Clive James

This is an excerpt from one of the world finest journalists, Clive James's interview with PBS’s Bill Moyer. I extremely recommend his latest book, Cultural Amnesia. It is a fascinating read indeed:

“In Vienna especially, because the universities weren’t fully open, the Jewish intellectuals were forced into the cafés and tended to develop a language which we are still speaking now, which is the language of the normal conversational rhythm about profound things. They took the initiative away from the academy, and in my view, it should be always taken away from the academy. I have a lot of respects for academics but academic language should not drive the conversation. The conversation should be driven from journalism. What we do in journalism is not incidental to culture but basic to it and it was demonstrated by the Jewish intellectuals in Vienna cafés. They learnt to write the article, the feuilleton, which is the whole basis of the modern culture.

I don’t believe that knowledge and understanding and wisdom are the property of a class at all. I believe they’re generally democratic things. It doesn’t mean that everyone will understand but anyone can.

It’s still my mission in life to write in a way that anyone who can read will realize that I’m talking about something. My enemy is the elevated language. When I use the word academic in a pejorative sense I mean that the language that puts a distance between the fact being talked about and any possible comprehension. That’s the enemy.

There’s a connection between writing and talking which I like to maintain, for that very reason. It’s a political stance. My political stance is that learning and humanism should not be shut off from the people. That unless you can present these things in a way that can be understood, you’re losing. The idea that you can retreat to some sort of enclave where only you and your fellow qualify people. Incidentally, this idea was rife in the early twentieth century among right wing intellectuals. T.S Elliot for example and all his friends believed that only a few people were qualified for culture. I don’t believe that. I believe even though it might be a minority, anybody can be qualified.”

McDonald with truffles!

Once, there was an adorable German movie called “Bella Martha”. A simple romantic comedy/drama, which was anything but conventional. After all, when one combines romance, cuisine and good cinematography, it would be really inappropriate for the critical mind to function critically!

Although apart from "Departed" and that TV series "Office", I don’t have any recollection of a good American remake of anything whatsoever (and I’m absolutely certain that a good number of people would even question those only examples I represented), I went to the theatre to watch “No Reservation”; the Hollywood remake of the German movie; with the minimum expectation and mostly to observe the possible socio-cultural gap between these two versions. But man! is it possible to watch this shit without every brain cell of yours would cordially wish to exchange its position with a rectum cell of a dying old man, even with one, badly damaged by hemorrhoid!

Though they even repeated a good portion of the dialogues, it was kind of masochistically amusing to see how seriously you can degrade a movie, just by Hollywoodizing it! Meaning, stripping it away from any profundity, injecting some disgraceful, tasteless humor and sentimental crap and removing almost all the subtleties, nuances and sophistication that the original version was so rich of.

In fact, there’s a command in Photoshop that does exactly what writer and director of this movie have achieved to do and it is called “Flatten Layers!”

Back to the movie, apart from the disgustingly superficial additional scenes and story lines, even those scenes which were supposed to be the exact replicate, were nothing but some hollow, flat and badly-made versions of a thoughtful and delicious masterpiece.

Where one could even cry for Martha quite frequently, I seriously doubt that anyone would feel any sympathy for her generic version, “Kate” (or whatever the hell the untalented goddess, "Catherine Zetha Jones" was pathetically trying to portray). Replace the adorable “Lina” with the annoying, smart-mouth "Zoe" and the charming “Mario” with Mr. so-full-of-himself and voila, you’ll have the tasteless, bland, crime-against-cinema, “No Reservation”.

Just as an amuses-bouche, in the German version, Martha lives in a one bedroom apartment (as any normal single person who’s not a CEO would do) and expectedly, when she is forced to take care of her niece, she offers her room to the little girl and start sleeping on the couch. I really could not understand why a single woman in Manhattan should have an extra room, fully furnished!! Maybe because the rents in downtown New York are so affordable that it is crazy not to have some spare rooms! ha?!

And by the way, an Italian chef with a lively soul who hums Italian songs when he cooks is absolutely adorable. An American who plays loud Pavarotti in a busy kitchen in Manhattan and screams horrendously with it, is not!!! Just two minutes of "Aaron Eckhart" is convincing enough to beg Kate to smash his face with a hot, heavy cast-iron saucepan, at least two thousand times until he shuts the hell up forever!!! And maybe that’s how the director and the adaptive screen writer deserve to be treated as well!

Final word, unless one wants to make the same painful socio-cultural experiment, I seriously recommend avoiding this movie at any cost and instead, I absolutely suggest renting the fantastic original German version. After all, reading subtitles for two hours is better than letting your intellect to be insulted for the same amount of time, isn’t it?

A hilarious “Reservoir Dogs” moment from the hilarious BBC comedy series, “Coupling”

iRAQ!

Now that you reduced the poor country to rubble, is it too much too ask to at least, pronounce its name correctly?!

It’s not an Apple product for God’s sake! it is a country that should be called Iraq! “E-raq”! It should be pronounced, not like ipod, not like iphone, but more like E-mail!

And by the way, the same rule applies to her eastern neighbor and the next in line for “the operation liberty and democracy”, Iran!

So, for next time you want to say Iraq, let me give you a hint. Shift your mind slowly from the word iTune to some other words like “Ignorance”, “Irresponsible", “Inexcusable” or “Irreversible”!

You never know, maybe it helps!

The Miracle of Plastic Shoes

I was about to forgive the Flip-flops for the disaster they were; only out of respect to the shear number of beautiful feet- and their corresponding legs- they carried through out these past couple of years; that suddenly another catastrophe of taste hit the market…Plastic shoes!

I’m still trying to digest the ingenuity of the marketing gurus who forced women all around the globe to match their carefully picked clothes with those blue and green rubber crap which less than a year ago, according to Bill Maher, “Only pre-schoolers and mental patients would wear!”

But on the other hand, what should we wear considering the kind of music we listen to, the sort of movie we watch, the taste of food we eat and the style of houses we inhabit?!

I mean, character-less apartments with windows facing some concrete walls, McDonald’s double cheeseburger, Hip-hop so called music and Transformers and pirate of Caribbean as entertainments! What could have possibly come next?! Well, Plastic shoes…maybe!