Sunday round-up

News snips from today:

Aaronosonovavitch in Guardian sticking to his guns on war and lies. Tony did not deceive the public because he was himself deceived, we learn. DA digs himself further into the morass of his folie a deux with Tony, wherein supernatural explanations can be invoked just to avoid cognitive dissonance in DA's reverence and identification with TB. As a commenter at MLMB notes, it is curiously satisfying to see the hoops DA will jump through to remain on-message.

Michael Howard outBlairs Blair and gets tough on abortion, tough on the causes of abortion, which are fecklessness and immorality. This tightening of controls is another reactionary trend exported from the Land of the Free, where its a vote-loser to support choice.

Off-topic (for some, but not me) is the relevance of the same biological problems of the individual, raised in Organelles, to the abortion issue. The foetus is of the mother but not her, and with its embryological outgrowths of chorionic villus/placenta, functions as an alien invader. Many hazards of pregnancy (from the mother's POV), such as gestational diabetes or pre-eclampsia, are consequences of the foetus's 'selfishness'. In the first condition, the foetus alters circulating levels of insulin to get more sugar from the maternal bloodstream, even though this may make it grow so big as to be in danger of getting stuck during birth. In pre-eclampsia, foetal influences cause rises in maternal blood pressure so that blood flow through the placenta is increased, but again the consequences (maternal kidney damage, status epilepticus) can kill both foetus and mother.

But some foetuses are less important than others. An Afghan woman miscarried in an immigration cell after hours of questioning. Elsewhere in the Sunday Herald, the same journalist writes of the disproportionate impact of anti-terror legislation on Muslim immigrants. It's interesting in this light to assess a recent advert campaign from the Scottish Executive against racism, but then the terrorism/immigration laws arise from the London parliament, and not the Scottish one.

They screened one of these anti-racism adverts at the flicks last night, portraying racism as a transmissable computer virus that shuts down PCs (?metaphor for human minds?). I saw Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita' with two girlfriends, last viewed prolly 15 years ago. It was a good film to see with girls fascinated with the costumes, jewellery and 'types' of women portrayed, and their compelling shelf-like bosoms in their 1959 brassieres. As usual, R couldn't help expressing her emotional reactions in the cinema- gasping, laughing uproariously, sighing. I had to tell her once to shut up in a cinema, but rather enjoyed her last night. L was more circumspect, but we had a good natter afterwards.

Fifteen years ago, I'd been attracted and fascinated with the libertarian lifestyles portrayed, the appearance of Warhol's femme-fatale Nico and the glamourisation of difference for its own sake. Here, only 15 years after WW2 (1959), was a polyglot Rome filled with exotic self-explorers, wild black dancers, rockstars and musicians, poets, princesses, prostitutes, divorcees, trannies and writers. Yesterday, I was appalled by the characters' emptiness, the usury of friends and lovers, the boredom of hedonism, the lack of real family relationships.

R is always interesting on these matters because of her immersion and judgmentalism. She hated Marcello's fiancee, who tries to feed, mother, blackmail and guilt-trip him into loving her. For me, she was the most sympathetic (if flawed) character. I was judgmental too, condemning her weakness in staying with Marcello and trying to change him instead of recognising and rejecting her subordinate, co-dependent relationship. But Marcello, if he was strong or honest, would end the relationship instead of keeping her hanging on for further torture. Love in this film is strikingly absent- the nearest approximation being Staines' murder of his angelic children and suicide.



Of the real women casted by Fellini, Anita Ekberg goes on to live out her Sylvia role through the 60s, while Nico joins Warhol's Factory in the 60s, adopts smack and an itinerant performer lifestyle and dies prematurely in the 90s from a head injury. Fellini's wife (according to R) divorces him when he's about 70, after a lifetime of tolerating his philandering.

O tempora, o mores.