Dirty Dancing 2017 is a reworking, not a remake or reboot, and it's ok

Do you remember Michael Bolton's Timeless: The Classics album? And do you still cringe? There's a reason why classics are classics, and the golden rule is, Don't remake a classic unless you do something different. For example, The Four Tops' original Reach Out, I'll Be There is a classic and unless you're going to do what Joe Cocker did with the Beatles' With a Little Help From My Friends or what Jimi Hendrix did with Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower, i.e, rework the original so that you create a new classic, you probably shouldn't bother. With cinema a good role model here is Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. The film is a stone-cold classic of cinema, legendary in its influence and impact. It inspired 'seven swords' books and films of course, but one reworking went on to achieve classic status of its own: The Magnificent Seven. The reworking meant that most of Magnificent Seven's original audience had no idea at all that it was based on Kurosawa's original. 

Both of these classics suffered remakes. The point is, Don't remake a classic, don't reboot a classic either. If you want to touch a classic, rework it.
Dirty Dancing, the original, is seen as a classic of its type, partly for its story, partly for its soundtrack, and partly for the on-screen charisma and energy of the film's two leads, Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey.

If you've seen and loved the original, then Dirty Dancing 2017 can't be considered an outstanding success; but it's a worthy attempt--not a remake but a reworking--not a reboot but a reworking--and a lot better than the critics allow it to be. 

It appears to me that most of the critics were simply looking for a reboot and as I've said above, you can't reboot a classic and you shouldn't even try.

At the very least, Dirty Dancing 2017 tries.

It had something to work with for in truth, there were always two stories in Dirty Dancing. There was the story of Baby and Johnny; but there was also the story of Baby's family. In the original, the family's story was a backdrop, but in 2017 it's developed and brought forward. The reworking is a full 30 minutes longer than the original, and the characters of Baby's sister, father and mother are fleshed out. This fleshing has also become part of the soundtrack, with one song--'They can't take that away (from me)--even being reprised. This is sung in the film by Baby's mother, and then, later, her father. The other song, an early Dylan great, is claimed by Baby's sister. So the screenplay was reworked extensively.

But the soundtrack was reworked too. The original OST sold more than 32 million copies, so even using it was a big risk. The producers of 2017  decided to neither just replay the original nor create a new setlist but used newer, different artists', versions of the original songs. This choice has been applauded in its own right.

So the 2017 producers knew what they were risking and knew also what they were doing. This is a reworking. As a reworking it does, I think, a very watchable job.

Hawu! Relationships have become time-shares!

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50 Shades of Sex

What are you?
I'm a man.
Is that why you beat your wife?
I beat her to teach her the value of discipline; discipline is good.
Is that why you also rape her?
She is my wife: sex is good; I don't want her to lose out.

What are you?
I'm a man.
Is that why you beat your daughter?
I beat her to teach her the value of discipline; discipline is good.
Is that why you also rape her?
(Silence.)
Is that why you rape her?

I'm a man...

This  text appeared as the leading comment of the Times of Swaziland Sunday on 13th August 2006, under the subheading A disintegrating society... but it could have been published yesterday. We're eleven years on and seemingly no progress has been made as far as gender abuse is concerned. In fact, even a cursory glance at a week's newspapers and the social media for a single day suggests that things have even got worse since then. 

What does this tell us about the level of violence in our society? We don't even need to talk about terrorism in the world--what goes on in our homes? 

At the same time, sex is everywhere and in the open. It didn't used to be.  In the pre-AIDS era, people didn't practice safe sex but equally they didn't talk about it either. Now condoms, circumcision, safe sex and even gay, lesbian, and bisexual are words that people use freely. This new-found freedom of speech is perhaps a good thing, but it accompanies a widespread acceptance of porn, which isn't. Porn is everywhere: it's certainly on a cellphone near you. Porn is most usually associated with violence. Consider, for example, the massive commercial success of 50 Shades of Grey, with its million-selling books and box-office winning film. Whether it's porn or not, it's definitely sex plus violence. And it's not only tolerated, it's imitated.

At this moment in our lives, music streams like Channel O routinely screen soft porn while  stronger videos of sex and violence are whizzing around the webverse from cellphone to cellphone via social media and from laptop to laptop via flashdrives. One of the current viral videos is of an underage girl and boy in South Africa. The video has already brought untold anguish upon those involved. There were some loud voices saying how sad and how shocking this video was. But there were many more clamouring to get themselves a copy so they could see it for themselves.

If we are going to leave anything worth leaving for our children and children's children, then we have to do more than admit there is a problem. We have to act.

One way to act is through legislation. Legislation works by giving a clear message about what is considered acceptable and what is not. At the end of last year it was widely anticipated that a new Sexual Offences Bill would be passed this year. That hope has begun to fade, with reports implying that the Bill has been deliberately stalled and will remain unimplemented. This is a tragedy that will merely accelerate the downward spiral that we're already in. Legislation would be a public way of admitting that we have a serious problem.

Another public way would be for the churches--and there are so many of them--to also campaign for change in this area. Sadly, that also looks unlikely to happen.

The best way then is to do what wisdom tells us we should do: begin the change within ourselves. We could do worse than choosing the words of the apostle Paul, who also lived in such a time as this:

In the end, all change must begin with us.


 
                                    
                    

 

Google fast-forwards... to the past

They say that history repeats itself. That certainly seems to be the case with social media, which is all about communication. On the one hand, many posts are mostly emotional--whether it's posting selfies to get more self-love or posting a diss to burn an old flame. On the other hand, words are somehow too wordy and are being replaced by emoticons and emojis.

This is definitely a reworking of our ancestral past. Emojis were what we used before we invented words. Richard A Firmage, in his interesting book The Alphabet Abecedarium writes:

Pictographic or Iconographic writing was the first actual writing. A simple picture designated an object... the earliest known examples are Sumerian from about 4000 BC.

 This picture language was at first very simple. In fact it was rather basic. Some of this Sumerian language is shown above, with the pictures on the left and their meanings on the right. You can see that the images for man and woman are images of genitalia. Below the image for woman is the image for land. Combine woman and land and you get female slave. 

Where would we be without our whatsapp icon set? We're so used to using these images in our texting that it's hard to remember a time when we didn't have them. They seem so natural, and of course they are--pictographs and images are no doubt coded into our very cells.

Both Facebook and Google realise this and have been paying attention to the emoji side of texting.

Here are Facebook's new reaction emojis.


And below is Google's approach via a new app called Supersonic. Supersonic converts your voice text into a text-and-emoji message on the fly. What, I think, is particularly interesting is that both approaches are dynamic. We've already had entire novels written in whatsapp-speak. At present it seems unlikely that anyone could write an entire book using only emojis. But I suspect that time is not far off.

This genius created modern fantasy but no-one has heard of him

A long time before JRR Tolkein wrote The Lord of the Rings, well before he even wrote The Hobbit, William Morris wrote and self-published his first fantasy novel set in a totally invented world, The Wood Beyond The World (left). It was 1895.
   Morris was famous at the time, a protean figure in Victorian England. He was an active socialist, painter, designer, and owner of the Kelmscott Press.
   But almost no-one knew that he had just invented a new genre, fantasy, that would spawn in later generations the work of such diverse creators as Tolkein, CS Lewis, JK Rowling, Neil Gaiman and George Lucas. He followed Wood  with The Well at the World's End (1896) and The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897). Most likely he would have written more if death hadn't intervened.
   No-one knows why he wrote these late novels. Well is considered his masterpiece, and at the time was one of the longest stories ever written (228, 000 words). Tolkein's Lord is twice as long, but that was published as a trilogy. I've reread Well more times than I've reread Lord. It's a book to get lost in, full of characters and wonder. It's easy to see where it inspired Tolkein. In fact in one small section it includes a character called Gandolf, who does some magic... I also love his Wood and earlier The Story of the Glittering Plain. Lewis and Tolkein were members of a small literary club of professors and writers called The Inklings. They would get together and talk about literature and whatever they were working on at the time. Undoubtedly they discussed Morris. Lewis once said that after he discovered Morris he "got all the Morris he could get". You can get some here.

Whatsapp listens. Now we have the old text statuses and the new snapchat ones.

 In a recent blogpost I mentioned that the new whatsapp statuses were hugely unpopular here in southern Africa and that the change was an attempt by facebook (whatsapp's owner) to replicate snapchat (which facebook failed to buy). I then--as I'm sure did thousands of others--complained to whatsapp about the change through their beta app.



Well, now we have the old text statuses back as well as the new snapchat ones. if you go to your own Settings you can set your own text status just as before; and if you check your friends' View Contact you can see their status under the heading About and phone number. According to reports the company says that Android updates that reflect the statuses change will roll out next week; Apple updates will follow after that.

Why 'The Richest Man in Babylon' is one of the best financial books of all time

George S Clason's 1926 The Richest Man in Babylon has currently 505828 ratings and 2277 reviews on GoodReads and millions of copies in print. Clason originally composed it in parts, as a series of short pamphlets dispensing practical financial advice. Long hailed as a classic for all generations, it has been of inspiration and value to many many people. 

   But why is it so good? Yes, it offers practical and helpful advice; but so do many other books and they aren't as well-read or so famous. Is it that the advice is radically different from other books? No. In fact, some would say Clason's advice is homely and commonsensical rather than especially insightful. So what made it stand out and become viral in an age of print?

   Indeed, what makes this book still so special and so different from other books on similar themes? 

Quite simply, it's the power of story. Clason wasn't a brilliant financial advisor with insights unknown to others; he was a brilliant storyteller. This was his genius. The Richest Man in Babylon harnesses the potency of story. 
   We all of us love to hear and tell stories. If we didn't we wouldn't be human. Storytelling is primal.
   Consider the following books: 

•  The Alchemist
• The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari
• Harry Potter
• The Lord of the Rings

   and film and TV series like:

• Star Wars
• Star Trek
• Game of Thrones

These are all fables and myths for a generation that grew up without fables and myths. Ancient Greece is considered the cradle of modern education as well as the foundation of our modern world, but do you know what the Athenian youth studied at school? They studied the Homerian myths--the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey. These stories were more than just stories; they taught morality and character too. The Romans had the stories of Romulus and Remus, and the legend of Aeneas. The Jews had the stories compiled in Genesis, the Exodus, and the Judges.
   Here, in The Richest Man in Babylon, Clason creates a classic financial myth through careful and detailed elaboration of setting and skillful differentiation of character. He uses the powerful device of dialogue to share his ideas. Dialogue helps create character and thus personalises the teaching. Much of the dialogue uses question-and-answer (think Quora and Google) and throughout Clason understands how certain words and phrases trigger the reader's response to the text. Indeed, the storytelling techniques in this book are the same that drive our current social media and clickbait world.
   In short, The Richest Man in Babylon is a story with power because of the way it is told. It works like the telling of a good joke and is likely to endure for a long time to come.

Kenneth Rowley 2017

Whatsapp Statuses and the Coming Empire

I use whatsapp beta, so I get the crap good stuff first...                      

Here in southern Africa many households don't, and have never had, landlines but cellphone use is part of everyone's life. I surprised myself and most of my friends by buying a cellphone almost as soon as they became available (back in 1998). It was a Siemens handset. Despite the predictions of the so-called experts, MTN, Vodacom and the rest took off like rockets. In some African countries cellphone saturation is now running at over 80%.
    That's amazing, but it's very costly and there are many who argue that the introduction of cellphones compounded the already dire poverty situation in many countries.
   Anyway, I thought whatsapp was great until recently. See, I tried out whatsapp as soon as I heard about it circa 2011. At the time we were all using Mxit because we didn't want to pay through the nose using MTN. Of course once we started with Mxit we got hooked on Mxit's little red hearts that flashed and winked and glowed as we sat up chatting late into the dark, and the app's sounds and pix. Mxit was a cool app. But whatsapp had the potential to be cooler and we didn't have to ditch the emoticons either.
   As with all of these apps, the takeup at first was slow--you can't chat with your friends until they're using the app as well. At first we android users all had BBM envy; but whatsapp arrived at the right time. (When BBM was finally made available for non-blackberry users it was too late.) .
  Then facebook recently bought whatsapp. We feared for the worst; we liked our whatsapp the way it was. Facebook tried to buy snapchat but failed. So whatsapp statuses have become snapchat-like. At the same time, facebook's messenger now wants to take over your standard sms stuff in addition to the already popular facebook messaging.                      
We are being encouraged to send a facebook message instead of a standard sms instead of sending a standard sms, use whatsapp for snapchatting, and whatsapp for calling: an integrated solution to all our needs, and relatively inexpensive. In fact a boon to end users. But why? Is facebook trying to muscle cellular networks aside?
   In a sense, yes. Both facebook and google want the world to have free Wi-Fi so that they can grow the world's biggest consumer base--which will be their own users, i.e., us. It's a smart plan, and working so far.  It is obviously a plan for empire-building.
   Why should we be worried? (Apart from having no private identities, that is.) Are we under threat?
   Not directly no. Not at this moment. It's not average people who are threatened but every traditional status quo, including governments. Why are cellular networks so expensive? Because 'esteemed investors' can harvest money from them. That is under direct threat. For example, MTN's biggest money harvester in Africa has always been sms messaging. With the Internet they are now trying to mine it from data; wi-fi is cheaper but few have access to wi-fi as compared to cellular. It's all about money. Cellular networks get it directly. Data uploads as well as downloads, so streaming of media, especially youtube videos, consumes a lot of data. People don't think they're downloading, because it goes into a temporary file,  but they are. Facebook can do it cheaper and at the moment we're tempted to think they're actually on our side.

         

The Biggest Lie

The spirit of the world is all about getting things, owning things, possessing things, and we have carried this attitude of consumerism into our relationships, into the very heart of our personal lives. We have come to think that people can belong to us, that we can own someone. And, just as with things, we get angry when the people we 'love' fail to minister to our needs or get broken or stolen from us.

You see, the biggest lie--a very common one these days--is when someone says 'I love you'. No doubt millions say these words every day. What they invariably mean is, 'I want you to be mine. I like the look of you and have decided that i want you to be around to make me happy forever.' That is what most people mean when they say 'I love you'. And this is the biggest lie.

We have come to think that people can belong to us, that we can own someone.

We collect girlfriends, boyfriends, wives and husbands the way we collect cellphones or washing machines or houses or cars. And when they fail to live up to our expectations we get frustrated and angry. And the desire for possession when angry results in husbands beating their wives, girlfriends killing their boyfriends, and anything that has legs and can move being raped. Rapes, yes, for it's all about possession. Everyone's on the lookout for collecting someone new. 

One of the commonest greetings here in Swaziland (and echoed around the world) is 'Sisi, I'm proposing love'. That it isn't love becomes immediately apparent when the child, woman, gogo or donkey doesn't immediately consent to the man's request. 

And when we get tired of our girlfriends, boyfriends, wives and husbands we trade them in for newer models--makhwapheni style. 

Yet the worst of it is that our 'I love you' collecting habit doesn't make us happy but rather enlarges our fear. You see, the moment we get something new we worry that someone might steal it from us. A friend of mine recently tried an old number he had on his phone, the number of a lady he'd once dated. He dialled the number and a male voice answered. He asked for the lady and received a gruff, 'She's not here'. Then a few moments later that same man with the gruff voice phoned him back, aggressive and loud, with a host of questions as if he was the police officer in charge of a criminal investigation: 'How did you get this number? Who gave you this number? What do want with this woman? Who are you?' and so on. Once a man has said, 'I love you', and you have said, 'I love you too', he is terrified that once you are out of his sight you might be saying 'I love you too' to somebody else.

This isn't love. and it never was. A couple say 'I love you' to each other and then believe that they own each other and deny each other any freedom in a desperate bid to secure the happiness that they themselves so desperately crave. The world's values are sick and the world's love is already as stiff as a carcass. No-one can ever own another person--we call this slavery, not love--and no-one should even try.

The secret to relationships is not possession but freedom. Real love is always wanting the best, the highest good, for someone. That doesn't mean ownership, but the opposite--it means being able to let someone go. If you really love her, then you'll set her free to follow her own path. If she chooses you, that's great; but if she chooses someone else, then that's her choice. The truth is that the highest best for the other person might not include you. If she wants to spend time with you today, then thank God for that, for it's a blessing; but if she doesn't want to be with you tomorrow, then thank God for that too, for she's following her own path.

Are you looking for Mr Right? You will never find him. Mr Right is always Mr Wrong if you're looking for someone to become part of your collection. But if you're able to let someone go, then--even if it hurts for a while--you'll learn to be content and when you say 'I love you', you'll mean it and won't be caught telling the biggest lie.

[Originally published in the Times of Swaziland SUNDAY, September 24th, 2006.]

Poor Reader, Poor Thinker

It's like this: people who don't read can't think well. Consequently they're clumsy in expressing their thoughts, but they can feel. Most often they feel anger  and frustration. These are powerful emotions which constantly  percolate and burst to the surface in outbursts that are mostly violent eruptions of invective or physical violence.

Is it surprising that this is so? Not at all. We're first and foremost emotional beings who feel before we think. You know the expression, gut feeling? That happens to be true. We have some neurons in our stomachs (not just in our brains), so when we feel fear, for example, our stomachs register that discomfort before our brains awake to the danger.

But there's more. When we read a book, our brains don't differentiate between fact and fiction. If the book's hero falls in love, then so do we. If Mr Nasty is really nasty, then we hate him with all our being. Words can help us analyse what we feel--after the event--but words in the first instance trigger emotions.

You see, we begin learning language whilst still in our mother's womb. Language and thought begin together and need each other. They are locked together in an intricate dance, a woven fabric of being. This is no doubt why meditation on words and sounds is one of the most basic techniques in ancient tantric texts. [Tantra means woven fabric.]

Apart from being a writer, I'm also a mentor, teacher, and editor. Over the years I've discovered that mostly people are unable to express themselves clearly because they can't think clearly. That's why, when I teach writing, I tell would-be writers that they must write the last sentence of their essay, article, story or book before they begin writing the beginning. My audience often baulks at this, throwing up metaphorical (sometimes actual) hands in despair. But there's logic in language. There's such an intimate connection between beginnings and endings that if you develop the skill you can often predict what will happen in the future. That's not prophecy, just an ability to connect the dots.

Of course, each different language has its own different logic. English is linear and full of bipolar constructs, but not all languages are. In English we like to begin with a statement of intent, a topic sentence. Thus Americans are often thought to be rude, insensitive, overly direct and blunt. In siSwati (the language of Swaziland) the important statement often comes last. Arabic thought tends to move in a circular, roundabout way, and so on. When you use a language you effectively put on a pair of glasses through which you view the world. The language helps you to see, but it also channels what you see. The Chinese have many words for rice; the Eskimos many words for snow; Swazis have many words for meat; and in older Afrikaans dictionaries the word for 'gentleman' was witman, i.e., white man.

Martin Luther King in a sermon based on Mathew 10:16 said that we each need a tough mind and a tender heart:

Let us consider, first, the need for a tough mind, characterized by incisive thinking, realistic appraisal, and decisive judgment.  The tough mind is sharp and penetrating, breaking through the crust of legends and myths and sifting the true from the false. 

Quite so. Reading is one the few ways to develop a tough mind. The rage, the anger, the frustration of life can be tempered. Grow also a tender heart. Read, people, read!