Beirut, Lebanon
7 Nov
Top is Amal fighter in Amal-Hamas shootout in 2021. Bottom is unknown fighter, unknown date, c. 1970s, unknown militia affiliation. I know; herstory is always a blank.
Addendum: Female fighter is Jocelyne Khoueiry. Famous figure and photo apparently––waiting to find out why.
A short thread to @hannibulk––follow him
3 Nov
@hannibulk: “Not a single demographic on the face of the earth is more pathetic than Maghrebi Pan-Africans. They constantly cuck for people who routinely insult them and call them invaders.”
Yes.
Me: It reminds me of the new Afrocentrism of the 80s in the US (“Was Cleopatra Black?” on the cover of Newsweek.)
Or Spike Lee in a television interview: Katie Couric (?): “So, Spike, tell us about your trip. You just came back from Egypt and Africa…” Spike Lee (sullen, Afro-Nationalist self-righteous face): “Egypt is IN Africa.”
And Üsküdar (below) is in Asia, Spike; that doesn’t mean the people there are Chinese.
What’s wrong with celebrating the richness and complexity of sub-Saharan civilization’s beauty without connecting to Egypt/Greece (Black Athena) for validation. You’re just playing the white man’s game that way, idiot.
Coment: nikobakos@gmail.com
Andrew Tate Reveals Why He Converted To Islam: What’s the big surprise?
3 Novand faggy blue princes or female goddesses riding on a lion with eight types of battleaxe in each hand (though an erect phallus smeared with ghee and milk might be a turn on to Tate), no mourning mothers, weak, crucified gods, revenge for the slave woman cast out by the evil Jew
and her butch, “wild man” chad son, direct ancestor of PBUH, making the world submit to final and complete revelation…Father, Father, Father, more rules, there’s no IT but IT…
This is IT, five times a day, morals, rules, rules, rules…
…why WOULDN’T all that appeal to an overcompensating ass like Tate? Why are we second-guessing him? He’s telling us exactly what he likes about Islam and libs are bashing him because they don’t want Islam framed in that way but that’s kinna what it looks like to me…
…yes, as the always brilliant @MazMHussain points out, it’s like the last chapter of Houellebecq’s Submission.
(though I’m not sure @MazMHussain likes the rest of my position.)
All that said, why are we giving this ass the time of day? Sorry.
“He’s just an opportunist.” Uh, yeah, why else did anyone ever convert to Islam except opportunism or cowardice? Its “noble male simplicity”?
A simple creed for a very simple man.
Comments: nikobakos@gmail.com
P.P.S. Shubh Diwali once more
24 OctCelebrate the Hindu today. As Alt to monist, legalist, partiarchal, chauvinist, exclusionary, male hysteria monotheism. Do anything to honor the Lights of Pluralism and Complexity. Light a candle, kiss a mezuzah, kiss an icon, get a mawli, eat ladoo, watch the Dybbek. Remember that while God is One He has infinite manifestations––not just 99 or 100. The handsome young prince is also the very principle of existence itself. “I am the taste of water.”
SHIRK in every way you can think of!
And reject Modi, BJP, Hindutva craziness; it’s an attempt to turn Hinduism into Abrahamic craziness. Don’t become the enemy. It’s very tempting and very easy. Just let it slide. If you ignore them they go away.
Always have the Gita and Karamazov with you.
Yes, that’s me.
And one of this blog’s first posts:
The Dark Lord
In a previous post, April 10th “A Dancing Girl,” I wrote about the ubiquity of Krishna-Radha imagery in Indian culture, from the obvious traditionally religious contexts to Bollywood cinema. Sudhir Kakar, Indian psychologist and I guess all around cultural critic has a very interesting analysis of the Krishna archetype in Indian cinema. He contrasts him, the playful phallic teaser, with the Majnun archetype, the distraught, longing lover (“majnun” means crazed in Arabic, the same Semitic root as “meshugeh” in Yiddish), setting up an interesting Hindu-Muslim interplay between the two:
“The Krishna-lover is the second important hero of Indian films. Distinct from Majnun,the two may, in a particular film, be sequential rather than separate. The Krishna-lover is physically importunate, what Indian-English will perhaps call the “eve-teasing” hero, whose initial contact with women verges on that of sexual harrassment. His cultural lineage goes back to the episode of the mischievous Krishna hiding the clothes of the gopis (cow-herdesses) while they bathe in the pond and his refusal to give them back in spite of the girls’ repeated entreaties. From the 1950s Dev Anand movies to those (and especially) of Shammi Kapoor in the 1960s and of Jeetendra today, the Krishna-lover is all over and all around the heroine who is initially annoyed, recalcitrant, and quite unaware of the impact the hero’s phallic intrusiveness has on her. The Krishna-lover has the endearing narcissism of the boy in the eve of the Oedipus stage, when the world is felt to be his “oyster.” He tries to draw the heroine’s attention by all possible means – aggressive innuendoes and double entendres, suggestive song and dance routines, bobbing up in the most unexpected places to startle and tease her as she goes about her daily life. The more the heroine dislikes the hero’s incursions, the greater his excitement. As the hero of the film Aradhana remarks, “Love is only fun when the woman is angry.”
“For the Krishna-lover, it is vital that the woman be a sexual innocent and that in his forcing her to become aware of his desire she get in touch with her own. He is phallus incarnate, with distinct elements of the “flasher” who needs constant reassurance by the woman of his power , intactness, and especially his magical qualities that can transform a cool Amazon into a hot, lusting female. The fantasy is one of the phallus – Shammi Kapoor in his films used his whole body as one – humbling the pride of the unapproachable woman, melting her indifference and unconcern into submission and longing. The spirited, androgynous virgin is awakened to her sexuality and thereafter reduced to a groveling being, full of a moral masochism wherein she revels in her “stickiness” to the hero. Before she does so, however, she may go through a stage of playfulness where she presents the lover with a mocking version of himself. This in Junglee, it is the girl from the hills – the magical fantasy-land of Indian cinema where the normal order of things is reversed – who throws snowballs at the hero, teases him, and sings to him in a good-natured reversal of the man’s phallicism, while it is now the hero’s turn to be provoked and play the recalcitrant beloved.”
— Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, Sudhir Kakar
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Bollywood classicists will probably object to my not using one of the above-mentioned actors as a movie clip example, but I’ve chosen to use recent meteor-hottie Imran Khan instead:
Not that Imran Khan… No relation to Shahrukh Khan either or Salman Khan, but the nephew of Aamir Khan — just in case you doubted how nepotistic Bollywood is, how full of super-size Khan egos it is, or how disproportionately Muslim the industry is, a fact that usually remains unspoken. Other than his still teenage swagger, which the other Khans are getting a little too old to pull off, I think Imran is so perfect in the role of this archetype because he has those exaggeratedly large, murti-like* eyes and eyebrows that so many Indians have and have such deep religious significance and symbolism. “Darshan,” or the viewing of a deity, is usually centered on the eyes — on a visit to any temple one will usually find at least one devotee staring endlessly into the god’s eyes — and Hindus believe that the deity’s energy does not come to reside in an image until that very final moment when its pupils are painted in.
Anyway, here’s Imran with his Gopis, in the title number of the 2010 I Hate Luv Stories, playing the Dusky One to perfection (though as in Kakar’s classic trajectory, he’s later humbled into the Majnun lover):
And for those old-schoolers, here’s SRK, perhaps the central casting expert at the type, in the wedding scene from Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, the wedding he’s impudent enough to crash because he’s smitten with the bride’s sister and shows up to hit on her.
*”Murti” is the image of a deity in Hinduism, any image: statue, painting, drawing, cheap print from the kiosk. Obviously I don’t use the word “idol,” with its reek of monotheist condescension and demonization, as I generally consider monotheism — all of them — to be something of a plague and a great historical tragedy. We’ll just have to do the best we can with what we have for now.
Comment: nikobakos@gmail.com
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From the seemingly eternal Forverts: “Di balade funem 11tn september” (“The Ballad of September 11”)
11 Sep“A song written in the folk tradition of disaster commemoration.” So writes Linda (Leye) Lipsky, when describing Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman’s song, “The Ballad of September 11”, in her encyclopedic biography of the poet for the Jewish Women’s Archive. In this YouTube video, Yiddish singer Lucette van den Berg performs the song beautifully, accompanied by guitarist Erik Raayman. Read my own take on the song.
Why filmmaker-songwriter Josh Waletzky called his elegy for 9/11 “One World.” In Mikhl Yashinsky’s poignant article about the song, we learn that Waletzky, the producer of acclaimed documentaries like “Image Before My Eyes” and “Partisans of Vilna”, had a very personal link to the Twin Towers: his own father, Sholom Waletzky, worked there until his death from cancer in 1975.
Josh Waletzky composed the song only days after the attacks, and performed it several weeks later as part of a benefit to raise money for the victims’ families, although doing so made him uneasy. “There was still a strange feeling, in the wake of so many being killed, to now be playing music,” Waletzky said. Read the story ➤
To all my fellow πανταχού παρόντες Neo-Greeks, à propos death of Elizabeth II: you don’t have to have a full, complete, instant opinion about every-thing…
11 Sep…especially things you know no-thing about.
Your “ancestors” created thinking apparently. Try it sometime.
Prerequisite: learn to deal with ambiguity, contrast, moral complexity, continua, contradiction, etc.
Like, that “…contain multitudes” thang.
Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 
