According to Miranda Devine, one of Australia’s loony right newspaper commentators, watching AVATAR felt like being “hit with a leftie sledgehammer”. It appears that in America too, the loony right has been severely irked by the immense popularity of James Cameron’s epic hi-tech science fiction film. Devine tips her hat to the talent involved in the visual art of the technological advances in the film; but she can’t stand its ideology. This is the same syndrome exhibited by the US loony right. Devine gives a list of the film’s alleged leftie clichés where she includes “Humans bad”, “Capitalism bad”, “America bad” and “noble savages good”. One example from the US is American loony right commentator John Podhoretz, of the Weekly Standard’s film critic, complaining that the “conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism.”
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Judging from the news coming in from the US box office, this film will make a lot of money for its investors. Such is the irrationality of contemporary society. As a commodity to be marketed, of course, it has everything you need. The main thing though is the promise that you will see the biggest ever disaster special effects. While previous movie volcanoes and earthquakes destroy California, or sink it, or see the US east coast flooded by a tsunami all the way to the White House or a movie meteor has wiped out Paris or London, in this film you get to see, so the marketing promises, the whole world wiped out. 2012 is the year that the Mayans predicted the Sun would destroy the world – or at least it is that year, I presume, when you convert the Mayan calendar to the one we use today.
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15 October, 2007
It was a less than ordinary building on an ordinary road, an unattractive street despite the trees that lined it. Yes, it was an unattractive avenue adorned with buildings constructed on the cheap and for function only. Cables and wires of all kinds were strung from pole to pole, and building to building, a tangled mess, making even looking up at the sky unattractive. Around the trees was asphalt and concrete and that stretched out across six lanes, along which racket making and black smoke spewing vehicles traveled. There were not even jeepneys on this road, which at least would have added splashes of colour and trashy pictures to the narrow panorama of asphalt and cement and cables and grey, square buildings. The building was an embassy in Manila so it was fronted with a high iron fence of slats. It had a narrow and guarded gate as an entrance. A few trees jutted above the fence. It seemed a low building, square and flat and unattractive like the street. The hotel across the street and along a few buildings was also very plain, although the large glass panes that ran along the front marked it off from the cement and brick of the other buildings. Inside it was also plain, although with carpeted swirling stairs up to the first floor. The first floor was mainly function rooms, carpeted with just a few cream coloured upholstered sofa chairs in the corners. There were no functions on so the area was quiet. And here also the wall facing out onto to the street was made of glass. Read more…
It is Friday night, 7.30pm, on Orchard Road in Singapore. The crowds are out. The wide pathways as well as the underground labyrinths linking the malls from Ngee Ann City to the new boringly glitzy, pseudo glamorous Ion are busy with people. Office workers are window shopping and looking for something to eat – the food courts are crazily busy. Young women in fashionably sexy clothes right out of the glamorous window displays of the franchised fashion shops make their way around on the arm of their escort. Others, more tired as well as more casually dressed, buy some fried snacks at one of the stalls. Some just sit and rest on the concrete benches on the foot path.
Xmas at Orchard 2008
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Last night, here in Singapore, I went to the cinema to watch Michael Moore’s latest film: Capitalism: a love story. I had read that morning a very negative review of the film in the Straits Times newspaper, the island’s man daily newspaper, owned by a government linked corporation. Apart from the reviewer’s frustrations with Moore’s flamboyant theatrical style – his trademark, in fact – the review was ultimately a political rejection of Moore’s approach. For Moore, said the reviewer, viewed “capitalism as an evil, and an evil cannot be regulated”. But, went the rejoinder, there are many evils in the world that have been successfully regulated: “abortion, gambling, prostitution”. So much for the hegemonic Singapore viewpoint.
Capitalism: a love story is a strong but complicated and sometimes confusing film. Like all of Moore’s films his basic appeal is to sentiment, to the emotions of those Americans who have been exploited or oppressed or those who are angry that such injustice exists. The film moves through a series of examples of such injustice: grossly underpaid men and women piloting jet passenger planes, families being evicted from houses that they have lived in for decades, men and women thrown out of work, employees sacked as their factory closes down but without being paid the wages and redundancy payments they are owed, poor people stranded by the Katrina catastrophe and so on. These cases are movingly presented and do indeed reinforce the sentiments of both compassion and anger that any humane person feels.
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26 October, 2007
I have heard them referred to as “Hindu eyes” presumably a reference to some distant Indian originating Aryan genes. His eyelids were bigger than most peoples, kind of half shutting down over the eyeball. But they didn’t droop at all, it was just how they were. Steady half shut but big and focused eyes looking at you, or staring at you. There may well have been Indian blood somewhere in his ancestry. After all he was Balinese and Bali was the last Hindu enclave in Indonesia. And way back seven or eight or nine hundred years ago the rulers of the day, all through Sumatra as well as Java and Bali had invited Indian Brahmin to their courts to teach religion and writing and reading. But I haven’t been to India, so I can’t vouch that those strange eyes are indeed Indian.
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Probably more than 500 people registered to attend the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (URWF), held in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia in October. I think there were at least 100 writers also making presentations, participating on panels, and launching books. Included among the 100 writers were around 20 Indonesian writers, representing a steady increase in the number of Indonesian writers participating.
This UWRF was the first I had attended so I cannot make comparisons on the past, except for what people told me. Certainly, the increase in Indonesian participation, was development. Another was the evolving of fringe activities, including the holding of some forums and discussions with young Indonesian writers held at Udayana University, the state university based in the capital of Bali, Denpasar.
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