captyveny

And why was the book never made into a good movie? Yes, there was that catastrophe from 1975, but you would think that the French--Godard,Chabrol, Roehmer,Agnes Varda, Jacques Rivette--would have produced a major film. Surely, there was nothing in "O" that Rivette didn't show in his movie with a nude Jane Birkin and a luscious Beart?

No, but I do consider Chinese culture superior to most existing Western cultures as indicated by Chinese cuisine. The French intellectual/anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked argued that the more highly "processed and cooked" the food of a specific culture was made was indicative of the level of civilization that the culture had obtained. Ergo--grilled beef on an open mesquite grill in Texas--where you can see it is a hunk of meat from a cow--is indicative of a far lower level of civilization than the cubed meat, shaped dough, steamed dumplings of Chinese cuisine, which look positively otherworldly by comparison. And I was the only Caucasian at 1 AM on the docks in Hong Kong eating for one Hong Kong dollar everything that the stall owners who clustered around me were offering.

I became aware of the British view of the "chopstick" versus the "spoon" culture when I toured South East Asia in 1973. The British believed that the Chinese should be the administrators of Malaya because the "chopstick" culture was superior to the happy-go-lucky Malay "spoon" culture. So the Malays became the rubber tappers and the Chinese the administration in the Colony.

Mistress, An amazing video--far more powerful thanks to its brevity than The Night Porter with Dirk Bogard and Charlotte Rampling. How did you find it? As to the power of women over ideology--Josephine Baker received the French military honor of the Croix de Guerre and was made a Chevalier of the Legion d'honneur by Charles de Gaulle for her work socializing and more with members of the Axis powers and later with members of the German occupation of Paris during World War 2--which protected her from arrest while getting some information--all the while working assiduously for Deuxieme Bureau and later delivering messages and more for the French Resistance. One would have thought that members of the Third Reich would have recognized a "non-Aryan", but noooo. She had a wonderous derriere, for which she was renowned.