Forget the 2008 presidential election, this is teaching me how to hope again.

As is true of most Sufjan, the first three and half minutes or so are stronger than the second, but diehard fans will love the whole damn thing.

Some days I just can’t just jumpstart my brain, so I grab a Vault soda, and somewhere between the 50 grams of sugar and who knows how much caffeine OH MY GOD I CAN DO ANYTHING. It’s high risk, but high reward. Oh caffeinated beverages, when it comes time to turn in this thesis and I put you in my works cited section, it will not be to be cute, but rather to do right by the Honor Code.

I’m fairly certain this is a habit future me will deeply regret–both ten years down the line, when I will be disgusted by my college eating habits, and a few hours from now, when I will be crashing from a fairly intense sugar high. But for now, it’s working wonders.

Actual analysis forthcoming, “The Kingdom” was a pretty awesome movie. You say racist?–let me rephrase that–Jack Shaheen says racist? Well doesn’t he always?

I actually think its a not insignificant thing to have a positive portrayal of both Arabs and muslims in a commercial and exciting political thriller, the genre where they are the most lacking. Plus, it’s nice to see both Ashraf Barhoum and ‘Ali Suleiman (although underutilized) of “Paradise Now” again.

Mostly though, I just like the fact that, reading through my notes from the movie, I see things like “Jason Bateman, FUCKING SHIT UP.”

Storefront in Chatby district, Alexandria, Egypt (2008).

Every few months, I re-fall in love with The National. This is one of those times.

This particular song was used in the Obama campaign, I believe… a surprisingly angsty choice, but I suppose you’ve gotta have something to cut all that hope with.

I’m writing my senior thesis this year on (deep breath) how ideologies behind terrorism and anti-terrorist operations are shown in films from America and the Middle East. So far this has basically meant that I watch all sorts of violent and/or depressing movies and am usually a lot of fun to be around afterwards, but at some point, it did start to feel more like someone doing work and less like an emotional pincushion. After all, what’s one more exploding bus, as long as it’s just on your computer screen?

This week, however, I’ve been focusing on “Paradise Now” (dir. Hany Abu-Assad), and I’ve got to tell you, all that “de-sensitivity” stuff has turned out to be a load of crap, because it’s gotten progressively more heartbreaking each time I watch it. Instead of the tragedy losing its effect, I just feel like I’m caught in this recurring loop of these characters (who I’ve now spent so much time with), leaving a human wake that extends on both sides of the conflict.

The film follows Khaled and Said, two best friends who are young, aimless and living in the West Bank, after they find out that they’ve been picked to carry out a terrorist operation in Tel Aviv. From the moment we meet them, we hope that something goes wrong, that these men don’t go through with this horrible act because they are so likable, or at the very least, so recognizable. Things do go awry, as you might expect of a movie longer than twenty minutes, but this leaves only one of the men to question the mission while the other becomes more convicted in its necessity.

For all its overt discussion of terrorism’s role in the resistance, the movie somehow escapes coming off as didactic. Suicide bombing by no means justified in the story, rather, given a face, which is sometimes all the discomfort the audience can handle. The real tragedy is not that young Palestinians are forced to terrorist means, but that they are convinced from both sides that they this is their only option, which not only perpetuates the violence in the conflict, but destroys the families and community they leave behind.

Beautifully shot and brilliantly edited, I can’t recommend “Paradise Now” highly enough. And if you don’t believe me, check out the American trailer below, which has some really confusing Alexi Murdoch music playing over shots of the West Bank.

“Etiquette,” Tunnel City, Williamstown

]]> http://jamjama.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/fade-to-black/feed/ 0 Jamjama THE END http://jamjama.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/chernobyl-09-or-the-things-we-lost-in-the-fire/ http://jamjama.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/chernobyl-09-or-the-things-we-lost-in-the-fire/#comments Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:05:22 +0000 Jamjama http://jamjama.wordpress.com/?p=468 ]]>

This is what trust issues look like.

The day before I came back to school, my hard-drive, with no whimpers or warnings, completely died. Melted. Kicked the bucket. Apparently, all the little moving bits on the inside of its tiny computer-brain got jostled around one time too many and fell out. Or something. That’s what I gleaned from the MacMechanic employee who made a admirable attempt to explain the mysteries of modern technology to me at a time when I was not in a place to pretend to understand it.

Some time has obviously passed since, but it’s definitely been strange getting used to it. I’ve spent such a huge amount of time  staring into the screen of this little white machine, that I can’t help but feel attached to it, in that nice, Aldous Huxley way we try to avoid thinking about most of the time. It feels as if I’ve lost someone to amnesia–we’ve spent so much time together, my laptop and I, and yet this new hard drive knows nothing of it. “Remember the good old days?” I ask. “When you remembered my photos, music, and documents?” But no, no it does not. It does not remember those happier times, and it sure as hell does not remember said files.

Which brings me to another point: letting go of the things I’ve been forced to let go of. While I was pretty good about backing up papers and most of my music, I somehow did not have the same healthy sense of fear and preparation for my pictures. Now everything earlier than 2007 is gone (save the few that went onto Facebook), meaning the photos I took in Yemen, Egypt, Europe, and of family in that time have simply vanished into the series of tubes that I assume describes my old computer’s brain about as accurately as it does the internet.

I’m trying to spin it myself by thinking of what I was lucky enough to get back, reminding myself that photographs should save as place-cards for memories, not substitutes for them. You know, be all Buddhist about it. After all, it’s not like actual experiences have been stolen from me.

There was a time when I actually thought I was going to remember everything in my life, every conversation, every thought, every slow afternoon or half-clear dream I woke up with. When I realized that this wasn’t going to work out, I tried to document it myself, almost to the point of obsession, writing everything down that I could for the better part of a year. But this, so it turns out, is also not how it works.

I think that’s what I generally like about photographs, that they make no pretense of trying to capture a whole experience, only a moment of it, a tiny, random cross section. And since I’m eventually going to lose the details to the hard drive of my own mind, I’d just appreciate all the help I can get.

(I am making some minor changes around the site, and jumping on the this-time-I-really-mean-it train back to blogging town.)

Mosque – Sana’a, Yemen (2008).

Stepped into a time warp today listening to a 12/20/02 episode of This American Life, “Why We Fight.” Broadcast exactly four months before the American invasion of Iraq, it’s a portrait of American consciousness that feels unnervingly distance.

Back then, we were still undecided about whether or not they thought Iraq posed a legitimate enough threat to justify the war our government was flirting with. It was still understandable that no one knew how to pronounce “Iraq.” There was no recession, no huge war debt, no body count, no Abu Gharib, no GITMO. People in liberal enclaves such as NPR were still saying things to the effect of “I’m not so sure about this whole ‘invasion’ thing, but I like the president and I want to support him.”

It’s a bit like stumbling upon a picture from junior high and not being able to recognize yourself. You can’t imagine a time when you thought graffitied jeans or crimped hair were a good idea, just as you can’t imagine a time when an invasion without an exit strategy seemed feasible… and yet there it is, that image of a former self which proves you wrong.

Perhaps the best example of this comes in Act Three (“Realism 101″), in which The New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann and Brookings Institution analyst Kenneth Pollack argued about the for and against the invasion. It’s weird, remembering that arguments like these were persuasive in either direction, when they seemed well informed and thought through, and for their time they were. Yet there are some pretty glaring anachronisms, or at least, what feel like them now. For instance, both parties believed that Saddam Hussein had WMDs–they’re existence is in no way up for debate. It of course, begs the unsettling question of how current debates will look in only a couple years. When we talk about Iran or Gaza in three, four years, how uninformed will we consider the conversations we’re having now?

On the other hand, there are details that ended up staying true that have in some ways fallen out of our awareness. In Act Two (“When Firas Comes Marching Home Again”), Adam Davidson interviews Iraqi refugees and foreign workers who either live in or commute to Amman, Jordan. There are a number of Iraqis who left the country after being subjected to brutal torture for petty or non-existent crimes, the effects of which are still visible on their faces and fingers. I think it’s good to remember that the specter of violence has existed in the Iraqi consciousness for longer than the American occupation.

Also, these stories hit a little too close to home in a way they didn’t before the invasion. Before, these were Saddam’s brutal interrogation techniques, and were widely publicized in America as justification for overthrowing a wretchedly inhumane dictator. Yet now we have to square ourselves with our own track record in Abu Gharib, GITMO, and hundreds of CIA blackout sites all over the world.

If you’ve got an hour to listen, you should check it out for yourself, and see how far we’ve come, for better or worse.