West Virginia is now desperate. With a stunning 46 percent of fifth-graders tested in the state’s coronary artery risk project over six years turning out to be overweight or obese, West Virginia is willing to do just about anything to slim down the state’s chubby little children and the attendant health risks they suffer. The solution? Dance Dance Revolution!

Rolling in Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution — a video game in which the participant mimics the foot movements on a footpad to correspond with those shown on the screen — from the arcade into the public school system, West Virginia will allow ten- to fourteen-year-old students (almost 280,000 of them) to opt for the video game in lieu of participating in other sports.  

The theory behind the Dance Dance Revolution project is that the children who dislike certain sports will enjoy and turn to the game for fitness instead of forgoing fitness altogether. And this, while somewhat odd, is preferable to allowing the children to do nothing. However, to allow young children to opt for a video game in lieu of more serious physical education and participation misses the point; students need to enjoy sport, but they also need to develop an understanding of fitness and a sense of physical versatility. And Dance Dance Revolution, while fun, can hardly provide all of that.

West Virginia’s situation is certainly desperately unhealthy — within the U.S., it has the highest blood pressure rate, is within the top three for obesity, and is the fourth highest for diabetes — and hopefully this desperate measure will begin to make a dent in the state’s collective and lethargic consciousness.  

Mimi Hanaoka

We look into the mirror of popular media hoping to see ourselves — only a better, a glossier version of ourselves — something we can aspire to. We are also looking for a sense of belonging with the culture at large.

What if, in looking in the media mirror, you see no reflection but are a “societal vampire”? (In vampire lore, a vampire’s reflection cannot be seen in a mirror.) What if you can’t see yourself in that mirror at all? Or, what if your image is so distorted as to represent not a sublimated version of self but a monstrosity?

Minorities marginalized in media is an ongoing concern.

I was excited to read about this, an oportunity to have a hand in “silvering the mirror,” over at feministing.com:

WAM!’s annual conference, now in its third year, invites progressive journalists, authors, activists, bloggers, students, and fed-up TV viewers to come together to share skills, trade information, exchange strategies, and inform and inspire one another to make noise and make change.

Sponsored by the Center for New Words and the MIT Program in Women’s Studies, the WAM! conference is from March 31 – April 2 in Cambridge, MA.

The Center for New Words is dedicated to a simple mission (from the site): “To use the power and creativity of words and ideas to strengthen the voice of progressive and marginalized women in society.”

To accomplish this mission, The Center for New Words’ programs support diverse women’s engagement with the entire “word cycle,” from literacy to blogging to literary writing to opinion-making in the media and other domains of influence.

Annette Marie Hyder

Why, every night, do I only dream
of my lucky and dazzling star?
Why, every night, do I only dream
that this star will bring me the happiness
of which, during the day,
I never dream?

Guise deceives,
and every dream
that during the night we dream
the next day chases away.

Life happens only by chance,
one moment you’re up, one moment you’re down.
Life flows like a stream,
and death is like the sea.

Everyone will reach the sea,
some sooner, some later.
Still, the one who loves
shouldn’t lose hope.

When you see miracles in life
only love is capable of—
goldfish soaring above the clouds—
then you will understand.

That life is like water
which love turns into wine,
that love happens by chance,
and there is no happiness without it.

Život je jen náhoda

Proč že se mi každou noc
o tom jen zdá, o tom jen zdá,
jak v mém životě vyšla
má tak šťastná a krásná hvězda.

Proč že se mi každou noc
o tom jen zdá, že ta hvězda
mi dá to štěstí,
o němž se mi ve dne nezdá.

Zdání klame,
mimoto každý sen,
který v noci míváme,
zažene příští den.

Život je jen náhoda,
jednou jsi dole, jednou nahoře.
Život plyne jak voda
a smrt je jako moře.

Každý k moři dopluje,
někdo dříve a někdo později.
Kdo v životě miluje,
ať neztrácí naději.

Až uvidí v životě zázraky,
které jenom láska umí,
zlaté rybky vyletí nad mraky,
pak porozumí.

Že je život jak voda,
kterou láska ve víno promění,
láska že je náhoda
a bez ní štěstí není.

About the poem: First performed in 1932 by the theater trio Ježek, Voskovec, Werich, the song has had such an impact on the Czech language that native speakers cannot think of život (“life”) without the remainder of the line (“happens by chance”).

Listen to the Old Man without the Sea playing the tune.

Listen to the Prague Castle Orchestra interpreting “life.”

Jan Vihan Jan Vihan is a contributing writer for In The Fray.

Recently I was sitting in a room with a number of friends, and they went off on a political discussion, as my friends are wont to do.  In my circles, this means a lot of lefty rhetoric.  “Isn’t it great how Harry Belafonte called Bush a terrorist?”  “Bush hates black people.”  “Those people delaying the mosque in Roxbury are a bunch of racists.”

You’ve heard it all before, so there’s no need to repeat any more.

When I came home, I read up a bit about the NSA wiretapping story.  Basically, this involves the president asserting that he has the right to determine what is legal and that the courts and the legislature really have no say.  This is a pretty serious claim.  Sadly, it hasn’t lead to much serious conversation.  As far as I can tell, the right-wing justification for their lawbreaking consists of calling critics soft on terror.  This substitutes for a meaningful answer no matter what the question.  Do you believe that the president has the legal right to suspend the fourth amendment?  They are doing what is necessary to protect you, and your criticism endangers national security.

You’ve heard all that before as well.

I began to think a bit about what passes for political discourse.  And I began to think it all sounded a lot like the argument against the witch in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail.

Why do witches burn?  
Because they’re made of wood.  

How do we tell whether she is made of wood?  Does wood sink in water?  
No, it floats.  

What also floats in water?  
Very small rocks.  Ducks.  

So, logically, if she weighs the same as a duck, she’s made of wood.

That’s an abridged version, but you all can probably remember the scene as well as I do.

As I was thinking about this, my mind filled with anger and apprehension and admittedly a little resignation about the latest Bush escapade; I wished I knew a right-winger I could argue with.  But I don’t.  Conversations immediately degenerate into something like The Holy Grail.  And it is the same with my lefty friends.  Just as I don’t get into discussions with right-wingers, I avoid saying anything around lefties either.

And I like political discussions.

So today, I would like to make a plea.  It’s not an ideological one.  It’s not a moral one.  It’s merely practical.

I want to stand up for reason.  I want you to stand up for reason.  Just as Habermas claims, it’s the only thing that allows all of us to live together without our hands on each other’s throats all the time.  It’s what makes conversation possible between people with contradictory moral positions.

Next time you’re having a political discussion, think about what your postulates are.  Does your conclusion follow from them?  If somebody gave you evidence against these, would you change your conclusion?  Could you talk to someone with a different ideology and determine where exactly the disagreement lies?  Are your political positions even explicable in these terms?

Right or left, we all need reason.  If it declines into parody, we imperil our government, our society, and even our lives.

Pete DeWan

“We make no pretense of where we are…The real question is ‘Where is Haiti?’ — and ‘What is Haiti?’ If you are honest, even if you tell them, most passengers don’t know where they are, usually.”

Royal Caribbean International promises Caribbean cruises filled with blue skies, palm trees, and…abject poverty? As Danna Harman reports for the Christian Science Monitor, Royal Caribbean cruise ships dock at the Labadee beach in Haiti to disgorge passengers eager for jet skiing and sunbathing, not unlike Royal Caribbean’s stops in the Bahamas or Bermuda. But somehow Haiti doesn’t have quite the same ring as some of the Caribbean’s more prosperous islands. The cruise line identifies the location as “Labadee, Hispaniola” on its website and describes it as a private, secret destination.

The only real secret about Labadee is the poverty surrounding it. The real Haiti looks like this and like this — a country with the highest HIV seroprevalence rate in the Western hemisphere and a history of United States involvement and homegrown despotism. After driving to Labadee through the hilly countryside of Haiti’s northern coast, I found that the most striking thing about the beach was not its pristine vistas or palm trees, but the cement laid down under the sand to mask the land erosion resulting from overfarming. And while I found it easy to scorn the cruise boat tourists who disembarked, believing they were in Hispaniola, the missionaries quoted in the Christian Science Monitor article are correct. It’s only through tourism and marketing that Haiti will ever recover from its deep economic depression. In a way, the country must hide its true identity in order to sell itself to the clueless consumers who can save it.

llouison

I usually only post once a week, but I received a press release the other day that got my attention.  It’s about the first Yiddish action film made in 60 years called A Gesheft (The Deal) from Kosher Entertainment Productions. You don’t see many Yiddish films in the local multiplex, so I thought I should pass on the information for all of you who have been waiting all these years for someone to finally make a new Yiddish movie. I think it’s about time, don’t you?

The film is the brainchild of two Orthodox Jewish brothers, Yakov and Mendy Kirsh, a bookkeeper and a real estate agent respectively, who have no prior filmmaking experience. “We decided that religious Jews needed their own movies far from the dangerous influence of Hollywood,” comments Mendy Kirsh. “There’s no treyf (things that are non-kosher) in this movie!”

They’re sending me a copy on DVD, and I told them I’d review it.  If you want to check it out now, you can go to their website.  Just click on the company name at the top where you can purchase the DVD for $20, or simply find out more about their film and view trailers.

Just be aware that there are no women actors in the film because Orthodox Jewish men cannot be entertained by women.  The one woman character is played by a man, though he’s covered up so you can’t see his face. Talk about your niche marketing.

If the film is a big success, be sure that the studios will be quick to come out with Yiddish teen market films such as Oy, Where’s My Oyto? and HBO will probably make a Yiddish version of The Sopranos called The Shvitzers. It also reminds me of an old TV skit about Orthodox Jews in space, but that dates me.  Zay gezunt!

Rich Burlingham

“I am appealing to those who kidnapped the American journalist Jill Carroll…I am appealing to you in the name of God, in the name of anything holy, to let her go. She came to the General Conference of the Iraqi People headquarters to interview me. I am Dr. Adnan Dulaimi. I am the one who has been defending Iraqi unity and Iraqi independence. I’m the one who has been committed to the rebuilding of Iraq… I am asking you to release this woman. By kidnapping her, you are insulting me…I’m appealing to you, the ones who are holding this woman, to let her go, to free her, for the sake of our country and in the name of our honor and principles, in the name of the Iraqi people…”

— Adnan al-Dulaimi, of the Iraqi Accordance Front, joining the chorus of citizens and luminaries who are calling for the release Jill Carroll, the female American journalist who was kidnapped on January 7th while reporting in Baghdad.    

There have been a torrent of calls for Jill Carroll’s release, praising her professionalism and her concern for the Iraqi people, from myriad sources, including: the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement Hamas; the Iraqi Accordance Front; Montasser al-Zayat, head of the Liberties Committee at the Egyptian Lawyers’ Syndicate and former member of Gamaa Islamiya, the militant Egyptian Islamist organization; the Iraqi Islamic Party; Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brothers Mohamed Mahdi Akef; the Muslim Brotherhood Association, and a slew of others. Jill Carroll is a frequent contributor from Iraq to The Christian Science Monitor. Her captors released a video of her on January 17th in which they threatened that they would kill her unless all of the female prisoners in Iraq were freed within 72 hours. Jill Carroll’s family, various dignitaries, and numerous organizations continue to lobby for her release.

Mimi Hanaoka

In politically incensed eras like we’re experiencing today, filmmakers enjoy reveling in issues that have no simple solutions, and with a usually stringent point of view. Films like Syriana and Paradise Now are recent examples. Another current film, Steven Spielberg’s Munich, is indeed a political thriller, but this legendary director is able to present to us points of views from two sides of an issue. The result has brought some acid criticism from both the pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian camps that are the focus of the film. The trouble with films such as Munich is critics’ objectivity can be easily tainted by the desire to give them great reviews because the subject matter is so important and the directors so admired. This happened with Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, which even with profound subject matter, in retrospect, wasn’t that good of a film. Luckily, Munich is such a finely crafted piece of cinema with a director at the top of his game that critics such as myself do not have to worry about false praise.

With Munich Spielberg illustrates a tenuous issue that was as much headline material back in the 1970s, when the film’s events take place, as it is today and has been for a thousand years. On the one hand, the film is an essay on the disagreements over homeland that have been at the center of the hate between these two groups for ages, but these issues are only marginally explored under the veil of a taught, gut-wrenching thriller that examines many levels of right and wrong and all the gray in between.

Spielberg, along with his long-time collaborator, cinematographer Janzusa Kaminksi (Schindler’s List, War of the Worlds), decided early on that they wanted to take on more than just the décor of the early 70s and give the film a look and feel similar to many of the celebrated political thrillers from that era, such as The French Connection, Z and The Day of the Jackal. Kaminski creates a look that’s gritty on the one hand and emotionally decisive on the other by using techniques such as skip bleach, which give the film a color-muted appearance, and by the use of the zoom lens, which was a new gadget back when and understandably overused. On working with Spielberg, Kaminski says, “He’s a very skillful director when it comes to the camera.” This is illustrated by the director’s subtle placement of the camera that helps build tension and create mood simply by giving us a certain perspective to watch vital action unfold.

Much of the credit for giving Munich its gravitas is the multi-layered script that not only recounts violent events in history but also humanizes those events by using characters to represent all the emotions emoted from all sides. Spielberg gives credit to both the source material — Canadian writer George Jonas’ book Vengeance, which the director says “has never been discredited” — and playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America), who took a draft by Eric Roth and gave to it what is his first screenplay soul, depth, and relevance.

Choosing the right actors was also integral in making Munich shine, and with over 200 speaking roles, the casting team had their work cut out for them. They scoured the world to find not only the right looks and sounds but also the best actors. For instance, they hired Palestinians and Israelis to play those involved with the Black September massacre of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 games. Producers say that the tension on the set during the 10 days it took to shoot those scenes was not all acting. In one case, the son of one of the slain members of the Israeli team played his own father, who died when he was only an infant. He says acting in the film allowed him to gain an understanding of the terror his father experienced.  

To play the five significantly different covert assassins whose secret mission was to kill those responsible for the massacre, Spielberg and team purposely hired five significantly different actors. Leading the group is Australian Eric Bana (Black Hawk Down, Hulk) as Avner, the Israeli intelligence officer who must leave his pregnant wife behind in order to do his patriotic duty by leading the group. Bana creates an understated performance that underscores the hate that penetrated all who supported Israel after the athletes’ deaths but also the confusion over issues of morality and whether the mission was justified. His greatest strength as an actor was to give Avner the ability to feel some empathy for the Palestinian cause without losing his loyalty to his people. Avner is a character who acts as we all think we would in similar circumstances — willing to risk everything to correct a wrong but with an insight that doesn’t allow us to become a monster. The new James Bond, British actor Daniel Craig, plays the muscle of the group, who tries to keep their reasons for the mission clear and, by the fact that his character is South African, emphasizes their plight as a global one.  As the toy-maker turned bomb-maker, French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz perfectly plays the sensitive one, and they were lucky to get him because he had told his agent that he didn’t want to act anymore — unless on the remote chance that Spielberg came calling one day. Renowned German actor Hanns Zischler (Sunshine, Ripley’s Game) plays a Mossad agent who is undercover as an antiques dealer. He is the most distant of the five, but you can see by Zischler’s perfectly crafted performance that his character Hans has an inner rage that allows him to act in sometimes immoral ways. Rivaling Bana for the most complex character creation has to be Irish actor Ciarán Hinds (Road to Perdition, HBO’s Rome), whose Carl, the clean-up man, is the most meticulous member but also the one with the most wisdom and inner conflict over the moral implications of their actions. He knows they have to fulfill their mission, but he doesn’t have to like how they have to go about it. The rest of the cast is superb including Australian Geoffrey Rush (Shine, Pirates of the Caribbean) as Avner’s Mossad contact, Frenchman Michael Lonsdale (Day of the Jackal, Chariots of Fire) as Papa, and Israeli star Ayelet Zorer as Avner’s wife.  

For Avner, his struggle over the relevance of the definition of home is the key theme that resonates beyond the plot of the film.  It is the central question that many, especially emigrants and refugees, have pondered and dissected for hundreds of years. Early in the film Avner tells his wife that home isn’t Israel or any plot of land, but his family. As the film progresses this notion gets more and more muddled, and he becomes pulled from one side by the needs of his people, represented by a persecuted Jewish past, and from the other by his wife and child, whom represent what he hopes is a peaceful future. It is a question left unanswered on all levels.  At the end of Munich, when Avner is walking the streets of his new Brooklyn home with his infant daughter, he spots what he believes are men who want him dead. It is an important moment, for his past and future suddenly become in flux, and with Spielberg’s simple but effective staging and Bana’s exceptional performance, you cannot only witness a father’s worst fear — a threat to his child — but also the inner conflict between saving a whole race of people and saving his own family, which he knows will always be with him no matter where he calls home.  

Munich is playing nationwide and will probably be around through awards season. Rated R. 164 minutes. Released through Universal. Click here for listings in your hometown.

Rich Burlingham