Of "Tipping Points" and "Black Swan Events"

Started in on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007, 2010+) and am thinking how it seems to dovetail in some ways with Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000) and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005). Love this stuff. I'm not the only one by a long shot. In San Francisco, for example, had a fun discussion with a shrewd Filipino taxi driver about his favorite book -- Blink.

Initial response. A couple of recent watershed moments seem like the culmination of long slogging culminating in sudden shifts: LGBT marriage rights (in the USA and globally) and the removal of the Confederate battleflag from government buildings in the USA. These are the result of tipping points -- not complete shocks, but still surprising after seeing only incremental change  over many years.

Black Swan Events seem more "out of the blue." Two examples: one, the sudden plunge in gasoline/petrol prices in late 2014 from which such prices still have yet to "recover;" two, the sudden end to a depressing five year drought in Texas just this past May (2015). 

The drop in gas prices was wild. The follow-up question is, how did various people and groups respond to this change? 

The wild spike in rain in Texas was an even bigger surprise. True, climate change models have long suggested wild fluctuations in historical climate patterns, locally and regionally. However, no one to my knowledge could or did predict with any exactness what happened in the large area in and around Texas. Indeed, it was called a "one in two thousand year event" (when in fact, due to climate change, it may become a one in two year event -- maybe). 

Late spring flooding in Texas was a disaster for many, but overall, such heavy rains suddenly providing a dramatic reprieve to drought conditions is worth noting and remembering in the future. Here, it's generally better to have too much "fresh" water than not enough. There is some general prediction that California might also be rained out because of the formation of El Niño, which if it materializes would provide a tipping point against the current drought, if not (because of fairly detailed models) exactly a Black Swan Event. 

Cool to ponder. What other kinds of tipping points and Black Swan Events have people noticed lately?

Today's Rune: The Self. 

Mexican Revolution 100: US Forces Seize Veracruz, 1914

"U.S. Sailors entering Post Office, Vera Cruz." Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

Why were US armed forces taking over Veracruz one hundred years ago this week?

To quote Andy Warhol halfway in time between then and now, between now and then (for time is a double helix, and a vapory one at that): Why was this happening in 1914? 

"I don't know, what do you think?"

 

"Gathering [Mexican] Dead, Vera Cruz," 1914. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.  

"Every picture tells a story, don't it?" -- as that song by Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood from the early 1970s notes.

"Jackies entering barracks at Vera Cruz," July 15, 1914.  Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.  

 

Funeral parade in New York City for US armed forces killed in Veracruz, summer of 1914. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

'. . . I do hereby, under my authority as commanding officer of the military forces of the United States of America, proclaim that martial law exists in the City of Vera Cruz and the territory contiguous thereto now occupied by the forces under my command, and that such law shall be thereafter extended to such additional territory as may hereafter be occupied by my forces . . . Done at the City of Vera Cruz, this twenty-sixth [26th] of April, one thousand nine hundred and fourteen [1914] -- (Signed) F. F. Fletcher, Rear Admiral United States Navy, Commanding the forces of the United States of American now occupying Vera Cruz [aka Veracruz].' 

2014: Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Yemen -- what next?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.  

Friday Night Lights

Checking out the 2006-2011 Texas-based TV series Friday Night Lights. It seems warm and familiar like The Last Picture Show (1971) or Dazed and Confused (1993) but also fresh and new, luxuriating in longer term character development, extensive moral dilemmas and the annual cycle of American football seasons. Very good stuff.

You can look at this from multiple angles. For instance: change versus tradition, sort of like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1948).  The cool thing is that Friday Night Lights lets you see change as both a good thing and a sad thing; same for tradition. What is football, anyway? What does football -- or any popular social ritual -- mean to people, and why? Is it important, or whimsical, or both? Is it healthy, or damaging, or both? Is it life-affirming, or life-denying, or both? 

One can empathize with all the main characters, no matter where they're coming from or going. I like that. It's a fun, thoughtful and engaging series.  Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.  

Today's Rune: Partnership.    

Fort Worth Perambulation

What the hell, what the heck is going on here? Sundance Square's new building construction -- from vantage point of the alleyway near the sneaky elevator entrance to the Jazz Scat Lounge.

Art Deco detail, Sinclair Building (1930) entrance. Oil barons here closely equivalent to auto barons in Detroit. Kindred spirits, as it were.

Same alleyway as the first photo looking in the opposite direction. Elevator entrance down to the Jazz Scat Lounge, situated in the basement of the F. W. Woolworth Building (1926). So far, I haven't been able to determine if there was a sit-in here at Woolworth's in the early 1960s -- or anywhere else in Texas.

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).

The Great Blackout of 2003 in the US and Canada

For those who found themselves on this date ten years ago located within any swath of North America ranging from Detroit to Toronto to Manhattan, here's an oft-evocative writing prompt: "How did you respond to the Great Blackout of 2003?"

I've already gotten more than 100 responses so far, forming a mosaic of tales tall and short, muted and loud. The folks trapped in an elevator when the power failed. The heat. The food sizzling on grills in backyards and alleyways. The mad dashes from place to place grand and small. Generators. Boozing. Car radios. Dancing in the streets. Bartering by flashlight. All of it and more! How about you? 

Of course, some folks ain't never even done heard of nothing like such a thing. But there ya go, that's the way of the world and all the people in it. Go ask them that's stuck in Cairo or Aleppo on this date today, in the year 2013. Or in the parlance of our day:

***What?***

Today's Rune: Journey.   

The Ottoman Empire and the Great War of 1914-1918

In developing a mock online class on The Great War and the 1920s for training purposes, it's been interesting to connect the dots between the end of the Ottoman Empire -- and the intention of the Allied Powers to divvy up its territories -- to today's political and cultural developments throughout these same areas. Notice that Syria is smack-dab in the middle of this map of the Middle East.

For starters, all one need do is look at these maps to see the jigsaw puzzling impact of the Great War of 1914-1918 and its aftermath in the region, and on the world.

Here are some of my notes for such a class so far:

Unit 1, Lesson 2. The Ottoman Empire in Context.

Objectives:

To understand what was at stake for the Ottoman Empire in 1914.

To understand why the Ottomans allied themselves to the Central Powers.

To analyze why the Allied Powers sought access to Ottoman territories.

To analyze the strategic importance of geography and natural resources to all players.

Read G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918 (Delacorte Press, 2006), pages  74-79.

What was at stake for the Ottoman Empire in 1914?

Why did the Ottomans ally themselves with the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires?

Why did the British, French and Russian Empires want access to territories under the control of the Ottoman Empire?

Consider resources and geography. Petroleum and waterways.

Unit 1, Lesson 3. Gallipoli.

Objectives:

To understand the Allied campaign to capture Constantinople/Istanbul.

To analyze how the Ottoman Turks contained the Allied attack at Gallipoli.

To understand the political and cultural impact of the Gallipoli Campaign.

Gallipoli Disaster. Read G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918 (Delacorte Press, 2006), pages  265-272.

What was the Allied plan to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war?

How did the Ottoman Turks contain the Allied attack at Gallipoli?

Additional reading (primary sources): James Hannah, ed., The Great War Reader (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2000), pages 151-164.

Unit 1, Lesson 4. Armenian Genocide.

Objectives:

To understand why the Ottoman leadership conceived of its Armenian population as enemies.

To analyze the role of the Russian Empire in Ottoman calculation.

To understand the essential details of the Armenian Genocide.

To understand the aspirations of the Armenian and Kurdish peoples.

To analyze the longterm political and cultural impact of the Armenian Genocide.

Read G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918 (Delacorte Press, 2006), pages  289-291.

Why did the leadership of the Ottoman Empire scapegoat the Armenian population?

What was the role of the Russian Empire in Ottoman calculations?

Unit 1, Lesson 5. Palestine Front. Read G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918 (Delacorte Press, 2006), pages  538-541.

Unit 1, Lesson  6. Mesopotamia Campaign, 1915-1918.

Lieutenant General Frederick S. Maude after Allied capture of Baghdad in 1917: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators."

Critical thinking. What were the main objectives of the Allied forces in Mesopotamia?

What was the role of disease and the medical corps in the Mesopotamia Campaign?

Unit 1, Lesson 7. Treaty of Versailles, Treaty of Sèvres,  Mandate System. Emergence of Modern Turkey (Greek War, Smyrna). Syria and Lebanon, Palestine, etc. 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. Maps: UK National Archives.   

Butterfly Kiss

Butterfly Kiss is the ninth Michael Winterbottom film noted on this site and was his first theatrical release (1995). It's a creepy independent tale set mostly along "motorways" and "carriageways" and in and around "petrol stations" in northern England. Eunice (Amanda Plummer, who happens to be Christopher Plummer's daughter), a sort of Pied Piper of secretive mayhem, draws a neophytic devotee (Miriam, played by Saskia Reeves) into her orbit. Interesting film, particularly its psychological and quasi-religious dimensions. Also, Plummer and Reeves together are compelling.

Today's Rune: Gateway.    

     

Michelangelo Antonioni: Il Grido (Take III)

Now for the basic set-up of Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido (1957). In the small Italian village where Aldo (Steve Cochran) works as a mechanic at the local mill less than a dozen years after the end of the Second World War, Irma, his seven-year paramour, learns that her absentee husband has died overseas. Turns out she has another man, too, Luigi (though we never see him). With her husband dead, she breaks things off with Aldo, despite the fact that they have a young daughter (Rosina).

Aldo freaks out, and after trying to change Irma's mind, quits his steady job and heads out for a vagabond trip with Rosina to parts unknown. Along the way, they have adventures involving an ex-paramour and a new one (Virginia -played by Dorian Gray aka Maria Mangini, pictured above), before he decides to send Rosina back. Aldo then vaguely hooks up with a freelance prostitute (Adreina -- Lynn Shaw) who is struggling to survive. 

My favorite section is Aldo and Rosina's stay with Virginia and her boozing father Guerrino. Here we learn more of representative socioeconomic changes already noticeable in earlier parts of the film. Guerrino is losing his farm to development, and Virginia has taken him to a house/petrol station on a pre-superhighway transportation route where she can eek out a living and give him a place to stay. Virginia's husband is dead (possibly as a result of the war), as well as her mother. Aldo helps out -- for a while. We come to understand all of them better from this experience. Poor drunken Guerrino tries to throw rocks at developers as they are cutting down some of his trees. This "Myth of Sisyphus" moment is repeated on a grander scale in the final section of the movie. 

Even though from the retelling Il Grido may seem like a pitiful tale, it has a stark beauty to it, almost like a mix of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and a Thomas Hardy novel. It contains both tragedy and straight realism. Too, Aldo at times appears almost comic in his brooding, which adds another dimension to the film. All five of the major women characters seem to "get" him better than he understands himself. Aldo and Irma's daughter Rosina adds urgency and poignancy to the story, raising the stakes. The way she sees things (including many strange people) is made clear, drawing one's attention to various additional social details.

Poor Aldo. But in the end, my favorite characters are Virginia, Guerrino, Rosina and Adreina. This inspires a question: what makes certain characters more appealing than others? 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.     
    

Michelangelo Antonioni: Il Grido (Take II)

And now it's time to delve into the title of Antonioni's absorbing film Il grido (1957).

The raw English translation ("The Cry") doesn't do it justice, doesn't convey the necessary gravitas. Nowadays in English, a "cry" sounds almost feeble, or baby-like. Something more like jeremiad or lamentation is suggested.

Most readers will have seen some kind of representation or reproduction of Edvard Munch's 1893 painting called in English The Scream and in Norwegian Skrik (and in German, as part of a set, Der Schrei der Natur), yes? 

Check out the Italian variations for Skrik: L'urlo o Il grido. Now we're getting somewhere that's not lost in the translation. Consider Il Grido more like The Scream than The Cry. Despair in the face of change and instability. Aldo, the main protagonist (played convincingly by Steve Cochran, an American), despairs to such a degree that one can easily imagine his inner psyche reflected by the Munch painting.

Today's Rune: Signals.     

Michelangelo Antonioni: Il Grido (Take I)

Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido (1957) spotlights a fleeting period in modern life. Here, the setting is along the Po River valley in northern Italy less than twelve years after the end of the Second World War. A lot is going on in the background. There's painful recovery from the mass destruction and dislocation of war. And there's new mechanization, encroaching corporate development, evident transition from agrarian ecology to industrialization. Displacement. Wandering people, and people attached to villages and farms even as they are being upstaged by petrol stations, trucks moving up and down the main pre-superhighway transporation routes, speedboats racing in the river, airplanes droning overhead. The poor, for the most part, remain poor, scrounging from day to day and week to week.

Traditional delivery continues apace. We see a woman come by a house and sell a handful of fresh eggs from a basket, and a man delivers fresh milk, ladles it into a pot for heating up. Men work at a local sugar refinery in the first town we see, a transitional industry not yet fully automated. Food is hand-picked at the local market, in small towns that have one. A raised handmade flag on a stick signals for a passing doctor to stop and make a housecall. "It's just malaria," he says. It's a world away from today's "West," these black and white scenes from Italy in the 1950s, and it's astonishing to see.

Today's Rune: Protection.         

The Devil's Double

Lee Tamahori's The Devil's Double (2011) spotlights Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein's deranged son Uday and his double, Latif Yahia (on whose memoir the movie is based). It's good, violent in the way mobster movies usually are, with the spectacle of Uday Hussein standing in for all Caligula-type psychopaths thrust into positions of power in various places down through the ages. Caligula (or "Bootsy," 12-41 AD), the Roman Emperor, has a particularly bad reputation due to his excessive cruelty and flippant decision-making (such as appointing a favorite horse to be Proconsul). 

On the one hand, Uday Hussein (1965-2003) represents a universal archetype of unchecked abuse of power vested in individual people. On the other, the moviewatcher may learn more specifically about modern Iraq, the Iran-Iraq War and the Persian Gulf War -- the historical backdrop to the story of Uday and his decoy-double.

The idea of doubles is not new, and Saddam Hussein is said to have had several. In one memorable scene (due to its surreal imagery) in The Devil's Double, two Saddams are seen playing each other in a game of tennis. Creepy, man -- the stuff of doppelgänger nightmares.

Today's Rune: Defense.

Richard Linklater's 'Bernie'

I've now managed to see Richard Linklater's indie film Bernie (2011-2012) three times thanks in part to holiday gatherings. It's sort of like a mordantly comical variation on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866) blended with Bob Balaban's Bernard and Doris [Duke] (2006), but set "Behind the Pine Curtain" of East Texas.

Basically, horrible harridan Mrs. Nugent (I wouldn't be surprised if she was related in some way to rabid Tea Party nut Ted Nugent) becomes dubiously enmeshed with kindly conman Bernie Tiede, an assistant funeral director from Louisiana. Most of the people of Carthage, Texas, seem to have always detested Mrs. Nugent, while they take quite a shine to newcomer Bernie. As one woman puts it thinking back after his trial, Bernie had the rare ability to "make the whole world seem kind."

We know ahead of time that Bernie will end up shooting 81-year old Mrs. Nugent with her own armadillo rifle, despite her having already willed him her estate (which she'd in turn inherited from her deceased husband, a rich oilman). 

In Bernie, Shirley MacLaine (as Marge Nugent) and Matthew McConaughey (as Panola County, Texas, D.A. Danny Buck Davidson) seem to be enjoying their roles throughout -- one can even detect a few times where McConaughey seems about to crack up after delivering one of Danny Buck's absurd pronouncements.

Jack Black deserves high accolades for his outstanding performance in the lead role. He's got Bernie Tiede down pat -- accent, mannerisms and vibe. Plus, he can sing little gospel songs at funerals quite well.

In addition, the film is interspersed with the quips of numerous real-life observers from Carthage. Finally, Brady Coleman is right on the money as Bernie's defense lawyer, Scrappy Holmes. 

If you want yet another taste of Texas weirdness, you might want to check Bernie out.

Today's Rune: Harvest.          

Where the West Begins

Glen Sample Ely's Where the West Begins: Debating Texas Identity (Lubbock: Texas Tech University, 2011) does indeed debate Texas identity. Is Texas part of the American South, the American West, unto itself, or some other realm entirely?  All of the above. It is also First Nation country (think Caddo, etc.) or passageway (think Comanche, Kiowa, etc.), New Spain with a touch of New France, Mexico, Lone Star Republic, Annexed State, Slave State, Seceded State, Embattled State, Occupied State, cotton state, cattle state, oil and gas state, drought, fire and Dustbowl state, and in some areas emerging -- eco-preserve state. To a large extent, Ely shows, it depends on how much rainfall arrives: less than twenty inches per year west of the 100th meridan: the West. Transitional zone between the 100th and 98th meridian: Shatterbelt Region. Then transitioning to East Texas = Old South. Let's not forget South Texas, either.  

Upon closer inspection of Texas in its entirety, anyone and everyone would find a more complex milieu than that typically presented by either Texas promoters or detractors. It's a diverse place, with pockets not so diverse and other pockets more so. 

The history of Texas has oft been violent and cruel, but there is also a countercurrent of resilience, imagination, and adaptation to change. Plus good food and music, among other things. But some is Western, some is Southern, some is a mix or becoming very made over indeed.   

Fort Worth, the place (or at least a place) "where the West begins" according to some, is as good a place to point to the current diversity of Texas as any. According to the latest federal census reports (2010-2012), Fort Worth is now the 16th largest and most populated city in the USA -- one notch above Charlotte, North Carolina, and now two above Detroit, Michigan. 

Demographics of Fort Worth as of 2010 (rounded):

19% African American/Black
 3%  Multiracial
 1% American Indian/First Nation
34% Hispanic/Latino
41% Anglo/Non-Hispanic White
 4% Asian 

That's diverse by any standard. More to come on various aspects of this topic, no doubt.  

Today's Rune: Signals.      

Eating Some Sort of Food . . .

A. Q & A Session. 

1. Is there a food you used to like and now hate, or vice versa?

2. Is there a kind of cuisine that tastes better (or worse) now than say five or ten years ago?


B. Theme Session.

Then one day he was shooting for some food,
And up through the ground come a bubbling crude . . .

-- "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" (1962)

 . . . eating some sort of food . . . -- William S. Burroughs (1986)

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).

The Integral Accident and the Shock of the Global

Everything that's going on now in the world was foreseen already in the 1970s, and not just by science fiction writers. It's good to step back from where we are and look backwards and forwards, then at the year 2012.  Many of the same political battles are being fought, the same kinds of wars. What is different?  Global communications. Some new industrial technologies and processes have come along, and with  them -- as Paul Virilio has pointed out -- new types of industrial accidents: "When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution . . . Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress."  (Virilio,1999). Good thing to remember, one hundred years after the sinking of the RMS Titanic and nearly a hundred years after the Great War, the "War to End All Wars."

Examples of exactly what Paul Virilio means abound. Just take the past decade, right off the bat: the levee and surge protection (engineering and planning) failures in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (2005), the Deepwater Horizon explosion and Gulf of Mexico oil spill (2010) and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown in the wake of the 311 Earthquake and Tsunami (2011).  Engineering wonders, engineering failures. In economics, the 2008 global financial crisis, from which many parts of the world are still reeling. In wars, things go awry, too, and one can surmise that more disasters are already in the works.  

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.  

Jean-Luc Godard: Film Socialisme (Take II)

Godard's Film Socialisme (2010): funhouse, kaleidoscope, house of horrors. Beauty, ugliness. The better angels of our nature, the lesser demons of our nature. Literature and petroleum products. Art and war. A voyage on the Costa Concordia before it sinks.

"Money is a public good."
"Like water?"
"Exactly."

Egyptian hieroglyphs, jarring noises. Patti Smith with guitar. William S. Burroughs. “Casablanca, Algeria, Cairo.” Digital shambolic. David Lynch: INLAND EMPIRE (2006). Patterns. Questions. Suggestions. Palestine.

“I turned away so as not to see.”

Culture bank, watches, gold. Today, past, future. Crisp. Documentary quality. A slice of Robert Altman. “You will have friends.”

"Quo Vadis, Europa – Where are you going, Europe?"
“We look at ourselves in wars like in a mirror.”
“It takes guts to think . . . You have to love yourself enough not to harm your neighbor. . .”

"When you hear your own voice, where does it come from?"

Werner Herzog, Luis Buñuel. A llama, a burro, a petrol pump, a woman reading Balzac: Illusions perdues /Lost Illusions (1837-1843).
“I’m going back down south.”
“If you make fun of Balzac, I’ll kill you.”
To be or to have?  Erich Fromm (1976).

A long line, a suggestion box.

"Today’s August 4, right?"
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of Night / Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932). 
1789, August 4.
Saint Just ‘89.

Tactile, sinks, kitchens, washing up.
Florine and Lucien.
TEXT.

"Liberate and federate our humanity."

"On neither the sun, nor death, can we look fixedly." François de La Rochefoucauld.

Steps of Odessa – Battleship Potempkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
Eye of the camera, ears.
Man with a Movie Camera / Человек с киноаппаратом (Dziga Vertov aka David Kaufman, Elizaveta Svilova, Mikhail Abramovich Kaufman, 1929).

Hellas, Greece: Cassandra.

Brion Gysin, cut-up.
Space-time-puzzle.

"When the law isn’t just, justice precedes law."

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Flimflam

Gadzooks, how much flimflam spam and scam can we spic and span? Advertisements come at us from every direction. Are they the most influential way to communicate?

What ads look like phony-baloney in 2011?  I'd start with all the meds, pills and medicine man hogwash. Then I'd proceed to insurance and financial companies, anything to do with automobiles, energy corporations, beer-related fantasies and . . . well, you name it. But above all, consider your Adam's Apple!!      

Hey, must be good: it's toasted.  

Liar, liar, pants on fire: No wonder we're skeptical.

Today's Rune: Harvest.  

Tosin Otitoju Interview, Part II

Erik's Choice (EC): You’ve lived in Nigeria, the USA, Egypt and Yemen. Your next poetry collection (Yalla! / Let’s Go) was inspired by your stay in Yemen. What is it about Yemen? Do you have any comments about the tumult that’s going on there right now?

Tosin Otitoju (TO): Yalla! has poems from several places - Nigeria, America, Arabia.

What is it about place -- place matters. Humans can move. When one place sucks, you move and guess what? End of tyranny or the particular problems of that place. It describes place, takes the reader to some places . . .

What is it about Yemen? It was the most special place I had been. It was a preserve of something pure, less average. In other countries, the copying from other cultures is so much that new experiences are rare. Here, newness was all around. Love the architecture, lessons for us about choosing functional designs, lessons in attention to beauty. Then I did really feel such happiness, such release from being somewhat depressed in California. I can't imagine not being a little depressed in California. Hot summer days were much better. I did like the food and restaurants. I once had a sunny boyfriend. I did many happy things. But in Yemen I was the complete opposite of depressed.

The tumult -- Yemenis will often fix Yemeni society. Yemen is not about the USS Cole or whatever intersection with US National Security. Sad that for now the economy must be suffering. Proud that they are fighting for something better. God let me go back, Amen.

EC: Nigeria has approximately 155 million people and is about 50-50% Muslim-Christian and also about 50-50% urban-rural. Lagos has some eight million people, fifteen million in the greater area. Nigeria’s population will probably surpass that of the USA in the second half of the 21st century. What is Nigeria’s ideal place in the world? What is your ideal place in the world?

TO: I can't verify the data; I won't be surprised if the US has better data on Nigeria than Nigeria. :) Ideal is what we want it to be and for many Nigerians it would be a return to good values (kill corruption, for instance); respect among nations (living up to the name 'giant of Africa' for instance); wealth (and it's not going to come from oil, it's going to take work, at least some large and efficient structures/organizations, attention to the minimum/the poorest, increased access to capital). I think Nigerians are irritated that we fail so much, when we think we ought to be winners.

My ideal place: I still want to travel. I still want to honeymoon in Yemen (assuming I marry that Rafa character, lol). I learned from Caltech to see work as central to a person's life. This is a little bad, perhaps, but in life I want to be where I'm doing the important work that I must do. This instant it's in Nigeria (in a writer's residency - see? we have one . . .) but I'm considering California again. Variety rocks, so yeah I want to do the Morocco/Turkey axis with its colours and spices, but also the beach -- which Nigeria has, but also the black -- in Africa, Cuba, wherever, but also the Louvre and the cold, the wealthy, the old, the run-down, the natural. I want to see my old friends, I want to hovel in my little room, I want to go on the cheap, and I want to do Monte Carlo in expensive style. Is there enough time to live all these lives? Hmm, maybe I should be an actor, lol.

EC: Can you say something about the different groups such as Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Edo? And the role of OPEC and oil and gas production in Nigeria?)

TO: On Oil and Gas and OPEC - Nigeria fights the so-called "resource curse." For a while now, this distorted our economy, too easy to rob the nation at the center, too easy to ignore every other possible source of income, when you have oil. Cool story: illustrates.

On ethnicity: So many languages. Three are said to be major, but is it really three? Or four?

The North, with predominantly Hausa and Fulani speakers reminds me of Arabia; it's the more Muslim half of Nigeria. I felt at home up North but many Southerners don't see the value in going to the North. I am from the South, in the Yoruba region, i.e. I speak Yoruba. We like to stereotype one another. The distinct groups are still large and important, but there is quite some traveling and inter-marrying so we're not free to really hate one another. There is a system of government in which we try to make everything equal, regionally speaking. It insures against civil war, although some would say it slows down our development.

Cool story: here on stereotypes; and a sad story on the worst of our follies: here.

That writer (former colleague, amazing work) also wrote this.

I've got to rearrange, edit and publish it someday, he's so damn lazy, but it's clear that he has a real insight into our miscommunication across tribes.

Endnote: I've dated a few Nigerians finally but never dated a straight-up Yoruba guy. The closest I've got were mixes. But most Nigerians, even in faraway countries or in mixed cities/universities/environments, seek out exclusively their own ethnic group.

Today's Rune: Movement.  For more, please also see here.

Franny Armstrong: The Age of Stupid

Franny Armstrong's The Age of Stupid (2009) does a great service: in a pithy, entertaining way, it is conciousness-raising. How does it work?  Several stories are interwoven in a way that draws the viewer in, from multiple perspectives: a world archivist in the year 2055 (played by Pete Postlethwaite, who died earlier this year), dudes from post-Katrina New Orleans, from Mumbai and France; Iraqi refugee kids living in Jordan; an English family that is trying to establish wind power in their area; and Layefa Malemi, a woman living in rural Nigeria. This approach most definitely personalizes the film, an interesting mix of documentary (present or near past) and fiction (the near future).

Much more to discuss with The Age of Stupid, which was released in that relatively brief period between Hurricane Katrina (2005) and the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (2010). It also happens to tie in perfectly with the "Arab Spring," "Occupy Wall Street" and other happenings of 2011 by showing how power structures and resource exploitation are more or less the same around the world -- and tied together.

Today's Rune: Opening.