Review of "Tel Aviv on Fire"

A Palestinian-Israeli comedy about the occupation. Salam is a production assistant on the popular Palestinian soap "Tel Aviv on Fire", which features a Palestinian woman spy disguised as an Israeli, seeking to become romantically involved with the general so that she can obtain the secret plans for the Six Day War. Oh, and she's played by a visiting French actor. Salam is ostensibly there because he speaks good Hebrew and can advise her and others on the dialogue, but really he's there because his uncle is somehow senior in the production team.

But Salam keeps getting hauled in at the checkpoint between Ramallah where he works and Jerusalem where he lives, and the Israeli officer in charge wants to know about the show, because his wife watches it. In fact everyone watches it - Israelis, the staff and patients at the hospital where Salam's would-be girlfriend works...Salam lies that he is the writer, and then the officer (who is a bit of a thuggish buffoon, but also a bit comic rather than really nasty) wants to change the script. Then somehow Salam becomes the writer, and...

Well, you get the idea. It's a comedy about soaps, and TV production, but also about the occupation, and the unequal relations between Israelis and Palestinians. And it's both quite funny and quite poignant, and worth watching.

One from Netflix.

Review of 'Unquenchable Fire' by Rachel Pollack

Oh God, what a book! I had never heard of Rachel Pollack, and I didn't get this on recommendation or anything like that. I picked it up from one of those book swap tables, this time at Highgate Underground station. I was stuck for something to read and I got this. 

And the first few pages seemed really annoying, because I felt like I would have to engage with the details of the made-up religion...who all the Gods and Goddesses were, and so on. But I read on, and I realised that wasn't really the point. It's about the social and organisational dimensions of the religion, and the theology barely matters at all. 

And it's great - one of the best science fiction books I've read for a while. It depicts a future America - actually a future New York State, with much of the action taking place in Poughkeepsie and the rest in NYC - in which there has been a revolution, but a theocratic one, that has overthrown the Old World. Now the religion is in the process of being institutionalised, but doesn't fit very well into the structures being created - it's a polytheistic, decentralised sort of belief system, with magic, and multiple kinds of spiritual beings, and without a very strong good and evil thing going on. 

It's also more than a little mad, at least by our thinking; the stories of Christianity or Judaism seem models of rationality by comparison. It's a bit like the ancient Egyptian myths, with gods eating each other and going into the Land of The Dead, but even that sounds more rational than the mythological world depicted here.

It reminded me a bit of The Handmaiden's Tale, in that there are odd juxtapositions of theocracy and 'normal' American life - alongside the institutions of spiritual policing there are still multinational corporations, bars and restaurants and supermarkets, and processed food. But reading about Rachel Pollack, I see that she is described as an "expert on divinatory tarot [and]...a great influence on the women's spirituality movement". And then I can't help wondering whether this is not, after all, a dystopian satire, but actually something else. And I feel weird for liking it so much, but I still think it's a great book.

Review of 'The Duke'

Meh. Can't understand why everyone loves this so much. Predictable and a bit plodding, full of cliches and national treasure actors being national treasures. Was surprised to hear that it was a true story, but that was more surprising than anything in the film. I think they must all have had fun making it, especially the art director.

Informal distribution, this one.

Review of "Confronting Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists" by Daniel Randall

The first thing to say that is I really, really liked this book. I thought there wasn't much that I could learn about this subject, but I think Daniel Randall brings a sensitivity and a clarity to it that make the book really worth reading. I plan to give it to friends in the small town where I live, in the hope that they will understand something of what I would want to tell them if only we both had the time. You can open it any page and find a few sentences that deserve to go on a t-shirt. He's particularly good on the complexities and contradictions of British Jews' relationship to Israel and to Zionism...the extent to which their loyalties are far from unswerving, and are connected to a 'gag reflex' that comes from a genuinely felt sense of precariousness in and alienation from an increasingly nationalist Britain. 

He's sophisticated in the distinctions he makes between different kinds of antisemitism on the Left - the 'primitive antisemitism' of wealthy Jewish banker stereotypes and 9/11 conspiracy theorists...the sort of thing that has permeated the left from aspects of the neo-anarchist tradition best represented by the Occupy movement, vs the "anti-imperialism of fools" variant that is a descendant of Stalinist perspectives on international struggles, with nations and states and movements all sorted neatly in goodies and baddies, so that if someone is against the United States then they must ultimately be on the side of the angels. He points out how these two threads came together in the Corbyn moment in the Labour Party. I think he rather tends to play down the extent to which some of the accusations about antisemitism were made in bad faith, as part of a factional struggle by people who didn't care much about Jews but wanted to get at the Left. That goes for Corbyn's enemies within the Labour Party and for some elements of the 'leadership' within the Jewish community. 

Where I think the book disappoints is in its account of Zionism. Sure, Zionism functions as a "nationalism of the oppressed" for some diaspora Jews, and did even more so at times when Jews were a persecuted and endangered minority. And yes, Zionism is now bound up with the personal identity of many diaspora Jews who half-imagine themselves as a sort of expatriate Israeli, so that they think of  Israeli culture as their culture. But still, I don't think it's right to treat Zionism as just the Jewish flavour of Eastern European nationalism, so that we hold the left to account for not treating it in the way that we treat other nationalisms.

Zionism was always a weird kind of nationalism. Other nationalisms were engaged with the folk culture of the nation that they claimed to represent - the songs, the dances, the language. But Zionism, very unusually, was utterly uninterested in the language/s that its constituencies actually spoke, or the songs that they sang, or their literatures. Instead it favoured a language and a culture that it made up - modern Ivrit is a creole of liturgical Hebrew, and the Zionist folk songs that I grew up with have tunes that are lifted from other cultures - Russian and Rumanian, for example. There is no sentimentality about the beautiful mountains and forests of the homeland, because the territory on which the Zionists sought to create their nation was not one with which they had anything except a historical and religious connection. And quite unusually, there's quite a lot of contempt for the actual members of the constituency, who are believed to have weak, submissive, ghetto-dweller characteristics. Again, this is not absolutely unique among nationalisms; I'd say that some of the currents in Black nationalism among African-Americans are sometimes like that. 

In fact, as Randall notes elsewhere, Zionism has/had lots in common with Garveyism. The latter rightly attracted a lot of hostility from African-American socialists and communists, and it's possible to imagine another world in which hostility to Zionism as reactionary and utopian might have stayed like that, rather than shifting into the full "anti-imperialism of fools" that it did.

Perhaps in that world the Zionist settlements in Palestine might have ended up like the German Templar colonies (also in Palestine), a quirky blind alley of history with a few thousand (or perhaps tens of thousand) inhabitants, funny little communities in an independent, post-colonial multi-confessional Palestine. 

None of this really distracts from the value of the book, which is about antisemitism rather than about the politics of Israel and Palestine. I'm going to recommend it to all of my friends, especially my friends who are engaged in active or passive solidarity with the Palestinians, and see what they make of it.

Review of "Queer; a graphic history" by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele

I didn't get much out of this. I was hoping to become a bit better informed than I am. I went through most of life not having to think about this area very much. I have some gay and lesbian friends, and, and I want to say that I am on their side, but other than that I've managed without having to take positions on questions of sex, and gender, and intersexuality and non-binary...it's not a luxury I can afford any longer. These questions are dividing my friends, and I think I can't be agnostic about them any more.

But this book wasn't much help. I think I must accept that I don't find graphics a great way to organise a book, and this felt very superficial...not much more than some name-checks of intellectuals who have contributed to thinking in this area, but even though I really haven't explored it very much, I don't know much more now I've read the book.

Review of 'The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster

I read this book as a child of about ten...pretty sure that I just came across it in the children's library. I loved it then, and I'm pleased to say that, having renewed my aquaintance 53 years later, I still enjoyed. It's full of wordplay, and a nice child-level introduction to magical realism, and some good moral messages about how to live. I also enjoyed the pictures by Jules Feiffer, who often did cartoons in the New Yorker...oddly they'd not made so much impression on me the first time round. Now I need a ten-year-old to give it to!

I read the Wikipedia article about Norton Juster, and was surprised to discover he'd remained a working architect all his life...and that there's an animated film of the book, which I will seek out. Juster died around a year ago, otherwise I would have tried to write to him.

Review of Parallel Mothers

Almodovar's films just keep getting better. This one is part personal drama, part political exploration about contemporary Spain. It's hard to talk about the personal bit without spoiling it...except to say that Penelope Cruz is one of the two mothers in the plot, and though she is still beautiful as ever, she presents a lot of emotional range as an actor in this too. So does Milena Smith (not seen her before) as the other, younger mother...and nice to see Rossy de Palma (she of the amazing nose) back in business.

The political part is about exhumations of anonymous mass graves from the Civil War - Cruz's character wants an excavation of a village unmarked grave where her great -grandfather is reputedly buried, and the male lead is the forensic anthropologist who carries this out. Along the way there's discussion of Spain's unexamined past and the fault lines that still run through its society.

Watched via VLC, Chromecast, and informal distribution.

Review of 'Pig'

That rare thing, a really good film with Nicholas Cage in the lead role. This is beautifully simple in narrative structure, but full of depth and emotion. It's about a truffle hunter whose pig is stolen, and his journey into his past life in the city (Portland, Oregon) to get it back. It feels like it's a Greek tragedy, including a remarkable, terrifying journey into a literal underworld beneath one of the city's squares in a hidden sub-basement of a demolished hotel. Lots of stuff about food and foodies, and an almost perfect example of the three-act structure. Slow but clever, and definitely worth watching.

Informal distribution, VLC and Chromecast.

Review of Winter on Fire

Watched this last night. I learned very little about Ukranian recent history...hard not to feel that I was being played to some extent. There's nothing about the divisions in Ukraine between East and West, or about the murky history of the Orange Revolution, or the background to it...just lots of footage of ghastly brutality by the riot police. 

Watched it thinking about how pitiful the XR matras about nonviolence seem...according to the Hallam/Chenoweh formula, this was a "non-violent" struggle (less than 1000 people died), but it really really wasn't, and it was only the protestors' use of physical force that kept them in place and allowed the uprising to succeed. And none of them begged to be arrested so as to clog up Ukraine's justice and prison system.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'Light Perpetual' by Francis Spufford

There's a bit of a fantasy-style conceit right at the beginning of this book - all the characters are children killed in a V2 rocket strike on south London, and the book tells the stories how their lives would have turned out if they'd lived. The first chapter dwells on the rocket strike, the physics and chemistry, and some Achilles-and-the-tortoise style paradoxes about time. After that it's a much more conventional set of interconnected stories, checking in with the same characters over the years from 1949 to 2009. Since they are all working class children, it's a sort of history-survey of what happened to working class people over this period. Some rise out of their class, some try to rise with it, some rise and then fall. One is typesetter in Fleet Street; another becomes a shyster property developer. Tragedies befall them, but in the sort of random way that they do in real life, not as a carefully contrived story arc.

It's beautifully written, and it's hard not to care about the characters, even the nastier ones. Lots about the music business, because one of the characters is an almost-successful singer in LA before she goes back to south London and becomes a music teacher.

Really enjoyable and profound at the same time, and I will read more by him.