If you would like to adopt a clitoris.
Thanks to Rasna Warah who, among many other great things during the last few years, put me in touch with Wanjiru’s blog. Wanjiru also sends us to this site, which encourages you to send your knickers to Africa too. Yes: someone will wear your panties and rub your clitoris far away under the hot hot sun!
Responding to a growing appetite for distraction, shorthand journalistic cliché has infested our inner lives. Generally, it means we are unable to have respect for uniqueness of experience because it is summed up, packaged, placed in a captionable context. Soon this context demands total obedience; nothing else is relevant.
Indeed. For much more around this, go here.
The end of marketing (even ‘semiotics‘) as we know it. Full details here. Death Star, help us.
He is almost a gentleman. Cornell, Oxford and even saving the children. They are all almost gentleman. He is. And he is. Yet still ‘corruption’ is a word associated with this part of the world, where our primary gentleman tells us* it’s “a national pastime”. So it’s worth getting the FT this weekend to remind yourself about the six hundred and thirteen billion dollars of debt, and the role of one of ‘the Big Four’ getting jiggy with the books. Quality in everything they do. No irony lost on us on the Big Four. So where’s the fifth? Strolling around a Kenya safari park somewhere? Oh, pull the other one: you’re as crooked as they come. Gettleman should go home and search his soul and his knowledge base: there is something severely missing. Instead, he probably devotes time to events like this, which seem awfully old hat under the circumstances.
just a young couple. What irony, to describe the great man’s work thus. (Stupidity aside, try to go to the exhibition here.)
are we (all) not as angry about Avatar?
This paragraph perfectly captures why I could not continue as a reporter or as a news person, and why I felt I simply had no choice but to take the path (of, well, poverty) that I am now jogging along, a path which doesn’t really have a name as yet.
‘Ours is an era intoxicated by its capacity to reproduce history technologically, in an instantaneous digitization of all that has happened. But far from tempering our ability to politicize history, this seems to spur both individuals and regimes on to still greater tendentiousness. Among modern philosophers Baudrillard understood this development the best, and foresaw the deployment of symbolic events alongside the more conventional weaponry of international conflict. Sebald understood it as well: in The Rings of Saturn his fictive alter ego observes the Waterloo Panorama, a 360-degree representation of the battle warped round “an immense domed rotunda”, and muses: “This then . . . is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was”. To counter this synoptic view – which, again and again throughout his work, Sebald links to dangerous idealisms and utopian fantasies – the writer offered us subjective experience. This was not, however, reportage that relies for its authority on witness; Sebald, as he wrote with reference to the Allied bombing of Hamburg in his essay “Air War and Literature”, mistrusted seeming clarity in the retelling of events that had violently deranged the senses. Rather, his was a forensic phenomenology that took into account the very lacunae, the repressions and the partial amnesias that are the reality of lived life.’
The italics are mine: This. Is. It.
Sebald has helped me see Self in a better light. Great talk.
[Thanks SM for original link]
1.Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) never convincingly smokes at any point in the entire film. She also does not look like a chain-smoker entering middle-age, she looks like a Hollywood actress entering middle-age.
2. Jake Sully appears to have learned the Na’vi language fluently at some points in film, at others he can’t seem to speak a word and needs a translator and interpreter. When you learn a language, you aren’t able to speak bits of it as a native speaker: you stutter and wobble and correct yourself.
3. The Na’vi can only speak broken English. They say things like, Where you go Jakesully? so they sound a little bit simple and a little bit slow. When Jake Sully speaks, the subtitles – when used – imply that he is speaking the Na’vi language fluently and articulately. Given his basic command of his own language, this is unconvincing.
4. Neytiri looks quite like Angelina Jolie, infact like many of the Na’vi.
5. Neytiri is presented to us as wise, athletic, a hunter, a great shot, courageous and objective. And yet she suddenly has ‘hysterical’ outbursts such as when Jakesully (she can’t pronounce his name properly because she’s also simple) nearly falls off the cliff-top whilst choosing his toruk. ‘JAKE!’ screams Neytiri, ‘JAKE!’ as the film reverts to using the female in the most conventional and unimaginative way possible. Later, when she realises that Jakesully has been spying on the Na’vi and has sold them to the devil, she shouts out, ‘I TRUSTED YOU!’ again reverting to a eurocentric, human worldview of male-female relationships, as if she had simply caught him shagging (sorry, ‘mating’: they are natives after all, and so mate like animals… oh but they are animals… oh but) another Na’vi.
6. The Na’vi are presented as wise and in touch with their plant world and nature and yet they are so dumb, they are unable to assess Jake Sully as the souped-up squaddy he really obviously is.
7. The Toruk chosen by Jake Sully understands English instructions like ‘TURN LEFT!’, which leads to point 8:
8. The script is so bad, it might have been written by Jake Sully himself.
9. It’s all really about climate change. It will make the whole world wake up to itself. It will ultimately save the planet. James Cameron should be awarded a Nobel.
10. Jake Sully is a man with a conscience. That he is a mercenary, or a squaddy, or a fanatic white North American, is irrelevant.
11. Jake Sully is a cripple: he must be kind.
12. Neytiri’s braids transform miraculously into straightened caucasian hair when she falls in love with Jakesully; and, equally amazingly, revert to braids when she’s cross with him. That’s true.
13. Jake Sully never gets a Na’vi name, despite becoming a brother, their leader, their God, their and our superhero. Jake, we love you.
14. The Na’vi totally ‘get’ Jake Sully when he talks about his rights. ‘I HAVE THE RIGHT TO SPEAK’ he shouts, and the Na’vi all nod. They, too, like us, understand rights. They are animals, they mate, they love plants, but they also believe in rights. Good. So they are definitely ok then.
15. The Twin Towers is the key moment in the film. No wonder the avatar PTSD page is so popular. It’s all too much.
16. When the Twin Towers comes down, Jakesully uses exactly the same script as countless North American military films when soldiers are being ordered to attack: ‘MOVE! MOVE! GO! GO!’
17. It’s quite like that other movie about under-armed natives fighting over-armed whiteys, Black Hawk Down. It’s as clichéd, as arrogant, as poorly scripted, as racist, as paternalistic. But the FSE are probably better in Avatar, and at least they didn’t do what Black Hawk Down did: using clearly non-Somali black actors to play Somalis on the basis that all black people look the same. Don’t they?
18. Jakesully was a warrior who dreamed he could bring peace. That line alone would have stopped me going to the Ritzy on Saturday, but alas, everyone had simply insisted, ‘the three dee is amaaazing’.
19. Jake Sully becomes the Na’vi saviour, obviously. As he says himself, ‘I can’t do this without you’. Ring any bells? Afghanistan? Those bloody Na’vi: they are so bloody ungrateful. HELP the man, why don’t you? He’s doing it for you! Don’t you see? I s’pose it’s coz they’re kind of native animals. They don’t get it. But they’re so beautiful. Awwhhhh. I’d like one.
20. The Na’vi are more interested in saving non-chain-smoking spy Dr Grace, than their own people: and they can’t even do that properly!
21. Nasty Colonel Miles Quaritch, when giving his final battle speech to the troops, is really focusing on his black and hispanic men: we know this because the camera tells us. You see, it’s not only white people who are mean. If, like me, you thought the film was a sort of imperialist, paternalist exercise in US propaganda, you realise, at this point in the film, that you’ve been wrong all along.
22. Jakesully really like connects with Eywa. I wanna know how he did that? Ah! But hang on, he tells us in another beautiful bit of dialogue, ‘It was worth a try,’ as he tells silly Neytiri.
23. Neytiri falls in love with Jakesully. She ultimately comes to her senses and realises that the white human is best. Hang on a minute, he has become a Na’vi, by then hasn’t he? So I got that wrong. He’s not a clever white man saving the natives. He’s a native. Like, duuuurrrrh.
24. You will wake up feeling depressed the next day. Not because you want to live in Na’vi land and can’t cope with real horrible human land, but because so many people you like and respect told you that Avatar is an amazing must-see anti-imperialist film.
Here we go again. But at least this time, it might be a slightly more interesting discussion. Artur Domoslawski, reports G, has ‘sought to start a debate over the relationship between truth and fiction, a biographer and his subject, and how far modern Poland remained haunted by its communist past’. When it comes to Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Africanists in the world seem to be most upset by their limited comprehensions on truth. I have often wondered if there is as much noise about his writings on say, Iran. Or is it only truth vis á vis Africa that matters? And I am sympathetic, of course, given the amount of ignorance and bile and racism that has been written about that great continent. But I am not sure why the defense of truth & Africa within literature is so protectively fought, as if it were a matter for Oxfam or Save the Children. Unfortunately, RK has suffered as a result. And he has suffered because he is a journalist, and people’s somewhat naive (and, ok, I’ll be generous, reasonable) expectations that journalists are out to write the truth. Whatever that is. Between the last time I got a little sweaty about views of RK’s writings and now, I have read a whole lot more, including – like many others – WG Sebald. Truth & fiction & travel & autobiography. RK is not in the same writing league as WG; in fact I have never been convinced that RK is even that good (apart from his first hellbent rattle through Angola in the 1970s). But I would be delighted if this new biography* approaches RK’s work with more maturity and imagination and, heck, truth, than the self-righteous journalists (in the main) who bang their fist, shouting It’s not TRUE! It’s not TRUE! as if they had just discovered the earth wasn’t flat. We await a whole pile of protective (of Africa) reviews that slam RK as a liar whilst accepting that he was an awfully good writer.
Meanwhile, let us ponder the relationship between the mind and power. And the fact that RK separated his notebooks between ‘mundane facts’ and ‘impressionistic notes’. Why the separation? Why the distinction? Intriguing, since in the end, ‘the truth’ won out in the books in which the author was unable to keep these two sides apart. Although, he ought to have had a third for things he thought he had seen but was not sure about. They are the most interesting. Indeed, the epitaph to the book is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life’ which lends a little symmetry to my point.
*Kapuściński Non-Fiction: The Man, the Reporter, and His Times, is to be published by Świat Książki next month. Meanwhile, here is a piece I have written about him in The Guardian.
P.S. So Neal Ascherson reads my blog? I’m delighted. But just remember that you saw it here the day before.
P.P.S. 3quarksdaily has some more on Mr K starting – or ending – here.
