Caetlin Benson-Allott: Sex versus the small screen -- home video censorship and Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también

Sex versus the small screen: home video censorship and Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también
by Caetlin Benson-Allott
Jump Cut



Seventeen years ago, video critic Charles Tashiro warned that “you can wait for it on video, but ‘it,’ like Godot, will never arrive,” and today his aesthetic lament carries political implications as well (16). Video-tapes and -discs have changed our experience of motion picture exhibition significantly over the past thirty-odd years, due in part to the unprecedented proliferation of adaptation techniques like letterboxing, Pan & Scan editing, and color correction. However, some movies also lose footage during their transfer to video, particularly sexually and politically charged footage. In these cases, you see less of the movie on video than the full theatrical release. Motion pictures do go through many editing processes over the course of their production and distribution, of course, but these just-for-video elisions cut their movies’ narratives, tenor, and arguments, often without acknowledging the loss.[1] [open endnotes in new window] Furthermore, these video excisions almost exclusively affect international productions. The result is that this video editing effectively determines who gets to see which international releases and what parts of them, given that most U.S. viewers noe choose to or must “wait for it on video” (Klinger 4). This media-specific censorship suggests that video faces different moral standards than the cinema, standards that are enforced by the MPAA’s self-interested nationalist application of its rating system. However, it would be inaccurate to characterize either the MPAA or its member studios as specifically xenophobic. Rather they self-censor in order to appease video rental and sell-through outlets' conservative economic clout.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también is only one of the many victims of the U.S. video industry’s commercial adversity to foreignness and sexuality. However, the changes made for U.S. video distribution of Cuarón’s film are not only egregious but also exemplary, because they highlight the political ramifications of the MPAA and U.S. studios’ new economic dependence on video distribution. Specifically, MGM cut five minutes from Y tu’s film version in order to produce an R-rated video acceptable to the major video outlets’ standards for family friendly commercial viability. Although the studio also distributed an unrated “special edition” of Cuarón’s movie as it appeared in theaters, the R-rated standard edition the director put together at MGM’s behest led Cuarón to lament,

“I castrated my movie” (Hirschberg 15).

As I will show, Cuarón had to cede to MGM’s demand for a family-friendly video version of Y tu in order to secure any U.S. distribution for his film. However, this more marketable Y tu is missing more than a few penises and pelvic thrusts. Cuarón also had to cut the sexual mestizaje that completes his film’s narrative arc and political allegory.[2] This climax, the homosexual union of the movie’s teenage male protagonists, carries both dramatic and political significance in the film because Cuarón uses Mexico’s national tradition of allegorical filmmaking to condemn the neoliberal turn in Mexican politics.[3] Losing the culmination of the boys’ sexual narrative garbles Cuarón’s critique of government corruption and economic exploitation in Mexico. In this way, the editing sanitizes the film for some of the same multinational corporations that benefit most from recent trade liberalizations in Mexico, of which NAFTA is one (notorious) example.[4]

Y tu’s U.S. video distribution thus made it the subject of the same transnational neoliberal forces that it seeks to critique. For that reason, in this article I will employ both textual analysis and industry history to demonstrate how the giant video retailers have rendered video an even more fiscally—as so politically—conservative format than film. The first section of the essay details what gets censored from the R-rated Y tu, while the second section explores how those losses undermines the film’s larger political critique. My conclusion then situates Y tu mamá también within the recent upheaval in U.S. film and video distribution that made these changes seem fiscally necessary to its distributors. In this manner, I hope to communicate the political significance of Hollywood’s economic dependence on video distribution.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Lisa Sullivan: Elections in Honduras -- Whitewashing the Path to a Past of Horrors

Elections in Honduras: Whitewashing the Path to a Past of Horrors
by Lisa Sullivan
School of Americas Watch

I came to Honduras to participate as a human rights observer of the electoral climate in a delegation organized by the Quixote Center. Several delegations converged, connecting some 30 U.S. citizens with dozens more from Canada, Europe and Latin America. In the days prior to the elections we scattered to different cities, towns and villages, meeting with fishermen, farmers, maquila workers, labor leaders, teachers and lawyers, as well as those who were jailed for carrying spray paint, hospitalized for being shot in the head by the military, and detained for reporting on the repression. It was, most likely, a bit off the 5-star, air-conditioned path of most of the mainstream journalists who are filling your morning papers with the wonders of today´s elections.

But by the evening of the day of the elections, what we had witnessed in previous days pushed those of us from the U.S. directly to the doors of our embassy in Tegucigalpa. We realized that this place, not the polling stations, was where this horrific destiny of Honduras, and perhaps all of Latin America, was being determined. And so the U.S. citizens among us took our statements and signs and determination there.

We were, indeed, greeted by many: dozens of guards with cameras, some 30 journalists, Honduran police with guns and also cameras, as well as a low flying helicopter that at least made us feel important. While the journalists let us read our entire statement of why these elections should be not be recognized by our government because of the egregious repression, the embassy guards wouldn´t even let us leave our slip of paper. That, in spite of the fact that the embassy´s human rights officer, Nate Macklin, told our delegation leader to make sure to let him know if there were any human rights abuses.

Any? In each of the many corners of the country visited by the 70-plus international observers, we witnessed the fear, repression, intimidation, bribery and outright brutality of the government security forces (note: we were there to observe the electoral climate, not electoral observers, since we consider the elections to be illegal. Likewise, the UN, OAS, and Carter Center and other bedrock electoral groups boycotted "the event" as many Hondurans called the day.)

As elections were in full swing in the morning, our delegate and nurse practitioner, Silvia Metzler visited Angel Salgado and Maria Elena Hernandez who were languishing in the intensive care unit of the Hospital Escuela in Tegucigalpa . Both had been shot in the head at one of the many military checkpoints, no questions asked. Doctors give Angel a zero possibility of survival and he leaves behind a 6 year old son. Maria Elena has a better chance of recovery, but it will be a long road. She was selling snacks on the side of the road to support her teenage children when caught by military bullet.

Tom Loudon was on the streets of San Pedro Sula when police tanks and water trucks and tear gas canisters attacked a peaceful march of the resistance movement. It took him a long time to find other members of his delegation who had scattered in the frenzy, but they were luckier than two observers from the Latin America Council of Churches who were detained or a Reuters photographer who was injured in the massive display of repression. Dozens of cells phones captured the police beating anyone they could catch with their billy clubs.

The first person I thought of as I awoke on election day was Wlmer Rivero, a fisherman in a small town with the big name of Puerto Grande. I kept thinking of the fear in his eyes as he relayed how the police have been visiting his house and asking for him, ever since he trekked 6 days on foot to greet a returning President Zelaya. Each local mayor has been asked to put together a list of resistance leaders, and his name was one of 22 from his town. We suggested to Wilmer that he not sleep at home during the electoral days. He called the next day to thank us for our advise. The police had ransacked his home, and that of many of his neighbors, the night before elections, threatening his life. But, he wondered, what will he do now.

I also thought of Merly Eguigure who I had visited 2 days earlier in a cold and crumbling jail cell, reeking of human waste. She had been captured for having a can of spray paint in her car. Though she was released shortly before elections, she will face trial and probably prison for defacing government property. Merly claims that the spray paint was to be used in an activity to raise awareness of violence towards women. Perhaps authorities worried that the paint was destined to add a new message to the city walls. Every square inch of blank wall space in the city is covered with powerful graffiti against the coup. In spite of government to whitewash over it, the blank spaces are filled in again within hours.

To Read the Rest of the Report

Gil Scott-Heron: The New Deal

The New Deal
by Gil Scott-Heron

I have believed in my convictions
And have been convicted for my beliefs
Conned by the Constitution
And harassed by the police.
I have been billed for the Bill of Rights And treated like I was wrong.
I have become a special amendment
For what included me all along.
Like: “All men are created equal.”
(No amendment need there).
I’ve contributed in every field including cotton From Sunset Strip to Washington Square.
Back during the non-violent era,
Hell, I was the only non-violent one.
As a matter of fact there was no non-violence ‘cause too many rednecks had guns.
There seems to have been this pattern
That a lot of folks failed to pick up on But all black leaders who dared to stand up Wuz in jail, in the courtroom, or gone.
Picked up indiscriminately
By the shocktroops of discrimination
To end up in jails or tied up in trials
While dirty tricks soured the nation.
I’ve been hoodwinked by professional hoods.
My ego has happened to me.
“It’ll be alright, just keep things cool!
And take the people off the street.
We’ll settle this all at the conference table.
You just leave everything to me.”
Which gets me back to my convictions
And being convicted for my beliefs
‘cause I believe these smiles
in three-piece suits
with gracious, liberal demeanor
took our movement off the streets
and took us to the cleaners.
In other words, we let up the pressure
And that was all part of their plan
And everyday we allow to slip through our fingers Is playing right into their hands.

Juan Cole: Student Protests Erupt in Over a Dozen Iranian Cities

Student Protests Erupt in Over a Dozen Iranian Cities
Juan Cole

The protests against the regime in Iran on Monday were remarkable in several ways, I conclude on reading Borzou Daragahi's account in LAT. One is the sheer number of cities where students came out for rallies: "Esfahan, Shiraz and Kerman, in the eastern city of Mashhad and in the western cities of Tabriz, Kermanshah, Hamedan and Ilam as well as in Rasht on the Caspian Sea."

Another is that Iranian Kurds joined in the protests in Sanandaj and other cities, throwing a scare into the regime, which is said to be sending armored vehicles to help restore order. Iranian Kurdish dissidents have been targeted by the regime for harsh treatment in recent months. The rise of a semi-independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq has increased worries in Tehran about Kurdish separatism. It is alleged that PEJAK, the Iranian-Kurdish guerrilla group, has carried operations against the regime with US encouragement.

Protesters chanted 'Death to the Dictator,' attacked Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for destroying the country, and burned photos of Khamenei. AP says, 'Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi declared the clerical establishment was losing legitimacy in the eyes of Iranians. "A great nation would not stay silent when some confiscate its vote," said Mousavi, who claims to be the real winner of the June 12 election. . . '

Monday's rallies were bigger than the ones of November 4 and these protests are the largest since last summer.

Basij paramilitary intervened on motorcycles with batons. The regime used tear gas to dispersed the crowds, and some protesters were beaten. Reports of killings by the police have not been verified.

To Read the Continuing Updated Post and to access videos of the protests

Sugimoto Kousuke: Full Moon Party

(Courtesy of Lauren Davis)

We Want Everything: Communiqué from an Absent Future

Communiqué from an Absent Future
We Want Everything

I

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what the university is for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt. The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.

For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.

But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.

This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since grade-school. Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile. No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the cattle prod of parental admonition. On the other hand, those of us who came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take our place—that the logic here is zero-sum. And anyway, socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of student achievement. Those of us the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color” have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit. But we know we are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them. And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in the present for others, elsewhere.

If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience. First we pay, then we “work hard.” And there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded, consumer and consumed. It is the system itself which one obeys, the cold buildings that enforce subservience. Those who teach are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system. Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here: was the course easy? Was the teacher hot? Could any stupid asshole get an A? What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes? Who needs memory when we have the internet? A training in thought? You can’t be serious. A moral preparation? There are anti-depressants for that.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Democracy Now: The Assassination of Fred Hampton-- How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther

“The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther”
Democracy Now



Today marks the fortieth anniversary of the death of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. On December 4th, 1969, Chicago police raided Fred Hampton’s apartment and shot and killed him in his bed. He was just twenty-one years old. Black Panther leader Mark Clark was also killed in the raid. While authorities claimed the Panthers had opened fire on the police who were there to serve a search warrant for weapons, evidence later emerged that told a very different story: that the FBI, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and the Chicago police conspired to assassinate Fred Hampton. We speak with attorney Jeffrey Haas, author of The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther.

To Read/Listen/Watch

David Korten: When Our Leaders Fail to Lead

When Our Leaders Fail to Lead
by David Korten
Yes!

On Tuesday night, President Obama announced his decision to increase U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan. It was a tragic error. He specifically said that to compare Afghanistan with Vietnam is a misreading of history. In a way, I would have to agree. We ultimately left Vietnam in humiliation. Afghanistan is not comparable, because our prospects for success there are even worse.

I am neither a military strategist nor a student of military history, but I recall well the U.S. experience during the Vietnam War. I was serving at the time as a U.S. Air Force Captain. My first assignment was as an instructor at the Special Air Warfare School in Florida, where we instructed Air Force pilots heading for Vietnam to be part of the Air Force's role in counterinsurgency operations. I later served in the Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as military aide to the civilian responsible for monitoring all Defense Department-sponsored behavior and social sciences research.

These assignments brought me into contact with the most advanced thinking of the time about unconventional, asymmetric warfare—in which a conventional military force seeks to defeat an enemy who cannot be distinguished from a civilian noncombatant unless he is firing on you. This was the case in Vietnam and it is the case in Afghanistan.

I recall clearly one of the lectures I gave to Air Force pilots on the substantial body of social science research demonstrating that dropping bombs on civilian populations increases their will to resist. It isn’t a particularly startling finding, and I’m sure it holds up as well for any military operation in which seemingly indiscriminate fire causes significant civilian casualties.

So why are our prospects in Afghanistan even less hopeful than they were in Vietnam? As in Afghanistan, the enemy in Vietnam blended in with the people. In Vietnam, however, it operated as a coherent body with an allegiance to a command structure. Vietnam had experience functioning as a nation with a central government; it also had more physical infrastructure and a more educated population.

Afghanistan has never functioned as a nation under the central rule of either foreigners or Afghanis. It is a land fragmented physically and politically into feudal fiefdoms ruled by local warlords united only by a fierce commitment to resisting any form of foreign occupation. What passes for a central government has less legitimacy than did the government of South Vietnam, is even more corrupt, and is arguably not even fully in control of Kabul, the capital city. The idea that we or any other group of outsiders can pacify Afghanistan and bring it under some semblance of central democratic rule with a legitimate and reasonably competent government is beyond ludicrous.

It is difficult to convince civilians that you are there to help them when you are maiming and killing their loved ones for no evident purpose. Yet when you cannot identify the enemy, you will almost inevitably kill more civilians than combatants. I know how I would respond if a foreign army inflicted such harm on my family. The more troops we put into Afghanistan, the greater the resistance.

On November 20, 2009, Bill Moyers PBS Journal presented an episode on President Lyndon Johnson’s path to war. It is a piece of history that Moyers knows well, having served as a top-ranking member of President Johnson’s staff from 1964-1967. Drawing on the archive of White House tapes, Moyers tells the story, in Johnson’s own words, of how the political dynamics of the time drew him into an ever more costly escalation in a war that he knew from the beginning we could not win.

To Read the Rest

CFP: Inventions of Activism (Reconstruction 10.3: Deadline 02/01/10)

Call For Papers
Reconstruction
Issue 10.3
Michael Benton, Alan Clinton, Wes Houp and Danny Mayer

Inventions of Activism

"Creative acts of social justice fulfill every function that can be asked of a work of art.
They inspire us, make us think in new ways, and birth new beauty and dignity in our world."
--Rebecca Alban Hofberger, "True Visions"

"Screw Hope; Let's Act"
--Walker Lane "Nope to Hope: False Capital and the Spectacle Triumphant"

This issue of _Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture_ solicits a variety of work which looks to activism as a broad array of creative practices yet to be defined. We seek not to revisit debates between theory and practice, but to view activism as a form of invention which may lead to new cultural formations.

What challenges do activists face as practicing utopians? What more or less local examples of activism can be looked to as models for further practice? How can activism as performance, as technology, as art lead to the production of new political and social theory? How is activism the art of the possible?

We would like this issue itself to be a form of activism inasmuch as it brings together a set of theorized practices in the form of case studies from the present and the past, a community of minds in both its contributors and subsequent readers. We also encourage contributors to look to problem areas that have not yet been addressed or not addressed sufficiently, and to propose new models of cultural intervention.

Some areas of particular interest expressed by editors should serve as a starting point:

1. Testimonials of individuals and/or groups that document the structures of collective action and resistances (both external and internal) to these movements.

2. Activism as a form of social and political creativity. Considerations of how theory can promote or become activism, or how theories of political and social invention derive, post facto, from such activities.

3. The rhetoric of activism in its statements and endeavors.

4. Narration and development of (potential) actions with respect to labor (broadly defined).

5. Activism as a form of education, as supplement to or alternative for traditional educational theories. Educating activists. Activating educators. Theoretical and practical issues within "the academy."

6. Resistance to resistance: fatigue, Bruce Robbins' "sweatshop sublime," institutional reprisals from the most oppressive (violence, termination) to the most frustrating (hypocrisy and lip service from those in power, mainstream media misinformation, public indifference), mythologies (of the American dream, of freedom of choice, of the free market, etc.)

7. Reform from within the institution vs. revolution from without.

8. What is (non)violence and what roles do violence or nonviolence play in activism?

9. Issues of activism in different social and historical contexts, what can we learn (from Obama's vision of service to the most dangerous underground resistance movements)?

10. Psychologies of activism. For instance, do activists and/or organizers of activism benefit more from an openness to depaysement (the process by which the ethnographer/observer becomes altered and/or mediated by the culture under investigation) or dissociation/dispassion (the idea of "objective" or "critical" distance from the subject under study as providing a "better" vantage point).

11. What are the benefits or disadvantages of "traditions" in activism? Marx notoriously stated that he was not a Marxist, with that in mind, what kind of problems derive from the institution of founders and followers in activism? Even more fundamental, what is the problem of what Eric Hobsbawm called the "inner conflict of traditions," the inevitable conflict between universal rules and specific, ever-changing circumstances/situations.

12. J.K. Gibson Graham asks in Postcapitalist Politics "If we want other worlds and other economies, how do we make ourselves a condition of possibility for their emergence (7)?"

We hope that activists of all kinds will view this issue as a form of potlatch that may lead to new practice and theory, new activist communities. While we encourage the use of anecdote as example and extended narratives as models for inventing activism, we do not want this issue to be primarily about smoking guns and personal beefs. In the light of the sensitive nature of this endeavor we will consider a variety of approaches to publication---including anonymity and/or "fictocritical" accounts which do not name names or present a situation with altered details.

Please send completed papers and abstracts to the editors at inventionsofactivism@gmail.com no later than February 1, 2010. Earlier submissions and queries are welcome as we may be able to collaborate with authors in order to produce work that not only fits with the intent of the issue but with the standards of Reconstruction. Also, we encourage you to forward this CFP to interested parties and lists.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (ISSN: 1547-4348) is an innovative online cultural studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies. Reconstruction publishes three themed issues and one open issue per year. Send open submissions (year round) to reconstruction.submissions@gmail.com and submissions for themed issues to the appropriate editors listed on the site at Reconstruction

Reconstruction also accepts proposal for special issue editors and topics. Reconstruction is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

Chris Hedges: Liberals are Useless

Liberals Are Useless
by Chris Hedges
TruthDig

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”

I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.

Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Andrew Gilligan: Copenhagen climate summit -- 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges

Copenhagen climate summit -- 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges: Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough.
by Andrew Gilligan
Telegraph



On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.

At the takeaway pizza end of the spectrum, Copenhagen's clean pavements are starting to fill with slightly less well-scrubbed protesters from all over Europe. In the city's famous anarchist commune of Christiania this morning, among the hash dealers and heavily-graffitied walls, they started their two-week "Climate Bottom Meeting," complete with a "storytelling yurt" and a "funeral of the day" for various corrupt, "heatist" concepts such as "economic growth".

The Danish government is cunningly spending a million kroner (£120,000) to give the protesters KlimaForum, a "parallel conference" in the magnificent DGI-byen sports centre. The hope, officials admit, is that they will work off their youthful energies on the climbing wall, state-of-the-art swimming pools and bowling alley, Just in case, however, Denmark has taken delivery of its first-ever water-cannon – one of the newspapers is running a competition to suggest names for it – plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.

And this being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to "be sustainable, don't buy sex," the local sex workers' union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate's pass. The term "carbon dating" just took on an entirely new meaning.

At least the sex will be C02-neutral. According to the organisers, the eleven-day conference, including the participants' travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of "carbon dioxide equivalent", equal to the amount produced over the same period by a city the size of Middlesbrough.

The temptation, then, is to dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous circus. Many of the participants do not really need to be here. And far from "saving the world," the world's leaders have already agreed that this conference will not produce any kind of binding deal, merely an interim statement of intent.

To Read the Rest of the Article

Bertolt Brecht: A Worker Reads History

A Worker Reads History

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Greek triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?
Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?
So many particulars.
So many questions.

--Bertold Brecht, 1928

Rupa and the April Fishes: Une americaine a Paris

Courtesy of Laura W.

The People Speak (Al's Bar: December 13th)

Friends, colleagues, comrades!

Join us for the premier of Howard Zinn's new film:
The People Speak
@ Al's Bar (6th & Lime) on Sunday, Dec 13. 8-10pm
Free!

The People Speak is a documentary inspired by Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States and from the book he co-authored with Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History. These are the voices of resistance in U.S. history – resistance to injustice, to war. Voices that can inspire viewers to recognize the power ordinary people have to change the course of history. These are also the voices that are excluded from traditional histories. Some voices are obscure, some famous and you will hear them express ideas that are excluded from the orthodox histories.

The film brings together accomplished performers like Marisa Tomei, Josh Brolin, Viggo Mortensen, Sandra Oh and Eddie Vedder, to re-create the emotional impact of these moments in history. These slices of life are woven together with historical footage, music and narrations from Ben Affleck and Howard Zinn and together, become a film record of what makes our democracy come alive and why civil disobedience needs to be a defining characteristic of Americans. By presenting these amazing people from our past, we will inspire a new generation to act.

The People Speak website

Bruce Springsteen: This Land Is Your Land

BCTC Filmmaking Certificate Program: Fall 2009 Graduating Class Premiere Celebration (Dec 8)

On behalf of Arthur Rouse, BCTC Film Program…

BCTC Filmmaking Certificate Program
Fall 2009 Graduating Class
Premiere Celebration

Join us for the release of our 7 short works, taking you on a journey
from irony to suspense to bittersweet love and comedy.

Tuesday, December 8th, 6-8pm
NATASHA'S - downtown on Esplanade
5:30pm if you want to order dinner
6:00pm - Greeting
6:30pm - Showtime
7:30pm - Afterglow

Our 6th graduating class has created some fine work, and we look forward to seeing them soon in the emerging Cinematic Arts community in Kentucky.

Special thanks to our master class instructors from Hollywood,
New York, and the Midwest who graciously gave their time,
knowledge, and passion to mentor our students.

Best regards,
Arthur Rouse, BCTC Film Program

Michael Franti and Spearhead: Yell Fire

Film Studies: Dreams, Memory and Chaos

(Migrating some things from my film studies course--please feel free to provide comments about more films or articles/essays/bibliographies that fit this category)

Dreams, Memory and Chaos



General Readings:

Eig, Jonathan. “A Beautiful Mind(Fuck): Hollywood Structures of Identity.” Jump Cut 46 (Summer 2003)

Gaggi, Silvio. “Navigating Chaos.” New Punk Cinema. Ed. Nicholas Rombes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005: 113-125.

Isaacs, Bruce. "Non-Linear Narrative." New Punk Cinema Ed. Nicholas Rombes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005: 126-138.

Plate, S. Brent. “Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culturemaking.” Representing Religion in World Cinema. Ed. S. Brent Plate. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003: 1-15.

Readings of Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Dr. (France/USA: David Lynch, 2001)



Cain, Maximillian Le. “In Dreams: A Review of Mulholland Drive.” Senses of Cinema 19 (March-April 2002)

Ebert, Roger. “Review of Mulholland Drive.” Chicago Sun Times (October 12, 2001)

Falsetto, Mario. “There is No Band at Club Silencio: Thoughts on David Lynch and Mulholland Drive.” Synoptique 6 (Dec 6, 2004)

Frazer, Bryant. “Fast Friends: Mulholland Drive.” (2001)

Gessler, Nicholas. “Mulholland Drive: An Independent Analysis.” (September 29, 2002)

Koresky, Michael. “Altered Beast: Tropical Malady Meets Mulholland Drive.” Reverse Shot (Summer 2005)

Macaulay, Scott. “The Dream Factory.” Filmmaker Magazine (Fall 2001)

McGinn, Colin. "Dreams on Film."; "Reviewing the Dream Theory."; "How To Make a Dream." The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact NY: Pantheon Books, 2005": 100-157; 158-177; and 178-191. {For those that want to investigate more the theory of film and dreams.--the book is in our library.}

Ostherr, Kirsten and Arash Abizadeh. “Amnesia, Obsession, Cinematic U-Turns: On Mulholland Drive.” Senses of Cinema 19 (March-April 2002)

Rapfogel, Jared. “David Lynch.” Senses of Cinema 19 (March-April 2002)

Ruch, Allen B. “’No Hay Banda’: A Long, Strange Trip Down David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.” The Modern Word (April 23, 2002)

Sinnerbrink, Robert. “Cinematic Ideas: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.” Film Philosophy 9.34 (July 2005)

Thill, Scott. “The Not-So-Straight Story: It’s Just Lynch Being Lynch. And That’s a Good Thing.” Bright Lights Film Journal 34 (October 2001)

Wyman, Bill, Max Garrone and Andy Klein. “Everything You Wanted to Know About Mulholland Drive.” Salon (October 23, 2001)

Zacharek, Stephanie. “David Lynch’s Latest Tour de Force.” Salon (October 12, 2001)


More Films:

Being John Malkovich (USA: Spike Jonze, 1999)
A completely unique story announced Spike Jonze (director) and Charlie Kaufman (screenwriter) as bold filmmakers. It is great to walk away from a film that you enjoyed and were provoked by and to think, I have never seen anything like this.... A great film.

The Big Lebowski (USA/UK: The Coen Brothers, 1998: 117 mins)
"The dude abides." A classic by the Coen Bros, that while not as mystifying as some of these films, still explores along the same lines who and what we are... has developed a cult following that has led to an annual conference/party in Louisville bowling alleys.

Blade Runner (USA/Hong Kong: Ridley Scott, 1982/1991)
Landmark, visionary science fiction film that at its essence is about what it means to be human. Hugely influential in the field of science fiction and has roots in the tradition of film noir. I would also consider it to be a profound (drawing from the root questions of its source author Philip K. Dick) meditation on human consciousness. Through the struggle of the rebel androids we are reminded of human hubris in believing that only they are self-reflectively conscious (a preposterous and arrogant assumption).

The Company Of Wolves (United Kingdom: Neil Jordan, 1984)
Neil Jordan's cinematic adaptation of Angela Carter's feminist reworking of traditional patriarchal fairy tales in the werewolf stories in the collection The Bloody Chamber (1979: "The Company of Wolves", "Wolf-Alice" and "The Werewolf") is structured through the symbolic dreams of a young girl. Rich, vivid, surreal film.

Dead Man (USA/Germany/Japan: Jim Jarmusch, 1995)
Johnny Depp plays the lead character in this acid-western dipped in the American (and European) Myth of the West filtered (or juxtaposed) through Native-American counter mythos.

Donnie Darko (USA: Richard Kelley, 2001: director’s cut)
Ignored when originally released in the theaters this film picked-up an audience through rentals and was later re-released with a new director's cut. Jake Gyllenhal and a stellar cast (one of my favorite on-screen families) plumb some philosophical/scientific concepts, while exposing a range of social hypocrisies.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (USA: Michel Gondry, 2004: 108 mins)
As always Charlie Kaufman writes about memory and identity. Great production design, the stunning Kate Winslet accompanying Jim Carrey in a tale of lost love and memories. What would you do to forget the pain of a lost love. Is it better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all?

Human Nature (France/USA: Michel Gondry, 2001: 91 mins)
Rowdy/Bawdy comedy that delves into and around some deep human/identity issues.

I Heart Huckabees (USA/Germany: David O. Russell, 2004: 106 mins)
One of my all-time favorite philosophical comedies with a great cast and intelligent writing. One of the few films that I went and watched a second time while it was in the theaters.

Jacob’s Ladder (USA: Adrian Lyne, 1990: 115 mins)
After-effects of war on the returned, damaged soldier. What is reality? What isn't? Who can you trust?

Kontrol (Hungary: Nimrod Antal, 2003)
Filmed entirely in the Budapest underground railway system. What could have been a typical workplace comedy, slowly builds through absurd events and surreal atmosphere into something much more complex. Alternating between slapstick, mystery and romance, but never falling into simplicity.

Lost Highway (France/USA: David Lynch, 1997)
If you thought Mulholland Drive was confusing, try this earlier effort. I've seen it four times and each time I came up with a different interpretation.

Memento (USA: Christopher Nolan, 2000)
A man searching for his wife's murderer deals with daily memory loss--a bold, memorable film.

Pi (USA: Darren Aronofsky, 1998)
An amazing blend of science, philosophy, math, religion and conspiracy theories--set to a unique visual style. Aronofsky's (Requiem for a Dream) first feature film. A startling, mind-blowing original look into the mystifying patterns of life (as viewed by the skewed person who is recognizing them)--should be studied by all beginning filmmakers to give them an idea of how an excellent screenplay and unique visual style can overcome a low budget. Minimalistic, yet complex. On my DVD copy there is a featurette on the making of the film--check it out if you watch it, great depiction of collective filmmaking and the independent spirit (of course always much more uplifting when it turns out a film like this).

Pulse (Japan: Kiyoshi Kurasowa: 2001: 118 mins)
What effect does our increasing relationship to technology and media have on us? A dark, foreboding, haunting, mysterious film.

Run, Lola, Run (Germany: Tom Tykwer, 1998)
How do the smallest choices change the direction of our lives? Chaos theory inflected thriller.

Save the Green Planet (South Korea: Joon-Hwan Jang, 2003)
Like Being John Malkovich and Pi, unlike any film I have seen before--I can't give anything away and would like to hear what others have to say about it.

The Science of Sleep (France/Italy: Michel Gondry, 2006)
Told through the protagonist Stephane's creative dreams and distorted reality this is a creative film that explores the nature of love, friendship, and relationships.

The Usual Suspects (USA/Germany: Bryan Singer, 1995)
Nothing like a good mystery with a surprise ending--a favorite of many. A must for detective/mystery/crime buffs.

Videodrome (Canada: David Cronenberg, 1983)
I first saw this in the theater as a teen and it literally freaked me out! It repulsed me and attracted me at the same time. Despite its low budget, it is a stunning meditation on the power of media to influence our memories and inform our dreams. In an increasingly media(tized) reality this film is even more important today.

2010 California Marriage Protection Act

Huffington Post: Alex Leo on the 2010 California Marriage Protection Act

NPR: 'No Divorce' Initiative Lampoons Gay Marriage Ban

Zinn Education Project

I can UNDERSTAND pessimism, but I don’t BELIEVE in it. It’s not simply a matter of faith, but of historical EVIDENCE. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give HOPE, because for hope we don’t need certainty, only POSSIBILITY.

Howard Zinn, quoted on the Zinn Education Project