By Louise Ma and Chris Parker
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Posted By F. Sheikh
Micro-movies on the physics of love.
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Monthly Archives: July 2013
Is There A European Culture ?
Does Europe Exist ? By Enda O’ Doherty
The Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller, in a chapter she contributed to a book published in 1992, stated with some confidence her view that there was no such thing as European culture. There was certainly, she wrote, Italian and German music, and Florentine and Venetian painting, “but there is no European music and no European painting”.
It is true that the history of art and culture was not really Heller’s field, but it would seem that those who, in the same year as she wrote her essay, framed the Maastricht Treaty, signalling the transition from European Community to European Union, at least partially agreed with her. The treaty was the first time the community had taken for itself significant powers in the cultural field. European cultures (note the plural), the relevant article stated, were to be understood as requiring “respect” – by which one understands freedom from too much supranational interference (“The Community shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting their national and regional diversity …”). At the same time however, the Community was to be entrusted with the task of “[b]ringing the common cultural heritage to the fore”.
As with most negotiated texts, there is a compromise lurking here, or possibly a contradiction. First, cultures are to be understood as national (and grudgingly, just a little bit regional); they are even perhaps what define nations, the particular set of practices and inheritances which the Dutch, or the Germans, or the Portuguese have by virtue of their nationality, the thing that they have and no other nation has –that Dutch, that Portuguese thing. And yet it seems, according to Maastricht, that there is also a common cultural heritage which belongs equally to the Dutch and the Germans and the Portuguese. But what is this heritage? Is it something made up of a little bit of everywhere sort of tacked together (“the Europe of Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe” perhaps, to which statesmen like to pay obeisance in their speeches before quickly passing on to more important matters)? Or could it be something more mysterious, something actually European?
In all probability the form of words used in Article 128 (now Article 151) of the Maastricht Treaty arose from a conflict between national, or nationalist, sensitivity, some mildly separatist or regionalist traditions and supranational idealism, or, if you like, Brussels overreaching. In the current balance of power in the union the first tends to be stronger than any of the others. When the French talk of culture they mean Racine, while the Italians mean Petrarch and Dante. They may also of course be “convinced Europeans”, in which case they will wish to share Racine, or Petrarch and Dante, with all their neighbours. Of a putative European culture they will ask “How much of ours will get in?”
Interestingly, Agnes Heller thought that while there never had been a European culture there might well be one in the future, a position she perhaps derived from her intellectual background in Marxism-Leninism, which as we know regarded man as a plastic creature who could be moulded (for his own good) by engineers of the human soul into something more satisfactory than his current self. And so a person who today feels completely and satisfyingly Lithuanian might well one day, if acted upon by well-crafted and inspiring supranational cultural influences, feel more European than anything else. Click link for full article;
http://www.drb.ie/essays/does-europe-exist-
Posted By F. Sheikh
Egypt’s Coup & Behind The Scene Plans
The Grand Scam: Spinning Egypt’s Military Coup
by ESAM AL-AMIN
“On April 22, 2011, UAE Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed brought his intelligence and security chiefs to meet with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and his security officials to discuss the ramifications of the Arab Spring. Bin Zayed warned that unless the GCC countries developed a proactive policy to preempt the wave of popular uprisings sweeping the Arab World at the time, none of the region’s monarchs would survive. Three weeks later in an emergency summit meeting in Riyadh he delivered the same message to all the GCC heads of state. While Qatar remained indifferent to his message, the other five countries were receptive. Bin Zayed and Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the Saudi intelligence chief, were tasked with submitting an effective plan to counter the Arab Spring phenomenon in the region. Subsequently, King Abdullah solicited and received the help of King Abdullah II of Jordan to join this effort while Qatar was excluded from all future meetings.
For decades, the UAE had been very close to Mubarak and his cronies. Billions of dollars of ill-gotten fortunes looted from the country were deposited in banks in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. After the overthrow of Mubarak, dozens of security officials and corrupt businessmen quietly left Egypt and relocated to the UAE. When Mubarak’s last Prime Minister, Ahmad Shafiq lost the presidential elections to Morsi in June 2012, he also moved to the UAE. By the fall of 2012, it became evident that the UAE hosted a web of individuals who were plotting the overthrow of Morsi and the MB.”
“In November 2012, Prince Bandar presented two detailed plans to the Americans through the CIA. Plan A was a quick plot to topple Morsi in early December while Plan B was a long term plan that involved two tracks. One track was a series of destabilizing protests that would culminate in Morsi’s ouster, while another track included uniting the opposition to form one coalition to defeat the MB at the polls if the first track failed. While the CIA was fully aware of the plan it neither endorsed nor objected to it because the Obama administration, playing both sides, was also pursuing dialogue with the Morsi government.
The plan to topple the MB was built around a plot to assassinate Morsi in his residence on December 5. However, it was exposed by a loyal mid-level presidential guard hours before it was to take place. With the help of the MB, Morsi was able to thwart the plot, though he declined to expose it or discuss it publicly.”
“In March 2013, NSF leader ElBaradei met with Shafiq and Bin Zayed in the UAE. They all agreed that the only way to dislodge Morsi and the MB from power was by undermining his rule and the stability of the country internally and convincing Western governments, particularly the U.S., the U.K., France, and Germany, to back a military takeover. According to a recent WSJ report, a series of meetings took place in the Naval Officers Club between senior military officers, fulool representatives including the attorney of billionaire and Mubarak crony, Ahmed Ezz, the architect of the 2010 fraudulent parliamentary elections, and opposition leaders including ElBaradei. According to this report, which was not refuted or denied by any side, the army generals told the opposition that they would not move to oust Morsi unless millions of people take to the streets on their side.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/19/the-grand-scam-spinning-egypts-military-coup
Posted By F. Sheikh
‘Star Dust Memories’ By Maureen Dowd
‘My Lunches With Orson’ and ‘Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations’
If you are fan of watching old movies at TCM ( Turner Classic Movie Channel), you will enjoy reading about two Hollywood giants of their time, Orson and Ava Garner. (F. Sheikh)
Ava Gardner was “essential to the Hollywood myth about itself,” as her friend Dirk Bogarde observed, and so was Orson Welles. Orson was “his own greatest production,” as the Hollywood chronicler Peter Biskind writes, and so was Ava.
Two new books — “My Lunches With Orson” and “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations” — unearth vintage conversations with the stars in their final years, when they were broke, in bad health, unable to get work and mourning their lost grandeur. But oh, what gorgeous wrecks they were, and what mesmerizing stories they told, these Sunset Boulevard Scheherazades.
Even washed up and so heavy and arthritic he had to use a wheelchair, the 68-year-old Welles knew he was more interesting than anyone else in Hollywood. So he asked his pal Henry Jaglom, an indie filmmaker, to tape their lunch conversations at Ma Maison — with his ill-tempered toy poodle Kiki at the table — discussions that indolently roamed from chicken salad capers to chic romantic capers. The tapes span 1983 to 1985, when Welles died of a heart attack with a typewriter in his lap writing a script; they languished in a shoe box for years until Biskind learned about them in the 1990s and started bugging Jaglom to transcribe and publish them.
In 1988, living on her own in London, recovering from a couple of strokes and fearing she had pulmonary emphysema, Gardner asked the British journalist Peter Evans to ghostwrite her memoir. She had no money and didn’t want to sell the jewels that Frank Sinatra, Howard Hughes and other famous men had lavished on her. “Pretty damn soon,” she frets to Evans, “there’s gonna be no corn in Egypt, baby.”
Both books make you feel as if you’re eavesdropping, the one about Ava in a more invasive way. Unlike the chummy rambling chats between Welles and Jaglom, Gardner was in a constant tug of war with Evans, agonizing in vinous 3 a.m. phone calls, as he surreptitiously took notes, about whether she really wanted “strangers digging around in my panties drawer.”
Watching this Venus ply her mind games, sensuality and stubborn will on Evans, it’s easy to imagine what it was like to be a love object jerked on her marionette strings in her prime. You wouldn’t have a chance.
“You can sum up my life in a sentence, honey,” she tells Evans in her throaty voice. “She made movies, she made out and she made a [expletive] mess of her life. But she never made jam.”
Some of the colorful stories Welles tells have appeared elsewhere, with sharper aperçus. But what makes “Lunches With Orson” appealing is the piquancy of the much younger, skinnier actor and director taking on the Sisyphean job of reviving the Falstaffian outcast — a mitzvah another Welles interviewer and acolyte, Peter Bogdanovich, didn’t bother with, Welles thought, when Bogdanovich was on top.
Even maudlin, Welles and Gardner are magnificent. “A lot of booze has flowed under the bridgework,” Ava says.
Both hit the big time as teenagers, Boy Genius and Girl Vamp, landing Time covers in their 20s. They had in common a bawdy honesty, a desire to shock and a lust for living extravagantly.
The lion and lioness in winter are poignant. The cosmopolitan man who made “Citizen Kane” could not get financing to make a movie. The green-eyed woman who dazzled in Technicolor in “The Barefoot Contessa” was drinking, smoking, coughing and listening to old Sinatra-Tommy Dorsey recordings that Sinatra sent her after her strokes.
“Who’d have thought the highlight of my day is walking the dog,” dryly notes Gardner, who once danced all night and then began drinking Dom Pérignon in the studio makeup room at 5 a.m. “I miss Frank,” she says, even the fights. She knows he will outlive her: “Bastards are always the best survivors.” Click link for full article;