Not Cool Enough For Hollywood?

KevJumba's message is sadly relevant (visit his homepage - cute overload warning). It's not just an American issue. We are being denied Chirayliq potential on a global level. (Found here)
The fact remains that Hollywood productions get distributed around the world, while Asian productions - especially Central Asian, but also the more "marketable" Chinese, Korean and Japanese - frequently are limited to art house cinemas and private initiatives. For example, I wonder if we will ever get to see Goemon anywhere in Europe. (It's a fantasy spectacle based on the legend of Ishikawa Goemon, a thief who stole from the rich and gave to the poor and dared to defy the powerful warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi.) Needless to say, Goemon is full of cool, handsome, cute, sexy and all-round awesome Asian guys and girls.
EDIT: The Trailer was too wide to embed, so you'll just have to go to YouTube by yourself.

You have to keep in mind that Japanese movie budgets are usually only a fraction of the cost of a major Hollywood production. Expect Final Fantasy, not Star Wars. The director of Goemon, Kazuaki Kiriya, is famous for Casshern, a science-fiction epic which doesn't let the special effects get in the way of a good plot and compelling characters. Here's the trailer:

Langston Hughes in Central Asia

Thanks to the blog Moscow Through Brown Eyes, I was inspired to dig up some nice photos of American poet Langston Hughes' travels in early 1930's Soviet Central Asia. The Yale University Library has an online exhibition of Hughes' life (1902-1967) for starters.

In 1932, Hughes boarded the S/S Europa with a group of African-American actors and writers on their way to the Soviet Union. Their purpose was to make a film about the plight of black people in the United States, but after long and fruitless meetings with the Soviet producers, the whole project was scrapped.

Hughes took the chance to travel around Soviet-controlled Central Asia, areas that usually were not accessible to Westerners but that interested him for personal and political reasons. Hughes wanted to find a positive example of a "coloured South" to contrast with the Jim Crow south of the US. He met African-American engineers involved in the modernization of the Soviet cotton industry. He also met the Hungarian intellectual Arthur Koestler, who at the time was a member of the Communist party, but had already begun to develop his critical eye for the system. Hughes was a Communist sympathizer, although no party member - for him the dream of racial equality was so important that he preferred to look away from the harsh realities of famine and oppression. His self-critical period would come later, after WW2.

That said... maybe he was just dazzled by all the chirayliq guys he met on his travels?

From Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library's Langston Hughes collection. Described as "Group photograph of unidentified men and women in Russia, possibly Uzbekistan". See the larger original here.

Young writers of Central Asia, Hughes in the middle. On the backside of the photo there are descriptions in Cyrillic, which the library hasn't bothered to decipher.

Hughes' surprise traveling companion, Arthur Koestler. View the whole image here, plus chicken. Apparently Koestler heard someone play jazz records (this article claims it was Sophie Tucker singing "My Yiddishe Mamme") at a guesthouse in Ashqabat and knocked at the door; imagine his astonishment to find the poet whose works he had admired already in Europe.

Karim Ahmadii is perhaps the name of this man who dedicated his portrait to Hughes in 1933.

This is what Hughes wished to see - a coloured man and a white man shaking hands. His superficial view of Soviet race relations is problematic but understandable from today's perspective. The photo is titled "Yusuf Nichanov".

Back in the United States, Hughes wrote an article on traditional Uzbek dance for Travel Magazine.

He especially admired the "teacup dance", which he simply called "raks" (from raqs, dance), and was intrigued by the batcha - danging boys dressed and made up like women. (More on traditional Uzbek dance here.)

And in case you thought Hughes only had an eye for the guy, here's Tamara Khanum, dancing teacher, first woman to perform without the veil in Uzbekistan. The fate of her colleague Nurkhon shows what a brave act this was.

Langston Hughes wrote about his travels in A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, a short book reprinted as recently as 2006 in Bishkek. There is an interesting discussion about Hughes and the re-publication at the Registan blog.

Blog Tip!

Moscow Through Brown Eyes is a blog by "Buster", a graduate student and former Moscow resident, who combines experiences as an African-American in Russia with a broad interest in culture, society, literature, history and much more, which naturally results in a Chirayliq-heavy mix (as evident in the collection of attractive faces - Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois among others* - in the blog's title image).

Like Tinet, Buster has written a lot about migrant workers in Russia and other issues of social concern, but my favourite feature on MTBE is the recurring Russian Rap Friday. The last two videos have been especially sweet:



Rapper Huligan, Russian from Kazakhstan, gets to the roots with «Я провинциален» ("I'm Country").



Rapper-throatsinger Ondar sings for Tuva in Vladivostok, and Buster finds lots of yummy clips of Yul Brynner (Siberian-born Russian-Swiss-Mongolian-Roma, whom we probably should write about more) as side dishes to the main course.

*) Both Hughes and Du Bois, as well as many other African-American intellectuals, visited the USSR in the 1920's and 1930's. Hughes even travelled extensively in Central Asia in 1932, and visited China and Japan. Here's an article about how Langston Hughes' poetry survives in the school curriculum in Turkmenistan. It's also a very interesting re-telling of the chance meeting and ensuing companionship between Hughes and Arthur Koestler in the heart of Central Asia. There's also an incredible twist at the end of the story...

Howard Zinn

I'm a bit fed up now with my so-called historian career. But what better way to cheer myself up, than checking out history's cutest historians?

Meet Howard Zinn. He is American, but I found a way to weasel him into Chirayliq: His mother emigrated from Irkutsk.

Here, he isn't a professor yet, but a bombardier in the US Air Force in Europe during the Second World War.



This is one of the reasons he has devoted his life to non-violence and pacifist activism, as well as the post-war Civil Rights movement. (In Private Ryan saves war from 1999 and Dissent at the war memorial from 2004, he tells about his experiences.)

I must confess that I have tried to read Zinn's magnum opus A People's History of the United States, but I'm too bleeding-hearted to get past the introduction. Anything he says, I buy it. (Bad historian, Ainur!) You can read it online or check the publisher's site. You should definitely check the People's History website if you're interested in U.S. history - and I think we all ought to be. (There's also a comic version of The People's History, with this touching scene from WW2 Holland.)