People Before Profit blog

Workers Unite Film Festival opens May 9 in NYC

Thu, 01 May 2014 13:01:00 +0000

NEW YORK - The Third Annual NYC Workers Unite Film Festival will take place from May 9 through May 19 at Greenwich Village's Cinema Village theater and other venues around New York City. The festival will feature over 50 of the best documentaries and films by professional and student filmmakers depicting the lives of workers and their struggles, nationally and internationally.

New York City is the home of many film festivals. Most don't highlight the lives of working people, although some have working people as characters. But until recently there was no film festival in NYC that portrayed workers' lives and struggles, front and center. And no festival that took a side on behalf of working people in their fight for better wages, respect and dignity.

The Workers Unite Film Festival seeks to address this big business (and all too frequently independent film industry) blackout.

The stories of workers' struggles in Bangladesh, South Africa, Iraq, Spain, Palestine and Ecuador will be prominently featured, reflecting a festival theme this year of "Global Labor Solidarity." The documentary Schoolidarity addresses the issues around the militant 2012 Chicago teachers strike; Overpass Light Brigade portrays the creative tactics activists in Wisconsin used to defy the big business message machine during Scott Walker's union-busting campaign.

Closer to home, Under the Bus tells the story of the 2013 bus strike by ATU Local 1181 drivers in Staten Island, N.Y., in protest of proposed mass firings by Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration. Other films detail the struggle of NYC's "carwasheros" to unionize their industry; still another documentary portrays activists' struggles at Zuccotti Square during Occupy Wall Street.

Andrew Tilson, founder and executive director of the festival, referring to the global reach of this year's festival, says, "What is stunning is how exactly on point it is (workers' struggles in other countries) compared to our story. When you see these films you see what is happening here is very much what is happening in every country where you have a 1 percent that is trying to stomp on the rights of workers in general."

The week-long cultural festival is supported by a coalition of labor and community organizations, including the NYC Central Labor Council, NY Taxi Workers Alliance, TWU Local 100, SEIU 1199, Local 32BJ, New York State Nurses Association, CWA Local 1180, National Writers Union, and Make the Road New York.

Important additions to the coalition this year are some of the organizations that have recently been on the forefront of organizing drives in NYC, like the Retail Action Project, the Restaurant Opportunities Center and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

In an interview, Tilson said this growing coalition points to an increased understanding among unions that "supporting a working class culture and refocusing attention on the dignity of workers is something that is critical to building the workers' movement."

Tilson pointed out that, although today's unions have not always focused on culture, in the past unions did. The labor classic film "Salt of the Earth" was actually funded and produced by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in support of their strike against the Empire Zinc Mine in1951. The film will be shown at the festival on Sunday, May 11, in commemoration of its 60th anniversary.

Tilson, a documentary filmmaker himself and graduate of the labor studies program at NYC's union-affiliated Murphy Institute, decided to organize the festival when he noticed that "in a union-strong city like New York there was not a single real workers' labor film festival."

In addition to Washington, San Francisco and several other U.S. cities, there are currently 36 established labor film festivals around the world, including in South Africa, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, Taipei, Israel, the UK, Ireland, Italy and Spain.

New to the festival this year is a Poetry and Spoken Word Night on Thursday, May 15, at NYC's Lithographers Union hall. It will feature performances by Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, as well as many labor-oriented spoken word artists and poets, including this writer.

A special festival event against the anti-labor policies of Killer Coke and in solidarity with Latin American trade unionists will take place on Sunday, May 18. Films and speakers will address Coca Cola's financial aid to paramilitary death squads used to attack and assassinate trade unionists in Latin America. The 80-strong New York Labor Chorus will sing labor songs.

For ticket information and schedule of films, go to workersunitefilmfestival.org. Tickets, reasonably priced, can be purchased online or at the door on the day of the event. Full-week tickets and all-day tickets are also available.

Photo: http://www.facebook.com/WorkersUniteFilmFestival

"The Galapagos Affair, Satan Came to Eden" film review

Wed, 30 Apr 2014 13:50:00 +0000

This documentary is "Exhibit A" for that old maxim, "Truth is stranger than fiction." The atavistic impulse to "get away from it all," leave the proverbial rat race, and "return to nature" has been a literary theme since Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson cast away on so-called "desert islands." Archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl wrote the book Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature about his attempt to live close to the land in the Marquesas Islands in the 1930s.

During that same decade, a few Europeans got the same notion, but instead of settling in the South Seas, like Heyerdahl, Herman Melville, Paul Gauguin, and Robert Louis Stevenson, they chose the Pacific archipelago off Ecuador's coast.

As the title suggests, The Galapagos Affair, Satan Came To Eden is a chronicle of the best laid plans of mice and men going terribly wrong amidst the marine iguanas, tortoises, and other famous Galapagos wildlife. This doc is also a chronicle of human stupidity - if not madness - on a stupendous scale.

Veteran documentarians Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller previously collaborated on nonfiction films about dancer Isadora Duncan and on the Ballets Russes. Affair's co-directors skillfully unravel the dramatic incidents that unfolded on Floreana, a remote, uninhabited isle in an already extremely remote archipelago, 80 years ago. Strangely, however, key points of reference to the Galapagos are never mentioned, including Melville's stories called The Encantadas and Charles Darwin's visit there aboard the Beagle in his quest to prove the theory of evolution.

The island chain of events began when Friedrich Ritter, a German doctor, and his Berliner lover and patient, Dore Strauch renounced civilization and its discontents and relocated to the far-flung Galapagos in 1929. A self-professed Nietzschean, Ritter eschewed being a physician in favor of being an "Übermensch" in a state of nature at Floreana, far from the madding crowd. But the Germanic "super" couple are unable to leave behind the baggage of themselves: Dore suffered from multiple sclerosis and needed frequent medical attention -- not the backbreaking labor of life in the wilderness, which generated conflict between them. From time to time visitors sailed to the distant isles. Word got out about these "modern day Robinson Crusoes," and to the outside world suffering from the Depression they became a celebrity Adam and Eve living a supposedly Edenic existence.

This inspired others to try to "return to nature" at Floreana, including a couple from Cologne, Margaret and Heinz Wittmer. Without even corresponding with Ritter first, the couple just showed up unannounced, she expecting not only a baby but Ritter to serve as her personal physician. Their uninvited presence and requirements infuriated the reclusive Ritter, who now was being imposed upon by total strangers, not only to help them to survive but to play doctor again - something he had tried to give up, but was obligated to do to help Dore.

Into this combustible mix next came the self-styled Baroness Eloise von Wagner and two German paramours. The eccentric Austrian woman began making a series of outrageous demands, combined with outlandish behavior, as she planned to build a resort at this remote outpost. All hell broke loose in what was supposed to be a heaven filled with iguanas, tortoises, penguins, exotic birds, and more. As the press notes aptly put it, it's "Darwin meets Hitchcock."

Goldfine and Geller adroitly use archival footage -- much of it shot by a California moneybags yachtie who sailed to the Galapagos from time to time -- and original interviews with island residents, some of them children and grandchildren of the real life tale's protagonists, to relate this mysterious yarn with its age-old moral about being careful what you wish for: You just might get it - and then some. To give an idea how dire the circumstances became at this would-be paradise, Dore Strauch eventually deserted it, finding Nazi Germany preferable to her little utopia gone wrong. Providing Dore's voice, Cate Blanchett incarnates a character even more pathetic than the one she scored an Oscar for portraying in Woody Allen's 2013 Blue Jasmine.

In Genesis, there was a snake in Eden that resulted in Adam and Eve being expelled from paradise. In The Galapagos Affair, Satan Came To Eden, the characters' expulsion is not from eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, but from eating the forbidden fruit of all-too-human folly.

"Alphaville" totalitarian fears still relevant decades later

Wed, 30 Apr 2014 11:37:00 +0000

One of my favorite genres depicts dystopian sci-fi societies, wherein humans fight for freedom from futuristic fascism. George Orwell's terrifying 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are the greatest exemplars of this type of anti-totalitarian tale in tomorrowland. But for this film lover, arguably the greatest interpretation of dystopia for the silver screen is Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 masterpiece Alphaville, which has been lovingly, lushly restored, and theatrically re-released in all its black and white glory by Rialto Pictures. Almost 50 years later, the prescient Godard's sci fi classic takes on a whole new dimension as a parable of the NSA national security surveillance state.

The 35-year-old auteur was in fine form when he and renowned cameraman Raoul Coutard shot this low-budget take on high-tech totalitarianism. When the French New Wave shook world cinema with imaginative, stylish pictures, among other things, these filmmakers made their own versions of Hollywood genre movies. Godard's first feature, 1960's Breathless, took on the conventions of film noir, as did Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, also 1960. In 1964, Jacques Demy made The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, an MGM-like movie musical.

In 1965, the visionary Godard synthesized film noir, espionage movies, and science fiction with Alphaville, creating a potent political work of art presaging his revolutionary agitprop.

Alphaville's alpha male is portrayed by L.A.-born actor Eddie Constantine, who reprised the role he was noted for in French films: Lemmy Caution, a two-fisted tough guy, secret agent, or detective. But in Alphaville, wearing a Bogie-like trench coat and fedora, Lemmy is thrust into a dystopian future where the despotic state is ruled by the omnivorous, omniscient Alpha 60, whose eerily disembodied voice preceded Siri by several decades. Alpha 60 is the cinema's spookiest computer this side of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's HAL in that other sci fi masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. As secret agent 003, Lemmy goes undercover, posing when he enters Alphaville from the "Outlands" as a reporter for the Figaro Pravda newspaper named Ivan Johnson (while Lyndon Johnson was U.S. president).

Godard's wordplay throughout is tellingly droll and Orwellian: Alphaville is on "Oceanic" time, a reference to 1984, as is the futuristic city-state's "Ministry of Dissuasions"; the close-up of an elevator button reads "SS" - a play on the French word for basement ("sous-sol"), clearly a nod to the Nazis' secret police - and Alpha 60's mastermind is the über-scientist Professor Leonard von Braun, aka "Nosferatu," obvious references to both the Nazi rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, who went on to work for the postwar U.S. space program, as well as to F.W. Murnau's 1922 German expressionist Dracula classic.

Lemmy gets mixed up with von Braun's daughter Natasha, charmingly played by Anna Karina. Although Natasha is assigned to Lemmy as a "Seductress, Third Class," her dialogue suggests that Natasha is quite innocent and naïve, perhaps even virginal - at least when it comes to the notion of love, whose meaning Natasha claims not to know.

Indeed, love is the animating force of this struggle against a computerized tyranny where "logic" dictates human behavior at the expense of "conscience" and "passion." Beneath Lemmy's brawny private-eye persona lurks an idealistic romantic. So like Winston Smith and Julia in 1984, Lemmy and Natasha couple up and resist the Big Brother-like computer, which attempts to reign over a "technocracy, like ants and termites." Lemmy and Natasha are all-too-human: There's a nearly rapturous scene when they discover and express their love for one another, which was quite avant-garde for 1965 and remains rather lyrical, even poetic. Lemmy and Natasha take their place alongside Tony and Maria, and Porgy and Bess, among Western culture's great 20th century lovers.

Alphaville is full of Godard's signature style and leitmotifs - rapidly cut montages, pictorial panache, Paul Misraki's Noirish soundtrack, the use of written words (Godard even compares the dictionary to the Bible). And of course, no Godard film would be complete without his pseudo-philosophical musings, a vital, dissenting, visionary voice pleading for love, conscience, and poetry in our increasingly regimented, mechanized world. In Alphaville, Godard arguably prophesied the advent of the NSA's techno super-state half a century before Edward Snowden bravely blew the whistle.

The newly restored Alphaville opened at the Nuart in L.A. on Apr. 25, and is being released to arthouses across the U.S. through July. From Alpha 60 to the NSA, fight the power!

Photo: Wikipedia (CC)

"The Quiet Ones" is drama dressed up as horror

Tue, 29 Apr 2014 16:14:00 +0000

The Quiet Ones seemed to be the most intriguing amongst a recent string of otherwise by-the-numbers supernatural horror flicks. Granted, some of its marketing and aesthetics were similar, with even its name following a now-popular formula (see The Conjuring, The Possession, etc.). But the story here was different enough to draw me to the film. In the end, it batted around a lot of creative ideas, many of which fizzled out. The result was an interesting - but slightly underwhelming - drama masquerading as retro-horror.

Set in Oxford during the 70s, it follows the story of a college professor, Coupland (played by Jared Harris, who sci-fi fans might know from Fringe), who recruits three students to join him in undertaking an experiment with questionable ethics. The goal is to cure a purportedly possessed girl named Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke), whom Coupland believes is merely mentally ill and exhibiting cognitive abilities not normally displayed by people, but which are being studied in the area of fringe science. Coupland hopes to thus disprove the existence of demons and the supernatural, and to cure Jane.

The story is very loosely based upon the Philip Experiment, a 1972 parapsychology experiment conducted in Toronto, the results of which were likely a combination of coincidence and fraudulence. But the filmmakers here etch in some additional backstory: not only does this experiment awaken something dangerous, but that something has connections dating back to ancient Sumeria and a cult using a demon sigil that is suddenly showing up on people's skin (haunted by a tattoo artist, perhaps?). There's definitely a measured creepiness enveloping things as the plot unfolds, but it's mostly ruined by tired horror tropes and silly jump scares. At times, the film even plays with the found footage/shaky camera subgenre that movies like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity popularized, but here it feels forced.

Alas, the sinister escalation we see throughout the first hour of the movie all unravels soon enough, leaving us with an ending that lacks both cohesion and climax. The inventive beginning simply doesn't go anywhere, and the audience is only teased with the shadow of what could have been a better film. Sure, it's interspersed with some old school horror staples - mysterious noises, a creepy malevolent doll, some Carrie-esque fire play - but we've seen it before, and it's not as unsettling as it once was.

On a positive note, the film had good actors. Olivia Cooke was perfect at depicting both the menacing and gentle sides of Jane. Horror fans might recognize her from the A&E series Bates Motel; indeed, she'll likely go on to bigger and better things in the genre and become the next scream queen. But her talent is wasted here. In a way, Jane Harper feels like a character that accidentally wandered onto the set from a better movie somewhere else. Harris, meanwhile, puts on a nuanced and believable performance as Coupland. Again, it's squandered talent, and I believe better writers would have known how to make it shine.

There are a few other ideas thrown around in The Quiet Ones: there are themes of exploitation, indoctrination, and some sort of subtle commentary on some of the spiritual and occult outlooks of the 70s. But the development of these themes must have gotten left on the cutting room floor. By the way, the meaning behind the film's title is never really explained.

Though perhaps arbitrarily unique among its peers, The Quiet Ones will likely still get lumped in with the other PG-13 contemporaries and forgotten soon enough. It's an example of what happens when writers come up with an appealing concept, but simply can't deliver when it comes to fleshing it out. All in all, this movie is a dark drama with a few eerie moments, not a nerve-rattling horror film. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

"The Quiet Ones"

2014, PG-13

Directed by John Pogue

Olivia Cooke, Jared Harris, Sam Claflin, Erin Richards

Photo: "The Quiet Ones" official Facebook page

A Coffin in Egypt, Texas

Fri, 25 Apr 2014 13:07:00 +0000

The American composer Ricky Ian Gordon (no relation) is among the freshest voices in music today. His largest opera is The Grapes of Wrath. He is currently writing operas for the Metropolitan Opera and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.

His latest is A Coffin in Egypt, a yearning, nostalgic score starring the renowned mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, which premiered in Houston in March, and received its West Coast premiere in Beverly Hills in three performances in April. Kathleen Kelly sensitively conducted a nine-piece orchestra.

Von Stade plays the 90 year-old Myrtle Bledsoe, lone survivor at her family homestead in Egypt, Texas. It's 1970. She married in 1900, experienced WWI, the Depression, WWII, and many personal tragedies and spousal infidelities. The opera, with a rhyming libretto and stage direction by Leonard Foglia, is based on a play by prolific dramatist Horton Foote.

Incidental characters from her life wander on and off in speaking roles. The only other singing roles are an itinerant quartet of Black gospel singers from the local church, who interject inspirational messages throughout the 75-minute piece.

Myrtle has lived in deep embitterment over most of her life, resentful at her husband's treachery, lacking confidants, and retreating into her private world of books and painting. Critical to her environment is the Black side of town that has touched her deeply but from afar. Her husband's greatest outside affair took place with a woman of black/white parentage he seems to have truly loved, and with whose community he genuinely, and generously related, despite the Jim Crow times.

As a symbol of how isolated Myrtle has felt in all her years in Egypt, the set décor (by Riccardo Hernández, lighting by Brian Nason) highlights fields of cotton, projected like wallpaper of the house that cotton built. But repeatedly this "perfect lady," dressed in a regal red caftan, sings instead about the thick, tall stands of beautiful spring wildflowers she loved when she first arrived, and the long horse rides across the prairie she undertook to fill her days. Though outwardly a sympathetic character for whom we are meant to feel, she seems, in her self-absorption, constitutionally incapable of empathy for anyone.

Myrtle claims not to enjoy the Black gospel singing, but those voices have been reaching out to her for generations, trying to show her the value of friends, of hopes, of the meaning of life and the vision of a better world. She, wife of the cotton lord, sings solo. The cottonpickers sing together in gorgeous four-part harmony.

Among the family tragedies are two killings, with guns, that evoke today's "Stand Your Ground" laws. The way people literally got away with murder in those days is worth a comparison to now: How different is it?

A Coffin in Egypt provides the opportunity to comment on the fate of opera in America. Only a handful of major opera companies existed in the U.S. - the Metropolitan and the New York City Opera in New York, San Francisco, Chicago - "major" being a company that might dare to premiere a new work.

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, numerous regional companies emerged, some of them even willing to score a coup by offering an untested work that would get noticed in the musical press. Oftentimes the company would engage in significant educational outreach to introduce the work to its audience.

Recent years have seen the demise of several high-profile companies, the New York City Opera, for one, and others in Connecticut, and Orange and San Diego Counties in California. In the years of a shrinking middle class, and declining opera attendance, it turns out that bankrolling expensive productions of Aïda and Die Meistersinger is not so important to the nabobs of industry who inhabit opera boards.

Gordon's latest opera was a co-commission with Houston Grand Opera, Opera Philadelphia, and the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, showing that, from the bottom line perspective, larger companies are interested in smaller-scale works, and that newer venues, such as the "Wallis," are throwing their hat into the ring of serious new operatic ventures without the enormous overhead of maintaining a standing company (with obvious implications for professional musicians).

Now, with the ubiquity of live theater broadcasts from the Met, we may see a trend of regional companies offering more intimate, less standard productions, at a deeply cost-saving discount, in order to survive. Audiences seeking out new works, or significant revivals, will be grateful.

Photo: Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, photo by Lynn Lane.

"Cesar's Last Fast": The last shall be first

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 12:07:00 +0000

Jesus may have had a Last Supper but Cesar Chavez had a Final Fast. The Cesar saga about a real-life legendary labor leader and civil rights icon provides - no pun intended - fertile soil for cinematic plowing. Now we have not one full-length film concentrating on this trailblazing Chicano hero but two! - a case of feast or famine. Richard Ray Perez's stellar nonfiction Cesar's Last Fast is a perfect companion piece for the superb new Cesar Chavez biopic. With both films focusing on the same subject, covering much of the same ground and being theatrically released within weeks of one another, this pair of pictures is also a case study in comparing feature and documentary filmmaking.

Whereas Diego Luna's Chavez, shot on location in Mexico, mostly reenacts and dramatizes the title character's life and movement, Fast creatively uses heaps of news clips and original interviews conducted specifically for the doc to tell Cesar's sizzling story. Fast contains more detailed information about Cesar and his unionization cause, whereas Chavez is more entertaining. Both, however, are highly dramatic, as they cover union organizing in the fields and strikes against all odds, boycotts, marches, and Cesar's deployment of Gandhian tactics of nonviolent resistance in his crusade for pickers to live a better life.

Although there's material about his hard luck childhood at Delano, California, and so on, Perez's skillfully made documentary highlights Cesar's use of fasting as a way to win social struggles. In particular, it zooms in on Cesar's lengthy, final fast in 1988. Exactly why did Cesar risk death by refusing to eat for more than an entire month? Often, environmentalists and labor - especially blue collar workers - are portrayed as being at loggerheads with one another. But Cesar's specific reason for declining food for weeks was to shame the growers into stopping the spraying of crops with pesticide. Fast's archival footage reveals the birth defects a disproportionate number of pickers' children suffered, amidst allegations of cancer clusters caused by the choppers, bi-planes, etc., dumping their poison on the crops - and those who harvested them.

The documentary's talking heads include UFW stalwarts - Helen Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Cesar's brother Richard Chavez - and also delves into the roles played by the Kennedy clan, Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown, and other notables, along with the all important proverbial "cast of thousands," aka "the salt of the Earth," who marched and fought alongside Cesar.

Perez's nonfiction film gives us a fuller and more accurate picture of the real Cesar than is glimpsed in the feature. However, be forewarned: Some viewers who uncritically lionize Cesar may not like everything they see - such as the UFW's actions against Mexicans who were being shipped across the border to bust the union of mostly Mexican-Americans. Given today's context of immigration conflicts and "deporter-in-chief" Obama's record sky-high deportations of millions of undocumented residents, it's uncomfortable to hear the much-lauded Cesar, in his own words, call his brethren from south of the border "illegal aliens."

The falling out between Cesar and Gilbert Padilla over tactical differences and Cesar's banishment of his fellow organizer from the union is likewise distressing (according to the version events Padilla recounts onscreen).

While Cesar's reputation may not be unscathed, he still emerges as a noble working-class hero who, in his heyday, bettered the lives of multitudes of the least of these among us, alleviating the conditions of the wretched of the Earth. Perez tells the tale so well for two reasons: One, he himself, like Michael Peña (Chavez in Luna's pic), is the son of a picker. Secondly, Perez is a talented filmmaker. Along with Joan Sekler and Robert Greenwald and their 2002 nonfiction film Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election, he helped launch the post-9/11 "Tidal Wave of Dissident Docs" that challenged the Bush regime and helped forge a new path of the documentary as a dissenting art form in a world of sold-out corporate media, where "breaking" news is a verb, not an adjective.

As admirable as Cesar Chavez was, I have a humble suggestion for winning strikes and social struggles in the 21^st century: Don't starve yourself, but make the bosses and oppressors suffer by inflicting the misery on them that they so richly deserve.

In Gasland Part ll, Josh Fox continues to expose the destructive effects of fracking

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 14:54:00 +0000

Beginning from where his first award winning Gasland left off, Fox's worse nightmare has come true as his childhood house in a sleepy Pennsylvania forest has been surrounded by gas drilling rigs. From there he takes us on a road trip through the U.S., Australia and South Africa interviewing rural residents who have had their lives destroyed from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking for short.

Fracking is a process whereby millions of gallons of water, laced with 50 toxic chemicals, are injected deep into the ground to crack open dense layers of rock that trap natural gas. Much of this toxic water, along with methane, seeps into underground lakes and rivers.

People complain they can no longer drink their well water because it has been contaminated with methane gas and fracking chemicals. All are easily able to set their water on fire with a flick of a lighter. All report health problems. When they complain they are told by the gas companies that fracking is not to blame and that all water contains some amount of methane from natural leakage.

Local, state and federal governments will not intervene to help rural residents but rather they support gas companies. When local residents sue and win, settlements include non-disclosure clauses, which mean they can no longer talk about the problem. In other cases, local gas companies sue landowners to silence them. Many of the homeowners Fox interviews must abandon their homes to save their families.

In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency knows that fracking is polluting people's drinking water but will not help. One official tells a resident that his drinking water is safe but off the record not to drink it, admitting that he is following orders from top officials in Washington who have been bought off by the oil and gas industry.

Even more chilling, at a gas and oil convention held in Texas, it is revealed that industry is employing former military officials trained in counter-insurgency tactics (psy-ops) to rewrite local laws and fight against protesting landowners in Texas and Pennsylvania. Resistance was seen as an "insurgency" and military style propaganda and physiological tactics had to be employed to deal with unrest. The Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security labeled anti-fracking protestors as possible "eco terrorists", spied on them and shared info collected with the gas companies.

Fox makes it clear that the Obama administration has adopted fracking as its national energy plan to reduce greenhouse gas and make the nation self-sufficient in energy. On the world stage, Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010 championed the global shale gas initiative to help 30 other nations exploit their own shale gas. However, Bob Howarth, professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology at Cornell University, said that while natural gas produces half as much CO2, fracking releases huge amounts of methane gas, another heat trapping gas that is 105 times more powerful than CO2, worsening global warming. Evidence is also mounting that fracking causes earthquakes. None of this is necessary, as Director of Stanford's Atmosphere/Energy program Mark Jacobson cites a study his department undertook that says wind, solar and hydro electric can provide 5-10 times more electricity than the world needs.

Oil and gas companies have invested over $740 million in political campaign contributions to ensure that fracking is excluded from the Safe Drinking water Act so they do not have to tell the public what chemicals they are using in fracking water. Despite this, Fox demonstrates that there is a growing resistance to fracking across the U.S .and globe.

Gasland 2 is a welcomed, well-made sequel. Hopefully, Fox, a gifted filmmaker, will continue informing us about the damaging effects of fracking.

DVD review

Gasland, Part ll

Director: Josh Fox

Producer: HBO documentary films, 125 minutes

Labor says "NO" to outsourcing of "Draft Day's" music

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 12:43:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES -- Timed one day ahead of the April 11^th official release date for the new film Draft Day, starring Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, and Frank Langella, a spirited demonstration took place in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, to protest the treatment of American studio musicians.

What's the issue? These days, just about the first question any film producer asks is, "Where can I get the best tax credits?" Los Angeles, home of the Hollywood film industry, has suffered the loss of production for many years, as movies get lured by tax incentives and lower labor costs to film in Canada, Europe, and other faraway locations.

Lionsgate Entertainment, creators of Draft Day, for example, received $4.9 million in tax credits from Ohio taxpayers to film in that state. Actors and stage workers were apparently treated well and fairly. But post-production, when the film is scored, i.e., the soundtrack is recorded, Lionsgate did not hire American Federation of Musicians (AFM) professionals. Not in Ohio, not even in the United States. Instead, they hired an orchestra in Macedonia!

As Glen Arnodo, chief of staff for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, said, "Some people think music drops from heaven. But it doesn't. It takes talented union musicians to make music. When you take taxpayer money from Americans you sign up to be a member of the team."

Founded as an independent studio in 1997, Lionsgate had revenues of $2.7 billion in 2013, the fifth highest grossing studio at the box office. It is responsible for the "Twilight" and "Hunger Games" series, the new film "Divergent," and "Mad Men" on TV.

Ray Hair, international president of the AFM, pointed out that since 2011 Lionsgate has sent 20 of its films abroad for scoring, and kept only four in the U.S. "This seems to be a habit with them," Hair said.

Speakers from the AFM were joined by others from a broad range of labor, community, political, and faith groups. Los Angeles City Councilmember Paul Koretz lamented runaway production from a local economy largely based on film and television. "It's not just about the big producers and the stars," he said, "it's for all workers down the line." Koretz supports tax credits to keep jobs local, "But we're paying to lose jobs. Lionsgate, you can't keep doing this! Keep film music here in the U.S.!"

The AFM has launched a Listen Up! campaign to inform the public of the problem. "Recording a domestic film's music score overseas," says the union, "robs U.S. musicians and our communities of good jobs, deprives local economies of money that would otherwise have gone to public services and social programs, and undermines domestic musical culture and history."

One demonstrator, Pam Goldsmith, a viola player, has been a member of AFM Local 47 since 1958. In those days, all the big studios retained their own orchestras under union contract. "I have watched the work disintegrate," she told me. "Nowadays work is just drying up. It's all freelance now. Corporate greed is damaging the American way of life. People can't make a living because the companies are going to Macedonia. It's a sin and a crime."

It's not just the musicians and their families who feel the heat. Those wages paid to American musicians would have kicked in funds to Social Security and Medicare. The nation as a whole suffers from the global race to the bottom.

Musicians, and the labor movement with them, are telling Lionsgate that it is unacceptable to exploit U.S. taxpayer dollars and then fail to offer the same standards to musicians as to the cast and crew working in the film industry. The battle is engaged, and the musicians are not prepared to give up until their work is valued at industry standards guaranteed by to agreements between the AFM and the motion picture producers.

The AFM got its start in the early years of the 20^th century, when organists and small theater orchestras at silent movies were starting to be replaced by recorded sound. Now, says Ray Hair, with offshoring and outsourcing, "jobs have disappeared because the rich film companies have shoved us back into the silent era." Violinist Rafael Rishik summed it up: "In this campaign, silence is NOT golden."

The unions are NOT calling for a boycott of the film.

Photo: Violinist Rafael Rishik and Violist Jennie Hansen, with their "silent" instruments. Eric A. Gordon/PW

Echoes from “Cesar Chavez” reverberate to today

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 15:32:00 +0000

Now in theaters, Cesar Chavez, directed by Diego Luna and starring Michael Peña in the lead role, is a better expression of the filmmaking craft than an accurate depiction of history.

Though uneven, all is not wrong with a tale whose message is inspirational: excruciating suffering, great hurdles to overcome, momentary defeats, the long arc of justice, all activate our yearning to see the world made right. We need such films: If this one omits key points of fact, Americans of all "agendas" nevertheless need to see it.

Echoes reverberate to the present day, reminding us that the struggle continues under new conditions. In the main, are we not presently advocating a collective agenda for the whole country: affordable homes, good schools, a clean environment, healthy food, jobs at living wages, healthcare, security in our old age?

Accepting the principle of artistic license, we nevertheless might have expected more. Why did Luna shunt Larry Itliong and Phillip Vera Cruz, leaders of the Filipino farm workers, so far into the background? Why is Dolores Huerta's character (played by Rosario Dawson) so poorly defined? Why is she little more than a device to assist in plot pivots? Chavez's wife Helen (America Ferrera) leads the chant "Huelga!" (strike!) just after the court had deemed it forbidden speech. But other women were actually more involved in this early clash with growers as farm workers made their demands known.

Reference to the famous 1954 film "Salt of the Earth," about Mexican-American miners in New Mexico, is inevitable. In both films the lead male appears as a male chauvinist who slowly grows out of his backward ways.

The UFW contended with local California sheriffs who acted no differently toward working people of color than the Bull Connors of the American South acted toward African-Americans and civil rights workers, a reminder of how closely the two movements tracked each other.

Giving Mr. Luna his due as a director, there are some exciting moments driven by hand-held cameras that rapidly move us along with and in the action as close-ups of key story elements appear onscreen. Such compelling visual immediacy engages our interest and attention.

Child of a farm worker family, Cesar was inspired to correct the terrible conditions his parents endured. He absorbed lessons from the CSO (Community Service Organization), and then began taking on the challenge of organizing farm workers in Central California.

[CSO is a grassroots organizing effort that empowered a generation of Mexican-Americans and changed the course of history for their children through voter registration drives, citizenship classes, lawsuits and legislative campaigns.] A quick study, he outmaneuvers his adversaries, steering his organization toward its best negotiating positions. Short handle hoes are abolished, farm worker union recognition is finally achieved, a modicum of dignity secured. The power of "Sí se puede" brought all of that, but in the end it would take some politician's signature to make it stick.

Robert F. Kennedy and Chavez are shown as fellow travelers: Moments in the film touchingly recapitulate an iconic photograph of the two sitting side by side as RFK gently places a hand on the arm of the resolute labor leader weakened after almost a month-long fast.

We see newsreel clips of Governor Ronald Reagan, munching on boycotted grapes while accusing the farm workers of terroristic acts. Newly inaugurated President Nixon pontificates while horrific scenes of police riots in the California fields play out. Nixon ships grapes for sale in Europe, but the highly organized Europeans naturally would have none of it. A heartwarming scene is the "Boston Tea Party 2.0," showing Chavez and his newfound British labor friends dumping grapes into the Thames River. To anyone reading these words-as we approach the last midterm elections of Obama's presidency-It Matters Who We Elect!

Speaking of politicians, President Johnson, who was in office during much of the time covered in the film, goes unmentioned. Domestically, LBJ is now regarded as a great liberal, but of course there was Vietnam, which is only briefly touched on.

The famous trek from Delano to Sacramento was a "pilgrimage," a rite of sacred deliverance directed at lawmakers. Pairing the movement with religion indemnified its participants from excessive criticism and harm.

As Chavez coyly asked, "How can Catholics be Communists?" In the potent anti-communist environment of the 1960s, he had to downplay his early associations with the Communist Party to gain union and public support.

Although never compromising ultimate principles such as nonviolence, Chavez skillfully rode the bucking bronco of history as each challenge came his way.

Go see the film. It's flawed, but its heart is in the right place.

Photo: Farmworkers doing stooped labor with short-handled hoes in California. Bracero History Archive

March movies that came in like a lamb, went out like a lamb

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 11:20:00 +0000

Most of the movies from last month were not as memorable as the Cesar Chavez movie. The best of them that we saw was the Academy-award nominated foreign film, The Lunchbox. It is one of those films with a "sleeper effect" that doesn't make a giant immediate impression, but keeps rolling over in your mind days later.

The other reviews of The Lunchbox that I read didn't understand it at all. One said it was about Indian food. It was actually about people's need for one another in whatever form that may take. Apparently, urban Indians have an elaborate system of delivering more-or-less hot lunches to people at work. A lonely and misunderstood young wife does everything she can to impress her uncaring husband through the medium of lunch, but some glitch in the system causes her delicious preparations to go to a lonely widower who, like her, doesn't really know what to do with his life. It doesn't sound like much, and it doesn't seem like very much when you see it. Then the next few days go by and you realize, after tumbling it over and over in your head, that you've had a truly interactive art experience with a film.

I was eager to see The Grand Budapest Hotel because its creator has done such fine whimsical works before: The Fantastic Mister Fox, and Moonrise Kingdom. Both of them raised whimsy to an art form, and so does this latest work. The problem is, its still whimsey. There's an amazing array of big stars in central and cameo roles, and miniatures and photo effects are well used. It just doesn't add up to much and we forgot about it as soon as we left the theater.

Breath In is about a man in mid-life crisis, and it's not nearly as good as the song Jerry Lee Lewis did in the 1980s ("He's middle aged crazy, trying to prove he still can.") The acting is good, but it's hard to care about a white fairly affluent middle-aged schoolteacher longing to return to his Bohemian days. The object of his affections, a teenage foreign exchange high school student, remains that, just an object. We don't even find out, for sure, what motivates her into this mess. We get to understand the guy pretty well, but, try as we might, we still don't care.

Photo: Official Fox Searchlight film site for "The Grand Budapest Hotel."

“Shoeleather History” brings rambunctious New England Wobblies to life

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 11:06:00 +0000

Generally speaking, grassroots labor movements, the Wobblies in particular, don't receive histories on a state-by-state basis. Surely, if a state labor council exerted a notable influence over policy and politics, that well might be worthy of a study. But the Wobblies in Connecticut? Is that a subject? Are the resources for such a book even still extant?

We think back on the anarcho-syndicalist IWW, founded in 1905, and conjure up images of woodworkers, dockworkers, itinerant farm workers, and of course the great textile mill strikes in Lawrence, Mass., and Paterson, N.J., in the early 20th century.

But Steve Thornton is a longtime union organizer (SEIU), and before that ILGWU (now UNITE HERE) and AFSCME, who served on the Greater Hartford Labor Council.

He also threw himself into anti-war campaigns, housing rights activism, and radical journalism. So if there was anyone who would conceive to write such a book, Steve is your man. And in fact, he's given us "A Shoeleather History of the Wobblies: Stories of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Connecticut."

A hundred years ago, Hartford, Bridgeport, Bristol, Waterbury, New London, Willimantic, New Haven, Shelton, Ansonia, and other Connecticut towns had thousands of workers, many of them immigrants, employed in foundries, textile plants, furniture manufacturing, arms plants such as Colt and Winchester, and other industries. In an era

of widespread labor abuses - exploitation of children, unpaid wages, long working days, no overtime, no compensation for sickness or injury, docking pay for minor offenses or for situations beyond the worker's control (such as looms that often broke down), denial of the right to organize, or even to free speech - the IWW was around to "fan the flames of discontent," as its famous little red songbook liked to claim.

Connecticut was not immune to all those issues. Thornton brings in a rambunctious, rowdy, defiant cast of characters from those years, people who either passed through on speaking or organizing tours, or who became local, home-grown radicals. Figures such as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, Big Bill Haywood, Ben Legere, Robert Rives La Monte, Arturo Giovannitti, Emma Goldman, Helen Keller, Eugene V. Debs, Joe Ettor, Lucy Parsons, and Matilda Rabinowitz (later Robbins), make dramatic entrances and exits through Thornton's pages, giving rousing speeches in theaters or union halls, and often chased out of town by vigilante sheriffs after a good thrashing or jail sentence.

Thornton does a good job at threading us through the byways of long-gone political movements, showing how the Socialist Party was at first a strong ally of the IWW, then backed away from it, and also how the SP and the Socialist Labor Party under Daniel De Leon split from one another. For a long time, the AFL, the federation of traditional craft unions, was hostile to the idea of "One Big Union" that the IWW promoted, often opposing the Wobblies' embrace of the foreign-born, non-English speakers, women workers, and people of color. (In the 1930s the CIO took up this more expansive, inclusive vision.)

The IWW is famous for its free speech fights, especially ironic in Connecticut, nicknamed the "Constitution State." Especially at the time of World War I and the subsequent Palmer Raids on anarchists, Bolsheviks, and perceived radicals of every stripe, they played an important role in alerting otherwise average citizens to the real absence of constitutional norms in our country.

Thornton reminds us that those ubiquitous buildings found in most major cities, the local state armories, came into being precisely at this time, as a home for the National Guard or state home guard. Each one of these was a "fortress specially created and built to defend against homegrown unrest" (p. 88).

"Wobblies in Connecticut" draws on published memoirs, the work of labor historians, and ample use of local newspaper archives, even Helen Keller's FBI file, and is dotted throughout with evocative period graphics and photos.

As expected, this story is not a neat narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It jumps around a bit, as did the industries and personalities and the workers themselves. A complicated, inconsistently documented history cannot be told in a simple way. Sources are provided, but they're sometimes sketchy and out of order.

Nevertheless, of such modest building blocks our history is made. The struggle continues, and as we know, often doesn't look very different than a century ago!

See ShoeleatherHistoryProject.com for more grassroots stories.

Book information:

"A Shoeleather History of the Wobblies: Stories of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Connecticut"
By Steve Thornton
2013, Red Sun Press, 150 pages, $11.99

Book review: "Bohemians"

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 14:37:00 +0000

Bohemians would appear to be the book Paul Buhle has been waiting to introduce his entire lengthy career as a writer and editor. While his other 30+ volumes on left history and the blacklist all came from a place deep within, this latest addition to the Buhle canon somehow stands out, a place where the author can step into the times and places of the amazing characters within.

When this book arrived in the mail I thought I would skim it over, reading closely in a few areas and then bang out the review. But it wasn't possible as these largely chronologically placed tales of radical intellectuals (don't you just hate that term??) beckoned me to investigate further each time I tried to put the book down. This history is graphically told via the work of underground comic book artists and writers including the late Spain Rodriguez (whom Bohemians is dedicated to), Sabrina Jones, Peter Kuper, Sharon Rudahl, and many others, though Buhle makes appearances as scripter in many spots, offers a rock-solid intro and weighs in on the intros to each chapter too. But he'd be the first to point to the actual bohemian input of some of his comic brethren as most salient; Buhle is fascinated by the lives of radical artists though he regularly states that he remains apart from the lot, an observer who chronicles the movements.

Bohemians opens, befittingly, with utopianism, militant uprisings and every pronounced fight back to reactionary thinking the artists of the day could come up with, from free love, spiritualism, feminism, multi-culturalism and more. What is most compelling, though, is the almost constant connection between the bohemian artists and the concept of modernism. Is this an indication of a new age of Enlightenment?

Gay and lesbian lifestyles were accepted and the openness of inter-racial relationships are a matter of course. Theirs was a world in which one's politics were as revolutionary as their creativity and all of this was ignited by the vision of a new day. The cultural expanse of communism, socialism and anarchism are widely and deeply felt in these pages. Stand out chapters include the entirety of 'Village Days', a wide-eyed view into Greenwich Village in the 1910s. See John Reed carousing with Mabel Dodge, Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, and Arturo Giovannitti, dip into the pages of "The Masses" and "Il Fuoco" and embark on a journey into the Lawrence Strike. And while this chapter informs the reader of the Patterson Pageant, the benefit musical extravaganza Reed wrote with Dodge and performed on stage with actual strikers from Patterson, it somehow doesn't take us there (note to self: push Buhle to include a section on this when the book goes into a second printing!).

But Bohemians doesn't stop with the death of Reed. In fact, it dips back into the modern art movement in Manhattan in the earliest 20th century, giving an incredible vision into the time and the intensity of the struggle to break through the art establishment. Here you will find yourself walking the precipice of modern art and dadaism, including specific galleries and journals, both homegrown and European in origin, plus Duchamp, Man Ray, photography, cubism, and of course nudes descending staircases. From there, its Claude McKay's prideful, angry journey into life as a writer, in and apart from the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the turbulence of Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, Parisian salons and the tortured celebrity of Josephine Baker. But modern dance is offered thick, detailed segments with much focus also on theatre, folk music, and jazz. Pay special attention to the piece on Billie Holiday: it's a walk through her pained life with an ongoing experiences of Abel Meeropol, the communist composer-lyricist of "Strange Fruit," in comparative view. But along the path that Bohemians takes us on, we discover painters, poets, singers, actors, musicians, dancers and thinkers largely lost to the passage of time though they shaped the art of the here and now. Where would today's youth of Williamsburg Brooklyn be without them?

Chronologically, the book brings us into the 1940s - the era of bebop, modern jazz - with a close look at both Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. I must admit, I could have used a lot more Thelonious Monk, in fact this brilliant composer and classic bohemian archetype deserved his own chapter. The closing piece is the development of underground cartoonist Robert Crumb and the writer who worked so closely with him for years, Harvey Pekar. In later life, the very working-class yet quite bohemian Pekar partnered with Buhle on several books including The Beats and SDS: A Graphic History. To allow for the full breadth of bohemianism, one might have to fully absorb those two volumes while reading through this current one, and spend some time listening to the expansive, free jazz of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler as well as early punk and no wave.

Such a radical creative vision cannot rest.

The road of bohemianism is jagged and cuts through every revolutionary social movement. What could ever stop it?

"Bohemians"

Edited by Paul Buhle and David Berger with Luisa Cetti

Introduction by Paul Buhle

John Pietaro is a musician, writer and cultural organizer from Brooklyn NY - http://www.DissidentArts.com

Photo: The Cultural Worker blogspot

Captain America sequel hits all the right buttons

Tue, 08 Apr 2014 16:14:00 +0000

Comic fan or not, we live in the era of the superhero film, with Marvel Studios building franchises out of its best heroes and coalescing them into megafranchise teamups. The thing is, many Marvel comics have had interesting story arcs, with plenty of progressive things to say. Captain America: The Winter Soldier wisely followed suit, instead of taking the more brainless, "big guns and bigger explosions" approach we've come to expect from action movies. And it's that sort of risk-taking that made it wildly successful.

The first Captain America film, which took place during World War II, was campy and forgettable. In the space between that film and this one, the Captain (Chris Evans) was cryogenically frozen until he was awoken in 2012 to join a team of heroes in The Avengers. Now the character returns to his own film - a political spy thriller that moves along at breakneck pace. It delivers old school action and an engaging story that involves neither apocalyptic forces nor self-aggrandizing villains. Instead, it deals with a covert threat that exists right at home. In a sense, Capt., a.k.a. Steve Rogers, must fight the corruption within his own country.

Rogers, unlike Iron Man or Thor, has more or less become a government-sanctioned hero, defending his country from supposed terrorists alongside former KGB agent Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson). He's still got that cut-and-dry freedom-fighting mindset of the Nazi Germany era, and therein lies his naïveté, for the world doesn't quite work that way anymore. He learns this soon enough, forcing him to question whether his very moniker holds the same meaning it once did.

Capt. and Widow work for S.H.I.E.L.D., a pseudo-CIA/NSA/Homeland Security catchall type of organization with global influence and, for those paying attention, its own TV series. One of their leaders is Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who smells the growing stench of corruption within the agency, but doesn't yet know how to go about fighting it. Rogers gets a whiff, too, when he realizes he was played on a recent mission by the very outfit he works for, in order to secure classified information that even Fury isn't allowed access to. S.H.I.E.L.D., as it happens, is a bit of a puppet for a larger undertaking by fascist group Hydra. When Rogers and Fury start digging, they force the hand that pulls S.H.I.E.L.D.'s strings and attempts are made on their lives. This sets into motion a chain of events that set Capt. on the path to uncover a conspiracy that threatens the safety of the nation - and which involves the planned targeted extermination of millions of people.

Weaved throughout the storyline is political commentary that hits many of America's hot button issues. There are critiques of NSA surveillance and data-mining, the assassination of U.S. citizens without due process, and perhaps most strongly, drone strikes, represented by S.H.I.E.L.D.-controlled weaponized helicarriers. All of these issues snowball into unlimited capitalist control taken to its logical extreme. "The price of freedom is high," says Rogers at one point, and the film indeed goes on to examine the cost. Tapping into the zeitgeist of its viewership could very well have helped The Winter Soldier achieve such success, but the triumph is also owed to excellent directing and a committed cast, even if some actors (Johansson, newcomer Anthony Mackie) got the short shrift this time around.

An interesting side note: The Winter Soldier, in the comics, is a Soviet assassin - a piece of storytelling that came off a bit like an irrelevant relic of the McCarthy/anti-communism era, especially when Marvel has long killed and buried anti-communist propaganda, and even established positive communist characters in titles like X-Men. The film adaptation took the Winter Soldier's origin and skewed it, making him a weapon of the U.S. government itself (albeit serving a de facto German Nazi organization). He's also (spoiler:) Capt.'s childhood friend, Bucky (Sebastian Stan), who has been kept under cryogenic lockdown until needed and brainwashed to forget his identity.

Ironically, and despite being satisfactorily menacing, the Winter Soldier himself is the most unneeded part of the film, and the only character that feels both forced and underdeveloped. His story seems rather hardscrabble when compared to the more fruitful government conspiracy plot. Even so, keep an eye on actor Stan, who has signed a nine-film contract with Marvel and who, rumor has it, will assume the mantle of Captain America when actor Chris Evans' contract is up. (Marvel means business - they've got films and casting planned all the way through 2028.)

Much more interesting is corporate nemesis and S.H.I.E.L.D. senior leader Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford), who organizes assassinations and plots genocide with a calm smile and a glass of champagne.

Evans does a much better job playing the Captain this time around, and is clearly more comfortable in the role.

In conclusion, The Winter Soldier takes outdated black-and-white idealism (seen through the eyes of Rogers) and plants it firmly in a world filled with shades of grey, and I think that, more than anything, really speaks to audiences. In one part of the film, Rogers is asked, "How do we know the good guys from the bad guys?" to which he responds, "If they're shooting at you, they're bad." If only the world were that simple.

"Captain America: The Winter Soldier"

Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Redford, Scarlet Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan

PG-13, 136 mins.

Photo: Official film site

"Floyd Collins": heaps of social commentary on musical stage

Tue, 08 Apr 2014 14:35:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - As a reasonably attentive theatergoer, I eagerly awaited composer/lyricist Adam Guettel's latest work, having deeply appreciated his six Tony Awards-winning quasi-opera Light in the Piazza. The La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, in a suburb of Los Angeles, announced his Floyd Collins (with book writer Tina Landau, who also supplied additional lyrics), for a short production run (March 29-April 13), and I hurried to see it.

I was surprised to learn that this work actually dates back to the mid-1990s. It won Lucille Lortel, Drama Desk, and Obie Awards in 1996, and has been staged in a number of cities, including L.A. It had escaped my attention, although a cast recording does exist on Nonesuch Records.

Floyd Collins is based on historical events - like such other musicals as Parade, The Scottsboro Boys, Harmony, and Assassins, to mention a few. Born in 1887, Collins was an explorer in an area of hundreds of miles of interconnected caves, including Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park. One day in late January 1925, while searching out a new entrance to the underground, he fell into a narrow crawlway, got trapped there, and ultimately died of starvation and exposure on Friday, February 13.

What happened during those two weeks becomes, in the musical, a metaphor for all that is positive, and much that is terribly amiss in America. Why was Collins exploring caves in the first place? For the adventure, for the contribution to our knowledge of natural history, yes; but also because, as a wannabe entrepreneur, he dreamed ecstatically of opening a theme park and making a fortune off of tourists.

Why did a minor Louisville Courier-Journal writer named William Burke "Skeets" Miller go to Cave City, Kentucky, to report the story? Well, it was a good human-interest item, but his daily updates got syndicated in 1,200 newspapers around the country, and ultimately earned him a Pulitzer Prize. Floyd Collins became a folk hero, the whole country riveted on his travails, the new medium of radio also contributing to the frenzy.

On the ground above Collins, the whole family gets into the act. Brother Homer, passionately devoted to saving Floyd's life, is gradually seduced by Hollywood for his matinee idol good looks. His dad, a hardscrabble farmer with a naïve evangelical faith, is reduced to hawking balloons and cheap souvenirs of his son (photos a dollar apiece).

H. T. Carmichael, owner of Kentucky Rock and Asphalt, self-importantly contributes his expertise to the rescue, knowing that it will only boost business. He's an obvious precursor of those profit-hungry corporations that carve up pine-covered mountaintops to remove the precious coal below.

The whole carnival of hucksterism surrounding the effort recapitulates in backwater Kentucky the Roaring Twenties model of success, fame, monetization, and wealth, a small but shining example of Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" theory of disaster capitalism. Significantly, it's the women in this story, sister Nellie and Miss Jane (Floyd's stepmother), who come off relatively pure.

Guettel's score is a sophisticated mash-up of minimalism and country hollers and bluegrass. Particularly powerful are the echo effects that resound throughout: Floyd Collins refers to the caves as "one giant system" underneath the Earth's surface that clearly echoes the intricately interwoven social structure above, while the unlucky spelunker hovers midway between, slowly losing breath and hope.

For such a small-scale production, La Mirada recruited a highly experienced cast capable of straightforward balladry, yodeling, vaudeville routine, extended vocal monologues approaching operatic dimensions, and crisp ensemble precision. Standouts are Mark Whitten as Floyd Collins, Victoria Strong as Miss Jane, Kim Huber as Nellie Collins, Jonah Platt as Homer Collins, and Josey Montana McCoy as Skeets Miller.

La Mirada's production takes place in a 199-seat theater mounted on the larger venue's main stage, making for palpable intimacy with the action. We the audience become part of the community trying to save Floyd, and sharing in his fate. Rich Rose's clever multi-level scenic design puts us simultaneously on and below ground, aided by Lisa D. Katz's expressive lighting. Musical direction is by David O, with overall direction by Richard Israel.

The Broadway genre lends itself to heaps of social commentary, especially if you look under the surface.

Floyd Collins plays Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m., ending April 13. The theater is located at 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada. Tickets at 562.944.9801, or www.lamiradatheatre.com.

Did homophobia cut singer, LGBT activist Otep out of metal festival?

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 16:01:00 +0000

The annual Mayhem Fest, a tour that primarily features metal bands, has announced its 2014 lineup. Curiously, record label Victory Records has cut one of its artists - nu metal band Otep, whose eponymous singer is a lesbian and LGBT activist - out of the tour. It may be no coincidence that the festival's main sponsor is Rockstar Energy Drink, a corporation with ties to a homophobic, conservative political pundit.

Otep Shamaya, singer, poet, and advocate of gay rights and animal rights, tweeted about her band's exclusion, noting, "Lots of people are asking why we aren't on Mayhem Fest this year. Could it be that one of their corporate sponsors is openly homophobic?"

Quite possibly. Rockstar was founded in 1998 by Russell Weiner, who just so happens to be the son of conservative talkshow host Michael Savage. Savage was fired from cable television channel MSNBC back in 2003 after referring to an unidentified gay caller as a "sodomite who should get AIDS and die." Savage went further, saying that the caller was a "pig" and a "piece of garbage." He later said of gay people, "these bums mean nothing to me."

Cathy Renna, spokeswoman for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said that Savage's firing was the right decision. She remarked, "It's about time. This attack made the clearest case for why Savage has no place on any reputable news network."

As for Weiner himself? At a 2010 Rockstar-sponsored concert, he warmed up the crowd by chanting, "Who's heterosexual and proud? If you aren't, hopefully you will be soon!" He also proclaimed, "I'm proud to be the son of Savage!"

The energy drink company's association with these anti-gay positions is troubling for metal artists like Shamaya, who are working hard to show those not familiar with the metal scene that the heavy metal subculture is not, as it has sometimes been portrayed in the media, homophobic.

Since forming her band, said Shamaya, "It never crossed my mind that I was a rarity or something unique. And it never crossed my mind that I should hide what I am. I think the lesbian community is just now showing all of itself; all of its faces. Whereas before, people might have a certain idea of [some stereotype of] what a lesbian is. The more exposure people get to the LGBT community, I think that's good."

Despite the hatred attached to groups like Rockstar, Shamaya sees the culture surrounding the music as moving in a more accepting direction. "Being an out lesbian in heavy metal," she says, is different now. At shows, "we see guys bringing their boyfriends, girls bringing girlfriends, and mixed couples coming in now. It's becoming a very inclusive tribe of people coming together behind the message."

Rob Halford, frontman of metal band Judas Priest, said that his coming out as gay decades ago forever changed metal's views on LGBT issues for the better. "There are now areas of this music that are more compassionate, more tolerant, more open, more accepting, and more aware. We have destroyed the myth that heavy metal bands don't have that capacity."

Though it hasn't been confirmed that Rockstar's inclusion on this year's Mayhem Fest is directly responsible for Otep's exclusion, it certainly doesn't help the metal scene to be associated with any company that supports conservatives like Savage.

"There is still a long way to go," Halford concluded. "But heavy metal now is a completely different world compared to heavy metal in 1980. There are still a lot of issues that need to be addressed, but I think slowly but surely, things are getting better."

Photo: Otep performance in Indianapolis. Otep official Twitter page

Hugh Masekela: 75th birthday celebration tour

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 15:54:00 +0000

South African trumpeter and activist Hugh Masekela has entertained audiences with his special blend of jazz and world music for over 50 years. The legendary musician continues that tradition, as he currently tours the United States and the world in celebration of his 75^th birthday.

Born April 4, 1939 in Kwa-Guqa Township, Witbank, South Africa, Masekela was greatly influenced by American jazzmen at a young age. He combined that influence together with his own African heritage to create a style of music he has shared worldwide. In 1959, he helped form the Jazz Epistles, the very first African jazz group to make a record. This was the start of a successful and artistic career that continues today.

It wasn't just music that influenced the life of Hugh Masekela. As the young jazzman performed early on in places like Johannesburg and Cape Town, he witnessed the injustice inflicted on the South African people under the apartheid government.

In 1955, a large, multi-ethnic group of educators, intellectuals, trade unionists and clerics came together, led by the African National Congress, to author a declaration called the "Freedom Charter." This proclamation openly condemned the racist rule of the South African regime.

The subsequent years saw many of the Freedom Charter's supporters imprisoned or exiled. In 1960, Hugh Masekela traveled to New York City to begin a 30-year exile from his homeland.

He attended the Manhattan School of Music, studying classical trumpet. As Masekela gained fame as a musician, he continued to express support for his fellow citizens and human beings worldwide, who have suffered under oppression. He has used his voice, and his music, to make a stand against all governments that have mistreated their own people.

Masekela performed at the New Hazlett Theatre in Pittsburgh, PA on March 30 with his band. It was a long overdue return to this city. When Masekela played here in the late 1960's, he insisted on staying with some of the local concert organizers, who were living in the Pittsburgh project houses at the time. This reflection shows how Masekela has always been one with the people, even as his fame and popularity grew. His concerts are a celebration of life and culture. He thanked the people of Pittsburgh for their generosity, their joy, and their protests throughout the years. The show was sponsored by Kente Arts Alliance, an African American arts organization that strives to showcase performance and heritage in underserved communities.

Hugh Masekela's musical influences have no boundaries. At this recent show, he paid tribute to Bob Dylan with an interpretation of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" from his latest CD, Playing At Work: Re-Worked released in 2013. He also did an incredibly powerful version of "Stimela: Coal Train." This song reveals the lives of the conscripted men from all parts of Africa who ride the train to the golden mineral mines of Johannesburg and outskirts to work 16-hour days for almost no pay. It was an emotional performance by Masekela and the band, exposing the struggles of those working men and the injustice imposed upon them.

Masekela also performed "Bajabula Bonke (The Healing Song)," which he explained stands for hope in a world of dangerous weapons and dangerous governments. Following this song, he openly condemned all frontiers and borders of nations, saying the time has come to end those games. He went on to express the need for the world to come together, and stop acting stupid politically, and environmentally.

No Masekela concert would be complete without a rousing version of "Grazing in the Grass," his instrumental hit from 1968 which remains popular throughout the world. A Hugh Masekela show is a celebration of joy and unity among the people, and many were dancing in front of the stage. His encore included a tribute to former South African president and anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned for 27 years because of his stand for human rights. The song, "Bring Him Back Home," was written by Masekela and is remembered as being a worldwide anthem of support for Nelson Mandela's release from prison when it was released in 1987. The Pittsburgh show ended in a standing ovation, as a large birthday cake was brought on stage to honor the great musician and humanitarian.

Hugh Masekela will continue to appear at various venues around the world in celebration of his 75^th year. He brings an awesome amount of energy to his shows, including singing, playing, and dancing for the crowd. His legacy of performance is matched by his legacy of activism. Hugh Masekela continues to stand with all citizens of the world in their quest for equality and a better existence...while bringing some enjoyment along in the form of music to celebrate life.

Photo: Hugh Masekela's website.

"The Death of Klinghoffer": controversial history in opera

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 15:25:00 +0000

Leon Klinghoffer was an American Jew sailing aboard the Achille Lauro in 1985, when a team of Palestinian Liberation Front hijackers seized control of it off the Egyptian coast, holding the crew and hundreds of passengers hostage. The PLF's demand, as cited in the 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer, was the release of 50 Palestinian political prisoners.

Composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman specialize in expressing 20^th century historical events in opera. They are better known for their 1987 Nixon in China and, with librettist Peter Sellars, 2005's Doctor Atomic about nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project.

The rarely staged Death is the most controversial, dogged by criticism and cancellations. Long Beach Opera's production was the Southern California premiere of this work which debuted more than 20 years ago in Brussels, and then performed in Lyon, Vienna, and Brooklyn. What's the problem?

In the first scene a chorus portrays Palestinian refugees in a lamentation with a haunting melody and lyrics: "My father's house was razed in 1948 ... Israel laid all to waste." This is extremely powerful: for U.S. theatergoers, a rare live stage expression of what Palestinians call "al-naq ba ", Arabic for "catastrophe," referring to the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland during the conflict that led to the establishment of the State of Israel.

Contrast the comparatively commonplace renditions of Jewish suffering, not just Fiddler on the Roof, but many other films and stage works. This makes Death's second scene, with the same singers now as Jewish Holocaust refugees, far less potent and poignant, simply because scenes of Jewish misery are familiar to us, unlike the plight of the Palestinians.

This attempt to present a Palestinian perspective and backstory exposed Adams to charges of anti-Semitism and efforts to censor and suppress Death. But Adams - and Goodman (raised Jewish) - were striving to explain the fertile soil from whence terrorism grows. They also remind us that both Jews and Palestinians are historically aggrieved parties. But suffering does not always ennoble; rather, it can bring out the worst in people, with relentless mutual retaliation that only exacerbates outstanding grievances. The terrorist Rambo, chillingly played by baritone Roberto Perlas Gomez, sadistically enjoys inflicting suffering on the helpless hostages.

The portrayal of Leon Klinghoffer (baritone Robin Buck) is troublesome. Klinghoffer is revered as a folk hero to Jews and some Americans because despite being an invalid in a wheelchair he verbally stood up to the hijackers. In the opera he arguably comes off as somewhat unsympathetic, blind to his Palestinian captors' actual grievances, perhaps even a bit arrogantly belittling Arab suffering. (According to the plot, at least one hijacker lost close relatives during the 1982 massacres at the Israeli-controlled Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.)

It's certainly true that the misfortune of the wretched of the Earth is largely neglected by corporate media. To get attention, les misérables often resort to spectacular measures in the form of horrifying violence, which cannot be ignored. But the indiscriminate slaughter of unarmed civilians, innocent of any direct connection to historical offenses, is widely regarded as a loathsome, despicable tactic that usually results in terrible PR for terrorists and their causes.

The opera's 50 minutes' worth of choral interludes, telling the Biblical story of Hagar, set in the desert, on the ocean, etc., are meant to illuminate the overall theme, but some observers found them diversions from the linear narrative.

Still, Death is a towering work of art ably directed in this production by James Robinson and conducted by LBO's Artistic and General Director Andreas Mitisek. The set design by Allen Moyer cleverly evokes a cruise ship and Greg Enetaz's video design is likewise evocative.

Standouts in the cast include Suzan Hanson as Marilyn Klinghoffer - the couple was celebrating their wedding anniversary with this cruise, Jason Switzer as the hijacker Mamoud, and Danielle Marcelle Bond portraying three passengers awkwardly coping with the situation. Mezzo-soprano Peabody Southwell excels in a gender bender role as the terrorist Omar.

Opera has always tackled current affairs and historical events. Bravo to the composer and librettist for taking this topic on and to LBO for presenting it. Adams, the Minimalist music man musing on human misery, has attained maximum effect.

The Death of Klinghoffer was performed March 16 and 22 at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, Calif. The opera receives its Metropolitan Opera premiere in New York next season.

Photo: The actual Achille Lauro ship, photo taken in Malta in 1994, via Long Beach Opera Facebook page

"The Unknown Known" grills Donald Rumsfeld on Iraq war snow job

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 17:01:00 +0000

Along with Michael Moore, Errol Morris is arguably America's preeminent working documentarian. Morris' recent nonfiction films include 2003's Academy Award winning The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara and 2008's Berlin International Film Festival Jury Grand Prize winner Standard Operating Procedure. The former sought to explain why America, by invading Iraq, went "down the same rabbit hole again" (as Morris put it during his Oscar acceptance speech) through an investigation of the so-called "Mac the Knife," who was U.S. secretary of defense during much of the Vietnam War. The second doc examined torture committed by Americans at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

Morris' latest documentary, The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld, is a sort of synthesis and updating of the two, as the master moviemaker focuses his "Interrotron" on the man who was defense secretary during the Iraq war and is suspected of sharing responsibility for torturing prisoners from Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo and for other crimes against humanity. The Interrotron is a recording device similar to a teleprompter that enables the interviewee to appear to be making direct eye contact with the interviewer, and hence with the audience. The term enhances the "fly on the wall" nature of Q&As, evoking the words "interrogation," "interview" and, appropriately in Rumsfeld's case, "terror."

The Unknown Known follows Rumsfeld, through his career as a four-term congressman in the 1960s to his stints as a behind-the-scenes strings puller for presidents Nixon and Ford, serving the latter as America's youngest secretary of defense. It focuses on Rumsfeld's return to that post (by then as America's oldest defense secretary) during George W. Bush's disastrous presidency at the behest of his longtime crony, Dick Cheney. In this doc the "unknown" becomes "known" largely through the 20,000 memos the verbose Rumsfeld circulated during his six years as Bush's Pentagon hit man.

Morris effectively uses filmmaking's audio-visual language to express ideas and break the tedium of talking heads. He opens with beautiful black & white, time-lapse cinematography of Washington, D.C., and repeatedly uses a snowflake theme to make his case against Rumsfeld and his snow job. Another visual metaphor Morris deploys is images of the ocean, giving form to the gabby Rumsfeld's sea of words.

Morris' cleverest use of cinematic symbolism, however, is aural, as he overlays one track of Rumsfeld speaking over another, creating the impression of a literal double talker. For instance, sidestepping the Geneva Conventions, Rumsfeld refers to "detainees" instead of "prisoners of war." Morris includes a clip of the 2002 press conference wherein the Orwellian Rumsfeld philosophized about "known knowns," "unknown knowns" and, referring to the lack of hard evidence regarding Iraq's purported WMDs, "There are also unknown unknowns - there are things we do not know we don't know."

At times Morris cuts from a lie Rumsfeld tells the Interrotron to footage of a previous statement by him, in order to point out self-serving contradictions. Rumsfeld critics may feel that the interrogator isn't as hard hitting as he could be with the elusive subject, for example, not pressing Rummy on his shaking hands on Dec. 20, 1983, with Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein dictator, who was at the time using chemical weapons against Kurds and Iranians. Morris's disdain for his subject has actually been far more palpable in interviews he has given since completing his doc.

Morris's final question is, "Why are you talking to me?" Rumsfeld replies, "I'll be damned if I know." Perhaps in addition to trying to burnish his image and put his spin on history, a main reason why Rumsfeld agreed to be interviewed on film is to sell copies of his latest book.

In any case, a better question for this man who helped lead our country into a completely unnecessary war that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries and an incalculable loss of tax dollars contributing to the bankrupting of America is: Why are you smiling? Throughout the documentary he is jocular, even gleeful. I suspect that Donald Rumsfeld is happy because he was never charged with, let alone convicted of, committing war crimes, and walks around a free, very rich man. Why Rumsfeld and his fellow war criminals are allowed to walk around scot-free is truly an unknown known.

The Unknown Known

Director: Errol Morris

PG-13, 2013, 103 mins.