Battle of Algiers

Originally run on 1 December 2008, under my column "Cinecult."

Everyone loves The Battle of Algiers—the Black Panthers, the Red Army, the IRA, Donald Rumsfeld— and for good reason. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is one of the best-made movies about the West clashing with the Middle East and of occupation forces clashing with an indigenous people fighting for independence. It’s a complex movie that’s as relevant today as it was in 1966—perhaps even more so.

The film begins in 1957, with a recently tortured Arab man being forced to lead French paratroopers to the hideout of several key revolutionaries. The soldiers surround the hideout and threaten four revolutionaries—a man, a teenage boy, a woman and a child—that they have a choice between surrendering or being blown off the face of the other. From there the movie shifts backwards to 1954 and chronicles the eponymous battle for Algeria’s independence and the French government’s attempts to quash the rebellion.

When I was watching the film, a friend of mine passed by and asked, “Is that real?” Pontecorvo’s film is shot in the style of a documentary or a newsreel, as a grainy, handheld affair almost completely devoid of romance or theatricality. Everything is filmed with the idea that the following events just happened to pass in front of the camera (the trailer to the film has a disclaimer explicitly telling the audience that, in fact, not a single frame of newsreel footage was used in the film). Not only do shots of the city streets and rooftops look realistic, so do the frequent scenes of torture and explosions. Pontecorvo knew that these kinds of things shouldn’t be cleaned up and sanitizing them completely would compromise the film’s integrity. If you can watch a scene where a man gets a car battery attached to his ears without feeling a tad bit squeamish, then the point is entirely lost. The Battle of Algiers doesn’t shy away from harrowing violence, even when you might like it to.

The film benefits greatly from the score by legendary composer Ennio Morricone (who is probably best known for the “Waa-Waa-Waaaaa” in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). While Morricone does a solid job throughout the film, his talent really shines in a sequence where three Arab women prepare themselves to place time bombs in the city’s crowded French District. The score gallops along as they dye and straighten their hair, bluff their way through military checkpoints and place their deadly cargo inside of a café, an airport and a bar full of Europeans of every age and gender. His score intensifies the seconds as they tick along towards an inevitable carnage.

The bombing in turn escalates the conflict from a band of idealists taking on the government to a full-blown war against every European that calls this corner of North Africa home. The women’s three bombs rip through the crowded buildings, throwing bodies. It shows that this fight to liberate Algiers, while a righteous cause, can at the same time be a cruel and terrible thing. On the other side of the conflict are the French paratroopers, who wish to pacify Algiers by any and all means, including assassinations and enhanced interrogations (i.e., Torture). Though, in their attempt to bring order and civility to Algeria, they ironically anger the population into resisting their increasingly tenuous authority. In this world, war is portrayed as both more inhuman and less inhuman than we typically view it as. War in the world of The Battle of Algiers is a horrific and fanatical affair and it is often justified as such, but it can also simply become a mundane job with fallout and consequences.

To label The Battle of Algiers as a political film is to sell it short. Doing so would mean that half of its audience would be lost. And, while it very clearly is a movie about a political situation, it’s far more than that and it doesn’t suffer to the same sanctimonious trumpeting that Michael Moore (Farenheit 9/11, Sicko) and Oliver Stone (Platoon, W.) are known for. Even though history did side with the Algerian people, the film doesn’t take either side and leaves it to the audience to decide the exact meaning of what they just watched, like a moving Rorschach test. Regardless of where you fall on the aisle, you should be able to recognize a great story that’s well constructed on every level. The Battle of Algiers is, at its most simple, a film about the trials that a people go through for the sake of independence and self-determinism—something all Americans should be able to empathize with.

Image via Google. Naturally.

Putin the Best Foot Forward

Originally written on 17 November under the nom de plume Julio Harkonnen. Image by the wonderful Clay Cooper.

May 21st

I’ve rarely ever been black bagged. Also, I’ve rarely ever been thrown into a car trunk by Russian spewing Special Forces. I must say that I really wouldn’t recommend it, either.

After several hours of bumpy roads, I was dragged out of a car and down a flight of concrete stairs. There, in a dingy basement, my eyes tried to adjust to the first light I had seen for hours. There, hunched over the carcass of what was once a white Siberian tiger was the man I was summoned to meet. He started separating the feline’s hide from its flesh as he whistled what sounded like “L’Internationale.” After a couple of seconds he stopped sawing and looked at me.

“Ah, you are journalist, yes?”

Yes?

“Come in for bro-grab.” Before I had an opportunity to meet him or dive out of the way, he was on me like an angry bear. He then released me and looked me over. “Yes, you will do.”

I wondered how hard it would be to get tiger blood out of flannel. It wouldn’t be the last unique question I’d ask on my travels.

That was how I met former Russian president Vladimir Putin.

***

What I found out in my first few hours with Vladimir was he was not much on shirts. At first I thought he was just really proud of his communism-forged abs, but after I while I discovered it was just a cover for a severe chaffing problem. He would stay half naked for most of our travels.

After a few awkward moments, he pulled from his Jordache jeans a piece of yellow, lined paper. He unfolded it on the table and cleared his throat. “I come to America.” He stopped right there and raised a single eyebrow at me. I considered agreeing with him that, yes, he did come to America, but then he went on. “For years I think to myself, ‘Vladi, these Yankees, they are not like us Russians, yes?’ [Yes] I think I want to—how you say—road trip. See what makes Yankees click. I want to see Real America.”

Through his vodka-laced voice and my heat stroke I could hear that he was serious, he wanted me to write about his—our—journey through the arteries of America. He had selected me—probably for my lack of a home security system and any close family ties—to chronicle this pilgrimage.

***

Vladimir took me by the arm outside. There in the waning daylight he showed me what he called “The Sturgeon,” a massive, red, convertible Cadillac. This was to be our ferry and Vladimir was to be the Virgil to my Dante. That is if I understood Wikipedia correctly.

May 24nd

We stopped at some nameless greasy spoon across from a Shell station. I’d been holding in a 64 oz. Mountain Dew since we started and Vladimir refused to stop because we were “good time making” (He then cackled and stomped on the accelerator). So when we finally did stop at a restaurant I had barely undone my button-fly before the call hit me. When I returned there was a slice of pie and a cup of coffee to greet me at our table. I told Vlad that I wasn’t hungry, but then he gave me that I-will-gulag-the-fuck-out-of-you look, so I took a bite out of my own sense of self-preservation.

I washed down the bite with a slug of black coffee and he started laughing.

“Ha! I poison your coffee make!” he said as he slapped his knee.

“Huh?” is all I could get out.

“Polonium!” Then he busted out even louder, making a diabetic amputee with a shirt that said ‘God Don’t Make Junk’ to turn around and stink-eye us. “Oh man, you should sees your face! I totally had gots your going!”

He’s said this at every single meal we’ve had together. I’m starting to think he’s not joking around.

May 28th

Vladimir has an entire collection of knives. I have no idea where he got these things from or why he has eighty-nine of them. The trunk is full of them. That and the mummified remains of a timber wolf.

He shrugged. “He looked at me.” He sniffed. “Once.”

May 30th

“I call it the Rasputin,” he says to me, pouring the Stoli through a funnel filled with ice into an Iron Man collector’s cup. He said this as if he was answering a question I never thought to ask. “Is three measures vodka.” He poured a little bit more. “And two measures vodka.” The bottle went dry and sailed out the window. “Is real man’s drink.”

I told him I could man the Sturgeon if he wanted to. He waved me off and said that I needed to “nut up” and that I was acting like “a Kazakh.” For some reason, I thought of Thanksgiving at my parents’ house.

June 4th

I couldn’t tell if it was the time we ran out of gas outside of Del Rio or the time he got high on mescaline and drove through a field of sheep, but something inside him changed. Right as I gave up on wondering what he was thinking, he spoke up. “I am grow blue-ball violent.” I was sure this was a collection of words that made sense to Vladimir, but to me the meaning was entirely lost. “I am in need of combat. I am need to see wolverine fight! But wheres?”

I had to admit I didn’t know where. Conflict was something I saved for hypothetical discussions I had with my boss or for the internet. So I couldn’t aid him in his quest for animal-bound violence. Not that I wanted to.

As we reached the top of a hill, he looked out to where the Earth met the sky. “We will goes to land of the Aztecs. We’s will journal to Mexico.” Sanity and reason, I would later find out, left us on that hill.

June 6th

What follows was written down after all was said and done. My notebook was lost when the Sturgeon lost a tire and burst into flames against an elm tree. When I regained consciousness, I found Vladimir standing over me smirking. It appeared, in the confusion, he had lost his shirt.

He nodded at me and winked. Without a word, miles from anywhere, we began to walk.

***

The black wilderness seemed to stretch for hundreds of miles in every direction and thousands of years into the past. It was as though we were in a land that man had never walked through before. Even Nature seemed to be absent from the earth we walked over. It was just us two and our footfalls.

Out of the moonless night Vladimir said, “I think I maybe get it. Maybe not what I cames for, but I know something.” He stopped and took up a handful of pebbles and sand. “I knows something.” He let the gravel fall from between his fingers.

Just then I saw it. Civilization. A glittering beacon out in the middle of this expanse of misery. We started running for it. Or I thought we did. Hours of Hell ended in a few seconds of sprinting (followed by ten minutes of breathless hobbling). I collapsed against the tin side of a truck stop. A bearded man that looked like Jerry Garcia spat a mouthful of tobacco a few inches from my foot. I told him that I needed to find a phone and that my friend Vladimir and I had an accident and we needed to call for help. The man just stared at me.

“Who’s Vladimir?”

I looked to my left and my right, but Vladimir was nowhere to be found. Sometime in my dash for salvation he had slipped away into the night. Maybe it had something to do with what he found out on that walk or maybe it had to do with the mushrooms he ate or maybe, just maybe Vladimir was the kind of man that needed to be lost in the shadow of the Earth.

[Editor’s Note: The writer could not be found for editorial purposes. Though, when his
apartment was checked on, it looked like he had packed and his suitcases were missing.]

JOYCE V. SHAKESPEARE

Originally run on 3 November 2008

This is currently mounted on the wall of a good friend of mine. And if you're wondering, I pronounce it Sheik-ah-speer, like all good gentlemen.

The Only Good Ganguro is a Dead Ganguro

Originally run on 3 November 2008.

There’s a lot of pretty great stuff about Japan—ramen, Akira Kurosawa, ninja, robots and the elderly, but there’s also an ugly underside to the Land of the Rising Sun. No, I’m not talking about cheap anime, tentacle porn, the Rape of Nanking or one of the highest suicide rate in the industrialized world, I’m talking about some of the less obvious things that haunt the neon streets of old Yamato. Specifically, I’m talking about this horrible thing the kids have deemed the “ganguro.”

The origin of the word ganguro apparently comes from the Japanese word for “blackface,” so it’s good to know that racist stereotyping isn’t isolated to our half of the globe. The fashion consists of what I assume are color-blind female youths tanning their skin into Oompa-Loompa hues and bleaching their hair into nuclear whites. It is one of the uglier things I’ve seen people inflict on themselves and I’ve seen the BME Pain Olympics. Apparently this fashion was sort of developed as a direct challenge to traditional Japanese beauty, where women are supposed to be small, quiet and pale (Scientifically, it appears that ganguro style is as far away from the geisha as possible without segueing into another species). Luckily this questionable chic that started in the 90’s has been tapering off in popularity ever since the dawn of the new millennium. My guess is that one of these girls ended up looking in the mirror.

You could probably make an argument about me being some racist, misogynist imperialist, but come on—Look at these broads. Tell me with a straight face that there’s anything about that picture that could be considered a good idea. Unless, of course, you’re desperate for a Halloween costume.

Image from the foulest pits of hell and Google.