Reflections

By Biljana Vankovska In the eve of the holiday season last year I had decided to devote my column to a nonconventional theme. Instead of a usual text for this time of a year I wrote about happiness, the one that is not a gift of/by the state/politics but the one that is achieved in spite of it. My readers graded it quite poorly. Aware that the same may happen again I have decided to dedicate this last column in 2011 to a similar issue. This time it is a short and unexpected tractate in defence of love.

Alfàs del Pi, Spain The church was not as overfilled as it used to be for midnight mass on Christmas eve.  But the ritual unfolded as it has done for centuries, around John 3:16 “little bible”, “For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that anyone who believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”.  And the priest spoke about two parallel Christmases, one spiritual, of the bible, and one material with gifts, food, and licores. Could there also be two parallel Jesuses, one the Christ, and the other a revolutionary, fighting the Roman Empire and its client elite in the province conquered in 63bC?  Matthias Schulz (Der Spiegel 17 2011) has theologians and historians elaborate that thesis, leaning toward the revolutionary Jesus, disturbingly similar to his look-alike and act-alike Che Guevara two millennia later, also fighting an empire, also killed by...

‘Shame’ is a disturbing, much admired, Steve McQueen film that has been misleadingly reviewed, but deserves our serious attention. Let me put my reasoning in provocative language: ‘Shame’ depicts with chilling realism the degeneracy of high-end capitalist life style in the urban landscape of Sodom on the Hudson, otherwise known as ‘The Big Apple,’ that is, New York City. This sterile glitter of clubs and bars, loveless sexuality, acute alienation, and shady business operations is a city within the city that somehow co-exists with the world’s most innovative, abundant, and world class cultural life that continues to contain in its midst many enclaves of normalcy, humanism, and personal fulfillment. There is a central confusion in the film, perhaps deliberate: the city is portrayed as if it can be reduced to this skyscraper reality of nefarious business ventures and the flashy life it offers its operatives.