Tripping With My Wife - Fuji

Part three of our trip to Tokyo/Hakone....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOIByY_r8P4

Bernard Anton - poete, professeur, écrivain ( Plaidoyer pour la Terre et les Vivants)

My interview with Quebecois poet, professor, writer Bernard Anton is up at my new site. It's in French; I'll be doing an English translation later.

Tripping With My Wife - Tokyo Arrival [two]

The second part of my video about our 2010 trip to Tokyo is now up at YouTube:

http://youtu.be/cIh4ZJL2FDI

If you're interested in a detour, you can also link to it exactly the same way by going to my new site:

http://finnharvor.com/blog

The Business Army - One (YouTube)

The YouTube fermentation process has completed its yeasty cycle; I can now link to the upload of THE BUSINESS ARMY which is also below. However, this version has substantially clearer visuals.

Chad Pelley - Away from Everywhere, Salty Ink

My interview with Chad Pelley (Away from Everywhere, Salty Ink) is now up at my new site.

The Business Army - one

This is a rather shaky Google upload of the video I made around one of my screenplay-novels; I just uploaded it to YouTube as well and think the quality there is better; I'll try again when the connection between this site and that has its chance to ferment, or whatever it is computers do between just-fresh uploading and accessibility.

I'm posting it now because of the attention Dinesh D'Sousa's crockumentary 2016 Obama's America is receiving. By coincidence, I noticed D'Sousa's book yesterday while with my wife in the Kyobo bookstore in Kyoungbukkong. (This was a day before a wire story about the book caused a stir -- in other words, I knew nothing about the title.)

One thing that is striking about how the discourse is being framed is the degree to which this documentary is being compared to other American political documentaries that allegedly exist in opposition to what D'Sousa is doing (those other docs being leftist, this one being rightist). The discourse can be then seen as one of ideological conflict -- which, of course, exists. But it seems to me there is another way to see what D'Sousa's film serves as a symbol of, and that is as part of a historical tradition that I don't think Farhenheit 911 and An Inconvenient Truth partake of.

In a sense, any progressive president (and arguably Obama barely ranks on that metric) is a "problem" not because of what he does but what he (or she) might do: The challenge becomes one of pre-emptive containment, not criticism of de facto policy.

There is a parallel here -- and, in my opinion, a strong one -- between this kind of speculative/oppositional discourse and the kind of rhetoric Franklin Roosevelt was confronted with when he was elected. He was "an enemy to his class", someone who did not "run true to form", someone too "ill" to be president ... more to the point, he was a Red, and his policies (viewed at the time by Stalin as a clever means of maintaining a capitalist system the Soviets themselves thought was ripe for collapse) were depicted as crypto-radical. Roosevelt's radicalism primarily lay in the future....

Tripping with my Wife

Isolationism

John Baird takes a stand.

Noteworthy

Steven Beattie on the Giller longlist:

 this year’s jury, made up of Irish author Roddy Doyle, American author Gary Shteyngart, and Canadian author Anna Porter, has chosen a baker’s dozen made up of first-timers, genre writers, and previously overlooked names. 

"Too much risk"

Desmond Tutu on the haste to invade Iraq:

Days before George W Bush and Tony Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq, I called the White House and spoke to Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser, to urge that United Nations weapons inspectors be given more time to confirm or deny the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Should they be able to confirm finding such weapons, I argued, dismantling the threat would have the support of virtually the entire world. Ms Rice demurred, saying there was too much risk and the president would not postpone any longer.

The Business Army - audio

An audio excerpt from THE BUSINESS ARMY is now up at my new site.