Head-lines

Today the BBC ran a headline proclaiming that Ahmadinejad has just received a dire "poll blow." Congratulations to Tobias Funke in his new position as BBC correspondent. Also, congratulations to the people of Iran for disapproving of a neo-fascist gnome.

Broken Flowers

[spoiler]
Broken Flowers is a movie obsessed with examining impotence and generation. I thought it was one of Jarmusch's best movies in years, fusing his pristine style with humor, wit and a great soundtrack. He seems to work really well with emotions when they are poorly hidden, but nevertheless hidden, such as in the scene between Murray and the real estate couple. The opening shots introduce us to Don Johnston viewing "The Secret Life of Don Juan," a movie based on the book which the character of Don may be loosely based on, establishing the concern of inherited genres and tropes. Bill Murray, whose comedic dead-pan is used more effectively by Jim Jarmusch than by Sofia Coppola or Wes Anderson, is forced into an inverted Film Noir situation, which Murray's character jokes about in the movie, comparing Winston the Sherlock Holmes, etc, in which he investigates not some criminal mystery, but a mystery which reaches into his own uncomfortable life. This inversion turns noir on its head; Sam Spade (or Dolomite) found escape in the pursuit of other people's secrets, not their own.

The character of Winston comes up to help push Don into examining a mystery uncomfortably close to his own concerns, that of whether or not he may have a son. What follows is a sort of picaresque journey from one old flame to the next, trying to find the possible mother, but rather than being unrelated, each encounter reminds him of how tangential he was in his ex-lovers lives. Don Johnston confronts not women who love him, but who are lost in various ways, angry, damaged or hopeless in ways that he has shielded himself from by hopping from one relationship to the next.

The first house comes with a bizarre Nabokov reference whose bearing on the plot I am not sure what to make of. Don quickly becomes the man of the house, but the spectre of the dead father is confronted. Don looks for his legacy, but sees only echoes of his own fear of impotence; the dead husband who cannot control his nymph daughter; the childless real-estate husband who sells souless McHouses; the husbandless (lesbian?) cat-whisperer; the impoverished and tarnished "Penny"; and finally, the dead. Wifeless, all he has is this; the suspicion that any young man may be his son. What he settles with is not a happy comittment to another woman, but a realization of the deep uncertainty and rootlessness of his life. In the final scene, shot beautifully by Jarmusch, Don is much a like a ghost realizing he is a ghost, and as a viewer we are brought full around to the beginning of the movie, appreciating, perhaps, the sadness Murray displayed while sitting and watching a movie. Another great flick by Jarmusch. And speaking of ghosts, if you ever wonder what it would be like to see Jarmusch to write and direct a hypothetical sequel to Ghostbusters, then here you are.

Global Aids Day

As Andrew Sullivan notes (http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/), the efficiency of ribbons, and ribbon days such as today seem frustratingly small as gestures go, but if there is a valid reason to be reminded of a pressing need it is the AIDS emergency. As Bono has said, history will probably judge us on how we act in the face of this emergency, and that it is indeed not merely an epedemic, but an emergency. There is so much possible and yet not acted upon in preventing and treating HIV/AIDS.

It is sad then, that the newly appointed head of Family Planning at the HHS is Dr. Eric Keroak, a doctor who comes complete with a theory (formed on the basis of a prairie vole experiment) that humans lose the ability (chemically!) to form trusting relationships if they have too much out-of-wedlock sex. He has also said condoms offer "virtually" no protection against herpes. As medical director for Women's Services he headed an organization which, by charter, "does not distribute, or encourage the use of, contraceptive drugs and devices. … A Woman's Concern is persuaded that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality, and adverse to human health and happiness." So there's that. Add that to the new HHS push to encourage abstinence for everyone under thirty years of age, and you have a lot of wasted momentum and capital that could be used to fight the AIDS emergency here in the US.

On the bright side, President Bush has pledged millions of dollars toward fighting AIDS in Africa. President Clinton has been part of an effort to produce generic drugs to treat HIV/AIDS in children in developing countries for sixty dollars a year, where today only one out of ten children with AIDS gets any treatment at all. This seems like a key component of fighting AIDS in developing countries. If we can treat chldren, we can help destroy the stigma that may give many societies and better fighting chance down the road.

The Dialectical Field of "Snow"

[Spoiler Alert]
During the course of Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow, a theatrical coup takes place which blends the line between artistic presentation and political action, begging the question which W.H. Auden sought to answer when said "Poems don't seem to change anything." If this is true of art, then what use can it be? Is there a role for poetry in a politcal landscape like Kars? As Amardeep Singh observed , "Aren’t genres like Installation Art and Reality TV also attempting to bridge Reality (which normally has all the authority), and Art (which normally has none)?" Pamuk would seem to agree, in that none of the poems written by Ka through the course of the book appear, but are rather alluded to and formed cloudily in the readers mind indirectly. What Pamuk seems to be attempting is to place us as readers in the situation which Borges describes in the story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." We do not know Ka's poetry but we are moved to rewrite the poems in our minds as he would have, to vicariously rescue the notebook containing his poems from the hands of terrorists. Does Pamuk intentionally cover these poems in sort of snow, a detritus of political acts, in order to make a point? Snow, in its many guises, does serve role, which extended, provides snow as metaphor for a radical political field which provides an oppurtunity for an active dialectic. An open field can be metaphor for both liberation and battlefield, however, as Pamuk warns in his quotation of Robert Browning at the beginning of the book; "Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. / The honest thief, the tender murderer, / The superstitious atheist." Pamuk's points out this dual nature of the snow he wishes to describe in the first chapter, describing both the "silence of snow" which reminds Ka of God and inspires his poetry, and as a deadly force which makes his bus ride into the city a nearly catastrophic one.

In Snow a coup takes place in a remote town cut off due to a snowstorm. The secularists decide to "liberate" the town of its radical Muslim elements, which in the case of Kars includes mostly religious high school students. While the newspaper, controlled by political factions within the city, and the new television station advertise a night of theatre at the townhall, Ka watches from a hotel room with the family of his romantic interest, Ipek. While the theatre is transmitted to their screen, the family father, Turgut Bey, changes the channel.

"Father," said Ipek, "what are you watching?"
"It's snow," said her father. "If nothing else, it is an accurate description of our weather here. This counts as real news. Anyway, you know that if I watched one channel for too long, I feel robbed of my dignity."(119)

Slavoj Zizek writes in "Iraq, the Broken Kettle" that our predicament today is that "if we succumb to the urge of directly 'doing something' (engaging in the anti-globalist struggle, helping the poor...), we will certainly and undoubtably contribute to the reproduction of the existing order. The only way to lay he foundations for a true, radical change is to withdraw from the compulsion to act, to 'do nothing;--thus opening up the space for a different kind of activity."(Zizek, 72)

Snow ultimately offers a dissonant, open space for dialectic, both constructive and destructive, which is crucial for the political engagement of this novel. Snow is a metaphor, much like the boundary of the UN in New York, or the skin, for a circle drawn around entities to relate them to one another. Nowhere is this metaphor more active than in the meeting between an Islamist, Socialist Secularist, and several townspeople who meet to write a letter to the "world." At every turn, as they navigate the nuances of their disagreements and try to form a coherent statement which addresses all of their needs, they are forced to break off. When they do, they gaze out the window at the falling snow.

Noted:
Orhan Pamuk,"Snow," New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
Slavoj Zizek,"Iraq { The Borrowed Kettle," London: Verso, 2005.