Detox | Respite

WHAT’S UP?

Try to take it easy. It’s hot — too hot to do anything basically. A break is in order. Have a swim and get some fresh air. Let’s take a few steps away from what's happening around us and try to unwind. Because in two days it’s back to the grind, the endless loop of getting things done and working at full pace. We hope our recommendations help you make the most of this weekend. Enjoy!

READ

Today would have been the 96th birthday of Ali Reda (1924-1993), whose younger brother Mahmoud passed away last weekend. The brothers’ lives and careers were always intertwined; Ali’s career in dance was one of the major factors that led his brother down the same path, eventually leading to the moment they founded the Reda Troupe, which would later become a state-sponsored project.

The Reda brothers’ initial involvement with dance was not focused on Egyptian folklore, their troupe’s central draw: Ali was dancing tango, rumba and samba while Mahmoud was dancing with an Argentinian folk group, and used to perform different forms of Latin dance in Egypt and beyond. 

In the early 1950s, Ali was a gymnast who used to participate in several Egyptian dance competitions and started to take part as a background dancer in several films. Later, he began to do his own choreography and worked as an assistant director. Around the same time, Mahmoud was starting to feel the need to introduce a more Egyptian flavor to his performances, and that’s when the brothers decided to start the Reda Troupe.

Picture 1 (Mahmoud Reda and Farida Fahmy)

Following the troupe’s early success in Cairo, Ali directed his first film, Agazet Nisf al-Sana (Mid-year Vacation) in 1962, followed by Gharam fil Karnak (Love in Karnak, 1967) and Haramy al-Waraqa (The Pickpocket, 1970). All three films starred members of the Reda Troupe and featured their famous dances.

For more on the Reda brothers and their careers, check out this obituary for Mahmoud by Mohamed Shoeir, in which the author dives into the story of the troupe’s establishment. You can also check out this collection of articles by Farida Fahmy — co-founder of the troupe and its principal dancer for 25 years, and also Ali’s wife — in which she recounts many of her experiences with the troupe, and explains the philosophy behind several of their most famous performances. 

Meanwhile, here, Fahmy speaks about dancing with the milayat laff (a black sheet Egyptian women in urban working-class neighborhoods used to wrap around their bodies when going out, a staple of Egyptian heritage). You can also watch this interview with Mahmoud Reda about his creative family and career, and this episode on the life and work of Ali. 

[wonderplugin_video iframe="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyAoVXW0sQ8" lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle="" lightboxgroup="" lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage="" lightboxoptions="" videowidth=800 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss="position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;" playbutton="https://thefuturebegins.today/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png"]

And from the careers of Egypt’s most famous dancers, we move on to a Greek ballet dancer who lived in Alexandria and later left to become one of the most renowned gallerists and collectors in the United States and Europe. Read this piece on the extraordinary life of Alexander Iolas, the man who discovered Andy Warhol. 

WATCH

We’ve been struggling for a while to write this review. We relied on our own observations, conversations with friends, as well as the official guide issued with the release of the third and final season, and now we’re finally ready to recommend Netflix’s Dark.

Rather than trying to recap the show’s plot points in order, we adopt Dark’s assertion that time is not a straight line, but a maze; an assumption that pulls from the work of German philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly his concept of “eternal recurrence”: the idea that the universe and everything in existence has always been recurring and will continue to occur forever. It also borrows from Einstein’s idea of the unity of time and space: that the past, present and future are not part of a chronological timeline, but all exist together and create the time we are living in. A potential viewer of the series may wonder: Where does the drama lie among all of these abstract philosophical concepts? How can you create a drama in which time is the protagonist?

[wonderplugin_video iframe="https://youtu.be/cq2iTHoLrt0" lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle="" lightboxgroup="" lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage="" lightboxoptions="" videowidth=800 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss="position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;" playbutton="https://thefuturebegins.today/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png"]

We are placed in the fictional German city of Winden after the disappearance of children in a subterranean cave near the town’s nuclear power plant, which is about to be closed after serving as the backbone of the city’s economy and livelihood of its residents. But in a time-centered drama, the search for the disappeared children takes different avenues. Rather than asking how and where the children disappeared, they should be asking when it occurred. The drama here takes place across several different timelines that are each 33 years apart, the length of a full lunar moon cycle that resets with the alignment of the sun and moon. In these cycles, everything repeats itself, as the characters read in a book about time travel.

Amid this maze, we see the young Jonas seek to exercise free will in the face of the loop of outcomes and time that produced a world that causes him pain and suffering because of the loss of his loved ones. It is the same loop that Adam seeks to preserve without any changes. Adam plays a dynamic role in many events, which causes the conflict between him and Jonas.

Jonas reminds us of the biblical figure Jonah, as both of them took it upon themselves to get out of a crisis with the aid of divine instruction; even though it was the same instruction that caused all of this chaos in the first place. Adam, too, resembles his religious counterpart.

But their prolonged struggle revolves around the conflict between free will embodied by Jonas and the causal determinism represented by Adam. But their philosophical realization shows that things that may appear to be inconsistent with one another may actually be two sides of the same coin, or at least they often intersect with one another. For example, being and nothingness, time and place, beginning and end or light and darkness.

[wonderplugin_video iframe="https://youtu.be/9yA8EZQyhS0" lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle="" lightboxgroup="" lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage="" lightboxoptions="" videowidth=800 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss="position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;" playbutton="https://thefuturebegins.today/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png"]

It’s worth pointing out that this conflict takes place in different timelines, including Germany post-World War II, post-reunification in the 1990s and beyond.

If you watch the show, it’s recommended to come armed with curiosity. It may also be useful to watch the series at the same time as some friends or relatives so you can indulge in some group discussions and share your different insights and interpretations; it’s honestly a big part of the fun. 

Recommended for Detox by Sara Seif and Israa Awad

LISTEN

I read Ennio Morricone’s name for the first time when I was in college. I was flipping through the channels one sleepless night in search of something to watch when I stumbled upon one of the lesser-known spaghetti Westerns of the 1970s, Don Siegel’s Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970). The only reason I still remember the film’s name today is its music, which stayed with me for days. I found out the name of the composer because I looked up the soundtrack online the moment the film was over. 

Years later, I was watching Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) in the cinema and found myself smiling when I heard the same theme in one scene. Later, I realized that Tarantino had some of Morricone’s scores rearranged for the film, as an ode to the artist who he has dubbed his “favorite composer,” stressing that he did not mean only in the “ghetto” of film music, going on to compare him to Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Tarantino said that while accepting the Golden Globe for Best Original Score on Morricone’s behalf for his film The Hateful Eight (2015), for which Morricone wrote the original score, after the director had appropriated his older compositions in several films (in addition to Django, he also did it in Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds). 

[wonderplugin_video iframe="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAWpIQATcRE" lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle="" lightboxgroup="" lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage="" lightboxoptions="" videowidth=800 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss="position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;" playbutton="https://thefuturebegins.today/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png"]

Morricone’s absence from the awards ceremony was not strange. Although he wrote the music for some of Hollywood’s most famous productions and was often credited with changing the genre of the American Western, he chose to continue living in Italy, where he was born in 1928. As a result, he never became fluent in English, and when he received an honorary Oscar in 2007, he gave his speech in Italian and asked Clint Eastwood (his favorite movie star, in his own words) to translate it to the audience. 

The music of Ennio Morricone — who always insisted on being called “Maestro” — was never just one of the elements that made up the film it was written for. It became its soul; its very essence. His unique use of vocals, his employment of certain sound effects (gunshots, hoofbeats, etc.) to enmesh the music within the setting, his assigning of certain instruments to certain characters in a film to create a sensory link beyond what you see on the screen — it’s enough to think of the name of a film to have its music instantly fill your head. How can we imagine the final duel in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, for instance, without that escalating piece of music — the tension, the build-up, the epic resolution? Or the montage of the kissing scenes in Cinema Paradiso without its poignant, incredibly moving yet not overly sentimental score?

Below you’ll find a collection of Morricone’s most iconic works. Listen to them, or, better yet, watch the movies for the full, thrilling experience:

[wonderplugin_video iframe="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2b4XFUJwARF73TlYsO3vWxg2XXijKbIG" lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle="" lightboxgroup="" lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage="" lightboxoptions="" videowidth=800 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss="position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;" playbutton="https://thefuturebegins.today/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png"]

Recommended for Detox by Yasmine Zohdi