Oscar hopefuls, political dramas head to Toronto
By Jeffrey Hodgson
TORONTO (Reuters) – The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off
its 30th edition on Thursday with movies about violence, sex,
religious persecution and the stress of a post-9/11 world — all set
to share a stage with some of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
The 10-day event, which film critic Roger Ebert calls the start of
Hollywood’s “Oscar season,” will screen more than 250 features on
subjects as diverse as female miners, gay cowboys, a transvestite
Irish revolutionary, would-be suicide bombers, a mistreated child
bride and Japan’s emperor Hirohito.
Johnny Depp, Charlize Theron, Steve Martin, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony
Hopkins, Cameron Diaz, Viggo Mortensen and Jackie Chan are just a few
of the stars expected at the festival, which ranks with Cannes,
Venice, Berlin and Sundance as one of the world’s most influential.
The festival began on Thursday evening with the world premiere of
“Water” — a movie that sparked riots in India when the first attempt
was made to film it five years ago.
The emotionally charged film about an eight-year-old Hindu child widow
was eventually made last year in Sri Lanka, where director Deepa Mehta
said she could work without distractions.
“It was fabulous… I didn’t have to go to a single political
meeting. I just directed the film,” she said.
Closing the festival on September 17 will be crime drama “Edison,”
which pairs Oscar winners Kevin Spacey and Morgan Freeman with pop
star Justin Timberlake and rapper LL Cool J.
The movies shown in between will come from more than 50 countries,
with more than 100 being shown for the first time.
Last year’s festival offerings — including “Ray,” “Hotel Rwanda,”
“Being Julia,” “Sideways” and “The Sea Inside” — became major
contenders in the Oscar race and critics will be on the lookout for
next year’s award winners.
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s starring role in the biography “Capote” and
director Ang Lee’s revisionist Western “Brokeback Mountain” are
already being spoken of as likely nominees.
But festival organizers said lower-profile films, many dealing with
anxiety that followed the terror attacks in New York, Washington and
Madrid, would offer equally worthy viewing.
TERROR ATTACKS, WAR
“Sorry, Haters” tells the story of an Arab immigrant cab driver whose
brother has been caught up in America’s security net after the
attacks.
“Paradise Now” follows two young Palestinians in the days before they
are called up to become suicide bombers, a theme also taken up in a
U.S. setting in “The War Within.”
The festival’s director of communications, Gabrielle Free, said the
selection of several films with similar themes was not deliberate,
given that they were picked by different variety of programmers.
“September 11 is now four years behind us, and I think that’s about
the amount of time you would expect for some thought-provoking films
(to emerge),” she said.
Equally provoking will be the latest films from Canada’s two most
famous directors, both of which debuted in competition at Cannes.
David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” tells the story of the
manager of a small town diner whose life is thrown into chaos after
thwarting an attempted robbery.
And Atom Egoyan’s “Where the Truth Lies” revolves around a scandal
that d rives apart a pair of entertainers played by Kevin Bacon and
Colin Firth. The movie has already been slapped with a NC-17 rating
for its explicit sexuality.
(With additional reporting by Arthur Spiegelman in Toronto)
Reuters/VNU
09/09/05 13:49 ET

MPAA: Kids Can’t Handle “Truth”
by Josh Grossberg
Sep 9, 2005, 10:30 AM PT
Two’s company but three’s definitely a crowd.
That’s the verdict of the Motion Picture Association of America, whose
Ratings and Classifications Board has upheld the dreaded _NC-17
rating_ (,1,17213,00.html) it
slapped on Canadian filmmaker _Atom Egoyan_
( es/0,127,31877,00.html) ‘s
new art-house drama, Where the Truth Lies, because it featured a
ménage à trois.
The movie, which stars _Kevin Bacon_
(,128,102,00.html) , _Colin
Firth_ (,128,537 0,00.html) ,
_Rachel Blanchard_
( o/0,128,38399,00.html) and
_Alison Lohman_
( ,128,71269,00.html) , makes
its North American debut next week at the _Toronto Film Festival_
(,1,16931,00.html) .
It follows a popular 1950s-era comedy duo (Bacon and Firth) whose
career is derailed after they engage in a night of debauchery,
including a threesome with a beautiful woman who turns up dead the
next day in their hotel suite.
After reviewing Truth last month, the MPAA’s Ratings and
Classifications Board gave the picture an NC-17, which means no one
under the age of 17 is allowed admission, citing “some explicit
sexuality” involving Bacon, Firthand Blanchard.
The decision prompted protests from independent distributor ThinkFilm,
which claimed the three-way was artfully choreographed by Egoyan and
is central to the movie’s mystery. The company also noted that the
rating severely hampered the flick’s commercial prospects, since many
exhibitors refuse to book NC-17-rated fare.
ThinkFilm appealed and on Wednesday the filmmaker and Blanchard went
beforea 10-member panel in Los Angeles to make their case. Egoyan
argued that he filmed the ménage in a sustained master shot and that
trimming it would be nearly impossible without losing the scene’s
intent, which anchors the storyline.
An NC-17 is an “unwarranted response given the story it’s telling and
the way it needed to be told,” Egoyan told the Associated Press. “We
couldn’t trim any more without destroying the heart of the movie.”
Blanchard added that she had no problem shedding her inhibitions,
since the scene was vital to the integrity of the drama being played
out.
“The film is basically about the power of celebrity and the abuse of
that power,” she told the wire service. “It sort of expands on how
abusing that power sexually has consequences. It’s a redeeming film
and it has a positive message.”
Unfortunately their arguments failed to make the cut. The appeals
board voted 6-4 to overturn the NC-17 rating and give it an R,
falling one vote short of the required two-thirds majority.
Despite the setback, Where the Truth Lies will still be released
uncut. Because ThinkFilm is not an MPAA signatory like the major
studios, it has the option of issuing the movie unrated, and,
according to chairman Robert Santos, that’s exactly what the company
intends to do.
That’s the same strategy the distributor recently employed with its
potty-mouthed documentary The Aristocrats, in which a who’s-who of
comedians riff on the same dirty joke. Nonetheless, ThinkFilm faces an
uphill battle at the box office, since many exhibitors outside major
cities typically shy away from screening unrated films, and media
outlets don’t like to advertise such fare.
Another problem possibly hindering profitability: ThinkFilms is
contractually required to deliver an R-rated version to Columbia
TriStar Home Video. No word yet whether the film will need to be
chopped for its DVD release.
Where The Truth Lies is set to open in New York and Los Angeles on
Oct. 14 before expanding one week later to whatever U.S. theaters
agree to book it. E! Entertainment Television, Inc.

Is Hovnanian Near the Ceiling?
0907.htm
By Stephen D. Simpson, CFA
09/09/2005
Usually, finding a stock with a low P/E is an indication that
investors don’t expect a whole lot from the company in question. Yet
even though Hovnanian_(NYSE: HOV)_
() missed estimates by
only a small amount and lowered future guidance fairly modestly, the
Street responded by taking down the shares of this homebuilder by
about 7%.
Of course, homebuilders aren’t your run-of-the-mill single-digit P/E
stocks. There’s that purported bubble to contend with. Everyone knows
(or at least assumes to know) that this boom in construction of new
housing has to end eventually, so a lot of investors and analysts sift
through these earnings announcements for the merest hints of an “aha,
I told you so” moment.
On the surface, there’s not a lot to really hate about Hovnanian’s
quarterly report. Sales rose 24%, earnings climbed 32%, and
homebuilding gross margins expanded. Deliveries of new homes increased
by only about 6% in unit terms, but the value of those homes was about
23% higher.
Guidance, though, was the issue. Although company executives stuck to
their guns and pointed out that they beat their own guidance, that’s
like pointing out the price of nutmeg in Batavia — in other words,
pretty irrelevant.
True, it’s not the company’s fault if analysts get out in front of
management’s own projections, but that’s the way the Wall Street world
works. Speaking of that guidance, though, management said that sales
prices on new homes were moderating, and the company lowered guidance
for the next two years by about 4%-5% from prior mean estimates.
Pretty much everywhere you look, you see homebuilders trading at
single-digit P/E multiples. “So,” the novice investor asks, “how could
I possibly lose if I buy stocks like Hovnanian, D.R.Horton_(NYSE:
DHI)_ () , Lennar_(NYSE:
LEN)_ () , or
Centex_(NYSE: CTX)_ ()
?” Well, what happens if the bottom drops out of the earnings part of
the P/E ratio? This is how, and why, cyclical stocks draw in the
unwitting when the stocks approach their cyclical peaks — the stocks
look cheap until you realize the risk that earnings have peaked.
Have Hovnanian and its brethren peaked? Honestly, I don’t know. What I
do know is that the returns on equity we’re seeing in the sector
aren’t sustainable — unless we’re all going to own two or three
houses apiece. That suggests to me, then, that the risk/reward ratio
in these stocks is tilted too much toward “risk” for my comfort.
For more homely Takes:
* _Bad-Mouthing the Bubble_
()
* _Behind the Bubble Babble_
( m)
* _Don’t Get Crushed by Your Home_
( ary05081505.htm)
* _Home Sweet Homebuilder_
()
Fool contributor _Stephen Simpson_ (mailto:[email protected]) has no
financial interest in any stocks mentioned (that means he’s neither long nor
short the shares).
The Motley Fool.

All eyes on Agassi in men’s semis
By SANDRA HARWITT
.c The Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) – Although Roger Federer is the defending champion and
No. 1 seed, most eyes will be on Andre Agassi in the U.S. Open
semifinals.
Agassi, 35, is the senior citizen among Saturday’s four
semifinalists. He’s 13 years older than his opponent, fellow American
Robby Ginepri, and 11 years older than Federer and Lleyton Hewitt, who
will play each other in a repeat of last year’s final.
Only Ginepri is an unfamiliar face at this stage of the Open, with
Agassi winning the title here in 1994 and ’99, Hewitt winning in 2001,
and Federer taking last year’s trophy.
The seventh-seeded Agassi has won eight career Grand Slam titles, and
if he’s able to usher Ginepri aside as he’s done in their three
previous meetings, he will be playing in his 15th career Grand Slam
final.
That would make him the oldest Grand Slam finalist since 39-year-old
Ken Rosewall lost the 1974 U.S. Open to Jimmy Connors.
The appearance of Agassi in the semifinal is impressive considering
that a sciatic nerve injury in his back crippled him in the first
round of the French Open, and forced him to skip Wimbledon. He came
back in July, winning his 60th career title at his first summer stop
in Los Angeles.
“I always worry about health – is everything holding up?” Agassi
said Thursday, a day after his five-set quarterfinal win over James
Blake. “Mentally, it’s hard to get fatigued with the love I’ve been
shown here.
“I’ve gotten through two five-setters, and feel surprisingly good.
It’s a sprint now around the turn and down the homestretch. I’ll be in
position to give it a good run.”
Ginepri, 22, who spent a lot of physical and emotional energy in three
successive five-set matches to reach the semifinal, didn’t hesitate to
pay homage to Agassi ahead of their semifinal.
“He’s the king,” said Ginepri, who won his second career title at
Indianapolis in July. “He’s done so much for the game. He’s been
inspirational to so many people. I’ve loved watching him growing up
and play the game.
“Hopefully this won’t be his last run here, but I wouldn’t mind to be
the one to take him out from the Open.”
If the 46th-ranked Ginepri upsets Agassi, he will become the lowest
ranked U.S. Open finalist since rankings began in 1973.
Federer, who won his third consecutive Wimbledon title in July, has
beaten Hewitt in their last eight meetings dating back to a
fourth-round encounter at the 2004 Australian Open.
Federer knows that he continually frustrates the third-seeded Hewitt,
but suggested it would be inadvisable for the Australian to try to
change his style in hopes of beating him.
“He could, you know. But then again, he could even run into the knife
more brutally,” Federer said, laughing.
“I don’t think we can afford to change our games just because of a
particular opponent you play,” added Federer, who has won five of the
last nine Grand Slams. “He’s good enough with his base to beat me on
a day when I’m not on.
“Maybe now that he’s a married man and getting a baby, maybe that’s
going to help him to be a little bit more relaxed and maybe it’s not
everything just to beat me. He’s definitely put himself into positions
all the time. If he beats me, right away he’s in contention for No. 1
in the world or he can win a big tournament again.”
As feisty as Hewitt can be, he’s also realistic. He’s only won two of
the last 23 sets during his losing streak to Federer.
“He’s obviously the favorite,” Hewitt said. “It doesn’t get easier.
There’s no doubt I’ve got to go out there and execute what I want to
do and play extremely well to go with him. It’s a matter of hanging in
there with him and trying to put as much pressure as possible.
“There’s been no secret formula. No one’s been able to find the exact
formula to topple him just yet.”
09/09/05 19:19 EDT

A1+
| 18:58:28 | 09-09-2005 | Politics |
THE OPPOSITION WILL NOT BE DEPRIVED OF MANDATES
The issue of depriving the oppositional deputies of mandates because of
absentees will not be included in the in the agenda of the RA NA fall
session which will start on September 12. This decision was made today by
the NA Standing Committee on State and Legal Affairs.
There is a possibility that the Parliamentary majority has been careful in
this respect in order not to provoke tension in the Parliament. Information
has been received from the opposition field that the opposition deputies
discuss the possibility of stopping the boycott and returning t the
Parliament.
the decision of the NA Standing Committee on State and Legal Affairs is
accounted for by the fact that the issue was included in the agenda of the
previous NA session but it was not discussed.

A1+
| 17:37:07 | 09-09-2005 | Official |
LESSONS STARTED IN THE SEMINARY
Today the opening ceremony of the 2005-2006 educational year took place in
the Gevorgyan Theological seminary of Echmiadzin.
After the Lord’s Prayer the Inspector of the seminary rendered an opening
speech. He mentioned gladly that this year the seminary will celebrate the
60th anniversary of its re-opening, and that there are no more of the
difficulties which existed in 1945.
After the entrance examinations 43 applicants have entered the seminary, and
there are on the whole 240 students in the seminary.

Official: U.S is not seeking extradition of man who admitted throwing
grenade toward Bush
.c The Associated Press
TBILISI, Georgia (AP) – Georgia’s interior minister said Thursday that
a man who admitted throwing a live grenade toward U.S. President
George W. Bush during a rally in the ex-Soviet nation will face
justice at home.
Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili said that the United States had
not asked for the extradition of Vladimir Arutyunian, who was indicted
Wednesday by a U.S. grand jury on charges of trying to assassinate the
president.
“The United States trusts the Georgian justice and law enforcement
agencies, and it hasn’t made an extradition request,” Merabishvili
said at a news conference.
Arutyunian already faces terrorism and murder charges in Georgia
stemming from the May 10 incident in Tbilisi and the killing of a
policeman in a shootout before his arrest in July. Merabishvili says
that the charges carry a punishment of life imprisonment – the same
punishment that he would face in the United States.
Bush and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili were behind a
bulletproof barrier addressing a rally of thousands in Tbilisi in May
when the grenade, wrapped in a plaid cloth, landed about 100 feet
away. It did not explode; investigators said it apparently
malfunctioned. No one was harmed.
In a video broadcast on Georgian television, Arutyunian said he
intended to spray shrapnel over the bulletproof glass.
Autyunian got a new private lawyer Thursday to replace a lawyer
provided by the state.
09/08/05 13:53 EDT

The Telegraph (UK)
Trial of novelist ‘shows Turkey not ready for EU’
By Amberin Zaman in Ankara and Tony Paterson in Berlin
(Filed: 11/09/2005)
An internationally acclaimed Turkish novelist who faces prosecution for
speaking out about the mass slaughter of Armenians last century has said
the case against him shows his country may not be ready to join the
European Union.
Orhan Pamuk, who faces up to three years in jail if convicted at his
trial in December of “denigrating Turkey”, said that reforms promised by
the Turkish government in return for a guarantee of talks on EU
membership had not materialised.
Prosecutors provoked a furore across Europe last month by announcing the
action against him under the country’s recently adopted penal code,
which is supposed to bring Turkish criminal law more closely into line
with that of EU countries.
In his first interview since the prosecution was announced, Pamuk
declared: “Unfortunately I do not believe that Turkey has come very far
in this respect. Nothing has happened over the past year. Turkey has sat
on the promises that Europe has given and taken it easy.”
Although forbidden to comment directly on his own case, the best-selling
author added: “Turkey has not changed so much. Laws have been changed,
but the thought processes, our culture and our way of seeing things…
that has not changed much.
“There have been legal and political changes in the hope of EU
membership. But the trial opened against me shows… that the state
prosecutors have not changed very much. It shows that there is not much
tolerance in society.”
Pamuk’s comments, in an interview with a German newspaper, come as
several countries, including France, have stepped up their effort to
block Turkey’s entry to the EU after public opposition to the inclusion
of such a large, predominantly Muslim, country.
The EU has long cited Turkey’s chequered record on human rights as an
obstacle to membership, and its government – led by Recep Erdogan,
Turkey’s mildly Islamist prime minister – has enacted a series of new
laws in an attempt to overcome the objection. Talks on membership are
due to start next month.
Critics maintain that Turkey’s new penal code falls short of EU
standards by proscribing free debate of the Armenian tragedy and
criticism of Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus.
Last week Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, singled out the Pamuk
prosecution for criticism in a speech in which he nonetheless argued for
Turkish membership of the EU. “There is still some way to go with
implementation, as the recent charges against the distinguished Turkish
novelist Orhan Pamuk show, in the context of freedom of speech,” he said.
Pamuk drew nationalist ire in Turkey and received anonymous death
threats after telling a Swiss newspaper in February that “30,000 Kurds
and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me
dares to talk about it”. One Turkish official in the western town of
Sutluce ordered citizens to destroy all of his books.
Several of Pamuk’s novels, including the acclaimed My Name is Red, have
been translated into English. His most recent bestseller, Snow, explores
tensions between Turkey’s secular elite and religious conservatives.
Turkey has long denied that more than one million members of its once
thriving Armenian community were the victims of systematic annihilation
between 1915 and 1923. Armenians and many others label the campaign
genocide – a description of the events which is proscribed in Turkish law.
The Turkish government insists that a smaller number of Armenians –
several hundred thousand – died unintentionally of exposure, famine and
disease as they journeyed to Syria, after being deported for
collaborating with invading Russian forces.
Prosecutors are still deciding whether to bring further charges against
Pamuk for referring to the more recent killing of Kurds – whose
sometimes violent separatist movements in the east of the country have
been brutally suppressed by successive Turkish governments.
Mr Erdogan won strong praise from EU governments in April when he called
for a joint commission of Turkish and Armenian scholars to research the
events of 1915. It was the first time Turkish leaders had invited
international scrutiny of the deaths. This month a group of Turkish
academics who challenge the official line, saying that there was a
conspiracy to kill, will be allowed to gather in Istanbul to air their
views for the first time.

theaustralian.news.com
Lady screams the blues
Iain Shedden
10sep05
FOR someone whose name is associated with subjects such as mortality
and genocide, Diamanda Galas has an acute sense of humour.
“I’m able to take myself beyond the parlour room of my own insanity,”
Galas declares with a deep, rasping laugh, “whether it’s sadness or
happiness or whatever.”
The 49-year-old singer – although singer hardly does her justice – is
a one-off. She has been described as a vocal terrorist, not to mention
a political animal with a stage presence (think a deeply troubled
Morticia Addams) capable of wringing any number of emotions from
herself and her audience during a performance.
Consider that the two most famous and recurring themes in her oeuvre
are AIDS and the genocide of Armenians and Assyrians at the hands of
the Turks, and it’s clear that her art stems from a lot more than her
voice and piano.
A Californian of Greek descent, Galas has spent the past 20 years
confronting her audience with death, injustice, caustic humour and a
voice that can stretch across four octaves and scare the hell out of
you in all of them. Her avant-garde style calls on blues, jazz, opera
and more. She can silence a room with a scream that sounds as though
it comes from the deep recesses of her soul.
Her latest show, Guilty Guilty Guilty, which makes its Australian
debut in Brisbane on October 13, is subtitled “a program of tragic and
homicidal love songs and death songs”, which could be seen as light
relief from her normal agenda. That’s certainly how she sees it.
“There’s a lot of humour in that concert,” she says. “Some of the
songs are very funny. I’m glad that they have that side.”
The song list includes Hank Williams’s aching I’m So Lonesome I Could
Cry, Johnny Cash’s Long Black Veil and one of the staples of her blues
repertoire, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s I Put a Spell on You.
The show contrasts with her scheduled performances at the Melbourne
Festival on October 7 and 10. The first show there is Defixiones:
Order From the Dead, the latest episode of her Defixiones
work-in-progress that is dedicated to the victims of Armenian,
Anatolian and Pontic Greek genocides between 1914 and 1922. She will
perform it for the first time in her adopted home city, New York,
later this month.
Her last Australian appearances four years ago included Defixiones,
Will and Testament and La Serpenta Canta, the latter an eclectic
selection of songs that included a melodramatic centrepiece, the
death-row blues 25 Minutes to Go.
Wherever she travels, her long-term dedication to the fight against
AIDS and her obsession with the genocide issue are never far
away. They are part of her.
Growing up in a Greek Orthodox household in San Diego accounts partly
for her interest in the genocide of her ancestors and others in that
region. It is a part of history that she says is little known and she
has done everything in her power to change that, both as a performer
and as an activist in the media.
“I show a tremendous amount of anger,” she says. “To articulate these
things is hard. They are difficult to explain. Things that are
happening around the world, commercialisation and invisibility that
certain people are given in some cultures. I get extremely angry about
it.”
One can sense that anger welling up inside her as we speak. “There’s
a lot of history that deals with genocide of the Greek, Armenian and
Assyrian population at the hands of the Turks,” she says. “That’s
something that is very, very remotely recognised, if at all
recognised. Many people have fought for a greater recognition of the
Armenian genocide and they have been extremely powerful fighters.”
She says that the process of writing Defixiones only heightened her
passion for the cause. “When you’re dealing with these subjects you
end up becoming absorbed by a great deal of history, a great deal of
common events. You end up working in a lot of different
languages. That takes up a lot of time.”
What also took up a lot of time before Defixiones was her work in the
battle against AIDS. She lost her brother, artist Philip-Dimitri
Galas, to the disease. She has the phrase “Everyone is HIV+” tattooed
on her hand and several of her recordings, such as the landmark Plague
Mass and her 1992 recording Vena Cava, are informed by her knowledge
of the epidemic and by her role in campaigns to help end it.
These issues are the cornerstone of her life and career, but they are
not the sum total.
Galas may not have been destined to be a political activist, but there
was every chance she was going to be a musician. Her father was a
professional musician and she began her career playing piano in his
band. She had a formal music education too and studied improvisation
and visual-art performance, but she cites her early experience with
her father as crucial to her musical development and her taste for the
blues and jazz in particular. The attraction of the blues, she
explains, goes way beyond its recurring themes of love and death.
“I’ve been playing the blues for so long, I didn’t even have a chance
to be drawn to it,” she says. “I was playing it for money in my
father’s band when I was 13. He taught me how to play and that was a
very important part of my education. He played New Orleans music for
years. That’s a pretty basic grounding.”
That grounding wasn’t going to be enough, however. Even while she was
becoming an accomplished pianist as a teenager, her sights were set on
being a singer, though her father was against it.
“That was something that filled my father with trepidation,” she says,
“and he was right. He considered singers to have insane
lifestyles. It’s a difficult profession because people encourage
singers to sound like idiots and push them to present themselves and
to make a show and take credit for doing things they don’t do: like
music written by other artists. Plus my father didn’t want me to be
thought of as a sub-par musician, which in many cases singers are.
“But I wanted to do it because I wanted to be the leader of a band. I
wanted to do it because I had been inspired by people like Ornette
Coleman and by instrumentalists like that who were doing interesting
things. So I started studying voice a lot and going to teachers and
doing improvisation because I wanted to learn the instrument in a way
where I could master the musical aggression.”
There is no question that she has succeeded. The combination of her
emotional and musical ranges makes for rare and spectacular
theatre. The subject matter often fans the flames.
“Some people say that I’m fascinated by things that I am afraid of,
but many people do that,” she says. “Some of them go into the
military. Some of them go into the movies, some of them go into
deep-sea diving and some of them go into music. I have the opportunity
through my work to address things that keep me awake at night.
“What I’m talking about are timeless subjects like mortality. I can’t
seem to come to terms with that very well like some people. It’s
something that makes singing and performing and composing a great
gift.”
Subjecting your mind and your lungs to such an emotional kicking night
after night must take its toll, one would think. If it leaves
audiences exhausted and exhilarated, isn’t it even more confronting
for her? She says that when she gets on stage she is hoping “to be as
honest as possible, and I hope that I’m going to be able to discover
something new on stage every night and be at one with my
material. That’s why a performer prays and hangs around the
material. So that she can be free on stage and be able to feel the
things that are severe and such important subjects to (her) craft.
“You certainly don’t want to feel as you do when you’re sitting in
your living room having a coffee or something. You want to feel as if
you know as much about life in that moment and convey that in the
limited time that people have come to see you.”
If her music defines her as an artist, her appearance has led to less
sophisticated assessments of her as a celebrity. Terms such as
“daughter of darkness”, “gothic diva” and – a particular pet hate of
hers – “bride of Satan” paint a superficial picture at best.
Of the latter, she says she is “absolutely appalled. It’s so old. That
is the oldest quote in the book. They keep putting that out. It’s 20
years old. I just laugh at it. If they want to think that, then
fine. But as years go on, it gets so tiresome.”
She finds it particularly galling when such perfunctory descriptions
blur her art. “It matters to me when they say that and I’m doing
something to do with genocide or something, because it dismisses the
seriousness of its intent and the research that has gone into it.”
Her music is not for the faint-hearted, then, nor could it be
described as mainstream. She has been conspicuously absent from the
pop charts throughout her career. “A lot of today’s pop music is so
simple-minded, it would be impossible for me to play it,” she says. “I
would be asleep. I would say I have wasted my life.”
Nor does she subscribe to the conventional methods of the mainstream
recording industry.
“I’m not in the studio 24 hours a day the way people in pop music
(are),” she says. “I go in for a limited time and I do a lot of really
weird shit, and I have a record company that puts it out anyway. I
don’t get paid a lot for it, either. I sell records at concerts and
that helps me. I decided to make the money while I was alive rather
than when I’m dead.”
Diamanda Galas performs at the Melbourne Festival on October 7 and 10,
in Brisbane on October 13, in Adelaide on October 16 and in Sydney on
October 21.

September 10, 2005
The Turkish Identity
Next week, the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will
address the United Nations here on one of the issues threatening to
slow down negotiations to admit Turkey into the European Union –
recognizing Cyprus. But he should also address the question of Orhan
Pamuk, the pre-eminent Turkish novelist who has been charged with
“public denigration” of Turkish identity.
In February, a Swiss newspaper quoted Mr. Pamuk on Turkey’s
longstanding refusal to discuss the Armenian genocide and the deaths
of some 30,000 separatist Kurds more recently. Mr. Pamuk’s remarks
inflamed Turkish nationalists, and he left the country. He faces the
possibility of three years in jail.
The charges against Mr. Pamuk violate the standards of free speech,
one of the prerequisites to Turkey’s admission to the European
Union. The charges also cut to the heart of Mr. Pamuk’s writing. The
question of Turkish identity informs his work. In “My Name Is Red,”
Mr. Pamuk never lets the reader forget the ethnic and cultural
diversity of Turkey’s past. Nor does he flinch, in “Istanbul,” from
reminding readers of the “deliberately provoked” 1955 riots that
destroyed several non-Muslim neighborhoods in that city. Beneath the
notion of a Turkish identity lies a tension, still noticeable today,
that has nourished Mr. Pamuk’s writing.
It has been about six months since Mr. Pamuk’s comments were
published, so it is unclear why the charges are being brought just
now. Whatever the motive, they are a reminder that one of Turkey’s
biggest obstacles in dealing with the West is the way it chooses to
patrol its own history.