Disney's New Live Action - CGI Jungle Book

The live action Disney Jungle Book IMAX reboot opens this weekend.

Polish Arab Studs In International Scandal

     Horses have historically been central to Poland's pride, honor and culture -- as well as defense.

Lately Poland's government decided to interfere with the management of these ancient stud farms. Why is this global news? an international scandal?  Because the Polish Arab breeding studs have been supplying and augmenting the Arab breed's pedigrees for generations of the international Arab breeding class.  And now the breeding stock is imperiled.  This particular malfeasance that affects the rich pits the globally rich and famous against Poland's governing class, many of whom are also very wealthy.

  Post Card: Janow Podlaski Arabian Stud Horses, Polish Tourism Promotion Poster

    

During the cold war, the stud discreetly supplied the world’s elite from behind the Iron Curtain, providing a valuable source of hard currency to the communist regime.

The Arabian is considered one of the oldest horse breeds in the world and has been recognised on 4,000-year-old rock paintings. The qualities of Arabian horses – endurance, grace and speed – mean their bloodlines are found in most modern breeds of riding horse. They arrived in Poland in the 16th and 17th centuries as war spoils from battles with the Ottoman empire.

 Horses play in Poland’s state-owned Janów Podlaski stud farm. The stud is famous for its world-class Arabian horses but its director was recently sacked. Photograph: Janek Skarżyński/AFP/Getty Images

Among those profoundly affected by the mismanagement instituted by the Polish government's changes to to the personnel running the stud farms is the wife of Rolling Stones' Charlie Watts, Shirley Watts:

     The British horse breeder Shirley Watts, who runs a stud in Devon with her husband, Charlie, the Rolling Stones drummer, is threatening to sue Polish government officials after the death of two valuable Arabian mares she owned at a state-run stud in eastern Poland.

Poland’s agriculture minister, Krzysztof Jurgiel, is already facing the ire of the tiny but highly influential Arabian horse breeding world after he sacked three respected state-employed breeding specialists.

The two 16-year-old horses, Amra and Preria, died while in the care of Poland’s prestigious Janów Podlaski stud, to which Watts had loaned four mares in a cashless arrangement to help expand a valuable Arabian bloodline. Her two surviving mares, which are pregnant, were being transported home from eastern Poland to Halsdon stud with urgency.

Poland's government seriously effed-up.  Keep politicians -- particularly male politicians -- out of reproductive processes!

     She [Anna Stojanowska, Poland's national horse breeding inspector] said: “Poland’s reputation for breeding was hard built, by people with passion who never watched the clock. Trela has been replaced by an economist, Marek Skomorowski, who says horses are his hobby. Once we lose our reputation, that’s it, forever. It happened to Russia’s studs and it may now happen to ours.”

Warsaw-based Stojanowska said the sackings had been “part of political games” by the Law & Justice government, which won the October 2015 parliamentary election pledging to institute “dobra zmiana” – good change – in state enterprises where central government is perceived as having lost control. The policy has already led to dozens of sackings and resignations from state companies including a major regional insurer, PZU, the main electricity and gas utility companies and the mining conglomerate KGHM.

How Not To Describe Fiction Set in Africa

From the UK Guardian, by Ainehi Edoro, "How Not To Talk About African Fiction, " here.

    This is the opening, which, as it should, informs the reader of the theme and the subject of this opinion piece:

The history of modern African fiction is essentially 100 years of branding disaster. In marketing African fiction, the conventional practice among publishers both in Africa and the west has been to simply tag a novel to a social issue. “Such and such a novel explores colonialism.” Done. “So and so offers a searing representation of the scourge of misogyny.” Done. “Corruption takes center stage in so and so’s novel.” Done.

      African fiction is packaged and circulated, bought and sold not on the basis of its aesthetic value but of its thematic preoccupation.

Film (2013) included such high profile actors as Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton

Ainehi Edoro's chose as one of her examples of how differently fiction written out of African imaginations and experiences are described on amazilla.  The two novels  are David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas 2004), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006).   Both books have been made into films.

Tom Hanks, Halle Berry among other names played multiple roles in this 2012 film. 

 Edoro concludes with a quote from an interview with Helen Oyeyemi, author of six books, the most recent a collection of her short fiction, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (2016).  (NPR review here.)

" [    In a recent interview, Helen Oyeyemi identifies what is really awful about burdening fiction with social issues:

I’m wary of – how do I put it – “getting tagged,” I guess, but I also understand the need to try and do that. When I try to think about my favourite books, I’m still not quite sure how I found them. There needs to be something you can say to people that lets them know that they might like this book, but I sometimes worry that the kinds of things that people say about what I write would not help my books find the readers I intend. I feel like most writers write for people who just read, who would open a book and jump in and see what’s there. But burdening a book with promises that once you’ve read this book, you’ll understand this issue or that issue—it’s not good. [Read more] " ]

Turn: Washington's Spies - Season 2

~ ~ ~ ~        This is the AMC series about spies for Washington, and spies for the King, and spies and betrayals of everyone by everyone, from King George to General George Washington.

Season 1 was hard, due to pacing and  the difficulties getting  a handle on characters and their relationships, as well as a sense of location, despite having handy screen scrawls informing us where and when. CGI sets don't help with this kind of thing.

However, Season 2 was much improved (if no more historically accurate in many details and characters). There's less sex, but the sex is more  plausible -- indeed the sex is between John Andre, British officer, spy and prisoner, and  infatuated Peggy Shippen, a Philadelphia Tory, works very well, between the characters and in terms of the plotting -- and betrayals too.

The returning spy ring characters, and the new characters from the other side, such as John Andre, Benedict Arnold and Peggy Shippen, are a lot more interesting in themselves and in their relationships with each other.

         Recurring figure, British Major Hewlett, in particular deepens and broadens, which additionally illustrates how a long occupation in a fairly isolated place can and will blur the lines of 'sides' , at least among certain naturally compatible people, and loyalty, friendship and affection naturally springs up. We the audience begin to share sympathy with him as much as some of Turn's characters on Long Island.

General George Washington

In this season General Washington gets a fair amount of screen time; beyond that, he is shown taking the reins of the war as well as spying in his own hands.

Benedict Arnold

Benedict Arnold is played very much as I've always understood him to be. But where is Hamilton? Perhaps he's left out as an aide-de-camp in order to have room for Major Benjamin Tallmadge, Washington's Intelligence Officer, an historical member of the Culper spy ring -- though Hamilton also had some business in the surveillance of NYC's British military occupants?  Lafayette is in Valley Forge though, and the French fleet has arrived by the end of the season.

Washington is shown to be the most devious of them all -- which, whether or not there's historical evidence for this particular incident, I really like.  For American historians, Washington's a frustratingly illusive figure, in spite of how much is known. Why was he the most successful politician of them all, even Jefferson, for whose devious duplicity there is much documented evidence?  That Washington was as shrewd, cunning and devious as Jefferson does not necessarily change facts that he was -- as far as a slaveowning Virginian could be who was as obsessed with manufacturing his image and place in history as Jefferson-- an honorable, courageous and fair man, who genuinely believed it was his destiny and obligation to bring the states together, and to hold them together.  (Jefferson would have preferred to be separate from New England, except the south = Virginia couldn't afford it, either economically or politically in the larger world.)

Caleb Brewster is more than a spy. He likes gadgets and machines.  In season 2 he gets into British occupied New York harbor in a bathyscope machine. In the New Jersey battle set as a trap for Washington and the Continental Army he employs something like a grenade thrower.

My favorite single, recurring character is the Ring member, rough and ready, always loyal, acutely witted, Caleb Brewster.  However, Abraham Woodhull, as he's portrayed in this television series, is the most inept spy in the history of spying, partly because sex (which was a huge part of the difficulties with season 1's writing -- it just didn't work).  The historical Woodhull, though, was so cautious as to refuse to do anything at all for months, and even years.

Peggy Shippen (Ksenia Solo) and her true love, Major John Andre. Andre takes over Benjamin Franklin's house in British occupied Philadelphia.  When Philadelphia is retaken by the Patriots, Andre takes many of Franklins inventions and possession with him to New York, which Peggy awkwardly explains to Arnold, who takes the house in turn,  was "for safe-keeping," 

Adoration goes to the actress who arrived this season 2 to play Philadelphia Tory, Peggy Shippen. She is written here as really wanting John Andre, but got foisted upon Arnold to persuade him betray the U.S. and Washington (according to some, anyway). Peggy's played by Ksenia Solo, from the Canadian fantasy series, Lost Girl, which I adored, silly as it was, and much of the reason for loving it was Ksenia Solo and her character, Kenzie. (I'm still waiting for the last season to show up on netflix -- where the frack is it?)

Ksenia Solo plays Peggy Shippen so convincingly that it's a lovely watching experience. Once again Solo proves to be a skilled actress and does not need to depend on the mannerisms that made the Kenzie character so liked by so many, including me.

Perhaps the Big Plot in season 3 will be BA's plans to turn over West Point to the British and Peggy play-acting bonkers to save him and herself, while he escapes just by the bare skin of his britches to NYC and the British?  That will be tense! Their lives after this treasonous conspiracy were discovered weren't particularly or happy or prosperous.

I hope the series continues to feature a fair amount of Washington, which hardly any television or film does, because he's such a sacred figure. But I wish they hadn't made him hallucinate and be crazy -- and for no reason. That isn't helping. ​

Rachel spying on Major Andre

It would be terrific if Turn could do more for African American actors and actresses, beyond showing them silent and omnipresently laboring, or having a particularly talented warrior fairly new from

Historical Major Simcoe; more about him here. Don't believe everything about him seen on Turn.

Africa recruited into the British psychopath Major Simcoe's Queen's Rangers. Though the writers are trying to show an African American in Major John Andre's house spying on the behalf of the Patriots, it's awkward. That's because there really wasn't anything in the move to independence from Britain by the colonies for African Americans.  It was no revolution for them, and certainly no independence and freedom. Everything stayed the same for them. Those who joined the British and escaped with them after the war were the ones who found freedom.  It took the War of Southern Rebellion to make the real revolution for African Americans -- and it was when the Union armed black men it really began to win.

Season 3 of Turn: Washington's Spies, premieres next month along with a whole lot of shows, which I shan't see until they're on dvd from netflix.

Irish Writers Reflect on the 1916 Easter Uprising

My copy of Yeats' Collected Poems

     As Yeats is so impressed upon my literary bones this was of interest.  His great commemorative poem, Easter 1916, is cited by most of the writers, Irish literary lights as they all are.



As  example,  from Colm Tóibín, who connects dying in a military - political condition that made success impossible with that of the suffering of Irish women:

] "The men of 1916 had no chance of success. They went out to die, a few hundred of them – while thousands were being slaughtered each day in the trenches of Belgium and France. The scale was important. Big wars are terrible and killing civilians is just cowardly, but pitching a few hundred men against the might of the British army is a revolution. It was a transcendental moment of sacrifice and of suffering. Perhaps it was a result of colonisation, with its enforced poverty and shame, but Ireland was for a long time interested in the idea of suffering well, or of suffering better than the oppressor; none was expected to suffer more, or more quietly, than the women of Ireland, into whose bodies and biology suffering was hard-wired. So the idea of blood sacrifice is not removed, in my mind, from a modern state that cannot legislate for the proper medical treatment of pregnant women, because suffering is something we are supposed to do well. Also dying, if it comes to that. 

All nations have founding myths. I suppose I would prefer to have a revolution in my country’s past than a monarchy. I would prefer to move on from Catholic nationalism than from fascist dictatorship. But the truth is that local history has given way, in my lifetime, to global economics, and we have no good stories for this: no parades, no revolutions. The stories we tell ourselves about the past are not about politics. I mean they are not about fairness, about who has power and where the money goes. They contain a deeper madness. The stories we tell are about killing and being killed, and why that was all a terrific thing to do." ]

In contrast to the gravity of Tóibín's and  the others' pieces which generally were serious meditations upon death and politics, was Roddy Doyle's bit. He is the only member of this group who has a comic sense of the universe, and did it ever show.

I've always liked Irish humor. As well, culturally religious as the Irish are, either because of that, or in spite of it, they are the group I know of in which there are many folktales of an Irishman getting the best of the devil -- outwitting even the greatest Trickster of them all.  This deeply impressed me from the first time I ever encountered such stories in some of the tales included in a book in my small school's meager library. I thought, "No such story of the devil would ever have been told in my religion!"  This provoked further thoughts such as, "Do Catholics have more fun than Lutherans?" since the relationship my Catholic friends had with their parents seemed so much warmer and relaxed than those we Lutheran kids had with ours.

Of course that was long before I ever learned anything about Ireland colonization by England or just about anything else.  I hadn't yet read a single poem of Yeats -- or even heard of the man with whose words and life I would spend so much of my 20's.

  

Ghost Busters v. Wonder Woman

Kristen Wiig, right, with her co-stars Leslie Jones, Melissa McCarthy and Kate McKinnon pose for a promo shot for the new Ghostbusters

Robin Wright as Antiope is on the right. -- ooo la la yes, but what do I think about this costuming so obviously directed to the comix fanboy gaze. -- emphasis definitely on comix rather than comic..

Reading Wednesday: General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse

General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse (2008) by Joseph T. Glatthaar begins roughly a year before the first Battle of Manassas a/k/a Bull Run. 

His argument, with which I agree, is that the Army of Northern Virginia was the closest to successful of any institution that the CSA established. Over the course of this history of Lee's army it emerges how only the Army of Virginia embodied all the elements that made it impossible for the CSA ever to have become a functioning state -- which it never was.  Our argument is that what the CSA was, was an army.  The army was always willing to fight, but it wasn't willing to take ordesr, recognize a chain of command or (until far into the war around the late 1863's-1864) dig trenches or build other defenses.  It would not do labor, manual or otherwise.  The officers lived a very different way from the lower ranks of poor whites, and ate far better,  Though Glatthaar doesn't mention this (or that there were signficant populations in the secession states who didn't agree with the war) -- it was the manners and behaviors of the well-connected officers that perhaps more than anything caused massive desertion, as particularly the wives and children back home were starving -- in great part to the planter class acting as tax in kind collectors, stealing everything they could.   He doesn't mention this either, but these officers were behaving to the lower ranks in the way slave owners behaved to their property . . . . 

Glatthaar never denies that the the South seceded and went to war for the sake of preserving slavery. He seems to have no idea, however, that the actual objective was to expand slavery.

Glatthaar's declarations with which I do not agree, are that the South only wanted to be left alone to leave the Union.  Glatthaar's a military historian, and this is the problem -- he doesn't see a large enough picture.  He deals only with the members of the army and the battles.

What is most valuable about this history is Glatthaar's painstakingly gathered stats on how many members of the army were deeply rooted in slave owning -- particularly the officer class.  The previous calculations of how many owned slaves, how many slaves owned, how wealthy they were are all vastly incorrect according to the information he's gathered.  Many soldiers may not have been able to claim they owned even a single slave, but they lived with their father, who did, in a relative's home who did.  Most of them were closely connected to those who owned 20 or more slaves -- which put them even above the comfortably middle-class.  In other words, it was difficult to find in any of the ranks above the lowest anyone who didn't live a way of life according to the benefits of possessing slavery.  Their clothes were washed and cared for, their food cooked and cleaned up after, their horses and horses' tack -- all this and more by slaves, even if they themselves didn't own the paper on them.