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September 20, 2011 – 4:35 amMira Nair’s Kamasutra: A Tale Of Love (1996) is not a how-to sex manual on film but a movie about how a servant girl defines herself through her body and sex. And it still gets the snip from Indian censors.

Stephen Tan reviews.16th Century India. Maya, a servant girl, grows up with her friend and playmate, Princes Tara. As Tara prepares for her marriage to Prince Raj Singh, she passes her hand-me-downs to Maya.

Just as Prince Raj first sees Tara, he also sees Maya and is attracted to her.Prior to the wedding, out of spite and anger at getting nothing but hand-me-downs from Tara, Maya approaches Raj and offers herself to him. Tara’s hunchback brother, Biki, who is in love with Maya, spies on the lovemaking from the shadows. As Tara is about to leave for her new home, Maya tells her: “I’ve always worn your used things. But now you’ll forever wear what I have used.”Biki asks for Maya’s hand but when she refuses, he reveals that Maya had sex with the prince and Maya is driven out. Despondent, Maya prays at the river and meets sculptor Jai Kumar. Jai treats Maya as his muse and Maya is at first fearful when Jai tries to touch her body. Jai then introduces Maya to Rasa, who teaches young girls and women the way of the Kamasutra.Spending time together, Jai realises that Maya is becoming a distraction rather than an inspiration to his work and rejects her when she asks for a long-term commitment.

Maya then turns towards Rasa to master the ancient art of seduction. While on a tour, Raj, who has now become king, sees a statue with Maya’s likeness. He finds her and sets her up as his concubine.As a reward for his work, Jai is allowed to wrestle with the king. Jai beats the king in the game and is invited to meet Maya. Jai and Maya continue their relationship, this time in secret. Threats of an invasion by the Shah looms and, instead of forming an alliance with Biki, Raj - who indulges in orgies and has turned into an opium addict - insults the hunchback.

In retaliation, Biki forges an alliance with the Shah.Things begin to cool between Raj and Maya; Raj catches Jai and Maya together and sentences Jai to death. Maya finds Tara attempting suicide and, after declaring her own love for Jai, teaches Tara how to seduce and win back Raj. Tara helps Maya to leave the harem to visit Jai for the last time.

Maya pleads for clemency from Raj but he refuses when he sees that Maya will never love him. Maya is among the crowd when Jai is executed with an elephant smashing his head. As Maya heads out of the city, Biki and the encroaching army ride past.It is ironic that Mira Nair’s 1996 movie is banned in India, home of the Kamasutra. However, a DVD of Kamasutra: A Tale Of Love is available as part of the Kamasutra Collection from YBR (including Ashok Kumar’s Khajuraho and Vinod Pande’s Yeh Nazdeekiyan.) Unlike the “foreign” versions - with English dialogue, the YBR disc is in Hindi with most of the explicit scenes cut. What remains are bits of nudity and glimpses of the women’s breasts.According to the wikipedia, when the film was in production, it was called “Maya & Tara” (to avoid the censors). Since Indian government officials made many periodic visits to the set to ensure proper film etiquette, the cast had to improvise fake scenes which avoided the nudity and sexuality central to the story.

Upon completion, authorities screened the film and it was subsequently banned in India because of the erotic scenes that contained heterosexual as well as homosexual elements.A crucial scene - with strong lesbian undertones - that’s censored is when Maya (Indira Varma) teaches Tara (Sarita Choudhury) how to seduce Raj (Naveen Andrews), which includes the use of oral sex. While the explicit sex scenes are cut - for example, when Raj first beds Tara; what’s also cut are the full frontal nude/crotch shots - when Maya gives herself to Jai (Ramon Tikaram); or when Maya rises from the bath.While the film features nudity and sex, Kamasutra: A Tale Of Love is not a sex movie per se. Filmmaker Mira Nair, whose movies include Salaam Bombay, The Namesake and Amelia, is above that. Women may flaunt their bodies but there is a distinction between love, lust, passion and physical love. The Kamasutra (the book) may be a way to heighten passion and deepen love through physical sex and this also forms a blueprint for the way Nair’s movie unfolds.And yes, the characters, with the exception of Maya, are shortchanged.

Jai is portrayed as a brooding hunk whose “expertise” seems to be confined to his stone works and on the bed. King Raj has a bit more to work on - leaving affairs of the state to his minister, he indulges in sex, women and drugs. Though his rejection by Maya shows, it doesn’t come across as something earth shattering, more like a child being deprived of his favourite toy. And what’s left for Tara but to pout, glare and to shed some tears; and that sexually-charged scene with Maya.Where Maya is concerned, this is a female-empowerment movie.

Right from the beginning when she gives herself to Raj, she is conscious of what she’s doing. The reason may not be right - she may be doing things out of spite or anger - but she is aware. September 14, 2011 – 5:35 pmBeware the congenital pragmatist bearing gifts of unity and common sense.

Israel, for the first time in a long time, has some hard choices to make with a new protest movement demanding social justice. Alas, the elites are already talking about new threats that require costly new weapons. A modern fairytale by Uri Avnery.It sounds like the title of a romantic movie. “Daphne, Itzik and all the Others”. It starts off with a friendship between two youngsters, he in his early thirties, she in her mid twenties. Then they quarrel.

She remains.The audience knows exactly what it wants: it wants the two to reunite, kiss, marry and walk arm-in-arm into the sunrise, to the accompaniment of a soft melody.As for the actors, they are perfect. They both play themselves. Hollywood’s Central Casting couldn’t have done better.She is an attractive young woman, wearing a man’s hat for easy recognition. He is the Israeli young male, vaguely handsome, easily recognizable by his nose.The story starts with Daphne Leef, an editor of short films, daughter of a composer, unable to rent an apartment in Tel Aviv. She is fed up.

She announces on Facebook that she is going to live in a tent on Rothschild Boulevard and asks if anyone will join her.Some do. Then even more.

In no time, there are more than a hundred tents on the avenue, one of the oldest in town, a quiet residential neighborhood. Other tent cities spring up all around the country. A mass movement has come into being. On September 3, 350,000 people demonstrated in Tel Aviv, 450,000 throughout the country. That would be something like 18 million in the US, or three million in Germany.Some time after the whole thing started, the Israeli National Student Union, lead by its chairman, Itzik Shmuli, joined the protest. Daphne and Itzik were seen as the leaders, together with some others, notably Stav Shaffir, also easily recognizable with her flaming red hair.

(Stav means autumn.) That’s how the split started. Daphne Leef, Stav Shaffir and most of the others refused to cooperate with the commission. Itzik Shmuli embraced it and met with its members. Daphne was not satisfied with the limited reform likely to emanate from the commission, Itzik was ready to accept what was achievable.The media loved them. They embraced them with a fervor never seen before. In a way that was quite remarkable, since all the media are owned by the very same “tycoons” against whom the protesters are railing.

The explanation may be that the average working journalist belongs to the same social group as Daphne and the other protesters - young middle-class men and women who work hard and still do not make enough to “finish the month”.Also, the media need the “rating”: the public wanted to see and hear the protests. No one could afford to ignore it, not even a tycoon eager for profit.Four weeks ago, the first signs of a split started to appear. After first treating the protest with disdain, Binyamin Netanyahu saw the danger and did what he (and politicians like him) always do: he appointed a commission to propose “reforms”. He neither promised to implement its recommendations, nor did he allow the commission to break the bounds of the two-year state budget already enacted by the Knesset.For some, this was just a maneuver to gain time and let the protest movement lose its momentum.

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Others pointed to the fact that the commission is headed by an independent, 61-year-old professor in good standing, Manuel Trajtenberg (a German name written in the Spanish way) who could be expected to do his best within the limits dictated to him. Netanyahu himself, something between a pious Reaganite and a devout Thatcherite, promised to change his economic views altogether.That’s how the split started. Daphne, Stav and most of the others refused to cooperate with the commission. Itzik embraced it and met with its members.

Daphne was not satisfied with the limited reform likely to emanate from the commission, Itzik was ready to accept what was achievable.Actually, the controversy was not inevitable. Daphne and her colleagues could do what Zionists have always done with immense success: at every stage, take what you can get and move on to get more.But the split is much more than a disagreement over tactics. It reflects a basic difference of world view, strategy and style.Daphne is anti-establishment. She is not doing this for slight changes within the existing system. Though she was born into the heart of the establishment, Jerusalem’s sedate Rehavia neighborhood, she wants to overthrow it and to create something completely new.Itzik wants to work within the establishment. He talks about the “New Israeli”, but it is not at all clear what is new about him.Just before the huge demonstration, a terrible fact was disclosed: Daphne had not served in the army.

When it emerged that the reason was her suffering from epilepsy, something even more terrible was dug out: when she was 17 years old, she had signed a petition of high school pupils condemning the occupation and refusing to serve in the occupied territories, or even to serve altogether. (Obviously, these disclosures must have come from the files of the Shin Bet Security service, or from one of the neo-fascist “research” centers financed by far-right Jewish billionaires in the US.) Itzik, of course, had done his duty. Itzik wants to work within the establishment. He talks about the “New Israeli”, but it is not at all clear what is new about him.The fact that the masses joined the protest in spite of these disclosures shows that the old militaristic language has lost its luster. Daphne and her followers stand for a different discourse.Some believe that it is basically a gender clash: male versus female. Daphne’s style is soft, inclusive, affirmative, reaching out to all parts of society. Itzik’s style is much more exclusive.

Daphne and Stav never say “I”, always preferring “we”. Itzik uses “I” freely. He raised quite a few eyebrows when he said at the demonstration: “You are all partners in MY struggle”The protest movement is heavily influenced by women.

Women founded it, women are its main spokespersons. Does this change its texture?(I had an argument about this with a feminist friend. She insisted that there is no basic difference between the genders, that the existing difference is created by culture. Boys and girls are educated to follow different role models from age zero.

I believe that there is a basic biological difference, going back to the primates and before. Nature intended the female to bear and rear children, while the male had to fight and hunt for food. But in the end it comes to the same: the modern human being has the ability to shape him/herself, so we can design our culture according to our will.).Daphne seems to have no ego, no political ambitions. Almost everybody believes that Itzik, on the other hand, has his eyes set on a seat in the Knesset - using his new-found public stature in order to join the Labor (or any other) Party, if he cannot win the leadership of the protest movement and turn it into a party in his image.The latter seems unlikely. At the huge demonstration, his speech was well received. But it was undoubtedly Daphne who really touched the heart of the masses.

Itzik spoke to the head, Daphne to the heart.Something very strange - or perhaps not so strange - happened to the media on this occasion. All three major TV stations covered the event live and at length. Itzik’s speech was carried in its entirety by all three. But in the middle of Daphne’s speech, as if on orders from above, all three stations cut off her voice and started broadcasting “comments” by the same tired old gang of government spokesmen, “analysts” and “experts”.From then on, almost all the media overplayed Itzik and underplayed Daphne. The tycoons, it seems, have taken over again.From the start, the leaders of the protest insisted that the movement is not “political”, neither “left” nor “right”.

It is solely concerned with social justice, solidarity and welfare, not with affairs of state like peace, occupation and such.How long can this stance be maintained? Itzik spoke to the head, Daphne to the heart. Something very strange - or perhaps not so strange - happened to the media on this occasion. All three major TV stations covered the event live and at length. Itzik’s speech was carried in its entirety by all three. But in the middle of Daphne’s speech, as if on orders from above, all three stations cut off her voice and started broadcasting “comments” by the same tired old gang of government spokesmen, “analysts” and “experts”. From then on, almost all the media overplayed Itzik and underplayed Daphne.

The tycoons, it seems, have taken over again.Last week, General Eyal Eisenberg, commander of the home front (one of the four geographical commands of the army) made a speech in which he forecast a “general war, a total war” between Israel and an “Islamized” Arab world. In this war, weapons of mass destruction would be employed.Military and political leaders immediately downplayed this speech, saying that no such danger existed for the near future. But the implications were clear: the need to expend huge sums to equip all of Israel with “Iron Dome” anti-missile defenses, expend huge sums to buy submarines for our nuclear arm (only partly paid for by the Germans), and expend even more huge sums for buying the latest American stealth fighters. Billions and billions of dollars on top of the existing huge military budget.Israel is becoming more and more isolated.

Just before stepping down, the US Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, warned that Netanyahu is “endangering Israel”. The Palestinian application to the UN for recognition of the State of Palestine may lead to a severe crisis; the conflict with Turkey is becoming more dangerous by the day; in Egypt and other awakening Arab countries, anti-Israeli sentiments are reaching new heights.Can one really pretend that all this does not affect the chances of creating a welfare state? That the momentum of the protest movement can be maintained and increased under these darkening clouds?.The next stage will arrive with the recommendations of the Trajtenberg commission in a few weeks.Will they enable Itzik to celebrate and call the whole thing off? Will they confirm Daphne’s prediction by offering only crumbs from the table around which the politicians and tycoons are feasting? Will they extinguish this historic movement or give it new life?How will this movie go on? Ah, there we have to wait and see. We wouldn’t disclose the end, would we?

Assuming we knew it.Note: Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch’s book The Politics of Anti-Semitism. The above article was posted at CounterPunch.Posted in. September 6, 2011 – 4:39 amHow much can a meek man take when he has to cover up a murder and then watch the murderers gleefully debone the dead man? In Shion Sono’s Cold Fish, not a lot. Stephen Tan reviews.Teenager Mitsuko is caught shoplifting at a supermarket and her father, Nobuyuki, who opens an aquarium, and stepmother, Taeko, are called in.

Middle-aged Yukio, who had reported the theft, speaks up for Mitsuko. Upon learning that Nobuyuki runs an aquarium, Yukio - who also has his own aquarium - invites the three for a visit. After introducing the three to his attractive wife, Aiko, Yukio suggests that Mitsuko can work at his store.After Mitsuko has started work, Taeko drops by for a visit. Alone with Taeko in his office, Yukio suddenly turns on Taeko - he tears open her dress, grabs her breasts and starts kissing her.

Interestingly, Taeko does not put up a fight, not even when Yukio starts slapping her face and pushes her to the floor and rapes her. Instead, she says: “Hit me more. More thank you.” And when Yukio later drives her home, Yukio has his hand on Taeko’s thigh; kisses her and Taeko gives him a longing look.Taeko tells Nobuyuki that Yukio would like him to be his new business partner and urges him to meet up with Yukio. At the store, Mitsuko ignores her father and Nobuyuki is introduced to Tsutsui (Yukio’s “legal consultant”) and investor Yoshida. After Yoshida hands over his share of the money, he is poisoned.

Nobuyuki is forced to drive Yukio, Aiko and the dead body to an isolated shack at Mount Harakiri where Yukio and Aiko cheerfully dismember and remove the flesh from Yoshida’s body before burning the remains.Yoshida’s family wants to meet Yukio about Yoshida’s disappearance and Nobuyuki is coerced into covering up the murder. Nobuyuki is later picked up by Tsutsui with Aiko beside him. During the ride, Tsutsui fingers Aiko, and later Tsutsui roughs up Nobuyuki as a warning.

During the meeting with Yoshida’s brother, while eavesdropping outside the door, Aiko seduces one of the girls working at the store, which ends in some intense kissing.After the meeting, Nobuyuki is approached by a detective who is investigating Yukio and gave this warning: “There are over 30 missing people around this man. Don’t tell him we approached you If he found out that the police had spoken to you, you’d probably become another missing person.”Meanwhile, Aiko poisons Tsutsui while they are having sex. Yukio gets Nobuyuki to drive him over to the house. There, while Nobuyuki is cowering on the floor, Yukio and Aiko strangle Tsutsui’s driver who has also been poisoned.

The three then head up to the hills. After disposing of the bodies, Yukio forces Nobuyuki to have sex with Aiko and, in the process, Nobuyuki stabs Aiko in the neck with a pen. He then unleashes his pent-up frustrations and fury by repeatedly stabbing Yukio.Back at the shack, Nobuyuki gets Aiko to smash the head of the half-dead Yukio and leaves her to debone the man. Before he leaves, Aiko tells him, “I’m now your woman.” Nobuyuki returns home, knocks Mitsuko unconscious and rapes Taeko.

On the way back to the shack, Nobuyuki calls the police. When the deranged and bloody Aiko declares her love and starts giving Nobuyuki a blow job, he smashes her head with a statue before stabbing her.The police arrive with Taeko and Mitsuko.

With the police inside the shack, Nobuyuki slits his throat before Mitsuko who says, “Now you’re dead, you stupid old man!” She then gleefully starts kicking the dead man.In 2001, Shion Sono made Suicide Club, based on mass suicide or suicide pacts in Japan, that managed to both fascinate and repulse viewers at the same time. The surreal Strange Circus in 2005 plays like a story within a story as the film unfolds and its theme of incest, murder and abuse easily brings out the voyeur in us. 2007’s Exte: Hair Extensions was Shion Sono’s detour into mainstream horror, this time with Chiaki (Kill Bill’s Gogo Yubari) Kuriyama in tow.Unlike the convoluted Strange Circus, Cold Fish’s (2010) narrative may be linear but he has lost none of his chops. And for someone not noted for being a gore fiend, the ending is a real splatterfest. Here, Shion Sono takes an already dysfunctional family and further tears it apart.Daughter Mitsuko (Hikari Kajiwara) may look demure on the outside but alone with her stepmother, Taeko (Megumi Kagurazaka), she really lets loose, to the extent where she unfurls her anger by violently kicking her stepmother. The father, Nobuyuki (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), might be named after the film’s title - he only appears distant or unfeeling - but keeps everything bottled up inside him.

He is the everyman who is meek; gets bullied and beaten up and, no, contrary to what is taught - he does not inherit the earth.Nobuyuki is also a horny bugger, as Yukio (Denden) correctly figured out. He easily allows his daughter to move out so that he has more privacy for sex with Taeko. But Taeko can also be the cold fish of the title - she constantly turns down Nobuyuki’s sexual advances. But in a way, it is Taeko who is the odd one out.

She might have thought that marriage to the fish seller might be a way out for her - out to where she might not have known then but it certainly isn’t where she is at now. (She even has to sneak out of the shop to have a smoke.)As screen sirens go, with Taeko’s plunging neckline and dressed to kill - come on, she’s selling tropical fishes, not even working in a bar - one wonders if she’s still hoping that the right man would one day wander in.So, did she set the ball rolling when, during a meeting, Yukio turns on her, grabs her breasts and rapes her? And when Yukio later drives her home, the look between the two seemed pretty conspiratorial.

Or did things start when Mitsuko began shoplifting at the supermarket?But it is Yukio who is the predator and knows when there is fresh blood. He sees the daughter as a way to drive a wedge into the family; he knows that the father can be easily bullied and knows that the Taeko is his for the taking.What Yukio didn’t bargain for is that when a person is pushed too far, he can crack up and fight back. For Yukio - who kept everything inside and unspoken, helping to dispose a dead body (”making them invisible”) was still something he could just barely handle but it’s a crushing blow when his shortcomings and his manhood are hurled back at him. And he just fought back.And herein lies the film’s bleak humour. Reports icon images.

Nobuyuki thought that by killing off Yukio, his nympho wife Aiko (Asuka Kurosawa), and even Taeko, he would win back his daughter, or at least keep her safe. Little did he know that he had long lost his daughter and slashing his own throat will not change anything.

But then again, didn’t someone said the road to hell is always paved with good intentions?Note: The Cold Fish DVD (Third Window) is banned in $ingapore.Posted in. September 4, 2011 – 4:36 amThe Pirate Bay founders have launched a new file-sharing platform in August, 2011. After leaving the world famous torrent site, two of the original founders are now back with a one-click, file-hosting service called Bayfiles. Although Hollywood will not be cheering them on, unlike The Pirate Bay, the new service is dedicated to respecting copyrights while offering its users a great platform to store and share files. By Ernesto of TorrentFreak.In the fall of 2003, a group of friends from Sweden decided to launch a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’.

In the years that followed, the BitTorrent site made history as it grew to become one of the most recognized brands on the Internet.At a time where cyberlockers are quickly catching up with BitTorrent as the preferred way to share files online, on August 29, the founders of The Pirate Bay launched a brand new file-sharing venture called. One of the main reasons for this move is to provide users with a more reliable option for sharing and storing files.“BitTorrent is increasingly throttled or even filtered by ISPs, HTTP usually is not,” Bayfiles co-founder Fredrik Neij tells TorrentFreak.“Storage and transfers on Bayfiles also preserve users’ privacy. And another advantage is that users can be sure that content stays up, which is important for personal backups. It also guarantees that other personal files such as your MP3 collection are always accessible, so users are able to stream it live to any device,” Fredrik says. Bayfiles will be much more than just a simple cyberlocker.

There are ideas to expand it into a more feature rich cloud hosting service comparable to the likes of Dropbox. As with The Pirate Bay, the ultimate goal is to make sharing both effortless and efficient.Bayfiles works similarly to other one-click-hosting services such as Megaupload, RapidShare and Hotfile. With just a single click, users can upload files to the Bayfiles server, and then easily share them with the online public.

The site itself offers no search functionality or file directory to find content that other people have uploaded.A novelty, compared to The Pirate Bay, is that Bayfiles will respect the DMCA and accept copyright infringement notices. The terms of service clearly state that content that “violates third-party copyrights” is not permitted to be uploaded. It further states that repeat infringers will have their account disabled “regardless of proof of infringement.”How strictly the above policy will be enforced is yet to be seen, but co-founder Fredrik Neij told TorrentFreak that their Hong Kong based company Bayfiles Limited has officially registered DMCA agents. After all the trouble they had to go through in court for The Pirate Bay, Fredrik and former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde want to avoid running into more trouble with their new venture.Looking forward, Neij told TorrentFreak that Bayfiles will be much more than just a simple cyberlocker. There are ideas to expand it into a more feature rich cloud hosting service comparable to the likes of Dropbox. As with The Pirate Bay, the ultimate goal is to make sharing both effortless and efficient.As for the features, unregistered users can share files up to 250MB, regular members have a limit of 500MB and premium members can upload files as large as 5GB with unlimited storage. The premium accounts do come at a price, 5 euros per month or 45 euros for a full year.

Unlike other cyberlockers, Bayfiles does not offer a reward program where uploaders of popular content can be paid for their services.In the past The Pirate Bay founders have launched many side-projects, with varying success. None of these projects ever rivaled the popularity of The Pirate Bay, but if one site can outgrow the famous BitTorrent site in terms of users, it certainly is Bayfiles.The popularity of cyberlockers has increased exponentially in recent years. Just a few days ago we reported that eight of the 10 largest English language file-sharing sites are related to cyberlockers, each with hundreds of millions of pageviews a month. It is not unthinkable that Bayfiles will join this list in the future.In terms of copyright law, Bayfiles is a perfectly legal operation as long as the site doesn’t encourage or promote copyright infringement. Previously a US federal court ruled that RapidShare, a competing file-hosting service, is not liable for any copyright infringements its users may commit.That said, we doubt whether Hollywood will be happy with this new venture from a team of people who has been its arch rival for more than half a decade. Exciting times ahead.Note: Visit TorrentFreak.com for more updates.Posted in.

August 31, 2011 – 4:05 pmAre you listening to music or shutting out the world? David Yearsley writes about the iPod’s phony musical legacy.The man credited with convincing the global consumers that it is worth the effort and money and environmental degradation to condense their music libraries onto a matchbook-sized (or somewhat larger) gadget has announced his retirement. While Facebook has made it common practice to make privacy and the confessional mode semi- or fully-public, iPods have conversely exported the pleasure of listening privately to recorded music into the public sphere.The casual hello and exchange of pleasantries; an alertness to oncoming steps and the ability to wait politely for a person to pass by; an awareness of the sounds of the city or the country: for many, or quaint and tiresome, even though they can sometimes be useful for survival. A report in the Sydney Morning Herald from September of last year bracingly sums up one ubiquitous aspect of Jobs’ legacy:“Death by iPod is being blamed as a contributing factor to the 25 per cent rise in the number of pedestrian fatalities in New South Wales. The “iPod zombie trance” people get in when walking, driving or pedaling around listening to their mobile devices is being blamed for an increase in collisions and even deaths in Europe and the US.

The issue has been highlighted in Sydney by the death of a 46-year-old Glebe woman reportedly wearing headphones when she was knocked down and killed by an ambulance on Saturday night.”The story does not make clear if the ambulance’s siren was blaring, but here’s betting it was. The Apple God and the members of his cult might reply that iPods don’t kill people, people kill people.

Even so, who’ll be surprised if these devices aren’t labeled with warnings in the not-too-distant future.The solipsistic developments in civic life brought on by the iPods and iPhones and their lesser competitors is perhaps to be expected in an age of rapid decline in the sounds of natural world itself. Maybe it’s better to block it all out. Recorded music has become less a means of personal uplift and fun, and instead a mode of collective anesthesia.One notices the iPod mania most blatantly in public transit. In the lines at the airport, where the mix of boredom and nervousness are most stifling: one can hardly blame others for mainlining their audio-narcotics directly into the ears.As for the plane trip itself, during the few minutes at take-off and landing is when everyone including the ear junkies get most nervous, and it is precisely these most nerve-wracking phases of the journey that must be endured without the numbing effect. Getting home from the airport, it’s clear that most of the kids in the subway are also shooting up. Recorded music has become less a means of personal uplift and fun, and instead a mode of collective anesthesia.Many cranks - at least as far back as Plato or those impanelled in the Senate committee hearings of the 1950s that investigated the link between rock music and juvenile delinquency or Tipper Gore’s fright at explicit lyrics - have feared that excessive immersion in music leads to antisocial behavior.Having spent large swaths of my adolescence listening to LPs, I like to think I nonetheless escaped the darkest caves of audio hermit-dom. It is not the listening itself that I’m interested, but rather the question Jobs’ retirement raise: should he be applauded or condemned for getting so many to velcro their music to their person at all times and in all places.As for portability, it is a relative concept. Now the largest of instruments, the organ was once a portable tool (hence its name, organum, the Latin word for tool) used for gladiatorial training and combat, and for organizing troops and processions.

Libya boasts the richest story of mosaics featuring organists and gladiators.The modern-day successors to those sporting musicians, now working in places as diverse as Shea Stadium and Notre Dame de Paris, hold their breath to hear whether NATO bombs have destroyed these precious images of the noise-makers that later ascended to become the holiest of instruments. Equipped with poles these diminutive tools could be carried by two soldiers, pumped by a third, and played by a fourth. Long before the iPod made it possible to carry the organ’s music out into modern battle or into the rat race, the Romans had done it.As far as recorded sound, the greatest innovation in portability was, and to my mind still is, the gramophone. In the week before my wife’s birthday some years back, and a few years before the iPod blitzkrieg really got underway, I happened into an antique shop in the small city of Chichester on the South Coast of England. Upstairs I found a restorer of, and dealer in, gramophones.The chic green or red leather-covered models cost around five hundred British pounds.

But the classic black version of the HMV 101 I quickly bought as a birthday gift went for only one-hundred-and-fifty - still less than an iPod, and far cheaper than what its inflation-adjusted price-tag had been when it was made back in 1930. Batteries not included because they’re weren’t needed, and still aren’t.Along with the gramophone, the dealer allowed me to pick out a selection of 78s from the hundreds, or perhaps thousands, that circled the raised display of players. My first choice, right at the front of one of those rows, was a Dial record from 1947 with Erroll Garner on piano, Red Callender on bass, Doc West, and Cool Blues on the A side. I added to that some Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, and the campy Frank Crumit doing his “A Gay Caballero” from 1928. That the gramophone’s devotees must leave home with a half dozen discs and a dozen songs instead of several thousand, makes the choosing and the hearing all the more meaningful and memorable.The dealer also kitted me out with several hundred needles, with their three thicknesses capable of delivering three levels of loudness - soft, medium, and loud.

He said that a new needle should be used with every side played, though I’m sure many over the years, especially during the Depression, economized on that front.Clearly the dealer was more of an enthusiast than a businessman. (On a trip to Chichester a few years later to get more records, his shop had vanished.) He even threw in a record tray that sits on the turntable and in which one can transport five or six 78s when heading out on trip on the bicycle, or in the automobile, for a picnic or a walk or whatever.

He’d spotted this tray at a flea market where its owner had no idea what it was, having turned the rare thing upside down to serve as a stand for tiny animal figurines.My family and I were just beginning a North Sea tour and the gramophone was the perfect hand luggage; almost bulky, but not quite, truly portable and never in need of being recharged.At Gatwick Airport the slightly-bigger-than-a-breadbox object caused much consternation at the security gate, as the guards remained unconvinced by my explanation that what they were seeing on their screen was the innards of a gramophone from 1930. August 30, 2011 – 3:37 amThe fantastic and the familiar; where what’s normal becomes extraordinary - forget about trying to pin things down in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Just let the magic envelope you, says Critic After Dark Noel Vera.Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Bunmi Raluek Chat, 2010), is ostensibly about an old man undergoing renal failure, and his final days - but don’t let that synopsis fool you.It’s steeped deep in the beauty of Northern Thailand’s countryside and jungle - but no, this is not your usual ‘beauty-of-nature’ flick.

It’s filled with spirits and strange creatures and even stranger occurrences - but don’t let those elements waylay you either. The film is not quite as fabulist as it sounds, and not easy to engage with (for one, it moves at a pace a snail would find leisurely) but it can be ultimately fulfilling, if you manage to cotton on to what the director is trying to do.As mentioned, we have this dying uncle (Thanapat Saisaymar); he’s visited by his sister-in-law, Jen (Jenjira Pongpas), and Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee, who’s often in Weerasethakul’s films). While at the dinner table they’re visited by Boonmee’s dead wife, Huay (Nattakarn Aphaiwonk), and his long-lost son, Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong), who isn’t dead but transformed into a ‘monkey ghost’ when he chased and mated with a similar creature.Huay’s entrance is simple enough - she solidifies out of the thin air - while Boonsong’s isn’t: a pair of glowing red eyes (an allusion to the ape-men in Kubrick’s 2001?) rises from the staircase, cloaked in deep shadow. Weerasethakul had a practical reason for keeping the creature half-lit (it helped hide the fake costume), but the quiescent ambient sound, the total lack of background music, the sheer profundity of the surrounding dark gives Boonsong’s entrance an impressive if sombre power.But that’s not what the film’s all about, it’s not what gives Weerasethakul’s work its unique flavor.

Once Boonsong steps away from the shadows and Huay greets her husband and his relatives, talk devolves to gossip and health news. All sorts of spirits and fantastic creatures (as Boonsong notes) may be drawn to Boonmee’s approaching death, but the living and human welcome them as they might any dinner guest, and insist on bringing them up to date with affairs as they would a long-absent friend or relative.Later, there’s this interlude involving a princess and a catfish in a pond admiring her, and what captures your attention isn’t the catfish (a lump in the water at first) but the princess’ ease in adjusting to the idea of a talking fish and eventual, sensual response. The fantastic and the familiar encountering each other, accepting each other, achieving intercourse with each other in every sense of the word.At the same time Weerasethakul presents the quotidian as something extraordinary.

Boonmee, a landowner, goes out to his tamarind plantation. In one of the finest sequences in the film he has Jen taste the honey from his apiary, straight from the comb; he notes that the syrup has the flavor of tamarind and maize - a sort of sweet-and-sour combo. Jen, delighted, exclaims that it’s like chewing gum.Boonmee rests at a small hut he’s built for the purpose, drains the tubing of his errant liver, takes a nap, and there’s this lovely moment where Jen gazes at his sleeping back while he lies on the hut floor, surrounded by the orchard’s bright green beauty.Critics note how nonjudgmental Weerasethakul is; that said, I doubt if everything and everyone in the film is as benign as they appear, or that the film is as light-hearted as it makes itself out to be. Boonsong turned his back on his father and fellow humans to become a monkey ghost (did he think of what his disappearance might do to his parents?); Jen’s nephew Tong serves as a Buddhist monk, and on his last day sneaks out to Jen’s and his sister’s hotel room where he insists on taking a warm shower (“What if someone sees you?” he’s asked; “Then let me in,” he replies - the scene has this faint air of incestuous hanky-panky about it).Most ambiguous of all is Boonmee. When he visits his plantation he jokes with his workers - illegal immigrants from Laos - in awkward French, the language of their former colonizers; the workers laugh appreciatively, as they would with any boss who has the power to have them deported. “I’ve killed too many communists,” Boonmee later frets, thinking the karmic burden this represents won’t allow him to reincarnate as a higher being.“You killed communists for the nation, right?” Jen asks, presumably in an attempt to ease guilty feelings; no reply.

Possibly Boonmee was a member of the local counter-insurgency forces, which were known to have inflicted violence, even killings, against communist sympathizers in regions like the Isan countryside - but Weerasethakul doesn’t over-elaborate; he suggests that Boonmee has a troubled conscience, and moves on.Perhaps the film’s most extraordinary passage is a dream Boonmee describes, depicted by Weerasethakul as a series of stills a la Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962). He talks of going into the future in a time machine (yep - Marker); of an unnamed ruling authority that can make people disappear; of a light shining on him that can make him disappear; of having to run.It’s an unsettling moment, and I can’t say I have absolutely deciphered it, but the dream suggests a vision of retribution - perhaps revenge. The scenes that follow in the cave suggest, for all their melancholy sparkle and beauty, that Boonmee accepts this judgment as his fate (he sits, his head bent down, with all the wordless pathos of a wounded-down toy, seepage trailing from his side). A beautiful film, one of the finest of last year - of the last several years - and a fitting winner of the Cannes’ Golden Palm.Note: You can also email Noel Vera atClick for more movie reviews.Posted in. August 28, 2011 – 7:38 amWhy are all your new pop songs overdramatic melodramas?

Where’s the folky people tradition, asks Billy Bragg.How ironic that The Clash should be on the cover of the NME in the week that London was burning, that their faces should be staring out from the shelves as newsagents were ransacked and robbed by looters intent on anarchy in the UK.