A wedding at Lake Qarga, Kabul, in The Black Tulip.

Afghanistan has no film industry, which makes a new movie called The Black Tulip, about good people seeking some kind of normal life in modern Kabul despite the constant threat of violence, destruction and despair, doubly dangerous to have made and inestimably valuable to watch. Filmed entirely in a country where women’s rights are still tested daily and cameras are so verboten that even a tourist’s throwaway Instamatic is an invitation to trouble—and produced, written and directed by a woman, no less!—this is a gripping experience as politically enlightening and emotionally involving as it is educational and beautiful to look at. 

Writer-director Sonia Nassery Cole is an Afghan-American activist and filmmaker whose family fled to the U.S. to escape the invasion of Soviet troops in 1979, when she was 14. Three years later, having experienced first-hand the repression by a radical government as a child, she began her mission to free her country from tyranny—from the Russians and from the Taliban—by enlisting the aid of President Ronald Reagan and the United Nations. Working throughout the 1980s to aid the Afghan resistance movement, she raised millions to rebuild the lives of Afghan refugees and established the nonprofit Afghanistan World Foundation to provide care for land-mine victims and build a women and children’s hospital. With the new resurgence of Taliban terrorism, Ms. Cole’s role as an activist has accelerated to such a degree that I have no idea how she found the time to make a feature-length movie. When the leading actress had her foot amputated prior to production—according to the director, though this claim has been contradicted by Latif Ahmadi, head of the Afghan Film as well as the movie’s local casting director—Ms. Cole took over the role herself, and she is wonderful in it. Somehow, despite constant death threats and a bomb blast at her Kabul hotel, she finished The Black Tulip. The result is a remarkable film that shows the cultural heritage and everyday values of a courageous people united in a quest for family, faith and freedom.

The movie begins in 2001 with the retreat of the Taliban after 30 years of war, five of them under their deadly rule. Kabul is liberated and ready to savor freedom at last. A vital, arresting portrait of a modern city emerges, replete with pollution and gridlock traffic, but leavened by the fact that it is a place where a child can still laugh while flying a kite. The Mansouri family, guided by a matriarchal force named Farishta (beautifully played by director Cole) and her strong, devoted husband Hadar, will do anything to keep their two children from ever going back to a refugee camp. During the Soviet occupation, Farishta watched as her father was murdered and his book store, The Poet’s Corner, a symbol of literature and learning, was torched. Now, in the spirit of their new happiness and hope, the family reopens the old shop as a restaurant with the same name. Serving good food on linen tablecloths with crystal wineglasses, with a miked stage for poets and artists to read poems and sing songs that have long been condemned, The Poet’s Corner take two is an overnight sensation. The Mansouris are soon catering meals for the American military base, while the artists, whose voices have been silenced for years, form lines outside the door—two facts that also attract the attention of dark Taliban forces that still exist in the shadows, waiting to pounce. In no time, mysterious government “inspectors” arrive, offering “protection” from hostile elements. There’s more sadness and death on the way.

But The Black Tulip is not a war picture. It’s about the resilience of admirable people in a changing world. Girls still gossip and flirt. Students still wear burkas but they also carry backpacks ordered on the internet. Boys still play the centuries-old game of Buzkashi on horseback like the ancient Afghan tribes, but they do it in tight blue jeans. In the Mansouri family, Farishta’s beautiful, 24-year-old sister Belkis may come from an old respected family, but she is intelligent and independent, with progressive ideas of her own, while Akram Zabuli, her handsome, contemporary fiancé, has a father so steeped in tradition that he pleads for his wife to wear the old-fashioned burka and cover her face. Akram’s father believes a woman’s place is in the home. Conversely, Belkis’s family fully understands and encourages her goal—to finish medical school and open her own clinic. While these differences are resolved, the traditions of an Afghan wedding in a mountain village overlooking the rugged scenery of the countryside—still beautiful even after years of war—unite everyone with hauntingly beautiful music and festive costumes. But heartbreak ensues when the ceremony is disrupted by terrorists, and peace-loving Hadar is then forced to compromise his own pacifist views to take a stand—to save his restaurant and his family’s future.

Despite the inevitable tragedies that befall the Mansouris, the movie ends with a surge of optimism. Both sides of every issue are examined—old loyalties vs. new compromises, Western ideas vs. Islamic principles, the resentment of American presence vs. the ensuing fear that if the American military leaves, chaos will follow. The narrative is fictional, but rooted in truths that are self-evident. From the leading characters to the tertiary roles of dedicated waiters and customers to evil Taliban insurgents, the actors are perfect, without a false move in sight. Like The Poet’s Corner restaurant, Sonia Nassery Cole’s screenplay is a megaphone for freedom of expression. The title The Black Tulip is a stretch. There are no tulips in sight, black or any other color, and if anyone explained it in passing, I missed the subtitles. Consulting the film’s publicist, a fount of information, I have learned that the black tulip, blooming under the harshest conditions in the Pamir and Hindu Kush mountain regions of Afghanistan, is a symbol for the nation’s spirit. Growing amid ice and stone, the flower, much like the people, is able to prosper and survive against all odds. These are qualities the unconquered citizens of the country have possessed for centuries. The film is a deeply heartfelt experience that addresses the struggles of everyday people in a strange land most of us know nothing about. You will not go away unmoved. See it, and learn something.

rreed@observer.com

THE BLACK TULIP

Running Time 116 minutes

Written by Sonia Nassery Cole and David Michael O’Neill

Directed by Sonia Nassery Cole

Starring Haji Gul Aser, Sonia Nassery Cole and Walid Amini

3/4

Apparently, yes.

Fox News Network's favorite alternative proper noun spelling Megyn Kelly was on today, discussing a train derailment in Columbus, Ohio, when the broadcast rolled a clip of citizen journalism video, with the video's cameraman delivering a fairly astute observation of the massive explosion he'd just witnessed.

And yet, Kelly felt the need to apologize for it, and on a subsequent viewing, the 'bad words' were censored:

News Corp's other notoriously conservative news outfits don't seem to shy away from it. Question: Does this say more about Ms. Kelly, the network's viewership, or who someone with Fox News' censor button answers to?

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Amid manically glittering lights and a bunch of kids bopping in all sorts of school-centric locations (homage to "...Baby One More Time"?) are changed lyrics, to bowlderize the Lady Gaga song for young ears. These include:

• "you and me should dance alone" for "you and me should be alone"
• "you should hang with me... tonight" for "you're who should take me home... tonight"
• "I need a boy that thinks it's right to sing alone, tonight, yeah, baby" for "I need a man that thinks it's right when it's so wrong, tonight, yeah, baby" (this one seems vague enough to have been child appropriate?)

Offensive-seeming lyric kept in place for "Kidz Bop":

• "another shot before we kiss the other side"

Future "Kidz Bop" singles may or may not include Kidz Bop's "Darling Nikki," about a girl who loves to read magazines, and Kidz Bop's "Justify My Love," about a class field trip to Paris.

daddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

(AmericanCensorship.org)

In a blog post published Friday the Obama Administration signaled measured opposition to both the House-sponsored Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its kissing cousin in the Senate, the Protect IP Act of 2011 (PIPA). With fairly clear language (for government officials), impossibly-titled administration officials Victoria Espinel, Aneesh Chopra and Howard Schmidt authored the response to two petitions directed at the legislation, stating:

While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.

Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.

The "measured" part of White House opposition came later in the response:

So, rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right. Already, many of members of Congress are asking for public input around the issue. We are paying close attention to those opportunities, as well as to public input to the Administration.

Given the nature of relations between the White House and Congress, this response is likely to have no effect on legislators. Also, as noted by Fast Company blogger JD Rucker, another problem with SOPA and PIPA--a problem that will lead to them passing--is public ignorance as to what they're about. Rucker writes that even though there's a "perceived groundswell" against the acts, "the reality is that the majority of Americans still have no idea what SOPA is or what it means."

Protests by those who do know about the bills that could "break the Internet" continue. January 18th is Stop SOPA Blackout Day, when a number of major websites plan to go black to demonstrate just how devastating the acts could be.

If you're not clear on what could happen if SOPA and PIPA pass, AmericanCensorship.org can explain what's up with this helpful video.

Before she became famous, Marilyn Minter was a product of much of the same "nightclub kid" scene of the 1970s and 1980s that begot Madonna. And the artist's works--hyperrealistic close-ups of gleaming body parts--were as censored and controversial as some of the pop queen's.

Ms. Minter's drug-addicted, bedridden mother was an early subject, and enormous breasts have figured large in her work, even sex acts. In 1989, she tackled a subject specifically because no other major female artist ever had: pornography. Her giant, glistening, explicit pieces, enamel painted on metal, were rejected by feminists and conservatives alike.

Despite her critics, Ms. Minter was "rediscovered" in the Whitney Biennial of 2006, hailed for Stepping Up, a painting from her skilled series about the seedy side of glamour.

Team Gallery invited her to hang the reviled works from early in her career, along with another series on children from the period, "Big Girls/Little Girls," at a show that runs through April 30. The Observer sat down at the gallery with the flame-haired painter and photographer right before she left for a solo show in Germany and talked to her, ruefully, about her "overnight" success.

The Observer: It's been 30 years since you've shown these works together. Why now?
Marilyn Minter: It was Jose [Freire]'s idea from Team Gallery, the director. I think he saw them in a talk I gave, and pretty soon after that he made a proposition: 'You want to revisit that work?' I said, 'Well yeah, I think we can find it.' And we did; it took us a year to find it. I still don't have everyone, everything--I couldn't find half of it. 

The works weren't well received at the time.
In the late '80s, I think my vision was chasing people out of the room. Nobody else thought like this. I was really this pro-sex feminist. I did think that nobody has politically correct fantasies. And I thought that women should have imagery for their own pleasure. And I thought that everyone thought like that. 

There was censorship?
My New York dealer shut my show down a week early once. And I got kicked out of a couple group shows. I was going to be in group shows, and then all of a sudden I wasn't in them anymore. It wasn't overt but covert; I think the reason was because I was considered a traitor to feminism. Disappointing when you have criticism from the left; you expect it from fundamentalists, but it is a big shock when it comes from the politically correct left. 

What was going on in your life at the time you were making these works? You were collaborating with a team of artists in the East Village ...
It was a big experiment. We were doing lots of drugs and getting high. Once I got out of rehab, these are the first paintings that I made. That painting [she gestures at Big Girls, 1986] was the first one that I didn't destroy. I made these when I got out of rehab. 

After rehab, how many did you actually destroy?
At least 10. Ten pieces of shit. Ten lousy paintings. I was trying to find myself. 

Talk about the "Big Girls/Little Girls" series, which juxtaposes altered images of movie stars with images of little girls looking at their distorted reflections in fun-house mirrors.
My generation saw fun-house mirrors; your generation looks at video games. I grew up in the South, so they'd be at fairs, and they were really fun, they distorted you so much. I thought it made a lot of sense to use that imagery because I grew up with it.

[Early on] I couldn't figure out how to make a contribution to art history as a realist, so I took images that I liked and I [altered them]. ... It is basically a conceptual piece. I was thinking in terms of a little girl in a fun-house mirror, and these two famous movie stars, and I fractured it. ... I just projected [it on the wall] while I was painting and I projected at an angle. So there's this parallel of distortion, and in the middle of that painting is the girl looking into the fun-house mirror. 

How have the responses to you work changed from the '80s to now?
That's hard to gauge. I've been a much more accessible artist to the world since 2006 when I was in the Whitney Biennial. So people are a lot more receptive to what I have to say. 

Has the thinking on sexual imagery in art changed?
The Internet has desensitized people to sexual imagery. But there's still a real glass ceiling. ... I can be an old lady and work with sexual imagery, but as a young girl there is still a glass ceiling. But I'm not sure; it is really complicated, and sexual imagery is so loaded, and male or female, anyone who works with it is going to get criticized [for sexual exploitation]. 

Concerning your porn-inspired work, how did you choose your films or source materials?
All of the porn that I picked--well, at that point it wasn't video. You had to get it from magazines. There were these giant emporiums on 42nd Street, and I was trying to cover everybody. All the different modes of being and sexuality.  

What helped you continue as an artist despite some of the brutal criticism you received?
It is not like I had any choice in the matter. I am not that accomplished. I can hardly spell or add--like, all of sudden I would do anything else. ... But I think I do everything I do because I don't have a choice in the matter as an artist. I have a gift for only one thing. People that are accomplished have choices. I never had a choice.

Is that what it means to be an artist?
They really can't do anything else. Life is so much easier not being one. You can go bowling Friday nights.

editorial@observer.com

"You never know who you'll run into," Mr. O'Brien said. They were both in town for the National Book Critics Circle Awards that evening. Mr. Gass would be presenting Dalkey Archive Press, the outfit Mr. O'Brien started in 1984 in the paradoxically named town of Normal, Ill., with the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1995, Dalkey published Mr. Gass' second and most difficult novel, The Tunnel, a dense, rambling monologue of more than 650 pages that begins with a history professor sitting down to write a short introduction for his magnum opus, a book about the Third Reich, that deteriorates into an encyclopedic personal history. Mr. Gass smiled and the two wondered how they would get to the ceremony. They pondered the rain. They would take a cab.

Dalkey was initially a humble extension of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, the critical journal Mr. O'Brien founded as a way to talk about authors who, like Mr. Gass (as a novelist, not so much as a critic), were overlooked by most of the academy for being too difficult, too self-conscious, too much of a trickster. With Dalkey, Mr. O'Brien set out to keep these authors in print. The subject of The Review's first issue was Gilbert Sorrentino and included an interview with the author by Mr. O'Brien that predicted Dalkey's aesthetic. "It doesn't seem to me that fiction should take the place of reality," Sorrentino told Mr. O'Brien. "The idea of the mirror being held up to life is a very remote one as far as my fictional thinking goes. The point of art is literally the making of something that is beautiful, the making of something that works." Since then, the press has become a touchstone of independent publishing. Its list now includes at least 50 new titles annually, more than half of which are translations. (Only 3 percent of the output of the publishing industry at large comprises books originating from languages other than English.) Mr. O'Brien has done nothing less than give a voice to an otherwise unspoken thread of contemporary fiction.

"It's not that I don't believe in canons," Mr. O'Brien, who is 65 years old, said, sitting down at a table with The Observer. "It's just that I believe in our canon."

When Mr. O'Brien was a graduate student at the University of Illinois, he was submitting to academic journals articles about then obscure authors like Douglas Woolf, Flann O'Brien, Robert Creeley and Gilbert Sorrentino--who had called Mr. O'Brien's attention to many of these writers in the first place. At best, the response he would get was, "There's no currency here"; at worst, "We don't know who that is." One day, when the writer and critic Paul Metcalf, who died in 1999, was visiting Mr. O'Brien's home outside Chicago, the pair lamented the lack of discussion about their favorite writers. They thought, "These writers deserve a journal of their own." Within a year, Mr. O'Brien compiled the first issue of The Review, devoted to the work of Sorrentino. Creeley was the first person to agree to contribute.

"I mapped out five years for it," Mr. O'Brien said. "And I decided, since I had started this with really no money whatsoever, that it would last for five years and become completely broke and then it would fold and become one of those magazines that people would say, 'Hey, whatever became of. ...' And I thought that was fine. Five years is a good run."

Twenty-seven years later and The Review is still mapping out what Mr. O'Brien calls a "constellation" of authors, an alternative canon. More recent issues have included "Writing from Postcommunist Romania" and "The Cuban Fiction Issue"; a forthcoming issue about failure addresses such themes as "Should I Kill Myself and How?" and "The Internet as Consolation." Guest editor Joshua Cohen put the issue together with essays by Helen DeWitt, Jesse Ball and Sam Frank.

"John O'Brien has balls the size of a Henry James sentence," Mr. Cohen told The Observer. "American literature has no better foundation."

The first original book Dalkey published was Where Do You Put the Horse?, a collection of critical essays by Metcalf, who happened to be the great-grandson of another writer on the outskirts of what was fashionable in his time, Herman Melville. Mr. O'Brien said the connection between publishing and criticism is "absolute." The very act of publishing a book with the press carries the heavy significance of "a Dalkey book," though Mr. O'Brien still isn't exactly sure what that means. Certain terms get tossed around--experimental, postmodern, avant-garde--but Mr. O'Brien likes what he likes. He prefers the term "subversive." He has still published plenty of "conventional" novels in terms of content and style. And some works--Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, a few books by Hubert Selby, the National Book Award-winning Voices from Chernobyl--have raised the question from his staff, "Is this a Dalkey book?" when placed beside books by Mr. Gass and Sorrentino or younger writers like Ben Marcus and Aleksander Hemon.

Pigeonholing Dalkey is as difficult as summarizing The Tunnel. Flann O'Brien, whose final novel gave the press its name and whose work is now a part of its list, is a case in point. The Dalkey Archive is a comedy in the tradition of Moll Flanders or Tristram Shandy, a novel that is a parody of the whole genre. In a climactic scene that recalls Laurence Sterne's diagram that attempts--and fails--to make sense of the plot in Tristram Shandy, James Joyce appears as a character--long believed to be dead--to tell us Ulysses was a "collection of smut" and denies writing it. Mr. O'Brien has been a champion of this kind of fuck-you writing since the beginning of his career. He wishes there was more of it.

"We're in a strange time in which art is marginalized in public practices," he said. "The best thing that could happen for art in this country--I'm half-serious in saying this--is that censorship would be imposed. Art would suddenly come through a level of awareness that I don't think it has in contemporary America, especially literature. We had a critic take issue recently with a book who said, 'The problem with this book is the characters are not likable.' Was Raskolnikov likable? I mean, would you like to live next door to Hamlet? That should be the first act of censorship: Characters cannot be likable for 25 years. And no happy endings."

Just before the National Book Critics Circle Awards began, Mr. O'Brien stood by the stage with Mr. Gass and Steve Kellman, a critic and NBCC board member. They were discussing the presentation of the award.

"I'm gonna be brief," Mr. O'Brien said. "Tell some great anecdotes," he said to Mr. Gass. "Or make something up."

"Or you could just give a plot summary of The Tunnel," Mr. Kellman said.

"You could read The Tunnel," Mr. O'Brien said. Mr. Gass guffawed. "We're in the second edition of it now."

Mr. Gass flashed a look of sincere disbelief. "Really?" he said.

A voice came from the speakers to inform the literary cognoscenti, which was starting to seep in through the doors, wet with rain, what to do in case of a fire. Jonathan Franzen took a seat quietly near the front. Patti Smith walked down the aisle with a cup of coffee from a deli. Jennifer Egan was all smiles sitting next to her husband.

"Everybody scream and run!" Mr. Gass said.

"You're all going to die," Mr. O'Brien said. "Isn't that the real message here?"

"That would be it for the contemporary literary cul
ture of America," said Mr. Kellman.

A few moments later, everyone was seated and Mr. Kellman introduced Dalkey, calling it "a canon of American avant-garde." Mr. Gass sauntered up to the stage, first thanking God he did not fall and praying for a safe trip back down.

"There are a surprising lot of us many find strange to this land," he said. "We have come to Dalkey, some of us, to escape. To find readers worthy of our words, if I may brag bag loads, although we are modest under normal circumstances--retired, shocked, unread even by friends. Dalkey Archive's list is a banner of victory. It stands for a war that John O'Brien fought almost by himself to keep these books in print in a language we were willing to read. To get some of them read. To teach us, as that scoundrel Columbus did, how wide the literary world is, how stocked with artistic offenses we have, before now, refused to acknowledge."

Mr. O'Brien stood before the publishing elite, smiled and listened to the applause. It was the kind of happy ending he could accept.

mmiller@observer.com

Turns out that the Air Force is blocking Wikileaks, aiming to keep its personel from accessing more than 25 sites which contain classified material. The Journal is of course not subject to the rule, having pointedly decided not to publish Wikileaks material.  

The move is  based on military protocol, which states that classified material must be kept off unclassified computer systems.

But a defense official who spoke with the the Journal said blocking The New York Times was a misinterpretation of military guidance.

Hard to see the point of denying Air Force personnel access to information that they and everyone else in the world have been reading for weeks. But hey, Don't Access, Don't Tell has a familiar ring to it. 

Meanwhile, British tabloid The Sun introduced page 360 for the iPad, displaying topless ladies on the tablet device from every conceivable angle.

Apple sparked a storm of complaints back in February when it removed dozens of low level apps for sexual content, but allowed major publishers like ESPN and Playboy to remain, despite instances of nudity.

"The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format," Philip W. Schiller, head of worldwide product marketing at Apple, told The New York Times about the February snafu.

That seems to be a way of saying that Apple's bigger partners get preferential treatment. Not that Hearst is small potatoes, but earning the right to show 360 degrees of female nudity might just require a play as Apple-friendly as launching a new, tablet-only magazine.