Getting Ready for Summer Gardening

Finally, my grades are in, and I've put in just about as many new annuals and perennials as my little patch of earth can hold. I'm still hoping to fit a rose bush in one corner, but otherwise, everything is planted and ready to be enjoyed, pruned, and mulched until September. In about a month, there should be a little flower riot going on there, which I hope to document. Today, I hope the 1500 ladybugs I ordered will arrive in the mail from California....so much for organic gardening, right? When I went to the nursery yesterday, I discovred that I could have bought them four blocks from my house, but instead, I'm consuming fossil fuels to get them here in a timely fashion. Oh well. And now, it's time to go to an 8 hour seminar on how to advise students. I'm sure it will be thrilling.

What Have you Done With Your Life?

Yesterday, I spent about twelve hours at my 15th college reunion. I had gone with my friend, Cheryl, without whose influence, I would never have gone. I was glad I went, although I admit I've never been enthusiastic about giving money to Wesleyan, with which I was pretty disgusted by the time I left. For four years there, I was involved with various fights with the board of trustees over South African investments, core curricula proposals, and affirmative action policies. My favorite professors, Henry Abelove, Michael Harris, and Jerry Watts were all mistreated by the institution in various ways, (Harris and Watts were both denied tenure).
The other reason for my particular experience of Wesleyan had something to do with a basic class antagonism to the super-wealthy people I met there who seemed to spend most of their time high; there was a whole contingent in my dorm who spent most of their days smoking pot and playing backgammon, just until time for the exams that they invariably aced. Year after year, I met interesting people who were doing cool things (they were the ones who came to the reunion, obviously) but at the time, in my jaundiced view of everything, the priviledged neer-do-wells were at the center.
Oh, and then there was that whole disastrousfire-bombing and murder of one my once-friends, an entirely different kind of privileged ne-er do well.
So, I made the resolution upon leaving was never to have anything to do with a private college again because I saw Wesleyan's function as being a training ground for the ruling-class, one of whose primary lessons was about how to fuck up and not face the consequences. I must not have changed entirely, because one of the spots I was most nostalgic to return to was Eclectic, the "co-ed literary society" where I spent many weekends drinking beers and feeling miserable and excluded.
Oh, wasted youth!
(and yes, there were great people at Eclectic too, but I was too miserable when I was eighteen to appreciate them).
Of course, I gained a lot at Wesleyan. I often think back to things I learned there when I'm teaching now, and I think about how unfair it is that most of my students will never experience anything like it. The academic experience of Wesleyan, with those small classes, that amazing library, those bright, bright students, and dedicated professors - those were the things I still appreciate about the place, which combines the aesthetics of the palatial, the funky, and the idyllic in a way that's hard to explain. That aspect of Wesleyan was reflected most in the "Wes Seminar" on contemporary public education that I went to yesterday afternoon. So, yes, I really should give money to the school just to fund scholarships for kids from inner-city highschools. I found out that Michelle Pierce, who I'd never met at Wesleyan, as far as I can remember anyway, is doing amazing things in the Bronx. The discussion she facilitated during her seminar had all the hallmarks of those great classes I took there, and it was the best way to reconnect with the university.
The class dinner was also nice. Fifteen years later, it did seem like most of us had grown up.

Thank GAWD it's Friday

How did you celebrate the convictions of Lay and Skilling? By dipping back into the "Smartest Guys in the Room"? By listening to Greg Palast and Amy Goodman on the WBAI pledge drive? (it's like a spike in my brain to listen to this damn endless pledge drive on WBAI although Palast did just make a funny joke) By watching prison flicks?
Last night, my Mom reminded me that Bernie Ebbers was still out pending appeal. We wondered, why is this option available to rich assholes, but not to anyone else? Yes, maybe it's too soon to celebrate.
* * *
I also discovered that I have a remote personal tie to Enron. Tomorrow, I'm going to my fifteenth college reunion at Wesleyan, and did a little googling to find out what had become of my former classmates. I found out that a guy who used to be an environmentalist anti-nuke activist who dated my hyper-womanist room-mate was now the CEO of a natural gas company in Texas. I thought to myself, "who sold natural gas in Texas?" why, Enron of course! And it turns out that my alumnus once-radical pal had gone to business school in Michigan and wound up pimping out Enron's wacky strategy in Germany, I think for its water privatization division, Azurix. I guess if you're going to sell out, you might as well do so in a big way.
Meanwhile, the guy who I thought was really conservative and straight-laced in college turns out to be one of the most interesting people from my graduating class: Spencer "Kip" Boyer.
The main thing that people seem to remember about me from Wesleyan was my manic-panic plum hair.
You can file that under "I guess I was punk once"

Best Left Line of the Day

I'm in my apartment, back to procrastinating now that school is almost over, I'm listening to Robert Fisk on WBAI, who just got a laugh for this comment on an article on the LA Times:

Datelined Washington - an odd city in which to learn about Iraq, you might think - its opening paragraph reads: "Despite the recent arrest of one of his would-be suicide bombers in Jordan and some top aides in Iraq, insurgency mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi has eluded capture, US authorities say, because his network has a much better intelligence-gathering operation than they do."

Now quite apart from the fact that many Iraqis - along, I have to admit, with myself - have grave doubts about whether Zarqawi exists, and that al-Qai'da's Zarqawi, if he does exist, does not merit the title of "insurgency mastermind", the words that caught my eye were "US authorities say". And as I read through the report, I note how the Los Angeles Times sources this extraordinary tale. I thought American reporters no longer trusted the US administration, not after the mythical weapons of mass destruction and the equally mythical connections between Saddam and the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. Of course, I was wrong.

Here are the sources - on pages one and 10 for the yarn spun by reporters Josh Meyer and Mark Mazzetti: "US officials said", "said one US Justice Department counter-terrorism official", "Officials ... said", "those officials said", "the officials confirmed", "American officials complained", "the US officials stressed", "US authorities believe", "said one senior US intelligence official", "US officials said", "Jordanian officials ... said" - here, at least is some light relief - "several US officials said", "the US officials said", "American officials said", "officials say", "say US officials", "US officials said", "one US counter-terrorism official said".

I do truly treasure this story. It proves my point that the Los Angeles Times - along with the big east coast dailies - should all be called US OFFICIALS SAY.

Upcoming...I'm going outside to plant some annuals -- finally! I may be killing them though, as I seem to have a rather serious aphid infestation going on and no ladybugs in sight.

Lyrics of the day

I'm compiling students grades and listening to this awesome song by Sufjan Stevens. In nine minutes I have to review for a final with another batch of students. For now, enjoy this....

I fell in love again
all things go, all things go
drove to Chicago
all things know, all things know
we sold our clothes to the state
I don't mind, I don't mind
I made a lot of mistakes
in my mind, in my mind

you came to take us
all things go, all things go
to recreate us
all things grow, all things grow
we had our mindset
all things know, all things know
you had to find it
all things go, all things go

I drove to New York
in the van, with my friend
we slept in parking lots
I don't mind, I don't mind
I was in love with the place
in my mind, in my mind
I made a lot of mistakes
in my mind, in my mind

you came to take us
all things go, all things go
to recreate us
all things grow, all things grow
we had our mindset
all things know, all things know
you had to find it
all things go, all things go

if I was crying
in the van, with my friend
it was for freedom
from myself and from the land
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes

you came to take us
all things go, all things go
to recreate us
all things grow, all things grow
we had our mindset
all things know, all things know
you had to find it
all things go, all things go

you came to take us
all things go, all things go
to recreate us
all things grow, all things grow
we had our mindset
(I made a lot of mistakes)
all things know, all things know
(I made a lot of mistakes)
you had to find it
(I made a lot of mistakes)
all things go, all things go
(I made a lot of mistakes)

Late News Round-Up

Last week I was knee-deep in a chapter revision (done on wednesday) and in a few minutes, I'll be chin-deep in end-of-semester grading, but before that hits, I have a few words to say about last week's events...

1.John McCain speaking at the New School Graduation.
Disgusting. As Jean Rohe said in her graduation speech, on a day that is supposed to honor the students, Bob Kerry, craven pol, made an insulting choice for a graduation speaker. How low will Bob Kerrey go? They should have ousted him in 2001. I'm glad that students there protested.

2. John McCain speaking at Columbia University. Also disugusting.

3. Jason Leopold's story on Karl Rove: What the fuck? Josh Frank labeled a troll by Dkos posters? what a surprise.

4. What is there left to say? The answer has been out there for a long time, and the argument for it just gets stronger every day.

5. M.I.A kept out of the US? One more reason to listen to "Galang, Galang, Galang" on my subway ride to work today.

6. Guantanamo Events....Whatever happened the answer on this one is plain too; this place should be shut down. However, the administration continues to defend it by accusing the people inside of being "dangerous" even while they're shackled and surveilled.

Chatter about Street Thief Finally Begins to Emerge

After seeing "Street Thief" I was really curious to see what people's reactions to the movie would be. One of my regular readers (with whom I saw the movie) said that I was too hard on it, that the film was immensely entertaining, and if I recall his comment at the time "a mind-fuck" but in a good way. I did give it a very high rating on the "audience award" card for simply being watchable and enjoyable. However, I still hold that part of what made the whole thing so wild and entertaining was its premise of "truth." If I had thought I was watching staged burglaries, and an actor playing a burglar, I might not have been sitting there as I was, and I might have demanded more from it, such as character development, or more of a story.
As a fake documentary, however, it does have a plot twist, such as the disappearance of the film's main character and the involvement of the "film-makers" with the police investigation of his disappearance. And as I said in my previous comments, Bader is an extremely engaging Kaspar.
Meanwhile, here's an indepth discussion of it at
cinema strikes back

Tribeca Wrap Up

On Sunday, after the festival had officially ended, I saw two movies: the NY, NY animation program curated by Bill Plympton, of "Guard Dog" fame, and "Voices of Bam," the winner of a special jury prize in the international documentary competition. "Vocies of Bam" was one of the most unique documentaries I've seen, and left me wondering how on earth the film-makers filmed the scenes they did. It absolutely deserved an award. As you might expect, some of the animated films were just wonderful and some were weird, and some were a little silly. My favorites were "The Back Brace," which might still be up on the TFF website, "Guide Dog," "Sita Sings the Blues" and Roof Sex. I also learned about the folks at "Underbelly" who seem very cool.
I didn't see many docs during the festival, and also didn't attend some of the more interesting or entertaining looking films because I figured they would get distributed in the US pretty soon.
My list of still-want-to-see movies from the festival, but will just wait till they hit the theaters, movie channels, and DVD retailers:

Jonestown: Life and Death of the People's Temple
Maquilapolis
Jesus Camp
Blood of My Brother
Choking Man
Civic Duty
Yo Soy Boricua
East Broadway
Viva Zapatero
The War Tapes
and of course
The Case of the Grinning Cat by Chris Marker

Oh yeah, and everybody kept telling me to go to Sir, No Sir!. too bad that it played at the union-busting IFC center. I will have to wait for the DVD, and they maybe I'll use it in my class on Vietnam.

And the best movie of the week was.......
Steven Colbert at the Whitehouse Correspondents Dinner.
Maybe at next year's Tribeca film festival, they can have Colbert on a panel about the internet distribution of this CSPAN video and the "hidden" audience of the blogosphere.

Four Movies in Two Days: The Yacoubian Building; Two Players from the Bench; Blessed By Fire; Crime Novel

I've been going from one theater to another for the last couple of days, and all the movies I've seen have been worth it.

First, on Friday morning, I saw "The Yacoubian Building," about which I'd heard people talking at the festival after the first screening. They looked happy and excited on their way out of the screening, so I wanted to see it. Now that it has won the new director prize at this year's festival, I hope that it will find its way to movie screens in the US. It was completely watchable and fully engrossing; despite its length. I think the review that I read, which called it "Tales of the City" but set in Cairo, was pretty on target. The movie itself was beautfully shot, the acting, by so many major Arabic speaking stars was superb, and the script was clever. Based on a best-selling Arabic novel of the same name, The film tells the stories of several tenants of the same apartment building in Cairo, from the palatial suites of the wealthy, to the roof-top shanties of the very poor: Zaki Pasha and his sister Dalwat, the corrupt car-dealer, congressman and his secret second wife, the young woman Bosaina, and her boyfriend who seeks a position in the police force despite his lowly origins as a porter's son. The film is most challenging in its confrontation of class and gender dynamics in Egyptian society, and at its least-informed in its effort to deliver a sensitive portrayal of homosexuality. I was glad to hear an audience member ask a question about the really ridiculous representation of homosexuality as somehow stemming from childhood sexual abuse, at least as it appeared to in the film's major low point. Despite that, I enjoyed the film immensely.
I went to work on my book for a few hours and then made it to my second movie of the day, "Two Players from the Bench" a comedy written and directed by a popular Croatian director, Dejan Sorak. I was surprised to see that it was actually possible to create a comedy about the Hague War Crimes Tribunal, but indeed, this film was hilarious and smart. The audience, largely Croation, was cracking up and laughing hysterically throughout. The film lampoons both nationalism, as something phony, comical and dstructive, while also showing the international justice system as somewhat naive and easily manipulated by nefarious operatives. One corrupt man is able to set up the dismissal of charges against a Croatian war criminal by bringing in two very phony alibi witnesses (the two players from the bench). Although it is set in a political environment and concerns issues of war, justice, and nationalism, the film is only very subtly political, or rather "anti-political," depicting two "regular guys" caught up in a machine that is quite beyond them. The absurdity of their situation and their "common-sense" attempts to make the best of it create most of the humor of the movie. When asked what he thought about the tribunal and whether it was effective, the director dodged the question, saying "I'm an artist, not a politician." I was disappointed in his response, for it seemed that the obvious answer in the film was "no."


** *
Saturday afternoon I started my movie day with the moving Argentian film, "Blessed by Fire," a story of war and its affects on veterans and their families based on a novel by an ex-combattant of the Falklands/Malvinas war of the 1980s. As the directors said, this was most of all an anti-war film, and before the screening, the writer of the novel announced that an Iraq veteran had committed suicide the day before. This is the "human cost" of war, he said, after the film, which people forget too often. I'm surprised, but glad, that it won the prize for best narrative feature at the festival. As a universal story of the horror of war, it was among the most moving I've seen, and it also tells the story of a particular war about which most Americans know very little, and I hope that its winning of this prize will win it an American distributor. Apparently it has a distributor everywhere else BUT the US. There are few stories of war from the side of the losers...although "All Quiet on the Western Front" does come to mind. As I was watching the film initially, I wondered, what is so horrible about this war that would make so many people come home and committ suicide years later? It's not as if they're committing any war crimes that they're guilty about, which you hear about in Vietnam stories (not so much in films). And I realized, when the soldiers finally went to the front, that it was both the punishments by the officers and the defeat itself that led to the lasting psychological damage. While it could be seen as in some ways a nationalist film by the Argentinians, the brutality of the officers toward the conscripts doing the fighting was so extreme that it would be hard to fit this story comfortably into a recuperation of the Galtieri regime in any way. Interestingly, one of the "thank-yous" in the film's credits went to Nestor Kirchner, who recently condemned the Malvinas war as a jingoistic act of Galtieri's dictatorial government, but who also says that the Malvinas islands should belong to Argentina.
Saturday evening I went to see "Crime Novel" the popular award-winning Italian movie by Michaele Placido, produced by Warner Brothers in Italy. I really enjoyed this film, which tells a complicated story of crime and politics in Rome during the 1970s-1980s. In the midst of telling the story of a group of small-time hoods in a quest to make it to the top in Rome, it also depicts the Aldo Moro killing and the Bologna train station bombing, and implies the participation of members of the government in the latter. As the film's star actor put in in the Q&A, one must make critiques of the contemporary Italian regime rather indirectly, and this film has succeeded by seeming to really just be about "ancient history." Gangster movies, while always providing a fantasy of a life beyond rules and with great material pleasures, also always give us the chance to compare the actions of criminals with the actions of governments and legitimate businessmen, and "Crime Novel" is a good example of this kind of gangster film. While it did not have the depth of Pasolini's Accatone still one of my all-time favorites, it did strive for that level, and it leaves its audience with more than just a few hours of entertainment. Given the potential importance of this movie for the whole gangster genre - a significant Italian contribution at a critical moment in the history of Italian gangsterism and political corruption - I wished that Scorcese and Di Niro had shown up for the screening and the Q&A. Scorsese was clearly an influence, and it would have been interesting to hear his take on the movie. Instead, I hear that he did a special screening of some 1950s matinee movie this weekend.

West Side Highway; Siah Bazi: The Joymakers and Inside Out

Wednesday night, my room-mate and I went to see "West Side Highway," this year's "New York, New York" short program, and my reaction: what a disappointment! What's happened to short films in NY? The "Falling Man" film about the World Trade Center photograph was self-important, hokey, and borderline offensive to me. The "Orange Bow" movie turned out to be a fictional version of the Timothy Stansberry shooting in Brooklyn that turned kids from the projects into middle-class kids with nothing more to worry about than a birthday present for a crush. I was so irritated when the director of this film, during the Q&A said that "nothing had been done" about this shooting, given the fact that there was a movement around it in Brooklyn, and that this movement had been the subject of a documentary shown in the festival the year before. (I talked to her afterward, and she said that her movie had screened with it in California. It's just too bad that she didn't talk about the other film during the Q&A because it was made in NY by highschool kids who knew Stansberry)
"Shiner" whose maker had brought about 100 friends to the screening was kind of dull. The only stand-out was "King of Central Park," which was a definitive laugh riot, a kind of contemporary light-hearted take on "The Graduate." The guy who played the main character was one of the funniest actors I have seen in a long time, and Henry Winkler, who must be the film-maker's Dad or uncle, plays an excellent therapist. Go see it, go see it, if you ever get a chance.

* *
Last night, I saw a really good movie: Siah Bazi: The Joymakers, an Iranian documentary about a 400 year old traditional theater which is dying out in contemporary Iran. The film-maker, Maryann Khakipour, remmebered Siah Bazi players from her childhood in Iran. Similar to Comedia Dell'Arte, the troop has stock characters, most notably one called "the black" who acts as a kind of Shakespearean fool, commenting on society through comedy. "The Black" in the film is Sadi Afshar, who has been playing this character, who he says represents "the people," for most of his life. Now that the theater of this group, who are according to Khakipour, are the very last Siah Bazi players in Iran, has closed, they are all facing lives as truckdrivers and tea-servers. And the point of the film is ultimately that the Iranian revolution has made tragedy of comedy. I thought, for about a minute after the screening of Foucault's misguided support for the Iranian revolution, and then, of the entire notion of cultural politics and the effort of many modern revolutionary movements to remake culture and fight against tradition. What a crime against history, I thought, to obliterate a 400 year old theatrical tradition, and what a crime against reality, in some way. It's good to see that when regimes try to obliterate realities that they usually fail. Partly as a result of the showing of the film, this Siah Bazi group has gone to France and is quite successful there, according to Khakipour.
The attempt to remake the world according to the terms of ideology is of course not unique to fundamentalist Islamic revolutionary movements, but appears also in certain varieties of Marxism, which treat all nationalist movements and ethnic particularism as if they were just delusions and obstacles in the way of revolutionary action. But are these cultural traditions, this one born as a folkloric expression of the Persian people living under Ottoman rule, really just delusions? When the people in the film began playing and dancing to the music that goes along with Siah Bazi, they lit up because it was a music they had played all their lives, that they had heard when they were young, and that they would pass on to the next generation. There is a delight beyond the music or theater itself in maintaining those kinds of traditions; perhaps it is a recognition of one's contribution to the complex world that we all inhabit. It is the thought: I am saving something that has lasted for hundreds of years from being forgotten by history; I am keeping tradition alive.
Traditionally, Siah Bazi players would perform in people's homes, which, said Khakipour, made it easier for them to be critical of any regime. The group she followed in the film, however, performed in a theater in Teheran, which was part of an old pre-revolutionary entertainment district which used to be full of theaters, bars, music halls, and Jewish garment dealers. In recent times, it's become a center of electronic businesses and the last theater has closed. Such is the modern world; the film represents both contemporary economic and political shifts in Iran, and presents a view of Teheran very different from the one that is most commonly seen in the West.
Siah Bazi was screened along with a shorter documentary about Iranian transsexuals, which also gave a different view of life in contemporary Iran. Somewhat surprisingly, transsexualism is a recognized condition in Iran, and sex-change operations are endorsed by both Muslim clerics and the state. However, homosexuality is illegal, and the government must find that the person requesting a sex-change operation is a transsexual, rather than a homosexual looking for an easier life. In this way, the theory of transsexuality becomes more conservative than radical, for as the Muslim clerics argued, it reaffirms the essentialism of gender identity. Sex-change surgeries exist, they believe, to make a unity of the soul and the body, to correct a disjunction between the two. I have sometimes wondered myself, if the whole notion of the need for a sex-change wasn't some kind of critical gender essentialism. Rather than saying "there are many forms of woman" and I am one, or "there are many forms of man, and I am one," the notion of the biological/psychological transsexual is, "What I am, inside, is a man, or a woman, and I must adjust my body to that in order to be at peace with myself and with the outside world." I don't mean this to judge anyone, or to impugn the trans political activists in the GLBT world. It's just a thought about the increasing historical phenomenon, and it was hard not to think about that given the acceptance of transsexuality by the Iranian religious establishment.

New Template

So, by sort-of popular demand, I switched to a more eye-friendly template. However, I lost my entire blogroll. It's currently 1:30 am and I have to get up early. So guys,I will replace it but it won't be tomorrow.
Sorry. Hope you like the new look.

"Dear Father, Quiet We're Shooting"

On Tuesday night, I went to see David Benchetrit's new movie, "Dear Father, Quiet We're Shooting." This was another highlight of the festival. In the film, Benchetrit allows a group of men to tell their stories of refusal to serve in the Israeli military. Of different ages and from different parts of the military, the men explain why for them conscientious objection to serving in either Lebanon or the Occupied Territories is the only moral choice. While some might critique the film for its lack of background exposition, I found that the main speakers in the film were so eloquent about their own reasons for refusing to serve that the choice made sense. For someone quite familiar with the context of the events already, as most Israelis, the film's intended audience are, the speakers introduce new ways of thinking about the military and the war. While not as detailed in the description of atrocities, this film is comparable to the landmark "Winter Soldier."
The story of history that they tell is that Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was equivalent to the US's invasion of Vietnam, and that it involved horrible war crimes (aerial bombardment of civilian targets, Sabra and Chatila) for which the highest levels of government must be held responsible. They argue that they have learned from the Nazis that "I was following orders" is not an acceptable account. They criticize Peace Now members for "crying and marching" and then going back to the army again, "shooting and crying." They are critical of terrorism (and the film shows scenes of both Israeli and Palestinian funerals) while also saying that it's wrong for the IDF to be in the territories and that the Palestinians who commit these acts are in a hopeless situation. The speakers addressed and demolished just about every argument that's been made in defense of the actions of the Israeli state. Benchetrit's films are made to provoke political debate in Israel, and I think this film will do that. Benchetrit is convinced of his own rightness and is unapologetic about his choices as a film-maker. This may seem to be arrogant, but I appreciated his confidence in his own decisions. No doubt, this is what makes him such a damn good political film-maker. The comments by the conscientous objectors also resonated with many other similar situations. I think it might be required viewing for the contemporary anti-war movement in the US. The song, "Dear Father, Quiet we're shooting," once banned in Israel, was also very powerful, and I wish I could find it online. No luck yet, and it's time to end this entry!

Articles about Saturday's Anti-war Protest

I went to the protest on Saturday the 30th and it was huge. Tom Englehardt's article, posted today on alternet, provides a thorough description. Just as I was, he was surprised to find the demonstration as huge as it was despite the seeming lack of publicity. Newsday has a good photogallery.