The Square

The bottom line is that after two years of turmoil beginning in the winter of 2011 Mohammed Morsi remains under what the Times describes as "indefinite detention," Hosni Mubarak has moved from jail to house arrest “Mubarak to Be Transferred to House Arrest,” NYT, 8/21/13) and the military is still in power. These are the events that are narrated in Jehane Noujaim’s documentary, The Square, currently playing at Film Forum. Of course, the title referring to Cairo’s Tahir Square, the epicenter of unrest during the initial rebellion against the Mubarak dictatorship, also conjures up the memory of Tiananmen Square, where the Chinese movement was crushed in l989. Politically, both Arab Spring, of which the Egyptian uprising was a part, and the early rebellion in China both emanated from the same impulse--the struggle for human rights. The Square is a jeremiad since it betokens the tragic fate of many freedom movements in which resistance to authoritarianism becomes so ideologized that it spawns its own forms of repression. That’s what’s happening in Syria where Al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist factions have co-opted the opposition. Who knows if parliamentary democracy would have been the product of a successful people’s revolution against the party elite in China? The narrative of The Square is told in microcosm through the eyes of Ahmed, a streetwise agitator, Khalid an actor (who has starred in films like The Kite Runner) and Magdy, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the most torn of all the characters, precisely due to a political agenda—which increasingly puts him at odds with his confreres. The Square recapitulates the sickening history of freedom movements from the Russian Revolution on, with the early millenarian fervor attendant upon shocking degrees of naivete. While one has to admire the courage of the protestors, one wants to give them a history lesson—or two. Have they never heard of an Italian sociologist named Vilfredo Pareto and his concept of  “the circulation of the elites?” Have they never heard the expression that that power is conservative and self-perpetuating, no matter how lofty the ideals it seeks to uphold? The film is rather straightforward and earnest, but there’s one exception and that’s the intermittent cross cuts to a mural that’s constantly being painted by an unidentified hand. This brilliant little touch links the film to the works of painters as varied as Goya, Orozco and Picasso and their narratives of human suffering.

A Yankee in King Arthur’s Vestibule

Benjamin Franklin Sands

There is something truly regal about deploying to the throne that sits next to the coat of armor in the lobby of King Arthur Flour (aka The Baker’s Store) in Norwich Vermont. King Arthur Flour dates back to l790 and by l870 Sands, Taylor and Wood was the name of the company that created this building block of cake--which is still advertised as “never bleached” and “pure white as nature intended. The history of the company is recounted in a promotional video entitled “King Arthur Flour: History in the Baking,” readily accessible on You Tube.  And the lineage of the giants who started King’s Arthur including Benjamin Franklin Sands is hung on the wall opposite the throne. While Benjamin wasn’t an inventor like his namesake, nor a signer of the Declaration of Independence, this serious bearded chap looks like— well the CEO of a l9th century flour company. The King Arthur outlet in Norwich in many ways resembles a Williams Sonoma with its cookware and mixes and free samples of everything from maple syrup jelly beans to Himalaysian rice with garlic and Swiss char. But there’s also a baking school on the premises and for those who are interested in cooking the whole experience is like seeking the Holy Grail of a certain kind of baking. When you’re done with King Arthur, cross the Connecticut river over the Ledyard Bridge to Hanover, New Hampshire. There you’ll find, "The Epic of American Civilization," in the basement of the Baker Library at Dartmouth. The mural, by the Mexican artist who was a contemporary of Diego Rivera, depicts the evolution of the Americas from Aztec times through the advent of industrialization, though King Arthur Flour is not cited.