmondo blasted his way unto screens in 1960 as Michel Poiccard in Goddard's A bout de Souffle, playing a charismatic, small time crook in love/existential free fall, and who is, advertently, enthralled by the screen persona of the 40s Hollywood tough guy, in this case Humphrey Bogart.

Bogie

Belmondo as Michel Poiccard
in Breathless (1960)

New Wave films, especially Goddard's, or Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960), broke the line whereby movies pretended to be part of some pre-existing reality; Poiccard's on screen imitation of Bogart on screen persona exposes, uses, and plays with the semiotic codes of filmic masculinity, making us aware through its reflexivity that, out of a whole syntagm of possibilities, we are dealing with a select paradigm of rules that naturalizes and deceptively makes masculinity, as a whole, re-cognizable on screen. So, it is easy to see why Belmondo's Poiccard symbolizes a deconstructive imitation of Hollywood masculinity in Breathless and in doing so becomes iconic of such self critique or reflex.

One of my favorite examples of Belmondo being used reflexively to ground the questioning of Hollywood masculinity can be seen in Haskel Wexler's Medium Cool (1969).

Robert Forster and Haskel Wexler filming
Medium Cool. Photo: sticking place films

Robert Forster's character, John Cassellis, starts out as a Bogart-type tough guy who refuses to let the pathos of the kind of news he covers get in his way of covering them, that is until he learns his TV station is leaking his coverage to the FBI. He loses his job and in a bout of self examination, he imitates Bogart, the patron saint of all tough guys, and, like Bogie, he proceeds to light a cigarette and blow smoke only for the camera to pull out revealing him against the background a huge poster of Belmondo's Poiccard. One imitation certainly grounds the other; Poiccard's image becomes the refracting glass that makes the bigger cultural case about the sandy foundations of filmic masculinity or of the codes through which a masculinity like Cassellis's recognizes itself.

And remember that '69 was also Easy Rider and, thus, as far as the Hollywood establishment was concerned, counter-culture was no longer a fad but a zeitgeist, and then came the dawn of movies that questioned the values held by every movie before them and in tow was a new Hollywood masculinity (Hoffman, Hackman, Nicholson etc) that took on roles that did away with the Bogies and the John Waynes forever, or at least until they came back to apply the wild west to urban problems in the shape of a .44 magnum and a cowboy in a suit asking if you felt lucky.

Googling the scene from Medium Cool in connection with Belmondo, I was delighted to find that its been cited by a few, especially by Robert Stam, who already cited it in Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean Luc Goddard. If we look at these acts of reflexivity or the quoting of masculine originals like Bogie and Wayne as parody, and Belmondo and his Poiccard thus as parodistic, then one can use Stam's case for parody to double for the cross roads of reflexivity and deconstructive intertextuality in film and to recontextualize all what I have said so far:

Parody, one might argue, emerges when artists perceive that they have outgrown artistic conventions. Man parodies the past, Hegel suggested, when he is ready to dissociate himself from it. Literary modes and paradigms, like social orders and philosophical epistemes, become obsolescent and may be superseded. When artistic forms become historically inappropriate, parody lays them to rest. Parody highlights art's historicity, its contingency and transcience. It sweeps away the artistic deadwood, "clearing rubble from brains," as Brecht put it, associated with stultifying social conventions. Parody performs the perennial rehistoricization of the artistic process. As new novelistic and cinematic forms, like rising social classes, struggle for power and respect, they often fight with the weapon of parody (p. 135).

The French New Wave and the Hollywood 60s/70s counter-culture was definitely about the rise of new social classes and values, and thus the employment of reflexivity to revisit and parody all the values of the ruling class/"establishment" as well as the codes that held their perceptions in place.

As a weapon of masculine parody and its ideological undermining, Belmondo's screen persona certainly packs a .44.

Mali: The Revolution will be YouTubed

Ana na Ming by Salif Keita. Album: Moffou. Label: Decca. 2002.

USA: Our Philosopher King

Barack Obama's hand lies on a bible as he is sworn in as the 44th US president by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in front of the Capitol in Washington on January 20, 2009. By Timothy Clary/AFP/Getty Images.

For those wondering how the 44th president of the United States will lead, today's NY Times editorial, with a throw away line, points us to what he has already done, which, for better or worse, sums up his leadership style:

Just as he reshaped the Democratic Party to win its nomination, and the American electorate to defeat John McCain, Mr. Obama said he intended to reshape government so it will truly serve its citizens.

Barack reshapes everything he touches. He reshapes things because he senses, fundamentally, what seems to be at the root of a lot of American problems. For Barack, everything boils down to people and all problems can be tackled by generating the organic, systemic and that inter-connective whatever-you-want-to-call-it multiplier that's unleashed from mobilizing and bringing people together.

In a sense, it is almost as if Barack believes anastomosis to be a Platonic form or archetypal universal; in that, people are like blood vessels and therefore their problems are fundamentally due to the obstruction or clogging up of the routes of communication -- in most cases, by the blood clots of ideological entrenchment.

Thus, people must be enabled and empowered to bypass these clogged up and obstructed arteries by opening up collateral channels, which, like the growth of veinlets in a leaf or branches of a stream, grow to connect things that are no longer connected.

The obstruction of the usual routes that hinder discourse or the connecting of people, as far as Barack is concerned, is the Platonic form and root of the American problem, and for him every other specificity of this Platonic form--i.e., Iraq, Afghanistan, dependence on oil, health care, the credit crisis, civil rights e.t.c.--are simply mimics, imitations, shadows or representations of that fundamental Form.

It's easy to see in his swagger and self assuredness a young man, who sees himself as haven ventured out of Plato's cave and thinks the world of pundits and columnists still reside in the cave, fighting each other over the finer points of the shadows cast on the walls. He even dedicated a part of his inaugural speech to these cave dwellers:

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.

You can see in our president's eyes the cockiness of a young man, who thinks that as far as the world's problems are concerned he has found the philosopher's stone.

So what does all this mean?

You can either dismiss Barack as a wanna-be alchemist who believes in the transmutability of all our problems to a basic cause and, thus, runs away from arguing over specifics. Or you can accept him as our philosopher king, whom Plato referred to as a man who has access to Forms; a man who intuits, for example, Beauty itself as opposed to any one particular instance of beauty.

Either way, we have in Barack Obama a person who, faced with the real world and the intractability of its problems, holds steadfastly to his audacious trust in the untapped potential of the well organized and inspired mob.

USA: Martin Luther King Day

As Martin Luther King day comes to a close and with the inauguration of Barack Obama only hours away, Jay-Z waxes poetic on Jeezy's "My President is Black." 

This may not be exactly how he dreamt it, but right about now a smiling Dr. King turns in his grave with pride.


Jay-Z My President is black Remix LIVE 1-18-09 

from pleasedontstare on Vimeo.

My president is black in fact he's half white

So even in a racist mind he's half bright
So if you've got a racist mind he's alright
My president is black but his house is all white

Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk
Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could run
Barack Obama ran so all the children could fly
So I'll spread my wings, you can meet me in the sky

USA: Saying Goodbye To Our Lucy-in-Chief

W. returns from his last "vacation" to Camp David, has given his final monologue, and prepares to leave the stage of our lives forever. An outgoing president must feel like a groupie tossed out of the hotel or out of the bed of the band's tour bus to make room for the new flavor of the month.

As America comes to the end of the W. years, I think it becomes clear that W. became a function of the inability of a successful operation to change business models; W was, to put it simply, the final attempt to stock America's store house of imperial capital and leverage for another 100 years or so in the face of a flattening and threatening post-9/11 world. 

He failed. 

Regardless, we are still in the American century. The age of American exceptionalism continues even though the age of American exclusivity is definitely over. Although tomorrow, I think, marks a democratic apotheosis that's exclusively American, W as a throwback, however, stood, as embodiment as well as effigy, for the stubbornness in acknowledging the end of American exclusivity -- at least not without a fight.

Under the cover of 9/11, W. was the perfect puppet for the ventriloquists seeking to extend the age of American exclusivity. The ventriloquists designed and justified all the crimes W. perpetrated because once they set the neo-con wrecking ball rolling, they had to win and they had to win because nothing short of total victory could forgive the sins their wreaking ball wrought in ensuring they won. In other words, W. and friends, like Vietnam, found themselves in the vicious cycle of "the end will justify the means" scenario and like Oliver Stone had Mr. X say in JFK:

But it must succeed. No matter how many die or how much it costs, the perpetrators must be on the winning side and never subject to prosecution for anything by anyone. That is a coup d'état.

Mr. X is still right. The perpetrators must be on the winning side. They tortured, ignored the constitution, invented weapons of mass destruction, lied in order to take Americans to war, and did whatever they needed to do to win and they told themselves that it was all okay because as long as they won, no one would care how they won; as long as they won their sins could be erased. But, again, the subversive nature of a guerilla war proved the perpetrators, no matter what they did, could not be on the winning side, and that, in an armor piercing shell, is the bottom line.

The nation's complicity in the Bush years were the concessions given to W. in order to gain a victory that slowly dawned on Americans was never going to be big enough or symbolical enough to justify the losses sustained. But at the same time, for W. and his ventriloquists', nothing short of that total victory was necessary to save them from going to "hell" for all what they have done. In the face of this equation, W., like Lucy in Peanuts, therefore had no choice but to keep holding out the football and imploring America to come running to kick it. Whether America kicked it or not wasn't the point, keeping up the illusion of an achievable total victory was. That's the paradox of the W years.

In wishing W. farewell and Godspeed, I dug up the Iraq war-America as Charlie Brown analogy and also my favorite Colbert clip:

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Formidable Opponent - Peanuts

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

Like Charlie Brown, Americans wanted to kick the ball Lucy keeps holding out. Like Neo, it took them a while to realize that there is no spoon -- or ball.

Speaking of peanuts, the notes hovering over Schroeder's piano contain hidden directions to the holy grail.

Nigeria: Taking the Invention to the Inventor

Nigeria now sends its own pastors and priests back to the lands whence missionaries originally came. So it should come as no surprise that the country is capable of producing its own brand of Mafiosi and sending them back to the land where the Cosa Nostra was invented and whence organized crime came.

 

The Neopolitan mafia in the Italian town of Castel Volturno is known as the Camorra, writes Sebastian Rotella in the LA Times, and 5 of them in a sedan, sometime last september, were looking for an African drug dealer who had crossed them. So they pulled a "drive by" on a store front where illegal immigrant laborers gathered, and after expending 130 bullets they left behind 6 people, dead. Riots ensued. 

Rotella writes that the shooting was an "indiscriminate message from a Camorra clan aimed at terrifying its junior [Nigerians mob] partners into obedience" -- "'it was not about racism at all,' said Jean-Rene Bilongo, a community mediator from Cameroon who speaks French, English and Italian with the broad Neapolitan accent. 'It was about business.'"

So, you might be wondering what Nigerian gangsters are doing ripping off the Camorra and fighting a turf war with the Neopolitan mafia inside Italy? Well, read on:

Nigerian gangsters have made Castel Volturno a European headquarters. In the 1990s, demand boomed here for African prostitutes -- prosecutors call it "the Naomi Campbell phenomenon." Camorra clans "rented" turf to Nigerian pimps, a line of work that Neapolitan gangsters disdain. And as cocaine flows increasingly to Europe through West Africa, Nigerians have graduated from their previous role as smuggling "mules" and pay the Camorra for a cut of street trafficking action.

"The Camorra worked well with the Nigerians at first," said Antonio Laudati, a top Justice Ministry official who led a major prosecution of the Nigerian mafia last year. "They were low-cost labor. They were well-received because they were cheap and very loyal. But then the Nigerians started to rise to a new level." That coincided with the disarray of the region's dominant clan from the nearby town of Casal di Principe. As older Casalesi bosses went to prison, a new generation of swaggering, hard-partying gunslingers stepped up. During the last year, they embarked on a punitive campaign against Italian turncoats and foreign rivals, killing nine people.

Those deaths were in addition to the violence on Sept. 18, which came about because the Casalesi gunmen were looking for an African drug dealer who had crossed them, said a senior antimafia official who requested anonymity for security reasons. They gunned down a mob-connected Italian they suspected of protecting the African, then attacked the clothing shop in a drug-fueled frenzy, officials say. "Behind the massacre is a question of territory," Laudati said. "They were killed in a symbolic manner. It was an ethnic warning to rebellious Africans. This is a new reality, a work in progress, and we are trying to figure it out." [more]

Remember how, in America, the beginnings of the despicable but profitable drug trade became the downfall of the loftier mustache petes of old? Well, it seems it's always some despicable aspect of organized crime which the native gangsters feel is beneath them that creates the slim gap new entrants need, to get their foot in the door. So, at the end of the day, crime is just that -- labor. And the despicable, manual, low paying type of labor is, preferably, left to immigrants, even when its crime. Even prof. Blattman feels that "there's an industrial organization paper waiting to be written here." 

But if the Camorra are underestimating the resoluteness of the Nigerian immigrant, I think they've got another think coming. 

By the way, the article also reveals why Miriam Makeba was performing in Italy when she died.

props: Chris Blattman

Advertising: Menage a Squeak

Hilarious. 

Hell, a little bit of naughty condom humor might be just what the doctor ordered in this all out fight to halt the tide of HIV and Aids in Southern Africa. 

props: Daily Dish

Friday

Love Theme from "A Star is Born" (Evergreen) by Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. A Star is Born Soundtrack - reissued January, 2002.



A film (a remake) despised by many but one of the first VHS tapes my family ever owned. What can I say, "the woman with the nose" and I go way back.

Film: Dickensian Slumsploitation

City of Men (2002-2005 TV series)

Danny Boyle, in this BBC 2 interview, gives a moving explanation about how he and the producers of Slumdog Millionaire took great care not to upset the socio economic eco-system from which their Indian child actors came from. Rather than injecting an unsustainable level of wealth into their lives, due to their participation in the film, they, instead, put them in school and set up a trust fund, which will be activated when they leave school at 16, provided they stayed at school during the period and passed all their exams.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

No one can see the same slum after being purview to how it also doubles as a child's playground. Which brings us to this year's fave: Slumdog Millionaire.

Seeing all the enthusiasm Slumdog is generating this award season, it's impossible not to think back 6 years to another film that took America and the world by storm -- Fernando Meirelles' City of God. Like Danny Boyle, Meirelles, using an assortment of child actors as his dramatic vehicle, also manages to convey western audiences into the heart of another kind of slum: Brazil's favelas and the drug wars raging in them. Compare the chicken chase that opens Meirelle's film to the kids racing through the slums in Doyle's and it is not difficult to see that there is more to these films than the slums they depict in a fast cut, quasi-documentary style.

City of God

I think the West, in the face of globalization, has gone through changes that have brought on it a new realization of its self and its limitations, and that self, as a result of these changes, has also gained a renewed sense of perception of the Other. For the first time, in a long time, people inhabiting the developed world are intuitively aware of the flaws of their modernity.

Take the election of Barack Obama for instance, in his recent op-ed Roger Cohen describes what, for our purposes, can be described as an intuitive understanding on the part of the American people that the times have changed and there is more to the world than the Mies van der Rohe-smooth edges of capitalism's skylines or the machine-like rationality, efficiency and smart clarity of a Le Corbusier building. In the post-modernity we now inhabit, Cohen argues that the American people, in just concluded presidential election, intuitively sensed the need for the ineffable or a need for something more; a kind of "magic":

One thing seems certain: The meltdown is going to hang over at least the first 18 months of the Obama presidency. The Treasury is bare. Americans are deluged in debt. Confidence has been Madoffed. That’s the realism. But this 47-year-old man of mixed race, whose very name — O-Ba-Ma — has the three-syllable universality of a child’s lullaby, has always had something of the providential about him, a global figure who looks more like the guy at the local bodega than the guys on dollar bills. That’s the magic. He needs this magic, which resonates in a voice with the solemn clarity of a bell. Smart power will not be enough. If it were, Americans would have elected Hillary Clinton president. But in their abiding good sense, Americans intuited the imperative to reach beyond smartness for some ineffable quality, capable of unifying and inspiring at a time of national and global division.

America, in the past, found this "magic" in men like FDR, but now the realization is the modernity that produced such men has a lot flaws. There is no surer sign of this generation's dissatisfaction with modern approaches--or its thirst for "magic"--than the cultural and political trial Americans, as a whole, put themselves through in 2008 to go beyond mere rationality, experience, statistics, and logic, and then reach not only into diaspora but also into the postcolonial for what lies beyond the modern. They reached for Barack Obama, who they have elected as the 44th president of the United States.

Danny Boyle, in another interview, also notes this Western discontent or zeitgeist, and he makes the case that, in terms of storytelling, there is an emerging trend to get past a Western conception of modernity and its corresponding ideals and standards of humanity. In the search of a new type of realism that corresponds with the beyond/post-modern, the Third world's disorderliness, non-ideal conditions, organized chaos, bizarre hybrids of poverty and wealth, modernity and barbarity, innovations and inefficiencies and so on, are now the magical realities being sought for a new kind of storytelling. In the case of Slumdog Millionaire, the Guardian's blog calls Mumbai as it sees it:

a down and dirty glimpse of third world life [...] We may see the worst of Mumbai life - the street child kidnapped by a Fagin-like begging gang and blinded to increase his earning potential; the toilet which is little more than a hole in the ground, beneath which gallons of festering excrement menacingly await - but this is ultimately a comfortingly generic storyline reminiscent of a hundred million rags to riches tales.

In other words, the non ideal world of the "Other"--i.e., other to the West that is-- is now at the roots of an emerging trend in Hollywood and World cinema, which some have already labeled slumsploitation. Explaining why, in connection with shooting Slumdog in Mumbai, Doyle says:

Why [Mumbai] is a great place to go for storytelling... is that in the West we've kind of smoothed the corners of our existence. We've got these comfort zones now; health and safety, political correctness, and you can see some of the edges of storytelling have been taken off. That's why we are obsessed now with superhero movies and fantasy movies because they let you get those extremes back but in an unrealistic context. But in India you can get it in a realistic context as well where it feels like its actually happening to you, those extremities.

I would go on to argue that the search in the West for these extremes--i.e., those lost rough edges tapered off by modernity--now underlies the appreciation of a super realism that stops just short of the surreal, and to which non professional actors, especially child actors, are indispensable.

They are indispensable because the super reality of most Third World situations makes for an extreme proscenium arch that demands of an actor a naturalness or a level of comfort that only comes with haven lived in such situations. For the Hollywood actor, the Third World might as well be a polygraph, revealing the acting and the fact that he or she does not possess the rhythms, can not blend; the audience can tell right away that the actor is a tourist.

All these films seek to capture the everyday lives of those who just happen to live in very charged realities, which makes the inhabitants of these situations or the non professional actor indispensable. And when it comes to the children, even though the Third World brings with it a high degree of alienation difficult for a mainstream audience to digest, the non professional child actor is usually the one that generates an immediate empathy and builds the bridge of humanity between such audiences and the extremes of the Third World slums.

To see the centrality of children to Third World situations, let's skip Tsotsi and consider Bahman Ghobadi's 2004 film -- Turtles Can Fly. To understand what life is like in a refugee camp you can do no better, and you leave it asking yourself why such a film isn't being screened at the White House?

Turtles Can Fly

Satellite and the other kids in the camp are, technically, no longer children because what substitutes for a playground and swing sets are abandoned tanks and the clearing of land mines. Or, for example, by the time we learn why the little girl, Agrin, has this unshakable resolution not to accept the little boy that dotes on her, we do not only come to understand where her pain is coming from but we also empathize, more than we would an adult's, how one so young can be asked by the world to process such abuse and unfairness on behalf of international politics.

The same goes for the documentaries. Documentaries like War Dance (2007) and HBO's We Are Together (2008) tell stories about LRA abductions in Uganda and Aids ravaged South Africa by helping to tell the stories of children in those countries that have found something to live for.

War Dance (2007)

Finally, it is heart warming to see Danny Boyle, who is, via Trainspotting (1996), an extension of British directors making films dipped in 90s social-realism (e.g., the films of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Lynne Ramsay all of which still echo the aesthetic concerns of British kitchen sink realism) get some much deserved acclaim for evolving but, yet, staying true to their aesthetic concerns.

It comes as no surprise that these British directors will know their way around postcolonial situations or Third World slums. The Scottish housing estate turn slum set during the garbage collector's strike in Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher or the London apartments in Mike Leigh's All or Nothing (2002) or the 90s economically depressed Edinburg in Boyle's Trainspotting are all "Third Worlds" in their own rights.

In other words, one could argue that the British have been "slumspliotating" for a very long time.

South Africa: This Revolution Will Be YouTubed

Send Me by Hugh Masekela. Album: Time. Label: Sony, November 5, 2002

Middle East: That Was Fast

STR/ Reuters

Iranian demonstrators burned photographs of Barack Obama today as they protested against America’s inaction over Gaza. Dozens of people gathered in Tehran waving Palestinian flags and defacing and setting fire to images of the President-elect. Iranian demonstrators have often burned effigies or pictures of US presidents in the past but this appeared to be the first time Mr Obama’s picture had been defaced, a week before his inauguration as president -- Times online.

Uganda: The LRA's Strategic Lack of Shape or Form

Peter Eichstaedt (Institute of War and Peace Reporting) confirms Uganda's latest "surprise" assault--in December of '08--to deal with the rebel leader Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has failed. He writes:

The offensive came after LRA leader Joseph Kony had rebuffed the international community three times in 2008 by failing to sign a peace deal with Uganda that had been negotiated over the previous two years. Those negotiations came to a halt in late November. [...] Kony’s latest snub gave Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, who was prepared to sign the deal if Kony did, the excuse he needed –along with the blessing of the international community and cooperation from DRC and South Sudan – to launch an assault. But it was botched, as some had feared.

The first hint that the offensive was mishandled came when word spread that Ugandan ground forces arrived at the main LRA camp two days after Ugandan jets and helicopter gun-ships bombed it. They found nothing but burned huts.

Uganda still has not provided any proof that any LRA fighters have been killed or captured, three weeks after the attack. This, however, has not stopped Kampala from proclaiming the offensive, which is ongoing, a success. On New Year’s Eve, some two weeks after it began, Museveni was quoted in the New Vision newspaper as saying, “Our aim was to disrupt Kony and it was successful. Our initial plan was to scatter and stop him from causing terror.”

But the assault appears to have had the opposite effect. Kony has killed more people and sewn more terror in the following two weeks than during the entire preceding year. Museveni calls that a success? And the killing continues, with the latest reports that Kony is headed to the Central African Republic, to yet another failed African state where he can regroup.

Before we blame Museveni, we should remember that the Ugandan army, according to former Ugandan minister, Betty Bigombe, is riddled with corruption and may be over reporting its official numbers or capabilities.

But, on the other hand, we should come to the realization that Joseph Kony and the LRA's lack of a clear political agenda, as Bigombe attests to here, can, in and of its self, be conceived as a guerilla strategy.

If, for a second, we overlook all the terror, rape and mayhem they inflict or separate what they do from their politics, Joseph Kony and the LRA, on a very fundamental level, lacks all the properties of something with a focus, location, purpose, clear goal, or distinguishing features.

Naturally, the more definite your goals and agenda are, the more distinguishable you become; the more you are brought into a kind of focus and corporealness, and, in effect, take on a form, base and are head quartered so to speak.

Thus, in the same sense Kony's guerilla ingenuity is that he, and the LRA to a large extent, refuses to take on a form, a definite shape, a goal, hold still, or sign any agreements that might impose such things on them. Thus begging the question of how one even achieves the goal of engaging such formlessness, talk less of fighting it.

This 2006 Jeffrey Gettleman's Times article on the meeting between Kony and UN's Jan Egeland also illustrates, vividly, how Congo's impenetrable jungles lends to Kony and the LRA's ability to, tactically and strategically, remain ghostly and formless.

When asked, before the latest effort, why the Ugandan army couldn't kill Joseph Kony or defeat the LRA, Betty Bigombe said:

Guerilla warfare is not easy to fight. They [Guerillas] are always ahead. Whatever the government troops do is in reaction to what they have done. So, they are spotted in a particular area... and LRA has always been extremely mobile. They cover an average of 60 km a day, I've seen them move. You'll see them, like a tornado, over there and in minutes they have surrounded you and this is not exaggeration. So it's the complexity. By the time you mobilize your foot soldiers, logistics, to go and fight them, they have already moved to another area. Plus the fact that people were in IDCs, Southern Sudan was at war, so in the whole vast area--2 hrs if you travel by air--there are no people to pass on information. Because usually [to engage in warfare] you rely on technical form of intelligence [...] and human, but the human aspect was totally lacking in providing this information that was so vital in fighting the rebels.