About
AUDIO Ben Petersen on the Nepalese Revolution
Hear Ben Petersen report on his experiences in a New Zealand interview where he talks about the revolutionary changes in Nepal.
Gain entertainment from politics. Source your bitterness in the real world... and laugh at it. Life of Riley is a collection of political satires written by Dave Riley.
VIDEO Nepalese Maoists do Saturday Night Fever
Over at Links you can watch an extensive review and analysis of the Nepalese Revolution by Ben Petersen.
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Australian Socialist Alliance member Ben Peterson is videoed speaking in Wellington, New Zealand, during his seven-day tour of New Zealand. Videos by Socialist Worker New Zealand.
However, not so well known is the snazzy dance and vocal style of the Nepalese Maoists as indicted by this up tempo number which turns Bollywood style show numbers on their political head.
AUDIO The Insanity of the African American Racial ‘Critique’ of Cuba
Black Agenda Report:The 60 signatories to a letter denouncing racism in Cuba seem to consider themselves extensions of Barack Obama's State Department. The logic of their action, as articulated by Dr. Ron Walters, is to encourage the United States to “make the Black condition in Cuba 'part of any negotiations on the normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba.'” Then maybe the Cubans can negotiate with the U.S. on behalf of African Americans.
"Late last year, a group of 60 prominent African Americans circulated a letter denouncing racism in, of all places, Cuba ..."
AUDIO Haiti: Haiti Info-thon: Cuban Doctors in Haiti, Segment 1
While the world sat around and wondered what they could do to support Haitians after the earthquake, Cuban doctors were already at work. Since the late 1990's Cuban doctors have had a presence in Haiti, and have also been training Haitian doctors. At the time of the earthquake in Haiti, 402 Cuban internationalists, 302 of them medical personnel, had already been helping Haitians. These together with many of the 500 Haitian doctors who had been trained in Cuba free of charge formed the essential early group of lifesavers, attending to 1,102 Haitian patients in the first 24 hours after the earthquake. They have continued their work, boosted by an additional medical brigade which arrived promptly from Cuba. In this interview, Omme speaks with Nin Paglicia from the Canada Network on Cuba about the work of Cuban doctors in Haiti and the international Cuban doctors program.
VIDEO SATIRE The Daily Show: How capitalism bails itself out over and over again.
Chris Dodd announces his own financial reform legislation, and Jon Stewart pretends he’s a corporation.
Capitalist management 101
more about “The Daily Show: In Dodd We Trust“, posted with vodpod
SATIRE: Having the last laugh.
Unbeknown to most of those who inhabit my circle, I often suffer from feelings of inadequacy. These fleeting moments bear down upon me like a heavy rock as I grope for a footing on the precipice of life. You will know my meaning when I say that what I so often fear is that I lack monetary value.
How much am I worth? This is a market conundrum. When I watch the Antiques Roadshow I marvel at the face value placed upon the most diverse of objects. Here a few hundred and there many thousands of dollars attesting to the fact that to some, at least, the demand for the rare objet d'art or a hand-me-down tea cup with a chip in it is unrequited.
Unfortunately I cannot so easily treasure myself up by hanging on a lounge room wall or in the grandparent's attic for one or two hundred years before being featured on the BBC. The patina of such aging doesn't come easily to my CV.
I may be truly drop dead gorgeous or sublimely handsome -- and I am, all of those things* -- but unless I can drape myself over the cover of some mag or reward the Australian populace with a feature or op ed concerned solely with my thoughts and raison d'etre, then as the ever observant St Paul reminded us in one of his infotorials, while you may have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, without the folding stuff you are nothing.
'Tis a dispiriting thought that nothing.
Since I'm not one to let the indifference of the world get me down I thought I'd consciously establish a viable measure of my being by taking out a life insurance policy.
It was a simple self evident act that is offered to me every night on the teley by such philosophers of the law of value and price as the ever canny Billy Connelly.
If indeed I take pride in what I am, or so I reasoned, what better way to prove that quantitatively than by attaching upon my person a monetary value if I was , for some unholy reason, no longer available:missing from my social post, as it were. You know,physiologically stagnant.
I soon learned that the great thing about life insurance is that I can select my own worth.I don't have to worry about the fickleness of the market. I can value myself as much as I value myself! All I had to do was to pick a policy and sign on the dotted line.
I would no longer suffer from feelings of inadequacy because I would know my true value. And let me tell you, I put a hefty price on my head.
You cannot imagine how confident that makes me feel. With life insurance you really can walk around with tabs on yourself.
No matter what the world may throw at me to suppress my ego and make me feel worthless, I know that when I go, I am going to have the last laugh.Ha. Ha.
*See accompanying profile image.
SATIRE LeftClick is due for a work over -- and a new voice
I've been blogging for six of the last half dozen years. That's a long time serving those who surf the World Wide Webbly thing. Heave ho-ing and shivering my online timbers like I'm the bestest of tars.
But as my dear old pater used to say, there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries....
And such is I in shallow or in misery. Preferring neither, and many dollars short of a fortune, I hereby step from behind the perspicacious mask that has been my usual visage at this web address, don a snazzy pair of plastic sunglasses (see profile image) and will henceforth trans-substantiate into another being.
It is preferable to so proceed via this transforming (and cathartic) route rather than be obliged to move elsewhere with all its associated inconveniences and yell at you from over there in the hope I may draw your attention.
So comrades, family and friends, the short of it is that the voice that has screamed at you from these pages renovating your POV and seductively merging it with my own, will change in timbre, calibre and content as I advance two steps forward and retreat one step back to once again dare to compose political satire rather than something else.
"Political satire" does actually exist as proven by the undeniable fact that it now has its own Wikipedia entry.
I thought if I announced this fact as an intention before I actually started making the babies you would not be rashly prone to mark me down for becoming far too curiouser and curiouser far too quickly.
Curious is easy (I've done curious hundreds of times; puzzlement almost as often) but the trick with satire -- satire that may work -- is to push the normalcy envelope that little bit more queerish just as the other ( such as your good self) thinks that the world after all is the very best of what it could possibly be.
This time around -- and yes, I've trod this path before -- I write the satiric type words on a page, this page that is, way up here, in the clouds where blogs live. All the puppets, maskmaking, street theatre...all that ambition and distractions of my past obsessions will be contained by a wiser, older and humbler me.
But the maltose media will remain -- the video and the audio which will be selected for your listening and viewing pleasure and cultural enrichment. That and the crime fiction musings -- we gotta keep the pulp fiction.
So when they ask about me, just say that while Pundit is a loan word borrowed in English during the British Raj from the Hindi language, Dave is one of those but without the pretentiousness of inner cleanliness of brain ... But today, since everybody's doing detox, he is aspiring to become ever more punditious despite his shallow scholastic accomplishments and his life long failure to master a specialty.
dave riley
CRIME FICTION Dominique Manotti remakes the crime novel
American crime fiction, despite its many addictive attractions, always seems to be caught up in replicating the libertarian laissez faire of the American Old West. With writers such as Elmore Leonard there was an easy transition as he stopped writing Westerns, continued to utilize the same archetypes, and wrote contemporary crime fiction instead. The man who could write such stand out Western yarns as Hombre and Three-Ten to Yuma, later found a comfortable niche creating Mr. Majestyk and Get Shorty from the same stuff. The ethos was more or less the same.
But elsewhere on the planet that template has been broken , or simply by passed. European crime fiction today is also much richer and more variious than the exploits of John Rebus, Maigret or Kurt Wallander . And within that capacity to remake the crime novel, is Dominique Manotti.
Rough Trade is the first of her novels to be translated from its original French (originally published in 1995). This is as far from a neatly orchestrated who-dun-it? as you can get. Most of the time you aren't sure who is supposed to be the hero as there is so much activity driven by cynical street politics that there are no self evident good guys to latch onto. While this is a police procedural , the gendarmes are not to be trusted. Nothing is what it seems in this tale set in the Sentier district of Paris -- just after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and prior to a major shift in the international drug trade that followed.
How these events relate to the brutal murder of very young Thai girl is uncovered by Inspector Daquin who has to watch his back as much as he investigates the murder. But nothing is even that simple as the Sentier is not only the centre of the Parisian rag trade, but those who mostly work in the district's sweatshops are Turkish, and many members of the workforce are illegal immigrants. So the take home pay and working conditions of illegal immigrants has a lot to do with the many layers of corruption that infect the industry. While the Turkish workers are trying to organise a trade union to secure base rates of pay, others are seeking a return from more nefarious pursuits and among those so engaged are some leading politicians, mandarins ... and coppers.
Manotti's novel has been called neo-realist and it certainly has a pervasive grubbiness that is very palpabe, even shocking at times. Because it unfolds consecutatively day by day, even hour by hour, it has a stark immediacy that meanders through a complex web of inter-relationships and competing self interests. But for all that, Manotti writes as a detached observer leaving events to speak for themselves as even the many incidences of violence and corruption merge with a much broader, even international, political reality.
How she has managed to reference her work on such an epic scale, make political sense of it and still create bona fide crime fiction at the level of a few neighboring Parisian blocks is a major literary achievement.
Manotti, Dominique -'Rough Trade (translated by Margaret Crosland and Elfreda Powell)Paperback: 272 pages (Apr. 2006) Publisher: Arcadia Books ISBN: 1900850877
CRIME FICTION Leonardo Padura Fuentes -- the doyen of Cuban crime fiction
The Havana Culture website when not promoting Cuban rum carries a few interesting cultural titbits such as this video interview with Leonardo Padura Fuentes -- the Cuban crime fiction writer.
Leonardo Padura Fuentes is the most widely known author working in Cuba today. He has written movie scripts, two books of short stories and a series of detective novels translated into 10 languages at last count. His political essays serve as teaching aides for university courses around the world.
I love Padura Fuentes fiction and his The four seasons/ Havanna Quartet is an observant window into contemporary Cuba and the outlook of his generation, born after 1959. I highly recommend the read for an insight into the contradictions of the present Cuban experience.
His writing is a seductive mix of outlooks which mesh together and try , you could almost say they compete with one another, to come to some sort of political resolution -- even though the novels don't seem to be "political " in the ideological sense we may expect. But the stories house an ongoing dialogue that moves back and forth through time in order to give the present a substance that may give it tolerable meaning. Padura's characters may be alienated but their estrangement has neither a meaning nor etiology that can be identified in the way we may engage with our own disaffections.
So if you want to begin to understand Cuba today -- maybe in the crime fiction of Leonardo Padura Fuentes is where you can start.
LEONARDO PADURA / Leonardo Padura's interview
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