Voltron Character or 20th Century Political Movement?

N.B. This is something I compiled a few years back but (surprise, surprise) never found a place to publish.

PART I: POP QUIZ

For each numbered item, select the character that appeared on the television series Voltron: Defender of the Universe from the list of twentieth-century political parties, movements, and armed insurgencies.

1. a) GRAPO b) ASALA c) LOTOR d) DIKO

2. a) IRENE b) PASOK c) ZANU d) CORAN

3. a) SVEN b) DASHNAK c) AZAPO d) MEP

4. a) FRELIMO b) ALLURA c) PUDEMO d) LURD

5. a) JEM b) SWAPO c) PAGAD d) MOGOR

6. a) GERAKAN b) FISH MAN c) FARC d) RENAMO

7. a) SLORC b) UNITA c) LORN d) RUKH

8. a) PIDGE b) MOLIRENA c) KISS d) GRUNK

9. a) FUNCINPEC b) VOLTRICIA d) GOLKAR c) FIG

10. a) FODEM b) FANK c) MILF d) ZARKON


answers: 1c, 2d, 3a, 4b, 5d, 6b, 7c, 8a, 9b, 10d



PART II: GLOSSARY


ALLURA: Blue lion pilot (once held hostage by ZARKON)

ASALA: Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (seeks Turkish reparations for the 1915 genocide, founded 1975)

AZAPO: Azanian People’s Organization (South Africa; outgrowth of the Black Conscious Movement; founded 1977)

CORAN: Royal advisor to ALLURA (in charge of Castle Control)

DASHNAK (also ARF): Armenian Revolutionary Foundation (founded 1890; banned by Soviets; reformed post-independence; banned again; participant in current government)

DIKO: Democratic Party (Cyprus; center-right movement, founded 1976)

FANK (formerly FARK): Khmer National Armed Forces (Military component of Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic; founded 1953)

FARC: Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Marxist, rural-based insurgency, founded 1966)

FIG: Fighting Islamic Group (Libya; advocates overthrow of Muammar Qadhafi’s government; founded 1995)

FISH MAN: Victim of transgenic experiments (restored to health by daughter’s flute-pipe)

FODEM: Democratic Forum for Modernity (Central African Republic; founded 1997)

FRELIMO: Mozambique Revolutionary Front (independence movement turned ruling party; fought lengthy civil war against RENAMO; founded 1962)

FUNCINPEC: National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia (current royalist ruling party, founded 1981)

GERAKAN: Malaysian People’s Movement (center-left, non-racial party, founded 1968)

GIA: Armed Islamic Group (Algeria; terrorist group advocating overthrow of secular government; founded 1992)

GOLKAR: Functional Groups (Indonesia; state political party during the Suharto dictatorship; founded 1964)

GRAPO: First of October Antifascist Resistance Group (Spain; extreme left terrorist movement; founded 1975)

GRUNK: Royal Government of National Union of Kampuchea (Cambodia; government in exile, closely linked to FUNK, the political-military National United Front, both founded 1970)

IRENE: Integration, Representation Message of Hope (Venezuela; personal political party of former Miss Universe and Caracas municipality mayor Irene Saez; founded 1992)

JEM: Army of Mohammed (Pakistan; fighting for annexation of Kashmir; founded 2000)

KISS: Keep it Straight and Simple Party (South Africa; advocates minimal government; founded 1994)

LORN: Lieutenant in the Galaxy Alliance

LOTOR: Warrior son of ZARKON (fell love with ALLURA)

LURD: Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (fought to oust president Charles Taylor; founded 2000)

MEP: Electoral Movement Party (Aruba; social-democratic party, founded 1971)

MILF: Moro Islamic Liberation Front (Philippines; Islamist insurgency in Mindanao; founded 1977)

MOGOR: Commander of the Doom Forces (refused to serve LOTOR when ZARKON was made to pilot a lookalike Robeast)

MOLIRENA: National Republican Liberal Movement (Panama; founded 1982)

PAGAD: People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (South Africa; community anti-crime group turned anti-Western terrorist organization; founded 1996)

PASOK: Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Greece; nationalist party; founded 1974)

PIDGE: Green lion pilot

PUDEMO: People’s United Democratic Movement (Swaziland; founded 1989)

RENAMO: National Resistance of Mozambique (right-wing insurgency backed by Rhodesian and South African governments; fought civil war against FRELIMO; founded 1976)

RUKH: Ukrainian People’s Movement for Restructuring (moderate nationalist party, founded 1988)

SLORC: State Law and Order Restoration Committee (Myanmar; military government, founded 1988)

SVEN: Blue lion pilot (killed early on, then resurrected; place in Lion Force taken by ALLURA)

SWAPO: Southwest Africa People’s Organization (Namibia; Marxist-Leninist insurgency, formed to fight South African colonial regime; founded 1960)

UNITA: National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (backed by South Africa, fought post-independence civil war against ruling MPLA government; founded 1966)

VOLTRICIA: Baby born during one of ZARKON’s village raids; named for Lion Force rescuers.

ZANU: Zimbabwe African National Union (fought civil war against white Rhodesian government; founded 1964)

ZARKON: Drule king of Planet Doom (father of LOTOR)

Project Gatsby

Here's a movie I put together couple of years ago, an art-film-ish documentary about my college roommates and our college sofa.

Mixing French and Arabic(s)

I'm fascinated by on-the-fly language hybrids: Spanglish, Sheng (Kiswahili-English), the "HUGME" (Hindu-Urdu-Gujarati-Marathi-English) of Salman Rushdie's many-tongued Bombay. The other day I was emailing a friend about mixing French and Arabic in Tunisia, and hours later came across (via Language Log via Langauge Hat) some anecdotes on the real-world usefulness of Fusha (aka standard written Arabic) vs. French vs. local dialects.

From the Language Log post:

This situation makes the task of foreign learners more difficult, since they need to learn to deal appropriately with a very broad range of mixtures of "high" and "low" languages. This is true to some extent in any language, but the range of diglossia in "Arabic" appears to be significantly greater than in most other modern situations. You need to imagine a situation in which "Latin" is used to refer not only to classical and patristic Latin, but also to the spoken versions French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese (with none of them having any standard written form).

And the longer usage anecdotes, quoted in Language Log but from a World Bank-hosted pdf:

Hela is a sixth-grade primary school student living in Tunis. She spends her summers in Nabeul with her grandmother. Her two best friends there are Hiba and Meriem. Hiba lives in Nabeul all year round and is the same age as Hela. Meriem is a year older and lives in La Marsa during the school year. Hela goes to a private school where she started French and Arabic at the same time. She has more than 20 hours of classes in Arabic and about 10 hours in French a week. All the subjects other than French, such as Math and Biology, are taught in Fusha. Sometimes the teacher explains things in Arbi, but the students often have to speak in Fusha. Hela does not like Fusha as much as Arbi, it feels too alien to her. She even likes French better than Fusha. Meriem’s classes are a lot like Hela’s. She prefers French and often uses French words when she’s speaking Arbi. She thinks it makes her sound cool, like an adult. Hiba, on the other hand, didn’t start French until the third grade. Even though she now has the same number of hours of each language as Hela does, she prefers Arabic (both fusha and Arbi) to French and reads more Arabic books.

The three girls play together and watch television. Their favorite shows are Saoussen, which is in Fusha, and Les Schtroumfs, which is in French. Sometimes, when they play, they pretend to be the cartoon characters and try to sound like them. Hiba likes playing Saoussen best, because she doesn’t play well when they speak in French. Meriem prefers Les Schtroumfs because her Fusha is poor. They usually just speak Arbi together. After the summers over, Hela and Meriem go back to their homes. They decide to write each other letters over the school year. After the first day of school, Hela runs home to write letters to her friends. She starts to write a letter to Hiba, in Fusha, but feels that this is not a friendly letter. It feels more like homework. She thinks in Arbi, but cannot write what she means, and has to translate. Frustrated, she decides to write to Meriem first. She quickly realizes that her best bet is to write in French, but still struggles with finding the right words to say what she means. Finally, she settles on using Arbi words that she approximates phonetically and finishes one letter. For Hibas letter, though, its harder for her to do this with Fusha, so she just writes a very short letter and writes some words in French. These solutions work, but leave her feeling unsatisfied. She feels closer to Meriem because she can communicate with her better. She rapidly loses interest in writing to Hiba, though.

Hela's cousin, Farah, grew up in Saudi Arabia. She is the same age as Hela and is in the fourth grade. Farah only speaks Saudi Arabic, Fusha, and English, which she studies at school. She feels that Fusha is strange and silly. Nobody really speaks it there either. When Farah and Hela get together, they can only speak a mixture of their dialect with Fusha. It is very strange for both of them. They hardly ever write each other letters, because they’d have to do it in Fusha, which neither feels comfortable with. Farah feels resentment towards Fusha and reads even less. She doesn’t like music in Arabic as much as English or French music and only reads in Arabic if it is mandatory. Her French continues to improve and her Fusha remains poor. This does not bother her though, because she knows that once she gets to secondary school, Fusha would be much less important and if she wants to be a doctor when she grows up, she will only need French.

Power, Justice, Love, Dinner

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting that which stands against love.

—Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

It is as though [David, the psalm's writer] would say, "The Lord indeed makes a most unusual warrior of me and arms me quite wonderfully against my enemies. I thought that He would have put armor on me, placed a helmet on my head, put a sword into my hand, and warned me to be cautious and give careful attention to the business at hand lest I be surprised by my enemies. But instead He places me at a table and prepares a splendid meal for me, annoints my head with precious balm or (after the fashion of my country) puts a wreath on my head as if, instead of going out to do battle, I were on my way to a party or a dance. And so that I may not want anything now, He fills my cup to overflowing so that at once I may drink, be happy and of good cheer, and get drunk. The prepared table, accordingly, is my armor, the precious balm my helmet, the overflowing cup my sword; and with these I shall conquer all my enemies." But is that not a wonderful armor and an even more wonderful victory?

—Martin Luther, "Psalm 23, Expounded One Evening After Grace at the Dinner Table" (1536)

Nashville, New Orleans, Kingston

I've been meaning to pass on this tidbit to music-loving friends for a while: It's a 1997 radio interview with Keith Richards (with Liza Richardson on KCRW), promoting his Rastafarian drum and chant project "Wingless Angels".

Commenting on reggae music's multiple roots, Keith notes that, back in the formative days, in Jamaica they could just recieve the high-power radio transmissions from two U.S. cities: Nashville and New Orleans. Keith posits that reggae fused those influences: the back-beat of New Orleans funk becoming the reggae off-beat rhythm (I'm sure I'm muddling the rhythmic terms here), and the melodic approach of country-western informing the singing.

Not being as knowledgable about things reggae as some, I'll leave it as a fascinating fable (maybe mostly true) of cross-cultural pollination.

One Big Boxy Multicolored Metaphor

My friend Koranteng had a wonderful blog post a few weeks back about the woven-plastic bags, generally plaid, known the world over by various names but in Anglophone West Africa as the "Ghana-Must-Go". I'd seen them too on African buses, and if they had a name in my mind it was probably "South African Street Merchant Bags". A column on the Daily Telegraph points out that, as with just about everything these days, most of the bags are made in China. Koranteng, meanwhile, points out that, apart from that China fact, many of the better details in the Telegraph's column were lifted, without attribution, from his own inital essay.



I, meanwhile, will do my own lifting: Koranteng's photo of a woman dragging her own Ghana-Must-Go through a bus terminal reminded me of the cover image from this month's Atlantic Monthly, an image of a cargo terminal in southern China, stacked with shipping containers. Interesting how both in form and coloration the containers echo the bag, how they're both emblematic of trade and transit, to and from the world's far corners—the one touchingly (or maddeningly) personal and individual, the other anonymously corporate.

(Something to look into: what do those different container colors signify? Are they chosen by container-manufaturer? Shipper? Do they have any relation to what's inside?)

Re:Rereading. Also, Men in Boats Asleep

PATRICIA: Have you ever slept on a boat before?
JOE: No.
PATRICIA: It really affects your dreams. I look forward to it. Even though, sometimes, the dreams really shake me up. Okay. Good night.
JOE: Good night.

—John Patrick Shanley, Joe Versus the Volcano

A few days ago I finished rereading the Odyssey—I think this was the third time to completion. Among other things it brought back to mind a question I've asked myself before, whether it's better to read three great books once or one great book three times (or, indeed, whether they amount to somewhat the same thing). In the past year or so I've fallen out of the habit of having one of the 6–8 books I'm working through at a given time (not counting the Bible and Book of Common Prayer) be a reread. New ground is always so tempting, but I think it's a good discipline. But did I start a new-oldie after the Odyssey? Not yet anyway.

One detail of Homer's plot that I was especially thrilled to rediscover is that Odysseus, the great wide-awake sefarer, sleeps through the whole of his final homeward voyage. The crew that's bringing him back to Ithaca carries him and his parting gifts ashore so he wakes on dry land. There's something very moving about that image, and its other ancient parallels: Jonah asleep in the hold of the storm-tossed ship that's (trying) to take him away from Ninevah and God's calling; and Jesus, asleep in the bow of a similarly wind-vexed boat on the Sea of Galilee, right before his disciples woke him up and he calmed the storm. Three great wanderers, asleep at the wheel.

Urdu Desktop Publishing

The ever-stellar Language Hat linked to this refutation of a recently circulated story about the last hand-lettered newspaper in the world, an Urdu paper published in Chennai, India. Not so, says Iqag Notes:

The vast majority of “printed” Urdu works are hand written. That includes books, newspapers, magazines, posters, and so on. It’s true that there is at the moment an incredibly fast pace of change towards computerization amongst the major newspapers, and a slower pace for books, but this has been only over the last five years. In fact, one of the only things which are almost always computer composed are wedding invitations, because it’s cost effective for these small batches, and because the consumer bears the higher labor costs of DTP vs. caligraphy.

After which follows a fascinating history of efforts to render Urdu script in printed form - old-school typography, lithography (making a facsimile of a hand-lettered page), and desktop publishing.

Lithography was easier and cheaper than block type, and there was no particular reason to look back. That is, until the invention of computers and the various stages of mechanical and computerized typesetting. Still, developing the algorithm for proper rendering of nasta`liq was just not attracting the necessary investment. One factor may have been the fact that those kids from Urdu speaking families who went into computers in India - and even, to some extent Pakistan - were those least likely to be able to read Urdu. Even now, if you are Muslim and go to an English medium school, you take Arabic as your second language, and if you go to an Urdu medium school, the chances of you pursuing engineering are slim.

There's also a fascinating digression about printing the Qur'an:

As for the Qur’an, a trained Urdu calligrapher would be completely unqualified for that. Qur’an’s are written by teams of huffaz (people who’ve memorized the Qur’an) trained in Qur’anic calligraphy. They are repeatedly checked and certified by government bodies in multiple countries. Generally speaking, a publisher who prints a Qur’an with an error of a single diacritical mark can expect to be held responsible for recall and destruction of the entire issue. 95% of the Qur’ans you’ll run across in South Asia are reprints (mostly unauthorized) of the Taj Company edition of the 1930s. These are resized and recut to fit different editions. I watched someone spend two years cutting and pasting by hand to produce a new, large print multi-lingual interlinear edition which he hoped would become a marketplace sensation. Essentially, there are two visual styles in Qur’ans today, the Taj version, and that handed out by the Saudis. Everything else is a rarity. Many South Asians have trouble reading the Saudi version as it lacks visual cues they grew up with.

And this intriguing parenthetical:

(You must realize that most of the non-English publishing in India is done at the expense of the author or the author’s friends or students or disciples. This actually leads to very vibrant literary scenes about which people actually care quite a bit.)

Now let's see if I can do some script-comparisons—admittedly risky for scripts I can't read. Here's a headline from The Siasat Daily, rendered as a jpg with InPage's DTP software:


And here's an Urdu headline from BBC Urdu, which uses a Unicode font—it doesn't mimic the calligraphy as well—it's flatter, like standard Arabic type, but it's searchable:

سفر فیصل آباد، چیف جسٹس کا بھرپور استقبال

I'd like to find an image of a contemprary handwritten Urdu news article, but haven't figured out how to locate one yet.

Maiores Comediantes

I'd known about the French affection for Jerry Lewis, but evidently it extends to Brazil as well—as this cartoon, from the front page of the always-lovely Folha de S. Paulo from about a week ago. I clipped it from the pdf at newseum, and just now looked at the article it referenced: Brazilian editors rate the national and international comedians. Chaplin heads up most of the lists; Keaton figures most of the time. But a couple, including the editor of the Brazilian edition of Rolling Stone, put Jerry on top.

I watched my first Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis feature this past weekend: Living it Up. I have to say that it didn't do much to raise Lewis' comedic star in my opinion. Maybe the annoying nasal vocalizations just come out better in French or Portuguese. Or, come to think of it, maybe he's been dubbed. (I tried watching one of the dance sequences with the volume turned off, and it was definitely easier to focus on Lewis' undeniable skill). Then last night my mom and I finished watching an old Keaton silent feature, College, which was a delight, but less so than your average Chaplin.

Youtube: Brazilian comedians Mazzaropi, Ankito, Grande Otelo; and also Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis.

On M.I.A.

M.I.A., "Bird Flu"


M.I.A., "Boyz"

I heard second second track yesterday on KCRW ... a preview of M.I.A.'s sophomore album, due out later on. As usual, the UK/Sri Lankan rapper (um, chanter?) is up to her in-your-face, low-resolution tricks. But musically I find it a lot more interesting than a lot of the stultifyingly repetitive dancehall-beat stuff I've heard (largely reggaetón but not exclusively) over the past few years. Beyond that, there's the M.I.A. aura, aggressively transcultural, sort of an anti-Peter-Gabriel. And the lyrics are, for a get-on-the-floor dance song, a tremendous celebration-cum-feminist-critique of rowdy masculinity and its geopolitical consequences.

One thing that comes up for me, perhaps irrelevantly, is the sticky authenticity question. On the one hand, as Sasha Frere-Jones's New Yorker review of her debut album put it, she's giving voice to the third-world street (and its first-world urban echoes), delivering music "from a place where kids throw rocks at tanks, where people pull down walls with their bare hands. It could be the sound of a carnival, or a riot". (it's a great line by Frere-Jones, but I don't know how much M.I.A. herself talks about trying to be or not to be anybody's version of an authentic voice).

But M.I.A.'s whole approach, from music to videos to her artwork and anti-fashion attire (like a can't-stop-looking-at-it 1980s nightmare, with giant Reebok logos spraypainted on in a sort of piracy of piracy itself), is extremely canny, intellectual, and in ways more first-worldly than third-. Which is what lifts it over the bar and onto KCRW or into the New Yorker, where someone like me hears it and likes it—or at least can't stop listening—and feels a bit more authentic, hip in the way that certain NGOs are hip, for doing so ("pull up tha PEE-ple, pull up the Poor").

Le Bac

France 2's Le 20 Heures newscast has been doing their annual in-depth coverage of le Bac, the graduation exams that French secondary students take before (and to qualify for) moving to university or various skilled vocations. There seem to be about as many bacs as there are, say, college majors—tests in construction or wetlands management or cooking as well as the sciences, math, psychology, etc. The tests are spread out over a week or two, which makes for lots of coverage of students preparing (preferred shot: group of students lounging on the lawn like so many high school seniors, but boning up on their last-minute Sartre).

The odd thing to me is the level of scuriny the exam gets every year on the news. It seems comparable to what my friends and I gave when we were taking the SATs—chatting about possible questions, quizzing each other about how we did after it's over. But then again, we were the ones directly involved. With the bac, which has a much more centralized (c'est France after all), one-time-only nature, there's more of the sense of a rite of passage.

Yesterday was the philosophy bac, which I think is one of the media's favorites. Students have to write essays on topics like "can there be happiness" ... so every year France 2 gets a bunch of real philosophers to take the test along with the students, and then compares their answers ("the pursuit of happiness is problematic and ends in futility"). Imagine if we in the US had our public intellectuals all write SAT essays every year to lead on the nightly news (and in a legislative election week)!

Here are some video clips from yesterday's mid-day news. The evening one had the actual questions but I can't find it:

Le bac démarre avec l'épreuve de philosophie ( JT 12/13 - 11/06/2007 )
Cinq écrivains et l'épreuve philo du bac ( JT13h - 11/06/2007 )

Last Night. True Story.

In the dream I was driving. Down the road. In the car. And next to me ... was Ira Glass.

Not bad, I hope, for a first attempt at audio embedding (gracias a the Internet Archive and OdeoStudio). Well actually, second. The first attempt didn't record the voiceover at all. A third attempt might have done something about the audio levels, but that's enough going on for one day.

Also in hindsight the comments I make about television doubtless owe an arm and a leg to Rob Long's wonderful weekly Martini Shot commentaries on KCRW, most recently and specifically this one.

Spring, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

For the past few years I've had a sheaf of memory-poems kept by my dresser; I'll read/recite one every morning while I'm getting ready, sticking with each one till it's memorized. Here's one from a long time back (and coming late in the season—just a week and a half before the solstice):

SPRING

NOTHING is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

[via Bartleby.com]

I'm hoping to include these memory-poems from time to time in the new nblinks incarnation. I probably should look around to see the exact legality of quoting full poems before I start busting out the Czeslaw Milosz or Seamus Heaney.

Wonder Bread and the Mountaintop

For the past few weeks I've been reading a collection of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speeches, essays, sermons, books, and other writings. Obviously, plenty of inspring and moving stuff (what else did I expect?) — and also, given the nature of public speaking, a lot of repetition. It's a delight seeing phrases and pieces from the "I Have a Dream" speech popping up years ahead of time.

One thing that's surpised me is the extent to which MLK quotes from white intellectuals—James Russel Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Paul Tillich, Victor Hugo. I'm not sure if I can recall him quoting Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, or Booker T. Washington. I wonder if this was because of philosophical differences with those African-American luminaries, or more that he consciously needed, in speaking to the majority culture, to win their trust by referencing majority figures?

I did have a kind of amusing surprise as I read the text of King's final, deeply prophetic "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech—delivered the night before his assasination. I was familiar with the moving, slightly eerie climax, which is in the video clip above. But earlier on in the speech, he's sort of rambling along about the latest boycott the SCLC is supporting:

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain.

For me those two elements—Jesse Jackson and Wonder Bread were this strange, almost jarring intrusion of the present-day into an iconic American speech.

(I had a similar bit of cognitive dissonance when I first saw, last year, footage of Bob Dylan singing at the March on Washington. It was as if they'd taken the familar film of King's speech—those guys in the white hats standing behind, etc.—and Zelig'd the pop icon into the scene.)

Tunisian Nights

This week I watched the movie, which among its other highlights features this priceless blurb on the DVD cover:

"A Tunisian answer to DIRTY DANCING!"
— Stephen Holden, THE NEW YORK TIMES

I wasn't aware that Dirty Dancing had particularly addressed a question to Tunisia, but evidently Satin Rouge is the first and foremost response.

The IMDB summary contains a nice whilst:

After the death of her husband, Lilia's life revolves solely around her teenage daughter, Salma. Whilst looking for Salma late one night, Lilia stumbles upon a belly dance cabaret and though initially reserved and taken aback by the culture of the place, Lilia gets consistently drawn back to it. She befriends one of the belly dancers and is encouraged into dancing for the audience. Lilia also starts a romance with one of the cabaret's musicians, who unbeknown to both of them, is also romancing Salma.

I haven't seen Dirty Dancing so I can't tell whether Satin Rouge covers all the bases. It's definitely more risque/rebellious than, say, Strictly Ballroom. And the mother-daughter romance twist, especially at the end, felt a little like a French version of Monsoon Wedding: beautiful, witty, but more than a little creepy.

From director Raja Amari's bio info, I glean that she studied belly dancing at Tunis's top conservatory, but had never witnessed it in the cabaret context till she started work on Satin Rouge. So the forbidden aspect was not the type of dance, but the venue, which I found interesting.

I'll also note that it's the sole Tunisian film that my library system has, excluding stuff like Patton or Humphrey Bogart's 1943 vehicle (literally—it's a tank!) Sahara.

Back in Grey

At a friend's urging, I've decided to give this a restart, after a two year absence. We'll see how long it lasts, but the goal is to hit a stride that's a little more formal than the fragments of yesteryear, but still slightly casual and anonymous—if you know me, you know me, but if not, hopefully there'll still be lots of interest to the interested reader. But enough with the meta-statements. On to the fascinating.