Sita Sings the Blues was created by animator Nina Paley, who you might remember from her animated IMAX feature, Pandorama. All I’ve seen of Sita is the preview on archive.org, embedded later in this post, and it really captured my imagination.
Sita is great, like those wild Bollywood movies they show on Namaste America. Singing, dancing, love lost, singing and dancing, love regained, and more singing and dancing. It’s delightfully melodramatic. The Goddess’ story is interspersed with an autobiographical storyline from Ms. Paley’s own life. The movie is narrated by three sock puppets. Errr, that should say shadow puppets.
The music in the preview sounds like a cross between Timothy Leary’s White Birds Sing (Beyond Life) and Led Zeppelin’s Four Sticks (Led Zeppelin IV), however Sita Sings the Blues uses the music of Roaring 20’s era songstress Annette Hanshaw to express Sita’s (and Nina’s) feelings.
Edit:
That didn’t sound quite right. I like White Birds Sing and Four Sticks, but I realized later that other folks might not. The music was raucous and fun. Unlike the Indian engineers and professors I’ve met… What, do they only let the boring people come here? Maybe the US is a kind of exile.
Another edit:
When I wrote this article WikiPedia had nothing about the movie Sita Sings the Blues. After I added an item to the Sita disabiguation page, an article on Sita Sings the Blues showed up. Magically. How did we live without the interNets?
In WWII the Germans ran into Russia killing everyone they found. They destroyed entire villages, an entire way of life. In some parts of Russia 1 in 4 people died. Every family was affected.
However, the Germans awakened a sleeping giant. And when U.S. General George Patton realized just how big Russia was, he wanted our army to march right through Germany and into Russia to get at them while they were still recovering from Germany’s predations. There was a big antisemitic component to this that I don’t wish to go into at this time.
Remember that at the same time we were taking back Europe, we were also fighting in the Pacific theater. Japan was throwing Mitsubishi Zeros at us - yup, made by the same company that makes cars and Three Diamonds tuna. The kamakazi pilots literally committed suicide by ramming our ships with planes. They had already been at war with China for years before Pearl Harbor and they were pretty much tapped out.
Kamakazi means “divine wind” after a Chinese attack that was thwarted by high winds in the Sea of Japan.
Despite the fact that we had pretty much won against Japan, in 1949 we dropped atomic bombs on two important cities. Not on the Mitsubishi plant where Zeros were manufactured but a few miles away on a city full of civilians.
Why???
To impress the Russians that we were technologically superior.
The Russians hurried up to create their own atomic bomb. We upgraded to hydrogen bombs, which use an atomic bomb as an igniter. Russia upgraded.
The government created a big Communism scare to get the American people to fund this massive effort. We used smaller nations as proxies to test our technology against other countries that acted as Russia’s proxies.
We engaged in a “space race” that started with Russia’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 and culminated in our first steps on the moon in 1969.
Both of us developed Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Systems (ICBMs) to deliver nukes. We both developed sophisticated anti-nuke systems to shoot down ICBMs. We had enough missiles to destroy each other 30 times over - this is called “overkill.”
In 1962, JFK had a standoff with Russia’s Khrushchev over missile sites in Cuba, just 90 miles away from the US. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest we ever came to Thermonuclear Armageddon.
In the 1980’s President Reagan wanted to fill the sky with killer satellites. My favorite idea was “Rods of God,” in which satellites would carry up huge titanium rods that they could drop out of the sky on our enemies. These people were so wrapped up in it that they’d destroy the world if they had to.
Needless to say, we had a worldwide spy network to keep tabs on all this.
Fortunately for us, and devastatingly for the citizens of the USSR, they ran out of money before we did. I guess that means we won, but winning put the US so far in debt to foreign investors that we’ll still be paying it for another generation.
War, even a Cold War, is expensive.
That’s the cold war, the technological rivalry. We never actually fired a shot at each other, but we spent 40 years trying to prove our cajones were bigger than theirs.
Putin seems to trying to reconstitute the old Soviet Union. This time around, we’ve already thrown billions of dollars at the non-war in the Middle East and it is crumbling our economy. I don’t know where it will go.
It seems that my Snakes on a Plane category is the number one search result on google.co.uk for the phrase “snakes on a plane sex bit.” Rather odd, since this person had Firefox’s safe search feature active.
While I was marvelling at my search ranking I checked out the next result, a movie review on a site called, “Kids in Mind.” It was pretty funny. This creepy web site’s review of Snakes on a Plane consisted of a list of the profanity, violence and sex in the movie, followed by descriptions of the movie scene where the profanity, violence or sex occurred.
PROFANITY 6 - 18 F-words and its derivatives, 13 sexual references, 17 scatological terms, 11 anatomical terms, 15 mild obscenities, name-calling (punk), 5 religious profanities, 12 religious exclamations.
Hmmm, I only counted 15 F-words. I’ll have to watch the DVD again.
I can just imagine some sex-obsessed freak watching Snakes on a Plane over and over to count the snake bites AND, incidentally, to see a woman’s actual naked breast in the uhhhh sex bit. Horrors! Anything to promote Family Values, eh? I find it rather sick to post a list like that on a site called “Kids in Mind.” Anyone looking for kids’ movies with their kids might stumble upon it. Sheesh.
Now you know why China frightens me…and why “I, Robot” may not be so far off…
It’s mind boggling — almost incomprehensible for me.
Hugs…
Mind-boggling? Robots? What is this fellow yammering about?
Technology isn’t the Latest Big Thing. Technology is what we have been using for millennia to enhance our senses and increase our capabilities. Technology is a fancy way of saying “tools.” Any sufficiently advanced human can distinguish technology from witchcraft. Witchcraft? Burn the Witch! (Damn, burning witches again… apologies to my Wiccan friends.)
Globalization happened already. It’s done, it’s over. We’re now in the phase where we carefully adjust Americans’ salaries to match Chinese and Indian salaries - and lifestyles. If they do it right - well, you know, like boiling a frog slowly from cold water. Maybe they’ll find new career paths for everyone whose job description is now outsourced to India. Maybe we’ll learn to downsize our lifestyles to accommodate our globalized pay rates. Maybe the U.S. economy won’t collapse. We have to get all this done before China gets into full production.
You can get off your high horse and join the rest of the world, or you can outfit your army with bibles, flags and guns and send them out to stop human evolution. I’m more afraid of one ignorant, neurologically stagnant American politician than I am of all of Asia.
The US is very backward technologically. To put new technologies in place requires the regulatory equivalent of an Act of God. The people themselves are psychologically and neurologically resistant to change, so much so that a large percentage of Americans deny that something as basic as evolution can occur. At the personal level, this means most Americans believe that self-improvement is a fallacy. Well, I don’t accept that adults can’t learn.
The recent movie “I, Robot” is an abomination, intended only to reinforce the average American’s fear of innovation. Please read the book by Isaac Asimov, a prolific writer of the 20th century. The hard-wired personalities of the robots in it started with three laws that prevented them from harming a human or even, through inaction, allowing us to be harmed. Any attempt to break those laws resulted in a mechanical breakdown. I wish humans were wired this way.
Innovation… in parts of Asia you can walk up to a vending machine and call its number on your cell phone to get a soda or an instant-heating boxed meal. I can’t even get cellphone service at my sister’s house on the Delmarva peninsula, much less dial up a soda.
China is going to need about 10 times the oil we need when they get up to speed. That’s 10 times the pollution, 10 times the greenhouse gases. No, more than 10 times the pollution, as they don’t have strict air quality standards. The cloud of pollution over China is clearly visible on NASA satellite photos. We’ve know about Global Warming since the ’50s.
As larger purchasers, India and China will shape what products are available in the entire world. An example of this economic inevitability, the state of Texas is the largest textbook purchaser in the U.S and for that reason Texas creationists influence public education by asking for textbooks promoting their point of view. Every bookseller wants Texas as a customer - you stock what your best customer wants. These are then made available to all American schools. You can find a number of links on this topic on Constitution.org. I hope y’all can use chopsticks.
Why do we ignore problems instead of dealing with them? I bet you’ve heard at least one person say, “Don’t bring that into my universe” or “ERASE ERASE ERASE” - with a cute little crossing and recrossing the arms - to avoid talking about Global issues. Like a little kid putting his hands over his ears so that he can’t hear you asking him to take out the trash.
The video mentioned new books - how many books have you read this month? Not magazines, not graphic novels, but real paper and ink books? How about this year? Were any of them non-fiction?
I’m interested in what you really thought about the video. I thought it was trite. It’s rather startling to me that any citizen of the world could respond with anything other than “tell me something I don’t already know.”
Does anyone remember Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, and his bizarre insistence that 29% of the registered voters constituted a mandate from the masses? Somehow The Lady of the Lake sketch in Monty Python and the Holy Grail came to mind. The 2000 and 2004 elections weren’t much better.
I am holding on to hope for the 2008 elections.
ARTHUR:
I am your king!
WOMAN:
Well, I didn’t vote for you.
ARTHUR:
You don’t vote for kings.
WOMAN:
Well, how did you become King, then?
ARTHUR:
The Lady of the Lake,… [angels sing] …her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. [singing stops] That is why I am your king!
DENNIS:
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
ARTHUR:
Be quiet!
DENNIS:
Well, but you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR:
Shut up!
DENNIS:
I mean, if I went ’round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!
The children of Frank “200 Motels” Zappa and Jim “The Muppets” Henson are collaborating. It is likely to frag the underpinnings of civilization, if not the very fabric of the universe.
Were you as confused as I was as a child by the [tag]TV show[/tag] Fraggle Rock? It wasn’t much better than the truly horrific Banana Bunch but was marginally less traumatizing.
[tag]Ahmet Zappa[/tag] is getting together with [tag]Lisa and Brian Henson[/tag] to resurrect [tag]Fraggle Rock[/tag]. Why, I don’t know. Preliminary information is that they will be attempting to recreate the entire 98-episode Fraggledom in one Epic Film.
“It’s a complete ecosystem,” Zappa said of Henson’s idea to show children how living creatures need each other.
LaPuzza said that because of their astonishing sonar abilities, dolphins are excellent at patrolling for swimmers and divers. When a [tag]Navy dolphin[/tag] detects a person in the water, it drops a beacon. This tells a human interception team where to find the suspicious swimmer.
…
Sea lions can carry in their mouths special cuffs attached to long ropes. If the animal finds a rogue swimmer, it can clamp the cuff around the person’s leg. The individual can then be reeled in for questioning.
This gives new meaning to the name “Navy Seals.”
There was a truly pitiful movie out in the ’70s called “Day of the Dolphin.” In it, [tag]George C. Scott[/tag] plays a scientist who trains dolphins to talk and to place magnetic mines on ships’ hulls for the military. The high point of the movie was when the male, named Alpha, squeeked and whistled his love for the female dolphin, Beta. Oh, and there was a secondary plot in which the dolphins were being used to kill a politician.
Talking dolphins. The ’70s were a cultural and intellectual wasteland.
Netflix started rolling out their WatchNow instant video feature in January. If it hasn’t shown up in your account yet, try the link above to activate it.
Oh, but try it in Internet Exploder. It doesn’t work in Firefox.
Netflix WatchNow tests your connection speed to choose what video quality to stream. Other computers on your network can take away bandwidth, so if you plan to do any downloads or play interactive games online, well, don’t. Wait until the movie is over.
Kamakazi
divine+wind
Mitsubishi+Zero
Three+Diamonds
WWI
atomic+bomb
cold+war
Nazi
General+Patton
Hiroshima
Nagasaki
sputnik
Intercontinental+Ballistic+Missile
ICBM
communism+scare
space+race
Soviet+Union
Snakes on a Plane
Family Values
F-word
recycled canvas
Information age
technology
magic
Arthur C. Clarke
Globalization
China
I, Robot
tools
witchcraft
global economy
evolution
politician
Asia
self-improvement
Isaac Asimov
Innovation
Delmarva peninsula
Zero Population Growth
ZPG
One-child Policy
greenhouse gases
Global Warming
creationists
public education
Strange+women
distributing+swords
ronald+reagan
the+lady+of+the+lake
monty+python
holy+grail
farcical+aquatic+ceremony
executive+power
watery+tart
