David Sterritt is the chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and former longtime critic at the Christian Science Monitor. Sterritt’s books, from titles on Jean-Luc Godard and Alfred Hitchcock to more recent ones on B-movies and even the television sitcom The Honeymooners, reveal cinematic interests that stretch from the avant-garde to the long and widely beloved to the ostensibly (but perhaps not actually) disposable. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes link].

I'm interested in talking to you as a film critic, but also as a fellow interviewer. You've interviewed two filmmakers that are my absolute luminaries for filmmaking: Werner Herzog and Abbas Kiarostami. What does those guys' work mean to you?

An interesting pair. In some ways, they're really different from each other. I guess the way in which they're most similar is that each one seems to have carved out a distinctive — one might even say unique — niche in the world of the movies. The one who's been practicing the longest is Werner Herzog. I've interviewed him many times over the years, or just talked with him casually. Just a few years ago, I interviewed him — and this was kind of an interesting experience — during the San Francisco film festival in the Castro Theatre. Sold out house. Enormous number of people just jammed the Castro to hear Werner. I sat on the stage with Werner and they had us on a big TV screen. We did this interview for something like an hour, and it went really well. He was very witty, very scrappy, as he usually is. Just a real pleasure to talk to him.

The interesting thing was that the movie he had chosen, a brand new movie he had just finished, to have shown right after our interview as the other part of the evening. It was a very, very experimental work. It consisted largely of long takes of a diver swimming underneath ice floes in the Antarctic. These went on and on and on. There wasn't a whole lot other than that. I didn't stay for the screening; I had seen the film already. I was not really sure how the audience was going to respond to this. But later on, I was hearing that a lot of people were really dismayed. It was not only what they did not expect from Werner Herzog; it was what they didn't expect from the movies at all, ever.

It was just an interesting moment. He has, since, made a movie called Encounters at the End of the World, which is about the Antarctic and which is a very coherent and interesting documentary. I think that footage I'm talking about got incorporated into that film. But what was shown that night was so strange and so bizarre. The fact that he was perfectly happy to show this and see what people make of it — if they don't like it, okay, I'm going to be making another movie real soon. That sums him up, in certain ways.

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By Aditya Dev Sood

Not many people know where or what Karavali is, I find. Many in the north refer to it vaguely as Mangalore, on account of the large port city located there. With friends from overseas I'm best off describing it as the strip of India south of Goa and north of Kerala. European traders from the 16th Century called it the Canarese coast, from Canara, or Kanada, the language of the inland powers that loosely controlled it. It is also sometimes called the Konkan coast, for the Konkani speaking merchants, originally from Goa, who did so much of the commerce with European and Arab vessels. So many different languages, cultures, and religions are folded into these undulating hills, which rise up from the Deccan Plateau, before plunging down, just a few kilometers from the Arabian Sea.

I first came here by accident, in the late summer of 1991. I had actually gone to Goa to visit Ravi, an old school friend of mine, but hadn't counted on the dynamics of his rather conservative joint family, which frowned on us sipping beers in shacks by the seaside, and prevented us from going out at night, or from bringing friends over. He had a cousin graduating from the Regional Engineering College of Mangalore, several hours south by road, so we volunteered to drive down and pick him and his stuff up. We took the family jeep, a fiendishly powerful indigenous vehicle called a TRAX, which as I recall, looked to be built out of folded steel sheets and what was reputed to be a reverse-engineered Benz engine. The TRAX ate up the road, while its muscular window wipers swept away the rain furiously. From the right window you could glimpse the sea from time to time, and on occasion you would spot the trains of the Konkan railway, which run generally parallel and then sometimes criss-cross over or under National Highway 17. The drive down from Goa was among the most beautiful I had ever been on. And coming from the North, I was pleasantly surprised to find the scenic beauty coupled with a kind of rural prosperity I'd never seen before in India. Just about everyone seemed to have their own motorcycle and laterite-stone house with Mangalore tiled roofs and a clutch of coconut trees to tend. When I tried to explain what I'd seen to my friends and family back in Delhi, I struggled with the words. It's like India, I gushed, but perfect!

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Recently, my mother came to visit for a week. She bought some butter while she was here, since I didn’t have any. I don’t normally eat butter, but I do now. In fact, I’ve been eating it at every meal and putting it on everything I eat. I’d forgotten just how delicious it is. I now see other foods as mere vehicles for the greasy indulgence. After multiple failed attempts at self-restraint, I've reached this conclusion: as long as there is butter in my kitchen, I will consume it in a shamefully gluttonous fashion.

We like to think that we have free will, that we make decisions for ourselves–even if they’re trivial, like what to have for breakfast. But because I have a weakness for butter, whether or not I ate it over the past few days was largely determined by my mother, when she left a half pound of the decadent gold lard on my counter top.

Our breakfast choices, in general, seem to be largely determined by factors that are beyond our immediate control. Maybe you’d like to have toast and peanut butter for breakfast, but you won’t if someone else polished off the last of the bread. Or perhaps you’ve overslept and don’t have time for breakfast, or maybe you’ll be meeting with a friend who has a severe peanut allergy. The very fact that you desire toast and peanut butter may also be beyond your control. You could have awakened not feeling hungry at all. Sure, the choice is yours, but what you choose depends on a myriad of factors that are not within your control.

Debates about free will have been waged for millenia. They’ll probably continue far into the future as the issue is complex, but we should be able to agree on this: our actions, at least to a large extent, are determined by factors that are beyond our immediate control. These factors can be internal or external, or more often a combination of the two.

For example, the rituals of obsessive-compulsive disorder are largely determined by neurobiology. Many of us have minor compulsive habits, but at more extreme levels, obsessive compulsive behaviors, like repetitive hand washing and compulsive hair pulling, can get manifestly weird. People don’t choose to act this way and they generally can’t will themselves to stop. These behaviors are determined by internal factors, but they are nonetheless beyond the individual’s immediate control.

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Flash Fires

If these thoughts became fossils
they might be found by some
neuro-paleontologist in time to come
buried among those of others
pressed in the strata of notions
like carcasses of trilobites in stone
or the bony ghost of a pointing finger
caught in basalt —but they will not be

These thoughts are here and gone
like the flickerings of fireflies
after being incarnated momentarily
in wind blown through a larynx
and taken by a breeze to ears
into a mind or two and recalled
a few times like echoes
articulated by dancing tongues
and lips of others
until they run out of steam
after perhaps a generation
and vanish
like the smoke of flash fires in a
wilderness

by Jim Culleny
Oct 12, 2010

by Kevin Taylor Anderson and Salman Hameed

With the recent release of Let Me In – an English-language remake of the Swedish film, Let the Right One In – we essentially have a carbon-copy of the Scandinavian film. On the one hand we were relieved – surprised even – that the American incarnation remained true to both the style and content of the original film. On the other hand, as the lights came up, we were compelled to ask, “So why’d they redo it”?

If the remake was done simply to make more money, then one could have imagined the American filmmakers possibly selling out and sacrificing the bleak, contemplative tone of the Swedish version for either the teen romance of the Twilight films or the gorefest of remade foreign horror films. But admirably, the filmmakers resisted the temptation.

There are indeed some minor structural and other changes between the original and the remake. The bleak, snowy landscape and the featureless and unimaginative architecture of “somewheresville” Sweden is relocated to the equally nondescript outskirts of Los Alamos, New Mexico, circa the cold war era of the early 1980s. However, the rhythm and pacing of both the editing and dialogue match the original so exactly that you half expect the actors to deliver their lines in Swedish while ankle deep in snowdrifts. Yes, there is more explicit mention of religion (and evil) in the American remake, but ultimately, these changes are quite minor for the plot of the film. What we end up with is a vampire romance for an American audience (without the Twilight simplicity), but one with a European sensibility for time, place, character development and dramatic conflict.

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John Rabe is longtime public radio report and host of KPCC’s Off-Ramp, a weekly examination of Southern California and especially Los Angeles. The show’s interviews and field pieces provide a radio portrait of the city and its surrounding half-state, highlighting some of the most interesting people, places, and things there without attempting the futile task of precisely representing the massive amount and constantly changing composition of Southern California culture. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes link].

I just used the phrase “radio portrait” of Los Angeles to describe your show. Is that accurate, or is that just me being public radio-y about it?

No, I think that's absolutely fine. Off-Ramp is about anything interesting happening in Southern California. It's like an accumulation of snapshots, or a buckshot approach to covering something as huge as Southern California. If you put all of the shows together we've done since August of 2006, you'd have a pointillist portrait on the radio. If you're talking digital, because everything's broken up into tiny little pieces, you've got your radio portrait.

I like that pointillist image. There's a lot of analogies I've tried to describe the show. When I reviewed it on Podthoughts for The Sound of Young America's web site, which I believe is how you encountered me originally, I was just trying to describe what it's doing. Certainly, the idea that it covers not just L.A. but Southern California in general I didn't quite frame when when we started. How far are the boundaries of the show? How far are you willing to go in the name of what's interesting in L.A. and beyond?

Our signal reaches up slightly into Ventura County and all the way down to northern San Diego County. It reaches a little bit past Palm Springs, and then somewhere out into the water of the Pacific Ocean. We try to pick things for the show that are somewhere in that area, which gives us a huge amount of leeway. But there are times when we do stuff I think is simply interesting for Southern Californians to hear that may have no actual connection to Southern California.

I had Alan Furst on the show, the historical spy novelist. There's no connection, but I love Alan Furst. I knew he'd be a great talker. One of out commentators, Mark Hafley, recently realized that everybody was talking about the mosque, the cultural center they want to build on Ground Zero. He said, “Look, this used to be an Arab neighborhood before they leveled the area to build the World Trade Center.” Does that have something to do with Los Angeles? Angelenos and Southern Californians care about that issue. I stretch the boundaries when I want to.

The boundaries are already pretty wide. I'm thinking about the mandate of a show that covers interesting things in Southern California. Southern California is very large. “Interesting things” is an infinitely wide mandate. That seems like it introduces its own set of difficulties. Are there actually as few constraints as I'm describing?

Yes, there are very few constraints. I was simply given the gift by management to do an arts and news show that ran on the weekends. I didn't want to put any constraints on it. I didn't want to have themes. I didn't want to have holes we had to fill. You do a show; if you start doing a thing that's a specific thing every week, you've got to fill it and you've got to do that. I didn't want to have any of that. I wanted to just be able to go out and cover Southern California in whatever way I wanted, and either management agreed or didn't notice that that's how I described it. That's what I've been doing for four years.

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by Gautam Pemmaraju

Abbas Kazmi, the defense lawyer for Ajmal Kasab, the lone Pakistani terrorist who participated and survived the Mumbai attacks of 26 November 2008, shares a double bed with Rahul Bhatt, the son of Mahesh Bhatt, renowned filmmaker and desk-thumping arbiter of public culture. A gym trainer and famous person in waiting, Rahul Bhatt came into the limelight late last year due to his friendship with David Coleman Headley, the incarcerated terror location scout and ‘double agent’. Begum Nawazish Ali, the cross-dressing Pakistani TV presenter known for catty interviews with prominent Pakistani personalities, who deftly commutes between a variety of gender roles and inhabitations, however, has a swank ‘delights room’ all to himself, herself and the several iterations thereof. Ali, having been voted the ‘Captain’ of the house, has been awarded the privileged use of this exclusive room unto which he had laid immediate claim at first sight. In defense of this territorial claim, Begum and Ali, speaking as one, offer cheeky philosophical insight by saying that since two souls reside within his one body, a little more space is required than otherwise. Seema Parihar, a reformed bandit from the (in)famous central Indian Chambal Valley, still battling numerous court cases, wafts about benignly, guileless and asynchronous, offering on occasion the chorus of a folk song, affectionate banter, and advice on the tossing and catching of pebbles skillfully. This child’s game is no scruffy proof to the provocative dystopia within which thirteen residents find themselves sharing beds, food, household tasks and South-Asian schadenfruede, a unique idiomatic expression that is common despite the geo-political boundaries that separate the sub-continental nations. Clearly this is no child’s game.

This is the fourth season of Bigg Boss, the Indian version of the global hit TV reality show, Big Brother, hosted this time around by the resurgent Bollywood star Salman Khan, heady with the success of his recent ‘super hit’ film Dabangg, a hugely successful throwback to the formulaic 80’s pan Indian film which showcases the virtues (and a few well timed wrist-slap worthy vices) of the ‘hero’ – all for love, honour, mother, nation, the collective flame of which is kept alive by copious amounts of desi ghee. Heaving bosoms, exaggerated swaggers and sharp bravado work in tandem to re-articulate the claim of the Hindi heartland over the nation at large.

Arguably, a peculiar sociological experiment is afoot or even an absurdist drama of a truly conceptual nature, the contours of which hint at strange psychological narratives, unusual fictive bonds, and disturbing yet oddly comic undercurrents. The race row generated by late Jade Goody’s slurs against Shilpa Shetty or Germaine Greer’s shocking entry and quick exit on the UK version of the show, pale in comparison to the implications and potential animations of this current Indian version, only but a week old and to last three months in totality. The ever complex Greer, in an article about the show last year, writes that Big Brother ‘taught us to sneer and jeer’ at Jade Goody and predicts that for the show, ‘the bite of reality will prove lethal’.

The provocations thus far have been mixed – intriguing as well as predictable. Early in the week, workers of the right-wing Hindu political party, the Shiv Sena, picketed the gates of the Bigg Boss house and roughed up several security guards posted there. Protesting the presence of Pakistani participants as ‘anti-national’, the party leadership vowed to shut down the show. The predictable quiescence that followed underscores the general pattern in such a shake down – a pragmatic and mutually agreeable understanding is arrived at (or is in the process) before further escalation. One can only speculate as to the nature (or value) of the compromise between the broadcaster and the Shiv Sena, but once again we are rudely reminded of how deeply entrenched such political opportunism and fatigued acquiescence is. Cultural opiates, generously advertised, are the only way around – best to go to the new mall, eat a few McAloo Tikkis, watch Salman Khan thrust his hips out at you, then shop some, and finally, come back home to watch Bigg Boss.

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Justin E. H. Smith

I.

To speak of a 'cheap whore' is, among other things, to utter a bisyllabic dysphemism. Orthophemized, the phrase lengthens to 'inexpensive prostitute', and from there it can be launched into the tortured register of euphemistic speech –where no one who means what he says ever goes– that gives us phrases like 'down-market sex worker'. But let us not allow the harshness of the first formulation to get in the way of profounder analysis, for it is very often the short, gruntlike dysphemisms that are the most deeply rooted in our linguistic heritage. 'Cheap whore' for example, whatever else it has wrong with it, turns out upon inspection to be not only offensive, but also, like 'wireless cable', a contradiction in terms. In learning why, we may learn a lot else besides.

II.

I would like to say a few words about intention, action, desire, and lack, and about the possible connections between these that are revealed by the vocabularies of a number of natural languages. I had initially intended to do this in my Etymology from Memory series, where the rule of the game is to see how many threads of a common lexical root I am able to follow without having recourse to any information other than what is stored in my own brain. I do this as a sort of act of resistance to the increasing reliance of our society on external memory-storage devices (if in the end it is our brains that are the detachable prostheses of Google, rather than vice versa, we still need to make sure that our brains are good for something when they are detached). I decided in the end to do this one hors-série, however, since I realized after I had begun the importance of getting it right this time. My prostheses, if this makes a difference, were all made out of paper.

Lack is a cousin, as well as an outlier, to what really interests me, so let's start there. Currently, the standard way of expressing desire in English, with the verb 'to want', is really a borrowing of a verb that until recently meant something quite distinct: 'This room wants a fireplace', 'May you never want for affection', and so on. There is also a nominal form of the same word, as in: 'Children are dying for want of access to clean water'. There doesn't seem to be any intentionality here at all: the room doesn't desire anything, or feel a lack that it hopes to fill. Rather, the room has a lack, as a matter of fact, even though the room itself does not care one way or another about this.

So wanting is in its primary sense simply lacking, and is only secondarily, or belatedly desiring, which is to say lacking plus longing for the lack to end. Now willing is in turn a longing for some condition to end, or a longing for some new condition to obtain, coupled with some sort of ability to change one's condition or the condition of one's immediate environment. Interestingly, the notion of willing –also sometimes concretized into a thing that produces acts of willing, i.e., 'the will' (German, der Wille)– furnishes another way of expressing what modern English speakers mean by the verb 'to want'. Thus, while the more polite and euphemistic way of saying what one wants in German forces one to say what one 'would like' (ich möchte, etc.), the more direct way is by means of the verb willen, plainly a cognate of the noun –'the will'– for the thing that Western metaphysics supposes to be the source of voluntary actions: ich will etwas essen. I want to eat something; I will to eat something.

Here moreover one would not be altogether naïve to discern a connection with the most common form of the future tense of the English verb 'to be'. I will to eat something; I will eat something. There is evidently a fine line between registering one's own intention, and predicting the future. This assumes of course that our wills are translatable into reality, that there will be no impediments that prevent us, notwithstanding what we might will, from, say, eating. There are many philosophers (Hobbes, I take it, and surely Spinoza) for whom this 'disconnect' (as they say these days) is just fine, since 'willing' is really just an agreeable sensation that accompanies certain determined events, but not others. In Russian, for questions concerning the immediate future, the future tense of the verb 'to be' may often be used interchangeably with the verb 'to want': thus ty budesh' chaï? (You will tea?, i.e., Tu seras du thé?) and ty khochesh' chaï? (You want tea?) are two equally fine ways of asking someone whether she would like tea. It is as if we are all little gods when it comes to the satisfaction of small desires, where we need but will something in order for it to become the case.

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Mark Frauenfelder is the editor of Make magazine and co-founder the zine which has become the massively popular blog Boing Boing. His latest book, Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, is the story of his quest to fully customize his life by building, maintaining, and operating as much as possible with his own hands: hacking his espresso machine, making his own sauerkraut, building cigar-box guitars, brewing his own kombucha, and carving his own spoons, to name only a few of his eclectic set of pursuits. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas.

I feel like I've gotten to know publishing well enough to assume that your publisher loved the hook: here's this guy who, to some peoples' minds, embodies the internet, who has suddenly turned around, started raising chickens himself and making cigar-box guitars. How much could we characterize the book as a quest for a sort of balance?

I think that is a really good description of what it was. I do spend a lot of tine just sitting behind my computer, writing and blogging and editing articles. I'm not really using my hands other than moving a mouse around and tapping a keyboard. The book was my exploration of opportunities to use my hands in meaningful ways. That included raising chickens and becoming a beekeeper and making musical instruments, learning woodcarving and those kinds of things. It was a chance to get outside, a chance to connect with my kids and my family, and to make things that have a useful purpose in my life.

It makes me think of this one thing Brian Eno wrote, his complaint made many times over the course or his career that computers use one little finger of ours, when the human body has all this variety of muscles. Here we are using a few of them. I'll give it more than the one finger, but we're using such a limited range. How long did it take you before you started thinking to yourself, “Jeez, I don't feel so good using just the parts that need to interface with the computer”?

I've been feeling that all along, ever since I've been using computers. That's why I like taking walks or riding my bike and doing exercise like that. This took it to another level, where you're actually really engaged with all those muscles, and you're thinking at the same time, which is a really good combination. You've probably heard the expression “learning with your hands” or “thinking with your hands.” It's really true . Your hands are an important part of the thinking process. When they're active in doing something, it really does put you into a different brain state, a flow state.

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by Colin Eatock

Every day I pass through Toronto’s Bathurst Street Subway Station, on the way to work. And sometimes, on days when I’m not running late, I pause to listen to the classical music that the Toronto Transit Commission pipes into the station. But as much as I enjoy being gently eased into my working day with a Mozart symphony or a Vivaldi concerto, I’m well aware that the TTC isn’t really trying to gratify my particular musical tastes. There are other motives at work here.

Bathurst Street Station is a multicultural crossroads in the downtown, and there are several high schools nearby. Among the subway riders who pass through the station are thousands of young people of differing backgrounds – a volatile mix that’s constantly in danger of boiling over. The TTC’s answer to this threat is to crank up the classical music.

The use of classical music in public places is increasingly common: in shopping malls, parking lots, and other places where crowds and loitering can be problems. The TTC is by no means the only transit service to use the technique: in 2005, after classical music was introduced into London’s Underground, there was a significant decrease in robberies, assaults and vandalism. Similar results have been noted from Finland to New Zealand. The idea may be a Canadian innovation: in 1985, a 7-Eleven store in Vancouver pioneered the technique, which was soon adopted elsewhere. Today, about 150 7-Elevens throughout North America play classical music outside their stores.

As a classical music lover, I’d like to believe that my favourite music has some kind of magical effect on people – that it soothes the savage breast in some unique way. I’d like to think that classical music somehow inspires nobler aspirations in the mind of the purse-snatcher, causing him to abandon his line of work for something more upstanding and socially beneficial.

But I know better. The hard, cold truth is that classical music in public places is often deliberately intended to make certain kinds of people feel unwelcome. Its use has been described as “musical bug spray,” and as the “weaponization” of classical music. At the Bathurst Street Subway Station, the choice of music conveys a clear message: “Move along quickly and peacefully, people; this is not your cultural space.”

Some sociologists have expressed concern that this particular use of classical music only serves to further divide society along lines of age, class and ethnicity. And, not surprisingly, some in the classical music community are offended by this new purpose for their art. The English music critic Norman Lebrecht has written that using classical music as a policing tool is “profoundly demeaning to one of the greater glories of civilization.”

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by Jeff Strabone

The more I read about the so-called enthusiasm gap among Democrats—the idea that they have so lost their enthusiasm for President Obama that they somehow won't be able to vote in next month's Congressional and local elections—the more I wonder about the lack of public skepticism about its existence. True, one hears a lot of bellyaching on the left these days, but when does one not hear bellyaching on the left? Come Election Day, the enthusiasm gap may turn out to be true, and it may not. Given the talent gap in the Republican Party and its surfeit of certifiable psychos, a.k.a. the Tea Party, there could just as likely be something stronger brewing among the center-right: a revulsion gap, i.e. Republican voters unable to vote for kooks like Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharron Angle in Nevada, and Sarah Palin's uncanny double, Christine O'Donnell of Delaware.

Predictions are fun, and I've issued my share of them publicly and privately. But the conversation that Democrats ought to be having is whether we should be feeling an enthusiasm gap at all or rather, as I believe, an enthusiasm spike.

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Ben Walters and J. M. Tyree chat about film for The Owls site. Together, they wrote the BFI Film Classics book about The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute, and they’ve co-written reviews of No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading for Sight & Sound. This month, they discussed Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, the sequel to Wall Street and Stone’s take on the financial sector meltdown in the United States in 2008.

JMT: Where did you see Wall Street 2? Did the audience seem to enjoy it?
2:26 PM BW: well, i saw it at a press screening so it’s hard to tell. critics don’t make for very expressive audiences
JMT: How does the film look from the UK, the austerity land of Conservative budgets?
2:27 PM BW: well, kind of out of time, i must say – i thought it felt like a period piece
as if it were set at the end of the previous era (greedisgoodia) rather than during the subsequent one (austerityland). bit of a shame, as the first film was so zeitgeisty
2:28 PM but i suppose Stone was going for a gotterdammerung kind of thing…?

2:30 PM JMT: One thing I noticed is that, while Michael Moore trashes the bank bailouts in Capitalism: A Love Story – essentially giving the Republicans their election year playbook in his supposedly progressive film – Stone goes to great lengths to “explain” the government’s actions as “responsible,” etc., in that very wooden scene set during the abyss of the financial crisis.
BW: well, when you’ve got eli wallach telling you the world’s gonna end, you better listen, right?
2:32 PM JMT: A lot of cameos, speaking of Wallach. That same real estate broker is back. The new music by Eno and Byrne makes a delicious bookend to Stone’s use of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in the first film, it all seems so promising at first! Stone himself appears – am I mistaken? – as a purveyor or buyer of “ridiculous art.” Hmm…
BW: haha
2:33 PM i wasn’t sure if he was purveying or looking to buy. bookend i think is exactly right – i was expecting more of a survey of the new landscape but WS2 is more elegiac – or at least trying to be?
JMT: The original Wall Street [WS1] has a lot of wit. And it’s so fast paced. It’s a cocaine film.
BW: right, and very streamlined and sleek
2:34 PM this was a lot more muddled… but could that be apt?

Limos & Hairgel

2:37 PM JMT: Very interesting –> WS1 has this delight in the evil. Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is totally seduced by Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) and the interior design stylings of Daryl Hannah. It’s a film about pinkie rings, two-inch TV screens, ordering “Evian” at the restaurant, big hair, cocaine in limos…as Iain Sinclair once said about the 1980s, “cocaine in the executive washroom.” But here in WS2 the protagonist, Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) isn’t really fully seduced into the realm of evil. He’s got his Third Way idealism about his laser fusion plant investment scheme intact all the way until the end. I thought it could have been funny if the fusion plant turned out to be a “green tech” scam…

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By Maniza Naqvi

Out of sync by six hours and seven years, this ancient country's, age old way of marking time. A half century completed, mine. I find, here years gained, time lost, at the end of the Meher rains, and the festival of Meskel—in the month of Meskerem. I am here. Fire and water on my mind: a burning, a drowning, a joy and a sorrow.

September 11, 2010 marked the new year of 2003, at exactly 6 .00 pm, in the month of Meskerem, Ethiopian time. I am— I think, finally, perhaps, at the exact and true time. I am here during Meskel-the celebration that commemorates the “Finding of the True Cross” by Queen Helena in the 4^th century in Jerusalem. Having seen in a dream, the way that she would find the true cross, she ordered a bonfire to be sprinkled with Frankincense and lit— its smoke rising and falling to the spot where the true cross was buried. Each year the celebrants light bonfires and candles, dance, chant, pray and renew faith.

Here, confirmation and joy, is expressed almost as a sob, a sigh, or a breathless surprise. I am here in the season between exquisite joy and sorrow when rains much prayed for have come on time but have not left. The long rains this year are perhaps too long. Much before now and every year I have been drenched by these Meher rains from Ethiopia in a place elsewhere and faraway. Elsewhere bonfires of faith are under contemplation. Elsewhere floods threaten annihilation. Elsewhere a summer ends and winter begins.For they say in Pakistan, where the rains have stayed long this year and where the Indus is in flood this year, they say that the Monsoon, comes from here. The Meher in Ethiopia used to make a season of love elsewhere. I am here at the source of that season of love and rebirth, the Monsoon.

In the season of hide and seek between darkening rain and smoky light—in this place where identities blur, each candle lit from another, I too am here, where the faces of fruitsellers, priests, mullahs, professors, farmers, goat herders, bankers and the conductors hanging out of the blue van taxis calling out the next destination, resemble those east of here and west of here and of the icons revered in churches in St. Petersburg and Belegrade. And where the call from the church and the mosque carried on the breeze echo and sound the same. It is noon on Sunday–I listen to the singing that sounds like a dirge from the church that comes over the breeze in undulating waves to me. All its intonations familiar—the pathos of a Marsiya or a Noha or a Salaam during Moharam and the defiance of Qatubas of Friday prayers—or the rebuke of ghazals—that way of singing, that way of engagement, endearment, transports me to another place—all things known disappear and melt into a new familiar. I am taken aback, by seven years—set off kilter, by six hours, steadied back into balance, by what matters, in this place that marks its own time while the world marks another, hours forward by years back.

All of these sounds, the calls to prayers, seem the same to my ears and that perhaps is because the call for prayer began from here most probably, the same call to prayer brought to Islam by Bilal al Habashi. He is attributed for delivering the first call of prayers, I would venture that he called to prayer in the manner that he already knew how to do and so beautiful was it in its rendering that those who considered themselves superior to him in station took ownership of his initiative. There over the breeze as suddenly as it starts, it is gone, the azaan.

Rain just started has as suddenly moved on–The sun, blurred till now peaks out as though from inside its wrap of a soft white gauze just as bright yellow breasted birds alight on the balcony. Blue painted taxis, inch their way through traffic towards the hill where the palace sprawls and from there all the way down the slopes of the hillside shanty towns cascade downwards. Rumor has it that Haile Selassie’s ghost probably walks the corridors of the palace —and the only others in there behind those heavily guarded walls are prisoners and may as well be ghosts, held in the barracks in the ground below. An Emperor and his palace makes prisoners of men. And women. Still.

Again the call begins. This time, the churches. The sound that floats to me is distilled through my filters and transforms into the familiar sound of mourning. A lament, a catch in the voice, about the plight of kings, an intonation that the inheritance of true Kings, princes and princesses is poverty that truth can only be destitute—persecuted—exiled—dispossessed. Never to be rich, that is the mark of true kings, the lions of God, never to possess except the bounty of poverty. Such is the message that can only be contrived in a palace.

There is thunder, a storm is brewing and the calls of prayer are joined by the tap-tap, thud-thud sound of construction from the high rises going up all around are a clear indication that change is massively and rapidly afoot here. High rises are under construction all around—and on the outskirts of Addis, gated communities are going up of villas-with terracotta roofs and faux roman colonnades for the Diaspora to purchase.

Nearby a greenhouse and hot house plants —all waiting to be transferred to the hotel nearby for the pleasure of the guests there. Almost all of them here, I would wager in the name of poverty reduction. Inside my room, the storm, on television is on mute—for the story has run over and over again—of a possible burning of the Koran.

Could it be possible that all of religion—is about the rains? The burning anxiety for their arrival and fear of their staying too long. Followed by warmth and relief at their timely departure. Could religion be the eternal recording of the anxious searching of the night sky for the brightness of the stars and divining from the clarity of these criss-crossing points of lights shooting out in four, five or six directions the arrival and departure of the rains? The appeasing of the sun, the praising of the stars, the beseeching of the moon? Could the call to prayer, carried over through time be the beckoning of people to participate in a communal cajoling of the true mercurial tempered emperor, rain, to stay on schedule? To be merciful, to be kind? Could all religion be the anxiety wrought by the fear of what if, it is, too much, or too little, or too late? Could all of religion be a translation of this anxiety for survival, a desire to shed the shroud of despair with a persistence of hope? Could religion be a metaphor for the story of need and want for exactly that which can bring joy but once arrived in abundance wreaks havoc? Could religion and its accompanying props and paraphernalia all be in support of the retelling of this—ordinary story about rain—morphed into a story about a dangerous love, a narrative layered and coded beyond recognition of a justification of that individual universal fear of too little or too much and the communal instinct of survival through the rejection of a possibility that fear need not exist? And the eternal collective remorse that when things go wrong it is always because of something shameful, because of a fault—something left wanting and therefore the need for eternal penance and search for forgiveness? Could it be so, that holy is the making unholy of an abundance of love?

A tiny yellow bird, lands on the railing of the balcony and there it remains for a few moments in communion with me —a thought occurs, in this land of frankincense and myrrh–and Bilal Habasha——in this land of mosques and churches singing out the call to prayer, of Meskel, Eid and the Epiphany, of processions of taboots — in this the land of the Lion of God, the Queen of Sheeba and the traces of King Solomon, in this land of a Queen who seduced a King and who bore him a son—a thought occurs to me: Is it always about the seduction of a King by a queen and the bearing of a son? The attraction between “the others” and the inevitable seducing of the other, come to me—come to me—-to a union come—to an adoration.

I put my question to my tiny visitor. I am from here she says and you? And I reply—I am from somewhere near the Abyssinia lines—-and I tell her that monsoon comes there from here. I tell her the clouds go from here across the Indian Ocean reaching the shores over there making their way north past the desert, past the plains to the highlands there, then crashing into the wall of the Himalayas. And there stopped by that wall of mountains, stunned and crowded in that way, they have no other path but to stagger backwards, breakdown and weep and flood the plains. Bringing joy and bringing sorrow. She calls to me, you are here! You are from here. Just then, thunder rolls from the direction of the hills and startles her and with a swift flapping of her wings she is gone. This year the Meher has been plentiful and long. The Nile is in flood here. And there—in the land of my birth the Indus has over reacted and gone further and spilled into the plains and much lies in ruin. Such over abundance of benevolence is to be feared, kept in check with prayer. Could holy be the making unholy of the overflowing of love? Can only a fire or a flood, a burning or a drowning lead to rebirth?

(photographs from Meskel this year 2003 and 2010, September and Meskerem)

More Writing by Maniza Naqvi (here)

Chris Guillebeau is a blogger, entrepreneur, and liver of the unconventional life. Having written his blog The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel for “a small army of remarkable people” since 2008, he’s now the author of a book which expands on his ideas and experiences, The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [iTunes link]

This is the question anybody who reads your book is going to ask first: how many countries are you up to?

Right now, I think it's 151. It's kind of funny; in the book, it's outdated now. The book says 125, but I'm at 151 now, and I've surrendered my passport for the next four months so that I can go around America and talk about the book. Next year, I'll be getting back out on the road.

You have this mission to get to all 192 or 193 countries before your 35th birthday. Now you talk about surrendering your passport for four months. Kind of getting to know you through the book and the blog, I feel like that is a painful thing for you to do, to surrender a passport.

Yes, that's correct. I'm out on the road constantly, usually in about 20 countries a year. To surrender the passport was a big decision, but hopefully it'll be worth it.

One of the elements of this unconventional life, of the non-conformist life I talk about you as living, is that you do travel so much. You've got this goal of getting to all the countries. You talk about so many travel experiences. That seems to be one of the main things that draws people to you, that has gotten you such an audience. Specifically that, the traveling part; why do you think that's so resonant?

When you ask people, “What would you do with your life if time and money were no object?”, almost a majority of people identify travel as something they would do more. They might not do it as much as I do; they might not be interested in going to every country in the world. But I've found that when you talk to people about those big, life-dreaming questions, people always identify travel as something they would like to do, whether it's just a trip here and there or someplace they've always wanted to go. Whether it's backpacking or some other kind of experience, people are drawn to travel. They like the idea of being able to do more of it and to have more freedom that way.

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by Akeel Bilgrami

The notion of a miscellany fetches no particular interest, except in the light of its contrasting ideal of integrity. I don’t mean integrity in the moral sense–a person’s action keeping faith with her principles– but in the stricter sense of things being of a piece, being integrated rather than miscellaneous.

The intellectual pleasures offered by literature tend to be inherently miscellaneous, while science and philosophy are marked by a drive towards integrity, towards eliminating the element of miscellany. For someone given to both literature and philosophy, as I have been from an early age, each of these contrasting satisfactions can provide a sort of relief and release from the other.

It is often asked: what is the difference between imaginative literature and other sorts of intellectual endeavor? Are there any kinds of knowledge uniquely available, say, from novels and poems? Why do we read them when we could read books in psychology, sociology, moral philosophy—especially if these are illustrated with vivid examples of ethical, psychological, and social experience? There are many possible answers to such a question, and I want to explore only one of them, the one that has to do with the contrast between the miscellaneous and the integrated.

But first I need to address a larger theme –the special forms of knowledge that can accompany emotions. More often than any other form of intellectual enterprise, the writing of a poem or novel is expressive rather than ratiocinative; and the notion of expression places special significance on the states of mind we call emotions. We tend to say: we ‘express’ emotions, while we ‘present’ our thoughts. We could say that we ‘express our thoughts’ when we speak them, but that use of the word ‘express’ is innocuous. It might just as easily be replaced by the verb ‘present.’ But if we try to make the same substitution when we talk of ‘expressing our emotions,’ a crucial remainder is left out. That remainder is what gives a special character to literature. We can present and represent and study the emotions in our psychological and philosophical and other treatises, but we don’t, at least not without bending genres, express them there. It is not merely that the language is more literary when emotions are expressed rather than presented –a different set of expectations is created in the reader because a different set of pleasures is offered.

This is not the tired duality between rational thought and irrational emotions. As T. S. Eliot saw, that dualism is disastrous for literature. For one thing, expression should not be assumed to require spontaneity, as the multiple revisions that lie under the surface of serious literature demonstrate. More important, in expressing one’s emotions, indeed in possessing them, one is in fact often given a way of perceiving what one thinks and what one’s intellectual and moral commitments are. But it is a very special way of perceiving them.

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by Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin

We, the authors, are atheists. Some will no doubt hold that since atheists abhor religion in all its forms, consistency demands that they oppose the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” (which in fact is neither a mosque nor at ground zero). The thought is that atheists must oppose the building of any new building devoted to religious observance. But this view about what atheists must believe is false. Abhorrence of religion does not entail abhorrence of the freedom to practice religion. Atheists indeed affirm freedom of conscience, even though they oppose the views to which many are led by their consciences.

We atheists are particularly well placed to speak to public matters concerning religious tolerance. As we have no religion of our own, atheists are especially well practiced at tolerating religion. More importantly, atheists are also keenly attuned to the importance of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience for a democratic society. And the controversy over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque is a clash over these very principles. Our view is that those who oppose the Mosque have abandoned fundamental principles at the core of the form of constitutional democracy originated by the United States.

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A Paris Review-style interview with E.O. Wilson

(Read Part I and Part II.)

A score of books. Two Pulitzers. Papers that defined entire fields. So why did biologist Edward O. Wilson bother writing a novel? Because people need stories, he says. Wilson hopes his fictional debut from earlier this year, Anthill—about a young man from the South, militant ants, and the coupled fate of humans and nature—will help spark a conservation revolution.

Wilson met me at his Harvard office—a three-roomed cavern at the university’s natural history museum. “Harvard treats emeritus professors very well,” he observed. He showed me part of the world’s largest collection of ant papers, and a copy of his portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. He wore a blue/black checked shirt and slouched when he sat. His sentences were criss-crossed with asides and qualifications, and he squeezed in a few startlingly good impressions. Throughout our talk he sipped iced tea—or as Wilson, a native Alabaman, might say, sweet tea. When he spilled some on the table, he swept it onto the floor with his hand. “The difference between a book review and an interview,” he mused right before we started, “is like the difference between a handshake and a shot in the back.”

Sam Kean: Do you think your career or your scientific work have been different if you’d done a novel very early on as opposed to a later stage?

EW: That’s an unanswerable question because it would never have occurred to me to write a novel early on. I never would have had any ambition like that. All my hopes, all my dreams were to be a scientist. I didn’t even get into popular nonfiction until—I think the earliest date you could put on it would be 1978. That would be On Human Nature. That’s the first time I ever wrote a book for a popular audience, a broad audience.

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A Review by Ahmad Saidullah

Sudipta Kaviraj. The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 299 pp. $29.50.

I. Approaching India

Written in the 1980s and 90s, Sudipta Kaviraj’s eight essays on the intellectual history of politics and culture in India, with their heavy overlay of theory, are not meant for the casual reader.

He covers various topics: the specific nature of Indian democracy; aspects of Jawaharlal Nehru's and Indira Gandhi's regimes; political culture in independent India; the construction of colonial power; the relationship between state, society, and discourse; the structure of nationalist discourse; language and identity formation in Indian contexts; the links between development and democracy; and the interactions among religion, politics, and modernity in South Asia.

In investigating the specificities of Indian history, Kaviraj who is Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia presents himself as an outsider, a social theorist wary of rushing in where “historians, the most well-informed group about colonial societies” fear to tread.

Kaviraj has been associated with marxist and subaltern approaches to studying India's social and political life. These views have challenged the historical presentation of European colonialism as the great story of the triumph of western reason, science, and modernity. This narrative of modernity influenced Indian nationalists, the writing of nationalist histories, and the developments of the postcolony itself. “The external character of modernity is inscribed on every move, every object, every proposal, every legislative act, each line of causality including the externality of the historical project,” Kaviraj notes.

Like his colleague Partha Chatterjee at Columbia, Kaviraj prefaces his essays by acknowledging the limitations of these counter-approaches. Some forms of marxist thought reduce the history of rationalism to an economistic account of extractive capitalism. Others, in their attempts to draw a picture of society, seek to bring forward “an alternative epistemology of the subaltern classes…a hard task under any circumstance but particularly difficult for intellectuals drawn from the middle class.”

He examines Indian politics through western political philosophy and the perspectives of Indian history and indigenous political thought. Kaviraj is interested in India as a cultural entity with a diverse history and culture. His work is shaped by a belief in the plasticity of Indian politics in reflecting and shaping the world in which people live. He is keen on investigating whether the concepts used by historians of all stripes are adequate for understanding the culture and politics of India.

As colonialism ruptures the self–relations of a society through time, he sets out to find fundamental histories of epistemological concepts embedded in social practices that can enable scholars of Indian society to draw legitimate interconnections between the “world, nation and self.”

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