Dance: Wim Vandekeybus & Ultima Vez at the KVS

Twenty years after his first debut performance, and many creations later, Wim Vandekeybus and his Ultima Vez dance group will present an evening of "the best of" his work, to the title "Spiegel". Together with nine dancers he looks into the mirror to find the essence of his language of movement. The performance is also organised with the KVS.

"At the end of 1986 Wim Vandekeybus withdrew to Madrid with a group of young and inexperienced performers. Nine months later What The Body Does not Remember opened. Dancers tossed bricks into the air and then remained standing until someone pulled them away and caught the brick as it fell. Risk, conflict, strength, energy, instinct and repulsion are always key themes in Wim Vandekeybus' work. Over the years however, important existential themes such as fear, life and death have also appeared in his work."

Check more about Ultima Vez: http://www.ultimavez.com/
You can see Wim Vandekeybus at the newly opened KVS (Lakensestraat 146, www.kvs.be), from 29/9 to 13/10.

Planète: les glaces de l'Arctique fondent...

Les sols glacés présents autour de l'océan Arctique pourraient disparaître en 2100.
The ice around the Arctic ocean could disappear by 2100.

Planete: La température du globe au plus haut depuis près de 12 000

La température du globe au plus haut depuis près de 12 000 ans
LEMONDE.FR | 26.09.06

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Cinema: Thank you for smoking - image

Cinema: Thank you for smoking

A happily cynical and addictive comedy

“Thank you for smoking” is a happy effective (and addictive…) cynical comedy. Satirical, it follows the work of Nick Naylor (played by Aaron Eckhart), who is a tobacco industry lobbyist and who tries, at the same time, to remain a role model for his twelve-year-old son. He has a difficult and contradictory task: promoting cigarette smoking with intelligence, good looks and nice words (or at least the freedom to choose) in a time when health hazards caused by smoking have become headlines and a concern for the public opinion. All goes well until a beautiful journalist comes in the way and betrays Nick's sexually-achieved trust, making Nick’s world collapsing. But, “there's always one more coffin nail in Nick's pack”...

The film is highly recommendable, if nothing because it is quite enjoyable, very effective, fresh and always keeps you glued to the screen, waiting for more intelligent and satirical moments. The actors are excellent and very effective, in particular Eckhart himself. He has earned considerable acclaim for many of his roles, including “Erin Brockovich” with Julia Roberts or Neil LaBute's controversial film “In the company of men”. It seems he is quite “fashionable” again these days, playing in many different movies, such the “Black Dahlia” (see previous post), coming out soon in Europe.

Jason Reitman, the director, achieves a fresh and effective, addictive cinema. The film is quite cynical I would say, in relation to the world of lobbying, even though it can be said that it “defends” the right to smoke, or at least the right for pacific coexistence and mutual acceptance between smokers and non-smokers. But it does it in an intelligent way. The cynicism however, goes a bit far, to my understanding, when it brings in the “alcohol lobby” and the “lobby of the gun industry”, together with the tobacco lobby, as the M.O.D. squad (Merchants of death). In particular when the deaths caused by guns and by alcohol are made ridiculous, when compared with deaths due to road accidents, for instance. To my understanding that is quite dangerous, because, if smoking or drinking can be acceptable as a personal choice (as long as they do not bring negative implications for others), guns and the deaths caused by guns can certainly not be considered as a personal choice and should therefore not be mixed in a satirical way with tobacco…

It was probably not the intention of Reitman to “excuse” the use of guns. However, smoking comes out of the film quite well, if not quite glamorous, as when Hollywood contributed to give it a cool and romantic image. All in all a highly entertaining piece of cinema, go for it.
[* * *]

Société: Construisons un nouveau "nous"

Construisons un nouveau "nous", par Tariq Ramadan
LE MONDE 20.09.06

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Politics: Five years after the September 11

[free translation from the article in spanish by Joaquin Roy (*) in the "Nueva Mayoria" website]

What is the balance in the United States five years after the experience of 9/11? By large, the immense majority of US citizens are still in the post-traumatic stage, without hardly understanding what has happened. The "thinking" minority is essentially divided among those who already criticized president Bush before the attack and those who have tenaciously opposed the simplistic, interventionist and unilateral thesis.

Apparently under the effects of an extreme "illuminism", the traditional doctrine of the "exception" of the United States has been strengthened, which justifies any policy, no matter how preposterous it might be. In short, the result of the experience is that it is much more difficult to be North-American in today's complex and confused world, and that is not alone the fault of Ben Laden. Damage is also, partly, self inflicted.

For the first months, until the regrettable military intervention in Iraq happened, the North American lived a unique experience by which they protected themselves under a blanket of safety and of rejection of everything which was "foreign". Against what is generally believed, North Americans are essentially isolationist, reticent to any adventures outside their "neighbourhood". The tragedy of the 11-S caught to the full popular mind in dormilona of the end of the Cold War.

Facing the unexplainable, the tragedy was identified as an external product: the terrorists were foreigners, their ideology was foreigner, and foreigner was (and stillis) the phenomenon that president Bush obstinately sold as "the axis of evil". In view of the damage, hardly without time to react, a machinery of war was launched against the new enemy, vague and non identified. The implementation of the reprisal was put in the hands of armed forces that soon became some sort of foreign legion. Armed forces which, each day get more divorced of the North American society, thanks to the professional system. The present situation is by no means comparable to the symbiosis which existed between society and the American army during the glorious experiences of both world wars and those of Korea, and also in Vietnam. Today one realizes sadly that the excesses committed in a jail in Iraq are not the exception, but the rule.
Meanwhile, in spite of the systematic campaign of the White House to keep the guard at specific occasions, the terrorist threat has been lived more as an inconvenience than as a danger. Still today, North American (excluding the families of the military) hardly suffer any impact of the terrorist "blackmail". If one is not obliged to travel weekly, controls at airports are interpreted more as a nuisance than a threat. Getting home, it becomes routine.

Abroad, however, Bush has managed in five years to change hopelessly the ambivalent perception that the world had regarding the United States. Before one could distinguished between what were the "errors of US foreign policy" at certain times, and the fascination for American pop culture in almost the whole planet. When demanding that "those that are not with us are against us", Bush managed to reduce to ashes the headlines of Le Monde of 12 September ("We are all American") as those of the Twin Towers. If, before the 9/11, to be anti-US was the monopoly of the extreme left and some rightwing groups in certain countries like France and nostalgic Spain, nowadays large parts of the Third World and of Europe justifiably oppose Bush's unilateral policy.

In the internal front, Bush looked for shelter in that deep America that was before the spine and the reserve of the best that the country offered, and is now the mirror of a distrustful society, fearful of what is foreign. Those 50% that voted for Bush are exactly those who do not read the books that smash to smithereens the strategies of the "neocons" and who never read the editorials of the reference press (a couple of newspapers of national signification and a dozen of magazines). More than 80% of the US citizens and half of the Congress do not even have passport.

In return, the White House has attacked the means of communication that have traditionally been critical towards the power, inherently to their function, but what this time has been interpreted as a crime of anti-patriotism. The result, therefore, is a divided country with doubts about how to recover when the president leaves the power in two years.

(*) Joaquin Roy is ' Jean Monnet ' Professor and Director of the European Union Centre at the University of Miami jroy@Miami.edu

Citizenship: Citizen of NUTOPIA?

Art: Bruxelles en août/ Brussels in August

Photo de: Denis Erroyaux, vu sur www.vazy.be

Development: Brazil's competitiveness indicator

According to Brazil's FIESP (Federation of industries of the State of São Paulo) report on world competitiveness and its indicators, Brazil is not getting more competitive in the world.

The report assesses data collected for 43 countries, which represent 95% of the world's GDP over a period of eight years (1997-2004) from organizations like the World Bank, the UN, the world economic Forum and even the CIA. Without surprise, the United States and Japan come at the top of the list with values of 93.3 and 77 respectively, while Argentina is number one in Latin America with a note of 38.8. Brazil, however, with only 21.6 figures among the six most badly placed countries (38th place). It is only first to the Philippines (16.1), Colombia (15.0), Turkey (14.4), India (11.5) and Indonesia (7.6).

The countries are classified according to four levels of competitiveness: "high", "satisfactory", "average" and "low". The two best Latin-American countries are Argentina and Chile (of course!), coming in the third "average" category, together with countries like the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain and Portugal as well as China and Russia. Germany, France and the United Kingdom come in the second category described as "satisfactory", while the US, Japan, Sweden, Norway and Singapore top the list.

The factors taken into account in the study relate to the country's economy, the government, the capital, the infrastructures, technology development, the international trade, the companies and the human capital. The Federation stresses that there is "a clear relationship between the indicator of competitiveness and the per capita income of a country, measured in purchasing power parity in dollars". In addition the most competitive countries are those which show the highest level of the UN's human development index.

Politics: Gaza's darkness

In a recent article in Israel's newspaper Haaretz (leftwing), Gideon Levy writes about the terrible situation in occupied Gaza. His words are not kind to the Israeli government, neither to Olmert nor to Peretz… Bellow some extracts.

"Gaza has been reoccupied. The world must know this and Israelis must know it, too. It is in its worst condition, ever. Since the abduction of Gilad Shalit, and more so since the outbreak of the Lebanon war, the Israel Defense Forces has been rampaging through Gaza - there's no other word to describe it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately. Nobody thinks about setting up a commission of inquiry; the issue isn't even on the agenda. Nobody asks why it is being done and who decided to do it. But under the cover of the darkness of the Lebanon war, the IDF returned to its old practices in Gaza as if there had been no disengagement. (...)

Gaza is occupied, and with greater brutality than before. The fact that it is more convenient for the occupier to control it from outside has nothing to do with the intolerable living conditions of the occupied. In large parts of Gaza nowadays, there is no electricity. Israel bombed the only power station in Gaza, and more than half the electricity supply will be cut off for at least another year. There's hardly any water. Since there is no electricity, supplying homes with water is nearly impossible. Gaza is filthier and smellier than ever: Because of the embargo Israel and the world have imposed on the elected authority, no salaries are being paid and the street cleaners have been on strike for the past few weeks. Piles of garbage and obnoxious clouds of stink strangle the coastal strip, turning it into Calcutta. (...)

More than ever, Gaza is also like a prison. (...) Some 15,000 people waited for two months to enter Egypt, some are still waiting, including many ailing and wounded people. Another 5,000 waited on the other side to return to their homes. Some died during the wait. One must see the scenes at Rafah to understand how profound a human tragedy is taking place. (...)

Gaza is also poorer and hungrier than ever before. There is nearly no merchandise moving in and out, fishing is banned. (...)

And we still haven't mentioned the death, destruction and horror. In the last two months, Israel killed 224 Palestinians, 62 of them children and 25 of them women. It bombed and assassinated, destroyed and shelled, and no one stopped it. No Qassam cell or smuggling tunnel justifies such wide-scale killing. A day doesn't go by without deaths, most of them innocent civilians. (...)

It is difficult to determine who decided on all this. It is doubtful the ministers are aware of the reality in Gaza. They are responsible for it, starting with the bad decision on the embargo, through the bombing of Gaza's bridges and power station and the mass assassinations. Israel is responsible now once again for all that happens in Gaza. The events in Gaza expose the great fraud of Kadima: It came to power on the coattails of the virtual success of the disengagement, which is now going up in flames, and it promised convergence, a promise that the prime minister has already rescinded. Those who think Kadima is a centrist party should now know it is nothing other than another rightist occupation party. The same is true of Labor. Defense Minister Amir Peretz is responsible for what is happening in Gaza no less than the prime minister, and Peretz's hands are as blood-soaked as Olmert's. He can never present himself as a 'man of peace' again."

Politics: Poll - Israelis believed Nasrallah over Peretz

Polls conducted recently in Israel found that Israelis were more likely to believe in reports coming from Hizbullah's leader Hassan Nasrallah than from the Israeli Defense Minister, Peretz! And this is reported by Yedioth, a right wing Israeli newspaper…

"Since the end of the war in the north, two main issues have been keeping the public busy: The demand for an account of the failures by the Israeli leadership, and criticism of the press and nature of reports. A new study, by Dr. Uri Lebel of the Ben Gurion Institute, at the Beer Sheva University, has found that a problem requires urgent treatment: Israeli PR (spokesperson). The result of the poll, entitled "the management of Israeli PR during the second Lebanon war," show that Israeli PR was so lacking, that in many cases the public was forced to rely on the reports of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah."

Développement: Les temps changent... et la Cnuced change d'avis...

Développement : la Cnuced vante les mérites du "modèle chinois"
LE MONDE | 01.09.06

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Politics: The Iran-USA nuclear soap

Iran's President, Bush and Governator, who for once went against Bush's policy and agreed to cut gas emmissions in California.
Cartoon published in the newspaper The Guardian; cartoon by Martin Rowson
martin.rowson1@ntlworld.com

Politics: Noam Chomsky's article in The Guardian

Noam Chomsky , eternal critic of the North-American administration under Bush, has written an interesting article in THe Guardian to the title: "Their view of the world is through a bombsight"... which already tells a lot.

According to Chomsky, American support for Israel's "unwinnable aim of destroying Hizbullah only boosts its support in Lebanon and beyond".

He writes that:
"In Lebanon, a little-honoured truce remains in effect - yet another in a decades-long series of ceasefires between Israel and its adversaries in a cycle that, as if inevitably, returns to warfare, carnage and human misery. Let's describe the current crisis for what it is: a US-Israeli invasion of Lebanon, with only a cynical pretence to legitimacy. Amid all the charges and (...)."

"This is hardly the first time that Israel has invaded Lebanon to eliminate an alleged threat. The most important of the US-backed Israeli invasions of Lebanon, in 1982, was widely described in Israel as a war for the West Bank. It was undertaken to end the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's annoying calls for a diplomatic settlement. Despite many different circumstances, the July invasion falls into the same pattern. (…)"

"Israeli writer Uri Avnery observed that the Israeli chief of staff Dan Halutz, a former air force commander, "views the world below through a bombsight". Much the same is true of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice and other top Bush administration planners. As history reveals, that view of the world is not uncommon among those who wield most of the means of violence (…)".

"The core issue - the Israel-Palestine conflict - can be settled by diplomacy, if the US and Israel abandon their rejectionist commitments. Other outstanding problems in the region are also susceptible to negotiation and diplomacy. Their success can never be guaranteed. But we can be reasonably confident that viewing the world through a bombsight will bring further misery and suffering, perhaps even in "apocalyptic terms"."

Noam Chomsky's most recent book is "Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy"; he is professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the USA.

Citizenship: The 100 Most Powerful Women in the world...

... according to magazine Forbes.

North-American magazine Forbes published the 2006 list of the world's 100 most powerful women. In 2005, Angela Merkel, then leader of the opposition Christian-democrat party in Germany, did not even appear in the classification. This year she leads the table. Rice, American secretary of State since January of 2005, after having advised president George W. Bush on the national security since his arrival to the White House in January 2001, was relegated to the second place of the classification, which she led since 2004. The Chinese vice-Prime Minister, Yi Wu, who is nicknamed "the Iron Lady of China", and who is said to be intelligent, firm and elegant, also loses a place, to become third. The seven following women of the top 10 are business executives. Indra Nooyi, the appointed CEO of PepsiCo, a North American of Indian origin, is fourth in the Forbes' list, followed by Anne Mulcahy, of Xerox. Among the newcomers in this years' list, there are Michelle Bachelet, the socialist President of Chile (17th), the President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (51st) and the Prime Minister of South-Korea, Han Myung-Sook (68th).

In the same site, to the online survey to the question “When will a woman be elected president of the United States?”, surprisingly enough, the "2008" answer is ahead with 25% of the votes. Guess who would be able to make that possible…However, in second place with 24 % comes the answer "not in the next 30 to 40 years…".

Meanwhile, and according to another article in Forbes, quoting the Center for Women's Business Research, “the number of firms run by women grew at nearly twice the rate of all U.S. firms from 1997 to 2004. But a new study released this month by VentureOne, a unit of Dow Jones, shows that the number of women-owned or women-run businesses backed by venture capitalists has been on a slippery decline since 2002”. “To be clear, the number of venture-capital-backed, female-owned firms wasn't very big to begin with. In 2002, only 7.55% of all venture-backed companies had women as chief executives. But in the first half of 2006, that number fell to 3.7% (the lowest percentage since 1997). The number of venture-backed companies with women in top management bottomed out at 29.7%--versus 34.8% in 2002.” (…)
check: http://www.forbes.com/home/entrepreneurs/2006/08/30/venturecapital-kleinerperkins-women-cx_mc_0831women.html

Methodology: “The annual listing of the 100 most powerful women in the world is based on a ranking that is the composite of visibility (measured by press citations) and economic impact. The later reflects three things: résumé (a prime minister is more powerful than a senator); the size of the economic sphere over which a leader holds sway; and a multiplier that aims to make different financial yardsticks comparable”.

Citizenship: “Eight ways to change the world”

The Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR) in partnership with the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities (ANMP) are organising a conference in Lisbon on 12 & 13 October 2006 focusing on the contribution of local and regional government to the eradication of poverty. The conference, with the title "Eight ways to change the world", will focus on the contribution of local and regional governments towards the achievement of the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals. Among those taking part will be the Portuguese President Cavaco Silva, his predecessor Jorge Sampaio, the Portuguese Prime Minister José Socrates and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and former head of the Portuguese government Antonio Guterres (also Portuguese).

Citizenship: Israel destroys, the world pays...

Rebuilding Lebanon, country severely damaged after one month of war, will take time… and quite a lot of money.

On 31 August, in an international meeting in Stockholm, the EU Commission presented a first assessment of damage in Lebanon to the Donors' Conference for reconstruction in Lebanon.
According to European satellite assessment, it seems that some 1,500 buildings, 21 bridges over River Litani, over 500 sections of roads and over 500 cultivated fields have been destroyed or damaged in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese government estimates that some 15,000 homes were destroyed. In Beirut, all access to the airport, as well as several motorway sections have also been damaged. Furthermore and according to Oxfam (quoting figures by the Lebanese government), Israeli bombing affected 85% of the 195,000 farmers in the country, causing damage and loss estimated at between $135 million and $185 million. And the Lebanese authorities estimate total damage at around $3.5 billion.

So far, the EU Commission and Member States have together raised nearly €120 million in humanitarian aid for Lebanon. Some fifty governments and ten international organisations present yesterday stated their intention to contribute with some €735 million to the reconstruction of Lebanon, twice the amount aimed by the organisers. The EU, the US and the Gulf countries are the biggest donors. To Fuad Siniora, Lebanon's Prime Minister, this proves that Lebanon is not alone. However it is necessary that Israel lifts the blockade so that aid can reach the country. And that UN resolution 1701 be well applied...

sources: Agence Europe, El Pais, etc.

9/11 Story...

Another 9/11 strory: Loose Change 2nd Edition - by Korey Rowe / Dylan Avery / Jason Bermas