"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.

Stratocumuloqatsi

Want blue skies ? Think again …

It’s clouds that you actually want - white clouds, to be more precise; as white as if they were featuring in a tooth-paste ad -, for you are a concerned citizen and climate change is high on your personal agenda.

I came across this article in Newsweek by Bjorn Lomborg, Director of of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and a former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. He’s also the author of a book called “The Skeptical Environmentalist” which didn’t exactly go unnoticed and led the author to be accused of scientific dishonesty. When you get an entire website devoted to trying to debunk the supposed myths in your book, you know you are in a Dan Brown-ish league of your own, but it also makes you kinda interesting. To be sure, in this article Lomborg is not putting forward original ideas from himself, but what struck me was the sort of “Convenient Truth (?)” he is preaching, i.e. that we can fight global warming, not by cutting carbon emissions (at least not in the short run, for we’ll never make it in time to avoid a disaster if we purely rely on that sort of methods) but by making … the clouds more white, or “climate engineering” as he calls it.

One possibility is to make a small investment in climate engineering—ways of artificially lowering the temperature to postpone the rise in temperatures. For instance, automated boats could spray seawater into the air to make clouds whiter, and thus more reflective, augmenting a natural process. Bouncing just 1 or 2 percent of the total sunlight that strikes the Earth back into space could cancel out as much warming as that caused by doubling pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases. Spending about $9 billion researching and developing this technology could head off $20 trillion of climate damage. To put this in context, the U.S. annual budget on climate research is $6 billion a year: for just 18 months' worth of this spending, we might be able to avoid any additional temperature rise for the rest of the century. Climate engineering would raise ethical and logistical issues that warrant discussion, but we should welcome the possibility of a cheap, effective response to global warming.

Hallelujah ! A mere 9 billion USD and our planet is safe for some time to come. How come I do feel some scepsis about this, as I always do when I hear something that actually sounds to good to be true ? Yet I can’t deny either that it is one of the sexiest ideas I’ve heard about in this entire climate change debate and it actually claims to be a (stop-gap) solution, which makes it refreshing from the mostly gloomy soundbites we more often get to hear in this sort of discussions. Everything posturing as even only part of a solution is welcome in my opinion, for though I may not be able to save the world, I do care about my own self-preservation, amongst others.


Lomborg took the idea from John Latham and Stephen Salter – and some acknowledgement of that fact wouldn’t have been out of place, I figured. Anyway. here’s in a nutshell how the original author of the idea envisages it to work:

Clouds play an important role in the global climate system. Some types, such as marine stratocumulus clouds, can have a significant cooling effect thanks to their ability to reflect sunlight back out to space before it ever reaches the surface of the planet.

Prof Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh has a plan to expand the size and whiteness of these clouds using a fleet of remote-controlled, energy-self-sufficient ships. The ships use energy from the wind to propel themselves around and spray minuscule droplets of sea water into the air. These droplets become the nuclei, or "seeds", around which reflexive stratocumulus clouds can form.

As the water evaporates, tiny particles of salt would be carried into low-lying stratocumulus clouds by rising air currents. The salt would whiten the clouds, making them more reflective, and also create more water droplets, further reducing the amount of sunrays penetrating the atmosphere.


I think it’s going to be an eerie sight, this fleet of “drone” ships floating around our oceans, spitting water into the air like whales and creating clouds that hover above their hulls as if they were tied to the ships like balloons (just imagine Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass taking this on for a sequel to their Koyaanisqatsi / Powaqqatsi / Naqoyqatsi trilogy. Surely they wouldn’t have to look for some good cloudy day). Professor Salter is well aware as well that, even if his plans would get beyond the design phase and would actually be implemented, this is not the final solution to the climate change problem:

Salter believes that if fifty of these ships were built each year the fleet would be capable of increasing the reflexivity of the planet sufficiently to cancel out the temperature rise caused by man-made climate change. This wouldn't solve the CO2 problem, nor will it tackle ocean acidity. But the plan could create a window of opportunity in which the global economy could be decarbonised without the earth being pushed over the threshold of runaway global warming

The Newsweek article was interesting but does leave several questions unanswered, such as what would be the to-be-expected side-effects of this technique and what does the author mean with the ethical issues related to this subject. Still, to me it had a nicely reassuring effect to know that Big Science is actually working on solutions that can buy us time in this race against the clock, for as the Manchester Report clearly points out: Professor Slater's solution is by far not the only one that is on the drawing table.

The final turnaround however will only come when all of us realise that we need to decrease the size of our shoes, i.e. drastically reducing our ecological footprint. And that is going to take some while before we get there, so in the meantime I'm open to all suggestions ... till we get it really right in the end.

Sincerely Yours.

Aristotle for Afghanistan

Remember Umberto Eco's masterpiece "The Name of the Rose" ?
Remember that book about a book that allegedly never existed, while for others it merely went missing ?
The second book of the "Poetics" by Aristotle.
The one that was supposed to have dealt with "Comedy" ...

Have you never had the feeling these last ten-something years that the plot of this novel was played out in real life -hic et nunc- albeit it in, for most of you whoever will read this piece, a far different and distant place on this earth ?

The venerable Jorge had been guarding the book in the famous labyrinth of the library to keep it from the eyes of his fellow brethren, for fear that laughter would distract the attention that is due to God and to God only ... like the Taliban have tried to subdue laughter in Afghan society for it distracts attention from Allah. The old Jorge and the Taliban: all "scholars", yet so afraid of the power of words.

We all have witnessed, maybe some in the field, most from behind our screens and magazines, how this fear has worked out and has been translated in the extremist islamic rule by the Taliban before the US invasion in 2001. It was a rule of terror, based on an impossible number of prohibitions and most poignantly, reducing the status of the Afghan woman in society to something devoid of any respect for human dignity.

The US invasion in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban was probably the first and only war I wholeheartedly supported, because it promised, even if only as a side-effect of the real goal, which was going after Al-Qaeda, to redress a wrong against women that was almost intolerable even just to read or hear about, let alone having to live it. Because of this reason, I have kept believing in the justification for this war almost till this very day, but seeing this footage finally has made me seriously doubt.

For those who want to watch this part of the documentary, I have to put a strong disclaimer that there are some very graphic images being shown. The overall message is clear: life has not gotten better for Afghan women since the invasion, except maybe for some women in the major urban areas, but oppositely may have gotten worse as a result. As one of the interviewed is saying, under the Taliban, women had no rights and had to stay in their house and wear burqua's on the rare occasions they could come out; now they still have very limited rights, they still mostly stay in their houses but on top of that they now live in a war-zone and women are always disproportional victims in war-zones. Furthermore, self-immolation by Afghan women has seen a steady increase in numbers, it is said.

So where does that leave us ? If what this documentary shows is true, and I have no reason to doubt it, the major moral premisse for protracting this war, is just not there. It's not happening: women are not being empowered by the actions of the western allied forces. Worse: now even their western-backed leader, Hamid Karzai, is signing into law a proposal that does nothing less than justify rape within a marriage. It is becoming increasingly clear that we absolutely need to rethink Afghanistan in the West. Maybe we shouldn't have been there in the first place: had the US not backed the Mujahideen, which eventually evolved into the Taliban, as opposition to the Russian forces that held the country occupied in the eighties, there might not have been the current quagmire.

Yet what options do Afghan women face ? Continue living in a war zone for probably years to come, however with the intent to restore some sense of normalcy and returning them at least some of their human rights in the long run, or delivering them again in the hands of the Taliban, these venerable "scholars" who blast up schools and throw acid over young girls faces if they attempt for some education in one of those schools. The choice is more than heartwrenching.

If there's anybody who has got a copy left of the second book of the "Poetics", the one on "Comedy", by Aristotle, hidden somewhere deep down in his cellar, would he please bring it out and start mass printing it, such that laughter, even in Afghanistan, may not be lost for good once that other remaining copy is eaten by the fire in that labyrinth of the library of those that proclaim to be the true followers of Allah ?

Sincerely yours.

Bucket

I suppose it must be a highly irreverant remark for these Hindu's, but this picture (INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP/Getty Images) made me immediately smilingly think of the staging for Samuel Beckett's "Fin de Partie" (or "Endgame"):

The setting for Endgame is a bare, partially underground room, serving as shelter for the four characters: Hamm the master, Clov his servant, and Hamm's father and mother, Nagg and Nell (who live in garbage cans). Hamm is in a wheelchair and makes Clov move him around the room, fetch objects, and look out the window for signs of life. Outside all seems dead and nothing happens. Inside, the characters pass the time mortifying each other and toying with fears and illusions of a possible change, all along sensing the inevitability of their end.

 I hope these holy men won't have to wait for Godot before they can leave their garbage cans.

Sincerely Yours.

Borderstone

Now this was quite interesting...

When acclaimed director Oliver Stone was walking the red carpet of the Venice Film Festival this week, he was not alone. By his side, he had not his wife or another eyeblinding beauty, as is mostly the case at this sort of events, but ... a genuine president: Hugo Chàvez of Venezuela. The seemingly odd couple was at the festival to attend the premiere of Stone's latest documentary "South of the Border", which more or less stars Chàvez as the champion of the left-oriented "Bolivarian Revolution" in Latin-America, rooted in Venezuela but which has spread towards some of the neighbouring countries as well, most prominently the Ecuador of Rafael Correa and the Bolivia of Evo Morales.

I must admit, when I first saw the pictures and read the story, I was completely taken by surprise. I had not yet heard the first word about Stone's new movie, but lately I had started to dig a little into the figure of Chàvez. So, to see one of Hollywoods icons parade in front of the assembled press with one of the United States worst nightmares, was intriguing to say the least.

But maybe the movie shouldn't come as a surprise at all. After all, Oliver Stone had already done a political documentary in 2003 on that other Latin-American revolutionary, Fidel Castro, titled "Commandante", which was fairly supportive of the man. As such, to those that want to put Stone in the red camp, "South of the Border" will probably be considered more of the same. The usual "Quod erat demonstrandum ...".

Myself, I'm a fan of Oliver Stone. I like directors who go after the big stories, even if they are considered "controversial" among certain audiences: the Vietnam legacy in "Platoon", the murder on Kennedy in "JFK", the ethics and politics of journalism in "Salvador", free speech and porn in "The People vs. Larry Flynt" (which he produced)... Still, ever since I saw this news headline, I've been asking myself if it's not a very thin line Stone is walking by giving so much airspace to Chavez, who is himself just involved in shutting down a large amount of radiostations in Venezuela. The question is bogging me down a little bit. I'm not impressed really by "El Presidente" and what I've seen from him so far. Ofra Bikel, producer of a pretty concise documentary about Chavez on "Frontline" said he really seems like a revolutionary desperately in search of a revolution, which he never really had (Chàvez as president has always been elected, though he tried an aborted coup d'état in 1992, which landed him in prison).

"He would love to be another Castro. He admires Castro because he admires heroes. And Castro really is a hero. He was a revolutionary -- he fought. Poor Chávez, all he did was win an election -- not that heroic, and I think it embarrasses him. On the other hand, I don't think Chávez has the brains of Castro, or the bravery."

And to go and stand in front of the United Nations to give a rant about "devil" Bush, is almost like the pot blaming the kettle he's black: Chàvez is seeking out an enemy, just like the one he has picked -the United States- does, in order to give "legitimacy" to and create a perceived need for his strong leadership.

Yet, I don't know Oliver Stone other than from his movies, but I don't suspect him to be lightly indoctrinated by whoever whispers something into his ear. So if he thinks there is something to say about Chàvez and what this man represents in the wider region of Latin-America that might be of interest for the world to hear, I'm also interested to listen. Albeit only to learn about our own "western" bias in reporting on a phenomenon we may not like very much at our side of the world, but who does seem to have touched a chord with a mass of other people. Criminalizing someone based on his professed ideas of lifting the masses from poverty, is kind of a stretch to me. When you're talking the talk, but you walk an entirely different walk, that's where it's possible to nail someone down. But therefore, it is necessary to know the facts on the ground and I hope Stone's documentary will be able to learn us something in that respect. Something we didn't know yet.

But Chàvez should also heed the call and had better keep in mind when he next closes yet another TV- or radiostation, that one of those he perceives as "the enemy" took out the time and the energy to listen to him and to bring his story out, because this "enemy" had the freedom to do so and made use of that freedom, waves of undoubtedly upcoming criticism notwithstanding. It takes more to be a great leader than to confront your countrymen every Sunday afternoon with your own one-man show on television, publicly announcing populist decisions he has to withdraw just a few days later. Chàvez surely has what it takes to be a tyrant. I hope to see the documentary answer the question whether he also got what it takes to not be a tyrant.

Sincerely Yours.

The Seventh Day

If creation were to start all over again, God wouldn't be resting on the seventh day. No, I like to think he would be blogging on http://oldtestament.blogspot.com about all the magnificent exploits he had performed in the previous six days. After all, one has to keep up with the times, even if the times had just been recreated. Who knows, he might even be following Adam on Twitter. Always nice to see what's going on with your own creation, where he's hanging out, who he's hanging out with and what he's eating. Just think of all the confusion that could be avoided in the centuries to come in this "Second World" by having the First-Hand Source blogging about His ideas, His designs and their implementation Himself.

What I'm saying is: blogging, tweeting and whatever else there is out there, is changing the way this world acts and behaves and whether you like it or not, it's undeniable and pervasive. On my other blog, I opened by saying that someone had invented free speech and it was a software platform. Make that plural, in the meantime. I still stand by that idea. Blogging is the democratization of words and ideas on an unprecedented scale and people are using it in myriad ways, good and bad, to support what they think and push for their beliefs. It's an experiment in, amongst others, self-expression, in de-composing traditional borders and in testing the limits of tolerance and we don't know yet where it will take us.

I may not be much of a blogger really, but I do know that I want to be part of what is happening, by occasionally writing down my own take on things that interest me, encourage me or upset me; by writing about the beautiful or the ugly; by writing about the emotion and the reason. My writings will not be anything like a Big Bang. Rather, they will be silent, minute contributors to the biggest compendium of human civilisation that is being written into existence, word by word, sentence after sentence, on millions of blogs all over this world. It's utter chaos, but maybe one day, from the chaos we'll be able to see emerge some order that can take us further in a world that in almost nothing resembles anymore what it used to be.

The Seventh Day will never be the same again.

Sincerely Yours.