I watched the Black Swan yesterday and I really enjoyed Aronofsky’s direction as well as Portman’s great performance. I understand though some ballet critics and dancers who claim that we need to see Natali Portman as an actress and not as a ballet dancer. What attracted my interest was the interplay between the eternal duality: the good and the bad, the white and black, the total absence of any in-between state. The roles of Odette and Odile (the white and black swans in the Swan Lake) reflect the great differences between Me and me, where me becomes the antithesis of Me. The eternal struggle between the good self and the bad self that leads inevitably to an endless imperfect effort for perfection.
Archive for January, 2011
Black Swan
January 30, 2011Hungary and democracy
January 30, 2011Since 1st January 2011 Hungary holds the presidency of the European Union for 6 months. Hungary is supposed to be the model member state and promote the image of the EU as a whole. In December 2010 the government passed a new media legislation that places print, broadcast and online media under the supervision of a new authority powerful to impose fines for violating ‘public interest, public morals or order’ .
Is the freedom of speech likely to become a victim? Let’s hope that the new implementations will be watched closely by Brussels and that we will not talk about traumatized liberal values in an EU country that is supposed to lead the way for six months….
(Re)order Marxism
January 30, 2011In these days that we certainly have moved ‘from the triumph of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade’, I am so looking forward to reading the book I just ordered: How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism by Eric Hobsbawn. Does he make a case for the need to read or re-read Karl Marx now? Let’s see……
The Greek tawrith
January 30, 2011In the FT on Thursday, 27th January:
‘The rallies in the streets of Cairo this week did not only aim at the end of the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, but the target was also the president in-waiting, his son Gamal‘.
‘For Egyptians, and many Arabs across the region, the trend towards tawrith – inherited rule – has long been considered the ultimate insult for societies aspiring to greater freedom‘.
And let’s travel a bit towards the North, not far from Egypt: what about the Greek tawrith? Just take a look on the names of the Prime Ministers in Greece, their family connections, their political backgrounds. A great example of hereditary democracy! The same names the same families for years! The tawrith is not only applied on the Arab nations and politics, it is actually what rules Greek politics for years.
Thinking or Doing?
January 29, 2011Gideon Rachman asks in the FT of 25th January: ‘Where have all the thinkers gone?’
He is making an interesting discovery on the basis of this year’s list of the Foreign Policy magazine re the ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers‘ (of 2010).
He notices that the top ten in the list are quite more famous as doers (rather than thinkers).
‘…The 1861 rankings could have startd with Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill….then you could include Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. And that was just the people living in and around London. In Russia, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were both at work, although neither had yet published their greatest novels….’
After naming a few reasons that may account for the above difference between the thinkers of the past century and the doers of our days he concludes:
‘ ….there is a final possibility. That, for all its wealth and its gadgets, our generation is not quite as smart as it thinks it is’.
Probably Gideon Rachman is right. Probably we are less smart despite the tools we use to ‘make’ us smarter (i.e. smartphones?). Or, it is probably our epoch that requires us doing rather than thinking. If thinking is not reflected upon doing then what difference can it make? And, I believe, ‘doing’ has a taste, while ‘thinking’ may be just a nostalgia of a possible ‘doing’…..
A New Year full of promises?
January 29, 2011A wish for 2011: Promising blogs, interesting comments, world events that welcome interpretation but trigger smiles, happiness and satisfaction. Health, Happiness and Love + Action for the Humanity.
