Riots - from Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses"

This is so beautiful, I had to share it. The book was published over twenty years ago, which isn't that much really, but long enough to make us think "look how the same rituals still exist".

Just a little background to the story, not even to help you understand what's happening, but because it's funny to us Mediterranean types: one of the book's characters, Gibreel, wandering around London and being homesick for India, wishes for warmer weather. Because there are supernatural forces at play, the weather does become unusually hot, and so the city erupts into the usual hot-weather activities: riots, police brutality, minority protests, false arrests and so on.

So, the attached pages describe the police seizure of the night club where the protesters keep their headquarters, as seen on the TV news:

מצא את ההבלים

אומה יקרה,

אני מאמינה שחשוב לעודד אנשים כשהם עושים את הדבר הנכון. במיוחד אם מדובר באנשים שאצלם זה לא יוצא בקלות, ולא מה שמאפיין אותם ביומיום. כמו כן, כשאנשים מתנהגים בצורה עלובה, חשוב להצביע על כך בפניהם, ומהר. קיום שתי המצוות האלה הוא שמביא אותי היום לכתוב את הפוסט הזה.

גם אני מאד לא אוהבת את ראש הממשלה נתניהו, את מעשיו, את אביזריו, את המראה שלו, את הסובבים אותו, ואת הזווית של החיוך שלו שגורמת לו להיראות כמו איש עסקים מושחת שחושב שהצליח להערים על באטמן. לכן כששמעתי שהוא הצליח לחתום על עסקה להחזרתו של גלעד שליט - דבר ששימח אותי מאד - עשיתי מאמצים לפתח אליו כמות כלשהי של רגשות חיוביים. זה לא היה קל, זה היה מאבק פנימי קשה שנראה לעתים אבוד, אבל ביומיים האחרונים סוף סוף הצלחתי, וזה קרה בזכות מיזם "ביבי גאמפ" המטופש והעלוב שאתם כל כך מתלהבים לעסוק בו.



אובייקטיבית, מה בדיוק הבעיה עם התמונה הזאת? יש פה צילום של אירוע היסטורי, והדמויות המעורבות בו. זה שאנחנו אוהבים את משפחת שליט ולא אוהבים את ביבי זאת בעיה אישית שלנו. וזה לא שגלעד ואבא שלו דיגמנו לפורטרט משפחתי ופתאום הנדחף הזה הופיע - הם קבוצה של אנשים בתנועה, עם צלמים של דובר צה"ל מסביב, זה הפריים שיצא, וטבעי שהצלם ינסה לתפוס את ראש הממשלה יחד עם החיבוק.

ההשוואה לפורסט גאמפ - באמת? מה, הוא הושתל שם דיגיטלית כדי לנסות להוסיף לו חשיבות? הוא נדחף בכח לאירוע היסטורי שלא נוגע לו, כמו לימור לבנת באולימפיאדה? לא. הוא דמות חשובה באירוע ההיסטורי שהוא היה אחד מיוצריו, יש לו את כל הסיבות להיות שם, וזה שיש לו חיוך מגעיל זה מצער, אבל לא רלוונטי.

אבל אם כבר פתחתם פוטושופ, בואו תנסו תרגיל כזה: הפכו את התמונה לשחור לבן, ושימו את מנחם בגין או יצחק רבין ברקע. נראה פתאום הגיוני, נכון? ואם במקום ביבי היה שם שמעון פרס או אריק איינשטיין (ששניהם גם מגעילים מאד בעיניי), הייתם הרי מדפיסים מזה חולצות, נכון או לא? ואם זאת היתה שלי יחימוביץ, שגם החיוך שלה לא הכי פוטוגני? זה היה הופך לפוסטר שהיה מנצח לה את הבחירות בשנה הבאה.

לסיום, תזכורת: הסיסמא שכולנו היינו נורא מבסוטים ממנה "איפה השליט שיחזיר את שליט?", זוכרים? אז הנה.

October

Why I detest Lady Gaga

I know I've already written a lengthy rant about this, but I want to make it clear. I don't hate Lady Gaga because she is a bad singer. I hate her because she is an amazing singer. Because she has a Liza Minnelli voice and a Paris Hilton personality. Because she can do this:



... but chooses to do this instead:

The Three Musketeers 2011

People who didn't spend their primary school years carrying around Alexander Dumas' novel everywhere they went, can probably let this year's cinematic adaptation pass without comment. I am not such a person, and also I'm not a person who likes to let things pass without comment. And so, here we are.

From this point on, this post contains spoilers for both the book and the movie. The movie, of course, cannot be spoiled, and if you haven't read the book by now you have only yourselves to blame.

The creators of this film obviously found some of the book's elements too vulgar for their tender tastes. For example, all the nasty extramarital affairs, and unsightly female deaths. So they took them all out - the gentle queen Anne, of course, did not have an affair with Buckingham, and the sweet young Constance was not, of course, married. How could she be? She was waiting for the love of her life to ride in from the sticks on his orange horse. And of course she survives all the dangers on the way to have her kiss at the end of the movie. Even the wicked wicked Milady gets to live - and why shouldn't she? Her worst crime in the film was loving her career more than her moody boyfriend Athos. Surely spoiling her outfit with a little salt water is enough to sort her out. Also gone are the captain of the musketeers De Treville - one of my favorites characters, the musketeers themselves - apparently disbanded just before D'Artagnan shows up due to double-dip recession, and most of the plot, especially everything that happens after the diamonds adventure.

Strangely, after cleaning the storyline of these nasty nasty things, the writers found that they needed to add some vulgarities of their own - as big and vulgar as they could think of. So they turned the musketeers - the only three they had left (hey, the title only calls for three after all) into some kind of Mission Impossible secret scuba squad (I'm not kidding, they scuba!), added flame-throwing air ships (they make the annoying trip to and from London so much easier), turned the Duke of Buckingham into a total douchebag (that way the queen couldn't possibly like him), crash-landed into the roof of the Notre Dame, and, of course, had D'Artagnan kill Rochefort in a long and boring rooftop sword fight. At the end of the book, of course, D'Artagnan and Rochefort become friends, but that would've just confused today's tender-hearted viewer. Oh, and Rochefort had an eye missing. Scars are so subtle.

Having said all that, I need to insist that there were several excellent things in this movie, which made it almost worth watching:

All of the production design was breathtakingly beautiful, as was Milla Jovovich (what the hell is that woman made of?!). Most of the casting was spot-on, in ways that it hasn't been in previous adaptations. D'Artagnan was an adorable young goofball (the kid leading the horse), and so was the king - excellent! It was very smart to make them so much alike, in fact in all their scenes together they look like they're about to collapse into each-other's arms.

Usually the Cardinal and Athos (feather hat guy) are the sexiest men in the story, but this time Athos was totally flat, and Christoph Waltz as the Cardinal was good, but unexciting. This made room for two very sexy actors to take the parts of Porthos and Aramis (the big one and the one with the cross). I dare any hot-blooded  woman to watch this film and not fantasize about a threesome with those two!

The fact that they made Buckingham a strutting douchebag bugged me, but on the other hand Orlando Bloom as a strutting douchebag was great, and it's about time for him to lay off the elf stuff.

In conclusion ... oh hell, I don't have a conclusion. Long live the king, long live Paris, long live the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Musee d'Orsay!

We live in a world where good men are murdered and mediocre hacks thrive.

Jesus - murdered; Martin Luther King - murdered; Malcolm X - murdered; Gandhi - murdered; John Lennon - murdered; Reagan... wounded.


Thus spoke Bill Hicks (Him again? Oh alright then...) back in the 80-s. Well what about our hellish decade, in which Amy Winehouse is dead and Lady Gaga gets to perform with Brian May and be cheered by millions? How lucky is Bill not to have lived to see it, and how sad the world without him.

The most interesting thing I learned this year about sex and people.

I'm not sure how much "Game of Thrones" - the book or the TV series - has to teach us about life. Probably something about how winter is what happens while you're busy making other plans. Whatever.

The one thing I learned, not from the show but from looking up stuff about it on the internet, is that there's an unbelievable amount of people out there who think that if a sexual act is performed from behind, in necessarily means that it is anal sex. I wouldn't have believed it if someone told me about it, but the number of times I've read something like "...and how come they all only do it in the butt?!" is staggering. To me, all these people are repressed virgins and/or perverts.

I'm not sure why the citizens of Westeros choose to do it from the back 90% of the time - perhaps the rocks are cold and the ground dirty, or their seven gods don't approve of eye contact, or maybe that's the more practical way if you need to keep an eye out for dragons. Either way, if it was all anal, there wouldn't be so many bastards walking around, now would there?

The funniest comments are the ones accompanied by some deeply pseudo-intelligent analysis of the literary and/or cinematic qualities of the book/show.

Too literal, Amy baby...

The Anmation Professional's Circle of Life

1. Study animation
2. Work in animation
3. Work in animation some more (applies if lucky)
4. Become unemployed
5. Get a job teaching animation to new generation
6. Celebrate 35-th birthday
7. Pick new career
8. Watch Disney classics with your children

me vs the world 6

Where the passive-aggressive assholes shop!

This commercial is my current pet peeve. For those of you who don't speak Hebrew, the idea is that the husband wakes up in the middle of the night with a cold, so he wakes his wife up and sends her to "Super Pharm" to get him some medicine. While there, she spots the nail polish rack, buys two almost identical colors, and asks him which one looks better. Luckily for him, she got him headache pills.

Mmmm, where to begin, where to begin?

First of all, kudos for managing to degrade both men and women equally. Really, nice job.

Secondly, here's my definitive list of midnight medical conditions that would justify waking up the spouse: if you're bleeding in a way that might cause loss of consciousness. If you are choking. If you're experiencing heart or appendicitis symptoms. If you've soiled the bed in some way. If an internal organ has popped out. If your water broke. If a wild animal is eating your face. If you woke up and don't remember who you are. Anything else wrong - you wait until morning. If you wake up with a cold, put on a warmer shirt, a scarf maybe, make yourself a hot tea quietly! then try to go back to sleep.

Thirdly, and more importantly, is this: I know that I'm very old-fashioned and outdated, but I remember when commercials used to send the message of "buy this, it's what all the successful people are buying". All the cool kids eat these chips, all the rich businessmen have this car, all the modern women wear these shoes, etc. Lately, and I didn't notice exactly when this happened, the people in the commercials are bastards, swindlers, morons, they have bad marriages, dysfunctional relationships, they are bad parents - and still I'm supposed to want what they have! How'd you like to be stuck in line behind this passive-aggressive asshole? Not that this one would ever be caught shopping for himself - I'm sure that his wife buys everything for him, from underwear to birthday presents for his parents.

In conclusion, the next step that I recommend for the creators of this commercial, is what Bill Hicks used to recommend to all advertising and marketing people, i.e. this:

The Millemium Trilogy

This is what it feels like to read Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy:

The first book is fascinating, though vulgar, and you fall completely in love with Lisbeth Salander. The second one is exciting, though far-fetched. By the middle of the third one, you just want all the characters to take their women's rights, their journalistic integrity, their hyperactive libidos and their overblown IQ and end it all in a nearby fjord.

I shudder to think what the other seven books would've been like.

Tron Legacy

For the life of me I can't understand why, in this age of over-population, the majority of texts our mainstream culture manages to produce still preach the doctrine of reproduction above, and instead, of all other acts of creation.

Kevin Flynn has attempted the god-like act of creating an entire alternative universe from scratch, and he expects to get results from it that will benefit our world as well - something about perfecting the human genome, eliminating disease and so on that I didn't entirely follow. But oh no! He has been swallowed up, literally, by his work, and can't spend time with his son. How unfortunate. Too late he realizes that the only perfection he should've ever attempted is the one that hides inside this child. All his ideas about making the world better for the kid to grow up in - too bad, he should've scrapped those the moment the stick turned blue.

 Well, I'm sorry, but screw you, Mr. Kosinski, and screw you, eight (!) people it took to write this script, and screw you (passionately and at length, and sleep for a while and wake up and then screw you again, but always with contraceptives), Mr. Bridges, but being able to create something other than offspring is what separates us from the animals. It's one of the few good things that separate us from the animals. If you don't mind, some of us would like to keep that option open.

Jon Stewart's interview with Marion Jones

I saw this interview almost a month ago, and I'm still pretty broken-hearted about it. I'm not a big lover of sports, but I remember watching Marion Jones in the 2000 olympics and being completely won over by her. She was so amazing and so charming, and so far ahead of everyone else in every race, it was like watching a new species of human being revealing itself for the first time. Looking through 10 years' perspective and loss of innocence, it's pretty clear that she's on performance-enhancing drugs, but back then it was impossible to imagine anything dishonest behind that adorable face, that wonderful childish excitement. I may be a sucker for a pretty woman, but remembering that glowing victory I do believe her that she didn't know about the drugs.
Whatever happened, I'm appalled that they sent her to prison for it. Prison? For cheating in a sports event? People really do take sports way too seriously, I mean really!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Marion Jones
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

P.S.
It reminds me of something Kurt Vonnegut says in his introduction to "Bluebeard" (one of the best books I know) -
May I say, too, that much of what I put in this book was inspired by the grotesque prices paid for works of art during the past century. Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions to endow certain sorts of human playfulness with inappropriate and hence distressing seriousness. I think not only of the mudpies of art, but of children's games as well -- running, jumping, catching, throwing.
Or dancing.
Or singing songs.

Dinner for Schmucks

Well, I didn't want to see this movie, but now that I have I need to talk about it. If you watch it, which I don't recommend, notice this: it's a movie in which a lot of wonderful British comics take the back seat to a lot of mediocre American comics. There's Steve Carell, who is adorable, but I think everyone is as sick of him as I am at this point. There's Paul Rudd, the ultimate non-threatening "vegetarian" male lead, Zach Galifianakis, who belongs to the Tina Fey school of comedy (i.e. the belief that doing something annoying with a straight face and repeating it ad nauseum equals funny), and a female love interest - Stephanie Szostak - who, frankly, inspires even less passion than Paul Rudd. Then, in the smaller roles, you have a wonderful appearance by Lucy Punch - I've been fixating on her since Woody Allen's "Tall Dark Stranger", David Walliams from "Little Britain", and the hilarious and much loved in our house Chris O'Dowd from the cult "IT Crowd". It's a masterpiece of bad decisions, and mostly inspires wishful thinking. For example, my boyfriend (who made me watch it in the first place) said at the end how great this movie could've been if Wes Anderson had directed it. Could've, would've should've...

80-s hell

I haven't been to Europe in the past few years, but last night we had dinner in kind of a touristy place, and there were several people who were dressed hideously, who all spoke in different European languages (Spanish, Dutch). Therefore, I'm forced to conclude that Europe is drowning in a return of 80-s fashion that's much worse than what we're having around here.

כתבת השבוע 6

זקפה לאומית - יש
קומיסרית מטעם עצמה - יש
הזדמנות לטמא אמנות בפוליטיקה - יש
אמנים שיסכימו לזה מתוך לאומנות - סביר להניח
אמנים שיסכימו מתוך פחד מחרם - אולי
אמנים שיסרבו - יש לקוות, בטח כן
עונשים פרוצדורליים נגד אותם אמנים - אין לי ספק

שיהיה לכם לתפרים

מילא משרד הפרסום, זה ידוע שמדובר בחבורה של זומבים חסרי נשמה. אבל לחברה כמו "דלתא" שמתיימרת להיות רגישה לגוף האישה אמור להיות שיקול דעת שימנע ממנה להוציא פרסומת סנאף מבחילה מהסוג הזה.י

עכשיו הרכות המלטפת של תחתוני התחרה חסרי התפרים של דלתא יתקשר לדימוי של קרע פעור באיבר המין - דבר שכבר גרם לאינספור גברים לאבד את החשק לגעת בנשים שלהם אחרי הלידה.י

Anvil

Some people are evil. We know this with our minds, but every once in a while we get to see what we know, and we feel like we've stepped into a Bosch painting, where everyone has reached out for the closest arm or leg and started chewing on it. I got one of those shocks yesterday as I was watching the documentary "Anvil - The Story of Anvil".

If you haven't seen it I'll summarize it quickly, because what I want to talk about is not the main story but a single event within it. The film is about a heavy metal band called Anvil, which apparently started up in the 80-s along with Metallica, The Scorpions, Guns'n'Roses and some others of that group, were one of the best metal bands at that time, but for some reasons (which you can theorize about as you watch the movie) failed to make it big and disappeared into Canadian obscurity. However, instead of breaking up and falling back into writing or playing for other bands, Anvil stayed together and kept working. They've been together for over 25 years and put out about ten more albums, they have a few dozens of devoted fans in Canada where they live, and a few thousands more around the world. The film talks about what their lives look like now, why they failed, and how they're still trying to pull off a last minute comeback.

The part that had me cursing the TV at the top of my lungs happens about half way through, as Lips (the singer and band leader and a very cute guy) gets a chance to work with their old and still very successful producer, and needs to get together enough money for the guys to fly to London and record an album. It would seem that the advantage of being a metal band in your 50-s would be that your fans have become grown-ups with jobs and assets that might be able to help you in your time of need. And indeed we see Lips meeting with one of the die-hard fans that follow the band religiously to every dingy club they play in, who turns out to be the vice president of a telemarketing company. Every normal human being watching expects this guy to loan or even give Lips the money, but no - his idea of helping his idol is to put him to work as a telemarketer. This 50 year old man, who by the way already has one day job, sat in front of the cameras in a room full of teenagers and tried to sell some crappy sunglasses to people over the phone. Can you imagine, even if he turned out to be good at it, how long it would take him to earn enough money for a flight and several weeks stay in London?

This, to me, is an example of true, real, garden variety evil. Because evil is not talking with a scary Darth Vader voice or an evil cackle and plotting a laser beam that would blow up the moon because your mommy didn't love you enough. Evil is when you have power over someone to help them, not help them, or harm and humiliate them, and you choose the worst one of the three. Evil is something that simple, seemingly harmless people do on a tiny scale every single day.

I can't walk into that guy's office today and punch him in the face, all I can do is post his name and photo. Unfortunately he's using a "cool" pseudonym:

מתוך "דברים שאני שונאת" מאת אפריל פטר

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