Today's soul track:
R.I.P. Donna Summer.
Found dead today at sixty-three from cancer, Summer was one underrated singer, perhaps (along with the Bee Gees) the icon of the often-neglected disco genre. Born in Boston, she began her career as a session singer for groups like Three Dog Night before she hit big as a solo artist. We've all heard the hits: "Hot Stuff," "I Feel Love," "Last Dance," "Dim All the Lights," "She Works Hard For The Money," "Bad Girls."
"I Love to Love You Baby," off her 1975 album of the same name, was Summer's dramatic breakthrough here in the U.S, the song going all the way to #2 on the pop charts. It was a controversial song - what with all the groans and moans; Time Magazine claimed that twenty-two orgasms were simulated over the course of the song. An extended version of the song runs over seventeen minutes (so does that mean over 5x the number of orgasms?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPXizlnS7go
Donna, you belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Well, after about four weeks of reading it, I finally finished Thomas Mann's 1900 novel Buddenbrooks. Not too much I can say about it, really. It's a long, downbeat account of four generations of a German grain-selling mercantile family in the 19th century. Sounds like a winner, huh? Yes, it's at times boring, but that's Mann for you - you get the long, glorious, rhapsodic passages and the glum, drawn-out fatalism, but also oodles of irony and detail, narrative heft and shape. So I guess I liked it, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you were really interested in German literature of the early 20th century. And not to give anything away, but, basically, everyone dies.
Magic Mountain may still be in my future; in fact, I think it's on my Life List of books to read. So I'm not done with Mann yet.
Let's get to the movies opening this week:
The Dictator Sacha Baron Cohen's new film isn't quite getting the fanatical praise Borat got, but it's getting above-average reviews. Working with Borat director Larry Charles, the film (which co-stars Anna Faris, Ben Kingsley, John C. Reilly, and Megan Fox), it's about a clueless, oppressive North African dictator touring America. Is Cohen's schtick getting old? I have no desire to see this (and I didn't see Borat), but I have liked Cohen in the few films in which he's actually played sort-of normal characters: Sweeney Todd, Hugo.
Battleship It seems like I've been seeing previews for Peter Berg's big-budgeted blockbuster based on the Hasbro board game for half a year. The navy (represented here by Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Brooklyn Decker, True Blood's Alexander Skarsgard, Rihanna) must band together to fight a superior alien force. Eh? The chuckling, naysaying critics are deriding the film's poor writing and bad dialogue; it looks like so much junk.
What to Expect When You're Expecting The trend of making romantic ensemble comedies out of nonfiction self-help books continues with this badly-reviewed, filmed-in-Atlanta piece inspired by Heidi Murkoff's 1984 pregnancy bible starring an attractive cast: Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Banks, Dennis Quaid, Chris Rock, Anna Kendrick, Glee's Matthew Morrison (as Diaz's husband - who wears the pants in that relationship?), Gossip Girl's Chace Crawford, and, again, Brooklyn Decker.
The Samaritan I'm staying away from this one only because I feel like I've seen it a thousand times before. A prisoner (Samuel L. Jackson) gets released after twenty-five years and has a hard time staying on the straight and narrow, especially when a former partner comes calling with a job. Filmed in grungier parts of Toronto (cool!), this film noir/action piece is said to be a good role for Jackson but strictly by-the-numbers.
Hysteria This could be the surprise of the weekend (well, not in terms of box office...). A shame it's not receiving good reviews, though, because it sounds like it could be fun. A lighthearted drama set in Victorian London, it is about the medical revolution and the discovery of the vibrator. Hysteria, you see, is caused by an "overactive uterus" that needs to be stimulated. The film stars Hugh Dancy, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Like Crazy's Felicity Jones, Rupert Everett, Ashley Jensen, and Jonathan Pryce.
On we go with our photographers:
Weegee (Arthur Felig) (#37)
Born in Austria, Weegee grew up in NYC's Lower East Side. He was a freelance press photographer who was given his nickname because of his magical, Ouija-like gift for arriving at crime scenes before the police did; in fact, he kept a police radio with him in his car. He followed the city's emergency vehicles and was always around crime scenes. He photographed movie premieres, hookers, crime scene onlookers. He was self-aggrandizing, somewhat of an ambulance chaser. He liked to stamp the backs of his photos with "Credit Photo by Weegee the Famous." A 1992 movie, The Public Eye, starring Joe Pesci, was based on him.
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| Weegee at a murder scene |
| children sleeping on a fire escape |
Don McCullin (#38)
The British McCullin (b. 1935) is one of the world's great war photographers. His resume for shooting periods and events of conflict is astonishing: the Biafran Crisis in Nigeria in the late 1960s, the Vietnam War, the construction and fall of the Berlin Wall, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya (see below), the Troubles in northern Ireland, the Falklands War. He has won almost every award imaginable for his work. He lives in Somerset, England. The first photo below, taken in Biafra in 1969, was selected by Life magazine as one of the 100 Photographs that Changed the World.
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| Vietnam |
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| building the Berlin Wall |
I try not to allude or reference anything in here that my readers (and me, of course, too) know nothing about. So what was the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya?
Well, it's still a controversial topic. Last year, four eighty-something Kenyans started a lawsuit, claiming they were tortured and abused in detention camps during the 1950s; the claim for the lawsuit was first lodged in 2009. Most of the world sees Britain as the villains in the decades-long quest for Kenyan independence; those who are pro-British of course see Britain as doing what it had to do to squelch the communists and murderers leading the uprising.
In the days when Kenya was still a British colony, Mau Mau was an underground militant nationalistic group, mostly peasants, that sought to drive whites out of Kenya. Members of the group, most of whom were of the Kikuyu ethnic grouping, were veterans who had returned form war and found themselves unemployed. The jobs they were promised were not to be' and many found themselves working as porters on European estates. The Europeans within the country had taken most of the Kenyans' ancestral land, racially discriminated against them, initiated a system (kipande) that kept track up Kenyans' movements, excluded them from decisions, and heavily taxed them.
Within the Kenyan government, the members of the Mau Mau began to incite terror - looting and and murder. Britain declared a state of emergency and sent in reinforcement to quell the insolent, violent members of the Mau Mau, who were killing citizens in the Nairobi suburbs who refused to take the required oaths of the Mau Mau.
Jomo Kenyatta, president of the Kenya African Union (one of Kenya's two major political parties) was arrested for managing the Mau Mau society. Britain began to arrest Mau Mau activists by the thousands but the Mau Maus fought back. To make matters worse, white settler groups already in Kenya were disenchanted by the lack of urgency and efficiency of the Brits, so they began to fight the Mau Maus too.
Britain kept at it, though; on April 24, 1954, over 40,000 Kikuyu tribesmen were arrested. By 1956, the numbers kept coming in: Over 70,000 Kikuyus suspected of Mau Mau ties had been arrested, over 10,000 executed. Kenyans continued to get killed and suffer in prison camps.
In 1959, the state of emergency in Kenya finally ended.
In 1963, Kenya was granted independence. In 1964, it was declared a republic. Jomo Kenyatta, after years of detention and hard labor, its first president.
What's still debated and mired in controversy is the number of Kenyans killed by the British, specifically in the prison and work camps. The Kenya Human Rights Commission claims that 90,000 were either executed, tortured, or maimed during this period, over 160,000 detained in camps.
Others claim 11,000 were killed, others 25,000.
Less than forty white settlers were killed during this almost decade-long period of violence.
Kenyans filing suits today claim they, and many other Kikuju's who were not Mau Mau, were displaced from their homes and villages, charged with crimes (and put in camps) without a trial, and subjected to, among other atrocities, castration, sexual violence, beatings, malnutrition.
You be the judge.
Thanks:
http://www.elateafrica.org/elate/history/maumau/maumauintro.html
http://africanhistory.about.com/od/kenya/a/MauMauTimeline.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12997138
And finally, let's start a new weekly column:
Things
Today:
5 Underrated Things
Is the CW's Hart of Dixie (starring Rachel Bilson, above), whose first season just ended, the most original, inventive, moving, or subtle show? Nah. But it is one show that premiered last fall on a non-cable network that I watched from beginning to end without missing an episode. And I can't wait to for the new season this fall.
Bill Withers' second album, Still Bill, celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year and it still sounds Bill... I mean, great. No bad tracks on it and plenty of enduring great ones ("Lovely Day," "Lean on Me," "Who is He," "Use Me").
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