This Is Not A Film

Just saw the excellent guerrilla documentary This Is Not a Film by and about the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Panahi is under house arrest and was when he made this film. He was told he could direct or script films, so he made this documentary in his apartment in a single day and had it smuggled out of Iran on a USB drive in a cake. He's currently under threat of 6 years in prison, plus an additional 20 years in which he's not supposed to make films. Which makes this documentary quite a brilliant middle finger leveled at the Iranian government. A must-see for fans of film-making, Iranian film, Iranian culture, protest and anyone who decries censorship.

Banned Books Week

"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." -  Thomas Jefferson

It's Banned Books Week again from September 27th - October 4th, so pony up a few dollars for a copy of Catcher in the Rye - or the American Heritage Dictionary for that matter or pull that neglected copy of Huck Finn out of storage and give it another read.

Delete Censorship has a great list of 100 Most Frequently Banned or Challenged Books . Here are three of my favorites:

• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck - hard to know what impact this book would have on me if I read it now for the first time, but when I read it as a teenager, I wept like a baby. A great little novel, with great details (Curely's Vaseline-filled glove), which we tend to take for granted after being forced to read it.
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood - the irony of religious groups attempting to ban a book about persecution by the religious should, of course, be lost on no one. And those folk would do well to remember that The Bible consistently appears in lists of banned books, along with the works of Shakespeare, The Koran. In 2003, a Cuban court even ordered copies of The U.S. Constitution destroyed.  In other words, who gets to decide what's offensive?
• The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende - what's not to love about this rich, colorful work of fiction? Guess it must have some saucy passages that offended the more prudish.
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding - not the sunniest appraisal of human nature and how quickly civilization can deteriorate - I imagine it offends both liberals who believe we're all innately good and conservative horrified by kids murdering each other. In other word, it's probably a fairly accurate portrayal of what would happen. Alex Garland added a decade to everyone's age and had a hit with The Beach, so you there's something about the scenario we find compelling. 

Keep in mind, those are just the 100 most frequently banned or challenged - that's "out of 6,364 challenges reported to or recorded by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, as compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association."

Sara Rahbar

New York artist Sara Rahbar incorporates the American flag into her work in ways that would send Rush Limbaugh, et al, into fits of apoplexy.

In a week when the intent of a plainly satirical New Yorker cover flew over the heads of many people, you realize how volatile and necessary the work of an artist like Rahbar's is: to shock perhaps, but in doing so also to pinpoint the truly important against the backdrop of the merely symbolic.

There's an American flag burning in the background of that Obama cover, too: of course, many people couldn't get past the mere depiction of this piece of tri-colored fabric to approach the point being made. I imagine some of these same outraged people were puzzled by the reactions of some in the Muslim community to depictions of Mohammad.



Artwork from Ehsan Jami's controversial documentary "The Life of Muhammad."

Also: "Satire takes a beating when the truth is so ridiculous," Detroit Free Press

Support the Global Online Freedom Act

Via Amnesty International, support the Global Online Freedom Act:

Repressive governments are making Internet and technology companies allies in their efforts to censor the Internet. Without any U.S. regulation to specifically prevent this, companies like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have sacrificed international human rights standards, and their own corporate missions, in pursuit of new and lucrative markets. Ask your Representative to support H.R. 275, the Global Online Freedom Act of 2007, which would prevent U.S. companies from carrying out or facilitating the suppression of online speech in repressive countries.

The Gift of Language

Pat Conroy writes a great rant to The Charleston Gazette. Local parents recently tried to ban his books from a public high school. Near the end, he rhapsodizes about all that books have done for him:

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in “Lonesome Dove” and had nightmares about slavery in “Beloved” and walked the streets of Dublin in “Ulysses” and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.

Banned Books Week

It's Banned Books Week, so why not make a statement for freedom and buy or read a banned book.

Here's a few ideas. Some of them may surprise you, but these are the "Most Challenged Books of the 21st Century" (yes, that's the 21st century - so far):

1. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
3. Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
4. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
5. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
6. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
7. It's Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
8. Scary Stories series by Alvin Schwartz
9. Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey
10. Forever by Judy Blume

Of course, you'll note that the majority of those are children's books. Seems some folks really don't appreciate it when you try to expose their children to anything other than what they've been brainwashing them with from birth. Some other books which folks have tried to ban in the past include Jack London's Call of the Wild, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and, rather ironically, 1984 by George Orwell.

Fuck the FCC

Mark Morford sums up my thoughts on the recent New York appeals court ruling against the FCC. Should've known such a ruling would've come out of New York, I guess (conservatives will agree but for different reasons), as you'd be forgiven for thinking "the f word" was invented here.

BTW, the post title above ain't my words. Far be it from me to employ such harsh language on my humble PG-rated blog! Just quoting good ol' Steve Earle.