This is Benjamin
Archive for the ‘random’ Category
Protests in Berlin
February 27th, 2011 | benjamin
Protests in Belrin have more of a Soylent Green quality to them than those I’m familiar with. Fortress sized trucks parked at intersections, sparkling in their spotlights are the drips from the water cannons mounted above.
And it really is cold, yet the left turns out in droves.
Teams of police officers tap their hoses against tear gas canisters while local entrepeneurs collect discarded bottles of Beck’s and Club Mate for the deposit latent in each.
What I heard at spoken word
January 29th, 2010 | benjamin
‘I don’t read the news much, or not recent news anyway. But I did see a piece about a man from Birmingham who raped his child like 1000 times in three years.’ A pause. Which is like, what, three times a week.
I just thought, that’s wrong innit? Its disgusting. Because home is supposed to be a place of sanctuary.
So I wrote this poem from the perspective,’ he stopped and wet his lips, ‘of the little girl:
Morning, laying in my bed,
the sound of mum going to work, of car door close
and engine rev. Then the sound I dread:
Crrreeeek. Crrrreeek.
The door opening.
Crrreeeek.‘
At this point I could not absorb the description of the rape he gave, which was rather graphic, although mercifully not in rhyme. I had begun to shake with horrified laughter, a kind of irrepressible laugh of such force I have not experienced outside of a church or school assembly. I took great interest in the menu while my shoulders quaked.
He finished.
Silence.
For.
Effect.
‘Now I know that was a bit dark.’ Pensive look. ‘But, I mean, its not all roses is it?’
Youssef Chahine’s film Bab El Hadid (Cario Station): An Egyptian classic that makes for uneasy viewing
January 25th, 2010 | benjamin
The thing that impacts you most about Chahine’s Bab el Hadid (Cairo Station) is not the stark and passionate cinematography, nor is it the brutality at the heart of the film and its main character, disabled newspaper seller Qinawi, played by Chahine.
What is really disturbing is how Chahine winds Qinawi’s violent lust into everyday sexuality.
Qinawi spends his days at Cairo’s Central Station, selling newspapers, but most of all watching the women that surround him, whether passing through on journey’s, pose in stockings for newspaper advertisements, or, like him, making their living at the station. Qinawi is in particular Hanuma (Hind Rostom), the drink seller, who is already engaged for Farid Chawki (played by the actor of the same name), and who laughs off all of Qinawi’s ineffectual advances. As the summer heat bears down on Central Station, Qinawi’s infatuation boils over into a dangerous obsession.
I’ve never seen a more genuine, nor sobering portrayal of lust. We watch Qinawi as he watches erotic dramas unfold that he will never be included in, as he paws over newspapers freshly saturated with erotic Western imagery and pastes them on the wooden walls of his pathetic shack. We also watch him watching others, station workers lusting after and gently harrassing women as they pass.
What makes the film unique, for its heritage anyway, is the occasional attention Chahine gives to the women who are the object of his and others’ lust, women who live their lives constantly buffeted by the desires of men which reach out initially from the watching eye.
Chahine takes this everyday activity, watching, desiring, lusting, and shows how easily this spills over into violence. We not only see the women he desires, but we see the intensity of his longing growing until it completely consumes him and he is only a violent hunger barely contained by a thin membrane of skin and basic sociability.
But it is not just looking which is the problem, rather it is the lack of reciprocity, the looking without looking back. When Qinawi’s fantasy – of marrying Hanuma, building her a house by the sea, giving her children – is about to be punctured forever as she readies herself for marriage he decides to murder her. This fantasy is doomed to failure because it is impervious to the desires of Hanuma. It exists in spite of what she desires, not because of it. Its failure only feeds anger into Qinawi’s succession of lascivious fantasies.
This eventually drives him mad and in the film’s conclusion he is straightjacketed and sent to an asylum moments before he would succeed in marrying Hanuma. But what is really disturbing is that Chahine sets his madness on a continuum that begins with the desires of ordinary men. For what sets him apart from the other men gathered at this nexus of human interaction? The men around him are able, ocassionaly at least, to satisfy their desire. Qinawi, with his broken body, pride and masculinity can not. Otherwise they are not that far apart.
Qinawi’s violence began in his desiring eye. Chahine ventures that looking, an activity at central to the way men express desire – all men, not just sadistic lunatics – in fact commingles with violence and hatred and for this reason, Bab el Hadid makes for uneasy viewing.
Away for a bit
November 18th, 2009 | benjamin
As you may know, I have been pursuing an internship at a small number of media outlets in the United Kingdom. And, my ambitions have been realised. I am intensely excited that I will be an intern at The Guardian for a week this December.
Yes!
I will be with the marvelous G2 section.
So, for the time being, I’m preparing for this thrilling endeavour.
A god-given right?
October 14th, 2009 | benjamin
At the moment I’m blogging and publishing articles on a number of established news and journal websites such as ‘A god-given right?‘ on The Razor. I will collect these works here and continue to publish odd things here (and there).
ican’tfuckingbelieveit2.0
October 1st, 2009 | benjamin
Sometimes distance sharpens the lens. But the extent to which the Australian media have been captured by the interests of Kraft, the american multinational, is astounding, and mirth-making.
This was the lead story on all Fairfax news websites this morning, ahead of the Sumatran earthquake which killed thousands.
Applying tactics that they first polished with their ‘what kind of vegemite eater are you?’ campaign (or something equally inane), Kraft have now convinced the media that the naming competition for one of their products is worth reporting. The true genius lies, however, in the so-called ‘scandal’ around the name that was chosen as a consequence of the competition. This clever manoeuvre allows those editors with some residual pride and professionalism to report on the promotion without being seen to rely on press releases and PR guff from Kraft.
With cajoling from Kraft marketing, the amount of chatter around the promotion has reached a critical mass, so that journalists can consult the public sphere in order to produce the reports, rather than rely on press releases from Kraft.
The cynical geniuses at Kraft have even gone so far as to affect shock at what has transpired, as though the ‘scandal’ were somehow against their interests, as though this were a news event that transcends them.
These so-called professionals are (wilfully?) oblivious to the role they play in promoting Kraft’s products, regardless of whether we like the facile name for their facile product.
Laos PDR
March 12th, 2009 | benjamin
PDR = POLICE DON’T READ, as such, I am able to access my blog.
Expect more, from me, from life, from everything.
gaza dispatch
January 13th, 2009 | benjamin
Why post this? Agit-prop? Antisemitism? I feel this cannot be left untold. http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/01/12/from-italy-to-palestine-vittorio-arrigoni-writes-from-gaza/
hunger of information
December 13th, 2008 | benjamin
the song has replaced the album
rolling news has replaced music and
science has replaced the soul
obama the intellectual
November 20th, 2008 | benjamin
Now that America has elected Barack Obama to be the next president, a great deal of celebration has centred on the fact that Obama is a black man.
The persistent affection that the world maintains for the United States can be seen in the relief and satisfaction of many people that Obama will be the first African American to hold the most powerful position of leadership in the world.
And rightly so.
But another aspect of his election win receives less focus than it should. I am particularly heartened that Obama is an intellectual, and while this group by no means suffers the same discrimination faced by blacks and other ethnic minorities in the United States and around the world, they, or should I be so bold as to say we, face suspicion and hostility in a great many societies.
Obama edited Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School until becoming a United States senator. There is no way to predict in what specific ways these experiences will guide him in his role, it is reasonable to expect that he will bring his awakened critical faculties when making decisions.
He may be able to entertain other perspectives to his own, work strategically, and perhaps even see a world that exceeds in complexity the bipolar one depicted most recently by the Bush Administration.
But this not a mere rupture from his anti-intellectual predecessor. While previous United States presidents have been well educated, this has usually been a pretext to pursuing a political career. Bill Clinton, for example, was a Rhodes Scholar, but upon graduation began work on the McGovern presidential campaign, and four years later was already governor of Arkansas.
Obama, on the other hand, didn’t have any immediate party political trajectory. He toyed at being a writer, pursued change at the grass roots as a community organiser before realising that the most significant impact he could make would be in public life.
He just might bring to the presidency what I consider the role of all intellectuals: to engage the world in all of its complexity, to dream the world anew