cineSOURCE magazine

State of the Cartoon Report
by Karl Cohen

SF's Mark Fiore Wins Pulitzer for Polical Animated Cartoons

Mark Fiore, a political cartoonist and animator who rises above all others on the Internet, is presently on SFGate.com, Mother Jones.com, CBSNews.com and other sites.

Equal Opportunity Insulter: Fiore reserves his most searing sarcasm for bankers, Republicans, etc. Photo: courtesy M. Fiore

His submissions for the Pulitzer included "Science-gate" (12/09/09) which lampoons skeptics of global warming, "Obama Interruptus" (12/02/09) which portrays his trying to stay focused despite the distractions of the world around him, and "Credit Card Reform" (10/28/09) which takes on the fabulous mumbo-jumbo double-talk offers of the credit card industry.

In 2000, Fiore taught himself Flash, found two customers and started churning out Flash cartoons like crazy. Then the "dream job" he had always wanted appeared: the San Jose Mercury News hired him as their political cartoonist. Being on staff was great until he discovered his editor was under tremendous pressure to keep circulation and ad revenues up.

"It was awful," Fiore says. He lasted six months due to their restrictive editorial policy. (Translation: the Merc did not allow him to kick ass and say what he wanted because of editor's fear of loosing income if he really allowed his staff to speak freely.)

Fiore has been syndicating his weekly animated cartoons online since leaving the paper in 2001, earning high praise. The Wall Street Journal calls him "The undisputed guru of the form." He has received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and other honors. Syndicated weekly to numerous Websites run by newspapers and other organizations, his work is seen regularly by millions of people.

With excellent voice work, music, and animation, Fiore's cartoons are extremely well produced. More importantly, he is free to say what he wants. He says he gets his ideas from the daily media. Whatever upsets him the most generally becomes the subject/butt of his next cartoon. Indeed, he dares to make fun of any subject that interests him.

One brilliant Fiore cartoon, "What If_" (6/25/08), suggests what might happen if a third candidate had entered the 2008 presidential race. In a faux political hit piece, Fiore has an advertisement attacking the candidate's ethics, patriotism, etc. "He has never once been seen wearing a flag pin. He has spent years studying at a religious school in the Middle East. Some call him a hero for the injuries he sustained under torture, yet he would sit down and talk with those who would harm us. His tax plan amounts to making the rich poor and poor rich - Jesus Christ, not the change we want!" See Fiore's work at http://www.markfiore.com.

Imagemovers Starts "Dark Life" for Disney

Robert Zemeckis, who was one of the "Dirty Dozen" cabal of filmmakers at USC including Walter Murch and George Lucas, is keeping his team in the game despite Imagemovers's closure by Disney last month (see CS Apr10). "Dark Life," a science fiction set in the near future, when some humans have escaped environmental disasters by living under the sea, is slated for a fall 2010 release. But it is will contain little or no performance capture work, so I suspect the actors will perform on blue or green screen sets and Imagemovers Digital will drop in computer generated backgrounds. The studio is still set to close early next year.

Oakland Museum Celebrates Pixar

To celebrate Pixar's 25 years of animating excellence in the Bay Area, the Oakland Museum of California is mounting a massive show, with over 500 works, including several not previously seen, from July 31 to January 9, 2011. The show began in 2005 at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and over the past five years it has traveled around the world.

The local exhibit will also show off the museum's new major remodeling work, which kept it closed for months. The museum updated the exhibit so it will include art from "Up," "Toy Story 3," "Wall'E" and other recent projects. Adding a sense of novelty, there will be a giant "Pixar Zoetrope" that you can enter to see the moving images, and Artscape, "an immersive, wide-screen projection of digitally processed images that gives the viewer a sensation of entering into and exploring the exquisite details of the original artwork."

The exhibit covers about 11,000 square feet of exhibit space and is adjacent to Oakland's centerpiece, Lake Merritt, a lovely place to take a walk and grab a bite at Lake Chalet.

Disney/Pixar Sign Selick Contract

Variety announced no details except that the renown animator Henry Selick will work out of Pixar (he is still commuting from Portland but plans to move back soon) and that Henry's stop-motion work could be based on either his own ideas or adaptations. They also said, "Selick hopes to benefit from the Pixar brain trust and technology, but will continue to produce 'toons using his trademark stop-motion style."

Selick directed both "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach" for Disney. After "James" was completed, Disney decided to only produce computer-generated animation. However, after creating overly expensive CG products that were not super profitable, they suddenly see the wisdom of returning to less expensive, Selick-style stop-motion or to hand-drawn animation - a historically rare case of technological de-evolution.

Lucas Expert at Extending "Star Wars"

Variety has announced Lucasfilm Animation is working on a Star Wars animated comedy series. The Daily Show's Brendan Hay and Robot Chicken's Seth Green and Matthew Seinreich, will be among the writers.

Posted on May 10, 2010 - 05:15 PM
Did Romanticism Survive the Holocaust?
by Steven Middlestein

'Love at the End of the World', 32 stories about war, love and world travel, by Tonia Rotkopf Blair, is the latest venture from A Media Press which publishes cineSOURCE. photo: courtesy A Media Press

"WHAT DOES ONE CALL A DREAM
that actually came true but not as originally visualized?” is how Tonia Rotkopf Blair starts “Dreams”, the first of her 32 stunning stories in “Love at the End of the World”, the new book from A Media Press (which can be purchased here).

“Dreams” doesn’t mention the Holocaust, the subject of a third of her stories and a ghoulish presence in most of the others, but Rotkopf Blair’s dedication to positive visualization sets the stage for the entire work. Indeed, “Love at the End of the World” is a fascinating look into how a naïve, young woman was sustained through the terror by her dreams.

Romanticism is not a notion often associated with the Holocaust, save to mark the philosophy’s catastrophic collapse. In fact, there’s a cadre of Jewish intellectuals—Bruno Bettelheim, Cynthia Ozick, Lawrence Langer, to name a few—dedicated to destroying the first lady of remaining romantic in the face of atrocity, Anne Frank, and her editor/father Otto.

The Franks’s crimes: misrepresenting the Holocaust, sentimentalizing it, de-Judaizing it and bowdlerizing it into a farrago of kitsch, wishful thinking and denial that will only serve to deliver us to the next Holocaust.

If only Anne Frank and Tonia Rotkopf Blair would have renounced their childish ways and become steely-eyed realists, insist Bettelheim, Ozick, et al, they would have sharpened a spoon into a shank and taken out at least one Nazi, or one of their eyes, before being killed, thereby leading us towards a more empowered future.

What these armchair street fighters don’t realize—aside from the fact that Frank and Rotkopf Blair were two teenage girls on the brink of starvation—is that wars are not won by machismo, murder and pure power alone.

Equally important are women, culture and dreams. Although Frank wrote her book before witnessing the full horror of the Holocaust, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she was murdered two months before the end of the war, if Rotkopf Blair had attacked a Nazi she would not have lived to write her treatise on how to endure Auschwitz while preserving your heart.

Tonia Rotkopf Blair with a patient at Mauthausen hospitpal where she worked immediately after she was liberated from the camp of the same name in Austria by the Americans. photo: courtesy A Media Press

Sure, some young Jewish women did become guerrilla fighters. Hannah Senesh parachuted into Yugoslavia with a special forces team to rescue Jews in 1944. Even as her daring mission collapsed into capture and torture, however, she remained dedicated to poetry, notably her now-famous “Blessed is the Match (Consumed in Kindling Flame)”, which was found in her cell after her execution.

As Rotkopf Blair’s native Poland was consumed by war, instead of crawling out a sewer to join the partisans, the shy, soft-spoken fourteen year old dedicated herself to life, becoming the youngest nurse in the Lodz Ghetto, tending the sick and dying, often without medicine, for almost four years.

Moreover, despite loosing her family and the grotesque conditions, she was determined to follow the “normal” teenage development of learning about love, relationships and romance.

In fact, the first story she decided to write, after joining the writing class which generated most of the stories, was “Stefan”. About meeting a young man at the cattle cars and falling in love on the way to Auschwitz, it conveys a female side of the Holocaust, a bizarre mixture of love, horror and hope, few have dared mention.

Despite being jammed in a cattle car with over a hundred people in the sweltering summer heat, they found a corner: “We talked most of the night and sang, barely audibly, Chopin’s song ‘If I were a bird . . .’ We kissed — I felt delirious.”

“Disgusting and infantile” would probably be the judgment of Bettelheim and Ozick. “They should have been sharpening their spoons or trying to wriggle out the hole near the cattle car’s roof, to leap from the train.

“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism,” according to the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno, and we can assume that applies to reciting it on the way to Auschwitz.

Tonia Rotkopf Blair during her return to Auschwitz in 1980, 36 years after she was incarcerated there. photo: courtesy A Media Press

But can one recover from recover from Auschwitz with only Adorno’s Frankfurt School philosophy or bleak existentialism, not to mention the cynicism, nihilism and survival of the fittest rampant post-war? Don’t young women as well as others need a means to integrate a jaundiced regard of the Holocaust with hope, romance and dreams.

Rotkopf Blair did not commit suicide or shrivel into nothing in Auschwitz because her heart had been fortified by loving parents, romantic literature, and all the decent people she encountered, as well as her loving, romantic spirit.

Indeed so important is that spirit, by the end of the war, the Nazis came to agreed with Frank and Rotkopf Blair, as is pointed out by Doniphan Blair, who edited “Love at the End of the World”, and includes his own ground breaking essay at its end.

“The fact that the Nazi’s proclaimed themselves determined Darwinists,” he notes, “but didn’t force their soldiers to finish off… every last Jewish woman they had in their clutches, even though a rudimentary understanding of evolution indicates they must, means that they, too, realized that sexual selection beats natural selection over the long term.”

In other words, if humans don’t retain their capacity to reproduce—and poetry and romanticism is the human culture of reproduction—no matter how many enemy they may kill, their war is lost.

In addition to Stefan and other Jewish men and women, Rotkopf Blair engaged in relations with Belgians, Czechs and even Germans. “Whoring with the devil,” might be the spittle-spattered exclamation of Bettelheim and Ozick, but Rotkopf Blair’s faith in humanity were buoyed immensely by a chaste flirtation she carried with a decent German officer, in a work camp.

Indeed, Rotkopf Blair adores decent men and wants to give them their props. In her story “My Trip to Poland”, about going back 35 years after the war, she concludes in the Frankfurt train station after a German man—inexplicably, despite the presence of her husband—insists on flirting with her and buying her a bottle of wine and chocolates.

Rotkopf Blair with an infant in the maternity ward in Lansberg, Germany, where she worked for a year and half after the war until she obtained papers and passage to South America. photo: courtesy A Media Press

Little do Bettelheim and Ozick realize that life and death, war and peace, is not black and white and has many complexities. By throwing away our partial allies, by gouging out their eyes, by insisting on the ancient code of an eye for an eye, dedicating our selves harsh Jacobin world, condemning before learning the stories and details.

In these difficult times, with nationalism, neo-Nazism and xenophobia at our throat, and many groups falling prey to the easy solution of blaming their neighbors for what we are all obviously to some degree party to, Rotkopf Blair’s 32 painful yet poignant, horrific yet romantic, taut yet descriptive stories indicate an open forgiving look that points the way through a difficult history.

Unlike armchair fighters, those who have been through the fire know how a much even a modicum of decency can mean and how we have to preserve the stories of the weak, the female and the romantic, as well as those of the warriors, because without them where will the warriors get their dreams.

Steven Middlestein is a writer, editor and movie fanatic who can be reached . Posted on Jun 17, 2019 - 01:14 AM
Always Be My Mediocre
by Doniphan Blair

'Always Be My Maybe''s Ali Wong ambition-shames co-star Randal Park, a move she should have applied to her own film. image: courtesy Nahnatchka Khan

SAN FRANCISCO GOT TARRED AGAIN
by another barely-funny rom-com set in The City, this time by an almost-entirely Asian team, proving that white privilege is not necessary to make pretentious overblown films and begging the question: Can you parody hipster idiots while imitating Hollywood at its most commercial?

No wonder “Always Be My Maybe” went straight to streaming on Netflix, the international media conglomerate whose business model—cheap, fast and obsessively-topical—can not help but produce 80% crap, on May 29th.

The tragedy is the talent wasted, notably the brilliant, beautiful Ali Wong, fresh off her second “pregnant and hysterical” comedy tours/films: “Baby Cobra" and "Hard Knock Wife" (2016 and 2018, respectively), also from Netflix (part of its masterful 20%). Born and bred in San Francisco’s wealthy Pacific Heights neighborhood, Wong apparently felt it was worth letting down her hometown by going completely commersh to cover tuition at SF’s ridiculously expensive private schools, which she now needs for two kids.

Wong’s co-star Randal Park is another eminence grise of Asian comedy, having created a string of award-winning shorts, played dictator Kim Jong-un in the near-war-starting “The Interview” (2014), and garnered a Best Actor Critics' Choice Award for starring in the TV show “Fresh Off the Boat” (2015-ongoing).

The freshman film from Nahnatchka Khan, who directed/produced “Fresh Off the Boat” and whose parents are from Iran, the directing is utterly unremarkable, a disgrace to her parent's homeland, the first film nation of Islam, if not the entire Global South. But it is the lackluster writing from Wong, Park and Michael Golamco, a respected—until now—Filipino-American playwright, that is truly odd.

Wong falls madly in love with Keanu Reaves—for only a few days—setting the stage for 'Always Be My Maybe''s most searing satire. image: courtesy Nahnatchka Khan

Of course, it must be said that, in regards to the “can you parody hipster idiots” question, Wong, Park and Golamco did write a stunning scene for Keanu Reeves, where he plays himself and steals the movie in a devastating satire of celebrity sick-fucks as well as hipster idiots.

Sadly, Reeves’s startling appearance only serves to highlight the paucity of searing self-effacement and surgical insight into their own story and characters, although they also do a decent take down of Asian hipsters in a character played by the incredibly-named and obviously-talented actress Vivian Bang, as the oversexed, dreadlocked lover of Park, during his long separation from his childhood beloved and eventual wife Wong.

There are also a lot a sweet moments for a host of underserved Asian-American actors, starting with the always-excellent James Saito (from 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles', 1990, on), who plays Park's character's father.

Indeed, the Reeves scene proves that buried within “Always Be My Maybe” is an edgy, funny film fighting to get out. This is also indicated by a half-a-dozen solid lines, like when Wong says something like, “I hope it’s not still as small and grungy,” and Park retorts, “I hope your referring to my car’s back seat”—Asian comedy’s now-requisite small-penis joke.

In fact, all Wong, Park and Golamco needed was a standard-issue studio script doctor to cut the lard, like all the trillionaire bits—does Wong really have to go from learning cooking from Park’s mom to the planet’s most famous chef without even a mis-en-scene???—and add a couple of aggressive pages, of which the writers undoubtedly have notebooks, drawers and suitcases stuffed full.

Instead of shooting white koi in a Zen garden barrel, how about some Asian-on-Asian humor, since Wong’s character is Vietnamese and Park’s is Korean, and we know there must be some fascinating and funny stereotypes harbored by each group about the other? At the very least, instead of all that drawn-out, feel-good childhood footage or the long march towards marriage, how about more riffing repartee, given Park emerges in the film’s finale as a vicious cutup.

While Rotten Tomatoes gives “Always Be My Maybe” a 91% approval rating, and Rolling Stones’ Peter Travers claims, “It’s an irresistible romantic romp that turns the familiar into something sweet, sassy and laugh-out-loud funny,” that’s obviously patronizing white people and middle brow people of color talking, not cutting-edge comedic analysis.

After years of minor roles, the talented Vivian Bang gets her star turn, albeit as the fall-girl for all the satire 'Always Be My Maybe' holds back from its main characters. image: courtesy Nahnatchka Khan

Just because people on the screen look like you, that’s only twenty percent of the battle. If they don’t think like the you that you aspire to be, if they aren’t truly visionary, monumentally human AND hysterically funny, they aren’t all that inspiring.

If “Always Be My Maybe” is what kids of color or non-binary gender—and there’s the obligatory gay secondary character, of course, who is also pregnant and even gives birth mid-film (a nod to Wong’s “Baby Cobra”)—are obliged to watch on their first dates or to get their rom-com fix, the new army of Hollywood integrators are shooting themselves in the foot.

Indeed, they’re sending those kids to search Netflix for actually smart and funny rom-coms about love, separation and reuniting, like “His Girl Friday”—almost 80 years old and ALL white, but that's the thing about true talent, it transcends ALL barriers—a futile search, in fact, since Netflix doesn’t even have it. (Fortunately, Amazon does: go here.)

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Jun 10, 2019 - 04:55 PM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner: June 2019
by Karl Cohen

Ad for the first 'talkie' Mickey Mouse cartoons from Disney Studios. image: courtesy Disney Museum

This article's author is covered in this month's feature, "Karl Cohen: Cartoon King".

Excellent Exhibit at Disney Museum

The new large temporary exhibit at the Walt Disney Family Museum is a tour-de-force honoring their first big character, Mickey Mouse. Indeed, it features over 400 pieces of art, plus a balcony gallery of fine art paintings of Mr. Mouse by artists ranging from Wayne Thiebold and Andy Warhol to an amusing enormous work by San Francisco-based muralist Sirron Norris that has twelve Mickeys in it. (I only spotted nine—three are too well hidden.)

The show is full of rough preliminary drawings. The guest curator/Disney animator Andreas Deja told us at the press preview that he favors preliminary sketches by animators as they show the person’s hand movements and thoughts, while cleaned up drawings are normally by assistants and lack some of the artist’s personal touch.

By seeing this wide variety of images, you can trace the evolution of the way Mickey was drawn. While the drawings are fascinating, I was amazed by a large painted cel from The Band's last concert that showed a wide angle shot of the crowd around the bandstand, with what must have around 100 characters.

On the balcony there is a collage of large photos that shows the evolution of the costumed Mickey that greets people in the theme park. If you look closely, there is a very early goofy-looking Mickey with tiny black pupils. Not an image we are familiar with.

The production art includes Ub Iwerks drawings from 1928-30, drawings and cel paintings, including cels from some of the great films that were released in Technicolor. There is also more recent work, including a few films made with computers that are shown on a very large, flat screen display.

I was told that some of the hand-drawn works I was seeing had never been shown to the public before. Indeed, some were from projects that were never completed.

While Mickey and his friends sold over $3 billion in merchandise in 2018, according to the Wall Street Journal, the exhibit makes no mention of Mr. Mouse being what Forbes magazine calls “a fictional billionaire.” (I assume Spider Man is now on that list.) Instead, there is one tasteful display of really old toys—with no T shirts, balloons and other yucky things—to remind us that some really cool-looking things have been made that have his likeness on them.

“The exhibition is a testament to Mickey’s transcendent influence," notes a brochure, "from cartoons and comic books to real-life appearances at Disney Parks worldwide.”

Located in The Presidio by the main parade ground (104 Montgomery Street, not on the street of that name in downtown SF), the museum is open from 10 to 6, but last admission is at 4:45 pm, as you need two or more hours to really enjoy the exhibits. It closes Jan. 6, 2020.

A scene from 'Entropia' by Hungarian Flóra Anna Buda. image: courtesy F. A. Buda

Frameline Goes Animated

Frameline, San Francisco's world-famous LGBT festival, is presenting a program of animated films at the Roxie Theater Saturday, June 29th at 1:30 pm

The film "Entropia" (11m, 2019) is by Flóra Anna Buda, from Hungary. Winner of the Teddy Award for Best Short at the Berlin International Film Festival, it has vibrant colors that illustrate a science fiction tale about “queer relationships in the future without bras.”

"Biidaaban" (The Dawn Comes), by Amanda Strong (Canada, 19m, 2018), is a stop-motion work about “the indigenous musician-writer-poet Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

Canadian provocateur Trevor Anderson gives us "Docking" (4m, 2018), which infuses absurdist humor in his inventive and surreal approach to documentary. Here he explores his fears of dating through phalluses in space.

"Les lèvres gercées", by Fabien Corre & Kelsi Phung (5m, 2018, France) deals with gender identity when a mother and child attempt to start a dialogue in their kitchen.

"Sweet Sweet Kink: A Collection of BDSM Stories", by Maggie M. Bailey (14m2019, USA/Chile), is a fun and sexy short, which premiered at the SXSW Film Festival. It tells four naughty stories, highlighting each of the letters of BDSM: bondage, dominance, and sadomasochism.

The featurette, "Top 3", is by Sofie Edvardsson (45m, 2019, Sweden). “In this funny, bittersweet romantic comedy, perpetual list-maker Anton falls in love with David," according to the website, "but things start to go awry when Anton realizes that his dreams in life might be in direct opposition to David’s.”

Another program includes "Bacchus", the all-too-brief trailer for which is full of stunning, exquisite, abstract images. This gem is an impressive work of art made by 3rd year character-animation and CG-art students at the University College in Viborg, Denmark's animation workshop. The film was a Viemo pick last year.

A cartoon Moses leads his people to freedom in Nina Paley's 'Seder-Masochism'. image: courtesy Nina Paley

The Jewish Film Festival

"Seder-Masochism", by Nina Paley ("Sita Sings the Blues, 2012), who lived in San Francisco from 1981 to 2002 (Castro, Haight, Mission and Noe Valley), is a beautifully crafted, highly entertaining and delightfully provocative. A musical retelling of the Exodus and Passover, think "Fanatasia" (1939) meets the Old Testament, coupled with serious feminist criticism and a rocking soundtrack. Paley’s syncopated, beat-driven scenes of the ten plagues are exceptionally drawn.

Besides Paley’s “Seder Machoism,” there are two more animated or part-animated features in the upcoming SF Jewish Film Festival.

Still from Rachel Leah Jones's 'Advocate'. image: courtesy F. A. Buda

Rachel Leah Jones's "Advocate" follows Israeli human-rights lawyer Lea Tsemel. Having defended Palestinians against a host of criminal charges in Israeli courts for nearly five decades, she is a staunch supporter of compassion within the court system. This documentary juxtaposes two of Tsemel’s cases: the defense of a minor accused of attempted murder and a past case in which she defended her activist husband from an accusation of treason against the state. Director Rachel Leah Jones was born in Berkeley and lives part time in Tel Aviv.

"The State Against Mandela and the Others", by Nicolas Champeaux and Gilles Porte, focuses on the 1963 trail of Nelson Mandela and nine confederates forattempting to overthrow the South African state. While Mandela’s story is well known, there were a number of important supporting actors in this drama, including members of South Africa’s small Jewish community. Blending chilling archival audio with striking animation and interviews with surviving defendants, "The State Against Mandela and the Others" vividly brings this seminal courtroom drama to life.

Posted on Jun 10, 2019 - 12:23 AM
Karl Cohen: Cartoon King
by Doniphan Blair

Cartoon fanatic, scholar and maker Karl Cohen relaxes on a overstuffed couch in the similar front room of his San Francisco Victorian. photo: D. Blair

KARL COHEN WAS NOT SIMPLY
crowned king of Bay Area animation curation, a concept that would offend his egalitarian sensibilities; indeed, he had to slowly crawl his way to the top.

After growing up a nerdy, film-obsessed kid in 1950s Washington, DC, and getting his BA there, he headed west. Matriculating at the University of California, Berkeley, for an MA in art history, he barely graduated given that the Free Speech Movement exploded on campus, in his senior year, 1965.

“I got radicalized one morning as I was going to class,” he told me recently. “I saw limp protesters being hauled out of the administration building and tossed into paddy wagons. That was a horrible moment for me. I joined the picket line to show my support.”

Decamping shortly thereafter back to Squaresville, he pursued his chosen metier at the Des Moines Art Center, in Iowa, where he taught art history, and then the Toledo Museum of Art, in Ohio.

Within six years, however, he was back in the thick of it, moving to the Haight-Ashbury and showing his rapidly expanding film collection to the hippies, then the beats in North Beach and eventually all over.

Soon landing teaching gigs at almost every film department in the Bay Area, he became a fixture in the light show, film display and animation scene, which had kicked off locally a decade earlier with the arrival of blacklisted Disney animator David Hilberman at San Francisco State, in 1967.

Cohen (right) with new age musician George Mundy, for whom he did light shows, circa 1978. photo courtesy: K. Cohen

Cohen covered this important development in his major work, “Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animation” (1997, McFarland). He has also published almost two dozen major articles and several hundred lessor works (including "Cohen’s Cartoon Corner" in cineSOURCE, which has appeared monthly since the magazine’s inception in 2008).

Along the way he also made almost two dozen 16mm and Super-8 shorts, two of which garnered distro on the Midnight Movies circuit and television. Others appeared in many festivals, including the Chicago International and New York Erotic. Along with DP-ing the indie feature "Deeply Disturbed", from Loonic Video (1993), he has had one-man shows at the Intersection for the Arts and the Berkeley Film House.

In the 1980s, Cohen became the head of the local chapter of the Association International du Film d’Animation (ASIFA), which was founded in 1975 by Jeff and Margaret Hale (of "Sesame Street" and "Thank You Mask Man" fame), Prescott Wright ("International Tournée of Animation") and others. Since then, he has published its newsletter and recently received the international organization's lifetime achievement award, which is usually reserved for directors.

He also became a special effects specialist, notably of UFO-related material, some so lifelike it inspired UFO-sighting testimonials, but also more routine footage for the likes of Bank of America or Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

In 1993, Cohen began teaching his now-famous animation class at San Francisco State, growing it from cut-and-dry lectures to a multifaceted survey of animation, replete with incredible shows from his extensive collection.

"While I still cover the basics," Cohen told me, by email, "I also add important themes, including the importance of surrealism in animation, the use of seemingly-harmless cartoons for propaganda or to present provocative subjects to adults. I discuss the importance of art to what makes animation truly great."

Despite suffering a stroke in 1998, he gets around with a cane and remains a vocal supporter of animation, notably its more experimental aspects. Given this and his decade-plus dedication to writing for cineSOURCE, as well as the amazingly-elevated position the Bay Area holds in the history of animation, I had long wanted to sit down for a chat with Cohen.

We finally did so at the end of May at his deluxe digs, a four-story Victorian just eight blocks from the epicenter of the Summer of Love, the corners of Haight and Ashbury.

Cohen veers easily from good humor to incisive seriousness. photo courtesy: D. Blair

cineSOURCE: So you were here when the storied Haight-Ashbury was just around the corner?

Karl Cohen: I moved back from the Midwest in 1971, when the Haight was a mess.

I came in the fall of ‘71 and was confronted by an apocalyptic image. As you recall, the entire street was covered with graffiti, all the stores were boarded up—

Not all, I showed movies in one of them.

I became friends with Eric “Big Daddy” Nord, a somewhat-famous beatnik. He was the biggest of the beatniks, over six feet—250 to 300 pounds, I would guess.

He was asked by Tony Serra [famous Bay Area lefty lawyer] to live in the back of an empty store because Tony wanted someone in the space so it wouldn’t get destroyed by vandals. It had been the Print Mint [which did Zap Comix issues #4–9].

What was your specialty then?

Cartoons and comedies, the classics.

How did the hippies take to the Marx Brothers—they must have loved it.

It was fun showing films there, but there was not much of an audience, even though we were only asking for $1 donations. Then I was invited to go down to North Beach and start a Sunday night series that I ran for about 15 years at Intersection on 756 Union Street.

Intersection for the Arts?

Yes, they’ve since moved. In the early ‘80s they had a new director who decided to turn it into a conceptual art center. So she got rid of the poetry project, the comedian workshops, the film shows.

She thought conceptual was the big new thing?

Yes. The rent had been a dollar a year from Glide Memorial Church that owned the building. [She said,] ‘Oh, we can’t do that to the Methodists, we have to pay rent.’ [They said,] ‘Oh you want to pay rent, we will find out what the going rent is in North Beach.’ ‘Oh, we can’t pay that.’ Then they said, ‘Get the hell out.’

When did you get bit by the film bug?

Buster Keaton and Cosmic Animation: two typical nights from when Cohen was curating film at Intersection for the Arts, circa 1975. image courtesy: K. Cohen

By the time I was five or six. I grew up in Washington, DC, My father had 8mm movies of Charlie Chaplin and I loved looking at those. It was an unorthodox cinematic education.

I was about eight when my Uncle Danny opened the Dupont Theatre, Washington’s first integrated movie theater. It got picketed by the KKK, and the Hollywood film exchanges would not give him their films. Out of necessity, he ended up showing lots of documentaries and foreign films.

By the 1950s, the Circle Theatre was showing foreign and revival programs. I ended up seeing Eisenstein and so on by the time I was ten or twelve. I loved Cocteau [‘Blood of the Poet’, 1930, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, 1946]. When most kids were learning to love ‘Howdy Doody’ [TV show, 1947-60], I was enjoying Buñuel and lots of British comedies: Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers.

When were you finally bitten by animation?

I grew up with it. The MacArthur Theater in Washington showed UPA [United Producers Association] animation on programs with British comedies. I went to other theaters that showed three-hour-long cartoon marathons. I became a fan of Bugs [Bunny] and Daffy [Duck].

I was obsessed with those, too. In one of your recent ‘Cartoon Corners’, you were covering ‘Crusader Rabbit’. An early example of Bay Area animation?

Yup.

That was the first successful animated series made for TV [1950]. There were other examples prior to that, but they are all obscure footnotes in history. The voice of Crusader Rabbit was Lucille Bliss, who had voiced one of Cinderella’s evil sisters and later became the voice of Smurfette. She lived in the Castro and was a delightful friend, as she loved to talk about her long career.

You grew up watching ‘Crusader Rabbit’ and were pretty impressed?

I don’t know. As a kid, I wasn't thinking in terms of impressive; it was entertainment. But I was too old for it so I rarely watched it.

I saw the replays, eight-ten years later, and found them to be fantastic. They had a lot of adventures—they went to the South Seas. They really created this story line, friendship and adventure.

Yup.

Disney was only movies then?

Yup. Disney hated TV at that point. That was before he made millions on TV.

Cohen gets a hug from Marjane Satrapi, director of the ground-breaking 'Persepolis' (2007), after his interview that inspired her 45 minute rant about the insanity of Iran and the US and the power of animation. photo courtesy: K. Cohen

At some point you started teaching at State and got into cartoons?

It came from showing them. I recognized that the audience loved them. I loved them. I realized that the best animation is a great form of kenetic art. I started to get serious about collecting 16mm animated shorts in the Midwest.

I was working in the art museum in Des Moines. There was a man who had a small basement theater in his house. He showed great classics like ‘The Great Dictator’ [1940], ‘Metropolis’ [1927] and ‘Phantom of the Opera’ [1925].

He introduced me to a magazine where I could buy these films. So I started buying 16mm prints of cartoons, silent comedies and other films, even 1950s and ‘60s TV commercials. I just loved collecting and showing them.

And you still have—?

Yes, upstairs, although it is dangerous to go in the room.

I assume Steve Parr [1953-2018, a mutual friend and owner of Oddball Films] would come over and try to convince you to give him a few of those reels?

Oh yeah!

Did you give some?

Of course [both laugh]. I wish I had given him more.

Parr used to toss extremely large gatherings when he lived south of Market. At one party there was a rather unusual guy going around with a can of shaving cream and a pie tin, asking young women rub a tin full of cream in his face. It was quite pleasurable for him—judging from the wet spot on his pants—and he found several women who obliged him that evening.

I wrote a note to Herb Caen [the long time SF columnist, 1916-97] about 'Pie Face' Mike. He found a discrete way to mention Mike and Steve. We became better friends based on my getting him in Caen’s column. Parr seemed quite delighted with those few minutes of fame.

Do you still show 16mm—?

Now no one is showing 16mm anymore, only transfers to DVD and other digital formats.

I used to show them to my students at San Francisco State. All my animation history classes had films presented on 16mm—except more recent work—from my collection.

When did you start teaching there?

1993.

That is about when Pixar started. So the Bay Area—please tell me why—became this world center for animation.

Because people liked to live here, and you don’t need famous movie stars to do the voices. As far as the production goes, you can do that anywhere. So a lot of people said, ‘where do you want to live?’ And they said, ‘San Francisco.’

But let me go back, the industry on the West Coast started in your hometown?

Oakland?

You know where it was?

That place near Fremont?

Cohen covers Phil Tippett, a stop-motion creature specialist, who did stuff for 'Star Wars' and 'Jurassic Park', which appeared in a local media mag, Film-Tape World (1979-2007). photo courtesy: K. Cohen

Niles? No, that was live action.

There was an animator working in Oakland from 1915-1916, up till 1918 or later. You know who Willis O'Brien is?

No.

He animated the stop-motion puppet in ‘King Kong’ [1933].

His early experimental work was distributed by Edison. He lived in Oakland and then moved his studio to San Francisco. It was at Powell and Market on the roof of a bank. He needed a good source of light.

Amazing. So the Bay Area—specifically the East Bay—has been at the cutting edge of animation for 100 years?

Yes.

So then there was the North Bay animation scene. When did that kick in?

When Lucas went up there, after the original ‘Star Wars’ [1977].

When was the golden age of animation in the Bay Area?

Ahhh, I would say there wasn’t one. It is all transitory.

Martin Rosen produced ‘Plague Dogs’ [1982] at a space in North Beach. The following year ‘Twice Upon a Time’, made in Mill Valley, was released. It was directed by John Korty and Chuck Swenson, George Lucas as the executive producer. It was a nice period, but it wasn’t a golden age.

There was a time when there was a lot of stuff up at Hamilton Fields [ImageMovers, Robert Zemeckis].

They did motion capture and a lot of stuff for Disney.

That was about 1990, and then the Disney Museum opened here.

That was ten years ago [2009], because the family lived up here. Diane Disney-Miller and her husband Ron Miller. They created Sterling Vineyards.

By the time you add it all up, the Bay Area has been a big player.

Yes, but it doesn’t have a nice, logical history, because it is always being interrupted.

And now it is on sort of a downturn?

You have TV animation starting here with ‘Crusader Rabbit’ but going nowhere. The next productions are in LA. At that point, Alex Anderson—Jay Ward’s partner [the co-creator of 'Crusader'], who was in advertising—he didn’t go to LA with Jay. So you really don’t have that continuum.

‘Crusader Rabbit’ basically died. There was a lawsuit. It was in production from 1948 to 1950, when a lawsuit ended the production. The studio was in rooms over Jay Ward’s parent’s garage in Berkeley, and the sound was recorded in SF.

Cohen drops by a film night hosted by the late, great Steve Parr, long time friend and coveter of Cohen's fantastic film collection. photo: D. Blair

The first episodes were made for about $500 each—that is why the productions were called ‘limited animation.’ Now Alex Anderson’s animation stand and archive belong to our Cartoon Art Museum, in Fisherman's Wharf. When production started up again, in the 1950s, Ward had moved to LA [1956-59].

The companies that were in San Francisco... you had John Magnuson, who did ‘Thank You Masked Man’, with Jeff Hale directing [written and voiced by Lenny Bruce, 1971]. They had a studio called Imagination Incorporated in the late ‘60s and into the ‘70s, but then that dies. They created a lot of TV commercials and segments for 'Sesame Street'.

Where was that?

In North Beach, on Jackson.

What I would say, if there was golden age, it would be the late ‘70s to early ‘80s. You have John Korty, who won an Oscar for ‘Who are the DeBolts’ [1977], a documentary about a family, which had ten or fifteen kids [19, actually].

He had a studio in Mill Valley, and he got a contract from ‘Sesame Street’.

All the way in from New York?

Yes. He needed animators. So he hired animators who were learning animation by the seat of their pants.

Two of them were Gary Gutierrez and Drew Takahashi. While working for Korty, they got a contract, around ’75, to do the animation for the Grateful Dead feature—the introduction of the film was animated. They did this cosmic pinball game in outer space set to Grateful Dead music, some tuning-up sounds, which was very weird. It was great.

When they got the contract to do the opening footage, Korty said something like, ‘I don’t want that in my studio, it will take up too much space,’ whatever his excuses were. So Gary and Drew did it in Drew’s mother’s basement. It was a Victorian in SF. In 1976, they incorporated as Colossal Pictures and they lasted until ‘99.

They moved down to Bayshore at some point.

They were all over. I followed them for years. They were the best animation company in town, practically the only one. They did fantastic work.

They did features as well?

Titles for lots of features and TV shows plus the special effects for ‘The Right Stuff’.

It looks simple but it was very effective.

[laughs] They had wires strung outside the building, where they would film at just the right time of day or night, when the wire wouldn’t show, shooting at a certain angle. They would slide flaming space capsules coming back into earth on those wires.

They also hired the late Jordan Belson, a great unsung visionary filmmaker [pre-computer, computer-like effects, see his master work ‘Mandala’, 1953], to create amazing images for the feature.

Colossal Pictures did some TV animation that is still some of the best animation you have ever seen—from Captain Crunch to Coca-Cola commercials, as well as early titles for ‘Saturday Night Live’, ‘The Twilight Zone’ and MTV.

A Betty Boop-impersonator, hired by Cohen's wife Denise, entertains him on his 60th birthday. photo: courtesy K. Cohen

[They also did ‘Back to the Future: The Animated Series’, 1991, the "Aeon Flux" series for MTV, 1991-95, and effects for ‘Bram Stoker's Dracula’, 1991, ‘Demolition Man’, 1993, and ‘Natural Born Killers’, 1994, among many others.]

Did you yourself do cel animation?

I did experimental animation, cutouts, optical effects.

I also created a series of postcards of UFOs flying over SF. They were sold for many years in stores around the world. SF Magazine published my circular space station flying over the Transamerica Building in a full page ad for subscriptions to the magazine.

At one point, I got a very strange phone call from the ‘Cosmic Lady’ thanking me for photographing the UFO she had seen.

When did you start teaching animation?

I’d rather not name the school. It was a horrible school.

We formed a legal union and went out on strike against them. We won our strike. When we were reinstated, they said I had to teach what my staff replacement was teaching. I was teaching film history and he was teaching a course in animation.

So this is your Rosebud moment, you were forced into it by the oppressor?

Exactly.

I think that is common artistically: doing something by necessity not choice.

I was friends with Marcy Page and others who worked for Colossal. I put together a course overnight. I knew enough about it because I had been doing under-the-camera animation with cutouts.

Cutouts, that is a great tradition, too. Where did that start—must have been very early?

I don’t honestly know.

Your class was a practicum?

Yes, I also brought in a lot of films to show. Later I did a few courses with SF State Extension.

At some point, you switched to doing the history of animation?

Yes, in the early 1990s at State.

And, at that moment, Pixar blew up and you knew those people?

Cohen dug deep into his vaults for material even shocking to Berkeleyites, circa 1999. photo courtesy: K. Cohen

Oh god, yes. When they were in Richmond—before they got the fabulous place in Emeryville—they were in temporary buildings, sprawled over a large area. That is where people started running around on skateboards, rolling skates and scooters.

I did an interview for Film Tape World with John Lasseter. His office was twice the size of this [room] and it had nothing but shelves full of toys, stuffed bears, metal toys, trucks, whatever.

For inspiration?

Yeah.

You wrote a couple of pretty tough articles about women complaining about John, are you still on speaking terms?

I haven’t seen him in years. Last time I saw him was at the opening of the Disney Museum. My wife and I came in and he gave me a big hug—no big deal—he was a hugger. Diane Disney-Miller was there with him, greeting people.

A bit like Biden, borderline but not with real bad intention. Nevertheless, he suffered quite a bit from it.

Yeah. John knew me by name, when I came in the door, but since then so much has happened. I feel sorry for him. He is just a boy at heart—an overgrown boy.

Once, years ago, when Spike and Mike [Craig 'Spike' Decker and Mike Gribble] were in town, presenting one of their ‘Sick and Twisted’ shows’, they rented a luxury apartment on the top of a tall building overlooking the Fisherman’s Wharf area. They were probably a little tipsy and, in any case, someone ordered pizzas.

So what did they do when the pizza boxes were empty? John Lasseter and Mike Gribble were at the window. ‘Hey, let’s see how far they can be thrown.’ They were throwing these cardboard rounds, that you have in pizza boxes, out the window. They were asked to clean up their mess and told not to come to back. [laughs]

Yes, that was an incredible boom time but—

It died.

Where did it move to, back to LA?

Animation is still written and designed on paper here in the US, and then it is shipped abroad to do the work.

The first ‘runaway production’ [sent overseas] was Jay Ward’s ‘Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends’ [1959-1964]. The sponsor had a deal with a studio in Mexico. Their first work was awful, so Jay had to fly one or two LA animators to Mexico City, to teach that crew how to animate.

Soon other studios were sending work to Taiwan and Australia. I knew two women who moved to Taiwan to supervise a major production.

They ran into so much sexism on the job that they would have to call LA saying, ‘Hey so-and-so here at the studio, we asked him to make the changes, and he refused to listen to us. Could you tell him he will be fired if he doesn’t cooperate?’ It got down to threatening the guy’s career.

Women had to do a lot to win their rights to be recognized as descent human beings. It was hard.

And descent animators?

I won’t go that far. A lot of them were put in secondary positions. Disney wouldn’t even hire them in the 1930s, in a creative position. He would only hire them for ink and paint [coloring in the pencil sketches].

Cohen with Ron Diamond, producer of 'The Animation Show of Shows', which has featured outstanding animation from around the world for the last 20 years. photo courtesy: K. Cohen

He had a standard letter which said, ‘We do not hire women to do the creative work,' I was told by former Disney employees. The administration felt, ‘Why spend the money training the women to become artists when they are going to get pregnant and leave?’

Nevertheless a few women were hired in better jobs?

Mary Blair was one of his favorite designers in the 1940s and '50s. Retta Scott did some of the animals for ‘Bambi’ [1942]. She was here working on ‘The Plague Dogs’, probably her last job.

Right after that, Korty did ‘Twice Upon a Time’. He only put up the money, didn’t direct, although he is listed in the credits as a director, along with Charles Swenson, who did direct. Lucas put up some money. That was probably the pinnacle of animation here, along with the Grateful Dead feature.

It was a wonderful period, although ‘Plague Dogs’ was a very sad story. It was a British production [concerning two dogs who escape from a research lab]. Producer Martin Rosen did it here because he wanted to live in San Francisco—didn’t want to put up with a winter in London. So he opened a studio and hired Brad Bird—

Of Pixar?

Yup—[director of] ‘The Incredibles’ [2004] and ‘The Iron Giant’ [1999]. Brad Bird was a young animator working on ‘Plague Dogs’, along with Retta Scott, and Phil Robinson ['Casper', 1995, 'The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat', 1995].

Was there a feeder school producing a lot of these animators?

San Francisco State started its animation program around 1967 with David Hilberman, who was one of the blacklisted animators who moved here.

Blacklisted for what?

Walt Disney hated him—thought Dave was a communist. Dave told me and others that Disney must have thought that he ‘was the son-of-a-bitch behind the strike [Disney animators went on strike in 1941] and I’m going to get him.’ And he did.

So Walt Disney was not just anti-Semitic, he was a very vindictive guy?

He hired several Jews in key roles and was friendly towards them. I interviewed many of his retired employees and they never heard him say anything negative about Jews—that includes Dave [Hilberman].

That kind of contradicts the Saturday Night Live thing where Mickey shows the kids around the vault—isn’t that a masterpiece?

I show that to my students, it is ‘Journey to the Disney Vaults'.

It is one of the greatest spoofs—politically incisive as well as well acted. Poor Mickey is constantly trying to cover up, but he is chagrined to tell the kids about anti-Semitism.

Walt wasn’t openly anti-Semitic. However, he did have a typically southern upbringing that was offensive towards blacks. The NAACP went after him over blatantly racist moments in ‘The Song of the South’ [1946, an animated/live-action musical].

Cohen drops by Industrial Light and Magic's theater in the Presidio with his wife Denise, circa 1999. photo: courtesy K. Cohen

I interviewed Maurice Rapf, one of the film's scriptwriters. He was hired by Walt to clean up anything in ‘The Song of the South’ that might be objectionable to blacks. Maurice did that and then went on to do other projects at Disney. When the film came out, Maurice discovered Walt left in some of the offensive material that he recommended should be cut.

Maurice was one of several Jews Walt hired. He told me he believed Walt hired him because he offered a liberal perspective on the film. He believed Walt knew he was left wing and probably sympathetic towards communism, views quite different from Walt’s. Maurice said he met regularly with his boss and never saw any signs of anti-Semitism. He left in 1947 over a salary dispute.

In the early 1950s he was blacklisted. In his autobiography he talks about his politics, as he did when I interviewed him for ‘Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators.”

When Walt named Hilberman as a possible communist, I believe it was because he thought Hilberman was one of the major strike leaders. David disagreed. I knew David fairly well. He used to insist, ‘All I did was go around with cards asking, ‘Would you support us if we formed a union?’

And that is what he did. He followed the law of the National Labor Relations Board; he got the signatures and turned them into the union leaders. Others were the union leaders, not David.

The government recognized their strike as valid. They won. But Disney refused to go along with it, at first. He drew out the strike until it was the longest strike in film history, at that time. MGM and Warner Bros, they agreed right away.

The way the Disney strike ended, someone contacted the government—possibly Roy Disney—asking, ‘Can you do something.’ They went to Nelson Rockefeller, who was the head of the Pan American Union, an association Roosevelt supported. It was helping to create positive relationships with Latin America, due to worries that some Latin American nations might support Nazi Germany.

Rockefeller invited Disney to do a goodwill tour of South America. He was going crazy in the studio. I don’t know whether rumors were true or not, but he was supposedly washing his hands several times an hour and developed a nervous tic. They got him out of the way and his brother Roy settled the strike—supposedly, they say—in 24 hours.

What is your take on the man, in sum?

I agree Walt was a great producer. I loved the work that came out of his studio. Yes, it was very family-oriented, wholesome. He pushed his artists; he created great works of art; but to quote Dave, 'he was a son-of-a-bitch.'

What are some of your favorite films? I love ‘Snow White’ [1939] and ‘Jungle Book’ [1967].

A lot of the old work under his direction is great.

When Snow White walks into the first scene, it is better than any digital animation I have ever seen.

Yeah. It’s gorgeous work. ‘Fantasia’ [1940] is wonderful film.

Of course, ‘Fantasia’ is a masterpiece, shows that he is an artist. ‘Fantasia’ shows he opposed the Nazis, the symbolism is against mind control.

Disney made several WWII films that were very anti-Nazi. I don’t think he was ever favorable to their cause.

He was financially screwed by the Nazis. They showed ‘Snow White’ and some of his shorts and didn’t pay the rental fee. And Disney was a real businessperson: if you stiffed Disney, he was going to stiff you. He was nasty. Doing business with Disney was not always a gentleman’s handshake.

(Rt) Animation producer Marcy Page and animation teacher Diana Morse present Cohen a lifetime ASIFA Award, usually reserved for directors, at the Ottawa Animation Festival, 2008. photo courtesy: K. Cohen

If you were a Nazi not paying your bills—which they weren’t—then... He and Roy even went to Germany before the war to collect the money owed them. They met with some of the top Nazis—I don’t know if he met with Hitler or not—to try and get some of his money back.

What do you make of the fact Disney is essentially the biggest film corporation in the world now? Kind of odd, symbolically—the 'toons take over.

I think Walt would be very pleased to know that. The Wall Street Journal reported that his Mouse franchise sold three billion dollars' worth of products last year and the Star Wars items also represent an impressive chunk of change.

Do you think it is a good thing? Are they doing good work?

Most of their products don’t interest me. Their features are pretty frightening. You have the ‘lovely’ princesses films—

You find them just way too commercial?

Yeah. It is teaching all the wrong things to girls. When you go to Disneyland, you can have a Disney princess birthday party for her and buy her fake royal gowns—it’s nauseating.

What do you think of Disneyland in general?

It was fun. I have always been there as a guest of someone who works there. The entrance fee is over a hundred bucks now [$95-119 for adults, depending on day]. You can spend a very nice tidy sum staying at the Disney Hotel, although I think it includes free admission to the park.

But you know, they put on beautiful theatrical programs in their little theater, often very innovative, almost always musicals.

Yeah, but very wholesome. It is fine. The Christian right hates Disney for their stance on homosexuals.

Disney accepted homosexuals? When did they do that?

They accepted LGBT both as employees and as guests in their theme parks many decades ago. The Christian Right decided to ‘protect’ their flock by having boycotts. They hated Disney for holding things like ‘Gay Night’ in the park. I would have to look for the years when [the American Family Association and Southern Baptist Convention] called for boycotts. [The mid-‘90s.]

Around that time, they had a couple of gay characters [like Scar from ‘The Lion King’, 1994, according to many, given statements like ‘Oh, I shall practice my curtsy,’ and his lack of a mate.]

They have had gays on staff for decades. Some of the most creative people at Disney have been gay—they know that.

With gays he was OK?

Yes. The thing about Disney he was a Southerner and he did not realize his attitude was not loved in the North. He grew up in rural Missouri, for part of his childhood.

After WWI he was living in Kansas City, as was his brother Roy. They formed their first company with Ub Iwerks, a very creative and remarkable animator [an American of German descent].

The public is misled to believe Disney was a great animator, but by the mid-1920s he wasn’t animating. He was creating the scripts and making creative decisions, but he left animating to Ub. Together with Roy, he was running a company.

Iwerks was the genius who designed and animated the first Mickeys and silly symphony cartoons. Walt no doubt contributed a great deal to their creation, but Ub gets full screen credit on the main title card as the animator.

Animation was a great boon for hallucination, a spur to letting your mind run away. Watching Looney Tunes imprinted us all at an early age.

Yes.

Remember the time we went to Steve Parr’s and saw the pre-Hayes Code cartoons of cows with big—

Udders?

Very funny.

Denise and Karl Cohen do the Great Wall of China in 2004ll. photo courtesy: K. Cohen

Disney had one film where the cow is au natural, and she gets invited to party, and she puts on a skirt. That was the film that got the censor— originally the Oklahoma censor—to realize, ‘Oh my God, that cow is NAKED!’ And the censor’s reaction was perfectly logic, 'We can’t allow that!'

That was a Disney cartoon, black and white, made 1932-33, while strict enforcement of the Hayes Code began in 1934.

So he was really quite edge pushing when it came to those cows?

I don’t think Disney thought about it. The people who were offended were the censors in Oklahoma.

They were going along with the storytelling of the day, which was quite sexual because it was the Swinging ‘20s?

You did what was logical. I have never seen a cow with a hat or a dress on, have you? If you were a photographer and you took a picture of a cow, it wouldn’t occur to you that the cow doesn't have clothes on. [laughs]

I had known things were quite wild prior to the Hayes Code but I didn’t realize.

Yes, you see Betty Boop with her underwear showing. There is one 'Betty Boop' where you see through a hole in the wall, and a mouse is in bed with his wife. He gets up and goes to another bed—you know what is going on.

What do you see for animation in the future, aside from the mega blockbuster, family affairs?

The future of animation is excellent, if it comes from Europe or Japan.

If it comes from the US, outside of Pixar, it is probably going to be a little immature, loud, fast-paced. You end up with countless sequels. You are going to see sequel after sequel; you have ‘The Minions Part 12’ coming up.

They have become products, and they will milk as much money out of them as possible. They have created a recognizable product, and the kids are anxious to see more of this stuff.

There is also a lot of alternative animation?

Yeah. A lot of what is being done experimentally is wonderful, but the problem in this country is: we don't have the financial resources available for artists. They are not well compensated for the animation, except on TV. Some animators believe their only chance to make decent money is to create a successful TV series.

There is that lovely woman, Nina Paley, is she local?

No. She is now living in Urbana, Illinois, near the University of Illinois.

Her piece animating the old goddesses—

Oh, that is wonderful: 'You Gotta Believe' [2017].

Did you ever see Sally Cruikshank’s ‘Quasi at the Quackadero’ [1979]?

No.

She was here locally for about ten years 1970-1980, approximately [also did stuff for ‘Sesame Street’]. She was working for Gregg Snazelle as his in-house animator. ‘If I need a sample [shot], I want you to do it right away. And I want you on hand to pitch it. But when you are not pitching or doing my stuff, do what you want.’

She had ten years carte blanche do what she wanted. Her ‘Quasi at the Quackadero’ is now in the Library of Congress: 'one of the greatest of all times.'

Comedy Central has quite a few animated things on there. Where are all those made—‘Bob’s Burgers’?

Cohen relaxes against the 1930 Plymouth, owned by Vince Collins, who specializes in psychedelic animation and was visiting Cohen at the time. photo courtesy: K. Cohen

There is nothing centralized. The thing with TV animation is, that’s not where the really exciting animation is. Yes, ‘The Simpsons’ are still funny.

So you still give 'The Simpsons' high marks after 25 years? I saw one recently: they look very much the same.

I haven’t watched a ‘Simpson’ episode in years. They have good people and it is a formula now. They’ve done every script three or four times now—different characters but the same plot line. They actually just had the poorest audience rating they ever had, but they have a contract guaranteed for two more years.

Are you a fan of the ‘South Park’ guys?

I don’t watch TV. I have seen it. It is mildly amusing. I don’t know if I have ever watched an entire ‘South Park’ show. What I enjoy is seeing is European animation.

Anyone in particular, or country: Czech, Polish?

Any country. Schools are turning out brilliant students. So are the schools in the US. But in the US, if you do an exciting film, you have no place to show it. You’re lucky if you get it into a few festivals, and they don’t offer much money, if at all.

San Francisco is lucky to have the San Francisco International, which pays $2000 for the winning animated short, which is really good—I thank them for that. But the other people get nothing except a few free tickets and an invite to a party.

We just don’t have good animation festivals outside of the Bay Area.

There is one in The Netherlands.

There were two. One is more experimental, one is more for laughs, but the government said recently that they have to combine.

Were there any film in particular you remember really striking a chord with hippie audiences?

I was showing animated shorts. ‘The Sunshine Makers’ was a perennial favorite people are still talking about. Elves were singing the song ‘Sunshine, sunshine, I drink lots of golden sunshine.’ People were thinking that golden sunshine was LSD, sunshine acid, that was the brand name of the acid that Owsley had.

I did light shows for Bill Graham Auditorium, the Oakland Coliseum for Dead concerts for New Year's Eve. I used to show films at the Fillmore Auditorium before I had my stroke. I had great shows and full houses.

There was a Douglas Fairbanks comedy where he was high on coke. The character was called, Coke Anyday.

Pre-Hayes Code?

Yes, a silent comedy. It's a funny short. Audiences enjoyed that sort of thing. I also showed lots of Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, with the sound off—films that were visually great.

What are your favorites from that period: Popeye, Mickey Mouse, Road Runner?

They were all great. I don’t have a top ten list. The cartoons were outrageous, not because of the character but the writing. They were all different directors, different stars.

Cohen's house is stuffed to the gills with the oddest art collection imaginable, including a nice little West African display. photo: D. Blair

I was a contributor to the Cartoon Network's book on the 50 Greatest Cartoons in the late ‘90s. I pretty much agree with their top-fifty list [see it here]. It was based on a fairly good sampling of totally crazed animation fans—supposedly a thousand of us.

I guess animation and cartoons have been popular since the late 1800s. They started slow with political cartoons. But, at some point, it just took off like a rocket—and it is still taking off.

Most of it I am not that interested in, it is made for TV. Hollywood Reporter is now hyping a comedy show with characters with human bodies and bird heads—I assume they talk and act like humans.

‘Tuca and Bertie’? That’s the new one from the people who did ‘Bojack Horseman’. Did you get to see that?

No, but I saw a sample of this ‘Tuca and Bertie’. It is all juvenile, pee-pee-caca kind of thing.

‘Bojack Horeman is quite hipster. The main character is played by Will Arnett but it uses this trope of having animal characters—an interesting multicultural trope—built into the middle of the show. I enjoyed it.

It has bunch of throw away hipster humor but also quite a bit of introspection, self-doubt, sex, drugs and alcohol.

But how mature is the content? Sex drugs and alcohol, let's get beyond that. Do they take on Trump?

I think they're last season was pre-Trump.

There are couple of hallucinatory episodes which were quite good. One of the greatest hallucinatory episodes was on 'The Simpsons'. He licks a toad or something and he goes into a completely psychedelic universe—did you see that episode?

No, but I would enjoy it.

You can look it up on YouTube [actually no, YouTube makes you pay for that episode].

He is in some weird space that is collapsing and, all of sudden, he is sucked out through some sort of drain into live-action filmmaking. Homer is played by a guy in a bizarre suit with a cartoony face,who is walking along what seems like a street in LA. He passes a bakery with I believe some gay baked goods and is, like, ‘Wow.’

That is a whole genre, hallucinatory cartoons. You remember 'Dream of a Rarebit Fiend’ [1906]?

Sure.

That would be a great show. Exploring when the animators finally convinced the producers to let them use their metamorphosizing skills to follow a hallucinatory plot line.

So some of your art was used for the production of blotter acid?

I was amused that they used my UFOs, but I have no idea if the product was any good. They didn’t offer me a sample, they simply used my design. They saw my UFO photos in a gallery that sold my special effect photos and they contacted me.

Oswley?

No, some one else, I don’t remember their names—too many years ago.

The big question today is what is society going to do with all those kids graduating from animation school?

The future of animation in this country is the internet.

But how will they derive an income?

That is the problem. People have a million viewers, who said they ‘like,’ but they didn’t get any money. So, as result, they will go elsewhere for their livelihood.

(Left) A famous shot of UFOs over the TransAmerica building created by Cohen for SF Magazine, circa 1984. images courtesy: K. Cohen

The educational system is producing too many people with career potential for whom there is no opening. Or it may take them months or years before they can utilize their talents. In some cases schools are overproducing.

Supposedly more art students graduate each year then there are art jobs in the country.

I am sure. It is a shame. That leads to a lot of disillusioned people, that are having exorbitant student loan bills. Betsy DeVos doesn’t want to acknowledge that there is a major crisis of debt in this country.

It scares me as a teacher. I do my best to explain the subject and how students can do their best, but I don’t have jobs to offer. I can write letters of support, promote resources and give advice, but we have a system that is out of balance.

What would it take to balance it? Cut back on the department?

We have a small highly-successful, well-run animation program [at State], only about 25 or 30 carefully-screened and hand-picked students. Most of our former students—when I do run into them—do find employment in animation. I think the problem is with the for-profits that accept anybody who can pay, regardless of qualifications.

I ran into a woman who was working as a producer in an animation company 30 years ago. Now she is a student just taking it for her own edification and wants to do personal work. She doesn’t want to get employment within 30 days of graduation—but a lot of students will be facing collection agencies.

There are a couple of growth markets. Netflix is gearing up for animation. They are doing Netflix shorts, but whether it pays or not I don’t know. For my students, I certainly hope so.

Are you still teaching a class?

Yes. 'The History of Animation' at State. I go back to Winsor McCay [1866-1934], 'Gertie the Dinosaur' [1914], 'Dream of a Rarebit Fiend', but very quickly. The students need to know about what came before the Golden Age and they need to see some of the great classics. The other half of the class is about modern animation from Europe, Asia and the Americas.

I guess that covers it except for one last question, where would you point the young animator: the San Francisco State program?

Oh yes. It is extremely reasonable, as are the other state schools. San Jose also has an excellent program and it is absurd to pay the price of a private college.

If you want a similar education for almost free, you can go any of the community colleges. SF City [College] has a good program. Tim Harrington ['Rango', 2011, among many others] is teaching a course in animation. De Anza College has a well-established program, headed by Marty McNamara.

Cañada College, in San Mateo county, also has a good one. The head of the program is a Paul Nass, a former Disney animator—at one point Paul was teaching adults at Disney in Orlando. There are teachers who once worked at Colossal, WildBrain, Electronic Arts and other local companies.

Is there anything like an animation collective or avant-garde group here in town?

Not that I know of. There are members of ASIFA-SF, who are individual talents, and they network. But a workshop, no.

You are still the head of that group? What sort of stuff do you do?

We publish a monthly newsletter, ten to eighteen pages, that is quite informative to people who love animation. We have four or more screenings a year.

One is with the animators who were nominated for the animated shorts Academy Awards. Another is with Ron Diamond, his annual pick of films he admires that are winning awards at international animation festivals. Another presents the latest films from the National Film Board of Canada, with one or more guest animators presenting.

We do programs, big events, screenings at State. We have full houses in our 150 seat theater—it is not a huge but that is still 140-150 people who care. We hold an annual animation celebration that showcases new films by professional, independent and student artists. [For further info, go here].

But people are quite happy staying at home watching the internet or videos with their kids. We live in an exciting city, so whatever you are doing has competition.

Yup, it is a struggle.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on May 30, 2019 - 11:15 AM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner
by Karl Cohen

'The Slows', from local screenwriter Nicole Perlman ('Guardians of the Galaxy', 2014), sees a forested dystopian future. photo N. courtesy Perlman

THE NEXT MAJOR EXHIBIT AT THE WALT DISNEY FAMILY MUSEUM WILL BE”MICKEY MOUSE: FROM WALT TO THE WORLD” The exhibition will chronicle Mickey’s impact and influence on art and entertainment over the past nine decades and tells the story of his origin, rise to fame, and enduring world-wide appeal, juxtaposed with Walt Disney’s inspiring and parallel story. It will run from May 16 - Jan 6, 2020; in the Diane Disney Miller Exhibition Hall.
The exhibit features more than 400 objects, even rare and never-before-seen original sketches, plus character model sheets, concept artwork, nostalgic merchandise, vintage photographs, modern and contemporary Mickey art (by Andy Warhol, Wayne Thiebaud, Damien Hirst, Gottfried Helnwein, Matsumi Kanemitsu, Sirron Norris, and others). There will also be a selection of Mickey’s animated short films through the years being shown.

LAST MINUTE NEWS
Watch Priced Out Episode 4!
‘PRICED OUT - WHY YOU CAN’T AFFORD A PLACE IN SF’ Joe Sikoryak is the co-producer, of this six film series intended to help voters understand the complicated issues behind that simple problem. We’ve been in production and development for almost two years with a very small crew - about 8 of us. The episodes average 2 1/2 minutes each and were written and directed by Joseph Smooke and Dyan Ruiz, local filmmakers who have never tackled animation before. That’s where Joe came in to show them how it could be done, and to shape the story from policy-issues to more of a drama. They hired local illustrator Fred Noland as art director and Brooklyn-based Rip & Roy to handle the animation. Music and sound design are by Rachel Lastimosa
Joseph and Dyan have had a lot of success with their organization [people.power.media] to produce videos for non-profits and to promote political causes, especially around housing rights and other justice issues. For Priced Out they tackled a variety of themes of gentrification, redlining, displacement, current State and Local legislation, etc. They’ve begun to teach workshops using the series as well.
Visit their website and meet them at the fundraiser. https://www.peoplepowermedia.org.
Roxie Theater on May 14, 5:45 PM and 8 PM
See all 6 episodes shown for the first time to the public. Seats are limited! You can get your tickets here: bit.ly/POatRoxie Co-emceeing the event will be Oscar Grande of PODER (People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights) and Pam Tau Lee of Chinese Progressive Association. The Directors, Cast and Crew will do a Q and A with the audience and press immediately after the screening.
Joe Sikoryak, producer-director at Apolog Films, 1633 Market Street, SF CA 94103. (510) 407-7121 http://www.apologfilms.com and imdb.me/joesikoryak DEMAND REAL SOLUTIONS FOR HOUSING AFFORDABILITY!
PS: Joe Sikoryak’s latest live-action short Snaggletooth is playing in the Tribeca Film Festival, but he hasn’t abandoned his animation roots. Posted on May 01, 2019 - 06:42 PM
Scoping the SFIFF Shorts
by Jerry McDaniel

'The Slows', from local screenwriter Nicole Perlman ('Guardians of the Galaxy', 2014), sees a forested dystopian future. photo N. courtesy Perlman

WHEN I ATTENDED THE SFIFF "SHORTS 2"
program at the Roxie, I largely enjoyed all six films, ranging in length from 10 to 23 minutes, the first four mentioned here presented by Cinema by the Bay films.

Paloma Martinez, out of Palo Alto, brings us the provocative and timely “Enforcement Hours”, a visual road trip meandering around San Francisco to a track of telephone recordings. The calls are to an emergency contact center for people experiencing an ICE raid. The confusion and fear of the callers, even though they are living here, in a sanctuary state, is palpable. Bizarrely, some jack-asses call up just to harrass them.

“Director’s Commentary” is a bit meta-experimental. As it opens we see the two characters, played by director John Herschend and the always funny and beautiful, Beth Lissick (see cineSOURCE article), who has done lots of film work around the Bay, at a bar talking. Simultaneously, we see the people who play the actors and the purported director of this movie in little bubbles discussing and giving commentary of the scene. This works with some funny Segway riding and moments of fourth wall breaking. Toward the end, this cute, little flick devolves into a dance movie, which is what it wanted to be all along.

In “Dunya’s Day” director Raeed Alsemari finds laugh out loud funny at a wedding in Saudi Arabia. photo courtesy R. Alsemari

Local screenwriter Nicole Perlman, who co-wrote "Guardians of the Galaxy" (2014, Marvel Comics/Walt Disney), puts on her director hat for “The Slows”. This narrative is set somewhere in the future when the majority of the human race lives only as adults because the children are aged extremely rapidly by an advanced scientific method. There’s a sterile, sort of revolutionary aspect to the story which brings to mind Ayn Rand’s “Anthem” (1938).

Clandestinely, the lead female character acquires a pass to visit a compound out in the woods. There a group of people are living in a more natural and down-to-earth manner than the clearly messed up and humorless way of thinking inside the city. She seems to be attracted to the animality that the dirty inhabitants of the primitive village embody, even coming to a realization that she eventually has to act on. I’m looking forward to what Perlman will do next.

Cambodia is the setting for producer/director Kalyanee Mam’s study of how Singapore’s dredging of huge amounts of sand from the beautiful island environment is slowly but surely having a devastating effect on the locals’ way of life. This is another testament to the sad fact that humanity is eating itself and all living things without any sense of responsibility. Scenes of the main character visiting the great mounds of relocated sand and a “nature” park in Singapore create a dark and unreal juxtaposition against the family fishing and village life scenes back in Cambodia. Well done.

For a bit of comic relief, “Dunya’s Day” offers us a view into how the well-to-do in modern day Saudi Arabia put together a graduation party. It quickly becomes apparent that Dunya is more concerned with how impressed her rival “friends” are with the party she throws than who she’s throwing it for. A series of mishaps from the mutiny of the help to an unfortunate dead sheep brought me to a point where I kind of liked the incapable hostess. Director Raeed Alsemari made me laugh.

Riders from a Native American relay horse racing team in Canada. 'Fast Horse' by Alexandra Lazarowich. photo courtesy A. Lazarowich

Finally, “Fast Horse” gives us an intimate look at the coach and a young rider from the Native American relay horse racing team from the Siksika Nation in Canada. Alexandra Lazarowich (director) sweetly and matter-of-factly handles the coach’s commitment to the boys on the team as well as protagonist rider’s own commitment to the team. The music video type footage upfront and an Tarantino-like walking shot of the team were entertaining, even if a bit odd. Ultimately, triumph prevails, even in the face of defeat.

All in all, a great series of shorts, and I am looking forward to next year.

Jerry McDaniel is an actor, musician and filmmaker, who starred in the breakout Oakland film ‘Everything Strange and New’ (2009) and can be reached . Posted on Apr 26, 2019 - 03:20 PM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner April 2019
by Karl Cohen

Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman) and the Sasquatch named Mr. Link (Zach Galifianakis) in 'Missing Link". Photo: Laika

'Missing Link' from Laika

Laika’s “Indiana Jones” inspired stop-motion adventure comedy opens in theaters April 12. Their fifth feature, it is an epic globetrotting buddy movie with explorer Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman) and a Sasquatch named Mr. Link (Zach Galifianakis) who embark on a quest from the Pacific Northwest in search of the legendary Shangri-La, home of Link’s ancestry.

A welcomed change, Laika sticks its neck out and dares to create a film that doesn’t star a child hero.

“Link embodies a child-like innocence,” notes writer and director Chris Butler (“ParaNorman”, 2012), “the kids in ‘ParaNorman’ acted more adult than the adults in this movie.”

Let’s hope Laika’s work pushes stop-motion and storytelling into new areas of exploration, especially since its advanced publicity says, “Missing Link” moves in a completely different direction from its four Oscar-nominated predecessors.

Set in the early 20th century, the puppets and sets were built 20 percent smaller than usual so Link can seem enormous. He was 16” tall, a size that was still comfortable for animators to manipulate. The art department made 110 sets at 65 unique locations, the most in a Laika feature. One location is a Yeti temple.

One technical breakthrough was using full-color resin 3D-printed faces. The replacement animation faces were created using Stratasys new J750 printer and Fraunhofer’s Cuttlefish software.

Call For Entries to 2019 ASIFA Animation Festival

Once again ASIFA-SF has teamed up with professor Tim Harrington of SF City College to hold a fun event honoring independent and emerging student animators. The show will be in June at City College and people in the program will once again get a free copy of the program should you want to be included in the DVD.

Send entries as a file or a link to Tim Harrington , or use their Google form here.

The Simpsons, the first family of fun, confront one of their greatest existential dilemmas: donuts. image: Matt Groening

Disney Buys Simpsons

Now that Disney owns Bart Simpson, will they tame him? What did they really get for their $73.1 billion dollars that they spent buying the assets of Fox?

Sure they bought the rights to characters from “The Simpsons”, “Avatar”, “Deadpool” and “Atlanta”, and some other things for that absurd amount, but is spending that much to control more of the market worth it?

"We are rapidly transforming our company to take full advantage of evolving consumer trends and emerging technology in order to thrive in this new and exciting time,” said Robert Iger, Chief Executive Officer of Disney. “What lies ahead is the challenging work of uniting our businesses to create a dynamic, global entertainment company."

That sound like the voice of greed. Frankly I’d be more excited if they cared more about our world and were spending that money trying to tame global warming, to end world hunger or to bringing peace to the world. I’m tired of hearing about exciting plans for corporations to increase profits.

NPR just had an hour discussion on how tech corporations will create so many new millionaires in the Bay Area by going public (only the upper level of employees will benefit by stock offers), that the cheapest single family homes in San Francisco will sell for four to five million bucks within the next five years.

Yes, that will eventually make it impossible for anybody who isn’t a millionaire to live in SF. And what will Iger do with his additional billions that he gets for selling some of his holdings? And who will hire all the employees of Disney and Fox that are being laid off?

Burton’s ‘Dumbo’ Now in Theaters

Tim Burton’s live action retelling of Disney’s ‘Dumbo’ is now in local theaters. The trailer looks impressive, but the reviews are quite mixed. One calls it “weirdly watchable,” see Rotten Tomatoes review.

Emma Thompson was knighted a 'Dame' in sneakers, after which she asked Prince William for a kiss. photo: courtesy W Magazine

Thompson Not Lasseter Fan

In a letter obtained by the Los Angeles Times, Emma Thompson explained why she decided to exit “Luck” when John Lasseter took the helm at Skydance Animation.

"It feels very odd to me,” Thompson wrote Skydance, “that you and your company would consider hiring someone with Mr. Lasseter’s pattern of misconduct given the present climate in which people with the kind of power that you have can reasonably be expected to step up to the plate.”

“If a man has been touching women inappropriately for decades, why would a woman want to work for him if the only reason he’s not touching them inappropriately now is that it says in his contract that he must behave 'professionally'?”

“If a man has made women at his companies feel undervalued and disrespected for decades, why should the women at his new company think that any respect he shows them is anything other than an act that he’s required to perform by his coach, his therapist and his employment agreement?”

Although Thompson allowed that Lasseter's defenders insisted he deserved a second chance, "he is presumably being paid millions of dollars to receive that second chance. How much money are the employees at Skydance being paid to give him that second chance?”

“Given all the abuse that’s been heaped on women who have come forward to make accusations against powerful men, do we really think that no settlements means that there was no harassment or no hostile work environment? Are we supposed to feel comforted that women who feel that their careers were derailed by working for Lasseter didn't receive money?”

“I am well aware that centuries of entitlement to women’s bodies whether they like it or not is not going to change overnight. Or in a year,” concluded Thompson. “But I am also aware that if people who have spoken out—like me—do not take this sort of a stand then things are very unlikely to change at anything like the pace required to protect my daughter’s generation."

Guess Who Got a Salary Cut of Half a Million?

Don’t worry, the total possible annual compensation for Disney’s chairman and CEO Bob Iger could still be as much as $13.5 million. Disney will also be eliminating his annual $8 million increase in his annual “target bonus.” Instead they will give him the same lousy bonus of just $12 million a year.

Still, he told the press, “I am proud to be leading the Walt Disney Company through this important time and believe the changes I, with the board, have made are in the best interest of the company.” He really isn’t going to be as well-off in the future considering Iger's total salary jumped 80 percent for the latest fiscal year to $65.6 million and he earned $36.3 million in 2017 and $43.9 million in 2016.

Well, I guess $12 million a year is better than food stamps.

Karl Cohen is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .

Posted on Apr 01, 2019 - 11:12 AM
Ferlinghetti Forever, or At Least 100
by Doniphan Blair

City Lights Bookstore celebrates founder Ferlinghetti's 100th Birthday. Photo: D. Blair

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI CELEBRATED
his 100th Birthday with a big bash at his bookstore, City Lights, last Sunday, March 24th, although he himself was a tad too tired to attend. Regardless, some 500 beats, hippies and punks descended on North Beach, San Francisco, jabbering, drinking, reciting poetry, recalling various art projects and having a fabulous time

I certainly did. Indeed I met over a dozen old friends, including Lalo Obregon, a Mexican cinematographer I hadn’t seen in thirty years, and made some new ones, notably Hanson Lee, a Chinese-American, who said poetry helped him endure the Cultural Revolution. Comraderie was easy given the overwhelming joie de vivre and all those books, provided by that great and stable beatnik, Lawrence.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, circa 1955, put his money where his mouth was in terms of literature, law and love. Photo: courtesy City Lights

Not only was Ferlinghetti an avant-garde poet and anarchist, he was schooled in classical French literature, served in WWII, on a dangerous minesweeper boat, and became a businessman. In fact, he became a prodigious publisher of hundreds of titles, including political analyst Michael Parenti, poet Jack Hirschman, musician Ry Cooder and French philosopher Georges Bataille, as well as dozens of his old beat buddies.

He also had Italian influence, although his father died before he was born—in Yonkers, New York—and Jewish ones, from his mother. While that makes him Jewish, technically, I’m guessing her people were secular, hence not much purchase on his soul.

Lawrence is the veritable opposite of the dissolute Kerouac, the beats’ fairy god mother Ginsberg and their junkie father and language re-inventor Burroughs. Indeed, he stood tall-short for stable-crazy, socialist-capitalist, classicist-renegade and urban-wilderness, as is often only possible in California.

Jimmy didn't claim to be a beat, hippie, or anything save an aficionado of Greek fishing caps also favored by Ferlinghetti. Photo: D. Blair

City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, which he started in 1955, the year after I was born, and ran to the end of the millennia, is doing great, I was told by an employee, Chris. Although the pay isn’t excessive, it's a bookstore after all, “It’s fabulous in all other regards,” he said. It didn’t become a collective, as one might suspect, given its syndico-anarchist owner, but it’s in good business hands, largely those of stalwart Elaine Katzenberger, executive director and publisher for the last few decades.

Before that, it was quite the wild ride. Indeed, Ferlinghetti was arrested in his very first year for publishing Ginsberg's “Howl”, which led to a groundbreaking First Amendment trial.

In January, 1967, he crossed town to the Haight to be the principal poet at the Be-In, which attracted some fifty thousand people and triggered the Summer of Love. He refused to pay taxes going to the Vietnam War, in 1968, nearly going to jail, but was crowned Poet Laureate of San Francisco thirty years later. In his acceptance address, he decried the automobiles and yuppies destroying a once artistic city.

A disabled poet celebrates Ferlinghetti's 100th. Photo: D. Blair

Interestingly, City Lights faces San Francisco’s Little Italy—and the tittie bars where Lenny Bruce broke open the zeitgeist in 1963—but it backs up on Chinatown. If you tunneled through the store’s back wall, in fact, you would essentially emerge in China. “You need a visa just to walk down the street,” quipped my new friend Lee (coincidentally the monniker used by Burroughs in many of his novels for himself).

Lawrence undoubtedly did venture into Chinatown, to attend literary groups discussing China’s great beatnik poet, Li Bai from the 8th century, say, or to smoke opium, which may have still been around when he first rented the store.

I was about to ask Lawrence about those intriguing details when Elaine Katzenberger saw my list of fifteen questions and freaked.

Cinematographer Lalo Obregon(cntr) and Gustavo Vazquez, director of UC Santa Cruz Film & Digital (rt), old time friends of cineSOURCE. Photo: D. Blair

“Have mercy, he’s half blind for god’s sake. He doesn’t want to be bothered by your philosophical drivel.”

“OK, how ‘bout two?” I asked.

“A couple questions, OK," she allowed, "but make them ones he might be interested in.”

“What would he be interested in?”

“I don’t know, for god's sake—really busy with his birthday here—use your imagination.”

Although Lawrence just released an experimental autobiographical novel “Little Boy”, arguably one of his best books, see the laudatory NY Times review, and he would make a perfect cineSOURCE feature, the magazine was similarly un-forthcoming with what was needed for a fully-researched article.

Although Asian-Americans are slow to jump on the legal weed band wagon, this hipster graphic designer saw no reason why not. Photo: D. Blair

All I could do is shoot 200 photos and crack my first edition of his “Coney Island of the Mind” (1958), title from a line by Henry Miller, whose life work I was also obliged to synopcize this week (see article).

Rereading “Coney Island”, which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies, I was deeply taken with the poetics of “I Am Waiting”, but also surprised at the term “darkie” around half way through.

Although that was central to one of my unanswered questions, I assume it was just something someone would say when Lawrence was growing up in the 1930s. Other then that, "Coney" was a newly-installed street lamp lighting the way in the onrush of doom and gloom.

And a bit more. Photo: D. Blair

One of the many malignant elements Lawrence continues to rail against is San Francisco’s cut-throat gentrification. Chinatown and North Beach have strict zoning laws, which keep buildings under four stories, but a few blocks away in the financial district, the sky is being scraped—a painful metaphor for a visionary, back-to-nature poet.

Although Elaine would not pass Lawrence my questions, I heard his answers to the big media she let into his apartment, on the radio or read them in the papers. What he seemed to be saying is:

Run for your lives.

Scoop Nisker, author of bestseller 'Essential' as well as comedian and meditation instructor entering City Lights for his reading. Photo: D. Blair

Don’t let the capitalists eat you.

Try and find some peace and enjoy it right now before they destroy it forever.

Keep painting (as he did, he was also an accomplished painter).

Keep writing and thinking, or stop thinking, as the case may be.

As I surveyed the celebration, although it was almost entirely over-60 hipsters and few over-80 beats, with not a tech, rapper or kid of color in sight—save the seven-foot-tall black guy, undoubtedly a poet, but I didn't catch his name. Nevertheless, the vibe was open enough to accept us all, as Whitman, our poetic father-mother recommended.

Claire Greensfelder, local nonprof maestra, who used to hitchhike in to SF as a kid to hear beat poets . Photo: D. Blair

With the bookstore, now with three large rooms, flourishing from paper books, not digital copies, smack dab in the middle of North Beach, a fantastically expensive area, the survival of poetry, beatitude and the arts in San Francisco seems entirely possible, if not guaranteed

So long live Lawrence as well as the beats, hippies and punks.

We here at the minor media outlet of cineSOURCE salute you.

Indeed we vow to carry on the tricky poetic process—eviction, alienation, cynicism, accusations of elitism and threats of arrest be damned.

Doniphan Blair chatting with an African-American poetry aficionado. Photo: Tracy Welsh

Posted on Mar 28, 2019 - 04:28 PM
Should We Re-Censor Henry Miller?
by Doniphan Blair

Henry Miller, photographed by famous indie photographer and close friend Gilberte Brassai, 1932, Paris. Photo: G. Brassai

Early version published as “Miller Under Attack” by the Henry Miller Library, February 3, 2019

I WAS HEART WARMED TO READ ELAINE
Blair’s Henry Miller piece in a recent New York Review of Books (2/21/19 issue). Both her review of “On Henry Miller: Or, How to be an Anarchist”, and the book itself, by Scottish author John Burnside, are laudable attempts to decipher Miller, which is critical today.

Indeed, Miller’s survival as a pioneer modern novelist is now in doubt, as Blair quips in her opening line: “Pity John Burnside. It’s not the best time to publish an appreciation and defense of Henry Miller.”

In fact, today’s triggered-warned modernists may "cancel" Miller, as the saying goes, voluntarily reinstating the state censorship imposed on “Tropic of Cancer” (1934), and almost all of his books until 1961. That was when William Burroughs’s legal push to publish his own supposedly-pornographic “Naked Lunch” (1959) also freed “Cancer”, which became an overnight bestseller for Grove Press.

Ironically, young people viewing so much pornography on line, hypocrisy in politics and absence of romance in relationships desperately need an underworld expert to guide them through the contradictory physical plane to a functional understanding of experience and ideas, what could be called full freedom of thought, or Burnside’s anarchist ideal, or “Men’s Lib”, as Blair titles her piece.

Little does Blair realize: it is hardly men only who will be liberated. Indeed, Miller is linguistic LSD. His writing radically expanded literature, a leading edge of consciousness, opening it to the quotidian life, dirty little secrets and radical big pictures previously excluded from books.

Sure, some pages of “Tropic of Cancer” scan as misogynist pig drivel, but “I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt,” on page two, is hardly “something an angry gamer might have tweeted to Brianna Wu, the video game developer who received numerous threats after criticizing the sexist nature of her industry,” as Blair insists.

It was a joke—“After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. You can shit arpeggios if you like,” Miller continues—not to mention great writing and seminal sexting.

This author, Doniphan Blair, presents on Henry Miller's controversial ideas, April 13th, 2019, Big Sur, California. image: D.Blair

Indeed, we know that the “Tania” to whom that passage was penned enjoyed Miller's pronouncements, both in person and in print, given she was none other than author and feminist icon Anaïs Nin (1903-77), according to reputable sources.

Nin found Miller’s earthy honesty, flights of fancy and overall philosophy so refreshing, brilliant and essential, she gave him her heart as well as her body, typewriter AND money—from her banker husband—first to rent a decent room, where he could finish “Cancer”, and then to publish it. She also wrote the forward and helped edit. Although she edited their affair out of her own ground-breaking diaries published in1966, which Miller endorsed enthusiastically in his only uncensored early book, “The Cosmological Eye” (1939), and they decided not to marry, they remained life-long friends and collaborators.

As it happened, Nin was also intimate with June Mansfield, Henry's second wife, Antonin Artaud, the theater pioneer, and Otto Rank, the famed psychiatrist (Freud’s right-hand-man), whom she also hit up to publish “Cancer”—suggesting a symphony of love, elevated vision and cultural activism.

Such cross-gender and -profession cooperation was nothing new for Miller. June, a Jewish American Princess estranged from her family as well as a gorgeous genius grifter, had already seduced a man to finance an early, unpublished Miller called “Moloch”, about an anti-Semite oddly enough, while pushing him to find his iconoclastic voice.

And break everything he does.

If Miller’s misogyny seems shocking, try his anti-Semitism. Not only are June and Tania Jewish (in the book, the actual Nin wasn’t), so are most of the characters in "Cancer", including the protagonist’s closest friends, based on Miller’s best buds Michael Fraenkel and Alfred Perles. “[A]lmost all Montparnasse is Jewish, or half-Jewish, which is worse,” Miller writes, while he himself is “as ugly as a Jew. And who hates the Jew more than the Jew.” Miller often attacks himself, if not first, then foremost and in the most extreme terms.

While many writers of Miller’s day—Joyce, Gide, Orwell, Hemingway, Kafka—addressed the complex Jewish question glancingly, Miller tackles it straight up on page three of "Cancer", using reverse psychology and his patented technique: first shock the squares, then bury the gold, finally sneak in secrets in soaring psychedelic rhetoric.

Only gradually and sparingly does Miller reveal his intense romanticism, universalist mysticism and devout humanism. Ten pages into "Cancer", for example, he tells of a Jew in a lion cage without a gun trying to explain Spinoza to the lions, essentially a parable predicting the Holocaust.

Henry Miller (rt), Anais Nin and her husband, banker/artist/filmmaker Hugh Parker Guiler, circa 1932, Paris. Photo: unknown

In his attempt to take the piss out of all pieties—American, French, Nazism, capitalism, all “isms,” doctors, lawyers, priests—Jews and women were not exempt. Moreover, both Jews and women were coming under full public scrutiny in the 1920s and addressing them in a fusillade of irony and overexposure would prove better for their equal treatment than pandering to them in exaggerated panegyrics, especially given Jews had "The Bible" and women millennia of romantic verse. This must have been the thinking of Nin and Rank, a Jew as well as a psychiatrist, who were essentially Miller's partners in "Cancer".

"Hardly!" would harrumph Kate Millett. In her well-known “Sexual Politics” (1970). Millett examines and excoriates Miller's many seeming or actual misogynist passages, but fails to note that his first book was edited and published by Nin, whom Millett considered the first truly female author. She also says nothing about the rose-tinted view women had of themselves, after a century of prodigious novel writing and reading and associated romanticism. In this light, Miller's “cunts” and “fuckings” are largely a defrocking of the lily-white, prudish view of women, freeing them up to be as animalistic and base as men, in a sense paralleling the use of the word "bitch", now so popular among women.

Upstanding, middle class and extremely straight women were powerful in the home, as Miller well knew from his mother, and in the streets, as the suffragettes proved by pushing through prohibition—their signature legislation to control men—a year before they got the actual vote in 1920. Ironically, that fantastic matriarchal achievement brought a wave of female drinkers and radical freethinkers.

But before Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe and Dorothy Parker can-opened modern art to a female avant-garde and sex positiveness, most establishment women were not prepared to discuss the widespread flapper phenomena, driven by women fleeing the farm to dance and have fun, which often included fucking, at least according to Miller. My grandmother, the educated sister of an American poet famous in the '20s, probably would not have been able to explain it, let alone write a book about it.

Miller, meanwhile, tells that story, which is precisely what endeared him to Nin. Indeed, we visit a completely contemporary Swinging '20s through his "Tropic of Capricorn" (1938) and "The Rosy Crucifixion" (“Nexus”, “Sexus” and “Plexus”, 1949-59), so-called due to the eviscerating wounds inflicted by his proclivity for love.

Nor does Millett mention the feminine idyll Miller suggests in exchange. Aside from the trickster goddess June or gold-hearted Parisian prostitute, there’s the Greek peasant “monster with six toes.”

Henry Miller, circa 1948, New York City. Photo: Gilles Nadeau

“That she was ugly I could not deny, but... hers was the sort which instead of repelling attracts. To begin with she was strong, sinewy, vital, an animal endowed with a human soul and with indisputable sexual powers… Her eyes glowed like coals… her lips were blood red… Renoir would have found her beautiful; he would not have noticed the six toes nor the coarseness of her features. He would have followed the rippling flesh, the full globes of her teats, the easy, swaying stance, the superabundant strength of her arms… He would have caught the animal lust, the ardor unquenchable, the fire in the guts, the tenacity of the tigress, the hunger, the rapacity, the all-devouring appetite of the oversexed female who is not wanted because she has an extra toe.” (“The Colossus of Maroussi”, 1948, p111.)

Three other elephantine issues appear to go unnoticed by Elaine Blair (no relation to this author). Obviously, the genders are identical in every aspect EXCEPT sex, where they have alternative, sometimes opposing, perspectives as well as equipment. Hence, one is an outie, the other an innie. One carries the child and may legitimately worry where the milk money will come from; the other may be pregnant with a novel they think is going to change the world—AUTOMATICALLY causing tension, regardless of misogyny.

Secondly, Miller is a no-holds barred satirist, surrealist and revolutionary, as befits a sophisticated soul suffering through severe depressions, wars and societal dislocation. But he is also an irrepressible optimist, providing the basis for his uniquely American outlook. "Ever merry and bright," was his impoverished Paris-days motto, even as his French friends ran home to lunch with mama, or to descend into a suicidal funk.

Thirdly, while there is plenty of porn and insult to go around, Miller uses it to accentuate his massive mental leaps, from crotch-level to our most advanced aspirations, which he often makes in a single sentence, sometimes turning an attack redemptive in the final clause with a back-handed compliment. Challenging them to decode the push from the pull, Miller enfranchises his readers to think for themselves, not only as literate sensuous citizens, but self-made autodidacts, now entitled to critique all of civilization!

As is well known, for civilization and its classical canon to remain relevant, if not vibrant, let alone cutting edge, it must be reinterpreted and updated.

Miller dropped out of City College of New York after one semester because it interrupted his voracious inhaling of Western civilization, eastern philosophy, fine art, literature and extensive esoteria, in what was then becoming the center of the West, Manhattan. Almost everything that interested him, Miller jammed into his books, making his oeuvre of over two dozen texts essentially Enlightened Civ 101, albeit as viewed by the person in the street, not a pompous, over-educated asshole.

Miller and Nin, at the Villa Borghes which Nin rented so Miller could finish 'Cancer in the Tropics', circa 1933. Photo: unknown

Indeed, his “Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere”, also from “The Cosmological Eye”, published just before European civilization was butchered by Uncle Adolf’s minions, warns in no uncertain terms the myopic artists as well as politicians and PhDs.

“Now, my dear fellows, my dear Belgian, Swedish, Japanese, Dutch, British, French, American, Rhodesian, Arthurian, Cro-Magnon, Neanderthalian Surrealists, now is the time to grab hold of that most wonderful prehensile tail, which has been dragging in the mud for countless centuries. Get hold of it, if you can, and swing for your lives! It’s one chance out of a million, and I wish you luck, you poor bleeding bastards.”

Famously friendly with average folk, Miller stood in fierce opposition to all authority, an artistic necessity he learned while being ground down on the streets of New York, where he rode his bike everywhere, supported the black socialist leader Hubert Harrison, played piano at parties and honed to a razor’s edge his notorious gift of gab. After graduating from Grifting 101 with June, he perfected the art in Paris and Greece, to which he escaped just months before Germany invaded Poland.

He landed in Big Sur, California, where he lived off his watercolors, on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, in a cabin gifted by a female fan. Even in California, Miller was known for taking down liberal sacred cows, from Norman Mailer, who wrote a worshipful Miller biography, to Jerry Brown, who was immediately told off for being a politician, when he dropped by Miller's fancy new digs in an upper-crust neighborhood of Los Angeles.

He acquired that bourgeois palace, and transitioned to it seamlessly at 70, shortly after "Cancer"'s liberation from censorship earned him his first real royalty check: hundreds of thousands of dollars! At dinners there, his favorite hobby was identifying someone with a strong, sacrosanct position and working the conversation around to contradict it.

If Blair took the time to close read Miller, she would have found a master of the mellifluous flow, a weaver of multidimensional, sometimes contradictory, worldviews, ranging from radically-open autobiography to insightful critiques or fantastically freewheeling ruminations on love, art, death, writer difficulties, politics and, last but not least, the sex obsession shared by all classes and races as well as genders—but barely illuminated by literature until Miller.

Isn’t Miller merely reporting the facts, since men do think and talk just as he writes? Don’t women want to know what men actually think, instead of you’re-a-goddess whitewashes, to understand them better? And don't we—women as well as men, middle class as well as bohemian artists and liberated feminists—have to accept that many women thoroughly enjoy sex in all its aspects, including talk? In point of fact, dirty talk facilitates our ability to repurpose prudish, Protestant, patriarchal gender views to female fetish, fantasy and perversion.

Miller at his work desk, in a cabin in the California wilderness, Partington Ridge, Big Sur, circa 1955. Photo: unknown

By the same token, Miller had issues with women. Each of his five marriages only lasted around eight years. His other-gender understanding was tainted by being born in the 19th century to an overbearing mother, who once doused him in his bed with a bucket of water for laziness. Then there was the youthful homosexuality and truly Swinging '20s, not to forget the artist's obligation to break with society, or his extensive whoring, as well as his dream of reinventing a romanticism wild enough to inspire a new, very jaded and injured generation, powered solely by abstract exploration, without resorting to drugs, drink or mystical balderdash.

“Cancer in the Tropics” is over-the-top satire, cubism come to printed life, a multi-front attack on pretension and fake morality in iambic pentameter so tight it translates perfectly to punk, as this author proved in his song “The Happiest Man Alive”. A punk-folk rendition of the first two pages “Cancer”, it was debuted by The Doilies at Big Sur’s Henry Miller Library in 2001, three weeks before 9/11.

In fact, Blair's review quotes almost half of “Cancer”’s opener and almost nothing else of Miller’s many books, suggesting that she, too, recognizes—along with Nin, Rank, Eliot, Orwell and many others in the ‘30s, as well as today, like John Burnside—it was a critical call to arms and consciousness, arguably one of the most important books in the evolution of writing, a modern, democratic “Bible”, bursting with actual reality and daily life.

Sure Gertrude Stein, Louis-Ferdinand Celine and James Joyce had begun dismantling the novel by the time "Cancer" came out. But she’s archaic and hard to read; he’s a fascist misanthrope; and Joyce, while wild, funny and profound, is so 19th century.

One need only glance at “A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller” (1987), or “Nexus”, when June and her girlfriend sneak out of the house to board a ship to France—breaking his heart—or when Miller sneaks up a fire escape, peaks through a window and sees them shooting up—which dismembers his worldview—to realize Miller is not a simplistic, female-fearing hater.

He adored women, if perhaps too much.

I wonder about the pleasure experienced by women, Miller remarks somewhere in the "Cancer"s or "The Trilogy". Is it keener, different, in what way? This suggests a concern, if not for her full, every-wrinkle-in-your-cunt-reamed-out satisfaction, at least her feelings.

But, in point of fact, “[s]ex is a drop in the bucket when you consider the whole of a relationship," Miller told Hoki Tokuda, the Japanese-born singer-musician 45 years his junior, who became his fifth wife (see interview with her). "Some of the greatest love affairs in history were completely devoid of sex. I’ve found that my relationships with women that didn’t include sex were just as gratifying as the ones where sex was the main course."

Miller and his fifth wife, musician Hoki Tokuda, when he was about 80 and she 35. Photo: unknown

Unfortunately, Blair doesn’t mention Tokuda or Nin, except to admit she financed “Cancer” (perhaps because the NY Review of Books also recently panned her); nor Erica Jong’s immense Miller inheritance in “Fear of Flying” (1973); or the adoration of many other authors, from Kerouac and Ferlinghetti (whose book title “Coney Island of the Mind” is a Miller quote) to Philip Roth and Mailer; and, of course, astounded readers worldwide.

It’s a complex intellectual dialectic, one well worth teasing out. While Blair adds some insight, she fails to recognize the massive structural columns, built almost entirely by Miller, holding up the modern novel.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Mar 26, 2019 - 03:36 PM
cineSOURCE’s 5 Day Idea Tour

Tour leaves 6PM, Friday, April 12th, see itinerary below, or contact cineSOURCE at 888.5MEDIA5

Hitting California Road

Have you ever thought about hitting the road for a few days to dance on a beach under the full moon, say?

Did you know that California has three deserts—which bloom in April, and this year's should be great—four mountain ranges, 300 hot springs, a MILLION miles of back roads and numerous inspirational literary as well as environmental locations?

Did you know that cineSOURCE does tours?

Indeed, our sixth annual 5Day Idea Tour is leaving West Oakland on Friday, April 12th, first stop being Big Sur, replete with fine dining, a literary performance and Esalen's famous hot tubs.

All you need is a sleeping bag and pad, a jacket and sun hat, and eating utensils, and to show up at 6pm, Friday, April 12th, 2200 Adeline Street.

Please RSVP: 510 220.2126 or .

Our newly rented van will whisk you to Carmel for dinner and then Big Sur, to sleep at the Henry Miller Library and do a beach day. The library is also where tour facilitator, Doniphan Blair, will perform "Blair Does Miller", an introduction to the still-controversial author with a focus on his misogyny, anti-Semitism and psychedelic romanticism (see article),

Later that night, we'll do a beach fire and drop by the world-famous Esalen Institute, to bath in its tubs thirty feet off the ocean. After camping in mountains overlooking the Pacific, we do a back road crossing of California, from Route 1 to Route 395.

From then on, it's one long line of hot springs, mountains and deserts, which should have great flowers this year (see Death Valley Flower Report. Finally, we will find ourselves, literally as well as metaphorically, at a paradise oasis in Death Valley, where the supreme silence can quiet even the most obstreperous inner dialogue.

Along the way, we will discuss film, search for good Mexican food, do yoga, indulge gourmet snacks and stop at fantastic vistas.

Indeed, our second rule is: Whenever anyone wants to stop, we will stop and look and smell.

The next days include on more hot spring, the Manzanar Internment Camp Museum, viewing the HIGHEST point in the continental US (Mt. Whitney) and, perhaps, skiing .

The costs will be shared evenly for cineSOURCE "family" and plus 33% for "new friends." It works out to about $200-50, for van rental, gas, food and one night lodging, or $275-350, for new friends, although we work out the specifics en route.

For more info, please call 510 220.2126, or email . California remains the mother of all road trips—come out and play—literally in our back yard.

Itinerary

1100 miles, 5.25 days

Fri, Apr 12, 7pm Oakland to Carmel, MILEAGE: 100, dinner: River's Inn, on to Big Sur to sleep, MILEAGE: 40

Sat, Apr 13, Big Sur beaches, lunch: picnic, dinner: Deijons, 8pm: Blair does Miller, literary performance at Henry Miller Memorial Library,, 2am: hot spring, Esalen Institute, campout, Nacimiento-Fergusson Road, MILEAGE: 50

Sun, Apr 14, Nacimiento-Fergusson and other back roads to Bakersfield, sleep at Geronimo Hot Springs, MILEAGE: 250

Mon, Apr 15, Geronimo to Lake Isabella and Saline Valley Hot Spring, MILEAGE: 220

Tue, Apr 16, Saline Valley Hot Springs leave afternoon to Big Pine stay in motel. MILEAGE: 100

Wed, Apr 17, Do Movie Museum, or Manazar Japanese Internment Camp or Mammoth Ski Area or hot springs, MILEAGE: 60 , dinner in Placerville or Groveland, drive back to Oakland. MILEAGE: 325

Over five days and few hours, we will have enjoyed beaches, flowers, hot springs, full moon camping and at least some artistic inspiration.I have done this tour five times, first in 2003, and it never ceases to amaze, surprise, even shock. So much, right in our back yard, a vision quest for the taking, if in modern automotive manner.

What to Pack

Sleeping Bag (preferably down)
Sleeping Pad (as thick as possible, child's mattress rolled up and tied with twine works well)
Warm Jacket
Sun Hat
Eating Utensils (bowl, cup, spoon)
Water Bottle
Good Shoes
Bathing Suit and Towel
Musical Instrument
Shorts and Long Pants
One Great Book
Electronics (allowed but minimal)

Posted on Mar 24, 2019 - 02:07 PM
Summer of Love Shows, Movies & Festivals, Part II
by Doniphan Blair

return to Summer of Love Shows, Movies & Festivals, Part II

Their worldview was well articulated by a hand-drawn poster I saw tied to a tree: “Pray For Peace, Learn From All. Carry “Home” with You. Love Yourself. Help Your Neighbor. We Are Family. We the People Need to Be the People, And Work to Create a Better World, By Making Your Own Life Better First. Find Your Happy. Be Your Self. Move if You Have to But Live Your Live. Fill the Now with Good Things.”

To which I might add: "Protect the tribe but don't tribalize. 'Search out knowledge, even unto China,' as Muhammad said. Civilization is the sum of the tribes' ideas not blood. Keep tools current but bear in mind psychology, sex and other basics are as unchanged through time as through space or race. Know that we are in turbulent times but they can hardly match the '60s, let alone the '40s. Maintain the balance—female/male, nature/tech, play/work—and we'll be fine."

In this way, perhaps, San Francisco might reintegrate its storied history with its unprecedented present to foment a flourishing, front-edge content culture.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Mar 21, 2019 - 03:06 PM
Rob Nilsson: Enfant Terrible, Old Master of the Indie
by Doniphan Blair

Rob Nilsson, the actor, painter and poet as well as prolific filmmaker, enjoyed his recent New York star turn at the premier of his 40-year old 'Prairie Trilogy'. photo: Nicholas Blair

Skip to Part II

ROB NILSSON, THE PROLIFIC, POETIC
and iconoclastic Bay Area filmmaker, just did a full circle of sorts. In August, he showed a brace of 40-year-old documentaries co-directed with John Hanson, collectively called “Prairie Trilogy”, to great acclaim at Manhattan’s cool, new Metrograph Theater.

“We got it because of Trump,” Nilsson told me at the beginning of our rambling, revealing and occasionally contentious three-day, two-coast interview, which started late July, at his large house in the flats of Berkeley, and ended a few days ago, via email. “People are looking to see if there is some other way, in the effort to get rid of this clown.”

Nilsson and I also chatted at the Metrograph, before his show and at the deluxe after-party, in the haute cuisine restaurant that is part of the theater—it was the film's forty-year-belated world premiere, after all. As we washed down their spectacular food with their vaguely-drinkable wine—Nilsson going light on the latter, due to his monkish demeanor—we couldn’t help but notice how far we were from the tough times depicted in “Prairie Trilogy”.

Fortunately, Nilsson’s an old hand at such surrealist stretches, having leapt from obscurity into the spotlight at Cannes, in The New York Times, at meetings in Hollywood, and back again, many, many times. As it happens, “Prairie Trilogy” is about hard-scrabble farmers, vicious capitalists, home-grown socialists and a brilliant poet-activist named Henry Martinson, whom Hanson and Nilsson found still working at the AFL-CIO’s Fargo, North Dakota, office, age 97!

Nilsson himself just cracked that number in reverse, 79, although he's as vigorous and opinionated as ever, and swears he'll never retire.

“No, heaven forbid. I do my bike riding and stuff to keep my mechanism rolling—so far, so good.” On October 30th, the day after his 79th birthday, he biked nearly forty-five miles, from his home, half way across the Bay Bridge and to the foot of the Richmond Bridge, “in 3 1/2 hours,” he bragged by email.

Those statements notwithstanding, Nilsson is now creating his last films, also a trilogy, coincidentally. “It will probably be the last major thing I will do. I don’t know. Maybe there is something more coming.”

Of course, making features is insanely taxing, no matter how masterful Nilsson has become after 51—or so he claims (his IMDb page lists a "mere" 37, albeit no shorts, of which there must be almost a hundred). Making features can easily reduce youngsters half his age to blubbering idiots, not to mention Nilsson often acts or stars, as well as directs.

With his chiseled features—both sagging and drawn tight with age—intense gaze and priest-like bearing, which evaporates when he deems to crack his wide smile, Nilsson has delivered his unique brand of performance to scores of films. While IMDb lists only 33, there are undoubtedly double or triple that, given he's acted in at least half his own films and dozens more by cineastes from around the Bay, the States and the world, often indie mavericks in their own right.

Nilsson has also performed in Hollywood, appearing once each on “Miami Vice” and “Beverly Hills 90210” (1986 and 1992, respectively), and rendering roles in many of Bobby Roth’s TV films. Even at 79, he continues to send out headshots and garner much needed income from his acting career.

Nilsson's “Nomad Trilogy”, which he has already started with “Arid Cut", now in editorial, focuses on a young man embarking on a walkabout.

“This kid, Train Schickele—his name is Rail in the movie—this young, disaffected—well, I won’t call him disaffected—this young poet and tap dancer [is] needing to know about why he never met his father."

Farmer-actor John Ness (left) and 97-year-old poet-activist Henry Martinson in 'Prairie Trilogy' (1978). photo: courtesy R. Nilsson/J. Hanson

“He journeys through homeless encampments and out to the Nevada desert," Nilsson continued. "The search for his father provides the through-line through the three films.”

In another circle completing, Train Schickele is the son of David Schickele (1937-1999), one of Nilsson's best friend since the early '60s and their Peace Corps days in Nigeria.

That turned out to be a cultural adventure of immense proportions, given not only the fascinating village where Nilsson taught school for almost two years (Okeagbe, Akoko province), but the funky 8mm camera he brought and began shooting.

When the film came back from processing in England, he cut it—literally, using a razor blade and a board fitted with nails—into “The Lesson”, a spoof on colonialism featuring white surfers motorcycling around West Africa. Sadly, the only print disappeared, along with a box of camera equipment, when his apartment was burgled a few years later.

After his Peace Corps service, Nilsson retired to an island off the coast, where he wrote, painted and hung with locals through a paradise year, which ended abruptly with the news that Frithjof Holmboe, his beloved maternal grandfather, also a filmmaker, had died.

“He never even heard about my turn toward film,” Nilsson told cineSOURCE in 2008.

A peripatetic photographer known for shooting wild orchids and the first documentaries in North Dakota, where he was the state photographer, Holmboe eventually settled in Wisconsin, where Nilsson was born and raised to fourteen. After lighting out for the coast, Holmboe brought his extended family to Mill Valley, Marin County, fifteen miles north of San Francisco, where he bought and ran Strawbridge’s Camera store.

Nilsson ended up becoming the star of Mill Valley's Tamalpais High. Respected as a poet by his peers, he was also the class president, cross-country team captain and the big band's lead trumpeter, before heading off to college—none other than Harvard.

After taking a year off to work on Swedish freighters and hitchhike around Europe, he graduated from Harvard in 1962, only to find himself draft eligible and the war in Vietnam looming. When his conscientious objector application was nixed, he joined the Peace Corps, which was allowed as an alternative.

Before that, “I was trying to become a civil rights lawyer," he told me. "Food for Freedom was something that was being set up in Marin for people in Mississippi. They selected me to deliver the money. I had the check sewn into my jacket.”

“All these guys were in the SNCC headquarters,” the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Greenwood, Mississippi, “trying to hold out. I don’t think it could have been my idea, but I did do the bulk of the work, going to the city hall, going through the records, finding all the people who were wealthy enough—and liberal enough—to stand bail.”

“It just seemed like: ‘Wow, this is something so powerful, I have to be a part of it!’ I asked my grandfather if he would stake me going to law school and he said he would. I called the SNCC [but] they said, ‘The outside agitator [accusations] are so strong, we have to just do it on our own.’”

Rob Nilsson as Mel Hurley, a lovelorn war photographer, in his Sundance-winning 'Heat and Sunlight' (1997), which he also directed. photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

After Nigeria, Nilsson drove a cab (in Boston), met a woman (Indira, one of his fares), which produced a daughter (Robindira, to whom he is preternaturally devoted), and developed his art (poetry, painting and film).

His first real movie, “The Country Mouse", was an hour-long drama about an innocent abroad shot on the streets of Boston. He turned next to documentary, as was his pattern, after getting the gig to shoot a 30-minute "making-of" movie about Otto Preminger’s “Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon” (1970). Repatriating to California, he cut it on a Steenbeck this time, lent by Schickele, who preceded him back to the Bay and, by some strange quirk of fate, had also become a professional filmmaker.

Schickele had a Steenbeck, an expensive German flatbed editing machine, because he was already neck deep in his first feature, the docu-fictional “Bushman” (1971). Still taught at some film schools, “Bushman” opens as a narrative about a Nigerian, played by one of Schickele's students from the University of Nigeria, Paul Okpokam, who comes to America to attend San Francisco State University.

But when the actual Okpokam started organizing students to strike against the war in Vietnam and was arrested, “'Bushman' turned into a documentary about [David’s] efforts to get him out of San Quentin,” Nilsson explained, “which Willy Brown [a lawyer, who became mayor of San Francisco] helped him do.”

Schickele also appeared in “Signal 7” (1986), Nilsson first film using the method he invented for preparing actors and creating improvised scenes, which he calls “direct action,” but is essentially “direct acting,” given there’s little scripted dialogue.

Since then, Nilsson has done Direct Action workshops around the world, including in Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Italy and Armenia, and developed its ideas in lectures, in the book “Wild Surmise: a Dissident View”, and on his websites, Rob Nilsson and Citizen Cinema (there’s also a Wikipedia page).

In addition to using improvisation, Nilsson recommends we reject the “film as short story,” a paradigm promoted by film schools and Hollywood. “Smash the iron ball and chain of excessive plot," cineSOURCE quoted him saying, in the same 2008 article. "Create a poetic cinema based not on writing but on observing… mistrust your ideas… trust your experiences."

“Film is not a director’s medium,” Nilsson proclaimed, manifesto-like, on his website at that time (a statement no longer up). “The magicians who bottle the genie are the actors. The magician who lets the genie out of the bottle is the editor.”

“The second [new film] is ‘Center Divide’. It is about how gentrification is pushing people into homeless and RV encampments,” Nilsson continued in our interview, the first round of which was conducted in his old screening room, now full of film cans, video cassettes and half-full cardboard boxes.

After decades in a house with an edit suite, living quarters and sizable third floor loft, which he used as a painting studio, as well as a screening room, Nilsson appeared to be moving. “It is about the trip, the voyage itself, the adventure,” he said about his new film, but with a furrowed brow I took as a reference to his current situation, having to start anew so late in life.

Nilsson on his motor bike, although he also does regular biking, including a 40-miler on håis 79th birthday. photo: D. Blair

For this epic, road-trip triad, Nilsson created a new workshop and production group, albeit still under the auspices of what he calls Direct Action or Citizen Cinema interchangeably. Along with Schickele, it includes Penny Werner, who co-stars in "Arid Cut", Russell Murphy, a retired principal dancer from the San Francisco and Smuin ballets, and Michelle Anton Allen.

Allen was an alienated south-Cali kid when she happened to catch, late one night on cable, “Northern Lights”, the companion narrative to the "Prairie Trilogy" docs. Its stark, black-and-white images of struggling farmers stuck with her as she studied acting at Julliard in New York and returned home to work in TV-landia.

“While on a movie set with a once-prominent TV actress,” Allen told cineSOURCE, “I had an epiphany. If I was not careful, I could easily end up as an unstable, insecure, addiction-riddled TV actress surrounded by 'yes' people.”

“My response was to shave my head, throw away my makeup and make several serious changes in my life," including becoming a Citizen Cinema stalwart, acting or producing, as needed. “I’m happiest working with Rob, my cinematic soul mate.”

Also signed up for this ride are Lydia Becker, a longtime CC actress as well as practitioner of the complimentary Reichian therapy, Dante Dunn, an up-and-coming rap artist, the actress, singer, dancer AND fine artist Emily Corbo, and newbie Tony Milliner, who has done several CC workshops but no film until now.

Nilsson also happens to live near one of Berkeley’s infamous homeless encampments, in this case a community of van dwellers, seasonal workers and off-grid techies. Having befriended some, he's enlisted them as character actors, consultants or even set providers, be it the interior of their vehicles or their collective mass at meet-ups.

“Some of these people have the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous [at] Quartz Site, Arizona, I believe," Nilsson noted. "They get about 3,000 people. They have workshops on how you can live in the rough, put a solar panel on a Prius.”

Fleeing personal demons or the Bay Area's ridiculous rent, Nilsson’s nomads are houseless, but not homeless, and are reversing a millennia of "westward ho" by heading east for their better life.

On top of his prodigious film work, Nilsson is an accomplished painter, who shows his large, brush-strokey and colorful canvases, both abstract and figurative, most recently at San Francisco’s Spark Arts and the Harvey Milk Photo Center.

Poetry, too, remains an important, ongoing self-exploration. Ten years ago Nilsson published, “From a Refugee of Tristan da Cunha” (2007), a “collection of songs, rants, raids, runs into the chaos” (according to its Amazon page, where it's available—by the way, da Cunha is a remote, south Atlantic island not a brilliant Brazilian poet).

But these are loner pursuits: “Poetry is very internal thing for me. I kind of trust it will emerge viscerally. Painting is imagination. Filmmaking is more observation, I think, for me.”

Pure observation would be documentary but, aside from "Prairie Trilogy” and a handful of others, Nilsson skews narrative, which requires actors and larger crews, in other words: community.

In the early ‘70s, Nillson joined the Filmmaker’s Union of San Francisco, an alternative labor union, which led to the formation of Cine Manifest, a film collective (see his long remembrance at the end of cineSOURCE's “Cine Collectives Come Back, Finally!”).

Nilsson enjoying the 'Prairie Trilogy' premiere after-party with a Japanese filmmaker, with whom he was discussing a collaboration. photo: D. Blair

Cine Manifest facilitated his partnership with Hanson, whom he first met in Boston. In part because they both had North Dakotan grandfathers, their bond blossomed into “Prairie Trilogy”, “Northern Lights” and finally a full-fledged film company, New Front Films, in 1982.

After the success of their first feature, “We set out to make two films,” Nilsson recalled, in one of the dozens of email follow-ups to our seven hours of recorded interview, “my ‘On the Edge’ and Hanson’s ‘Wildrose’.” They completed those projects in 1986 and 1984, respectively.

"We raised about a million and half for ‘On the Edge’ throughout the country," Nilsson elaborated. "Along the way, we met Bruce [Dern, a respected Hollywood actor], a lifelong runner. He was perfect for the lead role of Wes Holman, as the film featured a runner and a cross country race based on Mill Valley’s Dipsea," America's second-oldest foot race. Nilsson himself continued to run track at Harvard and 10Ks and marathons into his sixties.

After Cine Manifest, which was a bit too ideological and doc-oriented for his taste, Nilsson went on to found a number of narrative film tribes, notably the Tenderloin Action Group, in the late-'90s, which became the Tenderloin yGroup, and Citizen Cinema, in the mid-2000s.

“How could I do this without friends, without a whole fortunate…” he waved his hands. “Once in a while you meet people like Marshall,” he opened his arms further. Marshall Spight is a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has both acted in and funded Nilsson projects and now owns Meets the Eye, one of the Bay Area’s biggest green screen studios.

There has also been financing from David and Carol Richards, the former a Nilsson classmate from Harvard, and help from many friends and collaborators. John Stout, a lawyer, producer and fundraiser, raised much of the million-five for “On the Edge”, big money those days—big money these days, considering how hard it is to fund anything but commercially-minded indies.

“The whole workshop thing is hundreds of people just being able to be there for these movies,” Nillson said, spreading his arms again.

“One thing I do wish is that I could get back some needed capital to these people that never had much,” Nilsson lamented. “That would be mean a financial success I’ve never had. I guess I can’t say there is much hope of that.“ Except, perhaps, “Nomad Trilogy”.

“They are all multi-story films," he said, returning to the epic at hand, "and some of the characters come across all three stories. The third is called ‘In Outland’, or perhaps 'Yonder'.”

Regardless of whether the trilogy's final film has a Mobius strip title or one shooting for the stars, it will be shot on the Schickele family land outside Mina, Nevada, which will serve as an Ithaca homeland for both Rail, the trilogy's Prodigal Son, and Nilsson himself.

“Hopefully housing a transcendent Penelope,” I remarked.

"No, Penny [Werner]'s character dies at the end of the first film."

"I meant symbolically, as in Odysseus's Penelope... in terms of the film."

“No! They find out they’re outsiders no matter where they go,” Nilsson answered, looking down.

Bruce Dern stars Nilsson's most Hollywood films, 'On the Edge', which combines an underdog sports story with Nilsson's political ruminations. photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

“It was a good weekend,” he noted by email, about his latest Manhattan star turn. In point of fact, he’s had quite a few, starting in 1979 when "Northern Lights" went to Cannes and brought back the Camera d’Or, the best first film prize, and was well-reviewed by Vince Canby, The New York Times' premier film critic.

“I went to the [Metrograph] shows on Saturday and Sunday and had enthusiastic responses," Nilsson wrote. "Four major articles: NY Times, Village Voice, Counter Punch and something from Criterion.”

“We now have a distributor and requests coming in. I'm blowing on the coals.” And what do you know—they're fired right up!

Indeed, Nilsson has been touring ever since, showing “Prairie Trilogy” at art theaters, colleges and festivals all over the country, including San Francisco’s Roxie and Marin’s Smith Rafael Film Center in late October, although a black-and-white documentary about impoverished, fly-over farmers will doubtfully deliver much relief to Nilsson's impecunious associates.

Not to mention another problem: “If I had my choice of which of my films I wanted to be known and seen,” Nilsson admitted, “it is not my favorite film.”

“I got more interested… in the cities than in the countryside,” he remarked, in what would be his only explanation for his Damascus Road conversion from salt-of-the-earth, somewhat-straight, cinema explorations to more bohemian wanderings and wonderings.

“What are the joys and sorrows, the sufferings,” he ruminated, "of these odd migratory animals, who came in from the land to master new technologies and be confronted by modern contradictions?"

“I would say ‘Heat and Sunlight’ is a more challenging film," he said, surveying his enormous oeuvre. One of his most impassioned unrequited love stories, playing out over one long day—both of which became preferred Nilsson tropes—“Heat and Sunlight” (1987) combined scripted moments and Direct Action.

It follows Mel Hurley (Nilsson in a black leather jacket), a photojournalist who covered the Biafran Genocide, the starvation of over a million Nigerians while the world watched, during the civil war that destroyed the country a few years after Nilsson was there. Hurley is now confronting another massive indifference, that of his lover, a gorgeous dancer, whom he suspects is sleeping with her performance partner.

About the madness of art as well as jealousy, with music by David Byrne and Brian Eno (with whom Nilsson did a doc about The Velvet Underground's John Cale), “Heat and Sunlight” stormed Sundance in 1988 and took the Grand Jury Prize (see a short clip here, sadly, Nilsson is severely underrepresented on YouTube).

Consuelo Faust, who plays the dancer, in what would be her only film role, "becomes a sexy, vivid, mesmerizing focus," according to the now-well-known critic Janet Maslin, in The NY Times. "And Mr. Nilsson himself ably captures the urgency and jealousy."

“On the Edge”, Nilsson's film preceding “Heat and Sunlight”, is not one of his favorites. Arguably his most Hollywood, the promotional catchphrase—"Feel the pain, live the dream, share the glory"— probably makes him want to puke to this day. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it thirty years ago and it’s fascinating from a film-studies perspective (see its trailer)

Starring Dern and Pam Grier, the great Blaxploitation star gone mainstream, it also features John Marley, from “Faces” (1968), the film which brought John Cassavetes's unique breed of improvisation, cinéma vérité and intimacy to a large audience (it was nominated for three Oscars). As if cribbed from a Hollywood movie, Nilsson met Marley accidentally at the famous Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard.

In fact, “On the Edge” garnered rave reviews, including one from the surprisingly-insightful mainstream critic Roger Egbert—"an angry, original, unpredictable movie... Bruce Dern, in one of his best performances"—and a pretty good one from The Times, which characterized it as a thinking man’s “Rocky” (1976), replete with requisite silhouette shots of training.

Nilsson hard at work at his edit bench/computer, which can require up to two years per film. photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

While The Times reviewer characterized the obstacles confronting the hero as routine, what is hardly Hollywood is Wes's father, a tough old lefty, who boycotts his son’s races because he wants him to stop dicking around and stand up for the people. I recall the father was played to a "T" by Bill Bailey, a non-actor who developed his back story fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War, ripping Nazi flags off German ships in US harbors and facing down the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Also Bailey’s only film appearance—he died shortly after production—the father character allowed Nilsson to explore issues vexing him from “Prairie Trilogy” and “Northern Lights” to the strange pair of Russian films he made seven years ago: How do we help our brethren? And what do we do if helping becomes hurting, if ideas or organizations become repressive or murderous?

Regardless of critical acclaim or personal faves, "It is always the next film that interests me,” Nilsson told me. “I like ‘Permission to Touch’ [2014]. I like ‘Fourth Movement’ [2017]."

Yet another Ouroboros digesting its own derriere, "Permission to Touch" is Nilsson's return to the characters and themes of "Heat and Sunlight", notably a now-elderly Mel Hurley and what women do with their bodies. While it doesn't achieve the original’s punchy, politicized romanticism or iconic black-and-white imagery—both in “Heat and Sunlight”'s cinematography and Mel's photography (provided by Steve and Hildy Burns)—it remains very solid Nilsson: heartfelt or insufficiently felt, as the case may be, taking place in one night and largely improvised.

Not to mention, he produced it on a fraction of the budget, with only two actors, himself and T. Moon, a stunning, woman-of-color television and theater actress who plays a performance artist (in lieu of a dancer), a crew of three and all shooting and editing executed entirely inside his Berkeley home.

T. Moon is a pseudonym because she doesn't want to be associated with the movie (for personal reasons), even though she delivers a fantastic scream-fest fight with Nilsson in its beginning, a lovely art-dance piece in its middle, and together they produce some rambling, if realistic, reconciliation, in its closing.

"Fourth Movement" didn’t grab me as much, although it's an intriguing piece about people on the periphery of the jazz scene who end up drinking and commiserating through one of the worst nights of their lives: election night, 2016, the dawn of the Trumpocalypse (see clip here).

"I guess it is because I can see what it is I am trying to do, and I can’t let it alone,” Nilsson explained, in reference to why it is always the next film that concerns him. “Whether anyone else sees, it is kind of irrelevant, anyway. I succeed, I fail, on my own terms—that way I know who to blame.”

“You can’t try to please anyone—that is ridiculous," he counseled. "Nor do I think you should play to an audience. You should play to your sense of what’s real, what needs to be done. In the end that’s all you’ve got. You have to know whose criticism to listen to. In the end, you feel it or you don’t.”

They obviously felt it back in the late fall of 1977, when Nilsson, Hanson and half of Cine Manifest decamped from their south-of-Market San Francisco warehouse and flew to North Dakota, where they were hosted by Hanson’s mother and neighboring farmers. Hanson also secured grants from the North Dakota’s National Endowment for the Humanities, arts organizations and unions.

So deeply did they feel it, in fact, they made not one but four films, “Prairie Trilogy” plus “Northern Lights”.

Nilsson in his once-lovely screening room now full of boxes and moving paraphernalia. photo: D. Blair

Perfectly complimenting its companion docs, right down to the elderly socialist Martinson doing the narration, “Northern Lights” was “stunningly photographed” by Cine Manifester Judy Irola, according to Times critic Canby. Using lots of chiaroscuro and graphic framing, Irola starkly iconized the young women and men trying to farm, survive and organize on America’s harsh northern prairies (see clips here).

“Northern Lights” opens equal or better than anything by Bergman himself: a laughing, lightly-dressed and erotically-charged Ray and Inga chasing each other through a snowy forest. Played by Susan Lynch and Bob Behling, from San Francisco’s theater scene, they're soon beset by money troubles, Ray's father dying and Inga leaving the homestead to look for work. Upon learning her marriage has to be postponed, Inga gulps down a whiskey—a rare Nilsson nod to hedonism.

One piercingly poignant scene shot in telephoto shows a clutch of young, inexperienced farmers struggling to thresh winter wheat in thin overcoats, high wind and swirling snow.

The story was based on Hanson’s grandfather, a Dakota farmer radicalized during World War I, who joined the Nonpartisan League, a movement advocating for farmers and against the rail, grain and bank monopolies. Nilsson’s grandfather Holmboe posthumously contributed the excellent North Dakota footage he shot in the 1920s, which appears throughout "Prairie Trilogy".

Joe Spano, another “Northern Lights” lead, moved to Hollywood soon after production to become Detective Henry Goldblume on “Hill Street Blues” (1981-87), but most of the remaining cast were Dakotan civilians. They were led by the Ness family, in particular John, with his commanding mustache and charismatic smile, who also appears in "Prairie Trilogy", scenes which look like outtakes from “Northern Lights”.

Ray, the first of many politically-conflicted Nilsson characters, reluctantly agrees to join the Nonpartisan League, which was called that to protect against the standard tactic of “red-baiting.” Sadly, the actual League was taken over by populists and right-wingers, just as Ray feared and for which “Trilogy” provides the historical account.

When “Northern Lights” returned from Cannes, in the spring of '79, with the first-time filmmaker's prize, Nilsson, Hanson and the Cine Manifesters were ecstatic but also shocked, as was much of the film world. European in style and politics but American in subject and character, it was the veritable opposite of the other great films of the late ‘70s, notably those by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, who were also forging a new cinema by the Bay. Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", also 1979, masterfully and artistically captured the '60s, but was unabashedly a war and Hollywood film.

Nilsson and Hanson's lower-budget backward glance seemed to provide a better window into the conflicts and complexities of the Bay Area, where artists and activists were trying to keep alive the ‘60s' social movements in the face of the tragedy of the Black Panthers, the Milk and Moscone murders and the Jonestown massacre.

“After having read about ‘Northern Lights’ for years, I reached out to Rob,” Jacob Perlin, the artistic director of the Metrograph Theater, wrote me by email, in response to my question: “Why the ‘Prairie Trilogy’ revival now?”

“I fell in love with the film and asked Rob and John Hanson if I could do a theatrical re-release. In 2013, the film opened at Film Forum in New York City, followed by a national tour.”

“[Then] I asked them for copies of everything they had done. I instantly recognized ‘Prairie Trilogy’ as being as much of a masterpiece as ‘Northern Lights’, and completely revelatory in terms of the kind of non-fiction films that were being made at that time.”

“Little did I know,” concluded Perlin, who decided to show and distribute "Prairie Trilogy", “the film had never had an official release, and the audience and critics are finding it just as wonderful as I had.”

'Signal 7', Nilsson's second break out film, featuring his improv technique, Direct Action, was presented by Francis Ford Coppola. photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

Why am I not surprised?

I became enamored of Nilsson’s work immediately upon viewing the wild and wooly, yet quite coherent, “Signal 7” at the Mill Valley Film Festival, which has world premiered many Nilsson films, in 1986 (not 1984 as listed on IMDb; also, its title is “Signal 7”, not “Signal Seven”). It, too, went on to be well reviewed by The NY Times, which called it “an unusual, touching, intelligent film," one that proved "excellent movies can be made without big stars and mega-budgets.” Presented by Francis Ford Coppola (meaning he introduced, not produced, it), Nilsson estimated it cost only $150,000.

I also happened to attend that after-party, which I spent drinking heavily with some "Signal 7" actors and their friends, notably the charming Raven de la Croix, a former Russ Meyer actress with a world-class bosom, whose day job was stripping.

About two cabbies (Bill Ackridge and Dan Leegant), in the course of one night (yet again), as they swerve around San Francisco, discussing life and dealing with difficulties (like the shooting of a fellow cabbie), “Signal 7” was the first movie—ever—filmed on the new generation of video cameras and transferred to 35 mm film for theatrical distribution.

Although marketed as “portable,” those cameras were not small and, with the film shot hand-held over three, very long nights, Nilsson introduced his cinematographers (Geoffrey Schaaf and Tomas Tucker) at the Mill Valley premier as “two human tripods.”

In addition to its video innovation, “Signal 7” marked Nilsson’s aesthetic about-face from his freshman feature—a leap a lesser artist would have been reluctant to take—to colorful, contemporary and aggressively-emotive films, which were largely improvised. Indeed, dialogue, actions and sometimes entire scenes were made up, after extensive exercises and backstory development using his Direct Action method.

Jazz achieved full improvisation in the early 1960s, but cinema was slow to jettison scripts in favor of free-blowing, outside of a few adventurous auteurs, like Andy Warhol and John Cassavetes—one of whom Nilsson hates, because he typifies the bloodless conceptual artist that is an anathema to a can-do, romantic Man of the West, the other whom he adores.

cineSOURCE magazine, for our part, has long advocated genre miscegenation, with one of the best mixes being the improvised film with anything else: drama, romance, comedy, cop, etc. One easy way to do this: shoot a few scripted takes—playing the head, as in jazz—and, once you have something serviceable in the can, improvise the hell out of it.

Then let the best take win in the editing room, where “the magician lets the genie out of the bottle," which can be incredibly laborious in an improvised film. First of all, dialogue and blocking vary greatly from take to take; secondly, the editing itself is extemporized, with the film often reinvented entirely anew in the editing room.

“Most of my films take over a year to edit, some two,” Nilsson informed me by email. "I’ve been on ‘Arid Cut’ now for over a year and I’ve got another year to go.”

Nilsson routinely attracts editors right out of film school, kids who’ve seen and fallen in love with his films, a system which also serves his budgets in recent years. Despite claiming that editors are the real directors, which implies introducing a second visionary, Nilsson closely oversees the entire process.

Almost all filmmakers, including those as hidebound as Hitchcock, allow ad-libbing, notably when confronted by bad lines or great actors able to inhabit characters better than some schlemiel scriptwriter.

But Nilsson reverses that ratio, rejecting the entire pretense of commercial filmmaking, while retaining many of its conventions, like cutaways, character arc and the hour-plus-some length. To get the rawest feeling and most relevant spontaneity, Nilsson recommends you prepare extensively but then take a deep breath and blow freely with all you got.

If it doesn’t gel into brilliant cinema, Nilsson doesn’t yell cut or bitch out his actors, like some dictatorial auteur. Instead, he interjects a few words, a reassuring look or even a hug (especially useful for inspiring first-time non-actors), and continues the scene. Even if a scene is bombing, he lets it dribble down to its natural demise, during which it may reanimate or deliver one last revelatory statement or expression.

And so it was that Nilsson assembled an immense body of unusual and fresh films and came to be recognized by many critics and film school professors as the foremost inheritor of the improv mantle from its great groundbreaker, Cassavetes, to whom “Signal 7” is dedicated.

Indeed, Nilsson is an aggressive innovator in his own right. He looks to poetry and mysticism much more than Cassavetes, a libertine who died of cirrhosis of the liver at 59. And he developed Direct Action, a fully immersive method, which fostered more improv. Cassavetes only used improvisation in rehearsal, after which he would edit the results into script form for traditional shooting.

Nilsson continued the discussion with an old friend, follower and some times provocateur, cineSOURCE publisher/editor Doniphan Blair at the Metrograph opening. photo: N. Blair

The first American director to win awards at both Cannes and Sundance, Nilsson has received numerous other plaudits, prizes and rave reviews; he has worked with some of America’s finest film actors (Stacy Keach in “Imbued”, 2009; Ron Perlman in “Stroke”, 2000); he’s attracted financing from Silicon Valley; and he has taught dozens of classes.

In addition to facilitating scores of Direct Action workshops around the world, Nilsson did almost a decade and a half running the Tenderloin Action/yGroup, in San Francisco; he has taught numerous classes at Emeryville's Film Acting Bay Area, which also provided actors and financing for a few films; and he held the columnist emeritus post—if only for one issue—here at cineSOURCE, in Oakland.

Alas, it's not quite the acknowledgement befitting a master of the indie, alternative or art feature—call it what you will. Indeed, Nilsson has had trouble of late raising money for his films or even covering his mortgage—apparently why he's subdividing in his home into rentals—not that Nilsson, the old Nigerian world traveller, well versed in Buddhist and poetic asceticism, complains.

The prophet's acclaim is often greater overseas, as the saying goes. And with European viewers more comfortable with complex cinema, Nilsson is in demand as a festival judge, teacher and collaborator in Russia, Armenia, Italy and elsewhere. On his peregrinations, however, he hasn’t found many people doing improv-ed films, perhaps because cinema's cost precludes leaving so much to chance.

“I bet you there are a lot more than I know,” Nilsson answered, when I asked about that absence. “I bet you because it is such a natural choice. Once you realize how difficult it is to get anyone to a realist point of view with written lines—it is like pulling teeth. Great actors can do it. But I’m not interested in acting. I’m looking for something closer to doing and being.”

Fortunately, in the course of making almost 30 Direct Action/Citizen Cinema features around the Bay, Nilsson has inspired a hard-working local group. Loosely affiliated as Bricolage, French for styles stuck together, they act in and produce each other's films, often using skills honed at Nilsson’s elbow: directing, workshopping or editing.

“Yeah, those guys are doing their best to follow that line. To me, it is a legit and possible dream,” Nilsson said, pausing. "I have a lot of respect for these filmmakers because they’re working from passion and commitment, not commerce. I hope they’ve learned things from me but they go their own way.”

And so they have. Jeff Kao, a fine artist turned filmmaker, delivered the astoundingly natural coming-of-age story, "Knowing Nothing Cold" (2016), with a completely teenage cast, including his daughter (see cineSOURCE article). Deniz Demirer, a handsome actor who turned in a strong performance in Nilsson's "Love Twice" (2015), wrote, directed and starred in “American Mongrel" (2012), an amazing, largely-improvised road trip movie. It concerns three acquaintances who, after a night of drinking and arguing, head off around the North-West.

Other Bricolagers include cinematographer Aaron Hollander, who has shot for Nilsson but is the human tripod for the prodigious output of fellow Bricolager, Daniel Kremer. Also a film scholar and historian, author of "Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films" and dozens of articles (including the above-mentioned one on Kao), Kremer is an indefatigable film worker, who has been the editor on a number of Nilsson epics.

Kremer has also directed over a half-a-dozen features, although I've only seen "Raise Your Kids on Seltzer" (2015) and “Ezer Kenegdo” (2017). A believable story of a Jew and a Pole becoming uneasy friends, “Ezer Kenegdo” follows the former, played by Kremer himself (despite a debilitating stutter growing up), as he hangs out with Orthodox Jews in New York, travels to San Francisco and connects with Demirer (who is originally Polish). Entirely improvised from that point on, they search for, find and finally drive out to the countryside to meet their favorite artist, a reclusive painter played by Nilsson.

Despite his anti-Hollywood stance, Nilsson often attracts its leading actors, like Bruce Dern, Stacey Keach or Carl Lumbly, shown here, in 'Love Twice' (2015). photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

The first time this author met Kremer and Demirer was in 2013, at one of the monthly screenings Nilsson mounted for a few years. The films were usually fantastic foreign features he selected, save one night when he presented a recent project, a 30-minute piece made with Celik Kayalar, the actor-director who runs Film Acting Bay Area, and three other accomplished thespians.

The film concerned the friends and collaborators of a deceased filmmaker (Nilsson, yet again filmed entirely in his Berkeley home), as they gather for the reading of his will. Although the lawyer never shows and they eventually disperse, his mentally-challenged daughter remains, providing a powerful indicator of the permanence of love.

The cast workshopped intensely with Nilsson and turned in excellent performances, but the production suffered longueurs, like when the pro-sumer camera iris-ed down at every window and blossomed after. When I suggested the film could better serve as a dress rehearsal to secure financing for a well-produced final version, Nilsson was outraged.

“The film was a class exercise done in a single take,” he said, “not a commercial enterprise.” Aside from criticizing the messenger, even though I thought the message was good, I wanted to muck up “an honest film” with “pretentious dolly shots” or “other Hollywood crap.”

Filmmaking in the rough is the sacrifice we have to make for Christ-like content, Nilsson seemed to say, although I also heard him opine one time that, “I think of myself more as a Judas, who has been accused of attempting to crucify Hollywood.”

“Absurd,” I retorted, as Nilsson’s small screening room went sound-stage quiet, "All film is interpreted reality. Doing a decent production would just be the logical, final step of the rehearsal process that you and the actors obviously worked very hard on."

As Nilsson clambered to his feet, he was interrupted by Demirer, who proceeded to ridicule my insane obsession with lighting, my bourgeois attachment to production values, and my suicidal devotion to death cinema, or words to that effect.

"I do recall 'interrupting' or offering my point of view," Demirer told me recently by email. Instead of my summary, however, he recalls saying, "We have to get over the forms of cinema that have been... forced on us for so long... [A] shaky camera, [an] unexpected and unusual light appearing and disappearing erratically in the frame does constitute cinema and does offer a psychological experience, whether you want to admit it or not."

"Yes, production elements, the filmmaker's tools, can sometimes draw attention to themselves, but why should this not be the case?" Demirer claims he continued, professorially, despite the fact that we were embroiled in a loud argument, which only lasted a few minutes.

"No one owes the actors anything but an honest search, a truthful approach which originally may have stemmed from a lack of resources but has long since become a conscious style that maintains integrity," he concluded. Or "something like that, the exact words are inaccessible at this point," he admitted, by email.

Alas, as anyone who was there undoubtedly recalls, things got so heated, with both Demirer and Nilsson yelling on top of each other as well as at me, I decided to perform my point—the 25 or so audience members were mostly filmmakers and actors, after all. I started crawling on all fours frantically about the room, proving what, I don't recall, save we should lighten up.

I had hoped that the master would welcome, and the acolytes would appreciate, honest feedback, but cloistered cults often have a hard time with that, a problem Nilsson himself addresses in his critiques of the Left. Indeed, Nilsson often makes an attempt to be open and curious, accepting criticism good-naturedly or suddenly switching from a self-centered monologue to inquiring about his interlocutor's opinions or affairs.

The Nilsson-inspired film group Bricolage (lf-rt, top): Daniel Kremer, Aaron Hollander, Josh Peterson and Penny Werner; (bot) Kris Caltagirone and Jeff Kao. photo: D. Blair

Equanimity returned with Nilsson giving Demirer an avuncular pat and me a forbearing nod, although I felt it prudent to exit post haste. Walking to my car, I thought I was about to be mugged, but it was just Kremer jogging after me. The film-school kid chopping away on Nilsson’s current project, I assumed, Kremer had observed the entire fracas from the back.

"Pretty wild, eh," I said, "well, you know, artists."

"Yeah, but I agree with you," he said.

That was not the only time Nilsson and I disputed the appropriate level of production. At a FABA event a year later, he screened a class production concerning a woman reuniting with the now-adult son she had given up for adoption. On top of its moving story, the actors had Direct Actioned to a fare-thee-well and delivered eerily-embodied performances. Alas, my enjoyment was again interrupted by production problems, while Nilsson was again irritated by my mention of it, although that time there was no shouting or crawling on the floor.

Thinking about that argument, however, I came to the realization that Nilsson's method is holistic, both of one piece and based on full commitment, at whatever venue or production level the situation allows. Hence, films rise rapidly from conception, come alive through Direct Action and are soon captured on film, by the shooters and cameras that are available, providing "a truthful approach," as Demirer noted in his email, if not our actual argument.

About a year after our second, friendship-threatening blow up, I had another epiphany. While I prefer to err on the side of professionalism, the more important quest is the investigation and revelation of strong feelings and inventive ideas. This makes me a Nilssonian, I realized, more devoted to a feminine-principled and visionary art than the work of macho, hyper-technical artists, who often lack innovation, honesty or soul.

Rounding out Bricolage is Josh Peterson, a true genie-releaser—he was nominated for an Emmy for editing “Soldiers of Conscience” (2009)—and the actors Kris Caltagirone, who also starred in "American Mongrel", and Penny Werner. A un-showy actress who throws herself subtly but fully into her roles, Werner stars in "Odds", a dark comedy she co-directed with Kao, as well as Kremer's "Raise Your Kids on Seltzer" and Nilsson’s “Arid Cut”.

"I think of Rob as a great inspiration in my life, even a 'mentor'—bordering on therapist!" Werner wrote me recently, by email. "I only began acting in earnest after attending one of his powerful workshops. My life has been greatly changed and enhanced from having met him."

In addition to doing a lot of extemporaneous scenes, the Bricolagers exemplify Nilsson’s notions of filmmaking as an exploratory or even shamanist quest—and not in the airy-fairy sense. Nilsson is interested in artistic vision, of course, but even more in simply seeing the basic reality of our all-too-human character and conditions.

“All the excellent acting you see on television, I can’t stand to look at it any more,” Nilsson told me. “Its excellence is excellent, but it ain’t what I am looking for.”

“The genius of the everyday people is what interests me. That is harder for people to understand or to like because you don’t have the music to go with it [although he often scores with fantastic music], the niceties, the little fillips of attraction. It is a little raw.”

“‘Why am I looking at him, he is just like my uncle?' That's why you should be looking at him,” he almost shouted, “because you NEVER looked at your uncle!”

So allergic is Nilsson to commercial film, he felt compelled to walk out in the middle of “Sorry to Bother You”, the surprise summer indie hit, written, directed and scored by Oakland rapper and activist Boots Riley. Nilsson had heard about and was impressed by Riley’s lefty family, but found his white characters “cartoonish,” despite my attempt to explain, “it was a broad farce. Weren’t the Russian ambassador or American general in 'Dr. Strangelove' cartoonish?”

Nilsson (2nd from rt) directing his crew on an early project, in the early-'80s. photo: courtesy R. NIlsson

Ironically, Nilsson seemed surprised when I mentioned that the second half of “Sorry to Bother You” featured animation, puppetry and a bio-engineering twist involving “horse cocks,” although I can just about hear his response, “Glad I missed it.”

Nilsson also didn’t like the first half of Oakland’s other summer hit, “Blindspotting”, telling me it was boring and that “the audience was laughing at not with the characters.” Again I tried to explain, this time that an elderly white guy, no matter how well-traveled or -read, could hardly expect to get jokes written by and about twenty-somethings of color.

Nilsson would have nothing of it. The individual, he insisted, is entitled to view any work of art on their own terms and render judgment.

Unlike with "Sorry to Bother You", Nilsson was forced to sit through “Blindspotting” because we went together and were grabbing a bite after. Fortunately, he was pleasantly surprised when film came alive halfway through, in its first fight sequence, which it was delivered in flashback, a trick Nilsson admitted worked well. I, in turn, thought the whole film worked well, with that fight drawing together stories nicely rendered during the more comic first half (see "Blindspotting Shows West Oakland’s Heart")

“I’m not interested in either of these films,” Nilsson wrote me by email, “and they weren’t part of our interview,” suggesting his strong opinions should be off the record. “I seldom see films I respect,” he added, by way of a conciliation prize to Oakland’s widely-acclaimed new filmmakers, although he did mention two recent ones he found to be “surprising breakthroughs.”

"Life and Nothing More" (2017), by the Spaniard Antonio Méndez Esparza, "is a terrific film,” he said. Distributed by Mark Fishkin, director of the Mill Valley Film Festival and long time Nilsson comrade-in-arms, "it is about a black single mother and her difficult son, shot in Florida.”

“The other is ‘Capernaum’ [2018, Nadine Labaki], which won a special jury award at Cannes. Shot in the slums of Beirut, [it is] about a street kid and his attempts to keep alive a young child left in his care by a prostitute. Both filmmakers—one which I’ve come to know and respect—spent years researching their films, and both films are done with non-actors, very much in my style.”

On top of eschewing commercial film's line delivery, blocking and script slavery, Nilsson had some recent run-ins with Hollywood hustlers.

“I had two people in the last couple of years whom I trusted, whom I shouldn’t have. There are so many hard chargers out there.”

In Hollywood, “‘We are making a film’ is a positive statement but in a negative context," he explained. "Most of the people who are making films aren’t doing anything. They are bullshitting with the hope that one of their lies will stick to another and actually [become] a film. Never, in my experience, is there ever a film when people talk that way. I got snookered and paid the price.”

Nilsson’s insistence on absolute artistic freedom also compelled him to end his columnist-muse position at cineSOURCE. That was after his second article went way long and the editor politely proposed a few cuts (we were still a paper magazine back then, with limited space), not to mention he spent a third of his piece trashing Warhol (whom we liked, as a filmmaker as well as an artist).

Nilsson’s first and only cineSOURCE article "Survival of Imbued" (2008), however, still rings loud and clear, perhaps enough to last us through the ages:

"The nature of film is that its disasters begin early and stay late,” it opens archly. “The film 'Imbued' is an example... The film was dead, and its death almost a relief.”

“Too much to do. Resources inadequate to the task. Bills piling up. Nerves stretched to slingshot mayhem into the retreating behinds of the routed... All that remained was the coffin, lugged to the boneyard by a cortege of spavined nags."

But “[y]ou can’t give in to Mother Chaos," Nilsson insists. "You’ll be swallowed up, yes; but the question is when. ‘Not yet,’ was the answer. And so two letters went out into the gloom. One was ignored. The other was answered: Stacy Keach was interested."

An edgy as well as accomplished Hollywood actor, Keach fell in with Nilsson like two peas in a pod of grizzled bohemians, rendering a nuanced performance as an old gambler obsessed with a young call girl. Played luminescently by Liz Sklar, she accidentally appears at the gambler's unfinished, luxury condo, where he’s camping out.

“A light bulb goes on which would otherwise have remained off,” Nilsson concludes about his characters, which he would probably admit were well-worn archetypes. In the end, Sklar’s character hits the down button but the elevator goes up, gracefully implying her new trajectory.

Nilsson did finally drop cineSOURCE a line eight years later, in 2016. He wanted to inquire if we would be so kind as to publish an essay, “yGroup Manifesto”, written 30 years earlier by him and his much-laurelled Tenderloin workshop. It would pair nicely, he said, with the about-to-be-released “Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics”, which included his article “The Way of Seeming”.

We were overjoyed: it had been four years since our last article (“Nilsson Not Slowing”); the cinema community needed an injection of Vitamin N; and cineSOURCE specializes in manifestos—in fact, we are the world leader, having published five of the eleven manifestos listed on Wikipedia's "Film Manifesto" page.

Not to mention the “yGroup Manifesto” provided a picture window into the famous film group, which had influenced so many filmmakers as well as viewers through its workshops as well as films.

The Tenderloin Action Group’s freshman outing, "Chalk" (1996), a pool hall story featuring members of the Action Group and some of the world’s top nine-ball pool players, was voted one of that year’s top ten films by New York’s Village Voice.

The Action Group and its subsequent iteration, the yGroup, went on to produce nine "9 @ Night" films, oddly paralleling the name of the pool game but so-called because their stories all start at nine in the evening. In the course of nine features, many of them also acclaimed, the "9 @ Night" series examines almost fifty characters on the rough edges of America.

“Driving through the Tenderloin,” San Francisco’s not-so-soft center, where Nilsson was editing “Heat and Sunlight” in 1987, “got me interested in making features right on the street,” Nilsson told cineSOURCE in 2008. “My brother Greg was mentally ill and had been missing for ten years. I didn’t know where he was, but I hoped to find some clues.”

Article continues at Rob Nilsson: Old Master of the Indie, Part II

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Feb 08, 2019 - 07:01 PM
Oakland’s Year of Living Revolutionarily
by Steven Middlestein

Nine Faces of Oakland's 2018 Cultural Revolution (starting with left column): Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, writer/actors 'Blindspotting', Boots Riley, writer/director 'Sorry to Bother You', Ryan Coogler, director 'Black Panther'; (middle) Rob Nilsson, 'Heat and Sunlight' plus 50 more features, Jamie DeWolf, the very-Oakland 'Smoked', Cheryl Fabio, Oakland blues documentary; (right) Japanese romance, modern tribals, George Soros. photo: various

2018 WAS A REVOLUTIONARY YEAR FOR
Oakland film, filmmakers and fans but also its film magazine, cineSOURCE, now starting its eleventh year (subscribe here).

2018 was so ginormous cinematographically, in fact, it will go down historically as a cultural watershed, not only in Oakland but among cineastes of color nation- and world-wide:

You’re now free to do commercial blockbusters, over-the-top satires, political rom-coms, even.

The only downside: 2018 will be a VERY hard act to follow—unless, of course, Oakland can quickly evolve into a mature as well as visionary film and art center.

For that reason, cineSOURCE devoted 2018 not just to covering Oakland's three hit films and their fascinating auteurs, messrs. Coogler, Riley and Diggs and Casal in "Black Panther Rules Cinema Earth", "Sorry to Bother Busts Wide Open Oakland Cine" and "Blindspotting Shows the Heart of West Oakland", but three East Bay indies AND three socio-political problems of note.

We kicked off the year with “The Perils of Production, Indie Style”, about the ill-fated filming of "Quest" (2017), before turning to three amazing filmmakers: one with only one feature under his belt, the other with over fifty, the third, a woman of color, who made a great documentary about the blues.

After years of activism and film study, Cheryl Fabio joined with Oakland's community TV station, KTOP, to make a detail- and music-filled epic about the blues scene which blew up West Oakland after Saunders Samuel King hit his first number one in 1942 (see "Cheryl Fabio Makes a Masterful Oakland Blues Movie” by Jerry McDaniel).

Indeed, West Oakland flourished for a few decades with supper clubs, fashionable boutiques and record labels, as well as blues men and women, the likes of which we're only now seeing again in Telegraph Avenue's monthly gallery-pub crawl (see "Can Oakland Save the World?"), or Fantastic Negrito's taking the award for Best Contemporary Blues Album Award at the recent Grammys.

“Smoked”, Jamie DeWolf's only feature thus far starts with a stunning introduction to Oakland and Shank, a charismatic OG (old gangster) played by L. Abdul Kenyatta, before turning to three hapless hipsters (one well rendered by DeWolf), who attempt to rob his medical marijuana dispensary. Given Shank's flamboyant thug crew, the three are obliged to flee for their lives while spitting out a stream of film-noir bon mots.

Rupert Estanislau, an actor with actual gang experience, doing the dispensary robbery that kicks off 'Smoked''s long chase sequences. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

Since releasing “Smoked” in 2012, DeWolf became the director, writer, shooter and actor behind a slew of provocative shorts, see his hairpin-turn-filled story here.

In "Rob Nilsson: Enfant Terrible, Old Master of the Indie" cineSOURCE finally answered the journalistic query first posed a decade ago:

How does one tell the story of an internationally-known indie, now 79, who won at Cannes with his first feature, at Sundance with his fourth, just finished touring the US with a revival of his second, and is hard at work on 52-54, collectively called "Nomad Trilogy"?

Answer: Subject him to a tour-de-force investigation, so revealing it shocked the lunch out of some of his colleagues, simply because Nilsson is THE OG of the improvised, edge-pushing feature, AND honesty and creativity are the beating heart of any art scene.

2018 marked a climax in Oaklandish art, from the stellar cinema—“Black Panther" is one of the top-ten grossing films of ALL TIME!—to achievements in its people-of-color, First Friday, Burning Man or sui generis as well as indie film communities.

But, to inform that work, to keep it at the cutting edge of insight and analysis, we need fresh perspectives and radical understandings.

For this reason, cineSOURCE started long-form, investigative journalism five years ago, kicking off with two media mysteries nagging the East Bay for decades: “The Jew and the Cowboy: Saul Zaentz and Creedence Clearwater" (2014) and “The Black Panther Filmography" (2015). We soon expanded to San Francisco and world history with “Summer of Love Shows, Movies & Festivals Beg Question: What Went Wrong with Hippie Intellectuals?" and “Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed" (both 2016).

"Elevated insight is required for art scenes to lead civilizations," noted Doniphan Blair, cineSOURCE's publisher/editor, who wrote the above four articles, with research assistance from his associates. "This has never more necessary than in today's Bay Area. We're oversaturated with culture and convenience, making us lethargic in that regard, while leading computer and social media companies have fallen prey to fake news, ersatz accounts and false flag operations—meaning we need alternative press."

Blair began 2018 with an essay about the Me Too movement and its unrecognized unintended consequences, “When Flawed Men Make Awed Art", before turning to three even more misunderstood and, therefore, dangerous socio-political problems.

Twenty-five years after Blair concocted 'Abstract Aborigine'—"we are all abstract thinkers native to this planet"—he met a tribal girl in Brazil, who liked photography and image making. photo: D. Blair

Although Barack Obama once proclaimed, "There's not a black America and white America... there's the United States of America," many Americans, including many Obama supporters, rejected that in favor of tribal identities, which empowered both Trump and DNA-based affinity groups.

A less racial lens through which to examine this phenomena, however, is tribe versus civilization, a tension ravaging the globe for five thousand years, according to Blair in his “Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto".

One big misconception: While we claim to adore our tribes, we're constantly voting with our feet for civilization, notably its tools for communication, war, medicine and travel, which the Islamic radicals worship, but also diversity, which they don't. If nothing else, we all love to eat out foreign cuisine.

Fortunately, the universality of tribe versus civilization makes comparative analysis easy. Blair initiated his own investigation by hitchhiking and busing from Europe to India, while periodically staying with tribal people. A few years later, he did a longer stint across South America, ultimately befriending the unorthodox anthropologist, Tobias Schneebaum (see "Interview with Tobias Schneebaum: Artist, Author, Cannibal?".

In "Romanticism and Its Discontents, East & West", Blair builds on an issue raised in his Me Too article, which is one of the central dilemmas of modern civilization: our desperate need for love and intimacy but our increasing inability to find it.

Surveying the love traditions of the ancients, he focuses on Japan, where the earth's first romantic novel, "The Tales of Gengi," was written by a women in the 11th century. The subsequent romantic movement liberated woman, poetry and dreams and led to samurais, geishas and the sensuous “floating worlds”, but also the messianic machismo of Imperial Japan, much as German romanticism was perverted by the Nazis.

Even so, the main deity and head priests of Japan's traditional faith, Shintoism, are female, while the home continued to be controlled by women. Naturally, the romantic ones were shocked by World War II, stupefied by the annihilation of their cities, and sickened by the phallocentrism, turning post-war to a readily-available means of opposing this: romance and sex.

A few academics, Asians and/or feminists have questioned Blair's capacity or right, as a Caucasian-looking cis male who hasn't toured East Asia or obtained relevant degrees, to address such a complex cultural enigma.

As with tribe versus civilization, romanticism is not unique to Japan and comparative research often uncovers insights inaccessible to more siloed students. Moreover, Japan's low sex, birth and romance crisis have been all over the news, as well as research journals, for decades.

Hillary Clinton was portrayed with a Jewish star and money illustration in a tweet by Trump, October 2016. image: D. Trump

As if tribe vs civilization and Japanese romantic problems were not hard enough, by the end of 2018, Blair felt compelled to expose yet another ancient taboo and mystery:

What's with the Jews and moneylending?

Of course, if you're sick of such provocative or problematic investigations, cineSOURCE's 2018 had plenty of other interesting news:

• Lauren Jiang's articles about Korea: notably "South Korea: Where’s the Romance?" or "The Story of K-Pop and Its Biggest Hits"
• Joanne Butcher's exploration of "Christian Films"
• Poetic perspectives on the tragedy of the California's fires: Tiny Gray-Garcia and Don Schwartz

Or pieces on Bay Area film and media production:

• "Cohen’s Cartoon Corner"
• "Make Films for Under 100K That Sell!"
• "The Harkness Ballet Was Camelot!" by yours truly

Not to forget the obituaries:

Stephen Parr, Bud Luckey and Hank Wessel

But, if you believe an advanced culture needs even more advanced film, art and ideas, and you’re familiar with rumors about Jews and money but never looked into it, Blair's Soros, Jewish Bankers and Interest Explained is for you. Sadly, it is a history so fraught with stereotypes, anti-Semitism and outright psychological disease as well as historical misunderstanding, it is almost never noted by the establishment press or even Jewish history scholars.

Fortunately, Blair has the DNA as well as research to back up his claims. The son of a Holocaust survivor mother, Tonia Rotkopf Blair, he started studying Jewish history in 1983 and produced the film "Our Holocaust Vacation" in 2007.

He returned to the subject three years ago, in the cineSOURCE article "Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed". It features groundbreaking analysis of how Jews were represented in early-twentieth-century literature, the symbolic meaning of Nazis in film noir, AND an answer to that troubling question "What's with the Jews and moneylending?"

Moreover, Blair is about publish "Love at the End of the World", his mother's collection of elegant and elegiac stories about another un-examined subject: enduring the Holocaust while remaining a loving and romantic teen. The book also includes one of Blair’s most important essays to date, “Darwin and Love: What I Learned Making a Holocaust Movie".

Although Blair's iconoclast Holocaust oeuvre has generated accusations of cultural insensitivity and anti-Semitism, with the massacre at the Pennsylvania synagogue in October 2018, he felt obliged to offer an explanation of Jewish involvement in moneylending over the millennia, to finally begin developing an honest historical understanding.

The cover of 'Love at the End of the World', by Tonia Rotkopf Blair, published by A Media Press. image: D. Blair

Heady notions to be sure, but what do they have to do with Oakland filmmakers and artists?

While a majority of Oakland's intelligentsia is understandably addressing race, identity and gentrification, if you get a flat tire in West Oakland, you are just as likely to be assisted by an artist as an ex-gang member. This highlights our obligation to elucidate our shared humanity and our hidden histories, which are stereotype manufacturing machines.

As it happens, Oakland is testament to people of all colors and income levels coming together to cohabit. Indeed, the recently-passed Frankie Robinson, the storied baseball player and first African-American manager, used to claim that growing up in Oakland the 1940s, he didn't experience racism and his family never even mentioned it.

After flipping between black and white majorities twice in the last fifty years, Oakland is now one of the world's most racially-balanced cities, with black, white and Latino having a quarter each, and Asians, First Peoples and others splitting the remainder (again see "Can Oakland Save the World?").

If Oakland fails in the fresh ideas department, our activists will founder fighting the tribalism of the Trump Era, our filmmakers will flee south to Hollywood and our artists will preach, but not sell, to the converted. Indeed, Oakland's grand multicultural experiment, which the Black Panther Party depended on for financial support, rallies and acquittals, will come to little without cutting edge consciousness.

When a tribe wishes to influence a civilization, the trick is not replacing the ruling cabal with another tribe, either through violence or defamation, but becoming that civilization's most creative and attractive cohort.

That is what Bob Dylan did, when he shifted from his radical early '60s' style to country music, or what Lin-Manuel Miranda achieved by retelling the founding fathers' story in his monster musical hit "Hamilton".

Indeed, creating a cool new American identity is precisely what Oakland was born to do, as Robinson noted. But biology and birth right are of little use when it comes to concocting brilliant new film, art and ideas. What is required is, well, brilliant new film, art and ideas.

Since we already have the brilliant new film and art, help us pursue brilliant new ideas by subscribing, or addressing our 50,000 monthly readers (average) with an ad, or making a comment at the bottom of an article.

Steven Middlestein is a writer, editor and movie fanatic who can be reached . Posted on Feb 08, 2019 - 05:56 PM
Kamala Harris—Oakland Multiculturalist or Establishment Centrist—for President
by Doniphan Blair

At her presidential campaign kickoff rally, Kamala Harris jumbotrons to a diverse Oakland crowd. photo: D. Blair

“We are a diverse country,” noted California Senator Kamala Harris, when she announced her presidential run on Martin Luther King Day (January 21st) via ABC’s “Good Morning America”, “and some people would say that when there is a diverse population one can not achieve unity."

“I reject that notion,” she said pointedly, both her prosecutorial abilities and relaxed nature on full display. Indeed, Harris not only served the law but rocketed to its top, becoming a deputy district attorney in Oakland when she was 26, district attorney in San Francisco at 40 and California Attorney General at 47, mostly without breaking a sweat, due to her dedication to prep.

“When we emphasize commonality, we will achieve greater unity,” Harris continued on ABC. “We need a president who has vision of the future where everyone can see themselves... You see, our United States of America is not about 'us versus them,' it is about 'we the people.'”

While this suggests a pan-partisan strategy based on Harris's biracial heritage, diverse professional interactions, interfaith marriage and extensive globetrotting, as well as Oakland roots, it’s not going to be all “Kumbaya” choruses.

“I want to be perfectly clear, I am not talking of unity for the sake of unity. I'm not talking about some facade of unity,” Harris elaborated the following Sunday at her campaign's kickoff rally, which she held in Oakland.

Although Harris was born in Oakland, on October 20th, 1964, she gave a shout out to only Kaiser Hospital, which appears to make her more of a Berkeley brat (wouldn't she have mentioned a neighborhood, if she’d lived in one?).

Neighboring Berkeley—that famously free-wheeling center of the ‘60s—was where her Indian mother, a cancer researcher, and her Jamaican father, an economist, attended university, fell in love, marched for civil rights and transcended enormous obstacles, save their own interpersonal ones.

When they divorced, mom moved to Montreal to take a job at Jewish General Hospital, bringing with seven-year-old Kamala and younger sis Maya. While Canada is famously white, especially in winter, Montreal is the capital of a secessionist French state, Quebec, and a legendary Jewish community. Indeed, Harris attended Westmount High, alma mater of their poet-saint, Leonard Cohen, as she may have noted to her future husband, Douglas Emhoff, on their first date.

Kamala Harris in a crush of overjoyed supporters, post-rally Oakland . photo: D. Blair

Of Jewish as well as white extraction, Emhoff is a partner at the global law firm DLA Piper and specializes in intellectual property, including his vigorous defense of a cartoon character's trademark. Upon marrying without ceremony at the San Francisco courthouse in 2014, Harris became a mother of two late-teen step-kids, probably a bit of a shock for both parties.

As if that wasn’t crosscultural enough, Harris has regularly flown twelve time zones east to be with her mother’s family in central India, including a grandfather who served in India’s diplomatic corps and impressed her deeply.

Despite Montreal’s attractive European vibe or attending Howard University in Washington DC, Harris remained smitten with the Bay Area and returned to attend SF’s Hastings Law School. Graduating with honors, she was a shoe-in for deputy district attorney in Alameda County, where the Oakland courthouse was made famous by the political performance art of the Black Panthers.

Fortunately, Oakland welcomes back its own, as well as impoverished immigrants and wealthy cosmopolitans, despite the aggressive anti-gentrifier movement, spotlighted by this summer’s hit films “Sorry to Bother You” and “Blindspotting”.

About 20,000 Oaklanders, mostly of the newly-arrived white persuasion but with a strong people-of-color presence, showed up to evaluate and cheer Harris at her unprecedented presidential campaign’s kickoff rally in front of the mayor’s office, which is occupied by her childhood friend, Libby Schaaf.

Getting into the rally looked hard, with people lining up for blocks and Oakland failing to provide enough security, but the line moved quickly, Harris held off starting until most had arrived and it was an almost-entirely friendly affair.

There were a few naysayers, including a Mayan-looking and -dressed woman rebuking Harris’s record on immigration and a track-suited African-American man with a sign saying, “Do your research; find the truth; she is not for you or me.” Indeed, some Oakland radicals call her Kamala the Cop, or a “politrickster for the aristokkkrazy,” as poet, homeless activist and cineSOURCE contributor Tiny Gray-Garcia put it.

Of course, Harris needs more than the poet vote to get elected and a career in law enforcement does bring establishment cred. Harris parses critiques of her profession’s conservative slant by saying, “My whole life I had only had one client: the people.”

Fathers and daughters, probably of Oakland's new techie elite, enthusiastically support Harris. photo: D. Blair

Harris dedicated herself to the law just like Barack Obama, with whom she shares running for president in the middle of a first US Senate term and Asian-African intermingling (Obama’s step-father was from Indonesia and he lived there for four years). But instead of Obama’s elevated jurisprudence—constitutional law, Harvard law review editing and teaching—Harris went into the trenches of prosecuting criminals.

“I want a seat at that table,” is how she explained her strategy to San Francisco’s public defender Jeff Adachi, a courtroom opponent was well as a friend, “I want to change the world.”

While a failure to push progressive judicial initiatives belies that, according to her critics, Harris countered at her rally by claiming, “At a time when prevention or redemption were not in the vocabulary or mind set of most district attorneys, we created an initiative to give skills and job training instead of jail time for young people arrested for drugs.”

Go here for full transcript of Harris's Oakland rally speech.

Rejecting old school drug wars, Attorney General Harris focused on gangs trafficking people and firearms, as well as drugs, and her department authored an innovative study of transnational organizations. She also prosecuted hate crimes against LGBTQ teens and advocated for California's marriage equality law, establishing precedents that influenced the Supreme Court’s “Same-Sex Marriage” decision in 2015.

Harris is not quite a writer like Obama, who considered becoming a novelist after his autobiography, “Dreams from My Father” (1995) turned bestseller, but her speech featured some pithy politi-speak, notably: “People in power are trying to convince us that the villain in our American story is each other but that is not our story… that is not our America!” and, “In this moment, we must speak truth about what is happening: seek truth, speak truth and fight for the truth.”

One truth that may prove problematic is that the young, ambitious and extremely attractive woman-of-color attorney inevitably encountered one of California’s most powerful men of any color, Willie Brown, also an attorney, as he was finishing fifteen prodigious years as the powerful Speaker of the California Assembly and about start two terms as San Francisco’s “da mayor” (his term).

Dating Brown, who was 30 years her senior and still married, presumably no longer offends anyone in America, now that conservative Bible-belters have converted to Trumpism, but some of his gifts might.

The deluxe BMW can be written off as something any rich guy would give a beloved girlfriend, but Brown’s facilitation of Harris’s appointment to state-wide insurance and medical oversight boards, with $400,000 remuneration over five years, might raise eyebrows on both sides of the aisle, even as it's dismissed as minimal compared to Trump’s philandering, fishy deals or felonies.

Although Brown broke with Harris to return to his wife, the California kingmaker continued to honor their friendship. Hence, it was not that hard for Harris to BART across the Bay and snatch the San Francisco district attorney’s office from the popular, if increasingly ineffective, Terence Hallinan, doyen of a famous local family of lawyers and liberals, in 2004.

Kamala Harris and one of her opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (2013-), who is hewing to a more conciliatory position. photo: unknown

With San Francisco dominating state-wide and national politics—from Governor Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom to Senator Diane Feinstein, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and ex-Senator Barbara Boxer (although she’s a Mariner)—Harris naturally jumped to California Attorney General in 2011. For her Senate race in 2016, Brown petitioned LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a powerful southern California challenger, to recuse himself. Harris won handily with 61% of the vote.

Brown’s patronage may come back to haunt Harris, especially in a presidential debate with a master of disaster, expert at smut, scandal and rabbit-punch jibes—unless Harris has an equally slicing rejoinder and sufficient equanimity. Fortunately, she’s disciplined and determined and undoubtedly has an answer to the Brown question that's as effortless as it is understandable, if not squeaky clean.

“Lord knows I am not perfect,” is how she put it at the Oakland rally. “But I will always speak with decency and moral clarity and treat all people with dignity and respect,” which may prove difficult duking it out in the bare-knuckled ring of American politics.

“Of course, we know this is not going to be easy guys,” Harris admitted. “And we know what the doubters will say… ‘It is not your time’… ‘The odds are long’… ‘It can’t be done.’” “But,” she concluded, “America’s story has always been written by people who can see what can be, unburdened by what has been.”

Despite her sometimes bubbly demeanor—she laughed a lot during her speech—she's obviously able to debate and destroy with the best of them, given she spend six years as the top prosecutor in California, the world's MOST litigious state.

Overruling staff and prudence, Harris pulled out of a settlement for Californian homeowners injured by the Great Recession, and personally called J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon. After arguing with him "like dogs in a fight," according to her just-released autobiography, "The Truths We Hold: An American Journey" (2019), she negotiated a ten-fold settlement increase from the five major loan companies to $25 billion.

An opponent of for-profit colleges, she also extracted over a billion from the now-closed Corinthian Colleges, although her office passed on similar charges against Trump University, perhaps because of its donations to her office, an allegation she dismissed. Later in the Senate, she supported refinancing students in debt.

As usual, Harris has been hard at work. In addition to serving as senator, where she became famous for grilling US Attorney General Jeff Sessions about Russia in 2017, and publishing the now-obligatory autobiography, she put out a children’s book. “Superheroes Are Everywhere” (2019) emphasizes innovation, disregarding slogans and learning how to do detail, in a chapter entitled “Embrace the Mundane”.

African-American protestor holds up sign at Senator Kamala Harris's Oakland kickoff rally. photo: D. Blair

The main critique of Harris around California is that she was both a cop AND not cop enough. Hence, she failed to aggressively prosecute criminals —notably not going for the death penalty with a gang member who killed a cop—or, conversely, to rapidly reverse the disastrous Three Strikes Laws of the 1990s, although she strongly supported Governor Brown’s prison reform in 2016.

Harris’s record is conspicuously middle of the road, suggesting timidity to her critics, real politic to her supporters, or an eye on higher office, as public defender Adachi noted. Obviously, Harris has immense experience negotiating between the power centers of California's diverse bases, including across the critical economic divide.

While Harris was born to elite professionals, has hung with upper middle classers most of her entire life and spent the last 30 years among California’s wealthiest—sister Maya’s boyfriend is Tony West, general counsel of Uber, for example—she is also a person of color, who attended a traditional African-American university and has defended and spent time with people at the other end of the social pecking order or law.

Naturally, she supports Medicare for all, reversing Trump's tax giveaway to the rich and most progressive positions. Despite this being her first senate term, hence her first experience with legislative politics, she obviously feels capable, qualified and prepared enough.

“I love my country,” was how Harris explained her bold decision to run, on ABC. “I feel a sense of responsibility to stand up and fight for the best of who we are. I am prepared to fight and I know how to fight.”

Indeed, “Oakland street fighter” is what David Brooks, the conservative but anti-Trump columnist, called her, even lauding her as the best candidate thus far (see his “Kamala Harris, Call-Out Star”).

If Harris garners the nomination, and Trump does as well, he will resort to his patented blend of tribalism, cynicism and lowbrowism, as well as covert racism and misogyny, although he did take note of her candidacy and admitted she may be the one to beat.

Before that beauty-and-the-beast match up, Harris will have to out-maneuver and -debate a vast field of Democratic candidates, which now numbers seven and will include up to a half-a-dozen more, some of whom have also noted she's a serious contender.

Kamala Harris is a woman in a hurry, both here coming into the US Senate and up her career ladder. photo: unknown

If Harris can maintain Oakland’s tolerant street multiculturalism and Michelle Obama's doctrine of staying high, while going low enough to confront the tough issues, she may have the right balance of court room wit and celebrity charm, multicultural chops and centrist inclusiveness to beat a sitting president who is almost her exact opposite: no legal experience, aside from being charged with crimes, anti-intellectual, uncouth and ugly.

“We are here knowing we are at an inflection in the history of our world, we are at an inflection point in the history of our nation,” Harris concluded at her opening rally. "We are here because the American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before."

With Brexit and rightist takeovers across Europe prompting 30 prominent intellectuals to post the surprisingly desperate "Fight for Europe Manifesto", and pending or impending environmental, economic, digital, espionage or foreign war catastrophes, Harris is hardly exaggerating.

"And we are here at this moment in time because we must answer a fundamental question: Who are we? Who are we as Americans? So, let’s answer that question, to the world, and each other, right here and right now: America, we are better than this," Harris said, pausing for a long sustained cheer.

"We are better than this,” were her final words, which she repeated three times, articulating an ambitious challenge which she herself just may be able to prove to a majority of the American people.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Feb 06, 2019 - 02:20 PM
Kamala Harris’s Kickoff Rally Speech
trancribed by cineSOURCE

Kamala Harris walking the halls of the Congress along with fellow senator and presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren. photo: unknown

In keeping with cineSOURCE's coverage of cutting-edge Oakland culture and politics, and since we couldn't find online the transcript of Candidate Kamala Harris's campaign kickof rally speech at Oakland City Hall, we had it transcribed.

Kamala Harris's Campaign Kickoff Speech, 1/27/2019

Oh my goodness. Thank you thank you, thank you, thank you [laughs]. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Oh my heart is full right now, thank you everyone.

I want to thank Libby Schaaf, the great mayor of the City of Oakland, for that incredible introduction and our longstanding friendship. You know, our mothers were friends also, together here in Oakland, and I can’t thank you enough Libby for your leadership and your friendship.

So here we are—here we are [cheers].

Well, let me tell you, I am so proud to be a daughter of Oakland, California [cheers]. And as most of you know, I was born just up the road at Kaiser Hospital.

And it was just a few miles away where my parents met as graduate students at UC Berkeley [cheers], where they were active in the civil rights movement. And they were born half a world apart from each other: My father Donald came from Jamaica to study economics my mother Shamala came from India to study the science of fighting disease [cheers].

They came her in pursuit of more then just knowledge. Like so many others they came in pursuit of a dream, and that dream was a dream for themselves, for me and for my sister Maya As children growing up here in the East Bay, we were raised by a community with a deep belief in the promise of our country, and deep understanding of the parts of that promise that still remain unfulfilled.

We were raised in a community where we were taught to see a world beyond just ourselves, to be conscious and compassionate about the struggles of all people. We were raised to believe public service is noble cause and the fight for justice is everyone’s responsibility [cheers].

In fact, my mother used to say, ‘Don’t sit around complain about things, do something.’ I think she was basically saying, ‘You've got to get up and stand up and don’t give up the fight.’ [cheers] [Harris laughs]

And it is this deep rooted belief that inspired me to become a lawyer and a prosecutor. It was just a couple of blocks from this very spot nearly thirty years ago as a young district attorney I walked into the courtroom and for the first time and said the five words that would guide my life’s work: ‘Kamala Harris for the people.’ [sustained cheers]

Now, I knew our criminal justice system was deeply flawed. But I also knew the profound impact law enforcement had on people's lives and its responsibility to give them safety AND dignity. I knew I wanted to protect people. And I knew that the people in our society, who are most often targeted by predators are also most often the voiceless and vulnerable. [cheering, breaking into 'Ka-ma-la']

Kamala Harris greets enthusiastic supporters as she exits her January 27 rally in front of Oakland City Hall. photo: D. Blair

I believe then, as I do now, no one should be left to fight alone. Because you see in our system of justice, we believe that a harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us. That is why when a case is filed, it doesn’t read the name of the victim, it reads ‘the people.’

And this is a point I have often explained to console and council survivors of crime, people who face great harm, often at the hands of someone they trust, be it a relative or a bank or a big corporation. I would remind them, ‘You are not invisible. We all stand together.’ Because that is the power of the people.

And my whole life I had only had one client: The people [cheering]. And fighting for the people meant fighting on behalf of survivors of sexual assault, a fight not just against predators but a fight against silence and stigma.

‘For the people’ meant fighting for a more fair criminal justice system. At a time when prevention or redemption were not in the vocabulary or mind set of most district attorneys, we created an initiative to give skills and job training instead of jail time for young people arrested for drugs.

‘For the people’ meant fighting for middle class families who had been defrauded by banks and were losing their homes by millions in the Great Recession. And I’ll tell you, sitting across the table from the big banks, I witnessed the arrogance of power. Wealthy bankers accusing innocent homeowners of fault as if this Wall Street mess was of The Peoples makings.

So we went after the biggest five banks in the United States; we won twenty billion dollars for California’s homeowners; [cheers] and together we passed the strongest anti-foreclosure law in the United States of America. We did that together [cheers] .

For the people meant fighting transnational gangs who traffic in drugs and guns and human beings, and I saw their sophistication and their persistence and their ruthlessness. On the subject transnational gangs, let’s be perfectly clear: The president’s medieval vanity protect is not going to stop them [cheering].

During the fight for the people to hold this administration accountable, I have seen the amazing spirit of the American people. During the health care fight, I saw parents of children with grave illnesses walk the halls of the United States Congress. Families who had traveled across the country at incredible sacrifice. They came to our nation's capital believing that if their stories were heard and if they were seen their leaders would do the right thing.

I saw the same thing with our dreamers. They came by the thousands by plane, train, automobile, on shore—they were sleeping ten deep on someone living room floor. And they came because they believe in our democracy and the only country they have ever know as home [cheering].

I met survivors who shared their deepest and most painful experiences, who told stories they had never before revealed, even to their closest loved ones, because they believed that if they were seen their leaders would do the right thing and protect the highest court in our land.

And together we took on these battles. And to be sure, we won and we’ve lost but we have never stopped fighting [cheers]. We have never stopped fighting, and that is why we are here today. And that is why we are here today.

Kamala Harris's ebullience on full display at the end of her meeting with her base's base, Oaklanders. photo: D. Blair

We are here knowing we are at an inflection in the history of our world, we are at an inflection point in the history of our nation. We are here because the American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before [cheering].

And we are here at this moment in time because we must answer a fundamental question: Who are we? Who are we as Americans?

So, let’s answer that question, to the world, and each other, right here and right: America, we are better than this, we are better than this. [long cheering]. We are better than this.

When we have leaders who bully and attack a free press and undermine our democratic institutions, that’s not our America!

When white supremacists march and murder in Charlottesville, or massacre innocent worshipers in a Pittsburg synagogue, that’s not our America!

When we have children in cages crying for their mothers and fathers—don’t you dare call that border security, that’s a human rights abuse—[cheers] AND that’s not OUR America!

When we have leaders who attack public schools and vilify public school teachers, that is not our America! [cheers]

When bankers who cracked our economy get bonuses but the workers who brought our country back can’t even get a raise, that’s not our America! [cheers]

And when American families are barely living paycheck to paycheck, what is this administration’s response? Their response is to try and take health care away from millions of families [boos]; their response is give away a trillion dollars to the biggest corporations in this country [boos]; and their response is to blame immigrants as the source of all our problems [boos].

And guys let’s understand what is happening here: People in power are trying to convince us that the villain in our American story is each other. But that is not OUR story; that is not WHO WE ARE; that is not our America! [cheers]

You see, our United States of America is not about us versus them, it is about ‘We the People.’ [cheers]. And in this moment we must all speak truth about what is happening. We must seek truth, speak truth and fight for the truth [cheers].

So let’s speak some truth [cheers] [Harris sees someone in the crowd and laughs]. Let’s speak truth about our economy. So let’s speak some truth bout our economy: Today our economy is not working for working people. The cost of living is going up but paychecks aren’t keeping up. For so many Americans a decent retirement feels out of reach and the America dream feels out of touch.

The truth is our people are drowning in debt: record student debt, car loan debt, credit card debt, resorting to payday lenders because you can’t keep up with the bills. People are drowning in America. We have a whole generation of Americans living with the sinking fear that they won’t do as well as their parents.

And let’s speak another truth about our economy: Women are paid on average 80 cents on the dollar, black women 63 cents, Latinas 53 cents [boos]. And here’s the thing, here’s the thing: when we lift up the women of our country, we lift up the children of country [cheers], we lift up the families of our country [cheers], and the whole of society benefits [cheers].

Let’s speak another truth: Big pharmaceutical companies have unleashed an opioid crisis from the California coast to the mountains of West Virginia. And people, once and for all, we have got to call drug addiction what it is: a national public health emergency [cheers]. And what we don’t need is another war on drugs [cheers].

Let’s speak truth: Climate change in real [cheers] and it’s happening now [cheers]. Every one here knows from wild fires in the west to hurricanes in the east, to floods and droughts in the heartland, but we are not going to buy the lie. We’re going to act, based on science fact not science fiction [cheers].

Let’s speak an uncomfortable but honest truth with one an other: racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia are real in this country, and they are age-old forms of hate with new fuel. And we need to speak that truth so we can deal with it [cheers].

Let’s also speak the truth that too many unarmed black men and women are killed in America. Too many black and brown Americans are being locked up, from mass incarceration to cash bail to policing our criminal justice systems needs drastic repair—let’s speak that truth.

And let’s speak truth: Under this administration America’s position in the world has never been weaker. When democratic values under attack around the globe, when authoritarianism is on the march, when nuclear proliferation is on the rise, when we have foreign power infecting the White House like malware [sustained cheers].

[Yells] Let’s speak that truth!

Let’s speak truth about what are clear and present dangers, and let’s speak the biggest truth of all: in the face of powerful forces trying to sow hate and division amongst us, the truth is that as Americans we have so much more in common than what separates [cheers]. Let’s speak that truth. Let’s not buy that stuff that some folks are trying to peddle. Lets not ever forget that on the fundamental issues, we all have so much more in common then what separates us.

And you know, some will say, ‘We need to search to find that common ground.’ [cheers] Here is what I say, ‘We need to recognize that we are already standing on common ground.’ I say, ‘We rise together or we fall together as one nation indivisible.’ [cheers]

And I want to be perfectly I am not talking of unity for the sake of unity. So hear me out, I'm not talking of unity for the sake of unity. I'm not talking about some façade of unity, and I believe we must acknowledge that the word unity has often been used to shut people up or to preserve the status quo [cheers].

After all let’s remember, when women fought for suffrage those in power said, ‘They were dividing the sexes and disturbing the peace.’ Let’s remember, when abolitionists spoke out and civil right workers marched, their oppressors said, ‘They were dividing the races and violating the word of god.’ But Frederick Douglas said it best—and Harriet Tubman and Dr. King knew—to love the religion of Jesus is to hate the religion of the slave master [cheers].

When we have a true unity, no one will be subjugated for others. It is about fighting for a country with equal treatment, collective purpose and freedom for all [cheers]. That’s who we are—that’s who we are.

And so, I stand before today [cheers], I stand before you today, clear-eyed about the fight ahead and what has to be done, with faith in god, with fidelity to country, and with the fighting spirit I got from my mother [cheers], I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for president of the United States.

[sustained cheering, then chants of ‘Ka-ma-la’]

Thank you, thank you. And I will tell you, I am running for president because I love my country—I love my country [cheers].

I am running to be president of the people, by the people and for ALL people. I am running to fight for an America where the economy works for working people, for an America where you only have to work one job to pay the bills [cheers], where hard work is rewarded and where any worker can join a union [cheers].

I am running to declare, once and for all, that health care is a fundamental right [cheers] and we will deliver that right with Medicare for all [cheers].

I am running to declare education is a fundamental right [cheers], and we will guarantee that right with universal pre-K and debt-free college [cheers].

I am running to guarantee working and middle class families an overdue pay increase. We will deliver the largest working and middle class tax cut in a generation—up to $500 a month to help America’s families make ends meet [cheers]. And we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, by reversing this administration’s giveaway to the top corporations and the top one percent.

I am running to fight for an America where our democracy and its institutions are protected against all enemies foreign AND domestic [cheers]. Which is why I will defend this nation against all threats against our cyber-security [cheers]. We will secure our elections and critical infrastructure to protect OUR democracy [cheers].

And we will honor our service members and veterans so no one who has served this country has to wait in line for weeks and months to get what they are owed, when they return home on first day [cheers].

I’m running to fight for America where no mother or father has to teach their young son that people may stop him, arrest him, chase or kill him because of his race [cheers]. An America where every parent can send their children to school without being haunted by the horror of yet another killing spree.

Where we treat attacks on voting rights, and civil rights and women’s rights and immigrants rights, as attacks on our country itself [cheers]. An America where we welcome refugees and bring people out of the shadows and provide a pathway to citizenship [sustained cheers].

An America where our daughters, and our sisters and our mothers and our grandmothers, are respected where they live and work [cheers]. Where reproductive rights are not just protected by the constitution of the United States but guaranteed in every state.

I’ll fight for an America where we keep our word and where we honor our promises, because that’s our America. And that’s the America I believe, that’s the America I know we believe in.

And as we embark on this campaign, I will tell you this, I am not perfect, lord knows I am not perfect, but I will always speak with decency and moral clarity and treat all people with dignity and respect [cheers]. I will lead with integrity and I will speak the truth.

And of course, we know this is not going to be easy guys, this is not going to be easy. And we know what the doubters will say. It is the same thing they have always said. They’ll say, ‘It is not your time;’ they’ll say, ‘It’s not your turn;’ they’ll say, ‘The odds are long;’ they’ll say, ‘It can’t be done.’

But, but America’s story has always been written by people who can see what can be unburdened by what has been [cheers].

That is our story, that is our story. And as Robert Kennedy many years ago said, ‘Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.’ [cheers] He also said, ‘I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and the difficulties of challenging an incumbent president but these are not ordinary time and this is not ordinary election.’ He said, ‘At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country, it is our right to the moral leadership of this planet.’ [cheers]

So today I say to you my friends, these are not ordinary times, and this will not be ordinary election. But this is OUR America [cheers]. So here's the thing: It is up to us, it up to us—each and every one of us. So let’s remember, in this fight, we have the power of the people.

We can achieve the dreams of our parents and grandparents; we can heal our nation,; we can give our children the future they deserve; we CAN reclaim the American dream for every single person in our country [cheers]; and we can restore America’s moral leadership on this planet [cheers]

So let's do this [laughs].

Posted on Feb 01, 2019 - 09:03 PM
Fight for Europe Manifesto
by Bernard-Henri Lévy

(clockwise from upper left) French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy and the Czech, Indian-English-American and Turkish novelists Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, respectively. photo courtesy City of Munich

On January 25th, 2019, Bernard-Henri Levy wrote, and Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk and other European intellectuals cosigned, the manifesto "Fight for Europe—or the Wreckers Will Destroy It". It was published in various periodicals, including London's The Guardian.

cineSOURCE is honored to join this effort, given 'Fight for Europe' is one of the most important appeals for multiculturalism and civilization of our day; Oakland is at the forefront of the multicultural civilizational struggle; cineSOURCE has a ten-year track record of advocating for radical multiculturalism; and—last but not least—we are the WORLD RECORD HOLDER in number of published manifestos: five (see Wikipedia page Film Manifestos).

Fight for Europe—or the Wreckers Will Destroy It

The idea of Europe is in peril.

From all sides there are criticisms, insults and desertions from the cause.

“Enough of ‘building Europe’!” is the cry. Let’s reconnect instead with our “national soul”! Let’s rediscover our “lost identity”! This is the agenda shared by the populist forces washing over the continent. Never mind that abstractions such as “soul” and “identity” often exist only in the imagination of demagogues.

Europe is being attacked by false prophets who are drunk on resentment, and delirious at their opportunity to seize the limelight. It has been abandoned by the two great allies who in the previous century twice saved it from suicide; one across the Channel and the other across the Atlantic. The continent is vulnerable to the increasingly brazen meddling by the occupant of the Kremlin. Europe as an idea is falling apart before our eyes.

This is the noxious climate in which Europe’s parliamentary elections will take place in May. Unless something changes; unless something comes along to turn back the rising, swelling, insistent tide; unless a new spirit of resistance emerges, these elections promise to be the most calamitous that we have known. They will give a victory to the wreckers.

For those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe and Comenius there will be only ignominious defeat. A politics of disdain for intelligence and culture will have triumphed. There will be explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism. Disaster will have befallen us.

We, the undersigned, are among those who refuse to resign themselves to this looming catastrophe. We count ourselves among the European patriots (a group more numerous than is commonly thought, but that is often too quiet and too resigned), who understand what is at stake here. Three-quarters of a century after the defeat of fascism and 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall there is a new battle for civilization.

Our faith is in the great idea that we inherited, which we believe to have been the one force powerful enough to lift Europe’s peoples above themselves and their warring past. We believe it remains the one force today virtuous enough to ward off the new signs of totalitarianism that drag in their wake the old miseries of the dark ages. What is at stake forbids us from giving up.

Hence this invitation to join in a new surge.

Hence this appeal to action on the eve of an election that we refuse to abandon to the gravediggers of the European idea.

Hence this exhortation to carry once more the torch of a Europe that, despite its mistakes, its lapses, and its occasional acts of cowardice, remains a beacon for every free man and woman on the planet.

Our generation got it wrong. Like Garibaldi’s followers in the 19th century, who repeated, like a mantra, “Italia se farà da sè” (Italy will make herself by herself), we believed that the continent would come together on its own, without our needing to fight for it, or to work for it. This, we told ourselves, was “the direction of history.”

We must make a clean break with that old conviction. We don’t have a choice. We must now fight for the idea of Europe or see it perish beneath the waves of populism.

In response to the nationalist and identitarian onslaught, we must rediscover the spirit of activism or accept that resentment and hatred will surround and submerge us. Urgently, we need to sound the alarm against these arsonists of soul and spirit who, from Paris to Rome, with stops along the way in Barcelona, Budapest, Dresden, Vienna and Warsaw, want to make a bonfire of our freedoms.

In this strange defeat of “Europe” that looms on the horizon; this new crisis of the European conscience that promises to tear down everything that made our societies great, honorable, and prosperous, there is a challenge greater than any since the 1930s: a challenge to liberal democracy and its values.

Signatories

Author Bernard-Henri Lévy (Paris), principals Milan Kundera (Prague), Salman Rushdie (New York), Elfriede Jelinek (Vienna) and Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul), and additionals: Vassilis Alexakis (Athens), Svetlana Alexievich (Minsk), Anne Applebaum (Warsaw), Jens Christian Grøndahl (Copenhagen), David Grossman (Jerusalem), Ágnes Heller (Budapest), Ismaïl Kadaré (Tirana), György Konrád (Debrecen), António Lobo Antunes (Lisbon), Claudio Magris (Trieste), Ian McEwan (London), Adam Michnik (Warsaw), Herta Müller (Berlin), Ludmila Oulitskaïa (Moscow), Rob Riemen (Amsterdam), Fernando Savater (San Sebastián), Roberto Saviano (Naples), Eugenio Scalfari (Rome), Simon Schama (London), Peter Schneider (Berlin), Abdulah Sidran (Sarajevo), Leïla Slimani (Paris), Colm Tóibín (Dublin), Mario Vargas Llosa (Madrid), Adam Zagajewski (Cracow).
Posted on Jan 30, 2019 - 07:52 PM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner: Feb 2019
by Karl Cohen

Lee Unkrich takes an Oscar for 'Coco' in 2017. photo courtesy Pixae

Unkrich Retires from Pixar

Lee Unkrich, the Oscar-winning director behind “Toy Story 3” and “Coco”, is leaving Pixar Animation Studios, marking the end of an era.

He joined the Emeryville, California-based studio 25 years ago, when it was making its inaugural feature, “Toy Story”, on which he served as an editor.

He went on to co-direct some of the company’s early outings—“Toy Story 2”, “Monsters, Inc. and “Finding Nemo”—now considered classics before taking the reins solo with the billion dollar-grossing “Toy Story 3”.

"I'm not leaving to make films at another studio,” Lee told Pixar employees. “Instead, I look forward to spending much-needed time with my family and pursuing interests that have long been on the back burner."

Unkrich is leaving on a high note: “Coco” made over $807 million worldwide and won the best animated feature Academy Award at the 2018 Oscar ceremonies. He is said not to have started on any new projects.

San Francisco’s Animated February

For a great annual survey of new animation, check out “Drawn, Painted, and Pixelated” (93 min) at SF Indie Fest on February 10th or 11th, 12:30 pm or 7:15 pm, respectively.

“D, P, and P” features new animation from around the world, with a wide range of styles and content, and titles like “Trump Bites”, “1 Beehive Street”, “Gissando”, “Dahlia”, “God I Need A Girlfriend”, “Kevin Kline Live #3”, “I Can't Bring You Away” and more.

I’ve seen several. Favorites include “Gissando”, an impressive stop-/slow- motion study using real objects by a USC student, Bill Plympton’s “Trump Bites”, which includes his “Trump and Putin: a Love…” You will be surprised, perhaps even shocked.

“I Had Too Much To Think Last Night” is a one-minute crazy journey into the artist’s mind—a tad too much LSD, perhaps?—while “1 Beehive Street” is probably a prize winner from Eastern Europe. About unusual activities in an apartment complex, it delighted me with all of its surprises.

Some of the other films, like “Dahlia” and “Subway Commute”, were probably selected for sheer sexy artwork-appeal, while “God I Need A Girlfriend” shows animation can also be unsettling.

The real red-headed girl from Peanuts revealed. photo courtesy C Schultz

Schulz’s Red Head Girl Solved

A new exhibit at the Charles M. Schulz Museum, “Behind Peanuts: The Little Red-Haired Girl” (January 31-August 4, 2019), explores the real-life story behind Charlie Brown’s unrequited love. In point of fact, it reflects Schulz’s own one-sided romance from 1959 which ended when Carol Johnston Wood rejected his marriage proposal.

Although Wood was mentioned many times in Schulz’s strip, she appeared only once, as a simple silhouette. On Valentine’s Day (February 14), admission to the museum, in Santa Rosa, is free for red-headed people.

Cartoon Art Museum Shows Rare Animation

From the earliest hand-drawn cartoons to today’s blockbuster CGI features, all animation begins with an artist and an idea. “A Treasury of Animation”, the new show at the Cartoon Art Museum (781 Beach Street, SF), features original production art and follows the evolution of animation from the 1920s onward.

Little known is that “Crusader Rabbit”, the first animated series screened on TV, in 1950, was made in Berkeley by J. Ward and Alex Anderson.

Crusader Rabbit was made in Berkeley by J. Ward and Alex Anderson. drawings: courtesy Cartoon Museum

The pioneering series was still in reruns in ‘60s, when many boomers rose at dawn on Saturdays to catch episodes. Each was an adventure with the intrepid rabbit and his friend, Ragland T. Tiger; once they went boating on the Bay but after the fog rolled in, got lost and ended up on a South Sea Island: Nothing Atoll.

A nephew of Mighty Mouse producer Paul Terry, Anderson started working at his uncle's Terrytoons studio in 1938. Having grow up with Jay Ward in Berkeley, they joined to create and pitch cartoons, including “Crusader Rabbit”, “Rocky and Bullwinkle”, and “Dudley Do-Right”, although only the former sold. Ward eventually moved to Los Angeles to sell the other series, while Anderson retired to advertising.

The Wild Weird Watts Towers

No tour of Cali culture is complete without a visit to Watts Towers, a rather tall—90 feet—and mosaic-incrusted series of towers by Sabato Rodia. An Italian immigrant and untrained artist, Rodia built it entirely on his own, between 1925 and 1955, on his property in the Watts neighborhood (1765 E. 107th Street).

The Watts Tower is one of the greatest achievements of 'outsider art.' drawings: courtesy Watts Tower

I first discovered this is a wonderful monument on the cover of “Wide Weird World”, a record album my uncle Kenny gave me around 1957. Within a few years. I got to visit them twice and photograph them, by which point much had been destroyed.

They used to have bowling trophy figures at the top, but kids tossing rocks knocked them off. Rumors off treasure hidden under the ceramics stuck on the walls and towers inspired a lot of digging.

While studying at Berkeley I attended a wonderful slide lecture on The Towers, which were designated national, California and LA historic landmarks in 1990, one of only nine registered folk art sites listed in Los Angeles.

Interestingly, one obsession begets another. The marine biologist Bruno Pernet has become fascinated with the many sea shells Rodia used to adorned his life/master work. According to Pernet, they include many species now extinct in the LA area, which Rodia collected, and provide a biological snap shot of the region, see LA Times article.

Collins’s Last Magic Show

Vince Collins presented his animated psychedelic “last magic show,” in January. Live action films of magic shows never look great, since you know they can be faked. But Vince’s show is so unreal, you know he is going to show you something bizarre. And he does, see here.

Karl Cohen is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached . Posted on Jan 29, 2019 - 05:39 PM
How John Lasseter Got His New Gig
by Karl Cohen

The founder and head of Pixar, John Lasseter, felt from grace for sexualized hugging. photo: courtesy Pixar

SURPRISE, SURPRISE: IT TURNS
out getting hired is often a matter of whom you know. In John Lasseter’s case it was Skip Brittenham, a Hollywood deal maker and a close friend of the Ellison family, of Oracle and World Cup fame.

Skip was also one of the guys who brokered the deal in 1991 to get a young startup company in the Bay Area a feature contract with Disney. That startup was called Pixar.

Skip was delivered to Pixar by Steve Jobs, who offered him a seat on the board because of his Hollywood connections. It turns out Skip also represents David Ellison, who is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s son, and David owns a startup animation studio, Skydance.

Indeed, there is yet another close connection: Skip’s daughter Kristina is marred to Jesse Sisgold, president of Skydance.

Rebecca Keegan, from The Hollywood Reporter’s staff pieced this puzzle together and uncovered additional information. To independently investigate sexual abuse claims by Pixar’s women, Skydance hired two lawyers from the firm Venable, but Keegan found scant evidence for a thorough investigation.

Rebecca located one person who described his interview with the lawyers as “a perfunctory conversation,” and she said that other people familiar with the allegations had not been contacted.

Rebecca also noted Skydance was a privately owned company so there wouldn’t be a troublesome board members objecting to the Lasseter hire. So as long as John doesn’t do anything controversial, like hug someone, he has the full support of Skydance’s owners and executives.

John is 62. If he wishes to stay active as a creative person, he can have a solid career ahead of him. If he gets bored or screws up he can always retire and enjoy being a gentleman wine maker if he keeps his property in the Bay Area.

And don’t forget as the creative head of Pixar he became a multi-millionaire many times over.

Karl Cohen is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached . Posted on Jan 26, 2019 - 03:38 AM
People’s Park Rejects University Takeover
by Doniphan Blair

A girl enjoying a concert at the 45th anniversary of People's Park, Berkeley, 2014. photo: D. Blair

PEOPLE'S PARK, A COLORFUL AND
contentious symbol of Berkeley radicalism, is being re-claimed yet again by the University of California, after 49 years of enjoyment by local families, homeless people, Frisbee players and dog walkers.

About a dozen protesters and quadruple that number of police, according to eyewitness accounts, confronted each other on the rainy morning of Tuesday, January 15th, as crews removed "five diseased trees," on top of almost 50 culled in December. On January 7th, a large eucalyptus tree, about a half a mile away and not tagged for removal, came down during a storm, killing 32-year-old Alexander Grant, from Novato, California.

In addition to tree clearing, UC Berkeley has a plan, announced last year, to build housing for about one thousand students on the site. Indeed, little has changed since 1969, when UC student James Rector was shot and killed by police in a similar protest. There were also protests in 1991.

Although the University claims the new building, which they hope to complete by late 2020, will have some housing for the homeless and veterans, and a monument to the park’s history, protestors feel that is patently unfair.

Diana Soline, one of the eight camping protestors trying to save People's Park, and her dog, Pancho Villa. photo: D. Soline

“For me occupying People’s Park was not just about saving trees, or the park,” I was told by Diana Soline Chornenkaya, 47, one of the protestors camping out, who had her possessions, including her hundred-year-old violin, confiscated. “It was about saving our humanity.”

Given the grassy, tree-dotted space is only a half a block from Telegraph Avenue, the main shopping drag next to campus, it remains an important resting or play place for homeless, students and other residents.

Moreover, it features a stage, where there are periodic shows, a basketball court and a toilet. It is also used for food distribution by restaurants, which donate leftover food, or the organization Food Not Bombs.

“I am a UC Berkeley graduate, I have a bachelors in Computer Science,” continued Soline, who was born in Russia and moved to the US in her teens. “I used to make over $100K [a year] consulting for Charles Schwab. Then I became disabled by PTSD—I was the victim of a crime. Combined with depression from several deaths in my family, divorce, bankruptcy and the loss of my home, that left me unable to provide for myself.”

“There are many homeless women in Berkeley who do not have access to shelters, they are forced to sleep on the streets by our inhumane system,” Soline said. “Some of them get raped. That’s why I put a women-only tent at People’s Park.”

Another protestor, who was arrested Tuesday morning around 6 am and held overnight, is Jesse Timms, AKA Cactus WildCat, 36 and a member of the Cherokee Nation.

A lot of people joined in building the original People's Park, back in the more activist days of 1969. photo: Clay Gerdees

According to Soline, a Berkeley cop by the name of Sean Aranas (badge number 76), “came up to Cactus, while he was lying on the ground in handcuffs, squeezed his testicles, twisted his arm and said, if he tells anybody, he will break his arm. [Cactus] screamed loudly, and the cop let go.”

A US Navy veteran, Timms served on a nuclear submarine in Middle East war zones and, as a result, also suffers from PTSD. After several years homeless and three applying for disability, Social Security and Veteran Services officials are denying him assistance, claiming he is not disabled, or his PTSD is not service-related.

“There is a reason why twenty veterans commit suicide in the US every day,” Soline told me. “Cactus WildCat is determined to speak up and protest for those who no longer can. For a Native American, Cactus being denied a right for housing is a double insult. ‘No Bread! No Land! No Peace!’ was one of his slogans during this occupation.”

Timms has been arrested multiple times, including in St. Paul, Minnesota, during protests of the murder of Philando Castile, the Montessori school nutritionist shot in front of his fiancé and her 5-year-old daughter.

“[Timms] has lost all of his belonging many times already,” noted Soline, “that’s part of being homeless.”

“Following the arrests and clearance of our personal belongings,” Soline continued, “I went to UC Berkeley police to file a formal complaint and request my property back. Then I saw Officer Aranas, who participated in the raid.”

Jesse Timms, AKA Cactus WildCat, after arrest and booking by the UC Berkeley police. photo: D. Soline

“Why did you do it? Don’t you see, it’s inhumane?” she asked him.

“‘I was just doing my job,’ he answered," Soline said. "‘But that’s what Nazis were saying when they killed 6 million Jews!’ I said. The officer didn’t appreciate being compared to a Nazi.”

“We said we are going to cut the trees and we did it,” was his explanation.

Attempts to build at People’s Park will "inevitably be met with incandescent violence," Wikipedia quoted an unnamed Berkeley radical as saying, "a shit show that will make the 1969 and 1991 riots look like an afternoon soiree of tea and crumpets."

But the small number of protesters, compared with one and two generations ago, and the massive number of striving, often overseas, students not that interested in activism, suggest otherwise.

The Counsel of People’s Park, the ad hoc group overseeing the protest, recommends remaining peaceful. Its demands include: no buildings on this land ever, amnesty for those arrested, the planting of two trees for every one removed, the dishonorable discharge of Officer Aranas, upgraded restrooms, a fire pit for sacred rituals, solar and wind harnessing equipment to power the park, and an "unregulated" community garden.

“Just hours before UC Berkeley police did its arrests, I was playing J.S. Bach on my violin," Soline recounted. "A couple of folks asked if they can play, and I let them. There was laughter and joy.”

“UC Berkeley has plenty of land to build new dorms,” she said. “Yet they insist on getting rid of People’s Park, a refuge, and a source of clothes and food for the homeless, for decades. For those of us who are on the bottom of our society, the richest society in the world, such treatment feels inhumane. And what about you?”

Sadly, Timms was feeling suicidal, so Soline took him by BART to the Veterans Hospital in SF.

“Many people supported our occupation,” Soline said, at the end of our conversation, “bringing us food, clothes, camping gear and some cash, I want to say a personal ‘Thank You,’ to all who acted out of their humanity to help us.”

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on Jan 17, 2019 - 01:23 AM
Lasseter New Animation Head of Skydance Media
by Karl Cohen

John Lasseter, the founder and ex-head of Pixar, in happier times before he was let go for sexualized hugging. photo: courtesy Pixar

MOST PEOPLE BY NOW KNOW THAT JOHN
Lasseter, the recently-disgraced head of Pixar, accused of multiple times of excessive hugging and more, is the new chief of animation at Skydance Media in Los Angeles. He will report directly to Skydance's CEO David Ellison, who wants to give him a second chance.

The head of one Hollywood woman’s group, however, has already spoken out, saying this is the wrong message to send women.

“Lasseter has been forthright in taking ownership of his behavior, apologized for his actions and has spent the past year on sabbatical analyzing and improving his workplace behavior," Skydance's Ellison told Variety.

"We did not enter into this decision lightly. John has acknowledged and apologized for his mistakes and, during the past year away from the workplace, has endeavored to address and reform them.”

Mr. Ellison did not specify how, nor does his explain what saying that Skydance “employed outside counsel to investigate the allegations” means.

A representative of Women in Film told the press that hiring Lassater, “endorses and perpetuates a broken system.”

Another woman media worker familiar with the situation told me, “I find this thoroughly disgusting and a slap in the face to the women that had the courage to speak out about his behavior.”

David’s father, Larry Ellison, is the CEO of Oracle Computers and one of the nation’s richest billionaires (he's largely responsible for bringing the America's Cup boat race to the Bay area, see "Steady as She Films: Panzica’s America’s Cup Doc”)

There is no easy solution as long as power brokers like Ellison feels hiring people like Lasseter is what his son’s company needs to compete.

“Skydance Animation is a small, untested player," noted The Hollywood Reporter. "It relies on a partnership with Madrid-based Ilion Animation Studios, a Los Angeles-based staff of 65 people and a distribution deal with Paramount Pictures."

"One of the projects in Skydance's pipeline, set up under the company's previous chief, Bill Damaschke, is a fantasy with a female protagonist, led by two of the most important female creative figures in feature animation: Shrek director Vicky Jenson and Beauty and the Beast and Lion King screenwriter Linda Woolverton."

Lasseter being accepted back by people in the industry will probably be seriously debated for some time to come.

One friend of mine, a retired Navy officer, says she believes, “some folks do deserve a second chance. I’ve worked for and with many men in private and military organizations. If we removed all the men who never learned to control their hormones, how many men would we honestly have in jobs?"

"Yes, I could have said, ‘Me, too,’ but I moved on several times over the past decades.”

Karl Cohen is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached . Posted on Jan 11, 2019 - 07:39 PM
Frida and Diego in Love
by Doniphan Blair

'Frida and Diego with Gas Mask' was taken in 1938 by Nickolas Muray, a very handsome Hungarian photographer who soon became Frida's lover. photo: N. Muray

SAN FRANCISCO LOOMS LARGE IN THE
serpentine saga of Mexican artists Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), due to the gorgeous murals he painted here in the 1930s, her accompaniment on all three, including the one after their divorce, and their embodiment of titanic creatives in love. Indeed, they remarried here in 1940 and the city just renamed the avenue leading to City College, site of Rivera's biggest Bay Area mural, Frida Kahlo Way.

Amidst our monumental MeToo realignment, it may be instructive to note that the petite Frida, shrunken further by childhood polio and the terrible street car accident, was obsessed with the 20-years older, 200-pounds fatter and macho—he used to carry a pistol and once shot the record player at a party because he didn't like the song it was playing—as well as brilliant Diego.

This generated Frida's observation that “There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.” But also her recommendation to: “Make love, take a shower, make love again.”

Frida became infatuated with Diego at fifteen, while watching him paint a mural at her high school. While he noticed her and her fiery demeanor, he thought she was only about eleven. Undeterred, Frida returned a few years later with a sheaf of paintings under her arm and proceeded to conquer the already-married and well-known womanizer’s mind as well as heart, suggesting that the empowered male needs an equally intense female—AND vice versa.

'Frida and Diego' by Frida from 1937. image: F. Kahlo

Mexico City was scandalized. Frida’s family rejected Diego, even though he was from a wealthy, old crypto-Jewish family and her father was the son of Jewish immigrants, calling them "La Balina y La Paloma," the Whale and the Dove.

Frida persevered, drawing on Diego’s ideas, encouragement and artistic friends not only to become his flamboyant very-Mexican wife but to excel at painting, almost single handedly inventing the aggressively self-examined female form, becoming art history's undisputed master of the self-portrait and ultimately eclipsing him.

Some paint snobs reject Frida for “unpainterly” brushstrokes, some Mexican nationalists for being half Jewish, and some feminists for sleeping with the enemy—not just Diego but quite a few powerful men, starting with Leon Trotsky.

But Frida’s spirit, images and ideas of what it was to be a women, an obsessively honest artist and a dedicated Mexican were fantastically innovative and powerful, which is why Diego adored her and probably would not be upset by her “Star is Born” turn.

Diego's 'Allegory of California', at the SF Stock Exchange, was his first US commission, 1931—note the pressure gauge on lower left edge, behind the tree stump. image: D. Rivera

Deigo was a man of many talents as well as appetites. Despite his communist convictions, he convinced capitalists across the United States to let him paint large murals in their buildings, by balancing fine art, illustration and a respect for multicultural working people as well as the businesses that hired them.

His first triumph was the San Francisco Stock Exchange in 1930. Although now the City Club and not open to the public, the mural is well worth the effort of signing up for the informative short tour (go here).

Called “The Allegory of California”, the smallish mural features lush colors and a floor-to-ceiling goddess, modeled on the tennis star Helen Wills Moody and derived from the matriarchal myth of Califia, which also provided the state's name. The overall theme is Californian industry, although he snuck in a couple of contrarian messages, like a sequoia tree stump or a pressure gauge in the red, in typical Rivera fashion (Frida was also a prankster).

Diego’s companion patriarchal mural, two miles away at the San Francisco Art Institute (800 Chestnut Street), is more accessible, both to the public (the hours are 9 to 6 and the room is often open at night) and as metaphor. It consists not only of a giant laborer in overalls but Diego himself, hard at work on the scaffold in front of the painting, his enormous butt looking back at the viewer.

Frida's 'The Broken Column', 1944, exposes her pain, body and vision, in equal measure. image: F. Kahlo

That was as self-reflective as Diego got, even as Frida was getting known for her tell-all canvases, one third of which are self-portraits, often nudes. Indeed, she garnered a New York show in 1938, where actor Edward G. Robinson bought four paintings, and great acclaim in Paris, where Andre Breton hailed her as a surrealist, a laurel she rejected.

“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

Her first Mexico show was only in 1954, just before she died, although she was able to attend in her hospital bed, receiving art lovers, regular lovers and courtiers, which she enjoyed immensely, largely due to her infatuation with doctors, disease and death.

“I hope the leaving is joyful,” Frida remarked, “and I hope never to return.” Diego passed three years later.

And so it was that Frida Kahlo, a slight slip of a half-Jewess, was crowned queen of Mexican art. She remained a local treasure until, about twenty years later, ka-boom: Frida-mania.

A Frida nude, photographer unknown but undoubtedly her lover Nickolas Muray, around 1939. photo: unknown

It started in San Francisco, among art professors like the Art Institute’s brilliant Raymond Mondini, painters like the Mission District's dedicated René Yañez and the few collectors with Frida canvases, as well as a public familiar with the city's three Rivera murals and the romantic story of his remarriage to Frida here in 1940.

Finally, after the Mexican American Museum opened by the Bay in Fort Mason in 1975, it mounted a massive show, famous for its striking poster featuring a life-size photo of Frida in a blood-red scarf, taken by her lover, the extremely handsome Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray.

Fridamania continued to expand inexorably in the ‘80s and ‘90s, mostly among women and Latinos, but also gays, the disabled and other oppressed groups. It culminated with the excellent 2002 film “Frida” by Julie Taymor and starring Selma Hyack (who is hardly a small-chested waif embodying Frida's body type but was great otherwise). The massive SF Museum of Modern Art retrospective was organized here in 2008, and went on international tour.

A force of nature, like the artist herself, Fridamania continues apace today.

While Diego's City Club and Art Institute murals show nothing of Frida or her tumultuous marriages, the interested viewer will be pleasantly surprised by San Francisco’s third mural. At City College’s Diego Rivera Theater (50 Phelan Ave—now Frida Khalo Way) and nominally open to the public, “Pan American Unity” (1940) is arguably Rivera's most spectacular project outside of Mexico, both in size, 22-feet tall and 75-feet wide, and cast of characters, including a regally-attired Frida at her easel painting.

A Frida nude by Diego, 1930, note the high heels. image: D. Rivera

Unfortunately, right behind Frida, Diego painted himself planting a magical white tree with Hollywood film goddess Paulette Goddard. While Diego may have compared sex to urination and relieved himself with Frida’s sister, which precipitated their divorce in 1939, he was also extremely compelling to some women. Goddard, who first met Rivera in the US, eventually moved to Mexico City, settling across the street from his studio.

By that time, Frida had already taken up with Trotsky, who arrived in Mexico in 1936, making the “Pan American Unity” mural another chapter in the Riveras' favorite parlor game: psychosexual brinksmanship. As for their community's political brinksmanship, Trotsy was attacked in May, 1940, by Frida and Diego's friend, the Mexican painter, muralist and Stalinist David Siqueiros, and killed three months later by a less effeminate assassin (Siqueiros was gay).

Getting back to the Rivera bedroom, Frida liked to torture Diego with her affairs with men, while he liked to brag to his buddies about her female conquests. Those included the other great woman painter of the day, Georgia O’Keefe, a seemingly-modest Midwestern modernist, who was also Frida’s artistic rival. In addition, Frida was said to enjoy Diego's bedtime stories about his many romantic escapades.

Aside from the subterfuge and sneaking around, there was the obvious overwhelming honesty portrayed in both artists' imagery and symbolism especially their use of the naked female body, which stands in stark contrast to today's new Puritanism.

SF City College's mural features Frida (center) but also Diego and film star Paulette Goddard (to right). photo: courtesy City College

Despite a conservative Catholic culture, Mexico rates very high on international surveys of male and female sexual excitement and satisfaction (notably the Durex Sexual Wellbeing Survey, 2006). Frida, for example, had her first lover at sixteen. Of course, Mexico City in the ‘20s was a place of revolutionaries, of both the political and artistic kind, the perfect stage for Frida’s self-invention, sexuality and fantasy.

Here’s how Amy Fine Collins summed up Fridamania in Vanity Fair, after the publication of her very revealing diary in 2013:

“Most pertinent to the diaries is an understanding of how the daughter of a lower-middle-class German-Jewish photographer and a hysterically Catholic Spanish-Indian mother became a celebrated painter, Communist, promiscuous temptress, and, later (during the diary years), a narcotic-addicted, dykish, suicidal amputee afflicted with a bizarre pathology known as Munchausen syndrome—the compulsion to be hospitalized and, in extreme cases, mutilated unnecessarily by surgery.”

Frida enjoying a last laugh with her pet hawk at her home, the Blue House, Mexico City, circa 1941. photo: N. Muray

Who said love, obsession and great art would be simple? When you consider how much Frida suffered through her dozens of surgeries, you multiply that by her rampant imagination and the experimentalism of the ‘30s, and lean the whole "mishigas" (Yiddish for craziness) against the gargantuan Diego, Frida as one of the first truly feminist artists never ceases to astound.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on Dec 19, 2018 - 08:37 PM
Blindspotting Shows Heart of West Oakland
by Doniphan Blair

'Blindspotting' stars and was written by Oakland-native Daveed Diggs (lft) and Berkeley-boy Rafael Casal. photo: courtesy C. López Estrada

THE FIRST TO HAIL 'BLINDSPOTTING',
this summer's indie hit by freshman feature maker AND Mexican immigrant Carlos López Estrada, starring and written by two East Bay buddies, was the Sundance Film Festival, where it world premiered last February on opening night.

Then came The New York Times. “The actual core of the movie is so pertinent,” its reviewer gushed about the film, which is simultaneously a rom-com, a race-baiter, a drama AND a musical, “'Blindspotting’ ought to be seen by the widest audience possible.”

And Variety: “'Blindspotting’ encourages audiences to look beyond surface prejudices and really see their fellow citizens for the first time… If ever there was a film to open America’s eyes, this is it.”

The only fly in the ointment was the perennially-snobby New Yorker, which sniffed, “the conflicts are schematic, the characters are thinly sketched.”

Now that big media has pronounced on “Blindspotting”, which is set in West Oakland and was written by and stars Oakland-native Daveed Diggs, fresh from his award-winning roles in the decade's biggest musical, “Hamilton”, and Rafael Casal, a spoken-word artist renown around Berkeley and Hollywood, perhaps it’s time to hear from a West Oakland media outlet, yours truly.

Apologies for running late. Alas, we heard nothing about “Blindspotting”, even as it was being shot all around our studio in the fall of 2017, mostly with an out-of-town crew. And we didn’t see it until a month after it hit theaters in July.

Totally understandable, the “Blindspotting” media team probably never heard of cineSOURCE, despite this being our tenth year, replete with our tenth annual Oakland report (“Can Oakland Save the World?”).

I’m not saying they’re the dreaded “G” word (gentrifiers), especially since I oppose gentry-shaming. They're probably just downstaters.

Moreover, The New Yorker couldn’t have been more wrong. “Blindspotting” is a masterpiece, so good, it could have been directed by Prince Charles, for all its creators' home address would matter, not to mention its insightful, race-reversing take on gentrification, which writers Diggs and Casal obviously derived from regarding the issue from all sides.

Collin and Miles suit up to work as movers, which brings them into people's houses and problems, including with gentrification. photo: courtesy C. López Estrada

Among other things, Diggs's mother is Jewish and he first met Casal at Berkeley High, an international university masquerading as a local high school. Diggs eventually joined Clipping, a well-known if avant-garde Berkeley-based rap group, and Casal did poetry slams as well as rap. Eventually, Diggs caught the ear of "Hamilton"-creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and was invited to audition. He ended up performing dual roles, the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, and taking a Tony Award in 2016.

“Blindspotting” features sharp satires of Oakland slang, food fanaticism, corner stores and, of course, the white yuppie scum, who’ve destroyed the city of late, as well as—thankfully—black culture, to keep the sides even. I particularly liked when a dashiki-dressed matriarch admits she's overjoyed to have haute hipster cuisine in the ‘hood.

They missed a few obvious Oaklandisms, however, like the men who wear their pants around their thighs or lower, displaying their designer undies (if you're lucky), or the mixed-race love fests, like Lake Merritt on Sundays (despite the one notorious white woman narcing on black families BBQing) or at the hundreds of burrito trucks nightly.

Not including a burrito truck was an infield error for Estrada, who moved from Mexico City to LA when he was 12 and probably became famous too young to know how they save single men's lives. He redeems himself with a lovely mis-en-scene opener featuring documentary footage of “side shows” (drivers doing tricks with cars), BART fights and other Oakland esoterica, before jumping feet first into Riggs and Casal's story.

It starts with Collin (Diggs), a sweet-tempered black guy, who gets out of jail (for an unrevealed reason) and is attempting to stay clean for his probation, despite provocations from his best friend Miles (Casal), a thuggy white guy, who's the life of the party. Aside from one edge-of-the-seat moment, when the son of Miles's girlfriend stumbles upon his gun, “Blindspotting” meanders through its first half, building characters and themes so they can roar to life later.

As it happened, I saw “Blindspotting” with filmmaker Rob Nilsson (see the epic article "Infant Terrible, Old Master of the Indie"). He laughed in my face when I remarked, as we left the theater, that it was like a Russian film, starting slow until it suddenly explodes.

“The first half was boring,” retorted Nilsson. “The audience was laughing at, not with, the characters.”

I tried to explain to Nilsson, who is white and just turned 79, that he might not quite cognize spot-on humor penned by and for twenty-somethings, often of color.

Collin doesn't get the joke when best-bud Miles picks out weapons from a happily-go-lucky thug—who is also an Uber driver, using a Mexican-American low rider car. photo: courtesy C. López Estrada

Regardless of Nilsson’s or The New Yorker's critique, the film's first half masterfully sets up the many subplots, which can be suddenly picked up, like a gun off of Chekhov’s mantle, and fired in the second half.

For that simple reason, "Blindspotting" is able to seamlessly blow up AND switch genres, from homoerotic as well as straight rom-com—Collin's relationship with his childhood buddy AND the girl who dumped him after his incarceration—to serious drama.

As if out of nowhere, from an anecdote told in passing, “Blindspotting” fills in its backstory blanks and rips out our hearts, only to shift gears yet again—as hard as it may be to believe—to a romantic musical!

Even Nilsson, with his anaphylactic allergy to anything Hollywood, had to confess the extended flashback was a deft cinematic trope. And, once the fights started, first in front of a bar, then in the middle of a typical Oakland party, flush with all conceivable socio-economic and racial types, he confessed his interest had been piqued.

And so, since it doesn't matter how flashy your film starts, which is the American system, but where you finish, which is the Russian cinematic philosophy, “Blindspotting” is fantastic: well-written, -motivated and -acted, as well as nicely shot, with some striking hard edits.

No wonder “Blindspotting” earned $4.3 million nationally by September, decent for an indie, given it probably only cost two-thirds that, while international box office and streaming brought in almost $400,000 by December (according to The Numbers).

More heartfelt than the blockbuster fantasy, “Black Panther”, which failed to fulfill its promise of a mythical allegory about the Black Panther Party, and more romantic and balanced then Oakland’s other acclaimed summer sleeper, the searing satire “Sorry to Bother You”, “Blindspotting” would take this year's cineSOURCE Stutter Award™, if we could afford to present such a thing.

Cinema quality aside, however, what about “Blindspotting”'s politics and philosophy? Is “Blindspotting” the great cultural antidote to the Trumpist racist surge?

As it happens, “Blindspotting” revolves around Collin witnessing an unarmed black man being shot in the back by a white cop. As it happens, “Blindspotting” sets this climactic moment on the corner of West Grand and Adeline in West Oakland, if in name only, during the film’s faux news report (the actual scene was shot on a side street).

And, as it happens, cineSOURCE studios are also on the corner of West Grand and Adeline, where this author has lived since 1989, a few years before “Blindspotting”'s director or writer-stars were born.

As happens, I, too, am an old white guy who, like Nilsson, believes my art and world-travel bonifides allow me to speak freely about any film but also West Oakland, regardless of tribal affiliations, especially valid given “Blindspotting” is about evolving beyond race-based viewpoints.

Driving home in his company's moving van, Collin sees a cop kill a black man on the corner of West Grand and Adeline in West Oakland. photo: courtesy C. López Estrada

So what is my take, as one of the few people to observe West Grand and Adeline for the last thirty years? (Actually, I am probably the ONLY person, since three of the intersection's four corners are industrial, and my building's one other long-term resident doesn’t face that direction.)

For one, few whites have adopted Oakland's unique black culture—low pants, teeth grills, regional slang—as Miles does, simply because Oakland has always been multicultural, leaving little incentive for cultural cross-dressing.

Indeed, the Black Panther rallies, often held four blocks from West Grand and Adeline in DeFremery Park were mostly radicalized white kids, since 1967's Summer of Love brought a massive influx of them, while most black kids were dissuaded by their families or their fear of the cops from attending (see cineSOURCE's "The Black Panther Filmography").

On Day Two of the Rodney King Riots, May 1st, 1992, I didn't notice a single other white guy playing basketball in DeFremery, at the exact spot where the Panthers used to hold their rallies. While LA burned and 49 were killed, and there were riots in Berkeley and San Francisco, I got some icy stares but no overt violence, while Oakland had only a few broken windows.

Two: there have been no killings by cops at West Grand and Adeline. While white cops killing black men is a critical issue for artists to tackle, and Oakland, with its Panther history and some high profile murders by police, is the perfect place to set such a story, it is not that relevant to West Grand and Adeline, or Oakland in general.

As bad a rap as the Oakland Police Department gets for its prodigious prostituting and number of police chiefs (three in one week, June, 2016), there have been no flagrantly-unmotivated killings by cops since Oscar Grant in 2009, as excellently explicated by Ryan Coogler in “Fruitvale Station” (2013), which springboarded him to “Black Panther”.

As it happened, there have been few killings by Oakland cops in the last decade; conversely, four of their number were murdered in one day, March 21st, 2009, by a hardcore criminal wanted on parole violation. Indeed, during the entire year of 2017, the OPD didn’t discharge a single weapon—ever!—while 76 Oaklanders were offed by civilians.

“How many murders have you seen,” I inquired the other day of Muhammad, who owns Nick’s Liquors, one block from West Grand and Adeline, and I’ve known for eighteen years.

“Oh man…” he said, “many, many.”

“How many? Ten?” I asked.

“Ten? Oh no,” he answered, "many more," punctuating his response with the hollow laugh people use when they’re addressing fate, although Muhammad is assisted in that regard by his faith and heritage.

An outgrowth of the Oakland church movement that emerged out of the high murder rate of the 2010, SAVE and True Vine Church does monthly protests around Oakland against violence. photo: D. Blair

Like many Oakland corner-store owners—and "Blindspotting" features one prominently—Muhammad is of Yemeni stock and his wife wears the colorful Yemeni dress, even though both she and Muhammad were raised in Oakland, where both of their grandfathers started stores in the 1960s.

A country beset civil war, Saudi bombings and now famine, Yemen has world-record weapon ownership, almost as much as the US. But that didn't prepared Muhammad for all the killings on his corner, mostly by drug gangs, or the stickups of his shop, which sent two relatives racing to Highland Hospital (they survived).

To be sure, being shot in the back by an officer of the law, sworn to uphold justice, in the land of the so-called free, is a crime against humanity. Nevertheless, it represents a tiny fraction of the actual human beings being killed in Oakland.

One evening in 2016, I was rudely awaken from a couch nap by a fuselage of machine gun fire, the loudest of the dozens of blasts I had heard over the decades, because it was coming from right beneath my window. Fascinated to find out what was going on but fearful to peak out or exit my front door, I circled around back.

By the time I got to the corner of West Grand and Adeline, a fresh-faced white cop, probably residing in the suburbs of Walnut Creek, and his female Latina partner, perhaps from San Leandro, were picking up shell casings. “About 18 here and another 15 two blocks down,” he told me.

Later, I got the details from a neighbor, who saw the fire fight from his truck, parked forty yards from the corner of West Grand and Adeline.

"A couple of cars were chasing each other down West Grand," he explained. "Then the first car swerved right onto Adeline, screeched to a halt and out jumped a guy loaded for bear—some sort of machine gun." When the pursuit car cornered, he ambushed it.

“I could see him about 20 yards away, riddling the other car with bullets, amazing they could still drive away,” my neighbor said.

“Did you call the cops?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

An anti-violence protest at West Grand and Adeline organized by SAVE and True Vine Church, attended by lawyer and mayoral candidate Pamela Green. photo: D. Blair

“Why,” I asked.

“I don't call cops,” he said.

Yes, a few people have died on West Grand and Adeline, but from traffic accidents: it is a notoriously dangerous intersection. In 2005, a car full of illegal immigrants, being chased by ICE, ran the red light and hit another vehicle, instantly killing its driver.

While no one has been murdered on this corner for the last thirty years, over a hundred people have been butchered within a three block radius. Indeed, Chestnut and 24th, three blocks away, is a heavily-trafficked crack corner where dozens have died (for the story of one young man who was slaughtered in October, 2017, see "Four Indies Out of Oakland, Some with Bullets").

One year after that machine gunning, on October 13th, West Grand and Adeline was the site of a demonstration by Soldiers Against Violence Everywhere, also called SAVE Oakland. Organized by Michelle Edmond and her many good Samaritan associates, they mount their brand of vigil/demo some where in Oakland every second Saturday of the month, from 11 am to noon.

I thought it was one of those anarchic parades—a high school football win celebration, a bicycling group—that periodically rolls through the neighborhood, until I looked and saw some twenty people, most waving signs saying “Stop the Violence” and “Honk to Help”, with one gentleman on a bullhorn.

One demonstrator was Oakland mayoral candidate Pamela Green, although SAVE was not endorsing her; another was a white guy, from a participating church.

"We don’t want accountability only from the police,” Ms. Edmond told me by phone, a few days later. “We want accountability from the community, to be accountable, to report to the police. We stand for every victim. Not all the victims are black or brown. We think murder is terrible and we want peace on the streets of Oakland."

When I noted that Oakland's murder rate had been cut almost in half, to 76, from a high of 145 in 2006, Edmond retorted:

Another reaction to gentrification may be arson, according to Mayor Libby Shaft, as transpired on October 23 at the Ice House Complex four blocks east of West Grand and Adeline. photo: D. Blair

“It is hard to say that 76 people being killed is OK. From our perspective, every life is precious. Every family deserves to have their family members remembered. Their life is precious and those who are committing the murders are still in the wrong. Those things are just basic."

SAVE, which has been operating for eight years, grew out of the clerical movement, which started during that very bloody year, 2006. Pastors, mothers, rabbis and teachers came out to walk the streets and rally the community, as well as put the police on notice.

One vocal advocate was Pastor Zachary Carey Senior of the True Vine Ministry, on nearby Isabella Steet—recently renamed Newton Carey Junior Way, in honor of his relative, who continues his efforts. Carey Senior along with Theresa Butler, an activist social worker, founded SAVE.

"Carey Senior had a passion for service in community," Edmond told me. "That is why he created the True Vine clothing and food drives and started calling for peace in the streets.”

Sadly, not everyone agrees. At their vigil-rally the previous month, in front of the MacArthur BART, a white women called the police, claiming, "'There was no need [for a demonstration] since there was no crime at this location,'" according to Edmond.

Conversely, I was overjoyed that someone was exercising spiritual strength on my corner, and I immediately jogged down to join them. Although the chanting and sign waving was invigorating, I found it especially moving when we gathered in a circle, prayed and honored the victims, including the son of youthful-looking woman.

"He was a very friendly kid," she said, "About to graduate high school."

As all of us should know, wherever we live but especially in West Oakland, any day can be our last, and it's worth honoring life as well as its passing as fully as possible.

Others, however, are not satisfied with the non-violent approach. On October 23rd, a five-alarm fire engulfed the half-completed 126-unit Ice House complex four blocks east on West Grand from Adeline. It is thought to be the latest in a series of suspicious fires at residential construction sites.

"It’s unclear whether an arsonist set the blaze," the about-to be-re-elected Mayor Libby Schaaf told a news conference, "[but] arsonists have been trying to burn down housing projects in Oakland.” There were also reports that homeless were living there, the site had a fire in April and security was lax.

Either way, citizen filmmakers, please try to shoot some footage. The documentary about what is happening in Oakland is an important part of a cinema scene that now ranges from "gritty, grimy films," like those by Jamie DeWolf (see cineSOURCE article) to block busters like "Black Panther" or a full-on masterpiece like "Blindspotting".

While "Blindspotting" tackles one of the terrible tragedies trying our body politic—the cold-blooded killing of young men of color by mostly-white police people—we must be a notch more pragmatic as well as spiritual, following the example of SAVE, to address the more lethal diseases attacking us.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Dec 19, 2018 - 08:31 PM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner: Dec 2018
by Karl Cohen

Pixar sweeps Hollywood, yet again, with 'Incredibles 2'. photo: courtesy Pixar

Pixar's Latest Incredible

The award season is beginning and Pixar will win yet another. This time it will be with “Incredibles 2” at the Hollywood animation award.

Directed by Brad Bird and the sequel to their 2004 hit, “The Incredibles”, it features a voice cast that includes Holly Hunter and Craig T. Nelson. The 22nd annual Hollywood Film Awards was held November 4th at the Beverly Hilton, produced by Dick Clark Productions, which shares a parent company with The Hollywood Reporter.

Toy Story 4 Not So Shabby

The ‘Toy Story 4’ teaser, featuring a new character named Forky the Spork, is laugh out loud funny. Hope you enjoy it.

Incredible Blu-Ray

Now out on Blu-Ray, “Auntie Edna” is the short accompanying the digital release of “Incredibles 2”. Find out what happens when Edna E. Mode, voiced by director Brad Bird, becomes the babysitter and creates a “super suit” for the infant.

It was directed by Ted Mathot and produced by Marc Sondheimer, the former being the story supervisor on “Incredibles 2”. He began working at Pixar as a story artist in 1999, and has since worked in a similar capacity on “The Incredibles”, “Cars”, “Ratatouille”, “Presto” and “WALL•E”. Mathot received an Annie Award in 2008 for his storyboard work on “Ratatouille.

Lasseter Looking

John Lasseter is looking for his next job after he officially retires from Pixar at the end of this year. The Washington Post says he is seeking a new job and he recently met with the agency William Morris Endeavor.

Catmull Retiring

Meanwhile Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, is retiring. He co-founded Pixar along with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter. He will step down next year in July and stay on as an adviser.

In memory of long time and lauded animator, Adam Burke (1972-2018). photo: courtesy Cartoon Brew

Veteran Pixar Animator Passes

Adam Burke, the veteran Pixar animator, has died. Born in 1972, Burke grew up in Massachusetts, attended CalArts, and left school when he was hired by Don Bluth to work on hand-drawn animation.

His credits include “Thumbelina, “A Troll in Central Park” for Don Bluth; “The Swan Princess” for Richard Rich; “Space Jam, “The Iron Giant and “The Road to El Dorado” for Warner Bros. and “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas”, “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” for Dreamworks.

In 2003 he joined Pixar. His credits for them include “The Incredibles”, “Cars”, “Ratatouille”, “Wall-E, “Up, “Toy Story 3”, “Cars 2”, “Monsters University”, and “Incredibles 2”. Burke’s brother told me that, “He was diagnosed with lung cancer ten months ago and still found a way to brighten other people’s lives through his tough and short battle."

Hole in the Head Fest

Another Hole in the Head Festival has a program “Strangers with Eye Candy" is a collection of animated short films from around the world. There will be a Q & A with some of the directors after the screening. See it Dec 9, 3pm, New People Cinema, 1746 Post St., SF.

 The Future of Your ASIFA-SF

We could us some input from YOU because ASIFA-SF has gotten very little news in recent years about what our local animators are doing as animators. This is why we no longer publish much local news except about Pixar. We would like to fill the newsletter with news of your work, community information and unusual animation events.

Hence, please BLOW your horn and keep us informed!

I report the local animation news in the ASIFA-SF newsletter. cineSOURCE and other sites reprint our local news and it is emailed out to thousands of professionals, animation artists, teachers and more. Moreover, the ASIFA international newsletter reprints items we originate. If there is a good story or an interesting event EatDrinkFilm may also want to run it.

Karl Cohen is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .

Posted on Nov 26, 2018 - 11:28 AM
No More Hoarding While Mama Earth Burns
by Tiny (Lisa Gray-Garcia/Daughter of Dee)

Poet/Poverty Skola Lisa 'Tiny' Gray-Garcia wears prison orange because she was incarcerated for the crime of being unhoused and wants to univisibalize those across the country like her. photo: courtesy T. Garcia-Grey

In keeping with our in-depth arts coverage of 'Cali Civilization in Crisis', this piece is by Tiny Gray-Garcia, a poet ('Criminal of Poverty', published by City Lights) and homeless advocate, working with numerous groups including Poor Magazine.

TODAY'S ANNOUNCEMENT/POEM IS
dedicated to all my fellow Poverty Skolazs who—even before the fires in Califaztlan—were barely housed, were pushed out of urban areas, were struggling to even stay in a tent...

...to all the people who don’t have what I call the "Privilege of Privacy."

Breathing in,
breathing out.
No more breath to shout,
just a gasp.
Amerikkklan scarcity models
forged this fiery path.

One dollar a day the inmate fire worker earns,
while our mama earth burns.
Gentrifuked out of our towns, space and centers.
We're living in forests, tents and highways,
when we used to live in the Bay.

It's very simple.

The time for radical redistribution of resources is nigh. There are direct actions people can take.

Radical redistribution ranges from buying masks and water to making food or healing tea and distributing to un-housed folks on the street, or in the towns and cities impacted by these fires.

The formerly houseless founders of Homefulness, landless peoples self-determined solution to homelessness, some of whom also write and edit Poor Magazine. photo: courtesy T. Garcia-Grey

Radical redistribution ranges from supporting projects like Mask Oakland, which is giving out masks out all the way up to buying land for folks so they can launch their own hopefulness projects—the opposite of homelessness.

Radical redistribution ranges to giving away excess cars, boats or RVs, so folks can live in them.

Give away your excess trust funds or resources so folks can live.

Give away your excess love so the earth can heal.

This is why we have created the Poor Magazine, and the Bank of Community Reparations with the Po Mamaz Reparations Fund.

Our goal is to give cars, money, land, housing and tech reparations directly to poor families or folks who are victims of displacement and gentrification.

Breathing in and breathing out,
no more energy to get thru the day.
No more breath left to shout,
"Un-housed fire victims don’t even make the count!"
Now we got more marginally-housed and fire victims living in tents,
wealth hoarders have made it impossible to find a place to rent.

Muteado Silencio, formerly houseless poet and co-founder/co-builder of Homefulness, speaking in front of a Homefulness construction project. photo: courtesy T. Garcia-Grey
Migrant indigenous familias afraid to even come in.
Already un-housed peoples exposed to air filled with smoke and poison.
The time is nigh for radical redistribution,
enacted interdependence is our solution.
Not just one of us, but all of us can live,
to see a new day and life we can give.

Different forms of redistribution for different folks:

Elders in Chico, Woolsey and Paradise need rides to the hospital, and help getting medicine.

The un-housed need you to open your extra rooms to families, your backyards to tents.

The earth needs you to share your time, if you can.

We are in a when Mama Earth is struggling, fires are burning and there is no more time for hoarding.

Radical un-hoarding is necessary along with un-gentrifuking, un-evicting, un-taking and un-buying.

No more time to hoard resources,
to buy or sell Mama Earth.
Open up your unused rooms, garages, farms, vacation homes.
Stop this war over ownership and turf!
Give away your third and fourth cars.
Support the Po Mama's Reparations Fund.
Help us po' folks manifest homefulness projects everywhere!

The formerly houseless founders of Homefulness, landless peoples self-determined solution to homelessness, some of whom also write and edit Poor Magazine. photo: courtesy T. Garcia-Grey
This is it Fam,
we're in a state of emergency.
It's called 'Our 21st Century Life.'
The only antidote is radical redistribution of resources, love and time—
that will heal this strife.

To learn more about the Bank of Community Reparations Fund, which includes the Po' Mamas Reparations Fund, the Tech Reparations Fund, the Homefulness Fund and so much more, email or come to the next session of PeopleSkool, on January 25th & 26th.

And to all the conscious redistributors, reparators reading this who are already doing it—so much gratitude, love and respect!

Poet and homeless advocate Tiny Gray-Garcia can be reached by email or on her website, or by buying her book 'Criminal Poverty'.

Posted on Nov 19, 2018 - 08:06 PM
Cali’s Ancient Mariner
by Don Schwartz

Firefighters battle to save homes from the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, on Thursday. photo: Stephen Lam

AFTER SO MANY DAYS OF UNPRECE-
dented smoke and no wind in my adopted home of Northern California, I was reminded of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1834).

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

In the poem, a sailor on a wooden ship has been cursed for having killed a seabird, an albatross, for no reason. One consequence of that curse is having the dead bird hanging from his neck, and another is being on a sailing ship with no wind.

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English author and poet (1772-1834). photo: unknown

Our smoke is staying with us because we have no wind. Indeed, as of November 18th it has been many days, even weeks, of these conditions, with school cancelled, people with asthma and other conditions confined indoors and average adults restricting exercise and more.

It is unclear when the smoke will clear, when the wind will return.

The mariner’s sin was to kill an innocent seabird. Finally, in a seeming non sequitur, as he regards the slimy sea creatures surrounding his ship, he blesses them.

Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.

The sea creatures predicted to reside in the Atlantic by Spanish artists, circa 14th century. photo: unknown

The albatross is released from his neck and the wind returns, but one aspect of the curse will never be removed. The mariner must roam the Earth, telling his story.

The seabird, of course, is a symbol of the natural world, the world we have been attacking for generations.

When will we bless this world, and honor it, and protect it?

Don Schwartz is an actor, writer and blogger on all things documentary, and can be seen here or reached .

Posted on Nov 18, 2018 - 08:55 PM
Rob Nilsson: Enfant Terrible, Old Master, Part II
by Doniphan Blair

Nilsson in the Tel Aviv Cinematheque with Mikhael Derenkovski, whose Holocaust chronicle helped him make 'What Happened Here' (2012). photo: Victoria Yakubov

Continued from Rob Nilsson: Enfant Terrible, Old Master of the Indie

“It turned out he had recently been taken in by a good Samaritan in Santa Monica,” he elaborated, a few weeks ago by email. “He came up, lived with me for about three years, joined the Action group and appeared in 'Chalk', before he hit the road again.”

Eventually hosted by the Faithful Fools Street Ministry, which does social work in the Tenderloin, the yGroup attracted some stellar actors, from the talented amateur Gabriela Maltz Larkin, who gave a standout performance as a sex worker in "Need" (2005), to David Fine, a versatile Hollywood character actor, who appeared most recently in “Sorry to Bother You”, as it happens.

“[I’d] done some time being a drug cowboy in the Tenderloin,” Fine told cineSOURCE, and “I like dark crime.”

“From Rob I learned the ability to relax or wire up,” Fine explained, “[to be] elated and then devastated... to look within, breathe deeply [and] then reinvent.” For this reason, “[a]ll at once the rag-tag band of merry/melancholy men and women [the yGroup] turned the tables on their demons.”

“There were some in the class who were pretty intense,” recalled Larkin, the actress. “One guy, for example, would scare people. At one point, he had Rob on the floor in a choke hold, with a wooden peg pushed into his eye. It got TOO real!”

Nevertheless, “I miss the camaraderie of those fourteen years," she added. "It clicked the first time. I walked into class one day and never left. I looked forward to coming on Tuesday nights and exploring different feelings—what [Nilsson] calls the six basic feelings: fear, happiness, anger, surprise, despair and love.”

No wonder the “yGroup Manifesto” opens ambitiously, if touchy-feely: “There can be no cinema outside the artist’s inner life... The collaboration of artists... writers, directors, actors, cinematographers and craft people of all kinds is given shape and energy by the kinetic release of the inner fountain.”

But then it turns on a dime: “Whereas the pale and anemic truth that ‘all art is political’ has spawned legions of nodding heads in the exclusive pews of race, gender and class... the living truth is that there can be no art without vision… [o]riginating in shamanic practice, in the ‘wild surmises’ of poets and sages.”

Although a good summary might have been “all art is visionary,” it concludes with: “We pledge ourselves as individuals to the communal circle of risk and protection where we reveal our secrets, power up our energy, open flesh and intuitive mind to received vision... to live with passion and to sing at the top of our lungs,” (for full text see "yGroup Manifesto").

“I am not interested in the predictable,” Nilsson noted, in the same cineSOURCE article I've been quoting.

“Today avant-garde is really another name for the establishment. Life is too dangerous and fragile to be exhibiting urinals while claiming to be anti-bourgeois. We have environmental problems, political meltdown, a proliferation of madmen who want bombs.”

Nilsson receiving yet another lifetime achievement award, this time from the Love is Folly Film Festival, in Bulgaria, where he also headed the jury (2012). photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

“Give me ‘the Aprés Garde’ with creators who astonish us with skill, vision and the freedom to rediscover new songs of the open road," Nilsson continued. "[H]igh wire walkers who dare the unknown and accept the consequences if they fall... Sunburnt souls finding their themes and saying ‘This is worth pursuing all the way around the bend.’”

No matter where you cut the cinema cheese, whether letting your guts hang out in front of the camera, or slicing away the tripe in the editing room, or wringing out your soul in your own private wilderness—writing—film is about self-realization, about becoming hyper-present enough to show your true self or that of your characters, in a manner sufficiently comprehensible, at least to the viewers who count.

An actor’s director, if there ever was one, Nilsson rehearses aggressively but leaves onscreen performances almost entirely to the individual, precisely so they can concentrate on achieving that epiphany. Because the performance is so intense, he generally makes do with minimal takes. While he rarely arrives on set scriptless, it is usually only a few pages, listing situations, characters and themes.

Nilsson’s remarkable skill is how he helps his actors develop those characters, in his Direct Action workshops, and inspires them to perform their hearts out, drawing on the full gamut of his poetics, insights, film theory and viewings, and his wildly-diverse life.

As a director, he’ll sometimes seize the floor, but almost always with a gentle hand. In the middle of a long, improvised set piece, for example, he will tip-toe up behind his director of photography, take hold of their back and slowly shift them to a different shot.

Mickey Freeman, who’s shot some twenty Nilsson movies, tolerates such mid-scene intrusions begrudgingly. A seeker of what he calls “the beckoning,” the perfect alignment of character, camera and vision, Freeman "knows I can’t do without him and that we are brothers," Nilsson told me.

Having seen over half of Nilsson’s oeuvre of the last decade, I find the films largely excellent, if markedly looser than his first decade, of which, with my viewing of "Prairie Trilogy" in August, I’ve seen almost all.

Another recent film of interest was “Next Week in Bologna” (2016), made in collaboration with the International Filmmaking Academy in Bologna, Italy, run by Owen and Christine Shapiro, founders of the Syracuse International Film Festival. In 2015, after screening his remake of "Heat and Sunlight", "Permission to Touch", to loud applause, the festival presented Nilsson a lifetime achievement award.

“Next Week in Bologna” opens with a male-female meet neat in the street, followed by a rambling, fun-photo-ed pursuit through the city’s old quarter. It ends in entirely different neighborhoods, however, cutting in black-and-white bits from the infamously-slow-if-brilliant art film “Last Year at Marienbad” (Resnais, 1961), or having the happy couple encounter a remorseful pedophile priest (Nilsson, naturally).

Nilsson's actors for 'Maelstrom' (lft-rt): Ed Ferry, Samantha Vansteen, Dan da Silva and Deniz Demirer at its Mill Valley world premiere in 2012. photo: Victoria Yakubov

The same year as "Bologna", 2016, Nilsson did “Love Twice” about a screenwriter—evoked nicely by Demirer—haunted by two lover characters, who refuse to obey his authorial commands. Nilsson started the film in Mexico, on a road trip with his Citizen Cinema Players, as he sometimes calls them, to the tropical paradise of Isla Mujeres, off the coast of Cancun, where he occasionally retreats to write.

Edited by Kremer, “Love Twice” finishes in Richmond, California, hardly a beautiful beach town, although the film emerges intact, given the story as well as the telling are loose. “Love Twice” has some great romantic and physical moments—outright acrobatics, in fact—and strong performances by Jeff Kao and T. Moon, as the lovers. It also features The Velvet Underground's John Cale, as the film-within-the-film’s producer, who is trying to get "a little something" off the gorgeous lead actress (Moon), and the well-known television actor Carl Lumbly, playing another producer, who both acts in the film and criticizes it.

That very same year—Nilsson generally has two or three films in production at any one time—there was “Devised”, which I didn’t see. Filmed entirely in Marshall Spight's green screen studio, it included Demirer again and a host of other CC Players, like Allen.

Another notable film, which I did catch, was “A Leap to Take” (2013). Not only does it take place in one night, as is Nilsson's want, it was SHOT in one night, by the human tripod Freeman, in a gravity-defying, nearly-continuous, three-and-a-half hour take.

“A Leap to Take” starts at a birthday party for a mob boss, portrayed with gusto by FABA director Kayalar, who can also easily conjure a grizzled, old Nilsson leading man. With 21 speaking parts, it features a host of FABA actors, most delivering incisive performances as they leave the party, board a double-decker bus and descend on another watering hole, as well as each into their own delirium of love, regret, anger, what have you.

Just before that, however, Nilsson made two films completely outside—yet again!—his previous work. Another fiction-doc pair, like “Northern Lights” and “Prairie Trilogy”, “The Steppes” (2011) addresses Stalinism while “What Happened Here” (2012) concerns Stalin’s partner-turned-enemy Leon Trotsky.

Shot in one of the Tenderloin's fantastic old buildings, “The Steppes” follows the elderly Ukrainian owner of a flop-house hotel. Although I haven’t seen it, Irit Levi, who also produced, is said to deliver a stunning performance as a woman haunted by the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine which killed as many as five million Ukrainians in the 1930s. Evidently, it is also augmented by a powerful score by longtime Nilsson sound-person and -designer, Al Nelson.

For “What Happened Here”, which also features an excellent soundtrack (by Daniel David Feinsmith, this time), Nilsson traveled to The Ukraine where a local television producer, Olga Zhurzhenko, helped him find Trotsky’s home town and his mother’s grave, both in ruins. Returning later that year with Freeman, Nilsson interviewed the people in the area about Trotsky, the Holodomor and the Nazis, who seized the town in 1941 and annihilated its Jews.

Nilsson spent almost year on research. After discovering, in the archives of Washington DC's Holocaust Museum, an eye-witness testimony about the Nazi atrocities there, Nilsson located its author, Mikhael Derenkovski, with the help of young Israeli filmmakers, and interviewed him in Israel.

Nilsson (rt) and co-director John Hanson introduce their 40-year-old 'Prairie Trilogy' on its recent world premiere tour, at the Metrograph in Manhattan, July 2018. photo: D. Blair

When an Israeli film organization gave an award to “What Happened Here”, the elderly Derenkovski “spoke with such humility and power, it was as if he’d been speaking before the public his whole life,” Nilsson recalled. “It brought everything full circle—an event I’ll never forget.”

Nilsson was inspired to make this film pairing by reading a biography of Trotsky but also his own interest in socialism and its breaking point, where it crosses into fascism, an investigation which started with “Prairie Trilogy” and “Northern Lights”.

“You can’t eat the rich,” Nilsson told me, matter-of-factly.

“I always felt the doctrinaire side of the Left has been its Achilles Heel. They got to have everyone equal, which cannot happen in any sense. You aren’t as good a piano player as that guy; you can’t shoot [film] like that guy. No, there’s differences, and we should love the difference, praise it, give it everything it can get.”

“Equality of opportunity is a goal we should work towards, but after that there is no equality. Let’s celebrate personal differences and nourish it. Let’s not send philosophers and ballet dancers out to harvest rice. The Cambodian farmers just laughed at them.”

“Once you read and find out what happened to the Bolsheviks, the Maoists, the Cambodians, the French Revolution—something cracked. [They] didn’t maintain the level of empathy that organizations like that need.”

“At Cine Manifest,” Nilsson told me back in 2008, “I argued to avoid ideology. I opposed the thought that there is any single idea that solves the human issues.”

“All humans have to be judged on a case-by-case basis," he said, in our recent interview. " Other members of Cine Manifest were Marxist-oriented lefties... but I was more of a populist/anarchist,” in the good sense of those words, he hastened to add.

“When you read Madison and Hamilton,” he elaborated in a recent email, “you realize they were very wary of human nature. They thought it was… more realistic to trust appealing to people’s interests, rather than relying on what they claimed were their values. Your biggest enemy is often in the family or the state next door.”

Consuela Faust and Nilsson in a love scene from 'Heat and Sunlight' (1987), a film esteemed highly by the critics as well as, in an odd synchronicity, Nilsson himself. photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

But what could compel people to be more generous—fiscally, emotionally, philosophically—great films, perhaps? In this time of blockbuster-ruled box offices, even as tiny cameras and YouTube access attempt to revolutionize cinema, visionary films are few and far between. Some have magical moments, brilliant lines and honest portrayals, but all at once, or film as a form of poetry, not so much.

“I happened to watch ‘Fugitive Kind’ [1960, director, Sidney Lumet, writer, Tennessee Williams] again,” Nilsson admitted, as if confessing a secret Hollywood habit.

“I watched Anna Magnani and [Marlin] Brando and it transcends…” he waved his arms broadly again. “Anna Magnani is one of the MOST present actresses I have EVER seen! Her emotions are so raw and Brando is Brando. God knows where he came from—that is just a personal gift.”

“But those who don’t have that charisma, who are working from the belly out, because they don’t know how to do anything else, because it has an element of honesty, of being truthful to oneself," Nilsson explained, "that’s what I care about.”

“The intermediary of a script and all of the paraphernalia of a set—go here and turn left and make your mark—that to me is just horrid. Even when it is done by... Bergman OK, Bertolucci OK, you can’t argue against those geniuses."

“It is not a business, the ‘film business.’ That, I think, largely leads people astray, away from the ‘ore.’ Which isn’t to say the ore will always be fashioned into something elegant and beautiful, or rough and savage—a wonderful piece of art.”

“But if you don’t start with that, or there are too many people telling you, ‘You can’t do this, there’s a union regulation and all this stuff,’" Nilsson said, drawing to a close. "You can’t do what a poet does or a painter does.”

Nilsson certainly mined ore during the 2000s, when he was mostly working with the yGroup on the "9 @ Night" films.

It was an intense period of creativity, we can assume, given the titles, which are almost all stark, single words: “Used” (2007), “Go Together” (2007), “Pan” (2006), “Need” (2004), “Attitude” (2003), “Noise” (2003), “Singing” (2000), “Stroke” (2000), all kicked off by the highly-heralded “Chalk,” (1996), which included Harvey Mandel as a surfer.

Sadly, cineSOURCE's per article budget, which we've already overdrawn by a factor of a fifty, precludes us from extensive old work review and I've yet to see a single "9 @ Night" film. To fill in the gap, however, here's an article by Ray Carney, a film scholar who's written books on Cassavetes and Dryer the "Surviving on the Margin", concerning Nilsson's Harvard Film Archive show. Connected to his alma matter, Harvard, the Archive screened all nine "9 @ Nights”, around 15 hours worth, one weekend in November 2007.

According to Carney: "Nilsson has been serving as the conscience and agent provocateur of low-budget American independent filmmaking [for thirty years]... He has devoted his cinematic career to presenting the sorts of sociological realities, interpersonal interactions, and emotional transactions that have been screened out of big-budget, mainstream American film."

(lf-rt) John Cale, of the Velvet Underground, Carl Lumbly, the well-known television actor, and their director Nilsson in 'Love Twice', at its premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival, 2016. photo: D. Blair

If "serving as the conscience" of American indies through nine "9 @ Night” films was not enough, during the same period Nilsson made “Security” (2006), about life after the 9/11 attacks, “Winter Oranges” (2000), a collaboration with a Japanese cine-tribe (Hiroshima’s Studio Malaparte), and “A Town Has Turned to Dust” (1998), an utter anomaly.

“A Town Has Turned to Dust” is Nilsson’s most Hollywood production—even more than “On the Edge"—given it was made for the dreaded TV monster and from a full screenplay, albeit one penned by the respected Rod Sterling for the BBC, forty years earlier, oddly enough. Within this utterly un-Nilssonian scenario (he updated the original to a post-apocalypse future), a racist merchant accuses an employee of rape and robbery. When the sheriff is unable to stop the vigilantes, a reporter visiting Earth from New Angeles—a megalopolis far, far away—does.

Somewhere in there (I can't find the date—it's missing from Nilsson's IMDb page) was a film even more outside Nilsson's geographical zone but very much in his cultural one: "Samt". Shot in Amman, Jordan, under the auspices of ZENID, the Queen Zein Al Sharaf Institute for Development, "Samt" probably emerged from a week-long Direct Action workshop and intimately addressed its participants issues.

So what is next for the Bay Area’s not-well-known-enough painter, poet, filmmaker and visionary, who pioneered an entire cinematic genre, especially now that he's supposedly doing his last major film, "Nomad Trilogy"?

“I'm now writing my take of my life,” he told me by email on July 25th. “You had a lot of it well organized [in previous cineSOURCE articles]. I'll certainly credit you if I use any of it. But I'm using my writing as a test of memory. What continues to read... what small moments continue to inspire or rankle.”

“Not sure who would want to read this," he continued. "I'm going to put in my poetry, my paintings, fragments and things I never let anyone read, and... free associate myself through my thoughts, beliefs and convictions. It's a kick to go back there, sometimes a boot [to the rear]... sometimes a bittersweet cut.”

Naturally, Nilsson’s urge towards autobiographical compilation and contemplation is not limited to text.

“I have my movies; I have my poetry; and I have my paintings,” he reflected, at the end of our interview. “I just had an art show at Spark Arts,” in San Francisco.

“I am trying to think: How does my painting integrate with the movies, which I have also shown in [the Sparks] gallery? How can I pull all three things [including the poetry] together and have a single show? I have been wracking my brains.”

“I have come up with this: I am going to call the whole ‘gallimaufry’, if that is how you pronounce it [meaning confused jumble in Old French], ‘Tenderloin.’"

Nilsson, in front of the 'Love Twice' poster, chatting with film and film school director Christopher Coppola, who cast him as a vampire in his 'Sacred Blood' (2015). photo: D. Blair

"I am going say: ‘The Tenderloin is a place in San Francisco. It is a major place for South East Asian families and small businesses. But it is also a dumping ground, a place for homeless, a place for graft and vice and drugs and suffering.”

Earlier in our interview, Nilsson told me that his interest in suffering was sparked by the recent bestseller, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” (2014, English), by the Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari. “I love one of his aphorisms,” he said, “which is that the closest thing one can find as an identifying characteristic of people is suffering.”

“I am going to show the suffering of the paintings; the suffering of the ‘9 @ Night’ films; and of my poetry. And I am going to say that a percentage of all the proceeds will go to the Faithful Fools Street Ministry,” which hosted the yGroup, and “that it is helping the suffering people there.”

“Suffering, so that’s the final upshot,” Nilsson concluded, looking like nothing less than—in his gaunt but vibrant old age—a saint from a Dreyer film, “a lot like what the Buddha has been trying to tell us.”

I looked around. The majority of our interview transpired in Nilsson’s downstairs screening room, where I had once crawled on the floor to prove a long-forgotten point; where he had shown so many fantastic films, his own and by others; and where he had shot not a small number of them.

It was now a ruin, torn apart, the big screen in the front as well as the fixtures in the back—gone. There were dozens of boxes, filled with endless flotsam and jetsam. Nilsson will soon be moving on, moving out of this fantastically-utilitarian house/studio he's inhabited and worked his ass off in for over two score years—completing that circle.

Nilsson had also paused and was looking around.

“What do I own? These paintings? These films here?” he said, banging a film can. “This is the only thing I feel proud of.”

“I have a skull—you see that skull up there, the baboon’s skull? David Schickele picked that up on [Mount] Kilimanjaro. He gave me that when he was dying [in 1999, age 62]. It was totem of his and he knew I knew that—that is why I value it.”

“When we went together back to Biafra in the ‘70s [in part to show Schickele’s “Bushman”], we found that the last hippo in the Cross River [local name: Oyono; location: southeastern Nigeria] had been killed. From then on we had this name for each other, ‘Hippo.’”

“The two of us were hippos. I’ve got a couple of hippos around here; once in while he would send me one. Animal totems were part of our friendship,” he said. "David was a big influence in my life.”

A self-portrait painting by Nilsson, circa 1985. image: R. NIlsson

I felt like crying. Rob was a big influence on my life. When I first met him, in 1986, I felt so enamored because I, too, was making an improvised film "Sammy Delerium" (sic), with my own cinema tribe (see "Brief History of Modern Lovers Commune and Ancient Currents Gallery".

Unfortunately, within two years, the group had disbanded and "Sammy Delerium" was abandoned. I doubted Nilsson would recall my unfinished feature from forty years ago, during which time he has made fifty films, so I didn't mention it.

Moreover, he had told me, on our way to see "Blindspotting", that he doesn't brook much depression. Yes, severe existential angst does enter his mind on occasion, he admitted, but after a few minutes of indulging or exploring it, you have to buck up and get on with the production of life at hand, he admonished.

Nilsson suddenly stepped out of his own introspection and turned to me—yet another one of his abilities: intense empathic interest in the other, which obviously fuels his filmmaking.

“What do you think? You suddenly seem kind of down.”

“It’s kind of heartbreaking, you know, Rob,” I said, choking up, “The fact that cineSOURCE couldn’t support you enough, that the Bay Area cinema scene couldn’t support you enough, that you have to move out of your place in your old age—to what, a retirement home?”

“Who told you that?” he retorted.

“This room is full of moving boxes; that was the impression you gave; that is what your contractor was saying right outside; that was—“

“This sounds good for some sort of life cycle bullshit you were hoping to put in your article, but it isn’t true.”

“I’m not leaving. I’m renting out one unit and developing this one to better create and show the work. I’m also creating new financial arrangements, which are personal business and not part of the article—so please don't mention it," he concluded, glaring at me.

And so Nilsson snapped me back to the beginning, Schickele and Nigeria, while jamming me forward with his ascetic discipline to make movies and other art at the highest level of creativity, as well as to treat each other equitably, all exemplified by his massive, multi-disciplinary oeuvre.

The sum total of this he hopes to bring together in one last show. Although he warrants a floor at SF's Museum of Modern Art, its curators are probably not adequately or at all aware of his inordinate work, innovation and world-wide influence, so he will have to settle for a smaller institution.

On the plus side, that will allow him more of his highly-coveted independence in precisely how he curates his sun-drenched paintings, his cooler visionary poems and his 51 films—54 with "Nomad Trilogy".

Obviously, he will need multiple screening rooms: one for the early achievements, one for "9 @ Night", another for the little gems, like the one about the mother and son reunion—which still sits burnt into my mind's eye, despite its production flaws. "Another room will have nine large TV screens, each playing one of the 9 @ Night films on continuous loops, with headphones available for an audience to hear the sound on individual screens," he told me.

This will probably happen when he finishes “Nomad Trilogy”, which I would guess will be in 2020—hopefully a good year for hindsight.

Wrong again, as I have been so many times in this moving target of an article. Indeed, this just in:

"Marshall Spight, my old friend and constant collaborator, has agreed to host 'Tenderloin' at Meets the Eye, his cutting edge green screen studio in San Carlos," Nilsson told me, via email on December 19th. It will feature an eighteen-foot tall "temple," designed by Spight, to show all nine of the "9 @ Night" films simultaneously, just as Nilsson imagined, plus extensive wall space for his paintings and drawings and a poetry reading—now scheduled for the spring of 2019!

Sure, "The Tenderloin Show" may not earn accolades equal to "Heat and Sunlight” or "Prairie Trilogy", which is still touring the indie circuit, let alone bring in sufficient funding for the Faithful Fools Street Ministry or his needy comrades-in-arts.

Nevertheless, it will undoubtedly “smash the iron ball and chain of excessive plot” and crack open the multiplex wall or smart phone screen enough to rouse from slumber a few child-prodigy cinema brats—like Michelle Anton Allen, long ago in Los Angeles—to the oft-hidden fact that:

There is liquid light, there is honest feeling and there is revolutionary poetry in moving pictures.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Nov 13, 2018 - 12:31 AM
Soros, Jewish Bankers and Interest Explained
by Doniphan Blair

Currency trader, philanthropist and open society activist, as well as Holocaust survivor, George Soros at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, this year. photo: courtesy Bitcoinist

WITH THE FIRST REAL POGROM IN
American history—the Pennsylvania slaughter of eleven Jews in a synagogue, on the Sabbath no less (Oct 27th)—and President Trump growing ever more inflammatory, dropping dog whistles like piss marks, many Jews, liberals and people of good will, including many friends of mine, particularly female, are feeling rather freaked out.

Some are depressed; others are wringing their hands; a few have asked me, “What are we going to do?”

Anti-Semitism did not abate with the Holocaust, many of us were shocked to learn, late in life. That is because anti-Semitism faded during the four decades following World War II, while many of us were growing up, leaving us without an early, frightening cautionary experience. Alas, anti-Semitism is on a tear today, as we can see, from homicidal hometown shut-ins and white nationalists to European and Middle Eastern intellectuals, from 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists to otherwise laudable leftists, who nevertheless retain an oddly oversized obsession with Israel.

After studying the matter for 35 years, discussing it with Jews, gentiles, Holocaust survivors (including my mother) and a few neo-Nazis, as well as helping to make the movie “Our Holocaust Vacation” (2007), I was lucky enough to stumble on four seemingly game-changing discoveries.

“Seemingly,” I say because when I announced them two years ago in cineSOURCE, “Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed” (2016), there was hardly uproarious acclaim.

My most earthshaking finding? A few Jews lent money at interest—sometimes high interest, sometimes what is called usury, although the exact percentage where interest becomes usury is rarely specified—during the Middle Ages.

Brilliant deduction Einstein, you might say, given the popular middle America saying “Don’t Jew me,” Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice” (1598), and everyone’s favorite Elder of Zion, financier and civil society advocate George Soros. But, when I was growing up in New York, across the street from the world’s largest rabbinical school, attending majority-Jewish schools, literally surrounded by Jews, no one once breathed the words “medieval Jewish moneylending.”

“That’s because it didn’t exist,” would probably be the response of Julie L. Mell, an associate history professor, who teaches medieval and Jewish history at North Carolina State University. Although the pressing need to publish this essay precluded my perusal of Professor Mell’s book, her title is telling: “The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender” (2017).

With all due respect to those who claim medieval Jewish moneylending was invented outright by zoological anti-Semites or exaggerated to an extreme, it is not hard to see or research that:

A) civilizations need capital to operate; B) “The Bible” outlaws lending at interest; C) the Catholic Church was the bank during the Dark Ages (how else did they build all those fancy churches?); D) when Christ didn’t return to kick off the second millennia, Church fathers concluded it was due to sin, the biggest one being that they themselves lent money at interest; E) to keep civilization crawling out of the Dark Ages, they needed a tax loophole with God; F) the Jews, who were living next door to the Vatican, as well as across Europe, could read, write and do a little math—some even had far-flung relatives with whom they were trading; which brings us to G):

“Hey, I have a great idea to solve this goddamn interest problem,” a bishop must have shouted in Latin, in the middle of the eleventh century, “We can lend money at interest to the Jews, who are going to hell anyway, and they can lend to the Christians, allowing us to make our 'vic' and keep God happy, while providing the peasants a way to survive the winter.”

Although I have not read Professor Mell, I just reread “The Jew in the Medieval Community”, written by Reverend James Parkes in the 1940s, after he fled for his life from Germany and was living under their bombardment in England. A medieval and Judiaica scholar, Parkes realized that the time had come to finally review all available ancient texts, letters and laws concerning medieval Jewish moneylending.

The cover of Reverend James Parkes's 'The Jew in the Medieval Community' showing Christians and Jews arguing, books in hand. photo: courtesy J. Parkes

“It was unfortunate that [medieval society] did not recognize that [Jewish] men followed moneylending as a profession,” Parkes concludes on page 282, “because society needed to be able to borrow money, and that many of their loans were made for the profit of the borrower.”

“Medieval Jewish moneylending” are three words that strike terror in the hearts of BOTH Jewish educators, scholars and clerics, who are stumped as to how to summarize such a complex, ancient issue, AND haters, anti-Semites and neo-Nazis, who need an all-controlling puppet master and father figure on whom to blame their grandfather’s, their father's and their own mistakes.

The mere fact of medieval Jewish moneylending, regardless of the details, allows people to fantasize that Jews built a secret compartment inside European banking, which lets them control interest rates, a notion supposedly certified by the notorious forgery—or revealing historical document, according to conspiracists—“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (1903, Russian police).

Interests rates are even more criminal than killing the revolutionary Jesus Christ, which “The Bible” tells us the Romans did and even simple-minded Christians realize they must forgive. Obviously, you can’t be both a pacifist follower of Christ and rabid wolf baying to crucify the Jews, while Christ can’t die for your sins and not be crucified (by the Romans, of course, although a Jewish mob may have cheered them on).

Indeed, the banking libel is bigger than the medieval blood libel, which accused Jews of harvesting Christian children to make their Passover matzo, and continued to emerge periodically until the 20th century, especially in Eastern Europe.

While the blood libel was cannibalistic and absurd—shouldn't blood make white matzo red?—the banking libel seemed to make sense and appealed to broad swaths of the world's population. Published as fact by the Nazis and anti-Semites like Henry Ford, "The Protocols" gathered believers across the 20th century and had a resurgence in the 21st, post-9/11. Indeed, “The Protocols” are available today at many ethnic or nationalist book outlets, as well as online versions, while Arabic editions can consume up to five percent of any given year's book runs in Egypt, which is the center of Arab publishing.

What can Jews do? They are the most readily-available “other” on which small-minders can blame big problems. Indeed, they are the perfect scapegoat, as Freud conceded in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929).

This is simply because the Jews are Western Civilization’s oldest, well-documented group—precursing the Greeks and about whom a blockbuster bestseller was written—who are still intimately involved in its evolution. Given the fact that: A) Jewish people were present at every major point in Western Civilization (Egypt, Greece, Christ, Rome, the Middle Ages, both of Spain’s Golden Ages, Magna Carta England and Germany’s 19th century unification and expansion), and that B) many people believe Western Civilization went off its rails and injured their grandfathers, you get C) the Jews must have conspired to screw their tribe somehow.

And so we have the vicious circle: Even though the Jews appear to have been severely punished for their supposed sins, from medieval pogroms through the Holocaust to today’s military and moral attacks on Israel, they’re still doing well. How can that be? They must control interest rates! Moreover, they’re more dangerous than people of color (although some are also that) because many can pass as white (hence the neo-Nazi chant: "You shall not replace us").

When I finally figured out medieval Jewish moneylending, around age thirty, after years of reading references to it while doing research at the Holocaust Library of Northern California, in San Francisco, I broached the subject with my mother.

“Don’t be an idiot anti-Semite,” she barked right back. “I grew up in one room, without water or electricity. There were no moneylenders in my city, as far as I could see.”

Admittedly, my mother's city was conquered by the Nazis when she was fourteen, precluding her ability to examine it, and she is not a professor of Jewish history or a rabbi. Nor were they honest or forthcoming. Indeed, if you peruse the indexes of books on Jewish history, of which there are hundreds, only a handful have more then a few entries under “moneylending,” and even fewer attempt to explain what happened, let alone adequately.

“The Bible”, also a book on Jewish history, as well as myth, philosophy, law and romance, does much better than most with eighteen moneylending mentions, all of which forbid the practice to fellow tribal members. It also enjoins Jews to forgive non-tribal members all loans, indentured servitude or promissory notes every seven years, during the so-called Jubilee Year, as well as to enact other redemptive measures, like leaving some harvest in the field to be gleaned by the poor.

Lending at interest TO FOREIGNERS, on the other hand, is not only perfectly legal but absolutely mandatory, both to Biblical authors as well as almost all other civilizational figures.

In point of fact, no merchant in their right mind, two thousand years ago or today, in the Middle East, Mongolia or Mexico, would hand over one hundred sheep to someone without them promising, when they came back the following year, to return the herd plus some of the new-born lambs. That would be the benefit of the transaction, some of which must cover the cost of the lender not having the benefit of a hundred sheep for one year, lest we disincentivize lending.

“Poppycock,” might be the retort of anthropologist and best-selling author David Graeber, albeit not using that word, since his 2011 “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” is very readable and well, if selectively, researched. Although “Debt” is a comprehensive, 500-page accounting of the myriad methods oppressors enslave people using debt and interest—and they are disgusting—it allocates only two pages to Jewish moneylending. That is hardly enough to explain the complexity, no matter how great the author, while still tarring the Jews as debt slavers.

Aside from Graeber and Marx, who studied lending at interest and didn't like it, almost none of our most influential philosophers, as far as I can see, have looked into it, despite the obvious fact that lending at interest is more critical to Western Civilization than geometry or electricity. Lending at interest is so central, in fact, it is the bright line dividing civilization, our supra-social structure, from our older, still very powerful human grouping, tribe.

I stumbled on this closely-held secret some thirty years ago, but it is so complicated I made no mention of it in my recent treatise, “Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto”.

Lending at interest was so difficult and divisive during Europe's transition from tribe to civilization, almost two-thirds of medieval rabbinical writing on record was concerned with it. Indeed, the two fiscal systems are diametrically opposed and almost impossible to reconcile.

While tribes do not lend at interest internally, because they enforce all responsibilities, including fiduciary, through family ties, civilizations exist largely due to lending at interest. Yes the Muslims, who also adopted the Hebrew interest prohibition, developed a workaround whereby they treated loans as investments, with income dependent on outcome, that is too complex for many deals. Hence, Islam also depended on loans at interest, from forced Jewish moneylenders or others. Without interest, there would be no incentive for anyone to help a non-tribal member or to reinvest the surplus of one tribe into another tribe, the very definition of civilization.

Let me repeat: Without interest, there would be no incentive for anyone to help a non-tribal member or to reinvest the surplus of one tribe into another tribe, the very definition of civilization.

Yes, the resources needed to build civilization—the buildings, armies and infrastructure, the castles and crowns—can simply be stolen by force. But the fact of the matter is: it is easier and more efficient for kings and tyrants to borrow at interest, since people will offer their capital willingly, on the assumption of recompense at a profit. Meanwhile borrowing at interest makes it much easier for average folk to recover from a natural or enemy-inflicted catastrophe, or to develop a business or invention.

Indeed, with the maturation of rule of law in Holland and England around the 16th century, which vastly increased the likelihood debts would be repaid, via the courts or debtor prisons, lending at interest created capitalism and—in tandem with the scientific revolution and The Enlightenment—modern civilization.

Back in the Middle Ages, however, the only professions open to most Jews were rag-picker and moneylender. Often the only Jews allowed to leave the ghettos, which were closed after the 11th century’s First Crusade (which started with a slaughter of Rhine Valley Jews), were the rag-picker and the moneylender. One wore actual rags, the other the finest couture and rode in a gilded carriage, going to dine with the prince.

By the way, Christendom’s popes, kings, bishops, princes and even saints frequently claimed that their oppression of the Jews—using ghettos, the obligation to wear funny caps or Stars of David, the enforced practice of usury, or outright violence—was part of their Christian love for the Jews, to push them to the "true religion" so they, too, could enjoy eternal life.

And so Jewish leaders were compelled to accept the churches’ and princes’ wealth and lend it back to the Christians at a healthy interest, gifting the church and princes a four-fer: avoiding sin, making money, building civilization AND destroying the Jews’ reputation.

In this way, the Jews simultaneously became both economically central and hated in most European principalities and many Muslim ones. Indeed, Jews lived inside the castle (where the women were often royal mistresses, making many European noble families part Jewish, if only genetically); Jews were fiduciary serfs, owned by the prince; this means they could be sold, lent at interest or harvested, although slaughtering them drove them to bury their wealth, forcing the princes to turn to blackmail, ransom and torture.

With Western Civilization’s dependence on Jewish banking besmirched by such grotesque practices, it’s no wonder peasants, farmers and workers became anti-Semitic. Imagine you’re an illiterate farmer in 17th century Ukraine, where the princes used “tax farming,” a practice originating in the ancient Middle East.

Not as bucolic as it might sound, tax farming in this case is where the richest local Jew is compelled, under pain of death, to pay the prince their region’s entire tax bill, up front, which they were then entitled to extract from the population, at whatever profit the market could bear.

Watching a wealthy Jew crisscrossing the countryside, collecting taxes, with the help of the prince’s Pretorian guard, just might turn a peasant from a giving Christian into a rabid anti-Semite, especially as the prince claims he himself is being squeezed by the Jews (the princes often gambled away all their liquid assets and became beholden to their Jews). Meanwhile, the priests are condemning Jews as Christ killers, demons and interest theives.

A related situation still stands today. On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s final ad “has been criticized for having anti-Semitic overtones and implying a vast international Jewish conspiracy behind Hillary Clinton… Philanthropist investor George Soros, Federal Reserve head Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, all of whom are Jewish, appear onscreen as Trump inveighs against ‘levers of power in Washington’ and ‘global special interests’—both considered anti-Semitic dog-whistles,” (The Times of Israel, 11/6/16).

Soros, as you may recall, made his first billion “shorting” the Bank of England in 1992, when Prime Minister John Major was artificially propping up the pound sterling.

Shorting, which was invented in 16th century by Isaac La Maire, a Dutch Jew, may seem like the most insane fiduciary instrument since tax farming, but it caught on because it is perfectly logical, legal and functional.

Shorting is when an entity loans shares to an investor, who either pays them back plus some, when the shares go up, or, when they go down, buys now-cheaper shares on the open market, repaying the loaned shares to the entity and pocketing the profit. Say A lends B 100 shares of A stock at $10 a share. If, after a set amount of time, the stock devalues to $9, B simply buys 100 A shares on the open market for $900, returns A the 100 shares and makes $100.

Although this is condemned by the tautology "making money from money," it is a perfectly logical use of funds which are simply another resource which can be hidden, held, invested or shared.

How does this help economies you might ask? Of course, when A’s stock goes up to $11, B simply pays $100. But, even if a short happens, the capital is kept close since it is usually a community member placing the short. In fact, companies often contract their own shorts as a form of insurance.

But does anyone ever take the time to explain lending at interest, medieval Jewish moneylending, shorting or Soros’s first billion to contemporary Hungarians, 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists, college kids or folks from ethnic communities featuring old-wives tales about Jews?

The short answer, as it were, is no.

The obvious, immediate and logical long answer would be for George Soros’s Open Society Foundations to produce a documentary series about the evolution of feduciary instruments with ten episodes, at a minimum—given it’s so damn complicated. In fact, Soros should host, simply so viewers can see for themselves that he doesn’t have horns. It could be titled just like this essay, “Soros, Jewish Bankers and Interest Explained”.

Barring that, Soros or one of my millionaire readers, of which I have one that I know of—and there are undoubtedly a few more, among the million plus millionaires in the Bay Area—should write me a check for $10,000, with which I can start this vitally important humanitarian project (cineSOURCE has access to a documentary production company).

Without such an educational effort, to save us from the insanity of blaming Jews for lending at interest, which they didn’t invent—that would be the Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians and other civilizations, in fact the Jews prohibited it—let’s at least try to get one economic fact straight:

The trick to lending at interest is not prohibition or limitation, a la Biblical Jews, medieval Christians or modern conspiracy theorists, but freedom, within some regulatory structure, so lenders can compete, which would allow the market to lower interest rates on its own. Once the average citizen comprehends the basic facts of interest rates as well as markets, they can start studying other normative investment methods, like shorting.

Yes, a few Jews have been at the forefront of inventing financial instruments, either due to compulsion in the Middle Ages, to being excluded from other professions, or to the brilliant math and risk taking of people like George Soros today. Yes, not all financial instruments are functional, as we found out the hard way in 2008, with the toxic bundled mortgages. And yes, new financial instruments are hard to regulate, precisely because they are new.

Nevertheless, we need and will keep inventing new financial instruments, of which lending at interest was the very first, after money itself.

As harsh as lending at interest’s side effects may be—if you think the 20th and 21st century is bad, check out the 19th century’s boom, bust and rampant fraud cycles—it did create the majority of our wealth, tools and toys. To begin functioning in a healthy fiduciary manner, to cut back on the pogroms, we have to get used to that five-thousand-year-old practice and cornerstone of civilization and stop blaming the Jews.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Nov 06, 2018 - 03:44 AM
The Harkness Ballet Was Camelot!
By Steven Middlestein

Rebekah Harkness (lft), founder/director of the Harkness Ballet and one of her top dancers, Marjorie Tallchief, a First Person of the Osage Nation. circa 1965. photo: courtesy Keystone Shows

THE HARKNESS BALLET BURST ON THE
burgeoning global dance scene in 1964, when the young Joffrey Ballet, in Manhattan, split over a power struggle for artistic control. Bold, brash and controversial, the Harkness revolutionized the way dance is taught and performed until, suddenly, it disappeared.

What happened to the Harkness Ballet, a company that produced two international touring companies, a youth ballet and its very own theater, whose training program sent more dancers into the world of professional dance than any other company of its time? Indeed, the name “Harkness Ballet” has been almost totally eliminated from books on dance history.

“It is one of the great artistic mysteries of the 20th century," filmmaker Leslie Streit told me. Streit works with Robin McCain, as Cinematiks, out of a live-work in the Bayview district of San Francisco, and they decided to investigate.

"That’s why we decided to make a documentary about it, ‘An American Ballet Story’.”

Although ballet history or ballet itself is often considered a little elitist, they found a story they couldn’t resist, after stumbling on it in 2010. That was when the ODC dance school in San Francisco hired Cinematiks to cover a three-month workshop taught by Maria Vegh, the former co-director of the Harkness Ballet School.

When Vegh talked incessantly about the Harkness, that it was a world-class company, that it had danced at the White House and performed for Princess Grace, the infomercial expanded into a much longer project.

Although Streit grew up in New York City, she didn’t see dance or dance herself until her late teens when she suddenly was smitten. Obsessed with ballet and the lives of its dancers she studied not only the art but everything related to it.

Harkness Ballet Company dancers 'Time Out of Mind', 1974. photo: Milton Oleaga

Her first research, along with partner McCain, led straight back to the Ballet Russe, the notorious Parisian troupe which toured prodigiously between 1909 and 1929. Drawing on the Ballet Russe model of bringing together great artists to create spectacular productions, the Harkness Ballet employed the best minds of the 1960s from not only dance, music and visual art but politics, journalism and Broadway musicals.

The Harkness dancers, choreographers, composers and designers were pioneers and experimenters. Themes of sexual repression, homoerotic love, tribalism and even the aftermath of rape were explored by some of the most famous choreographers of the day, notably Brian Macdonald, Alvin Ailey, Stuart Hodes and Margo Sappington, whose pieces are highlighted in the film.

All of the work and much of the music was original. Modern, jazz, Spanish and Indian dance were also taught at the school. The core ballet curriculum was based on principles of Kinesiology (how the body moves) rather than traditional ballet's learning by imitation.

Founder Rebekah Harkness gave opportunities and scholarships to dancers and students regardless of race, body shape or background. Her philosophy of “dance for everybody” was truly ahead of its time. Both the company and the school reflected a diversity in line with the civil rights movement of the day—a fact that caused problems when they toured the South.

In addition to founding and directing the company, Harkness arranged and composed music, designed pointe shoes and established a foundation that still supports dance today. Her generosity to her dancers was legendary.

But so was the reaction of the art press. Indeed, Harkness was maligned by powerful New York critics who sought to destroy her, particularly Clive Barnes, an Englishman who ruled New York arts from his throne at the New York Times, 1965-77. Barnes had a personal agenda and never let up.

Was it because Harkness was rich and powerful? Or simply because she was a woman? Was he attacking her artistic tastes or the fact that she withdrew funding from the Joffrey Ballet, which he loved?

The Harkness dancers toured the world to high acclaim, circa 1968. photo: courtesy Harkness Archives

Although the company was a sensation when they toured in Europe, Barnes’s influence and vituperation were so great, audiences, impresarios and theater owners were forced to take sides.

The drama unfolded year by year, dance piece by dance piece. Stories about conspiracy theories and chaos within the company came out alongside the daring of the pieces and the excellence of the dancers, which are the true legacy of the Harkness Ballet.

The first Harkness Ballet, which began in 1964 with core members from the Joffrey Ballet, was disbanded in 1970 by Harkness for many reasons, which will be explored in the film. They were replaced by dancers trained at the Harkness Ballet School.

But in 1975 the bottom dropped out of her fortune and Rebekah Harkness fell on hard times. Despite drastic cutbacks, economizing, and a last-ditch attempt to solicit public funding, she could no longer support a major ballet company on her own. Donors were reluctant to fund a company on the receiving end of so many negative reviews by Barnes, so the second company came to an end.

The world had clearly changed. Nevertheless, the Harkness Ballet School continued to train dancers for another ten years, until it too closed.

Rebekah died in 1982. The key artists carried on with other companies, creating a post-Harkness world, while the Harkness Ballet’s own accomplishments were buried behind hard-to-access archival walls or legal issues of rights ownership.

Many questions arise: How does funding affect art? Who owns art, creators or funders? Does art criticism determine success or is it “fake news”? Did the walls at the sumptuous Harkness House actually have ears?

Most importantly: What does the Harkness saga mean to artists today?

“An American Ballet Story” went into production in 2015. With little time for pre-production, as the producers learned that some of their interview subjects were dying of old age or disease, they dove in using their own money.

To date they’ve made three production trips out-of-state New York City, Florida and Cincinnati, and three to Los Angeles. When they couldn’t afford travel fees, they sent DIY video kits to their subjects. In this way, more than 70 former Harkness dancers, choreographers, composers, technicians and designers have been interviewed and the project is now in post.

A group of Harkness dancers. photo: courtesy Harkness Dancers

Their current plans are to not use a narrator and let film unfold through interviews with the people who were actually there, with each individual story forming a short stand-alone piece.

“It was Camelot!” Marina Eglevsky, a former dancer, told them, while Andrea Cagan, another dancer, who is now a bestselling author, recalled opening night at the Harkness House, a Gilded Age mansion on Fifth Avenue and 75th Street. Looking up the stairs, Cagan spotted painter Salvador Dali swooping down in a black cape and, on his shoulder, an ocelot. “It was magnificent!” she exclaimed.

For many of the former Harkness artists, it was the greatest time of their lives.

It has taken over three years to unearth archival film and video (video was rare in that era), and a growing collection of photos. Amazingly, more films and photos keep showing up.

The film’s score will feature Lee Gurst, a composer and musician who has toured with Barry Manilow and Bette Midler. Additional music is by Marga Richter and Michael Kamen, and even Mrs. Harkness herself, who will accompany archival dance footage. The first rough cut is due in 2019.

Over their more than twenty years, Cinematiks has proved that compelling media can be made on minuscule budgets. Their “VD 2001” is widely recognized as the first dramatic series on the web (1996-97); their “God Wears My Underwear” (2005), an experimental film about the Holocaust, has earned many plaudits.

Their recent feature documentary, “Elly and Henry” (2017), concerns a love story and Holocaust survivors who built the first solar house in America. Distributed by Espresso Media International, it can be seen on Amazon and Amazon Prime. You can also see more about “An American Ballet Story” at its website, which has thirteen short video previews, or on its Facebook page.

Steven Middlestein is a writer, editor and movie fanatic and can be reached .

Posted on Nov 04, 2018 - 12:42 PM
DeWolf Smokes Monster Oakland Joint Film
by Doniphan Blair

Despite the suit and cool cat demeanor, Oakland filmmaker, writer and performer Jamie DeWolf inevitably reached a point in his interview where he had to express himself fully. photo: D. Blair

WITH ONE BLOCKBUSTER AND TWO
indie darlings this year, Oakland film has become the biggest thing since crack cocaine in the ‘80s, or the city’s crazed football fans, Raider Nation, a decade later, or the Golden State Warriors' four-year-old basketball dynasty, although they’re moving to a brand-new, half-a-billion dollar stadium in San Francisco at the end of the season.

Unfortunately, it may be too soon to crack the champs for Hollywood on the Estuary. Yes, “Panther”, “Sorry to Bother” and “Blindspotting” were created by Oaklanders, but they were mostly crewed by Hollywooders, a situation not likely to change soon.

In addition to getting gentrified out, many filmmakers are self-evicting. With commercial film relatively small in Oakland and big productions from out of town, many are making the six-hour drive south to the actual Hollywood, some permanently.

Six years ago, Oakland had high hopes as a film center. It had the actual Oakland Film Center (two buildings/25 businesses on the old army base), the Oakland Film Office (featuring the talented Ami Zins wooing producers with tax rebates and incredible location variety) and a startup film magazine (yours truly).

Within a few years, the Center was gone (see cineSOURCE article), the city had cut its commission by half and, although cineSOURCE is still with us (as you may have noticed), the city and most film businesses cancelled their ads.

“I just hope it is not the last chimes of the bell,” noted Jamie DeWolf, another great Oakland filmmaker, albeit in the scrappy DIY, or “grimy, guerilla Oakland,” as he calls it, genre. Indeed, DeWolf wrote, co-directed with Joshua Staley, and starred in “Smoked”, a drug-addled, one-liner laced, caper-comedy precisely six years ago.

Although Oakland had a through-the-roof murder rate in 2012 (127 killed), as well as plenty of theft, addiction, sex slavery and unemployment (it still does—please don’t tell anyone), it was also a cheap, fun place to live, work and play for tens of thousands of activists, artists, musicians, filmmakers and writers.

For those who hadn’t gotten with the Oakland program, well, “You’re just a blind man jerking off to braille,” as a character quips in “Smoked”, which is available on iTunes and Amazon.

“I really wanted the film to be good on the page,” DeWolf told me in our late-October interview (below). “I wasn’t interested in trying to make it naturalistic in any way. It was all about clever turns of phrase, much like we used to see back in the day, with old noir films, where everyone talked ‘smart.’"

Starting as a writer, director and actor, DeWolf had to learn to shoot and more to make his feature, 'Smoked' (2012). photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

How 'bout this smart talk: “Your asshole was a question mark that someone else had the answer for.”

A lanky, red-haired 41 year old (his birthday was October 28th), DeWolf is from the all-white suburbs of Benicia and resembles an insurance salesmen in the cheap suits he favors. Alas, if you made any other confirmation biases, you’d probably be wrong, given DeWolf is from the wrong side of the tracks, literally and figuratively,

A graduate of the university of hard knocks, DeWolf majored in drugs and suicide, with a minor in film, until he attended actual film school—after making "Smoked"! His early years are examined, with all of DeWolf's excess intensity as well as artistry, in a cinema love letter to an early girlfriend, "Strchynine Valentine" (2018), now on the festival circuit.

Plus his white privilege is extra giving, given his family is not only serious Bible bangers but Hubbards, as in L. Ron Hubbard, as in Hollywood's only homegrown religion, which is more patriarchal than Christianity.

After moving to Oakland in his 20s and falling in with a sometimes shady pack of artists, musicians and performers, DeWolf was soon surfing the spoken word scene and performing all over the world with The Suicide Kings, which included his "Smoked" co-stars, Geoff Trenchart and Rupert Estanislau.

They even taught classes at high schools, often performing a play about Columbine, the 1999 Colorado school shooting that launched a thousand mad men. More recently, he made a striking short on the subject, "Ricochet in Reverse", with Eric Harris played by Rafael Casal, the co-star/co-writer of “Blindspottings”’.

“That was the play. We toured that around a lot. We were very, very proud of it [but] we were also doing ‘Smoked’. ‘Smoked’ was my crazy antidote to this hard-hitting piece about teen violence and suicide.”

Given today’s culture cops, “Smoked” could probably not get made now, even by the sheer force of will DeWolf exerted. Indeed, Oakland film may survive but only as a theme park, as a set for movies about an edgy, integrated and heart-felt city, the way San Francisco was once Hollywood’s urban face of film noir. If so, perhaps it is time to take a closer at “Smoked”, which cineSOURCE missed somehow in 2012.

'Smoked' stars (lf-rt) Geoff Trenchart, Rupert Estanislau and Jamie DeWolf; here eyeballing a young, delicious female... marijuana plant. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

Yes, “Smoked” is harsh; yes, “Smoked” is raw; and yes, “Smoked” rattles on its rails a little in the fourth reel. BUT it remains a rollicking good and funny ride with a lot of sophisticated touches, take-downs and tales.

“Smoked” follows three hapless dopers, played by The Suicide Kings, as they concoct their plan, hold up a marijuana dispensary and try to sell the take to the Chinese mafia. They spend most of the film running from the dispensary’s owner, Shank, a coke-dealing revolutionary who went legit with legalized weed, yet another revolution California started in 1999.

Shank is perfectly played by local storyteller L. Abdul Kenyatta, who limped out of his hospital room soon after a stroke to finish the film. Shank's life summary opens “Smoked” with one of the most concise, cool and graphically filmed summaries of Oakland history I’ve ever seen.

There's also two thugs interrupted in a punch-fest by a woman with pit bull, which they protect themselves from by claiming they're gay; and crazy music, a modernist mix of Jewish Klezmer, horror theremin and dime-store Asian, and the absurdist elegance of a thirteen-year-old girl responding to a pistol with a riddle about a cigarette, while smoking one.

From there it’s down into a morass of robberies, pistol whippings, running, punching and shooting, with time outs for rapid repartee or for Estanislao, who in real life is a gangbanger turned punk singer turned performance artist, to coo lovingly over the phone to his girlfriend.

Indeed, “Smoked” has everything except sex, which is both still taboo and over filmed, with so many of our confreres porn junkies. Dewolf plays it for laughs with women walking around with their tits and their acerbic tongues out, a hard joke to pull off. But DeWolf is undaunted by cinema challenges, as we can easily see in this provocative sexy short, "A Girl and a Gun", or this mini-horror flick, "OK Monster!"

After getting DeWolf's number from a woman I met walking her dog , and chasing him down through the three different coffee shops he texted me the addresses of, I found him sitting serenely just outside the property line—to avoid legal issues, I assume—of Oakland’s esteemed Grand Lake Theatre.

DeWolf was wearing a bright red suit and tie and what looked like a red wig, although it turned out to be his real hair. From about a twenty feet away, I just launched into it.

DeWolf wanted to be interviewed right on the street, right next to the Grand Lake Theatre, for some reason. photo: D. Blair

cineSOURCE: That’s quite the film you got going there!

Jamie DeWolf: Thank you.

Was that an enormous headache?

Yeah, I pulled a lot of teeth to get it into being.

I was thinking it was going to be some sort of sane undertaking. It was totally crazy. I wrote the most impossible script for someone to start with: three main characters, nine villains, every scene in a new location, all the same day—incredibly complex to pull off.

I wanted to make a chase film that has a constant sense of moving through the city, a calamitous day for all the characters. I probably wasn’t thinking, when I was writing, that this was going to end up being 70 random shoot days with no budget.

70, wow!

Whatever it was, we were never able to do [full weeks].

A lot of the people in the film didn’t have official acting experience, but they were all performers: either rappers, comedians, poets or storytellers. A lot of the roles I wrote for them, specifically.

We shot whenever we could. Some actors would vanish. One guy ODed, so we had to rewrite scenes.

He died?

No, but he couldn’t be in the movie anymore.

I had to be fanatically stubborn to get it made. There were probably 20 times we could have stopped. I just kept foraging ahead.

I knew the film would never be perfect. There were some shots [where] the exposure was out of whack, the sound was all over the place [but] I had to hit the finish line to get to my next one.

It was a pretty insane undertaking. I’m glad I did it. It was probably the most arduous film school possible. I actually went to film school after that.

Which one?

SF State. [But] I felt that nothing they were teaching me was anywhere near getting your ass kicked by a guerillas film.

You must have had some film chops before that?

Jaylee Alde, who plays the heavy in 'Smoked', tries to extract information from a thirteen-year old girl—unsuccessfully! photo: courtesy of J. DeWolf

I had been a film maniac ever since I was in middle school.

Where?

Benicia, next to Vallejo [30 miles outside Oakland].

I had a partner and we used to run around in the summer and make all these insane, kind of violent, action movies and weird, dark comedies with whatever cameras we could find. Driving around in a van, we’d pull up, grab some friends and go out to the wilderness and, you know, stage these insane scenes.

I was used to forcing things into being—if you want to make something happen, just do it!—DO NOT wait for permission!

We were churning through a lot of films, which led me to performance art. I ended up in the world of poetry slams, these lyrical battles that were erupting all over the United States [starting at a Chicago jazz club in ‘80s, blowing up in the ‘90s].

I ended up touring a lot with the two other [main] guys in the movie, Geoff [Trenchard] and Rupert [Estanislau].

The white guy looks like a famous actor.

Geoff—he’s a lawyer now.

Our trio was called The Suicide Kings: Geoff, me and Rupert. We were all sort of crazy teens, coming from very different backgrounds—we didn’t meet until our 20s. All of us had a violent adolescence, in whatever ways, and we started performing together.

We would do writing workshops inside high schools and middle schools—we ended up doing a lot of those. At first it was shocking anyone would invite us into a high school. Then we realized how important it was for us to be an example, the example that you can be a messed up malcontent but art is an escape route, a method of survival, whether performance, hip hop, theater.

We toured all over, all the way to Russia, doing plays. We toured with the full-length play called ‘In Spite of Everything’ about school shootings and survival through art. A very hard-edged play [which became the film ‘Ricochet in Reverse’].

‘Smoked’ evolved for me as something I would write when we were on tour: this wild, dark comedy that was NOT as hard hitting as the play.

We would meet a lot of kids who were suicidal, who made poems with references to violence. We would wrestle with: How do we deal with this appropriately, considering I was one of those kids in high school?

You were a suicidal kid in high school?

DeWolf likes to cover a lot ground, both talking fast and surfing through stories of being a suicidal teen, a father at 21 and a film writer, director, actor, editor, shooter, etc, etc. photo: D. Blair

Absolutely, on a downward spiral, a tailspin, who had that desperate mentality of, ‘If I am going to sink, I am going to take the whole ship with me,’ that sort of diseased, adolescent mentality.

‘In Spite of Everything’ was—

The fictional premise is that we were doing a writing workshop the day before a student comes to that class and kills everyone, his teacher and himself—and leaves a note implicating us.

The plays goes through a series of interrogations. We asked ourselves, if this happened in reality, what would happen?

What would happen is: the police would come after us and go through all of our backgrounds, which pushes the question: If you had a violent, disturbed adolescence and come out the other side, should people [not] allow you to work with students? [Or] should you be the first to work with students, because only you understand what a lot of them are going through?

The play evolved through a lot of scenes, characters, vignettes, all basically about surviving through art and how do you internalize trauma. Every one of us [Suicide Kings] had been molested, had gone through all types of violent upbringings, and so on.

It was about looking at that with a fearless, ferocious eye, acknowledging the ugliness you have been a part of and [figuring out] what are you going to do about it, as an adult. How do you internalize it? What are you going to offer those who are facing some of those same challenges?

That was the play. We toured that around a lot. We were very, very proud of it [but] we were also doing ‘Smoked’. ‘Smoked’ was my crazy antidote to this hard-hitting piece about teen violence and suicide.

You obviously think showing violence is not unhealthy, that it is kind of cathartic.

Anyone who argues the art and violence thing… it is such a hypocritical conversation. Often it is by the same people shoving 'The Bible' in some kid’s brain.

I grew up super Christian. I saw Jesus get crucified in grisly detail many times by the time I was twelve. ‘This is horrifying!’ [I would say.] ‘You need to see this!’ ‘This is what Jesus went through for you!’ ‘Watch the lashes on his back, the blood spraying!’

Violence is a part of our history, part of our psychology. I am certainly drawn in my art to explore difficult subjects. I would argue a lot of my artistic sensibility is dark: whether it is dark comedy [laughs], or a dark, hard hitting piece—that is how my psychology variates.

I love to do things that are hilarious and insane. [But] once I scratch that itch, I go, like, ‘What is challenging and confessional and rough but honest?’ That level of rawness, I have been very comfortable living in that realm.

DeWolf has hosted a monthly vaudeville-like show at the Oakland Metro since 1999; seen here promoing a faux fight. photo: D. Blair

For instance, I just finished a short film called ‘Strychnine Valentine’, which we just submitted to a bunch of festivals.

It is all about one of my very first girlfriends. I watched crystal meth and heroin completely devour her life. She became this harsh lesson that poison doesn’t play favorites. It doesn’t matter who you are, how beautiful you are, [it] is just an empty mouth that will consume anything in its path.

This was a very significant lesson that completely set me on a different road. It is a pretty dark film, but it is absolutely 100% honest, as brutal and raw as I could make it—beautiful in its own way.

I will also do a dark comedy about a family trying to figure out how to hide a body—an all-female crime caper.

To me, violence is going to happen anyway, no matter what kind of art comes out or not. A lot of violence, if you aren’t able to show its true brutality, whether for laughs or impact, I think that is more dangerous. It is more dangerous to sidestep the consequences of violence.

In ‘Smoked’, which is a dark comedy, there is a whole cycle, a coming around. Once you open the door to hell, you are going to get burnt, the classical criminal arc: There is always a consequence.

We would film some scenes [to ‘Smoked’], then go on tour with the play, teaching at different schools. I was also putting on my monthly series, which I still do, ‘Tourettes without Regrets' since 1999, first Thursday of the month at the Oakland Metro Opera House.

‘Tourettes Without Regrets’ features live performers, rappers, circus acts, comedians, poets. So a lot of that world was woven through ‘Smoked’. So much of ‘Smoked’ is based on our lives, a ‘mild’ exaggeration: having the rapper get shot on stage, Oakland’s grimy, punk kids, friends who are pretty hard-core criminals, kind of ‘whackitty’ drug folk, artists and performers.

It synthesized all those crazy anarchic elements into one ‘Bananas’ ride.

The film, in strange way, is a real microcosm of that time. I pretty much threw my whole world into that movie, as ridiculous as that is. I couldn’t believe how hard it was to make a sort of wacky, dark comedy about a cannabis club robbery.

But a film is a film, it doesn’t matter what the subject is or how seriously you want to take it. The complexity is still the same.

You haven’t done another feature since?

I’ve done 75 shorts, it feels like.

It was such a brutal and humbling experience, I resolved I would never put myself in the position where I wasn’t able to do everything.

Jamie DeWolf in his trickster, happy place. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

When I started [‘Smoked’] I couldn’t expose a shot if you handed me a camera. Coming out the end of that film, I was shooting it, editing, working with the sound mix—everything that had to happen. [Now] I shoot, I direct, I edit—I don’t like doing sound—but I can do everything.

You prefer that?

Not necessarily, if there is budget, I would rather not. [But] I realized, you are better off as a guerilla filmmaker if you can shoot. You don’t have to wait for a DP [director of photography].

Some of the people working on the film just moved really slow. That is not the way I shoot.

Since then, I have been a one-man documentarian; I have directed whole projects with film crews. I have been so busy, actually, with all of these other shorts and films and grants and documentaries and music videos.

I have five features ready to go. And I’m also starting to think again about my family history, which is the L. Ron Hubbard family.

You are from the Hubbards?

L. Ron Hubbard is my great-grandfather; L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. is my grandfather. I am not a Scientologist—at all. I was NOT born a Scientologist. The last Scientologist in my family was L. Ron Hubbard, Jr.

L. Ron created Scientology, raised his son in it, who became sort of his right hand man—also his enforcer. Yeah, he used to beat people up, shake them down, destroy their enemies. Then they had a massive falling out and went to war, all the way to their end days.

That is a whole subset of my life and I do performances of that. ‘The God and The Man’ is a piece that I performed for Snap Judgment [radio show].

Were you able to sell ‘Smoked’?

We got distribution through Indican Studios in LA. They also put out ‘Boondock Saints’ and different genres. We had a friend [Eric Jacobus, see cineSOURCE article] who got a feature film released by them, an action, comedy, martial arts flick.

I learned an important lesson: you have to be really careful monitoring your energy.

When you start a film, you may be signing on to three years of your life. You have to be ready for the stamina it takes. By the time I reached the end of it, I had gone from being a writer-actor-director to having to sit in a studio and grind through small, minute increments of volume changes or color corrections.

Near the end, I was really burnt. It was such an exhausting, grueling process, I just wanted to make a whole gang of shorts, of all different kinds, to showcase I could be the director that I knew I could be, which is kind of an endless goal.

It is coming time [for another feature]. I’ve been developing a few scripts. I have been waiting to see which one I want to pull the trigger on. I have one larger one, that would require a much larger budget, and two in the scrappy style of ‘Smoked’.

The 'Smoked' scene where 'No Nose' is pulled off his day job (body disposal) to hunt weed thieves, highlights DeWolf's interests in horror, gore and the instructive nature of exploring violence ON SCREEN. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

When I watch the film now, it is a crazy time capsule. So many of those locations and people don’t exist any more. There is a scene at Van Kleef’s [a seminal Telegraph Avenue bar], where Peter Van Kleef was dancing around, pouring drinks. He has passed away—they even named a street after him [Peter Van Kleef Way, 16th/17th on Telegraph].

It’s a time capsule to see Oakland when it was still grimy, guerilla Oakland. Oakland now is not something I wouldn’t recognize.

Time to bail back to Benicia?

No way, no way, no way.

It’s still pretty hip actually. We are sitting in front of one of the best theaters in the world.

I still love Oakland but, the fact is, it is evolving. When your rent is skyrocketing, the first to go are the families, followed by the artists, followed by the soul… [laughs] of the city.

When you referred to the difficulties of making the film, you didn’t mention the difficulty of writing it and that is pretty much the best thing in the film.

Thank you.

There were a lot of great one line liners—all your stuff?

All my stuff. Basically, it was from that school of ‘running all over with lyricists’—a lot of my friends are performance artists, poets, MCs, rappers, writers, comedians.

It always came down to just the line; it came down to lyricism; whether that is a punch line or an off hand comment. I really wanted the film to be good on the page. I wasn’t interested in trying to make it naturalistic in any way.

I really liked films like ‘Brick’ (2006, Rian Johnson), where the language is elevated. What I loved about ‘Brick’, it didn’t have any interest in doing naturalist language. It was all about clever turns of phrase, much like we used to see back in the day, with old noir films, where everyone talked ‘smart.’

With ‘Smoked’ that was something I focused on. I wanted moments that just had lyrical banter. I was obsessed with every turn of phrase.

Some of the shorts I am doing now, I am much more open to crazy improv. I will give the actors maybe five punch lines for them to land wherever. It is almost like handing them a tool set; it is a fun experiment.

DeWolf displaying his moody-artist side. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

I haven’t done another feature, since I have been so slammed with these other shorts and I wanted to be a better filmmaker. Now I have a camera that is full-cinema ready.

The Arri Amira [from the German Arriflex company, in the Alexa family, the same sensor, so I am really excited to work with that. The image quality is really gorgeous: it has a flat image that you can grade in all sorts of complex ways.

Some of that is just learning how to be a leaner meaner machine. I think I could honestly make a feature with probably a crew of four or five, you know, because I can shoot. I have shot so many projects, I know what will work.

That doesn’t mean I am the best DP but that is what I recommend to most directors: you need to be in every position at least once so you can understand it.

I think the ‘El Mariachi’ Robert Rodriguez mythos of just grab a camera and hit the streets and make a film in 14 days [is good]. I have learned the hard reality of that and how to do it the right way.

Rodriguez shoots his own films.

Right, so does Steven Soderbergh.

How about that older black guy, did he keep acting?

Abdul Kenyatta? Yeah, he is still around; he does a lot of singing; he is story teller; he has been working on a book.

Actually, he had a stroke midway through making the film—there is a lot of real life like that that we had to adjust around—which is why, at the end of the film, he isn’t moving. He is standing in the shadows, on a cane, since he just suffered a stroke. But he was kind enough to continue to finish out the film when he was going through rehab.

So he went to the hospital in the middle of the film?

Yeah. We had to switch actors once or twice. A lot of it is that scrappy indie quality of people just doing it when they can, which is also another reason I haven’t taken on doing another feature in that way. I have also learned you add so many problems that you can’t perceive.

Time is a constantly expanding factor. You get with actors, ‘Well, we are trying to film this on weekends.’ Well, everyone’s schedule is so insane. Imagine trying to get thirty adults to coordinate their schedule in any way. That actually causes a whole new raft of issues.

If I was going to do my next feature, I would bum rush it. Be as prepared as possible [and do it] in 20 consecutive days.

What budget you think you could do it?

I think I could do a grimy, indie feature—pull it off by the skin of my teeth—for 150 thousand.

I own the camera I would shoot it on. I have worked with a lot of filmmakers who I have done a ton of projects with, filmmakers that I would want to work with. They are fast; they have hustle. We don’t stand around and debate. We make things happen fast because that is what we are paid to do by other clients.

You can’t sit around in some director chair and make a whole lot of squares with your fingers. You have to hustle and knock out shots.

Also, I am far more used to coordinating with the crew and cast. I have directed and shot simultaneously a lot of my projects, so it is very easy for me. Something like a 150 thousand, if we are able to lock it down and do 20 hardcore days in a row.

A character from one of DeWolf's movies appeared to interrupt the interview until it became obvious he was inspired by the streets of Oakland, much like DeWolf himself. photo: D. Blair

My ideal would be to shoot five days and then give the actors a day off, while we are also reviewing. [That way] we know the pickups we need, while we are doing the shooting, versus the editing room.

I think next year, it is time for me to come back with a full feature or at least get one moving. That is the deal I made with myself. I sort of did the opposite route. I made a bunch of scrappy movies when I was a teenager, then went into the world of performance, then decided I wanted to return to film.

I view it as the ultimate art form. I love the fact it is forever. I’m a big ol’ film fanatic in that way, that film is forever.

I’ve done so many performances: in prisons, in Russia, all different kinds comedy, storytelling, all stuff I wrote. Early on, what got me into slam and the performance world is that it was all ‘written from you.’ I am not a vessel, an actor taking on someone’s work and inhabiting that—it is all coming from you.

First person?

Yeah. Based on a kind of gritty sensibility. That is what The Suicide Kings did. A lot of our writing was coming from these tales of survival and violence and trauma and sarcastic storytelling.

Where does that come from Benicia or Oakland?

Oakland. Benicia was a suburban wasteland.

You sound pretty much like an Oakland filmmaker.

I definitely identify with Oakland. Benicia was my teenage years. When I moved to Oakland, that was when I became a true-blue performer. I had always been performer-filmmaker guy, but Oakland was to me where I met my true family of artists.

You include a lot of sexual stuff, particularly for comic effect, but not the act, any particular reason?

If you're going to show sex, you better do something more original than soft-core pornography. Sex is about psychology and the characters; it should drive the story versus be a showcase of flesh. If your sex scene doesn't have any character beats other than the act itself, you're not offering the audience anything new.

What do you think of William Burroughs?

‘Naked Lunch’ is a stand-out seminal work, but I'm still a fan of his early hard-edged writing on heroin [perhaps ‘Junky’, 1953]. He writes with a brutal clarity on the subject, though there's contemporary authors that stare addiction in the face with a fearless ferocity that's almost hard to stomach.

Are there any sort of nameable art, music or film movement you see emerging out of Oakland?

I'm always wary of 'movements' as, too often, they're a label cooked up by writers to lump some rather disparate aesthetics into one box for the ease of discussion.

I think Oakland is unique in its scrappy sensibility, the roots of outrage and protest, of Black Panthers to Hells Angels, to AK-47's on the steps of the court house, to the Occupy surrounding city hall. The opening shot of 'Smoked' is of Oakland, and the entire film is circling around ideas of revolution, race and mayhem teetering under the surface.

DeWolf exhausted on set of 'Smoked', although it could be an art shoot expressing his subconscious. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

You don’t seem to mention or focus on race much, any particular philosophy behind that?

Smoked has repeated references to race and a huge multi-cultural cast.

I wrote many of the characters for my friends to inhabit and I created a topsy-turvy world that pushed those cartoonish versions of them to extremes. Many of my short films tackle where race and economic disparity meet, of individuals trying to survive against systemic dysfunction and societal structures that have a sociopathic bent towards crushing those below the line.

The shorts are routinely excellent, very poetic in their words, if not so much cineaste style. Draw any inspiration from the art/poetry films of the 60s and 70s?

I draw inspiration from everywhere I can, and take more from the worlds of poetry and art, besides just films. I think too many filmmakers run a danger of being limited to the track of cinema when there's so many arenas of aesthetics to fuel us.

Would you say Oakland has a pretty strong filmmaking community?

Yeah.

There is a real hustle in Oakland because it has kind of this gritty sensibility. I think that really informed a lot of the energy, not only of [‘Smoked’] but of the people from Oakland. There was not this sense that we are going to hang around and you are going to hand it to us.

What a lot of the movie reflects is about Oakland —the opening shot of the movie is of Oakland.

Is that a drone or what?

That was a helicopter shot, actually.

So you put in a few thousand here and there for what you thought you needed?

Basically how ‘Smoked’ started, we took a grant that we got for a theater performance and literally threw it to get the movie going. So when we started the movie we didn’t have enough to finish. We had ten thousand dollars and I was like, ‘I don’t want to wait, let’s go!’

That might have been ill-advised because how are we going to [finish]? That started a constant cycle of chasing your own tail. Kind of a classic first feature film scenario except I didn’t shrink from any kind of challenge, like having so many characters is insane. We didn’t have any budget for any actors, even myself. I am not getting paid; I am just throwing money into this hole.

And because I didn’t own any equipment, that was its own trump card. You are working with folks because of what they own not because of aesthetic choices.

Today I would go the opposite. When you come with your own gear and technic expertise to the table then you are choosing people because of their aesthetics and eye not, ‘Do you own this camera or whatever?’

Any cinematic inspirations?

A lot films that I love, that ‘Smoked’ was informed by, are movies like ‘La Haine’ or ‘Hate’ [1995 French film by Mathieu Kassovitz], a great film. ‘Kids’ [1995, Larry Clark]: I love the raw quality of it—fearlessly living, take it or not.

I remember when I saw ‘Kids in the theater, there were people next to me who were horrified, ‘Oh my god.’ But to me I was literally,I' know these kids; this is a party we went to last month.' It wasn't horrifying to me at all; [it] made me realize that is why you need films like that.

'Smoked''s two top thugs, Jaylee Alde (lft) and Abdul Kenyatta, at the famed Oakland club, Van Kleef's, shortly before bitching out the wide-eyed gentrifier behind them. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

They may be ugly, at least to someone else, but as long as they are based somewhat in reality [they're good].

How about ‘Irreversible’, ‘Reservoir Dogs’, ‘El Topo’. You know ‘El Topo’?

Yeah, yeah. I think ‘Smoked’ was also informed by classic crime caper films like ‘The Killing’, obviously, or ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’

I thought that film sucked. I thought your piece was so much better then that.

[laughs] Since I was a kid the movie that was most significant to me was ‘Goodfellas’.

By Scorsese, who is a master.

I saw it in middle school. It changed my life because the movie had no problem that every character was an anti-hero, corrupt and flawed. It wasn’t going by the typical Hollywood tropes, where your good guy was some cardboard easily identifiable character.

Your good guy was Henry Hill, the least morally repugnant [in the movie] only because he would not outright kill you and was not a stone-cold sociopath. But he would do whatever he could.

There is something about that rogues gallery that I really loved. I like Martin McDonagh, who wrote ‘The Pillow Man’ [2003] and ‘In Bruges’ [2008], dark comedy sensibilities, I have always had attractions to.

I think that is what I am wrestling with in my next feature: whether I want to do another dark comedy, which I love and I honestly don’t think there are enough of in the world, or if I want to go the hard-hitting, gritty route.

So I have two films: one is that exaggerated, rogue's gallery world, sort of like ‘Smoked’, reality on acid, sprinkled with some meth, anarchic, breaks all the rules, lots of characters all over the city.

Or I have another film based on old school crime rings, some folks I used to know. There were these large scale, kind of crazy, shoplifting rings all over California in the early ‘90s. They have very complicated scams with chain stores that led down this progression of violence. So I have a whole 'nother script on that, that is ready to go as well.

Quick question, coming out of your meth-ed out, fucked-up high school years, was there one thing that specifically turned you around?

My daughter. I had my daughter when I was 21. She absolutely made me accountable, I couldn’t just dive off the deep end. She was always my road back: I am responsible [for her] and couldn’t go down the same spirals.

Actually my daughter, I have been teaching her filmmaking and we had our first lesson over the weekend. ‘I am going to start you on a different way than I came to things. I want to teach you the tools first; then what you do with them and what you write, that is your path.

Definitely my daughter but also performance, art, meeting like-minded individuals.

I was like the classic lone wolf character who shows up at open mics and is really drowning. You find like-minded people who are drawn to the same life raft and, before you know it. you have crafted it into a sweet boat.

Basically it was meeting Geoff and Rupert. Actually, that is one of the reasons we called ourselves The Suicide King— we felt like we had survived. And that we had each other, as a way of working ahead and keeping each other accountable.

'Smoked' includes some graphic and nicely tracking camera work. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

Rupert used to be a gang member in the Philippines and in Vallejo. When I met him, he had just robbed three houses that week.

But you met him at a performance?

I met him at one of his very first performances. It was one of those things: by us staying busy with performance that got him out of the gang.

He was too busy doing shows. There were many times that they called and went, ‘We got to go run out to Oakland,’ and he goes, ‘I got band practice.’ He was a really gret punk singer. Some of his music is in [‘Smoked’]. Eskapo is one of his bands.

Do you own fake guns or rent?

I own a few prop guns, some of those were Air Soft guns we borrowed for the day. I've never rented any prop guns.

What do you think of Oakland film and the three world-wide hits it produced this year?

I love it.

I have seen all the films. 'Blindspotting’—I have known Rafael Casal [star cowriter see cineSOURCE article] I knew him as a performer and he was in one of my first short films ‘Ricochet in Reverse’. I think it's incredible. I thought that film was incredible.

I also love the fact they were all different. ‘Sorry to Bother You’ is that kind of anarchic, dark comedy, just totally, gleeful.

It’s vicious satire, like ‘Dr Strangelove’—

Yeah, exactly. Gleefully nuts, that resounds with me.

‘Blindspotting' was absolutely hard hitting but really real and really showed that. It wrestled with what a lot of us in Oakland have. Oakland is evolving but they did it in a really smart way, fantastic filmmaking, great writing. I though they just knocked it out of the park.

It's obviously totally unbelievable. I have been pushing Oakland as a film center for ten years. But now it is off the charts.

What I would like to see—let’s be totally honest: some of that can look good on paper. But what I would like to see is: Stop hiring people from LA to come to Oakland. Hire Oakland filmmakers!

I hit a point were ‘I guess I got to move to LA, even though I love Oakland,’ because the industry isn’t the same up here. And that is what happens. People are like, ‘Oh I am going to make a movie about Oakland.’ So they hire an entire crew from LA; they come up here; they shoot Oakland; and then they are going to go back to LA.

That part is really frustrating. There are a lot of indie filmmakers here that are bad ass. Also I think we have a really scrappy mentality, a hustle and a grit that you aren’t going it find in many other cities. It is infused through me and a lot of the shows I have been putting on for years.

Rupert Estanislau, an actor with actual gang experience, in the medical marijuana robbery that starts 'Smoked''s chase scene rolling. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

It is past DIY. It is a 'fuck-it' attitude. We even riot better then most cities. [laughs] The fact is San Francisco is forcing us to march to the beat of tech companies.

So that is the killer right there?

It’s gonna make things hard.

Art has to be income-drawing enough to compete with tech?

How are you going to have art competing against bits and ones and zeros? It is a different mind set. We will see what happens. Oakland will always be a corner stone of my art and my eye.

I love it. I love those films are happening. There is that movie ‘Bodied’ that is coming out about, [from] Oakland’s new battle rapper. ‘Black Panther’ opening [scene is] in Oakland and stuff—where the hell is all this Oakland love coming from?

I just hope it is not the last chimes of the bell at the end.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Nov 03, 2018 - 04:52 PM
Rich Sampler of New Animation
by Karl Cohen

Scene from John Kahrs's 'The Age of Sail', produced by Google. photo: courtesy J. Kahrs

THE 20TH ANNUAL ANIMATION SHOW
of Shows is opening in four local theatres November 2nd, see trailer. It offers a delightful blend of films, ranging from an exceptional sea-faring drama, “The Age of Sail”, to a very funny, goofy cartoon comedy, “The Green Bird”.

There are also handsome experimental images of a couple dancing in the sky in “My Moon”, and an ecologically poignant moment with a polar bear adrift on the sea in “Polaris”. The innocent imagination of a child is suggested in “Super Girl”, a minute-long poem created by a preschooler. In “Grand Canyon we are overwhelmed not by the beauty of nature but by… (I’ll let it take you by surprise).

In short, this collection of new films offers something for everyone.

My favorite was “The Age of Sail”, directed by John Kahrs and produced by Google. Kahrs won an Oscar in 2013 for his Pixar short “Paperman” and has animated on 10 features for Pixar and Disney. His new short is an action packed adventure with an old sea captain. It’s beautifully rendered sea and lighting effects are just as magnificent as the story. It has qualified for an Academy Award nomination and is certainly worthy of winning.

Another Pixar animator, Trevor Jimenez, made “Weekends” in his spare time over a four-year period. It explores the two distinct lives a child experiences. During the week, he lives with his quiet reserved mother who plays classical piano; on weekends, with his fun-loving father, whose taste for music and many other things suggests why this couple is separated.

A completely different kind of film experience is “Carlotta’s Face” by Valentin Riedl and Frédéric Schuld from Germany. It is a sensitive portrayal of a woman with prosopagnosia, which an online dictionary defines as “a neurological condition characterized by the inability to recognize the faces of familiar people.” The film is a fascinating work of semi-abstract visuals. Knowing in advance what the condition is gives gerater understanding to the film’s unusual visuals.

Show of Shows branding this year, produced by Ron Diamond. photo: courtesy R. Diamond

“One Small Step” by Andrew Chesworth and Bobby Pontillas opens with a heart-warming fantasy of a child dreaming of being an astronaut. The dream sequence of flying into space and to the moon with her father in a cardboard box is quite wonderful, but dreams can be shattered. The film has a poignant lesson about the importance of studying hard in school.

From CAL Arts’ exceptional animation program comes the film “Barry”, the protagonist of which just happens to be an extremely intelligent goat who wants to become a doctor. From Estonia comes one of the weirdest films imaginable, from Spain “A Table Game” by Nicolás Petelski, who studied with Priit Parn and created a strange, surreal four-minute experience which defies rational explanation.

From Germany, Veronica Solomon concocted “Love Me, Fear Me”, an impressive symbolic acrobatic pas de deux between two dancers made of clay! It conveys a wide range of emotions such as love, hatred, joy, fear and others with powerful visuals. The manipulation of the material is exceptional; the visuals flow so smoothly, at times they seem to defy gravity.

The Animation Show of Shows was created twenty years ago by producer Ron Diamond, who still runs it. His mission is to educate people that animation can be more than entertainment for kids; it can be a remarkable art form. In the past, Ron showed his programs of innovative shorts to appreciative audiences at animation studios and schools; however, in 2015 he began to broaden his distribution to theaters around the world.

If you haven’t seen any of his past shows and wonder if they really are something you might enjoy, you may not love every work as out tastes vary widely, but the overall quality is excellent and past shows have included 38 films that went on to receive Academy Award nominations with eleven winning. Most of the films have also distinguished themselves at other film festivals.

A 501(c 3) not-for-profit organization founded in 2015 for the express purposes of increasing public awareness of exemplary animated shorts, Diamond funds The Animation Show of Shows, through private benefactors, from successful Kickstarter campaigns and with donations from animation studios. He is also dedicated to restoring and preserving important short animations from the past.

The 98 minute program:

The Green Bird*, Maximilien Bougeois, Quentin Dubois, Marine Goalard, Irina Nguyen, Pierre Perveyrie, France
One Small Step*, Andrew Chesworth, Bobby Pontillas, U.S.
Grands Canons, Alain Biet, France
Barry, Anchi Shen, US
Super Girl, Nancy Kangas, Josh Kun, U.S.
Love Me, Fear Me, Veronica Solomon, Germany
Business Meeting, Guy Charnaux, Brazil
Flower Found in the Netherlands!, Jorn Leeuwerink, Netherlands
Bullets, Nancy Kangas, Josh Kun, U.S.
A Table Game, Nicolás Petelski, Spain
Carlotta's Face, Valentin Riedl, Frédéric Schuld, Germany
Polaris, Hikari Toriumi, U.S.
My Moon, Eusong Lee, U.S.
Weekends*, Trevor Jimenez, U.S.
Age of Sail *, John Kahrs, U.S.

* means qualified for Academy Award consideration

Karl Cohen is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .
Posted on Oct 28, 2018 - 04:35 PM
Great Year at Oakland’s Grand Lake
by Doniphan Blair

'Fruitvale Station', by Oaklander Ryan Coogler, sold out Oakland's prestigious Grand Lake Theater opening day, July 12, 2013. photo: D. Blair

BIG EVENTS IN OAKLAND FILM OFTEN
happen at the Grand Lake Theatre, the city's grand dame of cinema showcases. Almost a century old, it features a marquee visible for miles and was recently purchased by impresario, activist and antiquer Allen Michaan, who has been its tenant for the last 38 years.

An art deco masterpiece built in 1926, the Grand Lake is the jewel in Michaan’s theater empire, which he started in 1972, when only 19. Shortly after arriving from Connecticut to attend UC Berkeley, Michaan dropped out and began building The Rialto Theater in a warehouse on Berkeley's Gilman Street from parts scavenged from condemned film palaces. Within two decades, he had 24 theaters.

Alas chain consolidation, corporate greed and megaplexes made it difficult for a theater mogul as independent as Michaan. Hence, he switched to assembling one of the largest antique collections in California, on display at Michaan's Auctions, two massive warehouses on the old Navy base, in Alameda. But he retains the Grand Lake, which he adores as a living antique, with its neoclassical columns, crystal chandeliers and faux frescos, as well as Mighty Wurlitzer organ on the weekends.

"Buildings like that are money pits; they are so expensive to run. That is why every year we seem to have less and less of them," the boyish-looking Michaan told me during our recent interview in an office crammed with artifacts. "The Grand Lake survives because it is a very successful operation. People love it, they go to it, they buy tickets."

Indeed, with 2018 the biggest year in Oakland film history, the Grand Lake cracked its total take for 2017 in August. Along the way, it world premiered Oakland's two biggest homegrown films ever: “Sorry to Bother You”, by Boots Riley, and “Blindspotting”, by Carlos López Estrada. It also rented out to homeboy Ryan Coogler, when he wanted to invite all of his family, friends and neighbors to a private screening of his international blockbuster, “Black Panther”.

The Rialto, the humble beginnings of Michaan's theater empire, in a warehouse in Berkeley, was one of America's first independent cinemas. photo:courtesy A. Michaan

"’Black Panther’ smashed all of our house records, except maybe going back to ‘E.T.’ [1982]," Michaan told me. "It was huge. [But] when you add up the revenue from ‘Blindspotting’ and ‘Sorry to Bother You’, it exceeds ’Black Panther’! That’s how popular those films were at the Grand Lake. That's really saying a lot."

"People in Oakland are proud of their city and are coming to see these films," he continued. "The Grand Lake attracts a very ethnically diverse audience. Everyone seems to come and have a good time and get along with each other. We have never had any problems."

The Grand Lake is also well known for its community involvement and special events, often with rental fees partially donated.

Although Michaan's classical cinema interests compel him not to run pre-film commercials or sell anything but fifties-style snacks, he has become famous for his aggressive activism, which includes editorial comments right on the Grand Lake's marquee and hosting controversial shows, like a recent day of "9/11 Truther" films. Especially interested in election integrity, Michaan helped produce Greg Palast’s film "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" (2016).

Over the years, Michaan has spent almost $4 million on renovating and repainting the building and expansion. He split the balcony into a second theater and transformed neighboring storefronts into screens three and four. Each new room is decorated like the rest of the theater, using the "Egyptian Revival" or "Moor" look favored by theater designers since they started building cinema palaces in the 1910s. At that time, Islam was a place of dream and romance. He also installed two high tech 3-D projectors.

With its cutting edge films, classical looks and progressive politics, the Grand Lake is a true Oakland treasure. And after the city's stellar cinema year, I thought it only wise to stop by and see what the view looked like from there.

I met with Michaan in his painting and antique-filled office, one floor up from an acre of antiques, with a beautiful view of San Francisco across the bay.

Michaan in front of his Grand Lake Theater, 2011. photo: M. Short

cineSOURCE: As you well know, this is the greatest year in Oakland film.

Allen Michaan: By far. It’s off the charts.

The idea that Oakland is the future and should be a film center, since it has the stories to tell, all came true this year to an unbelievable degree.

Amazing. The exciting thing about it is, all of a sudden, Ryan Coogler is an A-List director. And these other films were so successful this summer, we will be seeing more output from those filmmakers.

Technically speaking Ryan is an LA director.

He is now!

But he has included Oakland in four of his six films [including shorts]. Of course, he started ‘Black Panther’ and closed it Oakland.

His first film was ‘Fruitvale Station’; we played it at the Grand Lake; it was enormously popular.

I covered it. I used a shot of the long line.

It was a break through for him and a great film for us, too.

He was there opening night. He talked to the crowd, I think, on two occasions. He bought out the whole theater, gave away the tickets to young people and came and spoke with them. He has been very supportive of the theater.

One thing I find amazing about Ryan is he maintains his street diction, his street culture.

Yeah. He’s good guy.

I was at the Grand Lake for the world premiere for ‘Sorry to Bother’.

Actually, it was for ‘Blindspotting’. We did a ‘Sorry to Bother You’ thing for the San Francisco Film Festival but it wasn’t like what they did for ‘Blindspotting‘. That was a Hollywood red carpet event. It was incredible. The studio rented [the theater] and all the stars were there.

Sorry I missed it. ‘Blindspotting’ was shot all around my building—I didn’t hear a word. I read somewhere you invested in these films.

A Die-In protesting the Iraq War in 2003 in front of the Grand Lake was not bad for business—in fact it emphasized Michaan activists politics, which he often posts right on his marquee. photo: Dave Id

No. I invested in and helped produce Greg Palast’s film ‘The Best Democracy Money Can Buy’ {2016, see full movie here] because I am very interested in election integrity, which is something we don’t have in this country.

No one ever approached me to have any involvement in these films, so far as investing.

About your movie houses: you had twenty, then four—

Now one, just the Grand Lake. The Grand Lake is special .

Everything else in Oakland is corporate theater: AMC in Emeryville and Jack London Regal. It is a very competitive business; you have big megaplexes with parking structures.

It is always a struggle to get people into the theater. And we’ve always done lots of specials at the Grand Lake—we like to do unusual things there.

When I was getting out of the movie business—basically being pushed out by the circuits—it was always my intent to keep the Grand Lake Theater, which is what I did.

I noticed you don’t do screen advertising.

We don’t do screen advertising. I run it in a very traditional way, the way theaters would be run 50 years ago. You go in—the food choices are pop corn, soft drinks and candy—and you watch a couple of previews of coming attractions and then the movie.

We also have the Wurlitzer pipe organ, which gets played on the weekend.

No thoughts of putting in a foody thing?

No.

I seen many events there, like Oakland International Film Festival. You probably give them some sort of discount.

The Oakland International usually does their opening night there. Then they do the rest of their programming elsewhere.

If Oakland were to have a little film movement, the Grand Lake would be the jewel in the center.

Allen Michaan, in his antique crammed office, looking east on an acre of antiques and west on San Francisco. photo: D. Blair

We hope to continue to be that, sure. The Grand Lake is an extraordinary building it is a wonderful survivor of an era of architecture that by and large to a huge degree has disappeared. It’s my mission to preserve the theater and keep it going.

Mine, too. Is there any chance there will be a revival, that places similar to the Grand Lake will be restored?

Doesn’t look good for old theaters. Every year we lose more of them. The Grand Lake survives because it is a very successful operation. People love it, they go to it, they buy tickets. And because of that we can afford to maintain the building.

Buildings like that are money pits; they are so expensive to run. That is why every year we seem to have less and less of them.

Even with four screens, we are a low screen-count theater. It is a difficult thing to program because of all the demands that are placed on you by the various film distributors: ‘We need you to play this and this and this and this.’

They do these weird film package deals?

‘You are our customer and we expect you play all of our pictures.’ But you can’t always do that because you don’t have the screens. For that reason you will never see a Sony picture at the Grand Lake.

They are so aggressive in their demands of what they want you to play that, years ago, I had to say, ‘I can’t do this. I am just going to have to forgo doing business with Sony. I can’t satisfy them. It’s always a fight.’ There is a lot of politics involved.

The last time I went by [September 15th], the Grand Lake was playing ‘Sorry to Bother You’ and ‘Blindspotting’ AND ‘BlacKkKlansman’. I am guessing that you are still running them even though the theaters are not super full.

Actually, I have to say that ‘Sorry to Bother You’ and ‘Blindspotting’ are both incredibly popular films. They both played nine or ten weeks, I have done very well, and they are still drawing people in.

As we are getting into the fall and Thanksgiving season, I am having to cycle them out. I have to take care of my other suppliers. Of course, they have dropped off. But, when I look at the total the number of people who came to both those films, they are among the top in years.

’Black Panther’ smashed all of our house records, except maybe going back to ‘E.T.’ [1982]. It was huge. [But] when you add up the revenue from ‘Blindspotting’ and ‘Sorry to Bother You’, it exceeds ’Black Panther’. That’s how popular those films were at the Grand Lake. That's really saying a lot.

What do you see for the Oakland film movement, from your perspective?

To me, it is great we have had these wonderful films this year. You earlier called Ryan an LA director. I think that as the young filmmakers we saw this summer—‘Blindspotting’ and ‘Sorry to Bother You’—become successful, they, too, will end up becoming LA filmmakers. LA is the film capital of the world. That is a natural evolution.

A recect Michaan marquee announcing that he will disregard the r-rating to show Michael Moore's latest film, 'Fahrenheit 11/9'. photo: D. Blair

It is great. We are spawning young people in Oakland that are going on to become Hollywood players. They will continue to have fond memories of Oakland and will probably look to have their creations showcased in Oakland. We hope to see more of them coming up here and seeing these people coming back, doing events at the theater, putting their new projects out in front the community.

I don’t know if we will ever see a year like this again. If we did it would be extraordinary. This was a record year for the Grand Lake.

How much did it go up?

Last year, 2017, was the best year we ever had! [But] we beat it the second week in August, which is phenomenal, since we have a third of the year left to go. So it looks like this year will be up 35% over last year, which is huge.

In the old days, film noir days, San Francisco was the city LA used to symbolize a city—

Oh yeah, Sam Spade days.

—so it could be possible that Oakland is the multicultural city that LA uses instead of the sprawling megalopolis of LA.

Could be. I can’t predict what these filmmakers will want to do with their projects. But happy to have them around and happy to have the year that we did.

Out of curiosity, do you have any take on ‘Sorry to Bother You’ and ‘Blindspotting’: a comparison of the crowds they drew?

A lot of Oakland people. People in Oakland are proud of their city and are coming to see these films. A very ethnically diverse audience for all these films. The Grand Lake attracts a very ethnically diverse audience. Everyone seems to come and have a good time and get along with each other. We have never had any problems.

You have never had any violence?

No, never.

They feel they are getting good a deal because prices are low; our snack bar prices are low; we have Five-dollar Tuesdays, Free Popcorn Mondays. We try to cater to the audience and deliver the best movie going experience, at far and away the lowest price in the area.

I think people respect us for that. They also respect us for the amount of community and special events that we do. The Grand Lake has earned a niche as an important part of the local community and it is treated thusly.

And, of course, you often have politics right on your marquee.

We have a lot of politics. I don’t think Republicans like the theater too much but that is OK. Who needs them [laughs].

I think our country is going down the drain and we have to save it. What can I say? [laughs]

You started worrying about it before the five-alarm fire when off.

Oh my god. Trump had a one-and-half-hour press conference today. I watched a little, I could not believe: How did we get here!?!

Is Popcorn Tuesdays your innovation or do you have a manager?

I direct what goes on in the theater. Whatever happens there are my policies.
There is a theater manager and assistant manager and they are the ones that are there every day. I only go there to watch movies.

Michaan in front of a massive floor full of antiques. photo: D. Blair

I read you got your first theater at 19?

I built my first theater at 19 from salvage of theaters that were being torn down. It was a completely recycled theater. It was in a warehouse in West Berkeley on Gilman Street.

It was a Rialto Theater and probably this country’s first real counterculture cinema. I opened the Rialto 1972. Old time East Bay people remember it well.

I don’t recall it. Now there is a Rialto in San Leandro.

They tried to hijack my company name to confuse people into thinking they had something to do with the Grand Lake.

When I had a chain of theaters, it was Renaissance Rialto Theaters; that has been my corporate identity since 1972. The corporate entity now is only the Grand Lake.

I closed [Gilman] in ‘89 after I build the Shattuck Cinemas. At that point, it just became too hard to get films. There were too many theaters in Berkeley.

Also, at the time, Gilman Street was going through a rough period. My customers started to get held up outside the theater. Their cars were getting broken into. People were coming in and holding us up at gunpoint.

That was a bad vibe?

That was a very bad vibe. And that was the end of the Rialto, it closed in ’89.

So you are down to one, but a great one.

I intend to keep the Grand Lake going as long as I can keep going.

It is a phenomenal architectural gem that has survived largely intact. It is so well constructed that, absent a major earthquake on the Hayward fault [laughs], it will survive for a long time.

Don’t we have to knock on wood? This is brass.

Here’s wood.

[they knock]

We got through the last earthquake, Loma Prieta, pretty good. We had damage but we fixed it all up.

Are you in contact at all with the city and film office?

Not really. I’ve never looked to the City of Oakland for any assistance or support whatsoever. They have not been supportive of the theater. Over the years, I have had a lot of run-ins with city officials over parking.

I was very angry when they put in meters in the parking lot under the freeway. I was able to get that parking lot build in 1985 with the cooperation of our then-council member Mary Moore. Prior to that it was a dirt lot; people were dumping stuff. We were able to get that paved over, working with the city and Cal Trans.

At the time, in 1985, I built Theaters Three and Four and the community needed more parking and we got it done.

A few years back, if you recall, Oakland did a very shady rejiggering of their parking
regulations. They extended the parking hours to 8 pm one night; they didn’t tell anyone; they didn’t change any signage.

The next day they blanketed city with tickets at 6 pm—very, very dishonest—and they killed my business. When they pushed those parking meters to 8pm, my business took a nosedive; people stopped coming to the Grand Lake; it was terrible.

Oakland's grand Grand Lake Theatre will presumably keep classical cinema viewing going strong for another century. photo: unknown

I started a whole revolution against this. I put out petitions all over town, ‘Rescind or Recall;’ I really mobilized a lot of people. I gathered ten thousand signatures and, within two or three months, I rolled back the hours to 6pm. I think the film we were playing was ‘Up’, so it must have been whatever that year was [2009].

It created for me an awful lot of enemies downtown because I humiliated them. To me, Oakland city leadership has not been great over the years. They’ve used parking as a revenue source, rather then as an amenity.

I think they missed the boat by taking such a closed approach. Instead of welcoming people to our city, they punish them for coming. It is not as bad as it used to be. They backed off a bit and San Francisco is way worse.

The city of Oakland has never done a thing or me except harass me for this or that or my customers over parking.

They didn’t do much for the film movement.

They didn’t, no. Sadly the City of Oakland is not a progressive government.

You probably recall, they supported the Film Center on the Army base [see cineSOURCE articles ‘Media Hub Hangs by Thread’ and ‘Film Center Under the Ax']

They signed a thing, about 2005, supporting it but it dribbled off. The same thing with the Film Commission: they had a very talented woman—

Ami Zins , I remember. We worked with her on a few things. Anytime she came to us and said, ‘I want to do an event, a screening,’ we got it done.

She actually made a profit. They had to pay two commissioners, which added up to 150 thousand a year, plus the rent, and they had to give a little incentive to the films. But if you do the math, they got quite a bit in return.

Yeah.

I have some sympathy when you have poor people and you say you are going to be giving these Hollywood filmmakers a 40% tax break.

But if you don’t give them a tax break, you are taking in nothing instead of 60%.

Everyone is giving tax breaks, Vancouver, Michigan.

You have to have incentives for people to come into your community and spend that kind of money. It is good business.

Look at the ‘Blindspotting’ credits. A friend who works in the business said about a third of the people were local, so many came up from LA.

If the Film Center was still here, there would been a convergence with these three incredible films. It would been a great boon for the city. But they phased it out—they got rid of Ami Zins, the Film Center, dropped the film commissioners to one. It was an opportunity lost.

That’s Oakland.

If you have some sort of visionary politician like Rebecca Kaplan. She could have explained it to people but evidently she did not. That was too bad. Maybe this year will inspire them, light a fire under their ass.

And your plans?

Basically, I will continue running the Grand Lake as I have been. Now that I own the property, I don’t have to worry about the lease running out.

You got a pretty good deal on that? 3.7 million sounds pretty cheap.

Considering what apartments sell for these days, I guess it is [laughs]. But our overhead goes up because paying the mortgage is more expensive than paying the rent.

The flip side is, it insures long term survival and incentivizes me to do other restoration projects that we have held off on doing because of the uncertainty of the lease running out in 2023.

The lease was written in 1929, when the original developers of the building, Krosky and Kaluski [who build it in 1926] got intimidated. That was when the Fox Theater was built downtown, in 1928.

They decided it would be better for them to offload the theater and make a deal with West Coast Theaters Inc. Then it went through very various corporate entities as one company got sold to another. [First] Fox West Coast, then it became National General Theaters in the ‘50s, and, in the ‘60s, it became Mann Theaters.

I bought the lease from Mann Theaters in ’80. At that time, I had six or seven theaters.

Are you a local boy?

I have been here since ’70. I grew up in Connecticut. I came out here, went to U.C. for a short period, dropped out and built the Rialto.

When did you get bitten by the film bug?

Always loved movies, always loved movie theaters. You know, in many ways I love the theaters more than movies. I love looking at old theaters, books of old theaters—love preservation. But I watch movies constantly; I love movies.

Is there are trick to your integration of your wealth and opulence to your politics? The combination of dealing in wealthy items and being on the left?

It’s a paradox [laughs].

I always loved art and architecture my whole life. I think what drew me into movie theaters and restoring movie theaters was my love of architecture.

I grew up in Stanford Connecticut and there were some great old theaters there. I used to love going to them. I didn’t like the new ones. Going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art [in New York City], I used to love looking at the architecture.

When I had to downsize my company and get rid of all my theaters—due to the major circuits—there was an opportunity, with the closing of the military base, to create an outdoor antique yard. I used to go to the Marin City Flea Market; that is what got me into doing what I do.

The antique business is a continuation of that philosophy of art and architecture.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on Oct 24, 2018 - 11:38 AM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner: Sept 2018
by Karl Cohen

The wild cantina from 'Star Wars'. photo: courtesy G. Lucas

Drinking at Disneyland

For the first time in its 63-year history, guests will be able to enjoy an alcoholic beverage inside Disneyland, outside of the secretive, invite-only Club 33, which is hidden in New Orleans Square.

The new Star Wars Land, which will open in the summer of 2019, and at Florida's Hollywood Studios in late-fall 2019, will feature a cantina with alcoholic drinks. Cheers!

The Dogged Schulz Museum

An exhibit of working dogs is showing, now to Jan. 27th, at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa. Schulz long payed tribute to them in his comic strip starting,of course, with Snoopy.

Snoppy was also a professor on occasion. image: G. Schultz

Snoopy had many hard-working personas including attorney, WWI flying ace, grocery clerk and hired hand. In his work, Schulz acknowledges how much better life is when we share the working day with dogs.

End of New Art Institute

The Art Institute of California, San Francisco, is closing. This is the for-profit chain of Art Institutes, not the old, well-respected San Francisco Art Institute, at 800 Chestnut in North Beach, which lost students over the last two decades but adapted and is fully operational.

Hundreds of faculty and staff are out of jobs, some 138 at the San Francisco campus on Market Street, near Civic Center, plus 78 at the Alameda campus of Argosy University, a general education school.

Dream Center Education Holdings, a Pittsburgh organization, acquired the schools last year and will be closing these campuses as well as some others in California, in December.

“Local demand at the physical locations,” Anne Dean, the Dream Center’s senior director of communications, wrote in an email, “has been far surpassed by the demand for online programs in these markets, as evidenced by declining enrollments.”

“We came to realize we would need to discontinue campus programs on a larger scale if we were to truly focus on investing toward a more flexible curriculum to meet student demand.”

Students unable to finish their degrees before the closures will be eligible for tuition reductions or grants, according to Dean. Transferring to another Dream Center campus will make students eligible for a 50% tuition reduction, while those transferring to a partner institution will be eligible for a $5,000 grant.

Scene from David Chai's 'Space Butthole'. photo: courtesy D. Chai

Chai's Space Butthole

David Chai, who teaches animation at San Jose State University, just had his eight-minute "Space Butthole" accepted into KLIK. Amsterdam’s major annual animation celebration, KLIK runs from Oct. 10th to the 14th.

Aside from what it sounds like, space butthole is a nickname for the various wormholes, time rifts, and other sphincter-like space anomalies encountered by Star Trek's Enterprise. Some buttholes have been penetrated by the Enterprise, or its various probes and shuttles, while others have discharged objects.

Make Your Own Western States Mutoscope

Western States Mutoscope is a Ludite animation machine that can work with hand cut stencils and plant fragments. John Fadeff, who studied animation at SF State, continues to create wonderful creative surprises on his mutascope. Perhaps you may even try your hand at creating one, see instructional video.

Student Loan Ripoff

The Guardian reports a Sallie Mae spinoff called Navient is trying to collect unpaid loans from people associated with deceased students. When the loans were made by Sallie Mae the debt was forgiven, but now that Navient has the paperwork they are trying to collect the debt. Forewarned is forearmed.

Karl Cohen is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached . Posted on Sep 26, 2018 - 08:40 PM
Photographer Hank Wessel: A Remembrance
by Nicholas Blair

Walapal, Arizona, 1971; © Henry Wessel. photo: courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery

HENRY WESSEL, THE INTERNATION-
ally acclaimed photographer long associated with San Francisco's vibrant photography scene, died at his home in Point Richmond on September 20th from complications associated with lung cancer. He was 76.

Hank, as everyone called him, meant a tremendous amount to me. In 1975, when I moved to San Francisco, I carried a small Leica camera which had been lent to me by a friend. I took up residence with my brother and a few other students from the San Francisco Art Institute at 2205A Pine Street in San Francisco.

There I met Larry Bair, another aspiring photographer who had studied with Gary Winogrand in Austin, Texas. Winogrand had told him, when he came to San Francisco, to look up Henry Wessel. Larry had been sitting in on Hank‘s classes at the San Francisco Art Institute ever since.

San Francisco, 1973; © Henry Wessel. photo: courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery

I was relatively new to photography but I was very enthusiastic. Larry took me under his wing and we frequently roamed the city exploring different neighborhoods with our cameras. Before long I was churning out prints in a rudimentary dark room in the basement of 2205A Pine.

When Larry thought I was ready he took me to SFAI and introduced me to Hank. He was very welcoming and happy to have me sit in on his class. I was very shy at first but, after a time, Hank convinced me to bring in some off my photographs for critique.

I was learning so much, so fast. Hank was instrumental not just in teaching me how to process Tri-X film (overexpose it two stops and underdevelop it, to reduce the contrast and preserve the highlights), but how to see and react to the outside world in an unobtrusive way by pre-focusing and raising a rangefinder camera to take a picture all in one stroke.

Taking pictures was all about observation. “Where you stand and when you decide to click the shutter were the only decisions you had to make," Hank would say. All that was required was an eye, an index finger and a camera.

Hank’s advice was staggeringly important to my development, as well as to dozens of other photographers. He encouraged me to photograph, photograph, photograph and then carefully look at the pictures The never-ending fascination was seeing how three dimensional reality turned itself into a two dimensional image.

Night Walk #45, 1968; © Henry Wessel. photo: courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery

Talking about pictures was also one of Hank's great fortes, I would marvel how he could make me understand things I had been totally unaware of.

When Gary Winogrand came to town, Hank invited me to put up photographs for Gary’s critique and attend a brunch at his house. He was beyond generous. Who was I—a nobody?—the rest of the crowd were largely graduate students and accomplished photographers.

A few years later Hank suggested I apply to the MFA program in photography at the Art Institute. I was very surprised and didn’t think it was possible, I had never enrolled in college before but Hank convinced me I could do it. Amazingly I was accepted and Hank, of course, became my official advisor.

I also began working for Hank, developing his negatives and making contact sheets. In exchange he gave me copies of his photographs, which I still cherish. Hank was always very, very generous and always offered more pictures than I was expecting.

Untitled, 1968; © Henry Wessel. photo: courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery

For financial reasons I was once forced to sell one of his photographs to a collector I met. She chose the famous image of the ice sign in the middle of a rocky desert. A few days later, however, she came back with a complaint.

“Hank was very sloppy,” she said, pointing out that there was a rather large hair that had not been spotted on the print. Not thinking much of it, I went ahead and spotted out the hair, or at least what I thought was a hair. She was happy.

Later when I related the story to Hank, he informed me that it was not a hair at all but a piece of bent iron rebar discarded in the desert. He found this hysterically funny and we both had a good laugh (see "hair" in top photo extreme lower right).

A week ago, I emailed Hank to tell him how much I appreciated his advice and guidance as a teacher, and how I often thought of him while editing my photographs. When I had last seen him, a few years before, he was extolling the virtues of scanners as a great way to look at contact sheets, and I had finally gotten around to getting one.

Richmond, California, 1989; © Henry Wessel. photo: courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery

A few days later I heard he had died in his sleep.

Hank was a fantastic human being, an extremely generous and supportive person, a Zen master with a camera, a great mentor and teacher. He will be deeply mourned.

Nicholas Blair is a New York-based cinematographer, photographer and filmmaker, who does everything from high-end television to indie docs and can be reached . Posted on Sep 25, 2018 - 09:47 AM
South Korea: Where’s the Romance?
by Lauren Jiang

Asian couples often show affection by dressing similarly: this particular team is Chinese but the affectation is also very popular in Korea. photo: courtesy Wall Street Journal

DESPITE THE MELODRAMATIC TELE-
vision shows running rampant or the fact that most K-pop songs are about love, it looks like adults in South Korea aren’t choosing to have families. At least, not like how they used to.

With the rapid economic growth Korea achieved in the past 50 years, citizens are working harder than ever, oddly enough, and they turning from building families to building professions.

In a recent BBC piece, “Why I Never Want Babies” (Aug 16, 2018), Simon Maybin speaks with South Korean women who are dead set against pregnancy.

He details a case where a South Korean woman informed her boss that she was pregnant, and was given more work as a result. The piling on of stress eventually culminated with her fainting, with a risk of miscarriage. Such lack of understanding in the workplace is commonplace in South Korea, and correlates with the national sexism problem.

Women are considered of secondary importance compared to men. Until recently, it was standard at company dinners for women to pour drinks for their male coworkers, taking on a subservient or even an entertainer-like role.

Women are also expected to fully care for their in-laws, as evidenced by a tradition widespread during the Korean equivalent of thanksgiving, Chuseok. During Chuseok, it is customary for the women of the family to cook and clean for the entire extended family, while the men relax. Many South Korean women hate this tradition, but feel they cannot do anything to change it.

With the birthrate as it stands now, South Korea is due for a dramatic drop in population by 2065. Only Singapore, Hong Kong, and Moldova have equally low birth rates: 1.4 children per family. (For reference, 2.1 is the replacement rate, where a population remains level).

The result of this phenomenon is the phrase “the Sampo Generation”. “Sam” means three in Korean, and the phrase represents the three things that the hardworking middleclass must give up in order to thrive: relationships, children, marriage.

It would appear that the Korean musical miracle which has energized much of Asia with its beats, lyrics and stories has failed to address one essential ingredient in its own romantic equation.

Having a child means taking off from your career, or otherwise being absent from much of your child’s life. And even if a parent is present, they must have enough money to support their children’s extra-curricular programs, math, music, sports, which are essential in Korea’s hyper-competitive workforce.

During my time teaching in South Korea, I heard first hand and endlessly about my students’ busy schedules. One of my fourth grade students didn’t just have regular school to attend daily, but also English after-school classes, soccer practice, and drum practice, on top of prodigious nightly homework.

It’s not uncommon for elementary school students to go to bed at 11 pm or midnight. They are being trained young, and the societal norm is to be hard working from a young age.

South Korea is headed towards a fate similar to that of Japan’s, where some small town primary schools are known to have only one child as a result of a low fertility rate. When a small country is booming, having children is the last thing on the minds of working woman. Instead, they are focused on maintaining their success and capitalizing on a professional model that works, albeit only for a few decades.

Settling down seems to be more of the issue than actual dating. During my time in South Korea, I observed many couples, often in matching outfits, on Seoul’s downtown streets. More than once, I was told single people don’t go out as much, and couples are seen out on the town more often.

Indeed, singles are more prone to stay at home or hang out with friends in private. I was also told that when two people enter into a relationship, they tend to only spend time with each other. But of course, this is prevalent in Western dating trends as well.

What differentiates the Korean dating scene from the Western is the fact that couples are either in inter-city relationships, or don’t have time during the week to meet because of work. Therefore, when they do get together, they spend the entire day together. This typically includes lunch, coffee, an activity, dinner, and then dessert.

Another difference between Korean and Western culture is the problem celebrities have publicly dating without excessive scrutiny. However, fans often speculate that dating is secretly happening all the time among people in the Korean entertainment industry. Celebrity couples rarely go public with their romantic status, because there are often consequences.

Contrary to the Western entertainment industry, dating is not something fans enjoy swooning over in Korea.

For example, just this month it was revealed that Hyuna, who could be called the Rihanna of South Korea, was dating E’Dawn, the lead rapper of the boy group, Pentagon. When the news was announced, many fan websites dedicated to E’Dawn immediately shut down, and 500 tickets for an upcoming Pentagon fan meeting concert were returned.

Shortly thereafter, E’Dawn was noticeably absent from events that Pentagon attended. Then came the news that he would be taking a hiatus from the group. Clearly, dating does have ramifications in the K-pop world.

Despite the realities of romance, K-pop style, it’s still the most marketable concept in mainstream entertainment. Ironically, people love watching or hearing about celebrities being in love.

In fact, there is a very popular TV show in Korea that is precisely about the wedded life of celebrities. Entitled “We Got Married”, the show selects two celebrities, and has them role-play as a married couple for a week. Perhaps the fake nature of this program is the reason audiences are OK with it, but it also goes to show there is more to Korean romance than a simple disliking of dating.

There is also a common concept in both the K-pop and Western music world called “shipping”, where fans pair up members who they think would make a cute real-life or even imaginary couple. These ships are often the inspiration behind fanfiction, which was once posted on forum websites, and is now popular on Tumblr among teenagers.

Even with all such shipping, daydreaming and living vicariously through imaginary romances, the reality is, Korean adults are less and less likely to get romantically involved or married, let alone have children.

As with any developed country, at a certain point, women start prioritizing their own career goals and achievements above all else. But, making money to support your family is still the underbelly of drives.

But not having children is bound to bang into another unstoppable Asian force. In most Asian families, attending to parental wishes is of the utmost importance, one of which is undoubtedly grandchildren. Turning to parents for council and direction is common, as opposed to the individualistic motivations or peer pressure more standard in the West.

The film “Crazy Rich Asians” grasps this notion completely: the “American” mindset is very focused on personal happiness, while the “Asian” mentality is to put others, specifically parents and family, before the self.

In my own family and culture, I have witnessed this time and time again. My father loved animals growing up, and was intent on majoring in zoology in college. However, his parents convinced him otherwise, stressing that he needed a major that would provide him with a job, like electrical engineering.

Being the good son that he is, he changed his major, but he didn’t like it. Still, this was the necessary sacrifice he believed he must take in repayment for all his parents had done to provide for him. He put his feelings and preferences aside out of respect for his parents.

It will be interesting to see where the future of Korea lies, especially if they will plateau on their success, or find more happy, balanced medium, in accord with the romantic dreams proselytized by their own, now very popular, musical art form.

Lauren Jiang, an entertainment and lifestyle journalist, was born and raised in the Bay Area and is passionate about strengthening community, expressing herself through performing arts, and Korean culture—indeed, she recently lived there for a year. Jiang can be reached . Posted on Sep 01, 2018 - 03:48 PM
Christian Films Arising!
by Joanne Butcher

Writer, director and Christian filmmaker Rhyan LaMarr. photo: courtesy R. LaMarr

SOME TWENTY YEARS AGO, WHEN I
was Executive Director of IFP/Miami, I had a meeting in Beverly Hills with a film producer. He was in his sixties and had been making films for 20 or 30 years. He told me that the majority of films he had made were Christian films. I had to believe him: his office walls were filled with posters from his many movies. My mind was blown! I had no idea there was a Christian film market.

Most filmmakers set out to make their first feature without consideration for the marketplace. However, a really smart way to think about how to proceed with a first feature is to look at where there is actually a demand for content. One of the genres where there is demand, and where filmmakers starting out might have success without much money and without big names, is faith-based films.

Today there are numerous claims for what marked the beginning of the Christian film movement; some writers say it started with Mel Gibson’s, “The Passion of Christ” (2004). Some that it started with unexpected hits, with no-name actors such as “God's Not Dead” (2014) and “Fireproof” (2008). I don’t claim to know when it all began, but I do know at least one producer who was making a living decades ago from films in this niche!

It’s normal these days to see box office returns as regular front page news. What people really mean when they look at when the Christian film market began is when did Christian films begin to make enough money that other people (namely Hollywood) started to take notice? “The Passion of Christ” made $370M. (I would argue that that may have had a lot to do with the fact the Bob Berney was the head of Newmarket Films that released “The Passion”, but that’s a story for another time.) “Fireproof”, about a porn-addicted fireman, made $33M from a $500,000 budget.

So what exactly are Christian films? That might seem to be an easy question to answer, but not necessarily. At the most basic level, they are all films that are free from graphic violence, harsh language, sex and nudity. They come in several genres: drama, family, comedy, thrillers all exist within the umbrella of faith-based.

Looking at this from a filmmaking perspective, what I like is that this is a genre that filmmakers can enter in earlier stages in their career when they don’t have much in the way of resources to bring to the table beyond a great script, enthusiasm, good friends and a little money. This is a genre where there are consistently good production values, occasional celebrities, good acting, but the script is really the key to the films.

LaMarr directing Bryshere Y Gray during the shoot of 'Canal Street'. photo: courtesy R. LaMarr

Also from a filmmaker’s perspective, one of the most significant elements is that the storytelling is truly coming from a religious perspective. The stories, whether they are dramas, comedies, thrillers, romance or family films, all tell stories of people who use their Christian faith to address challenges in life.

As with any other genre of film, it would be important for a filmmaker making a film in that genre to study the other films in that genre before attempting to make one. It would be as foolish to say “I’m a Christian so I can make a Christian film”, as it would be to say, “I’m not a Christian and I can make a Christian film.”

There are now many websites available to find films that are classed as Christian or faith-based films. Pureflix launched in 2005 and by 2013 was claiming to be the industry leader. There is also Cross Flix, Up Faith and Family, Christian Cinema and Dove Channel

The Christian Film Database lists all the distribution companies interested in distributing faith-based films. There is an audio CD by Rich Christiano (interesting name for a filmmaker who has made a lot of Christian films) called “How to Market and Distribute a Christian Film,” about his work making and distributing Christian films from $50,000 to $1M, including the extremely popular, “The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry” (2008).

One of the most rewarding aspects of working in a particular niche or genre such as this one, is that it’s very manageable to learn who all the players are very quickly, and find simple ways of meeting everyone! There are several Christian film festivals, but less than 10, and that’s a lot more manageable than working in many other genres.

One of the aspects of faith-based films I have been mostly pleasantly surprised by is the multiculturalism and diversity seen in many of the films. There seems to be an equality between white and black characters in the films that is certainly not the way American stories are presented in other films and television series.

In mainstream movies, diverse casting is not the norm. Mainstream films tend to focus on white characters, with African-Americans playing drug addicts, hookers, criminals, sidekicks and the characters who get killed first. But in Christian films, there is quite a bit of diversity, both in the selection of films on the sites, and in the films that achieve the greatest success.

However, more rare in faith-based films are films that overtly look at race. The recent “Canal Street” (2018) is certainly one of those. This is the film that inspired me to look more closely at Christian filmmaking. I saw it at the American Black Film Festival, in June in Miami Beach, Florida.

Writer, director and Christian filmmaker Rhyan LaMarr. photo: courtesy R. Lamarr

I spoke to “Canal Street’s” amazingly enthusiastic director, Rhyan LaMarr, after he had just finished Day 19 of a 21 Day shoot! Amazingly, he was full of energy and joy to talk about his work for God. I had already learned that there are definitely wide varieties within the umbrella of faith-based films and LaMarr even challenges the name faith-based.

“Faith-based films,” he argues, are for people who’ve already found Jesus. My films are faith-driven, and they aim to meet people where they are at.” LaMarr, like many other Christian filmmakers, see their work as a ministry. LaMarr just sees his ministry as being to people who don’t necessarily have faith yet.

LaMarr had already made several films by the time he directed “Canal Street.” From “The Dirty 30” that went straight to DVD, to “Restored Me,” that opened on between 100 and 200 screens, to now a movie opening on 500-1000 screens. (That’s another element of interest to filmmakers, Christian films really work the theatrical distribution angle—something to think about.)

LaMarr had been working on the script for “Canal Street” since 2005, and finally got financing in 2015. “We sat there in the production office in 2005 with no money, and I just created a vision board. We just asked. In Hollywood there’s a pitch packet with the actors the producer wants. But if there’s no money IT NEVER WORKS!”

“In the end, we got actors who were interested and believed in ME. They are not interested in ‘Canal Street’, or such and such particular project: they’re interested in you and your career! “

I was curious how LaMarr had managed to get such a large number of exceptional actors: Lance Reddick and Jamie Hector from “The Wire”, Mykelti Williamson, best known as Bubba in “Forrest Gump” and from several great TV series, Mekhi Phifer, whose screen debut was leading Spike Lee’s “Clockers” (1992), Bryshere Gray, from the TV series “Empire” and “The New Edition Story”, who plays Kholi, the embattled youngster at the center of the action in “Canal Street.” And this is not a complete list.

“The first actors we attached with money. We paid them. It’s called ‘Pay or Play.’ It means that if you don’t make the movie, the actor keeps the money. Everyone else we just asked them. As Mykelti Williamson said: ‘The script is the star.’ Nobody is bigger than your script.”

“We went after the big names,” LaMarr continued. “Woody McClain was the easy one. He was gambling on me and I was gambling on him. Also, with these names, you have to be confident. ‘I am confident that I can shoot you out in four days.’ Mekhi Phifer in five days. Lance Reddick in one day.”

“We shot the entire film in 16.5 days. And we shot it for PEANUTS!!! We shot it for ‘Mission Impossible’’s coffee budget!”

Rhyan LaMarr directing on the set of 'Canal Street'. photo: courtesy R. Lamarr

“Canal Street” definitely is different as a Christian film. According to LaMarr, the mainstream church does not speak to racism, or homosexuality, or a lot of other very important topics.

“’God’s Not Dead’, ‘The War Room’ and Tyler Perry have done amazing things for the community,” he told me, “but they represent only one part of the body of the church. For so many people, when they come to Christ, it isn’t a beautiful event: ‘I was on a toilet and I heard a voice.’ ‘Someone died and I saw God.’”

LaMarr asks: “How do you save a part of the community that isn’t being ministered to? Jesus did not minister to perfect people. He ministered to the outcasts, and he did so even though he knew one of them would betray him. The audience for my films are woke Christians, diverse Millennials, because I’m a millennial.”

It’s Day 19, and LaMarr is coming to the end of a 21-day shoot on a film that delves into mental health issues, a psychological thriller.

“We do a lot of projects that inspire. It’s all to bring about thought, to have a conversation. I want people to not escape reality. This is my prayer. We are scrappers and hustlers. I’m working on 7 projects, including TV shows. ‘An American Tragedy: the Sean Bell Story’. We just wrapped a dark comedy: ‘North of the Ten’. We just wrapped a dark comedy that’s getting buzz on social media.”

LaMarr has a LOT of energy!

“We’re supposed to be fishers of men. For the lost. For the unsaved. We filmmakers need to open up the spectrum a little bit. To not create projects that are safe. When did we get so entitled? We can open up and bridge the gap. Bishop Jakes, Tyler Perry, Pureflix have all been trailblazers and have allowed me to make my films... for millennials.”

Canal Street

The dynamic vitality of this film makes absolute sense now that I have spoken to LaMarr in person. It tells the all-too-common story of a young black man accused of a crime.

My favorite part of the film is how there are repeated fast-cut sequences of radio talk show hosts—some very well known—discussing the case. They act like a Greek chorus commenting on the action. Only in this case, they often pass judgment. They are the voices in our heads, condemning, judging. Each time the “chorus” comes back, the already exciting film turns up a notch.

Well drawn characters. Believable story. Issues of gun violence, racism, solving life’s challenges with faith. Some of the characters in the film are very grounded in their faith, some are not and come to find that faith works.

Fireproof

In this story set against a backdrop of a team of hard-working firemen, a porn-addicted husband about to get a divorce, is persuaded to use spiritual practices to find his way back to love.

The story is well told. The firemen’s crew is great! It struck me that it is rare to see a group of good people doing their jobs in films. Especially in Hollywood.

Again well drawn characters. Believable story. Addresses issues of marriage, infidelity, love, solving life’s challenges with faith. The main character, the husband, is not a man of faith, but he comes to faith and his life dramatically improves.

God’s Not Dead 2

I imagine this is the kind of film that LaMarr is striving to not be. The characters are basically caricatures. Two dimensional is being kind. The story tells of a high school teacher who answers a high school student’s question about Jesus, and is punished as a result. The film apparently represents a debate between freedom and oppression.

But in every scene, for example, when there are crowds represented, the crowd of Christians behaves in a quiet and meek way, while the opponents protesting for the separation of Church and State are depicted as screaming and rabid.

The teacher is shown as infinitely kind, meek and not wanting to cause any problems. There were some good lines as she meets her lawyer for the first time: “You don’t look like a lawyer.” To which he replies: “Thank you.” “I don’t think that was meant as a complement,” she says. “I decided to steer it in that direction!” he says jovially.

The lawyer who opposes her—and who is perhaps part of the ACLU—is actually characterized as the devil. He has a speech talking about why he does what he does, and he talks of HATRED: hatred of Christians.

If this wasn’t obnoxious enough, there is an anti-Christian TV news presenter who speaks very personally and tells people to go out and protest against Christians. The whole film struck me as being dishonest and, frankly, creepy. It purported to be about questions about religion, but it barely spoke about that and focused instead on how Christians are being victimized by the devil—that is the ACLU and the government—and that they have to stand up now and fight before they are completely destroyed.

A couple of days ago, I was chatting with a friend who would describe herself, I think, as a fundamentalist Christian. And we were talking about the topic of addiction, she said, "I think of addiction as a spiritual problem. There's a problem with evil. I call that 'The Devil.'"

We were discussing a topic about which she uses language she knows may be different than mine. She went to define the term "devil" in a way that we could share. I nodded agreement.

In "God's not Dead 2", there is no such discussion. The lawyer who fights for separation of church and state is The Devil outright; his reasons for his legal position are stated as being hatred of Christians. For me, this is dishonest.

It has become so tiresome to hear the complaint of victimhood, which has become so commonplace in contemporary culture, and how victimization justifies attacking the enemy by any means necessary. Painful!

Two-dimensional characters. Poorly told story. Addresses issues of religious rights, solving life’s challenges by standing up for religion against the enemy.

Hopefully, these three summaries give you a small sample of the range of films that are included under the umbrella of the genre Christian or faith-based filmmaking. The barriers to entry are relatively low, and as long as the purpose of the film is to spread the message of Christ, the doors are pretty wide open for filmmakers to fit into this very broad genre.

Joanne Butcher is a business coach for filmmakers working on sales, fundraising, business and money. You can reach her via or her website.

Posted on Aug 14, 2018 - 12:42 AM
Fantasy Closes, Zaentz-Fogarty Still Open
by Steven Middlestein

Creedence circa 1968 (lf-rt): Stu Cook, Tom Fogerty, John Fogerty, Doug Clifford, and (seated) Saul Zaentz, owner of Fantasy Records, about to launch Fantasy Films. photo: courtesy H. Emigholz

FANTASY STUDIOS CLOSED IN
September after a 60 year run, which took it all the way from small digs South of Market, in San Francisco, to West Oakland and finally Berkeley. It was there that its creatively-connected CEO Saul Zaentz built a eight-story, block cement building that looks like a US embassy in Malaysia, say, and was sometimes called "the house that Creedence built."

Along the way, Fantasy had hits with jazz artists, like pianists Dave Brubeck and "Peanuts" composer Vince Guaraldi, comedians, like iconoclast avatar Lenny Bruce, and rock and roll, albeit only two bands: the very hippie Fugs, from New York's Lower East Side, and the clean-cut Creedence Clearwater Revival, from San Pablo, north of Berkeley.

Although Fantasy Studios supposedly had enough bookings and was doing well, the sale of what is now called the Saul Zaentz Media Center by Wareham Development, who acquired it in 2008, will undoubtedly generate a rent hike and Fantasy wanted to go out on an upswing.

In this light, they are loathe to mention Fantasy's biggest downswing.

From KQED to the SF Chronicle, luminaries lauded the cinematic successes of Zaentz, who switched from music to filmmaking in the '70s and burst on the scene with the radical AND Oscar-winning “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1975. Always looking for literary properties and arty directors, to which he was dedicated with unmatched zeal, Zaentz went on to many, many more stellar achievements, notably the nine-Oscar-winning “English Patient” in 1996.

Little mention was made, however, of the tragedy that transpired at Fantasy, starting around 1971.

So little in fact, after hearing rumors about it for decades, cineSOURCE felt compelled to initiate its first piece of long-form journalism in 2014 with "The Jew and the Cowboy: Saul Zaentz and Creedence Clearwater". A six-month project eventually penned by Doniphan Blair, it was based on extensive research and interviews, including with Jeff Fogarty, John's nephew, and Hank Bordowitz, a rock writer out of New York, who did the enlightening Creedence book, "Bad Moon Rising" (2007).

Although there were other problems like rock and roll egos, off-shore accounts and "accounting irregularities," as the neologism goes, its pretty clear there was some exploitation. After Creedence became the biggest band of the San Francisco Sound, with 16 chart-topping singles IN A ROW, Zaentz and his lawyers forced them to abide an early-'60s low-ball contract, while he siphoned inflowing millions into his new film business.

Indeed, the Fantasy-Creedence story stands as a fascinating study in the romantic dreams of both Zaentz and John Fogerty and his fellow band members, but also basic human relations and throwing people under the bus.

“Come, come now," some might ask, "why air dirty laundry at this late date?” To be sure, in the face of so much horror daily, it can seem over the top.

Alas, the moral turpitude, ethical fungibility and history denial so rampant today came from somewhere.

In point of fact, it exists right here in music and film business in the supposed cradle of free speech and civil rights, although, since the Zaentzes have yet to release the full transcripts, many of the details and motivations remain a mystery.

Steven Middlestein is a writer, editor and movie fanatic and can be reached .
Posted on Aug 13, 2018 - 05:36 PM
Nervous Breakthroughs: Heinz Emigholz’s Films
by Gerry Fialka and Will Nediger

Filmmaker Heinz Emigholz in one of his subject buildings. photo: courtesy H. Emigholz

IF YOU'RE FAMILIAR WITH HEINZ
Emigholz’s work pre-2017, it’s probably through his architecture films, formally rigorous works which explore the nooks and crannies of modern buildings through canted angles and a precise, patient camera.

Those films have a laser-sharp focus on the architecture. Even when their subject is, say, the bustling “jewel box” banks of Louis Sullivan (2001’s “Sullivan’s Banks”), people are always merely in the background. Aside from occasional title cards identifying the buildings, there are no words in the films. So if you’ve seen those films, “Streetscapes [Dialogue]” will come as a surprise.

Dialogue is part of a four-film series that Emigholz calls “Streetscapes”, which also includes two films made in the mold of his earlier architecture films: “Dieste [Uruguay]” explores the work of the Uruguayan architect Eladio Dieste, while “Bickels [Socialism]” is about the buildings that Samuel Bickels designed in Israel, mostly for kibbutzim.

Unlike in Emigholz’s other architecture films, the relative lack of a human presence in “Bickels” sends a clear message. Many of the buildings Emigholz shoots are abandoned, as if to point out the failure of the socialist ideals alluded to in the title. Even more atypically, “Bickels” includes an epilogue in which a voiceover tells of the decline of the Vio Nova kibbutz in the Crimea.

“Bickels”, then, prefigures Dialogue, which melds the formalism of Emigholz’s architecture films with some features of (duh) more dialogue-driven films. For “Dialogue”, Emigholz turned his sessions with his therapist into a series of dialogue scenes in which a filmmaker (unnamed, but based on Emigholz) talks to a therapist about his artistic process, his mental blocks, and eventually about the creation of “Dialogue” itself. These scenes take place inside various buildings in Uruguay, filmed with Emigholz’s trademark Dutch angles, as if his characters have been transported into one of his previous films.

The poster from Emigholz’s 2017 film 'Streetscapes [Dialogue]'. photo: courtesy H. Emigholz

It’s often tempting but usually pointless to try to psychoanalyze an artist on the basis of their work. The work, after all, can speak for itself. But “Dialogue” is such a relentlessly self-reflexive work, above all about Emigholz’s own mind, that its invitation to speculate on its creator’s psyche is difficult to resist. You get the impression that filmmaking is a compulsion for Emigholz (okay, Emigholz’s fictional avatar, but in such a candid film it’s relatively safe to elide that distinction). At one point in the film he describes his work as an evasion, which is an arresting statement for an artist, especially a filmmaker, to make. We often think of the creation of art as a way to confront or to heighten reality.

One of the four questions from the “tetrad” that Marshall McLuhan would ask about any medium was “What does it enhance?” Many filmmakers would say that the camera enhances vision, is an extension of the human eye (e.g. Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye), but Emigholz talks about the camera as something that gets between his eye and the world around him, as if to shield him from reality. He tells us that “the camera is not the eye,” challenging the viewer to rethink how this tool extends the human sensorium.

Emigholz talks about his notebooks, filled with clippings of advertisements and other cultural ephemera and surrounded by his own writings in dense, tiny text. Parts of those logs are shown in the fourth movie from the “Streetscapes” series, “2+22=22 [The Alphabet]”.

There’s a “horror vacui” in their pages, whose every inch is filled. Maybe his fear of unmediated reality is related to his fear of the blank page. “The artist cures his neurosis himself,” says Emigholz, suggesting that his art is a way of working through his psychological issues the best way he knows how.

He continues, “There’s this recurring theme: how can this good feeling last followed by my idea of death changed?” In other words, his work is a far cry from abstract formalism; it implicates some deeply personal issues. In one sense, then, it’s perhaps surprising that he manages to produce works of thorough formal precision. On the other hand, it’s clear that he’s entirely uninterested in most of the trappings of the film industry as an industry, maybe because his art has such an intensely personal origin, maybe because of his fear of success, failure or some other hidden factor.

Building from Emigholz's 'Bickels [Socialism], 2016, a survey of 23 structures in Israel by Samuel Bickels, who was raised on a kibbutz. photo: courtesy H. Emigholz

He talks at length about his disdain for having to appear at film festivals to represent his work, and about how, when his works are praised, he remains deeply distrustful of their reception, as if he’s pulled the wool over the critics’ eyes and is afraid of being unmasked. The result is a hermetic body of work that follows its own internal set of rules but isn’t beholden to anything else. It is all the more powerful because of this freedom.

Early in the film, Emigholz quotes the old line about “turning breakdowns into breakthroughs." It’s the most clichéd line in the film but nevertheless an apt summary of “Dialogue.” Ironically, the obsessively inward-turning “Dialogue” opens up the rest of his oeuvre, giving us a new way into what might otherwise be entirely sealed off. With his art, he tries for that steely transformation of rejection into redirection, weakness into strength.

Gerry Fialka and Will Nediger are currently writing a book on the future of the history of avant-garde film, see their site here, or reach Fialka or Nediger .
Posted on Aug 13, 2018 - 05:04 PM
The Story of K-Pop
by Lauren Jiang

Seo Taiji & The Boys kicked off K-pop in 1992: (lf-rt) Yang Hyun-suk, Seo Taiji, Lee Juno. image: YG Entertainment
NOTE: After years observing the fantastic K-pop phenomena from afar, cineSOURCE connected with the talented Lauren Jiang, who followed K-pop for years, lived in Korea for one year and penned a quad of incisive articles. The other three are: "South Korea: Where’s the Romance?", "Adventures in K-Pop Fandom" and "Can (G)I-DLE Make It in the Tough K-Pop World?".

LAVISH MUSIC VIDEOS, BRIGHT COLORS,
trainee programs, military-precise choreography and seemingly-random English phrases are the elements which combine to make what’s taking the world by storm: K-pop.

Despite its seeming recent appearance, K-pop has been around since the 1990s. The first act to make their mark was Seo Taiji & The Boys in 1992, a trio which introduced rap into a music scene previously dominated by bumble gum or patriotic songs.

In fact, one of the Boys, Yang Hyun-suk, would go on to create YG Entertainment in 1996, Korea’s second most famous entertainment company after SM Entertainment, which was founded a year earlier by record producer Lee Soo-man. When Park Jin-young, a K-pop solo artist, established JYP Entertainment in 1998, K-pop had its entertainment trifecta and the race was on.

As it exploded on the peninsula, K-pop also caught fire in Japan, which was in the throws of its economic “Lost Decade” and craving upbeat and romantic art. Soon K-pop was in demand and the entertainment companies began aggressively recruiting talent through referrals and auditions but also right off the street at public casting calls.

Once the “trainee” is admitted to a company, they spend between three months and ten years learning their craft and honing their image. With their regimented schedules and living environments, even their romantic life is highly regulated, somewhat ironic since so much of their music concerns love. When the company finally deems them fit, they debut as an “idol”.

Scene from EXO-K's mega-MTV for their hit 'Overdose'. image: SM Entertainment
With the establishment of SM, YG and JYP talent factories came the phenomena of the K-pop idol. While idol seems like a synonym for singer or star, the public truly came to idolize them. Placed on the pedestals of fame, they are looked upon as flawless individuals, who never make mistakes, at least not publicly.

The perfect K-pop idol is an elusive combination of on-screen charisma, vocal talent—if you can’t sing, but can dance, they’ll make you a rapper, and, of course, good looks. Idols in turn are combined into groups, each fulfilling a specific role: for example, the most attractive is called the “visual.”

Unlike in American celebrity culture, idols are openly judged for beauty. On the talk shows, idols are literally asked to rank each other from best to worst looking.

Sometimes an individual is the “face” of the group, the most recognizable member. They often go on to pursue a solo career because of sheer star power (think Beyoncé in Destiny’s Child).

The “main vocal” is, of course, the best singer and the “main dancer,” the best at dancing, but the “happy virus” is the person with the most personality and energy.

There is almost always a leader, often the most trained in media relations, who starts most songs and handles the group’s introductions. With any combination of these elements, a strong K-pop group can be formed.

Most idols subject themselves to plastic surgery, although it doesn’t have the negative, fake connotation it does in America. Women and men alike go under the knife for “double-eyelid surgery,” which gives them Caucasian-like eyes, or nose jobs, the two most common procedures in Korea.

Suho (Kim Jun-myeon), the leader of the K-pop Chinese-Korean band EXO, performing in their MTV for 'Overdose'. image: SM Entertainment.
It’s often argued that the beauty ideal in Korea is based upon European standards: large eyes and a small nose, which tends to be the exact opposite of natural Asian features. While this argument is of interest to academics, idols consider plastic surgery purely transactional: the price you pay for success; the more attractive you are, the better you sell.

Idols are commodities in Korean culture, objects for consumption. That’s why they never speak out about political issues, or seem to rebel against the status quo, and are always loyal and obedient to their entertainment company.

In a very real sense, they sell their soul for fame and stardom. Contracts are commonly seven years or more, with clauses that control everything from dating to hair color.

As outsiders looking in, many international fans or observers criticize the entertainment companies as completely commercial, on the one hand, or dysfunctional and corrupt, exploiting and taking advantage of artists, on the other.

But many within the system view it as a temporary period of struggle that will help them become more resilient, almost like joining a fraternity or sorority. The first few years of fame is the “hazing” period before they become a fully vested member of the entertainment family with what it takes to be a successful K-pop artist.

The regimentation, overwork and even injustice that K-pop idols endure are public knowledge, yet not much has changed since the start of this culture and the industry that produces it.

The Stereotypes, the production team behind Red Velvet's 'Bad Boy', playing around, as usual. image: The Stereotypes
Groups still practice 12 hours a day. Still survive on cheap meals of ramen, kimchi and convenience store snacks. Still sleep four to a room in the dorms provided by the company. Still get little vacation time. But it’s all considered “necessary evils” to be successful in the K-pop scene.

Can the entertainment companies be blamed for such practices? After all, Korea only recently became a “first world” country. Having increased its economy by a factor of 100 between the 1960s and late-‘80s, it now has the 11th largest GNP in the world. With such extreme growth within such a short period of time, some of these operations are consistent with keeping up with supply and demand. After 25 years, K-pop is still experiencing growing pains.

As the genre becomes more and more popular world-wide, collaborations with foreigners is becoming an industry mainstay, notably among the singers, who can now be from China, Thailand or elsewhere in Asia.

A newish trend has been the bringing on of overseas hitmakers to crank out catchy tunes. Take any of last year’s albums from SM Entertainment, the most popular Korean company, and you’ll notice most of the tracks were produced or written by non-Koreans.

For example, the K-pop masterpiece “Overdose” by EXO was composed by The Underdogs, an American R&B and pop duo made up of Harvey Mason Jr. and Damon Thomas, who gave it both hardcore hip-hop and epic orchestral moments.

Creative art direction for Red Velvet's title track, 'Rookie', which was composed by musician and comedian Sara Forsberg. image: S. Forsberg
The producers considered the sheer size of the group they were writing for, a 12-member boy band, and worked to split the song so that each member could shine. They wanted to make a track that was different and stood out, as opposed to the generic sound that often plagues K-pop groups. With "Overdose" one of the most recognizable new pieces of music by EXO, The Underdogs accomplished that feat.

“Bad Boy”, a ‘90s R&B/Trap tune by Red Velvet was produced by The Stereotypes, a quartet consisting of Jonathan Yip, Ray Romulus, Jeremy Reeves and Ray Charles McCullough II. They also worked on “Somebody to Love” by Justin Bieber and “Finesse” by Bruno Mars.

In interviews, The Stereotypes emphasized how a song like “Bad Boy” wouldn’t make it in the US music industry: simply too “musical” and lacks the formulaic structure of most American radio hits. It’s more fun to write for K-pop artists, they said, because producers have more freedom to experiment and play around, often going through a half-a-dozen styles in a single song.

Another Red Velvet tune, “Rookie”, is a fun bubble-gum piece produced by Sara Forsberg, a popular YouTube comedian, also known as SAARA. Forsberg went viral with her video “What Languages Sound Like To Foreigners”. As a polyglot with an exceptional talent at accents, she captured audiences with her witty personality.

A lot of SAARA’s subscribers had no idea she was a K-pop music producer until her first K-pop hit, “You Think” by Girls Generation, was released. Since then, she’s gone on to launch a solo career under the moniker SAARA, and continues to make YouTube videos in addition to producing.

LDN Noise, a London-based production duo, created “Touch” by NCT 127, along with countless other tracks. Sampling an old-timey tune and taking it up a notch, “Touch” has a refreshing summer sound that sounds like sparkling soda.

Greg Bonnick (rt) and Hayden Chapman, from LDN Noise, speak at KCON, the most popular K-pop convention. image: KCON USA. image: LDN Noise
The British pair, Greg Bonnick and Hayden Chapman, often appear at K-pop conventions, where they share never-before-heard clips of their famous tracks. At one event, they played a vocals-only version of the song “Monster” by EXO, so fans could hear the hidden intricacies. They also make an effort to connect with fans on social media and release behind-the-scenes footage of the production taking place.

Despite the problems in the K-pop industry, it’s clear that their talent has international appeal and immense potential. They already work their butts off and are fully dedicated to their craft, it’s only a matter of bringing out individuality and authenticity that will be the key to world wide domination.

Lauren Jiang was born and raised in the Bay Area and is an entertainment and lifestyle journalist who is passionate about strengthening community, expressing herself through performing arts, and specializing in Korean culture—indeed, she recently lived there for a year. Jiang can be reached . Posted on Jul 24, 2018 - 10:30 AM
Adventures in K-Pop Fandom
by Lauren Jiang

K-pop fans eagerly await their band, Laboum, in 2017. photo: courtesy South China Morning Post
K-POP FANDOM IS UNLIKE ANYTHING
anyone has ever seen, at least not since the ‘60s British Invasion.

How can I claim this? First of all, fans of K-pop go above and beyond to see their “idols,” which is what they call their star singers, and to feel intimately connected to them. And, due to limited laws against invasion of privacy in South Korea and the country’s collectivist culture, the K-pop world makes space for even the craziest fans to live out their dreams.

The most hardcore fans, or “sasaeng,” are infamous for hiring taxi cabs to drive them around all day following the vans of their favorite K-pop acts (the groups often travel in vans, to keep the members together). Sometimes such fervent interest—OK, stalking—causes accidents, which forces K-pop artists to make statements publicly.

In one instance Chanyeol, a member of EXO, a Chinese-Korean group currently in the top five nationally, took to Instagram, saying, “We need to work to keep each other safe.”

It is also common for Sasaeng fans to find the phone numbers of idols and harass them with text messages and calls. This happened to Chanyeol’s band mate, Baekhyun, who was filming a live-streaming broadcast when a suspicious number started blowing up his phone. He ignored the calls but mentioned with irritation they were from a fan.

On the lighter side of the fandom, many fans buy DSLR cameras with massive lenses so they can take close-ups of their favorite artists, despite being galaxies away. After capturing the images, fans are quick to post them on social media.

Another common idiosyncrasy is the absence of dancing at concerts. Instead of freely dancing, fans often stand still while chanting in unison. A “fan-chant” generally consists of band members’ names, song lyrics and encouraging words. The purpose of fan-chants is to show respect and adoration, but only briefly, after which they listen quietly during the performance.

I witnessed a fan-chant when I attended a concert by Day6, a five-member boy band from JYP Entertainment. Before the show started, cards were passed around asking for no unnecessary screaming. This is not out of malice; loyal fans just wanted to create an environment for the artists where they’re not overpowered. Indeed, after each song, there were a few moments of loud cheering and then complete silence, so their beloved idols could say what they want.

Malaysian K-pop fans flew all the way to Seoul to see their 'idols,' the super group Girls Generation. photo: courtesy Malaysian Times
There is one must-buy item if you’re a K-pop fan. If you are truly a loyal and adoring fan of a K-pop group, you’ve got to buy their lightstick and wave it in unison during the concert.

Lightsticks are typically colorful, one to two feet long and display the group’s logo. Sometimes, they have Bluetooth connectivity so when the fans are at a show their lightsticks change color to the tune of the song, creating a unique and united spectacle.

Another thing that differentiates K-pop fans from other fans is their widespread and jealous attachment to their idols. Few artists across the entire industry can publicly date, let alone marry. Fans believe that the only relationship an idol should be in is with them.

Indeed, when idols do date, they usually have to consult their studio in order to #1, make sure the other person falls in line with their image and brand, and #2, be sure fans won’t be outraged over the news.

Certain idols are allowed to date, depending on level of fame. For example, when Wonder Girls’ Yeeun and 2AM’s Jinwoon began dating, fans were perfectly fine with it, since both come from less popular groups.

However, when it was revealed that superstar Taeyeon, from Girls Generation, was dating EXO’s Baekhyun, fans were furious. Both idols come from mega-famous groups, on top of which, both had been posting cryptic posts about one another on Instagram. It seems trivial, but these details are critical to fans.

With Twitter ablaze nowadays, fans take to the platform to congregate and share information. Sometimes fan wars breakout between followers of different groups. There are well-known rival fan groups, like the fandoms of EXO and BTS, two of the biggest K-pop boy bands.

It’s gotten so bad that the members of the respective groups never discuss the other group in their interviews. Their fan clubs, EXO-L and ARMY respectively, are often at each others’ throats, either online or in public, often sabotaging each other. For example, when BTS was up for a Billboard Music Award, some EXO-L fans conspired to vote for Justin Bieber, just so BTS wouldn’t win.

It’s all extremely petty, and often creates concern in Korea over why fans become so obsessed. Some say it has to do with their youth and immaturity. Others say it’s the anonymous nature of the Internet.

A Seoul concert by Infinite, at the start of ‘One Great Step’ world tour, 15,000 banners were distributed saying the fans will patiently await their return. photo: courtesy Beyond Hallyu
Still others suggest it is a natural outgrowth of Korea’s rapid transition from impoverished front-line state to an advanced, prosperous and highly romantic society, which happens to be in the nuclear shadow of their brother nation to the north, generating an existential angst not unlike in the West in the ‘60s.

The K-pop fandom is also very present on “stan Twitter”, the side of Twitter where the most dedicated fans, or “stans” (derived from the Eminem song “Stan”), use their own lingo and slang to communicate with each other.

This transcends other platforms, including YouTube, where “crack” videos, fan-made videos, are popular. Crack videos often include shots of K-pop idols and groups and popular memes, as well as voiceovers of a computer-generated voice reciting a funny script.

But K-pop fandom isn’t all bad. In fact, one of the most meaningful draws is the level of diversity. This can be seen at massive K-pop events like KCON, the annual K-pop convention held in different locations internationally and coming to Los Angeles on August 10th, and at concerts.

K-pop fans range from elementary school girls to elderly grandmas and men of many persuasions. Its diverse reach also connects people internationally.

Within a single fandom, people are very kind to one another. I witnessed this when I camped out, along with hundreds of other fans, the night before a BTS concert. In the shivering cold, as a light snow fell, many people passed out photo-cards of band members, or bookmarks and banners they had made. The level of creativity and generosity was so nice, it established a common bond among those in attendance.

The standard K-pop event, where a fan can interact with an idol, are the fan signings and fan meetings. Generally the idols perform a few songs, sometimes new renditions of old ones, and have meet-and-greet time, where fans line up to approach them sitting behind a table.

Often times, fans bring photo books they made themselves, or write questions on post-its, where idols write answers. Fans then turn to Twitter and other social media to share these post-its and signatures with the rest of the fandom.

Suga of BTS dons a garland gifted to him by a dedicated fan. Photo: courtesy of Big Hit Entertainment
At fan events, it’s very common for fans to gift idols with cutesy headbands or flower crowns. Unlike in America, boy groups don’t shy away from sporting the adorable pieces and fans “ooh” and “aah” whenever they wear them. Although fans are usually not allowed to hug band members, they can hold their hands.

Overall, being considerate of the feelings of the fandom is much more emphasized in K-pop than it is in the western entertainment industry.

The unity of the fandom and tendency to not stand out from the crowd is rooted in the collectivist style of Asian culture, in general, and South Korea, in particular. Contrary to American society, Koreans tend to be against individualism and prefer instead work towards greater harmony among the group. Within this context, their behavior as fans makes sense.

Lauren Jiang was born and raised in the Bay Area and is an entertainment and lifestyle journalist who is passionate about strengthening community, expressing herself through performing arts, and specializing in Korean culture—indeed, she recently lived there for a year. Jiang can be reached .
Posted on Jul 14, 2018 - 05:04 PM
Lassater: Not Just Hugs
by Karl Cohen

John Lasseter, founder and head of Pixar, was condemned and put on leave for his sexualized hugging. photo: courtesy Pixar
MOST PEOPLE BY NOW KNOW THAT JOHN
Lasseter “misbehaved” for years at Pixar and got away with it, but the details remained vague—no longer. A former female employee of Pixar, Cassandra Smolcic, has laid out the full and ugly picture of what was going on in a very well written article that has gone viral on the internet.

Smolcic's article, “Pixar's Sexist Boy's Club” (June 27, the blog beyourself), is a powerful account of five years working at Pixar as an artist and designer. While she has high praise for some of the men she worked with, she also shares with us some of the unpleasant things that happened to her and to other women on the staff.

It is disturbing; it is ugly; but it is also an honest recollection of being a woman working at what is considered not only the nation’s greatest animation company, but a very liberal work place, with all the amenities in Emeryville, between Oakland and Berkeley.

Unfortunately, what the public didn’t know until last November, is that, behind the happy facade, some women found that working where outrageous sexual behavior is tolerated and goes unreported and unpunished can be a horrible experience.

Two people who read Smolcic's article contacted me to note that sadly this is something they also saw happening in their career. Both prefer not to be named.

One was a production manager at a studio that made animated series for TV in the 1980s. She avoided being a target of the guys prone to hit up on the women by always wearing her riding boots and slacks to work, as she rode after work and on weekends.

“It wasn’t just my apparel that worked at [unnamed company]. I let them know that I spent my off-hours making 1000 pound animals do what I want so they should choose easier targets.”

“When [the owner] saw I could do the job well, he had me train some more women so he could promote them and pay them a fraction of what he paid the male production managers."

"But he would never address the problem that the artists wouldn't listen to the female PMs. That would have run in the face of the old-boy network. Lots of stories about that. It was so good to tell him to his face ‘I quit!’”

She also told me she loved working at Klasky/Csupo, the multimedia and animation studio in Hollywood, the producer of the first few seasons of “The Simpsons”. Many senior positions were held by women including that of the owner and the studio manager, Arlene.

Arlene didn’t put up with that kind of behavior. She would talk to the offending guy, and if he continued, she got rid of him.

"It was an atmosphere where that kind of behavior was not allowed," my informant continued. "Female power was in place. The problems there came from free-lancers from outside, not from the people I hired.” She went on to work on "Rugrats" and "Ahhhhh! Real Monsters".

“It was so wonderful," she continued. "For the first time in my career to go into a meeting and seeing that the women's ideas were listened to and we didn't have to go through the subterfuge of getting people to think a guy had come up with our good idea.”

The second person, a man, worked at Disney. “I worked with a bunch of guys who displayed shocking behavior at times," he wrote by email. "Some stories I could tell would cause your toes to curl. Sadly, their behavior was condoned."

"Anyway, the stories are getting told," he concluded, "and that's important.”

As far as it has come, evidently, the MeToo Movement still has a long road ahead.

Karl Cohen is an animator, educator and director of thce local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached . Posted on Jul 04, 2018 - 01:14 AM
Did Trump’s Art Film Help Avert Real War?
by Doniphan Blair

American President Donald J. Trump and North Korean Premier Kim Jong Un in the National Security Agency's 'faux film trailer' shown in Singapore. image: courtesy NSA
THE RECENT SINGAPORE SUMMIT
featured a four-minute film, with English and Korean versions, which the American President Donald J. Trump premiered—proudly and ostentatiously, as is his want—to much controversy. While not “Rite of Spring” riot levels, there was enough incredulity, ridicule and misunderstanding to go around.

The film, which doesn’t have a title—so let’s go with “Trump’s Gambit” (see it here), was called “a fake action movie trailer” by The SF Chronicle, “schlock” by Vanity Fair, and “corny, clichéd” by The New York Times, which also deemed to add “strategic.”

“Reporters thought this video was North Korea propaganda,” noted The Washington Post on June 12th. “But as the president explained it, the video [seemed] more like an elevator pitch. It was the type of glitzy production that Trump might have once used to persuade investors to finance his hotels.”

Evidently the 2,000 plus political reporters in attendance—not to mention Trump or the North Korean Premier Kim Jong Un, the sole intended audience—had ever been to film school.

Hence it was hard for them to see that “Trump’s Gambit” was a full blown art film, a distillation of dozens of film school tropes, notably Bruce Conner’s “A MOVIE” (1964) or the end of Dusan Makavejev’s “Mystery of the Organism: WR” (1971), which cuts from Stalin to a missile launcher to an erect penis (see trailer).

Thankfully, the National Security Agency kids who whipped up “Gambit”, probably using iMovie on their phones, spared us that cinematic quote. What they did include however was enumerable other art film references, which become especially apparent when you view it with the sound off, eliminating the bombastic narration.

“Gambit” has missiles going back into their silos (using that classic effect: backwards-running film), the film itself getting stuck in the gate and burning (a popular visual among socialist cineastes, see “The 49 Springs of Ho Chi Minh”, 1972, albeit with some lost significance in the digital age), and Conner-esque cutting. This included putting titles and start-of-film countdowns in the middle of the film, a basketball player sailing skyward for a dunk and horses galloping through water, great visuals for channeling a thrilling cinema sensation.

The actual film frame burning, a classic socialist cinema trick, in the National Security Agency's faux film trailer. image: courtesy NSA
The basketball-horses cut was so egregious, it was singled out by The New York Times in its withering critique of “Gambit” as “a fake movie trailer to deal with an actual nuclear threat.” So incensed was the paper, it re-cut and published not just one BUT two versions of the film.

The first (see it here) has Peter Baker explaining, in academic voice over, that virtually every cut consists of the cornball clichés or putrifying kitsch which fascists and totalitarians have long used to conjure a phony past or absurd future.

But The Times, the very next day (June 13th), evidently suspecting their tone might not have been sophisticated enough to fully belittle the over-the-top Trumpian fantasy, went one better. Visual producers Taige Jenso and Japhet Weeks re-edited the elevator-pitch into a Strangelovian satire, which they proceeded to play straight (see film here), EXCEPT for the one faux review quote they couldn’t resist: “Holy shit I can’t believe this is real.”

Amidst all the farce, counter-farce and irony, a very earnest young woman—for good reason, she had escaped famine, torture and imprisonment in North Korea—weighed in with a fourth short. In a completely sincere three minutes, delivered two days earlier, Yeonmi Park compared Kim to Hitler and ridiculed any attempts to dodge, satirize or sanitize anything, see “I Escaped North Korea. Here’s My Message for President Trump”.

I sympathize with Ms. Park. It is definitely disconcerting to see art of any kind coming from a dictator or dictator wanna be, while art warriors take them seriously, flinging barbs and bombs the other way. This seems to dumb down the grand spectacle of the arts and civilization, which have become incredibly advanced in South Korea, with its fantastic K-pop music scene—see cineSOURCE article "Behind S. Korea’s Biggest Hit Songs"—made even more amazing by its inverse in North Korea.

Saddam Hussein wrote four romantic novels which are insufferable, not just because he was a terrible writer but because he was enshrining himself as his society’s alpha-omega, the brutal murderer and tender artist. The first book, “Zabibah and the King” (2000), concerns a medieval Iraqi ruler, a beautiful common woman and her abusive husband, whom the ruler, the Saddam standin, stops.

The big problem in Trump’s case is not that he’s claiming “Gambit” is a great art film but that grifters often have enough emotional intelligence to game the rubes and to use art. The tragedy of America is not so much that Trump succeeded on a trifecta of backlash, tribalism and greed but that his New York neighbors, all those academics and critics, were too busy ridiculing him to notice what he was doing, despite the fact he was spewing out various bits of art, statements, full page ads and of course the notorious reality TV show, "The Apprentice" (2004-17).

Yeonmi Park, a North Korean survivor and activist, spoke out passionately in her heartfelt but ultimately misguided piece. image: courtesy Y. Park
On election day, November 8, 2016, The New York Times poll showed 80% in favor of a Hillary Clinton win until about 7pm that evening, where upon it flipped 180 degrees to 80% Trump.

“If you know your enemies and know yourself,” notes Sun Tzu, the great 6th century BCE Chinese military strategist, “you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles."

In this time of trigger warnings, sex-abusive artists and tribal circling of the wagons, why is watching Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary about Hitler, “Triumph of the Will” (1937), so important? Art provides a direct link into a subject, a person’s psyche, no matter how distasteful, which can then be studied and understood.

And what does “Gambit” tell us? We all want to be loved and take the hero’s journey; and two of the most eggrigious candidates in this quest are Trump and Kim. Just as the morally-dubious Oscar Schindler could hustle the Nazis, or Henry Kissinger could negotiate with Mao Zedong, who but the shallow and narcissistic Trump to crack the code of Kim?

Unfortunately for Ms. Park, whose dreamy, waif-like appeal could inspire to action enormous men covered in medals, prescribing Pyongyang a massive injection of Vitamin B-52 is tactically absurd. Seoul sits only 35 miles from the border, North Korean nuclear and missile tech is both set on mobile launchers and hardened in caves, meaning there could be 100,000s of dead with days. There is no military solution; hence the 25-year stand off.

“Engage the enemy with the straight move,” advises Sun Tsu, “and beat them with the freak move.” Not that Trump has any idea about strategic sophistication, let alone Sun Tsu, but a life time of grifting has given him some insights. Certainly, this film can be considered an example of "art war," if not the art of war.

“I hope you liked it,” Trump gushed about his "art film" to the assembled reporters in Singapore. “I thought it was good. I thought it was interesting enough to show. ... And I think [Kim] loved it.”

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Jun 15, 2018 - 12:03 AM
Disney Ditches Lassater
by Karl Cohen

John Lasseter, founder and head of Pixar, was condemned and put on leave for his sexualized hugging. photo: courtesy Pixar
DISNEY ANNOUNCED JOHN LASSATER
is leaving Pixar by year's end, on June 8th. They also said that Directors Pete Docter and Jennifer Lee are expected to take on added roles at Pixar and Disney Animation. Lasseter will have a consulting role until he leaves. Earlier that week his absence at that world premiere in Hollywood of "The Incredibles 2", a film he supported, was noted by the press.

Bob Iger, Disney chairman and CEO said, "John had a remarkable tenure at Pixar and Disney Animation, reinventing the animation business, taking breathtaking risks, and telling original, high quality stories that will last forever. We are profoundly grateful for his contribution, which included a masterful and remarkable turnaround of The Walt Disney Animation Studios. One of John's greatest achievements is assembling a team of great storytellers and innovators with the vision and talent to set the standard in animation for generations to come."

Lasseter issued a statement that said, "The last six months have provided an opportunity to reflect on my life, career and personal priorities. While I remain dedicated to the art of animation and inspired by the creative talent at Pixar and Disney, I have decided the end of this year is the right time to begin focusing on new creative challenges. I am extremely proud of what two of the most important and prolific animation studios have achieved under my leadership and I'm grateful for all the opportunities to follow my creative passion at Disney."

Due to complaints about his fondness for hugging people and other behavior that some people felt was unwelcomed, he took a six month leave of absence from Pixar and Disney last November. When he didn’t return to work in May the Wall Street Journal asked if his behavior was not “Harvey-like” enough to warrant permanent termination?

Thanks to widespread media coverage, many people now think he overstepped the present conventions of society. I assume Disney viewed the idea of his returning to work as toxic for the reputation of both Pixar and Disney. They lost no time getting rid of Roseanne Barr for her obnoxious racist behavior and now it was John’s turn to go.

His removal was a more complex problem as he is a founder of Pixar and was the leader of the corporation for many decades. He also owns a great deal of Disney/Pixar stock.

I imagine Igar and his staff thought long and hard about a diplomatic way to depose him. As expected they acknowledged and honored what Lasseter had done for the two companies and they named him as a consultant until he leaves for good. I suspect he will rarely be seen by employees of either company before the end of the year. I’m sure Disney consulted with him about their exit plans for him and hopefully they reached an attractive compensation deal. Perhaps there will even be a nice farewell party for him towards the end of this year.

John was already a multi-millionaire, but he probably had no intention of retiring before his behavior was exposed and it became worldwide news. Frankly, being able to retire at a young age (61) with millions of dollars at your disposal isn’t an awful way to leave Pixar.

If he had returned to Pixar there would have been people who would have welcomed him back and those who have little or no respect for him. I suspect some people now consider him as evil as Woody Allen and would have boycotted any film coming from Pixar or Disney with his name on it. (Woody Allen has one son who supports him in the press and another and an ex-wife who condemns him.) A public with mixed feelings about Disney continuing to work with him would have been accepted by some, but would have been bad news to others.

Karl Cohen is an animator, educator and director of thce local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached . Posted on Jun 08, 2018 - 09:11 PM
Can’t We All Just Get Along: The Movie
by Eric Protein Moseley

Activist and filmmaker Eric Protein Moseley, despite being homeless, felt it was critical to research and report on the subject of police violence. photo: courtesy EP Moseley
ON NEW YEAR'S DAY, 2009, OSCAR
Grant, a 22-year-old African-American man, was fatally shot just after midnight by Police Officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California.

A Bay Area Rapid Transit train, returning from San Francisco, was reported to have passengers aboard who were causing a disturbance. When the train arrived at the Fruitvale station in Oakland, Grant and several others passengers were detained by BART police.

Grant, who was unarmed, was forced to lie face down on the platform by two officers, one being Officer Mehserle. For no apparent reason, Mehserle pulled out his pistol and shot Grant in the back.

After being treated at Highland Hospital in Oakland, Grant was pronounced dead on January 1st, 2009. Local and national news outlets obtained several videos of the incident from a few different sources.

Protests took place soon after. While some were peaceful, others were violent.

All across the country, animosity between African-American communities and police departments have long existed.

Both sides continue to find it difficult to understand the opposition’s point of view when it comes to having a certain level of respect for one another.

The African-American community has, by way of video tape, proven that their community has been and continues to be targeted by violence from white officers. On the other hand, statistics have shown that the African-American population has been no stranger to violence projected towards white police officers.

In recent years, several other video tapes have surfaced showing police officers unlawfully killing African-American males. In retaliation, we have also witnessed several events where police officers were senselessly gunned down by those who believe that violence is the only way to stop violence from being thrust upon them.

Rapper 65 is interviewed in Moseley's 'Can't We All Just Get Along'. photo: courtesy EP Moseley
Both parties continue to point fingers at each other while, in the meantime, there seems to be no solution in sight whatsoever.

"No one should have to die!" is how I feel as a documentary filmmaker, father and black man. To elaborate, I made "Can’t We All Just Get Along", an hour-long documentary, starting in 2016 and covering police brutality dating back as far as the early 1960s.

Now that police brutality is off and on in the headlines, I feel I have to take responsibility and to try to raise awareness by producing my film. This main purpose of "Can’t We All Just Get Along”, which can be viewed here, is to bridge the gap between the African-American communities and the police who are sworn to protect them.

I will be the very first to admit that the production of this film is low resolution. Reason being is that I made it when I was homeless while in New Orleans in 2016. On July 5th, Alton Sterling, a 37 year-old African-American was shot to death by a white police officer in Baton Rouge.

The tension around the entire state of Louisiana and the country had been feed up with prior events concerning African-American males being shot and killed by white officers. I had no camera equipment at the time except for a low grade, not-so-smart camera phone.

Trying to figure out ways to shed more light on solutions to the problem, I knew that I could either wait until I got the proper equipment or I could start capturing stories as they were unfolding.

I decided to go with storyline over the production, content over form. I first arrived in Baton Rouge while tempers were flaring over the recent police shooting that occurred there. And right after that, three Baton Rouge police officers were killed in retaliation for the killing of Alton Sterling.

In 'Can't We All Just Get Along', a woman during the 1965 Watts event says: 'I don't check it and I'm laying on the burn.' photo: courtesy EP Moseley
The animosity was as deep as a Louisiana swamp after Hurricane Katrina.

When I first arrived in Los Angeles, Andy Bells the CEO of Union Gospel Mission provided me with an Apple iPhone, which helped bring up the quality of the film a small amount. The phone also gave me access to a free editing app.

I then found several news clips and whole stories to support events of police brutality that had taken place in the US dating from back in the early ‘60s to currently. But I was somewhat disappointed in the quality of the film and decided to can the whole project.

But when the recent police shooting of African-American males occurred recently in the Bay Area, I said to myself, “I have to go with what I have.”

The film may lack in production values but hopefully it makes that up with the indepth message it contains from the interviews that I captured.

For example when I spoke to Rapper 65 from Central, he shared a story with me on how he remembered the Rodney King riots as a child. It immediately took me back to the time that my father had taken our entire family on a cruise through the Watts Riots/Rebellion in the summer of 1965.

As a four-and-a-half year-old child , I was terrified and still remember the situation clearly to this very day.

But what struck me the most about Rapper 65 was when he went into full detail on how the majority of the police who patrol the African-American communities , know nothing about the everyday life or the obstacles residents face on daily base.

I have to agree with that as well. I believe that police departments need better training when it comes to stereotypes. I also make it a point to let it be know that African-Americans (under certain circumstances) are no stranger to shooting police officers.

Filmmaker Eric Protein Moseley feels that, whatever your experience, you can do research and tell stories. photo: courtesy EP Moseley
My film’s sole purpose is to bridge the gap between the African-American communities and the police who are sworn to protect and to serve those communities.

I take the viewer on an hour-long journey through Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Dallas, Texas and on to Los Angeles, where we review the Rodney King beating of 1992 after its 25th anniversary.

Also being addressed in the film are the issues concerning police brutality among the African-American communities in other places. Their role is expanded dramatically when I learned that, in a Bronx, New York processing center, a single-parent and pregnant woman was denied medical attention when she couldn’t walk to the door.

My main objective is to try to get both sides to see that there are good and bad people on both sides. No one should be stereotyped as a bad person, rather you are just a cop or an African-American, living in the United States. No one should be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Eric Protein Moseley is a filmmaker, homeless advocate and father who lives in LA and can be reached .
Posted on Jun 06, 2018 - 04:05 PM
Can (G)I-DLE Make It in the Tough K-Pop World?
by Lauren Jiang

The women from the promising new K-pop band, (G)I-DLE—(lft-rt) Soojin, Shuhua, Minnie, Soyeon, Yuqi, Miyeon—embrace for an album cover. image: courtesy Cube Entertainment
BUSKING IS VERY POPULAR IN HONGDAE,
Seoul’s hipster quarter full of restaurants and shops, which is jam packed every night of the week with people, a mix of energetic college students and curious tourists.

Despite the recent threat of nuclear war, Hongdae is jammed—in fact, the kids there don’t like to talk about it. They’d rather party hardy, using only alcohol—no drugs, and dance, starting right in the street, on their way to the club.

Street performing singers and dance groups generally cover famous songs and often draw big crowds of captivated listeners. See (G)I-DLE killing a medley of BTS's "Mic Drop" and CL's "Hello Bitches" here.

By the way, capital letters figure highly in the English version of K-pop names for some unknown reason—perhaps they just like to add that extra BOLDNESS!

Although (G)I-DLE likes to busk in Hongdae, they are in fact the newest girl group from Cube Entertainment, one of K-pop’s talent factories well known for the bands BTOB and 4Minute, which they trained for years with investments of thousands if not millions of Korean won.

The K-pop fandom has been questioning this decision, especially with Cube’s other new outing, CLC, being such a capable and talented girl group.

However, Cube seems to be emulating their more successful Korean entertainment industry peers, the most popular of which is SM Entertainment, with YG Entertainment coming in at number two.

CLC is Cube's version of SM Entertainment’s Girls' Generation, composed of girls-next-door types, who are universally swooned over. Meanwhile, (G)I-DLE is their version of YG’s Blackpink, the confident and edgy band of sisters. Both are all the rage across Seoul and even the hinterland—probably in Pyongyang, maybe even with Kim Jong Un himself!

On the other hand, perhaps Cube isn't intentionally trying to copy other mega-successful groups, and the fans don't mind, since (G)I-DLE has its own quirks and fun qualities.

These derive from its six unique members, Soyeon, Miyeon, Soojin, Minnie, Yuqi and Shuhua, all with fascinating backstories.

The (G)I-DLE girls join on set for their debut music video, 'Latata'. image: courtesy Cube Entertainment

Soyeon, the group leader, previously released two songs as a solo rapper and had a stint on “Unpretty Rapstar”, a popular female-rapper competition TV show, which gave her a seasoned street cred, along with an experienced, professional aura.

Miyeon used to be a trainee at YG Entertainment, where she was all set to debut with Blackpink. She’s known as “The Visual,” meaning the stunner who gets a lot of featured screen time.

Soojin grew up doing jazz dance and entered K-pop’s grueling training machine over objections from her father.

Indeed, K-pop has been criticized for being too regimented, forcing their trainees to practice relentlessly and even controlling dating and marriage (see BBC article from 1/16/2016.) Alas, it is a very competitive scene.

Soojin was actually set to debut three years ago, but as it goes in the K-pop scene, her group at that time didn’t make it against the cut-throat competition.

(G)I-DLE, which is a mix between the English word “I” and the Korean participle “deul”, meaning more than one, is rounded out with three non-Koreans. Recruiting international talent is more and more common with Korean entertainment companies since, in today’s entertainment industry, diversity sells.

Minnie is an ex-model and lead vocalist from Thailand, while Yuqi is from China and has a distinct voice for K-pop. It’s deeper and stronger than most women in the industry, and even more interesting when paired with her cutesy image.

Shuhua is from Taiwan and the youngest member, or “maknae,” as they are called. She doesn’t get much screen time yet, but with more industry experience that’s sure to change.

This group definitely embodies the "girl crush" concept, since they are super cute but also clearly talented. They have a lot of promise, from their international appeal to their classy, colorful style.

On May 2nd, (G)I-DLE released their first extended play album, “I Am”. The album embodies K-pop’s typical fun youthful concept, but with an edge — that deep soulful sound — provided by Yuqi and Soyeon.

The (G)I-DLE ladies pose for a pic during their 'Latata' dance tutorial. image: courtesy Cube Entertainment

The EP features the single "Latata" which already grabbed awards on “The Show” and “M Countdown”. A modern, trendy tune that showcases their potential and skill, its mysterious concept catches the ear while its tropical vibe pulls the listener in. Like most K-pop bands, (G)I-DLE does not play instruments and their music is primarily electronic generated by in-house musicians.

If you want to hop on the (G)I-DLE bandwagon, check out this video! Or them performing their debut single.

Many people thought K-pop would take a break while The Donald and Master Kim duke it out, but no way. These kids have been living under the nukes since they were born, and that is exactly why K-pop is so vibrant and doing better than ever, in its third decade on the world stage.

In fact, the K-pop boy band BTS just debuted at NUMBER ONE on the Billboard top 100 with their third studio album, “Love Yourself: Tear”, a rarity for an album with only the occasional lyric in English. They are the first K-pop band to chart since Psy amazed the world with his catchy “Gangnam Style” in 2012.

There’s a clear gap in the American boy and girl group market right now, with once-mega groups like One Direction and Fifth Harmony on hiatus. This provides the perfect opportunity for K-pop groups to swoop in and amass a fandom.

K-pop is irresistible to the masses. With its uber-catchy songs, excellently-produced music videos and wholesome personalities, what’s not to like? Especially at a time when racial inclusion in the media is becoming more pressing and openness to international music more common than ever.

Keep an ear out for more releases on American charts, since K-pop is definitely not going to stop rising anytime soon.

Lauren Jiang was born and raised in the Bay Area and is an entertainment and lifestyle journalist who is passionate about strengthening community, expressing herself through performing arts, and specializing in Korean culture—indeed, she recently lived there for a year. Jiang can be reached . Posted on Jun 03, 2018 - 04:03 PM
The Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto
by Doniphan Blair

In 1977, I developed 'Abstract Aborigine', the notion that we are all abstract thinkers native to planet Earth. In 2003, I met a girl from the Maranhão tribe in northeastern, Brazil, who liked photography and playing with images, and proved the point. image: D. Blair

IF GOOD IS WHAT BENEFITS MORE
people longer and evil is what helps fewer people for shorter periods of time, how do tribes and civilizations measure up?

Tribes are our blood and history, genetic, cultural and psychological. Tribes reach back into our Paleolithic past, probably the origin of language, the primary technology that allowed us to organize groups bigger than the multi-family clans apes and bears also use.

Tribes provide language, religion, crafts and cuisine, as well as family and group support systems, some of which remain robust after thousands of years. Tribes can also be old-fashioned, close-minded, xenophobic, claustrophobic, incestuous, violent and self-destructive.

Tribes can be injured and even die due to invasion, persecution, environmental catastrophe or their own failures or quirks. When this happens, surviving members naturally try to save themselves and their families by joining other tribes, either conquerors, neighbors or more benevolent or like-minded tribes, even if faraway.

Throughout history, individuals, groups and tribes have journeyed long distances searching for a better life, leaving few people in their aboriginal homelands. Such travelers were obliged to traverse difficult environments, the territory of hostile tribes and, sometimes, the gap between tribe and civilization. In this manner, those tribal people voted with their feet to join civilization.

Civilization is not intrinsically better than tribe, only bigger and more intellectual. Civilization involves the development of agriculture and cities (the secondary and terciary technologies of big group formation after language), art and ideas, science and technology, trade and communication systems, notably writing. First and foremost however is the development of law: rules which would allow two or more substantially different tribes to live together in relative harmony.

Indeed, life is a constant balancing act between uni-structural and multi-structural systems: cells/organ, organs/body, individuals/family, families/tribe, tribes/civilization, civilizations/earth, habitable planets/universe.

Few tribes refuse civilization they like. Regardless of cost, tribal members are often overjoyed to trade for hooks, guns, outboard motors, phones, penicillin, air conditioning, the Internet, more powerful gods or whatever goods or services they find useful. BUT they happily do this only if they can reject aspects of civilization they don’t like: notably conquest, enslavement, rape, disease, exploitation and environmental degradation.

To be sure, civilizations have habitually conquered, colonized, enslaved, killed and genocided tribes, not only those outside the civilization but internal groups, as demonstrated to an extreme degree in the last century by Germany, Russia and China.

In fact, civilizations have injured all of us, unless our forebearers were part of the Founding Tribe’s tiny elite, and even many of them were badly hurt.

We are all round pegs, free and natural spirits, who suffer when shoved into the square holes of civilization, with its myriad rules, restrictions and ideals. Civilizational assault is aptly expressed by any outsider kid, after enduring a day of middle school, or in the parable of Adam and Eve. It tells of a family forced to renounce former gods and their hunter-gatherer paradise to toil in the fields of civilization.

We all come from families which had to sacrifice to join tribes, which, in turn, had to sacrifice to join civilizations.

Tribal life privileges childhood—play, close families, simpler symbol systems—while adulthood can be circumscribed by taboos, rituals and obligations that must be honored even if irrational. Civilizations, conversely, repress human nature until late adolescence whereupon the individual is allowed increased freedoms of speech, movement, business and other creative endeavors, like art or romantic love.

Civilizations can be crippled by demagogues and elites, by the assumption that the educated know best, by inordinate uniformity or outright enslavement, by too much guilt or cynicism or too little physical affection or time for enjoyment—on top of the inherent hypocrisy. Nevertheless civilization is the obvious object of our journey from forest to city, from emotions to intellect, from simple survival to building more benefit for more people, but it is badly blemished by its frequent failure to deliver.

Indeed, the EXACT SAME benefits which drove us to join tribes—to share resources and information, to back up our families if they fail, to band together against evil tribes and, last but not least, to provide INCREASED MATING OPPORTUNITIES, since families can not reproduce within themselves—push us to join civilizations.

Given this intrinsic human need, many tribes accrued resources, information and technology and started civilizations, but only upon the realization of civilization’s first rule: End of tribe. As much as traditional elites attempt to maintain power and purity, simple logic rapidly advances the integration of foreign elements of value, from tools and ideas to reproductive mates.

Indeed, a civilization that builds on the basis of blood is a tribe, a tribe that builds on the basis of ideas is a civilization. This is proven by all the supposedly primitive people who hiked in from the hinterlands and contributed great things to civilization, driven by the universal logic that they had an idea, item or skill which could assist more people, longer.

Even when civilizations retain vestigial tribalism in language, cuisine, culture and status, it must transcend blood and emotions to become an idea-based meritocracy of some sort simply to evolve fast enough to feed itself.

In their quest for cutting-edge concepts or goods, civilizations often locate them among faraway tribes and immediately start the stealing or importing, which ever is easier. Although the tribes are generally the aggrieved partner, some will do business with or, in turn, rob the civilization, notably around hard-to-protect trade routes or storage depots. Either way, the two parties can inform and supply as well as oppose and rob each other.

In this manner, civilizations become self-feeding collections of races, religions, nations, tribes, clans, families and individuals, all working towards more sophisticated methods of cohabitation and collaboration. Civilizations are living entities, always changing, sometimes for the worse. When civilizations lose the functionality that inspired their formation, their citizens undetrstandably assume they might be better off abandoning civilization and returning to tribe.

Indeed, tribal rebellion is the threat that keeps civilization honest; tribal chaos is the threat that keeps civilization in power. Revolution, the rejection of the long, hard work of accruing civilization, is a weighty matter given the odds of going round and round and landing upright are small and that revolutions are generally led by tribes.

This is the problem plaguing the Middle East, where we have the earth’s oldest civilizations and, therefore, the earth’s oldest dysfunctional civilizations; where we have the earth’s oldest rebels and, therefore, the earth’s oldest dysfunctional rebels.

When civilization becomes dysfunctional, weak or abusive, it is eventually usurped by another civilization or a tribe, either from within, an upper echelon or lower oppressed group, or from without.

Since the invention of agriculture, which enabled us to live in cities, tribes outside of civilization have sometimes come to believe they should be inside its gates, enjoying the fruits of its gardens.

Such tribes believe that the civilization has become decadent, or that they are stronger and smarter, or that they can provide the civilization's goods and services more efficiently. These positions are central to radical Islamism, Nazism and communism, with their tribe-like uniculture improperly extended to civilization. Such tribes insist their culture, systems and even genetics would better advance civilization.

Hence it bears repeating: A single-tribe civilization is a contradiction in terms and the definition of evil, while a multi-tribal civilization, which provides more benefit to more people over longer periods, is the definition of good.

Ironically, multi-tribalism is universally adored, even by uniculturalists and racists, who will still borrow anything they find useful or pleasurable from any tribe, even so-called enemies. Witness the profusion of foreign cuisines in almost every city on earth—Chinese, Italian and American leading the way—simply so people can eat something other than their traditional tribal cooking which, night after night for your entire life, is insufferable.

Tribal mixing is essential for evolution, as well as pleasure, as most people well know. Intermarriage is essential to avoid inbreeding, both genetically and intellectually. In fact, culture itself is multiculturalism.

Language was invented not to communicate between identical twins, or hunter to hunter, where simple sign language would suffice. Language was invented to communicate between different people from different groups, starting with the sexes and extending to clans and tribes, for the obvious benefit of exchanging goods, services and, of course, genetic material.

All culture is appropriation. Kids absorb culture from their parents, their teachers, their neighbors, or raw and unfiltered right off the streets or the airwaves. Artists steal anything they like from any one, anywhere, although it can be hard to identify since they hide it so well.

Rule of law is required to restrict robbery, including of cultural creation and benefit. Nevertheless, as soon as culture becomes culture—ie the ideas are expressed in physical form with grace and logic—it is free to inspire, travel, trade, evolve, be reborn.

The only solution to cultural appropriation is secret societies. Even then, it is impossible to hide quality culture forever. If something useful or pleasurable is created, it will be bragged about or observed from afar and used by other tribes.

Intertribal cultural communication is essential at all times, everywhere, because all social organizations are marriages between different groups and groups must interbreed to get new ideas and avoid dying. Despite this obvious multicultural rule, some people insist civilization is about rule of law and can be legally unicultural, in terms of the social as well as scientific laws that govern us.

Civilization is the combination of the best available ideas, regardless of physical or genetic origins, as travelers, traders, artists and consumers have shown over and over since globalization started some five millennia ago. Airplanes, FedEx and the Internet have only proved this irrefutably.

Arguably the best available idea is tolerance, a primary tool to facilitate the working and living together of families, tribes, nations and civilizations. This can be labelled doing unto others as you would want done unto you, leading by example to avoid hypocrisy, or following the spirit not the letter of the law.

As Einstein and Darwin pointed out, everything is, and we are all, relative(s).

In point of fact, there can be no uniculture, neither in civilization, nation nor tribe, not even individuals, who share their biome with more foreign microbes than their own aboriginal cells and sometimes entertain multiple points of view.

In fact, singular entities must maintain multiple internal elements in order to provide fail safes, redundancy and internal competition-improvement mechanisms, the best known example of which is called democracy.

Admittedly, almost all civilizations came from single tribes, the ones which wanted more goods, services and land, which they acquired by conquest, trade, or the power of brilliant ideas, which are the true building blocks of civilization.

When tribes are visionary, rich and functional they expand into civilizations, when civilizations are small-minded, poor and dysfunctional, they disband into tribes, as we have seen for centuries in the Middle East and now in the US, England and elsewhere.

One notable symptom of the tendency to reject civilization is the fixation on the Founding Tribe phenomena. Tribes are often overjoyed to join a civilization as long as they can be Tribe Number One, even though that contradicts civilization.

And so it goes tribe versus civilization, the big structural problem bedeviling almost all social organizations, from the European Union down to the street gangs of Los Angeles or the universal competition between young and old.

Everything appears new to the young, and even more so today, with so many radical changes in culture, gender, communication, technology and the environment. Nevertheless, people are physiologically the same as back in the Paleolithic era and the big evolutionary step remains from sexual immaturity to maturity, from childhood to late adolescence, even though that's one step short.

People are understandably drawn to their own tribe and culture and civilized kids even more so. Simply to become autonomous individuals, they must both break with their parents' tribe AND find their OWN tribe, to insulate them against the dehumanizing depredations of modern civilization. With civilization so global, homogeneous and bland, intermarriage and simplistic multiculturalism has left many people feeling tribeless.

Everyone is entightled to be part of a personal tribe or to enjoy multiple tribal memberships in tandem with full citizenship in a civilization.

But to allow and enable this for others as well as ourselves, we have to become intellectually as well as sexually mature. We have to take full responsibility for our actions, words and ideas, a ritual that has been enforce since the beginning of tribes—think of the hero mothers, warriors, shamans and priestesses. Even as tribal and civilized definitions of maturity differ, the adult is the primary building block of both tribe and civilization.

Being more child-friendly, tribes have sophisticated rituals and myths facilitating the transition to adulthood. Some civilized groups imitate this, but the requisite information, tool and social skills are so large it requires a dozen or more years of study, after which the student is inserted into a world where a lot of that knowledge is outdated and the only constant is change.

Heraclitus, the 6th century BC Greek philosopher, famously said you can’t step in the same river twice because evolution is central to the universe.

Change is impossible, retorted his colleague Parmenides, since the universe is timeless, eternal and unchanging. Late in life, Heraclitus found the middle path: The way up the mountain is the same as the way down.

In 2017, after the United States and much of the world began devolving into tribalism, I felt compelled to draw on my readings, my visits with tribal people in Peru, Mexico, India and Brazil, and my research with Tobias Schneebaum, a gay New York artist who lived with tribes all over the world, to craft an alternative perspective. photo: Irena Blair

Both sides are partially right: Heraclitus and Parmenides, young and old, tribe and civilization.

Civilization only works when it endows equal rights, benefits and opportunities for all its tribes—unless their behavior is beyond the tribal average and the civilizational agreement. For example, we no longer allow cannibalism, which was once popular among many tribes. Tribes, in turn, only work when they allow the best for their tribal members, ie access to civilization.

This is easy to observe in microcosm. When people have jobs, culture and a way to trade goods, services and genetics, which requires rule of law and a functional form of democracy, civilization flourishes. As soon as they start losing their lives, jobs or right of free cultural expression, they tribe up.

The solution: knowing the exact benefits and pitfalls of tribe and civilization and engineering an adjustable, gear-like system where they interlock and empower each other, ever-more efficiently, on all levels to provide more benefit to more people for longer, ie what we call good.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on May 25, 2018 - 01:33 PM
Finding Film Investors: Dos and Don’ts for First Timers
by Joanne Butcher

Accruing cash to make films outside family or friends can be a daunting task. photo: courtesy CIO Vantage

SO BEFORE YOU GO RUNNING OFF TO
chase a bunch of people with money to invest in your first or next film, there are some definite dos and don’ts. And, before that, there are some important terms that need clarification:

Definitions

1. Investor

The Merriam-Webster definition of the transitive verb “to invest” is: “to commit (money) in order to earn a financial return.” An investor is a person who invests money in—in this case, in a film—in order to earn a financial return.

An investor is not someone who donates money—the correct term for that person is “donor.”

An investor would expect to be both thrilled to be involved in your film AND to receive the legal documents outlining A) how their investment will be used, B) what their return will be, in addition to the return of their investment, and C) when those monies will arrive.

These documents are legal documents that will most likely require that you retain the services of a lawyer. When you have the correct legal documents for your film, then you are ready to approach investors.

2. Donor

On the other hand, a donor is “a person or group who/that gives something (such as money, food, or clothes) in order to help a person or organization.”

Donors are people who give money to a film in order to support the cause it addresses, e.g. homelessness. Or they are those who give money to fund a film because they want to support the person making the film.

This final group usually comes under the heading:

3. Friends and Family

Many filmmakers look down on the idea of raising money from friends and family. However, until you have made one or two feature films, friends and family are most likely going to be your main source of support.

There is nothing embarrassing or strange about this. It’s just realistic. If you do not have a track record of making films that make money, then you really have no business looking for investors.

Present your proposal properly and the cash will more easily be forthcoming. photo: courtesy FOXBusiness

DOS

4. Evaluate of the Value of your Film

If you are making a film starring George Clooney that will cost you $5 million to make, you can take your business plan to a Sales Agent and get a Sales Evaluation of the income-generating value of your film. I really have no idea how much value George Clooney would add to your film, but for the sake of easy numbers, I’m going to say, $10 million.

So, now, with your Sales Evaluation letter in hand saying that your film is worth $10 million, you can begin the round of business building, including choosing the state or country where you will shoot and what tax credits you will receive.

You can also take your Sales Evaluation letter to a bank and get a loan. You can go with it to investors and show them how you will spend $5 Million and make 10.

So, let’s say this is your first film and you don’t happen to have George Clooney. In fact you have no names at all. Now what? How are you going to get the money to make your film?

So, first of all, how much is your film worth? If you don’t have name actors in your film, you are not going to get a Sales Evaluation letter from a Sales Agent. So how are you going to figure out the value of your film? This is the first step.

If you are a first time director, making your first film, I’m going to suggest that you use the number of $100,000. In order to make a first time film that is worth $100,000, you have to be able to make it for less than this amount, but you also to have high enough production values to be able to enter the marketplace with your work.

5. Evaluate your Fundraising Capacity

In our world, everyone has access to fundraising through crowdfunding. However, every filmmaker has a different capacity to raise money. I had a young, shy client in her early 20s making her first short film. When she came up with a list of every single person she could think of to ask to support her, she had 22 names.

As we get older, our networks build. For example, I have friends and family in several countries around the world, in a variety of communities I have spent considerable time in—sometimes in a volunteer capacity, in a number of professional communities, and I am active on social media.

My capacity to fundraise is dependent on my network of “friends and family.”

I also have experience in various additional types of fundraising from grant-writing for millions of dollars to finding corporate sponsors. I have even raised money for capital campaigns to build buildings.

Every filmmaker has a network of friends, professional associates, family members and so on. That network can be assessed and evaluated in order to land on a number that defines the filmmaker’s capacity to raise money.

DON’TS

6. Don’t Raise Money Based on How Much You Need

It’s common to hear filmmakers say that they need a certain amount of money to make their first film. This is a mistake. If you decide you need $500,000 to make your first film, you can find yourself in years and years of wasted time because you do not have the capacity to raise $500,000.

As you build your network and your history of business success as a filmmaker, your ability to raise money will grow. In other words, raise money based on your capacity.

7. Don’t Spend Too Much Money on Your First Film

It’s easy to imagine prizes and accolades, Sundance Awards and Oscars, and becoming famous—all from your first film.

But you know what? That’s a lot of pressure. How about you raise a modest amount of money, make your first film, and sell it? That’s already a LOT! Ask anyone who’s done it!

In my opinion, anyone who completes a feature film is a hero. I mean that! It’s a huge leap to transit from making shorts to completing a feature film. It’s a heroic enterprise to take a small amount of money in filmmaking standards—$25, 30, 40, 50K—and making a feature film.

Making a feature film at a standard that can sell and make money in the marketplace is another feat. If you set these as your goals and you succeed, you have completed a great accomplishment. No film you make after this will be as much hard work. You will have done it all before, and you’ll have more money!

8. Conclusions

$25K, 30K, 40K, 50K may be a microbudget for making a feature film of high enough quality to sell, but if it’s your own money or money you’ve been gifted and entrusted with by friends and family, you will quickly find that that is a LOT of money!

When critical moments come that make you think you should quit production, you’ll realize that no matter how micro people think your budget is, $25-50K is a LOT of money to lose. And losing it is easy to do.

So take as many precautions as you can—write the best script, get the most cost-effective producer and developed the best strategy, then go for it.

Joanne Butcher is a business coach for filmmakers working on sales, fundraising, business and money. You can reach her via or her website.
Posted on May 25, 2018 - 01:31 PM
Can Oakland Save the World?
by Doniphan Blair

Oakland's 'First Friday' gallery and club crawl now has over 25,000 attendees, from all races, classes and neighborhoods. photo: D. Blair

THIS IS MY TENTH ANNUAL OAKLAND
survey for cineSOURCE and, after a decade of delivering downers, I'm honored to announce: Oakland’s doing HELLA well! In fact, it's developing some tricks and techniques that just might save the world!

But what about all those murders, police scandals and homeless encampments, you ask? Well, they've been dropping, precipitously, particularly the kill rate and rogue police, although we're now confronting new plagues: gentrification, rampant hipster infestations and the eviction of long-term residents.

In terms of art, Oakland is booming. Indeed, our filmmakers just enjoyed their greatest season EVER, starting of course with the monster hit “Black Panther”, now one of the top 25 grossing films of ALL time, inflation adjusted. Directed by Oakland-native Ryan Coogler—I recently chatted with his cousin, who works media for the Oakland Police Department (OPD), “Black Panther” opens and closes with scenes in Oakland. Read our article "Black Panther Rules Cinema Earth".

Closer to the earth, there's the spectacular "Sorry to Bother You", by Oakland rapper Boots Riley, which we cover in "Sorry to Bother Busts Open Oakland Cine". A rollicking good and incisive satirical ride, it opens July 6th across the country at a Regal Cinema or United Artists theater near you.

'Sorry to Bother You', the biggest new film out of Oakland, since 'Black Panther' is really Hollywood, stars Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson, whose love anchors the aggressive satire. photo: courtesy B. Riley

Also very enmeshed in Oakland identity and issues is "Blindspotting", see our article, starring native Daveed Diggs, straight off his award-winning Broadway run with "Hamilton". It will have its nation-wide release on July 20th.

On a less stratospheric but still substantial level, the Oakland International Film Festival showed a bunch of insightful documentaries, features and shorts. Dominating the latter category: the shocking but spot-on "Pretty Ass White Woman".

Even a cursory glance at cineSOURCE's first survey in 2009, “Oakland on the Brink… of a Creative Explosion”, shows the city in better shape than any time since the 1940s. Back then, it was flush with shipping, manufacturing and music, as nicely detailed in this month's feature, “Cheryl Fabio Makes Masterful Oakland Blues Movie”, written by a new cineSOURCE contributor, Jerry McDaniel, a local musician and actor (the fabulous "Everything Strange and New", 2009).

Other interesting docs at the Oakland International's 16th iteration included the personal and artistic "My People Are Rising". About Aaron Dixon, the Black Panther who started a chapter in Seattle, the first outside of California, it was directed by local cineaste and teacher, as well as cineSOURCE writer, Rafael Flores (see his fascinating "Towards a Rasquache Cinema").

There was also "Futbolistas 4 Life", a poignant piece by Jun Stinson, about a scrum of undocumented Oakland high schoolers, their dedicated soccer coach and how they worked together to create their own soccer field. "Surviving International Boulevard", by Sian Taylor Gowan, provides a penetrating look into the very human lives behind the horror of child prostitution and sex trafficking that goes down daily on Oakland’s longest street.

That's a tough row to hoe, as it were, and hardly one embodying Oakland's deepest dreams and aspirations, but that's the whole damn point.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf defended the legitimacy of tipping off her undocumented citizens to immigration sweeps. photo: Oakland Mayor's Office

Oakland is diverse. Diversity is messy. Oakland is obliged to accept everyone, from spoiled, rich, techie brats to the desperate, the impoverished and the undocumented.

Indeed, the honorable Mayor Libby Schaaf (2015-) has been doing just that, standing up against anti-immigrant xenophobia and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's attempt to crack down on Sanctuary Cities, which Oakland most certainly is.

"Mr. President, I am not obstructing justice, I am seeking it," Schaaf wrote Trump in a May 18th op-ed in The Washington Post. "As a leader, it's my duty to call out this administration's anti-immigrant fearmongering for what it is: a racist lie."

If Oaklanders can't crack the code of multi-tribalism—which has to include tribes you may not totally adore—who can?

Which is why I'm so honored to have survived in West Oakland for 29 years, ten with cineSOURCE, and to be making my tenth attempt to shed some light on it.

The numbers don’t lie. Last year 76 people were butchered on our streets, BUT that's a full forty percent less than 2012’s 127 people—fantastic news, whatever the haters may say.

Indeed, not a SINGLE person was killed by the OPD last year and only one person next to my building: brother Mario—recent calls to the cops still couldn't ferret out his last name (see cS article). In fact, in the entire year of 2016, the OPD didn't discharge a SINGLE weapon (see Oakland Magazine article).

Many Oaklanders are very vocal about their rejection of gentrification. photo: D. Blair

Except for a two-year lull at the end of the Clinton Years, these are homicide rates not seen since the ‘60s, when they rose from about twenty a year to almost ninety at the end of the decade, topping out in 1992 at 165.

Since then, there's been an endless stream of police, city, civic and church initiatives attempting to address this forty-year-old crisis, all largely ineffectual. Which leads me to conclude that much of the improvement that Oakland is enjoying today parallels the prosperity that trickled down in the Clinton Years. In other words, hard cold cash, particularly from gentrification.

Sounds crazy, I know. And, to be sure, gentrification is pushing people onto the streets, out to the suburbs or from their favorite clubs and restaurants.

Indeed, gentrification has Oakland natives as well hipsters, just off the Jet Blue red-eye from Brooklyn, outraged and expostulating loudly about the benefits of arson or muggings. Gentrification is also a central theme in "Sorry to Bother You", "Blindspotting" and many other pieces, like the excellent and locally-produced web series, "The North Pole".

But be real. Like the tourism that finances San Francisco, gentrification is a legit biz, despite the requisite soul-selling—cities involved would be well-advised to institute rent control ordinances, which Oakland lacks (signatures gatherers are currently trying to qualify one for the November ballot).

"I will permit 10,000 live/works, apartments or condos," now-governor Jerry Brown told us many times, when he was Oakland's mayor from 1999 to 2007.

“That’s nothing, we are going for 100,000," claimed Mayor Ron Dellums (2007-11), who was raised in West Oakland and represented the region in Congress for THIRTEEN terms, from 1971 to 1998.

An Oakland Occupy subgroup deliberates how to improve the city in front of City Hall, 2011. photo: D. Blair

Meanwhile Mayor Jean Quan (2011-15), herself a ‘60s-era activist, could have easily walked downstairs from her office to the Oakland Occupy, which was in front of City Hall in the fall of 2011, set up a tent and organized some form of housing relief.

Sadly, Oakland's black population has been pushed out, dropping drastically by about 40%. But that was mostly in the naughts, when the Dot Com Boom's second wave exploded real estate values and speculators offered quick cash to building owners tired of comparatively-high property taxes, notably-high violence and notably-low performing public schools.

To be precise, the 1970 census counted Oakland as 35% black, 60% white and the remaining 15% split evenly between Asian and Latino. 20 years later, it was 44% black and 32% white, a "white flight" of almost half. According to the last census, 2010, Oakland's 425,000 residents were 26% African-American, 27% white, 16% Asian (one third Chinese), almost one quarter Latino (the majority Mexican) and 7% multiracial.

Although this makes Oakland less of a "chocolate city," it is now not only one of the most diverse but EVENLY divided urban centers on the planet. A fantastic asset for the city's psychology and culture, this makes Oakland the perfect laboratory for the town's enormous non-profit presence, led by many people but notably Obama advisor Van Jones and his Dream Corps, founded in 2014.

Yes, gentrification has destroyed the vibe of some corners, cafes or neighborhoods AND it is going to get much worse, given the construction going up all over town.

To be sure, Oakland was the seed bed for great black culture, starting with the above-mentioned blues and Black Panthers (see cS article), and a lot of less well-knowns, from "side shows" and "ghost riding the whip" (ghetto street performances using cars) to too many rappers to mention, not to mention the dancers, writers, painters and more.

Unfortunately, old Oakland was hardly a wonderland. In fact, it was ravaged by crack, crime and neglect. Even the downtown development named Old Oakland had to go begging to San Francisco for a "bridge" loan while West Oakland remains a Mecca for illegal dumping, ugly tagging and other blight.

Oakland's Fox Theater anchors the vibrant, new downtown scene of cafes, craft beer halls AND schools, including the nationally-known Youth Radio and the High School of the Arts. photo: D. Blair

In point of fact, some of the new arrivals are Asian-Americans who grew up as the children of immigrants in Oakland and are finally eschewing parent-ordered professional servitude to move back to their now-cool home town and have a little fun, just like all the other kids.

Admittedly, the many homeless encampments are a crisis of large proportions, but they are also perfectly understandable.

The 2011 Occupy Movement proved to anyone with eyes that you could camp out anywhere, including RIGHT IN FRONT of city hall. Although Oakland has large anarchist and vagabond populations, this was true up and down the West Coast. Once the Occupies ended, the encampments began in 2012. LA now has 48,000 sleeping on its streets nightly and almost every other town has people camping under its freeways, on its meridian strips or in its alleys.

"Oakland is solving the crisis in a unique way," Mayor Schaaf claimed recently. "We're bringing together corporate partners, community volunteers, and city staff to move people off sidewalks and into services."

Although Oakland just opened its second Tuff Shed Shelter, at 27th and Northgate, site of the city's oldest and largest encampment, the 20 cabins, with dead-bolted doors and low-voltage electricity, sleep only two people each. With three to four thousand on Oakland's streets nightly, there's a long way to go.

Nevertheless, Schaaf also acquired a single residency occupancy hotel and has lobbied many times in Sacramento, recently winning an additional $1.5 billion and announcing an incentive program to encourage landlords to accept Section 8 welfare vouchers.

Presumably some of the gentrifiers will be taxed, inspired or cajoled to do their part. In addition to the billions they've injected into real estate, construction and supply sales, they have sparked a lot of service-provider and some tech jobs, albeit not as many as once claimed.

The behemoth ride service Uber passed on its much ballyhooed HQ, a refurbished Sears, the size of a city block, in the center of Oakland's Uptown neighborhood. Sold in October, 2017, to the Oakland-based CIM Group, they intend to finally open it as an upscale mall, in late 2018.

Some techies are voluntarily donating funds and labor to Oakland's many youth-oriented media hubs, business incubators and schools, starting with the nationally-known Youth Radio, which began in Berkeley in 1993 and moved to Oakland in 2007. Some hubs are even financing young artists and entrepreneurs (see cS article “People Power Media Expands in Oakland”.

The street music, magic and other performances at Oakland's Murmur are often excellent, as this drum, base and rapper indicated on May 4th. photo: D. Blair

Legal weed has also generated some hefty new incomes, for growers and distributors but also the city and state, which taxes it at almost 33%. That makes a quality eighth of an ounce of Gorilla Glue, say, over $70—not your grandmom's 40 buck bag of kind bud.

And weed is yet another Oakland unifier, given its popularity across the entire demographic, as any trip to Harborside, the biggest marijuana dispensary in the United States, will tell you: black, white and Latino; young, old and middle-aged; hipster, square and non-descript. Only the Asians are notably absent.

The best exemplar of the Oakland Boom is the fantastically-popular and fully integrated—save the still-recalcitrant Asians—Oakland Murmur, a street fair and gallery-pub crawl which has transpired the first Friday of almost every month since 2006.

Although it was only a half-a-dozen galleries and few hundred people for a few years, the Murmur now includes over 50 galleries, plus "collectives, street artists, culinary artisans, performers, musicians, dancers, DJs, and poets," according to the First Friday site.

A lot of the work is excellent, like that of my old friend Richard Felix, who sets up large boards and pots of paint for the public to wale away. Or the outsider street artists, like the painter who presents some fifty, reggae-flavored canvases monthly, taking up about ten times the average vendor space, or the many musicians and performers, not to forget all the artists on display in the galleries.

Then there's the 25,000 attendees, many bridge and tunnel folk but also from all over Oakland and growing. Indeed, the policewoman I asked at May 4th's Murmur indicated that the official estimate might be low.

Blowing up in 2012, First Friday eventually went wild in the streets, replete with oil can fires, drum circles and intoxicated men, which inevitably led to a tragic killing, in 2013, of a young man by the name of Kiante Campbell. After that the city shut it down, but only for a month. Now The Murmur is properly policed, has almost no crime and everything closes, in an orderly fashion, at 9 pm sharp, whereupon the action shifts to the restaurants, bars and clubs.

While Oakland can seem pretty tribal, with people periodically labeling each other gentrifier, racist, thug or worse—especially in print, on the streets the vibe is usually fairly mellow, quantum leaps better than New York City in the '60s when I was growing up.

With apartments going up all over Oakland, this development is trying to get an edge with its name, Brooklyn Basin, and location, only four blocks from Harborside, the US' largest marijuana dispensary. photo: D. Blair

Yes, a lot of residents have reason to complain, either about the gentrification and skyrocketing rent or the car break-ins and cafe computer grabs, but cities need to integrate not just genetics and politics but class.

Oakland has long achieved this, with its wealthy hill and impoverished flat dwellers often encountering each other at the notoriously-contentious city supervisor meetings.

And the barriers between the two distrcts are comparatively permeable. From Black Panther party members, like Elaine Brown, to my neighbors in West Oakland, people periodically retreat to the Oakland hills, some of which seems like parts of Big Sur. There they share mutli-million-dollar houses, some with beautiful Bay views but teetering on the edge of cliffs, for about the same per-roomie cost as flat-land loft space.

Given this, perhaps Oakland can pioneer an advanced form of class compatibility by proving that it is both more fun and an economic necessity for urban communities.

New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are also very diverse but they are much larger, wealthier and more polarized. While Chicago shares Oakland's work-a-day spirit, NY and LA are rich and elitist, which bars entry to some of a city's most vital inhabitants. Being the poor relative at the Bay Area's ridiculously rich table, Oakland is more open and has fostered not only The Murmur but Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Occupy, Hyphy and more.

Along with the equal distribution of the racial big four—black, white, Latino and Asian plus a large First People cohort (see "There There", by Tommy Orange), this makes Oakland an elevated incubator of what can be called is Rainbowism, given multiculturalism is so bland and tribalism so deadly.

Although Rainbow Panthers might have made sense in the '70s, today it would be a travesty against that innovative group, which was such a hard act to follow. You never see anyone wearing black leather jackets and berets around West Oakland, although that would be a normative continuation of the Panthers in the 'hood where they started.

The eternal tension of almost all societies is between tribe and civilization. As much as some feel it is necessary to review and prosecute long-standing crimes—and it is absolutely necessary, simply to function you still need Rainbowism, where all tribes operate to their best ability within the context of rule of law and a level cultural playing field (see cS article, "Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto).

Town Park skate board park was started in 2009 by Keith ‘K-Dub’ Williams (left), without permits in DeFremery, the old Black Panther, park; now it's one of the area's most popular AND ethnically mixed. photo: D. Blair

An admittedly hard balancing act, it is easier in Oakland, which was a well-known city in the history of the West, but often wilder, more open and less pretentious than Berkeley and San Francisco.

Moreover, we are now blessed by equal race representation, a growing film scene, the popular Oakland Murmur and, of course, the twice-in-three-years—with another on its way—National Basketball League champions, the Golden State Warriors, fronted by the charismatic Stephan Curry. Indeed, his name has become a verb on local B-ball courts: "Snap, I just Curried you," (ie nothing but net).

Into this fecund setting is now stepping a lot of mature filmmakers, artists, activists, politicians and nonprof directors.

From my position, in my tenth Oakland survey, they seem to have as good a crack as anyone in history of resetting the imbalance in privilege, prosperity and power (from street to city hall), as well as hipster status, that little reported but widely adored right, to make Oakland the shining city in the flats as well as on the hill.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on May 24, 2018 - 07:28 PM
Feminist Makes Movie about Boys and Babies plus Interview
by Doniphan Blair

Kara Herold's new film, '39 and a Half', has the great Bay Area actress Beth Lisick consulting Tarot to improve her love life. image: courtesy K. Herold

IN THESE POLITICALLY AND SEXUALLY
troubled times, should a filmmaker make a movie about the simple fact that she, or more precisely her mother, would like her to get married and have a baby?

And should she make that movie in a quirky, whimsical way, using lots of animation, asides and intimate experiences played for laughs?

Would it win plaudits from MeToo movers and shakers, for whom a men- and marriage-centric movie might seem like walking into a stereotype ghetto and locking the gate behind you?

Of course it would BUT only if good enough!

Kara Herold's last film, 'Bachelorette 34' [2007], essentially a documentary on the same subject, featured her mother spouting such retro lines as: "Put on makeup. Be more perky. Go out on a mission and look for Mr. Right."

Nevertheless, layered with drawings, found footage and Herold's introspective humor, it was accepted by AND premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That was when Herold realized her style was viable and her mother was very funny—so why not whip out a quick companion piece.

Alas, “39 and a Half” blew up into a feature film with a full crew and SAG actors, including Beth Lisick, the excellent Bay Area thespian, known from "Pushing Dead" [2016] and "Everything Strange and New" 2009], as well as tons of Herold's patented animation.

Herold's mother came to San Francisco to help her find a husband and became the subject of her last film, 'Bachelorette 34'. image: courtesy K. Herold

All shot and looking damn good—see trailer here, Herold has launched a Seed and Spark campaign to cover an editor and composer and getting a clean cut by the end of summer—contribute here.

When forwarded her trailer by Steve Indig PR, I was surprised by Herold's seamless mix of art and feature film, a style we often boost at cineSOURCE, and how she did it in such personal and female terms.

As it happens, although Herold teaches film in Syracuse, New York, she returns to The Bay every summer because she attended San Francisco State, has lots of friends here and loves the scene. Which means, of course, she had to find a work space in Oakland, as she did, just down the street from cineSOURCE studios.

We tried to connect for weeks but it was hard since we were constantly leaving town. Finally, as cineSOURCE's tenth anniversary issue was about to launch and Herold was Lyfting from San Francisco, to spend the night in Alameda, she decided to divert her trajectory and drop by cineSOURCE, even though it was ten at night.

When she appeared at the door, a strikingly chiseled and handsome human, replete with wild red hair, we started out discussing the state of the industry—or lack there of.

Kara Herold dropped by cineSOURCE studios, at 10 pm one recent night, for a conversation about artful and alternative feature films. photo: D. Blair

Kara Herold: My film isn’t industry.

cineSOURCE: The ’39 and a Half’ trailer looks really good.

Thanks.

But still very indie. This is your first feature outing?

I made a lot of short films.

Yes, I saw “Bachelorette 34” [2007, 37 min], a beautiful collage film and also very personal. You have a lot ‘30s’ in your titles.

[laughs] Yes, I am no longer in my 30s.

‘Bachelorette 34’ was a found footage film with animation, a documentary, so stylistically, ’39 and a Half’ is different. This film was going to be a short sequel I was going to make really fast. Then it blew up into this huge feature film.

The script seems quite pithy, especially the line, ‘Reality is never as tasty as our plans.’ That guy—I was just watching ‘The Source’ documentary about the LA commune—he looks like he came right out of it.

Everyone who is in the film is based on reality—autobiographical. That was my ex-boy friend, but everything is exaggerated.

Who did the animation?

I have been doing the animation but not super professional. I [do] them in Aftereffects and then I hand it to over to this woman, Sylvia Roberts, who puts in the flourishes: making things pop, making the characters actually walk instead of sliding across the screen. Josh Tuthill has been doing some of the animations as well.

The drawings are done by two people. One is Andi Zeisler, who has done the illos for all my films—she is the editor of Bitch Magazine. I don’t know if you know it.

Between Bust, Babe and Bitch—plus you are not even allowed to say those words any more—it is tough to follow. But I am big fan of—

‘Zines?

Yes, but also matriarchies. I follow the old-school idea that they were highly-sexual, which is poo-poohed by a lot of academics, so I like those magazines with a tongue-in-cheek attitude. I had a girlfriend once who worked for a similar local magazine called On Our Backs.

An old boyfriend inspired the new ager, played nicely by Marcus DeAnda, who tells Kara's character (Beth Lisick), 'Reality is never as tasty as our plans.' image: courtesy K. Herold

Yeah, I have heard of it.

A playful dyke magazine but the publisher and then the editor, Suzy Bright, ended up marrying and having children with men, which kind of fucked it up. But they were being playful, so they were ahead of the game—I think all that is very good.

Andi was the subject of my first film. It was about ‘zines and called “Grrlyshow” [2001], with two rs.

Ahh, sounds like it is about something else.

It is the same thing as Bitch or Bust, calling it ‘Grrlyshow’—re-appropriating language.

Andi's 'zine Bitch was one of the subjects of ‘Grrlyshow’ and she drew the title sequence. Then I asked her to draw stuff for the next film, ‘Bachelorette 34’, and she started drawing for ’39 and a Half’.

Then there is another person named Lisa [McElroy], who is drawing some of the illustrations. I asked Lisa to match Andi’s but, of course, that is impossible but they are still great.

I just had a friend of mine, a filmmaker, tell me that, ‘Animation is no good. It is middle class, too expensive.” But it has become quite popular.

It is pretty popular.

In fact, the recent big film out of Oakland, ‘Sorry to Bother You’, has quite the animation scene at the end.

Do you know George Rush?

Yes. He produced ‘Sorry to Bother’.

I just met with him—I don’t know if anything will come of it. I want to see that film, especially now that you mention that.

And [the director] Boots Riley even put puppets in it. By the time he gets to animation, he has already gone through puppets! I wasn’t going mention that to my friend—he would probably blow a gasket.

[they laugh]

A 'zine editor from Herold's first film 'Grrlyshow' [2001], a documentary made with a lot of found footage. image: courtesy K. Herold

For me animation has always been to add [important stuff]. For ‘Bachelorette’, I felt I had to because it is all found footage, from the Prelinger Archives [which has free movies].

Did you know Steve Parr?

Some of it was from Steve’s collection [Odd Ball].

You heard what happened? Tragic, too bad. [Parr died Oct. 24, 2017, see cS article ‘RIP: Stephen Parr, King of the Oddballs’.]

Yeah, too bad.

For ‘Bachelorette’, I had this modern San Francisco story. Having animation on top of the found footage added some depth to the story telling.

For ’39 and a Half’, shooting a feature film as a super indie, on a self-funded budget—I got one grant and I got some help from Syracuse University, where I teach—the animation allows me to develop the interior space of the character. I couldn’t realize that shooting a feature film on the budget I had.

I am wondering if it is a low-budget solution to shooting a huge feature. You can’t afford the entire crew and actors to come for an extra day--thousands and thousands of dollars, you know?

I just think it allows you creativity in story telling [during] the editing process. You know my background [is documentary]. I always find my film in the editing. The animation allows me to still write while I am editing, instead of the Hitchcock method, where you know exactly how to put it together.

It jumps you into the interior world, which film is not that great at—art films are but not feature films. That is the real art, getting inside the character’s head with typical straight shots and cuts.

You have a lot of freedom with animation .

Not to be stereotypical but I think girls like that stuff. I remember seeing another film about a girl in San Francisco two years ago—

‘Diary of A Teenage Girl’ [2015]. Yeah, yeah but how about Terry Gilliam [who did lots of animation]?

Yes of course. And ‘Black Panthers: Vanguard of Revolution’ starts with this long animation sequence. My friend claimed that was garbage.

In my review, [see cS article] I said that it was a critical metaphor. He wanted to set the tone for the film because everyone has a different impression [of the Panthers].

Herold directs a child actor in a scene from '39 and a Half' shoot in San Francisco in 2017. image: courtesy K. Herold

Animation allows you to get to a very different space in your film.

You say it is largely biographical: so now you have a child?

You will just have to wait and see the film [laughs]. It is kind of about it. There are a lot of characters in the film. There is the mother character based on my mom.

‘Bachelorette 34’ was more about my mother than it was me because I discovered, through making that film, that she is super funny.

Where does she hang out?

She is in Minnesota right now, retired with my dad. They are from South-East Kansas.

So they moved one state?

They moved to California—I grew up in California—to escape the fundamentalist Baptist Church, which both their families are embroiled in. Politically, they are pretty progressive.

My mother is still uneasy that I didn’t follow the traditional path of marriage and kids. [She] was also deeply saddened. She thought that my life would be full of misery without that.

So I made ‘Bachelorette 34’ about her worries and anxieties around that. I also internalized some of these worries and anxieties. I thought it wasn’t going to be a film—I was just recording [her]—but then I started playing with the footage.

It turned out she is really funny. So it ended up being a film, she is the star and it is full of her fears and anxieties.

I wanted to make a sequel because I felt she is kind of a collaborator—she provided all the good lines.

‘Bachelorette 34’ took seven years to edit, even though it is [just] a thirty-minute film. After seven years of listening to her, I felt I could write her very well. I wanted to try something different: casting actors and doing a fiction piece. Writing her lines was the easiest part of the whole film.

Did she or anyone complain about you appropriating their life?

Not yet. The guy who was the Zen boyfriend hasn’t responded to my Seed and Spark campaign, [although] he donated to my last film.

Herold claims she is guarded but opens easily to discussing things many see as off limits. photo: D. Blair

That is problem because you get hit with three different human motivations: envy, shyness, legal.

Yes [but] it is such an exaggeration. I don’t know if he would even recognize himself in the film.

You would think but the people sometimes insist it is too close to them.

You know Caveh Zahedi [‘I Am a Sex Addict’, 2005, see trailer]?

Yeah, he did some very exposing films.

Yeah, he exposes everything in his film. His films ARE autobiographical. I feel ’39 and a Half’ is so far from the truth, it is exaggerated.

Are you familiar with Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch: ‘Tangerine’ [2016] ‘Florida Project’ [2018]?

No.

I love those guys. All their films are great. The weakest one—about a porn star, ‘Starlet’ [2011], on her day off—it is still good, especially if you are a man [laughs].

They research the stuff, then they make a feature but they could have easily made a documentary. They could do both: a documentary AND a feature! [see cS article]

Yeah, yeah. Are you a filmmaker?

Vaguely. I just made a film in Death Valley. It basically shot itself and then edited itself—god only knows what it is. [see it here]

Oh.

It ties into the Baker-Bergoch system: find the thread and go with it.

’39 and a Half’ is a great theme. I have a daughter who is almost 39, so I am familiar with those issues. I also like that it is unabashedly female.

Yeah.

Yeah, it used to be that people would say women couldn’t be comics or you couldn’t make movies about wanting to get pregnant—

Yeah, yeah, I know. Its interesting because I am not married and I consider myself a feminist and yet I tend to make these films with subject matters that some might say that doesn’t pass the ‘Bechtel Test’ [for whether films have three dimensional female characters]. They talk about men in my film.

Herold has long used animation to access to her inner world, as a way of writing in the editing room and to save the money needed for a lot of actors and equipment. image: courtesy K. Herold

I think your film passes the Bechtel Test.

I know. But sometimes I am self-conscious about making films about marriage and kids—in some sense, it is a reexamining.

Of course, it is perfectly legitimate—particularly birth. Birth was in that famous tearjerker from the 80s, what was it—‘Terms of Endearment’ [1983]. It showed a birth and people were like, ‘Oh my god, this is revolutionary!’

Well guess what? This is a thing that happens in every person’s life and it is extremely dramatic, particularly for a women but also for a man. Why hasn’t it been shown in movies?

Stan Brakhage, he did one: ‘Water Baby’ [‘Window Water Baby Moving’, 1959].

’Water Baby’ wasn’t that by Gunvor Nelson—no, hers was ‘My Name is Oona’ [1969]. I recently met that ‘water baby;’ she’s like fifty years old.

In so many ways, my film [’39 and a Half’] is so female. It is autobiographical . It has animation, all the major parts are female—although I don't think autobiography and animation are female per se.

Well, it is about a very female concern.

But it is a modern perspective.

So it is all shot?

Yes my goal is to get a fine edit this summer. After this Seed and Spark campaign, I need to raise a little money for the sound design.

Foley?

I don’t know if I need too much foley I had really good sound person, his name is Roger Phenix. He did the sound for ‘Rachel is Getting Married’ [2008], by Jonathan Demme.

A great film, I loved it.

He had six microphones placed in every scene. Doug Quin also did sound on the days Roger couldn't make it. So I am good with sound.

I need a little ADR and I need a score. The trailer had music that is paid for but it is all temp.

Can you divulge your total budget?

It is too much. Total, it is probably like $150,000, which is super-low budget but too much for the kind of filmmaker I am, you know what I mean?

It looks good. That is in the pocket. You can’t do much for under $100,000 and it has a known actress.

Beth Lisick.

She also starred in ‘Everything Strange and New’ [2009, a famous Oakland film], where she was great. And that is your one major actress?

Yeah and the mother, played by Alice Schaerer. I took a lot of time casting her.

[She] is in a lot TV shows in New York. She is a SAG actress. She is in ‘Law and Order’ and ‘Blue Bloods’, little bits here and there. She was an actress when she was younger and took years off to be a mother. She came back to acting I think in her late ‘50s.

Herold's character (Beth Lisick) self-inseminating in '39 and a Half'. image: courtesy K. Herold

That is pretty bold.

She is doing pretty well.

Where was it shot?

It was shot in San Francisco, New York City and Syracuse [New York State]. All the interiors were shot in Syracuse, where I live, and all the exteriors and some interiors in San Francisco. I came here for a week.

Is there a particularly reason you shot in San Francisco?

I think it is a San Francisco story. For one, it is autobiographical—I lived her throughout my thirties. A lot of women are single in San Francisco and they come to this choice in their thirties like, ‘OK, well, what am I going to do?’ It is kind of a crisis for some women—

A lot of women.

So Beth Lisick plays me and has two best friends in the film. One is a complete advocate for having a child-free life. The other one is based on a filmmaker friend of mine Kristy Guevara Flanagan [known for the doc ‘Wonder Woman’, 2008]

She is a really great filmmaker. She just got the Sundance Grant. She knows the part is base on her but is totally exaggerated. She is the person who decided she can be a single woman; she can have a kid; she can still make films—she can have it all!

And do it all easily, from the outside. The real Kristy, she is a professor at UCLA; she is making a feature film; she has a kid.

I am sure she has her struggles but from the outside she is doing very well, you know . This character is the comedic [element] in the film: the myth that people can everything.

If you don’t go to therapy for an hour every week and you are stable enough. I had the advantage of living in a commune, so I had built in baby sitting.

Oh wow. You could have been a character in my film, if I had met you earlier.

I have a whole alternative child raising system [laughs]. I used to take my daughter to movies at nine o’clock at night and when the lights would go off I would say, ‘Time to got to sleep.’ That worked for almost a year until one time we were seeing ‘Vertigo’ and I looked over and she was staring at the screen.

Where was your commune?

In San Francisco, Pine and Webster, only two blocks from the Source commune, after they got kicked out of LA.

Hmmm. What was yours called?

Modern Lovers. We were small, just a family-type thing, but it made it easy to do a certain type of child rearing which other people don’t have.

Herold in a portrait by Mary Joe Scott, from 'Bachelorette 34'. image: Mary Joe Scott

Are you still in touch with all the people in the commune?

Yeah some of them.

The reason why I was asking about your autobiographical stuff, I did an little expose on the commune last year [see article], for the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, and got some negative feedback. I had to cut people out of photos.

Oh. Is it available, that film?

That was an article. We do have film that is archived but never made.

I was a little surprised. I kept saying ‘That’s you naked 45 years ago, you don’t look like that anymore. No one knows that's you unless you tell them. No one will known those are your titties.’

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I have always tried to convince women friends to let me take some nudes—you will thank me when you are sixty, eighty. A few have but a lot didn’t.

Even the film I just shot in the Death Valley, of the people naked in hot springs, they didn’t want me to use their names. They let me use the footage but I wanted to put their names since they say beautiful things about love and romance. This is kind of a chilling period.

Yeah, yeah, that is true.

The autobiographical thing, now if it was something really weird [laughs], I can understand. Making these documentary films, getting releases , its really problematic.

You didn’t seem to have any of those problems.

‘Bachelorette 34’, the first question everyone asks is: ‘How did your mom feel about this film?’

The first night it screened was on the Free Friday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, so I had a huge crowd, in a huge screening room, and my mom was super embarrassed. But the second night, she was totally up for it.

She recognized the humor and she had some good things to say. She was funny. She oscillates in between. She is one of those people who doesn’t censor herself, which I appreciate because I censor myself all the time.

A lot of women are like that. They don’t have that super ego. My mother is ridiculous. It grows as she gets older because she just don’t care about anything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A lot of them are like that, they just make remarks, whatever is their flow, like they were with their sisters. They haven’t hung out enough with men, who are very guarded about their emotions, constantly gauging and jabbing and protecting and hiding.

Well there are degrees in women, obviously. I appreciate it in my mother, like how you appreciate it in women.

I appreciate it in my mother although it took me ten years to convince her to tell me the first time she had sex.

Oh.

Herold's cinematographers, Alex Mendez (lft) and student Sam Kolber, hard at work on '39 and a Half' (second cinematog Anjali Sundaram not shown). image: courtesy K. Herold

I thought it was relevant. My daughter was outraged. To me that is the matriarchal side of history. Those are the things that have always been hidden. I think there are still quite a few matriarchal stories that are simply not told.

’39 and a Half’ seems like a very funny film and you hope to have a fine edit by the end of the summer. And you are doing it right here [in West Oakland]. Where is your space?

At 12th and Center. It is not far; we will be neighbors.

Do you have any feelings about Oakland film, or Bay Area film?

I am definitely a Bay Area filmmaker. All of my major film influences are Bay Area. I went to San Francisco State in the ‘90s, when all the people who are working professionally in the Bay Area were doing autobiographical films. They were mostly men though, like Jay Rosenblatt, Cavey Zahidi, Marlon Riggs

Jay I remember. I have seen one or two of his films.

That was when identity politics was the rage and also a lot of punk rock, making films with whatever resources that you have, what ever camera you can find, using found footage.

How about Tiffany Shlain? She is a found footage fanatic.

Yeah, I don’t know her work that well. But you know Craig Baldwin, he runs Other Cinema on Valencia Street, he makes found footage. Jay does as well A lot of my immediate roll models are in the Bay Area, a lot of men, actually.

But then all my classmates at San Francisco State were women. I entered this filmmaking class that was really rare—thirteen woman and one man, and the man dropped out.

A lot them were older, I was in my twenties—it was grad school—and other people were in there thirties, which seemed old at the time [laughs].

They introduced me to all the radical feminist filmmakers who were also making autobiographical films, found footage films, scratching on films, animation, sort of this hand crafted way of making films. I think it was sort of this merging of East Coast feminist filmmakers with Bay Area filmmakers. It influenced my style.

I learned the most about filmmaking from the incredible women in my class. They are all still making films today: Anita Chang, Greta Snider, Cathy Crane, Corey Ohama, Lisa McElroy, Christa Collins and Kristy Guevara Flanagan.

I also worked at Yerba Buena for 20 years as a projectionist. I saw a lot of films. Like Joel Shepherd [the director]—last week he was let go from his position—but he showed a lot of exploitation and B movies.

I love some B movies. One of my favorite female filmmakers is Kathryn Bigelow. I don't think she has ever really equaled her early film ‘Near Dark’ [1987], which is a B movie, a vampire film.

She actually went to the Art Institute, she was a painter. Then she went to LA and had an affair—actually married the guy, the filmmaker—James Cameron.

I think ‘Near Dark’ is a perfect film. The beauty of B it comes under the radar but then it has to go above it at the end.

Un hun.

At State did you run in to Christopher Coppola? He is obsessed with B film because his family is all A. The only problem with him is he is so obsessed with it he doesn’t believe in coming up at the end. We disagree there. He just loves the general B tropes and freaks and weird stuff.

Yeah, yeah, sometimes it is hard to know. I just saw this film recently, it was so bad, I wondered if the director meant it to be that bad. Even though I projected a lot of those B movies, I am not totally into them.

Well there is that guy [Ed] Wood—I doubt they are doing it on purpose.

What are some other filmmakers you are into?

I came to film through Women Studies at UCLA, so my professors showed a lot of films, mostly documentaries, that is why I started making documentaries first.

Which they claimed was a female form but isn’t that is erroneous?

Herold' enjoys a good laugh, after she opens up and relaxes, no alcohol needed. photo: D. Blair

It is a form where women are not the minority.

It is like anthropology, they got into that because it is a touchy-feely thing but I don’t see it as such a female form as perhaps autobiography or fantasy.

Yeah. Have you seen ‘The Watermelon Women’? It is by this woman, her name is Cheryl Dunye, she made this film in the ‘90s [1996]. It is autobiographical and she is in it and Genevieve Turner is in it. She is black and dating a white woman in the ‘90s, in Philadelphia.

'The Watermelon Woman' follows the efforts of a young black lesbian filmmaker, played by Dunye herself, to find out everything she can about a black actress known as Watermelon Woman, who played maids in 1930s black-and-white films.

She now teaches at San Francisco State—that film was really influential [for me].

Then lately there has been a lot of films, like Lena Dunham ‘Tiny Furniture’.

I thought ‘Tiny Furniture’ was a masterpiece, exposing, particularly about a lot of characters and stories I grew up with. She nailed them--and she had her sister play her sister—

And her mom plays her mom.

It is over the top! They shot it on a Canon D7 and didn‘t pan. She had that guy whom I love, Alex Karpovsky, he is more of schlemiel. He is almost like a Steve Buscemi.

He always plays annoying artists. [In ‘Little Furniture’] he comes over to spend the night—I think the mother invited him—he doesn’t like the sheets, the smell, or something.

Yeah.

I am surprised she didn’t go on to do another feature—

Well, she has this little TV show. I only watched a few episodes.

I think ‘Girls’ is good—she deals with a lot of contemporary stuff—but she went down the rabbit hole with too many annoying characters and not enough reveal.

The punch of Tiny Furniture is just over the top it is so precise with no pans, it made it so clean—how about older stuff like Maya Deren [1917-61]?

Of course, who doesn’t love Maya Deren. In film school I did my Maya Deren film but I didn’t show tit to anyone.

And you mentioned Stan Brakhage.

Yeah, I showed all the Cinemateque films, so we had a night I projected Stan Brakhage.

You know the ‘South Park’ guys studied with Brakhage? What do you like to show [in your classes]? Michael Snow’s ‘Wavelenght’ [1967]?

Yeah, makes sense: Colorado.

I like to show Brakhage, I have showed Snow. I teach at Syracuse University [in upstate New York]. It is not like teaching at San Francisco State or UC Santa Cruz, where I have taught before.

Is it pretty big the department?

The departments it small and we all art filmmakers. There are two programs and one is art and the other journalism but because Syracuse University was written up as one of the top twenty five film schools [in the country] the students are applying from everywhere.

You sure you don’t want anything, I have tangerine juice.

I’m good—maybe some water.

I see it as my mission to introduce art and experimental filmmaking to the students.

And how do they like that mission?

[both laugh]

In my evaluations, sometimes they say she shows way too much experimental film. But that is my background and they hired me having seen my films.

Herold puts herself into found footage in 'Bachelorette 34' using the high-tech animation method of 'cut-out paper puppetry.' image: K. Herold

‘39 and Half’ is pretty mainstream compared to anything I have done. In part, I wanted to make a narrative film because that is what I teach. I felt I had to make one of my own to understand it.

I came up through the Art Institute and although Brakhage didn’t teach there, he was there almost monthly.

Yeah?

Of course, we Bruce Bailey, we had Bruce Connor—he didn’t come over much but he lived in the city. We had Larry Jordan, George Kuchar, Gunvor Nelson, Al Wong.

If I showed George Kuchar, I think the students would just not understand.

George was very loose. In my mind he was a better film teacher than filmmaker. He was very enthusiastic, very motherish, while Gunvor Nelson and Al Wong were very critical. That was the Golden Age for art film. It seems it has gone down hill.

My thesis—that I often spout in cineSOURCE—is I believe in the multicultural film: bringing in animation, bringing in improv. I don’t know if you are familiar with Rob Nilsson?

Yes, I am smiling because I have a colleague at Syracuse University, where almost every conversation, he brings up Rob Nilsson. He loves Rob Nilsson.

So does Rob Nilsson.

[they laugh]

So do I. A few times I have said to Rob, ‘That was a fabulous improv, just fabulous. So, now that you have it down, why don’t you reshoot without a fluctuating iris on your a cheap video camera. You have rehearsed the actors, done 99% of the work—I will shoot it for you!’

‘Naw, naw that takes the spontaneity out of it,’ he claims.

My theory is the combination of elements, you know, you have a scripted scene leading up to moments where you improvise, like jazz, or you bring in animation or… You know ‘Casa de Mi Padre’ with Will Ferrel [2012]?

No.

The critics didn’t have the feintest idea what they were looking at. Went over their heads.

The famous SNL-guy—Will Ferrell—speaking Spanish the whole movie? Long shots with cheap plastic cars on weird sets? Written stuff on the screen?

‘This is the assistant director. I supposed to get a real tiger here but I couldn’t and the director is forcing me to write this.’ And then, in the middle of the film, they have an avant-garde film!

What is the name I want to see it.

‘Casa de mi Padre’ and every single critic said, ‘This is garbage.’ The only one who got it, what’s his name from Chicago?

Siskel and Ebert.

Roger Ebert was the only one who got it—it’s insane.

Yeah.

The others didn’t even know what they were looking at. They thought they were looking at a poorly produced film. Didn’t they notice, in the middle of the film: crosses everywhere and now the character is in drag on a white set?

That sounds great.

That is my whole philosophy. It comes from Dusan Makevajev ‘WR: Mystery of the Organism’ [1971] which starts as documentary about Wilhelm Reich, then goes into a weird story about a Russian ice skater.

What is it called?

‘WR: Mystery of the Organism’

The reason I’m asking is I am trying to figure out: I shot three years of documentary footage for ’39 and a Half’ . [It was] of my parents coming to New York to audition people to play themselves.

So in ’39 and a Half’’ you have all this doc footage. I don’t remember seeing—

It is not in the film right now. I have been trying to figure out how to incorporate it, you know, how to move between this fiction film and documentary. So I am curious to see—

It seems like it is pretty solid right now, but you know—

Yeah I know. My editor, who is coming in May, said, ‘That is opening a whole can of worms.’

Well, you could but it has to cut itself. But trying to have a dream sequence, ‘I remember back’—

Anything is possible, it is just a matter of time. My goal is to finish this summer so incorporating three years of documentary footage is…

A lot of editing? There are so many things that can be done. I just saw ‘The Naked City’ [1954], remember that one?

No.

Herold casts her investigative but tolerant gaze on many things through a haze of fiery red hair. photo: D. Blair

It was shot on the streets of New York, cinema verité, they even introduce New York as a character—a little pretentious but it lives up to it. It has shots of the lower Eastside with Jews and horse carts, great stuff.

Dusan Makevejev used to do that, back in Yugoslavia before he left. He has a famous scene of a fight in a market place; he zooms back, no one knew what was going.

I love ‘Mysteries of the Organism’. He came ten years ago and played it at the Castro and it completely lived up to my memory. It has a shot of Stalin, and then an erection and it cuts to a missile going up, it is so good it makes the other art films look like garbage.

One of the best cuts I have ever seen except for the Coen Brothers’ ‘Blood Simple’ [1984], when they are sticking their fingers into bullet holes and then punching an answering machine, and a few others.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That is the type of stuff I love, call it mixed media even. But it has to work . It can’t work on paper, philosophically. It has to look good, which is hard.

When I was going to school all those people—Nelson, Wong—thought indie film was going to be the new psychedelics, open us up. It never did. Nevertheless MTV borrow a lot of that stuff and it did open up film to be more aggressive, wild, quick cutting, any number of things. By bringing in animation or weird little bits that work then art film can do its stuff and Stan Brakhage wasn’t all for naught.

What years were you there?

’74 to ’89. It was interesting time because that was when multiculturalism and structuralism hit. It didn’t produce that cgreat art in fact the ‘70s was much more fecund because there were al these types of filmmakers: feature, art, doc.

There was also James Broughton—Pauline Kael’s baby daddy [‘The Bed’ 1967].

It would be me and James against the class because they were all Marxists. You had to follow rules, you can’t show privilege. ‘Rich art’ that was their favorite criticism.

Un, hunh.

Which kind of fucked up the film department, although it was interesting to see. I think we are still in the throws of that, particularly in academia. It was a fabulous place…

I wonder what happened to the Art Institute?

Now it is run by Coppola. He is doing the best he can. He is great guy. I haven’t seen a lot of his films that are that great but he also believes in the mixed style. He says most of the kids now are from China.

They got hammered by a perfect storm: they got onboard digital about five years late; the Academy of Art came up and started eating their lunch; then they brought out this brilliant woman from the Barnes Collection, Ella King Torrey in 2003. A real rainmaker but she embezzled a million dollars and got into coke.

She embezzled a million dollars to feed a coke habit?

There is some disagreement—

I guess, you never know why anyone commits suicide.

She was a very handsome woman too—I mean that is only five percent—I guess, in part, she was out of her support system, she was in a new place.

They were already fading. They had a guy in the ‘80s, Stan Goldstein, he was a great. That was a mistake letting him go. We used to smoke pot with him in his office—that doesn’t make him a great guy—he was very familiar with the artists here. He came up through community arts, which is very developed here—one of the highest in the nation, he knew a lot of local artists, very articulate.

But it staggers on, a boutique school.

But the Art Institute had such good reputation; it is sad that it is fallen. And that location, you can’t beat it. San Francisco State has a good film school but the location is the pits.

I remember trying to energize them, getting up in the school meetings and saying why can’t we bring in someone from LA, not to become commercial and I suggest Haskell Wexler, he is writer a cinematographer he made ‘Medium Cool’ [1969], an fabulous guy.

I think they just drank the cool aid the idea that this very arty film is going to be so precious and so fabulous and so beautiful that it is going to go forever and the ‘70s with the people they had there certainly seemed that way.

They had other departments. Photography was quite strong with Hank Wessel, Jack Fulton, Linda Conner and photography is a local art form.

I am still in touch with a couple of teachers trying to hash it out—the main thing was missing digital.

Kuchar was pretty excited about digital. I was projecting his stuff at Yerba Buena and he was super excited about all the digital effects he learned to do: wipes and stuff.

Kuchar was easily amused, he loved life, he brought character into these weird art films there was so little it was like a breath of fresh. The films themselves never resolved into anything that great but he was a great spirits and lovely guy, great to be around.

I loved a lot of hose people Larry Jordan and Bruce Bailey, he has mad some great films and some of the others I thought ‘Wavelength’ was a perfect film.

If you find all the strong ones and put them together it was very impressive but they would never do that it, it was like one strong one and all these annoying ones [laughs].

You like Scott MacDonald and read his books.

Yeah yeah he did a book about Canyon, he’s great.

He is at the neighboring school, Hamilton [Clinton, New York]. I have never met him but I will have my students read his interviews I feel that is as an accessible way to [learn about art films].

I show ‘Fuses’ [1967] to my students, a 16 mm film by Carolee Schneemann (see it here. Mostly of her having sex with her boyfriend, with her cat in her room, but it is beautifully crafted.

Sounds good.

But the students hate it. They complain I am showing porn in my class.

You have to give trigger warnings?

After they read the interview Scott MacDonald did with her, they start to appreciate the craftsmanship. He interviewed all these people that you are talking about.

What film of that ilk does touch your students: ‘Moth Light’ [Brakhage, 1963]

Yeah, they like that and Maya Deren.

You know when I was in film school when I was 21 and I saw ‘Wavelength’[1967] I had no idea what I was watching and when I was projecting for Cinemateque it took me a long time to understand the language. I can’t blame them for being—plus these are films made fifty years ago.

But ‘Wavelength’ is so professional. How about something like ‘El Topo’?

I haven ‘t shown that or even seen it [laughs].

I would say ‘Mystery of the Organism’ that would be a good one to show, like ‘Wavelength’. They are a little like the B Film that works, that it pulls itself out of itself at the end, which makes it, to me, great.

Have you seen that Flicker film?

Oh ‘Flicker’ [1966, Tony Conrad], sure.

I showed them that and they thought they were going to die—students walked out. It is really interesting what your brain does just simple black and white image.

But I should probably start with ‘Rosie the Riveter’, which is a good film it is not experimental but it is accessible documentary [‘The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter’, 1980].

I would love to teach a documentary class. I haven’t been able but I was able to teach an autobiography class. That was fun.

There is a great film on Netflix that just won South By South West made by a Chinese woman where she follows a hippie around Florida.

Oh my god, that sounds great.

It is a new step for Netflix or SXSW, where they also had ‘Waking Life’ [2001, Richard Linklater].

SXSW also showed ‘Tiny Furniture’.

It is called, ‘I am another You’.

That is a great name.

The intro [here in Amazon] is bullshit. Basically, she just meets a dumpster diver. It is the reverse of 'Orientalism’ by Edward Said, who never told anyone that he moved to New York and appropriated all of that culture.

Of course a hippie dumpster diver would be mind blowing to a lot of people who imagine the US is just privileged people and condos. There are a lot of anarchist kids in Oakland, at the Rainbow Festival, in Florida, a lot of people think they are just homeless.

Of course, a lot of homeless are poor, fucked-up people, but there is always about 30-40% of voluntary people, who are just getting off the grid. She found one and her mind was blown. She became his Sancho Panza.

I was like, ‘Whoa.’ Every once in a while something rises up and it is so new and fresh it gives one hope.

But then it is all the same: commercial, averaged out, dumbed down, although I think ‘Sorry to Bother’ is also pretty good.

I am seeing Jonathan Duffy [known for ‘Hellion‘, 2014] tomorrow—he is one of the producers of ‘Sorry to Bother’. We meet for coffee once in a while.

He has made five films while I have made ’39 and a Half’. He is very prolific. Once a year he has film in Sundance. He is a producer mostly he knows how to pick his projects.

That is what a producer does.

So San Francisco has finally gotten over-yuppied. Do you think that spirit will move to Oakland?

I don’t know what happened. I am just some here for the summers and sometimes in December. Most of my filmmaking friends either left like me—they are academics — or they are hanging on. Or they have moved to the East Bay. But it also a matter of getting old, people change.

When I moved here in the ‘90s you could be an artist and get by. I was a part-time projectionist. I don’t know what the kids are doing these days. Are they moving to the Midwest? Detroit?

There are a lot kids still but they are mostly techies who don’t really support the arts, there are less clubs.

A lot of people I know moved to LA. LA has had a resurgence.

I have always loved LA.

Yes.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on May 23, 2018 - 11:44 PM
Romanticism and Its Discontents, East & West
by Doniphan Blair

The love-inducing cherubs we see every February have been part of our romantic culture since ancient times. image: detail of Raphael's 'The Triumph of Galatea' (1514)

ON VALENTINE'S DAY OUR THOUGHTS,
positive, negative or agnostic, often turn to romantic love.

A high art with a low object, romantic love was developed by many societies across the globe to bring together two very different people by integrating emotions, intellect and biology—a tough gig by any measure. With the widespread outing of sexual impropriety and crime, the flowering of transgender consciousness and our ever-increasing idiosyncrasies, it’s getting harder and evolving faster than usual.

Admittedly, romantic theory, romanticism or Romanticism, as the classical Western version can be called, suffered major setbacks since the latter's Golden Age in the early 19th century. That was when the English poets Byron, Shelley and Keats, among others, and novelists like Jane Austen, internationalized it from its German roots, turning Gothic tendencies toward enjoying nature, suicidal crushes and ennui to a more mature, adventurous and liberating passion.

Indeed, English Romanticism came to be considered the natural conclusion to The Enlightenment, since it provided a fecund workshop for free thinkers and a poetic style for America, with its vast natural kingdom, individualism and dreams of justice—until it came under attack.

First were the French romantics, whose love expertise could not be denied; then came the Darwinists and pragmatists, who considered it impractical, even though Darwin’s second theory essentially explains romanticism; and finally the alienation and pollution of the Industrial Revolution. Soon following was the 20th century’s orgy of war and mass murder, much of it orchestrated by ersatz German romantics, who failed to grasp their own forbearers’ insight into love and humanism.

Naturally, this generated widespread pessimism and cynicism, especially with the added threat of nuclear annihilation. Only twenty years after Auschwitz, however, the poets, dreamers and kids doubled down on 19th century Romanticism with an even more ambitious movement personified by The Beatles, notably their great cliché but even greater universal truth: “All you need is love.”

Regardless of those amorous achievements, romantic satisfaction remains a moving target. Although they sang of true love in the ‘60s, within a decade about half of all marriages were ending in divorce. Despite the benefits of liberated sex and revived romanticism, joining two very different people suffered the deprecations of the modern and then the digital age: atomized communities, physical isolation, attention deficit disorder and an obsession with machines.

With the emergence of the world wide web and, a decade later, smart phones, we now have near-universal access to "the tree of knowledge," albeit one swamped in triviality, fraud and porn. The latter jumped a brave-new-world level in January 2018 when Realbotix, out of San Diego, California, debuted its artificially-intelligence, able-to-converse and anatomically-correct female machines.

Realbotix, a San Diego company, debuted its lifelike and chatty sexbots in January, 2018, according to San Diego Union Tribune (9/13/17). photo: courtesy SDUT

Are we now due another radical romantic shift? Are the aesthetics and systems of yesteryear even viable? Can personality tests and big data—AKA dating apps—provide a better way to, if not true love, at least sustainable companionship, including reproducing the next generation? Indeed, reproduction has dropped precipitously in many advanced societies, making some form of activist romanticism mandatory for their continuance.

Alas, the ancient ways won’t go quietly into the night. Even as each generation must develop its own sexual mores, music, dance and other art, romantic behavior facilitating procreation follows guidelines dating back to the animals, even insects.

Long before the romance novel slew the hero narrative on the fields of literature, love was provisioning the brave souls standing against patriarchal panegyrics and epics. Italy probably had a third-century martyr Valentinus, who healed the sick and joined the lovelorn, but he was hardly the first to highlight the work of the heart. Romantic love is well-represented in “The Bible”, from Adam and Eve, who were “naked in the garden and not ashamed,” to “The Songs of Solomon”, eight matriarchal love poems, hiding in plain sight in the middle of that Ur-patriarchal text.

Romantic love also figures highly in Hindu scripture and ancient Persian, Chinese and Arab poetry, as well as much tribal lore, but nowhere more so than in Japan, where a sophisticated romanticism emerged in the 11th century, a few hundred years before its European equivalent.

Japan is also where we find romance's biggest reversal. Starting in the 1980s, census takers, psychologists and sociologists started documenting a decline in Japanese childbirth and sex. Sometimes called the "celibacy syndrome," it came from overwork, the education of women, or their ongoing oppression, or—conversely yet again—the end of traditional culture, according to various hypotheses.

Given Japan created a classical romanticism centuries before the West and experienced its modern crisis a few generations earlier, perhaps it can illuminate the love-life travails of over-worked bourgeoisie or over-individuated hipsters elsewhere. To effect that translation, how does Japanese romanticism compare and contrast with similar desires and dreams in the West?

Sexual revolutions are nothing new, as we can see from the ‘60s but also antiquity. While pre-history can not be known, which makes Matriarchy Theory controversial, there’s ample archeological evidence indicating patriarchies emerged from older matriarchies during the onset of civilizations (some 5% of societies continued as overt matriarchies).

Early human communities must have gathered around adept grandmothers, given their cultural control, the child’s maternal attachment and the inability to verify fatherhood. If men wandered around hunting and were not fully aware sex led to babies, as the evidence indicates, they simply could not know the sons on which to build a patriarchy until women told them about the birds and the bees.

Naturally, pre-historic matriarchies were more peaceful, but their very success stimulated growth and systems inevitably atrophy over time. Indeed, agriculture and cities, which women helped start, require an ever-increasing buy-in from men to do all the extra work of farming, building and fighting. While hunter-gatherers are on the job only a half-a-dozen hours daily and herders can easily flee overwhelming force, farmers labor from dawn until dusk and are viscerally driven to defend their investment.

A Roman copy of Praxiteles's 'Aphrodite of Cnidus', surprised at her bath, considered the seventh wonder of the world. photo: unknown

This made a gendered revolution inevitable, while inspiring early romanticism: men will fight for families they now know they have; women will give love and its results to those who help their families; culture evolved precisely to encourage such exchanges.

As patriarchies emerged, they had to compete with neighboring patriarchies, compelling them to not only fight but develop their stories, rituals and art, finally forcing a full break with matriarchal worldviews.

The ancient Greek men earned their stripes through long wars, epics about long wars and even more prodigious scientific investigation. Often left unmentioned is that they turned their romantic ideation on each other—homosexuality—which interrupted a central female power at its root.

Not coincidentally, the Greek's founding epic stars the gorgeous and independent Helen, evidently their last matriarchal queen. If Helen’s primary husband, Menelaus, stood by when she eloped with Paris, the handsomest man in the world, which is catnip for queens, there would have been no new philosophy to dramatize in "The Iliad”.

For the Greeks to evolve from their Bronze Age, warlord-priestess partnership to a cutting-edge patriarchy, with an army able to stop the enormous Persian Empire—twice in a single generation (5th C BCE)—some man had to assume full political as well as fatherly responsibility.

Since fatherhood starts with paternity awareness and matriarchal queens are free and regent, Menelaus had to fight for Helen, drag her home and lock her in the kitchen, if only mythically.

"The Iliad” debuted a patriarchal shift and host of heroes—Menelaus’s older brother Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus—but also the competition, infighting and jealousy endemic among men. Fortunately, they also invented pure rationalism, or philosophy, and the ten-year war ended with a symbol of sophisticated intellectual thought: the Trojan Horse.

Homer’s second book, meanwhile, covers Odysseus’s fantastic journey AND desire to return home to his wife, Penelope, both basic romantic concepts. Indeed, even as the Greeks reveled in their gendered revolution and exploration, they preserved their matriarchal knowledge base.

Women remained oracles and priestesses; they were idealized as Athena, the goddesses of wisdom AND war; and they were portrayed as intelligent and empowered—despite being stark naked—in the masterful statues Praxiteles started sculpting, also in the 5th C BCE, not coincidentally. As an inducement, they were allowed some freedoms, notably the annual celebration of Dionysus, which featured heavy drinking and orgies.

The more-ancient Hebrews, however, prohibited homosexuality and fostered patriarchal troth through even longer books, monotheism and circumcision. Despite the covenant-with-god or hygiene explanations offered by rabbis and scholars, cutting off the tip of the penis is obviously both a literal and symbolic deterrent to “dick thinking” and goddess worship.

Monotheism was the perfect faith for patriarchy, given a fertility goddess will inevitably birth more gods, and it granted men suzerainty not only over their children, women and houses but the entire universe, previously considered female. Moreover, its literacy and intellectual discourse fed civilization.

Despite the Greeks’ spectacular achievements in math, science, philosophy, democracy, architecture, art, theater, shipbuilding, sports AND armed forces, their failure to formulate a unified field theory, as did the Jews, condemned Hellenism to all but disappear by the 5th C CE, although aspects continued in the Roman and Byzantine empires, and in Islamic civilization.

The Hebrews, meanwhile, preserved their prior matriarchal culture in the character of Eve, "the mother of ALL living things," who obtained wisdom from the snake, an obvious symbol for both the phallus and research into how reproduction works, the obligatory first study of a self-conscious species.

Amaterasu coming out of her cave, by Utagawa Kunisada, the most commercially successful artist in 19th C Japan. image: U. Kunisada

While men had to be granted dominion in “Genesis”—it was a patriarchal text, after all—Adam is hardly the great warrior or genius, given he both blames Eve AND depends on her for knowledge. Moreover, many of the following Biblical stories tell of powerful women, and the Jewish Sabbath is essentially a matriarchal holiday, run by and for women (Christian women work on their sabbath, Jewish women do not).

The Japanese had a similar matriarchy-to-patriarchy transition. Like the Greeks, they developed a robust warrior class, which veered queer to veto pussy power. Indeed, they also defeated invasions by a neighboring super-power twice in one generation: the Mongols (1274 and 1281 CE). As with the Jews, they continued to honor women in the family and culture but more so in their religion, a fully female polytheism, unlike the Greek pantheon led by Zeus.

The supreme being of Japan’s ancient Shintoism is the sun goddess Amaterasu. While only a small percent of modern Japanese practice Shintoism (less than half are religious, the vast majority Buddhist), it remains the nation's cultural foundation; a female priest crowns each new male emperor, who is mythically descendent from Amaterasu, and its cultural and psychological effects continued to permeate.

With Japan’s unification, in the 3rd C CE, and its importation of new ideas (Confucianism, Buddhism) and tools (writing) from China, it entered its classical period. Capitalizing on the new cultural opportunities, women known as Saburuko began selling their services as entertainers and artists as well as prostitutes, a powerful trifecta since Shintoism eschewed sexual shame and featured sacred prostitution, as in ancient India and the Middle East.

Classical culture climaxed a couple of times but massively in the early 11th C with “The Tales of Genji”, by Murasaki Shikibu, a noblewoman. Nominally centered on Genji, the son of an emperor and a lowly concubine, who was reduced from royalty to commoner, it concerns a near-endless series of relationships with women, some seemingly incestuous, others generating offspring, all exploring feelings, etiquette, court culture and the power of love, instead of the quests and conquests men had been writing about since the invention of the technology.

In fact, "Genji" was the world’s first “novel” or “romance,” terms originally interchangeable in Latin-derived languages. (Romance's first syllable, meanwhile, references Italy’s founding tribe, city and empire, although Rome did little to advance its eponymous philosophy until Dante.)

“Genji” generated a romantic revolution, replete with the incessant exchange of poetry (often just two lines), enumerable love affairs (often clandestine), and art and aesthetics featuring affairs of the heart and imagination. In part because Shintoism has no central text, “Gengi” seemed to provide a powerful, indigenous worldview around which society could gather. The genre continued in Lady Sarashina’s “As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams” (11th C) and “Confessions of Lady Nijo” (14th C), among others.

The Greeks wrote little poetry and less about love, preferring the physicality and drama of theater. Sappho (7th C BCE), their only full-fledged romantic poet, was an educated woman, probably even a matriarch, from the island of Lesbos, which gave name to that gendered worldview, though she was also passionately bisexual. Not much Sappho survived Hellenism's civilizational collapse, only a few thrilling lines, “For love is the military power which no soldier or sailor can withstand,” among them.

The Christians, for their part, attempted to outlaw male lust, which empowered both the fertility faiths and violent men, with a cult of chastity. By venerating Christ’s virgin mother Mary, they enshrined matriarchal wisdom and love as well as a hoped-for restraint, although they took centuries to establish a celibate priesthood, and until today to start enforcing it.

Removing religion from society’s tumult was a logical defensive technique also used by the Greeks, Hindus and others, although it was considered anti-life by Protestants, Jews, Muslims and most eastern religions including Shintoism. Despite the sexual repression, Christianity was intensely romantic, with a handsome personal deity who loves you and will forgives all your sins, not to mention its promise of eternal life and unbreakable, sacred bond with the procreative partner.

Two troubadours from Avignon, one playing the popular nine-stringed lute, circa 1350. image: unknown

By the time Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) declared his devotion to Beatrice to become Italy’s first romantic poet, southern France and northern Italy had fallen for the Cathars, a Christian sect elevating asceticism, purity, pacifism and female feelings but also a second cosmological force, Satan. For that reason, the Catholics declared them a heresy and attacked them in the bloody Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), destroying their defenders and massacring their civilians, including their poets and musicians, eventually called troubadours.

Conflating love of the Lord with that of the beloved, the troubadours advocated for both a public Christian devotion and a private sexual one, in keeping with the Jewish, Muslim and Sufi poets of neighboring Spain's first Golden Age (9-11th C). Fleeing the Crusades, the troubadours crossed Europe, singing of love and freedom, which uplifted the peasants but transported the queens and knights, whose illicit love was more sacred than marriage, they claimed, since it was given freely.

Japan also fostered clans of skillful knights, the samurai, who joined with empowered women, if not queens. Their warlords finally took over in the Edo Period (1630-1868), installing the shogun and closing Japan to the outside world, although Zen mystics, artists and women continued expanding its intellectual horizons. “Life of an Amorous Woman” (17th C) by Ihara Saikaku, a man, combined humor, sex and love to showcase a more masculine romanticism. Becoming the "Gengi" of its day, it kicked off the fantastic "floating worlds" period.

In Europe, troubadour feminism was eventually subsumed by the morality of the Protestants, who often covered women’s bodies and outlawed dancing, music and drink, much like modern radical Islam. Japanese women, however, carried on as influential writers, performers and priestesses, as well as lovers, while wearing their favorite finery and consuming their share of sake.

Combining traditional skills with pithy conversation and exquisite taste were the geisha, Saburukos times ten, many from fallen samurai families. In fact, their robes, the kimono, derived from the dress of the samurai’s gay adjuncts, suggesting an amazingly queer-tolerant, gender-competitive society. Gay men also contributed extensively to the arts, naturally, and controlled outright the popular Kabuki theater, which prohibited women.

The geishas were the queens of the Floating Worlds of Kyoto, Tokyo and Osaka. But, unlike the denizens of other red-light districts world-wide, they blended male fantasy and gratification with their society’s highest arts, generating yet again the earth’s most advanced romanticism at that time.

Isolated from the real world, like the island itself, the Floating Worlds were divided from day labor but also the home, which was controlled by women, in the Confucian manner. Until recently, most Japanese men’s salaries were sent directly to their wives, compelling them to beg for booze money when on benders, a once-common sight Saturday nights across Tokyo.

Bit by bit, the men took over public life, but not creatively enough to save Edo society, which atrophied in the late 18th C. Eventually, the young samurai began to rebel, although they were divided between expelling the European traders and missionaries, who had trickled in, or embracing them and going modern. The choice was made in 1853 by the black gunships of Commodore Perry, who forced open Japan to American trade, in a catastrophe of national shame and unequal treaties.

But, as with the 3rd century imports from China, it triggered new thinking and tool use, and a determination to become equal to the invaders, leading to the Meiji Restoration. Named for Emperor Meiji, who took the throne at fourteen and ruled from 1868 to 1912, he may have contributed little. Meanwhile, a wily band of oligarchs steered Japan through years of crisis and rebellion, ended samurai feudalism and instituted a constitutional monarchy with a diet. They also achieved an amazing technological leap.

At the same time, the first schools for women were starting; some women were still prominent, like author Higuchi Ichiyō (1872-96), geisha Sada Yacco (1871-1946), and poet and feminist Yosano Akiko (1878-1942), the first tp translate "Genji" to modern Japanese. Others developed their own foreign affairs. Nine months after Perry, there began to appear mixed-race kids, starting in the main Yankee port of Yokohama, while many Japanese became fascinated with American culture.

The famous modern geisha Sada Yacco, who updated its traits and styles, circa 1900. photo: unknown

Empowered by western equipment and ideas, which they started studying zealously in the newly-opened universities, and their refocused patriarchal zeitgeist, the Meiji Restoration triggered an outpouring of male energy so massive, the Japanese built an industrialized society in ONE generation. While much manufacturing was still done in huts, they soon fielded a fully mechanized army, even more astounding given their gun prohibition the two centuries prior to Perry (because they allowed commoners to kill samurai).

While Emperor Meiji wrote poetry about peace, the oligarchs preferred the European playbook of power politics and raw materials extraction, colonizing Korea in 1873, invading northern China in 1885 and then annexing Taiwan. While not that remarkable in a century of European colonization of the Far East, Japan's victory over Russia in 1905 shocked Moscow elites, who blamed the Jews, and surprised the world.

Meanwhile, their refined romanticism continued, exemplified by Sada Yacco, who modernized geisha styles and became the Prime Minister’s mistress and then an admired actress, touring the US and Europe, where Japanese culture had, in turn, become a fad.

Japanese homosexuality, pornography and prostitution also continued apace, as detailed in Mori Ogai’s fascinating “Vita Sexualis” (1909). On top of explaining how he grew into a well-read modern man and doctor—the surgeon general of the Japanese Army, in fact—Ogai recalls many youthful adventures and societal secrets.

One is how almost every Japanese attic held an old book of sexy wood prints, if you could only ferret it out, although Ogai was initially confused when the men pictured seemed to have three legs. While the Greeks idealized small, symmetrical penises, Japanese artists preferred the exaggerated erections typical of matriarchies, which the women depicted in the woodcuts appeared to fully enjoy, along with the occasional orgy or bestiality.

Those books included work by some of Japan's greatest artists, who found porn a lucrative side gig. Katsushika Hokusai, the early 19th C painter of the famous “Great Wave Off Kanagawa”, also did “Dreams of the Fisherman’s Wife”, which graphically portrays her intimate enthusiastic involvement with an enormous octopus.

By the 1920s, the films of Yasujiro Ozu, the books of Junichiro Tanizaki and Japan’s emerging democracy were showcasing a highly hybrid culture, which, as we can now see, is a Japanese specialty. Alongside the traffic jams, fanatic photo hobbyists, “modern girl” flappers and importation of all other things Western, from whiskey to classical music, they preserved Shinto rituals, emperor worship and extensive indigenous culture, including a healthy fish diet (making the Japanese some of the most long-lived people on the planet).

“Tanizaki is a special case,” noted the English-American author Pico Iyer, who married a Japanese woman and lived there for decades, in his “Nymphets in the New Japan” (New York Review of Books, 6/8/17). “Part of what gives his work their often lurid fascination is the gusto with which the novelist indulges his delight in everything girlish,” perhaps a vestige of romantic matriarchies. “The other part, is that he so unflinchingly measures the cost of such obsessions,” the male moral backlash.

Alas, military success inflates male egos. After decades of skirmishing around northern China and internal Japanese assassinations, corruption and power grabs, the militarists took over and decided to demonstrate their resolve by seizing China’s northern-most province, Manchuria (1931).

Japanese imperialism was romanticized by many in the East and some in the West as a necessary push back against Western imperialism, but not so much after the "Rape of Nanking," which killed up to a quarter-million civilians in 1938. Indeed, Japanese fascism, racism and emperor- and warrior-worship, as well as extreme violence, already evidenced an out-of-control patriarchy, which new reports of torture, grotesque medical experiments and mass murder only confirmed.

'Dream of the Fisherman's Wife’, by Katsushika Hokusai, considered Japan's greatest 19th C artist. image: Hokusai, 1814

War was opposed by Japanese communists, Buddhists and pacifists, like George Ohsawa (inventor of macrobiotics), as well as some women and artists. Emperor Hirohito publicly recited an anti-war poem by his grandfather, Meiji the Great. But it was not enough to offset sixty years of unparalleled patriarchal as well as industrial and military success.

Indeed, the vast majority of Japanese intellectuals endorsed the war effort. Even the pioneering poet and feminist Akiko shifted from her staunch pacifism, after the First Battle of Shanghai (1932), endorsing "bushido," the samurai code of honor, and calling on the Chinese to embrace Japan, despite their butchery.

Japan allied with Germany and Italy in 1940, and proceeded to conquer most of China and much of South-East Asia, including England’s super fortress in Singapore. After invading New Guinea, they threatened Australia and snuck across the ocean to surprise attack the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, in late 1941.

"We have awoken the sleeping giant," worried navy commander Admiral Yamamoto, while Zen master Kodo Sawaki predicted, "Our homeland will be destroyed, our people annihilated.” Nevertheless, most of the military and elite believed that the combination of a devastating sneak attack and their control of all the forward islands of the western Pacific would deter an American response.

Nor was there a course correction six months into the war when the US Navy sank four of Japan's five aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway. With half the US population and less than a fifth its industrial capacity, many knew that was the war’s turning point, although Japan fought on valiantly and viciously for three more years.

All warrior groups tend towards fanaticism and death cults, but Japan’s was aggravated by its ancient romanticism, which fostered Kamikaze fighters and a proclivity for dreaming ridiculously large, not unlike its ally, that other romantic innovator, Germany.

Even the impending invasion of Japan, which threatened thousands of civilians as well as the fanatics fighting to the death, or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which instantly killed almost 100,000, was not enough to inspire surrender. Emperor Hirohito finally forced his commanders to do so after an aborted coup and the vaporizing of a second city, Nagasaki, which suggested a tsunami of slaughter to come.

Conquest sharpens the mind. But unlike in Germany, where there was extensive hand-to-hand combat and rape, and Nazism was outlawed postwar, Japan's occupation was less severe, the emperor was reinstated and samurai-worship continued among ex-military and some intellectuals.

Yukio Mishima (1925-70) began as a very creative author, who happened to be gay, and an aficionado of female culture. Indeed, he was raised by a powerful matriarch, his paternal grandmother; he adored "The Tales of Genji"; and he wrote romance novels, very popular among women, along with his literary novels, plays and essays.

But he eventually became obsessed with samurai values, including “seppuku,” the self-disembowelment used to restore honor, which he himself resorted to after his failed coup attempt in 1970. Mishima provides a veritable roadmap on how romantic worldviews, masculine fantasy and patriarchal failure can precipitate a grievous imbalance.

The alpha girls of modern Japan like to indulge colorful and eccentric tastes, in fashion and elsewhere, Tokyo, circa 2005. Image: unknown

By the 1930s, Japanese women were largely locked in their kitchens, uneducated and unable to keep up on the news. The deprivations of war, destruction of their cities and utter insanity of nuclear bombs must have been a terrible shock, especially to the romantically inclined. Although women were allowed to vote in the elections of 1948, and entered the educational and labor force with enthusiasm, they had another easily available recourse to voice their dissent: ending unqualified devotion to phallocentrism.

Japanese creativity reemerged right after the war, in an obvious attempt to process it. Indeed, there were over a half-a-dozen major art movements, from Gutai, led by Jiro Yoshihara, to the international Flexus movement, which included many women, notably Yoko Ono, an established artist long before she met John Lennon.

Geishas also continued, although in a diminished state. The renown Mineko Iwasaki had her story fictionalized by American author Arthur Golden in his bestselling “Memoirs of a Geisha” (1997), in the first person no less (she sued and received a settlement).

Today, women are well represented in the arts; Yayoi Kusama, an abstract painter and sculptor, draws high prices in New York’s elite art market; and pop music is often pointedly female. Japan has many girl bands but also mature women musicians, like the one-named singer Nora and her salsa band, Orquesta de la Luz, which won awards and fans worldwide the 1990s on.

But when I asked a Japanese woman friend about her nation’s romanticism, she replied, “You mean like mothers for their children?” She appeared unfamiliar with classical Japanese literature, even though she was well-educated, her father was an intellectual, and her mother encouraged overseas travel and study. Evidently, as she was boarding her first international flight, they didn’t hand her a copy of "Tales of Genji”.

Moreover, she said her mother was not that into sex; she praised women who rejected its thrall; and she herself was not that interested, even though she was a dedicated free spirit, who loved to play her guitar and sing loudly while sitting in the sun, naked.

On the other hand, she accepted her sister, who was a “night worker,” which includes escort services or full-blown prostitution. Prostitution is strictly regulated in Japan, as befits the descendants of Shinto priestesses and geishas. Full penetration usually involves the yakuza, the Japanese mafia and apparent banner bearers of samurai values. Evidently, even as one sector of Japanese society recoils, another is immersed in the senses, prostitution flourishes and Japan has an internationally-famous pornography business.

A Japanese man proposes in public, in a combination of kitsch, commercialism and traditional culture, circa 2010. Image: unknown

Many young Japanese men enjoy it, as indicated by the popular, sexualized Mangas (long, bound comic books) and Anime (animated fantasy films), which often feature naive immature men and smart sexual women. Although oppressed, some young women like to flaunt their ability to blend innocence and salaciousness, fostering the “schoolgirl" phenomena, which includes seducing older sugar daddies, and a flamboyant wild girl tradition.

Alas, it is often largely fantasy. Despite the baby boom which naturally follows the slaughter, as well as their ancient romanticism and modern geishas and sensuousness, it is evidently not enough to re-invent a functional romanticism.

There is a geek cohort called “otaku” and the more extreme “hikikomori,” young people of both genders, but mostly men. The Hikikomori are agoraphobics who refuse to leave the house, let alone engage intimately with the opposite sex. While some asexuality is standard, not at those levels and not including so many average men who are in a relationship or are married

Many explanations have been offered for Japan’s celibacy syndrome, notably the social tendency to conform and work too hard, the absence of "touch culture," and the demise of traditional culture, or conversely, the malingering patriarchy and oppression of women, who still have to contend with extensive groping on trains and subservience in the office (see "Why Aren't the Japanese Fucking?", 2015, or "Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?", 2013).

Alas, few commentators have mentioned how the inheritors of a robust romantic tradition might have been injured by the toxic masculinity of World War II. Although Japan's fecund balance between matriarchy and patriarchy was declining by the 19th C, the trauma of war and defeat may have broken it, leaving the average Japanese guy, or salary man, without a functional male role model, a modern Zen master, say.

There is nothing more painful than patriarchal collapse. Although the Greeks invented 95% of early Western Civilization, their power reached its zenith with Alexander the Great and the nation is now economically weak with a low birthrate (1.33 per woman, even less than Japan’s 1.44, circa 2016).

The Hebrews, for their part, only conquered the world of ideas, until the advent of Israel in 1948 and its military success. Despite its limited scope and low casualties, compared with neighboring conflicts, they too have been tarred as rabid patriarchs. Meanwhile an apparent gender equity has enabled the country to go gangbusters economically and reproductively (3.11 per woman, compared to the US’ 1.8).

Japan remains a very vibrant society, the third largest economy in the world. They recovered from the "bubble economy" and corruption of the 1990s, and their cars and cameras remain king. In addition to studying and working hard, the Japanese pursue all sorts of arts, hobbies and studies, sometimes from faraway, like the young people adopting the Chicano culture of Los Angeles, other times from within, like Buddhism or becoming a geisha.

Japanese romanticism continues despite the depredations—note the cherry blossoms in the background, indicating an ancient spring celebration honoring women and geishas. photo: unknown

Admittedly, refreshing romanticism is a tough gig. As the people who invented its earliest manifestation though, I assume the Japanese will eventually get back their mojo, probably with increasing input from the now-effervescent Koreans, they once conquered (see "The Story of K-Pop".

Knowing the Japanese expertise at expropriation, they will undoubtedly draw on many other sources as well. Perhaps they will even open Japan not just to foreign goods and innovation but people, wide-scale immigration, which they need to offset their population decline.

Balancing the needs of men and women, as well as practical business and romantic dreams, requires constant innovation and update. Japan may be a case study of similar problems in the West, after the recent exposure of criminal masculinity or the modern era's chilling of romance. Hopefully, however, the Japanese will eventually iron out their long twisting tale of love and art, while we can all look back on our fascinating romantic roots and create a fresh romantic future.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on May 21, 2018 - 12:50 PM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner
by Karl Cohen

The Fab Four in their anime personification. photo: courtesy The Beatles

Oh No, the Blue Meanies are Coming!

Fifty years ago "Sgt. Pepper" blew our minds when we hopped on the Yellow Submarine and took a wonderful trip to Pepperland. The creative team at TVC in London had to work with a limited budget from the producer, King Features, so they stretched their imaginations to come up with amazing visual creations that made up for the financial restraints.

King Features executives only wanted a quick, cheap film so they could cash in on owning the theatrical rights to The Beatle’s music. TVC, which did The Beatles’ TV cartoon series, felt this might be their only chance to do an important feature and they seized the opportunity.

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the movie will have a wide release across the United States, Britain and Ireland this summer.

Enjoy what we are told is a carefully restored psychedelic picture full of vivid colors and details along with a remixed 5.1 stereo soundtrack that was the handiwork of the Abbey Road Studios. The resulting timeless journey is still wonderful, so treat yourself and your friends to a high time with George, Paul, John and Ringo.

Go cheer them on as they confront the Blue Meanies. Soar with Lucy through a sky full of diamonds. Wish the Boob well as he tries to complete something. Ponder the mystery of "the sea of holes."

Specific movie locations are or will be announced at their site. This may very well be the best animated feature to come out this summer. It is scheduled to play at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, September 3-15th.

The pudgy new star from Pixar. image: Pixar

Pixar Does Dumplings

Pixar's next short "Bao" is about a Chinese dumpling which comes to life. It was cooked up by Domee Shi, who was born in China and raised in Toronto, and will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festivial, on April 21, before going on tour as the opener for “The Incredibles 2.” Shi began at Pixar as an intern working as a story artist on “Inside Out.”

“I just wanted to create this magical, modern-day fairy tale, kind of like a Chinese ‘Gingerbread Man’ story," Shi said. The film’s title “Bao” has a dual meaning: A steamed bun as well as a treasure.

Pixar's New Incredibles

The report in Indie Wire say the focus of Pixar's "Incredibles 2" is on the family and their super powers, with Elastigirl as the lead and a greater role for Jack-Jack, the baby who is discovering his powers. The action packed highlights shown have Elastigirl preventing a disaster with a runaway train and what might be a comedic sequence, having Jack-Jack combating a raccoon. The sequence shown also introduced a “mysterious Screenslaver.”

Brad Bird says "Incredibles 2" was made on an accelerated schedule as Pixar plans to release “Toy Story 4” in 2019. He says, “It’s a challenge for us, but the studio is three times bigger than when it made “The Incredibles.”

As for technological advances expect noticeable improvements in the character animation, environments, wardrobe, and effects. Also the family’s mansion is much larger (38,000-square-foot) as the extra space is needed to accommodate various sequences that will take place there.

The Frank Lloyd Wright inspired house had to be redesigned to adapt the space to meet the shorter production schedule. It is interesting to know that in planning chases and other sequences designers needed to know if the space was going to be big enough to accommodate the movement that was going to take place in it.

As for Bird’s style of directing, he told Indie Wire’s Bill Desowitz “I will get the shot that I want, but if somebody comes up with an alternate shot that they think can be cool, then they can persuade me.”

Image from 'Seder Masochism' proves Paley doesn't bow to the current chaste culture. photo: N. Paley

Paley Premieres Seder Masochism

Nina Paley will premiere her new animated feature, "Seder Masochism", at the famous Annecy Animation Festival in France. Her webpage about her new feature has a one minute trailer, but no details about the project. Clips are posted on her Vimeo Page, or check her blog.

For a tour de force Paley video featuring sexy dancing Paleolithic women see, " You Gotta Believe".

Collins is on the Loose Again

See Vince Collins's latest wild and dangerous, mind-altering work, “Subliminal Mind Circus,” if you dare.

An explosive one minute of images, it may leave you thinking “what the hell was that?” as it rushes past you. Who knows what strange thoughts it might induce? Naked clowns running down the street being chased by giant roosters?

Gorzycki Wins Wales Best Doc

Martha Gorzycki, who teaches animation at San Francisco State University, flew to Scotland and Wales to be honored again. She gave an artist talk at the University of Glasgow in their Film and Media Studies Department and showed several of her films including her latest work “Voices from Kaw Thoo Lei.”

Image from Collins's 'Subliminal Mind Circus'. photo: V. Collins

Then she flew to Cardiff, Wales for the International Documentary Film Festival where they showed her new work in a wonderful picturesque setting. She was gone from April 12-23rd. As for her “Voices from Kaw Thoo Lei,” it has now been shown by over 50 film festivals and it just won its 21st festival prize.

Careers in Animation

The 2018 Careers in Animation Panel event at SF State was a lively afternoon discussion with three highly informative guests. The nicest news is that Kat Alioshin is working on “The Inventor,” a stop-motion feature about Leonardo Di Vinci. It will probably be made locally if it is fully funded. Hopefully that will happen and there will be a need for people to fill entry level jobs.

Kat is also producing “Animation Outlaws,” a feature length documentary on Spike and Mike’s contribution to animation. Kat has filmed interviews with Nik Park, Pete Doctor and several others who are now well-known to animation fans. The tentative release date is April 2019. Information about “Animation Outlaws” can be found at here and on Facebook at spikeandmikedoc.

Kat mentioned Henry Selick has another stop-motion feature in the planning stages. If it goes into production it will probably be animated in Portland. Kat worked with Selick on “Nightmare Before Christmas,” “James and the Giant Peach” and on other of his productions.

She brought with her a metal lunch box containing several stop-motion puppet heads. She showed us how magnets inside of them are used to hold the replacement parts together. When Art Clokey was producing “Gumby” here the replacement mouths were simply printed on paper, cut out with scissors and stuck in place (probably with rubber cement).

Monica Rodriguez, who works as a Junior Motion Designer at John McNeil Studio and is a graduate from SF State’s animation program, spoke about breaking into the industry. She has a delightful vivacious personality so I wasn’t at all surprised the Berkeley studio hired her right away.

Rube Goldberg, a Jewish cartoonist born in 19th century San Francisco, was honored by a US stamp. photo: courtesy R. Goldberg

Also joining the panel was Charlie Canfield, who talked about his long career in the local industry that began when he moved here from Seattle to take a job at ILM. That was before the days of computer animation and effects. In recent years he has developed a successful career providing animated sequences for documentary films.

Goldberg is Quite the Rube

The art of Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) remains a marvel even almost a century in. Originally from San Francisco, Goldberg's show includes drawings, sketches and memorabilia and is at the Contemporary Jewish Museum through July 8th, 736 Mission St., San Francisco.

Got Kids?

If you desperately need something for your kids this summer, why not send them to Cartoon Camp? San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum’s Cartoon Camp is cooler than ever this summer as they are in their new location with half & full days of drawing excitement! Your kids can take part in week-long workshops dedicated to the art of cartooning.

They will hold three sessions: Week 1: June 18th – 22nd, Week 2: June 25th - 29th and Week 3: July 30th - August 3rd. Designed for kids ages 10 to 15. Contact them about special programs for Older Teens (16-18). The museum is located at 781 Beach St., SF, just down the street from the Buena Vista Café.

Charles Schultz's Sally was a seminal feminist figure. photo: courtesy C. Schultz

Sally's World

The next exhibit at the Charles M. Schulz Museum, "The World According to Sally", opens May 23 and closes December 3, 2018 at the facility at 301 Hardies Lane, Santa Rosa. It features a collection of over 68 original comic strips and objects. It will demonstrate the variety of ways Schulz captured Sally’s childhood frustrations and methods of coping with the world around her.

Karl Cohen is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached . Posted on May 15, 2018 - 09:47 AM
Sorry to Bother Busts Wide Open Oakland Cine
by Doniphan Blair

The stars of 'Sorry to Bother You', Tessa Thompson and Lakeith Stanfield, encounter a loud demonstration at work. photo: courtesy B. Riley

FINALLY A FEATURE FILM WITH ALL THE
the pathos, perversity, politics and BLACK comedy—in all implications of the term—to detonate a unique, aggressive film movement in Oakland.

The directorial debut of Boots Riley, the well-known Oakland rapper who co-created The Coup in 1991, “Sorry to Bother You” (see trailer) is an ambitious mashup of ideas, genres, cinematic photography (by newcomer Doug Emmett), great acting and no-holds-barred satire, the likes of which I haven’t seen since, say, “How to Get Ahead in Advertising” (Robinson, 1989).

It opens innocently enough in bed with Detroit and Cassius, beautifully played by Tessa Thompson (Creed”, 2015, “Westworld”, 2016-) and Lakeith Stanfield (“Atlanta”, 2018, or “Quest”, 2017, see cS article) respectively. They only finally get up when Cassius decides to go look for work in a crowded, overamped and modernized Oakland.

There’s even a tender mystical moment, which big pictures often fail to include: Cassius worries if what he is doing will matter in the future; Detroit lovingly assures him it will.

Although their romance humanizes the film through to its end, the hysterical bits start early—notably the electric door, on the garage where they live, opening accidentally during sex, or their car’s wipers requiring manual operation with a rope—as do the plot twists.

'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley, the well-known Oakland rapper, cleans up well for the media, a trick he learned when his band, The Coup, started charting in the '90s. photo: D. Blair

After Cassius lands a job at a futuristic call center, he begins dropping into people’s homes, literally—a striking metaphor for the soul-killing sales call. He learns to conjure a “white voice” (provided by comic actor David Cross), again literally, winning him sales and then accolades from a sleazy boss, played to the hilt by West Oakland’s own Michael X. Sommers.

The cast is rounded way up by Terry Crews as Cassius’s voice-of-reason uncle (“The Ridiculous 6”, 2015), Danny Glover (too many credits to mention) as the call center co-worker who hips him to the "white voice" trick, Armie Hammer as the center's corrupt owner (the Oscar-nominated “Call Me by Your Name”, 2017), Omari Hardwick (recently starring in the amazing “A Boy. A Girl. A Dream”, Basir, 2018), and many more.

Riley, who also wrote, could afford so much talent his first time out because 'Sorry to Bother You” has been garnering acclaim since 2012, when he floated its themes in an album of the same name (featuring the great “Magic Clap”), and two years later when the SF literary mag McSweeney's published his very funny script.

Riley earned a generous startup grant from the SF International Film Festival, where “STBY” was the two-week event's "centerpiece" and had its international premiere on April 12th—simultaneously at SF’s Castro AND Oakland’s Grand Lake, with Q&A skyped from latter to former. He was also taken in by LA’s premier African-American filmmaker whisperer, Forest Whitaker, whose name undoubtedly attracted some investors.

From a well-woke family out of Detroit (hence the female lead's name), Riley landed in Oakland as a child and if you haven’t heard his story, it’s well worth your next five minutes, or fifteen if you click all the music links.

Cassius (Lakeith Stanfield) celebrates selling out to become a top salesperson at his call center. photo: courtesy B. Riley

By the time he was 20, Riley was working at UPS, where he met the guy later called E-roc and they formed The Coup, receiving some airplay with their first album, “Kill My Landlord” (1993). Their second, “Genocide & Juice”, a year later, garnered good radio rotation with its single, "Fat Cats And Bigga Fish", which also had a stylish BW video, rich in production values, costumes and sets (see it here).

By the time we get to the 1998 “Steal This Album”, and its bigger hit, “Me & Jesus the Pimp in a '79 Granada Last Night”, featuring lines like “he was smilin' like a vulture as he rolled the horticulture,” Rolling Stone Magazine is calling it “a masterpiece of slow-rolling West Coast funk.” Its MTV, which Riley presumably directed (since he studied media at SF State), has a fully cinematic feel (see it here) and its songs actually inspired literature (Monique Morris’s “Too Beautiful For Words”, 2000).

"The Guillotine", one of The Coup’s most infectious tunes and colorful videos, features lyrics like “We got hella people, they got helicopters,” Boots in bunny makeup and the band line dancing across West Oakland. "Strange Arithmetic”, also off the "Sorry to Bother You" album, exemplifies their hybrid of rap, funk and punk.

At the same time, Riley was also exploring his aggressive activist side. He formed the Mau Mau Rhythm Collective, which mounted “edutainment” concerts, promoted the Black Panther Alumni Association and Copwatch, and helped stop the FBI's "Weed And Seed" program and Oakland's "No Cruising" ordinance.

Amazingly, The Coup’s fourth album, “Party Music”, scheduled for release late-September, 2001, had cover art with an exploding World Trade Center. After proving they were not party to the conspiracy, it required a rapid redesign, something Riley appears adept at.

Bay Area superstar Danny Glover spices up a scene in 'Sorry to Bother You'. photo: courtesy B. Riley

After its makeover, “Party Music” was hailed as “the hip-hop album of the year" by Rolling Stone, while Vibe Magazine listed Riley as one of 2002’s ten most influential artists, leading to appearances on Fox News, “Politically Incorrect” and elsewhere. Soon The Coup was touring with Rage Against the Machine and Riley was joining with their guitarist, the also-very-political Tom Morello, to form a side band, Street Sweeper.

Riley even scored that most commercial of hipster accolades, scoring an episode of “The Simpsons” with his tune "Pranksta Rap" (2005). The following year The Coup’s “Pick a Bigger Weapon” included guest artists Morello, Black Thought (The Roots) and Bay Area punk intellectual Jello Biafra, and was crowned Album Of The Year by The Associated Press. After touring the globe, where the French especially adore him, Riley returned home and became intimately involved with Oakland's Occupy in 2011.

Around this time he started writing “Sorry to Bother You”, which brings all of his interests—music, Oakland, politics, humor and wild-ass visuals—into one pulsating and provocative package.

The film’s biting satire—about a poor soul who sells out, makes bank and even breaks strikes—overshadows the need for more precise political exposition. It already compels the viewer to think, to laugh hysterically on occasion and to decide on their own, which is the secret to herding anarchists.

Amazingly, Oakland has already figured massively in this year's films, notably the opening and closing scenes of the worldwide blockbuster “Black Panther” and as the setting of the soon-to-be released, Sundance-darling “Blindspotting”. But the former is a tad too narratively complex and the latter too heartfelt to be iconic or ironic enough to crack the code of Oakland’s structural ambiguity.

Boots Riley, Terry Crews and Michael X. Sommers go goofy on the red carpert set up by the SF International. photo: D. Blair

“Sorry to Bother You”, on the other hand, does what an indie should do: bring to the table new ideas, analysis and techniques, not to mention the massive raw energy flop sweating off the screen, while staying just slick enough to entertain the troops at a multiplex in Topeka, Kansas, say.

Indeed, “Sorry to Bother You” is relentless, much like Riley himself, who is said to be stubborn but pragmatic. The script keeps on twisting and turning, with a gasp-out-loud development at the end of every second or third cut, with Lakeith Stanfield’s straight man carrying the story forward, until he reaches some incredible conclusions as well as confusions, some of which could not help but bleed into the making of.

Indeed, its Oakland-based production was known to have some issues that threatened to push it both over budget and out of that solidarity feel standard to indies. It was apparently saved by a few personnel changes and hard work by the production team, which included locals like producer George Rush, line producer Debbie Brubaker and location manager Heather MacLean, among the many others working feverishly to bring it across the finish line.

Admittedly, in the current festival version, the film's end is a bit of a mess, due to the profusion of story lines and strange occurrences. But rumor has it that there is a plan afoot to alleviate that with some strategic re-editing. Along with some additional filming, that did happen a couple weeks ago, this promises to present a more cohesive film by summer release time.

Regardless, even in the chaos of the climax, the incredible reveals still astound; there’s an animated sequence as shocking as it is satisfying—ditto the full- frontal male nude scene; AND there is a nice romantic denouement, delivering us right back to where we started, Detroit and Cassius in bed but so, so, so much further along—as are we.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on May 13, 2018 - 05:49 PM
Black Panther Rules Cinema Earth
by Doniphan Blair

Chadwick Boseman (lft) and Michael Jordan duke it out for the throne of Wakanda in Ryan Coogler's super-hero blockbuster, 'Black Panther'. photo: courtesy R. Coogler

WITH 'BLACK PANTHER' CRACKING ONE
billion box-office dollars world-wide, one month after it opened on February 15th, it takes its rightful place as both a spectacular hit and an important African-American film. It is also an important Oakland story, building on the city’s symbolism in popular culture.

Although it focuses on the adventures of a prince assuming the throne of Wakanda, an ultra-modern but still-tribal African kingdom, and features fantastic visions of women scientists and warriors as well as Africa, it has a plethora subplots, from Oakland revolutionaries and an abandoned child to a sympathetic CIA man and a vicious South African gangster.

“Black Panther” is star-studded, including Forest Whitaker and Angela Basset as well as a massive team of stellar black Los Angeles actors and artists. The hero, T’Challa, is well rendered by Chadwick Boseman, the 42 year-old South Carolinian, who did beautiful jobs as the first black pro baseballer Jackie Robinson (“42”, 2013) and the first black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (“Marshall”, 2017).

It also stars Michael Jordan (“Creed”, 2016, “Fruitvale”, 2013) as Erik Killmonger, the complex anti-hero often preferred by critics, who challenges T’Challa for the throne and the black panther’s magical powers. He advocates distributing Wakanda’s high tech tools to oppressed peoples—ie revolution.

With African-American culture so popular worldwide as well as across the United States, including Trump Territory, and with the paucity of black super—or regular—hero films, there is fantastic pent up demand. No wonder “Black Panther” became the third top domestic grosser, after “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (2015) and “Avatar” (2009), and the thirtieth top-grossing film of history, inflation adjusted.

Produced by Marvel, which invented as well as mastered the superhero style, from computer graphics to hero stories, in over twenty blockbuster films (“Spiderman”, 1999, “The Fantastic Four”, 2013), it still has a lot of humor, human touches and cultural context, coming directly from director Ryan Coogler, an Oakland native, who also co-wrote.

The head of Wakandan security, played by Kenyan-parented, Mexico-born, Lupita Nyong'o, in 'Black Panther'. photo: courtesy R. Coogler

In just seven films, Coogler has surmounted cinema’s entire genre hierarchy. While at USC Film School in Los Angeles, he did the arty, streetwise short “Locks” (2009), which he set in West Oakland. After three other shorts, he made the powerful indie feature, “Fruitvale Station”, based on a true story about Oscar Grant, the young black man killed by police at the Oakland BART station of the same name.

By his second feature, Coogler took on the typical Hollywood flick, “Creed” (2015). Technically an under-a-million indie, it reprised the “Rocky” franchise, replete with Sylvester Stallone playing a trainer and the “winning isn’t everything” final. Interestingly, “Creed” was a straight-forward, no-nonsense story with few frills, aside from its quality script and acting, somewhat in the directorial mode of Clint Eastwood.

Interestingly, it was shot by Maryse Alberti, a French cinematographer, making Coogler the only director to use women “cameramen” in a majority of his films, regardless of macho content or style. “Fruitvale” and “Panther” were lensed by Rachel Morrison, whom Coogler met in LA, where she moved after New York University Film School to attend AFI. She also shot the non-Coogler features "Cake” (2014), “Dope” (2015) and “Mudbound” (2017).

While “Black Panther” takes place mostly in Wakanda, it starts in Oakland with basketball-playing kids, one of whom is the son of the revolutionary plotting an action upstairs until he is interrupted by the crew coming from Wakanda to anoint him king.

Although the film makes no overt reference, setting it in Oakland is enough to connect it directly to the Black Panther Party, which Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale started six months after Marvel debuted their first Black Panther issue in Spring of ‘66. Newton was a big fan of pop culture but he doesn’t cite the comic, created by two Jewish writers in New York, as inspiration.

Nevertheless, it was Marvel’s legitimate response to black interests and politics in the ‘60s, and it highlight the virtuous rather than vicious circle of cultural appropriation. From cubism and classical music to jazz and rap, culture is all about virtuous appropriation since once you express something publicly, it is free to inspire, travel and evolve.

Indeed, Coogler homages the connection by having one of those writers, Stan Lee (also credited as one of the film’s writers), appear as the Thirsty Gambler with a few lines in a casino scene.

A fascinating-looking ancient-current shaman attends a meeting of the tribes in 'Black Panther'. photo: courtesy R. Coogler

While Coogler doesn’t include a single one of the Black Panther’s world-famous icons—the upraised fist, the black beret, the leather jacket, probably assuming it would break the fantasy or open a can of worms, he continues one of the party’s central political discussions.

He makes the struggle between N’Kanda and Killmonger about whether to just achieve freedom and prosperity for yourself or to share the revolution with oppressed people worldwide. The film finally splits the difference, using technology for good and improving civilization, not overthrowing it with all the destruction that can involve.

Unfortunately, “Black Panther”’s script buries those ideas one level too deep while letting the multiple stories weave a notch too complex, perhaps following the superhero narrative mode, with too many subplots and car and plane chases.

Moreover, the scenes unravel a tad too fast to conjure their full cinematic weight or visual enjoyment, say of a woman warrior wielding a high-tech spear or galloping atop a rhino, succumbing to the standards of superhero films, which need to be testosterone addled to capture the interest of attention-deficit-disordered, video-game-saturated boys.

Nevertheless there are enough pauses and funny lines, like when the CIA man, sweetly played by Martin Freeman, comes upon the new king’s sister, perfectly portrayed by Letitia Wright, and she exclaims, “Don’t scare me like that, colonizer.” And there are lots of visual treats, from wide panoramas of a gathering of the tribes to the avant-garde photography Coogler likes to include at least once in every film except “Creed”.

“Black Panther” has an upside down dolly shot into a meeting with the king, which reminded me of one weird shot in “Fruitvale”, hand held running down the street, an odd but interesting choice by cinematographer Rachel Morrison.

“Black Panther” also had a lot of fascinating tidbits I would have enjoyed more of: a slick, modern shaman in bright green tailored suit and a six-inch lip-expanding ring of South American tribes, a wizen old but fascinating looking woman leading one of the warrior clans.

Oakland now sports a modern sci-fi feel, most notably its unpretentious multiculturalism. photo: D. Blair

I would have also loved to see some Latino or Asian kids playing basketball at the end of the film, given Oakland’s multicultural courts and the conclusion of the film with similar sentiments of sharing expressed by T’Challa during his appearance at the United Nations.

Regardless, “Black Panther” is a spectacular vision of a modern African society that is both free of colonizers but able to accept one white CIA guy, that is both a super hero story but full of humanity. It certainly was to the ten-year-old kid I played basketball one day in March, whose aunt arranged for the whole family to see the film together.

“Black Panther” is certainly a testament to the art both of Coogler and Hollywood’s large, powerful and talented African-American community, many of whom will undoubtedly being doing fantastically more in the near future.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on May 13, 2018 - 05:47 PM
David Roach Digresses on Film
by Doniphan Blair

David Roach, the director for Oakland's International Film Festival since its inception 16 years ago. photo: courtesy D. Blair

"THE OAKLAND INTERNATIONAL FILM
Festival was bigger and better and more consolidated this year,” its director David Roach, told me by phone, one month after the 16th annual festival (April 4-8) and his catching up on some sleep.

“I would say the films this year were in alignment with what we are trying to do: show the power of collective action. We showed 'Acha Acha, Cucaracha’, a film by Mario Piazza.” Originally from New York, Piazza lives in Argentina and his film covers a rebellious artist collective there in the 1970s.

“We also showed ‘My People are Rising’, a biography of a Black Panther—Aaron Dixon, out of Seattle—by Rafael Flores." An Oakland resident and cineSOURCE contributor (see Towards a Rasquache Cinema), Flores's film is an insightful, artistic documentary about the defense captain of the first Panther chapter outside California.

“We did a free screening of ‘Acha Acha, Cucaracha’ for the city," Roach continued. "But there was so much rain—the first or second most rainy day in Oakland history—which prevented some turnout. We got some because we had a series of panel discussions, which started earlier.”

“It was very hazardous to drive that evening—you know, shit happens,” Roach said, laughing lightly, in his soft-touch style.

“We were screening a lot at Jack London,” the Regal Cinema Jack London 9 around the corner from the famous jazz club Yoshi’s. “That was part of our vision. We attempted to get this empty space across the street from the Jack London Theater. We got the insurance but it was affected by the rain so we moved everyone to Lungomare,” an Italian restaurant nearby.

“We are preparing to do even more there next year, since that is what brings the international appeal. People enjoy the scene there: the water, the restaurants, having meetings nearby.”

“One of the feature films this year that had a lot of buzz was ‘Lasso’ [directed by Evan Cecil], a horror film shot in Oakland. ‘Lasso’ had a pretty big budget.”

“’Pretty Ass White Girl’ [by John Eddins] was a short people really wanted to see again," Roach added. A button-pusher about interracial queer love, "It was a little like Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’. They even had a band, which showed up and played a screening.”

“’Kings’, about a black police officer in Oakland witnessing unethical things, was really well done—had a big name actress.”

“Filmmakers love to see their films on the big screens,” enthused Roach. “It is really about the filmmakers, to see them enjoy their film being seen, to hear their stories, to know them.”

“Some films were really powerful. Often times they may not attract an audience, as we saw in this film from Burkina Faso ['Burkinabe Rising', by Iara Lee], also about activist artists.”

Roach (cntr), receives a National Community Award from the Morehouse Alumni Association. photo: courtesy D. Roach

“We attempted to show ‘Sorry to Bother You’, with Boots [Riley, the director] coming from Oakland and all. “Boots is a very down-to-earth guy and has a diverse group of friends.”

"But it was funded through Sundance and, once it showed there, the next place would naturally be the San Francisco International Film Festival.” Indeed, that's where it premiered, simultaneously at Oakland's Grand Lake and San Francisco’s Castro Theater, a week after the Oakland International, with Roach in attendance.

“It was really fun to watch. My take: it was like a modern day ‘Which Way is Up’ ['72], which had a screenplay co-authored by Cecil Brown, who is from Berkeley, and who was at the screening. It starred Richard Pryor, who plays three different roles. The more white he becomes, the more success he gets but the more he loses his friends.”

“’Sorry to Bother’ had good character development in the first half. It looked really good; it moved well, the dialogue, the direction of the camera—everything! It was really well done.”

“It gives you this feeling that ‘Where you are is the best!’ because he ends up back in his old garage. It has been done before but it says what is valuable: Love is the key!”

“I went to the after party at the New Parrish [Club in Oakland]. I met some SFIFF volunteers who live in Oakland, people interested in being in or producing indies. I met quite a few actors. There is lot of energy that can go back and forth—we are also going to host [OIFF] events in San Francisco.”

And how about the emerging indie film scene in Oakland?

Roach plays with the dog in front of the hut once occupied by one of Oakland's first screen writers: Jack London. photo: D. Blair

“You know that picture of smaller fish being eaten by the bigger fish. [The film business] starts with the film buyers, then it goes to smaller distributors, then to producers and directors and some of the talent.”

“Typically, when you go to Sundance, there are different types of parties. The general film goers goes to regular parties: $20-30 to get in—great for people who like to party. Execs don’t do those parties—they go places where they have food and drink.”

“To really have an Oakland film scene, it would have to cater to those folks. And you have to let people know ahead of time because people gravitate to their needs. Filmmakers will come to our festival if they know there are distributors here. As of now, there is no ‘Black Hollywood’ here.”

And the gentrification of Oakland?

“It has had no effect on our festival. We are an international festival. We had submissions from 30-plus nations. And we are hoping the stories from Oakland can attract viewers elsewhere."

"Years ago we showed ‘Promises’ about Palestine and Israel. It was amazing to see an audience that was mostly Jewish and Palestinian have a civil Q&A after. This year [it was similar for the film about] Tully Lake, the concentration camps for Japanese—the audience was mostly Japanese-American."

“Oakland is an extremely multicultural place. We have always had a very mixed crowd. We've had films on Cambodians or Native Americans. You don’t know how diverse Oakland is until you have a film that touches those populations. We usually try to have that film next to a black film or a Russian-language film, so you see something different than your experience.”

“You have a film about a Black Panther but next to it a film about Argentina. When each group comes to see their movie, they are also learning about other cultures. We don’t want to just preach to the choir, we want people to experience something outside their circle.”

“When I think of gentrification I think not only of race but economy. I think that, for the most part, our festival is growing every year but not because richer people are coming to Oakland. Our tickets are very cheap: $15.”

And the other big Oakland films this season?

“Haven’t seen ‘Black Panther.’ I may be the only person in the world who hasn’t. After the festival, I headed out to the country for a couple a weeks. When you see all these films you don’t want to see movies for a minute.’

So it goes in the annual work cycle of David Roach and his dedicated team of supporters and volunteers in the brief lull after the storm and before they start prepping for 2019!

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on May 10, 2018 - 05:59 PM
Cheryl Fabio Makes Masterful Oakland Blues Movie
by Jerry McDaniel

'Evolutionary Blues' Director Cheryl Fabio with executive producer, KTOP's Michael Munson, after a screening at West Oakland's California Hotel. photo D. Blair

I MOVED FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO
West Oakland’s Lower Bottoms in 1989, just after the earthquake. Although it was known as a ghetto, it was the first place I felt at home since I don't know when.

People were sitting on their porches, talking to one another, playing in their yards. It reminded me of Oak Cliff, the Dallas quarter where I was born.

I learned about the sad event called "Cyprus Sandwich," when the freeway fell down and killed over forty people, but which also opened up the neighborhood and brought a breath of fresh air.

I would go now and then to Esther's Orbit Room, the famous club, which was around the corner. People there alluded to a vibrant musical history; friends in the music business also spoke of a shining past.

But that history remained a mystery until I saw "Evolutionary Blues: West Oakland's Music Legacy" (see trailer) at this year’s Oakland International Film Festival, which ran April 4-8th.

Although I was excited to see historical photos of places I had been riding my bike around, I was shocked to finally perceive the breadth, depth and achievement of Oakland’s music scene.

Opportunity had brought thousands of African-Americans from Louisiana, Texas and across the South to Oakland, starting in the early-1900s but booming during World War II, to build those killer ships.

Kept out of Oakland’s downtown clubs by the racist musicians union, black musicians settled around 7th Street in West Oakland turning the already-thriving commercial district into an entertainment capital. Soon there were over a dozen clubs, most famously Slim Jenkins’s Supper Club, where well-dressed black couples and others would dine and dance the night away to swing and bebop but also the blues.

Indeed, West Oakland pioneered a slower, more mournful urban blues, while retaining the horn sections popularized in Chicago. In 1942, Saunders Samuel King became the first to chart a number one hit record out of Oakland, “S.K. Blues, Part I" (check it out here).

The dynamic Miss Faye Carol belts it out. photo: C. Fabio

Unfortunately, after the war, the economy tanked, devastating the club scene. Fifteen years later, construction on the enormous central post office and then the BART station destroyed over a dozen square blocks, with thousands of people pushed out by imminent domain.

Nevertheless, a lot of the music, musicians and culture struggled and shined on, as Fabio so nicely documents in "Evolutionary Blues”.

Using extensive archival footage and stunning interviews with dozens of major players, Fabio and her team have composed a vibrant community history. It tells us where we came from and inspires where we can go to, in a professional, PBS-ready manner.

“My researcher, Tenisha Jones, and I scoured the library archives and catalogs together,” I was informed by Fabio, an attractive older woman sporting hip jewelry and dreadlocks, when we met over a light lunch at a little Thai place just inside Berkeley.

“We looked and looked, even when we didn't know quite what we were looking for.” Executive producer Mike Munson, from Oakland’s government television station, KTOP, where you can see the city council argue incessantly, “gave me the freedom to research and make the story I wanted to make,”

“The editor, Meadow Holmes, helped form and shape the vision,” Fabio continued. “After the two of us got the concept just right, she went back and beautified the look. Our camera guy, Godofredo ‘G’ Dizon, was unrelenting in making this tiny project look BIG. He let me drag him across the country, on a 24-hour trip, to Rhode Island’s Brown University, because one of our historians couldn't come to California!”

Perhaps most importantly, “The musicians shared themselves, they introduced me to their community, and they opened up," Fabio said.

"They opened up" is also a good tag line for this poignant snapshot not only of a hoppin' music scene but its politics, economics and problems—all backed up by an awesome soundtrack, history that needs to be archived and revered but also continued.

Come learn about and celebrate the long running river of music flowing out of our own Oakland, as Cheryl so aptly elucidates in her film and our conversation, below.

And if you can’t find a way to see “Evolutionary Blues”, please petition your city supervisor to let KTOP release and earn money from their productions. Then we could see them all right on Netflix.

On set doing an interview (lf-rt): cinematographer Godofredo ‘G’ Dizon, producer Michael Munsun, director Cheryl Fabio, crew Shomari Smith. photo: Biko Bradford

Cheryl Fabio: I’m from East Oakland—I grew up in East Oakland and I paid attention to my life, to some degree. My mother was very active in Oakland politics.

cineSOURCE: She was a poet?

She was a poet, a writer and she actually recorded some albums for Folkways, putting music to some of her poetry. All of that, in hindsight, informs how excited I was to do this project.

I’m a hyper-focused individual so where I put my gaze, that’s what I know about in the moment. I’ve always loved music but I’ve never GAZED on the local music. So this was an opportunity to do that.

So what sort of focus did you have before?

I spent a lot of time in schools. I went to undergraduate school at Fisk University in Nashville Tennessee; I studied sociology and learned photography there. I’ve always been focused on photography—then I went to film school at Stanford, their documentary program.

When I did it in the 70's, well, black girls weren’t making films. It was really hard to do. I was a single parent, so it was even harder. Juggling that took a lot of energy.

How old were your kids when you were going to Stanford?

Actually I had my first kid coming out of Stanford and that child is now 42 years old. Then I had a kid who’s 30 now.

This was a chance to pay attention to Oakland, to dig into the music. One of the first things that came up was that some of the guys who played behind my mother, when she made those four Folkways albums, were connected to the scene.

So there were pieces of information that I had had and I was going ‘Oh! That’s who they were talking about!’

It was also a chance for me to express what I had observed as a kid with my family and their friends going through the politics of Oakland, which had always made me shudder. A lot of my friends come from somewhere else and they can’t believe Oakland isn’t this panacea.

I’ve had very interesting conversations about what the ghettos in California looked like and what politics in the Bay Area has been like.

Important for me is Isabella Wilkerson's book, ‘The Warmth of Other Suns’ (2010), which explains the migration [from the South]. I thought, ‘Now I understand how we got here, how my family fits into this puzzle.’

Singer and piano player Lady Bianca in a scene from 'Evolutionary Blues'. photo C. Fabio

I’m a diaspora kind of person. My dad is from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, my mother is from Tennessee. I’ve spent time in Africa. I’m interested in all of it. But the film was a chance to dig deep into Oakland’s black community. I was always curious.

Although I came here when I was five, when I’d say, ‘I’m from Oakland,’ my contemporaries would say, ‘You’re not native.’ So there’s these slices of African-American life in Oakland that I got to experience [by making the film].

So first you were making photos, right? Were you doing series with showings or what was your focus?

Actually I had a hard time framing how to make a living with the kind of photography I was interested in doing. I was a street photographer. I studied Ansel Adams but I’m not really interested in that. I was more interested in recording the communities I was living in, but who is going to pay me?

I ended up going to Africa. My school, Fisk University, sent me when I graduated and I came back with a really nice portfolio of pictures. That’s what got me into Stanford. Then I shifted into kind of 'OK, how do I make all this work?’ I’ve just bounced around ever since then. Sometimes I’m working film, sometimes I’m teaching.

So you are teaching?

I taught public school for about four years and then I taught in Bay Area colleges and universities as an adjunct. That is a difficult life because it never amounts to much, just bouncing from one school to the next.

So are you focused on film right now?

I mean I have to bounce around ‘cause I don’t have a silver lining. Rent is due next month and there’s no film paying me this month. But I kept my household afloat. I’ve managed government channels like KTOP. I’ve produced for 30 years.

When cable came to town, each municipality, the streets of which they dug up, they gave a certain amount of bandwidth for education, for government. Public Access was optional, not all cities did it. Oakland had the guts.

In 2000 KTOP got a windfall—I’ve forgotten why. They built out a studio—a state of the art studio—and they hired a lot of staff. I was part of that.

I worked with them for about 3 1/2 years producing, directing and managing the studio. I was the operations manager. Ashley James, do you know him?

No.

He’s a well-known documentary filmmaker in the area; he was the station manager. Then the economy tanked and the City of Oakland layed me off and about 1600 other people.

Singer Lenny Williams, formerly lead singer in Tower of Power. photo: Biko Bradford

I had a relationship with KTOP. When they decided to do this documentary, they needed someone they could trust to deliver a completed project.

The crew is all union—I mean KTOP union, not what a union would look like in Hollywood. Their stage is for hire. It’s a great deal. They used to have this great woman, the stage manager, who did the lighting. They’re good at getting a lot out of a little and they work well together.

It worked out really nicely. The editor and I’d email the project back and forth so someone was always working on it. We got it done in a year and a half.

When was that completed?

We had the audio mix around September 15th [2017]. We showed it for the first time on the 27th, at the Grand Lake Theater—packed the house.

When I saw it at the Oakland International Film Festival, I turned to the woman sitting next to me and said, ‘This place should be packed.’ She said, ‘Well at least we're here.’

I used to run a festival in Oakland for the black filmmakers hall of fame. I know what it takes. Getting an audience out in the Bay Area is [hard] because people have so many choices. So you really have to invest in serious PR, planning and execution. When that happens we get a nice audience, when it doesn’t happen...

I often feel that Oakland is the seat of culture in the Bay Area. San Francisco has it’s own thing but it’s been pretty transient for a long time now.

In the old days [Oakland] had a formidable culture.

The thing I’ve always known, but this film concretized, is that our black communities are always under assault. The people in the community try and push back on harmful forces, but the apathy about what happens in black communities prevents corrective action.

I remember when Maxine Waters, the Los Angeles congressperson, was screaming about this infusion of drugs and guns into Compton. It was videotaped; we could see it. I could see that influx coming to my neighborhood in East Oakland. It was palatable; we're getting drugs and guns together.

But it was denied, nothing was done, and today we are in the situation we are in. The culture around just let that happen—it’s kind of interesting. You know the kids in that school that was just shot up?

Parkland, Florida?

The poster for 'Evolutionary Blues' includes ALL the musicians in the show (click to expand). image: Shomari Smith

Yeah. You know when those kids took to the street and started complaining, the attention they got and deserved? The black kids said, ‘Hey now, wait a minute. We’ve been screaming about the killings perpetrated on us for years and no one pays attention.’ That points to a very complicated relationship between race and our society.

I used to hear that Oakland is in the shadow of San Francisco but I just felt like it’s a different culture.

My family would drive across the country, either to New York or to Tennessee, every summer. I’m accustomed to the fact that America is not ONE culture—it’s a lot of tiny, little cultures. So it’s not foreign to me that Oakland has a different culture from San Francisco, it grooves differently and it drives differently. I think it’s a class difference, largely.

When I started meeting these musicians, they were like pissed with everybody. I thought maybe that’s a constant state. I had to get past them being pissed.

One guy kept saying, ‘If you’re not gonna tell the whole story then I don’t wanna participate.’ So I’d say, ‘What’s the whole story?’

No one was very specific about what the whole story was until I got to Geoffrey Pete, the well-known owner of Geoffrey’s Inner Circle in downtown Oakland. Then the light went on.

I remember when all those little clubs were being shut down and thinking, ‘What the 'f’ is going on?’ Geoffrey just said it very clearly. He’s coming from the position of a business owner and THIS is what’s happening.

By the time I’m making this film, I understood that this harassment was the nail in the coffin of that generation. If there’s any hope, it’s that some other generation has been born and has the guts to pick it up from there.

Do you see any of that going on?

I do. I showed the film at the West Oakland library. This young woman was tearful. You know this film attracts older people—usually it’s a sea of grey hair. This is a woman of about twenty years old, she tearfully said, ‘You guys don’t see us but we're here, and we're doing stuff. But y'all don’t see us.’

I’m not understanding what’s happened to the blues. When I see magazines, the blues belongs to somebody else now. They’re freezing a moment in time. For African-Americans, this music is a continuum. Those [mostly white] musicians know it, but as a consumer. It shows up in different ways in their music.

So it’s a continuum. And that young girl crying, she’s part of that continuum. It might show up literally as rap or hip-hop. Whatever it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be, [but] it comes from the same place.

Well, I have teenagers. One thing I notice is that they’re hung up on what’s going on for them—the internet, pop music—which I’m not sure is all that different from generations over the years. But I do sense a disconnect with history.

An incredible disconnect. It’s incredible and I think it’s our fault. As a kid, in the fifties, there was a disconnect again because there was a culture shift happening [then]. ‘That sinful music!’ and a lot of adult disparaged it. I was lucky to have progressive, really cool parents.

I understand the kids being disconnected from us, from history. If you’re disconnected from your parents and your grandparents, history’s not going to mean anything to you, you know. They’re the bridges; they kind of lay the seeds.

City of Oakland councilperson Lynette McElhaney contributed additional history during a Q&A after a showing of 'Evolutionary Blues'. photo: D. Blair

To me we've abandoned kids for the past thirty years. Things like the drugs, the guns... all of that stuff has caused, at least in my community, a disruption. It happens differently in different communities.

When I drive around North Oakland, where we are now, I don’t see the same kind of disruption that I see in the black or brown blue-collar neighborhoods like East Oakland. That’s where everybody who left North and West Oakland fled to in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. There was a terrible disruption.

When I grew up, I went to Castlemont High School. That’s the most depressing scene in Oakland now, if you ask me. There used to be stores along MacArthur Boulevard, a fountain, where you’d go get ice cream, a hamburger. There’s none of it; it’s the cruelest area; it’s a terrible place. And it’s my neighborhood. I’m part of the fabric of that—how did it happen?

When a city is unresponsive, when part of a municipality is under siege, that city government is complicit, at best.

Fay Carroll, in my interview with her, the very first thing I think I asked her was, why she sang the Billy Holiday song ‘Strange Fruit’ the way she does. I don’t know if you know it—other than in the film—but she sings it very hauntingly.

The way she talked about it, I thought, ‘Oh that’s a great answer but I don’t know how I’m gonna use it.’ I didn’t [film] the beginning sentences but it fit it in perfectly.

She said that she sings it that way because she wanted to make her audience feel how she feels when the song talks about fruit. It’s not plums or nectarines but black bodies hanging from trees. That unlocked for me her style of singing.

You juxtapose that with what that twenty year-old girl was saying to you—it’s chilling.

We don’t want them to be so far gone that it’s too late. Some of the tears in that young woman's eyes was that. But she’s a survivor; she’s in the library with all these grey haired people watching the film; she’s connecting enough to get emotional and say, ‘Hey, I’m still here!’

She’s got a lot of peers that have no place to be found. I’ve been going around to schools with this film. I went to a continuation school the other day and the teachers let me know that the students were gonna be reactive.

But they don’t know that I know they’re auditory learners, this group in particular. So they’re all over the place. But I got a text from the guy this morning saying, ‘You know, they’re still talking about that film.’ AND we only got about a third into it [before] I shut it down.

Slim Jenkins, owner of the supper club shown here, was considered the mayor of West Oakland until the building was torn down for a gas station. photo courtesy: Oakland Public Library

It was a combination of, you know, what they’d gotten [from history], what they could get from me and the film on that day. The administrator thought that maybe [the students] ran away from me but I’ve taught in public schools for so long.

In fact, I told the teacher to tell the kids that 'The next time you see me, you won’t be critiquing my work. I’m gonna be critiquing your work!’

We went to Oakland Technical High School with 500 kids in the auditorium, 9th graders—way too young—but it was still interesting. One class, the music class, they were fascinated.

I brought Larry Vann’s Groove Merchants, a band in the film, with me. So one of the musicians was sitting next to this group of music class kids. When they realized that the bassist Michael, who was in the film, was sitting next to them, they were all over the place. They’d seen him perform live, and now he was sitting next to them!

But all these other kids, they were all over the place, really acting out, the teacher was horrified. I said, ‘It is what it is.’

Clearly, part of ‘what it is,’ is that we weren’t any better when we were kids. But 500 kids could sit in an auditorium [back then] because that’s what you did. It was a treat to get out of your class and sit in an auditorium.

I think that the 9th graders are just entering into that period of ‘looking into the mirror.'

There’s so much information being just thrown in our faces. You know I go for weeks and don’t turn my TV on. I don’t need to. Sometimes I turn it on and some horrific shit’s happening. I mean, ‘Really? How’d I miss that?’

It’s just too much information and I can’t imagine being a young person, who’s getting all of this stuff, trying to filter through it. I can’t do it myself. When they get a little bit older, I think they will start to think about their place in history—a least we would hope so.

I’ve always had a strange relationship with history because I never saw myself reflected in it, I really never did. Its places and people that I don’t know and, frankly, don’t care about.

Maybe when your older generations start passing, you start understanding that we’re not here forever. You miss some information cause you didn’t ask some questions, you might have thought to ask, and they’re gone now.

Then I think it becomes more real to somebody who’s been as aloof to history as I’ve been. I’ve looked more at the past as a sociologist would than a historian. I kind of look at how people move and things. It’s all going to come together in the next doc. [laughs]

Do you think that doing this flick has kind of changed your perspective?

Yeah, it really has. The thing I know about myself is that I’m a multi-modal learner. One reason that I like film—I’ve spent two years on the project, so I had a lot of time to think about it—is it’s visual. It’s auditory. It’s digging deep. It’s staying light. There’s all of that stuff I like.

And it brought context to history—it did kind of turn me on. I have a different way of reading now. I have a bed full of books that maybe I’ll get to read and maybe not. There’s something that has worked for me, using all these different ways of accepting the information, but also connecting the dots of it.

Going back to this history that you didn’t know much about—

First of all, you KNOW the history! My mother’s family migrated from Tennessee, so I'm in it. I didn’t understand it emotionally. It really is about context.

I grew up in the ‘60s and social movements have been the bedrock of everything that I’ve experienced. I worked in Mississippi, in the voter registration drives in the late ‘60s at the end of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC.)

I’ve done all kinds of stuff. So activism is there and I do mean to lift it up. But I don’t see politics quite as some folks might.

I understand. I think, in general, that art can’t help but be political.

Well, yeah, because you’ve got a certain luxury, if you’re making [art], right? The luxury is that you get to sit back and reflect and think about it. I don’t know that most people get to do that.

People in this film, these musicians, they’re different from any other creative people that I’ve worked with. For them, it’s a business in a way that most artists I know don’t see themselves engaged in a business.

The difference is, well, you know, all creative people are under attack in times like these. But the [blues musicians] aren't hearing it. They’re not having it because they’re not rooted in this community of artists, so to speak, the ones getting arts grants and sponsorships, etc.

They’re small business people and made their guitar their business. That’s interesting to me ‘cause when their business starts getting shut down, there is no one advocating for them, right?

It seems like you showed that by showing the arc of what was happening by showing what happened to Geoffery’s getting shut down. He shined the light on the fact that [clubs] are just not politically cool in this town anymore right?

Yeah. Part of what I'm talking about is that in West Oakland there’s two communities that are getting displaced. There’s a creative community being displaced and then the blue-collar workers, the people who came because of that migration, the opportunities.

They stood up in their own feet and made a way for themselves and their families. But then, bit by bit, stuff starts, racism starts, tearing at the fabric, and there’s a discriminatory reaction to African-Americans being here after the war ends. The jobs are gone and black people are in competition with white people.

People get ugly about the fact that there’s this huge population of African-Americans. Bit by bit, it starts getting torn down. When we wipe out this one group it doesn’t get to go someplace else and morph and regenerate. Whereas the creative group that got displaced, they can go someplace else and create more community and regenerate.

Jerry McDaniel is an actor, musician and filmmaker, who starred in the breakout Oakland film ‘Everything Strange and New’ (2009) and can be reached . Posted on Apr 25, 2018 - 01:48 AM
cineSOURCE’s 5 Day 4 Season Road Trip

Friend of cineSOURCE enjoys Deep Creek Hot Spring at sunset. Photo: D. Blair

Note: The 5 Day/4 Season Road Trip starts 7PM, Friday, April 27th, see itinerary below, or contact us: 510 220.2126

Hitting the Road

Have you ever fantasized about hitting the road, spontaneously, if only for a few days?

Did you know that California has three deserts, three major mountain ranges, 300 hot springs and almost a million miles of cool back roads?

Did you know that cineSOURCE hosts tours — indeed, one is leaving West Oakland this Friday evening?

In fact, all you need is a sleeping bag and pad and a hat and to show up at 7pm, Friday, April 27th, 2200 Adeline Street—after you RSVP, of course (Doniphan: 510 220.2126 or ).

Our newly-rented van will whisk you to Carmel for dinner and then to Big Sur to camp and do a beach morning. Then we'll do a fascinating back road crossing of California to camp at the first of our four hot springs, Remington, near Lake Isabella.

Spring flowers in the mountains near Bad Water, Death Valley, lowest point in continental US. Photo: D. Blair

Sunday night, after enjoying the desert's spring flowers (see Death Valley Flower Report), we camp, cookout and play music under the full moon at the LOWEST point in the US. It will be in the 80s at night!

As well as discussing film, doing yoga, finding fantastic vistas and what ever else we want, the next days include three more hot springs, the Manzanar and Lone Pine Movie museums, viewing the HIGHEST point in the US (Mt. Whitney) and spring skiing.

The costs will be shared evenly and start at about $300 for friends of cineSOURCE. For new friends, it is plus 25%, or starting around $400.

For more info, come to our Martini Wednesday's Open House, call 510 220.2126, or email .

Join us! California is the mother of all road trips and literally in our back yard.

Itinerary Summary

Leave Oakland Friday 7:00 pm sharp for Big Sur, 155m, dining in Carmel. Saturday we swim Sand Dollar Beach, take Hunter-Ligget and other back roads to Bakersfield and camp at Remington Hot Springs, near Lake Isabella (270m). Sunday: Death Valley (210m) stopping for desert flowers, camping in Bad Water, lowest point in US and enjoying full moon. Monday it's on to Mammoth, 264m, stopping at the Lone Pine's Film History and Manzanar museums and sunsetting at Whitmore hot spring. Tuesday we ski, hike or hot spring and stay at a motel. Wednesday we return to Oakland, 316m, via lunch at Mono Lake, hot springs near South Lake Tahoe, hike at Echo Lake and dinner in Placerville, arriving by 11:00pm.

The Sierras, including Mount Whitney (far left), the highest point in continental US, near Lone Pine. Photo: D. Blair

Itinerary Detailed

Overall Mileage: 1200 miles

Friday Evening Oakland to Big Sur, 155 miles

7 pm Oakland (0) Leave
9 pm Carmel (115m) Dinner Rio Grill
11 pm Partington Ridge (35m)

Saturday Big Sur to Lake Isabella, 270 miles

9 am Partington Leave
10 am Sand Dollar Beach (28m), swim
12 am Leave
1:30 pm San Lucas (53m) Lunch
Night Remington Hot Springs, (200m) South of Lake Isabella, Camp

Hydratherapy yoga, Whitmore Hot Springs, near Mammoth. Photo: D. Blair

Sunday Lake Isabella to Death Valley, 200 miles

Hot Springs, side trip 110m
Viewing of flowers, multiple
Bad Water, Camp, cookout, play instruments loudly
Full Moon, 5:23 PM

Monday Death Valley to Mammoth, 264 miles

Between Lone Pine and Bishop
Lone Pine Movie Museum
Manzanar Internment Camp
Keough Hot Springs

Night, Camp, Mammoth Lake, Whitmore Hot Springs

Tuesday Mammoth Lakes
Spring Skiing, Mammoth Ski Area, or
Hiking at Convict Lake, or
More Hot Springs
Night, Mammoth, Motel

Spring flowers and Sierras int the distance, Death Valley. Photo: D. Blair

Wednesday Mammoth to Oakland, 316

Morning, Mono Lake, Hot Springs
Lunch, Echo Lake, hike
Dinner, Placerville
10:00 Oakland

Over five days and few hours, we will have experienced beaches, desert flowers, hot springs and fantastic vistas; we will have done music, yoga, photography, swimming and skiing, and we will be ready to reinvigorate our world with fresh vision, feelings and accomplishment.

I have done this tour four times, first in 2003, and it never ceases to surprise, even shock, me. So much is right in our back yard, a few hours drive away, yet we often remain in our urban self-indulgences.

Posted on Apr 24, 2018 - 08:48 PM
Miami Festival Scores Big
by Joanna Butcher

The poster for the 2018 Miami Film Festival was created by Pulitzer Prize-winning Cartoonist Jim Morin. illo: J. Morin

Note: The author used to run a theater in Miami and started the Florida Film Competition for feature producers.

It was 10am on a Sunday morning as I arrived at the Standard Hotel in Miami Beach for the Miami Film Festival’s 35th edition press day on a Sunday morning in the middle of March. Four filmmakers were in attendance with large segments of their production team plus press from all over the world: some with cameras, and some, like me, with a pen and paper.

As it happened, three of the filmmakers had directed films I was particularly interested in seeing. First, this arrangement was extremely efficient. And secondly, it was such a pleasure to meet the entire production team at the same time.

So often we are given the impression that a film is made by the director alone. Meeting the entire team on these films was a great reminder that no filmmaker goes it alone, although that notion was challenged a few minutes later—as we shall see, below.

The first team I met were the director, fixer, and subject of the documentary feature “6 Weeks to Mother’s Day”. Director Marvin Blunt has gained a wide international experience on the reality TV show "Miami Ink".

While in the process of researching a new investigative journalism piece on the shadier side of "volun-tourism" around the world, he was spending a couple of days in Thailand on the way to more important stories in Cambodia, when all his Thai meetings fell through. His Thai fixer, Ladawan Sondak, approached him with the idea of a visit to a Thai school.

“I was not at all happy about the idea,” is how Mr. Blunt put it. “It was not in the arena that I was investigating—foreign-run non-profits with volunteers paying to work there. I VERY reluctantly agreed to go, as I had nothing else to do.” As soon as he arrived at the school, he realized immediately that this was the project he was going to undertake.

This is the best filmmaking story I have heard in a long time: how a story just jumped up and grabbed the filmmaker in a completely unexpected way—a testament to creativity at work. A creativity that cannot be controlled, but instead leads the way to bring stories to the world that need to be told.

A scene from '6 Weeks to Mother’s Day' directed by Marvin Blunt. photo: courtesy M. Blunt

Blunt and Sondak also explained how locally-based fixers/producers make it possible for US productions to take place in a country such as Thailand, where film crews are highly experienced from working on Hollywood and commercial projects, but need a local producer to deal with issues of language and communication.

“6 Weeks to Mother’s Day” tells the story of a Thai school’s preparations for their annual celebration of Mother’s Day, when they celebrate their scholastic mother, Mother Aew, the founder of their school, and when graduates return, bringing their own children. It is a time of tears of gratitude as well as stories of their time at the school.

As it happens, all the teachers at the school are referred to as Mother and Father. They help the children in every area of life, from getting up and cooking their own breakfasts to teaching reading, art making, and the great art of having babies of their own.

The school, Moo Baan Dek, is founded on the liberal British educational approach called Summerhill. “The belief of the Summerhill approach is that the child is basically good, and it is mistaken efforts of parents and society that distort this natural goodness. If children grow in freedom from the beginning, this distortion can be avoided and the children who are already damaged by their upbringing can recover in a free environment.”

Mother Aew began the school with her husband in 1979 and the Summerhill principles of freedom, love and self-governance are evident in all of its aspects. As a lifelong educator, I was astonished at the educational principles demonstrated in scenes showing how children are not required to learn, but are encouraged to want to learn by the teachers; how the children run their own council that delivers discipline to the only infringement a child can make—harming another person; and how they negotiate with Mother Aew to give themselves tougher discipline than she would.

At Moo Baan Dek, the children are all orphans, abandoned and often abused. The school acknowledges how many years in this loving environment it takes for a child to recover depending the level of their abuse and if there was any love at all in their childhood. The school relies on donations and epitomizes a poor but loving community.

A scene from 'When the Beat Drops' directed by Jamal Sims. photo: courtesy J. Sims

The school runs on the barest of resources but it's poverty is contrasted, in one section of the film, with the degradation, alcoholism, and lack of hope seen in a visit to the parents of twin boys. Suddenly we realize that the school is actually beautiful, serene, and filled with love in comparison to the extreme harshness of life outside. This film is a must see for any educator and for anyone who likes children (and mums for that matter!)

The second team I met were the director and producer of a documentary feature called: “When the Beat Drops.” The birth of this film came from Director Jamal Sims’s experience many years earlier when he was still in the closet. He visited a Pride Event in Atlanta and witnessed the amazing choreography and hyper athleticism in a club that blew him away.

Mr. Sims should know: he is one of the most sought after choreographers in Hollywood having worked on over 30 motion pictures including "War of the Worlds", "Mr. & Mrs. Smith", "Crash" and "Mysterious Skin".

Several years later, now openly gay and married, Mr. Sims has returned to tell the story of these extraordinary dance groups and their competitions. These practitioners of a style of dance they call ”bucking” is directly taken from the choreography practiced by female cheerleaders in the top teams in the country. Gay men have taken these moves—in which the body “bucks” like a horse—and costumes and transformed them into this extraordinary dance style. For Mr. Sims, the film became a labor of love to bring these dancers and their world to the public eye. “When the Beat Drops” introduces us to great characters and superb dance moves.

Producer Jordan Brendan Finnegan impressed me greatly with his passion for the film. He told the story of bringing some bucking/dance clips to World of Wonder producers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato and showing them on an iPad. Finnegan’s wonder at the fact that these producers chose to take on the film and his total admiration of their work and that of his director showed how a true producer totally embodies the director’s vision to bring that work to the world.

Singer Omilani Alarcon (cntr) directed the film 'Latinegras', about growing up Afro-Latinas. photo: courtesy O. Alarcon

The third film I saw was a first film by local Miami filmmaker, and was one she really did make by herself! Singer Omilani Alarcon plays so many roles in her life as an artist but it was her childhood experiences on television that inspired her to attempt to tell the story of her community of Afro-Latinas in her film “Latinegras: The Journey of Self-Love through an AfroLatina Lens.” Alarcon apologizes that her debut feature film is not more polished, but the fact is it’s sometime hesitant presentation nicely matches the artist’s actual voice and the film’s story about her growing self awareness.

“Latinegras” moves back and forth between Alarcon’s direct-to-the-camera speech, to extraordinary historic photographs of slavery, to joyous conversations with Latinegras friends who chat animatedly and jovially about their daily lives living with racism and ostracism. There is no better way to learn filmmaking than to make a film, and inspire audiences with education and entertainment at the same time.

Elsewhere at the Miami Film Festival were many other interesting producing teams. Kevin Chinoy and Francesca Silvestri have been producing for many, many years and recently experienced a new level of success and visibility with their recent extraordinary film: “The Florida Project.”

Directed by Sean Baker, with assistance from Chris Bergoch and others, this exquisite film is almost documentary in style, and follows the lives of several children living with their parents in motels at the edge of the Disney Empire. The film shimmers with color and the heat of a Florida summer, while shining with extraordinary performances and dialog (see cineSOURCE article).

Chinoy and Silvestri have been working with Baker over several projects for many years and it was a pleasure to hear them tell stories of their collaboration with him and many other, mostly women, directors.

A filmmaker in the audience asked what made a really good producer, and Chinoy answered that being nice to people was the most important thing. This was my favorite moment of the entire Film Festival. The film business is entirely relationship based, and this simple advice will take producers a long way!

I was also a member of the new Rene Rodriguez Critics Circle Award where we watched ten festival films from all over the world.

Kevin Chinoy and Francesca Silvestri produced the Oscar-nominated 'Florida Project'. photo: courtesy K. Chinoy and F. Silvestri

The winner of the Award was another documentary-style film “La Familia” from Venezuela directed by Gustavo Rondón Córdova The first act of the film shows several children living in the gritty streets of Caracas and playing at being tough. The degrading language of the children is so well observed and every word said by them or by their distracted adults is an insult, a put down, a horrifying mixture of self-hatred directed at everyone else.

But one day, another child shows up with a real gun and real violence ensues. The survivor of this incident returns home where his father realizes that having attacked a child of gangsters, his own son’s life is now in danger.

But his son is far more interested in grandstanding and playing the big shot than fearing for his own life, fighting his father every step of the way as they frantically leave the town and try to escape to safety. This is a moving story of a parent who steps up to the challenge of rescuing his son who has already been lost to the destructive pull of his environment.

My personal favorites in the Award films were “Wind Traces,” directed by Jimena Montemayor from Mexico. Another beautiful story of a parent and children, this time it is about the parent being lost in alcoholism and grief after her husband’s departure.

Exquisitely played by Dolores Fonzi, the mother rolls around in her bed while her children discover the beauty of the world despite the lack of care they receive from their mother. The film was made with an almost entirely female crew, including director of photography, Maria Secco, editor Ana Laura Castro and art director Alisarine Ducolomb and just won the Guadalajara Film Festival’s Premio Mezcal for best director and best Mexican film and also the international critics’ FIPRESCI prize.

Dominican Nelson Carlos de los Santos directed the masterful and poetic 'Cocote', about a rural homecoming. photo: courtesy N. Carlos de los Santos

And finally, “Cocote,” a masterful and poetic work by filmmaker Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The story of a gardener living in the big city, who returns to his rural roots when his father is killed, it has only the loosest of narrative threads. The majority of the film is documentary footage of the funeral rituals conducted by the villagers who are almost all played by non-professional actors living in the film’s remote location. De Los Santos Arias studied at CalArts and his experimental film pedigree shows through in this beautiful film.

Major international film festivals such as the Miami Film Festival celebrate celebrity. That is their job. They bring ordinary people—filmgoers—interactions with the most famous actors and directors of contemporary cinema. There are big parties featuring food, fun and fame.

At the Miami Film Festival Executive Director Jaie LaPlante quipped, “We find what is best at other festivals and bring that here.”

Nevertheless, each major film festival has its own flavor and, for filmmakers, it is this uniqueness that is most important to understand. In order to have your film screened at a major film festival, you need to understand the type of films that show there. One of the major awards at the Miami Film Festival is “Best Film in the Knight Competition” which brings with it a $30,000 prize to a director who has at least one previous Official Selection (feature) of the festival. This emphasizes this particular festival’s interest in cultivating long term relationships with directors it brings to the event.

The Miami Film Festival is highly unusual in that it is a program of Miami-Dade Community College, THE largest institution of higher education in the country. President Eduardo Padron has lead the College since 1975, and it is through his creative leadership and partnerships, such as this one with the Festival, that makes the College such a unique and vibrant place.

Indeed, the festival is one that feels even more inclusive than other major festivals which only adds to the success of its already stellar lineups, many from Latin America.

Joanne Butcher is a business coach for filmmakers working on sales, fundraising, business and money. You can reach her via or her website.
Posted on Apr 17, 2018 - 12:24 PM
History of Advertising and Capitalism
by Doniphan Blair

The first issue of InfoArt, 1994,where this article first appeared, also included articles about NAFTA and functional capitalism. photo N. Blair

Note: First published in InfoArt Magazine, Oakland, June, 1994, but still supremely relevant today.

What Is Advertising?

To some, advertising is an unnecessary assault on our senses—typified by a loud-mouthed boor hard selling something we don't need or a billboard blemishing a beautiful landscape. To others, it is an unnecessary economic burden—inflating the price of everything we buy. When occasionally asked how I could live in the less-than-democratic political climate of Peru for almost a year, I would answer: freedom from advertising.

But advertising takes many forms, aside from the mass version which defines the term today. In the highlands around Cusco, Peru, aside from the tiny red Coca-Cola signs, there are cultural, public service and political announcements. More importantly, the women wear fantastically colorful skirts and shawls. Just as critical in Peru as on Park Avenue, fashion and body adornment are also advertising, since they broadcast our personal and cultural identity, marriageability, tribe, etc. Thus, advertising includes all human communication that overtly attempts to elicit or facilitate a transaction, action or reaction. Beginning where objective information leaves off and stretching until subjective art takes over, advertising is a hybrid of information and aesthetics that can be traced back to the non-camouflage markings on animals.

While few social interactions take place without some advertising, industrial democratic societies are built around and by it. Mass produced products cannot be sold by word of mouth, just outside the factory gates—they must be shipped to distant consumers, who must first know of them. Similarly, an industrialized democratic society cannot function without competition or the ability of competitors to offer alternatives. Mass advertising, then, is freedom of speech, long distance.

Product advertising has long been with us: beautiful signage has been excavated from the ruins of Pompeii, religions have built large buildings covered with symbols, etc. But modern advertising began with the Industrial Revolution, filling up the expanding newspapers and periodicals with ads and financing them with ad revenue. This created the basic feedback loop of information and desire that powered capitalism, built the railroads to deliver the goods and expanded our economic circle from village to nation to global economy. It also spawned our mass entertainment and telecommunication culture. While each new media was a gift from technology and capitalism to the arts, it generally had to pay its own way through advertising.

Everything Begins with Identity: word art by Doniphan Blair. photo D. Blair

The Evolution of Capitalism

Capitalism has evolved through four basic levels since Adam Smith suggested that governments loosen up their monopolistic hold on society and let business go to work. Inventors and entrepreneurs teamed up to create the Industrial Revolution (#1), which vastly increased the "The Wealth of Nations," just as Smith predicted. But it occurred in societies in the throes of feudalism, colonialism and slavery, fueling the fire of traditional power struggles. The birth of modern industrial economies was not a pretty picture—considering the human and environmental exploitation that accompanied it. Nevertheless, capitalism did provide a portion of the goods and technologies needed to maintain and organize our rapidly expanding and increasingly complex societies.

Considering human desire, it's not surprising that the volatile mix of technology and capital vested enormous power in the hands of a few and that they followed Darwin's first axiom of evolution, "survival of the fittest." If government had not gotten back into the business of regulating business, the Monopoly Capitalism (#2) that emerged in the 19th century would have undoubtedly expanded the feudalism it maintained in factory towns and on plantations across the world. Marx suggested the state take over completely, but politicians were little better at divining the complexities of modern economies. The protectionism of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, for example, exacerbated the Crash of '29 which, in turn, motivated Germany and Japan to seek monopolistic control over all sectors of their societies, with disastrous results.

Nevertheless, the lure of monopolism has persisted. But as IBM finally learned in the early '80s, after refusing to head the wake-up call of an antitrust suit, without the diversity and innovation of democracy and competition, monopolies eventually grow too big and stupid to even beat out a garage start-up. While the downsizing of Big Blue doesn't speak highly of the innovative abilities of the information industries, when faced with similar legislation, Bell Telephone voluntarily diversified and prospered.

The Evolution of Advertising

Early capitalists assumed they were the only game in town and early advertising followed suit, simply announcing goods or services in the traditional placard style. But even if governments hadn't stepped back in to counterweight Monopoly Capitalism, nature abhors a vacuum and a competing force eventually comes along. Once they realize that they are dependent on a single economy, adversarial entities are pragmatically compelled to attract business through advertising rather than by brutalizing the market, consumers and each other. And with two products of similar value, sales are driven by what the products and their ads look like, as well as what they actually are. Thus, capitalism followed Darwin's second axiom of evolution—the emergence of secondary sexual characteristics—into Competitive Capitalism (#3), with its colorful, status or sex related packaging and advertising.

A butcher shop sign, circa 79 AD, Pompeii, Rome. illo courtesy Italian National Museum

Human beings and cultures evolved out of the same environment that produced peacocks with their tails, fireflies with their luminescence and flowers with their color and scent. We also need to attract the attention of others for mating and other social interaction. Genetic evolution may have designed out our non-utilitarian appendages and markings as we became "thinking" animals, but as soon as we became "self-identifying" animals, we reinvented them to define and advertise ourselves. In fact, Darwin didn't have to journey to the Galapagos to study evolution; he could have researched Victorian England or his own closet. Thankfully, the debilitating corsets his wife was obliged to wear, in accord with her tribal culture, have disappeared, due to the groundbreaking re-emergence of women as an independent political and economic force and to modern fashion's breakneck pace—accelerated by advertising. Nevertheless, a few painful customs remain—understandably, some of us will sacrifice almost anything for sexual advertising.

The New Folk Culture

In today's mass produced society, we frequently make aesthetic statements and accessorize our identities through purchases. Those who blame marketing mavens for manipulating us fail to credit free will or explain why manufacturers invest in market research. Advertising may sway small children, but functional adults, by definition, only let it inspire behavior if it correctly defines choices they're already considering.

Therefore, to function efficiently, advertising must speak our language, reflecting and magnifying traits and styles culled from the overallculture. Fashions, fads and culture can emerge from an artist's studio, an entrepreneur's imagination or the lower classes, as rap music, baggy jeans and baseball caps attest. We are all in this together, wired into Marshall McLuhan's "Global Village" by our telecommunications networks, which scour the planet for the hottest new thing to titillate our fancies, sell themselves and feed the maw of our evolving and expanding culture. "High" culture still defines the historical foundations and future possibilities—and advertising also borrows from it, while underwriting its productions. But advertising has become our new folk culture, the cultural wing of a consumer society.

In this high tech socio-economic setting, the dividing line between information, advertising and art is fading fast. We now have cop documentaries with superb production values and cop shows with jiggly camerawork, Geraldo Rivera-style, audience interactive, talk shows with local dramas more fascinating than soaps and newspapers and newscasts as colorful as ads. Advertising, in turn, is borrowing from political imagery or avant-garde art, as in the recent Benetton, Absolut Vodka or Coca-Cola campaigns.

Meanwhile, Hollywood straddles the advertising/art frontier, doing product placement and licensing and making feature length commercials for American culture, to stoke the furnaces of this fantastically expensive, but equally fantastic, mass art form, which is pouring the foundations for a common global culture. If Jurassic Park is not currently on view in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, it is undoubtedly the coming attraction.

Like any significant aspect of the human experience, advertising has been interpreted through art, from pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstien to Jeff Koons—who has taken to hanging verbatim liquor ads in museums. As art incorporates advertising and information and information media includes more ads and design, advertising cannot help but inch towards more honesty and art, simply to compete with news and culture for our attention.

Woman's movement poster from around 1900, England. illo: unknown

The hard sell is increasingly ineffective in a data rich environment. Aside from impugning our intelligence and inviting litigation, the more an advertiser hypes their product the farther it has to fall if doesn't live up to its image. Manufactures hoping to make a killing before the chickens get home evidently haven't researched their market and care little about the bigger profits of quality products and repeat or word of mouth customers. Generic brands are good examples of informed businesses correlating product with image and giving consumers what they want: better prices (with its perennial appeal to bottomline survival) without the hype (although they still advertise).

Conscious Capitalism: Level Four

Our current information revolution is not the first: there was writing some 3,000 years ago, movable type in the 1400s (or earlier in Korea and China), and then telegraph, telephone, radio and television, in mind-boggling succession from 1850 to 1950 - due to the capitalist induced speed of research, manufacturing and marketing. But with the arrival of the microchips, satellites, cellular phones, faxes, fiber optics, intranets, email and the ongoing deluge of cable channels, new magazines and other information bi-ways, we are approaching the steep end of the curve. In twenty years, the entire memory of all of today's computers may be condensed, through molecular circuitry, into one laptop. Evidently, we have earned the right to capitalize the "Information Revolution" but are we really capitalizing on it? Are we saying anything new or different? Sure, the hardware and software are in place for putting a person on the moon or a television in every home but is the wetware—the ideas, images and information—up to the speed we need?

As the Information Revolution ramps up, human choices are being increasingly motivated by Conscious Selection, Darwin's undiscovered but implied third axiom of evolution. One hundred years ago we bought Campbell's soup because it was all there was (Monopoly Capitalism). Fifty years later, we selected it over competing brands because the packaging looked good (Competitive Capitalism). Today, some of us will only buy it after reading the ingredients and checking for a recycled logo (Conscious Capitalism). Although our primitive needs and impulses are still very much with us—in terms of price, packaging and other issues—the mind has become our biggest marketing zone.

While the environmentalism of industry is frequently more style than substance, many businesses are already adapting aspects of Conscious Capitalism. American business leads in personal computers and other information technology and some are emulating the Japanese example of non-hierarchical communication teams and streamlined middle management that was developed by an American, W. Edwards Deming. Business is becoming more conscious of consumers desires, the environment and their employees' needs and cultures. Many have little choice: employee turnover and retraining are expensive, as are environmental clean-up and discrimination suits. But the bottomline is: top down production and poorly researched or designed products are poison to an informed market.

Waste, whether in bureaucracy, tariffs, poor design or a less then enthused workforce, will have be reduced by those who wish to compete in the global economies of NAFTA and GATT. Because we are all in this economy together, fair compensation is also crucial - after deducting for legitimate profits, research and costs. Unless the total earnings from all the work done worldwide does not approximate the total cost of all the goods and services produced, the economic circle is broken and consumers cannot afford to perform the reverse "trickle-up" Reaganomics that drive profits.

American Woman's Journal ad from around 1880. illo courtesy Smithsonian Museum

The revolutions of the 20th century closed half the world's markets for three quarters of a century and will probably take another half-of-a-century to correct. They were motivated by working people understandably interested in obtaining what they made themselves or heard about through advertising. Most care little who owns the actual title to industry if they are getting a fair deal. If capitalism is indeed a more functional system, it now has a second chance to prove it to the workers of the world. Ironically, troubled industries, like the airlines, have stockholders that are more than happy to let the workers acquire the means of production—but through employee buy-outs rather then revolutions.

Cheaper, longer lasting or better designed products and more efficient services build a more productive society by freeing up funds for savings or other purchases. Governments should maintain a level playing field so that all businesses and institutions and peoples and cultures can compete as equals, but Conscious Capitalism cannot be instituted entirely by decree. Since business is the only force on the planet of sufficient size to effect the required change, Conscious Capitalism must beat out its competitors in the market place.

Evolutionary Advertising

The success of a good product or service—one that benefits society at large as well as individuals in particular—rests largely on its ability to communicate. The first step is informing the public what a business or entity does and where it takes place at an appropriate scale: a sign for a corner store, a saturation campaign for a corporation. But Evolutionary Advertising further suggests using identity, advertising and the information it conveys to place a product or service at the front edge of our rapidly evolving culture. That way, it stakes out a bigger piece of the future, enjoys a longer shelf life (good design can be used longer and in more marketing venues) and better identification and brand loyalty.

Although advertising must operate w