If you drank bourbon with me

"Are you desirable? Are you irresistible? Maybe if you drank bourbon with me, it would help. Maybe if you kissed me and I could taste the sting in your mouth it would help. If you drank bourbon with me naked. If you smelled of bourbon as you fucked me, it would help. It would increase my esteem for you. If you poured bourbon onto your naked body and said to me "drink this". If you spread your legs and you had bourbon dripping from your breasts and your pussy and said "drink here" then I could fall in love with you. Because then I would have a purpose. To clean you up and that, that would prove that I'm worth something. I'd lick you clean so that you could go away and fuck someone else."

Leaving Las Vegas, directed by Mike Figgis, inspired on the novel by John O'Brien.

As those who return from war

"...

And with each advance I collapse

over my self's embers

and perish,

and with each retreat I demolish the walls of my rhime

and walk out the house of meaning in hope

that I would return to it murdered.

And since it was rightful to avenge my death from a rose

the tribe threw me to the water

for me to crown my promise with an ear of wheat

or with the noon sun

so I went along this route for a short while.

I say by phrases I did not speak

and by a cup whose wine has cracked my face

and I busied myself with arranging the things of my soul

as those who return from war do

for a long while..."

Zakariyya Muhammad, Everything.

Il Divo, 2009 best movie

Il Divo, directed by the Italian film maker Paolo Sorrentino, was awarded with the Golden Iceberg as the best movie of 2009.



Il Divo is a master piece and probably the best european movie of the first decade of the 21st century. Sorrentino confirms that Italy still is the top one producer of high quality cinema in Europe.

Every aspect of Il Divo can be considered almost perfect: from the photography, its ironical treatment of History, its moral weight, the amazing dialogues and the monologues of the main character, Giulio Andreotti (Toni Servillo) to its artistical coup d'effet mixing visual FX and contemporary music.


***

The other finalists also are exceptional productions; any of them could have been winners of the Golden Iceberg.

The Silver Iceberg was given to Mishima, of Paul Schrader, for its poetry in motion, respect for the Japanese culture and because it achieves a very difficult task to show in two parallel stories the biography of Mishima.

The third qualified was the TV production The Office for its amazing, intelligent and hilarious humour.

The last finalists are The Wrestler and Battle for Haditha, two movies that help to understand the strength and healthy democracy of the United States, because there is no other country so used and able to critize itself.

El món seria diferent sense el Pinyin

"El Pinyin, un dels invents més transcendents del segle XX, ha fet 50 anys. És un alfabet fonètic creat a partir de la transcripció dels ideogrames xinesos amb l’alfabet llatí (a la foto, imatge d’una web de traducció). El món seria diferent sense el Pinyin, perquè la Xina no s’hauria obert ni hauria crescut tan ràpid. El febrer del 1958 es va aprovar parlamentàriament el Pinyin com a sistema d’aprenentatge de la Xina comunista i des d’aleshores mil milions de persones l’han utilitzat per aprendre el mandarí. Se’l considera clau per a la reducció ràstica de l’analfabetisme, perquè permet a l’estudiant d’escriure l’idioma amb una cal·ligrafia més senzilla i ajuda a vincular fàcilment la paraula o síl·laba amb el seu ideograma. Fins i tot a principis de la República Popular s’havia plantejat l’opció que la romanització substituís l’escriptura xinesa, influència cabdal de les llengües de l’Àsia oriental com ho ha estat el llatí a Europa. Per als acadèmics és un encert haver preservat l’escriptura i la seva simbologia, perquè és el gran patrimoni cultural de la Xina després de dos segles de pillatge i destrucció del seu passat cultural.

El principal responsable de la creació del Pinyin és Zhou Yougang, un venerable ancià de 102 anys, empleat de banca a Nova York durant les dècades dels 30 i 40 i amant de les llengües, que va tornar a la pàtria per ajudar els comunistes en la reconstrucció del país. Aquests dies ha explicat amb envejable lucidesa que el Pinyin va néixer perfeccionant els mètodes precedents de romanització, sobretot el Wide-Giles, que va ser el predominant durant gairebé un segle i que fa que encara avui a Europa ens referim a la capital xinesa com a Pequín i no Beijing, la seva traducció en Pinyin. L’ús del Pinyin va més enllà de les aules: els xinesos escriuen SMS en Pinyin i els occidentals entenem el mandarí gràcies al Pinyin."

Cristian Segura, a l'Avui del 2008, Cinquanta anys de pinyin.

Tibetans are back in town

"Early in the 18th century, Emperor Yongzheng ordered the Yonghegong Palace in Beijing to be converted into a Lama temple. The transformation of his former residence was designed to show the great importance Chinese rulers attached to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan religious society. Long after the emperor's death in 1735, Tibetans in Beijing enjoyed a prestigious status.

Tibetans in Beijing are worshiped no more. Today, they are an anonymous and small group compared with other ethnic minorities in China's capital city. Security measures for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games and last year's 60th birthday celebrations for the People's Republic of China kept Tibetans away. It was not until last autumn that their numbers began to rise again.

Dongdo is a Tibetan peddler one can find almost every afternoon at the entrance of the Dongsishitiao subway station, not far from the Yonghegong Lama Temple. He and his wife sell all kinds of traditional garments, side-by-side with two other Tibetan families. Dongdo and his wife live together with eight people in a tiny apartment in downtown Beijing.

Hailing from the northwest part of Sichuan province that is inhabited mostly by Tibetans, the couple lost their homes in the earthquake in May 2008 that killed more than 70,000 people. They didn't have money to rebuild or survive so left their hometowns, choosing Beijing to restart their lives.

Just before the Olympics, Beijing authorities sent them back to Sichuan. Dongdo says that they didn't obtain permission to resettle in the capital until last November, after the 60th National Day parade on October 1.

Statistics about the Tibetan population in Beijing are difficult to obtain. The last data available on the website of the Ethnic and Religious Affairs Commission of the Beijing Municipal Government only reported 585,000 ethnic minority individuals in Beijing city in 2000.

The Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee says it doesn't have specific figures on Tibetans living in Beijing province. Cai Fang, director of the Institute of Populations and Labor Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), also says he has no information about the migration of Tibetan workers inside China. Cai and two other prominent CASS professors last year wrote a report for the United Nations Development Program on migration among China's rural population.

A recent study of Professor Lu Ding, published by the National University of Singapore, determined that between 2000 and 2005, the migration ratio of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) decreased by less than a 0.5%. This means that emigration from the region is slightly above immigration.

Andrew Fischer, senior lecturer in population and social policy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, said: "Because of the economic boom in places like Lhasa [the capital of the TAR], net migration out of Tibet might not be increasing, relative to total migration, although in terms of absolute numbers I am sure there is probably some increase."

According to Dongdo and his friends, there are about 2,000 Tibetan peddlers in Beijing. This can't be the total number because experts like Fischer consider that most of the Tibetans who settle in the eastern cities of China are highly educated: "Most Tibetans only migrate to local towns and cities inside Tibet. The ones who migrate to elsewhere in China usually have high school or university education and hence Chinese fluency. There is also a regular number of Tibetans students who are sent to study in east China for high school, somewhere around 5,000 and 10,000 students per year."

The Beijing Tibet Middle School is an example of this "elite migration". Top students from the TAR - those who obtained the best marks in primary school - are sent to 26 Tibetans institutions across China. This school and another educational center for Tibetans - the only two of their kind in Beijing - are the first choice for the brightest Tibetan kids: 30 students apply for every vacancy.
Beijing Tibet Middle School has 810 pupils and 130 teachers. Just three members of the academic staff are Tibetans. Membership of the Communist Youth League of China is compulsory and students must wear a pin of the Chinese Communist Party during lecture hours. Most of these youngsters express their wish to work for the government. Luo Biao, vice headmaster of the school, said the majority of these undergraduates would become public servants.

Luo concedes he is not sure that the presence in Beijing of highly educated Tibetans helps increase understanding between the two cultures. "We help our students to interact with the local society in three different ways: we arrange cultural visits for them and sports competitions with other schools, and from time to time there are Han families that invite them to have lunch and take them out to enjoy leisure activities."

Violent and political clashes in Tibet could explain why most Han people avoid interaction with the Tibetan community. But Fischer is convinced that "not anyone would be scared of Tibetan migration in places like Beijing or Shanghai" because in these cities Tibetans are a clear minority, in comparison with places such as Chengdu, Lanzhou and Xining.

There are differences indeed. Near the Jianguomen subway station is a group of about 15 Tibetans proud of their identity - one carries a picture of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, on his cell phone. The man, who says he is from Lhasa, sells tiger paws that have been cut into small pieces. His customers are Han Chinese who believe the tiger has medicinal qualities.

Dechen Pemba, a Tibetan writer currently living in London, was in Beijing studying Chinese from 2006 to 2008. She recounts that during the Olympics, nearly all Tibetan migrants were forced to leave the capital, herself included. "Some Tibetan friends of mine even lost their jobs as a direct result of discriminations against Tibetans after the protests in Lhasa [the riots that exploded in the Tibetan capital in March 2008] ... Without jobs, and with anti-Tibetan sentiments rising high, they had no choice but to leave town."

Tibetans in Beijing live in fear and under surveillance, according to Pemba. But the number of Tibetan migrants in the city is growing, according to Mipham Jamyang, a Tibetan who leads the Lotus Center, a non-profit school founded two months ago with the aim to teach migrant workers useful skills, such as the use of computers or learning English. Jamyang says that Tibetans stay in Beijing between two to five years then return to their hometowns to invest their savings.

Jamyang takes issue with any idea that Beijing citizens dislike Tibetans and he is sure that Tibetans are treated fairly by the law and enjoy the same rights as other migrant groups. The Lotus Center opened with the authorization of the Beijing government and Jamyang will request official funds to sustain a school conceived to meet the growing needs of Tibetans flowing into the capital."

Cristian Segura, Asia Times Online. The Tibetans are back in town.

Burmese Days, 2009 Golden Iceberg winner

George Orwell's Burmese Days has been awarded with the GOLDEN ICEBERG as the best book posted in 2009 on La teoria de l'Iceberg.

The jury (myself) praised the extraodinary writing skills shown by Mr. Orwell and the way he uses his personal experience to alert about the prejudices of the Western society towards the Asian cultures.

***

*The Silver Iceberg, award for the 2009 second best book, goes to The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga.

*Third classified was The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao (Junot Díaz).

*The two other finalists were Indian Summer (Alex von Tunzelmann) and Two kinds of time (Graham Peck).

The first bite

"...

The moment they drove by laughing
at a slant-eyed yellowback gook
they must have seen a boy
who would never become a man We could say
they were dead wrong/but instead let’s say
this: Their fathers gave them their rage
as my father gave me mine

and from that summer day on we managed
to savor every bloody thing
that belonged to us It was a meal
constantly replenished—a rich
bitterness/we’ve learned to live on for so long
we forget how—like brothers—
we put the first bite in one another’s mouths."

Patrick Rosal, About the white boys who drove by a second time to throw a bucket of water on me.

November sky

"Sometimes

the November sky

resembles a speck of dirt

inside the delicate nail

freshly spouted

on the finger of a baby."

Rajendra Kishore Panda, The sky vision.

La bossa de El Corte Inglés

"El nen mor dins la panxa de la mare. Es produiex l'avortament i el pare ha de portar el fetus al laboratori. És divendres al migdia, tanquen pel cap de setmana i no s'accepta l'ingrés. Tal i com l'indiquen, el pare s'endú el fill en una bossa de El Corte Inglés i el posa dins la nevera."

Quim Monzó, Vacances d'estiu.

(Fins l'11 d'abril, exposició dedicada a Quim Monzó al Centre d'Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona)

I no paris fins a Perpinyà

"Quan escoltàvem per la ràdio
el vot de la investidura
amb tricorni i metralleta
treu el cap la dictadura
i ens quedem esparverats, garratibats.

Quin cobriment que va agafar-nos
quin espant i quin cangelo
quan la veu enrogallada
va cridar "todos al suelo"
començant a disparar... ratatata.

Llavors ens diuen que a València
per acabar de fer la guitza
va la cosa adelantada
i un catxondo els hi organitza
unes falles pel febrer... Ai quin merder!

Ja ens veiem tots altra vegada
ballant la dansa del sabre
que si algú no se'n recorda
és la dansa més macabra
de les que es fan i es desfan... Oi tant!

Llavors, quina nit, quina nit!
estàvem amagats sota el llit
però amb serenitat
i amb el cul apretat.
No en poséssim pas nerviosos!
Tranquil, Jordi, tranquil
que és la Guardia Civil
tu tranquil.
Ai, mama, por!

I se'ns donava la consigna
demà tots cap a la feina
"porque aquí no pasa nada"
segadors no esmoleu l'eina
que podríem prendre mal... en general.

I sobretot serenitat!
Però si guanya el del mostatxo
valdrà més estar borratxo
i deixar-se de punyetes
corre, agafa les maletes
i no paris fins a Perpinyà... Ja s'ho faran!

I l'endemà quan va arreglar-se,
quina cosa més estranya
fins i tot els més escèptics
tots cridaven "Viva España
i viva la Constitución", mira per on!
I visca el rei, ves quin remei!

I és que no saps mai
de qui carai has de refiar-te
si serà per bé o per mal
però ben segur que mai més res no serà igual."

La Trinca, La dansa del sabre.