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."