Perhaps the trashy magazine aspect of the show about Japan where this clip was taken is the best format for the subject matter. In any case, expect to be deluged with stuff from it on SmashingTelly.
I love this clip about weird Japanese women’s fashion tribes, Gyaru, including the evolution of styles up to the exceptionally weird, reverse Geisha: Ganguro.
China is perhaps too different from the US culturally and not different enough ideologically for there to be an immediate threat of actual war, however history shows that competition for natural resources tends to cause conflict.
For now, its more natural to secure a beachhead for access to oil resources by fighting against people who are both close enough and just different enough for there to be natural animosity. We fight people who believe in another branch of the Abrahamic religion, Islam rather than Christianity. In the global scheme of things, this is a hair splitting difference not dissimilar from Shia vs Sunni. These people have the resources that the US may eventually end up at war with China over.
Places that have wealth built on natural resources favor bullies who can grab it rather than the educated who have an upper hand when wealth needs to be created rather than mined. Places rich in natural resources: The Democratic Republic of the Congo; Saudi Arabia and Texas are therefore inherently pugnacious and anti-intellectual. From these places fighting springs naturally.
The battle in the subject of this movie is metaphorical. It could very well be figurative.
50 min 6 sec Jan 4, 2008
BBC 2 58 min 14 sec Nov 25, 2007
Documentary about a career woman in Saudi. An interesting peek behind the Iron veil, as it were.
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Planet of the Arabs is a very powerful 9 minute collage of racist stereotyping of Arabs in movies. What’s not at issue for me is the idea that an Arab volunteer from non-Arab Afghanistan might be portrayed (by an Indian) as Kalashnikov wielding, guerrilla fighter, opium trader, rather than a lefty apologist’s flower-growing, freedom fighter. What’s unnerving is the tone and the pattern of racist tradition, i.e. the number of appearances of unattractive, gormless, hook-nosed, brown people with twisted, toothy grins and bar-joke accents. All ominously reminiscent of historic, racist depictions, such as Dickens’ Fagin.
The utterly depressing thing about this film, however, is the context in which it has been received, as a conduit for those who foster both anti-semitism and anti-arabism.
The easiest way to recognize the veracity of a racist claim is to imagine the purported victim belonging to any other group of people and to not confuse equality with similarity or differentiation with prejudice. That thought experiment leads me to think the claim of racism against Arabs may have merit.
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Margaret Mead was one of the world’s most celebrated anthropologists. After living with a small Samoan tribe, in the 20s, she published research which suggested nurture was more important than nature, a view shared by her supervisor at Columbia but few others.
This lead to one of the most famous controversies in science, after it was strongly refuted by another anthropologist, Derek Freeman. It’s a controversy that is still unresolved, although a dramatic documentary made in 1987 proved that her evidence was flawed.
Mead argued that the passage from childhood to adulthood in Samoa was a smooth and not marked by the angst and stress seen in the United States. One possible reason: Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex, but eventually married, settled down, and successfully reared their own children. Not the kind of society that had values that many Americans shared, in the 20s when it was assumed that less developed societies were primitive in all aspects.
Its very funny that the principal controversy perfectly describes most Western societies today, and yet the debate seems to have pushed this fact, that the initial conditions are now synchronized, into the background. There was no word for teenager in the 20s. Our societies seem to have more rite of passage angst and later settling down – or at least people singing about it. Without our Samoan style society there would be no Emo bands from Brooklyn, or double-wide strollers containing the result of fertility-enhanced, older-couple, pregnancies.
It is a classic case of where politics and science collide, and one that could surely be studied as an anthropological phenomenon in itself. The ‘meta’ nature of it is what appeals to me.
58 min 53 sec Feb 15, 2007
Jonathan Meades looks at the branding and regeneration of inner cities through spectacular, but ultimately vacuous, signature buildings such as Bilbao’s “museum with nothing in it” – Gehry’s Guggenheim, and through loft style modernism light – rather like the ridiculous and vapid Phillipe Stark or Armani Casa condos being built in Wall Street, where I live.
The case is put with great wit and erudition, complete with sarcastic marketing doublespeak, throughout. The conclusion is that the end result of this insincere, marketing driven, regeneration is that the once diseased inner cities have merely relocated their problems to the areas beyond the ring roads. The places where they burn cars nightly in the Banlieus, but its not just in France.
This is the trend that was identified years ago by Mike Davis in city of quartz, but the difference is that Davis realized it is a phenomenon independent of the brand of politics, social libertarianism (read Blairism), that Meades sees as the culprit. But its worth seeing Meades do his bit because he says it so well. He understands architecture so much better than a Frank Gehry or Daniel Libeskind, who have become glorified window dressers able to plonk a building anywhere in the word, to rapturous acclaim, without actually having ever been there.
3 comments architecture, smashing telly top 10 documentaries, society, world
There is something fascinating about Pakistan which seems to defy stereotyping or simplicity. A country originally with two branches divided by an entire subcontinent, whose name is an acronym, and whose boundary makes little sense historically. Its a place which seems to be home to both Islamic fundamentalism of the most uncompromising kind, and the type of Islam that is very much at home with rational ideas of science.
BBC 28 min 37 sec Aug 21, 2007
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But were afraid to ask?
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1 hr 0 min 7 sec – Jun 6, 2007
A profile of one organization dedicated to rebuilding New Orleans during the first year after Katrina.