People Before Profit blog

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra announces Music for Peace

Wed, 06 May 2015 12:54:00 +0000

BALTIMORE, Md. - In the wake of Baltimore's recent unrest and tensions resulting from the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) announces a Music for Peace concert on May 9, 2015, at Mount Lebanon Baptist Church in West Baltimore (in the Mondawmin Mall neighborhood). Last week musicians of the BSO and Music Director Marin Alsop performed an impromptu open-air concert outside its home, the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, providing a respite from protests and violence for over 1,000 members of the community.

This Saturday, musicians from the BSO and Alsop will team up with musicians from the Baltimore Symphony Youth Orchestras, the BSO's inner-city after-school program OrchKids, Peabody Institute, Baltimore School for the Arts, and musicians from City College in a program dedicated to the resilience of the people of Baltimore and the future promise of Charm City. Mount Lebanon Baptist Church's pastor, Dr. Franklin Lance, will open the program with welcome remarks and will be joined by Delegate Barbara A. Robinson.

"Throughout the last week, we have been moved by the inextinguishable spirit of the citizens of Baltimore," commented BSO Music Director Marin Alsop. "Amidst all the violence and the negative portrayal of Baltimore, we and the nation witnessed a strong display of humanity and goodwill happening all around our city. With this free public concert, the BSO strives to stand in unity and bring our neighbors together in our common language - music."

Please Note: FREE CONCERT. Tickets will not be issued for this performance and seating is first come, first served. Early arrival is strongly encouraged.

Program details:

Music for Peace Concert

Saturday, May 9, 2015, 12:00 p.m.-1:30 p.m.

Mount Lebanon Baptist Church

2812 Reisterstown Road, Baltimore, MD 21215

Musical Program to include Beethoven, "Ode to Joy", Matisyahu: "One Day", Harry Belafonte: "Turn the World Around" and "Amazing Grace".

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is funded by an operating grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency dedicated to cultivating a vibrant cultural community where the arts thrive. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is supported in part by funding from Montgomery County government and the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is also supported by the Citizens of Baltimore County and Baltimore City.

Photo: Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

Disturbing questions posed in documentaries at Full Frame 2015

Mon, 04 May 2015 10:42:00 +0000

DURHAM, N.C. - Some 23,000 people have gone missing in Mexico since 2007, their relatives grieving in suspension over their fates, their nation paralyzed by fear. In a compact 73 minutes, director Bernardo Ruiz trains his lens in Kingdom of Shadows on three activists in this complicated cross-border sociology: Oscar Hagelsieb, a heavily tattooed federal agent from Socorro, Tex., who infiltrates drug cartels; a Texas rancher and one-time drug importer; and Sister Consuelo, a Catholic nun in Monterrey who keeps families' hopes alive even in an objectively hopeless situation. An abstract story of widespread brutality is brought down to a human level where viewers can begin trying to make sense of it all.

Don Henry Ford, Jr., wasn't making it as a farmer. As he sank ever deeper into debt in the 1980s, he stumbled into some marijuana smuggling, filling a truck every couple of weeks and raking in some major cash. But he was just a cog in a much larger machine, and had no idea how he fit into the larger picture. Only later did the contours of the major drug cartels emerge, and perhaps the scariest of them all were the Zetas, which grew out of the Mexican military, trained by the notorious School of the Americas.

Many pieces comprise this intricate puzzle. Many of them are imprinted "mandatory sentencing" - half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. are there for nonviolent drug offenses, many in privately owned prisons. Other pieces are from the "war on drugs" - illegality makes the drug trade that much more profitable. And of course "supply and demand" - the U.S. boasts the highest consumption of narcotics in the world. Marijuana's pretty tame nowadays, as it's legal in several states. Now coke and meth are more lucrative, and far more dangerous.

Every once in a while, the Mexican government stages a major narco operation, such as the one in the state of Nuevo León in 2011 involving 1500 troops. They'd detain 500-600 young people in a Saturday night raid and accuse them of being criminals. Some would never be seen again. Graves and elimination sites have been found, complete with the chemicals and barrels in which bodies are disposed of and reduced to ashes. Less than 5 percent of homicides in Mexico are ever prosecuted. No one can draw distinct lines dividing the police from the military from the cartels. The two monsters of corruption and total impunity protect the perpetrators, and faith in public institutions has too all but "disappeared."

The gap in news coverage on Mexico serves as an excuse to lock up "undesirables," i.e.., poor people of color for the most part, who will be missed only by other poor people of color. It fits the story that reporters are themselves targeted by the cartels - in fact Bernardo Ruiz' first film, Reportero, was about exactly that. The 2014 incident of the 43 student disappearances from Ayotzinapa is briefly mentioned, clearly a late addition to the film.

SWAT teams vs. plants

William "Dub" Lawrence is the former sheriff of a rural Utah county in the 1970s, and is the Peace Officer in this 2015 film who had dedicated his life to confront the SWAT team that he himself founded. Why did Lawrence turn around on the militarization of America's police forces? Well, the highly questionable standoff between cops and his own son-in-law, Brian Wood, resulting in the latter's killing, had a lot to do with it.

In the aftermath of urban rebellions in the 1960s, SWAT teams emerged as a quasi-military response to widespread poverty, bad schools, substandard housing, limited opportunity - and the resistance that regularly broke out in cities across the nation. It did not take long for overwhelming aggression on the part of the police to become embedded in the popular understanding of law and order. No-knock raids became the norm especially once SWAT teams started being sent out to serve search warrants. And then, after the Vietnam War wound down in the mid-1970s, surplus military equipment was handed out to police departments with the requirement that it be used within a year. We began seeing Humvees and launch missiles in quiet suburbs.

Something of an obsessive-compulsive - which can be a useful trait when tracking down every last detail in a police procedural - Lawrence investigates this family death, and then goes on to look at other local cases where SWAT teams have far exceeded reasonable standards of protocol and common decency in their crazed pursuit of criminals. Oftentimes the "crime" is little more than some home-grown weed cultivation, or perhaps an unregistered firearm. But the price exacted is wildly out of proportion.

In one such raid, on a basement marijuana project, one officer was killed, and five others wounded. The subject also suffered major bodily harm. And what were they protecting us from? Plants. Lawrence reviews this case in extravagant detail. The filmmakers, following his lead, seem determined to trace the path of every bullet fired, the suspense building up as the incident takes shape through experienced forensic analysis.

May I make this earnest plea to filmmakers about musical scores? You know those ominous low, heavily reverbed bass tones that signal tension, anxiety, threat, fear, that are always ramped up to ear-numbing levels? (To call that music is a compliment I will not stoop to pay.) I've heard enough of it. These loud, menacing rumblings have become an annoying and intrusive viral infection; worst of all, they've simply become a cliché. It's time to come up with other solutions. Filmmakers, you have been put on notice! I mention it here because Peace Officer is a major perp of this sonic crime.

Law enforcement officers are given time onscreen to deliver their defense of self-defense, but given all we have seen, they come across as oblivious to the deep social damage their actions are responsible for. In almost all these cases, it's the police who initiated the action in the first place. In the Q&A following the screening, "Dub" Lawrence offered that one way to keep officers safer is not to create these situations that seem scripted to ending in death.

It probably was a useful strategy to single out a white, all-American crusader from Utah - a retired sheriff at that - to focus our attention on this issue. And most of the victims of excessive-force policing in this story are also Caucasian. I know it shouldn't have to be this way, but white audiences who see this film will be that much more likely to respond to the questions the film poses. Black and poor communities already know all this: They long ago lost confidence in the kind of law enforcement that acts more like an occupying force.

During the years 2010-14 there were more deaths in Utah from police killings than in the drug trade. "We're on the wrong track," "Dub" Lawrence says. "I don't think mankind is equipped to tolerate injustice forever." His is the mainstream voice that may possibly be heard more clearly once the film goes into national release.

Created by Scott Christopherson and Brad Barber, Peace Officer won the festival's Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights, and deserved it - it also snagged both the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Award at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival. Yet, at 109 minutes, Peace Officer is truly a piece too long, not an uncommon problem for documentaries. It could easily have been edited down by a good 20 minutes: We've really and truly gotten the point many times over. The tedious repetitiousness of the forensic research almost replicates a police academy instructional film. Too much information.

Striking at the heart of (T)ERROR

Exploring the murky tactics of the FBI, (T)ERROR focuses on a longtime FBI informant named Saeed "Shariff" Torres, former Black Panther and ex-convict, and himself a Muslim, who is corralled into a life of undercover work to avoid a 20-year jail term. The film uses a sting against a white Muslim convert in Pittsburgh as an example of Torres' success. The FBI's M.O. is to gradually ingratiate the agent into the target's life and encourage him to say, do and publish things that will later be used against him. For young people radicalized by decades of U.S. attacks on Muslim and Arab cultures and nations, it's not so hard to be drawn into a spider's web of deception.

To their credit, the filmmakers do not particularly make a villain out of Torres. Rather, they portray him as doing what he's got to do to keep a roof over his head and support a young son. Interestingly, people victimized by his acts as an informant do not appear to be especially angry at him. He is shown in other, positive, roles, such as the master baker that he would like to be, and as a dedicated musician.

What still mystifies is why Torres allowed the filmmakers such intimate access to his life, especially as this one episode unfolds. He did not let the FBI know that he was allowing filmmakers to document it. One can only surmise a kind of repentance, and a guarantee that once his face and reputation have been committed to the big screen, he'll never be able to work for the FBI again.

It has been stated often before, but the three films reviewed here urgently reinforce the message: If some government agents in law enforcement behave unprofessionally, whether through the use of violence, extortion or spying, then all law enforcement suffers because it has sacrificed precious community trust which will be extremely difficult to ever regain.

Immediately upon my return home, I pick up the Los Angeles Times (Apr. 11) and see yet another article about FBI confidential informants intercepting one John Booker, a 20-year-old black Muslim known as Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, who supposedly planned to attack U.S. army troops. Once more, our nation saved! Yet the details smack of exactly the kind of entrapment (T)ERROR investigates in its elegant exposition. Of the 500-plus people charged with "terrorism" in the U.S. since 9/11, about half have involved an informant. To call these FBI agents "informants" is in my view a misnomer. I think something closer to "provocateurs" is much closer to the reality.

This suspenseful 93-minute film won the Reva and David Logan Grand Jury Award for filmmakers Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe. Accepting the award, Sutcliffe related to the audience, "We recently showed the film to a former FBI agent who quit the bureau after 9/11, in protest of what was happening there. He called the film a colonoscopy on the domestic war on terror" (The News & Observer, April 13). For the first time in Full Frame's 18 years, this top award was shared with another film, Kings of Nowhere, about residents of a Mexican village who remain in their homes after a flood.

In the Q&A with the directors following the screening, Sutcliffe stated that "we want to use this film to put pressure on representatives to create oversight." A good idea. I hope it works.

Three earlier review articles on the 2015 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival have already appeared in People's World: On human interest stories, the U.S. involvement in global politics, and the environment.

Photo from Peace Officer: "Dub" Lawrence traces the path of bullets in a SWAT team home raid. Peace Officer film

Big Muddy movies: The top ten Vietnam War films

Thu, 30 Apr 2015 15:10:00 +0000

Today, April 30, is the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and the reunification of the country. The liberation of Vietnam was the biggest military and foreign policy defeat in U.S. history. As Washington faces more overseas debacles we must ponder the disaster of America's imperial policies in Southeast Asia and learn the lessons about what happens when empires stick their noses into other peoples' business. A great way to reflect is through 'Nam war movies, which often also featured far out rock 'n' roll scores.

Hollywood already started noticing Vietnam with 1948's Rogues' Regiment, starring Dick Powell as a U.S. intelligence agent who joins the French Foreign Legion to hunt a Nazi war criminal believed to be in Vietnam. Gene Barry and Nat King Cole join the French Foreign Legion to fight the Viet Minh in Sam Fuller's 1957 banned-in-France China Gate. Angie Dickinson is the Eurasian wife of Barry, who dumps her after their "half caste" child is born with Asian features. Starring as the titular The Quiet American, Audie Murphy wooed Phuong (Giorgia Moll, who was actually Italian) in this 1958 Saigon-set version of Graham Greene's novel.

A decade later, after LBJ escalated U.S. intervention, many Vietnam features and documentaries were released. The first came out during the year of the Tết Offensive, 1968's The Green Berets, co-directed by and starring John Wayne. The pro-war movie was so blatantly propagandistic that the Defense Department asked Wayne not to list it in the movie's credits, in order to deflect inquiry into military support for a film ballyhooing U.S. Southeast Asian policy. (Nevertheless, according to David Robb's "Operation Hollywood," the GAO investigated - and dovish Congressman Benjamin Rosenthal condemned - the Pentagon for subsidizing an agitprop production with taxpayer dollars.) The Green Berets was as phony as its Georgia locations (which doubled for Indochina!) and it's no wonder - like that other chicken hawk, Sylvester Stallone, who starred in the Rambo flicks, Wayne did not fight in Vietnam; neither served in the U.S. military. According to Garry Wills' "John Wayne's America," during WWII the Duke pursued his acting career and avoided Selective Service notices while Hollywood colleagues such as Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable enlisted.

However, these war wimps' hawkish movies are uncharacteristic of most Vietnam films which, like many WWI productions, have antiwar themes. Indeed, some of these pacifist and protest pictures not only question the nature of war from an ethical perspective, but U.S. foreign policy itself. Compounding this has been the sense that Vietnam is the only war America ever lost (although Iraq and Afghanistan are now giving it a run for its money). Vietnam remains timely for the movies: In the 2014 James Brown biopic Get On Up the soul singer meets with LBJ in the White House, then embarks on a USO tour of 'Nam, where his plane comes under fire just prior to landing for a concert at a military base. Here's a list of the Top 10 Vietnam War films from Hollywood, France - and from Vietnam:

Bring the War Home: The Strawberry Statement

Vietnam was a contentious issue that divided America into hawks and doves, exacerbating a "generation gap" as youths subject to the draft questioned whether an immoral war was worth fighting. Many opted to resist going thousands of miles away to fight in steaming jungles and burned their draft cards instead. Pete Seeger summed the sentiment up, singing in '67, "We were waist deep in the Big Muddy, And the big fool said to push on." Combined with their disposable income, all this made students a lucrative target market Hollywood catered to with a cycle of campus unrest films - in 1970 there were no less than five of them.

Perhaps the most representative is The Strawberry Statement, which adapted Simon Kunen's diary-like account of the 1968 Columbia University student strike (Columbia wouldn't let the filmmakers shoot on campus), starring Bruce Davison as Simon and Kim Darby as Linda. They join student activists occupying a gym to protest the university's complicity in war research and its plan to turn a college-owned park in the Black community into a ROTC building. Police and National Guardsmen raid the gym, mercilessly beating and tear gassing long-haired students as they sing John Lennon's antiwar anthem "Give Peace a Chance."

Best Oscar acceptance speech: Hearts and Minds

The Vietnam War was noted for televised coverage that brought the conflict into America's living rooms. It also inspired numerous noteworthy documentaries, including some made by intrepid filmmakers who went to "enemy territory" in North Vietnam, including: Dutch director Joris Ivens' 1965 The Sky and Earth and 17^th Parallel in 1968; British journalist Felix Greene's (Graham's cousin) 1967 Inside North Vietnam; Cuban Santiago Alvarez's 1968 Hanoi, Tuesday 13^th and 1969's 79 Springs, about Ho Chi Minh. Perhaps the finest of these nonfiction films is 1974's Hearts and Minds, which won the Best Documentary Oscar. A scathing attack on the anti-communist ideology that paved the way for U.S. intervention, it shows how the war pitted Americans not only against Vietnamese, but also against each other (a recurring theme in these films). Perhaps the most poignant sequences are when Vietnamese suffering and grief are starkly contrasted with Gen. Westmoreland's racist, cavalier comments about how Asians don't value human life as much as Westerners do.

When New Hollywood producer Bert Schneider accepted Heart's Oscar in April 1975 he made this speech during the live telecast: "It is ironic that we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated. I will now read a short wire that I have been asked to read by the Vietnamese people...sent by Ambassador Dinh Ba Thi...chief of the Provisional Revolutionary Government's delegation to...the Paris political talks...: 'Please transmit to all our friends in America our recognition of all that they have done on behalf of peace and for the application of the Paris Accords on Vietnam. These actions serve the legitimate interest of the American people and the Vietnamese people. Greetings of friendship to all the American people.''

Redemption: Coming Home

In the first great feature about 'Nam, Jane Fonda - the real-life antiwar heroine who took shelter in the Metropole Hotel's bunker during Nixon's 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi - starred as Sally Hyde, wife of brainwashed Captain Hyde (Bruce Dern). She falls in love with paraplegic veteran Luke Martin (Jon Voight); both find redemption by protesting the war. Suggested by Ron Kovic's odyssey, Hal Ashby's profoundly poignant 1978 classic scored Oscars for Fonda, Voight and co-screenwriter Waldo Salt (who'd been blacklisted), and was nominated for five others, including Best Picture. Coming Home's cinematographer Haskell Wexler directed 1969's Medium Cool, which combined fiction with actual footage of the riots at the Democratic National Convention, and the 1974 documentary Introduction to the Enemy with Fonda and Tom Hayden.

The horror, the horror: Apocalypse Now

Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 resetting of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from Congo to Indochina may be the best big-screen adaptation of literature in cinema history. Much of this epic's power is derived from its visceral depiction of U.S. war crimes, especially a helicopter raid raining destruction down on a Vietnamese village. The aerial attack's objective: Securing a beachhead so a surfer (Sam Bottoms) whose initials are LBJ can catch the waves there. As the Yankees wreak havoc upon villagers, gung-ho Lt. Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall) infamously exclaims: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." During the chopper blitz a tape recorder blares Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" to terrify the Vietnamese, although Coppola's masterpiece helped set the trend of using great rock songs (such as the Doors' "The End") in Vietnam War movie soundtracks. In Marlon Brando's last great role he co-stars as enigmatic Col. Kurtz, who has been driven off the deep end by "the horror" of war, with Martin Sheen as the assassin Capt. Willard, Dennis Hopper as a drugged-out photojournalist, and a teenaged Laurence Fishburne as a jittery machinegunner who opens fire on unarmed peasants in a sampan concealing what turns out to be a puppy.

At war with ourselves: Platoon

This modern morality tale has a nitty-gritty grunt's-eye view of combat as wide-eyed recruit Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) observes sergeants Elias (Willem Dafoe) and Barnes (Tom Berenger) square off against each other, with Elias opposing Barnes' atrocities. Platoon scored four Oscars, including for Best Picture and Best Director. Even though he never wore the uniform of his country (except onscreen), the Pentagon lavishly subsidized John Wayne's Green Berets, but didn't provide any support to decorated, wounded Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone, because of his anti-militarism. One suspects that in this 1986 elegiac masterwork the naïve witness Taylor, who tries to do the right thing, is writer/director Stone's alter ego.

Bad dreams: Casualties of War

Based on an actual incident, playwright David Rabe - who'd previously written the Vietnam-themed features 1973's Sticks and Bones and 1983's Streamers - wrote this hard hitting 1989 drama directed by another Hollywood heavyweight, Brian De Palma. As sadistic Sgt. Tony Meserve, Sean Penn kidnaps the young Vietnamese woman Than Thi Oanh (Thuy Thu Le) in the Central Highlands to be his squad's sex slave, and Oanh meets a horrific fate. Max Eriksson (Michael J. Fox) objects to the gang rape and tries to bring the war criminals to justice in this gripping, sorrowful saga that touches upon PTSD.

Antiwar wheelchair warrior: Born on the Fourth of July

Ron Kovic inspired Coming Home, but this 1989 biopic helmed by Oliver Stone (who won a second Best Director Oscar) is Kovic's own story, based on his autobiography. It's one of the most moving antiwar movies since 1930's All Quiet on the Western Front. Both open similarly, with impressionable boys being brainwashed to go to war by their elders - in Kovic's case to fight communism. In this trenchant critique of Cold War ideology and the macho mentality Kovic (portrayed by Oscar-nommed Tom Cruise) is wounded in 'Nam, returns home in a wheelchair, experiences awful treatment in a VA hospital and becomes disillusioned. However, he regains a sense of himself by joining the peace movement; using his Marine Corps skills he leads a charge of disabled vets against Tricky Dick at the 1972 Republican Convention. Kovic finds redemption and meaning in life by rolling down the path of the antiwar crusade.

Vietnam, mon amour: Indochine

Indochina's former colonizer, France, has also produced Vietnam films, such as Pierre Schoendoerffer's 1992 big budget Diên Biên Phu, about the Viet Minh's 1954 decisive defeat of the French. Régis Wargnier's 2.5-hour-plus epic Indochine, which won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, was released that same year. Indochine is a sort of French Gone With the Wind about Vietnam during its colonial era, set against the rising revolutionary tide. Catherine Deneuve was Oscar nominated for playing French rubber planter Éliane Devries, a single woman who romances a French officer and adopts a Vietnamese girl, Camille (Linh Dan Pham), who eventually joins the independence movement. Stunning cinematography at locations such as Halong Bay in the Tonkin Gulf display Vietnam's beauty.

Suppose they gave a war and nobody came: Sir! No Sir!

David Zeiger's 2005 documentary chronicles widespread resistance in the U.S. armed forces to being imperialism's pawns during the Vietnam War. The nonfiction film includes clips from 1972's FTA ("Free The Army" or, alternately, "F*ck The Army") concert film featuring a traveling troupe of pro-peace performers led by Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, that staged vaudevillian antiwar skits, songs and dances near U.S. military bases. Only a week after its release Nixon suppressed distribution of FTA, but a third of a century later Zeiger's doc led to its re-release.

Is this the enemy? The White Silk Dress

America and France - the perpetrators of colonialism, imperialism, war crimes, etc. - have had their say about this Southeast Asian nation, but what about the Vietnamese themselves? Although filmmaking is an expensive medium, and Vietnam is a developing nation, the fact is that the Vietnamese have made extremely powerful, poetic, poignant films about their wars, and 2006's award winning The White Silk Dress is arguably the best. In this story with mostly female characters, about a family struggling to survive during the French and American wars, Vietnam-born writer/director Luu Huynh uses the titular garment or áo dài, Vietnam's national dress, as a lyrical symbol of nationhood. At one point, after the áo dài is cut into pieces, it is restitched together, as a metaphor for reunifying northern and southern Vietnam.

The 142-minute epic opens in 1954 at Ha Dong near Hanoi, where the hunchback Gu (Khanh Quoc Nguyen) and the lovely Dan (Truong Ngoc Anh) are servants working for a vicious Vietnamese master who collaborates with the French. After he's assassinated, Gu and Dan, who have become lovers, flee and stumble upon the scene of a massacre; they elude the French by playing dead amidst the corpses. After the Viet Minh's triumph at Diên Biên Phu the film jump cuts to 1966 at Hội An, a trading town near Đà Nẵng, where the impoverished Gu and Dan live in a thatched hut, striving to make a living as mussel sellers and to raise a family of four daughters. Dan undergoes Buñuelian sexual humiliation to earn money; when she's caught after curfew with what appears to be a Viet Cong leaflet, she is arrested and brutally beaten by South Vietnamese security forces.

In 1966 an aerial attack lays waste to their daughter's school. After another bombardment surviving members of the beleaguered family take flight with other peasant refugees. In a montage sequence actuality clips of atrocities, such as famous footage of a napalmed naked Vietnamese girl running, depict devastation. In a magical realist ending, the film jump cuts again to 1975; many Vietnamese women wearing áo dài are seen striding forward, symbolizing Vietnam's liberation and reunification. The skillfully shot $2 million film (a big budget production by Vietnam's standards) uses deft camerawork, alternation between desaturated and vivid colors, and heartrending acting to create an artistic testament by and for those who were the victims of massive crimes against humanity, yet survived. Watching the Vietnamese side of the story unfold onscreen with so much humanity, one gets the sense that having won the war, they are now winning the peace. Viva Vietnam!

Photo: Scene from Apocalypse Now.

Screamscape: The timely play "Dreamscape" about police killings

Thu, 30 Apr 2015 13:42:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - Now more than ever, writer/director Rickerby Hinds' Dreamscape is an urgent, ripped-from-the-headlines story about a police shooting of a young Black person. Except this liquidation didn't recently happen: The play is inspired by the 1998 shooting in Riverside, Calif., of 19-year-old Tyisha Miller (here called "Myeisha Mills" and depicted by Rhaechyl Walker, who also plays multiple parts). Two actors perform in this one-acter. According to its version of events, after Myeisha falls asleep in a locked car parked at a gas station and doesn't wake up when called, her cousin dials 911 for help. When a policeman arrives (played by African American actor John "Faahz" Merchant) he notices a pistol on the unresponsive Myeisha's lap and opens fire. Dreamscape's Jungian title refers to Myeisha's interior life, especially as to what she is thinking, feeling, dreaming as 12 shots fired by the cop strike her, four times in her head, five times in her back.

All this is very creatively expressed by the playwright, actors, choreographer Carrie Mikuls and taped music. Hip-hop is incorporated into the mix, along with Walker's scintillating dancing and Merchant's ear-blowing beatboxing. Walker doesn't just walk, she flies, like an In Living Color Fly Girl, while Merchant's superb sound effects and verbal pyrotechnics are in the same league as Michael Winslow of the Police Academy film franchise. (In addition to playing the killer cop, the multi-talented Merchant also plays an MC and white lab coat-garbed coroner.)

Honduras-born Hinds, who relocated to South L.A. when he was 13, has concocted the ingredients of a hard hitting drama, with trenchant subject matter imaginatively rendered. Bearing in mind that Hinds did not set out to create a doc-drama and freely used poetic license, his interpretation of the fictionalized murder of Myeisha raised a number of questions for this reviewer.

First of all, according to a Jan. 9, 1999 New York Times article, what really happened that fateful night of Dec. 28, 1998 was disputed, and a number of unanswered questions linger. Why did Tyisha have a gun and how did she get it? Did she point it at the police? Why was she unconscious and reportedly foaming at the mouth? And so on.

What is, however, indisputably factual is that there were four policemen at the scene and apparently all of them opened fire on Tyisha. Three of them were Caucasian; one was Latino. By casting a Black actor to portray the lone assassin (and Merchant is much darker than Walker), Hinds de-racializes excessive use of force by police just when we are witnessing an epidemic of white or part-white officers and vigilantes shooting and otherwise killing Blacks for little or no "cause." Race - indeed racism - is a central part of this reign of terror against African Americans, and the casting of a Black actor (as admittedly great as Merchant undoubtedly is) deflects from this most salient of facts. It's white police and self-appointed executioners responsible for this murderous trend; it is most definitely not a case of "Black-on-Black violence."

Without knowing the specific facts of the Freddie Gray slaying while in police custody in Baltimore, one could make a strong case that the 25-year-old's running from officers was not an example of suspicious behavior (not to mention not necessarily illegal). Even if one is as innocent and pure as the driven snow, fleeing from the police is an extremely reasonable thing to do: They are armed, dangerous and licensed to kill. Indeed, one doesn't need to possess Sherlock Holmes' powers of deductive reasoning to logically figure out that armed white police are not there to serve and protect, but rather a grave threat to one's personal safety and health.

The liquidation of Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tyisha and a long list of other lynch victims proves that America's "law enforcement" agents have at the very least extraordinarily poor judgment and training, combined, in all probability, with a callous disregard for Black life. The recent statement by a leader of the Baltimore police union that demonstrators were a "lynch mob" is a classic case of Freudian projection: He is calling those protesting what appears to be an actual lynching what his group seems to actually be. Let's remember in American history who lynched who.

While we're on the subject of police brutality, a word about Eric Holder's departure. Shortly after becoming America's first Black U.S. Attorney General he was faced with whether or not the Justice Department would vigorously pursue and prosecute the police liquidation of handcuffed, unarmed Oscar Grant. By declining to do so, Holder opened the proverbial gates to Hell, announcing loud and clear to racist American police departments that it was open season on Blacks. Don't worry, under Uncle Eric the Justice Department's long arm of the law won't reach police butchers - or, for that matter, the Bush regime's war criminals or Wall Street banksters, none of whom were criminally charged for their atrocities.

Instead, Holder threw the book at minor offenders, as well as dissidents such as Internet activist Aaron Swartz [driven to suicide], and imprisoned whistleblowers Private Chelsea Manning and John Kiriakou [but unlike them, under Holder's two-tiered double standard of "justice," Gen. Petraeus won't serve a day behind bars for leaking classified information to his biographer/mistress]. Late in his tenure, after the epidemic of police brutality reached tidal wave proportions, Holder finally took some action. But it was too late and too little - had he done so when the matter of Oscar Grant's murder was before him, maybe Eric Harris - another Black man shot to death by a uniformed white officer who "mistook" his pistol for his taser - would be alive today. Who knows?

The overall level of artistry of the entire Dreamscape production may actually distract attention from the destructiveness of the current uncivil war being waged against Blacks. I'm usually one to applaud aesthetic innovations and imagination both onstage and onscreen. But Dreamscape's cinematic techniques, special sound effects, busting of dance moves and the like, as the play moves in and out of what the playwright imagines to be Tyisha/Myeisha's state of mind while she is repeatedly struck by bullets, arguably prettifies the horrendous and softens the blows. The form of Italian Neo-Realism and British "kitchen sink" drama may be better suited for this harrowing subject.

Another question Dreamscape raises is Walker's interpretation of Myeisha's voice. During a talkback following a preview of the play, the light-skinned Walker confessed that because of her coloring and the texture of her hair she was told she "was not Black... [which] pushed me away from Black culture." Although Walker does not speak with what, for lack of a better term to express in print, will be imperfectly described as a so-called "ghetto accent" (nor do the offstage Hinds and Merchant), Walker's character does speak this way. So is an actress who was distanced from her roots falling back on racial caricatures to concoct her Black character? Is Tyisha's onstage voice (i.e., not Hinds' dialogue, but rather Walker's accent per se while acting) authentic or is it stereotypical? I'm not sure I am qualified to answer this question, but Walker's vocal patterns while playing her part sure had me scratching my head.

Nevertheless, having ranted and raved and said all this, there's no escaping the fact that Dreamscape is well worth seeing, by anyone interested in this topic and/or who simply enjoys great dancing, boxbeating and more. It's an important, if imperfect, work of art dealing with the current plague of police killings of Blacks. Like Ferguson, a controversial recent stage reenactment of the Michael Brown brouhaha at Los Angeles' Odyssey Theatre in late April, along with protesters in the streets, artists in all media need to tackle the swinish scourge of gun-toting, trigger-happy cops with badges.

Dreamscape is being performed Thursday to Saturday at 8:00 pm; and on Sunday at 3:00 pm, through May 17 in The Gallery of the Los Angeles Theatre Centre, 514 S. Spring St., Los Angeles. For more info: (866) 811-4111; www.thelatc.org.

Photo: http://thelatc.org/

"Words by Ira Gershwin": Where’s the man behind the legendary lyrics?

Wed, 29 Apr 2015 10:50:00 +0000

BURBANK, Calif. - Joseph Vass' Words by Ira Gershwin has great music and dance numbers performed by the estimable Elijah Rock, the sleek Angela Teek and a four-piece band conducted by keyboardist Kevin Toney, in this work's L.A. County premiere at Burbank's Colony Theatre. A total of 26 songs with lyrics written by Ira, set to music by his younger brother George, Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen and others, are sure to delight your ears, while the titillating tunes will set your toes tapping. But if you wanted to see a play with everything you ever wanted to know about Ira Gershwin, to paraphrase one of his songs, this ain't necessarily it.

Vass' script has little dramatic arc or insight. The show's tagline is "Meet the man behind the legendary lyrics." But after more than two hours spectators will learn precious little about Ira (Jake Broder), the lyricist of countless hits, including "Fascinating Rhythm," "'S Wonderful," "Love is Here to Stay," "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," and the opera Porgy and Bess. Indeed, at one point the rather bland Broder "confesses" in character that not only should listeners not examine his lyrics to discover anything about their creator's inner life, but that he purposely kept personal details out of the words he wrote.

Really? Did Ira Gershwin ever assert that? Expressing oneself is the raison d'être for most Western artists. Did the man who wrote the words to "Summertime," "Embraceable You" and "Someone to Watch Over Me" (none of them in Words) ever say that? Maybe he did, but this work reveals almost nothing about the inner life of the lyricist of literally hundreds of love songs. We find out matter-of-factly sometime in Act 2 that Ira was married - Exhibit A of journalism's cardinal sin of burying the lead. Although the playwright seems to break this illusion when alluding to George Gershwin's untimely death, rather curiously, this show is largely devoid of biographical details, let alone penetrating its prolific protagonist's psyche.

Furthermore, while Ira wrote the words for political songs and satires - including the first Broadway musical to win the Pulitzer Prize, 1931's Of Thee I Sing, and for the number "Union Square" in the 1933 sequel, Let 'em Eat Cake - Vass' script makes a grievous omission regarding Ira's political activism. Ira served on the executive board of the left-leaning Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions. When the House Un-American Activities Committee began its fascistic purge of Hollywood in 1947, Ira hosted meetings, including, reportedly, the very first powwow of the Committee for the First Amendment, attended by Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, at his Beverly Hills home; and he lent his famous name to the anti-HUAC cause, co-signing, for example, an anti-Blacklist Variety ad.

Opposing the inquisition in Hollywood earned Gershwin a summons to testify before the California Senate's witch-hunting Tenney Committee. There is a revival of interest in the Hollywood Blacklist, with books, theater and film about this reds-under-the-beds period. Vass' vast oversight is truly a missed opportunity, a neglectfulness in keeping with the curiously non-revelatory nature of his script. (To be fair, it does cover Ira's friendship and collaboration with lefty lyricist Yip Harburg, whose credits include the Depression classic "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" and Judy Garland's signature song, "Over the Rainbow.")

Where Vass does shed light is on Ira's creative process, and the dramatist deserves kudos for this. Ira likens songwriting to making a mosaic (which probably suggested the set's backdrop). However, perhaps out of modesty, Ira demurs, declining to liken his lyric writing technique to poetry. But I beg to differ: In "How Long Has This Been Going On?" Ira imaginatively rhymes "panties," "aunties" and "Dante's." And consider these gleefully, skillfully wrought lyrics from "Love is Here to Stay": "In time the Rockies may crumble,/Gibraltar may tumble/They're only made of clay/But our love is here to stay." While he may not have been Shelley or Shakespeare, in popular music Ira's word play ranks alongside such peers as Cole Porter, Noel Coward and John Lennon.

I don't remember Jake Broder being so monotone in both acting and singing when he starred as Louis Prima in Louis & Keely Live at the Sahara - indeed, quite the contrary. So I suspect the fault is in the script and possibly David Ellenstein's direction. However, even if Ira Gershwin wasn't a live wire offstage, there's a way to play a lackluster character without boring us.

Having said all this, the music - and in particular, the stellar, show-stopping Elijah Rock -makes this work worth seeing and hearing. The youthful Rock is establishing himself as one of his generation's foremost interpreters of the Great American Songbook, making Rock's casting in Words fortuitous and natural. This is really his show.

Words by Ira Gershwin is being performed Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 pm, with matinees Saturdays at 3:00 pm and Sundays at 2:00 pm, through May 17 at the Colony Theatre, 555 N. Third Street, Burbank, CA 91502. Free parking is adjacent. For info: (818) 558-7000, x15; www.ColonyTheatre.org. For more info on the superb Elijah Rock see: www.elijahrock.net/

"Mad Men" asks, "What's in a name?"

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 12:58:00 +0000

Season seven, episode eleven, "Time and Life"

When Roger laments the loss of the Sterling name--"No more Sterling Cooper. And no more Sterlings"--Don of the stolen identity and buried birth name retorts with a stolen line: "What's in a name?" But, as the partners know, an ad agency by any other name would not smell as sweet. Even Ted, who welcomes the chance to "let someone else drive," knows that being part of McCann Ericson is not the same as being SCP or Sterling Cooper West. The "name change" represents so much more: loss of autonomy, control, and identity. And represents different changes to different members of the team.

To Ted--the least striving of the bunch, who now wants a calmer life in which he can focus on nurturing a good relationship--being absorbed by the large firm is a relief. To the blue blood Roger, who's never worked very hard, it means a loss of the family name. As the father of a daughter whose child has another man's name and the father of a son whom he cannot acknowledge, who also has another man's name, his agency was the only Sterling legacy. Now it is gone, sold off for the millions they all lusted after a year ago.

Pete, too, had to contend with a battle over his blue blood name this episode: huffing and puffing that a Campbell has always attended the elite school that won't take poor little Tammy Campbell, how dare they decline her, he must punch the snarky school headmaster because that's what blue-blood gentlemen do to defend the honor of their women folk, I guess, though I wouldn't know for sure since my blood is more reddish brown, and I have never attended an elite private school, nor even ever been anywhere near Connecticut. But, surprisingly, after it was all over, Pete--who is typically the most whiny, angry, and/or expressive of a strong sense of entitlement over events he doesn't like--is the most sanguine after Ted. He tells Joan, "For the first time I feel like whatever happens is supposed to happen." He says this after he and Joan leave the group at the bar because he wants to check in with Trudy, who he recognizes has also had a really hard day. What? Pete maturing? If this lasts until the end, it will be quite the surprising, but nice, character development to wrap-up with.

How Don is reading this change is a bit harder to suss out at this point. In some ways, it's the biggest hit to him, the man who has always been able to mine the pain and screw-ups of his life and create out of them supremely persuasive and often beautiful advertising campaigns: the Carousel, the suitcase, the Hershey bar. He has on more than one occasion taken the firm at crisis points and lifted it out of the ashes to be reborn and re-formed. Yet this attempt did not work. Jim Hobart wouldn't even let him finish his pitch. It's Hobart who attempts to persuade them, through re-defining what has happened: "It's done. You passed the test. . . . You are dying and going to advertising heaven. . . . Buick, Ortho Pharmaceutical, Nabisco, Coca-Cola. Stop struggling. You win." But the partners know they have not won. And, while Joan tells Pete that "Hobart listed off accounts for everyone but me," after last week, when Don couldn't believe that all Ted wanted out of his work were bigger accounts, after he mused to his tape recorder about how "It's supposed to get better," I wonder if Don will be the one to opt out of Hobart's heaven. He's the master of re-defining, re-naming, and re-creating himself. Perhaps he will do so again now. Because the name is not as important to him. His autonomy and ability to act and create are.

Although these professional changes present varying levels of challenge for the men, it is the women of the episode who are most strongly affected. From the black secretaries who worry that the new firm won't "need one more black girl," to Meredith, who makes a surprisingly strong stand for herself and the other employees when she tells Don that he must talk to them because everyone is so worried about what's going to happen, to Joan who knows "they won't take me seriously there" after all the hard work and fight and putting-up-with-bullshit she's gone through to make partner at SCP, the women's positions are most precarious.

Yet it's through Trudy and Peggy--and even Tammy--that this episode most effectively demonstrates that even more than a name, what matters is one's sex. What's in a name? Not much for the women, who trade their names for a man's when they marry. Yet this name trade can be seen to stand for so much more. For Joan, it's the possible loss of recognition of her intelligence and worth as an executive. For Trudy, it's the situation of a suburban divorcee: being hounded by all the husbands at parties and school officials when she checks out schools for her daughter. She had wanted nothing more than to be a suburban wife, but now seems to be recognizing that this particular suburban life is not all it was cracked up to be. Her daughter fails her 'draw a man test,' only getting on to paper a head and a necktie. Some psychologists would likely theorize that this is because she lives without her father in her home, and it has stunted her emotional growth. But, what if it's a sign of the lack of wholeness and the emotional barrenness of these men--who, in the drawing, are only heads, but not hearts? (And on this show penises, but one could argue that their frequent sexual encounters with women they hardly know are also indicative of a failure to relate emotionally). When Jim Hobart walked out of his conference room, he left a tableaux of the five SCP partners, sitting in a row on one side of the table. Each one of them--the woman included--has been divorced; some more than once. Each one lives alone, partnerless. Only Joan, the woman, lives with her child. Peggy spends the episode having to work with children, which only serves to remind her of the sacrifice she made for her career. She argues to Stan that "no one should have to make a mistake and not be able to move on like a man does." She's right about how women and men shouldn't have to give up different things for their careers. But, don't these characters demonstrate that all of them--the men and the women--have given up too much in the realm of human emotion and relationship and closeness for their careers? And perhaps because they're too afraid to finish up that drawing of the man that is only a head.

Yet, interestingly, when faced with a career- and life-changing day, each one of them reached out or went in search of someone to love. Joan calls the new Roger; "I just wanted to hear your voice," she tells him. Ted leaves the gathering at the bar to meet the new woman he's in a relationship with; Roger leaves to go to Marie; Pete leaves to contact Trudy; and Don goes off in search of Diana. Peggy shares her deepest secret with Stan and the next day wants him just to stay on the phone with her while she's working. Who knows where they will go next with all of this. These characters are great for back-tracking, but they made some interesting emotional acknowledgments and movement tonight. We'll see where it takes them.

This article is from Mad About Mad Men blog.

"The Flash": first season speeds toward the finish line

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 12:49:00 +0000

The titular character of the CW's new and well-received series The Flash has been one of the primary heroes of DC Comics. Though he's never been quite as iconic as Batman or Superman, the red-costumed, speed-based protagonist is quickly gaining a reputation, and for comic book fans of tomorrow, the show, a spinoff of Arrow, could come to define the future of the genre.

For outsiders to this colorful, exceedingly complicated world of heroes, The Flash originally debuted back in 1940 in Flash Comics #1, then having the identity of Jay Garrick, who joined the Justice League that same decade - a team that then included Hawkman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and the Atom - in All Star Comics. But the Flash we know, Barry Allen (one of the more famous alter egos of the character), made his first appearance in 1956, and his origin was mostly kept the same for today's adaptation: Allen was a forensic scientist who became the fastest man alive after being hit with various chemicals while struck by lightning. If that sounds ridiculous, you should know that the series Arrow, on an episode that served as a backdoor pilot for The Flash, managed to sell it, if only you'll suspend your disbelief just a little.

The cast

The series stars Grant Gustin, who is almost a bit too cheerful and enthusiastic, but for the lighter tone of The Flash and the more optimistic outlook of the hero, it works. And while Gustin must still work to capture the emotional sophistication of his peers over on Arrow, he does a decent job portraying the character. Also very decent is Danielle Panabaker's performance as Caitlin, who works with Allen at S.T.A.R. Labs, along with Cisco (Carlos Valdes) and the enigmatic Dr. Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanagh). All three of these people know about Allen's powers and are more or less part of his "team," working to save the city from dangerous "metahumans" - people who received various powers after being exposed to a particle accelerator explosion accidentally (or perhaps purposely?) caused by Wells himself.

Also prominently featured is Iris West (Candice Patton), a love interest for Allen; her performance leaves something to be desired at the moment, as unlike the strong female characters on Arrow, she isn't given much to do, short of fitting the damsel-in-distress stereotype. Her father, Detective West (Jesse L. Martin) serves as a sort of mentor/father figure for Allen, but much more interesting is his real father, Henry Allen, played by John Wesley Shipp, who portrayed the Flash during the previous 90's television series (it was short-lived, and, quite frankly, a rather campy show). Shipp, however, easily seems like one of the best actors on the show, and gives that impression within the very small amounts of screen time he receives. Also fantastic was Mark Hamill (Star Wars), who portrayed villain The Trickster during one episode.

Where the show struggles

If you've noticed that a lot of Arrow comparisons have already been made, it's because it's inevitable. As a spinoff of the former show, The Flash must constantly work to match up, qualitatively speaking, with its parent series, while still maintaining its own unique tone. And that is where the show struggles. But part of the appeal is that The Flash is tonally different, even though its world and characters exist in the same universe as Arrow (there have already been numerous crossovers).

Part of the charm of The Flash lies in its self-aware, sometimes self-deprecating, nature. Giving its villains clever nicknames, for example, is a humorously recurring theme, and characters exchange purposefully bad puns with knowing grins. The cast, it seems, is having as much fun as we are, and unlike Arrow, which juggles complex themes and moral quandaries (to its benefit, of course), The Flash is all about the fun, and putting the "comic" back into "comic book." And while I wouldn't rank this series quite as high in quality as its counterpart, I can't deny that it's got me hooked, and gets better with each weekly installment.

At the end of the day, both series work rather well as two sides of a coin, because they compliment one another. The Flash, as I like to say, is the deep breath of relief that we take after having watched another gripping, stressful episode of Arrow. And with television still populated by so many post-apocalyptic stories and cynical narratives, it's nice to have to have at least one series that is cheekily simplistic and light-hearted.

The anticipation builds

But the show is not without its own drama. As its first season draws to a close (I believe there are four episodes remaining), it seems that Dr. Wells is not who he appears, and is connected to the death of Allen's mother. With this revelation, and with questions now arising of who to trust, it seems the airy atmosphere we've felt so far might suddenly grow thick and oppressive as the anticipation builds for a confrontation in the finale between the Flash and his mother's killer. Viewers can also expect an appearance by fan-favorite Grodd, a telepathic, megalomaniacal gorilla (yes, really), as well as another team-up between various heroes from both series that is also on the horizon before the season's end.

Say what you will about the silliness of it all; if you stick around long enough, you'll find yourself enjoying every minute of it. And if high ratings, awards, and positive reviews are any indication, The Flash will also be sticking around - for Season Two and beyond.

The Flash is on every Tuesday, at 8 p.m. Eastern/7 p.m. Central, on the CW.

"The Flash"

Grant Gustin, Danielle Panabaker, Tom Cavanagh, Carlos Valdes, Candice Patton, Jesse L. Martin, John Wesley Shipp, Rick Cosnett, Emily Bett Rickards

Photo: "The Flash" official Facebook page

"Arrow": tensions high as new season draws back its bow

Mon, 27 Apr 2015 15:48:00 +0000

Arrow, the wildly successful TV adaptation of DC Comics' Green Arrow series, has kicked it into high gear as its third season draws to a close. What started as a semi-procedural, with the eponymous vigilante ridding the city of various one-percenters and crime lords, has evolved into an expanded universe full of characters, with lengthy story arcs, and has even produced a spinoff - The Flash - featuring the famous "Scarlet Speedster." But with tensions, drama, and exceptional storytelling at the highest point it's ever been, it's Arrow that continues to bask in the spotlight.

Bear in mind that this is a series that, in its first season, got off to a rocky start, with dialogue that could have been plucked from a soap opera and a backstory that drew criticisms of Arrow being a stripped-down version of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, a film series which chronicled the rise of its main character in a similar fashion. But Arrow quickly diverged from that trajectory, creating its own path dominated by characters the fans liked (less popular characters were moved to the background), and slowly establishing its own world that, two years later, would spill over into The Flash, and which now looks set to also influence the upcoming Supergirl TV series on CBS, and an additional spinoff (tentatively titled Legends of Tomorrow) on the CW.

You can credit the writers for the series not only having such a quick turnaround, but such a meteoric rise in quality and popularity. The fantastic cast, however, is equally responsible for this. Notably, I would actually venture to say that the acting of Stephen Amell, who portrays Oliver Queen/Arrow, seemed, in the pilot, wooden at best. But by the middle of the first season, his performance had largely improved, and by the season's end, I realized this was actually a talented actor who had simply needed time to grow comfortable in the role, something he and his peers have certainly done, as the seemingly effortless chemistry between one actor and another proves.

In fact, I find that critics severely undervalue the fantastic acting on Arrow - something that I attribute, in particular, to Season 3's success. The actors and actresses have sold the drama so well, and everyone I talk to who is a fan of the series agrees that the shocking twists and turns have increased to anxiety-inducing levels. What you thought was going to happen one episode ago changes completely, and by the most unlikely means, over the course of an hour, and that is perhaps where Arrow's greatest strength lies.

The Arrow persona

This season has focused more on the Arrow persona of Oliver Queen, as opposed to last season, which did the opposite. At this point in the series, Queen is no longer a rich playboy, having lost his company to business rival - and rival for the affections of love interest Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) - Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh), who later becomes the hero called the Atom. This pull-back from the life of Arrow's alter ego is refreshing, because, admittedly, it was sometimes filled with "first-world-problem melodrama" (in other words, you hardly felt sorry for the business, relationship, and substance abuse issues of a handful of upper-class folks with too much time on their hands). Instead, elements of a growing epic begin to trickle into the show, which introduced Ra's al Ghul (Matthew Nable) as the new primary antagonist.

For those not in the know, Ra's is a major villain in DC Comics and a chief enemy of Batman. He appeared, played by Liam Neeson, in the 2005 film Batman Begins, but I personally think Nable's portrayal of the character on this show is ten times better. Ra's' interaction with Green Arrow in comic books is virtually nonexistent, so it was initially confusing that they decided to place the character in the series. As it happens, however, it was a good idea. It allows for rather poignant moral struggles and existential questions that no prior Arrow story arc could have offered. Cases in point: when Queen's sister Thea is put under the influence of a mind-altering substance and made to commit a murder. Questions arise as to the extent of her culpability, if any. And, of course, in the latest episode, in exchange for the safety of Thea and all those he cares for, Queen is forced to accept Ra's al Ghul's offer to take his place as the head of the League of Assassins, a notorious, cult-like group with fascistic elements and a subtle but global influence. He assumes the new moniker of Al Sah-him, and we the audience are left to wonder what moral code or system of values - if any - the Arrow persona now represents, in light of this - pun not intended - sudden darkness.

And leading up to this climax was a subplot in which Arrow and associates (sidekicks?) Laurel/Black Canary (Katie Cassidy) and Roy/Arsenal (Colton Haynes) were deemed terrorists for operating outside of the law and are subsequently hunted by the police. The grounded way in which this was handled was impressive, and was yet another example of how this show throws idealism out the window. The Arrow is not worshipped as a hero, but seen by most for what he is - a vigilante whose actions are sanctioned neither by the police nor most citizens, despite whatever good might come of said actions. And so, no great serendipities befall our heroes simply because they leap off rooftops in jumpsuits; rather, this season has documented their constant struggle to stay one step ahead of a corrupt police force and what often seems like the futility of their own efforts to make even a modicum of difference in their crime-plagued city. It's a very original and frank take on the genre.

With the cops still on the lookout for anyone with a cute nickname and a fanciful costume, the nefarious League forcing the hand of the protagonist, and the entire future of the "Arrow" - both the persona and the man beneath the hood - in doubt, the showrunners have painted almost every character into a corner around which it seems impossible for them to ever again emerge. And that's the brilliance behind the series, really. Everything gets more complex and everyone continues to unravel, and out of the resulting downward spiral comes a plot twist that suddenly shifts the entire paradigm. It's a fast-paced, non-stop ride, and with just three episodes left this season, anyone looking for an escapist thrill should go ahead and strap themselves in.

Arrow is on every Wednesday, at 8 p.m. Eastern/7 p.m. Central, on the CW.

"Arrow"

Stephen Amell, Emily Bett Rickards, David Ramsey, Willa Holland, Katie Cassidy, John Barrowman, Brandon Routh, Matthew Nable, Katrina Law, Paul Blackthorne

Photo: CW official site

J’accuse: French film "24 Days" in review

Mon, 27 Apr 2015 12:43:00 +0000

Director Alexandre Arcady's taut, suspenseful new film is entitled in English 24 Days, and like the similarly monikered Fox TV series 24, it deals with torture within a set period of time. 24 Days is based on a real-life tragedy, the January 2006 abduction in Paris of French Jew Ilan Halimi (portrayed by Syrus Shahidi), a cell phone salesman of Moroccan ancestry. Arcady shares the screenwriting credits with Antoine Lacomblez and Emilie Freche, who co-wrote with Ruth Halimi (played by Zabou Breitman in the movie) a book called 24 Days, The Truth about the Ilan Halimi Case.

Using a very realistic style, Arcady's probing camera takes us inside the kidnapping, from Sub-Saharan Africa to France. In addition to being a policier, 24 Days is also an intense family drama. The Halimis seem like a very close knit family, although Ruth and Didier Halimi (Pascal Elbe) are actually divorced, which adds to the already considerable amount of tension. This leads toward occasionally overwrought acting in a few scenes: How many crying babies and screaming sisters, mother, etc., can a viewer stand?

The film is gripping, with a political subtext and reminiscent of Costa-Gavras. 24 Days implies that the bungling police were extremely incompetent in carrying out their investigation and attempts to rescue Halimi. Most important, the movie explores the big question as to whether Halimi's kidnapping and abuse while being held prisoner constituted an act of anti-Semitism. The authorities try long and hard to deny this - but others thought differently, including Ruth Halimi.

Arcady has a North African background similar to Ilan Halimi's - he was born in Algeria and is also Jewish. He moved from Algiers to France when he was 15 and many of his movies have focused on Jewish issues and subjects, hence his interest in l'affaire Halimi. However, if 24 Days indeed asserts that Halimi's hijacking was because of anti-Semitism, Arcady's dramatization does not make a very convincing case.

In terms of motive, there is only a very quick specific Islamicist reference. The inept kidnappers appear to be acting more on the basis of greed than on hatred per se for Jews. Yes, they targeted Halimi because he was Jewish, not out of contempt for Jews, but out of their foolish belief that all Jews are rich. So while Halimi's abductors did indeed act under the impression of a false stereotype of Jews, they did not seem to be motivated by a deep-seated hatred, unlike inquisitors, Nazis, Islamicist extremists and other fanatics since Biblical days. Neither does the movie suggest that overzealous Zionist military policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians and other Arabs provoked the body snatchers. They just wanted to make a fast, easy buck, but stupidly chose a wrong target because they ignorantly believed an incorrect, idiotic caricature of Jews. (The Halimis are depicted as being a middle-class family of modest means, no millionaires they.)

Of course, France has a history of persecution of Jews, notably the notorious Dreyfus affair - which led to renowned French novelist Emile Zola's ringing defense, "J'accuse" - and the roundup of Jews and collaboration with the Nazis during the German occupation and the Holocaust. (Most members of the kidnapping ring do not appear to be of French ancestry - some seem Arabic and the Africans do not seem to be identified as Muslims.) As said, the Halimi events played out in 2006 and they indicate the ongoing precarious position of French Jews - and, perhaps, of members of this long despised minority group everywhere.

The resulting roundup of alleged abductors - mostly or all non-white, in French ghettoes - can also be seen in a different context in 2015. After Halimi's kidnapping and this film was made, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to France to participate in the demonstrations following January's Charlie Hebdo massacre and attack on a Jewish deli in Paris. In his usual bombastic manner, Netanyahu urged French Jews to relocate to Israel, in order to be safe (or at least safer).

Nine years after the Ilan Halimi tragedy, Netanyahu's proclamation adds a whole new meaning to the startling ending of 24 Days. Wandering Jews may also be wondering: Is Netanyahu right? Let's hope not. Is it too much to hope, as well, that all nations will eventually protect the safety of every ethnic and religious minority - including from police and vigilantes who shoot, choke and break their necks?

24 Days is now in national release and is available on iTunes.

Today in history: “Bread and Roses” for National Poetry Month

Mon, 27 Apr 2015 11:01:00 +0000

On this date in 1946, James Oppenheim's poem "Bread and Roses" was published in Industrial Solidarity. This was not its first publication, however: That was in the American Magazine in December 1911. The slogan upon which the poem was based originated from a speech given by Rose Schneiderman, in which she said, "The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too." The poem has been translated into other languages and has been set to music by at least three composers. It is suitable for singing on May Day!

It is commonly associated with the successful textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts during January - March 1912, now often known as the "Bread and Roses strike." The slogan pairing bread and roses, appealing for both fair wages and dignified conditions, found resonance as transcending "the sometimes tedious struggles for marginal economic advances" in the "light of labor struggles as based on striving for dignity and respect," in the words of Robert J. S. Ross.

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,

A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,

Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,

For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,

For they are women's children, and we mother them again.

Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;

Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead

Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.

Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.

Yes, it is bread we fight for - but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.

The rising of the women means the rising of the race.

No more the drudge and idler - ten that toil where one reposes,

But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

Adapted in part from Wikipedia.

Photo: Wikipedia (CC)

“Mad Men” asks, "what's next?"

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 14:19:00 +0000

Season seven, episode ten, "The Forecast"

While the first two episodes of this half season drew us backward - into an exploration of Don's losses, into a focus on the relationships to which he can never return - this episode looks forward. It invites us to consider- - with Don and others--what might occur after our time with them is finished. What's next? What's "the forecast" for their lives?

In the guise of preparing the "Gettysburg Address" speech on SCP for a McCann retreat that Roger will attend, Don wanders from colleague to colleague to suss out ideas on where the company is headed. But, it's soon clear that this is merely cover for his quest for a direction to and the meaning of his own life. His apartment "reeks with failure," according to his realtor, and while he protests that "a lot of wonderful things happened here," we know--and I expect he does too--that that's untrue. So, as President Lincoln sought to make meaning out of the deaths of tens of thousands of people on the fields of Gettysburg, Don Draper (on a much smaller scale) takes Roger's inflated metaphor for his talk and tries to engage others in discussions on the meaning of life. When Ted responds to Don that he hopes for perhaps a tire account, or bigger yet, a pharmaceutical company, "That's your dream?" Don wonders. "Bigger accounts?"

He pulls Peggy closer to where he wants to go, using her performance review to get her finally to say that she wants to create "something of lasting value." "In advertising?" he laughs. She just gets aggravated with him, though, retorting, "This is supposed to be about my job, not the meaning of life." When he responds, "So you think those things are unrelated?" we can glimpse what he wants, but she storms out of his office, thinking he's being critical of her aspirations, but I see him as trying to figure out his own.

When he's musing on the speech into his tape recorder, he says, "Four score and seven years ago. We know where we've been and where we are. Let's assume that it's good. But it's gonna get better. It's supposed to get better." How can Don Draper--who's so seriously mucked up his life and relationships--create something of lasting value that will make his life get better? For all of his faults, he does have a sense of how it should go. Though he should never have told Mathis the story about his comment to Lee Garner, Jr. - and Mathis shouldn't have been dumb enough to re-use it--Don does tell the younger man the truth when he says that he needs to fix his own mistakes and deal with his own problems. Is that what Don is finally - or again - trying to do? Mathis tells Don that he has no character; "you're just handsome." That's often true, but Don strikes me as giving it a sober effort in this episode.

He also has not been a good father in so many ways, but is right when he tells Sally that she is like him and Betty. For better and worse, we all are created out of the forge of our families, our childhood highs and traumas, our cultures, our time periods. Don knows that he is like his parents in many ways, that killing off Dick Whitman and adopting a new identity did not shed him of the dead young prostitute mother, the cruel father, the fundamentalist stepmother, the whore-house setting, or the grinding poverty. But, his advice to his angry daughter--who dreams "to get on a bus, get away from you and Mom, and hopefully be a different person than you two"-- offers a kind of hope, both to her and to him: "You may not want to listen to this, but you ARE like your mother and me. You're gonna find that out. You're a very beautiful girl. It's up to you to be more than that." And, it's up to Don to be more than just the handsome, but characterless, man Mathis accuses him of being. When he stands outside his sold apartment door, is he on the threshold of something new? Or will he again step back into the old? Or find some balance between the two?

--And--more briefly: is Joan also poised on the cusp of something new with the new Roger? It all moved very quickly, but there's not a lot of time left in the show. Will she have really found love before it's all over?

--And Glen Bishop. Yikes! I wasn't expecting him to be the means of bringing the later part of the war home, and don't know why we needed to have this minor character make an appearance in the show's wrapping-up stage, but, since Weiner apparently feels his reappearance is necessary, I'll try to make some sense of it beyond just saying "Eeew, creepy! Leave Betty alone!"

While I get a kid having a crush on an attractive adult neighbor (I had one of those when I was young too), Glen's means of expressing it has always creeped me out. Betty handled it better this time than when he cut some of her hair off as a souvenir when he was little, but did he really expect her to give herself to him as his going-off-to-war present? Not believable. So, I'm going to assume something beyond a literal interpretation is suggested by the whole scene. Does Betty have some sort of mystical meaning to Glen? Is she the beautiful Helen over whom war becomes worth being fought? Or a courtly love figure? The beautiful married woman sung of from afar by the medieval bard? But, what happens when the warrior actually talks to his idol on the pedestal? When she doesn't accept that role, the facade of the noble warrior starts to fall away: "But you understand why I'm doing it," he wants to believe, but instead Betty--one of the few characters left who does support the war--says, "Do you want me to say that I like it?" "I know you do," he presses on, "because I'm brave and I want to protect this country and everyone in it." Yet he and Betty both know that's a slogan. When she looks skeptical, he confesses that he's really going because he flunked out of college. His myth of the beautiful woman to fight for "was going to be the good thing that came out of it." He leaves on another lie--or at least a promise that cannot be kept--when Betty tells him, "You're going to make it. I'm positive." It's a kindness to send him off with, but her actions later with Bobby's toy gun show that she is now disturbed by and questioning the enterprise. It's an odd way to get at the way Vietnam was still a force in American life in late 1970, but it's either that or just "Eeew, Glen, stop."

Either way, the episode ends with questions about what's next for a number of the characters. And only a few more episodes to suggest where they might be headed.

This article is from Mad About Mad Men blog.

U.S. role in global politics featured at Full Frame 2015

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 12:36:00 +0000

DURHAM, N.C. - Following up on the 2015 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival that took place here Apr. 9-12, we have covered human interest and environmental stories, and now we look at three films addressing the U.S. role in a number of Asian countries.

Joshua Oppenheimer has done a remarkable project concerning the 1965 massacre of an estimated one million very loosely defined "communists" in Indonesia at the direction of the newly installed military rulers. In his 2012 film The Act of Killing, he concentrated on the perpetrators of this wave of genocide, and now, in The Look of Silence, 50 years after the fact, he recalibrates his focus on society's attempt to come to terms with this horrific period.

The story centers around Adi, an optometrist, whose older brother Ramli was killed in that episode, as he goes about questioning the ways in which various village leaders, and even members of his own family, collaborated in brutal acts of mass murder. Sometimes he corners his witnesses in optical lenses as he fits them for new glasses.

What Adi encounters is a society driven to denial and forgetfulness in a contemporary Indonesian climate of fear and intimidation. The wholesale murder of a million of their own fellow citizens must be justified - politically, socially, culturally, ethnically, religiously - any way possible, and ways are readily found. The episode has been turned into a foundational national historical patrimony, taught triumphantly to schoolchildren.

It takes a lot to shock a film audience today, but the casual, proud defense of killing people because they didn't pray, or for some other far less than felonious reason (like wanting to unionize), can make a filmgoer wonder just what kind of people we have in this world. Some of the killers captured on film truly seemed to enjoy reenacting the sadism of butchery and slaughter in which they participated as young men. One even published a book about his vicious fling with murder, with his own sketches "to bring the story to life." Several mentioned they had to drink cups of the victims' blood so they wouldn't go crazy, an anthropological custom that likely predates the establishment of Islam in the Indonesian archipelago.

One can only think of the much more familiar saga of the Nazi-sponsored Holocaust in the 1930s and '40s for a comparable lesson in relativistic morality.

Scant remorse or repentance has taken place in the ensuing years. Indonesia is in desperate need of a "truth and reconciliation" movement (hey, I know, a lot of countries are), but under the present reigning ideology, it is nowhere in sight. The fact that Adi is a professional devoted to improving and correcting people's vision is perhaps an accident of filmmaking, but it certainly resonates with the quest to open up that era to objective scrutiny. His mother, still alert in her 90s, believes the killers will be punished with eternal suffering in the afterlife.

More than once in the film the U.S. role in this history comes up. Oppenheimer replays a 1967 American TV broadcast that openly celebrates the liquidation. Now, the narrator proclaims, "Bali is more beautiful without communists." The same broadcast highlights Goodyear's rubber plantations in the country, where employees who wanted to unionize are now working as prisoners. In 1967 the connection between genocide and Goodyear in the same news story might have sounded coincidental, but at the distance of almost half a century it is all too transparent.

One successful and wealthy politician recalls eliminating communists day and night for three months, some 500-600 people at a time - the rivers ran red - while the military waited on the road to cart away the prisoners. He says he should be offered a free trip to the U.S. "because America taught us to hate communists.... If you do good, you're rewarded." That was, after all, the decade of Vietnam, the military coup in Brazil, invasion of the Dominican Republic, LBJ.

The Look of Silence is a quietly screaming act of witness, one among many documentaries proving that the very act of filmmaking is a risky, brave business, doing the work a free press ought to be doing on a daily basis, but doesn't. Adi asks questions, appeals for some gesture of remorse, and is answered with threats: "If you keep making an issue of the past it will happen again," says one deeply compromised legislator. Another killer accuses Adi of communist activity just for this unwelcome interrogation into history. Adi's long silent stares show him trying to absorb the enormity of the denial he is hearing, as if ruminating to himself, How am I supposed to understand these people, much less judge them?

The credits list an anonymous co-director and many anonymous members of the film crew. Truthtelling is dangerous.

Director Patricio Henríquez gives us Uyghurs, Prisoners of the Absurd, an interview-format exposé of what could legitimately be called a "Catch 22" situation.

Twenty-two Uyghurs, from a Turkic ethnic minority in Western China, fled their homeland seeking religious freedom, deeper Islamic education and ethnic identity in neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan. They were minding their own business and struggling, like any immigrants, to re-establish themselves in a new, unfamiliar land, when 9/11 struck half a globe away.

Shortly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference, excerpted in the film, announcing a generous program of financial rewards for Al Qaeda militants and perpetrators. "Leaflets dropping like snowflakes" promised $$$ for ransomed prisoners. What in time became a couple of thousand men held at Guantánamo included these 22 shackled and tortured Uyghurs, who barely spoke any of the languages of their fellow accused. They could not fathom how they managed to escape oppression in China, only to be treated so brutally, by the Americans, as "enemy combatants" - which, by the way, is not a recognized status under international law.

In this Kafkaesque tale of bureaucracy gone berserk, it becomes apparent before very long that these guys were neither terrorists nor guilty of anything. There is no evidence to cite against them. But the famous wheels of justice grind exceeding slow, and they languished at Guantánamo for years before they could be released. President Obama's pledge to close the prison went unfulfilled, as Republicans gesticulated wildly about admitting "terrorists" onto U.S. soil - even if held at maximum security prisons - but essentially to deny them constitutional rights that the government interprets as not applying to the base on Cuban territory.

As the tale unfolds the lawyers and translators appear, U.S. pro bono advocates who themselves are dumbfounded by the lack of constitutionality away from our shores. The Uyghurs repeatedly receive assurances that someone cares about them, they've not been forgotten, and they will be released some day. All the while, on the world stage, Chinese spokespersons continue to demand extradition for the 22, believing them to be subversives and renegades against the state.

Then the question became what countries would accept these men, and in the end a few places were found, far from their homes, families and communities, and with ambiguous legal status. A handful went to the Pacific nation of Palau, nominally independent but under the aegis of the U.S. eagle. Palau got a heap of payoff money to settle the Uyghurs, about which their lawyer quips, "It would have been a lot cheaper to bring them to Virginia." The last of the Uyghurs left Guantánamo as late as 2013. There remain 122 prisoners altogether at the base, some for more than 12 years already.

The tragic odyssey of these 22 Uyghurs - the word "absurd" only scratches the surface of what happened to these men - has drastically transformed and perhaps in some cases ruined lives. The only form of "truth and reconciliation" for them comes in the form of a documentary film that will likely have no discernible impact on policy.

A slice of life in today's Afghan National Army

Directed by Saeed Taji Farouky and Michael McEvoy, the front-line documentary Tell Spring Not to Come This Year gives us a slice of life in today's Afghan National Army (ANA) now that the foreign troops have left. The filmmakers courageously embedded themselves into a unit of poorly equipped, ill-trained, and only occasionally paid troops in Helmand province, who are trying to keep the Taliban at bay with a lot of Vietnam War-era surplus weapons. A viewer comes away unconvinced of their success.

We get a collective portrait of men at war, a classic theme in and of itself, with all the bravery, sacrifice, danger, as well as boredom, chaos and testosterone a viewer might expect. The film has a mesmerizing "you are there" quality as the camera picks up the soldiers' lives in the barracks and training camps, and on the battlefield. These are regular guys enjoying a smoke or a quick soccer match who, owing to their poverty and joblessness, get caught up in supranational geopolitical and religious conflicts way beyond their control, with shifting, uncertain allegiances.

A few of the troops are singled out by the directors for greater attention, but the omniscient voiceover makes a montage of them all, usually failing to distinguish among them. Each one is an Everyman for the whole unit.

The local inhabitants, meanwhile, are caught between the two different wars being fought. "If the government would buy wheat at a good price," says one farmer, "we wouldn't grow opium." Arms, money, roads and checkpoints seem to flow back and forth between Taliban and the regular army with dependable regularity, some by capture, others by corruption, and still others by financial and security arrangements that suit the warlords and the officer class. In some areas the tacit agreement is, "If you don't attack us, we won't go in."

The film title suggests that if only spring wouldn't come this year, the fighting season wouldn't start up again. After almost a decade and a half, Afghans have gotten used to the cyclical nature of engagement with the insurgents.

The dominant feeling is one of abandonment by the American and Western allies, and at the same time a sense of relief that they are gone. They were only in the country for their own reasons, anyway. Now the Afghan army is "being asked to carry on a war that they never started in the first place," said Saeed Farouky in the Q&A. Can the Afghans make a workable nation out of this place?

And at what cost? About thirty of the battalion featured in the documentary were killed during the filming. This sad, inconclusive artifact of today's Afghanistan, neither predictive nor prescriptive, leaves all its questions suspended in the dusty maelstrom of battle, unanswered.

Photo: "The Look of Silence"

"The Americans": Exploring lesser and greater evils

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 11:13:00 +0000

Imagine an alternate reality in which FX's hit drama "The Americans" is being reviewed in a modern world where the Berlin Wall came down but the Soviet Union has survived to the present time. Join us, comrades and retro '80s fans for a weekly review as we follow the exploits of undercover agents Elizabeth and Philip.

Season 3, episode 13: "March 8, 1983"

How do you decide what are lesser evils and greater evils? What is the greater good? How do you squeeze a body into a suitcase? Only the third question is answered unambiguously during this season of The Americans. (Answer: bend the limbs in queasy-looking angles, as we learned earlier in the season).

The finale is titled the date of President Reagan's famous Evil Empire speech to the National Association of Evangelicals. The nuclear freeze movement was at its height around the world, and was of great appeal to many people of faith. Reagan's speech, littered with religious imagery, explicitly bound the U.S.'s nuclear escalation with protecting people of faith against aggressive Soviet atheism. Because of the speech and the propaganda unleashed around it, American evangelicals would increasingly see the nuclear freeze movement, and any parleying with the Soviet Union, as being un-Christian and un-American.

A few weeks after the speech (and the events of this episode), Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. Star Wars. If it worked as advertised, such a space shield would ward off nuclear weapons and other missiles, and since the U.S. was hard at work on perfecting stealth technology-and NATO was about to roll out new nuclear missiles in Europe-then why would the Soviets not do everything to protect itself? If your enemy has nukes pointed at you right on your doorstep, has secretive ways of flying nuclear-armed aircraft, and plans a space shield to keep you from retaliating, then you are detoothed and declawed as a global power. The U.S. then has free rein to continue crushing liberation movements around the world, dictating the terms of international trade and propping up any U.S.-friendly tyrants it so desires.

We know that Reagan's coopting of the religious left largely succeeded, although SDI turned out to be a bust. We're lucky that Premier Tereshkova's sudden rise to power came after Reagan left office. It's unlikely that the decision to greatly reduce both nations' nuclear arsenals would have taken place during Reagan's watch.

As for our series' stars, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, their mission statement from season one to Wednesday night's finale has been to keep the Soviet Union from falling dangerously behind on the strategic military front.

They've been wounded, nearly killed, emotionally savaged, and in turn killed others in order to protect their homeland.

On the surface, this has affected each of them differently. Philip (Matthew Rhys) seems increasingly cynical and bleak, focused almost completely on his family rather than on the people he's supposed to be defending. Elizabeth (Keri Russell) has seemed stronger, since she experienced a harsher childhood in the tough post-WWII years, and believes that if the real Americans gain a decisive advantage over the Soviets, they'll crush her people or at the least make them struggle the way she and her mother did.

In this season's finale, we see more clearly what their mission has done to Philip and Elizabeth. The episode opens with the Jennings family at the air terminal, for Elizabeth and Paige are indeed off to West Germany for a surreptitious meet-up with Elizabeth's cancer-ridden mother.

Now, Paige (Holly Taylor) and Elizabeth are walking on a street in West Berlin, which back then was walled away from the rest of East Germany (historical note: West Berliners liked to binge-shop at cheaper-priced Eastern stores, which created shortages in East Germany and aggravated tensions between East and West).

Elizabeth describes her mother to Paige, "She's tough; she had to be. She's not like your classmate's grandmothers."

Long accustomed to hyper-alertness, Elizabeth's Spidey sense picks up a potential problem. Are they being watched? "Let's go straight ahead," she says.

Paige wonder if she has to be careful all the time. "When I'm working, yes," her mother replies.

After a restless night in their hotel room, there comes a knock on the door. The Soviets, with help from East Germans, have managed to smuggle in Elizabeth's mother for a brief visit.

Her mother (played by gloriously cheekboned Aleksandra Myrna) sits in a wheelchair. She says, in Russian, "Oh my little one, all this time has gone."

Elizabeth's face is raw with grief and love, all the emotions she'd had to suppress for decades pouring out in tears and soft words to her aged mother.

Elizabeth is on bended knees, listening as her mother says sadly but proudly, "I had to let you go. Everything was at stake."

"Pa-eege?" Grandmother says with a Russian lilt and reaches out her hand, which Paige, uncertain throughout, clasps. The three hold hands but such a moment cannot last, for in the next scene Elizabeth watches from a window up above as her mother is loaded into a car.

She'll never see her mother again. Weeping, Elizabeth turns from the window. She finds Paige in the bathroom praying. Elizabeth eases to the floor and watches as Paige continues praying silently.

Later, while they lie in separate beds, Paige asks, "I don't get it, why she let you go like that, let you leave forever. Could you let me do that?"

Elizabeth assures her daughter that she'd never have to do anything like that.

However, once they're back on American soil, walking through the airport, Paige says, "I don't think I can lie like that to Henry, lie to all my friends-lie the rest of my life."

"Everybody lies," Elizabeth tries to reassure her. "It's a part of life, but we're telling each other the truth now. We'll get through this, I promise."

Elsewhere, the season-long arc with Zinaida reaches its zenith. We learned in an earlier episode that she is indeed a spy, but in this episode, Oleg Burov gets his proof of that. Both Oleg (a KGB intelligence officer) and FBI agent Beeman carry major torches for the exiled and disgraced Nina, so much so that the pair concocted a scheme wherein Oleg pretended to be shadowy, mustached Soviet agent sent to terrify Zinaida into returning to the Soviet Union. Zinaida essentially laughed in his face.

The Chief of the Rezidentura, Arkady, gathers his full team and shares new orders from the Centre. There are to be no unauthorized assassinations or attempts. He received unconfirmed reports of someone doing an operation, but no one was hurt.

One can almost see the light bulb go off over Oleg's head. Zinaida is a fake defector. He and Beeman meet to set up the next stage of their Free Nina campaign.

Beeman then meets with FBI supervisor Gaad in their spy-proof vault to present the tape on which Burov (strategically) admits that Zinaida is a spy.

Gaad is boiling over Beeman's rogue operation, so much so that he accuses Beeman of placing the bug in his pen, which Beeman denies. Beeman wants to trade Zinaida for Nina, but Gaad is all about ending Beeman's career.

Gaad almost gleefully tells Beeman later that Zinaida will be traded for a high-value CIA asset, so forget about hooking up with Nina.

But then Beeman has another meeting, this time with the Deputy Attorney General, who's pleased with Beeman's work. "If you have a problem with red tape, you come to me," the official says. "Your mission continues with Burov, but Nina can't be released."

Nina, who is the object of Beeman and Oleg's desires, has her own system for getting ahead: she's out of the Moscow prison and tasked with figuring out how to manipulate Anton, a disaffected scientist whose field has to do with figuring out how the U.S.'s deadly stealth bomber works.

In an exchange between Anton and Nina, conducted in English in his dorm-like apartment, Nina says, "You know why they brought me here."

"I assumed, yes," replies Anton. She's been sent to spy on him.

Nina's face grows even more pensive, if such a thing is possible. "I can't keep doing this. Buying back my life a piece at a time...I don't know if it's worth it."

Anton advises, "You don't have to do it their way. First you turn down everything they ask for. It's hard, but then they start to lose their power."

Is Nina faking it, so that Anton will trust her more? Is she using her truth in pursuit of the control-Anton goal? At this point, it's hard to know.

In contrast to Nina, it's clear that Philip is in a lousy mood these days. When he meets with Yousaf, the Pakistani agent who killed the luckless Annalise, Yousaf asks, "Was it worth it, doing all this?"

Being that part of what happened was cleaning up after Yousaf's panicked kill, Phil is ticked off. He points out that for now the CIA is holding off on issuing Stinger missiles to the Afghani mujahideen/mercenaries. "A lot of young men won't die because of what we did," Philip says, mentally adding to that list his biological oldest son, who's a Soviet paratrooper stationed in Afghanistan.

Philip breaks off his half-hearted harangue. "Yousaf, I feel like shit all the time." Philip is burned out and has been for a while, but he's not in a line of work that allows him to completely rest and unwind.

He can hardly unwind when he meets with the Jennings' handler, Gabriel, who's upset with him over Elizabeth's sneak visit to visit with her mother.

Gabriel's also unhappy with Philip self-righteous blinders. "You can't see ten feet in front of you. I've been trying all along to take care of you. Grow up," he tells Philip, who's not ready for this dose of truth therapy.

But now Philip must attend to his job. It's something that's had to be done ever since the spy pen was discovered in Supervisor Gaad's office. A fall guy is needed, and it can't be Martha, who is Gaad's secretary and Clark/Philip's secret wife.

Not only does Philip need to keep the trail from leading to his spy operation, we feel by now he's also sincerely motivated to protect Martha. Those of us (me included) who thought poor Martha wouldn't last the season have been proven wrong.

This however isn't good news for Gene, the computer geek who'd initially been looked at by FBI investigators as the possible mole.

Philip, wearing a droopy mustache and even droopier hair, hides out in the man's apartment where he greets Gene with a cloth soaked in chloroform.

As the body hangs from a suicidal noose, Philip leaves carefully/carelessly hidden tech gear behind along with a message typed on Gene's stone-age computer screen: "I had no choice. I'm sorry."

His feelings churning from the act, Philip attends an est meeting alone (est being one of those fix-yourself not-the-world fads back then). Sandra, newly divorced from Beeman, is there.

The meeting's leader isn't the jerk we've seen from previous sessions. He says at one point, "The feelings in your gut are more important than all the shit in your head."

"Why are you here?" Sandra asks. Philip tells her he doesn't know, but that there was something he liked about it.

"In this seminar we tell each other everything. No secrets," Sandra says.

"Don't know if I can do that," Philip accurately says. It's the snarky phrase "I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you" made all too true for him.

Sandra suggests that they share with one another honestly, but Philip says he'll think about it. Too much to think about, for Philip.

Back home, the women in his life arrive. Paige declines food and heads immediately upstairs, leaving the adults to catch up with one another.

Phil tells his wife that he shut down the threat to Martha, which leaves the question of how to deal with Martha's reaction when she learns that a coworker has a. admitted to being the spy, and b. committed suicide.

Elizabeth advises telling Martha sooner rather than later about what happened. "I don't think you're seeing things clearly," she says calmly.

Philip stumblingly tries to tell Elizabeth something about his emotional torment, but then President Reagan comes on screen to remind the couple of what they're up against.

The speech is bellicose in calling the Soviet Union the focus of evil in the modern world, even more belligerent an address when we know what the U.S. had done to that point and was doing at that time.

Crushing liberation movements around the globe, using the CIA to assassinate African leaders and South American politicians, propping up the apartheid South African government, undermining leftist governments everywhere, pushing American corporate control of foreign natural resources, thwarting union organizers - all these actions directly led to countless deaths and massive environmental destruction.

If that's not evil, then what is?

Most Americans were shielded from that knowledge by our government and controlling media. We heard about the Soviet Union's malevolence, without learning the context of actions that on the face of it looked hostile. Speaking before Christian evangelicals, President Reagan is crystallizing the right-wing's plan on how to manipulate social conservatives into joining the Republican party.

Paige is a sincere Christian who belongs to a liberal congregation. She is struggling to understand what is happening to her world view, and more importantly to her parents and herself.

In tears, she sits in her bedroom and picks up the phone. She tells Pastor Tim that she's tried praying, but it doesn't help.

"They're liars, and they're trying to turn me into one. They're not Americans. You can't tell anyone this...they're Russians."

With that, we conclude the third season of The Americans. Some of you have theorized that Pastor Tim is a KGB operative set in place to provide Paige a safe sounding board. Whatever the case, the show is likely to return next season having advanced the time frame only a little. The year 1983 was a tense one for U.S.-Soviet relations.

From the looks of it, the Jennings' household will serve as a microcosm of that conflict.

Visit the Facebook page at the Amerikanskis.

Opera company makes history, casts black singers in "Don Carlo"

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 13:05:00 +0000

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- When King Philip II of Spain faces off against the Grand Inquisitor in Verdi's "Don Carlo" at the Academy of Music, they won't just be portraying history, they'll be making a bit of it, too. In what's believed to be a first, a major opera company has cast two African-Americans in the roles.

Bass-baritone Eric Owens as the king headlines the cast of Opera Philadelphia's new production, which runs for five performances, April 24 - May 3, while bass Morris Robinson sings the smaller but crucial role of the Inquisitor. Their highly charged encounter, which lasts just under 10 minutes, is one of the great scenes in opera - and one of the few written for two deep male voices.

Both men are in their 40s and at somewhat different stages in their careers. Owens, who grew up in Philadelphia, studied singing at Temple University and the Curtis Institute, developing a voice that allows him to excel in baritone parts as well as lower bass roles. Robinson, who grew up in Atlanta, attended The Citadel on a football scholarship (he was an all-American offensive lineman) and didn't begin studying singing until he was 30, when his deep, booming bass voice caught the attention of teachers at the New England Conservatory of Music.

Recently the two men talked with The Associated Press about their careers, working together and the challenges of being a black opera singer.

AP: How did you become interested in opera?

Owens: I've been an opera lover since I was eight years old. Classical music just took hold of me early on, before I had any designs on singing. I was there waiting for the Saturday-afternoon radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera to come on.

Robinson: (Laughing.) You really ARE a nerd, aren't you? Around the same time Eric was listening to those broadcasts, my only exposure to opera was Bugs Bunny and 'Kill the Wabbit.' I spent my time trying to get all the recordings I could of The Sugarhill Gang. Classical music didn't start getting to me until high school. I realized I couldn't play in the band and be on the football team, so I quit the band and joined the chorus.

AP: How does it feel to be singing these particular roles at this point in your careers?

Owens: It feels good. I mean there's something with Verdi where things just click in to where they're supposed to be. If the technique is not just like a nuclear reactor, just going, going, going, Verdi will kick your butt real bad. You sing any one of these arias and you feel like you've done 100 sit-ups.

Robinson: You can't fake your way through it. The Grand Inquisitor covers everything that's expected of a bass to be able to sing, from a low E to a high F, it's there, and it takes a lot of sustained legato lines. Eric just gets through singing his aria and he's downtrodden and then I come in (Owens, interrupting: 'All fresh!') and I tell the king what to do. I got to use my puppet strings to control him. And when you've got a guy like this singing in front of you, you've got to reach deeper and bring something a little bit more.

AP: As far as anyone seems to know, this is the first time these roles have both been cast with black singers. Archivists at the Metropolitan Opera and Opera America said they could find no examples of it happening. Do you feel this is any kind of a milestone?

Robinson: It may very well be coincidental, but I don't think it's insignificant. I'm just finishing a 'Magic Flute' in Houston where we had a black Pamina (Nicole Heaston), a black Papageno (Michael Sumuel) and a black Sarastro (Robinson), so that was monumental. I don't know if this is the turning of the tide, but I think it speaks highly that it didn't serve as a deterrent for them to hire us.

Owens: First and foremost, I think Opera Philly hired us because the dynamic of our voices complement each other and fits these roles quite well. And us being African-American, that's just, I don't want to say collateral damage, but it's gravy.

AP: Do you see yourselves as role models for aspiring black singers?

Robinson: I think we give hope to a lot of cats who are in school studying, who look like us and pursue this career and don't see very many examples.

Owens: It was a big deal for me when I was coming up and I saw people of color. What's cool about this event is that we do spend an awful lot of time being the only black person in a room, in a company, in a town sometimes. Awhile back, during all the Trayvon Martin stuff, I was in Switzerland with the Berlin Philharmonic. I walked into the hall for the concert and it suddenly hit me, I'm the only black person in this room. And I hadn't really given it much thought over the course of 20 years. And I wondered to myself: How would a white person feel being the only white person around constantly in their careers?

Photo: Eric Owens and Morris Robinson during a rehearsal of the opera "Don Carlo," at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. | J.R. Blackwell

Today in history for Poetry Month: Shakespeare on Robben Island

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 10:37:00 +0000

William Shakespeare was born on this day, April 23, 1564.

The magnificent movie Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is deeply moving in so many ways that to single out one aspect would be misguided. And yet I must point to the prison scenes. So brutal were the conditions, so vicious the guards, that we wonder how Nelson Mandela endured it all. Twenty-seven years! What kept him from utter despair?

Yes, the film portrays a strong and dignified Mandela inspired by love for his people and a burning desire for freedom. But this otherwise fine film did not portray a profound factor than sustained Mandela and his many comrades.

That factor was a book. No, not the Koran, though it was a bible. No, neither was it the Christian Bible. It was "The Robben Island Bible," the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

One of the Indian prisoners, Sonny Venkatrathnam, kept a copy of Shakespeare's works on his shelf disguised behind Indian religious pictures. He circulated the book to all the leading prisoners, asking them to autograph, in the margins, their favorite passages. All signed the book. Walter Sisulu, Mandela's closest mentor and friend, chose Shylock's

"Still have I borne it with a patient shrug, /For suff'rance is the badge of all our tribe."

Thirty-two prisoners signed that book, citing many plays. But Julius Caesar was their favorite. And Mandela with his signature dated Dec. 16, 1977, chose Julius Caesar's words:

"Cowards die many times before their deaths /The valiant never taste of death but once. /Of all the wonders that I have heard, /It seems to me most strange that men should fear; /Seeing that death, a necessary end, /Will come when it will come."

Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Mac Maharaj - all leaders in the struggle for a democratic South Africa - all signed the book. All found in Shakespeare a great teacher with deep understanding of human courage and sacrifice. Shakespeare reassured them that they were part of a much larger world.

When the prisoners were allowed to be together, they recited long passages from Shakespeare - the more militant passages from Coriolanus and Henry V as well as Julius Caesar.

In 2006 this "Robben Island Bible" left South Africa - temporarily. It was loaned to England to be part of the Complete Works Exhibition hosted by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon.

After he was freed and later became president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela continued to read, to quote and to love William Shakespeare.

Reprinted, slightly edited, from the Rossmoor News (Walnut Creek, Calif.), July 30, 2014, by kind permission of the author.

Photo: Wikipedia (CC)

Nukes and oil: Environmental themes at Full Frame festival

Wed, 22 Apr 2015 12:24:00 +0000

DURHAM, N.C. - My press pass gave me entree to ten films over the course of four days - and on the final day I squeezed in a couple more. One had to pick and choose discerningly among a hundred or more offerings, knowing that you would surely miss some important ones.

The two films relating to environmental themes that I was able to catch were Containment, co-directed by Peter Galison and Robb Moss, in its world premiere screening, and Bikes vs. Cars, by Fredrik Gertten. Each of these took on a topic of global scope and included footage from far-flung corners of the earth to make its point.

Containment is about the attempt to store toxic nuclear waste in a manner that will be effective for tens of thousands of years. The directors include commentary from true believers who are convinced they have the solution, and skeptics who challenge the nuclear industry's bromides and facile assurances.

Containment takes us to Fukushima, a wasteland after an earthquake and tsunami destroyed a nuclear power plant that should never, never, never have been built. We also go to the Savannah River in Aiken, S.C., where waste storage is all above ground, threatening to seep into the surrounding land and water. Local alligators and turtles there are deemed to be radioactive - and people eat them! A third locale is the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, N.M., where nuclear waste is stored in 900-foot deep underground vaults protected by a thick vein of solid salt. The eerie footage there is eye-opening and mind-boggling, and for several reasons that site may never again be open for filming.

There are an estimated 60-70 nuclear waste storage facilities in the U.S. alone. Any one or more of them could be an instant disaster, but Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials are forbidden to discuss how unsafe they might be. The question of a community's support for a facility is critical. But by whose consent? The voters of a town? How about the county or the state or neighboring states? And how about the "consent" of people in the future? It's forever.

Problems abound. The fact is, nowhere in the world do we really have a secure system for storage of nuclear waste, whether created for peaceful or military purposes. Even if we stop producing more of the stuff tomorrow, we still have to manage what we've got already. Strangely, I heard no one in this film utter the words "Pandora's box."

The filmmakers treat us to a little morbid fun when they interview futurologists - engineers, designers, philosophers - about the challenge of warning the Earth's inhabitants tens of thousands of years from now about the dangers of the waste sites we have created for them, when they will not speak our language nor understand our symbology. Stonehenge was built 6,000 years ago. So 10,000 years ago, when civilization began, Stonehenge was science fiction still 4,000 years into the future! That's just the beginning of the perspective we're talking about.

Which reminds me of an incident that occurred in August 1980, when I traveled to the USSR on a three-week trip with Promoting Enduring Peace. We met with the local Peace Committees in each of the five major cities we visited. At one session, where we focused on the issue of nuclear power, I raised the problem of nuclear waste storage. Our panelists assured us that from our point of view this was a reasonable question, for in a capitalist society contractors took advantage of every loophole and cut every corner to maximize profits, so no wonder our nuclear plants were not safe (this was shortly following a spate of activity around the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire). But in the Soviet Union, a socialist country, they go the extra mile to ensure that every precaution is put into place, every safeguard secure, because the government and the nuclear industry and the people are all one and share the same interests. I said, Fine, but how long is the radioactive half-life of nuclear waste - 25,000 years? - and how can you know that this country will still be socialist at that time?

Some members of our own group rose to object to my "hostile" questions. But afterward, one of the panelists approached me over refreshments, saying that the answers I had been offered were too overconfident, and that in fact some scientists in the USSR were asking the same questions. Needless to say, of course, six years later Chernobyl blew, and the way the government handled that incident contributed mightily toward undermining people's basic trust in the system.

At the Q&A following Containment, the directors called on one man in the audience who said, "I've been coming to Full Frame for 18 years and have seen hundreds of films here. This is the first time I've ever watched a film and needed to ask, Where is the nearest bar?" The implications of this film are truly chilling. People - and their governments - had better make some serious commitments to a non-nuclear future soon, like now.

Bikes vs. Cars (is that all there is?)

Did you know that Copenhagen and Amsterdam are the bicycle capitals of the world? The Danish capital city has 1000 kilometers of bike lanes, and 40 percent of its people commute by bike - more bicycle commuters than in the entire U.S. Part of the reason for that is that neither Denmark nor the Netherlands has a domestic auto industry.

The car industry is the number one spender in advertising dollars, and in the U.S., the oil companies are the number three lobby. Many societies, including the U.S., measure their economic health by the number of cars sold - worldwide, some 82.3 million sold in 2013.

Auto and Big Oil conspire to build ever more, and ever wider freeways to accommodate the one billion cars on the world's roads in 2012, projected to double in number within a decade if middle-class consumerist trends continue their trajectory in places like Brazil and India. Soon 25 million cars will be sold annually in China. And where will we park them all??!!

No other industry is strong enough to confront the combined power of cars and oil to combat its influence, although no specific reference came up as to Big Oil's role in global politics and war.

Director Gertten focuses his camera on bicycle activists in São Paulo, Brazil, who lose an average of one biker a week to the 7 million cars on the city's congested streets. Politicians there have remained unresponsive to requests for bike lanes and safer roadways, although recently the movement is toward more accommodation. In Toronto, by contrast, the backward-looking administration of Mayor Rob Ford actually ripped out miles of existing bike lanes to make room for more cars.

Bikes vs. Cars is forceful and pointed, yet I wanted it to be better. What I did not appreciate in the end was the overly simplistic binary premise encapsulated in its title. The film spends time reminding us that the famous trolley lines of Los Angeles were bought up by GM, only to be destroyed so as to sell more cars. But L.A. has spent billions of dollars in the last couple of decades, with state and federal investment, creating a metro system for its far-reaching sprawl that more and more people are using every day. Commuters in cars drive from the exurbs to the expansive free parking lots at metro rail stations to ride into or around town. Almost always, on city buses as well as on the metro, one also sees bikers conveniently letting mass transit take them and their bikes part of the route so they can get off at their stop and continue on their way.

I have been to many cities - New York, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, London, Paris, Moscow, Prague, Berlin, Mexico City, Tokyo, and Seoul - where metro systems succeed in moving large numbers of people around. They are the hardworking arteries pumping the urban heart and lungs. Any forward-looking urbanism must take the intersection of all three modes of transportation into account. To basically ignore one is at best disingenuous. A statement is voiced toward the end of the film that the only solution is to make it much more expensive to own cars, but I would suggest also to make it much cheaper to ride public transit.

Too much passionate advocacy can work against the cause if your viewers feel used, their intelligence underestimated. Perhaps when all the reviews are counted, mine will be a minority opinion, but I so wished this otherwise enlightening film had been more nuanced, integrated and balanced.

As an indication of the cornucopia of offerings screening at Full Frame every year, environmental films in 2015 also included Marshall Curry's If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, Jennifer Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes, Phie Ambo's Good Things Await, Betzabé García's Kings of Nowhere, Chad Stevens's Overburden, Brent E. Huffman's Saving Mes Aynak, and George Butler's Tiger Tiger. One simply couldn't take them all in.

Eduardo Galeano, writer and journalist

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 17:10:00 +0000

(Morning Star) "Our principal enemy is not imperialism, or the bourgeoisie, or the bureaucracy. Our principal enemy is fear and we carry it inside," one of the women who helped overthrow the Bolivian dictatorship in 1978 once told Eduardo Galeano.

The great Uruguayan journalist and writer, who died April 13, might have written those words as an epitaph to himself. If anyone consistently and courageously gave encouragement to those in struggle - particularly the indigenous populations of Latin America and the oppressed globally - it was Galeano.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, September 3 1940, Galeano started work at 20 and in the early 1960s was a contributor and later editor of the influential weekly journal Marcha.

Following the 1973 fascist military coup Galeano was imprisoned and later forced to flee Uruguay. His seminal 1971 book Open Veins of Latin America - which catalogues the pillage of the continent by European and later US colonialism and imperialism over five centuries - was banned by the right-wing military governments in his native country, Chile and Argentina where he settled for a short time before being forced to flee again to Spain in 1976 following General Jorge Videla's bloody coup.

The Open Veins was the book Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave to Barack Obama at the opening of the Summit of the Americas in 2009. US columnist Andres Oppenheimer described it as "a diatribe whose underlying theme is that Latin America's poverty is caused by US imperialism" and, in lurid prose that must have amused Galeano, stated that Obama showed misplaced appreciation for the gift "considering that Chavez's gesture was the equivalent of presenting Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf to an Israeli president." The book subsequently went to number two on the Amazon best-seller list.

When exiled in Spain he wrote Memory of Fire, regarded as one of the most powerful literary indictments of colonialism in the Americas. The trilogy - Genesis, Faces and Masks and Century of the Wind - combines history, journalism and biography in an incandescent prose.

As former Uruguayan president Jose Mujica has said of his writing: "He worked a gigantic path which helped all Latin Americans understand our roots. His work did more than illuminate truths - it painted our suffering and our shared feelings.

"Galeano imbued this work with a thorough effort unearthing even native-American legends and went on to discover a kind of telluric past depicting ancestral cosmologies which lay at the heart of the history of America." He was a "sharer of dreams, of hopes, of pain, of frustrations and a gigantic love for life."

In 1985 Galeano returned to Montevideo and, following the victory of the Broad Front alliance in the 2004 Uruguayan elections - which ushered in the first left-wing government in Uruguayan history - backed the new administration.

The Uruguayan people had used "common sense," he stated, because they were "tired of being cheated" by the traditional Colorado and Blanco parties.

In 2005, Galeano joined the advisory board of the pan-Latin American television station TeleSur based in Caracas, Venezuela. He was a supporter of the Bolivarian revolution and an unswerving, though unromantic, friend of Cuba. "I have never confused Cuba with paradise so why should I now confuse it with hell?" he once remarked. "I am just one among those who believe that Cuba can be loved without lying or shutting up (about it)."

"Fidel Castro is a symbol of national dignity. For us Latin Americans - who have been humiliated for over 500 hundred years - he is an endearing symbol."

Throughout his career, Galeano was showered with academic and literary awards in the US, Scandinavia, his native Uruguay and Latin America, where he gained the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize in 1975, 1978 and 2011.

One of his last books' Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, typifies his extraordinary output. These short stories, some only a few paragraphs long, provide historical insights and radical perspectives on everything from the origins of fire to football - one of Galeano's great obsessions - and along the way pays homage to communist leaders like Lenin, Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh.

In a recent interview, Galeano restated his literary mission. It was to give voice to "the nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodies, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who are not, but could be. Who don't speak languages, but dialects. Who don't have religions, but superstitions. Who don't create art, but handicrafts. Who don't have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them."

Galeano never lost sight of that mission and it is why his books will endure as long as the "nobodies" exist.

Reposted from Morning Star.

Photo: In 2005 Galeano met with the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez Frias, at the Embassy of Venezuela in Montevideo, when Chavez attended the Summit of Presidents of Mercosur.

This content was originally published by http://www.teleSURtv.netat the following address: http://www.telesurtv.net/multimedia/Los-momentos-insignes-en-la-vida-de-Eduardo-Galeano-20150413-0013.html.

Human interest stories shine at Full Frame film festival

Mon, 20 Apr 2015 12:47:00 +0000

DURHAM, N.C. - Let's begin our review of the 18th year of Full Frame, a documentary film festival held annually in Durham, N.C., with 3.5 warm human interest stories.

Full Frame offers a full plate of, shall we say, heavy fare: Very serious issues not ordinarily treated with a light touch. But a filmgoer simply has to relieve the load with some intimacy and humor.

As someone who has visited Cuba repeatedly, I was drawn to the world premiere screening of Tocando la luz (Touch the Light), an American production set in Havana that was filmed over a period of three years. Filmmakers Jennifer Redfearn (director) and her co-producer Tim Metzger, who also served as cinematographer, went to Cuba seeking out a fresh way to talk about the island country without the usual musical or political angle. One day they were introduced to a unique place: a movie theater with special film showings for the blind, where a live raconteur reads a narration in between the dialogue, telling the audience what they need to know about what is happening on-screen. Intrigued by this program, they went on to discover other services for the blind in Cuba, and decided to focus their feature on three sightless women in Havana, their backstories, families and communities, their challenges, aspirations and lives.

Anyone familiar with the world of the blind, and with life with a disability, knows that just about everyone seeks to gain as much independence as they can manage. The film focuses closely on the personal lives of its protagonists, showing the degree of support they get from relations and friends. If beyond that the intention of the film was also to show that Cuba has generous programs and policies in place to help her blind citizens, the point is made subtly and incrementally.

First we meet Margarita, a charming black lady in her 60s who well remembers the Revolution from her early childhood. Although she lost her vision completely before reaching the age of ten, she volunteered to serve in a blind militia corps for the defense of the Revolution, and remains forever proud of her training, her uniform and epaulets, which she guards protectively. Her husband has been dead for half a dozen years now, and is much missed. Although his story is not shown in any detail, they married despite her disability, and they were apparently very deeply in love. Margarita has an active circle of friends, neighbors, and fellow blind people, as well as a paid helper/companion. Understandably she has trouble letting go of possessions - and the sweet memories associated with them - if she's to move on in life.

Mily is up next, a vivacious 25-year-old, also black, still living at home with her parents, whom she loves, but also resents for their overprotection from life's vicissitudes. She has a boyfriend, also blind, who gently encourages her to stretch and make more of herself. He struck me as kind, clear-thinking, rational and optimistic, the very model of a modern Cuban man. She is shown, with some co-workers, at a worksite where blind people are employed in the more or less "make work" job of folding and stacking envelopes, which neither requires nor advances any skills - one of the few sour notes struck in the film. Her challenge will be to recreate her life as an adult with dreams of a home of her own and possibly children.

Finally we have Lis, who is almost wholly reliant on her mother, for she has never cared to learn how to use a cane to get around; and curiously, the mother (and grandmother) are also reliant on her. Lis is a talented singer who appears at shows, and even an international competition, so her earnings constitute the better part of the family income. But what will happen if and when her mother is no longer around? I found it very interesting - and surely the filmmakers did as well - that it was this family, Caucasian, that for at least three generations has embraced santería as their religion. A goat has a brief but poignant cameo role.

This film's first-time director won the festival's Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award. Editor David Teague deserves a shoutout for his fluid meshing of three disparate lives that do not intersect as such, but nevertheless all comment on each other.

And the Audience Award goes to...

The Audience Award for Feature Film went to director Alexandra Shiva's How to Dance in Ohio, which documents a few months in the lives of students at a learning center for people on the autism spectrum in Columbus, Ohio. As in Tocando, the focus is again on three young women, Marideth, Caroline and Jessica, who are honing their social and communication skills preparing to attend a formal prom complete with gowns, elegant hair stylings, corsages, dancing and dates, with crowds of jostling people and booming music. Its similarity with the Cuban film is precisely in the search for independence while managing a powerful disability.

An important character in How to Dance is the ebullient Dr. Emilio Amigo, the clinical psychologist who patiently works with his autistic clients in his well-appointed center to achieve measurable - and in some cases almost miraculous - results. There's a poster in his office that reads, "Life begins at the end of your comfort zone," a reminder to just about anyone that we are all trying to cope with the hand we were dealt. It may sound ungenerous of me, but I could not help feeling that in a big way the film was kind of an "advertorial" for Dr. Amigo's center. Still, he does impressive, caring work, and I suspect that the film will go a long way toward humanizing people with autism and suggesting ways their friends, families and communities can gain more understanding.

The .5 film among the 3.5 I mentioned above is a Dutch item directed by Astrid Bussink lasting 18 minutes, called Giovanni and the Water Ballet, which won the Audience Award for Best Short Film. It's about a 10-year-old boy who dreams of competing in the Dutch synchronized swimming championship, and is the only boy in the pool. It makes a gentle but firm case against stereotyping and encourages us to give kids the freedom of their choices.

A man and his horse

The third full-length feature reviewed here is the world premiere showing of Harry & Snowman, directed by Ron Davis, about a man and his horse. Because of its subject matter I was frankly not prepared to love it, but I did. Which proves once again the wisdom of stepping outside your comfort zone.

Harry deLeyer emigrated from Holland to the U.S. after WWII: In a brief passage he discusses his exploits as a teenager during the German occupation of Holland as a courier for the resistance. But what he always loved and wanted most was continuing employment with horses, and when he and his wife started a good Catholic family of eight kids, all were involved in the horse business. Harry taught riding, both at an elite private school for girls on Long Island, and then at his own stables and riding academy. His own kids' prowess was his best advertisement for the school.

Searching for a slow, working animal that would be good for beginners, Harry purchased Snowman at an auction in Pennsylvania for $80, rescuing the animal from the dogfood - or the glue - factory. As he befriended the horse and started training him to work with his student riders, he slowly began to appreciate that Snowman was capable of much, much more.

Cutting to the chase, Snowman became the most award-winning show horse of his day, winning national championships two years in a row at the most prestigious shows in Madison Square Garden in the late 1950s. After more than half a century, Snowman still holds the American record for the high jump.

His remarkable rise - he was called "the eighty-dollar champion" and "the Cinderella horse" - closely paralleled Harry's own ascent, from penniless immigrant to world-class trainer and rider, in a sport that flagrantly celebrated wealth, class and privilege. Equestrian fans of the lowest social orders could look to this stunning example of success against all odds, and hold it up as an inspiration. Taxi drivers were quoted saying, "There's even a chance for a little guy like me."

The day came when Snowman had to retire. He was paraded around Madison Square Garden in a final viewing before his adoring public as "Auld Lang Syne" played. TV news coverage at the time reported that there was "not a dry eye in the house," and by this time I was so hooked on the story that I sat there with a tear in my own eye. It felt good to be reminded of my own vulnerability to sentiment.

Full Frame is sponsored by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. The festival took place April 9-12 this year, in and around the Durham Convention Center, the next-door Carolina Theatre, and a few other neighboring venues. It's all very walkable and well organized. It is recognized as the premier locale for documentaries, and attracts both a national and international following, as well as a loyal cohort of local supporters and attendees.

These films are just beginning their public life, so it may be some months before they finish their tour of the festivals and get picked up for national distribution. Be on the lookout. Watch People's World for upcoming reviews on more documentaries at Full Frame about environmental issues, global policy, and law enforcement.

China is near: Reds versus rednecks in “Occupation”

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 13:07:00 +0000

Playwright Ken Ferrigni's outrageous play Occupation appears to possess the hallmarks of Sacred Fools' productions such as Bill & Joan, Jon Bastian's Beat Generation play about scrivener William S. Burroughs; Stoneface about comedian Buster Keaton; and the company's two Sherlock Holmes parodies. Occupation has originality (this is the West Coast premiere - it opened in New York, where New York Magazine wittily described it as "Idiocracy-meets-Red Dawn"). The two-acter's premise has the requisite outlandish imaginativeness:

In the not-too-distant future an indebted USA sells Florida to the People's Republic of China. This leads to an Everglades insurgency fought in the swamps, pitting the South Florida Christian Militia against the People's Liberation America (PLA).

So far so good: This is a pretty hilarious notion. Montages of faux news clips with a Jon Stewart panache appear on the stage's three flat screen TVs. The Chinese consul's name, Zedong (Robert Paterno), riffs on Chairman Mao Zedong's moniker. Redbook aficionados are pitted against Bible-thumpers - one of those Jimmy Swaggart Southern televangelist types, Bay Ray (Bruno Oliver), and his son, Florian (Brandon Bales). Florian and Zedong also cleverly appear in stagecraft-stretching videos shot in-house that are played on the playhouse's screens live (kudos to video designer Anthony Backman). It seems as if all's well on the satirical frontlines and we're off and running to the races.

Alas, while the preposterous premise is far out, Occupation's problem is in its execution. Instead of playing the Sunshine Patriots versus socialists saga in the Sunshine State for laughs as a farce, the reds vs. rednecks storyline veers toward tragedy. By taking itself too seriously, as if the credulity-stretching plot was plausible, this dystopian drama loses credibility. At times the acting becomes histrionic. Sacred Fools is a bold theater company, and in productions such as its version of Bertolt Brecht's Baal, it hasn't flinched from presenting onstage nudity and/or violence. But Occupation arguably becomes too bloody, while the plot's harrowing denouement is pregnant with mass extermination of biblical proportions. Meanwhile, director Ben Rock's staged sex is, for some reason, less graphic: It's a case of make war, not love.

The space at this theater tucked out of the way off the 101 freeway at Heliotrope is diminutive, but scenic designer DeAnne Millais does yeoman's (yeowoman's?) work in conjuring up a set which convincingly evinces three or four different locales: The office where the corrupt, married Zedong makes out with mistress Mei Mei (willowy Rebecca Larsen); the Everglades where the Swamp Foxes led by Gare (K.J. Middlebrooks) are based and launch their sneak attacks on the PLA invaders; and the campsite of the pregnant Bets (Halle Charleton), who comes across like a female counterpart to Deliverance's demented hillbillies.

Unfortunately, by buying into its unbelievable hypothesis the satire retires in Florida and misfires. Well, they can't all be Louis and Keely Live at the Sahara - the much extended hit that premiered at Sacred Fools and found its way to a larger theatrical venue.

Occupation is performed through May 9 on Thurs., Apr. 23 at 8:00 pm and on Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 pm at the Sacred Fools Theater, 660 N. Heliotrope Dr., Los Angeles 90004. For more info: (310) 281-8337; www.sacredfools.org/.

Photo: Scene from the play. | Sacred Fools Flickr page

“The Americans”: Set in the 80s but relevant to our time

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 12:27:00 +0000

Imagine an alternate reality in which FX's hit drama "The Americans" is being reviewed in a modern world where the Berlin Wall came down but the Soviet Union has survived to the present time.

Join us, comrades and retro '80s fans for a weekly review as we follow the exploits of undercover agents Elizabeth and Philip Jennings.

Season 3, episode 12: "I Am Abassin Zadran"

Margo Martindale, who played the Jennings' handler, Claudia, in previous seasons, makes a welcome appearance in an episode that builds the tension to a heartbreaking level for characters Martha (Alison Wright) and Paige (Holly Taylor).

That's the contrast in a nutshell: Claudia is in the know, while Martha and Paige at various levels are not. We see the consequences of that lack of knowledge: Martha is considering making a break for it, while Paige is questioning, shouting at times, every last detail of her family's cover story.

They've reached the breaking point in this wintry episode. Claudia, on the other hand, is her old wise and confident self. "Can you handle the truth?" is an old movie catch phrase-Claudia's proven that she can. We're one episode away from knowing whether Martha and Paige can manage the same transition.

But first, we receive another miniature course in spycraft from Philip and Elizabeth Jennings. For months, they've been digging up intel about the upcoming CIA briefing/training of a trio of Afghani mujahideen mercenaries. The CIA, continuing its reckless course of upsetting the balance of power in the Middle East, is planning on giving advanced shoulder-fired Stinger missiles to extremists who loathe all things Western (except missiles and money, of course).

The Jennings' operation entailed becoming smoke bros with a CIA agent's disaffected daughter (Philip's thankless task) and an assignation with a hotel manager (Elizabeth's not-so-sexy time).

But now, having learned the when, where and who, Philip and Elizabeth must pull off the final part of the mission.

It starts with Elizabeth, dressed in drab telephone company drag, sauntering through the back entrance of the hotel. She installs a phone transfer device that Philip, having snuck into the CIA agents' hotel room, is able to confirm via phone has been properly installed.

Task one accomplished, they returned home, only to find that Henry's alone, playing his electronic game. Where's Paige? Off with her pastor and his wife, planning to spend the night.

That's not going to happen. Paige is strong-willed, but her parents, loving as they are, have iron running through their veins.

They stake out the pastor's house and when they arrive, collect Paige, although not without a minor standoff with their daughter.

That's but the first round between them in this episode, but next let's see what's going on with Clark aka Philip and his other wife, Martha. As he walks up the street toward Martha's apartment, KGB trainee Hans drives by with a doffing-his-cap move that means...what? The coast is clear, or not?

Inside, we find FBI agent and coworker Stan Beeman sitting at Martha's kitchen table saying crap like "we all know it's the secretaries who make the place run."

Woven through his rhetoric is the not-so-hidden vein that the workplace is filled with concerns over the bugging incident. Does Martha have anything to share?

Martha does a masterly deflection. "Everyone knows about the state of your marriage. If you're wanting to talk about it, I'm not the right person," she says.

Well done. He's sent on his way without bumping into Clark/Philip. Turns out the cap move by Hans meant "coast not clear."

In the meantime, the mail robot bugging is continuing without a hitch, except that Rezidentura head Arkady, who works out of the Soviet embassy, is unhappy with the quality of the intel. He's inclined to shut the operation down, but agents Oleg and Tatiana, who have developed quite a rapport, urge him not to quit just yet. In a later meeting, they tell Arkady that they think they've uncovered potential marital misbehavior caught by the mail robot's microphone.

"Give it some time," Tatiana says. "It's in everyone's interest."

Another spy operation is having a rough roll-out. Elizabeth, here known as Michelle, is prepping her asset, Lisa, for the first camera-purse day at Gruman, Lisa's highly secret work site that is building parts for the Stealth bomber.

Such a plane is a potential game-over as far as the Soviets are concerned. The need to know is intense, yet for the moment Elizabeth has to contend with Maurice, Lisa's grumpy, greedy husband, who's an interfering presence.

Later, at the meet-up point, there's no sign of Lisa. Instead, Maurice shows up to hand over the purse and collect the money. He's rude, indifferent, and we know he has a history of violence. He's had it easy to this point in dealing with women, but "Michelle" possesses attack skills he can only hope to never experience.

Turning now to the denouement of the hotel operation. Philip is in disguise as a CIA officer when he comes to the agents' hotel room, seeking some alone time with Abassin Zedran, one of the trio of mujahideen. The phone hack works perfectly. Elizabeth, using a comically bulky '80s portable phone, pretends to be a case officer giving permission for Zedran to go off site.

Elizabeth and Philip, in their guise as CIA officers, meet with Zedran. They plant seeds of suspicion, in which his two compatriots are painted as being lackeys for the Soviets. Zedran boasts of his bloody exploits, most of them involving the slaughter of Soviet soldiers, and rival tribesmen.

Philip, whose oldest son is a potential target for this man, can only sit and quietly seethe. When Zedran returns to the hotel, he knives to death his two compatriots. Perhaps "knifes to death" doesn't convey the amount of gut spilling, throat cutting, and smearing of blood involved. But when the CIA agents rush into the hotel room, they witness in quite visceral terms what their government is paying for off in the remote hills of Afghanistan.

Zedran had professed to Philip and Elizabeth his desire to die as a blood-soaked martyr, but face to face with his actual CIA bosses, he's not likely to pay that deadly a price for his acts. Zedran has followers back home, after all, so there'll be two bodies dumped or otherwise disposed of in the Washington, D.C. area, and one cleaned-up Afghani murderer delivered back home. He'll probably still receive the missile training. The CIA wants fighters well versed in terrorism and brutality.

This undercover operation by Philip and Elizabeth played out perfectly in the short run, but in the long run, we know that the Stinger missiles were still delivered to Afghani mercenaries.

If not for Premier Tereshkova's later leadership in creating zones of influences in Afghanistan, who knows how it all would have eventually played out.

The Soviet Union to this day still observes the boundaries laid out at that time; the United States has been less compliant, but since we're currently being drawn into Pakistan's deepening turmoil in its breakaway state of Baluchistan, it may be that we'll see American boots on the ground in that region.

I can only hope that doesn't happen, since who knows when we'd emerge from such an obvious trap. There are too many conservative chicken hawks in our government and in the moneyed class who want to see American equipment and weaponry used overseas (not to mention being used by domestic police officers, which is a growing trend in our increasingly oppressive surveillance state). Profits all around for those who invest their money wisely, albeit immorally.

Philip and Elizabeth's single well-played operation can hardly stem the coming flow of Stingers to Afghanistan, but they at least played their part.

However, the discussion between elegant Gabriel, the Jennings' current handler, and an earlier one, the redoubtable Claudia at a diner concerns matters of the heart, rather than missiles.

We learn that last season's cluster-botch involving a lust-besotted teenaged son of Soviet spies killing his family, was a lesson that rocked agencies back home in the Soviet Union.

"They fired the head of the American department," Claudia tells Gabriel, and they almost down Directorate S (which is the hidden agents-in-place operation that includes the Jennings family).

"What makes them think they can try again?" asks a dubious Gabriel about the impending acculturation, one might say, of Paige Jennings.

"They think you can do it," says Claudia.

Speaking of...Paige continues her current trend of bursting in unannounced to her parents' bedroom. She wants answers now about the faces in her family's picture album. The cousin's fake, and so is the aunt, right? Right? Said at maximum volume, which only stops when Paige bridles at her mother's effort to quiet her down.

Later, Philip joins Paige in her room. "There is no Aunt Helen," he admits, but says that the pictures aren't all fake. He shows her two photographs: one of a very young Paige being brought to Elizabeth's hospital room upon the birth of little brother Henry, and the other of the two children in a tent during a family vacation to the Blue Ridge mountains.

Paige recalls that Henry was afraid they'd be eaten by bears. Philip, surprised, says he didn't know that. Paige kept Henry's secret. It bodes well for her future as a spy, that she's digging out secrets and keeping some, as well.

The next round between Elizabeth and Paige is a much more civil affair but one fraught with emotion. Paige recently learned that her grandmother is dying back in the Soviet Union.

"I talked it over with your father," Elizabeth says. "We think you should go with me. It'll be the only time you'll get to meet your grandmother."

Paige takes this in. She's not hostile to the idea. Her eyes well with tears she's determined to keep at bay. She's more like her mother than she may think. Is a trip to Moscow in the cards for next week's finale?

And now, Martha, back to being poor Martha for this episode. Paige is being spooned more and more information, but Martha has had to make do with far less than that.

She's picked up by Hans, a "friend of Clark," so that Clark/Philip can make sure that Martha hasn't been found out. The meet-up is tense, and later, alone at the apartment, Martha calls her mother. She just wants to hear their voices, and denies to them that she's having any problems.

When Clark/Philip comes in, however, Martha's sitting on the bed, a suitcase packed beside her. She's afraid that the FBI will find out about the pen.

"I can't be here with you like this," she says.

Philip has tried various tactics-love, workarounds, and soothing tones-on his wife, but now, motivated perhaps by a level of caring, he does something completely unexpected.

He takes off his glasses and slowly removes his wig. Plenty of pins involved and when the wig is off, a crying Martha, who's long known of the "toupee", finally see her husband undisguised.

This unveiling of himself is risky, leaving him all the more vulnerable in this relationship, but it's granting her a greater sense of agency and connection with this man.

In the course of his work, Philip has dealt out death blows and narrowly avoided those aimed at him. But this may well be the most dangerous act of all.

Next week's finale is entitled "March 8, 1983," which is the date on which President Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire.

These days, while the rivalry remains strong between our two nations, it's played out mostly in trade issues, and high-tech battles. We're still supposed to guard America's secrets against Soviet and Chinese interests, which is one of the reasons given by our government for invasions of our privacy, surveillance, and de-facto censorship of the news.

Proof of the latter statement? Consider how right-wing Congressmen in league with the arms industry, is pushing for further involvement in Baluchistan. Instead of a reasoned debate played out in prime time, we're distracted by celebrity catastrophes in a media environment that values novelty over hard news.

Secure in the knowledge that many Americans are prevented from hearing their rhetoric, war advocates are saying, don't leave it to Pakistan anymore because they've made a hash of things. We can't let the Baluchis break free because they'll a. align with extremists in the region against Israeli and American interests, and/or b. fall into the Soviet economic sphere.

Whatever the reason given-and regardless of where the battleground is set-it's about the protection of global capital and increasing America's share of power.

The '80s setting of The Americans story continues to have increasing relevance to our time.

Tune in next week for the finale. Also visit the Amerikanskis Facebook page.