People Before Profit blog

“Kung Fury”: 1980s-inspired action movie, released on YouTube

Fri, 29 May 2015 16:37:00 +0000

Kung Fury, a 31-minute, crowd funded 80s inspired action comedy movie, was released for free today on YouTube. Produced by Swedish studio Laser Unicorns that launched a kickstarter campaign to help funded it was able to raise $630,019 from what was originally a goal of only $200,000.

Kung Fury takes place in 1985 Miami and from the very first opening scene, which involves a cop car being flipped over by a skateboard, you can tell that you are going to be in for some physics-defying action and fun. The main villain of the movie is none other than Adolf Hitler or "Kung Führer" in the movie because he has mastered the art of Kung Fu and only the chosen one Kung Fury can travel back in time and take him down.

The sound effects and music for the movie are of course something straight out of the 1980s. It sounds like everything was produced from a Yamaha keyboard and that is actually a good thing! The 80s icon, David Hasselhoff, wrote the lead track "True Survivor" and it even has its own music video. The special effects in the movie are actually the biggest break from the 1980s theme as the computer generated special effects and animation goes far beyond the technology they had in the 1980s.

The acting in the movie was great based on the how low the budget is. Written, directed and starring David Sandberg as the main character "Kung Fury" brings corny catch phrases and ultra violent action together into one great short film. The ending leaves open the possibility of a sequel. Overall Kung Fury is a fun movie to watch and might give you a case of nostalgia.

"Kung Fury"

Directed by David Sandberg

31 min., 2015, Violence/language-not for kids

Photo: official Kickstarter page

"Death in the Congo" highlights obscure subject: African liberation

Fri, 29 May 2015 14:58:00 +0000

The struggle for African liberation, often spearheaded by socialist, left-leaning national liberation movements, is an important part of African history. Many figures loom large as part of this history, including Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo.

Young and charismatic, Lumumba endeared himself to the emerging national liberation movement, while trying to balance conflicting needs and agendas in a country largely controlled by Belgian financial interests - even after independence.

During this time, the late 1950's and early 1960's, as the 'Cold War' turned hot in many decolonizing nations, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for influence throughout Africa, including the Congo. Ultimately, the CIA, the United Nations and Belgian royalty would coalesce in the now independent African nation to rout the radical independence movement, oust and then assassinate Lumumba.

This is the backdrop of Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick's new book Death In The Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba.

While informative, Death In The Congo unfortunately misses the mark. Gerard and Kuklick spend considerable text describing political Ping-Pong, the back and forth deliberations and insider discussions within Belgian, UN and US ruling circles. Throughout, this reviewer felt overwhelmed with information and minutia, but gained very little political context. People deliberated, events unfolded, however, the larger political context - a world torn between competing economic and ideological camps, and Lumumba's role in the unfolding drama - was largely missing.

Additionally, most of the analysis, quotes, conversations and events are told from a Western perspective. African voices are almost absent, and/or minimized when - in my opinion - they should have been the dominant narrative.

Furthermore, I came away from Death In The Congo with very little additional information about the man Patrice Lumumba, his life's story, what made him tick. Often it is the nuance, the personal events that unfold over the course of a person's life that shape their political, ideological perspective on the world. Death In The Congo did not tell Lumumba's story and as a result the forces - their politics, interests and ideology - that coalesced and engineered his ousting and assassination are less understood, are murky.

Not to be too harsh, Death In The Congo did add some insight as to CIA fears that Lumumba "could bring to the Congo what Fidel Castro had brought to Cuba." Undoubtedly, as Gerard and Kuklick wrote, "The revolution in Cuba and the dangerous Castro were the lens through which American decision-makers viewed the Congo." Lumumba came to power roughly one year after the success of the Cuban Revolution, and CIA director Dulles strained to label him a Marxist - though his own agency's analysis "emphasized that nothing substantiated the allegation of Lumumba's communism or communist sympathies."

Most probably, Lumumba was a Pan-African nationalist - not necessarily a Marxist - who attempted to straddle the fence between capitalism and socialism. He, undoubtedly, made overtures to both camps. According to the State Department, Lumumba was "an unscrupulous opportunist and probably the most able and dynamic politician in the Congo...Ideologically he is probably not faithful to either East or West, nor is he likely to be prejudiced against accepting aid from either side."

The African American Communist Party, USA leader, Claude Lightfoot, remarked in the mid-1960s: "Clearly, the first important lesson of the African revolution is that the Black man's destiny is intertwined in numerous ways with the trends and currents prevailing over the entire world, especially with the global struggle between capitalism and socialism." He added, that this "global struggle" was a "central fact of our time," and that national independence struggles had to take a side. For, to not do so only emboldened reaction, colonialism and imperialism.

If anything, we learn that Lumumba was faced with a complex set of circumstances. He tried to bring democracy to a former Belgian colony. He tried to modernize the political infrastructure and institutions, while juggling the external and internal threats - from the Congo military (headed by Joseph Mobutu, who would soon become dictator), Belgian royalty, the United Nations and the CIA. He was besieged from all sides, but ultimately tried to stay neutral in a world polarized, which may have been his greatest mistake.

Lumumba remarked in summer 1960: "We are neither communists, Catholics, nor socialists. We are African nationalists. We reserve the right to choose our friends in accordance with the principle of positive neutrality." Roughly six months later he would be lined-up before a firing squad and assassinated.

Death In The Congo isn't a bad book. It fills a void. It sheds some light on an obscured subject, a subject clouded by Cold War historiography. But it could have illuminated so much more.

Death In The Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba

By Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick

Harvard University Press, 2015

When Aaron met Rachel: "The Fourth Noble Truth"

Tue, 26 May 2015 13:55:00 +0000

The Fourth Noble Truth starts off interestingly enough: Aaron (Harry Hamlin of Mad Men, LA Law) is a pampered, self-centered movie star who exemplifies the stereotypical indulgent Hollywood lifestyle. After a violent episode of road rage (that's not very well directed by writer/helmer Gary McDonald), as a condition of staying out of the slammer Aaron attends private Buddhist meditation lessons taught by Rachel (Kristen Kerr), who is also an aspiring actress.

Of course, their relationship begins with a typical Tinseltown "cute meet" that foreshadows what is to come. Skeptical of the whole meditation methodology, Aaron is basically complying with the stipulation to take part in this process in order to beat the road rage rap and avoid serving time. However, Rachel is serious and proceeds to teach Aaron - whether he likes it or not - Buddha's basic principles so he can discover inner peace and avoid "going postal" (the name of a movie Aaron also directed) in future.

Noble has an intriguing idea: Aaron embodies the privileged, egocentric self, while Rachel appears to symbolize spiritual values. Much of Noble consists of a dialogue between the two, with their diametrically opposed world views. Aaron is the libertine; Rachel the ascetic. Their interactions are well acted. However, this movie is no My Dinner with Andre, the 1981 film helmed by Louis Malle and co-written by its co-stars, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, which was so full of witty, sparkling, illuminating repartee.

Noble's path to enlightenment is problematic and doesn't fulfill the promise of its premise. While at first the discussions about the tenets of Buddhism do raise some consciousness and are absorbing and educational, Noble quickly runs out of steam. After half an hour the eight or so conversations between Aaron and Rachel become repetitive, boring and preachy. What a shock - a movie about a teacher (Zen or otherwise) is pedantic and tediously talky. There are even onscreen titles to drive the Buddhist points home. In addition to being aurally dull, these flat gabfests aren't even shot with interesting angles: An artist like Orson Welles might have lensed these vignettes to at least make them optically stimulating to look at. (Happy 100^th birthday, Orson - even if you're a century-old, you're still forever the Wunderkind!)

What's worse, especially annoying is that the prim and proper Buddhist tutor is a sexually repressed person using "enlightenment" to hide her inner conflicts and inhibitions. She's no better than those Catholic girls Billy Joel sang about, but Rachel - who, we're told, hasn't had sex for at least three years - hides behind Buddhism to mask her suppressed sexuality. She's another holier-than-thou stick-in-the-mud misusing religion as a rationalization for repression. In one of Noble's early scenes, after watching a DVD starring Aaron, Rachel starts to fantasize about having sex with him. But this individual is so uptight that not only does she stop herself from having an affair with the star, but from even allowing herself to self-stimulate.

Hardly a role model, in a Q&A with the talent after a private screening of Noble, Kerr actually expressed being irritated at her sexually frustrated character. Like most pedants this guru isn't as knowledgeable about the secrets and meaning of life as she pretends to be. Rachel is a know-it-all who desperately needs some carnal knowledge, and it's frankly annoying and gets on your nerves (including of said actress) that she's cloaking herself in proverbial Buddhist robes to disguise her dysfunction.

The low budget indie's repetitive will-they/won't-they and verbal sparring about her hang-ups becomes tiresome and redundant. In the hands of a better screenwriter, Rachel's actual lack of insight and enlightenment could have been developed more, like the hypocritical missionary in the classic short story "Rain" - but, alas, McDonald is no Maugham.

In this day and age where African Americans are being murdered by cops for, among other things, the heinous crime of "looking while Black," Noble includes a noteworthy encounter between Aaron and the LAPD. The police overreaction is so astounding and out of proportion to Aaron's infractions of the rules of his house arrest, that it made me think: If this character wasn't a movie star and Caucasian, the cops would probably have given Aaron a "warning shot" in the back of his skull. This actually might be the most compelling scene in the entire movie.

It's also interesting to note that in Hamlin's very first role after Mad Men - which ends at a Big Sur meditation retreat - he stars in none other than a movie about meditation.

Beneath its Buddhist veneer, Noble is yet another autumn-male / summer-female flick. But most moviegoers will probably feel that this verbose exercise in didacticism, a case study in how not to make a propaganda picture, fails with its ignoble protagonists to dramatize its path to higher consciousness. Because the highest wisdom lies in the fifth noble truth: That enlightening films must also be entertaining - otherwise, write a pamphlet or Zen kōan.

The Fourth Noble Truth opens June 5 in Los Angeles. Watch for national release.

The Fourth Noble Truth

Director: Gary T. McDonald

Writers: Gary T. McDonald, Gary T. McDonald

Stars: Harry Hamlin, Kristen Kerr, Richard Portnow |

87 minutes, no MPAA rating

East meets island: movies from Asian Pacific Film Festival

Fri, 22 May 2015 10:53:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - The 31st annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival continues to serve as a gateway for features, shorts, animation, and documentaries right here in the belly of the motion picture beast. LAAPFF also provided seminars, panels, and galas - and a gathering place where East met Island. Here are reviews of a few of this year's film offerings.

Waterworld meets Alphaville at Vietnam

The best film I saw at LAAPFF was Vietnamese director/co-writer Nguyễn-Võ Nghiêm-Minh's 2030 (the Vietnamese title is "Nước," which, appropriately, means "water"). This is a futuristic look at global warming which, in the eponymous year, has caused flooding in much of southern Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh City. 2030 is very stylish, sensuous and cinematic, combining elements of different film genres: Sci Fi and Film Noir. It's sort of like Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 Alphaville meets 1995's Waterworld.

In 2030, the Lemmy Caution hardboiled detective-like character (played by Eddie Constantine in Alphaville and Kevin Costner's Waterworld Mariner) is actually depicted by a Vietnamese woman, Quynh Hoa, playing Sao, who tries to unravel the mystery behind the death of her fisherman husband Thi (Kim Long Thach). Amidst the floating farms of flooded Vietnam, Sao's investigation leads to the corporate honcho and scientist Giang (Quy Binh) and his overwater laboratories.

It turns out that Sao and Giang have a past, which is revealed via a complex flashback structure that may be hard to follow for some viewers of this subtitled feature. But this 98-minute movie is well worth the effort and concentration it requires to be understood. Quynh, who starred in 2011's award winning Saigon Electric, is quite good. The cast includes professionals and in a Neo-Realist way, non-actors, in this movie that includes some sexual content.

2030 is the second feature directed by Nguyễn-Võ Nghiêm-Minh, who previously helmed and co-wrote 2004's award winning The Buffalo Boy, which was also shot in Vietnam with a watery subtext. Minh, who now lives in the L.A. area, was a physicist at UCLA, so he brings an unusual skill set to filmmaking. It's fascinating to see how someone with a scientific background portrays onscreen climate change - especially a scientist who also has a highly aesthetic visual sense. Visually, 2030 has the elegance of physics and it deserves distribution, so viewers far and wide can experience this vision of life underwater. Perhaps by doing so we might be able to avoid such a liquidy fate.

Fa'a Samoa cinema: Ofa Ma Alofa

Along with writer/director Ty Sanga's documentary Visions in the Dark: The Life of Pinky Thompson, Ofa Ma Alofa helped put the "Pacific" into the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. A number of Samoans and Tongans attended the crowded screening, which was part of LAAPFF's "At What Cost, Love" program of shorts. Of course, the Pacific works are what this film historian/critic, who lived in Oceania for 20-plus years and has co-authored three books on South Seas Cinema, is most interested in.

Ofa Ma Alofa is a 20-minute scripted short with actors by writer/ director Gabrielle Fa'ai'uaso, an undergraduate of Samoan ancestry who has been a film student at the Academy for Creative Media at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. The dialogue is in Samoan and Tongan, with English subtitles.

This well made, well acted film was inspired by ancient legends and historical events, and depicts a war between invading Tongans and Samoans. Following a battle, Ofa (Tongan for "love") is left to die, but Alofa (Samoan for "love"), a young Samoan maiden, secretly rescues him and heals the wounded invader in the jungle. They fall in love and all hell breaks loose in this Romeo and Juliet saga set in the Polynesia of 1160 CE.

The most noteworthy thing about Ofa Ma Alofa is its attempt to depict pre-contact Polynesia: The action takes place 500-plus years before the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen "discovered" Samoa in 1722. Usually, indigenous people aren't represented onscreen unless they are in interaction with palagis (Caucasians), as if Natives did not have a "pre-history" until whitey showed up and graced aboriginal people with the magnificence of their presence. (Consider this: With all the countless movies set in Manhattan, there's only one I know of that depicts the pre-contact tribes living in that island before Henry Hudson, the British, the Dutch showed up - about one minute in the 1955 Marilyn Monroe movie The Seven Year Itch.) Then, of course, once the outsiders arrive, onscreen Pacific Islanders often become background characters in stories set in their own homelands, mere props existing only vis-à-vis the white interlopers, who are usually the protagonists.

But in Ofa Ma Alofa all of the characters are Polynesians, and we get a sense of their aboriginal apparel, tongue, tattoos and traditional way of life, lived close to nature, so this is refreshing. The short was obviously made on location somewhere in Polynesia, but it's not clear on which South Pacific island - Oahu? Tutuila? But it definitely does have an Oceanic ambiance.

Unfortunately, having said all that, what does Fa'ai'uaso represent as the pre-contact way of life? It could be argued that Ofa Ma Alofa perpetuates the South Seas stereotypes of Pacific Islanders being extremely violent, brutal "savages." This is supposed to be a love story but there's more making war than making love onscreen. There may have been wars and conflicts in 12th-century Polynesia, but there were also a lot of other things happening that you can make a movie about without perpetuating belligerent, warlike caricatures.

Another problem is that the leaf-skirted actress portraying Alofa (Suluama Fa'ai'uaso) is clearly wearing pasties beneath the leafy leis covering her chest. Are we supposed to think that the ancient Polynesian women wore pasties (or swimmers in contemporary French Polynesia, for that matter)? Listen, if you're going to attempt to depict the past as it really was, don't impose the missionary madness introduced by the Europeans and Americans on your characters and plot. And if you can't be authentic because you've been brainwashed by missionaries and the like, then make movies about something else. Your ancestors deserve nothing less. Be accurate as to how they really were - not the way so-called Christians want "pagans" to be portrayed. I'm just saying - be true to thine own South Seas self!

Now that I got that out of my system, Fa'ai'uaso is a gifted filmmaker and I hope he will continue to make movies, including features. I look forward to reviewing them in future. Once upon a time, it was the palagi, like Robert Louis Stevenson, who was the "tusitala" - the "teller of tales." The most exciting development in South Seas cinema is the surging tidal wave of indigenous filmmaking that talents such as Fa'ai'uaso and Sanga are a part of. Fa'ai'uaso has a good eye and has made other shorts. He shows promise - by keeping it real he'll go much farther as a genuine artist. (See his demo reel here.)

Chucky Meets Kurosawa: Ghost Dolls

Squeamish as I am, I don't like the horror genre because spooky movies give me the heebie-jeebies. Nevertheless, I have to admit that writer/director Yuki Nishikata's Ghost Dolls is an exceptionally well crafted short set in 19^th-century Japan. It brings you back in time with an eerie tale that had my skin crawling and hair standing on end for 15 minutes. Call it Chucky meets Kurosawa - a pretty scary, cinematically rendered ghost story with special effects in the land of the rising sun. Highly recommended for filmgoers who love to have nightmares.

For more LAAPFF info see here.

The new book co-authored by L.A.-based reviewer Ed Rampell is "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book" (see: http://hawaiimtvbook.weebly.com/).

Photo: Japanese American National Museum Blog

"Blood on Steel": Book remembers 1937 Steelworkers strike

Thu, 21 May 2015 13:20:00 +0000

On Memorial Day, 1937 thousands of steelworkers, their families and allies, marched on Republic Steel in Chicago's southeast side demanding union recognition. In what would soon come to be known as the 'Memorial Day Massacre,' peaceful protesters assembled just yards from the mills entrance, were fired upon by local police - killing ten strikers and wounding over one hundred more.

While the massacre received voluminous media attention, it was actually just one battle in a larger war fought by an accumulative 85,000 steelworkers from Pennsylvania to Illinois against what was then known as the 'Little Steel' companies.

Michael Dennis, in his short - though insightful - book Blood On Steel: Chicago Steelworkers And The Strike Of 1937 has not only documented in grisly detail the events of that fateful day, but has also added historical and political context.

According to Dennis, the strike "...vividly symbolized the larger movement for industrial unionism and social democracy that occurred in the 1930s." Additionally, "In place of despotism, workers imagined a system of democratic representation for industrial laborers in the mines and mills," thereby "express[ing] the egalitarian themes of the era."

In the mid-1930's the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations, headed by Mine Workers' president, John L. Lewis, formed and financed the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, or SWOC, which by January, 1937 had signed a groundbreaking union recognition agreement with U.S. Steel, the largest steel manufacturer in the country. By April, 1937, 200,000 steelworkers had joined the new union.

Excited by the recent victory - as well as the recent upsurge in labor organizing, strikes and sit-ins, especially in the auto industry, spurred by the passage of the Wagner Act - SWOC went after the smaller steel mills. Republic Steel became a target, as steelworkers organized for higher pay, better benefits and more safety regulations.

However, Tom Girdler, Republic Steel's president, expressed the sentiment of all of the 'Little Steel' companies. He was "convinced that a surrender to the C.I.O. was a bad thing for our companies, for our employees; indeed for the United States of America." To him, SWOC and the CIO were both "racketeering, communist-dominated outfits...," which he refused to negotiate with.

It is true that Communists organized for both the CIO and SWOC. As "tough, skillful, and implacable organizers..." they "provided vital leadership, fostering a sense of class awareness and political coherence among workers." In fact, during this time over 60 Party members organized full-time for SWOC alone throughout the mid-west. However, that does not mean the Party dominated the CIO or SWOC, as Lewis was careful to keep Communists at arm's length - though he respected their work ethic and courage - and quickly removed them after steel had been consolidated.

Girdler, had no way of knowing the extent of Communist influence within the CIO or SWOC. He did, however, know that red-baiting was a useful tactic and he employed it liberally. Furthermore, the Chicago police had had numerous run-ins recently with Communist-led Unemployed Council which had organized marches, demonstrations and actions demanding relief. They were also eager to blame the 'Reds' and finger anyone protesting for unemployment benefits or unions as dangerous radicals.

In preparation for the "imminent confrontation," the planned march, Republic "spent more than the city of Chicago on tear gas and sickening, or vomiting, gas." It stockpiled weapons, including four submachine guns, 525 revolvers, 64 rifles, 245 shotguns, and "enough clubs and ammunition to hold off the Illinois National Guard." The steel company also employed 370 police guards.

It is within this context that the 'Memorial Day Massacre' occurred.

Dennis recounts: As the march proceeded towards Republic's front gates "Without warning, the police had torn into the demonstrators' ranks...Tear gas canisters fell rapidly...One crack [a gunshot] was followed by a cluster of shots, which were soon consumed in a torrent of small arms fire that engulfed the marchers...What had appeared to be almost a staged event only a minute before now dissolved into wild terror and confusion..."

Bloodied and bruised bodies ran for cover. Women and children weren't spared the police rage, as Billy-clubs and batons were swung wildly. The injured were refused medical attention, while the dying were thrown into paddy wagons - groaning and bleeding - and taken for the "long journey" to police headquarters - not to a hospital - where many were beaten again.

Ten strikers, or supporters, would die due to the wounds inflicted by an unprovoked police attack, including Party member, Joseph Rothmund. Party leaders, like Joe Weber, the SWOC sub-district organizer, and Hank Johnson, a leader in the Party-led National Negro Congress and SWOC organizer, were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the strike.

While Dennis castigates Republic Steel and the Chicago police, he also claims that Lewis's unwillingness to "support a larger protest [movement] hastened the failure of the strike. "Responsible" adherence to contracts, not industrial democracy, was becoming the defining feature of [late 1930's] labor unionism," he added, which separated the steelworkers from the broader movement for workers' rights and limited the possibility for more radical change.

Blood On Steel is a good, little book, captivating and grisly. It adds historical and political context objectively. I highly recommend it this Memorial Day weekend.

Blood On Steel: Chicago Steelworkers And The Strike Of 1937

By Michael Dennis

John Hopkins University Press, 2014, 140 pages

Photo: Workers are struck and beaten by police during the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937. | University of Oregon archive

"Mad Men" ends, but is it the real thing?

Tue, 19 May 2015 18:09:00 +0000

Mad Men, Season Seven, Episode Fourteen, "Person to Person"

I was ten years old when McCann-Erickson first aired its legendary "Hilltop" Coca-Cola ad in 1971. I must have been captivated because I remember acquiring the sheet music to bring to my piano teacher so I could learn to play it. As excellent advertising does, this happy, feel-good, sugary commercial tapped into the emotional state of a war-weary country, still plagued with the previous decade's violence of political assassinations, urban riots, and police brutality toward civil rights and anti-war protesters.

The youth counter-culture, at its best, represented an idealistic quest-perhaps naive, but genuine-for love, unity, and one human family that transcends boundaries of race and nationality. McCann expressed in its ad the truth that the violent, warring world could use a little harmony. And with that truth, enmeshed in and inseparable from the pathos of world peace, the big lie that Coca-Cola is "the real thing." If you want one, you need to buy the other. And with the choice to end this brilliant series about advertising and the quests, weaknesses, yearnings, struggles, and screw-ups of those men and women who create, exploit, dream, and consume it with this ad, we receive a glimpse into some of the show's main themes: that in our post-modern world, it is difficult-if not impossible-to discern what is "true" and "real," (if there even is any referent to those words), AND that while people and institutions can and do change and re-create themselves (I was happy about that one), such change is incremental and not linear.

Had someone asked me to list out possible final glimpses of Don Draper, sitting half-lotus, meditating on a California oceanside cliff would never have made it to the top 100. But, while preposterous, it also makes sense. Don has long been on a quest for meaning and always been attracted by California, the land of new starts and make-believe, and of one of his soul-mates, Anna Draper. Like the ocean, his psyche and spirit have been pulled toward a shore of growing self-awareness and authenticity-and back again toward the depths of oblivion, self-absorption, and con-artistry. It was the Season Two finale that saw him walking out into the ocean, arms stretched out, ready to be a part of the inter-connection that Anna spoke to him about. Despite years of attempting to run from his past, in Season Four's "The Summer Man," he recognizes in his journal that "when a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him." He's been trying to come to terms with this life for a long time and with increasing intensity this last season or so. From his truth-telling about his childhood to the Hershey clients, to the trip with his children to the whore-house of his childhood, to his last episode warnings and second chance offered to the young con-man of the hotel, Don has been attempting to be more authentic, to the point of leaving his work as a "con-man" advertiser. But, after each of these steps forward, Don-like any real human being-isn't completely transformed, never to revert back to earlier behavior. This episode finds him a drunken mess again after receiving the news of Betty's impending death. All journeys to the center of the self are, to some degree, selfish-even if necessary to be a better person in relationship with others. Betty calls Don on the selfishness of his hobo lifestyle with the punch-to-the-gut line about his children after her death: "You'll see them as much as you do now, on weekends. Oh, wait Don, when did you last see them?" Yet, it's only with Don that we see Betty able to cry over her death sentence. Despite years of separation after years of a deceptive marriage, they have a strong enough connection that they don't even need to complete their thoughts. "Birdie," he says through his tears. "I know...." she says before hanging up.

So, Don heads to California, to the home of Stephanie-as close as he can get to Anna after her death from cancer-the one person who will greet him as "Dick." Still not sure who he is, he goes to someone who knows he is Dick Whitman, while hoping that she will allow him to be Don Draper-to be her family. But, while she sees he is in trouble and invites him to the retreat with her, she angrily tells him, "You're not my family." After she abandons him there, a seriously despairing Don makes his second person-to-person call to Peggy. She tells him, "You can come home," but he doesn't know where that might be. Mystified and worried, Peggy asks him "What did you ever do that was so bad?" His confession centers on his transgressions against family: "I broke all my vows, scandalized my child," he begins. It is these sins that have left him with no home to go to. "I took another man's name and made nothing of it" reflects his fears that he has done nothing useful with his talents and his professional life. While there is much hokum at the retreat, and much that can foster a me-centered lifestyle, there is also room for genuine soul-searching, and Don finds his truth in the story of the very ordinary man who feels invisible: "It's like no one cares that I'm gone" has always been Dick Whitman's fear, born of having been a child who no one wanted to be there. Like advertising, the retreat is selling some things that people don't need, and offering some truth. What will Don do with this latest new revelation? Go back to New York and his children? Back to McCann to create the Coca-Cola ad that commodifies the yearnings of the sixties movements? Or is the juxtaposition of the smiling, meditative Don and the "Hilltop" ad a reminder that no matter how much we may learn about ourselves, there is also this cultural push and pull between awareness and commodification? That humans will never reach "nirvana," but will always vacillate between a desire for family, for "person to person" connection, and for worldly goods that can more easily assuage our existential anxieties and yearnings? I like that Weiner and Crew have provided no definitive answer to Don's next step. It leaves space for imagination, reflection, and relation to his character. Though some will always want a bow tied around a wrapped-up narrative, this show would not have been true to itself had it offered one.

And, while it might look like the other characters' story arcs have achieved more closure, that's not necessarily so. The Campbells are back together, boarding their Lear jet for Wichita, still after wealth and prestige, but also family unity and connection. The final image of them suggests happiness, but they have not yet reached their destination. Things are still "up in the air" for them. What will these New Yorkers think of living in a small Heartland city? Will Pete be able to remain faithful to Trudy as he'd promised? What is in store for them? We cannot know; a number of scenarios are possible.

The Peggy/Stan shippers will be happy, I am sure. While I wasn't rooting for them to be together, I like the final image of them: at work, Peggy typing, Stan looking over her shoulder. Has she found a way both to have her career and have some happiness in love? Stan has come miles from our first introduction to him. He has gone from a sexist jerk who did not want to accept Peggy as a professional to one who urges her to do what she is good at and is happy to do the work he enjoys from behind her. But, they have both had relationships before. We can't know how this one will work out.

Roger, too, is focusing on personal relationships, making provisions for Kevin in his will and entering his third marriage-this time with a woman close to his age. They both seem happy and keep bickering. We see them mid-toast, but can't know for sure how it will end.

Joan has chosen her work over her unreasonable man: "I can't just turn off that part of myself. I would never ask you to choose," she tells Richard, evidence that 1970 is a hard time for a woman to have both a committed relationship and a career. But, she has grown miles from the office manager she once was, whose goal was a husband and house in the suburbs. I hope that she'll make it in her new endeavor, but we cannot know for sure. She, like Peggy, knows it's a risk.

The only character, indeed, about whom we can say with any certainty what will happen is Betty. She will die soon. But, she has grown and changed through this as well, allowing Sally to be with her and help her. Perhaps acknowledging that Bobby also knows what is happening. The ad-whether Don or someone else at McCann created it-tells us that Coke is "The Real Thing." Yet, it is not. The only thing that we can know for sure is real is that we will, like Betty, someday die. And perhaps that advertising will always lie to us. This show has always had an existentialist focus, and this ending carries it through: leaving us the image of a dying woman smoking a cigarette, and leaving open the question of what we-like the other characters-will do with the time we have remaining.

There is so much else that I could say about this episode, this season, and how they wrap up the series. I'll be thinking and writing more about those questions in the weeks to come, so stay tuned.

This article is from Mad About Mad Men blog.

A grand romance in staged Around the World in 80 Days

Tue, 19 May 2015 17:49:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - This stage adaptation of Jules Verne's classic 1872 novel Around the World in 80 Days is simply sheer delight. In this charming Actors Co-op David Schall Theatre production, based on Mark Brown's play, five gifted thespians play 39 different characters to great effect, a technique used by casts small in size but large in talent in other shows, such as the Hitchcockian 39 Steps and Israel Horovitz's Lebensraum. Indeed, this comedy could have been entitled "Around the World in 80 Roles."

All this lightning-fast changing of costumes, props and sets lends itself to levity - especially as mustaches droop and muttonchops fall off of undaunted actors who know the show must go on. Although Verne is best known for his groundbreaking science fiction, beneath all of this version's madcap mayhem and merriment is one of literature's great interracial love stories.

As most readers know, Phileas Fogg (Philip Kreyche, seemingly the sole cast member with only one part to play) is a very proper, punctilious Englishman more punctual than Swiss precision timing. So much so that it seems the Londoner's heart is made out of cogs and gears.

The drolly monikered Fogg enters into a wager with fellow members of the Reform Club and, without a moment to spare, he and his gentleman's gentleman, Passepartout (Andrew Carter who, like his character, is boundlessly energetic), embark - more than a century before the dreaded advent of so-called "reality TV" - on a truly amazing race: Gallivanting across the globe in the wagered 80 days. Of course, set in 1872, this is long before the Wright Brothers flew their winged contraption at Kitty Hawk or the invention of cars and other forms of high-speed travel we now take for granted.

But en route Fogg encounters, and along with his faithful manservant, rescues alluring Aouda (the enchanting Eva Abramian, who also plays some transgender roles) in India. But Aouda is more than a mere damsel in distress: She is high-spirited, feisty, spunky, bright and most lovable. (In one humorous if politically incorrect scene set in the Wild West, the Indian (dot) shoots it out with Indians (feathers) attacking them during the voyagers' cross-continental train trek.)

To make a long story short, Aouda makes the machine man realize he is mere flesh and blood, after all. Jules Verne not only anticipated trips to the moon and 20,000 leagues under the sea, but the trend of interracial romances in European letters, featuring the Western male courting the "exotic" Third World female. Eight years before Pierre Loti's eponymous 1880 Marriage of Loti, wherein the Frenchman "wed" the Polynesian vahine Rarahu at Tahiti, and a third of a century before the Yank Pinkerton wooed Cio-Cio San in Puccini's 1904 opera Madame Butterfly (based on another Loti cross-cultural romp, 1887's Madame Chrysanthème), Phileas met Aouda.

While their trip around the world is whimsically, expertly rendered by scenic designer David Goldstein and projection/prop designer Nicholas Acciani, Fogg's real odyssey is within, where the man of pure logic discovers emotion and dare we say - oh yes, let's -true love.

I've but one bone to pick, and this is with none other than author Mssr. Verne himself, who superimposed a totally unnecessary crime story on his tale, as if the endless adventures of the world travelers and their love affair weren't enough to preoccupy and transfix the minds of readers (or in this instance, viewers). Having said that, in one of his countless roles as Scotland Yard's Detective Fix, the protean Bruce Ladd is always a hoot (as is his coy co-star Kevin Coubal, whether he's going for broke as a Chinese broker or British consul). I ended up not minding this superfluous, somewhat distracting bank robbery subplot too much; my mild objection is a mere quibble that should under no circumstances dissuade ticket buyers from enjoying a superb night out at the theater.

Director Rhonda Kohl deserves kudos for keeping this globe and stage spinning, along with audience members' heads. Inspired by this daffy, delirious tour de force, I made the mistake of watching part of the completely mirthless, ineptly made, utterly depressing 2004 movie version of Around the World in 80 Days, which reduced Verne's captivating novel to the low level of bumbling slapstick, substituting silver screen special effects for charm. For some strange reason in this big budget "blockbuster" Aouda is transformed from an Indian into a Frenchwoman, while the French Passepartout is turned into a Chinese character - but not even Jackie Chan could rescue this $110 million misbegotten bomb. Produced with just a smidgeon of the flick's budget, the Actors Co-op David Schall Theatre spectacle is far superior, and although performed onstage instead of onscreen, infinitely more cinematic. The play's rendering of an elephant is far more visually inventive than any of the pic's special FX. Because when it comes to the arts, imagination and artistry outstrip and outrank money any day.

However, this play did make me want to read Verne's original novel, as well as re-see the Todd-AO 70 mm 1956 classic, which won the Best Picture Oscar and starred David Niven, Shirley MacLaine (who spoke about making this movie at the recent TCM Classic Film Festival) and Cantínflas. Until then, I could see this perfectly enjoyable stage ode to joie de vivre, wherein love conquers all and time stands still, another, well, 79 times.

Around the World in 80 Days is being performed through June 14 on Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 pm and on Sundays at 2:30 pm, with Saturday matinee at 2:30 pm on June 13, and 1:30 pm on June 6, at the Actors Co-op David Schall Theatre (located on the campus of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, with free parking across the street on Carlos Ave.), 1760 N. Gower St., Los Angeles. For more info: (322) 462-8460; http://actorsco-op.org/.

Photo: Actors Co-op Theatre Company Facebook.

Today in history: Vietnam leader Ho Chi Minh is born, 1890

Tue, 19 May 2015 15:06:00 +0000

Today is the 125th birthday of Ho Chi Minh, regarded as the father of this country. He died at the age of 79 in 1969, not living quite long enough to witness the people's victory over the invading U.S. forces, but able to see it coming.

Ho Chi Minh led the Việt Minh independence movement for more than three decades, fighting first against the Japanese, then the French colonial power and then the US-backed South Vietnamese government. He was President of North Vietnam from 1954 until his death in 1969.

Aside from being a brilliant political thinker and military leader, Ho was also a sensitive memoirist, writer and poet. Here, in his memory and honor, are four short poems.

The leg-irons

With hungry mouth open like a wicked monster,

Each night the irons devour the legs of the people:

The jaws grip the right leg of every prisoner:

Only the left is free to bend and stretch.

Yet there is one thing stranger in this world:

People rush in to place their legs in irons.

Once they are shackled, they can sleep in peace.

Otherwise they would have no place to lay their heads.

Advice to oneself

Without the cold and desolation of winter

There could not be the warmth and splendor of spring.

Calamity has tempered and hardened me,

And turned my mind into steel.

Restrictions

To live without freedom is a truly wretched state.

Even the calls of nature are governed by restrictions!

When the door is opened, the belly is not ready to ease itself.

When the call of nature is pressing, the door remains shut.

On reading "Anthology of a Thousand Poets"

The ancients used to like to sing about natural beauty:

Snows and flowers, mood and wind, mists, mountains, and rivers.

Today we should make poems including iron and steel,

And the poet also should know how to lead an attack.

From The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse. Originally published in Ho's Prison Diary.

Photo: While James Jackson served as CPUSA international affairs secretary, he traveled to Hanoi and interviewed Ho Chi Minh. This photograph of the two men was one of his prized possessions.

Lead-up to Tribeca: Havana Film Fest, games for change

Mon, 18 May 2015 15:25:00 +0000

First in a series of reports from the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival last month in New York.

NEW YORK - A trip to New York City is always an awesome cultural and political experience. There's more going on in one city block than in some entire cities! Although I was only planning to attend the venerable Tribeca Film Festival, April 15-26, now in its 14th year, there were many diversions that occasionally pulled me away. For a city that offers at least three political rallies daily, I was able to participate in one - the giant Fight for $15 rally that took over several blocks of Central Park West and marched all the way to Grand Central Station with thousands of supporters. The spirited gathering brought attention to the need to raise the minimum wage so that even many full-time workers can rise above the poverty level. These issues were also raised in several films at the Tribeca Film Festival here this year. An empowering documentary that played at the Traverse City Film Festival last year, entitled The Hand That Feeds, is one of the finest and most militant statements about New York undocumented workers fighting to organize for better pay and working conditions.

Just prior to Tribeca each year, the Havana Film Festival of New York presents highlights from Cuba and the rest of Latin America, much like its famed parent event that takes place every December in Havana. Attending one festival is time-consuming enough, but missing this entire festival would have been a shame. I had to fit in the latest film from one of Cuba's more venerated directors, Fernando Pérez (Havana Suite, Clandestinos). His first independent film, The Wall of Words, deals with mental health and how patients are treated in Cuban society. The heartwarming personal story of a mother (Isabel Santos) who dotes on her mentally disabled son, while often sacrificing the rest of her family members, features one of Cuba's most famous actors as the mentally impaired son. Without uttering a single word in the entire film, Jorge Perugorría adds another bravado performance to his long list of varied roles, starting with the gay lead in the award winning Strawberry and Chocolate. And just recently both he and Santos starred in a film by revered French director Laurence Cantet, Return to Ithaca, which tells the homecoming story of a Cuban who has spent 16 years in exile in Madrid.

The Armenian genocide was addressed in a new film, 1915, released in theaters across the city, while running in tandem with Tribeca, which also featured The Cut, a film about the same subject. It's the 100th anniversary of what many people, including most Armenians, consider the 20th century's first act of genocide. Unfortunately both movies dealt more with emotions than substance, and the complex historic details of the end of the Ottoman Empire and World War I were slighted.

The Cut was directed by Turkish-born director Fatih Akin, who was praised for his sympathetic treatment of the Armenians, but the plot often seemed contrived, taking the protagonists to Cuba and then Minnesota, while the acting, along with the music score, at times seemed removed from reality. Rock guitars played in the score when there were no instruments of this type existing, and the main lead looked the same through the entire span of years covered in the story. By the end, after years of physical hardships and tragedies, he looked younger than his grown daughters. This is not to diminish the power and importance of one of the first films dealing with the Armenian genocide.

The 12 Annual Games for Change Festival, New York's largest game event, celebrates programmers who choose to develop social impact games. Awards were given to games that taught about the Bill of Rights (That's Your Right), that focused on innocent victims of war rather than the typical soldiers of fortune (This War of Mine), and that demonstrated how harmful choices can make a harmful world (Parable of the Polygons), just to name a few.

A trip to El Museo del Barrio Latin American Museum acquainted attendees with the fantastic work of cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, a longtime associate of the great Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel. Figueroa crafted his skill to such a high level, having worked on over 200 films, that when the Hollywood legendary cinematographer Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane) died, Hollywood came begging for Figueroa. He declined however, preferring to work in his own country Mexico, creating some of the most beautiful photo and film images of the period.

Despite these great diversions, Tribeca was calling me with an enticing list of films that any progressive film lover would die for. There were many panels, red carpets, parties, and special events, with guests such as Valerie Plame, Alex Gibney, Roseanne Barr, George Lucas, Stephen Colbert, among many in attendance. Highlights from the festival will be covered in the next few columns.

Photo: Scene from The Wall of Words. Havana Film Festival New York

Today in Asian-American history: Actor Chow Yun-fat turns 60

Mon, 18 May 2015 13:45:00 +0000

Chow Yun-fat, born May 18, 1955, turns 60 today. A popular Hong Kong actor in dozens of Chinese-language films, he has also crossed over to become a recognizable presence in the American cinema.

He is best known in Asia for his collaborations with filmmaker John Woo in the "heroic bloodshed" genre films A Better Tomorrow, The Killer and Hard Boiled; and in the West for his roles in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Mainly playing in dramatic films, he has won three Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Actor and two Golden Horse Awards for Best Actor in Taiwan.

Chow was born in Lamma Island, Hong Kong to a mother who was a cleaning lady and vegetable farmer, and a father who worked on a Shell Oil Company tanker. Hong Kong was a British territory until 1997. He grew up in a farming community in a house with no electricity. Each morning he helped his mother sell herbal jelly and tea-pudding on the streets; in the afternoons he worked in the fields. His family moved to Kowloon when he was ten. At 17, he left school to help support the family by doing odd jobs.

His life changed when his actor-trainee application was accepted. He signed a three-year contract with a television studio and shortly became a heartthrob and a familiar face in soap operas that were exported internationally.

After Chow appeared in the 1980 TV series The Bund, about the rise and fall of a gangster in 1930s Shanghai, he became a star throughout Asia.

But Chow aspired to a big-screen career. Success came in the 1986 gangster action-melodrama A Better Tomorrow, which became the highest grossing film in Hong Kong history at the time.

Though best known for playing honorable tough guys, whether cops or criminals, Chow has also starred in comedies and romantic blockbusters such as Love in a Fallen City (1984) and An Autumn's Tale (1987), for which he was named best actor at the Golden Horse Awards. He brought together his disparate personae in the 1989 film God of Gamblers, in which he was by turns suave charmer, a broad comedian and an action hero. This film once again broke Hong Kong's all-time box office record. His combination of tough demeanor and youthful appearance has earned him the nickname "Babyface Killer."

In 1995 the Los Angeles Times proclaimed Chow Yun-fat "the coolest actor in the world." Chow moved to Hollywood, attempting to recreate his Asian success in America. His first few films in the U.S. were disappointments. Chow accepted the role of Li Mu-Bai in the 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which became a winner at the box office and the Oscars.

In 2007, Chow was cast as the pirate captain Sao Feng in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. His part was omitted when the movie was shown in China, on the grounds that Chow's character "vilified and humiliated" Chinese people. Chow has identified with the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, which has sought to stave off complete political integration with the rest of China. His political stance eventually resulted in censorship by the Chinese government.

In 2008 Chow released a book of photos taken on the sets of his films; published by Louis Vuitton, proceeds were donated to Sichuan earthquake victims.

In all, Chow has appeared in over 121 films and 24 television series.

Adapted from Wikipedia.

"Chow Yun Fat for wiki" by Sliceof - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

"The Water Diviner": A farmer's post-war search for closure

Mon, 18 May 2015 13:06:00 +0000

The machine gun was invented in 1884, but it didn't really come into its own until World War I, one of the deadliest conflicts in history. Tens of thousands of Axis and Allied forces were slaughtered, largely with machine guns, in the Battle of Gallipoli, which lasted from April 25, 1915 until January 9, 1916.

World War I's unprecedented mass murder and mayhem, set into motion by incendiary events in South East Europe, inspired many of cinema's greatest anti-war movies, including All Quiet on the Western Front, La Grande Illusion, Paths of Glory, King of Hearts, Oh! What a Lovely War, and the heartbreaking and horrifying 1981 film Gallipoli.

My movie buddy and I went to see this movie because it is Australian, and we've consistently been impressed with Australian movies. We weren't disappointed in "The Water Diviner."

The main character is an Australian farmer who tragically loses his three sons at Gallipoli. After the war, with nothing left to lose, he goes to Turkey to try to find their remains, "So they can be buried, at home, with their mother." As he is good at finding water in the desert, he assumes that he can find their bones in the wide battlefield.

In the foreground of the story, our Australian finds some help from former enemies. Most of the bad guys are British bureaucrats. Like a lot of good movies, though, the background is as good or better than the immediate doings of the main characters. At the end of World War I, the losing Ottomans found their mighty empire carved up, mostly by the British.

The only way that our tragic hero can accomplish his goal is by cooperating with his new Turkish friends against the bureaucratic obstacles of the English. That makes for a pretty interesting movie. Several characters are especially interesting. It's also very well acted and directed; and it's superbly filmed in Australia and Turkey.

"The Water Diviner"

Directed by Russell Crowe

Written by Andrew Knight, Andrew Anastasios

Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Jai Courtney, Yilmaz Erdogan

Rated R, 111 minutes.

Photo: The Water Diviner Facebook

“There is Power in a Union”: Strong story needs to take our side

Mon, 18 May 2015 10:40:00 +0000

This is the labor history book that the national AFL-CIO sells. It is a thorough and objective account of American labor history from its beginnings to recent times. The powerful story of American labor more or less tells itself.

Having read a large number of American labor histories, I am most interested in their treatment of the period from World War II to present. Most histories fail to deal with the period at all, they just end in a glorious fanfare about the victories before 1947. Dray's book does us the favor of accounting, also, for the long downslide in the union movement 1947 to present.

The problem with writing recent history, of course, is that many of the protagonists are still alive and more than ready to sue authors; consequently the writers tend to soft-pedal any condemnations that might have been otherwise deserved. Dray is one of those writers. The 1947-to-present period is discussed factually and unemotionally, without taking sides or making any accusations. The drop in union membership from 37 percent of the workforce down to 11 percent is explained, if at all, simply by a bad mood in America. Americans, one may infer from this history, just weren't very interested in unions after 1947.

To be fair, Dray does talk about the critical turn represented by the Taft-Hartley law. He does explain that the AFL went along with the anti-communist oath that every union leader had to swear, and that the leader of the CIO, Walter Reuther, did too.

Dray writes on page 498 that the great John L Lewis considered the anti-communist oath an insult to American workers, but "Other labor leaders, including Walter Reuther of the UAW, agreed to sign the affidavits and chastised fellow UAW leaders reluctant to do so. The AFL also fell into line..."

One could argue that Dray's account of the expulsion of the progressive union leaders from the CIO speaks for itself. One could credit him for revealing the AFL, and subsequent AFL-CIO, connection to the CIA. But I'd argue that he could also have mentioned the fact that Reuther and the remaining CIO unions raided the unions they had just expelled. He might have mentioned the "Treaty of Detroit" contracts that led American unions toward employer-provided health care and pensions and away from national health care and improved Social Security benefits for everyone. He might have mentioned that labor's "successes" of the 1950s and 1960s came at the expense of increasing isolation from the rest of the world working class. And he could have credited the coup of 1995 that gave the AFL-CIO a whole new, inclusive, attitude.

It's just an opinion of mine, but even though I totally support the direction of the AFL-CIO since 1995, I don't exactly see how they can overcome the errors of 1947-1995 until they are at least acknowledged, and the AFL-CIO hasn't done that yet. Neither has Philip Dray in his otherwise excellent labor history book.

There is Power in a Union, The epic story of labor in America, by Philip Dray,.

Anchor Books (Random House), New York, 2010.

Available in Hardcover, paperback and Kindle editions

“Ex Machina”: what will the androids do?

Fri, 15 May 2015 15:33:00 +0000

As we move closer and closer to creating actual artificial intelligence, sci-fi gives us interesting speculation as to what it would do. In other words, once a computerized machine achieves abilities equal to our superior to ours what motivations will it have? Ex Machina adds its own interesting twist.

You can tell when a movie was a genuine art experience if you're still thinking about it a week after you saw it. The mood and imagery in this very small, claustrophobic film, does that, or at least it did it to me. My movie buddy liked the film but wasn't as impressed as I was. She particularly pointed out that the entire story, and the presentation of it, are male chauvinistic to a high degree. The guy who makes the androids, you see, makes them as full-frontal-nude women and openly brags about their sexuality.

He's not a nice fellow. He's a computer prodigy-whiz who has himself all confused with God Almighty. The other human in the story, another highly competent nerd, tries to find his way through all the manipulations of the "machine master" while also sorting through his feelings for the gorgeous and empathetic android he "interviews" every day.

The story is well told. In the serene mountains of Norway, the genius has built a completely automated laboratory. His creations are perfect and respond to him just as he wants. In the old days before PC's took over, data processing departments were cold, nearly freezing, clean to the point of hygenic, and no one spoke with any emotion. It was intense. It was macabre. So is Ex Machina. Don't miss the dance scene!

From the beginning, I wasn't interested in either of the humans. I wanted to know what the android would want. In the great sci-fi masterpiece, I, Robot, the machines are programmed with simple rules that eventually lead them to take progressive leadership and benefit humans in ways that they can't understand or imagine. In the Terminator series, up to about 47 sequels now, the machines are determined to kill us all. A recent effort, Chappie, had a robot so brilliant that he could transfer his consciousness into another, superior, machine. He could also provide eternal life to humans by transferring theirs, and he was happy to do so. I liked Chappie even though it got the worst reviews I have ever seen.

The computer program that entranced Joaquin Phoenix in Her eventually abandoned him because she wanted to seek higher knowledge in a network of other computer programs. She let him down gently, though. Hal, in 2001, wanted mission success so much that he decided to kill all the imperfect humans who might mess it up.

What will the exotic woman/android in "Ex Machina" want? When actual artificial intelligence is created, and it can't be far away, what will it want?

"Ex Machina"

Written and Directed by Alex Garland

Stars: Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac

Rated R, 108 Minutes

Photo: Movie website

To drone or not to drone? - "Good Kill" asks the question

Fri, 15 May 2015 15:27:00 +0000

In 2013, I interviewed CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin, author of Drone Warfare, Killing by Remote Control, who asserted: "There were between 46 and 52 drone strikes under the Bush administration. And now there are over 400 - that's not counting Afghanistan. So this has been tremendously increased under the Obama administration. If you look at Afghanistan the numbers are even more astounding - the last year where have figures for is 2012, and that's 506 drone strikes, whereas there were very few drone strikes under Bush.... The CIA runs the drone program in Pakistan solely, not with the military. Then there's a joint CIA-military program in Yemen, then the CIA is involved in a lot of use of spy drones around the world and in the proliferation of bases."

Now a feature film has been made with major Hollywood talents dramatizing the dubious Unmanned Aerial Vehicle program and the controversies surrounding it. New Zealand writer/director/producer Andrew Niccol's Good Kill is a hard-hitting, thought-provoking movie exposing and opposing drone warfare in Afghanistan and Yemen. Fresh from his Oscar-nominated role in Boyhood, Ethan Hawke portrays pilot Major Tom Egan who, after repeat combat tours flying over the Iraq and Afghan theaters of conflict, is now stationed outside of Las Vegas. There he is deeply conflicted by his role in the UAV liquidation-by-remote-control project.

From the relative comfort of an air-conditioned trailer in a military base in the Nevada desert, the droners wreak Hellfire havoc on targets in other deserts half a world away. The fetching if kvetshing Zoe Kravitz, daughter of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, plays fiery Vera Suarez, a Latina Air Force officer who has qualms after she joins the UAV team at the Nevada air base.

What Suarez bellyaches about are the moral implications (or lack of) of droning, which according to the movie (and Medea) is an imprecise method of murder which inevitably results in "collateral damage" - including the deaths of unarmed civilians, among them, alas, children, women and the aged. According to the film, this killing of casualties, whose only crimes are being at the wrong places at the wrong times, is acceptable to the CIA. You know the CIA: That U.S. organization (your tax dollars at work) that LBJ called "Murder Incorporated" (hey, it takes one mass murderer to know another!), which has overthrown democratically elected governments from Iran to Guatemala to Chile, etc., tortured more dissidents than the Spanish Inquisition, and so on.

Suarez denounces the CIA-directed droning of non-combatants, as U.S. "terrorism" and a "factory creating terrorists," because of the widespread anger and blowback these killings provoke and spread. During one testy trailer exchange with her commanding officer, Lt. Colonel Jack Johns (portrayed by Bruce Greenwood), Suarez cheekily asks: "Was that a war crime, sir?" To which Johns replies: "Shut the f*ck up, Suarez!"

His conscience troubled, Major Egan can no longer "keep compartmentalizing," as Johns advises him to. He has a drinking problem and his marriage to Molly (January Jones) is, like his liquor, on the rocks. Like Jeremy Renner's lead character in 2010's Best Picture Oscar winner The Hurt Locker (co-produced by Nicolas Chartier and Zev Forman, who also co-produced the far superior Good Kill), Egan has difficulty making the transition from the combat zone to the home front: He is still at war, "taking potshots" at people across the globe being surveilled by remotely piloted aircraft with their lethal payloads.

But unlike The Hurt Locker's PTSD-ed, traumatized psychopath, Egan finds a path back to his sanity. It's a similar route blazed by veterans such as the courageous Ron Kovic, whom Tom Cruise depicted in Oliver Stone's 1989 antiwar classic Born on the Fourth of July. He takes a stand against orders to shoot Hellfire missiles from a drone at civilians.

Meanwhile, the gung-ho Specialist Zimmer (Jake Abel) is the troop's trailer trash, who represents the jingoistic dregs of military madness. Zim derides Suarez as "Jane Fonda" and quips about putting "warheads on foreheads."

Perhaps Zim is one of the "gamers" whom the Pentagon recruits for its UAV program, which appears to play out like a video game (albeit one with extraordinarily high stakes involving life and death). The Las Vegas vibe and backdrop enhance the sense of the inherently risky nature of drone warfare. Good Kill's aerial footage, apparently shot in Morocco, has the look and feel of a video game, as it simulates what the Nevada-based airmen-turned-chairmen see on their computer screens as these not-so-Big Brothers watch Afghans and Yemenis from seats in their air-conned trailer. This cinematic technique has a Brechtian alienation feel, distancing film viewers from the action. Good Kill's combat isn't as viscerally exciting as that depicted in more conventional, pro-war flicks, like American Sniper or John Wayne's Sands of Iwo Jima. But that's because this is an antiwar work of art that wants audiences to use logic and reason, not just emotion, when assessing the story onscreen.

Drone warfare, of course, is a compromise. On the one hand, the U.S. ruling class still wants to, you know, rule the world; while on the other, its ordinary people just want to get about the business of living their lives without endlessly fighting and dying abroad.

What's a poor imperialist to do?

Use advanced technology to fight in cowardly ways that are less likely (at least in the short term) to directly, immediately endanger Americans, so the masses won't rebel against these imperial misadventures generating U.S. body bags, rising up from the streets to the barracks, like we did during the Vietnam War. Drone warfare is just the latest strategy for American exceptionalists to project U.S. power abroad and stick their noses into people's business overseas, without triggering widespread protests at home. Because, you know, it's only a bunch of subhuman sand N-words getting Hellfired.

Meanwhile, back at the review:

In that interview with Medea Benjamin I asked: How are the subjects of drone warfare's targeted killings selected? The feisty organizer replied: "They're supposed to be high level Al Qaeda operatives that pose an imminent threat to the U.S. and American personnel and citizens. There's supposed to be no way to capture them. We have not been told how they try to capture them or what constitutes a 'high level Al Qaeda operative'.... The 'kill list' is calculated in the 'terror Tuesdays' at the White House every week, where the president and his advisors - including CIA - 'nominate' people to be on the kill list. Ultimately, the president has to sign off on the kill list. From what we know it looks like there are two separate but overlapping kill lists: One is the CIA kill list, the other is the military kill list. It's speculated that [having two lists] makes it more difficult to have Congressional oversight and the executive is not thrilled about having that."

To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, it would seems that the Medea is the message. Andrew Niccol - who wrote and directed the 1997 sci-fi pic Gattaca, also starring Hawke, and 2005's arms dealer drama Lord of War - has given dramatic form and expression to the anti-drone critique of antiwar activists, such as not-so-private Benjamin. Right on target, Good Kill is a good film, a thinker's thriller.

"In Walt We Trust": Radical new assessment of Walt Whitman

Fri, 15 May 2015 15:03:00 +0000

Few American literary figures have received as much critical analysis as Walt Whitman, variously referred to as the Good Gray Poet, the Bard of Democracy, the Father of Free Verse, and the Prophet of Gay Liberation. Each of these epithets reflects a different approach to Whitman, who has waxed and waned in popularity throughout the 150 years since the first publication of Leaves of Grass. In his new book, In Walt We Trust: How a Queer, Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself, Penn State professor of English John Marsh examines the critical analysis of Whitman and applies it toward remedying what he calls our "contemporary American malaise."

Marsh begins by identifying four possible causes of dissatisfaction in modern America: death, money, sex, and a "materialistic and vulgar" sense of democracy. According to his analysis, Americans are too preoccupied with the fear of death, with hoarding wealth, and with commodifying the human body. Our political structure, on both liberal and conservative fronts, is marred by these anxieties. Marsh includes himself among those suffering from this American malaise, sharing how his own anxiety led him to seek a cure for what ailed him. For Marsh, that cure was found in the poetry of Walt Whitman. Recognizing that there is "nothing new under the sun," he addresses each of the four identified sources of our cultural anxiety with specific excerpts from Leaves of Grass and Whitman's other writings.

According to Marsh, the fear of death is largely tied to the love of money. Since Whitman writes, "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you," ultimately, according to Marsh's interpretation, everything in the universe is shared. We often fear death because we have a fear of loss arising from a false sense of ownership, in which you own your "atoms" and I own mine. "[Whitman's] belief rests on the fundamental fact that atoms, the fundamental constituents of the universe...do not respect or even require the notion of property." Precious metals, high-tech gadgets, our houses, our flesh, are all made of the same "stuff," and that stuff is universal and "does not stop long enough to be owned."

The commodification of the human body, in which our society sees sexual objects in place of human beings, is undeniably a prevalent source of cultural malcontent. Our modern reduction of sex to its most animal elements, according to Marsh, stems equally from the body-shaming prevalent in our culture and from our false sense of ownership: Bodies are dirty, sexual objects that can be "owned," used, and discarded. Interestingly, sex is celebrated by Whitman, who devotes a cluster of poems in Leaves of Grass to physical attraction between men and women. According to Marsh, however, his praise of sex saves sex from the degradation it receives when reduced to the shameful, animal act it is seen as today. Going back to his atomic theory, your atoms are as good as my atoms, and sex becomes the symbolic celebration of our shared humanity.

The culminating chapter receives its title from a quote in Democratic Vistas, in which Whitman writes, "Affection shall solve the problems of freedom." For modern readers struggling with the injustices and degradations characteristic of late capitalism, Whitman's call for comradery appears fresh and pertinent. By celebrating the "life-long love of comrades," Whitman hopes to "make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks," in which the human family endeavors to celebrate the miracle of friendship. Affection, he believes, will bring a spiritualization of democracy, moving it from the basis of material organization, to the structure of friendship and love.

John Marsh is the author of two previous books: Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way out of Inequality and Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry. He is also the editor of You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-1941.

An intimate and moving tribute to the Good Gray Poet, In Walt We Trust presents Whitman's writing as culturally relevant for contemporary readers.

Monthly Review Press, 2015, 248 pages, available on Amazon.

Photo: Monthly Review

"The Other Blacklist": Red Scare's impact on African Americans

Fri, 15 May 2015 13:50:00 +0000

The McCarthy era 'Red Scare' and blacklist was undoubtedly an assault on the Communist Party, as well as the broader labor-led left. While individual Party leaders, members and close allies bore the brunt of the assault on democratic rights, other forces close to the left (communist or otherwise) were also affected by the wave of repression.

Mary Helen Washington's The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s is a welcomed addition to the history of this period, especially its impact on African Americans.

To her credit, Washington doesn't gloss over the role of the Communist Party in fostering, facilitating and supporting a Black 'Popular Front' of literary and cultural figures. She writes, "...it is clear why the CP attracted blacks, especially during the depression." For, it was the Party's leadership in the Unemployed Councils, the National Negro Congress, the Sharecroppers' Union, the Civil Rights Congress and the Council on African Affairs, among other formations fighting for equality, that lead thousands of African Americans to join the Communist Party, and form a Red-Black alliance - even during the 1950's McCarthy period.

The Other Blacklist starts with an analysis of Lloyd L. Brown, a public CP member, author and editor of the Marxist, Party-led cultural journal Masses & Mainstream. Brown, the author of the classic novel Iron City and essay "Which Way for the Negro Writer," was constantly hounded and harassed by the FBI.

Iron City found its genesis in real life, as a reflection on Brown's years as a union organizer in Pittsburgh, his seven month incarceration "for trying to get communists on the ballot," and his befriending of a young Black man on death row - whom he formed a defense committee with.

According to Washington, "Brown clearly wanted Iron City to represent both the Party's power as well as the anticommunist attack..." In many regards, Brown novel was an autobiographical socialist-realist novel. It was sold through the Masses & Mainstream subscription list, an illustration of the lefts' independent cultural apparatus that was soon to be decimated by the 'Red Scare.'

Brown joined the Party in the early 1930's through the John Reed Clubs, became active in the Young Communist League, worked to free the 'Scottsboro Nine,' eventually becoming a Party leader, literary and cultural figure, and editor of Masses & Mainstream. He eventually left the Party in the late 1950's - though he remained committed to socialism. Ultimately, Iron City, though largely neglected when first written due to the other blacklist, has now become a central document in postwar Black cultural studies.

The Other Blacklist doesn't only focus on open Party members. It also highlights the cultural contributions of people like Alice Childress, whose membership in the Party is contested.

Childress, taught dramatic art at the Party-led Jefferson School for Social Sciences, wrote for Party-led publications like Masses & Mainstream, the Daily Worker and Freedom - Paul Robeson's publication - spoke at Party-sponsored union and May Day benefit events, and worked in the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, among other groups considered treasonous.

Childress was identified by the FBI as a member of the "Harlem Regional Committee" of the Party. However, Brown - an open communist - claimed that Childress "deliberately refused" to join the CP "so as not to handicap herself as a writer and as an actor..." Brown would add, "She was with us on all important issues," regardless of her actual membership status.

Though her Party membership is contested, through her work in the Harlem Unity Theatre, Committee for the Negro in the Arts, and the interracial New Playwrights theatre - founded by communists Mike Gold and John Howard Lawson - Childress's "racialized radicalism" undoubtedly became part and parcel of the history of the communist-led radical leftist cultural tradition. And it builds upon a narrative that challenges the standard Cold War view that the Communist Party became irrelevant and isolated after the witch-hunts - and practically had no impact on the late 1950's early 1960's era civil rights movements.

This is probably Washington's greatest contribution in The Other Blacklist - the challenging of this standard Cold War narrative, as, understandably, many communists, leftists and radicals of all stripes, were reluctant to reveal their membership in and participation with progressive forces.

During the height of the 'Red Scare,' Childress also risked her livelihood and aided Party members in their underground work. She "crossed the line into subversive and illegal activity" by hosting well-known Party historian Herbert Aptheker, among others, for underground meetings - which "could have meant a jail term for Childress." Childress's relationship with the then CPUSA national women's commission chair, Claudia Jones, is also obscured by the history of McCarthyism and the sanitizing of African American literary and cultural history.

Among other things, Washington contextualizes Childress's plays "Gold Through the Trees," "Trouble in Mind," as well as her essay "For a Strong Negro People's Theatre," as part of a radical, working class tradition expanded to include race, gender and sexuality.

Washington also looks at the life and work of artist Charles White, authors Frank London Brown and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as an analysis of the First Conference of Negro Writers in spring 1959, which - we find out - was funded by CIA front groups and actively worked to obscure, discredit and marginalize then African American communist literary and cultural figures like Lorraine Hansberry and Julian Mayfield.

The Other Blacklist is a well-researched, informative, illuminating work. It succeeds in placing communists, and their allies, in the heart of the African American literary and cultural upsurge that ultimately aided in the emergence of the 1960's era civil rights movement. By challenging the standard Cold War narrative of Communist Party irrelevance and isolation, The Other Blacklist not only promotes radical African American cultural production in the 1950's, it also highlights the very real internal and external pressures faced by communists and their allies. It adds nuance and depth, personalizing a very political historical moment.

The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

By Mary Helen Washington

Columbia University Press, 2014, 347 pages

Photo: Columbia University Press

"Avengers: Age of Ultron": Wham! Bam! Kaboom!

Fri, 15 May 2015 13:43:00 +0000

The latest Avengers movie is better than the Transformers series. There is sort of a plot and a little bit of human interaction. It has mega-star actors, several with Academy Awards, and is directed by Joss Whedon. It was Whedon who caused us to go. We feel that we will always owe him allegiance because of Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer on TV.

Age of Ultron humbled this reviewer. I had liked to think that I, as a lifelong movie addict, in some way shared the tastes of other moviegoers and, in a very limited sense, could speak to and for them about movies. But no more. As I remember my opinion of the film, I am forced to confess that I have no taste.

To me, Age of Ultron had all the charm and insight of a fireworks display. Fireworks displays, while impressive, usually last only a few minutes. Age of Ultron is over two hours long. All computer-generated. All noisy. It was bo-o-o-ring. I had to remind my movie buddy that the esteemed Joss Whedon directed it just to get her to stay for the last 90 minutes.

Finally it ended and we trudged away with shoulders sagging and dazed expressions. Fortunately for us, we then went to another movie.

The next day, the newspaper revealed that the Marvel/Disney sequel earned a staggering $187.7 million in its debut weekend, making it the second-biggest U.S. opening of all time. The biggest was $207.4 million in the 2012 opening of The Avengers.

"Avengers: Age of Ultron"

Directed by Joss Whedon

Written by Joss Whedon and Stan Lee

Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Elizabeth Olsen, Jeremy Renner, Don Cheadle, Samuel L. Jackson, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Paul Bettany, Cobie Smulders, James Spader, with cameos by Anthony Mackie, Hayley Atwell, Idris Elba, Stellan Skarsgard, Andy Serkis, Josh Brolin

141 minutes

Photo: Cast of "Avengers: Age of Ultron" at the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con International. Wikipedia & Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Also see Blake Deppe's review here.

"Mad Men": Betty gives poignant gift

Mon, 11 May 2015 14:34:00 +0000

Season seven, episode thirteen, "The Milk and Honey Route"

What an utterly sad Mother's Day episode! Since "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," our introduction to this series, presents advertisers' work to persuade smokers that cigarettes will make them happy, despite the news reports of links to lung cancer, and since we have watched Don, Betty, and numerous other characters smoke like chimneys over seven seasons, I shouldn't be surprised that at the end, someone receives a lung cancer diagnosis. But, I was not expecting this conclusion to Betty's story. To me, she has been at times a compelling character, but at other times a frustrating or infuriating one.

I've found the writing of her screen time to have been uneven: they developed her as a richer character when married to Don, and less so after their divorce. But, she has always been beautiful and almost always graceful. She was brought up to be a lady and to conform to what society and her mother expect of her, though she tells Sally that she has fought for things in her life, and we have seen her do that.

Since the title of tonight's story refers to a 1931 book with the subtitle "A Handbook for Hobos," I went back to my writing about the other episode about hobos, Season Three's "The Gypsy and the Hobo." It features an empowered Betty who confronts Don about his identity after discovering his box of Dick Whitman papers and mementos. When a lawyer she consults tells her just to go home and work it out, she handles it her way, and later does fight for a divorce and marriage to the new man she loves. She was capable of going against society's dictates to stay married no matter what.

My favorite image of her is still the one of her standing in the yard in her housecoat, cigarette hanging out of her mouth, rifle at her shoulder as she shoots at her neighbor's birds. She could be a fighter, but this time when Henry and Sally urge her to fight, she declines. Is she--as they think--giving in too easily? Is she just being the "good girl" her mother taught her to be, accepting her fate too willingly? Or is she being wise and much more accepting of the inevitability of death than most Americans?

She displays an existentialist's awareness that one can't avoid dying and vital self-knowledge that she does not want an extra six to nine months if they come at the price of painful and debilitating treatment. She tells Sally, "I've learned to believe people when they tell you it's over. . . . I don't want you to think I'm a quitter. I've fought for things in my life. It's not a weakness. It's a gift to me. To know when to move on." She's moving on with grace. And not ceasing to live until it's really time to go. While Henry sees no reason for her to continue going to class, asking her "Why are you doing that?" she responds with "Why was I ever doing it?"

I was feeling so sad for her, thinking how unfair it is that now she's finally doing what she told Don she'd always wanted to do, this happens. But, life is unfair; she was going to school because she wanted to learn and grow. So, until she can no longer do that, she's determinedly going to keep learning and growing. Bravo to her!

And while she won't give Sally the fight she wants and won't let her take care of her ("I watched my mother die; I won't do that to you"), she gives Sally the beautiful gift of the letter: "I always worried about you because you marched to the beat of your own drum. Now I know that's good. I know your life will be an adventure." Sally and Betty have had their battles over the years; some of them featured Betty trying to make Sally be like her. But, as she's preparing to die, Betty gives her daughter the gift of letting her know that it's okay to be herself. And, that she loves her for it.

Our final glimpse of her is her struggle to climb the stairs at the college. She doesn't fit in, hasn't tried to look more hip like the kids. But, she's there, fighting in her own way. Marching to HER own drum.

I'd like just to stop there, as this is Betty's episode, but should make a couple of other brief observations:

Don, we discover, has chosen the hobo life for now, charting out his next stretch of the journey over the phone with Sally, consulting the map on his hotel room bed. His wanderings must stop for a week when his car breaks down in Kansas.

At the urging of the man who runs the small hotel, he attends a VFW event and after too many drinks, tells the other men the story of accidentally killing his CO in Korea. They all understand that "you just do what you have to do to come home." This seems to be another catharsis for Don, though the next day finds him getting beaten by the men when they think he, the hobo, has stolen their money. This stretch of road is no longer the "milk and honey route." He offers advice to the young man who actually did steal the money: that since he's committed a big crime, "if you keep [the money], you'll have to become somebody else. And that's not what you think it is. You think this town is bad now. Wait 'til you can't come back."

Through his words, we continue to see some of his thinking about his own position. There's been some fan speculation about him pulling another identity shift to escape, but he neither wants nor needs to do that again. He is free to live the life of a hobo for as long as he chooses. He doesn't need a new identity to do that and has no horrible family from whom he wants so badly to get away that he'd "die" to do it. He ends up with no car, smiling on a bench waiting for a bus, with his one small bag beside him. But, for how long will that smile last? He'd promised Sally he'd call her again in a week, so he's about due to talk to her again and receive some sad news. Don has had to deal with Anna's death and more recently with Rachel's. These have shaken him greatly. What will he do when he finds out Betty is dying? The "Land of Milk and Honey" might not be long in front of him.

And then there's Pete, who finally figures out--after talking with his brother about it--that he is the way he is with women because his father was that way. Has he really learned something? Will he change? He tells Trudy that he's "not so dumb anymore." So, it looks like he'll be moving into the Kansas that Don is vacating. Will it be a "Land of Milk and Honey" for the Campbells? This story arc conclusion felt a bit too pat, but I've never liked or trusted Pete. Trudy seems wary too. Who knows?

"Mad Men" isn't Victorian fiction with its reward of virtue with marriage and punishment for sexual promiscuity with death, and it shows particularly strongly tonight when someone who has transgressed against so many in such arrogant and contemptuous ways seems to be granted the happy ending of remarriage, and Betty Francis--no saint, but nowhere near the sinner Pete is--is fated to die in her early 40s.

One more week to see what is in store for Don, his soon-to-be motherless children, and Peggy.

This article is from Mad About Mad Men blog

Poets honor 'migration' paintings of Jacob Lawrence

Fri, 08 May 2015 15:51:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) - For a tribute in verse to one of the 20th century's greatest painters, the late Jacob Lawrence, only the finest poets would do.

Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa, former poets laureate and Pulitzer winners Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey and National Book Award winners Terrance Hayes and Nikky Finney were among 10 special guests Friday night at the Museum of Modern Art. They read original works inspired by Lawrence's celebrated "The Migration Series," commissioned for a Lawrence exhibition at MOMA that runs until Sept. 7.

"Art begets art and influence crosses art forms," explained the evening's host, Elizabeth Alexander, herself an acclaimed poet who in 2009 read at President Obama's first inaugural.

"Prepare to be dazzled," she added as she brought the poets to the stage, including Tyehimba Jess, Patricia Spears Jones, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Crystal Williams, and Kevin Young.

"The Migration Series" is a sequence of 60 panels, completed in 1941, that narrate and personalize the mass journey of blacks from the rural South to the urban North between World War I and World War II. Lawrence was in his early 20s at the time, but with remarkable sophistication captured a generation's struggles and hopes through silhouetted figures, sharp outlines and a narrow, but striking range of colors.

The paintings predate the civil rights era by more than a decade, but the poets sadly pointed out their relevance to today, with some making references to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the death of Freddie Gray while in the custody of police in Baltimore. Among the panels singled out by poets was No. 21, showing three blacks in jail, handcuffed together, heads bent. No. 14 pictures a white judge facing down two blacks in court, while No. 15 features a tree branch with a rope hanging from it.

Jess' "Another Man Done" was a stuttering, rapping rundown of blacks and the law:

They were arrested at the slightest provocation.

They were at the slightest provocation.

They were the slightest provocation.

They were provocation.

They were

They were.

Each reader had his or her own story to tell of family members moving about the country, with the Ohio-born Dove remembering the drawls of her Georgian elders, and of how they came to write their Lawrence poems. Finney said she placed Xeroxed copies of Lawrence's paintings on her kitchen wall, in numerical order, and was inspired to write a poem in which each stanza included 60 words and ended with the word "sixty." Hayes was taken by No. 9, a portrait of boll weevils eating into crops, and imagined "a brood of boll weevils migrating to the U.S./In bales of Mexican cotton." Jones based her poem "Lava" on No. 57, in which a lone washer woman lowers a rod into a swarm of clothing.

She stands in this painting

A cruciform of desire

In a center of beauty

Dressed in white, the orange stick

Her cudgel, her sword. The laundry

Her step on that ladder to the future.

Photo: A painting by Lawrence, in a style known as "dynamic cubism." | assatashakur.org

In new play, God comes to Earth, finds his humanity

Thu, 07 May 2015 12:56:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES, Calif. - So, did you hear the one about God walking into the psychologist's office? That is the premise of O My God, a brilliant, engaging 2012 Israeli play now being given its American premiere in Los Angeles.

The West Coast Jewish Theatre artistic director, producer and stage director Howard Teichman looked high and low for an Israeli play to offer his L.A. audience, and came across this one, by Anat Gov, a popular TV and theater writer. O My God was voted the best play in Israel for the year 2012, though sadly the author died the same year from cancer at 55.

If you're familiar with the concept of the 50-minute hour - the standard psychiatrist's hour-long session - well, this is the 90-minute hour, a rollicking trip through the mind of God who, being a busy guy, needs to wrap it all up in one appointment. Amazingly, and against her own expectation, Ella succeeds. A "divine comedy" indeed, as the show's blurb promises.

God, played with ironic authority by the international star Mike Burstyn (he starred in Barnum on Broadway, among a long list of other accomplishments), has been depressed. For 2000 years, give or take a thousand.

Eden was "a vast, peaceful safari park," he says. But after "Bloody Friday" - the Sixth Day, when he created human beings - it was pretty much all downhill from there. He clarifies: whole civilizations "fighting over the sanctification of my name."

At first Ella can't accept that this is really God in her office. Who would? After all, the Holy Land is generously populated by biblical psychotic wackjobs of every conceivable denomination. So God has to perform a little prestidigitation to convince her, stuff as simple as opening and closing doors with the wave of his hand, freezing her in place for a minute, like Lot's wife, and other dime store magic tricks. Kudos to the lighting designer Gil Tordjman for his, uh, heavenly effects.

Given the shortage of time, Ella gets down to work on her new client, observing that without any parents or friends, he must have been pretty lonely, and had no life experience to guide him when creating human beings to be his companions. What were his expectations of them? She runs through a checklist of all the expected, and many unexpected insights a shrink might ask of a patient, the usual ones about love and abandonment, of course, as well as others that from her modern, secular point of view, challenge the very all-powerful "godliness" of God.

Ms. Gov shows a keen knowledge of the biblical texts that show God to be a complex and troubled character at best, and at worst a bellowing bully lording his authority over everyone and everything he's created. I learned a lot from her play: For example, I did not know (did you?) that the Book of Job is the last time (at least in the Hebrew scriptures, I'm not sure about the New Testament) that God speaks - and man, what a speech that is! You know, the one that self-importantly puts poor Job in his craven, sniveling place, by contrast to the majestic, fantastic, supernatural feats God has achieved. Burstyn delivers this passage in the original biblical Hebrew in stentorian tones worthy of a Mafioso not accustomed to being challenged. The Book of Job is also the only place in Hebrew scripture that refers to Satan - whom, of course, God must have created, right?

"What was there in Job that awakened your Satan?" the probing Ella asks.

In other words, she accommodates to God appearing in her office, and then proceeds to treat him empathically but rationally and clinically like any other patient in trouble. Ella is played by a versatile and totally believable Maria Spassoff.

Not at all incidentally, O My God is as much about Ella as it is about God. She has her own constellation of "issues." For one thing, she has a 17-year-old son, Lior, who is severely autistic. He grunts and vocalizes but cannot form words. Yet, he is an accomplished cellist and a painter, whom Ella has learned to accept as a gift in her life. As the old Jewish saying goes, God couldn't be everywhere, so he made mothers.

The third actor in the play is Lior, performed by the young Joseph Rishik, who plays a mean cello and offers a fully realized interpretation of his difficult character.

Set design by Kurtis Bedford is a perfect representation of the controlled chaos of life, and Howard Teichman's direction is crisp, spot-on, and exploits the multitude of laugh lines with warm grace.

I've rarely spent a 90-minute hour so scintillating and sparkling with wit and wisdom as this.

O My God plays Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm through June 7, at the Pico Playhouse, 10508 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles. For tickets and further information: (323) 821-2449; wjct.tix.com

Photo: Maria Spassoff and Mike Burstyn. (Michael Lamont)