Il Gattopardo - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

"Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quielli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti Gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra."

Gran novela, magistralmente comentada por Javier Marías aquí.

Le Meilleur de Cassiya avec Désiré Francois

All this from the booklet:

"CASSIYA, 1992, est l'année de leur succès, avec "Marlène", "rèv nou zansét" et bien d'autres encore. Ce groupe far de l'ile Maurice qui nous a fait vibrer, chanter et danser avec leur rythme propre à eux même revient pour nous offrir leurs plus beaux titres. Désiré Francois, voix principale de CASSIYA, nous ramène 19 ans en arrière, pour nous les faire revivre, toujours en gardant cette authenticité et cette originalité qui a été la recette de leur succès et bien sûr toujours au côté de la formation CASSIYA.

LE MEILLEUR DE CASSIYA - Avec Désiré Francois - VOLUME 1 est un album dédié pour ces amoureux de la musique mauricienne."

BIOGRAPHIE DE DÉSIRÉ FRANCOIS

30 ans déjà que Désiré FRANCOIS vi de sa passion, la musique. Enfant de Cassis, quartier de Maurice, c'est à 16 ans qu'il se lie avec ses instruments fétiche qui sont la guitare et la ravanne. Ses journées entières sont consacrées à ses amis avec qui il partage sa musique. À cette époque, ses influences musicales sont les mélodies de Ménwar de George ARMEL, Roger AUGUSTIN..., mais aussi des airs venus d'ailleurs. C'est dans les années 80 qu'il commence à faire ses propres compositions inspirées de la réalité qui l'entoure.

Avant d'être chanteur Désiré FRANCOIS faisait parti d'un groupe surnommé "zanfan cassi", où il jouait de la basse, avec lui Alain LAFLEUR à la guitare solo, José FRANCOIS }a la batterie, Eddy ARMEL au chant et à la guitare rythmique.

C'est à partir de ce groupe, que Désiré et Alain LAFLEUR commenca à créer leur propre composition. Vint ensuite Dominique ISIDORE, qui jusqu'à aujourd'hui continue à composer pour Désiré.

C'est en 1992, sur la scène du Star Show, un concours de chant à l'ile Maurice que Désiré FRANCOIS fait sa première apparition en public.

De cette création est née les premières compositions: séparation, katium, civilisation, rêve nou ancêtre, la vie martyr, l'accorité et dans morisien, avec comme voix principale Désiré FRANCOIS.

Ses compositions donnèrent naissance à l'album "Séparation" dans lequel c'est join Gérard LOUIS, et Alain RAMANESUM. C'est à ce moment que le groupe décida de s'appeler CASSIYA.

Le groupe au fil du temps s'est perfectionné et est devenue un groupe professionnel. Leur premier concert hor de Maurice, fut en 1993 sur l'ile Rodrigue. Ensuite en 1994 il se rendit à la Réunion... leur succès leur permis ensuite de jouer sur les scènes d'Afrique et de métropole.

De cette grande complicité est née 10 albums: séparation, ici kot nou été, racine la vie, naryé pa éfasé, le morne, tymboli, cassiya neuf, no amize séga et nous destiné.

C'est ainsi que par sa voix incontournable et sa sensibilité, qu'il se fait une place dans le monde de la musique et surtout dans le monde du Séga mauricien. Un séga mauricien, qu'il lui est cher et qu'il emmène sur les scènes de l'Océan Indien, Européen et d 'Afrique.

Pour Désiré FRANCOIS, la musique fut un levier, un moteur. Cette passion luipermet d'exprimer ses idées, ses émotions...

L'un de ses premier titres fut "séparation. Vient ensuite "Marlène", "Rève nou zansèt"... des titres chargés de vécu, de souffrance, d'amour. Des parole qui relatent avec humilité ses pensées.

Aujourd'hui, il continue sa carrière solo, à son titre, cinq albums: la Vérité, la Terre, best of et La Vi et "Rékonésans".

Dans ces albums, des titre comme "zistwar", "Angélina", la "drogue", "déraciné"... à ses côtés Alain LAFLEUR à la basse, Bruno FRANCOIS à la batterie,Chrstophe SERRET à la guitarre solo, Eddy ARMEL à la ravanne, Richard SIMISSE à la percussion, Kersley JOLY à l'harmonica, Roméo JACQUES au clavier, Christian BRASSE aux cuivres."

All the Shah's Men - Stephen Kinzer

"it seemed more like a dime novel than historical facts"

-Dwight Eisenhower, on Kermit Roosevelt's account of the 1953 coup in Iran

All the Sha's Men was one of the most successful book in 2003. The Economist picked it as one of its top 10 books on History that year. The quality of the research done in American primary sources (Russians and Iranians obviously denied access to their archives) is undeniable.

There are several comments on this book around the web, from Wikipedia's to The New York Times', where Kinzer works as a foreign correspondent. The most interesting review that I found is the one published by David S. Robarge at the CIA's Studies in Intelligence (the CIA is the agency that orchestrated the coup in Iran in 1953). 

Most reviews agree that Kinzer's book reads more like a novel than a scholar text, and some of them mention that Kinzer goes too far to make a direct causal link between the 1953 coup and the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and 9/11 as an extension. 

While most readers will find the thriller-like style of Kinzer appealing, I think it trivializes the personality of the main actors of the plot. The book is also extremely partisan: Mossadegh was the good guy (Kinzer reckons he was a little bit stubborn, but most heroes are, anyway), the British were the bad ones, and Americans were good during Truman's term and became bad during Eisenhower's. That is, in a nutshell, what this book is about. My intuition tells me things had to be more complicated, but I can't get that information from the book. I will have to go to other sources, because Kinzer wastes too many precious paragraphs and pages writing like a novelist. Kinzer's style is excusable and even encouraged in introductory books, but All the Sha's Men is supposed to be an authoritative source on the 1953 coup in Iran. The bottom line is that this is a great book for non-experts; experts probably already read it and dismissed it for a lot of reasons, including but not limited to its style.

As usual, you don't even have to read the book or the reviews to know what it is about. The podcast below is an interview given by Kinzer in February in 2012, when the prospects of a bombing of Iran by Israel or the United States were serious. The fact that Kinzer is considered an authority on Iran 9 years after the first edition of his book is a testimony both of its quality and of the lack of interest to write about Iran from a scholarly perspective. In the interview, Kinzer discusses his book and the policy options of the United States to engage with Iran. 

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

"What makes things break up like they do?"

-Ralph

Lost is nothing else than the most recent reincarnation of a mental exercise present in Western civilization since Voltaire's Candide: what would a group of people in an uninhabited island look like? The objective of this question is to speculate on the true nature of men: optimists think that man is inherently good, so the group would eventually build up an utopia; pessimists, predictably, argue that the members of this hypothetical society would kill each other. 

The Cold War version of this mental exercise is Lord of the Flies, a book written by William Golding in the mid 50s, which earned him the Nobel Prize later on. Being a citizen of the second half the 20th century, Golding added an innovative twist to the Voltairean question: instead of grown ups, the inhabitants of the solitary island would be boys (there are no female characters in this novel).

Like other books written by Nobel Prize winners such as Herman Hesse's Demian, Lord of the Flies is a required reading in most middle school programs. Six out of the first 10 entries in Google for this book are synopsis and ready-to-turn-in essays which is, I guess, a testimony of the validity of  this book as a school text (1 of the remaining entries is the link to Amazon, and the other 3 are links to the movie, in case you were wondering). 

School kids obviously have to read something, but I think that framing Lord of the Flies as a book for teenagers is a mistake. Considering that kids are a product of the education provided by adults, it is the latter who benefit the most from seeing what the former might become if left on their own in an non supervised environment. Let me put it this way: if you are an adult and think that your child might end up acting like one of the characters of Lord of the Flies, you are doing something very wrong.

The Nobel Prize Foundation has this interactive game on Lord of the Flies to help children to prepare their exams.

And you can hear Golding motivation to write this book (and why he didn't include any girls in it) in this video:

PS. ("chased from hell to breakfast"; great expression)

Goodbye Again - Anatole Litvak

All the women over 40 years are alone. Goodbye Again provides elements to confirm. the hypothesis.

Great movie.

The Travels of Marco Polo

From fiction to fiction. That's the path followed by The Travels of Marco Polo over the last 700-ish years. 

When Marco Polo published his book, presumably as a guide for merchants, most people thought he was exaggerating. At one point, the Catholic Church included it in its Index despite Polo's praises to the Christianity and his comparisons between Kublai Khan's deeds and manners and an "ideal" Christian ruler. (arguing that a pagan was as good as a Catholic in order to get the approval of the Vatican was not uncommon: Comentarios Reales de los Incas, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega presented Incas as monotheist worshipers of the Sun as a way to "legitimize" his book and his Inca parents before his Catholic and Spanish audience). Polo also mentions that Kurds, Muslims, and Tibetans are brute and mostly thieves.

Today, we obviously know what parts of Polo's accounts are historic facts and what are myths. And the book is written in such a business-like style that it's hardly an engaging reading. The value of the book lies in the sensation it leaves to the reader's mind. Marco Polo was one of the first Europeans to make the trip, so everything for him was brand new. At a time when it is possible to travel from one side of the planet to the other in 36 hours at most, reading a book where getting from Italy to China takes 3 years makes the reader wonder what it would be like to be in Polo's shoes. 

Only two documents written by Marco Polo have survived until today. One is obviously his Travels (Il Milione, in Italian); the other is his will, where he frees a Chinese slave, which he probably brought from there. Polo had a good heart for the standards of the time.

I found this documentary on Marco Polo. The most interesting part is the comparison between Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, which starts around minute 38.

Jalsa Harbour

Quoted directly from the booklet:

Remersiman
Cher fans,
mo remerci zot tou enkor ene fois, surtout mo banfans de Harbour Music, sans zot pa ti pu ena encouragements pou fer sa travail la.
Big up a tous ban misiciens, producteurs, chanteurs et chanteuses ki finn aide mwa pu realise sa projet ja. Mo remercie Mons Joseph Denis Sunnee qui finn touzour la pou promouvoir la misik lokal.
Yoyo ti envi ki so santer "Fam la zeness" interpreter par ene la voiz feminine, pas trakasser, dans les mois a venir nu pu resi realise sa reve la, et surtout il pu ene version en tipik.
Remerciement special a Michel Nany, Kenny Seenien, Kong, Nono, James, Gino Lapiniaire, Philip Thomas, Reshad Janferberg, Jean Alain Résidu, Patrick Antoine, Jocelyn Perreau, J.F. Purbhoo, Boyzini, B*I*G*, Nasty Kool, DJ Boy, DJ Nitish, Ras Mayul, Kriton, Harbour Crew (Staff)
Dieu Merci,
Kailesh

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

I just completed Harper Perennial's edition of the complete works of Oscar Wilde. The book contains an introduction by Vyvyan Holland, Wilde's son.

A number of critics have dissected and studied Wilde's works. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a masterpiece, and so are The Importance of Being Earnest and Wilde's short stories. The rest of his theater and his poems are OK, but nothing extraordinary. His essays on art and aesthetics require a very high knowledge on the topic; they are not designed for the general public. His essay on The Soul of Man Under Socialism is partly right when it says that Socialism deserves a chance if it makes individualism the core of its action plan -it didn't, in case you were wondering.

This edition also contains De Profundis, the poem that Wilde wrote during his time in prison his lover Lord Alfred Douglas (as usual, Wikipedia contains an excellent summary of the Wilde-Douglas love affair). De Profundis is one of the most intimate and touching texts I've ever read. If I had to recommend this book based on a hidden pearl few people know about, De Profundis would be it.

Out of Africa - Sidney Pollack

The Economist recently reported that Out of Africa is Angela Merkel's favorite movie. After watching it, I offer three possible explanations of Frau Merkel's taste for this movie:

1. Merkel identifies herself with Karen Dinesen (Meryl Streep), a tireless woman who is able to do a Safari on her own, run successfully a coffee plantation, and have a love story with a hunter.

2. A coffee plantation in Africa run by a white womAn who teaches Africans to read and have European manners is a simile for Merkel's vision of Europe when and if it overcomes the current financial crisis: she and the Germans would be able to finance their socialist state with the rents they would extract from the GIPSI countries as a result of successive rounds of rescue. In return, Frau Merkel and other law-abiding serious Germans would teach citizens from the GIPSI countries to become hardworking people (not Germans, but something close to it).

3. Merkel simply likes the love story between Karen Dinesen and Denys Finch (Robert Redford)

With its 2 hours and 40 minutes of duration, Out of Africa is also the testimony of a bygone era of film making. At the time of its release (1985) relatively long movies were not uncommon.  Competition with other media was not an issue back in the day, so studios could invest in long movies and directors could develop their stories fully, especially if a movie was based on a book.  Dances with Wolves took these two concepts to the extreme with its 4 hours of duration. Home theater, DVDs, HBO and Netflix changed that radically: complex histories are now told in series, and movies are usually 2 hours shots of superficial stories for wide audiences.

For some reason, youtube has the full movie online. I embed the video right below:

Crazé Séga - Various Artists

Let it be warm!!!

The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II - Edvard Radzinsky

A new way to present information and let the reader decide. In other words: down with the 5 stars!

Pros	Cons
Research from primary sources such as first-hand testimonies, archives	Assertions of dubious quality such as “Rasputin did have magic powers” (no kidding)
Engaging narrative. Reads like a novel	The author takes issues too seriously so personal that reader can’t tell what is a historic fact and what is an opinion (“His tragedy was that, although he was stubborn, he was also unable to say a clear no to a petitioner’s face. He was too delicate and well bred to be crudely determinate. He preferred silence to rejection, and as a rule the petitioner took his silence for consent.”
It is a book about Russia written by a Russian and translated to English by a Russophile. It has pearls such as this: “Russians love a good plot-camarillas, Masons, whatever-wherein fact there is usually just plain sloppiness.	Typical Russian attitude of “Russia is different and nobody from the outside can understand it”
The research on the death of Nicholas II and his family, as well as the destiny of their corpses, is exhaustive.	The research on the fate of the people who actually murdered the imperial family is too large, at least for non-Russians or non-experts. I finished this book one day ago, and I already forgot most of that part of the book.
The first edition of the book was written in the last days of the USSR and you can feel it: “In my day, there was a revolutionary idea in the air that a Chekist should visit a dying man instead of a priest. In the end, even atheists need to unburden their souls, and who better to tell than the institution where one was supposed to speak only the truth?

Throne of Blood - Akira Kurosawa

People from the West tend to see Kurosawa's Throne of Blood as an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth (see, for instance, Wikipedia , IMDb, and The Guardian, just to mention Google's top 3). This is obviously an oversimplification. Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth but it goes beyond that: it incorporates elements of Noh theatre and is not based on the Western ethos of making good triumph over evil. Instead, the plot of Throne of Blood is circular, with the cycle of violence repeating again and again, without making clear references to morality. The World of Throne of Blood is one where power seeking is the motive of all the characters and moral issues are left outside. These fusions of Buddhist, Japanese, and Western elements were common in Kurosawa's career and gained him criticisms in Japan (where he was seen as a sold-off) and praised in the West (where he was seen as the only understandable Japanese filmmaker)

I don't know if I should recommend Throne of Blood. The movie is obviously a masterpiece, like most of the material produced by Kurosawa. The camera work is simply fantastic, and so are the make up and the attire of the actors. However, modern audiences have lost the sensibility to appreciate silences in movies, which is a constant in this movie. If there is one reason why I would still recommend Throne of Blood to a movie viewer of the 21st century the scene where Taketoki Washizu is killed: much more dramatic and sadist than anything you've seen so far and with far less blood.

Throne of Blood has been re-issued to the market recently by The Criterion Collection.

And youtube auto generated a channel for the movie, available here (I'm obviously no responsible for the content of the channel or any copyrights infringement, etc).

Lágrimas negras - Bebo y Cigala

En cuatro palabras y para no hacer el cuento largo: este es un discazo.

Lágrimas negras combina jazz, bolero, son, flamenco, bossa nova y música del Caribe, en una mezcla que resulta extremadamente disfrutable y profundamente misteriosa: ¿acaso es el español el vehículo que hace que estos géneros, en aparencia tan diferentes, puedan encontrar un piso común desde el que se pueda crear?

En ese sentido, Lágrimas negras es también un homenaje a la idea de Iberoamérica: no deja de ser inspirador que El Cigala, Bebo Valdés, Javier Colina, Caetano Veloso, y el Niño Josele, por mencionar solamente a los más mediáticos, se hayan reunido en un proyecto musical en el que se puedan identificar mexicanos, brasileiros, portugueses, españoles, cubanos, argentinos, y todos los demás países en América que fueron conolizados por los países que todavía se conocen como "España" y "Portugal."

Fuerza natural - Gustavo Cerati

Fuerza natural fue el último disco que Cerati grabó antes del accidente cerebrovascular isquémico que lo tiene en coma actualmente. El sonido del disco le tira más bien al pop. "Magia" parece canción de grupo de quinceañeros, y "Amor sin rodeos" está bien como broma o como tema de telenovelas.

Fuerza natural no es un disco malo. En general, resulta bastante escuchable y disfrutable, y si bien no es memorable desde un punto de vista musical, sí que tiene un componente emotivo bastante fuerte por ser el último disco que hizo Cerati. Con el paso de los años, Cerati fue suavizando su sonido y tendió cada vez más hacia lo comercial. En los últimos años llegó incluso a escribir algunas canciones con Shakira. Nunca sabremos si este giro se explicó porque Cerati quería hacer más dinero o porque tenía una auténtica vocación e inquietud artística que le fue llegando con los años.