Videocracy

Director: Erik Gandini
Country: Sweden
Year: 2009
Language: English, Italian
Runtime: 85 minutes
Format: Color/35mm

Disinformationist and cultural watchdog director Erik Gandini, whose previous films include Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers (2003) and Gitmo – The New Rules of War (2005) that won the best documentary award at the Seattle International Film Festival, (sounds like my kind of guy) now brings us a film that explores the strange and astonishing world and influence of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – owner of the country’s television empire. The following synopsis explains:

“In a late evening of 1976, a local Italian television broadcasts a quiz where viewers at home have to answer questions. For each correct answer, a housewife takes off a garment and does a brief dance. The format is simple and very successful.

Unaware viewers did not know that the show was the beginning of a complete change on the way of doing television. A revolution that would forever change the entire Italian political system, changing the values and becoming a powerful instrument of government for the nation.”

As if that isn’t enough to get any reader of the CulturePin.com to make a date for this screening, here is a trailer:

PUBLIC SCREENINGS
Tuesday September 15
10:00PM
VARSITY 3

Thursday September 17
8:00PM
VARSITY 1

Saturday September 19
2:30PM
VARSITY 4

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Valhalla Rising

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Country: Denmark/United Kingdom
Year: 2009
Language: English
Runtime: 90 minutes
Format: Color/35mm

European director Nicolas Winding Refn is probably best known for the Pusher trilogy that migrated the gangster film genre to Copenhagen on an epic scale. His latest film Valhalla Rising tackles the Viking genre – typically heavy with mutton eating and battle axes gleaming in the reflection of the moon off of glaciers, he raises the roof high and takes us deeper inside the world of these powerful warriors who preceded Christopher Columbus arrival to North America by several hundred years.

From the programme:
“The film’s landscapes look so foreign and desolate that Valhalla Rising might as well have been shot on the moon.”

Looks like a lot of visual eye candy and excitement to me.

PUBLIC SCREENINGS
Tuesday September 15
4:00PM
WINTER GARDEN THEATRE

Saturday September 19
12:15PM
SCOTIABANK THEATRE 3

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Midnight Madness Programme 2009 – Pt. II

Solomon Kane

Director: Michael J. Bassett
Country: France/Czech Republic/United Kingdom
Year: 2009
Language: English
Runtime: 104 minutes
Format: Color/D-Cinema
Rating: 14A

Continuing with our list of gory epic sagas started with Valhalla Rising, director Michael J. Bassett, whose previous films including Deathwatch (2002) and Wilderness (2006) – films that in hindsight appear to have prepared him for undertaking the famous pulp-fiction story of 16th century Puritan Solomon Kane, is shot in a gritty and irreverent manner invoking a return to high-spirited action and adventure. Interestingly enough it is part of the Midnight Madness programme which can only mean that the action and adventure quotient is high indeed.

PUBLIC SCREENINGS
Wednesday September 16
11:59PM
RYERSON

Thursday September 17
3:15PM
SCOTIABANK THEATRE 1

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Bitch Slap

Director: Rick Jacobson
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Language: English
Runtime: 104 minutes
Format: Color/35mm
Rating: 14A

Bitch Slap director Rick Jacobson has directed over 100 episodes of television including the series Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Baywatch. The movie is called Bitch Slap. If you are a fan of Russ Meyer’s big-boobie-desert-romps or Tarantino’s instatiable lust for grindhouse fare mixed with really really bad bluescreen, then what are you waiting for? It’s Midnight Madness, it’s happening now, get a ticket and get there. If any of the above sound offensive or abhorrent to you, then for goodness’ sake stay home and watch reruns of Friends.

PUBLIC SCREENINGS
Monday September 14
11:59PM
RYERSON

Wednesday September 16
3:15PM
SCOTIABANK THEATRE 3

Buy Tickets

If you get a chance to see any of these films, please let me know what you thought of it. Also I would love to hear any other film recommendations you may have by posting a comment on this article. Have a great TIFF 2009!

The post Film Picks Part 2 – Toronto International Film Festival – TIFF 2009 appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

Vanessa is studying the semiotics of fashion in Halifax, Nova Scotia where she discovered the language of culture can be unzipped from the patterns found in textiles. From Chan Chan to Lake Titicaca in Peru to the mega-industrialized cities of Canton, there is a history of meaning woven into the very fabrics that under closer scrutiny reveals much about the culture. For example the pelicans find their way into Peruvian “mantas” – cloth used for everything from baby harnesses to satchels for carrying foodstuffs, because the behaviors of pelicans may reveal the stock of fish in a given body of water. The action of a certain animal running uphill may belie the coming of a storm. For these reasons, these systems of communication are transmitted in the images found in the weave.

Vanessa trekked four days up the Incan trail, not only laden with but constructed of a semi-precious green stone called Serpetina, to the mystic cloud city of Machu Pichu. She considered the flora and fauna along the way and how their colors and movements worked their way into the cloth.

At Lake Titicaca, the natives have created floating islands out of reeds where they have taken up permanent residence – powering their internet connection via solar panels. The implications of this are astounding and beyond the scope of this article. But consider what this means in light of a thing like the Principality of Sealand.

Although now some villages are using synthetic dyes and fibers, natural colors were created from insects to onions, from llama and alpaca wool – but now the global popularity of alpaca has forced prices to raise so high the the very natives who innovated use of the material can’t afford it.

A month later, Vanessa finds herself in Hong Kong en route to a tech convention in Guangzhou where the sky is, as she describes, a permanent ashen color from all the pollution to be found in the world’s central factory for technology. Nine-story high building filled with nothing but cell phone merchants bring on intense migraines and colossal skyscrapers – glass and steel wonders that put the best New York has to offer to shame follow the dictates of Feng Shui and yet these things remain virtually unknown and unseen by the Western world.

Textiles are made on looms and looms, which used punched cards to create the complex patterns used in textiles are essentially the precursor to today 8.9″ laptops, thus the patterns thereby created are miniature programs whose propriety belongs to those micro-cultures that developed them. To unlock these codes is to understand hidden knowledge about the world, language and development of a culture. In these times when thousands of unique languages are going extinct by the week, to learn to read these lines of code is to reveal much – to find the seeds for restoring their significance in the world.

I urge you to listen to this extraordinary interview with this designer on my podcast and explore further the possibilities and semiotics of fashion.

Listen to Episode 17 of the KeramCast – or subscribe at iTunes by searching for “KeramCast” in the podcast directory.

The post Unlocking the Code of A Culture Through Textiles appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

Unless someone can correct me on the source of this quote, I am going to attribute it to the last person I know who uttered it – Midi Onodera the lesbian Japanese-Canadian director of the film “Skin Deep” in which I played a transsexual woman over a decade ago. The film explored sexual, ethnic and social archetypes.

It has always stuck with me, because it highlighted something we at some point took for granted yet had already become so prevalent in our collective, dare I say, North American mindset: “culture festivals,” “a shot of culture” – the idea that it was something you went out and got a dose of, like a soul drip mainlining into your consciousness.

“Freedom fries” is perhaps the most chilling prominent example in recent memory of whitewashing the diversity that exists in life.

I just stopped by Mashti Malone’s, the Persian ice cream store on La Brea and Sunset, that serves “homemade” flavors that include lavender, ginger rosewater saffron, pomegranate, Turkish coffee, so that I could pick up some black currant juice. This is the only place in Los Angeles I have found where black currant juice can be found. There is a reason for this.

“Blackcurrants were once popular in the United States as well, but they became extremely rare in the 20th century after currant farming was banned in the early 1900s. The ban was enacted when it was discovered that blackcurrants helped to spread the tree disease White Pine Blister Rust, which was thought to threaten the then-booming U.S. lumber industry ^[1].

The federal ban on growing currants was shifted to individual States’ jurisdiction in 1966. The ban was lifted in New York State in 2003 as a result of the efforts of Greg Quinn and The Currant Company and currant growing is making a comeback in several states including Vermont, New York, Connecticut and Oregon.^[2] However, several statewide bans still exist including Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.^[3]. Since the federal ban ceased currant production anywhere in the U.S., the fruit is not well-known and has yet to reach the popularity that it had in the U.S. in the 19th century or that it currently has in Europe and the UK. The first nationally available black currant beverage in the U.S. since the ban was lifted in many states is a powerful health-food nectar under the brand name CurrantC. Since black currants are a strong source of antioxidants and vitamins (much like pomegranate juice), awareness and popularity are once again growing in the U.S.”

– Wikipedia

In article by Ann Baldelli about the return of the Blackcurrant, farmer Allyn Brown III points out the irony “that the federal government banned commercial cultivation of the Ribes species, which is native to America, to protect the white pine, which was imported from Europe. While commercial crops were eradicated, the currants and gooseberries thrived in the wild.”

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to serve us blackcurrant juice daily. Rife with antioxidants and more vitamin C than any other juice (except perhaps Kale juice which would be really unpleasant). It was as common to me as Kool Ade or Tang may have been to others. We were in Canada so the laws around its production were different.

As I left Mashti’s, I noticed a little Middle Eastern restaurant. Hungry, I walked in a found an incredible, albeit brief menu of cornish hen kabab with sour cherry rice, saffron chicken and so on. I exclaimed, to no one in particular that it was a lovely menu, and the gentlemen standing in line before me asked if I had not ever been there before. I replied I hadn’t. He confided that it was one of the oldest Persian restaurants in Los Angeles and that the food was delicious. What was interesting was that he started to say “Iraqi,” but stopped himself and opted for the politically cooler “Persian” qualifier instead.

As he was leaving, he gave the proprietor, a large burly man, a kiss on each cheek, said some words to him in Arabic, then turned to the cooks at the take out counter and wished them well in perfect Spanish. Why this filled me up so much is, I suppose, the motivation for this piece.

I left a message for my friend in French the other day, in response to her French accented outgoing voicemail message. She called back to say how much it turned her on. This made me wonder – why is it so exciting to hear someone speak a non-English romance language? Because it is rare here in the US? Because it belies culture?

I was fortunate enough to be raised in an Ecuadorian/Polish household and was thus exposed to an already fecund environment for diversity in tradition, sentiment, nuance, music, literature, history and there’s that word again, culture. I learned French in school (being that I lived in Canada, French was always an option in school). All of this gave me a much richer understanding of the world, of food, of poetry, and most interesting to me, a way to think and say things that could not be similarly conveyed in English.

English is an incredible language. It is vital, complex, malleable to a fault and extremely effective for communication. But it easily lacks in certain departments. Note the almost inherent surrealist and analogical perspective of Spanish speakers, or the wry, didactic attitude of the French speaker, the sensual, familial sensibility of Italian, or the efficient, inclusive grammar of Japanese. Though the observation may threaten to engender stereotype, it only appears that way because it has to be parsed through the observational calculation of English.

This all to underline a disturbing phenomenon starting to spread like so much White Pine Blister Rust on the internet – localization of content. Is it ironic that a discussion on heterogeneity should be wary of the threat of localization online? Does the original world wide web not resemble more of a WTO than a UN? Perhaps from askance, but really it was just an lifting of borders. At the dawn of the browser, suddenly the curtain was lifted on the world, and without the barriers of money, Customs officials and mainstream media, we were afforded access to the thoughts, feelings and approaches of our contemporaries around the world.

With the advent of localized content (something already implemented at YouTube and MySpace) we restore the idea that what is immediately around us is of most interest, thus renewing an insular, incestuous perspective.

POM is all the rage now, but pomegranate juice was a staple in Arab countries for eons before it became a major industry in California. Like the Amazonian rainforest, we have no idea what other virtues and gifts exist within it mysterious borders, until it is perhaps too late. Every day another language goes extinct and with it all the nuance, perspective and wisdom of that culture.

It is imperative that we remain open to all of this and understand that all of it is required for the full experience of life, rather than treat “foreign” custom as a sideshow attraction.

The post Culture is not a commodity, it is a necessity appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.