Don't you know, they're talkin 'bout a revolution, it sounds like a ... tweet *

It used to be like this: you would start in a far-away place, in exile from your own country, gather 80 something people in a boat which was so old it's name was "Granma", sail back to your country, where your group almost immediately got decimated upon arrival till there were only a couple of you left and then start a guerrilla fight from the mountains, as result of which, a couple of years after your return, the dictator you were after  had to flee the country and you could declare yourself a successful revolutionary hero and continue working on getting famous by smoking big cigars.

Or you could go for the scenario where you set up a Party that is not especially popular with those in command, get squeezed into an area where you're about to get smoked out like rabbits and from which you manage an escape by means of a long march which costs the life of thousands of your followers, only to settle in the end with the survivors in a place where you live in grottoes dug out from the mountains and from where you start to charm the peasants in the neighborhood, pick a small fight with the reigning nationalists, pick some more fights, a bit further away from your grottoes and helped by those peasants which you charmed by not taking their food and not raping their women, after which you join those nationalists because they need you to help them fight some japanese scum but once you've "been there, done that", you just beat those same old nationalists and finally march victorious on the capital ... where you declare yourself a successful revolutionary hero and continue working on creating one disaster after another from there onwards.

Today, things move a bit different. The starting point is basically still the same: at the top, there's someone you don't like and who you want to go, or there's a cause who you think will go nowhere without your support. The means to reach your goal, however, are slightly different from the past practices. Since it doesn't help your cause to get your head chopped off the moment you set foot on enemy land, and walking for thousands of miles to get out of jeopardy is neither high on your agenda, so you take out your cellphone and you send ... a tweet. Viva La Revolucion !

The last couple of weeks have brought another example of this new revolutionary model. One of the major topics on Twitter was the hashtag #freevenezuela, pointing to an outpouring of dissatisfaction in the country with Hugo Chavez' closing down of several television- and radiostations, critical of his government, and his reigning in of freedom of expression in general. With the Venezuelan economy still in dire straits and not likely to recover significantly anytime soon, El Presidente is trying to turn attention away from the real problems, for instance by picking yet another fight with neighbour Colombia, but it seems many of his compatriots don't like to be fooled no longer and they are massively engaging in twittering their frustration. One could say: well let them, if that takes the steam off the kettle, there's worse things to have to deal with, but Chavez sure didn't see it that way: he saw fit to condemn Twitter as a "tool of terror" and saw the need of "eliminating terrorist threats posed by social networks".

He's not the only one freaking out over messages of maximum 140 characters. When elections were held last year in Iran, re-elected president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad felt the tweeting heat coming right at him, with massive street protests as a consequence and when the Uighurs in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region started to vent their frustration over the treatment of their (islamic) minority by the majority of Han Chinese, one of the first sites to not survive the voracious appetite of the Great Chinese Firewall sure enough was Twitter (followed by an almost complete shutdown of the internet in the restive province).

Throughout history we have seen the power of words being used by the literate, sometimes in name of the oppressed, sometimes in their own name and being dreaded by the ones in power. But as is explained in this video, what we had in the past was a one-to-one sort of conversation, or, in the case of broadcast, a one-to-many type of conversation. What Twitter and the other social media are bringing us at the beginning of this new century is the many-to-many conversation that is no longer mainly driven by professionals but by amateurs, that is ubiquitous and that is fast. Examples from the same TED-talk: last time China had an earthquake the size of the one we saw last year ravaging part of Sichuan Province (i.e. the earthquake that swept away the town of Tangshan in 1976), it took the government three months to admit to the scope of the disaster. Now there were people taking pictures of buildings collapsing, sending tweets as things were happening and it was via Twitter that the BBC became aware of the quake, quite before the US Geological Survey website had anything online.

It's the speed and the ubiquity of these media that gets world-leaders with a less than clear conscience going berserk over it. It's the rallying power of these media that now starts off revolutions: the technology resembles the guerrila tactics of the past -an individual engaging in an act of "insubordination" against the organisation he's fighting by sending a message opposing that organization and making others aware- but when you look at the turn-out of the masses in Iran, in Xinjiang, Tibet, the convening of the forces progresses at such a speed that not to take heed when it is directed against you, would be ... well ... unwise, to say the least.

It's too early to tell where this new evolution may lead us, whether the obvious benefits it may have in bringing to the surface the abuses of power that happen worldwide will outweigh the dangers of having a whole mass of amateurs taking the driver's seat, but at least for now, it may bring a new voice to those that have remained unheard. 

Sincerely Yours.

* Free adaptation from Tracy Chapman's "Talkin' about a Revolution"

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"Burn it Blue": some thoughts on Frida Kahlo

There's two movies I will always remember, both for the same reasons: the colors and the music.

The first one is "37°2 Le Matin", also known as "Betty Blue", a movie by French director Jean-Jacques Beineix, about spare-time writer Zorg, who happens to meet Betty. The young lady is so enchanted by the scribblings from Zorg that her only concern  from then onwards is to get them published, leading to her insanity when that turns out to be more difficult than planned. The scenes where the couple meet and set out to start painting holiday bungalows on a beach, in pink and blue, are among the most amazing views I have ever come across in cinema. Those are scenes you don't forget, only by virtue of the colors and the rather fantastic minimalist score of Gabriel Yared.

The second one is "Frida", directed by Julie Taymor and starring Salma Hayek, about the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. A significant part of her life she spent in the "Casa Azul", the house where she lived and which is a museum dedicated to the artist now. The vibrant blue, red and green colours of the house, like the colours of Kahlo's paintings, seem to splatter off the screen and watching it while listening to the grandiose wrinkled voice of Chavela Vargas in "La Llorona" or Caetano Veloso in "Burn it Blue" is another cinematic experience I'm not likely to forget anytime soon. And because of the movie, I got interested in this woman, who at times seemed to combine the superhuman with the everyday, down-to-earth normal human ...

So a couple of weeks ago I was happy to find, in a bookstore nearby, this little pocket book by French Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio "Diego and Frida" ("Diego et Frida" (1993) published by Gallimard, "Folio", "Editions Flammarion", Paris), which details out the life and times of Frida Kahlo and focuses in particular on her stormy relationship with her just as notorious husband, Mexican revolutionary muralist Diego Rivera. It's near to impossible to not be touched by the story of Frida and Diego as it is laid out in the book, so I guess next I will be looking for the official biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera (on which book the script of the movie was based), but while doing some further browsing on the web, I found this quote from Diego Rivera which struck me:

"Frida is the only example in the history of art of an artist who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings. The only woman who has expressed in her work an art of the feelings, functions and creative power of woman".

When one isn't familiar with the sort of paintings Frida Kahlo produced, this may sound a bit over the top, but one look at some of her work reveals immediately what it is Diego was talking about when he referred to "the biological truth of her feelings".

Frida wasn't meant to live as long as she has, even be it only forty-eight years, but still she did. Diagnosed with polio at age six, which left her right leg thinner than the other, the major defining disaster of her life, however, was an accident she had when she was eighteen:

"On September 17, 1925, Kahlo was riding in a bus when the vehicle collided with a trolley car. She suffered serious injuries in the accident, including a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, and a dislocated shoulder. An iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus, which seriously damaged her reproductive ability." (Wikipedia)

Incredible as it may seem, Frida recovered. She left the hospital just one month after she had been brought in, but for the rest of her life she would remain confined in the realm of sometimes excruciating pain as a consequence of her accident, pain which couldn't be resolved despite the thirty-five operations she had during her life. During her long revalidation at the house of her parents, where she was almost litterally harnassed to the bed, what started as a way to fight boredom and loneliness and waves of despair would ultimately become the instrument through which she faced the world and what brought her fame: painting. Her mother bought her a mirror which hung over her bed so Frida could see the subject she would keep reproducing on canvas during the rest of her life, which was herself. Yet, the acquaintance with Frida Kahlo's work is not an easy one, for her universe is not something a lot of people can relate to. It does make crystal clear though what her husband had in mind when he referred to the biological truth of her feelings and "The Broken Column" (La columna rota, 1944) is one of the best examples.

This portrait of a bare-breasted Frida, weeping, stuck with nails all over her body, harnessed with strips of cloth and chest torn apart to reveal that broken spine, represented as a column from a classic Greek temple, is the biggest endorsement of the truth of her husbands' words. For this self-portrait, she let go of her usual elaborate Tehuana costumes in which she normally dressed and let her hair hang down, as if to strip herself of any adornment and make-up and just to show her pure self and what it was she was hiding inside. But although everything in this painting shouts pain -even the landscape is torn up and shredded- yet the woman still  manages to appear beautiful and composed. The spine, or the "column", may be broken in pieces, but it is just as well intact and supporting Frida in holding her head up high. The whole drama and personality of this amazing woman is converging in this single image, the intensity of which, though in a totally different fashion, I could only compare to "The Scream" by Edvard Munch.

Through paintings like these, she made her entire life an exploration of the "self" and of that self's interaction with the outside world, especially with Diego, whom she called the "second disaster in her life", but with whom she choose as well to spend the better part of her life and on whom she feeded for her art, her communist activism and her personal feelings.

Her body eventually gave in, on July 13 1954, in the "Casa Azul" where she was born. As Le Clézio writes in his book, Diego never went back to Coyoacan after Frida's death. He  loathed the idea to have it become a museum, as he wanted it to be an open place, a sanctuary to the memory of his wife whom, notwithstanding everything that had happened between them (Diego may have been the only man ever to be diagnosed by his doctor to be "physically incapable of monogamy"), he had deeply admired and loved even more. Everything in the house, which did become a museum after all, is motionless, holding it's breath while awaiting the possible awakening of the niña.

Frida went, leaving behind on the last page of her diary the words "Espero alegre la salida - y espera nunca volver" (I hope my parting will be happy - and I hope to never return). With the legacy she left, she doesn't have to return: she is just here to stay.

Sincerely Yours.