Monday, December 17, 2012


A Culture of Violence

Behind the Connecticut Massacre

by JERRY KROTH
Each time there is an outbreak of homicidal mania, whether Columbine, Virginia Tech, or Adam Lanza’s slaughter of twenty eight innocents in Connecticut, the media directs us to stories about gun control and the need for better policing of individuals with mental illnesses.
The larger context—that America is a society brimming over with violence—is entirely lost in the discussion.
Let’s take a look at the forest for a change, shall we:
There are 192 million firearms owned by Americans, more than any other society in the world.Our rate of death from firearms is three times that of France and Canada, fourteen times greater than Ireland, and two hundred and fifty times greater than Japan, where firearms are aggressively controlled.
The U.S. has more prisoners, per capita, than any country on earth—three times more than Cuba, seven times more than Germany—and, indeed, we house twenty-five percent of all the prisoners in the world.
As for media violence, by the time the average American child leaves elementary school, they will have witnessed 8,000 murders and over 100,000 other acts of violence, and, to rub more salt into these open wounds, the U.S. also leads the world in the sale and rental of violent video games.
That litany of statistics comes to us compliments of our gratuitous interpretations of the First and Second Amendments.
But the forest we are talking grows ever larger.
Since World War II, the United States engaged in over fifty military operations abroad killing some four million people (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, the list goes on). If you add in to that total massacres by proxies and surrogates, the number flirts with five million (Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, and elsewhere).
We are the only country in the world seemingly perpetually at war. In 2011-2012 alone, the United States was killing people in nine different countries: Iraq and Afghanistan with troops, Libya with rockets, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen with drones, Honduras with raids against drug cartels, the Philippines with air support against insurgents, and most recently in Kenya as 150 Special forces started their operations. No other country in the world can boast of so many military involvements.
To remedy the horrors we saw in Connecticut should not be limited to screening mentally ill individuals from purchasing Glocks—which is about as far as our craven mainstream media wishes to venture. Instead we need to recognize the massacres of Jonestown, Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Connecticut are merely symptoms of a much more ubiquitous cancer.
To finally address this problem is to begin a long and arduous process of cultivating a culture of peace. Such collective psychotherapy begins by treating the patient on many fronts and in a multi-dimensional way: To forbid the sale of handguns, nationwide; to ration the sale of ammunition; to prohibit the sale of violent toys to children (Greece already does), to aggressively control the sale and access of violent video games to children (Australia, Venezuela, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and Brazil already do), and to prohibit the broadcast of violent scenes, explicit or implicit, on network television during family viewing hours, a practice already in effect in many European countries
And, who knows, we might even take it one step further and retreat from our aspirations of empire and global hegemony, close down our military operations, and bring our vast armies and armadas home —over 400,000 Americans at last count stationed in almost 1,000 overseas military bases.
Russia has ten overseas military bases. China none.
So much room to grow!
Imagine our progressive President, instead of limiting his compassion to the shedding of a tear at a press conference, actually proposed comprehensive and revolutionary changes and legislation that focussed not on the symptoms but, at long last, finally started to address the disease itself.
Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor Emeritus from Santa Clara University and the author of Duped! Delusion, denial, and the end of the American Dream, 2012. He maintains a website atcollectivepsych.com

Friday, December 14, 2012

Tv Spot: "Tamo´ En Cine"





Client : fundacion global democracia y desarrollo.
product : VI Festival de Cine Global Dominicano.
“tamo´ en cine″
creative director : wandro quiroz
creative : argenis mills
hd
director : argenis mills
executive producer : gabriela boullosa y leticia brea
producer : gabriela boullosa.
coordinator : giselle
photography : cesar zayas
art : eumir sanchez
editing : jennyver caraballo

Light Drawings de Pablo Picasso

Fascination du maître pour les dessins lumineux
En 1949, Gjon Mili, photographe travaillant pour Life Magazine montre à Picasso une série de clichés immortalisant des sauts dans l’obscurité de patineurs et patineuses à qui l’on avait placé de petites lumières sur leurs patins. Fasciné par le résultat, l’artiste espagnol a alors conçu une série de dessins lumineux dans une pièce sombre avec deux appareils photos et une petite lumière électrique en guise de pinceau.
C’est ainsi qu’il tente de « peindre » ses versions de centaures, de taureaux et de profils grecs, nous offrant une série de photos tout à fait splendide et un peu irréelle signée par Gjon Mili.
Light Drawings Pablo Picasso Light Drawings de Pablo Picasso
Light Drawings Pablo Picasso 2 Light Drawings de Pablo Picasso



His Music was a World Apart From the Hippy Culture that Embraced It

The Meaning of Ravi Shankar

by TARIQ ALI
Ravi Shankar was a virtuoso sitar player long before he became a cult for a drug-fuelled hippy generation that found the exquisite music he plucked from the strings a perfect accompaniment to the consumption of marijuana and LSD. Had technology been what it is now, plugged ears would have been listening to him all the way from London to Kathmandu.
The Beatles, who flirted with Indian mysticism for a while (provoking some delicious satire from Private Eye, which called the Maharishi “Veririchi Lotsamoney Yogi Bear”), became seriously fascinated by the sitar and George Harrison took lessons in Indian classical music. The results were limited, Norwegian Wood probably ahead of the others. Not to be left behind, Brian Jones experimented with the instrument as well in Paint It Black. The fad didn’t last too long. The Beatles and Stones moved on to other things. As with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in later years, the “fusion” between west and east was only partially successful. But the positives should not be underestimated. The Beatles’ affair with Indian music helped project it to a global audience. There was rarely an empty seat at Shankar’s concerts in the United States and western Europe.
His Bengali parents had inculcated a love of music and culture while their boys were very young. Uday Shankar, the older brother, was a very fine classical dancer and choreographer. He had danced with Anna Pavlova in Paris during the 20s and he rarely compromised his art in order to please audiences unfamiliar with Kathakali and other classical Indian dances. The younger brother was the same in his own field.
“A raga,” Ravi Shankar explained to his illustrious fans in the west, “is a scientific, precise, subtle and aesthetic melodic form with its own peculiar ascending and descending movement consisting of either a full seven-note octave, or a series of six or five notes in a rising or falling structure called the Arohana and Avarohana. It is the subtle difference in the order of notes, an omission of a dissonant note, an emphasis on a particular note, the slide from one note to the other … that demarcate one raga from the other.”
The response of Harrison and Jones was not recorded, but even if they understood what he was saying it left no trace in their music or the lyrics. The raga did not dominate Sgt Pepper and as the radical music critic of the 70s Richard Merton pointed out in a startling intervention in the New Left Review of all places, the distinction of the Stones lay elsewhere. For him, Under My Thumb, Stupid Girl, Back Street Girl or Yesterday’s Papers were targeting sexual exploitation: “The enormous merit – and audacity – of the Stones is to have repeatedly and consistently defied what is a central taboo of the social system: mention of sexual inequality. They have done so in the most radical and unacceptable way possible: by celebrating it.” All that can be said on this front is that making love while listening to Under My Thumb might have been more pleasurable to some men. Women would undoubtedly have preferred the slow rising movement of the Arohana.

It was the great violinist of the western classical tradition, Yehudi Menuhin, who understood Shankar immediately and demonstrated this in a series of joint concerts. I was present at one of them. The occasion was affecting and enjoyable. How could it not be with these two virtuosos in command of the evening? It did not work for me on the musical level.
The origins of Indian classical music, not unlike their western counterparts, lie in the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures of 2,000 years ago. The human voice deployed to recite the Vedas and later aid the temple dancers was paramount before any instruments emerged. During the medieval period the entry of Islam in the subcontinent brought with it a Persian tradition of poetry, painting and music that spread from Afghanistan southwards. Melody and rhythm, rather than harmony and counterpoint, dominated the music from the east.
The Indian tradition remained oral, each composition a gift from the guru to his pupil, and hereditary musical families still dominate classical music in south Asia. Shankar was both pleased and amused by his sudden rise to fame and iconic status in the west. His purist colleagues in India were disdainful. Not him. He spoke of how pleased he was by “the openness, willingness to learn and sincere enthusiasm of western audiences”. He meant this, of course, and it was true. But he also knew that the innate knowledge of south Asian music-lovers could not be easily reproduced elsewhere. An all-night open-air concert in lush surroundings on a summer night in Lahore or Delhi, Trivandrum or Dhaka, with the voice of divas competing with the instruments and reaching a crescendo as the dawn light intrudes and they combine for a finale, has no equivalent in the west. Here the constraints of time and money determine the length of a concert.
Indian classical music was born when time barely existed. It developed further within the structures of royal courts and a system of patronage where the ruler or the feudal master determined all. Satyajit Ray‘s cinematic masterpiece The Music Room conveys the obsession and the flavour of that period. Much has changed in South Asia, of course, but all-night concerts still take place.
When I was introduced to Ravi Shankar in London after a concert in the early 60s, he looked at me and asked: “Well?”
“Not the same as in our part of the world,” was the only reply I could muster.
He laughed, a deep throaty laugh. “That it will never be.”
Tariq Ali is the author of The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power.  He can be reached at tariq.ali3@btinternet.com.