lefter, warmer

Tribeca Film Festival - Moloch Tropical

2010-05-03T07:21:00.004-04:00

So, I didn't really redeem myself as a blogger with this year's festival by keeping a daily blog of what I saw. It all started - or didn't start - because I was undecided about what to say with the very first movie on my list, Raoul Peck's film Moloch Tropical. I went to see it because I liked Peck's films Lumumba and Sometimes in April. He has also made the documentary, Profit and Nothing But! and is currently making a film titled Karl Marx. In other words, he is a left film-maker and he makes beautiful films.
Moloch Tropical was without a doubt, beautifully made - full of pathos, horror, and even humor. However, it justifies the overthrow of Aristide in 2004, and to use his story to portray the nature of the "universal dictator." At the Q&A, Peck discussed it as not specifically about one person, but about the nature of power and the meaning of democracy. However, this is a cop-out. It is obviously about Aristide - references to him as a former priest loved by the poor are made throughout the film, and the necklacing of a former friend and ally, of which Aristide was accused in 2004, is central to the narrative. What I find particulary problematic in this merging of the "universal" and the historically specific examination of a dictatorship is the portrayal of this Aristide-like dictator as a repulsive sexual predator.
I hadn't realized before I'd seen this, but during the U.S. coup, Peck wrote an anti-Aristide editorial in Newsday, and has been one of the Haitian intellectuals who are most disenchanted with his presidency.
In contrast, the film Aristide and the Endless Revolution shows multiple views on the 2004 coup, but is sympathetic to Aristide. The left in the U.S. is divided on the issue.
Having received most of my information about the events of 2004 as they were occurring through the coverage of it on the very pro-Aristide Democracy Now, I was shocked by this film and thought, if this is an accurate representation of Aristide in Haiti, it's devastating. To figure out what the deal is, I now plan to read Alex Dupuy's The Prophet and Power.
Ultimately, my critique of the film is that in merging "Moloch" story with a perhaps justifiable critique of Aristide, Peck has created an excuse for doing what one blogger describes as turning priest into a cannibal.

Back to the Tribeca Film Fest

2010-04-23T08:23:00.002-04:00

I really started this blog in earnest back in the Spring of 2005 when I first went to the Tribeca Film Fest. Five years later, I've had very little time or energy for such focused procrastination, but perhaps this year I will blog about every movie I see at TFF and thus redeem myself. Today, I'm seeing Raul Peck's new film Moloch Tropical and later on, My Queen Karo.

Back-To-School Politics - the Politics of Composition

2009-08-26T10:19:00.006-04:00

One of my friends posted Stanley Fish's NYT article on college composition courses on facebook today. There are lots of well-informed comments from different perspectives on the NYT page.
Since I taught writing in the kind of composition department that Fish decribes,I feel qualified to school the bemused Professor Fish.

Part of Fish's assessment of trends in the teaching of college composition courses fits my experience. I taught college-level composition for six years - first as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota and then during my first two years working as an adjunct at CUNY, where I also read and evaluated ACT exams. I share some of Fish's frustration with college comp classes; I often felt I was doing something more "old-fashioned" than what others did because I did teach grammar and sentence structure, and because I insisted that the course material could not consist of watching movies, but had to engage the written word. I was, as Fish is, appalled to find that some of my colleagues did not give their student any reading assignments at all.
The reason that people did this wasn't really political; it was a strategy for dealing with the existing skills of the students they met in their classrooms. The majority of people teaching college writing courses today are graduate students who do not want to alienate their students, and want them to enjoy their classes. Confronting students with difficult reading assignments and practice with grammar is not an obvious route to teacher-popularity.

Some of these courses my colleagues taught involved lots of direct instruction in writing; one model course that was very popular with teachers involved students critiquing each others' writing as a group while the instructor marked up essays on an overhead projector. Those teachers couldn't be faulted for not teaching writing; there was no content in those courses at all. However, I never used this approach because I thought that exposing students to really good writing was key to improving students' work. If the students aren't that familiar with written language, they aren't equipped to teach each other how to write. Their criticisms of their peers might not be anymore valid than their criticism of Joan Didion; (my advanced journalism major students claimed that her book Miami was full of "run-on sentences" because she wrote in long -grammatically correct- sentences.

In his article, Fish blames bad composition teaching for the tragically bad writing of American university students. However, the real problem is that as television has replaced print as the medium of news and entertainment, the majority of our students are not literate in "print culture." It is more common now to encounter college students who simply do not read - not newspapers, not magazines, not books. Those who do read don't often read models of what college classes ask them to produce. At the beginning of the semester in my history class, I ask students what the most difficult book they read recently was. Almost all of them listed works of Shakespeare which they had read (and had not understood) in their English classes, and a few named Harry Potter books. Very few of them read anything for pleasure - unless they were reading internet news or sports articles.

The problem that writing instructors face is not the result of bad schooling. If people do not read, they will not be good writers. If they are not familiar with written language, which is not like spoken language, they will not be able to produce elegant prose.

Why don't people try to familiarize their students with this more difficult writing that would be a model of what they want their students to achieve? Is it because of a multi-cultural agenda? no.
One group that seriously objects to teaching essay-writing by assigning essays to read are the English literature faculty who want to teach their students the great works of literature. They are on the canonical mission for which Fish criticizes ACTA. Those lit people are holding back the teaching of writing just as much as those who teach the smarmier versions of comp-rhet.
They're not teaching writing either; they're teaching the appreciation of literature - and the students be damned who don't appreciate it. In order to engage students at all, many of these literature teachers ask their students to respond with an experience they once had which was similar to something in the book that they just read - but teaching students how to write autobiographical narratives does not help them write better essays in their college courses - although it may help them "relate" to literature.

One of the comments on Fish's article comes from a student who just couldn't relate; he's not interested in literature, but who says he would learn to write better if he could write about something that interested him:

I have always found it difficult to write about writing or literature, but easy to write about things that exit in the physical universe.
So it appears to me that rhetoric and grammar should be taught incidentally as students consider other things. After all, people who are actually interested in grammar are destined to become English professors.
Or to put it another way, I always want to learn to write better, but please spare me from writing about, or even thinking about Moby Dick.

That's an example of a larger general truth; I recall reading about a shocking study that revealed that students' writing improved when they wrote about subjects that were interesting to them. Maybe it's tragic that everyone isn't interested in Moby Dick, but being so shouldn't be a pre-requisite for learning how to write a decent college paper. Comp/rhet scholars who do the "writing across the curriculum" and writing-intensive courses that ACTA finds disdainful agree. They say the goal should be to teach students how to write argumentative essays that will help them in college courses in many disciplines, and to assign readings that help them learn about argument.

Following this notion, I assigned reading to students in composition classes that were models of what I wanted them to write. I did not assign Moby Dick because I wasn't teaching them to write literature. I assigned essays - on the topics that Fish thinks are standing in for what should be the real content of the course.
One semester, I used sports writing as a focus to try to engage students' interest. Another semester, I had students do research on ongoing debates about their own university, reading the school newspaper and documents in the university archives. I taught "composition with a cultural diversity" focus that got students to write about racism, class, gender, and media bias - all using great essays - James Baldwin, Cherrie Moraga, Noam Chomsky. I taught them about the value of evidence and logical fallacies by assigning Pierre Vidal-Naquet's work on Holocaust Denial for a couple of semesters. I used some excellent composition anthologies and some newergrammar books.
My favorite grammar book of all time was Scott Rice's Right Words, Right PlacesR, which used sentences from canonical works of literature to teach sentence structure and style.
That book, now out of print, brings me to the last point: Grammar.
Everyone talks about how bad it is, and yet no one really wants to teach it. Grading students' papers one grammatical-error at a time is not teaching, it is editing. I met countless students whose main lesson from high school had been that they "couldn't write" and "didn't know grammar". They were actually traumatized by people's attempts to teach them grammar; they avoided writing at all costs, finding classes with no papers required. They didn't think of grammar as something creative or interesting, but only as a something that they would "mess up" without knowing it. They learned that they were "bad writers" and they believed that "good writers" were superior people who were born, not made.
Meeting those students is what causes writing teachers to avoid doing much about grammar; they don't want to compound the problem. If they can just get the students to engage a little with writing in a positive way, they hope, grammar correction can come later. This doesn't work either.
But how do you teach grammar - at a college level? If I stand up and give a lecture about parallelism, it is unlikely to result in improvement in students' writing. The best method is all the "active-learning" and "critical thinking" stuff that the ACTA people Fish cites would probably hate, especially in college. My approach to teaching grammar was to stress to students that written grammar was a set of rules that they weren't comfortable with, that "good writing" wasn't a natural talent, and that they would not improve without practice, much as if they were learning to play tennis, or the guitar. I used grammar books that had creative exercises or got my students into games involving sentence structure so that instead of focusing on error, students could engage with grammar as a tool that they could use to express themselves more clearly. These grammar lessons were quite lively - but they took a lot of their methodology from creative writing courses that I had taken in the past. The comp/rhet people probably thought that was old-fashioned of me; and the ACTA people probably thought that if the students still needed that work in college, they just shouldn't be there in the first place. After all, the thing that Fish really doesn't mention is that the teaching of these important skills is done by graduate students and now adjuncts, because the "real professors" think that teaching grammar is beneath them, along with the students who don't know it.

What to Do, What to DO?

2009-08-17T11:22:00.004-04:00

A number of third-party enthusiasts are gleefully pointing out all the ways that Obama has failed to live up to people's expectations of him. For an example, note the comments after Dave Lindorff's recent piece exhorting people on the left to get active for Single-Payer at the Town Halls. I don't think that this "I told you so" glee directed at Obama voters is any better than the "I told you so" finger-shaking I got from Dems following the election of George Bush in 2000 (I had voted for Nader.) The answer is still to put pressure on whoever is in power through grass-roots action for single payer all the while knowing that in the end, we will probably not get it.

I agree with Lindorff in general about the need for the left to out-organize the right at the health-care reform town-halls. In fact,I have read that single-payer advocates have been visible at every town-hall meeting so far, but the media is rarely reporting the story (note the previous blog entry). However I'm a bit puzzled by his recent comment on counterpunch that "obstruction" is the only viable option at the town-hall meetings. He goes on to say,

Instead of opposing the right-wing hecklers at these events, progressives should be making common cause with them. Instead of calling them fascists, we should be working to turn them, by showing them that the enemy is not the left; it is the corporations that own both Democrats and Republicans alike.
The only proper approach to the wretched health care legislation currently working its way through Congress at this point is to kill it and start over. At these "town meeting" staged events, Obama and the Democrats need to hear, in no uncertain terms, that we don't want no stinkin' ObamaCare. We want Medicare for all.

Given that one of the biggest fears of this group is that "Obamacare" is actually a "Trojan Horse" for single-payer (which is how Dems have tried to sell the plan to the left) this strategy seems unrealistic to me. Just as the media won't report the single-payer advocates already questioning the corporate Dem plan, the wisdom on the street (and on the Hill) if Obama's plan is defeated (or further watered down) is that America is not ready for a public-option, let alone single-payer.

My sense, based on what I've seen and read about right-wing protesters (beyond the anti-choicers and other religious fear mongerers)
is that
- They don't want "illegal aliens" to be insured and they believe that these illegal aliens will be covered by "Obamacare".

-They fear that if medicare is extended "for all" that it will go bankrupt or the U.S. as a whole will go bankrupt - and their coverage will be reduced - this is why seniors are prominent protesters at the Town Halls. This is not then, an irrational "keep your government hands off my medicare," it is a rational (but misinformed) argument: "I can't afford to share my medicare" (probably with them illegal aliens). Glenn Beck has recently been stoking these fears by suggesting that the health care plan, added to the bank bailout will send the US into an inflationary spin that will lead the government to the solutions offered by Nazi Germany, including euthanasia. One of pieces of meat he tossed out to the far-right base was the notion that the Federal Reserve will just "print money" in order to pay for the health care plan.
and that brings me to the third group:

- They are tea-partying libertarians who think that EVERYTHING is done better in the private sector (note: Ron Paul) and want to eliminate public schools, etc. The powers behind this movement are neo-cons, but the frothing at the mouth base are angry white men who think that the government is helping less deserving others instead of them.
If you want to understand these white anti-government types read Leonard Zeskind's book about them, or follow his articles on the tea-party movement. Don't believe me? - note the guy in confederate t-shirt pictured here, holding the sign reading "Abolish Federal Government."

It's hard to imagine how single-payer advocates are going to make common cause with this crowd.

Town Halls - Angry Mobs? Astro-Turfers? and What About Single-Payer?

2009-08-07T09:54:00.004-04:00

If you look at most media coverage of this month's health-reform town hall meetings you would think that crowds are divided between people who support Obama's plan and the conservative opposition. This presentation, which Democrats also encourage, lends credibility to the notion that Obama is proposing the only universal-health coverage plan on the table. What that doesn't tell you, is that the most organized presence at the Town-Hall meeting are real grass-roots single-payer advocates, who don't support Obama's plan because it subsidizes private insurance companies.
Now that Pelosi has finally agreed to actually let the house debate and vote on single-payer plan, it seems even more reasonable that the discussion of Single-Payer at Town Hall meetings should be heard, or at least reported.
Despite the tea-partyish, anti-tax radicals' complaints, it does seem that people other than vetted plants are able to speak at these events (unlike the Bush meetings where people were kept out/expelled for wearing t-shirts or having a bumper-sticker on their car) but it's a shame that a bunch of wing-nuts are dominating the media coverage.

The Republicans and Democrats are both confusing the issue. On the hand, Republicans are arguing that the Obama health plan is a "trojan horse" for single-payer, which, according to most opinion polls, is actually what most people want. On the other hand, Democrats argue that single-payer is politically impossible because of American public opinion, while simultaneously arguing that the "angry mobs" currently disrupting health-care town-halls are a bunch of corporate interests in disguise. The sad fact is that the health-care corporations are likely to win either way. IF ONLY "Obamacare" were the Trojan Horse that the Republicans fear.
Once again, Democrats are in a bind because their corporate ties leave them incapable of defending themselves against right-wing "populists" or supporting the truly populist movement for meaningful U.S. health care reform.

***
For those who are uninformed, "single payer" means replacing private insurance companies with national insurance that would cover everyone. It is not the same thing as "socialized medicine" because doctors and hospitals are still private businesses, not publicly owned in this model. It is what they have in Canada and France. "Socialized medicine," where doctors are paid by the state is what they sort of have in England. (privatization has been slowly destroying the NHS)

** Just added: Paul Krugman's column has a good analysis of both the mobs and the anti-mob commentary here.

Hollyhocks - Planted Two Years Ago and Worth the Wait

2009-07-13T12:50:00.001-04:00

best street art project this year!

2009-05-28T17:53:00.000-04:00

If only you could smell it

2009-05-15T10:05:00.000-04:00

The gardenia has burst into bloom this week.

Fanciful Plant

2009-05-15T10:04:00.000-04:00

I think of this flower as a "Dr. Seuss Plant." Does anyone know what it's really called?

Columbine and Azaleas

2009-05-15T10:02:00.001-04:00

This columbine is close to four feet tall. What a surprise - it was puny last year.

Bluebells and Azaleas

2009-05-15T09:59:00.002-04:00

On the Radio

2009-05-11T08:15:00.001-04:00

You can listen to me being interviewed about my book here: http://lawanddisorder.org/2009/05/10/law-and-disorder-may-11-2009/

TFF Films 9 and 10, From Palestine: "Salt of This Sea" and "Rachel";

2009-05-06T09:24:00.005-04:00

I started my TFF weekend with two films about Palestine/Israel: the feature film Salt of This Sea starring Suheir Hamad, in the blurry photo below. Later that I day, I saw Simone Bitton's documentary about Rachel Corrie, Rachel.
Both these films were very good. Salt of this Sea, which told the story of a Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American taking her own "Right of Return," could serve as an educational film about the Palestinian situation as a whole, but wasn't didactic. It was also visually stunning, well-acted, had an engaging story, and didn't include a ton of violence, which was a relief. The most ideological element of the film is probably the loving panning of the scenery of the once Palestinian Israel. It was a feat to make the film because it was shot by Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans in both Palestine and Israel. As the writer/director, Annemarie Jacir explained, in several scenes, they would keep shooting until the police would come and stop them. I hope that this film can educate people about Palestine the way that the musical Sarafina did about Apartheid. Pyramide Films is distributing it and it should be showing in U.S. theaters this Fall.

Simone Bitton's Rachel, was about terrible violence, and presented a much grittier, grimmer Palestine and Israel than the beautiful landscapes presented in Salt of this Sea. An exploration of youth and commitment, the film told the story of Rachel Corrie's death through the eyes of ISM members who were with her in Gaza in 2003. I was so struck by it in the beginning: we hear Rachel Corrie's words from her emails and diaries and then go to close-ups on the face of a young woman reading. "What is your name? " we hear the film-maker ask, and "How old are you? How old were you when you were in Palestine?" A few minutes later we see the earlier image of one of the readers, screaming immediately following Corrie's death. This film also includes testimony from IDF bulldozer drivers and interviews with Corrie's parents and teachers. Her parents have created a foundation in her name, which you can go to here.
One of the strongest parts of the film is the showing of a section of video from the IDF surveillance of the area. Here's what Bitton had to day about it when she was interviewed by Salon magazine:

I knew that in the Palestinian territories there are military cameras everywhere, the whole territory is controlled by camera. There must be huge operation rooms in military headquarters with screens, you know. Even in the old city of Jerusalem, there is one camera after the other, there is no dead angle. So I knew for sure that the Philadelphi corridor and all Rafah [the road and city where Corrie was killed] were filmed all the time by these military cameras.

So obviously there should have been a recording of the mission during which Rachel was killed. I tried to obtain it, and it was very difficult, but in the end I got a tape from the Israeli military and I remember the young soldier who gave me the tape telling me, "Oh, I had to work all night to get it ready for you." I don't know exactly what they did, but what is for sure is that we see a little bit of the mission scene before [Corrie's death], and we see after, but we don't see it happen. When I go very slowly, image by image, I can see that it has been cut. Also there are conversations between the soldiers on this tape, and these cameras have no sync. Obviously the sound comes from another machine; somebody had put it together.

If we were in a court, this videotape wouldn't have any value. But I'm in a film, and in a film it has great value. It's one hour into the film and we've been talking about these bulldozers, this group of young people, this house which was standing and now has been destroyed, and here it is -- here's the place, here's the house, here are the bulldozers. It's very, very strong emotionally and cinematographically, and I chose to have it in the film with commentary by one of the young activists. He recognizes himself in this very bad-quality image because he was wearing a white T-shirt and there's a white spot of somebody running in the frame. It's a very strong situation, to recognize yourself on the image of a military video camera, when you were not aware you were being filmed.

This film was really well-done - sensitive, probing, and very moving. I hope it shows in American theaters or on television.

* * *

Starstruck by Suheir Hamad after "Salt of This Sea"

2009-05-02T11:26:00.000-04:00

TFF Film #8 : My Dear Enemy

2009-05-01T08:49:00.004-04:00

Last night at the Tribeca Film Fest, I hit the limit of my endurance. My boyfriend calls a certain look I get as I'm about to fall asleep, "sleepy face" and I think I was wearing that for the second half of "My Dear Enemy," a Korean comedy about a woman who comes to collect a debt of 3500 won ($2600) from her incorrigble ex-boyfriend. The film was subtle, enjoyable, and wonderfully acted, and I'd like to see it again when I'm more awake.
The drama unfolds as the two drive around Seoul, where the charming rogue of an ex-boyfriend borrows money from other girlfriends, acquaintances and friends in order to pay her back. Because of the series of vignettes with hilariously strange characters, the film reminded me of the classic 80s film, After Hours, although set in a lower key. The heart of the movie is the dynamic between the two main characters. I can't imagine a film like this being done in America, where "boyish" man / tough, unyielding females movies tend to be annoying and cliched. Perhaps it's a good thing that I was barely conscious for the ending, because now I'll enjoy it again when it comes out on DVD.

TFF Film #7: The Fish Child - Under the Surface of a Femme Fatale

2009-05-01T08:13:00.004-04:00

When I was in graduate school, one of my professors said that what you needed to win a Pulitzer prize for literature you needed was a certain combination of sensational plot elements including incest. I don't know if that actually fits the prize winners between 1992 and 1999 when I was in Graduate school, but I thought about this argument after I saw The Fish Child on Wednesday night. I don't mean to say that I didn't like it, but the film did pile on just about every bad thing: incest, murder, prostitution, and there's more but I don't want to give too much away. One of the principle characters was also crying just about every time she was on screen.
The Festival guide hooked me by comparing the film to Thelma and Louise. I also saw it because the director's previous film, XXY won the Critics' week grand prize at Cannes (that one's about hermaphroditism, so there may be something to this Pulitzer Prize formula and big film critics).
So, although I liked the movie I was disappointed because I was expecting an exciting and thrilling movie filled with humor and lively female characters. This movie was more dreamy, slow, and depressing, and the two female characters were troubled, secretive and often silent. The story is told from the point of view of Lala, the rich daughter of a judge who's romantically involved with her family's Paraguayan maid, Ailin, who's about to turn 21. At the beginning of the film, the judge is mysteriously killed, and for the rest of the movie we seek the answer to his murder, and to the "real" identity of the Paraguayan maid. At about one hour into the film I started thinking of Ailin as a classic "Femme Fatale" - but I liked how the movie then undid this "type" and explored her character's origins along with slowly revealing the intensity of the relationship between the two young women. The film was very well paced and since good drama should emerge from believable characters it got away with the soap-operatic plot elements. Since telenovelas also play a role in the film, perhaps this was an intentional commentary on the soap opera as a genre.

TFF Movie #6: Cropsey

2009-04-29T07:52:00.004-04:00

The Documentary, Cropsey says it is about the exploration of an "urban legend" that comes true, but it is mostly a true-crime documentary about the cases of missing children on Staten Island in the 1980s and trials of Andre Rand, convicted in two kidnappings. The film conveyed the horror of these disappearances as well as the generally creepy atmosphere around the grounds of the old Willowbrook State School, where Rand used to work, and where he continued to camp out after it was closed down in 1983. It is also the grounds where the body of one of the missing children, Jennifer Schweiger, was finally found.
The film-makers worked very hard to track down people who knew Rand, and established a correspondence with him while he was in prison during his trial for the kidnapping of Holly Ann Hughes, who like the other missing children from Staten island in the 1980s has never been found. However, they were never able to get an interview with Rand, so the film has to rely on comments by police, neighbors, and the defense attorneys. Their treatment of Rand is balanced, and they present a nuanced analysis of the atmosphere around the trial by comparing Rand to the urban legend of "Cropsey" and describing him as a "perfect scapegoat" for a community traumatized by horrible, unsolved disappearances of children. These disappearances are truly tragic and I felt so terrible for the Staten Island community while I was watching the film. I had never known about these cases before.
Another truly tragic story in the film is about the Willowbrook state school, which is the most convincing connection between Rand and the missing children. Many of the missing children were developmentally disabled and Willowbrook was a school for the "mentally retarded" with a truly scandalous history. According to police, when they showed Rand footage from Geraldo Rivera's 1972 expose of the school, he became very, very disturbed - his eyes rolled, he drooled, and he began rocking. Having been so traumatized by working in a school where children were left naked, lying on the floor in their own feces, Rand then continued to live on the grounds of the institution, which has an elaborate underground tunnel system, after it had closed.
While the film-makers interweave a discussion of growing up on Staten Island with the tales of the abandoned grounds and tunnels of Willowbrook, which they tramp through several times, I think the film might have been more interesting if they had done more with their own experiences as kids growing up in a town where children disappeared. People talk about Staten Island as a "dumping ground" in a general way in the film, but that aspect of the story could have been elaborated more. To me, the most surprising story in the film was told by a Black man from the island who was, along with about five others, taken on a "trip" in a van by a man and didn't know at the time that he was actually being "kidnapped"! Was there a connection to Rand? We don't know. Instead of delving further into how people felt as these news stories about disappearances came out, they investigate truly ridiculous claims by police that Rand was the Jim Jones of Staten Island, the leader of a secret Satanic cult lodged in the tunnels of Willowbrook. That's where I thought the film really took a wrong-turn - literally, going back to the same tunnels again, where by that point, the dark images of dirty walls and trash had ceased to have an impact. Even though the film-makers don't wind up agreeing with the cult allegations, they don't weave them into their own "urban legend" analysis, which remained too superficial.
A more successful treatment of the impact on a community in such a case is the novel about Atlanta's child murders by Tayari Jones, Leaving Atlanta, which had much greater psychological depth. Of course, novels and films are totally different media, but without an answer about Rand, or going into greater depth about the surrounding community, it just became repetitive. I wearied of seeing grafitti-ed walls, clips of television coverage of the murders, the trial, and the Willowbrook school, and of the inconclusive hunt for the truth about Rand. This was an interesting film, but I thought it was foiled by an overuse of the generic conventions of "true crime" so that it felt more like a TV special than a feature film.

TFF Movie #5: Defamation

2009-04-28T00:37:00.003-04:00

I just returned from seeing Yoav Shamir's documentary about the political use of anti-Semitism, Defamation. Shamir sets out at the beginning to explore anti-Semitism because it always gets major headlines in the Israeli newspapers, but he says he has never himself experienced it. Shamir goes looking for anti-Semitic incidents, and doesn't find much - though he does hear some odd comments from people, but most of the film is about how the Anti-Defamation League inflames people's fears of anti-Semitism without much justification. He interviews several rabbis who have very interesting and surprising things to say about the ADL and general anxieties about anti-Semitism. His conclusion at the end of the film is that it is not "good for the Jews" to be so obsessed with the Holocaust.
I'm glad that Shamir made the film and I think it was good, in fact important. Shamir is generally empathic with his subjects, which gives the film a feeling of balance, and is also probably why people open up to him. In one particularly interesting section of the film, three Black residents in Crown Heights start talking to him about the value of the book "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The best part of the film concerns the tour of Poland's death camps by a group of Israeli high school students who are warned by their guides that dangerous anti-Semites may try to break into their hotel rooms at night. He interviews several of the teens, and in one powerful moment, a girl says that even before the visit to the camps (which 30,000 Israeli teens now make every year), she was raised knowing that she is "hated" and that believing that makes her feel angry and feel hatred herself. "What is this doing to US?" Shamir said he wants the audience to think about. For that reason it's very thought provoking; I'd say it's a film that Jewish people really need to see.
The person who has done the most serious work on the exploitation of the memory of the Holocaust is Norman Finkelstein, whose book The Holocaust Industry, is a brilliant expose of the manipulation of the Holocaust for political and financial gain. Shoav includes Finkelstein in the film, but it is a pity that he did not spend as much time with Finkelstein as he did with ADL members, and that he did not do much to actually interview him about his research, or even show some clips from previous talks that Finkelstein has given, since Abe Foxman gets quite a bit of screen time. Because of his criticisms of Israel's foreign policy, Finkelstein lost his job as a professor at DePaul University two years ago.
Like the fellow who keeps this blog, I thought that the film was unkind to Finkelstein. It's interesting that he and I both reached for that word; I made that comment in the Q&A earlier tonight. While Shamir compares Finkelstein to a prophet, his editing makes the scholar seem unhinged; he says things that outside of context don't make sense. However, in the closing section of his interview, despite Shamir's somewhat dismissive framing, I thought he got the better of the film-maker. After he jokes that Abe Foxman is "worse than Hitler" (it's true that Finkelstein is a provocateur and his polemical style is part of the problem that he's had in academia), he goes into detail about the way that every politician in Israel calls every opponent Hitler. "Remember Rabin, before he was shot?" he asks Shamir. We do get a window into the source of Finkelstein's own abrasiveness, however. He says "At my house, it was always the food is worse than Auschwitz!" Since Finkelstein is known to be the child of Holocaust survivors, people have often engaged in a bit ofarmchair psychology about his passion about the issue.
It's also puzzling to me that Shamir was more sympathetic to Walt and Mearsheimer, of whom both Finkelstein and Chomsky were critical for their inflation of Jewish power over American foreign policy in the pages of the London Review of Books when their work originally was published some years ago.
I wonder if Shamir, who commented negatively about Finkelstein as not that original and kind of "crazy," will ultimately come to understand him better. Having made this film, Shamir too will certainly be called a self-hating Jew, an anti-Semite and a Holocaust Denier. It's too bad that he couldn't acknowledge the contributions that Finkelstein has made to the study of the very subject that his film set out to explore.

Here's what the great historian, Raul Hilberg had to say when Finkelstein was denied tenure:

“ the substance of the matter is most important here, particularly because Finkelstein, when he published this book, was alone. It takes an enormous amount of academic courage to speak the truth when no one else is out there to support him. And so, I think that given this acuity of vision and analytical power, demonstrating that the Swiss banks did not owe the money, that even though survivors were beneficiaries of the funds that were distributed, they came, when all is said and done, from places that were not obligated to pay that money. That takes a great amount of courage in and of itself. So I would say that his place in the whole history of writing history is assured, and that those who in the end are proven right triumph, and he will be among those who will have triumphed, albeit, it so seems, at great cost.”

The cost to Finkelstein has been obvious. I hope that the cost to Shamir will not be as great. His style is gentle, so he may get through to more people.

at the "City Island" Premiere

2009-04-27T09:01:00.000-04:00

TFF Movie #4: City Island

2009-04-27T06:41:00.003-04:00

During the Great Depression, Americans crammed movie theaters to see something known as the "screwball comedy" combining hilarity and glamor. If Raymond De Felitta's City Island is any indication of the kind of comedy our current depression will bring, we will at least be laughing on the weekends before we go back to our million-hour-a week-jobs. It's relatively early in his career, and it's high praise I know, but writer/director De Felitta may ultimately be compared to the great movie-comedy writers of that era: Preston Sturges and George s. Kaufman.
After reading the synopsis in the Tribeca Film Fest guide, I was a bit dubious. The film seemed to combine so many things: a teen-ager with a fat-fetish, a prison guard with a secret? I thought it would be weird and quirky, a sleeper. But no, this was the funniest movie I have seen in a very long time. The audience was howling for almost the entire film. What makes the film funny is not weird unlikely situations, but that it takes something we all understand to an extreme. The comedy of City Island stems from the fact that everyone in the family is lying about something, or as the previously linked official movie website puts it, "keeping a secret." The humor and the interactions in the film reminded me of Moonstruck, another Italian-American recession-era comedy from 1987. Both films could be compared to screwball comedies because of their madcap situations and characters, but instead of the glitzy parlor comedies of that era, both films center on working-class to middle-class Italian-American families and the humor erupts in big emotional exchanges rather than the "witty repartee" of the 1930s era films.
While there is much here that draws on 30s-style comedy, there are elements that mark this film as one specifically of its time. The main character in the movie, played beautifully by Andy Garcia, is a prison guard, and one of the other major characters in the film is an ex-con. The internet and social networking also feature hilariously in the plot. I won't say more. The film does not yet have a distributor, but I believe that it will get one. I also see this film as a serious candidate for Tribeca's audience award. We shall see....

washington square park at 90 degrees in April

2009-04-26T23:20:00.000-04:00

back to my garden

2009-04-26T23:18:00.001-04:00

2009-04-26T23:17:00.000-04:00

2009-04-26T23:15:00.000-04:00

2009-04-26T23:13:00.000-04:00

2009-04-26T23:12:00.000-04:00

extreme close-up tulip

2009-04-26T23:11:00.001-04:00

2009-04-26T23:09:00.000-04:00

2009-04-26T23:07:00.000-04:00

in line for "Fear Me Not"

2009-04-26T10:30:00.000-04:00

TFF Movie #3: Fear Me Not

2009-04-26T09:40:00.002-04:00

Last night I went to see Fear Me Not , a very suspenseful film by Dogme co-founder, Kristian Levring. I don't want to spoil it by saying too much here because the movie's best feature was its suspense. Not that much happens in the film and the pace is much slower than the trailer might lead you to believe. Afterward as my friends and I talked, we discovered that we all had terrible fantasies about what the main character was about to do for almost the entire movie. I was anxious for half an hour after the film ended, so if that's the mark of a good suspense film, I should have given it a "five" rating on my audience award ballot. If you want to see something elegantly made, disturbing and suspenseful, go see it.
However, while I thought the movie was incredibly well-made, I found the character's shift into "evil" - as the director put it in the Q&A - unconvincing, going too quickly from relatively "normal" thoughts into violent actions without any seeming underlying hostility, fear, or anxiety. The way that the violence was directed against women in particular didn't make psychological sense to me. The film-makers said that there was much of the film that was meant to be unknown to the audience, but I think that's a bit of a cop-out. As one rather dismissive young woman in the audience put it in the Q&A, "so this is basically a mean guy who likes doing nasty things to ladies?" The implied statement I believe was, in this genre, we've seen that film so many times that the standard has to be higher if we're going to give it props as an artistic statement.
Levring's debt to Hitchcock was clear in the movie's pacing and visual storytelling - both were superb. But the film-makers got the surface of Hitchcock without the depth. They were all too postmodern in their refusal to dig for the "truth" about this character. Hitchcock's films remain satisfying because we can identify elements of ourselves or people we know in the characters. Even his sometimes ham-handed 1950s pop-Freudianism gave his films a lasting impact that I don't think a self-consciously flat post-modern characterization of the "evil everyman" can achieve.

2009-04-25T15:00:00.000-04:00

Double Tulips

2009-04-25T14:59:00.000-04:00

this year's tulips

2009-04-25T14:57:00.000-04:00

Tribeca Film Review #2 - The Swimsuit Issue

2009-04-25T10:48:00.004-04:00

A friend of mine told me about her friend, Jane, who coached an all-male synchronized swim team in Sweden and that there was a film about them at this year's TFF called "Swimsuit Issue"
I had thought the film would be a documentary about this real team but it turned out to be a comedy based on their story in the vein of The Full Monty. (and in fact, the film-maker cites that film as an influence)
It was very crowd-pleasing and entertaining, and like the previous film, also made a somewhat serious point about men and their emotional boundaries. The guys in the film get the idea for their synchro team after holding a mock synchronized swimming party in drag for one of their friends. Following that, they begin to take themselves more seriously and want to practice, but claim that "reverse gender discrimination" is rampant in the sports world when the local pool denies them access.
The film doesn't stay with such a simple analysis. As the men are about to leave to begin competing for the first time, the female synchronized swimming coach tells one of the men on the team that they've gotten more publicity than she has in her entire career. Also, it becomes clear that homophobia, rather than "reverse sexism" is the reason behind the refusal of most people to take men's "synchro" seriously. If you look at youtube videos, you'll see that the majority of comments on men's synchro impugn the masculinity of the performers, and in the interview with the director linked above he says that men's homophobia (along with cold water) was the biggest challenge of making the film. The process of confronting homophobia among members of the team is one of the most interesting parts of this charming movie.

At the Q&A it became clear that the people involved were serious about promoting men's synchronized swimming - and they are not alone. There is real men's synchronized swimming and it is associated both with both Queer culture and non-athletes. If you look at the Youtube videos of men's synchro world cup competitions you'll see a certain campiness, which makes these swimmers entertaining. You may also notice that the people doing it are not quite as athletic as the women's teams.
However, if men could be accepted as synchronized swimming competitors, that could probably change.
The American male synchronized swimmer, Bill May, really camps it up, but he's very serious about this as a sport. He is currently performing in Las Vegas in a duet with a woman, and, according to the film-makers, is working hard on getting such "mixed doubles" into the Olympic Games. I agree with the mission. It would be great to see a queer-identified sport with openly gay men and queer-friendly decidedly un-macho straight guys reach a wider audience. As one commenter on the Swedish tv clip linked above commented, that really "conspires the objective of sports." (whatever that means).

Tribeca Film Fest 2009: "Here and There"

2009-04-24T08:36:00.004-04:00

Last night, I went to my first Tribeca Film of the year, "Here and There,", a romantic comedy set in Belgrade and New York. It was the first time I had ever stood on the "rush ticket" line and I got in quite easily, though I did get to the theater more than hour before the film began.
The film was very good - a simple story told economically about a broke American musician who makes a deal with a Serbian immigrant to go to Belgrade, marry the man's girlfriend and then bring her back to the U.S. It was unusually graceful, I thought - music was part of the story and worked beautifully; the juxtaposition of events in New York and Belgrade was seamless; and the love-story was very touching. The minor characters were great - the nationalist Serbian cab-driver who hates America, the woman in the convenience store who wants to go to America, the guy who stood on the corner, the Puerto Rican mechanic. It was interesting to see a film that shows economic struggles that real people go through without being maudlin or didactic. Indeed, it was quite funny, and it made sense when the film-maker revealed that the idea for the movie came from his own experience as a "man with a van" (pronounced "wan" in the movie) running his own "moving company" to get by in NYC while he was studying at CUNY. (Yes, CUNY students and profs should all go see "Here and There" )
The film reminded me of Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger than Paradise" because of its story of relatively ordinary events, its low-key humor, and its generally hip affect, so I wasn't surprised when I read this interview in which the director, Darko Lungulov cited Jarmusch as an influence.

There was a also a funny little comedy of errors at the screening last night, which showed the real-life amiability of the people who had made such an amiable film. I was sitting in the seats right behind those reserved for the film-maker and cast and because these are, of course, prime seats, people all came up and tried to sit in them. Most see the tape and the "reserved" labels and walk away. Eventually, an older Serbian woman ignored the "reserved" mark and sat in one of the aisle seats. She continued to sit their blithely as one theater manager after another tried to figure out where to put the very large crew (one from New York one from Belgrade) along with cast members (including Cyndi Lauper), given the small number of seats as more and more people came into the theater from the "rush" line. They evicted one group of people who had unwittingly taken the seats designated for the film's star and his friends, but left the older woman, who seemed not to understand what was going on. "Are you with the film-makers?" one usher asked her. I couldn't hear her response. Shortly before the film was scheduled to begin, it was discovered that the star's friends were stuck outside ("this is not cool!" he said to the usher) and the ushers started strategizing about what to do with the woman, who continued to ignore everything that was going on around her. The artistic director, sound editor and others all vacated the prime seats and went to sit by themselves in various parts of the theater, but still, the woman stayed. At this point I heard Cyndi Lauper ask the person sitting next to her, "Who's Mom is she?"
So, finally the woman, who was not a cast-member's mother after all, did move and the star's friends got their seats. I think they all enjoyed the film, as did I.

Tea-Baggers vs. Anti-War Protests, Numbers and Media Coverage

2009-04-16T11:43:00.002-04:00

I was in a red-state gym the other day, forced to watch a cardio-workout's worth of teabagger coverage on Fox news. I couldn't help wondering, as I looked at the numbers cited why THIS was considered a "huge" and newsworthy event while anti-war protests of this same size, and even larger would be considered irrelevant. Especially when we consider that anti-war protesters have had to maintain stamina since 2002, they've been a much more impressive movement than the astro-turfing swell of the teabaggers.

Let's review:
October 26, 2002: 100,000 march on DC; 50,000 march in San Francisco

A few months later, on January 18, 2003, even more came out against the war in DC and more occurred in cities throughout the U.S. I marched in DC that day in 20 degree weather and talked to my Mom and step-mom, while both were at marches in other cities.

But it was February 15, 2003 that was the biggest of them all. In New York City, counts ranged from 300,000 to 1 million marchers against the war. I was at that one too. We could not get to the U.N. where the actual protest converged, but remained stuck on feeder marches up to ten blocks away, where there were taxi-cubs who could not move because of the massive number of people in the streets - so I'd say that 1 million is not an exaggeration.

At the RNC convention in NY, in 2004, according to police, 800,000 marched against both Bush and the war.

Since then, anti-war marches in various cities have numbered at least in the "tens of thousands."
The last really big anti-war march on Washington was the one in September 24, 2005 where Cindy Sheehan was a featured speaker, and which C-Span estimated at 500,000.

And even in April 2006, a year when anti-war protests were smaller (despite increasing opposition to the war judging from both polls and midterm election results), 300,000 people marched against the war in New York City.

By 2007, hundreds of thousands were STILL showing up to protest the war, and yet coverage in the mainstream media was almost non-existant.

While protest numbers may not have always hit the 500k mark (though they did at least three times - in cold weather- no less), they remained in the tens of thousands, and increased in regions across the U.S., while poll numbers told the story of growing public opposition to the war in Iraq.

So, now how do yesterday's tea-bagger protests stack up?
According to "FiveThirtyEight," the anti-tax protests yesterday hit 262,026 mostly based on rallies of about 1000 each in a number of Southern cities. That's not an un-significant number, but the overall total is much smaller than the cumulative numbers of anti-war protests for any given date of major mobilization since late 2002. These numbers were achieved with the help of beautiful spring weather, massive media coverage (and not just on Fox), and the advocacy of the Republican Party. In addition, they have spurred stories taking their potential political impact seriously, even by non-right wing outlets.
In contrast, the larger anti-war mobilizations which were organized independently of political party support, and in the midst of a significant divide within the anti-war movement itself, have been underplayed, routinely under-counted, and mocked by the mainstream media, even the so-called liberal media.
The NYT, MSNBC, WAPO, CBS, and CNN all covered the tea-parties and the criticisms of their own coverage much more extensively than they covered much larger, and much more significant anti-war protests or the anti-war protester critiques of mass-media coverage.

Once more, corporate media spins the day.

Justice for Vega and Rosario?

2009-03-08T09:42:00.004-04:00

Tomorrow Morning at 9:00 am, the detectives, Patrick J. Brosnan and James Crowe who shot and killed Hilton Vega and Anthony Rosario in 1995 will be in court for the third day of their civil trial for wrongful death. The plaintiffs in the case are Vega's and Rosario's mothers. The Bronx-based Justice Committee encourages people to pack the court-room to show support for the families:

This Thursday, the civil trial will begin for the killings of Anthony Rosario and Hilton Vega by two NYPD officers. The trial will be held in Bronx Civil Court and we NEED to fill the courtroom starting Monday, March 9th at 9am - 4pm.

The reason that they went to the civil trial option was that despite the report by the New York Civilian Complaint Review Board that found the shooting an example of excessive force, the city did nothing to punish the officers involved. In fact, shortly after this critical report came out, Giuliani attacked the CCRB itself, leading to the resignation of its director, Hector Soto, who said they forced him out because he refused to defer to the police department. The case became an example of the complete unaccountability of New York City cops. According to the NYCLU, the CCRB is still failing to fulfill its mission because of police obstructionism.

I learned most of what I know about this case about eight years ago when I saw the film Justifiable Homicide. (read the NYT review here). What I found most interesting at the time was that the organizing done by Rosario's mother played such a big role in creating the massive protest movement that arose around the police-shooting of Amadou Diallo. Not only does the film show that the police shootings were unjustified, but it also reveals the power of collective action.
The movement led to independent investigations of the shootings and reports done by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. When I mentioned this trial to someone last night he was aghast to realize that the two officers had not been tried before for these crimes which were deemed, as the movie title says, "Justifiable Homicide" by a Bronx grand-jury in 1995. I hope that the civil trial come to a different conclusion.

If 50,000 People Demonstrate in Front of City Hall and the NYT and Daily News Barely Cover it...Did it Make a Sound?

2009-03-06T09:59:00.009-05:00

Yesterday, nearly 50,000 union members, students, and families demonstrated for "fair share tax reform" in New York as an alternative to the huge budget cuts and sales tax increases currently being proposed by the governor and the mayor. At CUNY the current cut proposals are backed by tuition hikes for our students, the majority of whom come from families making under $50,000 /year. The majority of those tuition dollars won't even go to CUNY, but will fill gaps in the state budget. Check the budget fact-sheet here. In other words, the governor would rather tax the poor than tax the rich.
The "fair share" plan, sponsored in the legislature by assemblyman Eric Schneiderman, would roll back tax cuts for the wealthy that were passed over the last thirty years. This strategy would eliminate about half of the current state budget deficit. Despite the fact that most city unions support it and despite the fact that several legislators in the NY state assembly and senate support it as well, the proposal has barely been covered in the city's major newspapers.
In today's New York Times hard copy, there is a photo of the protest with the caption "A tax and spend proposition," and there is a brief item about the rally in the "City Room" section on the NYT's web-page. The New York Post had a very brief item on it, and the Daily News had nothing. What were the more important news stories that edged out a public response to an ongoing policy debate? If you check the regional/local sections, it appears the NYT thought that the sale of Gandhi's sandals, eyeglasses and pocket watch was more news-worthy, while the Daily News featured a lengthy article on Svetlana Pankratova's leg-shaving for charity. (In contrast, NY1 (linked above)and The Gothamist gave the rally more in-depth coverage. )
This rally, and the debate about the "fair share" reform bill deserve more coverage from major newspapers. After all, polls on this issue continue to show that the majority of New Yorkers support some sort of tax increase on the wealthy as an alternative to service cuts and regressive sales-tax increases. But if you check the NYT for articles about this reform proposal, which now has 22 supporters in the state senate, you won't find much.
Instead, people scratch their heads on call-in shows and write on blog comment boards about how the city is going broke because of over-paid public employees. Could this be because instead of reporting on what the majority of New Yorkers think or experience, the paper of record acts as a stenographer for the Republican mayor and the NY business interests represented by the "Citizens Budget Commission"?
To say that 3% cost of living raises "out-pace inflation" in NYC is laughable. That NY public-employee salaries are higher than average private sector salaries reflects the fact that NY's economy is fueled by a massive low-wage workforce (who rely on services provided by these public employees), while the fact that NY public employees make more than other public employees is a consequence of the high cost of living in NYC. Instead of bringing down those low-wages and cutting services to poor New Yorkers, the "One New York Coalition" that organized yesterday's rally is calling on the top 3% of New York earners to pay their fair share in the midst of a major budget crisis. Go to the Professional Staff Congress website to write a letter to your legislator urging support for Fair Share Tax Reform in New York state.

It doesn't take an "Orchestrated Campaign" to Know....

2009-02-23T00:50:00.003-05:00

If you wonder where this "orchestrated campaign" line comes from, look no further than the Daily Telegraph, which has characterized historian Ron Rosenbaum's critical review of The Reader as a cabal set to deny Kate Winslet an Oscar.
I don't agree with Rosenbaum on much, but the characterization of an article in a newspaper as an "orchestrated campaign" strikes me as well, anti-semitic. After all, therewere actual demonstrations against Milk - and I haven't seen any coverage of that at all, except that Sean Penn mentioned people with "hateful signs" outside the theater in in his acceptance speech for Best Actor.

But the theme of two of this year's awards seem to be that for the Oscars, anything that even mentions the Holocaust will do.
The obvious one is The Reader, aka, "the poor little Nazi": Anthony Lane's reviewin the New Yorker back in December said what needed to be said:

[the novel it was based on] was pernicious from the start—a low-grade musing on atrocity, garnished with erotic titillation... Imprisoned for life, Hanna must read to herself, but are we really supposed to be moved by the thought—or now, in Daldry’s film, by the sight—of an unrepentant Nazi parsing Chekhov? That is not culturally nourishing; it is morally famished. There is a fine scene, near the end, when a survivor of Hanna’s crimes (the great Lena Olin) tells the middle-aged Michael (Ralph Fiennes) that “nothing came out of the camps,” that they “weren’t therapy.” Quite true, so why has the film pretended otherwise?

The less known Holocaust movie award winner this year was a German film called Spielzeugland (Toyland) - which may be among the most mawkish and manipulative few minutes of film anywhere. The story? During the war, A German and a Jewish family live next door to each other and the two young children take piano lessons together. One day, the German mother tells her son that the family next door must go away, he asks where and she answers, "to toyland." Little Heinrich sneaks out of bed and tries to join the family as they leave for the camps, thinking fun awaits. His mother finds him missing and goes on a search for him. Finally, the SS actually let the haus frau right onto one of the Auschwitz-bound trains, where she does not find her own son, but rescues the neighbor's child, pretending he is hers. (Heinrich wound up somewhere else). The two boys grow up in wartime Germany together as brothers and both survive the war. Presumably, the neighbors never rat them out. hmmm. It doesn't matter: a Holocaust film with a happy ending. As Art Spiegelman said when Schindler's list won, “The main dream image the movie evokes for me is an image of 6 million emaciated Oscar award statuettes hovering like angels in the sky, all wearing striped uniforms.”

Beyond the larger historical or moral problems, it's disappointing because not only were their great performances in good films (like Ann Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married and Melissa Leo in Frozen River) but there some quite good live-action shorts this year. One was the unnerving Auf Der Strecke (On the Line), which (unlike the Reader) showed real moral complexity. Another was the very artful Manon Sur le Bitume (Manon on the Asphalt) which developed several characters in such a short time that I found it simply brilliant. Similarly deft was New Boy, which won the Tribeca Film Festival short film award last year.

But no, the Oscar goes to: A hackneyed, completely unbelievable Holocaust tear-jerker!

Song of the Day

2009-02-21T11:54:00.002-05:00

Democracy Now broadcast a story yesterday that military suicides are at their highest US history.
In light of that grim story, here's a song for the day. I've been wishing that we could substitute it for the fascist excrescence that's been showing in every movie theater in NYC during the previews.

here are the lyics:
"That Man I Shot" by the Drive-By Truckers:

That man I shot, He was trying to kill me
He was trying to kill me He was trying to kill me
That man I shot I didn’t know him
I was just doing my job, maybe so was he

That man I shot, I was in his homeland
I was there to help him but he didn’t want me there
I did not hate him, I still don’t hate him
He was trying to kill me and I had to take him down

That man I shot, I still can see him
When I should be sleeping, tossing and turning
He’s looking at me, eyes looking through me
Break out in cold sweats when I see him standing there

That man I shot, shot not in anger
There’s no denying it was in self-defense
But when I close my eyes, I still can see him
I feel his last breath in the calm dead of night

That man I shot, He was trying to kill me
He was trying to kill me, He was trying to kill me
Sometimes I wonder if I should be there?
I hold my little ones until he disappears

I hold my little ones until he disappears
I hold my little ones until we disappear
And I’m not crazy or at least I never was
But there’s this big thing that can’t get rid of

That man I shot did he have little ones
That he was so proud of that he won’t see grow up?
Was walking down his street, maybe I was in his yard
Was trying to do good I just don’t understand

Quote of the Day; Dennis Kucinich

2008-09-29T18:43:00.002-04:00

I've been too busy to blog for the last year or so, but I had to throw my support to the all-too-imperfect Dennis Kucinich for his opposition to the bailout:

Rep. Dennis Kucinich: "The $700 bailout bill is being driven by fear not fact. This is too much money, in too short of time, going to too few people, while too many questions remain unanswered. Why aren't we having hearings…Why aren't we considering any other alternatives other than giving $700 billion to Wall Street? Why aren't we passing new laws to stop the speculation which triggered this? Why aren't we putting up new regulatory structures to protect the investors? Why aren't we directly helping homeowners with their debt burdens? Why aren't we helping American families faced with bankruptcy? Isn't time for fundamental change to our debt-based monetary system so we can free ourselves from the manipulation of the Federal Reserve and the banks? Is this the US Congress or the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs?"

As I'm sure Kucinich knows, there hasn't been much difference between the BOD of Goldman-Sachs or their equivalents and the US congress for a very long time (at least not since the era of Alexander Hamilton) but it's still a good quote. Meanwhile...I'm glad we didn't let the Republicans privatize social security.

From the West Indian Day Parade

2008-09-27T11:34:00.000-04:00

Midsummer Garden: Bird's Eye View

2008-07-26T11:40:00.000-04:00

Bells of Ireland

2008-07-26T11:36:00.003-04:00

I really like these flowers. You can read about them here.

African Daisy, or Gazania

2008-07-26T11:07:00.000-04:00

Intelligent Design

2008-07-26T11:01:00.000-04:00

Conversations on the Stoop: Intelligent Design

2008-07-26T10:47:00.005-04:00

This morning when I was weeding, a Jehova's witness who was visiting my neighbors struck up a conversation with me:

"They're beautiful, aren't they? So many different varieties. It's really amazing."

"Yes," I thought, "I work really hard at choosing varieties and colors and arranging them in a way that emphasizes the beauty of each plant and try to create a good image that you can see differently from different angles in the garden. I weed, water, fertilize, amend my soil, use organic mulch, and even grow things from seed in multi-year projects. I think I do pretty well. Thanks for noticing. (And that's not to mention all the work of botanists and others who work on plant varieties for decades.) This is the product of human effort; they don't call it hortiCULTURE for nothing. Yes, let's stop and appreciate all of that."

"You know," said the Jehova's witness, clutching her Bible, "When someone gives us a bouquet we thank them for being so thoughtful. It's interesting that when many people look at flowers like these that they don't recognize that there's a designer. Some people think that we we evolved and all that, but when you see these flowers, you know it's intelligent design."

I told her I disagreed with her because I knew she didn't realize who the intelligent designer of this particular patch really was and walked inside.
humph!

Rachid Taha at Central Park Summerstage

2008-07-06T09:56:00.000-04:00

What a great show!

more mystery plants bloom

2008-07-01T08:40:00.000-04:00

This year's flower box

2008-06-12T10:04:00.000-04:00

Summer Rose

2008-06-12T10:03:00.001-04:00

Huechera and other perennials.

2008-06-12T10:00:00.002-04:00

Can anyone tell me why this trumpet vine never blooms?

oh, hey, take a look

2008-05-16T12:32:00.005-04:00

here is a book that you might be interested in reading.

Three Documentaries: "Baghdad High," "This is Not a Robbery" and "Donkey In Lahore"

2008-05-16T08:09:00.005-04:00

It's been two weeks since the Tribeca Film Festival ended, but I haven't finished writing all my reviews.
On the second Friday of the Festival, May 2nd, I saw three movies in one day, all documentaries. The first movie I saw was Baghdad High, previously released in England (and available there on the BBC iPlayer)as The Boys From Baghdad High. It was compelling, though it avoided taking political risks, partly due to the film-makers' ethical choices, and partly due, I'm guessing, to the film-makers' own political biases. The film follows four Baghdad high school seniors in the 2006-2007 academic year. They are: one Kurd, one Sunni/Shia (yes there is such a thing), one Shiia, and one Christian. They live in a multi-ethnic neighborhood and attend a multi-ethnic school. The boyswere chosen by the principal of the school because they could be trusted to use video cameras and not get into trouble, or to get others into trouble.
The lack of basic security in Iraq limited the ability of the film-makers in significant ways. On-line film reviews have already pointed out that the film does not delve deeply into politics, which is true, but the film can be excused to a degree by the dangerous situation the boys and their families would be placed in were they to reveal anything very controversial - and it's easy to say something controversial in a city that's in the midst of a civil war. However, the film-makers specifically sought out the experiences of "regular people" who were not political in order to portray something different from the "hard news" story of terrorism.

"It struck us that, when looking at the slate of Iraq films and documentaries, that all you ever hear is the opinion of warlords, generals, religious fanatics, and other 'leaders,' " says Mr. O'Mahoney, who worked as a peacekeeper in Bosnia during the 1990s, and as a freelance producer for HBO, the BBC, and the Discovery Channel. He now heads his own production company, StoryLabTV.
Journalists don't "peel too deep into that onion," Ms. Winter says. "The layers we can get to is the hard news, and the hard news points to a place where people are losing their mind."

But does that attempt to isolate the story from politics distort reality? At one point, one of the boys, Muhammed, asked his mother what she thought of the Americans and she responded that she had been hopeful before the war started, but that she is more ambivalent now. All the boys talk about the "terrorists" who are ruining their lives, and in a few sequences we see checkpoints; at one point a boy reveals that he thinks that the execution of Saddam Hussein is "the end of Iraq," while another's Shiia family celebrates. The electricity outages are a regular feature of the boys' daily lives, and often, we see them in fear of the violence: In one memorable sequence Hayder walks to his neighbor's house saying "I may be killed at any moment," and Ali worries that his girlfriend hasn't called him because something has happened to her. The film shows how much the war has disrupted the lives of these young men in a very personal way, and yet the film-makers' failure to provide an analysis of the violence leaves the Bush administration's representation (and the US news media's) of the situation unchallenged. One can glean from the film that the 2007 "surge" actually made things worse for the boys, but the bad conditions are not explained. While the boys couldn't do it, the film-makers could have found a way. They could have used written explanations providing statistics on civilian casualties; they could have given more information on the refugee crisis for broad context. The fact that they didn't frame the stories means that Baghdad High is much less challenging than the hard-hitting Arna's Children, during which three out of four of the subjects become directly involved in armed conflict, one as a suicide bomber. I'm not saying that the film-makers should have sought out a potential suicide bomber as a film-subject, but that the issue of young people involved in the armed conflict could have, and should have been addressed in the film in some way. The film-makers didn't supply any voice-over or interviews with other people in Iraq to frame the narrative because Iraq is not safe for journalists and these film-makers weren't in Iraq during the shooting. A more politically-minded set of film-makers would have made use of the work of people like Dahr Jamail and Patrick Cockburn who have been able to do interviews with people "on the street" about politics in Iraq. When I think about this film in the context of the work of independent journalists, I think there's something kind of problematic about these Westerners who were too afraid to go to Iraq themselves using these kids to collect the footage for a film that will advance the film-makers' careers. These boys were great subjects, and the film is well edited, but is Baghdad High another version of what Robert Fisk calls "hotel journalism" in which Western reporters rely on Iraqis to take the risks in getting the stories from the streets?
* * *

The second film I saw on Friday was much more problematic: This is Not A Robbery. As you can see from the linked synopsis from the Tribeca Film Festival's own web-page, this film was a light-hearted look at the life of an octegenarian bank-robber. The young film-makers found out about "Red" Rountree by reading his obituary after he died in prison at the age of 92 and decided to make a film. The film was certainly well-made and entertaining, but at a certain point, I began to feel that it was superficial, and ultimately, mocking the subject. Here's the story of Red Rountree as revealed in the film. A man has a successful career, makes lots of money, is fun-loving and has a great marriage to a woman with a child from a previous marriage whom he adopts as his own son. The son dies in a car accident at age 23; his wife is an alcoholic and dies of cancer; he invests all his money in a risky scheme and loses everything. In the depths of depression after his wife's death, and his early eighties, he starts dating a crack and heroin-addicted stripper who uses him for his social security check. He does drugs with her and even marries her. When he realizes that she's not going to stop doing drugs, he leaves her and starts robbing banks. The twenty-something hipster film-makers found this whole story hilarious. Sure, Rountree's own comments are funny. He was a funny man; his reason for robbing banks? "I hate banks!" When asked how he could be a Christian and rob banks during one of the interviews show in the film his response was "there's nothing in the bible about.." The interviewer interrupted him with the commandment: "Thou shall not steal." His response was "but it's fun stealing." There is an element of fun and adventure to the whole story and to Red. However, I think a better film would have maintained a balance between appreciating Red's humor and having real empathy for him and seeing a larger meaning in his story than simple entertainment.
His story was a tragedy that was largely caused by social problems that the film doesn't acknowledge. There's no discussion of why Rountree was sentenced to prison, where he died, instead of put in some kind of secure home for the elderly. There's no discussion of the lack of services available to impoverished elderly people. Rountree's second wife, Juanita (who had also died by the time the film was made) was also a subject revelry in the film. Red's family saw her as a devilish seductress and when we finally see her, it's after a string of invective describing her, then a dramatic piece of "film noir" music and we see her, darkly lit, with a cigarette - it's edited for a punch-line. After all, there's nothing funnier than a drug-addicted stripper with two kids who marries an 80 year-old because he treats her better than her own father did. I lost all my forgiveness for these unabashedly self-promoting film-makers when during the Q&A they explained their use of animation for certain scenes in the film by saying that among other things they wanted to see "the old guy smoking mother-fucking crack!" That's a new low, even for hipsters from L.A.
No wonder Red's family didn't have much to say after the first screening.
next!

* * *
The real ethical low-point of the film festival was Donkey in Labore, which was, like some reality TV, totally fascinating and entertaining, but at the expense of the real people in the film. The Film-maker, Faramarz K-Rahber, was friends with Brian, a goth puppeteer in Australia who came back from a trip to a puppet festival in Pakistan talking about marrying a Pakistani girl named Amber, who is ten years his junior. K-Rahber, a film-maker, decided that this would be a great opportunity to make a film. Claiming that his camera didn't put any pressure on the couple, he said that "from now on, I am here as a film-maker and not your friend" and declined to intervene in any way (except by shooting the film). That means that during the next five years, as the couple got engaged and tried to be together, he interviewed both Brian and Amber because he spoke both their languages fluently, yet he refused to mediate or help the two of them translate.
He also didn't take the position that many more collaborative docuemtnary film-makers do, and show them the video footage of each other. In other words, he concealed knowledge that he held that would have helped the couple, which is a tactic frequently used in reality television. While Amber and Brian might have had the same problems in their relationship if they weren't being filmed, it's also likely that just being on film in this way encouraged both of them to continue their unlikely relationship. In addition, the fact that the film-maker had knowledge that could have helped his subjects had he shared it made sharing the info the responsible thing to do. He had access because he was Brian's friend, and because he spoke Amber's language. Had he acknowledged the influence that he had as a friend and as person with a camera, a more ethical approach would have been to intervene in a positive way, instead of just as a voyeur,and to document his own participation. Instead, he used the ruse of objectivity as a screen for his increasingly exploitative relationship to the couple.
The most egregious non-intervention came during the years-long ordeal over Amber's Australian visa application. After the first step in their wedding ceremony, A Muslim ritual, Amber and Brian were separated for many years. Brian could not make a go of a business in Pakistan, and decided to try to bring Amber to Austrailia, but communication problems with Amber's family lengthened the process considerably. Amber, in Pakistan, was so anxious that she became physically ill, and even fainted during one of K-Rahber's interviews. At the same time, we see Brian as he gets increasingly concerned that Amber's family is blocking the marriage, while Amber's family believes that Brian is going to abandon Amber after the first stage of the wedding, that he is a typical Western male who discards his wife. Brian becomes so frustrated that he threatens to divorce Amber in an overseas call to her brother-in-law, who is his only intermediary - because of course, the film-maker who knew exactly what was going on refused to intervene. At the brother-in-law's urging, Brian and Amber have an online chat to resolve the problem during which Brian writes

"you know there's something wrong with my brain, don't you? It's called borderline personality disorder."

So, not only did K-Rahber take advantage of a friend, but he took advantage of a (severely) mentally-ill friend - not for the sake of art, but for the sake of his own career, and for the sake of our entertainment. If you read the link above, you'll find that one of the characteristics of BDP is extreme instability in personal relationships, intense separation anxiety, and frequent, impulsive changes in self-identity. Perhaps this might explain why Brian found it so easy to go on a trip to Pakistan, decide to get married, and convert to Islam. Perhaps that's why Brian had such difficulty dealing with a cross-country love affair.
And what about Amber? Being in a relationship with someone suffering from this disease could bring a lot of difficulty into someone's life. As the website linked above describes it:

People with BPD often have highly unstable patterns of social relationships. While they can develop intense but stormy attachments, their attitudes towards family, friends, and loved ones may suddenly shift from idealization (great admiration and love) to devaluation (intense anger and dislike). Thus, they may form an immediate attachment and idealize the other person, but when a slight separation or conflict occurs, they switch unexpectedly to the other extreme and angrily accuse the other person of not caring for them at all.

I doubt that Amber knew what Borderline Personality Disorder was, but I'm sure K-Rahber did, since he was "friends" with Brian. It was simply irresponsible of him not to try to inform Amber of his friend's emotional instability, especially since Amber was about fifteen when this entire saga began.
The people sitting in the theater near me were all appalled by the end of the Q&A. Although Greencine Daily describes this movie as a "screwball comedy" we don't know what will happen in the end, and what I saw in the theater was a man's exploitation of his friend and his abetting in the total disruption of a young woman's life. Neither one of the subjects committed suicide during the years they spent in anxiety, but it could have happened quite easily. What if Brian had gone ahead and divorced Amber? While attitudes about divorce are changing in Pakistan, the consequences for her future might be severe.
What did happen by the end of the film was that Amber moved to Brisbane with Brian and they are currently attempting to make the marriage work, but who knows how it will turn out? I really felt for Amber when I saw her sobbing as she said goodbye to her entire family and went off to live with a man who was essentially a stranger to her. If things go really wrong, K-Rahber's decision to put his career before his friendship will be partly to blame.

TFF Day Six: My Marlon and Brando

2008-05-11T09:32:00.002-04:00

Between Thursday 5/1 and Sunday 5/4, I saw about seven movies: Thursday was My Marlon and Brando; Friday I saw Baghdad High, This Is Not a Robbery and Donkey In Lahore; Saturday I went to the restored version of Haile Gerima's Harvest 3000 Years, and on Sunday I saw the NY doc-award winner, Zoned In and the audience-award winner, War Child.

I'll be gradually making comments on all of them before I move on to new topics.

* * *
My Marlon and Brandowas an excellent film that I hope will get a theatrical release in the US, although it is unlikely to score at the box-office. When I went to see it at Tribeca, the director arrived for the Q&A just after having found out that the film had won the festival's emerging film-maker for a narrative film award. The film is a fictionalized tale of the real life love-story of a Turkish actress and an Iraqi Kurdish actor who fell in love shortly before the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003. While the heroine, played by the actual actress Ayca Damgaci, works on her role in an absurdist play in Istanbul, she tries to maintain contact with her new boyfriend who's gone back to the Kurdish region of Northern Iraq. He looks forward to the arrival of the Americans and tells her in video diaries that he will fight with the Peshmurga in Iraq. Eventually, she decides she can't deal with international phone-calls anymore and sets off to visit him in Iraq - in the Spring of 2003.
In actual documentary footage, we see Ayca at demonstrations against the war and Ali at the demonstration surrounding the falling statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. I won't say what happens in the film, but only that despite what might seem an awkward premise - real people play themselves in a fictional film - it is an excellent film on the politics of the Iraq war and its impact on individuals. Far better than American "problem" films like Syriana, it tells a story about the real toll of war, and also shows the audience the diversity of experience in the contemporary Middle-East. The acting is superb; the writing and editing are excellent; it manages to capture the humor of everyday life in the midst of danger, fear, and anxiety. It doesn't "wow" you with its greatness, because neither the acting nor the writing is grandiose, and that's why it works so well.

Another Day in the Garden

2008-05-06T06:51:00.000-04:00

The tiny mystery tulip reveals itself

2008-05-06T06:46:00.000-04:00

I posted a picture of this one when it was just a bud. Now look at it!

This might be a hollyhock

2008-05-06T06:41:00.000-04:00

If I'm right, I'll have at least two big hollyhocks this year.

I always wanted to have these kinds of daffodils in my garden

2008-05-06T06:39:00.001-04:00

Unfortunately, when I came home yesterday, I found that someone had cut it.

Before the coming of the tulip thief

2008-05-06T06:32:00.000-04:00

I was really curious about how these three pinky-white tulips might change color as they grew, but when I came home yesterday all three of them had been decapitated. The jerk left one of the blooms lying on the sidewalk so I put it in a glass of water last night. Maybe it won't just die.

TFF Day Five: Secrecy

2008-04-30T19:12:00.002-04:00

My apologies for all the late Tribeca posts, but as soon as I was done seeing movies, I had to face a pile of work. So, here goes....
After the first weekend of the festival was over, the next movie I saw was a documentary called Secrecy. It covered the issue of secrecy in the Bush administration. Given the number of films now out about the crimes of the Bush adminsistration, many of which deal with the issue of secrecy as a key problem, as well as the books, articles,and radio programs covering the issue of Bush and secrecy, a documentary on this topichas to be excellent to stand out. This one wasn't and didn't. I wanted to like this film, but I didn't find it revelatory and I didn't think it was the best way to introduce the issue to a less-informed audience such as students.
The film-makers were focused on the difficulty of representing secrecy visually, and did a number of clever things: showed documents floating into a black hole, used animation to illustrate concepts, placed their interview subjects in front of abstract backgrounds. They did choose interesting people to interview: someone from the National Security Archive, a woman from the CIA's Israel office, a creepy guy from the National Security Administration, the lawyers from the Hamdan case - except not Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. That's too bad, since Ratner's been writing some of the best stuff published on this issue.
The film's real problem was not a lack of visual interest, but the lack of a coherent organization. The film-makers chose to emphasize two legal cases: Hamdan and the 1953 Reynolds case that established the precedent for government secrecy. I didn't know the background of Reynolds, but the way that the film presented the case didn't make sense to me in a documentary context. In order to create suspense, they returned to the narrative of the case throughout the film, interspersing it with other discussions about secrecy and Guantanamo as the film went along but didn't explain its significance until nearly the end of the film. They had me wondering, "why am I suddenly hearing about this plane crash? What does it have ot do with anything?" I don't think that there's a place for that kind of viewer experience in documentary film-making, which works better if it follows the structure of an academic article, where you should never be wondering, "what is the point of this story?"
I think these film-makers could have learned from the technique of Alex Gibney, whose use of thematic "chapters" has made more abstract subjects intelligible and framed talking-head interviews successfully. These film-makers instead tried to create suspense, which in a documentary, doesn't often work. After all, an informed audience will know "what happened" because it's public information covered in the news, and people don't conceal that kind of information as a "spoiler" to keep your film's "surprise" from being ruined when you make a documentary.
So, sorry, I didn't like Secrecy, though some of the interviews were interesting. I am still looking forward to The Power of Nightmares, a BBC documentary which will come out in the US in June.

All that rain did some good

2008-04-30T12:20:00.001-04:00

. Things got a lot greener in the last two days. Flowers are falling from the local trees, but in my garden...

It's still tulip time

2008-04-30T12:15:00.000-04:00

what color will this one be?

2008-04-30T12:11:00.000-04:00

I think this tiny tulip may mature in an interesting way.

and the azaelas are about to bloom

2008-04-30T12:08:00.001-04:00

TFF Day Four: Going on 13 and Sita Sings the Blues

2008-04-29T08:32:00.001-04:00

On Sunday at noon, I saw Going on 13, a documentary that followed four San Francisco Bay-Area girls: Ariana, Isha, Rosie, and Esme, as they grew from ages nine to thirteen. In some way, each girl's story represented a particular ethnic group or "social problem." Ariana is African-American; Isha an Indian immigrant in a traditional family as one of my friends said, she's ABCD (American-born confused Desi); Rosie's parents (one white, one Nicaraguan) are divorced and her mother struggles with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder; and Esme is Latina. Most of them come from working-class homes, so their experiences of adolescence are quite different from those that we see in most commercial fictional "teen problems" shows.
The film-makers spent a very long time with these girls and their families and eventually shot 300 hours of film or video, so much of the work for the 90 minute film, as it is for any documentary was in the editing process. They also did a cool museum installation - check it out. When I was recruiting friends to go with me to the movies, this one is the one that almost everyone wanted to see, and I think it's because it's such a rare thing to see a documentary focused on girls. I really enjoyed this film; its explicitly feminist point-of-view was refreshing, and the depiction of life in school and the relationship between school and home was especially enlightening to me as a teacher. We see, for instance, how Rosie's mother's illness led to her depression, truancy, and lateness. We see how Ariana's family corrects the (unbelievably bad) sex-education class that she attended in school one day. We also see the importance of peer relationships; at one point Isha cries because she's not included by other children on the playground at age nine. We see Ariana reject a boy who likes her and the role that other kids play in relaying information back and forth between the two - and we see his reaction. We see Esme struggle with low self-esteem as she talks about how others taunt her about her weight. In general it forces the viewer to think about how much pressure girls are under at this age because of the expectations of beauty and sexuality that our popular culture creates. Most of us know just from seeing videos and hearing pop songs today that there is much more explicitly sexual material available to young people than there was even twenty years ago (when I was coming out of my teens), but it's a different thing to see that from the point of view of the kids themselves. The identification of people who are still children with hyper-sexualized notions of womanhood are apparent everywhere in the film. At one point we see the teen-aged Ariana at a birthday party where everyone dances (and sings along) to the song "Get Low" (the if you couldn't figure them out, here are the lyrics). In another scene, Ariana rolls her eyes and openly criticizes the video chosen for a class party by her fifth grade classmates. "they just want to see those girls in their panties," she says, as the class watches "Bring it On" which her fifth grade teacher had apparently not seen before popping in the video machine. Especially in the medium of film it is very unusual to see complicated young girls who don't physically fit the normative concepts of beauty. I wonder if we did a study of the family tv-shows currently on television just how many 12 -13 year olds are played by either older or younger children.
By the time my students reach me, they are done with this difficult time in their lives, but the film reminds the viewer of how much impact the experience of puberty has on a person's later development.
The film was very intimate - though there was one important issue that it didn't touch - masturbation. I wonder if there were student-to-student conversations on that topic that didn't make it into the film and if it was because it was too difficult to handle without sexualizing the girls or offending their parents. That was the one omission of something VERY important to the experience of puberty that would have been good to include, even in, or perhaps especially in a "family" film. Apparently there are (according to IMDB reviewers) some very bad sex-ed documentaries that deal with the issue of masturbation, so I wish this film had made the attempt.

* * *

The second film I saw on Sunday was also a feminist one, but about a different age group,the imomrtals. Sita Sings the Blues is an animated feature by New-Yorker, Nina Paley. (No, to those who wondered, she is not Grace Paley's daughter.)
This film has been a very long-time in the making, and it was great to see it in its full version. I had seen a short from it at the Tribeca NY animated shorts program two years ago, and the complete film is quite wonderful. Paley has really pulled off a unique feat: she's put the story of the Ramayana, as told by some Desi friends of hers, (represented by shadow puppets in the movie), together with the story of the end of her marriage, and sewed the whole thing together with musical numbers by (white) blues singer Anette Hanshaw. The film is beautiful to look at; she uses several different animation styles to represent the characters of Sita and Rama, and said during the Q&A that it was to represent different versions of the story from different regions of the world, such as Thailand. Her own character of Sita must be modeled on those Hindu statues that feature round breasts sometimes compared to "golden pots" in Sanskrit poetry. The music, which includes contemporary Indian music along with the Anette Hanshaw musical numbers, is also fabulous.
Some may wonder, should a white woman tell this Indian story? She's had some critics for this who see it as appropriation, but the Desi cartoonists at sepiamutiny love the work and Paley collaborated with a number of Indian actors, singers, musicians, and friends in the making of the film, and she did work very hard in her studyof the story. I'd say it's more homage than appropriation.
So... my ranking? I tore off the audience award ballot at "5" for excellent, and I'd buy a t-shirt to promote the movie for sure.

All together, my Tribeca Film Fest Feminist Sunday was a good one, and I made two new friends who were there as part of an indie-film meet-up group. So what if I fell asleep during the trial by fire? I've been to a lot of movies in the last couple of days, and I look forward to catching the part that I missed when the DVD comes out.

TFF Day Three: An Omar Broadway Film

2008-04-29T08:30:00.003-04:00

So, I saw so many movies that I got behind in the blogging.
On Friday night, I saw "An Omar Broadway Film". This film was a collaboration between film-maker Douglas Tirola and prisoner Omar Broadway, who shot videos of whatever he could see while incarcerated in the Maximum Security Gang Unit in New Jersey's Newark state prison. The film-making began when an unidentified guard gave Broadway a video camera that he could use to document brutality in the prison. When they first got the camera, Omar and his cell-mate filmed the day-to-day routines in their cell so that audiences can understand what the experience of prison is really like. In the process we see that, and also get to know our film-makers a little as they record themselves as their first subject. They show us how they doctor their food to make it edible, and use prohibited devices like cell phones. In another scene, as one of them uses the toilet, the other peeks out from behind a dividing curtain and tries to impress upon the audience how horrible it is to share such a small space with someone and to be "this close" to someone who is "taking a shit!" "It's only because we're so innovative that we even have this!" he says, tugging on the curtain. "Otherwise, I'd just be here." What they show isn't always so humorous and it sometimes reveals rather unflattering things about the two men. In one scene, Omar videotapes a message to his seven year old daughter, who was born right before he went to prison, and tells her that he had originally told her mother to have an abortion, but that that doesn't mean that he doesn't love her now, but that he didn't want her to grow up without a father. The fact that they proudly lead the Bloods' roll calls in the prison isn't likely to endear them to most audiences either.
Probably the most important thing that they show is the routine violence in the prison. Over the next few months, Omar and his cell-mate videotaped through the tiny window in their cell door as guards in riot-gear routinely attacked prisoners who were standing outside their cells, refusing to lock in for the night because they wanted to take the one shower per day to which they were entitled. The most outrageous incident that the two caught on video involved guards dragging a prisoner down a flight of stairs by his feet and then dragging him naked across the floor.
The film had great immediacy as Omar and his cell-mate began coughing and gasping each time the guards armed in riot gear began spraying mace into the area outside their cell as part of their routine method for enforcing prisoner compliance with rules. When they had enough tape, and when it seemed that the prison was going to raid his cell and find the camera, Broadway finally got the tape out of the prison andafter being turned down by CNN, Nightline, and Oprah Winfrey, and attempt to get the rapper Fifty Cent to take on the project, he and his mother finally got the segment of the stairway brutality onto Fox Five local news. There it would have sat if Broadway's co-producer Douglas Tirola had not come along. Apparently, fifty cent maintained some interest in Broadway, because Tirola, who also works at MTV, heard about it from another hip-hop artist, and it's a good thing he did.
Broadway's tapes show the prison from the point of view of an incarcerated and (at the time of filming) unapologetic member of the Bloods gang, but the film that the Tirola created with Broadway's tapes is not a film celebrating the "gangsta" life. He uses the tapes as the center of the narrative, but surrounds them interviews from multiple points of view on crime and neighborhood politics. From her guided tour of the neighborhood drug corner where Omar used to sell drugs, to her attempts to sell copies of her son's DVD on the streetht, Omar Broadway's mother is as much a character in the movie as is her son. Tirola also includes interviews with gang-task-force police, Department of Corrections officials, former and current gang members, longtime anti-prison activist, Bonnie Kerness, and the head-writer of Oz, Tom Fontana. Through skillful editing, the resulting film goes beyond the simple "verite" style of revealing the inside of the prison or documenting brutality. It is significant that Tirola kept footage in the film that others might have taken out as too unflattering because it allows us to accept Omar and his cell-mate as complex humans in their own context, not as stereotypical or romanticized caricatures. While the film is focused on Broadway and his video project, the interviews with people who describe horrific acts by the bloods, or economic decline, or prison policies, show the life that we see from Omar's cell in a broader context. By the time the film has ended, the audience can also see that Broadway becomes increasingly concerned with this role as a witness, and he seems to grow in the process of the film-making.
I thought that this movie was really remarkable, and was especially glad that during the Q&A, not only was Omar's mother present, but that she used the speaker on her cell phone to call her son, who is currently being held in a state prison in Maryland, so that he could hear the audience cheer for him. Knowing how isolating prison is, I can only imagine how touched Omar must have felt hearing that big New York crowd clapping and cheering for him at the night of his movie's premier. It will be interesting to see what he does when he gets out of prison in 2009; I hope he keeps up the movie-making.

TFF Day Two: Algeria, Unspoken Stories - another "Gone with the Wind?"

2008-04-26T09:50:00.007-04:00

Perhaps it's extreme to compare Jean-Pierre Lledo's, Algeria: Unspoken Stories to that mythic version of the Civil War and the Reconstruction, but by the time the film was over, it really did feel like the French-Algerian (Pied Noir) version of "Moonlight and Magnolias."
The film followed four different Algerians from different mixed-ethnicity neighborhoods as they recalled their experiences during the war of independence and immediately after. The focus of the film was on the massacres of Europeans in the immediate aftermath of independence and the killing of the non-Muslim Arabs, called "Gours." The first half of the 2 hour + 45 minute film was interesting. Lledo's first subject was a farmer named Aziz, a "gour" whose family was killed by Algerian resistance fighters (?) in 1955. His second was a woman named Katilba, a Muslim Arab from a mostly Jewish and Christian neighborhood called Bab El-Oued, who had left there for the Casbah during the war of independence, but since the 1990s cannot return to either place. Hers was the best segment of the film, and featured a defense of revolutionary violence by her and a woman resistance fighter. The second half of the film degenerated significantly from there. The failure to edit the film effectively really began to take its toll in the third segment followed a man in Constantine who refused to be identified and therefore was covered by a black square throughout. His section concerned a Jewish Andalusian singer named "Cheikh Raymond" (look here too) who had been assassinated in 1961. Because of the blacked-out main "character" this part of the film was utterly confusing and not at all engaging. In the final segment Lledo turned the interviewing over to a young playwright enchanted with Albert Camus, who interviewed residents of the formerly Spanish neighborhood in Oran where a massacre of Europeans followed independence on July 5, 1962. The film reached its nadir when Tchitchi, an Arab who was a popular fixture in Spanish dance-halls referred to the time prior to independence as when the people were "happy" and got along. While the film-maker wrung his hands over the deaths and exile of Europeans following independence, the numbers of Algerian dead during the war - anywhere from 350,000 to 1 million- were not mentioned at all. The violence perpetrated by the French is only mentioned in fragmentary comments. There was no exposition in the film, making it problematic for anyone but an Algerian audience. Speakers referred to "gours," Pieds-Noirs," and the OAS, and none of these were explained in any detail. The Islamic terror of the 1990s was mentioned over and over again, but was not explained either. As one outraged Algerian audience member reminded the rest of us during the Q&A, how was it that everyone got along in these neighborhoods when Muslim Arabs were segregated in contrast to Jews and Christians who had full citizenship? As another (Algerian?) man pointed out, the whole thing could be misleading for anyone who didn't know the history of French colonialism in Algeria. One of my favorite things about seeing films at this festival is that at every screening of a foreign film that I've gone to has an audience of people from the country in question who have interesting comments and questions afterward.
As my companion at the the film argued later, the most interesting part of the film- the interview with the female Algerian resistance fighter - was largely wasted. Instead of arguing with her about whether violence against civilians is ever justified, I wished that Lledo had asked her about gender politics in Algeria after the revolution. Neither she nor Katilba wore the hijab and both seem quite Westernized. I was interested to see that Lledo had made a previous film with Henri Alleg, and despite my problems with this film, I thought of trying to see his more Algerian, Algerian Dream, but then I read the review linked above which describes it as an "interminable home movie," I've decided I can give it a miss. After seeing Peter Scarlet kvell over two post-revolutionary films (the Forgacs film in the '05 festival that practically took the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War) and one impossibly bad Brazilian feature at the fest in '06, I think I'll be wary of his recommendations in the future.

Tribeca Film Fest : "Elite Squad" and "Shorts: Off the Beaten Path"

2008-04-25T12:43:00.005-04:00

This is my fourth year going to the Tribeca Film Festival and there are a few general tips I'd give people who are attending this time. First: bring earplugs! During both films I saw on Thursday, even though they were in different theaters, the volume was way too high. At "Elite Squad" my entire row (nearly the back row) had their hands over their ears during the shooting sequence, and we were a group of relatively young theater-goers. Second: they've blocked off the best seats in the house, not just for film-makers and their entourages, but also for "industry people" with special passes. These seats rarely fill,because, as I learned from pink-pass carrying acquaintance at the short program, people who have to go to films for work don't always want to see them. (Also, there are so many films playing that no one could actually attend all of them.) So, even if you didn't buy tickets in advance, you might actually have a chance to see the film you're curious about. One guy who came off the "rush tickets" line seemed to be sitting right next to the producers of "Elite Squad." Fun for him!
and now, onto the reviews...

Shorts Program....I chose to go to the international films this year. The program, which was generally good, started with a grim film and ended with a bleak one, with a few charming stops in between. The films were "Good Boy," "Angels Die in the Soil," "The New Yorkist," "New Boy," "In the Year of the Pig," "Ana's Way," and "Cargo." Both "Good Boy" and "Cargo," both memorable and concise, were about how bad situations can lead children to monstrous acts. The magical realist "In the Year of the Pig," with its voice-over narration was almost like an animated film, but was beautifully filmed on location in Havana's Chinatown with very expressive live-actors who barely spoke. New Boy," based on a Roddy Doyle short story was my favorite in the group. It managed to treat serious issues: racism, war, childhood trauma; without a heavy hand. Perhaps its resolution was a bit superficial, but it was winning. The standout performance was by Sinead Maguire as "Hazel O'Connor," but all the actors were excellent.
The film that had initially drawn me to this program, "Angels Die in the Soil," was disappointing. It did not look good - it's hard to make a film work on a snowy landscape, I guess, and this one wound up looking over-exposed. The composition of the individual shots was not especially interesting, and the characters' relationships were not clear. It was also the longest of the films. The weakest in this group was probably "Ana's Way," with the throw-away "New Yorkist" a close second-to-last. While "Angels" was frustrating because it was an interesting premise poorly executed - a girl digs up martyrs' bones near Halabja for sale to people in Iran; "The New Yorkist" was about nothing much and executed pretty well. It screamed "ironic white boy student film," and I think most of us have seen enough ironic white boys for a while.

Elite Squad: This fiction feature film has already shown in Brazil and Europe, where it won Berlin's golden bear prize, and has been reviewed in the New York Times, but it is not showing in US theaters until November. As one might expect from a film produced, directed and written by the people associated with Bus 174 and City of God the film is beautifully composed, well-written, and based on research. The structure of the film is a narration by an officer looking for his replacement on the the Brazilian police squad known as "BOPE" a kind of SWAT-team that specializes in raiding drug-dealers in the Favelas. Their methods include wholesale murder and frequent use of torture. On the way to seeing BOPE, we also get a taste of Brazil's incredibly corrupt regular police, who take protection money from merchants and even steal from each other. To a critical viewer, the police are one more criminal gang in a city that has descended into anarchy.
While the director, Jose Padilha, clearly intended his film to condemn BOPE and the police in general, the use of the voice of the BOPE officer as the narrator and the unsympathetic portrayal of NGO activists and student volunteers (who in one scene smoke dope while preparing a presentation on Foucault's Discipline and Punish for their sociology class)has also led some viewers to see the narrator, Officer Nascimento, as a hero. I wondered about whether this happened during the film myself - would it be possible to read this film as a "glorification" of these cops? I imagine that like some Brazilians, many Americans will do so, but that only shows the level of violence and illegality we have come to celebrate in law-enforcement, as evidenced by the show "24." To a more critical viewer, Elite Squad presents a complex picture of Brazilian society where there are no heroes. Paulo Lins, who co-wrote this film also wrote Quase Dois Irmaos,which was critical of the connections between the Brazilian far-left and the drug lords in the Favelas, and pointed to bourgeois liberals' failures. What was lacking in this film was a character presenting an alternative to the problem. Even if the efforts of that person were in vain, identifying almost ANY other attempted solution to the crime problems in Brazil would have made it harder for people to see the methods of BOPE as a "necessary evil" in the context of a lawless city. That the lead characters who start off sympathetic become so increasingly brutal may work to make those who initially sympathize question their beliefs more than the film would have if it had shown a caricature of the police as uber-villains without human motivations. However, the fact that the students - and their professor - were more caricatures than the police were was a major problem in this film and ultimately undermine the director's state goal of presenting an unqualified condemnation of the police.
Despite this problem, the film was provocative, well acted, and unsettling.
During the Q&A, Padilha, who was cheerful and unassuming talked about how members of his crew were kidnapped during shooting the film in the favela, and about how BOPE tried (unsuccessfully) to have it banned, and about the problems in Brazil today, where members of BOPE have displaced some drug-lords, and are the new gang leaders in some of the Favelas. Also, he appeared quite pleased and proud that millions saw the film on the internet before it premiered in theaters, giving the lie to the notion that film-makers are especially outraged by "internet piracy."

Tulipmania in Brooklyn

2008-04-25T10:36:00.000-04:00

Look at how these red and white tulips changed yesterday. Now they're almost pure rose-red.

even more tulips

2008-04-25T10:34:00.000-04:00

In from the outside

2008-04-25T10:32:00.000-04:00

These flowers were too out of the way to be seen in my garden, so I thought they'd be better displayed in a vase. I love those daffodils with the orange center. I contemplate cutting because recently three blooms disappeared from the front of my flower-bed. I put a little note up, asking people not to cut my flowers, and today, I noticed that someone left a wilted bloom under my sign. I guess that flower-thief felt guilty. As always, gardening is community building. After I put up the note, I heard from others who've had people steal their flowers. As my room-mate said, "it's like taking a slice of pie out of your fridge."

red-winged blackbird

2008-04-23T10:03:00.001-04:00

Yesterday in the park my boyfriend and I saw a red-winged blackbird. We didn't know what it was, but based on the picture of the adult one in the link, I'd guess this one was pretty young. If you click the link on "listen ot the songs of this species," you'll hear it make the weird squawks it made when we took its picture. It was a good day for bird-watching in Prospect park. We also saw a robin fixing her nest in a pretty flowering bush.

a new tulip opens every day

2008-04-23T09:54:00.001-04:00

tulips that change every day

2008-04-23T09:52:00.000-04:00

this year's tulips

2008-04-22T13:08:00.000-04:00

April's Flowers

2008-04-22T13:06:00.000-04:00

I think I'll start blogging again

2008-04-22T08:38:00.005-04:00

I lost my zeal for blogging when I started to find the news overwhelmingly tedious.
I had no news flashes for you. The most important thing to notice is that the war goes on, and there is no end in sight. My work schedule has become even more demanding. Since my last post, I've been elected chapter chair of my union, though I don't officially take up this position until the end of this semester.

However, two of my favorite reasons for blog entries come around every Spring. The tulips are now in bloom in my garden and the Tribeca Film Festival starts this week. The ticket policies were better this year, so I bought a ten-movie pass. I'll be writing and posting pictures about both flowers and film soon, soon, soon. And now it's time for me to head in to Manhattan for the day.

Corporate Cronies Complain Again: Rangel's Tax Bill

2007-11-10T09:40:00.001-05:00

I was just reading the business section of the NYT when I came across this article about congress's attempt to reform the "alternative minimum tax" and was once again confirmed in my view that the business page contains the most important news stories. I checked the WSJ for stories on the bill and found this story, which frames the problem as one of the Democrats trying to maintain fiscal responsibility and keep in line with "pay as you go" rules that call for off-setting any spending with changes in taxes or spending cuts. A similar story in Forbes focuses on the "tax-the-rich" vs. "tax-the-middle-class" aspect of the story, as does the New York Times. Both papers say it is unlikely that the senate will pass the bill, but if they do, Bush has promised to veto it.
The policy advocated in this new House bill, written by Charles Rangel, seems reasonable. It would keep "upper-middle-class" taxpayers from being caught by the Alternative Minimum Tax, and pay for it by closing a loophole that benefits ultra-wealthy hedge-fund managers, who currently pay 20% less in taxes than most other people. As Citizens for Tax Justice puts it, the bill calls for the end of the ongoing use of middle-class tax dollars to subsidize multi-millionaires. Real-Estate interests have responded by hiring a major Bush economic advisor, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, to spin the story by suggesting that increasing the taxes on hedge-fund managers to the regular rate instead of keeping it at an especially low-rate will hurt real-estate in a time of crisis. Karl Rove goes beyond that, obfuscating the issue with scare tactics, and claims that proposed tax changes in the house threaten a general "$ 1 trillion tax increase." Here's how Rove got there. According to an article by Lisa Lerer, Politico.com,

Repealing the AMT would reduce federal tax revenue by more than $800 billion over the next 10 years — and that’s assuming the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010. With the tax cuts in place, the costs would near $1 trillion.

But of course, Rangel's proposal does not create a big gap in the budget without paying for it; it shifts the tax-burden to hit more of those ultra-wealthy people that got major tax-cuts from Bush. The tax-increases in the bill include:

a surtax of four percentage points on married couples with adjusted gross income of more than $200,000 and 4.4 percentage points for couples with more than $500,000 in income.
The bill also targets the managers of hedge funds and private-equity firms. The executives' earnings would be taxed at ordinary income tax rates, which are more than double the capital gains rate they now pay. Hedge fund operators would also lose their ability to defer income taxes through the use of offshore havens.

Ultimately, the $1 trillion tax-hike that Rove and Republicans are proclaiming would effect the wealthy people that have benefited most from the hugely expensive Bush tax-cuts. The Tax Policy Center breaks down Rangel's bill like this:

* About 86 million households (57 percent of the total) would get a tax cut in 2008.
* About 3.6 million households (2.4 percent) would pay higher taxes.
* Almost no one earning less than $100,000 would receive a tax increase.
* Almost 80 percent of households earning more than $500,000 would face higher taxes.

As Sam Pizzigati of the blog "Too Much" argues, it doesn't reverse that much of the damage; it's a modest proposal, after all.

Given the clarity of what the bill does, the questions are: 1) will the American public get clear enough information to see that the bill is in the interest of the middle class? and 2)Will Democrats have the courage to support it when it goes to the senate?

Lyrics of the Day: Two Professors Describe Their Work Weeks

2007-09-20T08:42:00.000-04:00

Last night, I was co-emcee with Blanche Weisen Cook at the Professional Staff Congress event "Our CUNY vs. Their CUNY." The event featured satirical pieces by union members who teach at Brooklyn College, The CUNY Grad Center, Hunter, Laguardia Community College, BMCC, and John Jay. Since I also wrote and directed a short musical theater piece for the event (in which I also performed)), today's lyrics are by me. They are two songs about the work-load at the CUNY's community colleges.

The first is a duet between a professor Shifrin, who teaches writing-intensive courses, and Professor Stone, the department "suck-up" It's called "the 27 hour blues" with music by Joyce Moorman, of CUNY's music department. The 27 hours in the title refers to 27 credit hours, which means five classes one semester and four classes in the next. Or a "fifteen hour week" in one semester and a "twelve hour week" in the next. As the song explains, teaching involves more work than what's done in the classroom.

The 27 Hour Blues
SHIFRIN:
I teach 27 hours a year,
It makes me crazy
Oh, 27 hours a year
It makes me crazy

STONE
You mean that's all you do?
I think you're lazy
We get the summers off too
You and your whining really amaze me

SHIFRIN:
If you knew how hard I work
You wouldn't be so scornful
When you hear my 27-hours-a-year blues
you'll know why I'm so mournful

STONE: If you think you can explain
I'll try not to interrupt
Maybe I'll feel your pain

SHIFRIN:
We call forty hours a regular week
So how can 27 be so bad?
I'll break it down for you piece by piece

STONE: It can't be really bad just take it from me

SHIFRIN
According to a study by a Texas professor
It takes twenty minutes to grade a student's paper
With twenty-five students that 's 500 minutes
Or more than eight hours before your work is finished
And if you teach four classes the hours are 33
But if you're teaching five classes, it's 42 you see

And if you add prep time the total comes 57
Do you believe me yet when I say this job isn't heaven?

If you add the hours spent in class the total hits 72
Now do you see why I've got the blues?

SULLIVAN: You forgot the office hours - aren't three required?

SHIFRIN: That makes it 75 !

STONE: Now I think I see your point

SHIFRIN
That leaves me with 93 hours a week.

SULLIVAN: You have to sleep!

SHIFRIN
Subtracting sleep leaves 37
subtracting three for meetings
and another two for email reading
leaves thirty two!

SHIFRIN AND SULLIVAN: which divided by seven leaves four hours a day

CHORUS:
Time off we need it
We need it all
If we remembered the work-load
we wouldn't come back in the fall
Don't make us come back early
Vacation is short
Time off we need it!
We need it all!

STONE:
I see why some run from a job at CUNY,
It's not just the lousy pay

CHORUS:
Time off we need it
We need it all
If we remembered the work-load
we wouldn't come back in the fall
Don't make us come back early
Vacation is short
Time off we need it!
We need it all!

The second song was sung by "professor Sullivan" who responded to Shifrin's song with the comment that her work-week wasn't as bad because she didn't teach writing-intensive classes. However, as we see in this song, sung to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General," perhaps she spoke too soon....

I am a very conscientious history professor
I spend ten hours reading books before I give each lecture
From Spartacus to Reconstruction, Manitou to mass production
I answer student’s questions with the facts and not conjecture
I’m very well acquainted too with matters technological
I use computers in my class because it’s pedagogical
I spend seven hours weekly on those methods Paolo-Freirean (hmm, Paolo Freireran...)
And if I have two preps it’s twenty-seven hours I’m carryin’

I’m fifteen hours in the classroom and five more in the office clime
I do more than I’m asked because it seems to me I’ve got the time
The students really need me see, they visit on the regular -
I am a very conscientious history professor

It’s 47 hours and we haven’t got to grading yet
I write my own exams and quizzes, that’s at least two hours I bet
Add another five for grading - piles which are so very thick
The total's now at 54 - I think I might be getting sick
Administrative meetings are another duty of my week
The emails that I must respond to are another hour at least
Let’s round it off at sixty hours, I thought I had it easier…
But when I think of finals week it makes me even queasier.

It's blue books by the pound and their handwriting is so hard to read
And multiplied by 35 it’s really quite a task indeed.
With twenty minutes for each one, it’s 12 more hours before I’m done
And multiplied by five it means I hardly see my kids at home.

Gosh I didn't know that I worked 120 hours a week
That leaves just 48 for me, I see that I am up shit’s creek.

Anti-War Demonstration News Round Up and comments

2007-09-16T11:35:00.000-04:00

I'm so out of the loop that I completely forgot about ANSWER's demonstration in Washington today, because I'm planning to go to one of UFPJ's marches next month and I'm now in the rare position of trying to figure out what the demonstration was like based only on news coverage. First, take a look at these photos posted at the DC indymedia site. The presence of uniformed veterans and their participation in civil disobedience is striking. Sycamore's Diary at Dailykos also has pictures, interesting comments and thoughts from "Kossacks" who were also a presence at the march. What it may have lacked in numbers, it seems to have made up for in spirit. UFPJ's strategy has clearly been to stop doing major DC mobilizations, partly because they don't want to deal with ANSWER. There are a number of local and regional actions planned for the entire month. I would say that the most effective way to get these going among a larger percentage of the population would be to do them through schools and workplaces, neighborhood clubs, etc., which is probably the idea. My question to readers is, do these need to happen on a national basis to be effective? Or is the activism at the regional and local level more meaningful?

* * *
Both the NY Times and the Washington Post had stories comparing the demonstration to the spirit of Anti-Vietnam protests because it became "rowdy" and involved 189 arrests. The Post story reported on the major presence of uniformed Iraq war veterans from IVAW; the Times ignored their presence, and both papers gave substantial coverage to pro-war counter-demonstraters. While one paper referred to "dozens of arrests," the number was close to 200, which I think may be the highest of any mass national anti-Iraq war protest.
More so than usual, the papers suggest that the pro-war demonstrators were equal to the anti-war activists. However, this reportgives the number of 1,000 for the pro-war protesters and the organizers' estimate of 100,000 anti-war protesters. (closer numbers were reported on Indymedia as 50,000 anti-war demonstrators and 500 pro-war demonstrators)
For thoughts on the relatively small size of yesterday's posters, the comments section of Marc Fisher's Washington Post column yields an interesting "view from the American street" on the war, the media, and anti-war activism. Common Dreams, which has the AP story and another set of commentsgives a view from the left.
And now it's time for me to head out. Sorry I've been off the blog so much. I haven't felt motivated by ongoing events and news coverage. Jon Stewart had the best comment on the Petraeus report that I've seen.

By August, My Garden Is a Little Overgrown

2007-08-19T09:40:00.001-04:00

2007-08-19T09:40:00.000-04:00

2007-08-19T09:39:00.000-04:00

2007-08-19T09:38:00.000-04:00

From May to July in My Garden

2007-08-18T09:29:00.001-04:00

Scroll down to see the progress from spring to summer.

2007-08-18T09:29:00.000-04:00

2007-08-18T09:28:00.000-04:00

2007-08-18T09:27:00.000-04:00

2007-08-18T09:26:00.001-04:00

2007-08-18T09:26:00.000-04:00

2007-08-18T09:24:00.000-04:00

2007-08-18T09:23:00.000-04:00

2007-08-18T09:22:00.000-04:00

2007-08-18T09:18:00.000-04:00

2007-08-18T09:17:00.000-04:00

2007-08-18T09:15:00.000-04:00

2007-08-18T09:14:00.000-04:00

Let the Joyous News At Last Be Spread.....

2007-08-13T10:16:00.000-04:00

No, it's not clear yet whether it's time to break out the festive brews here in Munchkin Land -

We've got to verify it legally to see
if he
is morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably (of course I mean politically) dead.

But I jumped like a kid on Christmas morning when I heard Amy Goodman say "Karl Rove is stepping down." Was I dreaming? Apparently not. I may try to get more together later, but for now, I like the headline at The Huffington Post, the comments at Daily Kos,and the article by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.