Always between two trains, or two countries, or two towns, catch me if you can. You may find me in English, except if I am in Pali or some other more or less exotic language, or book. Have you tried the Dhammapada recently? If not, just give it a try, in Pali of course. You may also have a try at looking for me on the Internet, simply Coulardeau with Google, but on the global web, not on the French pages of it. Have a good trip.
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Jacques Coulardeau at Amazon (5)
SUPERNATURAL,
CAR CHASE OR JOY RIDE?
Dr Jacques
COULARDEAU & Ivan EVE
Illustrations
Annunzio COULARDEAU
CHAPTER ONE, The Tale
of Two Brothers and Their Impala 67
CHAPTER TWO, Hitting
The Road
CHAPTER THREE, They
“Are The Hollow Men”
CHAPTER FOUR, Their
Number Is 666
CHAPTER FIVE, And
Cain did not slay Abel
APPENDICES:
SUPERNATURAL IS LEADING TO SO MANY THINGS
- ELAINE PAGELS – REVELATIONS, VISIONS,
PROPHECY, & POLITICS IN THE BOOK OF REVELATION; - ERNEST ALFRED THOMPSON WALLIS BUDGE – LEGENDS OF THE
GODS, THE EGYPTIAN TEXTS; - BRIAN DE PALMA – RAISING CAIN; - PROPHECY COLES – THE IMPORTANCE OF SIBLING RELATIONSHIPS
IN PSYCHOANALYSIS; - JOHN
STEI NBECK – EAST OF EDEN; - ELIA KAZAN –
JAMES DEAN – EAST OF EDEN; - TV SERIES – EAST OF EDEN – 1981; - JAMES DEAN – GIANT; -JAMES DEAN – REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE
And we went down into the
mental maze of this American series that turns the car into the supreme weapon
to correct the Creation of God of all the mishaps it went through and all the
monsters God himself created along with all the rest. What a sloppy achievement
for God and what a reckless endeavor for the producers of the series! And the
project of the authors was so phenomenal that it could not in any way go
through academic acceptance. The endeavor was supported though for a while by
some academic master minds in the field of American series but it could not
survive a university reading committee in a public university that was looking
for the American-ness of American TV series. This series is far beyond
hamburgers, Coca Cola and Bourbon. Miles on the other side of the border of
suburban American middle class comfort or mild psychosis. Thriving or
smoldering in the outer space of standard normality or even digestible crime.
Publisher: Editions
La Dondaine; 1st edition (March 28, 2013)
ASIN: B00C3ODA0S
Publication Date:March 28, 2013
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:34 PM 0 comments
Monday, March 30, 2015
Jacques Coulardeau at Amazon (4)
THE INDIAN OCEAN THE MARE NOSTRUM OF HUMANITY [Kindle Edition] Dr Jacques COULARDEAU & Ivan EVE(Author)
A MENTAL JOURNEY
Dr Jacques Coulardeau was
in Sri Lanka
in 2005 and he brought back from there a tremendous treasure chest full of
poetry, meditation, philosophy.
Ivan Eve came back to France in 2009 after twelve years in Vietnam and Laos with an advanced Asian reserve
and education. He met Dr Jacques Coulardeau in the Paris Sorbonne and since
then has been working with him as his assistant.
This volume brings together
several studies and documents, most of them unpublished before on the general
geo-political question of the restructuring of the Indian
Ocean as the center of global maritime commerce.
At first we go back to its
central position as soon as Homo Sapiens emerges from Africa
some 150,000 years ago.
Then we look at the history
of Sri Lanka from the arrival of Homo Sapiens, then Buddhism, then the Chinese
and later on the European colonial powers, to the central position it is taking
in maritime commerce thanks to Chinese investment and the developing of the
port of Hambantota and a few others after the end of the LTTE terrorist period.
We then stop on the
Buddhist influence in Sri
lanka as it appears in the Sigiri Graffiti
in, Sigiriya from the 9th to the 12th centuries, plus a
selection of these Sigiri Graffiti in an original English translation;
And finally we move to the
development of Container maritime Commerce in the Indian
Ocean at the Global level today
And we can then come to the
concluding hypothesis that the world is being restructured globally and by
reconstructing the dominance of the Indian Ocean
the way it was up to the 15th century though in our modern context.
Jacques Coulardeau
Amazon.fr €8,24
Amazon.com US$10,67
Simultaneous
Device Usage: Unlimited ? Publisher: Editions
La Dondaine; 1st edition (October 31, 2012), Sold by: Amazon
Digital Services, Inc. Language: English ASIN: B009ZVO0F6
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:58 PM 0 comments
Prodigieusement pierrotiste mais parfaitement lunaire
MARCEL CARNÉ –
JACQUES PRÉVERT – ARLETTY – JEAN-LOUIS BARRAULT – PIERRE BRASSEUR – LES ENFANTS
DU PARADIS – 1945
Ce film est un prodige de turbulence et de sentimentalité au bord de la
passion et du tsunami populaire.
C’est tout d’abord et avant tout un film sur le théâtre, le théâtre parlant
et le théâtre de mime, tous théâtres à l’italienne avec deux balcons et un
paradis, bien qu’il manque le pigeonnier (je me souviens de celui du Grand Théâtre
de Bordeaux). Une croyance folle au théâtre populaire où les pauvres sont au
paradis et les acteurs sont leurs anges et ils ont intérêt à se bien tenir. Et
une pièce était un vrai succès quand le parterre suivait le paradis, même si les
loges et les balcons n’aimaient pas le charivari et les interventions bruyantes
et passionnées du populo du paradis. C’était le monde à l’envers, du moins le
monde de Shakespeare puisque chez William le populo est au parterre et le paradis
ou troisième balcon est pour les estudiantins pas totalement désargentés.
Mais le film oppose, compare et en fait chante les deux grands genres du
théâtre d’acteurs et du théâtre de mimes. L’un comme l’autre ont leurs règles
et leurs fonctionnements, mais tous les deux sont des arts de passionnés pour
un public de passionnés, pour des auteurs qui n’ont jamais le dernier mot mais
pour des créditeurs toujours enragés et violents que seuls de généreux
donateurs peuvent tenir à distance. C’est toute une période largement disparue
en France où l’état a pris la relève du mécénat royal inventé par François 1er
qui avait pris partiellement le relai de l’église et de quelques nobles. L’état
mécène fait que le théâtre populaire est mort au profit du théâtre pour la
classe moyenne moyennement éduquée qui veut apparaître ouverte d’esprit :
beaucoup d’enseignants enseignés (80% selon certains). Il reste bien sûr le théâtre
privé mais alors on est chez la classe moyenne moyennement éduqué qui ne crache
pas sur l’étiquette bourgeoise ou qui n’en a cure. Si vous avez envie de voir
des choses neuves, des créations vivantes par leurs auteurs qui sont toujours
ou encore vivants c’est là que vous devez aller car le théâtre public fait
surtout dans l’archéologiquement funéraire pour ne pas payer de droits d’auteurs.
Le film est donc la fête du théâtre quand il était œuvre de création
complète, même si un Othello ne saurait résister à la montée des classiques.
« O rage ! O désespoir ! Mon Dieu qu’ai-je donc dit !
N’ai-je donc tant vieilli que pour la calomnie ! »
Le film ajoute à ce théâtre la scène de la rue qui est sans cesse un
boulevard du crime ou une esplanade de carnaval. On défile, on danse, on
chante, on musique, et on fait tant d’autres choses dans cette rue en folie. On
détrousse le passant. On pique les poches et les montres. On tue par ci par là
quelques badauds ébahis ou quelques rentiers confits. Tuer est aussi un art et
voler est un des beaux arts fondamentaux à la vie, même si celle-ci doit s’envoler
d’un passant pour donner la fortune à un malappris à la fine lame.
Et en plus ce film savamment et brillamment restauré est en un noir et
blanc éclatant de lumière et d’ombre mélangées et entrelacées. C’était le temps
des voitures à chevaux et des luminaires à gaz de ville. Rien ne vaut la bonne
répartie et si un nobliau invite son cocher à votre prochaine performance n’oubliez
pas d’inviter ses chevaux en avant-scène. On n’a que la finesse des rênes de ses chevaux quand on n’a pas la brillance
d’une intelligence bien éduquée ou d’un sens social empathique.
Vous adorerez les acteurs et actrices, tous très jeunes et tous promis à
des vies bien richement chargées. C’était le temps où les vedettes se formaient
treize à la douzaine. Depuis on a importé le star business de je ne sais quelle
forêt de houx à côté d’une ville de perdition dédiée aux anges du paradis. Suivez
mon regard. On y finit là bas comme ailleurs six pieds sous terre, même s’il n’y
a que les petits oiseaux et ces vedettes pour passer de l’eau en l’air, comme disait
mon père, avec un mot plus clair en deux syllabes commençant avec un pêt bien sûr,
un pêt mémorable : « Celle-ci se dégagea encore, mais en faisant ce
mouvement elle lâcha un pet, non pas un pet vulgaire mais un pet au
son cristallin qui provoqua chez elle un rire violent et nerveux. » — (Guillaume
Apollinaire, Les Onze Mille Verges, 1907, Les Onze mille verges ou les Amours d'un hospodar [Format
Kindle], ). Et Frédérick
Lemaître n’aurait pas pu dire mieux. Mais entre Apollinaire et Prévert on est
bien entouré.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:27 PM 0 comments
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Two films and one series: a deadly mixture
THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS – 1993
It was a great film when it came
out. The acting is still absolutely astonishing and admirable and yet there is
something that is missing twenty-two years later.
The film is so centered on the
main character, Esteban Trueba, and his family, or rather his personal history
in Chile,
his economic fight to raise himself by his own effort over his lot, to become
one of the most economically powerful, and later one of the most politically
powerful men that we do not really capture the country itself. What is shown of
the working class movement is just really anecdotal. Too close to the tragedy
in 1993 the film does not show Allende’s party, which was not the Communist
Party of Chile, using Lenin and Stalin as direct political references. Their
approach was tremendously sectarian and that explains this, and vice versa.
They only won the election with slightly more than one third of the votes which
was not enough and the enthusiasm of the beginning wore out rather fast.
The film is silent about the real
conspiracy with the support of the USA and with the deranged support of the
Conservatives who did not even understood what they were doing, at least that’s
what the film shows though I am sure it was not that simple: these politicians
supported the putsch and for a long time then Pinochet himself. The film is
silent on the length of his reign, on the difficulty the country faced later on
when he was to be removed, etc. It is nearly a miracle that some democratic
order could be re-established in this country. It is true 1993 was too close:
the distance was not enough to be able to really get into some detail about the
contradictory situation the victory of El Pueblo Unido brought into Chile with
Allende first and then Pinochet.
The film is silent too on the
fact the US embassy was not
the refuge for escaping revolutionaries because the USA were on Pinochet’s side all
along. Canada
was the only viable option indeed. So twenty-two years after the film and
forty-two years after the putsch the film is rather nothing but a denunciation
of harsh working conditions for the working class, of military arrogance and
violence when “service men” meddle with politics, the full inhumanity of the
politicians who accepted the adventure of a military coup, and the purely
family-oriented empathy of Esteban Trueba at the end of the film.
The fact that Blanca was
questioned during her detention by her half brother was sentimentalese and such
a connection between the torturer and the tortured person was a fair guarantee
that the questioning would fail because on the torturer’s side there was a
desire for revenge, hence the use of pure violence for the sake of violence,
and on the side of the tortured person, Blanca, there was a strong feeling of
resistance, hatred, desire to fail that intruder, that out of wedlock
competitor, challenger, dominator. There should never be any relation of that
sort between the two sides of a questioning session of that type, i.e. under
duress.
So the only thing we have at the end
is that decision of Blanca’s to wash away any desire of revenge or vengeance, but
we know that in 1993 that could not be true and even today it sounds very
difficult. We have very few examples of that nature and South Africa does not really
qualify because in that case the dictatorial power (the apartheid government)
just passed that power to their opposition whose leader they liberated from
prison on the occasion. For that feeling to be believable you need distance and
a tremendous political change that can bring reconciliation. But the real
objective was and still is justice in such cases.
The film then has strong scenes
and moments but altogether it has become too sentimental and politically
superficial to be believable.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
RAGTIME, THE MUSICAL
– CD – 1998
The music is quite fine and even
at times great though it is not what you could expect as ragtime music. But the
music is varied and entertaining, certainly swinging and joyful.
The situation at the beginning of
the 20th century in New York, the state as well as the city is
rather simple with a lot of social clichés: the immigrant who will succeed by
pure chance added to some hard work; the bourgeois type upper middle class
racially tolerant wife; the real ragtime musician and his loved one; the
anarchistic working class militant calling for a revolution; The ship full of
Jewish immigrants that nearly sank in view of Ellis Island; and I should say
etc.
The main events are the vicious
killing of the musician’s girlfriend by some gang of firemen who will also
destroy the musician’s Model T out of spite because the man is black. Then the
social and psychological derangement that this racist fact causes in the
musician is by far too much since he starts a gang of bomb terrorists who start
bombing all kinds of buildings to get even with society, to get a vengeance.
The son of the rich family whose fortune was made in firecrackers decides out
of spite mostly to join the musician and his gang and help him make better
bombs. That is slightly childish.
The negotiations to stop this
rampage are performed with the worst forked tongue you can imagine and the
musician who is guaranteed justice in court and who has gained a safe exit for
the members of his gang, comes out and is shot down at once by all the police
waiting for him. That too is too much.
The end becomes then
sentimentalese.
That kind of discourse on race
relations and what it used to be and is no longer is rather easy but was
typical of the 1990s. It is when racial discrimination was at the highest in
justice and prisons that we had so many of these entertaining musicals or film
to try to make us believe everything was going dandy and fine. It is evident
that we are far from that nice situation and discourse. After six years under a
Black president in the US black kids, teenagers mostly are shot down by the
police even when they are unarmed.
Sorry chaps! But there is a lot
of work still to do to come to a racially tolerant society in the USA.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
PETER KRAUSE – MICHAEL C. HALL – SIX FEET UNDER –
2001-2005
Full and total! The series is all
there in 25 DVDs and 63 episodes. It is morbid but in many ways absolutely
hilarious. Morbid because it only deals with dead people since it takes place
in a funeral home. Morbid also because the family that owns the funeral parlor
and the family of their Latino associate or partner are so taken up by these
deadly and lethal circumstances that they lose their minds and their sanity
that get locked up in some coffin. In other words their lives are nothing but a
parade of hearses.
You will enjoy the four main
women in this film who are so hysterical and so out of control that you could
not spend five minutes with them without them jumping onto you for various
violent activities from hitting you to beating you down, to humping you (that
is called rape) and refusing any advances from you, men or women, after they
have captured your attention and now they detain your bodies. The best one is
in the first episode, Mrs. Fisher, the mother calling her husband who is
driving a hearse right then to tell him to crush the cigarette she is sure he
is smoking, which is true. He does so and gets another one out and when he
tries to light it up he runs into a bus. Good morning Mr. Reaper.
It is hilarious when you are
confronted at the beginning of each episode with the death of one, two or
three, or even more, people who are going to get into the mortuary. You cannot
imagine how people can die. There are some berserk and completely insane ways
of doing it. Dying is a fine art.
It is hilarious because one child
is made by accident out of wedlock and another after many attempts and even a
miscarriage. The elder Fisher son is responsible for the first accident and he
marries the woman who used to be his best friend in high school or college, or
whatever. But one day she disappears and many episodes later the truth will
come up: it is so sordid that it becomes hilariously impossible. Then the poor
Nate, Nathaniel Samuel, will finally marry and have a second daughter with the
woman he met in the first episode on the plane from Seattle to Los Angeles on
Christmas eve who dragged him nearly forcefully into the rest rooms or some
other cupboard to have a kinky episode of rump riding on the sly in the fast
lane.
That relation is just plain
absurd. It is marrying fire and water or lemon juice and milk together. It gets
sour in a jiffy and they break up and then they go back on the sly, and they
announce a first marriage and they have to cancel it and then they will
announce a second marriage and that will end in death and sourness. But what a
trip around and around the maypole, you can see what I designate with this
fairly friendly English device called a maypole with hams and other prizes at
the top, if you can climb that high!
Imagine now the younger son who
is a closet gay man who comes out of the closet without opening the door that
is locked up anyway and they seem to have thrown the key away. He is just as much
wavering as his brother about what he is looking for, who is looking for, and
many other issues. These two gay men (plus a few more sidekicks) are making
everything difficult, even kissing or holding their hands. And they only want
to have children, and that too is an adventure. If you do not laugh it’s
because you are slightly tight on the gay side. It’s never gay offensive but it
is gay hilarious. You might be influenced into getting gay for the fun of it
and the great enchanting vivid trip into wonderland and along the yellow road
of bricks.
The sister, the youngest Fisher
child, is even worse. She goes to art school and she starts having adventures. She
is attracted by a lesbian woman and yet at the very moment when she should get
active she panics and steps back. Imagine the situation. The lesbians actually
are those who are shown as most distant from the core of the story. They remain
marginal and unimportant.
The mother and her lovers are by
far the best. The mother wants in order not to want and to reject what she
wants and is begging for without accepting it when it is offered to her on a
platter. She is a Salome of some sort. She is afraid of any kind of amorous and
sentimental bodily contact. And she is an obsessive compulsive cleaner and
ordering busy beaver chasing dust, dirt and disorder. She is straightening up
everything, everybody and everyone with her own crooked and twisted desires and
she wonders why people are gesticulating around her when she whips them up and
down with a cat-o’-nine-tails and pretends it is thorn-free roses.
Enjoy the trip six feet under and
be sure of one thing: there is no ladder to climb out of it. That’s a real
treat to die and it is a tearful great extravaganza for those who survive and
have to inter the bodies in a way or another, even throw them to sharks if you
can.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 4:20 PM 0 comments
On ne peut pas reprocher à Guillaume d’ignorer les
résultats de la recherche archéologique, anthropologique et historique des
dernières vingt années. On peut et on doit cependant clairement montrer les
contradictions formelles que ces leçons contiennent.
Gustave Guillaume pour des raisons qui nous échappent fonctionnait avec deux
modèles formels ; un modèle binaire surprenant mais très rhétorique, j’entends
digne de la classe de rhétorique du lycée qu’il avait du suivre : « thèse +
antithèse = synthèse », formulation largement reprise par Saussure et sa
formule « langage = langue + parole » que Guillaume ne fait que transformer en
« langage = langue + discours ».
Cependant dès qu’il entre, à la suite de Meillet fréquemment cité, « chaque
langue forme un système où tout se tient et a un plan d’une merveilleuse
rigueur. » (256), dans les (sous-)systèmes qui composent le système global
d’une langue ou le système encore plus global du langage, il emploie un modèle
ternaire très systématique : les trois chronothèses de la chronogenèse, les
trois aires de la glossogénie, etc. Il insère cette triade mentale dans le
tenseur binaire ce qui donne « langage puissanciel ||
effection || langage effectif » (285) mais cette effection qui est
bien une opération en soi est réduite à un seuil ou centre d’inversion qu’il ne
compte alors plus comme une opération ternarisant le tenseur binaire qu’il
s’obstine à définir comme binaire.
Cela est étrange mais plus de cinquante ans après le délivrance de ces leçons
il est bien sûr impossible de faire l’impasse sur la recherche qui a eu lieu
pendant ce demi-siècle et on se doit d’appliquer les trois consignes de
Guillaume sans oublier la deuxième de l’exploration de l’effection (« 2.
explorer l’effection »). Les linguistes ont du pain sur la planche mais ils se
doivent de devenir anthropologues et archéologues s’ils veulent comprendre la
langue.
La question cruciale est : QUELLE EST L’ORIGINE DU LANGAGE ? Cette immense
recherche vaut bien un désagréable désagrément avec les créationnistes
d’inspiration religieuse ou les innéistes d’inspiration chomskyenne. Cela
permettrait aussi d’ailleurs de comprendre que la Singularité de Ray Kurzweil
est, comme son nom l’indique, un peu courte ou singulière.
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 6:50 AM 0 comments
SCANDALE : Toute la vérité sur Manuel VALLS (le vrai visage que les médi...
Le mensonge politique est un crime contre l'humanité
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:07 AM 0 comments
Friday, March 27, 2015
Jacques Coulardeau at Amazon (3)
TRIPPING
ENDLESSLY
ALL ALONG THE
DOWNFALL
Jacques
COULARDEAU
Illustrations
Annunzio
COULARDEAU
CONTENTS
Saint Austremonius p. 5
Psychophagus p. 7
Sun Sand and Strife p. 9
Casus Belli at the Casa Dei p.
11
Haunted p. 30
Memory Blocks p. 45
One Happy Morning p. 56
Perth Wolfenstein p. 67
Birds of a Feather p. 100
Fearless John’s Prayer to the Black Virgin
Of La Chaise-Dieu Abbey church
p. 114
All these poems
and stories are dedicated to Lucretia who helped crossing the long depression between
the mountain of hostile war and the mountain of reconstruction.
Some people,
some events played an enormous role in those years, The University of Perpignan
in their Mende unit; the Festival of La Chaise-Dieu and sacred music, music,
and music again; Michel Thénot of Central Parc with whom I visited
dozens of Romanesque churches running after Black Virgins; in Sri Lanka Sujeewa
and Sudarshani and the confrontation with elephants; and then Paris with
several life-ghosts who made me recapture life: many were named Arthur but some
stand out, Ivan, Paula and Animata. Special mention to Christian Gauchet,
Ghalib Hakkak and Père Emmanuel Gobilliard.
They are too
numerous to be named all. They are legions and that’s how we survive on this
earth, satiated with love, friendship and mental and spiritual experience.
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:58 PM 0 comments
Rihanna - Bitch Better Have My Money (Audio)
Money money money, green or blue, euro or dollar, bank or mortgage, money über alles
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 6:34 AM 1 comments
Pas d'auteurs pas de livres Salon du Livre de Paris 2015 Manif des auteurs
A écouter et méditer.
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 6:00 AM 0 comments
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Jacques Coulardeau at Amazon (2)
Right at the Bottom of the Urn[Kindle Edition]
Jacques
COULARDEAU(Author),
Annunzio
COULARDEAU(Illustrator)
The score is full of notes, filled
with notes, notes and bars that have no shape at first, except going up and
down, at times clustered in bunches here and there. The composer looks at his
score, perfectly and neatly printed in world-class toner on the paper. And he
has the sudden envy – and he has that sudden envy every single time he comes to
the end of a composition – to be able to take it and shake it and rearrange it
all haphazardly, maybe one day even empty it into the kitchen drain or flush
all those notes down the toilet in the bathroom. Good riddance.
To Ivan Eve,
at a time when the sky was all smiles
From his Lord Wotton
at a time when he fell for Dorian Gray
the toy of the Lord Shiva of all Perdition
preparing for the shiva’h of his youth
lost in the seven veils of his maturity
Product
Details :
File Size: 675 KB –
Simultaneous Device
Usage: Unlimited
–
Publisher: Editions La Dondaine;
1st edition (May 15, 2010) –
This
collection of ten plays is one of the strangest collections I know. Most
authors are women. The theme of Chicana women is central and lesbianism is
shown as some kind of escape from the Post Colonial Traumatic Stress Syndrome
of Chicano men and Chicana women.
Among
these plays there is a rewriting of Medea’s myth from this lesbian point of
view that is phenomenal in many ways and particularly in the fact that Medea is
making herself a lesbian to protect and save her motherhood that leads her to
killing her own son not to lose him to his father and hence lose her motherhood,
not seeing that she kills her motherhood at the same time, which becomes final
in the end when the dead son brings poison to his own institutionalized mother
and thus terminates her like some kind of vermin. Out of love . . . for sure!
At
the same time the consciousness of that Post Colonial Traumatic Stress Syndrome
is not clearly captured which leads to mourning the dead Chicano soldiers in
the American imperialistic wars without denouncing these wars per se.
I
just wonder if these authors have not integrated themselves too much into
American society and particularly American universities that are dealing with
Indian or Chicano or Lesbian studies as some kind of attractive gimmicks to
have more students. Note the gay theme is nearly totally absent from this
collection and yet when mentioned like in the first play of the collection it
does not concern Chicanos per se, even if the main part of this first play
happens in Las Vegas which is not exactly Chicano or Indian.
Enjoy
the reading of the reviews as some kind of introduction to that Chicano and
Chicana drama which is anyway essential in American culture today, and not
only, far from it, the United
States.
1-LUIS ALFARO –
STRAIGHT AS A LINE - 2000
2-COCO FUSCO & NAO BUSTAMANTE – STUFF – 1996
3-MIGDALIA CRUZ –
FUR, A PLAY IN NINETEEN SCENES – 1995
4-NILO CRUZ – NIGHT
TRAIN TO BOLINA – 1994
5-NAOMI IIZUKA – SKIN,
AN ADAPTATION OF BÜCHNER’S WOYZECK – 1995
6-OLIVER MAYER –
RAGGED TIME – 1994
7-PEDRO R.
MONGE-RAFULS – TRASH, A MONOLOGUE – 1995
8-CHERRIE MORAGA – THE HUNGRY
WOMAN, A MEXICAN MEDEA – 1995
9-MONICA PALACIOS –
GREETINGS FROM A QUEER SENORITA – 1995
10-CARIDAD SVICH – ALCHEMY OF DESIRE:DEAD-MAN4S BLUES, A
PLAY WITH SONGS – 1994
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 3:53 PM 0 comments
This collection of ten plays is one
of the strangest collections I know. Most authors are women. The theme of
Chicana women is central and lesbianism is shown as some kind of escape from
the Post Colonial Traumatic Stress Syndrome of Chicano men and Chicana women.
Among these plays there is a rewriting of Medea’s myth from this lesbian point
of view that is phenomenal in many ways and particularly in the fact that Medea
is making herself a lesbian to protect and save her motherhood that leads her
to killing her own son not to lose him to his father and hence lose her
motherhood, not seeing that she kills her motherhood at the same time, which
becomes final in the end when the dead son brings poison to his own
institutionalized mother and thus terminates her like some kind of vermin. Out
of love . . . for sure!
At the same time the consciousness of that Post Colonial Traumatic Stress
Syndrome is not clearly captured which leads to mourning the dead Chicano
soldiers in the American imperialistic wars without denouncing these wars per
se.
I just wonder if these authors have not integrated themselves too much into
American society and particularly American universities that are dealing with
Indian or Chicano or Lesbian studies as some kind of attractive gimmicks to
have more students. Note the gay theme is nearly totally absent from this
collection and yet when mentioned like in the first play of the collection it
does not concern Chicanos per se, even if the main part of this first play
happens in Las Vegas which is not exactly Chicano or Indian.
Enjoy the reading of the reviews as some kind of introduction to that Chicano
and Chicana drama which is anyway essential in American culture today, and not
only, far from it, the United
States.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Olliergues, France, March 22, 2015
6 years spent in foreign countries: 1 year in North Carolina USA, 1 year in California USA, 1 year in Zaïre (Kinshasa), 3 months (2005, August-November) in Sri Lanka on research with an NGO attached to the UNESCO site of Sigiriya, numerous shorter periods in Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany (East and West), Austria, among others