People Before Profit blog

Progies honor transsexuals, feminists, card-carrying Communists and more in film

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 13:47:00 +0000

A number of movies and subjects completely overlooked by the Motion Picture Academy won Progie Awards, which annually recognize the Best Progressive Films and Filmmakers - in other words, "the People's Oscars."

Based on real-life research that used humans as lab rats to explore the limits of conformity and more, Experimenter - which didn't receive a single Oscar nomination - scored The Trumbo for Best Progressive Film, The Progie named after screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Written and directed by Michael Almereyda, Experimenter depicts the 1961 Yale University psychology tests which - alluding to recent harsh "enhanced interrogation" or torture techniques - used electric shocks designed by social psychologist Stanley Milgram as forms of control. Experimenter co-stars Winona Ryder, John Leguizamo, Dennis Haysbert, and Peter Sarsgaard as Milgram.

Sarsgaard tied with Bryan Cranston, who portrayed the title character in Trumbo, to co-win the Paul Newman Best Progressive Actor Progie Award. The biopic Trumbo depicts the heroic struggle of Spartacus screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and lefty Tinseltown talents to break the Hollywood blacklist. Although Trumbo and other Hollywood Ten artists were sentenced, fined and jailed for contempt of Congress after they refused to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 whether or not they belonged to the Communist Party, Trumbo shows that Dalton had indeed been a dues-paying, card-carrying CP-er.

Sean Baker's Tangerine, starring and about transgender African Americans, won The Robeson, The Progie for Best Portrayal of People of Color named after singer/actor/activist Paul Robeson. Innovatively shot with iPhones, Tangerine was - like many other African American-related films and artists - also completely neglected by the Academy Awards.

The Progies celebrated another movie snubbed by the Academy: Suffragette, the fact-based, stirring saga of Britain's movement for women's right to vote, scored the Marianne and Juliane Progie Award for Best Pro-Feminist Depiction of Women, named after Margarethe von Trotta's 1982 German film about sisters. In Suffragette Carey Mulligan portrays a rank and file proletarian who joins the cause, along with Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep, in a cameo as the feisty, fiery feminist Emmeline Pankhurst.

Kirby Dick's hard-hitting anti-rape documentary The Hunting Ground, about the scourge of sexual abuse on America's college campuses, edged out Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next to win The Dziga for Best Progressive Documentary, the Progie named after Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov.

Director Ken Loach's Jimmy's Hall - another fact-based film about Irish working-class resistance to British rule, written by Paul Laverty - won the Our Daily Bread Progie for Most Positive and Inspiring Working Class Screen Image, named after the 1934 feature directed by King Vidor and produced by Charlie Chaplin about an American commune during the Great Depression. Winning The Gillo Progie for Best Progressive Foreign Film, Roy Andersson's Swedish comedy A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence was another Oscar oversight. (The category is named for Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, who helmed 1966's The Battle of Algiers.)

There were some overlaps between this year's Academy Awards and Progies. Tobias Lindholm's Danish feature A War (Krigen), about alleged war crimes committed by Danes in Afghanistan and the subsequent trial, won The Renoir Progie for Best Pro-Peace Film (A War was Oscar-nommed in the Best Foreign Language category). (The Renoir is named after French director Jean Renoir, who made the 1937 antiwar masterpiece La Grande Illusion.)

Cate Blanchett snagged The Karen Morley for Best Actress in a progressive film about women for her role in the pro-lesbian rights movie Carol. The Todd Haynes picture based on a Patricia Highsmith novel was up for six Oscars. (This Progie Award is named for Karen Morley, co-star of 1932's Scarface and 1934's Our Daily Bread. Morley was driven out of Hollywood in the 1930s for her leftist views, but maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for New York's Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.)

Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence - which deals with the genocidal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of suspected Communists by the U.S.-backed General Suharto coup in 1965 Indonesia - won The Conformist Progie for Best Anti-Fascist Film, named after Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 anti-Mussolini classic. The Look of Silence is a sequel to Oppenheimer's 2012 The Act of Killing - both Silence and Killing received Oscar nominations in the Best Documentary division.

Adam McKay's witty anti-Wall Street The Big Short about those banks too big to fail - or jail - won The Buñuel for Best Slyly Subversive Film (in a Progie category named after the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, co-director with Salvador Dalí of 1929's The Andalusian Dog, 1967's Belle de Jour and many other classics).

The recently-deceased Haskell Wexler, long a lefty stalwart in Hollywood, earned The Sergei, the Lifetime Progressive Achievement Progie Award named after Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet director of the 1920s masterpieces Battleship Potemkin and 10 Days That Shook the World. Wexler won two Best Cinematography Oscars, for 1966's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the 1976 Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory. He also co-made and/or co-shot a host of other films. Wexler, who died at age 93, may be best known for directing 1969's landmark Medium Cool, which combined documentary footage of the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago with fictionalized footage.

The 9th annual Progie Awards show why The Progies are needed, in stark contrast to the Oscars, which are voted for by members who are overwhelmingly white, male and over 62 years old. Although artistic excellence is the stated standard for the Motion Picture Academy's coveted golden statuettes, commercial considerations and studio politicking often come into play, with Oscar campaigns that can cost millions of dollars (more than the budgets of most indies).

The Progies, on the other hand, not only recognize aesthetic criteria, but also political value and relevance. The Progies honor films and filmmakers that stand up for human rights, workers' rights, women's rights, gay rights, minority rights, peace, the environment, and against fascism - films of conscience and consciousness that have something meaningful to say about the human condition. The Progies are democratically voted for every year by the James Agee Cinema Circle, an international group of left-leaning film critics, historians and scholars, so there are no commercial considerations and studio politicking involved. The goal is simply to shine a spotlight on progressive pictures and artists.

Much has been made - and rightfully so - about the "whitewashing" and boycotting of this year's Oscars, which have excluded many Black-themed films and talents. The Progies guarantee the recognition of nonwhite films and artists, as well as pro-LGBT, pro-worker and pro-women pictures and talents through categories specifically set aside to honor those works which deal with these themes.

This may raise some eyebrows, but it's worth pointing out that in some countries, such as Aotearoa/New Zealand and Venezuela, there are electoral seats set aside in order to ensure that the indigenous people, at least theoretically, are represented in the parliament. This Progie practice is a more effective antidote than Chris Rock's jokes about the Oscars being too white. Appreciation for The Progies may help the Academy to get out of the hole it has dug itself into over the years, in terms of nonwhite misrepresentation, neglect of women, supporting LGBT people and their rights, etc. The essential point is that there are solutions to these problems: Where there's a will, there's a way, as The Progies prove!

Photo: HaskellWexler.com

This week in history: Hattie McDaniel, first African American Oscar winner

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 12:05:00 +0000

On February 29, 1940, Hattie McDaniel, actress, singer-songwriter, and comedienne, best known for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939), won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, making her the first African American to win an Academy Award.

In addition to acting in many films, she was the first black woman to sing on the radio in the U.S. McDaniel appeared in over 300 films, although she received screen credit for only about 80. In 2006 she became the first black Oscar winner honored with a U.S. postage stamp.

Hattie McDaniel was born June 10, 1895, in Wichita, Kan., to former slaves. She was the youngest of 13 children. Her father, Henry McDaniel, fought in the Civil War, and her mother, Susan Holbert, was a singer of religious music.In 1900, the family moved to Colorado. Hattie graduated from Denver East High School.

Her first film appearance was in The Golden West (1932) as a maid; her second was in the highly successful Mae West film I'm No Angel (1933), as one of the black maids West camped it up with backstage. McDaniel had a featured role as Queenie in the 1936 version of Show Boat, and sang a verse of "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" with Irene Dunne, Helen Morgan, Paul Robeson, and the black chorus. Later in the film she and Robeson sang "I Still Suits Me," a song written especially by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein for the film.

It was McDaniel's role as the house slave who repeatedly scolds her owner's daughter, Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh), and scoffs at Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), that won McDaniel her Academy Award. "I loved Mammy," McDaniel said when speaking to the white press about the character. "I think I understood her because my own grandmother worked on a plantation not unlike Tara." Her performance alarmed some whites in Southern audiences, who complained that she had been too "familiar" with her white owners.But that was largely the character that Margaret Mitchell portrayed in her novel.

When McDaniel tried to take her "Mammy" character on a road show, black audiences did not prove receptive.While many blacks were happy over McDaniel's personal victory, they also viewed it as bittersweet, believing that the film celebrated the slave system and condemned the forces that destroyed it. For them, the unique accolade McDaniel had won suggested that only those who did not protest Hollywood's systemic use of racial stereotypes could find work and success there.

The Twelfth Academy Awards took place at the Coconut Grove Restaurant of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Ironically, McDaniel and her escort were required to sit at a segregated table for two.

She made her last film appearances in Mickey (1948) and Family Honeymoon (1949). She remained active on radio and television in her final years, becoming the first black American to star in her own radio show with the comedy series "Beulah." That show was controversial: Critics felt it perpetuated negative stereotypes of black men as shiftless and lazy. She reportedly replied to her critics, "Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making $7 a week being one."

Victory on "Sugar Hill"

Outside of her acting career, McDaniel was also an activist. McDaniel was the most famous of the black homeowners in Los Angeles who helped to organize the black West Adams neighborhood residents to save their homes. Loren Miller, a local attorney and owner/publisher of the California Eagle newspaper, represented the minority homeowners in their restrictive covenant case. McDaniel had purchased her white two-story, 17-room house in 1942. Some of her unhappy white neighbors referred to the original racial restriction covenant (also known as "redlining") that came with the development of tony West Adams Heights back in 1902 which restricted "Non-caucasians" from owning property, and took their case to court.

Superior Judge Thurmond Clarke decided to visit the disputed ground, popularly known as "Sugar Hill." The next morning, he dismissed the case, saying, "It is time that members of the Negro race are accorded, without reservations or evasions, the full rights guaranteed them under the 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution. Judges have been avoiding the real issue too long."

Hattie McDaniel died on October 26, 1952, at age 57, in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles.

Adapted from Wikipedia (including photo).

“Race” and “Risen”: Two films, two very different kinds of hero

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 10:10:00 +0000

What does it mean to be a hero? What can we learn from our heroes? How shall we treat them? Two current films, Race and Risen, provide us with some answers, but also raise further questions.

The subject of heroes has become central to American cinema. A parade of comic book superheroes, war heroes, detectives, doctors, and do-gooders marches through theaters setting standards for exemplary behavior. Race and Risen add to this perspective two contrasting pictures of heroism.

Race is the well-told tale of Jesse Owens' triumph at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, winning four gold medals and smashing the Nazis' plans to use the games as a showcase of their racial superiority. Director Stephen Hopkins (Lost in Space) and lead Stephan James (Selma) sure-handedly build Owens' pre-Olympic life. We are introduced to the two most important principals, girlfriend Ruth Solomon (Shanice Banton), who is the mother of his child, and mercurial coach Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis). Snyder, a former Olympic caliber athlete himself, defies over-worked coach clichés to land closer to flawed friend than all-knowing mentor. Ruth is stolid and supportive under duress, but her character is never developed beyond loyalist lover.

Owens himself carries the movie, running smoothly from Ohio State training days through Olympic triumph. James fleshes out his character with deft strokes that help us understand his trials and development. He never undermines the narrative, moving it along seamlessly over hurdles of racism and infidelity. Where he encounters setbacks, he learns and overcomes, showing the depth of human heroism. When sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller are removed from the Olympic relay race, presumably for being Jews, Owens expresses solidarity, then, as substitute, triumphs.

Risen follows a less plausible path. Rather than seek out the historical Jesus, as Race does with Jesse Owens, writer-director Kevin Reynolds (Waterworld, Red Dawn [1984]) constructs a superhero more on the order of Marvel Comics. The film chronicles the crucifixion and rising of Yeshua (Jesus of Nazareth) through the eyes of the Roman Tribune, Clavius. But it is also the story of the Tribune's rise from non-believer to religious adherent. Like Clavius, we are asked to venerate Jesus more than to learn from him.

Clavius is a typical Roman commander. The right-hand man of Pontius Pilate, he wants nothing more than to win promotion and secure retirement to a villa outside of Rome. When Yeshua's body disappears, he searches town and countryside, interrogates troops, guards, witnesses, and disciples. The disappearance and life after death is presented uncritically as miraculous. Hold the science. Forget the facts. Clavius, played by Joseph Fiennes as somnambulant, switches his shallow-rooted, unquestioning allegiance from his Roman superhero god to that of the radical Jews.

The conversion is immaculate and inert. Jesus has sucked all the critical air out of the room. He is presented as so perfect a superhero that his disciples appear dotingly foolish as they fall unquestioningly in line, like a political campaign where the charismatic leader's simplistic sloganeering becomes the followers' meaningless mantras. Could this be counter to the well-documented history of Jewish theoretical questioning and disputatiousness?

Of the superheroes presented in Risen and Race, notable is the reality of the human hero who shows us how to rise over our own mistakes and manmade obstacles, more so than the flawless superhero that asks us to abandon our critical abilities. It is no miracle that the story of human triumph makes for a better film as well.

Race

Director: Stephen Hopkins

Starring: Stephan James, Jason Sudeikis, Eli Goree, Shanice Banton

Focus Films; Rated PG-13; Drama; 134 minutes

Risen

Director: Kevin Reynolds

Starring: Joseph Fiennes, Tom Felton, Peter Firth

Columbia Pictures; Rated PG-13; Action, Adventure, Drama; 107 minutes

Paul Robeson fought Jim Crow, lynching, and McCarthyism

Fri, 26 Feb 2016 14:28:00 +0000

Gerald Horne has made an amazing contribution to African American radical history with the newly published biography Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary.

Though not as widely known as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X - at least, not among most white activists - it is impossible, as Horne argues, to understand their lives without first understanding Paul Robeson's.

"Like Malcolm, he [Robeson] was a militant: a turning point in his dramatic fall was when he confronted President Harry S. Truman face-to-face in the White House, berating him because of the lynching of African Americans..." Additionally, Robeson, who lived abroad for years, "developed a global appeal that dwarfed what the Muslim Minister only sought to accomplish in the final months of his life."

Further, "Like Dr. King he had a mass appeal among African Americans. But, unlike the Nobel Laureate, Robeson was not only an artist whose performance stirred emotions and fealty worldwide, he was also allied with a then rising socialist left and allied trade unions...providing this performer with a reach that even Dr. King at his height found difficult to match," writes Horne.

Time magazine in 1943, would claim Robeson was "probably the most famous living Negro..." The Worker in 1964 would proclaim Robeson "the best known American in the world," though he would ultimately also become "the most blacklisted performer in America...," as Pete Seeger, the well-known folk singer, told his fellow performer.

As a political biography, Horne does a great job connecting Robeson's internationalism with the emerging socialist camp - and the concomitant rise of Communist Parties - as the Rutgers educated sportsman, actor and activists' thirst for language, enabled him "to communicate more effectively with diverse audiences" around the world.

Robeson intently "deepen[ed] his knowledge of languages," which "introduced him to the unity of humankind and thus dovetailed with his developing socialist beliefs..." Horne writes.

Arguably a product of his times, Robeson was a man one generation removed from slavery who grew up in a country practicing its own form of racist apartheid known as Jim Crow. As a Black man who eventually became a world-renowned actor and artist, early in his career Robeson's "groping as an actor in his attempt to grasp the lineaments of Othello was of a piece with his groping as a black man seeking to grasp the lineaments of capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy."

Seeking to make a living as an actor, it was in London where Robeson got his first big break - and began his life-long relationship with communism. For as Horne writes, while Robeson was very close to U.S. Black communists like Ben Davis and William L. Patterson - and while he never shied away from supporting the CPUSA - he repeatedly denied membership, though "his closeness to London comrades raises questions - rarely asked, hardly answered definitively - as to whether he was ever a member of the party in Great Britain, more of a likelihood than U.S. membership."

Gus Hall, the CPUSA's long-time chair, would later claim in 1998 that Robeson was in fact a member of the Communist Party, USA. He told attendees at a Robeson centennial tribute in late May of that year, "My own most precious moments with Paul were when I met with him to accept his dues and renew his yearly membership in the CPUSA. I and other Communist leaders, like Henry Winston...met with Paul to brief him on politics and Party policies and to discuss his work and struggles."

Regardless of Robeson's actual membership status, he unabashedly supported communists - even at the height of McCarthyism, telling a crowd of 5,000 in Harlem in June 1949, "...I'm not afraid of Communists; no, far from that. I will defend them as they defended us, the Negro people. And I stand firm and immovable by the side..." of the arrested CPUSA leaders. "Their struggle is our struggle."

Though he was at times an extremely wealthy man - making $100,000-plus a year in the late 1940's - he was also always broke, as he donated considerable income and time to working class and revolutionary movements, often singing and/or performing for free or donating the proceeds to progressive political causes. One example was the Council on African Affairs (CAA), "the vanguard organization in the U.S. campaigning against colonialism," headed by W.E.B. Du Bois and W. Alphaeus Hunton.

As McCarthyism enveloped the United States, Robeson's passport was confiscated, eliminating his ability to travel and earn a living, though his "voice continued to resonate abroad." In fact, argues Horne, "...Robeson's consistent internationalism, his maniacal study of languages and cultures was redeemed...when a great wave of humanity demanded that his right to travel be restored."

The attempted isolation of Robeson wasn't just about silencing him as an African American man who embodied the challenge to domestic Jim Crow, racism and international colonialism. It was also about silencing the domestic communist-led Left, dismantling a long fought for and hard won Red-Black alliance and the organizations which this alliance birthed. For, as the Party-led Civil Rights Congress and CAA were being destroyed - as other organizations, especially those tied to Dr. King filled the vacuum - it became increasingly apparent that they "did not have the international ties of the CRC, nor the global reach of the CAA, which amounted to a net loss for African-Americans and their allies," writes Horne.

I devoured Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary in one sitting. In a relatively short book, Horne has captured the essence of Paul Robeson as both a domestic leader for African American equality, as well as an international icon promoting decolonization and socialism on a world stage.

I hope a new generation of activists - Black and white - read Horne's insightful book.

Paul Robeson: The Artists as Revolutionary

By Gerald Horne

Pluto Press, 2016, 174 pages

Photo: PBS.org

“Striking Gridiron”: A touchdown for readers

Fri, 26 Feb 2016 11:37:00 +0000

Many of us collect something, and know that feeling of finding that once-in-a-lifetime treasure. Or you've had that feeling of glancing down to find a $20 bill, a four leaf clover or something you'd been looking for but had given up. That's what It felt like when, buying my monthly weight in books at the Half Price store, I happened upon "Striking Gridiron," (Greg Nichols, 2014, Thomas Dunn Books).

"Striking Gridiron" is based on the 1959 undefeated season of the Braddock High School football Tigers. That was a season in which Braddock broke the previous high school winning record of 56 games that had been set by a Massillon High School team coached by the great Paul Brown, in his first coaching gig two decades earlier, prior to Brown's founding of the Cleveland Browns.

All that would've won me over before opening the book, but that was not nearly all. Braddock is part of the Ohio Valley, which runs from Pittsburgh through Warren/Youngstown and Steubenville, nearly across to Cleveland. It is part of the Pittsburgh area and home, like much of that area, to massive steel mills, in this case the huge Edgar Thompson Works. 1959 was also when the largest United Steelworkers (USW) strike occurred. This was the backdrop to "Striking Gridiron."

By the end of the 50's, the "color line," the term referring to the Jim Crow practice of barring African Americans from teams, had been broken. Pro football was integrated by Paul Brown's Browns in 1946 and Jackie Robinson broke it in baseball in '48 with Brooklyn. This created a pressure which resulted in a great many teams, including high school/colleges, "integrating." This was the case of most Ohio Valley teams as well. "Integrating" at that time meant that they had a single Black player or two, token minorities who were brought in to be part of otherwise all-white teams. However, the Braddock team coached by Chuck Klausing, the central focus of the book, began doing things differently. Klausing strongly believed "fairness and earning your way." That meant that kids at Braddock had to actually earn their positions, resulting in half the Braddock teams in the '50's being African American, an unheard of situation at that time.

Klausing's defense of his team, the fight against racism, is also a major backdrop to the drama of the '59 football season.

There was also a very personal item with "Striking Gridiron" that jumped out at me. The front cover shows coach Klausing and some team members, including a young African American player named Ray Henderson. A great many steelworkers knew him later as "Butch" and as a leader in many labor struggles.

I got to know Butch years later, when George Edwards had recruited me into the rank & file reform movement in the USW. That movement had numerous forms, but that particular part of the movement was left-led, organized into the National Steelworkers Rank & File Committee (NSWRFC). NSWRFC put the fight against racism at its core. George Edwards, a leader of the Communist Party as well, was elected as one of the co-chairs. Another co-chair was Juan Chacon, a USWA/community leader from the Southwest who'd starred in the great, once-banned, union film "Salt of the Earth." Ray 'Butch' Henderson was the other NSWRFC co-chair.

None of that is actually part of this book, although at the end, Nichols does speak of Ray becoming a "community leader" and NAACP leader.

NSWRFC, in the 1970s, worked with the USW Black Caucus (which was known as the Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Steelworkers and was led by Jim Davis of Youngstown) to win a major federal lawsuit (Fairfield Decision-Consent Decree). The consent decree was designed to do a number of things: desegregate hiring/transfer/bidding processes in the steel industry, pay back-pay to African American workers and reinstitute craft training, with minorities and women getting first shots. All this came much later, and none of us who worked with Butch as co-chair knew his celebrated sports background.

I spent my entire adult life with the USW, working at the Lorain mill, for the union, and with steelworkers and their families. I say that to say that the young author, Greg Nichols, did not do any of that, but somehow does manage to "get it"!

Chuck Klausing, the coach and major protagonist of "Striking Gridiron" states, on the book's inset;

"Greg Nichols couldn't have written it better if he'd been on the sidelines with us."

Henderson is one of the team leaders, described as a "block of granite" that "nobody could block or tackle," and was an offensive end for the Braddock team. Unfortunately, according to Klausing, Butch had "hands of stone," which in football language is not a compliment. Without giving everything away, this is a problem they had to, and did, overcome, but just in time.

The main rivals of Braddock, where all the kids are sons/daughters of striking steelworkers, is North Braddock, where most of the team is made up of sons of mill managers. I know----can't make it up and have it fly, but, of course, the game that will enable Braddock to be undefeated and break the record is against North Braddock. You'll have to read it, but it IS about their undefeated season!

There are some real struggles, and not just football ones, in this fine read.

Nichols talks of how the corporate steelmill owners underestimated steelworkers. He discusses management's strategy heading into the '59 strike, 116 days, and the longest in U.S. history at that time. The companies planned on bankrolling steel, over-ordering to build up huge inventories, which they figured would wear out steelworkers, whose families would get hungry and pressure them to go back to work. As well, this was the '50s and union militancy had been rolled back. David McDonald, known to many as "Dapper Dave" for his taste for expensive suits, good food and rubbing elbows with bosses, was USW president. Management figured the workers wouldn't follow McDonald and that McDonald wouldn't lead. What they didn't figure on was what the workers did---take over the strike themselves, with mass picketing, huge rallies, pushing city/county officials and the local unions setting up food and rent relief for the strikers.

All this, while the players had to try to help their families, help with the strike and prepare for games that were all-important for those working class communities. The season builds to a climax, running alongside the strike!

Within this context, one of the personal struggles Klausing fought was attempting to get college scholarships for his players. He is extremely frustrated that he can help some players, but was much less successful helping African American players get into college. Butch Henderson is one player that Klausing spoke of particularly working for, but was ultimately unable to help with higher education. It is one of numerous areas where the book takes the fight from their football opponents to institutional racism, maybe doing more to prepare students for life ahead than anyone knew at the time.

I've often felt that there are close ties that bound working class culture to the game of football. When the Cleveland Browns were stolen from that city, unions, community groups and others rose up, holding huge demonstrations, marching on the old stadium and demanding use of eminent domain to "take over our Browns!" To this day it has puzzled me that it was easier to get folks to understand, buy into, public ownership of "our Browns" than it was to sell the idea of public takeover of closed mills.

While it still bothers me, since reading "Striking Gridiron," I think I've got a better handle on it.

Our working class culture, especially in steel towns where everyone "is part of" the mill becomes the culture of our people, all-pervasive in those areas. Football, a tough game, especially he early pro game, was born in the Ohio Valley. I remember Lou "The Toe" Groza being interviewed in his hometown of Steubenville. He pointed to a nearby football field, then to a local mine and a steelmill, stating;

"You'll either make it there, or you'll have to make there!"

That workers' culture is formed, in part, by the nature of folks in those towns----immigrants, East Europeans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Italians and Russians, and large, older, African American communities. People thrown together in hard, tough situations who can be dead quick if they don't pay attention, and work together! Folks living where the class struggle isn't something in books or speeches, it is, whatever it is called there, something those workers take home with them. It is with them always, especially when others look down on them. The disdain, arrogance, of other, wealthier folks who think they're "better" just pulls everyone together even more. Unity is part of the grit that blows in the window. It had better be, or you just won't make it!

"Striking Gridiron" is filled with working class culture. Most of the mills are now gone, not because steel isn't needed but because rich folks wanted to be richer and so they moved those jobs elsewhere. Those proud communities like Braddock have been turned into poverty-stricken ghost towns by unseen wealthy economic royalists. It is tragic!

And, while they've hammered us down, "Striking Gridiron" is a book about working folk that won't be beaten. It is a truly great book about a bunch of truly great people who pulled together and came out on top.

For a while, they were heroes. They were champions.

Bringing Eleanor Roosevelt’s lover Lorena Hickok out of the shadows

Fri, 26 Feb 2016 10:33:00 +0000

Eleanor Roosevelt is etched in American memory as the people's First Lady, the workaday heroine of the New Deal White House. She symbolized American resilience: in times of Depression, of war, she rolled up her sleeves and got to work, using her position as First Lady to hammer out policies that would lead to greater opportunities for women. Feminists rightly claim her as a leader and a pioneer. Yet many people still don't know, or won't admit, that Mrs. Roosevelt did pursue a personal life even while she was in the White House. In fact, her heart belonged to one woman: her lover and lifelong confidante, Lorena Hickok.

Terry Baum's one-woman play, Hick: A Love Story: The romance of Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, now playing through March 6 at the Theatre Project in Baltimore, complicates and enriches our understanding of this American heroine's private emotional life. And, like the best biographies, it offers us another hero who has been invisible, but was there all along: Lorena Hickok, or Hick.

The play's frank assertion that Hick and Eleanor were lovers represents a departure from earlier dramatizations of their relationship that maintained a high-minded ambiguity. In 2000, another one-woman show by Pat Bond (a friend of Baum's who died in 1990) came to Baltimore and garnered this review in the Sun: "Lorena Hickok, dead 32 years, will step onto a stage in Fells Point tomorrow evening and tell how she came to befriend and love Eleanor Roosevelt. She'll say just so much and no more, leaving the question open: What really went on between her and the woman who was once the most powerful in America?" In removing this ambiguity and claiming the couple's relationship as part of America's queer history, Hick: A Love Story raises more interesting and salient questions, both about Eleanor's image as a selfless public servant and about Hick as a historical figure in her own right.

In 1932 when she met Eleanor, Hick was a journalist with the Associated Press in New York, the highest-paid and most celebrated woman reporter of her time. Hick had worked hard to get the coveted assignment of covering FDR's first campaign for president-but Eleanor's charisma and their flirtatious meetups on the campaign trail derailed Hick's plan to deliver a hard-hitting profile of the candidate. As Eleanor's lover, Hick made a series of professional compromises, ultimately leading her to dismantle her career in journalism. Within a couple of years, Hick was working full-time for the Roosevelts, documenting the hardships people were facing in the Great Plains as a result of the Depression and feeding Eleanor material for her daily syndicated newspaper column.

Despite such sacrifices, Baum, who wrote and stars in the play, doesn't portray Hick as embittered. Instead, Eleanor's unabashed love gave her the sense of self-acceptance she had been missing as a closeted lesbian. Her earlier self recriminations-"I'm a monster, a pervert"-give way to a compassion and self-respect that make it almost easy for her to throw over her career out of devotion to Eleanor.

The 2336 letters from Eleanor to Hick that prove the affair happened did not surface until 1978. That year, according to Baum's program notes, Eleanor Roosevelt biographer Doris Faber "found 18 filing boxes willed to the [FDR Presidential] Library by Lorena Hickok, a close confidante of Eleanor's, with the instructions, 'Not to be opened until ten years after my death.' Hick had died exactly ten years earlier."

The letters, written during and long after their affair until Eleanor's death in 1962, provide the textual basis for the play. As Hick, Baum swaggers and vamps around the stage, showing us all the conflicting forces that must have been at work inside Hick. Still, the play is strongest when Hick reads Eleanor's letters, with a voice-over narration by Paula Barish as the voice of Eleanor. This dedication to the biographical facts does feel cumbersome at times; but it pays dividends later, as we see Hick slowly grow into her role as the keeper of the truth about Eleanor as a sexual and emotional human being.

Eleanor understood what it cost Hick to devote herself to the First Lady and tried to ease this by providing a room for Hick inside the White House (!), and later by entrusting Hick with her letters and confidence. Eleanor, a master of public relations, never asked for the letters back before her death, even though they were no longer together as a couple and Hick could have easily exposed her. Indeed, Hick was conflicted about keeping the letters and said she burned the most explicit of them. The letters that remain are stunning in their intimacy: "I want to put my arms around you" and "it is all the little things, tones in your voice, the feel of your hair, gestures, these are the things I think about and long for. "

Even as Eleanor made history as the first ambassador to the United Nations, as the co-architect of many of the New Deal programs that brought the United States out of the Depression, she also became self-actualized as Hick's lover.

Baum's ambitious narration skips across the decades, touching like a stone on the surface at certain points in time. Through Baum's monologues, we witness the couple's meeting and first lovemaking during the campaign for the presidency in 1932; their "honeymoon," a remarkable three-week train trip into Canada alone-without the Secret Service--during the Roosevelts' first term in office; and an inauspicious later trip to Yosemite that was marred by Hick's jealous demand that Eleanor choose between her and the public that loved and needed her almost as much as Hick did.

The play, though overly sentimental and nostalgic at times, presents Hick as a hard-working person who happened to fall for someone who was making history and who thus became swept into the stream of history herself. Though she has been invisible in history textbooks, Hick at the end of her life performed an important national service in donating to the library the cache of letters she had received from Eleanor over the years. Because of this one act of bravery, Americans must learn to understand their beloved Eleanor Roosevelt as a complicated, emotional, and sexual woman who met and fell in love with another woman. Hick's leap of faith-and Baum's honest interpretation of their story-finally lets us see Eleanor Roosevelt as part of the still-emerging history of LGBTQ people in the U.S. Instead of shocking or scandalizing the audience, Hick's revelations about Eleanor push us further along the path toward accepting our American icons as full human beings.

HICK: A Love Story

The Romance of Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt

Thu February 25 - Sun March 6

Baltimore Theatre Project, 45 West Preston St., Baltimore MD 21201 Box office: 410-752-8558

Photo: Lorena Hickok. FDR Library.

“Detroit Jazz City”: New CD celebrates the Motor City

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 13:16:00 +0000

Music enthusiasts may rarely think of Detroit when it comes to jazz ... but a new CD might change that. Detroit Jazz City is a new compilation featuring the best of Motor City jazz. It brings together classic recordings by some of Detroit's legendary jazz artists and adds some great newer tracks from current talent. The result is not only a must-have for jazz fans, but for everyone who loves good music. This CD goes beyond the music itself. All proceeds from sales will benefit Focus: HOPE, a Detroit nonprofit organization that provides education and training for underrepresented minorities and others. It's great music for a great cause.

The CD leads off with Marion Hayden performing "The Uncrowned King." Hayden is one of very few female jazz bassists in the business and continually performs in the Michigan region. Other current musicians who contribute include clarinetist/saxophonist James Carter with "Many Blessings" and composer/guitarist A. Spencer Barefield who performs "Ghost Dancers." Barefield is the artistic-executive director of the Creative Arts Collective in Detroit. The newer artists represented here showcase the continuing energy of the Detroit music scene and jazz in particular. This CD excels at mixing recordings from current artists along with vintage tracks from Detroit jazz legends.

Among the legendary musicians included is tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, who spent over 40 years in the music business. Henderson became a familiar face in the Detroit music clubs of the 1950s. His talent shines through on "Mode for Joe."

Trumpeter Marcus Belgrave is presented in fine fashion with the tune "Lottie The Body's Mood." Belgrave made a successful name for himself in the Detroit jazz scene and beyond, appearing with many greats during his career including Ray Charles. He was a jazz trumpet professor at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and recently passed away at age 78, in 2015.

Drummer Elvin Jones was born in Pontiac, Michigan, and was a member of the John Coltrane Quartet from 1960 to 1966. He is represented here with the track "Reza." Trumpeter Donald Byrd originated from Detroit and seamlessly shifted from bebop into funk and soul later in his career. Byrd is heard with his recording of "French Spice." Pianist Kenny Cox accompanied singer Etta Jones in the 1960s and is featured on "You." After many years in New York City, Cox returned to the Motor City and became a fixture at local jazz venues.

One vocal track serves as the finale of this nine-song compilation. The tune is "Sheila's Blues" and it is performed by legendary female jazz singer and songwriter Sheila Jordan. At age 87 Jordan is still actively performing her style of bebop and scat for audiences worldwide. Her recording on this CD is autobiographical as she traces her childhood roots from Detroit to a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania and back to Detroit as a young singer.

Detroit Jazz City is released by Blue Note Records. The vintage tracks were produced by Alfred Lion, Duke Pearson, and Francis Wolff. Don Was, a Detroit native and current president of Blue Note Records, produced the new recordings. This was a very special project for Was, who says, "All of us at Blue Note Records are excited by this opportunity to shine a light on the rich musical legacy of Detroit and on Focus: HOPE who have done so much to help the city's less fortunate residents."

Focus: HOPE is a non-denominational organization founded by Father William T. Cunningham and Eleanor M. Josaitis in the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit Race Riot. [Until the riots following the assasination of Dr. Martin Luther King in April 1968, the Detroit Race Riot stood as the largest urban uprising of the 1960s. - See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/detroit-race-riot-1967 - sthash.VXYohNHy.dpuf ]

Its mission statement adopted in 1968 includes recognizing the dignity of every person and pledging intelligent and practical action to overcome racism, poverty, and injustice. It runs a variety of community educational programs and child care in a modern campus, in an area of Detroit populated by abandoned industrial buildings.

Detroit Jazz City is a win-win addition for any music collection. It showcases the very best of Detroit's jazz legacy, and all proceeds will go to programs aiming to better the lives of Detroit area citizens.

Photo: Audio CD cover, Detroit Jazz City, Bluenote, "The finest in jazz since 1939."

“I kill a man…/I love a man…”: The Emile Griffith jazz opera

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 15:58:00 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO - Of the hundreds of opera performances I have attended over a lifetime, rarely have I been so emotionally engaged and stirred as I was by Terence Blanchard's Champion: An Opera in Jazz, that tells the story of 1960s and '70s boxer Emile Griffith.

Griffith came out of the U.S. Virgin Islands, and prided himself on his abilities on the baseball field, as a popular singer, and as an inspired creator of hats, a skill he came to New York City to try and market. Enter boxing producer Howie Albert, who takes one look at him and declares he's got the perfect body to be a welterweight boxer. The die is cast. His training commences.

Griffith appears on the scene with more baggage than the average young man in his twenties seeking his fortune in the Big City. Deserted by his mom as a child (along with his six siblings by different dads) and raised by a series of none too caring relatives, young Emile is castigated as a child of the Devil, and forced to hold heavy cinderblocks lifted above his head for hours at a time as punishment. (For what? Just for being a kid, so far as I could tell.) That's what gave him such a strong body.

In New York, Emile meets his estranged mother, who doesn't even recognize him correctly, but soon sees him as her ticket to the lifestyle to which she'd like to become accustomed if he can make it as a professional boxer. Everyone seems to want a piece of him; but part of the load he carries is that in this unpropitious time, Emile is also struggling with his sexuality. He is attracted physically and emotionally to men, but he is so deeply damaged that he can never permit himself the simple comforting intimacy that might finally bring him some peace of mind. He is always on the run - from his own demons.

The most salient moment of Griffith's career took place in 1962 when he faced the Cuban-born Benny Paret in the ring. Before and during the match Paret tries to distract Emile from his game with taunts that he's a "maricón," a vulgar term for homosexual. In this hyper-masculine world there is just no place for genteel diversity of sexual orientation. In a supercharged rage against Paret's words, against oppression, against the thwarting of his own plans for his life, against all the hurts he had suffered as a child, Griffith strikes out mercilessly - as he's told he needs to - landing 17 hard blows on his cocky Cuban opponent in less than seven seconds, all on live TV. Paret is thrown into a coma from which he does not emerge and within days is dead.

The guilt from this incident continues to plague Griffith. Over the next decade, as he defends his title in bout after bout across the globe, the boxer eventually and inevitably starts showing signs of dementia pugilistica. By the time we meet the elder Griffith this condition is extremely pronounced: He barely knows what a shoe is or where it belongs. He has truly lost his footing. In the end, meeting with Benny Paret's son to ask forgiveness, he does receive a belated grace. Griffith died in 2013 at the age of 75.

But this is an opera, not just a biography. And it's the music that tells Emile Griffith's gripping tale of rise and fall, of bad that comes out of good, and maybe with some luck, a little good that comes from bad.

Composer Terence Blanchard is one of the brightest lights in the jazz world, a trumpeter, bandleader, composer and educator. Thirty years ago he starred with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and he's gone on to win five Grammy Awards with his various ensembles. He's the most frequently sought-after composer for Spike Lee's films, beginning with 1991's Jungle Fever. Blanchard grew up in opera-loving New Orleans, where his father sang as an amateur baritone. Champion is Blanchard's first opera.

Much of the famous boxer's story is told in Dan Klores and Ron Berger's 2005 documentary Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story. Blanchard chose Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright (The Shadow Box), filmmaker and actor Michael Cristofer as his librettist. Writing an opera libretto for the first time, Cristofer says, "For me, Emile's story not only asks the question of what it means to be a man, it asks what it means to be a human being."

Later in life, Griffith remarked, "I kill a man and most people understand and forgive me. However, I love a man, and to so many people this is an unforgivable sin." It's possible that Leonard P. Matlovich (1943-1988), Vietnam War vet and recipient of the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star, knew this quote. Matlovich was the first gay U.S. service member to purposely out himself to the military to fight their ban on gays. His tombstone at Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., reads, "When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one."

A stellar cast of newcomers and veterans

Champion portrays Griffith at three critical stages of life. As a barefoot youngster in the West Indies he is played by Moses Abrahamsson (seen February 21), alternating with Evan Holloway. Almost omnipresent at the top of the multi-tiered set is the elderly, severely disoriented Emile portrayed by bass Arthur Woodley, distinguished recitalist and opera singer with many leading American opera companies, who also created this role in the world premiere production at Opera Theatre of St. Louis in June 2013.

Emile Griffith in his prime is played by the handsome, fit, multi-talented actor-singer, bass-baritone Kenneth Kellogg, who is building a notable career in regional opera companies with otherwise standard operatic roles.

Soprano Karen Slack, who has sung at the Metropolitan Opera as well as many smaller houses, plays Emile's mother Emelda Griffith. She has a firm, soaring instrument that adjusts easily to Blanchard's jazz style. She was especially effective in a keening solo accompanied by only a jazz bass. The role of the trainer Howie Albert was taken by baritone Robert Orth, Artist of the Year at both the New York City Opera and Seattle Opera.

Smaller roles, but every one of them necessary and significant, are played by Andres Ramirez as Luis Rodrigo Griffith, Emile's adopted son and caretaker; Mark Hernandez as the Ring Announcer; Michelle Rice as Kathy Hagan, the owner of a bar that caters to gay people and to which Emile is almost hypnotically drawn from time to time; Aisha Campbell as Emile's Satan-fearing Cousin Blanche; Victor Ryan Robertson as Benny Paret, and later his son; Chabrelle Williams as Sadie, whom Emile marries not really out of love but in an unsuccessful escape to respectability; and Bradley Kynard, a man in a bar with whom there was just maybe a fleeting chance of Emile's finding companionship.

A critical role is played by the hard-working 12-person chorus of West Indian and Harlem paraders, reporters and boxing fans. A special note needs to be made of Joe Orrach, Champion's choreographer, who happens to be a U.S. Air Force Welterweight Champion. He opens the show with an extended solo at the speed bag, which he uses expertly as a percussion instrument. Opening the second act, Orrach thrills again, this time with a kind of tap dance for agile boxer's feet, becoming a virtuoso turn at skipping rope, varying rhythms and a range of sound effects from those tools like a trained orchestra player.

Touched by genius

Blanchard's orchestra has some 30 players, and is strong on strings and brass. He incorporates a jazz trio of piano, bass and drums which becomes more prominent in Act II. Nicole Paiement, artistic director and founder of San Francisco's alternative Opera Parallèle, which produced the opera in conjunction with the SFJAZZ Center, conducts this many-layered score with great vigor.

Blanchard's music is touched by genius. Few other operas have been composed in the jazz idiom. Much of the time, it needs to be said, Blanchard uses his orchestra in a fairly traditional manner (strings are generally not so much featured in jazz), and there appears to be little of the improvisational, which is one of the hallmarks of the jazz form. But his harmonies and occasionally his use of the jazz trio do mark the music as coming from a different genre base. (Perhaps a suitable analogy might be Kurt Weill's radical use of music hall and jazz cabaret as the foundational germs for his highly sophisticated scores for Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny in the late 1920s, a surprising, but really perfectly legitimate fusion of conservatory principles of composition with a modern esthetic and non-standard instrumentation.)

Blanchard captures the merry moods of West Indian festivals and parades from Emile's childhood, the Harlem strut of a successful, well-dressed populace on the town, and the wretched mental states of Emile both in his manic highs and self-hating depressive lows. His solo writing for the mother and the wife shows real affinity for the voice. Emile's solo "What makes a man?" delivered as a reverie before he KO's Paret, is a memorable aria for the bass that could easily find its way onto recital programs and recordings. The moment of Paret's beating and collapse is captured in the orchestra by a quickly descending funnel of sound that declines into sudden nothingness.

The audience for Champion was a mix of races, genders and sexual orientations, and clearly of seasoned opera lovers, sports fans and the generally curious. Blanchard is, for me, the composer of the moment, who has set a high bar and from whom much will be expected.

I believe Champion has broken new ground in theater, in music, in opera; and not least for the stunning multiplicity of roles the composer has created for professionally trained African American singers. This new masterpiece should be in demand at forward-looking opera and musical theater companies around the country. I anticipate that Champion will have its champions not only as a work in and of itself but also as one to build upon for a whole new American repertoire. I hope there are plans for a video production and audio recording.

Champion plays at the SFJAZZ Center, 201 Franklin St. (at Fell), San Francisco. Remaining performances are Feb. 24, 26 and 27 at 7:30 pm, and Feb. 28 at 4 pm. For tickets, call 866.920.5299, or go to SFJAZZ.org.

Photo: Kenneth Kellogg (center stage) as Young Emile Griffith and Arthur Woodley as Old Emile Griffith (seated on bed, upstage) in the Opera Parallèle and SFJAZZ co-production of Terence Blanchard's "Champion: An Opera in Jazz," February 19-28 at SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco. | Bill Evans.

Progressive cinema: “Angel of Nanjing”

Tue, 23 Feb 2016 10:41:00 +0000

A newly released documentary has been winnings awards around the world. The very touching Angel of Nanjing follows a young man who is on a personal mission to save people attempting to commit suicide by jumping off the largest bridge in China.

Chen Si, without any psychology or medical training, takes on the human task of convincing people that life is valuable. On his motor scooter, wearing a jacket that states 'Cherish Life Everyday" he patrols the largest bridge in China, which runs over the Yangtze River in Nanjing. It's the most popular place in the world to commit suicide. China has almost 300,000 a year, nearly one-third of the world's total.

The compelling film contains amazing video footage of thwarted suicide attempts. Talking people off the bridge, giving them food, companionship, finding jobs, all without the common religious solutions of seeking God's help, but rather a commitment to society and the human being.

He credits his strong feelings for life to his grandmother, who is shown in her small village dealing with the pains of old age. Without professional training he feels he has acquired a lot of firsthand experience and has developed some theories about suicide. He groups them into five types:

- Those caused by a sudden drastic change in life, loss of job or loved one. "These are easiest to save as long as I can get them out of immediate danger and give them time to heal."

- The second type are those suffering from psychological problems, which he attributes to the rising standard of living leaving many behind.

- The third category are people at an advanced stage of terminal illness. "The success rate is very low because they cannot bear the pain of their disease."

- The fourth type is caused by domestic violence, usually women.

- And the last group are those caused by emotional pain from personal relationship issues.

Since he began his mission 11 years ago, he has saved over 300 lives, and at great personal sacrifice. Chen says, "As long as I can get within 50 feet I can determine if someone intends on suicide." He uses personal funds to help pay for temporary shelter for those he's saved from suicide. In addition, he has a yearly Christmas party bringing together many of those he's saved over the years.

Despite all the lives he's saved, Chen's mission has taken an unexpected toll on him. He feels incredible guilt when he learns someone committed suicide while he wasn't at the bridge, and even more when he is there and is still unable to save them. He's become a heavy smoker and drinker, and often finds himself battling with depression. He is also under growing pressure from his family to quit, who cannot understand why he spends so much time and money helping others when he has his own family to worry about.

But the film focuses on the humanity of this average man, showing how love for life and people, outside of the traditional religious solutions, can drive a person in a country of over a billion people to exercise compassion for his fellow humans.

The award winning documentary is directed by Jordan Horowitz and Frank Ferendo, and produced by Balance Films and Blue Bus Productions. It debuts on VOD (iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play) February 16th.

"Requiem for the American Dream": Wake-up call!

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 11:25:00 +0000

Noam Chomsky's new film Requiem for the American Dream is a clear-eyed, easily accessible outline of how and why American idealism has been sabotaged. Although he doesn't detail the dream, Chomsky sketches its promise of mobility, an expectation of progress toward a better life through some sort of democratic polity.

These documentary interviews, filmed over four years, suggest that the destruction of the dream is not a natural, inexorable occurrence, but the result of choices made by people operating within certain belief systems and for self-enrichment. Could the dream have been realized through different circumstances, different people making different choices?

Regarded by many as America's most influential intellectual, Noam Chomsky is also a great storyteller. Without overwhelming the viewer or the material, he marshals data, example and anecdote, cutting through 250 years of history to distill ten basic principles of wealth and power which have conspired against the American Dream. More than anything, the film is a well organized, thoughtful look at these forces and their consequences.

This is not an exhortative polemic. Although Chomsky is not dispassionate, he is more saddened than outraged, more intent on finding cause than inciting action. Unlike fellow system critics like ubiquitous former Labor Secretary cum political reformist Robert Reich, Chomsky neither suggests nor pleads for saving capitalism through economic reshuffling or revitalized bourgeois democratic elections.

Chomsky finds the roots of the Requiem in how the United States was originally set up. The U.S. Constitution put power in the hands of the wealthy. The Constitution was written to prevent, not promote, democracy. Concentrations of wealth resulted in concentrations of political power. The course of our history has been defined by the struggles of this wealth and political power against upsurges in democratization, most notably in the 1930s labor movement and the 1960s peace, civil rights and women's movements.

Power and wealth fought back against these popular movements by trying to shape ideology and manufacture consent. Elections are engineered. Attempts to regulate the economy are undermined. Solidarity of the American dreamers is attacked. As Chomsky has shown through earlier work ("Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" with Edward S. Herman, 1988) control was extended beyond the use of force into the domain of culture by marketing compliance and marginalizing dissent.

Chomsky himself provides an example of the extent to which dissent is marginalized when he chooses to avoid mentioning by name the great sources of ideas which help us understand how power and wealth function: socialists like Gramsci, Lukacs or even the scholar of the British Museum himself.

Rather than end his dissertation in despair, Chomsky offers elements of hope, if not exactly a well lit path to redemption. Popular movements, efforts to dismantle illegitimate authority, freedom of speech and new forms of political action all offer hope. He cites philosopher John Dewey's admonition that institutions should be under participatory democratic control. What matters, relates Chomsky, quoting his friend historian Howard Zinn, are the countless deeds of unknown people who lay the basis for the events of human history. Ultimately, learning how the world works will greatly aid in changing it.

For his great contributions to the latter, particularly the summary given in Requiem for the American Dream, Noam Chomsky has helped lay the foundations for understanding and ultimately change.

A trailer for the film can be seen here.

Photo: Official website

Documentary on Black Panther Party explores organization’s complex history

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 16:16:00 +0000

"You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail a revolution." So said the iconic founding leader of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton. This year marks the Black Panthers' 50th anniversary. Founded in Oakland, California in 1966, the black nationalist organization came out of the growing Black Power movement to empower African Americans in the U.S, and across the globe, against the ills of oppression and poverty under a structurally racist system.

Newton's quote highlights the importance of the existence of the Black Panther Party beyond one single member or leader, showing what this organization represented for a people and the struggle against inequality. The PBS network this week aired the documentary The Black Panther Party: Vanguard of the Revolution. The film showcases the history of the Black Panthers in all its various shades. As one former member, Phyllis Jackson, states in the film when referring to the life and times of the Panthers, "It wasn't easy, it was complex."

The two-hour documentary, by director and producer Stanley Nelson, details the rich history of the party, which was its most active from 1966 to 1982. This is an ambitious task that although has its impressive moments, often leaves much to be desired, especially when it spends an extensive amount of time on a few leaders of the party, leaving a good amount unsaid about other key players. Despite this shortcoming, the rare footage, interviews by former members, and written letters make for a stylistically pleasing introduction to this important organization.

The film begins by explaining the origin of the party and why it was needed in the late sixties. It sets the background by showing the racism faced by black Americans, including: rampant police brutality in cities heavily populated by African Americans, (in particular Oakland California); poverty; and an overall "rage in the streets," (as former party chairperson Elaine Brown puts it). It explains that the party began as a militant defense organization, expressly exercising the Second Amendment right to bear arms. From this highlight alone we see that history can often repeat itself, or is ongoing, as police brutality and the value of black lives in the United States is still a hot topic some fifty years later.

From there, the documentary moves chronologically, highlighting some key moments in the movement. Some of these moments include: the national fight to release Huey P. Newton from prison, and how the slogan "Free Huey" came about. We see evidence of the shoot-out involving Black Panther Party members Bobby Hutton and Eldridge Cleaver, which resulted in Hutton being the first Panther member killed by police. We witness leader Fred Hampton's rise as a public figure to become Chairman, and his brutal assassination at the hands of law enforcement; and also the shifting of the Party into electoral politics with the campaign of leader Bobby Seale for Oakland Mayor and leader Elaine Brown for Oakland city council.

The film also extensively talks about the infiltration of the Party by law enforcement, led by former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The film explains, through interviews with former FBI agents and police officers, that the Black Panther party was one of the main targets of the government's Counter Intelligence Program known as COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO was a series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the FBI aimed at discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations.

This ties into the narrative the film presents the case that the fall of the Panthers was greatly orchestrated by the U.S government, as it was seen as a major threat to the system. It goes further to argue that although the FBI set the stage for the demise of the party, it was the clashing of large personalities within the organization, mainly between Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, that ultimately dealt the death blow. Impressively, with examinations like this, the film does not shy away from the darker parts of the Panthers' history and shortcomings.

Another example of this, though brief, is the documentary taking a moment to discuss the role of women within the organization. The film cites that at the height of the party's popularity a majority of the rank and file members were women. Yet, as Elaine Brown notes in the film, sexism was not overcome within the organization. As she puts it, "We didn't get these brothers from revolutionary Heaven," despite the fact that gender norms were challenged in the party by allowing the women to carry weapons.

The film itself falls short on the gender issue in that it highlights many of the major male figures of the party but does little to profile the first and only woman chairperson of the organization, Elaine Brown herself. Brown appears in a few snippets of recent interviews and a short highlight of her campaign for Oakland City Council, but unlike her male counterparts, her rise to leadership and contributions aren't covered extensively, despite the fact that she was chair of the party for three years in Newton's absence. Brown actually has an autobiography A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story, which does a great job of addressing the intersectionality of being a woman and black within the revolutionary struggle. It is a shame that none of this is truly detailed in the documentary.

At its best, the film shows an organization, mainly made up of young people initially, who wanted to stand up and fight back against the oppression they faced. It shows the contributions they made in uplifting a community through public programs and revolutionary ideals. In the year 2016, we have the emergence of Black Lives Matter, and a society that still faces much of what the Black Panthers were fighting against in the 1960s. That is what makes this documentary so timely and powerful even if it only chips away at the tip of the iceberg regarding the complexities of the movement. If nothing else it can encourage those that watch the film to dig deeper into the history of the party, which will forever be remembered as a key influencer in the struggle for black liberation.

Photo: Black Panther Party women - Screen shot from trailer

New Civil War book examines the role of guerrilla conflict

Wed, 17 Feb 2016 10:03:00 +0000

Until recently, the role of the Civil War guerrilla has been largely neglected. Joseph M. Beilein Jr. and Matthew C. Hulbert, however, have done a tremendous service to Civil War history generally and guerrilla conflict specifically in The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth.

While guerrilla conflict is very much a niche topic, Beilein and Hulbert, and the eight other essayists who contributed to this volume, tell a narrative history every American should be interested in; small-scale guerrilla conflict not only helped to shape the out-come of the Civil War, but also helped to shape the parameters of war-time violence, of which both Union and Confederate guerrillas engaged in - often spurring even more violence.

As they write in the Introduction, "...[T]he black flag has long been associated with the Civil War's guerrilla conflict. When raised, the flag allegedly signaled a war without mercy, fought to the death, without exception. It was meant to instill terror...it reminded men of their own mortality - of the utter finality and loneliness of death on the battlefield."

In Violence, Conflict, and Loyalty in the Carolina Piedmont: A Comparative Perspective the contributors convincingly argue that guerrilla conflict "was a product not only of wartime strains and fluctuating power structures but also of antebellum socioeconomic conditions: kinship ties, neighborhood dynamics, political affiliations, and the...ways in which communities functioned. Power relations in rural southern localities, especially in a political sense, were formed long before the attack on Fort Sumter," they conclude.

For example, in the South Carolina Piedmont, "the upcountry, cotton was certainly king prior to the Civil War..." enabling a "shift from a self-sufficient form of agriculture to the more commercially engaged production of cotton" and the concomitant use of slaves. Conversely, in the North Carolina Piedmont "slavery was far less important." Textiles and other industries, as well as the railroad, were emerging as the dominant form of economic activity. Additionally, the central Piedmont counties "contained a large Quaker population, and a number of citizens had religious and other ideological concerns about slavery as an institution."

Such differing political-economic relations shaped the degree to which various communities engaged in guerrilla activity. And, "Differing responses in the North and South Carolina Piedmont developed into contrasting relationships with the nascent southern nation...Respective military enlistment patterns [as well as guerrilla activity] give the historian a clear insight into the divergent loyalties within the two regions."

The guerrilla conflict, as one contributor notes, served "an ideological as much as a strategic motive." In what is referred to as "the politicization of the various shadow warriors in the American Civil War," guerrilla partisans often shared a "collective ideological" rather than "individual, personalized" motive, as they literally battled over the "centrality of slavery and emancipation in precipitating the fullest expression of this form of warfare..."

Additionally, Confederate guerrilla partisans targeted "government officials, federal and county, from postmasters to judges...they hunted office holders or draft board members, who by extension represented the legitimacy of the federal government." Further, "Unionist legislators, regardless of their stance on slavery, were among the first to become actual targets of irregulars" or guerrillas.

To its credit The Civil War Guerrilla also devotes an illuminating chapter on the impact of Native American insurgent activity against both the Union and Confederate armies. Interestingly, we learn that Confederate officers and soldiers - with approval from Jefferson Davis - hoped to recruit pro-slavery Texans, take New Mexico, and "vanquish California, using its Pacific port to reestablish international trade and subvert the Union blockade" and "Through the instruments of empire honed by American expansionist efforts in the previous decade...the Confederacy could act as a nation on the world stage and maintain its own independence," while establishing "its dominion over the Union and over the region's Native Americans." Fortunately, Native American guerrilla raids helped to squelch this plan for continent-wide domination.

My criticism of The Civil War Guerrilla is the lack of attention on partisan activity that free Blacks or slaves led, initiated or participated in. African Americans, undoubtedly, played an active, leading role in their own liberation from slavery, as soldiers and as guerrillas - as the documentary evidence makes abundantly clear - during the Civil War, and long before.

The Civil War Guerrilla would have been strengthened by contributions highlighting this aspect of irregular conflict, something historian Gerald Horne has done in his work: The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation, Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow and Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States , The Haitian Revolution, And The Origins Of The Dominican Republic - which I mention to illustrate the availability of resources.

Minus this caveat, The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth is a wonderful contribution to Civil War history.

"The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth"

Edited by Joseph M. Beilein Jr., and Matthew C. Hulbert

Kentucky University Press, 258 pages

Kendrick Lamar and other top moments of the 2016 Grammys

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 12:22:00 +0000

Watched the Grammys last night. Most of it. A lot of it dragged but a few terrific performances and notable speeches/awards punctuated the slow-mo show. Here are my top moments:

Kendrick Lamar's performance of "The Blacker the Berry" and "Alright" was like watching a Langston Hughes poem come to life. Powerful. Beautiful. Truthful. Prideful. Biting. Layered. Artistic. Lamar won the top number of Grammys this year, taking home four, including (of course) Best Rap Album for "To Pimp a Butterfly." Tupac must have been smiling...

Stevie Wonder and Pentatonix a cappella tribute to Earth Wind and Fire's Maurice White. They held that song ("That's the Way of the World") together with probably very little time to practice as Wonder was asked at the last minute. Great musicians.

Stevie Wonder holding up the envelope with the Song of the Year winner written in Braille and teasing the audience: ha ha, you can't read it! Followed by his disability rights advocacy that everything should be accessible to every single person with a disability.

"Thinking Out Loud" Song of the Year winner Ed Sheeran thanking his parents who came to the Grammys for the last four years and finally saw their son win instead of having to say: Maybe next year.

Hamilton - both the performance and acceptance speech/poem/rap by Lin Manuel-Miranda with the Puerto Rican flag held up by a cast member behind him. What a story about the making of a musical blockbuster. Who'd have thunk it?

Lady Gaga's tribute to David Bowie. She wows us with her National Anthem during the Super Bowl and then does it again during the Grammys. What reach, versatility and musicianship. Great collaboration with Nile Rodgers.

Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for Album of the Year. I was rooting for Lamar to win it but this industry powerhouse made history by being the first woman to win it twice. She gave an empowering message to girls and young women: Own your accomplishments.

Phillip Riggs. Who? The 2016 Grammy Music Educator of the Year. I'm so glad they started such an important award in 2014 and that's not because my son is a music educator! I love that they mention the winner during the broadcast. I just wish they gave the teacher a few minutes to say something. The more advocacy of music and arts in the schools the better!

Meghan Trainor who won Best New Artist and was genuinely moved by being considered an "artist" and not just a "songwriter."

Wondering what Lionel Ritchie was thinking while he watched the tribute to The Commodores.

Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson won Record of the Year for Uptown Funk and George Clinton got a well deserved shout out from Ronson: "I see George Clinton over there, a man who has done more for the word funk than we could ever hope to dream of in our entire lives. So I want to thank James Brown, George Clinton...Prince, Earth Wind and Fire, of course."

I never saw the Apple commercial before with Mary J. Blige, Kerry Washington and Taraji Henson. Brilliant.

B.B. King tribute with Chris Stapleton, Bonnie Raitt and Gary Clark. The thrill was there.

What were your highlights - or lowlights - this year?

Photo: Kendrick Lamar performs at the 58th annual Grammy Awards on Feb. 15, in Los Angeles. Matt Sayles | Invision | AP

A new opera focuses on Frau Schindler of “List” fame

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 15:08:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - A well prepared concert reading of Frau Schindler, a new opera by composer Thomas Morse to a libretto by Ken Cazan (with Morse), took place at the University of Southern California on February 5th. The opera places Emilie Schindler, Oskar's wife, at center stage. It's is a keen psychological portrait of the woman who, alongside her husband, saved a thousand Jews from extermination by employing them in his factory. The story is well known from the 1982 book Schindler's List by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, subsequently turned into a blockbuster film directed by Steven Spielberg.

In three acts, the opera features more than 20 roles, plus chorus, in scenes that alternate between the Schindler home and the factory. Much of the final act takes place in Switzerland, where the Schindlers find temporary refuge at war's end, and then Argentina, where they settled. Professional singers played the two leads: mezzo-soprano Blythe Gaissert as Emilie, and baritone Troy Cook as Oskar. The rest of the cast, and the orchestra, were comprised of USC students. The one-night event was a presentation of the USC Visions and Voices program. Brent McMunn, conductor and music director of Thornton Opera at USC, did heroic work preparing this difficult score and leading his talented young performers.

Emilie is not the only woman in Oskar's life: He pursues a number of serial affairs, making little attempt to keep them on the down low, which becomes a constant leitmotif of the opera. Nevertheless, Emilie believes he needs her, and the home, stability and common sense that she provides.

The faithful wife has been selling off family jewels to support Oskar's succession of unrealistic business ventures. When she is recuperating from a back operation, Oskar never comes home from his business affairs to see her. Toward the end of their lives, Oskar effectively leaves Emilie behind in Argentina when he returns to Germany and an attractive job offer.

Emilie is childless for reasons unexplained. At one point in the second act, she has a poignant scene where, against her own Catholic inclination, she helps one of her Jewish women workers abort an unplanned (and illegal) fetus. (The almost comic irony to this is that Ms. Gaiessert, the singer of the Emilie role, was herself quite visibly pregnant!)

Composer Morse has a background in film and popular music, and currently shuttles between Los Angeles and Berlin. Frau Schindler is his first opera. He is certainly aware of historical precedents in opera. In the scene where Oskar introduces to his brutish Nazi colleagues his new business plan of making armaments under cover of an enamel factory, employing a thousand Jewish workers whom he will replace as they drop, he entertains them with a recording of the "Liebestod" from Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, that rapturous fusion of love and death that concludes the opera. And all the while he expostulates about the New World Order they are creating. Wagner was notoriously Hitler's favorite composer, leading many in the post-war world, especially Jews, to reject his work.

The way the Nazis' New World Order is described - basically extracting free labor out of populations that have little other access to housing and food, or even life itself - suggested parallels to such "orders" that for all practical purposes exist today in many places, on agricultural plantations around the world, among the foreign worker corps in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and in maquiladora-type factories in Latin America and Asia.

I had picked up in the orchestration remarkable simulations of glass, particularly from the harp which plays an outsized role in the pit. These suggestions of lightness, transparency and fragility I thought might have recalled the Nazis' coordinated campaign of terror and breaking of windows on Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), which occurred in multiple German and Austrian cities on November 9-10, 1938. And sure enough, just moments later, the Nazi business partners at the Schindlers' dinner party toast their new business scheme by casting Emilie's heirloom Baccarat champagne glasses into the fireplace.

How much melody does opera require?

Morse sets his text the way people talk, although more concisely and singably. His "set pieces" - extended solo passages - are few, but are wonderfully subtle reflections on character, especially those for the title role, and a lyrical rumination on women in a time of war by Emilie's friend Frau von Daubek (Katie Beck). Most operas have some expository dialogue (up to the 20th century generally referred to as "recitative") between "numbers." Beginning with Wagner and then Richard Strauss, the proportion of declamatory writing over set pieces increased: Late Strauss works such as the pre-Nazi era Intermezzo (1924) and Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman), premiering in Dresden in 1935, are largely in this style. Morse surely must have had such models in mind - the kind of operas actually being written during the Nazi era - in his compositional strategy for Frau Schindler.

The conversational mode naturally revives the old debate over how much melody opera actually requires. If the acting, stagework and the spectacle are impressive enough, audiences will forgive a work that is other than (or less than) a stunning parade of stellar arias, duets, ensembles, choruses and orchestral interludes. Even in Wagner's 19th-century operas the text is largely declaimed: The truly memorable "hit" tunes of his epic works occupy probably no more than 30 or 40 percent of their length, which explains why so many people, including avid opera lovers like myself, find much of his work overblown and tedious.

There is enough on-stage action in Frau Schindler, such as a dinner party, an afternoon tea with another woman who is herself a quiet dissenter from the régime, confrontations with Nazi thugs, and the appearance of the Jewish prisoners, to keep the eye and brain engaged while listening to a somewhat wordy score. Although in the end, an opera will have lasting impact not primarily through its subject matter but through its music.

Although set chronologically, I noticed one detail out of order. The year is 1944, when the Soviets are moving in from the East, and the Americans from the West. The Nazi era is patently coming to an end. But then there's a news report about the German losses at Stalingrad, which took place well over a year before. Morse's music at that point is a wrenching threnody for the dead. Oskar's single real aria in the opera follows, his recall of the dark times they have all passed through and his appeal to his fellow human beings to get on with their lives and do the best they can. His words are somewhat prosaic, but this is nevertheless a shining moment for his character.

Commissioned by the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz in Munich, the opera is slated to receive its world premiere staging in a German translation that may actually be more idiomatic to its subject than the original English. I believe the German and more contemporaneous equivalents of "a blip on the radar screen," "they bought it hook, line and sinker" and a few other ahistorical expressions that cropped up in the libretto may indeed sound better in Munich.

If opera is, in Wagner's term, a "Gesamtkunstwerk," an art form that brings together all the arts, then it is especially rewarding to see that artists today are dedicating themselves to serious topics that may attract a public. Congratulations are due all around. I'll be following the news from Munich to see how well they like Frau Schindler.

Photo: music.usc.edu

“The Mine Wars”: Turning coal into the diamond of solidarity

Thu, 11 Feb 2016 13:44:00 +0000

"In the first two decades of the 20th century, coal miners and coal companies in West Virginia clashed in a series of brutal conflicts over labor conditions and unionization. Known collectively as the 'Mine Wars,' the struggle included strikes, assassinations, marches, and the largest civil insurrection in the United States since the Civil War."

So begins The Mine Wars, a magnificent PBS documentary tale of the birth of the United Mine Workers of America a century ago, in the dawning years of the 20th century. There is something about the industrial, proletarian labor movement that is hard to convey to those who have not lived it. The UMWA personifies this thing as perhaps no other union. That thing is solidarity. Solidarity is a value system of honor, discipline and cooperation formed by conditions where the truth that "No one will save us but ourselves - we are our own protection" becomes overwhelming, a life and death demand, and a moral imperative.

The Mine Wars bears powerful witness to the workers and families whose labors under the mountains of earth fired the furnaces, and set flowing the rivers of light, energy, and steel; whose work fueled and transformed the world, that allowed the awesome lift of civilization and labor itself from darkness; whose insurrection for recognition of their union and human rights secured the rights that today we cherish as no less dear than the oxygen we still freely breathe; and whose gift, by example, is the possibility of hope for a different future. It is said that Pandora, the first human woman according to Greek mythology, loosed (according to Zeus, anyway) evils upon the world from her box to assault the authority of the gods. Hope, however, she kept safely locked away from them - for the future of humanity.

Any who seek to understand the unique solidarity and defiant culture that enabled mine workers in West Virginia, and throughout the world, to prevail and strive for dignity in a multigenerational struggle against a raw, lawless, naked corporate dictatorship, should memorize this tale. Does their model for survival, indeed rebellion, against such enslaving and life-crushing conditions, speak to our times?

Does Bernie Sanders' proposition that "revolution" best describes the shifts in relations of class power needed to accomplish a turnaround in the conditions aggravating inequality and injustices speak truth to you?

The Mine Wars has a couple of heroes who thought so: Mother Jones and Frank Keeney. Mother Jones was an inspiration to all miners. Standing down gun thugs, mine guards, death squads, deputies, prosecutors and preachers, wherever Mother Jones traveled speaking for union organization, strength, courage, and a rising of miners followed her. Frank Keeney was a rank and file miner and socialist chiefly responsible for the mobilization, the multiracial mobilization in a segregated state, of the insurrection against the coal dictatorship in 1921. The insurrection failed, put down by federal troops. But its child, the upheaval of the 1930s under the leadership of John L Lewis, transformed the entire labor movement.

Want to teach the secret of beating the billionaire class in this time? Make this story one you tell and retell to your children, grandchildren and family, so they can tell it too. Times come, and may come again, where the fight for freedom against overwhelming odds, must be fought again, with little but Pandora's hope to cast like a moonshot at a future generation. Miners poet Diane Fisher once wrote: "Who has heard the trump of the Last Day as the siren sounds at the mouth of the mine, as the children suddenly stop their games in horror, as mothers' brooms are paralyzed in mid-thrash - drawn to, and through, the darkness and smoke spewing forth - they are bound beyond life to each other."

That bond is and was the wellspring of the powerful solidarity culture that gave birth to and sustained the UMWA, under pressures as strong and fierce as those that transform coal to a diamond.

Here's an excerpt from a Mother Jones speech from the first statewide campaign by the UMWA in 1912, in response to the murder of union miners by mine guards, and in an effort to build solidarity with miners striking in Pennsylvania. It was transcribed by a court reporter for use in a court injunction against her. Later, Jones was accused of inciting violence in the West Virginia coal fields, convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison. The sentence was later commuted:

"The whole machinery of capitalism is rotten to the core. This meeting tonight indicates a milestone of progress of the miners and workers of the State of West Virginia. I will be with you, and the Baldwin guards will go. You will not be serfs, you will march, march, march on from milestone to milestone of human freedom, you will rise like men in the new day and slavery will get its death blow. It has got to die. Good night. (Applause)."

Now this was my takeaway, though from a different desperate context, spoken by Clint Eastwood giving advice on confronting insurmountable odds: "When things look bad and it looks like you're not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. 'Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That's just the way it is."

The Mine Wars aired on PBS beginning on Jan. 28. Available online and in DVD. The film can be accessed on the website, with substantial additional video and print documentation.

Photo: PBS

VIDEO: #OscarsSoWhite goes viral

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 11:28:00 +0000

Controversy followed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announcement of the nominees for the 2016 Oscars ceremony.

This marks the second year in a row where not one nominee in the four major acting categories (Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, or Best Supporting Actress) is a person of color for the prized golden statue.

(story continues after video)

Since the Jan. 14 announcement the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite has gone viral across the internet to convey the frustration that many have with the lack diversity in the awards program.

High profile celebrities such as Jada Pinkett Smith and Spike Lee have gone on record saying they will boycott the Feb. 28 ceremony.

People's World took it to the streets to ask the public what they thought about the possible boycott and what steps could be taken to increase diversity.

Photo: Video snapshot

Video: Chauncey K. Robinson

Contributors: Teresa Albano and Estevan Bassett-Nembhard

Cartoonist Ted Rall delivers with “Bernie”

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 10:31:00 +0000

A few months ago, Senator Hillary Clinton looked like a sure bet to earn the Democratic party nomination to run for President.

Over the past twenty years, she has constructed a mainstream political resume and secured corporate backing that could help her succeed against the Republicans' money-driven incitement of America's paranoid side.

Senator Bernie Sanders--a man in his seventies who has ignited the imagination of many young people--is poking holes in the aura of inevitability that surrounds Clinton. Who is this man who identifies as being a democratic socialist, who came close to winning the Iowa caucus and thumped Clinton in New Hampshire's primary this week?

Political cartoonist Ted Rall provides some answers in Bernie, his fine graphic nonfiction book about the veteran politician from Vermont. He offers a deftly drawn, incisive portrait of the man and the political climate against which he rebels.

Rall, whose most recent book is Snowden, smartly combines the biography with an exploration of how a powerful Southern-led faction of the Democratic leadership dumped liberalism after Nixon's landslide victory over McGovern in 1972.

Sanders, a scrappy ex-jock who grew up in Brooklyn, aligned himself with progressive causes from college onward, from civil rights, to LGBT equality, the anti-war movement, and women's liberation.

But as he entered politics in the early '70s, the Democratic Party began its decades-long recanting of liberalism's first principles of economic opportunity combined with social justice. White flight from the feared browning of their neighborhoods found a political counterpart in the abandonment of the Democratic party by white Southerners.

Fearful of losing their grip on power, conservatives within the party began promoting centrist candidates. Along the way, the leadership squashed liberal and leftist dissent, arguing that the Presidency could only be won by attracting voters from the vast white middle of the electorate.

Bernie wasn't having that. Starting with his terms as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he proudly called himself a socialist. Entering Congress in the 1990s, he often caucuses with Democrats but breaks from them on issues relating to racial and income inequality.

That rebellion against the status quo may be one reason why Sanders holds such appeal for younger voters.

Writes Rall, "Recent college graduates emerge into a bleak job market, staggering under the burden of student loans they'll never be able to repay. Because Congress has rewritten bankruptcy laws in favor of the banks, those debts are permanent and can never be discharged."

Their blue collar peers face similar problems with stagnant wages and a perpetual war economy that builds bombs instead of daycare centers.

While largely approving of Sanders record, Rall does describe the antiwar left's criticism of Mr. Sanders's unwavering support for Israel and President Obama's targeted assassination of suspected terrorists.

There is debate as well among leftists over Sanders decision to run as a Democrat and over whether they can support a Euro-step candidate who seems to be more inspired by Nordic nations than by classic Marxist-Leninist (or Maoist) doctrine.

With a system so stacked against socio-economic change, why even run? In a recent campaign speech, Sanders said bluntly that no person elected to the presidency will "be able to address the enormous problems facing the working families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the power of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign donors is so great that no president alone can stand up to them."

As laid out in Rall's book, Sanders' goal is to help spur the American people to organize for change and not rely on one person or one party to make that happen.

Bernie delivers both a quick read and a lasting impression.

Inextricable bond between shepherd and flock: A modern Icelandic tragicomic film

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 11:33:00 +0000

Icelandic director Grímur Hákonarson has a small hit on his hands in his new film Rams, starring two of his country's leading stage actors, Theodor Júlíusson in the role of Kiddi, and Sigurour Sigurjónsson as his younger brother Gummi.

The island country in the North Atlantic claims the northernmost national capital city, Reykjavík, at 64 degrees north. But the city is never mentioned. Rams is set in a rural valley, with the modern conveniences and social services one might expect from an advanced social welfare state, but the main occupation - preoccupation may be the better word - is the local sheepherding industry.

Hákonarson has not made a documentary, but the narrow focus on the lives of these country people almost makes it so. We see how an old employment has kept the population going, although again, there is little of the greater world beyond. We don't really know what happens with these sheep: Are they raised for their wool, their meat? Both? For internal consumption? For the world market? Through good times and bad, strong communitarian principles have kept this important, historic economic sector from disappearing. It's considered part of the national patrimony.

We do learn that indeed there have been some bad times, when the dreaded sheep disease scrapie has infected the flocks. (It was introduced from Britain in the 19th century.) When this catastrophic contagion breaks out every few years, attacking the animals' brains and spinal cords, there is really nothing else to do but slaughter the whole valley's sheep, destroy stacks of hay and anything that might harbor the scrapie mites. And then meticulously disinfect everything left standing. One unconsolable community member, given the news, asks, "Why not just take us too?" Government agencies are strict in their protocol, appropriate for any infectious disease, which the populace simply has to follow, like it or not, aware that their own future depends on full eradication.

A snippet of an Icelandic poem is recited at a Búdardalur village awards gathering, about the age-old co-dependency of sheep and man in this part of the world. It's a good reminder of that rimy tradition of epic poetry about this isolated culture going back many centuries since the Norse first settled there well over a millennium ago. Because of the great distance from other cultural influences, and additionally owing to its own largely rural speakers, the Icelandic language has remained remarkably consistent for longer than just about any other European language. People there can trace their ancestry thanks to record-keeping from the very beginning of Icelandic civilization.

It's not hard to understand why a people with so little productive activity to engage in for long winter months, except working to keep their sheep alive, would be drawn to epic sagas of the mist-shrouded past. Rams is itself a kind of Icelandic saga, albeit a modern one, with ancient roots in well-manured soil: The struggle of both humans and animals to survive in unforgiving nature, pestilence of biblical proportions, brothers who have not spoken for 40 years although they live in adjacent houses on the same old family property, sacred promises to dying parents, old scores never settled.

This is the same forbidding landscape that yielded up the epic novel Independent People by Halldór Laxness, the only Nobel Prize laureate (in 1955) from this small country. This novel, likewise set in the backward hinterland, revolves around the slow process of tenant farmers gradually buying their way out of an indigenous form of feudalism that dominated Icelandic society for centuries. In 1953 Laxness was awarded the Soviet-sponsored World Peace Council Literary Prize.

It's ironic that the two principal characters in Rams, so obsessed with breeding and the survival of their unique, award-winning stock from the Búdardalur valley, are themselves seemingly disinterested in perpetuating their own DNA. Neither has married nor has offspring.

One could easily enough interpret Rams metaphorically as a stand-in for the whole world - threatened on the one hand by ecological disaster, yet on the other, stymied by ignorance, greed and tribalism from saving itself.

The film is described in some of the publicity as a comedy, but it is so only in the wisest, darkest and most contemplative appreciation of "the human comedy" - which is as often as not a comforting euphemism for the human tragedy. Be prepared at best for a few sad, knowing chuckles at the foibles that beset our all too proud species. The film has won a number of film festival awards, including "Un Certain Regard" (honorable mention) at Cannes.

The enigmatic ending leaves us not really knowing who will survive, man or sheep? Maybe both. Maybe neither. In any possible outcome, redemption does not come cheap.

Rams
Director: Grímur Hákonarson
1 hour, 33 minutes
An Icelandic-Danish production, 2015

Photo: Cohen Media Group

“Hail, Caesar!” A specter haunts Hollywood in new goofball comedy

Thu, 04 Feb 2016 13:27:00 +0000

Hot on the heels of the Oscar-nominated Trumbo, another 1950s-set movie about Hollywood Reds has been released. The prolific Coen Brothers' Hail, Caesar! is a zany Tinseltown satire with an all-star cast that rather promiscuously - and drolly - mixes fact and fiction. Although you wouldn't know it from the movie's somewhat deceptive, widespread advertising,Caesar's subtext revisits the specter that haunted Lalaland then: Communism. The Coens had tackled this topic in 1991's Barton Fink, inspired by that playwright of proletarian theater, Clifford Odets, and his imagined movie colony misadventures.

Josh Brolin portrays MGM (called here, rather pointedly, "Capital") veep Eddie Mannix, a real-life character known as a "fixer," due to tough tactics he deployed to rather zealously guard stars' errant private lives in order to protect studio interests. (Some suspected this exec/enforcer of foul play, including mob ties and involvement in the 1959 gunshot death of TV's Superman, George Reeves, who'd romanced Mannix's wife - Bob Hoskins portrayed Mannix in the 2006 film Hollywoodland about Reeves' mysterious end.)

Most of Caesar's other fact-based characters, however, have a nom de plume - or, rather, nom de film, as the case may be. Trying to pierce Mannix's cone of silence over his wayward talents is Oscar winner Tilda Swinton in a double role as the Hollywood gossip columnists (who hate that appellation) Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, here called Thessaly and Thora Thacker, rival tabloid twins. (Helen Mirren's dead-on incarnation of the wretched Hopper earned her a Golden Globe nom for Trumbo). Scarlett Johansson depicts Esther Williams, known for her aquatic exploits on film, as DeeAna Moran, a naughty nautical nymphomaniac.

Venezuelan Veronica Osorio of the Upright Citizens Brigade quite fetchingly portrays Carlotta Valdez, who seems to be a cross between the Brazilian "Tutti Frutti girl" Carmen Miranda and that "Mexican Spitfire" Lupe Vélez. In a kooky cameo Frances McDormand (Joel Coen's wife) plays the film editor C.C. Calhoun, who seems inspired by Hollywood's most fabled female editor, Dede Allen (she cut 1981's Reds, and remember that great montage at the end of 1967's Bonnie and Clyde, when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway get whacked in a hail of bullets?).

Channing Tatum plays the Gene Kelly-like actor/dancer Burt Gurney, who conducts espionage for Moscow. Kelly was near the Hollywood Left, and his former wife Betsy Blair (Oscar-nommed for 1955's Marty) ran afoul of the Hollywood Blacklist and was either a close fellow traveler or "card carrying, dues paying member" of the CPUSA. Kelly's third wife, née Patricia Ward, presented a one-woman show about her late husband at the Pasadena Playhouse, and she told me Kelly was "very progressive."

A clownish George Clooney plays fatuous star Baird Whitlock. It's hard to pinpoint the thesp who inspired this character, since the Hollywood of the 1950s had so many blithe celebs. Nevertheless, Whitlock has a pivotal role: While acting in one of that era's religious epics which, like 1959's Ben Hur, was set during the Roman Empire (hence the title, Hail, Caesar!), Whitlock is kidnapped by a pair of lefty extras acting in cahoots with a cell of Communist Party screenwriters. They discuss dialectical materialist gobbledygook at their Malibu seaside lair, which is reminiscent of John Wayne's Hawaii-set Reds-under-the-beds 1952 Big Jim McLain, wherein the Duke busts a commie ring in the islands, starring as a Joe McCarthy-type HUAC investigator, whose name even has the Wisconsin senator's initials. (Big Jim McLain was actually suggested by the case of the Hawaii 7, although Wayne's agitprop flick twisted this persecution of Hawaii labor organizers.)

Screenwriters such as Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson were especially persecuted during the Red Scare, although the Malibu cell is led by an academic called Prof. Marcuse - a clear reference to the Marxist theoretician Herbert Marcuse, who wrote One Dimensional Man and whose students included Angela Davis. The socialist cell's Marxist musings are derived from Das Kapital with a "K" - in contrast to Capital studio with a "C." Cold War propaganda justified witch-hunting of LaLaLand leftists because, among other things, it was alleged that they were Soviet agents acting in collusion with those gremlins in the Kremlin, undermining mom and apple pie with the secret socialist sauce in their scripts.

Hail, Caesar! has great fun lampooning this canard. Of course, none of the blacklisted North American-born filmmakers went into exile behind the so-called "Iron Curtain" - Joseph Losey went to England, Ben and Norma Barzman to France, Trumbo to Mexico, etc. While they may have been pro-Soviet, they were motivated more by pro-labor, anti-racist, anti-fascist motives than by love for Uncle Joe and Moscow, where - as said - none of them settled.

This offbeat spoof of Hollywood and the Cold War is sly, wry and zany, although there are only a few laugh-out-loud moments (unlike the Coens' hilarious 1987 Raising Arizona and their funnier 1996 Fargo). Hail, Caesar! also includes recreations of classic Hollywood tableaux with great pictorial panache from Westerns, musicals (full of homoerotic camp), swim scenes and religious spectacles (movies which, the Coens imply, propagated America's ideological response to Marxism). Hail, Caesar! is not so much a screwball comedy per se, but rather a wacky, inventive, original goofball comedy.

Joel and Ethan Coen, who also gave us 1998's The Big Lebowski (reportedly inspired by indie avatar Jeff Dowd), also co-wrote the recent powerful dramas Bridge of Spies and Unbroken, proving that the creators of Hail, Caesar!'s anti-anti-Communist romp are forces to be reckoned with in the Hollywood Babylon Empire. Hail, Coens!

Photo: Official site

"Pride + Prejudice + Zombies": The undead wear petticoats

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 14:59:00 +0000

Do you enjoy classic novels about manners, morality, education, and marriage in 19^th-century Britain? And do you also enjoy violent horror pictures about the zombie apocalypse? Then there's a movie coming out this weekend that was made just for you. In fact, it could be suited for anyone who enjoys well developed characters, strong female leads, and an overall fun time at the movies - that includes flesh-eating undead humanoids.

From the creators who brought you Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter comes the movie adaptation of one of the bestselling novels of 2009. Pride + Prejudice + Zombies is a horror film that mashes together the classic Jane Austen novel with a modern-day zombie twist. All the beloved, well known characters of the original source are there, but now in a world where the undead roam the earth as an ever growing threat. Yet this doesn't stop society from continuing to push for a woman to be well behaved and well married. Repressive patriarchal norms don't take a day off, not even in the zombie apocalypse. The movie follows the journey of the main character, Elizabeth Bennet, as she negotiates a world where she'd much rather be slaying reanimated corpses than looking for a husband.

Burr Steers (Igby Goes Down, Charlie St. Cloud) is the screenwriter-director for this project. He creates an early 19^th-century environment, with women adorned in beautiful British regency ball gowns and petticoats, while maintaining the darker horror element: Those same women are often seen lifting their petticoats to reveal blades and rifles in hidden places ready for a zombie fight. The film takes itself seriously enough that when there are no threats of the undead on screen, one could be watching one of the many film adaptations of the Austen piece. But when the zombies come out, there are plenty of amusing beheadings, severed limbs, and sneaky walking corpses all in a PG-13 style. Very Jane Austen polite - although some fans of the zombie genre might find the lack of excessive gore a bit frustrating throughout the movie's 108-minute running time.

What may be most appealing about the film is that at its heart is a young woman attempting to find her place in the world, while falling in love with a man who is obsessed with class rank. In the original Austen novel Elizabeth Bennet had an internal struggle between her mind and heart. P+P+Z keeps Elizabeth's conflict intact, while adding the external threat of death at every turn. The stakes are raised higher for her, given that at any moment her life may become a short one. Not exactly a far cry from the original, as the life expectancy at that time was an average 47 for men and 50 for women. (Austen herself died at 41.)

Lily James, as the rebellious heroine, and Sam Riley, as her brooding zombie-fighting suitor Mr. Darcy, have plenty of chemistry to keep viewers interested in the romantic subplot. Their classic scene of Elizabeth rebuffing Mr. Darcy's insulting marriage proposal is tweaked in the film to include a high-energy hand-to-hand combat between the two would-be lovers, that lends action to their fiery words. It's almost as if Austen, in writing that now famous dialogue, knew that one day it would be infused with ninja combat and flying bodies. OK, that may be a bit of a stretch, but the fight sequence fits perfectly with the dialogue, as do many other scenes that fill out the well known classic moments with battle.

Television and film stars Lena Headly (Game of Thrones, The Purge), Matt Smith (Doctor Who), and Charles Dance (Game of Thrones, Bleak House), play smaller, but memorable parts in the film, adding to the efficient cast. James' dynamic with her onscreen sisters, played by Bella Heathcote, Suki Waterhouse, Ellie Bamber, and Millie Brady, is believable as all the young women go back and forth between being "warrior daughters" (as Dance's Mr. Bennet so affectionately calls them in the film) and young women trying to be presentable for their suitors.

You've got a strong heroine, a dashing love interest, an interesting subplot, good battle scenes, and the high stakes of world doom: All the makings of a solid zombie film with Austen's social commentary mixed in for good measure. You don't need to be familiar with the original novel, or the parody novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, to enjoy P+P+Z, which stands alone as a fast-paced zombie film that happens to be set in the early 19^th century. If you want an entertaining night at the movies with a bit more character development than merely the expendable bodies of the traditional zombie genre, then this film comes highly recommended. The movie opens nationwide on February 5^th.

A trailer for the film can be seen here.

Pride + Prejudice + Zombies

Cast: Lily James, Sam Riley, Lena Headey, Douglas Booth, Matt Smith, Jack Huston, Charles Dance, Bella Heathcote

Director: Burr Steers

Screenwriter: Burr Steers, based on the novels by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

PG-13, 108 minutes

Photo: Poster for Pride + Prejudice + Zombies