People Before Profit blog

A book of considerable consequence: "Chasing the Scream"

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 16:56:00 +0000

Johann Hari, British journalist and storyteller extraordinaire, asks the penetrating question, "What if everything we know about drugs and addiction is wrong?" Seizing the reader's attention from the opening sentence of his three-year, thirty-thousand-mile fact-finding odyssey, Hari presents compelling evidence to support his contention that there are several practical alternatives to the policy that has been the scourge of large segments of humanity for the past one hundred years. It is no exaggeration to declare this a book of considerable consequence.

"Why did the drug war start and why does it continue? Why can some people use drugs without any problems while others can't? What really causes addiction? What happens if you choose a radically different policy?" Hari's responses to these essential queries are revealed in richly developed scenes that vibrate with the fervency of a man on a mission. It turns out that something quite personal motivates him: There is a history of addiction in his family and at times, he himself has felt drawn toward the siren song of certain chemical substances.

When all drugs were legal

Across the globe, a century ago, all drugs were legal. Here at home, cocaine was an ingredient in the aptly named Coca-Cola, and bestselling cough syrups of the day were fortified with opiates. On the other side of the Atlantic, upper-class English women purchased heroin in the toniest department stores.

Against a backdrop of foreign revolution, war, massive internal migration and increasing industrialization, American society embarked on a reactive search for a scapegoat on which to displace the attendant cultural anxiety. As the author describes, the United States settled on the use and abuse of drugs as a cause to be vilified and exploited. In due time the rest of the world followed.

No analysis of the birth of the "war on drugs" would be accurate without scrutinizing the degree to which racial fear and hatred were used to give the tortured false assumptions at its core the necessary propellant to gain traction. Hari's framing of the pivotal role played by the malevolently ambitious and racist Harry Anslinger, director of the corrupt Bureau of Narcotics, in the hounding to death of transcendent African American blues singer Billie Holiday, is a tragic component of the author's astute interpretation of the "war's" history.

Once the courageous Ms. Holiday began singing the anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit" to white audiences, Anslinger had the pretext to bring the full weight of his governmental agency down on "Lady Day," making it impossible for the great artist to continue her career. Another song in Ms. Holiday's repertoire that spoke to audiences of deep suffering was the wrenching "Lover Man Where Can You Be," a paean not to a lover, but to heroin, the drug she began using at an early age to deaden the pain of a traumatic childhood.

Anslinger's racially motivated campaign didn't stop there. The flames of hysteria blazing around the "Yellow Peril" were fanned by his paranoid tales of Chinese men luring Caucasian girls into "opium dens" where the young women would become addicted and forced into acts of "unspeakable sexual depravity." "Once the Chinese dealers got you hooked," said Anslinger, "the yellow race would rule the world."

Headlines in the era's newspapers bellowed forth with horrific tales of the fearsomely uncontrollable "Cocaine Addicted Negro," beings so hopped up on drugs that cops couldn't bring them down at point blank range. In response, some police forces began using higher caliber bullets.

Race and prison

According to recent estimates, as Hari has told interviewers, 50 percent of the U.S. adult population has broken drug laws. Clearly, the country can't imprison half its citizenry. Not surprisingly, law enforcement targets the lowest hanging fruit - poor neighborhoods populated largely by people of color - to make their arrests. African Americans don't use drugs at a higher rate than whites, but 1 in 3 African American males will go to prison during their lifetime, a significant percentage serving time for non-violent drug-related offenses, while Caucasian males have a 1 in 17 chance of spending time behind bars for similar crimes.

The "war on drugs" is a cornerstone of the prison industrial complex. The shameful inequities laid bare by these statistics constitute but one of many facets of the mass incarceration disaster decimating the lives of many millions. With 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of its prisoners, the U.S. leads the world in the number of imprisoned individuals - a staggering 700 out of every 100,000 Americans are presently behind bars. In her groundbreaking book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," legal scholar Michelle Alexander characterizes the system of mass incarceration as a means of social control. Her analysis is an indispensable companion to Hari.

Ideally, the free flow of legal commerce is protected by the state through regulation and enforcement of laws by the police and government agencies. When drugs are made illegal, those involved in the sale and circulation of illicit goods are compelled to use violence as a means of protecting their distribution networks. Hari traces the arc of Arnold Rothstein's ascendance as a Prohibition Era kingpin, connecting the escalating murderous mayhem employed by the gangster and his minions to the present-day Mexican Zeta drug cartel, an organization that serves the vast market of North American consumers and relies on widespread assassination to exert its power and influence. Drug cartels in Mexico are now arguably more powerful than the state.

Exploring the alternatives

During his visit to Vancouver, Hari, expertly assisted by Canadian professor Bruce Alexander, deconstructs a 20^th-century experiment that isolated individual rats in a cage. The rodents were given a choice between two sources of water - one, a bottle containing unadulterated water, the other, water blended with cocaine. Invariably, the animals would drink the spiked water until the consumption caused their death. The findings were used to support the theory that once drugs imbedded their chemical hook in the brain, it was next to impossible to reverse the resulting addiction, a conclusion that flies in the face of more recently obtained data.

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is connection, Hari persuasively affirms as he continues his discussion with the professor. Dr. Alexander designed a new study after observing the limitations of the "isolation experiment," creating instead a "rat park," where rats were placed in an environment furnished with toys, other rats to play with and have sex with, plenty of food, and the same two sources of water: one with the unadulterated liquid, the other mixed with a potent drug. The outcome of this experiment was quite different: The rats in the "happy cages" showed no need to anesthetize themselves due to social isolation. Instead, they chose "to spend their lives doing other things. Addiction is an adaptation," writes Hari, "It's not you - it's the cage you live in."

Childhood trauma is frequently a factor in creating the need to numb one's emotional pain. The corrective, as reported by the author during his travels to Switzerland and Portugal, is not just removing the drug; rather, the addict can only recover when he or she is put in a position to be connected to a life of meaning that includes work, friends and family. Social recovery is the answer; individual recovery alone is not enough. The removal of legal penalties is not in itself a panacea: Treatment centers, job training, government subsidizing of jobs for rehabilitating drug users, drug education for teenagers, and compassionate care of addicts are all part of a combined approach that greatly mitigates the cost to both individuals and society.

Switzerland voted in the 1990s to decriminalize heroin at the energetic urging of its president, Ruth Dreifuss. "Patients" gained access to clinics where the drug was administered under medically supervised conditions. In the past 15 years, there have been no overdose deaths, an amazing reversal of the country's former epidemic. Dreifuss has declared that the focus should not be on eradicating drugs, but rather on assisting people to stay alive. As far as the president was concerned, "the only good addicted person is a living person."

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs, going farther than Switzerland, dedicating monies previously spent on enforcement to programs that employed psychologists, medically supervised treatment modalities, and a government program that reimbursed employers half a year's wages for employing rehabilitating drug users. Portuguese society had been bottoming out from a heroin pandemic that saw an incredible 1 percent of its population becoming addicted. The number of overdose deaths was skyrocketing.

The ever present potentially fatal challenge for addicts before decriminalization was that it was impossible for them to know a proper "dosage" because dealers, driven by a desire for profit would use cheaper unknown and potentially dangerous substances to cut the drug. There was also a significant threat of infection posed by injecting drugs with dirty needles.

Powerful forces are at work to frustrate substantive change to the status quo. HSBC Bank has come to a $1.9 billion agreement with the U.S. government after it was found to have been laundering billions of dollars of Latin American drug cartel money. Might other entities in the banking industry be engaging in similar practices? Private prisons increasingly dot the landscape and rake in profits for their shareholders. Many Americans still view drug use and addiction as a moral failing rather than a public health concern, even as neuroscience research shows the fallacy of such thinking.

Much has been written about the CIA's possible role in drug trafficking operations. In particular, during the Reagan administration, Gary Webb, reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a series of articles implicating the agency for assisting traffickers during the crack cocaine epidemic that laid waste to Los Angeles and other American cities. It was Webb's contention that the proceeds were used to fund the illegal Contra War in Nicaragua.

In 2007, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan, where the longest war in U.S. history is being fought, was producing over 90 percent of the world's non-pharmaceutical-grade opiates, valued at approximately $4 billion. In an economic system rife with corruption and fueled primarily by the illegal drug trade, the country's opium farmers realized approximately 25 percent of the profit from the sale; the remainder went to warlords, district officials, insurgents and drug traffickers.

For decades, Americans have been exposed to news accounts showing the eradication of poppy fields and the burning of large caches of illicit drugs, as if to drive home the notion that the "war on drugs" is being waged and won. But might we in actuality be approaching, however slowly, the last days of the "war on drugs?"

A handful of states have decriminalized marijuana for medical use and a smaller number have legalized it for recreational use. Voters have approved measures that tax the sale of the drug and it appears likely that more states will follow suit. Could marijuana be the "gateway" drug that leads the country toward a more sane approach?

The Obama administration is beginning to take small incremental steps in the direction of a humane drug policy. On the White House website, the president "calls for drug policy reform rooted in scientific research on addiction, evidence-based prevention programs, increased access to treatment, a historic emphasis on recovery, and criminal justice reform."

Johann Hari's engrossing narrative provides the reader with historical context and hard-won insight from around the world as humankind continues to grapple with the life-and-death challenges of drug use and addiction.

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

Hardcover: 400 pages

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (January 20, 2015)

Available in Hardcover, paperback, Kindle and Audible editions

Bloomsbury, 2015, 389 pp.

“The Man Who Knew Infinity”: An infinitely rewarding film

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 15:31:00 +0000

ZÜRICH, Switzerland - How do I love The Man Who Knew Infinity? Let me count the ways: The feature that kicked off the 11th annual Zürich Film Festival on Sept. 24 is anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-war, and also depicts the great lefty philosopher Bertrand Russell (Cambridge-born Jeremy Northam) in a well-acted, stylish movie based on a true story made on location in India and England. Infinity also portrays a deeply moving personal story, which co-star Stephen Fry (who plays Sir Francis Spring) described at a press conference in Zürich's posh Baur au Lac hotel as an "intellectual, spiritual love affair between two people of different castes."

Those two men are Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel), an untutored Indian mathematician, and academician G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons), who brought Ramanujan to Cambridge circa 1914. The Isle of Wight-born Irons struck Oscar gold with 1990's Reversal of Fortune and has co-starred in many movies since. Patel co-starred in 2008's Slumdog Millionaire, which won eight Oscars, including Best Picture and in 2011's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its 2015 sequel, plus HBO's 2012-2014 Newsroom series.

The Madras-born Ramanujan, who has what he describes as a god-given gift for numbers, has to overcome British colonial officials who dismiss the uneducated Indian, as well as local taboos. Once introduced to Trinity College, Ramanujan must contend with the racism and elitism of English academia. Ramanujan and his mathematical prowess offend the "master race" sensibility of some of the veddy British Cambridge dons, who refer to him as "Gunga Din" or, worse, a "wog" (a racial slur akin to the N-word). Even his champions, Hardy and Littlewood (Toby Jones), challenge the prodigy, whose intuitive creative process clashes with the proofs-based logic of Western methodology.

As Infinitywriter/director Matt Brown pointed out at the press conference, "Lots of films have come out in the last years about science. It's in the Zeitgeist - people yearn for them." And like computer pioneer Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), a closeted gay man in homophobic, WWII-era Britain in 2014's The Imitation Game and the physically disabled physicist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) in 2014's The Theory of Everything, Ramanujan must combat adversity as he struggles to introduce "groundbreaking" mathematical theorems. Separation from his homeland and wife Janaki (Devika Bhise), along with the advent of World War I, further complicate matters for the beleaguered Ramanujan.

After a group of WWI soldiers beat Ramanujan, cruelly calling him a "freeloading little blackie," the overseas Indian's troubles are compounded by health issues triggered, almost metaphorically, by racism. The renowned philosopher Bertrand Russell's outspoken opposition to World War I is depicted and he is sacked from Cambridge. In 1967, the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal investigated and condemned the Vietnam War. During the press conference I asked Stephen Fry, the only Cambridge graduate among the participants - which included director Matt Brown, producer Edward Pressman, actors Jeremy Irons, Dev Patel, and Devika Bhise - about the figure who plays a small role onscreen but is arguably the most famous personage Infinity depicts and was the subject of the 2008 documentary The Three Passions of Bertrand Russell, with Noam Chomsky.

"Bertrand Russell was an aristocrat, whose first great achievement was in mathematics," explained Fry. "He rescued math. Russell paradoxically turned to philosophy. He was extraordinarily brilliant, a deeply moral atheist. He was implacably opposed to World War I and said something very theological to critics who took him to task for questioning that their 'sons lay their lives down for their country in sacrifice.' Russell replied in the newspapers: 'We're doing something far worse: Asking them to kill for their country.'"

Hardy also opposed WWI, and his extraordinary friendship with Ramanujan becomes the basis of this moving film, with the logical atheist encountering a sort of Indian mystic, as East meets West. Asked about wisdom, the 25-year-old Patel said at the news conference: "I don't possess it yet. I'm on the path to it... Ramanujan was a superhero, with his amazing mind, great brain."

The Man Who Knew Infinity is only director Brown's second feature. It has a straightforward, narrative structure and is, perhaps, a bit on the earnest side. The sumptuous cinematography at South India and Trinity College locations makes it often splendid to look at. As Irons said of the highly philosophical film: "In this movie we have both beauty and wisdom." Although this reviewer failed math in high school, I found Infinity an infinitely rewarding biopic that showed, as Fry put it: "Math is an art, not a science."

From Sept. 24 to Oct. 4 the $7.5 million Zürich Film Festival is screening 161 films from 33 countries, including 36 debut films and 14 world premieres, ranging from European, Hollywood and international major features to indies to documentaries. For more information see: http://zff.com/en/home/.

Photo: Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons with umbrella.

Today in history: Alberto Moravia died in 1990

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 11:02:00 +0000

Twenty-five years ago, on September 26, 1990, Italian writer Alberto Moravia died in his Rome apartment at the age of 82. In the same year his autobiography, Vita di Moravia ("Life of Moravia") was published.

Born as Alberto Pincherle in 1907, Moravia was a novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism.

Moravia once remarked that the most important facts of his life had been his childhood illness, a tubercular infection of the bones that confined him to bed for five years, and fascism, because they both caused him to suffer and do things he otherwise would not have done. "It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will." His writing was marked by its factual, cold, precise style, often depicting the malaise of the bourgeoisie, and was rooted in a high social and cultural awareness.Between 1959 and 1962 Moravia was president of the worldwide association of writers, PEN International.

The pen-name "Moravia" was the surname of his paternal grandmother. Born in Rome to a wealthy middle-class family,his Jewish Venetian fatherwas an architect and painter; his Catholic mother was of Dalmatian origin.

Moravia did not finish conventional schooling because, at the age of nine, he contracted the disease that kept him abed. During those early years he devoted himself to reading. He learned French and German, and wrote poems in French and Italian.

His 1929 debut novel Gli indifferenti ("Time of Indifference") was a realistic analysis of the moral decadence of a middle-class mother and two of her children. He wrote short stories for the magazine 900. He collaborated with the newspaper La Stampa, the literarymagazines Caratteri (Characters) and Oggi (Today), and started writing for the newspaper Gazzetta del Popolo(The People's Gazette).

He had cousins passionately devoted to the anti-fascist cause, and also an uncle on his mother's sidewho was an undersecretary in the National Fascist Party cabinet. The fascist government confiscated some of his books, banned publication of others, and prohibited publication of reviews of his works. To avoid fascist censorship he adopted a surrealist and allegoric style, and after 1941 wrote under a pseudonym. Moral ambiguity and circumstantiality figured into the thematic terrain that Moravia explored.

After the armistice of September 8, 1943, Moravia and his wife Elsa Morante took refuge in Fondi, on the border of Ciociaria, the experience that inspired La ciociara ("The Woman of Ciociara," also known as "Two Women") in 1958.

In May 1944, after the liberation of Rome, Moravia returned and began writing for important newspapers such as Il mondo(The World) and Il corriere della sera (The Evening Courier); the latter published his writing until his death.

At war's end, and with the end of censorship, his popularity steadily increased. His novel La provinciale("The Provincial") was cinematically adapted by Mario Soldati; in 1954 Luigi Zampa directed La romana, and in 1955 Gianni Franciolini directed I racconti romani ("The Roman Stories"), a short collection that won the Marzotto Award. In 1953, Moravia founded the literary magazine Nuovi argomenti (New Arguments), which featured Pier Paolo Pasolini among its editors.

Several more films were based on his novels: in 1960, Vittorio De Sica cinematically adapted La ciociara(Two Women) with Sophia Loren, which also served as the source for a new opera in 2015; La noia (Boredom or The Empty Canvas)by Damiano Damiani in 1962, which was also adapted for Cedric Kahn's film L'ennui (Ennui) in 1998;Agostino, filmed with the same title by Mauro Bolognini in 1962; in 1963 Jean-Luc Godard filmed Il disprezzo (Contempt); in 1964 Francesco Maselli filmed Gli indifferenti (1964). His anti-fascist novel Il conformistawas the basis for the 1970 film The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci.

In 1967 Moravia visited China, Japan, and Korea. In 1972 he went to Africa, which inspired his work A quale tribù appartieni? (Which Tribe Do You Belong To?). His 1982 trip to Japan, including a visit to Hiroshima, inspired a series of articles for L'Espresso magazine about the atomic bomb. He addressed the same theme in the novel L'uomo che guarda ("The Man Who Looks") and the essay L'inverno nucleare ("The Nuclear Winter"), which included interviews with contemporary scientists and politicians.

In 1984 Moravia was elected to the European Parliament as member from the Italian Communist Party. His experiences at Strasbourg, ending in 1988, are told in Il diario europeo ("The European Diary"). In 1985 he won the title of "European Personality."

Adapted from Wikipedia.

Photo: Wikipedia (CC)

“Best of Enemies”: New documentary revisits Buckley vs. Vidal

Thu, 24 Sep 2015 14:37:00 +0000

The 1968 presidential campaign was one of the most tumultuous in American history. Issues such as Vietnam, civil rights, and changing attitudes about what freedom actually meant all collided during the Democratic and Republican national conventions. Choices in media were not as varied as nowadays. The vast majority of Americans depended increasingly on the three major television networks for coverage, and ABC News found itself at the bottom of the ratings.

Enter William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal. The network decided to combine footage of convention proceedings with a series of live televised debates involving these two intellectual thinkers who represented extreme opposite views of American society and where it was headed.

Best of Enemies is extremely relevant as a window into current events. It serves as more than simply a time capsule. Co-directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville have created a documentary that does not seem forced or padded. The film offers a wellpaced mix of archival television footage and new commentaries.

Media historians will savor footage of the actual debates. Ample time is given to the original broadcasts, a series of ten debates split between the Republican National Convention in Miami and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Best of Enemies firmly deals with the subject matter of the broadcasts and the political reality of 1968. Equally important, it encourages viewers to ponder current political media. The original debates dealt not just with Vietnam and racial protests of the era. The rightwing Buckley and leftist Vidal were standing on their respective philosophical platforms, and much of America was tuning in. This was the groundwork for the confrontational television we commonly see today.

William F. Buckley, Jr. was a conservative writer and commentator who rose to fame as founder of National Reviewmagazine. He is often considered the father of the modern conservative movement. His popularity may be attributed to the desire of the right wing to present a favored spokesman to confront progressive movements in the United States.

In contrast, Gore Vidal was an accomplished novelist and one of America's great liberal thinkers. Vidal was on the cutting edge of progressive ideas and his writing reflected this. His 1948 novel "The City and the Pillar" dealt with homosexuality in a way that respected the characters without sensationalism. Thus we had the ingredients for a powerful discourse on national television, and as Vidal told Buckley himself, viewers got their money's worth.

Many of the confrontational issues of that era carry on today. News footage of the racial protests during the RNC in Miami seems indistinguishable from recent confrontations on the streets of Baltimore and Ferguson. The predominantly white, middle-class Republicans inside the convention preached law and order while the disenfranchised and ethnic minorities were on the streets protesting the indifference of politicians and their agendas. Gore Vidal took the upper hand by questioning the relevance of a political party that is entirely based on greed. This set the stage and put Buckley on the defensive for much of the debates.

Viewers are probably well aware of the infamous 1968 DNC scenario. Thousands of anti-war protestors gathered in Chicago during the convention where a candidate to succeed Lyndon B. Johnson would be chosen - LBJ had declined to run again - culminating in a violent confrontation with police in Grant Park. These events were heatedly debated on national television by Buckley and Vidal. As Buckley defended the containment of demonstrators, Vidal questioned whether America should be engaged in wars overseas when our own citizens' freedoms were being violated in the streets of our cities.

In reality, at that time both political parties were faltering. Chicago was led by Democrats, and Mayor Richard J. Daley defended the violent police actions against the protesters. The confrontation in the streets, and between Buckley and Vidal, was in essence cultural and ideological, overshadowing the political parties themselves.

The film features informed narration by Dick Cavett, Noam Chomsky, Christopher Hitchens and others. Colorful commentary is also provided by Buckley's brother Reid Buckley, who reveals his reactions on camera as he views the infamous threat that his brother made against Vidal during the live debate. The aftermath of those heated words lived on to haunt both William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal until their deaths.

Best of Enemies succeeds without being partisan or overbearing. Its subject speaks for itself, allowing filmgoers to make their own case with the material at hand.

California rolls in new film “East Side Sushi”

Thu, 24 Sep 2015 13:50:00 +0000

Anthony Lucero's fine film East Side Sushi uses the framework of food film to deftly explore class, work, ethnicity, and sexism. Lucero's light-touch love letter to his native Oakland is a welcome relief from a summer of dinosaurs, international terrorists and super heroes.

Lucero's California roll derives most of its flavor from the writer-director's smart script and fine ensemble acting led by Diana Elizabeth Torres as Juana. A single mother, vending fruit and drinks from the family push cart, Juana supports her young daughter Lydia (Kaya Jade Aguirre) and slowly declining father Apa (Rodrigo Duarte Clark). We follow her deadening routine of rising at 4:00 a.m., preparing Lydia for school, peddling in the streets and getting harassed and ultimately robbed at gun point.

Juana's spirit is not corralled by her circumstances. Needing more income and benefits to keep her small family afloat, she pursues a job at Osaka Restaurant. Despite her cooking ability and readiness to learn, like many women and Latinos, she finds her role limited to cleanup and basic backroom preparations. But Juana refuses to know her place. She studies this foreign cuisine, learning the art of sushi.

She brings her work home to mixed reviews. Apa, her father, prefers his familiar burritos and teases her unmercifully about this strange food that she insists on trying out on their traditional Mexican household. Young Lydia has no patience for the meticulous time-consuming preparations and ends up sleeping on her supper!

Juana persists. She is eager to join the front ranks preparing sushi with her male counterparts on the restaurant floor in front of customers. When the opportunity to step into the role of front line chef appears, Juana performs well. But the very conservative owner Mr. Yoshida chastises her and denies her the opportunity for promotion. In classic food film form, Roji Oyama provides the dramatic tension embodying male and traditional control. Certainly having a young Hispanic woman, no matter how hard working or accomplished, preparing sushi in front of his customers would render reckless restaurant wreckage.

Angry and frustrated, Juana quits. She abandons her love of food, seeking refuge as a car detailer. But the opportunity to compete in a prestigious statewide sushi chef competition presents itself. Does she have the energy, desire and skill to compete in the male-dominated competition?

Whether Juana wins or loses, the film itself is a triumph. Like a seasoned veteran, Lucero mixes his ingredients well. There is no need for spoiler alerts, as he avoids heavy-handed Spielberg-Dickensian coincidences that attempt to wrap up all loose ends. Realism trumps both cynicism and unbelievability.

The film also showcases the neighborhoods of Oakland, where local restaurants volunteered their kitchens, and local actors and crews made the project a labor of love. As Lucero recounted at the film's grand opening at the beautiful Grand Lake theater in Oakland, he had unsuccessfully pursued Rodrigo Duarte Clark for some time -only to bump into and recruit him on the neighborhood streets during a shoot for another film.

"I avoided those calls," said Rodrigo with a smile. "I thought it might have been the police!" It seems as if Anthony Lucero still has a little more work to do to shake that old image of Oakland.

"East Side Sushi"

Directed by Anthony Lucero

107 minutes, 2014

A Latina Medea for the modern age

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 13:23:00 +0000

MALIBU, Calif. - It's a challenge to stage any of the surviving ancient Greek or Roman plays for a modern audience. Gay Los Angeles playwright Luis Alfaro, now 53, 1997 winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," has made a personal project out of transforming them into contemporary stories that still retain the pity and terror audiences two and a half millennia ago sought when they settled down in the municipal amphitheater for a little catharsis.

He's already done "Electricidad," based on the Electra story, and "Oedipus el Rey," as well as a children's theater production, "Aesop in Rancho Cucamonga." Now the theatergoing public can see his version of the Medea story in a gripping tale of mounting terror at the Getty Villa in Malibu.

"Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles" is Alfaro's third version of the Euripides text: Earlier adaptations were staged in San Francisco and Chicago. Currently the play is set in Boyle Heights, the heart of immigrant Latino L.A., and all unfolds within a packed 90 minutes.

Medea and Hason, with their young son Acan and their combination friend/housekeeper/cook/curandera (folk healer) Tita, have endured a harrowing journey from their native state of Michoacán over the border to get here. The challenge of surviving in the new land, much less thriving and getting ahead, is really too much for the small-town Medea, rooted in her indigenous culture, but is exhilarating to Hason, who wants to adapt and assimilate, like, yesterday. Call me "Dad" now, he tells his son, not "Papi."

Medea's foil is the ambitious, scheming Armida, who immigrated years ago and has carved out a small empire for herself in Boyle Heights, using City Hall connections and a previous marriage to establish herself. The cast of characters, with their distinct personalities, reflect the various ways newcomers find their place en el Norte.

It's remarkable the way Alfaro opens "Mojada," with fairly extended introductory scenes full of light humor and earthy gossip. You can't help thinking, with only 90 minutes at his disposal, when is he going to get to the meat of the story? But he is cagily laying the foundation for the tragedy, as little by little we learn the backstory against which the current developments play off.

Alfaro is certainly no romanticist about rural life back home: That too, was a land of terror, especially for women like Medea, maltreated and disinherited by her father, then her brother. "I belonged to the land like one of the animals.... I wasn't his sister any more, but his property."

While Hason goes out on construction jobs, Medea is virtually chained to her sewing machine at home, where she shows her skills as a maestra, or in the curandera's words, a "puro pinche da Vinci" (a regular da Vinci, but expressed more graphically). Medea has also learned some of the curandera's art of brujería (witchcraft) and knowledge of herbs, which will come in handy by the end of the play.

Alfaro studs his play with little gems of wisdom, some of them hard, bitter pills to swallow, such as when Hason asks Medea, "Do you think anything in this country is free? Everything has a price." And the cruel Armida gloats, "I didn't create the morality of this nation. I just use it for negotiation." She orders Medea to get out of the house (that Armida owns), and just "Get lost in this country." How many people - millions - are "lost" one way or another here in the U.S., without papers, without homes, without sustenance, security or future? Is this the price we must pay for others to succeed so royally?

The Greeks were famous for not depicting horror on stage but summoning up moving words to describe it for us. The passage where Tita reveals the details of Armida's death by high-fashion dress is a marvel of Latino magical realism.

The cast of six, directed by Jessica Kubzansky, and produced by The Theatre @ Boston Court, are all great performers. My blind Mexican friend who accompanied me that night made a point of remarking how perfectly they articulated their speech - all the quicksilver shifts between English, Spanish and Spanglish, between raucous humor and tear-jerking horror, and between the elevated tone of the Greek theater and the gutsy language of the street.

Medea is played by the beautiful, sad Sabina Zuniga Varela, and Hason by the jaunty Justin Huen. VIVIS played Tita the curandera with great range - she started the play with an indigenous rite and proceeded to participate in all the neighborhood gossip, even wielding a machete when necessary. The comic neighbor Josefina, seller of pan dulce, is played by Zilah Mendoza; Armida with chilling remorselessness by Marlene Forte; and the son Acan by Anthony Gonzalez, who is a member of the children's traveling company at the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts.

The spacious amphitheater at the Getty is vacant as the play begins, but for most of the action a roll-on structure indicating the house in Boyle Heights where the action takes place occupies center stage. Efron Delgadillo Jr. is responsible for the effective scenic design.

A great theatrical opportunity for Angelenos awaits in Malibu. With any luck "Mojada" may come to regional theaters around the country soon.

"Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles" plays Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 pm through October 3rd. The Getty Villa is located at 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades. For tickets and further information: (310) 440.7300 or www.getty.edu.

Photo: left to right: Medea (Sabina Zuniga Varela), Josefina (Zilah Mendoza), Tita (VIVIS). | News.getty.edu

"Labor’s Home Front": the AFL in World War II

Fri, 18 Sep 2015 14:48:00 +0000

The history of labor during wartime is an enticing subject. The history of labor during World War II is especially so, as that war in particular is considered the "Good War." It was the war against fascist brutality and Jewish extermination, and for "Big D" democracy. So labor's response, at least in my view, takes on a more profound meaning and is well worth continued research.

In this context, Andrew E. Kersten's Labor's Home Front: The American Federation of Labor during World War II is an important study of the AFL, its affiliate members and the international unions that constituted its governing bodies, and how they responded to workers' rights and unionization campaigns during the war.

Like most Americans, as well as the AFL's then rival - the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) - the AFL initially took an isolationist stance towards "the European War." However, by the time of the Pearl Harbor bombing "the AFL was staunchly pro-defense."

The AFL's support of President Roosevelt and the war effort did not come without a price, though, as "The AFL's leadership wanted to make certain that in the defense emergency, all stakeholders shared the burden of making policy decisions. No unionist wanted to return to the situation of the First World War, during which employers and their government allies, no matter how progressive, basically ran the show," and it must be added, profited handsomely from the wartime production boom, while workers' wages stagnated or declined.

Undoubtedly, the AFL wasn't alone in this perspective, as "both houses of labor [the AFL and the CIO] demanded that the work of the war must be shared and that no one group unduly profit...." Nevertheless, the AFL was not above outmaneuvering, undermining and undercutting the rival CIO and its members.

For example, in July 1941 the AFL's Building and Construction Trades Department "signed an incredible and exclusive industry stabilization agreement that affected 1.5 million Federation unionists." Called an "epochal pact" by AFL leaders, the contract "was essentially a closed-shop agreement between the Building and Construction Trades Department and the U.S. government for the construction of all defense-related building. In other words, only AFL unionists were to work on any structure constructed for the defense emergency."

While this was quite an agreement - one that undoubtedly provided 1.5 million AFL union members and their families with job security - it was also a double-edged sword, as the AFL also made "major sacrifices." First, the Federation agreed to a no-strike pledge, which many unionists - and some radical groups, like the Communist Party - supported. Second, they agreed to "obey the federal government's plan for job and material allocations," which meant that federal managers, not workers, determined how much material and time should be allocated for job completion.

This agreement undoubtedly led to resentment and conflict, as workers - often against the wishes of both AFL and CIO leaders - engaged in work stoppages and strikes. Throughout the course of the war there were a total of 14,731 work stoppages and strikes involving 6.7 million workers.

Workplace safety was often the main point of contention. For, as Kersten wrote, "Quite literally, during the first few years of the Second World War, it was safer for Americans to be on the battlefield than it was for them to work on the home front of the arsenal of democracy."Workplace deaths during the war averaged between 17,800 and 20,100 peryear; 1943 saw the highest number of wartime workplace deaths. Further, a staggering 2 million workplace injuries and/or disabilities occurred peryear during the war.

After a general overview, or macro-perspective, of wartime labor relations, Kersten shifts gears and provides a micro-level analysis of one AFL union and its wartime policies regarding equality and inclusion of African Americans. The chapter titled "Building Ships for Democracy: The AFL, the Boilermakers, and Wartime Racial Justice in Portland and Providence" illuminates how individual Boilermaker locals in Portland, Ore. and Providence, R.I. handled issues of race, racism, inclusion and exclusion, as well as the union's national leadership's role in maintaining racism within the union - even going so far as to throwout union election ballots cast by African American members!

Kersten then shifts gears again to focus on the wartime animosity between the AFL and the CIO, and how "the leadership of both...did not push hard for women's issues," though "this was especially true of the American Federation of Labor."

In all, Kersten's Labor's Home Front is a critical understanding of wartime and labor history generally. Some mild criticisms are warranted, including the absence of an analysis of how leftist forces, especially the Communist Party - as well as right-wing forces - influenced the overall direction of the AFL, its affiliated international unions and/or union locals. For example, it is widely understood today that communists played a foremost role in some CIO unions during the war; it would have been interesting to learn about similar influence in AFL unions - from the CPor otherwise.

However, minus this minor shortcoming, Labor's Home Front is a welcome contribution to American labor history.

Labor's Home Front: The American Federation of Labor during World War II

Andrew E. Kersten

New York University Press, 2006, 274 pages

Jewish-African American partnership in new documentary “Rosenwald”

Fri, 18 Sep 2015 10:55:00 +0000

Aviva Kempner's new documentary film Rosenwald is the incredible story of Julius Rosenwald, son of an immigrant peddler who never finished high school yet rose to become head of Sears and Roebuck.

No ordinary capitalist, Rosenwald was deeply affected by the plight of African Americans in the United States, whom he came to see akin to the sufferings his own relatives endured under the the pogroms of tsarist Russia.

The filmmaker has up to now largely concentrated on making documentaries with Jewish content. She made Partisans of Vilna, about the valiant Resistance fighters of World War II (Vilna is the Yiddish name for the city of Vilnius in Lithuania).She also wrote, directed and produced The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, an award-winning film about the Jewish baseball player who fought anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s. In 2009, she released Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, a 90-minute documentary on Gertrude Berg, one of America's favorite radio and television personalities, who starred in an original situation comedy, "The Goldbergs."

Inspired by Booker T. Washington and the traditional Jewish commitment to repairing the world (tikkun olam), Rosenwald transformed himself during the first half of the 20th century into a thoughtful, progressive philanthropist and civil rights advocate. With his offer of matching grants, he launched the establishment of YMCA residences that would be open to African Americans, allowing them to move from the oppressive rural South to cities and good jobs. The Rosenwald Fund disbursed generous grants and helped foster the careers of what we can see now as a catalogue of black writers and intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, the painter Jacob Lawrence, and the captivating contralto Marian Anderson.

New York Times reviewer Daniel Gold captures the film's essence, noting that Rosenwald's affiliation with Booker T. Washington produced broad results on the grassroots level. The philosophy behind their work together included "sweat equity" in countless African-American communities throughout the Jim Crow South of their day. Together they built over 5,300 Rosenwald schools.

As noted in the Times, "At one point in the pre-civil rights era, it was estimated, one in three black youths in the South attended a Rosenwald school."

Kempner wrote, produced and directed the film, which includes commentary by leading historians, civil rights leaders such as Julian Bond and John Lewis, and Rosenwald family members.Former Rosenwald students such as Maya Angelou and Democratic Representative John Lewis of Georgia remember the healthy environment of their formative years in Rosenwald schools. Kempner draws a stirring portrait of an extremely wealthy yet modest and moral man, rescuing him from oblivion for modern audiences.

Kempner also devotes attention to other aspects of Rosenwald's life such as his influence in helping found the NAACP; with the Tuskegee Institute and World War II's Tuskegee Airmen; as well as his mark on affordable middle-class housing for Chicago's African-American community.

Julian Bond called the film "A great American saga of interracial cooperation." CBS Radio has hailed it as "A powerful Civil Rights story engaging both the heart and the head."

As Gold noted: "If Rosenwald is not well known today, that is partly because of his belief that foundations should not be self-perpetuating; The Rosenwald Fund closed in 1948, 16 years after his death."

With Rosenwald under her belt now, Kempner has turned to co-writing and producing Casuse, the story of Larry Casuse, a young Native American activist who kidnapped the mayor of Gallup, N.M. to draw attention to the plight of the Navaho people and to expose the hypocrisy of the establishment.

Two thumbs up, Rosenwald!

Thanks to Eric Gordon for editorial assistance.

Photo: rosenwaldfilm.org

Today in history: Writer Ken Kesey born in 1935

Thu, 17 Sep 2015 13:53:00 +0000

American writer Kenneth "Ken" Kesey was born on this day 80 years ago on September 17, 1935. He is best remembered for his novels "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"and"Sometimes a Great Notion." He was a countercultural link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.

Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colo., to dairy farmers. In 1946, the family moved to Oregon. Kesey was a champion wrestler in both high school and college and almost qualified to be on the Olympic team until a serious shoulder injury stopped him.

In 1956, while attending the University of Oregon, Kesey eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Norma "Faye" Haxby. They remained married until his death and had three children: Jed, Zane, and Shannon; Kesey had another child, Sunshine, in 1966 with fellow Merry Prankster Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams.

Kesey graduated from the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication in 1957. He was awarded the highly selective Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in 1958. He enrolled in the creative writing program at Stanford University that fall, where he would develop lifelong friendships with Ken Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, and Robert Stone.

While at Stanford, Kesey clashed with program director Wallace Stegner; according to Stone, Stegner "saw Kesey...as a threat to civilization and intellectualism and sobriety" and rejected Kesey's Stegner Fellowship applications for the next two years. Nevertheless, Kesey received the $2,000 Harper-Saxton Prize for his first novel in progress and continued to audit the graduate writing seminar through 1960 (taught that year by Frank O'Connor and Malcolm Cowley) as he began the manuscript that would become his first published book.

Kesey, the CIA and the drug culture

Kesey volunteered to take part in what turned out to be a CIA-financed study under the aegis of Project MKULTRA, a highly secret military program, at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospitalwhere he worked as a night aide.The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, and others.Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the study and in the years of private experimentation that followed.

Kesey's role as a medical guinea pig, as well as his stint working at the hospital, inspired him to write "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." The success of this 1962 book allowed him to move to a log house in La Honda, California, where he frequently entertained friends at psychedelic parties later recalled in writings by Allen Ginsberg, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Frank Reynolds.

At the veterans hospital Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs with which he had volunteered to experiment. Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, but rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave. The novel expresses deep skepticism about electroshock therapy and lobotomy.

Because everybody assumes the novel's lead character Chief is already crazy, he's able to keep on fooling them about being deaf and unable to speak, too. He cleverly exploits the prejudices of Nurse Ratched and other members of the administration."They don't bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when I'm nearby," he says,"because they think I'm deaf and dumb. Everybody thinks so. I'm cagey enough to fool them that much. If my being half Indian ever helped me in any way in this dirty life, it helped me being cagey, helped me all these years."

In 1963, the novel was adapted into a successful stage play by Dale Wasserman, and in 1975, Miloš Forman directed a screen adaptation, which won the "Big Five" Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Best Director (Forman) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben, Bo Goldman).

When the 1964 publication of his second novel, "Sometimes a Great Notion," required his presence in New York, Kesey, Neal Cassady and others in a group of friends they called the "Merry Pranksters" took a cross-country trip in a school bus nicknamed "Further."This trip, described in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (and later in Kesey's own screenplay "The Further Inquiry") was the group's attempt to create art out of everyday life, and to experience roadway America while high on LSD. In an interview after arriving in New York, Kesey remarked, "The sense of communication in this country has damn near atrophied. But we found as we went along it got easier to make contact with people. If people could just understand it is possible to be different without being a threat."A huge amount of footage was filmed on 16mm cameras during the trip which remained largely unseen until the release of the documentary film Magic Trip in 2011.

"Sometimes a Great Notion"is considered Kesey's great work by many critics. The story involves an Oregon logging family who cut and procure trees for a local mill in opposition to striking, unionized workers. It inspired a 1970 film starring and directed by Paul Newman; it was nominated for two Academy Awards.

In the mid-1960s Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana and spent five months in the San Mateo County jail in Redwood City, Calif. On his release, he moved back to the Willamette Valley family farm in Oregon, where he spent the rest of his life and continued writing.

In 1994, Kesey toured with members of the Merry Pranksters performing a musical play he wrote about the millennium called "Twister: A Ritual Reality." The tour included a sold-out two-night run at The Fillmore in San Francisco. In Boulder, Colo., they coaxed the Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg into performing with them.

Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992. In 1997, health problems began to weaken him, starting with a stroke. In June 2001, Kesey was the keynote commencement speaker at Evergreen State College. His last major work was an essay for Rolling Stone magazine calling for peace in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. An October 2001 tumor surgery on his liver was unsuccessful: He died of complications on November 10, 2001, age 66.

Adapted from Wikipedia and other sources.

Photo: Kesey poses with his bus "Further." | Jeff Barnard/AP

“Meet the Patels" is about an immigrant marriage mania

Thu, 17 Sep 2015 10:53:00 +0000

It's a well known piece of wisdom in today's America that young people, especially men, have a congenital inability to commit. We are reminded of it in countless movies whose basic plot line centers around his need to find himself before he can settle down either with a romantic partner or with a fulfilling career choice. Part of any "coming of age" story is to identify what's real and important to the protagonist, which may not be quite the same as what his parents and family had in mind. Every once in a while filmmakers give us the female version of this story (this year's hit entry in that category is Diary of a Teenage Girl).

What started out as a little Patel family project by sister Geeta, behind the camera documenting her 29-year-old brother Ravi's year-long quest to find the perfect wife (preferably also a Patel - the huge extended Patel family originates from the state of Gujarat in India), has turned into Meet the Patels, a major motion picture release riffing off of other similar tales of disconnect between children and parents (Meet the Fockers comes to mind). There is also an endless brood of My Big Fat[insert ethnicity here] Wedding pictures that explore similar territory.

Even at only 88 minutes, it feels like there's too much of everything: driving around in cars, traveling to cities across the North American continent, and back to the Indian source, to meet available partners who are listed in widely distributed books of biodata, Patel family gatherings full of gossip and matchmaker advice, exuberant Indian parties, scenes of close-knit Indian family life, effusive Indian hospitality even from total strangers (but who share the name Patel!), Patel family matrimonial conventions with all the stupid "icebreakers" that make such speed-dating events so obnoxious in any community.

What takes up so much time could have been cut back while other questions could have been introduced. Parents lament how hard it is on them when it seems like their kids don't even want to get married, and many these days are still living at home. But the deeper social issues for these phenomena go unexplored. What are prospects for marriage, family life and raising children today when for so many young people the future looks so unpromising? Even those with college degrees are looking at unpaid "internships," precarious temporary work, maybe flipping burgers at minimum wage, fast disappearing job security, no pensions, heavy student debt, outrageous rents, and doubts about the political survival of Social Security and Medicare. With such prospects of insecurity about the future, it's understandable why "commitment" may well be a rare-to-find commodity today (and I do mean "commodity" in its Marxian sense of something that has inherent value and can be exchanged for money).

In Ravi's case, his class position would seem to insulate him somewhat from these challenges, as his immigrant parents came to America in their twenties and made out well, now inhabiting a million-dollar home and funding a charity back home. They gladly pay for all of Ravi's trips so he can find a wife. But what is the story with all his friends and contemporaries who fill out the cast? Are they all so immune to the issues young people face today? Is romance truly the only thing they think about?

It's not even so true that Ravi lacks commitment, but that his commitment is divided: He is the servant of two masters, the American identity into which he was born and his traditional Indian family loyalty. This is, of course, an old story in America, which needs retelling in each generation and within each ethnic enclave. He has to find his path toward being honest to both parts of himself. Sort of like what they tell us in yoga: "Find the effort and the ease in the pose."

Barely touching on the issue of class, Meet the Patels strikes a single thematic note almost ad absurdam. Its unidirectional drive, without subplots or the twists and turns of a good story, makes it too predictable, although viewers will certainly laugh and enjoy themselves along the way and respond warmly to the strong but good-natured characters in Ravi's family, who are ultimately far more open to adaptation than he suspects. The film feels like a writer's first novel, overly autobiographical, something he needed to get out of his system before moving on to more serious work.

Viewers will enjoy the soundtrack, which is an appropriate combination of American popular and Indo-American beat music (think Bollywood disco), and little traditional Indian music. The animation, used to relate the back story to what Geeta is filming in real-time, is cute and clever (again, like Diary of a Teenage Girl), but there is a lot of it.

Meet the Patels

Directed by Ravi Patel and Geeta Patel, starring Ravi Patel

PG, 2015, 88 minutes

Today in history: Critic, playwright, Brecht translator Eric Bentley born

Mon, 14 Sep 2015 11:53:00 +0000

Eric Russell Bentley, born Sept. 14, 1916, enters his 100th year today. Bentley is a British-born American critic, playwright, singer, editor and translator. In 1998, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame and is a member of the New York Theater Hall of Fame in recognition of his many years of cabaret performances.

Bentley attended Oxford University, receiving his degree in 1938, and subsequently attended Yale University (B.Litt 1939 and PhD 1941). Beginning in 1953, Bentley taught at Columbia University and simultaneously was a theater critic for The New Republic. Known for his blunt style of criticism, Bentley incurred the wrath of playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, both of whom threatened to sue him for his unfavorable reviews of their work. From 1960-1961, Bentley was the Norton professor at Harvard University.

Bentley became an American citizen in 1948, and currently lives in New York City.

Bentley is considered one of the preeminent experts on German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, whom he met at UCLA as a young man in the 1940s, and whose works he has translated extensively. He edited the Grove Press issue of Brecht's work, and recorded two albums of Brecht's songs for Folkways Records, most of which had never before been recorded in English.

Although a great admirer of Brecht, and someone who knew him intimately both in America and Europe, Bentley maintained his political independence. "Marxism was important to me," he wrote in "The Brecht Memoir." "I was and am deeply influenced by it. But I have never been a Marxist." He chafed at those in literary, academic and theatrical circles whose primary allegiance to Brecht was based on his communist politics. Yet no one in the English-speaking world did more for Brecht's work than Eric Bentley.

In 1968, Bentley signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1969, the same year he declared his homosexuality, coming out at age 53. He has cited his gayness as an influence on his theater work, especially his play "Lord Alfred's Lover," based on the life of Oscar Wilde.He won a Robert Chesley Award in 2007.

Bentley's many critical books including "A Century of HeroWorship,""The Playwright as Thinker,""Bernard Shaw,""In Search of Theater," "What Is Theater?""The Life of the Drama,""Theater of War,""Brecht Commentaries,""The Brecht Memoir," and "Thinking About the Playwright." In addition, he edited "Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968," which appeared in 1971. His most-produced play, 1972's "Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been: The Investigations of Show-Business by the Un-American Activities Committee 1947-1958," was based on the transcripts collected in that book. His plays "Round One" and "Round Two" are modern-day takeoffs on Arthur Schnitzler's play "La Ronde," chronicling the sexual escapades of his generation at the turn of the 20th century.

Discography

Bentley has released a number of recordings, including"Bertolt Brecht Before the Committee on Un-American Activities: An Historical Encounter"(1961), "A Man's A Man" by Bertolt Brecht (1963), "Songs of Hanns Eisler"(1964), "Bentley on Brecht: Songs and Poems of Bertolt Brecht" (1965), "Bertolt Brecht's The Exception and the Rule" (1965), "The Elephant Calf and Small Comments on Large Themes"(1968), "Bentley on Biermann: Songs and Poems of Wolf Biermann"(1968), and "Eric Bentley Sings The Queen of 42nd Street" (1970).

As Eric Bentley turns 99 and enters his 100th year, he is recognized as America's oldest living playwright. Readers and theatergoers who appreciate Bertolt Brecht in English have primarily Eric Bentley to thank.

Adapted from Wikipedia and other sources.

Photo: Brecht and Bentley outside the Schauspielhaus, Zurich, 1948. By Ruth Berlau, from "The Brecht Memoir."

Should you see “The Book of Mormon”?

Mon, 14 Sep 2015 11:48:00 +0000

The Book of Mormon, the musical, has been playing on Broadway to rave reviews since March 2011. It won 9 Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score. Traveling productions are popping up in just about every major city; reportedly, it's a big hit in Salt Lake City.

The concept, music and lyrics are by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park, and Robert Lopez, co-creator of Avenue Q. Parker and Stone are known as "equal opportunity offenders," so I was prepared for risqué jokes, politically incorrect humor, and cringe-worthy satire of Mormons and Protestant missionaries. I was not prepared for the racism.

Much of the satire is admittedly very funny and pointed. "Turn it Off" is a catchy song and dance number about how to deal with uncomfortable thoughts among the missionaries, who work two-by-two in unfamiliar cultures. "Turn it off, like a light switch, just go click! It's our nifty little Mormon trick...so if you ever feel you'd rather be with a man, Turn it off!"

Another scene is a clever spoof on long-held Mormon beliefs about the inferiority of dark-skinned peoples. As the Mormon missionaries are in Uganda, the unpopular second banana, Elder Cunningham, is forced into the leading role as his partner, the golden boy Elder Price, flakes out.Cunningham has never really studied the Mormon doctrine, part of which tells of a battle between the Lamanites who received the curse of "a skin of blackness" and the Nephites. As he retells the Book of Mormon, he reinvents it along the way, embellishing it with stories that reflect the villagers' lives and changes the racist depiction of the Lamanites so that the Ugandans will want to convert to Mormonism.

Although much of the cast is African-American, including the wonderful Nikki James, who won a Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, the audiences at The Book of Mormon are generally almost all white. This seems surprising at first, but may well be because the portrayal of Ugandans relies on simplistic and unfunny stereotypes of Africans.

The people of the village are portrayed as childlike and uneducated. They are terrorized by the General Butt-F*cking Naked, who kills anyone who will not agree to have his female family members circumcised. According to the World Health Organization, female genital mutilation (FGM) in Africa is most prevalent in Guinea, Djibouti, and Somalia (over 90 percent of females 15-49 years old), as opposed to less than one percent of females in Uganda.

The villagers all have AIDS and believe that they can only be cured by having sex with a virgin; and since there are no more virgins, they must have sex with infants. One character calls out, "I've got maggots in my scrotum" every so often. In a key scene, the African villagers present a pageant to the Mormon leaders. As they act out the distorted story of the Book of Mormon told to them by Elder Cunningham, they wear grass skirts and huge phalluses made of gourds.

In another scene, "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream," Elder Price is in hell and finds there Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Jeffrey Dahmer and Johnnie Cochran (??!!).

If you have seen The Book of Mormon, what do you think? What did you find funny and what was offensive? In an age when seemingly nothing is sacred, did it cross one line too many for you?

I looked at many reviews in a cursory internet search and found discussions about possible offense to Mormons but no comments about the portrayal of Africans. Is it possible to joke about missionaries in Africa without being racist? What stereotypes are too outdated and inaccurate to be humorous or thought-provoking?

I guess it's possible to see The Book of Mormon as a hugely popular metaphor for Western imperialism in the underdeveloped world, an imposition of Western "faith" traditions as the entrée to investment and exploitation. Barbara Kingsolver did a bang-up job on missionaries in Africa in her great novel The Poisonwood Bible. Or is that my leftie mentality on overdrive?

Just asking.

But seriously, asking. Any reader comment?

Photo: Wikimedia (CC)

Today in history: "BaddDDD" black poet Sonia Sanchez is born

Wed, 09 Sep 2015 12:24:00 +0000

Poet, playwright, professor, activist and one of the foremost leaders of the Black Studies movement, Sonia Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Ala. Her mother died when she was very young and Sanchez was raised by her grandmother, until she too died when the author was six years old. Sanchez eventually moved to Harlem with her father, a schoolteacher, in 1943. She earned a BA from Hunter College in 1955 and attended graduate school at New York University, where she studied with the poet Louise Bogan.

Sanchez also attended workshops in Greenwich Village, where she met poets such as Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Etheridge Knight, whom she later married. During the early 1960s Sanchez was an integrationist, supporting the ideas of the Congress of Racial Equality. But after listening to the ideas of Malcolm X, her work and ideas took on a separationist slant. She began teaching in 1965, first on the staff of the Downtown Community School in New York and later at San Francisco State College (now University). There she was a pioneer in developing Black Studies courses, including a class in African American women's literature.

In 1969, Sanchez published her first book of poetry for adults, Homecoming. She followed that up with 1970's We a BaddDDD People, which especially focused on African American vernacular as a poetic medium. At about the same time her first plays, Sister Son/ji and The Bronx is Next, were being produced or published. In 1971, she published her first work for children, It's A New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs. Sanchez's other work for children include The Adventures of Fathead, Smallhead, and Squarehead (1973) and Sound Investment: Short Stories for Young Readers (1980). As William Pitt Root noted in Poetry magazine: "One concern [Sanchez] always comes back to is the real education of Black children." Sanchez's work for adults is similarly committed to radical politics as well as visionary imagery. The author of over sixteen books of poetry, Sanchez has also edited several books, and contributed poetry and articles on black culture to anthologies and periodicals. She is one of 20 African American women featured in the interactive exhibit "Freedom Sisters," at the Cincinnati Museum Center.

An important and influential scholar and teacher, Sanchez taught at Manhattan Community College, Amherst College, and Temple University, where she was the first Presidential Fellow. Her many honors and awards include the PEN Writing Award, the American Book Award for Poetry, the National Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the National Education Association Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pew Arts Foundation. She has received the Peace and Freedom Award from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Excellence in the Humanities, the Langston Hughes Poetry Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Robert Creeley Award, the Harper Lee Award, and the National Visionary Leadership Award, among many others.

Summing up the importance of Sanchez's work, Kalamu ya Salaam concluded in Dictionary of Literary Biography: "Sanchez is one of the few creative artists who have significantly influenced the course of black American literature and culture." In an interview with Susan Kelly for African American Review, Sanchez concluded, "It is that love of language that has propelled me, that love of language that came from listening to my grandmother speak black English.... It is that love of language that says, simply, to the ancestors who have done this before you, 'I am keeping the love of life alive, the love of language alive. I am keeping words that are spinning on my tongue and getting them transferred on paper. I'm keeping this great tradition of American poetry alive.'"

Since the 1970s Sanchez has published a steady stream of poetry books and plays. Other poetry books by Sanchez include: Homegirls and Handgrenades, which won the American Book Award in 1985; Liberation Poems, A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women, Love Poems, I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems, Under a Soprano Sky, Shake Down Memory, Continuous Fire, Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions? and Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems.

Sources: The Poetry Foundation and Encyclopedia.com. More information can be found here and there.

Photo: SpeakOutNow

“Lincoln for Beginners”: illustrated biography of a gradualist radical

Tue, 08 Sep 2015 12:24:00 +0000

Reflecting upon the life of his friend Abraham Lincoln, the great self-educated black advocate for emancipation Frederick Douglass wrote about him in 1876, 11 years after Lincoln's death:

"Though deep, he was transparent, though strong, he was gentle. He was tolerant toward those who differed from him and patient under reproaches.... His great mission was to accomplish two things: First, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin, and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery.... Taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better suited for his mission than Abraham Lincoln."

These words are in fact the last words in the prolific historian Paul Buhle's "Lincoln for Beginners," the latest installment of a series that includes many political and literary personalities alongside a couple of dozen important thematic subjects in sciences, philosophy, religion and the arts.

Final words usually signify a point of view, a summing up, and it is hardly accidental that Buhle has looked to Douglass to provide the guiding spirit behind his effort at condensing our 16th president's life and purpose into a simple, well-told but brief accounting.

Buhle's Lincoln is not the self-made mythic hero who cleared the land, chopped wood, studied by candlelight, debated Stephen Douglas and emancipated the slaves. Rather, he is a man of profound complexity, a melancholic, at times depressive figure who entertained notions of suicide, on whose shoulders fell the terrible weight of his country's history at a painful turning point in the road.

How to move away from slavery while preserving the American constitutional system, and indeed the integrity of the nation, was the challenge Lincoln faced. Given the vacillating, amoral political leadership in America before Lincoln - and succeeding him as well - with their fatal penchant toward unjust compromises and selling out to powerful commercial and financial interests, few can stand beside Lincoln with any degree of righteousness.

Knowing how dangerous it is to judge according to the standards of a different time, Buhle takes on the subject of "The Great Exception: Native Americans" in a separate subchapter. "[O]nly few Native Americans could find any reason to celebrate Lincoln," he says; in fact, feeling betrayed over and over by the federal government, many tribes responded to Confederate promises and joined the "Lost Cause" to see what better deal they might get. Perhaps in less turbulent times Lincoln's "better angels" might have allowed him the space to offer a more benevolent treatment to America's First Nations.

Buhle is clear in describing the political landscape of the time when Lincoln emerged as a political figure, first with the Whig Party, which opposed the Mexican War in the late 1840s, and then with the new radical Republican Party, which sought to end slavery. He became a firm republican advocate in response to the turmoil in Europe in 1848-49, supporting "the right of any people...to throw off, to revolutionize, their existing form of government and to establish such other in its stead as they may choose." He saw slavery as hopeless, free labor as the future, and openly allied with the rising labor movement in the United States, especially for his 1864 re-election. Buhle reminds us that "he would one day hail the formation of the International Workingmen's Association in Europe, headed by Marx."

Lincoln's gradual evolution

An overarching theme in Buhle's short study, and well for current activists to keep in mind, is the gradualness and incompleteness of Lincoln's evolution. Subject to "essentialist" arguments over what the "essence" of America was and would become, Lincoln proceeded not always in a straight line, but driven as time, place and circumstances changed, by necessity and possibility.

Lincoln was famously known during the Civil War period for abrogating constitutional rights to free speech. He once asked, in the heat of battle for the Union, "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier who deserts" - and there were many - "while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?"

Whole libraries are dedicated to the study of Abraham Lincoln, and the controversies abound. Buhle's synopsis, reflecting all the warts and charm of his subject, might a good place for anyone to begin, especially a high school student. Those who consider themselves more learned in American history might still benefit from seeing how Lincoln is viewed today by a historian with strong ties to the 20th- and 21st-century radical movement.

Sharon Rudahl's work has appeared in underground newspapers and magazines, Marvel Comics, and also in Paul Buhle's "Wobblies!: A Graphic History." Her drawings are interpolated throughout the book on an average of every third page or so, but there are also seven several pages-long "comics interludes" that summarize the story in picture and text ("Young Abraham," "Lincoln Takes a Wife," "A House Divided," "Lincoln in the White House," "Father Abraham," "War is Hell," and "Victory and Vengeance") and provide compelling visual detail expressive of the period and the large cast of characters.

The last chapter, "Lincoln's Legacy," begins with a quote from historian W.E.B. Du Bois, in which he speaks of the African American people who in their third century of slavery "arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy of the working millions which this world had ever seen."

Buhle then goes on: "As Du Bois suggests, a different outcome in the American South after the war - a true success for Reconstruction - would have sent a powerful message of multiracial democracy at a time when European colonialism was racing through Africa and Asia, leaving a trail of destroyed lives numbering in the millions." The author proceeds in far-ranging thought to tie together the strands of history up to present times, showing where Lincoln's achievements bore fruit, and where the coalition of progressive interests he brought together fell apart "to the detriment of all parts."

The elections of Barack Obama n 2008 and 2012 "brought a sense of relief, at least briefly, to a nation weary of racial controversy and conflict. Yet suspicion and hatred, if not gross discrimination, had already turned toward Muslims, the most recent 'outsiders' viewed as a threat to the social order. And the gap between rich and poor continued to expand, with no changes in sight. Was this the America upon which Abraham Lincoln had staked his devotion and his very life to save? The question hangs fire." These last words sound slightly antiquarian, yet also pointedly summon up modern-day lynchings and visions of "the fire next time."

"Lincoln for Beginners"

By Paul Buhle, illustrated by Sharon Rudahl, foreword by Eric Foner

A For Beginners Documentary Comic Book, 2015, 167 pp., $15.95.

Today in history: Beethoven's opera "Fidelio" in Berlin, 1945

Fri, 04 Sep 2015 17:28:00 +0000

To inaugurate the resuscitation of normal civilian life in Germany 70 years ago, the Deutsche Oper staged Ludwig van Beethoven's only opera Fidelio under the baton of Robert Heger as the first opera performed in Berlin after the end of the World War II. The performance took place at the only undamaged theater in the city, the Theater des Westens, on September 4, 1945.

To Germans, as well as to the Allied occupation armies in the city, the anti-tyrant opera first performed in Vienna in 1805, featuring a chorus of starved prisoners, represented one of the highest points of German humanism, a necessary reminder of what the best in German culture could produce.

In Henry Stewart's one-sentence summary of the plot, "A political prisoner's wife goes undercover as the male title character, infiltrates the family of the prison guard and frees her husband from a secret dungeon just as the local petty tyrant is about to kill him."

It had not occurred to the Nazis to ban this famous opera, the work of a certified "Aryan" composer, during their rule. They counted on German audiences not to make the connection between the despotic colonial ruler Pizarro and Adolf Hitler. At the time, the most famous German novelist Thomas Mann remarked, "What amount of apathy was needed [by musicians and audiences] to listen to Fidelio in Himmler's Germany without covering their faces and rushing out of the hall!"

Fidelio was a traditional piece used to celebrate democratic moments. It was the choice of world-famous anti-fascist conductor Arturo Toscanini in December 1944, at the time of the Battle of the Bulge, one of the last great battles of World War II. He led the first complete opera performance to be broadcast over the NBC radio network, by the NBC Symphony Orchestra, featuring soloists from the Metropolitan Opera, and later issued as an RCA Victor recording. Toscanini made it clear that Beethoven believed in liberty and was opposed to tyrants such as Napoleon; in the conductor's opinion, Beethoven would have likely opposed both Hitler and Mussolini.

Fidelio also re-opened the Vienna State Opera in 1955.

The first night of Fidelio at the Semperoper in Dresden on October 7, 1989, marking the occasion of the 40^th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic, coincided with violent demonstrations for political change at the city's main train station. The applause after the "Prisoners' Chorus" interrupted the performance for a considerable time. The production by Christine Mielitz had the chorus appear in normal street clothes at the end, signifying their role as representatives of the audience. Four weeks later, on November 9^th, the fall of the Berlin Wall foretold the end of East Germany's existence before reunification with West Germany the following year.

Adapted from Wikipedia and Henry Stewart "Operapedia: Fidelio," Opera News, August 2015.

Photo: Florestan (Günther Treptow) and Leonore (Karina Kutz); September 1945, Deutsche Oper Berlin "Fotothek df pk 0000016 b 041 Szenenbilder" by Deutsche Fotothek‎. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de via Commons.

Today in history: Eduardo Galeano, writer and journalist born 75 years ago

Thu, 03 Sep 2015 12:16:00 +0000

(Morning Star) "Our principal enemy is not imperialism, or the bourgeoisie, or the bureaucracy. Our principal enemy is fear and we carry it inside," one of the women who helped overthrow the Bolivian dictatorship in 1978 once told Eduardo Galeano.

The great Uruguayan journalist and writer, who died April 13, might have written those words as an epitaph to himself. If anyone consistently and courageously gave encouragement to those in struggle - particularly the indigenous populations of Latin America and the oppressed globally - it was Galeano.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, September 3 1940, Galeano started work at 20 and in the early 1960s was a contributor and later editor of the influential weekly journal Marcha.

Following the 1973 fascist military coup Galeano was imprisoned and later forced to flee Uruguay. His seminal 1971 book Open Veins of Latin America - which catalogues the pillage of the continent by European and later U.S. colonialism and imperialism over five centuries - was banned by the right-wing military governments in his native country, Chile and Argentina, where he settled for a short time before being forced to flee again to Spain in 1976 following General Jorge Videla's bloody coup.

The Open Veins was the book Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez gave to Barack Obama at the opening of the Summit of the Americas in 2009. U.S. columnist Andres Oppenheimer described it as "a diatribe whose underlying theme is that Latin America's poverty is caused by U.S. imperialism" and, in lurid prose that must have amused Galeano, stated that Obama showed misplaced appreciation for the gift "considering that Chávez's gesture was the equivalent of presenting Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf to an Israeli president." The book subsequently went to number two on the Amazon best-seller list.

When exiled in Spain he wrote Memory of Fire, regarded as one of the most powerful literary indictments of colonialism in the Americas. The trilogy - Genesis, Faces and Masks and Century of the Wind - combines history, journalism and biography in an incandescent prose.

As former Uruguayan president Jose Mujica has said of his writing: "He worked a gigantic path which helped all Latin Americans understand our roots. His work did more than illuminate truths - it painted our suffering and our shared feelings.

"Galeano imbued this work with a thorough effort unearthing even native-American legends and went on to discover a kind of telluric past depicting ancestral cosmologies which lay at the heart of the history of America." He was a "sharer of dreams, of hopes, of pain, of frustrations and a gigantic love for life."

In 1985 Galeano returned to Montevideo and, following the victory of the Broad Front alliance in the 2004 Uruguayan elections - which ushered in the first left-wing government in Uruguayan history - backed the new administration.

The Uruguayan people had used "common sense," he stated, because they were "tired of being cheated" by the traditional Colorado and Blanco parties.

In 2005, Galeano joined the advisory board of the pan-Latin American television station TeleSur based in Caracas, Venezuela. He was a supporter of the Bolivarian revolution and an unswerving, though unromantic, friend of Cuba. "I have never confused Cuba with paradise so why should I now confuse it with hell?" he once remarked. "I am just one among those who believe that Cuba can be loved without lying or shutting up (about it)."

"Fidel Castro is a symbol of national dignity. For us Latin Americans - who have been humiliated for over 500 hundred years - he is an endearing symbol."

Throughout his career, Galeano was showered with academic and literary awards in the U.S., Scandinavia, his native Uruguay and Latin America, where he gained the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize in 1975, 1978 and 2011.

One of his last books, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, typifies his extraordinary output. These short stories, some only a few paragraphs long, provide historical insights and radical perspectives on everything from the origins of fire to football - one of Galeano's great obsessions - and along the way pays homage to communist leaders like Lenin, Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh.

In a recent interview, Galeano restated his literary mission. It was to give voice to "the nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodies, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who are not, but could be. Who don't speak languages, but dialects. Who don't have religions, but superstitions. Who don't create art, but handicrafts. Who don't have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them."

Galeano never lost sight of that mission and it is why his books will endure as long as the "nobodies" exist.

Reposted from Morning Star and published in PW on April 21, 2015.

Photo: In 2005 Galeano met with the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez Frias, at the Embassy of Venezuela in Montevideo, when Chavez attended the Summit of Presidents of Mercosur.

This content was originally published by http://www.teleSURtv.netat the following address: http://www.telesurtv.net/multimedia/Los-momentos-insignes-en-la-vida-de-Eduardo-Galeano-20150413-0013.html.

Refugees

Thu, 03 Sep 2015 11:50:00 +0000

Editor's note: This poem is a response to the refugee/migrant crisis now engulfing Europe.

"There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible, as the conscience that
dwells in the heart of every man."
- Polybius

"Non chiederci la parola che squadri da ogni lato
L' animo nostro informe, e a lettere di fuoco"
- Eugenio Montale

Don't ask of us for the word to square
With our shapeless souls on every side
- translated by L.L.T

What borders are there between us?
The borders of earth, grass and steel - sharp steel
of a bayonet or a stun grenade
that kills or maims.
There are those crossing treacherous seas now
to reach the border of Lesbos, that luscious
Greek island where the poetess, Sappho,
once wrote paeans to her homeland,
a homeland that knew war has no boundaries.
Refugees from Syria, Iraq, Africa -
they all come to this island full of ancient ruins, memories -
And what of Alexander, son of Macedon,
how many borders did his army's javelins break down?
How men fled from the fires in Persepolis
after Alexander torched it!
Today, thousands flee
from Turkey, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen,
with only the scorching sun in their faces,
their mouths and words
tasting like bitter lemons,
while the memory of human cargo buried at sea,
or of a mother, father, sister or brother
suffocating to death in a smuggler's truck
turns a living heart to stone.

Editor in chief of this poem is William Dane Dodge, Montreal, Québec.

Photo: Migrants arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa, in the Mediterranean Sea, 2007. Noborder Network/Flickr

Artists to link up Sept. 26 for world peace and justice

Wed, 02 Sep 2015 12:57:00 +0000

OAKLAND, Calif. - Thousands of artists, poets and performers will be staging performances that are global in content and size this Sept. 26 in a global call for world peace and justice..

Individuals from the U.S., Sierra Leon, India, Brazil, and many other countries will be performing pieces on peace, sustainability, and social justice.

These performances are not meant solely to entertain but also to inspire us to take action to create a more peaceful and just world.

Here in Oakland our very own Cassandra Lopez and the We Tell Our Stories Film Collective will be contributing to the event with the documentary, "We Tell Our Stories."

According to the group's Facebook page, this film "chronicles the real-life experiences of grassroots leaders and local agents of change in Oakland who are committed to continuing the legacies of President Nelson Mandela and Dr. King by addressing the struggles for social justice and equality".

The 100k Poets event will be broadcast via live stream at the Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library on 6501 Telegraph Ave in Oakland on September 26^th at 6 p.m.

If you are interested in performing at this venue please feel free to email lopezcassie1945@sbcglobal.net.

Admission is $5 at the door and some light refreshments will be provided.

Bay area People's World supporters sponsor this event and encourage everyone to view the documentary and be inspired.

For those of you who live outside the Bay Area, the event can still be viewed privately via live stream.

More information is available at the 100 Thousand Poets for Change website 100tpc.org.

Photo: Some of the Story Tellers, documentary Facebook page.