Posts tagged "film-and-tv":
Almodovar | Mishra
(From January 11)
Re-watched with wife last night Almodovar's "Parallel Mothers", which bears a second watch, certainly. It's a wonderful piece of story-telling and a film that is both emotionally engaging, visually beautiful, and packed with meaning.
There's a sub-plot in the film about a dig to exhume victims of fascism, buried in a mass grave at the start of the Spanish civil war. D said, on watching the exhumation of skeletons at the end, that she could not help but be reminded of Gaza.
Map shown in Wikipedia of Spanish Civil War grave sites and those that have been exhumed so far
Wikipedia article on the White Terror in Spain
My day began and ended with stories of genocides, in Congo, Turkey and Spain; but my bedtime reading was in The World After Gaza, where I've reached a point that describes the ways in which the memory of the Shoah has been perpetuated in Israel. And I've just read a quotation that Mishra gives by Susan Sontag:
There is no such thing as collective memory. All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.
So it's all about narratives and what we do with them. And it seems to me that even "individual" memory is subject to our past conditioning and present influences, such as thoughts about how other people will see a predicament, which is in turn affected by societal mores, portrayal in the media, proclamations by respected leaders, etc.
Unless we have the courage and unaffected capacilty to truly see or validly experience, how will we have the ability to remember?
“On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I think of Mary Seely Harris and her Kodak brownie again. And then I think of the faked video clips from Minneapolis.
Historical memory and its uses
Mishra (The World After Gaza) has a great deal to say about historical memory, and the way it is "used".
Early on in the book, he includes a quote by Yehuda Elkana, a Holocaust survivor and former director of the Van Leer Institute, who thought that the cruelty of Israel's Occupation of Palestinian territories stemmed from the feeling of victimhood engendered in Israelis from memorialisation of the Shoah and said 'It may be that it is important for the world at large to remember' the shoah… but Israelis 'must learn to forget'.
When I mentioned this idea to my wife she disagreed totally. as she recalled a program she once arranged here in the village on "memory and recognition". Instead of forgetting past traumas (like the Shoah, the Nakba, or the apartheid regime in South Africa), it was suggested there that memory could be a tool for conflict transformation; rather than forgetting, trying to forget, or, heaven forbid, suggesting to the victims than they forget. Through deep acknowledgement of the suffering caused, and honouring its memory, a healing could take place, as well as a deriving of the proper lessons to ensure that the same would not occur again.
An example given in the program was the TRC process that followed the regime change in South Africa, which though not perfect permitted a peaceful turnover of power rather than a bloodbath.
That's what I remember at least from the program. Mishra's description of Germany's holocaust remembrance culture is not described at all charitably by Mishra, even though it has done more than any other country to cultivate such remembrance.
Just as Israel seems to have derived from the Shoah the lesson to develop a strong army so that this would never again happen to Jews, he says that Germany has transitioned (officially at least) from anti-semitism to philo-semitism and unquestioning support for Israel; no matter what the country might actually do. This, however, fails to defeat other forms of racism and does not make the world safe from genocide.
He mentions the very small number of convictions of former Nazis in West Germany (many fewer than in East Germany), the fact that the country continued to be administered by the same people as during the 3rd Reich and Germany's lack of remembrance for other genocides for which Germany, as a colonial power, had been responsible in Africa.
It's Mishra's special position as an "outside observer", who grew up in post-colonial India, but one who is keenly interested in Middle Eastern culture and history, that makes this book so interesting.
Journal
Watched "It was just an accident" (2025) by Jafar Panahi. He's a brave man and the film deserves the acclaim.
There are other Iranian films that touch on the subject of oppression by the regime more obliquely, and therefore maybe more effectively. Still, to do so in such a confrontational way, while secretly making the film in Iran, is quite amazing.
The fact of making the film is enough, in this case. Maybe a real life encounter with one's torturer, which every victim probably longs for, would similarly be a bit of a let down. Turns out he isn't the monster he managed to project into your imagination, but instead the ignorant victim of a stupid system. Or maybe it serves him to be seen as such? I liked the film's comic elements.
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Nice to see that Barry Kauler is still around, developing software. I used PuppyLinux for a number of years. He turned it over to the community in, I think, 2013. Afterwards he developed what he now calls EasyOs. Looks interesting.
- https://bkhome.org Barry Kauler's site
- https://easyos.org EasyOS site
You can also read his Theory of Reality at:
Lazy day at home
Went for an early morning walk with my new barefoot-like sandals: crossing through the pinewoods, descending the path that leads down to the vineyards in the valley, then back up through the woods towards home. Surprised that despite the stony paths around here, there was no discomfort in these sandals, except once when I was looking at my phone and banged my toes into a rock lying on the path. That's the thing about walking without adequate foot protection: you have to be mindful.
While walking I listened to another chapter of The Dawn of Everything, then some beautiful hang-drum and flute music by the Nadishana Trio, and similar tracks on Sound Cloud.
After breakfast, I watched a Frederick Wiseman documentary, High School.
H, a friend of D came to visit, bringing with her a dessert she had made for the holiday known as Layali Beirut ("Nights of Beirut"), which I enjoyed with a cup of English breakfast tea. It's a kind of firm pudding, made from semolina, cream, orange blossom syrup, sprinkled with pistachio nuts.
In the evening I took some photos of the sunset, from the village entrance (above - more at my photoblog).
Links of the day
Real solutions to our global food crises are neither beautiful nor comforting. They inevitably involve factories, and we all hate factories, don’t we? In reality, almost everything we eat has passed through at least one factory (probably several) on its way to our plates. We are in deep denial about this, which is why, in the US, where 95% of the population eats meat, a survey found that 47% wanted to ban slaughterhouses.
The answer is not more fields, which means destroying even more wild ecosystems. It is partly better, more compact, cruelty-free and pollution-free factories. Among the best options, horror of horrors, is a shift from farming multicellular organisms (plants and animals) to farming unicellular creatures (microbes), which allows us to do far more with far less.
I have put Monbiot's book Regenesis on my reading list.
Practice day / book launch, a film
This morning I took part in a practice day / book launch for the translation of Zen and the Art of Climate Change (the same theme as the book launch that I previously described in Tel Aviv. Here there was maybe a greater effort to describe the common ground between the spiritual approach and the phenomenon of climate change, which Avner Gross managed to describe very well. the event was much smaller (about 40 people) so there was a chance for the audience to express themselves - their remarks were interesting.
In the evening I watched the film The Banshees of Inisherin. I wasn't expecting to like it, so I wasn't disappointed. The story seemed weak and phony, as well as being full of overused stereotypes about Irish people and island people. The locations themselves are amazingly beautiful. I recognised some of them from a couple of stays on Inishmor, and it seems that others were filmed on Achill Island in County Mayo - which I haven't seen.
Journal
Only the Animals
We watched the film "Only the Animals" (Seules les Bêtes) directed by Dominik Moll. Wikipedia has a good article about without too many spoilers. I agree with what most of the critics say about it; I would also give it about 4 stars. It could be categorized as a black comedy; but it's many things. Not a feel-good film; all of the characters are suffering badly - all of them want something they can't get and therefore end up hurting each other.
Easily bored
Most of what people are writing about in my social media timeline is quite boring to me, and, I think, because that is true, I skim, therefore missing the posts that might be more interesting.
So many of the posts concern the social media network itself. Since Mastodon has become so dominant, people are usually writing about Mastodon, or comparing it to Twitter. It's true that the phenomenon of so many joining Mastodon can be a subject for endless discussion, but I am not so interested in reading it.
Awhile back someone attempted to put a different spin on this observation. They said that the best movies are always about making movies, the best novels are always about novel writers, the best blogs are always about blogging, etc. But actually I have never looked at it like that. Instead, I usually tend to stay clear of content that is about the making of the content, because it generally shows that its creator shows a failure of the imagination. Not always, but often enough.
If I'm reading a novel, I expect the writer to be able to step away from the mirror, and show me something other than his own image. If I'm reading a blog, I don't want the medium to take over, but remain properly in the background. I'm aware that very often I fall into the trap myself (like now), but I'm always sorry when my blog becomes, post after post, obsessed with some aspect of the medium itself.
The Modi Question
I watched the first episode of the BBC documentary. I may watch the second, but I think I sort of got the message already. It's clear that Modi, as Gujarat's chief minister, wanted, for whatever reason, to let his Hindus let off some steam. There was a massacre of Hindus on a train. The Hindu population was seething with anger. For three days, he allowed them to run amok, and then he stopped it. His reasons were probably political, though perhaps not only so. The psychology of allowing the masses to "let off steam" is a theme that I've seen before in Indian governance.
Anyway, the result was that about 2,000 people were butchered and Modi went on to become prime minister. The Modi Question is not such a difficult one. What did we not understand? I don't think we even need to accuse Narendra Modi of racism. Political expediency (on a party-political level and on the level of governance) is sufficient to explain his motives. It's the way things work in India.
Modi is right that the British should be the last to speak about human rights, unfortunately. That anger is genuine and justified. It would still be great if he could put aside such blame games, and answer a reporter's questions straight without throwing back counter claims about the inappropriateness of their asking, on account of national culpability. Asking questions of leaders is not parallel to the parable of "casting the first stone." Giving complete answers is what we should expect of our leaders.
Modi can, with a degree of justification, claim that the issues being raised in the documentary have been settled in India's supreme court. But if he and the BJP are so confident, we can't help wondering why the documentary has been banned from screening in India, under emergency regulations. Someone has already pointed out that meanwhile, in the BJP's India, a new film that presents a controversial portrayal of Nathuram Godse (Gandhi's assassin) is allowed to be screened without issue. Gandhi's killer Godse is a "real patriot" for some Hindu nationalists. "Many visit a temple near new Delhi dedicated to him." (Aljazeera).
A book launch
There's a new publisher in Israel called Radical (https://radical.org.il/en/), which specializes in translation of books that focuses mostly on climate change. They have four books out so far and yesterday they had an event in honour of the translation of Thich Nhat Hanh's book Saving the Planet. The place was packed. Among the speakers were the translator, Hagit Harmon and a scientist Dror Bornstein. They also showed a film about the life of Thich Nhat Hanh.
Afterwards we sat with Hagit to discuss the evening and a similar evening about the same book that will be held next week in Wahat al-Salam.
Other books that Radical have put out in Hebrew are "Less is More" by Jason Hickel and David Attenborough's "A Life on our Planet". Greta Thunberg's book is now being translated and it looks like "The Dawn of Everything" is coming. It's inspiring to see a bunch of mainly younger people doing something radical to change the consciousness in this country.
The audience at the book launch for translation of 'Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet'
A film, thoughts about Epicyon and federation, links
Cinema Sabaya
Went with Y and D to see Cinema Sabaya, which is amazing. I didn't feel like making the effort to see it and D almost had to drag me along - it would have been insulting as Y had already bought us the tickets. But I was immediately caught up in the film, because it's simply so well done. A mixed group of Arab and Jewish women take part in a video-photography course. From class to class and exercise to exercise they learn about each other and themselves; where they can relate to one another as sisters and where they cannot agree; where they can support one another and where they shouldn't press too hard. There are layers on layers of complexity. The film is utterly engaging and unfailingly authentic.
Epicyon
I decided to support Epicyon with a modest monthly donation on Patreon, because I like how this software is developing - and developers, especially those who do not have a big support base, deserve to be supported.
I still find lots of problems there, which will need to be ironed out; however, it's working for me, and I do enjoy its simplicity. The UI looks better on the phone than on the computer.
That said, there seems to be a worse problem with federation itself. I don't think this is unique to Epicyon, but may be more prevalent the further you move outside the Mastodon scene. I noticed also with Hubzilla that some posts do not seem to federate well, and I'm seeing it now with Epicyon, because I have duplicated my follow lists from fe.disroot to my epicyon instance. When I examine the timeline I see that my posts on Epicyon rarely reach my account on fe.disroot. I also see that not all of the posts from the people I follow on fe.disroot reach my instance on Epicyon. In other words, I cannot depend upon Epicyon (and probably not on fe.disroot) to see everything that someone has posted.
That's a problem that does not exist in RSS, for example, which works mostly flawlessly.
My interim conclusion is that (a.) If I really want to know what someone is saying, I need either to subscribe to their RSS feed, or to look directly at their instance. (b.) My instance on Epicyon is still a valuable source - I find many interesting posts there. It's just that I cannot depend upon it as a single news source.
I have yet to try using RSS feeds on Epicyon itself (which seems to be one of its features). That will be my next experiment.
Israelis in Qatar
It's funny that Israeli journalists are shocked by the way they are being shunned by the people they try to interview during the World Cup in Doha. And it's good to see that Palestine still finds lots of support in the Arab world. If not from the leaders, then from the man in the street.
I don't think that these journalists should be shunned: it would be better to use the opportunity to speak directly to Israelis. A message like "Please tell the people in your country that I will be happy to speak to you once Palestinians can enjoy freedom and dignity in their own country. We Arabs are waiting for you to stop the oppression, the apartheid and the occupation of Palestinian lands. When Israelis learn to treat Palestinians as equals, we will welcome you in our countries as brothers." Something like that. You can't just boycott people - you have to adopt a carrot and a stick approach and state the conditions under which the boycott can one day be lifted.
Links
“If you make a dismal prediction and it comes true, it means you’ve failed to have utility. I don’t claim to have all the answers but I do believe that our survival depends on modifying the internet – to create a structure that is friendlier to human cognition and to the ways people really are.”
Israeli Filmmaker’s Critique of ‘The Kashmir Files’ Draws Fierce Backlash - The New York Times
This is marvelous. One guy had the courage to tell the truth*, unlike all the fawning diplomats who were left trying to clean up the mess.
- (I haven't seen the film so I should say his truth.)
Diary
Epicyon
I made a new fedi personal instance using epicyon. It took hours, and wasn't even my first choice. I rented the new server under the assumption I'd be using Streams. See the post I wrote on epicyon itself here. It's actually a temptation to continue using epicyon's blogging feature. But org-static-blog gives me better possibilities for presentation.
I love this system, though I do not know yet how well it works. I've used a couple of former instances I made in the fediverse, to follow the new instance, and see how well it managing to send and receive posts, and it seems to be performing all right, though with mixed results. From one connection, I was unable to send a connection request; another said that a connection had yet to be confirmed. But these particular instances exist on the periphery of the fediverse.
There are differences between the presentation of the the different fediverse flavors. Mastodon most closely resembles Twitter and is similarly suitable for fast-paced ongoing conversations. Those become annoying on software with a more spacious presentation, like Epicyon, and tend to result in slightly disjointed conversations: it's easier to follow those by following their link back to Mastodon. I've unfollowed some of the chattiest people, even though they have something interesting to say. I'll catch up with them elsewhere. And, as with Twitter, I often find an easier way to follow people is to browser-bookmark them and go directly to their personal profiles, checking in just occasionally.
In my timeline I like to see more substantive posts - either directly or through links - and that is what I try to post too. After unfollowing, my timeline is closer to what I want to see.
Shantaram
I rewatched the first episode with D, and since then we managed another couple of episodes. It captures well the spirit of the book - I think Roberts will be very happy with it. One thing that comes across very much is the writer's emotional warmth and humanism. The characters are all 3-dimensional; even the minor parts.
Delivery heroes
I ordered 2 new computers last week for Einat at the spiritual center and all this week the delivery company has been calling to say they will be arriving. On Thursday they called to say that they would deliver by 8 PM. But nada. Today, I was skeptical that anything would come because Fridays here are a bit like Saturdays elsewhere; it's a day when fewer people are at work and you don't expect much to happen: out here in the boondocks, even the post doesn't come.
But at around 6 PM I got a call to say the delivery man was on his way. I met him outside and all my annoyance with the company dissipated. As often happens in Israel, the delivery van was his ordinary car - with packages crammed into the back seats, the front passenger seat and the trunk. It took him several minutes to locate the package in the dark, with the flashlight of his phone.
He told me the story of why he happened to be arriving at dinner time on a Friday: the previous guy in charge of deliveries to our area had quit earlier in the week, and he was the new guy - just 2 days on the job and struggling to deal with a backlog that was especially big due to Black Friday sales. Looking at the number of remaining packages in his car, he obviously had another couple of hours work, and had been at it since the morning.
How can you give a delivery company a poor rating when the guys themselves are working so hard? - being sent out in their own cars, missing dinner with their families in order to bring well-to-do scumbags their new toys. It's the same as with other forms of exploitation.
I unloaded the computers at the spiritual center and met Einat there. She was super-happy with the new laptop, a feather-weight Asus Zen Book with a reversible oled touch-screen. She too was pretty busy: a group coming to rent the halls at 8 PM, and tomorrow a special program for the UN's day for the elimination of violence against women.
TROM
I really like the TROM people.
TROM is a project that aims to showcase in detail the root cause of most of today’s problems and proposes realistic solutions to solve those problems. But it is also about challenging people’s values, explaining in simple language how the world works, and providing free and good quality educational materials/tools for everyone.
I haven't got into TROM as such yet, but I think there's lots of potential there. They have a really cool peertube channel. And the people involved are really interesting - Tio, Sasha and Aaron are the ones I've encountered. Sasha has a great website of her own, "Big World Small Sasha".
Potato nose
My cold has lasted over a week, and it's run through 3 packs of tissues + hankies. The span of time is in excess of my usual winter colds and I think this is partly due to a potato. I was spooning a vegetable soup a few days ago when the onset of a sneeze caused me somehow to inhale. I immediately had a burning sensation at the top of the nose and a slightly painful feeling there for the rest of the evening, but then it passed. Two or three days later I started to develop a bad smell in my nose - a smell similar to that of a potato that is rotting at the bottom of a basket of vegies.
An altered sense of smell sometimes result from nasal infections. But I discovered today that this one was for real, when a sneeze suddenly ejected a large piece of potato skin. It had probably been irritating my nose all the while, and keeping my cold alive in the process.
Reactions to political realities
When G was here a week ago, back from Mumbai, I was asking him how he found the worsening political reality there - which seems almost as bad in India as here, and in quite a similar way. He said that one thing he found is that it changes the way people behave. I asked him if he could give an example. He said that there is a Muslim tailor who has a shop in the apartment building of his wife's family's Mumbai home. A Muslim tailor in a building with no other Muslims, in a political climate that is worsening for Muslims. Nowadays, whenever he is there he makes a point of consciously going to sit and spend time with him, because he knows that nobody else will. So what might be a normal human response becomes a political act. That's how bad it's getting there.
Here in our village the connections between the different identities are much more normal. The conscious act is to keep alive connections with Palestinians in the West Bank.
Links
It ain't lookin' good around here. A "soft" annexation. Also Yuval Noah Harari is saying that Israelis are replacing the vision of the "two state solution" with the vision of a land with three classes of people: Jews with all the rights; Palestinian citizens of Israel with some rights; and other Palestinians with very few rights. Full-on apartheid, in other words. My wife thinks maybe that's not a bad thing, as eventually it will force change. Unlike the current stasis, which leads nowhere, a civil rights struggle. But 21st century realities are unlike those that preceded them. States are much savvier about quelling or subverting phenomena like nonviolent activism, and Israel is extremely sophisticated about managing reactions in the international press.
Germany Forces a Microsoft 365 Ban Due to Privacy Concerns – Best of Privacy
Europe may yet keep the world sane, at least they have a healthier understanding of the dangers of tech imperialism. They are pushing back in a similar way to which Americans push back against China.
Saturday
On Saturday morning I fixed a few broken items with epoxy glue, but not a pair of shoes, whose sole has become partly detached. From watching a couple of YouTube videos, it looks like it will be better to buy a specialized glue for that - one that's waterproof and flexible.
In the afternoon I met with a German group, who have been touring NGOs and civil rights groups in the country. They were very interested and asked lots of questions about the village.
In the evening I continued to watch some more video interviews with Gregory David Roberts. Some of them were filmed a few years ago - like the CNN story - he toured around Mumbai with the reporter, visiting some of the places featured in the novel - including the Colaba Slum, where his character - and Roberts - had lived. He says in the interview that this particular slum, near the "World Trade Center" would soon be cleared and the residents relocated. That didn't happen, however the slum shown in the TV series based Shantaram was not filmed there on location. It was instead filmed near Bangkok, where "Shantaram’s crew rebuilt a shantytown, complete with a river running through the middle." I guess it's a lot easier to find money to create a fake slum than to re-house the residents of a real one.
Today's links
Ethiopian civil war: parties agree on end to hostilities | Ethiopia | The Guardian
Another war you never heard of may be over.
Rishi Sunak scraps plans to move embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem | Foreign policy | The Guardian
Simple proposal to foreign governments: offer to move your embassy from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem but condition that upon building a parallel embassy for Palestine in East Jerusalem.
Big Tech’s Algorithms Are Built With Invisible Labor
"Artificial artificial intelligence."
UN chief warns ‘we will be doomed’ without historic climate pact | Cop27 | The Guardian
Doomsayer.
Revealed: The Former Israeli Spies Working in Top Jobs at Google, Facebook and Microsoft
Only the best and the brightest.
Gregory David Roberts
I started to watch Shantaram, which I found surprisingly good - it captures the atmosphere and feel of the novel and the casting is brilliant. I read the novel in 2009 and loved it, of course, like everyone I know. But I didn't read The Mountain Shadow, Roberts's second novel, because I read a couple of negative reviews when it came out. I sort of passed him off as a "one book" writer. Someone introduced me to that term when describing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek writer Annie Dillard; though I actually enjoyed a couple of her other books.
Anyway, after watching the first episode of "Shantaram" I had a look to see what Roberts has been doing since. I was delighted to see that he didn't stop with those two books, but has both continued writing and has been re-inventing himself as a musician. He's also studied under an Indian guru and become a devotee of Kali. He has an amazing look, with a red tikka down his forehead, goes shirtless, and is adorned with beads, necklaces and rings. He lives in Jamaica, which he says is a great place to produce music. He's also been writing new novellas and a graphic novel and recording YouTube films and podcasts about philosophy, spirituality, his books and his writing techniques. At age 70 he's wonderfully lively and creative. An inspiration.
Journal
Fediverse
I am gradually picking up many of the connections I previously had, just because someone ends up boosting posts by one of them, here and there. As a result, my timeline is growing more interesting by the day.
My strategy of interacting very little, posting only sparingly, keeping my follows off-record and, in my bio, discouraging people from following, seems to be working quite well :-)
I get that Mastohost (which is hosting my new instance) is a poor model for the Fediverse: too much concentration of instances on a single server. Personal instances, such as on Mastohost, is still much better than for everyone to join a few big instances, which then eventually go down, just as the mastodon.technology instance is about to do. The owner/developer of Mastohost has committed not to hosting more than 25% of all Mastodon instances. I think a better plan would be consider not the the total number of instances, but the total number of users. A quarter of all instances already sounds like a large amount, but if those instances are large, it could translate to the majority of users on the Fediverse. It's also true that lowering the bar (of technical know-how and expense) is what will get more people to run their own instances, which is what the Fediverse needs. Whereas the administrators of large instances can be expected to have greater technical know-how.
The first preference should be to get individuals to run personal instances from home. But the second preference should be to encourage the creation of many small instances. A way to achieve that could be the model of small co-ops renting space on green VPSs. There would be sharing of ownership, administration, costs and maintenance, together with restriction to a handful of users. That way, there is not too great a concentration of instances on one server, and if an administrator quits, the instance can still continue.
Video
We download and stream a lot of video content, but personally I can never watch more than a couple of movies or TV shows per week. Beyond than that just feels like overload. Even if I'm bored I won't watch more any more. I read, surf the web, listen to podcasts or listen to music. So I haven't watched anything new in the last few days. I tried watching "The Worst Person in the World", but it didn't hold my interest. I watched the latest episode in "The House of Dragon". But without great enthusiasm.
Music
I am still really enjoying SoundCloud. In Israel/Palestine it isn't possible to pay for a SoundCloud subscription, which means that much of the mainstream content isn't available, but, on the other hand, I noticed while in Portugal and Spain that it wasn't possible to listen to my usual content without taking out a paid subsciption. So this works very well for me, because I practically never listen to mainstream western music, and I'm amazed by the almost infinite supply of free content. I would never be able to discover so much wonderful music without a service like SoundCloud. It's like entering a secret world with musicians that few people have ever heard of.
Currently listening to the station of Kinan Azmeh, a Syrian musician. Beautiful tracks from musicians from the Middle East and around the world.
Books
I'm reading Ville Triste by Patrick Modiano. I'm reading in French on the Kobo. It's helpful to be able to click on an unknown word and get the translation. Modiano's books are fairly short, which also suits me, as I'm a slow reader (even in English). I love Modiano's prose and the atmosphere that he is able to establish. This book departs a little from the kind of story that he usually tells, but the familiar elements are there. Did he deserve his Nobel? Sure, why not.
Links of the day
The stories that most interested me were:
The revelation of Liz Truss's influences though I haven't been able to verify the facts of that story.
Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt’s Cop27 masquerade
Although the venue is much less important than the success of the meeting.
Pesticide use around world almost doubles since 1990, report finds
It isn't a pretty picture. Not getting better. The EU is not living up to its commitments to limit dangerous pesticides either.
Saudi Arabia sentences US citizen to 16 years over tweets critical of regime
When you take an average modern nation-state, which is already embarassed and touchy about the exposure of its dirty laundry (see under Assange) and you add to that an autocratic leader who, either for political expediency or due to severe psychological issues, is wary of the least opposition, you get a mixture that guarantees that virtually every citizen lives in fear of criticizing the regime, or maybe even thinking bad thoughts about it.
Alchemy
Yesterday evening I finished watching the first season of "The Bear", which somehow lives up to all the rave reviews of the critics. It does so more on account of its presenting a situation than for its storyline - the plot for all of the first season could be summarized in two or three lines.
So we watch it because we find the characters interesting; because as humans we are interested in humans. The show's humanity is the reason for its success. Nobody gets fired, no matter how outrageous their behavior, because they need each other; they are in it together. How great it would be if this were the case in real life.
There was a teacher at our village school - she taught the children how to make art out of garbage, recycling or reassembling materials that people would dump outside her door- like cardboard or old magazines - or which she would bring from nearby factories. Using the materials at hand was also how she would relate to human beings: it might sometimes be more convenient to replace them but, since anyway we are all flawed things, it is more sensible to learn how to work most effectively with the ones that are here with us.
The same lesson has to be internalized and applied to ourselves, with whom we are also stuck; our tally of fatal flaws, past traumas, weaknesses and fears. It's a matter of working with all these elements and alchemizing the crap. Like shining a pair of beat-up old shoes; like cobbling together a raft to save us from the flood. Perfection is a bricolage of broken parts. Or, seen differently, imperfection is maya, illusion, and we are already perfect as we are. The effect is always present in the cause, the manifest in the unmanifest.
Mastodon vs the blog
I realized, on looking at the parameters of Mastodon, that even though I own the instance, if I wish to actually preserve what I write, I had better write here in my blog. I knew it, but hadn't completely internalized that. The capacity of my server space on Mastohost is inevitably limited and anyway, what I write here gets a local copy. So Mastodon will be for links, reblogs or posts that I care less about, inevitably. The question is always "why blog at all" (as opposed to writing a diary)? I suppose because it imposes a certain discipline. It isn't a question for me regarding the need to write (in itself); that's just something I feel compelled to do; it's the way that I process experience.
New walk planned, film
It took several hours today to decide on a flight to Porto, in Portugal, in order to walk again on the Camino trail. Perhaps we will make it to Santiago on this one. Flights are expensive in this season - and increasingly immoral. But the only way to reach the European continent from this country is to fly, so it's either that or stay at home. At least when we reach our destination, our manner of vacation will be environmentally friendly. The trip is planned for September.
There was one film at the Jerusalem film festival that would not have been D or YS's cup of tea, but which I found interesting, so I saw it now: "Crimes of the Future", by David Cronenberg. The genre is somewhere between science fiction, horror and fantasy. Elegant and well acted, it is set in a future when the human body is adapting to the environmental crisis by gaining the ability to make evolutionary changes to itself. There is a political movement aiming to speed this process, while police and bureaucrats fear that humanity will mutate into a new species. At the intersection are two performance artists. One of these is growing in his scarred and mutilated belly new organs of unknown function. The couple exploit this capacity in performances of on-stage surgery where the organs are removed, while a wowed audience snaps away and films them. It's a fascinating and visually impressive movie, though sometimes difficult to watch.
The film festival
YS invited us this year to see films with her at the Jerusalem film festival. The festival takes place every year in July, and, for many years we have been going to see four or five films. Choosing them has always been difficult, but this year we let YS choose them for us. It was actually at the film festival, one year, that we renewed our connection with her.
So, over the course of a few days, we saw 6 films:
- Eami by Paz Encina
- Pacifiction by Albert Serra
- Decision to Leave by Park Chan-wook
- Incredible But True by Quentin Dupieux
- Holy Spider by Ali Abbasi
- Robe of Gems by Natalia López Gallardo
All of the films were international, and of the kind that one would see only at a film festival. YS isn't into Israeli films, which is fine with me. But, except for "Incredible but True" - a light comedy - most of them were hard-going. "Holy Spider" was the most rivetting, because it works as a thriller. Some of the scenes were quite brutal; not bloody - a series of women are slowly strangled to death. Not easy to look at, and, as they say, not something that you can easily "unwatch". The action takes place in the holy city of Mashad. A night overlook of the city, shown near the beginning, makes the city itself look like an enormous spider. On my two short visits back in the 1970s, I did find the place a bit discomfitting, as I believe any non-Muslim would.
Eami is 90 minutes of pure poetry, about a genocide of a native people in Paraguay. But it is narrated in a long monologue, in a sleep-inducing voice, unfortunately.
Fighting sleep was a major problem for me during the festival. "Robe of Gems" was almost incomprehensible. Not only to me. D was thinking that it took place somewhere in Argentina (it is set on the Mexican - US border). YS and other people in the audience had difficulty understanding the plot too, and the relation between the characters.
"Decision to leave" was a bit easier to follow, but very long (2 hours 18 minutes). It's well made, but didn't draw me in. Now, less than a week afterwards, the memory of the film is already fading.
My favourite among these films was "Pacifiction", though it was the longest of all of them, at 2 hours and 45 minutes. Certainly it could have been shorter, and the director was playing with our attention, but there was something about its slow pace that suited its story-line and tropical location. Boredom is part of my experience also in South Asia, but isn't something I grudge. The characterization is interesting, with many enigmatic personas, including that of the French high commissioner at the center of the film. Peter Bradshaw, who also loved the film has done justice to it in his review. I didn't think about its similarity to the work of David Lynch.
2022-04-17 | Drive My Car | Movies
We watched "Drive My Car" in two sittings… it's a 3-hour film. A great film. Hey, it's 2022 and they are still making good films, somehow. I have not read the Haruki Murakami story upon which it is based, although I've read so many of his novels and stories. And I have also never seen or read Uncle Vanya, which is enfolded within it. It isn't the first film to do that - I have the earlier one in my library to watch.
I often wonder why the tears flow so easily when watching movies, though in my ordinary life, it is less common for me to express, or even experience, strong emotions. I prefer not to give myself over to strong emotions like grief because I suspect that once we allow it to engulf us, it only ever leaves us in moments of exhaustion. The characters in Drive My Car eventually find consolation and healing, apparently, whereas this is not something I often see among those who grieve for their loved ones.
Emotion is a lens through which we look at the world. As long as we keep looking through it, the world will always appear in a certain way. If we throw aside the lens, the world already looks different. The consolation of philosophy? Perhaps.
Although I watched Drive My Car to the end - sometimes I will watch a film or a TV series up to a certain point and then decide that that's enough. It's not necessarily that I disliked what went before, but only that I am fine with being left with what was there on the screen up to that point. That's usually the case also in real life. One day we suddenly leave it, with many tasks uncompleted, many knots we never unravelled, many strings that we never managed to tie.
A man who loves movies:
I let my love for cinema destroy my life… but I’m still always eager to see a good film.
It’s not important who made it.
Just seeing it is the important thing.
The cinema lost me my job.
It robbed me of my life… my social identity.
But even now, just one good film and I eagerly turn back to cinema.
Whenever I see a film, I dissolve myself in it… to such an extent that I reach the bottom.
I fade out and perhaps… I get lost in it.
And this has played an essential role in my life.
Hossein Sabzian
https://www.sabzian.be/article/hossein-sabzian
2022-02-17 - Diary - a Turkish film - links
In the morning helped D prepare for her Day of Mindfulness at the Spiritual Center. In the daytime, I was at home. My son and his daughter brought the "family cleaner" to clean up the rooms they had been living in before moving into their new house. The mother of M said originally told me that he was from New Guinea, but it turned out he was from Konakri Guinea in West Africa. He has been spending time in Israel on-and-off for years, since 1988, and is now aged 56. He belongs to the Fulani tribe - which is huge - they are spread across more than 20 countries, all across to the Red Sea. Most are Muslim. He says that in Guinea, there are no inter-communal problems, unlike, say in Nigeria. But Guinea has a history of military coups and is currently again run by the military. He is planning to return again soon, as he has been away for awhile. He has one grand daughter, whose picture graces the wallpaper of his phone. They have a house in the city and another, a few hundred kilometers away in a village. He says that he enjoys the village the most; it's very green there and the family are farmers. We talked a little about music as I like a few musicians from neighbouring Mali - Kandia Kouyaté, Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, and he likes these too so I played him some of the music while he worked. He says that also in Guinea they have great musicians and told me a couple of the names to check out. Meanwhile he did a really good job of cleaning. I don't know if he has a profession besides cleaning, but he is quite a smart guy.
I too have been doing a lot of cleaning lately, at the office, after the arson attack there, so it's not just dirt, but nasty black soot. Zakariya and Mahmud have meanwhile painted so there is no lingering smell from the fire. It's been a good opportunity to get rid of a whole lot of material that has accumulated over the years, and I've been putting everything else back in order. After tidying up I will check and see if the computers still work and we will also bring in someone to clean windows, doors and everything that wasn't painted.
In the afternoon I had to take Yael home, as she had overnighted with us since Friday, and fetch the grandchildren. It's been a while since I was in Jerusalem, and so got a bit mixed up with the way - OsmAnd wasn't very helpful; it couldn't find the street, only the neighborhood, and then it wanted to send me off in a completely opposite direction, or, at least a direction that was counter-intuitive, so I ignored it.
In the evening we had a birthday party for one of the grandchildren and D. My daughter gave her a gift of earrings, the stone of which comes from meteorite fragments from the Campo del Cielo site in Argentina. I read about this: it seems that it's one of the world's most important meteorite sites, from a fall that happened 4,000 - 5,000 years ago. The meteorites are the heaviest ever found, being composed mostly of iron. The age of the material is about 4,5 billion years, going back to the formation of the solar system.
Once upon a Time in Anatolia (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da)
I saw this fine movie the other day, by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. We have seen one other film by him, The Wild Pear Tree, but I think that the one I just saw was a more interesting one. Most of the film takes place on a night trip through the Turkish countryside by a team including a policeman, a prosecutor, a doctor and two suspects in a murder to try to discover the site of the body. The real material of the film is the back stories of the main figures. Their stories are not presented visually but emerge in the conversation. There are some surprises along the way, and the film leaves a strong impression.
Links
Forget state surveillance. Our tracking devices are now doing the same job | John Naughton | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/19/forget-state-surveillance-our-tracking-devices-are-now-doing-the-same-job>
On a less mundane level, a German activist, Lilith Wittmann, had a suspicion that a particular mundane government agency was a front for a spy operation, a hunch that was stoutly denied by all concerned. Reasoning that one way of checking might be to see where post addressed to the agency actually wound up, she sent a parcel with an AirTag in it to the agency and watched through Apple’s Find My system as it was delivered via the Berlin sorting centre to a sorting office in Cologne-Ehrenfeld and then appeared at the federal domestic intelligence agency in Cologne.
‘People want to reclaim something pure’: the rise of the urban honesty stall'
2022-02-13: Kimi
Watched Kimi, based on the review in The Guardian. Since I agree with the review, and this Benjamin Lee writes reviews better than I can, there's not much to add. I too would give it 3 or 4 stars, because it's enjoyable, well-made, does what it intends to do, and doesn't try to be more than it is. Films like this feel "transactional"; it feels like we, or the company that purchased the film, have entered into an agreement with the director and s/he has lived up to the agreement and handed over the goods. He (Soderbergh) and the cast may have given it their all, worked really hard, or just had a good time - it doesn't matter - as the product has been delivered in perfect condition.
Documentary film festival
Spring is usually the time for the DocAviv documentary film festival in Tel Aviv, but this year, of course, there's the pandemic, so they have postponed it till September and, in the meantime, are streaming some films that one can watch from home.
Dorit ordered us four films, three of which we've watched already. The first was "Kingmaker", about former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcus. We also attended a Q and A with the filmmakers about that. It's a good film, if a bit long, and reaches the inevitable conclusions about money, corruption and power. What was new to me was that the Marcus dynasty are still aiming for a comeback, which seems incredible. In my sort of world, their downfall and the "people power" revolution of Ferdinand Marcus's successor Cory Aquino was hailed as one of the victories for nonviolent action; Gene Sharp type material.
The second film was "The Human Element" (2018) which is based on the photographic work of James Balog. This was a very successful film, in that it both told a personal story and the growing consequences of climate change in the US. It's structured around the four elements of Earth, Air, Water and Fire, and what happens when a fifth rogue element, Human Beings, add to that mix. But the point of the film is that humans can also reverse the negative changes if they want to, so it tries to give room for a little optimism. For example, it shows a plan for a disused open coal mine - a huge dead area - to be turned into a solar energy installation. In one sad sequence of the film it shows the effects of air pollution on asthmatic children at a special school where they need to interrupt their studies in order to take their medicines or go on inhalers. In another, it shows what is happening to the people on Tangier Island in the Chesapeake bay, which stand to become among the first refugees of climate change. Large swathes of the island are already awash.
The third film was "The Ashram Children: I am No Body, I Have No Body" (2019), by an Israeli filmmaker who, during his childhood, spent a part of every year in an ashram - the Anandavadi ashram in Kerala. During the film he embarks on a personal journey to meet several other children he knew at the ashram as a child. He interviews each of them about their memories of the experience. Several others refuse to meet with him, or at the last minute, after he's arrived in town, find some excuse not to meet. Others issues dire warnings against making the film and tried to scare him away from continuing. His mother too voices strong opposition. But he was traumatized; he needed years of counselling to overcome the damage done to him by "growing up in a cult" (as he experienced it) and being encouraged to lie to his school mates back home about where he had been.
The interviews with those who had gone through the same experiences are revelatory. He himself, and one of the others he speaks to, haven't entirely broken free of the spell of "Gurudev"*. One of the interviewees describes his long personal journey of gaining self-confidence after growing up with feelings of inferiority. After spending 10 years as a bagger in a supermarket, even fearing a promotion to the position of cashier, he finally works up the confidence to attend college. Today,he is a successful academic, the author of a forthcoming major study of religion. But it wasn't an easy journey, and when it comes to the point of speaking about his parents, and the attitudes that may have motivated them, he breaks down.
When one of these children grows up she returns to the ashram, shaking with fear, but needing to express her anger and reprobation of the teacher. When she is able to do so, she realizes how this godman that she grew up to fear is completely inconsequential; a kind of Wizard of Oz figure, whose only response to her is to turn away and leave the room.
The children grew up, it seems, neglected by their parents, fearing the guru, while being governed by strange beliefs, fears and an elaborate set of purity rules. One of them tells how, as a child, he wondered whether, if Gurudev asked his parents to drown him in the river, they would agree to that. Looking back on the experience, one of the interviewees points out that regardless of the verity of adwaitic philosophy being pumped into them, it is completely inappropriate to impart it to children who are just discovering their sense of selfhood and identity.
*"Gurudev" is Sri Adwayananda Sri K. Padmanabha Menon - the son of the much better known Vedantic heavy-weight, Sri Atmananda Krishna Menon.
Planet of the Humans (again)
Reading George Monbiot’s critique of “Planet of the Humans” I appreciated his ability to sift through the many details, see where the errors lie and then state the ways in which the film is inaccurate, dangerous and damaging to the cause that it is supposedly trying to support. Environmentalists face so many challenges from the political right and those with vested interests who wish to undermine challenges to the continued degradation of the biosphere.
Perhaps I misinterpreted the film, or saw what I wanted to see in it. Or perhaps I’m right after all. It’s true that everyone experiences reality according to their individual tendencies. What dawned on me while watching it was that however careful we are to produce cleaner forms of energy, and however efficient those processes become, we will simply be encouraged to consume more, and it is built into the capitalist system and our own species’ nature to do so. We will not be able to reverse the destruction because the more we produce, the more we will use. I don’t see this as being a problem of the developing world and its burgeoning population (and growing needs), but a challenge to be addressed by those who are at the pinnacle of progress – who are also the heaviest consumers. They need to provide leadership in learning how to use less, not more.
But I don’t think they will do so.
Human
Human-themovie.org by Yann Arthus Bertrand
Watched this movie today for a second time; the running time is 3 hours and 10 minutes, and it’s available for free in a number of languages. I’ve also managed to watched several supplementary short documentaries about the making of the film and listened separately to the sound track. Actually I think this may be my all-time favourite film. It’s hard to see with dry eyes. The storytelling, music and cinematography are consistently incredible – if anything, the movie steadily improves as it goes along. The signature theme, for example, only becomes evident in the second half or last hour. The way the film is constructed and edited contributes to its power and ensures that there is never a boring moment. There are subtleties that I only picked up on the second watching. The image of a man speaking on a phone at the corner of a Manhattan skyscraper is followed by a man standing high among desert cliffs. The film plays a little with our expectations. Derisive comments about “rich people” by a poor man are followed by an obviously “rich” American, who, in turn, quickly wins our sympathy. The impoverished window of an Indian farmer who committed suicide due to the water crisis is followed by an educated upper class Indian, who, despite first impressions, places her simple story in its sharp political context. The director says that this is essentially a political film, and one has to agree, but it is not directly so. It commands our attention by its intense humanity. No film could be more true to its title. It captures the essence of what it means to be a human being in our era, beset by vast inequalities, violence, political turbulence and climate change, as well as the options we face as human beings when confronted by these horrendous difficulties. It gives a voice to the voiceless and permits us to hear stories that would otherwise be unlikely to reach our ears. Eventually it is the beauty of these portraits of ordinary human beings, even more than the magnificent landscapes, that lingers in our memory. It is not just that these humans are unforgettable, but that they also hold us accountable. We are so far removed from some of them that even the work that they are doing is unintelligible to us. People hang out long lengths of fabric over a wooden construction for what purpose? A human chain of men move earth with shovels to achieve what? Men rummage through a garbage dump to find what? If we thought we understood our world, we find that we are out of touch.
Eventually it’s an optimistic film. Nobody forced these people to be interviewed. They agreed because despite everything, they believed in the value of their experience and hadn’t given up on either us, the viewers, or, in most cases, themselves.
"Long Day's Journey into Night"
I saw the Chinese film “Long Day’s Journey into Night” (2018) the other day. It’s very long, and I only just managed to stay awake till the end (my partner didn’t). But still I’m glad I saw it. Visually, it’s among the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen. Every frame is stunning. In terms of the plot, you just have to accept that it’s all a jumble – it’s deliberately so. Only the 2nd part of the film creates a coherence – but it’s the coherence of a dream, where the brain takes many disconnected elements and somehow weaves them into a story. After the film, it’s helpful to read what the critics say, in this case. The most helpful essay I found was Roderick Heath’s on Film Freedonia. Seeing this film, and thinking about it more deeply, is sure to offer a lot.
At the film festival
This year at the Jerusalem Film Festival we saw three films: “House of Hummingbird”, “Young Ahmed” and “The Invisible Life of Eurydice Gusmao”. All three were special. “House of Hummingbird” was the best; a poignant coming-of-age film where not a lot happens (for its 2 hours and 20 minute running time) but it holds the attention and keeps the eyes moist throughout. For a lot of people, this will have been their favourite film in the festival.
“The Invisible Life…” is a very strong movie, at times hard to watch. Full of raw emotions, this film also runs for 2 hours + but it does occasionally feel a bit long. The discomfort that it creates is probably deliberate. I think the filmmakers want us to suspect that the story is not what it seems. There are hints to the film’s undercurrents in the name of Eurydice and the references to Greece. This caught my attention immediately because the views of Rio reminded me of the old French film “Orfeo Negro” (which is also of course set in Rio and based on the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice).
My working hypothesis is that the two sisters, who never find each other despite years of longing and searching, are actually two sides of the same person, which can never be reconciled. When one thinks of it this way, certain aspects of the film begin to fall into place. So although this is a very challenging movie, it somehow works because it keeps one thinking about it long afterwards.
“Young Ahmed” is not, in my opinion, a great movie. It’s well-made and interesting, but also annoying, perhaps subtly flawed. The main character, a teenager who falls under the spell of a radical imam, is surrounding by gentle, caring, mostly fairly enlightened people. There are no justifications in sight for his murderous zeal. This may represent a part of reality; it may even be what the film is trying to show. But in reality the state of our societies is less perfect than is shown in the film. There is racism, inequality, and all the rest. There are other films, like “Paradise Now”, that make a better presentation of the background, though this one is special in its depiction of a likable, but often inscrutable young man.
The Sea of Trees
Auroville has a movie theatre which seems to specialize in films no one ever heard of. But the screenings are free, the place is airconditioned, and sometimes there are real gems. Tonight’s offering was “A Sea of Trees”, which is about a man who goes to commit suicide in a Japanese forest that is a popular suicide spot. A special film.