Reviews about the book "Latest News"
REVIEW
The book, "Last news" , is a collection of details from an episode, where we all were actors. A period of social disorder, when it performed the stage of absurd, has marked our existence, through the modification of our moral values. Ticu Isari immortalize the images of the fair's vanities and he smothers his mutiny in sonorous columns, hardly heard. The camera immortalizes pain, tears, and injustice, but it does not intervene. It is a coldness similar to a knife blade.
However, the cameraman suffers, lives and vibrates up to rebellion. A revolt, which yet does not erupts in a blind outburst. A revolt dominated by the conviction that singular acts are in vain. Ticu Isari, from behind the portrait, sometimes he does not show us the evil, he just suggests the existence of it. At times, he points, concentrating the fascicule of light, towards the evil zone. In this collection of details, with predilection from Iasi, yet from around the world, Ticu Isari does not crave to offer us an enlightening portrait of recalled times, even if, this is in fact, the final purpose of his book. Living in the middle of the events, in the hurry of a new history creation, the book author does not claim to be a meticulous chronicler.
However, he has the conviction, and I accept as true, that his volume presents us the actors of the time as they were, are , and will be. Children, old people, oppressed, oppressors, heroes, betrayers, scamps, saints, devils, everyone is part of the vast portrait, suggested by details, desperately . "The Latest News" is an uncertain portrait, drown by a fog, that we all wait to dispel.
University Teacher, Doctor Constantin Simirad
REVIEW
Mister Ticu Isari, founder and director of the Private Television Tele'M, comes into view this time, in front of the public, in a totally new posture, which to be sincere we expected it , but it hasn't been......attest it! Therefore, Mr. Ticu Isari offers us a veritable Chronicle of Iasi ,at the end of century and millennium, in which, with attention and talent, surprises the facts, specifics to the Moldavian Capital, but also the ones who shaken the planet.
The essential consists in that The World is judged and watched from an epicentre, and this is named and symbolic Iasi. Follower of unsurpassed Nicolae Iorga, the chronicler bends, with delicacy and profound understanding, over the "little" ones, which is, they have their part of guilt, usually greater than we are disposed to concede, in the creation of the history.
I recommend, with great pleasure, to the Reader, The Chronicle of Mr. Ticu Isari, being convinced that we have in countenance a BOOK that will have a well-deserved and stunning success!
Iasi, 1st December 2002
Academician, University Teacher, Doctor Gheorghe Buzatu
REVIEW
As I was reading your book, a few names revived, repeatedly, into my mind: F. Brunea Fox, Geo Bogza, John Dos Passos. You have the rare capacity to suggest without underlining, leaving the reader with the sensation that he discovers alone, the moments signification, as Fox did it so many times, either speaking about leprosy (as you did it with Tichilestii), or about the ladies from The Cross of Stone.
At the same time, you are aware of the power ,of the fact apparently divers, which recall on me Bogza's work of art "375 minutes at Mizil". However, the book ,through his structure and its rhythm, remembered me of the Dos Passos's novel, the one –throughout a collage of news, in fact divers, pieces of articles-he was succeeding to do an extraordinary dynamic chronicle of America, at the beginning of the XXth century.
The book speaks about Romania, between 1995-1999, but about his author, too. The events selection, their listing, betrays - behind the displayed neutrality- an authentic conscience, unprotected against disappointing and sores.
Therefore, I would say that the final part, the rhymes, is in fact the moment of maximum sincerity and the act of great courage.
University Teacher Dr. Tudor Vlad
James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research
Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Georgia
ULTIMILE STIRI
By Nichita Danilov
Critic of Art
Monday, at 6 pm, at City Hall Iasi took place the launch of book "Last news", written by Ticu Isari, the manager of television Tele 'M. Portraying the book and the author, the Mayor Constantin Simirad, made a point of the key role, played by Television Tele’ M in opinion's public, in a very difficult and troubled time of Romanian society, the transition from totalitarian regime to the market economy. On Mayor's opinion, Tele M was the only television where: "all citizens could express freely their opinions and woes".
Living in the core of the events, in hasten of a new history creation; the author pretends not to be a meticulous chronicler. However, he is certain, and I believe he is right to be, that his album illustrates us the performers of the times, as they were, are and always be.... The heroes of Ticu Isari's news - children, old people, vagabonds, leprosies, noblemen, kings, politicians, historical personages, policemen, priests, singers, actors, writers, drivers, painters, administrators - they all live in an harsh world, un uproar of a continuous present, where time elapses quickly and without rhyme, and where the only law is the jungle's.
The news are not presented nude, they wear a weight, that one of living feelings of the man who is there as reporter. He bangs, he flares up, he takes attitude, condemns, refers to past events etc., etc . If this "nosiness" would not exist, through the absurd of the situation and the cruelty of reality, it would seem to be inferred from Harms, Urmuz or horror films.
On 28th of November 1998, a citizen from Pacurari, ill with kidneys, took the pail with garbage to the waste bin and never make it back home. Two police officers grabbed him and put him in the torture room at the Cooperative the "Work of the Invalids", where they hilted him with the truncheons ,until Dumitru Agape fainted. Afterwards, they took him on the street and tied him, like a bloody flesh, of the same Cooperative fence, where the guardians are "dumps, blinds and deaf" , because they are afraid of being beatten and fired. After three hours of desperate searching, his wife found him, hanging on the fence, as the robbers crucified with Jesus, and so she called Television Tele 'M. Of course, the police officers were drunk.
The police officers and their victims from "Ultimile stiri" have something in common with the police officers and the tortured described by the writer Pedro Camacho of llosa in “Ant Julia and the writer”. In fact ,also "the romantic" editorial staff from Tele' M reminds me about the ghostlike radio station, where Pedro Camacho worked, writing ,daily ,radio drama scenarios. Even if the scenes from "Ant Julia and the writer" were written from the desk, they still had certain tangents with the reality from Lima.
Unlike them, the scenes from "Ultimile Stiri" are written, directly, on the street. They are not produced by the hallucinating mind of a sick writer, but by the quotidian. The reality, where we live. The Sergeant, Lituma of Llosa, the one who finds a naked black man, inside an abandoned barn, has a human behavior. His action is affected by his emotions; he is not reacting like a simple mechanism that moves the truncheon and the boots.
Ticu Isari's sergeants, dispossessed of any feeling, are presented as simple brutes. They do not investigate, but they maltreat the man without asking useless questions. Otherwise, in "Last news" the world is set half-and-half: the brawlers and the beaten. The hangmen and the victims. The shots are atrocious, no matter if they happen at the police station or in the torture room ,from the "Invalid's Cooperative", where the guardians are "deaf and blind and dump" or in the courtyard and the good Christian’s houses .Here are some paragraphs:" The daughter, the son in law and the nephew beat to death Dumitru Dumitresu. On his medico-legal certificate, number 1154 from 28th of March 1997, it writes that the old man, seventy-one years old " was hit with the pitchfork ,the hoe and an axle, by three persons".
Or a more cruel image: Constantin T. Mihai, seventy-one years old, (the majority of Ticu Isari's characters are old people) tells how on 1st of August, this year, at seven o'clock in the night, heard his wife screaming. He goes off his summer warehouse and he see his son, Neculai, how he is killing the woman with the hook from the fountain. When he saw him, he let go of his mother, with five broken ribs, in a pool of blood and get on his father. He hit the old man until another brother of the brawler and a son of the fallen one, Eugen, who pushed away Neculai and he firmly began to beat him, until he left his father unconscious. After that, the two brothers, pleased with their work, left, leaving dead the two old people in the courtyard. Of course, if he would investigate, the reporter would find out the cause of the conflict. However, the reporter, equipped himself with the camera, is happy to present the reality from a single point of view, the victims.
Pedro Camacho complicates the facts. He presented the events from multitude points of view, all verities. Ticu Isari does not like the aggressors. Therefore, he does not give them any chance of escape. The reality, of course, is a little more complex .Inside the victims and the hangmen live the same hell. Peeling from one part of the truth, the reporter emphasizes the absurd of the world where we were given to live. Not perchance, the Romanian reality has similarities with South American .The explanation is the political and the social. The bareness and dictatorship, regardless of meridian, bring the society to the same common denominator. People transform in beasts.
In the main, synthesizing the impressions, the book "Last news", written by Ticu Isari, it may be looking like a suite of images, somehow desperate, painted by a naïve painter, which with rudimentary potential, succeeds to outline a veridical chronicle of the contemporaneous society.
The bits and pieces, he throws on the canvas, are atypical: mud, blood, pounded glass, poison. In addition, on his palette we find the axe, scythe, sword and of course the pitch. The Reporter is not unreceptive, he urges the reader to rebellion.
On the Centre of the painting comes into view the city and behindhand the country. Moreover, beyond the horizon is the globe. The black images are sprinkled, here and there, with glimmer of optimism and hope - this people of Romania is not completely lost.