Arrival photo, Tangier, Morocco, 1951

Rare family photo: Deplaning in Tangier, 1951 

  Robert (waving), Liza (age 9, wearing hat),  Eliane (in suit), Pierre (age 4, school uniform)
We were visiting my maternal grandmother, Wanda Castro, who lived at
21 rue Rembrandt, overlooking the corniche.
June 9 2015 would have been my mother's 99th birthday.

Black Hole of Procrastination

Where Sheep May Safely Graze Pt 11

Where Sheep May Safely Graze (contd)

New York, May 23--It's not only a tranquil Memorial Day week-end in the city, but awards time at the 68th Cannes Film Festival and Iceland's Rams (Hrutar) by Grímur Hákonarson has just been awarded the top prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. As the film's story goes, two brothers who hadn’t spoken in 40 years reunite in a remote Icelandic valley to save their rams.

Meanwhile, closer to home on Mulberry Street, sheep are also being honored in a more low-keyed fashion, without fanfare or fashion police. As I cross the street from the public library side, three sheep are being bundled out of a van from Hudson, NY and promptly set to graze the delicious fresh long grass in Old St Patrick's Cathedral cemetery, their needs perfectly suited to the task at hand. Says the Monsignor, "They'll be here for two months to keep the grass trimmed."  Literally. After all, we the people in New York give short shrift to the metaphorical use of the phrase "mowing the grass" and the practice to which it refers of obliterating people, buildings and neighborhoods in the Gaza strip.

Asked whether this was the return of the lambs named Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh which had been brought in for St Francis Festival of the Animals last Fall, Monsignor said no, these were new sheep and had been given cartographic rather than scriptural names: Mulberry, Mott and Elizabeth.  Nor did their  visit coincide with an event on the ecclesiastical calendar. " We just like to keep things pastoral," the Monsignor smiled.

A Woodpecker Is Hard To See

A WOODPECKER IS HARD TO SEE
New York, May 2, 2015--Faster than a drum roll, a downy woodpecker drills into  a plane tree's broken branch in M'Finda Kalunga community garden at Chrystie and Rivington on a Saturday afternoon, one of the three times a week  when the garden's open. Of course, the woodpecker could also be drilling when the garden's not open, which is the rest of the time. Once, roosters crowed in the garden until humans moaned about being woken at dawn. Now hens lay eggs and the roosters have been relocated upstate, but have visiting rights. Other such recordings are at the Urban Nature playlist on my YouTube channel, nothingofficial.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL263403CEBEFC751A

This video is dedicated  especially to all those rhapsodising over  the new Whitney's inaugural exhibit (which I haven't seen yet)  and over the nautical properties of the museum's "airy, spacious, light-filled",  architecture, as though it's about to raise anchor, become unmoored and sail down the Hudson into the sunset, bearing an art cargo. Robert Smithson did something else with his public art project  Floating island, but that's another story..

"We're Overworked, & Underpaid, All We Want is $15 . . ."

Tribeca: Stranded in Canton by Mans Mansson

TRIBECA: STRANDED IN CANTON by Mans Mansson
handwritten notes retyped from my spiral bound notebook

New York, April 24--looks like Denmark picked off a lot of awards 

at Tribeca. I missed both Bridgend and Virgin Mountain..one Virgin film was enough for one festival.. and I've read "Killing Williamsburg", black humor novel about fictitious suicide epidemic ...and seen Virgin Suicides....

but I did watch every frame of STRANDED IN CANTON, a very laid-back and wryly humorous film, not an award winner so far but should be, not Danish but Swedish...bittersweet...not clichéed...v open-ended ending....light, but stays with you

The story's about Lebrun, a Congolese farmer..."j'ai ma porcherie, mes poulaillers, ma pisciculture...je ne suis pas un businessman...." whom Mansson met in Kinchasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, when he played a whole season there as a member of a football team. After his football career, Mansson went to art school in Stockholm and started making films.

Lebrun is trying to extract himself from an impossible predicament in Canton, where's he stuck with a whale load of bright yellow Joseph Kabila presidential election T-shirts, which haven't been delivered and are now worthless because the election is over. Wassim, the Lebanese warehouse manager wants a a large payment for months ofstorage. Like many of the roles in the film, Wassim plays himself and pretty much, according to Mansson reached by phone upstate, invited himself into the production when he saw the two-person crew shooting. Two people ie the director doubling up as cinematographer and his sound person. 

That's the whole deceptively simple story, how Lebrun passes the time, trying to get out of this predicament, raise the dough to pay off Wassim. He has a buddy, Frank, with terrible marketing ideas, hired as production translator from Mandarin and Cantonese, who doubles up as a main actor. There's a non-romantic interest, a Beyonce-like but Platonic Cameroonian girl-friend, who is the common sense anchor of the film and acts as a sounding board for Lebrun's delusions of savoir-faire.
The acting's very good and subtle...my face cracks up as I write this because in a way it's such a ridiculous story, but so emblematic of false hopes of fast fortunes...not only of the Congolese and sub-Saharan African diaspora in Guanzhou, China's highly polluted manufacturing hub but of expatriates everywhere who are escaping the economic desitution of countries ravaged by exploitation, war and government corruption,,,,,
                                                    
PS Mansson says script was not prewritten , but developed during production.  Screenplay credits go to Mansson, Li Hongqi and George Cragg. The film is a succinct 79 minutes in Cantonese, English, French, Lingala and Mandarin, With Lebrun Iko Isibangi , Nana Nya Sylvie, Wassim Hasbini, Frank No playing versions of themselves.          

--Liza Béar

Film stills from Stranded in Canton  2014

by Mans Mansson screened at Tribeca Film Festival 2015

Left: Lebrun, Congolese entrepreneur in Guanzhou and Frank, his friend

TRIBECA: Sworn Virgin: Laura Bispuri, director

Film still of synchronized swimming sequence in Laura Bispuri's first feature Sworn Virgin, an Albanian, German, Italian Kosovan and Swiss co-production now screening at Tribeca FF.