Attention entertainment royalty: the Internet doesn’t take kindly to your online begging.
Zosia Mamet and her sister Clara, both actresses and the offspring of famed playwright David Mamet, found out the hard way this week when their effort to crowdsource $32,000 for a music video flopped (they raised a little over $2,000).
The format has had recent, notable successes: Gawker was able to raise $200,000 for a video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford allegedly smoking crack; L.A. actor Kristen Bell raised $2 million for a film project.
No such luck for the Mamet girls. Perhaps it was the reason the band offered for making a video—“Basically an excuse to spend more time together,” according to Zosia, star of Girls. Or the admission that the song was written in an hour, or irritation that either could have dipped into proceeds from their lucrative TV careers (Clara acts in ABC’s The Neighbors).
In the end, their tales of woe and hardship—“like being taken out of the town your family lives in or the demanding schedules that prevent attendance at family functions” fell on deaf ears.
My sister bought this 'Tsumiki' building block set for Ivy for Christmas and it has been completely commandeered by Marlow!! She loves taking off the magnetic top, picking out the little blocks one by one, and making little stacks and towers. She's completely obsessed with it (if she wasn't so cute, I would be so...
I've written before about the Bonz toys when we featured our Favourite Toys theme a couple years ago... and I believe the Zolo range is part of that same toy family, or at least both toys function in the same way. It is essentially a set of 48 funky, colourful pieces and kids get to...
In our little household, we have actually gone through more tea sets than an elephant in a china shop. These tea sets have been made out of plastic, china, paper...most of them have been truely hideous, especially as they have been coloured on with markers and otherwise defaced. A tea set is the ultimate toy...
Ava has a new favourite toy: the 'House of Balls' from stylish French toy company Vilac. The concept is simple: four coloured balls (perfectly sized for a toddler's hand) and a house-shaped track with a little bell on the end. It's amazingly addictive for babies and toddlers! They love to see the ball roll down the...
I'm not sure if your kids are the same as mine, but my girls are obsessed with my computer. They make their own computers out of cardboard and it seems to be an essential component when playing the Mummy and Papa game. A sign of the times, I guess... How cool is this toy computer...
Alessia from the newly launched eco shop, e-side, recently sent me this Doudou Veilleuse -- a cute little rabbit, made from fairtrade and organic cotton, that glows in the dark! I'll admit I was skeptical, but sure enough it works really well -- looks like a normal little 'doudou' until the lights go out and...
Theme Week: Win a Billy Rocker!
When it comes to simple ideas, these cool Billy Rockers take the cake. They're not just fun ride-along toys, but also a craft project/design challenge. With a little paint, crayons, stickers, etc. you can customize the rockers into anything you wish: a rocking horse, dragon, dolphin, unicorn, etc. The Billy Rocker is made from recycled...
Yes...that's right this toy is pretty amasing! Happy Mais is made from natural GM-free corn starch material that is totally biodegradable, compostable and coloured with non-toxic food colouring. These little pieces (which remind me of cheese puffs) are really versatile. One can build flowers, animals, trains... just about anything. All you have to do is...
Well, this proves that there is a lot to write about beanbags. (The third post already)! Though these ones aren't for sitting on... I bought these 12 tiny beanbags in NY about two years ago and they are a favourite in my family. The baby loves the different colors, texture and feel of them (they are filled...Mohammed Hanif’s debut novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes had already started reminding me of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of The Goat before I saw Hanif's reference to that work in his Acknowledgements page. Not only are both books novelized treatments of the final days and the assassination of a real-life dictator (the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo in the Llosa book, Pakistan’s Zia ul Haq in Hanif’s), they follow a similar structure – converging narratives that alternate between the activities of the dictator and those of his would-be killers. In A Case of Exploding Mangoes the former narrative is in the third person, while the latter is in the voice of Ali Shigri, a young junior officer whose reasons for wanting to kill Zia we gradually discover.
Ali’s account – which, in its irreverence and blithe disregard for the supposed dignity of the Army, resembles Catch 22 in places – shows us the absurd randomness that can govern military life. But the most engaging sections of this book are the ones that deal with Zia – his growing paranoia about his security, his insistence on reading meaning into recurring verses from the Quran, his childlike dependence on his inner circle (any of whom might prove untrustworthy). This long-deceased despot is a soft target for an author writing a historical fiction: it’s easy to make him a figure of ridicule, to use him to lampoon the deep-rooted insecurities of those who have too much power. Accordingly, Hanif places Zia at the centre of some episodes that cry out to be turned into lowbrow comedy: these include domestic squabbles with the First Lady; a rectal examination; a scene where he sneaks out in disguise one night to experience Pakistan through a commoner’s eyes, and ends up being forced by a policeman to chant imprecations against himself; and an ostentatious public-relations display of charity towards widows.
Thankfully Hanif resists the temptation to go overboard with these scenes, keeping the humour droll and low-key for the most part. But what I thought interesting is that in the very process of mocking Zia, Hanif also, in a sense, humanises him. For example, the Zia-in-disguise episode is very funny, but there is also something poignant about the dictator’s desperate need for attention (from his wife, and even from the man who lends him a bicycle) and his speculation – as he rides the empty streets – that he might be ruling a ghost country where nobody other than his bureaucrats and bodyguards lives. The tragicomic narrative makes Zia more accessible to us; he becomes a little more than the remote dictator mercilessly ruling over people’s lives, especially since this book deals with a phase of his life where he is more the persecuted than the tyrant. This is not to say that Zia becomes a sympathetic figure in any meaningful sense, but there is at least some ambiguity in our response to him: besides, it’s difficult to unqualifiedly fear or loathe a man once you’ve seen him in a doctor’s office with his pants around his knees, worrying about worms eating away at his innards, or anxious about the possibility of assassins digging a tunnel beneath his room.
I liked A Case of Exploding Mangoes overall, despite minor reservations about the elements of magic realism involving the blind woman, the crow and ripe mangoes, and the persistent feeling that Ali Shigri could have been a better-developed character. Otherwise, it’s a sharp and playful debut, and a rare example of a contemporary political satire that mostly hits the right notes.
I was wondering how this book escaped your attention and you promptly posted this review. The book seems to be attracting reviews everywhere. How do you rate the author compared to Mohsin Hamid? I read that Mohammed Hanif is head of BBC Urdu service.
Krishnan: oh, I'm sure there are many equally good (but lower-profile) books that escape my attention every week - one simply doesn't have the time to read and review too much. Difficult to compare with Mohsin Hamid - Hanif is a less experienced novelist and it shows in places, but otherwise there's no real frame of reference to compare the two. They're both witty and lucid though.
Hanif's novel is simply brilliant..and fearless. Which is not something you can say for Mohsin Hamid, who tends to take himself far too seriously. The only problem i see is that many western reviewers (and presumably readers) will regard big chunks as surreal imaginings when they are the absolute literal unvarnished and fantastic truth! Zia really did shut himself up in army house for almost two months. He really did have massive crying jags whenever he visited mecca or medina and so on...
Liked the review though I didn't read the book. Now I will!
Good book for a first time novel. The only gripe I have (and a quick search on the interweb shows me I'm not alone) is - What's with Hanif's women? Its as if they are an alien race to him - he's almost afraid to deal with them. none of them are really human. There are 4 in total I