Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love

The best known African singer in the world, the most significant cultural figure in Senegal, the voice that 'Rolling Stone' described as perhaps containing the whole of the continent (though I'm not sure whether that's a kind of silly post-colonial statement or a magnificent expression of what it can do), father, son, brother, political activist, mystic, and frankly one of the most obviously attractive human beings I've ever seen, Youssou N'Dour is the subject of a new documentary by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, 'I Bring What I Love', which I saw last night at the Nashville Film Festival.

And what a film it is.  We follow N'Dour's tour of 'Egypt', an album of Sufi devotional music whose sound envelopes the audience in a transcendent challenge to the populist 'understanding' of Islam post-9/11; Youssou's experience of his own religion is one in which generosity to the stranger, peace among neighbours, and celebration at the drop of a hat are the common marks.  Even when these are not the means by which the faith is manifested - we all fail to live up to our best traditions - Youssou N'Dour appears so committed to its outworking that he even has a problem with the violence necessary to slaughter a lamb at a sacred feast.  This may be the most telling moment in the film, for it includes the moment in voiceover when he admits that even pushing 50, every time he is in the presence of his father, he feels like he's '15 years old'.  It's at that point that so many of us will identify with him - and maybe hope that we are all doing better at life than we give ourselves credit for.

'I Bring What I Love' is not the most clearly structured film; I felt it was about a quarter of an hour too long, and the story became repetitive after a while - but these are tiny concerns far outweighed by the sheer human vitality on display in the form of this man, an heir of the 'griot' tradition who suffered insults from his own country for trying to fuse religion and popular culture; a global superstar willing to let a camera crew observe him relating to his frail grandmother without it seeming exploitative or publicity-hugging; a person who appears to be living from his best self, or at least his most self - he's not letting pain or difficulty get in the way of figuring out what it means to be a fully human being.

And the scene when a Dublin audience is gently admonished to drink up because Senegalese Sufi musicians don't want to play devotional music while alcohol is being consumed (and the audience politely agrees, even applauding the invitation) seems to me to be a sign of hope that marks the best consequences of globalisation.  Youssou N'Dour's music invites us to consider the religious cliche that we are all one.  So far, so what?  Well, what can I say to that?  If you don't listen to the music, you won't know why I'm so excited about this film, and the life-altering potential presented in essence in its title.

David Dark on Life in the Reality-based World

My friend Dave Dark's wonderful new book 'The Sacredness of Questioning Everything' hasn't yet been given to President Obama by Hugo Chavez, at least as far as I know, but I'm sure that's only because the Spanish translation hasn't been published yet...You can, however, read an extract of it here, at Killing the Buddha - a site where Dave's work has been crying out to be posted for years.

The extract begins like this:

"In a now famous piece in the New York Times (”Without a Doubt” October 17, 2004), Ron Suskind described a conversation with an unnamed aide within the executive branch of the federal government. The aide listened to Suskind’s questions and eventually observed that Suskind and his ilk were a part of “what we call the reality-based community.” The reality-based are those who still “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” Suskind agreed to the label, perhaps presuming it to be a compliment, and the aide cut him off:

That’s not the way the world really works anymore…. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actor…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Is it such a surprise? Manufactured realities are the business of governments, transnational corporations, and other top buyers of advertising space. Advertising isn’t what they do with a small percentage of their budget, with whatever’s left over after they’ve provided excellent services and manufactured goods; advertising is primary vocation. As McLuhan taught, the mediums are the messages. We’re soaking in them, as it happens. Did we expect a memo?

Two hundred years or so before we heard reports of a magically reassuring place called the No Spin Zone, William Blake talked about “mind-forged manacles,” metal clasps forged by the mind and for the mind. He heard the clank of the manacles whenever human beings opened their mouths. It’s the sound of people letting other people do their thinking for them. It’s the dirty trick whereby we keep perception at a safe arm’s length, denying ourselves the ability to think carefully, and letting a talking head, a career politician, or an ideological authority do the work for us. As Simon and Garfunkel tell us, it’s the way we hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.

News networks understand this. They have to sell the news, after all. And what is news? Whatever they can sell unto us as news. They anticipate what it is that most people will watch and, for better or worse, deliver the audiovisual goods. If we want to hear about Lindsey Lohan’s woes more than we want to know about genocide in Darfur, Lindsey Lohan’s daily life will be the news. To survive, the networks have to play to our “felt needs.” In this sense, we are the newsmakers—and the networks are just the sales force. They’ll give us whatever they think we want. It is all they can afford to give."

Read the rest of it at Killing the Buddha.

JG Ballard

JG Ballard died at the weekend.  If you only know him for 'Empire of the Sun', I recommend a deeper journey into his work; if you only know him for 'Crash' - a disturbing imagining of what happens to humans when they confuse (and fuse) their spiritual longing with material things, and which, when filmed by David Cronenberg gained him a kind of notoriety which I imagine was amusing, I recommend 'Empire of the Sun'.  'Empire' is one of the darkest and most troubling stories of war and childhood.  Ballard was a serious writer who cared more than most about how technology is changing what it means to be human.  If he never seemed to be the cheeriest of thinkers, it's because he felt life had been so trivialised by our particular forms of media that it deserved sustained attention from a position of gravity.  Short introductory Guardian piece here.

'In the Loop': The Best Political Satire since 'Dr Strangelove'?

I may just have seen the film of the year.  A contemporary satire that deserves comparison with Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, which starts hilarious, gets funnier, and more real, and even more uncomfortable until the laughs are intellectual but become inaudible, because the truth of what is happening on screen can only evoke anger.  'In the Loop', Armando Ianucci's expansion of his TV show 'The Thick of It' is the first plausible, and the best English language film about the events surrounding the Iraq war.

Rather than engaging with the parts of the story with which we already think we're familiar - the belligerent language of crusade, axis of evil, 48 hours to get out of the country, and so on - the film takes place behind the scenes, where spin doctors dominate Cabinet ministers, the Prime Minister is only ever evident as an invisible authority, and no one ever asks what's right or wrong.  The purpose of politics appears to be purely career advancement for people who can't be bothered to think about anything; the threat of resignation is the only leverage potential held by people who seem incapable of making moral or ethical arguments about why invading a country that has not invaded you is, at the very least, a bad idea.

Of course we don't know what exactly happened to propel legitimate grievance, ideology, anger, falsehood into mass killing...but the suggestion in 'In the Loop' is that no one who was involved really understands either.  The movie shapes its narrative around the character of a minister with a troubled conscience (Tom Hollander) being manipulated by Peter Capaldi's Downing Street communications director; wine and cheese soirees mingle with UN committee meetings as the physical backdrop for the process that ended, or still hasn't ended, with hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, thousands of dead soldiers, and a generational mess that can only be accurately called a crime.

Ianucci and his co-writers know how to make people laugh; but their purpose is deadly serious, because after all the talking heads and late night commentary, all the books and blog posts, all the protest marches and campaigns, even after the election of a replacement to the cowboy President, we need a new language to make visible the nightmare of what actually happened.  'In the Loop' stands out from the crowd because it is, on the surface, a comedy, but honours the tradition of, along with the writings of Twain and Swift, films like Chaplin's 'The Great Dictator' as works that have to attempt to be funny, because the truth is so terrible.

'In the Loop'is a wake up call.  I've only seen it once, and may be guilty therefore of over-statement, but for now I'll bet that the venality of politics-as-game hasn't been as sharply observed in the cinema since 'Dr Strangelove'.

Columbine after Ten Years

There's a sad piece of serious journalism by Andrew Gumbel in The Guardian today - the tenth anniversary of the Columbine murders presents the opportunity for reflection on how the insatiable desire for quick results led to significant media distortion, which took rumour and emotiveness and turned them into a story that, it turns out, is remembered for being something very different to what it was. The boys who killed were not part of an organised group; they did not find themselves inspired by over-immersion in the music of Marilyn Manson, it appears there were no victims martyred for expressing their Christian faith.  The intention was to blow up the school and kill as many as 2000 people.  They were consumed by nihilism.

This part of the story, the most important part, the 'why' of the 'what', is the part that you and I have heard least about.  We've seen sensationalist footage of what we were led to believe was the school during an agonising three hour shooting incident, when later it turned out that the perpetrators may have been dead before the cameras arrived.  We've seen parents experiencing the most unimaginable grief seeking to honour the memory of their horribly murdered children by publishing books about words it appears they never actually said.  We've seen computer games and industrial metal music blamed for why two boys would do these unspeakable things.  But we've rarely - if ever - seen a serious examination of the reasons.

Because, on the one hand, nihilism - as popularly understood - is terrifying.  Some people seem to kill just because they want to; and they probably want to at least partly because they inhabit a world in which it's convenient to dehumanise each other.  This is not an underground or hidden world.  It's the one you and I live in too.  Call me irresponsible, but it does seem pretty obvious that the way we deal with public figures in disgrace, or even our neighbours when they do things that annoy us are both part of a continuum of social relations that ultimately, when pursued to its logical end, leads to a descent into allowing ourselves to kill.

Of course, most of us don't ever actually get to that end - but, if John O'Donohue was right to say that killing can only happen when you turn other people into 'slates' that can be wiped clean (she's not like me, his motives can't be explained, I hate them), then we're kidding ourselves if we think that we ordinary decent people are not capable of participating in the same kind of societal descent.

It's easy to find simplistic 'solutions' to the question of why people do unthinkable things; it's harder to ask questions about violence in which our own behaviour might be part of the answer.  But, as Gumbel says, every couple of weeks or so, someone shoots and kills a number of people in one place, but the 24 hour news cycle doesn't seem to have the space for anything other than film of the aftermath, closeup photos of the shooter, and brief obituaries of the dead.

I'd really like to take this question of dehumanisation more seriously; and I don't want to just blame the media.  The relationship between journalists and the public is recursive; we're both in it together, and to some extent give each other what we appear to want.  So let me make a suggestion that might be dramatic, or even unfair, but I'd be glad to hear a better alternative: if we don't press for an end to the assumption that audiences have only short attention spans, and the ideological position that states none of us really wants to explore beyond the surface of why people do what they do, then we're complicit in advancing the dehumanisation narrative that will lead to the next mass shooting.  And the next.