People Before Profit blog

"The Chesapeake Bay Retriever": A shaggy dog mystery story

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 11:53:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - In the year 1936, desperate for income and looking after his frail, anorexic wife Eva Goldbeck, increasingly radicalized American composer Marc Blitzstein accepted a $350 commission to write the score to a short film (ca. 11 minutes) celebrating the history and skills of The Chesapeake Bay Retriever. It premiered at a movie house in New York City on Tuesday, May 26, 1936, on a triple canine bill with The Collie and The Poodle.

Blitzstein did not attend the screening. He had traveled from New York up to Boston, where Eva lay ill. In fact, she died on May 26. Goldbeck herself, though largely unremembered, does merit a significant footnote in the history of the American Left: She was the first writer in this country to recognize the special genius of German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, and was his first English-language translator.

In his mourning for Eva, Blitzstein threw himself into the great comic work that would bring him musical and theatrical notoriety, his evergreen satire of capitalism, The Cradle Will Rock, produced by John Houseman and directed by Orson Welles in 1937 on Broadway. From that moment on, until his death in 1964, Blitzstein never left the public eye. He went on to write operas and musicals, choral pieces, song cycles, orchestral works, and other film scores, notably the 1942 feature-length Native Land, featuring narrator and singer Paul Robeson, about American fascism and deprivation of civil liberties.

A fine writer and critic, whose articles appeared several times in communist publications in the 1930s and '40s when he was a Party member, Blitzstein also became the widely hailed translator/adaptor of Kurt Weill and Brecht's Threepenny Opera and other works. His 3PO ran off-Broadway for years in the 1950s and became the standard translation. If you know "Mack the Knife" or "Pirate Jenny," it is almost certainly the Blitzstein version that you recall.

Although no further record of later screenings of the doggie film has come to light, Blitzstein's cheerful, tonal score for piano, bassoon, clarinet, and violin, survived. Its chief distinction may be that it separated the composer from the more severe modernism of his early Beaux Arts work, and prepared him for writing in a comedic vein.

In the late 1970s I undertook to write the first biography of Blitzstein (Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein, St. Martin's Press, 1989, and now available from iUniverse in both paper and electronic versions). In the process, as my extensive acknowledgments attest, I reached out to hundreds of people who had any relationship to the composer. In 1984 I wrote to Anthony A. Bliss of Oyster Bay, N.Y., whose dog had been featured in the 1936 film. Bliss answered that the film was lost. And so I said in the book, as did Howard Pollack in a later biography of Blitzstein.

On March 18, 2014, I received an email from Sue Webb, a writer and editor for the People's World, which has also published many of my own articles. Sue forwarded to me an email that came to People's World from the former historian of the American Chesapeake Club, who had readily located me with a quick internet search. Only recently had Anthony Bliss, Jr., sent her my 30-year-old letter to his late father, thinking it perhaps best belonged in the Chesapeake Club archives.

From Dyane Baldwin's email of Mar. 17: "I think I can help you.... In 2007, the club purchased on eBay an untitled film that was said to have Chesapeake Bay Retrievers in it. The club got the film converted to CD with the audio. It turned out to be the film you are seeking! (although we had no knowledge of your quest at that time)."

A follow-up email (Apr. 2) from the current historian of the club, Joanne Silver, describes that amazing old film stock that she took a chance and purchased. "It was tough getting it transferred and the sound track. The original place I brought it to removed the sound track and plugged in 'Memories by Barbara Streisand' and I went nuts. They had to send it out to pick up the soundtrack."

Ms. Silver sent me the CD in exchange for an inscribed copy of my book. The score sounds very much as I had described it. What I had not quite expected to find (as someone not especially a dog lover) is that the short is informative, absorbing, even a little suspenseful, and charming, with the constant bubbling of Blitzstein's witty accompaniment. In addition it is a small window not only onto the lives of the dogs themselves, but of their owners and trainers, blissfully attending to their pastoral hobby in a period of mass unemployment and privation (just thought I'd throw that in for some social context).

When the club purchased that canister of film on eBay, they hardly could have imagined that its most precious feature would be its long-lost Marc Blitzstein score! Copies of the CD are now available. If you're interested, send a check for $18 ($15 plus $3 S/H) to American Chesapeake Club, c/o Joanne Silver, 412 Woodbury Dr., Wyckoff, NJ 07481. Proceeds go to the ACC health and rescue fund. And tell 'em People's World sent you!

Heart of lightness: "Florencia en el Amazonas"

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 11:14:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - Who says the operatic art form is dead? Simply put, Florencia en el Amazonas is among the finest operas this reviewer has ever seen. In terms of stagecraft and theatrical special effects, composer Daniel Catán's Amazonas is superb, even exceeding the Broadway production of Phantom (which is, of course, set largely in an opera house) in onstage visual wizardry. Regarding plot, it is more like Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, with its tale of ivory traders embarking on an odyssey into the jungle.

But instead of floating down the Congo River on a steamboat into "deepest, darkest" Central Africa, the opera's El Dorado (as the paddle wheeler is symbolically named) traverses the Amazon River, from Leticia (Colombia) to Manaus, Brazil, the Amazon's largest city and a major port for ocean vessels, although it's about 1000 miles from the Atlantic. However, Amazonas thematically departs from Conrad's meditation on imperialism and reversion to savagery: This 1997 work, with a libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain, is about that elusive quest not for ivory but for "a crazy little thing called love," as Freddie Mercury so eloquently put it.

The passengers aboard this ship of fools for love are inspired by the late Colombian literary lion, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Gabriel García Márquez, although this work is not an operatic adaptation of any of his novels per se. The dramatis personae include: The title character, Florencia Grimaldi (Chilean soprano Verónica Villarroel), a renowned diva traveling incognito en route to reopen Manaus' opera house and seeking her long lost love Cristóbal, a butterfly hunter. Paula (mezzo soprano Nancy Fabiola Herrera from Spain's Canary Islands who, appropriately enough, sings like, well, a canary) and Alvaro (American baritone Gordon Hawkins) are a middle-aged couple who hope the flame of their passion will be relit by hearing Florencia's stirring arias. The lovely, youthful Rosalba (New Orleans soprano Lisette Oropesa) is a would-be writer.

Onboard the El Dorado, Rosalba encounters the young sailor Arcadio (Sonora tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz), who expresses ennui regarding his job to his uncle, the straight-arrow Captain (American bass-baritone David Pittsinger). Crewmates can be colorful characters, and in Act I Australian baritone José Carbó perfectly captures this piquant quality as Ríolobo. Unfortunately, in the second act this character - whom Performances Magazine calls the "spirit of the river" - all but floats away offstage.

Amazonas' real "star" is the El Dorado - kudos to scenery designer Robert Israel and director Francesca Zambello, whose recent evocation of a man o' war at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in last season's Melvillean Billy Budd also featured a maritime theme. The trials and tribulations that befall the El Dorado during its river journey are spectacular to watch onstage. Lighting designer Mark McCullough does yeoman's work to assist Israel in rendering these FX, along with spellbinding projections.

At times the paddle wheeler actually moves onstage, starboard to portside and back. As for going full steam ahead, the charming images rendered on scrims and backdrops by projections designer S. Katy Tucker provide the illusion of frontal movement down the river. The projections of the Amazon's flora and fauna are lovely to behold in this enchanting production, enhancing its magical realist vibe, with imagery that has an Henri Rousseau dreamlike quality.

(Fun Fact of the Day: Despite his many jungly canvases, Rousseau never set foot in or his eyes on a jungle in his entire life.)

Catán's LA Opera-commissioned Il Postino - which had its world premiere at the Dorothy Chandler in 2010, with none other than Il Maestro, Plácido Domingo himself, portraying Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda, and Ms. Herrera as Doña Rosa - also made superb use of scrims and onstage special effects to literally visualize poetry and poesy, the act of creating poetry.

A quintet of dancers, who may be Amazonian indigenous people or water sprites, performing balletic movements choreographed by Eric Sean Fogel, add to the opera's mysterious, exotic ambiance.

Like librettist Fuentes-Berain (who is also an acclaimed screenwriter mentored by Gabriel García Márquez), Catán hailed from Mexico City, which explains why their opera is sung in Spanish (rather than Portuguese, Brazil's national language). Overhead English supertitles translate the libretto. This was the first opera in the Spanish language commissioned by a major North American opera company. Catán, who taught music at Santa Clarita's College of the Canyons near Los Angeles, helped to bring the operatic medium into the 21^st century and to enthusiastically infuse it with new blood, utilizing not only up-to-date technology for his theatrical purposes, but an enlarged orchestral palette reflecting the sound atmosphere of tropical America. His opera version of Frank Capra's 1941 populist picture Meet John Doe was left uncompleted owing to Catán's untimely death in 2011.

Fuentas-Berain's lyrics, Catán's music, ably conducted by Grant Gershon, combined with soaring performances expressing the meaning of romance, plus eye-popping sets and special effects that are sometimes aerial (keep your eyes peeled!) as well as nautical, combine and conspire to make Florencia en el Amazonas a voyage of the blessed. El Dorado's gold, but of course, is true love. So take someone you love to see a tour de force down the Amazon that never loses its head of steam.

Florencia en el Amazonas is performed on Sundays, Nov. 30 and Dec. 14 at 2:00 pm and Dec. 10, 18 and 20 at 7:30 pm at LA Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. For more info: (213) 972-8001; www.laopera.com.

American Grace

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 09:30:00 +0000

Remember those who grew this food
Who picked and packed
Who shipped and sold.
Bronze rainbow arms
Have set this food upon our table.

Remember those who built this house
Assembled, weaved, created
Light and warmth and health.

Remember those who fought and died
To break the king's command, the slaver's yoke
And slay the Nazi beast.

Remember those who walked in darkness
Eyes on the gourd and the Trail of Tears,
Marching in Selma, martyred in Memphis

They can't kill the dream, Jesús y Maria,
Che on his cross in the Andean highlands
Shot in the stadium, pushed from the airplane
Martyrs for freedom
And America.

Never forget
Our ancient foe
His craft and power,
His cruel hate
His endless thirst
Through blood and oil
For profit, profit
Uber alles.

Remember those whose songs of love
Restore us still
Pablo, Diego, Woody and Giant Paul
Mus' keep on fightin', Comrades all

Remember those who grew this food
Who mined and forged
Who sang and loved
Who fought and died
Who made all wealth
All honor and glory,
All power and peace
Be unto you
Be unto you.

Photo: El Vendador de Alcatraces by Diego Rivera (kamikazecactus/CC)

This poem/prayer was originally published in People's Weekly World in March 2006.

"Once Upon a Time, Veronica"

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 15:31:00 +0000

Despite its fairy tale title, Brazilian writer/director Marcelo Gomes' Once Upon a Time, Veronica is a realistic look at contemporary urban South America. What's engrossing about this film is that it takes viewers behind the scenes into the psyche and soul of its protagonist, Veronica da Silva Fernandes (Hermila Guedes). By going beyond the celluloid stereotypes of countless Carmen Miranda movies, 1959's mythic Black Orpheus, etc., and revealing Veronica's inner life, we have a fully fleshed out picture of a 21^st-century woman living in Recife, on Brazil's northeastern coast.

Much of the truthfully drawn film is concerned with Veronica's private life. Its nudity and sex acts are fairly graphic by Yankee standards, where couples often make love beneath blankets. But our heroine is far more than a beach blanket bimbo or just another "hot Latin lover." In fact, Veronica is a doctor (if I understood correctly, a psychiatrist). Much of the film details her work inside a city hospital and the related stresses of trying to treat, and perhaps heal, psychologically suffering patients, some of whom abuse her.

In the classic "physician, heal thyself" mode, Veronica too experiences existential angst and ponders the meaning of life, often empathic with her clientele. In this sense, Once is reminiscent of European Sixties cinema by Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, with those estranged characters seeking purpose and connection. As Southern Hemisphere countries undergo development, part of the process seems to incur these psychological crises that once seemed reserved for denizens of the materialistic, consumer societies in the developed world.

Veronica finds release from her daily grind in carefree sex and water. Whether romping in the surf (alone or with friends or as part of an orgy) or in her shower, water is a recurring motif that provides our heroine with a form of hydrotherapy. Perhaps it can be argued that the sea in particular is what connects Veronica most to her Brazilian-ness.

As for her sexuality, Veronica confides that her problem isn't having sex or finding partners, but rather discovering true love. So there's a conflict as to whether Gustavo (João Miguel) will remain solely a sex partner, her boy toy - or, on a more intimate level, become Veronica's "official boyfriend."

Perhaps this is because Veronica still lives with her ailing, aging father, Zé Maria (W. J. Solha) - who loves frevo music and has a book by Lenin on his shelf - with whom she has a warm, nurturing relationship. Maybe she's channeling those loving feelings into her father, instead of a romantic partner (paging Dr. Freud!).

Guedes' performance always rings true. Her Veronica is not a classic beauty; rather, her attractiveness is derived from the character's realistic earthiness. We experience a natural instead of artificial woman, which makes her all the more sexy and endearing. She embodies an insouciant state of grace that is the essence of joie de vivre. Apparently around 35 years old, Veronica is physically and mentally poised somewhere between youth and the onset of early middle age. Indeed, the film begins with Veronica sitting at her medical exams, as she transitions from student to entering the workplace as a professional.

Gomes combines neo-realist and more arty cinematic styles, with lots of close-ups. We get a real slice of life as lived by real residents of 21^st-century Recife. But a shot that lingers on Veronica's grief-stricken visage goes on far too long, and one almost wants to shout "Cut!" at the screen at this affectation. The Brazilian auteur's other films include the noted 2005 Movies, Aspirin and Vultures.

Overall, Once Upon a Time, Veronica is a candid, absorbing film that sheds light on contemporary Brazil through the life of a vibrant, bright woman full of longing and striving for hope. It opens in Los Angeles on November 28 and then screens nationwide.

Photo: Courtesy Big World Pictures

Ursula LeGuin says up with fantasy, down with capitalism

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 14:56:00 +0000

The 65^th annual National Book Awards, which took place Nov. 20, were punctuated by an impassioned speech by fantasy author Ursula K. LeGuin. The writer attended the New York ceremony to receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. She seized the moment to talk about the importance of fantasy in modern times, and to decry the capitalist stranglehold on the arts, including the continuing commodification of literature. And it was met with a reaction of thunderous applause.

"To the givers of this beautiful award, my thanks from the heart," said LeGuin. "I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long; my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction - writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful awards go to the so-called realists. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art."

Many readers of the fantasy genre and its offspring (epic fantasy, gothic fantasy, urban fantasy, etc.) are quite familiar with the big names - Tolkien, Lovecraft, Rowling - but less so with LeGuin, whose works have been powerfully progressive, and counterintuitive to classic fantasy tropes in the best possible way. With books delving into real-world issues including environment, race, gender, and sexuality, LeGuin molded her corner of the genre into a tool for speaking politically to readers. Indeed, her material would pose a potent argument against the anti-fantasy naysayers who dismiss the genre as silly or irrelevant.

In fact, according to LeGuin, in the face of today's cynicism and objectification, fantasy fiction has never been more important. "Hard times are coming," she remarked. And during such a period, "we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom; poets, visionaries - the realists of a larger reality." (Story continues after video)

What's interesting is that LeGuin's comments essentially promote creative fantasy fiction as being an effective counterpoint to the sad or brooding post-apocalyptic works that seem to permeate U.S. pop culture today. Writer Josh Tyler, of sci-fi review site Giant Freakin' Robot, associated such doom-based stories with dwindling creativity and the representation of a kind of apathy that seems present in young readers today. "The offerings today are much the same," he said. "Every other premise seems to involve telling the story of a future where the Earth is doomed or society is repressed. It's no accident that [one of] the most popular [titles] is The Hunger Games, which tells the story of a time where humanity is fractured and forces children to murder each other for sport. This dismal outlook does nothing to inspire anyone; we can do better."

In an interview with the Guardian this month, LeGuin stated her displeasure with dystopian stories, remarking that, particularly within the fantasy genre, world-building is a very important component of the work itself, one that is by nature an engine of creativity, and which provokes real analyses of societal issues that post-apocalyptic narratives seem unable to address. "Neglect of rational questions in imaginative fiction is often excused, even legitimized, as literary license," she said. "I hated to do that."

But as LeGuin suggested during her speech, the recent stagnation of fantasy and sci-fi should not really be blamed on the attitudes of the time, but rather, identified with an uptick in capitalist greed, which has experienced a victorious emergence in the worlds of both literature and film. "Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same as responsible book publishing or authorship," she stated. "Yet, I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. And I see a lot of us accepting this - letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write."

Like the stories she has written, however, LeGuin ended the speech with words that were thoughtful and constructive: "Books, you know, they're not just commodities. The profit motive often is in direct conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism; its power seems inescapable. But so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. We who live by writing and publishing want - and should demand - our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom."

Photo: Ursula LeGuin is introduced at the National Book Awards by fellow fantasy writer Neil Gaiman. | Robin Platzer/AP

Hollywood Left turns out to support Howard Zinn’s new book

Mon, 24 Nov 2014 15:16:00 +0000

Rocker Tom Morello brought the house down - and the crowd of 800 to their feet - with rollicking renditions of Bruce Springsteen and Woody Guthrie songs at a Nov. 13 Los Angeles event celebrating the publication of the 10th anniversary edition of Voices of a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories Press). Co-edited by the late Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, the hefty volume contains quotes by indigenous people, slaves, abolitionists, suffragettes, labor organizers, agitators, anarchists, communists, feminists, dissidents of many stripes representing the downtrodden, the dispossessed. In short, the wretched of the Earth.

This updated version of Voices adds passages from whistleblower Chelsea Manning, anti-surveillance Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, anti-globalization activist/author Naomi Klein, Dream Defenders, Undocumented Youth and other resistance figures. A host of Hollywood heavyweights, including Kerry Washington (star of ABC's Scandal series and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained), Oscar-winner Marisa Tomei (My Cousin Vinny) and Benjamin Bratt (Steven Soderbergh's Traffic), read various quotations from Voices during the show at Downtown L.A.'s Japanese Cultural & Community Center.

Introducing the talents participating in the sold-out performance Arnove noted sadly that the occasion was "bittersweet" as this was the first edition since 2004 of Voices - a companion book to Zinn's classic text A People's History of the United States - to be released after the historian's 2010 death at age 87. But Arnove - who co-produced the Oscar-nominated documentary Dirty Wars and compiled the additions for this third edition of Voices - asserted: "I have no doubt that he would want the struggles and voices that have continued in the last several years...to be documented and celebrated and to give expression to those voices.... So I am very confident that Howard is very much with us in spirit...and I also feel that Howard is with the strikers who are striking at the docks at L.A.'s port and with the Walmart workers who are sitting in today - and at Ferguson, Missouri."

Singer/songwriter Joe Henry then proceeded to set the mood, kicking the event off with a moving performance of a 1971 Bob Dylan song about prison guards killing "Soledad Brother" George Jackson, a Black Panther linked to Angela Davis, singing, "Lord, Lord, They cut George Jackson down, Lord, Lord, They laid him in the ground." Nuyorican actor Ramon Rodriguez (HBO's The Wire) then read a passage from Voices by historian and Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, extolling the virtues of the so-called "New World's" Natives and decrying their brutal treatment and enslavement by Spanish colonizers.

Big and little screen actor John Krasinski (NBC's sitcom The Office and co-writer and co-star with Matt Damon of the anti-fracking movie Promised Land) read the 1886 address to the court by anarchist August Spies, who was executed shortly afterwards because of his alleged ties to Chicago's Haymarket Square protest, which led to the creation of May Day (in the USA, not Russia, Cuba or China!): "Here you will tread upon a spark...and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out."

Broadway actress Christina Kirk (Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda, NBC's A to Z series) passionately delivered a stirring speech called "Wall Street Owns the Country," as relevant today as it was circa 1890 when populist Mary Elizabeth Lease proclaimed: "We want the abolition of the National Banks.... We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out.... We will stand by our homes...by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the Government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay, [so] let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware."

In a more lighthearted vein Marisa Tomei read Naomi Klein's speech delivered via the "human microphone" to Occupy Wall Street demonstrators at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan: "I love you.... The One Percent loves a crisis.... [The] 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say, 'No. We will not pay for your crisis.'... 'Why are they protesting?' ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: 'What took you so long?' 'We've been wondering when you were going to show up.' And most of all: 'Welcome.'"

Kerry Washington - who portrayed the enslaved wife Jamie Foxx rescues in Django Unchained and stars in the hard hitting Scandal TV series about presidential hanky panky and intelligence agency covert actions - read testimony by civil rights activist and former cotton picker Fannie Lou Hamer about her efforts to register to vote in segregated Mississippi. Washington was the only actor to return for a sort of encore as Sojourner Truth, reenacting the ex-slave's famous 1851 "Ain't I a Woman?" speech to women's rights advocates, debunking religious arguments against gender equality. With her finely etched features, the beautiful Washington wittily pointed out as Sojourner: "Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him."

In what may have been the show's canniest casting Hong Chau - a Vietnamese woman - delivered boxer and Muslim Muhammad Ali's eloquent explanation why he was resisting the draft and refusing to fight in Vietnam, with defiant words as timely today as they were in 1966: "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home to drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn't have to draft me, I'd join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I'll go to jail, so what? We've been in jail for 400 years." Ali's greatest fight was fought outside of the boxing ring.

Michael Ealy, the star of Think Like a Man and About Last Night, brought back to life an equally fiery statement by Malcolm X, reciting his 1963 "Message to the Grass Roots." In another bit of clever casting, actress Alicia Witt repeated the 2013 courtroom statement of Chelsea Manning (the former U.S. soldier who exposed American war crimes in Iraq by revealing classified documents to WikiLeaks and is in the process of undergoing a gender transition): "I understand that my actions violated the law, and I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.... I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal."

Manning also quoted Zinn's excoriation of false patriotism: "There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people." Jesse Williams, who portrayed civil rights and peace activist Rev. James Lawson in The Butler and appeared on Grey's Anatomy, poignantly read Zinn's famed 1971 antiwar speech, riffing on the notion of civil disobedience: "Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the problem there was obedience, that the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong. They should have challenged, and they should have resisted; and if we were only there, we would have showed them. Even in Stalin's Russia we can understand that; people are obedient, all these herdlike people."

On a day when reports emerged that Obama might take sweeping executive action regarding immigration reform, Benjamin Bratt depicted undocumented immigrant Gustavo Madrigal-Pina, criticizing Obama and U.S. immigration policies. Actress Q'orianka Kilcher, 24, whose father is Peruvian and who has portrayed Pocahontas in Terrence Malick's The New World and a Hawaiian royal in Princess Kaiulani, read the poem the low road by Marge Piercy.

Tom Morello - the grandnephew of Kenyan independence leader Jomo Kenyatta who co-founded Rage Against the Machine and whom Rolling Stone rated #26 on its 100 Greatest Guitar Players of All-Time list - provided a moving musical interlude, belting out "The Ghost of Tom Joad," with its Steinbeckian lyrics by Bruce Springsteen. The acoustic guitar of Morello, who belongs to the Industrial Workers of the World, bore the words "Arm the Homeless" and a decal with a hammer and sickle. Morello dedicated the song to Iraq War veteran turned antiwar leader Tomas Young - star of Phil Donahue's 2007 documentary Body of War - whose recent death from the injuries he suffered in Iraq greatly angered him, the singer said.

Backed by Carl Restivo and Joe Henry, Morello also closed the 90-minute Zinn-inspired event by performing a rocking version of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," the unofficial alternative national anthem (and not just of the American Left). This rendition included Woody's sometimes neglected lyrics dissing private property; Morello's electric guitar pyrotechnics were positively Hendrix-like. The Wobbly guitar slinger directed the audience to get out of their seats, dance and jump upon his cue, which the onstage talents joined in on, especially an enthusiastic Washington. Toward the end Morello repeatedly sang, "Take it easy," and then added, "But take it!" Concluding, the leftwing troubadour quipped, "That was pretty rhythmic clapping - for a progressive audience!"

Playwright Bianca Bagatourian, whose new experimental bio-play about Howard Zinn The Time of Our Lies was recently performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, exulted that the program "captured the spirit of Howard," whom the dramatist knew. Indeed, a splendid time was had by all - one would have to be a "Zinn-fidel" to not have enjoyed the big show.

For those who missed the West Coast Zinn-palooza, another version celebrating the new book release took place at New York's New School on Nov. 21 with Arnove, actors Viggo Mortensen, Peter Sarsgaard, Kelly MacDonald, Aasif Mandvi, Jessica Pimentel, Wallace Shawn, Elizabeth A. Davis, Christina Kirk, Erin Cherry, Susan Pourfar, Brian Jones, and Jeff Zinn, singer-songwriter Allison Moorer, poets Staceyann Chin, Idris Goodwin, and Kevin Coval, and other special guests, plus music by DJ Charlie Hustle.

The storied affinity between performing artists and the Left continues on without skipping a beat. Happy People's Thanksgiving!

Photo: Seven Stories Press

Movies you might have missed: "We’ll Live Till Monday"

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 14:05:00 +0000

The scene of the classroom makes for great drama, which is why so many memorable films have a school setting for their backdrop.

One of the most interesting of this genre, and likely one that is the least familiar to American audiences, is the 1968 Soviet production of We'll Live Till Monday, directed by Stanislav Rostotsky (1922-2001). It won the Golden Prize in the 6th Moscow International Film Festival in 1969 and a USSR State Prize in 1970.

When the film opens, two characters present us with a study in contrasts. One is a veteran educator, now a shadow of his former self. He appears to have lost the spark in his heart and the twinkle in his eye that had made him a beloved figure among both students and colleagues. The other is his young protégée, who is seen taking her first turn at the front of the classroom, attempting to negotiate the group dynamics that make such a profession so challenging.

We'll Live Till Monday burrows deep into the various facets of the school-as-workplace. The morale of the educators, the generation gap, the interaction with parents, and the relationship between teachers and administrators are all explored.

One of the best moments in this film (which is marvelously shot in black and white) occurs when the school principal is just about to exit the office but gets waylaid by the angst-ridden protagonist. Realizing there is no escape from the complaints of agonizing ennui that plagues the teacher, the principal throws down his hat and coat, and invites his comrade to wax nostalgic about the unpleasant memories of a derailed romance that have sunk the veteran educator into his funk. The teacher at last tries the principal's patience when he requests a leave. The exasperated principal tries to restore a sense of duty to his old colleague and barks in reply, "Take your leave! Go nurse your honor while we stay here and build!"

Journalist and playwright Mike Davidow was one of the great commentators on the Soviet experiment. For years he chronicled his observations of Soviet society in the pages of the People's World and its predecessors. Mike saw We'll Live Till Monday on its original release in the USSR and had this to say: "It is an honest portrayal that also deals frankly with the complex human problems that are involved in molding the communist man and woman. Its artistic strength lies in its profound, probing integrity." No one could have said it better.

Photo: imdb

Hurry! Hurry! Two great events at Lincoln Center, NYC

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 12:52:00 +0000

NEW YORK - Two great events of transcendent cultural significance are taking place at or across the street from Lincoln Center in Midtown Manhattan, but only until the end of November. Anyone within striking distance of NYC is advised to hurry over there and take them in.

First is a career retrospective of the self-made radical painter and visual chronicler of 20th-century American working-class life, the long-time Communist Party member and union organizer Ralph Fasanella. His exhibition "Lest We Forget" runs only through Sunday, Nov. 30 at the American Folk Art Museum at 2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue at 66th St., right across the street from Lincoln Center. The show honors Fasanella on the centennial of his birth.

This major exhibition includes a selection of artworks from the museum's own collection, which holds more than one hundred Fasanella pieces. The Bronx-born Ralph Fasanella, who died in 1997, could be called the radical Grandma Moses. He worked in a folklike narrative style, piling and compiling numerous historical references into each of his canvases. Celebrating authentic working-class people, especially immigrants and the communities they built, Fasanella became famous for his series based on the Lawrence, Mass., textile strike led by the Industrial Workers of the World. Over the course of a career spanning 52 years, he also addressed Sacco and Vanzetti, McCarthyism, the Rosenbergs, and in his final painting, the demise of the USSR. At that point, in the early 1990s, not long before the end of his life, his feelings about the Soviet Union and this first attempt at building a socialist society had obviously become quite complex.

"Lest We Forget," organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, comprises several dozen major paintings, each one worthy of long, appreciative study. For those who may have seen some of Fasanella's paintings reproduced as poster art, the scale and detail of the original works will not fail to impress.

Visiting hours are Tuesday-Thursday 11-7; Friday 11-7:30; Saturday 11-7, and Sunday 11-6. Visit the page about the Ralph Fasanella Collection and Archive at the American Folk Art Museum.

And now, back across the street to the Metropolitan Opera, which this month is concluding its run of performances of the 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). Only three performances remain: Friday, Nov. 21 and Tuesday, Nov. 25 at 7:30 pm, and Saturday, Nov. 29 at 1 pm. This opera, with a libretto by the composer and Alexander Preis, is based on a short story by Nikolai Leskov published in 1865, when Russian literature was beginning to come to world attention. Its titular reference to Shakespeare reflects the yearning of Russian writers to be taken seriously as having something to say of global importance.

Briefly, the story concerns Katerina Ismailova, wife of a landowner far from the bright lights of Moscow, who is driven crazy by the "idiocy of rural life," to use Marx's phrase from the Communist Manifesto, which could perhaps more properly be translated as the "isolation" of rural life. Besides which, she has a loveless marriage, a tyrannical father-in-law, a lustful nature with nothing to occupy her time constructively, and a disposition toward murder. And she has to endure the constant sexist taunting and humiliation by every man around her. It was once said by an early critic of Puccini's opera Tosca that it was a "shabby little shocker." Well, Shostakovich ramped that up in geometric proportion.

Shostakovich followed many of the normal precepts for Russian opera: large crowd scenes, a drinking song, sad songs of longing and lament, workers songs, wedding songs, a policemen's production number, a soldiers chorus, a treacherous lover, a fool, and a tipsy, hypocritical Orthodox priest and, since Czarist oppression is never far out of sight, a lonely prisoner's aria and a prisoners chorus.

Though the story line is marbled with the kind of naturalism or hyper-realism that came into literature at the end of the 19th century (think Emile Zola or Theodore Dreiser, or verismo in Italian opera), the creators of this opera knew they had a sequence of over-the-top incidents that rightly called for a heavy dose of satire. The composer himself referred to the work as "tragi-satirical." In many places the orchestra takes over from the words, underlining the action with sardonic comedy and a highly evolved sense of the grotesque. After the steamiest sex I have ever seen on the operatic stage, a series of descending trombone slides graphically indicates the scene coming to its end.

In the Met's staging, originally a 1994 production designed by Graham Vick, revived in 2000 and now again in 2014, the setting is mid-20th century, less specifically Russian and more universal, complete with cars, tractor, crane, cement mixer, refrigerator, TV, comic books and strobe lights; but all the tackiness, the banality, the crudity of rural life is fully on display. One could only think of Betty Friedan: "Each suburban wife struggles with it alone," she wrote in The Feminine Mystique. "As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - 'Is this all?'"

Was Leskov's story an appropriate vehicle to adapt into an opera for socialist audiences in the USSR and a more general public worldwide? Obviously Shostakovich and Preis believed so. It shows the tragedy of a land caught in the grip of a semi-feudal autocracy, its people and its productive forces held back by irrational prejudice and ignorance, its aspirations toward modernity thwarted at every turn. A teacher is arrested and sent to a Siberian labor camp for heresy because he wonders if God gave man a soul, does a frog also have a soul? Paternalistic severity, drunken vulgarity, the mean objectification of women, religious obscurantism, private ownership of land, and the killings that one can expect from such a horrible milieu: All these are the crimes of Czarism that the Revolution overturned. It compares to the almost exactly contemporaneous Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, another searing criticism, but of capitalist ideology and its hideous amorality.

The Soviet Lady Macbeth has a fascinating history. It premiered to widespread acclaim, with productions in Leningrad and Moscow, although some critics noted the absence of a positive moral presence in the work. It shortly traveled abroad in a dozen different productions, arriving only a year later in Cleveland's Severance Hall and New York's Metropolitan Opera. A Wunderkind of Soviet music, Shostakovich was hailed worldwide as the newest, freshest voice of the new socialist culture that emerged after the 1917 Revolution, a globally recognized master of orchestration not yet even 30 years old.

But what Shostakovich could not anticipate with this opera was that by 1936, only two years into its life, Joseph Stalin had solidified his tight control over the Soviet apparatus. Whereas the 1920s and early 1930s are remembered as an era of immense flowering of the arts, the Stalin years are characterized (generally speaking, with notable exceptions) by adherence to more traditional folk and symphonic forms, less experimentation, greater politicization of the arts, heavy censorship and toeing of the line. The middle 1930s were the years of the great purges and show trials which liquidated large numbers of the early Bolshevik leaders, both party and military, if they might have posed any threat to Stalin's one-man rule.

On Jan. 28, 1936, two days after Stalin himself walked out of a Moscow performance of the opera, Pravda published an unsigned editorial called "Muddle Instead of Music," that sharply criticized "the din, the grinding, the squealing" of Lady Macbeth, lamenting the fact that the composer had received nothing but untempered praise. From that moment on Shostakovich knew he was a marked man, and from his example Soviet artists understood they had to trim their sails to fit the new, narrow precepts of socialist realism. In some cases, musicians, actors and poets lost their lives to Stalin's terror.

From the perspective of history we can see that Stalin needed to knock down any possible challengers to his position, even - or maybe especially - from a young composer bursting with talent and ideas whom the whole world had come to respect and love so well. Shostakovich showed the horrors of Czarist times, and that was a healthy reminder in 1934. But did Stalin really want Soviet audiences in 1936 to see lines of starving, long-marching, leg-chained prisoners trekking off to Siberia in heat and cold, dust and pain?

Not so strangely, in the West during that same decade a similar transformation also occurred in the arts, partly stemming from reduced support during the Depression for large-scale symphonies and operas, from an apolitical beaux arts mentality focused on the individual artist's expression, to a more Popular Front esthetic appealing to a wider audience base, sometimes produced by WPA-era government units, and focused on broad historical themes. Such cosmopolitan composers in the U.S. as Aaron Copland, Elie Siegmeister, and Marc Blitzstein, moved to communicate more directly to the public in an age of fascism abroad and strong fascist-minded movements at home, made this turnabout in their style. The Seattle-born Earl Robinson led the way with his folk-inspired songs and cantatas. The supreme achievements of that period were Copland's ballet scores, Blitzstein's comic labor opera The Cradle Will Rock, and Robinson's choral pieces Ballad for Americans and The Lonesome Train.

Under the musical leadership of James Conlon, who conducted the first Met performances of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1994, the score shines brilliantly. It is assuredly one of the operatic masterworks of the 20th century which, after Stalin died, tentatively and then enthusiastically returned to the repertory, becoming once again a powerful, effective and much admired work, a recovered gem from the first generation of Soviet culture. The production is studded with great singing up and down the roster, starting with Katerina performed by the tantalizing Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, who could easily morph into a great stage actor, and her lover Sergei sung by tenor Brandon Jovanovich, with his big cat-like prowling and stalking, a Marlon Brando figure in full operatic bloom. The chorus, as in Mussorgsky's operas, plays a huge part in its various roles as farm laborers, wedding celebrants, captive prisoners, and more.

As I say, hurry, hurry!

Photo: Fasanella painting. BayCitizen.org

Florence of Suburbia: “The Vortex” in review

Wed, 19 Nov 2014 13:50:00 +0000

In much of the public mind, Noël Coward is mainly considered to be the consummate sophisticate, a Britty witty wordsmith and wag able to sling lyrics and bon mots along with the best playwrights and songwriters with Cole Porteresque ease. While all this is quite true, Coward's groundbreaking hit, The Vortex-which he not only wrote but co-starred in as Nicky Lancaster and made him an overnight sensation in 1924 -- proves that there was much more to Coward than the ability to render droll repartee and songs. Indeed, he also created superb anti-Nazi plays and movies.

While The Vortex contains more than its fair share of sharp banter, it is also a powerful dramedy about vanity, adultery, repressed homosexuality, substance abuse and more among an upper-class milieu with its hangers-on. Nicky's (Craig Robert Young) interactions with his emasculated father David (John Mawson) and clashes with his mother Florence (Shannon Holt) may call to mind Eugene O'Neill's tragedies and James Dean's tortured relationships with his 1950s onscreen fathers.

Florence is a fading beauty whose obsession with her looks and age overshadows all else in a life full of pretension. This single-minded fixation on eternal youth and attractiveness greatly impacts upon her family and friends. Daniel Jimenez plays Florence's gigolo Tom Veryan as a bland bloke whose main virtues are his relative youthfulness and generic handsomeness. In a bit of nontraditional casting, Skye LaFontaine (who is apparently part-Black) plays the English "lady" Bunty Mainwaring whom Nicky is courting (perhaps, subconsciously, to be his beard). Cameron Mitchell, Jr. plays the effeminate Paunceforth "Pawnie" Quentin, who favors maroon and kerchiefs. As the savvy Helen Saville, Florence's best friend, Victoria Hoffman has the unenviable task of being a truth teller amidst this not-so-rarefied realm of gossamer glitter, glitz and artifice.

In Matrix Theatre's reprise of last spring's Malibu Playhouse production (with much the same cast), the action-which Coward set during the post-World War I Jazz Age-has been reset to London during the swinging Sixties. The transition works well. England during that period of the Beatles, Cream, Stones, etc., was extremely interesting, and The Vortex's themes of promiscuity, drugs, and the breakdown of classes provide a natural background for Coward's social critique. And this iconic era gives director Gene Franklin Smith, sound designer Joe Calarco and choreographer Anna Safar a legitimate excuse to play snippets of those fab Sixties tunes listeners still love so well.

Scenic designer Erin Walley also captures the mod spirit of the times in acts one and two, although the third and final act is aptly universal and ageless, as its overriding theme can be traced right back to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Smith's direction of his gifted ensemble is spot on. Young's depiction of Nicky's struggle to rise above being just a callow upper-class lad in the role that rightfully made Sir Noël famous is moving to watch. However, during the dénouement his declamation of the title word was hard to hear, so I had to look up Nicky's line vis-à-vis his mother and her infidelity: "We swirl around in a vortex of beastliness." Nevertheless, the Matrix's three-acter is well worth seeing and eminently worthy of its creator.

The Vortex is being performed Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 pm and Sundays at 3:00 pm through Dec. 14 at the Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles 90048. For info: (323) 960-7735. For tickets: www.plays411.com/vortex.

Television news criticized in "Nightcrawler"

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 12:14:00 +0000

Last things first, there are four different union insignias at the end of "Nightcrawler:" Stage Handlers, Teamsters, Screenwriters/Actors, and Producers Guild. It's a union-made film!

Most of the reviews call "Nightcrawler" a gorefest, made-for-Halloween, shocker. But there's a lot more to it. Jake Gyllenhaal, who must forevermore be seen as a top-tier serious actor, plays a totally focused sociopath petty thief who changes careers when he becomes fascinated with freelance television reporting. Crafty and madly obsessive, there is nothing he won't do to delivery gory crime scenes to television news.

Fortunately for Jake's character, television news eagerly cooperates. For the moviewatcher, which is worse? Is Jake the lowest creature creeping around Los Angeles at night, or is television news the true monster?

Rene Russo plays a world-weary TV news editor who acts as Jake's enabler. This is the first time I've seen her play anything less than glamorous, and she's terrific. Her qualms about the obviously dangerous nightcrawler aren't moral or ethical. Her only consideration, exactly equal to Jake's only consideration, is her negotiating position.

Jake's camera focuses on bloody victims and on active criminals, even murderers. The increasingly unsettling, chilling part of the movie doesn't come from the accidents and crimes, but from the other side of the viewfinder. Nightcrawler is a fine work of art with extremely worthwhile content.

Photo: Film official Facebook page

Russian films at Chicago International Film Festival

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 12:45:00 +0000

New themes are now appearing in Russian films that expose the extent of government corruption, which ultimately decimates a people subjected to an increasing supply of drugs, crime and violence. Gradually they develop a lack of social concern, even the will to live. Several films selected for this year's Chicago International Film Festival are beginning to explore the underbelly of this "new capitalism," a system many fought to install in the former Soviet Union, but whose limitations we over here are very familiar with.

Most Russians, including filmmakers, are not quite ready to lament the tragic loss of a great socialist experiment, despite its inherent problems. However, the sarcastically titled film The Fool gets as close as any by portraying the tragic flaws of newly entrenched, competitive, corrupt and antisocial government officials who are now destroying what's left of the land. A young field engineer, one of the last socially conscious workers in a vast sea of bureaucrats working only for personal advancement, discovers a housing complex that is structurally flawed, and according to his calculations, will collapse in a very short time. He urgently tries to convince local officials to have the building evacuated immediately to save over 800 people who reside within. But the building is loaded with drug abusers, sick and handicapped seniors and young lost souls, all victims of an uncaring society. So why go to any trouble to save them? The young engineer is told by his father at one point, "During the Soviet days there was corruption, but not like the rampant, out-of-control immoral lack of concern for fellow humans that exists today. People are trampling over each other to cheat and steal whenever possible, whenever it benefits them." The "fool" is the one young man who has to convince even his own family members who have become hardened with the realities of the new state. He refuses to give up, and essentially becomes the new hero for a new day, although the film doesn't end in any predictable manner. He futilely acknowledges, "We live and die like rats, because we treat each other as nobodies." This is a rare film that offers a plea for compassion and collective action, rather than individualism and its destructive consequences.

Winner of a Special Mention Award for Creativity, The Owners offers a weird and stylish mockery of post-Soviet Kazakhstan. With slow, long shots and minimal dialogue, the viewer is given time to think about the absurdities taking over the former Soviet region previously free of rampant crime and corruption. A crazy story with buffoons and idiots crying at TV cartoons, villagers unable to communicate on any significant level, the whole village (including the corrupt police) fighting over an evacuated shack, and many other surrealistic scenes, the film seems to imply that the only option people have left, is to simply - dance. Filled with symbolism and cultural references, this highly creative tragicomedy is beautifully filmed and loaded with thought-provoking scenes.

Examples of the more common anti-communist cinema that comes out of the former Soviet bloc countries are Viktoria and Fair Play. In the supposedly newfound "freedom" to expose the endless failings of the former socialist system, Fair Play bathes in the joy of revealing how scientists in communist Poland utilized new untested drugs to enhance body strength and performance, experimenting on unaware athletes, ultimately enabling their country to win many undeserved Olympic medals. Yes, seriously, we want those medals back! It's always interesting how screenwriters carefully choose words that have extended political connotations without having any proof or factual documentation to justify exactly what was said or what went on in those closed locker rooms. No one knows exactly what the trainer said to the young high school sprinting star who questioned using a strange new drug, let alone the tone of voice that was used, or if it even happened. Surely the trainer, the scientist, the student, the mother, all would have a different story to tell. But when the character is to be portrayed as a villain, the dialogue is toughened and the direction becomes cynical and over the top. Film becomes propaganda, advancing a point of view, an ideology. Not that this is wrong, as long as the truth is not breached. Facts are facts - but opinions can be bought. No one doubts that in the early stages of enhancers there were abuses, and even attempts to benefit from miraculous scientific achievements. But this has happened for decades in capitalist countries also - it's still quite often in the headlines. But here in America, there are no cries for the "end of capitalism." Instead, the athlete is scorned and punished, and quite often the color of their skin is a considerable factor in the condemnation.

Viktoria is a stylish fantasy about a Bulgarian woman who gives birth to a baby born without a belly button. This of course could only happen in a country where a pregnant woman who's given up on the socialist system, including her oppressive socialist-minded husband, attempts every method to abort the unwanted fetus. The baby, miraculously born unattached to the uncaring mother, becomes a symbol of the wonders of science in Bulgaria. Paraded around as a miraculous child, becoming a close friend to the leader of the country, the child grows into a lovely young lady, the pride of socialism. Unfortunately, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc comes along, and the young lady is thrown aside, becoming a symbol of a failed state, the tragic child of an unaffected mother who, interestingly, never finds satisfaction in anything, her husband, family or the new government she obviously wished for. The film is an interesting allegory of the tragic, complex political history of the region, offering stunning visual images and thought-provoking scenes. There's much more here to examine.

One of the hits at the Festival and winner of the Audience Choice for Best Documentary Feature, was the homegrown film about the great hockey empire and the undefeated sports champions, the Red Army (previous reviewed here). Chicagoan Abe Polsky crafted an entertaining and thrilling study of a powerhouse that most Americans knew little about, except that they were unbeatable and were our enemies during the Cold War. He grilled one of the greatest athletes in history, Slava Fetisov, to the point of obsession, egging him on to admit that he would have preferred to make millions in the West rather than play for the Soviet Union. After all, everything must have a price. There are fun and revealing interviews with trainers, politicians and numerous hockey players, but one of the most famous interviewees is the former TV star who co-hosted a talk show with Phil Donahue, the charismatic Vladimir Posner. Posner was the Soviet spokesman for many years interpreting glasnost and perestroika to the befuddled West. His father was a prominent Hollywood writer until he was blacklisted and they were forced to emigrate to the Soviet Union.

Although director Polsky's intent was surely to expose the failings of the socialist system's sports program, he couldn't crack Fetisov, who remained much like the young moralist in "The Fool" mentioned earlier. A disciplined committed athlete, much like the great Muhammad Ali, Fetisov became Minister of Sports, leading a campaign to free sports of drug enhancement abuse.

Photo: "The Fool" film

"Interstellar" says the world may not end

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 11:33:00 +0000

If you are still marveling over Stanley Kubrick's great sci-fi film 2001, released 46 years ago and still stunning, you will probably like Interstellar. In both films, the follies of humankind have just about extinguished our species, and help has to come, if at all, from somebody in outer space.

The difference between the two movies is dialogue. Kubrick's characters barely explained anything, which led everybody to go back and read Arthur C. Clarke's original book to find out what happened in the movie. Interstellar is so full of technobabble, and so long (clocking in at 2:49) that some would consider the explanations a distraction.

Kubrick's characters had no discernible personalities. That was an important part of what his movie was saying about modern life on Earth. Director Christopher Nolan's characters in Interstellar are full of emotions, dreams, hopes, and despair. Romantics may be disappointed in the love story that is set up perfectly when super-attractive stars like Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway are thrown together for years on a spaceship, but everybody will be enchanted by the father's raging love that McConaughey displays over and over again for his daughter. She is played, by the way, by three extremely accomplished actresses.

Both films, I'm happy to say, run counter to most American sci-fi in that they show positive hope for humanity, even though it has to come from outer space. We don't starve to death, poison ourselves, blow ourselves up, play 'Hunger Games,' or get taken over by mindless terminator machines in this future. Thank goodness!

Photo: "Interstellar" official Facebook page

From “hear” to eternity: Philosopho-palooza in "Discord"

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 13:18:00 +0000

It should come as no surprise that a play featuring three characters known for being writers -- and philosophical ones, at that -- is bound to be talky. As its longwinded title indicates, Scott Carter's The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord can "talk the legs off of a Japanese table" (FYI, Japanese tables don't have legs). The premise is reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit, in that in the hereafter the three title characters are eternally confined to quarters with one another. But instead of, as Sartre's cowardly character Joseph Garcin put it, "hell is other people," Hades is hearing self-important blowhards hold forth for all eternity.

Or, perhaps heaven, as we're never entirely sure where our titular trio of chatterboxes wind up, albeit for only 85 straight minutes, not, thankfully, perpetuity. (Though when they get onto the subject of Jesus it does begin to feel like time without end.) Fortunately, the three actors who bring the idealistic scribblers to life are all accomplished actors of stage and screen who often succeed in making Carter's philosopho-palooza engaging, entertaining, and at times enlightening.

David Melville, a Shakespearean actor of English origins, hams it up as his fellow countryman. In fact, Melville's scenery-chewing and scene-stealing kinetic kleptomania may have some in the audience asking, "What the Dickens?" One wonders if the renowned author acted so boorishly and buffoonishly, although as perhaps the UK's first literary celebrity, he might have been as vain as he's depicted. Melville's comical performance reminded me of the zany Alan Sues, on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. In any case, Melville's hammy performance injects a needed note of hilarity into what could otherwise have been a very dull play.

Whereas Melville's Dickens is daffy, Larry Cedar's Jefferson is dour; Melville is wild, Cedar is wry. As Leo "Don't Call Me Count!" Tolstoy, Armin Shimerman shimmers as an over the top novelist. Racing around the stage in his peasant getup, fright wig and stagey beard, Shimerman looked more like Rasputin than the author of War and Peace, but what do I know?

This production helmed by veteran director Matt August makes deft use of stagecraft and special effects to break up the characters' interminable prattle, trying to figure out why they are thrown together and then pondering the meaning of life. This creative team includes lighting designer Luke Moyer, sound designer Cricket Myers, projection designer Jeffrey Elias Teeter, and to a lesser extent scenic designer Takeshita, as the set itself is pretty minimal.

Since 1993, playwright Carter has been Bill Maher's executive producer, from the comic's Politically Incorrect days on Comedy Central and then ABC, to HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. Carter tries to replicate Maher's formula of mixing punditry, patter, and pleasantries in Discord, hence Melville's -- and to a lesser extent Shimerman's -- comic relief. When it descends into dissertations on the New Testament, I was reminded of Kevin Smith's obscure, doctrinal asides on Catholicism in 1999's Dogma, strictly snoresville for this secular humanist atheist (like Maher). Religion, like prayer, should be kept out of public schools. And theaters?

But when Jefferson and company muse upon other matters Discord comes alive and is philosophically engaging. In meditating out loud about why the three of them have been thrown together, their flaws are discussed. Interestingly, their libidos have gotten the better of them (in terms of the patriarchal monogamy conventions of their eras). When it comes to sex, the Russian was a no-account Count, the Brit a dickens of an adulterer, and the American the worst of all. Indeed, Discord becomes most interesting when the slave owning by the author of the Declaration of Independence is questioned.

When I was little, my dad, a civil rights activist, took me to Monticello, where we partook of the grand tour of the domicile of Virginia's Renaissance Man, inventor-architect-scholar-writer-philosopher-president-bon vivant. The docent pointed out the pre-electric "great man's washing machine," which was hand operated; "the great man's architectural design for the mansion;" "the great man's library," and so on. But then we were casually shown "the great man's slave quarters." Your then-innocent reporter was absolutely thunderstruck, and asked the guide what she was talking about, so she repeated that, indeed, those humble abodes were where the "great man's" slaves lived.

Well, who do you suppose was operating the great man's washing machine by hand? Most certainly not the aristocratic Mssr. Jefferson, whose hands were far too busy scribbling immortal bon mots -- btw, the great man also invented a clever device for making duplicate copies, so his prose and correspondence would be preserved for posterity. Lucky us!

It was at that precise moment that I figured out America was a colossal lie, an "empire of glib-erty" (to paraphrase Jefferson the slaveholder), built upon falsehoods and forced labor. People have long scratched their noggins trying to figure out how the man who wrote "all men are created equal...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" could own other human beings -- among them his common law wife and mother of his children, Sally Hemings.

But the answer is really quite simple: It's not just that Jefferson was a hypocrite of gargantuan proportions. In the context of his era, he was very simply pursuing his own class interests. If pursuing his happiness meant getting rid of an English king and coercing Africans to do all his labor for him so he could drink fine wine, read rarified texts, invent do-hickeys, and have sex with his late wife's darker skinned half-sister, so be it. You can be damned sure that to secure their rights, Jefferson and the fellow ilk of his class instituted a government that did not derive their unjust powers from the consent of the governed -- and enslaved. Thomas Jefferson and the other slave-owning Founding Fathers were just pursuing their unalienable rights, even if at the expense of denying millions of others their human rights and pursuit of Happiness. And while we're at it, how many Native Americans signed the Louisiana Purchase? So even the "Emperor of Liberty" wears no clothes. (Maybe one day someone will write a play featuring Nat Turner, John Brown, and Geronimo.)

Still and all, theatergoers should not discard Discord. This onstage rambling rumination is at its best when dramatizing and presenting these and related ideological issues. And that is what makes this philosophical theatrical treatise worth watching, along with a grand finale that is a well staged, rapturous ode to the art of the written (not spoken!) word. So to sum up, paraphrasing Mssr. Dickens, perhaps ticket buyers can reach accord: Discord is both "the best of times and the worst of times."

Discord has been extended through Nov. 23 and is being performed Tuesdays through Fridays at 8:00 pm; Saturdays at 3:00 pm and 8:00 pm; and Sundays at 2:00 pm and 7:00 pm at the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater at the Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Los Angeles 90024. For tickets: (310) 208-5454; for more info: www.GeffenPlayhouse.com.

Photo: Geffen Playhouse

Hits and misses at Chicago International Film Festival

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 13:04:00 +0000

One of the most inspiring labor films in many years, Pride, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, was not shown at the Chicago Film Festival because it is now in commercial release across the country. Reminiscent of the great labor classics, Made in Dagenham, Brassed Off, and Norma Rae, the story tells of the unique coming together of the labor and gay rights struggles, and takes place in England in 1984 when Margaret Thatcher was out to destroy both groups. The totally uplifting and life-affirming script is supported by a powerful political music soundtrack that includes Paul Robeson singing about the Welsh miners, and Billy Bragg's "Power in the Union" pumping over the closing credits.

Although there were some complaints that no Welsh actors were used in a film about Welsh workers, the real-life characters are brought to life on the big screen in all their glory with some magnificent acting. Especially Mark Ashton, the young activist who started Lesbians and Gays Supporting Miners (LGSM), who was determined to fight for solidarity between the two traditionally antagonistic groups. Tragically his struggle ended at 26 years of age from an AIDS death. It's a film that makes you laugh and cry, feel the beauty of life and be inspired to continue the struggle. Yes, the miners lost the strike and were forced back to work, but the movie ends on a powerful high note showing scenes of masses of activists, gays and workers uniting in struggles around the world.

A re-run of the 2007 film, Comedy of Power by prolific French director Claude Chabrol, and starring the famed actress Isabelle Huppert as a magistrate going after a corrupt CEO, was shown at the Chicago Festival as part of a tribute to the great actress. It screened at one of Chicago's oldest, most splendid film houses, The Music Box, which hosts many great independent films throughout the year. Although the film's theme has potential intrigue, the pacing and script are low key and fail to involve the viewer in an exposé of corporate abuse. It's treated more as a personal vendetta by a judge dealing with marital and physical issues while stalking a CEO who misuses public funds. Despite the powerful names involved in the project, there are many other films, including documentaries, which address corporate power and abuse more urgently and dramatically.

Another couple of honored French filmmakers, the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Rosetta, The Son), known for their humanist treatments of working people in trouble, presented their latest cinematic award-winning achievement, Two Days, One Night. The simple and predictable plot, in much the same style as their previous films, follows a young woman who was voted out of her job by workers who were cynically given the option by their boss of getting a bonus rather than have her return to work after a long sick leave. Fighting to save her job, she is given the weekend to try to persuade her fellow workers in her small shop to vote her back on the job. She calls and visits each of the 12 workers, finding out their reasons why they voted one way or the other. The film is based on these interactions. In a time of economic hardships, many of the workers voted to get the much needed extra pay, while others based their decisions on more personal reasons. It's a well executed human drama, rightly winning many awards, including Best Film at the Sydney Film Festival. But like most labor films made in capitalist countries, the option of organizing for collective action is usually overlooked, unions are rarely mentioned, and a class analysis is nowhere to be seen.

One of the most intriguing film descriptions at the Festival was for a movie called Joy of Man's Desiring, described as a poetic meditation on work by Québécois director, Denis Coté. It was a minimalist "exercise in freedom from big budget films," as the director put it in a Q&A after the screening. Shot for $30,000 in 3 weeks at 3 or 4 small factories around Montreal, the film consists of static shots of workers on machines, at lunch, and basically standing around. Simply showing the rhythms and repetitive movements of the machines and the production line, accompanied by some impersonal metal music, the director added sparse carefully written dialogue for a few of the workers - nothing they necessarily would have said themselves. Even signs on the walls of the shops are concocted by the director, mostly politically meaningless slogans. The factories chosen are small, no unions involved, no work issues addressed, simply visuals of impersonal machines being controlled by seemingly robotic people. The director's intent was to not be subjective, but to be free of ideology or personal opinion, if that's even possible. Esoteric, meaningless visual exercise for art's sake. Almost as exciting as watching metal rust.

The film goes nowhere, as did the discussion with the director, who said that at first workers were reluctant. This would seem expected, since he came from nowhere, with little experience or sympathy for the worker, and described a film to them that would simply show machines and workers moving. They seriously questioned his motivation. In the director's own words: "I tried to make a film without a message, without a position, strictly objective about the workplace and workers." It might have been good therapy for the director, burdened with making big budget films, but he missed a great opportunity to make a point, rather than a pointless film.

There were many great films at the Chicago festival that were reviewed in previous festival reports, such as The Imitation Game, Timbuktu, Look of Silence, and many others I didn't get to see. There were several great bio docs about formidable persons in the arts. Gian Luigi Randi: Life, Cinema, Passion, is a fascinating documentary about the history of Italian cinema through the experiences of someone responsible for the success of many great films. 92 year-old Randi is an historian, critic and director of the prestigious Venice and Rome Film Festivals for many decades, chumming with legends of the film world and promoting the best in world cinema. Another writer responsible for two classic books that were turned into blockbuster films (but who took no credit for the screenplays), Walk on the Wild Side and Man with the Golden Arm, is the Chicago writer Nelson Algren. In the doc Algren, we learn of this working-class writer who actually lived among the downtrodden people he wrote about - pimps, prostitutes, alcoholics, drug addicts, and other fascinating characters who enriched his novels. His writings attracted existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, lover and partner of the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, who shared her love with Algren for many years while living in Chicago. Algren's uncanny ability to capture the pulse of the underclass in his writing and his revulsion of the establishment, ended with his relative obscurity as a sadly underappreciated artist. This engrossing film helps set the story straight.

I'd like to conclude with one of the most magical documentaries in recent memory. It reminded me once again how cinema has the power to capture the essence and wonder of life as it's juggled around in the creative, fertile mind of a visionary artist, delivered onto the screen as a work of art for the world to see and use in all its power and glory, and often for the enrichment and betterment of the people. As we activists strive to make a better world, many by utilizing the arts, in cinema we can always turn to no better craftsman and visionary than the great Orson Welles. Dedicating his entire life to the power and advancement of film and theater, Welles provided us one of the richest bodies of cinematic art available. Chuck Workman, known for creating the beautifully stylized video montages at the Oscar Awards, has crafted a tribute to Orson Welles and his commitment to the art of cinema. The Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is just that - a recognition of the genius of a man who was a magician, an actor, theater director, filmmaker and progressive. His Citizen Kane has been considered by many critics and film lovers as the greatest movie ever made, followed by his stunning The Magnificent Ambersons.

But this documentary reminds us of all the other great projects he was involved in. It follows his life from childhood through the many tumultuous events that shaped this giant of cinema; his many appearances on talk shows; the many films he was forced to work in as an actor to help pay for his personal film projects, many of which were never completed in his lifetime; the film projects that were taken from him and deformed by company hacks; the many loves of his life and the many friends and associates who share rich experiences about the man who symbolized the highest quality of filmmaking. But Welles was always quick to say, as a life's lesson learned, that the goal is not "art for art's sake." There is much more meaning and purpose to cinema. There are many great progressive filmmakers, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to go back and view all of just this one director's offerings.

Photo: Chicago International Film Festival

Iran at the Chicago International Film Festival

Fri, 07 Nov 2014 15:05:00 +0000

The Best Picture Award winner at the 50th Annual Chicago International Film Festival went to the stunning Iranian film The President. Set in an unnamed Middle East country (actually filmed in Georgia), the film follows the flight of a deposed dictator and his grandson out of the country. It starts with an amusing scene of the two of them overlooking the night skies of the city, toying with the power of ordering all the lights out. When the dictator hands the phone over to the 10 year-old, imitating the President, he orders all the lights out, and we see the city go totally dark. After leaving everyone without electricity for a while, he orders the electricity back on, but instead, gunshots start to erupt: It's obvious the people have had enough and the revolution has started. Sensing trouble, the president drives his family to the airport for a quick escape, but he remains with his grandson, assuming this will be over shortly. Much to his surprise, everyone has joined the revolution, and he hopelessly dodges every possible obstacle to escape across the border. On his escape route he is confronted by the people who were subjugated, tortured and abused during his long reign of power.

But the director adds a complicating element. The revolutionaries quickly become as dreadful as the dictator in their rampage throughout the land, raping, killing and abusing as badly as the dictator they overthrew. Iranian master Mohsen Makmalbaf (Kandahar, Gabbeh), has crafted a troubling parable that will keep its viewers guessing what exact country he's telling about - it surely could be Libya, Egypt, Iraq or several others.

The President takes on the style of a road movie, at times both comical and frightening. The president becomes a symbol of the destructive power that consumes leaders who lose their connection to the masses. The grandson becomes the symbol of innocence, too young to understand how violence and hate develop into a destructive force. The film offers a plea for humanity and common sense, urging ways to stop the seemingly endless cycle of violence consuming many countries in the Middle East today. It is riveting and visually stunning, often understated and poignant. There are many beautiful visual ironies, a limo encircled by a gag of sheep, the pompous dictator with his young grandson both bedecked in medals and officialdom, gradually peeling away their façade in a long and futile attempt to escape, along the way discovering the brutal realities of the land he once ruled.

Iranian cinema holds a magical place in the film world - at once simple and lyrical, always searching for the essence of humanity in all its beauty and wonder. Most often free of violence and graphic sex, with themes focusing on poetry, people and love, it is logical that they would produce one of the finest examples of the Romeo and Juliet theme. A Few Cubic Meters of Love is just such a story - doomed forbidden love. A young Iranian laborer, Sabar, meets and falls in love with Marona, the daughter of an "illegal" Afghan worker, who live in the immigrant shacks on the land of a small metal factory on the outskirts of Tehran. The Iranian shop owner houses and hires the desperate illegal workers, benefitting from the low pay he offers them. Frightening random police raids force the workers to flee and hide in a large drain pipe under a road. But amid this squalor and poverty a flower grows. Sabar and Marona, a highly charismatic young couple, find relief in escaping to a cargo container, a few cubic meters in size, where they exude the joy of their newfound love for each other. Although they never once kiss each other, or even touch each other, the beauty of their love is unquestionable. She skips all the way to the secret rendezvous place carrying flowers for her lover. He can't remove the permanent glow on his face when she's in view. But despite his attempts to get her to share his commitment in words, her cultural restrictions make her unable to verbally state she loves him.

There are many subtle references in the film to differences in culture, language and class. Although he is a lowly worker, he is not in the even worse position of illegal lowly worker. And of course the extremely conservative father would forbid any such relation between the lovers. The film feels like a documentary, with the honesty and reality of the story. This is a beautiful film with probably the most unforgettable ending in the history of cinema. Check out any Makmalbaf film if you can; you won't be disappointed.

Alice in Blunderland: "The Dance of Death" and war between the sexes

Fri, 07 Nov 2014 14:49:00 +0000

This production of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg's 1900 The Dance of Death, now playing at A Noise Within (ANW) in Pasadena, is expertly acted and directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott. The latter also co-stars as the former artillery captain Edgar, who is enmeshed in the most miserable marriage this side of Edward Albee's George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, not to mention those suffering Scandinavian spouses in countless downbeat Ingmar Bergman movies often starring the Swede's stock players, such as Liv Ullmann in the bleak Scenes From a Marriage.

In Dance, ANW resident artist Susan Angelo masterfully depicts has-been actress Alice, the other half of this unhappy marriage -- or perhaps I should say the other "third" of what becomes a triangle, once the couple's old "friend" and Alice's cousin, Kurt (Eric Curtis Johnson), enters the fray.

This Dance is a new version adapted by the noted Irish playwright Conor McPherson. What ANW presented on stage seems to be The Dance of Death I, not including the second part of the play, which Strindberg also wrote in 1900. McPherson's adaptation stresses Strindberg's gallows humor. Many in the audience, myself included, laughed and smiled at the black comedy elements -- although many of the not-quite guffaws might stick in your throat.

The Dance of Death not only clearly influenced Albee but also the Theater of the Absurd. There's something terrifying about this grim, glum, gloomy view of marriage and "love," with the couples tearing each other apart, instead of supporting, nurturing and (dare I say?) loving one another. Do some people marry for the purpose of humiliating one another à la Virginia Woolf? Yikes! This distressing thought is truly frightening. Is this why Edgar and Alice married? Do they hate themselves and each other so much that the purpose of their marriage is to psychologically and physically ransack one another? Is it all one big game of marital discord? If that's the sorry case, so much for wedded bliss.

This depressing notion is a strain of thought repeatedly expressed in arts reflecting the Scandinavian psyche: Dramatists Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, painter Edvard Munch (who gave us The Scream), filmmakers Victor Sjöström, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and of course Bergman, whose 1957 masterpiece The Seventh Seal literally closes with a dance of death. Even the marriage of Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen), the fictionalized first female prime minister of Denmark in the stellar Danish TV series Borgen, falls apart: Not even her nation's most powerful person can keep her marriage together. (A complete three-season DVD set of Borgen -- arguably one of the best series in television history -- has just been released.) So what gives with those Danes, Finns, Norwegians, Icelanders, and especially those Swedes? Is it those long winter nights? Or is this existential, angst-ridden side just another stage/celluloid stereotype? Inquiring minds want to know.

McPherson's adaptation, which accentuates the dark humor presumably inherent in Strindberg's original intent, lightens the load and makes this classic more palatable for contemporary theatergoers. Leavened by levity and laughter, the comedic aspect makes the tragic elements easier to take.

According to the playbill, in 1884 Strindberg "was tried and later acquitted for blasphemy for a collection of short stories he wrote called Getting Married." The writer also wed and divorced an actress, Siri Von Essen. He eventually separated from his third wife, Harriet Bosse, also an actress, all of which might inform Strindberg's jaundiced view of Dance's Alice.

Perhaps it's just coincidental or maybe something's in the Southern California air, but this is the fifth play I've seen in about a month (Much Ado about Nothing, Albee's The Goat, Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, Rogue Machine's Cock), that deals with troubled marriages or relationships where the alienated participants rip each other to shreds. With laughter amidst the agony of marital mayhem and relationship wretchedness on stage, let the games begin!

The Dance of Death runs through Nov. 23 at A Noise Within, 3352 East Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91107. For exact times, dates and more info: (636) 356-3100, ext. 1; www.anoisewithin.org.

Photo: Scene from "The Dance of Death."

"Citizenfour": "The Shock Doctrine" plays out in the Patriot Act

Fri, 07 Nov 2014 13:05:00 +0000

Once in a great while a film of such importance appears that it changes forever all that has come before: Citizenfour is such a film.

We're writing in a state of shock. Or perhaps PVTS - Post Viewing Traumatic Stress. Yes, like some of you, we've followed the NSA revelations a bit, alongside all the other news that clogs our arteries. But here it is, all laid out in front of our eyes, up-close and personal in the heroic figures of Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald, with a supporting cast of William Binney, Jacob Applebaum, and the writers and editors at publications in Germany, England, Brazil and elsewhere who have tackled timely and local angles of this incredibly critical story.

It's more than a "story." It's a do-or-die moment, and History commands us to reconceive how we're going to live out the rest of our lives.

Author Naomi Klein, in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, alerted us to the way 21st-century capitalism uses the confusion and immediate needs of a natural - or often man-made - disaster to remold society in a more capitalistic mode, to monetize and privatize the public inheritance of a nation for the benefit of the few. Since the year 2001, the National Security Agency has been playing out the principles of the doctrine by using 9/11 as a pretext for all its activities.

Amid the dense fog of fear, under the rubric of combating terrorism, the National Security State passed the Patriot Act, making inroads into our privacy as citizens that many legal scholars and activists consider profoundly unconstitutional. Despite numerous civil libertarian attempts to dial back its most offensive clauses, the Patriot Act has gone on to spawn a shockingly intricate, highly sophisticated and secret system of invasion into our private lives. The business and corporate community has been cowed into compliance, and now it is reaping its reward.

The National Security State flourishes under Barack Obama

Working "within the system" to return the United States to a semblance of constitutional norms has hit a brick wall. Our vaunted independent judiciary has been stonewalled into feckless impotency under the mantle of "national security." Even when top NSA and other government officials such as James R. Clapper and Keith Alexander, bedecked in their medals and epaulets, openly, obviously lie under oath to Congressional committees, they walk away with impunity.

Whatever he might have led us to believe, whatever we might have projected onto him, the metastasis of the National Security State flourishes under Barack Obama. It has been observed that, more than all other presidents combined, Obama has used the Espionage Act, put into law during the WWI era to deal with spies, to charge present-day whistleblowers. The harshness of that act, and the secrecy it invokes, effectively allow no defense on any grounds.

Spying on Americans is not entirely new: Radicals of all stripes have known this for generations. What is new is that after 9/11 the spying applies to everyone, and not just in the U.S. but all over the world. At first we were led to believe that only people in regular contact with foreigners, especially in Islamic countries, were of government concern. That was the cover.

We know now that every phone call is recorded, all our computer data can be mined, every digital, radio, audio and analog communication is stored in an NSA data repository of massive "metadata" that paints a very large canvas. With the technological advances of recent years, especially the "linkability" that connects bank cards to credit cards to online accounts to checking accounts to toll road and public transportation passes to airline travel to fingerprints, the metadata collectors can establish with almost immaculate precision where you were, how you traveled, what you purchased, whom you talked to, whom you met, whom you emailed, what internet sites you visited, what bank deposits you made, what movies you rented, what library books you borrowed, what organizations you contribute to.

We now basically have martial law for the Internet. We have no effective checks and balances, no controls, no limits, no warrants, no oversight. It's all permitted, and it's all secret. "This is not science fiction: It's happening right now," Snowden says. "Things are going dark."

Snowden is in a position to know, with his years of Privileged Access clearance at Booz Allen Hamilton, a $6 billion company under contract with the NSA. Estimates are that 70 percent of the "Deep State" budget is spent on such private contractors whose ties to the federal government are standard practice but kept well out of view. James Clapper, for instance, is a former Booz Allen executive.

A chilling effect on speech and action

Once upon a time, say Edward Snowden and a whole new cohort of Internet theorists, the internet was a platform for individuals to revel in the free exchange of ideas. Now, the awareness that all can be known to the government - and more and more to corporations that want to sell us ideas and things - is acting as a deterrent to freedom, a chilling effect on speech and action. Sadly, out of fear of the next terrorist attack, many Americans are willing to surrender their privacy and personal liberty, saying, "I've got nothing to hide, so I don't mind if the government knows everything about me."

If the right of dissent, as one of the hallmarks of a free society, is so compromised, how shall concerned citizens react?

After two earlier documentary films, My Country, My Country on Iraq, and The Oath on Guantánamo, Citizenfour is the third in Laura Poitras's trilogy on post-9/11 America. Under conditions of extreme internet security, using code names and encryption, Edward Snowden contacted her, and through her Glenn Greenwald, to share the mountain of secret NSA documents he had access to, and to set up a meeting. Act I of the film surveys the scope of the spying crisis, and shows how it came to be that the three of them, along with Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian, spent eight days talking and filming in a Hong Kong hotel room. That is Act II.

We get to know Edward Snowden rather well in 114 minutes. A boyish age 29 at the time of filming, with a sonorous baritone voice, he is a focused thinker, one could say a scholar-philosopher of the Internet Age, who speaks knowledgeably, clearly and precisely. He is thoughtful and kind, reflecting on the pain of exile and the loss of intimacy with family and loved ones. He doesn't even seem to have much concern for what will happen to him personally, as he lives from day to day with a terrifying uncertainty of the future that few of us could tolerate.

At the same time he is - appropriately enough for the issues we are dealing with - a private man who doesn't at all want this story to be about him. The media have put a wrongheaded focus on who reveals the excessive exercise of state power rather than who authorizes such illegality. He may well have had the Gary Webb story in mind. He wants the focus to remain always on the NSA and the vast gulf it has created between state power and the citizenry, between the elected and the electorate, which defines the time we live in.

Snowden's coming forward goes much farther than meekly "speaking truth to power," bearing witness to evil under perilous conditions. He is engaging in the direct action of whistleblowing, no matter the cost to himself, for the sake of higher ideals of intellectual freedom, justice in government, and privacy rights. He encourages others to speak out too. (As the satirical poster says, "If you see something, say something. Unless you're Chelsea Manning.") One of the final scenes in the film contains the revelation of a second whistleblower.

His attitude is (paraphrasing), "Here I am. I'm not afraid of you. You can't bully me. I'm not going to skulk in the shadows. Even if you nail me to the cross, others will take my place." He talks about the balance of power between the government and the people, and when that might start to shift back. He feels that the more public he and the journalists are, successively revealing truths about the NSA in story after story, the more protection they have in the public light. If the attention of the world is on these out-of-control government abuses, and the global demand for change grows exponentially, they will personally become less subject to U.S. prosecution. For a recent update on Edward Snowden today, click here.

Going public

It is easy to agree with one of Snowden's lawyers who states that the motivation for the State to pursue his client is 95 percent political and only 5 percent legal. After all, there is not a single example of harm coming to anyone as a result of either the Chelsea Manning or Snowden leaks.

Act III of the film is, of course, going public with the story through articles by Glenn Greenwald in the London Guardian and Laura Poitras in the Washington Post, and the worldwide support they garnered. And we experience Snowden's widely reported odyssey to his extended amnesty in Moscow where, passportless, he reconstructs his life. He continues to assist researchers and journalists in exposing various parts of the vast digital archive of secret documents that he liberated from the NSA's dark cellars.

The great irony not just of the film but of this new Golden Age of Spying, is that all the information our government is collecting does not lead to greater national security. Do we really have a clue what to do about ISIS? Are we properly assessing the global effect of our massive extrajudicial drone activity, the targeted and not-so-targeted assassinations? Do we have any idea how our up to now unqualified support for the Israeli settlement project has made the U.S. the world's bogeyman? Do we know or even care into whose hands our guns, missiles and tanks fall? Have we taken any pains whatsoever to update our image in Latin America, supporting coups here and there, and continuing with our dismal approach toward Cuba?

Have we taken stock of the global resentment toward our corporate government's constant pushing of the fossil fuel economy and ubiquitous GMOs? We could go on. All the metadata in the world cannot save us from a corrupt politics. There are arguably more people in the world who hate the U.S. now than ever before.

Metadata collection was ultimately welcomed by the American corporate class as good for business. But now that it has become a worldwide scandal that the U.S. has not been able to bring to heel, not only our country but business itself has lost credibility. Who now trusts Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and all the other platforms, which have pretty much without exception caved in to federal demands to turn over their operating systems to the NSA?

As evidence emerges that the NSA has hacked into German PM Angela Merkel's and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's private cell phones, they are outraged. Scenes of Citizenfour shot in Rio, Brasília, Hong Kong, Moscow, Berlin, and Brussels show us that most of the world takes great offense to our actions. In fact, most of our spying has not been to protect the homeland anyway. Rather, such blatant intrusion is designed to gain corporate, business, economic and political competitive advantage for the U.S. And if the U.S. is setting an international precedent for systematic secret trespass into private communication, why can that model not be copied by other nations, which likely it already has been?

Respect for government plummets, confidence in business melts, international standing vanishes. The United States looks more and more like a dying empire, internally unable to provide for its own people, and thrashing about in its last sunburst of state power before losing the global sense of legitimacy upon which it all rests. Although many elements of the National Security State were already in place long before 9/11, these are the effects of George W. Bush's overreaching response to it. Which, by the way, he could have prevented in the first place had he not recklessly ignored the listening systems we had at the time and responded to the strong predictions made in the months and weeks before 9/11 that terrorists were planning an air attack.

According to a discussion on the website tomdispatch.com, the executive branch did an investigation to see if any terrorist plots were intercepted by indiscriminate collection of metadata, and no evidence was found of any plots being discovered or averted, despite initial self-serving claims of 54 plots having been stopped.

If it is the nature of dictatorships to acquire information about their citizens, and to use it against them, what does that make the U.S. at this point?

The NSA and the National Security State have committed possibly irreparable damage to democracy itself, which depends on free speech and liberty of thought. Now citizens - and people around the world - are policing themselves in what they say, what they write, even making jokes about everyone being watched and listened in on. People have become cautious and circumspect. How do we carry on open, untrammeled discussion of anything of substance if it's not protected speech, if it makes us vulnerable years from now when some enforcement agency might believe it has a case against us?

Do we all need, starting now, to encrypt every communication we make, to put all our cell phones and electronic devices in the refrigerator when we're meeting, as a group of Snowden's lawyers do? Considering the ability of the NSA to guess 1 trillion passwords per second, Snowden asserts that not even the most skilled encryption technicians are a match for such technological power.

The new whistleblowers of the future?

The credits for Citizenfour indicate support from German film funds, Sundance, the Rockefeller and MacArthur foundations, and other significant pillars of civilization and culture. Clearly a sector of the corporate and intellectual élite is beginning to peel off its loyalty to the security state as being antithetical to their interests in any democracy as we know it.

The film includes scenes of experts in data analysis who have turned against government and corporate malfeasance giving talks to large audiences of young techies and activists, some or even many of whom may become the new whistleblowers of the future if the State does not change course.

So, should we be afraid, very afraid? Do we shut down all communication with the world? Do we disengage from society, go off the grid if we care to maintain any remnant of the privacy we thought we had? How would we ever acquire the skills and resources to lead such a life of airtight encryption to foil the snoopers?

Snowden is clearly telling us: No, be bold and fight back with everything you've got, your very lives and treasure if it comes to that. Fittingly, Laura Poitras, who directed, filmed, and produced Citizenfour, dedicates it "to those who make great sacrifices to expose injustice."

In the end, any viewer will have to ask, "What do I do now, knowing what I know?" The implication for organizers and activists, for the human race and for all creation, can only be to create a movement of resistance to the totalitarian state - and we would say to capitalism itself - so large, so wide, so deep, so public and open, and so embedded in every profession and public agency, that no amount of spying, infiltration and dirty tricks can stop it.

Over the last few years a number of issues have emerged of which it could be said, as Naomi Klein has recently about global warming, "This changes everything." The overweening influence of corporate money and campaign donations in the most powerful nation on Earth is clearly another of those issues. The existential questions about democracy raised in Poitras's new film comprise another. They are all connected, of course. How to pull together the grand coalition, the great unifying consensus, not just nationally but internationally, to bring about a new way of being on this planet, is the challenge of our time.

That is indeed the answer to this film's question: What is a citizen for?

Inside Syria: New book sheds needed light

Fri, 07 Nov 2014 11:14:00 +0000

Reese Erlich's informative and insightful book "Inside Syria" brings to mind the Greek myth of a vast maze under the palace at Knossos, with one exception: King Minos' labyrinth on Crete concealed a single Minotaur; Syria is teeming with the beasts.

Erlich has spent almost three decades reporting from the Middle East, and he brings his considerable knowledge of the region into this analysis of the Syrian civil war. A winner of the Peabody Award and the Society of Professional Journalists explanatory journalism award for "Inside the Syrian Revolution," Erlich combines on-the-ground reporting with an encyclopedic background in the region's history. It is a combination that is particularly useful for a subject as complex and nuanced as the current war, one that has gradually drawn Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, Iran, and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, along with the U.S., France and Britain.

The mainstream media generally considers history an afterthought, which explains why it does such an awful job reporting on the Middle East. Journalists like Erlich, Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn understand that the history of the region and current events are one and the same, a sort of paraphrase of William Faulkner's observation that history is as much the present as the past.

While understanding the historical context of a story is a pretty good rule of thumb for producing competent journalism in general, that is particularly so in the Middle East, precisely because many people think they know about that past. Didn't they see "Lawrence of Arabia"? Read "Exodus"? Or-God help them-read the mainstream press or watch television news?

The book begins with the initial revolt-"The Uprising That Wasn't Supposed to Be"-and then backs into broader historical context, including a chapter on T.E. Lawrence (if this particular period is of interest to readers, they also might consider picking up Scott Anderson excellent book, "Lawrence In Arabia"). How Syria was created, and the imperial machinations of her architects, Britain and France, is essential to understanding not only the internal dynamics of the country, but its place in the region. The current hostility between Turkey and Syria has roots that reach back almost a century. If you want to understand Lebanon-a key player in the Syrian civil war-knowing how it was created and the strategies of ethnic division that France employed to maintain its colonial grip on this small but strategically placed country is essential.

The book covers Syrian history without bogging the reader down. This is, after all, a report on the on-going civil war. But Erlich does not glide over the important details, including how the U.S. camel first put its nose under the tent. Two chapters cover the period just after World War I, the impact of World War II, and the appearance of the Assads in 1970.

Erlich maintains that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's economic "reforms" helped impel the current uprising. Adopting neoliberal policies, Assad sold off state-owned enterprises-generally to regime allies and insiders-and opened the economy to outside competition. The result-aided by a long-running drought-was growing impoverishment and lots of unemployed youth. Joblessness and economic crisis is a volatile mix and needs only an "incident" to set it off. That happened in March 2011 in the southern city of Daraa, when Syrian security forces brutally attacked peaceful demonstrators.

After laying the historical groundwork for his reporting, Erlich follows with a detailed chapter on the 2011 uprising.

While Erlich has a clear point of view-he detests dictatorship and neo-colonialism in equal measure-he is a careful and thorough reporter. His discussion of the use of chemical weapons is a case in point. Erlich carefully unpacks the evidence that the Assad regime used Sarin gas and finds that some of it has been exaggerated or even possibly fabricated. Which doesn't mean the Damascus regime is innocent. His discussion weighs the charges on all sides and concludes that we really don't know. What we do know is that U.S. intelligence didn't think the evidence against Assad was a slam-dunk, a fact that the Obama administration deliberately obscured. It is a fascinating treatment of the subject-there were several incidents involving the use of chemical weapons, not just the most horrendous at Al-Ghouta that killed several hundred people-and a good example of Erlich's diligence as a reporter.

His chapters on "the Uprising begins," and "Who Supports Assad" are a must for anyone trying to figure out who is who in this complex tragedy. Erlich details the various factions, how they interlink and how they differ, and why the U.S. policy of arming "moderate forces" is doomed to failure. These chapters are essential for understanding the internal dynamics of the two sides, which are more like a Rubik Cube than two opposing poles. The book includes an invaluable appendix on the groups involved, as well as a useful timeline of the current uprising.

Syria is part of a much larger picture, and its strategic placement-bordering Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon-means what happens in Damascus doesn't stay in Damascus. Why is Iran backing Assad? Is this all about religion? (Hint: nope). What will this mean for the 30 million or so Kurds trying to form their own country? Do all the Kurds want to form a country, and, if they do, what will moving that particular piece on the Middle East chessboard do? How might this affect the on-going fight by the Palestinians to form their own country?

The Syrian civil war has morphed into a proxy battle with Iran and Russia on one side, and the U.S., Gulf monarchies and some NATO members on the other. While the battle is not over religion per se, religion greases the movement of arms and aid. "To the pious go the guns," writes Erlich, which means that adherence to the reactionary brand of Islam favored by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies is a litmus test for whether you get arms and ammunition. It is not an atmosphere in which the American's favored "moderates" can thrive.

Erlich says the White House recognizes that the "ultra-right wing Islamic groups" like the ISIS, Al-Nusra, and the Islamic Front are growing at the expense of the less extreme or secular groups and at one point considered simply "re-defining" the extremist Islamic Front as "moderate" so it could send aid to that organization.

Because Erlich is one of those old-fashioned journalists who believes that you need to talk to the principals involved, the readers get an opportunity to listen to what Kurds and Palestinians have to say. This combination of street interviews, suite discussions- he beards the U.S. State Department in Foggy Bottom-and historical background makes for a thoroughly engaging read. While he generally keeps his distance, Erlich injects himself when needed, or when he wants the reader to know that this is his opinion, not God's. He also has a sense of humor. There is a wonderful moment when he gets off a bus in Gaza to be met by Hamas officials.

His final chapter-"U.S., Russia, and outside powers"-discusses the international dimensions of the civil war-virtually anything major that happens in the Middle East, with its enormous oil and gas reserves, has an international dimension-and what ought, and ought not, be done, to solve it.

The Obama administration is slipping into a quagmire that some have even compared to Vietnam. That analogy is probably flawed, but it should still gives us pause-for one, Vietnam demonstrated that air wars don't work unless you have reliable allies on the ground. Once again, the U.S. is at war. Once again, the U.S. is ignoring international law and choosing to use military force over diplomacy. Once again there is a logic at work here that leads to yet another dark tunnel of escalation.

In 1966 journalist Robert Scheer wrote a small book, "How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam," that undercut the popular narrative about Communist aggression and toppling dominos. The book shattered the official paradigm and gave the infant anti-war movement ammunition for its confrontation with the administration of Lyndon Johnson. Erlich's "Inside Syria" has similar heft and should be widely read, because we are once again at war without the slightest idea of where it leads or what its ultimate goals are.

"Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect"

Reese Erlich, with forward by Noam Chomsky

Prometheus Press, New York 2014

Photo: Prometheus Books official site

New directions for LA opera: "Dido and Aeneas/Bluebeard’s Castle"

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 11:51:00 +0000

LA Opera's edgy double feature takes this august art form in other directions and shows the possibilities of different modes of expression for the operatic medium. Both one-act works are directed by Australian Barrie Kosky of the Komische Oper, a world-renowned company located in what was East Germany's East Berlin. Neither of the current works onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is being produced in the mode of tried and true traditional operas - you'll see no warbling Brünnhilde in metallic breastplates.

Indeed, there is even a bare-breasted performer in Dido and Aeneas, which is first up on stage. Dido and Aeneas is a tragic romance (although performed here with lots of humor) derived from Virgil's ancient Latin epic poem The Aeneid, written shortly before the birth of Jesus. According to Greco-Roman mythology, Dido (Irish mezzo-soprano Paula Murrihy) was the queen of Carthage (in present-day Tunisia), while Aeneas (Pennsylvania baritone Liam Bonner) was a Trojan prince who, after his romantic sojourn with Dido, proceeded on to help found Rome. British baroque master Henry Purcell composed Dido and Aeneas with a libretto in English by Nahum Tate, first presented circa 1689, when Tate was England's Poet Laureate.

The staging of this Greco-Roman legend appears to be so primitive that it is now avant-garde. The sets wrought by German scenery designer Katrina Lea Tag, making her LA Opera début, are minimalist; indeed, Dido's consists largely of a long white bench in front of a wall. Tag's costuming are more reminiscent of 17th-century England than the ancient Mediterranean, except for a male/female couple who are clad only in g-strings, feathery haberdashery and, like classical mimes, painted white.

With much comic panache, a trio of cross-dressing Black witches steal the show. The crowd-pleasing Sorceress John Holiday, First Witch G. Thomas Allen, and Second Witch Darryl Taylor are being ballyhooed as opera's first-time ever threesome of African American countertenors. With their slapstick and vaudevillian flair, this beguiling ménage à trois of transvestites cast a merry spell upon the audience. Even more hilarious is the thought of how old Messrs. Purcell and Tate would have reacted to this scene-stealing silliness injected into what was intended as a tragedy, first performed at a school for éelite young ladies. But they, of course, took liberties with Virgil's Aeneid: All is fair in love, war and opera.

Purcell's chamber orchestra has versatile Elliot Graham Figg tickling the ivories on both an organ and a mellifluous harpsichord. A pair of theorbos - long-necked string instruments from 16th-century Italy that can be glimpsed in the orchestra pit and look like lutes or mandolins on steroids - are plucked with aplomb by Richard Savino and Hideki Yamaya, enhancing the bass. The musicians of the ca. 21-piece LA Opera Orchestra mostly played woodwinds and strings, conducted by Steven Sloane. Grant Gershon directed the LA Opera Chorus. At various points the large cast seems to spill offstage and into the aisles.

As Dido and Aeneas is drawn from Greek and Roman sources, with appropriate intervention by the god Jupiter, there is much musing upon "empire growing." Naturally the founding of Rome, and nothing less than the future fate of Western civilization, imperialism and duty, take precedence over sublime love.

After intermission, 20th-century Hungarian composer Béla Bartók's sole stab at opera, Bluebeard's Castle, is decidedly downbeat and minus any comic relief. The libretto is by Hungarian Jewish leftist Béla Balázs, who also wrote the classic Theory of the Film, Character and Growth of a New Art in the 1940s. It's interesting that a serial wife-killer (here portrayed by British bass-baritone Robert Hayward in his LA Opera debut) also attracted Charlie Chaplin, who used a similar character to lampoon society's real mass murderers - militaristic leaders of genocidal régimes and wars - in his 1947 post-WWII classic film Monsieur Verdoux.

Although there are imaginative special effects in Bluebeard's Castle, which premiered on May 24, 1918, in Budapest during the last months of WWI, it does not come across as a black comedy in this production, which is presented on a tilted circular rotating platform with spare sets by the same creative crew as Dido's. Bluebeard's latest bride, Judith (German mezzo-soprano Claudia Mahnke also making her LA Opera debut), explores her new digs at the castle, where she encounters seven locked doors. Having heard ominous rumors about her husband, the zaftig Judith demands seven keys in order to open each locked portal and allow the sunshine in. As to what happens next, let's just say, beware of what you wish for, because you just might get it. Newlyweds living happily ever after need not apply in this house of horrors with Bartók's nightmarish, sinister music and recurring blood motif.

Whereas Purcell relied upon ancient myths for his inspiration, Bartók partakes of European folklore, with a much smaller cast. Both are sagas about love gone terribly wrong, presented with innovative stagecraft and an experimental sensibility. Viewers might mistakenly believe they are across the street and down the block at REDCAT. But no; with both of these hour-long pieces, LA Opera is taking chances and artistically opening things up, proving once again, as it did a few years ago with its cutting edge Ring, that this opera house can present customary, conventional fare, as well as risk-taking, formally challenging works along with the best of 'em. Leave your metal breastplates at home.

Dido & Aeneas and Bluebeard's Castle are being performed Nov. 6, 12, and 15 at 7:30 pm, and on Nov. 2 and 9 at 2:00 pm at LA Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. For more info: (213) 972-8001; www.laopera.com.

Photo: laopera.org