Recommended

So Yong Kim’s debut film about the struggle with language and love. I watched it this evening at the IFC–small theater, plush seats, bar downstairs–and called my buddy Heesok immediately afterwards, urging him to watch it. Here’s a review by Nathan Lee:

Written and directed by So Yong Kim, a multimedia artist making her remarkable feature debut, In Between Days is the story of Aimie’s faltering relationship to Tran, and of the melancholy stasis of a life neither here nor there, arrested in a state of threshold uncertainty. In other words, an intensely specific film about the universal yearnings of adolescence, here rendered doubly resonant through a fluent synthesis with the immigrant experience.

Orly, Sunday. Parents used to take their children there to watch the departing planes.

The Presidential race. Who’s running, who’s not, who cares, etc. Here’s a passage from Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance:

For company, she’d bought the bonus double Arts and Leisure sections of the Friday edition of The New York Times. She liked reading reviews of plays she’d never see, recitals she’d never hear, exhibits she’d never visit. Lucy was no vicarious culture vulture; it was the language of the reviews themselves that she treasured. After the front-page headlines, body counts, senatorial brawls, and denunciatory op-eds, it was good to loiter in a world where “subtlety” and “restraint” were terms of praise. So, sipping wine, she read about “the innate good taste and nuanced phrasing that informs Mr. Thomas’s spectacular, crystal-clear performance” in a dance concert at NYU. A pity, Lucy thought, that Mr. Thomas was unlikely ever to run for president.

Austin Merrill and Anderson Tepper at Vanity Fair provide a list notable non-fiction books and novels from Africa in recent years. Here’s a brief sampling of the fiction:

Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead). Ethiopian-born writer Mengestu’s debut novel is an eloquent and wise portrait of African-immigrant life in Washington, D.C.

Moses Isegawa, Abyssinian Chronicles (Knopf, 2000). If the film The Last King of Scotland—based on Giles Foden’s excellent 1999 novel—whetted your appetite for details of Idi Amin’s grisly reign, pick up this debut novel by Isegawa for an even more elaborate portrait of 1970s Uganda. Isegawa, now based in Holland, writes with a feverish intensity, furiously stuffing an entire decade’s worth of woe and clamor into this dense, ambitious book.

Ahmadou Kourouma, Allah Is Not Obliged (Anchor, 2007). Recent civil wars in Africa have spawned their own literary genre: child-soldier novels. Besides Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation and Helon Habila’s Measuring Time (both discussed in “The Continental Shelf”), there is the Congolese author Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), and now, finally translated from the French, the last novel by the great Ivorian author Kourouma, who died in 2003.

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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released two sets of previously classified historical documents.
“The CIA fully understands that it has an obligation to protect the nation’s secrets, but it also has a responsibility to be as open as possible,” said CIA Director Michael V. Hayden. “I’ve often spoken about our social contract with the American people, and the declassification of historical documents is an important part of that effort.”
The first collection, which some call the “Family Jewels,” consists of almost 700 pages and was compiled in 1973 under Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger, who asked CIA employees to report activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency’s charter.

Go here

I realize that this blog, perhaps unfairly, has paid too much attention in the past to prisoners in Guantanamo and Iraq. So, here’s a note from the news of Paris Hilton’s release from jail this morning:

Hilton, with her blond hair pulled back in a braided ponytail, strutted past throngs of media and fans wearing a sage jacket, white shirt and skinny jeans.

“Inmates, prior to their release, are given a chance to go into the restroom to change their clothes, to put on make-up and fix their hair if they want to — and clearly Paris did,” CNN’s Brooke Anderson told CTV Newsnet on Tuesday from outside the prison facility.

Aren’t we glad this happened! If Paris had stayed in prison a few more days, we wouldn’t want her to be caught riffing Frederick Douglass’s famous oration, “What to the prisoner is the Fourth of July?”

My appreciation for Paris is rooted in this.

Why are we not seeing more photographs from Iraq of dead and wounded soldiers?

Ashley Gilbertson gives you the answer to that and other questions–including, for instance, what Iraqis with sensitive skin are deeply allergic to.

The next day, Ziad and Mustafa were blindfolded, handcuffed, and put under guard on a cot outside the JSS. Ziad, the heavier of the two, was rocking back and forth. He looked as though he was in pain. Mustafa hunched next to him, with bright red lash marks clearly visible at the top of his back. Through an interpreter, I asked an Iraqi what had happened. “He has sensitive skin,” the Iraqi soldier said through a mischievous smile, “and he got a rash.” I lifted Mustafa’s jacket to get a better look. I’m no doctor, but it seemed pretty clear: Mustafa was allergic to being whipped by electric cables. When I tried to photograph Mustafa’s welts, the Iraqi soldier grew angry and stepped in front of my camera.

Via

Click here for Gilbertson’s website

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Shepard Fairey

Thanks, Lauren Cerand

Mark Sarvas has learned from the NY Times that India is among the most researched keywords on the newspaper’s site. Which seemed as good a reason as any to read Siddhartha Deb’s review-essay in the Nation about the opposed ways in which India is viewed:

There is a fundamental dissonance between lived experience and analysis that becomes pronounced at certain times, across particular cultures and in relation to certain subjects. Today this is especially true of books that look at people living on the margins of globalization, at groups whose assimilation into the model of neoliberal capitalism is still unfinished, still unpredictable. All too often, a writer crossing the border into other realms of existence chooses to ignore the dissonance, offering an analysis that hardly takes into account the difference between the way things look from the Western centers of neoliberal capitalism and the way life feels in the new capitalist outposts in Asia.

Here is another recent piece on India and globalization by the indefatigable Vijay Prashad.

Photo by Haran

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Via Paper Cuts