HOLLYWOOD & VINES:

Strike City

Well now they've done it. Hollywood, California, film bastion of the western hemisphere, might as well be called "Strike City" now because the powers that be have blown it. Big time.

The Writer's Guild of America, aka the WGA, is in negotiations with studios and networks for a new contract. For those outside the showbiz loop, the WGA is the union that represents film and television writers in the United States. Across the table are the motion picture studios and television networks. Collectively, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), ABC, CBS and NBC. These are the two groups at the table. Or were.

Negotiations were suspended March 1st with no agreement in sight. The WGA contract runs out midnight, May 1st. If no one (read studios and networks) will negotiate with writers for new and improved terms in a new contract before that contract runs out, television and motion picture writers are going to stop working.

"Big deal," you say. "Why should I care?" ... More


AMERICAN DREAMS:

Other People's Money

It's easier to live well as a poor person in a rich country and easier to live well as a rich person in a poor one. This might not seem true, but it is. I only started to figure this out during the last few years.

I have been comparing notes with friends of mine who live abroad about things like gasoline (or petrol) prices, what it costs to do transnational money transfers and the like. What I have learned is that it costs me less for so many things, living here in the United States, the richest country on Earth, than it does people in countries with lower per capita incomes. Here are a couple of examples:

1. If an American had to pay the equivalent of $50 to fill the tank of a compact car, as many people abroad do, there would be riots in the streets. We pay more than a buck twenty a gallon and it's a major nightly news topic.
   
   
2. In some countries, I have learned, Western Union will charge you a fee to convert a money transfer to US dollars from your local currency and then a very high fee for the service. I've transferred money to friends abroad from here in the US for a sliding (downward) fee that starts at $15 for the first $100 and Western Union converts it to the recipient's local currency at no cost to me.

Re-thinking "Home"

There is an atmosphere of panic, a sense of losing control. Nobody knows how many immigrants are entering the European Union illegally. It is like calculating the consumption of illegal narcotics on the basis of seizures and arrests.

A crammed, rusting hulk, its willing occupants glued together by their own excrement, lurches aground within metres of some of the most expensive apartments in the world, disgorging hundreds of Kurds; nine Rumanians reach London, slung under a luxury train that has travelled at 180 MPH in sub zero temperatures; corpses are found frozen in aircraft holds, amongst the champagne and caviar.

This is not a distant tide of human flotsam on the nightly news invariably and inconsequentially described as being "Of Biblical proportions". These people are as proximate and elusive as rats except when a vaguely oriental beggar proffers a tiny child like a collecting tin. Chains of organised crime are traced across continents, knife fights of obscure provenance break out at dusk in musty market towns and so-called "Community Leaders" prophesy discord. You can always tell the colour of a crisis from the description of those supposedly responsible for defusing it; white people, no matter how fraught and fractious seem to manage to get by without community leaders but they are an obligatory appurtenance to being brown, yellow or black. ... More


QUEER PLANET:

Why I Love "Queer as Folk"

Today, as an adult, I am reminded of Ken and GI Joe whenever I see gay male characters on TV. Just like the dolls we give to children, the gay characters on our little screens have been neutered. These video creations have no penises. They are not sexual beings.

Stop and think about it. When was the last time you saw two gay characters "gettin jiggy with it," making "the beast with two backs," or just plain "copin' a feel?"

Heck, American TV doesn't even allow gay men to kiss each other! Oh sure, they've shown two men kissing as a joke, but never in a fit of passion or as a tender moment between two people who love each other.

Has Will seriously kissed anyone besides Grace? Has our lone black gay male character, Carter in "Spin City," swapped saliva with anyone? Did we see John Goodman's character in the recently cancelled "Normal, Ohio" receiving a big wet one from a fellow bear?...More


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G21 AFRICA:

Swahili Cuisine

Binyawanga Wainaina

It infuriates us how they seem to just lounge on street corners and laugh the whole day; how they close their shops every afternoon to sit under coconut trees and gossip, moving only to follow the shadow of the tree; how they just shrug their shoulders nonchalantly when chaos comes their way.

Their in-your-face sexual confidence makes us feel like prudes. They speak Swahili, like we do, but for them conversation is the highest literary form. No cliches allowed, your imagery must be original, and interesting. Never repeat a simile. You are allowed to embellish the truth, insult your audience, be laviscious, even pretend to start a fight to spice up the conversation.

Just never be boring (like people from up-country are).

The Mombasa jeer is calculated to reduce you to jelly. The Mombasa sneer melts the jelly, and you will just ooze away. We up-country folk tend to be very quiet at the coast. Or we just stick to English. Its safer.... More

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