My Log 270: Tribute to Merchant-Ivory film productions, whose work is at an end following Merchant’s death

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The late Ismail Merchant

I have always loved the film productions of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, most of whose best work over forty years was written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Last night I went to one of their last productions, The White Countess, which was written not by Ms Jhabvala, but by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese-born, British-raised writer who became famous with his novel The Remains of the Day, that was translated into one of the most wonderful of the Merchant-Ivory productions, for which Ms. Jhabvala wrote the screenplay in 1985.

Part of the success of this trio surely must have come from the fact that they were such a mixed bag, Merchant being an Indian Moslem, Ivory an American Protestant, and Jhabvala a German Jew. Yet from 1965 when they burst on to the scene with Shakespeare Wallah, until the present day this team has produced one intelligent, thoughtful, inspiring film after another. Personally I can remember Heat and Dust, (1983), featuring one of the most delectable performances by the glorious Julie Christie, A Room With a View, (1985) an adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel, Howard’s End (1992) another Forster adaptation by Ms. Jhabvala, and the wonderful Remains of the Day (1993) that the team adapted from Ishiguro’s superb novel.

Merchant died in 2005, which has brought an end to this string of successes, and it seems that at the age of 84 Ms Jhabvala has laid down her pen, which gives me permission to say that The White Countess was the least successful Merchant-Ivory production I can remember, although it was crowded with distinguished and excellent actors.

Unfortunately Ishiguro’s screenplay moved too slowly to really grab one: and for that matter, for a story set in 1930s Shanghai, the tale was too convoluted and interiorized within its major characters. The Merchant-Ivory productions, although always about interesting personalities, also usually managed to lay out the socio-political background in which the major characters found themselves. In this respect, this movie was somewhat deficient, I felt, although it certainly tried hard to suggest the confusing politics of those years as the Japanese were preparing to invade China.

The main character was played by Ralph Fiennes, and was called Todd Jackson, a former American diplomat who had lost his wife and child, and himself become blinded, in an explosion. No longer active in politics, he wanted to open a high-class night club in which he could rub shoulders with the leaders of society. He made the acquaintance of a Russian émigré countess who was earning a living as a taxi dancer for herself, her daughter, and a family of hangers-on, all of them White Russian nobility, and, impressed, he asked her to join him in his enterprise, which he named The White Countess, after her. (In the cast were a parcel of Redgraves, Vanessa, Lynn, and Natasha Richardson, filling the roles of the White Russians.)

This was all clear enough, but one kept wondering when the real action was to start, and what form it would take. Great prominence was given to a mysterious Japanese who befriended Jackson, but against whom he had been warned, because he was said to be a man who turned up just before the Japanese walked into wherever he was. In other words, a dangerous man, as indeed he eventually turned out to be.

With the arrival of the brutal Japanese, the expatriate citizens of the French, British and European sections of Shanghai decided to decamp, and rushed for the boats that could take them to safety. The countess’s family had insisted on keeping from her young daughter knowledge of the disreputable work she did to keep them all alive, and decided they should leave her behind when they left. The denouement, as the blind diplomat, obviously now in love with the countess, struggled to find her in the crowd, and finally did so, was full of action and tension.

The acting of Fiennes and Natasha Richardson (who died from a head injury while on holiday in the north of Quebec) both gave beautiful performances in the featured roles, but these were hardly enough to rescue the somewhat somnolent pace of the movie, or the confusions of Ishiguro’s script.

This is probably the last we can hope to see of the great Merchant-Ivory productions, and I cannot let them go without expressing my appreciation for their wonderful work over the years and my regret that we will see no more of them. They have been an ornament to the craft of film-making, and no mistake.

The night before I saw an even more confusing Italian psychological thriller called The Double Door, which was about a couple who were attacked by robbers as they were guarding a palace full of precious works of art, which the robbers got away with. The man was supposed to have been killed, leaving the woman to undergo a series of remarkable events, all of which turned out to have been figments of her imagination while she was in a three-day coma. Rescued from her coma, she got together with the man who had been thought to be dead, but was very much alive. And the climax to the film came when the woman was discovered to have been involved in the robbery, after which she went off to South America with her lover, one of the robbers. A bit of a struggle to keep all these confusing strands straight in one’s mind. I am not so good at that as I used to be, I guess I have to admit. One of the penalties of age.

My Log 269: French and British: two versions of working class reality in two enjoyable films

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On successive nights I have seen two interesting movies dealing with working class subjects, but movies very different in their approach. Both were set in the early 1960s, but one was French one English, and perhaps that was one of the major differences between them.

The French film was called The Women on the Sixth Floor, and it was a sort of domestic comedy contrasting the mores of a French bourgeois couple with those of the floor-full of upstairs maids who served them, without being seen by them in any real sense for many years.

The English film was Made in Dagenham, a hard-nosed political film about how a group of machinists working for Ford in Dagenham, east of London, decided to go on strike for equal pay for equal work. Both were full of humour, but the humour was quite different in each film, although both had what might be called a soft-core centre allowing good to triumph in the end. But I have to admit I preferred the English film, mainly for ideological reasons.

The French film, directed by Phillippe Le Guay, opens in one of those ancient Parisian apartment buildings that are normally presided over by a concierge past whom even an army would find it hard to penetrate, usually an aging battleaxe with her nose in everybody’s business. This was true in this apartment house, which appeared to be owned by a character expertly played by Fabrice Luchini, married to an idle rich woman who filled her days with trivia of one kind and another. Into Mr. Luchini’s life came a pretty young woman from Spain, come to join her aunt, who is one of the maids living upstairs. Mr. Luchini welcomes her, tells her her predecessor has left, that she earned 250 francs a week (or was that a month?) and he immediately finds a piece of steel behind her affable, smiling exterior.

“Four hundred,” she says firmly.

He pretends he didn’t understand what she was saying, and insisted the pay would be 250. “Four hundred,” she said again, still smiling affably. He promised to talk to his wife about it, and the next day, somewhat entranced by the pretty new maid, comes back with a solution. “You will be paid 400, but as far as the mistress is concerned, you will be getting 250 --- not a word about this arrangement to her,” says the brave bourgeois, and so the arrangement is made.

The predecessor had worked for the family all her life, but when the family’s mother died she could not adjust. Quarrelling with the master, she is given her cards. Monsieur explains her severe loss to the pretty new maid, telling her the old girl was like family. “Where is she now?” asks the new girl. Monsieur did not know. “And yet she was like family?” asks the impertinent one, setting a tone for the mores on show in this film.

The new maid is a model of modernity, she boils his morning egg exactly as he demands it (three and a half minutes, he explains, anything either softer or harder spoils his entire day), she keeps the dishes washed, the clothes ironed, everything turns upward in the household arrangements, and he finds himself attracted to the young woman in a way that seems rather strange to him.

Somehow or other she persuades him to go upstairs to meet the other Spanish women who have been living up there, unregarded, for years, and he finds their toilet is horribly blocked, and orders in a plumber to clear it out. Thus the film gets underway, and the comedy is broad among the working class women from Spain, who seem to have inherited a much more modern attitude to life than the hidebound French bourgeoisie, in spite of having been dragged up under the tyrannical Franco regime. At least these women stick together: one of them has only to send out a call from her window for help and the rest appear as if by magic to wash, dry, vacuum and the like. Eventually the master quarrels with his uptight wife, who doesn’t believe his story that he was invited to dine with the maids upstairs, and she kicks him out, expecting him to return any moment. He moves upstairs into a cubby hole, living with the maids, and suddenly finds himself happier than he could have ever imagined being, as he is alone for the first time in his life, and making his own decisions without any interference from mother, father, wife or anyone else.

Part of the solidarity of the maids comes from their adherence to the rituals of he church, which appear as a joyful inheritance, that rather turned me off, to tell the truth. But eventually monsieur’s beautiful young maid confesses she has an eight-year-old son born out of wedlock, and surrendered for adoption. When one of he maids her aunt says she knows where the boy is, the young woman decides she must return to Spain to be near him. And after surrendering briefly to the romantic advances of monsieur, she disappears, and he is left with no option but to return to his loveless marriage.

Three years pass: and I will aleve it to readers to guess what happens: it is all resolved with delicacy, and most happily.

Well, that’s the French version of a working class dilemma: the British version is rooted in the poverty of he Cockney workers at the Ford plant, women workers who are egged on to demand equal pay for equal work by their shop steward, in a beautiful performance by Bob Hoskins. He confronts the comfortable senior pooh-bahs of the union movement, who call in the striking women and tell them how they should go back to work, and leave it to them to negotiate an increase in wages. No, says the young woman who is discovering leadership qualities as she becomes the spokespeson for the women workers. No, we don’t accept these compromises. We are striking for equal pay for equal work. But that will ruin the Ford company, cry the bosses, echoed by the union pooh-bahs.

As the strike drags on, the plant runs out of the materials provided by these women, and the factory closes. Then the pressure comes on their husbands: will they support their wives? In a pig’s eye they will. They tell their wives to stop all this nonsense and get the factory working again so they can get some money into the house.

The film is excellent as it shows the intense pressures created by strike action. It also ha wicked portraits of the higher-ups who are forced to make decisions about this kind of industrial action: the company executives, under pressure from Detroit; the Labour government ministers, compromising all along the way since they got elected (“I wasn’t running the country then,” as Harold Wilson remarks when challenged by his active socialist minister Barbara Castle with a memory of his policies when in opposition). Anyway, this too has a happy ending. This strike apparently actually happened in 1968, and the victory of the women workers led to the passing of Equal Pay legislation that was quickly followed in other countries, and has helped to transform the situation of working women.

I liked this film very much: one seldom sees serious movies dealing with politics, and when one crops up, one is obliged to give it its due, recognizing that almost all of the media, including films, are biased overwhelmingly in favour of establishment attitudes and practices.

My Log 268: A trip to Mostar: monument to our modern capacity to carry out outrages as bad as any in the past

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I visited Mostar yesterday, and if I ever needed reinforcement in my view that war is berserk (I don’t need it, actually) I found it there.

Mostar is that beautiful little town, 150 kilometres from
Dubrovnik, in the heart of Bosnia, where, in an act of monstrous cruelty and cultural blindness that we all watched on television, the Croats destroyed a famous bridge that had spanned the river Neretva since 1566, and was regarded as one of the marvels of Ottoman architecture.

As The Guardian remarked in an article published in 2004 when the bridge was officially restored: “The Old Bridge stood for 427 years until a failed Croatian theatre director-turned militia leader, Slobodan Praljak, trained his artillery on the structure in November 1993, when his forces were driving Mostar's Muslim population into an east bank enclave.”

Along with others who collaborated with him in the destruction of Mostar, Mr. Praljak has been in custody in The Hague for some years, undergoing trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. This is the tribunal that issued indictments against 161 people for crimes against humanity and the like during this ridiculous war, and the last of these 161 people was arrested last week, 16 years after hostilities ceased. Some 64 of these people have been sentenced, 13 acquitted and 14 trials are still underway. (To plunge into the Web site of this tribunal is to take a voyage into the murky world of ethnic hatred, and to expose oneself to a recital of the follies and absurdities of which human beings are capable.)

The bombing of Dubrovnik is one crime that the tribunal has concerned itself with, and the destruction of Mostar is another. Mostar was said to be the most ethnically integrated population in the whole of Yugoslavia, but the war put a stop to that. At first the Croats fought with the Moslems against an attack by the Serbs, whose leaders had declared that they wanted to unite all Serbs in Yugoslavia under one government. But in the middle of this, the Croats turned on their allies, and began a vicious attack against the Moslems, driving them across the river into the east section of the town, and then bombing their houses mercilessly.

Today, Catholic Croats and Moslems still both inhabit the town, but they live separately, on opposite sides of the river. The Catholics have built a new church, complete with a huge tower that looms over the entire town, and along with the rebuilding of the bridge, the market areas around the bridge have been largely rebuilt too. But the Moslem side of town lags in redevelopment behind the Christian side, which, naturally, has been favored by Western world supporters. I believe the Serb population from before the war was driven out of town, and has not returned.

During the war the city was first attacked by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), essentially a Serbian outfit, which established control over the town. Within three months, forces of the newly-established republic of Croatia managed to force the Yugoslav Army out of the town. The JNA then shelled the town, destroying a Franciscan monastery, the Catholic cathedral and the bishop's palace (with a library of 50,000 books), a number of secular institutions as well as fourteen mosques.

In 1991 Croats living in the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina had proclaimed the existence of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, as a separate "political, cultural, economic and territorial whole," on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A result of this was that Mostar was divided into a Western part, which was dominated by the Croat forces and an Eastern part where the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was largely concentrated.

When the Yugoslav Army moved out fanatic Croat Catholics destroyed Orthodox monastries and cathedrals, and bombed the ancient bridge, for which their leaders are still on trial in The Hague.

We went on a bus tour to Mostar. It took more than five hours to travel the 150 kilometres from Dubrovnik, not because the roads are bad --- indeed, they are beautifully surfaced --- but mainly because the modern Yugoslavia-as-was is now divided into six independent nations which maintain border posts whose utility is beyond the understanding of a simple guy like myself. We passed these border posts six times on the way there and back: it was never clear whose nation controlled the post, and the personnel running the posts appeared to be dressed identically. By peering closely at the small notices posted up one could gather that this post might be Bosnian, this one Croat, but there is nothing like what one has become accustomed to at most border posts, a clearly demarked area between an exit post of one country and the entry post of the next. In fact, I noticed at one post that on the way to Mostar our bus pulled into a long line of buses which were facing in one direction, with a small low hut in front of us through a window of which the drivers had to produce some documentation or other, which had a tiny notice that it was Bosnian, but on the way back the buses pulled up in the same line, except it was facing in the opposite direction, and an identical window in an identical hut seemed to belong to the other nation: the two posts were together, in other words. If this is the only benefit they have received from their war, it can hardly have been said to be worth it.

Nevertheless, the journey was very much worth taking. On the way to Mostar we stoppd at a village that I can only describe as amazingly beautiful. This was Pocitelj, a tiny place on a hill beside the Neretva river (the same one that runs through Mostar) whose population before the Homeland war in 1991 was 900. But this village was founded in the fifteenth century, and came under Ottoman rule for four centuries, during which a walled town was built, testimony to its strategic importance as a defensive position. When the Ottoman rule was replaced by Austro-Hungarian rule the town lost its strategic importance, which fortuitously enabled it to maintain its unique architectural mix. But in the 1990s, once again, Croatian forces bombed and shelled it destroying Pocitelj's sixteenth-century master works of Islamic art and architecture and displacing most of the town’s Moslem population.

Since the war, outside experts in ancient monuments have expressed their concern over the fate of this exceptionally beautiful town and in 1996, thanks to work of the Universities of York and Sarajevo, it was named as one of the world’s 100 most culturally endangered heritage sites. A restoration program arising from that designation has brought about the rebuilding of damaged and destroyed buildings, the encouragement of the return of the refugees and displaced persons to their homes, and the long-term protection and revitalization of Pocitelj's historic urban area.

We enjoyed a luncheon in the Mostar market area, an old-time local dish known as “under the bell” --- meaning lamb cooked under a bell that is submerged in glowing embers, utterly delicious --- served by an old-time waiter in a modest café sitting above the river. Not far away the merchants were just wrapping up their morning at the market, and shops selling tourist trinkets, and for all I know, precious, locally-made artifacts, were crowded with tourists. I suppose it could be said that Mostar has returned to some kind of normalcy --- but the populations appear to be living still at dagger’s drawn, on either side of the river. Mostar is, if anything, a monument to the fact that our modern civilization, with all our knowledge, artistic sensitivity, and ethnic tolerance, is still capable of outrages that rival those of past centuries.

My Log 267: Immersed in a world of mass tourism, where mobs of people follow guides mindlessly around ancient monuments

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The island of Hvar

I remarked to someone the other day that after spending a few weeks in what used to be called Yugoslavia, there is one thing I can definitely say about it: in any group of what we used to call Yugoslavs, there will always be at least one, and probably many more, young women wearing the shortest possible shorts, below which are visible a pair of slim, beautiful legs, tanned to the nth degree. Where were such girls when I was a boy, I have asked myself.

The person to whom I made this remark protested that this was a somewhat superficial observation, but I am not so sure. It seems to indicate quite a lot about the changes that have overcome what was until recent decades a workers’ state, in which enterprises were owned by the workers, and the economy was run with the interests of the ordinary bloke uppermost in mind.
After a brutal internecine war that seemed to be designed to entrench capitalism in what once was a welfare state, what exists now, so far as I have seen (which admittedly isn’t a hell of a lot), seems to be a captive state completely given into the hands of tourism, both of the luxury, and of the mass varieties.

Of course, my judgment has been clouded, perhaps, by the fact that I have spent most of these weeks visiting a friend in Dubrovnik, which is today a very strange place of human habitation. It is an ancient town set at the tailend of a small state, Croatia, that, after having defended its independence staunchly through the ages, has finally surrendered to the god of tourism.

The town seems to have no function except to be looked at by gawking tourists, who emerge daily from one of those immense cruise ships that ply the Adriatic, calling from time to time at one or other of the ports they pass along the way. These people, who appear to come from all over the world, are ferried into the town by tenders, where they are attached to a local guide who stands there holding up a sign to identify her, and thereafter, they are obliged to follow this person around as she gabbles off her spiel, allocating to the maximum, half an hour for each medieval attraction. This is a holiday?

I have it on good authority (a trades union official in Dubrovnik), that Croatia, in this new dispensation, owns nothing. Foreign money has taken over, and the Croatians have been reduced, by and large, to being the waiters, cooks, and tourist guides to the new millenium. I have seen this before, in the West Indies, where an island like Antigua, once a prolific producer of sugar, closed all its sugar mills at a stroke, thereafter reducing the possibilities for its population to be waiters, taxi drivers, beach boys, or hookers.

So, as an economic engine in the modern state, Dubrovnik can be more or less discounted.

Okay, you might argue, Dubrovnik is an exception. It was bombed severely by the Serbs during what they call the Homeland war. This brings me perilously close to discussing the insanity of that war, a temptation I intend to resist.

I went this week to Hvar, a small town on a bleak, elongated Adriatic island. I had gathered the impression from what I had been told of Hvar that it was a rural kind of place: forget it, Hvar is a tourist trap, just like Dubrovnik, but with a few more signs of real life. Its beautiful harbour is crowded with boats, ostentatious boats of the super-rich, ugly boats of the nouveau-riche, bustling, companionable boats of the ferry service that takes people to and from the many islands that surround the city.

But Hvar, let there be no mistake, is a tourist city. It does have a splendid small market selling fresh fruit and vegetables, but otherwise it is, as someone once complained to me about Durbovnik, a town full of shops selling T-shirts made in China.

We had to catch a hydroplane at 6.30 am, and when we arrived at the dock at 6 am, we were confronted by boatloads of noisy young Europeans, some of them horribly drunk, others delirious with love, emerging after spending the entire night on one or other of the islands, where night clubs purvey their trade. A young Norwegian, intoxicated by all the heat and sun, told me one night club on one island has an Oslo Week, for which 300 young Norwegians have come south to participate. The very peak of modern-day tourism.

Where we were going on the hydroplane was to Split, and here I found something slightly different. Although this city of roughly half a million people is a centre for tourism, it does bear the marks of a real, functioning place. The immense harbour is crowded with huge ships, many of them designed for carrying cars back and forth around the islands, and others, more modest, for just simply taking people around.

The town itself is a wonder. The city centre exists inside what is known as Diocletian’s Palace, a place built by an Illyrian from these parts who became emperor of Rome around the third century AD, and decided to surrender his power voluntarily, apparently the only Roman emperor ever to do that. He came back home, built this huge palace, and today it is the centre of this amazing city, a veritable World Heritage Site within which ordinary people live and carry on their business from day to day, a place around whose every corner lurks a visual delight --- perhaps a broken down Roman wall, perhaps a building built in by later generations and very much still occupied, perhaps --- a delightful touch this --- a gallery of doorways built above the city square all of them giving on to a balcony, in which is situated a bar, run by a beautiful young woman who, unfortunately, appeared to be a chain smoker. (Never mind, although she left her butt smoking into our nostrils, after a few minutes she returned to stub it out completely.)

Split has a wonderful market that sells everything under the sun. I sat on a chair at a bar in this market, and was delighted by the arguments, yelling, laughing and crying of its inhabitants, who, so far as one could judge, were simply carrying out their functions of everyday life. They looked as though they spent every day in this same place.

Unfortunately Split had a major festival underway, so we weren’t able to get a room close enough in to make it worthwhile. So at about 3 pm we climbed aboard a bus, and embarked on the five hour drive south to Dubrovnik, along a landscape of the most forbidding character. Most of the houses along this highway appeared to be more or less new: one had the impression that many of them must have been holiday homes of the city bourgeoisie. The only touch of realism came from a place where, under Tito, they had filled in a swamp over an immense area, and turned it to productive fields. The houses there were mostly rather dreary apartment buildings built in the days when the government was serious about providing work and accommodation for its people.

I have never been a supporter of tourism, not even as an economic engine. I remember once being moved by the realization that all the people who, like me, were climbing around the Acropolis in Rome were diverse peoples from all over the world, and that in this activity they were paying some obeisance to the past, to the history and achievements of earlier civilizations.

Today, even that reassurance seems to have disappeared from these trailing mobs of tourists, following along after their guide, hoping for their half hour inside the cathedral or the medieval palace. What are they getting out of it, these people, could somebody tell me?

My Log 266: Beware of what you read: the guys with the facts don’t really want you to know them

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Ronald Reagan, faker-in-chief

I remember when Ronald Reagan was President of the United States reading a story that said he had decided to cook the books --- in other words, in future new rules would be applied to how the U.S. calculated its unemployment figures. In future, the story said, the official unemploymentrate in the United States would be only about half of the real rate, because of some legerdemain with the way they calculated the figures.

I am reminded of this every time I read an article today about how much unemployment there is in the U.S. Officially, they have only 9.1 per cent of the work force unemployed. But, as so many dissentient economists keep saying, if the U.S. calculated unemployment the way every other nation does, they would be admitting that just on 20 per cent of their workforce are without work.

Ever since the Reagan change the mainstream media has gone along with the changes, reporting straight-facedly figures that they all know are barefaced lies.

An article someone has sent me today from Aljazeera, by Ted Rall the political cartoonist and author, indicates that not only the unemployment figures are cooked but so are most other indicators of economic well-being.

One of Rall’s points is that the bottom line --- that mythical point at which American corporations declare their profit or loss --- isn’t an entirely believeable account of the health even of a particular corporation, let alone of the economy overall. “For example,” he writes, “the Internet search giant Yahoo! saw revenues decline 12 percent in late 2010 yet doubled its profits. How'd they do it? They fired one percent of their workforce. If Yahoo! were to continue this trend, it would soon cease to exist.”

Rall calls in a quote from the Wall Street Journal in support. "While the US economy staggers through one of its slowest recoveries since the Great Recession," the paper wrote July 5th, "American companies are poised to report strong earnings for the second quarter --- exposing a dichotomy between corporate performance and the overall health of the economy."

Most modern economies depend up to two-thirds on consumer spending. But, writes Rall, Consumer confidence, the measure of people's willingness to part with cash to buy goods and services, is in the tank. When 60 percent of Americans rate the economy as poor, don't count on them to buy stuff. They're not.”

Obama’s response had been to transfer trillions of dollars to investment banks, insurance companies, airlines and automobile manufacturers. This was in accordance with pure Reagon voodoo economics (as George Bush senior once called it when contesting the presidency nomination with Reagan) the theory that wealth that is given to the rich will eventually “trickle-down” to the workers and middle class. This theory, a favorite of conservatives everywhere, has been exploded a gazillion times when actually put into operation.

Rall writes that just to keep pace with the growth of the population, it is necessary for the economy to add 1.2 million jobs a year, so when Obama boasted in January that the recovery was underway because 1.3 million jobs had been created in the previous year, he was as they say, whistling in Dixie. Since the so-called economic recovery began, in fact, some two to three million more jobs have been lost, to be piled on to the 8,000,000 jobs that had been lost when the economy collapsed originally. So when the Department of Labour boasts that 18,000 jobs were created in June of this year, they are actually disguising the fact that 82,000 jobs had been lost.

Another shattering fact revealed in this article (which quotes from a website called Shadow Government Statistics) is that if the United States calculated inflation as all other nations do, the real inflation of recent months would be admitted to be 11.2 per cent, which would account for the fact that the real gap between the wealthy and the workers is galloping along at a fine old rate.

At the core of the question when is a recovery not a recovery, writes
Rall, lies the question of vocabulary. Since the 1970s, he writes, American economics have defined a recession as being when the Gross Domestic Product falls in two succeeding fiscal quarters. By this definition, very often a recession is over before it is actually declared to have existed.

“This contributes to a strange reality gap: We are not in a recession until we are in a recovery. Effectively, then, it is rare for the American news media to state at any given time that the US economy is then in a recession. Naturally, this contributes to the perception that newspapers and TV stations lie, and that they do so on behalf of an uncaring regime.”

The message from all this should be: beware of what you read. The guys with the facts don’t want you, the average citizen, to know them.

My Log 265: I become a culture vulture and am exposed to the secret world of European opera and song

Image by Stuart Pinfold via Flickr
Fireworks celebrate the launch of the Dubrovnik summer festival

In the two weeks I have spent in Croatia I have become a culture vulture, for my host has dragged me to no fewer than six musical/entertainment events, only one of which I would have even considered had I been in Ottawa.

Last night’s event was particularly memorable, for it was held in the open courtyard of one of Dubrovnik’s most regal buildings during a heavy rainfall, the first they have had here in months, and both orchestra and audience were obliged to huddle under the verandahs surrounding the courtyard while the fiddlers fiddled on, and the seven singers gathered together from all over Europe, ran through a programme of favorite opera songs.

The orchestra was that of the Opera and Ballet of the Albanian National Theatre, and the singers were obliged to make themselves heard over the incessant rattle of the rain pouring down from the overhead spouting on to the stones of the courtyard. Two sopranos from Poland and one from Russia had to suffer the indignity of their long gowns getting wet around the hems, but they maintained their sangfroid admirably, and as far as I can tell their form was maintained to the satisfaction of the knowledgeable audience. They were aided in their programme of stuff from Puccini, Bizet, Rossini, Tchaikovsky and Donizetti, by four tenors and baritones from Mexico, Columbia, Austria and Croatia, the whole thing conducted by an Albanian conductor and a local one who presides over this summer festival.

All of these performers were just names to me, unknown names, since there is probably no one less knowledgeable about classical music than me. They did provide most informative and complete programme notes, however, which led one into a whole world of European academies where these performers had studied (from the age of four some of them, poor little sods), because all of them had played in opera and concert halls in every small town and several major cities in Europe, it seemed. The whole ensemble presented to my innocent eyes and ears was of a huge underground of classical music that has been sawing away, regardless of whether the government was communist, nationalist, conservative or fascist: all of them seem to have eagerly supported these particular arts.

That got me going on one of my premiere hobby horses: that in all of these subsidized entities, the poor pay through their taxes, but the events are designed to be enjoyed only by the rich, for the poor could not possibly afford the ticket prices.

This is why I have always objected to paying for entrance to the museums and concert halls in Ottawa, when, after all, my taxes have already gone to establish these palaces of culture, and they should thereafter be available to me at no, or very minimal cost. This is not how it works: opera and ballet are the arts of a small elite. The only opera company I ever saw --- I have not seen many, I am sure readers will not be surprised to learn --- that I wholeheartedly approved was one in China whose job it was to take Peking opera around the communes of the particular county in which they operated. All performances were full, the halls packed with peasants in their sweatshirts, after a long day in the fields. The audiences paid close attention, reading the modern translations of the medieval Chinese language used in the operas, that was projected down the side of the stage. Oddly enough, these audiences never applauded, even when it was over, but just got up and left, although they seemed throughout the performance to enjoy it thoroughly.

Okay, that was last night, and part of the Dubrovnik summer festival, which has so far, in a mere two weeks, exposed me to the conducting talents of four separate conductors, None of them is household names (and even if they were, I probably would never have heard of them) so I will abstain from commenting, except to say that one of them, a Russian, seemed to be behind the beat most of the time, one of them, an Indonesian, who gave an energetic, rousing performance and pulled a remarkable variety of faces in the process, and the two last night were elderly men who were models of decorum and modesty in face of the orchestra hey commanded.

Most of the other performances were at an event called Le Petit Festival du Theatre, which took place also in an open air arena, the weather here usually being settled and warm enough to support these outside experiences.

There were two notable events at this festival. The first was a recital by a Yemini singer from Jerusalem who greeted each of us at the door as we filed into the arena, her purpose apparently being to establish some kind of rapport between herself and her audience. She had some obscure purposes, which were never adequately explained, but seemed to have to do with her wish that we should all shake off our outer snake skin and get down to the real us. To accomplish this she asked us to do all manner of things, such as touching the top of our head with our hands, shimmering and shaking so as to loosen that proverbial snake skin, thinking of a word, and, when asked, declaiming the word so everyone could hear. (I was sorely tempted to tell her my word: crap! But didn’t want to put a kibosh on the show).

I told myself, however, that when the moment came that she asked us to hold hands, I would be outa there. And that is exactly what happened when the request came. I headed for the door. I have a constitutional inability to lay myself open to any pseudo-religious revivalist who happens along, preferring to keep myself cautiously at a distance from all proselytizers, especially those who do not fully reveal their purposes.

However, the next night was a concert I thoroughly enjoyed, because, of course, it was the only one that came anywhere near my limited experience of music. A young woman from Paris named Laetitia de Fombelle performed a number of songs in English and/or French which enabled her to reflect upon life, love, its betrayal and fulfillment. This is the well-trodden territory of the French chanteuse, and when after the show I congratulated her on her performance and remarked that I was surprised that she sang a Jacque Brel song inEnglish, she said she was unable to sing it in French because it had become far too personal to her. Notable, to me, in this perfromance was the contrast between her effortless credibility and comfort when singing in French, and the somewhat strained, rather tense atmosphere when she sang in English. Her choice of songs was not hackneyed, and she got a rousing reception from a packed house. This sort of culture, feeding into my lifelong love of the French and American popular song, I could take every night of the week, if it was available.

So there it is: my cultural level is being heightened and improved to such an extent that I think I am about to embark on a protest, and refuse to be dragooned into anything else that I could classify as culture vulturism.

My Log 264: Report on delegation to UN in defence of Abdelrazik's right to be removed from no-fly list

Recently a seven-person delegation went from Montreal to New York to plead the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik, the Canadian citizen who has been persecuted for no reason, because of his Arab descent, and who was returned from a six-year enforced exile in Sudan, during which he was tortured, but eventually cleared of all wrong-doing, only because a Canadian court ordered the Harper government to allow the man back to Canada, as provided for the in Charter of Rights.

Since his return, Abdelrazik has continued to be persecuted because his name was placed on the UN Security Council 1267 No-Fly list, and he has been struggling to get his name off the list ever since.

A group of sympathetic Canadians has steadfastly represented his case to the higher authorities, and their latest move was to send a seven-man delegation to New York to plead with the relevant committee to remove his name from the list.

The report of their mission has been issued, and I reproduce it below:

On June 16th, 2011, a seven-person delegation, acting in solidarity with Abousfian Abdelrazik, met with a representative of the German Mission to the United Nations (Germany currently chairs the 1267-Committee) and representatives of the 1267 Monitoring Team. The delegation travelled to New York to support Abdelrazik's five-year struggle to have his name removed from the Security Council's "1267" blacklist.

During the almost two-hour meeting, the delegates, most of whom knew Abdelrazik personally, stressed the urgency of removing him from the list and pointed out the obvious inconsistencies of the blacklisting regime with the founding principles of the United Nations as articulated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; including the right to freedom and to a fair trial, the prohibition on torture (false information obtained under torture seems to have been used against Abdelrazik) as well as rights to security of the person, to earn a living, and to free association.

The delegates argued that the blacklist should be abolished, not simply reformed. They were able to convey the fact that people are increasingly aware of the issue and that mounting numbers of organizations and individuals are calling for the regime to be scrapped.

The diplomatic reserve of the UN officials was briefly punctured when they were suddenly brought face-to-face with Abdelrazik via a personal video message, in which he invited those present, "and the rest of the committee to walk in my shoes. I invite you to come to live with me for one day ... I am sure this is going to touch you, because you are human beings. Please, I have suffered enough. I want to end this suffering." As the spokesperson for the 1267-Committee remarked, it was good to be reminded that there are real human beings involved.

* Full message from Abdelrazik to the 1267-Committee:

http://montreal.mediacoop.ca/video/abousfian-abdelraziks-statement-un-1267-committee/7513

Asked for a response that delegates could bring back to Abdelrazik, the 1267-Committee spokesperson asked Abdelrazik to trust in the delisting process. As Karl Flecker, National Director of the Anti-Racism and Human Rights Department of the Canadian Labour Congress and one of the delegates, explained to media after the meeting, "What that means for Abousfian is that he has to, once again, trust the people who have had control over his life for the last five years. And to wait longer for justice. We cannot acquiesce to the hope for modest reforms to something that has fundamental injustice."

* Video of Karl Flecker and Sameer Zuberi, Canadian Muslim Forum, speaking at press briefing outside UN after the meeting:

montreal.mediacoop.ca/video/project-flyhome-delegates-discuss-meeting-un-german-mission-concerning-abousfian-abdelraziks-s

After the press briefing, the delegates were joined outside the gates of the UN by supporters from New York and a fabulous marching band, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra:

* Audio of RMO (yes! they are singing, "hey hey, ho ho! 1267 has got to go!"):

www.mediacoop.ca/audio/rude-mechanical-orchestra-playing-abdelrazik-nyc/7516

It was clear from the meeting that the 1267-Committee is feeling international pressure and hoped to relieve some of that pressure by introducing a few modest reforms. Indeed, the meeting with the Project Fly Home delegation took place on the eve of a Security Council meeting where reforms to the blacklisting regime, as well as the political imperative of removing the Taliban from the list (in order to advance a negotiated deal in Afghanistan), were due to be discussed. However, in the end, the reforms adopted on June 17th by the Security Council to the delisting process, in resolution 1989, failed to make any significant progress towards justice. In essence, instead of 15 states having an unconditional veto over a delisting request, now only five do (the five permanent members of the security council).

* Press release from FIDH on the reforms

www.peoplescommission.org/files/abousfianMedia/fidh_june_2011.pdf

The delisting caravan was a focal point for support for Abdelrazik and for mounting opposition to the UN 1267-blacklist and to blacklisting schemes in general. The delegation was composed of spokespeople from seven diverse organizations: Emilie Breton, Project Fly Home; Dolores Chew, South Asian Women's Community Centre (SAWCC); Karl Flecker, Canadian Labour Congress; Pierre Jasmin, Artists for Peace; Nicole Leach, Regina Solidarity Group; James Loney, Christian Peacemaker Teams; and Sameer Zuberi, Canadian Muslim Forum. Each were backed by an extensive network from very different sectors of society.

* Delegate biographies:

www.peoplescommission.org/en/abdelrazik/past.php#caravan_delegate

The delegates delivered a letter to the 1267-Committee, calling for Abdelrazik to be delisted and for an end to the 1267-Regime, co-signed by almost 100 organizations across Canada, collectively involving millions of people: student groups, human rights organizations, faith-based organizations, labour unions, community groups, NGOs and more. These organizations were joined by American allies, including the AFL-CIO - the main American labour umbrella, with 12.2 million members - and the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), in calling for Abdelrazik to be delisted and the 1267-List to be scrapped.

* Read letter to Chair of 1267-Committee and see list of endorsers:

www.peoplescommission.org/files/abousfianMedia/letter_to_1267_en.pdf

The blacklist spokesperson also received a stack of letters from individuals across Canada, most of whom had donated to Abdelrazik in open defiance of the sanctions imposed on him. The letters offer a snapshot of the diversity and strength of support for justice for Abdelrazik across the country.

* Read quotes from some of the letters (well worth a read!):

www.peoplescommission.org/files/abousfianMedia/wittig_excerpts.pdf

The delegation was preceded by events in Vancouver, Calgary, Regina, Ottawa, Kitchener and Halifax, including two sanctions-busting events, as well as a press conference in Montreal and a caravan to the border to see the delegation off. The initiative was covered by the media quite sympathetically in Canada and internationally and two editorials called for Abdelrazik to be delisted.

* Select media coverage of the delegation:

www.peoplescommission.org/en/abdelrazik/articles.php

My Log 263: Follow-up to Tar Sands horror: huge shipments of machinery being fought by Oregon citizens

A reader of this blog has sent me a follow-up to my piece on the Tom Radford film about the Athabasca tar sands and its horrors.

The piece is from a magazine called Eugene Weekly, published in Eugene, Oregon, and it gives details, suitably horrendous details, of the proposal to transport monstrous machines through that pristine part of the world to Alberta to take part in the rape of the earth there; and of the fight being waged against this proposal.

The link to this article is

http://www.eugeneweekly.com/2010/09/02/coverstory.html

and I urge anyone who has any interest in these tar sands to read the piece. The proposal is to send shipments the largest of which is 210 feet long, 30 feet high, 24 feet wide and weighing 500,000 pounds, along the ordinary roads of the West, which, in the opinion of the protesters, pose all sorts of dangers en route, not even counting the harm these machines will do when once installed.

My thanks to Dana Magliari for providing this link.

My Log 262: Film on tar sands screening on Al Jazeera, gives Canada huge black eye

Image via Wikipedia

Collage of tar sands

Canada has been receiving a well-deserved, mighty black eye around the world in the last week or so as Al Jazeera, the Arab online station now equipped with a full range of sophistication and excellent reporters, has been broadcasting a superb and persuasive film made by Niobe Nicholson and Tom Radford about the Athabasca tar sands.

The programme makes no bones about it: not only is the oil extraction from the tar sands in northern Alberta the biggest construction programme in the world, but it is also “the dirtiest oil project ever known.”

Furthermore, the programme produces a lineup of ridiculous Canadian politicians, from Stephen Harper down to the environment minister of the province of Alberta, who disgrace themselves and their nation by pretending there is absolutely nothing wrong with this project that is almost single-handedly responsible for nullifying all global efforts to reduce the emission of the carbon gases that are so gravely damaging our planet.

Radford recalls on the Al Jazeera website that he made a similar film, Death of a Delta, in 1972 using a hand-cranked Bolex camera, whose subject was the right of the small community of Fort Chipewyan to “to have a voice in the construction of a massive hydroelectric project on the Peace River, the W.A.C. Bennett Dam. At stake was not only the survival of the oldest community in Alberta, but the protection of a World Heritage site, the Peace Athabasca Delta, a convergence of migratory flyways and the greatest concentration of waterfowl on the continent. In the David and Goliath struggle that ensued, David won. Water was released from the dam and water levels in the Delta returned to normal. The unique ecology of the region was saved. The town survived.”

Today, that same David, the one thousand native residents of Fort Chipewyan are fighting an even more imposing Goliath, this monstrous development of the tar sands whose “expansion will have an estimated $1.7 trillion impact on the Canadian economy over the coming decades. An area of boreal forest the size of Greece will be affected by industrial activity. Once again the issue is water, but this time it is not just the flow of the river, but the chemicals the current may be carrying downstream from the strip mines and bitumen upgraders. In recent years, according to the Alberta Cancer Board, Fort Chipewyan has experienced an unusually high rate of cancer. Local fishermen are finding growing numbers of deformed fish in their nets.”

Radford’s online notes record that “gripped in a Faustian pact with the American energy consumer, the Canadian government is doing everything it can to protect the dirtiest oil project ever known.”

He produces a string of very calm and factual scientists who have discovered the facts about what is happening, placed those facts before the public, and are challenging the two governments to reveal their own data which has apparently persuaded them that there is nothing unusual occurring, nothing dangerous, in spite of the spike that has been recorded in cancer in the area, and who do not admit that if they were to introduce remedial measures, the cost of them would be so high that the whole operation would cease to make money.

Heaven forbid! Faced with the inexorable logic and honesty of a man like Dr. David Schindler, also a hero of the earlier struggle, the government produced an investigatory board which unequivocally concluded that improvements are needed in the governments’ methods of collecting facts about what is in the Athabasca river and delta. The local natives, led by chief Alan Adam, know that their rights --- constitutionally guaranteed, by the way --- to hunt and trap, and catch fish, have already been nullified because of the pollution of a huge area of the boreal forest in which they have always lived, along with the animals on which they have depended for their living since time immemorial. At a meeting of the chiefs of communities who inhabit the area of the tar sands, and the Athabasca delta --- a World Heritage site --- Chief Adam said bluntly, “If I am standing alone against this, I am going to have to make a deal with these mining interests,” something which, in the context of this whole development, seems unthinkable.

Already thanks to the tar sands, Canada has become the biggest supplier of oil to the United States, and the most chilling statement in the film comes from Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State in the Obama administration, that they have to depend on dirty oil from the Arabian gulf, or on dirty oil frm the Athabasca tar sands. In other words, money is primary; the incessant demands of the modern economy for ceaseless exponential growth, a mantra that is shared by every government on earth, so far as one can tell, must be fed, one way or the other. This is a suicide position.

Never mind the boreal forest; never mind the animal populations that are already under immense pressure; never mind the rights of local native tribes. Give us that oil, Jack, we need it…

Tom Radford is to be congratulated for this movie. Al Jazeera is to be congratulated for screening it every day for nine days on the trot.

And our Canadian politicians have surely been given a warning that they cannot afford to stand at the head of the lineup of people who don’t give a damn about the health of the earth. Something’s gotta give, and Albertans and the rest of it, if we have any say in it, are going to have to face up to what we are doing to the earth.

My Log 251: The world of the traveller today: mass tourism, or luxury tourism, and its deleterious impact on the human environment.

Image via Wikipedia

Dubrovnik, Croatia: the mass tourists arriveI have done quite a bit of travelling in the last two or three years, and have begun to develop a stronger than ever distaste for the impact of mass tourism on the human environment.

First, on a visit to my home country of New Zealand, I found evidence that the luxury tourism business into which New Zealand has now slotted itself, has reduced what was once an agreeable, modest little country of mostly small towns, into a major rip-off place. This was later confirmed by a British Rugby writer, Peter Bills, of the Independent, who had exactly the same feeling about it, after many trips. And it has been reconfirmed by the reports of the extravagant prices being charges by many operators for the coming Rugby World Cup, the most recent of these, unless my memory betrays me, suggesting that one operator is charging $15,000 a night, or something equally ludicrous.

At the moment I am on my second visit to Dubrovnik, in Croatia, a small, walled city, extremely beautiful, but one that after being more or less restored to its full glory following Yugoslavia’s disastrous wars of the 1990s, has now been completely taken over by the tourist industry, not so much just luxury tourism, as mass tourism.

Not a day goes by without the arrival of some cruise liner, which shuffles its passengers ashore in tenders, disgorges them in one or other of two harbours, and then sends them marching off around the town under the guidance of guides who hold up signs with numbers and languages to indicate where each tourist can find his proper place. These guides, who do presumably know a lot about the city and its history, pause on the streets from time to time as they go through their spiel. They are under strict orders to perform certain functions, to show their packs of people certain notable landmarks, and at each landmark they have an allotted time, beyond which they cannot dare venture for fear that the following group might overtake them. In one palace, currently used for symphony concerts in the evenings, but traditionally one of the central buildings in the choosing of the Parliament, they have had to build a second door so that the occupying group, if one may call it such, can escape by the back as the following group is marching through the front door.

Why anyone would regard being herded about a town in this way as having anything to do with a holiday is beyond me. Personally I am here staying with a friend, who I am helping as she tries to build an autobiographical account of her rather remarkable life. Yesterday we went as a small group of five to have a meal along a river that runs into the second harbour, called Gruz, on the other side of town. Just getting on the bus among these crowds of tourists, with their baby-carriages and their backpacks, and their intensity, an experience to which one apparently commits oneself voluntarily in the full flowering of one’s mind, gave me as much of a whiff of this kind of tourism as I will ever need. Verily, it was a sort of nightmare, until the mob disembarked from the bus en route, leaving us to find in solitude a very pleasing riverside restaurant free of the pack.

My friend, who has lived here for 40 years, complains that in the old days the city was full of little shops offering services of all kinds –— barbers, tailors, grocers, wine merchants, drapers, and so on. Now, she says, these have all gone, or nearly all gone, and been replaced by shops selling T-shirts made in China.

One is constantly being solicited by beautiful young woman with brochures advertising this or that thing: one I picked up yesterday advertises the locations of three stores within two streets of a firm called T-shirt World, which promises to transfer anything anyonewould want on to a T-shirt, “within one minute.” This has apparently become the quintessential event of mass tourism, allowing the participant to offer a hackneyed T-shirt to nieces and nephews on return home. “We are offering a catalogue with over 500 applications --- funny, new, always actual, with Dubrovnik motifs or desired text and picture,” says the brochure, which, although quite small, is printed in six languages.

I love that expression “always actual”, whatever it means. Of course, only 20 years ago they were pummeling each other to smithereens, these people, in favor of each of their nationalisms, so that “always actual” might contain some sort of hidden message. I hope not.