Performing a Sky digibox system software update in Spain

Performing a Sky digibox system software update in Spain

In most cases you will not have to do a manual Sky digibox system software update, as the Sky boxes will automaticlly update the software when ever new software becomes avaialble from Sky.

You may have to perform a manual Sky digibox system software update if your Sky digibox has not been powered on or getting a signal from the satellite

Slimtime

Thanks A-hom's info

Slimtime from Slimtime on Vimeo.

Redefining Black Independent Cinema

In August 1984, the Los Angeles Times first-string film critic, Charles Champlin, devoted his column to the subject 'A Black Film Bonanza Hollywood Ignored.' He - and the Los Angeles filmgoing audience - were discovering for the first time the wealth of Black cinema that had been produced in recent years. Beneath the facade of Hollywood'd glitter and Southern California's 'me' culture, Los Angeles is becoming a city of color. The largest ethnic group in its public schools is Latino, and it has one of the largest Asian populations in the US. It is a city with a long history of organizing for affirmative action in the workplace and schools. Los Angeles has been the source of some of the most pioneering and important independent works in recent years, much of which has been produced in these Third World communities.

The event which inspired Champlin's article was the First Annual African and Black American Film Festival at the Fox Theatre, which was held over for two extra weeks because of the unexpected audience response. The festival was something of a milestone for Los Angeles' Black independents. Billy Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts and Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding, which have both been making successful rounds of international festivals, had their homecoming and United States theatrical premiere there. Also on the bill was Ashes and Embers by Washington, DC-based Haile Gerima, who, like Burnett and Woodberry, was trained in UCLA's film school. Another former classmate, Iranian filmmaker Rafigh Pooya (In Defense of the People), organized the showcase. He bought and refurbished the Fox Venice theatre with borrowed money, added a small cafe, and dedicated its programming to independent films from all over the world.

My Brother's Wedding and Bless Their Little Hearts are representative of the cooperative efforts of a group of Los Angeles-based Black independents who have worked together for years. Theirs is not a production cooperative in the same vein as Visual Communications, a group of Asian American Filmmakers that grew out of the Asian American movement. Rather, it is a network of directors - who also crew - that 'rallies each other's projects,' according to filmmaker Julie Dash (Four Women, Illusions). Among the films that have drawn from this pool are Alile Sharon Larkin's Your Children Come Back to You, Ben Caldwell's Babylon Is Falling, Barbara McCollough's work-in-progress Horace Taproot: Musical Griot, John Rier's Black Images from the Screen, as well as films by Dash, Woodberry, Burnett, Bernard Nicholas, and others. Added to this group are the many other Black independents working in Los Angeles - Carrol Blue (Varnette's World, Conversations with Roy de Carava), Roy Campanella, Jr. (Pass/Fail, The Thieves, Impressions of Joyce), Stan Lathan (Go Tell It on the Mountain), and Bill Duke (The Killing Floor). These filmmakers represent a major force in independent cinema that is changing the image of the Black experience on the screen.

During the 1970s, Hollywood discovered an antidote to its lagging box office in the Black youth market. The Stepin Fetchits were replaced by blaxploitation pimps and superdudes. (Thus one studio could re-edit Bill Gunn's Ganja and Hess into the vampire movie Blood Couple). Needless to say, the project ideas of the new Black independents departs from such standard Hollywood fare. These independents are creating realistic glimpses of Black life - defined by Black characters, articulated by Black writers, and interpreted by Black actors and actresses. These filmmakers have embraced the breadth of the Black experience: families, women, artists, traditions, identity, political concerns, Africa. Dash and Larkin portray Black women who are neither street-smart whores nor background scenery to white plots, but complex characters who take control of their lives. Blue moves beyond Hollywood's fleeting interest in Black singing and dancing to document Black visual artists. Woodberry and Burnett explore men in relation to their families - and the families they portray don't consist of welfare mothers and troubled teenagers. 'The subject matter I work in doesn't lend itself to commercialism,' said Burnett, who wrote the screenplay for Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts, a portrayal of a family's struggle to cope with the father's loss of his job. 'If you go to producers and say, "I want to do a story about a Black man and his family," no one's interested. Dope, sex, drugs - that's what's marketable.

Some of these independent films also depart significantly from the typical Hollywood aesthetic of glossy photography and fast-paced editing. Burnett's Killer of Sheep, the story of a slaughterhouse worker, and Woodberry's Little Hearts eschew such commercial signposts for a leisurely, almost ultra-realistic pace, emphasis on character rather than plot, and black-and-white cinematography.

Many in the group began their careers at UCLA, during or following the Ethno-Communications period, the affirmative and social action program which trained a generation of Third World filmmakers, as profiled in The Independent (March 1984). There, they learned every aspect of the craft - and also confronted the lingering racism of the industry. Ben Caldwell remembers being one of two Blacks, out of hundreds of students, sitting through a film genre class screening of Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs by the noted animator Steven Kranz. 'Here was Kranz showing it and saying, "This is a tribute to Black people." And we said, "Hey, it isn't." But the rest of the class looked at us and said, "Ah, come on, you guys are always complaining." They actually booed us. I felt so humiliated.'

workstyle. 'Because of the UCLA method,' he explained, 'you crewed on other people's films. That carried over [when we left school], because we often don't have the funds to pay people. You do people a favor and they return it.'

Due to the realities of Hollywood where, as McCullough says, 'Racism is alive and well and keeping people from working,' the need for mutual assistance was reinforced. 'We all know how to do everything,' Dash pointed out. 'We all can shoot, do gaffing, electrical - right down to getting lunch. One minute you're a porter and the next minute you're a director of photography.' They crew for each other for little or no pay. Says McCullough, 'I think that, given our lack of resources, we do a hell of a lot, and our work says something.'

Los Angeles has no low-cost film equipment/facilities access centers like New York's Young Filmmakers/Film Video Arts or Minneapolis' Film in the Cities, so independents there must rent from high-priced rental houses used to dealing with huge Hollywood budgets (although the Long Beach Museum of Art and EZTV provide access for videomakers). Therefore, they help each other out by sharing access to equipment when they have it (although they do not own equipment themselves). Julie Dash - who has felt the double whammy of racism and sexism - must rent equipment through a male friend, because the rental houses wouldn't give her an open account. 'They told me I could only rent through him, even though I was the filmmaker, and he only needed a light meter once in a while.' the group has also developed networks of talented Black actors and actresses around Los Angeles. One young star who has emerged is Charles Burnett's niece Angie Burnett, who has appeared in Bless Their Little Hearts and Your Children Come Back to You.

Despite their accomplishments at UCLA (among others, Burnett won the coveted Louis B. Mayer prize of 10,000USD for best film, Larry Clark's Passing Through won first prize at the Moscow International Film Festival, and Gerima won a special award from the National Endowment for the Arts), the doors that opened for talented white students were often closed to them. 'You became and independent because you didn't have a choice,' said Burnett. 'You're either independent or you just don't make a film, period. No one was beating down my door to make a major motion picture.'

While Black independents in Los Angeles resist the pressures of Hollywood, they do respond to it in varying ways. 'When I first started, I had a desire to make films for special audiences,' explained Carroll Blue. 'When I worked for Jane Fonda at IPC Films, I got to see how to make films for a mass audience. Now I'm trying to reach that audience plus have my own special way of seeing things, like [Euzhan Palcy's] Sugar Cane Alley - that's the kind of film I'm trying to make. It's universal, but within a certain culture.' Blue's latest film, Conversations with Roy de Carva, which won a Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival, is a polished, highly visual, and tightly-cut document of the photographer's life which does not fail to discuss the racism that defined his career.

Caldwell, whose innovative Babylon Is Falling and I and I merge music and documentary imagery, regards the proximity to 'the beast of Hollywood' as a positive challenge. 'It makes independents who work on the periphery more intent and less compromising. It makes for good and different work.' Caldwell places the range of approaches in Los Angeles' Black film community in a historical context. 'The Black independents involved in media are rebuilding from the 1940s,' he explained, referring to the pre-war surge of Black cinema which had its peak during the 1920 Black renaissance, led by filmmakers Oscar Micheaux and Noble Johnson. 'There is a gap since then, a missing generation. So we are redefining Black film.'

The true measure of this process of redefinition has been in the work itself. Films by Los Angeles' Black filmmakers have been screened at major festivals and aired on television around the world, and have won numerous awards. For example, in 1981, the Berlin International Film Festival forsook prizes to any films in competition, but gave special recognition to Burnett's first feature Killer of Sheep.

But many group members realize they are now ready to move on. As young filmmakers developing their craft, it was easy to keep justifying the free shoots as a learning experience. But now they all have years of experience, and some have the added pressures of family. McCollough must work temp jobs (after a two-year stint at a special effects house), Woodberry works in the UCLA film school equipment room, Dash is staying home to write and core for her newborn baby. 'I'd like to do a film sometime where I'm paying people,' said McCollough. 'Working on eachother's films - it just can't happen anymore. We are professional people looking for work. We have to survive. We have projects of our own that we want to do.'

'We need an institution of a foundation,' said Dash, 'some kind of place where we can get equipment. It would be nice if we had a Black Filmmaker Foundation out here.' There have been several attempts to organize a more formal structure. After the Third World Cinema Conference at Howard University in 1981, a coalition of Third World filmmakers was launched in Los Angeles. According to Burnett, 'We met for awhile, but we're all filmmakers, so we had to kind of come and go, and the organization became secondary.' The Black filmmakers have tried over the years to form an organization, but have remained an ad hoc group coming together for shoots and around specific lobbying issues. In 1979, Caldwell refurbished a small house and turned it into a screening room with editing facilities and a writers' space in an effort to develop a creative home for local independents. It lasted until 1981, when his marriage fell apart, and he left for Washington DC to teach film at Howard (he has since returned to Los Angeles). 'When I had my place it was used to showcase peoples' work,' Caldwell explained. 'If people want critical analysis now, they have to get a screening room from AFI or UCLA. But there's a lack of consistency. Black independents need a place of their own.' Caldwell is discussing the possibility of reviving the Third World coalition idea with Chicano and Asian American filmmakers. And Rafigh Pooya's new Fox International holds a great potential for providing a center for local independents. He plans to hold seminars and bring filmmakers in to meet their public as well as give theatrical runs to independent films.

'My personal belief,' says Caldwell, 'is that this whole group of us has just started - most of have only done three or four works on our own. As we're developing the network is developing. We're just starting to have enough blood to pump into the system.'

[This is a slightly edited version of an article entitled 'Nothing Lights a Fire Like a Dream Deferred' by Renee E. Tajima and Tracey Willard that was originally published in The Independent (Vol. 7, No. 10, November 1984, pp. 18-21). At the time of its writing, Renee Tajima was an associate editor of The Independent and Tracey Willard was a writer and poet in Los Angeles.]

A milk love story!

A Love Story… In Milk from Catsnake on Vimeo.

Pendulum Waves

Creating a real-life particle animation

Creating a real-life particle animation

Egypt's Recurring Diesel Shortage Problem

Egypt ministries responsible for diesel supplies have not learned the 6 p's ("previous planning prevents piss poor performance")

Nov 2009 Egypt Sells Diesel to Bangladesh  for period Jan to June 2010

Article March 2010 diesel shortage

And of course Diesel shortage again this year  - article

Quote from article

"One expert from the petroleum industry, who preferred to remain anonymous, attributed a good part of the problem to what he called "the government's poor planning". He pointed out that Egypt has been repeatedly suffering diesel shortages for the past three years around this time of year. He explained that the government should examine diesel consumption on a monthly basis to provide the needed quantities beforehand. "Knowing that in summer consumption peaks, the government should have been prepared," he told Al-Ahram Weekly."

ooooooooooops - here is rumor (I could not substantiate googling) .I heard today - unfounded... Egypt is full of Rumors........ Saudi stopped regular exports of Diesel to Egypt because of way Egypt is treating Mubarak and family?????  is it true Saudi is holding Egypt to ransom????????????

Winter Diesel was also a recurring yearly problem. I recall, when working in Egypt Oil and Gas Sector, each year a panic would set in when winter coming (yup called winter here even though a low of 0 C might be a record) to receive winterized Diesel. 

Diesel fuel solidifies in winter weather.  Diesel fuel contains paraffin's, similar to the wax candles are made from. When the paraffin cools it solidifies into a light yellow or white wax, plugging fuel filters and choking your fuel system. 

Diesel engines are becoming more popular in Egypt, especially for large trucks, minibuses, and recently more cars and 4x4's. If you have diesel engine, and have problems, you can do some emergency treatments as below

A farmers type emergency solution is to add a gallon of gas per 15 gallons diesel, (1 liter per 15 liters) but beware this reduces the cetane rating, at a time when you most likely need it.

 

A better way is to add 10% - 20 % kerosene (in Egypt 5%-10% would likely do the job well)

The L train...

Three Films by Ousmane Sembene

Popular narratives, world war, Marxism and Modernism, Khrushchev’s Moscow, African working-class life: a rich education for any artist. Over four decades of film-making, Ousmane Sembene has deployed this formation to extraordinary effect. If he has focused consistently on the social relations of Africa’s distorted development, the sheer breadth of his aesthetic— the disorientating combination of African ritual and modes of speech with expressionist set-pieces, domestic naturalism, epic choreography, social satire, sexual comedy or farce - projects his work on to a broader, more universal canvas. The complexity of his films eschews surface slickness: narrative realism can be undercut by jarring moments of melodrama, flashbacks, non-professional acting; which yet contribute, as in Brecht, to an epic sense. There is no dogmatic closure in Sembene’s work: elements of didacticism are undermined by the revelation of fresh complexities, endings are characteristically freeze frame, the final outcome still unsure. Contested relationships remain open - as in the trickster tales: Brer Rabbit's forerunner Leuk the Hare may get away this time, but that doesn't mean he's safe.

Sembene’s first film, a mere 19 minutes long, contains many of the elements - though not the humour - that would characterize his future work. Borom Sarret (1962) sees Dakar through the eyes of a cart driver - the bonhomme charette of the film’s title - who narrates the voice-over, in French. Starting off from the crowded working-class quarter, he is hired to take a well-dressed passenger up to the deserted, tree-lined streets of the Plateau, where carts like his are banned. The stark, black-and-white documentary style, reminiscent of Italian neo-realism, is heightened to a more melodramatic register by the effect of non-professional actors and the use of post-synchronous sound. The sense of excess - of antirealism - is intensified by the soundtrack, the music of the traditional xalam giving way to the strings of Salzburg as we reach the Plateau.

Stopped by a policeman, the borom sarret tries to pull his papers from his pocket; as he does so, his war medal falls to the ground. His hand reaches out to grasp it, but the policeman’s boot stamps down first. We see a subjective shot of his tormentor, towering above. At another point, the driver is pulled up by a traditional gewel, who starts to sing the praises of his ancient family name in hope of cash. As the flattery continues on the soundtrack, the camera turns to a shoeshine boy who has found a new customer among the audience; but as soon as he’s finished, the sharp-suited fellow kicks the boy’s box away and leaves without paying—the sort of story the new gewel could tell. The end is still more damning. When the borom sarret returns home empty handed, his wife passes him their child and walks out, promising: ‘Tonight we will have something to eat’. Here as elsewhere - Guelwaar, for instance - prostitution is provocatively postulated as the economic basis of Senegalese life.

Six years later in his fourth film, Mandabi, or The Money Order, Sembene would again map out the socio-geography of the streets of Dakar. In between he had made Niaye (1964) and La Noire de . . . (1966). Initially he had planned to make the film in black and white, wanting at all costs to avoid any element of the picturesque- ‘J’avais peur de tomber dans le folklore’. Instead, the colour is servant to the drama - emphasizing the comically oversized sky-blue boubou of Ibrahima Dieng, for instance, the central character: a man dwarfed by his own vanity, the sleeves of his magnificent robe obstruct his hands. The film opens with the rhythmically sweeping blades of a group of roadside barbers, shaving customers beneath a shady tree; their dextrous movements are underscored by the kora soundtrack. But rising to his feet to pay, Dieng - played by Makhourédia Gueye, one of the few professional actors Sembene works with - finds that his shave has left him penniless, and must return home to his two grumbling wives. The money order sent home from Paris by Dieng’s nephew Abdou seems to offer salvation: ‘You will kill us with hope!’ Dieng’s wives assure the postman. An ironic shot shows young Abdou street-sweeping beneath the Eiffel Tower.

The series of obstacles that Dieng now confronts recalls the list of impossible tasks the trickster must perform, to escape from deadly danger. But while Leuk the Hare will succeed in duping the leopard of his skin or the elephant of his tusks, Dieng’s attempts end in repeated failure. At the Post Office, he learns he cannot cash the money order without an ID card; at the Police Station, he can’t get a card because he doesn’t have a birth certificate; at the City Hall, he is turned away again, for not knowing his exact date of birth; even his own origin becomes unobtainable. Dieng’s self-regard - the respect due to a devout Muslim elder - crumbles before the Western bureaucratic structures with which the increasingly elusive money order is hedged. Long shots of the blue boubou’d Dieng as an anonymous figure, lost in Dakar’s crowded streets, cut to close-ups of his deeply worried face - the image informed, as Fredric Jameson puts it in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (London 1992, p. 2.), ‘by its non-visual systemic cause’. The mandat becomes a socially corrosive force: family and neighbourhood relationships begin to crumble; Dieng’s encounters with the corner shopkeeper, quack photographer, sharp-suited conman, deteriorate into brawls or end in humiliation. Finally one of his relatives cashes the cheque but pockets the money, explaining to an incredulous and desperate Dieng that he’d been robbed.

In counterpoint to the filming of Mandabi, Sembene was fighting his own battle for and against money from France. The Minister for Culture Malraux had secured the funding for Sembene’s previous movie, La Noire de . . ., the story of an African girl taken back to France by a white family; but at the price of having voice-over and dialogue spoken in French. Since it is an explicit premise of the film that Diouana can barely speak the language, this was a radically inappropriate form for the interior monologues through which she voices her experience of Europe, her alienation and her fears. In trickster fashion, Sembene managed to turn the linguistic tables on his metropolitan funders by using Toto Bissainthe’s beautifully modulated French-Caribbean tones to deliver Diouana’s thoughts in voice-over - the non-French speaker articulating, as the white family cannot, a fluent and complex vision of the world.

With Mandabi, Sembene managed to extract enough funding to cut both a Wolof-language and a francophone version, Le Mandat, also released in 1968. But this was the last time he would be dependent on French state funding, or make a wholly French-speaking film. Henceforth, language in Sembene’s films - high or low, formal or intimate, Wolof or French - would be a function of dramatic requirement, not producers’ diktat. Later films would receive funding from Senegal and, in the 80s, from Channel 4 and Canal Plus. In any case, the Pompidou government could hardly have been expected to welcome his next project.

In the context of intensifying struggles against Portuguese rule - Amilcar Cabral’s troops would play as extras - Sembene returned to his native region of Casamance to explore, in Emitai (1971), transformations in mass consciousness in the course of anti-colonial resistance. The atrocities perpetrated by French forces requisi tioning rice in the region during the Second World War had first been denied by the authorities, then blamed on a handful of Rightists installed by the Vichy regime. In fact, there was an essential continuity of personnel throughout the period. A recurrent pattern in his work, Sembène juxtaposes two socially defined spaces: white military rituals are shown in counterpoint - sometimes ironic, often chilling - to the animist practices of the Diola people, whose fetishes and sacred grove mirror back the flagpole and parade ground of the Army camp. But the heart of the film dwells on the contradictions that confront the villagers, as their traditional deities fail to protect them from the French.

In desperation, their chief Djiméko leads the young men out to battle against the superior occupying force. He falls wounded and is carried back to confront his gods in the great gnarled tree where they dwell. In an extraordinary scene, they claim that he must die for refusing to make the proper sacrifices. Djiméko raises his voice to them: ‘I must die, but so will you’. Resistance is taken up by the village women, singing together in defiance of the white commander, in scenes that are intercut with the fatalistic rituals of the defeated menfolk. The men now play the female role, carrying rice to the French, while the women pick up the spears they’ve left. Just before the massacre - the villagers have been given one last chance to reveal the women’s store important news reaches the Army camp. The photograph of Pétain that stands behind the commander is silently replaced by one of de Gaulle. At the end, the screen goes blank. The shots ring out. Under French pressure, the scene that showed the troops shooting down the villagers was cut by the Senegalese authorities. French troops are still stationed in Senegal. ‘You don’t tell history to get revenge, but to root yourselves in the ground’, Sembène would explain when the French ambassador stormed out of a Dakar showing of Camp de Thiaroye (1988), based on a historical, postwar incident in which thirty-five tirailleurs sénégalais were slaughtered and many more wounded as the French Army suppressed a revolt over pay and conditions. ‘I didn’t want to indicate what the exact date was—whether de Gaulle was taking power in Senegal, or in France’, Sembene has said in an interview with Guy Hennebelle (‘Ousmane Sembene: “En Afrique noire nous sommes tous gouvernés par des enfants mongoliens du colonialisme”,’ Les Lettres françaises, 6–12 October 1971, p. 16.): ‘I wanted to suggest that for us Africans, there was no difference between the two regimes—the methods changed a bit but the objective was still to maintain the French Empire.’

[This essay is extracted from 'An African Brecht: The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene' by David Murphy, which was originally published in New Left Review, Vol. 16 (July-August 2002, pp. 117-21.]

Fox Movies and Fox (or Fox Series) on Nilesat frequency changes

There have been some changes to the FOX channels on Nilesat at 7 West.

Fox Movies on Nilesat is still on frequency 11766 H 27500 5/6

Fox Series - now called just FOX - has move to the new frequency.
FOX is now on frequency 11296 H 27500 5/6
FOX's new frequeny is on a satellite whose signal footprint is different to Fox Movies. This means that FOX is not available in Spain on your current dishes

ProceduralNoise (ProcGeo) node test

Sample file

Egypt Tightens Work Permit Requirements

On May 12th. 2011, the  "New Labour Minister El-Borai announced he will stop issuing work permits to foreigners amidst resentment of employers who take advantage of cheap foreign labour"  Here is link to full article.

All expatriates I know fall into the "expert professional" category and should not be affected, however forewarned is forearmed.

Below is comment of advice from a colleague's experience

"I made a trip downtown today to the Mogamma to renew my residence visa.

Whilst there I was informed by senior officials that in future  the immigration department will be tightening up and enforcing previously ignored or relaxed rules and regulations. 

I was advised that a clamp down on people working without proper paperwork is in process.  Checks will be carried out and those found to be employed in Egypt, but living only on touristic visas, may encounter problems.
If you believe this may describe your current immigration status then I would recommend speaking with your employer or organization well in advance of any planned renewal procedures to avoid problems."

NAGRAVISION NEW KEYS 10-05-2011

TV Globo- Hotbird 13°E | Nagravision 2 |  11585 /v/ 27500
Key 01: D7 CB E9 3D 30 E2 C9 13 91 07 38 74 57 DB 90 23

Teleclub (Swiss cable)  Nagra1
Key 00 : B07E50460F558518

Cablecom (Swiss cable network)  Nagra2
Key 01: F2 C9 BF D2 CC B6 1E 5B 81 13 D6 B2 B0 79 A3 E0

KABEL DEUTSCHLAND  Astra 3A (23.5°E) Nagravision 2 |
key 00: 9AF11CE0871C97911FFF4099851B867D

Telefônica TV Digital Brasil  (7311) |@ Amazonas |Nagravision 2
Key 00: EF C2 D5 5A 72 01 9C 9C 2E AB F1 EE 75 4A B1 34

Sabc] 68.5°east Pas7-10 ETV |   Ident: 2D01| Ngar1
Key 01: DE 48 2B 90 63 E9 C6 54

Euskaltel cable tv  NAGRAVISION2
Key 01: 8D 03 0F 57 0F 88 5F 60 98 74 F9 0D 23 20 C7 42

Spain Cable TV ]  ident: 4B11 | (DEC: 075 017 )  Nagravision 2 |
key00: 6BF9BC5019AD9731CADDOC11F701CCFA Dreambox
key00: EE 81 77 15 90 67 D1 BD , 10: 03 27 CA 66 26 A2 3C 9A  Azbox
Key 00: 6BF9BC5019AD9731 -01: CADDOC11F701CCFA  illusion

Digital Cable Group (Swiss Cable) ]  Nagra1  
Key 01: 25 F4 8B CF D8 93 FB 5F

Myth and History in 'Daughters of the Dust'

In her 1991 film, 'Daughters of the Dust,' director Julie Dash seeks to derive both a narrative structure and a cinematic style from the West and Central African religious traditions that inform the cultural sensibilities of the Gullah people who form the center of her story. In taking the approach, Dash requires that viewers enter Gullah culture fully from the outset, and she provides little context for her American audience to translate the characters or the story into the more familiar classical Hollywood style. translation, the film insists, damages the integrity of the unique cultural and social experience of the Gullah people, and, as viewers, we are called upon to take the difficult road of letting go of ingrained expectations for what a film about the consequences of slavery should look like, how characters in such a story should behave, and what the function of religion in the community should be. Dash is so keen on disrupting what American audiences had been conditioned to anticipate concerning how African Americans - and black women in particular -  should appear on film that she sought to set the atmosphere of a 'foreign' film from the start, beginning with the voice of one of the narrators speaking in Gullah without providing subtitles.

Gullah culture developed among the enslaved Africans who worked to produced cotton, indigo, and rice on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Isolated by virtue of their location on islands and allowed more cultural freedom because white slaveholders were often absent from these plantations, Gullah people developed distinctive religious and social practices grounded in West African traditions. The term 'Geechee' refers to African American slaves on the Georgia coast who are culturally similar to Gullah people. The word 'Gullah' is generally thought to be derived from the name 'Angola,' but in A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullahs (New York University Press, 1988) Margaret Washington Creel suggests that it may have originally referred to the Gola people of Liberia and that 'Geechee' may derive from the neighboring Gizzi people. This would mean that Upper Guinea is the primary source for Gullah and Geechee cultures rather than the widely accepted Kongo-Angola origin.

In this film, which is so much about opening oneself to West and Central African ways of apprehending the world, Dash requires that we engage these possibilities along with the characters in the film, even as we might find the task of doing so confounding or discomfiting. From the opening shots on the beach of Ibo Landing - the images of Bilal Muhammad (Umar Abdurrahman) praying near the water at sunrise, and the first glimpse of the family's matriarch Nana Peazant (Cora Lee Day) fully clothed and washing herself in the ocean like a 'salt water Negro' - we are asked to take a religious journey entirely in the terms of this extended Gullah family, especially from the perspective of the women.

The first feature-length film by an African American woman to gain theatrical release in the Unites States, 'Daughters of the Dust' became a flashpoint for discussions of the meaning of diaspora for black women, the quality and concerns of African American film in the 1990s, black aesthetics, and the burden of representing African American history. Dash was unable to get the support of a major studio during the fundraising period and relied, instead, on other funding sources, including the nonprofit American Playhouse series, the National Endowment for the Arts, and various southern arts foundations, prompting her to comment that, 'One of the ongoing struggles of African American filmmakers is the fight against being pushed, through financial and social pressures, into telling only one kind of story. African Americans have stories as varied as any other people in American society... Our lives, our history, our present reality is no more limited to "ghetto" stories, than Italian American are to the Mafia, or Jewish Americans are to the Holocaust. We have so many, many stories to tell.' Without a distributor, Dash took 'Daughters' to festivals in 1991, including the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the award for cinematography. Eventually, Kino International, a distributor specializing in foreign-language films, agreed to take on 'Daughters' and arranged for it to open at the Film Forum in New York City in January of 1992, where it sold out for every show with African American women expressing particular interest. See Julie Dash Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman's Film (The New Press, 1992, pp. 7-26) for a discussion of the production and distribution process.

Examining the West and Central African and 'New World' religious groundings of the film's narrative and thematic concerns, this essay explores Dash's engagement of both myth and history in order to make sense of the varied and heated responses to this religious film that positions black women at the center of its vision.

The two modes that help to structure 'Daughters of the Dust' - attention to historical detail with a focus on the specificity of Gullah culture and a cyclical structure that relies heavily on a central myth of origin and on archetypal characters - do not coexist without tension, but, for Dash, the tension derives from the very constitution of the African diaspora. The dislocation that produces diaspora and the struggle to make a home and construct individual and collective identity in the 'New World' has necessitated that people of African descent rely on a complicated and ever-involving combination of various African ways of being and sensibilities encountered and transformed in the diaspora. The Gullah people provide a particularly rich case for Dash's investigation, but her concerns move beyond this particular community and are aimed at exploring the ways in which the cultures of people of African descent in the diaspora are fundamentally of the diaspora. Cultural critic Greg Tate writes,

'Praised for its photographic sculpturing, Daughters is a powerful piece of African American psychological modeling and portraiture... It is, finally, slavery that transformed African people into American products, enforcing a cultural amnesia that scraped away details without obliterating the core. We remain in a middle passage, living out an identity that is neither African nor American, though we crave for both shores to claim us. It is Daughter's achievement to represent this double alienation as an issue for the community as a whole, and as personal and interpersonal issues for the film's principle characters.'

Tate's assessment links Dash's work to W.E.B. Dubois's notion of 'double-consciousness,' which Dash uses in a way that resists a rigid separation between African and American and seeks a fluid and dynamic combination of potential African diaspora identities.

'Daughters of the Dust' is steeped in detail. Dash and her crew lovingly and painstakingly constructed sets and settings using ethnographic photographs from the early 1900s, adorned the characters in a variety of African hairstyles, and filled the frame with objects that speak of the African sources of Gullah culture in order to locate the characters in a rich and vibrant historical setting. In this regard, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes, produced by the Savannah Unit of the Georgia Writer's Project under the Works Progress Administration and first published in 1940, was clearly an important source for Dash's work in setting the historical context. In oral history interviews and photographs, the contributors attempted to document the unique culture of the Sea Islands and to demonstrate connections to African languages and cultural practices. Dash was also influenced by the photography of James Van Der Zee.

Historical accuracy is an important element of Dash's goals for the film as she feels deeply the responsibility of representing attentively the history, culture, and lives of the Gullah people from whom she descends. At the same time, she does not understand her film project to be an ethnographic one - that is, she does not want the film to provide only empirical documentation of historical data. Myth, symbol and archetype are equally important structures for conveying the information she wishes her audience to have. Dash noted when responding to a question about the film's relationship to history, 'I think I felt I had to bring a basic integrity of the historical events and issues, but I had to be free to be able to create some drama, to create some symbolism...' (Houston Baker, 'Not Without My Daughters,' Transition 57 (1992), p. 164). It is not symbolism invented for the world of the film on which she draws, however, but on symbols with roots deep in the varied cultural streams that contribute to the cultures of the African diaspora. The film treats us to some of the visual symbolism of West and Central African religious traditions and to visual and oral accounts of a New World African myth of community origins, and presents us with characters constructed around archetypes from Yoruba religion.

While there is considerable variety among West and Central African peoples with regard to religious beliefs and practices, it is possible to identify a number of general characteristics held in common across ethnic groups,some f which will be addressed in the course of this essay. For a broad discussion of these general characteristics as they relate to African diaspora cultures, see Mechal Sobel, Trabelin' On: The Slave's Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Greenwood Press, 1979) and Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (Random House, 1983).

In many interviews and in commentaries on the film, Dash explained that the film's narrative structure was inspired by the African griot tradition in which a family or community history is recounted in vignettes rather than through a linear narrative of causality. So while the film's events are deeply rooted in the year 1902, the story sometimes flashes forward or backward in time in ways that are not clearly marked in typical Hollywood fashion. Indeed, in the audio commentary to the Kino International DVD, Dash argued that the entire film could be read as a flash forward from the period of slavery. Many viewers and reviewers of the film identified what they understood to be a conflict between the film's deep commitment to historical accuracy (read as ethnography) on the one hand, and the nonlinear approach to narrative, the use of myth, and the presentation of characters as archetypes on the other (read as confusing at best and as historically irresponsible at worst).

In an otherwise favorable review in the Denver Post, for example, Howie Movshovitz wrote, 'I can't think of a movie where the story matters less. It's not that the story is inconsequential, although it has something on an uncritical Sunday-schoolish attitude toward the past. What gets you in this film are the images of the island, the almost constant sound of breakers rolling onto shore and the rhythms of island life' (Denver Post, 20 March 1992). Writing in the Houston Chronicle, film critic Jeff Milar posed a series of questions and mocking answers to his readers in his largely unfavorable review, asking, 'Do you feel that any 10 minutes of it could be exchanged with any other 10 minutes of it? Well, obviously, you have arrived with preconceptions of linearity, and "Daughters of the Dust" is not linear... Do you think that the film is composed of arbitrary images, arbitrarily sequenced, which never quite settles down to practical textual work? Well,  you just don't "get" it. I didn't get it' (Houston Chronicle, 13 March 1992). USA Today's reviewer for 'Movies in Brief' dubbed the film a 'structural shambles' (USA Today, 1 April 1992).

Some reviewers felt challenged to locate 'the story' in the midst of of the details and had difficulty ascribing meaning to the symbolic images upon which the camera lingers, as indication of the perceived conflict between Dash;'s use of myth and history in the film. In Dash' version of the Gullah world, however, historical detail, symbol, elements of character and place, etc., appear in relation to one another and in an order that creates a composite over the course of the film, requiring viewers to engage mythic time that brings together pas, present, and future and historically located events at the same moment.

[This essay was extracted and slightly edited from Judith Weisenfeld's book chapter, 'My Story Begins Before I Was Born: Myth, History and Power in Julie Dash's "Daughters of the Dust",' which was originally published in Representing Religion in World Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culture Making, edited by S. Brent Plate (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 43-66). Some of the original endnotes have been integrated into the text.]

Imported Pork Products In Egypt - Finally!

Pork products were fairly prevalent in Egypt before April 30th, 2009 when some 250,000 pigs were killed due to fears of a "swine flu" pandemic. At the time even UN WHO stated the actions taken to cull all the pigs was a mistake. Even calling the flu strain "Swine Flu", created by WHO proved to be a big error.  However, history shows the pigs disappeared as well as any imports. Here is link to history. 

Seems time heals, and some local pork products started to be available some months back, but at exorbitant prices. A new start up company GETCO STAR, of German Origin, has now been established in Maadi, Digla area. All products are imported, and I understand to obtain import licensing plus Health Ministry approvals was no easy feat.

I wish them all the good fortune and look forward to my crispy streak bacon with poached eggs on toast. Yummy !

New Free HD channel available - NHK World HD

NHK World HD has now launched onto the Freesat & Sky epg's.

It is the first free to air HD news channels to launch in the UK - as Sky NEws HD is part of the Sky HD subscription package

On Freesat NHK World HD is on epg 209 (this replaces the standard defintion (SD) version on HD boxes)

On Sky HD boxes NHK World HD is on Sky channel 518 and the standard defintion (SD) version moving from 516 to

for MoM's day....

Thanks Zard's info....

I think to be a MoM is one of the most difficult thing in the world...
Mommy add oil...Mommy relax....

Cairo Egypt Real Estate - Have a really nice flat for Sale

Click on blog title - negotiable to a point.

Green Lantern............

IGN comment about Green Lantern trailer....

7 Popular Myths about the Revolution

Click on title - excellent read........... on the mark.

'La colonia penal,' a Film by Raoul Ruiz

A journalist arrives on the Latin American island of Captiva, where a dictatorial President rules capriciously over a society that seems to consist mainly of males in military uniform, speaking a polyglot language. We learn from a voice-over that the island was first turned into a penal colony by Ecuador in the late nineteenth century, then occupied by the United States from 1899-1920, until it achieved independence and once again became a penal colony. In 1954, the United Nations assumed responsibility for it as an experimental society and it has been independent since 1972. The President is evasive and apparently anxious about the report that the journalist will deliver. At her hotel, she is importuned by a poet, who is exposed as a pickpocket by the ever-present troops. The President's behaviour becomes even more eccentric, and he vehemently denies that there is any torture on the island. A party of troops serenades the journalist before she is unceremoniously bundled off to the prison to witness scenes of punishment. A native woman recites a bizarre fable about a man who is bewitched, drowned and reborn in Europe as a little girl, only to have 'her' husband murder her daughter, at which point the whole continent sinks into the sea.

The journalist challenges a soldier (who may also be a writer) about a series of improbable coincidences between disaster and atrocity stories reported first from other Latin American countries, then mysteriously repeated or exaggerated in Captiva. She finds that her baggage has been searched by the soldiers and when she protests to the President, he accuses her of having already written lies about the country. The President tries to shoot himself, but is restrained by the troops; he addresses a gathering of distinguished visitors to thank them for their support. Soon after, while broadcasting to the island by radio, he is assassinated. The journalist inspects a number of bodies in the morgue and assures a soldier that the grant requested should soon come through. In a closing voice-over, she says that her report was favourable and was accepted by a majority of press agencies.

Like a message in a bottle from Allende's Chile, 'The Penal Colony' reaches Britain after a series of adventures too complex to detail here, in a version that lacks all credit titles and which may be some seven minutes short. In this state, which is almost certainly the best achievable, it is not a film to be approached without some contextual information. Even more than most of Ruiz's work, it stands in a perversely oblique relationship to its ostensible script and subject. It is certainly doubtful whether the innocent spectator would deduce from a single viewing that the basic industry of Captiva is the manufacture of news on behalf of international press agencies. Yet only this realisation lends coherence and satirical point to the otherwise erratic sequence of events and encounters that constitute the main body of the film. It explains the ambiguity of the scenes of torture and execution, which appear both playful and savage, and the range of stereotyped attitudes struck by Luis Alarcon's President for the benefit of the visiting journalist, a declared "specialist in underdeveloped countries".

The sequence of the the night-time prison visit, where some form of torture seems to be in progress (off-screen), ends with an enquiry as to whether she is impressed, which is probably only comprehensible if one already appreciates that she is in search of the quintessential Latin American news stories of repression and atrocity. One deduces that the soldier to whom she complains about the plagiarised Captiva news must be a correspondent with some responsibility for 'producing' the island's staple export. But then the converstation takes a more precisely ironic turn when the journalist claims to have just witnessed a scene straight out of one of the soldier's novels; to which he replies that this is just what 'Garcia Marquez and that other lad Fuentes did.' Magic realism indeed! The general strategy of 'The Penal Colony' is in fact common to all of Ruiz's Chilean films: deceptively casual reportage of the fantastic seen in everyday terms. In his first feature, 'Three Sad Tigers,' violence and self-deception were shown as elements in the everyday life of many Chilean marginals. For the film that came immediately after, 'Nobody Said Anything,' a story by Max Beerbohm about a pact with the devil served to structure a study of a group of minor intellectuals 'who live in their own reality and believe that it is in fact Chile.'

Here the starting point was Kafka's parable about a famous explorer called upon to witness a model execution in a remote settlement, which ends with the condemned man escaping and the officer in charge destroyed by his own execution machine. Ruiz displaces Kafka's central irony of the 'perfect execution' into a more complex ironic commentary on Latin America's strenuous efforts to conform to the stereotypes by which it is commonly represented abroad. Ruiz has since reflected that his concern at this time with torture and military dictatorship now seems something of a presentiment of what was soon to happen in Chile and other Latin American countries. Now that we also know his European work better than his Chilean career, 'The Penal Colony' can clearly be seen to foreshadow his recent deadpan irony and play of stereotypes, while many of its more bizarre and mysterious details - the rattling of sabres, a swordfight reflected in a window, the President singing for his guest - recall Ruiz's beginnings as one of Chile's first playwrights of the Absurd.

[This review was written by Ian Christie under the title 'La colonia penal (The Penal Colony) (1971)' and was originally published in Monthly Film Bulletin, 52: 612/613 (1985), p. 18. An extract is available online at Rouge Press. Information about the director Raoul Ruiz is available on Mubi and the film is briefly mentioned in South American Cinema: A Critical Filmography by Tim Barnard (University of Texas Press, 1996), pp. 224-5.]

DISH | Get DISH TV Now

Hurry up and order DISH before May 17th! The current DISH TV special which gives us 5 packages starting at under $50 is almost over. Here are some of the reasons to get DISH TV now and the current DISH promotional code.

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Damn Egypt for Cancelling Day Light Saving (DST)

Well, the new Egyptian Government, wisely I think, cancelled Day Light Saving Time (hereafter referred to as DST). But did not inform the rest of world. So my bloody computer and Blackberry and all thinks it is DST in Egypt. 

Guess what - I am sitting at computer since 3 AM (bit of insomnia) doing crap things to pass the time and low and behold the little thing on bottom right ( the time widget thing) screen says 6:25 am.

Time to get teen up for school.  And I did.   Well, up to now all is perfect as she is dressed, fed and and happy, and at least 5 minutes before school bus arrives - and fed dog on way out.

So, tired, retired, Dad went to Bed and crashed.  Why not, all is in hand and did great job. Made breakfast, prepared snack, and of course money for lunch.

Then ............................ When woke up wifely tells me story.

Read on........Her alarm went off at 6:30 am. I did not hear. She did not see me, as always I have morning shift., so went to wake up the  13 year old beast. 

Whoooooooooooooops.   - not in bed. WTF.  She ventured outside to find her waiting for bus ------------ hear this -------------one hour early.

 So, moral of story - check your damn electronic stuff for time...........

I am sticking with Alarm clock that is battery driven not this net stuff.

Anyway - my story

God Rays/ Crepuscular rays/ Volumetric lighting

Mac Pro is no Fun

Daughter came home to Cairo (Egypt) from University in Canada with her Mac Pro. I wanted to remove an application I had asked her to install. Took me forever as was thinking Windows PC mentality. Where was the add/remove, or  revounistaller Pro?  Mac Pro - move program to trash!!! All Done.

I spend hours from time to time with our 3 Windows PC's. Making sure my AVG Pro Suite is up to date, running Malwarebytes, defraging HD, Cleaning Junk files, updating or upgrading Office Programs. Using Windows Recovery when I screw up with testing a new Windows type program. One thing I don't do is watch it updating Windows all the time as I stopped that stupid function.

So what fun is a Mac Pro. Comes with iWorks (everything one needs). Apparently no concern with Virus's and Malware. Defrags itself so I am advised. Bloody thing just sits there and runs.

If I go to Mac (which I will) what will I do with all my extra time not having to mess with Windows Programs?????

Your Friend Who Works in Special Effects Probably Needs a Hug Right Now

the article is from here.

and Green Lantern - Official Wondercon Footage [HD]

We can't remember who said it -- maybe Bruce Campbell? -- but a Hollywood actor defined the difference between studio movies and independent films like this: If you know what your movie's release date is before you even start shooting it, you're in a studio movie. That's become even truer over the years: Nowadays, a movie will have a release date before it even has a script. As you can imagine, that makes life incredibly stressful for all those involved with an upcoming tentpole, and today Variety gave us a little glimpse into one such group of individuals: the people at special effects houses.

The Variety article is behind their paywall, but The Playlist gets the gist of it, which is that Warner Bros. was forced to shell out an additional $9 million to pay for extra FX companies to help complete the effects for "Green Lantern," which comes out June 17. But the people Variety talked to at Warner Bros. insist it's not to fix any effects -- just to get them all done in time:

"There is no problem on 'Green Lantern,'" Chris de Faria, Warner's exec VP of digital production, animation and visual effects told the trade. "We try to add things to make the movie better until the 11th hour. That doesn't mean we're risking the movie up to the 11th hour."

This is something studios always want to emphasize when news gets out that a tentpole is rushing to make it to the finish line: "Everything is fine, nothing is wrong, we all know what we're doing, the shareholders have no reason to panic, would you like more cupcakes?" Besides, Warner Bros. are hardly the only ones rushing to hit a deadline: Variety says that one effects house working on Paramount's "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" "has gone to seven-day weeks, 12 hours a day, and canceled the Easter Sunday holiday for its [special-effects] artists."

The Variety article blames all this on the way studios now set up their big movies, valuing the release date over considerations for whether or not it's all that feasible. "So you are always chasing your tail," said Marvel exec VP of visual effects Victoria Alonso, who has "Captain America" to worry about. "You work backwards from that release date, then you add production not being ready to shoot or location complications and you shave the weeks you push from post."

We have friends who work in post-production, and we know that when they get assigned to a big movie that we won't see them for a few months before its release: Their lives are absolutely hellish as they kill themselves getting the movie done. Of late, no tentpole has missed its release, as long as you don't count the last-minute decision not to put out "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1" in 3D as was initially planned. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that big-budget summer movies often aren't very good: The studios are probably just thrilled they got the damn thing out in time.