Thanks to the good people over at Calabash Music I just enjoyed my lunch while watching this amazing little animated film.
Hungu was conceived and directed by Canadian Nicolas Brault with production assistance from the National Film Board of Canada. The official write-up:
The hungu is an African musical instrument, ancestor of the Brazilian berimbau. Its origins are carried on in an ancient tradition. Inspired by the grace and raw beauty of African rock paintings, Nicolas Brault applies his narrative gifts to a world where humans and nature are subtly linked.
Under the African sun, a child walks in the desert with his kin. Death is prowling, but a mother’s soul resurrected by music will return strength and life to the child when he becomes a man.
The filmmaker combines 2D animation on a graphics tablet with the warmth of sand animation, thus uniting modernity and tradition, Brazil and Africa, music and memory. Sparse in design and humanist in its outlook, Hungu exudes the elegance and suggestive power of a timeless story.
My power and prestige precede me, which allows access to inside information not intended for you plebes. Just the other day the mayor, Gavin Newsom, sent me a quick e-mail about what he’s been up to. I guess the cat’s been let out of the bag so it’s safe to say that he’s considering a run for governor when Arnold Schwarzenegger gets termed out. There’s an exploratory commission at work, feeling out the mood on the street, seeing what chances our native son has at ascending into the hallowed halls of Sacramento. Newsom himself has been on the move, spending less time at City Hall in lieu of places like Washington DC where he witnessed Barak Obama’s swearing-in (part one) and sat through a two-day Mayors conference. Now he’s in Switzerland and, after a quick four-day stay in Paris with his wife, Newsom has joined the global economic elite at the Davos forum.
Who’s footing the bill for this assessment of gubernatorial aspirations? That’s a good question and according to Chronicle muckrakers Matier & Ross the trip to DC, because of the Mayor’s summit, was a city expense that included whatever accommodations deigned appropriate for Newsom and two staff members, but the tally has yet to be made public. Private funds have sent Newsom and wife abroad, but what work isn’t being done while our mayor rubs elbows with the high profile talking heads of high finance? There’s no accounting for that sort of thing, but it is known that he has a member of SFPD keeping an eye on things overseas. In addition to world-class events Newsom has also be galavanting around the state to shake hands with commoners and possible squeeze dimes from their wallets. This is presumably handled by whatever campaign fund Newsom has already amassed but, as a sitting mayor, he is escorted to many places by our own cash-strapped police department.
But it takes money to make money, as evidenced by my very personal e-mail received from good old Gav. Using his life-altering experience of watching Obama being sworn in as a segue Newsom begins to rattle off his hopes and dreams of what can be done sitting in Sacramento; each bullet point is accompanied by a link asking if you’ll join us. Regardless of whether you’re into universal health care, climate change, schools or the economy the links all direct you to a sign up sheet so you can begin to receive personal pleas for contributions to purchase the sensation of participating in democratic change. That’s what this is all about, he summarized, we have made San Francisco a laboratory for change and he wants to take this experience state-wide. (more…)
Can a first time feature film shot entirely on handheld digital video starring a cast of unknowns represent an honest portrayal of inner city life? Eric Eason excels at one thing, imposing a mood on a time and place by offering the viewer little flavors swiped from a well-stocked sampler buffet. Unfortunately his overbearing atmosphere broadcasts the future as subtly as a drunken rhino on a three day binge and his attempts to express fast-paced city life by means of a constantly whirling digital camera drag this little picture down into the gutter of art trash. There’s redeeming qualities if you don’t mind picking through dead pigeons and discarded condoms running along the sidewalk.
Ostensibly a family drama the more fulfilling effect Eason manages is to use the day of a fractured Latino family to explore their community. Manny Moreno (Leo Minaya) is graduating from highscool top honors with a full scholarship to Syracuse. His older brother Junior (Franky G) can barely get it together to put the deposit down on the rental hall in between shouting at his wife (Julissa Lopez), brushing off his kid and looking for the white-out to falsify some documents needed for his contracting work. But this is a big deal and nothing will get in between family, except for their absent father; Manny lives with his charming old-school Grandfather (Hector Gonzalez) who has nothing but obvious pride for his charge.
There’s an early period dedicated to a couple slice-of-life vignettes. Manny takes the train to school and hangs out with his trash-talking friends, hams for the camera and tries to flirt like a street kid but is woefully unable to affect the same brash braggadocio as his peers. There’s an obvious excitement in the air, graduation is only hours away, but what excites Manny more is that his family is throwing him a party afterwards and he would really like Marisol (Jessica Morales) to come. Unfortunately she has to babysit her son.
Across town Junior is frantically running around because his team of Mexicans bailed on a job. What he finds is a squad of laid off busboys begging to drywall in their uniforms. He’s late, there’s no time, so the restaurant staff climb in the back and watch as Junior, with his forged insurance registration, charms his way a townhouse, and then into the upperclass tenant. There’s still the rental hall deposit to be paid, and Junior hauls ass to the check cashing place looking for a certified check. He charms a girl working there as well, and presumably his money order works out fine in the end.
Meanwhile Gramps is legging it through Washington Heights to an unremarkable doorway. He arrives in a brothel where he’s greeted warmly by the madam and all the girls kiss him on the cheek. Smoking his cigar, surrounded by admirers, he opens his case and reveals lingerie and jewelry for sale. But Mr. Moreno (Manuel Cabral), the missing father, has also been busy. Early in the morning he set about crafting the world’s longest sandwich and has it delivered to the place of the party. When Junior finds it there he flies into a rage, bringing the gift back to the bodego his father runs and throws it in his face. Obviously there’s some bad blood in this family. (more…)
Any impression that the Catholic Church is a backward institution run by clueless old men has been obliterated by Pope Benedict XVI’s launching of a Vatican Youtube channel. Now the faithful can use the power of the World Wide Web (his words) to check in daily with their spiritual father, unfettered by the limitations of space and time.
Mind blowing stuff, but it raises an obvious question. Surely the Vatican has the money to deliver these messages of goodwill and hope through their own digital channels, relaying the word of God through high resolution streaming rather than low-grade Youtube clips. Is the Church concerned that no one would check into a dedicated site and hopes instead that viewership will trickle in through the interconnectedness of Youtube? Salvation can be had for millions of midnight Youtube trollers desperate for fulfillment just by stumbling onto a random video. If this is so then it seems strange that The Pope would rely on a social-network model to increase viewers while simultaneously warning against the threat of virtual friendships in lieu of an honest-to-God life.
I’m also a little curious about the way that Pope TV is set up. They don’t allow embedding (which is why trying to watch the video above sends you direct to their channel) and they don’t allow anyone to rate their videos. Even more perplexing is that it seems like commenting is enabled but I’ve yet to see a single comment on any of the videos I’ve looked at. The subject matter seems ripe for lampooning but perhaps the usual assortment of snarky Anonymous lurking throughout the web are a little concerned about their eternal salvation.
A shockingly compassionate piece of crime-fiction from the Godfather of amoral tales populated by sociopathic anti-heroes, The Grifters is the closest a Jim Thompson novel comes to a tale of redemption: Can a young man raised by a frequently absent mother who would rather abandon her child, who has found a life as a con-man, break free of the grift? Thompson was masterful at detailing the inner workings of his characters’ minds but often this was to show the inhuman deviousness of cold-blooded killers; here Thompson examines the thoughts of a man questioning, without intending on introspection, the very nature of his being when the distant past comes crashing into the present.
Roy Dillon’s vomiting bile outside a shop where his quick-change con earned him a baseball bat in the gut. The cruising cops take him for an afternoon drunk until they see his credit cards while he rifles through his wallet for his license. They take their leave and Dillon drives off just as soon as he can stop retching. Appearing to be a respectable man, holding down a straight job and living in a modest apartment in an unassuming Los Angeles neighborhood has been the key to his success. Con men find themselves constantly on the move, splitting town as soon as their faces become too recognizable. Dillon has found that he can stick to the short grift working from a central location and spare the expenses of life on the lam.
Except he’s dying, and doesn’t even know it. Internal hemorrhaging has him writhing in bed, unable to eat or sleep, and even a visit from Moira Langtry can’t dispel the nagging suspicion that something was seriously wrong. It wasn’t so much that they had a relationship as they had an understanding– she was an independent woman who didn’t need to be tied down, he was a swindler who couldn’t afford to be exposed. They speak mostly from discarded B-movie scripts, using a refusal to communicate to constantly challenge one another.
It takes a surprise visit from Lilly Dillon, his estranged mother, or the closest thing he had to one. She had come up the hard way, marrying young to escape the backwoods poverty and deprivation of her childhood, only to subject her son to a more urban variety of neglect as she elbowed her way through the seedy underbelly of Baltimore. In town on business, working the west coast tracks for an east coast mob, she mixes business with pleasure by tempering Roy’s long-standing and carefully metered resentment by saving his life.
And of course Lilly and Moira take an instant dislike towards one another. They’re roughly the same age and they’ve both graduated from the school of hard-knocks. No one’s an angel except for the Jewish immigrant Carol Roberg, a struggling nurse, who becomes a pawn for Lilly to block Moira’s grip on Roy, insisting on his staying with mom during an extended period of recuperation with a pretty young nurse around all day to feed him ice-cream. So he lays in bed torn between a sense of morality and desire, ruminating on his past and the cold war years between mother and son, wondering what exactly Moira wants from him, and how soon he can shake everyone off and return to the grift. (more…)
An amazing opportunity is afforded to a bright young man living in the small coastal village of Andhra, India. Although his father is a traditional healer and he is expected to follow in the family footsteps the local school administration, recognizing his academic talents, have the boy fill out some forms. Soon he was sitting through his grade examinations and, after having passed, was granted admission to the Navodaya Vidyalaya, a national network of schools set aside for talented youth who would otherwise be stuck in underfunded and underachieving institutions.
A Navodaya Vidyalaya is a school which is staffed by carefully screened instructors and populated by high scoring and intelligent students. It is a free service which provides room and board, supplies and stipends for travel by bus and rail. There’s just over 550 such academies spread throughout almost every state of India and have been operating since the mid-80’s; three-quarters of all admissions are reserved for children being brought in from rural conditions to afford them the opportunities they could never find back home.
Presumably this system of advanced education is funded by the government, which is probably why Shantanu Dutta of Around and About finds reason to praise India for this achievement. For such a troubled country with massive poverty, racial strife, an incredible economic gap, wide-spread corruption and temperamental utilities he wonders why anyone would bother paying taxes and finds some solace in this unique branch of the national education system. A part of me shares his enthusiasm– of course it’s great that some kid from the sticks who shows promise can be catch a lucky break and land placement in a good school. However, another part of me wonders what happens to a school when you strip the best students to be raised in isolation, and save the best teachers for these high-performing institutions.
One of the mission statements of the Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti is to prepare and then encourage their rural students to return to their homelands and make what improvements they can with the benefit of their superior education. I wonder how the kids left behind, growing up under hardship with little of the amenities granted their more learned peers, feel when the prodigal sons and daughters return to try and revolutionize the home village. Is it at all fair to abandon the hopeless slow-learners to their fate and rescue the bright bulbs, teaching them privately how to shine for the future good? Obviously with the investment in these specialty schools there resources not going to the standard regional schools and those making the sacrifice, the students left behind, suffer the most for their former classmates success. (more…)
One of the people I wanted to interview for my Guardian series was the former botanist and broadcaster David Bellamy, who has made a number of wildly misleading statements about global warming. He refused, but Channel 4 has made the film of our memorable battle in 2005 available.
Not as stylized as his previous videos, this is borrowed from a Channel 4 broadcast. It’s important to attack false scientific claims and it seems rarely done, so Monbiot pushes on in his lonely crusade. If we only had a fleet of environmentalists to tackle every industry or political action committee, every lobbyist and every seated senator, perhaps things could actually change. As always click on the picture to be taken to a page where you can watch the video.
War is hell, especially if your unit is sent to a place too haunted for the Vietcong to traverse. Leaving the terrestrial horrors of hidden snipers, tripwires, landmines and death by fire behind a small group of South Korean soldiers find themselves faced with an unseen and unexplained enemy in this high grossing psychological-horror flick.
In 1972 a South Korean military base begins to receive transmissions from a unit long missing and presumed dead. Unable to ignore these radio messages but unwilling to commit a large scale investigation the army brass picks Lieutenant Choi Tae-in (Woo-seong Kam) from the MPs after he narrowly escapes assassination in the bed of a prostitute. With a reputation for leading men into horrific bloodbaths where almost no one survives he’s forced to cull recruits for the mission from the VD clinic or rely on easily duped volunteers. A motley crew of under-achievers assembles at the dock, waiting along with their taciturn Sergeant Jin Chang-rok (Byung-ho Son) waiting to be taken down river to R-Point.
Despite army intelligence they do fall under fire in the middle of a bamboo grove but soon discover their adversary to be a corpse and a young girl, wounded by a mortar blast. Leaving her to die they find themselves troubled again by strange rock inscriptions as they begin to enter their objective; Chinese etchings tell a tale of the slaughter and mass burial of Vietnamese at the hands of the Chinese and that R-Point stands on a filled lake which serves as their grave. Shaking off superstitious warnings they continue.
Upon waking the next morning a ghostly mansion rises above them, shrouded in the omnipresent fog. They find no one inside the ruined building, just the remains of transmitter equipment and assorted boxes left behind. Downtime is split between routine barracks banter and the radio operator struggling to get a signal back to base, until the building is buzzed by a chopper. As it turns out the Americans are storing something on the second floor, something not to be disturbed, and the squadron leader warns Lt. Choi that R-Point is haunted. His men are betting, he says, that when they return if four days all of the Koreans will be dead.
The next day the troop splits up to search for any sign of their missing comrades, any evidence of them alive or dead. As they parade through the grounds they discover burning incense left at the ruins of an ancient temple and are forced to contend with the idea that they are not quite alone here. Some of the soldiers, left behind for a moment, find themselves chasing their comrades who suddenly disappear in the tall grass. The radio operator begins to receive transmissions from French soldiers who say they are nearby and would like to come visit. When one of the soldiers is outed as having belonged to the missing unit a fight breaks out, and the next morning he goes missing. But not for long– someone has strung him up from the roof of the mansion.
But the radio can’t get ahold of headquarters and the search must continue. More people see soldiers that can’t possible be there, and everyone is getting suspicious that tricks are being played on them. Lt. Choi and Sgt. Jin begin to butt heads over how to proceed and there’s a growing sense among everyone that something is being hidden from them. And then, of course, there’s the woman in white that Choi sees every night when the lighting storms begin, but this isn’t something you can exactly tell your men when they’re on the verge of losing it completely.
Julien Coupat is all that remains, one of twenty individuals arrested in connection with co-ordinated incidents of sabotage against France’s TGV high-speed railways last November. Iron bars were used to short out the electrical systems of several lines which stranded approximately 20,000 passengers on trains and in stations, affecting departures to as far away as London. There were no injuries, no explosions, no manifestos left behind at the points of vandalism, but initial suspicion fell on striking railway workers.
Three days afterwards police held simultaneous raids in Paris, Rouen and Tarnac, netting twenty suspects, eleven of whom were soon freed. The remaining nine, now referred to as the Tarnac 9 because most were from there, remained in detention and questions for several days. Four more suspects were released while the remaining were charged with “association of wrong-doers in relation to a terrorist undertaking”. Nearly a month after the acts of sabotage three more people are released by the courts, leaving archeology student, Yidune Levy, and her “companion” Coupat. On January 16th Levy was freed after a judge’s intervention, although she may be re-incarcerated pending judicial review. Coupat was originally ordered released in December by a judge but an emergency order has kept him in jail. (more…)
Somewhere in between my rapidly decaying body and my rapidly decaying mind is a slumbering mid-life crisis. There will be no cherry-red convertible and a mistress half my age, but when my thoughts do stray into the possibilities of life-improving changes that can be made the fact that I’m still slugging away in the thankless realm of unit-pushing retail finds itself naked in the spotlight.
It’s not so bad, of course, which is why I’ve been able to stay for so long. They leave me alone and let me do what I do without any oversight, they don’t mind the fact that I’m a slob who shows up a little late here, leaves a little early there. I don’t interact with customers except through the safety of the internet, I have a little computer in the corner and I’ve been able to amass a collection of bizarre import DVDs and countless records. The company isn’t horrible, doesn’t go out of its way to destroy the world or exploit anyone; they try to donate money to worthy causes and collect old batteries and personal electronics for recycling. However, the daily knowledge that I contribute to a cycle of plastic exchanging hands hangs heavily over my head and makes me feel useless and lazy, caught in a trap of an empty existence. Underneath the general curiosity and compulsive clicking that takes me from one corner of the internet to the next is a search for something that might resonate within the core of my being.
The entrepreneurial spirit is not strong in me, so I find what people come up with endlessly fascinating. Today Dave Richards of Defeating Global Poverty introduced a new company called Burro operating in Ghana renting rechargeable batteries to locals. The business plan is straightforward: electricity is unreliable or unavailable to many citizens who have to operate lanterns and radios by battery power. The favorite brand is Tiger Head, a low charge disposable zinc-carbon variety dry-cell that corrodes and releases manganese dioxide. People using batteries to keep their houses lit at night or ghetto blasters blaring all day burn through these quickly, throw them away and have to buy more.
Burro imports cheap Chinese rechargeables and rents them to people who have signed on for monthly accounts. The high-quality rechargeable batteries can be swapped out as frequently as needed through any number of agents who resupply them and recharge the spent batteries. For a moderate sum per month (roughly equal to three times the cost of a single Tiger Head D-Size battery) customers are guaranteed as much battery power as they need for a set cost.
The company was started by Whit Alexander, co-founder of the Cranium board game. Presumably the sale of Cranium to Hasbro has lined Whit’s pockets with enough capital to invest in this innovative project currently being run out of the city of , due north of the capital Accra. They set up shop and began to hire a team of partners, agents and salespeople; by all accounts the idea has caught on very quickly with the Ghanaians and subscriptions have soared. So we have a company that provides a necessary service which gives people steady jobs while reducing the amount of toxic trash polluting the world. Expanding slowly into neighboring villages the company is effectively establishing a network which can be used for future projects.
Still there’s a little rough with the smooch. I’m not keen on cheap Chinese imports, although I understand that trying to supply an African nation with affordable products must be a challenge. It’s also distressing in an irrational way to see yet another wealthy white guy swooping into the continent and wrapping the locals in his benevolent arms. It doesn’t make him a bad person, of course, and I believe that his intentions are good, but it still sits uneasily in my gut. I hope that when the business is established Alexander spins his participation off to the local partners he’s working with and lets them take the reins for the next Burro ride.
Both pictures are stolen from the Burro Brand blog. You can check it out and follow their progress as they take over the local battery market.
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.jpg "Manito DVD via Film Movement")
Anxiety Neurosis 