ENRON – THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM £19.99 DVD release: 11.09.2006 Duration: 110 min Genre: documentary Lions Gate Home Entertainment ****     “So, how exactly does Enron make its money?” asks business reporter Bethany McLean the Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling for the magazine Fortune in March 2001. And is a bit surprised that he can not answer the straightforward question. In fact, even now, five years after the collapse and bankruptcy of America’s seventh largest corporation, the question is still a mystery, given that Enron’s accounting firm Arthur Anderson shredded one ton of balance sheets before the full extent of the fraud was known.

Simon Schama is the presenter of the television series: “The Power of Art“, which runs for eight weeks on BBC 2 on Fridays. The Professor in art and art history at Columbia University in New York City narrates the documentaries using beautiful and descriptive language as well as creative and artistic form and style. He uses his impressive in depth-knowledge to feature the artists, their biography, the motivation to and the development of their work. Last Friday’s episode was the seventh in the series and focused on the emergence of Pablo Picasso’s political art piece “Guernica”. The title “The Power of Art“ does unfortunately not refer to the influence of art on politics or society in general, but to the immediate impact on the individual viewer.

I haven’t blogged for a while, but I have written a lot. Mostly reviews. I was trying to get them printed in newspapers and magazines, and am still unsure if I need to hold back the articles from putting them on the blog before they are printed and published. We were away as well, the last three weekends, visiting relatives. We went down to Leeds and visited a Leonardo DaVinci drawings exhibition and also the rest of the museum with sculptures. In Nottingham, we went to a Space centre and an Industrial Museum, which was fun. And in Nuremberg, I went to the left-wing bookfair and got some brilliant music and books, and also enjoyed some talks and visited the Red Cross Museum, the courtroom 600 in which the nazi trials took place and the Museum at the nazi party rally grounds.

On Infoshop, there is a moving eyewitness report about what really happened at the barricades. Apparently, the footage has been recovered, too. I wonder if this is the first Indymedia volunteer who died since Indymedia was founded. Infoshop reports: “Suddenly, about a dozen people started shouting, donning masks, picking up Molotov cocktails (known as bombas Molotov) and cohetes (large bottle rockets typically shit out of PVC pipes the people call bazookas), and collecting rocks and sticks.” And: “Many corporate news outlets, most notably those relying on AP “reporter” Rebeca Romero (widely believed to be on Ulises Ruiz’s payroll), have claimed it was “unclear” as to who shot first.

Documentary filmmaker, photographer and reporter for various Indymedia projects Brad Will has been shot by paramilitaries in Oaxaca, Mexico, yesterday. Apparantly he died with his videocamera in his hand. Fellow friends and activists said they have been able to identify the murderer by the footage. BBC, Reuters, Yahoo News and AP lied in their article that there would have been a shoot-out and unclear who shot first. However, LaJornada and witnesses say that protesters only had stones, slingshots and some DIY defences. It makes me really angry to read that on the mainstream media, as if to avoid the public getting too interested in what’s really going on in Mexico at the moment.