ONCE UPON a        TIME
                                                                                          ezine at l'atelier bonita
                                                     established since december 2002

ALPHABET CITIES                                       by Bonita 5 JANUARY 2003 - Harvard University. On the road again for four weeks and returning to Marseille in early February. Welcome to my coast-to-caost journals. Alphabet Cities: Blogging Across the USA - January 2003 A is for America. The continent, I mean. The one that includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Guyana, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela ... have we forgotten there are places outside of the U.S.? (5 Jan 03 Cambridge) B is for Basic Law, Article 23 of Hong Kong. A kindred soul with whom I have been conversing on issues regarding Article 23 mailed earlier today. "... In future years, when we look back over this sad episode, nobody will deny that the Government was the decisive winner. With the gift of hindsight however, I wonder just how many people will come to truly believe that unfortunately, Hong Kong herself was the loser." (2 Jan 03 NYC) C is for ... D is for Dance, Dance, Dance. Haruki Murakami's novella tells of a creature who sneaks into people's dreams, entices them with earthly delights and steals the subjects' conscience. Eventually the men die but the dancing creature lives on, and on. (4 Jan 03 Boston) E is for Umberto Eco. And to the crowd who are still burning intellectuals, Signor Eco's Crisi della crisi della ragione just WON'T BURN. Ha! (4 Jan 03 Boston) F is for Fear. On 11 December, 2002, police shut down the Union Square subway station in New York City for an entire afternoon after they found 37 black boxes with the words "fear" painted on them. It was revealed later that it was a class project of Clinton Boisvert, first year art student at the School of Visual Art. If convicted, Boisvert faces a possible jail sentence as a terrorist. Fear. What would be the outcome, one wonders, if the boxes were painted with the logo of a major corporation, like, MSNBC? Good heavens, have we forgotten our sense of irony? (1 Jan 03 NYC) G is for Globe. A man went to the immigration office and told the clerk he wanted to expatriate. "Where are you going?" The clerk asked. "I don't know." The man answered. The clerk showed him a globe. The man spinned it around several times, then asked. "Is there another one with different places on it?" (1 Jan 03 NYC) H is for Homeland Security. In German, it is Heimat Sicherheit. Heimat means Motherland, or, homeland, a very old word used by the Nazi Party during World Wat II to rally extreme nationalism. Must we be reminded of this unpleasant phrase of history? We must have some very old and vindictive people in power in Washington. But why? (3 Jan 03 Washington DC) I is for Intellectuals. It remains a mystery to me why so many right wing Americans hate the word "intellectual." So I put the question to several close friends in Europe, Asia and Canada. Here are some of their answers. I would define an intellectual as one who thinks about a topic long enough to find a some sort of resolution and then leaves that topic for another. .......... I think the state encourages negative reactions towards intellectuals because you can't put a pound or dollar sign on what they do. Their role is directly opposed to that of the state in a sense, in that they think about/analyse the world, and this is the last thing the state wants anyone to do. The state wants us to do as we are told, not think for ourselves, and learn an economically viable skill so that we can be well behaved little worker drones. Which is why we don't teach philosophy in our schools. .......... I think that is why there isn't this strange split between intellectuals/non-intellectuals in France, say, where it is encouraged in schools from an early age. Yes, I don't think what is seen as intellectualism is something only for the elite. I think it is projected that way to put people off. .......... It's difficult, because everyone has a different idea of what constitutes an intellectual. I'm sure most intellectuals would resist definition and pigeonholing anyway. For me, someone like Chomsky is an intellectual - by and large his work would be considered non-vital, even indulgent. He is, after all, making a living simply from spouting his own opinion. If he and people like him were discouraged from intellectual endeavour then the world would go on, but it wouldn't be a world I would like very much. (5 Jan 03 Cambridge) J is for ... K is for Killers. I could not believe my eyes when I saw US Secretary of State Colin Powell making a high tech sales presentation to rally the world into killing citizens of another country as if he was doing a Wednesday morning round to sell the boss's newest widgets. What about people's lives? Are the lives of men, women and children of Iraq not worth considering? Are we returning to Byron's times when "lives aren't worth the price of a pair of knickers?" During Powell's speech, Picasso's reknown anti-war masterpiece "Guernica" which was hung outside the UN Security Council, was covered up by a blue sheet. (5 February 03 New Haven, Connecticut) L is for Love. It is difficult to understand why something that pulls all of us from gravity is actually ... transparent. In his State of the Union address tonight, George W. Bush spoke of "terrorism" 17 times, "war" 66 times, "weapons of mass destruction" 20 times, "axis of evil" 20 times, "homeland security," "fight" and "patriotism" 21 times. The word "engage" was never mentioned. It is far more important to remember those who love us, silently and unconditionally, than to carry grudges about the people who we don't like. Very difficult to do, yes. Then again, that's the essense of love. (29 Jan 03, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri) M is for Movies. I think "Bowling for Columbine" and "Talk to Her" is the same movie viewed differently. The former being a metaphor of male aggression and the latter its feminine counterpart. Both are about the violation of the self. (1 Jan 03 NYC) N is for Name. What's in it? Why do people in the US refrain from using the word "liberal," as if it is the plague of the century? And where did the experts in the White House dig up terms like "regime change"? Why didn't they just call it a coup d'etat when we used that against Iraq? If we black-list certain words, why don't we shelf certain other words as well? Over November-December 2002, I visited a new political forum and found, to my amazement, that some posters had described "intellectuals" as "leftists," "elitists," "communist." These names left me much bewildered as I have always thought that these were definitions of three very different ideologies. A number of American and conservative posters had also described citizens who voted for members of the US Democratic Party as "poor people who are uneducated, liberal and left-leaning." Now I Am profoundly puzzled. Since when is being poor equated with being uneducated? I have seen many iliterate megamillionaires on television, some of them have even gone through Yale University and are still uneducated. If people want to call each other names then why should the term "liberal" or "Democrat" or "leftist" be singled out for scrutiny? Why can't we jeer, "Republican! Republican! Republican!"? There. But nothing's changed. After perusing the forum for a few more weeks, I departed. At heart, we are all equal. Yet too often we have ignored this fact until we have torn each other to smithereens. To those who asked, I shall answer with this passage from Lao Tsu's Tao Te Ching. Look, and it can't be seen. Listen, and it can't be heard. Reach, and it can't be grasped... Just realize where you come from: this is the essence of wisdom. Name-calling will not change the world. Isn't it time to try something a bit old-fashion, like, compassion? (13 Jan 03 Chicago) O is for Optimists and Obsolescence. Has anyone ever thought about electing a martyr as statesman? If somebody else, namely, your mayor, governor, senator or president dies for each crime we commit, will rules and guidelines be obsolete? If there exists on Planet Earth only one morally courageous species known as homo sapien, then laws and order are instated for the benefits of all things human. But this is not so. It seems that rules and guidelines, on the whole, are installed to protect those in power. And in time of crisis, the laws never really "protect" the citizens but rather pushing them further into the firing line. "We were elected in the hope that we would do what is in the long term interests of human society as a whole, what is in the interest of the freedom, security, and dignity of all of us, what is in the interest of our life in peace and prosperity," said former Czech president Vaclav Havel in his farewell speech. But why did he vote to attack Iraq? ... ode to Optimists and Obsolescence ... (30 Jan 03 Toledo, Ohio) P is for [a gift of a haiku] Poem. Pygmy intellect Excessive testosterone Boy's toys in Iraq (23 Jan 03 Los Angeles) Q is for ... R is for Rien. I don't know if you remember the dialogue between Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard's "À Bout de Souffle" - JS: William Faulkner said, "Between despair and nothing, I'd choose despair ..." JPB: "Fvckwit. In the end, there's only nothing. Nothing." If peace defines the stability of a government and war reaffirms the stability of a handful of megamillionaires; in between the great divide, there exists nothing. And in the silence, there rises our sullen art. Regardless of history, the law, reason, wars. "Si tous les dégoutés s´en vont, il n´y a plus que les dégoutants qui restent." To the beautiful man who told me his favorite leftist saying, I raise my hat high. Once more. Rien. (21 Jan 03, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) S is for ... San Francisco peace march, 18 January, 2003 Still a poet of a city ... sweet SF, will you be an inspiration again? (18 Jan 03, San Francisco) T is for ... U is for Urban Outfitters. They can ride all night long but sometime before 7 a.m., transit police will hurry them off the subway trains. The first wave of morning commuters arrive, holding their noses and brief cases by Prada, Guess, D&G, Diesel, Urban Outfitters. Oddly, whenever I enter a train still soaked in the scent of homelessness, I feel not only for the men and women wandering on fringes of society, but a tremendous sadness for our pack of perfectly manicured urbanites and the fates of their tragic-comic existence. (14 Jan 03, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois) V is for Value. Human value, according to the London School of Economics, is quantifiable. If V = human value W = hourly wage (in USD) t = tax rate C = local price index Personal value can be obtained by using this formula V = (W(100-t))/100/C Considering time wasted in monetary terms, the negative value of a single employed person who cooks supper after a full day of work is * For an individual who is familiar with food preparation: USD 13.00 per hour * For an individual who is unfamiliar with food preparation: USD 15.00 per hour * For an individual who orders takeaway's: USD 9.00 per hour In summary, the average personal value of * An employed male: USD 9.00 * An employed female: USD 7.00 If one follows the results of the London School of Economics equation, an employed person is worth USD 0.15 (fifteen cents) per minute. Considering the average computer rental rate of USD 0.30 (thrity cents) per minute, human values are indeed a lot cheaper than a PC at Kinko's. (19 Jan 03 San Francisco) W is for What if... "The Hours," a film underwritten by males, for males, of males and slaps the faces of literature, feminism, gender identity, poverty, and, yes, crabs; is to be remade with an all-male cast? Think about this: Ed Harris will play Virginia Woolf, Tom Hanks as Laura Brown, Jack Nicholson as Clarissa Vaugh, Tom Cruise as Vanessa Bell... ho, ho ,ho. I can just see Nicholson emptying out a massive dish of fancy food into the trash bin after a party was called off -- while only a few subway stops away, inner city children are starving. (23 Jan 03 Los Angeles) X is for a song ... At 10 p.m. sharp, the rooming house turned off its hot water supply. I opened my files, taking care not to let my icy, dripping hair soil the image of Murillo's "The Return of the Prodigal Son." Downstairs, the concierge rurned up the late news as Faye Wong sang into my headphones. Long time no see, Chi-town. Tv: "This is wartime ..." Faye: "You have the wrong number ..." Tv: "This is wartime ..." Faye: "I told, you, wrong number ..." Tv: "This is wartime ..." Faye: "May be years from now, you'd regret this ..." 2:15 a.m. I had a chance to walk through the Thorne Rooms again at the Art Institute yesterday. The radio announced the weather, 8 degrees Farenheit, gusty, clear. (15 Jan 03 Chicago) Y is for ... Z is for Zhang Yimou. This one is for money, the next one's for me. Was this what Zhang Yimou was trying to say in his latest film "Hero"? But what if there will be no "next one"? And if the "next one" will also be for money? "Hero" is a visual feast reminiscent of another film created with the same allure 71 years ago - when Leni Riefenstahl glorified her Hitler in "das blaue Licht." There is no there there. When an artist becomes a salaried man, what next? (3 Jan 03 Washignton DC) ©2003 L'Atelier Bonita _____________ A year after receiving her PhD in history, Bonita left New York City to work as a museum curator in Marseille, France. Her publications include J.F.M.: a catalogue raisonné of the graphic art of Jean-François Millet, En Route 1999, and the soon-to-be-published Empire of Our Prodigal Sons. Bonita, who is often seen in her Lazio football jersey, is the editor of Once Upon A Time magazine.

                                                   ONCE UPON      a TIME
                                                                                          ezine at l'atelier bonita
                                                     established since december 2002