Tuesday, December 31, 2019
Monday, February 11, 2019
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Cuba: November 2016
“Before Night Falls” (Antes de anocher ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Night_Falls_(film)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/before_night_falls/
"Before Night Falls," by Julian Schnabel, is a superb film that shows a ground level personal history of 20th century Cuba as the setting for (and cause of) the narrative of the life of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, played by Javier Bardem. Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban writer grown up in a rural area, celebrated and celebrating in the revolution, then lifestyle crackdowns, smuggling out work, prison, exile in New York. It brings us the feel of those different years as Arenas goes through them, and portrays the complexities of Cuba in those years. Bardem read all of Arenas’ books before filming and spent months with Arenas’ dear friend Laslo to bring authenticity to the role. Johnny Depp has a fun dual cameo role in the prison years and Sean Penn makes a surprise appearance in a rural area somewhere .... I didn’t know he was in it and didn’t recognize him at all the first time I saw this: I just felt disturbed that I knew that face from somewhere. I think it is all in Spanish, or mostly. The soundtrack is great Cuban period music. The film is worth seeing over and over as are other films of the same genre: history as background for individual lives.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/before_night_falls/
"Before Night Falls," by Julian Schnabel, is a superb film that shows a ground level personal history of 20th century Cuba as the setting for (and cause of) the narrative of the life of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, played by Javier Bardem. Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban writer grown up in a rural area, celebrated and celebrating in the revolution, then lifestyle crackdowns, smuggling out work, prison, exile in New York. It brings us the feel of those different years as Arenas goes through them, and portrays the complexities of Cuba in those years. Bardem read all of Arenas’ books before filming and spent months with Arenas’ dear friend Laslo to bring authenticity to the role. Johnny Depp has a fun dual cameo role in the prison years and Sean Penn makes a surprise appearance in a rural area somewhere .... I didn’t know he was in it and didn’t recognize him at all the first time I saw this: I just felt disturbed that I knew that face from somewhere. I think it is all in Spanish, or mostly. The soundtrack is great Cuban period music. The film is worth seeing over and over as are other films of the same genre: history as background for individual lives.
Monday, July 6, 2015
I Even Have an Explanation for Donald Trump
...but I don't know where to start now ... really, since Trumplestiltskin has made himself known. I began this in July; it is now March.
In short, I had come up with a good explanation for the horrible things he says, based on observations of people he chose for his show -- not the current one (he refers to the rallies as "My Shows") -- "the Apprentice." It's long and interesting and has something to do with his appreciation of right-brain thinkers on the show. I believed at the time that that was why he limits his vocabulary and promised, "I don't know now, but it will be good. Everything I do is."
More recently, the word "Disingenuous" came to me (and I saw the wonderful Sandra Bernhard also describe him in one word as "Disingenuous" on "Watch What Happens Live"
Most recently, it appears cynically sinister
In short, I had come up with a good explanation for the horrible things he says, based on observations of people he chose for his show -- not the current one (he refers to the rallies as "My Shows") -- "the Apprentice." It's long and interesting and has something to do with his appreciation of right-brain thinkers on the show. I believed at the time that that was why he limits his vocabulary and promised, "I don't know now, but it will be good. Everything I do is."
More recently, the word "Disingenuous" came to me (and I saw the wonderful Sandra Bernhard also describe him in one word as "Disingenuous" on "Watch What Happens Live"
Most recently, it appears cynically sinister
Monday, September 16, 2013
"Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it...."
Cripes. It's worth it to ignore today's news, or take it with a shaker of salt and a margarita and spend your time reading news magazines over one year old.
Funny how Syria is all of a sudden Obama's problem: the area has been begging for help for years because of chemical weapons. The talking heads are at it again. I want to hear reasoned and intelligent discourse; I want to see real people making real decisions.
Haven't been able to stand Boehner for years: last week he wept on presenting a talk about dead children -- Syrian dead children I believe. Now I see that Boehner is human, and as such is not a one-dimensional political being (though many are, evidenced by their hard-lline ego-driven politicism). Goldwater wept and gained understanding. Richard Nixon's tears never got me: they were tears for himself, not for others.
As to seeing real people making real decisions: let's hear it for flippant diplomacy. Whatever works:
"Is there anything Assad could do?" asks a reporter.
"Yes. Turn over all his chemical weapons,"says our Foreign Minister.
and somehow Vladimir Putin, whose government has been supplying Assad's government with weapons, says, "Yes. Assad can give them to us for safe-keeping."
Well, hell, we have the Atom bomb for safe-keeping. A world with weapons locked away and held by different powers is better than one in which everyone wanders the streets armed with AK-47s.
Who's most vociferous about "Obama's failure" to seize Syria's chemical weapons? I'd hazard a guess that it is the same people who are violently opposed to gun control in the US. Kaff kaff.
I'm going back to reading my issues of The Week from 2011.
Funny how Syria is all of a sudden Obama's problem: the area has been begging for help for years because of chemical weapons. The talking heads are at it again. I want to hear reasoned and intelligent discourse; I want to see real people making real decisions.
Haven't been able to stand Boehner for years: last week he wept on presenting a talk about dead children -- Syrian dead children I believe. Now I see that Boehner is human, and as such is not a one-dimensional political being (though many are, evidenced by their hard-lline ego-driven politicism). Goldwater wept and gained understanding. Richard Nixon's tears never got me: they were tears for himself, not for others.
As to seeing real people making real decisions: let's hear it for flippant diplomacy. Whatever works:
"Is there anything Assad could do?" asks a reporter.
"Yes. Turn over all his chemical weapons,"says our Foreign Minister.
and somehow Vladimir Putin, whose government has been supplying Assad's government with weapons, says, "Yes. Assad can give them to us for safe-keeping."
Well, hell, we have the Atom bomb for safe-keeping. A world with weapons locked away and held by different powers is better than one in which everyone wanders the streets armed with AK-47s.
Who's most vociferous about "Obama's failure" to seize Syria's chemical weapons? I'd hazard a guess that it is the same people who are violently opposed to gun control in the US. Kaff kaff.
I'm going back to reading my issues of The Week from 2011.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Bonds of Trust
I've been really
bugged by the number of teachers who have been found to be having
physical sexual relationships with students, breaking the bond of trust
within which learning can take place. This is a tangent indeed: the topic of people being allowed to have private lives outside of their employment has somehow fallen by the wayside and this begins to sound like a defense of people who don't know how to conduct themselves at work or at home.
It's largely the fault of the teachers and administration, though culpability cannot rest in the hands of a minor, formal social boundaries, such as those between between teacher and student, adult and child have dissolved. Really shocking are the number of cases of female teachers involved with adolescent male students.
Students are allowed to have "crushes" on their teachers: a crush is an intense admiration and desire to be with the person to learn from them: the crusher wants the crushee to share his experience, knowledge, way of adapting to the world. It is a natural relationship, like the parent-child one, and should be inviolable: i.e. the adult needs to be the adult in these situations. "But she threw herself at me," are not words a real man uses, and certainly not a gentleman. I don't know what to say about a female teacher and male student. Bottom line: it just isn't done.
Why can't teachers be expected to be ladies and gentlemen in their professional lives, i.e. at school and in their dealings with their students and families? Administrators have rigidity confused with professionalism when they hire people who work with children, and rigidity has no place in education, which is another soapbox on which I proudly stand. The result of off-kilter hiring practices results in people who might present the "right" measurable image yet lack the necessary soul.
As a point of clarity, teachers and others trusted with people's lives are not and should not be held to the highest standard in every part of their lives, only in those parts that might affect those with whom they work: basically, in vernacular terms, "I don't care what you do in your own time as long as it does not affect your job," still works when we have a common understanding of what is and is not "done." Where, how, why, and when did that line blur?
It's largely the fault of the teachers and administration, though culpability cannot rest in the hands of a minor, formal social boundaries, such as those between between teacher and student, adult and child have dissolved. Really shocking are the number of cases of female teachers involved with adolescent male students.
Students are allowed to have "crushes" on their teachers: a crush is an intense admiration and desire to be with the person to learn from them: the crusher wants the crushee to share his experience, knowledge, way of adapting to the world. It is a natural relationship, like the parent-child one, and should be inviolable: i.e. the adult needs to be the adult in these situations. "But she threw herself at me," are not words a real man uses, and certainly not a gentleman. I don't know what to say about a female teacher and male student. Bottom line: it just isn't done.
Why can't teachers be expected to be ladies and gentlemen in their professional lives, i.e. at school and in their dealings with their students and families? Administrators have rigidity confused with professionalism when they hire people who work with children, and rigidity has no place in education, which is another soapbox on which I proudly stand. The result of off-kilter hiring practices results in people who might present the "right" measurable image yet lack the necessary soul.
As a point of clarity, teachers and others trusted with people's lives are not and should not be held to the highest standard in every part of their lives, only in those parts that might affect those with whom they work: basically, in vernacular terms, "I don't care what you do in your own time as long as it does not affect your job," still works when we have a common understanding of what is and is not "done." Where, how, why, and when did that line blur?
It's the Mata Hari Factor, Stupid!
Of course not. However, all government representatives posted overseas are sent with the warning not to become involved in affairs, since emotional neediness can be used as a tool for manipulation in order to gain information. They are warned against affairs especially with host-country nationals, as the representative is a target who may have information to be leaked casually, in error, in guarded bits and pieces to be put together later.
Another factor is that a person could become involved with someone who appears to be safe and whose instability later surfaces through changes in the romantic relationship or within him/herself and as such becomes someone whose actions could endanger the security of the US and its information. The foreign service offices like to have people in proven long-term stable relationships as a countermeasure to becoming involved in affairs which could in some way endanger US interests. In the 1950s, of course, was the surface issue of blackmail. As we know, the instability of people with whom one becomes intimately involved can be a danger in itself -- another kind of blackmail: not a threat to reveal the affair but to reveal secrets that became known -- any manner of results can come out of emotional weakness/neediness and the illogical actions that it engenders. That's the situation into which Petraeus found he had fallen. As an upstanding person, he recused himself, relieved himself of duty as soon as it became apparent that even he, no doubt to his surprise, had fallen into one of the traps about which he had been cautioned. It all seemed all right at the time . . . . it always does. For that reason, he was sworn to upholding a high moral standard, keeping his emotions in check. He probably did. He knew and worked with the writer for a long time. He knew she was not a spy. However, he stepped over the line of what we call propriety into the inappropriate by becoming closer to her outside of their agreed-upon relationship: a man and his biographer. Now, looking back,could he have, in full trust, told her things "off the record" which she did keep off the record? He must wonder. She entered into the relationship as a trusted biographer, and any further relationship than that steps into territory outside the bounds of security, unknowingly, of course. The boundary had become blurred and he didn't see it when he crossed over and stepped into a situation against which he had been warned and had no doubt warned others. How embarrassing when it was revealed that she had become emotionally unstable, according to the standards of foreign service, and was now stalking another member of the "Intelligence Community," to which Petraeus, and not she, belonged.
That's why Petraeus resigned. He fell into the trap. It is so easily done. Worse, traps are not intentionally laid. That's what he forgot. Now a bucket-load of silly behavior becomes public, and with it the possibility that security could well have been breached. It was not; had this gone on undisclosed, it could have been.
No, it's not about blackmail. In short, in foreign service, in Intelligence work, it's the Mata Hari principle.
It's about being human and swearing to hold oneself to a higher standard than ordinary humans. It's expected of priests, therapists, teachers, coaches, doctors, parents -- all of us who come into intimate contact with people, who are trusted with people's lives and by means of this unbroken trust help them to thrive.
Another factor is that a person could become involved with someone who appears to be safe and whose instability later surfaces through changes in the romantic relationship or within him/herself and as such becomes someone whose actions could endanger the security of the US and its information. The foreign service offices like to have people in proven long-term stable relationships as a countermeasure to becoming involved in affairs which could in some way endanger US interests. In the 1950s, of course, was the surface issue of blackmail. As we know, the instability of people with whom one becomes intimately involved can be a danger in itself -- another kind of blackmail: not a threat to reveal the affair but to reveal secrets that became known -- any manner of results can come out of emotional weakness/neediness and the illogical actions that it engenders. That's the situation into which Petraeus found he had fallen. As an upstanding person, he recused himself, relieved himself of duty as soon as it became apparent that even he, no doubt to his surprise, had fallen into one of the traps about which he had been cautioned. It all seemed all right at the time . . . . it always does. For that reason, he was sworn to upholding a high moral standard, keeping his emotions in check. He probably did. He knew and worked with the writer for a long time. He knew she was not a spy. However, he stepped over the line of what we call propriety into the inappropriate by becoming closer to her outside of their agreed-upon relationship: a man and his biographer. Now, looking back,could he have, in full trust, told her things "off the record" which she did keep off the record? He must wonder. She entered into the relationship as a trusted biographer, and any further relationship than that steps into territory outside the bounds of security, unknowingly, of course. The boundary had become blurred and he didn't see it when he crossed over and stepped into a situation against which he had been warned and had no doubt warned others. How embarrassing when it was revealed that she had become emotionally unstable, according to the standards of foreign service, and was now stalking another member of the "Intelligence Community," to which Petraeus, and not she, belonged.
That's why Petraeus resigned. He fell into the trap. It is so easily done. Worse, traps are not intentionally laid. That's what he forgot. Now a bucket-load of silly behavior becomes public, and with it the possibility that security could well have been breached. It was not; had this gone on undisclosed, it could have been.
No, it's not about blackmail. In short, in foreign service, in Intelligence work, it's the Mata Hari principle.
It's about being human and swearing to hold oneself to a higher standard than ordinary humans. It's expected of priests, therapists, teachers, coaches, doctors, parents -- all of us who come into intimate contact with people, who are trusted with people's lives and by means of this unbroken trust help them to thrive.
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