Some interesting goings-on in Zimbabwe these days.
There is apparently a thriving trade in male semen for rituals, so much so that gangs of women are picking up male hitchhikers, giving them sexual stimulants, raping them and collecting their sperm. Three sisters are currently on trial for such an offence. 31 used condoms were found in their car.
And schoolgirls in a southern part of the country are being attacked by goblins. "Parents say their daughters were attacked in classrooms by dwarf human beings which transformed into baboons." The girls are now quite reasonably refusing to go to school. "A goblin is a mythical creature, an evil spirit and there will have to be cleansing rituals at the school if the hysteria continues," said Dewa Mavhinga, a Zimbabwe scholar.
"Earlier this month, Sam Sipepa Nkomo, water affairs minister, said workers had run away from building a dam because it was infested with mermaids. "These mermaids are also Zvikwambo," Mr Mavhinga said." Zvikwambo is the local word that also refers to goblins. (http://tgr.ph/GL8GwE)
A couple of years ago "A Zimbabwean mother killed her baby son and sold one of his ears for $20 (£13) to a Mozambican witch doctor, police have confirmed."
Friday, March 23, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
A Taste of Cherry
Just saw A Taste of Cherry, 1997, by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, which won a Palme D'Or at Cannes. Although the start was not exactly prepossessing, I found the movie more and more interesting as it went on, and it has been resonating strongly with me ever since.
We all need others in our lives. The standard narrative for this need is the love story. A man or a woman searches for someone to share life with, to love and to cherish, and be loved and cherished by, until death. In some respects A Taste of Cherry is the negative to this positive, a sad undermining of it, in an unfortunate land; in any case, a parallel. Like a love story, it ends as soon as the right person has been found.
The protagonist is Mr Badii, a middle-aged man searching for someone to shovel earth over him after he commits suicide and lays down in the grave he has already dug beneath a cherry tree on the outskirts of Tehran. In a subtle nod to the more traditional stories we are used to, the first man he approaches thinks he is looking for a gay pickup. But no, he is not looking for sex, or companionship, much less love. His need is absolutely minimal: all he wants from the other is a decent burial, the tiniest shred of humanity. Because a personal relationship like love is not involved, he shows no emotion, no involvement: throughout the movie, he remains expressionless.
Badii goes about his quest by inviting men who look promising into his 4x4 and driving them around interminable winding dirt roads up and down a hill outside Tehran to the grave he has dug, so they can understand what he wants from them. The constant twists and turns, on which the visuals linger, are of course suggestive of the tortuous nature of any such quest. The setting itself is richly ironic, a dusty area where earth is constantly being moved: groups of men dig holes, presumably for trees, heavy equipment roars around, moving huge quantities of dirt from one place to another. And yet it is hard to get someone to move twenty shovelfuls into a grave.
As in a parable, Badii meets a series of interesting characters who have different reasons to refuse his request: the construction worker who thinks he is gay, a Kurdish soldier doing his military service who is too shy and simple to accept such an unusual task; an Afghan seminarist whose religion tells him suicide is wrong. Finally, he finds an old Turkish taxidermist, himself tempted by suicide in earlier days, who tries to dissuade Badii by relating his own experience, and how he realized how beautiful life is. However, Badii is adamant, and the taxidermist agrees to bury him.
The whole movie until now has taken place in the fall and winter, the colours of the landscape invariably a dusty yellow-brown, not without charm in the bright sun, but cool and lifeless. On the night Badii takes his sleeping pills and lies down in the grave, a storm breaks out and the rain pours down. And suddenly now, everything changes, and instead of the story continuing, we witness part of the shooting of a movie: here is the actor who plays Badii, the director giving orders, a bunch of recruits who we'd seen previously marching up the winding road.
But this is not the movie we have just seen. Here the landscape is exuberantly green, and the soldiers, seen before on a forced march, now stop to rest by the cherry tree. Their joyful boisterousness recalls Badii's happy memories of military life, and nature here is as the Turk saw it, brilliantly beautiful. This is not Badii's empty, lonely world, but a busy, happy, companiable one, one that was before, and can be after. Life goes on, greater and better than the one sad episode we have just seen. Badii's fictitious body, and the rain, and the telling, have provided the stuff to trumpet the possibility of a brighter world.
We all need others in our lives. The standard narrative for this need is the love story. A man or a woman searches for someone to share life with, to love and to cherish, and be loved and cherished by, until death. In some respects A Taste of Cherry is the negative to this positive, a sad undermining of it, in an unfortunate land; in any case, a parallel. Like a love story, it ends as soon as the right person has been found.
The protagonist is Mr Badii, a middle-aged man searching for someone to shovel earth over him after he commits suicide and lays down in the grave he has already dug beneath a cherry tree on the outskirts of Tehran. In a subtle nod to the more traditional stories we are used to, the first man he approaches thinks he is looking for a gay pickup. But no, he is not looking for sex, or companionship, much less love. His need is absolutely minimal: all he wants from the other is a decent burial, the tiniest shred of humanity. Because a personal relationship like love is not involved, he shows no emotion, no involvement: throughout the movie, he remains expressionless.
Badii goes about his quest by inviting men who look promising into his 4x4 and driving them around interminable winding dirt roads up and down a hill outside Tehran to the grave he has dug, so they can understand what he wants from them. The constant twists and turns, on which the visuals linger, are of course suggestive of the tortuous nature of any such quest. The setting itself is richly ironic, a dusty area where earth is constantly being moved: groups of men dig holes, presumably for trees, heavy equipment roars around, moving huge quantities of dirt from one place to another. And yet it is hard to get someone to move twenty shovelfuls into a grave.
As in a parable, Badii meets a series of interesting characters who have different reasons to refuse his request: the construction worker who thinks he is gay, a Kurdish soldier doing his military service who is too shy and simple to accept such an unusual task; an Afghan seminarist whose religion tells him suicide is wrong. Finally, he finds an old Turkish taxidermist, himself tempted by suicide in earlier days, who tries to dissuade Badii by relating his own experience, and how he realized how beautiful life is. However, Badii is adamant, and the taxidermist agrees to bury him.
The whole movie until now has taken place in the fall and winter, the colours of the landscape invariably a dusty yellow-brown, not without charm in the bright sun, but cool and lifeless. On the night Badii takes his sleeping pills and lies down in the grave, a storm breaks out and the rain pours down. And suddenly now, everything changes, and instead of the story continuing, we witness part of the shooting of a movie: here is the actor who plays Badii, the director giving orders, a bunch of recruits who we'd seen previously marching up the winding road.
But this is not the movie we have just seen. Here the landscape is exuberantly green, and the soldiers, seen before on a forced march, now stop to rest by the cherry tree. Their joyful boisterousness recalls Badii's happy memories of military life, and nature here is as the Turk saw it, brilliantly beautiful. This is not Badii's empty, lonely world, but a busy, happy, companiable one, one that was before, and can be after. Life goes on, greater and better than the one sad episode we have just seen. Badii's fictitious body, and the rain, and the telling, have provided the stuff to trumpet the possibility of a brighter world.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
The Iron Lady
The Iron Lady is a muddled disaster of a movie about Margaret Thatcher.
It pulls you in opposing directions and you worry that the director doesn't really know in which one she wants you to go.
A series of flashbacks on Thatcher's rise to power portray a resolute young woman, brilliantly articulate, who stands up to the male chauvinist establishment and does what she thinks is right for her country without flinching. It seems that we are supposed to have a generally favourable opinion of her, all the more so since little time is wasted on opposing points of view or the disastrous results of some of her policies. Yet the flashbacks which detail her political success story are presented as little episodes of remembrance in the life of a distressed, demented old woman abandoned by her son, without friends, drinking heavily, talking incessantly to her dead husband and worrying about disposing of his clothes. Fully half the movie, I swear, is devoted to following the poor woman around her empty house towards the end of her life, leaving you with an overwhelming feeling of miserable unhappiness and failure.
Of course, Meryl Streep is amazing in the role of Margaret Thatcher. And the make-up artists Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland really deserved their Oscar. In fact, you feel obliged to wonder, uncharitably, if it wasn't Streep's perfect acting and Coulier and Helland's exceptional make-up that resulted in the emphasis on the lost, demented side of Thatcher, which they were able to render so well. Kind of sad, if that's the case. It'd be nice if these movies actually meant something.
It pulls you in opposing directions and you worry that the director doesn't really know in which one she wants you to go.
A series of flashbacks on Thatcher's rise to power portray a resolute young woman, brilliantly articulate, who stands up to the male chauvinist establishment and does what she thinks is right for her country without flinching. It seems that we are supposed to have a generally favourable opinion of her, all the more so since little time is wasted on opposing points of view or the disastrous results of some of her policies. Yet the flashbacks which detail her political success story are presented as little episodes of remembrance in the life of a distressed, demented old woman abandoned by her son, without friends, drinking heavily, talking incessantly to her dead husband and worrying about disposing of his clothes. Fully half the movie, I swear, is devoted to following the poor woman around her empty house towards the end of her life, leaving you with an overwhelming feeling of miserable unhappiness and failure.
Of course, Meryl Streep is amazing in the role of Margaret Thatcher. And the make-up artists Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland really deserved their Oscar. In fact, you feel obliged to wonder, uncharitably, if it wasn't Streep's perfect acting and Coulier and Helland's exceptional make-up that resulted in the emphasis on the lost, demented side of Thatcher, which they were able to render so well. Kind of sad, if that's the case. It'd be nice if these movies actually meant something.
Seafood Watch
Seafood Watch is a wonderful site to get information about what fish and seafood are best to buy in terms of safety and sustainability. You can get quick charts and complete reports on each species, so you can see where they are fished, by what method, whether the fishing is sustainable, what pollutants you may be consuming, etc.
Of course, it makes for some sad reading. We probably shouldn't be eating the cod or salmon or Basa that we find in Safeway or at the Superstore...
Of course, it makes for some sad reading. We probably shouldn't be eating the cod or salmon or Basa that we find in Safeway or at the Superstore...
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Amazing McLuhan!
50 years ago, long before the invention of the personal computer, the Canadian academic and visionary Marshall McLuhan foresaw the importance of the computer and the possibilities of the internet. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962, he says
"A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind."Amazing!
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Gobbledegook
More financial gobbledegook from Reuters:
"Risk-on positioning could continue to be funded by short euro positions following the LTRO," said analysts at BNP Paribas."
Romney
Well, the Romney gaffes are starting to rival the Bush gaffes, except that Romney's are nearly all about how he doesn't understand what it is to be a normal (not super-rich) person.
Asked if he follows Nascar racing, a common pursuit, he says not exactly but he has several friends who own Nascar teams.
Asked about his support for American car makers (he opposed Obama's bailout for the auto industry), he says his family is a strong supporter, and for example his wife has two Cadillacs.
Asked if he follows Nascar racing, a common pursuit, he says not exactly but he has several friends who own Nascar teams.
Asked about his support for American car makers (he opposed Obama's bailout for the auto industry), he says his family is a strong supporter, and for example his wife has two Cadillacs.
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