Post #3 by Nikolaos

       Nikolaos Stavrou-Wilson      4.11.13      Imagery and Culture

Catherine Saalfield is a film maker who is a good case of a woman taking ownership in the media.  Why?  She has started her own non-profit corporation, Aubin Pictures, to produce and distribute her cinema work.  By taking the independent distribution route Saalfields possesses creative control.  Her work, such as Positive:Life with HIV , was aired on public broadcasting television, a channel that is not mainstream, and Bent T, a program about Gays and Lesbians, was not typical content.  As the reading about Women Make Movies by Zimmerman shows, women face a more uphill climb than men do to make it in the entertainment industry, and they have to battle to show men that their films are just as important as men’s films.  Examples of large media entities owned by minority folk is Def Jam Records, founded by Russell Simmons, BET Television owned by an African-American man, and The Source magazine, also owned by Russell Simmons. 

The mainstream media, to be general, is a steady barrage of facts used to create fear, as the messages touch on unemployment and other troublesome social issues; crime, for example.  The anti-dote to mainstream media is an internet blog that offers reviews of works of literature and movies from around the world, at http://libricinema.wordpress.com/.   As Salmon Rushdie showed,  writers are provocative and rebellious people  in society, fearless and feared by the mainstream powers because of their skill in weaving stories that truly touch the hearts of the people.  Rushdie was forced into exile.  The great Herman Melville is reviewed on my found blog, and his craft is a lofty read to experience, more enlightened than TV news writers work—and taking more time to digest as well.  The message that this blog is sending is: read a lot, a lot of great books, and check out some good movies as well.  Encouraging one to read, that is not a message that the mainstream media promotes. The blog goads the mind to read more, and to explore the literary landscapes of great writers from numerous backgrounds and life experiences in order to enhance the human experience in a way much deeper than mainstream media of whatever messages they promote will do for you.  Reading the books reviewed will sharpen your mind more than watching the television will. 

Story telling is what has connected humans over countless generations, what eager eared listeners and skilled orators engage in, what the mind takes flight on, what drama pulses on and fear and excitement and entertainment live in, what the consciousness of a human is expanded by, hence my interests in great stories.  Yet I fear reading is becoming less and less a part of the fabric of the lives of people, as people become engrossed in technological devices and grow up on Nintendo and Playstation.    My selected blog reminds people of reading and this is one reason why this blog is a success.  Without books it is 1984.  Books and movies on wordpress.org, is also a success because it informs me of books and movies that I may have missed, books that offer a better way to pass the time than viewing the tumultuous TV essays concerning conflicts that run through mainstream media.

   The mainstream media presents us with just facts.  Facts presented in 30 second intervals on the TV news,  that generate low attention spans, and truthfully I don’t know what the content of mainstream media is because I don’t watch TV or swim in cyberspace.  Of importance is that it is not just what mainstream media says, it is the mode of how it says it: brisk and brief, whereas good books are slow reading.  Facts may be dulling, and facts are not creative nor do they employ imagination, and hence facts do not reflect the highest and best that humans are.  A great fiction story is just as real as a non-fiction piece, because both the fiction story and the “real” story live in the mind, but a great fiction book promotes good, whereas a mainstream story delves into negativity.   The blog that I have found as my form of alternate media is far, far away from what the mainstream media presents because it encourages you to read writers who each individually on their own right are strong-minded and uncensored, so imagine the spirit of independence in all those works amassed and combined and merged, that are reviewed at http://libricinema.wordpress.com/. 

Books are what enlighten us, far more than the television programming supplied to the plebian populace, TV, which Michael Franti termed, “The Drug of the Nation”.  The media mainstream provides the same old shit, in a 24/7/365 cycle.  It is therefore good to read, both contemporary novels from all around the world, and classics from around the world, and to get hip to what is really going on, and not what the mainstream media is saying.   For example, The White Tiger by Adiga Aravind is a book reviewed on the blog, and it is written “…allegory/description/condemnation of democracy in 21st Century India. The poor are still enslaved, the rich, still entitled. The plot revolves around a young man from the country who uses his wits—and murder—to rise to wealth and prominence in Bombay. He is facile and witty, and he paints a penetrating portrait of his country. The White Tiger is an allegory”.  There is history to be learned on the wordpress.org site as well, and history as told by people that have personally lived it.  My friend who writes the blog lived in Ethiopia during a revolution, and reviews a book, Beneath the Lion’s Gate by Maaza Mengiste, about a Communist revolution that personally reminded her of the people she knew who lived the military revolt against Halile Selassie.  The maze’s of events that the books on the blog present would if walked be a vast track of knowledge. 

As cable offers many choices, in the literary arena too there are many choices out there so how does one sift through the lesser to find the best, like a bee that goes from flower to flower taking only the finest pollen?  Luckily there is the gifted scribe writing at http://libricinema.wordpress.com/ to guide us.  

 In conclusion, http://libricinema.wordpress.com/ is a blog on wordpress.org written by an anonymous author (who I do know) who reads a lot and sees a lot (movies).  It provides thoughtful reviews of heavy literature, to guide one towards embarking on the journey into the extraordinary vistas of these novels and films.  The site was founded because the author read a lot and saw a lot and needed to put back out what the author had perceived, as a creative outlet.  Try the site and see for yourself whether you like the author’s taste and then perhaps you shall return to read it again and again.