e(r)ratic vein, poetry by jo gordon

"sonnets that seethe with passion... delivered with brilliant style and economy... a unique new voice whispering true secrets directly into your ear... sometimes evoking... sometimes tickling..."-- sursumcorda.com

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Akira Kurosawa' Dreams

First I promise to go easy on movie posts--this makes three in a row. As you probably (should) have noticed I have started a movie blog -- movies on north 35 -- and I'm excited.

Akira Kurosawa has made 4 of my 20 favorite movies of all time, The Seven Samurai (1954), Ran, Based on Shaeksapear's King Lear story (1984), Rashomon (the way of Samurai) 1950, which inspired Jim Jarmush's 1999 Ghost Dog, The Way of the Samurai. And finally my most favorite as they say : Dreams, Yume 1990. I think however, that if you can see any of Kurosawa's movies, you're probably in for a treat. Kurosawa is a great writer and director, and his name on a film really means something. Here is another oppinion -- "Truly one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. I saw this ......film for the first time in 1993 and it was placed forever in my mind as one of my greatest cinematic experiences. I agree with what another reviewer said about this film, that it is not for everyone. It is very artistic in that the cinematography carries a lot of the story and some may become bored with it. Hollywood has a way of brainwashing a lot of viewers into needing a lot of dialog or action. If that's what you're after, you wont find it here. You have to use your brain for this one. This movie is Japanese and what little dialog there is, is in subtitled for the American viewer. So you may need to do a little reading. This is not simply a movie; it is several short, amazing stories that stem from the mind of Akira Kurosawa (a genius in my book). One is like a beautiful fairytale and another is a nightmarish fable and still another is a terribly haunting ghost story, there are others but all are done very well. This film needs to be seen in the letterbox format as it was intended. The cinematography, as I said earlier, contributes so much that it should be viewed completely. I really don't know what else to say about this movie except that if you have an artistic streak and like to see how movies can become art I would highly recommend" -- from IMDB.

sex, lies and videotape

by Roger Ebert

I have a friend who says golf is not only better than sex, but lasts longer. The argument in "sex, lies and videotape" is that conversation is also better than sex - more intimate, more voluptuous - and that with our minds we can do things to each other that make sex, that swapping of sweat and sentiment, seem merely troublesome. Of course, this argument is all a mind game, and sex itself, sweat and all, is the prize for the winner. That's what makes the conversation so erotic.The movie takes place in Baton Rouge, La., and it tells the story of four people in their early 30s whose sex lives are seriously confused.....One is a lawyer named John (Peter Gallagher), who is married to Ann (Andie MacDowell) but no longer sleeps with her. Early in the film, we hear her telling her psychiatrist that this is no big problem; sex is really overrated, she thinks, compared to larger issues such as how the Earth is running out of places to dispose of its garbage. Her husband does not, however, think sex is overrated and is conducting a passionate affair with his wife's sister, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), who has always resented the goody-goody Ann.An old friend turns up in town. His name is Graham (James Spader), and he was John's college roommate. Nobody seems quite clear what he has been doing in the years since college, but he's one of those types you don't ask questions about things like that, because you have the feeling you don't want to know the answers. He's dangerous, not in a physical way, but through his insinuating intelligence, which seems to see through people.He moves in. Makes himself at home. One day he has lunchwith Ann, and they begin to flirt with their conversation, turning each other on with words carefully chosen to occupy the treacherous ground between eroticism and a proposition. She says she doesn't think much of sex, but then he tells her something that gets her interested: He confesses that he is impotent. It is, I think, a fundamental fact of the human ego in the sexually active years that most women believe they can end a man's impotence, just as most men believe they are heaven's answer to a woman's frigidity. If this were true, impotence and frigidity would not exist, but if hope did not spring eternal, not much else would spring, either.The early stages of "sex, lies and videotape"are a languorous, but intriguing, setup for the tumult that follows. The adultery between John and Cynthia has the usual consequences and creates the usual accusations of betrayal, but the movie (and, I think, the audience) is more interested in Graham's sexual pastimes.Unable to satisfy himself in the usual ways, he videotapes the sexual fantasies of women, and then watches them. This is a form of sexual assault; he has power not over their bodies but over their minds, over their secrets, and I suspect that the most erotic sentence in his vocabulary is "She's actually telling me this stuff!" Ann is horrified by Graham's hobby - and fascinated - and before long, the two of them are in front of his camera, in a scene of remarkable subtlety and power, both discovering that, for them, sex is only the beginning of their mysteries. This scene, and indeed the whole movie, would not work unless the direction and acting were precisely right (this is the kind of movie where a slightly wrong tone could lead to a very bad laugh), but Spader and MacDowell do not step wrong. Indeed, Spader's performance throughout the film is a kind of risk-taking. Can you imagine the challenge an actor faces in taking the kind of character I have described and making him not only intriguing but seductive? Spader has the kind of sexual ambiguity of the young Brando or Dean; he seems to suggest that if he bypasses the usual sexual approaches it is because he has something more interesting up, or down, his sleeve.The story of "sex, lies and videotape" is by now part of movie folklore: how writer-director Steven Soderbergh, at 29, wrote the screenplay in eight days during a trip to Los Angeles, how the film was made for $1.8 million, how it won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, as well as the best actor prize for Spader. I am not sure it is as good as the Cannes jury apparently found it; it has more intelligence than heart, and is more clever than enlightening. But it is never boring, and there are moments when it reminds us of how sexy the movies used to be, back in the days when speech was an erogenous zone.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

Murder, betrayal, lust, food, sex... perfection --1989--written and diredcted by Peter Greenway "This is arresting British writer-director Peter Greenaway's 1989 masterpiece. It takes place almost entirely in an elegant restaurant, with elaborate meals, gorgeous decor, excellent service ... and adultery, murder, and cannibalism. The bored wife of a barbarous crime boss decides to take a gentle bookseller as her lover, and her husband brutally retaliates. But she gets her gruesome revenge on him in the end. Helen Mirren, the thinking man's sex symbol, has never been sexier (the adulterous encounter in the spacious white restroom is incredibly erotic!). Greenaway sets this ghastly tale in sumptuous sets, with a use of color that is to die for -- if you'll pardon the expression. Tim Roth and Ciaran Hinds may be glimpsed among the supporting cast. Definitely sui generis. " --David Loftus .....
Helen Mirren, a British actress of some repute (best known for her portrayal of Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect series), has never been sexier than here. Her performance is proof that a female lead doesn't have to be under 40 or classically beautiful to heat up the screen. Mirren's lovemaking scenes with Alan Howard are charged with eroticism, and her final confrontation with Gambon is tense and bitter.Set design is top notch. Le Hollandais is a surreal place, the kind of fantastic setting that Jeunet and Caro would bring to the screen years later in films like Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. This is also a movie of vivid colors: reds for the dining room, pinks for the rest rooms, and greens for the kitchen. The Cook is always visually interesting, even on those rare occasions when other aspects of the production aren't as arresting.One message that Greenaway clearly conveys is the association between two of life's most obvious sensual pleasures: eating and sex. He litters this picture with the brutal and the grotesque -- including murder, covering someone with excrement, and cannibalism. The Cook is always as visceral as it is visual, with Gambon on hand to provide acid commentary for everything (he never seems to stop talking). Then there's the ending, which contradicts the saying that revenge is a dish best served cold. In this case, it's warm, and very, very appropriate. -- James Berardinelli

Diplomacy" as a Launch Pad for Missiles

In this age of the regurgitated corporate CNN', the foul Fox News, the official mouthpiece Euronews, and the filth purveying Aljazira, everyone needs to get out of their lazy chairs and look at alternative sources for their news. GNN is an underground organization working to expose people to global issues through guerrilla programming through music videos, articles, and investigative reports. Includes a forum and a monthly newsletter, as well as ability to get your own space and blog among other guerrillas. The following is an article about IRAN.

The Iran Crisis: "Diplomacy" as a Launch Pad for Missiles, by Norman Solomon
A time-honored scam: When you're moving toward military action, talk diplomacy.

The current flurry of Western diplomacy will probably turn out to be groundwork for launching missiles at Iran. Air attacks on targets in Iran are very likely. Yet many antiwar Americans seem eager to believe that won’t happen.
Illusion #1: With the U.S. military bogged down in Iraq, the Pentagon is in no position to take on Iran.
But what’s on the horizon is not an invasion – it’s a major air assault, which the American military can easily inflict on Iranian sites. (And if the task falls to the Israeli military, it is also well-equipped to bomb Iran.)
Illusion #2: The Bush administration is in so much political trouble at home – for reasons including its lies about Iraqi WMDs – that it wouldn’t risk an uproar from an attack on Iran.
But the White House has been gradually preparing the domestic political ground for bombing Iran. As the Wall Street Journal reported days ago, “in recent polls a surprisingly large number of Americans say they would support U.S. military strikes to stop Tehran from getting the bomb.”
Above those words, the Journal’s headline – “U.S. Chooses Diplomacy on Iran’s Nuclear Program” – trumpeted the Bush administration’s game plan. It’s a time-honored scam: When you’re moving toward aggressive military action, emphasize diplomacy.
Donald Rumsfeld proclaimed at a conference in Munich on Saturday that – to put a stop to Iran’s nuclear program – the world should work for a “diplomatic solution.” Yet the next day, the German daily newspaper Handelsblatt reports, Rumsfeld said in an interview: “All options including the military one are on the table.”
Top U.S. officials, inspired by the royal “W,” aren’t hesitating to speak for the world. Over the weekend, Condoleezza Rice said: “The world will not stand by if Iran continues on the path to a nuclear weapons capability.” Meanwhile, Rumsfeld declared: “The Iranian regime is today the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. The world does not want, and must work together to prevent, a nuclear Iran.”
Translation: First we’ll be diplomatic, then we can bomb.
Illusion #3: The U.S. won’t attack Iran because that would infuriate the millions of Iran-allied Shiites in Iraq, greatly damaging the U.S. war effort there.
But projecting rationality onto the Bush administration makes little sense at this point. The people running U.S. foreign policy have their own priorities, and avoiding carnage is not one of them.
Non-proliferation doesn’t rank very high either, judging from Washington’s cozy relationships with the nuclear-weapons powers of Israel, India and Pakistan. Unlike Iran, none of those countries are signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Only Iran has been allowing inspections of its nuclear facilities – and it is Iran that the savants in Washington are now, in effect, threatening to bomb.
With sugar-plum visions of Iran’s massive oil and natural-gas reserves dancing in their heads, the Washington neo-cons evidently harbor some farfetched hopes of bringing about the overthrow of the Iranian regime. But in the real world, an attack on Iran would strengthen its most extreme factions and fortify whatever interest it has in developing nuclear arms.
“The U.S. will not solve the nuclear problem by threatening military strikes or by dragging Iran before the U.N. Security Council,” Iran’s 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi wrote in the Jan. 19 edition of the Los Angeles Times, in an oped piece co-authored by Muhammad Sahimi, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Southern California. “Although a vast majority of Iranians despise the country’s hard-liners and wish for their downfall, they also support its nuclear program because it has become a source of pride for an old nation with a glorious history.”
The essay added: “A military attack would only inflame nationalist sentiments. Iran is not Iraq. Given Iranians’ fierce nationalism and the Shiites’ tradition of martyrdom, any military move would provoke a response that would engulf the entire region, resulting in countless deaths and a ruined economy not only for the region but for the world. Imposing U.N. sanctions on Iran would also be counterproductive, prompting Tehran to leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its ‘additional protocol.’ Is the world ready to live with such prospects?”
While calling for international pressure against Iran’s serious violations of human rights, Ebadi and Sahimi said that “Iran is at least six to 10 years away from a nuclear bomb, by most estimates. The crisis is not even a crisis. There is ample time for political reform before Iran ever develops the bomb.”
Last Friday, the Iranian Student News Agency quoted Iran’s former president Muhammad Khatami, who urged the Iranian government to offer assurances that the country’s nuclear program is only for generating electricity. “It is necessary to act wisely and with tolerance so that our right to nuclear energy will not be abolished,” he said.
Though he failed to develop much political traction for reform during his eight years as president, Khatami was a moderating force against human-rights abuses. His demagogic successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a menace to human rights and peace. But it’s by no means clear that Ahmadinejad can count on long-term support from the nation’s ruling clerics.
The man he defeated in the presidential runoff last summer, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, wields significant power as head of the government’s Expediency Council. Though he has a well-earned reputation as a corrupt opportunist, Rafsanjani is now a beacon of enlightenment compared to Ahmadinejad.
In early January, a pair of Iran scholars – Dariush Zahedi and Ali Ezzatyar, based at the University of California in Berkeley – wrote an LA Times piece making this point: “Contrary to popular belief, the traditional conservative clerical establishment is apprehensive about the possibility of violence inside and outside Iran. It generally opposes an aggressive foreign policy and, having some intimate ties with Iran’s dependent capitalist class, is appalled at the rapid slide of the economy since Ahmadinejad’s inauguration. The value of Tehran’s stock market has plunged $10 billion, the nation’s vibrant real estate market has withered and capital outflows are increasing.”
And the scholars added pointedly: “The history of U.S.-Iran relations shows that the more Washington chastises Tehran for its nuclear ambitions, the more it plays into the hands of the radicals by riling up fear and nationalist sentiment.”
Right now, the presidents of Iran and the United States are each thriving on the belligerency of the other. From all indications, a military assault on Iran would boost Ahmadinejad’s power at home. And it’s a good bet that the U.S. government will do him this enormous favor. Unless we can prevent it.
Norman Solomon is the author of the new book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com.

Never give up on that other world

Never give up on that other world, from Le Monde diplomatique, January 2006--
by Ignacio ramonet go to the article

This year the World Social Forum (WSF), a forum for alternative thinkers the world over, is convening twice. Different venues and dates, but both meetings will be decisive: in Bamako, Mali, from 19-23 January, and in Caracas, Venezuela, from 24-29 January. An important political meeting is scheduled for 18 January, the day before the Bamako forum convenes, and the 50th anniversary of the famous Bandung conference. ..........The meeting is described as an international day of reflection, successor to the tricontinental political movement, and will focus on rebuilding the internationalism of peoples and an anti-imperialist front. Some 100 intellectuals and representatives of social movements from the third world and elsewhere are due to attend.
The idea of organising a social forum each year started in the immediate aftermath of the 1998 victory over the villainous proposal for a multilateral agreement on investments; the creation in France of Attac (association for the taxation of financial transactions and for the aid of citizens); and the success of the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation summit. At the time, it seemed that the march of liberal globalisation could be stopped in its tracks.
Tactically, it was necessary to establish a symmetrical but politically contrasting counterpart to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, held each year in late January. That summit attracts political leaders from North and South, eager to prove their allegiance, and ready to sell off their countries’ assets with promises of maximum return on inward investment, never mind the environmental and social costs.
The decision to convene a social, not an economic, forum on the same dates followed. Not in the North but in the South. The first World Social Forum was in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where locally elected politicians had come up with the idea of participatory budgeting. The forum’s theme was taken from its publication: Another World Is Possible. That expression produced the concept of altermondialism, a multifaceted movement encompassing the whole range of opponents to liberal globalisation.
The WSF is an innovative and visionary political project. Its aim is to bring together in one place, with associations, NGOs and trade unions as intermediaries, people who genuinely represent all the world’s citizens opposed to globalisation. The victims of catastrophes of globalisation are specifically included.
The political objective underpinning the forum is radical in its modernity. Whereas the United Nations provides a forum for states or governments - the structures of power, the WSF aims to bring together, for the first time in history, an embryonic assembly representative of all humanity. It has had a definite strategic objective: to thwart the process of liberal globalisation that is breaking up societies, ruining the most fragile economies and destroying our environment. But, over time, that objective has become blurred and some people have forgotten about it.
That was clear at Porto Alegre in 2005 when it became apparent that the original idea had lost momentum. Many felt that the forum had to be more than a venue for discussions that did not lead to action: a minimum platform was needed so that words could be transformed into actions. The platform would provide meaning and design for alternatives to neoliberal proposals, incorporating the common objectives of citizens from North and South. If it failed, the forum risked losing political credibility and becoming a showpiece for civil society in which, despite the best intentions, good governance would become the main focus of attention.
This realisation led to a return to the offensive and provoked a major debate on the role and future of social forums: global, continental, national and local. The debate is critical for the future of altermondialism. It will be continued in Bamako and Caracas; and will be particularly impassioned in the Venezuelan capital where, for the first time, the WSF will come into direct contact with the reforms introduced by President Hugo Chávez.
The atmosphere in Latin America is affected by the recent success in Mar del Plata, Argentina, of opponents to the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, and also by the electoral victory of Bolivia’s Evo Morales in December. In Caracas people will be able to see for themselves that globalisation is not inevitable.
It is possible to reverse the trend, if you keep faith with the principles of justice and solidarity.

NPQ interview with Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman, 93, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976. His monetarist and laissez-faire ideas have been profoundly influential in the past several decades with leading political figures from Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan. In late November, NPQ editor Nathan Gardels spoke with Friedman at his hilltop San Francisco apartment with panoramic views across the San Francisco Bay to the Golden Gate Bridge. .......Read the Interview

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