Informational Blurb ~ Uzbekistan

Just a note providing a link to the Economist's new article on Uzbekistan, as some of you have been asking me what I know about it (wtf?). Also check out these two bloggers for more info on my favourite part of the world... Registan.net and Scraps of Moscow.

On Hot Air in Uzbekistan

Anyone here ever peruse the news published by the Institute of War and Peace Reporting?

[pause] How odd. And how fortunate that I'm here to scrunch it up into interesting, low-cost and high-impact morsels!! Action-packed with black humour, tres naturale...

From an article on May 7, I bring you:
These Two Quotes That'll Bring Tears to Your Eyes

“We assess films on several fundamental categories, which are unacceptable for the Uzbek mentality,” said commission chairman and film critic Saodat Khojaeva. “We see if there is any pornography in a film, whether it is a thriller and whether it contains calls for violence or inter-ethnic conflict.”

["unacceptable for the Uzbek mentality???" ... I totally agree on the thriller part, though. Out with thrills!!!]

Private producer Abdurahman Davlatov’s film “Bombastik-3” has been in limbo for years after it was denied a license. The problem is that it features a scene in which the main characters get into a hot air balloon and fly to a magical country where wondrous creatures and giants live.

“We were told, ‘How can that be. Citizens of Uzbekistan simply flew across the border? Where were our border guards?’ They say that we made Uzbek border guards look like fools,” said Davlatov. “But this is a simple children’s fairytale, a comedy, and there is no politics in it.”

[Central Asia... Any place that makes one want to laugh AND cry is just...irresistably compelling to me. Throw in a dash of Russian language, and I'm all up for an adventure...]

***********
quotes from: Uzbek Film Industry in Crisis: State censorship and under funding has crippled Uzbek filmmaking. By Sid Yanyshev in Tashkent (RCA No. 374, 07-May-05)

Who Says Jargon's All Bad?

From a UN document on the Millenium Development Goals (it's the last clause I love the most):

Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics (NUTS)
The NUTS is a single uniform breakdown of territorial units defined for EU Member States and Candidate Countries by EUROSTAT. It provides a classification or harmonization of measurement of sub-national regions and administrative levels for the purposes of regional comparisons. The aim of using NUTS is to ensure that regions of comparable size all appear at the same level, making it possible to compare policies from one country at a certain NUTS level with policies from another country at the same NUTS level.

You gotta love international cooperation!

On Apologies...

From Russia with Love

Two articles on apologies in the press today. One's a hilarious one from The Moscow Times, which has Putin sharpening his tongue on recent Western and Baltic pushes for Russia to explicitly condemn its domination over the Eastern Bloc from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1941) until the fall of the Berlin Wall. (amusing names we've given our history) (is "bloc" block in German or something?) The story can be read at
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/05/11/010.html

President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday ruled out any new renunciation of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, saying the Congress of People's Deputies had condemned it as illegal in 1989.

"What more is needed? What, should we renounce it every year?" Putin said at a news conference. "We consider this issue closed and will not return to it. We pronounced it once, and that is enough."

So, the question is, is once enough?

The Germans have really focused on the issue of their wartime guilt (and mind you, I am talking of very different abuses and guilts here, of course). But are they doing that because they're German, and there's something in the German culture that demands retrospection, intellectualization and coming to terms with ... what? identity? guilt? roles? truth? And if so, where does this come from?

Or perhaps the Germans are going through this because their crimes were predominantly against people in other countries, so there's no way to hide the stain as one might within "a family." That said, the Soviet exploitation and repression of the Bloc countries and the "periphery" (a million pardons) republics could also be considered foreign. Or could it? Is that the issue?

Is it that the Germans didn't have an actual ideology which subverted the individual to the state, as the Russians pushed through every facet of their social structure? Am I overstating? Did the Germans just have a leader and a vitriolic campaign, whereas the Russians had a leader and a dehumanizing legal code, and that's what makes the difference?

Or perhaps it's an issue of time. Maybe the longer one colludes with a reality, the more the reality becomes a fragment that is a part of us, and us a part of that reality. (What a strong word, to collude. Every moment of acceptance is collusion, though. In ever fact of life. But we don't often judge ourselves so harshly. As Montaigne, I think--watch me be wrong--said, "Experience is what men call their mistakes.")

Maybe I lean toward the last two "explanations." Two-to-three generations of life can't be shunted as a total loss, a total mistake, a complete sham, a travesty of justice...

U.S. President George W. Bush also took aim at the pact a day before he arrived in Moscow, telling a gathering in Riga on Saturday that the Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II will be remembered as "one of the greatest wrongs of history."

What exactly did Bush say? Did he explicitly say that one of the greatest presidents (some argue the greatest) of the United States sold off Eastern Europe as chatel to Stalin? Did he say "I'm sorry, that was a travesty of justice and a misuse of power and completely denigrated the flag of freedom that we've waved ever since that hypocritical decision." I think not. And then US legislators (Congressman Jack Kingston) demand that: "the Russian Federation must state clearly and unambiguously that the Soviet Union's five-decade-long occupation of the Baltics was wrong," Of course the Russians find the Americans duplicitous and sanctimonious. Brilliant beacon we are.

I'm still waiting for a real and proper apology for Abu Ghraib, and where is our soul-searching as a nation about that? Or maybe that's just a German thing.

OH, but to get to the lighter stuff, I do love Putin's rejoinder to the Baltic issue. Although he notes that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (of 1941) was renounced in '89 and therefore does not need to be renounced again on legal grounds, he adds:

"If the Baltic countries became part of the U.S.S.R. in 1939, then there is no way we could occupy them in 1941, since they were already part of the Soviet Union," Putin said in reply to a question from an Estonian journalist. "Maybe I did not study very well at the university because I drank a lot of beer in Soviet times, but I have something left in my head because the history professors were good."

Another good line:
Putin urged the Baltics to make peace with the past. "What, are we going to allow the dead to grab us by the sleeves and prevent us from moving forward?" he said.

From Germany, with ...

And another article that's not funny at all. It's about how we absolve ourselves, judge ourselves, condemn ourselves, and find a shade of gray which sits easy with us. An SS bookkeeper at Auschwitz, who counted up the lira, zlotys and other wealth of "exterminated" and imprisoned Jews, discusses his point of view. Reported by Der Spiegel and included in the online version of the New York Times, the article can be read at
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,355188,00.html
It's an article worthy of reading...

He's not guilty; he's not an accomplice; he's a witness, he says. Individual's crimes were "barbaric" but mass genocide was policy, he says... But he hasn't been able to really take part in the German reinvestigation into the past as he doesn't want to go there. He doesn't deny it, though, and has written a memoir which he's sent to his friends and sons.

Life. So... huge and small. And heavy.

Dao Hai Phong, or My Saturday Affair

How It All Began...
Last Saturday the weather forecasters predicted a rainy weekend. Somehow, even in the 21st century, we're still paying people for predictions, and still getting surprised when they don't presage reality.

I went out for a walk, to take advantage of the few moments before the rains came and thereby dispelled my propensity to look all about me on my ambles. I returned home 4 hours later, as dry as when I'd left the house, if one kindly overlooks my slight post-exercise flush.

On my excursion (sans rain), I'd bumped into a Gallerie l' Indochine, which I'd never noticed before. Tucked into a beautiful brownstone, this little gallery houses Asian art and a Brilliantly British Man who introduced me to the paintings and their artists. I don't honestly recall the name of the Burmese artist whose works graced the walls--his was a style that seemed to require some intellectualization or perhaps a greater understanding of Buddha than I have--but the three paintings that were newly arrived and leaned up on the wall were ... spectacular.

That's when I met Dao Hai Phong. Not in person. He's in his late 30s or early 40s. A Vietnamese artist. His paintings would only set me back about $3K, which is fantabulous. I'll check if I have the money in my other purse.

A Selection of Paintings by Dao Hai Phong, my latest love


Dark Nights


(I have no clue what this is called. I found it at "the Apricot Gallery.")


Boat by the Lily Pond


(Another unknown name. Same gallery.)


Sunset by the River


Peaceful Village


Rainy Day


Pink Glow


Grand Panorama


The First Art Lecture Ruth Has Ever Dared to Give
Apparently, Vietnamese art is rather influenced by Impressionism, not least as their primary art school was set up and fully stocked with a good share of French Impressionists in the 1860s. This influence has lasted, according to the Brilliantly British Man. In a book he showed me, Dao Hai Phong notes that freedom comes with a responsibility to explore, but also not to be caught by "false influences," which will re-form Vietnamese art into its own image or mold. His art is dramatically different from his contemporaries, although apparently, our Brilliantly British Man tells me, there have been attempts to emulate his style.


And the Wrap-Up...
What a good weekend this one has been for love!

I returned home last night in a state of great excitement. Oh, how I entered the bookstore with tearful anticipation, dashing to the shelves which surely housed my Rilke, waiting for me so faithfully.

Dashed, I was forced to walk out without a book (I know, the shock), but I made up for this by immediately running into Barnes & Noble, where I found my Rilke in abundance (and near Rimbaud). I brought home his selected poetry, translated by my dear Stephen Mitchell.

All is good once more. :) May everyone else's day be as blessed. :)

I Am In Love

That's right, kids. I have met Rainer Maria Rilke (who names a boy Maria?) and am 100% besotted. He's a German-speaking poet born in Prague in 1875 (a resident of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). I'd learn German to read him, I think, and that makes for the first time since Russian and Dostoevsky that I've said something like that... I hope this doesn't auger for a love affair with Germany--that'd be too messed up for even me, being of Polish background and all... :)

His Bio.... How dramatic! And his name means "Reborn." How brilliant...

Check out these fantabulous sections from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which are a bunch of recollections and imaginings from when he moved to Paris in the early 1900s...

On Paris, and this is how the book starts *shiver*

So, this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in. I have been out. I saw: hospitals. I saw a man who staggered and fell. A crowd formed around him and I was spared the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. She was dragging herself heavily along a high, warm wall, and now and then reached out to touch it as if to convince herself that it was still there. Yes, it was still there.

Next page

To think that I can't give up the habit of sleeping with the window open. Electric trolleys speed clattering through my room. Cars drive over me. A door slams. Somewhere a windowpane shatters on the pavement; I can hear its large fragments laugh, and its small ones giggle.

Later

And yet something happened again that took me up and crumpled me like a piece of paper and threw me away: something incredible.

And then

From the open windows, the air of the previous night crept out with a bad conscience.

Comparing people to lids of cans

Let us agree on one point: the lid of a can--or let us say, of a can that is in good condition, whose edge curves in the same way as its own--a lid like this should have no other wish than to find itself on top of its can; this would be the utmost that it could imagine for itself; an unsurpassed satisfaction, the fulfillment of all its desires. Indeed, there is something almost ideal about being patiently and gently turned and coming to rest evenly on the small projecting rim, and feeling its interlocking edge inside you, elastic and just as sharp as your own edge when you are lying alone. Ah, but there are hardly any lids now that can still appreciate this. Here it is very evident how much confusion has been caused among Things by their association with humans. For humans--if it is permissible to compare them, just in passing, with tin lids--humans sit upon their occupations ungracefully and with extreme unwillingness. Some because in their haste they haven't found the right one; some because they have been put on in anger, crooked; some because the corresponding rims have been dented, each in a different way. Let us admit in all sincerity that basically they have just one thought: as soon as they get a chance, to jump down and roll around and clatter.

On rulers, their mortality and their propensity to travel and luxuriate in all their ostentatiousness

For the sake of this blood he dragged around with him all these objects that he cared so little about. The three large diamonds and all the precious stones; the Flemish laces and the Arras tapestries, in piles. His silk pavilion with its cords of twisted gold and four hundred tents for his retinue. And pictures painted on wood, and the twelve disciples in massive silver. And the Prince of Taranto and the Lord of Chateau-Guyon. For he wanted to persuade his blood that he was emperor and there was nothing above him: so that it would fear him. But his blood didn't believe it, in spite of all the proofs; it was a distrustful blood. Perhaps he kept it in doubt for a while. But the horns of Uri betrayed him. After that, his blood knew that it was circulating in a lost man: and it wanted to escape.

And on and on, he writes like an intoxicating, undulating music coursing through the reader's senses. He's incredible. Such a poet, such a visual, tactile experience. He talks about death, mortality, solitude, mothers, and our faces, to each other and masking us even from ourselves, separating us from others. He's incredible.

I now have to buy every single thing he's written. He's displaced Keats (who?), Pushkin (who? *ducking from hostile missiles sent by the Russians*), and ... dare I say it? Shakespeare! *ducking from the slings and arrows of outraged fans*

Ah, love.

Let me see if I can dig up some of his poetry. I daren't continue to write about him now; work beckons (rather manically, I might add). But here's a link I'll enjoy perusing, and which you might too; one which leads to a selection of his poetry, translated. Stephen Mitchell is the translater of my copy (oh, beloved copy) of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and so he's my preferred translator...

Rilke, thy name is beauty.