Posts by Matty

do you think that this was another way of showing how males were superior to females in their teaching, or that their god "jehovah" was more favorable to the male appearance.

They will explain it away by saying that depictions of spirit creatures as male are just symbolic, and of course they actually have no gender. Classes and collectives tend to be depicted as female, the bride of Christ, the spiritual Israel, being the obvious one.

36

119 Hours....

by onacruse in

...until i meet the most incredible, wonderful, fascinating lady i've ever encountered in my life!

bikerchic, you have captured my heart and make me happier than i've ever been, ever, ever, ever!

craig (of the totally twitterpated, gushing-and-blushing-all-over-the-place dufus-in-love class).

Matty

onacruse, I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but I don't think you should see bikerchic at all. She might very well be an evil apostate, I heard that there are one or two around here. In fact I suggest you don't associate with any of the women here, I certainly wouldn't. You just never know, Satan may have an eye on your soul, and will want to steal it away.

I'm only saying this for your own good.

56

Goodbye, I Hope You All Have a Great Life

by Robdar in

jw
friends

goodbye everybody.

i have enjoyed my time here for the most part.

i have made some great friends and a few not so great enemies.

Matty

Take care Robyn, please give me your addy, I aint got it!

7

A Jdub father's love for his son

by William Penwell in

jw
friends

ii just heard a story yesterday that will make you sick to your stomach and i can't believe that i once followed such destructive cult thinking.

i over heard a dub father saying that he turned his son into the elders for smoking!!!

his son is now being df'd over his what his dad said.

Matty

46

She is dying

by Vivamus in

jw
friends

i have never felt more helpless in my life.

my grandma is sick, dying, and there is nothing i can do.

when i look at her, i see this echo of a woman that once was vital, strong and alive.

Matty

(((((Vivamus)))))

7

Is There "Something Of The Night" There?

by Englishman in

jw
friends

all this talk of subliminal images has got the old brain-box working overtime.. i'm just recalling being taken to the kingdom hall as an 8 year old child.

my parents had great difficulty in actually getting me there, i would kick and yell the house down in protest every sunday afternoon when it was time to leave, so great was my dislike of the meetings that we attended at staines kingdom hall.. you see, what upset me, was that i felt a sort of sinister atmosphere present there.

i got the same sort of vibes from the societies books and magazines and loathed having to read them.

Matty

Come to think of it I find the pictures of happy smiling witnesses more scary than the Watchtower's pictures of horror. Those vacant grins are truly gross.

7

Is There "Something Of The Night" There?

by Englishman in

jw
friends

all this talk of subliminal images has got the old brain-box working overtime.. i'm just recalling being taken to the kingdom hall as an 8 year old child.

my parents had great difficulty in actually getting me there, i would kick and yell the house down in protest every sunday afternoon when it was time to leave, so great was my dislike of the meetings that we attended at staines kingdom hall.. you see, what upset me, was that i felt a sort of sinister atmosphere present there.

i got the same sort of vibes from the societies books and magazines and loathed having to read them.

Matty

I think the illustrations in the society's publications are particularly scary for kids. They have such a vivid imagination, and they really live what's going on in them. So if they see someone torturously dying at Armageddon, they embellish it with even more blood and guts!

Where is Tallyman when you need him?!

3

White Teeth: JW's in T.V. End of World Program

by Kenneson in

jw
friends

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv_and_radio/story/0,3604,792774,00.html

Matty

TV review

The TV adaptation of White Teeth, which starts this week, will be a massive boost to Zadie Smith's already huge profile. But have the makers done justice to her work?

Mark Lawson
Monday September 16, 2002 The Guardian

John Grisham's rules for writing successful fiction include the suggestion that the protagonists should be facing a deadline. This tip has been taken seriously in the first part of White Teeth (Tuesday, 10pm, Channel 4), in which the world is due to end.

The earth's termination date - the final midnight of 1974 - has been confirmed to the Willesden branch of Jehovah's Witnesses in a letter from America. Clara (Naomie Harris), the young Jamaican daughter of a leading player in these final days, helps her mother to warn north-west London of the need to repent. But, in a chat-up line that displays a genius beyond most teenagers, biker Ryan (Charlie Creed-Miles) persuades her that, if the end is coming, she ought to come before the end.

White Teeth is adapted from Zadie Smith's novel by Simon Burke and directed by Julian Jarrold. Most literary fiction on television has the advantage that almost no one in the audience will have read it. Many writers - Jeanette Winterson, David Lodge, Hanif Kureishi, PD James, Ruth Rendell - were popularised by small-screen versions of novels with previously moderate sales.

Smith, though, has close to a million readers even before the intervention of TV, which makes this exercise more like doing Austen or Dickens: the ratings will include a swathe of viewers watching like lawyers to check for default from the novel. As a cross-generational saga with a visual image in its title, Smith's book is suited to the medium and the director uses her dental metaphor nicely.

Allowed only four hours, they treat the piece as four self-contained short-stories, concentrating on one character, with background cameos from people in previous weeks. The compression is often ingenious so that, for example, Samad Iqbal (Om Puri) is introduced in a scene that seems incidental - using the urinal in a restaurant - but which economically sets up the erotic envy that drives his own story.

Even so, in its opening scenes, the TV White Teeth feels less fresh than the book did. This is largely because the drama's chosen starting points - young girl with bible-blinded mother, communal life in multi-racial London - keep bumping into two of the most celebrated examples of televised modern literature: The Buddha of Suburbia and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

Gradually, though, Smith is allowed to gain some distance from Kureishi and Winterson. Picking up from the structure of Smith's novel, a frequent device of director and adaptor is the standard dramatic situation that reverses expectations at its end. Most deflowerings of young women in fiction are disappointing and lead immediately to pregnancy; Clara's initiation is orgasmic and contracepted.

Many other subsequent scenes - a mother coming home unexpectedly, a motorbike accident - also amusingly defeat clich. When a Willesden bigot roars abuse at an Indian bride, she screeches back. An attempted exhaust-pipe suicide is thwarted because the driver chooses a no-parking zone. Some of the producers worked on Our Friends in the North and there are familial resemblances both in the wig-and-costume historical flow (characters are followed from 1974 to the present) and in the use of Top 40 time markers - T. Rex, Cockney Rebel, Slade and so on - which occasionally make the project feel like a soundtrack album that has had a drama based on it.

The big difference from Our Friends is the weight given to the politics. In White Teeth, we learn that Heath's three-day week is in operation only from a passing comment and, while the non-white characters are occasionally victimised by their skin, racism is never the theme of the piece, as it would have been if the drama had been made in the 70s rather than set in that period.

This isn't a weakness because such intolerance is itself now more subtle and underground than it used to be. Typical of White Teeth's nicely sly treatment of the subject is the second episode (set in 1984), when white infant teacher Poppy Burt-Jones (Maggie O'Neill) starts an affair with Samad Iqbal. It's made clear that her operatic gestures of multi-culturalism - a love for the food and music of "the east" - are a form of racism. Posing as colour-blindness, her conquest of Samad is a kind of erotic colonialism.

Julian Jarrold confirms the impression given by his versions of Great Expectations and Crime and Punishment that he is the most innovative director of literary adaptations. Some find his style self-advertising - if the camera isn't on stilts, it's on skates - but the point is that what almost always disappears when a book comes to the screen is authorial tone. The conventional solution to this problem has always been voiceover narration. In a way far more true to the medium he's working in, Jarrold's visual flashes provide an organising visual style to replace the missing prose style.

His signature crane shot - used in White Teeth to look down on Jehovah's Witnesses gazing towards heaven, and on cars circling roundabouts - is also especially apt for televised books, because the long look down is the perspective of the novelist and of God. As television, White Teeth carries a few narrative snags of spinach. A PTA meeting in a trendy London school is too broadly satirised and Robert Bathurst is too good an actor to be playing, after Cold Feet, another middle-class snob with another son called Josh.

But - unlike the safe and retrograde Shackleton - this drama feels in keeping with Channel 4's remit as a network. If the book receives the usual sales boost from televisation, then Zadie Smith will soon have the largest readership of any serious novelist in Britain. In her brief phenomenal career, she has frequently seemed an uncommonly lucky writer and her good fortune continues with the people who brought her debut novel to the screen.

Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002