People Before Profit blog

"Season of the Witch" examines occult history of rock

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 15:11:00 +0000

Once again, it's Halloween. And while the pagan origins of the holiday have been blurred through a lense of commercialism and largely forgotten, there are some to whom the occult and folklore are still subjects worthy of research and even practice. Perhaps nowhere in modern culture was its presence more prevalent than throughout the history of heavy music. In the book Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll, author Peter Bebergal traces its lineage back to its varied mystical roots.

The seeds of blues music

Bebergal takes readers back to Haitian mythology, wherein the seeds of blues music lay. "If you want to learn to play guitar, find a crossroads and wait there at midnight," writes Bebergal. "If you are patient, 'a large black man' will emerge from the gloom. It could be Papa Legba, a Haitian deity whose strange origins lie in the religion known as vodou. It could also be Eshu, a West African Yoruba god who is a guardian of pathways."

Or it could be a demon; that's the old story of Delta blues singer Robert Johnson, who sold his soul at a crossroads for his talent, or so the legend went. And the rumor was, a good number of years after this arrangement was made, a hellhound would come to collect, and drag you to Hell. Note some of Johnson's song titles, like "Crossroad Blues" and "Hellhound On My Trail." It was a later version of the Legba/Eshu tale that was expounded upon; these sorts of things happened when African Americans came over as slaves to the U.S., and their religions clashed - albeit, to some extent, coalesced - with Christianity.

The author remarked that even in these pre-rock days, when owning slaves was the norm, the Catholic Church had its scapegoats. Before rock icons, it was African Americans, says Bebergal, who bore the brunt of Christianity's harsh disapproval. Yet they held on to many of their customs and much of their lore, even amidst the burdens of racism and slavery. "For the Christian South, distrustful of anything that did not conform to the church and suspicious of secular music in general, the blues was a perfect storm, a tempest challenging the idea that an American black identity had to be bound up in the church."

Transmitter for a new spiritual truth

Speaking as an occult enthusiast, as well as a classic rock and metal fan, I prepared myself for the possibility that this book would be another clichéd assumption that attention-seeking devilry served as the sole motivating force behind all "occult rock" bands. Fortunately, Bebergal doesn't go that route. He provides a true examination of the scope of occult beliefs, initially documenting its LSD-laden, New Age/hippie-centric presence in music. "It was in England," asserts Bebergal, "where bands found a formula for injecting a dose of adrenaline into the syrupy pop that had become the staple of radio play." With bands like "the Beatles, the Who, and others of the British Invasion ... it was [all about] the LSD experience, held aloft by Eastern mysticism, that would utterly transfigure rock's sound and performance, and its ability to convince fans it was a transmitter for a new spiritual truth."

The Beatles were meeting with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, practicing transcendental meditation, and England and the U.S. were by this time "infused with a fascination about the occult, one dependent on the idea of teachers from the East to give it form and function."

Part of what can be gleaned from this book is that, whether or not we, as materialists, believe that "heightened spiritual awareness" or "enlightenment" can actuate any sort of progressive societal change, what's worth noting is that the cultural ramifications effected by these ideas can. One such example is the multiculturalism established by this New Age expansion of rock and roll, as when the Beatles began to incorporate the sitar into their songs, unwittingly offering parts of traditional Indian music to the U.S. mainstream palate - a musical communion that transfigured a previously inaccessible sound into something with which a listener from the states could begin to identify.

Bebergal does, of course, transition the reader to the period when things began to take an aesthetically darker turn; the drug-fuelled mystic lyricism and the hippie-peace-Woodstock era was drawing to a close, and filling the void left by it was a collection of bands that wanted to dabble, at least thematically, in the more controversial and "black magickal" portion of occultism. These artists were cut more from the cloth of Aleister Crowley than Madame Blavatsky.

Indefinable by nature?

For the Rolling Stones, however, the influence of the occult was used primarily to shroud the band in a veneer of darkness and mystery. Berbegal wrote that he believed occultism to be "indefinable; a tabula rasa that becomes a projection of whatever fears or desires that culture needs, and do not fit within a mainstream context," though "the irony of the Stones in this narrative is that, except for Mick Jagger's almost faddish interest in the occult ... the band had no abiding spiritual motivation beyond that of making music."

Next came Led Zeppelin, and while they too were a rock band, they sowed the seeds of what would soon be known as 'heavy metal.' Accordingly, they upped the ante in terms of occult presence, but even there, it was largely fantasy-based - more Tolkien than Zoroaster. The height of their popularity came at a time when "book publishers such as Ace and Ballantine were putting out cheap paperbacks of old sword-and-sorcery stories." In other words, fantasy-oriented mysticism was in vogue, and Led Zeppelin wanted to embody that when and where they needed.

Then came Ozzy Osbourne; arguably, Black Sabbath was the first true heavy metal band, though Bebergal astutely noted that rock band Coven (who had heavy themes of witchcraft) were the first to 'throw up the horns' - "the hand sign with up-raised index finger and pinkie that would become the staple gesture of metal fans." Nevertheless, Ozzy and Sabbath ranked even higher on the occult scale: "The covers to his first two solo records, Blizzard of Oz and Diary of a Madman, are both suggestive of Osbourne practicing some kind of wicked magic. Fans loved it."

But it was Marilyn Manson who truly took things seriously and helped pave the way for a new era of dark identity for music fans during the 90s. Despite his image-centric "shock" reputation, which was a decade-long thorn in the side of Christian conservatives, he practiced what he preached. Manson remains a member of the Church of Satan and his most iconic album, Antichrist Superstar, is laced with complex occult themes to such an extent that it is still being examined and analyzed by college professors and philosophers today.

Ritualistic roots disregarded

One disappointment for me was a lack of emphasis on black metal, and I say this not out of favoritism, but because it is the single type of modern music most closely associated with the occult today, and yet it got only a passing mention. It was great, of course, that the author at least cited bands like drone metal artist Sunn O))) (whose concerts are often called long, somber ceremonies of sonic experimentation), and U.S. proto-black metaller King Diamond. And yet, the well-known ritualistic roots of Norwegian and Swedish black metal were disregarded and, I feel, deserved coverage.

There seems to be a decent balance in the book when it comes to covering both the musical and magickal aspects of its source material. When noting the influence of a particular occult belief system on a band, Bebergal goes into detail, and name drops practitioners like Crowley, Blavatsky, John Dee, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey. He also references other important books that touch on interrelated subjects, such as black metal handbook Lords of Chaos and art-magick analysis Surrealism of the Occult.

Bebergal does, however, make a factual error. He credits the origins of Baphomet, a demon famously drawn in 1856 by occultist Eliphas Levi (who is surprisingly not mentioned in the book), and currently used as the figurehead of the Church of Satan, to the Freemasons. Actually, the character was likely established by the Knights Templar, and its name is believed to have been derived from that of Egyptian ram deity Banebdjedet.

Fuel for cultural evolution

Overall, the book is generally well-written, because its analyses are dedicated, unbiased, and free of embellishment. Interestingly, it shows how occultism served, at times, as its own kind of fuel for cultural evolution and development. This made me think of the Beatles-inspired musical film Across the Universe, in which, at the height of Vietnam War protests, an artistic painter was told that by refusing to take part in these demonstrations, he was removing himself from important political involvement and doing nothing; in truth, many artists and musicians of that time were trying to change the world in their own way, by inspiring listeners to look inward first. Season of the Witch related this to the reader - that people's very lives were being changed by the occult-charged lyrics and sounds of the time.

This notion seemed curious at first, but it made sense as I remembered a piece of art that currently hangs on the wall of the People's World office, featuring a quote by Bertolt Brecht: "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." And there it is; through the passing down of various folklore and mythos, each rock and roll icon has picked up that hammer and chiseled new features into the myriad statues of old - those pagan figures who continue to inspire artists today. And while others were doing their best to change reality for the better on the surface, these dabblers in the occult were working down below, in the proverbial belly of the beast, outside the purview of conformist convention, transforming pop culture and, by proxy, the world we live in. Believer or not, if that isn't magic, I don't know what is.

Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

Peter Bebergal

Penguin Random House publishing, 2014, 252 pages

Photo: Image taken from book cover. WNYC.org

“Free Radical Bluz”

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 12:58:00 +0000

To folks like me unchosen to prance

Down the pampered path

Of primrose mathematics

Well I'm glad to be telling'

What little I know about it

Power up my lungs to shout it

Like Paul Revere would ready us

Against the patriarchal march

Of servile sharp-tooth fanatics

That we won't get bled out

By the moneyed fraction

Or submit to sorry subtraction

Of our kids' rebellious core

There's a time n place

For long division

But we won't heed no split decision

Cuz there's no good reason to put up

With them bad ol' numbers anymore

You can make up yer own verses

You can shout out what ya chuz

Shout out yer very own

Yer very own

Very own

Free radical bluz

Yer very own free radical bluz

To my friends n neighbors

Who wonder aloud

If silver really does surround dark clouds

Well I'm glad to be telling'

What little I know about it

Power up my sousaphone throughout it

Stars n stripes wave forever I figure

When all together with vim n vigor

Cuz our common sense is truer

Than a pie-in-the-sky detour

There's no shortage of fair weather fiends

Who add no meat to yer cornbread n beans

So we don't want his highness

Unknown for his shyness

To tell us when it rains

We unfettered go-getters

Do a whole lot better

Cuz our own hard heads have

Our very own brains

You can make up yer own verses

You can shout out what ya chuz

Shout out yer very own

Yer very own

Very own

Free radical bluz

Yer very own free radical bluz

To my fellow workers going it alone

Who square off with bosses

But just get skinned right down to the bone

Well I'm glad to be telling'

What little I know about it

Power up my memory

That I'll not doubt it

There's a lot to be said

For individuality

But yer dealin'

With corporate criminality

Ya gotta admit

That we're not like superman

So we gotta come up

With a long-range plan

There's a lotta people

In our situation

We're the biggest bunch

Of agitation 'cross the nation

We're the biggest bunch

In the whole wide world.

Let's compose a circumferential hymn

We'll send the biggest e-mail

That's ever been hurled

You can make up yer own verses

You can shout out what ya chuz

Shout out yer very own

Yer very own

Very own

Free radical bluz

Yer very own free radical bluz

[2014]

Photo: Verizon customer holds a "We are the 99%" sign during a Communication Workers of America picket line and march to Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York City, Oct. 21, 2011 (Teresa Albano/PW)

Scandinavia at the Chicago International Film Festival

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 10:40:00 +0000

Scandinavia showed up in full glory at the 50th Chicago International Film Festival. A Swedish film even won the coveted Best Foreign Film Audience Award. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, directed by Felix Herngren, is an entertaining, hilarious Forest Gump-type send-up of the history film genre. Many references are made to world figures and events as our hero gradually reveals his life story in between scenes of his current crisis of being chased by a violent biker gang after he accidentally ends up with their stash of money. And you can bet there are a lot of life stories in his 100-year span. His escapades are fantastic and ludicrous. After being orphaned by a father who was killed as a revolutionary in Czarist Russia, he develops a passion for explosives and spends his life blowing things up, resulting in several stays in mental hospitals and jails. His fate takes him to the Spanish Civil War, where he fights with the resistance - then ironically ends up dancing with Franco himself. He travels later to the U.S. and participates in the Manhattan Project, where he gives Oppenheimer some suggestions for improving the bomb. He later meets Truman on the day Roosevelt dies and becomes a Cold War spy, eventually becoming a double agent for Russia, where he also gets to dance with Stalin. One unbelievable adventure after another leaves the viewer exhausted and bewildered, but the acting and story line are so fresh and creative that this film will satisfy most everyone.

Another stylish film from Sweden is the Cannes winner Force Majeure, directed by Ruben Ostlund, which addresses a poignant moral concern. How would you react to your loved ones in a panic situation? A family vacationing in the beautiful snow-covered Alps is having lunch on the deck of a hotel when a controlled avalanche seems to go out of control and advances towards the deck. After shouting orders, the young father unthinkingly abandons his wife and kids to escape the threat. They all recover quickly and life goes on, but the family unit begins to crumble as the wife questions his morality and the role of the male as protector of the family. Ironically the wife is confronted with the same crisis situation near the end of the film when she unwittingly abandons husband and kids escaping from a runaway bus. The film gives new meaning to the color white, as quite often the entire screen is totally white with one or two small skiers moving across the frame. But it's a moral tale above all else. The pacing of the direction and fine acting make it an award-winner - and the accordion music score is thrilling.

Another Swedish winner at the Festival, receiving the New Director's Gold Hugo award was Underdog, a working-class tale of status and human relations, while addressing the historic battles between Norway and Sweden. A young Swede comes to work as a housemaid for a Norwegian man supposedly nearing divorce. While his wife is away for an extended stay in Africa, relations develop between the two and his two young daughters, eventually evolving into much complexity as the wife returns unexpectedly. The sensitive and insightful story offers much to think about in the way of family roles, class differences and human emotions.

There were several other great films from Scandinavia at the festival. The famous Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman, was represented by a revival of his epic autobiographical classic, Fanny and Alexander, considered by many to be one of the greatest films of all time. Bergman's famous leading lady, Liv Ullmann, now turned director, appeared in person to present the opening film of the festival, Miss Julie, her filmic take on August Strindberg's classic play of class and power. A documentary exploring the effects on the Polynesian islands from French nuclear testing in the 1960s and '70s, Vive La France, also addresses the social and political consequences of French colonialism. The human drama, 1001 Grams, won the Best Cinematography Award and is Norway's official submission to the Oscars.

Danish master filmmaker, Lars Von Trier, was represented by a revival of his early groundbreaker, Breaking the Waves. Look of Silence, although produced in Denmark, was filmed in Indonesia and is the sequel to The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer's shocking exposé of rightwing brutality in the island country. They were both reviewed favorably in earlier columns.

There were many other Scandinavian films at the Festival, several award winners that I was unfortunately unable to view. But one of the most striking and memorable films was another award winner, this for Best Costume Design, although it's certainly deserving of many other awards. Speed Walking is a realistic and humanistic recreation of the sexual norms of the 1970s in Denmark, where the liberation of porn had a strong influence on society. Its frankness and honesty about sexual awakening in the youth of that time would probably raise some eyebrows in some countries. Director Niels Arden Oplev confessed in the Q&A, "If I directed this in America I would probably get arrested." But he wanted to be true to the more liberal times of the 1970s, representing it honestly and graphically. The award-winning costumes, sets and props lend a high degree of presence, along with some of the finest acting in memory. Laughs, cries and gasps came from the audience when three 14 year-olds were discovering love for the first time, but in a most sensitive and beautiful manner. The film contains very touching portrayals and is amazingly without any nude scenes. "I didn't want to create a film pedophiles would want to download, but yet I wanted to be honest about the story," said Oplev, who directed We Shall Overcome and the blockbuster crime thriller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This newest film of his is based on a popular book in Scandinavia, and offers a refreshingly, oddly innocent, vulnerable look at burgeoning sexual awareness. And it's very entertaining.

Photo: "The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared" Swedish poster.

Brad Pitt fires last shot in “Fury”

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 14:56:00 +0000

The first half of the new war film Fury is grim, gritty, and intriguing, but soon it all goes terribly awry. The premise of the film is not particularly unique in the war movie genre, an experienced squad, or in this case the crew of a Sherman tank, have an inexperienced new recruit thrust into their ranks.

The setting for the picture is Nazi Germany in what will prove to be the final weeks of the war. The evil of the fascist state is aptly illustrated, and the landscape remains dangerous. Upon surveying the destruction all around them one GI appropriately comments, "It's hard to believe we're winning the war."

Brad Pitt portrays Staff Sergeant Collier, a combat veteran who stays alive thanks to experience and instinct, and always staying one step ahead of the situation with a sharp eye, and a steady temperament.

The film seems authentic as it shows the camaraderie, rivalry, and locker room humor of the tank crew. In the best scene of the film the crew sits down to an impromptu meal with two civilian occupants of a German home in a town that was only moments ago cleared of hostile combatants. It is in this scene in which we realize that the whole crew is on the verge of a total psychological breakdown and is likely only able to hold themselves together thanks to their training and a will to survive.

One of the strange things the viewer notices early on is the unusual amount of religious imagery and quoting of Christian Biblical verses. At first the viewer might suppose that this is going to be a device used to question the faith of man in a situation of endless horrors, which are graphically illustrated in the combat scenes. At one point a character so prone to quoting the scripture that his nickname is "Bible" is asked if Jesus loves Hitler, and for those keeping score at home, the answer is "yes," if Hitler were to accept Christ.

By the second half of the film two things go wildly wrong. First, the combat scenes go from the tense and shocking to so over the top and unlikely, that they seem straight out of a horror flick or adolescent video game. Secondly, the dialogue goes from being sprinkled with Bible verses to positively clogged. I began to wonder if it was the American Army or the Salvation Army that was fighting the Third Reich.

The film does boast some excellent performances, including Chicago native Michael Pena, known best for portraying farm worker activist Cesar Chavez in the film of the same name. English actor Jason Isaacs adopts a convincing New York accent in a small role as a weary and realistic Captain, and actor Jon Bernthal, who studied at the Moscow Art Theater School, is memorable as a loutish north Georgia Redneck. Sadly, these performances are all wasted by the second half of the film when the script turns utterly preposterous.

For films set during the waning days of WWII one would do well to check out I Was Nineteen, a 1968 production of the German Democratic Republic, that not only deals with the fanaticism of last ditch Nazi resistance led by the SS, but unmasks the aristocratic Wehrmacht officer corps as well. For a look inside the lives of a tank crew of the same period it is hard to beat the 1969 Soviet production In War as in War.

As for Fury, after they cut out all the dirty words, it might have a future being screened at Baptist Bible summer camps or at Promise Keeper rally after-parties, but for a working class audience it will remain little more than a curious oddity in the war movie catalog .

Fury

Directed by David Ayer

2014, 134 min., Rated R

Photo: Brad Pitt stars in "Fury." (Fury on Facebook)

"Force majeure" film review: What would you do?

Tue, 28 Oct 2014 16:18:00 +0000

Force majeure. According to Investopedia.com: "A French term literally translated as 'greater force,' this clause is included in contracts to remove liability for natural and unavoidable catastrophes that interrupt the expected course of events and restrict participants from fulfilling obligations." A so-called "act of God" is a good example of this.

One such occurrence sets the stage for the plot and theme of Force majeure, a stylish Swedish movie written and directed by Ruben Östlund that scored the Cannes Film Festival's Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard (special mention) category.

Tomas (Johannes Bah Kunke) and Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) are a Swedish middle-class couple vacationing in the French Alps with their young son and daughter Harry and Vera who, in a bit of clever casting, are played by real life sister and brother, Clara and Vincent Wettergren. Some sly dialogue in passing fills us in on the fact that this ski holiday is a rarity, as Tomas is so busy with his career. These throwaway lines (the film is mostly in Swedish and French, with subtitles and some dialogue in English) inform what happens next.

We won't tell exactly what happens next, except to say that in this precarious world of climate change, war and disaster, this morality play ponders what we'd do when faced with a force majeure.

The perpetrator of the apparent misdeed is in denial over the course of action (or lack of) when the titular force majeure happens, which rocks the marriage and parent-child relationships to the core. The film becomes an examination of gender roles, marital relations, parental responsibility, and of this petit bourgeois couple and their children. Interaction with a janitor at the posh Alpine resort where the family is vacationing also cannily injects a class dimension into the story. As things come undone the perp seeks redemption.

Force majeure is in a long line of artistic work - theater, film, TV, painting-reflecting the dour Scandinavian psyche. But I find Force majeure most in keeping with the theme of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. In any case, there is some stunning cinematography of ski and snow. Plus excellent use of Antonio Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons." The ending of this highly philosophical film reminded me of Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Sorry to be so enigmatic, but since loose lips sink ships, you can find out for yourself what is meant by that.

Force majeure opens this week in national release.

Two new films tackle race in depth

Tue, 28 Oct 2014 15:46:00 +0000

It's definitely time for movies to tackle racial issues in depth, and the Chicago International Film Festival has provided the forum with two new important films. One will probably be a blockbuster, if it isn't by the time you read this; the other, one hopes, will also get needed recognition, but they are both of extremely different quality.

The Evolution of Bert is a labor of love that took the director over 20 years to complete. Filmed on and off throughout the years using students from his Black Studies classes at Ohio University, and only when time and money were available, director Jeffrey Wray used 16 mm cameras to recreate the early look of black and white documentaries. Partly inspired by the filmed version of Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, the often raw and low budget-looking film focuses on issues of racial identity and the racism still prevalent in contemporary American society. Content often trumps form when issues as urgent as these are addressed in a progressive manner. The film, begun in the '80s, begins humorously with defining the four major stereotypical options available to Black men: the successful Black Republican (who ultimately sells out his people), the insurance salesman (a job security fallback), the working class stiff (destined to struggle for jobs), and the revolutionary activist (committed but doomed to economic insecurity). Obviously from personal experience, the director chose to play the role of the hip educated revolutionary, influenced by jazz, poetry and African American culture, who meets regularly in a coffeehouse influencing Bert, the first-year college student confronted with issues of racial identity and the desire to avoid falling into one of these predestined stereotypes. Bert struggles with women on campus, getting interested in school, and finding a suitable identity. Despite the loose and erratic editing and occasional student-level acting, the film addresses many of the same issues and is as relevant in current times as the next film discussed here, which came out with tremendous hype and thunderous promotion.

Dear White People is one of the most thought-provoking, intelligent and entertaining American films made on race and racial identity. It is hilarious, insightful (maybe even "inciteful"), and has such a dense screenplay that it will have to be viewed several times to catch everything. Bold and challenging, it has already been compared to Spike Lee's films, especially Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X, and the classic campus comedy, Animal House. African American director Justin Simien, who also happens to be gay, held nothing back, confronting issues like racial identity, reverse racism, skin color and profiling, sexual orientation, Uncle Tom-ism, post-racial ideology, campus drugs, white fraternities, cultural differences - all within the social structure of the 2 percent Black students coping with survival on a majority-white, "racism doesn't exist anymore" campus. Actually, the originally planned title was 2%, which refers to the real average percentage of African American students on U.S. campuses.

As in the previous film, the director clearly identifies with a specific character with similar experience and attributes, in this case, Lionel, a geeky gay Black student with a giant Afro who knows little about Black culture. Unaccepted by anyone on the Ivy League campus and unwilling to take any position on race, he is hired by the white campus newspaper to infiltrate the Black student groups, and somehow ultimately comes around to "leading the revolution" instigated by his experience at a shocking black-face fraternity party. It's Sam, the radical DJ, host of the "inciteful" show "Dear White People," who antagonizes the white students with statements like, "... the amount of black friends required not to seem racist has just been raised to two ... and your drug dealer doesn't count."

Simien said he used a Twitter account to test the Dear White jokes used in the film, and then incorporated some of the Internet responses in his script. He said he had always intended the film to be a satirical multi-protagonist story (although he was told "you're not Robert Altman, so don't try!") about identity with a Black lens, more so than racism per se. He wanted it as a call to action, and started funding through Kickstarter. Five years later the film, released ironically at a time when the Ferguson killing brought racism once again to the headlines, came to fruition.

The popular, handsome dorm president, Troy, son of an "Uncle Tom" associate dean, is a product of Black parents driven to have their child succeed by assimilating and dating white girls.

A mixed-race student, Samantha, known as DJ Sam, represents the militant Black nationalist who exposes racism in all its form and challenges students' racial identity, with an acerbic wit and deadly sarcastic style in her "Dear White People" radio show. All combinations of race relations are fearlessly explored and developed, leading to unpredictable consequences.

The movie is about keeping it real and finding an authentic self. When asked what it means to do this, director Simien responds, "It's such a double-edged sword. You have to decide who is defining 'real.' As a Black person where, in the world my identity is often decided for me before I walk into the room, ''real' is a marketing ploy used by, often times, white executives to sell me a product. For example, 'real' is the top hip hop on the Billboard charts, it's the right shoes, the McRib sandwich." He suggests that "what it means to be real is to be your authentic self, and whatever your identity is out in the world is related to who you really are. And that can be really, really tough. It's hard to be yourself in most situations. Too many of us are being fake trying to be real."

The director answered astutely when asked about his "target audience." Simien replied, "I prefer not answering that question because it always sounds like a marketing ploy. It can be confused with the intended audience for the message, which of course would be everyone, as opposed to the audience who will buy the film."

The many messages in both of these films need to be experienced by a large audience. It was pointed out at both screenings that racism today is manifested in different forms, not as overt as in the past. It might be that the anti-racism struggle is at a higher level, and that success has come to many more African Americans than in the past, but this creates the illusion that racism has been conquered or eliminated. When considering percentages of Blacks in prison, mortality rates, salaries, unemployment rates and almost every other social indicator, whites always fare better. These inequalities need to be addressed urgently, and destroying affirmative action, public assistance and other programs because we are supposedly in a "post-racial" society is delusional.

Although these films don't directly address the current realities of mass Black incarceration, rising school tuitions, or the persistent economic and social inequalities between races, they do provide an important forum for thought and action presented in an extremely entertaining and provocative manner. These films also avoid a class analysis, focusing primarily on a privileged class of Ivy League students dealing with race. But the directors are quick to say they don't intend to provide any answers or solutions: It's up to viewers, based on their own realities, to decide what to do. One suggestion is to go out immediately and see Dear White People (Evolution of Bert will be harder to find), one of the freshest and most satisfying cinematic experiences dealing with the critical issue of race.

Photo: Bert romances Nita. Facebook.

"The Wanted 18" is a charmingly subversive human comedy

Tue, 28 Oct 2014 15:07:00 +0000

There's never been a film about Palestine quite like The Wanted 18, a charmingly subversive human comedy that had its world premiere at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Combining stop-motion animation, drawings, live interviews and reenacted scenes, while blending Palestinian and Canadian esthetics, this highly creative documentary succeeds on many levels.

During the first Intifada, now seemingly eons ago, creative attempts were made to overcome the harsh realities of the Occupation. A group of people in Beit Sahour, a small village in the West Bank, gathered donations to buy several cows from a left-wing kibbutz, in order to produce their own milk on a collective farm. Because this cut into Israeli profits, the 18 "illegal" cows were declared a "threat to the national security of the state of Israel," and a massive search was on.

The experience is remembered by many of the townspeople involved, a doctor, pharmacist, butcher, and many others who had never seen a cow before, resulting in some hilarious stories. When they were bringing the cows to the village, at night in a truck in a rainstorm, they went up a hill, got stuck, and the cows escaped out the back, running into the dark every which way throughout the village. It took a long time to round them up, and once they did, they realized no one knew how to milk a cow. And it gets more hilarious! The clever stop-action animation that alternates with live-action footage humanizes the cows by letting them talk and express their feelings. They are supposedly Jewish cows, now taken to a strange Arab land, and their comments reflect off the social conditions of the Occupation.

Co-directors Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan spoke with me discussing the challenges of artistic collaboration and the application of art in humanizing the struggle. Amer was born in Kuwait, but his family came from Beit Sahour in Palestine. They were kicked out of Kuwait and forced into a Syrian refugee camp. In 1990, Amer read a story about Beit Sahour in a comic book called "The Young Arab." It was about checkpoints, the Intifada, and an intriguing story about how cows were used in the struggle. He started fantasizing about the hometown he had never been to, and began drawing pictures of cows. In 1996 he went to Beit Sahour for the first time in his life. Later he moved to Ramallah and continued developing his art skills while studying architecture in Vancouver, eventually getting a Masters Degree in Fine Arts in London.

In 2005, he pitched a film idea to Canadian producer, Ina Fichman, who had traveled to Palestine searching for stories. Amer suggested a short animated film, but when she hooked him up with the Canadian filmmaker Paul Cowan, he suggested making it a full-length documentary.

The rare combination of Canadian and Palestinian cultures results in a unique blend rarely seen in film. Cowan's skills as a documentarist were revealed in the working-class doc about Nova Scotia coalminers (Westray) and one of the only films about the 1919 Paris Peace Conference after WW I that carved up most of the world (Paris 1919). His humanistic approach is demonstrated in his interview style, and the way he films recreations of important points in history.

As co-director, Amer led a team of 15 animators in the complex project. He said, "We chose stop-motion, rather than many contemporary digital options, because although they were clay, they were real puppets with real shadows, and you sort of feel like they were real." Cowan added "the animation is not slick, it's the antithesis, and I feel that really works with the story, creating a man-made feeling."

Cowan says, "Our relationship has been for the last five years. I had done documentaries before, and had experience with combining drama, documentary, archival footage and interviews. Amer brought his animation and the story. But then we got involved with each other's business, and it became a collaboration where we would try each other's ideas. We made several trips to each other's country during the course of making the film. The National Film Board of Canada provided many services, and Radio Canada and Arte France put money into the film."

Cowan reasoned that "the struggle has been seemingly going on forever, and people just begin to tune out. But then, I think if there's any magic to the film, it's to make people care about Palestine." It was a challenging concept bringing together not only the documentary format with animation, but two entirely different cultural styles. Amer clarifies that "we wanted the story to be clear for the Western audience but at the same time not boring for Palestinians and those who know about the conflict. Also telling the story in a very human way through the perspective of the (Jewish) cows gave enough context for both sides." Paul added, "I was a bit worried if it would work with cows talking throughout the very real and often brutal story." But the cows laugh, cry and joke with each other, like humans, and it works. "One character in the film says that after awhile it appears the cows 'were living our lives, being chased, running away.' And in fact, for the audience, these Jewish cows were the Palestinians." Amer adds, "There's a subtext, metaphors, in the entire film, where the cows represent the Intifada, and their fate parallels the struggle."

Amer explains, "We gave voice and face to the two sides, in the sense that we are not afraid of the truth. We want the story to be out there." In describing the characters being interviewed, Paul explains, "although they were clear-eyed about the situation, they were not bitter, they don't 'hate the Israelis', even though they talk about the terrible situation."

In describing the process of Palestinians acquiring the animals, Paul offers that "100 cows were purchased from the same kibbutz, for 5 other farms, but they were immediately discovered, stables bulldozed and the cows killed, leaving only the one in Beit Sahour." Israel was afraid the idea of becoming economically independent would spread to other areas and products.

The film also covers the issue of double taxing Palestinians. Those who refused to pay money to their occupiers had household furniture and items confiscated as compensation. This illegal practice was officially condemned by the UN, although it continued throughout the Intifada as an additional form of punishment to the Palestinians.

Discussing the process of putting the film together, Amer explained, "We asked each character to select a family member that looked like them back then. This created a sort of nostalgia in their eyes watching their relatives play themselves 25 years ago. For them it was kind of a second chance to look back at an era when they loved themselves and what they were doing." Paul states, "Their ability to remember the most precise details and express the feelings they had at that important time was extraordinary. It's a very complex thing. In a sense, they were sad, because everything they tried to do in the first Intifada has not happened. And yet at the same time, it was a tremendously exciting time for them. Even though ultimately it failed, it was a time when they were young, they believed everything was possible and they felt they were masters of their own destiny."

Starting Oct 31^st the film will be shown in Ramallah and throughout Gaza and the West Bank, as well as Haifa in Israel. After being personally involved in the story's development for almost 25 years, Amer expressed his excitement: "I'm waiting to see their reaction."

View a trailer here:

Image: screenshot

"The Ballad of Jane Elkins," Texas slave woman hanged

Tue, 28 Oct 2014 14:16:00 +0000

DALLAS - Like most places with large Latino populations, our town celebrates Dia de los Muertos (day of the dead) around Halloween. Teatro Dallas grouped three short plays with the title, "The Festival of Death" to run October 27-November 2.

The outstanding play was "The Ballad of Jane Elkins." It's mostly a soliloquy in which African-American slave Jane, already hanged for murder, comes back alive to go over her feelings in the last few days before she used an ax to split open the head of slave owner Master Wisdom. Jane Elkins holds the distinction of having been the first woman officially executed in Texas, but Texans are not particularly proud of their slavery history; consequently, few people know about Jane. In that regard, Teatro Dallas did a great service to the community here.

What little is known comes from the trial transcript. Jane was "worth" $700 and her owners had no objection to her being executed. She had been sold or loaned to Wisdom in 1853 ostensibly to care for his two children. He lived in Farmers Branch, a suburb that made a racist spectacle of itself in national news when they tried to fine any landlord who rented to undocumented workers. Jane was hanged in the center of Dallas in June 1853. According to the transcript, she did not speak during the trial and no one ever asked, "Why?"

The short play fills in the gaps. Actress Sydney Hewitt, with the rope still around her thin neck, tells us of a female slave's life of humiliation and misery. "They broke my spirit long before they broke my neck," she tells the audience. The final shame, of course, is rape. That's what pushes her over the edge, as almost anybody who ever knew or thought about Jane Elkins believes.

The other two plays, "Cocaine" and "The Strange Rider" are also about death and dying. All three plays are well executed in the mode of Mexican surrealism that is familiar here.

A highlight of the performance comes in the theater lobby before any curtains open. Two walls hold small altars to our honored dead. Director Cora Cardona explains that Dia de los Muertos is the oldest tradition in the Western Hemisphere and predates the "discovery" by Columbus. She said that modern pressures have brought it into concurrency with European traditions of All Souls Day and Halloween. Mexican people, she said, have feasts in graveyards while remembering and honoring their deceased relatives.

One of the honored dead in Dallas this year is Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to die of Ebola in America. Cardona said he was turned away from the hospital initially because he didn't have health insurance. His altar has a figure in a hazmat suit and several hospital items arranged around a news article announcing his death.

Another altar has a book about slavery in America and several artifacts associated with slavery days in Texas. It honors Jane Elkins. For those who mourn slavery and the special oppression of women, the honor may be 161 years late, but it is very very welcome.

Photo: The altar dedicated to the memory of Jane Elkins, in the lobby of Teatro Dallas. Jim Lane/PW

Freedom of the press? "Kill the Messenger" in review

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 15:26:00 +0000

I. F. Stone, one of the heroes of investigative journalism in the last century, wrote that "All governments lie." A telling illustration of Stone's simple yet profound observation plays out in meticulous detail in the new film Kill The Messenger, starring Jeremy Renner as San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb. Webb was the writer who in the mid-1990s broke the shocking story that the CIA was directly involved in crack cocaine trafficking during Ronald Reagan's presidency, using the proceeds to illegally fund the Nicaraguan contras' war against the duly elected Sandinista government that overthrew the hated Somoza dictatorship.

Film director Michael Cuesta and writer Peter Landesman show Nancy Reagan early on, amongst a parade of presidents and government leaders, beginning with Tricky Dick Nixon, decrying drugs in America. Her "Just say No" became the oft-mocked mantra of the day, while hubby privately whispered, "Just say Yes," thus creating the specter of a constitutional crisis by flaunting the congressional Boland Amendment which expressly prohibited the government from financially supporting the contras.

The narrative takes its first steps in a local-interest story about a drug raid. Webb mentions that the government appropriates the homes and property of accused dealers without due process; he becomes skeptical of government aims and the attendant loss of constitutional protections. But his editor deletes that paragraph from the article, leaving Webb to wonder if he has the support of his own newspaper to say such things.

Almost overnight, Webb is drawn into a spiral of nefarious personalities, gun-running and drug-pushing, crooked bankers, a cast of characters all orchestrated by the CIA, willingly abetted by law enforcement and federal prosecutors committed to concealing the truth. After an explosive burst of fame for the first major story going live on the internet, he encounters an ultimately acquiescent mainstream media that says, "Some stories are just too true to tell." All the while, the executive branch of government is hell bent on preventing "another Cuba on our shores." Oh, and did we mention the stacks of U.S. currency piled so high they had to be periodically rotated to avoid the paper going to rot?

The crack cocaine explosion in urban America largely affected people of color. The turf war made the stakes higher and more seductive for such gangs as the Crips and the Bloods, giving the lie to the ubiquitous anti-gang rhetoric in the public discourse. The National Security State acted not just to drug people and dull their spirit, but to start filling up jail cells in the ever quickening pace of prison building and long, mandatory sentences. The War on Drugs = the Prison Industrial Complex = the New Jim Crow.

Kill the Messenger raises daunting questions about the role of the press in society. Who would have believed that the San Jose Mercury News, publishing primarily local news stories, could possibly score a scoop of this magnitude? Webb succeeded in unmasking a scandal of far-ranging implications that the Los Angeles Times missed in its own back yard. South Central L.A. at the time, at least as depicted in the film with scenes of a drugged-out population, was awash in the scourge of the crack cocaine epidemic. Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles is shown in news clips enraged that her community has been devastated willfully and consciously by the pure evil of our own government.

The film is especially effective at showing how insidiously the CIA dredges up past indiscretions on Webb's part so as to portray him as unstable, unreliable, and perhaps too inventive with his sources. The national press, one major newspaper after another across the country, starts making the story not about drugs, guns, contras and Oliver North, but about Webb himself. The New York Times and the Washington Post (and its unnamed recently departed executive editor Ben Bradlee) played their part loyally. These famous bloodhounds in search of the truth that brought us the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal protected the government, partly out of professional jealousy of a provincial newssheet, and partly to assure future access to sources within the Beltway.

Kill the Messenger adheres closely to familiar Hollywood mid-level thriller stylistic flourishes that might leave some in the audience yearning for the kind of storytelling we've seen in such transcendent cinema as Costa-Gavras's Z or Haskell Wexler's 1969 Medium Cool, an enduring reflection on journalistic ethics set against the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Messenger's musical score fits more the mold of All the President's Men: heavy, tension-inducing electronics and percussion with low, ominous, reverberant bass notes, predictable, commercial and obvious.

The film clings tightly to the facts of Gary Webb's real-life drama, originally detailed in the 2006 book Kill the Messenger by Nick Schou, and Webb's own 1998 volume, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, which contains an introduction by Rep. Maxine Waters. The tale is told with convincing portrayals of Webb by Jeremy Renner, Sue Webb by Rosemarie DeWitt, Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos by Oliver Platt, the son Ian Webb by Lucan Hedges, and a riveting appearance by Michael Kenneth Williams as L.A. drug dealer Freeway Ricky Ross. The story is brought to life with contemporary clippings, headlines, TV news segments and voiceovers.

About that word "contemporary": In fact there are two stories occurring a decade apart that we are watching. Webb's articles, published in 1996, during the Bill Clinton years, referred to events that took place under Ronald Reagan, two presidents before him, in the mid-1980s. Those not intimately familiar with this saga may come away confused by the conflation of a present-tense you-are-there sensibility with news flashbacks.

Through one lens one might question this mash-up of time frames. But through another lens one appreciates that all that has occurred before our eyes is of a piece. We need only look back to the muckrakers and Daniel Ellsberg, and forward to Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, not to mention courageous newsroom reporters such as the New York Times' James Risen, alternate media giants such as Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jeremy Scahill, bloggers too numerous to mention, and filmmakers and documentarians such as Michael Moore and Laura Poitras, to see to what lengths governments will go to keep their programs and policies far away from the light of day.

This passion play is a piece of our nation's recent and ongoing history that begs to be told to a wide audience.

French New Wave classic flows back onto the screen

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 10:56:00 +0000

The late 1950s and early 1960s was a pivotal, heady, historic time for French cinema, as Nouvelle Vague or New Wave classics flowed onto the screen. Whereas Cahiers du Cinéma critic and enfant terrible François Truffaut's reviews excoriating the state of France's motion picture industry had previously gotten him banned from the Cannes Film Festival, in 1959 filmmaker Truffaut triumphantly returned, winning Cannes' Best Director and OCIC Awards (as well as an Oscar nom) for his masterpiece The 400 Blows, a poignant picture about unhappy boyhood. In 1960 Breathless was released; its director, Jean-Luc Godard, is widely regarded as the New Wave's most radical auteur, in terms of film form and leftw-ing politics. But Alain Resnais, whose Hiroshima Mon Amour was also nominated for Cannes' 1959 Palme d'Or, certainly gave Godard a run for his francs, both cinematically and politically.

Resnais' film, which won the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes bestowed by international film critics, has been long unavailable for theatrical screenings, but has now been restored and is being theatrically re-released in glorious black and white. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a groundbreaking work written with a novelist's sensibility by Marguerite Duras (who, along with Resnais, scored Cannes' Film Writers Award). Born and raised in Vietnam and Cambodia, Duras enhances this story about what Noel Coward would call a "brief encounter" between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva as Elle) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada plays Lui). Elle is making a pro-peace film on location in postwar Hiroshima and the A-bombed city forms a backdrop to their love affair.

As for Hiroshima Mon Amour's politics, it was quite daring to make an anti-nuclear film at that time, especially vis-à-vis U.S. audiences. To this day many Americans have an unexamined assumption that nuking Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki, was a vital -- hence justifiable -- factor in ending WWII, a rationale Elle gives voice to. But Resnais and Duras audaciously critique this rationalization (which Oliver Stone blew to smithereens in his recent Untold History of the United States documentary series for Showtime) and present the human face of atomic disaster. Viewers should be aware that there are a few gruesome shots that caused this writer to avert his eyes from the screen -- but then again, nuclear war is no cotillion ball.

The nuclear nightmare has left its mark on Lui, although he was away from Hiroshima, serving overseas as a soldier, when the Enola Gay dropped its fatal, fateful payload on its civilian target, which included Lui's family. Similarly, Elle's experiences in occupied France during WWII made an enduring, indelible impression upon her. As a teenager she had a doomed romance with a German soldier at Nevers.

The Frenchwoman therefore has sex with men who were both on the opposing side during WWII (as Duras well knew, Japan and France vied over Indochina). Although not explicit by 2014 standards, the sexuality onscreen was bold in terms of 1959 aesthetics: At a time when professional virgin Doris Day held sway in Hollywood, it is clear that this interracial couple is engaging in and enjoying sexual intercourse in an artfully shot sensuous sequence.

In the existential mode, Hiroshima Mon Amour asks profound questions: Can love overcome the horrors of war? Sigmund Freud asked which is stronger: Eros (the life force) or Thanatos (the death instinct)? Or as "Dr." George Carlin, that consummate master of wordplay, put it: "The person who thought up the slogan, 'Make Love, Not War'... his job was over that day. He could've retired at that moment. If it would've been me, I would've walked away. So long, I'm goin' to the beach. You guys work it out."

Speaking of Freud, Hiroshima Mon Amour is also about the persistence of memory, and how it can rule and even terrorize our lives, long after those traumatizing events have taken place. Indeed, one could make the point that both characters, especially Elle, suffer from PTSD. The work's film form, which deploys flashbacks and even flash forwards to a flashback (!), helps express these notions. Resnais continued to experiment with cinematic structure as late as his 2012 You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet, made two years before his death in 2014 at the age of 91.

In 1959, the N.Y. Herald Tribune predicted Hiroshima Mon Amour "will still be important 50 years hence." Well, today, as in 1959, this black and white, subtitled movie is not for everyone: Popcorn munchers hungry for mindless entertainment might want to move on to the next screen in the multiplex. Some 2014 viewers may even find the acting, storyline, etc., to be pretentious, too arty, too intellectual, perhaps even laughable.

But 55 years hence, for serious cinema students interested in fine films and movie history, Alain Resnais' masterpiece remains essential viewing. In 1961 Truffaut and Godard co-directed the whimsical short A Story of Water, a romance about the flooding of a French village, which in retrospect could be viewed as metaphorical foreshadowing for how the New Wave inundated world cinema. And Hiroshima Mon Amour remains an essential ripple in this marvelous movie movement. I impatiently await the restoration (assuming it needs it) and re-release (which it surely needs) of Resnais' other early Nouvelle Vague classic, 1961's Last Year at Marienbad.

Hiroshima Mon Amour has been re-released in national distribution. To find out when it screens at a theater near you see: www.rialtopictures.com/hiroshima.

Eye in the Sky: Surveillance and the art of Arnold Mesches

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 14:42:00 +0000

The monks of medieval Europe who spent their days illuminating manuscripts were workmen first, artisans certainly and sometimes artists, their work - apart from praising God and preserving His holy word - being that of archivist and historian. More than mere decorators, what they "threw light on" or "brightened" was the world preoccupied with heaven and hell, sin and grace, the nature of things and the saving power of God.

Round about the turn of this century Arnold Mesches, who is neither monk nor medievalist nor Christian, began illuminating manuscripts from the world that long since had killed God but appropriated or accommodated to a version of His all-seeing eye. The manuscripts in question: Mesches' FBI file, 1945 to 1972.

Mesches' FBI file, 1945 to 1972

Arny, as he calls himself, is 91. He walks quickly. Something about him in motion, with a cane, talking, seems cantilevered. Wrists, elbows, shoulders, knees, all snap to as if operated mechanically, with great economy. He has objectives. He does not notice the chalkboard sign on the street that says, "Coffee! Throw it in the face of your enemy!" He does not worry that the hipsters inside the coffee place are solitary, affixed to their screens; that Bushwick, where we're walking, the latest of New York's rough zones to be colonized by art, is in a fight for its life. The sun is high, we are alive and headed to see his pictures at a gallery called Life on Mars. He has that punch so familiar among old commies who never forgot that while hope survives, politics are possible.

"Were you in the party?" I asked.

"Aw, yeah," he said. His wrist bats the question like a lazy fly. Once, years ago to a group of Nation interns, Alger Hiss slipped from his long-told testimony and murmured, "We were all communists then." Arny's wrist says the same, with vigor.

He had decided to petition for his FBI file after seeing those of some friends. "I loved the way they looked, those black strokes, like Franz Kline color sketches. I also thought, 'This is history, and, hey, this is my history.'"

The package that eventually arrived bespoke the precautions of a madman with a secret. Unbound from the armor of wads of plastic tape, the 768 pages disclosed the comings and goings of Mesches' past, each page a single report, supplied by FBI agents or, more often, by comrades and bedmates, people at a meeting, in a crowd, studio models, purported friends. He learned that the Bureau paid informants $75 a page for their trouble. "Imagine if you were reporting on ten people, that's $750 a week, $3,000 a month; people were living on it." Half a million people were within the state's scope during the years the House Un-American Activities Committee functioned. "I had only 768 pages. I had a friend who had 4,000. He was a very busy man."

Beauty in the riddle of ink on paper

Arny pored over those pages, and while he was getting goose bumps he also saw beauty in the riddle of ink on paper. He began a series of large paintings, collages. Mulling the idea of illuminated manuscripts, he worked smaller, using the pages themselves, making diptychs, containing the documents within borders, adorning them with miniatures, ornamenting them with rough or classical lettering, tarting them up in gold.

The result was a 2002 exhibition at PS1 in Queens, now refreshed, concentrated and christened "Next in Line" for a new generation under surveillance. It is on intimate, riveting display until November 2 at Life on Mars. New Yorkers, get moving.

The show is comic as it is serious. Serious because it's comic. The painted or lifted images bracketing the documents, interrupting them, obscuring them, emerge from the same period as the files but otherwise their juxtaposition is an accident of aesthetic choice. There is the first cover of Playboy, a paint-by-number Last Supper, Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking, a soldier in winter in Korea, snapshots of Coney Island, of Arny's children, an audience in 3D glasses, Malcolm X, the KKK, pieces of toys, logos for Flair, for Mad, Nixon, image transfers from magazine ads for Cutty Sark, for Marlboro, from porno sheets, a hula hoop, the Kennedy convention with grotesques on lofted banners, Havana January 1, 1959, the Hollywood Strike 1946-47, Paul Robeson as Othello, a bloody handprint, a lunar module, a stencil of pickets, a protest armband, clowns, a sketched portrait of Arnold Mesches commissioned by the FBI and executed by an informant who masqueraded as a comrade.

Mesches was subject 100-27874. A "rank and file member" of the Los Angeles Communist Party, the FBI acknowledged some years into its watch, "book number 49939" - not much, or not yet. His "potential or actual dangerousness" seems to have been that he might become something more, might know someone bigger, do something bigger. He certainly popped up at a lot of marches and concerts for "peace." Who could know his dark ambitions? He had been precociously radical, a "former AYD member"; that's American Youth for Democracy, de facto youth arm of the CP. He had sold food from a lunch truck. While doing set illustrations for a Tarzan movie he walked off the job in the great Hollywood Strike. He learned to work in watercolor by going out painting with a couple of set people every morning after picket duty. He "dressed like a Communist," always in jeans, a T-shirt - pretty much the way he dresses now. He did covers and inside drawings for Frontier, "definitely anti-FBI." "He did sketches on disarmament for a conference in April, 1960, sponsored by the Emma Lazarus Jewish Women's Club." He drove a 1954 Ford station wagon, "an old model Nash, California license 2N19005"; in the vicinity of his house were parked a 1958 Chevrolet two-door, a 1954 Plymouth, 1953 Caddy, 1955 Dodge, 1957 Plymouth. Their license numbers are appended. He taught art in Salt Lake City but was "expelled for Communist Sympathies." He taught art at USC. He signed a brief in support of John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo as representative of the Arts & Professions Group. On August 10, 1950, his son, Paul, was born. On January 26, 1966, the Special Agent in Charge of LA sent J. Edgar Hoover an airmail letter "Re: Artist Protest Committee/Information Concerning/(Internal Security)" with Mesches' name and the suggestion of an upcoming demonstration evident but much else blacked out. Yes, he might be dangerous, but ten years into the surveillance an agent was still asking, "Arnold MESKE? try Arnold Maches, try Arnold Musches."

The absurdity of the record works on you like a fever

The absurdity of the record works on you like a fever. Arny's crazycat illumination turns up the heat. You envision the informants, those "of known reliability" and "unknown reliability," making their notes, conferring their daytime smiles; the few who always spelled his name "Arnie" failing to cover their tracks. You think of the agent receiving the reports, filing them dutifully, divining their import. Maybe this should go to the Director? Where's the whiskey? and later, at home, where are my balls? You think about that $75 and the schoolteachers who were bought on the threat of never working in LA County again. You try to imagine sex between the schoolteacher and her lover after she has delivered her report, you try to imagine the workday's end for the monks of the Civil Service who draw thick lines through all those bought words, and you cannot. You sense only the dread in the space between the sigh and the cigarette.

"I really wanted the images to have a feeling of those days, the external life of those days," Arny says at the gallery. "I was inspired by Bruegel. There's a very important event - Icarus is drowning - and the farmer is plowing."

The worst that happened to Mesches was the burglary of his studio in 1956. Two hundred sketches, 100 prints, all his paintings, including several of the Rosenbergs, were robbed, "every piece of work that I could live on." His file makes no mention of this event and is silent about the six months leading up to and following it. Clearly, Arny carried on after the theft of his work, but this show isn't really about him, or who survived, who drowned. It isn't even really about the HUAC years. It's about the world of the drowning and the farmer.

He titled the show "Next in Line" because surveillance is the open secret of this era. Almost no action feels private, but who knows how usable the vast store of information might be, and for what? Arny worries about the NSA, whose technical ability to sweep up data on billions of people in an instant makes pikers of his old nemeses in the FBI. His major addition to the earlier work is a fifty-inch canvas clustered with faces, pen-and-ink drawings affixed to the surface, some overlapping, in different tones, different styles. The work suggests, somehow, a police bulletin board assembling evidence of a crime

The faces are all grim. The effect is fear, whereas in the collision of cruelty, clownishness and chutzpah of the illuminated manuscripts the effect is possibility. As subject and author, so to speak, of the latter, Arny represents a boisterous, "Screw you!" to the whole twisted mess. The faces in the crowd of the most recent collage are not broken on the wheel, not quite victims, but they might be, and Arny's is among them.

The difference hinges on which side of the historical arc the pieces stand. The grim faces could just as easily belong to the early years of HUAC, the scoundrel time of secrecy and constrained terror. Something happened, though, in the political culture across those years of Mesches' file, and it wasn't just that Joe McCarthy was disgraced or that by 1972 the money had dried up for hunting reds. The game was really up six years earlier when the committee called twelve young Vietnam War protesters as hostile witnesses, and the kids and their supporters treated their inquisitors as the scorn-worthy gasbags that they were. Jerry Rubin came dressed as a Revolutionary War soldier. A young man from Stanford began his response to committee chair Joe Pool of Texas with a contemptuous "Well, Joe-Joe." No one took the Fifth, but one witness did say, "I will not answer that question on the grounds that it nauseates me." Another declared, "I certainly am a communist!" One, asked to swear to tell the truth, gave a Nazi salute and clicked his heels. Meanwhile, spectators hooted, jeered, applauded and behaved in every way absurd for the august chambers of Congress. They say tyranny is in trouble when the people lose their fear. Mesches' illuminated manuscripts belong to that side of history's arc. His faces serve best as a warning, though I'm not sure in the way he intended.

I had asked Arny about absurdity on our way to the show, in the shadow of Bushwick's razored industrial walls, past fliers for renovated loft rentals, "Now Going for $4,867." His eyes got bright as black marbles. "Absurdity is the key," he exclaimed. "I used to use anger, but that doesn't involve the audience. It doesn't have the same questioning aspect." In his work he has tried, he's written, "to re-create the sense of utter instability and sheer insanity that I feel has so often permeated my years." Those years are now. The empire is on the rocks, grasping and dangerous, but a joyless, fearful, isolated people haven't got a hope.

JoAnn Wypijewski is co-editor of Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence. She can be reached at jwyp@earthlink.net.

Reprinted by kind permission of the author and Counterpunch

Photo: Next in Line by Arnold Mesches

In "The Decent One," Heinrich Himmler: Dedicated family man

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 16:06:00 +0000

In her analysis of the Adolf Eichmann trial more than 50 years ago, writer Hannah Arendt referred to the "banality of evil" as the crushing ordinariness of everyday life while atrocities of unprecedented proportion are not only going on all around you, but you are actively perpetrating them.

I have no doubt that her pointing to this troubling disconnect in our thinking processes helped guide a generation of (mostly) young protesters toward opposing the Vietnam War. Not even a full generation after the end of World War II, when we thought the global community had said "Never again!" here were our own leaders, in the U.S. and other countries, doing what disturbingly looked like pretty much the same thing.

It is that very ordinariness that film director Vanessa Lapa addresses in her new documentary The Decent One that focuses on the life of Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS and among Adolf Hitler's innermost circle of loyalists. Himmler headed the Gestapo and ruthlessly pursued any perceived enemy of the Third Reich, showing mercy to few. He was one of the principal designers of death camps, working closely with scientists and administrators to ensure that his beloved German officers and soldiers could be spared the headache of having to personally execute Jews and other undesirables in mass killings. That's where gas came in so handy.

Using all archival footage without questionable "reenactments," but with some added sound (running motors, explosions, music), Lapa surveys the early, not particularly distinguished life of her subject, gradually revealing how infected he was (banally, of course, along with millions of others, and not just in Germany) by the casual anti-Semitism and muscular, militaristic masculinity that defined Aryan ideology. In relatively short time, Himmler rose in the Nazi hierarchy owing to his efficiency and effectiveness as his responsibilities increased.

Where Lapa uses original film work, it is to pan over the hundreds of diaries and letters that Himmler and his family exchanged over the course of some 20 years - mostly with his wife Marga and daughter Gudrun - while voiceovers relate the banalities of love and courtship, parenting, sibling relationships, work routines and vacations, holiday plans and gifts. All bathed in a wash of tender embraces and kisses from "Heini."

The story of where this cache of documents came from remains somewhat mysterious. It is surmised that at the end of the war, some Allied soldiers, acting against orders, appropriated Himmler's personal effects from his home in Gmund, and sold them. (Himmler committed suicide on May 23, 1945, with a cyanide capsule shortly after being captured in the final days of the war.) Eventually the papers wound up in Tel Aviv, where they languished untouched for years.

Finally Lapa's father purchased the collection for the purpose of allowing this film to be made. Paired with film clips from 151 different sources, both family and institutional, the resulting 94-minute documentary, a 2014 Israel/Austria/Germany production, in German with English subtitles, is grippingly eerie.

Himmler personified Nazi doctrine in his abhorrence of weakness and homosexuality, his petty bourgeois standards for gender roles (submissive wife, obedient children), his hatred for Jews and Communists. (Viewers will hear a brief clip of "The Internationale" accompanying the scene of a Berlin street rally.) Above all, he loved his German nation, fantasized about the impeccable Aryan morality of the race-pure medieval commonwealth, and wholly identified with the mystical cleansing role the German nation was ordered by history to play in the world.

For someone as punctilious as Himmler, he does show his personal lapses. Disturbed that his (older) wife had given him only one child, when the ruling ideology was to build up the nation with a much higher birthrate than that, Himmler takes on a mistress, by whom he has another two children. And toward the end, after Stalingrad, after the inexorable retreat back home, German cities being bombed into submission, Himmler is still writing upbeat letters reflecting blithe certainty that his side will win.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

Lapa's film certainly does not "humanize" Himmler in his frankly unremarkable family devotion, but only points up how unrecognizable he is as the man who could at one and the same time be one of the great masterminds of Nazism. Is he truly a freak of nature, a moral Frankenstein? Or is he simply opaque to us, like the strangler or serial killer - or bankster or corporate rapist of the Earth - who, it turns out, lives next door, or even in our own house?

Among the memorabilia my Dad nabbed in the course of his service in the Counterintelligence Corps were a few telegrams sent to a regional Gauleiter by leading Nazi officials, congratulating him on the birth of his new son. They were of scant historical significance and I wondered what to do with them. Eventually I turned them over to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust as examples of precisely the kind of "banality" to which these criminally misguided individuals were allowed to rise.

Through it all, Himmler indulges in self-congratulation, emphasizing at every turn how well his officers treat animals, even the "subhuman" ones. Even their plan for a Final Solution of the Jewish Question was in their minds a generous act of decency on behalf of the Aryan nation and the future of the world. It is no exaggeration to say that I squirmed with discomfort and shame for the cognitively dissonant human race at more than one point in the film.

As Himmler writes home from Warsaw, Riga, Lemberg and other cities where he's traveled to supervise the war, all I could think of was the Kurt Weill song "What did the soldier's wife receive?" ("Und was bekam des Soldaten Weib?"), written in 1943 to a poem by Bertolt Brecht. From Prague she received high-heeled shoes, from Oslo a little fur piece, from Amsterdam a fine Dutch hat, lace from Belgium, a silken gown from Paris, an embroidered smock from Bucharest. And from vast Russia? The soldier's wife received the widow's veil.

This haunting film, now in theaters, recently won the best documentary award at the Jerusalem Film Festival.

Photo: Image from The Decent One.

"Dear White People": A wild and crazy "post-racial" campus comedy

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 15:55:00 +0000

The most racially charged movie in 25 years is released around the time when the grand jury in Ferguson is expected to announce its findings regarding the shooting of a Black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white policeman. Dear White People culminates with what may be the big screen's most intense racial confrontation in a film set in contemporary America since Do the Right Thing. And the police play a role in the clash as they did in Spike Lee's 1989 drama.

In Dear White People, the mixed-race female protagonist Samantha White or "Sam" (Tessa Thompson) asks a white theater box office ticket seller: "Can we have a movie with, you know, characters in it, instead of stereotypes wrapped in Christian dogma?" Dear White People is arguably that movie. Scoring awards at the Sundance and Palm Springs Film Festivals, DWP is at the forefront of the cinematic surge of Black-themed films that propelled 12 Years a Slave to Best Picture, acting and writing Oscars last year.

In DWP Sam, a film student, screens her course project Rebirth of a Nation for stunned college cinema students. Featuring Black actors in "whiteface," the militant moviemaker's silent short subverts celluloid stereotypes, stirring classroom controversy with its deconstruction of movie minstrelsy. Sam's work references D.W. Griffith's 1915 racist Civil War-era epic The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan. When screened at the White House, Pres. Woodrow Wilson supposedly exclaimed: "It's like history written with lightning!"

Writer/director Justin Simien's Dear White People is like current affairs written with enlightening ideas about the state of race relations in today's supposedly "post-racial" USA. DWP is an eerie motion picture prophecy of the current Missouri civil disturbances. With a soundtrack ranging from "Swan Lake" to hip-hop to bebop, DWP is so imaginatively rendered that at a screening Thompson gushed: "This is a new genre Justin has made. It's satire, but it's real. It's all those things."

There's nothing black and white in this complex comedy drama. Full of humor - in June, at its LA Film Festival presentation, Simien drolly reassured "white people in the audience... you have permission to laugh" -- as well as ethnic angst, DWP is a cross between Animal House and Spike Lee's Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing.

Simien's sophisticated satire is set at Winchester University, a fictitious Ivy League school where Blacks are 2 percent of the student body. Sam is their strident, if conflicted, leader. A radio DJ, Sam delivers caustic commentaries over campus airwaves, from which the movie's title is derived, such as: "Dear White People, the amount of Black friends required not to seem racist has just been raised to two." (She adds that drug dealers don't count.)

Sam is elected house president of the historically Black residence hall Armstrong/Parker House, defeating her more accommodationist opponent, the buff Troy (Brandon Bell). Troy represents the establishment, as his father is Winchester's Dean (veteran actor Dennis Haysbert). To compound matters Troy dumped Sam in favor of the white Sofia Fletcher (Brittany Curran), daughter of Winchester's patronizing President Herbert Fletcher (Peter Syvertsen, whose character asserts: "Racism is over in America. The only people thinking about it are Mexicans, probably."). Despite her nationalistic bluster, however, Sam is clandestinely close to the white Gabe (Justin Dobies).

Sam spearheads a campaign opposing the administration's "Randomization of Housing Act," which would end Armstrong/Parker's status as an African American sanctum. In an uproarious scene President Fletcher's son, lily-white Kurt (Kyle Gallner), and his Caucasian cohorts are exiled from the hall's dining room. Kurt edits Winchester's prominent humor magazine, Pastiche, which is similar to Dartmouth's Jack-O-Lantern and Harvard's Lampoon.

Two more DWP Black characters seek to become mass media figures -- but unlike Sam, do so even if it means compromising their ethnic identities. Sporting the big screen's biggest Afro since 1970s' Blaxploitation flicks, the gay, nerdy, misfit Lionel Higgins (Tyler James Williams) goes undercover to write an exposé of Sam and Winchester's Black milieu in his bid to become the sole current African American staff reporter for the university's Winchester Bugle newspaper, with its New York Times adviser.

In her quest for celebrity, the blue eye contact-wearing, self-denying Colandrea "Coco" Conners (Teyonah Parris) appears ready to sell out other African Americans as she strives to star in a reality TV show. Status-conscious Coco also beds Troy and agrees to host Pastiche's annual Halloween party at Garmin House, the clubhouse where Kurt lives. In a confrontation with the racist minstrel-like merrymakers, all hell breaks loose at the party in American cinema's most powerful modern-day racial row since the riot at Sal's pizzeria in Do the Right Thing.

Simien has said that while writing DWP "the Trayvon Martin thing happened; I saw the whole post-racial bubble really bursting. Then for me the script became about something. This interesting Black experience became about the American-Black experience. What does it mean to be Black now? Is there still racism?" The subsequent events at Ferguson appear to answer those questions.

The "culture war" is coming soon to a theater near you: Dear White People is now in nationwide theatrical release.

The Revolution is coming to a theater near you: 1969 in review

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 13:45:00 +0000

One of the great things about the theater is that it can dramatize history, and the people who make it and shake it. Actual events can be given shape and form when expressed in the theatrical medium. Playwright Barbara White Morgan attempts to do this by taking on the heady late Sixties, when revolution was in the year, with the Towne Street Theater world premiere production of 1969.

Ajamu (Jaimyon Parker) wears the era's obligatory uniform of black leather jacket, shades (even indoors and at night) and Afro, which were de rigueur for the period's Black militants. His comrade, Lewis (Lamar Usher) also even dons a beret. Ajamu is the leader of the Afrocentric Blacks United group, which occupies a building that the city government, led by City Councilman Ernest Butler (Kenny Cooper), wants to redevelop and turn into a youth center. This sets the two -- both African American but from different sides of the ideological tracks -- on a collision course.

In doing so, this two-acter directed by Kim Harrington poses and dramatizes questions that were very much in the air circa 1969. How will the oppressed advance and attain liberation? By staying within the system or by straying outside of the prevailing established ways of doing things? In Morgan's play, integration collides with Black nationalism, nonviolence with militancy, Civil Rights with Black power, the ballot with the bullet.

While Blacks United is a fictional group, it seems like a synthesis of, or suggested by, actual organizations, such as the Philadelphia-based MOVE and the Black Panthers (although the latter actually considered themselves Marxists, not what Huey Newton and Bobby Seale mocked as "pork chop nationalists"). Indeed, the staged standoff at the Blacks United headquarters calls to mind the similar impasse at MOVE's HQ, which resulted in the U.S. government's only domestic aerial firebombing of the 20th century. In any case, SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) is also alluded to, while Ajamu seems like a composite character composed of Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey, etc.

The earnest Ernest believes in more incremental change through the electoral process, and seems emblematic of the wave of African American politicians who attained office in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and the Voting Rights Act, which saw the late Sixties elections of Carl Stokes and Richard Hatcher as the Black mayors of Cleveland and Gary. 1969 ponders whether these changes at the top will engender true Black empowerment -- or the creation of a new African American establishment. The fact that the drama's city councilman's last name is "Butler" -- long a stereotypical and subservient role for Blacks -- may indicate where Morgan stands on that issue.

Megan Weaver is fetching as Ernest's wife, Grace Butler. Has the city councilman's wife, with her Afro wigs and fur coat, gone bourgie? Grace's (presumably) younger, less together sister Edna (Lina Green, who has an expressive face and appeared in Adam Sandler's Jack and Jill) is trying to pull herself together. As 1969 was rather famously also when Woodstock took place, no play about that year would be complete without a flower child, and Samantha Clay has some scene stealing fun as the stoned-out hippie Joyce, which displays her background with the Groundlings improv troupe. In a double role she also plays Mayor Evans' (Jonathan Harrison) conventional wife Sylvia, who may well be the flip side of her countercultural alter ego. Another white actor, Andy Ottenweller, portrays Dave Epstein, radical host of a talk show in, perhaps, the David Susskind mode (although Epstein's Dave is hipper, younger and to the liberal Susskind's left), who sympathizes with Ajamu and his cause.

All of the elements are here for a combustible concoction set against the background of the sizzling Sixties. Alas, this Molotov cocktail never explodes. Although I was intellectually absorbed by 1969, it rarely became emotionally engaging, even when high stakes were being played. Perhaps this was due to the acting, directing, or maybe the writing -- or perhaps all three? For one thing, the staging is a bit repetitious. The play's credits do not list a set designer per se, and it shows, considering the very standard artwork that decorates the Butlers' apartment (although it may be meant to cleverly reveal the couple's being divided between their Black sides and the bland middle class values they seem to aspire to). In any case, this is supposed to be live theater, not a pamphlet or leaflet.

Having said that, Morgan's plot does have some twists and turns which I did not see coming, which is to the dramatist's credit. As is the effort to render a play with characters who embody the social struggles of 1969, and a story that dramatizes that era's "almost" revolution as we saw it. Alas, our side lost and we must soldier on, especially as the civil unrest unfolds in Missouri, showing that, beneath the surface, America remains a powder keg ready to blow. 1969 is presented by the Towne Street Theater, which was created after the 1992 L.A. riots "to create, develop and produce original work that is reflective of the African-American experience and perspective..."

Perhaps next stop for TST's 1969 is Ferguson? The fire next time!

1969 is being performed Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 pm and Sundays at 4:00 pm through Nov. 2 at the Stella Adler Theater, Main Stage, 6773 Hollywood Blvd., 2nd Floor, Hollywood, California, 90028. For info: (213) 712-6944; www.townestreetla.org. For online tickets go to: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/towne-street-theater-presents-the-world-premiere-of-1969-by-barbara-white-morgan-tickets-12898777591

Panopticon's breathtaking ride on "Roads to the North"

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 15:16:00 +0000

When it comes to underground music, the black metal genre is about as subterranean as it gets. Known for its harshness of sound and low-fidelity recording, and perhaps even more so for its infamously anti-religious lyrical material, it has built itself a reputation steeped in controversy. As of late, a number of such bands in the U.S. have infused their sound with various cultural and musical influences, and one of those is Kentucky's Panopticon, who have just released their fifth full-length album, Roads to the North.

Cascadian black metal

Panopticon is the musical project of one man - Austin Lunn, a Kentucky native, environmental activist, and, when it comes to metal, a jack of all trades (he provides vocals and plays all the instruments you hear on the albums). Lunn began playing black metal, but eventually branched out into folk metal, traditional folk music, and bluegrass, along with blackgrass (a fusion of that genre and black metal). All in all, the music falls under the umbrella of 'Cascadian black metal,' a subgenre that defines particularly atmospheric, nature-oriented black metal with folk elements. It is so named because bands that started this trend, like Agalloch and Wolves in the Throne Room, originated in the Cascadian region of North America.

The last release by Panopticon was called Kentucky, and focused on the historical plight of coal miners in Lunn's home state, especially their efforts to unionize and secure decent wages. It also dealt with coal mining in general as a harmful practice, with songs that referenced mountaintop removal and pollution of land and water. There were even covers of two famous labor songs, "Which Side Are You On?" by Florence Reece (and once covered also by Pete Seeger), and "Come All Ye Coal Miners" by Sarah Ogan Gunning.

Panopticon's lyrics have differed from album to album, but have almost always been environment-themed, with socially conscious and culturally rich undertones. This is rather different than the decidedly more violent lyrics of the Norwegian and Swedish bands that first begat black metal - and yet it is not so far removed, at least in the thematic sense, from the genre's penchant for constantly referencing and idealizing nature. One must remember that bands Immortal and Satyricon, both well-known black metal pioneers, wrote lyrics that spoke of worshipful adoration for - respectively - Scandinavian winter landscapes and the old forests of medieval times. Panopticon, for its part, continues this tradition, but focuses on the plentiful nature that exists in the Appalachian region of the U.S.

Further detailing why Panopticon moves away from the Scandinavian sound, Lunn said in an interview, "I love folk metal and Viking metal. It's awesome and a lot of fun, and Viking metal-era Bathory is one of my favorite things to listen to. But I wanted to keep it honest. Yes, I love Scandinavian history, but I grew up in the Southern region of the U.S., and a lot of people are not aware of the history and folklore of their own region. The schools don't promote it; I think American history classes in public schools dumb down our history." I like to go to places where history happened, "feel the soil under my feet; learn about it," and the music is reflective of that.

From sadness and sorrow to bucolic tranquility

That tradition remains quite prevalent on Roads to the North. While 2012's Kentucky focused on coal mining and unions, and 2011's Social Disservices focused on the unequal and prejudicial treatment of poor people and the mentally ill, the latest shifts things away from strong sociopolitical issues, and handles the dilemma of our warming planet from a more internal, primitivist, and romanticized perspective. Roads to the North indeed takes the listener along a road, with twists and turns emphasized by changing instrumental styles and cross-genre textures. Though deliberately subjective, Lunn purposefully sought to make the music emotively transitional, progressing from feelings of sadness and sorrow to those of bucolic tranquility.

Lunn incorporates the sounds of various instruments, including banjo, Native American flute, qilaut (a frame drum made of caribou skin, indigenous to the Inuit cultures of the Arctic), and fiddle. What's best about these instruments is that they aren't there to provide a hollow sense of eclecticism or multicultural sophistication, but rather, to truly benefit and color the music itself. As such, they are used where appropriate, and blended with the black metal (as in the three-part, 24-minute-long epic "The Long Road") where it works.

"Where Mountains Pierce the Sky" is a particularly strong track; it begins with Americana-style folk music that transplants your eardrums onto a placid Appalachian hiking trail, then picks up the pace and connects this seamlessly to a black metal crescendo, which, visually speaking, rises in tandem with the mountains it lyricizes.

Given the swathe of intermingling genres and eco-themes that fill the album, one would expect this release to be not so much a road, but more a tangled mess of endless, busy highways. But it's not so; every piece of music compliments the piece that preceded it, and no two styles clash. Not only is it the best recent example of successful music experimentation, it's also arguably one of the most listenable - and re-listenable - albums Panopticon has ever done, and that's a credit to Lunn's musicianship.

According to Lunn, Roads to the North is the first release where Panopticon isn't so much crying out in protest, but simply documenting and telling a powerful story, though often, as with most art, that is a form of protest in and of itself. "I started Panopticon when I was 24 or 25," Lunn explained, "and I feel like now that I am 31, I have definitely changed as a person. I have gained perspective and turned inward more, withdrawing from city life and seeking more time alone, or with family. I live out in the woods now and have really grown to love it and cherish the solitude. I feel like in a lot of ways, the music reflects that." On other records, "I was talking about what pissed me off; what I felt was wrong with the world. Now," on Roads to the North, "I am finally ready to focus on what I think is right and beautiful in this world."

Photo: Panopticon official Facebook page

Laughter through tears in Canada's "Rez Sisters"

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 11:54:00 +0000

VICTORIA, B.C. - Every seat was taken in the Belfry Theatre October 7^th for a performance of the drama, The Rez Sisters. All the actors were First Nation women and one man whose virtuoso performances were greeted with a standing ovation.

The audience was invited to join a post-performance discussion of the play and thirty or so people, including First Nation tribal members, attended, sharing their insights, hailing the play for exposing racist oppression of the native peoples of Canada. We had taken the Coho ferry across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Port Angeles to see the performance at an old converted church in the Fernwood neighborhood of Victoria.

The play by Canada's acclaimed First Nation playwright, Tomson Highway, tells the story of seven First Nation women, all sisters or sisters-in-law, living on the fictional Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island in northern Ontario. Plagued with poverty, illness, and violence, the women are transfixed by the idea of traveling to Toronto to join in the "Biggest Bingo in the World," convinced that winning the half million-dollar jackpot will solve their problems.

Each woman has her own story. One has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. One, a child-like mentally challenged girl, has been raped. Pelajia Patchnose, played by the celebrated Tantoo Cardinal (Smoke Signals, Dances with Wolves), opens the play. Standing on the roof holding a hammer she proclaims that her dream is to finish re-roofing her house, creating a warm place to live. She speaks of prizes that will benefit her tribe, benefit all people, like paved roads. She plays a leading role throughout the play, more grounded in reality by her tools.

Throughout, Nanabush, a jokester dressed as a bird, dances around the women. Played by Waawaate Fobister, he is a spirit from the netherworld who gently mocks their dreams.

Neither the provincial government nor the tribal council will fund their road trip, so they raise the money by house cleaning, window washing, babysitting - all acted out with great enthusiasm onstage. They add up their earnings. They are a couple of hundred dollars short.

Emily Dictionary, dressed in her motorcycle togs, decides to sing at a local saloon together with Annie Cook, played by Lisa C. Ravenbergen. They sing so well that they earn more than enough to pay for the journey. Their western-style ballad is one of the high points of the play. Emily, played by Reneltta Arluk, is also the driver of the vehicle that careens its way south to Toronto. She is full of energy and wit, undefeated by the trials and tribulations of life. I wanted her to sing another song.

They arrive at the Biggest Bingo. The master for the game is Nanabush now dressed in flamboyant satin, who loudly proclaims the biggest jackpot in the world. Each person in the audience has a bingo sheet tucked in their program. The actors all freeze. The master invites us all to play. A woman sitting in front of us won. "Bingo!" she cried. The master told her she could pick up her jackpot at the front office.

Then the actors resumed playing Bingo, furiously.

But the lottery, a plastic bubble lit up with twinkling lights, lottery balls bouncing, sinks down into the stage and is gone. None of the women has won. Marie Adele Starblanket, the cancer victim (played by Tasha Faye Evans) has a convulsive coughing fit. She stands, runs upstage. The bingo master lifts her as if to carry her into the afterlife. She falls into the pit and is dead. The bingo game is over.

In an epilogue back home at the reserve, Pelajia Patchnose tells the audience that the women will keep on living, struggling for decency and happiness.

Life is a lottery. Everyone must play. But the "free market" rigs the game so the casino always wins. Tomson Highway wrote the play 28 years ago. It rings as true today as when he wrote it in 1986. The Belfry Theatre production of this play ends October 19. It has played to a full house. In Canada and the United States, there is a hunger for honest truth-telling like The Rez Sisters. I hope the producers take it on the road and it makes its way south of the Canadian border.

Photo: Rez Sisters on their way to the Biggest Bingo in the World, Belfry Theatre website.

Chicago International Film Festival celebrates 50th anniversary

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 11:47:00 +0000

The longest-running competitive film festival in America is celebrating its 50th anniversary this month. The Chicago International Film Festival, running for two weeks from Oct. 9-23 will be showing over 200 films. It was the dream of 22 year-old Michael Kutza back in 1965, who still plays the role of Artistic Director. He selects significant films from around the globe that celebrate courageous and talented filmmakers, with the Festival still open to diverse styles and themes, experimental, political and challenging.

The Festival is also strong on celebrations honoring masters both past and present. This year Charles Chaplin and Orson Welles are featured in special documentaries. A thorough study of Italian film history through the eyes of film great Gian Luigi Rondi will also be shown.

Stars in attendance this year include director Oliver Stone, actress turned director Liv Ullman, Colin Farrell, Isabelle Huppert, and Kathleen Turner, to name a few, with Stone presenting director's cuts of Natural Born Killers and Alexander the Great.

Some films that were screened in at the Toronto International Film Festival have shown up in Chicago also, including the great biopic on mathematician Alan During, Imitation Game; Red Army, the thrilling doc about Soviet hockey; Red Rose, a drama about the 2009 democracy movement in Iran; and the sequel to Act of Killing, the equally shocking Look of Silence, all of which were reviewed in previous columns.

Each year the Festival also pays tribute to classics, this year including the 75th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn, the 60th anniversary of A Star is Born with Judy Garland, the 25th anniversary of Michael Moore's Roger and Me, Ingmar Bergman's classic Fanny and Alexander, Lars Von Trier's first breakthrough film, Breaking the Waves, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest which premiered in 1975 at the Festival.

There are many other progressive films to look for, most of which will be reviewed later in these columns. Producer-director Bob Rafelson (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Last Picture Show) will present the Action4Climate Award Winners for the Best Short Films about climate change. Dear White People and The Evolution of Bert address Black identity and race relations; workers and labor issues are covered in Two Days One Night, Joy of Man's Desiring and Underdog; films from Cuba (Hotel Nueva Isla), Tunisia (El Gort), China (Iron Ministry), Georgia (The President), Russia (The Fool), Rwanda (Life After Death), round out an amazing collection of films, many of which will be difficult to see elsewhere.

Each movie screening starts with a short video welcome recognizing the significance of this year's Festival, narrated by a deep, slow-speaking resonant voice underscored by classic film music: "Everybody, but everybody, loves the movies: 5 decades, 10,000 features, over 2 million attendance, over 10,000 performances, over 40 countries each year, 80,000 entries, 100 weeks and 1.5 million bags of popcorn."

That's a lot of movies from the country's longest running festival!

Fertile Ground: Art and community in California

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 14:26:00 +0000

Curators, from both San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Oakland Museum of California, teamed up to craft an exhibit showcasing the influence of community across four important periods of California art.

While all four-time periods presented are of great interest- the first gallery presented, Patronage, Public Art and Allegory of California, is especially rewarding for a viewer with an interest in labor and political history, highlighting a rich overview of the creative community that thrived in the Bay Area in the 1930s.

The decade opened, artistically, with the arrival of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in San Francisco. The pair were heralded by a supportive progressive art community, which included businessman and patron of the arts Albert Bender, as well as several artists in the Bay Area which had worked with the couple in Mexico or had been influenced by both their artistic methods and Communist politics.

A flurry of debate over the appropriateness in hiring a devoted anti-capitalist to decorate the west coast temple of commerce was launched when sculptor Ralph Stackpole secured a commission for his friend Rivera to create murals for the Pacific Stock Exchange. OMCA's gallery signage pokes gentle fun at this controversy with the title "A Communist at the Stock Exchange" in the section depicting the mural created by Rivera, Allegory of California. The resulting work of art, however, was far milder than the work Rivera created in New York in1934, Man at the Crossroads, which so infuriated his patron, John D. Rockefeller Jr., that he had it chipped off the wall of Rockefeller Center.

The closeness Kahlo and Rivera shared with the arts community in the Bay Area is represented by two beautiful paintings by Kahlo, one a portrait of the couple with words commemorating their visit, the other a portrait of Dr. Leo Eloesser, a leftist activist who would go on to serve in the Spanish Civil War. Kahlo painted several portraits during the couple's stay in San Francisco, while Rivera completed public projects.

The first art-related New Deal project in the country, even predating the better-known Works Project Administration, was the Coit Tower mural project, which commissioned 27 artists to decorate the interior of this unique feature on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. Most of the artists were socialists and Communists, who were also influenced by Rivera's artistic style and his employment of mural art to inform and educate utilizing public art. (Refreshingly, OMCA's gallery signage includes the political views of the artists, in a matter of fact manner, along with their other biographical information.)

The San Francisco waterfront was a center of strong labor ferment, especially among the longshoremen, under the leadership of Harry Bridges. A display in the gallery is devoted to the events leading up the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, including archival material from news outlets reporting on the struggles. Dorothea Lange was present at the large May Day gathering that foreshadowed the strike, and two of her photos documenting speakers and members of the crowd are on exhibit in this section.

Spring and summer of 1934, artists painting up in Coit Tower were able to witness events unfolding down the hill from the windows of the tower, including Bloody Thursday, July 3, 1934, the day of a reactionary police attack on striking workers. Two men, Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise, a CPUSA member, were shot and killed by police,

The Coit Tower artists were fighting their own battle in the tower, as the entrance to the murals was padlocked, in reaction to controversy over Marxist, Communist and other left-wing imagery depicted in the murals. It was felt that the artwork was feeding into the unrest at the docks, and one mural by Clifford Wight, depicting the hammer and sickle, would be mysteriously painted over, a historical puzzle that still remains unsolved. (KQED, Let's Get Lost) The artists also picketed at Coit Tower on hearing that Rivera's Rockefeller mural had been censored, which also fueled their drive to depict radicalized political content in their artwork.

Although the theme of the show is community and how it leads to creativity by fostering connections among artists, the question left unasked by the show is, how is community created? Proximity, shared resources, shared views and challenges all work to bring people together, but what creates a shared sense of purpose that creates a vigorous and unique art movement?

Fertile Ground does make the case that striving in isolation, despite the stereotype of the lone starving artist, does not reflect historical reality for well-known California artists. In the case of the New Deal artists of San Francisco, arguably it was the support of social programs like the WPA that made it possible to live free from starvation, create works, and collaborate with each other in public spaces. The social forces of the times influenced viewpoints and subject matter, but it was a government commitment to put artists to work that allowed those viewpoints to flourish.

Fertile Ground: Art and Community in California

Oakland Museum of California Sept. 20--April 12, 2015

Link to slideshow of photos from exhibit: http://s955.photobucket.com/user/mpkartist/slideshow/Fertile%20Ground%20OMCA

Photo: Diego and Frida, from the slideshow

The Cold War plays at Toronto Film Festival

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 13:57:00 +0000

The Soviet Union was obsessed with two sports: hockey and chess (that's right! It's a sport). For decades, they held the championship in both arenas. Two new films shown at the Toronto International Film Festival bring back memories of those glorious Soviet days when they proudly displayed the accomplishments of their socialist system.

Pawn Sacrifice deals with the unbeatable Soviet chess master, Boris Spassky, and the classic world championship match with Bobby Fischer, America's unbeatable foe. Uncannily accurate portrayals of Spassky and Fischer by Liev Schreiber and Tobey Maguire move this drama along to the well known exciting climax.

Along the way we learn of Fischer's youth and how he got involved in chess, prompted by his "New York Communist parents," and his growing obsessive behavior that eventually drove him off track. The Cold War is referenced often, especially by his anti-Communist lawyer manager who helps turn him away from his parents. Spassky is the exact opposite, calm and resolute, hardly affected by Fischer's antics, but certainly fearing the young man's talents. We know who wins, but it's a thrilling story to follow, especially in the hands of the competent director, Edward Zwick (Glory), and a fine cast of actors.

Red Army deals with the unbeatable Soviet hockey team that took home all the trophies. With players whom even Wayne Gretzky bowed down to, Soviet teams constantly amazed the crowds, and of course pissed off the Cold Warriors. Red Army, directed by Chicagoan Abe Polsky, is a loving tribute to hockey and its thrilling competitiveness, featuring interviews with some of hockey's greatest players. By the way, what ever happened to all those great players? And how did they accomplish the impossible? Oh, and yes, how can we get the players to defect and play on our side? These are all questions raised in a jovial manner by an interviewer who seems to prefer avoiding any political ramifications, as he goes to great lengths to get the truth. He interviews the first coach, the wives and all the players. The "A Team" of players eventually joined the Detroit Red Wings in a nostalgic reunion that lasted for years. True, it's only a sport, but it was also the Cold War, and that's what makes the film most intriguing.

Slava Fetisov, probably the greatest hockey player who ever lived and one of the only ones who chose not to defect from the USSR (later Russia), is featured heavily throughout this fast-paced, often funny examination of an awesome sports industry. Fetisov, who lived and played throughout the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, served as Minister of Sports in Putin's Russia. His commitment and passion for the sport seems unending, and his youthful exuberance belies the struggles he describes in his coy interviews. Fetisov is often turned off by the interviewer's inarticulateness, and is even caught off camera giving Polsky the finger - in a joking manner. This comical interplay is characteristic of the tone of this hearty and penetrating study of a critical chapter in world history and hockey, often displayed in thrilling archival footage of championship games with Canada and the U.S. Sony Pictures Classics will release the film in January.

A certain nostalgia for the Soviet days is unavoidable for millions of people around the world who remember the positive aspects of socialism compared to the ills plaguing many of the citizens of the former Soviet republics today.

But anti-Communists now residing in those newly independent countries are enjoying the unchallenged opportunity to rewrite history, and they are making movies like In the Crosswind from Estonia. The film starts with a bold statement: "June 14, 1941 - 40,000 innocent people were deported from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The aim of this secret operation - done on Stalin's orders - was to ethnically cleanse the Baltic countries of their native people." That sets the tone for the rest of this bitter diatribe, forgetting that it was Hitler and the Nazis that started the war (invading the USSR just a week later) that eventually killed around 50 million people.

Film, even documentaries, can misrepresent the truth as fast as the present becomes past. In the West's perpetual rush to rewrite history, after spending billions to distort and denigrate the accomplishments of then existing socialist countries, we get films like this. It's understandable though, since historical recreations are passed through many stages, capitalist studio heads, anti-Communist writers, historians and academics.

Searching for the truth can be a rocky road.

On the eastern front, Soviets were fighting the Nazi scourge for a long time by itself, losing thousands of towns and villages, ultimately over 20 million lives lost. Some like to add this figure to Stalin's crimes, implying that he started the war and was equal to Hitler. When people attack Stalin for his crimes, is the target actually one person or the entire Soviet socialist experiment?

In the Crosswind, however, is a beautiful and artful film, attempting to recreate the horrors of those forced to evacuate their homeland, for whatever reasons you want to believe. Using black and white photography, the entire film uses slow tracking shots of motionless actors holding poses, as if they were photographs. It's a very dramatic effect, especially with the powerful musical score, but eventually becomes tiresome and pretentious.

Images recreate the narrated words from philosophy student Erna's diary - Russian soldiers holding down and forcing innocent citizens with frightened gazes. Very little is said of Nazi atrocities, whose forces were creating gruesome scenes of horror (see Elem Klimov's Come and See), advancing with speed and power to create more Lebensraum for the Aryan Volk.

Many Baltic citizens defected to the German enemy's side and fought against the Soviets, providing espionage within the USSR and betraying military and state secrets. Many others escaped abroad.

The movie ends with the final attack on Soviet history: "in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, over 590,000 people were casualties of the mass repression during the Soviet occupation. Large numbers of deported women and children died from starvation and fatigue. Very few made it back to their homeland. This film is dedicated to the victims of the Soviet Holocaust."

Ah, yes, history is written by the victors.

“Sixteen Tons,” a novel about coal miners, invites us to rethink capitalism

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 11:25:00 +0000

What does it take to bring a pot of water to boil, to light a lamp, to heat a home?

When read in light of this simple question, Kevin Corley's 2014 novel Sixteen Tons, a Novel pushes us to interrogate the humanity of the U.S. dominant culture's values as they have historically been realized in the way we organize our economy and the social relationships of production so we can produce goods and services to meet our basic collective needs, such as bringing the proverbial pot of water to boil. What stands out in Corley's rich and intimate, yet epic, portrayal of working-class lives across generations as he narrates the larger history of class struggle in the U.S. coal industry from 1898 to 1948, is the sheer and constant violence and brutality workers and their families endured-and also engaged in. Indeed, in this sense, the work can be read as a novelistic counterpart to Louis Adamic's 1934 history Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, though Corley focuses exclusively on coal mines and really brings the history to life with well-developed characters across classes, as he explores in layered ways the social, psychological, and historical factors that condition character and behavior.

Sixteen Tons represents violent behavior on all sides, urging us to reflect on the circumstances in our class culture that foster brutality. The novel opens portraying the Virden Massacre of 1898 in which workers shot African Americans being brought in as strikebreakers and then moves through particularly bloody landmark moments in U.S. labor history in the coal industry, including the massacre of striking workers in Ludlow, Colorado in 1914, the Battles of Matewan and Blair Mountain in West Virginia in 1920 and 1921, the Herrin Massacre in Illinois in 1922, up through struggles in the 1930s when workers organized the Progressive Miners of America as an alternative union of John Lewis's United Mine Workers union.

The violence is murderous, and it doesn't simply punctuate this history; it pervades and indeed defines it. When reading the novel, I was reminded of Paula Gunn Allen's characterizing of Native American women's writing as a war literature that has "articulated and rendered the experience of being in a state of war for five hundred years," even if "non-Indians are largely unconscious of this struggle." Sixteen Tons, in its representation of the relentless violence of class struggle, particularly against workers and their families, underscores that we can also accurately characterize U.S. working-class literature as similarly rendering the experience of living in a constant state of war, of being constantly under attack. And, certainly, U.S. culture as a whole is "largely unconscious" of this fact and history. One character in the novel, in commenting on the Battle of Blair Mountain, comments, "Fifteen thousand of us there were, the biggest army on American soil since the War of Succession," highlighting the magnitude and reality of this class war that rages on in our history and culture without acknowledgment for the most part. Part of Corley's achievement is in making this class war visible in the most human of terms as we follow the lives of working-class families for the most part simply wanting to earn a living wage and live with and raise their families in loving and cooperative ways.

Corley's representation of the Ludlow Massacre is particularly unrelenting, as we see the tent city where workers' families live under fire from corporate-backed snipers and militia at all hours of the night, killing children and parents. Finally, the tent city is burned to the ground and the workers and their families are hunted. It is sheer brutality, and it makes us ask if this is really the best way we can devise for producing the energy to bring a pot of water to boil. Seriously?! As another character says, speaking of the mine bosses at Blair Mountain, " . . . they're just sleek, dignified church-going gentlemen who would rather pay fabulous sums to kill men for wanting to join a union than pay those same men for delving into the subterranean depths of the earth and producing the wealth for them."

The novel makes visible and forces reflection on the murderous brutality towards workers, towards people generally, in our economic system designed to produce profit rather than meet human need. Typically, it is conceived that feudalism supposedly differs from capitalism in that it employs non-economic forms of coercion to extract value from workers while capitalism relies on impersonal market forces to determine wages and so forth. Sixteen Tons invites us to rethink capitalism by focusing on the naked and brute violence employed by capital to reduce wages and production costs at the expense of worker safety. And it asks us to imagine a better, a more humane way to bring the pot of water to boil.

Book review

Sixteen Tons, a Novel

Kevin Corley

Hardball Press, 2014, 388 pages/paperback