|
|
A group of Palinesque evangelical Protestants traipse around Israel, which they want preserved so that it can be destroyed by God.
running time 40 minutes
5 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: religion world
An English sikh having been mistaken for a muslim by a rastafarian and asked what its like “to be at the bottom of the barrel”, decides to find out what its like to be a muslim in Britain after the London terror bombings. He grows a beard to look a little bit more ‘fundamentalist’, and sets off on his travels.
Running time: 57 mins.
1 comment » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: religion world
The premise of this 5 part documentary series is interesting in itself – breakaway states, but this episode is particularly relevant. It is about the Georgian breakaway states including South Ossetia. These are the Caucuses – where Caucasians, a ridiculous term that is racism by indirection, don’t come from. Unless you are Georgian, or a Georgian from a breakaway state that doesn’t want to be Georgian, that is. Confused? Stay tuned.
(running time: 30 mins.)
Comments Off tags: world
Quite often, I hear people complaining that New York has lost its edge and that it has been ruined by gentrification and Yuppies. The people that I hear this from have tended to be middle class white people.
Here are some pictures of New York in the 70s and 80s, when I remember visiting the South Bronx and it looked worse than my early memory of Beirut. Not much to romanticize about, unless you look back wistfully on poverty rarely seen outside of the ‘developing’ world and people shooting up through bloody, shoeless feet. The gritty creativity of downtown New York, was a theme park hell, whereas further north there was the real thing.
There is a consensus these days, that rising oil prices spells the end of suburbia. However, few people under 40 in global cities such as New York and London have any memory other than the improvement of inner city areas. Here real estate costs soared through tenement and terrace gentrification, rezoned industrial building conversions and more recently cartoon loft condo dwellings. But in a country with few socialist programs outside of free tennis courts, and a financial services crash which will lop a sizable chunk of New York’s local government revenue, the Brownstone and brick frontiers could easily retreat as they have done in the past.
2 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: society world
On its 50th anniversary, a group of Airstream enthusiasts plan to recreate Airstream founder, Wally Byam’s 1959 Cape Town to Cairo caravan, which travelled the full length of Africa.
I love the story of this trip, because it is like someone’s grandfather climbing Everest in a plaid shirt. Byam and his followers looked like the apotheosis of 50 suburban Americans, the type that cosmopolitan types may sniff at. But they did some genuinely ground breaking traveling. And they did it in style – because they had Airstreams.
Above is a clip of the original, and here is a link to the 50th anniversary trip.
Comments Off tags: world
Worth linking to, even if there is no embed, a 20 minute, bleak, prescient, profile of Georgia from 2004.
“After the dramatic ‘Rose Revolution’ that saw him to power, will Saakashvili be able to unify his country?
The hardest tasks still lie ahead. Vast swathes of the country are outside his control. Having claimed independence, they answer to no one. Everywhere you turn in South Ossetia are signs of Russian influence. The police and soldiers wear Russian uniforms, cars have Russian numberplates and the region even runs on Russian time. But technically South Ossetia is part of Georgia. Saakashvili is doing his best to win back their support but any invasion would surely be bloody.”
I seems like the Russian invasion of Georgia is the inevitable result of 2 variables: natural resources and union.
Russia feeling it needs to be aggressive against splinter states to prevent fragmentation of other self identifying enclaves; and protecting access to oil routes. From the US Civil War to Iraq this is a feature of most conflict.
Olympic ceremonies have ranged from camp trash to deeply serious, military-style maneuvers. The Chinese opening ceremony will, no doubt, manage to combine the two, but there will be one important cultural factor that will come into play. The Chinese invented fireworks, and early footage suggests that several megatons of Firecrackers will welcome in Beijing 2008. Enough to pollute the air!
The Olympics started in Greece, as the Athenians tried to tell us in 2004 in an hour long, surreal, extravaganza, featuring a video link ‘drum off’ and people in illuminated pregnancy costumes. Professional eccentric, Bjork, completed the hallucinogenic effect with one of her songs…
2 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: sport world
Charles Frith writes: “Internet star and Beijing history teacher Yuan Tengfei talks about freedom of speech, with a clarity and frankness rarely seen in China.”
Comments Off tags: world
A documentary about the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. A lot has changed since then and one can’t help but wonder if prosperity leads more easily to freedom than protest.
2 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: history world
Part 1 of a 3 part documentary about Savile Row, the street in London, where the worlds leading bespoke tailors have made suits for the rich and famous for several centuries. Where Churchill bought his pinstripe and Fred Astaire, his tails. The filming coincides with the arrival of an undesirable element on the street, Abercrombie and Fitch.
Like the $5,000 – $30,000 suits themselves, the subject of this film may not seem worth it at first, but it a quiet, unrushed, dignified and won’t go out of fashion.
1 comment » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: nostalgia world
Don’t be put off by the ‘Loaded’ style laddish presentation, the Vice guide to North Korea is very much worth watching. Fourteen, five minute segments where the Vice guys bribe their way into Pyongyang and are taken on a series of surreal tours to barren destinations throughout the failed state.
Comments Off tags: world
Another very good video magazine from SexyBeijing is the Hard Hat show. Here, Beijing based English film maker, Nick Bonner talks about his films about North Korea.
Sexy Beijing is a videoblog, written and presented by a New Yorker (I assume), living in China, Anna Sophie Loewenberg. Its great, everything that video blogging should be, short, smart and funny. Collect them all.
A galaxy of Chinese stars (almost none of whom are recognizable in the West) sporting Zoolander haircuts and wearing the type of clothes that children’s TV presenters wear (hip, but very clean, and not too hip that you’ll scare the kids) sing an anthemic, fist in the air, Chinese pop song of the universal “We are the World” genre.
This is a fascinating glimpse of what an emerging, mainstream Chinese TV culture might look like, and you get to see all the cool new buildings that Beijing has built for the Olympics (the stadium, swimming stadium, national theater, Beijing museum and airport etc.) The lyrics to the song go something like this:
“When you see our Olympics on TV in America, you will shit your pa-ants. We take your capitalism, sell you plastic toy and build ourselves a free-eeway. There are a billion of us, we are very indu-ustrious, you can never wi-in. Repeat 78 times: There are a billion of us, you can never wi-in.”
Running time: 6 mins 50 secs
In order to persuade anyone that any kind of institutionalized event is a bad idea, all one needs to do is say “imagine x run by the DMV”. The Eurovision song contest is what it would be like if the music industry were run by the DMV.
To commemorate Eurovision’s biggest winners, the Irish, who have just blown the European Union treaty and the last time oil buggered up the global economy, here is the 1973 Eurovision song contest, held in Luxembourg – which is a bit like a country run by the DMV.
Following the terrorist attack against Israel at the Munich Olympics, and Israel’s debut in the competition, the floor manager strongly advised people in the audience to remain seated while clapping, to avoid being shot by security forces.
Belgium’s entry at 8:15 is pretty special, and if you have a history of hallucinogenic flashbacks, I’ve no idea what’s going on at 1:05, but you might not want to watch it. Beyond satire.
9 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: comedy music nostalgia world
A mammoth 3 part series on the globalization of the world economy, made by two Frontline veterans Greg Barker and William Cran. This is an example of a great documentary that has the same instinctive appeal as conspiracy theorist nonsense like Zeitgeist. In which case, Commanding Heights is possibly a perfect vaccination against such viruses of the mind. Perfect, healthy, brain crack.
Part 1 here: 115 mins.
7 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: politics series world
This is the first part of six in a documentary series about the Yugoslav War. Made in 1995, the year that Bosnian-Serb General Mladic’s troops marched 8,300 Bosnian men and teenage boys out of Srebrenica, and executed them, some burned alive and tortured. Armed UN Peace Keeping soldiers watched them pass.
Despite the demands that Serbia should turn over Mladic as a precursor for eventual entry into the European Union (token efforts at complying including a 1M euro reward, were made by the Serbian government), in 2008 the ratification process was started anyway, although nobody seems to know the status and Kosovo’s independence has flared up bestial Serbian nationalism again. The whole story is making a farce of the EU.
There has been some criticism about the accuracy of translation, however, this series would be in my list of top ten documentaries of all time, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It unravels the mechanism of the sordid path of human conflict, from nationalism to genocide, like no other film before or since. It is the film that was never made about the holocaust.
Running time: 50 mins.
6 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: history world
As with the fictional ‘around the world in 80 days’ this 5 month 10 part odyssey made in 2005, includes a variety of modes of transport, exotic locations food and cultures – all to find the world’s 80 principal treasures. The list, of course, is suitably maverick and non-cliche for it to be absolutely fascinating. Chosen by Dan Cruickshank who is a personal favorite architectural historian, this is a must for architecture fans.
1 comment » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: architecture history world
It has become such customary practice for politicians to criticize other regimes as if they could only possibly rule without the will of the people that this was even trotted out when the Chinese government waded into China. Which is why this clip found by Charles Firth is so interesting – it gives us a glimpse of popular Chinese nationalism and for reasons Charles explains convincingly.
A solid documentary on the tragic Failed State of Zimbabwe and the responsibility for it that one man, Mugabe, bears. Watching this made me wonder if failed states were not the result of monsters, but that monsters were the result of failed states.
If Mugabe were assassinated, there is a strong chance that many innocent lives would be saved and huge number of people would suffer less. Unlike many leaders Mugabe does not have the resources to make himself safe, and a single Cruise Missile would perhaps have a chance of success. Yet this outcome is unlikely, leaders rarely get assassinated outside of war, by a foreign state. There are reasons for this: Zimbabwe has no strategic benefit to others – no oil, and it is ‘illegal’ under UN law to assassinate a leader of a foreign state etc. But what if these reasons were actually an inevitable result of the way that countries evolve collectively?
What if the institutions of states evolve over time so that they self calibrate towards the stability of rule rather than the well being of the largest number of people? The natural equilibrium of politics is such that decision paths that allow for attacking the head of an organization or society will be rarer than war which requires bottom up confrontation with lots of individuals when evaluating the chance of a net reduction in suffering.
In other words, like the Selfish Gene perhaps there is a Selfish Meme, a naturally selected macro organization where people are expendable if the rules and institutions and nationalistic ideas (extended-genotype?) that create countries (extended-phenotype) survive. Perhaps what looks like the result of corrupt humans in government, is in fact the nature of government itself.
4 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: politics world