People Before Profit blog

Today in history: Mark Twain, antiwar polemicist, is born in 1835

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 16:52:00 +0000

On November 30, 1835, Samuel Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri. He would later adopt the name Mark Twain and become one of America's most popular writers. He was also an active voice in the anti-imperialist movement around the turn of the 20^th century, as the U.S. embarked on building a far-flung global sphere of influence modeled in part after the Old World empires.

On April 25, 1898 the U.S. declared war on Spain following the sinking of the Battleship Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898. As a result Spain lost its control over the remains of its overseas empire -- Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines Islands, Guam, and other islands.

In 1904, Twain wrote:

The War Prayer

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and sputtering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spreads of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpouring of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.

It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came - next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their faces alight with material dreams-visions of a stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! - then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation - "God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest, Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!"

Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory.

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there, waiting.

With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside - which the startled minister did - and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

"I come from the Throne - bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd and grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import - that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of - except he pause and think.

"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two - one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this - keep it in mind. If you beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer - the uttered part of it. I am commissioned by God to put into words the other part of it - that part which the pastor, and also you in your hearts, fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory - must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle - be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it - for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."

(After a pause)

"Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits."

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

Source: www.antiwar.com

Photo: "Mr. Clemens and his kitten" by Underwood & Underwood - The New York Times photo archive. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

American Grace

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 18:11:00 +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.

Latin Grammy Awards: Don’t vote for racists

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 15:33:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES -- The Latin Grammy Awards held in Las Vegas November 19 started out as a typical music awards show. The televised annual musical awards show featured musical acts from around Mexico, Latin and Central America. Two of the most famous, important, and worldwide accepted musical groups throughout Lain America and the United States came to the Latin Grammy's, making very important political statements.

Los Tigres del Norte, an internationally famous and long time Mexican musical group known for ballads-corridos, once again featured their brand of politically inspired music focusing on immigrants and the U.S. immigrant experience. They had the crowd standing as they performed their song 'Somo Mas Americanos' (We are more American) in an outstanding performance.

Los Tigres del Norte finished the set by walking toward the audience and holding up a large sign that read "Latinos Unidos No Voten for Racistas!!" (United Latinos don't vote for racists). The audience gave Los Tigres a standing ovation.

Mana, another group known throughout Latin America and with a big following in the U.S., received a Grammy for Best Pop/Rock Album. Mana is very popular with a younger generation of Latinos. Mana recently was headlining with Metallica, a popular heavy metal band at the Rock USA festival last year in Las Vegas.

Mana also engaged the audience with a statement that Latinos must vote against racist candidates. Once again the audience gave Mana a standing ovation. Mana joined Los Tigres del Norte in displaying the sign 'Latinos Unidos No Voten for Racistas!' Other statements were made by Grammy participants but none as significant as those made by Mana and Los Tigres.

Mana and Los Tigres had the courage to address two important issues affecting the Latino community. It was clear from the audience response that the issue of racist attacks on the Latino community needed to be addressed. The other issue was the need for some type of push back. This included registering to vote and getting out to vote.

According to a recent study by the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) 25.7 million Latinos became eligible to vote in 2014. This is expected to grow, as 800,000 new Latinos become voting eligible every year.

It was recently announced that a group of well known rock, pop R&B, country and hip-hop entertainers will be holding a TV concert highlighting the importance of tackling racism. The concert was held in Los Angeles and taped. It is called "A concert for Progress on Race in America."

Photo: Los Tigres del Norte and Mana hold up a sign during a performance at the 16th annual Latin Grammy Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Thursday, Nov. 19, 2015, in Las Vegas. Chris Pizzello | Invision | AP

“A Year Without Sundays:” remaking Cuban society through literacy campaign

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 13:45:00 +0000

A modern day activist for social change often dreams of that day when all the hard work of struggle comes to fruition, and the opportunity to make the world anew finally arises. What is the first issue you might identify to set to rights? Equal income? Gender equity? Expanded suffrage?

"Un Año Sin Domingos/A Year Without Sundays: Images from the literacy campaign in Cuba" is a book which examines the record of a country taking on this question, drawing on photos, interviews, and archival material that illustrate the excitement of building a society created by its people.

It was 1961, and a new Cuba looked out on a fresh beginning. With Batista and his cronies out of power, new opportunities opened up to create a democratic society, however Cuba still faced deep-seated issues which could prove to be barriers to participation.

As a consequence of the previous government's deprioritization of education for working-class and rural people, Cuba faced a daunting statistic - 14 percent of the population could not read or write.

As early as 1959, Fidel Castro issued a call to young Cubans asking them to join in helping to eradicate illiteracy. Students as young as 12, drawn largely from the more educated urban population, signed on to train as teachers. This structure, drawing the urban population into more contact with the rural and working class populations, was also meant to help break down the social barriers that were an artifact of the previous regime.

Engaging in eradicating illiteracy to advance the people of Cuba created a sense of solidarity and served as an organizing task that brought thousands of people into contact with the revolution. It channeled the energy of young Cubans who wanted to have a hand in helping to remake society - in all, the teaching force grew to 268,420 teachers.

The teachers (maestras) were organized into brigades, and were trained to teach simple reading and writing, with texts prepared by the campaign. Skills in first aid were also provided, as well as basic instruction from psychologists in working with people with barriers to literacy. Cubans with vision problems that prevented them from reading and writing were even tested by ophthalmologists and given free prescription glasses.

A census drive was also performed to take a count of every single Cuban, to identify people who needed to learn how to read. The young teachers then travelled to serve those people, even in the remotest areas of Cuba. During the day the teachers helped with the everyday chores of the village and at night, taught reading and writing.

Teachers, some never having been more than an hour away from home before, were housed with their students when possible. As part of the experience, teachers lived life along with their students, washing clothes by hand, drinking from rivers, and travelling by horseback.

While Cuba turned energy inward to create a better future, the country was also expending energy on defense against counter-revolutionaries and their foreign allies. Teachers recount how, while carrying out the literacy campaign, they watched as a U.S. Destroyer approached the shores of Playa Girón, which signaled the advent of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Meanwhile, counter-revolutionaries brought threat from within, identifying brigade teachers and taking them out and lynching them. Despite this, the campaign pressed on, each region which eradicated illiteracy would report to the project and a national announcement would celebrate each milestone.

Before the literacy campaign, 14 percent of Cuba was illiterate, which totaled 979,207 people. At the end of the year without Sundays, illiteracy had been reduced to 3.9 percent of the population.

The book "Un Año Sin Domingos/A Year Without Sundays" consists of essays, paired with texts (all bilingual Spanish/English) taken from interviews from Catharine Murphy's documentary film on the literacy campaign "Maestra." It is richly illustrated with photos and posters that echo the tone of the New Deal's Works Project Administration in documenting the rebuilding of Cuba.

A Year without Sundays: Images from the Literacy Campaign in Cuba / Un Año sin Domingos: La Imagen de la Alfabetizacion en Cuba

By Catharine Murphy & Carlos Torres Cairo

Ediciones Aurelia and The Literacy Project, 2014

132 pages and DVD

"The Green Inferno" is new low in racist film making

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 11:06:00 +0000

I thought that new lows in extreme, flagrantly racist portrayals of the Indigenous peoples of North and South America were an anachronism - a step back in time which no filmmaker would again dare traverse. How wrong can one be?

Filmmaker Eli Roth, who specializes in the horror genre, has no problem time traveling in the wrong direction. His latest offering, or in this case, cinematic atrocity, made its debut with "The Green Inferno." After viewing it (parts of which left me momentarily speechless) I gathered my wits to write a review.

The story is about a group of well-meaning, idealistic college students who are enticed by a campus activist intent on pulling a public relations expose to aid an Indigenous Brazilian tribe whose lands are being invaded by money-hungry logging developers. To make this part of the long story short: Most of the students end up being eaten by those they sought to assist.

The Indian people are reduced to such a level of beastly subhumanness that I found myself actually, unconsciously mentally rooting, at some points, for the developers to wax victorious.

At the end of this movie experience, nobility passes to a young white woman, who stops the slaughter of the Natives with a cell phone camera, photographing the carnage, and later expounds about how well she was treated by the Indigenous hosts who devoured her fellow activists.

All that was missing from this walk back in cinematic time was a resurrection of Johnny Weismuller from the grave to swing through the trees playing Tarzan. Just replacing the mythical hungry-for-human-flesh Indians with the Indigenous of Africa would have added the final touch.

How many otherwise well-meaning white people and others will believe that many Amazon peoples are not actually cannibal, especially those that are classified as "uncontacted." According to Brazilian government sources there are over 67 tribes in the Amazon that are listed as "uncontacted." This is a bit of a misimpression because many of the tribes considered "uncontacted" are in fact descended from Native peoples who retreated, centuries ago, into the fastness of the Amazon region in the face of the European invasion in the so-called "Age of Discovery."

Many of the Indigenous peoples living in the Amazon originally lived on the Atlantic Coast. Others of the "uncontacted" are descendants of the survivors of 20th century assaults by loggers and the rubber boom and have made a conscious decision to have no further contact. They are exercising their right to self-determination.

There is a lingering stereotyped impression some have of the Amazon peoples. When I mentioned recently to a white friend of long standing that I had been invited by an environmental land rights organization, to meet with the Indigenous peoples to write a story, his first comment was that I might end up with a "shrunken head." This type of film only reinforces such concepts.

Eli Roth wanted to make a horror film. The true horror that is ongoing is the hideous, abominable genocide that has been perpetrated against the Native people of Brazil, from the 16th through the 21st centuries.

A few examples will suffice to show that the genocidal crimes against humanity committed in 19th century California against Native people, as I wrote in an earlier column, were still being committed against Indian people in the 20th century in Brazil .

The Figueiredo report of 1967 detailed shocking atrocities committed against Brazilian Indians in the 1940s, '50s and '60'. This study resurfaced recently - 45 years after it was supposedly destroyed in a fire.

One of the accounts cited in the report describes the 1963 "massacre at the 11th parallel," where dynamite was thrown from a plane onto a village of Cinta Larga Indians. Only two survived.

Other atrocities included the poisoning of hundreds of Indigenous with sugar laced with arsenic. Severe methods of torture were also used such as slowly crushing the victims' ankles with an instrument known as the "trunk."

The 7,000-page document details mass murder, torture, sexual abuse, enslavement and bacteriological warfare conducted against Brazil's Native peoples. Many were completely wiped out during this era of the 20th century.

This is what mammon-mad capitalism has meant to Native people throughout the length and breadth of the Western Hemisphere - genocide, suicide, bestial torture, sadistic institutionalized murder, lives of unremitting misery with the grim, gory specter of utter annihilation always looming on the horizon.

There is one image of Brazil, from the 1970s, that is forever seared into my memory. This was from the Native newspaper, Akwesasne Notes. It was of a mostly nude, Brazilian Indian woman hanging upside down by her feet. The caption said that her baby had its head shot off and that her captors killed her by cutting her in half with a machete.

To further indicate the attitude of some racist Brazilians toward Indigenous people I must relate an account, from the 1990s, of a good friend of mine, an internationally known American Indian poet. She was flying back to the U.S. from Brazil and sitting behind her were a group of American and Brazilian businessmen. They were discussing hunting. She overheard one of the Brazilians remark, "Brazil is one the few countries where you can still hunt Indians." This is the true horror that exists in Brazil.

Another bone I have to pick with this hideous film is in reference to the only Black character, an African American student, in the university group. He is the first member of the sortie to be killed and eaten. His demise is the most grotesque of any of the students. I could not help but note that going back to the early days of America cinema, the African American was always the first to "bite the dust." Needless to say this is indicative of the hold of racism on the film industry even to this present day.

Sadly, Roth took the low, ultra-racist road in the cinema. We in the Native community want to see this monstrosity consigned to the junk heap of film history never again to raise its racist head.

Photo: AP

New book celebrates the centennial of jazz great Billy Strayhorn

Fri, 20 Nov 2015 10:42:00 +0000

Billy Strayhorn's name remains forever linked to bandleader Duke Ellington and His Orchestra. The African-American composer, arranger, lyricist, and pianist thrived creatively after joining Ellington in 1939. Born in Dayton, Ohio, and raised in Pittsburgh, Strayhorn was one of America's most talented composers, but often overshadowed by the presence of Ellington. The two legendary talents combined efforts to create some of the most popular Big Band classics of all time, including "Take the 'A' Train" and "Satin Doll."

Though immensely admired among fellow musicians, the public rarely contemplated his individuality beyond Ellington's band. It's true he attained success during his 28-year collaboration with Ellington, but there was much more to this artist. An aura of determination graced Strayhorn's life. His story is featured in a new oversized volume that has been released in conjunction with the centennial of his birth.

"Strayhorn: An Illustrated Life" is a treasure of essays, interviews, sheet music, and photography showcasing his life and career. Strayhorn managed to rise above each of his personal challenges. The book describes Pittsburgh as not the harshest environment for an African-American youth, but there remained prejudice to confront. The fact that Billy Strayhorn was also a young gay man coming of age in the 1930s underlines the hurdles he encountered overcoming social bias. His uncompromisingly sophisticated talent began in his teen years. Jazz musicologist Walter van de Leur comments in his liner notes, "That a youngster from one of Pittsburgh's poorest and most depressing neighborhoods came up with 'Lush Life,' one of jazz's most beloved ballads, is baffling."

Billy Strayhorn's life changed on December 1, 1938 at the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh where Duke Ellington was performing. A local friend set up a meeting between the two and an impressed Ellington hired Strayhorn into his band. Strayhorn moved to New York City and spent the next three decades composing for Ellington and touring the world. The young man with humble beginnings was now on top of the world, but never let it change his compassion. There are numerous testimonies from friends, family, and fellow musicians of his endless generosity.

"Strayhorn: An Illustrated Life" is a collaborative effort produced by Billy Strayhorn Songs, Inc. (BSSI). This is a family-based organization that attempts to preserve and perpetuate the legacy of one of America's finest composers. In 1967 upon the death of Mr. Strayhorn, his nephew, Gregory A. Morris, became executor of his estate. In the following years many previously unreleased works by Strayhorn have been shared with the public through Morris and BSSI. The book begins with a proper introduction by jazz legend Ramsey Lewis. It is then divided into two sections. Part One is titled "Musical Orbits."

This section, written by Strayhorn's niece A. Alyce Claerbaut, reflects on his artistic success and his dedication to family and friends along the way. Singer Lena Horne was one of his closest companions and the two became soulmates. We also learn of Strayhorn's personal relationships, including time spent with partners African-American musician Aaron Bridgers, and later Bill Grove.

"Moral Freedoms," the second half of the book, is written by Bruce Mayhall Rastrelli. This section explains how Billy Strayhorn remained true to his ideals not only musically, but culturally and socially. Readers will discover that civil rights were as much a part of Strayhorn as his composing. Mr. Strayhorn was open about his sexuality, which was decidedly uncommon in that era. Mercedes Ellington (Duke's granddaughter) states, "It was very dangerous then to be a homosexual - male or female." Music publisher Herb Jordan adds, "If you dealt with Billy Strayhorn you had to accept him as he was or not at all, and that again was revolutionary for that period."

Billy Strayhorn was a dedicated contributor to the cause of freedom and became a poster idol for the NAACP voter registration campaigns in the 1940s. Strayhorn also formed a strong relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Musically, he collaborated with Duke Ellington for a series of civil rights shows, including "My People," a stage show presented in Chicago as part of the Century of Negro Progress Exposition in 1963. On June 7, 1963, Billy Strayhorn accompanied Lena Horne in a concert in Jackson, Miss., in support of civil rights. While traveling South, they stopped in Atlanta to meet with Julian Bond and make a donation to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

"Strayhorn: An Illustrated Life" is a welcome addition for anyone interested in jazz, civil rights, or photography. It is edited by A. Alyce Claerbaut and David Schlesinger. Strayhorn's biographer David Hajdu and filmmaker Robert Levi contribute interviews and insights from his fellow musicians. Billy Strayhorn was born November 29, 1915: This book is a fine tribute in his centenary year. In Strayhorn's own words, "Ever up and onward!"

"Strayhorn: An Illustrated Life"

Publisher: Agate Bolden

Available in Hardcover and Kindle editions

Dalton Trumbo, the “Spartacus” screenwriter who broke the blacklist

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 16:00:00 +0000

Dalton Trumbo, the jailed Hollywood Ten screenwriter who broke the Hollywood Blacklist, is making a comeback. He's depicted by "Breaking Bad's" Emmy and Golden Globe winner Bryan Cranston in the superb biopic Trumbo censorship message remains relevant, considering current efforts by police and rightwing media to intimidate and boycott director Quentin Tarantino after his criticism of police brutality at a Rise Up October rally in New York.

I saw Trumbo at a Film Independent Forum screening in the Directors Guild of America's Sunset Blvd. theater. It's the latest feature about the Hollywood Blacklist and McCarthy era, when Tinseltown talents and others were subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about "subversion" onscreen and off. If witnesses were "unfriendly" and refused to "cooperate" by informing on their own political activities and those of others, they were banned from the motion picture industry. In the case of 1947's Hollywood Ten, Trumbo and other leftists were fined for contempt of Congress and imprisoned.

HUAC/McCarthyism movies include Charlie Chaplin's 1957 A King in New York, 1973's The Way We Were with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, 1976's The Front with Woody Allen, 1991's Guilty by Suspicion with Robert De Niro, 2000's One of the Hollywood Ten, 2001's The Majestic with Jim Carrey, and George Clooney's 2005 Good Night, and Good Luck.

Well directed by Jay Roach, Trumbo is arguably the best of the bunch. In addition to Cranston, it boasts a stellar cast: Helen Mirren portrays gossip columnist/witch-hunter Hedda Hopper, comic Louis C.K. plays another blacklisted scribe, Diane Lane is wife Cleo Trumbo, Elle Fanning is daughter Nikola Trumbo, John Goodman is producer Frank King, Michael Stuhlbarg is Edward G. Robinson, and David James Elliott is Cold Warrior John Wayne (who actually starred in this genre's first HUAC/McCarthyism feature, 1952's reds-under-the-beds Big Jim McLain).

After the Film Independent Forum screening, on the DGA stage, Jay Roach - who'd helmed HBO's 2012 Game Change with Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin and 2008's Gore vs. Bush Re count - said Trumbo "was theatrical. He cared about communicating ideas.... He was a humanist and earthy person; although wealthy, he was committed to social justice.... He showed the Blacklist's absurdity by writing - using his superpower," secretly winning two Oscars, including for 1953's Roman Holiday - although he didn't receive screen credit until, as Trumbo dramatizes, Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger bravely used his name on 1960's Spartacus and Exodus, thus ending the Blacklist.

Roach criticized HUAC for investigating "Hollywood for sending secret codes through films...to hypnotize Americans through movies." Despite years of Congressional hearings and millions of taxpayer dollars, HUAC "couldn't prove [Hollywood was] subversive." Roach compared HUAC to the House Select Committee that grilled Hillary Clinton shortly before Trumbo's premiere, quipping it gave the movie a PR bonanza and "a Benghazi bump."

There were several Trumbo scenes that troubled me, in particular those depicting the impact the period's repression had on the screenwriter's son, the late Christopher Trumbo (portrayed as a boy by Toby Nichols and a teenager by Mattie Liptak), who wrote the 2003 off-Broadway play Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted, the basis of 2007's documentary Trumbo, and who co-wrote with historian Larry Ceplair 2015's Dalton Trumbo, Blacklisted Hollywood Radical (University Press of Kentucky).

These sequences especially disturbed me because I knew Christopher. We became acquainted through my writing about the Hollywood inquisition, a subject interesting to me because I was named after legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, due to his televised exposés of Joe McCarthy. My first major Blacklist piece was published in "The Finger" column of New Times L.A. and I devoted part of my 2005 book Progressive Hollywood, A People's Film History of the United States (Disinformation Company) to the topic. More recently, I initiated the special 46-page Blacklist section of the Sept./Oct. 2015 issue of the Writers Guild of America's Written By magazine (Trumbo edited its precursor), which contains two of my articles and a cover story about Trumbo and its screenwriter John McNamara by Louise Farr.

In Trumbo's stirring conclusion, Cranston poignantly delivers the magnanimous 1970 speech the vindicated Trumbo made upon receiving the Writers Guild's prestigious lifetime achievement Laurel Award: "[T]he Blacklist was a time of evil.... When you...look back with curiosity on that dark time, as I think occasionally you should, it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims."

In 2004, Christopher was talking with ex-Screen Actors Guild President Ed Asner (who knows a thing or two about paying career consequences for political convictions) in the lobby of the Guild's Beverly Hills theater at the memorial service for Bobby Lees, blacklisted screenwriter of 1948's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I told Christopher: "I disagreed with your father. When Dalton said the Blacklist had no 'villains or heroes' he was wrong. All your father had to do was name names and inform on others and he could have kept on working in Hollywood" as, reputedly, moviedom's highest paid screenwriter.

"But instead, your father stuck to his principles," I added. "For doing that, Dalton and all of the others who refused to be informers were true heroes."

Christopher looked at me: "It's okay to disagree with my dad. Lots of people did," he replied, smiling wryly.

Trumbo http://www.bleeckerstreetmedia.com/trumbo

Director: Jay Roach

Writers: John McNamara, Bruce Cook (book)

Stars: Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Helen Mirren

124 min. Rated R

Photo: Trumbo, Facebook

Rampling and Courtenay: The past preserved haunts the present in “45 Years”

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 15:00:00 +0000

Writer/director Andrew Haigh's 45 Years is a profoundly stirring movie about a longtime married couple poignantly portrayed by two cinema greats, the British thespians Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling. As they prepare to celebrate their 45^th wedding anniversary a completely unexpected blast from the past upends their tidy marital world. Within the film's first few minutes Geoff Mercer (Courtenay) is notified that the remains of his onetime lover, Katya - who died in a Swiss mountaineering tragedy - have been found and that she is perfectly preserved.

This proceeds to totally unsettle Geoff, and his marriage to Kate Mercer (Rampling) threatens to unravel. Long buried (literally and figuratively) feelings surface and it turns out that the old married couple may not have been as honest with one another as they had pretended to be for almost half a century. The present is haunted by the past, and Geoff muses that while he now looks like a man in his seventies, his long lost love, frozen in ice, still looks like she did when she vanished in the Alps in 1962.

This is a significant year, as 1962 is when Courtenay made his feature film debut in Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, written by Allan Sillitoe - a pivotal film that epitomized the "kitchen sink" drama of postwar British cinema featuring "angry young men." Courtenay went on to play another one of these proletarian rebels rubbing up against the English class system in John Schlesinger's 1963 Billy Liar and a Russian revolutionary in 1965's Doctor Zhivago, for which he was Oscar-nominated.

45 Years is a rumination on aging, a meditation on the meaning of life. Interestingly, as Geoff remembers his younger days he develops a resurgent interest in sex - and the leftwing politics of his youth. After a reunion of his factory mates, Geoff is disgusted that the son of a former militant, "Red Len" (a Lenin reference?), has become - of all things! - a banker! Shudders! How shameful, comrades!

Rampling - who played a Holocaust in 1974's sadomasochistic The Night Porter - is likewise superb as a wife confronting a life lived if not with lies, then with grievous omissions. It turns out that both suffered deep losses of loved ones the year Geoff and Kate met, which could help explain why they wed when they did.

It's great that in this day and age of youth-oriented movies that these two veteran actors can play lead roles on the big screen. And instead of the special effects-laden, explosion-laced big budget extravaganzas, it's rewarding that here's a movie where the characters' biggest challenge is whether or not they'll be able to make it to their 45^th wedding anniversary party - and if their marriage will survive. Will it? That's a matter of subjective interpretation best left to viewers.

While younger viewers may find 45 Years to be dull and uneventful, more mature theatergoers are likely to find it a riveting, truthful, even transcendental experience ripped, if not from the proverbial headlines, from real life and transposed to reel life. Both Courtenay and Rampling won 2015 Berlin International Film Festival Silver Bear prizes for their 45 Years performances - and let's hope that Oscar remembers these iconic cinematic stalwarts, still spinning their spells on us from the silver screen.

"45 Years"

Director: Andrew Haigh

Writers: David Constantine (short story), Andrew Haigh (adaptation)

Stars: Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay, Geraldine James

Photo: Movie still, 45 Years Facebook

Leith: weaponized Aryans on film in North Dakota

Mon, 16 Nov 2015 15:19:00 +0000

Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker's Welcome to Leith is an 86-minute documentary about contemporary neo-Nazis who insinuate and infiltrate their way into a tiny jurisdiction in North Dakota. They begin to do so when a man - who turns out to be a notorious white supremacist - starts buying up property in little Leith. In doing so they threaten to turn Leith into a "village of the damned" where the township's jurisdiction would be under the control of the fascists next door.

Even though there's only one African American living in Leith (and apparently no Jews), this pits the hardcore reactionaries against the diminutive population of ordinary townsfolk and their allies. Demonstrations erupt, with outside "agitators" from the right and the left, along with court battles amidst anxieties about the gun-toting, hostile pro-Hitlerites with their swastika flags. The heroic Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been tracking these and other hate groups, is an important factor and makes the point that after 9/11, the U.S. government stopped keeping tabs on them.

Shortly after Halloween the Los Angeles Times said Welcome to Leith "may be this year's scariest movie." This is actually a very clever, well put, pithy point. Onscreen, the racists make their case by calling for a separate white nation from other ethnicities. However, historically white supremacists have generally claimed that Caucasians are genetically superior to other races, nationalities, etc. Given this documentary's pathetic "exemplars" of white womanhood and manhood, Leith's Aryan adult subjects are so hideous to behold and cretinous that they debunk their own arguments in favor of racial superiority.

And as for racial "purity," in what may be the film's best moment, the focal individual in the film appears on a TV talk show hosted by a Black woman. He has taken a challenge for an ancestral test, and it turns out that according to his DNA profile that he is 14% sub-Saharan African in his ethnicity. Exposed as part Black, the Black TV hostess slyly attempts to fist bump her embarrassed "brother."

Leith's white supremacists very shrewdly insist on their civil liberties - even if their uncivil behavior has the end goal of taking everybody else's rights away. In the meanwhile, Welcome to Leith delivers plenty of food for thought.

Welcome to Leith is opening at theaters across the U.S. and Canada throughout the rest of the year.

The trailer for the film can be viewed here.

Welcome to Leith

Written and directed by: Michael Beach Nichols, Christopher K. Walker

Photo: Kynan Dutton, Craig Cobb and Deb Henderson patrol their neighborhood in Leith, N.D. as seen in Welcome to Leith, a feature documentary by Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker. Photo by Gregory Bruce.

“Mediterranea": Europe’s embattled migrants on film

Fri, 13 Nov 2015 09:17:00 +0000

Jonas Carpignano's Mediterranea is a powerful look at the plight of mostly undocumented migrants from Africa to Europe. This feature follows Burkina Faso native Ayiva Seihon (Koudous Seihon) and a group of other African migrants from French- and English-speaking sub-Saharan nations as they embark on the long, grueling trek to Europe from Algeria and then Libya. The unsparing fiction film shows that along the way this ragtag group must confront the harsh elements in the desert; bandits; rip-off coyotes; and a storm at sea, as they set sail for Europe.

Instead of finding a "promised land" upon their arrival in Italy, the Africans must somehow make their way in a mostly unwelcoming world. Minus working papers, they must find work, which is difficult, hard labor, including, like the California-bound Oklahomans the Joads in John Steinbeck's Depression-era classic The Grapes of Wrath, as fruit pickers. The newcomers live in Hooverville-type shantytowns and must deal with hostile Italian mobs, as well as the police. (By the way, Steinbeck's other novel about class struggle in the fields, featuring a Communist-led strike, In Dubious Battle, has been adapted for the screen by actor/director James Franco and will be released in 2016.)

Mediterranea'smost powerful scene is a riot, where after two of them have been shot and killed the Africans rampage through the Italian town they've been subsisting in, burning cars and looting. Their harrowing slogan is, alas, all too familiar to African Americans: "Stop shooting Blacks!" (which they for some reason chant in English). One couldn't help but think of the Ferguson slogan: "Hands up! Don't shoot!"

But what's not familiar to American viewers is exactly why these migrants are making the perilous journey from Burkina Faso and other African lands to scrape by in Europe? Mediterranea, which is an expansion of Carpignano's 2012 award winning short A Chjana, also starring Koudous Seihon, is the New York-born director's feature debut. Although one can assume that the Africans are seeking "better" lives with higher paying jobs than are available back home, the movie fails to make their motivations clear.

Mediterranea is not out-of-date per se - but it is definitely not up-to-date. Europe is beset now by the world's largest refugee crisis since World War II, a disaster of epic humanitarian proportions. I just heard on FOX News that 60 million people around the world are currently "displaced." But like those Central Americans attempting to enter the USA in 2015, they are mostly not economic migrants per se. Rather they are fleeing war and massive violence rendering nations such as Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Guatemala, etc., unsafe to live in at any speed for masses of besieged, beleaguered people.

Mediterranea was also made before the current round of civil unrest in Burkina Faso, but writer/director Carpignano's failure to show what people are running away from and why is a grievous omission that may be an inexperienced first timer's mistake. Theatergoers aren't mind readers and I seriously wonder how many Americans could even find Burkina Faso on a map.

(By the way, this current flood of humanity desperately crossing borders in search of safety, et al, is largely the result of imperialist invasions and interventions in countries such as Iraq and Libya. We can thank the war hawks of recent administrations for this devastating blowback, as well as Reagan's despicable Contra war of the 1980s. We should also recall those many Jews and others who tried to escape Nazism as we grapple with this tidal wave of suffering people.)

Mediterranea also doesn't explain why Italians roust the immigrants. Competition for rare resources? Vying for low-paying jobs? The petty theft newcomers such as Ayiva perpetrate in order to survive under harsh conditions? Maybe the Italian males want access to African prostitutes but don't want Blacks dancing with Italian women at a disco? Mediterranean nations such as Italy, Spain and Greece that are on the frontlines of receiving the "brunt" of the economic migrant surge may have higher standards of living than, say, Burkina Faso, but they aren't paradises either, with high unemployment rates, national debts, and other problems facing their citizens.

It's not simply a matter of racism because there are several Italian characters who aren't racist and even express sympathy for the immigrants, including one nicknamed "Momma Africa." Are she and another young European women who help the migrants acting out of religious sentiments or political convictions? Inquiring minds want to know - but apparently Carpignano expects his viewers to be clairvoyants.

Who knows why Mediterranea'scharacters are putting themselves at such risk to themselves - Carpignano doesn't bother to explain.

Nevertheless, alternating between docudrama and artsy styles, it is well acted and worth seeing for those interested in racism and the situation of Blacks in general and particularly of sub-Saharan Africa's, and to a lesser extent North Africa's, economic migrants. Despite its shortfalls Mediterranea succeeds in putting the stateless, the homeless, the wretched of the Earth in the limelight they deserve.

New book offers no optimism for a free Puerto Rico

Thu, 12 Nov 2015 13:42:00 +0000

The latest media coverage of Puerto Rico focuses on unpayable debt while steering clear of the island's colonial status. Yet an off-and-on independence struggle has continued there for at least 150 years. A tipping point came in 1950 when Nationalists launched an armed rebellion. It failed, and independence agitation has lagged ever since, weakened by the population's growing economic distress and dependency, swelling emigration to the United States, and the specter of repression.

Nelson A. Denis' new book, "War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony," lays bare the colonial nature of U.S.-Puerto Rican relations. He does so by looking not at earlier colonial history or U.S. legislation and decrees, but rather measures taken to subdue Nationalists before and after their uprising. The book's title testifies to that slant. Island police chief E. Francis Riggs spoke those words appearing there in 1935. He was passing off recent police murders in Río Piedras as what happens in war.

Writing as more storyteller than historian, Denis portrays horrific oppression and obsessed, flamboyant, and even bizarre personalities. Vivid language and efficient organization of material add a real-time dimension to his narrative. The book has the potential to promote awareness among North Americans who don't associate Puerto Rico with theft or owning. And it may spur U.S. anti-imperialists who read the book to remember a U.S. colonial holding near at hand.

Denis' father and mother were natives of Cuba and Puerto Rico, respectively. His family was living in New York in 1962 when the FBI abruptly took away his father, who was deported. He was eight years old and never saw his father again. Denis says this made him become a lawyer. For 40 years he talked with Puerto Rican independence activists to learn about their struggles and about the Nationalists in particular. He eventually gained access to mountains of U.S. intelligence files on Puerto Rico.

Much of the book is about Pedro Albizu Campos, president of Puerto Rico's Nationalist Party from 1930 on. For the author, "the story of Albizu Campos is the story of Puerto Rico. It is also the story of empire." He casts Albizu as both heroic and tragic. Orphaned and poor, Albizu was the first Puerto Rican to attend Harvard College and was valedictorian of his law school class there. He spent 25 years in prison and dedicated his life to Puerto Rican independence. The book presents convincing evidence that radiation torture in prison hastened his death in 1965.

Mounting agitation by the Nationalists provoked increasing repression on the part of Puerto Rico's militarized police, the FBI, and U.S. Army. The climax occurred in October 1950 when the Nationalists launched armed assaults against symbols of authority.

Sugar cane production dominated the island economy in the 1930s; four U.S. companies owned half the arable land. Albizu led an island-wide strike of sugar workers in 1934. Population surveillance, intelligence gathering, disruption of rallies, and police violence intensified. Massacres, assassinations, and disappearances ensued. Federal authorities imprisoned Albizu in the United States in 1937. The charge was conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government.

He returned in 1947 to an expanding U.S. military presence, economic distress, and a climate of fear. Nationalist Party recruitment was down. The island police, FBI, and Army intelligence shared secret police dossiers on 100,000 Puerto Ricans. Some 75,000 were under surveillance. A "gag law" criminalized even possession of a Puerto Rican flag.

Albizu declared in June 1948 that "For the past fifty years, the United States has been at war with Puerto Rico. They steal our land, sterilize our women, inject us with cancer and tuberculosis, they find traitors to rule over us, parasites who live by robbing their own people." He announced in July 1948 that "Our country is past speeches. Puerto Ricans have to fight for their liberty with all arms at their disposal."

Denis reports that informers had already alerted the police and army to rebel plans when the revolt began on October 28, 1950. Thousands of U.S. troops descended on cities. Fighter planes bombed Jayuya and Utuado. Nationalists on a suicide mission struck at the governor's residence. Two Nationalists were killed trying to murder President Truman in Washington. Truman had offended by dismissing the rebellion as an "incident between Puerto Ricans." Except for a six-month release in 1953 prompted by international pressure, Albizu would spend the rest of his life in La Princesa prison.

The author offers no optimism as to eventual national independence. Yet long ago Cubans preparing for war against Spain did envision a parallel Puerto Rican evolution toward independence. Members of Jose Martí's Cuban Revolutionary Party even devised Puerto Rico's flag. Why did the two paths diverge?

Cubans had already fielded two armies in two independence wars in 1898 when the United States was taking over remnants of Spain's colonial empire. They had fought for social justice and independence and defeated Spain's army. That record promised no good for U.S. aspirations to own Cuba, but circumstances in Puerto Rico at the time must have been more encouraging.

Nelson A. Denis was the editorial director of El Diario/La Prensa, the largest Spanish-language newspaper in NYC, where he published over 300 editorials and won the Best Editorial Writing award from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, Denis served as a New York State Assemblyman (1997-2001). He has written for the New York Daily News, Newsday, the New York Sun, and Harvard Political Review.

Denis's screenplays have won awards from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), and CineFestival. He also wrote and directed the feature film VOTE FOR ME!, which premiered in the Tribeca Film Festival.

War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

by Nelson A. Denis

Nation Books, New York, 2015

Available in Kindle, Hardcover and paperback editions

Spike Lee’s "Chiraq" spotlights Chicago gun violence

Tue, 10 Nov 2015 14:37:00 +0000

Spike Lee's latest film, Chiraq is already being considered a contender for the Oscars, but that's not the only reason people are talking about the famed director's latest project. The release of the film's trailer last Tuesday has put the controversial movie back in the forefront due to its subject matter and title.

Chiraq is described as exploring the epidemic of gun violence on the South Side of Chicago, and black-on-black violence in the Englewood neighborhood of the city. The title of the film is a term coined originally by local Chicago rapper, King Louie, back in 2009 that was a play on words, comparing the crime rate in the city to the war zones of the Middle Eastern nation.

Critics of the film and its title have gone on record as saying it puts the windy city in a negative light, and could be a detriment to building tourism. One of the leading critics of the project, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, has been noted as saying, "I was clear that I was not happy about the title. I told him [Lee] also that there are very good people that live in Englewood who are raising their families and there's a lot of positive things that are happening in Englewood mainly driven by the people that make up Englewood."

Alderman of Chicago's Fourth Ward, William Burns, went on record as saying, "I have no issue with filmmakers wanting to make movies about the city of Chicago... What I do have issue with is using a title for a movie that offends many people on the South Side, makes it harder to bring economic development to those neighborhoods and to give someone a tax subsidy to do it." Burns is referring to the tax incentive that offers producers a credit of 30 percent of expenditures. It was brought about as an attempt to spur growth, job opportunities, and stimulate diversity in hiring within Chicago.

Burns explained, "The tax credit is about jobs and bringing productions to the city, but look, if we give incentives to a corporation ... we frequently have requirements... With the title, 'Chiraq' that's branding whole parts of the city. For people who live on the South and West Sides who pay their taxes, are active in block clubs and work to make their neighborhoods better, it's a slap in the face. South Siders and West Siders already walk around with a massive chip on their shoulders. There's a sense the media only comes to cover dead bodies and not the positive things that happen every day. And why is this guy from New York coming to do a movie about Chicago?"

During an interview for Chicago Magazine, Lee fired back against his critics, in particular Mayor Emanuel, by saying, "His whole thing was, the title is going to hurt tourism, the title is going to hurt economic development. But what tourism is he talking about? While we were shooting the film, you had the NFL draft here. Quarter million people in Grant Park ... So this part of the city is booming. But there are no bulletproof double-decker buses going through the Wild Hundreds [the gang-infested area from 100th to 130th Streets] or through Terror Town [a two-by-four-block patch of South Shore]. What economic development is going on in the South Side?"

As of June of this year the number of people shot in Chicago has surpassed 1,000. To put it into perspective, over this year's Memorial Day weekend, at least fifty-six people were shot in Chicago, twelve of those incidents proving fatal. Arthur Lurigio, a professor of psychology and criminal justice at Loyola University Chicago, was quoted by the Chicago Tribune as saying, "Where there's shootings, there's a sense of a neighborhood that is continuing to decline. That's in disarray. As long as we continue to invest in the riverfront and downtown, which we will, and we continue to disinvest or allow disinvestment from those communities, there will be shootings today, tomorrow." The city's police department has also reported a rise in homicides, with over 161 this year alone. This is in comparison to the 137 last year.

The trailer for Lee's Chiraq seems to show the moving story of gun-related crime in Englewood from a variety of character angles, along with having a "Lysistrata"-inspired plot line involving the women characters withholding sex from their partners as a campaign to get them to stop the violence.

The film has a star-studded cast, including John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Nick Cannon, Angela Bassett, Dave Chappelle, and Jennifer Hudson. Cusack joined Lee in a press conference in Chicago some months ago to combat the controversy surrounding the movie. Cusack, who grew up in Chicago, said at the conference, "I love my city of Chicago and I would never do anything to hurt it." At the same press conference Lee concluded, "Wait until the movie comes out. You don't like it, you don't like it, but see it first."

Chiraq opens in theaters nationwide December 4.

“Embrace of the Serpent”: Odyssey into Amazonian "heart of darkness”

Tue, 10 Nov 2015 11:29:00 +0000

Inter-species interaction between outer space aliens and human beings has long been a staple of the science fiction genre, as in 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still and its 2008 remake, 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kindand 1982's E.T. Roswell, et al, notwithstanding, the jury is still out as to whether or not Earthlings have actually encountered extraterrestrials. Be that as it may, the closest counterpart to this cross-cultural experience is the first contact between so-called "primitive" aboriginal peoples and self-styled "superior" civilizations, often wielding more advanced technology.

That these inter-"racial" rendezvous have a sci-fi vibe is attested to by the Samoan word for Caucasians: When the sail of navigator Jacob Roggeveen's Dutch West India Company ship appeared over Samoa's horizon in 1722, it appeared that the foreign visitors in their strange-looking UFO were "bursting the sky." To this day Samoans call white people "palagi" (shortened from "papalagi"), which literally means "sky burster."

Colombian director/co-writer Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent- Colombia's official Oscar entry for the Best Foreign Language category - is the latest in a long line of works of art dealing with early contact between indigenous people and foreigners from afar. Before the cinema, literature pondered these often fatal interchanges in novels such as James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 The Last of the Mohicans and Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness (Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Apocalypse Now brilliantly reset Conrad's Congo saga in Indochina). The 1995 animated feature Pocahontas is an archetypal depiction of this culture clash and intermingling.

The initial arrivers - who are usually Westerners - to pristine Third World lands include explorers, missionaries, sailors, soldiers, settlers, traders, anthropologists and the like. Although these outsiders typically view themselves as savers of souls and bringers of civilization, their self-appointed, self-anointed role in carrying out what Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate of racism and colonialism, dubbed the "white man's burden" usually makes them, in practice, uninvited, unwelcome imperial intruders and interlopers.

In Embrace of the Serpent the Westerners on twin voyages of discovery in Colombia's deepest, darkest Amazon are both real-life scientists. Guerra's film, co-written by Bogotá-born Jacques Toulemonde Vidal, is based on their journals. Theodore Koch-Grünberg (Jan Bijvoet) is a driven German ethnologist who roamed around the Amazon circa 1909. (Germany has had a long fascination with anthropology, as well as a pre-World War I empire stretching from Oceania to Africa. Dr. Augustin Krämer's early 20th-century books about Palau remain highly regarded.)

Serpent's other man of science is American Richard Evans Schultes (Brionne Davis), who traveled to the Colombian Amazon rain forest in the 1940s. Considered "the father of ethnobotany," the New York Times called Schultes "a real life Indiana Jones" and "swashbuckling scientist" in its 2001 obituary. In his 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow Wade Davis called Schultes, ''The last of the great plant explorers....'' Schultes was also one of the psychedelic Sixties' pioneers of hallucinogens who co-authored 1979's The Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers with Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who took the first LSD trip.

Indeed, Schultes, like Koch-Grünberg before him, is on a quest for the rare, hard-to-find yakruna plant, which reputedly has great mind expanding attributes - it is the silver chalice of psychedelia. If in Serpent Schultes and Koch-Grünberg play the role of Cooper's Hawkeye or Conrad's Marlow, the Amazonian shaman Karamakate is similar to Uncas, the last pure-blooded Mohican in Cooper's novel.

Karamakate is a fascinating character, a "noble savage" similar to Melville's harpooner Queequeg in Moby-Dick, a child of nature who lives as one with the rain forest and possesses mystical insights. Karamakate believes he is the last surviving member of his tribe, which has been ravaged by its contacts with "whitey," in particular the rubber plantation barons who have enslaved Amazonian natives - hence his solitary existence in the jungle. The sorcerer claims to know where the last yakruna is. On the other hand Koch-Grünberg purports that other Cohiuano - the tribe Karamakate thinks is extinct - still exist and the German contends he can lead the South American Indian back to his long-lost people. In exchange for doing so Karamakate agrees to take Koch-Grünberg to the last remaining yakruna plant.

Thirty-plus years later Schultes embarks on the same yakruna odyssey. Serpent cuts back and forth from his journey to that of Koch-Grünberg's sojourn. It turns out that both have the same guide - Karamakate as a young man (portrayed by Nilbio Torres) and Karamakate as an elder (played by Antonio Bolívar). The intercutting across the decades of the twin stories does not make this fact very clear, but Guerra may do this deliberately to express the notion that Amazonia's tribal peoples possess a different sense of time than Westerners have.

Both white men have their ups and downs with their versions of the loincloth-wearing Karamakate, who distrusts outsiders, due to the eco-havoc foreigners have wreaked upon the Amazon and its plant, human and animal inhabitants. These bumpy relationships mirror South America's troubled history of race relations.

Serpent's stunning cinematography is (mostly) in glorious monochromatic black and white. However, as splendid as it looks, shot on location for seven weeks in the jungles at Vaupés in Colombia's remote Amazonas region, I wished Serpent had been lensed in living color. This way viewers could experience the rain forest's vivid colors, as in John Boorman's aptly named 1985 The Emerald Forest shot in the Brazilian Amazon and Werner Herzog's 1982 Fitzcarraldo, with its Peru and Brazil locations.

Well-directed, Serpent is also well-acted, but the standout in the cast largely composed of members of Vaupés' tribes is Cubeo tribesman Nilbio Torres. In true Neo-realist style, Torres never acted before, but with the authenticity he brings to his role, this Amazonian is amazing. As press notes put it, the buff Torres "has never set foot in a gym; his amazing physique has been sculpted by the hardships of the jungle...." A gifted actor, this newcomer deserves a Best Actor Oscar nomination.

Also according to press notes, Serpent is "the first Colombian film to feature an indigenous protagonist and to be told from his perspective." According to Guerra's director's statement: "The explorers have told their story. The natives haven't. This is it."

In a New Yorker article about Schultes he was quoted as saying: "All that is required to bring out their gentlemanliness is reciprocal gentlemanliness. I do not believe in hostile Indians." Indeed, the versatile Torres and Bolívar alternate between gentility and fierceness in their depictions of the younger and older Karamakate.

The Westerners' search for the sacred yakruna plant parallels Karamakate's quest for his lost tribesmen. The film culminates with a psychedelic sequence in color, evocative of an acid trip that is reminiscent of the grand finale near the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This subtitled, 125-minute epic odyssey runs the gamut, covering deracination, acculturation, colonization, religious zealotry, the return to nature, the indigenous struggle for survival and much more. What a wild ride and long, strange trip it is.

Embrace of the Serpent will be theatrically released in New York on Feb. 17 and Los Angeles on Feb. 19, with a national rollout to follow. For more info see: http://embraceoftheserpent.vhx.tv/.

General Nat Turner, the Black Spartacus in a new play

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 16:01:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - Nat Turner was a far greater revolutionary than his fellow Virginians George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Not only did he - unlike them - not own slaves, but he was indeed a slave himself who heroically rose up against his white "masters" in 1831 at Southhampton County, Virginia, in what was probably the most successful slave revolt in American history.

I've been an admirer of Turner since I was a boy, when I first read about him in William Styron's 1967 The Confessions of Nat Turner. So I eagerly looked forward to the premiere of Paula Neiman's Nat Turner: Following Faith. I wish I could tell you that this is a classic Turner movie - or play, as the case may be. But it's not - alas, I regret to report that this play does not live up to the promise of its premise. Just as many felt Styron's controversial Pulitzer Prize winner was flawed, Neiman's interpretation is likewise problematic.

I usually champion creative, imaginative approaches to form, whether onscreen or onstage. However, the trouble with Neiman's script is that she lets her storytelling style get in the way of simply telling an already extraordinarily compelling story. Her play uses a series of cinematic-type techniques - flashbacks, flash forwards and the like. This is not only confusing and distracting but it over-intellectualizes a real-life saga that is at its heart emotional. You don't have to be a Marxist theorist to figure out that slavery is wrong - this is primarily passionate, not cerebral, subject matter. A straightforward, naturalistic narrative would have better served this riveting, historical story.

Neiman's Nat is depicted as a sort of seer on a spiritual quest in the prophetic religious tradition. Fair enough - but other aspects of her interpretation of Turner are troublesome and perplexing. Like Styron, she projects lots of psychological complexities upon the slave rebel. If Styron, as I recall, imbued Turner with a heavy dose of jungle fever for the slave owner's hoop-skirted Southern belles, Neiman does something even more dubious: She makes "General Nat," as he was nicknamed, lose his nerve. During much of the extremely violent rebellion he inspired and led, onstage he shrinks from doing the bloody deeds he has agitated that his fellow slaves perform in the fight for their liberation from bondage. (That is, ruthlessly kill even "whitey's" unarmed women and children.)

To compound matters, although Turner was both able to read and renowned as an orator, as the title character Liberian actor Tarnue Massaquoi appears to repeatedly stumble over his lines. At a time when the Black Lives Matter and Rise Up October movements, et al, are resisting the despicable slaughter of often unarmed African Americans by police and vigilantes, this play portrays the Black Spartacus as having cold feet and sometimes being inarticulate.

I asked Neiman after the premiere where she got the idea that General Nat had a failure of nerve. Admittedly, from a dramatic point of view in a, say, Eugene O'Neill or Tennessee Williams type of play stressing characters' psyches, this would be a subtle, nuanced touch. Be that as it may, Neiman admitted there was circumstantial evidence suggesting that, perhaps, Turner might have frozen up and been unable to kill at first - but this was her supposition and interpretation. This strictly subjective version of events would be somewhat akin to Dalton Trumbo ending the 1960 movie Spartacus by having Tony Curtis stand up, point at Kirk Douglas, and tell the triumphant Roman army "He's Spartacus!" in order to save his neck.

Again, at a time when not only ordinary African Americans are coming under attack, but even prominent Hollywood celebrities like Quentin Tarantino, merely for using their First Amendment right to speak out about police brutality, America's oppressed need heroic role models to encourage them to stand up and speak out strong.

To be sure, during this two-act epic directed by Dan Martin that clocked in at about three hours on opening night, Following Faith does have a few scenes and performances that are inspirational. For me, the play's best moment was when a newly freed slave named, methinks, Lucy (the Playbill says Nancy) gratefully thanks General Nat for having her vicious master slain and liberating her. The emancipated woman, beautifully portrayed by Sade Moore (who told me after the show that her character was based on an actual historic figure), then goes on to join Nat Turner's rebellion.

Another standout in the cast of about 15 is Jaimyon Parker who plays Will, a slave from another plantation who throws his lot in with the aspiring rebels before the revolt begins. Once the insurrection gets underway Will proves himself to be a stalwart revolutionary, who - as Malcolm X would later say - fights for Black freedom "by any means necessary." No matter how bloody the deed, the enraged Will is willing to do it.

While this may sound bloodthirsty to some readers, the fact is that in the cruel, oppressive antebellum South slaves had little nonviolent recourse to resisting the terrors and horrors imposed by the white supremacist system, other than perhaps running away. Just consider this simple, trenchant point: More Americans died in the Civil War than in any other U.S. war. The conflict to end slavery proved to be the USA's most violent conflict, even up to today. (And yet, as noted, the repercussions of the slave trade and human bondage still reverberate.)

Phrederic Semaj also does a great job as the enslaved Hark, whose body is bent and misshapen - until General Nat's rebellion sweeps ol' Virginny. In the second act he is rather cleverly able-bodied as he joins the revolt: The revolution turns one-dimensional man into three-dimensional man and woman. Semaj also has a great singing voice that makes you feel the spine-tingling old Negro spirituals. Terry Woodberry as Moses has superb elocution, while Asante Jones (who appears on the hit TV series Scandal) also has a great voice.

But I had no idea that Asante Jones, who narrates the drama, was supposed to be Gabriel Prosser, another actual historical figure who tried to lead a different slave insurrection. And at no time that I can recall does the almost 180-minute Following Faith bother to inform the audience the years when the real life events being depicted on stage took place. Either this is sloppy storytelling or a really clever device by the playwright to suggest that the occurrences of circa 1831 are not that dissimilar from what's going down some 184 years later. (Judging from the quality of the writing I suspect which one it is.)

Much has been made about the TV and cinematic surge in Black images and subjects. On the big screen films like 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained, Selma and Straight Outta Compton have emerged, while on the small screen programs such as Empire, Black-ish, Scandal, etc., are trendsetters. Is there a similar phenomenon taking place on L.A.'s stages?

In addition to Nat Turner: Following Faith, last year another drama about Black luminaries, One Night in Miami, depicting Malcolm X, singer Sam Cooke and footballer/actor Jim Brown with heavyweight champ Cassius Clay as he prepared to change his name to Muhammad Ali, was presented at the same theater. On Nov. 7 the Fountain Theatre opens South African playwright Athol Fugard's The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek. Last August, the Fountain also presented the stage adaptation of Claudia Rankine's poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric. In 2014 the Stella Adler mounted 1969, about Black Panther-type militants, while singer/actor/activist Paul Robeson was lauded in a Robey Theatre gala and depicted in a one-man show at the Mark Taper Forum. Meanwhile, L.A. theaters such as Will Geer's Theatricum Botanicum and A Noise Within pursue non-traditional casting, with multi-culti casts performing classics, from Shakespeare to Arthur Miller's All My Sons, which is currently on the boards at ANW.

In any case, if there is such a Black-themed theatrical trend, Following Faith is part of and reflective of what's going on in our culture now. Unfortunately, it does not do General Nat and his courageous unshackled followers justice. Having said that, it may be worth seeing for theatergoers interested in the subject matter, especially those who know little about one of the most electrifying moments in American history: When way down yonder in the land of cotton, the last boldly decided they shall be first. At least this play, flawed as it may be, shines a light on those unforgotten, brave freed slaves who declared in 1831, straight outta Southhampton, that yes indeed, Black Lives Matter, and Justice too - or else!

Nat Turner: Following Faith plays Thurs. to Sat. at 8:00 pm and Sun. at 2:00 pm until Dec. 6 at Theatre/Theater, 5041 Pico Blvd., Los Angeles 90019. For info: (213) 529-5153; http://buytickets.at/natturner.

Remembering poet, Spanish Civil War vet Ramon Durem

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 12:01:00 +0000

Before the year 2015 closes out, we remember Ramon Durem, known as Ray, who was born on January 30, 1915, in Seattle, Wash. Although of mixed heritage, he identified as African American. After short stints in the Navy and as a laborer along the West Coast, Durem attended the University of California, Berkeley for two years, where he joined the Communist Party in 1931. Active in radical causes on campus, Durem was arrested for picketing against silk imports from imperial Japan.

Durem arrived in Spain on April 29, 1937, to serve with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting for the Spanish Loyalists. He was wounded in action at Brunete. After recovery he returned to action through the Ebro Offensive. He married nurse Rebecca Schulman in Spain. They named their first child Dolores for the iconic defender of the Loyalists, Dolores Ibarruri, "La Pasionaria." Durem was among the Americans who participated in the farewell parade in Barcelona, and returned to the U.S. in December 1938.

Durem and his wife moved to Los Angeles. He continued to be an active union organizer and was arrested on a number of occasions. During the 1940s Durem divorced and remarried and moved his new family to Guadalajara, Mexico, in order to escape government harassment. He left the CPUSA during the Browder period, disagreeing with its approach to the "Negro Question." In 1962 Durem and his wife returned to Los Angeles, where he died in 1963, at 48, of cancer.

Writing as Ray Durem, his poems were first published in the Crusader, a journal edited by Robert Williams, the North Carolina-based Black Nationalist leader who in the 1960s was forced into exile in Cuba and later China, returning to the U.S. in 1969. Other poems were published in literary journals and newspapers. His work attracted the interest of Langston Hughes, who included one of Durem's poems in the anthology "New Negro Poets: USA." A volume of Durem's poetry entitled "Take No Prisoners" was published posthumously in 1971. Ray Durem's work impacted the Black Power movement, serving as a both a political compass and cultural inspiration.

"Award (A Gold Watch to the FBI Man Who has Followed Me for 25 Years)" (1964), dryly acknowledged the poet's many days of intimate FBI surveillance, also captured in a 312-page file maintained between 1940 and 1967.

Award

[A Gold Watch to the FBI Man who has followed me for 25 years.]

Well, old spy
looks like I
led you down some pretty blind alleys,
took you on several trips to Mexico,
fishing in the high Sierras,
jazz at the Philharmonic.
You've watched me all your life,
I've clothed your wife,
put your two sons through college.
what good has it done?
sun keeps rising every morning.
Ever see me buy an Assistant President?
or close a school?

or lend money to Somoza?
I bought some after-hours whiskey in L.A.
but the Chief got his pay.
I ain't killed no Koreans,
or fourteen-year-old boys in Mississippi
neither did I bomb Guatemala,
or lend guns to shoot Algerians.
I admit I took a Negro child
to a white rest room in Texas,
but she was my daughter, only three,
and she had to pee,
and I just didn't know what to do,
would you?
see, I'm so light, it don't seem right
to go to the colored rest room;
my daughter's brown, and folks frown on that in Texas,
I just don't know how to go to the bathroom in the free world!

Now, old FBI man,
you've done the best you can,
you lost me a few jobs,
scared a couple landlords,
You got me struggling for that bread,
but I ain't dead.
and before it's all through,
I may be following you!

Adapted from http://www.alba-valb.org/volunteers/ramon-durem, blackpast.org and other sources. "Award" is published in Arnold Kenneth, ed., "Poems of Protest Old and New," New York: Macmillan, 1968.

Photo: Ray Durem, public domain.

“Moby-Dick”: Melville’s masterpiece gets an operatic treatment

Mon, 02 Nov 2015 12:15:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - In 2014 LA Opera presented Herman Melville's Billy Budd, as interpreted by composer Benjamin Britten and librettists E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier. Now the sea winds are blowing again at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with a mind-blowing production of an operatic adaptation of Melville's masterpiece Moby-Dick, surely one of the best operas I've ever seen and heard. The formidable projections by Elaine McCarthy, who has an opera background as well as a Broadway pedigree, Robert Brill's set visualizing the whaler the Pequod, Gavan Swift's deft lighting, the performance of Jake Heggie's music, singing and acting of Gene Scheer's libretto, with much dialogue taken from Melville's 1851 novel, combine to render a compelling retelling of the immortal literary classic in the operatic medium.

Under Leonard Foglia's attentive, imaginative direction these elements merge to express a powerful psychological drama published five years before Sigmund Freud's birth. During the 19th century, then as now, Americans roved the Earth seeking oil. Before electricity illumined us, whaling played a vital role in the oil industry, as lights were lit with oil drained from whale blubber aboard whaling ships that included assembly line-like factories. (The Dallas Opera, located in an oil capital. was one of the joint commissioners of this piece.) Although Melville, who actually was a whaler, goes in depth into cetology in his novel, Moby-Dick is arguably first and foremost - and foremast! - an allegory about human madness.

Fully embodying Captain Ahab's monomaniacal obsession to hunt down the great white whale who had previously amputated him, tenor Jay Hunter Morris (but, of course, from oil rich Texas) is perfect as the peg-legged psychopath. Morris imbues the 58-year-old skipper with a towering presence, as Ahab blithely disregards and discards his New Bedford employers' oily mandate, proceeding to use the ship and crew they've financed to pursue his personal vendetta against Moby-Dick at the watery ends of the Earth. "I am the darkness leaping out of light!" Ahab proclaims. The madman mesmerizes - and bribes with a gold doubloon - his sailors, charismatically enlisting them in his apocalyptic, psychotic cause in a scene suggesting a tyrant rallying his true believers at a war rally.

So far, so good - but librettist Scheer and composer Heggie's version of Melville's novel also raises questions. Not about the translation from one medium to another - as far as I am concerned, this work's conversion from literature to opera is smooth sailing. Some opera house purists may gripe about the new-fangled techniques of this opera's nimble, pneumatic, special effects-laden stagecraft, but the cinematic projections on scrims and screens, et al, are supplementary and complementary to the storytelling through orchestral music accompanying the singing and acting of about 40 live performers. There may be no horned helmets and brassy breastplates, but the theme is as Wagnerian as it gets, and represents 21st-century opera at its finest.

The problems are not about the opera's form but with its creators' taking of unauthorized liberties with the text by Melville, who having died in 1891, is obviously in no position to protect against or protest changes to his creation. When playwright Terrence McNally (who began the project with Heggie but later left it) conceived this rewrite, he set it completely at sea. Gone is the Spouter-Inn where Melville's narrator first encounters Queequeg (bass-baritone Musa Ngqungwana), along with the novel's other brief land-based portions. So the entire saga is set at sea, which is actually not a bad idea, and doesn't seem to alter Melville's original intent much.

But, arguably, not so with other textual changes. Ishmael, who seems to be Melville's alter ego, is introduced and referred to throughout as "Greenhorn" (tenor Joshua Guerrero), a reference to his being a whaling virgin (the novel identifies him as an experienced merchant marine, so not a nautical novice). In the opera Greenhorn first meets Queequeg aboard the Pequod, and instead of Melville's celebrated first sentence - "Call me Ishmael" (which Scheer cleverly uses to great effect later on) - when the curtain lifts, a Samoan chant is heard onstage uttered by Queequeg, accompanied by drumming. The words - "fune la," etc. - are projected onto the supertitles, but for some strange reason, unlike when audiences at the Dorothy Chandler attend other operatic performances, the Samoan is not translated. Why? Are ticket buyers supposed to be mind readers? I lived in Samoa for two years and have a Samoan daughter but I could only understand part of the chant - and inquiring minds want to know what the words mean.

In any case, Queequeg is probably the finest male Polynesian (although not necessarily Samoan - he says he comes from "Kokovoko," which is probably fictitious) character in Western fiction. Lately, the issue of "culturally correct casting" has been in the news, including in terms of indigenous roles. Ngqungwana does a good job with his singing and acting, portraying this "noble savage":Melville and Ishmael/ Greenhorn clearly hold this dead eye dick harpooner in high esteem. As Melville wrote: "Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed."

In terms of appearance, Ngqungwana conveys the Kokovoko Polynesian prince's tattooed visage, body and hairdo. But he is probably way too overweight to convincingly play a harpooner (Guerrero is likewise too big to play a young sailor probably based on Melville's youthful self).

But the biggest question here is why was a South African cast to play a Pacific Islander? For those who may reply, well, there aren't any Polynesian opera singers, I have three words for you: Kiri Te Kanawa, the Maori soprano from Aotearoa/New Zealand. Is this a case of: If you've seen one dark-skinned character you've seen them all? Racially insensitive? Or is it that acting is all about pretending and make-believe so it doesn't matter? (Fun Fact of the review: In the 1956 John Huston screen version of Moby-Dick, Queequeg was portrayed by Galician actor Friedrich von Ledebur, who fought with the Austro-Hungarian cavalry during World War I.)

Even more questionable is the casting of Pip, a little Black boy who provides entertainment to the Pequod's crew, but is here played by soprano Jacqueline Echols. Don't get me wrong - Echols is in fine voice and acts well, but by casting a female as Pip the opera breaks the all-male world Melville created aboard his microcosmic Pequod.

Homoeroticism may be a theme of the saga. Ishmael and Queequeg are bunkmates in the novel and in the opera, aloft in the rigging, they sing a duet so loving that I almost shot up out of my seat and cried: "Hey you guys! Go get a berth!" The story also has many biblical allusions, with the names Ahab, Ishmael, Rachel, etc., derived from the Old Testament. (Although your guess is as good as mine as to where Melville conjured the moniker Queequeg up from.) But above all, this is a tale of maritime madness, as Melville literally plunges the depths of the unconscious mind to unfold his saga of insanity.

His 1851 metaphorical fable, alas, was way ahead of his time. After Melville's first novel was published in 1846, Typee, set in the Marquesas (between Tahiti and Hawaii in what is now French Polynesia), became an instant bestseller and the young New Yorker who had called a whaling ship his Harvard skyrocketed to the 19th-century equivalent of literati celebrity status. But 19th-century readers couldn't understand Moby-Dick, and the psychological theme and style of the story caused Melville to lose his readers. To support himself Melville worked as a U.S. Customs inspector in Manhattan. When Herman Melville died in 1891, the Great American Author was all but forgotten. But, presumably at night, as determined as his character Bartleby the Scrivener, the forgotten genius continued to write. In 1888 the undaunted scribbler began the philosophical Billy Budd (perhaps one could say that Benjamin Britten and his librettists "completed" it with their adaptation of Melville's novella).

I'm a huge Melville lover and in 1992, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his 1842 exploits in the Marquesas Islands, I reenacted Melville's exploits there for the Chicago Tribune. I jumped ship - the splendid passenger-freighter Aranui, which sails from Tahiti to the Marquesas - and lived at Taipivai, in Nuku Hiva, where Melville's first novel, that runaway bestseller Typee, took place.

Although LA Opera's Moby-Dick has some fishy alterations that may cause devout Melvilleans and Polynesians to raise their eyebrows, this should not deter viewers from experiencing it. With its state of the art special effects, this Moby-Dick is a tour-de-force. As the audience rose to their feet at the Oct. 31 premiere in the Dorothy Chandler, tears came to my eyes during the thunderous ovation: Melville may have been forgotten by the readers of his era but he is, happily, remembered now as the genius he was. Indeed, on Dec. 11 a new motion picture premieres about the dramatic real-life incident that inspired Moby-Dick, Ron Howard's In the Heart of the Sea, co-starring Thor's Chris Hemsworth and Ben Whishaw as Melville.

Like Ishmael, I can't wait to "quietly take to the ship" again to cast off "a damp, drizzly November in my soul," when I hopefully return to Tahiti in early 2016 aboard the all-new, fifth version of the cargo cruiser Aranui, with its muscular tattooed Polynesian sailors, so reminiscent of Queequeg. In the meantime, for landlubbers and lovers of opera, literature, spectacular spectacle and adventure on the high seas, LA Opera's Moby-Dick is a must-see, ear- and eye-popping extravaganza and work of art. It is, quite literally, a whale of a show.

Moby-Dick is being performed Nov. 7, 19 and 28 at 7:30 and Nov. 15 and 22 at 2:00 pm by LA Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. For more info: (213)972-8001; www.laopera.com.

A short video clip can be seen here.

L.A.-based reviewer Ed Rampellco-authored "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book"(see: http://hawaiimtvbook.weebly.com/).

Photo: Jay Hunter Morris in a 2013 San Francisco Opera performance of "Moby-Dick." | Cory Weaver / San Francisco Opera