People Before Profit blog

“Candide”: The best of all possible shows?

Wed, 27 Jan 2016 14:18:00 +0000

LONG BEACH, Calif. - In 1974 I saw, and fell in love with, Candide on Broadway. With music composed by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by - among others - Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker and Stephen Sondheim, and book by Hugh Wheeler based on Voltaire's drolly philosophical 1759 novel, the production had a big impact on me. From the opening strains of Lenny's "Overture" I was enthralled by the frothy, bouncy, ebullient music that never fails to enchant and lift spirits. Voltaire's sagaspoke to me - the story of a naïf who leaves his birthplace, Westphalia (in what is now Germany), and travels to the tropics in order to find his own way in the world and true love. Two years later, when I left New York for Tahiti, I felt like a modern-day Candide, a latter-day innocent searching abroad for the best of all possible paradises.

Since its 1956 premiere on the Great White Way, Candide has become a perennial. The current Long Beach Opera revival at the Beverly O'Neill Theater (formerly Center Theater) is based on the Royal National Theatre version, the book in a new iteration by British writer/director John Caird, with a heaping dose of input by director David Schweizer. This LBO production is at all times innovative, witty and charming, full of puppetry, pageantry, imaginative stagecraft and Voltaire's waggish sensibility. In lieu of CGI and expensive Hollywood studio big-budget special effects, the staging humorously includes wayang kulit - Indonesian shadow puppets by scenic/puppet/mask designer Sean Cawelti.

The play just sort of cleverly stirs to life - so don't arrive late. Veteran performer Robin Buck, whose singing and acting credits range from Manhattan to Switzerland to L.A. Philharmonic and who starred in the title role of LBO's great 2014 production of John Adams' operaThe Death of Klinghoffer, here plays both the 18^th-century philosophe Voltaire and Doctor Pangloss. The high-voltage Voltaire's plume was dipped in acid, and along with the church and monarchy, Pangloss is mercilessly mocked by the French Enlightenment thinker for his blind optimism, relentlessly preaching to his students that this "is the best of all possible worlds."

Among Pangloss' students is Candide, played by Todd Strange. The fresh-faced tenor imbues Candide with the role's innate naïveté, expressing what Voltaire described as Candide's being "endowed by Nature with the most gentle character. His face was the expression of his soul. His judgment was quite honest and he was extremely simple-minded...." Strange's visage and his performance convey all this but, alas, the lead actor's image is somewhat undercut by graying hair. I'm not an age-ist, but when the story begins Voltaire calls Candide "a youth," so gray locks unlock the fourth wall a bit.

Wearing a blonde wig, soprano Jamie Chamberlin (who previously portrayed Marilyn Monroe in LBO's Marilyn Forever) plays the guileless Candide's love interest, the cunning Cunegonde. Along with Strange she warbles the lovely duet "Oh, Happy We," perhaps the two-acter's sweetest number.

Mezzo soprano Danielle Marcelle Bond (who also depicted Monroe in LBO's Marilyn Forever) displays comic panache as Paquette - perhaps the archetypal saucy French maid. So does Suzan Hanson in multiple parts, including as the Baroness and the Old Woman who is, literally, the butt of jokes because she only has one buttock. Although the reason why is alluded to but never quite explained onstage, one can imagine Voltaire devoting a half-assed novella to the saga as to how this came about. In any case, the fact that Hanson can play such frivolous characters, as well as Marilyn Klinghoffer, the wife of the terror victim in the aforementioned LBO production, is a testament to this soprano's range and talent.

The same is true for Roberto Perlas Gomez, who likewise has multiple parts in Candide, including as Maximilian and manipulative Cacambo, but has portrayed serious characters in dramas, including the terrorist named "Rambo" in LBO's Klinghoffer and Chou en-Lai in its Nixon in China.

In stark contrast to Pangloss' optimism, baritone Zeffin Quinn Hollis, whose acting/singing career has taken him from Palm Beach to Hungary, has a scene-stealing number wherein he refutes the not-so-good Doctor's Pollyanna-ish viewpoint. As the street sweeper Martin, Hollis provides a proletarian perspective on the drudgery of hard, physical labor in this work full of barbs hurled at the 18^th-century's class hierarchy, where the few had so much at the expense of the many. (See the extent of progress we've made since 1759!!!) Hollis' pessimistic solo is one of the production's showstoppers - and heart stoppers. Well done, stout fellow.

The story takes our hero Candide from Westphalia to Latin America's mythical golden city of El Dorado. En route, Candide encounters the Inquisition in Portugal, and surely under Lillian Hellman's pen, the church's auto da fé stands in for the witch-hunting of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Torquemada-like Joe McCarthy in the Senate. As Bernstein comments in the playbill, Voltaire's 18^th-century work is "especially valid for us in America...[with its] inquisitorial attacks on the individual...." When Hellman was called before HUAC, rather than crawl, she was ready to brawl and heroically - famously - proclaimed: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions" (slightly misquoted in the program note supplied by Bernstein's daughter Jamie Bernstein).

Speaking of which, Lori Meeker's costumes in this sometimes modern-dress production are delights to the eye, along with a few commedia dell arte masks. Now a question as to genre - is Candide, as Bernstein pondered, "operetta or comic opera or whatever...." Or, for that matter, is it even a Broadway musical (a category the composer of West Side Story is also wellacquainted with)? In the first act there is spoken dialogue and it seemed to be used more than recitative - conversational talking often used to move the plot along of some operas, as in Verdi's La Traviata. Well, no matter how it is categorized, the LBO orchestra conducted by Kristof Van Grysperre enhances the show with live music that's always a pleasure to the ears (and eyes, when the 14 musicians onstage are not behind the shadow puppets' screen).

Enjoying Candide now comes at a special time for me, as I prepare to return to paradise, embarking on a voyage aboard the Aranui 5 cargo cruiser to the Oceanic El Dorados of Tahiti, the Tuamotu atolls (while they're still here!), the Marquesas Islands, Bora Bora. Be that as it may, audiences will have the opportunity to experience this lively, lovable version of Candide onlytwo more times. It is well worth the "voyage" to Long Beach. And after all, to paraphrase Mssr. Voltaire, "we must all cultivate our operas" - or whatever the heck you want to call it!

Candide is being performed on Sat., Jan. 30 at 2:30 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. at the Beverly O'Neill Theater (formerly Center Theater), Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 East Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, CA 90802. For more info: (562)432-5934; LBOpera.org.

Photo: Long Beach Opera

“13 Hours” and “Cartel Land”: Cries and whispers

Wed, 27 Jan 2016 12:15:00 +0000

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and Cartel Land, two current films about vigilante actions, share common roots and concerns, but end up worlds apart.

13 Hours is a political screed told through the eyes of six secret mercenaries, an implausible Benghazi for Beginners, that often ignores the findings of eight Congressional Subcommittee Hearings, jettisons inconvenient conclusions and blames the local C.I.A. chief and "Harvard- and Yale-educated" bureaucrats running our government.

Cartel Land is a more fact-based, sobering documentary that examines anti-drug cartel citizens' group actions on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border.

Director Michael Bay's 13 Hours purports to be the story of "the secret soldiers of Benghazi," or in other words, the efforts of shady ex-armed forces security contractorsto fight off Libyan insurgents' attacks on the U.S. Ambassadorial staff in 2012. "When everything went wrong, six men had the courage to do what was right," proudly announces the theatrical release poster. The film is based on Mitchell Zuckoff's controversial book,13 Hours. It stars James Badge Dale, John Krasinski, Max Martini, Toby Stephens, Pablo Schreiber, David Denman and Dominic Fumusa.

The film's trailer states: "This is a true story." But there seem to be problems with the truth right from the beginning. The new security guards pull their guns to get through their very first checkpoint, an incident which neither film, nor findings support. It is implied that government officials impeded assistance to besieged Embassy workers, including repeated direct orders to "stand down." Yet the Senate Committee found "no evidence of intentional delay or obstruction."

The film also suggests that air force intervention would have saved American lives. But the House Armed Services Report contradicts this, finding that air support was unavailable or would have arrived so late as to make no difference. Throughout, 13 Hours blames and belittles the efforts of career diplomats, while extolling the efforts of the six vigilantes who had very little access to information as events unfolded.

The film's disingenuous, dishonest mash-up of disproven shibboleths aimed at the U.S. government and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was timed to be released just before the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire Primary. Sadly for right-wing supporters, the film seems to backfire as badly as the Congressional Hearings, which actually ended up bolstering Secretary Clinton's standing in the handling of the Benghazi tragedy. Pretentious inaccuracies aside, the film is a poorly written, sloppily directed, overly long exercise in de rigueur action scenes which seem to be dialed up from Expendables outtakes.

In contrast, Cartel Land is a serious film, evenhanded in showing the complexities of vigilante action. Director-Producer Mathew Heineman cuts back and forth across the border showing how, absent effective government response, citizens' groups arose in Arizona and Michoacán, Mexico, to fight the powerful drug cartels.

Tim "Nailer" Foley organizes the Arizona Border Recon. Only an hour and a half from Tucson, in the Alter Valley, Foley claims there's no law in these border lands. He arms other citizens and begins patrols to stop the drug smugglers. On the other side of the border, Dr. José Manuel Mirelesorganizes towns in Michoacán to fight the murderous Knights Templar Cartel. Claiming that the Mexican government often works with cartels, Dr. Mireles becomes a folk hero as his Autodefensas citizens' groups take back control of 28 towns. Members of the public are armed to fight back against the cartel foot soldiers, and Citizens' Councils organize to govern.

But ultimately both Nailer and Mireles' popular movements founder. Overly vigorous citizen enforcers beat suspects and invade homes. Seizure of drugs and "stolen" property leads armed vigilantes down the path of abuse. Dr. Mireles cashes in on his cult standing to engage in relationships with young admirers. As Autodefensa breaks its own rules, robbing, killing and chaos ensue. Angry civilians questionthe benefits of this new rule. "If we do not believe in institutions of state," asks one townsman, "we are no longer citizens."

Unlike 13 Hours Director Michael Bay, Mathew Heineman is not the prisoner of an agenda. In showing us a more complete picture of vigilante action, he raises honest questions: What happens when governments fail to protect and serve? When is it justified to override established authority? Is it better to try to work within existing institutions or work outside them?

Cartel Land has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Film.

"The Shannara Chronicles" offers elves, magic, and Millennials

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 17:57:00 +0000

Everything ancient is new again on The Shannara Chronicles, which caters to a very specific audience and is cut from a similar cloth as many other stories of its kind - though neither of those things makes it bad. In fact, the fantasy series, which airs on MTV (of all places!) and is an adaptation of the mildly enjoyable (but mostly forgettable) Shannara novels written by Terry Brooks, is far better than it has any right to be.

A quick refresher in Shannara backstory: this series (or at least its first season) is somewhat loosely based on The Elfstones of Shannara, which is actually the second book in the series (over 26 novels have been written since then); the first book, The Sword of Shannara, was thought by many to be too similar to The Lord of the Rings, and in many ways, it was, so it was wise to start with Elfstones. Though these were far from being my favorite fantasy stories, I certainly liked them well enough, and was rather concerned when I learned what network this show would be premiering on. Let me say that, in my opinion anyway, this is the first good program - perhaps the only one - that has aired on this channel in years.

The first thing that surprises you is that the showrunners actually put some real soul into this adaptation; their dedication is easy to see in the brilliant cinematography, to which the New Zealand filming location lends itself wonderfully. It also has an excellent cast that includes Manu Bennet (Arrow, Spartacus) and John Rhys-Davies (The Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, Sliders). But, of course, there are the newcomers to consider, who play the three main characters, the half-elf Wil (Austin Butler), elven girl Amberle (Poppy Drayton), and human thief Eretria (Ivanna Baquero). The best of the three seems to be Drayton, who gives a surprisingly nuanced performance and puts a really interesting spin on a character that, in the books, came off as a rather one-note, doe-eyed caricature.

There are, of course, drawbacks to the show. I refer to the parts where MTV's fingerprints are most prevalent: on the script. Firstly, the writers decide to have the characters talk in a really modern style, which is okay because Shannara is actually set thousands of years in the future, despite being a magic-based fantasy. However, this becomes really awkward when the network gets too heavy-handed in their effort to market the show to people in their early twenties, and we end up having characters utter Urban Dictionary-esque phrases and Millennial-isms that are so misplaced even the actors seem embarrassed to say them. That's the first issue. The second is that there is an undercurrent of soap opera melodrama that weaves in and out of episodes, which just shows you that MTV is trying to maintain the same viewer base that watches its other, more vapid shows, while also catering to the Game of Thrones crowd.

Those two problems aside, the other ways in which The Shannara Chronicles deviates from its source material are more understandable. Where Elfstones had the flaw of patronizing its female characters and/or pushing them to the sidelines, this show places them front and center, and gives them something to do. There's also a heavier presence of sex and violence here than in the books (though not enough to prevent the series from being referred to as "Game of Thrones Lite"). Some of it does feel gratuitous, but because the series itself is really just a straightforward, fun ride that doesn't try and philosophize or make itself "socially relevant," it can be enjoyed for the good old-fashioned escapism that it is.

And it's true; in many ways, this is no Game of Thrones. Our characters are having just a bit too much fun; looking far too clean and good for the camera as they traipse across the colorful, vivid landscape. And the modern electronic music will probably pull in part of the audience its channel is looking for, while quickly wearing out its welcome with many fantasy aficionados. But within the great, growing expanse of TV shows, and especially on this network, The Shannara Chronicles is something quite exciting and refreshing.

It's definitely an old concept based on an old book, offering little that's truly groundbreaking. But there's a subtle difference between this series and some of its peers: in fantasy terms, rather than rehashing timeworn clichés, this show's method is more akin to taking an old antique that's been in the family for generations, fixing it up, and handing it over, clean and polished, to the next generation. A little ostentatious, for sure - but it's got sentimental value.

Photo: Shannara Chronicles website

"The X-Files": The nostalgia is out there, but is it good?

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 14:12:00 +0000

Like it or not, we're living in the age of the comeback, on small and silver screen alike. And if relatively newer shows like Heroes, 24, and Prison Break can return, you can bet that television networks are going to do their utmost to breathe new life into a sci-fi cultural gem from the 90s. The question is whether The X-Files, in its six-episode "event series," lives up to the hype, or holds a candle to the original. For the most part, it does. And while this revival is far from necessary, I must admit that it's a highly welcome one.

This year's plot lays out a new alien theory: one in which the U.S. government seems to be using technology long since abandoned by the extraterrestrials. And what are they using that tech for? Experimentation, population control, weather control, even eugenics. The military-industrial complex seems to be the real culprit this time around, and during the premiere episode, Mulder (David Duchovny) realizes that zero-point energy has been a viable resource that has existed for decades, but which has been suppressed by the government in favor of the ever-prominent beating of the oil drum. The writers weave a tapestry of post-alien science fiction, story elements based on kernels of truth, and a plethora of conspiracy theories in varying shades of crazy.

This, in part, is how The X-Files seems to have gained heightened relevance in the current cultural and sociopolitical climate, and the show indeed has new things to say in relation to that altered landscape. In many ways, we live in a time where paranoia is perhaps at an all-time high, privacy concerns and the freedom of information are hot topics, and an ever-festering cynicism toward everyday American life seems to have a hold on my generation.

The X-Files manages to capture all of that and mold it into a backdrop for a compelling new myth arc. It mostly feels like a natural evolution of where the show was back in the 90s, but the first two episodes were not without some ham-fisted dialogue and references ("Edward Snowden," "9/11") that felt a little contrived. This approach ultimately feels appropriate enough; but what it means for the hardcore fans of the show, I can't yet say. Suggesting that the alien conspiracy nine seasons in the making was, after all, a (mostly) human conspiracy all along, is at once both a risky and intriguing gamble.

This, of course, does not mean that all things involving little green men are out the window. Aliens are still involved somehow, it just seems that they're not so much the enemy as the - albeit inadvertent - facilitators of government world domination. And we're still going to get episodes that follow the monster-of-the-week format, in which Mulder and Scully (Gillian Anderson) deal with various strange phenomena - often non-alien. From the previews, it seems like next week's episode, "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster," involves exactly what the title suggests.

Speaking now from a more personal perspective, I've really enjoyed the first two episodes of this revival. It seems like the show has managed to, thematically speaking, "grow up" and move out of the 90s, but it also doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The characters have not necessarily evolved, they've just sort of adapted to the changing times; Mulder uses a laptop to browse conspiracy websites now, and he and Scully still have their meetings with FBI assistant director Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) - except that now they're conducted under the scrutinizing noses of the U.S. Department of Defense.

The series premiere was a little slow-paced, but that was necessary, and didn't bother me at all. However, for those who might not have liked that, the follow-up episode started to really get things moving, despite being a mostly self-contained episode. So far the show has maintained its subtle humor, Duchovny and Anderson have the same great chemistry as always, and the series seems ever so slightly edgier and grittier. I do have to say that so far, though, the series is still finding its footing in terms of the tone and feel of things; parts of these episodes felt a little too polished and clinical - almost like a police procedural. Back in the day, the plot wended its way through a smokescreen of dark, amorphous mystery, and I think that is what really pulls viewers in and keeps them interested. Hopefully the show is working its way back toward that kind of atmosphere.

But, of course, it would be disingenuous if The X-Files sought to completely imitate its previous formula. So many recent "comeback" shows have fallen rather flat because they attempted to replicate the recipes that led to their original success. I think, after seeing two episodes, that The X-Files' greatest strength going forward is that it acknowledges the inevitable nostalgia that its audience will feel, but chooses not to wallow in it. Instead, it opts to take the best parts of its predecessor and translate them in a new way for a new generation of viewers. That allows for plenty of creativity, and I look forward to seeing where the remaining four episodes take us.

Photo: The X-Files Facebook page

Singing the praises of a Portuguese Holocaust hero

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 13:55:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - Ever hear of Aristides de Sousa Mendes?

I didn't think so.

But more and more, as time goes on, you will.

Five years ago the newly formed Sousa Mendes Foundation, dedicated to honoring the memory of this extraordinary man, commissioned Connecticut composer Neely Bruce to write an oratorio about the Portuguese rescuer. Bruce agreed, at no fee, but asking only for the commitment to a performance of the work. That commitment was fulfilled to great acclaim on Jan. 24.

A well attended Sunday afternoon performance of Bruce's oratorio at the American Jewish University celebrated the legacy of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the man whom Mário Soares, former president and prime minister of Portugal following the 1974 Carnation Revolution, called "Portugal's greatest hero of the twentieth century." (Soares, still living at 91, was a one-time Communist, later Socialist, and still active in global politics.) The occasion marked this year's International Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorated on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.

Sousa Mendes was a career diplomat who had served in numerous locales around the world. In 1940 he found himself in Bordeaux, in southern France. Thousands of desperate refugees from Central Europe fleeing from the Nazis flooded into the area begging for visas to Portugal, from whence they could escape to safer havens.
Officially neutral, Portugal at that time was unofficially pro-Hitler. Dictator António de Oliveira Salazar issued a directive called "Circular 14," which forbade Portuguese diplomats to issue visas to such undesirables. But stricken by conscience, Sousa Mendes, recruiting his family to help, wrote out some 30,000 visas in a few weeks' time, defying his own government's explicit orders. About a third of them went to Jews, including Hans and Margret Rey, later authors/illustrators of Curious George. Among the non-Jews were the artist Salvador Dalí, Otto von Habsburg and family, and the Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg.

Upon his recall to Portugal, Sousa Mendes was fired, disgraced, and blacklisted for the rest of his life. Even though he had been a personal friend of Salazar, the dictator would never forgive the breach of protocol. In 1954 Sousa Mendes died a pauper, and his extensive family suffered unemployment and exile.

Sousa Mendes declared, "I would rather stand with God against Man than with Man against God." Holocaust historian Yehudi Bauer described the diplomat's action as "perhaps the largest rescue action by a single individual during the Holocaust." The Portuguese hero stands alongside the perhaps slightly better known Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who performed a similar act of issuing visas from his post in Kaunas, Lithuania (and who was also disgraced at home for the rest of his life), and the famous Oskar Schindler, who, after all, profited from his war matériel factory while keeping his Jewish workforce employed.

In 1966 loyalists to the diplomat's memory got Sousa Mendes declared a "Righteous Among the Nations" by the Holocaust memorial in Israel, Yad Vashem, and gradually the campaign to restore his name took on urgency.

Aristides the oratorio

Bruce's "dramatic oratorio in twenty tableaux," "Circular 14: The Apotheosis of Aristides," is conceived on a grand scale at almost two hours in length, performed with an intermission. It needs such length and breadth to explore what can only be described as the story of a martyrdom. One can compare it to the great masterpieces in this form by Handel ("Messiah"), Bach ("The St. Matthew Passion") and Mendelssohn ("Elijah"), and in the 20^th century Sergei Prokofiev ("Alexander Nevsky"), Michael Tippett ("A Child of Our Time") and William Walton ("Beshazzar's Feast").

An oratorio is a dramatic text telling a story, but in concert, not staged with the traditional elements of costume, sets, lighting, and acting. Yet I could surely not have been the only listener to wonder, "Why not an opera?" It seemed to call out for a staged representation, which indeed has happened with some of those great oratorios of the classical canon. (This spring the Los Angeles Master Chorale will offer a staged version of Handel's "Alexander's Feast.")

"Circular 14" contains music of great variety and often of unearthly transcendence. We hear salon music as the Sousa Mendes children perform a little house concert to welcome the diplomat back home from a diplomatic trip. We hear Aristides' fond recollections of his postings in waltz time, we hear the variegated cries of the refugees in despairing sonorities (I was reminded of Gian Carlo Menotti's opera "The Consul"), a grand fugal procession of names of people saved by the precious visas, folk music from Portugal and France, a lyric interlude capturing the family's return drive home to Portugal.

Bruce's most powerful scenes take place in the second part: a chilling duet between two rival tenors, Sousa Mendes and the unyielding Salazar in which the dictator reveals that he is the Portuguese state, i.e., there are no legitimate civil institutions the demoted diplomat can appeal to; a stunning modern polytonal church liturgy for the death of the first wife Angelina; a bravura coloratura aria for the much younger, vivacious second wife Andrée; and an effective extended scene involving Aristides and César, Andrée, the son Pedro Nuno, Rabbi Kruger and chorus.

Bruce's piano perforce had to fill in for the colors and timbres in the more lush orchestral parts he has written for a larger production of the oratorio. Fortunately, he is an expressive, communicative performer. The rich Portuguese musical tradition was given some due, but the single Portuguese guitar that we heard was not given the space, nor the vernacular writing, to allow it to shine.

The character of the Polish Rabbi Kruger could have been given a more Jewish musical voice. The lack of clear differentiation of musical vocabularies seemed particularly striking in a first-half duet between him and Sousa Mendes.

Legendary Portuguese hospitality?

The libretto, by the composer, serves to tell the story, but in its earnestness does not always rise to memorable poetic heights. Sousa Mendes explains his actions recalling, "For a thousand years our country has sheltered the homeless and honored the refugee. Portuguese hospitality is legendary." And in his scene with Salazar, he repeats this tic of received wisdom: "Our people have obeyed the laws of hospitality for all of recorded history."

Now this may well have been his rather aristocratic and self-delusional understanding of his nation's past. But there is that little thing of the Inquisition and the old Catholic habit of burning up Jews and heretics in an auto da fé once in a while (the term "auto da fé" is Portuguese, of course), not to mention the expulsion of Jews and Moors. That flagrant misstatement cannot be allowed to stand. In fact, it could be turned into a plot point: Perhaps Sousa Mendes acted as he did in part out of remorse for his country's past treatment of "the other."

Sousa Mendes was apparently an old-school kind of gentleman who grew up at a time when Portugal still had a royal family. He was once recalled from his post in Brazil when at an elegant banquet he made the mistake of raising a toast "To the Portuguese monarchy!" But when the Republic turned fascist under Salazar, Sousa Mendes obviously made his accommodation and continued to serve his country despite the oppression at home.

And then, too, there's the matter of the far-flung Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia, to which there's no reference (and where the Church also extended the arm of the Inquisition). Perhaps one cannot expect this great humanitarian to have opposed his nation's colonial project (how many English or French at that time opposed their nations' colonialism?), but it's unseemly to overlook this part of the Portuguese conundrum from a contemporary vantage point. After all, the fact that eventually the Portuguese people came around to rehabilitating Sousa Mendes owes to their having overthrown fascism, abandoned the colonies, and restored democratic norms.

Much is made in "Circular 14" about what Sousa Mendes calls "one of my favorite places," the city of San Francisco, where he was stationed in the 1920s. In fact, several of their children were born in California during those years. The oratorio includes prayers to St. Francis more than once. Significantly, both San Francisco and Lisbon are located on the western edge of their respective continents, a locus where drifters and refugees often end up, and a launching place for the continuing voyage. Many of the Sousa Mendes grandchildren wound up in California.

What of the future?

Characters in "Circular 14" include Sousa Mendes himself (dramatic tenor Robert MacNeil), his twin brother César de Sousa Mendes - also a diplomat, stationed in Warsaw (actor Michael Gill, in a speaking role), the fascist dictator Salazar (lyric tenor Ashley Faatoalia), the Polish Rabbi Chaim Kruger (bass-baritone Stephan Kirchgraber), Sousa Mendes' first wife Angelina (soprano Marina Harris), the second wife Andrée Cibial (coloratura soprano Katherine Giaquinto), a chorus of the 14 Sousa Mendes children with soloists Jonathan Frias, E. Scott Levin and Ariel Pisturino, and a larger chorus of refugees (The Donald Brinegar Singers).

Donald Brinegar conducted the entire ensemble, which also included the composer Neely Bruce at the piano, Pedro da Silva on Portuguese guitar, Cameron O'Connor on Spanish and electric guitars, and John Krovoza on cello.

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in Pan Pacific Park (LAMOTH) is currently displaying "Visas to Freedom: Aristides de Sousa Mendes and the Refugees of World War II," artifacts from the Sousa Mendes family as well as families that survived thanks to the diplomat's help, which have been loaned to LAMOTH by the Sousa Mendes Foundation and Sousa Mendes' grandson. The exhibition tells the broad story of Sousa Mendes's heroic actions while also highlighting his multiple ties to the State of California. The exhibit is on view until March 1. More information can be found here. The Sousa Mendes Foundation aims to turn Casa do Passal, the family home in the town Cabanas de Viriato in Portugal, into a museum and site of conscience for future generations.

At the premiere the contributions of retired Congressman Tony Coelho, who long represented California's Central Valley, were recognized, and Coelho was on hand to receive an award from the Sousa Mendes Foundation. Coelho was the only Congress member of Portuguese descent, and for years he carried the torch for Sousa Mendes' cause. He revealed that even once democracy was restored the bureaucracy balked at honoring Sousa Mendes because they believed it would set a poor precedent to lift up the actions of a lawbreaker. But Coelho's hints about their attitude potentially affecting foreign aid did the trick, and the Portuguese managed to come to terms amicably enough with their own history.

As arduous as it is to get a huge work such as this off the ground (thanks in this case to producer Marilyn Ziering), the greater challenge will be to secure a second and later productions. We few hundred on Jan. 24, 2016, may have experienced a once-in-a-lifetime event. But I hope not. There are feelers out for the fully orchestrated version to be performed in Salt Lake City and in Lisbon. The very last consoling words of the oratorio, derived from Scripture, are "He watches over his holy ones."

But will He watch over "Circular 14?"

Photo: Aristides de Sousa Mendes.

Screen Actors Guild Awards — the union alternative to the Oscars

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 13:06:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES (PAI) -- Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett are union members. So are Clare Danes, Louis C.K., and Peter Dinklage. They'll all be in Los Angeles on Jan. 30 as nominees for their union's highest honor - the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Unlike the better-known Academy Awards, SAG Awards are decided exclusively by their fellow practitioners: All 116,741 members of SAG-AFTRA get ballots and can watch the entries online.

The SAG Awards are also unlike the Oscars in that they are for film and television, and include categories that honor outstanding performances by entire casts, not just individuals.

With a gala dinner, an auction, and sales of bleacher seats to the red carpet affair, the event also raises funds for the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, which funds a children's literacy program and provides scholarships and health and financial aid to members and their families.

"Yes, it's glitzy and glamorous, but really it's about celebrating our union," says SAG-AFTRA national board member Mary McDonald-Lewis, a Portland, Ore., voice actor and dialect coach.

McDonald-Lewis said she's especially excited this year about the nominations for Trumbo, a true-to-life film about Hollywood radicalism, and for performances in The Big Short and 99 Homes, both which are about financial fraud in the mortgage industry.

You can watch the 22^nd Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards live Saturday, Jan. 30, 5-7 pm (PST) and 8-10 pm (EST) on TNT and TBS. And there's another reason to watch: The history of the Oscars - the Motion Picture Academy Awards-themselves.

Everyone's heard of the Academy Awards but few know the anti-union origins of its sponsor, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio boss Louis Mayer founded The Academy in 1927 by to prevent unionization in the film industry.

As an invitation-only professional organization, the Academy was meant to be a more prestigious alternative to unionization. With separate branches for producers, actors, writers, directors, and technicians, it would settle workplace disputes and eliminate the need for unions and strikes - while remaining controlled by producers.

From 1927 to 1933, the Academy functioned as a company union. In competition with the Screen Actors Guild and other unions, it developed a standard contract covering terms and conditions of work.

Hollywood unionized anyway in 1933, and company-controlled unions were outlawed in 1935. But the Academy continues on as a way to promote the film industry. To this day, its membership is self-selecting, and secret.

Don McIntosh is Associate Editor, The Northwest Labor Press

Photo: (L-R) SAG Awards Committee Vice President Daryl Anderson, Committee members Woody Schultz and Jason George, actor Anna Faris, SAG Awards Committee Chair JoBeth Williams, SAG-AFTRA Executive Vice President Gabrielle Carteris, actor Anthony Mackie, and SAG Awards Executive Producer Kathy Connell. Screen Actors Guild Awards Facebook.

“Aferim!”: The wild, wild East in film

Fri, 22 Jan 2016 13:04:00 +0000

Set in Eastern Europe in 1835, co-writer/director Radu Jude's Aferim!, Romania's Official Entry for the 88th Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, is - at least for American viewers - reminiscent of Westerns. The plot revolves around two males on horseback scouring the countryside, hunting for a missing person. With this plot you'd think Aferim! is Romanian for "After Him!" but it actually can be translated as "Bravo!"

The horse opera Aferim! reminds me most of is John Ford's 1956 classic The Searchers, wherein John Wayne plays ex-Confederate soldier Ethan Edwards, who returns home to West Texas after the Civil War and proceeds to roam around Monument Valley and environs with Jeffrey Hunter on an epic odyssey to find Ethan's niece, Debbie Edwards (Natalie Wood), who was kidnapped years earlier by Comanches. However, in Aferim! lawman Costandin (Teodor Corban) and his son Ionita (Mihai Comanoiu) are hot on the trail of an escaped slave, Carfin Pandolean (Cuzin Toma), in order to return him to the nobleman who owns him.

There is another point The Searchers and Aferim! have in common: the element of racism. In the former the crux is whether, after so many years in captivity since she was a child, Debbie has "gone Native" or will return to "civilization" and live according to the white man's ways. In Aferim!, Carfin is enslaved because he is a member of a despised minority group, the so-called "Gypsies." Along with the Jews, these people were among those the Nazis would later earmarkfor racial extermination during the genocidal Holocaust.

One can see the roots of this hatred in Aferim!, with the abysmal, oppressive mistreatment of these abused human beings living in bondage. Fortunately, they survived the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune perpetrated against them in early 19th-century Romania and on through the "Final Solution." But they are still often Europe's outcasts and the name "Gypsy" is no longer considered to be culturally correct. Stereotyped as thieves - especially of children (as in the case of Debbie in The Searchers) - the slang term "gypped" is probably derived from bigoted tropes about people now more properly known as the Roma. Aferim! may provide insight into how the Roma were regarded and dealt with in 1835 Romania, but it also raises disturbing questions about the Roma's plight and situation today in the supposedly more enlightened European Union - and may even shed light on the way the current tide of refugees from war-torn countries have been treated by contemporary Europeans.

Aferim! has a number of genre conventions of the Western, from horseplay to gunplay to saloon girls to sprawling landscapes - although these Badlands are in the Balkans. One could argue that the Romanian-set Aferim! should be called an "Eastern." In any case, with its commentary on class and race Aferim! and heartbreaking cruelty, it is a compelling drama from which it's hard to avert one's eyes.

Jude's film is welldirected and shot in atmospheric black and white by director of photography Marius Panduru. Aferim! won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival and was the Official Selection at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. The L.A.-based South East European Film Festival (SEEFEST)has previously screened some of Jude's films, including The Tube with a Hat, Shadow of a Cloud, and co-presented with AFI Everybody in Our Family. (This year's 11th annual SEEFEST takes place in L.A. from April 28-May 5.)

Aferim! theatrically opens in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco on January 22. A national release will follow.

Bullets and broken hearts over Broadway

Fri, 22 Jan 2016 11:26:00 +0000

So, a Marxist walks into a theater to watch a fluffy new musical set in the 1930s - and leaves with a big wide smile across his face. Not just for the great singing and even more fantastic choreography that light up this L.A. iteration of Woody Allen's "Bullets over Broadway" on its first national tour, but also for the implicit critique of commercialism that is the American way in all things - and also in the theater.

The set-up is the classic 1930s nerdy, neurotic, guilt-ridden, angst-driven New York Jewish playwright David Shayne (Michael Williams) - a genius in his own mind who is but one more example on a long list of avatars of the auteur himself (Mr. Allen) - who secures backing for his new play only from Mob boss Nick Valenti (Michael Corvino), on condition that Shayne cast Valenti's girlfriend, Olive (Jemma Jane), a Broadway hoofer and the very model of an airheaded floozy with no talent except to annoy one and all (audience included) with her only intermittently comprehensible Jersey locution delivered with a high-pitched twang and exaggerated overacting.

A seasoned theatergoer will immediately place "Bullets" alongside "Guys and Dolls" with its lovable O.G. gamblers and lowlifes, or perhaps "City of Angels," with its jazzy, noir score, or "The Producers," with its portrait-by-stiletto of theatrical ventures as a venal occupation.

After her long, lewd and suggestive hot dog scene ("I want a hot dog for my roll"), and after we are introduced to the pet dog owned cloyingly by Eden Brent (Rachel Bahler), a supporting character in Shayne's play, we hear the line, "This is a dog-eat-dog world. You have to make a few compromises." Cheech (Jeff Brooks), the tough whom Nick assigns to watch Olive at all times, turns out to have quite a good head on his shoulders apart from his highly developed sharpshooter's aim with a gun. He asks, "Morality? What's that mean? Public opinion?"

This is the subtle art of Woody Allen at work: to embed into a story, punctuated at every turn by the percussive tattoo of pistols and assault weapons, some wise and sad truths about life and art. He himself has been accorded the witch-hunt treatment on "morality" charges, after all.

The score is fresh and bouncy, all songs derived from the period and arranged for every possible permutation of soloists and the generous ensemble (John Mezzio seems to be responsible for the choice of material). We hear the familiar, such as "They Go Wild, Simply Wild, Over Me" and "Up a Lazy River" and "Tain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do," and rarer tunes such as "Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me" and "(I'll Be Glad When You're Dead) You Rascal You." But each finds a new resonance set into this gangland fantasy that brings together high and low art, sublime aspiration and yes, those ol' debbil compromises. With each reprise these new meanings probe ever deeper into recesses of significance you never in your life imagined those songs contained.

As an example of the layering of meaning in "Bullets," the actress Helen Sinclair (Emma Stratton), whom Shayne desires as his lead, sings a big number, "There's a Broken Heart for Every Light on Broadway." Despite her past status as a diva of the Broadway boards, and despite her chance now for a comeback in a principal role in a pathbreaking new play, Sinclair is also a broken heart in her own way - a committed alcoholic reduced to consuming lighter fluid and paint thinner (it's Prohibition time), and a serial failure at love, always falling for the artist instead of the man. But more universally, how many dancers, actors, singers, and writers got off the bus or train in New York over how many years, with gleaming lights in their eyes and dreams of fame in their hearts, only to become poorly paid foot soldiers of this great industry with precarious work at best and life in a tawdry rooming house, forever awaiting that big break from Mr. Producer?

Late in the action, when the dust settles and the characters' fates are drawn, this same Ms. Sinclair tells us, "It's no crime to be a total mediocrity." In other words, no, not every aspiring young person will set the world on fire, but isn't there a place in this world for the rest of us who perform an honest job and just want to live out a decent, fulfilling life?

The Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, often in collaboration with composer Kurt Weill, featured American gangsters to represent the apotheosis of capitalism. The predations of Mafiosi (of any ethnicity) - involving liquor, drugs, weapons, gambling, prostitution, horses, real estate, territory, city politics and power - were nothing, they implied! Compare that to the global crimes of Big Oil, the capitalist fixation with military intervention, colonialism and neocolonialism, tinpot dictators propped up in dozens of poor nations, rape of the Earth for raw materials, mass hunger and illiteracy, enormous "odious debt" and similar assaults against humanity. Gangsterism was but the local and much smaller-time expression of those larger phenomena.

In modern times Kander and Ebb's musical "Chicago" took this Brechtian idea to its American apogee: Who could experience this show and not come away with a dark understanding of the elevation of corruption and vice as the actual norm in this country, as opposed to the grade-school civics - and all that jazz - that we were taught?

The original film "Bullets Over Broadway" starredJohn Cusack, Chazz Palminteri, Jennifer Tilly, and Dianne Wiest, who won Best Supporting Actress for her performance. The musical adaptation played on Broadway in 2014 for 156 performances and 33 previews. In Los Angeles it's playing at the Pantages Theatre, one of those classic urban Roaring Twenties Hollywood baroque deco-dent style venues that happily has come back from its zombie days as a shoddy movie house.

The American musical tries for the most part not to send ticket buyers home with the depressing message that there's no hope or justice in the world. Even if overall the takeaway is tragic (a "West Side Story," for instance), there is the beauty of catharsis if it's not too bathetic. "Bullets Over Broadway" will not strike most theatergoers as a penetrating examination of the sins of capitalism - and don't take me wrong, it isn't, and isn't meant to be. But studded throughout are thought-provoking insights not just about the nature of art but about what kind of art our society produces and consumes. One thing you can count on: There's always a money trail, and it ain't always pretty.

Everyone on stage is simply divine in this fast-moving production, directed and choreographed by the brilliant Susan Stroman, that ticks along like the proverbial clockwork. One complaint, however, in this era of #oscarssowhite: In a cast of 27, couldn't they have found (judging from their photos in the program) more than one (count 'em, 1) person of color among the chorines? Was this perhaps a necessary compromise?

"Bullets Over Broadway" runs at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, through January 24. For ticket information call: 323-468-1770. The touring production schedule can be found here.

“Lenin's Last Struggle” recounts a losing campaign against the emerging Stalin

Fri, 22 Jan 2016 11:07:00 +0000

I have previously written about the excellent and informative book, "The Soviet Century" by the Soviet-born historian Moshe Lewin, but now I'd like to take on an earlier book by Lewin, "Lenin's Last Struggle."

This book predated "The Soviet Century" by a number of years, so you might think that it could be skipped since anything in it would be covered in, and updated by the later book. This would be wrong, though. "Lenin's Last Struggle"is rich in detail and goes into certain questions that were to profoundly shape the future of the Soviet Union, things which are not covered in such depth by "The Soviet Century."

Moshe Lewin was a collective farm worker in the USSR and a soldier in the Soviet army. He later became director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, a fellow of the Kennan Institute, a senior fellow of Columbia University's Russian Institute, and later emeritus professor of history at The University of Pennsylvania.

Lewin paints a picture of the frustrations facing Lenin in this final period and his increasing misgivings about Joseph Stalin. It also illustrates Stalin's growing confidence in the face of Lenin's physical decline and shows, sadly, the total inability of anybody other than Lenin himself to stop the rise of Stalin and the absorption of the Bolshevik Party into the emerging Stalinist system.

Lewin reveals that toward the end Lenin desperately sought allies who could stand up to the Stalinist onslaught after he himself was gone. But this was wishful thinking on Lenin's part:There was nobody capable of playing the game of political intrigue that would have been necessary. The author deals with the early 1920s, particularly1922-24, the last years of Lenin's life, during which he was sick most of the time. Sometimes he was able to carry on nearly as normal, however at other times his illness restricted his activity, sometimes severely.

During this period - ominously, as it turned out - it was Stalin who was charged by Central Committee of the ruling Bolshevik Party with supervising Lenin's convalescence. Because of this, Stalin was able to greatly influence what Lenin was told and what he was able to do. For his part, Lenin came to recognize and to deeply resent Stalin's attempts to control him.

Lewin makes his point in part through the retelling of several anecdotes but also by focusing on two major policy questions of the time. One was the debate over the Bolshevik government's monopoly on foreign trade during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period. NEP was a realistic response to the state of isolation that the Bolshevik government found itself in, and while it was meant as a practical means of providing some "breathing space" for the revolution until the more advanced nations could come to its assistance, it also provided the anti-Bolshevik forces with certain openings.

Lenin strongly believed that, in view of the potential danger that could be represented by outside forces, it was very important that the foreign trade monopoly be maintained. Others, including Stalin and his supporters, believed that the trade monopoly should be relaxed. The indisposed Lenin significantly asked Leon Trotsky to champion this cause for him. This time, at least, Lenin was able to restrain Stalin, who was not yet powerful enough to move against Trotsky.

Lewin next goes into considerable detail about what has been called the Nationality Crisis which arose during the formation of the Soviet Union from the former constituent parts of the old Tsarist empire. In particular, he focuses on the infamous incident in which Stalin's associate Ordzhonikidze struck a Georgian communist, a supporter of the leading Georgian Bolshevik Midivani, in a dispute over the Georgian position in the then-proposed Soviet Union. Lenin was greatly disturbed by this incident. It's instructive in view of what would take place a few years later that such a use of non-deadly physical force against a communist should have been found so shocking. Lewin relates how Stalin and his associates did everything they could to keep Lenin from making an independent analysis, but in the end Lenin made his own inquiry, completely independent of Stalin, and his views on the situation changed completely. Lenin once again called on Trotsky for help and support and, as Lewin speculates, this must have disturbed Stalin greatly.

Toward the end of the book Lewin goes to considerable length analyzing what has been called Lenin's "Testament," a document which gives an assessment of the people he evidently sees as the future leaders of the country. Lewin reports that the "Testament" in its entirety consisted of several parts and was written over an extended period. Although this first part of the "Testament" is only mildly critical of Stalin, Lenin concludes it by calling for the removal of Stalin as General Secretary of the Central Committee. Lewin goes further to suggest that Lenin also wished that Stalin should not only be removed as General Secretary but that he, and his supporters, should be expelled from the party. Lewin ends the book by speculating, with some documentary basis, on what might have happened in the Soviet Union had Lenin not disappeared from the scene so early.

The book features an extensive appendix and, providing extremely important insight into Lenin's final thoughts, the essay "Better Fewer, but Better" is reproduced in its entirety. This essaywas one of Lenin's last works, if not the last, published as it was in March of 1923 (Lenin died in January of 1924). In the essay Lenin, among other things, implicitly attacks Stalin and his methods of organization. It represents Lenin's ideas on combating what he saw as disturbing trends developing in the Soviet system and offers some light on what may have been his plans for the future.

"Lenin's Last Struggle"

Moshe Lewin

New Edition, 2005, featuring a new introduction by the author

Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith

University of Michigan Press

Paper, $29.95

The Progies show how film awards can be inclusive and progressive

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 14:45:00 +0000

Nominations for the 9th annual Progie Awards - recognizing 2015's best progressive films and filmmakers - have been voted on.

The Progies highlight features, documentaries, and the artists who made and appear in them, based on their progressive political, social, cultural, ethnic, economic, gender, ecological, immigrant, pro-human rights, pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-labor, etc., content and form.

The nominations and awards are given in a variety of categories named after great progressive filmmakers and films of conscience, consciousness and creativity. Up to five nominees can be selected per category -- except in case of a tie, when more than five nominees can be entered in a category.

Michael Moore and his new film Next invaded the Progie nominations in four categories, including for Best Progressive Documentary and Lifetime Achievement. While the nonfiction biopic Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia was nommed in the Best Progressive Documentary (but lost to the Edward Snowden exposé Citizen four) in 2014, Gore is back this year in Best of Enemies, which features Vidal debating rightwing idiot savant William F. Buckley during the 1968 presidential race.

The feature film Trumbo is up for The Trumbo, the Progie for Best Progressive Film, which is named after Dalton Trumbo. Bryan Cranston is also nommed for the Best Progressive Actor Progie for portraying Trumbo in the biopic about how this Hollywood Ten screenwriter helped break the Hollywood Blacklist by writing scripts under assumed names while "banned" by the studios and finally receiving screen credits for the slave revolt epic Spartacus and Exodus in 1960. The feature is notable for its positive depiction of a protagonist clearly identified as having been a Communist Party member.

Films critical of corporate practices on Wall Street and sports - The Big Short, Concussion-also received multiple Progie nominations. As did Suffragette, a hard-hitting drama about the militant struggle of British women for the right to vote. Todd Haynes' pro-lesbian rights drama Carol received two noms, too. So did Spotlight, the fact-based exposé of priest molestation and high-level church cover-up revealed by a heroic team of investigative reporters. The Turkish feature Mustang galloped to two Progie nominations in the Best Foreign Progressive Film and Best Pro-Feminist Depiction of Women categories.

With its anti-police brutality theme, the N.W.A. hit Straight Outta Compton was nominated in the Best Anti-Fascist Film Category, as well as for Best Portrayal of People of Color. The harrowing Hungarian anti-Nazi drama Son of Saul, set in Auschwitz, received three noms, including for Best Anti-Fascist Film. Tangerine, featuring transgender African Americans and shot with iPhones, has also been nommed for Best Portrayal of People of Color, as well as in the best LGBTQ Rights and Most Positive and Inspiring Working Class Screen Image categories. Ken Loach's pro-Irish proletarian drama Jimmy's Hall, written by Paul Laverty, is likewise nommed in the latter category.

Recently deceased cinematographer/director Haskell Wexler is also being considered for the Lifetime Achievement accolade. Comedienne/actress Lily Tomlin, who has been making America laugh since the 1960s TV show Rowan & Martin's "Laugh-In," is also nommed in that category, as well as for Best Progressive Actress for Grandma. Another comic/actress, Sarah Silverman, is nominated in the latter category for her performance in I Smile Back.

The Progressive Magazine began publishing the Progie winners in 2007, when the awards premiered in order to put lefty films in the limelight. Since then, the James Agee Cinema Circle, an international group of left-leaning film critics, historians and scholars, has voted for the annual Progie nominations and awards.

The 2015 Progie Awards nominations are...

1.The Trumbo: The Progie Award for Best Progressive Picture is named after Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten, who was imprisoned for his beliefs and refusing to inform and helped break the blacklist.

The Big Short; Concussion; Experimenter; Spotlight; Trumbo.

2. The Newman: The Progie Award for Best Actor in a progressive picture is named after Paul Newman.

Steve Carell, The Big Short; Bryan Cranston, Trumbo; Ian McKellen, Mr. Holmes; Mark Ruffalo, Spotlight; Peter Sarsgaard, Experimenter.

3. The Karen Morley: The Progie Award for Best Actress in a film portraying women in a progressive picture 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.

Sakura Ando, 100 Yen Love; Cate Blanchett, Carol; Arielle Holmes, Heaven Knows What; Sarah Silverman, I Smile Back; Lily Tomlin, Grandma.

4. The Renoir: The Progie Award for Best Anti-War Film is named after the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, who directed the 1937 anti-militarism masterpiece Grand Illusion.

A War; Bridge of Spies; Sicario; Son of Saul; Where to Invade Next.

5. The Gillo: The Progie Award for Best Progressive Foreign Film is named after the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, who lensed the 1960s classics The Battle of Algiers and Burn!

The Brand New Testament; The Club; Embrace of the Serpent; Mustang; A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence; Son of Saul.

6. The Dziga: The Progie Award for Best Progressive Documentary is named after the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who directed 1920s nonfiction films such as the Kino Pravda (Film Truth) series and The Man With the Movie Camera.

A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile; Best of Enemies; Finders Keepers; Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief; The Hunting Ground; Welcome to Leith; Where to Invade Next.

7. The Our Daily Bread: The Progie Award for the Most Positive and Inspiring Working Class Screen Image is named after a 1934 movie about an American commune during the Great Depression produced by Charlie Chaplin.

Brooklyn; Jimmy's Hall; Straight Outta Compton; Suffragette; Tangerine.

8. The Robeson: The Progie Award for the Best Portrayal of People of Color that shatters cinema stereotypes, in light of their historically demeaning depictions onscreen. It is named after courageous performing legend Paul Robeson, who starred in 1936's Song of Freedom and 1940's The Proud Valley, and narrated 1942's Native Land.

Concussion; Dope; Embrace of the Serpent; Straight Outta Compton; Tangerine

9. The Sergei: The Progie Award for Lifetime Progressive Achievement On-or Off-screen is named after Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet director of masterpieces such as Potemkin and Ten Days That Shook the World.

Danny Glover; Michael Moore; Susan Sarandon; Lily Tomlin; Haskell Wexler.

10. The Buñuel: The Progie Award for the Most Slyly Subversive Satirical Cinematic Film in terms of form, style and content is named after Luis Buñuel, the Spanish surrealist who directed 1929's The Andalusian Dog, 1967's Belle de Jour and 1972's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Anomalisa; The Big Short; The Brand New Testament; A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence; Spy; Where to Invade Next.

11. The Pasolini: The Progie Award for Best Pro-LGBTQ Rights film is named after Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who directed 1964's The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales in the 1970s.

Carol; The D Train; The Danish Girl; Grandma; Tangerine.

12. The Conformist: The Progie Award for Best Anti-=Fascist Film is named after Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 anti-Mussolini film.

Beasts of No Nation; The Best of Enemies; Labyrinth of Lies; The Look of Silence; Son of Saul; The Stanford Prison Experiment; Straight Outta Compton.

13. The Marianne and Juliane: The Progie Award for Best Pro-Feminist Depiction of Women is named after Margarethe von Trotta's 1982 German film about sisters - one an editor, the other a militant.

Carol; The Diary of a Teenage Girl; Grandma; Mad Max: Fury Road; Mustang; Spy; Suffragette.

The James Agee Cinema Circle's participants will select the award winners from the nominees around mid-February, and the results will be announced shortly before the Academy Awards ceremony on Feb. 28, 2016. Until then, we'll see you in the Left Aisle at the movies.

May the Best Progressive films and filmmakers win!

#OscarsSoWhite goes viral as Academy Awards nominations are announced

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 15:16:00 +0000

Activist communities on the Internet had prepared for it: as it turned out, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite was buzzing the morning of Jan.14, as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for this year's prized golden statue.

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.

The hashtags #OscarsSoWhite and #OscarsStillSoWhite trended on Twitter after the nominations were announced as people from around the country weighed in on the lack of diversity in the 87th year of the prestigious awards ceremony.

The original creator of the hashtags, April Reign, who is managing editor of BroadwayBlack.com and an editor of NU Tribe Magazine, spoke to the LA Times about her reasoning for creating the popular trend topics last year. She said, "It happened because I was disappointed once again in the lack of diversity and inclusion with respect to the nominees. And we see, despite all of the talk since last year, nothing has changed, and it looks even worse this year."

Oscar nominations are determined by votes of the estimated 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A survey conducted by the L.A. Times in 2014 of the members of the academy found that 94 percent were white, 77 percent were men, 2 percent were Black, 2 percent were Latino, and less than 5 percent were Asian or Native. (The Academy itself does not release demographic) breakdowns of its membership.)

One could argue that these demographics may affect which films and performances get nominated. The president of the Academy, Cheryl Boone Isaacs (who is African-American), responded to the criticism on the racial, and gender, makeup of the Academy members by announcing a diversity campaign in membership last June.

Isaacs stated that the 322 new members invited to join were truly diverse. Some of those new members included Mexican-Kenyan actress LupitaNyong'o, British actor David Oyelowo, and African-American comedian Kevin Hart. Directors outside of the U.S such as Argentina's Damian Szifron and Poland's PawelPawlikowski, African-American musicians John Legend and Common, South Korean actor Choi Min-sik, and British actresses GuguMbatha-Raw and Felicity Jones were also extended invitations to join.

Along with this, Isaacs announced this past November a five-year program to encourage top studio executives to "expand their thinking when hiring, mentoring and encouraging new talent." Isaacs said: "[The academy] has no power over Hollywood [and] nothing to do with hiring," but hoped to "widen their normal stream of thought." Yet it would appear from the recent nominations that the stream of thought on diversity is still narrow.

The Academy Awards is a ceremony to celebrate the movie industry, yet the nominations seem to ignore representation of a significant portion of the population that financially supports it. As reported by the Washington Post, although minorities make up 37 percent of the U.S. population, they were responsible for 46 percent of the $1.2 billion in movie tickets sold in the United States last year.

And although some films nominated this year have diverse casts, in many of these cases the nominated person associated with the film is white. As Trey Taylor, a regular writer for Vogue, The Atlantic, and Interview commented on Twitter, "It's telling in a film directed by a black dude with five black dudes in leads, they nominate two white scriptwriters." Taylor is referring to the film Straight Outta Compton, a biopic about the African American rap group NWA. The high grossing and critically acclaimed movie, that included a black director, F. Gary Gray, and black lead actors, earned an Oscar nomination--but for its three white screenwriters.

Similarly, white actor Sylvester Stallone was nominated for his performance in the high grossing film "Creed," but the film's black writer-director, Ryan Coogler, and black star, Michael B. Jordan, were not. Darnell Hunt, director of UCLA's Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies stated to the press, "The Academy is white and male, so we have a taste culture that's only going to recognize certain types of projects."

Last year a boycott of the Oscars was called for as many, fed up with the lack of people of color nominated, took to Twitter to live tweet about other shows they were watching during the awards ceremony's broadcast that night.

Ratings for the ceremony were down 16 percent, its lowest ratings in six years. Something similar may occur again, as April Reign concluded in her L.A. Times interview about the push to keep the pressure on Hollywood for more diversity: "The point of #OscarsSoWhite is not that there needs to be a person of color in every category. The point is we need to make sure that the best and brightest are given the opportunity to audition and write and direct and then make the [nomination] decision with respect to the best performances."

A full list of the Academy nominations can be found here.

Reading the backstory on Bernie: “Outsider in the White House”

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 10:44:00 +0000

Can a seasoned Independent who calls himself a "democratic socialist" get elected to the White House in 2016? It sounds highly unlikely on the face of it. But Bernie Sanders' political autobiography from 1997, "Outsider in the House" (he was still a U.S. representative then), has been republished with a new title inserting the word "White" before "House." If readers and voters got to know him a little better from this candidate's story told in his own words, it's just conceivable that political tables could be overturned in a few months' time.

Many - perhaps most - candidates running for office at this level come out with books promoting themselves and their vision for America. In the crush of his current presidential campaign Sanders probablyhad no time to work up a whole new narrative, especially when the ideas and principles he laid out almost 20 years ago are still very much the content of his program today. Whole passages from his book read as though they might have been penned yesterday, as Sanders thunders against the oligarchy, the media they control, the wars they instigate, and the lousy deal they have inflicted on the working people of our country.

Sanders has shown a remarkable ideological consistency over the years. There's little evidence of shifting in the political winds, of backtracking or retreat from the main points he has tried to put before the American people for the last 40 years. His capacity to stay on point without being sidetracked by smartass "gotcha" questions from reporters has time and again gently humiliated those faithful servants of the ruling class posing as news providers, while unfailingly reminding his audience of what real and far more important questions need to be asked.

Throughout Bernie's career he has been plagued by opponents and the media misunderstanding and misrepresenting his message. A powerful recent example of this was the Hillary Clinton campaign's conscious misstatement of Bernie's position on Medicare for All, phrased in such a way as to frighten seniors into believing that Bernie intends to end Medicare and raise taxes.

But Bernie has always taken the high road, responding to attack with the truth and the facts, and never stooping to throw mud back or dig into another politician's past for dirt. By building a slow, steady reputation for fairness and honorable action over a decades-long career, he has won the erstwhile consistently Republican state of Vermont over to a progressive way of looking at the world. In his last election, in 2012, a year that turned the Senate over to the GOP, Sen. Sanders won the confidence of Vermonters in his re-election bid by an overwhelming 71 percent, taking every county in the state.

While the particulars of Sanders' electoral races going back to the early 1970s are of undeniable historical interest, and certainly to any progressive contemplating a run for office, so much detail about campaigns lost and (mostly) won from decades ago might be a chore for most readers to plow through. In addition he has a filmic habit of jump-cutting back and forth in time that can be confusing. Since the original book seems to have been left intact, with just an appended preface by Sanders and an afterword by political columnist John Nichols, the data cited in its pages are, well, outdata-ed. "[T]here are 12 million American workers earning less than $5.15 an hour, or $10,712 a year," he says (p. 120), as but one of many statements that might have been brought current in a helpful footnote.

On the other hand, it is truly illuminating into the foresight, intelligence and empathy of this man when one reads, two pages later, "When fast-food chains, grocery stores, and service industry employers pay $4.50 or $5.00 an hour, their employees often need additional support in order to eat, pay the rent, and take care of their kids. These are the workers who receive Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing, and other resources through government programs." We know this is an almost universally accepted analysis today, even among Republicans who are supposedly always trying to rein in government spending. But to say that in 1997? Who was listening?

As the First Gulf War was ginning up under the first President Bush, Sanders had this to say on the floor of the House on January 18, 1991:

"Mr. Speaker, a few months ago the entire world rejoiced that the Cold War had finally ended, and that the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on bombs and tanks and missiles could finally be used to improve human life, not to destroy human life.

"Mr. Speaker, a major war in the Persian Gulf, costing us thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars, could well be a disaster for the people of our country - especially the working people, the poor people, the elderly, and the children. I predict that this Congress will soon be asked for more money for guided missiles, but there will be no money available to house the homeless. I predict that this Congress will soon be asked for more money for tanks, but there will be no money or effort available to develop a national health care system, guaranteeing health care for all of our people - as virtually all of the industrialized world has."

These are the ringing words that in other places and times composers would be commissioned for massed choruses to sing in orchestrated cantatas in our symphony halls. But Sanders' prescience that the long promised "peace dividend" at the end of the Cold War would soon be squandered in the cultivation of new enemies went ignored. His book is filled with such quotable passages displaying his sensible passion for justice and peace.

Today, with a national audience - despite his virtual eclipse in the corporate media - there is no disputing that Sanders has changed the conversation in America, and forced other candidates to declare themselves on issue after issue.

One of the themes that recurs as a leitmotif throughout Sanders' life is the degree to which both major parties have colluded to deny an Independent a rightful shot at obtaining office. This complaint could be echoed in every state of the union. Although he is now running of necessity in the Democratic Party primaries, his career demonstrates that with some pluck it is still possible to mount successful races outside the two-party system, as other recent victories around the country for the Working Families Party and independent candidates for city councils have shown. Under a President Sanders - and even if he is not elected, under his inspiration - I imagine a reinvigorated appreciation for one of his favorite slogans, to advance "the left wing of the possible."

This is indeed an exciting moment to be a socialist in America.

"Bernie Sanders: Outsider in the White House"

First published as Outsider in the House, 1997.

Verso, 2015, 346 pp., $16.95.

"The Big Short” in review: The fire next time

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Zap those zombies. Silence the serial killers. Get out of outer space. Cancel cancer and forget about fantasy. The very best films of the last few years have been made about something more dramatic...and more frightening! The Great Recession of 2008 has given us our new apocalyptic threat.

The film version of Michael Lewis' non-fiction book "The Big Short" is a high percentage earner in the Great Recession sweepstakes. Steve Carrell, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt take us over market mania mountains, from heated housing highs to the crash and burn recession rupture.

Starting separately, but later intersecting and overlapping, these four principals recognize and try to capitalize on market weaknesses. Aided and abetted by able assistants, they recognize the false value created by fraudulent and shoddy practices and the lack of critical thinking. Although they come at the market from slightly different perspectives, each character represents outside analysis that challenged lazier conventional wisdoms. Each group is also highly critical of the Gilded Age venality and damage potential of the housing bubble.

The film mixes broad humor, captivating drama and sharp characterizations, particularly that of Carrell's character Mark Baum - the real life Steve Eisman. Editing, cuts, didactic asides and useful definition of insider terms pull the audience along the bumpy economic road. All-white board rooms and self-congratulatory back rooms reek of short-sighted received knowledge and solipsism. At one dramatic turning point, Carrell is virtually laughed off the stage as he predicts a crash...while in real time Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers stocks are plummeting.

The Big Short is a worthy housing crisis companion to the stellar 99 Homes, which deals more with on-the-ground misery of the victims of eviction and the corruption of cutting-edge real estate agents of doom. The fictionalized accounts of Margin Call and Wolf of Wall Street amplify the corporate corruption which nurtured the crisis. Rounding out the Great Recession's fine film quintet is Inside Job, which in documentary fashion exhumes the root causes which Big Short dramatizes.

Two small weakness should be mentioned. First, the film repeatedly tells us that virtually no one saw the housing crash coming. This is just not so. The vast majority of buttoned-down, boardroom boneheads ignored warning signs. But anyone who had studied history or was not completely in the thrall of the market Zeitgeist could see storm clouds and occasional flashes of lightning. You didn't need to be Roger Babson to see that Newton's Law would soon take effect.

Furthermore, the film a bit too easily characterizes the great calamity as a one-off. Certainly the economic crisis was ignited by the faux capitalization of the housing market. But in reality, it was the crisis of capitalism writ large, a severe economic dislocation that reflects the weakness of our economic system as a whole, not just the greed of this age and culture.

As the film notes in its epilogue, systemic corrective measures were not taken after the crash, despite its severity. The same types of practices are creeping back into the market to threaten our current housing boom. The next time we may not be lucky enough to have leadership which at least minimizes the damage at 8 million job losses and 6 million houses. The next time we may be burning down the house.

Photo: Wikimedia

This week in history: Jack London, writer, socialist, is born

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 12:35:00 +0000

Jack London, novelist and passionate advocate of labor unions, socialism, and the rights of workers, was born 140 years ago in San Francisco on January 12, 1876. Best known to U.S. readers as the author of Call of the Wild, London also wrote several powerful works dealing with labor, capitalism and socialism. These include his famous dystopian novelThe Iron Heel, his non-fiction critique of capitalism and poverty The People of the Abyss, and an essay collection titled The War of the Classes.

John Griffith Chaney was the child of an unmarried mother who had come from a once wealthy family that had fallen on hard times. He took the name of John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran his mother married in 1876, the year Jack was born.

Growing up in poverty, London had a youth filled with hard work and adventure. Before he reached the age of 19, he worked in a cannery, a jute mill, and a streetcar power plant, sailed as a seaman on a sealing boat, hoboed around the country, and joined Kelly's Army of unemployed protesters against economic inequality in the U.S. At 19, he crammed a four-year high school course into one year and then enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, but quit after a year because of financial hardship. Instead he joined the Klondike gold rush.

London only spent a brief time in the Klondike in the winter of 1897. Like most gold seekers, he suffered extreme physical hardship and his prospecting efforts failed. But he returned to California with a trove of stories that eventually made him wealthy. He published his first stories of the Alaskan frontier in 1899, and eventually produced over 50 volumes of short stories, novels, and political essays. His 1903 novel about a domestic dog who joins an Alaskan wolf pack, The Call of the Wild, brought him lasting fame.

Despite his early identification with rugged individualism and fierce competition, London, through his life experiences, became an outspoken socialist and supporter of the American labor movement. He colorfully described his transformation in a 1903 essay titled How I Became a Socialist.

A short diatribe on "The Scab" is often quoted within the U.S. labor movement and frequently attributed to London, although it has not been found among his writings. It opens:

"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles. When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and Angels weep in Heaven, and the Devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out...."

A commentator describes the novel The Iron Heel - sometimes viewed as a portrait of futuristic fascism -as "London's attempt to consolidate his ideas about the struggle between the working class and the looming specter of capitalism, as epitomized by the shadowy The Oligarchy. It was Marxism for fans of ripping yarns."

"One message of the novel stands true today: Those on the poverty line can only achieve some sort of economic level playing field against the ruthless elite - identified today as that 1% of the planet who own 50% of the wealth - by joining together for common causes."

London died at age 40 from kidney failure on Nov. 22, 1916. The buildings and property where he built his last home, and where he and his wife were cremated and interred, were later preserved as Jack London State Historic Park, in Glen Ellen, California. London became for much of the 20th century possibly the best known American author around the world, and much celebrated in the socialist countries.

How do we see Jack London now?

The year 2016 marks the centennial of London's death, and might be a good time for scholars, readers and activists to revisit his legacy. As "Ben" commented two years ago (Nov. 22, 2013, in an earlier version of this article marking London's death anniversary), "It is troubling that you would publish an article on Jack London without discussing and critiquing his open white supremacy. This was not an incidental part of his politics, and was not just a matter of being a product of his time. He was a bitter enemy of the anti-racist wing of the [Socialist Party], fought for resolutions against Asian workers, embraced social-Darwinist logic for imperialism and declared 'I am first of all a white man, and only then a Socialist.'"

Another commentator, E.E.W. Clay, added, "We will have no progress in socialism, democracy, peace, land nor bread and butter without combating the 'White Only' menace to labor and humanity. 'White Only' advocates and their apologists, are enemies of humankind and labor no matter what 'classic' they write."

These observations reflect some of today's critical thinking about the "heroes" and "great men" of our past. How much of their work stands the test of time even as we know their creators were deeply flawed human beings? How much of a person's character must be defined by their worst belief, act, or even crime? We need to take into account the actions of every person, and weigh their positive against their negative contributions.

Do we throw George Washington and Thomas Jefferson into the trash bin of history because they were slaveholders? Do we ban the music of Richard Wagner because of his anti-Semitism? Do we remove Ernest Hemingway, or Paul Robeson, from our shelves on account of their womanizing? Should we discount the New Deal and Social Security because President Franklin D. Roosevelt achieved these advances by wrenching accommodation to the Jim Crow Southern states dominated by Democratic Party politics in the 1930s? Do we damn forever those sectors of the left that were so tardy in their embrace of the LGBT struggle and the feminist movement?

Perhaps it has always been so that we are drawn to paint our friends in a bright rosy light and our foes in lurid, smarmy tones. It is the mark of the mature critic to aid understanding for present and future generations by sober assessment characterized on the one hand by firm principle, and on the other recognizing the specific influences and limitations on an individual of a particular place and time in history.

Jack London, and anyone, must be considered in that light.

Photo: Portrait of young Jack London. UC Berkeley, The Bancroft Library

"The Revenant": Voice in the wilderness

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 15:47:00 +0000

In The Revenant, Alejandro González Iñárritu has fashioned a powerful, soaring reverie of love, duty and survival . . . an environmentalist's epic which raises questions not just of family and relationships, but of the morality and impact of Western colonization.

Legendary guide Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his mixed race son Hawk (Native American actor Forrest Goodluck) have led an English language trapping party through the harsh western wilderness. The rapacious trappers have little trust for each other. They are surrounded by rival French and hostile Indians, buffeted between immense snow covered mountains and dark unforgiving forests. They have lost most of their party through conflicts and to the elements.

Glass has led them through this abyss. But when he is severely mauled by a bear, the trappers must leave him behind to seek aid. Party leader Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) leaves Hawk, Bridger (Will Poulter) and John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) to protect Glass until they can return with reinforcements. Bridger is earnest in executing his charge. Fitzgerald is treacherous.

When Hawk tries to protect his father, Fitzgerald kills him and buries his father. The Revenant is the story of Glass' near death survival and pursuit of Fitzgerald. But it is also a cavalcade of breath taking images of pristine wilderness . . . and man's destructive footprint.

DiCaprio and Hardy brilliantly hold the center of the struggle with performances elevating their characters to archetypes. DiCaprio's odyssey through the wilderness is a painful etching of European encounters with natives, animals and elements. Hardy gives full flesh to the amoral pragmatism of colonial foot soldiers, a villain of conditions more than free will.

Inarritu stages his drama in land that we've since reshaped for individual enrichment. But here Oscar Award winning Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki ("Birdman," "Gravity," "Children of Men") has recreated the beauty and harshness of the lost world encountered by the trappers. The extensive twilight shots of battles and camp sites are a world of murky confusion of allies and enemies with as much danger from one as the other. The score by Ryuichi Sakamoto ("Babel," "Black Rain"), Bryce Dessner and Carsten Nicolai carries gravity and majesty to operatic proportions.

Taken together with "Babel," "Birdman or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)" and "Biutiful," Inarritu's The Revenant has given us powerful explorations of relationships and family. Inarritu may draw back from polemical statements, letting his characters raise questions about what relationships mean. But he lays bare the emotional and physical tolls of these pursuits. To ignore his messages would be living as rootlessly as Tom Hardy's trapper. To live well in this world, we need explore their meanings . . . as well as merely enjoying the craft of our most accomplished and interesting director.

This article was reposted from the Huffington Post.

Photo: AP

Unpacking a trunk of new Soviet Yiddish songs: A self-interview

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 15:25:00 +0000

Eric: So, your CD City of the Future has just been issued by ARC Music Productions International Ltd. out of England. How does it feel?

Gordon: It's exhilarating. It's been a long time coming and I'm very proud of our work on it. It's been a highly collective process between me as executive producer (people in the film biz will recognize that as the guy who raised the money) and the artists, headed up by the world-renowned, multi-talented Yale Strom.

Eric: "New" Soviet Yiddish songs? What does that mean?

Gordon: A little background is necessary. One of my jobs as director of the Southern California District of the Arbeter Ring (Workmen's Circle) was to gather, sort and ship out thousands of books donated locally to the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass. We saw hundreds of volumes of the Collected Works of Sholem Aleichem, and quite a few of the Collected Works by Guy de Maupassant in Yiddish(!). But occasionally some unique ephemera would turn up. Around 1998 there appeared in a shopping bag left outside our door, a copy of Samuil Polonski's "Far yugnt/For Youth," a songbook of 19 numbers published in the USSR in 1931, with lyrics by some of the most important Yiddish poets active in Soviet Russia.One day, I said to myself, setting it aside, I'm going to take a closer look at this and see if we can do something with it.

Eric: And?

Gordon: We had to get the right personnel in place at Arbeter Ring to assess what this book reallywas. I can read Yiddish, so I understood that this collection was created to form the basis of a new Soviet Jewish repertoire for use in the Yiddish school system. In 1931 there were Yiddish schools, theaters, choruses, and the so-called "autonomous Jewish republic" of Birobidzhan in the Far East had just been established. We had a gifted musical director of our in-house Mit Gezang Yiddish Chorus, Kathryn Rowe, who faithfully entered all these songs with their original vocal and piano parts into a musical computer program. We had a expert translator in Hershl Hartman, and I did the modern transliteration so that our singers could read the texts.

Every August, Arbeter Ring cosponsored a program of talks and music to commemorate the 1952 murder of a dozen or so leading figures in Soviet Yiddish culture, including, tragically, poets Itsik Fefer, Perets Markish and others whose lyrics Polonski used. Finally, on August 10, 2008. we presented in cantata form, in the order they appeared in the book, all 19 songs in concert, with piano accompaniment as published. This was a world premiere performance, because I'm sure that no one in the USSR ever staged the songbook in that format.We had an appreciative audience (although one or two critics thought we interpreted these songs about building socialism with a little too much enthusiasm!). That audience, and another larger one a year later in Tucson, were for all practical purposes the only people who hadever heard these songs in this country.

Eric: Were they really all new to Western ears?

Gordon: Only two or three of these songs at most ever escaped the pages of the songbook into the known Yiddish repertoire, "A krenetse/A Well" and "Fabrik lid/Factory Song." The opening song of the collection, "Hirsh Lekert," an already extant folksong, appearedas if to say, "This is the history we came out of."There's one other song whose moving lyric by Fefer had been set by another composer, but so far as I know "Ver hot es?/Who Did It?" in Polonski's version is a premiere recording along with all the other songs.

Eric: What are these songs about?

Gordon: Actually they're not all political. "A krenetse," for example, is a pastoral ode to the young women and men who gather at the well. There's another song about sledding in wintertime, and a sweet, poignant memory of childhood in pre-revolutionary times. But most are about building new cities ("City of the Future" is one title), life on the collective farm, the Red Army defending the Soviet Union, the day the news of Lenin's death came to town, and a particularly amusing one about a "meydl" - a young woman - allowed to drive a tractor. That one is the most "Jewish"-sounding item.

It gives me a chill to imagine 10-year-old boys in Soviet Yiddish schools singing the song "Royte Armey/Red Army" with Itsik Fefer's lyricsin 1931. Ten years later they would be young men of twenty and heading for the front to help repel the Nazi invaders. I know it's hyperbole to say this, but I can't resist making the claim that this song - along with similar ones in other Soviet songbooks in other languages - saved the world from fascism! We can never forget that as many as 25 million Soviet citizens lost their lives in the defense of the motherland.

Eric: No fulsome praises for our Great Leader Joseph Stalin?

Gordon: Not at all. His name is never mentioned either in the songs or in the foreword. In 1931, the purges of the mid-1930s were still unforeseeable, not to mention Nazism, a new World War and the Holocaust, nor of course the postwar crackdown on Jewish culture. The 1931 songbook totally predates the Stalin cult of personality.

Eric: 1931. That was the time of the Great Depression.

Gordon: Yes, and worth remembering that. While the rest of the world languished in profound economic despair, the USSR with its planned economy was building and growing, and even importing skilled workers. At that particular moment in the arc of Russian, Soviet, and world history, our 29-year-old composer and his lyricists had plenty of reason to be hopeful.

Eric: So who was Polonski?

Gordon: He was not in a league with Shostakovich or Prokofiev, to be sure. But Samuil Vladimirovich Polonski (we call him Shmuel) was central to Soviet Jewish music, and yes, there indeed was some. There's a biographical entry on him in the Encyclopedia of Soviet Composers and Musicians (Moscow, 1981). Born in 1902 in Gaisino in the Podolsk region of Ukraine, he grew up in a traditional Jewish environment, the son of a klezmer violinist father and a mother who knew and sang a treasury of folk songs. Shmuel himself became a master of improvisation on woodwind instruments and played in an itinerant klezmer orchestra.

But the world was changing fast: He was 15 years old in 1917 when the Russian Revolution broke out. From 17 to 20, he served in the Red Army, and by his early 20s was already leading musical ensembles and choruses.It's worth noting that Polonski died at the age of 52 in 1955 - two years after Stalin - so we presume that he was left personally unscathed by the anti-Jewish terror of the late 1940s and early 1950s. But there is scant reference to him after his move to Moscow in 1945, when he returned from the eastward evacuation that saved millions of Soviet Jews, and Jews from elsewhere in Europe as well.

Eric: How are we supposed to hear these songs today?

Gordon: Polonski occupied the space allowed for and created by Soviet Jewish musicians in a world that had, to say the least, its uncertainties. In 1931 Polonski could have guessed that with growing urbanization, industrialization and assimilation, the future of Yiddish in the Soviet Union might not be extremely bright. Those same larger historical forces operated everywhere, not only in the USSR, of course. The Yiddish schools were not attracting a large number of Jewish children, nor would Birobidzhan ever draw a significant population of Jews. Most parents wanted their children in Russian-language schools in the larger cities to ease their integration into modern society.

So I wonder if, while writing these songs in utter sincerity, he was not also conscious of creating a record of a specific uplifting moment in time, a time of progress, building, pride, and hope, and as a legacy to the future. In a very real sense, that quality of being an artifact of its period became more real as the terrible tragedies of the later 1930s, 1940s and 1950s unfolded. Polonski wrote these songs for the future, for us to discover and cherish. These songs also preserve some very precious lyrics that likely don't turn up anywhere else in their authors' published works.

Eric: So is the album more or less an academic restoration of the piano-vocal score?

Gordon: To the contrary! I approached Yale Strom to make new arrangements of these songs because I knew that a whole CD of piano and voices might sound quaint or archaic. So Yale put his genius to work and re-imagined these songs with today's version of all the hope and joy and thrill of building a new future, which, by the way, the world needs doing in so many ways! There's a wide range of instrumentation - in fact, no piano at all - and definitely a salute to Polonski's own klezmer background. Best of all, we have the highly accomplished musicians that Yale works with and the most prominent names in Yiddish music all gathered together to bring these songs to life: Michael Alpert, Judy Bressler, Elizabeth Schwartz, Daniel Kahn, Jack "Yankl" Falk, Vira Lozinski, and Anthony Russell. I admit it, I have visions of a Grammy in my future! So, enjoy!

David Bowie, 1947-2016: Departure of the Cosmic Chameleon

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 13:34:00 +0000

Imagine what life was like for us kids in the 1970s. We were coming of age in a rather awkward cultural gap that opened up after the grand adventure that was the sixties. Not only did all the grooviness evaporate before we sat at the table, there was also a premature nostalgia spreading for the 1950s, but it didn't result in any of the raucous pleasures of that era so much as offer up counterfeit treasure. So no Elvis or James Dean - instead we got Fonzie. We needed a savior. We needed a starman.

Which is where David Bowie comes in. I'm not certain that, despite his vast success and high profile, he ever fit into the mainstream. Instead he stood out in high relief as an utterly alien component. The first Bowie record I ever bought was Changes. It told me to turn and face the strange and it meant it. Seventies Bowie was a subversive force that perhaps shone bright in a sort of freak splendor for regular people, but quickly became a beacon to those of us who didn't quite fit, or didn't want to.

Far from an overnight success, David Bowie (born David Jones) had been around since the mod era and had been in a couple of R n' B combos that never charted. Then he was a mime. Then he was trying to be Anthony Newley. Then he was trying to be Bob Dylan, Lots of ch-ch-changes but the perpetually stalled career was a wonderful chrysalis for what he finally emerged as: which was a new and provocative sort of cultural force. At the time of his first breakthrough (in the role of Ziggy Stardust- rock's first meta concept) he may have seemed a part of his surroundings to a degree. There was an emerging "glam rock" sensibility that encompassed the likes of Roxy Music, Elton John and T Rex. But none of these other acts had quite the ingredients or the trajectory of Bowie. While some of these acts overlapped with what Bowie was doing they didn't offer the peculiar and artful intersection of artifice and sincerity that Bowie did. There was an intellectual curiosity and fearlessness in what Bowie fashioned. He was provocative in terms of sexual norms and made that a virtue rather than a mere stunt.

Bowie's significance to us kids of the times was not only as an artist but as an educator. He pried open, for me (and so many others), a world that included Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Iggy and the Stooges, William S. Burroughs, Bertolt Brecht, Jaques Brel, Kraftwerk and much more. All of this was of immense value to those of us left utterly bored by CB radios and mellow corporate rock. Bowie was warmly welcomed as the first white artist to appear on Soul Train and a few years later challenged MTV on the lack of black artists on the music channel. Bowie's persona and work took the knife (Bowie knife?) to the barriers between man and woman, black and white, past and future. That knife was either a threat (to the conventional) or a tool to those of us who wanted more openings to peer through.

And Bowie was an artist. I never felt that he was a mere entertainer, but rather a true original force and brilliant synthesizer. And he didn't stay still but progressed, shedding identities and modes of work and style to offer new canvases. I particularly remember the shock of the new that his Berlin era records made in consort with Brian Eno provided.

The 1980s were a bit strange, because Bowie became (for a brief while) a far more conventional figure and seemed to suddenly be moving towards... well ... normality. Despite starting the decade with the wonderful Scary Monsters... he was soon producing his least adventurous music and enjoying his biggest hits. I think a lot of us felt like Bowie was slipping from our world and falling to Earth. There was MTV, movies with Muppets, and that embarrassing remake of Dancing In The Streets with Mick Jagger! His greatest value during this era was his enormous influence playing out in the careers of new stars. Gary Numan, Boy George, Eurhythmics, ABC and so very many others seemed to bring to life specific Bowie personas: you could have predicted the UK pop charts with 70s Bowie album sleeves alone.

But Bowie returned, with coming decades seeing him relinquish the mainstream and quietly return to challenging material. In recent years he had been quiet due to health challenges following a collapse on stage. When he reemerged it was at full intensity in the work, but without live appearances. In the very recent period he battling cancer whilst producing a final album and an off Broadway play. It was a generous parting from a challenging and rewarding cultural icon.

Black Star is now available worldwide, and Lazarus is playing an extended run at New York Theater Workshop 79 East 4^th Street, New York, NY 1000

Photo: AP

Here's why you should go see “Trumbo”

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 12:31:00 +0000

If you haven't seen Trumbo, run to the nearest theater and check it out. It is politically that good. With Star Wars and the constant maze of blockbuster movies invading your local theaters, Trumbo is in danger of disappearing or being drowned out.

The movie Trumbo is about the persecution of top screen writer Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood 10. It dares to be honest about McCarthyism and the extraordinary danger it posed to democracy. It shows the courage and integrity of the Communists and other victims who fought back and ultimately won their right to create and make a living.

The movie focuses on Trumbo, who did not deny his party membership nor did he denounce his beliefs. He ultimately prevailed despite being dragged before the House Un American Activities Committee in 1954, blacklisted, losing his livelihood, victimized by the FBI, held in contempt and sent to prison. That was the plight of many others besides Trumbo, but his story is highlighted here. The movie treats the Committee as the tyrants they were. It shows the informers as pitifully cowed into trying to save their own skins, and right-wing, red-baiting media charlatans like the notorious Hedda Hopper as fascist-minded, power-hungry, anti-Semitic opportunists.

The movie breaks the mold when it comes to the way Hollywood typically treats Communist characters. Dalton Trumbo played by Bryan Cranston comes off as a courageous, principled individual who refuses to be cowed by the congressional committee. We see the enormous pressure on himself and his beautiful supportive family. The film shows how he successfully organizes among his fellow blacklisted screenwriters to find a way out of their victimization. That was the main story in Woody Allen's The Front.

The Trumbo character makes the point in the end that what they are fighting for is the First Amendment and defense of democratic rights for all. These were patriots in the greatest meaning of that word because they refused to give in to the wellfinanced attempt of the extreme right to outlaw all progressive thought and stop all forms of resistance on the part of labor and people's movements.

While I think that more needed to be said about the rising civil rights movement in there 1950s that was breaking the McCarthyite stranglehold on real progress for the nation, the fact that Trumbo's daughter, played beautifully by Elle Fanning, carried on the father's politics by becoming a civil rights activist was a significant part of the movie from both a family and political perspective. Diane Lane plays Cleo Trumbo, his courageous partner who stood by him through losing their home and wealthy life style and the scorn the family had to face. John Goodman plays the owner of a "B" movie company who hires Trumbo to write good screenplays for his low-budget films and takes a baseball bat to a reporter who tries to intimidate him.

In the real world the Communist Party was not just a victim of McCarthyism. It remained an organized force in its own defense legally and politically not only in Hollywood but also in the broad peace, economic and social justice fronts of struggles. Because it fought back the party survived and democratic rights for all were preserved.

The right danger then was very much like the right danger today. It is politically and financially sponsored by the most reactionary sections of the one percent. Trumbo, whether intentionally or not, sounds the alarm.

Donald Trump and his crude, anti working class, racist Republican cohorts are the rebirth of McCarthy and worse.

Their glorification of political incorrectness is to magnify racism, male supremacy, homophobia, war and aggression. It pisses on the graves of all of those who fought and died to make this country more humane and democratic.

Go see this movie before it disappears from the theaters. Get active against the right-wing forces. Take Trumbo's inspiration to others and bring them to the polls next November.

To defeat the Republicans who are the main obstacles to peace, economic and social justice today is to honor and further exonerate the victims of that horrible period in our history.

It's playing in limited theaters around the country. So check the movie listings and go see Trumbo.