My tweets

• Wed, 15:27: Daniel Fienberg writes very, very well on a very, very bad TV show: "The H8r" http://t.co/Z94OuU4
• Wed, 16:13: IMF: Austerity boosts unemployment, lowers paychecks - The Washington Post http://t.co/UP9Agk4 via @washingtonpost
• Wed, 16:18: David Cameron's efforts to privatize the National Health Service move one step closer: http://t.co/19V8YfJS
• Wed, 16:20: The best performing economy in Europe is also the only one without a govt to impose spending cuts: http://t.co/hJHltXc1 via @LondonReview
• Wed, 22:06: Fine, DC "relaunch" all yr books, put Superman in jeans, make Batgirl walk again - but do not fuck with Amanda Waller: http://t.co/IzOx0KcM
• Wed, 22:24: Look Moleskine, just because you put a Star Wars logo on it doesn't mean I'm gonna to drop $25... oh, who I am kidding: http://t.co/TFTNAHWu
• Wed, 22:53: In addition to remedial instruction on how to listen, someone should explain the concept of "defamation" to this kid: http://t.co/cDCPiFxc
• Wed, 22:54: Oh, don't tease me, Toronto Star - "Conrad Black could be stripped of Order of Canada": http://t.co/o4dORM6l
• Wed, 22:58: Rob Ford says the ppl he talks to tell him to ‘stay the course’ - like Doug would say anything different: http://t.co/hbK4KWN1
• Wed, 23:04: Gee, it's like there's no honour among paid political hucksters: Gravy train architect Kouvalis now trying to fight it http://t.co/vuM70djr

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Movie Night on Queen St, Jo'burg...

Someone should write an essay about The Bang Bang Club and District 9 - both movies made by white South African-Canadians, both deal explicitly with Apartheid and township violence and implicitly with the problem of addressing Apartheid as a white South African (male).

It's significant that both films are made by expatriots and that both films deal with Apartheid at a double remove - The Bang Bang Club follows the photographers who documented the township violence in the years between Nelson Mandela's release from prison to the 1994 elections; we see the violence both through the dramatization of their experience and through the narrative device of reproducing their photographs. In District 9 the remove is both allegorical - real world problems of poverty, violence and transient underclasses placed into the science fiction frame of an alien landing - and the faux-documentary narrative device recurring throughout the movie.

Both films portray horrific acts of casual violence but rarely place the audience in the position of empathizing with either victim or perpetrator. We, along with the protagonists, are instead bystanders, as complicit as we are impotent, unable to either share in the suffering or end it.