some are going anarchist in romania and we like that

or maybe i shouldn't call it just that, but for me anarchism is anytime one can see through the vail of manipulative society and want to replace power with solidarity and community. REAL EYES SEE REAL LIES, and they seem to have some of that:

made the intro cuz i wanted to spread the word about a documentary in the line of many anti-capitalist ones, but a bit more poetic, spiced with cool quotations from many counter-culture authors of all times. slightly pedantic, maybe not powerful enough to open the eyes of "the enslaved", but able to reinforce what we know quite well. i don't know how to help people chose not to ignore these truths, but i'm bound on trying.

oh, dad!

“And When Have You Last Seen Your Father?” (Anand Tucker, 2007)

…a difficult question to be asked as you approach the age of thirty,or forty because either you’ve left home long ago and life now reserves too little time to remember the old folks, or the memory of a young and present dad- a real dad!- is under a thick layer of dust. Have you ever seen him really? What do know about his life before you? Maybe a couple of photos with army chums and one in which his head is fully covered in curly hair. Just an opportunity to laugh, imagine further and reminiscence… or maybe you can grasp the real him in the gaze of mom. If they’re still together after all these years, it must have been love! Or habituation? Or the fear to lose a home?

There comes a time when they get old, when they make us come back and want to get to know them as adults, to interpret their mistakes through cynical adult eyes. Would you rather confront them than take care of them? You have some pieces of the puzzle from back in adolescence: it was impossible for him to be faithful while mom was resilient for the kids. He was often the heart of the party in public and nothing but a grump in private. But still, he taught you how to drive, took you camping and bought you your first beer. But then again, he always criticized you, made the worst jokes on your behalf and was still far from being content with your achievements.

Anand Tucker’s film speaks to the moment in your life when you realize you’ve gone a long separate way since that umbilical cord was cut. So long that it takes a journey into childhood to reconnect with the old people who live at your former address. What was so good and what was so awful about them? How did you come to hate one of them?
Colin Firth faultlessly plays Blake, an awarded writer who visits the house of his parents to spend the last days with his dying father. The sad event gives him the opportunity to make up with the grim memories he had of the dad- a cheating personality, “minor duplicities, little fiddles”, lack of empathy, or the constant desire to impress and to be liked, on account of others. Although knowledgeable of having been cheated throughout their marriage, the old mom (Juliet Stevenson) does not cease to be at her husband’s side. As his strength leaves his body into being spoon-fed, he rewards her with pathetic hypocrite moments of “I don’t know what I would have done without you.” Blake is about to make the mistake of being sucked into memories of his first love- a sharp-tongued lassy maid in his family’s house during his adolescence- and forget about his wife and kids. Their arrival after the death of the father and the attempt to reconcile with his aunt (the one he suspects to have been his dad’s lifelong mistress) brings him back to present life. There he finds space to accept the dad that passed away as a faulty person, but as a real dad- one whose memory he can squeeze to his chest, one whose ashes he ritually tastes.

Imdb rating: 6.8

WATER

“Water” (Deepa Mehta, 2005)

“A woman who is unfaithful to her husband is reborn in the womb of a jackal”(The Laws of Manu)

Chuyia’s husband dies so her family sends her to a widows’ ashram where she is to spend the rest of her life. Only that Chuyia is a little girl of about 7. They shave off her long beautiful hair and leave her among bald women in rags, to share their austere life. They expect that she would offer senseless devotion to a husband she never knew and to a tradition she is too young to embrace willingly. She keeps asking for her mother and wants nothing more than to return home. Among the other scary widows, as different in character as the many inhabitants of an inferno she meets Kalyani, a beautiful young widow, the only one who for some reason keeps her hair.

The story is placed in India in 1938, in a time in which the name of GandHi was starting to be heard. Widow houses survive through the hideous practice of prostituting one of them to the rich. In this case, it becomes the duty of Kalyani, thus the beautiful hair still on her head and her looks. From a miserable state she almost reaches salvation in the possibility of marrying a young handsome and liberal aristocrat. He’s ready to pursue his love in spite of his higher caste, but as the two elope, she realizes she’s been selling her services to her future father-in-law. Kalyani finds her end in the arms of the sacred river Ganges, deciding to commit suicide, aware that the desired escape is an illusion.

The film’s beautiful scenery and music are only matched by the deep sadness of the storyline. The ending brings a minuscule ray of light, the teaching of Gandhi enlightening one of the widows into helping Chuyia to escape. Albeit half dead after having been molested, as she becomes the replacement of Kalyani through a trick of the widows.

There’s no controversy about arranged marriages in the film, but the pressure of society and tradition making women live as half-dead is poignantly carried across. The film is obviously not Bollywood, but Canadian! It was actually banned in India, although it addresses a still existing social problem and the dire life of a demographically expanding society, the drama of cultural idiosyncrasies reinforcing the cycle of poverty. In spite of the title, "water" is not an environmental film, but it deals with a large-scale phenomenon, “There are over 34 million widows in India according to the 2001 census. Many continue to live in conditions of social, economic and cultural deprivation as prescribed 2000 years ago by the Sacred Texts of Manu.”

Nominated for Oscar

Imdb rating: 7.6

bowing to the rain- throughout the world

1.rainbow in Dresden/Germany, shot from aboard an Eurolines Bus/Aug 2010
2.rainbow over the San Juan River shot from a fast boat to Boca de Sabalos/ Nicaragua/ Oct 2010

exquisite corpse in a French train...and then the rain

The salamander lost its tale. so went on an adventure to find
a new one.
And then we went to see the giraffes
They make the most beautiful silence ever heard
By the human herd.
A heard noise quivers with shivers...leaving slivers in their ears tiny trapped
Memories in their skin
Peeling that orange I gave you will only
Make your fingers yellow and your soul sour
While eating that fig that she gave you could
Save you from their power.
Showered with lame excuses like limp and stumpy limbed mine victims
A maimed love for lost...
Faking a photo and framing it too
Would make you believe in spirits and goo.
I declare forcery here some sort of sorcery hand made
Braided and released on the generic popular nation
Formed in a lead based alchemy a disaster for you and me.
"One should not suppose more things than it is absolutely necessary
For one to live, breathe and drink."
That's the advice the old oma gave her last
I will always remember as a gem of the past...
Last incased in a ring to be held...sort of in your palm
At all times...pressed...huh.Bleep...bing bing. Bop...
Sorrow floats.
Mousey mousey mousey boy
As sick in his head as a dead wooden toy
A forty year old boy. A teenager with a boner coy.
Lourdes ...smack filled syringes...price chopper...
A tactile sentimental styrofoam flesh wound...
Pitch black and not a sound in sight
She told me she knows how it feels to be bright
That she taught herself perfect Chinese
That she can fake playing the trombone
Should she please
Like rotten milk from a cow's disease.

every mother's day needs a mother's night

oldie, but still dope. didn't get my mom anything either...but the weather is so bad, nobody would come over tonight :(


Mother Lover

John | MySpace Video

9

if you worship tim burton,you're bound to like this short of to Shane Acker's, which they produced in 2005.
long feature followed in 2009, gotta get my claws on that one!

on poverty theoretically

i chose microcredit as a topic for my research paper for uni.
it's an intricate issue, many pros and cons, can't wait to see where it leads me...
this is a documentary which wants to seem balanced...i am glad they're presenting the failures and loopholes in it tough:

city doggie-village doggie

my brother and his fiance adopted her from an animal protection association in Bucharest called ROBI and ever since, all they talk about is Adela. Such organizations estimate about 30.000 stray dogs in Bucharest, with a birthrate of 100 puppies per day. Authorities don't want to make the numbers public, but at least there's an Administration for the Surveillance (?) of Dogs Without Owners which also makes adoptions possible despite the obvious failure to manage the situation. in this video she's puzzled by the chicken's idea of humping that water bottle.




this is Leutzu, my dad's countryside dog that he picked up from the street. no intermediaries in this case, it was love at first sight.he really needed a new buddy around the house. our old dog there (RIP) was over 20 when he passed on last year.
the young one's name is the diminutive of his predecessor, Leu.
i don't see many stray doggies in the countryside, maybe because they are more valued there or things there just fit in easier.


these two dogs will probably never meet, but it was a pleasure for me to spend a few moments with each of them.

what is home?

got a friend or maybe the lost love of my life or maybe the biggest asshole i crossed paths with...dunno which one yet. what i do remember is that he keeps saying he does not know the meaning of 'home'. at some point, the meaning becomes clear to us...

as she was stuffing that pathetic travel cushion in and barely closing the backpack he was getting more and more worked up with rage. why can't we just go? what the heck got into you? dead, blocked, her throat too knotted in, incapable of any reply.

no, actually she remembers a heavy dark moist word like lead climbing inside her body, from the bile up. she couldn't stop it by clenching her teeth, so the word managed to come out clearly: SOULLESS.

next second, shoes were flying out the door and onto the staircase, bags as if by magic already outside the apartment. angry face uttering loud slow-motioned words and pointing.

alright, damn, way to go! bags a bit too heavy, the light outside a bit too bright.
that initial moment of pure bafflement. now what? crossing the bridge into the city, a wet small piece of paper read: WE ARE THE ENGINEERS OF OUR OWN PERCEPTION

when bored, doodle about what hurts!

it happens to me so often at university.maybe it's a female student syndrome to chat loudly from inside the toiled ...ah, nobody reads good manners codes anymore :( some of those crappy rules help those around you...shit, esp. us, nervous people.