It’s really disheartening to have to write yet another post, about yet another problem in the Moroccan press, but it seems the wheels of censorship never stop. Over the weekend, the government ordered all issues of Tel Quel and its sister publication Nichane seized from points of sale. The magazine’s editor in chief Ahmed Reda Benchemi was heard by police on Saturday, and was back at home on Sunday, according to this Reuters report.
So Salman Rushdie was finally honored with an honorary knighthood (he’s Sir Salman from now on) and a Pakistani MP apparently thinks that this award justifies suicide attacks. In addition, the Pakistani minister for parliamentary affairs says that the honor “has hurt the sentiments of the Muslims across the world. ” I’d love to know what qualifies her to speak for Muslims across the world. My God. Can you imagine if Rushdie ever wins the Nobel? The loonie fringe will probably blame him for everything from the Iraq war to the fighting in Gaza. Enough.
Suketu Mehta (Maximum City) writing in The New York Times:
I grew up watching my father stand on his head every morning. He was doing sirsasana, a yoga pose that accounts for his youthful looks well into his 60s. Now he might have to pay a royalty to an American patent holder if he teaches the secrets of his good health to others. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2,315 yoga trademarks. There’s big money in those pretzel twists and contortions — $3 billion a year in America alone.
Read on, to find out how knowledge is being patented, and by those who should know better.
The Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of the budget for the 2005 action film Sahara, which starred Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz, and which is considered a financial disaster for the studio that produced it. What I found interesting about Glenn F. Bunting’s article was this tidbit, which describes the shoot in Morocco: the work involves paying out bribes, interfering with government development projects, and the removal of trees:
Although portions of the movie were shot in Britain and Spain, most of the filming was done in Morocco, a country in North Africa that has become a popular site for U.S. filmmakers. “Babel,” “Syriana,” “Black Hawk Down” and “Kingdom of Heaven” all have benefited from Morocco’s welcoming environment, favorable exchange rate and cheap labor. An “assistant propman” on “Sahara,” for example, earned a weekly salary of $233, the equivalent of one day’s pay for a U.S. prop worker. In one impoverished village, a “Sahara” crew acquired household items at a bargain price. “We actually bought all the dressings from this person’s house at a very inflated rate, which was probably about a dollar,” Eisner said on the “Sahara” DVD. Producers had little reason to worry about red tape or paperwork because in Morocco a single permit provides access to the entire kingdom.Cold cash came in handy. According to Account No. 3,600 of the “Sahara” budget, 16 “gratuity” or “courtesy” payments were made throughout Morocco. Six of the expenditures were “local bribes” in the amount of 65,000 dirham, or $7,559. Experts in Hollywood accounting could not recall ever seeing a line item in a movie budget described as a bribe. “It’s a bad choice of words in a document, but it’s a perfectly normal and cost-efficient way of getting a film made in a place like Morocco,” said David A. Davis of FMV Opinions Inc., a Century City financial advisory firm.
The final budget shows that “local bribes” were handed out in remote locations such as Ouirgane in the Atlas Mountains, Merzouga and Rissani. One payment was made to expedite the removal of palm trees from an old French fort called Ouled Zahra, said a person close to the production who requested anonymity. Other items include $23,250 for “Political/Mayoral support” in Erfoud and $40,688 “to halt river improvement project” in Azemmour. The latter payment was made to delay construction of a government sewage system that would have interrupted filming. Putnam, Anschutz’s lawyer, said the “local bribes” reflected line items that were budgeted but not actually spent. He said the payments on location in Morocco were reviewed after “Sahara” executives were contacted by The Times.
Honestly, I started to laugh about all this, until I got to the part where palm trees are being taken out and river improvement projects that benefit Moroccans are halted in order to accommodate films, and then I wanted to cry.
The rest of the article describes, in painstaking detail, all the movie’s expenditures, which included a payment of $72,800 to McConaughey’s hair colorist for 90 days’ work. Yes, those numbers are correct.
Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass has revealed that he served in the Waffen-SS during World War II.
The author, best known for his first novel “The Tin Drum” and an active supporter of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), said his wartime secret had been weighing on his mind and was one of the reasons he wrote a book of recollections which details his war service. The book is out in September.“My silence through all these years is one of the reasons why I wrote this book,” the paper quoted Grass as saying in a preview of its Saturday edition. “It had to come out finally.”
You can read the Reuters release here.
Feminist scholar Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch) has jumped into the row over the film adaptation of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. As you may recall, the novel stirred some strong feelings within the Bangladeshi community back in 2003, and now that a production company has started work on a film adaptation, some people want the filming to be taken elsewhere. (There are, it should be said, other people from the community who think filming on location would be great for business and should be encouraged. Not that this makes for great newspaper copy. But, moving on.)
Greer’s stance, or however much of it I can decode, seems to be that a) Monica Ali is not really Bengali, because she has “allowed herself to forget” her mother tongue; b) she is British, and has a British point of view ; c) she is not ostracized because she went to Oxford and lives in a nice neighborhood; therefore d) she doesn’t really have what it takes to write about poor Bengalis from Brick Lane; and, as a corollary, e) Bangladeshi Britons are better off not reading the book or seeing the movie.
This Ali-bashing is getting really tiresome. Yes, she made a poor stylistic choice with Hasina’s voice, and no, Brick Lane is not without fault. But to claim to know what Monica Ali’s intentions are when she wrote the novel is just plain ridiculous. Is Greer a mind reader? And to condemn Ali because she dared—dared!—to go to Oxford is even more stupid. Since when has education been an impediment to writing? What gives Greer the right to decide whether Monica Ali is Bangladeshi enough? And what gives her the right to tell Bangladeshi Britons whether they should see the movie or not?
In other developments, Salman Rushdie fired off a response to the editors, in which he took issue with Greer’s characterization of Ali, and added
At the height of the assault against my novel The Satanic Verses, Germaine Greer stated: “I refuse to sign petitions for that book of his, which was about his own troubles.” She went on to describe me as “a megalomaniac, an Englishman with dark skin”. Now it’s Monica Ali’s turn to be deracinated: “She writes in English and her point of view is, whether she allows herself to impersonate a village Bangladeshi woman or not, British.” There is a kind of double racism in this argument. To suit Greer, the British-Bangladeshi Ali is denied her heritage and belittled for her Britishness, while her British-Bangladeshi critics are denied that same Britishness, which most of them would certainly insist was theirs by right. “Writers are treacherous,” Greer says, and she should know.
Touché.
Just when it seems that the administration makes a step forward, like getting that fucker Zarqawi (not that it will change the situation in Iraq or return the hostages he’s taken, but hey, I’ll take comfort wherever I can get it at this point), it takes two steps back. This past weekend, when two Saudis and a Yemeni committed suicide at the prison that shame forgot, a Gitmo camp commander declared that the men “committed an act of war” against the U.S. How monumentally arrogant and soulless do you have to be to say something like that? I mean, seriously?
John Malkovich will play David Lurie in the film adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Why, oh why? He will completely ruin it.
(via)
A survey of publishers, booksellers, agents and librarians has found there is fear of pursuing books that appeal to readers of color. According to the survey:
While 7.9% of the UK’s population is of ethnic minority origin, only 50 (1%) of this year’s top 5,000 bestsellers are by BME writers, despite the high profile of award-winners Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy and Monica Ali.
Wait, it takes a survey to know that?
Well, color me surprised: The BBC reports that when George Clooney’s Syriana was screened in the UAE, two minutes of film were removed by government censors: They dealt with mistreatment of Asian workers in an unnamed Gulf country.
