Enjoy IT, CHULA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1Lr4AS3NZY
http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/sara+fleetwood+mac/video/x10n4n_fleetwood-mac-sara-live-79_music
http://www.lyricstime.com/fleetwood-mac-welcome-to-the-run-sara-lyrics.html
SARA
(Fleetwood Mac)
Wait a minute baby...
Stay with me awhile
Said you'd give me light
But you never told be about the fire
Drowning in the sea of love
Where everyone would love to drown
And now it's gone
It doesn't matter anymore
When you build your house
Call me home
And he was just like a great dark wing
Within the wings of a storm
I think I had met my match -- he was singing
And undoing the laces
Undoing the laces
Drowning in the sea of love
Where everyone would love to drown
And now it's gone
It doesn't matter anymore
When you build your house
Call me home
Hold on
The night is coming and the starling flew for days
I'd stay home at night all the time
I'd go anywhere, anywhere
Ask me and I'm there because I care
Sara, you're the poet in my heart
Never change, never stop
And now it's gone
It doesn't matter what for
When you build your house
I'll come by
Drowning in the sea of love
Where everyone would love to drown
And now it's gone
It doesn't matter anymore
When you build your house
Call me home
All I ever wanted
Was to know that you were dreaming
(There's a heartbeat
And it never really died)
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Dientes de flores, cofia de rocío,
manos de hierbas, tú, nodriza fina,
tenme prestas las sábanas terrosas
y el edredón de musgos escardados.
Voy a dormir, nodriza mía, acuéstame.
Ponme una lámpara a la cabecera;
una constelación, la que te guste;
todas son buenas, bájala un poquito.
Déjame sola: oyes romper los brotes...
te acuna un pie celeste desde arriba
y un pájaro te traza unos compases
para que olvides... Gracias... Ah, un encargo:
si él llama nuevamente por teléfono
le dices que no insista, que he salido.
(24 de octubre de 1938)
http://www.bibliotecasvirtuales.com/biblioteca/antologiapoetica/PoesiasAS.asp
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
From The Times
October 30, 2007
Women want to talk about it, but men are more likely to retreat into stoney silence. Our correspondent investigates the science behind how we argue
October 30, 2007
Women want to talk about it, but men are more likely to retreat into stoney silence. Our correspondent investigates the science behind how we argue
In Gapun, a remote village on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, the women take a robust approach to arguing. In her pithy new book The Myth of Mars and Venus, Deborah Cameron reports an anthropologist’s account of a dispute between a husband and wife that ensued after the woman fell through a hole in the rotten floor of their home and she blamed him for shoddy workmanship. He hit her with a piece of sugar cane, an unwise move that led her to threaten to slice him up with a machete and burn the home to the ground.
At this point he deemed it prudent to leave and she launched into a kros – a traditional angry tirade directed at a husband with the intention of it being heard by everyone in the village. The fury can last for up to 45 minutes, during which time the husband is expected to keep quiet. This particular kros went along these lines: “You’re a f****** rubbish man. You hear? Your f****** prick is full of maggots. Stone balls! F****** black prick! F****** grandfather prick! You have built me a good house that I just fall down in, you get up and hit me on the arm with a piece of sugar cane! You f****** mother’s ****!”
Such a domestic scene may be familiar to some readers, but for most of us arguing with our partners is not quite such an explosive business; except, perhaps, when discussing who is most responsible for a navigational hiccup on the way to lunch at the home of an old flame of our partner’s, or getting to the bottom of who left the ****** ******* cap off the **** ******* toothpaste for the third ****** ******* time this ****** ******* week.
Human beings argue about everything from adultery to Zionism and we do so in different styles, whether we are submissive, passive, aggressive, abusive, abusive-passive, aggressive-abusive, submissive-aggressive or submissive-passive-aggressive-abusive.
But are there any broad differences between the sexes in the way that we argue? US research into marital stress on the heart has thrown up an intriguing finding about the way some are prone to “self-silencing” during arguments. The research by Elaine D. Eaker, published in Psychosomatic Medicine, found that more men than women had a tendency to bottle up their feelings during confrontations with their partners.
Tim Smith is a psychology professor at the University of Utah, whose own research has found indications that women’s heart health is affected adversely by quarrels and men’s when they feel they are losing control. There are clear indications, he says, that it is a male tactic to withdraw from arguments. “Women, on average, are more often in the role of the managers of relationship matters. They are often in the position of bringing up and pursuing things they would like to change. This is seen in wives making a request and pursuing it and husbands withdrawing and pulling back. The more of it a couple displays the weaker their relationship future is.”
John Gray, whose Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus is one of the most successful self-help books of all time, explains this male withdrawal process thus: “To avoid confrontation Martians may retire into their caves and never come out. This is like a cold war. They refuse to talk and nothing gets resolved.” He says that it is “passive aggressive behaviour” and Martians are “afraid of confrontation and would rather lie low and avoid talking about any topics that may cause an argument”.
Edward, 37, a freelance writer, says he is a practitioner of the withdrawal method. “I’m useless at arguing. I have things that bother me but when I finally say something I am too slow to win the argument. I’ll make an accusation about what I know is a pattern of behaviour that is hurtful for me. But then I’ll get asked to come up with examples and I’ll freeze. I don’t recall them. I can only launch in when I have all the evidence to back up my argument ready to use. I suppose I’m too lazy to do that. I think women, on the whole, are more practised at arguing, or more interested.”
Gray’s thesis is that the differences and disagreements between men and women don’t hurt so much as the ways in which we communicate them. “Most couples start out arguing about one thing and within five minutes are arguing about the way they are arguing.” The pattern he identifies involves a woman raising an issue, often asking rhetorical questions rather than being direct. The man, rightly or wrongly, hears disapproval. Men, according to Gray, are in great need of approval.
Feeling challenged, the man becomes focused on being right and forgets to be loving. The woman then becomes upset by his unloving delivery and defends herself from his sharpened expressions. Her tone becomes mistrusting and rejecting. Gray says that we need to remember that our partner objects not to what we are saying but how we are saying it.
“Most arguments escalate when a man begins to invalidate a woman’s feelings and she responds to him disapprovingly.” When a woman shares her frustration men go on the defensive. “Every cell in a man’s body reacts with a list of explanations and justifications designed to explain away her upset feelings.”
Christine Northam, a counsellor with Relate, the marriage-counselling service, points to An Introduction to Family Therapy, by R. Dallos and R. Draper, which cautions that “despite these differences between men and women, especially in the supposed concern that women have with feelings, analysis of everyday conversations does little to bear this out.”
But Northam adds that in her experience of many years of helping couples, the way men and women have been conditioned affects the way that they argue and that it true that men have a greater tendency to withdraw. One popular phrase among psychologists is “the distancer and the pursuer”, says Northam. “One of you wants to sort it and the other one backs off: ‘I will shut down and I won’t deal with you.’ That does lead to a lot of tension in the relationship and you end up not addressing what you need to be talking about.
“I do talk with men who find it very, very difficult to engage with their feelings. Women say: ‘He won’t respond to me, he won’t listen, he thinks he’s right all the time.’ Men have been socialised to think that they know what they are talking about. I know it’s changing, it’s really changing a lot. But that’s still around: ‘Men are powerful and what I say goes.’ Women internalise that too. It’s not just the blokes. Women get very frustrated, hysterical, when trying to get their point across because it seems that it just falls on the dead ground all the time. What they are saying is not being picked up and acknowledged and dealt with.
“Certainly the younger men that I see tend to be much more willing to engage with their feelings, keen to understand them and talk about them. Older men find it slightly trickier or more than slightly trickier.”
She adds that women are also capable of the withdrawal technique. “Oh yes, women are quite powerful at doing that as well. They change the subject or rubbish it or cry. Crying is a good one and then the poor man says: ‘Oh my god, she’s in tears’.”
We all recognise that scenario. “I don’t argue a lot but I do cry a lot,” says Sarah, 32, an advertising executive. “I’ll say something harsh to him and he’ll say something probably only equally harsh back and then I’ll be in floods of tears. I call my friend and she says: ‘Where are you?’ ‘In the loo.’ And then when I finally come out after half an hour he’s just watching TV as if nothing has happened.”
Christine Northam says that another major difference between the way men and women argue is that “men tend to resort to aggression very quickly, whereas women are more manipulative and try and present a problem and go on and on about it rather than being succinct. Men get angry and feel defensive and shameful very quickly, then they get aggressive. In the worst-case scenario they get violent. Men tend to probably become more aggressive more quickly overall — but not every time by any means.
“Aggression I would say is more easy to recognise when blokes are arguing. Men want to be more powerful. All couple disagreements are about power and control: who’s going to come out on the top. You have to be ever so grown up to start negotiating and that’s what couple counselling is about — helping to negotiate instead of arguing all the time.”
She says that men are also more prone to decline to take their partner’s concerns seriously. “They say: ‘She’s going on again. Oh, here we go.’ They tend to trivialise. I’m afraid it goes back to our patterning; the stereotypical stuff we have all been fed. We are very much influenced by the way our parents were or even our grandparents. We all like to think we are terribly different but we are not. It stays inside you and so the way you do emotions is learnt in your family. To look at them, understand them and then make a conscious decision that you will do it differently is very grown up.”
Deborah Cameron, the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford, believes that the differences between the way men and women argue are overstated. “The idea that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate is a myth,” she says. She is sceptical of research that examines what people say in staged situations, or that relies on people to report on their own relationships. “I do not believe research based on questions about how people argue that require them to be better observers than almost all people are of their own linguistic behaviour.”
Even if people were to be wired up and recorded over a long time to capture spontaneous arguments, it is hard to draw conclusions about differences between the sexes, she says, because people argue differently in different cultures and situations, as her account of the approach of the women of New Guinea suggests. “It depends which men and women you observe,” she says. The idea that there is no difference between the arguing styles of a woman in the West, her granny and a woman in a tribal village in Africa is “absolute rubbish”.
“You can’t generalise about men and women. Cultural differences are much bigger than gender differences. You need to specify what culture and what community within that culture.” She is scathing of John Gray’s work, which she says “ignores the difference that context and subject matter make, and is massively generalised and exaggerated”.
She says that “it is intriguing to people that there are differences, but people use it as a prop”. But while Cameron is probably right that it is extremely hard to prove in a scientific way that there are differences between men and women in the way that they argue, it is also unlikely that anyone will ever be able to show conclusively that there are no differences. So as long as men and women are still arguing, researchers and writers and psychobabblers will continue to argue about how they are arguing.
And on that note I am going to withdraw from this particular discussion.
At this point he deemed it prudent to leave and she launched into a kros – a traditional angry tirade directed at a husband with the intention of it being heard by everyone in the village. The fury can last for up to 45 minutes, during which time the husband is expected to keep quiet. This particular kros went along these lines: “You’re a f****** rubbish man. You hear? Your f****** prick is full of maggots. Stone balls! F****** black prick! F****** grandfather prick! You have built me a good house that I just fall down in, you get up and hit me on the arm with a piece of sugar cane! You f****** mother’s ****!”
Such a domestic scene may be familiar to some readers, but for most of us arguing with our partners is not quite such an explosive business; except, perhaps, when discussing who is most responsible for a navigational hiccup on the way to lunch at the home of an old flame of our partner’s, or getting to the bottom of who left the ****** ******* cap off the **** ******* toothpaste for the third ****** ******* time this ****** ******* week.
Human beings argue about everything from adultery to Zionism and we do so in different styles, whether we are submissive, passive, aggressive, abusive, abusive-passive, aggressive-abusive, submissive-aggressive or submissive-passive-aggressive-abusive.
But are there any broad differences between the sexes in the way that we argue? US research into marital stress on the heart has thrown up an intriguing finding about the way some are prone to “self-silencing” during arguments. The research by Elaine D. Eaker, published in Psychosomatic Medicine, found that more men than women had a tendency to bottle up their feelings during confrontations with their partners.
Tim Smith is a psychology professor at the University of Utah, whose own research has found indications that women’s heart health is affected adversely by quarrels and men’s when they feel they are losing control. There are clear indications, he says, that it is a male tactic to withdraw from arguments. “Women, on average, are more often in the role of the managers of relationship matters. They are often in the position of bringing up and pursuing things they would like to change. This is seen in wives making a request and pursuing it and husbands withdrawing and pulling back. The more of it a couple displays the weaker their relationship future is.”
John Gray, whose Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus is one of the most successful self-help books of all time, explains this male withdrawal process thus: “To avoid confrontation Martians may retire into their caves and never come out. This is like a cold war. They refuse to talk and nothing gets resolved.” He says that it is “passive aggressive behaviour” and Martians are “afraid of confrontation and would rather lie low and avoid talking about any topics that may cause an argument”.
Edward, 37, a freelance writer, says he is a practitioner of the withdrawal method. “I’m useless at arguing. I have things that bother me but when I finally say something I am too slow to win the argument. I’ll make an accusation about what I know is a pattern of behaviour that is hurtful for me. But then I’ll get asked to come up with examples and I’ll freeze. I don’t recall them. I can only launch in when I have all the evidence to back up my argument ready to use. I suppose I’m too lazy to do that. I think women, on the whole, are more practised at arguing, or more interested.”
Gray’s thesis is that the differences and disagreements between men and women don’t hurt so much as the ways in which we communicate them. “Most couples start out arguing about one thing and within five minutes are arguing about the way they are arguing.” The pattern he identifies involves a woman raising an issue, often asking rhetorical questions rather than being direct. The man, rightly or wrongly, hears disapproval. Men, according to Gray, are in great need of approval.
Feeling challenged, the man becomes focused on being right and forgets to be loving. The woman then becomes upset by his unloving delivery and defends herself from his sharpened expressions. Her tone becomes mistrusting and rejecting. Gray says that we need to remember that our partner objects not to what we are saying but how we are saying it.
“Most arguments escalate when a man begins to invalidate a woman’s feelings and she responds to him disapprovingly.” When a woman shares her frustration men go on the defensive. “Every cell in a man’s body reacts with a list of explanations and justifications designed to explain away her upset feelings.”
Christine Northam, a counsellor with Relate, the marriage-counselling service, points to An Introduction to Family Therapy, by R. Dallos and R. Draper, which cautions that “despite these differences between men and women, especially in the supposed concern that women have with feelings, analysis of everyday conversations does little to bear this out.”
But Northam adds that in her experience of many years of helping couples, the way men and women have been conditioned affects the way that they argue and that it true that men have a greater tendency to withdraw. One popular phrase among psychologists is “the distancer and the pursuer”, says Northam. “One of you wants to sort it and the other one backs off: ‘I will shut down and I won’t deal with you.’ That does lead to a lot of tension in the relationship and you end up not addressing what you need to be talking about.
“I do talk with men who find it very, very difficult to engage with their feelings. Women say: ‘He won’t respond to me, he won’t listen, he thinks he’s right all the time.’ Men have been socialised to think that they know what they are talking about. I know it’s changing, it’s really changing a lot. But that’s still around: ‘Men are powerful and what I say goes.’ Women internalise that too. It’s not just the blokes. Women get very frustrated, hysterical, when trying to get their point across because it seems that it just falls on the dead ground all the time. What they are saying is not being picked up and acknowledged and dealt with.
“Certainly the younger men that I see tend to be much more willing to engage with their feelings, keen to understand them and talk about them. Older men find it slightly trickier or more than slightly trickier.”
She adds that women are also capable of the withdrawal technique. “Oh yes, women are quite powerful at doing that as well. They change the subject or rubbish it or cry. Crying is a good one and then the poor man says: ‘Oh my god, she’s in tears’.”
We all recognise that scenario. “I don’t argue a lot but I do cry a lot,” says Sarah, 32, an advertising executive. “I’ll say something harsh to him and he’ll say something probably only equally harsh back and then I’ll be in floods of tears. I call my friend and she says: ‘Where are you?’ ‘In the loo.’ And then when I finally come out after half an hour he’s just watching TV as if nothing has happened.”
Christine Northam says that another major difference between the way men and women argue is that “men tend to resort to aggression very quickly, whereas women are more manipulative and try and present a problem and go on and on about it rather than being succinct. Men get angry and feel defensive and shameful very quickly, then they get aggressive. In the worst-case scenario they get violent. Men tend to probably become more aggressive more quickly overall — but not every time by any means.
“Aggression I would say is more easy to recognise when blokes are arguing. Men want to be more powerful. All couple disagreements are about power and control: who’s going to come out on the top. You have to be ever so grown up to start negotiating and that’s what couple counselling is about — helping to negotiate instead of arguing all the time.”
She says that men are also more prone to decline to take their partner’s concerns seriously. “They say: ‘She’s going on again. Oh, here we go.’ They tend to trivialise. I’m afraid it goes back to our patterning; the stereotypical stuff we have all been fed. We are very much influenced by the way our parents were or even our grandparents. We all like to think we are terribly different but we are not. It stays inside you and so the way you do emotions is learnt in your family. To look at them, understand them and then make a conscious decision that you will do it differently is very grown up.”
Deborah Cameron, the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford, believes that the differences between the way men and women argue are overstated. “The idea that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate is a myth,” she says. She is sceptical of research that examines what people say in staged situations, or that relies on people to report on their own relationships. “I do not believe research based on questions about how people argue that require them to be better observers than almost all people are of their own linguistic behaviour.”
Even if people were to be wired up and recorded over a long time to capture spontaneous arguments, it is hard to draw conclusions about differences between the sexes, she says, because people argue differently in different cultures and situations, as her account of the approach of the women of New Guinea suggests. “It depends which men and women you observe,” she says. The idea that there is no difference between the arguing styles of a woman in the West, her granny and a woman in a tribal village in Africa is “absolute rubbish”.
“You can’t generalise about men and women. Cultural differences are much bigger than gender differences. You need to specify what culture and what community within that culture.” She is scathing of John Gray’s work, which she says “ignores the difference that context and subject matter make, and is massively generalised and exaggerated”.
She says that “it is intriguing to people that there are differences, but people use it as a prop”. But while Cameron is probably right that it is extremely hard to prove in a scientific way that there are differences between men and women in the way that they argue, it is also unlikely that anyone will ever be able to show conclusively that there are no differences. So as long as men and women are still arguing, researchers and writers and psychobabblers will continue to argue about how they are arguing.
And on that note I am going to withdraw from this particular discussion.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
The Counterfeiters
Philip French
Sunday October 14, 2007
The Guardian
The grim German movie The Counterfeiters , written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, opens intriguingly in a bleak, rundown Monte Carlo days after the end of the Second World War. A weary, poorly dressed man carrying a small case full of money books into a smart hotel. He has a new suit of clothes made, goes in a dinner jacket to the casino, plays recklessly and picks up a high-priced whore. While having sex, she is shocked to see a concentration camp number tattooed on his arm. Why is he here and apparently bent on losing? The answer is given in flashback form, starting in 1936.
The antihero is Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), a Russian Jew celebrated in the underworld as a master forger. Arrested in 1936 by Inspector Herzog, head of the Berlin CID fraud squad, by 1939 he is in the dreadful Mauthausen camp in Austria, wearing the green triangle as a habitual criminal and the yellow star as a Jew. His skills making sketches and portraits of guards and propagandistic murals bring him special privileges.
Then in 1944, he's moved to the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin, where, appropriately, his prewar nemesis Herzog is in charge of a top-secret forgery unit. Their principal task is to produce vast quantities of pounds and dollars as a way of financing the war and undermining the British and American economies.
This is a fictionalised version of a true story not unlike that of Eddie Chapman, the British criminal released from jail in the occupied Channel Islands on condition that he became a Nazi spy. A respectable Jewish banker from Hamburg brought in for his professional skills despises Salomon as a professional criminal, while a communist master printer from the Resistance views him with contempt for his determination to survive.
Salomon and his fellow inmates are faced with a choice. They can collaborate, thus helping the German war effort, they can refuse and be shot, or they can compromise, walking a tightrope of subtle prevarication. When the Germans quit Sachsenhausen, the moderately privileged forgers must justify themselves before the ill-treated, emaciated prisoners from the rest of the camp. This is a fascinating, low-key movie about moral choices and life-and-death decisions made in terrible conditions. Few will emerge from it without considerable respect for its antihero and without asking how they themselves would have acted.
Philip French
Sunday October 14, 2007
The Guardian
The grim German movie The Counterfeiters , written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, opens intriguingly in a bleak, rundown Monte Carlo days after the end of the Second World War. A weary, poorly dressed man carrying a small case full of money books into a smart hotel. He has a new suit of clothes made, goes in a dinner jacket to the casino, plays recklessly and picks up a high-priced whore. While having sex, she is shocked to see a concentration camp number tattooed on his arm. Why is he here and apparently bent on losing? The answer is given in flashback form, starting in 1936.
The antihero is Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), a Russian Jew celebrated in the underworld as a master forger. Arrested in 1936 by Inspector Herzog, head of the Berlin CID fraud squad, by 1939 he is in the dreadful Mauthausen camp in Austria, wearing the green triangle as a habitual criminal and the yellow star as a Jew. His skills making sketches and portraits of guards and propagandistic murals bring him special privileges.
Then in 1944, he's moved to the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin, where, appropriately, his prewar nemesis Herzog is in charge of a top-secret forgery unit. Their principal task is to produce vast quantities of pounds and dollars as a way of financing the war and undermining the British and American economies.
This is a fictionalised version of a true story not unlike that of Eddie Chapman, the British criminal released from jail in the occupied Channel Islands on condition that he became a Nazi spy. A respectable Jewish banker from Hamburg brought in for his professional skills despises Salomon as a professional criminal, while a communist master printer from the Resistance views him with contempt for his determination to survive.
Salomon and his fellow inmates are faced with a choice. They can collaborate, thus helping the German war effort, they can refuse and be shot, or they can compromise, walking a tightrope of subtle prevarication. When the Germans quit Sachsenhausen, the moderately privileged forgers must justify themselves before the ill-treated, emaciated prisoners from the rest of the camp. This is a fascinating, low-key movie about moral choices and life-and-death decisions made in terrible conditions. Few will emerge from it without considerable respect for its antihero and without asking how they themselves would have acted.
The bitterest pill
German film-makers are now daring to tackle the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Can they portray the reality, or must history be sweetened? Jonathan Freedland reports
Friday October 12, 2007
The Guardian
Draw up a list of the major films dealing in the history of the Third Reich, and especially the Holocaust, and a striking fact emerges: none of them is German. Schindler's List was American; Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour masterpiece, Shoah, along with Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, were both French. Roman Polanski's The Pianist had a Polish director, British screenwriter and American star. Whether documentary or drama, The Diary of Anne Frank or The Pawnbroker, Holocaust movies have come out of every place but Nazism's country of origin. On the subject that lies at the heart of contemporary German history, mainstream German cinema has remained all but silent.
Now, though, there is a change. The release of The Counterfeiters, a dramatised account of Operation Bernhard - the plot to flood Britain and the US with forged pound notes and dollar bills, perfectly faked by a squad of mainly Jewish artists, printers and crooks imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp - marks something of a shift. Along with 2005's Downfall, the meticulous study of the last days of Adolf Hitler, holed up in his Berlin bunker, it suggests Germany's film-makers are at last offering an international audience their own interpretation of the events that have shaped them.
And it's not only movies depicting the catastrophe of the 1940s that are gaining worldwide attention. Last year's Academy award for best foreign film went to The Lives of Others, a gripping tale of an East German Stasi agent who eavesdrops on a dissident playwright, his cold, authoritarian heart eventually melted by what he hears. Earlier, foreign audiences had embraced a very different look at the now-vanished German Democratic Republic: the comedy Good Bye Lenin!, in which a young man is forced to maintain the illusion that the Berlin Wall never fell, at least inside the apartment he shares with his mother, who has slept through the great upheaval of 1989 thanks to an eight-month coma.
Cinephiles admire this clutch of new films as evidence of a welcome resurgence in German cinema. But there's more at work here than a boom in German movie-making. In their examination of the consecutive tyrannies that arose in the country, they also afford a glimpse of how Germans currently see their history - and themselves.
Both Downfall and The Counterfeiters suggest a watershed has been reached, part of it simply chronological. "Those old enough to remember those events directly are no longer part of the cinema audience," says the Frankfurt-based writer and publisher, Dr Cordelia Borchardt. "For most of those watching, Hitler is a figure from ancient history. It's less of a taboo." That, she suggests, has freed up film-makers to enter terrain previously considered too sensitive, to tell Germany's darkest stories. "This is about accepting as our own heritage what for so long has been left to others. We dare do it now."
The results are powerful. Karl Markovics's central performance as the Jewish master-forger Salomon Sorowitsch in The Counterfeiters is grimly haunting. The humiliation he undergoes when a Nazi officer casually urinates on him is a scene that lingers in the memory, as is the image of a fellow Jewish inmate processing discarded passports only to chance upon the documents of his own children, both murdered in Auschwitz. The film also lays bare the terrible dilemma that confronted those forced to work for the Nazis. The tension in the story turns on the figure of Adolf Burger - now aged 89 and on whose memoir the film was based - who is determined to sabotage the dollar operation, even at the risk of his own life and those of his fellow inmates, rather than help the Nazi war effort. Similarly, Downfall's evocation of the claustrophobia and delusional madness that engulfed the Führerbunker is flawless.
And yet one senses a subtle form of evasion in both films. "Welcome to the gilded cage," a veteran prisoner tells Salomon when he arrives at the section of Sachsenhausen cleared for Operation Bernhard. The captives are well-fed, sleeping on beds with real sheets and blankets - conditions utterly unlike those elsewhere in Sachsenhausen or in any other concentration camp. More importantly, they are ruled over by an SS officer who is venal, but not murderous. Now, this exceptional situation at least provides The Counterfeiters with a way around the perennial obstacle confronting all films about the Holocaust, namely how to portray the unportrayable (clearly no actors can ever be as bone-thin, as starved, as the camps' real victims). And, to its credit, it repeatedly reminds the audience that what it is witnessing is atypically moderate by Nazi standards. Characters say as much explicitly - "We have it so good in here, while out there ... " - and occasionally reality intrudes. At one point a bullet, fired in an execution in Sachsenhausen proper, pierces the wall of the forgers' enclave.
But that only emphasises the point that the real action, the real horror, is underway on the other side of the wall. The same was true of Roman Polanski's The Pianist, which followed a lone man who escaped the fate visited on every other Jewish inhabitant of the Warsaw ghetto. The cinematic logic for these choices is wholly understandable, but it means that ultimately these films avoid the harshest truths. What we see in The Counterfeiters is, ultimately, a criminal conspiracy rather than a genocidal one. It is showing a corner of the calamity of the Final Solution, but it avoids the vast, looming bulk of it.
Downfall can be viewed the same way. Borchardt remembers her discomfort seeing the film for the first time: its relentless focus "on a few senior Nazis, as if that was the only thing that mattered". The film does depict the destruction of Berlin, and we see the loss of civilian life, but it is true that the key action is behind the reinforced, underground walls of Hitler's bunker. The full horror of that period remains unglimpsed, even unmentioned until a sentence flashed on screen before the end credits, reminding us that 50 million people were killed in the second world war.
There are other concerns at work too. The obvious criticism of Downfall was that it humanised Hitler: Bruno Ganz's Führer is gently solicitous towards his secretaries, kind to his dog and stoic, even brave, when making plans for his own death. (He is also shown hunched, palsied and flying into delusional rages as he orders imaginary armies into battle.) But the truth is that Hitler was a human being, rather than a mythic monster, and the film forces us to confront that much more uncomfortable fact.
Downfall does, nevertheless, surrender to another common, if understandable, need: to find a "good German" in amongst all the evil. We see an SS medic, frantically scouring Berlin, seeking out the wounded and vulnerable. But it also works more broadly, leaving the viewer with the sense that the Nazis were a small ruling cabal, while the rest of the German people were its victims. Even Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, is presented benignly, pleading with the Führer to surrender, so saving Germany's cities and its people. Again, the film seems aware of the message it might be conveying and takes steps to correct it. "The German people chose their fate," says one character. "They gave us a mandate." The trouble is, the character saying these words - allowed to articulate the view made famous by Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners - is none other than Josef Goebbels, a somewhat tainted source.
The context is very different, but a similar dynamic might be at work in the recent movies about the East German experience too. When it comes to evading the full harshness of the past, few movies could touch Good Bye Lenin!. Its GDR is a place whose chief crimes appear to be drabness, naff brands and terrible clothes - with the oppression of state authoritarianism barely hinted at. It is an exquisite example of what became known as "Ostalgia", nostalgia for the Ost, the old East. The film is full of affection for a little country that for 40 years was a socialist holdout against the tide of capitalist consumerism. It is touching, teaching that no people should ever be expected fully, and so rapidly, to despise its own past. But it is a hardly a clear-eyed contemplation of the historical record.
The Lives of Others was hailed as an antidote to Ostalgia, with its fierce gaze on the work of the Stasi, but it too is, however subtly, guilty of some quiet evasions. Ultimately, its Stasi officer is a good man - a good German - who does the right thing. Yet historians concede there were all too few, if any, such cases: two disaffected officers were executed, one in 1979, another in 1981, but the film's hero is different. He gets away with his act of rebellion.
This is not to carp. Each one of these films is outstanding, richly deserving of international attention. They are good, reflective contemplations of the German past which, in turn, reflect well on the society that produced them. But they also hint at what may be a universal truth: that when it comes to its own history, there is only so much reality any nation can bear.
German film-makers are now daring to tackle the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Can they portray the reality, or must history be sweetened? Jonathan Freedland reports
Friday October 12, 2007
The Guardian
Draw up a list of the major films dealing in the history of the Third Reich, and especially the Holocaust, and a striking fact emerges: none of them is German. Schindler's List was American; Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour masterpiece, Shoah, along with Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, were both French. Roman Polanski's The Pianist had a Polish director, British screenwriter and American star. Whether documentary or drama, The Diary of Anne Frank or The Pawnbroker, Holocaust movies have come out of every place but Nazism's country of origin. On the subject that lies at the heart of contemporary German history, mainstream German cinema has remained all but silent.
Now, though, there is a change. The release of The Counterfeiters, a dramatised account of Operation Bernhard - the plot to flood Britain and the US with forged pound notes and dollar bills, perfectly faked by a squad of mainly Jewish artists, printers and crooks imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp - marks something of a shift. Along with 2005's Downfall, the meticulous study of the last days of Adolf Hitler, holed up in his Berlin bunker, it suggests Germany's film-makers are at last offering an international audience their own interpretation of the events that have shaped them.
And it's not only movies depicting the catastrophe of the 1940s that are gaining worldwide attention. Last year's Academy award for best foreign film went to The Lives of Others, a gripping tale of an East German Stasi agent who eavesdrops on a dissident playwright, his cold, authoritarian heart eventually melted by what he hears. Earlier, foreign audiences had embraced a very different look at the now-vanished German Democratic Republic: the comedy Good Bye Lenin!, in which a young man is forced to maintain the illusion that the Berlin Wall never fell, at least inside the apartment he shares with his mother, who has slept through the great upheaval of 1989 thanks to an eight-month coma.
Cinephiles admire this clutch of new films as evidence of a welcome resurgence in German cinema. But there's more at work here than a boom in German movie-making. In their examination of the consecutive tyrannies that arose in the country, they also afford a glimpse of how Germans currently see their history - and themselves.
Both Downfall and The Counterfeiters suggest a watershed has been reached, part of it simply chronological. "Those old enough to remember those events directly are no longer part of the cinema audience," says the Frankfurt-based writer and publisher, Dr Cordelia Borchardt. "For most of those watching, Hitler is a figure from ancient history. It's less of a taboo." That, she suggests, has freed up film-makers to enter terrain previously considered too sensitive, to tell Germany's darkest stories. "This is about accepting as our own heritage what for so long has been left to others. We dare do it now."
The results are powerful. Karl Markovics's central performance as the Jewish master-forger Salomon Sorowitsch in The Counterfeiters is grimly haunting. The humiliation he undergoes when a Nazi officer casually urinates on him is a scene that lingers in the memory, as is the image of a fellow Jewish inmate processing discarded passports only to chance upon the documents of his own children, both murdered in Auschwitz. The film also lays bare the terrible dilemma that confronted those forced to work for the Nazis. The tension in the story turns on the figure of Adolf Burger - now aged 89 and on whose memoir the film was based - who is determined to sabotage the dollar operation, even at the risk of his own life and those of his fellow inmates, rather than help the Nazi war effort. Similarly, Downfall's evocation of the claustrophobia and delusional madness that engulfed the Führerbunker is flawless.
And yet one senses a subtle form of evasion in both films. "Welcome to the gilded cage," a veteran prisoner tells Salomon when he arrives at the section of Sachsenhausen cleared for Operation Bernhard. The captives are well-fed, sleeping on beds with real sheets and blankets - conditions utterly unlike those elsewhere in Sachsenhausen or in any other concentration camp. More importantly, they are ruled over by an SS officer who is venal, but not murderous. Now, this exceptional situation at least provides The Counterfeiters with a way around the perennial obstacle confronting all films about the Holocaust, namely how to portray the unportrayable (clearly no actors can ever be as bone-thin, as starved, as the camps' real victims). And, to its credit, it repeatedly reminds the audience that what it is witnessing is atypically moderate by Nazi standards. Characters say as much explicitly - "We have it so good in here, while out there ... " - and occasionally reality intrudes. At one point a bullet, fired in an execution in Sachsenhausen proper, pierces the wall of the forgers' enclave.
But that only emphasises the point that the real action, the real horror, is underway on the other side of the wall. The same was true of Roman Polanski's The Pianist, which followed a lone man who escaped the fate visited on every other Jewish inhabitant of the Warsaw ghetto. The cinematic logic for these choices is wholly understandable, but it means that ultimately these films avoid the harshest truths. What we see in The Counterfeiters is, ultimately, a criminal conspiracy rather than a genocidal one. It is showing a corner of the calamity of the Final Solution, but it avoids the vast, looming bulk of it.
Downfall can be viewed the same way. Borchardt remembers her discomfort seeing the film for the first time: its relentless focus "on a few senior Nazis, as if that was the only thing that mattered". The film does depict the destruction of Berlin, and we see the loss of civilian life, but it is true that the key action is behind the reinforced, underground walls of Hitler's bunker. The full horror of that period remains unglimpsed, even unmentioned until a sentence flashed on screen before the end credits, reminding us that 50 million people were killed in the second world war.
There are other concerns at work too. The obvious criticism of Downfall was that it humanised Hitler: Bruno Ganz's Führer is gently solicitous towards his secretaries, kind to his dog and stoic, even brave, when making plans for his own death. (He is also shown hunched, palsied and flying into delusional rages as he orders imaginary armies into battle.) But the truth is that Hitler was a human being, rather than a mythic monster, and the film forces us to confront that much more uncomfortable fact.
Downfall does, nevertheless, surrender to another common, if understandable, need: to find a "good German" in amongst all the evil. We see an SS medic, frantically scouring Berlin, seeking out the wounded and vulnerable. But it also works more broadly, leaving the viewer with the sense that the Nazis were a small ruling cabal, while the rest of the German people were its victims. Even Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, is presented benignly, pleading with the Führer to surrender, so saving Germany's cities and its people. Again, the film seems aware of the message it might be conveying and takes steps to correct it. "The German people chose their fate," says one character. "They gave us a mandate." The trouble is, the character saying these words - allowed to articulate the view made famous by Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners - is none other than Josef Goebbels, a somewhat tainted source.
The context is very different, but a similar dynamic might be at work in the recent movies about the East German experience too. When it comes to evading the full harshness of the past, few movies could touch Good Bye Lenin!. Its GDR is a place whose chief crimes appear to be drabness, naff brands and terrible clothes - with the oppression of state authoritarianism barely hinted at. It is an exquisite example of what became known as "Ostalgia", nostalgia for the Ost, the old East. The film is full of affection for a little country that for 40 years was a socialist holdout against the tide of capitalist consumerism. It is touching, teaching that no people should ever be expected fully, and so rapidly, to despise its own past. But it is a hardly a clear-eyed contemplation of the historical record.
The Lives of Others was hailed as an antidote to Ostalgia, with its fierce gaze on the work of the Stasi, but it too is, however subtly, guilty of some quiet evasions. Ultimately, its Stasi officer is a good man - a good German - who does the right thing. Yet historians concede there were all too few, if any, such cases: two disaffected officers were executed, one in 1979, another in 1981, but the film's hero is different. He gets away with his act of rebellion.
This is not to carp. Each one of these films is outstanding, richly deserving of international attention. They are good, reflective contemplations of the German past which, in turn, reflect well on the society that produced them. But they also hint at what may be a universal truth: that when it comes to its own history, there is only so much reality any nation can bear.
London Film Festival
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When bad news is nothing but good
Halle Berry and John Cusack have the Oscars in their sights, David Lynch says farewell to film, and Clint turns in a top tune
Jason Solomons
Sunday October 28, 2007
The Observer
Over the past few years London's film festival has made a habit of hosting prospective Oscar nominees. This year was no exception as two Hollywood stars blossomed into award contenders - Halle Berry, back to her best in Things We Lost in the Fire, and John Cusack in Grace Iis Gone. Both actors are now 41 and have been popular for nearly two decades. They are both flourishing playing characters who initially deny, then deal with, grief over the premature loss of a spouse. Berry, of course, won an Oscar for playing another widow in Monster's Ball in 2002 but she has been trapped in a succession of rotten roles ever since.
Berry is exquisite in Susanne Bier's delicate drama, playing a mother of two in suburban Seattle, numbed after the random shooting of her husband (David Duchovny). As she recovers she strikes up a friendship with her husband's best friend, a recovering heroin addict played with bruised charisma by the superb Benicio del Toro. As in her Danish films such as Open Hearts and After the Wedding, Bier's Hollywood debut concentrates on little twists of fate, tiny glitches in the cosmos, the family drama here occasionally flitting back in time to allow the audience to piece together fragments of emotion. It's to the immense credit of the director and her actors that melodrama is avoided in this tasteful, mournful interpretation of Allan Loeb's script.
Cusack has more of a familiar screen persona to shed than Berry as he takes on the most serious role of his career in Grace is Gone, playing a patriotic father of two young girls whose wife is killed on a tour of duty in Iraq.
Both actors get their big moment coping with the bad news - Berry's is delivered by two policemen, Cusack's by the dreaded visit from two servicemen, and it sends him into a paralysis of denial, so much so that to avoid telling his children the truth he whisks the girls out of school and on to a long road trip from their midwestern home to a Florida amusement park called the Enchanted Garden. Cusack gives his character a silly, pigeon-toed walk and some other over-acted mannerisms, but this simple, downbeat film written and directed by James C Strouse provides him with his finest role and features a marvellous performance from debutante Shelan O'Keefe as his 12-year-old daughter.
The fog of war spreads over London this festival. Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha is perhaps the most intriguing contribution, re-enacting a terrible episode in which US marines exact revenge for a terrorist bombing in an Iraqi town by opening fire on a room full of women and children. It's amazing drama, of course, but perhaps most interesting is the question of whether it's true or not. I have no way of telling, and I think that Broomfield, for so long a documentarist, knows this as he embarks on a new form of dramatic reconstruction cinema.
Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs brought Tom Cruise to Leicester Square and, although widely derided, provided a gripping debate on the subject of the current 'war on terror'. Unfussily directed by Redford, its very simplicity is its virtue, letting the script's ideas come to the fore.
The familiar war in Brazilian cinema is one with favela drug lords, and it is thrillingly explored in City of Men, director Paulo Morelli's follow-up to Fernando Mereilles's City of God. It focuses on two 18-year-olds trying to break out of the ghetto's cycle of guns and violence and face responsibilities as young adults.
Morelli takes in big themes of social pressure and fatherhood while creating a dizzying sensory canvas of Rio slum life, full of colours, samba rhythms and gang warfare. I felt its honesty and positive energy were refreshing in a predominantly gloomy festival.
The cat's whispers
Was Halle Berry joking when she said there was a possibility of Catwoman returning? Radiant in her Versace gown, pregnant Berry told the audience after her Leicester Square screening that she and her Things We Lost in the Fire director Susanne Bier had been discussing reviving her widely-panned role. 'She'd do a lot better job of it than the last time round,' said Berry. At a post-screening reception for the film at Mint Leaf restaurant, I asked the director if they were serious. 'It's true we would like to work together again and I did suggest Catwoman to her. It would be very different, more feminist, but I think we could pull it off, so don't count it out.' We won't.
In tune with Oscar
I've heard a song you'll be hearing on Oscar night. Jamie Cullum sings it and Clint Eastwood wrote it and it's the title track of Grace is Gone, a powerful, bluesy ballad, delivered with gusto, and playing over the final credits to the film. 'It's as if you can hear Clint in the notes as he [Cullum] plays this beautiful, haunting theme,' the film's star, John Cusack, told me. 'It's a blessing for our film.'
Digital Lynch
David Lynch has admitted for the first time that he will never return to traditional cinema. The cult American director of such diverse films as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and The Straight Story told me: 'I'm never going back to 35mm cameras, never, never.' Lynch, who was visiting the LFF to promote the benefits of transcendental meditation with his pal Donovan, used digital technology for his last film, Inland Empire - starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons and Naomi Watts in a bunny suit - which had trouble finding audiences outside his most loyal fans. Despite that film's rough ride, he remained unbowed and declared traditional cinema techniques to be dead, a statement that will shock his many admirers. 'Film has had its day and you could do interesting, beautiful things with it, but digital is the new thing. It's much better, way better for the scenes and every aspect of the story you're telling,' he said. 'Aesthetically you can do so much more with it and more plug-ins are coming along all the time.'
Lynch, who was the subject of the annual David Lean talk at Bafta last night, said he hadn't yet come up with the idea for a new film but that the muse could strike at any moment. 'We're getting to the stage with digital that if you can think it, you can do it. And I meditate twice a day - haven't missed one session in 34 years - and believe me, the ideas come at any time.' With typical humour he added: 'And these days, the ideas come digitally.'
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When bad news is nothing but good
Halle Berry and John Cusack have the Oscars in their sights, David Lynch says farewell to film, and Clint turns in a top tune
Jason Solomons
Sunday October 28, 2007
The Observer
Over the past few years London's film festival has made a habit of hosting prospective Oscar nominees. This year was no exception as two Hollywood stars blossomed into award contenders - Halle Berry, back to her best in Things We Lost in the Fire, and John Cusack in Grace Iis Gone. Both actors are now 41 and have been popular for nearly two decades. They are both flourishing playing characters who initially deny, then deal with, grief over the premature loss of a spouse. Berry, of course, won an Oscar for playing another widow in Monster's Ball in 2002 but she has been trapped in a succession of rotten roles ever since.
Berry is exquisite in Susanne Bier's delicate drama, playing a mother of two in suburban Seattle, numbed after the random shooting of her husband (David Duchovny). As she recovers she strikes up a friendship with her husband's best friend, a recovering heroin addict played with bruised charisma by the superb Benicio del Toro. As in her Danish films such as Open Hearts and After the Wedding, Bier's Hollywood debut concentrates on little twists of fate, tiny glitches in the cosmos, the family drama here occasionally flitting back in time to allow the audience to piece together fragments of emotion. It's to the immense credit of the director and her actors that melodrama is avoided in this tasteful, mournful interpretation of Allan Loeb's script.
Cusack has more of a familiar screen persona to shed than Berry as he takes on the most serious role of his career in Grace is Gone, playing a patriotic father of two young girls whose wife is killed on a tour of duty in Iraq.
Both actors get their big moment coping with the bad news - Berry's is delivered by two policemen, Cusack's by the dreaded visit from two servicemen, and it sends him into a paralysis of denial, so much so that to avoid telling his children the truth he whisks the girls out of school and on to a long road trip from their midwestern home to a Florida amusement park called the Enchanted Garden. Cusack gives his character a silly, pigeon-toed walk and some other over-acted mannerisms, but this simple, downbeat film written and directed by James C Strouse provides him with his finest role and features a marvellous performance from debutante Shelan O'Keefe as his 12-year-old daughter.
The fog of war spreads over London this festival. Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha is perhaps the most intriguing contribution, re-enacting a terrible episode in which US marines exact revenge for a terrorist bombing in an Iraqi town by opening fire on a room full of women and children. It's amazing drama, of course, but perhaps most interesting is the question of whether it's true or not. I have no way of telling, and I think that Broomfield, for so long a documentarist, knows this as he embarks on a new form of dramatic reconstruction cinema.
Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs brought Tom Cruise to Leicester Square and, although widely derided, provided a gripping debate on the subject of the current 'war on terror'. Unfussily directed by Redford, its very simplicity is its virtue, letting the script's ideas come to the fore.
The familiar war in Brazilian cinema is one with favela drug lords, and it is thrillingly explored in City of Men, director Paulo Morelli's follow-up to Fernando Mereilles's City of God. It focuses on two 18-year-olds trying to break out of the ghetto's cycle of guns and violence and face responsibilities as young adults.
Morelli takes in big themes of social pressure and fatherhood while creating a dizzying sensory canvas of Rio slum life, full of colours, samba rhythms and gang warfare. I felt its honesty and positive energy were refreshing in a predominantly gloomy festival.
The cat's whispers
Was Halle Berry joking when she said there was a possibility of Catwoman returning? Radiant in her Versace gown, pregnant Berry told the audience after her Leicester Square screening that she and her Things We Lost in the Fire director Susanne Bier had been discussing reviving her widely-panned role. 'She'd do a lot better job of it than the last time round,' said Berry. At a post-screening reception for the film at Mint Leaf restaurant, I asked the director if they were serious. 'It's true we would like to work together again and I did suggest Catwoman to her. It would be very different, more feminist, but I think we could pull it off, so don't count it out.' We won't.
In tune with Oscar
I've heard a song you'll be hearing on Oscar night. Jamie Cullum sings it and Clint Eastwood wrote it and it's the title track of Grace is Gone, a powerful, bluesy ballad, delivered with gusto, and playing over the final credits to the film. 'It's as if you can hear Clint in the notes as he [Cullum] plays this beautiful, haunting theme,' the film's star, John Cusack, told me. 'It's a blessing for our film.'
Digital Lynch
David Lynch has admitted for the first time that he will never return to traditional cinema. The cult American director of such diverse films as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and The Straight Story told me: 'I'm never going back to 35mm cameras, never, never.' Lynch, who was visiting the LFF to promote the benefits of transcendental meditation with his pal Donovan, used digital technology for his last film, Inland Empire - starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons and Naomi Watts in a bunny suit - which had trouble finding audiences outside his most loyal fans. Despite that film's rough ride, he remained unbowed and declared traditional cinema techniques to be dead, a statement that will shock his many admirers. 'Film has had its day and you could do interesting, beautiful things with it, but digital is the new thing. It's much better, way better for the scenes and every aspect of the story you're telling,' he said. 'Aesthetically you can do so much more with it and more plug-ins are coming along all the time.'
Lynch, who was the subject of the annual David Lean talk at Bafta last night, said he hadn't yet come up with the idea for a new film but that the muse could strike at any moment. 'We're getting to the stage with digital that if you can think it, you can do it. And I meditate twice a day - haven't missed one session in 34 years - and believe me, the ideas come at any time.' With typical humour he added: 'And these days, the ideas come digitally.'
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Once
Copyright © 2007 Fox Searchlight Pictures  | A modern day musical set on the streets of Dublin. Featuring Glen Hansard and his Irish band “The Frames,” the film tells the story of a street musician and a Czech immigrant during an eventful week as they write, rehearse and record songs that reveal their unique love story.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox_searchlight/once/trailera/ |
Sunday, October 07, 2007
http://www.literatura.us/vallejo/trilce.html
XIII
Pienso en tu sexo.
Simplificado el corazón, pienso en tu sexo,
ante el hijar maduro del día.
Palpo el botón de dicha, está en sazón.
Y muere un sentimiento antiguo
degenerado en seso.
Pienso en tu sexo, surco más prolífico
y armonioso que el vientre de la Sombra,
aunque la Muerte concibe y pare
de Dios mismo.
Oh Conciencia,
pienso, sí, en el bruto libre
que goza donde quiere, donde puede.
Oh, escándalo de miel de los crepúsculos.
Oh estruendo mudo.
Odumodneurtse!
... un portento de MUJER.
Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains
http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony/jimmycartermanfromplains/  | Jimmy Carter Man From Plains is an intimate, surprising encounter withPresident Jimmy Carter. Following the path of Mr. Carter’s recentcontroversial book tour for Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, AcademyAward©-winning director Jonathan Demme reveals a complex individual who,with the gusto and determination of a youngster, criss-crosses the countryto get his message across, even as that message creates a media onslaughtin which his credibility and judgment are called into question. JimmyCarter Man From Plains explores both the private and public sides of JimmyCarter, whose intense sense of justice compels him to pursue, withundiminished energy and hope, his lifelong and deeply spiritual vision ofreconciliation and peace.
... PowerPLAY. |
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Del pasado efimero
(Antonio Machado)
Este hombre del casino provinciano
que vio a Carancha recibir un día,
tiene mustia la tez, el pelo cano,
ojos velados por melancolía;
bajo el bigote gris, labios de hastío,
y una triste expresión, que no es tristeza,
sino algo más y menos: el vacío
del mundo en la oquedad de su cabeza.
Aún luce de corinto terciopelo
chaqueta y pantalón abotinado,
y un cordobés color de caramelo,
pulido y torneado.
tres veces heredó; tres ha perdido
al monte su caudal; dos ha enviudado.
Sólo se anima ante el azar prohibido,
sobre el verde tapete reclinado,
o al evocar la tarde de un torero,
la suerte de un tahúr, o si alguien cuenta
la hazaña de un gallardo bandolero,
o la proeza de un matón, sangrienta.
Bosteza de política banales
dicterios al gobierno reaccionario,
y augura que vendrán los liberales,
cual torna la cigüeña al campanario.
Un poco labrador, del cielo aguarda
y al cielo teme; alguna vez suspira.
pensando en su olivar, y al cielo mira
con ojo inquieto, si la lluvia tarda.
lo demás, taciturno, hipocondriaco,
prisionero en la Arcadia del presente,
le aburre; sólo el humo del tabaco
simula algunas sombras en su frente.
Este hombre no es de ayer ni es de mañana,
sino de nunca; de la cepa hispana
no es fruto maduro ni podrido,
es una fruta vana
de aquella España que pasó y no ha sido,
esa que hoy tiene la cabeza cana.
(Antonio Machado)
Este hombre del casino provinciano
que vio a Carancha recibir un día,
tiene mustia la tez, el pelo cano,
ojos velados por melancolía;
bajo el bigote gris, labios de hastío,
y una triste expresión, que no es tristeza,
sino algo más y menos: el vacío
del mundo en la oquedad de su cabeza.
Aún luce de corinto terciopelo
chaqueta y pantalón abotinado,
y un cordobés color de caramelo,
pulido y torneado.
tres veces heredó; tres ha perdido
al monte su caudal; dos ha enviudado.
Sólo se anima ante el azar prohibido,
sobre el verde tapete reclinado,
o al evocar la tarde de un torero,
la suerte de un tahúr, o si alguien cuenta
la hazaña de un gallardo bandolero,
o la proeza de un matón, sangrienta.
Bosteza de política banales
dicterios al gobierno reaccionario,
y augura que vendrán los liberales,
cual torna la cigüeña al campanario.
Un poco labrador, del cielo aguarda
y al cielo teme; alguna vez suspira.
pensando en su olivar, y al cielo mira
con ojo inquieto, si la lluvia tarda.
lo demás, taciturno, hipocondriaco,
prisionero en la Arcadia del presente,
le aburre; sólo el humo del tabaco
simula algunas sombras en su frente.
Este hombre no es de ayer ni es de mañana,
sino de nunca; de la cepa hispana
no es fruto maduro ni podrido,
es una fruta vana
de aquella España que pasó y no ha sido,
esa que hoy tiene la cabeza cana.
DIRECTOR'S CHOICE THE SEVENTH SEAL (Det sjunde inseglet)
THE SEVENTH SEAL (Det sjunde inseglet) 
30 Sep only
![SEVENTHS [PG]](http://cinemacity.co.uk/classes/process.image.php?f=SEVENTHS.jpg)
Sweden 1957
96 mins
director : Ingmar Bergman
starring : Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot, Nils Poppe, Max von Sydow
The enduring masterpiece that inspired so many filmmakers and critics throughout the late ‘50s. Bergman's Faust, this searing morality tale functions on many levels - as a recreation of medieval life, as a desperate debate on religious belief, and as a vision of romantic love. Bergman provides no answers; it's the questions that enthral. Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson relished their first starring roles, and Gunnar Fischer's cinematography was never better.
*This screening will be introduced by Cinema City Director David Litchfield.*
Sunday, September 16, 2007
http://www.apple.com/trailers/lions_gate/ladronquerobaaladron/trailer1/
Copyright © 2007 Lionsgate
Copyright © 2007 Lionsgate
Ladron Que Roba a Ladron
A heist movie in the classic Hollywood tradition, LADRON QUE ROBA A LADRON follows two crack thieves, Emilio and Alejandro, who reunite to rob the biggest thief they know – Moctesuma Valdez, a TV infomercial guru who’s made millions selling worthless health products to poor Latino immigrants. Valdez’s empire is next to impossible to infiltrate. But Emilio and Alejandro know if they go undercover as day laborers – chauffeurs, gardeners, maids, and repairmen – they can rob Valdez blind right under his nose. It’s a perfect plan…except that no one on their team wants the job.
In Theatres: August 31st, 2007 Foreign Joe Menendez (dir.) |
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Trade
Copyright © 2007 Roadside Attractionshttp://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/trade/trailer/
http://www.tradethemovie.com/index.html
http://www.tradethemovie.com/get_involved.html
When 13-year-old Adriana (Paulina Gaitan) is kidnapped by sex traffickers in Mexico City, her 17-year-old brother, Jorge (Cesar Ramos), sets off on a desperate mission to save her. Trapped by an underground network of international thugs who earn millions exploiting their human cargo, Adriana’s only friend throughout her ordeal is Veronica (Alicja Bachleda), a young Polish woman captured by the same criminal gang. As Jorge dodges overwhelming obstacles to track the girl’s abductors, he meets Ray (Kevin Kline), a Texas cop whose own family loss leads him to become an ally. From the barrios of Mexico City and the treacherous Rio Grande border, to a secret internet sex slave auction and a tense confrontation at a stash house in suburban New Jersey, Ray and Jorge forge a close bond as they frantically pursue Adriana’s kidnappers before she is sold and disappears into a brutal underworld from which few victims ever return.
Trailer (2:23)
Drama
Rating: R
In Theatres: September 28th, 2007
Marco Kreuzpaintner (dir.)
Kevin Kline
Cesar Ramos
Alicja Bachleda
Paulina Gaitan
Marco Perez
... male educati.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Summer short story special
Message In A Bottle
Every solid thing had turned into its watery equivalent.
The rain fell in long, straight chains, each drop linked to the last - long lines of rain, welded out of the iron-grey sky and dropped like security shutters, sealing off road from road, town from town.
Drive straight on - no, the road is impassable; turn in a bath of rain, the wings of the car splashing like a bird. There are no birds flying this afternoon. No birds bathing in a shallow stone trough of water. There is no shallow water. By evening the roads will be canals, and the steep rises up the valley will be waterfalls. The river and the road are the same thing now and none of us can walk on water.
"I have to get home," I say to the policeman at the roadblock, but he shakes his head, rain running like tears down his face. I look ahead; everything is soaked, shifting, except the rain itself, which to all appearances is solid. Can't see through it, can't see past it. The rain is like a room where the walls are gradually moving closer together. Soon I'll be like a saint in a glass case, a relic from another time. The rain will close round me like I'm a message in a bottle, like I'm a genie in a jar. The lead sky will plug the top and I'll never get out, never. That'll be me, nose pressed up against the rain-glass, a homunculus in an alembic. On this alchemical afternoon when nature is switching her liquids and solids, my outline is beginning to blur. I say to the policeman - "I have to get home."
He shakes his head slowly, because things move more slowly under water. He turns to talk to a lorry driver hulked inside yellow waterproofs, his red face the colour and texture of soggy corned beef. I try my mobile again, the rain running up my sleeve as far as my elbow. Then, as the policeman goes with the lorry driver towards his cab to get a map, I realise I can slip back in my car, release the handbrake and just roll out of sight, down the hill, down the road I need to get home.
I suppose this is a crime - failing to obey an officer in uniform, but if I park the car and wait to be rescued, how long will I be waiting? Life is not a fairy tale and I am not a princess. There is no happy ever after. Marriage has taught me that.
I get in the car. I make my getaway. My heart is beating like it's someone else's - you never notice your own heartbeat - and my heart is someone else's. I'll get home to you. I'm on my way home. Message Sending Failed
Drive on.
I'm driving on. The off-road tyres were never designed to turn catamaran. I'm gliding duck-wise down through the rising floods, not far now to my turning, when I remember that water is always level - not sometimes, always. One of the characteristics of water, other than its wetness, is that it is always level. I realise, too late, that the water-level on the road is much deeper than I have reckoned because this road dips. I've driven it thousands of times and I know that it dips, but, yet, I have been driving along it in all the serenity of it being straight. A wet road, a treacherous road, but a straight road.
Wrong.
In slow motion the water comes up over the windscreen like a fish tank filling. Up the glass it goes, and I am back at home as a child, my nose pressed up against the glass of our aquarium as my father gently fills it with the special hose, and the coral arch, and the little plastic statue of Poseidon and the mermaid with her comb on her rock each become magnified slightly, and the weed stands and floats, and finally the four angel fish and two zebra fish are lowered back in their net, and my father's finger and thumb sprinkle fish-flakes on the level surface of the water.
Then the water rises over the top of the car.
Jesus! This car has electric windows and no electrics. My breath is shallow as the water is deep. How much air have I got? This is a hatchback, so the spare tyre is in the rear under the carpet, and I once saw a film where James Bond breathed the air from the tyre, but I am not James Bond, and to open the door I must equalise the pressure in the car and to do that I must smash the window, and to do that... tyre... wheel brace...
I scramble over the back, find the heavy metal wheel brace, and smash it with all my strength into the rear window. It shatters. With the water like a power-jet fighting me, I lug at the stupid wires of the heated rear window and try to make a hole that will take me out. Now I am on the inside of the aquarium and if I can't make a hole big enough, and I can't, I must wait, wait, until the water takes control of the car, and... here it comes, total terror and one deep breath, my hair floating like weed.
I have to turn slowly back to the front, and beg my hands to work the handle that works the door...
The door gives, and I lie down and shove it with both feet. I come straight out like a birth, and behind me my tiny Titanic carries what was my life. I am out.
In the rush of jubilation, heady as the air I can suddenly breathe freely, I missed the fallen tree; that is, I didn't miss it, I hit my head on it and passed out.
Susan hasn't come home yet - she was in the car - yes, we are worried... her mobile - no. there's been no signal all day. I hope so, too.
You have... two new messages, and a saved message, saved message, saved message. Martin... it's Susan.
When I came round, I was floating quietly down the river-road like Ophelia, like the Lady of Shalott, like Winston Churchill's funeral barge, like the Take That! final tour, like the stones floated down the Thames to build St Paul's Cathedral, like Francis Drake sailing up from Deptford after scuttling the Armada, like a whale, huge on the outside, tiny on the inside, who thinks he can drift slowly past the docks and wharves, turn round at Tower Bridge and go home again, but he never can go home again because he's bigger than he knows, and the river is not so deep as it was once, in the old days, in the stories that one whale tells to another, stories like tubes of glass blown out into the sea.
And that was me, perfectly sealed in a glass tube, where the water had hardened around me like resin.
And that was me, floating home.
Martin stood on the back steps of the house looking at the river. It would not reach the house - it was built high enough up the bank - but the garden was now a lake. He watched the rain, thinking how rain is usually transparent, and how this rain was dark, each drop like lead-shot. It wasn't cold but the rain was harsh and heavy, hailstone rain. A new kind of rain, he thought, hostile, unforgiving, not like mercy, like punishment. But why should humans expect any mercy? Where was Susan?
Martin was going to tell Susan about Caroline. He had two pizzas from the freezer and a couple of bags of that salad washed in chlorine or toilet bleach or whatever it was the supermarkets did to salad to make it last longer or to kill the bugs. He had promised to make supper, but it seemed a waste to buy anything nice when neither of them would feel like eating, and when she would probably throw the food at him. He hadn't chosen anything too wet or too tomatoey for that reason.
She should have been home long before now. He wanted her to be all right, to be safe - and part of him, not a big part, only a fingernail or a nostril, wanted her to be dead. Clean and simple dead. Then he could be sorry, and he would be sorry, too, because he had loved her once, when love had seemed clear and transparent, before it darkened and hardened, and fell like a shutter between them. Yes, if she were dead, a quick painless death by water, then he would be free to remember all the good things, and later, no one, not even her own parents, would begrudge him Caroline. He would be free.
But he knew there would be no such thing as a merciful ending.
He looked at the sky. Lead-shot.
The water has quickened. I can only steer this thing by swinging my arms and legs from side to side, like steering a go-cart, or one of those lie-down pedal cycles. I can't explain how I have come to be inside a pod of water, but that is what has happened. There is no water inside the water, and I can breathe. The falling rain makes it difficult to see out, but I know that after the dip the river runs under the bridge, which means... whoa! White-water rafting is not a suitable method of transport. But it doesn't matter because this river is our river and all I have to do now is snag myself to the bank and call Martin.
Martin was standing at the back door when he thought he heard his name being called by someone far away as a dream is far away. The voice was familiar but uncanny; known and not. He hesitated, then he put on his coat.
The river was swollen, its tongue dark and foaming behind the trees. He thought about time being a river, and never step in the same river twice, but if he could go back in time, he would, wading up the current of his life until he got to the place where love had dried up, where there was no water, no wading, only a thick bed of stones. Being in bed with Susan was like that now - stones.
Martin stood still. There were things floating in the river: books, a photograph album, a bouquet of white roses, a shoe. Someone's house must be flooded already, he ought to save these things and give them back. He wondered what he would grab and run with if his own house were flooding.
He leaned in and dragged two books and the photograph album out of the water. A teddy bear was spinning towards him with that look of regret common to stuffed toys of a certain age. He hauled him out and sat him in the fork of the willow.
Martin opened the photograph album. A young man with a new haircut smiled at him. The woman at his side was holding out her hand, newly ringed.
Something was bumping against his legs. It was a bed. It took him all his strength to pull it clear. He sat on the side of the wooden frame, panting. Behind the bed was a chest of drawers, then a picnic table, then a gas cooker, then a 60s Mini, then a cot. The cot was crying. Martin jumped straight in and grabbed the cot in both arms, bracing his body against the swirling water. The cot was empty.
Now he was in the middle of the river, but the river had become a conveyor belt and, rocking giddily towards him, half floating, half submerged, came the detritus of his past, the long-gone objects forgotten and thrown away, lost and buried, land-filled, recycled, charity-shopped and dumped, replaced, refitted, disappeared forever, over and done with, life is a straight line, time's arrow, time's river, flow on, flow on. What happens when the floods come?
There was a dead body coming towards him. He screamed and hid his face. The body spun in the high water like an astronaut in space, weightless and loose, then caught on a branch like a puppet, freed itself, floated on.
There were others in the river with him now, coming closer with questioning looks on their faces. Friends he had had to leave behind - Martin was an ambitious man - colleagues he had regretfully dismissed - Martin was a leader - his son, he hadn't seen much of his son. The river rose.
What's this, floating nearer, as he stands up to his chest in the clear fast water? He can see her feet like the feet of an embalmed Pope. But she isn't embalmed, she's alive, and she's his wife, and she's coming down the river like a ship sighted and feared, thought lost and damned, crewed by spectres. The spectre of his wife rushing at him feet first. He catches the pod. It bursts like a soap bubble. She's in the water with him, her head cut and bleeding, dripping red drops like hurt rain.
Susan is hurt.
Imagine it. The flood waters subside and the ark comes to rest on top of Mount Ararat. The dove returns with an olive branch in her mouth.
Imagine it. Years and years later, the ground is long since dry and fertile, and the boat is still up there, beached on its mountain-top like a memory-point - absurd, impossible testimony to something that never happens.
But it did happen.
Later, I realised that I wanted to get home so very badly because some part of me knew that home would never be as it had been after that day. My life with Martin, our life together, was washing away; one more day of rain and it would be gone.
I knew what he was going to tell me. I knew how I was going to respond. We were both ready for the last act, and then the rain came, merciless and clear, and the river rose, depositing the past for us both to see; our beginning, and then, our end.
He plans everything, but this was not the plan. My heart beating too fast, I sank because I was drowning anyway. Just keeping my head above water, hoping.
But in the castaway stories of shipwreck and loss, something finds its way to the shore. The floods that destroy also return, and where I landed was where I left so long ago - a landing place I used to call my own. A place to begin again.
I was already sealed and stoppered, locked and nailed down, put in a bottle by the enchantments of fear, every fluid element hardening around me, dark transformation of pain.
In the wreckage I escaped. I stood up, water coursing down my body, blood on my face. But these were liquids and not stones, this was movement, not mass. The casing had shattered - what was inside was not pretty, but it was alive. I am alive.
Inside the bottle, a piece of paper, a story in a glass tube. Unfold it, what does it say?
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.
And the paper is dry land, and the story is a place to begin again.
© Jeanette Winterson, 2007
...El Valle de Calafia.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
http://www.bbc.co.uk/britishfilm/summer/films/enigma.shtml
Showing:
BBC TWO, Saturday September 1, 10.35pm
Synopsis:
(2001) Based on the bestselling novel by Robert Harris, the film pays tribute to the heroic cryptanalysts of Bletchley Park. Tom Jericho, a brilliant code breaker recovering from a breakdown brought on by his obsessive desire for the beautiful Claire.
Returning to Bletchley Park, he finds himself embroiled in two seemingly unrelated mysteries. One involves Claire's sudden disappearance, the other is a race to crack the Germans' Enigma code before their subs make mincemeat of an Allied convoy crossing the Atlantic. With help from Claire's room mate Hester, Tom uncovers a web of betrayal and intrigue every bit as fiendish as the Enigma itself.
Director:
Michael Apted
Producer:
Mick Jagger
Cast:
- Dougray Scott (Thomas Jericho)
- Kate Winslet (Hester Wallace)
- Saffron Burrows (Claire)
- Jeremy Northam (Wigram)
- Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Puck)
- Tom Hollander (Logie)
- Donald Sumpter (Leveret)
- Matthew Macfadyen (Cave)
Review:
Email us your review of this film
Enigma is a superior period drama that pays tribute to the heroic cryptanalysts of Bletchley Park. They spent World War II deciphering the codes Nazi U-boats used to communicate with each other. Stylishly directed by Michael Apted from an intelligent Tom Stoppard script, it's a ripping yarn that recalls such early Hitchcock classics as The Secret Agent and The Man Who Knew Too Much.Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci avoided the palette and mixed colors directly on the canvas, Italian researchers said after they reconstructed his work step by step "as if watching him while he painted."
Leonardo Painting techniques
Da Vinci's Painting Technique Uncovered
FLORENCE, Italy (Sept. 1) - Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci avoided the palette and mixed colors directly on the canvas, Italian researchers said after they reconstructed his work step by step "as if watching him while he painted."Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
Under the Same Moon (La Misma Luna)
Copyright © 2008 Fox Searchlight Pictures
UNDER THE SAME MOON (LA MISMA LUNA) tells the parallel stories of nine-year-old Carlitos and his mother, Rosario. In the hopes of providing a better life for her son, Rosario works illegally in the U.S. while her mother cares for Carlitos back in Mexico. Unexpected circumstances drive both Rosario and Carlitos to embark on their own journeys in a desperate attempt to reunite. Along the way, mother and son face challenges and obstacles but never lose hope that they will one day be together again. Riggen’s film is not only a heartwarming family story; she also offers subtle commentary on the much-debated issue of illegal immigration.
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Trailer_inglés
Friday, August 24, 2007
In 1978 John Pidgeon covered the Police's first US tour. Nearly 30 years later he joined the reunited band as they took to the road once more
http://music.guardian.co.uk/rock/story/0,,2155024,00.html
'Whatever we do, this will always be the seminal band'
In 1978 John Pidgeon covered the Police's first US tour. Nearly 30 years later he joined the reunited band as they took to the road once more
Friday August 24, 2007
The Guardian
On page 253 of his compellingly readable memoir, One Train Later, Andy Summers logs the April 1978 release of the Police's Roxanne, adding tersely, "It gets reviewed by John Pidgeon in Melody Maker." That short statement telescopes into a more convoluted reality. True, for one issue only, I was MM's singles reviewer, though not until mid-October, by which time Roxanne was a six-month-old stiff. But that record was still a hit on my turntable, so I made it the yardstick by which I would judge the new releases.
Roxanne had come at me out of nowhere on a wavering car radio signal, as so much rock'n'roll of my short-trousered youth had, title or artist's name or both obscured by static, leaving only a half-heard lyric and melodic hook lodged in my brain along with a memory of the palpable thrill they had provoked. It took a trawl of record shops to track it down. "It was the Police's Roxanne, and it still makes me tingle," I preambled. "I had no idea who they were, and I still don't really, but I don't care. Roxanne is simply a great single." And if that reads like an all-too-obvious endorsement of an acknowledged pop classic, remember: Roxanne was a flop, a sleeper that wouldn't chart until May 1979.
My singles column appeared on Thursday October 12. No one had matched Roxanne - not Elton John, not PiL, not Bruce Springsteen. That afternoon A&M Records' press office rang, asking if I would be free to spend some time on the road with the Police in November. Let me check my diary. In the States? I'm free.
I had already seen the Police play live, at one of the scant 10 gigs they had played since April. The venue was the Nashville Room in West Kensington, and I was accompanied by two pals, former Faces keyboard player Ian McLagan, who'd been every bit as excited as I had on hearing Roxanne, and lugubrious, lovable Kevin Coyne, in whose band Andy Summers had played and who was intrigued by his erstwhile guitarist's punk makeover. While Kevin chuckled over Summers' bottle-blond hair, Mac and I scoured the sparse crowd for someone who might be Sting, our only sight of the singer having been an arty Xeroxed image on the single's sleeve. It was the parachute suit and peroxide crop that persuaded us we'd found him, but, to be certain, Mac asked, "You're Sting, aren't you?" to which Sting responded, "Yes, but you're Ian McLagan."
Half a lifetime later, on July 28 2007, after the first of two formidable performances at Boston's Fenway Park on the US leg of their reunion tour, the Police are convoyed back to their hotel with a full lights-and-sirens police escort, each intersection cleared of cross traffic, every red light run as green. Having sprinted from stage to car, Stewart Copeland heads for his room to shower. A couple in the lift have seen the cavalcade arrive going the wrong way up a one-way street. The woman will rail against this extravagant abuse of her top-rate tax dollars, but, before she does, her husband asks the still-sweating drummer what he has done to merit such treatment. Copeland grins and says, "Easy, why d'you think I named my band the Police?"
My band. Which it had been, originally. Having tired of the unwinnable race to recoup record company advances, been invigorated by the punk scene, and spotted a singing bass player in Newcastle ready to try his luck in London, Copeland had not only come up with a name for the group, but composed its entire repertoire of mile-a-minute thrash and found a three-chord Corsican guitarist, Henry Padovani, to help play it.
"It was a difficult period," confided Sting, that singing bass player, in 1978. "Stewart had wanted to form a new wave group, but I'd just come down from playing in a jazz group and I wasn't exactly keen, but I was inspired by the amazing energy of the whole thing, and I thought, 'Well, I'm new to London and I'm totally unknown, so I'll give it a go.' We did a 15-minute lightning set and I squealed and screamed."
Then Summers, already an experienced player, saw them at the Marquee. "I thought there was fantastic potential in Sting and Stewart," he explained. "I'd always wanted to play in a three-piece band and throughout all my years of playing I never had. I felt that the three of us together would be very strong. They just needed another guitarist and I thought I was the one." The group played a French punk festival as a four-piece; then there were three.
The effect of Summers' arrival was instant. "One by one, Sting's songs had started coming in," Copeland explained, "and when Andy joined, it opened up new numbers of Sting's we could do, so the material started to get a lot more interesting and Sting started to take a lot more interest in the group." Despite the lack of progress represented by those 10 UK gigs in seven months, Copeland insists today that he never doubted - "never for a second" - that the trio would make it, the core of his unshakable confidence being his belief in Sting.
"The minute I saw Sting," he recalls, "playing in the refectory [of St Mary's College, Newcastle], I thought, 'There is a unique talent that is going all the way to the top.' Once we were in a band together, I would go on stage knowing that whatever was going to go wrong, Sting was going to kick ass, and he wasn't going to quit until he'd got the place going."
Summers joined the Police in August 1977 - lending this current tour, which comes to the UK on September 4, the air of a 30th anniversary - and owns up to moments of doubt during those first 12 months. "We'd been at it for a year, and just basically hanging by a thread," he recalls. "There wasn't anything happening. There was no point in doing gigs, because we'd end up with about two quid each a night. Then we lined up that first little tour of the East Coast of the US, and that's where it started."
I met them in Washington, DC, on November 10 1978, and took advantage of my tab at the Watergate Hotel, several stars swankier than the band's budget accommodation, to treat them to dinner. After two shows at the Atlantic Club, I joined them in their van for the drive to Philadelphia, where they played the half-empty Grendel's Lair, then we drove to New York for two final gigs at CBGB.
The tour had been made possible by three things: Freddie Laker's pioneering Skytrain, which delivered the trio and their tour manager to New York for £100 each; an Econoline van with two rows of seats and space behind for equipment, which their manager, Miles Copeland (Stewart's brother) had bought earlier in the year for a Squeeze tour; and the support of a third Copeland, Ian, an agent who would not have picked up the phone to book $200 club gigs for anyone other than his kid brother. That fee covered two modest hotel rooms, fuel for the van, and a $20 per diem each for food and drink. Some nights they made more, which took care of extras and their flights back to the UK.
On my own (non-Laker) flight home, I composed the opening paragraph of my piece: "The Police are not punk. The Police are not disco. The Police are not heavy metal. The Police are not power pop. The Police are just the best rock and roll band I've seen in years." I assured MM's editor they would be the next big thing and, as such, deserved the cover, but when the issue appeared they had been demoted to an inside spread, with rockabilly voodoo weirdos the Cramps on the front instead.
By then the Police were back in the UK, supporting student favourites Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias on a short tour, during which it became clear to Summers that "there was something serious happening. The period of self-doubt probably disappeared with the Alberto gig in Bath [on December 1], where there was just this mob scene and hysterical girls, and that was the moment when we went, 'Wait a minute.' That was a turning point, and we started to go like a rocket after that."
Six years earlier, my first major assignment as a music journalist had been to tour, riotously, with the Faces, and as recently as July 1978 I'd caught the end of the Stones' US tour in California, more fun and games. But in Washington, with the Police, I visited the National Air and Space Museum; on a night off in Philadelphia we went to the cinema; and in the van we talked about books. Photographed in New York, Sting hid neither his glasses nor the copy of Daniel Martin he was reading. I remember thinking, sure, the other way is fun, but there's no denying theirs is a practical, economic approach to touring. Those thoughts stayed with me, until, reading One Train Later, I came across Summers' sardonic description of his on-the-road self in 1982: "I am a rock-and-roll asshole, an emaciated millionaire prick." How did he get to that from where I'd left them? Could the clue be in the penultimate word? "It got much more dissolute as time went on," he confirms. "It did turn into the usual clichéd stuff, where everywhere we turned up there was a party. The rot set in. You know, the water keeps hitting the rock and it finally starts to crumble." Sting's assessment of their excess is more moderate. "We never really qualified as rock and roll animals ever," he says. "It never crossed my mind to trash a hotel room or get completely fucked up. We dabbled."
By the early 80s, of course, the Police had become the biggest band in the world, in August 1983 playing Shea Stadium in New York, a marker for mega-popdom set in 1966 by the Beatles. By then the three were reputed to be permanently at each other's throats. Yet, in 2005, when Stewart Copeland got round to editing the 50 hours of Super-8 he had shot on the road and in the studio for his film, Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out, and he reached the moment where the band broke up, the only footage he could find was of them goofing around. While pointing out that he would not have been filming when they weren't getting on, he admits that Sting's anguished look, inserted into the film to signify strife, was in reality a frown of concentration as the singer worked on a vocal harmony.
"People have asked what went wrong back in the day," Copeland expands, "and the answer is it didn't go wrong, it went rather well actually. We broke up at exactly the right time. What would have gone wrong is if we had stuck together to the point where we hated each other and started to hurt each other and self-destruct. That would have been wrong."
After the final gig in Melbourne in 1984, all three, he says, "hit the ground running." Each made signally non-Police music. Sting's first solo album, The Dream of Blue Turtles, was "a real patchwork of all kinds of styles. I was just having fun as a songwriter, and I carried that on in the interim." Summers formed new musical alliances, played jazz, pursued his interest in photography. Most strikingly, for a decade Copeland didn't pick up a drum stick. "I was a film composer, and not only that, but I was desperate to escape type-casting as the drum-score film composer, and so for many years I was writing scores with no discernible rhythm at all. I went a little too far, as you do when you've got something to prove."
In his memoir Summers writes of "the ache of something unresolved ... The problem with the demise of our group is that we didn't play out all our potential," though he now admits: "We had it all there in a way. But I definitely felt wounded afterwards. It felt like something was stolen and I had to deal with it. Then I occasionally thought, 'Maybe it was the best thing to do.' I didn't just want to be in a pop band."
Distilled into a two-hour live show, the Police's musical history feels fulfillingly complete. Every stage of their musical journey, from the proto-punk of Next To You to the enigmatic universality of Every Breath You Take, is revisited. And, surprisingly perhaps, although the songs are all familiar, they still sound vital, visceral, with emotion or meaning still to impart.
Confounding red-top gossip, the three are emphatic that some form of alliance survived the intervening years. Copeland says, "We have a basic underlying respect and, I would say, love for each other, the three of us. There's a bond there that none of us can shake off." Sting agrees: "Relations with Andy and Stewart have always been cordial. We didn't see much of each other, but it's bullshit that we've been at loggerheads for years and years."
"Over the last twenty years," Copeland adds, "people in my company have assumed that what I like to hear is Sting-bashing, so I hear a lot of it, and I'm sure I don't need to tell you what the opinions are. I tell these friends of mine, 'If Sting was here now with a guitar in his hands, you would within moments realise he's the most talented, gifted musician you've ever met - ever.' Because he is."
"Despite all the crap written about us, how we all hate each other, we're not like that, it's such bullshit," Summers confirms. "If that was the truth, we wouldn't have been able to come back together and do this. Whatever we do, this is always going to be the seminal band we were all in."
While Copeland was assembling his film, Summers was writing his book, a project with the potential, he became increasingly aware, to put paid for good to any chance of a reunion. But he stuck to his aim "to be completely honest, not to do some varnished story. What I was interested in was the fragility of it, how it's always about to collapse at any point, and how difficult it is to bring three egos together and sustain it for a long period of time. It was necessary to talk about the arguments, the difficulties, the tension, as well as paying tribute to the talents of the other two. When I got the book out, I thought they may never speak to me again, but in fact the reverse happened. Sting was very complimentary."
Recalling his suggestion for the running order of the Police's final album, Synchronicity, Summers wrote spikily: "Sting likes this idea, and thus it is ordained." If a reunion was ever going to take place, Sting would need to like that idea too - as eventually he did, surprising even himself.
"I woke up one morning in November last year, and the John Dowland record [Songs From the Labyrinth, Sting's lute recordings] had just gone in the charts, so I was very happy about that, and I thought, 'What do I do now? Should I do that again? No, that'll paint me into a corner. Do I do another Sting album? No, I'm not really ready for it. What do I do to surprise people? Or surprise myself even?' And this little voice said, 'You reform the Police.' And another little voice said, 'Don't be ridiculous, you don't want to do that,' but this persistent voice said, 'No, that'll really surprise everyone.' And surprise, as you know, is everything in this business. So I had a meeting with my manager, floated the idea, and she fell off her chair. We phoned Andy and Stewart, and they didn't believe it either, because I'd been so adamant. If you'd asked me the day before, I would've said, 'You're out of your fucking mind. I don't want to do that.' But suddenly everybody clicked with it, it just triggered something, and the timing was perfect."
With Sting long accustomed to tailoring the musical setting for his solo shows - "having my own way or 'You're fired!'" - what form would the line-up take? Backing singers? A keyboard player? Horns? Summers, for one, was initially apprehensive. "In the early days we did one tour with backing singers and one with saxophones, which I personally hated. I thought, it's got to be the band, the three of us, or not at all, and there was absolutely no contest about that. Because Sting is a natural musician, he's a player. He's not some singer who's got old and fat, he's the real thing."
"My instinct was it should be us raw, warts and all," Sting says, "and I was pleasantly surprised at the first rehearsal. Although it certainly wasn't polished, there were still moments of, 'Oh, that's why we were good, that's why we were successful.' So rehearsal was just about joining those moments together and expanding them, and I think we're still on the way."
Their once-teenage fans are now in their 40s, and from his drum stool Copeland has observed other changes: "At the front we used to have a lot of teenage females fainting. Now we have grown men weeping." Weeping for what? Their lost youth? "I guess that's what it is. There are certain songs, and I look out there and they're weeping inconsolably. It makes me feel good. It hits me with, 'I guess it must be important what we're doing.' I mean, it isn't, it's just music, but it does affect people - and that affects me."
The reunion is scheduled to end in February 2008, when Copeland is looking forward to getting back to being a composer and suburban dad, and Summers will be braced for a post-tour crash before immersing himself in diverse projects. Sting, as always, is eager to embrace the future. "Nothing goes on forever, and once you accept that, that's a great relief," he says. "If I thought I was agreeing to be manacled for ever to this thing, like Sisyphus, I wouldn't have come into it. I think freedom, even to go back, is what I want - to contradict myself, to go back on what I thought was dogma, to be open."
So what is this bond, the shared chemistry that took these three from half-empty clubs to the biggest stages in the world, and still has people filling stadiums to see them? Does the man who formed the Police have the answer? "There are times when Sting and I shake our heads at the disparity in our music values," Copeland offers, "and yet there are 60,000 people out there that want to hear us play together. How's that possible? We disagree so deeply and profoundly about fundamental pillars of our artistic philosophy that sometimes we look at each other and it's not just like we come from different planets, but that different rules of physics apply, and, like I say, we shake our heads and wonder at the strangeness of life that you put these two value systems together and something happens that makes people cry."
· The Police's Their Greatest Hits is available on A&M. The band's European tour opens in Stockholm on August 29. Their first UK date is at Birmingham NIA on September 4.
· Andy Summers' exhibition I'll Be Watching You: Inside the Police 1980-1983 is at Jill George Gallery, 38 Lexington Street, London, from August 30 to September 10.
... I will turn your FACE to alabaster.
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