Michelangelo Antonioni: L'eclisse / Eclipse (Part II)

Two interconnected scenes from Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse / Eclipse (1962) go like this: after seemingly breaking up with a paramour, Vittoria (Monica Vitti) returns to her well-above-ground-floor Roma apartment, looks around, finds a hammer and puts up a small objet d'art. Her apartment neighbor friend Anita (played by Rosanna Rory) is sent by her husband to see what the racket is (and out of curiosity, no doubt). They chat a little, then Marta (played by Mirella Ricciardi), from her higher-up-across-a-courtyard apartment, calls and invites them over for company. Turns out when they get there that Marta's husband owns a plantation in Kenya, and judging from the interior of her pad, they have become wealthy from African colonization. There are many photographs and artifacts from Kenya and other parts of Africa spread around Marta's apartment, and mentions are made of Somalia and South Africa. 

This is Vittoria's first time inside. Marta waxes enthusiastically about Europeans in Kenya, and also proceeds in a derogatory manner about black Kenyans. Vittoria and Anita ask questions, and then we cut to Vittoria dancing in blackface with a pointed spear, jumping up and down on Marta's large bed. Marta becomes irritated. The tension is intruded upon by the sound of dogs yapping outside below. Marta's black poodle Zeus has run off with other dogs. The three women head down and out in pursuit.

Okay, so -- what is Antonioni trying to do here? Shock? Question colonialism, including Italy's historical role in Libya, Ethiopia, and so on? That's my initial guess.  

However, what is the intent and impact of blackface performance ever?  Does it depend on when and where and by whom? This is always controversial, at least it has always been in relatively recent history. Yet even now, blackface continues -- 50+ years after this weird scene in L'eclisse.

Consider the "African Queen" blackface photographs of Ondria Hardin, a "white" teenager from Lumberton, North Carolina, featured in Numéro in its March 2013 issue, images taken by Sebastian Kim. What the hell?

I just saw a live performance of the first half of Langston Hughes' Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961) and damned if, in one of the "moods," it didn't spotlight blackfacing amid counterpoints on whitefacing. Langston Hughes and Michelangelo Antonioni, and now Numéro -- progress, regress or digress? 

Okay, so -- what next?

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).   

The First and Last Casualties

Coverage of wars and poverty, of competing ideas and political conflict is all over the map.  Attention Deficit Disorder and entropy on one hand, pre-existing ideological prejudices and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder on the other.  Avoidance on the one hand, oversaturation on the other.

Some of the most memorable wartime investigative journalism can be epitomized by the work of Seymour Hersch, who has, during his career, written a number of penetrating stories for United Press International (UPI), the Associated Press (AP), The New York Times, The New Yorker, and more. Prime examples: exposing the My Lai Massacre (1968). Investigating the context of what led to the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (1983). Digging into the false pretenses and cynical manipulation of public perceptions by the Bush-Cheney Administation that led to the Iraq War (2003-2011). Delving into the ghoulish facts of the Abu Ghraib POW scandal. And so forth. This is not to say that Hersch is always completely accurate in his reporting, but rather that he's done more good investigative work relating to war and abuse of power than most. Under the banner of the First Amendment, we need more people doing this kind of work.

Today's Rune: Flow.

Downfall: Collapse of the Qaddafi Regime, 1969-2011

The 2011 Libyan War is coming to a sudden crescendo in Tripoli. The government of Muammar al-Gaddafi / Qaddafi is disintegrating as rebels roll through the Libyan capital.   Things are happening so quickly this year that the Syrian government may collapse next. Turkey, with a military show of force, could precipitate the change. Turkey, along with a significant number of other countries, may also pressure Israel to accept the formation of a Palestinian state. A wild year, to be sure. Four months to go.

The map above is already obsolete: the majority of the people of South Sudan declared their independence from Sudan on July 9, 2011, an act which has been internationally recognized.

Today's Rune: Strength.

Blood and Oil: The Middle East in World War I

Blood and Oil: The Middle East in World War I: A Film by Marty Callaghan (The Minutes of History Series, 2006) gives a rare and helpful overview of the catastrophic human disaster called variously the Great War, the First World War and World War I -- from the perspective of the "Middle East" and "Near East." With so much ground to cover, it focuses on the Turkish Ottoman Empire and its regrouping as modern Turkey; the British Empire; the Russian Empire; the Arab revolt; the geo-strategic fight over resources (Suez Canal, Dardanelles, Persian Gulf, fresh water sources, petroleum); and to a lesser extent, the French Empire, the German Empire, Persia-Iran, the Kurds, Greeks, Italians, Armenians, Jews and Indian troops.

Even a cursory watch will help viewers trace the connection of 1914-1918 and continued warring into the 1920s as set-up for today's turmoil in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Israel, Gaza, Libya, Egypt and so on, including Kurdish guerilla activity. Blood and Oil does a fine job showing why Turkey remains an important regional power, though it never directly deals with the Armenian Genocide, and it might have been expanded to include North African fighting in places like Libya. 

Today's Rune: Possessions.  

22 Thermidor CCXIX

What makes a red letter or banner year? Years like 1968 pop to mind, and years wars start or end -- 1945 of course, continuing all the way back like that to beyond the mists of early calendar time. Today, 22 Thermidor / Fervidor, Revolutionary Year 219, known in the parlance of our day as August 9, 2011 and to some as Nagasaki Remembrance Day -- lest the world forget that day an atomic bomb was dropped on a (second) Japanese city filled mostly with civilians during a cataclysmic conflict in 1945 -- today we pull back and consider 2011 as another red letter year perhaps more along the lines of the 1968 upheavals. But who knows? There are several months left to go.

What have we learned this year?  What has happened?   The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has got to take the radioactive cake; surely the Arab Spring / Arabic Rebellions roil the status quo; and, of course let's not forget climate change (mostly bad news) . . .  But what else "big" has happened or will happen this year?  In the words of one Detroiter: What else you got?

Today's Rune: Journey.

The Medium and Understanding: War Films

In Homer's The Iliad, the reader comes to understand why the different parties fight and what they are aiming to achieve. It's not a pretty picture, but it's understandable and it makes a powerful, enduring and universal story. The following three movies do the same, and they go "the whole hog."  Turner Movie Classics is airing the first one: Gillo Pontecorvo's La battaglia di Algeri / The Battle of Algiers / La bataille d'Alger (1966/1967). We see what motivates opposing forces, we see tactics, strategy, policy, and (brutal) consequences.

Should we remain in Algeria? If you answer "yes," then you must accept all the necessary consequences.

The enduring importance of this history-based fictional film should be obvious. This is the real deal. I haven't been able to see and process all the recent documentaries about Iraq and Afghanistan, but somehow I doubt more than a fraction of them are able to show all sides with such clarity.

The other two, along the same lines: Pontecorvo's Queimada / Burn! (1969), set in the Caribbean, and Moustapha Akkad's Lion of the Desert (1981), set in Libya.

Opening lines of The Iliad:

Rage -- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,

murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

(Robert Fagles' translation from the Greek).

Today's Rune: Defense.

It Came Out of the Sky

Cutting edge, the latest in war technology: aerial assault on Libya. Today in 2011, the operation against Libyan land positions includes the Italian aircraft carrier Giuseppe Garibaldi. In 1911, Italian zeppelins, also known as dirigibles, blimps and airships, began the assault from above with the support of fixed wing biplanes. One hundred years of bombs and missiles coming out of the sky.

(Incidentally, the contemporary Giuseppe Garibaldi could only be so designated in the late 1980s due to an outlawing of such Italian weaponry after the downfall of Mussolini's fascist regime in the 1940s. That is, the Italians are good to go again now, free to send jets and choppers from flight decks into war zones just as they sent zeppelins and biplanes into action one hundred years ago).

In 1911, zeppelins and biplanes. Today, mobile robots in Japan, pilotless Predator drones firing Hellfire missiles in Pakistan, Tomahawk cruise missiles raining down on Libyan positions. Exactly the same as in 1911, yet even more Satanic in ingenuity.

(William Blake, "And did those feet in ancient time" 1804-1808:

And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!).   

In taking the longer view, it becomes very apparent that in North Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, for much of the last century and even beyond that, war and revolution has hovered over the decaying remnants of the Ottoman Empire -- dogs of war fighting over various tasty scraps of territory, waterways, petroleum reserves and other resources. The Italo-Turkish War of 1911-1912 was only one of scores of such violent convulsions. Today's news highlights only the "present" side of a continuum that is -- in the parlance of our day -- "moving forward." The vanishing point or "endgame" of the current upheavals may exist only in our imaginations, ungrounded in the historical record.   

Today's Rune: Defense.

Sport of the Gods

Another war, same planet. And a lot of upheaval around the clock. More to come. No doubt. Ares, one of the many gods of war, must be delighted with the carnage.

Pictured abve: Dareen Abughaida reporting on the latest from Libya and around the globe via Al Jazeera English Live Stream.



A snippet from Black Sabbath, "War Pigs," as relevant now as in 1970.

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor.

Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun . . .

Today's Rune: Disruption.

Libya Revisited

And so begins Operation Odyssey Dawn eight years after the launch of the Iraq War, one week after the sudden onset of the Japanese earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster. I am weary already. How about you?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.

Omar Mukhtar: Lion of the Desert

If you like history, war movies, action movies, and maybe something a little different, you might want to check out Moustapha Akkad's Omar Mukhtar: Lion of the Desert (1980/1981). First, overall it's excellent. Second, it's set in Libya during Italy's fascist period, with Mussolini aiming to expand his "New Roman Empire" in Africa, focusing on the struggle between Libyan guerillas vs. Italian occupation and shot with meticulous detail. Third, none other than Colonel Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi / Qaddafi invested heavily in the film. Fourth, director Moustapha Akkad, who also produced the Halloween series of films, was, along with his daughter, assassinated by an al-Qaeda bomb in Jordan in 2005. Fifth, Lion of the Desert was not shown on Italian TV until 2009 -- nearly thirty years after its theatrical release. 

I have only minor issues with Lion of the Desert: early on there's a little bit of hokiness, some melodramtic music and a crazy affinity for zoom shots, sort of like a 70s TV movie. But once it kicks into gear, this film becomes mesmerizingly more effective. It's as if the director and crew settled down and really got to work after some initial adjusting. The cast is strong, especially Anthony Quinn as Omar Mukhtar, the guerilla leader, and Oliver Reed as Rodolfo Graziani, the relentless, brutal and merciless Italian commander. Having earlier played Napoleon, Rod Steiger also does a pretty good impression of Mussolini. Let's not forget Irene Papas.

The conflict itself seems as old as humankind itself, though in the modern style, the Italians are fully mechanized and the guerillas move around on foot and horseback with light weaponry and explosives. One of the most impressively dramatic -- and horrific -- scenes is the 1931 Italian blitzkrieg assault on Kufra, starting with aerial bombardment (a prototype of Guernica, Spain, 1937), next ground artillery, then small Whippet-like tanks and machine-gun mounted armored cars followed by infantry. Other horrors include the creation of concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire and flanked with guard towers, public hangings, poison gas, and a massive barbed wire "Hadrian's Wall" running north-south in Eastern Libya, cutting the rebels off from Egypt. It's nasty stuff, like so much of war is, made more nightmarish through use of modern weapons churned out by the 20th century's Satanic mills. Finally, there is also human decency in the film, epitomized by individuals on both sides of the conflict, an important touch.

Today's Rune: Defense.   

Al Jazeera English: Global News Coverage

As far as I can tell, no broadcast news service has done a better job covering this year's exciting events in North Africa and the Middle East than Al Jazeera English. I love it not only because it provides great coverage and analysis, but it's also accessible 24/7 and delivers news from a more interesting perspective than I've seen in a long time. 

Lately, the AJE portal into Tunisia, Egypt and Libya has been mesmerizing; lately I always seem to tune in around the time Dareen Abughaida is on via the Doha, Qatar desk (that's her above in an AJE screen shot). Abughaida herself is mesmerizing, the events are mesmerizing and the times, well, certainly quite interesting.

Other AJE news desks reporting around the clock include ones based in London and Washington, D.C.  And what's completely amazing is you can access Al Jazeera English via streaming video on the internet, bypassing any need for the "normal channels." High speed internet helps but is not necessary. Or, one can key in "Al Jazeera English" in a search engine and the main website will pop right up, complete with live blogs and Twitter posts, etc., from Libya and across the region.


Live stream here: http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/

(Map: AJE). These are big time historical events and processes crackling across North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, way out of the old box. What better way to understand this than by checking out what's going on via Al Jazeera English?

Today's Rune: Partnership.

Egypt: The Widening Gyre

In interpreting what's going on, it may be useful to know the relative population sizes of the various countries in the greater Middle Eastern region and beyond. Otherwise, it would be as if California was given the same relative weight as Wyoming, or New York the same as Rhode Island. There are differences -- everything is not weighted equally. In fact, world news coverage is often quite skewed in other directions for cultural, political, economic or other reasons.

Demographics/population

Tunisia: 10-11 million
Egypt: 80 million
Israel: 7-8 million
Libya: 6-7 million
Lebanon: 4-5 million
Syria: 22 million
Jordan: 6-7 million
Saudi Arabia: 20-26 million
Iraq: 31-32 million
Iran: 77 million
Turkey: 74 million
Somalia: 9-10 million
Sudan: 44-45 million
Ethiopia: 85-86 million
Algeria: 35 million
Yemen: 24 million

The largest populations of those listed above:
Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Algeria.

The smallest populations of those listed above:
Tunisia, Somalia, Israel, Libya, Jordan, Lebanon.

What will happen if the Tunisia-Egypt convulsions ripple throughout the region?   Should those in power in Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan (etc.) be nervous?  

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.   

Wrong is Right

Imagine a world of intrigue and propaganda, of setting up an Arab dictator, claiming he had Weapons of Mass Destruction, exploiting the news media, and launching an invasion of that Arab dictator's country . . .

That's essentially the point of Richard Brooks' Wrong is Right (1982), starring Sean Connery as a superstar celebrity journalist. At the time, I thought the target country a dead ringer for Libya. Brooks (1912-1992), who also directed In Cold Blood (1967), loosely based Wrong is Right on The Better Angels, a 1979 novel written by ex-CIA operative Charles McCarry (b. 1930). Oddly enough, McCarry's first book was Citizen Nader (1972) -- about Ralph Nader, who's running for president (again) in 2008.


I met Frank Snepp (b. Kinston, North Carolina, 5/3/1943), another ex-CIA operative-turned-author, back in the early 1980s. He spoke to my small Vietnam War class at UNC-Chapel Hill, and what he had to say about how things really happened between Tet and the fall of Saigon gave me the chills . . . He could only speak from memory, as "the Company" served him notice -- anything more detailed would be construed a possible threat to national security. Check out his Decent Interval: An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End Told by the CIA's Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam (1977) and its 1999 sequel: Irreparable Harm: A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took on the CIA in an Epic Battle Over Free Speech. Last I heard, he was working as an investigative reporter and consultant in Las Angeles.


Meanwhile, on SHADO Moonbase, an officer bearing a keen resemblance to not-yet-then-born Christina Ricci reveals Space Age fashion secrets, early 1970s . . .

Today's Rune: Defense. Snow Day. Dentist. Oorah!

Arabic Groove

The kind of Arabic music I like best, from what I've heard over the years, has a relentlessly droning rhythm like slow hot funk or exotic rhythm & blues. Electronic-influenced Arabic tracks are stunning. It's worthwhile to remember that Arabic culture spreads from Iraq in the east to Morocco in the west, through the Middle East and all across North Africa. It's eclectic, and varies according to locale and local traditions, plus infusions from the rest of Africa, from Europe and the USA, and from other influences outside core Arabic realms.

One of my favorite tracks to date is by Natacha Atlas, who is Egyptian, part-Jewish and part-European, and steeped in Arabic musical traditions. Her "Kidda (This Way)" remixed with Transglobal Underground, sounds perfect to my American ears. It's available on the internet and on the Arabic Groove sampler (Putumayo World Music, 2001). The CD has a variety of styles from Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, and Morocco. Some tracks exude a little too much pop for my tastes, but some, the kind I really enjoy, play straight with no chaser.


Today's Rune: Flow.

Birthdays: Charles XII of Sweden, Paolo Giovanni Pannini, Ralph Bellamy, Charles Eames, John Hersey, Mohamed ElBaradei, Joe Piscopo, Jello Biafra (Eric Reed Boucher), Paulina Rubio Dosamantes, Evangelia Psarra.

Happy Father's Day!

Mass Myopia

The news, dear readers, is myopic. Take one variable: population. The following are sample national estimates for 2003 (in millions) taken from UN sources and from The Economist. How should we suppose these estimates will change over say, the next fifty years? It's good to keep some perspective for our viewfinders.

China 1,304.2
India 1,065.5
USA 294.0
Brazil 178.5
Pakistan 153.6
Russia 143.2
Egypt 71.9
Turkey 71.3
Ethiopia 70.7
Iran 68.9
France 60.1
United Kingdom 59.3
Italy 57.4
South Korea 47.7
Spain 41.1
Sudan 33.6
Algeria 31.8
Canada 31.5
Morocco 30.6
Uzbekistan 26.1
Iraq 25.2
Saudi Arabia 24.2
Afganistan 23.9
North Korea 22.7
Taiwan 22.5
Yemen 20.0
Syria 17.8
Kazakhstan 15.4
Portugal 10.1
Somalia 9.9
Tunisia 9.8
Israel 6.4
Libya 5.6
Jordan 5.5
Georgia 5.1
Lebanon 3.7
West Bank and Gaza 3.6
Armenia 3.1
Kuwait 2.5

If one glances at the bottom of the list and compares the figures with recent headlines, one can see that when the Israelis lose nine killed in action in one day of fighting against Hezbollah guerillas, it is comparable to the U.S.A. losing about 450 troops K.I.A. in one day. So far, the U.S. has suffered about 2,570 K.I.A. and nearly 19,000 W.I.A. in Iraq in the last three years. The Israeli Army is facing an intense foe and are finding themselves in a nasty little war. The Lebanese have suffered worse than the Americans did during the 9/11 attacks by far in the last couple of weeks, proportionally. We'll see what happens next; but meanwhile, let's not lose sight of the rest of the world. There's a lot more going on than Israel and Lebanon. And just wait until 2025 or so, if we make it!

Hasta La Vista!