It seems Turkish lobby has succeeded to have the backing of 8 former U.S secretary of states. These secretaries served both democrat and republican governments and names such as Madeline Allbright and henry Kissinger and Collin Powell are among them. This time Armenian foreign ministry also came forward and criticized the move. The battle on the congress resolution on Armenian genocide is heating up more and more. you can read the story here.
A new documentary has been broadcasted in the US covering four university students all of whom are are transgendered. (Please skim the Wikipedia article if you don’t have any background on this subject.) It is called TransGeneration. It is on the Sundance and Logo channels (available on most digital cable and sat.)
It is a really great show. There are 8 parts, each of which features all of the four students: two of whom are transitioning female to male and two are transitioning male to female. These young adults are very interesting. Their stories are extremely compelling.
One of the students is T.J., who is Armenian from Cyprus (although he was born in Beiruit.) T.J. went to Melkonian in the 1990s as Tamar and won a Fullbright Scholarship to come to the US.
[T.J.] has embraced college as a place for intellectual, political and personal self-discovery. After graduating at the top of his high school class in Cyprus, T.J. received a Fulbright scholarship to study in the U.S. At Michigan State University in East Lansing, T.J. is part of the campus’ tight-knit transgender community, and openly expresses the male identity he sensed as a very young child. Bright and politically engaged, he has chosen to continue towards a graduate degree in Student Affairs Administration at Michigan State University. But T.J.’s gender expression is irrevocably at odds with his family and community in Cyprus, where he is expected to return after completing graduate work. His mother refuses to talk to him about the subject, and it is no secret that he is expected to sublimate his personal desires to the will of his community. As T.J. plans to a visit home in May, he realizes that he will have to confront his mother and sister about his desire to transition. And T.J. knows that if he is to become the man he deeply feels himself to be, he may never be able to go home.
When T.J. calls his mom in one of the episodes, you can hear the pain in his voice telling his mom that he only wants to visit for a week in the summer. In Armenian it is more painful than the English subtitles, certainly.
If T.J. goes to Cyprus, he will be forced to live as a woman again, something that he is not comfortable with.
Armenian GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered) people have a world of issues to deal with related to their families. T.J.’s story is not unique. Watching this show highlights a number of these issues. I can’t express in words what it is like to see this pain.
(I hate to make it sounds like this show is so upsetting - there are lots of positive moments as well.)
More information about T.J., including an interview.
more…
day 4, noon:
Shopping in Baku. Went to quiksilver. Very nice and attentive staff. All 8 of them. In a tiny shop. Midday on a monday in november. I bought a cute roxy sweater. The staff was typical. I was followed around the store. (which is weird until you realize it is normal even in supermarkets. I tried to pay with a credit card (it was a $40 sweater) but the pulse phone line for the credit card was being used by someone talking. I paid in cash so I have to go to an atm today (but they are all over because the pension system was computerized last year). I also went to miss sixty. the tags on the clothes said distibuted by a Romanian company. hmm. I’ll have to go to one in London to see if they are selling the same stuff. now I am at cafe mozart with other foreigners sitting alone.
Okay, there is an open market for tourist goods along one of the main parts of this major shopping area. My basic thought was,
oh, more crap that I don’t need. But I did keep my eyes open for a cool Aliyev painting or something. Don’t worry Armenians,
Vernisage isn’t the only place in the world with weird paintings, Russian stacking dolls with Winnie the Pooh on them and paintings of mermaids without shirts. I saw out of the corner of my eye a Russian language cover of the album Rubber Soul. My mind went straight to EBAY GOLD! I went to look at it and this guy had basically ever classic rock album with Russian language covers. He said 1 album would be 8000 manat (a little under $2). I told him it was too expensive. He said that if I bought multiple albums, each one would be 1000 manat less. That’d be pretty cool. Then I noticed that all the albums were reissues! Printed in the late 80s and early 90s. Damn!
I thought that they were like, underground contraband rock from the 60s. Oh well. I didn’t buy them.
The major shopping area sort of needs an explaination. I wish that I could find some sort of diagram or map of it. Basically sets of shops that are in 5-9 story buildings jigjag across in various directions. The roads are made pedistrian only, so you can walk for miles down different streets for shopping. It is mainly clothes with DVD and cell phone shops thrown in now and then. Bars
and places to eat are there too, as well as nightclubs. The firt night that I was here I walked through it at 2 in the morning - quite a different feeling from today! It was packed on a random Tuesday! I’ll look online for a map. It was really neat.
Oh, also the main cinema is here. It shows a few different films, some in English. They are the latest Russian releases. That new Disney movie with the chicken is showing there now. The threatre is certainly Euro-remond. It looks just as nice as an American theatre inside and it seemed like lots of people were going to see movies. Also people around here were talking about going to the movies quite often.
With all of this stuff going on all in one area, it certainly makes for a lot of cool community interactions. Sure, people that live here full time probably prefer places off the beaten path, but you can meet up with your friends, find a place that everyone likes and wander around.
The shops here are, as I’ve said before, really quite nice. Hopefully my internet connection will stay alive long enough so that I can get the photos uploaded.
Anoher observation: in 2006, they are changing the value of the money here. Now 1 manat will be almost 1 dollar. Some places
are already changing their menus. The biggest bill here now is worth $10, so they probably need to do this. Plus, counting so high- what does it get you?
New Blog Alert: A Fullbright scholar focusing on the theatrical arts is blogging. She has some very interesting things to say about drama interacting with culture. Check it out here.
The Moscow Times has an interesting take on the privatization of Armenfilm and what it may offer the Armenian cinema.
…In 2004, private investors took ownership of the Vilnius-based Lithuanian Film Studio, and last month, Armenia headed in a similar direction. Yerevan’s historic Armenfilm, founded in 1923 and long part of the rich film tradition of the Caucasus, passed into the hands of the well-connected local media group CS Media City, or CSMC, and its subsidiary Armenia Film Studios, for the sum of 350 million drams (just over $750,000).
Cinema in the Caucasus has always straddled the present-day national borders, and though Armenia has a considerable reputation in film, it’s often been dwarfed by neighboring Georgia, where directors, especially those from the generation of the 1950s and 1960s, earned particular fame.
For instance, Armenfilm is named in honor of Amo Bek-Nazarov, a Soviet actor and director whose career began before the Bolshevik Revolution. Although of Armenian descent, Bek-Nazarov played a major role in Georgian silent film, and one of his best known works, “Pepo” from 1935, unfolds in 19th-century Tiflis, though it features an almost exclusively Armenian cast. Boundaries are further blurred by the fact that Georgia’s state film production body, Goskinprom, actually started in Baku, now the capital of Azerbaijan.
National loyalties are relative, indeed: One of Yerevan’s most prominent museums may honor Sergei Paradzhanov, the censored and once-imprisoned creator of Soviet-era classics such as “Color of Pomegranates,” who died in the city in 1990, but the director rarely worked in the country and is more often linked to Georgia and Ukraine…
Popular culture is certainly an important part of a nation’s culture and Armenia is no different.
Popular culture, or pop culture, is the vernacular (people’s) culture that prevails in a modern society. The content of popular culture is determined in large part by industries that disseminate cultural material, for example the film, television, music, animation, and publishing industries, as well as the news media. But popular culture cannot be described as just the aggregate product of those industries; instead, it is the result of a continuing interaction between those industries and the people of the society who consume their products. - wikipedia
We here at Blogrel, while seemingly bookish bleeding heart news junkies, certainly are also consumers of popular culture. As such, we’d like to welcome a new feature to Blogrel, and a new blogger: Harmick, our own Armenian pop scene liaison will write a bi-weekly entry updating all of us on the news, events, and gossip of Armenian pop. Let’s welcome him to the group.
As reported by Azg, via Groong, the HayFilm studio is now up for sale after many months of anticipation from interested buyers. The asking price is: 266968 thousands AMD and the winner must invest a minimum of 30 billion AMD in 10 years and to guarantee the maintenance of working profile for at least 50 years. [all this from the privitization.am site]
Matt blogged on Hayfilm earlier this year. A few different business people and investors have already showed interest. ArmeniaNow covered one. ArmeniaDiaspora covered a few more.
Wouldn’t it be fun for a bunch of people got together and bought it?
What do we know about HyeFilm? Arm-Cinema has the most background, but I think that it would be interesting to do an investment study, nonetheless.
Powered by WordPress