brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

More than 100 members of the media were killed worldwide in 2006, making it the bloodiest year on record for journalism, the head of the United Nations cultural organization said Wednesday. In a statement ahead of World Press Freedom Day May 3, UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura called on the world to ‘commemorate media professionals who have lost their lives and honour those who bring us information despite danger and risk.’

Revelations of colored lights occur to the initiate during his spiritual training: there are dots and spots and circles; the soul passes through periods of black color and of black and red spots until the appearance of the green color indicates that divine grace is near–green has always been considered the highest and heavenly color.

Letters written with ink do not really exist qua letters. For the letters are but various forms to which meanings have been assigned through convention. What really and concretely exists is nothing but the ink. The existence of the letters is in truth no other than the existence of the ink which is the sole, unique reality that unfolds itself in many forms of self-modification. One has to cultivate, first of all, the eye to see the selfsame reality of ink in all letters, and then to see the letters as so many intrinsic modifications of the ink.

Whale Rider • Bladerunner • Bicycle Thief • Until the End of the World • Wings of Desire • Blue Velvet • Pulp Fiction • Rear Window •
L-Avventura • The Machinist • Shadow Magic • American Splendor • Lolita • Vertigo • A Story of Floating Weeds • La Strada: Special
Edition • Fitzcarraldo • Umberto D. • Aquirre: The Wrath of God • Open City • Gummo • Even Dwarfs Started Small • Ossessione • Rocco
& His Brothers • La Terra Trema • Crazed Fruit • Tony Takitani • Lessons of Darkness • Wheel of Time • Grizzly Man • The Flowers of St
Francis • Knife in the Water • Le Notti Bianche • Why Does Herr R. Run Amok • Chinese Roulette • Favela Rising • Cobra Verde • Control
Room • The Trial • Heart of Glass • Rollerball • The Pornographers • The Thomas Crown Affair • In the Heat of the Night • NIghts of
Cabiria • Touch of Evil • Derrida • Basquiat • Pollock • Ali: Fears Eats the Soul • Bombay • Mother India • Voices of Iraq • Andrei
Rublev • The Third Man • The Killers • Red Beard • Chinatown • On the Waterfront • Sholay • Ran • Pyaasa • The Life of Birds • Dev •
Miss India • Twin Peaks • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas • Naach • Sarkar • Maya • The Motorcycle Diaries • Bold • Born into Brothels
• Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi • Anand • A Passage to India • Taxi Driver • The Terrorist • India: Kingdom of the Tiger • Yasujiro Ozu’s Good
Morning • How to Draw a Bunny • Salaam Bombay • Nayagan: Tamil • Veer-Zaara • Gandhi • Foxy Brown • Visions of LIght • Arakimentari • Rashomon • Blood of a Poet • Inch’ Allah Dimanche • A Soul Haunted by Painting • I Dreamed of Africa • A Panther in Africa: POV • Mama
Africa • Africa: The Serengeti • Out of Africa • Africa Blood and Guts • The American Friend • National Geographic: Africa • Run Lola
Run • Hidden Fortress • Breathless • La Dolce Vita • The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia • Children of Paradise
• Lost Boys of Sudan • La Notte • Tokyo Story • L’Eclisse • Lolita • Citizen Kane • Battleship Potemkin • Man with the Movie Camera •
Legend of 1900 • L’Avventura • La Belle Noiseuse • Nowhere in Africa • 8-1/2 • The Battle of Algiers • The Idiot • The Bad Sleep Well •
Pi: Faith in Chaos • Ikiru • Eraserhead • M • City of God • Hotel Rwanda •

“LESSONS OF DARKNESS”

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.” Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can´t legislate stupidity.”

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species – including man – crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog

“We believe that poverty does not belong to a civilized human society. It belongs to museums.”

“All human beings have an innate skill – survival skill. The fact that poor are still alive is a proof of their ability to survive. We do not need to teach them how to survive. They know this already. ” This firm faith in basic human ability drove the man, named Mohammad Yunus, to turn a dream called ‘Grameen Bank’ into a $2.5 billion (US) reality.

 Dr. Mohammad Yunus was born to a well-to-do family in Chittagong, a business center in Bangladesh, in 1940. His father was a successful goldsmith who always encouraged his sons to seek higher education. But his biggest influence was his mother, Sofia Khatun, who always helped any poor that knocked on their door. This inspired him to commit himself to eradication of poverty.

Dr. Yunus lives modestly in a two-bedroom apartment at Grameen Banks headquarters in Dhaka, Bangladesh with his physicist wife, Afrozi and their daughter Deena.

Yunus was an outstanding student who won a Fullbright Fellowship to do PhD at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1965. He returned home in 1972 to become the head of the economics department at the Chittagong University. He found the situation in newly independent Bangladesh worsening day by day. The terrible famine of 1974 in Bangladesh changed his life forever. He thought that while people were dying of hunger on the streets, he was teaching elegant theories of economics. He felt the inadequacies of elegant theories of economics and decided to make the poor his teachers. He began to study them and question them on their lives. One day, interviewing a woman who made bamboo stools, he learnt that, because she had no capital of her own, she had to give up more than 93% of her proceeds to the middleman. Dr. Yunus identified the problem as one of structure. Lack of credit to the poor. He thinks that people are poor today because of the failure of the financial institutions to support them in the past. Thus the idea of micro-credit was born. The idea is terribly simple and in the area of development and aid completely revolutionary.

The Grameen Bank (in Bengali, Grameen means rural) which Dr. Yunus has built over the last 22 years, is today the largest rural bank in Bangladesh. It has over 2 million borrowers and works in 35000 villages in a country of 68000 villages. 94 % of its borrowers are women. The bank is based on simple, sensible rules, meticulous organization, imagination and peer pressure among borrowers. The break that Grameen Bank offers is a collateral-free loan, sometimes equivalent to just a few U.S. dollars and rarely more than $100. In rural areas, it makes things happen. 98% of its loans are honored. Thus he has turned into reality a philosophy that the poorest of the poor are the most deserving in the land and that given the opportunity they can lift themselves out of the mire of poverty. His ideas combine capitalism with social responsibility.

Micro-credit concept is now being practiced in 58 countries. In the US, it is a success even with the Shifting poor of Chicago’s toughest districts. The United States alone has over 500 Grameen spin-offs. Bill Clinton said in his election campaign that Yunus deserved a Nobel Peace Prize and cited the Experiment of Dr. Yunus as a model for rebuilding the inner cities of America. Pilot projects are starting in Britain. The methods are adapted to suit local conditions, but the principle of empowering individuals with their own capital is the same.

Professor Yunus has received honorary doctorate from many Universities in the United States, Canada, England and many other countries. The World Bank has made him the head of advisory committee to propagate his vision worldwide. The countless prizes he has been awarded include The World Food Prize, the highest honor of the Rotary International, “Award for World Understanding” and Care Humanitarian Award. Asia Week magazine called him one of the 25 most influential Asians. New York Times hailed him as the star of the UN’s women’s conference.

The Grameen activity has branched into non-banking activities like venture capital, textile industry, Internet and cellular phone service etc.

Dr. Yunus has set his sights on the total eradication of poverty from the world. World’s leaders are starting to take him seriously.

LONDON – Corruption is rife and rising in business dealings across the world despite changing laws and greater resistance from companies to demands for bribes, a survey said on Monday.

The annual global corruption survey by international consultancy Control Risks and law firm Simmons & Simmons found that nearly half of businesses contacted said they had lost a deal because a competitor had paid a bribe.

The worst affected country was Hong Kong, where 76 percent of companies said they had lost a deal for that reason in the past five years. One in three French companies said they had lost out through bribery in the past year alone.

“Our survey shows that corruption continues to be a huge international issue and honest companies are still losing out to dishonest competitors on a large scale,” Control Risks consultant John Bray said.

And while laws were changing and companies were beginning to fight back, more of the 350 business leaders in seven countries that took part in the survey said they thought corruption would get worse rather than better for the rest of the decade.

The worst affected sectors were oil, gas and construction, where project values were often very high and where relatively minor officials on low pay and possibly susceptible to bribery were in positions of considerable power, the survey said.

“Companies across the globe are starting to fight back against corrupt practices,” Bray said. “But it is clear there is still a long way to go before corruption becomes a thing of the past.”