Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2001 20:32:03 +0100
Subject: pornography of the personal


Eric and Hugh

Best seller in the UK hardback book charts - The thief of time - Terry Pratchett
- phantasy, comic and deeply humanistic.

regarding the below - the effect of the republican senator shifting towards
being and independent are what in your view?

re: american hollow - there are similar tv and film programs - i'll think of
some examples.

regards

sdv.

hugh bone wrote:

> Steve,
>
> There are so many Americas here in the U.S.  In the recent Presidential
> election, East and West Coasts voted mostly
> for Democrats, Southern States and inland States west of the Mississippi
> River voted mostly Republican.
>
> Some have said "There's not a dime's worth of difference" between the two
> parties since both depend on Corporate donations to maintain serial
> incumbency in Congress, and wealthy corporations often donate to both to
> insure access to the party in power.
>
> Herewith, an item I sent to another List, responding to remarks of someone
> in Europe.  It is also relevant to Eric's remarks on
> tribalism.
>
> ~~~~
> The movie, "American Hollow", is a 1hr., 35 min. slice of the life of an
> extended family of poor people  who live in in a tiny valley in eastern
> Kentucky.  Some get small relief checks. They eke out a living with
> vegetable gardens, small game, gathering and selling roots from the forested
> hillsides.  There
> seem to be no jobs or good schools in commuting distance.
>
> They have assorted bad habits - wife-beating, drunkenness, drugs? are
> perhaps the worst.
>
> The film uses text and subtitles, not the preachy voice-overs so common in
> our Public Television.
>
> The film doesn't tell viewers, as our Religious Right would, how these
> people should be moral and responsible, and lift  themselves by their
> bootstraps and become part of mainstream America.  The Film  doesn't tell
> viewers, as our Liberal Left would, that these people just need more help
> from the Government.
>
> So I wonder......is there any comparable group of relatively isolated,
> poverty-stricken people in your country, and if so, what are you supposed to
> think about them?
>
> Rory Kennedy is credited with making this movie.  It came out in 1999.  You
> can find reviews on the Internet.  I used HotBot,
> "Rory Kennedy AND American Hollow".
>
> It's greatest technical achievement is probably that it seems so natural,
> unstaged.
>
> Perhaps the best that can be said for the people, is that those who leave,
> get jobs and fail, wind up in jail, or whatever, are accepted back into the
> community without rancor.  Most of those who leave, fail, and return to the
> Hollow.
>
> If I had not driven through that area twice the past 15 years, I would have
> been more skeptical about the movie.
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> > Been in Dallas again ---- not a dissimilar experience to the first
> > paragraph... It always strikes me when I'm in the USA that the greatest
> > multi-cultural task that a post-modern European has is the multi-cultural
> > relations that we have to establish and understand between the citizin of
> > the USA and ourselves. It is easier to deal with inhabitants from any
> third
> > world, second or European state than it is with the US subject. Strange
> and
> > alarming by turns, and yet we appear to know so much about the US dominant
> > culture....  Curious. The self and other relations are to similar and yet
> > to strange, the unreadable  facial structures and expressions... and so on
> >
> > sdv
> >
> >
> >
> > Mary Murphy&Salstrand wrote:
> >
> > > steve:
> > >
> > > I remember a piece of antropological folklore which has it that in some
> > > tribal societies, if a person commits a great crime, he or she is not
> > > tortured, imprisoned or physically exiled.  The person simply no longer
> > > exists for the tribe. They are no longer spoken to, their name is no
> > > longer mentioned. They are ignored as if they were no longer present.
> > > They walk alone amid the others as an invisible living ghost.
> > >
> > > Needless to say, such a penalty becomes a veritable death sentence.
> > >
> > > If we are retribalizing today through communication technologies into a
> > > kind of global village, then the loss of a cell phone or laptop with
> > > modem becomes the loss of an umbilical chord.  The loss of a connection
> > > becomes a loss of the soul.
> > >
> > > Are we becoming ghosts in a planetary machine?
> > >
> > > Does anything really exist until it appears on television?
> >
> >