Directed by Bill Guttentag & Dan Sturman
Saw it yesterday night.
Bleak catalogue of war atrocities.
Dramatized, dead voices played by high-profile celebrities: Mariel Hemingway, Edward James Olmos, Michelle Krusiec, mingled with the testimonies of the survivors.
Re-enactment of the tragedy.
Manifest desire to make the event, unique, irreversible, non-repeatable.
And yet, echoes everywhere: the Holocaust, the Armenians, Darfur, and so on...
The same, yet always different: human horror.
Innocence or intimacy: if spoken, they become instantly, irremediably spurious.
As a journalist, he felt like the archetypal abjurer.
The project was a complex one indeed. He seemed miles away from completion, stuck as he was in this sojourn of commissioned writing. He was taking way too long and not taking it too well - he wasn't the onlye one. He was integrating data, methods or methodologies, new and entire areas of vocabularies to translate. He had to comply with an ever-growing list of tedious constraints and was losing himself in an inferno of constant re-writing, which is another way of not writing at all. In short, it was no pushover.
It felt as if all purpose, his life itself, was cancelled. No, it was not easy.
“In a nutshell, not speaking can be explained this way.”, he thought. This doesn't make much sense at all.
His silence was a series of displacements: in other words, no answer to anyone.
Yet, he really hated writing for others: magazines, papers, even this fucking priest. He hated it with a passion.
The sheer force of his frustration was helpful though.
Along with Mohamad Qasabgi, Farid al-Atrash and Sharif Haydar, Munir Bashir (Arabic: منير بشي, Syriac: ܡܘܢܝܪ ܒܫܝܪ) is rightly considered to be in the pantheon of the best 'ud- (or oud) players of all time.
Born in the city of Mosul (northern Iraq) in 1930 (he passed away in Budapest in 1997), the musician lived to create a unique, contemplative idiom that established him as the absolute father/master of the solo lute, the matrix from which originated all the new generations of oudists. This is exactly what emerges from the two cds of Mesopotamia: Bashir gives an astounding display of inspiration and technical mastery, moving between the hieratic maqamat (مقام), the traditional melodic scales/modal structures of Arabic music, and solo improvisation, for which he always had a propensity. As he wrenches the instrument out of the ruts where years of being relegated to the rank of accompanying second fiddle have thrown it into, he returns to the roots and the prestigious lineage of the taqsim (instrumental improvisation) masters. The performance, recorded in his Baghdad studio in 1987 is an essential document of a music.
Describing the Borgesian pianist requires an accumulation of adjectives: explosive, unpredictable, feverish, chatty, witty... the words are there, available, yet inefficient.
Listening to Martial Solal, in one (strict, strong) sense, implies an encounter - with a vivid anxiety, and a playful virtuosity that tells no other tale than itself.
Lovely and scholarly, its self-contained, half-sketched narratives suggests some kind of danger is here, and there, always delayed, and the heat is omnipresent, terrible, full of snares and traps. After so many flip-flops and surprising breaks.
Perfectly plural rhythms, out of joint/whack elusive forms, rapid-fire transition-free transformation: this is the quintessential music of whim.
Directed by Paul Greengrass. Produced by Patrick Crowley, Frank Marshall, Paul L. Sandberg & Doug Liman. Written by Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, George Nolfi, Tom Stoppard (uncredited). Music by John Powell. Cinematography: Oliver Wood. Editing by Christopher Rouse
During the peaks of the film, Bourne must achieve the impossible : stay hidden at the heart of a world of absolute transparency and visibility, in the midst of a gigantic panopticon, a network system built with the means of modern technology (satellite surveillance, computers, cell phones, microchips).
This third episode of Bourne’s adventures in the realm of international espionage is the one that probably pushes the sensation of paranoia the farthest. It gives the sense of a reality entirely under control/surveillance. That new possibilities offered by modern instrumentation makes the conventions of cinematographic action obsolete is a challenge that the film takes up lives up to, in a splendid manner.
The aesthetic parti pris adopted by Paul Greengrass, which increases the credibility and verisimilitude of the events that unfold on the screen, beyond all likelihood, is a peculiar one. The much talked-about hand-held camera work undermines the stability (certainty) of the regard, is shaky, making impossible for the viewer to find, in this confusion, an undeniable center/focus for the unfolding of the action. What could be considered a simple gimmick, or a stylistic preciosity is here a potent addition to the intensity of the suspense and forms a core element of an ultra-kinetic definition of cinema.
Niemand
zeugt für den
Zeugen
Nobody can demand
more soft-hurting
than you
and yet
you offer your soul
against the gray.
And we,
blades of grass biding their time,
weed growing betweeen the lines
of Mycenaean stones
destroy the long-standing concrete
He knew it was not allowed.
But God. She smelt like heaven.
There was no denying it.
The power of geometric data: perhaps it was installed in transversal signs.
Irreversible, it was blue and the result of temporary retinal inputs.
So she was there. Playing, poised. The demonstration was brilliant, as he knew it would be.
She looked at him, unblinking, smiling an unambiguous polite smile.
They had a very polite talk. Then she asked: "Would you mind if I..."
She wrote down the address of her hotel, a few blocks away from there.
