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 11, 2010 - 12:15 AM
Fascism Is Unhealthy for Living Beings—So Just Say No!
by Doniphan Blair

Freedom Tower, New York

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

IT'S BEEN A ROUGH RIDE THE LAST FEW
years for me and most other liberals as Russian fascists invaded Ukraine, Islamo-fascists attacked Arab liberals, Christians, Druze and Yazidis, as well as Israelis and Jews, and Americans reelected Trump.

It might seem obvious but it bears repeating: average Russians, Palestinians and Middle Americans will not prosper under fascism, even if it promotes some programs they support. Conversely, it's up to liberals to make the cost benefit analysis: Is it cheaper to take a stand now or later?

As I learned from the young soldiers on my first trip to Ukraine, in October 2022: We're already in the Third World War, ever since Russia violated Ukraine's sovereignty by seizing Crimea in 2014, although it's "stochastic," meaning irregular and hybrid. Sure, it's hot as hell in Ukraine, where they're enduring the dystopian future of drone warfare as well as classical Russian brutality, but you wouldn’t know it next door in Poland or across Europe. Indeed, I saw no Ukrainian flags, nor heard much advocacy or even concern, as I crossed from Paris to Warsaw. In Cologne's crowded main square, a Support Ukraine table was entirely empty.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, Germany

Such is the liberal dilemma. Ensconced in democratic largess, with liberalism's intoxicating consumer goods, civil rights and assurances, it takes time for a voting majority to cognize we're under attack, stochastic or otherwise, by fascists, meaning those opposed to democracy.

Eventually, however, tomorrow or in two years or ten, we classical liberals—which is everyone who supports democracy, from Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger on the Right to socialist democrats (but not so much democratic socialists) on the Left—will have to decide. As rational, responsible adults: What the fuck are we going to do?

I tried writing articles like “Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution”, published on two news sites besides cineSOURCE, or “Dear Oakland: Why Doth Thou Forsake Our Freedom Fight?”, but journalism can’t quite capture the looming threat or assuage the impotent feelings.

Art Institute Museum, Chicago

Rooting around for a strategy, I knew I needed a slogan and settled on JUST SAY NO TO FASCISM, an homage to Nancy Reagan’s laughable “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign. It suggests a nonviolent, voluntary activism, in a tone open enough to attract diverse adherents but sardonic enough to not dampen enthusiasm with dour catastrophizing.

Once I had my slogan and logo in September 2024, I made a T-shirt and began doing various forms of performance, some modest. For example, I drove from New York City to California wearing my JUST SAY NO TO FASCISM T-shirt, and received quite few nods, smiles or words of solidarity, even in the South. In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, I performed my song “What they Did Here,” my version of Abraham Lincoln’s 272-word political poem, “The Gettysburg Address” (see my performance here).

JUST SAY NO swag: T-Shirt, $25, Stickers, $1, Bumperstickers, $5

Shameful Plug Warning: JUST SAY NO TO FASCISM T-shirts are available, in all sizes, including tapered for women, $25 plus shipping. Or you can earn one as a gift by donating to Buy Me a Coffee or subscribing to cineSOURCE magazine. The JUST SAY NO revolution has plenty of swag, in fact, including 2.5” square stickers: $1 for one, $5 for eight, $10 for 20—email orders . When you're wearing a T-shirt and get a smile, you can hand them a sticker—kids love stickers!

I also started doing presentations and lectures, like “The Liberal Way of War: Reinterpreting Sun Tzu for the Modern Era", at the Henry Miller Memorial Library, in Big Sur, California, on July 27th. In that one, I explained how liberals can fight strategically, shedding the least blood but still effectively defeating the enemy. My main example was Israel, which did a reasonable Liberal-Way-of-War job under difficult circumstances. I also have presentations on ancient matriarchies, the Sufis, and reinterpreting Darwinian Evolution though natural, sexual AND conscious selection, but those await a more peaceful time.

Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, Germany

Although I did get a few proPalestinian protestors at the Henry Miller, I was able to hold my own with fresh perspectives. The proZionist arguments are many—ancient residency, tiny land grab, the Arabs expelled all their Jews, while Israel accepted two million Arabs—but I focus on the foolhardiness of supporting Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which blended 7th century Islam and fascism.

No one wants to be beaten by their father, while most people prefer liberalism in most aspects of life. To stand against the four fascisms—Russo, Islamo and the hard right and left—we need a large, multicultural center. Fortunately, we have hidden allies, from the Middle West, where cannabis is legal in 30 states and there are plenty of reluctant Trump voters, to the Middle East, with liberal traditions like the Partisan of the Nude art movement of the 1950s, the Arab Enlightenment of the 1800s, or the Sufis, the spiritual leaders of Islam for centuries (see "My Half Century with Islam"), as well as the many modern Arab Zionists (see "Why Arab Liberals Support Israel").

Fortunately, my JUST SAY NO project is an appropriate culmination of my 49 years of public art projects, beginning with the Art War Show at Ancient Currents Gallery which I co-directed from 1976 to '88. It also ties into my Holocaust research, which led to the production of a film, and book. To that I can add a number of other studies but most importantly that of conspiracy theories, the assault on truth that forms fascism's intellectual foundations (see article).

Post-modern Orthodox, Warsaw, Poland.

Admittedly, my successes so far are minimal, especially compared to my father, Vachel Blair, who volunteered for the Lincoln Brigade and fought fascism, first against Franco and then Germany, in North Africa, Italy and over Europe in the air, see his story, not to mention my mother. After she survived the Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz, she travelled through Europe, South America and the United States determined to reach the cultural capital of New York. She was putting herself through college when I happened.

Regardless, each of us must do what we can to stand against fascism, be it Russian, Islamist, Trumpian or of the radical left. The latter is tricky, since I'm left-leaning, but “Doctor, heal thy self” is the first, mandatory step to wellbeing. Indeed, coaxing the Left toward increased rationalism is required to cure the intractable “horseshoe politics” that infects our body politic today, much as it did Germany in 1930s. Expecting the Right to solve that standoff is absurd. I explore addressing horseshoe politics my recent article about Oakland.

Warsaw ghetto memorial, Warsaw, Poland

In any liberal-fascist relationship, it is only a matter of time that the latter grows greedy and violent. No matter how seemingly stable, one of their selling points, they are not. Indeed, fascists will eventually begin to insist that, "The liberals are too rich, they must be corrupt," or "Liberals are spoiled, decadent and weak, hence, easy to beat." After years of appeasement, trying to buy them off with money, land or forgiveness, it becomes obvious: Fighting fascism is periodically required, for the sake of their children as well as ours, both of whom prefer to live under liberalism. We have to prove to the survival-of-the-fittest freaks that sexual and conscious selection evolved out of natural selection simply because both were more effective than simple strength. Indeed, liberalism's openness and ability to innovate does, in the end, provide peace through superior power.

My next stop is Ukraine and Israel. I am searching not for the breaking story, although I will dispatch some of those, but a new worldview that will enable us to crack our opponent's codes, proceed without repeating our errors, and balance left and right, male and female, artist and soldier, romance and pragmatism.

Sticker wall at Batyarska Brew Pub, Lviv, Ukraine.

These times are reminiscent of 1939, but it doesn't have to end horrifically. We still have time to pull together a big-tent coalition, to train up and supply those fighting the Liberal Way of War. When not on the frontlines, we can enjoy ourselves as the Ukrainian soldiers as well as my mother showed me. It will be a long struggle, since it requires not so much defeating an actual enemy but becoming adults, as I explore in my article about Witold Gombrowticz (see it here), and evolving beyond adolescent wishful thinking and conspiracy theories.

If any of this is of interest, check out my Instagram or YouTube or support me at Buy Me a Coffee, cineSOURCE magazine or GoFundME.

Posted on Oct 09, 2025 - 09:54 AM
The Genius of Gombrowicz and Poland: Becoming Adult in the Age of Trump and Putin
by Doniphan Blair

Witold Gombrowitz's photo from the passport he used to leave Poland in July 1939 for Argentina. photo: courtesy W. Gombrowitz

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

"THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A GROWN
up," according to André Malraux, the French novelist and politician, in his “Anti-Memoir” of 1967. “Until you have to become an adult, just to get anything done,” would be the response of ambitious hippies at that time and rational pragmatists today. Maturity is, in fact, THE big question of human relations, politics, history, even Darwinian evolution. Yes, reproduction is adulthood’s biological marker, and sexual selection decides the next generation, but to pass down your genes successfully, you must guide your children to their own maturity, which requires patience, probity and functionality.

No one captures this conundrum better than Witold Gombrowicz (1904-‘69) in his groundbreaking second book, “Ferdydurke”, published to instant acclaim in Warsaw in 1937, but also Poland itself. After being swallowed up by Prussia, Russia and Austria for exactly 130 years, the Polish people reemerged as an adolescence nation in 1918 only to be conquered 21 years later by Germany and the Soviet Union, which collaborated on its insanely brutal destruction.

Regardless, the Polish people rose against the Nazis in August 1944, just as the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto did 16 months earlier. Most of the entire city and Poland's underground army fought doggedly for two months with few weapons, while the Soviet Army sat just across the Vistula River, until the Polish Air Force flying out of Italy and other Allies parachuted in some war materiel. I learned this recently at the impressive, immersive Warsaw Uprising Museum, which evokes the many Polish men and women of all faiths and professions, as well as children, who stood up against fascism. They only surrendered when Warsaw was almost entirely flattened by the Germans, to try to spare civilians. The Nazis continued their slaughter, of course, in Warsaw as well as across Poland, including the bizarre death marches of Jews and political prisoners from the camps into Germany.

The ruins of Warsaw's Jewish Ghetto, around St Augustine Church in May 1943, became all of Warsaw after the 'Rising' of September 1944. photo: public domain

The Poles continued to man up post-war. In 1980, led by Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa and his Solidarity Union and many dissidents, Poles triggered the process that toppled the Soviet Union. Free elections and admittance to NATO and the EU soon followed, in 1991, 1999 and 2004, respectively. By then, Poland was rising like a phoenix from its Soviet-era, rust-belt ashes, as well as Nazi annihilation, to first world splendor, a transition I witnessed wide-eyed while visiting in ‘96, ’97, ‘05, ’22, ’23, and October 2025.

Warsaw today is awash in design-y skyscrapers, broad boulevards and similar bike lanes, all sorts of cuisine (including a lot of vegan) and quite a few People of Color (often from Poland's Cold War allies, some running the many Vietnamese restaurants, which are very popular), statuesque women and everything digital, LGBT and recycling, cool tourists and German techno raves—not to mention the arms dealers. I met a couple of hip, young ones enjoying Warsaw’s clubs and museums as well as booming weapons' business, as the youthful nation invests a full 5% percent of its rapidly expanding GNP into defense.

Meteorological storm over Warsaw, its skyline no longer dominated by the Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science (right). photo: D. Blair

Obviously, the war in Ukraine has grown more dangerous, as it approaches its fourth anniversary, and the big year looming over many Poles, some western Europeans and a few Americans is 1939, the start of history’s greatest slaughter, which Poland bore the brunt of, second only to Ukraine.

Oddly enough, a month before World War Two started, Witold Gombrowicz boarded Poland’s first cruise liner on its maiden voyage, which was to Argentina, making “Ferdydurke” the literary hand-grenade he tossed off the back deck while fleeing the apocalypse for gentler Latino climes.

“Ferdydurke”’s drama and symbolism shocked me, when I read it in 1996. Not only was it masterful writing and laugh-out-loud funny, it revealed the inner workings of a nation I’d been trying to dicipher for over a decade, since starting to study the Holocaust in 1983. After a deceptively rambling intro—the “sleeper opening” common to Eastern European narratives, which contrasts starkly with the Hollywood trick of slamming you into the action headfirst—“Ferdydurke” explodes into life. The protagonist, Joey (Józio in Polish), is startled to find his old teacher, Pinko or Pinchon, pushing into his rented room, grabbing his manuscript off the table, and judging it immature. Although Joey is 30, the professor proceeds to drag him back to high school and full adolescent immersion.

Conrad, a Warsaw street book vendor, did not like 'Ferfydurke', preferring Gombrowicz's 'Dairies' instead. photo: D. Blair

My summary may be slightly off. “Ferdydurke” is not famous enough to rate a synopsis on Wikipedia, and none of the book stores or vendors I've checked with thus far in Warsaw had a copy, in English or Polish, suggesting it's still wildly popular or the opposite. Conrad, a bookman with a 20-foot table on Chmielna Street, Warsaw’s main youth drag, didn’t have a copy, nor did he like “Ferdydurke”.

“Too much ego,” was Conrad's critique, to which he added, “I prefer his ‘Diaries’ [1969],” of which he did have four copies, although they weren't selling that well, despite The Paris Review's claim it was "widely considered his masterpiece."

“Old fashioned and weird,” was the opinion of the young woman working the top floor of a deluxe downtown bookstore, Empik, where I did finally find a complete Gombrowicz set, including “Ferdydurke”, but only in Polish, a brand-new, brightly-colored, minimalist edition. Due to Gombrowicz's rejection of having some of his books censored, the Polish version was long published by Jerzy Giedroyć’s Paris Literary Institute, which also serialized his "Dairies" in the renown, albeit with only 3,000 subscribers, Polish-emigre Kulture magazine. “I had to read 'Ferdydurke' in school,” the shy, soft-spoken and, thereby, more beautiful bookwoman said, “And when you are doing a school report, such a book becomes even harder to understand.”

The reaction of Luc Albinski, a part-time writer residing in a lovely high-rise apartment filled with art, when I asked him about “Ferdydurke”, was: "I love the book," and “Gombrowicz is telling us that adulthood is puberty wearing a suit.” At a bar in the catacombs under Krakow, Poland’s university and intellectual capital, some 30 years ago, I was ignored by a Polish beauty for not addressing her Polish until I said, in English, “What do you think of ‘Ferdydurke’?”

This article's author at the only memorial to Gombrowitz in Warsaw. photo: D. Blair

In today's Warsaw, however, the dozen or so Poles I asked, aside from Albinski, were either not fans or unaware. The pierced-tattooed twosome strolling by Warsaw's only Gombrowicz memorial—a plaque at Chocimska 35, where he lived for a few years, which features a sculptured likeness from the famous photo of him in fedora—never heard of him.

Gombrowicz's honest acknowledgement of immaturity makes him mature, ironically, which evidently galls those stuck in perpetual adolescence, suggesting why it took so long for him to get his due. Years of struggle in Argentina earned him literary acclaim but little else until the release of a Spanish translation of “Ferdydurke” in 1947 and a Ford Foundation grant in 1963, which financed his return to Poland.

Shortly thereafter, however, he had to decamp for France. As well as refusing to publish his work, the Polish communist authorities initiated a vicious smear campaign. They were undoubtedly incensed by how Gombrowicz dodged the bullet of World War Two—even though he did report for duty at the Buenos Aires Embassy but was considered unfit—on top of his scathing social critique, not to mention the bisexuality.

Despite the censors' attempts to quash “Ferdydurke”, it became an international bestseller, was translated into 30 languages, and numbers 11,023 on Amazon’s fiction list today. His three subsequent novels, "Trans-Atlantyk" (1953), "Pornografia" (1960) and "Kosmos (1965), as well as "The Possessed", his supposed commercial potboiler, which was serialized in the late '60s under a pen name, were almost as well received. Meanwhile, his first theater piece, the tragicomedy "Ivona, Princess of Burgundia" (1938), about a prince determined to defy convention by marrying a plain woman, and other plays were staged and acclaimed in Germany, France and Sweden.

Gombrowitz not having a good day. photo: courtesy Gombrowitz

Gombrowicz won the Prix International in 1967 and was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for a few years, indicating that his surreal, romantic, sexual and sometimes sick stories of youth, oppression and dreams captured the narrative of that time. It's even more poignant today, in fact, as Poland has gone whole hog for freedom, modernism, multiculturalism and rock and roll—with dyed hair, eccentric outfits and legal weed (CBD only, THC requires a prescription)—but is once again under extreme threat from fascism and war.

“Ferdydurke”’s cinematic climax comes as Joey exacts his revenge. Using forged notes (as I recall), Joey arranges a midnight meeting between Professor Pinko and one of his students, the pretty teenage daughter of the Moderns, an optimistic, handsome, essentially American family, with whom he's infatuated. She is called Zoo and the Moderns the Youngers in the actual movie, “30 Door Key” (1991, free on YouTube), by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, who worked in Hollywood and is best known for “Moonlighting” (1982), so I will use that nomenclature.

Blowing up archetypes into Macy Day parade balloons, Gombrowicz conjures a cosmically comic scene. Joey deploys another forged note to also lure to the late-night rendezvous Zoo’s actual crush, the brutal bozo who’s been torturing Joey at school. When he and the Professor show up at Zoo’s window, an ecstatic Joey watches from the bushes as it veers into a complete pandemonium. In the confusion, Joey and the Crush connect somehow and flee to the countryside, living between the landed gentry—which Gombrowicz's family was--and the peasants, another set piece largely incomprehensible in the West.

We ignore Gombrowicz at our peril.

This is especially true as the West stages an enormous production of “Ferdydurke”, playing the part of Joey while Professor Putin schools us in realpolitik, fascism and active measures. On September 9th, Russia deployed 18 drones deep into Polish territory, undetected by Polish defenses. They're probably preparing for “a hybrid-war 'Pearl Harbor' on Europe, a large scale assault,” speculated Jonathan Fink, the host of the respected Silicon Curtain podcast, which focuses on Ukraine and Russia. “Mass drone incursions combined with informational campaigns.”

Polish journalist and politician Radosław Sikorski and wife Anne Appelbaum, American journalist and historian, voting in Poland's election of 2023. photo: courtesy Sikorski

Once again, Poland is manning up. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, husband to author Anne Appelbaum, who is one of America’s top analysts of Russia and autocracies, made an eminently adult statement at the UN’s emergency meeting of September 22nd, addressed directly to the Russians.

“By ordering mobilization in 1914, you precipitated the start of World War One, which bled Europe white and led to your Bolshevik Revolution. By signing the Hitler-Stalin pact, you helped start World War Two, the bloodiest in history. By sovietizing central Europe, you caused the Cold War. Don’t start another one. We are peaceful democracies, who have studiously avoided actively joining your attempt to reconquer Ukraine, but we will not be intimidated… You have been warned.”

Representing liberals who've read Sun Tsu's "The Art of War" or one of his wife's books—a good, short one is "Twilight of Democracy" (2020)—Sikorski is a member of the Civic Platform, a hybrid liberal-conservative party, which won back the prime ministership with Donald Tusk in 2023. Unfortunately, in June 2025, the presidency was retaken by the Law and Justice Party, illiberal conservatives, who controlled Poland from 2014 to '24 and fostered a climate of fear and scapegoating. Law and Justice did well with that platform, paralleling Trump in America, because many Poles feel ignored or aggrieved, making them prone to adolescent wishful thinking or conspiracy theories. Indeed, there's a long tradition of blaming problems on the Germans, Russians and sometimes Americans as well as, of course, the Jews. In addition to post-war pogroms (notably in Kielce, 90 miles south of Warsaw, on July 4th, 1946, which killed 42 Jews), there were antisemitic purges of the professions in 1956 and '68, which drove most of the few remaining Polish Jews to emigrate to Israel.

The author and his family at the second memorial to murdered Jews created by the remembrance and reconciliation movement of Mszana Dolna, Poland, 2022. photo: unknown

According to Luc Albinski, who co-created the documentary "Nobody Told Me" about his grandmother, a Jewish doctor who accompanied her patients to the Treblinka death camp, and wrote a play about her, in an email: “In Poland, alongside a vast uninterested majority, we find both the best and the worst: extreme antisemites of every stripe—from workers to intellectuals—and passionate philosemites rooted in a vibrant remembrance and reconciliation movement."

I myself was touched deeply by Poland's R&R movement, starting when my family and I visited a mass grave in Mszana Dolna, south of Krakow, which holds the remains of my grandmother, aunt and uncle, on August 19th, 2022. Not only was the site completely renovated, as we walked down the newly cobblestoned path to the small but now beautified memorial, we were met by an honor guard of Polish Boy and Girl Scouts, who played an important role in the Warsaw Uprising, Mszana Dolna's mayor, Anna Pękała, and the leader of the town's R&R movement, Urzsula Antosz-Rekucka. By the time we hugged Urzsula, my brother and I were crying like babies.

I was similarly astounded by the R&R efforts in Lodz, my Polish family's hometown, which range from major memorials to trees and plaques honoring the deceased, or the large, vibrant Marek Edelman Dialogue Center, which produces lectures, films, art shows, books and festivals. A doctor whose wife and children left Poland after the '68 antisemitic purge, Edelman remained and worked relentlessly to heal and restore Lodz, which is enjoying a cultural and financial renaissance similar to Warsaw.

“Ferdydurke” doesn’t answer the riddle of adulthood—an enigma all individuals are obliged to solve personally—but Gombrowicz metaphorizes and personifies it to a "T," in the drama of “Ferdydurke”, his own life and that of Poland. His last piece, an operetta entitled "Operetka", skewers totalitarianism while expressing the quiet hope that some kids will surmount childishness and resurrect civil society.

Gombrowicz and Rita Labrosse, a French-Canadian literature student, who became his secretary and then wife, in southern France, circa 1964. photo: courtesy Gombrowicz

Through an increased military, a galloping economy and a rapidly evolving culture, Poland is wending its way to the leadership of Europe, a position it hasn’t held since the Polish-Lithuanian Empire was at its peak in the 17th century. Whether they can inspire their new European friends, living in the lap of liberal luxury but plagued by partisans of the hard left and right and inundated with vastly different if not dis information, is hard to say. Some Dutch travelers, in Poland on a government-funded mental health vacation, told me that Ukraine is a CIA concoction not worth fighting for, while an old German friend of mine said her sons would not enlist, even if Russia invaded, but would help civilian efforts from behind the lines.

If enough of European kids agree with the aforementioned Dutch and German young men, a generation and a half of democracy in Eastern Europe may be drawing to a close. On the other hand, if Poland's artists, soldiers and politicians have studied their “Ferdydurke” as well as their nation's centuries-long suffering, they'll man and woman up and eventually lead the Dutch, Germans and other Europeans by example—the only adult trick that actually works on teenagers.

Posted on Oct 09, 2025 - 09:52 AM
The Modern Films, Ancient Environs & Different Peoples of Robert Lundahl
by Robert Lundahl

Robert Lundahl, returning from hiking to the Elwha River source, Olympic Mountains Washington, 1995. photo: R. Lundahl

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Oscar Wilde: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”

I WAS IN MY SAN FRANCISCO OFFICE
listening to NPR’s “Pulse of the Planet,” when I first heard about the Elwha, a river on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where Congress had mandated the removal of two dams the year before. I had prepared for this moment. I had acquired a 4 wheel drive truck and an Eclair ACL 1.5 16mm film camera.

Art is a form of expression, reflecting the world around us through mediums like painting, literature, music, and film. Oscar Wilde’s quote, “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors,” changes the perspective on the nature of art. It suggests that art is not just a similacrum of reality, but a projection of the maker’s own experiences, emotions, and interpretations.

I had traveled to the Elwha several times, shooting this and that, when down the road walked two Elder women, members of the Klallam tribe.

Adeline spoke first. “We heard you want to hear a story.”

“Yes,” I replied tenuously.

Adeline Smith and Beatrice Charles (Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe), 'Unconquering the Last Frontier'. (2025 re-master) photo: R. Lundahl

“You mean the one about how they put a pipeline through my mother’s farm, killed the animals, the dogs and the chickens, destroyed the farm, and then how she died of cancer?”

“That would be the one,” I responded.

With that we began a lifelong friendship. And a film.

Bea Charles and Adeline Smith were indigenous activists of a previous generation.

Together, they contributed 12,000 words to the Klallam dictionary.

Together, they testified in the legal case US v. Washington, restoring treaty rights.

Think Marlon Brando refusing the Academy Award for Best Actor in the Godfather. Brando supported the tribes’ fight for their treaty rights, advocating for their access to traditional fishing grounds.

The film we made together with the Lower Elwha Klallam community, 25 years ago, is called “Unconquering the Last Frontier.”

The level of racism I witnessed in the fading logging and mill town of Port Angeles became an unfortunate, though all too familiar, backdrop for several films made in both Washington state and Southern California.

The poster from Lundahl’s PBS doc, 'Song on the Water' (2005). photo: R. Lundahl

My mother was progressive for her time, having studied at Sarah Lawrence College with Joseph Campbell. Without realizing it, I was raised in a non-culturally specific household environs. Multi-cultural, multi-racial San Francisco in the ‘90’s suited me.

I travelled to 23 countries filming for client Sun Microsystems.

“Unconquering the Last Frontier” premiered at Dolby Labs and subsequently at Oakland’s Fine Arts Theater, projected from 16 mm. film. It was one of the last films processed, timed and printed by Jim Moy at San Francisco’s Monaco Labs. In a strange twist of fate, the pipeline built through Adeline’s mother’s farm supplied water to Rayonier Mill, producer of Rayon, guitar picks, ping pong balls, and celluloid acetate motion picture film.

Today, three dams on Washington’s Skagit River in Skagit and Whatcom counties block salmon runs which sustained the Swinomish, Upper Skagit and Sauk Suiattle peoples since time immemorial.

After sustaining a life threatening injury, I found myself under resident care. Fortunately Topaz AI allowed me enhance and increase resolution of this and other films to 4K for projection. It’s complicated and takes experimentation.

I had been creating “Cinema Verité Radio Documentaries” on primetime KPFK, Los Angeles [now on PRX, Public Radio Exchange], an arduous weekly task. There were 74 or 75 created, based on a simple premise.

Philip Smith (Chemehuevi) confronts construction workers at a sacred site outside of Blythe, California, from “Who Are My People?” (2015). photo: R. Lundahl

That simple premise? Ask three good questions.

The show, called CreativeFRONTLINE, was produced with Indigenous Investigative Journalist, Tracker Ginamarie Quinones.

The dams on the Skagit are problematic for several reasons. Aside from blocking fish runs to upriver tribes, who depended on them for food, spiritual sustenance, and cultural identity, as did the Elwha Klallam tribal families featured in “Unconquering the Last Frontier,” the dams supply all the power to the City of Seattle, via Seattle City Light.

A recent article, called “River of Deception” in The Nation explains the destruction caused.

The Elwha Dams were removed in 2011 and 2014, in the first major dam removal and ecosystem restoration effort in the world, predating dam removal on California’s Klamath. In both cases fish stocks are returning.

On the Skagit, however, removal has not been proposed, with Seattle City Light resistant.

Upper Skagit Tribal Elder, Scott Schuyler comes down clearly on where his tribe stands, in the Nation’s article. Referring to the waterless and diverted riverbed, Schuyler says, “The tribe would prefer to take out the dams and restore a free-flowing river.”

Alfredo Figueroa (Yaqui/Chemehuevi), Acacitli, Blythe. California, from 'Who Are My People?' (2010) photo: R. Lundahl

A few phone calls later, enlisting the support of the Mt. Baker Group and Washington Chapter of the Sierra Club and a former Executive Officer of several tribes, Unconquering the Last Frontier is back in the theaters, in Port Angeles, Port Townsend, Mt. Vernon, Olympia, and down the road maybe Seattle and Berkeley.

The KPFK “Cinema Verité Radio Documentaries” and salem-news.com print versions followed on from an opportunity to work with Sr. Alfredo Acosta Figueroa, UFW [United Farm Worker] leader with Cesar Chavez, in making “Who Are My People?”

In the Mojave desert, the world’s energy companies converge to produce power. They’ve destroyed ecosystems, migrating birds, tortoise, and sacred places from ancient civilizations. The LA Times indicates, we are at a “Flashpoint” between competing value-systems. Bodies have been exhumed, and geoglyphs destroyed, in an area that is a long-term indigenous settlement. “Who Are My People?” depicts how the world’s energy firms have met their match in a small group of Native American elders, in the hottest desert on the planet.

More atrocities, more cultural genocide, more racism brought me to a place of societal discontent.

Nothing is perfect in this world, says Alfredo Figueroa, Chemehuevi Cultural Monitor and Founder of La Cuna De Aztlán Sacred Sites Protection Circle. There are many beginnings and many endings.

Reverend Ron Van Fleet (Mojave/Apache) at Ivanpah Solar Electric Facility, outside Las Vegas, from “Who Are My People?” (2012) photo: R. Lundahl

It is the beginning which sets the story in motion; and therefore determines what we see and how we see it. The desert and the West is a place of many such beginnings and endings.

When I was a student at the University of Oregon, one of my professors was a television Art Director and painter named Bob (Robert) Kostka, now deceased. Bob had studied at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, founded by a generation of emigré artists and architects from Europe after World War II, who had fled the Nazis. As a young student, my early readings about the Bauhaus had focused on architects such as Mies van de Rohe, and Walter Gropius, famed for “modernist” buildings without ornamentation. The great French/Swiss architect Le Corbusier had been an influence. Le Corbusier had called buildings “Machines for Living.”

My beginnings therefore in a professional education that would lead me eventually to corporate communications and filmmaking, was ‘Cartesian,” seeing the human-built world as a kind of “clockworks.”

Kostka, however, perplexed me. He had seen in me at that time a kind of intellectual rigidity and sought to dilute it, actually he wanted to annihilate it. “You’re a good talker,” he would say.

Author, Frank Waters, Taos, NM. photo: Bob Kostka

First, Bob introduced me to the great English filmmaker, Nicolas Roeg. Nick had started his career as second-unit director on David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. A desert film with few parallels. Wikipedia states, “A characteristic of Roeg’s films is that they are edited in disjunctive and semi-coherent ways that make full sense only in the film’s final moments.” It was another desert film, 'Walkabout' (1971), which completed the destruction of my Post War American “Rationalism.”

Nick Roeg’s distrust of civilization mirrored Bob’s. Not content with the ordinary perspective (and life) of a Chicago Art Director for PBS station, WTTW, Bob spent a great deal of time in Taos, NM, where he befriended the great Western writer, Frank Waters. Bob Kostka had photographed Waters on several occasions, and some of these pictures appear on the dust jackets of his books.

One of Frank Waters’ seminal books was Book of the Hopi, which he wrote with Oswald White Bear Fredericks. Book of the Hopi correlated the stories and prophesies of the Hopi clans and made them available in written form for the first time

The Hopi and the Chemehuevi of the Colorado River Basin share elements of a worldview that matter today. Both speak of great migrations of peoples following the end of the Fourth World, a world ended by flood, caused by, what we can surmise today, a warming of the Earth. “Everybody has a flood story,” says Figueroa.

As Sigmund Freud points out in “Civilization and it’s Discontents”, Civilization requires conformity for some very good reasons. However, our notion of what civilization is at any given moment may be based on a version of reality that has outlived its usefulness. Kostka, Roeg, and Waters in no way were conformists. What each sought through the connection with ancient peoples was a grounding vision and lesson in Earth-based cultures, that allowed them both a psychological and physical perspective to be more realistic and sustainable in their thinking.

Poster for 'Incident at Ft. McDermitt', a CreativeFRONTLINE Cinema Verité Radio Documentary, KPFK, Los Angeles (2024). photo: R. Lundahl

As the film screening approaches, Vanessa Castle, [Elwha Klallam] has informed us her family will be receiving Adeline's land back. Seized when Adeline’s mother was dying, her title to the land was an ‘Indian Patent,” and her hospital bill was charged against that Patent, illegally, as a “Patent” cannot be mortgaged.

For more info, see my site or IMDb page. You can attend or sponsor an upcoming screening, book here in Port Angeles, Port Townsend, Mt. Vernon (at the beautiful 800 seat Lincoln Theater), Seattle, Olympia and Vancouver and love get a show at the David Brower Center in Berkeley.

Posted on Oct 07, 2025 - 01:58 PM
The Apologist: A Column Scrutinizing Idiosyncratic Films

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Jean-Luc Godard regarding Quentin Tarantino: "He chose the title of one of my worst films to name his production company [anglicizing “Bande á part” to A Band Apart]. He would have done better to give me some money."

Norman Bates, within Hitchcock's black comedy, Psycho (1960): "I wish... people could apologize for other people."

We believe it would behoove all of us to equitably excuse filmmakers for many of their cinematic trespasses.

Upon achieving dissatisfaction with a particular project, one must keep the following in mind:

It's almost impossible for a director to not piss off some uptight demographic. And, these hard-working semi-innocents are victimized by nosy producers, snotty thesps, fickle film-goers and nature itself.

We admonish those who knock ‘Shack Aesthetics’, from ‘The Whole Shootin' Match’ (1978) with Lou Perryman as Lloyd, directed by Eagle Pennell. photo: courtesy E. Pennell

Then there are opinionated and unpredictable writers who negatively critique indubitably stupendous projects primarily in service of half-assed, half-witted ego gratification, if not sad confusion. It's rather deplorable that after watching that which is wonderful, one is then forced to wade through a plethora of nitpicking reviews.

Those who contemplate a movie as a condensed novel with a very direct expression of a complicated plot are certainly a component of that which is problematic, while failing to understand the range of what can be cinematic. What if the meaning of a movie is no more important than the audio-visual spectacle in which it is entangled?

Inspired filmmakers will subvert Marshall McLuhan's edict that film is a "hot" medium that presents maximal data in high definition, requiring minimal interpretation. Invariably, fluid product allows each watcher to luxuriate in personal interpretation.

A picture's audio-visual continuity allows one to enter a world that is packed with oddly achieved moods, going beyond mere plotting, which is exemplified in the LONG VISUAL SCENES of "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968).

Likewise, DAVID LYNCH’S "Eraserhead" (1977) along with "Mulholland Drive" (2001), the spectacular "Twin Peaks: The Return" (2017) and much of Michelangelo Antonioni's work, especially "L'Avventura" (1960), "Blow Up" (1966) and "The Passenger" (1975) all contain spectacular abstract flavor. Such is the case to a certain extent regarding Quentin Tarantino's latest "hang out movie", "Once Upon A Time In Hollywood" (2019).

* * *

Did Ed Wood Jr. influence David Lynch? From the former’s 'Night of the Ghouls' (1959). photo: courtesy E. Wood

Very specifically, we claim no apologias necessary. However, those narrow of mind may differ. To wit: Some severely deranged reviews for your pleasure from “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” (OUATIH) IMDb Users:

"Forty-five percent of this movie was shots of dirty feet and people walking or driving. Q.T. and his foot fetish is disgusting and distracting to view on screen."

"Boring, boring, boring and violence."

"Do you think people are stupid? No, you are stupid with such crap movies."

"It was good watching Brad Pitt kill these people but that's not what happened, unfortunately."

"Tarantino constantly drops the names of actors, movies and series, but for what? Am I supposed to know them all?"

"I'm not a fan of the director, I find his movies to be like someone on acid directing a film!"

"Filthy 'hippy' characters made me feel dirty just sitting in my chair. Made no sense at all, didn't know what the hell was going on!!!"

"I really hate Tarantino, so I had zero hopes for it."

"Nobody acted good in the movie."

"I wish he did not make this movie. There is no story. You just watch old times like a boring documentary."

Imagine that within 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood', Gypsy (Lena Dunham) restrains a glib, invasive Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), as she mockingly instructs Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) to "Sniff my foot, stuntman, sniff my foot." photo: courtesy Sony Pictures

"One of the worst movies ever. Not for normal people."

"Every scene is the same. A lot of the characters don't even fit to the story. Also, the dialogue and conversation is really cheap."

"Let's be clear, LA is a hellhole and not everything is fun and glamorous in Hollywood."

"Tarantino's fetish for THOUSANDS of pop cultural references and his childhood's favorite songs, shows and music are EXHAUSTING."

"Why must quentin tarantito [sic] insist on changing history? He needs to write something original or stick to what actually happened."

"It's just ‘60s nostalgia and, considering most people alive today didn't experience the ‘60s, what is the point?"

"This movie is the second worst movie I've ever seen in my life."

"Tarantino's feet fetish dropped the ball! In whole film we see feet from different states and angles, which is unpleasant!"

"A very boring movie, portraying most characters as stupid people."

"When Mr. Tarantino cannot fill a movie with blood and bones, this is what remains of his genius."

Tortured, snuff filmmaker Mark Lewis, played by Carl/Karlheinz Böhm within Michael Powell's 'Peeping Tom' (1960), nuzzles his instrument, an unusual excuse for a muse. photo: courtesy Sony Pictures

"Snooty movie making for the sake of snoot."

"It's one of the most boring movies ever created in the history of movies around the world. With stupid over the top acting as usual. Stupid QT!"

"To anyone who says this is good, you are insane."

"LIES! The action never begins!"

We, however, tautologically claim “OUATIH”, as opposed to merely describing the causation inherent in a series of events, provides an intimacy within the mise-en-scène. A great film may tell a story, but an important aspect of any production is that it also provides an option to engage with a unique world.

Legion are those who misunderstand QT, suspecting he will solipsistically wallow in his silly obsessions, while in fact, he's merely trying to share the thrill he enjoys relative to various aspects of topical and vintage pop conventions.

* * *

We believe every "Z" movie—our endearment FOR A CINEMATIC FORM WHICH TRANSCENDS A AND B—boasts a consciously achieved moment, whether via producer, scriptwriter, cinematographer, director or art director, that is auspicious. And we're prepared to apologize, relative to countless minimally production-valued films, that have been unfairly rebuked, with great vigor.

Colander v. Semiotics: In Edward Dein’s 'Shack Out On 101' (1955), Slob (Lee Marvin) stares holes in Kotty's (Terry Moore) visage. photo: courtesy E. Dein

So, Why Not Go for the Obvious

"Plan 9 From Outer Space" (1957) Ed Wood Jr

Considering the believability and physical integrity of the sets alone, one could describe the filmmakers in-question as bordering on imbecility. Almost every other conceivable element in the movie is also bewildering. Circa 1980, Michael Medved dubbed it “the worst film ever made.”

Yet, perhaps the power of cinema is to provide an experience impossible to enjoy any other way. Imagine the cheapo turn-on inherent in viewing a mental auteur's interpretation of a glue-sniffing ten-year old's fever dream. Every production deficit provides a sublime participation opportunity, within a fabulously cut-rate microcosm.

Could it be probable that Wood basically was in thrall to a fantastic Shack Aesthetic?!?

And, to be found are various—to utilize an overused label—icons. Vampira, AKA Maila Nurmi, plodding zombie-like is an unforgettable pop image; likewise, Bela Lugosi with-scowl is seared into the collective consciousness along with Criswell and his unconvincing attempt at impressive enunciating. Then, there's Tor Johnson, whose mug was popularized via “Plan 9”, became the basis for myriad Halloween masks.

All of these famous thesps create a mood that's a mile deep while lending great and ostensibly expensive color.

* * *

Andy Warhol was interviewed by Gene Swenson in 1966.

AW: Uh, well, I guess I'm influenced by everybody, but, well, I like the way Godard works just because I think he's bringing television out to the movies and think that's what we're trying to sometimes do.

GS: Why is it you make these films?

AW: Ummm, well, it's just easier to do. It's easier to do than painting. Uuuuuh the camera has a motor and you just turn it on and walk away.

GS: Is there anything special you're trying to say in these films?

AW: No.

* * *

Only intellectuals will be allowed to sell Notebooks on Cinéma. photo: courtesy JL Godard

"Breathless" (1960), Jean-Luc Godard's first feature, in concert with Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (also 1960), are both considered to be ground zero for a genesis of modern film grammar.

The former is the tale of two young, amoral existentialists, Michel and Patricia. Their respective, relative lack of ethics, may be somewhat open to interpretation.

The scene featuring a fem vendor of legendary French magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma (Notebooks on Cinéma), was warning Michel to ditch NY Herald Tribune dealer Patricia, who might present a danger, for a less psychotic chick. Simultaneously some New Wave fetish was provided in the form of picturing the magazine, which Godard, Traffaut and other such directors would critique films within.

* * *

Who would wanna blame Roman Polanski for embracing such a royal gas—confabulating cute and cutting Nicholson's nose in "Chinatown" (1974)—that he couldn't resist starring in "The Tenant" (1976) and throwing himself out of an elevated window twice. . . ?

And who could imagine that something as banal as an "apartment trilogy", (consisting of "Repulsion" (1965), "Rosemary's Baby" (1968), and “The Tenant”) could so thoroughly threaten one's mental anodyne?

* * *

"Let me see your toes. Toes are important in a woman. Don't laugh," says Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) to Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg) in “Breathless" by Godard. (Could this explain something?)

Michel Poiccard to taxi driver: "Never mind the pedestrians! Just hurry up! Overtake that Peugeot! Don't change gears! Eyes on the road! We'll be right back." (Not.)

* * *

Umpteen HitchCult difficulties sadly complicate our fandom. Of course, we're all aware that Donald Spoto, one of HITCHCOCK’S primary US champions, went on to unearth singularly unsavory behavioral failings.

Stunning Method Acting via, who'd uh thunk it, Arch Hall Jr. as serial killer Charles Tibbs. Takes place mainly in an old auto wrecking yard & snake pit. Written & directed for a 1960 release by the extremely unprolific James Landis. photo: courtesy J Landis

We must declare however, that the biographer would seem to have harbored an ax to grind, claiming for instance that Hitch was incapable of sustaining friendships, which would appear to be a false statement. Yet, similar to countless of his characters our director was both a charming villain and a compromised hero.

Unlike the equally morphically unusual Orson Welles, Hitch was preoccupied with his weight and concomitantly managed to therefore suffer romantically. Should he have found sufficient "guts" to simply ignore a not completely unacceptable physiological condition, he could've found himself buried in groupies. Alma's response to his acting upon such a thing, however, would've most likely been too threatening for him to authentically contemplate.

Ostensibly, not content to sublimate his feelings of physical inferiority while simply torturing characters, he formed means in which he could incorporate his overpaid and stuck-up actors in the realization of cruel fancies. Evidently, he never perved upon the person of Kim Novak, although he did find excuses to repeatedly dunk her in the studio tank during the devising of "Vertigo" (1958). And who could forget Hitch's two leads (Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll) being handcuffed together during the fabrication of "39 Steps" (1935), while waiting for the "lost key" to be located?

Quite possibly the Master of Suspense subscribed to an exhibitionistic form of masochism, relative to his excessive bulk and supposed lack of bravery. He often would find any obscure reason to feature a young, strong man with his shirt off who's expected to be juxtaposed with the image of Hitchcock himself via cameo, within many of his projects. In the abysmally underrated "To Catch A Thief" (1955) he also has the youngest of the two buff characters that are clad in swimming trunks execute a chin up. (Are we encouraged to imagine our director surrealistically attempting such a feat?)

One of the many younger script writers he brought home for dinner, who was typically ignored in favor of a nubile wife, could be paraphrased as stating, "If Hitch had too much wine, he would take my wife's hand in his, look her in the eye and bellyache that he was 'just a big fat slob'."

As with any good masochistic fantasist, Hitch was open minded regarding homosexuality. Whenever working with such an individual, he was fascinated by any gay gossip he could and definitely would extract.

And he greatly enjoyed torturing any male thespians, hetero- and homo- sexual. Montgomery Clift made the mistake of being terrified to appear in “Rope” (1948) as a gay thrill killer, being deeply closeted, especially where Hollywood was concerned, leading him to turn down the offer. Soon he found himself sensitively wandering all over Quebec City wearing what appeared to be a long housecoat within "I Confess" (1953).

Admonitory cautioning quoted by 'Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films' (2003) written and directed by Bret Wood. photo: courtesy B. Wood

Hitch found countless excuses for his male characters to find themselves holding a woman's purse. During "Dial M for Murder" (1954), one will hear Police Inspector Hubbard, strikingly played by John Williams, admonish his inferior that he's risking arrest, by delivering our heroine's handbag while wearing it on his wrist.

We doubt that there's enough time in the universe to adequately explain Alfred Hitchcock's psyche and nearly pathologically intertwined filmmaking genius.

Importantly, Tippi Hedren has forgiven her tormentor, of whom we could expect, never supplied his greatly called for apology.

* * *

The Apologist: "Beatitude Valedictions from the Vortex Room, San Francisco." (Wishing our 2 fave shack girl catalysts, HMM & JAG, nothing but rattling tin can cantatas.)

The Apologist is channeled via Dave D Og Swan, an underground filmmaker and garage group agitator who can be reached

Posted on Oct 02, 2025 - 02:14 AM
Dear Oakland, Part 2
by Doniphan Blair

The Oakland 'No Kings' protest in front of the mayor's office, April 5th. photo: D. Blair

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Return to the beginning of Dear Oakland: Why Doth Thou Forsake Our Freedom Fight?

AS IT HAPPENS, THE VAST MAJORITY OF
Oaklanders do support Ukraine, I was overjoyed to find out upon my return, albeit not enough to do so publicly, by flying a Ukrainian flag, for example. The flag in my window was the only one in West Oakland, in fact, and one of the few in the entire Bay Area, which would have devastated our progressive grandparents. Ninety years ago, the Bay Area was a crucible in the defense of democracy and mustered many men and women to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where the Lincoln Brigade provided an important military force (my father joined in Ohio, see his story). Just as peer pressure inhibits Oaklanders in tough hoods from talking to cops, it seems to me, supporters of Ukraine fear offending friends or neighbors who oppose US foreign policy or romanticize Russia. Oaklanders were famous for being PC-free straight shooters, when discussing crime, corruption or a perpetrator’s race, in the street or at parties, but that working-class honesty faded after the BLM and pro-Palestine demonstrations.

Many Oaklanders joined the scores of protests for Palestinians, starting before the blood dried at Israel’s Burning Man, the Supernova trance music festival, where 378 people were murdered. West Oakland was soon slathered in graffiti, even more than BLM summer, including two 100-foot-long slogans near my place. There were 8,000 Black Lives Matter rallies nationwide, according to Crowd Counting Consortium, but over 12,000 anti-Israel protests in the United States, as of June 2024, and many more since, making Palestinianism the most popular movement in history. In November 2023, an activist addressing Oakland’s City Council received loud applause after claiming that the Hamas attack was a false flag operation staged by Israel to cover their intended genocide, and the Council passed a motion supporting Palestinians.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of Oaklanders are moderates, center-left or even center-right, including a handful of Republicans (3.5 % of 280,000 registered voters). Oakland’s centrists often keep their own council, but they showed up en masse for the “No Kings” anti-Trump marches of April 5th and June 14th, which had surprisingly little Palestinian or BLM signage. In fact, Oakland has a large chapter of the century-old Socialist Workers Party, publisher of many important books as well as The Militant weekly newspaper, and is much more centrist than its name implies. Indeed, the Socialist Workers Party supports the right to self-defense of both Ukraine and Israel and even organized a few pro-Israel gatherings, albeit small.

Anti-Zionism in California, where colonialists with no local heritage committed an actual genocide and seized territory 15 times the size of Israel, smacks of hypocrisy and transference, but that’s an ancient proclivity, beyond the scope of this article, except to note it involves the liberal dilemma. In fact, Oakland and Israel share both elevated multiculturalism (Israel is about 63% POC, Oakland 70%) and the challenge of providing their citizens Roosevelt’s fourth freedom: the freedom from fear. After a century of unprecedented success, liberals have a hard time comprehending that they, their allies and their values are under existential attack—that gangsters and fascists find them weak, decadent and easy to deceive, rob or defeat. Hamas personifies this by embezzling billions from liberal institutions, building a vast bunker and arsenal, declaring a fight to the death in no uncertain terms, and performing pitch-perfect horseshoe politics propaganda, which attracts sympathy from liberals as well as solidarity from other fascists.

Oakland's first synagogue, Temple Sinai, started at 13th and Clay Streets in 1875 (shown here in 1889) and moved a few times before being built at its current location, 28th and Webster Streets, in 1914. photo: courtesy Temple Sinai

The explosion of racism against Oakland’s Jews after 10/7 was unique since the founding of the Town’s first synagogue, Temple Sinai, in 1875. Although Orthodox, they were already lenient Californians who dropped the tradition of separating women and men in synagogue. That probably had some effect on one young parishioner, the avant-garde author, Paris salon leader and largely-out lesbian Gertrude Stein, who moved to Oakland three years later, age four. In addition to helping the Jews, America’s freedom of religion and California’s emerging tolerance encouraged the embrace of the Zen Buddhists, who arrived in 1892, and the Muslim Sufis, who came in 1907, a spirit that reigned supreme for almost 150 years. Hence, no security was needed at Temple Sinai until 2018 and America’s first pogrom, the murder of 11 Jews at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania’s Tree of Life Synagogue.

Security at Temple Sinai had to be increased again after 10/7 as Jewish students were belittled and bullied in Oakland schools and on Berkeley’s UC campus, sometimes abetted by teachers. Public menorahs were defaced or destroyed; synagogues were graffitied; insults were hurled and death threats made. About 30 Jewish families moved. I myself didn’t feel safe as a Jew for the first time in my life, including the seven months I spent busing and hitchhiking around Islam, from Turkey to India and back in 1972-3 (see my article), an odd inversion of Oakland’s traditional tolerance, intermarriage and Jewishness.

I was called a Nazi by some White anarchists in a van with a bullhorn at an anti-Trump rally because I was carrying a Ukrainian flag. Considering that animosity against Ukraine is minimal compared to the anti-Zionism—the anarchists were also blasting out vicious anti-Zionist slogans—and that virtue signaling and violence are popular, I would fear for my wellbeing carrying an Israeli flag. Ninety-nine percent of Oaklanders are not racist, to be sure, and even fewer violent, but they may not fully realize that tolerating antisemitism is tacit approval, that antisemitism is at the root of many conspiracy theories, or that many of their family, friends, favorite artists and professional service providers are of Jewish descent, affiliation or culture.

Eldridge Cleaver, here speaking to college students in 1968, evolved from prison writer to bestseller and head of the international Panthers and then Christian, clothing designer and Republican. photo: courtesy the Panthers

Oakland’s Black Panthers were not anti-Zionist. When they formed, in October 1966, the Left still supported Israel as an innovative socialist state replete with collectivized democratic kibbutzes, full medical and expanding civil rights for Arabs. That status flipped following the Six-Day War, in June 1967, when America began supplying Israel with arms.

Combining classical antisemitism with cultural Marxism and supposed realpolitik, post-Holocaust anti-Zionism provided a symbolically enormous, if physically small, scapegoat through which to channel virtue signaling on an industrial scale, both against American foreign policy and for the Middle East’s socialist states, movements or leaders. The Soviet Union voted for Israel in 1949, but its espionage agencies were masters of the magical powers of antisemitism, conspiracy theories and active measures, leading it to sponsor the UN declaration “Zionism is racism” in 1975.

At the same time, radical Islam was rocketing up, its advocates increasing their attacks on Muslim liberals, Sufis, women and artists as well as Jews, Christians and pagans. Radical Shi'a Islamists seized Iran in 1978, where they soon liquidated their leftist allies and declared holy war on the United States and Israel. Three years later, Sunni extremists murdered Egypt’s liberal president, Anwar Sadat, for the crime of making peace with Israel.

A few years earlier, the renown American leftist Eldridge Cleaver, third in the Black Panther triumvirate after Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and the bestselling author of “Soul on Ice” (1968), visited or lived in most of the Middle East's socialist countries and met many of their leaders. After returning to the US, serving a modest prison term and embracing liberal democracy, he became an entrepreneur, Christian and designer but also a Zionist, which means supporter of Israel’s right to exist. Cleaver even had kind words for Oakland's cops, after dealing with the police in Algeria, North Vietnam and North Korea.

To save Oakland, if not the world, from the horns of the liberal dilemma, we need another Occupy-like, community-wide discussion as well as Cleaver's willingness to evolve. Despite the increasingly dire threat from the hard right in the Trump Era, we have to reinvent the Left simply to defang the Right’s empowerment through horseshoe politics, much as our progressive grandparents and parents did during the ‘50s and ‘60s, after the Left divided over the vast mass murders of the Soviet Union and China or Western radicals’ performative violence. In point of fact, we have to do this to insure the cultural and commercial viability of one of the planet’s most multicultural and creative cities, our Oakland. To this end, I would like to revisit my debate with Professor Davis, an Oakland resident as well as the eminence gris of the BLM movement, when her class visited my commune’s art gallery, Ancient Currents, in 1982. Professor Davis easily eviscerated my embryonic ideas about "abstract aborigine," but I was rescued by an Afro-Nicaraguan student, who agreed with me.

Angela Davis, the overachieving California activist, professor and former Black Panther, looks over a West Oakland corner. photo: D. Blair

Professor Davis’s achievements in California are immense but not quite enough to renounce Marcuse’s critique or her own Soviet apparatchik comments, or to propose a fresh way of integrating social assistance, collectivism, free expression and capitalism, which is not that hard in our still fairly-free society. We did it at our commune; Avis and United Airlines were employee-owned for a while; and there are currently more than 50 collectives doing business around the Bay, notably Oakland’s popular Arizmendi Bakery.

A good first step would be to lower Oakland’s tax rate of 10.75%, about a fifth more than San Francisco’s 8.625% and a tenth more than suburban Orinda’s 9.75%, which punishes merchants and anarchists alike and repels investors, shoppers and young mothers. High sales tax burdens can be more easily borne by commuter residents ,who often do big shops elsewhere and whose elevated property taxes are offset by lower values.

The liberal dilemma now challenging Oakland, America and much of the West has been long in coming, although many of us, including me, missed the early signs. The hard left's "long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by Rudi Dutschke, a German activist and friend of Marcuse, was succeeding spectacularly by the turn of the millennia, especially in the universities. The Obama Administration, to a modest degree, and the Occupy, MeToo, BLM, trans and pro-Palestine movements, to increasingly greater degrees, radicalized many people, especially the young, exacerbated by the liberal failure to solve skyrocketing rents, homelessness and immigration, which fueled horseshoe politics. Given America’s socio-political train wreck and Oakland’s frontline status, it won’t be easy to come up with new political concepts or coalitions, let alone revive the pre-Covid economy. But Oakland is known for Lazurus-like resurrections and, in the special election of April 15th, we got a brand-new mayor.

The stalwart, Oakland-based political figure, Barbara Lee during her whirlwind campaign to be mayor of Oakland, 2025. photo: D. Blair

“I wouldn’t wish running Oakland on my worst enemy,” is a remark I’ve made more than once, but Barbara Lee comes as prepared as possible. Born in 1945 in El Paso, Texas, a tough town for a Black girl back in the day, she moved to Oakland in the ‘60s to attend Mills College (recently closed but reopened as part of Northeastern University) and UC Berkeley. After helping start a mental health clinic and working on Bobby Seale's 1973 mayoral bid, Lee interned with Representative Ron Dellums, got elected to the California legislature in 1990 and soon graduated to Congress. Taking over from Dellums as America’s most radical congressperson, she cast the sole vote against invading Iraq in 2003. Although Lee lost her 2024 Senate run, in a multiway contest against a savvy downstate player, Adam Schiff, and barely won Oakland’s special election—her leading contender was Loren Taylor, a UC graduate, business owner and City Council member, and only 36% of eligible Oaklanders bothered to vote—she seems suitable, if she can build coalitions across the aisle if not fashion a new, left-leaning worldview.

Mayor Lee’s capacity for political balance is suggested by her two sons, who work in the insurance industry (one for a Black owned company), and by Dr. Rajni Mandal’s assessment that “her political acumen is really good. She can definitely use that political capital to do things,” but not so much by her cabinet. Her chief of staff, Miya Saika Chen, worked for the very progressive Nikki Fortunato Bas, Oakland’s first Filipina-American councilmember, and her communications director, Justin Phillips, was a SF Chronicle columnist covering events and food but also DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). Mayor Lee’s “100 days of listening” ended in July, but she didn’t come out strong on much, except for ending OPD’s federal oversight and abating violence.

“Based on the impassioned speech [Lee] gave to the federal judge, the judge was really impressed with her,” Dr. Mandal said during our July 12th interview. “There is great potential for her ending federal oversite.” Unfortunately, the powerful Police Commission “sent a letter to the judge that completely disparages the whole process. It said that the Chief [Mitchell] is against reform, that all he does is complain about the [oversight]… and he thinks it’s a sham… The chair of the Police Commission again outlined their far-fetched plan to be ‘co-compliance director’ [for the oversight, although] both the plaintiff's attorneys, Mayor Lee and the judge made inferences that they do not support that.”

Dr. Rajni Mandal was focusing on raising her two daughters until a shooting on her street in 2024, when she started bringing facts and figures to public forums, like this police meeting of July 12th, see her interview. photo: D. Blair

“I had a pretty disappointing meeting with Mayor Lee, along with other rabbis,” I was told by Rabbi Jackie Mates-Muchin, the rabbi at Temple Sinai (a woman) on July 31st. “We were saying that a lot of people feel marginalized”—she later noted the recent graffito on a Jewish building, “Kill Jews”—“but I got the feeling she didn’t understand.” What the diplomatic rabbi didn’t mention but is obvious to many non-Jews as well as Jews: Once you break the sacred covenant that all humans are created equal, which ethnic Marxism does, you create space for racism and conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories often lead back to the Jews, first through religion, led by the Christians for millennia, then through race, the Nazi method, and now the unequal treatment of and libels against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, on which many Arab liberals depend. Indeed, there is a little known but surprisingly strong liberal tradition in the Middle East dating back to the Partisans of the Nude art movement of the 1950s, the Arab feminists of the '20s, the 19th century "Nahda," or Arab Enlightenment, and the tolerant, artistic Sufis, who were the spiritual leaders of Islam for centuries (see my article).

Of course, Mayor Lee must pay attention to the progressives, who are powerful in Oakland, and their leaders, sometimes called the “woke mafia." Indeed, the Police Commissioners, although they relaxed their opposition to police chases, are still intent on cutting the size of the OPD or preventing it from acquiring equipment like drones or a new BearCat armored vehicle. The police say it's invaluable for sideshows or hostage situations but, according to the Police Commissioners, the BearCat is not that effective and triggers people with PTSD.

I attended a public meeting at an East Oakland library on July 16th with four OPD officers, who explained the current situation and their needs, including a bearded, ponytailed Latinx Lieutenant Omar Cardona. Cameras have been installed all over Oakland, they said, but people have been destroying them. There’s usually one sideshow per weekend, against which the OPD uses a "containment strategy," including impounding dozens of vehicles of sideshow observers, which a new law made illegal, who are often from out of town. Guns were readily available on the street, starting around $300; shop owners were arming up; and 1574 rounds were fired in June. The Covid killing spree did finally dissipate, thankfully, and only 39 people have been murdered to the date of their presentation, compared to 51 in the same period last year, which puts Oakland on track for a decent annual rate, well below 100. One cop also noted that they do not assist, whatsoever, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This seemingly suburban scene transpired in the heart of West Oakland, three blocks from my live/work studio. photo: D. Blair

Indeed, Oakland saw a 29% drop in violent crime thus far this year, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which Mayor Lee and Chief Mitchell have been crowing about, although the Chief said it followed a national pattern. Nevertheless, Mayor Lee claimed in July that "Our comprehensive public safety strategy is working. Crime rates are coming down even though we still face many challenges,” and added, “Let me repeat, President Trump is wrong.” Robberies and auto thefts have dropped the most, by 41% and 45% respectively, although arson, that unhoused favorite, was up by 9%. Mayor Lee also said her budget this year includes 678 cops, with the intention of reaching 700 over the next year or two, almost what Jerry Brown wanted 20 years ago, although the actual number is about 640 due to attrition and lack of recruitment.

Unfortunately, even if murders in Oakland were to drop to 2018’s historic low of 67, that’s still over one a week, meaning hundreds of family and friends traumatized annually. "We still have so much work to do,” Mayor Lee admitted candidly, after two people were killed and six wounded in multiple shootings, with no immediate arrests, a few hours after September’s First Friday (9/5/25).

At the police public meeting, the Police Commissioners asked tough questions, but things remained cordial until a member of Oakland’s large Chinese community got frustrated and started rattling off crime stats. Some stores have been robbed two or three times in one day, he said, and tax revenue is way down because businesses are fleeing. Dr. Mandal also made an articulate, politically balanced statement in favor of the police. In our interview, she told me that, “You can barricade all you want, in your house, in your neighborhood, whatever, but that doesn’t change the fact that the entire city is hurting, right? And if you don’t fix the systemic issue, you’re not going to be able to fix anything.”

Like Dr. Mandal, who just wants her kids to grow up in a functional city, many Oaklanders are doing what they can. The home owners’ association of South Prescott, an area in West Oakland a mile from Raimundi Park, did a GoFundMe to buy traffic barriers to prevent RVs from parking on their streets. After the Wood Street encampment was dispersed, campers took over their children’s park, which they aggressively lobbied the city to clear. The people arguing on NextDoor, the neighborhood discussion app, sometimes get acrimonious over White privilege and how to help the homeless but everyone agrees: Encampments full of folks with mental issues, rats and fires are not sustainable. An Oakland fireman friend told me they were summoned to the Wood Street encampment about 250 times in 2022. Business people, meanwhile, have come up with “tax increment financing,” to help their neighbors pay tax burdens in installments in order to stay in Oakland.

Oaklanders, including a Yemeni-American, at First Friday, the monthly street fair on Telegraph Avenue, June 2025. photo: D. Blair

Other than these problems and the liberal dilemma, however, Oakland is doing great, especially compared to Covid times.

“Oakland film may be down but it’s not out,” Debbie Brubaker, the legendary local indie film producer who grew up in the East Bay, told me on July 25th. In fact, the recently closed Holy Names University (1868-2023) in the Oakland hills reopened for film shoots in January 2025. “The guys running Holy Names are fantastic. They are really excited about having a film scene—they have my back! Commercials will always be shot here, they generally shoot in Oakland or SF, if cities are called for. Holy Names could be a full-on Hollywood set. The views up there are insane!”

The recently released feature, “Freaky Tales” (2025), is a funny, sometimes fantasy story about Oakland, which includes a cameo by Oaklander Tom Hanks (Skyline High, 1974) and was directed by Berkeley-born Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, who did the excellent “Half Nelson” (2006). Also shot here is the upcoming dramatic thriller “Josephine”, starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan and written, directed and produced by Beth de Araújo, a Brazilian-American San Franciscan. Although Boots Riley, of “Sorry to Bother You” fame, decamped for Louisiana to make the “I’m a Virgo” series for Amazon, Brubaker says, “It’s fabulous.”

“Oakland could revive as film center. There’s a consortium, the East Bay Film Collective, which meets every third Thursday at the Night Heron Bar [1780 Telegraph].” EBFC is dedicated to revitalizing Oakland’s “culture economy,” according to its site, #MakeItBay, and includes among its members comedian W. Kamau Bell, host of CNN’s “United Shades of America”. “There’s also the Worst Film Festival held at Mama Dog Studios," which is at 700 26th Street, eight blocks from my place. A very Oakland concept, "It celebrates learning from your mistakes. Submit the worst short or part of a feature, and talk about the process. I went last year and thought it was great—a lot fun.” The last WFF transpired on August 28th.

Oaklanders at First Friday enjoying the mural painting, which has been provided free for over a decade by Richard Felix, a friend from the SF Art Institute whose studio is five blocks from mine (see the mural archives on his site). photo: D. Blair

CineMama, meanwhile, is “building a cultural hub in Oakland… for developing, producing, and exhibiting films for film professionals,” as per their website. They hold writers’ meetups, filmmakers’ happy hour and events like the “Reel Queer Flix” screenings at different locations. Another big booster of Oakland film, notably by backing EBFC, is Unanimous Media, the production company of Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warriors’ three-point king.

In the arts, Councilwoman Carol Fief got reinstated a municipal arts position by soliciting support from nine philanthropies. The Oakland Museum continues its Friday night fiestas until the end of October, featuring live music, DJs, food trucks and figure drawing, among other activities, as well as the opportunity to see great exhibitions like September’s “Of Dogs and Other People: The Art of Roy De Forest”. Creative Growth, nationally known for its work with disabled artists, just celebrated its 50th anniversary and got a new director, Sunny A. Smith. The Joyce Gordon Gallery (also one of my graphic clients), which focuses on Black and Iranian art, recently received great coverage on ABC, while Johansson Projects, the premier gallery on the First Friday strip of Telegraph, is showcasing important art from all over California.

As usual, a better, more beautiful Oakland seems very much in reach, given our copious fundamentals of talent, housing stock and location. Oakland could revive not only as a film center, as Brubaker hopes, or a culinary cornucopia, as many chefs are attempting, but an important ideas workshop, as well as pleasant place to live, where a lot of artists, my old friends Wetback and Donna, and my new friend Rajni Mandal as well as little ol’ me, with my cineSOURCE magazine or JUST SAY NO TO FASCISM project, could cooperate and profit in harmony and happiness.

Convincing a majority of Oaklanders to join this endeavor won’t be easy. I have gotten to know the Yemeni-American community a bit over the last 30 years, largely by befriending Muhammad, who ran our corner store at 26th and Adeline, and observing and hearing about his colorful life. I sometimes talked to his first wife, who always wore a colorful Yemeni dress, although her father was an Oaklander, born here. Since their community’s main livelihood was liquor stores, their life was not easy, and Muhammad witnessed more than ten murders. A few followed the American immigrant dream of education, integration and upward mobility, but most did not. Indeed, many Yemeni-American women donned the black burka after 10/7, suggesting to me that Oakland’s elevated pro-Palestinian movement, as well as Yemen's decade plus of war, civil war and now war with Israel (which they initiated in support of Hamas), made a religious reckoning seem nigh.

On October 8th, Chief Mitchell tendered his resignation, after 18 months on the job, the 12th chief since 2000. Although Mitchell offered no explanation, he "tried to fix the system and was blocked at every turn," according to Dr. Mandal, in a recent email to me. "At some point, he realized, it was fruitless. The issue is not Mitchell, but the lack of mayor support and obstruction by all the oversight (Police Commission, Privacy Commission, NSA)." Indeed, the Police Commission ultimately nixed OPD's request for new rifles and a replacement BearCat armored vehicle, and the use of Flock cameras. Called "a dangerous nationwide mass-surveillance infrastructure" by the ACLU, Flock's gunfire locator and license plate reader systems were introduced in 2017, are currently used in over 4,000 cities nationwide, and were found effective in Oakland.

There's also Measure NN, approved by Oaklanders in 2024. Its over $45 million-a-year budget is completely controlled by a Mayor-appointed five-person commission, which will now dominate police and public safety decisions (see Dr. Mandal's article here or, to get involved, email her ).

Full moon over Oakland's Downtown, from my building's nice roof platform, generously built by the landlord, Francis Rush (1954-2023), who was also a large-canvas abstract painter and my friend. photo: D. Blair

The challenge is taking into account how people vote with their feet and pocketbooks not just words or at the ballot box. Almost everyone already abides equality-based multiculturalism in many things, like cuisine, since nothing is worse than eating your own tribe’s food, day after day, forever. In fact, honest people are inherently multicultural, since the theory of mind that allows us to communicate requires inferring other people's perspectives. This built-in quality of consciousness leads us to draw from diverse sources, regardless of ideological or traditional parameters.

Radical multiculturalists are, by definition, centrists—how else could we accept and empower so much difference?—and the opposite of horseshoe politics practitioners. Instead of the hard left and right bonding en extremis, the most aggressive members of each side becoming allies of convenience, moderates select on the merits and build more modest but honest cooperation between liberals and conservatives, socialists and capitalists, therapists and engineers, artists and warriors.

I see this happening a lot in Ukraine and Israel. Many of my leftist friends may find this hard to believe, but Ukraine and Israel are maintaining functional multicultural democracies, despite the extreme duress, and that is precisely what enables them to pull together nationally—unlike in the United States. In Ukraine's case, the inter-communal assistance started during the 2014 revolution on Maidan Square when rightwing soccer hooligans carrying sticks, a few wearing motorcycle helmets, defended the liberals from police attacks, a pattern now scaled society-wide. We need to learn from but also assist those fighting on the frontlines of democracy, as our grandparents did during the Spanish Civil War.

Young men and women looking to channel their proclivity for adventure and activism could join my proposed “Malcolm Nance Battalion.” Like the Lincoln Brigade, they would volunteer to defend democracy but this time in Ukraine, where Nance, an African-American Navy officer, cryptologist, intelligence operative and Arabic speaker, answered the call and served, shortly after the 2022 Russian invasion. On a more local level, I would like to help kids go camping, which provides an opportunity for adventure and skill building, starting in the Oakland hills but then graduating to California's spectacular wildernesses.

How do we address the gangs of youths on small motorcycles who like to roar through traffic or around a neighborhood, doing “wheelies” and blasting music, sometimes till midnight on weekdays, which annoys the hell out of some Oaklanders? Perhaps Oakland could organize parades, with competitions and prizes, as well as enforce more traffic law, as OPD did with sideshows. As it happens, my hood had a sideshow on September 26th at our local burger joint, Hyphy Burgers, because a famous YouTuber, IShowSpeed (AKA Darren Jason Watkins), was there and, naturally, West Oaklanders wanted to put on a show. Unfortunately, sideshows generate a tremendous amount of noise from the tires squealing, which had some of my neighbors tearing out their hair (and it was over five blocks away), until the cops showed up.

Or perhaps Oakland should tolerate some scofflaws and retain some of its traditional wildness?

Mexican-style sodas, fruit or food is often on offer from immigrant entrepreneurs on Adeline in front of my live-work studio. photo: D. Blair

Either way, rationalism compels us to learn how to cooperate, the best platform for which is liberal democracy. Yes, it has been in crisis of late, but evolving an innovative, agile and strong center is a slow, arduous process, while quick fixes are often dysfunctional overreactions. We are all liberals of sorts, from conservatives to social democrats, even radicals and libertarians, because no one likes living under an authoritarian boot, Left or Right, and only liberal democracy has enabled diverse people, professions and ideologies to flourish simultaneously.

In fact, a big tent full of liberals will recognize the threat to democracy—eventually—and figure out how to defend it, as well as equality-based multiculturalism and artistic freedom—again eventually. If we didn’t, we’d still be in caves controlled by bullies.

Posted on Sep 23, 2025 - 06:16 AM
Dear Oakland: Why Doth Thou Forsake Our Freedom Fight?
by Doniphan Blair

The Pergola on Oakland's Lake Merritt is the place for drumming, skating and people-watching on weekends. photo: D. Blair

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Jump to Dear Oakland, Part 2

OAKLAND, O OAKLAND, MY HOME FOR
over half my life, my aboriginal town, full of my fellow tribal members: How could you turn against our traditions of multiculturalism and democracy—as well as little ol’ me—especially as the future of freedom and artistic life is under existential attack worldwide?

Oakland was doing great until Covid, its best decade since the 1940s, with booming business, art and filmmaking and low murder rates. A couple hundred people strolling around a few art galleries on a Friday afternoon in 2006 blew up into a massive monthly street fair on Telegraph Avenue, a half a mile from downtown. Eventually featuring over a dozen new galleries as well vendors, food trucks, performers, group paintings and drum circles, First Friday attracted up to 25,000 people a month, including many bridge-and-tunnel folk, which stimulated business and tax revenue as well as culture.

Another big Oakland booster was Jerry Brown, mayor at the time. Born into a San Francisco political dynasty—his father was California’s governor from 1959 to 1967, and he held that post 1975-’83 and 2011-’19—Brown crossed the Bay Bridge to Oakland in 1995. That was just after the “Crack ‘80s,” when the population dropped by a quarter and murders peaked at 165 in 1992, which made Oakland one of America’s deadliest cities.

Seventy-three shots were fired in a West Oakland gang war on the street behind my building on October 15, 2021. photo: D. Blair

I saw the results one sunny morning, shortly after I moved to West Oakland in 1989 and started building a live-work studio there. Racing to pick up a print job for an aromatherapist, who was flying out to a convention, I found the building surrounded by cops and the entrance spattered with blood. A guy working next door to the print shop had gone on an all-night crack cocaine bender and, when his boss showed up in the morning, stabbed him repeatedly. The victim was a father of three; the client and I were devastated, although she made her flight; and my printer friends, who often donated their services to liberal causes, soon moved to Berkeley, four miles away.

West Oakland suddenly seemed like the Old West: wild and dangerous but with wide open spaces and incredible people—mostly—a fecund mix of working class, intellectual and renegade, as well as race.

After Jerry Brown moved to Oakland, he started We the People, a novel political organization given it was also a radio talk show by the same name, which he hosted. “We the People” ranged widely and was a big hit on lefty radio. I heard the Gore Vidal episode when they both laughingly admitted, halfway through their cogent critique of capitalism, that they were both upper-class Whites. A brilliant politician as well as four-term governor, Brown was the brains behind modern California. But he was not presidential timber, I was dismayed to note, after meeting him in 1999, when he and my band inaugurated a park in north Oakland. That was due to his egghead demeanor and propensity to scowl, although Brown was perfect for an over -hyped and -extended California as well as traumatized, underperforming Oakland.

“The two-party system is deeply corrupted,” Brown said at the time, so he ran as an Independent in 1998 and won in a landslide, 59% against eight other candidates. “He’s our royalty,” a middle-aged, middle class, very-well-put-together Black woman told me, while we waited on a supermarket line. Brown lived on the street-fair section of Telegraph Avenue for most of his time here, in an airy loft with pretty good art, I noticed at an open house.

Jerry Brown, the four-term governor of California, was also the two-term mayor of Oakland, in 2024. photo: unknown

There was one scandal, however. His close friend but also political consultant and bodyguard (licensed to conceal carry after moving to Oakland) was a heavily-tattooed French hipster named Jacques Barzaghi. After he got into a shoving match with the fourth of his five wives, and she called the police, Brown fired Barzaghi, although no charges were filed.

A more discrete hipster, although he pardoned Timothy Leary in 1976, Brown spoke of Oakland during his mayoral campaign as an “Ecopolis… both in harmony with the environment and in harmony with itself." He emphasized Oakland's northern California location, replete with bay views, redwood glades and woodsy campsites overlooking Lake Chabot full of European travelers, while also applying substantial political muscle. After switching Oakland to the “strong mayor” system, Brown shepherded through Measure Y, which funded many new programs but also an expensive Rand Study to monitor them.

Oakland’s already ample non-profit sector expanded. To mention a few I knew personally from designing their graphics: Youth Radio moved from Berkeley and remains an award-winning education and media creation program; the East Bay Perinatal Council, run by the indefatigable Dr. Barbara McCullough, still provides excellent support for young mothers, and the Center for ArtEsteem (previously Attitudinal Healing), started by African immigrants Aeeshah and Kokomon Clottey in 1989, continues its sophisticated self-help and restorative justice as well as artistic work in West Oakland (see their site).

Unfortunately, socialist largess is hard without capitalist success, which Oakland desperately needed, after many of its industries and the large Army base faded or closed. City elders bet on housing, always cheaper in Oakland than elsewhere in the bejeweled Bay Area but especially during Silicon Valley’s decades-long mega-boom. Housing was also a good physical partner to Oakland’s spiritual selling point: multiculturalism.

Uptown's Telegraph Avenue has murals, clubs and theaters and, a few blocks further, the monthly street fair/gallery crawl, First Friday. photo: D. Blair

Brown’s pet project was revitalizing Oakland’s downtown, long a ghost town after five o’clock, by investing in an arts district called Uptown, a few blocks up Telegraph Avenue, and building 10,000 new dwellings. His successor, Ron Dellums, born and raised in West Oakland, and the district’s long-term liberal U.S. Congressperson turned one-term mayor, factored that up to 100,000. While Brown built 90% of his projected units, only a third of Dellums were completed over the decade after he left office, with only seven percent “Fair Share” subsidized housing.

To reassure home buyers so soon after the Crack ‘80s, even though murder rates were low by the end of the '90s, Brown recommended expanding the Oakland Police Department by 14%, from 625 to 725 officers. But Oaklanders didn’t vote to fund his initiative, even after murders jumped back to Crack ‘80s levels in 2006. Their anti-cop attitude dated from the Black Panther Party, which became famous for their generous social services, aggressive politics, and savvy use of media but started with police monitoring in West Oakland. Their first few members would drive behind patrol cars, observe police stops at a legal distance, and brandish long guns, in case anything went awry (until "open carry" was outlawed in California in 1967, see my article on the Panthers). Such sentiments were reenforced by the Riders, a gang of corrupt White cops, also based in West Oakland, and probably whom I saw a few times standing over young African-American men spreadeagle in the street.

Oakland had a large, hardscrabble White community including Okies, Dust Bowl-era immigrants from Oklahoma, Hells Angels, who had a large compound in East Oakland, and much of its police force, which was well over 95% White until the late-‘60s. The Riders were finally arrested in 2000 for extortion, planting evidence, kidnapping and torture but not murder and only a few served time, although the OPD was placed under federal receivership, meaning oversight, where it remains today.

Brown also hustled hard for education and the arts during his two terms. The Oakland School for the Arts opened in Uptown, in 2002, and became the flagship for Oakland’s unique charter school system, developed here in 1993. The art school continues to serve some 800 sixth through 12th graders well today. The California College of Arts and Crafts, home to the nationally-known Bay Area Figurative Movement in the ‘50s, dropped “crafts” from its name in 2003 and expanded its curriculum and enrollment, albeit mostly in its San Francisco campus. After decades of dust gathering, the Fox Theater switched from film to music, reopened in 2009, and became a major Bay Area venue.

Filmmaking took off after a two-person Oakland Film Commission opened and began offering tax rebates and concierge production services. A bunch of commercials, scenes from a few Hollywood films, and a slew of amazing indies were soon shot, which brought spending on hotels, equipment rentals and extras but also professional and creative opportunities. Three funky building in the old army base became the Oakland Media Center, which housed over 30 production, gear or related companies. A mile away, some friends and I started cineSOURCE magazine, a monthly paper tabloid covering film, art and politics, which went digital-only in 2010.

Jerry McDaniel plays an Oakland everyman in Frazer Bradshaw's feature 'Everything Strange and New' (2008). photo: courtesy F. Bradshaw

One phenomenal local feature was “Everything Strange and New” by Oakland cinematographer and San Francisco Art Institute graduate Frazier Bradshaw, which starred his neighbor and my friend, Jerry McDaniel, as a professional clown, carpenter and father of two (see my article). “Everything Strange and New” featured “the two saddest blowjobs in film history,” according to one critic, and won the prestigious international critics’ association (FIPRESCI) award in 2009. Then came “Smoked” by Jamie de Wolf, in 2012, a colorful comedy about weed and thugs and, the same year, “Licks” on just thugs and one of the most brutally honest films on the subject I’ve ever seen. “Licks” was directed by Jonathan Singer-Vine, a White twenty-something from Berkeley with immense assistance and star-turns from his large cohort of Oakland friends, actors and actual gangsters. Don’t see it if you are allergic to the N-word (see my article).

The following year, “Fruitvale Station” provided an art-film look at an actual young Black man, Oscar Grant, killed by a BART cop in Oakland on New Year’s Eve, 2009. That was the freshman feature from the very Oakland Ryan Coogler, who became instant Black royalty in Hollywood, 350 miles to Oakland's south, a position he turned platinum five years later with his third feature, “Black Panther”. About the Marvel Comics’ character not the political party, although a secondary story set in Oakland does connect the two, “Black Panther” became the nineth highest-grossing film of all time! In fact, 2018 was a banner year for Oakland film. It also included the well-reviewed “Blindspotting” written by and starring Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs, Oakland homies who met at the world-class Berkeley High School, also about a cop and a killing but centered on their Black-White bro-ship and rendered romantically as a musical, and the striking, surrealist satire “Sorry to Bother You” by Boots Riley, a local rapper-rocker turned writer-filmmaker, starring the now-famous LaKeith Stanfield.

Oakland’s art and film efflorescence combined with its urban amenities, like its large downtown lake, haute cuisine popping up all over and monthly First Friday street fair, to attract cannabis entrepreneurs, queer women, Burning Man devotees, and other alternative lifestyle aficionados as well as young families and single techies. The possibility that Oakland would become another tech hub, as Uber and other big players planned on setting up shop, contributed to its bull market. So did the halving of the murder rate, which went from 146 in 2006, when First Friday started, to 74 in 2019, although that was the peaceful year neighboring Berkeley had none.

Florencia Manóvil shooting a scene from her 2015 internet show, 'Dyke Central', see cineSOURCE article. photo: courtesy F. Manóvil

Gentrification priced people out, cutting Oakland from half Black in the ‘60s to a quarter and causing resentment among some people I talked to. Oakland’s African-American culture stayed strong, however, from its large population of Black intellectuals to wildly inventive music, slang and dress (like the style of wearing pants half-off, usually displaying colorful underwear) and the infamous “sideshows.” Consisting of automotive tricks like “donuts,” sideshows can take over an intersection or street, draw a large crowd and become an incredible spectacle, a people's public art performance. Unfortunately, they can get dangerous, especially when large, due to auto accidents and weapon discharges (into the air or people), until enough cops arrive “to effectuate an orderly dispersal.”

Other people I talked to enjoyed leaving Oakland for suburbia or the new services and opportunities on offer from the city’s ever expanding blended family. Oakland’s schools were integrated in 1872, but the Ku Klux Klan was around until the 1920s, and White, Black, Asian and Latino communities probably didn’t mix much until World War Two, when the younger generation danced together at the jumping jazz and blues clubs of West Oakland.

That golden age crashed post-war and Oakland had a depressed ‘50s and ‘60s, but it carried on to become one of the most mixed cities on earth: 30% White, 29% Hispanic, 21% Black, 15% Asian and 1% Native, according to the 2020 census, which also notes 11% multiracial but not interclass involvement. The Oakland hills are known for their beautiful bay views, multi-million-dollar homes, and well-off People of Color but also as Oakland’s tax, investor and volunteer base. The latter is personified by Rajni Mandal, a Hindu-American doctor I met recently, who worked in West Oakland and lives in a nice but view-less portion of the hill neighborhood of Montclair. She started getting involved in municipal politics last year, after a shooting on her street, notably issues involving supporting the police (see my interview with her here). East and West Oakland have some of the most blighted corners in California, but those areas still have decent parks, some middle-class homes, flourishing churches and adequate government services, as I experienced during my three decades attending the West Oakland Health clinic and East Oakland’s Highland Hospital, a public facility nationally known for gunshot surgery.

Roller skating in DeFremery Park has been happening every Thursday night during the summer for a few years. photo: D. Blair

In the 2010s, Oakland’s entrepreneurs, artists, activists and civic leaders doubled down on its new economy and progressive ethos to create a vast variety of businesses and programs but also esoteric projects like street-front art incubators, a T-shirt store/municipal movement called Oaklandish, THUG Therapy, a men’s mental health group run by hip hop star Mistah FAB (AKA Stanley Cox), and skateboard parks. K-Dub (AKA Keith Williams), a popular muralist who had a studio in my building, organized the secret, late-night installation of old, wooden skateboard structures in a corner of West Oakland’s DeFremery Park, the site of many Black Panther rallies. Eventually awarded permits and rebuilt in concrete, with funds raised by K-Dub, it remains well attended by kids of all colors and genders, one of whom recently told me, “It’s still the best skate park in Oakland.” An older crowd began roller skating on the nearby basketball court, one night a week, replete with skate rentals and lights, while a woman’s roller derby team uses it for practice, and all the above are soliciting funds for a properly-paved skate area.

Talking to my friend Harvey, who lived most of his life in a large Victorian across the street from DeFremery—it was a drug park in the Crack ‘80s, he told me, and a big dealer was the son of the city’s first Black mayor, Lionel Wilson—we agreed the transformation was remarkable. Indeed, many “old gangster” Oaklanders, often a cynical lot, had begun to admit that “The Town,” as Oakland is sometimes called (in contrast to San Francisco’s “City”), might make good on its perennial promise to become a cultural and multicultural Mecca as well as hipster paradise.

Until Covid. After the biological pandemic came the intellectual plague. Conspiracy theories blaming excessive quarantine or Chinese lab leak cover ups on corrupt Democrats emerged from Oakland’s large cohort of alternative therapists and radical vegans, while some on the left felt we were under threat from revanchist racism, which required increased identity politics. Oaklanders went all out against George Floyd’s grotesque murder and for Black Lives Matter, naturally, and protestors covered the city with signs, murals and marches. Although the riots of May 29th and June 1st, 2020, trashed Downtown, decimating Brown’s dream and some minority-owned businesses, the rioters were of diverse ethnicities and philosophies, from radicals and anarchists to hooligans and gangsters, some from Oakland, others from out of town, the vast majority young men. Other protesters, however, opposed their vandalism, helped shop owners clean up and promised renewed patronage, a Yemini-American smoke shop proprietor told me, although he closed a few months later.

Since 2004, St. Columba Catholic Church at 6401 San Pablo Avenue has been erecting a named and dated cross for every murdered Oaklander. photo: D. Blair

Unfortunately, the crimes committed by cops were overshadowed by those by Oaklanders or residents of the surrounding region who liked the city's sense of adventure and lax law enforcement. There was another BART police killing of an African-American, Sahleen Tindle in 2018, in West Oakland, although years have passed without a police murder but over 100 civilian killings annually. There have been 3938 killings, by my count, since I arrived in 1989, which is a lot for a city of under a half mill, almost one percent of the population. When enthusiasm for Black Lives Matter obliged authorities to make good on the protestors’ preferred chant and policy, “Defund the Police,” Libby Schaaf, Jerry Brown’s assistant and acolyte, who was elected mayor in 2014, refunded the OPD on the down low, in an eleventh-hour attempt to stem the Covid crime tsunami.

The OPD was fairly functional in the 2010s, having recovered from the Riders police gang scandal and instituted many reforms, according to “The Force” (2018), by Oakland documentary filmmaker Peter Nicks, an African-American who made “The Waiting Room” (2012), the Independent Spirit Award-winning film about Highland Hospital. Regrettably for Nicks, another major police scandal broke in 2016 which not only contradicted his film’s conclusions but provided an Oakland story so steamy it could have turned “The Force” into a breakout hit, if Nicks hadn’t already locked edit.

To summarize: a bunch of cops fell in mad love with a smoking hot but underage Nicaraguan-American sex worker from East Oakland, who went by the name Celeste Guap and whose mother was a police dispatcher. After her White cop boyfriend committed suicide, and his note revealed sex trafficking as well as romantic love and anger about her infidelities, three OPD chiefs resigned in one week. The first to go was Sean Whent, the seemingly decent chief from “The Force”, who must have known something. The second came five days later, because he had a well-known extramarital affair, and the third three days after that, probably for sexual peccadilloes, in light of Schaaf’s statement, “As the mayor of Oakland, I am here to run a police department not a frat house.” Admittedly, 2016 was the height of the MeToo movement’s cancellation of abusive men, and racist texts between Oakland cops leaked around then, muddying the blame game.

Chief Anne Kirkpatrick (lft) and Mayor Libby Schaaf before firing her for lying on a report, said the city, or revealing corruption, in Kirkpatrick's view. photo: Darwin BondGraham

Mayor Schaaf tried to solve her sex scandal imbroglio by enlisting Anne Kirkpatrick, previously Spokane, Washington’s police chief. Despite her brave game face, Chief Kirkpatrick suffered from whiteness, was unprepared for Oakland’s quirky people and troubled cops, and was fired in 2020, for making false statements about a West Oakland raid, according to the city. Kirkpatrick, however, claimed it was for calling out corruption in the Police Commission, and filed a whistleblower law suit she eventually won. “Kirkpatrick maintained she was fired for elevating what she described as concerning abuses of power by two members of the Police Commission,” according to the Oaklandside website (5/18/2022), and was awarded $1.5 million in July 2022.

Guap, the star of what could have been a telenovela titled “OPD in Love”, also sued the city and won a few million but declined to go to Hollywood with the salacious details Oaklanders are still dying to know, probably because of her family’s deep ties to the police.

Covid in Oakland was tough, see my 2022 article. Health-wise, the Town did fairly well for a city with perennial budget problems, but there were significantly more fatalities among People of Color. This was especially true for Latinxes, many of whom had to work through the pandemic, or elderly POC, sometimes due to gathering without masks, as was the wont of many Black families or friend groups on weekends, in the north-eastern corner of Lake Merritt.

Young people took the opportunity to run wild (I saw a still-smoking, upside-down car on a West Oakland side street, which had been flipped and flown through the air by a young woman). A 12-year-old boy shot and wounded a classmate at a charter school in East Oakland (8/29/2022). Traffic law was largely suspended in East and West Oakland, which swelled annual pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities to about 30, a massive number. Uptown was covered with “diamonds” (broken car window glass) and West Oakland with graffiti and bags of garbage, dumped by cheapskates saving on garbage removal fees. Text-organized flash mobs robbed large stores wholesale, many of which closed, while the smaller ones remaining open often went credit card only. One in 30 Oaklanders had their cars stolen. Theives stripped out the copper wires connecting the street lights in front Harvey’s house and elsewhere, leaving many blocks dark. Stickups were legion.

A young woman joined the Covid 'wilding' in 2023 by stealing a car, driving down a West Oakland side street around 80 mph, flipping it and hurtling through the air about 60 feet—she survived and fled, according the young man whose brand-new car she nicked on the way through. photo: D. Blair

An employee at Oakland’s largest cannabis dispensary, Harborside, recently told me there were quite a few armed robberies during the Plague Years, but things are better now, obviously due to two well-armed guards. I myself was jumped leaving an Uptown bank, one sunny high noon in June 2022, by four seasoned professionals, 18-to-25-year-old African-American men, including an in-bank spotter and expert get-away car driver. Having a gun in my stomach was shocking, but the cops who took my report seemed sent from central casting to restore my Oakland esprit de corps: an older, tall and wise African-American, a short, mustachioed, tougher-talking White, and a softspoken, clean-shaven Latino rookie, who did the interviewing.

The Covid murder increase, which transpired nationwide and was influenced to some degree by Black Lives Matter, since it disparaged and decreased police activity, was the largest homicide increase in American history, a penalty borne largely by the Black community. In Oakland, it seemed driven not by drug dealing or gangs but social media, I was surprised to learn, chatting with neighbors, educators and on neighborhood blogs. “Young men are obsessed with respect” was an oft-heard observation. Stuck at home during the Covid lockdown and looking at Facebook and Instagram, they evidently became enraged seeing their girlfriends with other men.

In 2021, an African-American twenty-something was shot to death next to my building’s parking lot, while trying to pick up his kid from his baby momma, who was in the car of her new boyfriend, with whom he had words. My neighbor, an emergency room doctor, saw it from her window and raced down, but he was already dead. Another neighbor, an educator who knew the victim, told me he was middle class and from Berkeley but ran with a wild crowd, another way of earning respect but the dread of African-American parents, after cop stops.

Police encounters are recipes for “respect contests,” both between young men and the cops but also with their peers, who are watching or see videos later. On one of my medical visits to Highland Hospital, I saw a young man being raced into the emergency room, on a wheelchair by his friends, while proudly announcing into his phone, “I’ve been shot! I’ve been shot!”

Traffic law, suspended in West Oakland during Covid, has not been restored, as illustrated by young men on motorcycles popping wheelies and plowing through red lights. photo: D. Blair

Racism and violence against Asians exploded, including a couple of horrific hate-crime killings, one five blocks from my building. They seemed inspired by President Trump’s China Covid claims but also BLM, since racism against one group encourages it against others. The BLM movement worked wonders illuminating historical wrongs and inspiring governmental and corporate change, and related movements worldwide, but it privileged race. Focusing on ethnicity, heritage or nature more than ethics, actions or nurture, without reinforcing the “all humans are created equal” standard, devalues morality and inflates intergroup tension.

A friend of mine’s son who attended the Oakland School for the Arts was harassed for being White starting after BLM summer, even though his father was a Venezuelan immigrant. I felt racist vibes in Oakland for the first time after invading a man’s space in West Oakland’s only Starbucks, or so he thought when I reached past him for the cream, although his friends restrained him and apologized, which was reassuring.

Oakland’s murder rate hit 137 in 2021 and 126 in ’23, two years after the national Covid crime spree had faded, suggesting extra pathology. In 2024, a friend of mine had his back window shot out on the freeway after a minor infraction by a road-rager who was young, male and White. The OPD was unable to investigate so much violence and theft as well as homicide, or maintain the legally-mandated response time for 911 emergency calls, as I noticed on hold for over 20 minutes one night trying to report a murder on my corner (10/20/2022). The nation’s oldest Black organization, the NAACP, rebuked Oakland for poor police services.

Crime penalizes the rich mathematically less than poor people, who are robbed of cash, cars and possessions they can ill afford to lose and algebraically more friends and family. Unsolved murders can devastate communities and families, especially when there are multiple killings in one area or family, or by bullets randomly flying through windows or walls. As bad as West Oakland can be, the murder rate is much worse in East Oakland, I’m always astounded to note, even after 17 years reviewing the city’s murder lists for my periodic cineSOURCE article about Oakland.

Although West Oakland had almost no Black Panther murals or graffiti until 2016, there is now quite a bit, often in this style. photo: D. Blair

But what could the municipality do, aside from juggling existing funds to new programs, which may or may not work, and Oakland often tried anyway? Community members were not forthcoming to detectives; community leaders didn’t organize night marches, as they did during the 2006 return to Crack ‘80s’ murder levels; and there was no Curtis Sliwa-style Guardian Angels, which could have been organized by old Black Panthers, reformed gangsters and street-wise clergy—like the big, burly Pastor Lankeford (for whom I did graphics)—as well as celebrity rappers. Mayor Schaaf’s $50,000 bonus for enrolling in a police academy hardly replenished the cops quitting out of frustration, fear, or concern about their record. Eligible recruits from Oakland evidently don’t trust the cops, don’t want to offend their anti-cop neighbors, or have better opportunities elsewhere in the super-rich Bay Area, since almost 90% of OPD officers are from out of town.

After Mayor Schaaf fired Kirkpatrick and installed two placeholder chiefs, she didn’t get a permanent chief until February 2021, but it was worth the wait. A West Oaklander born and bred, LeRonne Armstrong lost a brother to gun violence and held a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a masters in organizational leadership. He also pioneered a number of reforms and spiritual practices, notably a moment of silence at his press conferences, one second for every murdered Oaklander, which lasted an uncomfortable two minutes by the end of the year. Armstrong also liked to ask: Why are Oaklanders so vocal protesting cops who kill but quiescent about the young men.

Oakland’s civic collapse comes from flawed liberal programs but also intentionally evil ones, according to some intellectuals on the hard left dating back to Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). A German-Jewish sociologist who fled Nazi Germany, was accepted by the US, and worked for its intelligence services, Marcuse settled into the deluxe California lifestyle of a University of California professor, in San Diego, as well as a bestselling author, of "One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society" (1964). Marcuse had ample opportunity to observe and interact with the hordes of hippies and activists who flooded California in the ‘60s, and he concluded that Californian liberalism was a bribe to distract the people from their desperately-needed revolution and a front to cover capitalism’s impending turn toward totalitarianism.

Generational poverty, inadequate education, addiction and homelessness defy simple solutions, to be sure, especially amid the fantastic wealth and opportunity of California, now the fourth largest economy in the world. That stark contrast and the elevated cost of living drives some people to drop out and try to live off the fat of the land, like the hippies, although they should not be confused with the “working homeless," regular folk maintaining hygiene and decorum and often holding down jobs, or the intellectually disabled, denied institutionalization in California in the 1970s by Governor Ronald Reagan.

Claims that current methods are counterproductive—that we should defund or abolish the police or prison system and suffer the consequences until the new system achieves success, rather than instituting more methodical reforms—are belied by Oakland’s many innovative government and private sector programs, the people who benefited, and those who created or are running them. Chief Armstrong, for example, helped start or worked on Ceasefire, a violence intervention program, Stop Data Collection Project, which reduced racial profiling, and the OPD’s interaction with the SPARK program, an academic-professional collaboration developed by Stanford University. Unfortunately, ultra-progressives as well as conservatives might retort that Oakland has had liberal programs for 60 years, and where did they get us?

This large Afrofuturist mural of Black Panther leaders Bobby Seale (lft) and Huey Newton (rt) is directly across from Oakland Police headquarters. photo: D. Blair

The '60s were tumultuous, sometimes violent times, and evolving through them was tricky. An older Black Panther leader and Air Force veteran, Bobby Seale, mounted a respectable run for mayor in 1971 and won an impressive 40%. After conceding gracefully and promising cooperation, Seale inspired many people to join the civil service and paved the way for Oakland's first Black mayor, eight years later. A successful lawyer and respected judge as well as minor league baseball pitcher who grew up in West Oakland, Lionel Wilson largely ended White Republican domination of Oakland's politics and served three terms scandal free, aside from the skyrocketing crime of the Crack ‘80s and his son’s alleged involvement.

Many Panthers were enthusiastic activists and good Samaritans, happy to help their fellows while trying to reform if not violently overthrow the government, but others were more revolutionary or Machiavellian. They deployed shows of force, like arriving en masse to community meetings, in their stylish black berets and brown jackets, to push a preferred policy, or walking around with long guns, which frightened people, including one of my West Oakland neighbors, when she was a girl. Nevertheless, no shots were fired during the Panthers’ year of open carry patrols and their cinematic seizure of the California Legislature in May 1967, which suggests good discipline or luck.

They eventually did resort to violence, mostly against the police but also fellow Panthers, government infiltrators and others, which petrified middle-class Oaklanders of all melanin levels. Black Panther rallies in West Oakland’s DeFremery Park were mostly White kids, in fact, from the counter culture centers of Berkeley, four miles down Adeline Street, or Haight Ashbury, nine miles across the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, because most African-American parents forbid their kids to attend. They feared arrest, drug use or violence by Panthers as well as police. Indeed, Black community leaders didn’t allow Panther murals or memorials in West Oakland until in 2017 (see my article), although there are many now.

Church-goers also decried Panther drug use and sexuality, admittedly hard to avoid next door to Berkeley and San Francisco, where many men as well as women were enamored of Panthers. Panther leader Huey Newton, who led the police monitoring—after he realized how to do so legally in a community college law class taught by Edwin Meese (future attorney general for President Reagan)—became best friends with Bert Schneider, a Jewish-American Hollywood player. Schneider produced “The Monkees”, “Easy Rider” and other iconic ‘60s work and began subsidizing the Panthers. When Newton was acquitted of killing a cop in West Oakland and released from San Quentin’s death row, Schneider chauffeured him in a Cadillac to a rally in Oakland, where he hopped on a car, stripped to the waist and showed off his prison buff.

A strong writer and speaker, despite his high voice, Newton obtained a PhD in Panther history from UC Santa Cruz and became America’s leading revolutionary. He toured the world giving speeches and meeting leftist leaders and intellectuals, as well as a few rightwing ones, like William Buckley on his “Firing Line” television show in 1973, where Newton acquitted himself well (see episode). Newton remains revered by the Left, including in a recent book about Oakland’s extensive activist and union history, “The Pacific Circuit” (2025), by respected Oakland journalist and radio host Alexis Madrigal, although Madrigal notes he “struggled with the valorization of Huey Newton,” because he was “violent and abusive.” Many Oaklanders caught bad feelings after Newton became a gangster and used extortion, arson and some murder, until he himself was murdered in 1989, during a coke deal in… you guessed it, West Oakland.

Two-thirds of the Modern Lovers commune circa 1977: (lft-rt) Doniphan Blair, David H., Alison S., Steve S., Tootie A., David W. and Nicholas B. photo: J. Slon

Oakland’s secret sauce is opposites attract and fructify, I learned from Wetback, an African-American hippie I met in the late 1970s. Tall, muscle-bound and with blue-black-skin, he earned his multicultural monicker growing up in a California border town and in prison. Wetback liked to wear dashikis and red-bandana headbands, read spiritual books, work out, and sell cannabis by the joint, often accompanied by his much younger, blonde girlfriend, Donna, the daughter of an Oakland cop. Wetback and Donna periodically visited the Modern Lovers' commune where I lived in San Francisco and once invited us to a cookout at their small place in the flats of East Oakland. Five of us went and met their neighbors and friends, including some Black Panther and Hells Angels types, and heard their music, which featured Oakland’s top acts of the day: Tower of Power and Sly and the Family Stone (Sylvester Stone just passed at 82, 6/9/2025), both multiethnic bands with White drummers. There was also Creedence Clearwater Revival, an all-White band from North Berkeley who sounded Black and were the biggest band of the San Francisco scene, with 16 top forty hits between 1968 and ‘70.

After Mayor Schaff termed out in 2022, Oaklanders elected the BLM-friendly Sheng Thao, America’s first mayor of Myanmar (Burmese) national and Hmong tribal descent, through “rank choice” voting (the second ballot choice provides plurality if there’s no outright majority). The president of Oakland’s City Council for two years but also a single mother who experienced homelessness, Mayor Thao had a minor in city planning from the University of California, Berkeley, four miles down Telegraph from Oakland City Hall, and a mandate to increase progressive programs like MACRO (Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland). When that non-emergency service run by the fire department was announced, it got over 1000 applicants but hired only 26, who are legally restricted from responding to all but a few types of calls, due to liability concerns.

Although Oakland was still surfing the Covid crime wave, Mayor Thao’s first major move was to fire Chief Armstrong. Allegedly, he failed to properly investigate a rogue cop who happened to be Chinese-American—he may have been trying to maintain good relations with that distressed community—but a BLM red flag, nonetheless. When Mayor Thao didn’t install a temporary chief, the city went chief-less for a year and half, additionally handicapping the department. More troubling, Thao herself came under investigation for corruption and was recalled by voters in November 2024, along with District Attorney Pamela Price, who was seen as soft on crime during the Covid-era wildings.

“Thao promised to commit the City of Oakland to purchase housing units from the Duongs,” two Vietnamese-American brothers who followed their East-coast mafia colleagues into waste management, and “extend the City’s contract with the Duongs’ recycling company, and appoint city officials selected by the Duongs,” according to California’s indictment (1/17/25, get more info here). The Duongs also “promised to and did fund a $75,000 negative mailer campaign targeting Thao’s opponents in the mayoral election, and made $95,000 in payments to [Thao’s African-American boyfriend Andre] Jones for a no-show job with their housing company, with the promise of additional payments.” Perhaps predictably, Thao’s supporters claimed the charges were trumped up or fabricated. Coincidentally, Thao’s salary went up $13,000 in 2023 to $216,000, and reports emerged that some directors of the Black Lives Matter nonprofit organization had embezzled millions of donated dollars.

Mayor Sheng Thao (lft) and her new police chief Floyd Mitchell, 2024. photo: courtesy Oakland Mayor's Office

Murders did drop under Mayor Thao, to 86 in 2024, undoubtedly assisted by her belated appointment of Floyd Mitchell as police chief. A strikingly handsome African-American, Mitchell ran the cop shop in Lubbock, Texas, where he did a form of community policing he called “coffee with a cop,” although California still required 160 hours of recertification and “diversity, equity and inclusion” training. Mitchell is flourishing in Oakland, I assume, considering his broad smile at photo ops, which seems to say “It’s not Lubbock!” as well as the minimal news about him. One small article noted he had to start supervising OPD’s Internal Affairs department, which he found time consuming.

In addition to Internal Affairs, there's the ongoing federal oversight of the OPD, which is expensive, and extensive civilian review. The latter is divided into three parts, the Police Commission, that Chief Kirkpatrick complained about, and its investigative and audit branches, which is inefficient as well as expensive, according to Dr. Mandal.

Another one of Mayor Thao’s achievements was getting help from Governor Gavin Newsom, another Jerry Brown acolyte, who abided his mentor’s love for Oakland by quadrupling its California Highway Patrol shifts to 162 a week. That was invaluable for investigating the many freeway shootings, but it increased accidents from high-speed chases, which Oakland outlawed and is a major complaint of the Police Commission. Dr. Marvin Boomer, a popular math teacher from East Oakland’s tough Castlemont High, was recently struck and killed by a fleeing driver (5/28/25), although active police pursuit had already stopped. Six people were killed by police chases over the last decade.

Unfortunately, Thao’s administration missed the deadline for a big grant application, was hit by a severe cyberattack, and was hemorrhaging revenue from the unpaid rent and taxes remaining from Covid-era eviction moratoriums and bankruptcies.

On the other hand, restaurants were opening at a record pace. In fact, Oakland was voted America’s best cuisine city in 2024 by the readers of Conde Nast publications. Evidently, cutting-edge Bay Area restauranteurs priced out elsewhere had gobbled up Oakland leases depreciated by the Covid recession, crime and building glut, as the Brown-Dellums gentrification plan hit full speed.

Property values fell from their all-time high in 2022, and 2024’s 15% budget deficit hurt Oakland’s failing schools and potholed streets. City-wide construction of colorful bike lanes and complicated pedestrian islands continued apace, however, despite overruns, both in budgetary terms and by drivers running over unmarked islands. But the new lanes are beloved by the increasing number of bicyclists, and they made Oakland look like a normal progressive city, a selling point for the real estate agents.

A foot deep pothole (rt) broke axels for years, 75 feet from an expensive urban redesign of bike lanes, pedestrian islands and curb cuts. photo: D. Blair

Oakland’s film industry was largely gone by then. It started slowing in 2012 when the Media Center closed for the Army base rebuild and the Film Commission cut its two-person team in half, firing the popular rainmaker Ami Zins. City councilors failed to convince Oaklanders that tax breaks for middle-class filmmakers brought substantial spending, jobs and internships, not to mention culture. Location filming also disappeared as crews were increasingly robbed. Other important businesses and cultural organizations moved, from the California College of the Arts to all three professional sports teams, although the multi-championship-winning basketballers, the Golden State Warriors, did so pre-Covid.

A lot of people left Oakland, including progressives fed up with the frequent gunfire and occasional gruesome murder. The May 2nd shooting and wounding of two at Pierre Pierre, a “bold, elegant, unapologetically Black” restaurant in the iconic Tribune Tower in Downtown, “shook the foundation of everything we've worked to build," Chef Cleashaun Hill told reporters, hence, they were relocating to a "safer environment."

Nevertheless, Oakland’s population remained around 435,000, as people snapped up reasonably-priced units in design-y buildings with arty exteriors, high ceiling and big windows. In fact, a small two-bedroom can still be had for under a half a mill, a bargain in the Bay Area, due to surplus construction but also proximity to tough corners or homeless encampments, which increased by about a quarter during Covid, as one percent of Oakland residents were forced to live on the streets.

A half mile from my place was the gargantuan Wood Street encampment, almost ten blocks long and with some 400 people in tents, cars, RVs and Tuff Sheds. Those are the tiny dwellings, set up in pods of 20 to 30 units, about ten thus far around Oakland, with Wi-Fi, shared toilets and kitchens and social services. Oakland has over 300 encampments, about ten of which are open air drug markets, Wood Street being the largest and most egregious. Its denizens were notorious for running wild, settling disputes by setting each other’s residences on fire, and “homeless mafia” drug dealers, although some of its denizens mentioned substantial community cooperation. Wood Street was cleared, starting in April 2023, but most residents moved to other undeveloped side streets of West Oakland.

Wood Street now runs through Oakland’s hottest new hood with scores of new buildings, including The Black Panther, a five-story, blue and silver condominium on 7th Street, the center of the ‘40s club scene, and Raimondi Park, a minor league baseball stadium and home to the new Oakland Ballers (see article)—although Lionel Wilson Park may have been a better name, to honor our pitching mayor. Across the street from the stadium is an upscale, multiethnic food court replete with a microbrewery and large patio, which is often packed with people and kids of all colors.

A mile and a half away on Telegraph Avenue, First Friday, which restarted in 2022, is bursting with commercial, artistic and Oakland energy, including group paintings and drum circles, but only about a third of the pre-pandemic attendance. In the Mayor’s office, the Department of Race and Equity, which opened in 2016, is doing some laudable initiatives, like fast tracking marijuana store licenses for people imprisoned under the old drug laws, but also some ineffective ones.

Rich regions invariably have poor districts where illegal goods and services are on offer and low-paid workers, artists and rebels like to live. America itself enjoyed that service from San Francisco, during its 19th century debauch and the ‘60s, but as the Bay Area became fantastically wealthy and NIMBY, nonconformists were pushed to Oakland.

Volunteers hand out candy on Halloween, 2011, at the Oakland Occupy in front of the mayor's office. photo: D Blair

Given Oakland already had established communities, some conservative, the Town became inherently tribal and hard to govern. The 2011 Occupy Movement filled the plaza in front of the mayor’s office with a flourishing encampment and provided a forum for municipal dialogue, but neither Mayor Jean Quan, an old ‘60s activist herself, nor the anarchistic Occupiers figured out how to channel that enjoyable exercise into meaningful reform or intercommunal cooperation. I heard a few strange suggestions at the discussion circles I attended, like letting young people express themselves through property damage, since insurance covered it anyway, but most people seemed reasonable and rational, as did most Oaklanders I knew.

Until Covid.

The plague years, the BLM riots, the near doubling of the murder rate, the diminished police presence, the collapsing economy, the corrupt mayor and peak “wokism” infected Oakland with a textbook case of “the liberal dilemma.” When liberal societies fail to deliver on implied or actual promises, they’re besieged by radicals from the Left and the Right, so-called “horseshoe politics.” The hard right appellation can also be applied to gangsters, corrupt officials and capitalists who oppose liberal democracy, a hostility shared by hard leftists, hence the horseshoe. A multi-front war is never easy, but liberals are additionally challenged by having to organize committees, do studies and inspire action from citizens too busy enjoying liberalism’s good life to recognize the danger or even participate. Competition for moral ascendency is common in all communities, but virtue signaling is force multiplied among those long assured of their moral superiority or desperate for a status boost or quick political fix.

As if the problems plaguing Oakland were not deleterious enough, the liberal dilemma is part of the inevitable decay of the liberal era we’ve enjoyed since World War Two, which blessed California, despite its plethora of problems, more than almost anywhere on earth. Naturally, we had a bumper crop of revolutionaries, from the Berkeley free speech movement, Black Panthers and antiwar protestors of the ‘60s to the less well-known and much smaller movements surrounding multiculturalism, which started in the ‘80s, and critical race theory, intersectionality and the trans revolution, which came with each succeeding decade.

Postmodernism and multiculturalism fascinated me when I studied them in the ‘80s at the San Francisco Art Institute with the brilliant art historian Raymond Mondini and Angela Davis, a titanic activist and socialist thinker as well as member of the Black Panthers and star student of Herbert Marcuse. Aspects of those ideas helped answer some of the questions nagging at me after five years of traveling and living in Asia and South America, but other aspects were contradicted by what I learned on the road.

Materialism, money and class struggle are not more important than spirituality, art and equality, I realized. Having grown up with classical lefties in New York City's Upper West Side and lived among more avant-garde ones in a commune in San Francisco, I was familiar with the inherent dysfunctionality of Marx's engineering mindset, command economies or a unicultural society built around an all-powerful political party. Indeed, the viability of emphasizing group identities over individual rights is refuted by the individuality of the cultural Marxists themselves and the obvious fact that almost all people, families and communities are cultural hybrids, which adopt any tool, concept or commercial operation benefiting them.

“Rock and roll does not sound right in Portuguese,” explained my friend Leche, a street musician and surrealist painter living in Salvador, Brazil, when I asked why he sang in English, which he could barely speak.

All cultures as well as humans are created equal, I concluded, but how people appropriate, mix or ignore them depends on utility, taste and dreams more than economics, politics or traditions. Virtually all the artists I met in Peru, where I lived for seven months, or in Delhi, India, where I stayed for a month with the director of the art school, Om Prakash Sharma, a great multiculturalist as well as abstract painter and classical musician (see my article), or in Timbuktu, Mali, where my daughter visited in 2010 and I interviewed the director of the Festival in the Desert, Manny Ansar, use whatever they like and can afford, often scrimping for years to overcome the up to 300% tariffs on already expensive equipment. The Tinariwen, Mali’s biggest "desert blues" band and the Festival in the Desert’s standard closer, started with guitars made from metal boxes but soon graduated to Gibson Les Pauls.

Poster from the 1981 Tropical Civilization show at Ancient Currents Gallery, San Francisco. illo: D. Blair

To describe Leche, Om Prakash Sharma and the Tinariwen, I developed the term “abstract aborigine,” suggesting we’re all legitimate intellectuals of cultures native to this planet. And I debated those ideas with Professor Davis in her class and the students interested in cultural Marxism at our school. We also exhibited artists exploring related themes in my commune’s art gallery, Ancient Currents. The hippies, punks and post-modernists argued fiercely in the Bay Area in the 1980s, and my critics sometimes dismissed my philosophy or lived experience unfairly, it seemed to me, but we were all part of a vibrant avant-garde, discussing and disputing politics, culture and spirituality. Rational utilitarianism and classical liberalism would eventually prevail, I assumed, as it usually did among artists and progressives, while ideologues and extremists would remain confined to academia or fringe communities—until Russia invaded Ukraine.

After visiting Ukraine in the fall of 2022, I was surprised to find myself being denounced by a couple friends and neighbors and many strangers, in person and on Facebook, who accused me of supporting a fascist regime, NATO expansionism or American imperialism. I tried to explain Ukraine’s complex, sanguineous history in person and writing—notably in my article “Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution”, published by two news sites and cineSOURCE—but attracting readers or convincing zealots is not easy, even among friends. The Bay Area was famous for protesting wars in South Asia and the Middle East or South African apartheid, but Ukraine’s tens of millions murdered over the last century, their ‘60s-esque democratic revolution of 2014, and their invasion by actual fascists did not touch my community that deeply, perhaps because Ukrainians are mostly White (although there are Romani, Muslims, Jews and a few African immigrants).

Article continues at Dear Oakland, Part 2

Doniphan Blair is writer, filmmaker, musician, world traveller and artist based in Oakland who can be reached .
Posted on Sep 04, 2025 - 03:28 PM
Cheerleading for Oakland: Interview with Rajni Mandal
by Doniphan Blair

Dr. Rajni Mandal was focusing on raising her two daughters until 2024, when she started bringing facts and figures to the public meetings of the Oakland Police Commission. photo: D. Blair

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

AFTER READING ONE OF RAJNI MANDAL'S
incredibly articulate articles about Oakland's current problems with its civilian Police Commission, we met on July 12th at her house on a side street in the wooded, hilly Oakland neighborhood of Montclair. A doctor of East Indian extraction, she was born in Peru, raised in upstate New York and graduated from Cornell, Duke and NYU, although she is well acquainted with Oakland, having worked as a wound care specialist in many of its nursing homes.

Dr. Mandal is of medium height and brownness but with an outsized, upbeat presence and personality. She started by offering me a cup of tea, which I took light, no sugar.

cineSOURCE: One of the things I am very interested in is multicultural evolution and the arts. Oakland has a lot of potential—

Rajni Mandal: Huge!

It is kind of a catastrophe, as I guess you know.

I came here in ’89, just in time for the earthquake. [Then] Jerry Brown moved here, and he became mayor, and he gave it his best shot.

How long have you been here?

About 15 years.

He did a damn good job. There was one scandal: Jacques Barzagi. Then Oakland did very well from 2010 'til Covid, when it collapsed.

And here we are, five years later.

Are you hopeful about [the new mayor of Oakland] Barbara Lee?

Based on the impassioned speech she gave on Thursday to the federal judge, yes.

The judge was really taken with her and really impressed with her. I think her political acumen is really good. She can definitely use that political capital to do things, and there is great potential for her ending the federal oversite [of the Oakland Police, instituted after the Riders Scandal of 2000].

She said it was one of her priorities, in her hiring, to have one person directly reporting to her whose main job was to get rid of federal oversight.

That one person?

Michelle Phillips. She was our inaugural Inspector General and she left about a year ago for Minneapolis to be their director of Civil Rights Division. The mayor called her personally to have her come back.

Wasn’t Chief Mitchell supposed to be the go-to guy for all that stuff?

Dr. Mandal with her minivan, in which she ferries around her kids or her neighbors who want to voice their opinions in municipal forums. photo: courtesy R. Mandal

You have many facets to it. Chief Mitchell oversees OPD [Oakland Police Department] but OPD is under the City of Oakland, the mayor and the city administrator. The city administrator she is hiring is going to be the main liaison with OPD.

I got the impression that Mitchell wasn’t too happy to spend half a day reading reports.

Yes. It’s a lot of work, and a lot of work he could be using—

Does Mitchell seem like a talented guy?

Yes! I was really impressed and so were my neighbors. He speaks really well. He tells it like it is. He is also very diplomatic, but he stands his ground! And that has irked the anti-police people.

Like [the police chiefs] Armstrong and Kirkpatrick before him, they were ousted because they spoke up against federal oversight, among other things.

Kirkpatrick evidently misspoke about a police raid, and she was definitely out of her league.

Yes.

She was a woman solving the sex crisis—I can understand that [Mayor] Schaaf wanted to find some sort of solution to this endless sex crisis.

You’ve seen LeRonne Armstrong speak, and he’s pretty good?

Yeah. I think he’s pretty good.

Unfortunately, again, that was a very political time, with [Mayor Sheng] Thao and the Police Commission. He had a press conference where he spoke up against the federal monitor and said, basically, he was being ousted for quote unquote speaking the truth.

I mean, there was a myriad of other issues.

Well, Armstrong had that other scandal [about a rogue cop involved with a hit-and-run accident and a gun discharge in an elevator]. Where do you come down on that? It is hard for me to discern.

It’s hard. Yes, there were issues, but would it lead to the Chief being fired? I don’t think so. What I think led to the Chief being fired was political capital.

He didn’t have enough?

He didn’t have enough, especially with the Sheng Thao administration.

Especially because the woke were totally against him. He’s from my neighborhood in West Oakland and so, whenever I am hanging out with the homies, I say, ‘So, does anyone know LeRonne?’ But I haven’t been able to find him.

Ha ha. I talked to people who knew him personally and supported him for his City Council run. He ran for City Council at large—obviously, he didn’t win.

Dr. Mandal waiting to speak at OPD's July public meetings. photo: D. Blair

The thing that I liked about him is he had a ‘moment of silence,’ a second of silence for everyone murdered. In the beginning of the year, it was very short but, at the end of the year, it was very long. A minute of silence is a long time and, in Oakland, it was two minutes.

He would say ‘Why are Oaklanders so interested in protesting police killings in Minneapolis when right here we have a 100 killings a year?’ By our own kids, mostly young Black men. That was really speaking truth to power.

Yes, absolutely. What we had most recently, the pursuit policy, it has been a really big flash point in the Police Commission—

Outlawing high speed pursuit?

Yes. Currently, Oakland has one of the most restrictive pursuit policies in the nation. It has to do with the fact that officers have to ask for additional approval if they are going to chase above 50 miles per hour. They also have an extra layer of supervision compared to other places, but it is really that 50 miles per hour limit [that bothers them].

That was set a couple of years ago because there was a fatality, and the Chief changed the rules to the 50 miles per hour speed limit. Since that happened, the number of pursuits went down significantly, and everyone said, ‘Yeah, that’s great, the less pursuits the better.’

But then what happens is—because our policy is such an outlier compared to the surrounding area—people come here from other places in order to rob convenience stores or anything else. And they know they can’t be chased.

Those are the two sides of the issue. Obviously high-speed pursuits have a risk to pedestrians and other residents, but there is also a balance. Pursuits are one tool that is used for fighting crime.

Chief Mitchell has proposed to take away that restriction and take away that one extra layer of supervisor approval associated with it. He has not really made anyone happy. The people who are talking about increased crime, especially convenience store crime, the cars ramming into stores, that sort of thing, really wanted officers to pursue for property crime. Whereas currently, it is just violent crime. He's not changed that, we’re still going to stick with violent crime, we are just getting rid of the speed limit.

And the other side is just as unhappy because they want zero pursuits. So, this going to increase the number [of pursuits] slightly, but it is not good enough for them. He is trying to come up with a compromise but compromises don’t make anyone happy.

Yeah. He is fortunate, the murder rate has gone down significantly.

Absolutely. And the CHP [California Highway Patrol] has a huge part to play in that.

That was from [Governor] Newsome and Sheng Thao—she made the request.

Yup.

So there is still a very heavy woke sort of mafia operating?

Dr. Mandal, working as a 'wound doctor' in West Oakland nursing homes. photo: R. Mandal

Absolutely.

To touch on those two things, so we recently had a CHP chase that led—indirectly not directly—to a teacher from Castlemont [High School] being killed, Dr Marvin Boomer. Originally, the witness accounts said the police were right behind the speeding car, and that is why it lost control.

But when the actual video footage and the time line was released, it turned out the police had stopped pursuing him, and were just doing helicopter surveillance. The fleeing vehicle lost control, but there wasn’t an active pursuit at the time.

But all that was mired…Especially the Anti-Police Terror Project, the leader is Cat Brooks—

She ran for mayor?

Yes, she ran for mayor.

They came up in the wake of this tragedy to try to ignite the anti-pursuit stance. That was taken up by a lot of media outlets and everything else. I think The [SF] Chronicle published it first: Well, actually there was no pursuit happening at the time, [but] it was still not enough to counter them.

These woke, if you want to call them that, or anti-police advocates, are still very heavily entrenched in the city government. The [civilian oversight] Police Commission was echoing all their points during a meeting. They still have a big sway in public opinion as well as the government.

Are they still determined to have fewer police?

Yes, absolutely.

So back in 2020, there was this Reimagining Public Safety Task Force that happened after the whole George Floyd protest, and the goal of this task force was to defund the police 50%. Cut the number of officers—everything—in half.

They had all these recommendations, not all of them have gone through, but one of their points was to civilianize officers. If there are jobs that are not quote unquote law enforcement, administrative for example, civilians should do it. Transfer those jobs to a non-police person—for example IT—which totally makes sense, totally makes sense.

Unfortunately, with the budget cuts, they have frozen all the civilian positions. There are more cops doing those jobs, because the work still has to get done.

In addition to that, Internal Affairs is a big issue, because that’s the department that has been under federal supervision, because of all the officer misconduct and the scandals that we’ve had. So now the new target is: They want all the Internal Affairs Division—all those investigations—to be that transferred to the investigative branch of the Police Commission, the Community Police Review Agency (CPRA).

They spent $100,000 just recently to get an outside study to figure out if this possible, to see if this can happen, and that study was just released a month or so ago [June 2025].

It caused a big stir because, obviously, you can’t get rid of the entire Internal Affairs Department. They don’t just work with misconduct, they work with a lot of other things that have to do with rules and regulations, policy, reporting to the federal government. You can’t totally get rid of it, but that was the goal, they wanted to get rid of it completely.

But now it turns out—and this is one of the issues with civilian oversight—who’s overseeing the civilian oversight? There’s nobody.

There’s the CPRA, the Community Police Review Agency, that investigates the same 100 cases—they share 100 cases with Internal Affairs, both investigate at the same time. Yeah, there’s duplicate efforts. So yeah, you could move over cases over to that civilian agency and free up officers—that’d be great.

But this civilian agency has not had consistent leadership, has been using Excel spread sheets to track cases, does not have actual standardized training procedures, standardized operating procedures, standardized reporting procedures. And, they can’t meet their deadlines.

They say it’s because they are understaffed. But it’s an issue of not just of understaff but poor leadership, and poor oversight and poor organizational structure, to begin with.

These people say, ‘Oh, we have to get civilians to do these things.’ You have to make sure who you are transferring the work to people who are the same quality and, currently, we don’t have those things.

And the MACRO thing [Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland] doesn’t seem to be taking off?

Ha ha. The MACRO was initially a pilot study. I think it focused on West Oakland, and then it moved to East Oakland. Then it expanded to the whole city but without anyone really telling them to do that.

It’s only 26 people.

It is very small. They have, I think, four buses out every shift.

But the whole goal of MACRO was part of this Reimagining Public Safety Task Force, in order to off load OPD, right? And have them deal with the mental stuff. Sounds great, but currently they only take three calls a day.

Dr. Mandal makes a salient point at the OPD's public meeting. photo: D. Blair

And OPD probably gets over a 1000 calls a day.

Um huhn. So that is not working. And most of the work they do is sort of self-driven, [health] checks, giving out water bottles. They find people, and they do [their service]. So, it is actually not offloading OPD, which was the main reason.

So it hasn’t really helped—virtually nothing?

Exactly. That’s another mired issue. They kept their funding in this next budget round through the Fire Department. So, they are trying to get an oversight body or something to fix it up, so that it actually works. We’ll see.

So the federal oversight?

We have a judge, Robert Orrick, and the monitor is Robert Warshaw.

Both Roberts. Some people say they are corrupt.

Yeah, if you look at Warshaw and Associates, Robert Warshaw, he has done this little gig in multiple places. I think it was in upstate New York as well as Maricopa County, Arizona. They sort of kicked him out, because they noticed…

And he was getting a 100 Gs a year or something?

Yes, he’s getting a good amount of money. What he’s doing, and what he has done previously, his MO: he has withheld compliance, right? Saying ‘Sorry you’re not complying, not complying,’ but actually changing he reasons for it and not giving any indication of how you fix it.

The chief and the city brought [that] up at the last meeting, on Thursday, to the judge. The plaintiff’s attorney was saying, ‘This is just excuses. You shouldn’t have to be told how to be compliant. You should know what to do.’

But the issues, if you look at all the reports from the last several years from the monitor, he just shifts back and forth, back and forth, and doesn’t actually give any [reasoning] out.

So the judge told the city and the chief [of police] ‘The next time you talk to him on the phone, tell him exactly what you told me. And, if he doesn’t come back and give you what you need, talk to me. And I will make sure that it gets done.’

So now at least he is on notice, which is good.

And obviously Barbara [Lee] and Floyd [Mitchell] are pushing to end it?

The only people who are not are the Coalition for Police Accountability and the Police Commission. The anti-police activists submitted a letter to the judge. The Coalition for Police Accountability is a separate [group] founded by Rashidah Grinage, who is an activist. Currently the chair is Millie Cleveland.

So this group—a funded and organized group—is also very entrenched and considered ‘subject matter’ experts for the city on, basically, police oversight.

They sent a letter to the judge that completely disparages the whole process. It said that the Chief is against reform, that all he does is complain about the NSA [Negotiated Settlement Agreement], and he doesn’t care about getting out of it, and he thinks it’s a sham. [The letter is] talking all about how the Police Commission is not funded, the Police Commission can’t do the things they [are supposed to] do because the city doesn’t care about oversight and is not funding them.

A lot of allegations without much substance. And they’re biased. They’re not part of the city, so they don’t have to be factual in what they say.

Is the police department that corrupt?

No!

People have their doubts because from the Rider thing [a gang of corrupt cops from the 1980s and ‘90s].

There wasn’t a lot of police killing. There was one during the Oakland Occupy, and a couple out in San Leandro. And, of course, Oscar Grant but that was in 2009, and that was a BART cop.

I am a bit favorably inclined to the Celeste Guap thing [the 2016 police scandal involving an underage sex worker] because, obviously, she was very much an active participant.

Yeah.

And her mother was part of the police [a dispatcher].

And this scandal was not just OPD centered. That scandal was spread out [to other cities].

I think [she] was kind of romanticized… I actually talked to a very interesting woman, who worked undercover as a prostitute for the police—she was a policewoman. She didn’t let me interview her face front but we talked on the phone. Pretty fascinating, the way she talked about it.

There are a whole lot of questions we can jump into: Can Oakland be made into a liberal California city, or do we have to acknowledge that in any wealthy region there is poor region that has—

The public meeting, when Oakland police officers presented the proposal for new equipment, including an armored 'BearCat' car, was surprisingly cordial and humor-filled, despite the political tensions. photo: D. Blair

So, what is your definition of a liberal city?

When Sheng Thao fired Chief Armstrong, the people were saying ‘Well Armstrong may have made a mistake but he’s a pretty good guy.’ In a more traditional, semi-corrupt Oakland, we would say, ‘Well, he is from West Oakland, and he has been working here for 40 years, and let's just go with him.’

But other people said ‘Well, Sheng Thao has to uphold the law’—this was before she was busted [for corruption]—

Ha ha.

—which kind of spoiled her argument.

Other people said, ‘Well, no, Oakland has to move forward into a kind of liberal, abide-by-the-law [city]. She has to make an example and put her foot down and say, ‘We can’t tolerate any deviance.’

It is a very complicated sort of discussion. What do you feel about that?

My description of liberal is different.

I am a registered Democrat. Liberal values include treating everyone the same, trying to be equal, to decrease income disparity and try to offer supportive and preventive services in order to do that.

But I do think Oakland and the Bay Area is way more to the left than me. I consider myself a liberal and a democrat, but that is not good enough in Oakland.

When you say liberal city, I think we already have a very liberal city.

I meant full rule-of-law city.

Are you considering rule of law equals no corruption? Is that what you mean?

I mean zero tolerance of what Armstrong was accused of: [covering up] a rogue cop who fired a gun in an elevator. That’s a bad vibe.

Oh totally! There has to be rule of law; there has to consequences for actions. But I don’t believe in collective punishment, if that makes sense. So, I do agree that the people who were involved with [the discharge of a gun in an elevator] and the people who covered it up, they have to account for their actions. But I don’t think that the entire 1000 or so people who are in the department should be penalized, if that makes sense?

It is not just the police but you also have non-sworn staff, like the dispatchers. It’s 620 [officers] but you only have 520 active officers because of medical and administrative leave.

It’s been 620 for 30 years.

We had over 700 for a bit.

That was for just one year, when [Mayor] Libby Schaaf refunded the police on the down low, and she even got it up somehow. She did that amazing thing.

Yeah.

I remember when Jerry [Brown] put a proposal [on the ballot] saying—for some reason he split the proposal in half—he said should we get 80 more police officers and move from 620 to 710 or whatever it was. And Proposition B was: Should we finance the 80 officers.

So, Proposition A passed with 99%—

Of course!

—but Proposition B, nothing. That was kind of the beginning of this whole…

You asked, ‘Why did I go into this?’

So, like a lot of people since the pandemic, [I noticed] crime has increased everywhere in our city. And it has gotten closer and closer to your neighborhood, if it wasn’t there already. If you weren’t a victim of crime, you are by now, either property crime or other crime. Or you have seen crime happening right in front of you.

We had a shooting in our neighborhood and neighbors banded together—

Right here?

Right here. Over catalytic converter theft, they shot at the person who was—

A homeowner shot at the—.

No, the catalytic converter thief shot a homeowner.

In addition, we had a lot of break-ins. Again, the level of crime here is nothing compared to other parts of Oakland. But, I think, it is the fact that—and people have talked about this—the quote unquote spread [of crime]. Everyone is sort of more aware of it.

And whether that is fair or not fair, I can’t say, but all I can tell you is my experience. A lot more people were really scared. They were wondering: ‘Where are the police when you call them? Why do they take so long or only come at two o’clock in morning? Why have we never seen a police officer patrol our area?’ These questions came up.

You can barricade all you want, in your house, in your neighborhood, whatever, but that doesn’t change the fact that the entire city is hurting, right? And if you don’t fix the systemic issue, you’re not going to be able to to fix anything, if that makes sense.

Staffing and policy is what I am focusing on, basically.

Dr. Mandal arriving at Oakland's City Hall to try her luck with elected officials. photo: courtesy R. Mandal

When did you start doing that?

About a year ago.

I find that one of the interesting things about Oakland, is these millionaire districts.

I know—crazy disparity!

I used to come right up here to rehearse with my band.

Where? Winters’ house?

No, I forget exactly. It was the same exit but up on the hill. It was an architect friend, he built a house but he couldn’t sell it so he moved in. It was so steep there—nowhere to walk—but a nice place to rehearse.

I am assuming that the vast majority of these [Montclair] people are bleeding heart liberals who moved to Oakland—because they could have easily moved to Sausalito.

Of course.

But they moved to Oakland, and they volunteer, and they donate. Some of them may even invest in things or run non-profits, or something like that.

I love that because I grew up [next to] the Harlem ghetto, but I went to a very elite private school—so I have always had a mix of people—

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Racism was over for me in 1960 but classicism is even harder. But that, to me, is also over. You know, Keith Richards says it very well, ‘Just because I am a billionaire, doesn’t mean you can treat me like shit.’ And Oakland has achieved a type of classist equality or unity.

I would counter that.

I am saying compared to other places.

Oh completely—California in general. The majority of the metropolitan areas of California are definitely like that, [very liberal] compared to other areas. But I think in Oakland there has been more of a divide in the ideologies of different areas of the city.

So, the San Francisco Chronicle, I think last fall [actually April 11. 2025, see article], published a great article about the different electoral groups in Oakland . And where they are geographically located, and what were their main thoughts about public safety, the police, about homelessness, about all these different issues: What was important to them?

You saw there was a big divide between quote unquote The Hills and West Oakland, but East Oakland [the poorest part of the city] and The Hills have very similar values.

That is interesting. I have to look that up.

I can send it to you. It was a fantastic article, especially when it came to public safety. That was just mind boggling. The issue is that, when it comes to voter turnout, The Hills obviously has a higher voter turnout then East Oakland. But when you combine West Oakland and the middle Jack London area, and another [the rest of the city], those outweigh the turnout on The Hills and the East.

And they were talking about what are the prevailing populations and who shows up to vote, and who’s basically making those decisions. It is very interesting, and I do recommend you see that. It does show there is a classist slash geographic divide.

There is always a certain amount of classist stuff but I think, just by virtue of being here, people are—

People are way more open [in Oakland], I agree. But in the government, there it is the different.

Well, the city government was completely captured by woke people.

Yes.

My fear is that so many people moving in—and I go on NextDoor, and I can hear that they’re grumbling—as more and more people move in—and, of course, the Black population has gone from 50% down to 21%—there will come a time when they are not going to stand for it anymore. They’re going to just start voting and going to City Council meetings and various things.

Un huh.

I’m predicting, down the road, ten or 15 years, there is still going to be an entrenched, you know, thug population, who are just rebels—

Yeah, yeah.

—and they’re mugging people and they’re making bank and stuff. The thing I was mentioning earlier—about Oakland being a little fuzzy on the law, and accepting some corruption—could sort of fudge things. [That would] allow the different energies to continue.

If you ever have a chance, there is a fantastic documentary called ‘Cocaine Cowboys 2’ [2006] []. The first one became famous and takes place in Miami. It follows Blanca, whatever her name is [Griselda Blanca], the famous woman narco trafficante.

Yeah, yeah.

She was an incredible murderer. Finally, her hit man said, ‘You can’t kill the kids,’ and she said, ‘Kill the kids.’ Finally, he said, ‘I can’t do this anymore’ [and he turned state’s evidence].

But anyway, the second—I made documentary films and, technically speaking, they both are terrible because they have loud music going constantly—but the second one, ‘Cocaine Cowboys 2’ [2008], is about Oakland.

Really?!?

And it’s just absolutely unbelievable, man. A guy from Oakland [Charles Cosby], he was reading the paper, and he saw a tiny notice that Blanca had fled to California, was arrested, and was in Santa Rita Prison [Dublin, 25 miles from Oakland].

What?

And this was the beginning of the Crack ‘80s. So being an entrepreneur, he could see business—

An opening!

Dr. Mandal makes another well-worded point in an Oakland Police Commission meeting. photo: courtesy R. Mandal

and markets coming. So, he went out to Santa Rita and he applied to be a visitor—she was already running the jail—and he became her lover. He would have conjugal meetings with her once a week. And something like ten days later, a skinny little Colombian girl came to his door and threw a package on the floor—ten pounds of coke! He became the biggest dealer in Oakland.

He’s very reasonable guy. He’s just an entrepreneur.

Yeah.

In any another business, he could have done very well. It doesn’t delve that much into whether he killed people or not, but it seemed like he ran a straight business and then got out. He bought a few houses or a street in East Oakland—obviously for his mother. Anyway, it is a look into this other side.

The complexity of our multiculturalism—

Agreed.

—is off the charts.

Yes.

Some people think that if you just get Black and White people together—but how ‘bout the Hmong?

Yes. That’s one of the things.

Or the Yeminis?

Yes, the Yeminis, too.

The Yeminis have been here for three generations. Now I see them all burka-ed up, much more than five years ago.

I assume that’s from the antisemitism and the woke thing and they think, ‘Oh, great, we’re moving toward that.’ I’ve tried to interview them, too. It’s hard to get them to commit.

Yeah.

I got [a Yemini store] on my corner. I knew the guy there for 20 years, but he moved back to Yemen—

Argh!

with his fifth wife. We were friends. I felt safe, going there. I knew he would jump out from behind the counter with his shot gun.

Right.

We called him Muhammad for some reason, but his name was actually Ahmed, we learned later. One time I said to him, ‘Muhammad, how many people have you seen killed on this corner?’ ‘Oooh, many, many,’ he said, smiling. ‘How many?’ ‘Oh many, many.’ ‘How many? Give me a number, ten? ‘Ten!?!? Acchhh!’

Way more!

It’s insane. This is like a block from my house.

And I also knew his nephew, who shot himself. I guess he was pulling a gun on a [robber]. He got kicked out of the family for becoming a druggie.

Muhammad gave me insight into the community. His father was born here—so they’re born here—but, I guess, because they live in the ghetto and deal with mostly alcoholics, there is no connection to the community. There is no interest.

At the Oakland Street Fair, I did see what looked like a Yemini girl, who was scantily dressed. So, it looked like she had transitioned over.

Yeah.

It’s a very weird part of our multicultural mix: They’re over here, on the side, selling alcohol to the heathens—

Yes, ha, ha, ha.

and retiring back to Yemen—even though they are born here! But I did find a couple of enlightened ones—I mean, not enlightened—

More westernized?

I mean hipsters, whatever. I met one ten years ago and was going to do a graphics job for him, but it never came to fruition.

I have reached out to bunch of people to do an interview? I couldn’t find anyone. I am just picking up information. I just go over to my corner store.

Yes, I was going say that.

I just chat with the guys working there. They let go of a bit of information. Whatever, as you know it’s an enigma, it’s a complexity.

It is so multicultural, which is fantastic, but then it is also hard, as you said, to get cohesion.

Yeah. No, it’s impossible.

It’s impossible to get a coalition of people together, because they’re so disparate, right? And different lifestyles, different ideas. It is very hard to get a consensus.

So, the people who come into government, right, are some of the people who can get a consensus. They’re a group who are very organized and have a cohesive message, which may not be the message of the majority. But, because they have that organization, cohesion and financial support, they’re able get into government and do the policies that match their values, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. Of course, you’re familiar, we’re in a kind of multicultural crisis worldwide.

Oh yeah.

England is just freaking out.

Un huh.

New York is about is about to go socialist—and, umm, that’s why I really love Oakland.

Yeah.

Well, first of all: California!

Of course.

I did interview a guy in my neighborhood who ran a little league [baseball team] and he would take the kids to the Bay—they had never seen it before. But, of course, you know, someone has a car, and they could drive in two minutes—

Yeah.

to the Bay. But they’re not interested.

[His neighborhood is] called Ghost Town and is right next to my neighborhood, and now there is brewery called Ghost Town. I was offended by that. It’s like having a bar in Auschwitz called The Gas Chamber.

Yeah, that’s not, that’s not…

But, whatever. It is beneficial, you know, it brings business, people. There is taco truck there.

Yeah.

West Oakland is booming, I don’t know if you’ve been to Raimundi Park?

Yes, it’s amazing, Prescott Market, all of it, yeah!

But, it seems to me that—I love Prescott Market, it’s all very multicultural—but they’re all techies knocking down 150 Gs a year. At some point, they’re going to have nothing of [common] interest with Celeste Guap and her family.

And, ah, I don’t see how we’re going to grow together.

Exactly. We are growing more apart. I think that is what it is, and the resources are also being spread more apart. So, I do agree. The people who need it the most are not always the beneficiaries.

And also, there was this: maybe I sent it to you? The Bay Area Council Economic Institute just put out a report about Oakland and how the public safety is affecting the economy.

Of course.

We already know, like duh!

They put facts and figures and everything else in it. [They showed] just how, yes, there may be areas that are booming, comparatively, but in the majority of Oakland, business is down. Businesses are leaving, real estate values are going down, rents are… everything is dropping. Business tax revenue is going down because there are less businesses.

The main reason why is people are not comfortable going into those areas because they don’t feel safe. And the businesses themselves are being broken into. It is too expensive to run a business in Oakland because of all that overhead [from the theft] and they’re leaving. [The report] quantified and they did surveys and everything else to show that.

Even though you have nice pockets [of the city]—what looks to be really awesome things—not enough people are coming down into Oakland, even from the East Bay.

When they should! We’re like the number one foodie city in the country!

It was voted number one by Conde Nast! I don’t know how that happened.

But hey—even with that—people are still not coming!

What I assume happened is that: In the Covid bust, rents became very available, and there are foodies all over the Bay Area, and they looked over—and there were a bunch of new building—

Yeah, there were.

And they said, ‘It is pretty cheap,’ and they moved in and started doing new stuff.

I actually put that out on my building chat, and one of the people in the building runs a Korean restaurant. I said, ‘Did anyone else notice this happening, becoming number one restaurant [city in US].’ He said, ‘Yes, and I am one of them. I started,’ such and such a place.

It’s a huge industry and experimental, and there is so much of it.

But, you know, the majority of Oakland—they were surprised. ‘What do you mean number one?’ ‘What are you talking about?’ Again, it is because, I think, not many people are going to those places from Oakland. From the East Bay, no one is coming to shop in Oakland.

Well, June’s Pizzeria in West Oakland—

June’s is different.

You’re going to have these amazing spots. But, as a whole, the economy is down, because people aren’t coming. Places like June, places like Raimundi, places like Prescott show the amazing potential of the city. The amazing potential—and the fact that we are not reaching that [potential] across the city. I mean, right?

To deal with the crime… Well, Armstrong, he started a few things—I don’t think he started this one thing—but they were paying parolees to go to parole meetings, a little amount. Twenty bucks if you do this, 50 bucks if you do that, and it was working.

That is the thing that is so amazing, four miles from [Oakland] down Telegraph is UC Berkeley, you could walk it. It would take you about one hour.

Yeah, yeah.

One time, I was at party, and I mention I had been at Castlemont High School doing a photo shoot. I said, ‘Boy, that place is rough,’ and she said, ‘It’s not that bad. We got 30 people into Ivy League colleges last year.’ I said, ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah, I’m the head of advanced placement.’

And so, the combination of money, and intellect and talent, and poverty and tragedy, and where it can bleed across. The opportunity, you know. Huey Newton’s brother Melvin became a professor at Laney [College], I think.

For those who want to get out of it, it is possible. But some don’t. They’re rebels and, of course, rebels get the girls. And they get respect in the hood.

Un huh.

Now this guy Charles Cosby is the type you need to bring out and talk about… whatever. I’m just spit-balling here.

That is why, I think, in the city, there are plenty non-profits that provide the mentoring, that provide the coaching, that try to do these preventive practices, right? Try to change that culture.

Yeah. It seems there are actually more non-profits than anywhere else.

Yes, that is correct. It seems that way.

And I think a lot of it comes from right around here [the Oakland Hills].

Yes. I think it is a great thing because the need is there. The need is certainly there.

The flip side of it is: Who is watching where is the money coming from? Is it being used appropriately? Especially if it is city money—but that’s a whole other story. But yes, the need is definitely there.

Oakland has got such diversity but also such disparity that you need to do something in order to bridge that gap.

Yeah.

The study I was telling you about: If you want to fix the economy, you got to fix public safety. And to fix public safety, number one—and I agree with all their recommendations—you have get the police out of federal oversight. If you do that, you free up the police of a lot of administrative work, which the police currently does, which they don’t really need to do.

The second one they said was, we need to fix the civilian police oversight agencies that we have. We have too many! We have the Police Commission, then the investigative branch of the Police Commission, and then the audit branch of the Police Commission. There are three separate ones.

And the only one that has law enforcement experience is the audit branch. So the people doing the investigations and the people doing the policy work have no law enforcement policy or practice experience.

So this is just the Woke Mafia?

Exactly. They are saying you need to revise that. You can still have community members, [but] make it one organization. Still have community members, but also have law enforcement to be part of that process, too. And they said, if you have civilians out there, and they have this much power, it is very easy for them to become manipulated.

Which is what is happening now.

Yup. And the $20 million for dealing with the [federal] oversight, that is the salaries for 80 police officers we’ve been waiting for 25 years!

Exactly! We could save a ton more money, and make our officers more efficient, if we get [relief from federal oversight].

I thought it was very interesting. A lot people say, ‘Oh yes, if we have more police everything would be fine,’ and I agree with them, but you also have to think about the policy aspect and the oversight aspect.

And you need more MACRO—I mean, 26 people, man! Three calls a day?

But you have to make sure that MACRO can really respond to those calls. Because, currently, there are so many regulations about what calls they can take. That’s why they only take three [calls] from OPD. If you are going to do something like that, make sure they are trained, and that you have the policy, whatever, the requirements, so they can actually offload case.

Because, currently, they can’t.

A friend told me, when they put the call out for MACRO, 1500 people went down—I think that’s what he told me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

People are interested.

Well, Curtis Silva, he’s kind of a right-wing guy, and he is still running for mayor of New York.

Ha, ha, ha.

But, you know, he actually had people out on the streets and patrolling neighborhoods, you know.

Oakland actually did that in 2006, very briefly. So, in 2006 the murder rate jumped back up. And people were so freaked out, because of the Crack ‘80s—there were the Crack ‘90s, too.

Yes, yes.

They were only ten years out, and they were so freaked out. Pastors and council members started walking the streets of East Oakland. And [the murder rate] went down, it really had an effect.

I would have thought the Woke Mafia would have done something like that, instead of just complaining. It seems like a pretty good way to make your presence known and to be useful, that sort of thing.

I agree. There are a lot of word: you have to do more ‘community policing’ and you have to do more ‘violence prevention.’ And that’s great, but you also have to have enforcement. There is a lot of talk and lot of money going into things, but there’s not boots on the ground.

It’s not transferring over.

They do actually have an immense amount of programs. I haven’t done a comparative study, but paying the parolees, all the different things. They had midnight basketball, before Covid.

Covid obviously hit a lot. And it is still on its way out, and we are still trying to rebuild.

Covid was bizarre. There was no traffic law in West Oakland. People just running right through red lights—well, they would look both ways.

Ha, ha. Well, it is still like that!

Currently right now, in the past three years, [many] pedestrian deaths. There’s been over 30 people who die on the streets of Oakland every year, from pedestrian and bicyclist due to automobiles, due to speeding and running red lights.

And that is just appalling—it is the highest in the area!

Yup.

Um, so, you know, when these activists talk about they want less [police] pursuits? What is happening currently? The number of people fleeing police has gone up by 300%. We have more people fleeing, the police just can’t pursue them.

There is a sense of lawlessness out there. You can get away with running red lights, you can get away with speeding, because no one is going to really catch you, right? I think there is a relationship between that. There is a relationship between quote unquote this sense of lawlessness, people just not following the rules anymore, and now, unfortunately, more people being killed.

Yup, yeah, that is true.

But you are still committed to Oakland? Or?

Yes, of course! Ha.

I think my number one goal is policy.

It is trying to counter the narrative, that is in the civilian oversight [people] and even in city government. There is this narrative that police are lazy, police don’t do their jobs, we don’t need that many police. That’s what I am trying to counter, really.

And it is the data and fact of just showing up at these meetings and saying [what I know]. The problem is: the only people who are showing at these meetings and speaking, as members of the public, are these activists!

Yup, so you show up?

I show up, and I am not a member of anybody. I’m just a homeowner, showing up to these meetings to counter that.

So, you get up and speak?

Oh yeah, I have been, for like a year. And I bring facts. I bring data, just like the article that you read [see it here].

It was very good, actually.

And that’s what I bring up, what you read.

And you have some journalism experience?

None, I am just a physician. This is my first foray into anything like this.

What do your neighbors think? Are people supporting you?

Oh completely.

If I didn’t have the support of my neighbors… That’s why I go. I am going there to represent my neighbors. I bring neighbors with me. We car pool in my minivan. Many speak as well. I encourage them. I say, ‘Just say what you think. You have one or two minutes and just speak your mind.’

But when we go there, we get heckled by those people, they boo us.

And are they mostly People of Color, or mostly White?

Both. It’s just the activists, those same activists show up every time. This is the first time they have had a countering [opinion], someone coming in with something different to say. They are challenged by it.

Instead of trying to go against the message, they go against the messenger.

Ad homonym?

They call me racist. They call me Trumpist. They say I am a plant from the Police Union.

You are what?!?

I’m a plant from the Police Union. I have come up and said, ‘Nope, I have no relationship with any of these people. I’m not paid.’ I am as a homeowner, as a mom, because I want a safer city.

I am here because I care.

Aah.

And they can’t seem to make sense of that. I have been a pain in their side.

What I do, I try to expose. I try to share this message with my neighbors. We have our neighborhood council. Just share that this is what has been going on in the city. It has been going unchecked for years.

So, if you don’t like it, come and speak up. Ha, ha, ha.

Absolutely. Well, you are doing God’s work. It is an incredible thing to have so many communities jammed into one municipality. I guess Montclair is not part of Oakland?

It is!

Ah, Piedmont is not part of Oakland.

The City of Piedmont is surrounded by Oakland. It has its own separate police, its own city government.

But this area [Montclair]—we’re all Oakland.

It’s fabulous, and it goes on for ten miles

Ha ha ha. Our city is fantastic. I love going to all parts of our city. I’ve worked in all parts of our city. I have walked it.

As a physician?

Yes.

I used to do wound care in nursing homes. I would go to nursing homes in West and East Oakland, and I treat the patients there. I talk to the nurses and the staff and everyone else. So, I am familiar with these different areas of Oakland.

Unfortunately, you know, when I come and speak, the Police Commissioners [say], ‘We only hear complaints from people not affected by crime. And your views really don’t matter.’ Another Commissioner said, ‘If you are criticizing the Commission, you are anti-Black.’ So, that was discouraging.

Hold on, a commissioner said, ‘If you are criticizing us, you’re anti-Black’?

Yeah, and that was when I brought 15 of my neighbors to the Police Commission to speak up, supporting the police chief in his changes to the pursuit policy.

Was that Mitchell at that time?

Yeah, Mitchell.

This was just a few months ago. That was their response to that. From there, I told my neighbors, ‘There is no point in coming to these meetings. You are not going to be able to change their minds.’

They are actively trying to dissuade other views.

Un huh.

I changed the strategy to go to the city council meetings, because they are elected officials. They do listen to the constituents and, actually, you do make more headway there. And they have more power. And they will respond to feedback whereas the Commission is unelected, and they can sort of do whatever they want.

They’re not held accountable by the public.

Right, right. So, it is basically people protecting their turf, shouting you down. Just accusing you—

Exactly.

Because they have had that turf for a long time. They’ve had nobody come and counter that narrative. Like ever! Then I showed up.

I am not some, I don’t know… I am educated, I speak well, I come with data. I am not just like yelling at them or anything like that. Over time I hope I develop a little bit of credibility, right? In order to counter that.

Do you ever think of running for City Coun—

No way, no!

I think of myself as I cheerleader for Oakland, right? I want to spread awareness—that’s number one—spread awareness, educate, encourage participation.

The more your voter base is engaged and participating, then they are going to make better decisions when it comes to the ballot box. And that’s where change can happen. That’s the only reason I am doing this. I am not interested in any political job.

Are there any City Councilors from up in the Hills? There must be one or two.

Our District Four City Councilmember lives up here, Janani Ramachandran, she lives up here in the Hills. Usually everyone else lives in their district.

Yes, OK. Well, incredible work you’re doing.

I hope it was helpful.

Yes, very helpful.

This interview was done on 7/12/25. For more on Dr. Mandal, see "From Peru to Oakland: An Indian American Journey". Posted on Aug 28, 2025 - 05:43 AM
Not in Our Town: Billings, Montana
by Doniphan Blair

From Native Americans to Blacks and average Montanans, the people of Billings stood with their Jewish neighbors when they were attacked by neo-Nazis. courtesy: Not In Our Town organization

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

IN A BOWL IN THE PLAINS OF EASTERN
Montana, Billings may seem far from Jewish life, but its Jews arrived in the 1880s, consecrated a cemetery in 1919, and built their first synagogue in 1944. In 2005, they opened a larger synagogue, big enough for a congregation of 60 or so families but too small for a full-time rabbi. A student rabbi from Los Angeles flies out once a month or on the high holidays. Montana’s largest city, Billings has 121,000 people, making the 1000 or so Jews less than 1%.

I first spoke with Carol Roberts in 2024, a striking and engaging woman who was in Billings during the Menorah Incident, later known by the catch phrase "Not in Our Town." Jewish and from Cincinnati, she met her Montanan husband, Don, in college. Although he didn’t convert to Judaism, Carol’s three daughters all got Bat Mitzvahed, and Carol served on the board of Billings’ one synagogue, Beth Aaron. Carol comes from a family of activist Jews, notably her grandfather Alex Frieder and his brothers. They had a cigar company in the Philippines during World War Two and helped over 1200 Jews find refuge there, as detailed in the documentary “Escape to Manilla”.

Carol Roberts shows me around Congregation Beth Aaron and some of its striking art. photo: D. Blair

On my recent August 2025 visit, Carol gave me a tour of the small temple’s lovely sanctuary, with seats for 100, and colorful art. She also gave me a copy of Julie Coleman’s history of Montana’s Jews, “Golden Opportunities”, which started when merchants came in covered wagons to supply the gold miners and settlers. I told Carol about my friend Joe Folberg, from St Louis, who did much the same in modern times, driving around the West with a trunk filled with goods priced better than the monopolistic trading posts. The Beth Aaron Synagogue got its name when the merchants who founded it, in the spirit of the West, gambled for the naming rights, and Louis Harron won.

Carol didn’t experience much antisemitism in Billings, which won the All-America City Award in 1992, except in 1980, shortly after she moved there. She awoke one morning to rock salt in her plants and “Death to the Jews” in shaving cream on her front window. She and Don quickly cleaned it up, so to not frighten their daughters, one now a doctor in DC, another a political consultant in California, and the third an orthodontist still in Billings.

That was an isolated incident until the early ‘90s, when the skinheads and Ku Klux Klan became active. They distributed Klan newspapers and flyers, which attacked mostly homosexuals and Jews, according to the Facing History and Our Selves website. It has an excellent article, “Not in Our Town” (8/2/2016), from which I borrowed much of the following.

As usual things started small: a bumpersticker saying “Nuke Israel” on a stop sign near the synagogue, a beer bottle coming through the window of Uri Barnea, conductor of the Billings Symphony and an Israeli immigrant. “It started in October with headstones being turned over in cemetery,” Carol told me. But it took off in December 1993, when a large cinderblock smashed through the window of Tammie and Brian Schnitzer's home.

Police Chief Wayne Inmans, who grew up among prejudiced people but enlightened himself, readily joined BIllings' 'Not in Our Town' movement. photo: D. Blair

The attackers hit the bedroom window of five-year-old Isaac because it had a menorah, in celebration of Hanukkah, the Jewish winter “Holiday of Lights.” Fortunately, Isaac was watching TV with his 2-year-old sister and a babysitter in the living room. The sitter didn’t see the broken window or call the police, but Brian did.

As it happened, Billings’ police chief, Wayne Inman, was well versed in the issues, having just moved from Portland, Oregon, where an Ethiopian student, Mulugeta Seraw, was killed by members of an Aryan group in 1988. Billings’ neo-Nazis were largely imports from Portland, in fact, since some had obtained witness protection there. Chief Inman even knew one personally from arresting him.

Already in 1993, Margaret MacDonald, a mother of two and the part-time director of the Montana Association of Churches, was organizing a statement against hatred and bigotry. Despite initial resistance, she persisted and more than 100 organizations and 3,500 people signed the resolution. Indeed, Margaret, Tammie Schnitzer and others had already formed the Billings Coalition for Human Rights. “This wasn’t a Jewish issue,” Tammie said. “It was a human rights issue. We wanted to make the community aware of what was going on.”

In October, the Jewish cemetery was vandalized, and on the Jewish New Year, later in the month, a bomb threat was made to the synagogue during the children’s service. The synagogue elders, “seemed to feel that to acknowledge a problem or identify ourselves as being different would make us stand apart,” Tammie said. Rejecting that strategy, she urged her fellow Jews to speak out. “I wanted to let people know what was happening. But some members felt that we would put ourselves in more danger. We didn’t know what to do.”

Graffiti on the house of Native American-White couple: Natives were also effected by the racist attacks and were active in protesting against them. image: unknown

In the following weeks, many Billings residents took action. When skinheads started showing up at the African Methodist Episcopal Church—Montana has a small but well-established Black community, descendants of the Buffalo Soldiers—some White Christians started attending every service. In October, a Native-White interracial couple awoke to find a swastika spray-painted on their house. Graciously, the local painters’ union volunteered to repaint it.

About ten percent of Billings, Native Americans figured prominently in this story—as we can see by the many men in full headdresses in the famous panorama photo of over 100 Billings residents holding menorahs (see first photo)—although they're not mentioned much in the reporting.

The haters were especially incensed during the Christmas and Hanukkah season, hence the cinderblock through the Schnitzers’ window. The police officer who answered Brian’s call advised them to take down their Hanukkah decorations and take their kids with them, when leaving the house.

Lying in bed that night, Tammie contemplated the irony: the attack had occurred during Hanukkah, a holiday commemorating Jews who fought two thousand years earlier to worship God in their own way, also a strong sentiment in the American West, notably among Mormons. “I wondered what kind of struggle we were going to be in for,” Tammy thought (according to the Facing History and Our Selves article), “And how we could stop it before it became worse.” Tammie told a reporter from The Billings Gazette that the officer’s advice troubled her. “Maybe it’s not wise to keep these symbols up,” she said. “But how do you explain that to a child?”

When Margaret MacDonald read Tammie’s statement, she thought about how hard it would be to explain to her own children they had to take down their Christmas decorations, due to safety concerns, and she immediately called her pastor, Keith Torney.

The menorah printed by The Billings Gazette and eventually hung in over 6,000 homes and businesses. image: The Billings Gazette

“What would you think if we had the children draw menorahs in Sunday school. And if we told people to put them up in their windows?” Margaret asked. Agreeing wholeheartedly, Reverend Torney began enlisting other churches. Soon there were hundreds of menorahs in windows across Billings. “It wasn’t an easy decision,” Margaret said. “With two young children, I had to think hard about it myself. We put our menorah in a living room window, [but] made sure nobody sat in front of it.”

One of the first to put up a child-painted menorah was Becky Thomas, also a mother of two and a Catholic, who lives near the Schnitzers. “It’s easy to go around saying you support some good cause, but this was different. It was putting ourselves in danger,” Becky said. “I told my husband, ‘Now we know how the Schnitzers feel.’”

“Yes, there’s a risk,” Chief Inman told the many people calling about the safety of such a gesture. “But there’s a greater risk in not doing it.”

The editor of The Billings Gazette, Wayne Sheeley, also joined the struggle. On December 7th, he published in his centerfold a large menorah, perfect for taping in windows. Local businesses also distributed photocopies, and a billboard appeared with the iconic phrase, “Not in Our Town! No Hate, No Violence. Peace on Earth.”

The haters continued to lash out, however, breaking glass at the Evangelical United Methodist Church, taking pot shots at a Catholic school, kicking in the windows of cars displaying menorahs, and more hate speech and graffiti.

But for every menorah torn down, ten appeared. Eventually, as many as 6,000 homes or businesses in Billings, representing almost a quarter of the population, were displaying Jewish menorahs. “All along, our coalition had been saying an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us,” said Margaret MacDonald. “And God bless them, the people of this town understood.”

The citizens of Billings kept their menorahs up until the New Year, long past the end of the actual religious Hanukkah.

“The haters could attack a couple of Jewish homes,” noted Chief Inman, who grew up in community with no Jews or Blacks, where making slurs against them was common, but realized, as he went into the wider world, that was not right. “They could make a second wave of attacks on Christian homes and churches. But they could not target thousands of menorahs.”

The Not In Our Town movement was picked up across America: shown here activists Camille Taylor and Suresh Krishna from Bloomington, Indiana, on a visit to Billings, Montana. image: unknown

The vandalism and hate literature and calls ended, but without good witnesses or evidence, the police were not able to make arrests. Don Roberts, Chief Inman, Brian Schnitzer, Uri Barnea and Russel Brown, a member of the African-American community joined together in a civil suit against the offenders and the Aryan Nation. “It got to the point where the names of the supporters of the Aryan Nation and KKK were going to be disclosed,” Chief Inman said. “They didn’t want to do that, and we haven’t heard from them since [due to our] threat that if they came back proceedings would start. Many moved out.”

The following year, 250 Christians joined Billings’ Jews for their traditional Passover meal and hundreds attended a concert of Jewish music organized by the Schnitzers, to show their appreciation of their neighbors and the town.

Meanwhile, the Billings Menorah Incident blew up into a world-wide story, often using the slogan “Not in Our Town,” a phrase coined by the owner of a sporting goods store, Universal Athletics,. That became the name of the movie produced by The Working Group, a nonprofit founded in 1988 in Oakland, California (see the film's short or their site). It also became a nationwide model and was adopted by many media projects, like a kids’ book, and businesses, used the “Not in Our Town” slogan.

Billings continues to be a multicultural place. Over a 100 people gathered in 2022 to commemorate the Not In Our Town movement, which started there 29 years earlier, and rededicate themselves to keeping hate out of their community. Indeed, Billings’ Jewish community is expanding and continues to thrive and a small Chabad Lubavitch center opened a few years ago.

After the 10/7/23 attack, in October, 2024, the synagogue put two billboard on Interstate 90, facing each way, of the hostages still be held, and the synagogue had a remembrance ceremony. Imagine how the Israel-Hamas War might have turned out if the progressives of the world had followed the “Not in Our Town” tradition of Billings, Montana, and stood with Israel, instead of their attackers?

Article author Doniphan Blair in front of the Beth Aaron Synagogue. image: D. Blair

“Now things are quiet, things are pretty much normal,” Carol continue. “We are not that involved with what is happening in Israel, but a member of the congregation was in the IDF and we have Israeli members. So it is never too far from our thoughts."

"There is a very small Muslim community in Billings. I have met a couple, and they are not radical folks. They left Iran or Iraq a long time ago, and they recognize the freedoms the United States provides. We have folks on both sides of the [political] isle in congregation, so we make the synagogue a political free zone, except for personal conversations.”

After Carol left, driven by husband Don, who had waited in the car, I stayed for 45 minutes. The Beth Aaron Synagogue of Billings, Montana, was the perfect place to contemplate what can happen when people of good will don’t stay silent.

Posted on Aug 21, 2025 - 12:39 PM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner July ‘25
by Karl Cohen

Lampooning Lump is a full time job. illo: Greg Perry

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

This Cartoon Corner has sections written by Leonel Cortes and Nancy Denney-Phelps.

Trump’s Hollywood Tariffs Blocked

An appeals court blocked Trump’s tariffs that are the key to his supposedly making “Making Hollywood Great Again,” but a day later he got a ruling that his tariffs can go into effect while they wind their way to the Supreme Court. Trump has claimed he wants to make the Hollywood features great again, but can he? He received a major blow when a U.S. Trade Court ruled on May 28th that he “exceed any authority granted to the president.” The ruling by a three-judge panel with the New York-based court of international trade, came after several lawsuits argued Trump had exceeded his authority.

Then on May 29th, the Trump administration filed for “emergency relief” from the ruling “to avoid the irreparable national-security and economic harms at stake”. That request was granted, leaving US trade policy “dependent on his whims and unleashing economic chaos around the world.”

White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the judges had “brazenly abused their judicial power to usurp the authority of President Trump.” She called banning Trump’s wishes as part of “a pattern of judicial overreach “ and “ultimately the supreme court must put an end to this.”

Her comments were made as judge Rudolph Contreras from the district court in Washington DC, called the tariffs “unlawful.” He ordered a preliminary injunction against the tariffs on behalf of a pair of Illinois toy importers. This ongoing legal fight is important to animation as so much of what is seen in the U.S. is animated abroad.

Scene from Genndy Tartakovsky’s 'Fixed' about Bull, an average 'good dog,' . illo: G. Tartakovsky’

The Annecy Festival

Tartakovsky’s “Fixed”, which premiered at the recent Annecy, tries hard to be outrageous and it succeeds. Director Genndy Tartakovsky’s R-rated, adult “romantic” comedy is about Bull, an average, all-around “good dog” who discovers one day that he's going to be neutered in the morning! As the gravity of this life-altering event sets in, Bull realizes he needs one last adventure with his pack of best friends and his balls, of which these are the last 24 hours! What could go wrong...? Produced by Sony Pictures Animation but handed over to Netflix to distribute, probably because it was too crude, it will premiere August 13, 2025.

Variety Loves Annecy

‘Variety’ got very excited about several shorts for grownups shown at Annecy. In an article by Jamie Lang that talks about “10 Shorts Not to Miss at Annecy 2025”, he discusses serious works not made for juvenal audiences. “Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s ‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’ is a haunting fable that delves into sorrow, love and the corrupting power of greed,” he wrote. “Premiering as one of the opening-night shorts at this year’s festival, this Canadian title showcases the duo’s signature handcrafted puppetry and surreal storytelling. With a poignant score by Patrick Watson, the film immerses viewers in a melancholic tale where a girl’s tears transform into pearls, leading to unforeseen consequences. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, this short is one in a long line of standout titles that benefit from one of the world’s most prolific and supportive public filmmaking programs.”

“Life With an Idiot” by Theodore Ushev (France) was inspired by Victor Erofeyev’s novella of the same name, and is a tour de force of political expression and raw emotion. Theodore Ushev, whose 2019 short “The Physics of Sorrow” made our must watch list at Annecy 2020, adapts the story into a stark, expressionistic film filled with jagged edits and visceral brushstrokes. In the film, a protagonist accused of not working hard enough is forced to live with an idiot as punishment. Pulled from an asylum, the nearly deaf roommate can only utter a single syllable: “Ech.” Domestic chaos leads to societal critique backed by an aggressive sound design and stark aesthetic. Ushev’s latest, produced by French powerhouse Miyu Productions, demands attention and leaves a mark.

In “Atomik Tour”, Bruno Collet (Czech Republic and France) merges social media documentary realism with surreal stop-motion as a Cold War tour guide leads us through an abandoned nuclear site via a video streaming app. With dark humor and eerie nostalgia, Collet critiques both the absurdity and the tragedy of nuclear history while occasionally shocking the audience with psychological thrills. His miniature sets brim with unsettling detail, and the uncanny monotone characters deliver deadpan lines that hit with precision. It’s a timely and quietly powerful film that exposes how we commemorate, or forget, collective trauma.

“Star Wars: Visions – Black”, Shinya Ohira (Japan) is one of the most experimental entries in the Star Wars: Visions anthology, Black by Shinya Ohira reimagines the galaxy through a gritty, impressionistic lens. Known for his frenetic animation and abstract storytelling, Ohira delivers a visually explosive meditation on conflict and identity. Far from traditional fan service, this short dives into the psychological toll of warfare and the ambiguity of heroism. It’s Star Wars stripped to its philosophical bones, raw, kinetic and unforgettable. An upbeat and frenzied jazz soundtrack fuels the most visually stunning interpretation of the Death Star’s destruction that we’ve ever seen.

To read the rest of this great article, go here.

The top Annecy Cristal award for best feature went to “Arco”, the debut feature of French director (and popular comics creator) Ugo Bienvenu. The film is about a rainbow-hued boy from the far future who finds himself trapped in the near future of 2075 after a flight goes wrong. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last month (Last year Flow was the winner at Annecy.) For a full list of winners, go here.

Scene from 'Life with an Idiot' by Thomas Ushev. illo: T. Ushev’

Ushev Gets Political

Theodore Ushev won the short film grand prize at Annecy in 2020 for “The Physics of Sorrow” and was nominated for an Oscar in 2017 for “Blind Vaysha”. This year, his film “Life with an Idiot”, was shown on opening night at Annecy. When he was invited onstage to talk about his film, at one point Ushev told the audience, “Fuck Putin, fuck Trump, and fuck Netanyahu, fuck the fascists.” The packed house of 925 people from every corner of the animation world was soon “erupting into applause.” He later added, “If you follow an imbecile, the chance you’ll become an imbecile is very high; if you admire an idiot, your risk of becoming an idiot is very high.” Other speakers also expressed their opinions of current events.

AI Both Protested and Shown at Annecy

There were 18,200 badge holders from 118 countries at Annecy making it the major annual event for animation and the forum for all things animation

Indeed, protesters at Annecy decried the use of AI in animation. Cartoon Brew, the animation watchdog, reports that an alliance of international animation unions, federations and organizations called for action over the usage of artificial intelligence, citing its destructive impact on the craft and business of animation, as well as on industry workers. One slogan at the protest was “Generative Al Does Not Support Artists, It Destroys Them.”

Over two dozen organizations issued a statement that calls on regulators and lawmakers to enact legislation that protects workers and their rights. They are also asking producers, executives and others to protect the creative culture of animation created by humans. The signers include ABRACA (animation workers union, Belgium), AWI (animation workers union, Ireland), CVVI (video game union, Spain), La Guilde francaise des senaristes (writers union, France), SNTPCT (animation/vfx workers union, France), FIMF (International Federation of Musicians), The Animation Guild (animation workers union, U.S.), SPIAC-CGT (animation workers union, France), and Kunstenbond (illustration, comic, and animation workers union, Netherlands).

Nevertheless, an animated feature made with AI was shown at Annecy. It was made in the Dominican Republic, which jumped into the animation world with its first animated feature, “Capitan Avispa” (2024), released in 33 countries. Alas, ‘Olivia & The Clouds,’ called “Wildly creative” by Cartoon Brew, seems from its trailer suggests to be a confusing, experimental independent film (more on that here).

Very Short Short Charms Annecy

The delightful 20 second short that opened Annecy was made by the Hungarian artists Fruzsina Gaal and Marcell Laszlo. Annecy present a tribute to Hungarians, see it here.

Incredibles 3 Announced

‘Incredibles 3’ is coming Pixar Animation Studios revealed during Annecy Festival. It will be directed by Oscar-nominated Peter Sohn (“Elemental”, “The Good Dinosaur”). Sohn takes over the superhero franchise’s mantel from Brad Bird, who wrote and directed the first two films and will return as screenwriter for the new sequel. Bird will also serve as co-producer.

Scene from of Pixar's 'Gatto'. illo: Pixar’

Glimpse of Pixar's Gatto

“Gatto”, slated for the summer of 2027, is set in Venice and will be directed by Enrico Casarosa for Pixar. His “Luca”, 2021, was shown on Disney+.

Capobianco Animation

The “Hugh and Fred Bird”, an animation by Jim Capobianco, is a great parody of Disney’s World, based on Wally Wood’s artwork, see it here.

Paul's alive in animation. illo: P. McCarthy’

Paul McCarthy Animation Announced

A feature based on Paul McCarthy’s book will include the voices of McCartney, Ringo Starr, Lionel Richie, Céline Dion and others. The music will be by McCartney. The story published in 2005 is about “a young squirrel named Wirral (voiced by Himesh Patel) who embarks on a journey to bring back his mother’s voice (Sugartail, played by Céline Dion) after it was stolen by a despot diva named Gretsch (Hannah Waddingham), who has banned all music and all freedom of expression.”

Disney Attacks Artists

In the early 1970s, Air Pirate Comics did parodies that offended the Disney Corporation. They took the fun-loving artists to court. Is Dan O’Neill, their leader, going to be in serious trouble again? Disney’s lawyers took the Air Pirates case all the way up to the Supreme Court. To find out about the new adventures of Dan and the documentary about the Air Pirates see Jed Riffe’s new 5-minute Kickstarter promo “MOUSETRAP: The Air Pirates War Against Disney”. It is part animated, delightful and informative. The animator is even a well-known former Pixar artist, support their Kickstarter.

Use this image to oppose AI in animation. illo: D. Blair

Disney Sues AI Company

Disney and Universal filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence startup Midjourney accusing the company of copyright infringement. The 110-page complaint says Midjourney, which was founded in 2022, “helped itself” to copyrighted material to train its software, calling the company “a bottomless pit of plagiarism.” While authors, artists, record labels and news organizations have all sued AI companies to protect their work, the new lawsuit marks a first for major Hollywood movie companies, who have, until now, kept their grievances out of court.

Disney Gets Anime-Inspire Miraculous

Disney acquires the anime-inspired “Miraculous Stellar Force”. A special will appear later this year and the new series will premiere in 2027 on Disney Channel and Disney+.

Matel Joins with Open AI

Will your child soon be able to have conversations with their favorite doll? Well, guess what: The toy company Matel is developing a partnership with Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Mattel says using the technology “will bring the magic of AI to age-appropriate play experiences with an emphasis on innovation, privacy, and safety.”(How will the porno industry use AI?)

Video Games in Trouble?

Is the video game business in trouble? Many people in the gaming industry expected it to bounce back quickly after 2022’s post-pandemic decline, but it hasn’t. Instead more than 10,000 developers lost their jobs in 2023. Wired Magazine published an article that claimed that “the bottom fell out of the game industry” in 2024. Wired quoted one expert as saying the job loss was 40% higher!

Electronic Arts is an international game developer company with corporate headquarters in the Bay Area, is undergoing dramatic strategy shifts. They recently canceled work on Black Panther, a major cliffhanger project for Disney and Marvel. EA has already announced three layoffs this year with the biggest being about 300 staffers in March according to Variety.

In May, 2025 Variety reported that the release of Grand Theft Auto 6 was planed for this fall, but the publisher, Rockstat, has moved the date to May 26, 2026. They also noted that President Trump’s unpredictable tariff policies have already had a demonstrable impact on the release of a new game new console. The asking price has risen. They speculated that overall hardware sales will struggle this year.

A scene from 'How to Train Your Dragon', a combo live action and animated movie. illo: Universal Pictures

Future for Animation’s Live Action Sequels

Will live-action sequels of animated features be profitable for Hollywood studios in the coming years? Are they an important new format that Hollywood producers can use to make money, or is the public growing tired of them?

Disney acts like their audience may be coming tired of them. Disney can count on almost all their animated blockbusters and sequels as being quite successful, but they announced they were halting production of live-action remakes after the recent failure of the “Snow White” remake. It had a $250 million budget and it only made $205 million globally. They halted work on their live-action remake of “The Sword in the Stone” (1963), but their “Moana” remake, which is almost finished, will open July 10, 2026. I suspect all the controversal press about “Snow White” while it was being made soured the publics desire to see it.

Since then “Lilo and Stitch” has come out and it turned out to be a smash hit. It is now the 3rd highest grossing film of the year (about $869 million worldwide as of June 20). While it didn’t get exceptiomal ratings (only 72% from critics at Rotten Tomatoes, fans gave it a 92%), that didn’t seem to reduce the number of people anxious to see it. On Memorial Day it broke record for the highest grossing box office on that holiday. One person who saw it told me, “I should have stayed home, it wasn’t that great.” Lukewarm press didn’t seem to hurt it.

I suspect Disney will change its mind about making live action, part animated sequels, and make more of them in the coming years. They are less expensive to make and there are lots of good candidates for this kind of film from the Disney and Pixar’s libraries.

Universal Pictures “How to Train Your Dragon”, a live action and part animated feature, is also well on its way to becoming a success. It had an impressive $198 million global opening and it scored 98% from Rotten Tomatoes. Hollywood Reporter says it sticks close to the original film. “It honors the charm of the original. It’s not an essential remake, but at least it’s not an offensive one.” It is Universal’s first remake of an animated feature and there will probably be a lot more in the future. On June 24 it sailed past $350 at the global box office.

The stars of the new hit film, 'Flow'. illo: Latvian artists

Flow Film Busts Box Office

Latvian Oscar-winning animated feature “Flow” continues to add to its impressive box office success, officially passing the €50 million ($57 million) mark at the global box office. That makes it one of the most commercially successful independent animated Oscar nominees in recent years. The film was made on a modest €3.5 million ($3.7 million) budget.

Marvel’s New Thunderbolts Loses

If “Thunderbolts” lost millions of dollars despite great reviews, where does Marvel go next? Variety reports that after 6 weeks in theaters the film had only grossed $371 million globally. Bob Iger had called the comic book adventure when it was released the “first and best” example of Marvel’s new movie strategy.

Marvel had been Hollywood’s most consistent hit maker. It is still the highest-grossing film franchise in history ($31 billion from 36 films), but bad reviews in recent years of “Captain America: Brave New World” (2025), “The Marvels” (2023) and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” (2023) have hurt the franchise’s reputation. Now, despite good reviews and good word of mouth, the box office isn’t impressive.

From the cool new kids series 'Mr. Crocodile'. illo: N/A

Nickelodeon Gets Mr. Crocodile

The new animated kids series “Mr. Crocodile” is based on the beloved French children’s book “Monsieur Crocodile a Beaucoup Faim” (Mister Crocodile Is Very Hungry) by author Joann Sfar. It follows “the toothy, loveable Mr. Crocodile” and his best friend, the human girl Daisy, “as he cheerfully navigates life with boundless enthusiasm and comical misunderstandings due to his instinctive crocodile logic. They turn everyday activities into zany adventures as they share an unconditional acceptance of each other’s approach to life.”

Sony Gives Free Animation Classes

“This Is Animation” is a new free online course designed to introduce learners of all ages to the art and industry of animation. It was created by Sony Animation in conjunction with educational platform Yellowbrick. “Animation is one of the most collaborative of all storytelling mediums. This course is about pulling back the curtain, showing the magic behind the process, and inviting new voices to explore careers--both artistic and non-artistic--in this incredible industry,” see here.

Jurassic World Returns

Universal’s ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ opened on July 2nd and “'roars to the top of the box office,” according to CNN. Universal expected it to gross about $120 million over the five-day holiday period.

China’s Drone Show Sets Record

China’s latest drone light show set a world record using 11,787 drones. To see images from other record breakers search for “world record drome display.”

The cover of the art magazine, dummy. illo: dummy

dummy Explores Art

Welcome to dummy, a new publication that explores art. Published by the writer John Kelly and The Dummy Corporation. Each issue of dummy looks at a different topic with the intent of conducting a deep examination of historical material and presenting rarely seen images, especially when it comes to creative process. Subscribers to dummy received extra bonus items and discounted shipping. Kelly has written extensively for The Comics Journal and other publications for more than 30 years and has a wide range of interests. This is the online store for The Dummy Corporation.

dummy’s premier issue features “The Art of Pee Wee’s Playhouse” as the cover story. See it here.

Mickey and Minnie Are Legal

Not well-known trivia: Mickey and Minnie Mouse are legally married, at least their voices. Their current voice actors, longtime Mickey and Minnie Mouse voice actors Wayne Allwine and Russi Taylor, tied the knot to each other. Their work friendship blossomed into genuine affection after each obtained a divorce, and they were married in Hawaii in 1991. The couple refuses to talk publicly about their romance.

Betty Boop on Broadway

Three Tony nominations but no wins for “Boop! the Musical”. It was nominated for Best Choreography, Best Costume Design for a Musical and Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical. The show received both mixed and positive reviews. It opened in April and will close July 13. Find out more about "BOOP! The Musical" here. Cartoon Brew ran a group of fun clips from Betty’s shorts.

On the other hand, “I saw it, and it’s incredibly excellent,” animation historian Jerry Beck wrote me, Everyone who sees it loves it - I did. Hopefully it will tour the country - and if so, I urge you to see it. Incredibly entertaining - and its nods to the original Fleischer cartoons couldn't be better.” See some of Betty Boop's greatest moments here.

Pixar’s Sweet, Safe Elio

Pixar’s sweet, safe space adventure “Elio”, about a kid who gets his wish of being abducted by aliens, isn’t exactly out of this world. Indeed, Angie Han of The Hollywood Reporter writes, “Cute but inessential… ‘Elio’ is a perfectly nice kiddie sci-fi adventure that does everything a movie with that description is supposed to do, but much like Elio, I frequently found myself longing for the more transportive experience, of the sort that Pixar used to make a house specialty." Its opening weekend box office was just $35 million worldwide for a film that cost about $150 million before marketing, etc. A new low for a Pixar release.

New Heart of Darkness “Heart of Darkness” is being being produced by BreakThru Films, the Polish studio behind the acclaimed oil-painting feature “Loving Vincent” directed by Gerald Conn. The work-in-progress is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness,” which also gave us “Apocalypse Now”.

AI Panic at Cannes

The Hollywood Reporter says, “At Cannes Lions, as ad-world elites sipped rosé and eyed yachts, one question kept surfacing: Are we being replaced? ‘A lot of what the agencies have done can be replicated pretty well by AI,’ confides one advertising ex-CEO.” The full article is titled "Madison Avenue Braces for the AI Apocalypse".

New MeTV Toons Network

MeTV Toons network was launched on June 30th by Weigel Broadcasting Co. and DirecTV. A few days before, they announced a multi-year carriage agreement for Weigel’s classic animation channel MeTV Toons, which joined DirecTV’s streaming and satellite homes on Monday, June 30. MeTV Toons will soon be found on channel 295 for Choice and above customers, as well as inside DirecTV’s new genre packs. The network launched in June 2024.

Join a Saturday morning cartoons. illo: Minnesota Street

Saturday Morning Cartoons at Minnesota Street Project

It is delighted to announce the start of its Saturday Morning Cartoons series, which kicked off June 28th, 11-12:30 pm at 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco. Get cozy in our Media Gallery with delicious coffee and pastries from our neighbors at Piccino as we watch vintage cartoons and discuss the history of animation. The Casemore Gallery's current exhibition is “You, the performer.” Contact them to find out when their July event will happen at http://www.minnesotastreetproject.org

Two Bay Area Festivals Call for Animation Entries

The 2025 Studio 8 Film Festival is making an open call for San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) alumni, faculty and staff to submit to their “celebration of bold, original, and experimental filmmaking connected to the legacy of the San Francisco Art Institute. We welcome submissions in animation and lyrical/poetic forms in honor of Lawrence Jordan and Gunvor Nelson.”

Length less than 10 minutes and submission fee, $20, although if that presents a problem, let them know. For questions email here.

The Screening will be September 20, 2025 at The Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St, San Francisco, and selected by Christopher Coppola, Deborah Fort and Toney W. Merritt, with the deadline end of day July 28, 2025.

Brainwash Movie Drive-In/Bike-In/Walk-In Festival Calls for Entries

A unique even that has screened the weird, unusual and significantly great (but, probably, unheralded) movies of the world for the past 30 years. Every season, the Brainwash Festival screens your movies, gives awards and now going online, too! Join us! Submit your movie and/or come on out for the shows, or stay home and see how it all looks on the home movie screen. Nothin’ like it! So enter and help yourself and the movie arts at Brainwash!

You can enter your movie by clicking here, or email festival director .

Welcome To In The Loop By Leo (Leonel Cortes)

WB Splits in Two to Save Money To save the sinking financial ship of Warner Brother’s Discovery, the company has decided to split into two publicly traded companies. By mid-2026 WB is expected to become WB Streaming & Studios (S&S) and WB Global Networks (GN). S&S is dedicated to streaming while GN is meant to handle traditional television. At the same time Global Networks is expected to burden the bulk of WB’s current $38 billion debt. Cartoon Network and Adult Swim will be controlled by GN while animation studios like WB Animation, Cartoon Network Studios, and Hannah-Barbera Studios will be under S&S.

Currently it appears that this split won't affect their animation studios, but it is still too early to tell. This is an attempt to cut costs and with one new company holding the bag, there is a possible chance that Cartoon Network and Adult Swim will end up seeing a reduction in future productions.

LEO Speaks Out About One Problem With AI AI is already ruining YouTube. More and more creators are losing viewership because AI videos play into Youtube's algorithm, which focuses on consistent output. The recommendation section of YouTube is slowly being filled with AI channels that have zero substance. Although you can also argue that the general public are the reason for this. They are the consumers after all.

The Annecy panel celebrating the Cartoon Network. illo: Annecy

Talking Toons with Cartoon Network Animators At the Annecy Animation Festival, Cartoon Network held a panel celebrating its 25th anniversary. The panel varied from nostalgic stories of first working with the network to discussions about the current state of animation. Some of the discussion focused on young animators taking on show runner roles, an experience that wasn’t familiar to the industry until Cartoon Network appeared. There was also a focus on streaming and producing new shows.

Some animators pointed out that networks are only focused on existing properties and that getting in a new idea was getting difficult unless it was already a success online. While there was some pessimism, the current state of animation from their perspective was still hopeful as they mention that they get to mentor new animators and see a hopeful future in them.
Rather than recapping the recaps you can read what was discussed at the panel in Variety’s and Animation Magazine’s articles.

Adult Swim Makes Us Smile with a Show’s Renewal Adult Swim announced at Annecy that the hit series “Smiling Friends” has been renewed for a fourth and fifth season. Creators Michael Cusack and Zach Hadel held a panel for the third season of the show at the festival and discussed their creative process, go here.

The duo talked about how they don’t have a writing team and it’s just the two of them writing episodes. This creates points where some episodes cause trouble due to meeting deadlines. These “stress episodes” have the pair of writers scrambling to write an entire script in a day, with it ultimately working out as they find something silly to tie the episode together. Despite the stress, they enjoy the ability to have hands-on control over their show, and it allows them to explore the world they created and the characters that inhabit it. While the series is renewed to season 5, Cusack and Hadel have discussed that the series will eventually end rather than going on forever. Season 3 of Smiling Friends will premiere in the fall.

Scene from 'Laika'. illo: unknown

Laika Has Us Speak to the Dead Again This Halloween Following the financial success of “Coraline”’s 2024 re-release, award winning stop-motion studio, Laika is planning to re-release "ParaNorman" in theaters this Halloween. This re-release has Norman and friends remastered for 3D and 2D formats. The film will be accompanied by a new CG short film ParaNorman: The Thrifting. Those who missed the original release of this film or just want a reason to go to the theater, this re-release will start October 25th and last for one week only.

Pixar Shoots for the Stars but Falls ShortDisney-Pixar's newest film Elio was released in June with disappointing numbers. Making only $21 million on its opening weekend, this makes Pixar’s biggest box office bomb and the first bomb this summer. With a budget of $150 million and other blockbusters coming out, it’s unlikely that this film will recoup its budget by the end of its box office run. Elio has an interesting production history with its original director being replaced by two other directors. Comparing the original trailer for the movie and the current trailer, there appears to be a shift in tone from a reluctant hero forced into his situation to a film about a kid having a safe space adventure.
Multiple reviews for this film lament that current Pixar stories focus on children as main characters and stories that clearly are catered to kids instead of all ages.

Scene from 'KPop: Demon Hunter'. illo: Netflix

Sony Battles Demons with Netflix Original Animated by Sony Animation, “KPop: Demon Hunter”s, follows a K-pop group that come from a long line of demon hunters. Their goal is to seal the demon realm off for good while maintaining their pop-star status. The only issue they face is a new boy band consisting of demons getting in their way. This Netflix original film provides amazing visuals that Sony Animation has been improving upon over the years. The cartoony facial expressions show that CG animation has evolved so much that we’re getting close to what could be achieved with 2D animation. Those who are fans of the K-pop genre will the musical sequences as it captures the visuals of live action K-pop music videos. The only disappointing thing about the film is its action sequences and the lack of character development for the side characters. Regardless, this is still a visually great film worth watching.

Kojima Productions is Delivering an Adult Animated Feature Video game series Death Stranding is getting an animated feature. Set in a post-apocalyptic United States after the “Death Stranding” event, creatures that hunt and consume humans roam the planet while the last remaining humans hide in colonies. Currently the film is being scripted by Aaron Guzikowski and is animated by Line Media. The series is also getting a live action adaptation produced by A24. These announcements come after the announcement of the game’s sequel Death Stranding 2: On the Beach which released on June 26th exclusively for the PlayStation 5.

Fists Fly in Invincible Fighting Game Amazon’s hit animated show Invincible is getting a 3v3 fighting game. Invincible VS is slated to come out in 2026. Fans of the show and the comics will have plenty of characters to choose from. See the trailer for the game.

Legal Troubles Continue with South Park The creators of South Park are entering a new legal battle against Paramount. The claim is that Jeff Shell, soon to be new president of Paramount, interfered with contract negotiations between the creators and potential buyers of South Park. Evidence shows that Shell tried to change contracts that Netflix and WB-Discovery would sign in order to benefit Paramount. These changes include the length of contracts lasting from 10 years to 5 years and giving Paramount+ a 12-month exclusive extension of ownership over streaming rights. This lawsuit does not appear to pause any current deals involving the show, so expect to see the new season on July 9th.

Social Outcasts Find a Home Titmouse and cartoonist KC Green are working together to develop an animated version of his webcomic, The Anime Club. The story follows four outcast anime fans who are a bit too obsessive about their hobbies. The series has been in development since the start of the pandemic, according to Green. In a world where anime’s popularity has grown since the original webcomic came out, will our heroes change for the better? Probably not. You can find the original comic here.

Nickelodeon Breaks Millions of Tiny Hearts Emmy award winning show “Tiny Chef” has been cancelled by their home network Nickelodeon. Having lasted for 3 seasons and won 2 Emmys, the animators announced the cancellation of the show through social media. The heartbreaking minute clip shows the Tiny Chef hearing about the news and ending with him sobbing on his bed. The animators followed that clip with another one a few days later with the chef playing a banjo cover of Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones. These clips aren’t just the animating team venting their frustrations but are also a call for help. Currently the team is attempting to crowdfund Tiny Chef through their website. So far fans have donated over of $100,000.

Scene from German filmmaker Heinrich Sabl's first animated feature, 'Memory Hotel'. illo: H. Sabl

The Nancy Denney-Phelps Section

International TrickFilm Festival The first signs of spring for me are the flowers in my garden and the International Trick Film Festival in Stuttgart. The two new festival heads, Annagret Richter, Artistic Director, and Heike Mozer, Financial Director, are a dynamic team, and this is their second year.

The positive changes were very obvious right away. First of all, the entire staff was much more relaxed than I have ever seen them. Annagret and Heike were everywhere, talking not just with the animators that they already knew but also introducing themselves to first-time festival guests, making them feel welcome.

The Awards Ceremony and party have been moved from Sunday to Saturday evening so everyone can go to the Sunday bar-b-que and have a relaxing day before heading home on Monday. The programming was very strong with an emphasis on stop motion. There was also an Animation Nightmare Special and a focus on Swiss animation, as well as numerous workshops, masterclasses, and talks. So many interesting things were happening that it was impossible to see and do everything. Another big change this year was the delicious lunch that was provided to every participant. This may seem like a small detail but to animators, especially the students, who are on a budget, it is a big deal.

I had the honor of being a member of the Feature Film Selection Committee. My three fellow committee members and I are quite proud of the films that we selected. In years past the Feature Films catered heavily to family-friendly films. This year they were mostly more adult-oriented.

Heinrich Sabl’s “Memory Hotel” In 1999 German filmmaker Heinrich Sabl, known for his pre-2000 stop-motion animation, began work on his first animated feature, “Memory Hotel”. After over twenty years of work on his film it was finally screened in the Stuttgart Feature Film Competition. The film opens in May 1945 when five-year-old Sophie flees from the Russian front with her parents to a small Polish village. They have tickets for a ship bound for America. On the way to the harbor, they stop at a hotel where, to their surprise, they find a Nazi officer, Scharf, and Hitler Youth Beckman.

Sophie’s parents are killed during a fight with Scharf and a Soviet soldier named Vasily and the child loses all of her memories. As Sophie grows up, she is forced to prepare food for her captors and the hotel guests. Beckman has been hiding in an alcove by the elevator shaft ever since Sophie’s parents were killed.

Time passes and Sophie is forced to marry Vasily. She also forms a friendship with Beckman. Memory Hotel has many twists and turns in its 100-minute running time. Henrich Sal has created an exciting, disturbing film incorporating dialogue that is a realistic portrait of the German/Soviet history of guilt and their attempts to cope with it.

During selection, I watched “Memory Hotel” with an eye for how it would fit into the festival and for the overall quality of the film. I was so intrigued with it that I immediately watched it again paying close attention to the story and dialogue. I find the film fascinating.

At Stuttgart, Henrich Sabl gave a presentation titled “Memory Hotel – A Quarter of a Lifetime for a Film”. During it, he showed a video about the making of the puppets and another one related to his work process. He talked about how he balanced working on a film for so long with the demands of daily life. He also revealed that he is not done with the film and that there will be a slightly different version at Annecy in a few weeks. He revealed that one of the reasons, aside from financial constraints, that the film took so long was that after 9/11 he made major changes in the film and more changes were made after Russia invaded the Ukraine.

Illicit Love from South Korea Another feature film that touched me was “The Square” by South Korean animator Bo-sol Kim. The film is a romantic drama set in North Korea. Although it is beautifully animated with soft colors and lovely backgrounds, the 73-minute film portrays the harsh realities of life in present day North Korea. The story is about Isak Borg, the First Secretary of the Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang, North Korea, and Bok-joo, a local traffic officer. Borg is secretly dating Bok-joo and wants to marry her. This is not possible because his tour of duty is almost up and he cannot stay in the country and under North Korean law she cannot leave the country.

One day after Borg sees a suspiciously acting man at the couple’s secret meeting place, Bok-joo disappears. With his departure date nearing, he begins a frantic search for her and starts to suspect that his interpreter Lee Myeong-jun has been spying on him and has discovered his secret meetings with Bok-joo.

Best Feature Film Award The jury gave The Best Feature Film award to Laszio Csaki from Hungary for Pelican Blue, a film that I like a great deal. I have written about it extensively in previous articles so I won’t go into detail here except to say that the film is about a little-known piece of history, Hungarians stepping out from behind the Iron Curtain, freedom to travel, and three young men who create the opportunity to experience the outside world for a whole generation. If you have the opportunity to see this charming “gangster comedy/animated documentary” don’t miss it.

Best Short Film AwardI was extremely happy that the short film jury selected Florence Miailhe’s “Butterfly” (Papillon) for its top award for short film. All of Florence’s films are beautifully animated, visually stunning, and touching. “Butterfly” is the especially poignant true story of champion French swimmer Alfred Nakache. Born into a Jewish family in North Africa, he overcame his fear of water as a child and went on to break the world’s butterfly stroke record in 1941.

He, along with his wife and young daughter, were deported to Auschwitz, He survived the ordeal, but his family didn’t. He returned to the water for the 1948 London Olympics. At the end of his life, on his final swim, his memories flash before his eyes.

Italian Directo Matteo Burani I first met Matteo Burani in 2018 at Animarkt in Lodz, Poland, where I was the young Italian director’s pitching coach. I found his project, “Playing God”, intriguing and since then, I have followed the progress of his film. The success of the 2021 Kickstarter campaign and finally to Stuttgart, where I got to see the film on the big screen. It looks beautiful and the story is engaging. The 9-minute stop-motion film is set in an artist’s atelier where a mysterious blind sculptor has spent much of his life trying to create a masterpiece. He is surrounded by deformed figures that he considers inferior, the result of years trying to find perfection. Playing God is the story of a clay sculpture’s relationship to his creator and the elusive quest for perfection.

The stop motion film pays homage to such Eastern European stop motion masters as Jan Svankmajer, the Polish sculptors Stanislav and Szukalski, and the Italian sculptor Alberto Giancometti. Two hundred individual deformed clay puppets were made by animator and art director Arianna Gheller for the film. “Playing God” is so richly dense that you need to watch it at least twice, once to concentrate on the story and then again to focus on all of the beautifully sculpted figures.

Czechs Living Large I am fond of “Living Large”. The 88-minute Czech, French, and Slovenian film by Kristina Dufkova is based on a book by Mikael Ollivier. It is the story of 12-year-old Ben. He loves music but he loves food even more. He is constantly plagued by his school’s three bullies. His divorced parents don’t know what to do about him, and even the school nurse is concerned about his weight. Despite his love of food and his talent as a chief, Ben decides to go on a diet to rid himself of the bullies who love to torment him.

Even more important, he has met Klara, the girl of his dreams, and has fallen in love. In the end Ben learns that what truly matters isn’t how you look, it’s how you feel about yourself.

With everyone, especially young people, being constantly confronted with images in magazines, advertisements, and on television of “the perfect body”, we have become a society compulsively obsessed with obtaining the unachievable “perfect body”. Living Large is a movie with a message. not just for young people but the entire family, learn to accept and appreciate yourself.

The film was presented at 10 in the morning to a theatre full of 10 to14-year-old school children as part of the Tricks For Kids screenings. Since no one from the film’s creative team was at the festival, I was asked to talk about “Living Large” with the students after the screening.

Katharina Vogt, Program Manager for Tricks For Kids, introduced me to the audience and acted as my translator. She had come armed with a stack of questions to ask me, but after she asked me the first question hands went up all over the theatre. For the entire half hour, the students asked me all sorts of questions about my life as an animation journalist. One young boy asked me how much money I made as an animation journalist. Another young lady who wanted a photograph with me, asked when I was going to retire because she wanted my job. It was a lovely experience to be so warmly received by the students. I had a wonderful time even if we never did discuss “Living Large”.
.
My Book, On The Animation Trail My husband Nik and I gave a presentation of my book “On The Animation Trail: 20 Years of Animation Festival History”. We were interviewed by the festival’s Yannik Tessenow. We also showed a short video by Joanna Quinn about the making of the book’s covers, a short teaser for a film that German animated documentary maker Katrin Rothe is making about Nik and me, and my 2 minute 59-second film Nancy’s Spectacle(s).

Future Festivals The 2026 edition of the festival will be held from 5 to 10 May 2026. You can learn more about this year’s festival, how to submit your film for the next edition, or volunteer at their site.

Summer Reading by Nancy Denney-Phelps

My picks cover a wide spectrum—from sex in animation to the art of digital filmmaking, a practical guide to Premiere Pro for filmmakers, and expert insights for scriptwriters. No matter your passion, there’s something here for everyone.

Cover of the new book about sexy animation, 'Intimate Animation'. illo: CRC Press

”Intimate Animation” by Ben Mitchell and Laura-Beth Cowley, from CRC Press , 232 Pages, $52.72 Ben Mitchell, the editor of the United Kingdom’s Skwigly Online Animation Magazine and author of Independent Animation, and Laura-Beth Cowley, an animator and feature writer, have based their book on conversations with animators on their conversations with animations on their Intimate Animation Podcasts from 2016 to 2022. The initial podcast discussion was with the incredibly talented Czech animator Michaela Pavlatova, director of such films as the Oscar-nominated Reci, Reci, Reci (Words, Words, Words). Her erotically delightful film, Tram, won the Annecy Short Film Cristal in 2012.

To immediately set the record straight, right in the book’s prologue, the authors state that this is not a book about Hentai, a Japanese term referring to a subgenre of manga, anime, or other media that contains explicit sexual content. What it is, is an exploration of the changing trends in the animation industry since the early 2010’s. As the authors note “There has been a surge in animation projects that have pushed boundaries, broken taboos, prompted discussions, and wow festival and online audiences alike through compelling storytelling and unmatched artistry.

The book’s introduction gives a short history of erotic animation. Starting with hand-cranked mutoscopes, on to the1928 Eveready Harton in “Buried Treasure which was created by a group of animator pals for Winsor McCay’s stag birthday party, we are introduced to some early examples of 1970s, ’80s, and ‘90s films that were the forerunners to today’s trend toward honesty and openness in animated films that are aimed at an adult audience.

The opening chapter of the book examines the use of animated films for sex education and hygiene-oriented films which dates back to the 1940’s. Chapter two is all about self-discovery, beginning with a discussion of Andreas Hykade’s films. “Ring of Fire” (2000) and “Altotting” (2020), like many of his films, draw upon incidents from his childhood and youth.

Woman animators like Signe Baumane, Michaela Pavlatova, and Joanna Quinn are ground breakers in portraying women’s erotic inner thoughts, often with magnificent touches of humor, who continue to blaze a trail for the next generation of young animators.

The next chapter, “The Body”, introduces the classic femme fatal, Betty Boop who debuted in the 1930s in her low-cut dress and short skirt. Bill Plympton, the king of independent animators, is also a master of surreal situations and sight gags as in his 1995 “How to Make Love to a Woman” in which the woman exists in the film as a literal sex object.

No book on sex in animation would be complete without a chapter on lust. It can take many forms as in Shoko Hara’s 2020 film “Just A Guy”. Her stop-motion animated documentary examines why some women are so attracted to convicted death row inmates, even going so far as to marry them. Hara’s film zeroes in on Richard Ramirez, known as the Night Stalker, who murdered at least 13 people in California in 1984-85. While awaiting execution on San Quinton Prison’s death row numerous women wrote love letters to him and one woman went so far as to marry him in prison.

Finally, in chapter five Mitchell and Cowley get around to the subject of love. From a couple whose relationship is metaphorically adrift at sea in Levi Stoops's 2023 Drift to Chintis Lundgren and Drasko Ivezic’s films such as Manivald, which examines a uniquely complicated relationship, this chapter his chapter explores love in many different forms.

Intimate Animation is a must-read for anyone who wants to delve into the complex subject of sex, love, and relations. The book is well-written, insightful, and a great, fun read. If your appetite is wetted for more after you finish reading the book, The Appendix has a complete list of all of the Skiwigly Podcasts with the name of the animator, the title of the film that they discuss, and the date the broadcast aired.

There is also a QR Code that gives you access to a comprehensive list of animated projects that deal with the themes of love, relationships, and sexuality. Along with a suggested reading list on the topic, there is exclusive Skwigly Online Animation Magazine site content and an excellent table of contents, which make it easy to cross-reference people and films.

“I Got You Covered: The Premier and Fun Guide to Script Coverage, Notes, and Story Analysis”, by Beverly Neufeld, Foreng Films Publishing, 2022, $12.99 The book is an easy-to-understand guide to script notes, critiques, and writing for screenplays, teleplays, short films, and series. It takes you step by step through the entire process of how to give notes in a tasteful, motivating, and inspiring manner. It also stresses how to remain objective rather than subjective.

There is a section detailing what competitions, executives, agents, and networks are looking for in a script. In this day and age, when Netflix and other pay for view television networks are optioning animation projects, this is an invaluable chapter. If you are interested in getting a job as a script reader, a separate chapter gives you the nuts and bolts of how to get your foot in the door and land your first job.

Neufeld ends each chapter with exercises that build from chapter to chapter. If you do the exercises, when you have finished reading the book, you will be well on your way to starting a script of your own or having a portfolio to show a prospective employer.

Beverly Neufeld definitely knows what she is talking about and she is able to translate it to the written page. After obtaining her MFA in screenwriting at UCLA, she has been a script consultant at Slamdance Films as well as a freelance script doctor. She is a professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in their writing division, teaching script coverage and screenwriting, as well as teaching online coverage classes.

As a seasoned journalist, I read “I Got You Covered” with great interest. The book made me think about my writing, and I learned some things along the way. Anyone who plans on writing a script will do well to read this book.

ASIFA-SF is Volunteer Run

The editor is Karl Cohen and contributors include Nancy Denney-Phelps, Jim Middleton, Leonel Cortes, and other friends of ASIFA, with proofing by Jim Middleton and Scott Kravitz. ASIFA-SF is a chapter of Association Internationale du Film d’Animation with over 40 chapters around the world.

Now that we are supposedly post-Covid, we hope to do live events once more, but that isn’t happening yet.

To keep our chapter alive, we need to find volunteers to develop live and/or online programs. Indeed, we are offering free memberships, free newsletter and tickets to whatever screenings we get invited to. Contact Karl .

Posted on Jul 14, 2025 - 11:35 PM
NY Times Publishes My Letter on Porn
by Doniphan Blair

The NY Times section were Doniphan Blair's letter about pornography appeared. illo: NY Times

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT,
Doniphan Blair—meaning me, this author, yours truly—got published in the New York Times, the goddamned New York Times. Admittedly, it was only a letter to the editor, but, hey, it was in the Sunday, June 1rst edition, under the title “Politics and Perils of Pornography”, alongside other responses.

Although only 100 words, my letter allowed me to broach one of my favorite subjects, matriarchies, albeit squeezed into the difficult question of porn.

“As bad as new porn always seems,” was how I opened, (see whole text here), but soon segued to my theme, “It is based on ancient traditions. In fact, our interest in fantasy, sex and role-play have produced something resembling porn all the way back to the polytheist temples.”

Although that was far as I could go, into the history of matriarchies, before returning to the subject at hand, I was able to conclude with another one of my favorite topics: romance. “This is evidence that our fantasies cannot be repressed or shamed out of existence, but only managed and channeled into expressions of partnered, romantic sex.”

Given the radical implications of ancient matriarchies, ever-increasing pornography and the crisis of modern romance, I thought I might survey some of my writing on those subjects, starting when I interviewed Muslim women filmmakers in 2011, reviewed a show of nude paintings by women in 2020, or my analysis of the romantic evolution of Japan from 2016, among other essays.

From My Article about Muslim Women Filmmakers, 2011

Women's Voices Now (left to right): Miriam Wakim, Director of Development, 26, Lebanese-American; Cassandra Schaffa, Director of Festival Operations, 27, Czech-Puerto Rican; Catinca Tabacaru, Executive Director, 29, Romanian-Canadian; Oluchi Enemanna, Project Manager, 23, Nigerian; Betsy Laikin, Project Manager, 27, American; Mona Pajwani, Project Manager, 32, Indian. photo: Yura Liamin

Although she will probably hate me for saying this, if there ever was a matriarchal revolutionary, it is Catinca Tabacuru: 29, Romanian-Canadian [third from left in photo] but rather American, a graduate of Berkeley and Duke Law, an art dealer and human rights worker, and now a film festival director. Indeed, her Women's Voices from the Muslim World: A Short-Film Festival is coming March 17-19 [2011] to the Los Angeles Film School.

The spot light is hard for Tabacuru. Articulate and outspoken, she is also modest and collaborative. Indeed, her small team has done an incredible job of networking with related organizations, launching the festival on a shoestring, and even negotiating a possible collaboration with the State Department—talk about walking into the patriarchal lion's den!

Moreover, matriarchal references are problematic. The very existence of pre-historical matriarchies is denied by most academics simply since they don't mirror patriarchies but with women on top. Similarly, excessive seduction or cooperation was rejected by most first and second wave feminists because they just wanted to be treated equally to men and didn't want to confuse that goal with alternate paradigms. But those women weren't dealing with revanchist patriarchs who, in reaction to Women's Lib and modernity, want to lock women into burkas and kitchens and resurrect a mediaeval Islam.

"If we are talking about a reformation of Islam," says Tabacuru, "That is going to take a while. I don't really want to wait for all of Islam to reform in order to make sure women can drive in every country."

Hence, Tabacuru's quest, beautifully summarized by her organization's name: Women's Voices Now!

See full article here.

Judith Linhares's 'Look Back', 2008, recently appeared in the '#PussyPower Show' at David & Schweitzer, Brooklyn. photo: courtesy J. Linhares

'Nude in the Age of Trump and Porn' Digested, from 2017

The female body is a powerful weapon, it turns out, to the surprise of those of us hailing from more innocent or politically-correct places.

In Ghana, in 2005, 200 women protestors threatened to take off their clothes to shame into action the male delegates attending a peace summit for the Liberian civil war. Many observers agreed, their body-image activism broke the deadlock.

More recently, at the Women’s March on January 21st, bold placard statements and sometimes-strange sculptures reclaimed the word and the image of “pussy.”

Yes, it is a fraught subject, with feral fascination notorious among men and exaggerated in the age of Trump and porn, but the mystical and moral qualities of the nude remain unbowed.

The "naked body provides a vivid reminder [of] harmony, energy, ecstasy, humility, pathos,” according to British art historian Kenneth Clark, in his acclaimed book, "The Nude" (1963). “[It] arouses memories of all the things we wish to do with ourselves, and first of all, the wish to perpetuate ourselves," he adds, emphasizing what scientists often fail to mention: the importance of biology to aesthetics.

Simply put: the curvy female body is the site of 99% of reproduction and, as such, is an apt icon for life and evolution. The male nude, meanwhile, is interrupted, visually and morally, by the linear, sometimes violent and often indiscriminate phallus.

Indeed, reproduction depends on communication, cultural as well as genetic. Starting at a distance with the surveying of potential mates, reproduction becomes physical in the defining moment of foreplay to sex but only reaches fruition with the raising of the next generation. Indispensable to this biology among humans are the "three Cs," communication, culture and cooperation, with some form of romanticism at its center.

This four-and-a-half inch limestone statue is about 27,000 years old and was found in 1908, near Willendorf, Austria. photo: courtesy Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna

No wonder the female nude became our first real art, with the Venus figurines appearing around 45,000 BC and enjoying a popularity run of 40,000 years (incredibly summarized in Grace Paley's short "You Gotta Believe"). Although they finally faded in the face of patriarchal bullying and self-consciousness, the nude was soon reinvented by the Greeks.And it has been reinvented almost every generation since.

Indeed, over the entire last two-and-a-half millennia, the nude has largely held its own, dominating the provocative space between sacred and profane, until a recent publishing revolution upended that aesthetic and moral balance.

Starting in 1999, but going full bore in the new millennia, online computers graduated from dialup to DSL and gained high-resolution access to the World Wide Web. Along with a repository of humanity's knowledge and art, this included an avalanche of garish, over-lit portrayals of the naked form, mostly female.

Although pornography has been with us since ancient times and expanded greatly with the printing press and then, in the 1960s, with Playboy, Penthouse and, finally, Hustler Magazine—an acme of biology unaesthetically portrayed, it is now overwhelming our culture. By the time kids today turn 18, over 90% report viewing internet porn, significantly more than those who have Googled a Modigliani nude, let alone gazed on one in a museum. Moreover porn accounts for at least 20% and as much as one third of all internet traffic.

While this is a frightening development for those of us hailing from more innocent or politically-correct places, we have to be realistic. Titillation, self-love and sexual exploration have been with us for a long time and, being personal activities, are difficult to repress or censor, leaving us where we started: our imaginations.

Given about a half-a-million women, and some men, went to Washington, DC, and tens of thousands more to the 400 marches nation- and world-wide, many with banners saying "Pussy Grabs Back," we may be witnessing a new movement in public and gendered image-making.

In fact, the New York art scene just had a notable season of self-image exploration by women, culminating with an all-star group show, "#PussyPower", at the David and Schweitzer Gallery, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the inspiration for which was primarily political.

See full article here.

My Investigation of Japanese Romanticism, 2016

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. This was a quantum leap from the quests, conquests and imposition of rules men had been recording since the invention of the technology of writing.

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.

Two troubadours from Avignon, one playing the popular nine-stringed lute, circa 1350. image: unknown

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.

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 Albigensian Crusade, the troubadours crisscrossed 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 of Japan 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.

The famous modern geisha Sada Yacco, who updated its traits and styles, circa 1900. photo: unknown

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.

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 during 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 matriarchal phallus shrines, which the women depicted in the woodcuts appeared to enjoy immensely, 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.

'Dream of the Fisherman's Wife’, by Katsushika Hokusai, considered Japan's greatest 19th C artist. image: Hokusai, 1814

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.

War was opposed by Japanese communists, Buddhists and pacifists, like George Ohsawa (inventor of macrobiotics), as well as some women and artists. The great naval commander Admiral Yamamoto was so opposed to the invasion of China and, later, attacking the United States, he was subject to assassination attempts. 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) and endorsed "bushido," the ancient samurai code of honor, (although some say an exaggerated version was popularized in the late 19th century), even calling on the Chinese to embrace Japanese domination, despite the butchery.

See full article here.

Cleopatra, the 1st century BCE Egyptian queen and great matriarch, married Roman emperor Marc Anthony after coming to see him in a purple-sailed flotilla, dressed as the Goddess Isis. photo: unknown

A Chapter from My New Book, 'My Half Century with Islam': The Third Middle East Secret: Matriarchies

Monotheism is metaphorically masculine and intellectual, hence best contemplated at a distance, to shield supplicants from its infinite conceptual power and macho anger, while goddess worship is more local, intimate and human. Goddesses are cosmic mothers whose grandmothers created the earth and who can birth new gods, imbue idols with spirit, and merge with devotees psycho-sexually. Such full-body communion was imitated by Dionysus and Bacchus, the male Greek and Roman fertility gods, during their festivals.

Sufism also derived from those fertility cults, according to a few scholars, which suggests why the Wahhabis were so opposed Sufis as well as women. Whether or not that is Sufism's actual origins, goddess culture is a hard fact, which brings us to a third secret of the Middle East (after “Sufis saved Islam” and “Some Sufis became decadent”): Matriarchies.

Middle Eastern societies were almost entirely patriarchal, according to most European, American and Arab academics, since the invention of writing in the Third Millennia BCE, if not long before, but a minority of scholars disagree. Given how polytheist gods are born from goddesses, as men are from women, a polytheist heaven headed by a god, or a society ruled by men, remains somewhat or largely matriarchal, especially in the early years of patriarchy, no matter how many restrictive laws they passed. Some women operated and even dressed patriarchally, but the vast majority preferred womanly wiles, wisdom or private pressure to achieve their objectives, not public intimidation, brute force or other male strategies, which made their achievements harder to recognize or record and easier to downplay or erase. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence that there were a few female rulers and many goddesses, priestesses and oracles as well as family heads and intellectuals all across the ancient Middle East. Indeed, some polytheist temples featured ceremonial sex, either on the altar or with "sacred prostitutes" skilled in soothsaying, music and ritual as well as sex (still exemplified by Japan's "geishas"). Precisely because she was so respected, the pagan Egyptian mathematician and astronomer Hypatia was murdered in 415 CE. More average matriarchs, meanwhile, ran religion in the community or home, the so-called "kitchen" gods, and managed village and family life, notably the choosing of the mate—which is also called "sexual selection" and is the critical but little known second half of evolution identified by Darwin a decade after "natural selection"—sex itself, midwifery, nursing, childrearing, weaving, singing, dancing, preparing better tasting food and healing/witchcraft.

Monotheism was a rebellion against the priestess status quo, which included public sex, seduction of visiting dignitaries and teaching women how to influence men through the base psychology of fetish and witchcraft but also the sophisticated mentation of aesthetics and romance, as well as the basic biology of desire. The prophets were so outraged, they excoriated "the daughters of Zion" for walking "with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes" and "making a tinkling with their feet" (wearing bangles, Isaiah 3:16), and anthropomorphized entire cities as fallen women. “Jerusalem… committed her whoredoms with… all them that were the chosen men of Assyria… with all their idols she defiled herself,” (Ezekiel 23:4-7), or Babylon was “the mother of harlots and abominations of the Earth,” (Revelation 17:5). The Jewish patriarchs tried to deter idol worship, sensuousness and extramarital sex by prohibiting the portrayal of human likenesses and the sexier arts, like dancing, and by threatening women with death for adultery. That was understandable in the eighth century BCE, during the shift to patriarchy in nomadic cultures, where men sometimes traveled for up to years. Sunni Islam's elimination of figurative art in its entirety a millennia and a half later, however, was unprecedented for a civilization, given humanity's reliance on self-consciousness, mirrors and art to help us visualize our bodies and selves in nature and society (which is why the Partisans of the Nude art movement was so important for the 20th century Middle East).

'When God Was a Woman', by Merlin Stone, broke new ground and was highly lauded when it came out in 1976 but wasn't all that accurate. photo: unknown

Regardless of patriarchal or feminist critiques, or scholars who ridicule matriarchal history as exaggerated or invented (arguments exacerbated by errors in popular '60s-era books, like "When God Was a Woman" by Merlin Stone, 1976), Islam is only 14 centuries old. Hence, there are plenty of archeological findings, writings from the day and ongoing folk tales, as well as sacred texts, which speak volumes from between God-dictated lines. For example, it is widely accepted that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, was an older, wealthy businesswoman, who was his boss but also his suitor in marriage—a great matriarch, in other words! Or that Islam’s holiest building, the Ka’aba in Mecca, is cared for today by a clan called Guardians of the Old Women. Until about 1400 years ago (it will be exactly that long in 2029), the Ka’aba housed dozens of polytheist idols, mostly depicting goddesses, and was surrounded by hundreds more. It was also encircled by brass and leather panels bearing poems, some ribald, by the winners of Mecca's popular poetry contests. Yes, Muhammad destroyed the Ka’aba's figurines in December 629 after conquering Mecca peacefully, through negotiation, but he kept one, the Ka’aba Stone, as the central icon of his new, idol-less faith, in keeping with syncretism, the universal tradition of blending religions or repurposing of older beliefs, buildings or symbols. Unfortunately, the Ka’aba Stone was engraved with a "yoni" (a "Y" mark signifying vagina), which obviously served to preserve matriarchal memories, especially after being touched by millions of Muslims during their Hajj pilgrimage. Interestingly, the Ka’aba is called “al-Haram,” meaning both “sacred” and “forbidden," which helps illustrate its history of theological gender switching but adds the task of integrating opposites, a popular theme in Arab culture.

"I personally believe all the world is a matriarchy” is a single-sentence revelation from “Afghanistan” (1973), the exhaustive book by Louis Dupree, a respected American anthropologist. Dupree lived for over a decade in an Afghan village and reveals another side of that desert and mountain society, which is notoriously misogynist unless you’re familiar with its Queen Gawhar Shad, from 15th-century Herat, its female fighters, from the fierce Pashtun people (also known for their homosexual practices), or its poetry, see “Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women’s Poetry” (2010), edited by Sayd Majrouh, an Afghan-born, Sorbonne-educated philosopher and folklorist. Afghanistan has a tradition of “landays,” two-line poems also found elsewhere in the Middle East, generally used by women—men prefer epics—often to communicate with men they sexually select, surreptitiously in the street or via messages carried by confidents. Inflamed by their society's social suffocation, such liaisons frequently led to marriage, after the lovebirds convinced or outlasted their opposing families (which could take 20 years), or wild sex, as described in some Landays. “Give me your hand, my love, and let us go into the fields; So we can love each other or fall beneath the blows of knives.” When their relatives come to kill them, according to Majrouh, who was himself murdered by extremists (Kabul, 1988), the men flee, but the women traditionally stand and take it, a la Hashashin, albeit for love, romance and pleasure not hate, politics or money. Dupree also notes extensive, secretive extramarital sex, which most villagers ignored but some machos escalated into "honor killings," the euphemism for offended men murdering their own sisters, wives, mothers, daughters or cousins (an obviously deleterious practice, psychologically and evolutionarily). This strong and secret female side of Afghanistan shows that even centuries of arranged marriages, confinement and punishment, sometimes severe, could not erase women's longings for matriarchal freedom, romance and sex.

In fact, the Middle East is home to humanity's first written love poem by an unknown Babylonian woman living around two millennia BCE and rather sexy, even by post-internet-porn standards. It includes the line, “In the bedchamber dripping with honey let us enjoy over and over your allure.” The first extant, first-person, written poem, meanwhile, is two centuries older but also Babylonian and on love, albeit for Inana, the goddess of sex and war. It was penned by Enheduana, the high priestess of Ur and beloved daughter of Sargon the Great, founder of the Akkadian Empire, the earth’s first multi-nation civilization (nation being a multi-tribe and tribe multi-clan), which flourished around 2300 BCE. Sargon was the son of a great matriarch, as he announces in his autobiography (which also chronicles the origins of agriculture): “[M]y mother was a high priestess, my father I knew not… in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes… The river bore me up and carried me to Akki [probably Baghdad], the drawer of water [who] took me as his son and reared me [and] appointed me as his gardener. While I was a gardener, [the Goddess] Ishtar granted me her love.”

A statue of Afghanistan's revered tenth century female poet, Rabi’ah Balkhi, probably in Tajikistan. photo: unknown

The first great poetess of the Sufis, and the Persians in general, was Rabi’ah Balkhi, of tenth century Balkh, Afghanistan (Middle Easterners sometimes take their birthplace as their last name). Indeed, she remains highly revered regionally, from poetry classes to girl names or those of institutions, like Kabul's Rabi’ah Balkhi University (which is still called that, in January 2025, despite the Taliban reconquest of 2021). Rabi’ah fell madly in love with a slave, Bektash, refused to break it off, and was attacked by her relatives. As she bled out, however, she inscribed her romantic musings on the wall in blood, including the lines: "I knew not when I rode the high-blooded stead; The harder I pulled its reins the less it would heed,” and “When you see things hideous, fancy them neat; Eat poison, but taste sugar sweet." Persian, Arab and Jewish women were known for their romanticism, passion and libidos, which is the natural result of a matriarchal society's encouragement of female sexual expression and male sexual selection of those traits. Much of this is detailed in the eyeopening book, “Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women” (1994), by the increasingly respected researcher and novelist Geraldine Brooks.

Rumi’s father, Bahuaddin, who lived three centuries after Rabi'ah, was also a resident of Balkh and a talented writer and Sufi. He tells the tale of “the husband of a woman who composes songs and sings them in public. One day he arrives home unexpectedly and finds her with another man. He storms out, vowing divorce. Later he remembers the prepared meals, the clean clothes, the warm bed and the excitement of living with a woman who sings beautiful songs she composes herself,” (“The Drowned Book”, translated by Coleman Barks, John Moyne and Baha Al-Din Valad, 2004). Having so many smart and sensual women starring in so many folk tales helps explain why so many Muslims are so desperate to control their women. They think it will help Islam evolve from “jahiliyyah,” “the time of ignorance and chaos,” code for matriarchal polytheism, into a law-abiding, functional and masculine monotheist civilization.

See full article here.

Thanks for reading to the end of this article, which indicates your interest in the somewhat taboo topics of ancient matriarchy, porn and romance. They are fascinating subjects, worthy of investigation both for their own sake and to shed light on current dilemmas. For more info, please email me .

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Jun 20, 2025 - 06:36 PM
Randy Gordon, cineSOURCE’s Most Prolific Writer
by Doniphan Blair

J. Randy Gordon (lft) and Doniphan Blair in front of the Sonoma Film Festival sign, 2023. photo: R. Gordon

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

AFTER RANDY GORDON CONNECTED
with cineSOURCE in 2009 and we reviewed his book "Busibuzz", about buzzwords and catch phrases in the business and entertainment world, he began pitching me articles. Over the last 16 years, Randy ended up researching and writing the first drafts of over 20 pieces, on a wide variety of subjects, some of which are among cineSOURCE's most interesting articles.

The first great one was about an incredible woman sailor, P.J. Panzica, who also directed the documentary "The America's Cup: 150 Years In The Making" (2013), all of which—Panzica, her film and the Cup—we covered in "Steady as She Films: Panzica’s America’s Cup Doc". "A fast moving survey," according to our review, "her film nails down the sometimes despicable truths about a sport where the rules are invented and then circumvented, usually by the all-powerful Cup-holder, with one thing in mind: Win at all costs—sometimes including life itself." We ran "Steady as She Films" in time for the Bay Area's America's Cup in 2013, which we also attended—it was fabulous!

Oracle's majestic 72 footers breach the Golden Gate. photo: courtesy GGYC

A mere one month later, Randy revealed his love for sports in "Siegel Triumphs in Muhammad Ali Doc". "He was also one of sport's greatest poets," Randy wrote about the visionary Ali. By the way, I would give Randy the byline, as I did in that article, if he did most of the writing. We would share it, if I did the lion's share, and the article would be just by me, if I had to rewrite it from the ground up, which was my way of trying to incentivize better writing.

"In addition to his most famous couplet, 'Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,'" Randy continued about Ali, "there were dozens of others, veering from profound insight—"It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up."—to advanced sagacity." Randy applied similar insight to the film itself, "Hardly a typical sports doc, 'Trials' pieces together a mosaic of Ali's controversial years... which climax in the lead-up to, and aftermath of, his Sonny Liston championship bouts."

Surfer.com provides the classical shot of Bianca Valenti, San Francisco's queen of the big wave riders. photo: Sachi Cunningham

Another great story, on a topic close to my heart, was "San Francisco Surfer Girls Charge Hard in New Doc". Not only did Randy research and interview the makers and subjects of a great film, “It Ain’t Pretty” (2017) by Dayla Soul, also a surfer, we focused on Mavericks, the big-wave competition that comes to Half Moon Bay, near the Bay Area every year, and figures in the climax of that film. "We soon meet Bianca Valenti, a Marin County resident, who started surfing as a kid and became a world-class 'charger' (balls-to-the-wall surfer)." Valenti's struggle becomes the core of the film and her quote concludes the article: "Be brave! Be bold! Have fun! Play bigger!!!'"

By the way, Randy is also an enthusiastic representative or, shall we say, hustler for cineSOURCE. Indeed, in 2017, he started getting cineSOURCE business cards and, since then, has received 6,500 cards, three times my own number.

Another story of a scrappy underdog concerned the Irish musical duo, Dave Browne and Dave Rooney, endearing gents whom we met in 2020 at the Napa Film Festival, which cineSOURCE had been covering since 2010. Randy became fast friends with the Daves, as he called them, and wrote "Making and Breaking Records: An Irish-American Band", about their film, "An Irish Story: This Is My Home" and world record for gigging in all 50 American states.

Napa was also the setting of another article, "Films (and Film Writers) Fly High Over Napa", arguably our best, where we imitate Hunter S. Thompson, albeit me writing the whole thing as if I'm Randy, while I play the Dr. Gonzo sidekick part, albeit as Randy's photographer. I think the opening three paragraphs, not to mention the 11 hot photographs, did the job nicely:

'Out of control writer' Randy Gordon (lft), 'filmophile' Nancy Holland and 'photographer' Doniphan Blair, at the Napa Film Festival, 2016. photo: unknown

I'm blasting my two-bit Corolla through South Napa's fecund farmland, looking for that special full moon that's supposed to be rising in the East, my head also blasting from cineSOURCE's "Martini Party" last night (11: is that excessive?).

It's closing night at the often incredible Napa Valley Film Festival. Unfortunately, I'm running late, having barely made my daughter's soccer match in time to pick her up before the Soccer Mom snitches notify my ex.

My evening is scheduled similarly tight. First order of business: find the fine, film-ophile Nancy Holland, who bailed on an important open house (she's a part-time realtor) to meet me and cash in on my swear-to-die promise of a great film and closing party. Second, locate the photographer, Blair, who cineSOURCE finally deemed me worthy of assigning, to cover my interview with Alan Kropf, director of the festival's closer, "Pisco Punch: A Cocktail Comeback Story".

And so it went, through over 20 collaborations, arguing half the time and trying to get Randy to edit more. You know how some writers like long, anecdotal intros to set the tone? Well, Randy loves them so much, he believes in having two or three! Regardless, I would edit the copy down, Randy would negotiate some of it back, and we would strive for that perfect tone—just aggressive enough, not too many factoids—which abides a good writer-editor relationship and makes for better writing.

Thanks Randy, and I look forward to your next submission, as cineSOURCE itself is "blasting its two-bit Corolla" through the pressing issues of the day: Trump's Conspiracism, Ukraine and Arab Zionists, but also as the Napa and Sonoma film festivals, which we love and will continue to cover, despite their periodic cancelling of cineSOURCE's coveted "all festival" pass.

Since this article is going out in April, when cineSOURCE does its Oakland Issue, here are three more Randy articles, which happen to be about Oakland sports films: Al Davis Memoriam: RaiderNation Keeps Winning in Oakland, Linsanity: Doc On Unique Player, and Still Standing Tall: East Bay Football.

Posted on Jun 13, 2025 - 02:53 PM
Between Principle and Survival: Why Israel Struck
by Magnus Toren

Arab and Persian Zionists are increasing and speaking out more and more, shown here a graffiti from Tehran. photo: brave Iranian Zionist

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

NO NATION SHOULD RUSH TO WAR. A
preemptive strike—especially one that risks igniting a wider regional conflict—deserves serious scrutiny. Critics of Israel’s recent strike on Iran raise important concerns: the danger of escalation, the potential for civilian casualties, the violation of international norms, and the erosion of already fragile diplomatic channels.

These arguments are not without merit. War, even when undertaken with precision and restraint, has unpredictable consequences. Every bomb dropped has moral weight. Every act of force invites backlash and carries the seeds of unintended suffering.

And yet—for Israel—this is not a debate about geopolitics or legal theory. This is about survival.

The Iranian regime has not been coy about its intentions. It funds and arms proxy militias on Israel’s borders. It chants openly for the destruction of the Jewish state. It pursues nuclear capabilities while denying its aims with a wink and a smirk. And it does all this with the confidence that the world will hesitate long enough for it to succeed.

In such a reality, Israel faces an impossible choice: act and risk condemnation, or wait and risk annihilation.

No responsible government can wait idly while a sworn enemy encircles it with weapons and prepares for the day it can strike decisively. History has taught the Jewish people, in the most painful ways imaginable, what happens when threats are dismissed, when genocidal rhetoric is waved away as mere bluster.

Israel does not seek war. It does not relish confrontation. It does not operate from imperial ambition or religious zeal. It operates from necessity.

In an ideal world, peace would be negotiated in good faith, and international guarantees would offer real protection. But in this world—a world where Israel is still denied recognition by many of its neighbors, and where Holocaust denial walks hand-in-hand with nuclear ambition—there are moments when strength becomes the only path to peace.

This strike is not an act of vengeance. It is not a reckless flex of power. It is a desperate assertion of the most basic human right: to live.

Israel’s critics are right to urge caution, to warn of unintended consequences, to advocate for diplomacy. But those same critics must ask themselves—if not this, then what? And if not now, then when?

Because when survival is on the line, hesitation is not prudence. It is peril.

Magnus Toren is a world traveller, guitarist, bibliophile and director of the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, California, and can be reached Posted on Jun 13, 2025 - 11:47 AM
Zhan Petrov: A New Voice in Improv Film from Ukraine
by Doniphan Blair

Zhan Petrov shooting the motorcyclist racing across the prairie for 'Center Divide', circa 2021. photo: K. Barskaya

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

UKRAINE IS MUCH IN THE NEWS THESE
days, tragically, given Russia’s murderous invasion, but we are well advised to also take note of its culture and people. Indeed, Ukraine has a long tradition of avant-garde art, starting with the Jewish writer Isaac Babel (1894-1940), with more coming now, as Ukraine leads the pro-democracy movement worldwide. A person exemplifying this is Zhan Petrov, whose journey is marked by resilience, innovation and bold filmmaking, largely in the Bay Area.

Born in 1992, in Odessa, a crossroads of empires and revolutions, known to many of us through Babel’s “Odessa Stories” (1923), Zhan also hails from an artistic family. His great-grandmother, a National Academy of Music piano teacher, may have known Babel, while his grandfather became a jazz trumpeter in Odessa’s many dive bars, and then on the tourist ships that used to frequent its Black Sea port. Zhan’s father liked to show avant-garde French films, in the back yard on an old 16mm projector, hence his name, Zhan, which is Ukrainian for Jean, as in Jean Luc Goddard.

Zhan (right) at a birthday party, 1994. photo: Petrov Family

Zhan’s first love was basketball, and he started on two of Odessa’s top high school teams, but he eventually followed his grandfather to sea. Sailoring led to a lifelong interest in the people he met in ports throughout the world. One vivid memory Zhan told me about was from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where he befriended a hard-working stevedore by sneaking him a bowl of soup. Unfortunately, that was forbidden and his new friend was beaten by a policeman. Tragically, when Zhan moved to intervene, his friend said, “No, it would make things worse.”

Two years after Ukraine’s pro-democracy revolution in 2014, and Russia’s invasion of Crimea, which is near Odessa, Zhan and his family emigrated to California. Zhan began studying film at De Anza College, in Cupertino, the heart of Silicon Valley, where he translated skills learned at sea, dealing with all sorts of people and situations, to making movies.

Immigrating to a new country and becoming a filmmaker are not easy tasks, especially in the professionally crowded and competitive Bay Area. Moreover, Zhan had to support himself. He started working construction a few weeks after arrival alongside seasoned Mexicans then as an Uber driver and finally chauffering a limousine, replete with uniform. A grinding routine, he often showed up to classes wasted, after driving an eight-hour shift or a night of editing.

Zhan working as a seaman, Morocco. photo: Z. Petrov

One formative experience, Zhan said, was an improv class where students invented dialogue, which often produced more honest performances, he noticed. Another was his teacher Milena Grozeva, who was also a working editor, notably on “Presque Isle” (2008), by Bay Area indie legend Rob Nilsson. Indeed, Grozeva introduced Zhan to Nilsson’s films and philosophy, called “direct action cinema,” and then Nilsson himself. She also recommended John Cassavetes, the alternative Hollywood filmmaker who was Nilsson’s mentor, the Danish Dogme group, and a cinematic worldview valuing authenticity over polish which Zhan made his own.

“If the shot is too clean, too staged—it’s not me,” Zhan told me, “I want you to feel the sweat, the stress, the surprise. That’s where the truth lives.”

Indeed, his graduation thesis film, "Love Funeral" (2021), combined his diverse studies and influences into a highly original film, which featured chaotic relationships and aggressive filmmaking. “It was entirely unique,” according to actor and writer Don Bajema, who appeared in the Morgan Freeman vehicle “High Crimes” (2002) as well as many Nilsson projects. “All in one long shot over a period of one hour and 13 minutes.” See its trailer or full film.

Poster for Zhan's debut feature, 'Love Funeral', shot simultaneously with cell phones, shown simultaneously on a screen divided in four. photo: Z. Petrov

Inspired by Mike Figgis’s “Time Code” (2000), which used multiple cameras starting at the same time, Zhan filmed "Love Funeral" with four cell phones, in one continuous shot, which he showed simultaneously, on a screen divided into four, with overlapping dialogue. The setting is a Gen Z party with Hip-Hop music blasting, people drinking and smoking and everyone on their phones, either recording the party for social media or messaging someone outside of it. As the characters flip between speaking Russian, Ukrainian and English, it soon spirals out of control. By the end, relationships are in ruins; lovers have stormed off; and the place is a wreck. “Often torturous to look at,” remarked Nilsson, after viewing an early cut.

Zhan provided his actors with character and script outlines, but all dialogue and action was improvised. Using guerrilla-style filmmaking and innovative production techniques, he created a striking first feature reminiscent of Cassavete’s debut, “Shadows” (1959). Although it didn’t reach a mass audience, it still proved you don’t need a big crew or budget to provoke discussions or feelings. "Love Funeral" had a few screenings in the Bay Area, which established Zhan's reputation as an imaginative risk-taker, and won a few awards, including the Globe Award from the Berlin International Film Festival.

After his introduction by Professor Grozeva, Nilsson invited Zhan to shoot his upcoming film, "Center Divide" (2021), in Northern California’s gorgeous and sparsely populated Modoc County. Zhan was thrown into the deep end of low budget cinema, replete with unpredictable shooting conditions, improvised solutions and bumfuck America. He also did the film’s drone shots, which gave him a feeling for the terrain.

When “Center Divide” premiered at Marin County’s Mill Valley Film Festival, in 2021, since Zhan had also become the film's editor, he had to manage digital files and troubleshoot technical glitches as well as do his first Q and A with an audience. “Hearing from the festival-goers and critics helped me develop a better understanding of what it takes to engage an audience,” Zhan told me.

"Faultline" (2022), his second film for Nilsson, was even more ambitious, given its larger cast, politically-touchy topic and short shooting schedule, only 16 days, also in Modoc County.

Zhan took on additional production responsibilities and one incident became legendary, after he lodged the entire 20-person cast and crew at a motel, payment due on arrival. While filming a sunset scene outside a bar, however, he was informed that some hunters had arrived, cash in hand, and rented those eight rooms. With daylight fading, Zhan leapt action. After calling every motel, lodge and B&B within 30 miles, he secured housing for everyone by midnight. “Although that left me only few hours of sleep before the dawn call,” Zhan told me, “I learned more about the nuts and bolts of film than any film class.”

Zhan's three year old daughter, Charlotte. photo: K. Barskaya

"Faultline" also tested him privately. As it happened, his romantic partner, Klarissa Barskaya, was also in the film, playing an Odessa art gallery owner, and helping with production. The intensity of the work brought them closer, so much so, she became pregnant—yet another unscripted moment that proved successful. At the premier of “Faultline” at the Mill Valley Festival the following year, Zhan watched the movie with Klarissa and their infant daughter, Charlotte.

After "Faultline" garnered positive attention in the Bay Area’s independent film community, Zhan earned accolades. “Zhan could capture moments on camera, as if each frame could stand alone, a painting with visual composition and meaning,” I was told by Don Bajema, who played the film's lead, a man searching for his father.

Film critics also took notice: “A chronicle of seekers and desperados on the move, 'Center Divide' is unsettlingly contemporaneous,” according to Berkeleyside, a Bay Area news website (10/7/2021). Nilsson praised Zhan’s work on both his films as well as Zhan's thesis film, "Love Funeral", in an article for Senses of Cinema, “The Black and White Epic No Budget Digital Feature Film.”

Inspired by Nilsson’s "9@Night Films Cycle", which was shot with marginalized people in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, Zhan decided to attempt a project in the same neighborhood. Along with his film and acting crew, Anastasia Shubina, Timofey Glin, and Konstantin Kodincev, he walked the streets, cameras blazing, hoping to document reality faithfully. Unfortunately, San Francisco’s old whorehouse district is a much wilder place today, with brazen thieves and crazed drug addicts, some zonked out on "flakka," the so-called zombie drug.

Having done street shoots in similar places, Zhan knew the rules: be respectful, stop filming if someone protests, and put away the camera or leave, if the situation gets tense. Indeed, to avoid drawing attention, they shot with iPhones. Unfortunately, while filming a group of homeless men one night, another group emerged from the shadows of a nearby alley.

“Who the fuck you filming?” one shouted.

Zhan and Rob Nilsson, his mentor and now partner, editing 'Fault LIne' in 2022. photo: S. Blair

Zhan tried to explain they were documenting the neighborhood for an art project, but the man threw a punch, striking him in the face, while another shoved his crew members, and a third broke or stole their iPhones.

It was in that moment, when his face covered with blood, Zhan told me, somewhat sheepishly, that he felt the full impact of the filmmaker on their environment. While trying to document the streets' reality, he had collided with it, a sobering realization. When he continued that project, “How I See”, Zhan hired a local "guide”, who knew the community.

Zhan’s “Hyde Street Incident” became a test of his dedication to the immersive principle absorbed from Nilsson. The most authentic storytelling often comes with personal investment and risk. Indeed, the footage he recovered from the smashed phones added important meaning to the film.

Zhan’s next project was perhaps to be expected: a documentary about Nilsson, entitled "The Way Things Seem To Be" (see trailer). A comprehensive, four-hour look at Nilsson’s life, art, and philosophy, it is a massive undertaking that has already spanned two years. Instead of a conventional biography, he is going for an immersive portrait, much like Nilsson’s own films. Rather than list achievements or have talking heads spouting praising panegyrics, Zhan hopes to show feelings and process, the behind-the-scenes moments, although he also did many interviews with Nilsson, his actors and crew and some film critics.

In addition, Zhan dug through Nilsson’s archives: 45 feature films, numerous short films, unpublished scripts, poetry notebooks, paintings (Nilsson is also a painter) and essays, eventually accruing more than 200 terabytes of data, an enormous amount. A key element is explaining Direct Action Cinema. Although Nilsson occasionally uses scripts, he rejects traditional ones and works off of the notion of full improvisation in reaction to real settings. He mostly uses amateur actors but occasionally enlists a seasoned professional from LA, including Stacy Keach, Ron Perlman and Robert Viharo. Nilsson's first step is to bring the actors together in a workshop and do relaxation, concentration and expression exercises. After a week or two of this, and discussions of his script outline, detailed and motivated characters and stories emerge.

Zhan and Rob attend a showing of Rob's film 'Northern Lights' at the New York Film Festival in 2024. photo: Z. Petrov

Zhan directed, shot and edited the documentary, called "The Way Things Seem To Be", worked with sound engineer extraordinaire Al Nelson to produce an excellent final mix, and began sending it out to peers and a few festival programmers, after it was finished in February 2025.

“Zhan directed this project with remarkable skill, blending cinéma vérité with a deeply immersive storytelling approach,” was the opinion of Bobby Roth, who directed “Prison Break” (2013) and television episodes in the “Lost” and “Grey’s Anatomy” shows. John Hanson, who was Nilsson’s co-director on their breakthrough film "Northern Lights" (1978), said, “Zhan seamlessly wove together scenes from Nilsson’s films with personal testimonials and context. I think the film will be important in gaining wider recognition for Nilsson’s contributions to independent cinema.”

"The Way Things Seem To Be" was an achievement that not only honored his mentor but established Zhan as a documentary as well narrative filmmaker. Indeed, the film celebrates independent cinema—the risks, the art, and the surrounding community—at a time when these voices risk being drowned out by blockbuster franchises and algorithm-driven content, making it both a tribute and a call to action.

Another highlight of their collaboration was a special event at the 2024 New York Film Festival, where Nilsson and Hanson’s "Northern Lights" screened as part of a special revival. After traveling to New York, they were wined and dined before attending two sold-out screenings at Lincoln Center. The audience was a mix of older cinephiles and younger festival-goers curious to see an example of 1970s independent cinema, a black-and-white depiction of North Dakota farmers organizing against the banks in 1915, which has renewed relevance now.

At the post-screening Q&A, Zhan remarked from the audience, “The film’s concluding lines, ‘Things are going to change, I’m sure of it, I’ve got time I can wait’ represent my faith in the future.”

In addition to his Nilsson documentary, Zhan is also the mastermind behind “Rob Nilsson Art Forms”, a new, innovative combination of website, art gallery and film site. Indeed, it is both a digital archive and distribution platform for Nilsson’s films, paintings, poetry, and writings as well as forum where new independent projects can also be incubated. They have been developing this with Anubhav Ashok, a tech expert previously at Google who now runs Ask.Videos, and Ilya Fomin, a lead engineer at YouTube Live, who did the coding.

Zhan in 2024. photo: Z. Petrov

Nevertheless, it remains a organic, DIY project. Even at the Lincoln Center show, Nilsson and Zhan were standing outside, handing out flyers for “Rob Nilsson Art Forms.” Although that was an unusual sight in this digital and dislocated age, they are both advocates of the theory that to keep independent cinema alive, one has to directly engage the audience, one person at a time if necessary. They also hosted a talk about the future of independent cinema. While the streaming era has made distribution and promotion easier, it often buries independent films and favors algorithm-friendly content.

“Rob Nilsson Art Forms” also includes a 40-minute stand-alone film by Zhan, “Immersive Voyage”, a visual essay on the nature of creativity and Nilsson’s career. It highlights Zhan’s skills as an editor and emergence as a potent exponent of alternative filmmaking. Zhan just completed "Reserve Cameraman" with Ilya Fomin, a cinema verite, single-take film shot behind the scenes at a Las Vegas beauty pageant, which captures its chaotic mix of vanity, pressure, and vulnerability.

Every step of Zhan’s journey, from his ocean travels to improvising scenes in the Tenderloin’s streets or coordinating a large production, has equipped him to take on the future of film and continue a legacy of alternative film and innovation, fostering the ongoing conversation of the art across the generations.

He is also determined to use emotionally honest art to address the crisis of culture in societies turning towards authoritarianism, which he knows well. Indeed, he grew up with family members who endured the Soviet Union, some even the horrors of Stalinism. Naturally, he is extremely concerned with its modern iteration, Putin's Russia, its murderous invasion of Ukraine, and the fate of the people he left behind.

“It’s terrible,” Zhan told me. “I still have friends and close relatives in Odessa. Some of them are stuck. Some of them can’t get out. I worry every day.”
Posted on May 06, 2025 - 10:26 PM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner May ‘25
by Karl Cohen

Scene from another crazy comedy from Sylvian Chomet 'The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol' (2025). photo: S. Chomet

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Magnificent Life Goes to Cannes

Sylvain Chomet’s animated “A Magnificent Life”, distributed by Sony Pictures, will show at Cannes. After directing one of the craziest screwball comedies of this century, the animated “The Triplets of Belleville” (2002), Chomet’s new film, “The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol”, honors one of France's greatest 20th-century creative artists (1895-1974).

Pagnol excelled as a novelist, playwright and then filmmaker after he saw an early talkie in 1929, which excited his imagination enough for him to contact Paramount Pictures about turning his hit play, “Marius”, into a talkie. That film’s impressive success resulted in his founding his own studio in 1932 and, in 1946, he was the first filmmaker elected to the Academie Francaise.

The Cannes Film Festival, considered the most influential and prestigious in the world, runs May 14-24. In June, “Magnificent Life” will be shown at the Annecy International, the most important animation festival in the world which has been held in Annecy, near Switzerland, since 1960, because of governmental support for its animation industry.

The nasty looking Nezha, star of China's new big hit. photo: unknown

Massive Chinese Hit Has Ugly Star

This nasty looking creature is the star of a massive animation hit from China, already grossing $2.116 billion according to Variety (April 20th issue). You can see an action-packed clip here or the entire film for free on a hard to watch bootleg copy here. If they bootleg us, I guess we can bootleg them, although what I saw wasn’t at all interesting! Has the film really made over 2 billion, or is that fake news?

Disney to Debut New Films at Annecy Fest

Disney will show lots of upcoming releases at the prestigious Annecy Festival including a a sneak peek at “Zootopia 2”, Pixar's “Elio” and Marvel Animation’s “Eyes of Wakanda”. They will also screen footage from Pixar’s upcoming 2026 releases “Hoppers” and “Toy Story 5”. Lucasfilm will premiere “Black”, a new Star Wars: Visions short, and “Devotion”, an episode from the “Star Wars: Tales of the Empire”.

Moona, the Hawaiian star of Disney's biggest streaming film. photo: Disney

Disney’s Moana Breaks Streaming Records

“Moana” has been the most streamed movie in the U.S. in each of the past two years, according to Nielsen’s figures. It might have some competition this year, albeit from its sequel “Moana 2”, which had its streaming premiere March 12th on Disney+. It shot to the top of the streaming rankings for the week of March 10-16 and it has the highest single-week total for any feature film on a streaming platform so far in 2025.

The 'Mind Craft Movie' has big stars which paid off with the biggest box office this year. photo: Mindcraft Move

Mindcraft Movie Fun for Kids

The Mindcraft movie, made from a game and called “A Minecraft Movie”, was directed by Jared Hess, stars Jason Momoa, Jack Black and Danielle Brooks, and is 2025's highest grossing domestic film thus far! From the trailer, it looks like it combines elements from past box office hits, from the “The Lego Movie” (2014) and low budget version of a Lucas films.

CAAM Fest Returns to Bay Area

The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), which had its festival May 8-11, showed “Between Pictures: The Lens of Tamio Wakayama”, a 70-minute documentary on the Japanese photographer. It includes several animated sequences. They are also showing two animated shorts, “Splash Back” and “Grandma”.

Game Release Cancelled

Electronic Arts, headquartered in Redwood City, California, cancelled its next ‘Titanfall’ game as it lays off more than 300 employees.

Disney’s New ‘Snow White’ Waiting for Her Prince

The Hollywood Reporter says the live action “Snow White”, which cost around $270 million to produce and $100 million to market, is slow to catch on. It projects that the film will need to earn about $500 to million to safely recoup its costs, which looks like will take a while, although the Mouse generally triumphs in the end.

Plympton: 'Will draw for food.' photo: B. Plympton

Did Plympton Forget His Cheerios?

In a recent email I received from Bill Plympton, he invited fans to “Get a custom caricature by me of yourself, a loved one, or your pet for just $150! If it's specifically for your mom, we'll knock it down to $80 just for the up-coming Mother's Day! We created a Google Form to make the ordering process even easier.”

“We have a limited amount of original drawings left from ‘Your Face’ and ‘Simpsons’ couch gags for $300 a piece, and art from ‘How to Kiss’ and ‘25 Ways to Quit Smoking’ for $200 each. All other pieces from Plympton's films are just $100 each. We'll send you scans or you can send us screenshots of your favorite scenes and we can try to match them. Or get a ‘Director's Pick’ at random! To order, please e-mail us .

An interesting but failed 'Strawberry Fields' project photo: unknown

See Some of Strawberry Fields

See scenes from “Strawberry Fields”, an unfinished feature from 1989 that was supposed to be the sequel to “Yellow Submarine” (1968), by that film’s producer Al Brodax. Even though he used famous musicians to do covers of Beatle’s songs: Michael Jackson did “Come Together,” Cyndi Lauper sang “Across the Universe,” Crosby, Stills & Nash did “Blackbird”, and Cheap Trick performed “Magical Mystery Tour”, he abandoned it when he couldn’t get the rights to the Beatles performances and Paul, Ringo and George refused to allow the film to depict their likenesses.

Unfortunately, the script Brodax wrote wasn’t that funny or impressive, especially when compared to the script and animation of “Yellow Submarine”, by TVC Studio in London. Although both Brodax and TVC had produced the awful looking “The Beatles Cartoon”, which ran from 1965 to ’67 on both sides of the pond, TVC wanted to be known for doing original, creative work and saw “Yellow Submarine” as possibly their only chance to do that. Hence, they spent a lot more time and money on the production than Brodax was willing to pay for but, although they went over budget and lost money, they did establish the reputation they were hoping to get.

For “Strawberry Fields” 20 years later, Brodax was in again control but not driven to create an original masterpiece so it was abandoned. It was being created in 2D by another company in London, not TVC, and the 3-D CGI by the Computer Graphics Laboratory of the New York Institute of Technology. See it here.

Years ago, I spent several days at an animation festival in Tel Aviv with two people from TVC who worked on “Yellow Submarine” and, wow, did they have war stories. Read The Beatles' Yellow Submarine Turns 30: John Coates and Norman Kauffman Look Back | Animation World Network. See it here.

Queer astronaut makes strong comedic debut. photo: E. H. Hobbs & L. Varghese

Lesbian Astronaut Film Surprise Hit

At its world premiere in Berlin, “Lesbian Space Princess”, the first feature by Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese from Australia, won the Teddy Prize and landed a major distribution contract which includes the US. A very biased person connected with its distribution called the film, “Bold, bonkers and bursting with heart. It’s a deliriously funny sci-fi adventure packed with razor-sharp satire, outrageous invention, and a proud, unapologetic spirit.”

While I don’t normally kowtow to what distributors say, the same day I read the above in Variety, Nancy Phelps wrote me, “I am a reviewer for Kaboom’s selection process and so I watched the film in my living room. I couldn’t stop laughing… It may not be high art but it is laugh-out-loud funny, sweet, and extremely colorful fun.” Nancy’s Kaboom review will appear in my June newsletter.

Czech animator Paul Fierlinger. photo: P. Fierlinger

Great Animator Fierlinger Passes

The wonderful, sometimes outspoken independent animator, Paul Fierlinger, dies at 89. He danced to a different tune and was unafraid to make films about controversial subjects, from alcoholism, “And Then I’ll Stop”, to “The Story of Joshua Slocum”, the first man ever to circumnavigate the world alone in a sailboat, or “Me... Jane” (2014) about Jane Goodall.

He also created a wonderful feature “My Dog Tulip”, “A Room Nearby”, a film about loneliness for PBS, and a fascinating autobiography, “Born from Memory”, which includes his unusual childhood. He was born in Japan, lived in the US during WWII, but his father was a Czech diplomat so he had to grow up behind the Iron Curtain, although he did rebel after being sent to a Czech Communist school.

A reliable producer of many TV commercials and industrial, notably for big pharma, he created political commercials for Hubert Humphrey, the very popular “Teeny Little Super Guys” segments for “Sesame Street”, and the Oscar nominated animated short “It’s So Nice to Have a Wolf Around the House”. Paul was also involved with the development of the computer program TV Paint. See a feature length interview with him on line: "The Art and Life of Paul Fierlinge".

Drop Your Shorts Short Film Screening

Ken Pontac presents “Drop Your Shorts!”, a fabulous night of fun where your short films are projected on a big screen at Cinelounge. There will be a submission fee of $20. The screening dates are April 17, May 15 and June 19, 2025, from 6:30 to 8pm. the Nancy Phelps film will be shown at their May event. For more info, go here.

Tony White and one of his characters teach animation. illo: T. White

Tony White’s New Film

Tony White is excited about presenting his new animation course: "Walking the Walk", He wrote me that, “It is hosted by Adam's Animation Academy in the UK and I believe it is one of the best courses for animators that I've offered so far. The animated walk is a big challenge for so many people - beginners and professionals alike—so I'm offering this course to help them learn all the critical walking actions that every animator should know.”

“It is based on a lifetime of my perfecting walks of all kinds, having been taught about them when I was apprenticed by some of the late, great legends of the past—namely Richard Williams, Ken Harris and Art Babbit—in my youth. Plus, I simply love teaching good animation anyway—it keeps me young and relevant!”

Tony added: “The course is hosted in the UK, it can be studied worldwide at any time and at any pace. This is because—apart from a few live mentoring sessions I'm doing with signed-up students along the way—all 10 of the actual classes will be recorded, so students can access them anytime they like and study at their own pace.” Contact Tony .

ASIFA-SF Needs Help with Its Site

HELP!!! ASIFA-SF needs a person to help restore our crashed website. Can somebody get it up and running again? We need to either fix or kill it. We also need a new webmaster. Email or call 415 386-1006

The Looney Tunes sign off guaranteed to depress kids. illo: L. Tunes

In The Loop With Leo by Leonel Cortes

Have The Tunes Left the Building? Looney Tunes has been going through a series of events these past several months to the point that rumors of Warner Brothers selling the IP rights to the series were floating around. During this period of confusion, Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav ordered the destruction of a building tied to their legacy.

Building 131 was the last home of the original WB’s animation studio from the 1950s until late 1960s. Building 131 gave birth to many Looney Tunes theatrical shorts like “Robin Hood Daffy” and “What’s Opera Doc?” The building has not seen much use in the previous decades but still holds historical significance to the world of animation. The reason behind the destruction of this building is to make more room for base camps for HBO shows. The order to destroy this building caused outrage over the internet, along with some individuals placing posters on the building in protest.

At the same time Ketchup Entertainment purchased the rights to “Coyote Vs Acme” for $50 million. This film was shelved as a tax write-off but several streaming sites showed interest in purchasing the film. After two years of failed deals, Ketchup Entertainment has saved the film, and it is expected to be released sometime in 2026.

While the internet continued to speculate on the WB leadership, Warner Brothers announced a surprising twist. They have recently ordered the production of 3 animated films. These films come from the Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, and Flintstones franchise.

Fox's top animation stars a go for next season. illo: various

Four for Four at Fox Fox has recently announced the renewal of four of its mainline “Animation Domination” shows. “The Simpsons”, “Family Guy”, “Bob’s Burgers”, and its soon-to-be returning “American Dad” are confirmed to get four new seasons each. While good news for all 4 long running series, these seasons will be shorter as the order has reduced them to 15-episode seasons instead of the typical 22. According to Deadline this is to help with other Animation Domination shows fit within the block’s scheduling.

China Puts a Limit on US Films With the ongoing tariffs the US is placing, China has decided to retaliate by limiting the amount of US films entering the country. This could impact the potential international box office growth of certain films, but experts say otherwise. Most of these experts have pointed out that China has seen a reduction in viewership for Hollywood films. Ultimately China’s decision has limited impact on Hollywood blockbusters.

30 Years on the Road Disney’s celebrating the 30th anniversary of “A Goofy Movie” with a documentary and video with the voices of Max and Goofy. Not Just Another Goof released on April 7th. Bill Farmer and Jason Marsden’s "On the Road Again", follow the duo interviewing each other while driving in an AMC Pacer, the car that the animated main characters drive in the film, see it here.

Man Made Horrors are Already in Reach Researchers working with the computer chip maker, Nvidia, trained an AI system to analyze 81 “Tom & Jerry” shorts. The goal was to see if the AI would be able to create long form videos without having to struggle with current limitations. While the video themselves do not look amazing, the focus of this project is to make the characters appear more like their short counterparts, while also maintaining continuity between scenes.

To see how you feel about it, check them out here or here. For those interested in the details of the project they have a Github.

An incredible panorama from 'Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure'. illo: Warner Bros.

The Race is On for Jojo Fans Warner Bros. announced that production for part 7 of the hit anime "Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure" is underway. Part 7, also named "Steel Ball Run", follows the series fan favorite Johnny Joestar, a paraplegic jockey, who enters a race across the American frontier. Warner Brothers has a website set up for those interested in tracking updates go here.

Reunion for Residents of Arlen, Texas The ATX TV Festival and Hulu have announced that the hit series King of the Hill is having a reunion event. The event will have the cast present a sneak preview of season 14 of the series. This event will be held from May 29 to June 1st in Austin, Texas. For fans of the series, Hulu has announced that season 14 will air on the streaming service sometime this summer.

Every Dog Has His Day Genndy Tartakovsky’s animated film “Fixed” has been acquired by Netflix. Originally co-produced by Warner Bros and Sony, the film was planned for a theatrical release, but WB pulled out after completion of the project. Sony, left holding the bag, shopped the film around until Netflix picked it up. The film is about a dog named Bull who discovers that he is to be neutered the following morning. Learning the gravity of the situation, Bull and his pack of friends have one last grand adventure. Netflix has set the movie’s release date for August 13th 2025.

A Lot of Shows Coming from a Galaxy Far, Far Away Disney has announced a collection of Star Wars shows during this year’s Star Wars Celebration in Tokyo. First up is “Maul-Shadow Lord” which focuses on former Sith Lord, Darth Maul. So far, the only information known about the show is that it will take place one year after the Clone Wars.

Second on the reveals is a sequel to Disney+’s “Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy”. Named “Lego Star Wars: Rebuild Galaxy-Pieces of the Past” (what a mouthful), which follows Sig Greebling and Darth Dev. The pair must use their Jedi and Sith powers to stop a new threat to the galaxy. Finally, Disney+ announced volume 3 of its anthology anime series, “Visions”. This volume will host 9 episodes with production done by well-known anime studios such as David Productions, Trigger, and Kamikaze Douga. Visionsis set to release on October 29th on Disney+.

8 Seasons Down, 92 to Go Adult Swim, earlier this month, teased season 8 of the hit series, "Rick and Morty", with an April Fool's joke stage play. An official trailer for the new season then dropped later this month. Season 8 is set to air on May 25th on Adult Swim. See Adult Swim’s April Fool’s or the Season 8 Trailer.

Poster for 'Common Side Effects'. illo: M. Judge

Taking a Second Dose with Adult Swim Adult Swim recently revealed that "Common Side Effects" has been renewed for a second season. The hit series about a couple of 'shroom heads to take on Big Pharma and more was produced by Mike Judge. Having just ended its first season on March 30th, it is now available for streaming on Max.

ASIFA-SF is Volunteer Run

The editor is Karl Cohen and contributors include Nancy Denney-Phelps, Jim Middleton, Leonel Cortes, and other friends of ASIFA, with proofing by Jim Middleton and Scott Kravitz. ASIFA-SF is a chapter of Association Internationale du Film d’Animation with over 40 chapters around the world.

Now that we are supposedly post-Covid, we hope to do live events once more, but that isn’t happening yet.

To keep our chapter alive, we need to find volunteers to develop live and/or online programs. Indeed, we are offering free memberships, free newsletter and tickets to whatever screenings we get invited to. Contact Karl .

Posted on May 05, 2025 - 06:44 PM
Norwegian Film Saves Sex and Love
by Doniphan Blair

'Love (Sex Dreams)' hits escape velocity when teenage Johanne arrives at the home of her French teacher crush—the next line is 'Or my entire life would end.' photo: Dag Johan Haugerud

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

EVEN THOUGH CINESOURCE WAS
rejected for a festival pass at the Sonoma Film Festival this year, which we received annually since 2010, writer Randy Gordon and I decided—what the hell—let’s go anyway (read about our other cineSOURCE adventures, including in Sonoma here).

And, guess what—we had a TERRIFIC time!—as usual. I even got a nice, old-fashioned Airbnb three blocks from the square, and we saw some great films and ate some fabulous food, which is the added bonus of the Sonoma or Napa festivals. Although I can only mention one film, due to budget constraints, it was so good, it will make up for not reviewing three, as is our standard.

“Dreams (Sex Love)”—the title includes the parenthetical for reasons I will explain below—hails from Norway, and is insanely good, in that master-of-the-cinema-arts manner Nordics exude, especially in their now famous noirs. In fact, this film reverses the noir aesthetic. Not only is “Dreams (Sex Love)” sunny, romantic, childlike and vulnerable (see trailer here), it turns the gender, race and feminist complexities of our day on their head, not to mention it has fabulous film crafting. Indeed, “Dreams (Sex Love)" is presents as workman-like, which allows it to periodically take your breath away by blossoming into effervescent beauty.

The set up is simple enough: a drab-looking, totally-typical Norwegian (blond but barely attractive) teenage girl, Johanne (excellently inhabited by Ella Overbye), falls in infatuated, horn-dog sexual attraction as well as mad love with her beautiful, organic, arty AND, last but not least, brown French teacher (Selome Emnetu), until the multicultural onion starts peeling.

First Johanne writes about the affair, which turns into almost 100 typed pages, which she gives to her feminist single mother (Ane Dahl Torp), who is outraged she didn’t know about her only child’s first sex already. They are an open, honest, ultraliberal and share-everything family, after all.

Johanne finally explains all to her miffed mother. photo: Dag Johan Haugerud

By the way, this all unfolds in an innocuous we-live-at-IKEA-but-wild-things-are-happening-in-the-all-gender-bathroom kind of way, so you’re not distracted by braggadocio flourishes but still periodically amazed by the precision and symbolism of the film's cinema arts.

It all seems fine and good—our hero has survived her first brush with that blood thirsty demon: romantic sexual love—until her mother shares the story— despite explicitly promising not to—with Johanne’s grandmother (Anne Marit Jacobsen), who happens to be even more of a feminist and also an artist.

Indeed, Grandma is a published poet and probably prominent, although the filmmakers don’t make a big thing of it—that supposed Nordic modesty, which is actually their way of virtue signaling. As you may have already guessed, mom and grandma eventually mollify their anger and Johanne accepts their apology. (In case you didn’t know: mothers ALWAYS read their daughter’s diaries, even after they swear not to, and the ones who claim they didn't are lying.) Moreover, Grandma decides it's good enough to submit to her editor.

Although there’s no girl-on-girl nudity—unfortunately, since sex is a part of life, cinema does it so much better than novels, and Nordics are supposedly nude-positive, due to their tradition of co-ed saunas—and Johanne only has sex with her teacher nine times (if I recall correctly), the story keeps climbing up, expanding out, engorging, as it were. As it broaches new ideas and feelings, both for the characters and for us, we are soon reeling from the many but fully motivated narrative reverses.

You know the way some films have three or four endings, and you wish the filmmaker had just stopped upping the ante, and stood pat at the simple and solid first or perhaps second, which would have made the film sharper and more succinct, “Love” has three ending—but, in its case, each one is better than the last.

Dag Johan Haugerud, the 60-something ex-librarian who is reinventing romance as well as sex and love for the post-woke era. photo: Dag Johan Haugerud

The biggest shocker comes with the credits, when we learn “Dreams (Sex Love)” was not written by a teenage girl or even an avant-garde feminist author but a nerdy looking, middle aged man, Dag Johan Haugerud. Ironically, he came up as a librarian before becoming a novelist and then rocking Scandinavia with a number of films, starting with "I Belong" (2012) which won the Nordic Film Prize (a whopping $7,000 US).

Indeed, “Dreams (Sex Love)” is called that because it is the third part of the trilogy, along with ”Sex” and "Love"—all three were completed and began winning awards all over Europe in 2024. I desperately want to see the other two, but they are not available on standard streaming services.

Soon to be at an art house near you, I recommend getting off the couch because hot sex couched in smoking hot culture is the only way we'll solve the romantic crisis currently rendering us unloved and unlovable as well as killing us (literally, our population decline) today.

Posted on May 04, 2025 - 11:55 AM
Oakland Sports Resurrect: Activists & Artists Remain Strong
by Jay Randy Gordon

(Lf-rt) Jason Kidd (Dallas Mavericks' Coach, 10-time All-Star, NBA Champion), Trevor Parham of Oakstop, Jaylen Brown (Boston Celtics, NBA Championship MVP), and in back OaklandXchange Executive Director Shawn Granberry. photo: OaklandXchange

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

OAKLAND JUST HAD A RUN OF HORRIFIC
sports luck, losing their pro basketball and football teams in 2019 and 2020, and baseball four years later. Fans felt ripped off, disrespected and abandoned until, in the typical underdog, reinvent-yourself Oakland fashion, The Town (as it’s called, in contrast to The City across the Bay), is getting a whole new lineup of teams, cool enough to rep the Bay Area as well as Oakland.

Oakland may be butt-hurt and broke—Covid brought a wave of violence, it has a $280 million deficit, and it just recalled its mayor for corruption—but it still has its fighting spirit and vibrant creativity PLUS a brand-new mayor. Indeed, she—and it has been a she for three mayors now—is the widely respected, long-term Congresswoman Barbara Lee. Elected on April 15th with 50.1% of the vote, she offered a ten-step plan, including “improve public safety, secure county resources to address homelessness, update Oakland’s charter to focus on transparency and conduct a forensic audit of city contracts,“ according to NBC (4/21/25).

Oakland's new mayor, long time Congressperson Barbara Lee, and Damon 'Shuja' Johnson, a photographer and activist. photo: D. Johnson

In addition, Lee, who took office on April 21st, will rely on Oakland’s many artists, poets, writers, spoken wordsmiths, civic activists and Oaklandish enthusiasts to rise out of the ashes and prove that, in this time of crisis, nationally and internationally as well as locally, Oakland is a contender.

“You've gotta take the bitter with the better, the crooked with the straight,” as my friend "One-Man" Joe once told me, standing next to his RV on a side street in West Oakland.

Making bitter better was brought up to a high art after Oakland was denuded of ALL its pro sports teams, starting in 2019. The first team to decamp, the multi-championship winning Golden State Warriors (basketball), crossed the Bay Bridge in 2019 to their new deluxe digs at the Chase Center, at Third and 16th Street in San Francisco. Then came the Raiders (football) once famous for their crazy fans, who often showed up in face paint. They left for Las Vegas, after playing in Oakland from their founding in 1960, albeit with a 14 year hiatus in LA.

After a three-year stopover in Sacramento, The A's (Athletics, baseball) will also end up in Vegas, but enter, stage left, the Oakland Ballers. Starting in 2024, they have a small stadium in West Oakland’s Raimondi Park, part of the new neighborhood, Prescott, with dozens of nice condominiums and an indie food court, replete with microbrewery. Behind Raimondi Park is the infamous Wood Street Encampment, but it was cleared in 2023 (also only a half mile from cineSOURCE). Part of the Pioneer League, which partners with Major League Baseball, The Ballers started as a movement to keep professional baseball in Oakland and is fan-owned. Its management is dedicated to creating a community-focused experience, for example ensuring access to games by public transportation and having good eats.

Great concept because the fans of the new Oakland Ballers OWN the team! illo: Oakland Ballers

What's going on with the Oakland Coliseum, once home to the A’s and Raiders, you ask? Well, its become the home of the the Oakland Roots, a second tier soccer team in the US Soccer League. Founded in 2018, the Oakland Roots also highlights its community mission, which includes activism and the arts, with Coliseum halftime shows by Hip Hop artists such as P-Lo, the Bay Area born Filipino-American rapper.

In addition, there’s BAY FC (which stands for football club), a women’s soccer team in the NWSL (National Women’s Soccer League). Female-founded and player-driven it is playing at PayPal Park in San Jose (also the home of the MLS San Jose Earthquakes).

In 2020, the once-Oakland, now Bay Area Panthers, an indoor football league team, began playing at the Oakland Arena, the Warriors old place, but they moved to San Jose. Nevertheless, the Coliseum, in typical Oakland multiculturalism, is now getting a cricket team, the San Francisco Unicorns.

Oakland's new lineup of sports teams: Bay Football women's soccer, The Ballers baseball, The Roots men's soccer, The Panthers indoor football and Unicorns cricket team. illo: D. Blair

Shifting from sports to social support, Oakland XChange is a great example of another Oakland tradition: homies helping homies. A nonprofit dedicated to innovation and cultural diversity, it empowers underrepresented artists and entrepreneurs. According to Executive Director Shawn Granberry, "We combine the efforts of Coach Jason Kidd and NBA Finals MVP Jaylen Brown to build a strong economic base for African Americans in Oakland… including real estate, financial support and training for business owners, to help them be successful and lasting."

Chapter 510 is another nonprofit, this time helping young people write and get published. Its teaching artists and volunteers work with educators to support Black, Brown and gay kids (8-19) to write. Located at 546 9th Street, Oakland, it hosted a stellar fundraising event on April 29th at The California Ballroom, featuring with bestselling author Nnedi Okorafor, a Nigerian-American writer of science fiction and fantasy, like “Who Fears Death”,which won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Okorafor spoke with a Chapter 510 young person, Aida Ndiaye, and author/scientist Kemi Ashing-Giwa. Chapter 510 has partnered with Oakland schools such as Hoover Elementary, Acorn Woodland and Westlake Elementary, often doing an immersive storytelling event called “The Future of School.”

HipHop For Change enhances opportunities for marginalized communities by using Hip Hop music and culture as a vehicle for education, empowerment and employment, inspiring the next generation to address injustices and advocate solutions through Hip Hop. Follow them on Instagram.

HipHop artist Stanley Cox (AKA Mistah F.A.B.), creator of T.H.U.G. Therapy, Dope Era Academy, and Dope Era Apparel. photo: Dope Era

As great as these groups are, perhaps the most amazing is T.H.U.G. Therapy, where warrior ethics and high ideals are translated through street culture to help those injured by same. Thug, which stands for “teaching, healing-helping, uniting and guiding,” is a free workshop to help men open up about mental health struggles, and assist them in same. It was created by HipHop artist Mistah F.A.B., AKA Stanley Cox, the man behind the popular clothing store, Dope Era, and is held every other Wednesday from 6 to 8 pm in the basement of Club Dezi's at 1802 Telegraph.

Although wellness is a new, sometimes forbidden genre in the HipHop scene, local creatives like Karega Bailey, Christian Walker and Rexx Life Raj as well as Mistah F.A.B. have lifted the taboo on speaking openly about mental health, and are encouraging others to do the same, while also providing referrals, pep talks and other services. I myself have attended more than 12 sessions and can attest, personally, that this free program is effective, inspirational, uplifting and judgement-free.

Another avenue to positive change in Oakland is a podcast which began in 2024, “Finding A Way”, see their recent episode. Its mandate is to draw stories from all walks of Oakland life while weaving them into colorful mosaic painting a brighter future.

Shifting from self-help to the elevated art of film, a bunch of Oakland directors have recently debuted work, starting with “Sinners” (2025), directed by Oakland-born, now-Hollywood resident, Ryan Coogler. His breakout film was “Fruitvale Station” (2013), about the travails of young, hip Black Oaklander, before he went on to "Creed" (2015), "Black Panther" (2018) and more. Described by Variety as a "lush, enveloping, historical, phantasmagorical social-panorama from-dusk-till-dawn vampire film," “Sinners” focuses on twin brothers returning to their hometown to start anew, only to discover an even greater evil welcoming them back. Set in 1932 and the Mississippi Delta, it features A-lister Michael B. Jordan, with Coogler since “Fruitvale Station” in a the role of both twin brothers.

Also in the vampire genre is “A Horror in Oakland” (2025), directed by Pharoah Powell) where mysterious deaths in an Oakland ‘hood are traced to vampires and it's up to the homies to stop them.

Poster from the new Oakland film, 'Freaky Tales'. photo: A. Bolden and R. Fleck

Continuing with the horror in Oakland motif, albeit that of neo-Nazis and corrupt cops is “recent episode". Encompassing four tales set in 1987 in Oakland, “Freaky Tales” is a multi-track mixtape of colorful characters—an NBA star, a corrupt cop, a female rap duo, teen punks, neo-Nazis, and a debt collector—in a fever dream of showdowns, explosive action, edgy humor, gory kills and sly twists. Directed by Oaklanders Anna Bolden and Ryan Fleck, and narrated by Too$hort (with his original song of the same name), it stars the A-listers Pedro Pascal, Tom Hanks, Ben Mendelsohn, and Jay Ellis, as Eric "Sleepy" Floyd of the Golden State Warriors, who shot a fantastic game in 1987 and emerges a literal superhero.

A new documentary film starts shooting this May, currently titled "Hip Hop The Bay: From Hammer to Hiero, Hyphy and Humboldt", with executive producers Shawn Granberry of HipHopTV, Dwayne Sparks of EntertTech, and yours truly (Randy Gordon). We hope to work with Mistah F.A.B. and other heritage hip hop artists, entrepreneurs, producers, musicians, spoken word artists, and a wide range of up and coming and on the scene hip hop talent to show where Bay Area Hip Hop came from, is at now, and where its going.

These compassionate cannabis programs are carried on in other places like Rootd510 Dispensary a cool, massive facility on Telegraph Avenue, which connects Oakland with Berkeley. Started by Rickey McCullough, a 50-year-old entrepreneur of color, it also has in back a large theatre featuring music, comedy and other shows. McCullough is following the tradition of giving back, started by the first “compassionate cannabis” programs, which were founded in the East Bay at the Cannabis Buyers' Club of Berkeley by Aundre "Special" Especiale, who worked with famed cannabis rights activist Jack Herer, founder of Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP), which advocated for decriminalization and using it as a renewable resource for fuel, medicine, fiber and more.

Markelle 'The Gazelle' Taylor (lf), an ex-inmate and marathon runner from San Quentin, now run therapist and grocery store worker, appearing at a benefit for the nonprofit Run for a Better Oakland. photo: D. Blair

After working many years at the famous Harborside Dispensary, alongside wunderkind weed activist-author Steve DeAngelo, author of "The Cannabis Manifesto", McCullough started The Last Prisoner Project a nonprofit dedicated to reforming our criminal justice system through a progressive drug policy and freeing the tens of thousands of drug-war prisoners, convicted of an activity that is no longer a crime. Using legal intervention, constituent support, advocacy campaigns, and policy change, they aim to repair the harms of this discriminatory and counterproductive crusade.

Another nonprofit doing great work while being involved in film is Run for a Better Oakland nonprofit organization helping K through 12th grade Oaklanders to develop healthy lifestyles through running. Indeed, they sponsored a $75 a head benefit at the Parkview Theater on April 17th featuring the award-winning documentary, "26.2 To Life: Inside the San Quentin Prison Marathon". The Storyville produced-documentary tells a story of second chances and the transformation of three men sentenced to life for murder who undertake running in San Quentin's in prison marathon.

The fund raiser included a Q and A with former inmate Markelle "The Gazelle" Taylor, who was released 6 years ago from San Quentin Prison in Marin County. Currently living in San Rafael, Markelle became a "run therapist," social worker and 1,000 mile club runner as well as for a grocery store worker, while continuing his running regimen, from just jogging to training for and running 10Ks, half marathons, and marathons.

Twelve-year-old Kea'Von Shabazz, the positive poster child for hope in Oakland. photo by D. S. Johnson

Running for a Better Oakland is a typical Oaklander-run enterprise with dedicated folks trying to give back to their community through the discipline of running. There are literally hundreds of similar organizations throughout Oakland which will hopefully step up as Oakland recovers from the devastation of Covid, excesses of Black Lives Matter and a corrupt mayor, and gets back to what it does best: fresh alternative thinking to address our problems.

Jay Randy Gordon, the MARINSider, is a Marin County-based writer and producer specializing in business development and experiential marketing, who can be reached here.
Posted on Apr 30, 2025 - 02:04 AM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner Apr ‘25
by Karl Cohen

Scene from John Dilworth’s 'Howl If You Love Me'.. illo: J. Dilworth

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Dilworth's Adventurous New Piece

If you dare, see here the trailer for John Dilworth’s ‘”Howl If You Love Me”. Spoiler Alert: Jim, who loves Julie, turns out to be a werewolf!

In the Loop with Leo (Our New Feature by Leonel Cortes)

The Pokémon Resort Reopens Their Doors This September. Netflix announces a second season of Pokemon Concierge coming out in September of 2025. The stop-motion animated series follows Haru and her fellow coworkers working together to make the resort an inviting and comfortable environment for all visitors. The series avoids Pokémon battles and instead focuses on the bonds and friendships formed with trainers and their Pokémon.

Scene from 'Pokémon Concierge' coming to Netflix in September. illo: Titmouse

What’s In the Box? The animation studio Titmouse recently announced that they are working on a subscription-based service called Churp.tv. This mystery box provides subscribers with animation goodies from collectables, apparel, and even codes to a secret website that hosts cartoons for subscribers only. Founder Chris Prynoski describes the service: “It’s like Sanrio for stoners,” go here. Prynoski talks with Animation Magazine over Titmouse’s 25th anniversary and how the studio grew from its humble beginnings.

Daffy and Porky Work Together to Save the World! ”The Day the Earth Blew Up” is Looney Tunes' first fully animated film to be released in theaters. The movie follows Daffy and Porky and their attempts to save their home from condemnation while also saving the world from an alien invasion. Running on a meager $15 million budget, this fully 2d animated movie is great for Looney Tunes fans of all ages. You can read an interview involving the voice actors here. As well as an interview with the director here.

Looney Tunes Are for Kids Streaming service Max has removed all Looney Tunes related content from its platform. According to Deadline, the service places Looney Tunes under children’s content which Max states doesn’t fair well compared to adult and family-oriented programs. This decision follows others with Cartoon Network shutting down its website and the shutdown of Boomerang.

Can Wily T. Coyote get a fair trial, see the new Warner Bros movie. illo: Warner Bros

Will Coyote See His Day in Court as well as Theaters? After a decent opening weekend with “The Day the Earth Blew Up”, Ketchup Entertainment is looking to purchase the rights to Coyote Vs Acme. If negotiations go smoothly then it is expected that Ketchup Entertainment will release the film in theaters sometime in 2026. According to a WB insider, Warner Brothers is looking to sell the rights of Looney Tunes entirely. WB has not made an official statement on the matter. Why Warner Brothers thinks this is a good decision is beyond me.

Chinese Success Inspires Asian Animation Industry to Join the Global Stage Ne Zha 2’s success has inspired not only China but Southeast Asian countries to invest in their animation industry. Pearl Studios, producers of Ne Zha 2, is already set to release another animated film in 2026. Indonesian studio Visinema Group is releasing their own animated feature Jumbo at the end of March. The rise of streaming has produced a demand in animation and Southeast Asian studios are benefiting from it. It’s likely that the rest of the world will start seeing a lot of animated features or shows from these locations in the near future.

Disney Announces Some Future Projects In a case of very early news, Jon Favreau is writing and producing an Oswald series for Disney+. All we know is that it will be an animated/live action hybrid show starring the rabbit. Continuing with early news, Bob Iger announces Coco 2 during The Walt Disney Company’s annual shareholder meeting. The movie is currently in its initial stages, but it is set to be released in theaters sometime in 2029.

Seth McFarlane's secondary show, after 'Family Guy', is still pretty popular, hence is coming back for its 20th season. illo: S. McFarlane

Good Morning Fox After spending over a decade on TBS, Seth McFarlane's “American Dad” is returning to Fox once its 19th season concludes. TBS and Adult Swim will continue to air reruns of the series until 2030 but first run episodes will come from Fox. The hilarious series already has 400 episodes and personally I’m happy to know that the series is not ending any time soon.

Disney Veteran Talks Tech and Revolution Bill Kroyer, director of FernGully and pioneer CG animator on the movie Tron, recently released his book Mr. InBetween: My Life in the Middle of the Animation Revolution. Kroyer’s book follows his experiences from being an inbetweener to directing his own film all the while the industry shifting from hand-drawn animation to computer animation. As mentioned in an interview, Kroyer wants to show how the industry was prior to the transition of digital animation. The interview can be found here. Kroyer's book can be found on his website mrinbetween.org along with a discount code.

Box Office Hit Production Studio is Closing its Doors Jellyfish Pictures, a British VFX company known for its work in both live action and animated films is closing its doors. Despite being the studio behind the animation for this year's first animated hit Dog Man, the studio is unable to afford to keep its lights on. The official statement from the studio pits the blame on Covid hardships and struggles with not keeping up with demands after writer and actor strikes. The company has already laid off the majority of its staff with only a few staying around to help with the sale of its assets. It is unfortunate to hear more studios shutting down due to economic stress even though they produce successful works.

Scooby Doo 'Going Rive on Retfrix' Netflix in its never-ending quest to bring animated series to the live-action format introduces Scooby-Doo into the fold. According to the press release the series will bring together the teens and the Great Dane onto a summer camp setting. Netflix hasn’t confirmed an air date for the show but has confirmed that it will be an eight episode season.

China's super popular animated fantasy, ‘Ne Zha 2’, confounds critics. illo: Jiaozi

Now Back to Karl Cohen with “Ne Zha 2 Triumphs with Two Billion”

It seems the cinema press doesn’t know how to relate to this film, a Chinese animated fantasy adventure film written and directed by Jiaozi. They seem to be shocked that a country not well-known for animation has a hit that has made more money than Pixar’s most successful work. China’s "Ne Zha 2" has grossed about $2 billion worldwide. (The numbers differ in every article I’ve seen.) It has also broken the world record for IMax theaters and at the end of March it was the fifth highest grossing film of all time.

I had to go Wikipedia to find out what the film is about. Certainly not a Hollywood script, adapted from Chinese mythology stories and the 16th-century Chinese novel “Investiture of the Gods” (Fengshen Yanyi). The story begins with. “After Ne Zah and Ao Bing are struck by heavenly lightning together, their physical bodies are destroyed. To prevent their souls from dissipating, Master Taiyi Zhenren exhausts his Seven-Colored Sacred Lotus to regenerate their physical bodies, though they are still fragile. Ao Bing's father, Ao GFuasg, the Dragon King of the East Sea, believing his son is dead, orders Master Shen Gongbao attack Chentang Pass with the monsters imprisoned under his palace and the other three Dragon Kings of the Four Seas…” Indeed, Wikipedia’s story summary continues for SEVEN more paragraphs.

Fiore Update

Mark Fiore is is running a daily update of the disturbing thing spewing out of the mouth of you know who. It is called “Your Daily Firehose”.

A scene from Disney’s new 'Snow White', starring Rachel Zegler. illo: Disney

Snow White’s First Review

Variety praised Disney’s new “Snow White”, which opened in theaters March 21, as a “visual feast” and one of the conglomerate’s “best live-action remakes in years.” The writer who saw it at the Hollywood premier went on to say, “It recaptures the magic of the 1937 movie,” and people are “calling it a dazzling hit for the House of Mouse.“ Other comments say Rachel Zegler performance is excellent, it has show-stopping musical numbers and that at the opening, “Zegler was one of the fairest of them all,” see Harper's Bazaar article.

Disney Courted Disaster Releasing ‘Snow White’

Will people enjoy the new film for what it is or will they attack it for not being whatever their problems they have with it? Does it matter if it is or isn't politically correct, if it is or isn't true to the original story or....?

Rachel Zegler, the woman who plays Snow White, has said things in interviews that express her contemporary views on the story. Gosh, everybody knows Zegler doesn't have skin as pure as snow. It seems Disney press people somehow woke up and freaked out, realizing that promoting a modern version of a true classic that contains dated content isn't the same as releasing a sequel. They were also upset that Zegler stated a political opinion in public when she posted on the website X “always remember, free Palestine.”

Disney, probably fearing some sort of anti-“Snow White” campaign, delayed having a major all-out publicity campaign for it. There was no red-carpet Hollywood opening and it wasn't shown to the press before the first screening in LA. The result of a low-key promotion is that advance ticket sales projections were lackluster.

Fox s headline was “Snow White' has brutal box office opening weekend.” The movie grossed $43 million in the US and Canada and $44 million overseas for a total global debut of $87 million.” That is about what was expected. Will it turn out in the long run to be successful if word of mouth comments from parents and their kids are favorable?

As I write this “Snow White” has been out for less than a week and it is already the sixth highest box office success of 2025, a possible indication that the industry is in a slump and the film is actually doing well. The New York Times ran “Snow White and the Seven Kajillion Controversies”, an excellent two full pages+ story on the production’s rough history, on Sunday March 23. It covers a lot of ground including the studio originally planning to use little people for the dwarfs, but opted for computer generated characters instead. That decision has upset Hollywood’s small but vocal community of little actor.

The sad loss of the East Bay Media Center that many of us used. illo: Sasha Slaughter courtesy Berkeley Scanner

Bay Area Archive Burns

Sad news. I wasn’t familiar with this group but "It's still there with this burned out hole, it's so sad," posted Bay City News, on April 15, 2025, 7:51 am. “Just two weeks after the passing of its co-founder Mel Vapour, the East Bay Media Center [1939 Addison St. in Berkeley] was destroyed in a massive fire in the predawn hours of Monday… The building was unoccupied at the time and no one was hurt, but a 40-year-old film cultural center was lost.”

The Center provided equipment, training and more since the ‘80s. "Today, I've just been in shock and trying to recover and get my feet on the ground," said the center's owner Paul Blake. "To think of the media center and the loss that we have, I mean, we had all sorts of hardware, intellectual properties, archives, etc”

For 34 years, it also hosted the Berkeley Video/Film Festival, showed films and more. It will be missed.

The poster for the Drop Your Shorts Show. illo: Cinelounge

Shorts at Cinelounge

DROP YOUR SHORTS! A fabulous night of fun, of your short films projected on the BIG SCREEN at Cinelounge, is coming. There will be a submission fee of $20. The screening dates are May 15th 2025 and June 19th 2025, from 6:30 to 8PM. Nancy Phelps film will be shown at their next event, see their site.

Sotheby’s Auctions Animation for Burned Out LA Artists

NOTE: image Character design by Tim Burton and Carlos Grangel for Corpse Bride

AnimAID is doing fundraising for animation artists impacted by the Los Angeles wildfires, with bidding online from April 23– 30 through Sotheby’s. There will be rare pieces of animation history including original drawings, paintings, animation cels and maquette figures tied to animated films and series like “Snow White”, “The Simpsons”, “Beauty and the Beast” and more. They were donated by Warner Bros, Disney, DreamWorks and more.

The auction will also include prizes like getting to voice a minor character in Sony Pictures Animation’s upcoming theatrical feature “Goat”, receiving an original drawing by Nico Marlet, the award-winning designer who did DreamWorks Animation’s “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Kung Fu Panda”, or touring an animation studio.

ASIFA-SF Needs Help!

ASIFA-SF needs a person to help restore our crashed website because our webmaster seems to have vanished. Can somebody get it up and running again? We need to fix it or kill it. We also need to replace our former web person.

We also need to find volunteers to develop live and/or online programs to keep our chapter alive. We are offering: free memberships, free issues of newsletter and free admission to whatever screenings ASIFA-SF members get invited to.

For web repair or free membership, please contact .

Miguel Rivera, the 12-year-old musician voiced by Anthony Gonzalez, stars in a second 'Coco'. illo: Pixar

Unkrich to Direct ‘Coco 2’

Director Lee Unkrich and co-director Adrian Molina have reteamed at Pixar to develop “Coco 2”, a sequel to their Oscar-winning 2017 hit animated feature, “Coco”. The film is scheduled to open in hit theaters in 2029.

Oswald Down the Rabbit Hole

There is an awful trailer for an independent film project that defies my explaining—it uses Disney public domain footage—is it horror, noisy crap or ??? Somebody called it “’Screamboat Willie’, a ‘splatstick’ parody”, see IMDb.

It’s a big mystery. It might be connected with the live action horror film “Screamboat” that opens in NYC on April 2nd. There, the evil monster’s costume suggests he has Mickey Mouse ears.

Disney Accepts Unionizing

Disney animation production management workers ratified their first union contract, after an intense organizing effort that saw a supermajority of production workers vote to unionize in February 2023. The agreement was overwhelmingly ratified by the unit with 96% voter participation and ratified with 93% support.

The ruling affirmed the eligibility of full-time production coordinators, production supervisors, and production managers to unionize with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839. Wages will rise from 24% to 35%. The fight for fair treatment and pay is often not seen by the public. It has included signing petitions, marching to deliver signatures, staging courageous silent protests in front of executives. This fight for their fair treatment has gone on for several years. A similar fight is still ongoing at DreamWorks Animation for their first contract.

Disney Did Not Plagarize

A jury has decided that Disney did not plagiarize the material in “Moana” from Hawaiian stories. The long-running copyright infringement lawsuit against Disney for “Moana” material as finally come to an end, with the company cleared of plagiarism allegations. The suit was a five-year legal battle that ended up in a two-week long trial in a federal court.

It took a Los Angele jury less than three hours to rule unanimously in Disney's favor. The panel determined that the “Moana” team did not have access to Woodall's script or his project outlines, and therefore did not need to address the supposed similarities between the two works.

Adventures in Indie Animated Feature Funding

Writer/Director Signe Baumane traveled to Bordeaux, France in March to attend Cartoon Movie, a big animation forum where producers and directors presented their feature film projects to sales agents, distributors, financiers and producers for possible co-productions and sales deals. 30 projects gave presentations. Signe was there with two of her producers, and they presented a 90 slide powerpoint show of “Karmic Knot” and explored potential co-production deals. Some of the slides can be seen here.

Animator Kath Dudek passes at 69. illo: K. Dudek

In Memory of Kath Dudek

One of ASIFA-SF’s first members, Kath Dudek, has died at 69. Kath was a delightful friend who livened up many ASIFA-SF events by singing well-rehearsed close harmonies songs with her partner Litz Plummer, “The Opera Lady.” She had studied animation at SF State and was proud that she once animating human cells for a medical film using Jello (probably in the early 1980s).

ASIFA Kicks of Year-Long Anniversary Celebration by President Deanna Morse

The International Animated Film Association, ASIFA (Association International du film d’Animation), is celebrating their 65th anniversary with a variety of exciting initiatives throughout the year. ASIFA’s mission has always been to connect animators worldwide and promote the art of animation. As a global umbrella organization, ASIFA supports unique regional groups and chapters across the world.

Chapters are hosting a range of vibrant local and national activities, including ﬁlm festivals, workshops, screenings, and celebratory events. The spring celebration has already kicked of with retrospective screenings, awards, and seminars at notable festivals, including the Cairo Animatex Festival (Egypt), and the Monstra Animation Festival (Portugal). Summer brings the Zagreb International Animation Festival (Croatia), and the Annecy International Animation
Festival (France), with even more activities planned for the rest of the year.

A Few Highlights:
• International Animation Day: ASIFA has issued a call for very short ﬁlms about peace
to be streamed on October 28, 2025, in celebration of the birthday of animation.
https://asifa.net/asifa-peace-for-the-planet/
• Special Anniversary Cash Award: ASIFA will sponsor a special cash award at select
festivals to recognize the anniversary.
• ASIFA Student Award and ASIFA Member’s Postcard Gallery: These popular
initiatives are underway, celebrating the talent and creativity of the animation community.
• ASIFA Prize Retrospective Screenings: Curated screenings of ASIFA Prize winners will
be showcased at several major festivals.
• Zagreb Animation Festival: ASIFA will host a General Assembly meeting, and animator
Sayoko Kinoshita will be honored with the prestigious ASIFA Prize for Lifetime
Achievement.
• Annecy Animation Festival: A major gathering is being organized by ASIFA Hellas,
Hollywood, China, and others to celebrate the milestone anniversary.
In addition, ASIFA Magazine and the ASIFA Academic Journal will highlight the
organization’s history, achievements, and future directions.
For the past 65 years, ASIFA has worked tirelessly to connect animators around the globe,
celebrate the art of animation, and foster cultural exchange, all while upholding the values of
peace, love, and tolerance.

For more details on these activities, visit our site, thanks, Deanna Morse, President.

Cartoon Brew Goes Daffy and Porky

In honor of the release of “The Day the Earth Blew Up”, seventeen delightful moments were posted on Cartoon Brew on March 25. Just click on Porky Pig And Daffy Duck's Greatest Moments.

Scene from Martha Gorzycki’s amazing 'Voices from Kaw Thoo Lei' about the Karen people of Myanmar. illo: M. Gorzycki

Amazing Animated Documentary About Myanmar

The Karen people in Martha Gorzycki’s amazing “Voices from Kaw Thoo Lei” (2016), fled Burma. But friends and family members who remained are helping rescue people enslaved at scam call centers. In Gorzycki’s innovative animated documentary several people from Burma (now Myanmar) speak about surviving terrorism and genocide inflicted by the corrupt Burmese military government. While her voices have escaped the horrendous horrors they witnessed, others who still live in eastern Burma near the border with Thailand are being mentioned in the world news for helping rescue people trapped and forced to work and lived in scam call centers.

Newspaper accounts claim that possibly 10,000 people have been freed, but thousands more are being held captive. The press reports are not clear about how large the problem is. One news story on the BBC in March placed the number of people around 250,000.

The centers are said to be run by gangsters who are from China and other countries. They advertise high paying jobs in China and they work with small “airlines” to bring the potential workers from different countries to their future jobs. In the story I read the writer said her plane had to make an “unscheduled” stop. She was then escorted to the remote jungle compound where she lived for over a year until she was rescued. She said that those who resist doing the work are beaten.

There are numerous call centers in other lawless countries in that region of Asia. I read that in rural Cambodia they have the audacity to set off fireworks displays whenever they make a major killing (rip-off). To see her film go here, or for more information Google “scam call centers Burma.”

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .

Posted on Apr 17, 2025 - 04:11 PM
Randy Gordon, cineSOURCE’s Most Prolific Writer
by Doniphan Blair

J. Randy Gordon (lft) and Doniphan Blair in front of the Sonoma Film Festival sign, 2023. photo: R. Gordon

Oracle's majestic 72 footers breach the Golden Gate. photo: courtesy GGYC

Surfer.com provides the classical shot of Bianca Valenti, San Francisco's queen of the big wave riders. photo: Sachi Cunningham

'Out of control writer' Randy Gordon (lft), 'filmophile' Nancy Holland and 'photographer' Doniphan Blair, at the Napa Film Festival, 2016. photo: unknown

I'm blasting my two-bit Corolla through South Napa's fecund farmland, looking for that special full moon that's supposed to be rising in the East, my head also blasting from cineSOURCE's "Martini Party" last night (11: is that excessive?).

It's closing night at the often incredible Napa Valley Film Festival. Unfortunately, I'm running late, having barely made my daughter's soccer match in time to pick her up before the Soccer Mom snitches notify my ex.

My evening is scheduled similarly tight. First order of business: find the fine, film-ophile Nancy Holland, who bailed on an important open house (she's a part-time realtor) to meet me and cash in on my swear-to-die promise of a great film and closing party. Second, locate the photographer, Blair, who cineSOURCE finally deemed me worthy of assigning, to cover my interview with Alan Kropf, director of the festival's closer, "Pisco Punch: A Cocktail Comeback Story".

And so it went, through over 20 collaborations, arguing half the time and trying to get Randy to edit more. You know how some writers like long, anecdotal intros to set the tone? Well, Randy loves them so much, he believes in having two or three! Regardless, I would edit the copy down, Randy would negotiate some of it back, and we would strive for that perfect tone—just aggressive enough, not too many factoids—which abides a good writer-editor relationship and makes for better writing.

Thanks Randy, and I look forward to your next submission, as cineSOURCE itself is "blasting its two-bit Corolla" through the pressing issues of the day: Trump's Conspiracism, Ukraine and Arab Zionists, but also as the Napa and Sonoma film festivals, which we love and will continue to cover, despite their periodic cancelling of cineSOURCE's coveted "all festival" pass.

Since this article is going out in April, when cineSOURCE does its Oakland Issue, here are three more Randy articles, which happen to be about Oakland sports films: Al Davis Memoriam: RaiderNation Keeps Winning in Oakland, Linsanity: Doc On Unique Player, and Still Standing Tall: East Bay Football.

Posted on Apr 06, 2025 - 05:47 PM
My Half Century With Islam, Part 4
by Doniphan Blair

A founder of Islamic modernism, Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-'97), was probably a Persian Shi'a but preferred to be known as a Sunni Afghan, hence his name. illo: unknown

Continued from My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
Return to My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
Return to My Half Century With Islam, Part 1

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

ALL CIVILIZATIONS ARE MONOTHEISMS
insomuch they’re rules-based, share the social construct of increased ethics and cooperation, and are universalist. Despite their stupendous suffering and occasional cynicism, often expressed in humor, most Jews assumed the other monotheists would eventually recognize this obvious fact. They were mistaken. Many Muslims and Christians rejected the inherent equality and tolerance of monotheism, even after it helped inspire the American Constitution and the elimination of slavery, a pattern of prejudice continued among communists and fascists. Sadly, monotheism has long been gamed by charlatans, cult leaders and false messiahs as well as authoritarians, who role play Islamic, Christian or Jewish values but lust for the idolatry of personal or tribal benefits, despite the fact that “[a] civilization that builds on the basis of blood is a tribe, a tribe that builds on the basis of ideas is a civilization,” as I noted in my “The Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto”.

Salafists Try to Make Islam Great Again

The Wahhabis were resisted from their mid-18th century beginning by liberal Muslims, first the preachers in Wahhab’s own family, then those in Mecca. Indeed, Islam’s most sacred city was famous for tolerance and creativity pre-Islam and that tradition continued, especially when it welcomes millions of visitors during the Hajj. Making the pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the “Five Pillars of Islam” (but only if a devotee can afford it), and Muslims from all over the world came to pray, talk, trade and sometimes marry, since women often attended unveiled, or be entertained and enlightened by Sufi storytellers and theologians. During Wahhab's Hajj, with his devotees, “the qadi [head judge] of Mecca pronounced them to be unbelievers, in view of the well-known principle, based on ‘Hadith’, that whoever without good reason denounces a fellow Muslim as an unbeliever himself enters that category,” (Hamid Algars, “Wahhabism”, 2002).

The Wahhabis were so unpopular, in fact, they were driven from Mecca in 1811, eight years after conquering it, by Egypt’s new ruler, Muhammad Ali Pasha, a military genius backed by hardened Albanian troops. Ali Pasha was also a liberal Muslim, probably a Bektashi Sufi (a tariqa which allows alcohol), who opened Egypt to the West, by reviving the multicultural, scholarly center and port of Alexandria. The Ottomans followed suit in 1839 with top-down reforms, called “Tanzimat,” which introduced elections and later full citizenship for Greeks, Armenians and even Jews, including the right to serve in the army (important for men to prove their capacity and status, unfortunately, just in time for WWI).

Meanwhile, "The Nahda," the Arab Enlightenment, bubbled up from Arab street, driven by writers and diplomats, ranging from progressive modernists to conservatives or clandestine Wahhabis. One of the best-known was the activist and scholar Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897), who travelled throughout Europe as well as the Middle East, Persia and India teaching, publishing and sometimes plotting, including assassinations. His most famous disciple, Muḥammad Abduh (1849-1905), became Egypt’s Grand Mufti (religious head) and famously liberal. Indeed, he allowed figurative art (after visiting European museums), often quoted “The Quran”’s “No compulsion” line, amplified women’s rights, and inspired Egypt’s 1919 Revolution. In fact, many Middle Easterners adopted western ideas, tools and goods, which radically altered lives and life spans, but their democracy was in its infancy, their institutions were archaic, and their leaders were often corrupt. Thus the poor and disenfranchised were forced toward Salafism, as Wahhabism came to be known, after incorporating Islamist innovations from India and elsewhere.

Farida Mazar Spyropoulos, a Syrian dancer married to a Greek restauranteur, introduced belly dancing, Middle Eastern romance and the 'Hoochee-Coochee' dance to America at the Egyptian pavilion of the 1893 Chicago world's fair, where the line to see her went around the block. photo: unknown

Unlike the Protestants, who evolved from Puritans to mostly tolerant democrats in three centuries, the Salafists believed modernity could be stopped by increased fidelity to Shari’ah Law, even though they reinterpreted “The Quran” and added sections. The Muslim Brotherhood was started by an Egyptian schoolteacher in 1928, to restore a caliphate after the Ottoman one was abolished in 1924. Although it adopted a few theories from Abduh, it borrowed mostly from European Fascists, already in control of Italy, and the Nazis, using brown uniforms, mass rallies and extreme antisemitism to became Salafism’s preeminent sect. Indeed, Hamas is an offshoot; Qatar is a Brotherhood state; Erdogan’s Turkey is Brotherhood-inspired; and the original Egyptian group tried to co-opt the Arab Spring in 2011 but then destroyed it. As the Brotherhood was beginning, the Wahhabis finished their conquest of most of the Arabian peninsula, established Saudi Arabia (1932), and began building immense wealth in partnership with infidels, the Americans who discovered oil there in 1938, even though that, too, is forbidden by Shari’ah Law.

The Salafists also excoriated and ended, to various degrees, depending on region, the traditional Arab culture of belly dancing, music, wine and hash, which flourished in the Middle East's world-class cafes for centuries. The Arabs always made wine, which many Muslims partook privately, but then they developed “al-kuḥl” (an Arabic word), which some young men use to this day as a rite of passage or mystical psychedelic experience, by getting blotto drunk. Although coffee was discovered in nearby Ethiopia in the 10th century, it was adopted by Yemeni Sufis, to help with late-night prayers, and popularized around the 15th century. Hashish arrived around the 12th century, with commercial cultivation starting in Egypt and the more high-end in Lebanon, but international commerce continued, since hash was a compact and popular trade good from Afghanistan, again with Sufis involved. Although Baba Ku was the hash-smoking folk hero from the cultural center of Balkh, the real pioneer was another Afghan Sufi, Qutb ad-Dīn Haydar, the dour leader of a small Malamati (self-blaming) Sufi tariqa in the 13th century. He preached abstinence and fakirism (in his case, pushing an iron rod through a scabbed-up hole in his arm) until, one day, “Walking in the country side in the midday heat, he discovered the divine properties of a plant that… almighty God has bestowed… which will dispatch the shadows that cloud your soul and will brighten your spirit,” (Gabriel Nahas, Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, 1982).

The mullahs outlawed tobacco after it was imported from the New World in the 16th century, up to under punishment by death but, after about fifty years, the sultans convinced them it was not an intoxicant like alcohol. From Turkey to North Africa, the “hookah” (water pipe) was borrowed from hash smokers‚ while smoking cigarettes in public proliferated by the 17th century. In this way, globalization gifted the Middle East three pleasant, only modestly toxic and widely popular drugs, a cocktail not available in Europe until the 19th century. Indeed, many Middle Eastern men delighted in their coffee, tobacco and hash in their reserved space of the cafe (women ruled the home) until the arrival of the Salafists, who really got going in the 20th century. From Morocco to India, they challenged the corruption of regular folk as well as authorities and started funding desperately needed charities, schools and hospitals. Not so welcomed, however, was how, to varying degrees, they forced women to cover and punished of, artists, gays and minorities, although they did inspire some Shi'a and Sufi preachers to adopt aspects of their doctrine in an attempt to restore Islam. This two-century struggle was considered an internal Islamic reform movement and largely unknown in the West until Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979.

The Shi'a Ayatollahs became notorious for holding 53 Americans hostage for 15 months, replete with mass demonstrations featuring the chant “Death to America,” but they also proved much more brutal than the Shah, who was culturally liberal and not quite as repressive. In fact, the Ayatollahs installed harsh religious as well as regular police and hanging judges, who executed many of their opponents but also supposed allies. Some Western leftists, like French philosopher Michel Foucault (who visited Iran twice in 1978), supported Iran’s revolution, which reversed the CIA-assisted coup of 1953, even though it proved disastrous for Iranian women, artists, Sufis and minorities as well as leftists. A vibrant intelligentsia endures, especially among Iranian filmmakers, but the authoritarianism remains, which sparks months-long protests every few years and is repressed with mass incarceration and murder. There were protests in 2019 and even larger ones in September 2022, after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, was killed for not properly covering her hair. In the summer of 2024, mainstream media reported that Iranian Revolutionary Guard agents were assassinating dissidents in Turkey.

World travelers, show here camping (probably near the Bamiyan Buddhas) was a common in Iran, and enjoyed by many Iranians, as I experienced, until the country was closed in 1979 by Shi'a Ayatollahs. photo: unknown

The Ayatollahs also adopted extreme antisemitism, despite Persia’s traditional friendship with the Jews, starting in antiquity with a mythical Persian Jewess, who became queen and saved her people (recounted in “The Bible”’s “Book of Ester”), and the actual King Cyrus the Great. A brilliant lawgiver and liberal as well as general, Cyrus defeated Nebuchadnezzar and freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity. He even helped them rebuild their temple in Jerusalem (making him the only gentile given the honorific “messiah”), and brought Jews to Persia. They lived there comparatively well for 2,500 years, in fact, sometimes serving as advisors and doctors, and reaching a population of 100,000 in 1948, when Israel became a state. Iran was one of the few Muslim countries, along with Turkey and Morocco, not to expel their Jews, and they flourished under Shah Pahlavi.

Despite such long fraternity, mutual benefit and occasional intermarriage, however, the Ayatollahs kicked the Jews out in 1979 (the few who remain endorse the country’s vehement anti-Zionism, which some Jews profess, in adherence to the ancient belief that Israel's emergence must await the messiah). Moreover, the Ayatollahs decided that supporting the Palestinians and oppressed Shi’a of Lebanon, and attacking Israel was the perfect trick to unifying a chaotic Islam and attracting Muslims of any sect who felt humiliated or angry with the West. After the once-impoverished, third-class Jews living across Islam enjoyed suspicious battlefield and economic success in Israel, with some help from the West, they could serve as the perfect symbol of evil and scapegoat. Israel may be tiny and far from Iran, but if the Ayatollahs could destroy it, that would prove the superiority of Shi’a theology and ethics, help them defeat the seven-times larger Sunnis, and make them God’s chosen people—absurd as that may sound to an Iranian liberal, artist or Sufi as well as rational observer.

The Muslim Brotherhood was not the only group to import fascist and Nazi ideologies and tactics to the Middle East. Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1938, was supposed to minister to the spiritual needs of Islam’s third sacred city, but was actually an aristocrat and a brutal warlord. Indeed, he ordered the murder of dozens of liberal Muslims as well as hundreds of Jews, in massacres, which started in Hebron in 1929, with the slaughter of 68 Jews (and a hundred more elsewhere) in an orgy of violence that prefigured Hamas’s invasion of October 7th. Although liberal Arabs saved hundreds of Hebron’s Jews and, after they fled, Hebron’s merchants wrote an open letter asking for their return, the Arab’s fascist aristocracy was intimidating, held sway, and fomented more revolts and then wars. Indeed, al-Husseini took over the Arab Revolt in 1936 and, six years later, moved to Berlin, where he spent the remainer of World War Two encouraging Bosnian Muslims to fight for Germany and lobbying Nazis to bring the Holocaust to the Holy Land.

Anti-colonial British sentiment in Iraq inspired the “Golden Square” coup of 1941, which was supported by Italy’s Fascists as well as the Nazis. The rebelling officers controlled the country only briefly, but enough time to butcher 250 Jews in Baghdad, which was half Jewish for over two millennia, replete with pillaging, raping and defilement as well as foreshadowing. In 1948, a similar “farhud” and the public hanging of a dozen of Iraq’s Jewish elite forced the entire population of 90,000 to flee, penniless, to Israel. Although the Ba’ath Party founded after the war was socialist, it produced the fascism of Sunni Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (1979-2003), and that of the Shi’a Assad family in Syria (1970-12/8/2024). Full-blown Islamo-fascism, however, which was not so much nationalist as Islam- and world-wide, only arrived in 1979, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Within three years, Egypt’s liberal president, Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Egyptian soldiers affiliated with Islamic Jihad (another Muslim Brotherhood offshoot). His crime: making peace with Israel. Then came Hezbollah, “The Party of God,” an aggressive mosque-state combo of sect, political party and military (bigger than the Lebanese Army until 2024), as well as an Iranian colony in the Middle East, a bit like the ten castles the Hashashin seized in Syria, eight centuries earlier. The Iranians sympathized with the Lebanon’s Shi’a underclass in Lebanon, exacerbated by the country’s civil war, 1975-’90, which killed 150,000, and Israel’s inevitable involvement, due the invasion by Syria and attacks, mostly by Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. After the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan, for trying to overthrow King Hussein (of the liberal Hashemites, a Meccan dynasty installed by the British), they dominated Lebanon until the Israelis forced them to flee to Tunis, Tunisia, including 8,000 fighters who remained at loose ends until mixers were organized and marriages ensued. But, Hezbollah remained and began earning leftist as well as radical Islamist street cred with two massive suicide truck bombings: one of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983, the other of a Jewish community center in Argentina, in 1994, murdering 241 and 85, respectively.

The Palestinian spiritual leader and war lord, Amin al-Husseini (lft), lived in Germany at the end of WWII, made Nazi propaganda and lobbied Hitler for death camps in Palestine. photo: unknown

Seven years later, those numbers were eclipsed ten-fold by al-Qaeda’s Hashashin-style attacks of 9/11, which killed 3,000 and shot Salafism to the top of the news, foreign policy and negative public opinion world-wide. Although some Muslims celebrated, others took to the streets of Tehran, Cairo and elsewhere to show solidarity with America and opposition to radical Islamism, which went quiet for a decade. Indeed, in 2011, pro-democracy protestors rose up across the Arab world after a Tunisian fruit vendor, Tarek Bouazizi, set himself afire to draw attention to the endemic corruption. The Arab Spring quickly toppled Egypt’s corrupt dictator, Hosni Mubarak, who died in prison in 2020, and Libya’s colorful, capricious one, Muammar Gaddafi, who was raped and killed by rebels in 2012, after three and four decades of abuse, respectively, as well as leaders in Tunisia and Yemen. Alas, the Arab Spring failed to attract overwhelming support, was outflanked by seasoned Salafist operatives and triggered civil wars in Libya, Yemen and Syria, with only the latter finally resolved. After Israel destroyed Hezbollah, Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad's biggest local supporter, a miraculous 12-day campaign, mostly by ex-al-Qaeda fighters, cost only 200 casualties and forced Assad to flee to Moscow on December 8, 2024. This dealt a significant blow to both Iran, the main backer of the al-Assad regime (composed of Alawites, yet another esoteric Shi’a sect), and Russia, which installed military bases there in the Cold War, began bombing rebels in 2017 and lost its only Mediterranean naval base, in Tartus. The conquering faction, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (meaning “life and freedom for the Levant"), seems more tolerant and democratic then the average Salafist group, evidently chastened by the horror of civil war, which killed up to 600,000 (80% civilian) of Syria's multicultural society, including Shi’a, Sunni, Druze, Kurds and agnostic modernists.

Civil wars generally favor fundamentalists, as per the saying from the 14th century Middle East, “Better a century of tyranny than one day of chaos.” The Arab Spring did produce Egypt's first-ever free election in 2012, but voters elected a Muslim Brotherhood member president, Muhammad Morsi, whom the army soon had to oust for abrogating democracy (he died in prison, 2019).

Nevertheless, Sunni fundamentalists are still powerful in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, where the Taliban is more repressive than ever, Mali and elsewhere, especially after the birth of Salafism’s newest iteration, the Islamic State during the chaotic fighting in Syria in 2014. IS (also called ISIS, to insult the goddess, and DAESH, its initials in Arabic) conquered a third of the country and a similar slice of Iraq. Armed men would race across the desert, a la Wahhab cavalry, but in Toyota pickup trucks, and do orgiastic attacks. They proclaimed a caliphate, the first since the end of the Ottomans, which attracted radical Islamists, freebooters and sadists from across the West. In keeping with Salafism’s double-down strategy, IS adopted every possible western weapon, communication system and luxury good but a more repressive Islam than even 18th century Wahhabism. They mandated gloves, eye mesh and anklets, to more completely cover women, and forbid images or music for entertainment, education or enlightenment purposes, but not propaganda. Indeed, their slick marketing and social media used extensive beheadings and torture imagery, not to mention porn was readily available on their devices.

We don’t have to find a modern al-Ghazali to divine that IS’s claim to abide the letter of Shari’ah Law contradicts the spirit of the peace-professing and mystical Muhammad and Sufis, who were once popular across the Middle East. IS’s fiendish fundamentalism frightened so many Muslims, in fact, many Middle Eastern countries—including Iran—assisted the American and Iraqi armies defeat them, culminating in the Battle of Mosul (2016-’17), and the killing about 10,000 IS fighters and 8,000 civilians. Other than the Taliban’s second seizure of Kabul, in 2021 (the first was 1996), that was Salafism’s last major battle before October 7th, 2023.

Me hanging out with Ukrainian soldiers and refugees (the guy giving a gang sign is from the destroyed city of Mariupol) as well as Anne, a pianist who said she'll never play Russian composers again, the Golden Rose Synagogue, Lviv, Ukraine, 2022. photo: D. Blair

Authoritarians Invariably Attack Liberals

On October 7th, 2023, I was in Lviv, Ukraine, a lovely cafe and university town, hanging out with some of its many educated, artistic and worldly teens and 20-somethings—hippies, in other words…

Conclusion

This concludes the first half of “My Half Century with Islam, Its Loving Sufis, Four Secrets and Monotheist Wars”. The second half will include the rest of this chapter, which covers from Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution of 2013 through the second Russian invasion (2/24/2022) to Ukraine today, especially how it helps democracies worldwide (it supplied the Syrian rebels drones and intelligence). It will also have 11 more chapters:

14. My Dark Night of the Soul: Realizing a Second Holocaust Is Possible
15. Why Israel Has the Right to Exist
16. The Fourth Middle East Secret: Many Arabs Welcomed Zionists
17. Today’s Arab Liberals: Arab Springers, Honest Monotheists and Ex-Muslims
18. Can Sufis Save Islam a Fifth Time?
19. The War of Symbols in The Middle East and Across the World
20. Everything is in the Mind: From Ancient Hindu Maya to Modern Deconstruction
21. Is Fanatical Islamism More Powerful then Cultural Marxism?
22. The Meaning of 10/7: Forming a Just, Equitable and Radical Multiculturalism
23. Why We All Love Liberal Democracy Even Though Some Won't Admit It
24. Surviving the Chaos of Multi-Front Global War

Some of my articles to be linked in the second half of "My 50 Years with Islam":

Why Arab Liberals Support Israel
Did Arabs and Jews Like Each Other in 1948?
‘The Green Prince’ of Peace Documentary
Theo Who Lived: When Hippie Meets Al-Qaeda
Feras Fayyad: Fighting the Syrian Regime Thru Film
Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed
Darwin and Love: What I Learned Making a Holocaust Movie
Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs

Posted on Feb 07, 2025 - 02:11 PM
Great Gifts from cineSOURCE
the staff

$25: Our brand new 'Just Say No to Fascism' T-shirts, sizes XL to tailored female small.

Happy Holidays

Despite democracy’s downturn and the new Cold War, we have to keep our spirits up. Indeed, for better mental health, I order you to celebrate copiously, with good cheer, tasty consumables and great gifts.

Speaking of which, cineSOURCE has some excellent offerings in the 25 buck range. And, with two items or more, free Bay Area delivery (30 crow-fly miles from cineSOURCE in West Oakland). Or you can peruse and pick up from cineSOURCE, or we are happy to ship, regular or expedited.

For orders or any questions, please or call/text 510 220.2126.

Provocative T-Shirts

• Just Say No to Fascism: Our new T, fresh off the presses, features the scintillating statement and great graphic of “Just Say No to Fascism”.

It comes in black only, sizes from XL to tailored female small, and costs $25, plus $10 for 7-day shipping or $18 for 3-day shipping, plus $5 tailored female.

$20: 'Go Creative' T-shirts, XL to tailored female.

• Go Creative: Another great T, it features that slogan emblazoned on a pink Oakland cityscape, with rising golden sun.

It comes in black only, sizes from XL to tailored female small, and costs $20, plus $10 for 7-day shipping or $18 for 3-day shipping, plus $5 tailored female

• Abstract Aborigine: This classic T, with 11 silk screened colors, features that slogan over an indigenous Brazilian girl taking photos in the jungle. This item was made in 20 years, hence the classical and quality price.

It comes in black only, only sizes L and M, and costs $45, plus $10 for 7-day shipping or $18 for 3-day shipping.

Stand For Something: Bumper Stickers

• Just Say No Fascism Bumper Sticker, 11"x3,: This provocative message, perfect for car, house, stocking stuffer or helium balloon, is only $5 for singles, $3 for multiples—not to forget FREE shipping.

$5: Just Say No Fascism Bumper Sticker.

Books About Other Worlds

• “Love at the End of the World: Stories of War, Romance and Redemption" is poetic, loving look at life that began in a great family, passed through the hell of the Holocaust, and resurrected back to love, by Tonia Rotkopf Blair. It also includes Doniphan Blair's essay on "Survival of the Lovingest," a radical revision of Darwin. Paperback (right): $18, plus $5 shipping, hardback (left) $25 plus $7 shipping (multiply by 2 for expedited shipping).

$18: 'Love at the End of the World' has 37 stories that find grace, balance and love, despite life's difficulties, no matter how extreme.

An extract from the story, "The Good Germans":

Across from my area [in a work camp in Germany], on the other side of the hall, there were three young German trainee pilots, in their blue-gray uniforms, also working on parts of airplanes. The young pilot directly across from my workspace started asking my master to send me over so I could retrieve a tool that fell into the cavity of the airplane wing he was working on.

We were not supposed to talk or look at each other, but I saw his eyes, they were blue. His blond hair, showing under the pilot’s cap, looked luxurious, compared to my shaved head. He began asking for my help more and more often. And I began looking forward to going over there. It was exciting.

On the fourth or fifth time I went over, the pilot was very jittery, walking around the wing of the plane, not looking at me, kind of doing a little dance and singing from the side of his mouth, “What a great war, what a wonderful war, my mother burnt, my father burnt, my brother burnt.” I was scared but my heart went out to him. A bond developed between us, without ever exchanging a word or looking directly at each other.

$40: 'Be Happy' Poster, 30"x22, 3-color seriograph.

Uplifting Poster

• “Be Happy Poster", 30"x22, is a quote from concentration camp survivor Micheline Maurel. The 3-color seriograph (silk screen) is $40 plus $15 shipping on regular paper, or $200 on archival, rag paper (multiply by 2 for expedited shipping).

Curated Cannabis

• Glitter Bomb, deeply cheesey, indica-dominant, organic-grown: $35/eight, $60/quarter, $110/half, $200/full, plus $5 for 7-day shipping or $11 for 3-day shipping.

Posted on Dec 20, 2024 - 08:08 AM
Ukrainian Movie Combines Opposites Beautifully
by Doniphan Blair

Scene from 'The Porcelain War', a fascinating new film from Ukraine. image: courtesy Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

In these challenging times, it’s critical that those on the front lines help those of us far from it learn how to meet the challenges we may someday face. Not only do we have to move from spoiled insouciant to responsible adult, pronto, we have to embrace many other extreme opposites.

No where is this more manifest then among Ukrainians, where a comedic writer and actor shape shifted into their president and, even more incredibly, a great wartime leader. It is also evident in the new film, “The Porcelain War,” by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev, an American filmmaker and Ukrainian ceramicist, respectively. In it, we soon learn that the friendly people and fantastic artists from the storied city of Kharkiv are also the soldiers defending it, see trailer.

Unlike in the gargantuan Russia, which only has two great cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Ukraine has about ten, starting with Kyiv and including Odessa and Kharkiv, both famous for their poets, artists and filmmakers. Because Kharkiv is less than 50 miles from the Russian border, its residents have also become famous for fighting an implacable, murderous enemy.

In fact, Kharkiv is home base for the notorious Azov Battalion, which has been standing against the Russians since they first invaded in 2014, and is now Ukraine’s most laurelled division. Outside of Ukraine, people criticize the Azov for being hard right, unaware how hard they’re fighting, not just for Ukraine’s democracy—led by a Jewish president they love—but for democracy internationally. A young friend of mine from Lviv, another artist-filled Ukrainian city, who happens to be a scrawny intellectual, just quit his job, started working out and volunteered for the Azov—who accepted him into its drone corps. I couldn’t be prouder.

Indeed, not only are the Ukrainians the frontline for democracy in Europe, they provided drones and intelligence to the Syrian rebels. And the liberation of Syria, in 12 days, after 12 terrible years, has not only rid the world of a brutal fascist dictator, it dealt the fascist alliance of Russia and Iran a serious blow.

“The Porcelain War”, however, whisks us away from such sick realities to a terrible war balanced by incredible beauty, which is needed to endure the long haul, which this struggle will be. Unlike the Azov, which was originally composed of soccer hooligans and Nazi punks, “The Porcelain War” documents a small unit of diverse Kharkivians—artists, doctors and farmers—who refuse to abandon their much bombed but even more beloved city, and are fighting for it as a potent drone unit.

One team member is Slava Leontyev, one of the filmmakers, and between scenes of war, we join him and his wife, Anya Stasenko, in their studio. He sculpts small animal figurines, which combine folkloric and modernism, and she paints them, often with incredible light or nature nearby or in the background. Indeed, the cinematography is fantastic. Then, as we settle into this intense opposition—war, making art, walking in lovely nature—the film jumps another notch, into gorgeous animation. It all serves to bring home, subtly and sophisticatedly, unlike any war film I have ever seen, the intense integration of life and death, art and war, dream and determination, that we need fight in the modern interconnected world.

“The Porcelain War” just won a Sundance award, is shortlisted for Best Documentary Feature Film at the 2025 Oscars, and opens on Friday, January 3rd, at the San Francisco’s AMC Metreon and the Smith Rafael Film Center, in San Rafael.
Posted on Dec 20, 2024 - 07:07 AM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner, Dec ‘24
by Karl Cohen

'The Fireside Angel' by Max Ernst,1937, a leading German Surrealist. photo: unknown

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Surrealism Turns a Hundred

In October 1924, French writer Andre Breton published what’s now known as “The Surrealist Manifesto”. The seminal text—which argued for a new style of art and literature that would be “free from any control by reason, exempt from aesthetic or moral preoccupation”—helped give rise to a new, avant-garde movement that spread around the world. To mark the manifesto’s 100th anniversary, a new exhibition in Paris is examining Surrealism’s enduring global impact. Titled Surrealism, the show incorporates more than 500 artifacts and artworks, including poems, drawings, sculptures and paintings. The show opened in Brussels in February, is currently on display at Paris’ Pompidou Center. and will move on next year to Madrid, Hamburg and finally Philadelphia, where it will be a welcome addition to that art-filled city.

Scene from 'Spellbound' an animated feature by John Lasseter. photo: courtesy J. Lasseter

Welcome to a New Season of Animation

John Lasseter has produced “Spellbound”, a direct-to-video princess feature for Netflix. Apparently, they think it is more profitable for them to bypass theatrical releases. This is the second animated feature from the Lasseter-led Skydance Animation (part of the impending Paramount-Skydance Media merger).

“Spellbound” is a modern musical fairy tale that takes place in the mythical kingdom of Lumbria as Princess Ellian embarks on “an invigorating quest” to break some sort of spell. It is not your typical family drama, as the mysterious spell has transformed Ellian’s parents into massive, rampaging monsters. It opened on Netflix on Nov. 22. Watch the trailer here

The poster for 'Flow'. photo: courtesy G. Zilbalodis

"Flow", by Gints Zilbalodis from France was at the incredible Alamo Drafthouse, on Mission Street in San Francisco, where you can get a great beer and decent meal delivered right to your seat. “When the cat’s home is devastated by a great flood, he finds refuge on a boat populated by other creatures, including a dog, a bird, a capybara, and a lemur. Sailing through mystical landscapes, they must navigate the challenges, dangers, and wonders of this new world.” There is no spoken dialog. It is visual story telling at its best.

After Jim Middletown saw “Flow” at the Ottawa Animation Festival he said, “Flow was a jaw-dropper. If this is the possible future of independent production, then Pixar, Disney et al, will have to do serious jogging to catch up - a new level of imagination is reached with this one. It's a film for someone wanting to see a fine movie, not an afterthought for promoting special products at Burger King.”

”Vengeance Most Fowl” is the title of Wallace and Gromit new piece, starting on January 3rd on Netflix. Read a long informative article about the construction of the puppets, the story and other facts, plus see their full trailer.

“The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie” is a 2D animated feature shot in a widescreen format. It will have a limited run starting December 13 to qualify it for an Academy Award, and it will open theatrically across the nation Feb. 28. 2025. Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both voiced by Eric Bauza) “discover a secret alien plot to take over the world via mind-control and chewing gum, gumming up the works with their inimitable antics in the process.” Ketchup Entertainment produced it.

Scene from Greenpeace's new piece. photo: courtesy Greenpeace

Streaming: New Formula for Animation Producers

It seems to be that going directly to video streaming, as with “Spellbound”. It avoids spending too much $$$ on detailed artwork, since they bypass the big screen (so why bother?), and they can stick to bankable formulas (like using the Disney “Princess Formula”). In the future, it will probably include using AI as much as possible to reduce the amount paid to animators and writers. Cutting costs can be more important than quality to the bean counters in the front office. They know people come for the story, not for an aesthetic experience, so they skimp on details.

Greenpeace Gets Animated!

“My Pet Footprint’ is their new TV series to combat climate change. Fifteen-year-old Bella and a friend embarks on a surreal adventure through time and space, experiencing firsthand the most significant climate change impacts created by Big Oil. Greenpeace East Asia Unveils "My Pet Footprint" an animated series trailer

Paddington in Peru

The Guardian says the new animated feature “Paddington In Peru” is “just as jolly as the previous two films, but not really as funny.” When I looked Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 92% rating from the critics and 88% from the public. The trailer makes it look like a delightful Indiana Joes type of adventure. See the Guardian review here

Paddington whitewaters a river in Peru. photo: courtesy unknown

Moana’s Record Breaking Start

The Walt Disney Animation Studios tentpole “Moana 2”, that opened Nov. 27, is off to a fantastic start in advanced ticket sales. Indeed, it set records Monday Oct. 28 in terms of first-day advance ticket sales, according to online retailer Fandango. It sold more tickets than any other 2024 animated film, including fellow Disney/Pixar summer 2024 blockbuster “Inside Out 2”. It’s also the fourth-best showing of the year for any movie behind “Deadpool & Wolverine”, “Wicked”, and “Dune: Part 2".

“Moana 2” sets Disney animation record with $13.8 million in previews. On Thanksgiving, it continued on its record-shattering path, earning a massive $28 million in the US. Variety said, “The animated sequel is on track to gross at least $175 million over the five-day holiday.” It didn’t seem to matter that the reviews from 145 critics gave it a rating of 65% (Rotten Tomatoes). The SF Chronicle review said “at least three quarters of this movie is utter confusion. mind numbing, incomprehensible.” On Sunday night, The Hollywood Reporter headline read “’Moana 2’ Tops Best Thanksgiving Ever, Opens to Record $221M in U.S. and $386M Globally.” Indeed, it smashed numerous records and was the biggest five-day debut in history!

Trailer for ‘Mufasa: The Lion King’

The film opens on Dec. 20th, see trailer.

Pixar’s ‘Dream Productions’

Pixar has created a TV series for Disney+ that is essentially an 82-minute movie told in four episodes, but with a much smaller budget than the typical Pixar film, according to its director, Kelsey Mann. It is a spinoff of “Inside Out”, “another story about managing a healthy relationship with your emotions.” “Dream Productions” premieres on Disney+ December 11th, see trailer.

A boy comes to understand an octopus in Disney's new short ‘The Boy And The Octopus’. photo: courtesy Disney

Disney Holiday Short ‘The Boy And The Octopus’

“The boy comes to understand the extent of the octopus’ desire to explore everything the world has to offer,” is a sentence I saw somewhere, see trailer.

‘Venom 3' Led the Quiet Post-Election Weekend

With no new releases the weekend after the election, Sony’s “Venom: The Last Dance” stayed on top of the domestic box office chart for its third weekend with an estimated $16.2 million from 3,905 theaters for a domestic total of $114.8 million. “Venom 3” earned another $33 million overseas for a foreign total of $279.4 million. Its world-wide box office total was $394.2 million on Nov. 11th. What does this say about the public’s taste?

Arcane, Most Expensive TV series Ever

The 2nd season of the TV series “Arcane”, said to be the most expensive TV series ever made, is returned to Netflix on Nov. 9. The first season won four Emmy Awards in 2022, including outstanding animated program. It was also the No. 1 TV show in the 85 countries served by the streaming service. It was based on their franchise “League of Legends”, an adult animated steampunk action-adventure television series. It was created by Christian Linke and Alex Yee, and was animated in France under the supervision of Riot Games. The budget was $ 250 million. Watch Arcane | Netflix Official Site.

A scene from Disney's is 'Ice Age 6’. photo: courtesy Disney

Disney’s Ice Age 6

Disney is gearing up to produce “Ice Age 6” with cast members Ray Romano, Queen Latifah and John Leguizamo, part of “Ice Age”’s sixth sequel. It will be the first film in the series to be released in theaters since Disney bought 21st Century Fox’s film and television units in 2019. The assets include the rights to the “Ice Age” franchise.

Emily the Cat Lady

“Emily The Strange And Her Four Cats” is being developed by Warner Bros Pictures Animation. The studio is collaborating with producer Bad Robot to adapt the illustrated character that was created 30 years ago by artist Rob Reger and the Cosmic Debris team. “Emily the Strange” is said to be a multimillion-dollar franchise that includes books, comics, games and an apparel line. Screenwriter Pamela Ribon, known for “Nimona” and “My Year of Dicks”, will write the movie’s script according to Variety.

‘Halloween Vs Day Of The Dead’

Now in development, “Halloween Vs Day Of The Dead” will be set in in a steampunk world and delves into the traditions of Halloween and Day of the Dead. The rivalry of the two towns Halloween Ville and Day of the Dead Town, that broke relations hundreds of years ago, can only be resolved by the most unlikely and innocent residents, the children. The story centers around Pump Kid, a boy from Halloween Ville, and Bony Lu, a girl from "Day of the Dead Town". Together with a group of friends they go on a journey to reunite their feuding towns and people. No release date is set.

Munich based Studio 100 Intl. has teamed up with Mexican animation studio Lunch Films to develop “Halloween vs Day of the Dead”. It will blend 2D and 3D animation and the director is Celso Garcia whose credits include The Thin Yellow Line. The producer is Guillermo del Toro.

A poster for Disney's cancelled feature. photo: courtesy Disney

Story of a Canceled Disney Feature

The untold story of a canceled Disney animated feature, “Who Killed Fraidy Cat?” is as follows It was in development at Disney, first with Piet Kroon working with several writers at different times, and later with Disney vets John Musker and Ron Clements. A long, well-illustrated story about the production is online. It is by David Mahler, a cartoonist and writer from Melbourne, Australia.

The story outline and the first treatment looked promising, a Hitchcock-like crime story about a cat and a parrot in London. It was going to be a 2D work, but it went through several revisions during the first years of this century when Disney was moving into computer animation. The article about this failed project includes lots of drawings and paintings capturing different styles and moods, see article.

Piet Kroons, the film’s first director, created an exceptional animated short, Transit, 1998. It deserves another viewing or a first screening if you haven’t seen it yet, see it here. Kroons also created “Dada”. 1994, which may just be one of the weirdest animated films ever made, see it here His credits also include work on several features including “Iron Giant”, “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West”, and “Osmosis Jones”.

Recent Opening Weekend Grosses

WICKED Grosses: Domestic (69.2%) $112,508,890; International (30.8%) $50,001,000 Worldwide; $162, 509,890 (3 days, opened Nov. 22).

MOANA 2 smashed several records, taking in $221M in U.S. and $386M Globally. It was the biggest five-day debut in history! The critics were not impressed with the film, but will the box office reports influence the Academy members who select which films gets an Oscar nomination?

Indie Animation

Discover the stop motion work of Amanda Strong, a Native American from Canada who has gained considerable recognition for her contributions to contemporary Indigenous cinema. She is an Indigenous filmmaker, media artist and stop motion director whose work has explored ideas of blood memory and Indigenous ideology. The Pacific Film Archive recently presented a retrospective of her films. Her three National Film Board films, "Hipsters Headdress", 2017; "Inkwo for When the Starving Return", 2024, and "Four Faces of the Moon" trailer are here, and her impressive demo reel here.

A poster for ‘Courage the Cowardly Dog’. photo: courtesy John Dilworth

You Might Want To Read

“25 Years Later, Looking Back at ‘Courage the Cowardly Dog’ and Its Heady Mix of Jungian Concepts, Nietzsche, and Angry Eggplants” is by John Dilworth, the creator of the beloved Cartoon Network series, tells IndieWire about treating his animated show like an indie film. For more info go, here

Memoir Of A Snail

Here is an informative discussion about “Memoir Of A Snail” with its author Adam Elliot. “I get emails from angry parents all the time telling me, ‘Your films are not for children!’ and I say, ‘Of course they’re not! Why are you taking your children to my R-rated film?’” says Elliot. “I mean, we have an orgy in the story, swingers, alcoholics and child abuse.”

Elliot insists that their team’s use of sexual lubricant for character tears is not meant as an innuendo. Though, he adds, “I suppose it could be. It’s great stuff because it doesn’t evaporate,” Elliot explains of the lubricant. “If you film a tear coming down the face, which we drag down with a toothpick, it’ll stay there for a day without drying up. If we put it all in there, in the eyes, and we take that toothpick and wiggle it around, it looks like the tears are shimmering.”

Elliot says. “And one day, when I was young, at three o'clock in the afternoon, this film called ‘Alice’ came on and I watched Jan’s version of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ in stop-motion. I was mesmerized. It was dark. It was disturbing. And I thought, ‘I want to do that.’”

“It’s a medium. There’s room for all types of animation. I mean, the reason I even became an animator is because you get to play God. You’re not restricted by anything. Characters can look however we want them to look, and we get to be megalomaniacs and control freaks.” This marvelous film has 200 characters, 200 sets and 5,000 snail pieces. It had its world premiere at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival.

I think the film is a finely produced masterpiece. I hope you get to see it as it is extremely funny, sad at times, thought provoking, wonderful… see the trailer. Indeed, you can see ‘Memoir of a Snail’ on Animation Showcase, until Christmas.

The Animation Showcase is a streaming platform featuring outstanding recent shorts and features from around the world. It promotes hard to see works to the animation community that you may have read about winning recognition at internationals festivals and the Academy Awards, but you never thought you would ever get to see them.
The showcase started in 2016 with the goal of helping upcoming creative talents in the animation industry get exposure. Their streaming platform, which was developed during the COVID years, has enabled them to reach our community worldwide. They not only stream the films for free, but they make available making-of and featurettes about some works.

Other films available include “Letter to a Pig’, “Affairs of Art”, “War is Over”, “The Flying Sailor”, the feature “Chicken for Linda” and dozens of other exceptional works made recently. There are also several making-of features including Henry Selick’s “Wendell and Wild”, Guillermo del Toro's “Pinocchio” and Aardman’s “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget”.

To connect to the platform. Logon with your address and the password, asifasf2020 (no cap letters). The Animation Showcase is also available on your TV or Home Cinema system via Apple TV & Roku. Special thanks to Benoit Berthe Siward, founder of the showcase.

Images from 'Ultraman' by ILM. photo: courtesy ILM

Great Images from Ultraman

Images that give you a solid punch in the face from Ultraman are part of what ILM flashes on the screen as Ultraman delivers a whopping blow. The images include heavy duty “impact frames” when Ultraman runs forward and throws a punch directly into the camera. There are also flares, acid green-colored skies with purple lightning, speed lines, frames that flash black and white and other element that will hopefully jar the minds of the viewer (go here).

Animation Guild Goes for Better Contract

The Animation Guild (tag) is pressuring producers for a better contract TAG has been in negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) as contracts expire Dec. 2. They have been demonstrating their strength to producers since this past summer in order to get the best deal possible for animation workers. The issues include fair wages, job security, and common-sense guardrails around Generative AI use. As for AI animation workers say, “We do not have to resign ourselves to a future where the only job is the mundane checking of AI outputs. GenAI will never be able to do what we do, and by organizing, we can ensure a future where our art, stories, and work remain beautiful, meaningful, and human.”

TAG held a “March on the Boss” on November 12 where members gathered outside Glendale's DreamWorks Animation offices to present a petition to executives, signed by more than 58,000 members and their public supporters. The petition reminds the bosses that while animation workers kept content production alive during the COVID lockdown, and animation is outperforming live-action on screens and in merchandise sales, they face unprecedented levels of unemployment, losing their healthcare, homes, and livelihoods. There were also large demonstrations in November at Warner Bros and Cartoon Network.

The “March on the Boss on October 24 at Netflex again showed the employers that TAG members will stand together for as long as it takes to get the contract they deserve. They presented Netflix a petition with almost 2000 signatures.

In early August an impressive group of unions and guilds issued a joint statement of solidarity with TAG, supporting their efforts to negotiate and reach an agreement The statement read, “We stand with the members of TAG as they seek contractual provisions that set fair wages and working conditions, prevent overwork, and safeguard workers from the impact of artificial intelligence. TAG negotiates independently of IATSE’s West Coast Studio Locals to address the unique priorities of animation workers, and they do so with our full collective backing.“

The statement was supported by The American Federation of Musicians (AFM), Directors Guild of America (DGA), International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 40 (IBEW), International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 399 (IBT), Laborers International Union of North America Local 724 (LiUNA!), Operating Plasterers & Cement Masons International Association (OPCMIA) Local 755, Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), United Association Plumbers Local 78 (UA), Writers Guild of America East (WGAE), and Writers Guild of America West (WGAW). The producers are represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).

Last Minute News

Variety reported that TAG and AMPTP reached a tentative agreement. The guild announced it for a three-year contract includes AI protections “that include notification and consultation provisions,” increases to the health and pension funds (consistent with those in the IATSE Basic Agreement that was negotiated earlier in the year), as well as wage increases of 7% in the first year, 4% in the second year and 3.5% in the third. TAG also reported that it includes protections for remote work, “improved” terms for new media, new bereavement leave terms, additional sick days and recognition of Juneteenth as a holiday.

Disney Ends 2024 on High Note

Thanks in large part to its theatrical film division and growth in streaming, Disney reported revenues of $22.57 billion in its fiscal Q4 which ended Sept. 30. That was up 6 percent from the same quarter a year ago. The growth was driven by entertainment, where revenues were up by 14 percent to $10.8 billion thanks to Deadpool & Wolverine and Inside Out 2. Streaming improved its profitability, with operating income of $321m between the company’s DTC offerings. Disney+, meanwhile, added more than 4m “core” subscribers, and now has more than 120m core subs. Revenue in DTC was $5.8b. from Hollywood Reporter

Disney expects to spend $24b in content in its fiscal 2025, up slightly from 2024 when the company says it spent $23.4b. The company disclosed its planned content spend in its annual report. Don’t expect a flurry of additional movies or TV shows, however, as sports programming expenses are set to rise next year thanks to contractual rate increases at the NFL, the start of the new NBA contract — which nearly doubles the previous fee — and the launch of the new ESPN flagship streaming service.

Although testimony sited several cases where woman were paid less for the same job and men with less experience were advanced to better paying jobs over women with more experienced, a Disney executive told the pressDisney CEO Bob Iger said the company has already undergone a great consolidation, after acquiring the assets of 20th Century Fox in 2017. While noting that Disney will “always look opportunistically at opportunities,” Iger said the company does not have immediate plans for acquisitions under the new administration.

Disney Settles Class Action Suit

The Disney company will pay $43 million to settled class action over women's pay. It has also agreed to hire experts to address compensation disparities impacting roughly 9,000 women who said they're being paid less than their male counterparts for similar work. A Disney spokesperson issued a statement that said, “We have always been committed to paying our employees fairly and have demonstrated that commitment throughout this case, and we are pleased to have resolved this matter.” Then why did the lose?

SIGGRAPH Asia 2024

SIGGRAPH ran in Tokyo from Dec. 3 to 6. You can read information about the full program here.

In the lower right cut away of the actors, you can see how Wonder Dynamics is doing AI. photo: courtesy Wonder Dynamics

Wonder Dynamics Does AI

Wonder Dynamics AI tool turns live-action footage into 3D animation. The company co-founded by Tye Sheridan launched Wonder Animation, co-founded by Tye Sheridan, creates 3D CG animation using AI reconstruction. On October 30, they launched the beta version of Wonder Animation that lets artists shoot a scene with any camera, in any location, and then turn the footage into an animated scene with CG characters in a 3D environment via AI reconstruction.

Wonder’s flagship, Wonder Studio, has already demonstrated their technology that industry for tech that allows users to place CG characters over live action footage. Their technology allows editors to put multiple cuts and various shots together and then use AI to reconstruct the scene in a 3D space. It can work with images created using various software including Maya, Blender, or Unreal.

“There is a current misconception that AI is a one-click solution, but we know that’s not the case,” said Nikola Todorovic, co-founder of Wonder Dynamics. “That’s why with the beta launch of Wonder Animation, our focus is on bringing the artist one step closer to producing fully animated films while ensuring they retain full creative control. Unlike the black-box approach of most current generative AI tools on the market, we’re empowering artists to shape their vision instead of just relying on automated outputs.”

Wonder Dynamics was founded in 2017 and in May was acquired by Autodesk, expanding the company’s reach and offering more access to its tech to provide studio-level films with VFX and CGI that can be done on an indie film budget.

Can Watching Movies Rewire Your Brain?

A Stanford research study confirms what we assume, that when people lose themselves in a story, they become more empathetic. The idea for the study resulted from producer Scott Budnick meeting Barack Obama in Washington in 2019 at a screening where Obama screened an early cut of his legal drama “Just Mercy”. The film is about a man in Alabama man who is wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. At the time, Obama was in the midst of setting up his production company, Higher Ground, and he mused to Budnick that perhaps “a film could literally change somebody’s brain matter.”

Months later, Budnick mentioned Obama’s comment to Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt and the seeds of an intriguing new piece of research were planted. Scott had received a MacArthur genius grant for her research on racial bias and says “you don’t have to wonder. You could actually study that. ”

Five years later she did that using Stanford’s psychology department’s MRI machine to see if watching “Just Mercy” changes brains patterns. It was part of the first academic study using a specific cultural product to measure empathy. The study is still underway, but the first phase of the study that had participants watching videos online, hints that movies do have the potential to change minds. The findings were published Oct. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study made with 60 participants suggests that watching “Just Mercy” increased participants’ empathy for the incarcerated and decreased their enthusiasm for the death penalty. This story appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

Do You Like Wild Cartoons

See lots of outstanding examples in this collection of clips: A Thrilling Tour Through The History Of Wild Takes In Animation by Vincent Alexander is on Cartoon Brew . It covers takes a wide variety from Ub Iwerks’ Mickey to Ren and Stimpy.

The cover of Nancy Denney-Phelps' new book, 'On the Animation Trail: 20 Years of Animation Festivals'. photo: courtesy Disney

Nancy Denney-Phelps' New Book

My friend and colleague, Nancy Denney-Phelps, just published, on the 18th of December, with Routledge, her excellent book on animation, "On the Animation Trail: 20 Years of Animation Festivals. The paperback is $59.99, hardback, $160.00 and the eBook is $59.99 ·

Letter from the President of ASIFA

November 26, 2024

Dear ASIFA member,

Thank you for being part of our world-class organization, ASIFA, the International Animated Film Association. Your membership is a wonderful step towards supporting our animation community, globally.

In 2025, ASIFA will celebrate our 65th Anniversary, 65 years young. Our Association
International du film d’Animation was founded at Annecy, chartered under UNESCO, with the goal of connecting animator to animator, worldwide, and celebrating the art of animation.

We recently created a short snappy video that gives an overview of our organization. Please view it, feel free to share it, use it. Six and a half minutes long, it is on asifa.net, see it here.

Coming up in 2025 — Your chapter will continue to facilitate your vibrant work
and activities. And, the international ASIFA will continue our regular activities - offering a website, supporting international connections, coordinating International
Animation Day, promoting the Animation Workshop Group (where artist-teachers work with children), coordinating the ASIFA Student Award, and giving our lifetime award, the ASIFA prize. These are all volunteer run initiatives, with volunteers around the globe.

In addition, we will offer a few new activities around our anniversary celebration. There will be another call for postcard art early in 2025. And we will have our General Assembly, our global members meeting held every three years. We will elect new officers, and take stock of our organization - past and future.

More information will be shared in 2025, please check our website at http://www.asifa.net.
If you want to participate in a specific activity, or connect with another chapter, you can find details on our website, or feel free to email one of us directly.

It’s holiday time in the USA, a time where we pause and say what we are thankful for.
I am thankful for you, for this global community of animation artists who believe that there is power in connecting with each other, across borders, to share our love of the art of animation, to build bridges, across cultures, to seek mutual understanding. To work for peace.

I am thankful that ASIFA will celebrate our long heritage next year recognizing that we are 65 years young. Honoring our past, and and moving forward with new ideas and initiatives.

Thank you for being part of our global community of animators.

In peace, Deanna Morse
President, ASIFA

Email her or see her site here.

ASIFA-SF Needs Your Help

ASIFA-SF is a chapter of Association Internationale du Film d’Animation with over 40 chapters around the world. Now that we are supposedly post-Covid we had hoped for a rebound with live events once more, but that isn’t happening yet.

To keep our chapter alive, we need to find volunteers to develop live and/or online programs. Until that happens we are offering free memberships. These new members are needed to tell others to sign up to get free issues of our newsletter and whatever screenings that ASIFA-SF members get invited to.

For more info contact .

Posted on Dec 14, 2024 - 05:40 PM
My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
by Doniphan Blair

A Wahhabi warrior from the Arabian desert circa 1800. illo: unknown

Continued from My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 4
Return to My Half Century With Islam, Part 1

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

ALI WAS A RESPECTED WARRIOR AND
served Muhammad devotedly, including in the killing of Medinan Jews, but he was also a man of peace, who opposed power grabs—a Muhammadian democrat, in other words. Finally elected as the fourth “Righteous Caliph,” he was soon assassinated, at prayer no less, for being too tolerant to Muslims who committed infractions, for not punishing them harshly enough. Considered the first Sufi by some, since he would have heard the supposed secret teachings, Ali was murdered by members of the Kharijites, Islam’s first extremist sect, who were traumatized by Islam’s first civil war (656-61 CE). That sanguineous slaughter started when the majoritarian Sunnis established a dynasty (in contradiction to Muhammad), amassed a massive army, and mercilessly massacred the minority Shi’a, including Muhammad’s grandson, Husayn. Martyr stories oblige intellectuals to parse God’s will creatively, which stimulates sophisticated ideas and art but leaves regular folk confused.

Mohammedan democracy and Sunni egalitarianism were hard to scale up, the further Muslims got from his charismatic leadership, as was the trick of integrating mosque and state. Sunnis switched to primogeniture succession and hierarchies headed by sultans and viziers (political leaders and managers), who ran the armies and bureaucracies for the caliph (religious leader). After the Damascus-based Umayyad Dynasty grew too fast, fomenting division and corruption, the Abbasids seized power (749 CE) and reigned for almost exactly a half millennium from Baghdad. Reforms were attempted, often by Sufis, but the Abbasid Caliphate declined into dysfunction. In 1258, after they murdered emissaries from the Mongolian khan called Genghis (or Chinggis), they were annihilated, including the flooding and burning of Baghdad as well as slaughter. No democratic elections were held until the Sunni Ottomans started experimenting with democracy in 1877, and many Arab nations still have kings today.

Despite tyrannical tendencies, Islam was idea-based and could be easily improved by encouraging ethical leadership, everyman activism and moral suasion, as Muhammad did in his day, decent mullahs ever since, and Sufis throughout their history, but especially during their renaissance. Islam’s allowance of four wives, to those who can afford it, did deprive poor men of sensual satisfaction as well as families and matriarchal partners, while dowry requirements favored older as well as rich men. But those sexo-social imbalances were relieved through the lingering looseness of the pagan era and the universal practice of situational homosexuality, especially in the men-only professions of herding, transporting, soldiering and sailing. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of those workarounds faded after Islam turned a thousand and was confronted by European conquest and science, the civilizational achievement their forbears helped transfer to Europe, compounded by the standard cycling between liberal and conservative societies.

After societies innovate, achieve success and accrue wealth and power through greater openness, creativity and tolerance, they indulge luxuries, spoiled children and intellectual fantasies, until they enter a period of decadence, decline and corruption. Seen as illegitimate or weak, they are eventually attacked by reformers or authoritarians from within or predators from without.

Although the single monotheist lord is the supreme patriarchal metaphor, queer Michelangelo preferred to portray him as ensconced in angels. illo:Michelangelo

Honoring But Also Correcting Thy Father

By the late 18th century, both the Ottoman Empire and many Sufi tariqas had become corrupt. This made Muhammad Wahhab's ultra-conservative Islam attractive, especially to the desperately poor, of which there are often many in barren desert regions. After the Wahhabis conquered most of Arabia, they turned north and massacred Karbala, the region's biggest Shi’a city, which is near Baghdad and still features a shrine to Muhammad’s grandson Husayn. Taking Mecca in 1803, they became the putative heads of Islam, if only for eight years. They destroyed the centuries-old Sufi community, composed of storytellers, musicians, poets and philosophers as well as Islamic teachers, some of whom retaliated, although most went underground (some Sufis claim there's still a tariqa in Mecca). Along the way, the Wahhabis also attacked Jews, Christians and pagans, enforced mosque attendance and daily prayers, and took control of women, replete with full body covering (sometimes enforced while they worked the fields, a health hazard), public chaperoning, genital mutilation and honor killings, which they hoped would reduce matriarchal power and sex magic, after the permissive Sufi Era.

Islam's politico-religious hybrid made its achievements gifts from God but, by the same token, its defeats and decadence had to be blamed on sin. Monotheism became so popular so quickly because it solved so many problems, but not the “Why bad things happen to good people" conundrum, which polytheists easily answer through their central conceit of multiple deities and the pat response: “You must be praying to the wrong god.” The same theological crisis challenged Judaism in the 6th century BCE, after King Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Solomon’s Temple and kidnapped half of Jerusalem to exile in Babylon (50 miles south of Baghdad). Although they were soon freed by the Persians, who also helped rebuild their temple, the rabbis still had to answer for abandonment by God. Blaming increasingly subtle sin like “coveting thy neighbor’s wife in thy heart,” Jewish intellectuals developed “guilt,” a more internalized and sophisticated social control than tribal peer pressure, shame, shunning and excommunication.

Rejecting such severe self-criticism, an unknown rabbi wrote and the rabbinical community approved of “The Book of Job”, arguably “The Bible”’s most advanced theological postulate, since it answers the "Why bad things happen to good people?" riddle. Stylistically unlike other Biblical books and thought to originate outside Hebrew culture, "Job” was probably written in the 5th century BCE, shortly after the Jews' liberation from Babylon. It became a foundational text for the new Pharisee sect, which also began reciting scripture in public. Using big characters reminiscent of “The Parable of Adam and Eve”, God bets the Devil that his great devotee, Job, is so righteous and upstanding he won’t renounce God, even if his good fortune is annihilated. Despite losing his health, possessions, flocks and family—everyone except his wife (who, unlike Khadija, doesn't support him and recommends he admit error)—Job defies the three wise men and their accusations of sin and addresses God directly, enacting the supreme rebel archetype. In the heat of their argument, God asks, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4), which inspires Job's epiphany: The universe is simply too old, large and complex to be fully understood. Hence, the path toward good—which can be defined as “greater benefit, for more people, over longer periods,” while “Evil is short term benefit for the few”—includes struggle, pain and, on occasion, grotesque tragedy.

I dealt with Job's conundrum once in a discussion with my mother (by phone in the 1990s). “If it wasn’t for the Holocaust, you probably would have stayed in Poland and not come to America,” I told her, “Then you wouldn't have met my father, which means I wouldn’t exist.” “That’s not true,” she said, after a long pause, "You would have been your father’s son.” “But how could that be without you as my mother?” “You would have been your father’s son with another woman,” she concluded, which would have pleased Khadija, given my mother was ceding the traditionally female power of birth to a good man, a righteous patriarch.

Michelangelo’s muscular 'Moses'. photo: unknown

Muhammad drew mostly on Jewish and Christian stories but added a few from his own experience, his tribe’s or Mecca’s 350 polytheisms. Hence, “The Quran” has the single-sentence revelation, “God speaks in parables to mankind” (Surah 24:37), which contradicts literalism, if taken literally. Christians similarly syncretized polytheist themes, like gods mating with humans, while the Jews incorporated Egyptian theology and Babylon's "Flood" and "Tower of Babel" myths. Muhammad improved on the older texts by condensing and fine tuning as well as rendering them in magnificent poetry (in the original Arabic). The Israelites exploited every known literary device, from poetic flights of fancy to omniscient instruction or proto-modern texts, like the agnostic, vanity-busting “Ecclesiastes” or “The Songs of Solomon”, eight romantic matriarchal poems in the middle of a primary patriarchal text. Nevertheless, "The Bible" remains a long, philosophical novel about the Jews, thus the antisemitic bugaboo. The origins of the universe and humanity and the adventures of the mythical Jewish heroes make “Genesis” a page turner, but the next four books, starting with “Exodus”, concern their liberation from slavery and idolatry, led by Moses. Traditionally considered the greatest Jewish prophet and the author of "The Torah” (the first five books of "The Bible"), Moses was almost assuredly Egyptian.

There’s no archeological proof for Moses but, if he didn’t exist, why did the Israelite poets give him an Egyptian name, have him speak through his "brother" Aaron (suggesting lack of Hebrew fluency) and marry a woman from the Kenite tribe, mythical descendants of Cain? Foundling stories, like the Pharaoh’s daughter finding the infant Moses in a basket floating on the Nile, were a common literary device for tribe switching (Sargon the Great used the same trope, probably because he wasn't from Akkad). In point of fact, all societies are somewhat or largely multicultural (regardless of purity claims, unless they're far from trade or migration routes), obliging their storytellers to invent biographies believable enough to transform their adopted heroes into blood kin.

Moses must have been both Egyptian and an acolyte of their secondary sun god, Aten, as Freud insists in his last book, “Moses and Monotheism”, written in 1938, after he was allowed to flee Vienna to England (the Nazis reviled his theories but feared he was too famous to murder, at that time, though they soon dispatched many of his relatives to death camps). Atenism was history’s first pure monotheism, aside from Persia's more dualist Zoroastrianism, probably developed by elite priests over a few generations. It was instituted around 1350 BCE by Pharaoh Akhenaton, with support from his beautiful wife, Nefertiti, and his military, using force. That enraged the Egyptian aristocrats, who lost their status and incomes derived from polytheist temples. After his 17-year reign, they destroyed Akhenaton's statues, shrines to Aten and the sacred capital city,Amarna, (Atenism is important to emphasize, I feel, to offset the Pharaohs as the Biblical epitome of evil, given the Egyptians developed antiquity's greatest culture, replete with the still-mysterious pyramids; they are the cultural fathers of the Greeks as well as the Jews; and Jews should share with modern Egyptians the honorific of inventing monotheism.)

Rome's Arch of Titus shows soldiers bringing home Jewish booty, the Second Temple's massive menorah, circa 70 CE. photo: unknown

Recognizing the moral conflict between religious compulsion and friendship as well as the crimes of a highly hierarchical society like Akhenaton's Egypt, Moses (or someone like him) reinterpreted Atenism and rebuilt it from the ground up for slaves and the poor. In addition to monotheism, Moses’ major message is all humans have the God-given right to freedom and equality—just as friends treat each other—liberating them from both bondage and idolatry, slavery of the mind as well as body.

Slavery began as a primitive social welfare program, after the onset of labor-intensive agriculture, because it allowed starving families to exchange children for food, solving the downside of their reproductive success and enabling both the parents and children to survive (the latter were eventually accepted into their new community). After the rise of civilizations, however, it became an abusive and perverse booty-of-war and labor pool system, especially the inherited, lifelong "chattel" slavery of the Americas. Among the ancients, however, enslavement was usually temporary, more like the indentured servitude also practiced in America until the Civil War.

Moses was probably an upper class Atenist, if not a pharaoh's son, who witnessed a slave being abused by an overseer, killed him and fled into hiding. His epiphany about how one Lord means equality and justice for all triggered monotheism's social revolution. Liberating the builders of the pyramids, still one of civilization's greatest achievements, symbolized the inevitable triumph of liberalism over tyranny and was enshrined by the Jews as their first and still foremost festival. An egalitarian ritual, Passover is performed priest-less and at home by recounting Moses's efforts and the Jews' perilous journey over food, with a relaxed vibe (participants are encouraged to recline) and a democratic structure. All adults are encouraged to read a portion of the text, "The Haggadah", while the children get to answer Socraticly "The Four Questions" (including the ultra-liberal option of rejecting Judaism), while freedom for all humans is referenced, in keeping with monotheism's universality. The Christians appropriated Passover, turning it into the Last Supper, a respite before the storm of Good Friday's betrayal and crucifixion, and Easter's resurrection and renewal, which also freed all humans, albeit only from sin, not physical slavery.

Whether Moses (or someone like him) saw “god” or made “him” up, or someone else did, is immaterial to post-modern textual analysis. After meeting God on Mount Sinai, why did the authors of "The Bible" have Moses carve “The Ten Commandments” on stone tablets, only to smash them shortly thereafter? Or, if that actually happened, why not edit out that embarrassing affront to Moses's authority? Narratively, it serves to reveal his sorrow at seeing his (adopted) people revert to praying to the polytheist Golden Calf, despite his struggle to liberate them, mentally and physically. Meta-narratively, however, it highlights “no compulsion,” a theme often reiterated by the Jews, like when Moses’s (supposed) first cousin, Korach, led another revolt against him. Ethical evolution has to be voluntary and personal, the Jews realized, so they proselytized only through poetic descriptions, strong narratives and reasoned arguments, at multiple levels of symbolism.

Eliminating idol worship also signified a novel attempt to transcend the material world and turn society toward spiritual values, responsible relationships and improved mental health. Many polytheisms had incredible insights and metaphysics but their overall cosmology was chaotic. One God, meanwhile, alleviated stress by ordering the universe and ordaining one day respite a week (the Egyptians had a day off every ten, while polytheists had monthly full moon and other festivals). That is the downtime we moderns depend on, epitomized by the two days off we now enjoy for the Sabbath (soon to be three). Monotheism's increased attention to the intellect and spirit, as well as unified rule of law, greatly benefited Hebrew culture, which proceeded to produce dozens of monotheist prophets, many of whom got their own chapters in "The Bible", thousands of moral rabbis, poets and regular people, and the founders of two new monotheisms, Christ and Muhammad.

Although the Jewish states of Israel and Judah were tiny, compared to their imperial neighbors, Jerusalem became literary center by 750 BCE. illo: courtesy MapPorn

Religion Inevitably Involves Politics

"No coercion" made sense religiously, but for a people to flourish on the Israeli isthmus—the continental crossroads Homo sapiens had been hiking across for millennia to get out of Africa—the Jews fashioned two tiny states. The first was the Kingdom of Israel, situated to Jerusalem’s north and lasting from 900 to 720 BCE, and then a smaller, poorer nation, including a lot of barren land, around the city itself. That was the Kingdom of Judah, which reigned from 850 to 586 BCE but then even longer, from 530 BCE to 70 CE, 864 years total. Judah gives us the words “Jew” and “Judaism” (as opposed to the older assignation, Hebrew, still their language name) after half the residents of Jerusalem were kidnapped to Babylon, in 586 BCE, where they were asked about their identity and faith. The larger Israel had more farmers, traders and soldiers, and started first, hence, provided the polity their political name, until today. Abraham's grandson Jacob was renamed Israel after wrestling with God, suggesting they were the tougher tribe of the Hebrew speakers, while the Judeans were significantly more intellectual.

Although extremely early Jewish history has little archeological evidence and remains disputed, it was probably King Josiah who instituted major theological reforms and produced "The Bible". (I started researching this when my mother began asking, repeatedly, "Who wrote 'The Bible'?" around when she turned 90, an interesting question for a secular humanist Jew approaching death.) Josiah was installed as a child regent in 648 BCE but ruled rather maturely for 39 years, gradually eliminating, with the occasional use of military force, the shrines and stories of the other gods, while talking up new ideas and enlisting rabbis and scribes to compile, edit and publish “The Torah", "The Bible"'s first five books. Those texts established the origin of the universe created by the one Lord and the adventures of the first mythical beings and Jews: from the first family of Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel to the first Jews, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In addition, the writers chronicled Josiah’s doings in “Chronicles” and “Kings”, which became two of the 39 "books" (chapters) of "The Old Testament", the earth's second bestselling book after "The New Testament". King Josiah on, Jerusalem has been a religious, scholarly and publishing powerhouse known worldwide and the Earth's only Jewish metropolis, even as other groups arrived and sometimes became the majority, until Tel Aviv was founded in 1909.

So respected was Jerusalem, in fact, even though it was conquered three dozen times over three millennia, it never served as the capital of a single other nation or imperial district, and polytheists pilgrimaged there to petition its powerful god. That was why the liberal Persian king, Cyrus the Great, helped rebuild the Temple in the sixth century BCE, and there were moneychangers, which Christ reviled (not moneylenders, as often assumed due to later stereotypes). Foreigners simply needed local currency to buy oil for prayers. Muhammad ascended to heaven from Jerusalem, to connect him to the original monotheism, making it Islam’s third holy city (after Mecca and Medina), but he only visited a couple of times and obviously didn’t compose that story. Jerusalem maintains a similarly elevated status today, replete with psychiatric institutions full of people of all faiths afflicted with “Jerusalem Syndrome” (AKA messianic psychosis), adding up to algebraically more mental cases than at any other sacred site.

Atenism, Judaism and the Late Bronze Age Collapse inspired another unified worldview, originally called "Babylonian science.” Although five millennia ago the Sumerians invented the math of time, based on the Sun and Moon cycles and corresponding numbers of 12, 60 and 360, and the Babylonians had a working understanding of the Solar System's first five planets by 1500 BCE, their oracles were still divining the future through the color of a sheep's liver. "Why look to an animal's viscera," an entrepreneurial prognosticator must have asked a king of that day at one point, “When your destiny is in the stars?” Shortly thereafter, a new tribe of seers was furnishing Babylon's royal family with a fecund farrago of soothsaying and stories infused with cutting-edge astronomy and an almost-agnostic, non-denominational monotheism eventually known as "astrology."

Of the Zodiac's many stories, one of the most insightful is about the sign of Scorpio, which starts around the universal day of the dead (late October) and chronicles the soul's journey through death to redemption and resurrection, foreshadowing Christ. illo: D. Blair, 2013

Babylonian Science was seen as a rational complement to other beliefs and came to be revered by the Egyptians, Greeks and then Europeans, where it eclipsed the similar pseudo-scientific investigations of alchemy. Although India, China, Mesoamerica and Africa have their own elaborate versions, Babylonian astrology's "horoscopes" (from the Greek, meaning life forecasts from planetary positions) have filled many books and newspaper columns and are now plentiful online. In fact, astrology became one of humanity's most popular unified field theories, along with Judaism, Christianity, Islam and science. A majority of our fellows may favor science, as we can see by their cell phone, vaccination and vehicle use, but the number of them referencing one or more of the astrologies probably approaches three billion, plus about a billion religious Muslims, an equal quantity of devout Christians, and one one-thousandth of humanity practicing Jews.

Forty-eight years after Nebuchadnezzar ransacked Judah in 586 BCE, the Jews resurrected and ran ‘til 70 CE, not a bad reign for such a small state. Alas, Judaism was ripe for reinterpretation by then, in keeping with monotheism’s half-millennium update cycles as well as accelerated by the brutal Roman conquest in 63 BCE, which aggravated animosity between the Jews' two biggest sects, the Pharisees and Sadducees. The former were mystical populists, who integrated fate and free will and followed the great prophets who reformed Judaism post-Babylonian captivity. They opposed both the rational Hellenizers, enthusiastic fans of Greek culture (after Alexander the Great’s more benevolent conquest in 332 BCE), and the priestly, scholarly, establishment Sadducees. The latter rejected predestination as well as the new prophets, abiding only the five books of "The Torah". By the first century CE, however, there was a plethora of prophets with radical new notions and fanatical followers, notably Jesus and his ilk, like John the Baptist and the Essenes, but also the Zealots, who terrorized Jerusalem, killing and looting (often disguised as women), and the assassins of the cult of Sicariis, which prefigured the Hashashin (though they fled after attacks) and still means “hit man” in Spanish.

Although Jesus was a peaceful hippie type and rabbi, embodying Judaism’s highest ideals, he was also a maverick mystic in the prophetic Hebrew mode, aggressively critiquing the religion and society of his day. His pacifism contradicted David, in fact, the Jews' most exalted prophet after Moses, who came up a romantic shepherd and musician but transformed himself into a giant killer and righteous king, mimicking the story of monotheism. Given David supposedly co-authored “The Psalms”, still an apex of Western wisdom literature—"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me" (Psalm 23)—he exemplified the marriage of sword, spirit and word, the blending of matriarchal and patriarchal powers that came to be considered mandatory for messiahs. David was probably just a local chieftain—not the second king of the mythical unified Israel-Judah state—but his existence was verified by a stone inscribed with “The House of David" unearthed in the 1990s by archeologists at Tel Dan, Israel. As with Moses, if David didn't exist, it is perplexing why Jewish storytellers made up so much dirt on him, like when he ordered into battle the husband of the beauty Bathsheba to seduce her. Either way, someone fairly smart and skillful must have established Jerusalem, around the ninth century BCE, and someone's son or grandson, perhaps named Solomon, did build a substantial temple there, regardless of embellishments two centuries later by King Josiah’s writers.

Christ, seen here with correct skin tone in an Eastern Orthodox icon, is well-known worldwide to be Jewish. illo: unknown

Similarly, we can assume Christ existed, given “The New Testament”'s authors admitted he was from Galilee, not Jerusalem, but devised a sophisticated narrative workaround. Mary and Joseph had to go to the sacred capital to register for the Roman census around the winter solstice, which connected him to the pagans, emerging astrology, David's royal heritage, and civilization simultaneously. Christ’s rejection of political power precluded messiahdom, according to most Jews, but others were happy to separate church and state, theology and tribe, mind and body, which contributed to Christianity’s rapid success. Through its simplified, universalized and more etherial Judaism, a Christian could commune with converts from other tribes, transcend physicality, and enjoy romantic devotion to a more personal God, a spiritual hero who solved the secret of death, heavenly justice and earthly selflessness. Gilgamesh rejected Goddess Ishtar and her sensual polytheism, and hiked to the end of the earth to study with a male mystic, while Jews focused on terrestrial actions and ethics without mentioning heaven much. Christ celebrated celestial life, which could be made eternal through abstract language's ability to conceptualize infinity, the natural syncretism of an all-knowing Lord with Eastern concepts of karma and transactional reward for eschewing sin.

“The Gospels” are four different biographies of a powerful hero-martyr, written by Jesus's disciples Mark, Matthew, Luke and John (or their disciples), between 70 and 100 CE—the mere fact of four precluding divine dictation. “The New Testament” has 26 books in all, over half (14) attributed to Paul, although he never met Jesus and probably penned only half (7). Originally known as Saul of Tarsus (5-65 CE), Paul was a Turkish tentmaker and Pharisee Jew, who opposed Christianity until his mystical epiphany on the road to Damascus. Deciding that Christ's martyrdom obviated Jewish laws, including many practiced by Christ himself, he abolished circumcision, the strict "kosher" dietary codes and other rituals, invented much of Christianity, and sought a more intellectual redemption through forgiveness, faith and grace.

Christ is highly esteemed by Muslims, albeit not as a deity, with over a hundred by-name mentions in "The Quran", exceeded only by the founder of monotheism, Moses, with 136. Muhammad's syncretizing and synopsizing connected those two heroes, in fact, by turning Moses’s sister, Miriam, into Jesus’s mother, Mary (related names). Muhammad often closely abided the ancient Jewish narratives, including having Abraham's first son, Ismail (eventual father of the Arabs and Muslims), be born from Hagar, an Egyptian princess, according to "The Hadith", or the servant of Abraham's wife, Sarah, according to "Genesis". Both traditions agree that Sarah was initially infertile, but God said Abraham would father a large nation, a claim she had to take on faith, given God appeared only to Abraham, so she supported his polygamy. While that's an interesting imbroglio to plant at the root of two tribal trees, Sarah did eventually bear him a son, Isaac, who becomes the Jewish patriarch. Islam, for its part, has Abraham and Ismail as well as Hagar (who is unnamed in "The Quran") travel to Mecca and build and carve their holiest of holies, the Ka’aba Building and Stone (later defaced by polytheists with a yoni). While Abraham briefly abandons the family (another odd plot twist), Hagar saves it by finding a well with good water (with help from Angel Gabriel), an event highlighting matriarchal power which was incorporated into the Hajj pilgrimage's rituals. Judaism long preceded Christianity and Islam, as everyone in seventh century Arabia as well as first century Jerusalem knew, making it entirely logical that the new monotheists drew on it deeply but also claimed it was antique, that the Jews disobeyed God, had to be eliminated, etc.

Muhammad and Muslim warriors at the Battle of Uhud, fighting the Meccans led by HInd's husband, Abu Sufyan, painted in 1595. illo: courtesy Wikipedia

“The Quran” was also a biography recorded by disciples, since Muhammad didn’t write—although he emphasized the importance of literacy to monotheism—but his personality suffuses the text, essentially making it an autobiography. As we read its Surahs, arranged from longest to shortest (suggesting a post-modern disregard for chronology, perhaps to bury controversial Surahs at the end), we can hear Muhammad's distinctive voice: dictating to a scribe, preaching in front of the Ka’aba, explaining to his neighbors, especially the Jews and Christians, and sometimes pleading, to get them to join monotheist civilization as well as his new monotheism and enjoy a more functional society.

The Romans became massively multicultural after conquering the Greeks, whose culture they appropriated wholesale, while also borrowing from other tribes and civilizations. Such assimilation was impossible with the Jews, since Roman emperors liked to be worshipped as gods, an abomination for monotheists. The Hellenizing Jews respected Greek and Roman amenities, from the roads and aqueducts to theater, science and Olympics (in which Jews competed naked, tying up their penis skin to look uncircumcised), but the two communities argued polytheism-monotheist dialectics and libeled each other. Around 168 BCE, the Syrian-Greek King Antiochus IV fought with rebellious Jews and outlawed Judaism, while the Jewish Maccabees won some battles and kept a sacred lamp burning for eight days, a modest miracle which generated the Hanukkah holiday. Differences escalated even further after the Romans crucified Christ, Caligula installed his statue inside the Jerusalem Temple, and subsequent emperors destroyed Judah outright. Using their standard tactic of extreme violence, the Romans repressed with extreme prejudice three Jewish rebellions, between 66 and 136 CE, an inevitability given Jewish monotheism compelled them to stand for freedom of religion, speech and ritual—proto-liberal democrats, in other words.

After Rome killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, a lot of survivors fled (the Diaspora), while a majority remained in or around Jerusalem. Those wandering Jews (mostly young men) were often respected, since monotheism solved so many polytheist problems, and they frequently married into ruling families and/or built philo-Judaic communities as far afield as Nigeria, Samarkand and Bangladesh, traces of which remain today. Mostly, they spread out across the Roman Empire, which allowed Judaism, in keeping with their openminded polytheism, and joined their more persecuted cousins, the Christians. While the latter preached aggressively, often in secret, the Jews discussed theology, and both scribed thousands of copies of their respective books and built dozens of synagogues and churches. Turning from prophecy to commentary, the Jews produced “The Talmud” (200-500 CE), which analyzed “The Torah”, and “The Zohar”, which dissected “The Kabbalah”. Moses de Leon of Spain liked to insist he copied "The Zohar” from an ancient, Israeli text, but he did so to boost book sales, and it was written about 1275 CE (as his wife later admitted).

In this way, the Christians and, to a lesser degree, the Jews converted much of the Middle East, North Africa and southern Europe, as far as Spain, using the spirit not the sword, greatly assisted by the fact those populations were accustomed to classical civilization and monotheism was the next logical step. Despite the Romans' bellicosity and militarism, they themselves gradually converted to Christianity until Emperor Theodosius I (of Spain) made it the state religion, in 380 CE. Three hundred years later, however, when warrior preachers accompanied Islamic armies into Central Asia and North Africa, or their Christian counterparts entered northern Europe, tribal people like the Berbers, Turks, Celts, Goths and Scandinavians were traumatized by religious compulsion. As one Goth complained after converting, “I hear my father crying out from the grave.”

Medicine was both a science and easily portable profession studied by Jews since antiquity: here a 15th century German Jewish physician, with distinctive headgear, examines a patient. illo: unknown

Why Christians and Muslims Began Abusing Jews

As civilization developed, Jews used their book learning and intellectual training to evolve from their traditional labor as shepherds, farmers, merchants and rabbis into doctors, diplomats, moneylenders and international traders. These professions were central to civilization but also easy to blame if health, politics or finances went bad. Despite the scriptural mandate to be righteous, assist strangers and respect fathers, authorities decided to demote the Jews to third class status, even though many Christians and Muslims maintained friendships, partnerships and marriages (as indicated by how Jews look similar to non-Jews from the same region, as well as DNA tests). There was much cooperation among elites, which is well documented from Morocco to India and exemplified in Baghdad, where the Jews were taken by Nebuchadnezzar but many eventually settled. Indeed, they built both the city and an alternative Jewish center, replete with its own "Babylonian Talmud", famous for recommending men marrying around 15 to channel their sexuality. Through Baghdad's Muslim conquest, Mongol annihilation and Ottoman resurrection, Jews lived peacefully beside their neighbors, working in the diamond, spice or other commodity trades, until the 19th century when they started newspapers, railroads and other modern businesses. In fact, Baghdad had the world’s largest urban Jewish population (90,000), outside of Europe or New York City, until they were expelled in 1948.

The front stage rationale for repressing Jews was simple: If they can be pressured into accepting Christianity or Islam that would prove the superiority of those religions, the compulsion not withstanding. Just as the Jews were “chosen” as the first monotheists (aside from the Atenists), subsequent monotheists wanted to believe themselves chosen and ecumenically entitled. Backstage and subconsciously, however, many Christians and Muslims were angry, confused and desperate for psychological and political relief. Both afflictions could be cured, it so happens, by fashioning a blameworthy villain and applying the standard psychology of scapegoating, which is better defined in the modern era as "conspiracism." Given that the Jews were the oldest people to travel and settle the world (in the second century CE, while the Roma arrived 900 years later) as well as the original practitioners of the monotheism now followed by just over half the globe, Jews were known to many peoples for a long time, making them ideal scapegoats.

Although most Muslims, Christians and Jews agree they share one God, that thesis has only been fully practiced once before the modern era, during Granada Spain's 'La Convivencia,' meaning coexistence, from late 700 to 1492. illo: unknown

Freud dissected the mechanics of scapegoating in “Civilization and its Discontents” (1928): “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, as long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness… In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the Jews of the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows… Once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence.” Similarly, once the Goths converted to Christianity, their tribal law essentially made all Christians fellow tribalists, leaving only the Jews, Gypsies (or Roma) and witches blameworthy. In fact, “the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for antisemitism as its compliment,” Freud wrote before Nazism was a decade old, adding presciently about the other major totalitarianism, “[T]he attempt to establish a new, communist civilization [finds] its psychological support [scapegoat] in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois.”

In fact, Freud couldn't even begin to imagine how "the Jewish people... rendered most useful services to the civilizations," given that both Muslim and Christian kingdoms would invite the Jews in, when they needed to increase trade, banking, medicine or learning, and then do an about face, when times turned tough, and sacrifice them to the mobs.

Freud did nail scapegoat psychology, based on his renown “narcissism of minor differences,” which drives neighbors to fight over small issues to release natural aggression, but there are bigger problems, in my opinion. The failures of families, tribes, cities, nations and civilizations, although compounded by the vagaries of war, weather, pestilence and economics, are almost always due to the stupid, corrupt or repressive behavior of leaders, mostly men. Since those corrupt and failed leaders are peoples’ fathers (or mothers, albeit rarely,), public review of their faults is hard in patriarchies, which require fatherly respect and where criticism can offend community members as well as authorities. This primordial tension between respecting ancestors and studying and correcting their errors can be alleviated through honesty, courage and bold action, in an atmosphere of mutual respect and helpful discussion, or its opposite: cowardice, denial and anti-intellectualism. People who revere dysfunctional forbears are traumatized doubly. Not only do they suffer personal abuse and societal collapse, in multicultural societies, where tribes mix based mutual advantage, they witness their neighbors and others of similar social strata enjoying patriarchal affection and support, a psychological poison exacerbated by travel and media, especially social media. To expatiate such severe sorrow, they must transfer their anger to a fictional or symbolic threat, what Freud called scapegoating but is better defined in the modern era as conspiracism, or manipulating conspiracy theories, the obsessive following or Machiavellian managing of strategic rumor mongering, largely driven by a mental disorder I'm calling "repressed father hatred syndrome."

Mediaeval Jewish moneylenders, often caricatured grotesquely, provided civilization two essential services, small loan banking and perfect scapegoats. illo: unknown, circa 16th century

Although this ancient proclivity to transfer blame has long been exploited by the greedy, tyrannical or psychopathic, it was exacerbated to an extreme by flaws in the Christian and Muslim civilizations. In addition to the problem Freud points out—Paul’s universal love inevitably needing an “other” to hate —another ethical error emerged when Christian and Muslim authorities prohibited lending at interest, a fiscal policy they “borrowed” from “The Old Testament”, where it is forbidden 18 times. The thing was: the ancient Hebrews could maintain an economy without interest because they operated as a tribe, where "interest" was repaid through labor, marriage and other gifts, but outlawing lending at interest would severely limit a multi-nation civilization. Think about it: who would lend a non-tribal member a hundred sheep, say, on the promise of reimbursement five years later with the exact same-sized herd? Lending is the central fiduciary instrument of civilization, in fact, after money itself, and dates back to Sumer. Reason being: it encourages people to do business outside their tribe; it redistributes accumulated resources through fair recompense instead of violent seizure; it accelerates economic recovery after an environmental or social disaster; and it finances startups and inventions. The common complaint against it— that excessive or “usurious” interest is enslaving, "debt slavery"—is often true and tragic, but there were mitigating traditions of basic humanism and generosity, like leaving some food unharvested for gleaners, debt forgiveness during “jubilee" years, or competition between lenders offering lower interest rates, which is improved by decreased restriction, not more regulation.

To replace the indispensable growth mechanism of financing, many Muslims turned loans into investments, with recompense dependent on outcome. The Christians, for their part, invented a “tax loophole with God” after the turn of the first millennium. Theologians began to worry that Christ cancelled his “second coming” due to the Church's extensive lending at interest, which condemned them to eternal damnation. Since the Jews were going to hell anyway, they reasoned, they could provide poor Christians retail moneylending, while the princes and bishops would be the wholesale bankers, lending to and extracting "their pound of flesh" from the Jews (see my article on about it ).

The cover drawing of Reverend James Parkes's groundbreaking 'The Jew in the Medieval Community' (1938) shows Christians and Jews arguing, books in hand. illo: courtesy J. Parkes

Muslims, Christians and Jews debated publicly during the Middle Ages, the latter sometimes under pain of death, but the main topic was usury. Due to Christian and Muslim hypocrisy about interest, religious compulsion and other issues, despite holding a similar theology, many Christians and Muslims were challenged by their encounter with Judaism, which their faiths claimed to have surpassed. This generated a death wish, much as spoiled children hope their parents would disappear. Despite believing in the same Lord and universal justice, Christian and Muslim authorities attempted to relieve their social problems and inferiority complexes by blaming and punishing Jews. They instituted restrictions and humiliations, from the obligation to wear identifying insignias, hats or clothing to exclusion from professions, commerce, certain activities or the community outright, which almost inevitably leads, eventually, to mass murder. When times turn tough, to prove the validity of what had started as a psychological trick, a symbolic scapegoating, the aggressor is obliged to produce a real victim. You don’t need to be a scholar on monotheism to realize that murdering Jews because their version of monotheism is older abrogates the ethics of Christ and Muhammad. That, in turn, increased Christian and Muslim guilt, the need to repress it, and anger with their fathers, hence, the proliferation of repressed father hatred syndrome (RFHS).

While the Muslims did enact the occasional Jewish massacre, or “farhuds” as they are called, over their first millennia and a half, until the end of World War Two in 1945, Christians committed almost 99% of all antisemitic atrocities. They started in 1096 with the First Crusade, intended to “bring the light of Christ to the world,” which massacred the large Jewish communities along the Rhine River, and culminated with the grotesque capture of Jerusalem, three years later. Unlike the city’s fair surrender to the Muslim Caliph Umar 450 years earlier, the Crusaders butchered Jewish and Muslim residents, until the streets ran ankle deep with blood. Until the First Crusade, however, the Dark Ages had been a time of light for Jews, living peacefully across southern and middle Europe, doing the same work as their neighbors and often respected members of multi-faith communities. Fourth century Cologne, Germany, for example, had a central square surrounded by temples for Roman and Gothic deities as well as a church and a synagogue. As the Church accrued a spiritual monopoly as well as financial as well as "spiritual" power, they felt it advantageous to force the Jews into moneylending, ghettos and the wearing of insignias, which soon led to horror.

The mass psychosis of mob-driven antisemitism first appeared as a “blood libel” in Norwich, England, in 1144 CE, after a 12-year-old boy was discovered dead. Although there was nothing linking his death to Jews, a monk, Thomas of Monmouth, who investigated it four years later, insisted there was. English nobility was following the standard method of inviting Jews in to encourage trade, lending and theological thinking but, if need be, throwing them to the dogs, often with the connivance of the clergy. After killing and expelling their Jews, England was officially Jew-free from 1290 to 1656, although both Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote about them in that period. Accusations of blood libels spread like wildfire across Europe, as is possible with intensely stimulating, verbally-transferred fantasies. According to the Christian rumormongers, rabbis used Christian children’s blood to make Passover matzo, the sacred unleavened bread they use on Passover to honor liberation from slavery, even though matzo is obviously white, and blood red. Fifty years later, in 1190, about 150 Jews were murdered in York, England, after seeking refuge in a royal tower, to which they fled because they were supposed to be under the auspices of the king. That first mass murder of Jews in England did shock the society of the day. Nevertheless, despite their immense achievements, from maintaining the earth’s oldest democracy to helping defeat the Nazis, a malevolent strain of antisemitism remains in the national psyche, periodically emerging among Britain’s hard right and left and new-age conspiracy theorists and now Muslim immigrants.

King Edward I (on left) expelling English Jews in 1290, due to a conspiracy theory claiming they used children's blood to make Passover matzo. illo: unknown

Antisemitic murder expanded during Black Plague (1346-53), which was blamed on the Jews, because they had lower death rates from kosher cleanliness and medical practices (not witchcraft, as claimed). Then came the Inquisition, which started in 12th century Italy and France but reached an apogee in 16th century Spain, when perhaps 300,000 Jews were killed, some burnt at the stake. Although the Khmelnytsky Uprising in 17th century Ukraine killed tens of thousands of Jews, and was long considered the root of the Holocaust, it was more a political uprising against the Polish aristocracy, for whom the Jews often worked as tavern owners, who are always also money lenders. A religious-based slaughter came two centuries later to Ukraine and Russia, where we get the word “pogrom,” although it involved few victims until 1920, when 100,000 Jews were murdered and 1,000 communities annihilated. Unfortunately, that was two years after the unprecedented death orgy of World War One, when some 20 million died, and during the chaos of the Russian Civil War, when the Red, White, Black and Green Armies (communist, tsarist, anarchist and peasant, respectively) fought brutally and killed nine million.

As if that were not enough of Freud's death drive, or “thanatos,” 21 years after the First World War, the Nazis launched yet another, condemning over 60 million souls to the grave, including the industrial slaughter of almost six million Jews. It came to be called the Holocaust, from “holokaustos,” Greek for “burnt offering,” due to its train-gas chamber-crematorium assembly line but more importantly its symbolic nature. Even though Jews were part of German society for a millennium and many Germans were happy to have them—indeed, “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck recommended them as wives, diplomats and business partners—they served as the Nazis as perfect scapegoats, symbols of wrongdoing, much as Freud predicted. Already blamed by various sectors of society, they became the perfect protagonists in the Nazis’ favorite conspiracy theories, “The Stab in the Back” and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (the Jews supposedly secretly orchestrated Germany’s WWI surrender and control the banks, respectively). There was second, even more important reason: the Jews represented both freedom of religion and liberal democracy—the same reasoning as Rome’s war with the Jews—as well elevated ethics and patriarchal affection—not only did their fathers love them but also the symbolic great father of monotheism. The Nazis knew they had to obliterate such a moral structure to build their survival-of-the-fittest and totalitarian society.

Antisemitic annihilationism tainted not just the Nazis but the Germans who acquiesced, the Europeans who collaborated, and the societies which denied Jews the refuge that was practiced almost almost universally, throughout history. Given only the city-state of Shanghai accepted visa-less Jews (and only about 20,000 made the long, expensive journey), the nations of world can be said to have joined to form the last ring of barbed-wire and guard towers in the Nazi universe of concentration and death camps and killing fields.

The German matriarch and intellectual, Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833), was born in a ghetto but became the first host of the many European literary salons in the 19th century run by Jewesses and beloved by gentiles. illo: unknown

As if mass murdering Jews was not enough sin for European Christians, from the 12th century to the Enlightenment, Jews were often confined to ghettos, which were closed to varying degrees, from locked after curfew to 24/7 imprisonment, sometimes for centuries. Although Jews could convert to Christianity, making mediaeval Christianity enlightened compared to Nazism, forcing the Jews into ghettos generated generations who had never seen a tree, save those painted on synagogues walls. In fact, often only two types of people were allowed to leave the ghetto: rag collectors and moneylenders. The latter were essentially fiduciary serfs, who could be loaned, rented, sold or “harvested” (for hidden gold), while the “Right of First Night” entitled the lords to rape Jewesses on their wedding night.

Jews finally rejoined monotheist civilization in the West around 1800, and in the Middle East, about a half a century later, after the Enlightenment was brought to much of Europe, at the point of a sword. Emancipation began with the French Revolution’s “Rights of Man”, which included the Jews, but was instituted by Napoleon, through his conquests (1798-1814), although those laws were often rescinded. Not surprisingly, Europe's religious antisemitism transformed almost immediately into its political cousin, where Jews were accused of being communists or capitalists, ill-mannered or overeducated, foreign immigrants or too assimilated. France itself dissolved into paroxysms of antisemitic psychosis 80 years later, when mobs chanting “Death to the Jews” marched the streets of Paris during the Dreyfus Affair, which involved a Jewish army officer by that name accused of spying for Germany (he was later acquitted).

The standard antisemitic trope was that Jews were crafty, controlling or outright evil, even though many Europeans found they were suitable spouses, writers, musicians, chemists, political theorists, entrepreneurs and professionals. Indeed, the respect of so many gentiles helped Jews join society with surprising speed, although their enthusiasm was largely due to abuse and their abilities honed over millennia of monotheism. The latter fostered literacy, education and even scientific investigation (mostly medical, until the 19th century) as well as optimism, love (familial, romantic and humanist) and devotion to justice. Inspired by the archetype of Moses bringing the law down from Mount Sinai, many Jews became lawyers. While some were shysters, many fought bravely for human rights. Indeed, the ancient Jewish project of relief from bondage, suffering and poverty continued, applied to themselves but also all humans, as suggested by monotheism. In fact, many Jews becoming involved in progressive politics, from liberal democrat to communist, and philanthropies, especially building hospitals and schools, where the Jewish ones often equalled gentile institutions, despite being a tiny percent of society. One of Martin Luther King's closest confidants and allies was Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who was born in Warsaw, Poland, and became a professor of mysticism in the rabbinical school next door to Columbia University. Others devoted themselves to writing, music, other arts and or the general promotion of culture and civilization through publishing, museums and theaters.

The Jews were released from European ghettos in time for the 19th century’s explosion of democracy, capitalism and science. They had the energy, intelligence and desperation for freedom but also cash, due to the moneylending, which nurtured a few rich families, notably the Rothschilds. While their forbears served as smalltime lenders or “tax farmers” (who paid a region’s tax bill up front and were provided soldiers to collect it, an antisemitism manufacturing machine), over the centuries they could study the profession and market. Hence, they became adept bankers, international merchants and industrial magnates including suppliers of war materiel, which was critical to Europeans for prosecuting their many wars. It was only through complex lending, international connections and detailed planning, they could get the weapons, ammunition, horses and food needed.

The vast majority of Jews, however, were impoverished. My grandfather, Mendel Rotkopf, was a loom operator working in the new, industrialized and multicultural (Polish, German and Russian) city of Lodz, Poland, but he lived in one room with his family of five, without running water or electricity. Indeed, Jews had to study, work and hustle extremely hard to reenter the civilization they helped invent and finance, regardless of the Holocaust.

Although Karl Marx (lft) was raised Christian, Freud (center) was an atheist, and Einstein (rt) a mystical Jew, they are considered the three Jews who made the modern West. illo: D. Blair

Nevertheless, within a century, Jews just out of the ghetto developed dozens of new enterprises and fields, from lumber yards and department stores to medical professions and film making, which enriched a few but benefited millions, both in Europe and the Americas as well as the Middle East and Islam. Indeed, their inventions and achievements were historically unprecedented, notably in political, psychological and scientific fields, especially the communism of Marx (who was of Jewish descent but became antisemitic), Freud’s psychoanalysis (he was an atheist tribal Jew) and the physics of Einstein (a mystical modernist of Jewish descent), as well as the work of writers, artists and philanthropists.

In fact, Jews were instrumental in establishing of the modern, liberal and democratic societies, despite representing as little as ten percent of a nation’s population, as in Poland, or less than one percent, as in Germany, which was saved during World War One by two Jews. The Allies were going to try Fritz Haber, inventor of nitrogen fabrication, as a war criminal, because his process allowed Germany to keep making explosives, but he received the 1918 Nobel Prize in chemistry instead, because nitrogen is needed for fertilizers and he helped feed billions. Walter Rathenau was so revered for reengineering Germany’s wartime military supply chain, he was elected prime minister, although he served only five months in 1922 until his assassination (one assassin apologized to his mother).

Article continues at My Half Century with Islam, Part 4 Posted on Oct 26, 2024 - 04:30 PM
My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
by Doniphan Blair

Members of a Wahhabi militia, the Ikhwan, raiding Transjordan, the old name for Jordan, 1923. photo: unknown
Continued from My Half Century With Islam, Part 1
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 4

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

ALAS, THIS SUFI SUCCESS, TOO,
concealed a problem: the rapid rise of Islamic fundamentalism. As Sufis came to the West, enjoyed its religious freedoms, cultural and financial opportunities, and the esteem of its intellectuals and some celebrities (notably English author Doris Lessing and American actor Edward G. Robinson), they didn’t complain, let alone write exposes, about Sufism being under attack by Muslim “reformers,” first the religious then the political. Ancestral lands should be places of knowledge and spirituality not tyranny and sectarian conflict, at least symbolically, they believed. The Ottomans had the most Sufi orders of any society, from Rumi’s Whirling Dervishes to the Janissaries, a widely respected, if sometimes brutal, military brigade, but Turkey’s founding father, Ataturk, outlawed them all in 1925. That's because the Sufis controlled the guilds and opposed Ataturk's innovative project to secularize society, abolish Ottoman identity hierarchies, and switch Turkish from writing in Arabic script to Roman.

As it happened, the Ottomans had just spent the previous century fighting the Sufis’ worst nightmare, the army of Sunni radicals which galloped out of the Arabian desert in the late-1700s. Called the Wahhabis, they were led by two Muhammads, the indefatigable preacher Wahhab and his wily warrior buddy, bin Saud. After the first Muhammad's conquests as a prophet, any Arabian warlord worth his salt needed a fiery preacher to rally the troops. Determined to destroy what they deemed un-Islamic, the Wahhab-Saud “jihad”—which means striving or struggle as well as war against unbelievers—was an understandable reaction to Ottoman corruption and archaic Sufism. Indeed, it was similar both to other austere movements that emerged from the desert and the back-to-basics theology and aggressive proselytizing of the Protestants, who started two centuries earlier in Germany. After overturning Catholic corruption and hierarchies and translating “The Bible” into local languages, the seemingly progressive Protestant Reformation unleashed a storm of sectarian wars and deranged witch hunts, lasting 150 years, and a fanatical evangelism, still with us today.

A bit like the Puritans who colonized Massachusetts, the Wahhabis prohibited all rituals not listed in “The Quran”, music, all art except poetry, grave stones, flags, birthdays, and all displays of that primordial symbol of matriarchal power, the female body. While “The Quran” directs “believing women to restrain their looks, and to guard their privates” (Surah 24:31), it says nothing about covering their hair, let alone faces, only breasts and bottom areas. Alas, Muhammad’s wives concealed their faces voluntarily, out of courtesy, to avoid arousing unnecessary sin among men living nearby (understandable, given Muhammad's sex life and the ecstatic vocalizing of some matriarchs). Conservative clerics used that behavior as well as Muhammad's division of his space with curtains, when he had guests, to protect his women, and other trumped up doctrinal precedent to force women to veil, starting four centuries after Muhammad. Until the rise of Wahhabi fundamentalism in the 19th century, however, they did this only periodically, after blaming war, pestilence or famine on women's elevated sexuality (which was natural, so soon after the matriarchal era) and their failure to fully “submit,” the root word expanded into “Islam” and “Muslim," to the one, true and male god. (Arabic linguistics builds concepts by adding syllables.) A fanatic of the "fallen woman" theology, Wahhab once killed a woman on the spot after she confessed to him her adultery.

The Wahhabis went on to murder many women accused of adultery, polytheism or witchcraft (like the Protestants), but that's a traumatizing tradition enforced mostly by more macho clans, while many families hid or quietly married off accused women, and it's easier to relieve religious angst by scapegoating minorities. A readily available “other” was the Shi’a, a seventh of all Muslims, who followed additional rituals, worshipped their intellectuals and sometimes considered them the "mahdi," a messiah figure—hence, they divided into innumerable subsects, some quite esoteric—and the Sufis, about three percent of today's Muslims but more back then. There were also smaller groups like the Yazidis, who mixed monotheism with polytheism. Although the Sufis were mostly Sunni, they liked to invent mind-altering meditations, refine them into rituals, and not only pray to Allah but "meet" or "join with" him.

The mystics of Islam were much closer, conceptually and geographically, than their Abrahamic cousins to the ancient Asian theology of “becoming one with god,” but that violates monotheism’s “Thou shalt have no other gods before me," according to conservatives. The Sufi saint al-Hallaj was martyred by the Abbasids, in 922 CE, in Baghdad, despite being warned repeatedly and placed under house arrest, because he refused to stop saying he was intimate with God. Allah is everywhere and in everything, of course—“As close as your jugular vein,” as the Islamic aphorism goes—and monotheism is a unified field theory, but it separates human from the godhead and uses a form of dualism, given “God divided the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:4), good from evil, and physicality from spirituality. Islam tried to integrate politics and religion, which joins terrestrial power dynamics with God, but nothing else. The Wahhabis considered the dedication of Sunni Sufis to their sheikhs and saints, which included fetishizing their cloaks, artifacts and graves, and their use of dance, chanting and other techniques to achieve ecstatic states to be “shirk,” Arabic for idolatry and sinful. They also rejected the Sufi embrace of women.

Cleopatra, the 1st century BCE Egyptian queen and great matriarch, married Roman emperor Marc Anthony after coming to see him in a purple-sailed flotilla, dressed as the Goddess Isis. photo: unknown
The Third Secret of the Middle East: Matriarchies

Monotheism is metaphorically masculine and intellectual, hence best contemplated at a distance, to shield supplicants from its infinite conceptual power and macho anger, while goddess worship is more local, intimate and human. Goddesses are cosmic mothers whose grandmothers created the earth and who can birth new gods, imbue idols with spirit, and merge with devotees psycho-sexually. Such full-body communion was imitated by Dionysus and Bacchus, the male Greek and Roman fertility gods, during their festivals.

Sufism also derived from those fertility cults, according to a few scholars, which suggests why the Wahhabis were so opposed Sufis as well as women. Whether or not that is Sufism's actual origins, goddess culture is a hard fact, which brings us to a third secret of the Middle East (after “Sufis saved Islam” and “Some Sufis became decadent”): Matriarchies.

Middle Eastern societies were almost entirely patriarchal, according to most European, American and Arab academics, since the invention of writing in the Third Millennia BCE, if not long before, but a minority of scholars disagree. Given how polytheist gods are born from goddesses, as men are from women, a polytheist heaven headed by a god, or a society ruled by men, remains somewhat or largely matriarchal, especially in the early years of patriarchy, no matter how many restrictive laws and customs the men passed or established. Some women operated and even dressed patriarchally, but the vast majority preferred womanly wiles, wisdom or private pressure to achieve their objectives, not public intimidation, brute force or other male strategies. That made their achievements harder to recognize or record and easier to downplay or erase.

Nevertheless, there is ample evidence that there were a few female rulers and many goddesses, priestesses and oracles as well as family heads and intellectuals across the ancient Middle East. Matriarchal culture was so powerful, some polytheist temples featured ceremonial sex, either on the altar or with "sacred prostitutes" skilled in soothsaying, music and ritual as well as sex (still exemplified by Japan's "geishas"). Precisely because she was so respected, the pagan Egyptian mathematician and astronomer Hypatia was murdered in 415 CE. More average matriarchs, meanwhile, ran religion in the community or home, the so-called "kitchen" gods, and managed village and family life, notably the choosing of the mate, which is also called "sexual selection" and is the critical but little known second half of evolution identified by Darwin a decade after "natural selection." They also managed sex itself, midwifery, nursing, childrearing, weaving, singing, dancing, preparing better tasting food and healing or, as it is sometimes called, witchcraft.

Monotheism was a rebellion against the priestess status quo, which included public sex, seduction of visiting dignitaries and teaching women how to influence men through the base psychology of fetish and witchcraft but also the sophisticated mentation of aesthetics and romance, as well as the basic biology of desire. The prophets were so outraged, they excoriated "the daughters of Zion" for walking "with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes" and "making a tinkling with their feet" (wearing bangles, Isaiah 3:16), and anthropomorphized entire cities as fallen women. “Jerusalem… committed her whoredoms with… all them that were the chosen men of Assyria… with all their idols she defiled herself,” (Ezekiel 23:4-7), or Babylon was “the mother of harlots and abominations of the Earth,” (Revelation 17:5). The Jewish patriarchs tried to deter idol worship, sensuousness and extramarital sex by prohibiting the portrayal of human likenesses and the sexier arts, like dancing, and by threatening women with death for adultery. That was understandable in the eighth century BCE, during the radical shift from matriarchy to patriarchy in nomadic cultures, where men sometimes traveled for years, and lingering matriarchal memories gave women great power. Sunni Islam's elimination of figurative art in its entirety a millennia and a half later, however, was unprecedented for a civilization, given humanity's reliance on self-consciousness, mirrors and art to help us visualize how to place and present our bodies and selves in nature and society (which is why the Partisans of the Nude art movement was so important for the 20th century Middle East).

'When God Was a Woman', by Merlin Stone, broke new ground and was highly lauded when it came out in 1976 but wasn't all that accurate. photo: unknown
Regardless of patriarchal or feminist critiques, or scholars who ridicule matriarchal history as exaggerated or invented (arguments exacerbated by errors in popular '60s-era books like "When God Was a Woman" by Merlin Stone, 1976), Islam is only 14 centuries old. Hence, there are plenty of archeological findings, writings from the day, and ongoing folk tales, as well as sacred texts, which speak volumes from between the God-dictated lines. For example, it is widely accepted that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, was an older, wealthy businesswoman, who was both his boss and his suitor in marriage—a great matriarch, in other words! Or that Islam’s holiest building, the Ka’aba in Mecca, is cared for today by a clan called Guardians of the Old Women. Until about 1400 years ago (it will be exactly that long in 2029), the Ka’aba housed dozens of polytheist idols, mostly depicting goddesses, and was surrounded by hundreds more. It was also encircled by brass and leather panels bearing poems, some ribald, by the winners of Mecca's popular poetry contests. Yes, Muhammad destroyed the Ka’aba's figurines in December 629 after conquering Mecca peacefully, through negotiation, but he kept one, the Ka’aba Stone. That became the central icon of his new, idol-less faith, in keeping with syncretism, the universal tradition of blending religions or repurposing older beliefs, buildings or symbols. Unfortunately, the Ka’aba Stone was engraved with a "yoni" (a "Y" mark signifying vagina), which obviously served to preserve matriarchal memories, especially after being touched by millions of Muslims during their Hajj pilgrimage. Interestingly, the Ka’aba is called “al-Haram,” meaning both “sacred” and “forbidden," which helps illustrate its history of theological gender switching but adds the philosophical quest to integrate opposites, a popular theme in Arab culture.

"I personally believe all the world is a matriarchy” is a single-sentence revelation from “Afghanistan” (1973), the exhaustive book by Louis Dupree, a respected American anthropologist. Dupree lived for over a decade in an Afghan village and reveals another side of that desert and mountain society, which is notoriously misogynist unless you’re familiar with its Queen Gawhar Shad, from 15th-century Herat, its female fighters, from the fierce Pashtun people (also known for their homosexual practices), or its poetry, see “Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women’s Poetry” (2010), edited by Sayd Majrouh, an Afghan-born, Sorbonne-educated philosopher and folklorist.

Majrouh describes Afghanistan's tradition of “landays,” two-line poems also found elsewhere in the Middle East. They are almost always used by women—men prefer epics—often to communicate with men whom they sexually select, speaking surreptitiously in the street, when their minder is distracted, or via messages carried by confidents. Inflamed by their society's social suffocation, such poetic liaisons frequently led to marriage, after the lovebirds convinced or outlasted their opposing families (which could take 20 years), or wild sex, as described in some Landays. “Give me your hand, my love, and let us go into the fields; So we can love each other or fall beneath the blows of knives.” When their relatives come to kill them, according to Majrouh, who was himself murdered by extremists (Kabul, 1988), the men flee, but the women traditionally stand and take it, a la Hashashin, albeit for love, romance and pleasure not hate, politics or money. Dupree also notes extensive, secretive extramarital sex, which most villagers ignored but some machos escalated into "honor killings," the euphemism for offended men murdering their own sisters, wives, mothers, daughters or cousins (an obviously deleterious practice, psychologically and evolutionarily). This strong and secret female side of Afghanistan shows that even centuries of arranged marriages, confinement and punishment, sometimes severe, could not erase women's longings for matriarchal freedom, romance and sex.

In fact, the Middle East is home to humanity's first written love poem by an unknown Babylonian woman living around two millennia BCE and rather sexy, even by post-internet-porn standards. It includes the line, “In the bedchamber dripping with honey let us enjoy over and over your allure.” The first extant, first-person, written poem, meanwhile, is two centuries older but also Babylonian and on love, albeit for Inana, the goddess of sex and war. It was penned by Enheduana, the high priestess of Ur and beloved daughter of Sargon the Great, founder of the Akkadian Empire, the earth’s first multi-nation civilization (nation being a multi-tribe and tribe multi-clan), which flourished around 2300 BCE. Sargon was the son of a great matriarch, as he announces in his autobiography (which also chronicles the origins of agriculture): “[M]y mother was a high priestess, my father I knew not… in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes… The river bore me up and carried me to Akki [probably Baghdad], the drawer of water [who] took me as his son and reared me [and] appointed me as his gardener. While I was a gardener, [the Goddess] Ishtar granted me her love.”

A statue of Afghanistan's revered tenth century female poet, Rabi’ah Balkhi, probably in Tajikistan. photo: unknown
The first great poetess of the Sufis, and the Persians in general, was Rabi’ah Balkhi, of tenth century Balkh, Afghanistan (Middle Easterners sometimes take their birthplace as their last name). Indeed, she remains highly revered regionally, from poetry classes to girl names or those of institutions, like Kabul's Rabi’ah Balkhi University (which is still called that, in January 2025, despite the Taliban reconquest of 2021). Rabi’ah fell madly in love with a slave, Bektash, refused to break it off, and was attacked by her relatives. As she bled out, however, she inscribed her romantic musings on the wall in blood, including the lines: "I knew not when I rode the high-blooded stead; The harder I pulled its reins the less it would heed,” and “When you see things hideous, fancy them neat; Eat poison, but taste sugar sweet." Persian, Arab and Jewish women were known for their romanticism, passion and libidos, which is the natural result of a matriarchal society's encouragement of female sexual expression and male sexual selection of those traits. Much of this is detailed in the eyeopening book, “Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women” (1994), by the increasingly respected researcher and novelist Geraldine Brooks.

Rumi’s father, Bahuaddin, who lived three centuries after Rabi'ah, was also a resident of Balkh and a talented writer and Sufi. He tells the tale of “the husband of a woman who composes songs and sings them in public. One day he arrives home unexpectedly and finds her with another man. He storms out, vowing divorce. Later he remembers the prepared meals, the clean clothes, the warm bed and the excitement of living with a woman who sings beautiful songs she composes herself,” (“The Drowned Book”, translated by Coleman Barks, John Moyne and Baha Al-Din Valad, 2004). Having so many smart and sensual women starring in so many folk tales helps explain why so many Muslims are so desperate to control their women. They think it will help Islam evolve from “jahiliyyah,” “the time of ignorance and chaos,” code for matriarchal polytheism, into a law-abiding, functional and masculine monotheist civilization.

Bedouin women fetching water, Middle East, early 20th century. photo: unknown
Patriarchy: From the Loins of Matriarchs

Muhammad could be a pushy preacher and tough crusader on occasion, but he was also a creative visionary, a responsible merchant, a loving person and a dedicated family man—a well-socialized mystic, in other words. He worshipped Khadija, who courted him, may have been his first lover, bore him six children, and taught him the ways of romance among Arab women. When asked by a disciple how to excel at that, Muhammad recommended sending the beloved messages, like short poems, as befits “The Messenger of God,” while implying romantic love itself is a message from God. Head over heels in love with her young husband, Khadija rewarded his backbreaking work, leading her camel trains across the desert, with an annual month off. Muhammad would retire to a cave on a mountain north of Mecca, eat little and pray a lot, one of his three favorite things, along with perfume and women. That mystical practice became Ramadan, Islam’s month of fasting during the daytime.

Khadija and Muhammad modeled how empowered women and men could cooperate, which must have been common as the matriarchal era transitioned to patriarchy. Although pair bonding and reciprocal altruism is practiced by most animals, it was advanced algebraically by the romanticism of the Middle East. After Muhammad’s first revelation, he ran the five miles from his mountain hideaway to Khadija’s house, in downtown Mecca, because he feared he was possessed by a spirit. Rejecting that, Khadija assured him he was hearing the one, true God, “submitted” to his new faith, and became the first Muslim, as well as Muhammad’s great ally, along with his cousin Ali. Submission may seem like a strange metaphor for a religion based on unity, equality and justice, but it symbolizes how a strong matriarch would cede dominion to an emerging patriarch, to fully empower his hard work, leadership and romance, or how we mortals must accept the mysterious unfolding of an all-powerful Lord or universe.

Women organized our earliest clans, we can assume, since Paleolithic men didn't study birthing or childrearing and spent a lot of time away from camp, hunting. Although some research is fuzzy or disputed, a lot is obvious and accepted, as with goddess culture. For starters, as Homo sapiens developed their massive brains (“sapiens” being Latin for “wise”), it became harder for them to pass their mother's birth canals, obliging them to be born prematurely. Their larger heads still caused bleeding or death to mothers or infants, who also needed more calories and time to achieve adulthood. This put evolutionary pressure on women, obliging them to shift some of that cost to men, by getting them to bring more meat back to camp, to replace blood lost during estrus ("time of the month") or giving birth, or for better sustenance during pregnancy and postpartum. As many biologists have noted, the human race is a hybridizing experiment run by women.

Since nothing lives forever, entities that live must master reproduction shortly after simple survival. That women’s wisdom emerged from reproduction research is suggested in “Genesis”, where the Snake in the Garden of Eden must symbolize "penis" (as people who have held snakes have observed). But it is proven by science, from Darwin’s second theory of evolution, sexual selection, to cutting-edge gendered behavior and brain studies (despite the diminishment of late due to concerns about, accusations of, or actual sexism). To cite easily observable brain function differences, female Homo sapiens have language centers in both brain hemispheres (unlike the male's left only); they become verbal earlier as toddlers; and they are more talkative as teens and adults. Indeed, gossip provides the intelligence alpha females needed to manage their community’s sexual selection and reproduction life.

Many academics credit hunting as the driver of abstract language, but hunters often use silent communication and don't need to identify as many complex activities as women running families or clans, which certifies "Reproduction 101" as the first fruit on the Tree of Knowledge. Not only did seizing the means of reproduction cause "Eve," the first self-aware woman (or symbol thereof), to be ejected from the Garden of Eden, the natural kingdom governed by genetic evolution, it triggered a "cultural big bang," that of speech, art and early romantic behavior. Signaling in service of sex has been central to life ever since the first unicellular split into sexes two billion years ago, and "secondary sexual characteristics" evolved to indicate health and fertility, but it only became fully symbolic only among Homo sapiens. Once women had enough language to count back nine months from a baby's birth and identify its father, they could dispel paternity uncertainty, the mandatory first data point men need to build a patriarchy. Once women could articulate full sentences with subject, object, verb, concepts became modular, and they could leverage male desire through logic and truth but also lies and subterfuge. Estrus was hidden biologically in Homo sapiens, unlike most animals, which helped women manage sexual selection intellectually. Given all this, abstract, grammatical spoken language was probably invented by women between 70 and 140,000 years ago (Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari favors the former date), and soon fostered vast improvements in lifestyle, clan organization and tool use as well as gender relations.

The large breasts of the 34,000 year-old Venus of Willendorf, found near that Austrian town in 1908, were thought to be stylization or from sickness but more likely represent a healthy mother who nursed many children. photo: unknown
The great matriarchs must have guided our evolution, genetically and socially, for tens of millennia, at least back to the time of the Paleolithic “Venus figurines,” which are up to 42,000 years old. Those few-inch-long icons, often depicting fat, fantastically-breasted women, were most likely fashioned by tool-using men to honor their clan’s most successful mothers (and their own memories of nursing, boosted by the mnemonic aid of language), who were also their mates, priestesses and leaders. (The figurines may also have been used as a trade good.) In addition to language, women’s reproductive research obviously drove the invention of agriculture, which is merely the usurping of another species' reproductive process, and full-blown romance, the development of behavior and art based on mating signals. Exploiting these agricultural and romantic discoveries, small clans grew into tribes and towns and then, after a mere half-dozen millennia, cities, nations, empires and civilizations. That "cultural inflation" occurred first in the Middle East, with its three great rivers (Tigris, Euphrates, Nile), shortly thereafter along the Indus and Yellow Rivers (in Pakistan and China, respectively), and then worldwide.

During that expansion, however, the great matriarchs must have noticed diminishing returns from their organization of families with multiple fathers or how they got men to work the fields (which required a full day's labor, not hunting’s half) or to fight invading marauders to the death (hunters generally flee overwhelming force). After mastering language, women realized they could negotiate more advantageous exchanges of their services and products (sex and children) for male-supplied edibles, shelter and safety. After learning the women's new language and what they wanted, men flocked in from the wild bearing food, furs, firewood and more to join the family project, simply because it was an easier avenue to sex and reproduction than force.

The "great socialization of man" is mythologized in "The Epic of Gilgamesh" (also circa 2000 BCE) when Enkidu, boon buddy of the eponymous hero, is seduced into joining civilization by a temple prostitute by the name of Shamhat who liked to cook and have heroic sex (their first encounter lasted "six days and seven nights," after which Enkidu's animal friends rejected him), a strategy undoubtedly devised by the high priestess of Uruk (150 miles south of Baghdad). To counter Gilgamesh, the first articulate male (or symbol of same), who had finally grown smarter than the matriarchs and was abusing them, the priestess realized she had to find another, equally strong man, and set them against each other. After their initial fight, which wrecked Uruk, Gilgamesh and Enkidu became great friends and took a mythical, homo-erotic road trip to solve the mystery of death, previously understood only by women. Men were always involved in reproduction, of course, but until Gilgamesh and Enkidu (or the men they symbolized), they lacked the understanding of life pioneered by women, who started religion as well as language based on researching reproduction and child rearing.

Their augmenting of male participation and responsibility, until men became the leaders of society (patriarchy) and the universe (monotheism), was another stroke of female genius, which doubled down on their exchange of sex and children for more male contribution, using primitive romance. Perhaps not surprisingly, getting men to renounce their rough folkways, be more responsible fathers, work harder, and be more romantic remains a bone of contention between the sexes today. Back in the Paleolithic, however, our very survival rested on the rapid evolution of men from adolescent hunters to adult fathers, farmers, fighters, builders and poets, usually inspired or led by more articulate women.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and bad times beget better ideas. Khadija believed her husband's new theology provided precisely that for her tribal group, the Arabs, who had long pined for a monotheist prophet of their own, and her city, Mecca, which was famous for its poetry contests, religious cults, and oaths to remain peaceful during festivals, but was beset by feuds between powerful priestesses and matriarchs and male warriors, merchants and poets. Successful societies grow, by definition, but when communities get too large, they exceed the "Dunbar number" of 150 (the maximum amount of people who can maintain strong personal relationships simultaneously). When this happened, the vast adaptability and output of women’s work, networking and deeply-bonded small groups, and the matriarchs' use character aggrandizement or assassination to increase her power, was overshadowed by the strength and efficiency of large male groups, which used hierarchies, teacher-student fealty and shallower friendships, as well as non-injurious competition honed to a hard edge through constant play. To parse this tricky transition, Khadija ceded to Muhammad authority over her self, family, houses and businesses, not to mention the once-female universe, and together they forged the Arabs’ late but rapid and successful transformation to patriarchal civilization.

Regendering a society is not easy, as we are realizing. Christian theologians thought monotheism would be improved by making God more forgiving and accessible, marriage sacred, and sex a sin (even within marriage, if not for procreation). Alas, that didn’t cure Christian cravings for power or sex, as we well know, and Muhammad must have noticed among his Christian relatives, Meccan friends or those he met in Jerusalem, where he travelled for trade. Returning to Judaism’s more matriarchal matrimony, he permitted divorce and hailed sexual pleasure as a natural gift from God, even incorporating it into Islamic heaven, an interesting rejiggering of monotheist metaphors.

Muhammad famously adored women and, after Khadija died, took a dozen wives and concubines (perhaps compensation for a quiet youth), although he limited men to four wives, who have to be loved equally. That directive suggests Muslims are better served by monogamy, with which monotheism shares a prefix and inherently supports, due to its "worship of a single lord paradigm." Islam went with polygamy, however, probably because it mirrored matriarchal families, where a grandmother-run home, sometimes with dozens daughters and granddaughters, is orbited by up to a hundred men, an equitable, efficient arrangement when they work at long-distance trading, herding or raiding. In fact, Muhammad can be considered a feminist for his day. “The Quran” refers to men and women as equals and states that “both men and women are guardians of one another” (Surah 9:71); it grants women property rights and half the male's inheritance; and Muhammad supported female sexual satisfaction (to deter polytheist revanchism but also bless natural feelings), all of which he must have decided in close consultation with Khadija. In Christianity’s more feminized culture, however, women had no real rights to inheritance, property or publicly acknowledged pleasure until the 19th century.

A Baghdad gate, 19th century. illo: Arthur Aletrilly, 1882
By reversing Christianity's separation of church and state and restrictions on sex and marriage, and Judaism's entrustment of children to women, Islam became monotheism's most masculine iteration, a quality increased by its late arrival to civilization building and its need to rapidly raise male discipline and armies. Although Muhammad adored and respected women, Islam's masculinity pushed it toward ending matriarchal power instead of balancing it, as in Judaism, or transforming its romantic aspects into religious fervor, as in Christianity. Muslim men wield full authority over their female family members as well as children, whom they retain after divorce. While Christianity forbade divorce and Jews required a rabbi’s approval, a Muslim man merely informs his wife, three times before witnesses, “I divorce you,” (which can liberate women, when an abusive husband does so in a fit of rage, according to the brilliant Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi). This parallels Islamic conversion, which is based on the thrice oathtaking of “There is no true god but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” While it may seem simplistic, compared to Christian prayer and baptism or Judaism's year of study, it reflects monotheism's cerebral nature, where words are holy acts and a monotheist's word is their bond. The power of language is amplified algebraically, however, when spoken words are frozen into writing, an inherently masculine process, given its dependence on tools and ability to vastly increase authority.

To attract polytheists to their movement, Christians introduced a goddess figure, Mary (considered a virgin, despite Christ’s older siblings), and her literal god child, both of whom are deeply revered by Muslims (save for deifying Christ), earning them 31 and 90 citings respectively in “The Quran”. The Hebrews, for their part, made their Sabbath a goddess holiday: women do the first prayer, don’t do any chores (unlike Christian and Muslim women), and are encouraged to pursue reproduction, religion or relaxation. Powerful Jewesses appear throughout “The Bible”, some of whom reappear in “The Quran”. “The Old Testament” does call for stoning adulterers (Deuteronomy 22:22), to end sexually permissive polytheisms and solidify male paternity certainty but, in practice, Jews often tolerated pre- or extra- marital sex. This is due to monotheism's increased individualism and human rights as well as ongoing esteem for matriarchs, which is integrated into Judaism. The Hebrew's first millennium, chronicled in "The Bible", was largely patriarchal, but as they were conquered and oppressed by the Babylonians, Romans, Christians and Muslims, the Jews reverted to matriarchy, notably how Jewish men served as partners to ruling elites and Judaism's legal descent through the female line. Unlike Christian kids, who are born in sin and must be baptized, any offspring of a Jewess is inherently Jewish. Muslims, meanwhile, are born with "fitrah," meaning innate purity while also referring to charitable donations during Ramadan. “Free women don’t commit adultery,” according to Hind, Mecca's most powerful priestess and wife of the chief who fought but eventually surrendered to Muhammad (causing her to disown him), which translates into legalese as: Free women are entitled to sexually select their mates, copulate at will, and their children have full legal rights.

Christianity tried to control male sexuality by shaming sex and reverting to prelapsarian innocence. The Jews emphasized self-control and symbolized sexual restraint through circumcision, which they enshrined as their central sacrifice to the one, true God. Many scholars say circumcision was adopted to promote cleanliness in a water-scarce environment (which it does), but cutting off the tip of the penis obviously signifies suppressing sex (much like amputating hands emphasizes "Thou shalt not steal"). Moreover, removing the penis's protective sheath unveils its inherent beauty, a body modification undoubtedly enjoyed by matriarchs. The Christians rejected circumcision, assuming their "sex is a mortal sin" psychology would be an adequate inhibitor, but the Muslims reintroduced it. Although it is not in "The Quran", circumcision is covered in “The Hadith”, the collections of Muhammad’s sayings, and “The Old Testament”, which Muslims also consider sacred (“He sent down the Torah and the Gospel,” Surah 3:3). Most Muslim boys are circumcised in their seventh year, albeit not seventh day, as with Jews. Unfortunately, sex was extremely enjoyable and seductive, according to the many Muslims close to the matriarchal era plagued by its colorful memories, hence a second circumcision was needed: of women. The "mullahs" (Sunni clerics) endorsed female genital mutilation (FGM), even though it's not mentioned in “The Quran” or “The Bible”, can cause severe injury or death, and can decimate or eliminate the pleasure Muhammad considered a gift from God. FGM is still encouraged or enforced by many Sunni societies, largely in Africa, with the highest rates being in the Horn of Africa. To this day, a majority of Egyptian women undergo FGM, despite Cairo's institution of a legal ban and media campaign around 2005.

Desert travelers stop for the night: perhaps how Muhammad and his disciples looked in the 7th century. illo: unknown, circa 19th century
Muhammad was an orphan: his father died before he was born and his mother passed at six. Although he was probably skinny, nerdy and perhaps sickly, making him an interesting patriarchal hero, he assiduously built up his body and character, which was why Khadija sexually selected him. He worked hard on his theology, meditating and praying on long desert hikes or during his annual month off on the mountain. After ten years of strenuous mystical practice, he received visions, which he developed in discussions with Khadija and others and then preached, passionately and poetically, in downtown Mecca, directly in front of the polytheist idols of the Ka’aba. His early revelations abided Judeo-Christian notions that the kingdom of God would be created voluntarily and peacefully, in accord with the Jewish prophet Zechariah (500s BCE), “‘Not by might nor by power, but by my spirit,’ saith the Lord,” (Zechariah 4:6), and Jesus, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God," (Matthew 5:9). Indeed, “The Quran” says, “[I]f they incline to peace, then you should incline to it; and put your trust in God,” (Surah 8:61). Alas, after being persecuted by Meccan authorities, fleeing to Medina, and entering into a war with his hometown, which pushed Khadija into an early grave (Muhammad mourned her for a year), he changed his mind. Instead of a slow transition from polytheism to monotheism, he reasoned, Islam could provide more benefit to more people, faster—which is one definition of “good”—by explaining in simple, local terms how monotheism works, by proselytizing aggressively, so everyone can hear the good news, and by defending Muslims, including going on offense.

Already a charismatic speaker, Muhammad transformed himself into an adept politician and strategically-brilliant general and led the outnumbered, ill-equipped Muslims to many heroic victories. As the messenger of God but not son, however, there were some defeats and mistakes, notably with his wives and the Jews.

After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem 500 years earlier, the Jews dispersed across the Middle East, the “Jewish diaspora,” including a Hebrew kingdom in Yemen and large, respected communities all over western Arabia, including Medina. Islam’s holy day became Friday, in fact, because that was the Jews' market day (before their work-free Sabbath), and the many Muslims who liked trading with Jews were available to attend mosque. Muhammad even began adjusting his ideas to attract Jews, as evidenced by the Medina Surahs of “The Quran”, wherein God often hails the Jews as the first monotheists but adds they lapsed into sin and should follow the new prophet. A few Jews converted and some sided with Muhammad against Mecca, but others didn’t, and there were various complex treaties, attempts by Jewish clans to remain neutral and Muslim accusations of treason. After a one-month siege of the Banu Qurayza, a Meccan Jewish tribe, Muhammad ordered 800 men and boys massacred and commandeered the chieftain's wife, Safiyya (Sofia), a famous Jewish beauty. Safiyya acquiesced to conversion and marriage but continued to assist her people clandestinely, a common practice among matriarchs under foreign patriarchs. "Khaybar," the name of another Jewish community near Medina, remains a battle cry among Muslims today, even though it ultimately negotiated a stable surrender by paying a tribute.

Alas, 7th century Arabian politics were complex, as was the art of receiving revelations, editing sacred books and establishing a new religion. “The Quran” has contradicting dictums, as do the also God-given texts of the Jews and Christians, and it includes pronouncements for and against alcohol, gambling, murder, fate, free will, and the Jews. "You will ever find them deceitful, except for a few of them. But pardon them and bear with them. God loves those who do good” (Surah 5:14), is a typical begrudging but fair Quranic comment about the Jews, attuned to both monotheist morality and the stiff competition in monotheism's marketplace of ideas. Such obvious incongruities oblige rational monotheists to eschew the letter of divine law and embrace its spirit, to decide logically in a given situation, which scriptural statement better advances their faith's core concepts of justice, cooperation and mercy.

As the birthplace of our oldest cities and civilizations, the Middle East harbors some of our most intractable conflicts and psychological problems. After the stoic, hedonist, intellectual and militaristic Roman Empire gave way to the romantic, chaste, emotive and pacifism-preaching Christians, the Arab intelligentsia was marooned between the Christian Byzantine Empire, the Persian Empire, which was mostly Zoroastrian (a millennium-old monotheism with polytheist proclivities), and the polytheist tribes of the mountains and deserts, which were almost always at war with the civilizations given their economies depended on robbing trade routes.

Pharaoh Akhenaten with wife Nefertiti and three daughters under the God Aten. courtesy: Wikipedia, please donate here
Regardless of divine origins, theories about God have to be periodically updated, from incremental adjustments and syncretic blending to major revisions or outright new religions, usually at 300 to 500 year intervals. It started with Atenism, the first recorded monotheism, which Pharaoh Akhenaten installed in Egypt around 1350 BCE but was overturned after he died. Then came Moses, or someone like him (or someone telling stories about someone like him), around 1100 BCE; the prophets of the Jewish revival, after their Babylonian conquest and exile, starting around 550 BCE; Jesus Christ and other Jewish mystics, like the Essenes; Christianity’s First Council of Nicaea (Turkey) in 325 CE (which deleted of dozens of “apocryphal” books from “The New Testament”); and, three centuries later, Islam. In keeping with this chronology, Martin Luther nailed his “95 Theses” to a church door in Germany in 1517, almost exactly a millennium and a half after Christ’s ministry, although he was not considered a prophet. That appellation would have to wait until the 19th century, when Joseph Smith started the Mormons in middle America and Baha’u’llah began the Bahá'ís in Persia, although they eventually fled to Utah and Israel, respectively.

Muhammad revered Judaism and Christianity, and opposed polytheist tribes and empires, making him a card carrying member of Western Civilization, but he also adjusted monotheism and satisfied some pressing needs, given Islam’s extraordinary expansion: twice the size of the Roman Empire in half the time. This was especially true in harsh mountain or desert climes, where Islam's masculine tone and warrior guidelines was a major selling point to discipline and manage newly patriarchal men. Nevertheless, Muhammad balanced that with benevolence, justice and peace, from the first phrase of each of “The Quran”’s 114 Surahs (chapters), “In the name of Allah, the most compassionate, most merciful,” and the many one-line revelations, like “There should be no compulsion in religion” (Surah 2:257), to Islam's universal greeting, “As-salamu alaykum” (“Peace be upon you”). There are also many of Muhammad's “Hadith” sayings, from his theory of jihad, where “the greater jihad” is against the ego and “the lesser" is political struggle, to his many exhortations to tolerate disagreement and forgive enemies.

Sufism does not derive from ancient fertility cults, as some scholars say, according to most Sufis, rather Muhammad’s private oral teachings, thought to be more metaphysical than his public pronouncements, “The Quran” and “The Hadith”. Such secret knowledge may be apocryphal, but Muhammad surely communicated concepts not written down, and the Sufis were dedicated to his lived example, which integrated a serious spiritual practice with work, family and women, who were often excluded from male mystical fraternities. Yes, the vast majority of Sufis were men, devout Muslims and patriarchal, but many accepted women as fellow tariqa members, teachers or saints, notably the first Rabi’ah. The 8th century Rabi’ah al-Basri (from Basra, 300 miles south of Baghdad) came from a respectable if poor family, but they were attacked during a journey, and she was sold into prostitution or slavery. Eventually freed, due to her dedication to prayer and good works, she became a poet and self-actualized Sufi, or even a proto-Zen master. "You know of the how, but I know of the how-less," was her explanation to Hasan al-Basri (642–728 CE), the Sufi, scholar and founder of the rational Muʿtazile school, as well as her suitor in marriage. Rabi'ah declined and remained chaste but defined a doctrine of divine love, making her the first saint of Sufism’s Religion of Love. In fact, it can be said that Sufis developed more female and romantic values and art than any other religious, social or literary movement in history by basing their beliefs on monotheism and social responsibility but devoting their free time to exploring rapture, art, romance and other alchemies of the material world.

Scholars and pupils st Baghdad's House of Wisdom's, late Abbasid era. illo: Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti, 1237, courtesy Bibliotheque Nationale de France & Wikipedia (please donate here)
The Inherent Liberalism of Monotheism

Islam’s vast conquests in under a century—west to southern France and east to northern India—was a world record and a wonder to behold. Indeed, Islam's armies often featured fearsome warriors riding spectacular Arabian steeds, sometimes wielding swords impaled with copies of “The Quran”. Religious war can be brutal and depraved, but those Arab-lead armies often abided advanced rules of war and negotiated fair surrenders. When Umar, the second of the four "rightly guided caliphs" who followed Muhammad, conquered Jerusalem in 637 CE, he allowed the ruling Christians to resume normal life and the Jews they had expelled to return. Many populations converted to Islam voluntarily, starting with Medina, which invited Muhammad to rule after experiencing extreme Jahiliyyah problems. Jews and Christians were accepted as fellow believers in the one, true God, which the former called “Yahweh” or “Elohim” and the latter "Jesus Christ" or "The Trinity" (a combination of Christ, Yahweh and mystery spirit), and Muslims “Allah.” Nevertheless, Christians and Jews were second-class monotheists, or “dhimmis,” and saddled with special taxes and restrictions, like prohibitions against riding horses or carrying weapons, although both were exempted from military service.

Many Muslim regimes encouraged the liberal side of monotheism. Shari’ah Law, Islam's precedent-based legal system, often liberated people from oppressive rulers, arcane rituals and racist caste systems, which was why Islam was welcomed by many in India. It frequently reduced poverty, illness and ignorance by increasing rule of law, opportunity, trade and literacy. It so supported Jewish and Greek thought, the two foundations of Western Civilization, some say Islam saved Western Civilization. Books in its lingua franca, Arabic, became the era’s internet, spreading science, philosophy and poetry faster and further than ever before in history, along the many silk, spice and trade routes of a long globalized world. Towns devoted to scholarship, like Alexandria or Timbuktu, went so far as to prohibit books from transiting their jurisdiction without their scribes making a copy for their libraries.

Despite Islam's amazing successes, however, tribalism, sectarianism, wealth disparities, slavery, tyranny and war, plus vestigial polytheist practices, remained. Out-of-wedlock sex continued in rural areas, crowded cities (where veiling helped women have affairs), and among merchant families (where men had to travel, sometimes for years). Slavery was pervasive, from the massive slave trade (almost double the European) of both black Africans (which could include castration) and white Eastern Europeans (the word "slavery" comes from the tribal name Slav) and western European sailors seized by Muslim Barbary pirates, to Islam’s ubiquitous concubines and “slave armies.”

To prevent constant palace coups, boys from tough tribes were kidnapped, educated in Islam, trained in the art of war, and sworn to the sultan as “slave soldiers,” a respected status. For the same reason, scheming family members, sultans often surrounded themselves with Christian, Jewish or Sufi advisors. Muhammad advocated freeing slaves, which many Muslims did, after which they could become full citizens (if they submitted to Islam), marry and serve in the regular army. “Slave generals,” meanwhile, sometimes seized power, became the sultan and mounted their own slave armies.

Protestors at the United Nations' 'Isaiah Wall,' featuring Isaiah’s 'Beat their swords into plowshares' quote, 2015. photo: unknown
Nevertheless, many monotheist ideals and metaphors are inherently liberal. While each grandmother goddess birthed her own human species physically, a single masculine lord had to create them mentally and metaphysically, indicating he made all humans simultaneously, equally and in his image. Allowing humans the free will to choose good over evil, instead of programming them to do so animalistically, actually proved God’s greatness. “The Parable of Adam and Eve”, far from depicting “The Fall” inflicted by a woman disobeying God, dramatizes our development from matriarchy to patriarchy, and from genetically-governed natural and sexual selection (living au natural in the Garden of Eden) to “conscious selection” (the identification and choosing of facts and building of abstract worldviews that represent reality).

While monotheism failed to fully establish the justice suggested by divine law, it symbolized those values nicely, both on earth and in the afterlife. Polytheist heavens were crowded, incestuous and crime-ridden, much like the ancient towns on which they were modeled, and more in the Middle East after the passings of the golden ages of Sumer, Egypt and Babylon, and the mysterious Late Bronze Age Collapse (12th century BCE). After so much rapid and elevated culture and building, the Middle East had too many civilized societies and citizens with high self-regard but too few men willing to accept full adult responsibility. Patriarchal monotheism may smack of misogyny to modern observers, but it was eminently logical after tens of millennia of matriarchal polytheism. Indeed, making the universe male and men central to it can be considered one of religion’s most important innovations, and it was facilitated by women, as Khadija indicates.

Based on books, monotheism fostered literacy and abstract thinking but also personal prayer, meditation and ethics. More intellectual and rational than polytheism, with its colorful rituals, titillating stories and mystery-cult metaphysics, monotheism eventually eschewed the sacrifice of living beings, which was how polytheists placated their deities and divined the future (the soothsayers of the Middle East, usually women, often examined a sheep or goat liver for signs). Monotheism emphasized individual souls over the collective spirits of forbears, castes or priestly hierarchies (although the Catholics and Shi’a did resurrect strong priesthoods). The mere concept of one Lord implied justice between tribes, nations and classes as well as individuals, favored internalized guilt over external tribal shame, and provided more hope, optimism and romanticism than polytheism, with their flexible celestial organization and future. In fact, a single, all-powerful God must know all or have a plan, including finding each of us a true love around which we can build our life, as emphasized early in “The Bible”: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, therefore shall a man cleave unto his wife,” (Genesis 2:24). Deep spousal bonding contradicts the family structure of both matriarchies and patriarchies, where the newlyweds stay in the mother's or father's dwelling and obeys their orders. Romanticism also reinforces the tough task of defending the family and community, adding intense emotion to hero tales and folk origins, which inspired extra effort from men. Increasing romanticism was essential, in fact, because successful communities are eventually threatened by greedy neighbors, hungry marauders or corrupt charlatans.

Monotheism provided an ethical foundation for liberal democracy through its unified field system and ability to organize diverse achievements and cultures. The citizens of Greece's city-states invented or improved almost all of civilization’s disciplines or systems, from democracy, math and science to theatre, architecture, sculpture (the first realistic carvers) and the Olympics. Without overarching coordination, however, most Greek speakers abandoned their classical culture to became Christian peasants by the 5th century CE. The Jews, meanwhile, preserved their patrimony through terrible travails and extensive rethinking and, in the 1800s, integrated Greek ideas (a second time, since they also did so after Alexander conquered Judah in 331 BCE). Almost all tribes employ forms of democracy, from weak to strong forms, and the Norse, Native American and others contributed enormously to democratic development through egalitarian councils, advanced ethics and dedicated friendships. But few tribal federations were able to establish or expand full equality and suffrage before the Enlightenment in Europe, which emerged there in the 18th century largely due to their long study of Judaic theology and Hellenic science. As it happened, monotheist Muslim scholars helped preserve and expand the Greek and other sciences, which led to the Renaissance, starting in 14th century Italy, the closest Europeans to Islam.

Although the Judeo-Christian version is well known, the Golden Rule is trans-cultural. illo: unknown
Indeed, monotheism reveals the fullness of liberal, democratic values in a single sentence, rightly called “The Golden Rule”. Based on the reciprocal altruism of animals and how true friends treat each other, “The Golden Rule” figures prominently in all three Abrahamic faiths: Jesus’s "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” delivered during the Sermon on the Mount; the Hebrew’s, "Love your neighbor as yourself," (Leviticus 19:18), and the Muslim, from “Hadith”, “Do unto all men as you would wish to have done unto you.”

We must be adult and take responsibility, Muhammad felt, since each soul will have to answer for their deeds on Judgment Day, even though “The Quran” does support both sides of the ancient fate-versus-free will argument. Desert dwellers and sailors, or those in harsh environments or societies, favor an all-controlling fate, which softens God’s volition and their own guilt over their own inability, while more rational coreligionists usually don’t have the heart to deny them that relief. Nevertheless, those same "fatalists" are constantly taking their future into their own hands, from crying out as infants to fighting for equal treatment. Ironically, whether the human condition is dominated by nurture and its end product, culture, or nature and its foundation, biology—indeed, nurture-nature is the modern version of the fate-free will argument—remains in dispute, from politics and policing to psychology and biology, with respected thinkers, like the English evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, siding with the latter.

Muhammad emphasized the former, esteeming individual merit and rights and opposing inherited rule and kings. In point of fact, the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, who ruled Islam after he died in 632 CE, were chosen democratically, using tribal acclamation (public cheering) by all Muslims present—including women! The vast majority shouted for Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s closest friend and the father of his child bride, Aisha, but a tiny minority insisted power be passed in the ancient manner, to a male relative, triggering Islam’s 14-century civil war. Even though Muhammad had no surviving sons, an obvious sign from God against patriarchal inheritance, his cousin and son-in-law Ali was considered close enough by “The Party of Ali,” words in Arabic which condense into “Shi’a.”

Article continues at My Half Century With Islam, Part 3

Posted on Oct 26, 2024 - 03:58 PM
My Half Century With Islam: Its Loving Sufis, Four Secrets and the Monotheist Wars
by Doniphan Blair

Hippies on the road east, Iran, 1972: (Lf-rt) Dave Winterburn, me (Doniphan Blair), Darko Radonovich (Yugoslavia) and Jimmy (Canada), the only extant photo from my journey to the East. photo: unknown
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 4

NOW THAT WE’VE ENTERED ANOTHER
hell cycle in the Middle East, it is only fitting and proper I honor the brilliant and angelic Muslims and Arabs who helped me over the last half a century. Their personalities and culture touched me deeply, starting when I crossed into Asia at age 17; they inspired my art and spiritual development; and they contributed to my discovery—if you’ll permit me that boast—of four little known but rather large facts about the Middle East, which may allow me to return the favor.

To touch on my fourth finding first: About a century ago, a generation of visionary Muslim and Arab mystics and artists came to prominence in the United States and Europe as well as the Middle East. Although I was long familiar with the mystics, I only learned about the artists recently, when I stumbled on Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery, tucked away on the upper floor of one of the school's new buildings on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and saw a phenomenal show of 20th century fine art from the Middle East. That was on October 17th, 2023, ten days after the biggest-ever massacre of Israelis in the Arab-Jewish wars—which are also only a century old—as Columbia was being besieged by students protesting Israel and supporting Hamas, tacitly or overtly, the radical Islamist organization which ruled Gaza and perpetrated the attack. Coincidentally, Columbia’s then president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, was from Egypt and probably knew personally some of the 42 artists in the show, but she had a lot on her plate and didn’t publicize it much. Indeed, the show wasn't reviewed right away or that positively by New York's finicky art press, despite its obvious groundbreaking qualities, and few students attended. That was a pity, given their interest in the politics of the Middle East but ignorance of its artistic culture or progressive history—like when Arab feminists returned from the 1926 women's suffrage conference in Paris and burnt their veils at the Cairo train station—not to mention the strange serendipity of Columbia’s only gallery mounting such an earth-shaking show at that exact moment.

The show covered from 1920 to 1970 and featured fantastic content, like paintings of the inside a women's “hammam” (steam bath), x-rated romantic encounters and hallucinatory tropicalista visions, but also form, with styles ranging from realist and impressionist to abstract and avant-garde. So much so, an art critic and collector from the United Arab Emirates, Sooud Al Qassemi, called those artists “the most pivotal moment in the history of Arab art,” a point emphasized by the show’s name, which was what the artists called themselves: Partisans of the Nude (see my article about them). Not only did the Partisans of the Nude like to paint images of people, which violates Sunni Muslim prohibitions against portraying humans, clothed or unclothed (although portraiture was largely accepted by Muslims in the 19th century), they stood for truth and honesty, which the naked body symbolizes, and against repressive religion and politics. They were proto-hippies, in other words. In fact, Art and Freedom, another group to which many Partisans also belonged, published “Long Live Degenerate Art” in 1938, a manifesto which denounced censorship, nationalism and fascism as well as “The Degenerate Art Show” mounted by the Nazis a year earlier in Munich, Germany.

“Girl in a Fishnet” (1918) by Egyptian Amy Nimr, when she was 20. image: A Nimr.
The Partisans of the Nude were mostly Arab men, including some of the top Middle Eastern painters of the day, but at least one was Jewish and a fifth were women. Exemplifying the latter was Amy Nimr (1898–1974), who went to art school in London but soon moved to Paris, got a one-woman show, and was hanging out with Henry Miller, the avant-garde, sex-positive American author (see my article about him), and his Jewish and Surrealist friends. That was not surprising given the innate surrealism of her work, such as “Girl in a Fishnet” (1918) of a woman hauled from the sea slathered in mussels, which she painted before the start of Surrealism (with Andre Breton's essay in 1919) or the fishnet stockings craze of the 1930s. The daughter of a Lebanese publishing magnate, Nimr became Cairo’s premier cultural salonniere and continued to make interesting paintings, especially after her son was killed on a picnic by a World-War-Two-era landmine, until she was forced to flee Egypt, in 1952, by the nationalist revolution led by Abdel Nasser.

I have not been able to determine whether any of the Partisans of the Nude were involved with Sufism, which is Islam’s mystical, artistic, pacifist and non-sectarian order, but I assume some were. That's because Sufis had long dominated high culture across Islam and were prominent in Cairo until the 1970s, including teachers with western students, even as Sufism was being repressed or outlawed elsewhere in the Middle East. Moreover, Sufis had already taken the West by storm, beginning in 1908 when Hazrat Inayat Khan, a master sitar player, musicologist and Sufi from India, performed a concert in San Francisco attended by a mystically-minded Jewish woman, Ada Martin. Directed by his “sheikh” (guru) to spread Sufism, if he encountered suitable students, Khan administered a crash course of teachings and blessings, albeit no Islamic conversion, and renamed her Rabi’ah, after Sufism’s first “saint of love.” “His spiritual power was all summed up in the principle of love,” Martin later wrote and, together, they founded the first Sufi group of the modern West, The Sufi Order, based in San Francisco.

The Wallach's Arab art retrospective, curated by the accomplished, young Columbia art professor Kirsten Scheid, who also teaches at Beirut’s American University, was the first of its kind in the United States and not just spectacular but illuminating. Indeed, it raised my spirits from the orgy of violence and hate emerging from the Middle East but also across the West, in the large anti-Israel demonstrations in dozens of cities and campuses throughout Europe and Australia as well as America, including Columbia’s quad a dozen blocks away, where it became a camp-in, and on my social media feed, sometimes from my friends. Antisemitism soon reached levels not seen since I started studying it in the 1980s, as the son of a Holocaust survivor, the worst Jew hatred since the 1940s.

Conversely, the Partisans of the Nude artists radiated light. They proved that cultures could be radically reimagined and renewed; and their work was a fortuitous gift in this fraught moment to all of us but especially me, during my dark night of the soul the following few months, as I contemplated the possibility of another Holocaust. It also transported me back to my immersion in Islam 51 years earlier, which was peaceful, pleasurable and often enlightening. Strolling away from the Wallach Gallery, in fact, it dawned on me: During my journey to the East, perhaps I wasn’t a “white hippie drug addict destroying native space,” as a cultural Marxist might critique me today or a Central Asian satrap back then, but a fellow Partisan of the Nude or neo-Sufi searching for my peeps.

One of my drawings from my incarceration in Munich's Stadelheim Prison, before I knew much about India. illo: D. Blair 8/11/1972
My Journey to the East

My journey to the East started slowly, with literary and cinematic references, but was brought to life by the world travelers I met, my first months on the road. Toronto Lee liked to reminisce about India's incredible food over our bowls of gruel, as we camped on a beach in British Columbia. Wolf told me about staying with a maharaja, while we played chess with homemade cardboard pieces on the yard of Munich’s Stadelheim Prison (he was in for distributing LSD, me for theft). After an elderly guard backhanded me in the face, and I spent a week nursing a swollen lip and listening to members of the radical Baader-Meinhof gang (AKA Red Army Faction) shout to each other down the air shafts, I wondered if the West wasn’t still somewhat Nazi, and I turned to face the East, as illustrated in my prison drawings.

My physical odyssey, however, began in Athens with the Turkish girl. We danced in a Plaka nightclub—she was on summer break from architecture school in Ankara—and retired to Annafiotika Way, an ancient alley directly under the Acropolis, where I was staying with Australia Paul, my road buddy since Yugoslavia. Although Paul later dissed the Turkish girl as ugly, I found her stunning, despite some acne, and smart, and our sex was slow and dreamy, which can be classified as mystical. My only conjugal connection during my Asia year, the Turkish girl came to symbolize the continent’s surprising openness and generosity but also hidden world of women, which I finally learned about twenty years later. In fact, matriarchy is the third “little known but rather large fact about the Middle East” I discovered, after the rise and fall of the Sufi Revolution.

A lush orientalism continued to embrace me as I stumbled off the small Greek ferry and around Izmir's large whorehouse district—gaggles of women waving—and found a working-class restaurant where I first tasted Turkey’s delightful cuisine, still one of my faves. By the time I hit Istanbul, in mid-September 1972, I was speedballing newness and oldness, otherness and revelations about my innermost self or philosophy, like the night I toured the old city with a pack of dogs. They stayed behind when I entered a mosque, which are left open, and tried to fashion my own form of prayer.

John Milich (1944-2023), my great friend and teacher, around 2005, on vacation in Europe. photo: Iris Sultan
By day, I ran around Istanbul’s museums, tea shops, hammams and hippie hotels, switching to The Utopia when I learned they had beds for a buck on the open roof. As I chose one and pushed my backpack beneath, I heard a “Hey” from across the roof, shouted by a skinny, bald, bearded and bespectacled guy, who was sitting on a bed, cross-legged. Ten years my senior, he had taken the “hippie trail” to India the year before and could provide practical tips and mystical bon mots in a mellifluous melange. Eventually a published political essayist, and professional astrologer and herbalist, as well as one of my mentors and a teacher to many, John Edmond Milich (1944-2023) converted to Islam on his deathbed. On the roof of The Utopia, I also met David Winterburn. Of more modest demeanor, if equally bearded and adventurous, David came to prefer Hinduism, lived overseas for over a decade, became a language expert, married an amazing African woman, and still goes to India.

A Turk in a trench coat and severe mustache turned out to be a nice guy, over beers in a cafe behind The Utopia Hotel, and to have hashish, the psychedelic green variety, yet another Turkish secret. When I shared it with the roof toppers, even Milich showed respect. A few days later, a short, bushy-bearded Cuban, who went by the name of Dolphin and was a member of Berkeley’s Hog Farm commune (famous for serving “breakfast in bed for 400,000” at Woodstock, three years earlier), appeared on the roof of The Utopia and announced, “I’m driving to Afghanistan in a bus called the Rainbow Express, 35 dollars a ticket.” I bought one.

We crossed the Bosporus into Asia on a large ferry, hit the bus’s cruising speed (50 mph) on the Ankara Plains, and saw double rainbows out the Bedford’s roof windows, on both the left and the right sides. That was prophetic, as you might imagine, for the 23 hippies barreling east on the Rainbow Express. Also prophetic was Milich, who found a book of poetry while rummaging in my pack for some reason and started to shout sonorously, “Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all wines flowed and all hearts opened. One evening I seated beauty on my knee, and I found her bitter, and I cursed her.”

On the roof of the Utopia Hotel, with a view of the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, Istanbul. illo: D. Blair
That poem, “Season in Hell” (1873) by Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet some call “the teenager’s Christ,” acquired special meaning for me six months later, when I fell ill with hepatitis, and then dysentery and worms, and dropped fifty pounds and into a deep, months-long depression. It proved even more predictive thirty years later, when Milich became an avid conspiracy theorist (see my article about him).

Islam, however, was utterly unconspiratorial at that time. It was wide open and highly hospitable, in fact, from Morocco to Indonesia—almost everywhere except Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union’s Muslim states—as millions of Muslims enjoyed tourism’s easy money but also friendships and cultural exchange. Indeed, the tens of thousands of westerners who crossed the Middle East and south-central Asia, from the mid-1960s to the late-’70s, were almost always welcomed by locals, even in desert and mountain redoubts not visited by foriegners since Marco Polo.

I learned that fun fact our first night out on the Rainbow Express when Dolphin drove off the road and into the woods and announced, “We’ll camp here for the night,” no facilities let alone permission. The Turkish police arrived within the hour, but all the chief wanted to do was sit by the fire, listen to me play guitar, look at the women, and have one of his officers stuff cigarettes with hash—grinning broadly the entire time.

The very next night, however, we were pelted with tomatoes by some boys in Erzincan. Evidently, they spotted us entering the town’s historic hammam, peaked through its roof vents, and got excited by the foreign partisans of the nude taking a co-ed steam bath—and the truck with tomatoes nearby. The only person hit hard was Carol, the beauty among us, by a big, rotten tomato in her face, but we helped her back to the bus and scrambled aboard, even as the Turkish boys surrounded and started shaking it. After Dolphin drove us off, I went in front and played an E-blues boogie, which got the Rainbowers rocking and him banging the steering wheel and beeping the horn. Dolphin was oldest person on the bus, at 37, and I was the youngest.

Life onboard the Rainbow Express bus, including a visitor (in back, in a fez), western Afghanistan. illo: D. Blair
Two hundred miles later, Iran’s curvy Arabic script and camels loping across the road broke my worldview, literally: a crack appeared and those images flooded in. Also breaking was the Rainbow Express, in a gorgeous gorge in the Alborz Mountains, a hundred miles north-east of Tehran, Iran. Our resident German hippie, also an acid dealer, gave me a few hits and the admonition not to dose the Yugoslavians, whom he considered too young and immature, even though they were a year older than me. I immediately located Darko and Jelko, and the two-years-older David, and we dropped down by the river. Listening to its torrent and looking at the snowcapped peaks of Persia, I thought I could see Alamut Castle, on a saw-toothed ridge, the first mountain fortress of the Hashashin cult. I had heard about the Hashashin from Mick Jagger’s character in “Performance” (1970), a film written and co-directed by the poet Donald Cammell, which explores the zero-sum challenge between vision, freedom and responsibility. (The actual Alamut was 75 miles to the west.)

Emerging in 1090 CE, the Hashashin were a small Persian sect of Ishmaelites, itself a subsect of Islam’s minority sect, the Shi’a, but they loomed large across Central Asia, as well as my imagination, due to their innovative use of hash, espionage and suicide strikes. Suicide is forbidden by Islam, but “Nothing is true, and everything is permitted” according to Hassan-i-Sabbah, the first sheikh of the Hashashin, a position eventually called “The Old Man of the Mountains.” That philosophy took Hinduism's one-sentence summary of reality, “Everything is 'maya’”, which is Sanskrit for illusion or mental construct and an early take on post-modernism, and perverted it into cynicism, fanaticism and nihilism. I-Sabbah's first tactical success was to sneak himself and some acolytes into Alamut Castle as servants and laborers, surround the satrap (meaning regional governor), and reveal themselves, daggers drawn, although they did allow him and his family to pack and leave, and even provided an "exit castle" payment, to maintain their righteousness. Nevertheless, the Hashashin "demand letter" eventually became a gold coin paired with a dagger, generally placed on the target's bed, to signify, "Take the bribe or die!"

I-Sabbah didn’t take drugs himself and killed his own son for drink. He studied science and developed Alamut's library and lab, which he supposedly didn't leave for 20 years, into a renown Shi'a knowledge center which hosted scholars, notably the polymath al-Tusi, one of Islam's greatest astronomers. But his primary research was cults. Indeed, i-Sabbah perfected the use of large doses of hash, pretend paradises (gardens stocked with women, food and luxury goods), and radical readings of “The Quran”, as well as conspiracy theories, to brainwash and exploit his followers. I-Sabbah liked to impress visitors by ordering acolytes to leap to their deaths from the parapets of Alamut. The Hashashin gave us the word “assassin,” in fact, which derives from their name (meaning hashish user), because, instead of fleeing after an attack, they would stand stock still and pray loudly. The novelty of that behavior shocked onlookers and blew their notoriety up from mere masters of espionage and murderers of celebrities.

Their first high-level hit was in 1092 AD of Nizam al-Mulk, the talented, liberal “vizier” (administrator) of the nearby Seljuk Empire, while he was on the road to Baghdad, whom i-Sabbah hated for some reason. The claim that those two, plus the renown poet Omar Khayyam, attended school together and swore a blood oath of mutual assistance, which al-Mulk abrogated, is undoubtedly apocryphal. It was one of the many Assassin tales which raced across Islam and around Europe, where the group came to signify intense oriental devotion, as in this line from the 13th century French troubadour Aimeric de Peguilhand: “You have me more fully in your power than the Old Man his Assassins.”

The First Crusade, by Christian Europeans of the Holy Land, started four years after the Hashashin, perhaps not coincidentally, given western imaginations were so inflamed by the stories about them. Since i-Sabbah studied in Egypt, with the powerful Ishmaelites of the Shi'a Fatimid Caliphate (909-1171 CE) who were centered there, and knew the region, he dispatched some trusted lieutenants to defend Islam. They usurped castles in the mountains north of Jerusalem and deployed their own assassins or bribed sleeper agents to attack local leaders as well as invading Crusaders. In the 12th century, they killed the Count of Tripoli, Raymond II (of France), and the King of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat (also French), and made multiple attempts on Saladin, the great Muslim general, because he was Sunni and may have mistreated Shi’a, obliging him to sleep in a raised, enclosed bed. Until the Mongols finally breached and destroyed Alamut almost two centuries later, the Hashashin terrorized the Middle East and Persia using disinformation, rumormongering and roleplaying, much like today’s conspiracy theorists, and suicide strikes, grotesque violence and religious fantasy, much like today’s Islamo-fascists. (Their ceremonies eventually included Islamic Satanism.)

On my seven-month, 7,000-mile journey through Islam in the early 1970s, however, I met no Islamo-fascists, assassins or even bandits, except for a Kabul cabbie who put a knife to my throat.

Images from my journey to the East dominated my art for decades. illo: D. Blair, 1979
After a delightful afternoon tripping on acid in the Alborz Mountains, Darko, Jelko, David and I hitchhiked into the town of Amol, near the Caspian Sea, for a bite and some of the opium Iran was famous for, even under the repressive Shah Pahlavi. At the restaurant, we met a banker who ferreted out a connection, but opium doesn’t burn in cigarettes like hash, so we couldn’t get high. The next day, our banker friend and his two young daughters came out, in his chauffeured Mercedes, to the Rainbow Express, still sitting next to a mountain road under repair by a family of Iranian mechanics, for an afternoon of intercultural dialogue.

By the time we got to the Afghan border, it was closed, but the guards let us sleep in a large, Persian carpet-covered room, a cozy, colorful bivouac before entering that ancient and wild land. Aside from the ubiquitous hash, which appeared a mile from the border with a guy waiving a slab from the side of the road, I was amazed by Afghanistan's mountains and deserts, dun-brown but dotted with green oases and villages of domed mud huts; the 1940s-era trucks covered with paintings of planes, trains and telephones (but no people); the flocks of females in bright blue, head-to-toe burkas, chirping in Farsi and swooping around like birds; and the black -turbaned and -bearded men, stoic but sometimes friendly. There was the owner of Your Apple Pie Bakery in Kandahar, who liked DJing tapes while chatting up Carol; the Kabul hotel boys, who spun madly around the room at my 18th birthday party while I rocked another blues; the hotelier in Mazar-i-Sharif, who blasted Turkic tunes and provided tea, crackers and opium (which he showed me how to ingest: orally, starting with a tiny piece); and the “chai wallah” of Kunduz’s biggest tea house, who entertained me, Hans Van Loo and his buddy Wim (Dutch hippies with whom I’m still in touch) with evocative gestures and "number one" hash, five bucks a pound. The chai wallah was so welcoming, calm and expressive, I came to assume he was an acolyte of Afghanistan’s millennia-old and highly revered Sufism.

I still kick myself for not visiting the Buddhas of Bamiyan, ten stories tall and one of the seven wonders of the world, which survived 13 centuries of Islam and the weather of the Hindu Kush Mountains only to be shelled to smithereens by Islamo-fascists in 2001. But it was December, the mountains were freezing, and I was desperate for India.

My Dutch friends Hans Van Loo (rt) and Wim on Chapura Beach, Goa, 1972. illo: D. Blair
Delhi’s rickshaws, restaurants and ear cleaners did not disappoint, nor did Bombay (now Mumbai), where we camped on the street next to the India Gate and partied for a week, or the full hippie immersion in Goa. For two months, I camped on Chapura Beach, hiked the beaches (as a partisan of the nude), swam with dolphins (once), read Dostoyevsky's “Crime and Punishment” (1866), which touched me deeply, and ingested copious quantities of hash and LSD. Every sunset, I would make a chillum (straight pipe) of my Number One Kunduz and shout the Hindu hashish prayers, “Alec bom” and “Bom Shankar,” which would bring Hans and Wim running from their nearby hut and, eventually, a crowd of “India freaks,” pilgrims to Goa from afar as Brazil, Japan and South Africa.

“Journey to the East” is a metaphor for self-examination, I knew from reading Herman Hesse’s 1932 book by that name, but some acquaintance with religion was useful, if not essential, I finally realized. Having had little ecumenical education during my secular humanist youth or years at an elite New York City high school, I cribbed from English Erica and Tall Dutch Hans, who managed a multi-faith shrine in a tiny, thatched hut next door to my tent. There was also the English-speaking Indians, who seemed to enjoy a rollicking good religious discussion, and the “sadhus,” the wandering Hindu holy men and (very rarely) women. A sadhu named Boleram liked to sneak up behind me at night, when I was walking home along the beach, a little tipsy from the cafe, and scream. “To keep you in the present,” he explained, smirking, when I ran into him in the hut of Craig Karp, a harmonica-playing Jewish kid from the New York suburbs, for whom Boleram cooked in exchange for room and board. (After Craig and I hitchhiked west together in 1974, I went to the San Francisco Art Institute for 16 years while he attended Portland State, got a degree in Arabic, joined the State Department, and became their man in northern Pakistan during the Afghan-Soviet War, 1979-‘89.)

This Om Prakash Sharma masterpiece had its American debut in his 1986, one-man show at Ancient Currents, a gallery in San Francisco, I ran with my brother, Nicholas Blair. image: OP Sharma, 1965
I learned about Indian art from Om Prakash Sharma, one of India’s first and finest abstract painters (Indian critics dubbed his style “neo-Tantra”), and a great sitarist, who attended Columbia University on a Fulbright scholarship and met my father somehow (we lived three blocks from campus). For three weeks, Om hosted and ferried me around Old Delhi, visiting herbal doctors, mango stands and artist buddies, while his wife Savitri fattened me up from hepatitis on her fabulous yogurts and curries. I was awed by—indeed, I still strive to abide—Om’s preternatural balance of East and West aesthetics, capitalist and communist concepts, and mysticism and rationalism, as well as maintaining the lifestyle of a rebel artist and middleclass householder simultaneously. Om lived in four modest rooms with Savitri, three kids and his girlfriend, Kathleen, an American studying Bharatnatyam, south Indian dance. It could have been considered a polygamous Muslim marriage, borrowed from Delhi's eight centuries of romantic, openminded Sufis, but Om was Hindu, and Old Delhi was still fairly traditional at that time (see my article about him).

I found Hinduism’s florid myths and guruology equal parts grotesque and fascinating and inhaled them from the India freaks. A long-blond-haired surfer type from California, whom I met on top of a truck in Gujarat State, told me an epic tale of gods and goddesses, after which he added, “But India itself is the guru.” A skinny French girl in a dirty sari (probably an ex-junkie) taught me the Hindu prayers at the ashram of Swami Muktananda, which I stumbled on hitchhiking around the fluorescent green countryside east of Mumbai. An upper caster who renounced those privileges to become a wandering, sworn-to-poverty sadhu, Muktananda had Boleram’s angular energy and withering gaze, which he would turn on me from his pillowed repose, on the dais of his marbled hall, echoing with the chants of dozens of devotees (mostly gringos), whenever I walked in.

Considered a “sadguru,” a combination of sadhu and guru which means perfectly realized being, Muktananda enthralled, educated and enlightened many people, first as a sadhu, then at his ashram, finally around the world, which he began touring in 1970. He would give talks and blessings and set up satellite ashrams, including the Siddha Yoga Foundation, a large facility two miles from my live-work studio in Oakland, California, which is still going strong today. Unfortunately, Muktananda could be abusive: spiritually of liberal humanism, physically of men, and sexually of women, even girls, according to eyewitness reports and journalists, like William Rodarmor (see CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1983).

David Winterburn and I occasionally play a game we call “Find the Guru Who Has Transcended Sex,” where one team proposes a clean candidate and the other gets to dig up dirt, which is hard for the first team to win since spiritual awakening is adjacent to romanticism and, thereby, connected to sexual love. The last time we played, David said, “The temptation of the flesh seems to symbolize the difficulty of the journey.” Sufism, on the other hand, embraced female-male relations, romance and sex, which was probably why I was so smitten by it.

From my 'Fall of Love' seriograph series, trying to summarized my five years of world travel. photo: N. Blair, Mexico 1975, illo: D. Blair 2017
My Sufism

My Sufism started slowly, also with world traveler mentions, but increased as I hitchhiked across India's Rajasthan State and saw its mosques, maharaja castles and Persian miniature paintings, and exploded when I returned to the States and finally cracked a book. Brilliant almost from page one, Sufism marries mysticism, poetry, music, dance, tolerance and romantic love with secular activities, like work, family life and even soldiering. Most importantly, it has some of the simplest but most sophisticated metaphysics in the history of religion.

On the road in Islam, I also learned to paint, including images of people. Arabic-like brush strokes appeared in my India sketches, expanded during my South America years, and matured into canvasses of monochrome figures, shaped like Arabic letters, or colorful nudes formed from Arabic-like puzzle pieces (see below), which could be considered my contribution to the Partisans of the Nude art movement.

For thirty years, I dipped and sometimes dove into Muslim, Arab, Turkish, Persian, Afghan, Pakistani, Indian, Moroccan, Egyptian and Palestinian culture but especially Sufism, which often expressed the others' best. A decade before I began studying Judaism and my mother’s Holocaust experience, I adopted various aspects of Islamic ideas, dress and music. My father was a fan of Egypt’s ethereal grand diva, Umm Kulthum, whom he heard there as a soldier during World War Two, and I played related riffs on guitar. My Asian interests, which also included Japan, China and Tibet, harmonized easily with my liberal upbringing and the multiculturalism of Manhattan and California, where I settled, although the reading and deciphering did take years.

From my series of nudes using Arabic-like brushstrokes, which can be considered part of the Partisans of the Nude movement. illo: 'Ryoko in Repose', D. Blair, 2012
Everything changed after 9/11, a suicide strike in the Hashashin tradition, even though the hijackers were Sunni not Shi’a. When no one wrote editorials or toured talk shows to explain how the Sufis exemplified President George W. Bush's claim that, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam… Islam is peace” (9/17/2001)—except for Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Egyptian-American writer, Sufi and founder of Cordoba House (disparaged as the “Ground Zero Mosque”), a lovely proposed mosque and cultural center cancelled for being two blocks from the Twin Towers—I felt obliged to speak up. Within two months, I wrote and performed my “Art Fatwa” (see below), a manifesto celebrating Islamic creativity and condemning Muslims as well as Westerners who defame Muhammad’s dedication to peace and love, despite his notoriety as a politician and general. A few months later, I produced “East Actually Does Meet West”, a poster with that headline over a photo of a Middle Eastern and an American musician meeting backstage at a performance (also below). And I began buying every Sufi book I could find in New York, Berkeley or Fremont, California, which has a large Afghan community and many ethnic grocery stores, some of which also stocked books.

After a six-month read and three-week typing frenzy, I finished “What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East?”, a 6,000-word article based on the best evidence I had unearthed and the tragic realization that Sufi sheiks were laying low for fear of assassins. I gleaned a lot from “A History of Islamic Societies” (1988) by Ira Lapidus, a respected professor of Islam at the University of California, Berkeley, which has 26 index entrees each for “Sunni” or “Shi’a” but double that (53) for “Sufi.” Although I was just an amateur researcher, who had only visited Islam for seven months in the ‘70s (plus the West Bank for a week during the first Palestinian "intifada," or uprising, in 1988), and I was not a Sufi, nor a devotee of any religion, I felt duty bound to build on what Lapidus and other scholars had referred to or revealed, if only in a single sentence, to rise to the challenge not only of the much ballyhooed “clash of civilizations” but Sufi creativity and what I myself had witnessed.

My 'Art Fatwa', which includes the lines: 'Islamic artists rise up. For one thousand years, your mystical brothers have been slaughtering you. There is no war with the West, the crisis is between moderate and radical Islam.' illo: D. Blair, 2001
Kabul was quite the Shangri-la in the early ‘70s. There was Afghan pop music blasting everywhere; bazars bursting with color, sides of beef black with flies, and bearded men who liked to haggle but would often give you a little extra (the so-called “baksheesh,” meaning friendly gift, in their case, but also corrupt bribe); hippie cafes covered with magical, mirror-speckled cloth (sewn by Kuchi tribal women); and a downtown with uncovered Afghan women, often beautiful, a few in miniskirts, some studying medicine. (After the first women graduated from Afghanistan's only medical school in 1957, about half of the country's doctors were soon female, until the Taliban's first takeover in 1996). The hippie invasion had unnerved Muslim conservatives, I could imagine, even though I myself didn't experience any opprobrium, especially since Afghanistan was still semi-feudal and extremely impoverished, as I noticed touring its rural regions (a year after the devastating drought of 1971, which caused a famine). But their fears seemed far outweighed by the feelings of other Afghans, who were enjoying the tourist revenue, cultural exchange and friendships, including romantic.

Regardless, the country was antique and world-class corrupt. On July 17, 1973, King Zahir Shah, a liberal who instituted some reforms, was overthrown and exiled by his cousin and competitor, Daoud Khan, a military man friendly with the Soviets, who claimed he could accelerate progress. I didn’t hear about the coup, when I passed through Kabul a few days later on my way west, but I followed developments in the American press and through David, who returned to Kabul to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer. He was evacuated in March 1978, two months after the Islamist revolution in neighboring Iran and two months before Afghan socialists, led by the Marxist Khalq party, killed Khan and 2000 of his supporters, and switched the mode of governance to socialism and a brutal police state. (The day after David and I arrived in Herat, Afghanistan, in 1972, there was a large demonstration in front of our hotel involving members of Khalq and Parcham, a moderate socialist party which, unlike Khalq, accepted Islam. It concluded with knife killings, which David witnessed and I saw the resulting blood in the street.) Within a year and a half of the so-called Saur Revolution, the American ambassador was kidnapped and killed, the Soviet Union had invaded (to stop the capitalist counterrevolution), and that noble, dun-brown land, dotted with green oases, had entered a hell cycle of invasions (the Soviets killed about one million, the Americans up to 200,000), civil wars and authoritarian or Islamo-fascist governments, ongoing today.

My poster “East Actually Does Meet West” (Max Michel, left, Nicholas Soter). illo: D. Blair, 2002
When “What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East?” was not accepted for publication, I self-published a 20-page chapbook (see its cover below) and mailed it to a few friends and scholars, including Lapidus. When neither he nor anyone else acclaimed my findings, I feared I was suffering from a bad case of Dunning-Kruger delusions, but I calmed those concerns—if you agree with my positive self-diagnosis—with 20 more years of reading and following the news. My discoveries are even more critical today, it would seem, in light of the lack of awareness of Sufi history and achievement, even among liberal or educated Muslims, and the popularity of radical Islamism, among conservative or young Muslims but also Western academics, young people and leftists.

So, what did I glean from Lapidus, the other scholars and my Arab and Muslim friends, not to mention the Sufi greats? And is it relevant to the modern Middle East? You be the judge, of course, but it’s inevitably controversial, especially as the region’s radicals push it toward broader war. One thing for sure, with the situation so ancient, intractable and dangerous, we are well advised to explore any promising perspective, which my four main findings appear to provide, take for example:

The cover of my book “What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East?” illo: D. Blair, 2004
The Sufis Saved Islam Four Times

The Sufis were a significant spiritual force in Islam starting a generation after Muhammad. Often itinerant mystics, quietist contemplatives or local teachers, they emphasized esoteric knowledge, vision-inducing rituals and “futuwah,” their codes of self-denial, generosity and right action. Although the Persian poet Mansur al-Hallaj (858-922 CE), sometimes called the “Sufi Christ,” was martyred in Baghdad for defying the caliph of the Sunni Abbasids, Islam's second empire, which stretched from North Africa to Afghanistan, the Abbasids were fairly liberal. They supported the sciences and arts, including outspoken poets, some of whom were openly queer, alcoholic or both (notably the brilliant Abu Nuwas, boon friend of Sultan Harun al-Rashid, who ruled 786-809 and was the son of al-Khayzuran, a great matriarch and power behind the throne).

Gradually growing in stature, the Sufis attained leadership status around 1100 CE after a titan of Islamic scholarship, al-Ghazali, proved that “Sufism was the mystical heart of Sunnism.” Al-Ghazali’s theological leap revived both Sunnism, Islam’s majority sect (about 85% of Muslims), which had turned moribund during the half millennium since Muhammad, and the Abbasids themselves, who had long exhausted their golden age. A century earlier, their clerics had "Closed the Gates of Ijtihad," meaning they ended interpretation of scripture, a bad vibe for intellectuals. The newly empowered Sufism served as a spiritual rebuttal, in fact, not only of the decadent Abbasids and their authoritarian caliphs but the nihilist Hashashin, who emerged at the same time and ran with the same mystical-wanderer crowd (al-Mulk's assassin infiltrated his travel party disguised as a Sufi). Many Sufi greats started as Shi’a, Islam’s small, scholarly, hierarchical and artistic sect—Shi’a didn't prohibit human figuration and often adorned their mosques with massive portraits—but they switched to Sunnism for its egalitarianism, six times more Muslims and al-Ghazali’s shattering insight.

A few decades after al-Ghazali, also in Baghdad (the world’s largest city from 800 to 1258 CE with up to a million citizens), al-Qadiri solved another riddle of Islam: How does one unify religion and politics? He must have achieved this balance, I believe, because his disciples, the Qadiriyya, established the first stable Sufi “tariqa,” which translates as “path” but means “religious order” (since Sufis oppose sects and sectarianism). The Qadiriyya are still with us, in fact, as are many of the subsequent tariqas which integrated freedom, vision and responsibility. “Give your hands to work and your soul to God” was the one-sentence life summary of Naqshband, a 14th century Persian sheikh whose conservative tariqa, the Naqshbandi, continues to minister to about four-fifths of contemporary Sufis, who live mostly in central Asia.

A painting of a hippie gathering or Sufi celebration near the Bamiyan Buddhas, before 2000. illo: D. Blair and Steven Harvey
Calling each other “friends,” the Sufis left their caves and meditation spots, took up professions and spouses, and formed tariqas and other fraternities, many of which provided community services, like hostels for travelers. This followed the lived example of Muhammad, who grew from camel train leader and family man to prophet and general, although most Sufis interpreted his mosque-state to mean ethical deeds enacted by individuals or grassroot organizations, and his conquests as spiritual endeavors. Sufis eschewed worldly affairs not because they considered it evil or themselves holier than thou, but because it distracted from their enjoyment of God, which they amplified to include nature, romance and art. In this manner, al-Ghazali (1058-1111 CE), al-Qadiri (1077–1166), Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) and the myriad more Sufi greats—like ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240), the prolific philosopher, poet and romantic, who journeyed to the Middle East from Spain (where he studied with two Sufi women masters)—inspired a spiritual and cultural shift which saved Islam. Indeed, the Sufi revolution was instrumental in rebuilding Islam from the "Mongol apocalypse," the invasions of the 13th and 14th century by Genghis Kahn and his minions, which probably killed over 20 million people in Central Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, traumatized millions more, and ended high culture for generations in some regions.

The Mongols were largely areligious animists, but a few of Genghis’s grandsons met traveling Sufi merchants and converted to Islam, which popularized the faith. Many Mongol chieftains came to enjoy Muslim civilization, especially its Sufism, including Tamerlane, another mass murdering conqueror, who invited the renown Persian Sufi poet Hafez (1325-‘90) to sit at his court. Alas, when Tamerlane took offense at an edgy metaphor, the poet prudently snuck out of the palace and fled. As it happened, Hafez exalted romantic mysticism (and vice-versa, mystical romanticism), claiming that “Wine-drunk, love-drunk, we inherit paradise,” and reviled fanaticism: “Lay not reproach at the drunkard’s door, Oh fanatic, thou that art pure of soul; not thine on the page of life to enroll the faults of others” (from “The Hafez Poems of Gertrude Bell”, 1897, an English woman explorer, anthropologist and colonial administrator).

The Sufi-led recovery from the Mongol Apocalypse was so spectacular, in fact, it begat the Sufi Renaissance personified by Rumi (1207-’73), who was from Balkh, Afghanistan, a highly cultured crossroads city (turned spooky hamlet surrounded by dripping mud ruins, by the time I got there in 1972). The precocious young Rumi enjoyed cosmopolitan Balkh until his father, Bahuaddin, suddenly packed up the family and fled, just ahead of the Mongols. After hiking 2,500 miles to Mecca and doing their Hajj pilgrimage, they settled in Turkey. Rumi became an Islamic judge and community leader but also prolific writer, adventurous mystic and one of the bestselling poets of all time—across both Islam and the West—as well as a dedicated romantic. Rumi's one-sentence revelations include “Love alone cuts arguments short, for it alone comes to the rescue,” and “To the ones who really see—the ‘chosen lovers’—love is a shattering, eternal light.”

The great scholar, mystic and poet Rumi. illo: unknown, 17th century, Turkey
That brings Sufi saves to four: al-Ghazali, al-Qadiri, the post-Mongol resurrection and their golden age. Moreover, not only were there Sunni and Shi’a Sufis, which helped pacify the severe sectarian civil war plaguing Islam since the death of Muhammad, there were Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Taoist, Confucian and even Jewish Sufis.

Mediaeval Judaism’s greatest philosopher, Maimonides (1138-1204 CE), known for his masterpiece “Guide for the Perplexed”, was a rational deist who fled intolerant Spain for the Holy Land and became court doctor for Saladin (1137-1193), one of Egypt's most revered sultans as well as generals. His sons, however, became Sufis, again with no Islamic conversion. Enamored of the mysticism of their ancient prophets, they rebelled against Maimonidian logic, joined the burgeoning Sufi movement, and reinterpreted “The Bible” as a mystical treatise. Indeed, they helped pioneer the Jewish mystical reawakening exemplified by “The Kabbalah”, a purportedly ancient Hebrew text, which was actually being written contemporaneously in Spain and only arrived in Jerusalem a century or two later. Their interest in mystical monotheism explains the plethora of Jewish Sufis today.

Sufi poets and philosophers proceeded to entertain and enlighten entire towns, regions, even empires, even those ruled by tyrants persecuting them, using the trick of couching avant-garde ideas in devout Islam. They were inspired, assisted and periodically replaced by one of the many wandering Sufi sadhus, who were not unlike the activists and hippies of the 1960s. Poetry was their rock and roll, in terms of popularity and promoting change, but Sufis also excelled at music, dance and other arts, religion and mystical theory and practice, like chanting, “moving meditation” (circular walking or spin dancing) and other techniques for inducing visions or rapture. Last but not least was their special sauce: romance, humor (some became court jesters), ironic insinuation and moral suasion, if not so much the legal variant, although many Sufis were Islamic scholars and judges.

Muslim scientists hard at work, circa ninth century, Baghdad. photo: courtesy Tazkiyah
Science became central to Islam, due to monotheism’s establishment of an ordered universe, the Prophet Muhammad, who recommended Muslims “Seek knowledge even to China,” and rationalist sects, like the Sunni Mu’taziles of ninth century Baghdad or the Shi'a intellectuals 300 miles south in Basra. Science was integral to Islam's first golden age, among the Abbasids from 775 to 945 CE, and Islamic science became central to Western Civilization, after the Christians repressed and occasionally killed scientists and burned libraries, during the eight, long centuries of the Dark Ages. In addition to incorporating the knowledge of classical Greece, India and China, Muslim scholars developed much of their own, from algebra and algorithms to alchemy (transforming physical substances mystically)—all Arabic words (“al” means “the” in Arabic)—as well as astronomy, including naming almost all our best known stars, and medicine. After Christians started returning to science and classical civilization in the 13th century, they relied on Muslim scholars like Ibn Sina, the 11th century Uzbek known as “the father of medicine” (a prodigious traveler and experimenter, he discovered germ theory and wrote the Middle Ages' main medical text), and the 12th century Spanish polymath, Ibn Rushd (called Avicenna and Averroes, respectively, by Europeans).

Alas, science provided little mass benefit until the Industrial Revolution, and most Sufis followed al-Ghazali's preference for revelation over rationalism, which Neil deGrasse Tyson credits with destroying the Muslim proclivity for science. Nevertheless, there were a few scientific Sufis, notably members of the Muʿtazile school and Omar Khayyam. A Persian mathematician and astronomer as well as poet, philosopher and possible friend of i-Sabbah (they were born two years but 500 miles apart), Khayyam investigated all sorts of things, including Sufism itself and its view of reality as a series of overlaying symbol hierarchies, using a poetic code based on alcohol (tavern as the teacher's house, wine as teachings, etc). Such iconography worked well in Islam where drinking was common, despite scriptural prohibitions, Sufism was sometimes forbidden, and the two shared altered states of consciousness (as Hafez liked to emphasize). In addition to imbibing real or metaphorical spirits, Sufis used divination (through dreams or other means), supernatural healing and other esoteric practices, like smoking hash, Tantric sex, “malamati” (“taming the ego by blaming oneself”), or the “torture meditation” of the fakirs, like self-flagellation.

"Pan Pipers", one of my Sufi-influenced paintings, circa 1977. image: D. Blair
Long before al-Ghazali, Sufism was respected from Afghanistan to Spain, from where troubadours carried it to Christian Europe, which contributed to the romantic revolution among southern France's Albigensians (also called Cathars). Devoted to their beloveds and arts as well as sheikhs and saints, the Sufis fashioned a functional way to live a sacred, romantic and responsible life, which modeled and inspired right action, creativity and love. In fact, Sufis are said to have conquered more territory with the word than all of Islam's armies with the sword. After leading the recovery from the Mongols, the Sufi Renaissance flourished from Senegal and Timbuktu in West Africa to Balkh and Delhi in Central Asia, with outlying regions continuing to join the movement for centuries. Indeed, it served as the spiritual foundation of Islam's second wave of golden ages, arguably greater than the 10th century Abbasids or the Spanish Umayyads' "Convivencia" (the largely peaceful "coexistence" of Muslims, Christians and Jews from 711 to 1492), notably in the Turkey-based Ottoman Empire, from 1299 to 1922, and India's Mughal Empire, founded by a descendent of Tamerlane in 1526 and lasting until 1858.

“In the 1600s a Sufi teacher from the west of the Pamirs [Tajikistan] crossed into southern Xinjiang and Gansu [western China], where he preached with great success,” notes Valerie Hansen in her fascinating “Silk Road” (2012). “In the 1700s his successors travelled to Yemen, where they studied with Naqshbandi [Sufi] teachers. On their return, they were unusually influential… In time, the descendants of these Sufis became the Khoja rulers of Khotan and Yarkand [in western Xinjiang]… Under their influence, Xinjiang became fully Islamicized.” Unfortunately, their descendants, the Uyghurs, have been harshly repressed by Chinese authorities, including having their culture decimated and almost two million people incarcerated in “re-education” camps since 2015.

An Indian sadhu on bed of nails, Benares, India, circa 1907. photo: unknown
The Sufi Downturn

The Sufis were so innovative as well as functional and religious, they were often ushered into the inner sanctums of Islam’s ruling elites as poets, sheikhs, advisors or outright sovereigns, as in Xinjiang. Over the centuries, however, cultures lose their edge, especially when leadership is passed to the first born instead of the most talented, or the system is corrupted by religious charlatans or Machiavellian politicians. Moreover, some Sufis indulged in odd superstitions, excessive rituals or strange practices, like fakir self-abuse (such as the cliche of sitting on a bed of nails, which was actually practiced), while others regressed to conservative Sunnism or acquiesced to tyranny. According to A.M.A. Shushtery, a scholar of Islam residing in southern India: "The Sufi movement started with ascetic and pious life; developed into a system of philosophy in which ethics was greatly stressed; and it gradually degenerated into speculation, semi-religious ceremonies, a kind of brotherhood, a source of inactive and easy life, a means of begging, a cause of revolution, [and] a way of deceiving gullible, illiterate and simple minded people" ("Outlines of Islamic Culture", 1953). "Of course, this description is subject to large exceptions," Shushtery adds, a point emphasized by his "cause of revolution" remark.

Most historians of Islam mention at length or fully acclaim the Sufis and their renaissance, which flourished from about the 13th to the 17th century, and longer in lots of regions. The last Mughal of India, Shah Zafar II, who ruled the ultimately tiny empire from 1837 to 1858, started as a wandering Sufi poet, which may have helped him and his people find peace amid Britain's conquest and colonization. Except for Shushtery, however, neither the historians nor the Sufis themselves said much, or anything at all, about Sufism’s decline, decadence or contribution to the fundamentalist Wahhabi counterrevolution. This is due to embarrassment as well as respect, but also because there were still many brilliant Sufis hard at work, the "large exceptions" Shushtery referred to, who eventually wowed the West.

Translations of Rumi, Hafez and Khayyam began arriving in Europe at the end of 18th century, with talented teachers and artists, like the sitarist Inayat Khan, coming a century or so later, although many didn't identify as Sufis, because they were already being persecuted in a many regions. The Lebanese-American wunderkind Kahil Gibran wrote and illustrated “The Prophet” (1923), which doesn’t mention “Sufi” but obviously draws on its themes. “The Prophet” was very popular during the Eastern mysticism fad of the “Roaring '20s”, and remains a bestseller today, especially among born-again hippies (the Wallach's Partisan Show had two lovely Gibran drawings). Meher Baba, a Zoroastrian from Mumbai, studied with a female Sufi master from Afghanistan (who ran away to India on her wedding day), became known as a nonsectarian positivist for his mantra, “Don’t worry, be happy” (chalked on a board, because he took a vow of silence), and was chosen by Rabi’ah Martin to take over her Sufi Order (which still has a spectacular, art-filled temple in Orinda, California). The Russian-born George Gurdjieff hiked much of central Asia in his youth, had many “Meetings with Remarkable Men” (as the title of his book, finally published in English in 1963, puts it), settled in Paris (where he weathered the Nazis), and taught Sufi practices without naming them. Known as a fabulist and trickster as well as disciplined mystic, insightful lay psychiatrist and repository of ancient wisdom, Gurdjieff still has many disciples and a few organizations worldwide.

Article continues at My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
Posted on Oct 26, 2024 - 12:21 PM
The Passing of Tony Reveaux
by Doniphan Blair

One of the few photos I could find of the recalcitrant Tony Reveaux. photo: T. Reveaux
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

ANTHONY "TONY" REVEAUX, OUR DEAR
colleague here at cineSOURCE, passed the week of July 10, 2024. In keeping with his mild-mannered but mysterious demeanor, I am not sure of the exact date, reason or his age.

Tony was my most mellow writer at cineSOURCE, although I did eventually learn he was quite the force in indie and avant-garde film. He even had an acting part in Chris Marker’s renown “Sans Soleil” (1983), and he started the film studies department at UC Santa Cruz. In addition to teaching filmmaking and film history there, and starting its film festival, he taught at the SF Art Institute, where he received his MFA, and at San Francisco and Sonoma State universities.

A dedicated cinema analyst, Tony was the first film critic at the New Haven Register, in his youth. He went on to appear in Artweek, San Francisco Chronicle, Microtimes, Computer Currents, Visions, Newmedia, MediaDirect CD-ROM (Japan), Film Quarterly, TV Technology, Entertainment Design and Film/Tape World, where I first met him. Indeed, Tony was a person I consulted in depth before I started cineSOURCE in April 2008, after Film/Tape collapsed the year before.

Tony wrote dozens of articles for cineSOURCE, often examining the art film scene but with a calmness and virtuosity, as can be seen in this 2010 article, “Radical Light: Bay Area Alt-Film”.

Tony also published four books: “Cool Mac Clip Art Plus!”, “The Independent Film” (with Sheldon Renan), and “The Art of the Animated Film”. “How to do Everything with iMovie”, which he wrote with Gene Steinberg, remains available for $26.36. And he has one film listed at the Filmmakers Coop, the 12.5 minute “Peace March” (1976).

As if that wasn’t diverse enough, he worked on many festivals and did multimedia design for the Oakland Museum, SF Conservatory of Music and University Art Museum Berkeley among other locations. Not to forget he was part of the Orange Hat Club, a group of swimmers who plied the San Francisco Bay, including in February!

Tony is survived by a brother who lives in Connecticut. I am guessing he was in his mid-70s, since he moved some years ago into an independent living complex in San Rafael. Evidently, he had a cancer that spread slowly, and his old friend Jeanne Thomas flew in from Montana to help.

Thanks Tony, for your calm and illuminating insight—love you!

Posted on Aug 03, 2024 - 01:20 PM
Julie Rubio’s New Feature: Painter Tamara de Lempicka
by Dave Fonseca

The poster for Rubio's new feature documentary. image: designed by Doreen Hemmati, painting courtesy Tamara de Lempicka Estate
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

“I live life in the margins of society,” said Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980), a Polish painter who lived in France, the United States and Mexico. “The rules of normal society don’t apply to those who live on the fringe.”

Similar could be said for East Bay filmmaker Julie Rubio, whose latest work is a feature documentary, "Tamara: The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival.” The film will screen in its entirety at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, as part of the highly anticipated de Lempicka retrospective, which opens October 12, 2024. This event is expected to draw significant attention from art and film enthusiasts alike, providing a platform for Rubio's film to reach a diverse audience.

Rubio, whose debut feature “Six Sex Scenes and a Murder” was the feature article of cineSOURCE’s debut issue, in 2008 (see it here), has been involved in lots of projects since, as a director, producer and cinema activist. Indeed, she is the current president of the organization Women in Film San Francisco Bay Area (WIFSFBA).

"Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival" delves into the life and legacy of the iconic Art Deco painter, known for her bold, sensuous art and tumultuous life, characterized by resilience against the immense challenges of her time. Born in Moscow to a Jewish family, Tamara later married a Polish lawyer who became entangled in the upheavals of the Russian Revolution. Fleeing the war, they sought refuge in Paris, where they rebuilt their lives as refugees.

Her story is told through her artwork, focusing on her relationships with her family, lovers, and friends, as well as her Jewish heritage and its profound influence on her life, career, and indomitable spirit. Told through her never-before-seen 8mm home movies and groundbreaking newly-discovered birth and baptism certificates, the film reveals her true name, heritage, and identity for the first time and will change art history.

Rubio's film captures the essence of de Lempicka's journey, highlighting her artistic genius and struggle as a woman in a male-dominated world. Indeed, during her first exhibition in the early 1920s, she signed her paintings "Lempitzki," the masculine form of her name. After enjoying international fame in 1920s Paris, her star dimmed but she kept working prodigiously, and has enjoyed a revival in today’s art market, where she is considered one of the top female painters, along with Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe.

Director and cine-activist Rubio with her new hero. photo: Jorgen Lilijefelt Wennstrom, painting courtesy Tamara de Lempicka Estate
Rubio is a prominent figure in the film industry, not only for her production and directorial work but cine activism. As well as "Six Sex Scenes", she directed the feature "Too Perfect" and short "Soledad is Gone Forever," while notable projects as a producer include the feature "East Side Sushi" (see cineSOURCE article) distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Company and Netflix, and "Oakland B Mine," "Del Cielo," "Everything is Temporary," and "Impression", which have also received acclaim and distribution.

As the president of WIFSFBA, she has been a vocal supporter of gender equality and has worked tirelessly to support the advancement of women in the industry. Indeed, her new film is a testament to that commitment to giving a voice to women's experiences. "The world is in a state of turmoil and desperately needs the stability and compassion that women's leadership can provide," Julie told me.

Following its screening at the de Young Museum, the film will undoubtedly be accepted to some major film festivals around the world. Given discussions are already underway with major distributors for both domestic and international releases, with an announcement coming soon, de Lempicka's compelling story will reach a broad and diverse viewership.

Rubio’s film is a crowning jewel in the current resurgence of interest in de Lempicka’s life and work. Other examples of this include an exhibition of the artist’s work at Sotheby's and the Broadway musical “Lempicka”, which opened in 2018, and has toured the country. Critics have pointed out the obvious influence of de Lempicka on the look-and-feel of the recent “Celebration” tour by Madonna, who is a collector of the artist’s work. The world is going through a “de Lempicka craze” and Rubio’s film captures the essence of the public’s current fascination with the Art Deco artist.

Participants in the film include de Lempicka's great-granddaughter Marisa de Lempicka, who provides an intimate peek into the world of this absorbing artist. Broadway star Eden Espinosa, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her role as de Lempicka in the musical, provides her insights during a comprehensive interview. Academy, Emmy, and Golden Globe Award winner Angelica Huston lends not only her distinctive voice as narrator, but also tells the wonderful stories about starring as Tamara in the Broadway play “Tamara”, and about wearing the de Lempicka jewelry that Jack Nicholson gave her the night she won her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for "Prizzi's Honor" in 1985.

Julie Rubio in the shot from 2008 which became the cover of cineSOURCE's debut issue. photo: D. Blair
Julie Rubio's "The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival" is more than just a film; it's a call to action for gender equality and the celebration of women's contributions to art and culture. Be sure to catch the screening at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco during the Tamara de Lempicka Retrospective Exhibition opening this fall. Witness a powerful narrative brought to life by a visionary filmmaker dedicated to making a difference.

For more information and updates, visit the Tamara de Lempinka documentary website or Instagram page, or the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco info on her show.

Dave Fonseca is a retired and recovering technical writer who now only writes about the things he truly loves. He can be reached .

Posted on Jun 13, 2024 - 08:57 PM
Incredible Animation about the Holocaust
by Karl F. Cohen

The gate of Birkenau death camp. photo: unknown
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

A FRIEND RECENTLY SENT ME
information about a book on an animation subject I knew literally nothing about, animated films about the Holocaust: “Holocaust Representations in Animated Documentaries” by Liat Ateir-Livny. Since I couldn’t find much information about the book online, I wrote several scholars and asked if they were familiar with the book or the films it might discus.

Only one person was able to help, Tsvika Oren, who teaches animation in Israel. He sent me a short list. Since then I’ve found a few other works on the subject. Fortunately, many of the shorts can be seen on the internet and trailers are posted online for the features. Although I only discuss shorts in English or with English subtitles, I found a whopping 23.

Some people who survived the Holocaust are now willing to share their painful memories, but for decades most preferred not to discuss their painful past. I remember a cousin once asking our grandmother what life was like in Europe before she came to America. “Life was awful, why talk about that?” she replied. Indeed, I never heard her or my grandfather discuss what happened to their Jewish relatives and friends who didn’t leave Europe. My mother told me it was too painful and depressing for her father to talk about that subject.

Today there is a growing interest in revealing some of those horrors from the past, “lest we forget.” Obviously, we don’t want history to repeat itself, but there is an antisemitic tendency to repress or deny that it happened, while time is running out for the last survivors to speak out.

“Holocaust Representations” tells of the first who spoke out using animation. The oldest are two by a Holocaust survivor, a three-minute abstract experimental piece with no dialog from 1958 and a feature made in 1982. The only other 20th century examples were a feature from 1995 and a 1998 short. But then there was a growth of interest in the topic, and the next film was from 2010 and 11 of the 23 films discussed were released after 2021.

Most of the animators who addressed the topic had strong personal reasons to explore this unpleasant subject, which inspired them to focus on creating, meaningful works that are educational and not unpleasant to watch. I discovered impressive, well thought out works that show victims surviving and rising above adversity. While the Holocaust is a depressing topic, dealing with it personally, one victim at a time, and showing their struggle to survive highlights elements of hope and humanism.

It is commonly known that animation can distance somewhat a viewer from feeling too empathetic towards the suffering of film’s characters. Had these film been made with actors, certain sequences might be too uncomfortable to watch. Animation erects an aesthetic barrier from extreme discomfort.

Obviously, there is an audience who wants to discover the truth about our pasts, no matter how upsetting. “Finding Your Roots”, on Public Television and hosted by Henry Louis Gates (2012-on) has become one of the networks most popular primetime shows, based on researching the long-forgotten ancestors of the show’s guests, who are fascinated by the history no matter how painful.

Unless you are Native American, whose ancestors were hunted by soldiers or white settlers who either stole their land or forced them into reservations, you or your ancestors were once immigrants. In many cases they came to escape famine, extreme poverty, pogroms or to be sold into slavery. For many of the Jewish guests on the show it is all to common to hear Gates inform them of unknown relatives among the millions who perished in Hitler’s death camps.

The poster for 'Sarah and the Squirrel'. photo: Y. Gross
The Films

WE SHALL NEVER DIE, 1958, by Yoram Gross, Australia, 3:18 min. This is an abstract, experimental film that might refer to the Holocaust.

SARAH AND THE SQUIRREL (also called "Sarah" or "The Seventh Match),1982, by Yoram Gross, Australia, feature (various length, depending on the version). This is a low budget production and probably a labor of love that never receive the distribution Gross must have hoped for. Gross was a Polish Jew and during WWII his family was on Oskar Schindler’s list; however, they chose to escape from being caught by moving several times from one hiding place to another. Mia Farrow provides the voice of the girl. Go here to see the trailer or the full the feature.

The film is about young Sarah who lives alone in a forest after her family is captured and taken to a concentration camp. She witnesses a group of Polish resistance fighters trying to blow up a railroad bridge, but they are captured. She decides to destroy the bridge, even though she lacked the tools to do it. To pad out the story Gross added some Disney touches such as her becoming friends with several animals of the forest and there is a great fire that might have been inspired by “Bambi”.

THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, 1995, 1 hour, 42 minutes, Japan. This is a gorgeous feature directed by Akinori Nagaoka, made for a juvenile audience, which won an award at the Chicago International Childrens’ Festival.

SILENCE, 1998, by Sylvie Bringas and Orly Yadin, 10:28 min. A Holocaust story inspired by the life of Tana Ross. Her mother was taken to Auschwitz in 1942 and she never saw her again.

OVERNIGHT STAY (or "Übernactung" in German) 2009, by Daniela Sherer, USC, 8:26 (trailer only). A woman recalls her memories of the Holocaust.

I WAS A CHILD OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS, 2010, by Ann Marie Fleming, 15 min. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

SEVEN MINUTES IN THE WARSAW GHETTO by John Oettinger, 2012, 8 min (clip only, full short can be rented for $2). This stop-motion puppet film is set in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. The dark gothic tones symbolize the brevity and suffering of a boy by the cracked skin of the puppet. He is in the middle of the brutal world of the Holocaust. Based on an actual event, it is quite different than most Holocaust films as it does not offer a feeling of relief at the end.

In the film the boy peeks through a hole in the ghetto wall and sees a carrot lying on the sidewalk just on the other side. He tries to pull the carrot through the hole, unaware that two SS men are following his every move.

“Seven Minutes in the Warsaw Ghetto” received a Special Mention at the Annecy Film Festival and has won other awards. It was shown by more than 120 international film festivals including: Palm Springs, Edinburgh, Dubai, Hiroshima and the London Animation Film Festival. .

Image from 'Children of the Holocaust: Ruth'. photo: Z. Whittingham
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST: RUTH, 2014, BBC by Zane Whittingham, 6:23, UK, cutout animation. Although shown at the Annecy animation festival in 2014, unfortunately, this short is no longer available online.

SILENCE or "Aufseherin" in Germany, 2016, by Wilbert van Veldhuizen. 5:30. Based on a true story about a young woman in the Dutch resistance who is arrested by the Nazi police in 1944.

STRINGS, 2017, by Erin Morris, Falmouth University, UK, 3 min, animated mainly on TV Paint. Inspired by the work of Amnon Weinstein who restores violins from the Holocaust so that they can be played as a symbol of hope. A handsome work of art with curved lines that flow to the music. The images formed by the lines are visual symbols that the viewer is left to interpret. Some images suggest buildings of the concentration camps, a few might refer to violin strings breaking, or are they a reference to violence or death?

THE NUMBER ON GREAT-GRANDPA’S ARM, 2017, Amy Schatz. Holocaust History/HBO. Opening footage sequence, 1 min.

LA STELLA DI ANDRA E TATI, 2018. Rosalba Vitellaro and Alessandro Belli. Art Dir. Annalisa Corsi. A very attractive trailer in color is online, 1:45 min. Story of an Italian child who endured the Holocaust. A longer promo in Italian, more clips and people talking about the film is here.

Image from 'Where is Anne Frank'. photo: A. Folman
WHERE IS ANNE FRANK, Ari Folman. Belgium, 2021, 99 min. Kitty, the imaginary girl that Anne wrote to in her diary, seeks out the deceased Anne which results in her inspiring a wave of modern social justice for refugees. “Folman uses a well-known story from a fresh angle while powerfully placing it in the context of the horrific tragedy that surrounds it” (from IMDB). Variety said, the “Waltz With Bashir” (2008) director examines the Jewish author's legacy, speculating on how she might feel about the mistreatment of refugees in Europe today.” Previewed at the Cannes Film Festival.

VOICES IN THE VOID, 2021, 18 min. As a teenager, Rabbi Bent Melchior went into hiding with his family to escape Nazi deportation. In his own words, he tells a story of heroism and survival, and of the regular Danish people who took exceptional steps to save their neighbors.

CHARLOTTE, 2021, by Tahir Rana, Éric Warin. 92 min. France, Canada, trailer only. An independently produced biography of German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) who was killed in Auschwitz.

TWO TREES IN JERUSALEM, 2022, 27 min, trailer only, search for full piece. An animated documentary produced by Humanity in Action, profiles the remarkable history of Eberhard and Donata Helmrich, who together saved the lives of countless Jews during the Holocaust.

HOLY HOLOCAUST, 2022. Osi Wald and Noa Berman-Herzberg, 17 min. It is an unusual art experience, a conversation between two women who are close friends. The artwork is quite stylized and the conversation seems carefully structured rather than improvised. Towards the end of the long discussion, it shifts to what might be factual or a dream that relates to Nazi Germany.

Image from 'Where is Anne Frank'. photo: A. Folman
LETTER TO A PIG, 2022. Tal Kantor. Israel, 16 min, trailer. A Holocaust survivor reads a letter he wrote to the pig who saved his life. A young schoolgirl hears his testimony in class and sinks into a surreal daydream where she confronts questions of identity, collective trauma, and the extremes of human nature. Oscar and Annie nominations. 2024. MAKING OF LETTER TO A PIG, and MAKING OF LETTER TO A PIG, THE TECHNIQUE, and MAKING OF LETTER TO A PIG, THE CHARACTERS.

THE TEDDY BEAR, Benjamine Gruen, 2022, 12 min. The true story of Michael Gruenbaum, survivor of Terezin Concentration Camp. The film is narrated by Michael Gruenbaum, who survived two-and-a-half years in Terezin as a child. It is a biographic statement and includes how a homemade stuffed toy saved his life. The film is described as appropriate for middle school age children and older. The film was made by Michael’s grandson who went to the Rhode Island School of Design.

THE HOLOCAUST DEATH TRAIN, 2022, 6 min. the "Death Trains" were used to transport innocent Jewish families to the concentration camps.

MY FATHER'S SECRETS, 2023, directed by Véra Belmont, France, Belgium, 74 minutes, trailer only. “A heartrending yet deeply uplifting tale of remembrance, love and the triumph of the human spirit.” My Father’s Secrets is an intimate, thought-provoking film that focuses on a family’s journey to reconciliation after facing the trauma of the Holocaust. At 20 years old, Michel’s father returned to his native Belgium, marrying and fathering four children. The story is the family’s journey to understand their father’s past as they grow up. A deeply uplifting tale of remembrance, love and the triumph of the human spirit. Featuring the voices of Elliott Gould and others. Based on the autobiographical novel by author/cartoonist Michel Kichka.

Image from 'Humo'. photo: A. Folman
HUMO, 2023, directed by Rita Basulyo, Mexico, puppets, trailer only. A somber emotionally moving work of art about an innocent young boy in a concentration where nobody in his world comes back. Film is dedicated “to our lost children.” It is an adaptation of the illustrated children’s book Humo by Antón Fortes. It was nnominated for an Annie award for best short and made the short list of animate shorts nominated for an Oscar.

BAMISTARIM, 2023. Tamar Dadon-Raveh. 8 min. Two young Jewish girls talking on board a ship bound for Israel about their life during WWII. English sub-titles.

Closing Comments

History is full of horrible wars that have not made this a better world. I grew up admiring Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to teach us to do something that seems to be much harder to do, to turn the other cheek, to love thy enemy and to build a better world together. Could the war between Israel and Hamas have been prevented if the two had been seeking a peaceful resolution over the years instead of acting as powerful advisories full of hate? I hope that someday world powers will learn to give peace a chance despite all our differences. Until that happens a few good people will continue to create various forms of media, reminding us for the sake of humanity that we need to change our ways.

The book that inspired this article, “Holocaust Representations in Animated Documentaries: The Contours of Commemoration” by Liat Steir-Livny, was published by Edinburgh University Press, is 264 pages and the hardback is $110.00. It is also available as an eBook. It examines representations of the Holocaust, survivors and their descendants in animated documentaries. One promotion for the book says vast majority of animated holocaust documentaries marginalize the horrors and focus on bravery, resilience, and hope, instead.

One of my friends in Europe was surprised I was writing about this subject now. They commented these films have been shown frequently in animation festivals all over Europe. I replied, ”We don’t have festivals like you do.” Also, there is no entry fee to submit films to festivals in Europe, so why should European animators pay to enter festivals in the US?

Posted on Mar 10, 2024 - 05:26 PM
Will AI Destroy Animation?
by Karl F. Cohen

Astronaut talking to HAL, the computer in '2001: Space Odyssey'. photo: S. Kubrick
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

AI HAS BECOME A HOT TOPIC, POSITIVE
and negative, and people are constantly speculating about its future. One friend told me, “Nobody is admitting that all the recent tech job layoffs are due to AI.” Is he correct? I needed to find out.

It seems there is a general belief that many companies will be able to use the new technology to enhance productivity and profit, but only a few people are asking how will it affect the workers.

Steve Lohr, who covers technology for The New York Times, was quite vague about that issue when he wrote on Feb. 1, 2024 that, “a new generation of artificial intelligence is poised to turn old assumptions about technology on their head. It will have its biggest impact on white-collar workers with high-paying jobs in industries like banking and tech.” He referred to a report that avoids saying the technology will do away with large numbers of jobs. Instead, he said, “Workers need to better prepare for a future in which AI could play a significant role in many workplaces that until now have been largely untouched by technological disruption.”

He did suggest some people may end up “building their AI replacements.”

Lohr also said, “There’s no question the workers who will be impacted most are those with college degrees, and those are the people who always thought they were safe.” He added, “Most experts expect that AI will mostly change jobs for the next few years rather than eliminate them — though that could change if the technology improves sharply.” He concluded saying workers will need “increased training to… adapt to a fast-arriving technology.”

More to the point, a discussion on “Philosophy Talk”, a radio show on KLAW on February 4th, 2024, focused on work created by artists. It suggested that some artists will be replaced, but AI will also influence workers to go beyond what they were capable of creating before AI existed. The speaker, Michael Frank, a Stanford professor, said that when it comes to making aesthetic decisions, AI will make mistakes including not being able to make the best subtle choices.

He believes AI is not capable at the present time to make those choices as there are endless possibilities of what our minds are capable of choosing and that AI is not that sophisticated. It works within a limited number of parameters. When he said AI isn’t capable of writing a book like “Moby Dick”, I flashed on it not being able to create a lovely film such as “The Man Who Planted Trees”.

Next, I asked Google, an older form of AI, what influence AI will have on animation. It replied, “AI can create more realistic characters, improve lighting and shading, and even add special effects. This can help animators to create more visually stunning animations. Overall, AI is having a major impact on the animation industry. AI tools automate tasks, generate content, and improve animation quality.”

I found one writer who feels AI will be quite destructive, and it may well wipe out jobs. A person (nicksaraev.com) posted on the internet “How AI Animation Will Decimate the Industry Within 5 Years”. He believes AI animation is already DEFINTELY BETTER than humans and many jobs will be replace by computers in less than five years. He predicts, “Animation models won't be perfect, at least not for the next few years, but they don't need to be.” The animation art used to illustrate the article is a far cry from Disney quality. They look like simple generic anime images.

Years ago, I remember hearing people claim that motion capture technology was going to replace animators. It was going to cut production costs and it would create a better-looking film. The technology turned out to be expensive and there was something about it that just didn’t look right, especially faces when they were not talking or moving. They looked dead. The technology is still in use at times, but it didn’t revolutionize animation.

AI-created image of mastodons. photo: OpenAI using their Sora
I suspect the doom and gloom writer is correct: some jobs will be lost to AI. However, most will be with companies trying to cut costs on small budget shows. In the past people tried to create low budget 3D computer animated features and most of those producers have moved on to other approaches to making a living.

If the first producers to use AI animation to tell a story, will it usher in a new direction for creative people to explore new directions in animation? What if it is used by low budget producers. Should we expect not particularly attractive looking work? Will the first uses just be seen as a novelty or will it be a marvelous introduction to an exciting new technology that will be further refined?

It is too early to know how successful AI will be as a production tool. My preliminary study suggests AI may prove useful for artists interested in using it. It might turn out to be better suited to helping writers grind out run-of-the-mill scripts. In time, it may prove capable of creating both cartoony as well as photo-realistic animation. The public is already quite comfortable in the non-realistic world of animation so, I would say, don’t expert Disney to replace its animators with AI, as it will probably turn out to be labor intensive to turn out quality work.

As far as the current state of AI, a video released in February, 2024, by the company OpenAI, using their still-in-development Sora system, shows are realistic extinct mastodon.

“Several giant wooly mammoths approach treading through a snowy meadow, their long woolly fur lightly blows in the wind as they walk, snow covered trees and dramatic snow-capped mountains in the distance, mid-afternoon light with wispy clouds and a sun high in the distance,” was the verbal prompt See OpenAI’s latest show reel, released a few days ago.

The new reel appears to be a considerable leap forward for generative AI technology. It can now create video footage from a photo, artwork or just text input (instructional prompts). The technology is also excellent at making smooth camera movement (pans, zooms, trucking shots, aerial shots) and one report said in some cases the shot can last as long as a minute.

While the system can do impressive things, it has trouble with some of the basics. For example, it can show a person taking a bite out of something, but when the mouth opens the something may still be whole and not show any teeth marks. The system has yet to learn cause and effect.

Lip synch is another basic problem for software engineers to master. Right now, they can make lips move on a still image of a person’s face, but the result is ridiculous looking. It will probably take a lot of computer power and time to create convincing images of people talking with all the facial muscles moving underneath the skin in a convincing way. Eye and head movements should look natural. The nuances of facial expressions may turn out to be a major challenge to mastered, and harder if the person is talking.

The day the amazing reel was released, the NY Times said, “OpenAI has completed a deal that values the San Francisco artificial intelligence company at $80 billion or more, nearly tripling its valuation in less than 10 months, according to three people with knowledge of the deal.” Microsoft had put $13 billion into the company so far.

The young company is already famous for creating ChatGPT. OpenAI is also known for a recent scandal where the board fired CEO Sam Altman because they thought he wasn't addressing the dangerous aspects of AI. A few days later Microsoft reinstated him, whereupon he fired some of his board.

OpenAI has told the press it is aware of the potential for its technology to be misused. As a result, the company has chosen to slowly roll out the tool while they “assess critical areas for harms or risks." For more on OpenAI go here.

None of the software is for sale at present and when it is available it may not prove to be very useful for someone with questionable intentions. Someday, perhaps soon, lip synch will be perfected enough to create realistic images of politicians making fake statements or other kinds of deceptive propaganda. Hopefully the government and/or industry will find ways to detect bogus uses of the technology and warn the public while it is being removed from the internet.

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .

Posted on Mar 10, 2024 - 05:14 PM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corners: Mar 2024
by Karl F. Cohen

Images by Marcy Page who was honored February's Annie Awards in Los Angeles. photo courtesy: M. Page
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover travel expenses for this article.

Marcy Page Gets ASIFA’s Lifetime Award

Marcy Page, the former Californian and National Film Board of Canada (NFB) animation producer, was honored for her “unparalleled achievement and exceptional contributions to animation.” The Winsor Mccay award, named for the cartoonist and animator (1866-1934), was presented February 17th, at the 51st Annie Awards by ASIFA-Hollywood, the Los Angeles branch of the International Animated Film Association.

Born and raised in California, Marcy graduated from San Francisco State, taught there and worked at Colossal Pictures, the storied, Bay Area animation company. After meeting a man and getting married, she immigrated to Canada, where she joined the NFB in 1990, first as a director and associate producer and then as a producer.

She sought out eclectic and unusual productions and co-productions during her career as a producer with the NFB’s English Program Animation Studio, pushing the boundaries of the animation medium. Her NFB credits include two Academy Award-winning animated shorts, Chris Landreth’s “Ryan” (2004) and Torill Kove’s “The Danish Poet” (2006). She was also NFB producer on four more Oscar-nominated films: Kove’s “My Grandmother Ironed the Kings Shirts” (1999) and “Me and Moulon” (2014); Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s “Madame Tutli-Putli” (2007); and Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby’s “Wild Life” (2011).

The streets of a post-apocalyptic New York in popular new YouTube movie, 'Hazbin Hotel' by 31-year-old Vivienne Medrano.
Should Animation Be This Intense?

“Hazbin Hotel” by Vivienne Medrano, who is 31 and a graduate of the School for Visual Arts, New York, is so packed full of energy both visually and in the soundtrack that it may require multiple viewings to understand what is going on, see her Vivziepop channel here. The first piece, "Hazbin Hotel", is a 30-minute, post-apocalypse comedy with over 100 million views. I’ve been led to believe by a friend, who is tuned into what is hot in current internet culture, that Vivienne’s aesthetic is a prime example of a current trend. Indeed, she has 9 million followers and over a billion hits.

Vivienne writes she has been absorbing and creating animation from a young age. She is part of a highly talented new breed of independent artists that may exist with a generation gap between them and animators from the past.

“The new animators don't know there was even a history of animation,” I was told, “Just that if they don't go viral before they finish high school, they are over the hill. On the other hand, animators who know the history, never hear of the immensely popular animation going on in the internet.”

My informant added that if you ask a young internet animator what is the most viewed animation ever made the answer won’t be Mickey Mouse; but might be “Baby Shark.” See her Wikipedia.

Geraldine Fernández, a Colombian graphic designer, hoaxed her nation by claiming she workd on 'The Boy and the Heron'.
Colombian Animator Hoaxes Nation

A Colombian graphic designer scammed her nation’s media into believing she worked with the renown Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, on his recently released masterpiece “The Boy and the Heron”. Before the film opened, Geraldine Fernández Ruiz, a graphic designer at a company that produces glass and aluminum products, convinced major media outlets in Columbia that she drew a lot of the feature.

She claimed Miyazaki praised her work three times during the production and he referred to her affectionately as “the Colombian.” She worked for him for “over 20 months, I had to deliver 25 thousand frames, and those 25 thousand frames corresponded to a 10-second scene… It was a lot of work, but it was worth it, especially because Miyazaki was there.” Unfortunately, her math is BS. At 24 frames a second there are 240 frames in 10 seconds of screen time which might take a seasoned animator a week to draw.

Fernández's statements appeared in print and on the internet until somebody finally checked facts and—gosh!—found no mention of her in the film’s publicity or credits.

Finally, when Cartoon Brew heard about it, they contacted the film's U.S. distributor, GKIDS, who confirmed Fernández was not involved in “The Boy and the Heron”, although she continued to insisted everything was true but she couldn’t offer proof because of a non-disclosure agreement.

Eventually, retractions appeared in the press. El Heraldo said they trusted Fernández’s claims and apologized to printing her lies. The paper El Tiempo announced their fact check failure and hoped this will not happen again.

Finally in late January, Fernández sent out a long apology admitting she had fabricated her involvement. As the situation got out of control, it became increasingly difficult for her to retract her lies, she claimed. Oh, by the way, it turns out she has been accused of using other animation artists' work for her reel.

David Hilberman’s kids, Mark, standing, brother Dan and cousin Bernard, at the 1941 Disney animators' strike, a year after they released the artistic masterpiece 'Fantasia'. photo: D. Hilberman
Play About Disney Workers Unionizing

“Burbank” is a theatrical play about Disney artists’ efforts to unionize, which started in the late 1930s and led to the Disney Strike in 1941. It will get an off-Broadway run from March 12-24 and it be available to stream on the Thirdwing platform. Written by Cameron Darwin Bossert, the play focuses on the faceoff between Walt.

The strike saw 334 Disney employees walk out and picket and 303 employees remaining inside. Employees of the studio had numerous grievances, including low wages, salary cuts, arbitrary layoffs, and other issues. A review says, “It captures the anxiety that can grip a workplace amid a labor struggle, and the ruthlessness that can ensue on all sides.”

Disney Loses Suit with DeSantis

A federal judge dismissed Disney's lawsuit against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis about who has the right to control development around the Walt Disney World Resort. The judge said Disney cannot sue DeSantis and his handpicked board that now controls the district in which the theme park operates. The statute granting the governor the authority to appoint every member of the tax district’s governing body is "facially constitutional" and cannot be challenged with a free speech claim. Nevertheless, the park is still the happiest place on earth!

From 'Steamboat Willie', the debut of Mickey Mouse, 1924, the copyright for which recently expired.
Disney CEO Upbeat

At the quarterly meeting for stockholders in February, Disney CEO Bob Iger painted a rosy picture of the company’s future. He reaffirmed that Disney’s streaming business will be profitable this summer, thanks to higher revenue per user and efforts to control costs.

The company, which is facing proxy fights with activist investors, said that its streaming business lost $216 million this quarter, down from a loss of $387 million last quarter, and less than $1 billion a year ago. He reported higher average revenue per user at Disney+, even as subscribers dipped slightly, following a price hike. Overall revenue was $23.5 billion, even from a year ago. The company expects to expand in all of its current physical locations, as well as in its cruise line.

Bob Iger bets the future of Disney will involve more games industry, in which they recently invested $1.5 billion. He says, “When I saw Gen Z and Gen Alpha and even millennials, and I saw the amount of time they were spending in terms of their total media screen time on video games, it was stunning to me, equal to what they spend on TV and movies.”

Mark Gustafson winning an Oscar in 2023 for Guillermo Del Toro’s 'Pinocchio'. image: courtesy M. Gustafson
Mark Gustafson Passes

Mark Gustafson, who co-directed Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar-Winning “Pinocchio”, among many other achievements, has died. He was 64 and suffered a heart attack. Our condolences.

After he earned an art degree from Pacific Northwest College of Art (BFA, 1982), Gustafson joined Will Vinton Studios in Portland, Oregon and slowly worked his way up through the ranks.

Stringer’s ‘Crab Day’

Watch Ross Stringer’s masterful short, which uses minimal color and dialogue, “Crab Day” (2023), here. It won the 2024 British Short Animation Award, BAFTA.

(Lft-rt) Frank and Caroline Mouris’ Oscar-winning ‘Frank Film,’ Jan Svankmajer’s ‘Dimensions of Dialogue,’ and Norman McLaren’s Oscar-winning ‘Neighbors.’
Many Comments On Cohen’s Article

I was pleased that several people took the time to say they appreciated my article, “Help! I Love Animated Shorts”. Most were short comments like David Chai, who teaches animation at San Jose State, writing, “WOW! This is a great article! I’m looking forward to the next two!” A few were longer, more meaningful statements, like from Shirley Smith, who studied animation at SF State.

“I love this article,” Smith wrote. “It traces the fantastic journey that independent animations and animators made in my life. It was a dense string of a huge variety of events that were unique, profound and funny, and so very inspiring. When I invited my friends, they got so excited to see this kind of thing. Karl and Carol love these unique shows, and just ache for more. I hope Ron Diamond can get some momentum going again. I know in my heart that people can get addicted to this kind of stuff. I've seen it happen. My favorite films were always done by independents. They are so much more authentic. “

A very useful note came from John Hays, a former Colossal director and co-founder of Wild Brain. He pointed out a show I will add if this article is reprinted. He wrote “Excellent essay, Karl! First time I’ve seen the complex history of animated shorts put together in one place and you’re definitely the right guy to do it. Great way to stimulate discussion on a worthy subject.”

“One thing you might consider adding to the mix is MTV’s & (C)P’s “Liquid Television”. The episodic show was a pretty good effort at bringing animated shorts to the mainstream. Also proved to be a good launching platform for potential series pilots. Worked well for ‘Aeon Flux’ and ‘Beavis and Butthead’ at least.”

Sketch of the fourth complex Universal Orlando is building in Florida, in an attempt to compete with its larger rival, Disney.
Labor Crisis at Universal’s Theme Park

The press has revealed a serious labor crisis at Universal Studios’ theme park. Labor problems at the Disney theme parks are well-known. Now The Los Angeles Times reports a UCLA study says that Universal Studios’ theme park in Hollywood has serious problems. They make massive investment in attractions, but try to cut costs on the laborers who keep it running. Many workers in this profitable theme park are underpaid and struggle to pay rent and buy food. One worker is reported to say, “It’s a constant battle, tearing at us mentally.”

This Hollywood Reporter article included numerous stories about people struggling to survive. The study says 44% of the workers reported they worried about being evicted from their homes, while others said they have had to reduce the size of meals or skip them. A quarter of the workforce has used food stamps, food banks or other need-based food donation programs.

The survey interviewed 1,330 park workers in the two unions that represent most Universal Studios personnel, including people who dress up a film characters like Scooby-Doo, Gru, Hello Kitty and the Bride of Frankenstein. They also talked to ride operators, tour guides, carnival barkers, clerks, parking lot attendants, store clerks, cooks, bartenders and warehouse workers. I find it shocking that the unions don’t fight harder for livable wages.

The example of how desperate people are is summed up in this quote from the article, “I’ve seen people get fired because they take food out of the trash to eat it. [Management] lets them go because they say that’s still stealing.” Hard to believe!

Winner of SF Indie Fest

The Audience Award for Best Animation at the SF Indie Festival went to “The Grand Book” directed by Arjan Brentjes. It concerns a young woman living on the streets of a 1920s city but under constant surveillance and unable to be herself?

Miyazaki’s standard gaggle of powerful old women from his Annie-award-winning 'The Boy and the Heron'. photo courtesy: H. Miyazaki
The Annie Awards 2024

“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” wins best commercial feature in the Annie Awards, the accolade presented by the Los Angeles branch of the International Animated Film Association, ASIFA-Hollywood. It was the shows' biggest winner in applause and by winning all seven categories in which it was nominated (best commercial feature, FX, character design, direction, music, production design, and editorial). “Robot Dreams” wins best independent feature at the Annie Awards. You can see the entire three-hour award ceremony online here.

“Robot Dreams” won best independent feature, and “War is Over! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko” was the best independent short. It also just won Spain’s Goya Award for Best Animated Feature.

Hayao Miyazaki’s masterful and popular “The Boy and the Heron” won Annies for character animation and Miyazaki’s storyboarding. It has won most of the critics’ awards. It also just won the Best Animated feature at the BAFTA ceremony in the UK “Nimona” had nine Annie nominations and it won for voice acting and writing.

Netflix’s “Blue Eye Samurai” won six Annies (for TV mature, FX, character animation, production design, writing, editorial). Three honorary Winsor McCay Awards were given. They went to legendary animator and director Charlotte “Lotte” Reiniger (posthumously), Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi; and National Film Board animator and producer Marcy Page.

The Iwerks Award (named for animator Ub Iwerks) for technical advancement was awarded posthumously to John Oxberry for his developing and producing the Oxberry animation stand that was used for many decades to shoot cell animation.

ASIFA Hollywood presented a well-run and nice looking three-hour long ceremony. If you want to see Marcy Page, who studied and taught at SF State and worked at Colossal Pictures before moving to Montreal, her appearance starts at one hour fifty minutes. It includes clips from her personal film "Paradisia" and clips of work she produced including the four films that received Academy Award nominations (two won Oscars). Ron Diamond introduces her.

Congratulations to ASIFA-Hollywood and their crew for a fine evening honoring animation. The show included clips for almost all the winners and a chance to see some of the talent who created it. It was also an interesting fashion show, from formal attire to white tennis shoes.

’Despicable Me’ Trailer Online

Take a look at the latest edition of Hollywood’s most financially successful animation franchise: the "Despicable Me" trailer. What does that tell us about popular taste?

Anime Your Way with Carlos

Calling all young creators! The Cartoon Art Museum is excited to host two free 90-minute anime workshops with comics artist and Anime Your Way founder Carlos Nieto III. It is a comprehensive step by step drawing program that teaches how to create and modify an anime character from scratch, regardless of drawing experience. Using simple shapes and easy to understand instructions, participants will gain the knowledge to create their very own unique anime characters. All materials are provided.

Join Carlos on Saturday, April 6, 2024—Kids (6-13): 1:00-2:30pm, Teens and Adult: 3:00-4:30pmat the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, Cartoon Art Museum, 781 Beach Street. Both workshops are free but advance registration is required; please visit here.

Image from 'They Shot The Piano Player' a feature by Spanish animators about a Brazilian pianist who disappeared in Argentina.
They Shot the Piano Player

“They Shot The Piano Player” follows a journalist trying to understand why a Brazilian Bossa Nova piano player was shot in Argentina. I was directed by Tono Errando, Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal, the Spanish team known for “Chico and Rita”, the 2010 animated piece, an adult romantic drama, also about musicians.

Opening on March 1st at the Landmark Opera Plaza, San Francisco, it is an ambitious combination of classical animation—it’s completely hand-drawn—documentary—it actually happened—and political commentary, on Argentina's authoritarian regime in the 1960s.

ASIFA-SF Needs Volunteers

ASIFA-SF is a chapter of Association Internationale du Film d’Animation, which has over 40 chapters around the world. Now that we are supposedly post-Covid we hoped to bring back live events, but that isn’t happening yet.

To keep the chapter alive, until we can find volunteers to make live events and/or online programs, we are offering a free temporary membership. That will get you our monthly newsleteer free and free passes to whatever screenings ASIFA-SF members get invited to.

Please contact to get on our email list, and tell others to join. That will help us rebuild our mailing list. Thanks.

Animation Mentor Student Showcase 2023

Animation Mentor is an online animation school teaching character animation skills to students in over over 105 countries. Headquartered in Emeryville, California, it offers six core animation courses, in addition to Creatures and Maya Workshops. Students are mentored by experienced animators, professionals working in the animation industry, see their site.

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .
Posted on Mar 09, 2024 - 12:51 AM
Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution
by Doniphan Blair

The author at the Golden Rose Synagogue memorial, a popular youth hangout in Lviv, Ukraine: guy giving gang signs is a refugee from Mariupol, where he witnessed terrible massacres, and the woman, Anne, is a pianist, who said she's never play Russian composers again. photo: D. Blair
• PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover travel expenses for this article.

• Although published in January 2023, this has good reportage on a variety of Ukraine issues and was picked up by Redaction Politics and Reader Supported News.

• For comments, use cineSOURCE's Facebook.

AFTER A TEN-HOUR HAUL IN HARD RAIN,
Dirk Grosser driving like an amphibious drag racer, the storm breaks, the sky clears, and we walk the five blocks from our funky hostel onto Ukraine’s main stage, Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti or Independence Square. It is a momentous feeling.

This is where it all began, both the massive, months-long protests in 2013, which stopped the kleptocratic, Russophile president, Viktor Yanukovych, and started what can be called Ukraine’s renaissance, and the escalatory overreaction. After the killing of over 100 protestors didn’t stop the movement, Russia's President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Crimea and Ukraine’s eastern provinces and, eight years later, the entire country, which is now Europe's worst war since World War Two. Putin had to attack the democracy developing on his doorstep simply because, if Ukrainians and Russians are so alike and integrated, as he keeps saying, Russians will want democracy, too.

Ukraine isn’t releasing casualty figures for security reasons, and the Russian Federation’s are unreliable, but total deaths have probably passed 400,000, according to recent estimates, notably by the renown historian, Yale professor and Ukraine expert and language speaker, Timothy Snyder. Ukraine may have suffered as many as 200,000 casualties, around half civilian, some of whom were also victims of torture. Almost a third of all Ukrainians have taken refuge, some four million abroad and eight million internally, with up to four million deported involuntarily into Russia. On October 10th, Russia began a strategic bombing campaign against infrastructure, which will kill many more civilians during the winter.

As it happens, the Russian tanks barreling down Ukraine’s highway M-07 toward Kyiv on February 24th, 2022, were also trying to get to the Maidan.

It is bigger than I expect, over two football pitches, with 19th century buildings on one side and modern ones on the other. This being Sunday—September 11th, oddly enough—and with the sky still full of dark clouds, the Maidan is empty save a smattering of soldiers on leave, tight-skirted women sipping Ukraine’s ubiquitous strong coffee, and vendors of patriotic, yellow-blue wrist bands with sad eyes. There are no soldiers on guard, as far as I can see, but scattered around like overgrown toy jacks are tank barriers, the so-called “hedgehogs,” or “yizhaky” in Ukrainian, some painted like child toys, others stacked like modern art. They are the only indicator of the war raging 250 miles to the east or south.

“There were many business people on Maidan,” I was told by Kirill, a handsome, bearded and genial 34-year-old, who directs and edits television commercials and is writing a romantic comedy—he loves old Woody Allen movies. I met Kirill a week earlier in Lviv, the quaint, cobblestoned café city in Ukraine’s west which serves as its San Francisco and is somewhat shielded from the war in the east. I’m omitting last names in the nightmarish event of a Russian takeover.

Kirill invited me to his place with a cordial “I have wine, beer and cannabis” and recounted his many days and couple of nights on the Maidan in 2014, to which he commuted from the south-eastern city of Dnipro, now under Russian bombardment. “I saw head of Ukraine’s Microsoft on Maidan. There were many older people,” he said.

The statue of Goddess Berehynia and an art show in Kyiv's Maidan Square, which remains a public space for free speech, despite the terrible war 250 miles away. photo: D. Blair
Ukrainian doesn’t have articles of grammar, so Ukrainians often omit them in English, including the “the” in their country’s former name, The Ukraine. “I still translate from Russian to Ukrainian to English,” admitted Kirill, who was raised speaking Russian, as were a third of his compatriots, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, part of Ukraine’s long tradition of being bilingual, trilingual or quadrilingual. Middle class Ukrainians often speak some or decent English, which they start studying in high school and continue while listening to rock. Kirill is a fan of Creedence Clearwater Revival, to which he was introduced by his father on cassette tape.

“There were even babushkas,” grandmothers in Ukrainian and Russian but also Yiddish, added Alena, Kirill’s girlfriend, who is in her early 20s, paints and is studying web design but could side hustle modeling. There were also priests, doctors, lawyers, teachers and entrepreneurs, although the vast majority were young people, not as many women as men, workers and students (including high schoolers), nationalists and anarchists, skinheads and hipsters.

Ukraine has a large cohort of tattooed-pierced, who wear their story on their skin: men with significant neck or face work, often referencing girlfriends, women with colorful “sleeve” murals and multiple piercings. A 40-something cashier at a small supermarket near where I lived for six weeks in Lviv, who had a ready smile when ringing me up, had a Chinese character on her neck.

“It was like a big family,” I was told by Artur, 22, whom I met on the Maidan six days later. Artur is a graphic designer, skater and fan of all things Californian, including the spiky hairstyle he sports. After two weeks battling baton-wielding police, the Maidan protestors settled into a few months of occupation, punctuated by marches, rallies and more police attacks. “There were big pots of tea cooking everywhere, people playing football, playing music, discussing politics, which I did not understand,” Artur explained, “I was only 14.”

“Then fighting started again. Yanukovych started shooting people. That really shocked us. We weren’t used to Ukrainians killing Ukrainians. That building was set on fire,” he said, pointing at a government office which protestors occupied and turned into a community center. “They restored it last year. Then Russia invaded Crimea.”

“Before Maidan, there was no Ukraine. After Maidan, there is a real Ukraine,” Artur concluded. “Most Ukrainians had friends on Maidan. Everyone knew we were no longer part of Russia, and we were a real country, a real democracy.”

It was called the Maidan Revolution or Euro-Maidan Revolution, because protestors gathered on the Maidan on November 21st, 2013, the very day Yanukovych cancelled Ukraine’s Association Agreement with the European Union in order to pivot to Russia, and they flew E.U. flags. The call to protest on the Maidan was first made by an Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, Mustafa Masi Nayyem, in a heartfelt Facebook post, which he closed with “Likes do not count.” After the killings, it became known as the Revolution of Dignity or simply the Revolution.

I saw photos of the martyred Maidanites on the fence of the National Art Museum. Called the “Heavenly Hundred,” they were a near even mix of youth and middle aged, working class and intellectual, albeit over 95% men.

Ukraine already had three democracy movements or revolutions, as they like to call them. The Granite Revolution of 1991 helped get out the 90% vote to secede from the Soviet Union. The less successful Ukraine Without Kuchma tried to oust Leonid Kuchma, the corrupt ex-communist, but he remained president until 2005, when he declined to stand for a third term. The 2004 Orange Revolution started after Yanukovych or his cronies tried to poison his opponent and steal the election but were stopped by Ukraine’s supreme court as well as the protests.

Kirill, a television commercial director, participated in both the Orange and Maidan Revolutions, of 2004 and 2014, respecitvely. photo: D. Blair
Kirill also participated in the Orange Revolution, when he was 16, which also involved fighting the police and camping on the Maidan in winter, but “It was not same,” he said.

Ukrainians continued to use mostly Russian in school, watch Russian television, and support Russophile candidates, including Yanukovych, whom they elected president in 2010, fair and square, even though he was a convicted criminal and notoriously corrupt—his son, a dentist, was one of the country's richest men. But Ukrainian politicians were often mired in corruption scandals; Ukrainians are understanding; and Yanukovych reinvented himself by hiring a hot-shot political consultant for a decade. That would be Paul Manafort, eventually Donald Trump’s campaign manager, a Russia security risk and a convicted fraudster.

“We have victim mentality from so much suffering,” Kirill told me, referring to Ukraine’s annihilation by the Germans during World War Two, when six and a half million people died, about a fifth of the population, but also by the Soviets. Nine million Ukrainians and perhaps many more died during the Russian Civil War (1917-22), the Great Terror (1936-38), and the Holodomor, when Soviet authorities starved to death about four million people to punish supposed counter-revolutionaries. Denied to this day by some Russians and Russophiles, the forced famine of 1932 to ’33 had two more iterations, in 1945 and ‘47, I was surprised to learn from a young intellectual I met working in a Lviv coffeeshop, Andrii.

“After Maidan, all that changes,” Kirill said, his voice rising slightly. “We understand we can change our life, and our life is in our hands. It is not what some people do to us—we can do what we want!” No wonder Putin was petrified.

As I pondered their incredible achievement on the Maidan, I recalled that many Ukrainians revere Stepan Bandera, a 1940s-era independence fighter and the leader of the more violent wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who is controversial but widely considered Ukraine's political founding father.

“Bandera? We love him,” replied Kirill, the first Ukrainian with whom I felt comfortable enough to ask about him, which precipitated an argument. As the son of a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor, I was painfully aware that some O.U.N. members had mass murdered Jews, Poles and Russians, the kernel of truth in Putin’s “Ukraine is controlled by Nazis” conspiracy theory. In fact, O.U.N. members brazenly slaughtered a few thousand Jews right on the streets of Lviv, some not far from where Kirill and I were sitting, the day the German Army entered the city, June 30th, 1941.

Kirill and I parted even closer friends, however, able to discuss difficult subjects. The genocideers numbered around 12,000, I later learned, from one of Professor Snyder’s Yale lectures uploaded to YouTube, while almost seven million Ukrainians were in the Red Army fighting the Nazis, a ratio of almost 600 to one. And two and half million of them died.

Contradicting another Russian conspiracy theory—that "Ukraine is not a real country and never existed”—they've been fighting for independence since the end of World War One, over a century ago, when they declared a state. Unfortunately, World War One morphed into the Russian Civil War, which swamped Ukraine in a ferocious free-for-all between the nationalists, czarists, anarchists, peasants and three foreign armies as well as the communists, who had to invade three times and use extreme violence to prevail (for this author's survey of that history go here).

The author at Lviv's memorial to those murdered by the Soviets after its 1939 invasion: 48,867 Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish ethnic people. photo: D. Blair
Given that sanguineous, two-part slaughter and then the Holodomor, the Great Terror and World War Two, 1914 to ‘45 in Ukraine was the bloodiest period in one of the bloodiest regions in history. In a desperate bid to carve out a country, the O.U.N. planned to expel the Soviets by siding with the Nazis, on whom they would eventually turn, while some members murdered Jews, Poles and Russians, in keeping with the eliminationist nationalism then popular across Europe.

As the war's outcome became obvious, however, much of the O.U.N. had a change of heart. Driven by a rank and file devastated by fascism, totalitarianism and the resulting wars, the leadership whitewashed that history and liberalized their platform, while their guerrillas kept fighting the Soviets into the 1950s. After the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the O.U.N. reemerged, supported right-wing parties, and remained central to Ukrainian culture, including through songs, street names and posters celebrating Bandera. Indeed, their greeting, “Slava Ukraini, heroyam slava,” glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes, is still popular, and the army made it their official salutation in 2018.

Nevertheless, after the fall of the wall, when hard-right parties became popular across Eastern Europe, not much in Ukraine. In fact, only the Svoboda party passed the required five percent vote, and only in 2012, to take seats in the Rada, or parliament, a half mile from the Maidan. Although Svoboda has a Nazi-like insignia and started as an extreme ultranationalist party, it had moderated some of its positions by then and won 38 seats, eight percent of the Rada.

“There were not that many on Maidan who were extremists,” Artur told me. “And they were not that extreme, like extremists in U.S. or Germany. I know one.” Ukrainians often have friends across ideological divides, which can be fungible, I learned, and some O.U.N. officials were friends with, married to, or themselves Jews.

There were a few neo-Nazi skinheads on the Maidan, mostly part of the punk movement popular across the ex-Soviet bloc for its ability to express anger. The founders of Right Sector, a hard-right party, met on the Maidan, where they helped lead its defense against the police. Republican Senator John McCain and Victoria Nuland, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, visited the Maidan and met with Svoboda and Right Sector leaders—Nuland famously handing out cookies. Although Nuland was supposedly managing American manipulation of the Maidan, the scandal surrounding her leaked phone call was mostly about her saying, “Fuck the E.U.,” and wanting to work around the institution so beloved on the Maidan.

Despite the Maidan’s diverse and vocal right-wing, however, they were vastly outnumbered and overshadowed by its liberals, leftists and anarchists, which is a powerful faction in Ukraine, one of the few countries where anarchists have mounted major parties or armies. Indeed, Svoboda lost all of its seats in the fall 2014 elections, despite its high-profile participation on the Maidan.

“There were a lot of poets on Maidan,” interjected Roman, Artur’s friend and fellow skater, who hadn’t said much until then. There were also many hippies, replete with long hair and colorful clothing, a movement dating to the late-‘60s in Ukraine, especially in Lviv.

During the Soviet dark ages, Lviv’s hippies lived underground, sometimes literally. They hid out in Lichakiv, the enormous cemetery for World War One soldiers but also politicians, authors and artists, who were often honored with large tombs and sculptures. I toured Lichakiv with Yarema, a photographer and artist with a gentle manner and shoulder-length hair, who wanted his photo taken next to the tomb of the sculptor Mykhailo Dzyndra, with its impressive abstract piece. Lviv’s most famous son is arguably Leopold Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), a respected writer on Ukrainian and Jewish life as well as romance and eroticism (his name was borrowed for “masochism,” oddly enough, considering the longsuffering Ukrainians), but he is buried in Germany.

Yarema and I dined at the nearby Jerusalem, one of two Jewish restaurants in Lviv, which was almost a third Jewish until 1942, on a tasty mushroom-barley soup and gefilte fish, served by an interesting woman of color. I thought she might be Roma, given Jews and Roma sometimes ally on the edge of European societies, but Yarema learned her mother is Ukrainian and father Nigerian.

Yarema appears younger than his 31 years but has had gallery shows, teaches life drawing, does web development and carpentry, and recently produced a “jam festival” with friends, cooking kettles of fruit over a bonfire at his family’s run-down property outside Lviv, which he’s fixing into a small artists’ retreat.

Yarema, a photographer and artist, at the tomb of the sculptor Mykhailo Dzyndra, Lviv's Lichakiv cemetery. photo: D. Blair
Lviv’s hippie history was also recounted to me by Bhodan, a 24-year-old artist and illustrator, who has read Jack Kerouac and Carlos Castaneda but also Amnesia.in.ua, a Ukrainian website run by “enthusiastic ethnologists,” and discussed it with his elders, like the director of Lviv’s Artists Guild.

During the ‘70s and ‘80s, people involved in "samizdat," the Soviet bloc’s clandestine free-expression movement, used tapes to share music, and they held small, illegal performances. Lviv had its first music festival after glasnost in 1989, Chervona Ruta, named for a popular love song and meaning a species of flowers or perhaps "red regret." It featured punk, pop and communist-era acts and became biennial, while the city became known for festivals. A well-respected jazz festival, originally called Alfa, now Leopolis, has been mounted every June since 2011, although this year’s was postponed “until immediately after victory,” according to its website. There are some great local jazz players, notably pianist Igor Yusupov.

The hippies took over Virmenka Street, in Lviv’s closed-to-cars Old Town, where they still preside in cafes like the homey Facet, which fills the street with tables in summer, or the massive, multi-roomed Dzyga, built into the city’s mediaeval walls and now one of its premier jazz venues and art galleries as well as cafes. Yarema had a show there of photos from his Turkey road trip. Hippies also started going to the Carpathian Mountains, 250 miles south of Lviv, especially a waterfall called Shypit, meaning to whisper, “to camp out, play music and run around naked,” according to Bhodan, who hitchhiked there with his girlfriend a few years ago, for the summer solstice celebration.

“Up to one thousand people… gather and make a big fire and celebrate life, or whatever, using psychedelics, marijuana and music… There are little customs. No matter of the time, if you meet someone, they tell you ‘Good morning.’ Some people wake up in the evening because they were partying all night… You can join any small conversation with people you never met before—you can have heartwarming discussions.”

Considering the Maidan protesters' dedication to freedom and their months of street fighting, which culminated with police snipers shooting about 100 of their comrades, Yanukovych fleeing to Russia, and the Roda voting unanimously for fresh elections, they were enraged when Russia attacked Crimea on February 20th, 2014. Insignia-less and masked soldiers poured out of the Russian naval base in Sevastopol, which dates to 1772 and was being rented from Ukraine. Evidently, two pro-democracy revolutions in one decade was too much for a Kremlin turning autocratic under Putin. Crimea’s governor chose not to fight, since the state had become almost entirely Russian-speaking after the Muslim Tatars were deported to Siberia in 1944, and it had substantial autonomy from Kyiv.

Sanctions were levied and the ruble collapsed, but President Barack Obama, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and other western leaders accepted the conquest of Crimea as a real politic fait accompli. Citing its Russian-speaking population and Russia's lingering superpower status, they rationalized it was not worth significant protest or an escalatory arming of Ukraine, especially so soon after the disastrous Iraq War, and that stable relations would encourage Russian democracy.

Across Ukraine, there were also Ukrainian speakers, generally older and male, who opposed the Maidan and its related protests nationwide and supported Russophile politics. Some Russian speakers claimed discrimination by a Ukraino-centric establishment, but it's hard to distinguish valid complaints from opportunism or corruption by Russian patronage and conspiracy theories. In the eastern states of Donetsk and Luhansk, Russian language speakers and some paid agents started separatist rebellions in April 2014, using small squads of ragtag fighters. But they soon obtained weapons from the Russian army, which quietly invaded four months later, even as Putin categorically denied to Obama’s face any involvement with the “little green men.”

A mohawked, middleaged soldier checks his phone in front of St. Michael's Cathedral, Kyiv. D. Blair
Militant Maidanites ran to the army or the paramilitary outfits organized on the Maidan by older veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War or younger Russian speakers, which belies allegations of widespread oppression. The latter were often soccer hooligans, also called “ultras,” or, to a lesser degree, white nationalists or punk intellectuals. The first commander of the now notorious-famous Azov Battalion, Andriy Biletsky, had a degree in history and decade experience organizing those three groups. The Azov debuted as a lightly-armed militia to oppose the separatists threatening Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city and next to Russia, but came of age in another large city, Mariupol on the Azov Sea, off the Black Sea, hence their name. After Ukrainian Army units in Mariupol proved poorly equipped and commanded, Biletsky led his fighters south and defeated separatists in open battle, in the summer of 2014.

More pacifist Maidanites often supported their friends and relatives who were fighting with supplies, equipment, medical or cyber services, or money. A journalist, Miriam Dragina, started a flea market, Kyiv Market, specifically to donate its profits to the army, which recalls the old joke: What if the library got funding and the army had to do a bake sale? Some simply bought sport rifles and drove to the front. The Azov and other independent brigades were integrated into army command by the end of 2014, but the war is still a very popular, anti-imperialist insurgency, much like the American Revolutionary War or Vietnam-America War, involving people from all walks of life and political persuasions. Almost everyone I met was helping supply a unit with food, automobiles, ammunition and more.

Another testament to Ukrainian democracy is the 2019 election of President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish—as were two of Ukraine’s six other presidents—in a landslide 73% of the vote, due to his anti-corruption stance but also charmed life-follows-art story. Four years earlier, the accomplished comic, actor, writer, dancer and producer had created and starred in a hit television series, a combination sit-com and political satire with surrealist touches, “Servant of the People” (2015-19, available on Netflix). Zelensky plays a bumbling high school history teacher, living at home with his taxi-driving father and professor mother, whose students film him ranting against corruption. After it goes viral, they file the papers for his presidential run, which everyone regards as a joke until—spoiler alert—he wins and takes on the establishment with the help of family and friends.

Also appointing friends as ministers, the real-life President Zelensky, whose political party is called Servant of the People, had a shaky start. Despite successes countering corruption, he was accused of nepotism and favoring the oligarchs backing his large media company, and he made egregious accusations against his predecessor, which earned him low approval ratings. Doing his fictional character one better, however, Zelensky matured into a charismatic commander who refused to flee, rallied his constituents amid catastrophe, staved off defeat, and assumed a starring role in the ancient contest between democracy and fascism.

Also determined to stop Russian expansion are the 20,000 or so foreign fighters, notably the Georgians, whose nearby nation Putin invaded in 2008, due to their Rose Revolution five years earlier, and who have their own brigade, and the much more brutalized Chechens. Indeed, the Chechens endured not one but two vicious wars with Russia (1994-96 and 2000-01), which killed over 100,000 people, fully seven percent of their population. There are also fighters from America, Scandinavia, Britain and other regions, including an increasing number of Russians.

A small cadre of foreign volunteers covers the gaps in citizen care left by governmental and international agencies and Ukrainian self-help networks, often focusing on communities with emergency needs, helping disabled refugees and delivering lost pets, which can be considered therapy animals. Dirk and I met eight of them for beers at an upscale pizzeria, in the park next to Kyiv’s urban velodrome, a lighthearted but dedicated crew of Australians, Canadians, Europeans and one American.

Another democratic indicator is that the ultranationalists haven’t held a Rada seat since 2019, when Biletsky lost his, and Zhan Beleniuk became its first African-Ukrainian representative. A wrestler who took gold at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Beleniuk was number ten on the list for the Servant of the People party, which won 125 seats. The Azov, meanwhile, received funding from a Jewish oligarch, sacked a commander for antisemitic speech, and accepted Jewish fighters. Most importantly, they’re fighting to defend Ukraine against an imperialist invader committing genocide.

Genocide, as defined by the United Nations, is the attempt to eliminate a culture, language or nation as well as people. Russian intentions are clear, from their officials' overt references—“Ukraine is not a country”—to military actions: the bombing of civilian infrastructure and cultural institutions, the destruction of monuments, including to the Holodomor, the use of rape as a weapon of war, the deportation of children and young women into Russia to be Russified and estranged from their families, and the sadistic torture of civilians, using amputation and castration.

Oksana, who works as a recruiter for the Georgian Brigade, takes a selfie in front of a destroyed Russian tank in Lviv's Old Town. photo: D. Blair
No wonder the Azov enjoy nationwide adulation, notably the big banners honoring the “Azovstal Defenders” in downtown Kyiv, Lviv and other cities, for their second defense of Mariupol, from March 1st to May 20th, 2022, when they fought the Russians to the death.

“They are like gods!” I was told by Oksana, an effervescent woman of about 22, whom I met in Lviv, after offering to take her selfie in front of the city’s display of destroyed Russian tanks. Oksana studied computer programming but much prefers working as a recruiter for the Georgian Brigade.

The Stalingrad-like siege of Mariupol destroyed or damaged over 90% of the city’s structures and may have killed up to 85,000 civilians, according to recent reports, including almost 600 sheltering in a theater marked “children” in large letters on March 24th. About 3,000 fighters, some foreign, and 1,000 civilians, including children, retreated to the massive, Cold-War-era bomb shelters beneath the city-sized Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, which is owned by a Muslim-Ukrainian oligarch. As gangrene, black mold and starvation set in, under constant bombardment, including by thermobaric bombs, with only a few helicopters flying supplies in and wounded out, 20 feet above the water to evade Russian radar, the mostly Azov fighters endured for 11 weeks.

Mariupol’s Thermopylae cum “Blade Runner” cum reality TV show was watched by many Ukrainians on videos uploaded thru the Starlink satellite system, which was largely donated by Elon Musk and is also essential for operating drones and artillery. The siege ended when the surviving defenders received safe passage in exchange for a few high-profile Russian prisoners, although 53 Azov were murdered in a Donetsk P.O.W. camp on July 28th. They were killed by Ukrainian shelling, according to Russian officials.

“How did you grow up so healthy in such an environment?” I asked Kirill, the next time we hung out. “Was your father an optimist?” “Yes,” he said. “He was a good man, nice man. He liked rock music and was devout Christian. And he was Jewish.” Kirill only learned that fact after his father died and, just last year, that his mother is as well, a secret they kept iron clad due to Soviet and Ukrainian antisemitism.

Nevertheless, the secret Jewish parent or grandparent story is fairly common in Ukraine. I met many Ukrainians with Jewish heritage, and Kirill once joked, “Half of Lviv is half Jewish.” And Jews date to the eighth century, when the elites of the Khazar Empire converted to Judaism, over a century before the birth of either Ukrainian or Russian culture. Despite the many gruesome pogroms—by the Cossacks in the 17th century, which included extensive rape, the czarists in 1920, and the Nazi genocide of one and a half million Ukrainian Jews—and today’s small number of publicly professing Jews, about half a percent, they remained somewhat integrated and represented throughout the country. Indeed, Ukraine still has Europe’s second largest Jewish population: coming after Poland before World War Two, now following France.

President Zelensky, 45, hails from a modest city in central Ukraine and studied law before going into entertainment. Natan Khazin, a 50-ish rabbi from Odessa, Ukraine’s third largest city and historically Jewish, was on the Maidan and helped its fighters with his experience in the Israel Defense Forces. Khazin even calls himself a “Zhido-Bandera,” a Jewish follower of Stepan Bandera. Nayyem, the Maidan organizer of Afghan extraction, married a Jewish woman and is raising his children Jewish. Meanwhile, the annual number of antisemitic incidents in Ukraine is often less than in France or England.

Kirill adores his mother, as becomes obvious when he takes her calls with a dulcet “Yes, Mama?” In fact, he moved her to Lviv, and her own apartment, when he and Alena evacuated Kyiv in December 2021, two months before the war. “I was listening to BBC and your president,” he explained. Kirill thinks Zelensky may have to answer for why Ukraine was so unprepared for the invasion: “They were building roads, when they should have been building rockets.” “But only after the war,” he added.

A troupe of dancers proved the Maidan was a place of freedom of expression, despite the nearby war. photo: D. Grosser
Ukrainian women seem extra loving, as is often the case in oppressed communities. I noticed on the streets of Lviv and Kyiv how they cared for children, who often clutch stuffed animals, due to the anxiety of war, or walk with beaus, holding hands and laughing, or girlfriends, in pairs or groups, also holding hands and laughing or chatting animatedly while out for coffee. Or when they cry and hug. Many seem to be Eastern European romantics, cautiously hopeful in the face of adversity, a worldview I learned about from my Polish mother and on four trips to Poland, Ukraine’s sibling society (Lviv was Polish until the Soviet invasion of 1939).

Their literary romanticism, meanwhile, dates to the poet, painter and folklorist Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), who was born an enslaved serf near Kyiv but secretly read books and studied art and became the country’s cultural founding father, honored many times more than Bandera with street names, statues or on the currency, the hryvnia (pronounced “ravinia”). Other luminary local authors include Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), who became a titan of Russian literature by inventing “the grotesque," an essential genre for understanding Eastern Europe, Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), whose tales of Jewish life inspired “Fiddler on the Roof” and Mark Twain, and Isaac Babel (1894-1940), also from Odessa and also Jewish, one of the Soviet Union’s most respected authors and journalists as well as modern stylists, until the secret police murdered him, in keeping with their grotesque tradition of problem solving through killing.

As Dirk and I walk out on the Maidan that glorious September 11th morning, I am struck by its large, open space but also strange structures, like the glass domes or comedic sculptures at its north end, where we entered, or the tall column capped by a figure in the distance. Despite the storm clouds, a wan sun shines, people are smiling, and there’s an eerie peace.

Unbeknownst to us on the Maidan at that moment, 250 miles to the east, around Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv, Ukrainian Davids are on the march. Indeed, they retook more territory in days than the Russian Goliath conquered in months, driving the invaders into a panicked retreat and to abandon immense amounts of equipment and ammunition. President Zelensky announces this battlefield success that very evening, in his nightly national address, the first good news Ukrainians have heard since their storied defense of Kyiv, six months earlier.

“They used special forces, drones and ‘maneuverable warfare’ to get behind the Russians and spook them into running,” a military analyst on CNN explained on September 13th, although he forgot to mention their masterful military feint. For weeks, President Zelensky had been talking up a counterattack in the south on Kherson, the only regional capitol conquered in Russia’s most recent invasion, which tricked them into withdrawing troops from the north near Kharkiv. Already known as a brave and funny commander in chief, Zelensky was proving to be a brilliant one.

“We love our president,” Alena had told me with a smile, which suggested a romantic-sexual side to national struggle.

Zelensky pushed his generals to attack, even though the Americans kept vetoing their battle plans, as the two militaries computer war-gamed during the summer in Ramstein, Germany. They had to break the entrenched front lines before winter, obviously, as a frozen war of attrition would benefit better-armed Russians. But they also had to prove to citizens and allies alike that the cornucopia of donated war materiel was being put to good use. As of September 11th, the U.S. had provided about $19 billion worth, five times the annual allotment to Israel, including advanced HIMAR missiles and promises of much more, although that could be reduced or decimated by a Republican-controlled Congress.

Filmmaker/performance artist Dirk Grosser interviews a survivor of Russian war crimes with translator Nadia (standing) in Bucha, north of Kyiv. photo: D. Blair
Dirk and I thread our way across the six lanes of Khreshchatyk Avenue, Kyiv’s main shopping street, which intersects the Maidan, since we neglected to notice the pedestrian tunnel for that purpose. We ascend the Maidan’s block-wide steps and approach its centerpiece, the gold-plated column crowned by Berehynia, the Slavic fertility goddess. Only then do we see, in the middle of the square’s proscenium, the dance troupe. It consists of a dozen women, including one of color (Ukraine has a substantial Roma population as well as some African immigrants), two men and a camera crew. Between takes of turning, jumping and gesticulating, the dancers goof off and giggle, although still well aware of the fierce battles raging five hours drive east or south. Each one probably has a cousin or friend under shellfire, at the front or already in the earth.

Kyiv seems normal, except for the passport control on the roads entering town and at the train station, the sandbags and plywood around important buildings and statues, the machine gun nests at official entrances, and the occasional air raid sirens, which oblige museums to evacuate, but everyone else ignores. People laugh in the streets, and the restaurants are full—up to a 30-minute wait at the most popular—but few openly celebrated Zelensky’s announcement of battlefield success on September 11th, as was reported in the American press. Almost everyone I met was still nervous, some were traumatized, and a few were having panic attacks.

Fifteen miles north of the Maidan is Bucha, whose residents reported the first Russian war crimes spree. Bucha bore the brunt of Russian bloodlust because it was where their once-vaunted armor was ambushed by Ukrainian regulars but also townspeople tossing Molotov cocktails. The Ukrainians destroyed up to a dozen tanks and vehicles which triggered a 25-mile-long military traffic jam and ruined Putin’s plans for a one-week war. Amazingly, the Russian soldiers carried dress uniforms for a victory parade, while many officers booked reservations at Kyiv’s premier hotels and restaurants.

Dirk Grosser is of medium height, strong build and open demeanor. He favors plaid shirts and hiking boots, perhaps in deference to his practical people from the once-East German city of Dresden, where he lives in a three-story townhouse he renovated himself. On our deluge drive from Lviv to Kyiv, Dirk told me how he raced all night from Germany to Ukraine, after a late start due to house guests, to attend a seminar he organized about what artists should do during a war. A performance artist and filmmaker by profession, Dirk started doing small conferences in this vein after learning some of his leftist friends supported the Russian invasion. In addition, he was shooting a related documentary, tentatively titled “Exile”.

Amazed by Dirk’s ambition and hard work as well as interested in the cause, I volunteered to production assist: find translators, do second camera and the like. Three days after our first Maidan visit, we drove the M-07 north to the once-bucolic commuter town of Bucha. We set up next to its verdant central walkway in the outdoor tables of a fast-food joint, which had umbrellas to ward off the light rain.

Every person we asked had had harrowing experiences. “I was in a basement for weeks,” a towheaded, ten-year-old boy, riding around on his scooter, told us, “I was very scared.” After calling his mother on his smart phone, which almost all middleclass kids have, he said, “She doesn’t want me filmed.”

Between wiping her eyes, a thin, expressive, perhaps 50-year-old Roma woman named Nadia told us about the rapes, including of underage girls, the men trying to remove their military tattoos, a death sentence under Russian occupation, the summary executions, which sometimes included torture or amputation, and the often audible screaming. The interviews were conducted in Ukrainian, which neither Dirk nor I understand, but our translator, an aid organizer from Kyiv also named Nadia, provided periodic summaries in English. At the end of the interview, most of us were crying, and we all hugged Bucha Nadia.

Bucha’s streets were littered with bodies for weeks, since the residents were too fearful to collect them. The kill count now exceeds 450, almost 2% of the population but will probably go much higher. Mass graves full of civilians, some showing signs of torture, amputation and even castration, have been uncovered in the liberated towns around Kharkiv like Izium.

A colorful children's synagogue on the edge of Babyn Yar, where Nazis killed 90,000 Kyiv Jews and many others, is part of the Ukrainian attempt to use art to address suffering. photo: D. Blair
“We were given orders to kill everyone we see,” a Russian soldier told his girlfriend by phone from Bucha, according to call transcripts published by the New York Times on September 28th.

Evidently, the Kremlin intends to terrorize the Ukrainians into submission, including the ethnic Russians they're supposedly saving, and escape recrimination through propaganda and conspiracy theories. This strategy will work, they assume, by virtue of their long expertise with such subterfuges but also the current popularity of conspiracism worldwide and cyberspace's capacity for disinformation. Hence, the Russians keep claiming they're fighting Nazis, even as they become like Nazis. Despite the obvious hypocrisy, their repetition of big lies allows them to not only dodge the bad press but transfer it to their enemies.

As if on cue, when the Bucha story broke on April 1st, Russian diplomats and media figures began accusing the Ukrainians of lying and fabricating evidence, using actors, ketchup and Photoshop, a gaslighting calumny that many Russians and Russophiles continue to repeat ad nauseam today.

On our way back from filming in Bucha, to complete our atrocity tour, we stopped by Babyn Yar, the ravine four miles north of the Maidan better known by its Russian name, Babi Yar. This is where the Nazis, also compulsive conspiracy theorists, slaughtered some 33,700 Jews in two days, still considered a record. Now located in a large, popular city park, Babyn Yar features an imaginative, multifaceted memorial. Right on the ravine’s edge, in fact, is a two-sided synagogue adorned with colorful animals, clouds and Hebrew phrases, a fantasy version of a traditional Ukrainian synagogue. The walls are hinged and there is an oversized hand-crank, the guard showed me, which folds the entire structure into a 20-foot-tall wooden case, suggesting children’s theater or the Jewish need for portability.

Some people were probably offended when the Babyn Yar Memorial foundation—formed in 2017, after the Soviets downplayed the Holocaust for decades, with an all-star board chaired by the Russian-Israeli scientist and dissident Nathan Sharansky and featuring rabbis, artists and politicians—decided to build a psychedelic, fold-up synagogue to commemorate what is traditionally marked by dark stone memorials or anguished sculptures. I myself was confused. But as I walked around and mulled it over, I realized: This is where Ukrainian middle schoolers are brought to look down into that monstrous death hole and, if you want to get metaphorical about it, what the souls there see looking up. Surely a positive image of Ukraine’s millennia-old Judaism provides some solace.

Dirk and I hiked down the path behind the synagogue into the ravine, which must have been deep, given it now holds around 90,000 Jewish bodies, almost all of Kyiv’s pre-war Jewish population, and a similar total of Roma, Russian and Ukrainian nationalist bodies, an irony not lost on some Ukrainians. Dirk can be contrarian, but he readily joined me in a meditative “om” chant. As a Holocaust survivor’s son, who has long grappled with this apocalyptic nightmare, I felt a certain peace in Babyn Yar’s death hole: Ukrainians were finally healing from that national trauma using sophisticated art and psychology. Tragically, it was just in time for the next atrocity.

Babyn Yar’s memorial complex also has an eight-foot, dark stone menorah, which serves as its centerpiece, and a large, black stone wall, although unlike anything I’ve seen at other Holocaust memorials. Titled “Crystal Wall of Crying” and installed in 2021, it was designed by Marina Abramović, the legendary Serbian performance artist, and has dozens of large crystals, which glow with light and are embedded in the wall. A football pitch away, there is a large, circular, silver platform with a dozen silver pillars, each fitted with an eyepiece for viewing archival Holocaust footage—everything riddled with bullet holes. The Holocaust in Ukraine was largely by bullets. Neither “Psychedelic Synagogue” nor “Riddled Silver Pillars” are listed on the Memorial’s Wikipedia page, and I’ve yet to find their creators’ names or installation dates.

The 'Silver Pillars' piece at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial riddled with bullet holes, Kyiv. photo: D. Blair
“When Bucha happened, we were all crying,” I was told by Marina, a 20-something woman who works in the arts, including promoting her reserved painter boyfriend, and has an irrepressible laugh. “But we can’t stay that way. If we let them depress us, they will win.” Many Ukrainians told me they were depressed for a week or a month after February 24th but were energized by friends, the exigencies of war or Ukraine’s stoic tradition.

Marina, whom I met in Lviv but is also a refugee from Dnipro, which is half way between Kharkiv and Kherson and was being shelled as we spoke, just returned from the U.S., where she visited her mother in Minneapolis and could have applied for refugee status. “I saw only a few Ukrainian flags or signs of solidarity,” she said. “At a club, the singer said she wanted to dedicate the next song to those who have suffered. I thought she meant us, but she was referring to George Floyd.” Marina also spends all her earnings to support Ukraine’s economy.

“Some people say this being happy is wrong,” Kirill told me. “But my friends who are soldiers say, ‘We have to protect this. You must do your normal life because we are in stress, and sometimes we need to go enjoy this.’” Kirill’s friends reminded me of the Babyn Yar installations, which I came to see as suggesting we appreciate life even as we mourn mass death, learn about horrific history and fight fascism, which I also learned from my mother's experiences in the Holocaust and my father's during World War Two. The Ukrainians perfected this philosophy, evidently, over a century of being butchered mercilessly by the Soviets, Germans and now Russians.

“Some people outside the Maidan were angry with us, saying, ‘It was like a festival, not a protest,’” said the Ukrainian popstar Ruslana Lyzhychko in “Winter on Fire” (2015), an excellent documentary about the Maidan Revolution (available on Netflix). Ruslana, as she is known, was also a center-right Rada representative but fell in love with the kids of Maidan and became their celebrity spokesperson.

As the Maidan dancers prance and gambol across Ukraine’s main stage, with no official minders and only Dirk, myself and four or five others watching or filming, I realize I’m witnessing a minor miracle: Ukrainians expressing freedom, fancy and joy in the shadow of a gruesome, genocidal war. When they take a water break, however, I continue my exploration and wander up the steps to Berehynia, standing resplendent in the slight sun, gold leaf gleaming off her column and the foliage she holds above her head.

That’s when I notice, behind Berehynia’s column, the art show: two dozen, ten-foot-tall, artistic iron easels with pages from a graphic novel, "Dad" by Oleksandr Komiakhov, I find out by Google Translating a photo of the credit. The title page surprises me. It has a man and woman seemingly straight from the Burning Man festival: him heavily bearded, wearing a motorcycle helmet and holding a baseball bat; her with pierced lips and a furry cat hat and cradling a box of Molotov cocktails.

“If these are the mythical heroes of Ukraine,” I think, or something along those lines, “They really have achieved a certain free speech absolutism, and freedom in general, a democracy which enshrines art and ideas, which many Ukrainians have been enjoying for almost a decade… Many of the kids of Maidan must be in government by now.”

A street poster from Lviv is an example of the excellent, war-related fine and graphic art in Ukraine's streets, galleries and museums. illo: #Neivanmade
“They are all phonies, patsies and spies!” would the rebuttal of many Russophiles and hard rightwingers but also some leftists, including friends of mine. Sandy Sanders, a neighbor, artist and seemingly decent guy, whom I’ve known for 20 years, denounced one of my heartfelt Facebook posts from Ukraine by insisting the Maidan Revolution was a “U.S.-financed coup” and the separatist struggle in the Donbas was a “neo-Nazi civil war.” Since he doesn’t seem like a Machiavellian manipulator, Sandy must be utterly unaware that he’s parroting Putin’s conspiracy theories, that people power is organic and hard to manipulate, or that fascist societies can't be paragons of liberty.

In fact, there’s precious little police presence in Ukraine, although martial law was declared on day one and they’re in a duel to the death with an adversary thrice their size and with a long resume of atrocity and spy craft. Indeed, three teams of pro-Russia Chechens tried to kill President Zelensky early in the war, the attack on Kyiv's secondary airport by Russian paratroopers and over 100 helicopters delivered special forces to decapitate the government, and they continue attempting to infiltrate spies, saboteurs and assassins, or to enlist them in sitio.

Nevertheless, in all of downtown Lviv, I saw only two soldiers standing guard (the 24-hour sentries at the central bank), while the nationwide curfew of 11 p.m., widely adhered to by Ukrainians, was barely enforced. On my many walks home at midnight or later, I saw few police patrols and no stops.

Five days after my first Maidan visit, I was stopped by a soldier who saw me take a selfie near a trainyard and demanded my phone and passport. I braced myself. “There is still a lot of corruption,” a few Ukrainians had warned me. Fifteen minutes later, however, I was chatting amicably in English with his commanding officer, who asked me to delete the photo and dismissed me with “Have a fun visit to Kyiv.”

Also defending Ukraine from Russian espionage is their “safe city” system, using surveillance cameras and artificial intelligence, Kirill told me. Amazingly, at the start of the war, Ukrainian cyber security held off the onslaught of Russia’s notorious hacker army. Others referred to their long, painful learning curve with Kremlin agents. “The K.G.B. killed my grandfather,” a long-haired Lviv waiter told me with a laugh, “It’s a sad story.”

As I review the Maidan's graphic novel, I am struck by the quality of Komiakhov’s drawings and visual storytelling but also that I’ll need a translator to make sense of it, so I circle back to Berehynia. Sitting next to her majestic column, surveying her sacred domain, the quarter-mile oval of Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, the name it was given after the 1991 Granite Revolution, I think about what Kirill, Artur and the others said, or I have read or viewed. Bit by bit, I begin to imagine how the Maidan looked eight years ago: teaming with tens of thousands of demonstrators—up to a million on some marches—waving signs and E.U. flags and chanting, “Ukraine is part of Europe!” “Together to the end!” and, after the police attacks, “Convict out!” directly at Yanukovych.

They also carried plastic sheets for the torrential rains. Within a few weeks, that plastic was woven into a sea of tents, barricades, lean-tos and kitchens, inhabited by a vast cross-section of Ukrainians, from tech workers and academics to dirty, young men carrying bats. One young man told me his dad went to the Maidan because “he always had to be in middle of everything,” while another said his dad promised to take him, but his mother intervened—he was only 14. The protesters discussed and debated, played guitars and drums, and DJed and danced, even though there was almost no alcohol on the Maidan. When temperatures plummeted and snow blanketed the vast encampment, they gathered around 50-gallon-drum fires.

As I ponder this critical history, about which I knew little before entering Ukraine on August 24th (its Independence Day from the Soviet Union, coincidentally), a moving moment from the Maidan Revolution—one I just learned about from the documentary “Fire in Winter”—comes to my mind.

After two weeks of protests, the Berkut riot police tried to clear the Maidan a second time. Their first attempt, on November 30th, 2013, merely shocked the protestors, who fought back fiercely or called their parents, some of whom joined them on the Maidan. The night of December 10th would be different, they realized, as they watched police buses pull up on Khreshchatyk Avenue and spit out hundreds of officers with helmets, shields and cement truncheons. As the women went to the proscenium for protection, some of the men—some wearing helmets, many carrying bats—went to face the Berkut. Meanwhile, a lone figure sprinted away, a theology student named Ivan Sydor.

The author with the military law student Diana (2nd fr rt) and her colleagues (lf-rt) Margherita, Christina and Maria. photo: D. Blair
As it happened, the official bell ringer for the 11th century Cathedral of St. Michael, on the hill north of the Maidan, was Sydor. Undoubtedly gasping for breath as he topped the belfry stairs around 1 a.m., he began ringing St. Michael’s bells furiously, as had his forbears during the Mongol invasion. Sydor rang for four hours and roused thousands, who ran to the Maidan, surrounded the Berkut and scared them off.

Thinking about Sydor’s desperate appeal, the Kyivers’ stalwart response and the bravery of the Maidan fighters, I pull my cap over my eyes, lest one of the dancers or Dirk see I’m crying.

Ukraine was much like Russia in the 1990s, devastated by “perestroika," the switch from central planning to a market economy, and plagued by bribery, mafias, assassinations and oligarchs, whose acquisition of immense wealth was inevitable. Whoever learned the tricks of post-Soviet capitalism first, from using armed gangs to seize industries to leveraging loans, manipulating laws or simply providing a decent product or service, made millions or billions. As Russia kept turning more authoritarian, corrupt and kleptocratic, however, Ukraine had three democratic revolutions, each of which increased to some degree political representation and economic opportunity and decreased corruption but especially the last.

As well as being pro -democracy and -Europe and anti -corruption and -authoritarian, the Maidan Revolution was sophisticated and centrist enough to galvanize a majority of Ukrainians. Indeed, it stimulated civic responsibility and cultural creativity, from governmental reform and motivated soldiers to music, fashion and art, and it unified Ukraine’s left, right and center. So much so, I took to remarking, “The Maidan is where Ukrainians fell in love with each other,” often to approving nods from Ukrainians.

I met another Maidan offspring extraordinaire at a bookstall in a Kyiv park, after its proprietor waved her over to translate. Clad in a camouflage uniform and cap, Diana, 22, seemed like a scout or soldier, if perhaps an officer, given her poise and long, single braid, in the Ukrainian fashion. Also from Odessa, a town laurelled for its multiculturalism and intellectuals as well as Jewish heritage, Diana and I were soon discussing current events.

“You get inspired to do something when your neighbor goes…” Diana said, gesturing wildly. “Boom?” I said. “Yes,” she said, “We learned a lot from our revolution.” “You mean Maidan?” “Yes,” she said, “We learned we can do great things. We learned that if a president doesn’t do what we want, we can take him out.”

After I invited Diana and her camo-ed colleagues, Margherita, Maria and Christina, to tea, she explained they were studying to become military lawyers. “Soon to be a growth industry,” I said, “In light of Russian war crimes,” to which Diana laughed loudly but her friends smiled politely. The Ukrainian Army is around one fifth women, some serving in combat.

“Ukraine is building a digital state,” I was told by Varvara, or Barbara, since the Ukrainian “v” is the western “b.” “It is more advanced than most of Europe—and I’ve been to Europe.” I met Varvara as she photographed food for the website of Cukor Black, a restaurant in Kryva Lypa, one of Lviv’s many courtyards or closed streets full of restaurants, bars and especially coffee shops. I was wolfing down a dish of their waffles, poached eggs, fish balls and arugula, all drizzled with crème fresh and accompanied by a delicious double cappuccino.

In fact, Lviv’s downtown and Old Town have more coffee shops per capita than any city I’ve ever seen, and a great cappuccino can be had from a kiosk on the streets of Kyiv for under a buck, thanks to the coffee craze that swept the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early 1800s. Middleclass Ukrainians can be quite foodie, with tastes ranging from sushi and stir fry to pizza and pesto or borscht, pierogi and herring, which is also traditional Jewish food.

Varvara photographing food for the website of a restaurant in Kryva Lypa, Lviv's famous food courtyard. photo: D. Blair
“I have many friends who are programmers for German companies,” continued Varvara, whose half-dreadlocked, blonde bob gives her round face an idiosyncratic beauty. “All good restaurants have this,” she added, tapping my table’s QR code, which brings up the menu on a phone. Most patrons also pay by phone, I noticed.

Another burgeoning Ukrainian business is modelling, I was told by Hanna, whom I also met in Kryva Lypa, at the record and DJ equipment shop Vinyl Club. Two days before, I saw three fashion shoots in Old Town, when it was bathed in golden afternoon light, before the onslaught of autumn rains. Hanna, who is petit and favors the blond-but-approachable look, recently returned from a shoot in Portugal but has modeled all over Europe. “Ukrainian models are popular,” she said, “Because we work hard.” Also playing a part, I suspect, is that Ukrainians are romantic, select for beauty and intermarry.

'Meet the Kids of Maidan' continues here

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine pub Posted on Mar 02, 2024 - 02:48 PM
Radical Middle Eastern Art Blows My Mind
by Doniphan Blair

Classical nude from 1933 by Mahmoud Said (1897-1964), known as the founder of modern Egyptian painting. From an aristocratic Alexandrian family, he was the son of Egyptian Prime Minister Mohamed Saïd Pacha and uncle of Queen Farida of Egypt but no relation to Edward Said.
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

ON OCTOBER 12th, 2023, FIVE DAYS AFTER
Hamas's deadliest-ever attack on Israel, New York’s Columbia University was rocked by students protesting in support of the Palestinians and a few counter-protesters. With helicopters hovering overhead and police at the ready, it was a tough moment for Minouche Shafik, the university’s Egyptian-English president. She closed the campus to the public, rejected “abhorrent rhetoric” and claimed that she embraced those on both sides “suffering great distress” from the rapidly expanding tragedy.

What Shafik didn’t do, but should have, was recommend the protesters walk a dozen blocks to see the groundbreaking show of modern Arab art at Columbia’s little-known Wallach Art Gallery, in the university’s new Manhattanville campus. Although some of the pieces were a century old, they were powerful enough to inspire the average viewer or challenge the more PC or Islamist. Indeed, a show of such artists in Gaza surely would have been shut down or worse by its theocratic rulers, Hamas.

“Girl in a Fishnet” was painted by the Egyptian Amy Nimr, as part of her application to the Slade School of Fine Art in London, when she was only 20. That was before she went to Paris and befriended famous Surrealists, and before fishnet stockings became popular, in the mid 1920s and '30s, respectively.
Titled “Partisans of the Nude”, amazingly enough, which is what the artists called their movement, the show was curated by Kirsten Scheid, a young but accomplished professor at American University in Beirut, Lebanon, where she did a similar show, and a visiting professor at Columbia and NYU. Well aware of the show’s implications, Scheid mentions some but avoids others in her catalogue and gallery notes, due to their radical nature but also her favoring of DEI and pro-Palestinian perspectives. In fact, some of the artists' themes and ideas contradict Columbia’s famous arbiter of all things Arab and Palestinian, Professor Edward Said (1935-2003), who was born in Jerusalem and schooled in Egypt before going Ivy League. In fact, Said’s “Orientalism” (1978) largely kicked off the multicultural revolution still roiling Western civilization.

Said didn’t cover the Partisans of the Nude artists in his comprehensive takedown of Europe’s misinterpretation, colonization and cannibalization of Arab culture, which I probably would have noticed, when I read “Orientalism” 20 years ago, given my interest in the nude as well as Arab culture. Indeed, I had never heard of The Partisans, despite my travels around and readings about the region, until I was strolling along 125th Street on October 17th, as the Columbia riots were raging, and saw a simple sandwich board for the Wallach Gallery. Columbia’s first official art gallery, the Wallach opened in 1986 on the main campus and moved to its new location in 2017, on the sixth floor of one of the university's many modernist buildings, which gentrified a once-derelict, warehouse corner of Harlem.

After Cezanne by Hussein Youssef Amin, Egyptian (1894-1984).
I expected little, given the signage and location, but exited the bright, orange elevator into a wonderland of evocative images. Suddenly, I was catapulting back to my many months of travel across Islam, which were suffused with adventure and romance, including a brief affair with a Turkish girl, in Athens, Greece, who was gorgeous despite having bad acne.

As I wandered around the formidable show of 42 artists, I also recalled my readings on Arab culture, notably Fatema Mernissi (1940-2015), a Moroccan sociologist, who put her entire society on the couch and dared to delve into the subject of sex. In her best-known book, "Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Muslim Society" (1975), Mernissi went so far as to predict that feminism would prove more revolutionary in Islam, due to its matriarchal and sex-positive roots, than in the West, where women were constrained by the repression of Catholicism and Protestantism.

A beautiful and evocative as well as surrealist piece by Abdullah Al Qassar, a Kuwaiti artist (1941-2003).
Mernissi was mistaken in that regard, as was Said, in his prediction that radical Islamism would soon fade away, but they were both brilliant intellectuals, attempting to forge an innovative East-West understanding, much like the Partisans of the Nude artists themselves, and were part of a mid-20th century liberalism then sweeping the Middle East. Although that tradition has been revived by the general move toward modernization as well as the Arab Spring, it is still largely eclipsed by the overweening patriarchy, nationalism, Islamism, extreme wealth and poverty in some quarters, and violence, not just against Israelis but Arab Christians, gays, women or members of minority Muslim sects, like the artistic Sufis.

After I surveyed Scheid’s show, I soon realized it was not just evocative and sensual but politically radical, comparable to Stravinsky’s 1913 “Rite of Spring”, which provoked riots in Paris. Indeed, her similar show in Beirut in 2016 was very vulnerable to attacks by extremists. Although that didn’t happen, many Arabs and others still feel the art is too provocative for public display. Regardless, it must be shown, according to Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, an Emirati writer, art collector and activist,whose Barjeel Art Foundation provided much of the show's art, simply because, “This is the most pivotal moment in the history of Arab art.”

"The Hamman", a fantastic environment I experienced the male version of in Turkey, painted here in 1958 by the female Lebanese artist Simone Baltaxe Martayan (1925-2009).
Although Scheid’s show notes are couched in the contemporary euphemisms of decolonialism and identity, she maintains a stridently innovative and diverse outlook, in keeping with the values of the Partisans of Nude artists themselves. She explains how they both embraced and rebelled against French and British culture and colonizers, who took over after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, a thesis exemplified by their adoption of the nude as a central subject and philosophy. Some even went so far as to form nudist colonies, but their interests were hardly prurient. Indeed, the nude seemed to serve them as a bold expression of honesty and emotion, hearkening back to the classical Greek understanding of the form but also a modern one (see cineSOURCE article "The Nude in the Age of Trump and Porn"). Unlike current western culture, where the nude has been MeToo-ed and taboo-ed, it symbolized for them revolution, the full exposure of the self and the truth, the final lifting of the veil or hijab, which Arab feminists burnt publicly in Cairo and elsewhere in 1920s.

Another classical romanticized nude, this one by Georges Hanna Sabbagh in 1923, who was born in Cairo but moved to and became well known in Paris (1887-1951).
In fact, the bold artistry of the Partisans of the Nude movement proves the Arab efflorescence that might have been, forged by creative people transcending colonialism, Orientalism, racism, nationalism, sexism and religion—of the show's artists, nine were woman and one Jewish—while embracing the western positives of medicine and culture. Indeed, many of them attended art schools in France, Italy or England, which was where they studied the nude, mostly absent in Arabic art, and appropriated it to empower their own visions.

Their heady, cross-cultural miscegenation helped foster an Arab openness and creativity that attracted Western expats, from the radical American authors Paul Bowles and William Burroughs, who lived in Morocco, to the English Lawrence Durrell, who settled in Alexandria, Egypt, and dramatized its once-ethnically diverse community in his bestselling “The Alexandria Quartet,” starring the beloved Jewess Justine. There were also many westerners in Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East, home to almost half of The Partisans of the Nude, and Cairo, which had almost all the other half. I myself encountered a bit of the same spirit when I travelled around Islam in the early 1970s. Cairo also had a substantial Sufi community, including many westerners until the 1970s, when the radical Islamists started killing people, notably assassinating the liberal President Anwar Sadat in 1981, after he made peace with Israel.

"After the Bath" (1956) by Akram Shukri, (1910-1983), Iraqi artist and architect, who probably saw some Pollack paintings.
While the Partisans were mostly men, one fifth of Scheid’s show were women, and what a crew they were, in keeping with Mernissi’s prediction. Amy Nimr (1898–1974) was only 20 when she painted the striking and meta-themed “Girl in a Fishnet”—she’s trapped in an actual fishnet, not fishnet stockings, a double entendre Nimr might not have recognized, given fishnet stockings only became available in the 1930s. Nimr went to Paris and befriended famous Surrealists, including the notorious womanizer but also brilliant author and analyst of the nude, Henry Miller, although she painted “Girl in a Fishnet” much earlier, as part of her application to London’s Slade School of Fine Art. The painting protrays a provocative balance between personal vision and Surrealism—not yet invented—and her upbringing in Egypt, making it a truly modern masterpiece.

No wonder Nimr, later known as Amy Smart, after she married Walter Smart, an English scholar of Persian and Arabic culture, soon exhibited in Paris, including a solo show in 1926, and eventually hosted Cairo's premier literary salon. She befriended many of the region's artists and intellectuals, including Durrell, Mahmoud Sa'id, the founder of Egyptian modern art, Ahmed Rassim, who wrote a book about her, and members of a Partisans-like group Art and Liberty.

A truly avant-garde piece, considering the cubist aesthetic, wine, and mixed-race couple, by Iraqi Ismail Fattah (1934-1994), painted in 1961.
Sure, Nimr's father was a rich media mogul, she was educated in France and England, and she was exhibited by galleries in London and Paris, but she remained an aggressive artist, who painted Nubians and Bedouins, sometimes in the nude, and Egypt's soon-to-disappear Jewish community. Moreover, she switched to images of corpses and apocalypse, after her son was killed by a WWII-era landmine on a family picnic in the desert, themes she maintained in Paris, where she had to flee in 1952, after Gamal Nasser's takeover of Egypt.

Sophie Halaby (1906-1997), born to a Palestinian father and Russian mother in Jerusalem, was the first Arab woman to study art in Paris. The Lebanese Saloua Raouda (1916-2017) was famous for introducing abstract art to the Middle East. Huguette Caland (1931-2019), also Lebanese, became known for her erotic abstracts, which appeared in exhibitions around the world, especially after she moved to and wowed Los Angeles. Only one of The Partisans in the show was Jewish, Azar Abdulnabi-Shalem from Iraq, but many of their patrons were, since a million Jews lived across the Middle East until they were expelled in 1948.

One of the show's few male nudes done in 1920 by Georges Daud Corn (1886-1971), from Lebanon.
Also represented in the show are many of the Middle East’s most respected male artists, too many to list but including Khalil Gibran (1883-1931), the wunderkind artist and writer from Lebanon. Although he was a Christian, who moved with his single mother to Boston at age 13, Gibran drew on Sufi mystism and Arab romantic poetry for his “The Prophet” (1923), which still sells well a century later and helped inspire the humanist mysticism of the ‘60s.

Middle Eastern progressives have a tradition of studying in colonialist capitals. Long before Mernissi attended the Sorbonne in the ‘50s, the Arab activist and modernizer Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897) was hard at work there. Al-Afghani’s protégé, Muhammad Abduh was so inspired by the art he saw in Europe that, after he became Egypt’s Grand Mufti, he issued a fatwa allowing the depiction of people, which is prohibited by Sunni Islam, although he may not have signed for full frontal nudes. “The Koran” enjoins women to cover their breasts, but says nothing about their hair or faces.

Said, meanwhile, took degrees from both Princeton and Harvard. While he rejected the European misinterpretation of Arab culture and was an active member of various Palestinian councils, he played and performed classical piano, not the Middle Eastern oud, and was very much at home on Manhattan’s largely Jewish Upper West Side, suggesting he should have written a companion piece to "Orientalism", “Occidentalism”, about his own assimilation of European culture.

This painting by Saloua Raouda is one of the best pieces in the show, since it incorporates nude, abstraction, a comment on male gaze, and Arabic script, including an Arabic letter which looks like a breast.
The Partisans made similar intellectual leaps, from appropriating Cezanne or Jackson Pollack to integrating Arabic history, lore and script. Unfortunately, painters often rely on rich patrons, some were compromised by their involvement with decaying, corrupt societies, and their imagery was often too incendiary for widespread display. Although some adapted new political ideas, like the Bahraini Abdullah al-Muharraqi (1939-), who combined nudes with political or Palestinian themes, they were criticized and overshadowed, first by Arab nationalists and then by religious zealots. The Partisan spirit, however, lives on in the cosmopolitan Arab cities of Cairo, Beirut or Dubai.

The implications of the Partisans of the Nude Show are obviously much more acute amid the horrific Hamas-Israel war and the increasing antisemitism and Islamophobia across the West, a testament to the transcendence of artists, regardless of ethnicity or class, which is why it embodied so much special meaning for me.

As it happened, I was 17 when I immersed myself in Arab and Muslim culture, a decade before I started studying my Jewish roots or my mother’s experience in the Holocaust. That was when I travelled for six months through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, where I stayed in Kabul for a month and toured Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz and elsewhere for another. Then I visited northern Pakistan, not far from where bin Laden was captured—fantastically beautiful country—and India’s Muslim, desert state of Rajasthan, also fascinating. The people I met, and the thoughts and hashish they sometimes shared, affected me deeply, but so did the visuals. Indeed, the curving Arabic script, desert panoramas and colorful clothing inspired me to invent a painting style called “Abstract Arabic" and, combined with the ideas, a philosophy, “Abstract Aborigine.”

"Pregnancy"(1959) by Egyptian Hamed Abdalla (1917-1985), is an integration of Arabic language script into painting, which ties into my "Abstract Arabic" work.
Hence, when I saw the Partisans of the Nude show and realized I was not alone in my exploration, I was so thrilled, I raced home and posted a long review, “Enlightened Arab Art Show At Columbia University” on my Facebook page, one of the first reviews of the show available online. Although the curator, Kirsten Scheid, didn’t respond to my messages, I became friends with one of the gallery’s attendants, Daniel Austin, a lovely guy, dedicated artist and “partisan of the nude,” insomuch he draws and paints a lot of nudes (full disclosure: he did one of me).

Despite the importance of the show, only a few Columbia students made the effort to attend, and I saw less than half a dozen people the two times I visited. That increased somewhat, according to Austin, after a couple more reviews, including one by Yasmine Seale, for the website 4columns (see it here), which waxes a bit pedantic but does a decent job.

The New York Times finally covered it on December 14th, see “Spotlighting the Body in a Nascent Arab Art World”, an extensive review which does highlight the radical nature of the work, although it spends too much time trying to refute claims that Arab culture didn’t include nudes. Alas, coming out only a month before the show’s closing was not enough to inspire the stampede to the Wallach Art Gallery the Partisans of the Nude deserved.

"War Generation" (1970) by Abdullah al-Muharraqi (Bahrain, 1939-), is one of the few pieces of the Partisan of the Nudes show to be overtly political.
This is a tragedy, since so many Columbia students as well as young people and leftists worldwide tacitly or implicitly support Hamas, fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, who would oppress or murder modern Partisans of the Nude. Given the immense focus on Arab culture of late, if mostly political, it behooves us to know what their visionary artists were up to. Indeed, knowing one’s artistic roots is essential to evolving a more functional culture any where, but no where more so than in the Middle East.

TO COMMENT: Please go this article's Facebook Version.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Feb 19, 2024 - 05:28 PM
Why Arab Liberals Support Israel
by Doniphan Blair

Dahlia Zaida, Egyptian activist now the executive director of the Center for Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean Studies. photo: courtesy J. Muhammad
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

“All the Arab states that exist right now, they want to get rid of the Islamists,” noted Dalia Ziada on Yasmine Muhammad’s December 18th podcast. “At the beginning of the war, they were happy to see Israel doing this to Hamas.” Elsewhere in the podcast, she says: “I am 100% supporting Israel in its war on Hamas. I believe if Hamas is removed—Hamas and the other terrorist organizations—it will be good for the entire region.”

The 30-or-so-year-old Ziada is currently the director of Center for Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the Babeş-Bolyai University in Romania, which produces in-depth research on politics, economy and defense policy. Previously, she was a leading feminist and activist from Cairo, where her cohort strove to reduce female genital mutilation.

Although Egypt banned FGM in 2007, it continues clandestinely among two-thirds of Egyptian women, but the drop from over 95% is significant. The big problem confronting Ziada and other Arab Spring activists is power imbalances and police states, which killed almost a thousand people in Tahir Square, Cairo, in 2011, and compels people to accept lies and conspiracy theories. Immune to such subterfuge, however, are the region’s great poets, politicians and activists, from Lebanon’s still-bestselling author Kahil Gibran to Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat, who made peace with Israel in 1978 and was assassinated by Islamists in ’81, AND Dalia Ziada.

I was blown away by Zaida’s openness and logic, which is why I quote her at length below, but also her tragedy. After growing up in a stable, supportive family—the first child of a loving, military-engineer father, who also practiced Sufism—and a modernizing Egypt, where she attended good schools, she was overjoyed to join the international liberal coalition. It’s heartbreaking, therefore, to see the fresh-faced Zaida, a devout Muslim who covers her hair, have her progressive dreams under attack from the radical religious, the hard right and now hard left, and conspiracy theorists.

An ancient tradition in Islam, conspiracism was perfected and popularized in the 12th century by the Hashasheens, or Assassins, from Persia and then Lebanon. Indeed, the perennial bestseller of Cairo’s publishing industry, the largest of the 22 Arab nations, is “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, the Russian forgery claiming Jews control the banks. In fact, Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian war lord who directed anti-Zionist violence, became the head of Islam in Jerusalem, and was the leading Arab supporter of Nazism, living in Berlin from 1942 to ’45, printed his own edition of “Protocols”.

“Then things escalated,” Ziada continued, about the current conspiracy mongering. “All this news coming from Gaza about people being killed… created an outrage in the Arab street. Outrage that is added to the anger that already existed from before, because of the mis-practices of the leaders of the Arab countries. For example, in countries like Egypt and Jordan, there is already a severe economic crisis.” The authorities start saying “all these lies and these slogans. And then they had to play along, not because they really believed, but they had to do so to protect their own seats—protect themselves.”

After defending Israel on social media, Ziada was attacked by Egypt’s radical Islamists, security services and media, a three-sided assault by the religious, the authoritarians and the conspiracists, although she also identifies a severe threat from the left. “I think that, somehow, I was used as a scapegoat in this game, unfortunately, for the Egyptian state to have this image.” Unbowed and obliged to go into hiding while in Egypt, Ziada continues her noble efforts, joining liberal activists from Ukraine to Iran and the Philippines who are standing up for democracy and freedom of speech.

“The only thing I am determined to keep using,” she says on Muhammad’s podcast, “is my voice,” and what a powerful and prescient one it is. “Believe me, it is all related, what is happening in [the] Israel-Hamas war right now. It is very much related to what is happening in Sudan and Libya—all over the region. It’s all related. If you look at the main source of all these conflicts, you will find out that it is… between Islamists, on one side, and the secular nation states, on the other side. It’s like the core—the core, the core, the core—of all these conflicts. Of course, there are other layers… but this is the base.”

“I think it also something that the Western world has to be very careful about… This problem is now being exported to them, specifically by Islamists. Anyone can search for this. There is a text written by the Muslim Brotherhood [Hamas’s precursor, formed in 1928 Egypt] leaders in the United States in 1990s. It was discovered by federal investigations and is now released for the public to read. The Muslim Brotherhood had a clear plan about sabotaging the West from within—”

“The ‘One-Hundred-Year Plan’?” interjects host Yasmine Muhammad, who also has an astounding record of activism and an amazing bio. Abused by her Egyptian mother, she was inspired by her pro-peace Palestinian father, but the former forced to marry an al-Qaeda operative. She had to go in public fully covered by the “niqab,” including her face and hands. After escaping that situation, Muhammad got an education, began helping others in similar straights and penned the phenomenal “Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam”. Rejected by dozens of publishers for being too provocative, she self-published, and it became a bestseller, see podcast interviewing her.

“Exactly,” continues Ziada about the One-Hundred-Year Plan. “To sabotage the West from within, which means they had a clear vision… [W]hat they want to do [is] make these nation states—successful nation states in the West—collapse, so they can build their own Islamic caliphate upon the ruins of these nation states. This is what they have been doing in the Middle East for so long, ranging from Iran to Malaysia, all over the region, up to Hamas, up to Sunni Islamist organizations, like the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS and al-Qaeda, and so on.”

“In the West, they adopted the strategy of infiltrating into the Western societies and, like, putting their children, who would normally be second-generation citizens of these countries, into certain groups… so they can promote their ideas… One of the manifestations of this evil plan we are seeing happening right now in the reaction to the Israel-Hamas War.”

“All this twisted rhetoric about Hamas being a resistance movement, about being the heroes of, or champions of, the Palestinian cause, this for me is nonsense—nonsense! It has nothing to do with the truth. But this was being told to western news in the United States, in Europe, in universities, everywhere, by their Muslim fellows, by their Islamist—I would say—fellows, who are saying this on purpose, to promote some lies, to ally [westerners] on the side of the evil, rather than being on the side of the good.”

“It’s really shocking to see that people in the US, for example, in American universities, who are women, who belong to the LGBT community, are supporting Hamas! They don’t even understand that if they lived under Hamas and the Shari’ah Law, they will be immediately killed, just for being an LGBT person, you know. It’s crazy. It’s crazy! So, when you see how brainwashed they are, you will be shocked—but there is a reason for that.”

“Islamists have been preparing for this moment for so long. That’s why we are seeing this extreme international polarization around the issue [of Hamas], although [what happened on October 7th] is very clear. We have a group of terrorists who attacked civilian people in their homes, on a holy day. They attacked people in their pajamas, you know; they raped women; they killed children. They arrested toddlers even, and kidnapped them, and [held] them for over a month, and tortured them.”

“It does not even need to [be] argue[d] about: It is a clear case of terrorism. And there is a state responsible about these civilians, which is the Israel state. It reacted like any other state in the world would react when it is faced by a terrorist, when it is attacked by terrorist organization like Hamas.”

“But, actually, Hamas twisted the whole rhetoric and made it appear like the Israeli government woke up one day and decided just to kill some Palestinians, just out of the blue, just because they think the Palestinian number is increasing. I know it sounds like a joke, but it was said in our media, the Egyptian media and the Arab media, by reputable analysts.”

“At the beginning of the massacre and the attack by Hamas, I was reading the Arab news… so I thought, like, as they were saying, ‘It was just a clash between Israeli soldiers and Hamas militants,’ which happened every now and then… no big deal. But two days later, I was invited [to an event] organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Israel and the Ministry of Defense, and it had journalists from all over the Arab world. More than 300 people were attending: journalists, activists, researchers. And they showed us the actual footage of what happened, like videos collected from the cameras of the houses, from the streets of the kibbutz where the massacre happened, and where the music festival was attacked.”

“They showed us, like, the real scenes of this horrific, horrific attack and, at that time, I felt, like, anger. I was so offended by the many lies that the Egyptian and the Arab media was promoting about the issue … “

“To be honest, regardless of religious background or nationality or anything, I related to these women, who were brutalized and were raped and murdered and mistreated simply because they are Jewish women, or because they are Israelis. It’s not an excuse! And all these children.”

“They killed the animals, like dogs and cats—they killed them! They burnt houses. They didn’t let any sign of life... It was an attack on humanity. This massacre was an attack on humanity—not only on the Jewish or Israeli people—it was an attack on humanity.”

“So I thought, I should stand up. And I have a following on social media, so I thought ‘OK, [that’s] the first place I can do that.’ As long as our media is lying, I will go and say the truth. And I did that… and actually, of course, expectedly, I received a horrible backlash from the many trolls on social media.”

“I thought, ‘OK fine, it will take two or three days, and it will go away, as usual,’ because it happened to me many times. But soon after it was picked by… the state-sponsored media in Egypt. By state-sponsored, it is REALLY state-sponsored: the state dictates everything that is being said in this station! So being attacked by these media stations, the state itself is against me.”

“In the beginning, I said, ‘Perhaps this is not the case. They made a mistake or something, but it [was] increasing. Once and again, the attack is increasing, to the extent that some members of [the Egyptian] Parliament appeared on these TV stations to call me a traitor—to call me a traitor!—to call me a threat to Egypt’s national security.”

“And here is the irony. Here is someone like me, who is a liberal thinker, while all the radicals… [who] are cheering for Hamas, cheering for the Muslim Brotherhood and supporting the Salafists, are NOT a threat to Egypt national security! Which is so ironic.”

“So, I thought, ‘OK, it will [blow] over,’ but, unfortunately, it didn’t. I started, like, to have death threats coming to my phone, and radical Salafists going to my mother’s house and looking for me and asking, like, to have my address or my phone number, like, to kill me, and things like that.”

“Thank God, it went well and my mother wasn’t hurt or anything, but it was really scary. So, I contacted people in the authorities in Egypt, and I said ‘Guys, I need protection.’ Their reaction, unfortunately, was, ‘We are sorry, we cannot really protect you.’ I said, “Is it because I oppose Hamas?’ They said, ‘No, not really. It is because you support Israel in its war on Hamas.’ So the words ‘support Israel’ was for them the sin, the big crime I committed. They wouldn’t mind me being killed by some fanatic in the street just because I said, ‘I support Israel,’ which is crazy because Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel that has been in place for forty years,” established by another advocate of Egyptian liberalism, President Sadat (1918-1981).

Zaida is well aware of what I only recently realized: We are in a four-way war against the radical religious and nihilist conspiracists as well as the hard right and left, four extremists groups brought together by a perfect storm and now joining in a kaleidoscope of alliances, all determined to end the 81-year-old liberal order.

Hence, Russia is allied with Iran, finances France’s fascist National Party, and is supported by MAGA, QAnon and other American conspiracists. Hamas, part of Iran’s colonization of the Middle East, is revered as anti-colonialist by the American hard left, many of whom will vote third party on November 5th, 2024, perhaps helping to elect Trump, a hard-right conspiracist also worshiped by America’s radical religious.

Liberal and “Peace Now” Israelis, meanwhile, have been whipsawed from protesting their authoritarian government through most of 2023 to having their children butchered and raped at a music festival and fighting a brutal two-front war against a religious death cult and their hard left and hard right allies in the West.

Welcome to Four-Way War, which no one knows better than Egyptian liberals. In fact, they have been struggling for human rights, democracy and improved economies since Muhammad Abduh, who studied with his Sufi uncle, became the liberal Mufti of Egypt in 1899. Sadly, they have received little respect or even press. In fact, innumerable Arab liberals have been murdered by war lords, authoritarians and fanatics, a story little known in the West and denigrated or erased locally.

As pro-Palestinian groups marched in Columbia University on October 10th, I was 12 blocks away, visiting the University’s new Wallach Gallery (615 W. 129th), and learning about an incredible Arab art movement, through the show “Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920-1960” (open ‘til January 14). A daring group of men and women (about 20%), containing Muslims of all sects, Christians and a few Jews, they painted a modern Middle East, free from authoritarianism and theocracy. It was so liberal, in fact, they called themselves the Partisans of the Nude see my review.

Even as Middle Eastern issues became fighting words on Columbia's campus, the Partisans of the Nude show languished unreported, unrespected and unattended. Even though supporting Hamas was all the rage among the city’s radicals, students and hipsters, this fabulous show of Arab art was virtually empty during my two visits, and it was only reviewed two months later by a couple of members of New York's large press corps.

And, when they finally got around to the Partisan of the Nude show, they didn’t recognize its full significance. In fact, those artists proved the need and strength of liberalism in Arab culture, which has been denied by critics both in the East and the West, but was previously exemplified by the tolerant, artistic Sufi Muslims.

Indeed, Ziada is one of many Arab liberals to defend Israel. There is also Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of one of Hamas's founders and the subject of the excellent documentary, “The Green Prince” (2014) see my article and Luai Ahmed. An outspoken and visionary Yemini-Swedish YouTuber, Ahmed tweeted on January 5th: “If you are pro-Hamas today, you would have been pro-Hitler in the 1930s. Both Hitler and Hamas kill Jews and gays simply for being Jews and gays.” Among women liberals there is the brilliant, brave and beautiful Yasmine Muhammad, and many others, although Ziada remains especially stellar for her sincerity, steadfastness and Muslim values.

In my dark night of the soul, which started this October when I learned that many of my friends were chanting “From the River to the Sea” on marches and many actually did want to end Israel, my heart was warmed by the stalwart progressives of the Middle East. Realizing their number was larger than I once thought, I felt reassured that classical liberalism—which we all love so much, even the protestors, as indicated by their reliance on those freedoms—would endure, despite the chaotic, confusing and perhaps catastrophic Four-Way War in which we're now embroiled.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Jan 10, 2024 - 01:09 AM
On Islam, Arabic Art and Afghanistan: What I Learned on my Journey to the East
by Doniphan Blair

Scene from Doniphan Blair's 6 min video 'Islam, Arabic Art and Afghanistan'. photo: D. Blair
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Although my mother survived Auschwitz, I always felt Jewish, and I stand with Israel, I came up and developed my first big ideas as an Arabist. See my six-minute video 'Islam, Arabic Art and Afghanistan.

It started with a bang when I went overland from Turkey to India in 1972, age 18. My journey east and back can-opened me to a cascade of cultures, people and landscapes. I became an "India freak," as indicated by my dress, behavior and new spiritual ideas, but I was also fascinated with Arab culture: the alphabet, hiking across the desert to pet a baby camel, exploring ancient mud cities, like Herat, Afghanistan, or smoking spectacular hash with an enlightened tea man.

Upon return, I read the Sufi poets and about the Persian Hashasheens. The visionary Arab seemed closer to my New York mysticism and cowboy shamanism than the ascetic Indian sadhus who eschewed sex. Five years before I embarked on my Holocaust studies, in 1983, I had invented a painting style called "Abstract Arabic." Those experiences were central to Ancient Currents Gallery, which I started with my brother and other members of the Modern Lovers Commune in San Francisco in 1976.

A drawing by Doniphan Blair from 1972 when he was in Afghanistan. illo: D. Blair
Our idea was to feature tribal art, art by artists from the global south, or "Western" artists influenced by those experiences, which I tried to capture with the concept "Abstract Aborigine," meaning we are all intellectuals and native to this planet. Until 1988, we did over 100 shows and performances, from New Guinea sculpture and South American weavings to the Indian painter Om Prakash Sharma, a poetry reading by Bob Kaufman or the Art War, Anti-Art and Fuck Art shows. While we lacked the backing to blow up, we showed some great art, explored important ideas, attracted a following and developed universalist experimental identities, stand in stark contrast to contemporary identity politics.

Although our neighbors in the now fashionable Upper Fillmore district of San Francisco sometimes complained, the world-travelers and global south artists we hosted loved us, as did the coterie of Black musicians who would come by to jam in our sound room as well as blow gage and enjoy the vegetarian feast we served nightly for a decade and a half.

Growing up Christian and Jewish, from a poor New York neighborhood while attending a deluxe private school, playing Little League as the only white kid in Harlem, I was ingrained with the multicultural exploration that flourished while doing Ancient Current. I developed three different "Abstract" painting styles: Arabic, which featured aggressive scribbles of color streaking through landscapes, Aborigine, which boiled shapes down to archetypes that often puzzled together, and Buddhist, which featured mandala-like compositions. It also fostered a radical centerism, a place of equilibrium, between moral relativism, since things are different in different cultures, and universal law and agreed-upon reality. While never the twain shall meet was the standard philosophical line of some of the classicists and postmodernists, I had met many people, mostly men, in Asia, I had looked into their eyes and felt their humanity, no matter how different from my own it might be.

Since neither Ancient Currents nor my painting took, although I kept painting, doing a well thought out series of ten or more every few years, there was not need to examine the ideas behind my work, until the mid-2010s. First, the Me Too movement called into question the validity of my Nude Series, started around 2010. I was exploiting women with my male gaze, a couple people implied or said outright, even though, my naked women, enshrined in the interlocking Arabic script patterns I had been building on for 40 years, obscured their genitalia and rendered them bejeweled. As cultural Marxism and Identity Politics emerged on top of Me Too, I realized that all my early work in India and South America, as well as with Ancient Currents and in my writing and image making there after could be called cultural appropriation or piracy or bowdlerization.

Fortunately, I was recently in New York City and happened to stumble upon an art show at Columbia University's Wallach Gallery (up until Jan 14) called Partisans of the Nude. And the Middle Eastern artists on display confirmed my 50 year-old experiment in radical multicultural art and philosophy, the painting style I called "Abstract Arabic" and the philosophy "Abstract Aborigine."

Indeed, at this terrible juncture of ideology, action and history, I would like to honor the progressive Muslims and Arabs of the last century, their culture and its effect on me. It’s not easy to articulate after Hamas’s barbaric attack, given the cheering by the hard left and hard right, and the hard military response by Israel, but I have to force myself, given the absence of other people offering creative, centrist or radically multicultural views.

Another Blair drawing, this time of the Rainbow Express, the hippie bus he road from Istanbul to Kabul in 1972. illo: D. Blair
My journey to the East started slowly, with tales from literature and world travelers, but it exploded beyond anything I could imagine as I disembarked in Turkey, in September 1972. The onslaught of sights, sounds and smells, especially in Izmir’s vast whorehouse district, triggered an avalanche of newness and oldness, otherness and innermost me, which eviscerated my 17-year-old psyche.

The stimulation kept increasing as I toured Istanbul, including one night with a pack of dogs, visiting mosques, tea shops, steam baths and hippie hotels, notably the Utopia, where I slept on the roof. It was there I first bought Turkey’s psychedelic green hashish, met friends I’m still close to, and boarded a hippie bus for Kabul, Afghanistan. Called the Rainbow Express, naturally, it cost $35.

As we crossed into Iran, my eyes were swamped by Arabic script, which ate like an acid into the squareness of western letters and ideas. In the mountains north of Tehran, actual acid did much the same. Down that path, I found Sufism, the non-sectarian, artistic and mystical wing of Islam, and “abstract Arabic,” a way of seeing which I incorporated into my art.

My “Abstract Arabic” body of work ranges from ink drawings to abstracts, essays, and nudes, paintings of naked women, which might be applauded by the Middle East’s most radical art movement of the 20th century, the Partisans of the Nude.

A Blair painting, done in Brazil six years after he was in Afghanistan, typifying his 'Abstract Arabic' style. illo: D. Blair
Some might people might critique me as a drug tourist, Orientalist or cultural appropriator, but that would require that they discount the hotel men happy to have tourists of any sorts, the hotel boys dancing wildly to my guitar, or the Asian guy in the desert with whom I shared a silent philosophical discussion, while the 20 others riding in the small Soviet truck stopped to pray to Allah.

If sometimes a bit stoic, the Afghans I met were almost entirely welcoming, except for the Kabul cabbie with a knife. Afghanistan in the early 1970s was a golden age, a few told me. Tragically, a few years later, they too descended into a hell cycle, which went for 43 years and was worse than the 75 years endured by the Arabs and Israelis.

The mud and dome architecture also enthralled me, after my youth in square New York City apartments. It reached an apogee at the Taj Mahal, which I visited with Mac—we drove 2000 miles together in his VW van—and two French junkies, who liked to argue about cooking. Its domes, pools and jewel-encrusted walls were crafted by Sufi artisans from the Moghul empire, the last emperor of which was also a poet, musician and mystical wanderer.

Although I feared becoming a full mystical wanderer myself, I adopted some of their ways: sleeping on the streets of Bombay, stopping at temples to pray, riding the asphyxiatingly-crowded trains, and eating the spicy street food, which was delicious but brought dysentery and worms.
I was also inspired by the Hashasheens, a literary reference I heard before I went to India from Mick Jagger’s character in the film “Performance”. A 12th century cult which used "macho” monotheism, hashish and the notion that “Nothing is real, and everything is permitted,” they came to be called Assassins, since they were also suicide hit men. Indeed, they terrorized Central Asia and the Middle East for centuries, using misinformation and roleplaying, much like today’s conspiracy theorists, and exaggerated violence, much like today’s radical Islamists.

After driving with Mac into the mountains of Pakistan to buy hash—, $1 a pound—near where bin Laden was assassinated, we crossed India to the hippie haven of Goa, for three-months vacationing and hash vending on the beach. The trip took a hard turn, however, after I got hepatitis and was robbed, but the ideas and inspiration kept in flooding in. So I staggered on, journeying through Rajasthan, Benares and Kathmandu, and returning to the West through the Afghan desert in the summer of ‘73.

And I continued journey after I returned, exploring Arab, Islamic, Persian, Turkish and Indian culture. Despite being Jewish, my half-adopted culture fit in fine with the multiculturalism of Manhattan and San Francisco, where I moved, although it did take me years to decipher what I experienced.

Everything changed after 9/11. I felt obliged to speak up for Arab and Muslim liberals, artists and Sufis, since so few in the media or elsewhere, including on the left or in Islam, were doing so. My “Art Fatwa” (October, 2001), “East Actually Does Meet West” poster (2001), and essay, “What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East?” (2004), didn't earn much acclaim, but those pieces remain central to my oeuvre and a testimony to the benefits of a journey to the East.
In fact, it was only after 9/11 that my professional studies started, as I raided the book shelves of the Afghan grocery stores of Fremont, California, buttonholed Sufi teachers at retreats and bought every last Sufi book at the world-renown Moe’s Books in Berkeley. After satiating myself on their insightful poetry and advanced philosophy, I tackled the Sufi’s little known history.

I also inhaled Arab scholarship, from the famous Palestinian-American Columbia professor, Edward Said, who lived two blocks from my New York apartment, to Fatema Mernissi, the brilliant Sorbonne-educated Moroccan, and Richard Burton, the 19th century English explorer turned Sufi. If you want a literary magic carpet ride to race you from Arabia’s first poet-prince, Imruʾ al-Qais, to “1,001 Arabian Nights”, I recommend the monumental “Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature”, edited by Robert Irwin.

What happened to the Sufis of the Middle East after 9/11 became the big mystery I had to solve, both to honor progressive Muslims but also my life work in the realm of Abstract Arabic. I made some startling discoveries, notably that the Sufis saved Islam three times—in al-Ghazali’s theology, after the Mongol devastation, and again in the Sufi Golden Ages—but they couldn't repeat that after 9/11. They feared the fury of the fundamentalists, who had been riding out of the Saudi Arabian desert since the 18th century and killing them.

And now we have the Hashasheens reborn as Hamas, also deeply devoted to the suicide strike. Indeed, Hamas perpetrated hundreds of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada (2000-05) and pushed their entire community onto the chopping block on October 7th.

I am from a refugee family, and I stand with all refugees, but only their right to a safe haven and citizenship not return, which would be insane for the 100 million refugees since WWII. Tragically, the radical Islamists made Israel a religious issue not a land swap between the 750,000 Palestinian and 900,000 Jewish refugees of 1948. And they besmirched the Palestinian cause by slaughtering Sufis, women, artists and Christians as well as Jews. Indeed, the Mufti of Jerusalem al-Husseini directed his thugs to murder many members of the liberal Nashashibi family in the 1930s and spent World War Two in Berlin lobbying for the Holocaust, including plans to set up a death camp in Palestine.

Nevertheless, Muslim and Arab liberalism started with Muhammad. It flowered with the massive Sufi movements, which fostered golden ages in Baghdad, Persia, India, Turkey, Morocco, Timbuktu and elsewhere. It gained power in the 20th century, typified by Said, Mernissi and the Partisan of the Nude artists but also the enormous Arab Spring protests, a dozen years ago.

Yes, the Israel Defense Force had to become brutal after 75 years of existential war with their neighbors, although statistically they remain one of the most pacifist armies on record. Meanwhile, the fact that so many educated, liberal and leftist Americans and Europeans support radical Islamists, at the expense of the Sufis, artists, Christians and women, not to mention Jews, suggests they are unfamiliar with Arab poetry, Sufi philosophy, Partisan of the Nude art or my “Art Fatwa.”

The Middle East is home to the oldest societies on earth, making them some of the most corrupt on earth. Reducing corruption is the radical Islamists’ main virtue, which endears them to impoverished and traumatized Arabs and Muslims. But monotheism means we're all equal, created by one god, which also requires democracy, so we can all worship in our preferred manner. Indeed, we’re already one scabrous, digitally-connected, world constituency, voting with our feet, if not at the ballot box.

So you tell me: will we follow the Islam of the Sufis or the Hashasheens? Posted on Dec 26, 2023 - 02:01 AM
Did Arabs and Jews Like Each Other in 1947?
by Doniphan Blair

Jewish and Arab boy, Palestine, circa 1960s. photo: A. Bulshetski
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

While Nazi loathing is legion, less well known is that many Germans loved Jews. “Every German stallion needs a Jewish mare,” advised “Iron Chancellor” Bismarck, the founding father of Germany; antisemitism was much higher in 19th century France than Germany, where Jews and Germans intermarried at a phenomenal rate; and German Jews won more Nobel prizes than any other group in history, suggesting a little-noted truth: When people come to love the Jews, others feel left out, threatened, compelled to destroy.

Jewish immigration to Palestine was a long litany of colonialism, exploitation and ethnic cleansing, according to some of my pro-Palestine friends and likeminded pundits, but a compelling, contradictory story is told by Bartley Crum in his 1947 book, “Behind the Silken Curtain”. A liberal Republican lawyer from San Francisco, who defended blacklisted Hollywood figures and Paul Robeson, among other progressive causes, Crum was on the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, the fact-finding officials dispatched to the Middle East to investigate the “Jewish Question” and take public testimony. Although Crum cites controversial private views throughout, he really gets rolling exposing little known stories in Jerusalem, in his twelfth chapter, which is titled “Mr. Effendi, Do Not Believe All You Hear” (effendi: person of high status).

I have edited Crum’s text for flow (indicated by ellipses), added some emphasis (in ALL CAPS) and historical parentheticals, and included twenty pages of text, since it is so worth reading.

Chapter 12 of 'Behind the Silken Curtain' starts as follows:

Wherever possible between and after hearings I spoke with the younger Arabs—Palestinian counterparts of my friend Tewfik in Cairo. Educated at the American University in Cairo and in Beirut, and some at Oxford, most were extremely wealthy. Though they stemmed from the effendi stratum of Arab society, it was my feeling that, given a free hand, they would become socially progressive. They made it clear, however, that in Palestine, the political scene was dominated by the Mufti [Amin al-Husseini] through Jaamal Husseini.

[Historical Note: The al-Husseini ruling family produced many of Jerusalem’s mayors and muftis. Amin al-Husseini was forced to step down as Mufti, meaning head Muslim cleric, because he led the Arab Revolt (1936-39), but he retained the title of Mufti.]

Arabs meet with Jews in Jerusalem, circa 1932. photo: unknown.
The younger Arabs appeared strongly influenced by Mrs. Antonius… [Katy Antonius was the daughter of a Christian Lebanese-Egyptian newspaper magnate, the wife of an esteemed Palestinian intellectual AND the lover of Palestine’s British commander. She was also Jerusalem’s premier salon leader and party host.]

I was perplexed to discover that, despite [Katy's] antagonism toward the Jews, several of her proteges believed that the key to the Palestine problem was not keeping the Jews out, but urging them to enter and build the old Greater Syria. This, it was explained to me, would utilize Jewish brains and Jewish capital. But there was little they could do about it because the Mufti, and the older effendis and cadis [learned men] maintained that the Zionists were in league with the British. They preached that it was impossible to get rid of the British unless they got rid of the Zionists. This they translated into keeping the Jews out.

Unquestionably, definite fear and hatred of the Mufti existed among Arab opposition families in Palestine. They expected his return to the Middle East [from house arrest in Paris, for being a Nazi collaborator] but doubted he would come immediately to Palestine because of the blood feuds still raging between many of the leading Arab families and the Husseinis.

I explored this subject with a member of the Nashashibi family [also the source of Jerusalem mayors, including Raghib al-Nashashibi, 1920–‘34, whose wife was Jewish], who called on me at the King David Hotel. Seated in the luxurious lounge of the hotel, listening to the teatime chamber music, he told me his cousin, Fakhri Nashashibi, a second -ranking member of his clan, had been killed in Baghdad in 1941 by the Mufti’s men.

“We have never avenged his blood,” he said. “Sooner or later we shall catch up with the Mufti.”

I told him of the Mufti’s record, as I had come upon it in Nuremberg. I said I was convinced of his guilt as a war criminal. [In fact, Amin al-Husseini was an avid antisemitic conspiracist and Nazi collaborator, who published the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", moved to Berlin for the last three years of World War Two, lobbied for the Holocaust, did radio broadcasts to recruit Bosnian Muslims for the Russian front, served as spymaster for the Axis’ Middle East department, and made plans to set up a death camp in Palestine.] I hoped sooner or later to see him tried, I assured him.

“You will wait a long time,” [the Nashashibi] said soberly. “I have lived in Palestine my whole life. My family has been here for generations. We know the ways of the British in such matters. You will see—the Mufti will be allowed to escape from Paris and then he will turn up in Saudi Arabia or some near-by Arab state and presently come back to power again.” He gave me the background of the long-standing feud between the two families and explained how strenuously his family had been seeking to rid Palestine of the Huessenis’ deathlike grip.

The cover of Crum's 'Behind the Silken Curtain'.
[The English attempted to prosecute Amin el-Husseini for instigating attacks on Arab liberals and Jews, but both the Brits and the Nashashibis thought that appointing him Mufti, after he lobbied for the position in 1922, “might temper Hajj Amin’s intransigence.”]

“It was the old story of appeasement,” Nashashibi told me now, “and like all appeasement, it proved a major error. As soon as Hajj Amin [hajj: honorific for one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca] came to power, he was as intransigent as ever. He purged the Arab leadership of every Arab that threatened his domination, and I do not exaggerate when I say that the Mufti’s gangs simply ELIMINATED BY MURDER HUNDREDS of his political opponents,” (my emphasis). The Mufti, he added, was publicly charged with “direct responsibility” for the murder of 28 men, all distinguished Palestine Arab leaders, in an affidavit entitled “Voice from the Arab Tombs of Palestine,” published in Cairo on January 2, 1939, by Sheik Ali Yassin, who had escaped to Egypt from Palestine. “The Mufti is a great problem for us, as you can see,” he added.

As to the question which brought the [Anglo-American] Committee to Palestine—Nashashibi’s solution, which I heard with some surprise, was partition. His reasons were these: the Jews could have an independent democratic state with a Jewish majority; second, the Arabs could have a large Arab state comprising Trans-Jordan and the Arab-populated parts of Palestine, all under King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan; and third, the British would be eliminated, which is what both Jews and Arabs wanted.

“From a dynastic point of view, we Nashashibis would like to see that solution,” he said. “[Jordan’s King] Abdullah has no love for the Mufti, and if Abdullah were to reign over greater Trans-Jordan he would put the Mufti in his proper place. Our family fortunes would prosper, because we have always enjoyed excellent relations with the Hashimite dynasty to which Abdullah belongs.”

He added: “Of course, these things cannot be said in public. Should you quote me specifically—” He brought the edge of his hand, fingers outstretched, against his neck in a vivid chopping motion. “’Helas!’ I would be finished.”

Later I reported his prediction on the Mufti to [Reginald] Maningham-Buller [a Conservative member of the English Parliament also on the Committee]. “I am afraid someone has been pulling your leg, old fellow,” he said good-humoredly. “I don’t think the Mufti will ever be allowed back in the Middle East.” [In point of fact, the Mufti returned to Cairo a year later, in August 1947, and continued his anti-Zionist and pro-Fascist work until his death in Beirut in 1974.]

Another Arab of influence with whom I discussed Middle East politics was Yussef D… Mr D. greeted me in French rather than in the Middle Eastern fashion and began our discussion by saying that he thought of Wendall Willkie [the 1940 Republican presidential candidate who toured the Middle East in 1944 and was a friend of Crum] as his ‘grand ami’—a man who really understood that all men were brothers.

He told me that the Arab world, even at the top, was far from unwilling to co-operate with the Jews. The entire Middle East needed the intelligence, ingenuity, and productive capacity they represented. Coming from an Arab dignitary this rather startled me, although I knew from conversations with [Chaim] Weizmann [the Russian biochemist who became Israel’s first president] and other Jewish leaders, and from my own examination here, that the relationship between the Arabs and the Jews—save when someone else was looking—was good.

Hasidic brothers, the land purchase document, and the Arab seller, circa 1935. photo: unknown.
Mr D. cited the vast unsettled and undeveloped areas in the Arab world. “You must not forget that the Middle East was the cradle of civilization and in Roman times the granary of the world. It once held millions of people and boasted great civilizations.” I asked him what he thought the needs were. First, he said, was education. For centuries, the Arab people had no opportunity for education. He took me to the window of his suite and pointed to the distant hills which were being reforested by Jewish settlers.

“Whether the present Arab leadership likes it or not,” he said, “we must realize that what the Jews are doing in Palestine must be done for the whole Middle East, if we are to take our rightful place in the community of nations.” Again I expressed some surprise at these conciliatory words, but he remarked, “You should not think what I say strange. I was a friend of Wendell Willkie.” He drew a wallet from his pocket and showed me snapshots taken of him and Wendell together. “I believe in peace with our neighbors. When I look at the Middle East, I think of it as a great customs union, a great trading area. Therein lies our hope...”

Our conversation veered to democracy. “Our people are unfortunately not ready for democracy as you know it,” he said. “We have a parliament, but no real freedom. We have the forms of democracy but not the substance. Take, for example, Lebanon. It is a republic. It has a parliament. But out of the 55 members of that parliament, not one represents the farmers, the artisans, or the workers. They are all wealthy landowners, lawyers or merchants. That is why we can have the forms of democracy but not its substance. We can get the substance of democracy only by raising the living standard of all of our people, by education and by developing the land. That is why I believe in irrigation and electric-power projects in this area…”

He lit a cigarette and thought somberly for a moment. “I say to you honestly, Mr. Crum, I am sick at heart. I have seen my own people telling your committee lies. You must not believe what they say to you in public—they say what they feel they must say for public consumption, but I assure you many of them are neither as recalcitrant or as belligerent [toward the Jews] as they appear!”

“If they were sure that Britain and America wished the Jews and Arabs to get together, we would. But they are not convinced, these Arab leaders: they wish to maintain their position of power, and they know that depends on keeping to the [British] Colonial Office line.”

I interrupted, “You mean the witnesses who appeared before us?” He said, “Yes, you must not believe what most of them say to you in public.”

Topside Arab leadership, he said, was extremely cynical about Western civilization. They used democratic catch phrases because they thought it pleased the Western world. In his opinion real democracy could come to the Middle East only though economic development of the whole area in co-operation with the Jewish community of Palestine. Medical needs were all important, he added. Disease was appalling among his people. “They desperately need education so they will better understand that the modern world offers them a better life…”

He concluded by emphasizing that the fundamental Arab error was in not sitting down with the Jews. Unfortunately, he said, the Jews, too, were guilty of this error and sometimes fell into the trap of thinking of the Arabs as their enemies.

Jewish and Arab Jerusalemites chat, circa 1938. photo: unknown.
There is no question that this man heads a school of thought in some Arab countries which has not been able to speak out. At this date I still do not feel free to reveal his name.

I tried to see as much of Palestine as I could, and the necessary facilities were given to me. One afternoon I came into the King David lobby to find a tall, dark Arab youth of about 24 waiting for me. “Mr. Crum?” he asked, and put out his hand. “I am Michael. I am to be your chauffer. I am a Christian, sir. I am named after a saint. I have a wife and a coming baby. I live in Bethlehem, and I have a hard time to make a living…”

“Michael, I want to know what the common man thinks,” I said…

Michael said apologetically that he did not want to be involved in such matters, but that some of the Arab Christians—perhaps one in five Palestinian Arabs were Christian—felt the presence of the Jews in Palestine helped safeguard them. The Christians had been persecuted by the Muslims long before the Jews, he said.

“Then Michael, what is the truth about trouble between the Arabs and Jews?”

Michael spread his hands. “Sir, I am interested in making enough money for my wife and my baby that is coming… I know I am an attractive man but where am I to go? I am limited. My father, my grandfather, his father, and his grandfather before him all lived in Bethlehem. I must live there, too. That is not right. A man should be able to move. I speak English, Arabic, Hebrew—but what good does it do me?” He explained that as an Arab Christian, he was viewed with suspicion by Muslim Arab officials, and said that he could not get visas to foreign countries such as the United States or West Africa [where the Lebanese mercantile class was well-established]… He could go to another Arab country, if he wished, but I am afraid my life would be even more difficult to make…”

“Do your friends read about politics?” I asked. “Do they know what is happening? Are they interested?”

“It is not easy to say, sir, that they are interested. We sit in the coffeehouse and we hear what the radio tells us, and we talk about what is taking place, but we have no power, my friends and I. The common man here is not important. He does not vote, no one asks him anything. A wise man does not become deeply caught in matters in which he can do nothing.”

Michael possessed a natural dignity of his own. He enjoyed himself where and how he could. He was not above becoming pleasantly intoxicated on Palestinian brandy, which he obtained in Richon-le-Zion, a Jewish village…

I found it interesting to discuss morals with him. In this he was as fatalistic as in other things. “You know, Jerusalem is a pure city, sir,” he told me. “We do not permit any houses of women within the boundaries of the city… here they are on the outskirts.”

As we drove through the country… I attempted to see Jewish and Arab life both in the whole and in detail; upon its average economic level and among its poor and its rich. I visited many Arab villages with Michael as my translator.

On one trip [fellow Committee members] Crick, Sir Frederick, and I entered the town of Beisan… [A]pparently the Arab Higher Committee had been there before us, for [there were] placards in English, reading “Bring the Mufti Back” and “Support the White Paper” [the 1939 English edict which prohibited almost all Jewish immigration and contributed to the Holocaust]…

Bartley Crum, the San Francisco lawyer who was member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry and wrote the groundbreaking 'Behind the Silken Curtain' (1947). photo: D. Halsman
Numerous sheiks welcomed us in their colorful robes, and there was much gracious and ceremonious bowing. We found these village Arab leaders extremely nationalistic. An Arab Roman Catholic priest was also present, and he expressed in the strongest terms his opposition to the Jews. I told him that I, too, was Roman Catholic, and recalled to him the clear stand of our Church on antisemitism…

[Crum’s extensive travels brought him from Nazareth, Jericho and Haifa to orange groves and shipbuilding shops as well as monasteries, mosques and Biblical sites.] I visited Hadassah Hospital on Mt. Scopus [in Jerusalem], not far from the Hebrew University, and was impressed by this medical institution, whose medical staff and nursing corps are unquestionably among the finest in the world. Later at the hospital’s outpatient clinic in the heart of modern Jerusalem, I saw Arab mothers bringing their children for treatment.

[I visited Tel Aviv,] a thriving city of 200,000… with tree-shaded boulevards, opera and theater, with playgrounds and modern schools, with buses and apartment houses. [My tour guide] told us how the city’s character had changed from that of a residential suburb [of the old city of Jaffa], in which trade was barred, to that of Palestine’s commercial center, following the 1921 Arab riots, when Jews were compelled to move their shops out of Jaffa. In 1936, an Arab general strike [led by Amin al-Husseini] which paralyzed port activities in Jaffa, led the Jews to develop a port of their own.

[Crum attended a play and visited construction sites and a Jewish family living in what “might have been an apartment in San Francisco,” except for] a small nephew recently rescued from the concentration camps… and his arm, just above the wrist showed the same purple band [of tattooed numbers] I had become so familiar with in Germany and Austria.

[He visited a kibbutz] where perhaps 350 men, women and children lived… This agricultural settlement seemed to present an excellent example of how smoothly Palestine Jewry fits into life in Palestine. Nearby was a monastery, and not far was an Arab village. The secretary of the kibbutz was about 30, wearing khaki trousers and a shirt open at the neck, and spoke English with an accent.

“I came from Yugoslavia ten years ago,” he told me. “My wife came with me. Our family believed that the Jews had no future in Europe: that we must return to the soil, that we must make a nation or be lost…”

I asked him if they had experienced any trouble with the Arabs.

“Our problem here is clear,” he said. “We must get along with our Arab neighbors. We do get along with them. They get along with us. When we drilled our well, the first to take water from us was the Arabs who lived nearby. Let’s go there for a moment,” he said…

As we passed a large lumber shed, I peered in. Two boys about sixteen were working with an electric buzz saw. They were making wooden marionettes in preparation for a children’s show they were to give in a few days.

“Are you surprised?” my companion asked, smiling.

I said I was. Somehow the thought of a marionette show in the middle of this “troubled” country seemed bizarre…

Orthodox Jew and Arab friend in Jerusalem's Old City, circa 2000. photo: unknown
Once in the Arab village, we came upon a kibbutz member adjudicating a dispute between two Arabs, and I was gratified to learn he had been a lawyer in Berlin. During the Arab disturbances of 1936-’39, the Secretary told me, many Arab villagers warned their Jewish neighbors of attacks. More Arabs were killed by Arab raiders, principally because the Arab villagers refused to give up men, donkeys, and food requisitioned by the Arab mercenaries [recruited by the Husseinis, often from Syria and Egypt]…

[Crum details the vibrant kibbutz life, notably the Secretary's explanation of how romance and marriage were more advanced on the kibbutz than in town, due to the absence of heirarchy both between women and men but richer and poorer men. Then he asks if they received any child survivors of the Holocaust. Since they had, he learns how they were slowly introduced to the new way of life. Crum especially enjoyed the kibbutz’s Children’s House, where children lived apart from their parents under the care of young women, noting “one of my pleasantest half-hours was spent in this child’s world in the middle of Palestine.”]

“As for money, it has no value here with the collective,” [the Secretary said.] “We have food, we have lodging, we have clothes… We each receive items such as toothpaste, soap and razors. We are all mature here. We do not ask for more than we need. We do not take advantage of each other.”

“But what about your young women? Do they wear identical dresses?” I asked. “The girls wouldn’t stand for it back home.”

He laughed.

“Yes, we recognize that, and so we have a few different styles of dress. The women choose what they like and, of course, they can sew or decorate it according to their wishes…”

[Crum concludes his kibbutz chapter with, “It is always difficult to draw conclusions on the basis of brief study, but the kibbutz movement seemed to me a striking contribution to modern life.” His next chapter concerns the Israeli freedom fighters, the Hagenah, the spies trailing him and the disagreements between the Committee’s English and American members, all of which is fascinating but I omit because it doesn’t illuminate Arab-Jewish relations. He jumps back into that topic, however, in Chapter 16: “Arab vs. Jew: ‘On the Top Level’”.]

[Crum starts by introducing Sir Alan Gordon Cunningham, His Majesty’s chief executive in Palestine and his problems, but also Cunningham’s predecessor] Field Marshal Viscount Gort, who had resigned his position in Jerusalem in 1945, shortly before his death. Gort had given his illness as the reason for his resignation, but there were many in Palestine who said that Gort had been unwise enough to let his heart rule him: he had become pro-Jewish [while most English authorities were pro-Arab, some did favor the Jews], and he simply could not carry out policies, particularly after the war ended and thousands of Jewish refugees pleaded to enter Palestine, which he knew would add to the bitterness and the anguish of Palestinian Jewry. Whatever the cause, there was no doubt that Gort was one of the most popular High Commissioners Palestine had ever had…

Sir Alan [Cunningham] struck me as a worthy successor to Lord Gort. Possessing an air of great gentleness and kindliness, he was not at all military in manner. If he had a free hand, I am convinced the Arab-Jewish problems in Palestine would be enormously simplified. He was one of the few British officials I met in whom I found a sympathetic understanding of both Arab and Jewish positions.

“I have tried hard to get both Arab and Jewish leaders together,” he said. “I have attempted it at government receptions, which you might say are really command performances. But”—he smiled wryly—“within a short time you’d discover the Arab and Jewish leaders on opposite sides of the room, afraid to speak to each other in public, especially in front of British officials.”

“Yet I know from my own confidential reports that in day-to-day activities, the Jews and Arabs of course see each other and get along well.” [Crum broached delicate topics like the British arrest of many Jews and Arabs, the need for American troops or the ability to absorb 100,000 Jewish immigrants, which Cunningham largely sidestepped. Crum] left Government House with the feeling that Sir Alan himself favored partition as a solution but with a far more generous territorial allowance to the new state of Judea [i.e. Israel—evidently, Crum was unaware of the new state’s intended name].

[At the Government House meeting with Cunningham, Crum encountered Anthony, a Franciscan monk from Vermont, who invited him to cocktails at his monastery. There, another monk told Crum how the Arab and Jewish children were friends at the Franciscan school.]

“Would you say the struggle between Arabs and Jews is at the top level only?” I asked.

He nodded. “On the top level,” he said, “there is no question of it.”

Into my mind flashed the words of Viscount Samuel, the first High Commissioner of Palestine [who was Jewish but nonsectarian and even appointed al-Husseini Mufti], as he sat before us in London, quiet, informed, his hands folded on the small table before him, and summed up the problem.

“I think if you could get a political settlement at the top, things would shape up very differently at the bottom. I do not think the bottom people wish to quarrel; at the top they rather like it.”

In London, critics of the Jews in Palestine had charged that the Arabs were paid far less than the Jews and this caused difficulties among the two peoples. [At Committee hearings] I had heard the testimony of Mrs. Goldie Meyerson, spokeswoman for the Histadruth, the General Federation of Jewish Labor, who told us, from the first day of Jewish work in Palestine, the Histadruth had never ceased to work for mutual aid and co-operation with Arab workers.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Meyerson, who had grown up in Milwaukee [also the childhood home of Golda Meir, Israel’s fourth prime minister, 1969-74] and become the first woman leader in the Palestine labor movement, “we recognize two different standards of wage levels in Palestine. It is not a happy situation and the record will show that we have worked constantly to raise the Arab level to the Jewish, or we face the possibility of bringing the Jewish down to the Arab. We don’t want this. We are building a country, a civilization, a way of life, and we don’t want a master race, with a people of much lower standard of living among us. We want our young people to grow up in an environment of high cultural standards, not only within the Jewish communal settlements, but in the neighboring Arab villages, in the streets of Jerusalem, in the streets of Haifa—everywhere.”

In the ‘20s, the Jewish employers and workers urged the Mandatory [Mandatory Palestine, established by the League of Nations and lasting 1920-’48] to establish minimum wage legislation for all workers, Arab and Jewish, in Palestine, she testified. This was not granted. The Jewish Agency repeatedly requested blanket wage increases to Jewish and Arab policemen and Jewish and Arab civil servants. This was refused.

I myself learned that much of the difficulty of raising the Arab standard of living lies in the OPPOSITION OF THE ARAB EFFENDI [my emphasis] to having Arab workers reach the same wage levels as the Jewish workers. This policy has been recognized by the Mandatory itself; even in government work a wage differential is maintained by the Mandatory between Arab and Jewish workers.

I built up my conclusions slowly. Walking through the streets of Jerusalem, I would come upon an Arab having an English letter read to him by a small Jewish school child. I found that Arabic was taught in all the Jewish secondary schools and even some of the elementary ones, while every agricultural settlement had at least one Arabic teacher. Down at the Dead Sea, Arabs and Jews worked in harmony. [Despite the wage differential,] the Arabs received almost double the wages paid Arabs in Egypt performing comparable work. In Haifa, Jews and Arabs are together members of the town council and the mayor is Jewish: both Jews and Arabs collaborate on numerous government boards, committees, and trade and commerce organizations. In the citrus industry, one of Palestine’s great industries, Jewish and Arab orange growers cooperate.

I discovered that basically their common success depended on their common efforts. In Jerusalem, for example, if Jews were to patronize only Jewish shops, and Arabs on Arab shops, both would suffer.

Arab governments invite Hebrew University professors to formulate schemes of improvement, and officials and students from neighboring Arab countries work in Jewish research institutions and laboratories. I thought it paradoxical to learn that the very Arab leaders who attack the Jews send their wives and families to Hadassah Hospital, an institution made possible only by the Zionist endeavor.

In rural areas of Palestine I found the Arabs looking upon the Jews with great respect. Farmers themselves, they regarded with approval these [Jewish] people who worked the land so earnestly, who were ready to stay up all night with a sick lamb, and whose of values toward the simple things of earth—planting, harvesting, irrigating—were like their own. These Arabs might be told time and again by political leaders that the Jews were a foreign people, alien to Palestine and its ageless way of life: but they saw the evidence of their own eyes that these men and women were ready to endure great hardship, live in malarial country, fight nature with all their energy—and they understood this.

THE BASIC TRUTH OF ARAB-JEWISH LIFE IN PALESTINE IS THAT POLITICAL CONFLICT ON HIGH LEVELS DOES NOT AFFECT THE RELATIONS AMONG MEN ON THE STREET [Crum’s emphasis].

I could find no conflict of interest. The nearer an Arab village was to a Jewish colony, the better its economic, social and health conditions. There is no question that the Arabs of Palestine are better off than those of any other Arab country. The birth rate of the Palestine Arabs is higher, the death rate lower: an Arab laborer in Palestine is paid higher wages and lives a better life than his opposite number in Egypt or in Iraq, although they have no problem there of Jewish immigration or “Zionist invasion.” It is precisely because of this better life in Palestine that tens of thousands of Arabs from neighboring Arab countries have been attracted to Palestine, crossing the border from Syria, Trans-Jordan, and Egypt—and they are still coming.

Yet despite this lack of conflict of interests, despite this lack of hatred and animosity in everyday life, in spite of the signs of neighborly friendship I had seen myself, apparently a feud exists on the higher levels.

I became almost obsessed with this question of Arab-Jewish relations. Left alone, I was told by both peoples, they would get along. And slowly this same conviction grew in me, and slowly it became definite truth to me that at every turn, whether covertly or overtly, whether by design or through ignorance, pressures were at work on both peoples to keep them if possible at each other’s throats.

It is obvious that there were two vested interests militating against a Jewish-Arab understanding. Two distinct groups, for reasons of its own, are opposed to a Jewish Palestine. The Arab kings and the effendis form the first group. British imperialism represents the second—and both, in that “passive alliance” cited by Dr. Einstein [earlier in the book], were now acting as one against a common enemy.

Pan-Arabism as a solid united force of the Arab world was more myth than truth. [As it happened, the United Arab Republic, which included Egypt, the Gaza Strip and Syria, only existed from 1958 until 1961.] The community of interests of the kings, sheiks, and effendis in the various Arab lands is unquestionably the main force of the Arab states in their fight against Zionism. And in this united front, the Arab masses are unprotected. What we have here is a class interest of state rulers, landowners and officialdom. To them, as distinct from the multitudes of the Arab peoples, Zionism’s social and technological innovations are a threat because they mean lifting the masses from their ignorance and serfdom...

[Crum’s remaining 70 pages covers why the Brits are so determined to keep the Arab establishment on their side—to help preserve their empire—public works that could help the Middle East and a chapter entitled “Arab Adventure”, about when Committee members flew to Syria and Iraq, where the authorities’ attempt to impress them with scenes of “happy Jews” backfired.]

If, in centuries past, the Arabs had been hospitable to the Jews, this was now the 20th century, and we were in an era of growing nationalism and xenophobia in which the Jew, the perennial stranger, was the first and most helpless victim. The result of Arab nationalism today was to denationalize the Jews and break any connection they had with Jews elsewhere—particularly in Palestine. At the same time, Arabs nationalism did not permit the Jew to become assimilated in the Arab states, so that he was, as it were, GROUND BETWEEN TWO STONES [my emphasis]. In Iraq for example, Zionism was high treason. Every Iraqi Jew’s passport was stamped “Not Valid for Palestine…”

[Fifty-seven pages later, Crum’s final paragraph concludes:] We cannot have peace, I am convinced, with a Middle East divided, half Fascist, half democratic. Palestine symbolizes the crossroads, not only for our foreign policy but the world. Which way will we choose?

My Conclusion

Although Crum's conclusion was prescient, he provides an even more important perspective by observing and officially documenting, in "Behind the Silken Curtain" and the Anglo-American Committee report, the cooperation between the Jewish immigrants and the majority of Palestinians, from the urban working classes, who were getting better wages and medical services, to farmers living near kibbutzes or wealthy liberals, like the Nashashibis, who were happy to have modern civilization arrive in Jerusalem and Haifa as well as Tel Aviv. Sadly, "[t]he community of interests of the kings, sheiks, and effendis in the various Arab lands" vehemently opposed the Jewish pioneers, as Crum emphasizes when he states it "is unquestionably the main force of the Arab states in their fight against Zionism." Many of his findings indicate exactly how these vested Arab interests were threatened by the emergence of a Jewish nation at the geographical choke point between the two enormous land masses of the 22 Arab countries.

As rulers of a region plagued by poverty, lack of education and powerful religions, the Arab aristocracy knew they could easily conjure anti-Zionism and antisemitism, based on monotheist devotion, conspiracy theories and millennia living as neighbors with Jews—proximity naturally breeding contempt, envy and scapegoating. Hence, only three years after World War Two and the Holocaust, which not only killed six million Jews but about 60 million others and generated almost as many refugees, rightwing Arab leaders felt they could easily destroy Israel. They mounted two wars: the civil war of 1947, led by associates of al-Husseini (he was still in Europe) and often involving mercenaries, and Israel's War of Independence in '48, after being invaded by the armies of Egypt, Jordan (the English-run Arab Legion), Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and, minimally, Saudi Arabia. It killed between 7,000 and 20,000 people, including almost one percent of Israelis, but that was microscopic in the sanguineous 1940s, especially since a fragile peace was reached in under a year.

While Israel is still one of the smallest nations in the world, with only 8,550 square miles, in 1948 it was almost half that. Nevertheless, that would have been enough to allow it to become the center of the "'great trading area,'" the French-speaking liberal Mr D. hoped for. Indeed, if the Arabs had accepted the Peel Commission plan of 1937 and some of the European Jews fleeing Nazi Europe, they could have built up a Middle Eastern Europe right as regular Europe was self-destructing. Tragically, a flourishing Middle East, benefiting from Jewish know-how, investment and socialist as well as capitalist and democratic expertise, would threaten the Arab aristocracy's chokehold on the peasant populations.

Hence, although the Arab establishment voted for Israel by proxy when they expelled over a million Arab Jews—and that became a standard land swap with the 750,000 Arabs forced out by the Israelis—they wanted their cake and to eat it, too. They endeavored to destroy Israel through Machiavellian politics and conspiracy theories and by refusing to accept in their midst Palestinian as well as Jewish refugees. With the connivance of the United Nations, they created the poison pill of the eternal Palestinian refugee. Hence, unlike any other refugee in human history, many of the descendants of those Palestinians remain refugees today. The Arab ruling class and rightwing was soon joined in this effort by the emerging Arab left and radical Islamists. They combined refugee intransigence with conspiracy theories like the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", which claims Jews control the banks, and European and Islamist antisemitic notions, which portray the Jews as communists, capitalists or evil monsters.

In point of fact, Israel is infinitely more legitimate than colonial nations like the United States, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico or Australia, given those invaders genocided the indigenous people and stole the vast majority of their land and none of their forbears ever lived there. Israel, meanwhile, was tiny, the Jews were its ancient inhabitants, had both immigrated and emigrated over the millennia, and had always maintained a presence in Jerusalem, which had been conquered around 40 times but never made the capital of another empire simply because everyone knew it was Jewish. In addition, they purchased about 10% of Israel from the Ottomans and helped their neighbors in agriculture, jobs, medicine and education.

Finally accepting those Zionist achievements and inherent legitimacy, much of the Arab ruling class made their peace with Israel. Jordan did so secretly in the early 1970s, Egypt, in 1978, and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords on September 15, 2020. Nevertheless, they refused to address the refugee tragedy, freeing Palestinians up to become citizens of their countries. Hence, the poison pill planted by Husseini and the intransigent Arab aristocracy—denying the Palestinians refuge and citizenship in the 1950s—has come to dominate Palestinian politics as well as the anti-colonialist Left and antisemitic Right.

Indeed, those sentiments inspired Hamas, well aware they were losing validity and that the leading Arab nation, Saudi Arabia which took over from Egypt in the '70s, was about to join the Abrahamic Accords. Knowing their audience's fears and phobias, Hamas elected to make not just a powerful military attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, but a grotesque, over-the-top transgressive one, which they proudly broadcast on social media for all to see. Their gamble paid off. Indeed, the anti-Zionist efforts of the old Arab hegemony were still in effect, as indicated by the enormous protests, starting on October 8th and continuing for months across many major cities of the West. Whether their sacrifice of Gaza and terrible traumatizing of the Gazans as well as Israelis, and the coming backlash against their supporters in western academia and progressive communities will prove to their benefit will take decades to unravel, let alone prove.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on Nov 23, 2023 - 03:04 AM
Conspiracy Theory Patterns in the Time of Trump
by Doniphan Blair

Senator Joseph McCarthy (rt) and his main assistance, lawyer Roy Cohn, circa 1954 Senate hearings
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

WE LIVE IN A GOLDEN AGE OF
conspiracy theories, from Donald Trump's siren song about stolen election to radio host Alex Jones’s three decades of hoarse yelling about “deep state attacks” on the Twin Towers and Sandy Hook, or basketball player Kyrie Irving’s towering confusion about the shape of the earth. But are there any rules governing their propagation and can we learn to slow or stop them?

Conspiratorial conjecture can be a fun parlor game, of course, since anything not vetted by science or journalism can be labelled—or mislabeled—a conspiracy theory, and speculating about your neighbors’ or government’s secrets is innately human. Indeed, it is cousin to police work, novel writing and even science.

If storytellers keep to hypotheticals or areas where they have experience or expertise, like their communities or professions, conjecture and even allegation are normal. But when narrative leaders insinuate that far-flung claims are facts, or they try to establish the conspiracy mongers’ standard ground rules—by stating some form of “Things are not what they seem,” “Secret enemies are plotting,” and “Only I can save you,” usually in that chronology—they are expertly weaponizing people’s imaginations, a central strategy of fascism and violation of human relations.

Enshrining a lie is a coup d’etat of the mind, in fact, the very opposite of the civilized values of truth and justice but also almost all tribal or warrior codes, which often start with a version of “A human’s word is their bond.” Violating that fundamental social agreement leads not only to mistrust and societal breakdown but irrationalism, scapegoating and mob rule as well as, if left to fester, mass psychosis and, inevitably, mass murder.

Conspiracy theories have been with us since Socrates warned against politicians acting like sweet shop proprietors who provide what people want to hear. In addition to their ancient provenance, such subterfuges are inherently modern, and always accelerate after leaps in communications technology, when early adopters can take full advantage. After the invention of the printing press, Protestant fanatics initiated centuries of witch hunting. After the 18th century success of the newspaper and novel, pseudo-historians exploited their tropes to report that a handful of liberal Germans, who called themselves the Illuminati, organized and managed the French Revolution, a conspiracy theory which 15% of American voters still believe, according to a 2019 Business Insider poll.

Also still with us are “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which was concocted in 1903 by the Russian secret police but elevated to a core belief by Nazis exploiting the new technology of radio. Hitler listed his conspiracist rules in “Mein Kampf” (1925), notably the “big lie,” while Goebbels emphasized repetition. Also abiding the primary conspiracist dictums, Hitler insisted bourgeoise reality is false, Jews and communists are plotting, and he’s Germany’s savior, but his magnum opus was: lie so large average folk simply can’t fathom you’re prevaricating.

“Agitations” was an old term for conspiracy theories revived by German scholars of the Frankfurt School, who fled the Nazis to Chicago, to describe the accusations of American populists, like the isolationist and antisemitic Nazi-sympathizer Father Charles Coughlin. In the 1950s, the CIA adopted “active measures,” a pro-active conspiracism popular among intelligence agencies, especially Soviet, which involved sneaking theories or alternative worldviews into regular media or culture.

The Soviet’s great active measures achievement was feeding false reports about AIDS being a CIA bio-weapon to kill people of color to Indian and Italian newspapers, from where they eventually spread. The CIA’s: publishing a subtly anti-Soviet Russian novel, “Doctor Zhivago”, and placing copies where they would be found by Soviet diplomats and artists visiting Europe, which turned it into a bestseller both at home and in the West, not to mention a Nobel Prize for its author, Boris Pasternak.

Modern American conspiracism arrived with Coughlin, whose weekly radio show had 16 million devoted listeners, but he was dwarfed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who eventually used the new medium of television, although the camera didn't love him. McCarthy fomented four years of fearmongering with his claim that “Communists are out to destroy us and are hiding everywhere,” including throughout the U.S. Army. He even went so far as to accuse the revered General George Marshall, a consummate application of the big lie theory, which he mastered studying “Mein Kampf.”

McCarthy’s fellow Republicans had the backbone to terminated his reign of terror in 1954, and he duly drank himself to death. But his methods were continued by his assistant, Roy Cohn, although they disagreed on some CT law. The under-educated, small-town McCarthy, also an avid gambler and morphine addict, felt that to fully establish a theory one had to first convince oneself. The highly educated and cynical Cohn rejected that, maintaining that the master conspiracist should only roleplay belief, in order to adjust the theory as needed but also avoid losing touch with reality.

There have been many conspiracist movements since the McCarthy Era, from the moon landing hoax and Satanic Panic in 1980s to the 9/11 “Truthers” and today’s QAnon, which remains popular, even though its anonymous leader largely stopped communicating after acknowledging Trump lost the 2020 election. The most successful conspiracy theory in American history, however, is the election rigging claim and anti-deep state movement started and led by Trump.

Trump’s expertise derives directly from Cohn, who came to serve as counsel for high society New York figures and Mafia dons, but also as a corrupt fixer, expert at bribing judges and placing or squashing newspaper stories. After they met in 1973, Trump became both Cohn’s client and a devoted disciple, who abided his mentor's tactics religiously: attack first or counterattack twice as hard, file endless law suits or counter suits, delay or deny outright paying debts, donate generously to politicians, and manipulate reporters like a pack of dogs, by withholding, bargaining with or gorging them on juicy gossip.

Given Cohn expertise with conspiracy theories, it is highly likely he told Trump, that if he goes into politics, start by attacking election integrity, the perfect electoral insurance policy. In 2012, Trump tweeted Barack Obama "lost the popular vote by a lot" and, four years later, denounced Ted Cruz for ballot stuffing in Iowa, while often insisting the Democrats would rob him of the election, if he won. When he actually did just that, if only through the Electoral College, instead of turning the page and becoming presidential, as so many of both parties hoped, he demonstrated his dedication to the Nazis' repetition and big lie rules by accusing the Democrats of rigging the popular vote. For emphasis as well as to prove his minions' servility, he insisted they exaggerate the size of his inauguration crowd.

In addition to his proclivity for the outright lie, Trump spouts conspiracy theories constantly, simply to see what sticks and to get an early start on the required brainwashing. An experienced showman, he is adept at roleplaying the tough politician or religious Republican, the carnival barker or friendly guy, which enabled his seduction of politicians and power brokers but also the downtrodden, in desperate need of a like-minded defender. He’s manipulated the media for over fifty years, fashioning and planting provocative stories, often breaking the bounds of believability or propriety but protected by his endless disclaimers, qualifications and innuendos as well as the First Amendment.

Indeed, his election fraud opera was a tour de force in CT propagation, starting with how he seeded the ground for years. Then he announced “Frankly, we did win this election,” on Election Day night, and achieved an apogee on December 2nd, with a speech so lie-laden even Fox News declined to air it. Viewed by millions on social media, however, it was a master class in repetitive, declarative sentences, building from minor imagination stretches to full-blown conspiracism, agitation and brainwashing, tricks he pushed even further in his 70-minute speech near the White House on January 6th. When he concluded with, “[I]f you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” he triggered his minions to march off like golems and attempt America’s first coup.

Trump achieved this despite the absence of virtually any voter fraud, whatsoever—conspiracy theories usually rely on a shred or two of evidence—despite most of his associates rejecting his allegations, and despite his recent criminal indictments. As his cases go to trial, he will obviously do daily brainwashing sessions from the courthouse steps.

Indeed, Trump is heir to the Cohn and McCarthy lineage of conspiracy theory masters, and he is friends with many others: Republican trickster Roger Stone, who also studied with Cohn, Alex Jones, America’s conspiracy king, who claimed 9/11 was an inside job on the day of, and Putin, who learned active measures in the K.G.B. and applies them constantly. In fact, Trump borrows freely from their conspiracy stories and laws, although he has also developed many of his own.

“Bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity… Controversy, in short, sells,” according to his “The Art of the Deal” (1987), which actually explains why his legal jeopardy is bolstering his popularity. Having established the CT ground rules—the news is fake, we’re under attack, and only he has the inside dope and guts for truthtelling—Trump can divert the massive media coverage of his crimes to flip the script. This is a standard conspiracist technique, also called mirroring, which is a hybrid of fake news, the big lie and active measures. Indeed, Trump’s election fraud scam was the dictionary definition of conspiracy mirroring: trying to steal the election by accusing the Democrats of stealing it.

When Trump calls Biden “crooked Joe,” or claims, “He’s the most corrupt president in our history… And this country will die if we have to go through another four years of this guy” (as he did in a September 29th fund raising video), he’s mirroring what some Democrats are saying about him. Mirroring enlists to ones side ideas already in the zeitgeist by inverting them through the principle of fake news. This allows Trump to insist all the accusations are “a partisan witch hunt” by the “Crazed Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Marxists, and Fascists,” (August 27th tweet).

As Trump and the media fan the dumpster fire of an under-indictment presidential campaign, he’s betting he can create enough chaos to drive to his ranks the Republicans who sat out 2020, Democrat-estranged minorities, leftists turned QAnon, and any of the almost one third Americans who still believe his false narrative about election fraud, according to a recent Monmouth University poll.

Trump’s media spectacle sucks the air out of the primary race, leaving opponents little airtime, a strategy he will carry to the general, although Biden’s detailed denunciation on September 28th, his first to mention Trump by name, shows he will challenge that with his own strong statements, although Trump has the advantage.

He is already attacking major American institutions, from the Constitution itself to the intelligence services, disavowing their reports, armed forces, threating General Mark Miley, or the Department of Justice, vituperatively defaming prosecutors and judges. While this may seem counterproductive, self-incriminating or catastrophic to the mainstream press, regular conservatives or even Trump’s own lawyers, it works wonders burnishing his anti-establishment credentials with disenchanted Americans.

It's the sixties all over again, in fact, but instead of civil rights activists and anti-war protestors revolting against the government, those in the street of late are Trumpers, conspiracists and white supremacists. Indeed, it is the biggest challenge to American democracy since the Civil War, as many pundits have noted, although often while neglecting to cite Trump’s advanced conspiracism, which leaves his methods and our current situation mysterious. Most people simply can’t wrap their heads around the notion that Trump is attempting to overthrow the American ethical as well as political system simply to stay out of jail and solvent.

No magic bullet or dramatic turn of events will convince Trump’s MAGA cult that he isn’t “the greatest of all presidents,” given conspiracism’s amazing ability to reverse losses through magical thinking and script flipping. Extracting his fangs from their neck will only come through time and hard-fought contests at the polls, the courts and in the streets, by security services and counter protesters. Trump’s power will eventually peter out, although he will retain one world title: history’s greatest conspiracy theorist, far exceeding his forbearer McCarthy or ally Putin, who had to launch Europe’s largest war since World War Two to establish his false narrative.

For our part, we can more strictly police truth, both in the media and CT parlor games, and understand that conspiratorial conjecture assuages trauma, inferiority complexes and father hatred, where one transfers that anger to a more palatable figure. It will require discussion and empathy not lectures and shunning, to reintegrate conspiracists into rational, rule-of-law society, unless they have committed actual crimes. We will also have to pass laws against intentionally false public pronouncements and enforce United States Code 2383, which forbids people who mount insurrections from holding office.

Posted on Nov 03, 2023 - 05:01 PM
Cohen Cartoon Corner Oct ‘23
by Karl Cohen

Scene from 'The Inventor". photo courtesy: Capobianco/Granjon
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

The Inventor Getting Good Reviews

It’s a delightful stop-motion feature directed by Jim Capobianco. A graduate of Cal Arts, a former Pixar employee with a long list of credits on Pixar features, he received an Oscar nomination for writing “Ratatouille”.

"The Inventor" is suitable for both adults and children. “The movie is marvelous, in a way: It's enchanting to see Leonardo drifting along in a reverie as his sketches fill the screen and sweet Renaissance-style music decorates the soundtrack.” Kyle Smith, according to the Wall Street Journal but corraborated by others.

“Oftentimes da Vinci is pleasantly lost in the cosmos of his mind, what Willy Wonka called ‘Pure Imagination.’ The target audience of “The Inventor” will surely relate.” San Francisco Chronicle

“A history lesson told with tongue-in-cheek wit, this animated tribute to Leonardo da Vinci is as peculiar as it is delightful.” Todd Jorgenson, Cinemalogue

“Funny, sincere, and moving.” Jackson Murphy, Cartoon Scoop

Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 74% based on 35 reviews. Their Critics Consensus said, ‘A beautifully animated history lesson, “The Inventor” seems somewhat uncertain as to which audience it's trying to reach, but it remains amusing and often engaging.”

Poster for 'My Love Affair With Marriage'. image: courtesy S. Baumane
My Love Affair With Marriage Toured with Director

“My Love Affair With Marriage” by Signe Baumane had its world premiere at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and went on to screen at over ninety film festivals worldwide. It won twenty three awards including the Grand Prix at the Animafest Zagreb and a major prize at Annecy. It begins its West Coast tour with Signe appearing in person at screenings in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and other cities.

“My Love Affair With Marriage” follows Zelma on her 23-year quest for perfect love and lasting marriage. She is a spirited young woman determined to find love in the bewildering world. Told from a woman’s point of view, the film blends historical, biological, social, and emotional arcs with a lively sense of humor and musical numbers. This animated film for adults tackles the issues of love, gender norms, domestic violence, fantasies, and toxic relationships to propel a woman's journey toward independence and liberation.

The film has a remarkable innovative look that combines hand drawn animation with dramatically lit 3D miniature sets and effects. It is an international co-production of companies in Latvia, the United States and Luxembourg, and it took seven years to complete. Baumane wrote, directed, and animated the film. Kristian Sensini from Italy composed 24 songs and wrote the score. Yajun Shi of China animated the biology sections. Dagmara Dominczyk voiced Zelma and Matthew Modine is an executive producer and plays "Bo", one of Zelma's husbands.

Signe’s award-winning animated feature will play in San Francisco at the Vogue Theatre, October 16, with Signe doing a Q&A. The date is firm, but she will not know the starting time until early October. She also knows she will be in the area from about Oct. 15 – 20 and she will do a Q&A in San Jose and at the Rialto Cinemas Sebastopol (details to be announced later). For updated screening details or trailer

Critics On My Love Affair With Marriage

"Latvian filmmaker Signe Baumane quietly delivered one of the best female resistance films of the year — and it's animated. It's a wonderful surprise in a movie already filled to the brim with them. It's a sprawling story that follows the life of Zelma (voiced by Dagmara Dominczyk), a girl who is destined to walk down the much-tread path of her ancestors to be married to a man and taken care of.

But the more she grows up and experiences new things, including bullies at school and terrible boyfriends, the more she realizes that what's destined for her may not be for her. Her body even resists the thought of such conformity.

“My Love Affair With Marriage” is an exuberant and complex movie about the journey to female rebellion," notes Candice Frederick, in HuffPost.

"Funny, moving, and visually stunning throughout, it's easily one of the most distinct animated films I've seen in quite a while and it serves as a needed reminder that animation is an art form that can be used for more than family-oriented narratives." – Peter Sobczynski, RogerEbert.com

"A joyfully exuberant piece of work that manages to conduct some serious examination of human behavior whilst always being nothing less than gloriously entertaining. Many of its themes of gender, identity and conformity also seem incredibly timely." – Laurence Boyce, Cineuropa

"This film is something special. It's unafraid to reveal our innermost thoughts, fears, hopes, regrets, mistakes, and dreams. It celebrates unfiltered authenticity with clever writing and delightful visuals. It's an outstanding feminist film that will undoubtedly win over audiences everywhere." – Liz Whittemore, ReelNewsDaily

"One of the best movies of the year. Signe Baumane's film is absolutely brimming with life, wonder, exploration, grief, trauma, longing, love, and so much more to the point where you could easily argue that this is the most expressive film in years." – Caillou Pettis, Caillou Pettis Movie Reviews

For those who have more contained ideas about animated films, “My Love Affair with Marriage” will doubtless make them think twice about the medium's endless possibilities. This is a deeply funny, socially conscious sharp satire with heart." – Josh Batchelder, Josh at the Movies

"Right from the start, Signe Baumane's animation proves it has earned a place in the hallowed halls of raw storytelling. Rough, storybook-sketched 2D characters are layered on top of highly texturized stop-motion backgrounds, detailing every paint stroke, scrape, sometimes even mold spore. And the imagery is just the start." – Victoria Davis, Animation World Network

Animated Features Released In October

“Girls und Panzer das Finale, Part 4” (Japan) opens Oct. 6
“Mortal Kombat Legends: Cage Match” (US) opens Oct. 17
“Johnny Puff: Secret Mission” (US, Spain, Italy) opens Oct. 20
“Lendarys” (France, Canada) opens Oct. 26
“Digiman Advednture 1L The Beginning” (Japan) opens Oct 27
“Justice League X RWBY Suoedr Heroeds and Huntsmen: Part Two” (US) Oct. 31

Scene from Bill Plympton’s new feature, the musical-comedy-western 'Slide'. photo courtesy: B. Plympton
Cohen's Review of the Mill Valley Festival

The festival included six new animated features and 18 animated shorts by both well know directors including Hayao Miyazaki, John Musker, and Bill Plympton and new emerging talent. They range from family films to far out experimental work. The festival ran from October 5 to 15 see details.

Plympton in Person with a New Feature

Bill Plympton’s new feature, "Slide", is a musical comedy western. Plympton describes the film as being about a logging town where “there’s a lot of lumberjacks, fishermen, and fog…and corruption. A mystical Clint Eastwood-type cowboy gets rid of the bad guys with his music.”

Bill’s growing up in the rural regions of Clackamas County, Oregon, influenced his creating “Slide.” Another influence was the old country music Plympton’s father liked, such as Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Patsy Cline. “I played a lot of slide guitar when I was younger,” he says.

ASIFA-SF’s Nancy Phelps saw a rough-cut screening of the film at Annecy. She told me she really enjoyed the film. "I think that Bill’s new feature is his best one ever and the music is great.”

Animation can be a time-intensive labor of love and “Slide” is no exception. “I did every drawing on this film,” Plympton says.

“It’s about 40,000 drawings. It’s pretty-rare, but for me, it was a joy. It took me seven years. COVID made it difficult to finance.” For that financing, Plympton turned to Kickstarter. 593 backers pledged a total of $84,145, slightly above the campaign’s goal of $77,800.

Earlier this year the roughcut of “Slide” was shown out of competition at the Annecy Festival in France. Now, the just-completed film has been shown at 2023 Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation & Technology, and the Woodstock Film Festival in late September.

Plympton says, “If Mel Brooks became a cartoonist, and Clint Eastwood too, and they made a film together, it’d be something like 'Slide'.” See trailer.

Robot Dreams Delightful Celebration

“Robot Dreams” Spain, France, 2023, 103 mins, directed by Pablo Berger is remarkable in several ways, including it not having spoken dialog. The film is a tale of friendship set in 1980s Manhattan. It is based on Sara Varon’s graphic novel about a lonely dog who purchases a robot. They bond and go off and have a wonderful time in a city populated by funny anthropomorphized animals. It is a tale of inseparable friendship that has its ups and downs. It becomes a tragicomedy that resonates with themes of acceptance, diversity, and enduring companionship.

It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the grand prize at the 2023 Annecy International Animation Festival. (This is not the 1988 feature of the same name that is based on short stories by American writer Isaac Asimov.)

Master Animation Class with John Musker

John Musker, a legendary animator, screenwriter, director, and producer is one of the creative talents behind some of the most iconic and beloved animated classics including “Aladdin”, “The Little Mermaid”, and “Moana”.

He gave an inside look into the process of his newest venture, his independently made short I'm Hip. It includes caricatures of animation colleagues, friends, and family. He will share his insights and wisdom about writing and directing animation. I’m Hip is about a self-absorbed cat in a jazzy song and dance film in which he proudly and comically proclaims his “hipness” to the world. The world is less convinced than he is. Recommended for all ages.

The Boy And The Heron by Hayao Miyazaki

The highly anticipated film from the legendary Academy Award-winning Hayao Miyazaki (co-founder of Japan's celebrated animation house, Studio Ghibli) has received outstanding reviews in Japan. Released as Kimitachi wa Do Ikiruka (translated as How Do You Live), the film is an original story written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, produced by the Oscar®-winning Studio Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki, and features a musical score from Miyazaki's long-time collaborator Joe Hisaishi.

They Shot the Piano Player

2023, Spain, France, 103 minutes, by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal (the genius duo behind Chico & Rita) is an upbeat, bold work that follows Jeff, a New York music journalist voiced by Jeff Goldblum, on a quest to uncover the truth behind the mysterious disappearance of a young Brazilian piano virtuoso, Francisco Tenório Júnior. The resulting musical feature is not only an homage to the life of Tenório Jr. but also a celebratory origin story of the bossa nova musical movement, capturing a fleeting time bursting with creative freedom at a turning point in Latin American history in the ’60s, just before some South American countries such as Brazil and Argentina fell under totalitarian regimes.

The film casts some of música popular Brasileira’s greatest figures, from João Gilberto to Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Vinicius de Moraes, Paulo Moura, and others, all of them giving heartfelt testimony to the enormous talent and vision that Tenório Jr. had and shared with them. Jeff Goldblum’s work as the main character and narrator “encapsulates the passion that seeps through the luminous animation.” The film takes us on a vibrant journey to the heart of a music that would change history forever, and shares the tragic story of a musician whose life was cut far too short.

Rosa and the Stone Troll

Rosa is a little insecure and dutiful flower fairy who always lived alone in her rosebush. More than anything she dreams of having a friend, but she is scared of everything and never dared to go out to the Summerland to meet one. One day the cool and adventurous butterfly Silk crosses paths with Rosa and they immediately become friends despite their differences. Silk wants to go on adventures in the Summerland and Rosa just wants to stay in her safe bush. But when Silk is kidnapped by an evil Stone Troll, Rosa lets go of her fears and set out on a dangerous journey to save her best friend. See trailer.

Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds

The artwork in the trailers is quite “trippy.” Agnès, the neighbor of Juliette (4 years old) and Carmen (8 years old), writes children's books that take place in a fantastic world, The Kingdom of the Winds. The two sisters discover a passage between their world and this extraordinary universe. Once there, the two girls take the appearance of cats, and discover the existence of Sirocco, this terrifying character able to control the wind.

Animated Shorts

The short program "Monster, Movies and the Moon" includes "Operation Frankenstein". Three siblings decide to create their own Frankenstein monster after finding parts of a discarded mannequin. But will you give life to your creation when you're seven years old and can only count on the help of your two older siblings? See trailer.

New Moon An imaginative surrealist journey of young Jay Jay and his mother Edie. Their inner-city dreams are illuminated by the new moon accompanied by the magic of Aretha Franklin playing on a summer's eve on a transistor radio in a backyard in West Philadelphia. Weirdo Could Jasmine and her middle-school frenemies be humanity’s best chance at stopping a monster invasion?

Short Program: Vive el Cine Infantil!

As part of MVFF’s ¡Viva el cine infantil! is a program for families including younger viewers. It celebrates Spanish-language and Latinx films. These are kid-centric animated and narrative shorts. Ages 6+

In “Cleo & Nina", Sara is 5 years old and loves the stories of her grandmother, Nina. They live in different countries, therefore they have not seen each other in a long time. Sara constantly asks her mother to call Nina to hear "the best stories in the world." The short film is an animated documentary that illustrates the telephone conversation in which Nina tells Sara the story of Cleo, her pet pig when she was a child.

“With a Wool Ball" is set in the hills of northwestern Argentina, where a girl spends the winter in her hut. She weaves colored ponchos and goes in search of her friends, native animals of the area, to keep them warm with her wool and to invite them to her hut to drink mate together and warm up with a story and a song.

In “Mist", (Niebla) Nicolas is a kid who has moved with his parents to the suburbs near to an ancient fog forest. The place takes on a new meaning when he starts to have mysterious encounters with native animals. He will discover a forest full of life and will understand the importance between humans and nature.

“La Calesita" is a heartfelt story of the beloved Argentinian merry-go-round operators who have dedicated their lives to providing fun and happiness to children and their neighborhoods. This is a story of perseverance and community above the individual.

Short Program: The Circle Game

The program includes “The Innocent Bystander”, an affectionate tribute to the late San Francisco musician Dan Hicks, and “Starling” made by people who work at Pixar.

“Starling” stars a mischievous star spirit travels home to Istanbul to celebrate her birthday with her family one last time. After being blown off course, she must maneuver through the city before time runs out. The film was created by Pixar employees: Mitra Shahidi, director and writer, US 2023, 9 min. Producer Jessica Heidt; Editor Ayse Arkali; Cinematographer and Composer Andrew Jimenez; and Animation Supervisor Holger Leihe.

Short Program: Youth Works

A collection of peer-reviewed, youth-produced short films that showcases an international cohort of storytellers who span genres from animation to documentary, comedy, horror, and drama. Seven of the thirteen works are animated. The animated works are:

“My Sisters in the Stars: The Story of Lee Yong-Soo” covers a woman born in Daegu, Korea in 1928 under Japanese occupation. She was taken away from her home at the age of 14 by the Imperial Japanese Army and forced into sexual slavery on the front lines of the Pacific Theater in World War II. She is one of 11 remaining known “comfort women” survivors in Korea, a system that claimed more than 200,000 women and girls from Japanese-occupied territories throughout Asia from 1932 to 1945.

The short film “Burnout” shows the childlike creativity that fuels our ideas and how that can turn sour if expended in large bursts too quickly. The narrative is the journey of finding where creativity begins and the conflict of creative expiration through the concept of burnout.

Nancy Phelps wrote me, “’Burnout’ was made by our good friend Dario who was one of the original founders of the KLIK festival. It is the true story of his burnout and during the making of the film his producer suffered burnout and is moving from her native The Netherlands to Budapest to become a poet.”

In “Mountain Man” the eponymous hero battles an antagonist made of stone amidst a harsh winter landscape. Good thing he’s a skilled skier.

In “Room” a teenager struggles with depression and social anxiety, expressing it by locking himself in his imaginary room where his life plays out. The film is shown from the boy’s perspective in his “room” showing how real-life events affect him in it. Since the pandemic began, many teenagers have experienced feelings of isolation and some of them still struggle to overcome their depression even after the pandemic subsides as this boy can't get out of his psychological lockdown.

A man remembers his past and his memories shape his choices in “Yesterday, Again”.

In “Better Late Than Never”, two cousins arrive at Grandma's Day of the Dead celebration and wait for their Tia Carmen to arrive with the food.

Nightmare Before Christmas

One or more theaters in the Bay Area are likely to be showing this annual favorite before Halloween.

The 13th Annual Albany Filmfest 2023

The festival ran from October 12th to 15th at the Rialto Cinemas Cerrito, 10070 San Pablo Ave, El Cerrito. In the program Seeing/Believing, Sat, Oct. 14, 10am, they will present seven eclectic short docs and narrative films “that look at believing what we don’t see, believing what we do see, and believing in what we see in ourselves.”

Two of them are animated. They are Sepe Rafiei’s Bunny is Missing (Celine's cat, Bunny, is missing, prompting a desperate search that leads to an unexpected discovery) and Laurel Eisenmann’s 3 AM (one night, a girl struggles to differentiate the parallel worlds of her dreams and reality as they begin to overlap). For information see program.

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .

Posted on Nov 03, 2023 - 01:23 PM
The Girls Making Ghost Town
by Doniphan Blair

Debra in a scene from 'Ghosttown'. photo: Jennifer Juelich
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

FOR THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, AS
the world awoke to issues of gender identity, it is often important to look back on a time when expressing one’s identity wasn’t accepted as it is now. Even though it continues to be challenging for many to open up to family and friends, there was a time in the not-so-distant past, when it was entirely unwelcomed by many, especially in rural America and that is theme of an ambitious short film now in pre-production.

Written and directed by local Bay Area filmmaker Jennifer Juelich and co-produced by actor Kari Wishingrad, “Ghost Town” tells a story of a woman, Angie, who returns to her hometown after 30 years and reconnects with a childhood friend, forcing her to question her life, love and sexual preference.

The film opens with Angie and her husband Gary attending her mother's funeral, and the sadness and uneasiness that involves, but soon involves Angie’s childhood friend, Zoey, with whom she had a secret, adolescent affair.

It was a relationship that Angie herself had initiated but ended, due to the era's climate of intolerance, and, after moving away, repressed in exchange for a safe, conventional life. Zoey ultimately confronts Angie about that choice and what it may have cost her emotionally.

Even though baby boomers enjoyed an era promoting individuality and sexual expression, not all were able to embrace that ideal. “Ghost Town” explores those themes of reaching middle age and reflecting on youthful decisions, choices often shaped by fear of retribution.

Juelich and Wishingrad feel their film is unique in that it focuses on a time when society's view on sexuality were changing, yet many still felt the weight of an earlier morality, especially in certain parts of the country. Their hope is to expose how intolerance and bigotry of a community can often create a lifelong fear for those most vulnerable.

Another scene from 'Ghosttown'. photo: Jennifer Juelich
Hoping to create a visual poem for those who have lost their way, "Ghost Town" is their first film as co-producers but have worked together on many films as writer/director and actor. They met when Juelich was casting a supporting role for her feature film “Neon Sky”, a local indie hit about a traveling carnival family, and Wishingrad ended up getting a part.

When Juelich brought her the script for “Ghost Town” several years back, Wishingrad found it compelling and immediately wanted to play the character of Zoey and, eventually, decided to co-produce as well.

Juelich has a degree in creative writing and has written and directed six shorts (“Legacy”, “An Honest Man”, “Cross Town”, “Northern Lights” and “Airspace”) and two features (“Love Doll” and “Neon Sky”). They have been accepted in several film festivals, including the local Sonoma International Film Festival, Tiburon Film Festival and most recently the San Francisco Indie Film Festival. She has also authored many short stories, given fiction is a true loves, and recently attended the Squaw Valley Screenwriter’s Workshop.

Wishingrad began her performing career at an early age, having grown up in New York City, attended a performing arts grammar school and seen many Broadway productions. She has performed in numerous plays and musicals throughout her life, both here in the U.S. and in France. She was in the award-winning Bay Area play “Tokens: A Play on the Plague”, produced by Whoopi Goldberg, written by David Schein, and directed by Robert Ernst.

For over 23 years, Kari has performed in dozens of films, many of these films finding critical acclaim on the film festival circuit. She’s also appeared in numerous TV shows, National commercials, print advertisements, and her smooth voice has been heard in numerous commercial, animation and corporate productions.

Filmmaker Jennifer Juelich (let) and producer and actor Kari Wishingrad. photo: Jennifer Juelich
This short will ultimately be used as a proof-of-concept to produce a full-length project on the subject, expanding not only on the story but adding additional characters and their struggles to come to terms with their past choices and how to move forward.

Currently, they are in pre-production and have launched a Seed & Spark funding campaign. If you are interested, please help. They plan to begin shooting in the fall of 2023 at a farmhouse and other locations around Sonoma, CA.

Posted on Nov 03, 2023 - 12:44 PM
Nicholas Blair: Prodigal Photog Returns
by Doniphan Blair

The cover for Nicholas Blair's new book of photographs from powerHouse Books. photo: N. Blair
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

NICHOLAS BLAIR, WHO GOT HIS MFA
from the now-defunct San Francisco Art Institute forty years ago and co-directed the innovative Ancient Currents Gallery, returns to San Francisco to launch his new book, “Castro to Christopher: The Gay Streets of America, 1979-1986”. It documents the enthusiastic emergence of queer culture in that period but also its tragic decimation by AIDS/HIV. The book release interview/party will be at Fabulosa Books (489 Castro St, SF), at 7pm, Tuesday, July 11th.

Blair got interested in photography as a kid. "We would discuss composition, lighting, and the image’s narrative,” Blair writes on his website about his father, Vachel Blair (see article), a cinematographer, who studied film in Paris on the GI Bill. “In particular Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘The Decisive Moment’.”

He also learned to do dark room work in high school from renown documentary photographer Melissa Shook—“I was a thorn in her side,” he recalled—but didn’t begin his life-long dedication to street photography until returning from a year’s travel in South America. That was when a friend, Anna Reinhardt, lent him the small, professional Leica camera once belonging to her father, Ad Reinhardt, the abstract painter but also dedicated world traveler.

A highly personal and mystical photograph from Haiti, 1984. photo: N. Blair
An early, interesting body of work emerged from Blair’s trip to Mexico in 1977. It was shown at Ancient Currents Gallery, which operated at 2205A Pine Street, San Francisco, from 1976 to 1987, under the tripartite mandate to display tribal art, artists from the Global South and American artists influenced by those aesthetics. While in Mexico, Blair collected the yarn paintings of the Huichol tribe, near Nayarit, Mexico, which became Ancient Currents’ bestselling show.

He lived in the commune behind the gallery, the Modern Lovers, where he built a dark room. A community of eight to fifteen people, it was dedicated to the arts and to a balanced lifestyle, including serving a healthy vegetarian dinner every night to all comers, which it did for over a decade.

After the 1978 murder of Harvey Milk, a city council member but also photography store owner, and the political upheaval across San Francisco, but especially in the Castro neighborhood, Blair realized something important was happening and set about documenting it.

By that time, he had become involved in the San Francisco Art Institute, introduced by his friend Larry Bair, who studied with Gary Winograd in Texas and came to San Francisco specifically to study with Henry Wessel, both nationally recognized photographers. After auditing Wessel’s classes, Blair applied to and was accepted in the SFAI Masters degree program, although he didn’t graduate high school or college.

Blair and Bair, who eventually came out as bi, would go out almost every weekend and some weekdays, avidly shooting all over San Francisco but coming to focus on the gay scene. Studying with Hank and Larry, he writes on his site, “I [perfected] a method of candid street photography that entailed pre-focusing the camera before quickly bringing it to my eye and releasing the shutter.”

Start of his 1980 hitchhike to Mexico, with then girlfriend Pammie Congdon, doing street photography and collecting Huichol tribal art. photo: L. Bair
Because he was from New York and periodically returned, he also started shooting Manhattan’s Christopher Street, the nearby pier on the Hudson River, Provincetown, Massachusetts, and other gay meccas.

Some have noted that Blair is not gay, hence an outside observer to the community. But the Modern Lovers had gay residents, including Nancy “Strut” Hedeen, the actual founder of Ancient Currents, and the gallery’s dedication to tribal culture helped develop ideas on how to accept a community on its own terms while still exploring a personal vision.

Unfortunately, Blair moved back to New York before his extensive body of “gay work” could be edited and printed, let alone shown at Ancient Currents, where he became the curator of photography. He did, however, organize shows for some great local photographers, notably Linda Conner, Jack Fulton and Larry Sultan. He also published pieces in San Francisco’s gay newspaper, Bay Area Reporter, where he had a weekly series, the national gay magazine, The Advocate, and the French magazine Gai Pied Hebdo.

Although he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Jerome Foundation, and his work was eventually collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, Brooklyn Museum and Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, he had limited success getting a teaching position and shows in the 1980s. Hence, he decided to follow his father into cinematography and was soon traveling the world for CARE, National Geographic, the Disney Channel and other outfits. Shooting stills during his off-time, he garnered great images in Haiti, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and elsewhere.

Filming in Brazil for a documentary about indigenous healing techniques, 2004. photo: D. Blair
He also started doing more commercial work and producing his own investigative documentaries. The latter included “Culture of Crash”, about the demolition derbies enacted each summer at county fairs and completed in 1998, and “Our Holocaust Vacation”, about his mother, a Holocaust survivor, which was shown over 500 times on PBS between 2008 and 2011.

The "gay book project," meanwhile, languished until 2019, when he dusted off his boxes of negatives and started the years'-long project of scanning and sorting. With the help of Gary Halpern, another SFAI photographer, whom he actually met in South America in 1974, and John Glenn, a New York video producer for whom he shot a lot of projects, he created a book proposal and a book, which, after many submissions, was picked up by powerHouse Books, a premiere photo book publisher.

It has gotten glowing reviews, notably in The Guardian, from the New York music and art critic Jim Farber, who also interviewed Blair at New York’s Rizzoli Books in June, for his book release there. Farber has commented on a couple of occasions that Blair’s outsider status drew him away from focusing on the pretty boys, who might have caught a gay photographer’s eye, and towards the graphics and overall content, including the many lesbians in those scenes.

A striking photo from 'Castro to Christopher' shows Blair's ability to document difficult moments: this one at a Castro pride parade in the early '80s. photo: N. Blair
Currently, Blair, 67, continues to run a video production company in New York, while living on its Upper West Side. He also travels extensively, often to visit his son, Stefan, 25, who works for MicroSoft in Seattle, or help his daughter, Willa, 22, set up house for her first job, after graduating from Binghamton University, as an archeologist for the Forest Service in Oregon.

Overall, “Castro to Christopher” is a triumph of both Blair's dedication to street photography but also Ancient Currents' innovative ethos about investigating tribal cultures as equals. His next book project will cover either his eye-opening trip to India in 1978 or similarly scintillating life at the Modern Lovers commune.
Posted on Jul 11, 2023 - 10:39 AM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner July 2023
by Karl Cohen

A scene from 'Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse'. photo: courtesy Marvel Entertainment
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Spiderman Subversion

"Spiderman" was censored for having a subversive image, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Indeed, the new blockbuster feature “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” has been “blocked from release in the United Arab Emirates after failing to pass local censorship laws. The film has apparently fallen foul of the country’s censors due in part to the blink-and-you-miss-it protect trans lives poster featured in the background of one frame, according to a source familiar with the situation.”

The film debuted on June 22nd across the Middle East and has grossed $569,613,989 worldwide as of this writing, June 29th.

Super Mario Bros. Billion Dollar Feature

Also as of June 29th, the film “The Super Mario Bros”, based on a video game, has grossed over $1.346 billion worldwide, passing “Frozen”, “Minions” and “The Incredibles” on the list of billion dollar hits.

What does the success of this film tell us about the American taste in animation?

Happier times at SFAI's lovely Moorish front garden, replete with goldfish pond. photo: D. Blair
The SF Art Institute Tragedy Continues

After the April bankruptcy filing of the SF Art Institute, its gorgeous campus, located in the city’s prestigious Russian hill neighborhood, has been listed for sale, albeit without a price. That is because it is contingent on whether the building includes Diego Rivera's fantastic mural, “The Making of a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City” (1931), appraised at over 40 million.

Although the University of San Francisco planned to acquire the school in 2022, as with the many other merger deals negotiated over the years, it never came through. Evidently, SFAI is too avant-garde for more modest institutions to handle.

Sale price would have to include the $450,000 in back rent on its 800 Chestnut location and $750,000 at its graduate school in Fort Mason, an albatross initiated by an innovative dean, Ella King Torrey, who tragically committed suicide in 2003, at age 45.

The notion that no silicon billionaire wants to buy the campus of 93,000 square feet, replete with bell tower, a library, two galleries, a theater and a rooftop amphitheater with phenomenal views, is a testimony to their lack of fore- or in- sight and poor harbinger for their ability to deal with AI.

Indeed, the land parcel's back yard could easily accommodate an apartment building, solving the student housing problem, while a design department could continue Steve Jobs innovative leadership in that field for Silicon Valley. Imagine if, in 1870, Paris decided to save money by closing its École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

Disney Economics 101

Hollywood’s economic guiding principal was made quite clear by Michael Eisner before he joined Disney. When he was the president of Paramount Pictures from 1976 to 1984 he wrote an infamous internal memo that stated his belief that, "We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective."

Eisner was head of Disney from 1984 to 2005 and guided it through the historic period now known as "the Disney Renaissance."

The ol' Disney homestead in the Hollywood hills. photo: courtesy Disney
Disney House for Rent, Only $40,000

The house Walt Disney built in 1932 for his wife Lillian and family in Los Angeles is now for rent, only $40,000 a month. Although a bit pricey, it is well preserved and has the same home theater where Disney screened his dailys.

How Big Is Cricket to Disney

For Disney when they lost the streaming rights to Indian Premier League cricket matches, they lost several million subscribers to Disney+ in India. That sent the company in a panic, so they started to cut expenses including current shows that don’t have high ratings. They also become more critical about taking on new projects.

Nevertheless, they still have an impressive number of subscribers, some 157.8 million of them, to be precise.

And those subscribers will now get to enjoy 28 newly restored classic Disney shorts. Rarely seen, groups of this incredible old animation will appear monthly.

Disney and Florida Cage Fight

Disney and Florida are in a high-stakes legal fight as Governor DeSantis opposes their support of equal rights for LGBTQ people and has attempted to curtail benefits to the company. Since the judge assigned to the case ruled against DeSantis in a similar First Amendment case, he wants a different judge. If DeSantis doesn’t win he will probably appeal it to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where more than half of the judges were appointed by former President Donald Trump.

While DeSantis loves throwing red meat to his base, Florida in general suffers. Not only is Disney fantastically popular with international tourists, Floridians enjoy it.

Moreover, Disney has cancelled a proposal to build a billion-dollar college campus in the state. Indeed, the project was going to attract 2000 employees. Hence, DeSantis’s anti-gay stand will cost the state tax revenue from both income they would have gotten from the construction project and the taxes employees new to the state would have paid.

Adult Swim Developments

Adult Swim is bringing back old favorites, including ‘Dexter’s Lab,’ and ‘Courage the Cowardly Dog’. The new programming block will begin August 28th on Cartoon Network at 6 PM, Monday through Friday. The lineup will also include "Dexter’s Laboratory", "The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy" and "Ed, Edd n Eddy".

Frame from Vince Collins's 'Retina Psykosis'. photo: V. Collins
New from Collins

Vince Collins's brand new "Retina Psykosis" is a mind bender. Vince has been making experimental animated shorts since the 1970s and his latest film is beyond far out. Check it out here

Posted on Jul 10, 2023 - 03:42 PM
The Vachel Blair Issue
by Doniphan Blair

Vachel Blair, enjoying a train ride in Poland, in 1997, son Doniphan to left. photo: N. Blair
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

NOTE: There are five articles or stories by or about Vachel Blair listed at the bottom.

AS I HELP CLOSE UP MY PARENT'S NEW
York apartment and sort through my father’s archives, I feel his presence quite closely, certainly more than the last decade, as he faded from mind after dying in 1999, perhaps more than ever.

That's because I'm reading his notes, articles and old letters, including from his girlfriends and two wives, many of whom were passionately in love with him. That reveals more than one can glean from a father-son relationship, even though he was a generous father and we became good friends after I came of age.

Indeed, those personal revelations allow me to see Vachel Lindsay Blair as he really was: a young man in a brutal fight for democracy in Spain, an intelligence officer in World War Two doing "bomb run" photography (filming out the B-24's bomb bay as bombs dropped), writing stories about the airmen, and making friends in Egypt, Libya and Italy, a dedicated student of film in New York but especially during his year in Paris at the Ecole Technique de Photographie, and as a filmmaker coming up in New York.

Reading his resumes, job application letters, discussions of film projects and thumbing through many scripts, I learned the answer to what I thought was a lack of ambition. He had tried to market himself as a director in New York but eventually realized the market was very competitive, he didn't have the necessary slick, New-York style, and he was a good technician.

So he devoted himself to editing and then cinematography, filming everything from Colt-45 commercials to state visits by foreign dignitaries, including the King of Nepal, who went mountain lion hunting in Nevada. Along the way, he occasionally did shoot/direct, like during his two-month adventure in the South Seas, making a film about vaccinating people in Tonga for the World Health Organization. He also filmed the Queen of Tonga and befriended many people, including a certain Suzy, whose letters I both read and read between the lines.

Vachel was also quite the author. Having studied political as well as library science at Cleveland's Western Reserve University, he wrote some articles after returning from Spain (see Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain), and over 1000 stories about the 98th Bombardment Group of US Army Air Corps (see Life and Death in the Air: A Bombing Run Goes Bad), and dozens of scripts.

Here is some of his pieces about his war experiences and my article on what he did in the Spanish Civil War:

Notes on Achieving World Peace

Vachel wrote this a few months after the end of World War Two, as if sketching out a speech. He was 30.

Life and Death in the Air: A Bombing Run Goes Bad

In this story for the 98th Bombardment Group, Vach captures the horror but also all-in-a-day's-work aspects of Captain Taylor's harrowing, roller-coaster attempt to get his B-29 back to base after bombing a bridge in northern Italy.

While Flying in a B-24 Over Fortress Europe

He wrote this flying in a bomber squadron crossing the Mediterranean to bomb sites in Italy in 1944. As an intelligence officer in a US Army Air, his duties included crawling out over the open bomb bay and filming the bombs as they dropped, writing stories about the airmen for intelligence and publicity purposes, and doing publicity photography.

My Father’s Spanish Civil War

As the title suggests, this is my article about his experience fighting for a few months in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, witnessing the full brunt of its death and destruction, age 22. Sadly, his fellow "green" American recruits and the Republican Spaniards were up against Franco's well-trained soldiers armed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain

This article, co-written with his high school buddy Marty Miller, had the subhead "Local youth, back from the front, gives first-hand account of those battling for the [democratic] Loyalists." It was published by The Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 21, 1937.

Posted on Jun 18, 2023 - 06:10 PM
Notes on Achieving World Peace
By Vachel Blair

Sergeant Vachel Blair. photo: USAAC Intelligence
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

NOTE: This is from three pages Blair jotted down, as if sketching out a speech, a few months after V-Day for World War Two, when he was 30.

Do you believe a man should be judged for merits alone? That’s what the Bill of Rights has shown to be the only practical thing to do. Prove it.

1. Children believe the world revolves around them. They cannot imagine how other people feel, for a while. Some people never do. (Children jeering a hunchback: cruel.)
2. Wisdom of the ages is in the Bill of Rights. No one has a monopoly on the wonders of the world. Give every man the break you want.
3. How worthy a man is has nothing to do with his name, or where he came from.
4. Like to act superior, chiefly? Indicates inferiority.

Here’s an Irishman. He’s your friend. OK, if you are Irish, you say “Great fellow.” Now change his face and his name only, everything else stays the same. He’s Hardwick—English. Same man. Is your attitude the same? Should be. Same with Jewish, and all minority groups.

2

It’s to our best interest to watch everything that went toward making the war.

Blair was studying film in New York when Pearl Harbor happened in December 1942, and bought this copy of the NY Times, around then making arrangements to enlist. photo: D. Blair
1. Political and economic welfare of all nations. (The Great Depression, 1929-30, and tariffs)
2. Fascism anywhere, being incubated, or war anywhere.
3. The losers [Germany/Japan/Italy]: Make a real democracy.
4. Learn the problems of our neighbors, learn to known them and appreciate their good qualities. All nationalities have their good and bad points. They have their rights and the right to live just as minorities in our country. (We’re just lucky to be Americans.) It’s to our advantage to know and appreciate these people.
5. We “muddled through” the last war.

3

1. Bring it down to the level of the individual: What I can do personally.
2. Strike at the marrow, the “I’m out for myself” view. Narrow self-interest is impractical, it won’t work.
3. Bring in the airplane and the new smallness of the world.
4. We must A: Take responsibility, not drift. B: See the other guy’s point of view. C: Recognize that our welfare is bound up with world’s welfare.

Nobody is superman. We have our way of life, but once in a while it’s good to see other lives. We go motoring in the country for a change, and appreciate it.

Blair witnessed the cutting edge of modernity, flying in B-24 bombers, and was at an Army Air Corps base in New Mexico, headed for the Pacific theater, when the war ended. photo: D. Blair
Advantages of various nations: We’ve got the plumbing. Italians, the musicians and the food, and the French, fashion, food, art. Chinese, philosophers and ancient civilization, English, dependability.
Russia: a “new world.” Pluck and suffering during the war.
Germany: skilled craftsmen, order, precision.
U.S.A.: mass production
Mexico and Latin America: romance

We can see these nationalities right in the USA. Makes life interesting.

4

What to do personally?

1. Support the UN.
2. Don’t permit fascism to rise again.
3. Study what other nations have to contribute to the world.
4. Bring back our responsibility toward the world. It’s not good business, good sense, or practical to save a few $ in self-interest and lose the peace. If it costs a little to maintain the peace, OK. The bill will be 1/1,000,000 what it will cost us the next war, when cities will look like this: __________ [flat].

It’s up to us as individuals. Not the guy next door. You. Let’s not wish our way this time because our luck has run out.

When Blair bought this newspaper, announcing the end of the war in Europe, he didn't know his future wife was just emerging emaciated from an Austrian concentration camp. photo: D. Blair
5

We made mistakes after the last war [WWI]. We have the responsibility of world leadership. We may have war thrust upon us, but we want to make sure we have done everything possible to prevent it. We have the most to lose. The mistakes of the last war, we’ve recognized them.

1. Didn’t join the League [of Nations]—[Instead] UN membership
2. Hawley-Smoot tariff—[Instead] reciprocal trade
3. Archangle [an Artic Ocean Russian town at the center of diplomacy in 1945], non-recognition of Russia—Recognized
4. Manchuria [the Japanese invasion of]—stopping oppression, [allowing] British [war] loan, and feeding Europe.

But for the grace of God we might have lost the atom bomb race. Germany had plans to hit N. Y. City. We have one more chance. Narrow self-interest will bring war down upon us.

Posted on Jun 18, 2023 - 05:26 PM
Tonia and Vach Song Book

Tonia Rotkopf Blair and Vachel Blair, around the time of their marriage, 1954, New York City. photo: Sidney Meyers
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover rebuilding cineSOURCE's site.

Si Me Quieres Escribir
From the Spanish Civil War, circa 1937
(NOTE: We did 3 bars each line instead 4 because Tonia did it that way)

intr Dm / / / AM / / / Dm / / / (2-2beats)
Si me/ quieres escribir ya sabes mi paradero. (2x)
Dm / / / C / Bb / / / A /
En el friente de Gandesa, primera línea de fuego. (2x)
2) Si te quieres comer bien, barato y con bueno forma
En el friente de Gandesa alli tiene una fonda
3) A lo entrada de la fonda hay una moro Mojame
Que te dice pasa pasa si te quieres para comer
4) El premier plato que te dan hay granadas rompadoras
La segunda des metrallas para recordar la memorias
5) Si ti quieres conquistar, espera la brigada Washington
Si los gringos llegaran puedemos vamos a ganar un monton

Summertime
by George Gershwin, 1920s

Am Dm Am
Summertime,  And the livin' is easy 
Am Dm E
Fish are jumpin' And the corn is high
Am Dm Am  
Your daddy's rich And your mamma's good lookin' 
Dm E Am
So hush little baby Don't you cry  

2) One of these mornings You're going to rise up singing 
Then you'll spread your wings And you'll take to the sky  
But until that morning There's a'nothing can harm you 
With your daddy and mammy standing by

3) Granton Mountain and the summer is foggy
But the nights are clear and the moon is bright
The coyote and bear have come back to the mountain
and little baby is going to be all right

Mama, Ya Zhulika Lyublyu

Russian WWII Song
Dm Gm Dm
1) Mama, ya locheka loblyu, mama, ya locheka hochu
Gm Dm
Loche viso kopro viyev, nove dingo zareb diev
Am7
Mama, ya loche kaloblyu
2) Mama, ya doctora loblyu, mama, ya doctora hochu
Vrač delaet mnogo abortov, i platjat očen’ horošo
Mama, ya doctora kaloblyu
English
3) Mama, I love the pilot, mama, I want the pilot
The pilot flies oh so high, makes lots of money in the sky
Mama, I love the pilot
4) Mama, I love the doctor, mama, I want the doctor
The doctor makes lots of abortions and gets paid extra portions
Mama, I love the doctor

Oyfn Pripetshik
Old Yiddish Song

Ch) DM AM Dm F C F
d e f# / / e g f# e d
Oyfn pripetshik, brent a fayerl, Un in shtub iz heys,
“Obdem primpichuck brent a fayer oo”
(2x) Gm Dm Am Dm
Un der rebe e kleyne kinderlekh, Komets alef beys

2) Zog me kinderlekh, tirer kinderlekh, zog me nokh a mol
zog me nokh a mol e tirer nokh a mol, komets alef beys

(my translation)
On the hearth therein, there a fire burns, and the house is warm.
And the rabbi there is teaching little kids to learn the alphabet.

Tell me children, my dear children, tell me once again
Tell me once again, my dear children, to learn the alphabet

Tumbalalaika
Eastern European Love Song
Am E7
VS1: Shteyt a bocher, shteyt un tracht,
E7 Am
tracht un tracht a gantze nacht.
Am F Dm Am
Vemen tsu nemen un nit far shemen,
Dm E7 Am
Vemen tsu nemen un nit far shemen
Am E7
CH: Tumbala, tumbala, tumbalalaika,
E7 Am
Tumbala, tumbala, tumbalalaika
Am F Dm Am
tumbalalaika, shpiel balalaika
Dm E7 Am
tumbalalaika - freylach zol zayn.
VS2: Meydl, meydl, ich'vel dir fregen,
Vos ken vaksn, vaksn on regn
Vos ken brenen un nit oyf hern?
Vos ken BENKEN, veynen on treren?
CH
VS3: Narisher bocher, vos darfstu fregn?
A shteyn ken vaksn, vaksn on regn.
Libeh ken brenen un nit oyf hern.
A harts kon benkn, veynen on treren.

ENGLISH
A young man is standing, standing and thinking
Thinking and thinking the whole night thru
Whom to invite, whom not to offend
Whom to invite, whom not to offend
Ch, Play, play, play the balalaika
Play, play, play the balaliaka
Play the balalaika, sing the balalaika
Play the balalaika, bring joy to all
Girl, oh girl, to you I would ask,
What can grow without the rain
What can burn without an end
What can break, and cry without tears.
Foolish lad, why do you want to ask,
A stone can grow, and grow without rain,
Love can burn and never end,
A heart can break, and cry without tears.

Hay Que Mulher Bonita
Brazilian pop song circa 1948
C G
Hay que mulher bonita hay que mulher shorosa
G F G F C
Si yo appanio so Diablo hay que noche soniarosa,
C G
Ela pasa avenida, elagante toda prosa,
G F G F C
Con zapato todo branco e vestido cordarosa
C G
A soltera fica tonta, a casada eviajosa
G F G F C
Solo hombres son gritando ‘Salve, salve Dona Rosa.

English
Oh what a beautiful woman, oh what a lovely woman,
If I could grab the Devil what a night we could have,
She goes down the avenue, elegant in all her prose,
With her shoes all white and her well chosen clothes,
The single women gets dizzy, the married are envious-a
Only the men are shouting ‘Hail, hail Dona Rosa!’

We Shall Overcome chords
by Peter Seeger (No More Auction Block For Me., words by Reverend Charles Tindley 1950s

C F C F C
We shall overcome, We shall overcome
F Am D G D G
We shall overcome some da-aaaay
F C
I know that deep in my heart
F C
I do believe
F C G C
We shall overcome some day

2. We shall walk together
3. We shall sing together
4. We shall all be free

Posted on Jun 17, 2023 - 12:44 PM
Life and Death in the Air: A Bombing Run Goes Bad
By Sgt. Vachel L. Blair, Cleveland, Ohio

Captain Jack Taylor next to his B-24 bomber, notice its female logo and successful strike count, as well as Cpt Taylor's relaxed demeanor, cigarette and loafers. photo: V. Blair or intelligence officer colleague
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover rebuilding cineSOURCE's site.

Vachel Blair's Other cineSOURCE Stories: “My Father’s Spanish Civil War”, “Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain” and “While Flying in a B-24 Over Fortress Europe”

Second Lieutenant John A. Taylor, of the 98th Bomb Group, has just completed his Airmedal Mission [perhaps his 25th]. It was a full day for the pilot of the “Buzzin' Two Duzzin’.” Here’s what happened:

Lt. Taylor was flying number four position [in a formation of 10 to 30 planes] over one of those Brenner Pass Bridges [in the Italian Alps], that’s hot even at 40 below. Just after “bombs away,” he saw a direct hit by flak blast off the whole tail assembly of the lead ship. Dodging debris and at the same time losing his number two engine to flak, he saw something make a six-inch hole in the right windshield. Nobody was hurt.

While he was trying to feather his No. 2 prop, No. 1 and No. 4 ran intermittently. The plane dropped out of formation while he tried to make them behave. He gave instructions for the gas to be shut off from the shot-out No. 2 but, in the excitement, fuel was cut from No. 1, which didn’t help much to speak of. By that time, the plane was losing altitude at a phenomenal rate. Lt. Taylor decided there was only one obvious move to make: he rang the bell and the boys hit the nylon [parachutes].

Before everyone took off from the flight deck, however, a little technical problem came to Lt. Taylor’s attention: He had eyes on his chute and his harness, too, but he seemed to be missing a snap in there somewhere. Someone had taken the wrong chute, and left his own snap-type job in another part of the ship.

One of the boys went back and found his back pack, tossed it up on the flight deck, and suddenly Lt. Taylor was alone in the rumbling old war bird with bomb-bay doors, nose-wheel doors, and hatches open for inspection.

B-24 Liberator bombers, similar to the ones that flew from south of Venice to the Battle of Brenner Pass, here heading to Germany from England.
At about 4,000 feet and still going down, he slipped out of the pilot’s seat to try out the chute for size and found it too small to buckle the leg straps. While he was thus occupied the plane, with auto-pilot out, couldn’t resist a temptation to pull up into a stall. Lt. Taylor moved to catch the controls but his misfit parachute harness, which was too short to buckle, was long enough to catch on one of the goddamn radio knobs.

As if to confound all plans of destiny, he reached out with one hand and jammed the wheel forward, for a dive to regain flying speed. The plane dropped like an elevator with cables cut. About this time Lt. Taylor figured he could use a three-day rest leave at Capri pretty handily. Somehow he managed to disengage his chute and pull the ornery warhorse out at 200 feet, leveling at 330, with one windmilling [busted] prop.

That taken care of, and not without a certain amount of relief, he began to look around for a likely spot to set her down. He spotted a field. While he was making his pattern [circling to finding a landing strategy], he found that No. 1 and No. 4 prop governors began to respond, at that warmer lower altitude.

“Things were going so well by that time—relatively, that is—I decided to head for home and see how far I could get.” He turned the gas back on to No.1 to see if it would run better; that gave him three good engines and one unfeatherable prop. With these improved living conditions, he pounded down "the hill" toward Venice, flying at fence-top height for fighter protection.

Vachel Blair told me that the Air Corps was very democratic: You could argue your way out of flight assignments and, after taking off, the crew essentially voted whether to do the mission. If they decided to turn back—because of faulty machinery or the vote—they would drop their bombs in the Mediterranean (you can't land loaded), but sometimes one remained and killed them. photo: V. Blair or intelligence officer colleague
“I could see the ‘Ities’ [Italians] scurrying for ditches in every direction,” he said. “Every once in a while, I’d pull her up to 50 ft., twist her around a bit, so I could see if any fighters were on my tail, and then let her back down.”

As the picturesque city of canals and gondolas came up, he swung around town to avoid the flak without noticing St. Marks Cathedral, the great Renaissance masterpiece. He did give Venice harbor a 50 ft. inspection, however.

“I was afraid the subs in port there would 'up' [their antiaircraft guns] on me, but they didn’t. All the flack I got from the area was way above the plane.”

Once out on the Adriatic at 10 ft, with the bracing salt air coming in the nose-wheel door, Lt. Taylor thought it about time he took over the radio operator’s portfolio. He dialed “Big Fence,” “Green G-George, please give me a heading for Ancona or the nearest emergency field.”

“Green G-George,” came the reply, “Steer 225 degree.”

That heading didn’t look quite right to Lt. Taylor. “And besides,” he added, “That word ‘steer’ sounded phony. I called for identification and they didn’t say a word. Then I really cussed them out. I said, ‘You dirty —.’”

Anyhow, he really cussed them out with vernacular reserved for such emergencies. He gained altitude a little after he had come down the Adriatic a safe distance. Within sight of land, he contacted the real “Big Fence,” located the field, made his pattern and lowered his [landing] gear without trouble.

Air Corps mechanics working away on a 'war bird' named Raunchy, who is an actual dragon. photo: V. Blair or intelligence officer colleague
“From my seat I couldn’t tell whether everything was locked, but by that time I wasn’t worrying much.” As it turned out, everything was locked when he eased the big bird in on a good landing. Destiny gave him a break.

A truck came out to pick up the crew. “Where is everyone,” the driver asked.

“I’m it,” said Lt. Taylor, “There ain’t no more.” Well, what the hell, that’s enough to make anyone’s eyeballs drop out.

Now that we see it can be done, the streamlined “Taylor System” of manning Liberator [B-24] Bombers might be widely adopted. Lt. Taylor may do for heavy bomb groups what Henry Kaiser did for shipbuilding. Who said there isn’t efficiency in the army?

NOTE: From November 6, 1944 to April 25, 1945 United States Army Air Corp flew 6,849 sorties B-25s and B-29s in the "Battle of the Brenner".
Posted on Jun 11, 2023 - 10:23 PM
Two Proposed Articles on Jewish History

Bruno Loewenberg, in the centerpiece photo from the feature interview in The Clinton Street Quarterly, 1982. photo: D. Blair

I would like to propose two articles for readers interested in Jewish or European culture and history, subjects amplified by the Russo-Ukraine War and the current popularity of conspiracy theories:

The Jews of Ukraine: A Long, Complicated, Partially Hidden History

Jews and Moneylending: A Long, Complicated, Largely Hidden History

When I visited Ukraine in the fall of 2022, I was surprised by the amount of Jewish people, or their children and grandchildren, and culture. Striking examples of the latter are the “psychedelic synagogue” at Kyiv's Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial and emerging research on the Cossacks.

IMG_4278.jpeg

“There existed Jewish Cossacks,” reported Russian historian Saul Borovoi (1903-1987), according to Brian Horowitz in The Librarians (6/23/2021). “In his view, two kinds of Jews lived among the Cossacks. One group consisted of Jews who converted to Russian Orthodoxy and joined as fighters… [O]ther Jews, as Borovoi documented, simply moved to the [Cossack lands] to serve as traders and commercial agents for Cossack landowners, as their coreligionists did for landowners in Poland.”

This cries out for investigation, given Ukrainians see their national origins in the Khmelnytsky Uprising, the 17th century Cossack rebellion, but some Jews consider it the first Holocaust. New population studies indicate it didn’t kill as many as once thought, however, and it was motivated more by political struggle than religious hatred, since Jews served the Polish empire as merchants, tavern operators and moneylenders.

I have long been fascinated by Jewish moneylending, simply because the subject was glossed over by historians and erased by society, both Jewish and gentile, except the conspiracy theorists. “Don’t ‘Jew’ me” shocked me, when I first heard it, on my first trip to the American West, as did the history of moneylending, when I first read about it, while studying the Holocaust in the 1980s (my mother was a Polish Holocaust survivor).

Raised among Jewish intellectuals and institutions, I found this lack of historical self-awareness scandalous. Indeed, I have almost 20 books on the history of the Jews, many with that title, mostly written by Jews, few with sections on moneylending and none with adequate ones, except for James Parkes's "The Jew in the Medieval Community” (1938). Moreover, moneylending is central to civilization, its first financial instrument.

With the recent increases in conspiracy theories and threats and violence against Jews, my curiosity has been eclipsed by desperation. We must finally and fully shine a spotlight on this long, convoluted and sometimes perverse history, starting with the Biblical prohibitions and the Christian workaround, making Jews their retail lenders. That no one did so in 19th century Ukraine or America in the 1950s is understandable. That the Jews-control-the-banks conspiracy theory remains rampant, however, is on us.

An important endeavor for journalism today, I believe, would be to rectify that millennia-long reportage failure by commissioning and publishing a number of editorials, introductory articles and well-researched longer pieces on Jewish moneylending, the Jews of Ukraine and related subjects.

Modesty aside, I'm a good candidate to write some of them.

In addition to my seven weeks in Ukraine, which produced "Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution” (2023), my resume features 40 years of Holocaust-related writing, starting with "Bruno Lowenberg: Artist and Survivor” (Clinton Street Quarterly, Portland, Oregon), which won a North-West Journalism Association Award in 1982. Other work includes "Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed” (2015), "Soros, Jewish Bankers and Interest Explained” (2018) and "The Benefits of Commemoration” (2022).

I also did research at the Holocaust Center of Northern California, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, and San Francisco State University, where I studied with Konnilyn Feig, and ad hoc investigating while co-directing the PBS-shown documentary, “Our Holocaust Vacation” (2007), shot mostly in Poland, editing my mother’s book, “Love at the End of the World: Stories of War, Romance and Redemption” (2021), and attending over a dozen Holocaust survivor conferences.

Thanks in advance for your timely attendance to or involvement with these proposals,

Cordially,

Doniphan Blair Posted on Jun 08, 2023 - 09:33 AM
Recent Articles by D Blair
by Doniphan Blair

Bruno Loewenberg, in the centerpiece photo from the feature interview in The Clinton Street Quarterly, 1982. photo: D. Blair
Articles, Proposed or Pending

In January 2022, I began a concerted effort to get my articles published outside of cineSOURCE. Here's scorecard of the situation:

Sent Out May 2023

Proposal for two articles about Jews of Ukraine and Jews and Money lending

Sent Out in January 2023

"Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution" was published by Redaction Report and Reader Supported News

This article documents my trip to Ukraine (August 24-October 9, 2022), with a focus on what young intellectuals think, telling the story of what happened during the Maidan Revolution of 2014, and the history of Ukraine’s Jews and neo-Nazis. It concludes with my encounter with Lviv's vibrant youth scene and being in an air raid—inspiring both hope and fears of nuclear war. (16,800 words, completed 1/15/23).

Send Out in January 2022

Letter from Oakland: A Progressive City in Crisis

"My Father’s Spanish Civil War" 2,800 & 1,200 words, 3/4/23. Using quotes from my father’s letters, I explore his difficult experience fighting for Republican Spain in 1937 with a shorter survey of his World War Two experience, notably flying in B-24 bombers, and a concluding paragraph on Ukraine.

"The Benefits of Commemoration" 3,600 words, 8/28/22. While travelling to Poland to put my mother’s ashes on her family’s mass grave, I encountered a moving three-day event of Poles honoring and remembering the Jews of their town and their destruction.

"How to Fight the Conspiracy Theory Plague" 2,000 & 1,000 words, 8/15/22. A summary of how conspiracy theories have infected America’s right wing and how to oppose it, focusing on the efforts of Adam Kinzinger.

"Conspiracy Mirroring: A Schoolyard Psy-Op Goes High Tech" 1,850 & 900 words, 7/8/22. Unique insight into the common conspiracy theorist trick: accusing their opponents of committing the same crimes they are perpetrating, and its evidence from fake news to false flags.

"Ukraine Fights for Freedom in Song, Film and Television" 2,300 words, 6/7/22. A survey of Ukrainian culture focusing on the winners of the 2022 Eurovision Song contest, Kalush Orchestra, Zelensky’s television show, “Servant of the People”, and an award-winning film, “Klondike", about a pregnant woman running a farm in the middle of the Donbas war.

"Ukraine’s Complex, Tragic History” 4,100 words, 5/10/22. A brief, enlightened review of Ukrainian history, focusing on the little-known killing of as many to 20 million Ukrainians from 1914 to 1945, and culminating with success of the Maidan Revolution, Zelensky’s election and the Russian invasion.

"Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs" 4,400 & 2000 words, 1/6/22. An expose of Trump’s extensive conspiracism, from spouting conspiracy theories to training with “the most evil man in New York,” Roy Cohn, and the origins of QAnon as a live-action roll playing game.

"Letter from Oakland: A Progressive City in Crisis" 11,300 words, 12/20/21. The author starts by examining the six murders that transpired around his building in 2020, then his 30 years in Oakland, Oakland’s history, its many police scandals, the Black Lives Matter movement and more.

SHORT VERSIONS OF LIST

"My Father’s Spanish Civil War", "Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution", "The Benefits of Commemoration", "How to Fight the Conspiracy Theory Plague", "Ukraine’s Complex, Tragic History”, "Conspiracy Mirroring: A Schoolyard Psy-Op Goes High Tech", "Ukraine Fights for Freedom in Song, Film and Television",
"Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs", "Letter from Oakland: A Progressive City in Crisis"

"My Father’s Spanish Civil War" 2,800 & 1,200 words, 3/4/23.
"Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution" 16,800 words, 1/15/23.
"The Benefits of Commemoration" 3,600 words, 8/28/22.
"How to Fight the Conspiracy Theory Plague" 2,000 & 1,000 words, 8/15/22.
"Conspiracy Mirroring: A Schoolyard Psy-Op Goes High Tech" 1,850 & 900 words, 7/8/22.
"Ukraine Fights for Freedom in Song, Film and Television" 2,300 words, 6/7/22.
"Ukraine’s Complex, Tragic History” 4,100 words, 5/10/22.
"Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs" 4,400 & 2000 words, 1/6/22.
"Letter from Oakland: A Progressive City in Crisis" 11,300 words, 12/20/21.

(First symbol: • sent out to publishers, * published my ‘zine)

* My Father’s Spanish Civil War, 2,800 & 1,200 words, 3/4/23. Using quotes from my father’s letter, I explore his experience fighting for Republican Spain, with a shorter survey of his World War Two experience, and a concluding paragraph on Ukraine.
• * Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution, 16,800 words, 1/15/23. I document my trip to Ukraine August 24 to October 9, 2022 with a focus on what young intellectuals and hipsters think, the hidden history of Ukraine’s Jews and neo-Nazis, and what actually happened during the Maidan Revolution of 2014, concluding with a contemplation of nuclear war.
* The Benefits of Commemoration, 3,600 words, 8/28/22. While travelling to Poland to put my mother’s ashes on her family’s mass grave, I fell into a fantastic event of Poles honoring and remembering the Jews of their town.
• * How to Fight the Conspiracy Theory Plague, 2,000 & 1,000 words, 8/15/22. A summary of how conspiracy theories have infected America’s right wing and how to oppose it, focusing on the efforts of Adam Kinzinger.
• * Conspiracy Mirroring: A Schoolyard Psy-Op Goes High Tech, 1,850 & 900 words, 7/8/22. A unique analysis of the common trick that conspiracy theorists use: accusing their opponents of committing the exact same crimes they are perpetrating.
* Ukraine Fights for Freedom in Song, Film and Television, 2,300 words, 6/7/22. A survey of Ukrainian culture focusing on the winners of the 2022 Eurovision Song contest, Kalush Orchestra, Zelensky’s television show, “Servant of the People”, and an indie film about fighting in the Donbas, “Klondike”.
• * Ukraine’s Complex, Tragic History, 4,100 words, 5/10/22. A brief, enlightened review of Ukrainian history, focusing on the little known murder of up to 20 million Ukrainians from 1914 to 1945, and culminating with success of the Maidan Revolution, Zelensky’s election and the Russian invasion.
• * Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs, 4,400 & 2000 words, 1/6/22. A little reported expose of Trump’s conspiracism, from spouting conspiracy theories to training with “the most evil man in New York,” Roy Cohn, and the origins of QAnon as a live-action roll playing game.
• * Letter from Oakland: A Progressive City in Crisis, 11,300 words, 12/20/21. The author looks at the six murders around his building in 2020, then his 30 years in Oakland, then Oakland’s history, its police scandals, the Black Lives Matter movement and more.
Posted on Jun 07, 2023 - 12:43 PM
The Shock of an Oakland Shooting
by Doniphan Blair

An artist's rendering of the shooter on 7th Street, across from the Bart Station, 6/1/23. illo: D. Blair
I SAW MY FIRST SHOOTING LAST
Thursday, June 1, in front of the BART station in West Oakland. It happened so fast, five shots in quick succession, there wasn’t time to be afraid, let alone hit the dirt. A guy in a white jacket and earbuds crossed the street without turning his head as the shooter blasted away behind him.

No one was hit but seeing my first muzzle flash at about 100 feet, across from a train station, at eight in the evening, with over 100 people milling about, was shocking and a bit traumatizing. Before that, I had only heard shots, sometime quite close but still not visible.

The young, hoodied shooter seemed to be “responding” to an altercation in front of a liquor store, although his attack was obviously premeditated, given the escape car at the ready, which peeled off after he leapt in. The cops arrived about five minutes later.

About 40 Oaklanders have been murdered so far this year, meaning we’re on track to equal or excel the 119 murders of 2022, almost double pre-pandemic years. Indeed, Oakland has been surfing some rough times since the pandemic.

There was the firing of yet another police chief—LeRonne Armstrong, whom I liked, and who grew up a dozen blocks from me—the clearing of West Coast’s biggest homeless encampment—Wood Street, a rough scene eight blocks from me—the loss of Oakland’s last sports franchise—the Athletics baseball team is moving to Las Vegas—and a ransomware attack. That crippled the city for almost two months.

Despite the difficulties, the brand-new, very young mayor, Sheng Thao, 37, previously a city councilor, is doing a good job, evidently drawing on insights gleaned from her disadvantages.

There’s no point in mentioning gender, given Oakland has had women mayors for the last 12 years, but Thao is a child of Burmese immigrants and suffered spousal abuse and homelessness. She’ll need all that and more to beat the next catastrophe: the budget shortfall, run up by her sisters-in-arms, the biggest in Oakland’s history.

Thao gave a spectacular interview recently to The SF Examiner (5/30/23). She didn’t mention Armstrong, whom she fired for not coming clean on a rogue cop investigation, a tricky choice, since the cop was part of the Chinese-American community and Armstrong was revered by African-Americans.

Nor did she mention the obscene murder rate, although she concluded, “That’s what keeps me up at night: to really figure out how we get more resources for young people. How do we make them feel special? How do we make them feel seen?”

Yes, it’s a rough situation motivated by boys wanting to role play men and sexual selection—there’s often a woman involved. From my perspective, it can only be abated by honest talk and action, in other words moving beyond ideological tropes to rational action. Posted on Jun 05, 2023 - 12:16 PM
Bruno Loewenberg: Artist and Survivor
by Doniphan Blair

Bruno Loewenberg, in the centerpiece photo from the feature interview in The Clinton Street Quarterly, 1982. photo: D. Blair
This article, a reprint from the summer 1982 edition of the Clinton St. Quarterly, Portland, Oregon's premier art and idea periodical, won a North-West Journalism Association Award in part because it was some of the first Holocaust material published in the region.

ONE AFTERNOON IN OCTOBER [1981],
an elderly gentleman came into Ancient Currents Gallery in San Francisco and plopped a stack of color photos down on my desk. Why this venerable man would select this gallery, known for our primitive, international and modern artists influenced by the tropics, baffled me. Soon I made an appointment to see more work in person. There, in a living room crowded with work by Mr. Loewenberg as well as lithographs by Chagall, Dali, Miro and Picasso, we sat comfortably downing rounds of schnapps while the artist, aided by quips from his wife, Lisbeth, conversed his way around nearly a century of creative living.

Suddenly, I realized the connection. I had been so busy looking into and gathering works that interrelate modern and "primitive" art, I hadn't realized that here was a patriarch in the very same field, a fellow quite modern but also of a tribe ... a tribe I share through my mother, who like Mr. Loewenberg, is one of the few members to carry our heritage, as it should be, from ancient to current.

The Jews were the first tribe to decide to enter Western Civilization and still maintain their codes. It wasn't until the 1900s that the "middle ages" were lifted from the shoulders of European Jewry. There were still pogroms as late as 1920, but in Germany the "Rights of Man" had finally filtered across the border and for a generation life seemed to open up. Jews could vote, hold office, and create their own world and art, which they did wholeheartedly, both in ethnic forms, such as the Yiddish Theater, and as major components of the Expressionists, Dadaists, Surrealists and Fantastic Realists.

It is my conviction that this change in the arts, and its obvious symbolic effect on society, was instrumental in fueling the paranoid classicist backlash arch-typified by Adolph Hitler. More schizophrenic than the average politician, who generally condones all backroom debauchery, Hitler sported some of the most small-minded aesthetics in all of Europe. The cure he instituted for his ailing fatherland was severe cultural amputation, but imagine how enraged he must have been when his "Decadent Art Show," designed to indicate the degeneration of post-1900 art, was popular among his fellow Aryans. What undoubtedly disturbed him the most in modern art was the tendency of artists to express two sides of things, equally and simultaneously (like Picasso's noses), a concept abhorrent to a schizophrenic for whom division is the basic nature of life.

As the noose of cultural control tightened around Middle Europe, the creative minds had to work faster and better. Some saw the "endgame" of such rigid cultural competition and fled; others, not so fortunate, survived through the strength of their inner vision. My personal need to understand how this could be done by sensitive souls and how they could maintain their awareness led me to encourage Mr. Loewenberg to speak on such topics. It is a delicate subject that I wouldn’t broach with the toughest “survivor” because to probe the subconscious, where such things are absorbed, would be like opening “Pandora’s Box,” unless that man is one who employs his subconscious daily and is accustomed to unearthing its contents for use in his art. Such a man, who has cultivated his awareness and dealt with the difficulties in his own mind, might be able to give us a clue how such artistic energy became the power for many to weather the dark night of Western Civilization and perhaps prove the psychic nature of creativity.

As a man who expresses himself with paint, he was sometimes uncomfortable with the precise nature of the written word. I assured him, though, as an artist, not a historian, he would be better able to paint a realistic picture of an epoch, though only forty years behind us, that had become an irreparable cipher to mankind due to its monstrous nature.

A Conversation

Bruno Loewenberg: I don’t even know when I began painting. I was always drawing, even as a boy… they were humorous drawings. I don’t know how great the influence of my father was. He was a ship’s chandler [outfitter]. I remember him having a big book into which he painted with water colors. He painted all the incoming and outgoing ships but only their funnels… a white funnel with a blue field, a golden star and the company’s insignia… I observed him always.

No one can say for sure what is the very source of their artistry. Courage of super-human dimension is necessary to present your own concept, free of all conventions. In the end art is freedom. It makes you free to think, to feel, to do your own thing. I did one of my best paintings in half an hour. Sometimes I did a beautiful painting and destroyed it.

Art is the preservation of our childhood, of fairy tales, of myths and ceremonies. Art is the growth to manhood, to grow up into the computerized world of adults. The symbiosis of both parts harmoniously is art. Everyone manages that more or less… the executive playing with miniature railroads. The fantastic world of dreams is the nucleus of our artistic creations.

To walk into nature, to feel nature, to be nature provides you with the essential means to create. Go and do it! The universe creates the music but the human heart performs it. There must be sense, a meaning in a painting, or it is all craziness. Sure the artist is crazy… he must be crazy because he cannot accept everything he sees. He has to bend it into another creation. This why Cezanne is so great, he changed the picture of the world and nature.

There is an intriguing similarity between a painting and human life. In life you move from place to place, according to your adventurous impulse. At each station you grow larger, on the way to each you destroy many things of which you are not aware, which are essential for the continuation of your life.

I was born in Stettin, which is now a Polish city, on the Oder River, which is like San Francisco, on the sea.

Bruno's first wife, Clara Muller, a cabaret dancer, circa 1933. photo: unknown
Doniphan Blair: So you grew up on ships?

BL: I grew up almost on ships, yes. My father paid for my education himself.

DB: Was that at a Jewish school?

BL: No. I attended the so-called ‘gymnasium,’ which is a preparatory school for the university.

DB: But you never went to university, what did you do?

BL: I became a book man after I left school.

DB: How did you sell the books?

BL: I first started in books as an apprentice… My father brought me to a bookshop and they took me and I had to learn for three years. Without those three years you could not be a book man in Germany, no. Here you can be a book man from one day to the next.

DB: Were most of the people [involved with books] Jewish?

BL: No, everything Jewish was hidden.

DB: Did they know you were Jewish?

BL: Of course, they must have known, they only had to look at my name—Loewenberg. Do you know where the name Loewenberg comes from? In the Middle Ages the Jews were not permitted to live in the city, so to live somewhere they had to have someone who took them over, who protected them. And one of the famous dignitaries, a count who took care of my ancestors, was a fellow by the name of Graf… Count Von Loewenberg. All the Jews living under his protection took the name. This is how we have all the Silversteins, the Appelbaums, flowering names, they are all Jewish.

DB: Was there much antisemitism when you were working in the bookstore among the people in the shop?

BL: Don’t ask too much, you see it opens a book for me. My life with antisemitism is a special chapter; I don’t know where to begin.

DB: Well, just tell us a few things to give us an idea.

BL: Sure, the Germans without being antisemitic is not a thing that you can say. That is what made it so easy for the Germans to overrun the Jews.

DB: So you never met a German who was not antisemitic?

BL: Oh, many! My first wife, she wanted to be Jewish. She kept telling me, but I had to tell her…. It’s not a question of a little water or something. You just have to be… born.

My friend Tepper… he is not only a friend but a book man like myself. He was a book man at one time in the shop where I worked. Then he opened his own shop and became very successful. When everything was over [the war] he became a supervisor of the city. We visited him, and he led us to various places of which he took care. There were some memorials erected to the memory of the people who attempted to kill Hitler. It was the house where they were executed, the [would-be] murderers of Hitler. He took care of making a temple out of this place. He was instrumental in bringing these buildings to be a monument in German history… my colleague Tepper.

DB: When were you married?

BL: From 1922 to 1929. My wife worked as a singer in the cabaret. A nice girl, but we were young… she still lives in Berlin… she’s 82. We still communicate.

DB: How about the fact she was gentile?

BL: All my friends were Aryan. Nobody asked, like America… a free country. Not until Hitler came; Hitler made an issue out of it and what an issue. He had his men working for that. Since I told you I was not politically minded… a non political person is a non-fighter… I let it go.

Hitler was there, he had his say, he took his life. He did the right thing. He delivered mankind from one of the most horrible criminals there was. Fortunately, mankind did not have to come with trial against him. He made the trial himself, by killing himself. That is enough for me.

DB: Did any of the artists know what was happening?

BL: No… not until it was too late. They were very naïve. This one woman wanted to introduce me to Goebbels [Joseph, the Minister of Propaganda], whom she knew, as if talking with me, a beloved friend of hers, a human being, would make a difference.

DB: Did you go?

BL: No.

DB: They thought they could change politics with art?

Bruno at his work desk, in house in San Francisco's Sunset neighborhood. photo: D. Blair
BL: Yes. I want to tell you a story. One time we were having a party, everyone was drinking on a side street in Berlin. Across the street, a small street, was another house, where arrived a truck of S.S. men and they rounded up all the people from the house. We continued to have our fun. Some of us made jokes even… ‘What are those people doing? They must have done something.’ Politics was always very unsafe. I always heard stories, we didn’t know, we thought it was politics.

DB: But the art scene was still safe, even with the Dadaists or whoever?

BL: Sure, of course… until Hitler. Then he had his ‘Enarte Kunst’ [Decadent Art] show. All the moderns had to participate, his showing of the decadence of the arts. The artists had only one advantage: they were not Jews. I knew them all from when I had the bookstore. They all came into the bookstore. I sold many of their works, engraving and lithographs by a very good Berlin publishing house. Everyone was buying them. They were reasonably priced, etchings by whomever was having a big show, the newest thing. I put up small exhibitions in my shop.

DB: Like who?

BL: [Karl] Schmidt-Rotluff… [Max] Pechstein, [Karl] Hofer, Otto Mueller, [Max] Bechman.

DB: Who bought these works?

BL: Oh, business people with a high life style, but they a certain instinct, a nose for where they could find art. I once had Teniers… I think, the Elder—a Dutch painter. So, I took it to this guy, the owner of Lysol—you know it is a German company? He looked at it for a long time… I waited. Then he gave it back to me. He said he couldn’t buy it. And he told me from then on I should know he never buys anything for less than 50,000 marks. So the next time I come… remember.

DB: How about the artists, how did they live?

BL: Well, we were in coffeehouses mostly. It was a big enclave, all these cabaret people were coming up from Vienna and opening theaters. Everyone was in the coffeehouses… [Berthold] Brecht was there. Always talking… some of them were very poor.

There was this one painter, a friend of mine… Hoextner, a drug addict. His clothes were ruined. He used to go around in the cafes from table to table asking each person ten cents… ten cents until he had a dollar fifty, then he would run off to the pharmacy to buy drugs. Cocaine. They used to offer it to me… all the time. I never tried any, but it was everywhere, in the cafes, at all the tables. The artists would either accept it or ignore it.

Hoextner always had his equipment with him. He would inject himself in the leg, through the pants, in the café, and continue talking all the while. He lived in a bathtub—he took me there once. He walked in a stoop with a wild look on his face. Sometimes we would go to the museums and galleries… we would listen in on what people were saying and then say things to them. We had many arguments with the bourgeoisie. They would think we were crazy; we wore funny clothes. Everyone had one thing that they always wore. One guy had these funny spats, a hat, a scarf, on which one would depend.

DB: Sort of like hippies?

BL: Sure, just like them. And we hippies used to go out all the time. I think they were sort of scared of us all in the group. We used to go to the theater or to hear music. It was a very beautiful time. People were coming in from all over Europe… many artists. Some were very successful because Berlin had the quickest impulses.

DB: How about the thirties… during the inflation?

BL: Ha ha ha… you don’t know what inflation is. I was afraid to sell a book. Today 500, then the next day it is worth a thousand and next week a million.

DB: Did people help each other out during the inflation… was there sharing of food or something?

BL: No. I really don’t know how we survived. People left their houses in the city with a bag with whatever valuables and went out to the country where they would buy ham, eggs, spinach.

DB: Your wife was working in the cabaret then, so they must have continued?

BL: The arts were booming. The impulse to create is greater in people in time of danger. If you are threatened, you are extremely excited, your normal life is threatened and this impulse is the mother of art. If it is anormal time and you can anything you want at grocery store, then there is nothing to excite you. You don’t have any impulse to create. You are sitting there eating what you bought. But if you have to fight for it, you are careful; if you are careful, you have to be excited.

DB: Now you said in 1937-8, there was a lot of artistic activity going on around Berlin.

BL: You know where I was living, near the Kurfurstendamm [a famous Berlin avenue], where all the activities were. It was sort of an enclave. They even permitted one coffeehouse. Here the Jews could come in and have their coffee. The only place where there was no sign, ‘No Jews Permitted.’ It was a very nice coffeehouse. I went there everyday to have my coffee. In the enclave, if [the Nazis] wanted to change, they would have to change every shop, every theater, every cabaret.

DB: They would lose the business.

Lisbeth Loewenberg: But [the Nazis] did it anyway.

BL: Til a certain point, then came the time you could not see a Jew on the streets. They just took them off the streets to the concentration camps. Then came the ‘Crystal Night’ [Kristallnacht, Nov 9, 1938]. This was the reason for the famous ‘Crystal Night’ when they took everyone Jewish. Every shop was smashed to pieces.

DB: In Berlin?

BL: In Berlin and all over, in every city. Still, as you know, the Jews were not brought in silence. They are not silent. They made their jokes. They had nothing more to live by [financially]. They had their forced labor, digging or whatever, trying to live by these government stamps. At the end of the week, you received maybe 75 cents to live [by], but as the Jews say—

LL: You get used to your worries and learn to live with it.

DB: This is a general question: The Jewish people, do you see them as a more speculative people or are they more realistic?

BL: They are both.

DB: How about in terms of being dreamers, dreaming of something?

BL: I think they have every trait.

DB: They are not particularly pessimistic or optimistic? So even in the Berlin time or during the time in the camp you found the same thing, some were pessimistic and some were optimistic? There wasn’t a sort of general flow?

BL: Well, I would say fortunately, in every moment in our life, something takes over and helps you to continue your life [to] have the greatest pleasure out of life. If you come into a concentration camp or prison, your mind changes right away; you are no longer the old person. Where do I sleep? Where do I get my food? These questions get so majestic and go over you, so that all metaphysical questions disappear. You don’t ask would I live this life over again; there is no such questions. There were a few philosophers in the camp [Buchenwald, where Bruno was 1938-9], known philosophers, who managed to raise such a question. We dared and we had the strength to think about such metaphysics.

One of my friends was named Heinemann [Gustav, perhaps]. He was a very famous politician. He was in the German ‘Landtag’ [state parliament]. They caught him and he was there in the concentration camp. And we always managed to come together for work, to get the same handle on the same box of sand, to carry it up and down. And we talked sometimes, somehow metaphysical talks. But most of the time you have no other idea but to stay alive.

DB: But when you raised those metaphysical questions, what did you come up with? Blame for the German people? Or did you question why this was happening?

BL: Very difficult to answer such a question. If you are 13 months in concentration camp, you have how many days? Almost 400 to come up with metaphysical questions. Questions that have nothing to do with your naked life, these I call metaphysical.

DB: This fellow, the politician, as someone in the German political structure, did he offer any reasoning or philosophy behind what was happening?

BL: No. We talked about living writers, poets and so forth. He knew under no circumstances he would come out of the camps alive. Because they swore he would die in the camp. There was a whole company of Viennese artists, actors, in the same part I was living. All the famous actors from Vienna were sitting there darning socks.

One day I got a horrible pain like sciatica, so they sent me to this place were I could sit. This was not great. They only sent me there because if I could not do anything worthwhile for the camp, at least I could darn socks. There we were all sitting, all the Viennese artists. Mr [Fritz] Grünbaum [popular cabaret artist], Farkas Beda Loehner, [Hermann] Leopoldi [composer]… cabaret people, all very sad, no one was laughing. There was a sign there which you found near the door, ‘Only the birds are singing.’

DB: Who put that there?

BL: The authorities—Hitler.

DB: Because they knew there were artists there?

BL: So that nobody had the idea to sing. Could be that someone starts to sing, ah, ah, no such thing—only the birds are singing. Ha ha, I must laugh if I think about it. But I am sitting here telling you about the camp. I should smash the [tape] machine. I didn’t have the idea to tell you about the camp. It was forbidden to me. They swore if I ever told anything about the camp that they would send an undersea boat to catch me on the high seas. They would get me anywhere; I was not supposed to speak about it… This they told me as I was leaving.

DB: So there was absolutely no artistic expression amongst these cabaret people? Did they ever sing, was there any small theater? Any [art] form?

BL: No songs, we had no songs. The birds never sang. We had an orchestra, a band. There were professional musicians among the thousands of prisoners, and they formed the band. And every afternoon they played when you came back from work; we came through the big gate to our various barracks where we lived, but before we went to our barracks, the whole camp had to be standing on the parade place to make roll call, every afternoon about 5 o’clock. There was music. On this side there were whipping posts. If you were marked for punishment, you were strapped in on a wooden horse on one side and there would stand an S.S. man with a big whip, and on the other an S.S. man would count one . .. two . . . till 25. It happened every day, and during the punishment of the poor fellow, who was very badly hurt, we saw their bottoms all cut, and during their punishment the damn orchestra played the famous band song, popa… pie… da… die. There we had song, we were not only suffering, ha ha.

DB: I was thinking, was there nothing amongst the people privately?

BL: No, there was no private connection, not even in discussion, not a talk. Silently we were sitting there, not talking.

IB: There were no [religious] services?

BL: No! How could you? This is a company, over which is spread a dark cover, a dark thin blanket of dark material, over your head, over your body, and there you will live all day and all night! Only sadness.

DB: So that dark blanket extinguished all expression of art?

BL: All expression. Terrible.

DB: I was wondering if there was any artistic reflection of that experience?

BL: My face here [referring to his painting ‘Ecce Homo’ on the wall] is from the life in the camp. It makes you bloated. You see everybody was blistered off, everybody had sick faces. And the clothes you had . . . you could not recognize a person who comes out of the camp. I never met a person who was in the camp. I don’t know who was ever in the camp, because we were all naked. Maybe it’s illusion. Maybe I dreamt it—nobody saw me there. Did you see me there? No. My wife didn’t see me. It’s all an illusion. Hitler is an illusion.

DB: Some people are trying to say that now. There are historical groups trying to establish that fact. But in a U.S. court of law it was ruled that it is not an illusion. There really were camps. An historically established fact.

BL: And you should think that a story like Hitler’s would be an atom bomb and change the whole of mankind, somehow opposite the Jews. No, not at all; it didn’t take away from antisemitism .. . not a bit. You think we left antisemitism? I have nothing to represent of my family, no one. All my aunts, all my uncles, all my nephews, all my nieces, all my cousins there were all killed, all of them. My sister and her little boy, they were all killed in concentration camps. I have nothing to represent my family.

DB: But your sister was the one who got the ticket for you to get out?

BL: She got a ticket for me, and then she was taken to the concentration camp.

DB: Why didn't she get out, too?

BL: I don’t know; that is another question. Why didn’t I get out before? I was warned, I was repeatedly warned, by well-meaning persons, and I didn’t get out. One day I was sitting in the coffeeshop, having coffee, and this fellow sitting next to me turns and says, ‘Listen, you should not even go home to get your things; you should just leave as fast as possible.’ I looked at him as if he were crazy. ‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘Because we are planning to do terrible things.’ ‘How can you do these things?’ I asked, and he replied only, ‘We are developing ways.” But you can’t go out, if you live in a city that is your home. Better not to mention these things.

DB: You don’t think it is important for the young people of today to know these things?

BL: What good is it?

DB: Maybe the whole world can learn from the mistakes. We as human beings…

BL: Try, try, you are young enough.

DB: So, you didn’t follow politics much in those days?

BL: Unfortunately, I am completely unpolitical, apolitical entirely.

DB: Is this from your own nature or a philosophy?

BL: No, my nature. To live in peace, it is an illusion. I have the illusion, I live in peace. I don’t want any arguments. I don’t want to know another man is a Christian. I am invited tomorrow afternoon at six o’clock by a very nice fellow; he is from Lebanon. He was at his window today and he calls over, we always greet, and asks if I can come over tomorrow for a glass of wine. Ho ho ho, with the greatest of pleasure, for a glass of wine I will come over at six o’clock. I don’t want to know if he is Lebanese, if he is anti-Jew or what. Leave me alone. We are human beings; let me have my glass of wine… that is all I want. I think a person who loses the basic naivete and spontaneity can hardly be called young. To be creative he needs these two basic qualities, and if you are able to maintain these traits you stay young to create your own work . . . independent of old age.

DB: One time during our conversation, you said you went into the concentration camp as if you were a ‘puppy.’ Somehow the same naivete and spontaneity you seem to feel carried you through them. Am I correct?

BL: Oh yeah, it has a lot to do with survival because the reality of things doesn’t touch you. At least not as much as your own fantasies. Your own image of your own self, they are stronger. You eat once a day in the concentration camp; you get a bowl of soup—no meat, but you eat this soup with great hunger, eager to have it, on long tables. If somebody died, the same moment he died everyone was grabbing his bowl.

In the camp, after this operation, when they cut open my hand—you can still see here—and they took out the pus and then they threw me… out of a back door into a field, with twenty or thirty people all with bandaged arms and legs. There was no anesthesia, nobody had any. They operated as you were, in full consciousness . . . they cut you up everywhere.

As I came out into this field where everyone was sitting, I had to start work. Because in the concentration camp, it is forbidden to have time to rest. This is the principle. They make you work even if you are drowsy. They gave me a basket of twigs and some sharp glass splinters which you took between your knees, and with your one free hand you had to shave the skin off the limb; this is what you had to do. There was another basket where you put the shavings.

All this you had to do but all this kept you very healthy. I never was hungry. I never was… I never desired more than a bowl of soup. It is still my habit here in San Francisco. When we go to the restaurant, I order a bowl of soup. It’s good enough for me, wonderful, clam chowder. Who thought clam chowder in the camps? Nobody.

Now this all makes you strong… If you want to become 91 years old, take a hard life on you. A life of a Spartan warrior. You have to take such a life, then when you become old you will never be sick… For there is no reason to be sick because there is nothing unhealthy that you are doing… working.

If you are 91 years old, you have many thoughts of dying; everybody older thinks of dying. I am not willing to die… to extinguish my consciousness. I’m not willing to give this up. But the question is, what ability do I have to influence this? Everyone wants to die in their sleep, a wonderful death.

Okay, this is a book written by Michel Georges-Michel [French painter and writer, 1883-1985]; he wrote about all the artists of the twenties in Montmartre and about [Marcel] Vertes, a great German painter. Vertes was close to the circus. He made some studies of aerial acrobats. There was a young girl, he invited her up to his studio. They had the following talk—now I will tell you what life is, right away!

‘When you are up there suspended between life and death, I suppose it must be an exhilarating and terrifying moment in spite of your being used to it?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘We are just used to it as you say.’

‘But you talk to each other, don’t you? I saw you talking last night when you stopped for a second.’

‘Oh, that was nothing.’

‘I’m sure you said something.’

‘It wasn’t anything. My partner said there is a coat that a woman was wearing in one of the boxes. He said it was fur, and I thought it was monkey. When we were on the ground again, we found out which one of us was right.’

That is what life is! In a moment, you are hanging between life and death—which you always do. Any moment you are between life and death… and you are having such conversations. I love this book.

Historical Note

Bruno was born on December 16th, 1890, and died on October 29th, 1986, at 95. After his sister's petitioning got him released from Buchenwald, he sailed from Marseille to Shanghai, the only place on the planet that would accept Jews without visas. He lived there the entire war, in the famous foreign enclave, managing a lending library on Ward Road which also did lectures and shows. Despite the Japanese occupation, he was able to tour some of China, including Kaifeng, where Jews had lived centuries prior.

In Shanghai, he met and married Lisbeth, when she was around eighteen. She had fled Vienna with her mother and father, although he died of cancer in Shanghai. She worked as a secretary.

In 1948 they emigrated to the United States and settled in San Francisco, where Bruno opened a bookstore on Polk Street and Lisbeth worked for Collier's magazine and then as the accountant at the JCC. Although Bruno's show at Ancient Currents Gallery, in April 1983, didn't sell any paintings, it was a successful display of his work, it had a well-attended opening, and initiated the gallery director, Doniphan Blair, into researching and writing about the Holocaust. Posted on Jun 02, 2023 - 12:03 PM
The Future of Holograms in Film
by Doniphan Blair

Princess Leia appears as a hologram in 'Star Wars', 1977. photo: courtesy G. Lucas
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

FOR THE LAST 46 YEARS, WE HAVE
been searching for holograms, true holograms, the next level to the one of Princess Leia in “Star Wars”. That was when she delivered to Obi-Wan Kenobi a fantastic ethereal message, a glowy phosphorescent image, compliments of the Bay Area’s Industrial Light & Magic.

Today, May 4th, is a big day for punster Star Wars fans—May the Fourth Be With You—and nearly 46 years since “Star Wars” debuted on May 25, 1977. Hence, it is high time to figure out what happened to the hologram, which many of us believed would peppering performances and art galleries as well as films by this time.

In point of fact, hologram-like apparitions have been with us a long time. Indeed, the “Pepper’s Ghost”, using a half-silvered surface to reflect an apparition-like person in a dark room to the side of the performance, was developed in 1862 by the English scientist John Henry Pepper. It was soon deployed in theaters, circuses, carnival side shows and even churches for ghost-themed plays and then movies, where it became a staple trick shot in the early 1900s.

From 1977 to 2023, quite a few films have continued the Star Wars/Pepper’s Ghost technique, showing us amazing footage of sci-fi futures with hover crafts to floating gardens or massive cityscapes. In lieu of holograms, however, they use CGI, light tricks or dynamic props.

Diagram of how a Pepper's Ghost works: the viewer looks into the left scene and sees the partially reflected by the half-mirror, marked by blue, reflecting the scene to the right. illo: courtesy A. Boswell
In the 1983 James Bond vehicle, “Never Say Never Again”, he plays a holographic video game with his psychotic adversary, while in the television show “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (1991) Scotty was trapped in the holograph-like sphere. “Oceans Twelve” (2004) had a holographic Faberge Egg, for the ruse to steal the real one from The Louvre, and other hologram star turns can been seen in “Total Recall” (1990), "Minority Report" (2002), and "Blade Runner 2049" (2017).

Alas, in our ever-changing media landscape, where everyone is looking for the next big thing, holograms have yet to deliver, let alone dominate.

That would disappoint my high school painting teacher and mentor Aaron Kurzen, who was fascinated by holograms. Although the hologram was invented in the 1940s and came of age in 1960, with the invention of the laser, holograms entered popular imagination when Dennis Gabor, a Hungarian-British physicist, finally won the Nobel Prize for it in 1971. Kurzen got into it around 1980 and had shows of his pieces.

Will films shot in 3D soon make their way to holography? Will that be the latest, greatest way to get viewers off couches in front of enormous flat screen televisions and back into theaters, fitted with fantastic holographic projection devices?

Sadly, we are simply not there yet. When you factor in the physical space needed—a desktop holographic device is like a large blender—you notice that currently machines are are best suited for single objects or figures. Even bigger machines generally keep the background black or white and require objects to come in and out of frame.

But, like “Star Wars”’ fans who continue to believe, the hope for holographic optimization remains, for a new canvas upon which artists and techies can paint, sculpt and morph a new form of art.

A desktop hologram device. photo: KeyShare Innovation Group
According to longtime cineSOURCE associate Randy Gordon, who was working on Sony PlayStation video games in the ‘90s and is now becoming a holographic media advisor, his moles in the industry say the hologram is due for a major expansion in films, art and performances.

“The immersive nature of the hologram is a compelling,” he says, “It is the evolutionary next step in sculptural visuals. While film and gaming holograms may be lagging, there are innovative and immersive developments that will fill the gap while we patiently await the next leap in holography."

So what is new and exciting right now? Gordon points to Transfix which started in Las Vegas on April 21st and runs through September. Transfix presents large installations by the most innovative artists of our day and is arguably the world’s largest immersive art experience. Its holographic-like presentation features over 50 interactive, kinetic pieces by artists from around the globe. The four-acre space includes artist-designed bars and a multi-level labyrinth filled with sculptures, projections and sonic experiences, many mind-bending.

There is also the nearly complete, billion-dollars project in Las Vegas called the MSG Sphere, a collaboration between MSG (Madison Square Gardens) and The Sands Hotel. Billed as "unparalleled entertainment" and "a revolutionary venue to enjoy immersive shows," The Sphere will soon showcase rock royalty Bono and The Edge of U2, who will take up residency in September . We can assume something spectacularly holographic will happen, like massive holograms emanating from The Sphere.

At the more modest end of the spectrum, a life-size hologram will be deployed as part of the private screenings of the new film “Mayan Revelations: Decoding B'aqtun“. A visually inspiring and archeologically fascinating film, directed by filmmaker and author Elisabeth Thieriot, it covers her research in southern Mexico and Guatemala on end-of-the-world conspiracy theories drawn from the Aztec and Mayan calendars.

In between, there will be increasing hologram use, for surprise, novelty, branding and storytelling. But it will be mostly around the edges and in novelty acts until the next hologram technology, featuring the abilities my art teacher Aaron Kurzen dreamt of, emerges and drives it to center stage.

Posted on May 04, 2023 - 11:47 PM
Romanticism and Its Discontents, East and 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 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 oversized individualism and dreams of justice as well as natural kingdom—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 there was 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 forbears’ 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 which leads to 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 named 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 civilization. (Nonetheless, some 5% of societies continued as overt matriarchies and significantly more as covert ones.)

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, however, they had to compete with neighboring patriarchies, compelling them to not only fight but develop their stories, rituals and art, and 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 men 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, women 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. This was a quantum leap from the quests, conquests and imposition of rules men had been recording since the invention of the technology of writing.

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 Albigensian Crusade, the troubadours crisscrossed 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 of Japan 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 during 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 matriarchal phallus shrines, which the women depicted in the woodcuts appeared to enjoy immensely, 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. The great naval commander Admiral Yamamoto was so opposed to the invasion of China and, later, attacking the United States, he was subject to assassination attempts. 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) and endorsed "bushido," the ancient samurai code of honor, (although some say an exaggerated version was popularized in the late 19th century), even calling on the Chinese to embrace Japanese domination, despite the 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," noted 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 throughout the country, 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 was an aficionado of Japan's female culture. Indeed, he was raised by a powerful matriarch, his paternal grandmother; he adored "The Tales of Genji"; and, along with his highly literary novels, plays and essays, he wrote romance novels, which were very popular among women.

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 grotesquerie of the nuclear bombs must have come as 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 their 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, if in a diminished state. The funeral procession for Admiral Yamamoto, who was shot down after the Americans cracked the Japanese codes and tracked his flights, passed in front of the house of his beloved geisha, Kawai Chiyoko. 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, from 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, her mother was not that into sex, she said; she herself praised women who rejected its thrall; and she was not that interested, even though she was a dedicated free spirit, who loved to play 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 and some women 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 immense slaughters, as well as their ancient romanticism and modern geishas and sensuousness, it is evidently not enough to inspire the re-invention of 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, I assume the Japanese will eventually get their mojo back, 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 fantasy 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 Apr 14, 2023 - 08:00 AM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner Mar 2023
by Karl Cohen

'My Neighbor Totoro' (1988), the Japanese animated fantasy film written/directed by Hayao Miyazaki is certified as top 100 film. photo: courtesy Studio Ghibli
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Animated Features included in Sight and Sound’s top 100 Films

The distinguished films are two by Hayao Miyazaki, “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988) is number 74 and “Spirited Away” is 75. This is an acknowledgment that animation is an important art. The poll has been conducted since 1952, once a decade by the British film magazine. Roger Ebert once described the survey as “by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies, the only one most serious movie people take seriously.”

An cell from Mark Fore's new animation . photo: courtesy M. Fore
New Mark Fore Animation Is Online

Mark is an animator who turns out weekly controversial cartoons that are socially responsible shorts. He has addressed the exploitation of railroad workers by corporations, corporations trying to pay zero taxes, there are ugly caricature of Trump and lot of other themes. See his site here

Why Glas Animation Festival Left Berkeley?

The Shattuck Theatres closed last year and now the Regal Theatres on Shattuck, the last commercial movie theatres in downtown Berkeley is closing. (The Regal has filed for Chapter 11 as rents were going up, attendance went down due to Covid, etc.). The only movie theatres left open in Berkeley are the Pacific Film Archive and the Elmwood—a truly astounding demise of theatrical cinema in our day.

A Na'vi (extraterrestrial humanoids living in the jungles of Pandora) teaches his son the way of the warrior. photo: courtesy J. Cameron
Making Obscene Amounts of Money

James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” has become the third highest grossing films of all time. It is now number 3 in the top three greatest box office champions. In the number one and two spots are the first “Avatar” of course—it took in over $2.9 billion—and Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame”, a near second with almost $2.8 billion. Cameron’s “Titanic” meanwhile holds the fourth place, with a worldwide gross of $2.3 billion.

“Avatar: The Way of Water” has taken in almost $2.3 billion so far. The film’s budget was said to be over $400 million with another $200 million was spent on advertising and promotion. Rotten Tomatoes reports “Avatar: The Way of Water” only has a 77% rating from the critics based on 315 reviews, but fans gave it a 93% rating.

Trigger Warning: ‘Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey’

This isn’t a cute, animated feature about the beloved bear but, rather, a noisy, low-budget, live action; horror film full of screaming women. It opened on Valentine Day with lousy reviews. Rotten Tomatoes reports only 5% of the reviews by critics were favorable and only 49% of the audience liked it. Apparently, it isn’t scary or funny—the title’s not bad, however.

'The Madelorian' poster for the new Star Wars movie. photo: courtesy Lucasfilm
People Still Love ‘Star Wars’ Brand

The trailer for the third season of Lucasfilm’s “The Mandalorian” drew a record 83.5 million views in its first 24 hours after premiering on January 16th, during the NFL wild card playoff game, no less.

A Disney Stockholder Is Trying to Fight the Man

Nelson Peltz, an activist investor, is waging a proxy battle against the Disney Company. He is seeking a seat on the board and a say in the company’s strategy. Disney responded by releasing a slideshow outlining its argument against Peltz. They say he “does not understand Disney’s businesses, and lacks the skills and experience to assist the board in delivering shareholder value in a rapidly shifting media ecosystem.”

Disney has acknowledged that some of the things Peltz is pushing for are taking place, including implementing a cost-reduction plan and “streamlining our organizational structure to enhance productivity.”

Peltz has a history of challenging the leaderships of companies that he has invested in and he is described as a Trump supporter. After January 6th, however, he apologized for having backed Trump.

CEO Leaves Disney Wealthy

Bob Chapek was fired as Disney’s CEO but left a very rich man, having earned $24.2 million in compensation for the last fiscal 2022 year he worked. (It ended Sept. 30, 2022.) In addition, Disney says his severance package is valued at $20.4 million.

Disney’s Slims Down

Disney is going on a diet and laying off a whopping 7,000 people, although that is only 3.6% of their global workforce. It will save them $5.5 billion. I guess they needed to keep up with the other top US corporations to maintain investor satisfaction. After all they only made 1.28 billion dollars in the last fiscal quarter and that was below the estimate of $1.43 billion analysts had expected to make.

Gosh, that made people unhappy?!? As if that were not enough, Iger reminded everybody but especially investors, they are producing more big cash cows, including sequels to “Toy Story”, “Frozen” and “Zootopia”. They are also streamlining operations to make their business more efficient.

Auction Houses Sell Millions in Animation Art

Auction houses grossed $22 Million in 2022 selling animation art, much of that total came from Heritage Auction in Texas. Their recent “The Art of All Things Disney Animation Art Signature® Auction” took in more than $3.4 million in a four-day sale. Most of the money was spent on buying works from the golden age by Mary Blair, Eyvind Earle, and Carl Barks. The works were put up for sale by collectors and studio archives. Only a small percentage of the pieces come from the artists who created the work.

An Edward Gorey illustration. courtesy: Cartoon Museum
Cartoon Museum Features Edward Gorey

San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum hosts an Edward Gorey menagerie featuring original artwork, limited edition serigraphs, and other rarely-seen works created by celebrated author and artist Edward Gorey. Open from 11 am to 5 pm at 781 Beach St, San Francisco, it will be up until July 9, 2023.

M&M Candies Subjected to Right Wing Attacked

The much-beloved–by-all M&M “spokescandies,” the official mascot of the candy company, have been attacked by right-wing political and media spokespeople. Rightwing pundits have attacked the lovable different colored animated candies with stupid, twisted and devious comments.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson did his ridiculous best to carry on this bullcrap by claiming he's a champion of victims of cancel culture. Early in 2022 he started attacking the M&M spokescandies, perhaps to drive them off the air. Other commentators at Fox joined the attack and came up with more stupid comments, reflecting their racism and other negative thoughts about non-whites.

M&M's popular spokescandies. photo: courtesy M&M
The pundit Kat Timpf is reported to have called Ms Green “an opportunistic, evil bitch” and warned that people “run from women like the green M&M.” Fox’s Martha Mac Callum was reported in the Guardian to have said that the all-girl packaging that the candy company had released in honor of International Women’s Day was a distraction that left the US vulnerable to its communist enemies.

In late January 2023 the maker of M&M candies held a press conference and announced they decided to take “an indefinite pause from the spokes candies”. Had the Fox pundits won? A few days later the NY Times asked, “Was the recent decision to sideline its spokes candies a response to cultural backlash, or just an elaborate stunt leading up to the Super Bowl? Wired Magazine also suggests M&M’s marketing department is intentionally trolling Carlson and that the candies will make a triumphant appearance during the big game.

Both The NY Tines and The Guardian view the right-wing media attack on what should be irrelevant parts of our national culture, as an entertaining distraction to the real ills of our society, from schools and public libraries feeling in some states they have to censor what books are on their shelves to the rise of hatred of minorities and hate crimes. Indeed, mass murders are now commonplace. I find these pointless, silly attacks on those colored candies are indicative of the sad state of spiteful dumb political rhetoric by right wing media today. See more info here

Mindless AI Generates Animated Show

There is a mindless artificial so-called “intelligence” generating an animated show. “Nothing, Forever” is pathetic looking, I kid you not! The technology has a long way to go, although this is probably the extremely crude beginning of something. The program is “Seinfeld-like” and streams 24 hours a day, amazingly. It is written voiced and animated by robots! See it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6mD9YzVbZI

A cell from Max Fleischer's short 'Bimbo’s Initiation', 1931. photo: courtesy M. Fleischer
The Delights of Bimbo, Fleischer’s Cartoon Star

You might enjoy rediscovering “Bimbo”, by Max Fleischer (1883-1972) an American animator, director and studio founder, who was born Jewish in Kraków, Poland. Although he developed Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman, Bimbo was his first sound cartoon star. If you have enjoyed seeing Disney’s earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, you might also enjoy the Fleischer Studio’s Bimbo. His world was full of amazing surreal gags.

I am excited about Bimbo, since a friend just informed me that a rare Bimbo cartoon, “Ace of Spades”, 1931, is now online. Until recently, only a short fragment was available online. Seeing it made me realize that Fleischer’s Bimbo was put in a more complex situation than Mickey, and that Max’s stories were closer to real life then Walt’s plots, which were often set in imaginary, fairytale like worlds. While Mickey was a goody-two-shoes and Peg Leg Pete was a melodrama villain, Bimbo in “Ace of Spade” is a card shark who cheats at gambling but is also a lovable scoundrel.

Seeing the newly posted cartoon led me to watch Bimbo in “Barnacle Bill”, 1930. Bill is a horny sailor who jumps ship, rushes to see his girlfriend (or possibly a wife) and “gets it on” with her. Satisfied, he dumps her and goes back to the ship. The film implies he has a girlfriend or wife in every port.

Bimbo’s first cartoon, “Hot Dog”, 1930, is even more blatant. He is cruising a city street that has a series of women standing by the curb. He tips his hat at each one. Was he looking for a hooker? He picks up the wrong woman and a cop arrests him.

In the most famous Bimbo show, “Bimbo’s Initiation”, 1931, Fleischer achieves full surrealism as Bimbo falls down an open manhole and lands in a bizarre world run by a secret society. But each time a hooded character asks him, “Do you want to be a member,” he says, “No.” That results in a series of outrages and possibly life-threatening things happening to him. Finally, discovering that the hooded character is a sexy, early version of Betty Boop, Bimbo grins and says, “Yes.”

Indeed, “Bimbo’s Initiation” was voted #37 in the book “50 Greatest Cartoons” (1994), by Jerry Beck, who polled a thousand members of the animation industry.

Bimbo’s stellar career was cut tragically short in 1934 when mandatory censorship was imposed on the film industry. They objected to Betty Boop having a dog for a boyfriend. Oh no, that implies bestiality!

All these pre-code shorts are online. Also check out “Swing You Sinners!” 1930. It takes place in a graveyard. Another gem is “Up to Mars”, 1930. It is a delightful, bizarre space adventure.

In 1931 as Betty Boop was becoming more popular Bimbo and Koko become secondary characters. Among her greatest hits are “Minnie the Moocher”, 1932; Betty as “Snow White”, 1933; “Is My Palm Read”, 1933 and “Chess Nuts”, 1933.

Scene from Canadian Alison Snowden and David Fine’s 'Animal Behaviour'. photo: courtesy M. Fleischer
Delightful Oscar-Nominated Animal Behaviour Deserves Applause

Alison Snowden and David Fine’s short. “Animal Behaviour”, which was produced by the National Film Board of Canada received an Academy-Award nomination in 2018. About a group psychotherapy session, it is full of amusing surprises. See it here.

Enjoy Historic Bay Area Footage

If you enjoy seeing incredible historic film footage of the Bay Area? SF State has a large archive that preserves 6000 hours of TV news film, documentaries and other footage produced in the Bay Area and Northern California in the from the Twentieth Century. Lots of it can be seen free here.

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached . Posted on Apr 13, 2023 - 09:33 PM
cineSOURCE Turns 15, Bets On Radical Multiculturalism
by Doniphan Blair

Randy Gordan (cntr) and Doniphan Blair (lft) collaborated on an article at the Sonoma International Film Festival. photo: D. Blair
DESPITE OUR SMALL BUDGET AND STAFF—mostly me but with essential help from Karl Cohen, see his new animation survey, Randy Gordon, read his film review of a new San Francisco indie, and a few other great Samaritans—cineSOURCE has been quite successful. Not only was our 15th birthday on April Fool's Day, we had a massive year.

Indeed, my Ukraine article, "Meet the Kids of Maidan", was one of cineSOURCE's most popular—despite the stiff competition, see our "Best Of" list below—and it was picked up by two news sites, including Northern California's respected Reader Supported News.

Thus inspired, we decided to mount a GoFundMe campaign to rebuild our site, which needs it after 15 years, and to cover my next reporting trip to Ukraine, also desperately needed, given continuing confusion about the war in the progressive community, see "Twilight in Ukraine”.

cineSOURCE merits your support, I feel, because it keeps punching way above its weight. Along with some media reporting, it provides investigative journalism, like “Kerner Collapse: Hubris, Hustle or Outright Scam?” or "Letter from Oakland: A Progressive City in Crisis”, and big ideas, like "The Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto” or our theory of radical multiculturalism, first mentioned in 2020.

Blair with a young man from Mariupol (2nd lft) and Anne, a pianist who said she'd never play Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff again, Golden Rose Synagogue ruins, Lviv. photo: D. Blair
Multiculturalism is a critical concept for a modern society. Indeed, it has been pushing us with incredible power ever since scholars like Edward Said began producing revolutionary analysis, like his “Orientalism” in 1978, a brilliant critique of colonialist aesthetics. What’s missing, however, is a self-reflective, universalized multiculturalism.

While Said proved that western views of other societies were perverted by implicit bias and perspective, he neglected to note the next level of understanding, despite his obvious ability to do so. As a prominent Palestinian spokesperson but also a Columbia professor, classical pianist and New Yorker, he knew about code switching and "occidentalism," the inverse of Orientalism.

All societies have travelers, traders, artists or intellectuals who mix, match or monetize their diverse cultural influences, often more than they or their historians care to admit. Moreover, there is always intermarriage, the ubiquitous bridging of gendered cultures that inevitably accompanies societal mixing. Despite pervasive prejudice, most humans are well aware that both genes and cultures need variation to avoid inbreeding.

As it happened, I grew up three blocks from the Saids in New York, albeit in a completely different world, or should I say worlds. While his place overlooked a park and was part of the Columbia University neighborhood, my family's 13th-floor apartment looked out on a tough housing project and was in Harlem.

Edward Said's groundbreaking 'Orientalism', the 25th anniversary edition. photo: courtesy E. Said
I knew nothing of Palestinian issues until my late teens, but my building was an apogee of integrating other cultures, with many notable Blacks and Jews, while my own family was a delicate balance of European Jewish and all-American values. Given I also played baseball in the Harlem Little League, attended an elite private school, and my best friend was from an upper middle class Greek-American family, a day in my life was a vertiginous slalom through vastly varying cultures and economic strata.

Alas, they were all part of the overarching culture of New York, which I was eager to escape by the end of high school.

Five years of world travel provided me a profound immersion in the other. As well as hitchhiking across America ten times, I traveled the back country of Afghanistan and India, hiked the wilds of Guatemala, Bolivia and Brazil, and slept on the streets of Athens, Mumbai and Rio. Although I made a few rookie orientalist mistakes, they were far outweighed by the incredible experiences, enlightening moments and fantastic people with whom I became friends.

They included urban professionals and artists but also street hippies, rural farmers and indigenous people as well as other world travellers. “In my region of Mato Grosso [Brazil]," my friend Tepe Kahok told me, "Every tribe has at least one European member and one has a French chief,” reflecting a common openness in isolated places to foreign input.

In fact, it wasn't that hard to integrate those rational perspectives with my New-York-City, melting-pot, center-of-civilization worldview. Eventually, those views inspired my search for the sweet spot between science and spirituality, classicism and avant-garde, tribalism and civilization as well as acknowledging the equality of all races, tribes, religions and nationalities.

Radical multiculturalism, I find, serves as a common sense foundation from which to tackle the big issues of our day: extreme identity politics, the epidemic of conspiracy psychosis, the Ukraine crisis, the nurture/nature controversy and more.

Thanks for reading and please help us get these ideas out. If there ever was a time to support cineSOURCE, it is now.

Indeed, with your help of our GoFundMe campaign, cineSOURCE can produce another 15 years of articles like:

Director László Nemes accepts his 2016 Oscar for 'Son of Saul', about 'life' in a death camp. illo: D. Blair
Big, Complicated Issues

The Black Panther Filmography
Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed
Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution
Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs
The Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto
Darwin and Love: What I Learned Making a Holocaust Movie
Romanticism and Its Discontents, East and West
My Father's Spanish Civil War

Alt-filmmaker Bruce Baillie, a good friend of cineSOURCE, surveys the sky in a film, circa 1998. photo: B. Baillie
Filmmakers and Artists

Was Hitchcock a Misogynist or a Feminist: See Chart
The Jew and the Cowboy: Saul Zaentz and Creedence Clearwater
Leader of the Wolfpack Revealed: Crystal Moselle
Bruce Conner: A Filmmaker/Artist's Cracked Vision
Rob Nilsson: Enfant Terrible, Old Master of the Indie
In Memoriam: Alt-Filmmaker Bruce Baillie”
Aaron Kurzen: Art Master, Nice Guy, Wild Surrealist
Om Prakash Sharma: Painting, Post-Colonialism and Tantra
Should We Re-Censor Henry Miller?
Quest for Heartfelt Film and the Santiago Rizzo Interview
Interview with Roger Guenveur Smith: H. Newton, History and More

Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in 'Easy Rider', 1968. photo: D. Hopper
Hipster History

Dennis Hopper: A Wild Life of Art, Success and Sorrow
Summer of Love Shows, Movies & Festivals Beg the Question: What Went Wrong with Hippie Intellectuals?
Brief History of Modern Lovers Commune and Ancient Currents Gallery
Finally, cineSOURCE’s Weed Report
Cine Collectives Come Back, Finally!
Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place

Oakland police carefully count the 73 rounds discharged on October 15th, 2021, right behind cineSOURCE's building in West Oakland. photo: D. Blair
Oakland Stories

Letter from Oakland: A Progressive City in Crisis
Sorry to Bother’ Busts Wide Open Oakland Cine
Oakland’s One-Man Social Service
Four Indies Out of Oakland, Some with Bullets
DeWolf Smokes Monster Oakland Joint Film

Researching Conspiracy Theorists

Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs
Conspiracy Mirroring: A Schoolyard Psy-Op Goes High Tech
Anti-Jewish Conspiracies & Conspiracy of Love

Film Stories

Tippi Hedren: The It Girl Interview
Feminist Makes Movie about Boys and Babies plus Interview
Steady as She Films: Panzica's America's Cup Doc
East Side Sushi Sweeps California
Predicting the Future Thru Film: The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
‘The Green Prince’ of Peace Documentary

Prejudice

Black Lives Matter and Oakland
Soros, Jewish Bankers and Interest Explained
Feras Fayyad: Fighting the Syrian Regime Thru Film
CAN ALL BE FORGIVEN? Art, Sufism and Radical Islam

Avant-Garde and Esoterica

Film Manifestos: Hot or Just Hot Air
Interview with Tobias Schneebaum: Artist, Author, Cannibal?
The Nude in the Age of Trump and Porn

Posted on Mar 31, 2023 - 10:25 PM
Twilight in Ukraine
by Doniphan Blair

Perhaps the only Ukrainian flag in West Oakland is at cineSOURCE studios. photo: D. Blair
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

IT'S A LITTLE ODD WATCHING SPRING
arrive in California—taking hikes, celebrating Passover, the Jewish festival of freedom—while there are almost no Ukrainian flags on the streets and respected California intellectuals, from Medea Benjamin on the left to Eric Weinstein on the right, recommend we ditch Ukraine to the Russian wolf.

When I started studying the Holocaust in the 1980s, the first piece to emotionally destroy me was the televised version of “The Wall” (1982), from John Hershey's book of the same name (1950) about the Warsaw ghetto uprising. I saw it on a black and white television in the front room of the San Francisco commune where I lived.

Director Khachatur Vasilian (lft) and producer Alex Denysov of the Ukrainian short 'Human', now on the festival circuit, see cineSOURCE article. photo: D. Blair
After about an hour, a strange feeling welled up in my chest. It burst at the line, “I just don’t understand why no one does anything,” or something like that. I started crying and then convulsing due to the pain in my chest. Evidently, I was releasing a lifetime of repressed feelings, which I had absorbed from my mother, an Auschwitz survivor, who didn't talk about it. Nor did anyone else when I was growing up in a Jewish neighborhood of New York in the 1960s.

I sobbed in place as "The Wall" continued its descent into depravity. Someone put a hand on my back, but not much was said. My friends were undoubtedly in shock, too, both from watching "The Wall" and not having seen me or many other men in such a state.

Eventually, one grows accustomed. I did, as I studied at the Holocaust Library of Northern California and attended conferences, starting with the international survivor gathering in Washington D.C. in 1983, although a piercing detail or a poignant juxtaposition of regular life with hell would still devastate me.

One perspective I found particularly tragic, which I heard about from my mother but also read about and saw in newsreels, was that of the Jews of Eastern Europe before the war, trying to build a regular life, few suspecting what was coming.

Ukrainian flags on Kyiv's Maidan Square with names of fallen soldiers, including from the International Brigade. photo: D. Blair
That’s what I feel like now about Ukraine.

Fourteen months into the mass murderous war, we have entered a twilight world between a clarion call against evil and the human tendency to become oblivious. As this invasion and war fade into the background, just as Russia's 2014 invasion and war did, we grow accustomed and accepting.

Putin is relying on the Russian capacity to withstand and inflict pain, a sort of society-wide sado-masochism, which he assumes will last longer than western interest in supporting Ukraine. Indeed, from Ron DeSantis and Victor Orban on the right to hard leftists or pragmatic leaders across the global south, many agree: We have to accept the Ukrainian genocide, they say, as an ugly but legitimate means of Russia reestablishing their "community" and strategic defense. This rationalization parallels those made by both fascists and communists after Germany invaded Poland in 1939.

Yes, most Californians and progressives worldwide support Ukraine but not quite enough. The Ukrainian flag flying in cineSOURCE's window is the only one I have seen in West Oakland, a four-square-mile area full of hipsters and liberals.

A flyer protesting 'endless wars' and 'bloated Pentagon war budget' produced by progressives who want to end support for Ukraine. photo: D. Blair
It is only when an overwhelming majority of Americans and people worldwide visibly support Ukraine that Putin and his enablers inside and beyond Russia will see that their path to a functional future is not through imperialism and genocide.

As the descendant of a Holocaust survivor, I can tell you: The attending trauma of surviving, the guilt of standing by and the psychosis of participating in the destruction of Ukraine will be immense and difficult for our descendants to digest.

Which is why I beg of you: Please join me in doing what we can to help Ukraine.

If you want to start by flying a flag, see cineSOURCE's Ukrainian flags. We got them by partnering with an incredible aid group composed of young, California-based Ukrainians, Support Ukraine with Us, to which you can also contribute directly.

Bold action in the face of daunting difficulties can redeem us.

Posted on Mar 31, 2023 - 10:23 PM
Sonoma International: The Little Festival That Went Big
by Doniphan Blair and Jay Randy Gordon

Author enjoying some sun, rare during California's recent rainy season, in Sonoma, one of his favorite California film festivals. photo: D. Blair
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

When I first drove out to Sonoma to attend its international film festival in 2009, I assumed it was a glorified advertisement for the town’s eating and drinking, which are fantastic. I was disabused of that notion utterly the following year when Robin Williams, the late, great Bay Area comedian, interviewed the actress Laura Hutton with uncanny intimacy, while eviscerating himself and teasing the audience, at the town's lovely Sebastiani Theater.

Although the Sonoma International Film Festival (SIFF) did come to specialize in films about wine and food, it became so much more. In 2018, I caught “Quest”, an excellent, Oakland coming-of-age story (see cS article), and that trend toward innovative programming was on full display this year, the festival’s 26th iteration, which ran from March 22nd to the 26th.

Kevin McNeely, who ran SIFF for almost two decades with his colleagues Ginny Krieger and Chay Woerz and programmer extraordinaire Steve Shor, and pulled off a pitch-perfect transition last year by passing the torch to Krieger. As the new executive director, she brought in artistic director Carl Spence, of Seattle and Barcelona fame, and the experienced PR person Jill Golden, who are obviously doing a fantastic job, as evidenced by the films.

The two main leads from 'Joyland', out of Pakistan, the fabulous, deep Alina Khan (lf) and moody powerhouse Ali Junejo (rt). photo: courtesy Saim Sadiq
Indeed, each of the seven films I saw was strong and a couple were masterpieces, notably “Joyland” and “Master Gardener”. The latter is a deep dive into Pakistani family life and its remarkably robust cabaret scene, focusing on a young married man falling in love with a trans singer but also much more, including avant-garde cinematography by Joe Saade. Oscar worthy, it may bring home the gold for Pakistan as well as writer-director Saim Sadiq.

“Master Gardener” is the new heavy weighter from Paul Schrader, of “Taxi Driver” (1976) and “Mishima” (1985) fame. Bookended innocently enough by the daily journal entries of the eponymous gardener, it is an aggressive exploration of modern multiculturalism, a claustrophobic battle of sex, blood and ideology between a white patrician woman, played by Signorney Weaver, her gigolo-master gardener with a severely checkered past (Joel Edgerton), and her niece, a young half-Black woman (Quintessa Swindell).

The 26th SIFF also had two shorts from Ukraine: “Liturgy of Anti-Tank Obstacles”, about artists who switched to making tank obstacles, which I didn’t see, and “Human” (12 min), which I did, after meeting its director and producer at the smoking hot party on Saturday night.

Shuming He, who directed the smart, well written 'Ajoomma', appearing at one of Sonoma's smaller but nice theaters. photo: D. Blair
The other amazing features I saw were “Ajoomma” (90 min), the freshman film by Shuming He. About a retired Singaporean woman on an innocuous tour of Korea, it unfolds into a tightly scripted adventure riddled with Korean soap operas, music stars and Yakuza, as well as romance and fantasy.

Yet another international Oscar contender I saw was “Fathers and Mothers” (96 min), directed by Paprika Steen and starring Denmark’s biggest actors. It addresses claustrophobia, political correctness and hipster families in the context of a liberal but all-controlling private school. Its first reel is a tour de force of scathing satire building into absurd but fully motivated scenes.

I also caught two great documentaries: “Judy Blume Forever” an aggressive look into the life of the famous young adult author, from co-directors Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok, which includes some lovely animation, and “Little Richard: I Am Everything”. Produced with help from CNN Films and Sam Wenner of Rolling Stone Films (son of Jann), Lisa Cortés’ portrait of the queer icon, preacher and superstar is one of the best music documentaries I have ever seen. It showed how Little Richard inspired everybody from Bowie and Jagger to Tom Jones and Prince but didn’t get his due until 1997, 20 years before his death.

Funke Fatale, the smoking hot band, at Sonoma's Saturday night party. photo: D. Blair
Every step of the way at SIFF you find yourself stumbling across events, wine tastings and gallery openings, culminating in the always-stellar Saturday night party, this one featuring a great band, Funk Fatale, eats and people.

It was there I met the 29-year-old Ukrianian filmmaker Khachatur Vasilian and his even younger producer Alex Denysov, who are now based in LA. Both Russian-speakers, they are refugees from Mariupol and Crimea, respectively and reflected the melancholic (Vasilian) and buoyant (Denysov) side of Ukrainian personalities. Their film, “Human”, concerns a man who wakes up in a field naked and runs to a lighthouse in the distance, and uses no language.

Vasilian, who immigrated as a child from Armenia to Ukraine, was inspired by his cinematographer, Olexiy Bardadym, who brought him to the light house location, where he wrote the script in five minutes. An up-and-coming filmmaker to watch, Vasilian is already under attack from rightwingers at home and abroad for “My Young Prince” a short about a teenager who falls in love with an older man, the first Ukrainian film about coming out.

Filmmaker Khachatur Vasilian, of the short 'Human', and his producer Alex Denysov, both Ukrainian. photo: D. Blair
We talked for almost an hour in the back but then came out to enjoy the cream cake, champagne and fantastic stylings of Funk Fatale, in keeping with the noble Ukrainian tradition of balancing devastation with enjoyment.

Posted on Mar 31, 2023 - 09:53 PM
SF Art Institute: Remembrance and Legacy
by Doniphan Blair

Penelope Houston, of the famous local indie band The Avengers, studied at the Institute and remains a working artist as well as musician. photo: D. Blair
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

IT WAS A BITTERSWEET EVENT AT THE
Minnesota Project in San Francisco on March 26th: the coming together of almost 1000 students, teachers, administrators and supporters of the recently deceased San Francisco Art Institute. They hugged and chatted, enjoyed the food and drink and musical stylings of Penelope Houston and Mike Henderson—both longtime Institute associates—and supported the new legacy association.

Mostly, however, they came to commiserate the closing of a massive artistic power in the Bay Area since its humble origins in a Chinatown storefront, back in the 1860s when San Francisco was still the Barbary Coast. What that means is, between the drinking, fucking and gambling, many of the city’s residents were turning toward aesthetics.

A memorial to Fred Martin (1927-2022), a working artist who helped run the Institute for half a century. photo: D. Blair
Although they were loath to leave Chinatown, where they could stomp out smokes on the floor and there was plenty of good eating, their fine art society had almost 1000 paying members by 1874. So they made their way to various mansions, finally settling on Russian Hill, at 800 Chestnut Street, in 1926.

Within five years, Diego Rivera, the world-famous Mexican muralist (see cS story), was doing a massive piece there, now worth tens of millions. Within a couple of decades, a coterie of avant-garde painters had arrived, including Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko from New York, David Park and Elmer Bischoff from Oakland, and the photographer Ansel Adams. By the time I showed up, in 1974, the film department was a who’s who of alternative cinema: Larry Jordan, Bruce Connor, George Kuchar, Gunvor Nelson and more.

Scene from a film by George Kuchar, one of the Institute's most revered film teachers, next to the REsearch publication table, manned by V. Vale. photo: D. Blair
Although we assumed 800 Chestnut Street was an 18th century Spanish monastery replete with haunted Hitchcockian tower, it was actually built for the school. According to the San Francisco Planning Department: the “Spanish Colonial Revival style original building [was] designed by Bakewell & Brown and the 1969 Brutalist addition [was] designed by Paffard Keatinge-Clay.” The latter provided an angular, raw-concrete back building with plenty of skylights and fantastic views of the Bay.

I fell in love with SFAI intellectually as soon as I heard about it in 1971, and physically when I first visited in 1974. I visited again a month ago. The big green door was devoid of information but unlocked even though it was midnight. Though a bit sepulchral, I enjoyed the arched courtyard and mosaic pool until a guard ejected me.

Linda Conner (rt), an Institute photography teacher, cuts a rug to the sounds of Mike Henderson (bck), a long time Institute associate. photo: D. Blair
Indeed, I loved SFAI so much, I stayed for 16 years. Often taking only one course a semester, I would use the film equipment, learn from the aesthetic arguments—especially in the 1980s, when the Marxists and multiculturalists began decrying most art as “rich,” “racist” or “colonialist”—and enjoy the teachers. It was often me and the teacher against the class.

At the Minnesota Project event, it remained incomprehensible to most of us how such an incredible physical plant with such an avant-garde pedigree could be abandoned by one of the world’s richest cities, which has long prided itself on art. Indeed, the city just rebuilt its Museum of Modern Art, which only opened in 1995, with a complete makeover in 2016, to the tune of millions of dollars.

A William T. Wiley print, part of the auction to support the Institute's legacy association. photo: D. Blair
Despite some prodigious efforts to negotiate a resurrection of SFAI under the auspices of the University of San Francisco or other institutions—the University of California owns the fabulous building—nothing, nada, zilch.

To be sure, the meeting of money and art has long been a fraught fiesta, and the Institute’s party was a particularly wild one. It seems that Fred Martin (June 13, 1927- October 10, 2022), who was a working artist and devoted almost half his life to the Institute, was one of the few deans able to find that balance. Martin signed off on my graduation, when I finally decided to leave, after negotiating the acceptance of my late term paper with Raymond Mondini, the legendary art history teacher.

Jack Fulton, another one of SFAI's great photo teachers, contributed this piece to the silent auction. photo: D. Blair
In the 1990s, the Institute tried to play catch up by finally installing a computer lab—oddly late, given Silicon Valley’s presence 30 miles south—and bringing in an art star from the East Coast to run the joint.

Elle King Torre was a handsome, dynamic woman with a lot of energy and ideas. But she expanded the graduate school, signing an expensive lease at the height of the dot com boom, and removed the basketball hoop, which seemed a bit controlling. Eventually losing control, she embezzled money, picked up a coke habit and, tragically, killed herself.

From then on it was a series of grabbing one straw after another, from bringing in an African-English critic as dean or the many children of Asian wealth—lovely people in their own right but not that able to deal with the Institute’s issues. Sadly, the gentrification of San Francisco also drove up rents so far no other students could afford housing, while tuition itself skyrocketed.

Barbara Lu, a performance artist who fashioned an SFAI-branded bra from two masks. photo: D. Blair
Nevertheless, everyone I talked to who studied there, even in the naughts and teens, loved the place and felt they got a great education. To quote my Oakland neighbor, renown filmmaker Frazier Bradshaw, "I didn't learn a damn thing about how to make a movie at SFAI. But I learned a tremendous amount about what I had to say as an artist" (see cS article).

Indeed, the Minnesota Project event was full of happy, creative people, drinking, dancing, bidding on art—including a William T. Wiley print that went for $1,500—and talking about their next projects, one of which could easily be resurrecting the Institute, if a local billionaire only realized its value.

Posted on Mar 31, 2023 - 12:53 AM
SF International: Better Than Ever
by Doniphan Blair

Anne Lai, director of SFFILM for the last few years, including through the pandemic and a move. photo: D. Blair
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

THE IN-PERSON FILMS AND 70 LIVE
events of the San Francisco International Film Festival, which goes from April 13th to the 23rd, are a welcome relief, given the festival only came back partially live last year.

Incredibly diverse and edge-cutting, this year's SFFILM includes entries from Ukraine, notably “Mariupolis 2”, by a filmmaker killed on the job, and Oakland, with a documentary about its basketball great, Stephan Curry, directed and produced by local luminaries Peter Nicks and Ryan Coogler, respectively. At the March 22nd press conference, the stellar lineup was announced by the charismatic but laid-back Anne Lai, who helmed the festival through the last few difficult years, which included a pandemic and a move.

This year’s festival—the 66th, cue the spooky music—is the product of almost 100 programmers paring over 4,000 submissions from about 50 countries to 90 films. Although that’s about 75% of last year’s run, they didn’t want to depend getting massive amounts of people into theaters, and this year’s festival is also available on line.

“Going virtual did have benefits,” noted programming director Jessica Fairbanks. Last year, in fact, they got their biggest audience ever and over half the films were directed by female or non-binary filmmakers, with a similar split for those of color.

Although the lovely new office building on 9th Street is not as cool as their previous digs in Chinatown, it is more practical, with the Ninth Street Independent Film Center down the block and plenty of parking.

And they have room for Film House, the work space for filmmakers supported through their generous scholarship programs. As America’s longest-running festival, SFFILM is deeply committed “film as an art form and as a meaningful force for social change,” according to its site.

That spirit is desperately needed in San Francisco itself, as the city enters another period of radical change. After three decades growing into one of the richest cities in the world, the city is suffering from a houseless, mental health and thievery crisis—so leave nothing in your cars and be aware at night.

Nevertheless, San Francisco’s world-famous culinary, art and night life is still stellar, almost back from pre-pandemic levels, as illustrated by the festival. Viewed at the deluxe, vintage Castro and new Dolby and other theaters around the Bay—while based out of the CGV Cinemas at 1000 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco—SFFILM 66 is shaping into another fantastic festival.

Posted on Mar 31, 2023 - 12:48 AM
Aaron Kurzen: Art Master, Nice Guy, Wild Surrealist
by Doniphan Blair

Painter, sculptor, teacher and philosopher Aaron Kurzen, at his home in Stony Brook, Connecticut. photo: D. Blair
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

“YOU WERE LIKE A SHAMAN TO ME,"
I told the old man with a bushy white mustache and matching hair, shortly after we met outside the mayor’s office of the small Connecticut town near where he lived.

“A shaman?" he asked, incredulous, with a slight smile. "How could that be?”

“You were like Don Juan, the shaman from the Carlos Castaneda books I was reading at the time. You were mysterious. You didn’t reveal your opinions, and you forced me to imagine what they were.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he responded, without rancor. “I was hardly a shaman, and I told you exactly how I felt. I was always honest with you.”

The author and Kurzen, with whom he eventually came to feel very comfortable. photo: Estelle Kurzen
Indeed, I could recall him telling me, almost 50 years earlier, that I should put something really strange in one of my paintings. He suggested a semaphore—the signal alongside railroad tracks, he had to explain—and I obliged.

What 16-year-old doesn’t love surrealism and its dream fluency? Or a teacher who is calm and friendly as well as knowledgeable and dedicated, even if enigmatic. Alas, it took me years to realize: He was the perfect guide for someone like me, desperately trying to embark on the odyssey of art.

Little did I know, Aaron Kurzen (1921-2022) was an actual surrealist. He didn’t tell us, naturally, the other teachers honored that discretion, and he never showed anything around the school but, in point of fact, he was the primary disciple of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). A Parisian avant-gardist who moved to New York, Duchamp became the main precursor of surrealism when he stopped painting to make “ready-mades”, like the unmodified urinal and bottle rack he proclaimed as art. Aaron met Duchamp while still in his teens, it seems, introduced by the gorgeous, ethereal, almost albino blond, young woman he met immediately after moving from Minnesota to New York.

Kurzen in his studio, with one of his whimsical assemblages, a violin bug. photo: D. Blair
Lenore Dunn, AKA Saja, was already an actress and Vogue model but her day job was assisting an art collector, Walter Arensburg, who was a fan of Duchamp. Aaron and Saja married and proceeded to transmit those ideas as well as their romanticism to some of New York’s burgeoning crop of painters, like their friend Robert Rauschenberg.

Aaron pushed Duchamp’s idea-oriented aesthetics toward the sensual with his whimsical sculptures, which were assemblages of ready-mades: a screaming Hitler, his teeth rows of browned-out cigar holders, an enormous cockroach, composed of a violin, “Garlic Presstasaurus" ("Reconstruction" series, 1977), a small beast made from a garlic press, which he gave me.

He also gave me a holographic piece, a two-foot tall, eight-inch wide structure, with a light and spinning plastic film. Ever the futurist, Aaron started working with holograms as an art form in the 1980s. That brought him to San Francisco, where there was a studio specializing in holograms and I happened to live.

More than anything, however, Aaron was a painter.

“You never let us see your paintings,” I told him, after we went inside the municipal building and reviewed the retrospective of his work on display, with three or four dozen pieces. The paintings ranged through his often changing and mixing of styles, from classical draftsman to postmodern Matisse as well as surrealism, and were interspersed with his sculptures, although nothing that large or aggressive. I would see those later at his house outside town, which he built from a salvaged military Quonset hut.

'Garlic Presstasaurus', a Kurzen owned by the author. photo: D. Blair
“I didn’t see a single one of your paintings or sculptures until I graduated. Nor did anyone I knew,” I kept complaining, after we sat on a bench at the end of the show. “When I finally saw them, I assumed you did that on purpose. You didn’t want us to see how wild they were and become crazed Dadaists before we were ready.”

Indeed, when I finally visited his New York loft, I was overwhelmed by a massive surrealist-abstract piece, about 20 by eight feet, hanging from the ceiling over the living area. Although fuzzy in my memory, it was an impressive attack of wild colors, shapes and realistic details, including an explosion of sorts, perhaps emanating from a figure, which sent shrapnel scattering across the entire canvas.

“That’s ridiculous. I wasn’t hiding them,” Aaron said, gesturing at the show. “You could have come by any time. I lived only a mile from the school.” That would be Dalton, once a radical refuge for poetic girls, creative boys and the offspring of intellectuals, now one of Manhattan’s most elite and expensive private schools, made notorious of late by an association with Jeffrey Epstein, who taught there in the 1970s.

“You never invited me. And I wouldn’t have thought to ask you, the art master, standing guard over the art room... in your coat,” the white lab coat he always wore, buttoned up and with a tie underneath. “So, you weren’t trying to be inscrutable?”

Kurzen's work ranged widely, the first on the left perhaps a self-portrait as a renaissance artist. photo: D. Blair
“No, not at all,” he said, with a chuckle. “I was just observing, enjoying, taking it all in.”

“I have always been relaxed about things. One time when I was three or so—this is a story my mother used to tell—she was wheeling me in a wagon down a street, in St. Paul [Minnesota], where we lived.” His parents were European Jewish immigrants and his father was a tailor, hence an early interest in scissors and collage. “After a couple of blocks, she noticed I had fallen out of the wagon. She went back and there I was, sitting on the sidewalk, taking it all in.”

“You weren’t purposefully following a strategy, a way of teaching visionary art?” I continued, trying to find the answer to notions that had accumulated over the years. Was he now doubling down by gaslighting me? I wondered.

“No, not at all,” Aaron repeated calmly, looking me in the eyes.

To be sure, Aaron had been my ally since before I even knew he headed Dalton’s substantial art department.

Some of Kurzen's abstract work. photo: D. Blair
He admitted me to the life drawing class, although I was only in the eighth grade. Gazing on nude models and translating their images into lines was oddly therapeutic for my extreme horniness, inflamed by Dalton's many poetic girls. Ever vigilant to a healthy equilibrium between vision and precision, Aaron would interrupt my reverie by dangling a yard stick in front of my drawing, to show how the model’s chin was above her knee, say, while in reality it was above her ankle—as he would prove by holding the ruler in front of the model.

After about a year hanging around the art room constantly and finally doing some serious paintings, Aaron invited me to join a private seminar on renaissance art, just me and my friend Nick Fain.

Already a mature cartoonist, Nick was known for "performative drawing." While we art roomers watched, he would render an oversized cartoon of the headmaster masturbating, for example, albeit only when Aaron wasn’t around, although he must have heard tell. Given his delicate dance between upstanding and avant, Aaron wouldn’t have risked his sinecure tolerating such disrespect of the school’s director, known to be a disciplinarian, a certain Donald Barr, father of the future attorney general, William.

We lingered for a long time at Kurzen's show, which may have been bittersweet, affirming his life work but confirming rejection by New York critics. photo: D. Blair
Aaron, Nick and I met only a half-dozen times—sitting on a bench to the side of the art room, pouring over the amply-illustrated, oversized, scholarly book Aaron would extract from his art closet—but that was enough study material for a semester, if not a lifetime. We learned about theories of proportion and composition, including the Golden Mean and “rabotna,” a term I have yet to see elsewhere (it means using the short side of a painting to divide the long side compositionly).

Those of us entranced by the odyssey of art spent long hours in the art room, working silently at easels, or on canvases affixed to the wall, or sitting around the central table, which was my preferred position, abiding Aaron’s assignments or enjoying his occasional comment, a process amplified by Dalton’s theory of education, the brilliant “lab plan."

Developed by Helen Parkhurst around 1919, the Lab Plan involved giving students monthly assignments and a free hour or two a day, the so-called laboratory, to work individually or with a teacher. Along with the Matathias System, teacher-monitored student diaries, which is psychoanalytic as well as shamanistic, the Lab Plan is one of the most impressive pedagogical tools I have ever witnessed in action. Indeed, the Lab Plan as well as the Matathias System, developed by a friend of mine, Lester Matathias, who taught middle school in East Harlem for two decades, and I was a guest teacher once, are worth universal adoption, and a movement I am hoping to advocate.

Kurzen and his 'baby' sister, Estelle, who lived nearby and with whom he took many of his meals. photo: D. Blair
Aaron’s mysterious method and encyclopedic knowledge were perfect for the Lab Plan, in fact, and he came to have immense influence on hundreds if not thousands of students, many of whom became artists.

After reviewing his retrospective, which really should have been in a New York City gallery or museum, not a country town's municipal office, we turned to discussing mutual friends, mostly from Dalton, whom Aaron remembered with astounding detail. That amazed me, given he was 93 and his short-term memory was shot. During our phone conversation to arrange my visit, he had asked me about five times if I was coming and when. Regardless, he was completely cogent when it came to long-term memory and walked almost briskly, without a cane.

We went to lunch with his three-years-younger sister, Estelle, who had been relaxing in the back of the gallery, driving them in my car to her assisted living facility, where they often took their meals. “I like to eat with my little sister,” he said, smiling at her. “He doesn’t like to cook,” she teased.

Kurzen in front of his Quonset hut house, replete with many additions, including a studio out back and pier into his backyard marsh. photo: D. Blair
Then we went back to his Quonset hut house, which looked out on a flourishing marsh full of reeds, into which he had built a substantial pier. "You can see a lot of wild life," he said, when we walked out on it. The carpenter who built it showed up, coincidentally, a working-class hippie with whom Aaron had a jovial repartee.

In back of the house was his studio building, all of which he called Zen Acre, in keeping with his last name but also philosophy. Both the house and studio were filled with incredible art, some by famous friends, and many sculptures, often larger and more aggressive than in the show, like the almost life-size woman wheeling a baby in a carriage, fashioned from cooking implements.

A mother wheeling her assemblage child. photo: D. Blair
We talked nonstop. He inquired of my life and work, listened attentively, and looked intently at some phone images and the one large watercolor I brought. He talked about his life and work, notably in the ‘50s.

“I did not have that monomaniacal drive to succeed, like Bob,” Aaron said, referring to his good friend Robert Rauschenberg. “And I wasn’t in his 'gay mafia,'” he added, without rancor, providing a glimpse into the little-recognized queer power of olden days, particularly in male-only cohorts, which the art scene largely was back then.

There must have been more to why he wasn't embraced by the New York critics, given his discipleship with Duchamp and immense oeuvre of satirical sculptures and imaginative paintings—not to mention romantic imprimatur by Saja, an alpha poetic woman. Alas, our few hours together on that muggy summer day in 2014 didn't provide an opening for that exploration, especially after my exhaustive shamanism examination. It was probably the luck of the game, a crotchety critic's dis combined with hustle exhaustion and the opportunity for other artistic outlets, like teaching.

Kurzen en studio. photo: D. Blair
Apparently, Aaron was consummately heterosexual as well as evolved, able to balance the artist's self-focus with cohabiting with a powerful woman. I met Saja only once and for only a second, but she was obviously amazing both in beauty and otherwise. Her passing, comparatively young in 1999, must have been heart breaking for Aaron, probably made more acute by the fact they were childless. Eventually, Aaron connected with Beatrice Perry, the sculptor, art dealer and heiress, and lived with her in a mansion overlooking the Hudson River until her death in 2011.

As I learned about Aaron’s relationships, I could not help but think that his sophisticated male-female understanding was yet another side of the shamanism he so stridently denied, making him evermore the excellent guide in the art warrior’s way.

Posted on Mar 30, 2023 - 10:59 PM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner Mar 2023
by Karl Cohen

'My Neighbor Totoro' (1988), the Japanese animated fantasy film written/directed by Hayao Miyazaki is certified as top 100 film. photo: courtesy Studio Ghibli
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Animated Features included in Sight and Sound’s top 100 Films

The distinguished films are two by Hayao Miyazaki, “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988) is number 74 and “Spirited Away” is 75. This is an acknowledgment that animation is an important art. The poll has been conducted since 1952, once a decade by the British film magazine. Roger Ebert once described the survey as “by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies, the only one most serious movie people take seriously.”

An cell from Mark Fore's new animation . photo: courtesy M. Fore
New Mark Fore Animation Is Online

Mark is an animator who turns out weekly controversial cartoons that are socially responsible shorts. He has addressed the exploitation of railroad workers by corporations, corporations trying to pay zero taxes, there are ugly caricature of Trump and lot of other themes. See his site here

Why Glas Animation Festival Left Berkeley?

The Shattuck Theatres closed last year and now the Regal Theatres on Shattuck, the last commercial movie theatres in downtown Berkeley is closing. (The Regal has filed for Chapter 11 as rents were going up, attendance went down due to Covid, etc.). The only movie theatres left open in Berkeley are the Pacific Film Archive and the Elmwood—a truly astounding demise of theatrical cinema in our day.

A Na'vi (extraterrestrial humanoids living in the jungles of Pandora) teaches his son the way of the warrior. photo: courtesy J. Cameron
Making Obscene Amounts of Money

James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” has become the third highest grossing films of all time. It is now number 3 in the top three greatest box office champions. In the number one and two spots are the first “Avatar” of course—it took in over $2.9 billion—and Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame”, a near second with almost $2.8 billion. Cameron’s “Titanic” meanwhile holds the fourth place, with a worldwide gross of $2.3 billion.

“Avatar: The Way of Water” has taken in almost $2.3 billion so far. The film’s budget was said to be over $400 million with another $200 million was spent on advertising and promotion. Rotten Tomatoes reports “Avatar: The Way of Water” only has a 77% rating from the critics based on 315 reviews, but fans gave it a 93% rating.

Trigger Warning: ‘Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey’

This isn’t a cute, animated feature about the beloved bear but, rather, a noisy, low-budget, live action; horror film full of screaming women. It opened on Valentine Day with lousy reviews. Rotten Tomatoes reports only 5% of the reviews by critics were favorable and only 49% of the audience liked it. Apparently, it isn’t scary or funny—the title’s not bad, however.

'The Madelorian' poster for the new Star Wars movie. photo: courtesy Lucasfilm
People Still Love ‘Star Wars’ Brand

The trailer for the third season of Lucasfilm’s “The Mandalorian” drew a record 83.5 million views in its first 24 hours after premiering on January 16th, during the NFL wild card playoff game, no less.

A Disney Stockholder Is Trying to Fight the Man

Nelson Peltz, an activist investor, is waging a proxy battle against the Disney Company. He is seeking a seat on the board and a say in the company’s strategy. Disney responded by releasing a slideshow outlining its argument against Peltz. They say he “does not understand Disney’s businesses, and lacks the skills and experience to assist the board in delivering shareholder value in a rapidly shifting media ecosystem.”

Disney has acknowledged that some of the things Peltz is pushing for are taking place, including implementing a cost-reduction plan and “streamlining our organizational structure to enhance productivity.”

Peltz has a history of challenging the leaderships of companies that he has invested in and he is described as a Trump supporter. After January 6th, however, he apologized for having backed Trump.

CEO Leaves Disney Wealthy

Bob Chapek was fired as Disney’s CEO but left a very rich man, having earned $24.2 million in compensation for the last fiscal 2022 year he worked. (It ended Sept. 30, 2022.) In addition, Disney says his severance package is valued at $20.4 million.

Disney’s Slims Down

Disney is going on a diet and laying off a whopping 7,000 people, although that is only 3.6% of their global workforce. It will save them $5.5 billion. I guess they needed to keep up with the other top US corporations to maintain investor satisfaction. After all they only made 1.28 billion dollars in the last fiscal quarter and that was below the estimate of $1.43 billion analysts had expected to make.

Gosh, that made people unhappy?!? As if that were not enough, Iger reminded everybody but especially investors, they are producing more big cash cows, including sequels to “Toy Story”, “Frozen” and “Zootopia”. They are also streamlining operations to make their business more efficient.

Auction Houses Sell Millions in Animation Art

Auction houses grossed $22 Million in 2022 selling animation art, much of that total came from Heritage Auction in Texas. Their recent “The Art of All Things Disney Animation Art Signature® Auction” took in more than $3.4 million in a four-day sale. Most of the money was spent on buying works from the golden age by Mary Blair, Eyvind Earle, and Carl Barks. The works were put up for sale by collectors and studio archives. Only a small percentage of the pieces come from the artists who created the work.

An Edward Gorey illustration. courtesy: Cartoon Museum
Cartoon Museum Features Edward Gorey

San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum hosts an Edward Gorey menagerie featuring original artwork, limited edition serigraphs, and other rarely-seen works created by celebrated author and artist Edward Gorey. Open from 11 am to 5 pm at 781 Beach St, San Francisco, it will be up until July 9, 2023.

M&M Candies Subjected to Right Wing Attacked

The much-beloved–by-all M&M “spokescandies,” the official mascot of the candy company, have been attacked by right-wing political and media spokespeople. Rightwing pundits have attacked the lovable different colored animated candies with stupid, twisted and devious comments.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson did his ridiculous best to carry on this bullcrap by claiming he's a champion of victims of cancel culture. Early in 2022 he started attacking the M&M spokescandies, perhaps to drive them off the air. Other commentators at Fox joined the attack and came up with more stupid comments, reflecting their racism and other negative thoughts about non-whites.

M&M's popular spokescandies. photo: courtesy M&M
The pundit Kat Timpf is reported to have called Ms Green “an opportunistic, evil bitch” and warned that people “run from women like the green M&M.” Fox’s Martha Mac Callum was reported in the Guardian to have said that the all-girl packaging that the candy company had released in honor of International Women’s Day was a distraction that left the US vulnerable to its communist enemies.

In late January 2023 the maker of M&M candies held a press conference and announced they decided to take “an indefinite pause from the spokes candies”. Had the Fox pundits won? A few days later the NY Times asked, “Was the recent decision to sideline its spokes candies a response to cultural backlash, or just an elaborate stunt leading up to the Super Bowl? Wired Magazine also suggests M&M’s marketing department is intentionally trolling Carlson and that the candies will make a triumphant appearance during the big game.

Both The NY Tines and The Guardian view the right-wing media attack on what should be irrelevant parts of our national culture, as an entertaining distraction to the real ills of our society, from schools and public libraries feeling in some states they have to censor what books are on their shelves to the rise of hatred of minorities and hate crimes. Indeed, mass murders are now commonplace. I find these pointless, silly attacks on those colored candies are indicative of the sad state of spiteful dumb political rhetoric by right wing media today. See more info here

Mindless AI Generates Animated Show

There is a mindless artificial so-called “intelligence” generating an animated show. “Nothing, Forever” is pathetic looking, I kid you not! The technology has a long way to go, although this is probably the extremely crude beginning of something. The program is “Seinfeld-like” and streams 24 hours a day, amazingly. It is written voiced and animated by robots! See it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6mD9YzVbZI

A cell from Max Fleischer's short 'Bimbo’s Initiation', 1931. photo: courtesy M. Fleischer
The Delights of Bimbo, Fleischer’s Cartoon Star

You might enjoy rediscovering “Bimbo”, by Max Fleischer (1883-1972) an American animator, director and studio founder, who was born Jewish in Kraków, Poland. Although he developed Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman, Bimbo was his first sound cartoon star. If you have enjoyed seeing Disney’s earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, you might also enjoy the Fleischer Studio’s Bimbo. His world was full of amazing surreal gags.

I am excited about Bimbo, since a friend just informed me that a rare Bimbo cartoon, “Ace of Spades”, 1931, is now online. Until recently, only a short fragment was available online. Seeing it made me realize that Fleischer’s Bimbo was put in a more complex situation than Mickey, and that Max’s stories were closer to real life then Walt’s plots, which were often set in imaginary, fairytale like worlds. While Mickey was a goody-two-shoes and Peg Leg Pete was a melodrama villain, Bimbo in “Ace of Spade” is a card shark who cheats at gambling but is also a lovable scoundrel.

Seeing the newly posted cartoon led me to watch Bimbo in “Barnacle Bill”, 1930. Bill is a horny sailor who jumps ship, rushes to see his girlfriend (or possibly a wife) and “gets it on” with her. Satisfied, he dumps her and goes back to the ship. The film implies he has a girlfriend or wife in every port.

Bimbo’s first cartoon, “Hot Dog”, 1930, is even more blatant. He is cruising a city street that has a series of women standing by the curb. He tips his hat at each one. Was he looking for a hooker? He picks up the wrong woman and a cop arrests him.

In the most famous Bimbo show, “Bimbo’s Initiation”, 1931, Fleischer achieves full surrealism as Bimbo falls down an open manhole and lands in a bizarre world run by a secret society. But each time a hooded character asks him, “Do you want to be a member,” he says, “No.” That results in a series of outrages and possibly life-threatening things happening to him. Finally, discovering that the hooded character is a sexy, early version of Betty Boop, Bimbo grins and says, “Yes.”

Indeed, “Bimbo’s Initiation” was voted #37 in the book “50 Greatest Cartoons” (1994), by Jerry Beck, who polled a thousand members of the animation industry.

Bimbo’s stellar career was cut tragically short in 1934 when mandatory censorship was imposed on the film industry. They objected to Betty Boop having a dog for a boyfriend. Oh no, that implies bestiality!

All these pre-code shorts are online. Also check out “Swing You Sinners!” 1930. It takes place in a graveyard. Another gem is “Up to Mars”, 1930. It is a delightful, bizarre space adventure.

In 1931 as Betty Boop was becoming more popular Bimbo and Koko become secondary characters. Among her greatest hits are “Minnie the Moocher”, 1932; Betty as “Snow White”, 1933; “Is My Palm Read”, 1933 and “Chess Nuts”, 1933.

Scene from Canadian Alison Snowden and David Fine’s 'Animal Behaviour'. photo: courtesy M. Fleischer
Delightful Oscar-Nominated Animal Behaviour Deserves Applause

Alison Snowden and David Fine’s short. “Animal Behaviour”, which was produced by the National Film Board of Canada received an Academy-Award nomination in 2018. About a group psychotherapy session, it is full of amusing surprises. See it here.

Enjoy Historic Bay Area Footage

If you enjoy seeing incredible historic film footage of the Bay Area? SF State has a large archive that preserves 6000 hours of TV news film, documentaries and other footage produced in the Bay Area and Northern California in the from the Twentieth Century. Lots of it can be seen free here.

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached . Posted on Mar 14, 2023 - 04:32 PM
Animation Labor Union Grows
by Karl F. Cohen

Animation grunt workers at their posts. photo: unknown
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Microsoft Video Game Workers Vote to Join Union

The successful organizing of about 300 employees at Microsoft’s ZeniMax, a game production company with studios in Maryland and Texas, is considered a major victory given the company has been non-union since it was founded. Microsoft acquired ZeniMax in 2020, and now it is the first Microsoft division to unionize, represented by the Communications Workers of America.

The unionization move at ZeniMax Media, which Microsoft acquired for about $7.5 billion, did not come about in the usual way, which is a union election run by the National Labor Relations Board. Instead, the company allowed workers to express their preferences by either signing a union authorization card or voting anonymously. Microsoft remained neutral throughout the union campaign and didn’t hold anti-union meetings or sending out messages that many companies do in their attempt to keep out unions.

It turned out that Microsoft is trying to acquire Activision Blizzard, a much bigger game company, which is undergoing unionization. Two AB branches have already voted to join the union, a third is about to vote and two others are in the process of gathering signature cards. To avoid interfering with that election, Microsoft chose to remain neutral in ZeniMax’s.

Computer game employees have been complaining for decades about “crunch time”—working long hours as deadlines approach—and other grievances. They endure grueling stretches of work shortly before a title is released and sometimes they don’t get paid overtime. Many don’t try to unionize because they are hired as freelance artists and feel that suits them, while some get to work remotely, so they feel independent. They are still stuck with management giving them outrageous deadlines that keeps them working overtime for many weeks at a time.

Those who fought to unionize ZeniMax hope to change the company’s approach into one that promotes workers. Game companies often assign workers more responsibility, but it seems they can be arbitrary at times about compensation for the added work. The union also hopes to negotiate more flexible policies on remote work.

Nickelodeon Workers Try to Unionize

Nickelodeon has refused to recognize their production workers who voted to join the Animation Guild, so a vote run by the National Labor Relations Board is being held. Nickelodeon’s animation artists are already represented by the union, but not production managers, production coordinators, and other staff workers. Nickelodeon’s lawyers apparently want to challenge who is and who isn’t qualified to be in the union.

From my own experience years ago, if you were not part of the management/administrative staff, you could vote and join the union, if you won the election for recognition.

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached . Posted on Mar 13, 2023 - 05:33 PM
While Flying in a B-24 Over Fortress Europe
by Vachel Blair

Patricia M. O'Connell, then Blair, met Vachel in the Library Science Department of Cleveland's Western Reserve and ran libraries, toured the country attending library meetings and married the director of New York's famous 42nd Library, John Corry, photo circa 1947. photo: V. Blair

Vachel Blair's Other cineSOURCE Stories: “My Father’s Spanish Civil War”, “Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain” and “Life and Death in the Air: A Bombing Run Goes Bad”

Letter to Vachel Blair's wife, written in a notebook while on actual combat flight, from Benghazi Libya to Italy somewhere, 1944.

Dearest Patty,

My lady, I am going to put your St. Christopher’s Medal to a test. I’m sitting on the flight deck thinking of you as we collect the formation together before going to a lively target. Yo ho! It’s a target I have sentimental interest in although at one time I had occasion to be only 20 miles from it [the target, referring to a place in Italy]. But that was some years ago.

Anyway, off we go. We’re circling the fields as planes take off and join the formation. Now to give you some idea of our situation here on the flight deck you must get a Life Magazine and look at a cross section of one of our planes. As I sit here I’d knock three people down if I turned halfway around. At the moment I am just behind the pilot’s armor plate, and I can look down into the bomb bay at our bomb load, which is resting mean and quietly there with a paper tag dangling from each nose [cone]; swinging in the breeze.

Now I am looking over the pilot’s shoulder, Lt. Seitz here and he is a damn good flyer. Ahead is the squadron commander’s ship. All over the sky you can see stairsteps of planes, a formation here and another there. Swell day, lots of golden sunshine and blue sky.

Your little flashlight is coming in handy, for the [flight] engineer just borrowed it. Don’t forget to send more batteries will you?

These lads on the crew are damn fine fellows. Lt. Caravalho, the bombardier, is sitting right there reading a Newsweek, Sgt. Rushmore is sitting in front of me at the radio operator’s table, Mac (Kenzie), the engineer, is standing between the pilot and the co-pilot.

We’re now on our way to the target, which will take some time, by the way, and we’re gradually gaining altitude. It’s getting colder too. Guess I’ll take a look in the back end now, and see how the boys are doing at the waist guns.

Cutaway of the B-24 'Flying Fortress' where the author, as a bomb bay photographer, would sit behind the pilot, next to the radio operator. illo: Life Magazine

Well, back again after a trip to the tail. Boys are sitting around smoking, all set to go. Jake, a Jewish boy from around 105th st. and Superior in Cleveland, is there reclining, smoking a Camel. He takes a waist gun.

You know, Patty, it always strikes me as I look over one of those planes in flight, droning along and vibrating to the “quattro motore”, that these sky trucks are an invention of the devil. Here we are all loaded up with men, gas and bombs. I can readily understand how there may be times when the noble thoughts of democracy and freedom might be set aside sometimes just to get in a little worry about self-survival.

[The] formation is all around us here, and all over the sky, above and below, are the other swarms of planes. This will be quite an attack on the “Fortress of Europe” as they call it in the newspapers.

Damn! Brought along a chute that’s too small in the harness so I’ve just cut the back cushion out. Lucky we don’t intend to go down anyway. Confounded thing is “no bueno” fit. Often wondered what I would do with my specs if we bailed out. Any suggestions Patty? Maybe it—

(paragraph cut out, apparently by Vachel, as a marginal note from the censor, Captain Needham, says “Patty, I didn’t do this”)

—fighters while hanging in a parachute. Better to have 20/40 vision then!

It’s a beautiful sight outside. We’re riding high above a white cloud layer that looks like snow.

Flyboy from the 98th Bombardment Group with their mascot, a monkey—the army was a rather loose, democratic organization in Vachel's day. photo: Vachel Blair

Tail turret is out. “No Bueno.” We’re going up. “Gonna pull the pins,” says Caravalho, our bombardier, as he drops back into the bomb bay. Then we’ll be all set, Patty, to drop the load of lethal destruction upon the bastions of the Axis [and for Vachel to crawl out over the open bomb bay doors and film them].

For another one of Blair's stories from the war in the air over Europe go here.

Editor’s Note: When you are in turbulence while flying commercially, think of Vach. His main job on the B-24 ‘Super Fortress’ was to walk back from his seat behind the pilot, with no harness but oxygen and a parachute, as the B-24 bucked from the anti-aircraft fire, and use a top-viewing Rollie camera, which he had to hold upside down, to film the bombs as they dropped.
Posted on Mar 08, 2023 - 02:58 PM
Conspiracy Mirroring: A Schoolyard Psy-Op Goes High Tech
by Doniphan Blair

Caricature is the stock and trade of conspiracists like Putin and Trump. illo: D. Blair

PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

WHEN VLADIMIR PUTIN CLAIMS THAT
Ukrainians are genociding Russians while carpet bombing Mariupol, when Donald Trump accuses Democrats of stealing the election while leading a conspiracy to do so himself, when antisemites insist Jews are taking over the world as they plot the same, it can be called “conspiracy mirroring,” the conspiracy theory trick of accusing enemies of what one is doing. It may seem ineffective or immature, like the schoolyard taunt, “I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you,” but conspiracy mirroring turns out to be a sophisticated psy-op. It is also evident in the “false flag” accusation, another common conspiracist tactic.

“Always say about your opponent what you yourself are doing,” affirmed philosopher Jason Stanley, author of “How Fascism Works” (2020), in a PBS interview (1/6/22). “We are even seeing the fascist label thrown at Democrats. Projection is a standard propaganda tool, one that Hitler and Goebbels explicitly recommended.” Goebbels is credited with establishing the concept, largely in his claim that, "The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the [First World] war was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves were doing," (Nuremberg, 1934)

Timothy Snyder, a historian specializing in fascism as well as Ukraine, coined “schizo-fascism” for authoritarians who call their antagonists fascists, while YouTube commentator Brian Tyler Cohen noted about Republicans: “Every accusation is a confession.” Most precisely, French psychologist Roger Mucchielli coined the phrase "accusation in a mirror," in his 1970 book discussing defense against propaganda techniques. He notes how war perpetrators often proclaim their devotion to peace and accuse their enemies of warmongering. This strategy is sometimes enacted in tandem with false flag operations.

Generally speaking, conspiracy theorists build their false narratives on an actual fact or two. Conspiracy mirroring, however, allows them to draw on any story that is in the air, including ones about themselves, their allies or their antecedents. Then they get the jump on the accusations they assume are forthcoming from their opponents, turning them into a he-said-she-said contest. This obliges the innocent party to play catch-up while appearing to be doing some conspiracy mirroring, in other words, accusing their opponents of that they themselves are accused of.

By using one's own presence in the collective memory but switching the story's protagonist, conspiracists kill four birds with one stone. They exonerate themselves, they incriminate their enemies, they re-enforce rule one of conspiracism that “Things are not as they seem,” and they explore their own psychology. Mirroring may appear odd or insane to those unfamiliar with the venality of conspiracy theorists, but its ability to trade on long-known narratives, which they are suddenly revealing to be the opposite of what was assumed, is an effective way to convince people saturated and somewhat immune to with regular theories, who need more titillating narratives.

The claim that Ukrainians are “Nazis,” however, is a standard conspiracy theory built on the fact that 80 years ago some Ukrainians did join the Nazis, worked at Auschwitz or mass murdered Jews (for this author's survey of that history, go here). Never mind that French, Swedish and many other Europeans joined the Nazis or Nazi-like parties, or that the Ukrainian number was small compared to the four and a half million of their fellow citizens who fought the Nazis, or the six-and-a-half million Ukrainians who perished in the war, making Ukrainians some of the fiercest anti-Nazis in Europe.

Another “Nazi fact” concerns Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, about a fifth of which were found by one survey to espouse white supremacist ideas. Again, many countries have that problem, from Putin’s mercenaries, the Wagner Group, known for their Nazi ideologies (starting with their name, a tribute to the antisemitic composer) and tattoos, to the American militias seeking to overthrow its democracy. The Azovs, on the other hand, have been fighting FOR Ukraine’s democracy, ever since the first Russian invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014. And they gave their “full measure of devotion” at the 2022 Battle of Mariupol, despite not having any current representation in parliament,.

Although Russia is obviously the Nazi-like aggressor and Ukraine the young democracy, many Russians and better-informed folk worldwide have swallowed Kremlin propaganda, augmented by their masterful use of cyberwar and conspiracy theories as well as traditional propaganda. The Russian effort is capped by the magic of conspiracy mirroring, which taps into subconscious feelings about the region’s horrific history and channels that at their enemies. Ukrainians suffered terribly in the twentieth century from both the Nazis and the Soviets, who killed millions in the Civil War, which was fought mostly in Ukraine, four million in the manufactured famine, the Holodomor, in 1932, and up to a million in the Great Terror. Mirroring assuages that guilt, hence their ability to make even more absurd claims, like “Ukrainians attack themselves for publicity purposes.”

In March, 2022, Russia’s ambassador to the UN denounced Ukraine for developing chemical-biological weapons and planning their use, an inflammatory accusation which blew up across Twitter, Chinese media and QAnon. Such accusations probably indicate Russia’s own preparations for WMD use, noted some Kremlinologists, well aware of their traditional use of mirroring. On May 8th, a Russian state TV broadcaster “reported” that, if the West wins, Russians will be sent to camps and subjected to sterilization, even as Russian soldiers were rounding up and deporting up to a million Ukrainians, including many children, into Russia.

Mirroring is central to another CT strategy, the false flag operation, which is occasionally employed by states but beloved by conspiracists. The Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11 and the 2012 Sandy Hook Connecticut schoolchildren slaughter were committed by the “deep state,” according to America’s preeminent conspiracy theorist, broadcaster Alex Jones. As silly as it sounds, many conspiracists believe him devoutly. Indeed, Marjorie Taylor Greene rose to national prominence and won a Congressional seat in part by ascribing the 2018 Parkland Florida high school shooting to a false flag operation and her stunts harassing traumatized students on YouTube.

Again, the power of a pre-existing narrative is harnessed by revealing hidden malefactors in accord with the second rule of conspiracy theories: “Enemies are secretly plotting.” While appearing intellectually shallow, it is strategically and emotionally brilliant, given it is able to provide simple answers and feelgood objects of rage to freaked out people desperate for a satisfying answers by shifting a single fact in the narrative, the perpetrator’s identity. Indeed, the accusation of conspiracy mirroring by conspiracists creates as confusing feedback loop, which fertilizes the ground for mor conspiracism and conspiracy mirroring.

Even the multiculturalism which allows Ukrainians to live as neighbors, colleagues and spouses with their large Russian and smaller Greek, Jewish, Muslim and tribal minorities, or to elect a Russian-speaking Jewish president in a 73% landslide, can be impugned by the adept conspiracy monger. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov defamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zalensky on May 1st saying Hitler “had Jewish blood” and “the most ardent antisemites are usually Jews.”

Russian state television went full flag-and-mirror show with the atrocities reported from Mariupol in March and then Bucha on April 2nd, claiming they were hoaxes using “crisis actors,” Photoshop or self-attacks. One Russian “investigative report” seemed to show a Ukrainian soldier confessing to raping a Russian woman and murdering her husband. Although it looked fairly primitive propaganda-wise, it is sufficiently believable and triggering in a region haunted by millions of murders.

Interestingly, Putin felt obliged to apologize to Israel’s prime minister for Lavrov’s antisemitism, suggesting the successful conspiracy theory master needs to constantly tend his concoction, but Lavrov’s Foreign Ministry was unrepentant, indicating how a regime can operate contradictory theories in tandem. In an online essay, the Ministry claimed Zelensky’s Jewishness is "not a guarantee against rampant neo-Nazism in the country," which it proved by stating some Jews collaborated with Nazis during the Holocaust, which is factually true even though their numbers were minimal compared to all other Europeans.

Russia’s tradition of fabricating false narratives dates back to the “Potemkin Villages,” built to impress Catherine the Great in the 18th century, and the czar’s secret police’s forgery of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” at the beginning of the 20th. Still one of the most successful conspiracy theories in history, it accused Jews of controlling the banks and, thereby, the world. Based on Russia’s immense achievements in the realm of disinformation, the Soviets established an all-consuming, propaganda-centric conspiracy kingdom or empire, if one includes Russia’s many fellow travelers among unrepentant communist, conspiracy theories or far rightwingers worldwide.

To be sure, some Russians were immune to the brainwashing and remained incredible activists and humanists, hence they were able to maintain their sanity and end Stalinism and then the Soviet Union—but not the scourge of conspiracism, that stains deeply a people’s sub- and regular consciousness. Indeed, Putin’s carreer focused on concocting conspiracies as a KGB counterintelligence officer and, when he headed the KGB’s descendant, the FSB, for almost a year, he must have overseen which theories to cynically promote or naively believe. His spinmeisters—like the hipster apparatchik Vladislav Surkov, who managed propaganda, false-flag political parties and the the Kremlin’s response to the Maidan Revolution (Surkov was on the ground in Kyiv in 2014)—specialize in weaving cacophonies of claims so confusing that demoralized Russians have little choice but to select the seemingly safest.

“Russian propaganda is designed not to convince its audience that Ukrainians are Nazis and that Russia is waging a defensive war,” explained Masha Gessen, the Russian-born American journalist and author, who has interviewed Putin, in her New Yorker article about Russian propaganda (5/18/22), “but to muddy the waters, to create the impression that nothing is true.” In this manner, conspiracism incorporates not just fascism and nihilism but the credo of 12th century Persian assassins, “Nothing is real, and everything is permitted,” and Satanism, the exaltation of lying and amorality.

Mirroring is also integral to another CT strategy, which could be called “discredit their best.” By attacking an opponent’s most esteemed aspect, representative or subste, from day one and in the most extreme terms, conspiracists get the jump on propaganda’s repetition principle and establishing their enemies-are-plotting trope, a point made personal by alleging that a respected figure is, “in fact,” secretly evil. Without evidence other than Jeffery Epstein, QAnon followers insist that many prominent Democrats and celebrities worship the devil and practice pedophilia, which suggests a mirroring of the accusers’ traumas, and worse, as hard as that is to imagine.

The Nazis exemplified discredit-their-best operations when they “discovered” “evidence” incicating that Germany’s most honored author, Johann Goethe, had murdered his best friend, the writer Friedrich Schiller. Another master was Senator Joseph McCarthy, when he accused General George Marshall, who literary led the Allies to triumph both in war and a generous peace, of actually leading the communist conspiracy. Ever the good disciple, Trump smeared Senator John McCain’s military service, including five years in a prisoner-of-war camp.

Putin’s claim that “Ukraine is not a real country” is another regular conspiracy theory, based on Russia and Ukraine’s thousand years of shared history and Russia’s imperial colonization. But it is contradicted by Ukraine’s 19th century rebellions and five-year fight for independence right after World War One as well as the three recent nationwide democracy movements, the Granite, Orange and Euromaidan revolutions, in 1990, 2004 and 2014, driven by young people flooding the streets in largely peaceful protests. As Russia’s more tolerant and democratic cousin, Ukraine is ripe for “best discrediting.”

What is commonly called gaslighting draws on both enhanced and regular conspiracism to trick subjects into thinking not just that reality is askew and brimming with hidden enemies, but they themselves are certifiably insane.

Gaslighting on a grand scale emerges around the central CT strategy of “fake news,” which was perfected by the Nazis, who also coined the term. Not only do the conspiracists propagandize “alternative facts” or use conspiracy mirroring to flip accusations against them, they “claim that all news is fake, and finally that only their spectacle is real,” according to historian Snyder in “The Road to Unfreedom” (2018). Divorced from almost all social constructs but their own, conspiracy theorist use various forms of “enhanced methods” to push their victim-believers into a group hallucination.

Mirroring, flagging and discrediting work well as psy-ops by virtue of their ability to harness existing narratives but also conspiracists’ desires and underlying psychology. By projecting onto other individuals the crimes they have committed or are conspiring to commit or would support if committed by others—by displacing their internal feeling onto external forces—they simultaneously hide from and explore their own pathologies.

False narratives are often contradicted by overwhelming evidence or Occam’s Razor analysis, where the simplest solution is the most likely, and the conspiracy theorists’ Rube Goldberg plots seem patently absurd. But when theories are repeated relentlessly, with preternatural confidence and periodic updates and finetuning to fit psycho-politcial developments, they are surprisingly powerful to people who are susceptible.

Russian “[c]overage is repetitive not just from day to day, television channel to television channel; nearly identical stories appear in print and online media, too,” notes Gessen, pointing out the power of centrally-planned, authoritarian conspiracism. By pushing confusing stories, while rolling out more extreme revelations, even if only implied or conjectured, viewers are compelled to seek relief in cynicism, suspicion or full belief.

It’s a difficult game to understand, let alone oppose or defeat, especially in our current golden age of conspiracy theories, which has been supercharged by advances in information technology but also the innovations of the professional conspiracists. In addition to exploiting social media and conspiracy mirroring, they use aspects of gaming, which range from conspiracy culture’s spirit of play to the massive multiplayer online games that almost all teenage boys are addicted to or the hipster fad that started around the turn of the millennium: live action roleplaying games. That is how a master conspiracist, pretending to be a high-level government insider codenamed “Q,” used enigmatic pronouncements on an obscure libertarian message-board website to create QAnon, a millions-strong, international conspiracy theory-based movement, in three years.

Traditional virtues of honesty, self-awareness and social responsibility seem hopelessly outclassed against such sophisticated subterfuges, unless we, too, develop secret psychological weapons, like using empathy for their traumas to find game-changing insights which are convertible to tactics.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on Mar 02, 2023 - 05:41 PM
My Father’s Spanish Civil War
by Doniphan Blair

Fighters in the Spanish Civil War. illo: D. Blair
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

Vachel Blair's Other cineSOURCE Stories: “Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain”, “Life and Death in the Air: A Bombing Run Goes Bad” and “While Flying in a B-24 Over Fortress Europe”

“WE COULD SEE THE DARK CLOUDS OF
fascism descending on Europe,” my father, Vachel Blair (1915-1999), told me when I was about 14 or 15. “Going to Spain was how you could fight it.”

When Spain’s armed forces rebelled against the five-year-old Spanish Republic on July 17, 1936, Vach, as his friends called him, was 21. About to become an Ohio college junior majoring in library science and minoring in political science, he was enjoying his summer vacation "riding the rails,” also called "hoboing." Traveling around America by hitching rides in or on boxcars or locomotives was common during the Great Depression. He may have read about the start of the Spanish Civil War in a newspaper or heard about it on the radio, which people sometimes blasted out their windows, or from woke hobos.

“I was socialist not communist,” my father explained to me a few times. “But the communists were the only ones organized enough to get you to Spain." From an American security clearance application he filled out in 1964, I learned the details of his enlistment.

"One morning late in 1936 I noticed an advertisement in the Cleveland Plain Dealer looking for volunteers to drive trucks in Spain. What they really had in mind, they said at an interview, was soldiering. At the age of 21, during the Depression, this seemed like a fine opportunity to escape the boredom of home and unemployment, to travel, and to see what war was really like behind the headlines, all prepaid.”

I was amazed by and immensely proud of my father’s independence, volunteerism and sacrifice, given his upper middle class, all-American heritage, but I never interviewed him in-depth on the subject, unfortunately. Indeed, I only learned the details recently, by reading a long article he co-wrote with Martin Miller for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, "Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain”, which featured a photo of him and a large illustration of Spanish fighters, published November 21, 1937.

Over a dozen young men from Cleveland made the journey in March, 1937, which wasn’t easy. After getting to France, they had to sneak into Spain. While hiding under the deck of a small fishing boat, Vach’s group of 13 Americans and 12 Canadians and Europeans was arrested by French authorities and incarcerated for a few days. In an earlier column, The Plain Dealer had reported their names, that "[t]hey refused to eat anything except salad and cheese, saying they were vegetarians," and that their leader, the 30-year-old Clevelander Joe Ballet, claimed they were tourists visiting Spain. Local French, who were republican Spain sympathizers and probably communists, effected their release and their renewed travel to Spain.

Of course, it was the communist Soviet Union that was arming Spain’s democrats and democratic England, France and the U.S. that was boycotting them—Vach’s passport was stamped “Not Valid for Travel in Spain,” in fact—theoretically to avoid escalating the war. Meanwhile, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy were sending troops, pilots and tons of war materiel to Franco’s fascist Nationalists.

“At least 15 Clevelanders were enlisted in the George Washington Battalion, in which I was an infantryman, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the two American units of the International Brigade,” Vach writes. “[We] participated in this determined attempt to sever the Fascist line of communications with University City, the Madrid suburb held by Franco’s army. We saw our first front line service in the Brunete Drive and in four days—July 6 to 10 [1937]—we were initiated into all the horror the Spanish war had to offer. My closest friend was killed in that destructive baptism of fire.”

Vachel Blair's 1937 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. illo: D. Blair
That was Roger Cornell, of 1886 E. 82d Street, Cleveland, the article notes, evidently as a community service. “Steve Kosjak, 978 E. 76th Street, was likewise killed in the attack… Roy Peters, 1741 E. 19th Street, died, needled by machine gun bullets. I saw Larry Friedman, a Cleveland College freshman, writhing on the ground, his stomach wrapped in bandages, waiting for a stretcher.”

Vach and his fellow green recruits of the Washington Battalion had joined the Lincoln Brigade, who had learned the unavoidable hard truths of war six months earlier in the Battle of Jarama. Together, they helped liberate the town of Villanueva de la Cañada. The Washington suffered so many casualties in the Brunete Drive, it was simply incorporated into the Lincoln. I remember my father telling me, with visible anger, how “macho” officers competing with each other had ordered them into ill-advised charges up the notorious "Mosquito Ridge," where they were cut down by Nationalist machine gunners.

The Lincoln was commanded by Oliver Law, an African-American from west Texas, until he died on Mosquito Ridge on July 9th. Law was succeeded by Robert Merriman, a UC Berkeley doctoral student from Eureka, California, who is thought to be the inspiration for Hemingway's hero in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940). Many fighters hailed from northern California, and San Francisco has one of America’s four monuments to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, downtown on its Embarcadero. I attended the 2007 dedication of the modest, square, structuralist display, with a lot of text and photos, by then-mayor Gavin Newsom. There was a decent crowd and a few elderly Brigaders.

Merriman died the following year, 1938, in the Aragon Offensive, when the Americans again took heavy casualties. The Nationalist were known for their take-no-prisoner tactics, but the Internationals were often used as shock troops. Hence, up to a quarter of the almost 60,000 died. For their sacrifice, they were decommissioned before the end of the war and given a hero's parade in Barcelona.

The night before the Brunete Drive began, Vach tells us that camped near by were “two battalions made up of former inmates of concentration camps and victims of oppression in the Balkans. Men were here who had tramped hundreds of weary miles with one thought in mind—to even the score a bit by taking a crack at the Fascists. Here, too, were liberty and wine-loving Frenchmen and Belgians (together in the Franco-Belge Battalion). English, Scotch and Irishmen, Czechs, Scandinavians, Canadians, Cubans, Poles and Italians and even a few Chinese, who had come half way across the world to fight western Fascism. We were truly the International Brigade.”

They were also kids marching into war. Two days before the battle, “It was July 4, and we were in a world which hadn’t more than the faintest connection with the world we had known. We wondered about you people back home. Were you planning picnics? All of us, with no noticeable exceptions, spent the afternoon writing letters to mothers, sweethearts, relatives and friends. The battalion mail box was stuffed, and not one letter even vaguely mentioned the attack. Not one of us wished to risk having our letters—possibly our last we would ever write—thrown out by the censor.”

Vach’s 3,000-word Plain Dealer feature (see the full text here) takes us deep into one battle in Spain, almost 90 years ago, but also the unchanging nature of global power politics and the primordial and inherently masculine “baptism of war,” replete with poetic touches, telling details and abject horror:

A short article about Blair and his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. illo: D. Blair
“We cleared our Russian rifles that morning… Each of us kept a French helmet, a gas mask, a grub sack with mess utensils, a canteen, a bandolier or cartridge belt and 200 rounds of ammunition, some of it stuffed in our pockets… Every movement, every moment had significance that day. But we were not downhearted—yet. I traded a pack of American cigarettes for a can of condensed milk, which was swiped by the British battalion’s cook… I can still see Roger Cornell, smiling as he doled out the spoonfuls to ‘Shorty,’ [Larry Friedman], ‘Smitty,’ our section leader, and two or three others.”

“The Lincoln Battalion came marching up and camped about 100 yards down the road… Their boys were not singing as much or as loudly as we. We were anxious to see what the front was like. Several fellows in our battalion, led by Milt Young, a Jewish boy from New York City, went over to the Lincoln. ‘You’ll see, you’ll see,’ they told Milt. This wasn’t sport to them.”

“We were in high spirits, tense, expectant when the order came that night to move. Some kind of history was being made here… All night we marched, walking beside the road much of the time, to permit the trucks to pass, stopping to rest once every hour for a smoke. The next morning, we arrived at our last encampment, ate our dry rations of bully [corned] beef and bread, and slept until late afternoon. Larry and I went down to the small, dirty creek just below us for a bath and a shave, Spanish style…”

“Everything was silent except the sound of marching feet heading to the front. We took turns carrying the company stretcher… We hurried east on the road until we reached our position for the attack, and started south down the slope toward the Fascist line, single file.”

“At our rear the sun rose from behind the snow-peaked Guadarrama Mountains, the hot, blistering Spanish sun… Three shells cracked over our head in rapid succession, the first shells we had heard in close range. They were from our own batteries, however… Shell after shell fell into the town bursting three at a time and leaving tall columns of smoke and debris.”

“We were approaching the range of the machine guns and their nervous rat-a-tatting… We would have to advance up a small valley toward the barricades. [Our] men were lying on the ground, waiting. Suddenly, a short, bronzed lad let out a yell, rose quickly and dashed forward for 25 yards before diving into some bushes. As soon as he yelled, the rest of us followed him. There were no given orders to charge. It is always spontaneous action. The men ran as far as they could in the four seconds it is estimated that it takes a Fascist to aim and fire again…”

Vachel Blair, in his U.S. Army uniform, about six years after he served in Spain. illo: D. Blair
“Frankly, each one of us was frightened. This was our first taste of gunfire—and it was aimed directly at us. I was down flat on my nose and stomach when a bullet dug into the earth eight inches in front of me… The towns barricades were less than 250 yards away from us, but all of that is uphill and bare of cover. We waited here in the hot sun… sniped at by riflemen in the tower of the town’s church. Two Moors [Moroccans fighting for Franco] added to our discomfort by wriggling down on the plain… and letting us have it, until we captured them bleeding from bullet wounds.”

His squad wasn’t central to the attack on Villanueva de la Canada that night because, when “[w]e were within 75 yards of the town… we heard the roar of triumphant Loyalist [Republican] troops as they charged into the town from the other side… Yells and revolutionary songs rang out in many languages. Cavalry and infantry intermingled as the troops marched by devastated, white-walled Spanish homes, some with black, empty doorways, others rosy with the glow of half extinguished fires… [W]e marched wearily toward Brunete and camped in an olive grove behind a brick farm house halfway… [D]uring the night the Spanish boys had laid down next to the Fascist dead under the wall of the farm house, perhaps believing them to be exhausted comrades.”

The next morning, “The call came to fall in. Brunete had been captured during the night and all morning trucks had sped down the road toward it. German aviators bombed us as we marched along on empty stomachs, killing six and wounding many. One bomb burst directly across from us as Carnell, Bready and I were falling on our faces.”

“That night Roger [Carnell] and I shared the same poncho. We were weary from marching in the hot sun and we were hungry. That was the last time Roger and I exchanged confidences. The next day he was killed on ‘Mosquito Hill’ without tanks to prepare the way and without adequate machine guns. Weary and exhausted, suffering from fatigue and hunger, we charged up that hill…”

“Carnell and I moved together as the company advanced into the bullet zone. At the signal cry, with several other men, Roger ran up a ridge to the right. A quick glance showed me there wasn’t enough cover there for another man. I scurried up to the left, flopping behind a tree. I was parked there, half way up Mosquito Hill, a Russian rifle in my hand, when a Spaniard ran up the ditch behind me, drawing additional gunfire as he came.”

“The middle of an attack may not be the best time to begin a conversation but we did talk there, throwing German, French and Spanish words together in order to understand each other. He came from the Lester Battalion, he said. I was down on my knees firing into clumps of bushes where Fascists might be lying, when he stood up."

Blair and his wife, Tonia Blair, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who supported the Spanish Republicans as a girl, 1962. illo: D. Blair
“’Shoot a little higher into those clumps,’ my companion directed. ‘Like this.’ ‘Down,’ I shouted in Spanish. He paid little heed. We were tired, more tired than ever before. The sun beat down fiercely. We were too exhausted to fear bullets.”

“Suddenly the Spaniard threw his arms around me. ‘Comrade,’ he yelled. Blood dripped from the seat of his trousers and his shirt was stained. I put my hand on his back to stop the blood. A bullet penetrated his body entering under the armpit and leaving through his back. I finally succeeded in slipping my first aid gauze under his coat, raised his garrison belt and tightened it to keep him from bleeding to death. Now to get him a stretcher. I ran down the ditch and jumped over a clump of bushes just in time as eight or ten bullets whizzed over my head.”

“There were no stretchers at the dressing station but young Larry Friedman was there, lying on the ground his stomach bandaged. ‘How are you making out, Shorty,’ I asked. ‘Do something,’ he moaned, ‘Do something.’ Now I needed at least two stretchers, one for Larry who was my friend.”

“Eventually we located some blankets, which were better than nothing at all. And then on our return we ran into the grub truck and stretchers. Loading bully beef cans, bread and cheese for our company on a stretcher, we located our lads, who had been without food for many hours. Larry had been taken away. I never saw him again.”

Vach left the Washington Battalion shortly after the Brunete Drive ended. Technically speaking, he deserted, since he hadn’t been decommissioned, perhaps explaining his reluctance to discuss the details of his Spanish Civil War sojourn, although foreign fighters are intrinsically volunteers. He was in Spain from March to August 1937. I got the impression, from his remarks over the years, that he concluded the Republican military was poorly organized and officered, and he would probably die there, like his friends Roger Carnell and Larry "Shorty" Friedman.

Instead, Vachel Blair returned to the United States in September, 1937, and reported what happened to the Cleveland community, notably in his Plain Dealer article. Six years later, he fought in World War Two, in the North Africa and Italy campaigns, serving in the U.S. Army Air Force as an intelligence officer and areal photographer. As such, he flew in six missions over southern Europe in B-24 bombers, which he also described in long, literary passages, as in this letter to his first wife, actually written while he was on a bombing run.

"Dearest Patty, My lady, I am going to put your St. Christopher’s Medal to a test. I’m sitting on the flight deck thinking of you as we collect the formation together before going to a lively target. Yo ho! ... Now I am looking over the pilot’s shoulder, Lt. Seitz here and he is a damn good flyer. Ahead is the squadron commander’s ship. All over the sky you can see stair steps of planes, a formation here and another there... Your little flashlight is coming in handy, for the [flight] engineer just borrowed it. Don’t forget to send more batteries will you?"

"You know, Patty, it always strikes me as I look over one of those planes in flight, droning along and vibrating to the 'quattro motore' [four motors symphony], that these sky trucks are an invention of the devil. Here we are all loaded up with men, gas and bombs. I can readily understand how there may be times when the noble thoughts of democracy and freedom might be set aside sometimes just to get in a little worry about self-survival..."

"It’s a beautiful sight outside. We’re riding high above a white cloud layer that looks like snow. Tail turret is out. 'No Bueno.' We’re going up. 'Gonna pull the pins,' says Caravalho, our bombardier, as he drops back into the bomb bay. Then we’ll be all set, Patty, to drop the load of lethal destruction upon the bastions of the Axis." What Vach withheld, due to self-censorship, was that his main job was to crawl out over the open bomb bay doors—wearing an oxygen mask but no safety strap—and film the bombs dropping and whether they hit the target. (See entire his letter here or his story about a bombing run gone bad here.)

As intense as World War Two was, Vach's brief Spanish Civil War experience, when he was 22 years old, remained foundational. Obviously, it was far beyond anything I witnessed traveling around American cities, the United States or the world, including my recent, modest foray into war reporting, "Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution". My father was much my superior in understanding war, or the way of the warrior, but he hid it from us, not wanting the attending horror, machismo and desperation to overshadow what he preferred to emphasize and provide: tolerance, optimism and support.

Doniphan Blair, in front of San Francisco's monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. illo: D. Blair
Nevertheless, most people in our circle knew he fought in Spain; he received the Lincoln Brigade’s newsletter and went to meetings into the 1990s (for more info, see the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives); and his Spanish volunteerism played a role in his grandchildren getting partial scholarships to a progressive private school in Manhattan.

Perhaps most significantly, when my father met my mother, Tonia Rotkopf, they bonded over the Spanish Civil War. As a young Jewish woman from a socialist family in Poland, she had learned the songs, collected donations for hungry Spanish children and knew about the politics. Indeed, some of her adoration of my father was a simple respect for the freedom fighters, who came from around the world to stop the fascists in Spain and a few years later went to Europe. Indeed, it was American troops, some tall, blond and Christian like Vach, who liberated her in Austria in 1945 from Mauthausen concentration camp.

My father, for his part, had long been friends with Jews, as we can see from his Spanish Civil War companions but also as far back as middle school, and, by college, he was a socialist. Going through his library recently, I came upon his "Black Book of Polish Jewry", a detailed expose of the onset of European atrocities, published in 1943 with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt. "The Black Book" refutes the claim that little was known about the Holocaust until late in the war. The fact that Vachel had a copy reminds us that people of good will could inform themselves and take action, much as is now needed in Ukraine.

The Spanish Civil War eerily parallels today’s war in Ukraine. Much as the democratic Loyalists desperately fought the fascist Nationalists, the 30-year-old Ukrainian democracy is in a duel to the death with the Soviet Union’s successor state, Russia, which tragically turned fascist and imperialist. Spain and Ukraine was/is on the edge of democratic Europe and struggling to join its normative, modern world; both were one of the few countries where anarchists were organized enough to mount political parties and armies; both wars had/have dedicated international brigades; and both were/are vicious confrontations where, if democracy was/is defended, it could have saved/save us a lot of suffering.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Mar 01, 2023 - 05:58 PM
Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain
By Vachel Blair as told to Martin H. Miller

Vachel Blair, in his U.S. Army uniform, about six years after he served in Spain. photo: Unknown
Vachel Blair's Other cineSOURCE Stories: “My Father’s Spanish Civil War”, “Life and Death in the Air: A Bombing Run Goes Bad” and “While Flying in a B-24 Over Fortress Europe”

This article had the subhead of "Local youth, back from the front, gives first-hand account of those battling for the Loyalists" when it was first published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, on November 21, 1937, and an introductory paragraph.

In the following article, Vachel Blair, 3028 Woodbury Road, Shaker Heights [Cleveland, Ohio], who recently returned from service in the George Washington Battalion, International Brigade of the Spanish government army, relates his experiences under fire in a major offensive.—Editor’s Note [from Cleveland Plain Dealer].

CLEVELAND WAS WELL REPRESENTED IN
the Brunete offensive [by the Spanish Republicans, 15 miles north of Madrid, in July, 1937]. The most extensive and thoroughly-planned drive of Loyalist Spain against Gen. Francisco Franco’s forces attacking Madrid.

At least 15 Clevelanders were enlisted in the George Washington Battalion, in which I was an infantryman, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the two American units of the International Brigade [the Washington was eventually incorporated into the Lincoln]. They and Cleveland youths who served as truck drivers in the transportation division, participated in this determined attempt to sever the Facist [sic] line of communications with University City, the Madrid suburb held by Franco’s army.

Since I left the Washington Battalion shortly after the offensive ended, I can tell you only of the experiences of the Clevelanders in my company.

We saw our first front line service in the Brunete Drive and in four days—July 6 to 10—we were initiated into all the horror the Spanish war had to offer. My closest friend was killed in that destructive baptism of fire.

It was only the night before the attack came to a stop Roger Cornell, 1886 E. 82d Street [Cleveland] and I shared for the last time our ponchos, the squares of khaki which serve as raincoats in the day and sleeping covers at night.

Steve Kosjak, 978 E. 76th Street, was likewise killed in the attack. Roy Peters, 1741 E. 19th Street, died, needled by machine gun bullets.

I saw Larry Friedman, a Cleveland College freshman, writhing on the ground, his stomach wrapped in bandages, waiting for a stretcher.

Two days before the artillery opened the offensive by sending shell after shell down into the enemy town of Villanueva de la Canada, all of us were alive, encamped under the scrubby, thinly-foliaged olive trees some 12 miles northwest of Madrid.

'Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain', was an long article written by Vachel Blair and published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 21, 1937. image: CPD archive

Any stray aviator flying over the rugged Spanish terrain would notice nothing unusual—we hoped—but around us in all directions were thousands of troops keeping cover. Near the Americans were two battalions made up of former inmates of concentration camps and victims of oppression in the Balkans. Men were here who had tramped hundreds of weary miles with one thought in mind—to even the score a bit by taking a crack at the Fascists.

Here, too, were liberty and wine-loving Frenchmen and Belgians (together in the Franco-Belge Battalion). English, Scotch and Irishmen, Czechs, Scandinavians, Canadians, Cubans, Poles and Italians and even a few Chinese who had come half way across the world to fight western Fascism.

We were truly the International Brigade, but the bulk of the 120,000 troops concentrated on this spot consisted of Spaniards. Forty thousand of them were to sweep down into the plain to the northwest of Madrid and take the strongly fortified Villanueva de la Canada.

The George Washington Battalion and 9,000 other members of the International Brigade were to circle in the southwest in the second contingent of 40,000 take Villaviciofa and attack the Fascist rear at University City.

The 40,000 Spaniard remaining were to head southwest smash through Brunete, continue south a few miles, and capture Navalcarnere, which is on the supply road to Franco’s University City salient. Once this was done, the Fascists surrounding Madrid would be either bottled up or, if retreating, might easily be routed as Mussolini’s troops were at Guadalajara.

It was July 4, and we were in a world which hadn’t more than the faintest connection with the world we had known. We wondered about you people back home. Were you planning picnics? All of us, with no noticeable exceptions, spent the afternoon writing letters to mothers, sweethearts, relatives and friends. The battalion mail box was stuffed, and not one letter even vaguely mentioned the attack. Not one of us wished to risk having our letters—possibly our last we would ever write—thrown out by the censor.

We cleared our Russian rifles that morning, and cut down on the equipment we would have to carry. Each of us kept a French helmet, a gas mask, a grub sack with mess utensils, a canteen, a bandolier or cartridge belt and 200 rounds of ammunition, some of it stuffed in our pockets.

Every movement, every moment had significance that day. But we were not downhearted—yet. I traded a pack of American cigarets [sic] for a can of condensed milk which was swiped by the British battalion’s cook. It tasted good, a spoonful at a time.

Vachel Blair, with his wife, Tonia Rotkopf, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor. photo: Nicholas Blair
“When we get back, we’ll each buy a can of this stuff and get good and sick on it,” Larry Friedman remarked.

I can still see Roger Cornell, smiling as he doled out the spoonfuls to Shorty [nickname for Friedman], “Smitty,” our section leader, and two or three others, including myself, who sat in a circle around the tin can nectar. It was good for four rounds.

Just at dusk trucks began to stream by us on the road at the edge of the camp, ammunition trucks, food trucks, ambulances, lorries, trucks of every description jammed with soldiers, trucks loaded with large artillery and anti-truck guns, and later giant Diesel [sic] trucks, each carrying a three-ton tank, covered with a tarpaulin. Their headlights were painted or papered to cut illumination to the point where German aircraft would not observe them.

The Lincoln Battalion came marching up and camped about 100 yards down the road. This battalion had helped thrust back the Fascists who almost severed the Madrid-to-Valencia highway on the Jarama Front back in January. Their boys were not singing as much or as loudly as we. We were anxious to see what the front was like.

Several fellows in our battalion, led by Milt Young, a Jewish boy from New York City, went over to the Lincoln.

“You’ll see, you’ll see,” they told Milt. This wasn’t sport to them. Nevertheless, we were in high spirits, tense, expectant when the order came that night to move. Some kind of history was being made here. The hillsides in the rolling, brush-covered country alive with the buzzing of voices as far as we could hear, and the coolness of the evening us once more comfortable and free, for eight hours at least, from the burning sun.

All night we marched, walking beside the road much of the time, to permit the trucks to pass, stopping to rest once every hour for a smoke. The next morning we arrived at our last encampment, ate our dry rations of bully beef and bread, and slept until late afternoon.

Larry and I went down to the small, dirty creek just below us for a bath and a shave, Spanish style, and found our battalion commander there ahead of us. “Food is coming up at dusk,” he told us. And it did—rice pudding and beans, lemons and beef and coffee, and even cigarettes, and we could take as much as we could eat.

We could hear the tanks, now off the trucks, rumbling toward the front on their own power. Once again everyone was excited, jumpy and very wide awake. Hurry, hurry! Tempers were short and several fights occurred when representatives of each section lined up with their buckets for grub. Fights over the place in line, fights over nothing, fights because each was afraid marching orders would come before his section could be fed.

A short article about Blair's involvement in the Spanish Civil War. photo: N/A
Three hours later, a half hour past midnight, marching orders did arrive. We tried to sleep in the meantime, but sleep was impossible. We merely lay on the ground and rested, not talking, thinking.

Cars began to pass us with their lights off. Everything was silent except the sound of marching feet heading to the front. We took turns carrying the company stretcher. Finally, at the dawn we saw another road parallel to the front, thousands of troops lined the road. Later I learned that over 110,000 men were here for an attack on 15 kilometers (nine miles) of the front.

We hurried east on the road until we reached our position for the attack, and started south down the slope toward the Fascist line, single file.

At our rear the sun rose from behind the snow-peaked Guadarrama Mountains, the hot, blistering Spanish sun. At 6 o’clock the artillery would open fire in order to “soften” the town for our first division. Behind the road we could see the guns and the gun pits. Eighteen miles to the southeast on this same road was Madrid. In front of us, three miles away, we could see our first objective, Villanueva de la Canada. Ahead of us to our left the Spaniards were already down the foothills, waiting for the opening artillery barrage before charging this strategic town.

Three shells cracked over our head in rapid succession, the first shells we had heard in close range. They were from our own batteries, however.

Gradually we made our way down the large gulches of the foothills. On the riddges, a quarter mile to our left and right, were rows of tanks, on in front of us and behind us thousands of men streamed single file down to the rolling plain.

Shell after shell fell into the town bursting three at a time and leaving tall columns of smoke and debris. The Loyalist aviation of twenty bombers and ten pursuit planes circled over the town in perfect formation, for now there were no big black puffs from German anti-aircraft guns. The planes circled twice over the town, dropping their deadly loads, and then speeding away along the front.

We were now in the rolling plain, only 500 yards away from the town. We were approaching the range of the machine guns and their nervous rat-a-tatting. Then, much to our surprise and chagrin, a runner reported that the first troops had been unable to take the town. We would have to advance up a small valley toward the barricades. The men were lying on the ground, waiting. Suddenly, a short, bronzed lad let out a yell, rose quickly and dashed forward for 25 yards before diving into some bushes. As soon as he yelled, the rest of us followed him. There were no given orders to charge. It is always spontaneous action. The men ran as far as they could in the four seconds it is estimated that the it takes a Fascist to aim and fire again.

Again we rose, and again we ran. Frankly, each one of us was frightened. This was our first taste of gunfire—and it aimed directly at us. I was down flat on my nose and stomach when a bullet dug into the earth eight inches in front of me. It may have been a spent bullet but that did not assure me.

Blair, his wife, Tonia, and sons Doniphan and Nick, circa 1972. photo: Unknown
along its edge. The towns barricades were less than 250 yards away from us, but all of that is uphill and bare of cover. We waited here in the hot sun, dug holes two feet deep in the sand for water, and poured the coffee-colored liquid down our throats, into our hair, and into our helmets.

An order comes to move south again. This new position is on a low ridge covered with wheat stubble. Here we were sniped at by riflemen in the tower of the town’s church. Two Moors [Moroccans fighting for Franco] added to our discomfort by wriggling down on the plain, perching themselves on a blanket and letting us have it, until we captured them bleeding from bullet wounds.

The general attack on Villanueva de la Canada is to take place at sundown. We place our packs and surplus equipment on the ground thinking we would return for them after the attack. We never did. Orders to move came at sundown. We were within 75 yards of the town when we heard the roar of triumphant Loyalist troops as they charged into the town from the other side. The ditches of the road retreat [sic] and the road south were filled with Fascist dead, which were later identified as mostly German. Yells and revolutionary songs rang out in many languages. Cavalry and infantry intermingled as the troops marched by devastated, white-walled Spanish homes, some with black, empty doorways, others rosy with the glow of half extinguished fires. The pungent odor of anise came from a dark, bomb-shattered café where a slight breeze rippled the sheet of canvas in the doorway.

After only a few moments in the plaza before the church, we marched wearily toward Brunete and camped in an olive grove behind a brick farm house halfway to Brunete. The next morning I got up to get a drink at the well and found that during the night the Spanish boys had laid down next to the Fascist dead under the wall of the farm house, perhaps believing them to be exhausted comrades.

The call came to fall in. Brunete had been captured during the night and all morning trucks had sped down the road toward it. German aviators bombed us as we marched along on empty stomachs, killing six and wounding many. One bomb burst directly across from us as Carnell, Bready and I were falling on our faces.

That night Roger and I shared the same poncho. We were weary from marching in the hot sun and we were hungry. That was the last time Roger and I exchanged confidences. The next day he was killed on “Mosquito Hill” without tanks to prepare the way and without adequate machine guns.

Weary and exhausted, suffering from fatigue and hunger, we charged up that hill, and would have taken it had we received adequate support.

Carnell and I moved together as the company advanced into the bullet zone. At the signal cry, with several other men, Roger ran up a ridge to the right. A quick glance showed me there wasn’t enough cover there for another man. I scurried up the left, flopping behind a tree. I was parked there, half way up Mosquito Hill, a Russian rifle in my hand, when a Spaniard ran up the ditch behind me, drawing additional gunfire as he came.

San Francisco's monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on February 25, 2023, when a pro-Ukraine rally was held across the street. photo: D. Blair
The middle of an attack may not be the best time to begin a conversation but we did talk there, throwing German, French and Spanish words together in order to understand each other. He came from the Lester Battalion, he said.

I was down on my knees firing into clumps of bushes where Fascists might be lying, when he stood up.

“Shoot a little higher into those clumps,” my companion directed. “Like this.”

“Down,” I shouted in Spanish. He paid little heed. We were tired, more tired than ever before. The sun beat down fiercely. We were too exhausted to fear bullets.

Suddenly the Spaniard threw his arms around me. “Comrade,” he yelled. Blood dripped from the seat of his trousers and his shirt was stained. I put my hand on his back to stop the blood. A bullet penetrated his body entering under the armpit and leaving through his back.

I finally succeeded in slipping my first aid gauze under his coat, raised his garrison belt and tightened it to keep him from bleeding to death. Now to get him a stretcher. I ran down the ditch and jumped over a clump of bushes just in time as eight or ten bullets whizzed over my head.

There were no stretchers at the dressing station but young Larry Friedman was there, lying on the ground his stomach bandaged.

“How are you making out, Shorty,” I asked.

“Do something,” he moaned, “Do something.”

Now I needed at least two stretchers, one for Larry who was my friend.

Two Americans joined me in the search for stretchers. The bullet that wounded Larry had first pierced the hand of one of these boys before entering Larry’s body. We couldn‘t find our ambulance, and once we picked up a stretcher we were forced to return it. Eventually we located some blankets which were better than nothing at all. And then on our return we ran into the grub truck and stretchers.

Loading bully beef cans, bread and cheese for our company on a stretcher, we located our lads, who had been without food for many hours. Larry had been taken away. I never saw him again.

Back again we distributed welcome rations to the fighters. The company dug in in a ravine halfway up the hill. The attack had been stopped.

And that night under cover of darkness we searched among the bushes for wounded and missing comrades.

Editor’s Note: Vachel Blair went on to live in New York City as a cinematographer, marry a Jewish Holocaust survivor, have two sons and live to 84.

For more info about the American fighters, see the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

Posted on Mar 01, 2023 - 05:26 PM
We Have Ukrainian Flags
cineSOURCE staff

WE HAVE UKRAINIAN FLAGS
for those who want to show support for the Ukrainian defense of their 30 year-old democratic tradition in the face of an autocratic colonialist invasion.

Flag Varieties and Prices

5 x 3 foot Sewn Polyester Flag Our cost: $10 Donation: $30

5 x 3 foot Printed Flag Our cost: $4 Donation: $20

6 x 4 inch Small Flag Our cost: $2 Donation: $5

12 x 18 inch Garden Flag Cost: $10 Donation: $20

To Get Your Flag, Contact cineSOURCE

510 220.2126 or

Pickup: cineSOURCE, West Oakland, 10am-10pm.

By Mail: Will include nominal shipping fee.

Donations Go To

Support Ukraine with Us

SUWU is an East Bay group organized by a few young Ukrainian-Americans who took it upon themselves to raise money and to travel to Ukraine to set up a highly efficient delivery system to help people in severe need.

They achieve this by A) buying all supplies in Ukraine, which both saves on shipping and stimulates the economy, and B) by setting up ad hoc shipment centers in living rooms and garages and having local volunteers package every thing from food staples to cleaning supplies and clothing.

Posted on Feb 22, 2023 - 06:44 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
First published by cineSOURCE in December 2018, this updated article has important new info.

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 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 a terrible street car accident, was obsessed with the 20-years older, 200-pounds fatter and extremely 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, “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, watching him paint a mural at her high school. While he noticed her and her fiery demeanor, he thought she was eleven. Undeterred, Frida returned a few years later with a sheaf of paintings under her arm and proceeded to conquer the already-married and notorious womanizer’s mind as well as heart, suggesting that an empowered male needs an equally intense female—AND vice versa.

Mexico City was scandalized. Frida’s family rejected Diego, even though he was from a wealthy, old crypto-Jewish family and her father, Guillermo, was a German immigrant who should have been cool with that (her mother was "mestizo"). They called Frida and Diego "la ballena y la paloma," which means the whale and the dove or, alternatively, "el elefante y la paloma." Recent research indicates that Frida's father was, in fact, a Lutheran, not Jewish, but her proclivity for claiming he was of Hungarian-Jewish descent through the entire Nazi era makes her Jewish, as far as I am concerned.

'Frida and Diego' by Frida from 1937. image: F. Kahlo
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. Indeed, she almost single handedly invented aggressive self-examination through painting, a distinctly female aspect of the art form, and became the undisputed master of the self-portrait, ultimately eclipsing Rivera in art history.

Some paint snobs reject Frida for “unpainterly” brushstrokes, some Mexican nationalists for being half Jewish, or so they thought, and some feminists for sleeping with the enemy—not just Diego but quite a few powerful men, starting with Leon Trotsky, the Jewish communist from Ukraine who led the revolution until he was double-crossed by Stalin.

Regardless, Frida’s spirit, images and ideas of what it was to be a woman or an obsessively-honest artist or a dedicated Mexican were immensely innovative and powerful, which is why Diego adored her and probably would not be upset by her star-is-born turn.

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. He balanced fine art, illustration, politics and a respect for both working people and, to a degree, the businessmen 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 and once-a-week tour (go here).

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
Called “The Allegory of California”, the smallish mural features lush colors and a floor-to-ceiling goddess, modeled on tennis star Helen Wills Moody and derived from Diego's re-imagining of the matriarchal Califia, the mythical Muslim queen, who also provided California its name. The overall theme is Californian industry, although he snuck in a couple of contrarian messages, like a sequoia tree stump or the pressure gauge, with its arrow in the red, in typical Rivera fashion (Frida was also a prankster). With its hills full of oil derricks, "Allegory of California" shows little of California's wondrous beaches, mountains and deserts, but Diego was probably too busy chasing California girls, like tennis-star Moody or film goddess Paulette Goddard, to go on scenic road trips.

If “The Allegory of California” is matriarchal, Diego's companion piece two miles away at the San Francisco Art Institute is patriarchal. Tragically, the venerable old institute went bankrupt in 2021, and the future of the mural or at least being able to see it is in jeopardy.

Around midnight last week, I visited the old campus at 800 Chestnut Street, which consists of an ancient monastery with bell tower in front and a modern, angular cement building in back. There was no status update on the door but when I pushed it open I could see, in the middle of the arch-lined Moorish courtyard, the pool, once full of gold fish and lilies, was empty. It was sad, spooky and devoid of life until I was accosted by a stereotypical guard barking "This is private property," although he did give me a contact person's name.

Aside from the incredibly stupid tragedy of San Francisco's monied elite, one of the richest communities in the world and supposedly art minded, letting its century-and-a-half old art institute perish, there is the problem of seeing Diego's mural, considered the lessor of San Francisco's famous three but still fantastic.

Called “The Making of a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City,” and completed in 1931, it is a bit larger than than "Allegory" and fully male metaphorically. Not only is the mural filled with a giant, white male laborer in blue overalls, it includes Diego himself, abiding an interest in self-portraiture obviously inspired by Frida. Instead of painting himself planting a magical tree with the Hollywood sex goddess Paulette Goddard, as in the four-times-as-big City College mural, symbolic Diego is hard at work, sitting on the scaffold in front of the painting, his enormous butt facing the viewer.

Alas, 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 full frontal nudes. Indeed, she garnered a New York show in 1938, where actor Edward G. Robinson bought four paintings, and she received great acclaim in Paris, where Andre Breton hailed her as a brilliant surrealist, a laurel she rejected.

Frida's 'The Broken Column', 1944, exposes her pain, body and vision, in equal measure. image: F. Kahlo
“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, an experience she enjoyed immensely, in part due to her infatuation with doctors, disease and death.

“I hope the leaving is joyful,” she 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—albeit in her mind only—was crowned queen of Mexican art, if not culture. And she remained a solely local treasure until, about the mid-1970s when, ka-boom: international Frida-mania.

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 of Frida canvases, as well as an art-viewing public already familiar with the city's three Rivera murals and the romantic story of his remarrying Frida here in 1940.

Finally, after the Mexican 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 great otherwise). The massive San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art retrospective was organized here in 2008, and went on international tour.

A Frida nude, photographer unknown but undoubtedly her lover Nickolas Muray, around 1939. photo: unknown
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 their 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 properly 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 its cast of characters, including a regally-attired Frida.

Unfortunately, right behind Frida, Diego painted himself planting a magical white tree with the actress 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 many alpha women. Goddard moved for a period to Mexico City, settling in a hotel across the street from Diego's 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: psycho-sexual 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).

In 2021, City College loaned the 30-ton "Pan American Unity" mural to San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, where it went on display on June 28th. The project took millions of dollars and all sorts of experts, from fresco folks to art handlers and truckers, who designed and implemented special cases with shock absorbers on trucks going five miles an hour for the seven miles to the museum.

A Frida nude by Diego, 1930, note the high heels. image: D. Rivera
Exhibited in a free gallery on the museum's first floor, the mural will be on view until January 2024. It is a unique opportunity to see a great and enormous work of art, and also fantastic curatorial work, but most importantly a testament to the massive psycho-sexual and artistic relationship of Frida and Diego. I just saw it myself the other day, and the "Pan American Unity" is magnificent, in a massive room with 60 foot ceilings, much more spacious than in City College. On one side of the room is a seven-tier, wooden amphitheater perfect for lectures, like the one I would be happy to give about the Frida-Diego romantic philosophy.

I would start by pointing to the middle of the painting, Diego's tryptic self-portrait of himself and Paulette behind the regally-attired Frida, alone at her easel and discussing how Frida and Diego mastered modern, fully liberated love, which embraces matriarchy-patriarchy, female-male, mind-body. In other words, they accepted each others' elevated gender characteristics of macho and femme as fascinating, beautiful and lovable.

Then I would turn to the even more important theme of the "Pan American Unity": radical multiculturalism. In point of fact, right next to his tryptic self-portrait, Diego has a young, innocent indigenous girl, one of his favorite figures and probably a stand-in for Frida, and a slightly older, blond-haired white boy. He probably symbolized Nikolas Muray to their in-crowd, but to us more average viewers simply a bold continuation of his cultural-interconnection theme, which is integrated throughout the piece. Indeed, the centerpiece is a hybrid of a Toltec god and a machine, very much a futuristic "transformer," for the kids of today.

Getting back to Frida and Diego's bedroom, as some might prefer over highfalutin' art criticism, she liked to torture him with tales about her many affairs with men, while he liked to brag to his buddies about her conquests of women. Those notches in her belt even included the other great woman painter of the day, Georgia O’Keefe, a seemingly-modest Midwesterner, who was also Frida’s artistic rival, since they were the first women to have fully articulated a uniquely female art. Georgia was also a great multiculturalist—her longtime boyfriend was the New York photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who loved to argue, happened to be Jewish and had an overweening mother—and a great lover. Indeed, in her 90s, living in Taos, New Mexico, she was allegedly intimate with the 30-something Juan Hamilton.

SF City College's mural features a glorious Frida (center) but also Diego and film star Paulette Goddard and a cute native girl and white boy, suggesting radical openness and multiculturalism. photo: D. Blair
For her part, Frida was said to have enjoyed Diego's "bedtime stories" about his many sexual 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. Their self-portraiture however is right in line with today's selfie obsessed. How did this happen in Mexico?

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. Moreover, of course, Mexico City in the 1920s was a place of revolutionaries, of both the political and artistic kind. It was the perfect stage for Frida and Diego’s self-invention, sexuality and fantasy as well as disciplined creativity and dedicated love.

Here’s how Amy Fine Collins summed up Fridamania in Vanity Fair, after the publication of her very revealing diaries in 2013:

Frida enjoying a last laugh with her pet hawk at her home, the Blue House, Mexico City, circa 1941. photo: N. Muray
“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.”

Who said love, obsession and great art would be simple? When you consider how much Frida suffered through her injuries and 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.

For more indepth analysis, see "Frida" (1983) by Hayden Herrera, or "The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera" (1963) by Bertram Wolfe. And be sure and catch “Pan American Unity” at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art before January 2024, at which point it goes back to City College.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on Feb 21, 2023 - 03:02 PM
Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Revolution (Abridged Part II)
by Doniphan Blair

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Rodion, a Russian-speaking costume designer from the Donbas, was very happy with Ukraine's recent progress and very angry with his Russian relatives. photo: D. Blair
Continued from 'Meet the Kids of Maidan: Part I'

“What an incredible place, a cool architectural space, a symbolic place,” I muse, until I work myself up and start yelling to myself: “In the middle of a fucking genocidal war, the goddamn Ukrainians are so democratic, they don’t mind anyone coming to their central square and saying whatever the fuck they want—including the likes of Dirk, a half-crazed German performance artist!” During my five or six times on the Maidan, in fact, I don’t recall seeing a single soldier, police officer or even untoward stare.

The next day, Dirk and I bade each other adieu with repressed emotions. Suddenly involved in each other’s lives—we also took meals together and roomed in a deluxe, rococo one-bedroom on Pushkin Street ($24 a night and four blocks from the Maidan!)—we were unable to understand what that might mean in the middle of our generation’s most destructive and divisive war, now slicing through friendships, ideologies and countries as well as mass murdering Ukrainians.

It was 1 a.m. by the time I hit Lviv. The cabbie raced the three miles of curfew-cleared streets from the train station to downtown, which is next to Old Town, where I had a spartan room in a 19th century building. In Ukraine, what that usually means is the building's entrance, stairs and hallways are falling apart—a comment on undemocratic collectivism, perhaps—but, once inside an apartment, they’re nice, large, luxurious even, having been renovated by the actual owner. At Kirill’s, for example, which he rents for the equivalent of 400 bucks, we walked up three flights of decrepit stairs, along a pealing balcony, and into a lovely, high-ceilinged duplex with a wrought-iron staircase, which leads to a big bedroom with a claw-foot tub and view of the city.

And spotless. Ukrainians are hygiene freaks who take their shoes off at home and in some businesses, like dental offices, and put on slippers or disposable shoe coverings.

Donning my slippers and stumbling down the dark hall, past five other rented rooms, I was happy to see my small room and tiny bed, which obliged my toes to stick out the slats at the bottom, as well as the chair, desk and large window, which looked out on Kryva Lypa, Lviv’s well-known courtyard crammed with cafes, now deserted during wartime at 2 a.m.

Kryva Lypa means “crooked linden tree,” which is still here, three stories tall, right beneath my window and surrounded by a circular, wrought-iron bench often occupied by women laughing, hipsters arguing, parents rocking kids or soldiers enjoying peace. Instead of the tourist trap I had assumed Kryva Lypa to be, when I moved in, it’s an old bohemian hang- and hide- out, protected by its two access tunnels, which can be easily blocked. Indeed, Kryva Lypa is where Lviv’s first movies were shown in 1903 and hippies and punks first congregated.

An eight-foot, punk-era turntable sculpture still hangs in the brew pub Bratyska (“bratyar” means brothers), which features 30 beers on tap, including a tomato one I didn’t try, and a famous borscht I did, every day for a week, in fact, after catching a cold. Prepared daily by Pani Lida (“pani” means missus), the no-nonsense, middle-aged woman I saw taking smoke breaks on the front porch, the borscht was both tasty and had great sides: cloves of garlic and slices of onion and pig fat, in addition to the standard sour cream and dark bread. No wonder Bratyska is so popular with college students, especially from the National Academy of Art, two miles away.

“I’m taking the interior design curriculum but hate, hate it,” said Pauline, whom I met on Bratyska's porch and is tall and stunning, despite the acne she doesn’t hide with makeup. “It was the only department I could get into with my small portfolio. I only draw or paint sometimes. My passion is performance art.” “Oh, that’s cool,” I effused, trying to seem so myself, “A friend of mine just did a performance on the Maid—” but Pauline interrupted me. Her friends from the Academy, easily recognizable by their distinct dress and greetings, had arrived.

Ukrainian prayers for peace are joined by members of the Hare Krishna, seen here in Lviv's Old Town. photo: D. Blair
Next to the Bratyska was a well-appointed nightclub and jazz venue, which just reopened as a comedy club. “Lviv’s fourth,” I was told by the ticket taker, a twenty-something Ukrainian-American woman raised in Sacramento, which is near where I live in California, who moved back after the war started. “What can I say? Ukrainians love comedy,” she explained. “People under threat of death need humor?” I offered, " Perhaps the gallows humor thing," and, “Or they’re honoring Zelensky,” which finally got a laugh.

In fact, Zelensky did do standup around Kyiv, Ukraine and Russia, where he also acted in a number of films, including playing Napoleon in the Russian comedy feature “Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon” (2012). Although poorly reviewed and a box office flop, the film’s kooky plot or mere existence suggests that conquering Ukraine was not foremost on most Russians’ minds at that time. Meanwhile, Zelensky’s experience in Russia, from being a comic on the road to a more respected actor or his one meeting with Putin, provided him invaluable insight.

“We know for sure that we don’t need the war,” Zelensky pleaded with Russian listeners, during his February 23rd, eve-of-destruction broadcast. “Not a Cold War, not a hot war. Not a hybrid one. But if we’ll be attacked… if they try to take our country away from us, our freedom, our lives, the lives of our children, we will defend ourselves."

Across from Microbrew Bratyska, in one of Kryva Lypa’s access tunnels, is one of its lesser lights: Dizzy Coffee, a tiny shop with two tables and a small upstairs loft but a powerful interior design using Piet Mondrian's colored squares. After my late-night return from Kyiv, I dropped by Dizzy for a quick cappuccino but got into an in-depth discussion with the barista, Andrii.

Thin, dark haired and 23 years old, with a sweet face beneath a light beard, Andrii has a degree in economics and a penchant for machine-gun-fire speech and wild gesticulation. As I learned over the next few days, Andrii is the elder in a crew of voracious-reading, pop-culture-consuming and debate-loving kids, who also listened to their grandparents. It was Andrii, in fact, who informed me of the Holodomor’s three rounds—1932-3, ’45 and ’46-7—hands flying around the espresso machine for emphasis but not spilling a drop.

“My grandmother worked in bakery,” Andrii said, during our first chat, which went high speed between coffee customers for over an hour. “Soldiers came every day and took 90 percent of bread. It’s a problematic. It goes for few years after war.” The Soviets also murdered almost 300 Ukrainian writers in the 1930s—"Called 'executed renaissance,'” he told me—and kept killing intellectuals into the ‘70s.

“She was Jew, Holocaust survivor from Warsaw,” Andrii added about his mother’s mother. “Her name was Mandelbaum, popular Jewish name,” although his family didn’t find that out until perusing her papers after she died. As it happened, her husband was a member of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who had been arrested and did time in Siberia before they met.

“Did they know each other’s stories?” I asked. “They must have,” Andrii said, “They lived together for many years.” “Did they love each other?” “They must have, they had four children.” “Is your mother loving?” “Yes.”

Andrii, economist, historian and barista, at his post in Kryva Lypa's Dizzy Coffee, where he headed up a crew of young Lviv intellectuals. photo: D. Blair
Somewhere around then, into Dizzy’s cramped confines strode Andrii’s best friend, Vasyl, 22, all boots, skinny jeans and unkempt, curly black hair. A programmer for a German company, who does comparatively well, I learned when he told me about his life two weeks later, Vasyl grew up poor in one of the Soviet-style apartment blocks that speckle the suburbs of eastern bloc cities. When he was sixteen, he worked in a factory for eight months, learned not to romanticize proletariat life, and bought his first computer. He also plays classical piano, loves heavy metal and punk, often reads or listens to books on tape, and writes poetry. Andrii writes prose. Vasyl also told me about his grandparents, speaking almost as fast as Andrii but with less gesticulation.

“He was very, very against war,” Vasyl said about his grandfather, Mykhailo (Michael in Ukrainian). “He was born few years before the Great War and saw many terrible, terrible things as a kid: dead people, dead animals, bombed buildings, bombed streets, bombed whole cities, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera”—Vasyl’s trademark expression in English. Andrii’s is “problematic,” used as a noun.

“He wrote it all in his memoir, which I read, which was hard to read, because it is written by hand and had many strong statements. Some too strong for publication,” although that could be cleaned up by his daughter, Vasyl’s mother, a book editor. “He died last week,” Vasyl added, to which I offered condolences. “He had good life. He was 85. We will have cemetery thing on Sunday.”

Vasyl’s parents are religious, which is how many older Ukrainians addressed the terrible trauma of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism and genocide, although his mother is Jehovah’s Witness. “It was her way of rebelling against grandfather, who was Orthodox,” Vasyl explained. Somewhere in there, he noted that, “She and I are the only ones in our family to graduate from university,” although Mykhailo was a renown building crane operator.

“When the war started, Grandfather thought we should surrender, surrender right now, surrender as soon as possible,” Vasyl said, getting excited. “‘We are going to lose anyway,’ he kept saying, ‘And that will stop killing.’ But after a week, Grandfather changed his mind. ‘We have to fight,’ he said, ‘To stop killing in the future.’”

Andrii tried to enlist in the Ukrainian Army but was rejected and did extensive volunteer work near Kyiv. Vasyl didn’t bother, since he’s been plagued with health problems since childhood and figures he can contribute more in other ways. What he calls his “homemade NGO” recently bought a car, 70 pairs of socks and some shoulder bags for rocket-propelled grenades, which a friend drove across Ukraine to “their unit

For the next three weeks almost daily, Andrii, Vasyl and I embarked on a broken-field run across Western civilization, from “The Bible” and Plato to Poe and Crowley, the filmmakers Lynch and Tarantino, or the philosophers beloved by twenty-somethings worldwide: the Slovenian leftist Slavoj Žižek and the innovative evolutionary psychologist but also rightwinger from Canada, Jordan Peterson, both of whom Andrii and Vasyl find interesting but too extreme. One of them, I can’t remember which, read and enjoyed “Tropic of Cancer” by Henry Miller, the other Gregor Von Rezzori’s “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite”, two of my favorite books.

At any moment, of course, we would switch to breaking news or reports from the front, which I was now getting from an American with a literary bent and checkered past who was fighting with the Ukrainian Foreign Legion near Kherson. Paid the same as Ukrainians, foreigners can reject orders or quit fighting. Over hours-long phone calls—one of which Vasyl listened in on—or text dialogues, Terry, 53, from upstate New York, regaled me with pithy stories about firefights or his international comrades: the short, gorgeous Norwegian of tribal Sana heritage, who was tough as nails and drove a Porsche, the Jewish woman medic from Texas, who hauled a wounded man almost twice her size to safety, or his close friend Paul Kim, 1997-2022, whose death devastated him. A Korean-American from Oklahoma, Kim was a dedicated democrat, an up-for-anything warrior, and perhaps the first ex-US military officer to die in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Dirk Grosser doing a performance piece on Kyiv's Maidan Square, on September 17, 2022. photo: D. Blair
Or we’d analyze Putin’s psychology, that of the leftists supporting him or the rightwingers opposing him. After beers at Bratyska one night, we retired to my meagre quarters, and Vasyl delivered a dissertation on Ukraine’s neo-Nazi punks: how they emerged from the punks of Russia, a society defined by its anti-Nazism, which makes those symbols an easy way to rebel; how a popular Russian punk musician moved to Kyiv and developed a following; how they want to destroy the state, like anarchists, not strengthen it, like actual National Socialists; and how it was better to keep talking to them rather than letting them stew in alienation.

Andrii and Vasyl were also collaborating on a magazine, Фрайдей найт. Pronounced “fraydey nayt” and meaning Friday night, it references an older magazine, Четвер (“chetver” meaning Thursday), edited by a popular modernist writer from the Carpathians, Yuriy Izdryk. Friday Night's logo—a slab of meat taped to a Ukrainian embroidery, a la Maurizio Cattelan’s "Banana" (Art Basel Miami, 2019)—was designed by Andrii’s girlfriend, Stasia (short for Anastasia), who is talented, bright-eyed, beautiful and, it so happens, blonde, and may be all of 20.

“Andrii will do more editing and content creation,” Vasyl said, “And I will do tech and funding. We will focus more on ideas, poetry and philosophy, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, since war is already discussed everywhere.” The first issue will probably be printed in February, they told me, and be accompanied by a social media presence.

Some of Dizzy’s denizens were only 16, I was surprised to learn, and still in high school, where they’d read but didn’t quite get Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, one admitted to me. A few joined the debate club Andrii and Vasyl attended and toured with around Ukraine. They invited me to the club once, which met weekly at a youth center across Old Town, and debated in English, so I could participate. Watching Evelina, a tall, innocence-exuding, almost albino-blonde 16 year old defend the proposition “Is nostalgia beneficial?” in high-speed English—on top of hanging around Andrii, both her parents are lawyers—I thought, “My god, the kids of Maidan are getting younger, fiercer and more articulate!” No wonder Putin is petrified.

The last night of September is a Friday, coincidentally, considering Andrii and Vasyl's magazine, and the rain pisses down, as it has almost constantly for three weeks. I think of the soldiers. It must be brutal soaked to the bone, trying to move through swollen streams and muddy fields, especially when on the attack, as many Ukrainian fighters have been since a few days before the deluge started on September 10th.

My room is cold, and I have a bad cold, although it’s not Covid, I know, since I just took a test. Ukraine did not miraculously escape the pandemic, as it sometimes seems, it's just that Covid's mortal threat is far overshadowed by that of war. Hence, no one mentions it, unless someone actually gets sick, and only one in a thousand on the street masks.

The sirens start around midnight and howl for a half an hour straight, longer than the four or five other air raid signals I've heard in Ukraine. “Does that mean a real attack?” I text Andrii on Instagram, their preferred communication platform. “It’s bullshit,” he responds. “Should I go down to the basement?” “No. You will get sicker.”

The sirens wail intermittently until 4 a.m., long enough for me to entertain dark-night-of-the-soul scenarios: What if the Russians bomb Kryva Lypa to punish Ukrainian free thinking at one of its sources? “Kryva Lypa is old. Its buildings have big walls,” Andrii said earlier that day, tapping a wall, “Only direct hit breaks this.”

It strikes me as tragic but also absurd and then disgusting and grotesque that my new friends and I, the community of Kryva Lypa, the people of Lviv, the people of Ukraine, a burgeoning, nation-building democracy, are now ensnared in a modern, mass-murderous war.

Girl posing with a sculpture of their beloved 'babuskas' (grandmothers), Kyiv. photo: D. Blair
The all-clear siren sounds around 7 a.m., and I hear doors opening and chairs scraping as Kryva Lypa’s waiters and baristas start another business day during wartime. That's when my thoughts turn to the Maidan.

“If the Russians go nuclear,” it suddenly hits me, “The Maidan will surely be ground zero! If the Russians are already attacking libraries, memorials and other cultural institutions, they will obviously want to destroy the central symbol of Ukraine's independence movement.”

I feel like crying, but the tears don't come.

As horrific, unimaginable and destructive as nuking the Maidan will be for Russia, Europe and the world, as well as of course for Kyiv and the people of Ukraine, those are the Kremlin's stakes, which it has been raising since a few days after the war started. Given Russia's systemic corruption, poor weapons, untrained soldiers and tradition of extreme violence, there will eventually be nowhere else for them to go for a path to victory. Nuking the Maidan will be counterproductive, politically, strategically and militarily, most analysts agree, but more militant and angry Russians, like members of the white supremacist mercenaries, the Wagner Group, now central to Russia’s war effort, get a perverse pleasure from being world-class killers.

"Never Again" seemed like a reasonable goal when I was coming up, but history suggests there will always be more genocides, that all weapons eventually get used, and some sort of nuclear attack is just a matter of time. Contemplating that conclusion can be psychologically devastating but we have to analyze the possibility.

But the horror can't go on forever, history also indicates. Someday it will end, and Ukrainians will rebuild, restore and heal, as they did after the Holodomor, the Great Terror and the Nazis. Indeed, the kids of Maidan grew up hearing how their grandparents did exactly that, they just enjoyed three decades of democracy, which they refuse to renounce, and they love each other dearly.

It may take a decade or two to vanquish the Russian Federation, to give them enough death to inspire treaty adherence, to scrub Kyiv of radioactivity and reconstruct the Maidan in all its glory—to put Berehynia back on her golden pedestal—but Ukraine will survive, of that I suddenly feel certain, having gotten to know the kids of Maidan.

I lull myself to sleep in my tiny bed, which finally warmed up, imagining how the Maidan will look during its first Victory Day celebration, which I am determined to attend. I see happy faces, despite the horrific death toll and suffering, because surmounting that soul-crushing sorrow is an obligation of Ukraine's geographical-historical destiny. I hope my decades of Holocaust and mystical studies are enough to offset my own sadness and help them with theirs, especially when I see some of my Ukrainian friends and, if the road to peace is long, their kids. I also hope to meet an incredible crew of freedom fighters and lovers from around the world, including, I hope, anti-fascist Russians.

Drifting into dreamland, I fantasize about the speakers and performers on the Maidan’s proscenium for Victory Day. There will be some fantastic dancers, I assume, as well as performances and art shows around the square and across Kyiv and Ukraine. There will surely be seminars and conferences addressing how to restore a devastated economy, infrastructure and environment, augment psychological services or develop dialogues in polarized societies, which Americans would do well to attend. I also hope there will be presentations on the Roma crisis, LGBTQ rights and Jewish history tailored to Ukrainians.

I left Ukraine on October 9th, the sky still dark with impending storms. Eighteen hours later, the air raids in Lviv and Kyiv were real, as Russia began its strategic bombing campaign against power and water facilities. In Lviv, the missiles did not kill anyone directly but the electrical blackouts did. None of my friends were seriously affected—they claimed it was nothing new, or they posted photos of candle-lit dinners—but I felt I had deserted them.

Valter (cntr), a 23 year-old soldier on leave from the front, and his friends (lft-rt) Oras, Adriana-Maria and the 14-year-old Ruslan and Nazar, at the Golden Rose Synagogue memorial, Old Town, Lviv. photo: D. Blair
Things will get bad as temperatures drop, surgeons operate by flashlight, the elderly and young freeze, and World-War-One-style trench and artillery battles rage across the 500-mile eastern front. Meanwhile, the Kremlin keeps upping its ante: more infrastructure bombings, more relentless attacks, more soldiers mobilizing, more torturing of civilians, and more threats of their nihilist nightmare, nuclear holocaust.

Imagine what a populous, prosperous and peaceful country Russia would be today if they hadn’t killed so many of their own people as well as others. Despite their world-class literature, their leaders appear unfamiliar with a central fact of human history: If bullies were so successful down through the ages, we'd still be living in caves.

It will be tragic, it will be brutal, it will be genocide, even without the detonation of nuclear devices. Unfortunately, the efficacy of our ideas—and how they trickle down to civic society, culture, technology and discipline—are periodically tested by those who fantasize that extreme amorality and brutality can bring victory. Sadly, the only way to prove them wrong is by force of arms. During this difficult moment of historical transition to a digital, diverse and civil-rights-supportive world, the kids of Maidan may end up saving not only Ukraine but the spirit of democracy.
Posted on Feb 12, 2023 - 12:11 AM
Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Revolution (Abridged)
by Doniphan Blair

Young people hanging out at the Golden Rose Synagogue memorial in Lviv: Valter (cntr), a 23 year-old soldier on leave from the front, and (lft-rt) Oras, Adriana-Maria and the 14-year-old Ruslan and Nazar. photo: D. Blair
• PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover travel expenses for this article.
• For comments, use cineSOURCE's Facebook.

AFTER A TEN-HOUR HAUL IN HARD RAIN,
Dirk Grosser driving like an amphibious drag racer, the storm breaks, the sky clears, and we walk the five blocks from our funky hostel onto Ukraine’s main stage, Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti or Independence Square. It is a momentous feeling.

This is where it all began, both the massive, months-long protests in 2013, which stopped the kleptocratic, Russophile president, Viktor Yanukovych, and started what can be called Ukraine’s renaissance, and the escalatory overreaction. After the killing of over 100 protestors didn’t stop the movement, Russia's President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Crimea and Ukraine’s eastern provinces and, eight years later, the entire country, which is now Europe's worst war since World War Two. Putin had to attack the democracy developing on his doorstep simply because, if Ukrainians and Russians are so alike and integrated, as he keeps saying, Russians will want democracy, too.

As it happens, the Russian tanks barreling down Ukraine’s highway M-07 toward Kyiv on February 24th, 2022, were also trying to get to the Maidan.

It is bigger than I expect, over two football pitches, with 19th century buildings on one side and modern ones on the other. This being Sunday—September 11th, oddly enough—and with the sky still full of dark clouds, the Maidan is empty save a smattering of soldiers on leave, tight-skirted women sipping Ukraine’s ubiquitous strong coffee, and vendors of patriotic, yellow-blue wrist bands with sad eyes. There are no soldiers on guard, as far as I can see, but scattered around like overgrown toy jacks are tank barriers, the so-called “hedgehogs,” or “yizhaky” in Ukrainian, some painted like child toys, others stacked like modern art. They are the only indicator of the war raging 250 miles to the east or south.

“There were many business people on Maidan,” I was told by Kirill, a handsome, bearded and genial 34-year-old, who directs and edits television commercials and is writing a romantic comedy—he loves old Woody Allen movies. I met Kirill a week earlier in Lviv, the quaint, cobblestoned café city in Ukraine’s west which serves as its San Francisco and is somewhat shielded from the war in the east. I’m omitting last names in the nightmarish event of a Russian takeover.

Kirill invited me to his place with a cordial “I have wine, beer and cannabis” and recounted his many days and couple of nights on the Maidan in 2014, to which he commuted from the south-eastern city of Dnipro, now under Russian bombardment. “I saw head of Ukraine’s Microsoft on Maidan. There were many older people,” he said.

Ukrainian doesn’t have articles of grammar, so Ukrainians often omit them in English, including the “the” in their country’s former name, The Ukraine. “I still translate from Russian to Ukrainian to English,” admitted Kirill, who was raised speaking Russian, as were a third of his compatriots, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, part of Ukraine’s long tradition of being bilingual, trilingual or quadrilingual. Middle class Ukrainians often speak some or decent English, which they start studying in high school and continue while listening to rock. Kirill is a fan of Creedence Clearwater Revival, to which he was introduced by his father on cassette tape.

Kirill, a television commercial director, participated in both the Orange and Maidan Revolutions, of 2004 and 2014, respecitvely. photo: D. Blair
“There were even babushkas,” grandmothers in Ukrainian and Russian but also Yiddish, added Alena, Kirill’s girlfriend, who is in her early 20s, paints and is studying web design but could side hustle modeling. There were also priests, doctors, lawyers, teachers and entrepreneurs, although the vast majority were young people, not as many women as men, workers and students (including high schoolers), nationalists and anarchists, skinheads and hipsters.

Ukraine has a large cohort of tattooed-pierced, who wear their story on their skin: men with significant neck or face work, often referencing girlfriends, women with colorful “sleeve” murals and multiple piercings. A 40-something cashier at a small supermarket near where I lived for six weeks in Lviv, who had a ready smile when ringing me up, had a Chinese character on her neck.

“It was like a big family,” I was told by Artur, 22, whom I met on the Maidan six days later. Artur is a graphic designer, skater and fan of all things Californian, including the spiky hairstyle he sports. After two weeks battling baton-wielding police, the Maidan protestors settled into a few months of occupation, punctuated by marches, rallies and more police attacks. “There were big pots of tea cooking everywhere, people playing football, playing music, discussing politics, which I did not understand,” Artur explained, “I was only 14.”

“Then fighting started again. Yanukovych started shooting people. That really shocked us. We weren’t used to Ukrainians killing Ukrainians. That building was set on fire,” he said, pointing at a government office which protestors occupied and turned into a community center. “They restored it last year. Then Russia invaded Crimea.”

“Before Maidan, there was no Ukraine. After Maidan, there is a real Ukraine,” Artur concluded. “Most Ukrainians had friends on Maidan. Everyone knew we were no longer part of Russia, and we were a real country, a real democracy.”

It was called the Maidan Revolution or Euro-Maidan Revolution, because protestors gathered on the Maidan on November 21st, 2013, the very day Yanukovych cancelled Ukraine’s Association Agreement with the European Union in order to pivot to Russia, and they flew E.U. flags. The call to protest on the Maidan was first made by an Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, Mustafa Masi Nayyem, in a heartfelt Facebook post, which he closed with “Likes do not count.” After the killings, it became known as the Revolution of Dignity or simply the Revolution.

I saw photos of the martyred Maidanites on the fence of the National Art Museum. Called the “Heavenly Hundred,” they were a near even mix of youth and middle aged, working class and intellectual, albeit over 95% men.

Ukraine already had three democracy movements or revolutions, as they like to call them. The Granite Revolution of 1991 helped get out the 90% vote to secede from the Soviet Union. The less successful Ukraine Without Kuchma tried to oust Leonid Kuchma, the corrupt ex-communist, but he remained president until 2005, when he declined to stand for a third term. The 2004 Orange Revolution started after Yanukovych or his cronies tried to poison his opponent and steal the election but were stopped by Ukraine’s supreme court as well as the protests.

Street musicians playing in front of the opera house, Lviv, Ukraine. photo: D. Blair
Kirill also participated in the Orange Revolution, when he was 16, which also involved fighting the police and camping on the Maidan in winter, but “It was not same,” he said.

Ukrainians continued to use mostly Russian in school, watch Russian television, and support Russophile candidates, including Yanukovych, whom they elected president in 2010, fair and square, even though he was a convicted criminal and notoriously corrupt—his son, a dentist, was one of the country's richest men. But Ukrainian politicians were often mired in corruption scandals; Ukrainians are understanding; and Yanukovych reinvented himself by hiring a hot-shot political consultant for a decade. That would be Paul Manafort, eventually Donald Trump’s campaign manager, a Russia security risk and a convicted fraudster.

“We have victim mentality from so much suffering,” Kirill told me, referring to Ukraine’s annihilation by the Germans during World War Two, when six and a half million people died, about a fifth of the population, but also by the Soviets. Nine million Ukrainians and perhaps many more died during the Russian Civil War (1917-22), the Great Terror (1936-38), and the Holodomor, when Soviet authorities starved to death about four million people to punish supposed counter-revolutionaries. Denied to this day by some Russians and Russophiles, the forced famine of 1932 to ’33 had two more iterations, in 1945 and ‘47, I was surprised to learn from a young intellectual I met working in a Lviv coffeeshop, Andrii.

“After Maidan, all that changes,” Kirill said, his voice rising slightly. “We understand we can change our life, and our life is in our hands. It is not what some people do to us—we can do what we want!” No wonder Putin was petrified.

As I pondered their incredible achievement on the Maidan, I recalled that many Ukrainians revere Stepan Bandera, a 1940s-era independence fighter and the leader of the more violent wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who is controversial but widely considered Ukraine's political founding father.

“Bandera? We love him,” replied Kirill, the first Ukrainian with whom I felt comfortable enough to ask about him, which precipitated an argument. As the son of a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor, I was painfully aware that some O.U.N. members had mass murdered Jews, Poles and Russians, the kernel of truth in Putin’s “Ukraine is controlled by Nazis” conspiracy theory. In fact, O.U.N. members brazenly slaughtered a few thousand Jews right on the streets of Lviv, some not far from where Kirill and I were sitting, the day the German Army entered the city, June 30th, 1941.

Kirill and I parted even closer friends, however, able to discuss difficult subjects. The genocideers numbered around 12,000, I later learned, while almost seven million Ukrainians were in the Red Army fighting the Nazis, a ratio of almost 600 to one. Two and half million of them died.

Contradicting another Russian conspiracy theory—that "Ukraine is not a real country and never existed”—they've been fighting for independence since the end of World War One, over a century ago, when they declared a state. Unfortunately, World War One morphed into the Russian Civil War, which swamped Ukraine in a ferocious free-for-all between the nationalists, czarists, anarchists, peasants and three foreign armies as well as the communists, who had to invade three times and use extreme violence to prevail (for this author's survey of that history go here).

The 'Heavenly Hundred' martyrs of the Maidan, shown here, were mostly shot by rooftop snipers. photo: D. Blair
Given that sanguineous, two-part slaughter and then the Holodomor, the Great Terror and World War Two, 1914 to ‘45 in Ukraine was the bloodiest period in one of the bloodiest regions in history. In a desperate bid to carve out a country, the O.U.N. planned to expel the Soviets by siding with the Nazis, on whom they would eventually turn, while some members murdered Jews, Poles and Russians, in keeping with the eliminationist nationalism then popular across Europe.

As the war's outcome became obvious, however, much of the O.U.N. had a change of heart. Driven by a rank and file devastated by fascism, totalitarianism and the resulting wars, the leadership whitewashed that history and liberalized their platform, while their guerrillas kept fighting the Soviets into the 1950s. After the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the O.U.N. reemerged, supported right-wing parties, and remained central to Ukrainian culture, including through songs, street names and posters celebrating Bandera. Indeed, their greeting, “Slava Ukraini, heroyam slava,” glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes, is still used, and the army made it their official salutation in 2018.

Nevertheless, after the fall of the wall, when hard-right parties became popular across Eastern Europe, not much in Ukraine. In fact, only the Svoboda party passed the required five percent vote, and only in 2012, to take seats in the Rada, or parliament, a half mile from the Maidan. Although Svoboda has a Nazi-like insignia and started as an extreme ultranationalist party, it moderated some of its positions by then and won 38 seats, eight percent of the Rada.

“There were not that many on Maidan who were extremists,” Artur told me. “And they were not that extreme, like extremists in U.S. or Germany. I know one.” Ukrainians often have friends across ideological divides, which can be fungible, I learned, and some O.U.N. officials were friends with, married to, or themselves Jews.

There were a few neo-Nazi skinheads on the Maidan, mostly part of the punk movement popular across the ex-Soviet bloc for its ability to express anger. The founders of Right Sector, a hard-right party, met on the Maidan, where they helped lead its defense against the police. Republican Senator John McCain and Victoria Nuland, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, visited the Maidan and met with Svoboda and Right Sector leaders—Nuland famously handing out cookies. Although Nuland was supposedly managing American manipulation of the Maidan, the scandal surrounding her leaked phone call was mostly about her saying, “Fuck the E.U.,” and wanting to work around the institution so beloved on the Maidan.

Despite the Maidan’s diverse and vocal right-wing, however, they were vastly outnumbered and overshadowed by its liberals, leftists and anarchists, which is a powerful faction in Ukraine, one of the few countries where anarchists have mounted major parties or armies. Indeed, Svoboda lost all of its seats in the fall 2014 elections, despite its high-profile participation on the Maidan.

“There were a lot of poets on Maidan,” interjected Roman, Artur’s friend and fellow skater, who hadn’t said much until then. There were also many hippies, replete with long hair and colorful clothing, a movement dating to the late-‘60s in Ukraine, especially in Lviv.

During the Soviet dark ages, Lviv’s hippies lived underground, sometimes literally. They hid out in Lichakiv, the enormous cemetery for World War One soldiers but also politicians, authors and artists, who were often honored with large tombs and sculptures. I toured Lichakiv with Yarema, a photographer and artist with a gentle manner and shoulder-length hair, who wanted his photo taken next to the tomb of the sculptor Mykhailo Dzyndra, with its impressive abstract piece. Lviv’s most famous son is arguably Leopold Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), a respected writer on Ukrainian and Jewish life as well as romance and eroticism (his name was borrowed for “masochism,” oddly enough, considering the longsuffering Ukrainians), but he is buried in Germany.

Yarema, a photographer and artist, at the tomb of the sculptor Mykhailo Dzyndra, Lviv's Lichakiv cemetery. photo: D. Blair
Yarema and I dined at the nearby Jerusalem, one of two Jewish restaurants in Lviv, which was almost a third Jewish until 1942, on a tasty mushroom-barley soup and gefilte fish, served by an interesting woman of color. I thought she might be Roma, given Jews and Roma sometimes ally on the edge of European societies, but Yarema learned her mother is Ukrainian and father Nigerian.

Yarema appears younger than his 31 years but has had gallery shows, teaches life drawing, does web development and carpentry, and recently produced a “jam festival” with friends, cooking kettles of fruit over a bonfire at his family’s run-down property outside Lviv, which he’s fixing into a small artists’ retreat.

Lviv’s hippie history was also recounted to me by Bhodan, a 24-year-old artist and illustrator, who has read Jack Kerouac and Carlos Castaneda but also Amnesia.in.ua, a Ukrainian website run by “enthusiastic ethnologists,” and discussed it with his elders, like the director of Lviv’s Artists Guild.

Lviv had its first music festival after glasnost in 1989, Chevrona Ruta, named for a popular love song, which featured punk, pop and communist-era acts, and the city became known for them. A well-respected jazz festival, originally called Alfa, now Leopolis, has been mounted every June since 2011, although this year’s was postponed “until immediately after victory,” according to its website. There are some great local jazz players, notably pianist Igor Yusupov.

The hippies took over Virmenka Street, in Lviv’s closed-to-cars Old Town, where they still preside in cafes like the homey Facet, which fills the street with tables in summer, or the massive, multi-roomed Dzyga, built into the city’s mediaeval walls and now one of its premier jazz venues and art galleries as well as cafes. Yarema had a show there of photos from his Turkey road trip. Hippies also started going to the Carpathian Mountains, 250 miles south of Lviv, especially a waterfall called Shypit, meaning to whisper, “to camp out, play music and run around naked,” according to Bhodan, who hitchhiked there with his girlfriend a few years ago, for the summer solstice celebration.

Considering the Maidan protesters' dedication to freedom and their months of street fighting, which culminated with police snipers shooting about 100 of their comrades, Yanukovych fleeing to Russia, and the Roda voting unanimously for fresh elections, they were enraged when Russia attacked Crimea on February 20th, 2014. Insignia-less and masked soldiers poured out of the Russian naval base in Sevastopol, which dates to 1772 and was being rented from Ukraine. Evidently, two pro-democracy revolutions in one decade was too much for a Kremlin turning autocratic under Putin. Crimea’s governor chose not to fight, since the state had become almost entirely Russian-speaking after the Muslim Tatars were deported to Siberia in 1944, and it had substantial autonomy from Kyiv.

Sanctions were levied and the ruble collapsed, but President Barack Obama, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and other western leaders accepted the conquest of Crimea as a real politic fait accompli. Citing its Russian-speaking population and Russia's lingering superpower status, they rationalized it was not worth significant protest or an escalatory arming of Ukraine, especially so soon after the disastrous Iraq War, and that stable relations would encourage Russian democracy.

The author at Lviv's memorial to those murdered by the Soviets after its 1939 invasion: 48,867 Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish citizens. photo: D. Blair
Across Ukraine, there were also Ukrainian speakers, generally older and male, who opposed the Maidan and its related protests nationwide and supported Russophile politics. Some Russian speakers claimed discrimination by a Ukraino-centric establishment, but it's hard to distinguish valid complaints from opportunism or corruption by Russian patronage and conspiracy theories. In the eastern states of Donetsk and Luhansk, Russian language speakers and some paid agents started separatist rebellions in April 2014, using small squads of ragtag fighters. But they soon obtained weapons from the Russian army, which quietly invaded four months later, even as Putin categorically denied to Obama’s face any involvement with the “little green men.”

Militant Maidanites ran to the army or the paramilitary outfits organized on the Maidan by older veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War or younger Russian speakers, which belies allegations of widespread oppression. The latter were often soccer hooligans, also called “ultras,” or, to a lesser degree, white nationalists or punk intellectuals. The first commander of the now notorious-famous Azov Battalion, Andriy Biletsky, had a degree in history and decade experience organizing those three groups. The Azov debuted as a lightly-armed militia to oppose the separatists threatening Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city and next to Russia, but came of age in the large city of Mariupol on the Azov Sea, off the Black Sea, hence their name. After Ukrainian Army units in Mariupol proved poorly equipped and commanded, Biletsky led his fighters south and defeated separatists in open battle, in the summer of 2014.

More pacifist Maidanites often supported their friends and relatives who were fighting with supplies, equipment, medical or cyber services, or money. A journalist, Miriam Dragina, started a flea market, Kyiv Market, specifically to donate its profits to the army, which recalls the old joke: What if the library got funding and the army had to do a bake sale? Some simply bought sport rifles and drove to the front. The Azov and other independent brigades were integrated into army command by the end of 2014, but the war is still a very popular, anti-imperialist insurgency, much like the American Revolutionary War or Vietnam-America War, involving people from all walks of life and political persuasions. Almost everyone I met was helping supply a unit with food, automobiles, ammunition and more.

Another testament to Ukrainian democracy is the 2019 election of President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish—as were two of Ukraine’s six other presidents—in a landslide 73% of the vote, due to his anti-corruption stance but also charmed life-follows-art story. Four years earlier, the accomplished comic, actor, writer, dancer and producer had created and starred in a hit television series, a combination sit-com and political satire with surrealist touches, “Servant of the People” (2015-19, available on Netflix). Zelensky plays a bumbling high school history teacher, living at home with his taxi-driving father and professor mother, whose students film him ranting against corruption. After it goes viral, they file the papers for his presidential run, which everyone regards as a joke until—spoiler alert—he wins and takes on the establishment with the help of family and friends.

Also appointing friends as ministers, the real-life President Zelensky, whose political party is called Servant of the People, had a shaky start. Despite successes countering corruption, he was accused of nepotism and favoring the oligarchs backing his large media company, and he made egregious accusations against his predecessor, which earned him low approval ratings. Doing his fictional character one better, however, Zelensky matured into a charismatic commander who refused to flee, rallied his constituents amid catastrophe, staved off defeat, and assumed a starring role in the ancient contest between democracy and fascism.

Another democratic indicator is that the ultranationalists haven’t held a Rada seat since 2019, when Biletsky lost his, and Zhan Beleniuk became its first African-Ukrainian representative. A wrestler who took gold at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Beleniuk was number ten on the list for the Servant of the People party, which won 125 seats. The Azov, meanwhile, received funding from a Jewish oligarch, sacked a commander for antisemitic speech, and accepted Jewish fighters. Most importantly, they’re fighting to defend Ukraine against an imperialist invader committing genocide.

Oksana, who works as a recruiter for the Georgian Brigade, takes a selfie in front of a destroyed Russian tank in Lviv's Old Town. photo: D. Blair
Genocide, as defined by the United Nations, is the attempt to eliminate a culture, language or nation as well as people. Russian intentions are clear, from their officials' overt references—“Ukraine is not a country”—to military actions: the bombing of civilian infrastructure and cultural institutions, the destruction of monuments, including to the Holodomor, the use of rape as a weapon of war, the deportation of children and young women into Russia to be Russified and estranged from their families, and the sadistic torture of civilians, using amputation and castration.

No wonder the Azov enjoy nationwide adulation, notably the big banners honoring the “Azovstal Defenders” in downtown Kyiv, Lviv and other cities, for their second defense of Mariupol, from March 1st to May 20th, 2022, when they fought the Russians to the death.

“They are like gods!” I was told by Oksana, an effervescent woman of about 22, whom I met in Lviv, after offering to take her selfie in front of the city’s display of destroyed Russian tanks. Oksana studied computer programming but much prefers working as a recruiter for the Georgian Brigade.

The Stalingrad-like siege of Mariupol destroyed or damaged over 90% of the city’s structures and may have killed up to 85,000 civilians, according to recent reports, including almost 600 sheltering in a theater marked “children” in large letters on March 24th. About 3,000 fighters, some foreign, and 1,000 civilians, including children, retreated to the massive, Cold-War-era bomb shelters beneath the city-sized Azovstal steel works, which is owned by a Muslim-Ukrainian oligarch. As gangrene, black mold and starvation set in, under constant bombardment, including by thermobaric bombs, with only a few helicopters flying supplies in and wounded out, 20 feet above the water to evade Russian radar, the mostly Azov fighters endured for 11 weeks.

Mariupol’s Thermopylae cum “Blade Runner” cum reality TV show was watched by many Ukrainians on videos uploaded thru the Starlink satellite system, which was largely donated by Elon Musk and is also essential for operating drones and artillery. The siege ended when the surviving defenders received safe passage in exchange for a few high-profile Russian prisoners, although 53 Azov were murdered in a Donetsk P.O.W. camp on July 28th. They were killed by Ukrainian shelling, according to Russian officials.

“How did you grow up so healthy in such an environment?” I asked Kirill, the next time we hung out. “Was your father an optimist?” “Yes,” he said. “He was good man, nice man. He liked rock music and was devout Christian. And he was Jewish.” Kirill only learned that fact after his father died and, just last year, that his mother is as well, a secret they kept iron clad due to Soviet and Ukrainian antisemitism.

Nevertheless, the secret Jewish parent or grandparent story is fairly common in Ukraine. I met many Ukrainians with Jewish heritage, and Kirill once joked, “Half of Lviv is half Jewish.” And Jews date to the eighth century, when the elites of the Khazar Empire converted to Judaism, over a century before the birth of either Ukrainian or Russian culture. Despite the many gruesome pogroms—by the Cossacks in the 17th century, which included extensive rape, the czarists in 1920, and the Nazi genocide of one and a half million Ukrainian Jews—and today’s small number of publicly professing Jews, about half a percent, they remained somewhat integrated and represented throughout the country. Indeed, Ukraine still has Europe’s second largest Jewish population: coming after Poland before World War Two, now following France.

A troupe of dancers proved the Maidan was a place of freedom of expression, despite the nearby war. photo: D. Grosser
President Zelensky, 45, hails from a modest city in central Ukraine and studied law before going into entertainment. Natan Khazin, a 50-ish rabbi from Odessa, Ukraine’s third largest city and historically Jewish, was on the Maidan and helped its fighters with his experience in the Israel Defense Forces. Khazin even calls himself a “Zhido-Bandera,” a Jewish follower of Stepan Bandera. Nayyem, the Maidan organizer of Afghan extraction, married a Jewish woman and is raising his children Jewish. Meanwhile, the annual number of antisemitic incidents in Ukraine is often less than in France or England.

As Dirk and I walk out on the Maidan that glorious September 11th morning, I am struck by its large, open space but also strange structures, like the glass domes or comedic sculptures at its north end, where we entered, or the tall column capped by a figure in the distance. Despite the storm clouds, a wan sun shines, people are smiling, and there’s an eerie peace.

Unbeknownst to us on the Maidan at that moment, 250 miles to the east, around Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv, Ukrainian Davids are on the march. Indeed, they retook more territory in days than the Russian Goliath conquered in months, driving the invaders into a panicked retreat and to abandon immense amounts of equipment and ammunition. President Zelensky announces this battlefield success that very evening, in his nightly national address, the first good news Ukrainians have heard since their storied defense of Kyiv, six months earlier.

“They used special forces, drones and ‘maneuverable warfare’ to get behind the Russians and spook them into running,” a military analyst on CNN explained on September 13th, although he forgot to mention their masterful military feint. For weeks, President Zelensky had been talking up a counterattack in the south on Kherson, the only regional capitol conquered in Russia’s most recent invasion, which tricked them into withdrawing troops from the north near Kharkiv. Already known as a brave and funny commander in chief, Zelensky was proving to be a brilliant one.

“We love our president,” Alena had told me with a smile, which suggested a romantic-sexual side to national struggle.

Dirk and I thread our way across the six lanes of Khreshchatyk Avenue, Kyiv’s main shopping street, which intersects the Maidan, since we neglected to notice the pedestrian tunnel for that purpose. We ascend the Maidan’s block-wide steps and approach its centerpiece, the gold-plated column crowned by Berehynia, the Slavic fertility goddess. Only then do we see, in the middle of the square’s proscenium, the dance troupe. It consists of a dozen women, including one of color (Ukraine has a substantial Roma population as well as some African immigrants), two men and a camera crew. Between takes of turning, jumping and gesticulating, the dancers goof off and giggle, although still well aware of the fierce battles raging five hours drive east or south. Each one probably has a cousin or friend under shellfire, at the front or already in the earth.

Kyiv seems normal, except for the passport control on the roads entering town and at the train station, the sandbags and plywood around important buildings and statues, the machine gun nests at official entrances, and the occasional air raid sirens, which oblige museums to evacuate, but everyone else ignores. People laugh in the streets, and the restaurants are full—up to a 30-minute wait at the most popular—but few openly celebrated Zelensky’s announcement of battlefield success on September 11th, as was reported in the American press. Almost everyone I met was still nervous, some were traumatized, and a few were having panic attacks.

Filmmaker/performance artist Dirk Grosser (right) interviews a survivor of Russian war crimes with translator Nadia (standing) in Bucha, north of Kyiv. photo: D. Blair
Fifteen miles north of the Maidan is Bucha, whose residents reported the first Russian war crimes spree. Bucha bore the brunt of Russian bloodlust because it was where their once-vaunted armor was ambushed by Ukrainian regulars but also townspeople tossing Molotov cocktails. The Ukrainians destroyed up to a dozen tanks and vehicles which triggered a 25-mile-long military traffic jam and ruined Putin’s plans for a one-week war. Amazingly, the Russian soldiers carried dress uniforms for a victory parade, while many officers booked reservations at Kyiv’s premier hotels and restaurants.

Dirk Grosser is of medium height, strong build and open demeanor. He favors plaid shirts and hiking boots, perhaps in deference to his practical people from the once-East German city of Dresden, where he lives in a three-story townhouse he renovated himself. On our deluge drive from Lviv to Kyiv, Dirk told me how he raced all night from Germany to Ukraine, after a late start due to house guests, to attend a seminar he organized about what artists should do during a war. A performance artist and filmmaker by profession, Dirk started doing small conferences in this vein after learning some of his leftist friends supported the Russian invasion. In addition, he was shooting a related documentary, tentatively titled “Exile”.

Amazed by Dirk’s ambition and hard work as well as interested in the cause, I volunteered to production assist: find translators, do second camera and the like. Three days after our first Maidan visit, we drove the M-07 north to the once-bucolic commuter town of Bucha. We set up next to its verdant central walkway in the outdoor tables of a fast-food joint, which had umbrellas to ward off the light rain.

Every person we asked had had harrowing experiences. “I was in a basement for weeks,” a towheaded, ten-year-old boy, riding around on his scooter, told us, “I was very scared.” After calling his mother on his smart phone, which almost all middleclass kids have, he said, “She doesn’t want me filmed.”

Between wiping her eyes, a thin, expressive, perhaps 50-year-old Roma woman named Nadia told us about the rapes, including of underage girls, the men trying to remove their military tattoos, a death sentence under Russian occupation, the summary executions, which sometimes included torture or amputation, and the often audible screaming. The interviews were conducted in Ukrainian, which neither Dirk nor I understand, but our translator, an aid organizer from Kyiv also named Nadia, provided periodic summaries in English. At the end of the interview, most of us were crying, and we all hugged Bucha Nadia.

Bucha’s streets were littered with bodies for weeks, since the residents were too fearful to collect them. The kill count now exceeds 450, almost 2% of the population but will probably go much higher. Mass graves full of civilians, some showing signs of torture, amputation and even castration, have been uncovered in the liberated towns around Kharkiv like Izium.

“We were given orders to kill everyone we see,” a Russian soldier told his girlfriend by phone from Bucha, according to call transcripts published by the New York Times on September 28th.

Evidently, the Kremlin intends to terrorize the Ukrainians into submission, including the ethnic Russians they're supposedly saving, and escape recrimination through propaganda and conspiracy theories. This strategy will work, they assume, by virtue of their long expertise with such subterfuges but also the current popularity of conspiracism worldwide and cyberspace's capacity for disinformation. Hence, the Russians keep claiming they're fighting Nazis, even as they become like Nazis. Despite the obvious hypocrisy, their repetition of big lies allows them to not only dodge the bad press but transfer it to their enemies.

A colorful children's synagogue on the edge of Babyn Yar, where Nazis killed 90,000 Kyiv Jews and many others, is part of the Ukrainian attempt to use art to address suffering. photo: D. Blair
As if on cue, when the Bucha story broke on April 1st, Russian diplomats and media figures began accusing the Ukrainians of lying and fabricating evidence, using actors, ketchup and Photoshop, a gaslighting calumny that many Russians and Russophiles continue to repeat ad nauseam today.

“When Bucha happened, we were all crying,” I was told by Marina, a 20-something woman who works in the arts, including promoting her reserved painter boyfriend, and has an irrepressible laugh. “But we can’t stay that way. If we let them depress us, they will win.” Many Ukrainians told me they were depressed for a week or a month after February 24th but were energized by friends, the exigencies of war or Ukraine’s stoic tradition.

Marina, whom I met in Lviv but is also a refugee from Dnipro, which is half way between Kharkiv and Kherson and was being shelled as we spoke, just returned from the U.S., where she visited her mother in Minneapolis and could have applied for refugee status. “I saw only a few Ukrainian flags or signs of solidarity,” she said. “At a club, the singer said she wanted to dedicate the next song to those who have suffered. I thought she meant us, but she was referring to George Floyd.” Marina also spends all her earnings to support Ukraine’s economy.

“Some people say this being happy is wrong,” Kirill told me. “But my friends who are soldiers say, ‘We have to protect this. You must do your normal life because we are in stress, and sometimes we need to go enjoy this.’” The Ukrainians perfected this philosophy, evidently, over a century of being butchered mercilessly by the Soviets, Germans and now Russians.

“Some people outside the Maidan were angry with us, saying, ‘It was like a festival, not a protest,’” said the Ukrainian popstar Ruslana Lyzhychko in “Winter on Fire” (2015), an excellent documentary about the Maidan Revolution (available on Netflix). Ruslana, as she is known, was also a center-right Rada representative but fell in love with the kids of Maidan and became their celebrity spokesperson.

As the Maidan dancers prance and gambol across Ukraine’s main stage, with no official minders and only Dirk, myself and four or five others watching or filming, I realize I’m witnessing a minor miracle: Ukrainians expressing freedom, fancy and joy in the shadow of a gruesome, genocidal war. When they take a water break, however, I continue my exploration and wander up the steps to Berehynia, standing resplendent in the slight sun, gold leaf gleaming off her column and the foliage she holds above her head.

That’s when I notice, behind Berehynia’s column, the art show: two dozen, ten-foot-tall, artistic iron easels with pages from a graphic novel, "Dad" by Oleksandr Komiakhov, I find out by Google Translating a photo of the credit. The first page surprises me. It is a man and woman seemingly straight from the Burning Man festival: him heavily bearded, wearing a motorcycle helmet and holding a baseball bat; her with pierced lips and a furry cat hat and cradling a box of Molotov cocktails.

“If these are the mythical heroes of Ukraine,” I think, or something along those lines, “They really have achieved a certain free speech absolutism, and freedom in general, a democracy which enshrines art and ideas, which many Ukrainians have been enjoying for almost a decade… Many of the kids of Maidan must be in government by now.”

A mohawked, middleaged soldier checks his phone in front of St. Michael's Cathedral. D. Blair
“They are all phonies, patsies and spies!” would the rebuttal of many Russophiles and hard rightwingers but also some leftists, including friends of mine. Sandy Sanders, a neighbor, artist and seemingly decent guy, whom I’ve known for 20 years, denounced one of my heartfelt Facebook posts from Ukraine by insisting the Maidan Revolution was a “U.S.-financed coup” and the separatist struggle in the Donbas was a “neo-Nazi civil war.” Since he doesn’t seem like a Machiavellian manipulator, Sandy must be utterly unaware that he’s parroting Putin’s conspiracy theories, that people power is organic and hard to manipulate, or that fascist societies can't be paragons of liberty.

In fact, there’s precious little police presence in Ukraine, although martial law was declared on day one and they’re in a duel to the death with an adversary thrice their size and with a long resume of atrocity and spy craft. In all of downtown Lviv, I saw only two soldiers standing guard (the 24-hour sentries at the central bank), while the nationwide curfew of 11 p.m., widely adhered to by Ukrainians, was barely enforced. On my many walks home at midnight or later, I saw few police patrols and no stops.

Five days after my first Maidan visit, I was stopped by a soldier who saw me take a selfie near a trainyard and demanded my phone and passport. I braced myself. “There is still a lot of corruption,” a few Ukrainians had warned me. Fifteen minutes later, however, I was chatting amicably in English with his commanding officer, who asked me to delete the photo and dismissed me with “Have a fun visit to Kyiv.”

Also defending Ukraine from Russian espionage is their “safe city” system, using surveillance cameras and artificial intelligence, Kirill told me. Amazingly, at the start of the war, Ukrainian cyber security held off the onslaught of Russia’s notorious hacker army. Others referred to their long, painful learning curve with Kremlin agents. “The K.G.B. killed my grandfather,” a long-haired Lviv waiter told me with a laugh, “It’s a sad story.”

As I review the Maidan’s graphic novel, I am struck by the quality of Komiakhov’s drawings and visual storytelling but also that I’ll need a translator to make sense of it, so I circle back to Berehynia. Sitting next to her majestic column, surveying her sacred domain, the quarter-mile oval of Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, the name it was given after the 1991 Granite Revolution, I think about what Kirill, Artur and the others said, or I have read or viewed. Bit by bit, I begin to imagine how the Maidan looked eight years ago: teaming with tens of thousands of demonstrators—up to a million on some marches—waving signs and E.U. flags and chanting, “Ukraine is part of Europe!” “Together to the end!” and, after the police attacks, “Convict out!” directly at Yanukovych.

They also carried plastic sheets for the torrential rains. Within a few weeks, that plastic was woven into a sea of tents, barricades, lean-tos and kitchens, inhabited by a vast cross-section of Ukrainians, from tech workers and academics to dirty, young men carrying bats. One young man told me his dad went to the Maidan because “he always had to be in middle of everything,” while another said his dad promised to take him, but his mother intervened—he was only 14. The protesters discussed and debated, played guitars and drums, and DJed and danced, even though there was almost no alcohol on the Maidan. When temperatures plummeted and snow blanketed the vast encampment, they gathered around 50-gallon-drum fires.

As I ponder this critical history, about which I knew little before entering Ukraine on August 23rd (its Independence Day from the Soviet Union, coincidentally), a moving moment from the Maidan Revolution—one I just learned about from the documentary “Fire in Winter”—comes to mind.

A street poster from Lviv is an example of the excellent fine and graphic art about the war in the streets, galleries and museums of Ukraine. illo: #Neivanmade
After two weeks of protests, the Berkut riot police tried to clear the Maidan a second time. Their first attempt, on November 30th, 2013, merely shocked the protestors, who fought back fiercely or called their parents, some of whom joined them on the Maidan. The night of December 10th would be different, they realized, as they watched police buses pull up on Khreshchatyk Avenue and spit out hundreds of officers with helmets, shields and cement truncheons. As the women went to the proscenium for protection, some of the men—some wearing helmets, many carrying bats—went to face the Berkut. Meanwhile, a lone figure sprinted away, a theology student named Ivan Sydor.

As it happened, the official bell ringer for the 11th century Cathedral of St. Michael, on the hill north of the Maidan, was Sydor. Undoubtedly gasping for breath as he topped the belfry stairs around 1 a.m., he began ringing St. Michael’s bells furiously, as had his forbears during the Mongol invasion. Sydor rang for four hours and roused thousands, who ran to the Maidan, surrounded the Berkut and scared them off.

Thinking about Sydor’s desperate appeal, the Kyivers’ stalwart response and the bravery of the Maidan fighters, I pull my cap over my eyes, lest one of the dancers or Dirk see I’m crying.

Ukraine was much like Russia in the 1990s, devastated by “perestroika," the switch from central planning to a market economy, and plagued by bribery, mafias, assassinations and oligarchs, whose acquisition of immense wealth was inevitable. Whoever learned the tricks of post-Soviet capitalism first, from using armed gangs to seize industries to leveraging loans, manipulating laws or simply providing a decent product or service, made millions or billions. As Russia kept turning more authoritarian, corrupt and kleptocratic, however, Ukraine had three successful democratic revolutions, each of which somewhat increased political representation and economic opportunity and decreased corruption but especially the last.

As well as being pro -democracy and -Europe and anti -corruption and -authoritarian, the Maidan Revolution was sophisticated and centrist enough to galvanize a majority of Ukrainians. Indeed, it stimulated civic responsibility and cultural creativity, from governmental reform and motivated soldiers to music, fashion and art, and it unified Ukraine’s left, right and center. So much so, I took to remarking, “The Maidan is where Ukrainians fell in love with each other,” often to approving nods from Ukrainians.

In addition to organizing seminars and shooting a documentary in Ukraine, Dirk planned a performance piece. He enacted it on September 17th, in the middle of the Maidan, on the same spot graced by the dancers, which was dry, since it hadn’t rained for over a day. As I filmed, Dirk arranged on the ground 20 posters for the “Kunst Krieg” (“Art in War”) conference he arranged a month earlier in Berlin, each poster emblazoned with the word “cancelled,” since that’s what happened, for reasons he didn’t fully explain. Then he began calling German galleries to reschedule the conference.

“You remember the Maidan Revolution, eight years ago? I am standing on Maidan Square right now!” he tells them before asking if they can host a one-session conference on artists and the Russo-Ukrainian war. After chatting with a baritone gallery owner, Dirk grins at me, shouts something unintelligible, and starts cleaning up. It takes him three trips to haul away the paving stones he used to hold his posters down in the autumn breeze and, eight years ago, the kids of Maidan lobbed at police.

As I pack up the camera tripod, sliding its legs together, it dawns on me: “I take the train to Lviv tomorrow, so this is my last time on the Maidan.” I look around: Berehynia smiling down from her column, the multi-colored pigeons (black, white and mottled), the smattering of Kyivers going about their day, and the regulars, the yellow-blue wrist-band vendors and two tourist-photo hustlers, one wearing a cartoon horse outfit, the other covered with tattoos and carrying two large, white show pigeons, to whom I nod, since I got some photos earlier.

'Meet the Kids of Maidan' continues here
Posted on Feb 11, 2023 - 07:23 PM
I’m Charlie Walker, A San Francisco Original
by Jay Randy Gordon

Poster for 'I'm Charlie Walker’ (2022). courtesy: P. Gilles
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

YET ANOTHER BAY AREA INDIE HAS
been picking up good reviews around the country—NY Times, Boston Herald and SF Chronicle—headed to Paramount Plus and available on many streaming platforms.

Called “I'm Charlie Walker” (2022) and starring action hero Mike Colter and the acclaimed Dylan Baker, it is a very green film. That's because it concerns when two Standard Oil tankers collided in the San Francisco Bay and dumped 800,000 gallons of crude, in January 1971, and the cleanup crews and now-well-known environmental groups which emerged to deal with it.

It is also a very Black film. Although written and directed by Patrick Gilles and produced by Mike Regen, who are white, “I'm Charlie Walker” is about a Black, former-Air Force entrepreneur, who barnstormed his way through the institutional racism — much more egregious 50 years ago than today— into a contract to clean up the beaches north of the Golden Gate Bridge and keep the peace between the mostly hippie crews and the oil men managers.

To do a thumbnail sketch of Charlie Walker, the entrepreneur who was born in Mississippi but raised and still residing in San Francisco’s new premier Black neighborhood, Bayview-Hunters Point, is a fool's errand, with yours truly as the fool, as you can see, if you skip ahead to his provocative interview below.

Suffice it to say, the film is based on his real life account, called “America is Still the Place” (2003), which he wrote while doing three years in Folsom, and the book is selling on Amazon for 35 dollars for a USED paperback, with new copies starting at $99!

The mere outline of the story is incredible—a feisty underdog overcoming racism, hippies, sex and drugs on the beach, rich white men getting their comeuppance, and, of course, everyone getting together to sing "Kumbaya" and save the planet. Director/writer Gilles was pretty brave jumping in, having come up through music videos, with only one previous feature under his belt.

That film, “Olive” (2010), which he co-wrote, directed AND shot, features Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes’s incredible wife, as well as star, and concerns a ten year-old girl with mystical powers who convinces people to appreciate life again. While a tad too metaphysical for CineSource’s reviewer, it was pretty amazing, especially having been shot on a Nokia phone.

'I'm Charlie Walker’ actor Charleston Pierce (2nd fr lft), who plays Charlie Walker's friend, and the real-life Charlie Walker (cntr), with some of the film crew. photo courtesy P. Gilles
The executive producer was Bill O’Keeffe, owner of a local commercial glass company, SaftiFirst, who also executive produced “I'm Charlie Walker”.

Playing Charlie Walker is the established actor Mike Colter, who has been cleaning up lately, including co-starring in the new "Plane" (2023) and television, "Marvel's Luke Cage" (2016-18), the Netflix hit “Jessica Jones” (2015-19) and “The Good Wife” (2011-15). He also has parts in “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012) and “Men in Black 3” (both 2013), among others features.

Meanwhile, Dylan Baker, J. Edgar Hoover from “Selma” (2014), is the uptight oil man who eventually lets his hair down; the beloved local Carl Lumbly, well-known as Mark Petri from “Cagney & Lacey” (1981-88), plays one of Walker’s friends, Willie; and Steven Wiig, one of the hardest working and best bit part players in the Bay Area (“Sacred Blood”, “Yosemite” 2015, among others), renders Walker’s loyal accountant nicely; with other roles delivered beautifully by Safiya Fredericks, as Walker's Wife, and Monica Barbaro, as one of the prostitutes.

Even the Honorable Willie Brown (the former mayor of San Francisco) does a cameo as a cab driver, which he, in fact, was while studying law in the Bay Area in the ‘50s, a nice, inside joke since Charlie Walker used to drive for Brown and they remain close friends.

Aside from the above-the-line talent, the production is almost completely Bay Area. Director Gilles rented a big house on Dillon Beach, west of Petaluma, and, much as Walker did 50 years ago, “We would shoot all day and party all night in this beautiful beach house on the cliffs above the Pacific,” he told CineSource via email.

“This is a Bay Area indie film by all measures,” he continued, about the 22 day shoot. “The crew was local. Most of them worked on, or are working on, just about every project that shoots in the Bay Area. We used friends’ homes for locations, friends’ cars for period-correct vehicles, friends and family as extras and minor speaking roles.”

Mike Colter as Charlie Walker and the Honorable Willie Brown, who once drove cab, as his driver, in 'I'm Charlie Walker'. photo courtesy P. Gilles
“Our friends from Alice Radio [97.3] helped out. Sarah does the voice of the radio dispatcher/narrator. Vinnie and Uzette had on-screen roles as the 'King of the Hippies' and 'Super Hot Bar Girl,' respectively. Both my brothers Bob and John worked on the film. John's wife and kids show up. My wife and kids are in it.”

Indeed, the Monophonics, a popular local band from San Rafael, did most of the excellent period-sounding score.

Model coach and actor, Charleston Pierce, who grew up in Bayview-Hunters Point and has known Charlie his whole life, plays Charlie's friend; renowned lighting expert Bill Holshevnikoff handled lighting and cinematography; and Frank Simeone provided production and casting and appeaers on screen as one of the Tower oil men.

When the oil spill happened in 1971, Northern California’s biggest ever to-date, volunteers flocked to help. But no one was keeping tabs and when the oil company had to start paying them, that was a problem, especially since Charlie Walker was already feeding and housing many of them while trying to keep the peace.

Although the hippies didn’t believe him at first, the real-life Walker convinced them he was there to clean their beach AND get them paid, which means “we can’t have you guys roughing up oil people,” all of which provides a great, central drama for a film without gratuitous violence.

A secondary story concerns Walker putting together a paper trail to show expenditures. Some might call it embezzling or money laundering but when the Standard Oil (Tower Oil, in the movie) accountants found over $375,000 missing and Mr. Walker, in turn, "found" photos of Big Oil execs coking and whoring with the hippies, it was decided that the $375,000 was, in fact, money well spend on a job well done.

The party has arrived: (lft-rt) Dylan Baker, Steven Wiig, Mark Leslie Ford, Mike Colter and the women of the night, Hannah Rose and Monica Barbaro (far right), who recently blew up as Lt. Natasha Trace in the recent blockbuster 'Top Gun: Maverick'. photo courtesy P. Gilles
Indeed, some of it was simply creative entrepreneurialism like selling oil-tainted sand from the beach to road paving companies.

The execs cared little about West Marin, a backwater at the time, since its beaches were deemed too difficult to get trucks into and the cherry contracts all went to white truckers working between Ocean Beach and Half Moon Bay.

That the film has been cleaning up, as it were, at African-American-focused film festivals may be a testament to the paucity of good Black dramas, especially ones without murders, rap music or gangs.

Although Walker is an incredible character and the story is fantastic, it is has a few longueurs, notably the absence of dramatic foreshadowing for Walker’s secret photographing of the oil men with their hair down, which contradicts Hitchcock’s “Bomb Under the Table” principle.

There is certainly a bomb under the table when it comes to talking to Charlie Walker, who talks the talk AND walks the walk. Indeed, the film starts with an interview with the actual Walker and that footage could have run longer.

To find out more about this Bay Area icon, Mr. Walker agreed to meet me at his favorite cafe, Le Central, at 453 Bush Street in downtown San Francisco, a spot favored by literati, cognoscenti, celebrities and millionaires, of which Walker is/was all four.

When I walked in, Walker was at the tiny bar with none other than his close friend, the Honorable Willie Brown, once mayor of San Francisco (1996-2004) AND head of the California Senate (1980-'95), but also the state representative for the Western Addition when I lived there. An incredibly friendly guy, I thanked him for his service.

As we were settling into a table, in the small, low-ceilinged joint, Walker was hailing all the regulars, including San Francisco’s most famous haberdasher, Wilkes Bashford, who made Mayor Brown look so sharp, and Scott Farnsworth, Walker's favorite waiter for the last ten years, who joked that he wanted to audition for the movie and planned use shoe polish to play Charlie.

Charlie Walker, the subject and original author of his bio 'America Is Still the Place', at his favorite upscale eatery. photo D. Blair
Charlie Walker: We were number one.

CineSource: At the Harlem Film Festival?

In Austin, we were number one. In San Francisco, we were number one. Everywhere we go, we are number one. It’s a good movie.

What do you attribute that to, some sort of feeling that people are into now?

Yeah, and that nobody gets killed in the movie. You see, in all the movies we saw, they killed everybody but the audience. And people are tired of that.

It’s an uplifting story and it looks back on a fun time.

Yeah, a lot of shit went down that everyone is going to forget.

The depictions in the film of the partying, are they pretty realistic? You were working in the day—

And partying at night. 6 o’clock in the morning you had to get up.

But you were younger then and could do it?

Of course.

You were in the air force in Alaska?

Our home base in Fairbanks and then we flew reconnaissance in Korea and everywhere.

You were the only Black guy on the squad, I am guessing?

No, there were three of us.

My dad used fly on B-17s during the Second World War as an aerial photographer, scary shit.

I did aerial photography and sketching.

So you were an artist?

No, I don’t say that. I did what they taught me.

So they wanted photos and sketches, interesting. How did you segue into trucking and the cleanup thing?

Well, I did a lot of things but I decided, after I got out of the service, I wanted to be in the trucking business. I was really looking for a job driving but then I found out they didn’t let Black people into the teamsters.

Walker and his favorite waiter, Scott Farnsworth (in the mirror), about to pour a glass of wine on him. photo D. Blair
Here?

Here in San Francisco. So I went down to the Chronicle [newspaper]. The guy who was the manager and editor was man named Gilroy. I went down and said, ‘You haven’t got one Black driver, can I drive for ya’ll?’

He said, ‘No one ever came up here and asked—you are hired!’ That is how I got job, just like that.

So you have always taken the position that you are going to ask, that you are not going to be dissuaded by racism?

No, I don’t bother with it.

By the way, anything you say I will check with you.

I don’t care. Do what you want. If you ask me something I don’t want to answer, I will let you know right then and there. [Indeed, Mr. Walker made no changes to the proof CS sent him.]

I haven’t read your book but my associate Randy Gordon has [he said, 'It reads like a movie!'] and I saw the movie. I know you have a policy about being very open about anything, even illegal.

White people know everything, anyway.

You mean about Black people?

About Black people, yeah. The same attitude as during slavery, they still got it.

Really? That is your feeling? You feel the current Black Lives Matter is—

Bullshit. We have multi, multi, multi-millionaire Black people who will not come back around their own people, where they grew up, and invest.

You feel some of the responsibility is on the community to—

Yeah. Of course.

I was thinking perhaps it is more the Black Lives Matter people are a little spoiled because when you came up it was really tough.

Walker and Scott, the waiter, indulged in a running, meal-long banter, replete with racial teasing, widely considered politically-incorrect. photo D. Blair
No, it wasn’t like that. It was just that everyone knew their place, that was all.

Just because a person tells me, 'No,' that doesn’t mean the end of it with me. It might be the end of it with them but not with me.

The teamsters said, 'There was no getting in the union.'

Jack Golberg said, ‘That was bullshit.’ He was the head of the union. When I showed up, he said he had a meeting with all of them and said, ‘Don’t fuck with this guy [Walker].’ That was the end of it.

And when you were getting into the trucking and cleanup you had to do a protest. You parked your truck in front —

Right there on Leavenworth and Hyde, where they were bringing the dirt out of the tunnel for BART [subway] and wouldn’t let us work. They didn’t want Blacks on the job [although] they didn’t say it like that.

I had just gotten back from from overseas and I saw it like this: If these motherfuckers don’t want me in the union, I have been shooting at the wrong people. That’s how I feel.

We have to look at things differently. I see that today with young Blacks, they aren’t looking at it right.

What is their basic mistake would you say?

Their basic mistake is they sell drugs. Italians sold liquor and they took the money and invested it. We don’t do that. You get the money and the police come and take it.

Well, a few dealers invest. There is a guy in Oakland, Charles Cosby, the subject of ‘Cocaine Cowboys II’ [2011]. Some of these guys are entrepreneurs but they don’t have any place to do business so they go into drugs. But not many, you are right.

They are doing it wrong. There is nothing wrong with selling drugs ‘cause someone is going to buy it. If there is a market for it—no problem!

Exactly, and you yourself have been involved?

No, never sold drugs in my life. Didn’t find it necessary. When I got married, I had three daughters. I figured it like this: If I didn’t want my daughter to fuck with drugs, I didn’t want your daughter to.

I never had a taste for it. I snorted some cocaine but I wasn’t crazy about it.

I think it is overblown, to use a phrase, but a little weed—

I smoke weed, even today.

And when did you start?

When I was about 14.

Here in SF? Who was your first—

I don’t know. It was just there and I smoked some.

Walker with his old friend, the honorable Willie Brown, ex-mayor of San Francisco. photo D. Blair
You were talking about racism in San Francisco, but was San Francisco also a little more tolerant than other—

This is most racist town in California. They do not like Black people here. Chinese people don’t like us. Some don’t even speak to us.

The Black population of San Francisco has gone way down. I used to live in the Fillmore, Willie [Brown]’s old district, and they already tore down a lot of buildings but there was still a lot going on. I was able to hear some jazz, had some neighbors who were musicians. Now it is much, much less.

Look what happened. White people took our music, what little culture we had. Bands all got integrated but white bands don’t let Blacks work with them. If you don’t believe that look at the hillbillies that play music. They don’t have Black people in their bands.

There is one Black hillbilly band, I think. [Carolina Chocolate Drops]

Sure, there is always one.

There was some integration in the ‘70s, Sly and the Family Stone. What did you think about, in the ‘70s, the Black Panthers?

I knew all of them, Huey [Newton], Eldridge [Cleaver]. They never bothered me.

What were they like?

I was never friends on a social basis. I just knew them, seeing them in different places.

How did their ideas relate to your ideas?

No comparison. They wanted to fight; they didn’t want to make money. They wanted to beg. Like right now, there’s a place down the street called Glide Church. Taking Black people back a hundred years.

Because?

They feed people and expect nothing of them. I don’t want you to give me nothing. I would rather rob you than you give it to me.

That was your difference with the Panthers?

With everybody.

Well there are a few like minded, like Willie [Brown]. When did you first meet Willie?

When we were going to school around ’67. Willie Brown chose to stay out of it. He knows how to get something done, how to deal with white people. I [also] knew.

How did you learn that, from experience, your mom told you?

It is something you just learn, you don’t know how.

Was ‘I'm Charlie Walker’ the first film you were involved in? How did you enjoy that?

Yes. I thought it was humorous.

Steven Wiig, Johnson's accountant, and Mike Colter, Johnson (both seated) blowing 'gage' with the hippies, a practice the real Walker continues to this day. photo: Josie Rodriguez
I wish they had more of you in the movie. Were you on the set? As their consultant?

Yeah. Yes.

And the film turned out pretty much as you remember it?

Uh-huh, although they had to change some things around to make it appealing to white people.

Yeah? But the prostitution and drugs, that was happening —

Uh-huh, the nightlife.

And there would be hippies camped out on the beach and you would be hiring them in the morning?

Uh-huh, I got along with them.

Were they space out, drugged out? They worked?

They were cool to me. Everyone was happy because no one could get along with them but me.

Part of that working together is part of the appeal of the film?

Yeah.

But then, at the end, you kind of give it to the man, as well.

What do you mean ‘give it to the man’?

Well, you kind of blackmailed them.

That’s a white man’s vision of what I did. If I was white, you would say I am a business man. The problem with what you say is that you are white and you always look at anything we got we beat it out of them.

But that is the question, I was wondering when you were going to ask that. How do you beat something out of someone when you are doing business with them? It is a business deal, right?

I was under the impression from the movie that you had some documents on them—

Yeah, but that’s doing business. That’s the American way. That is all that is, the American business way. When a guy’s got you by your nuts and he wants something, he just reminds you of it. Then he gets what he wants.

All the American businesses do it like that but when Black people do it, they want to make you into a criminal. 'You beat him, didn’t you?' Hell no! I did a business deal with him.

I don’t remember the details from the film but my impression was—

I know what your impression was but I am just telling you, it was business deal. Strange of you to take that view.

Maybe I am misremembering the film.

It is not that. It is just your innate opinion of Black people.

I grew up in Harlem so—

Don’t make no difference: You are white.

That’s what a lot of people try to tell me.

You act like a white man, you look like a white man.

I know but having grown up on the streets, been mugged 20 times, dealt drugs—

But you never stopped being a white.

That is true, that’s true. But being white, that is the genetics of it. Then there is the culture and having had some of the culture of—

That is American culture, not the culture of one human being to another.

Color is a climatic thing, that is all. If you moved to Africa today, in the hot sun, and have a baby, he is not going to be as white as you.

I would hope I would have an African wife.

If you had a white wife, the baby would look different than both of you. The sun would do that, a climatic condition.

OK. So any other movie projects on the horizon?

I am writing another book.

You want to tell me a little about it?

[It’s titled] ‘The Perfect White Man’.

Is it novel?

Just like the other book.

Autobiography?

It was based on the truth but it was not an autobiography, it was about that incident, the oil spill.

This one will about the perfect white man. Like being here with you. You display a shady view of Black people. Either you don’t understand them or it is just the way you are.

OK. I was under the impression that there was some illegal activity by you depicted in the film.

It speaks for itself. Pat [Patrick Gilles, the director/writer] did a great job—

Of bringing your story to the screen? So none of his adjustments, his liberties—you’re happy with what he did?

He’s not like you or most white people. He takes it on face value of what it is I did. He’s a very, very intelligent and smooth man. But you got that everywhere. It makes no difference that he is white.

Any discussion of turning your new book into film?

I got someone who wants to buy it already.

What do you think of the general filmmaking scene in San Francisco?

I think that every Black [character] I see in movies is bullshit.

You have to look at what America is about. They never talk about that. Slavery set them up pretty good. You got people for 300 years with no damn nothing, then you let them out of slavery and don’t give them none of the proceeds and tell them, ‘Now go get your own.’

That is why I always say, ‘Slavery ain’t over.’ That is why there are so many problems. White people don’t want to admit how wrong they were and what to do about it. They think that they might have to give too much money.

What is too much money? They give other people money. [The Germans] gave the Jews money. They gave the Filipinos money, the Japanese did. But it is too good for Black people. You know what I mean?

Yeah, sure. That is pretty much central to the Black Lives Matter and some of the themes they are exploring.

No. You are putting it in another frame. I was willing to give my life for this country and to come to back to a country that says, just because you are Black, you can’t work, that’s a real wrong.

Sure.

So I think people are going to have to start to re-assess what this country is really about and where we fit in. White people will say I am mad about it but I ain’t mad. The reality is: That is the reality.

White people say everything belongs to them and they are right but when are they going to share it? They didn’t get there by themselves.

That is like having a wife and you get a million dollars and she was there taking care of the kids. Is any of that hers when you decide to get another woman?

Why, then, do you use the title for your book ‘America Is Still The Place’?

Cause it ain’t changed!

But that [title] sounds positive.

It is positive! It ain’t changed! America is still the place.

But it sounds like you are saying that America is still the BEST place.

It might say that to you. You may interpret it like that, that’s your right. But I don’t look at it that way.

But looking at the movie [it seems that way]. And that was the title of your book.

Yeah, I understand, I am just saying. I can turn that around to a negative but I would rather it be a positive.

Your story suggests that it is positive.

Yeah. You can [make] it here.

It is like when Ford made the first car, nice car, but a lot of changes have been made in that car since he first made it. You know what I mean? From telephone to camera. So you have to understand, things change.

So what would you say to young African-American entrepreneurs today, that America is still the place?

It is still the place if you got the money and get something with it and get away with it. It is still the place where white people are doing that. You got to figure out what you want to do and go about your business. It is still the place that America is for sale, right?

As a poor person myself—

It is for sale. You can buy anything you want.

Ah… I look at it a little differently but I understand.

How do you look at it?

Well, I look at California as a type of freewheeling place. I grew up in Harlem, going to Little League during the 1964 riots, cops everywhere, place burning down. But I also went to a fancy, rich, white private school. So I saw both sides and both sides were very closed but California is more open. Different things can happen.

They hate you out here but they don’t tell you they hate you like they do in the South.

You think so? I understand that but can you really compare? The South is so bitter and vicious and small.

The problem with you is that you don’t want to believe that. You want to believe that everything is alright. But it ain’t.

My mother is survivor of the Holocaust. Israel is about to experience another Holocaust. I am completely broke; I am bankrupt; my film magazine has not made a dime, I lost 50 thousand bucks on it. I am living in constant—

Fear?

Fear. But I am also living in California. I can drive to LA, camp on the way, interview some Hollywood folks, come back via Big Sur, and for 200 bucks have a fantastic vacation.

Those are the two sides of California I am talking about. I am guessing you have those two sides, too.

Now you think I am just a white guy and we are on two different sides but I am hearing you say that California is still very racist but also that it is still the place.

Right. But you know one day you might hit.

What? [café is very noisy]

Hit. H. I. T.

Maybe, I am hopeful, but I am not counting on it.

But you are still out there pitching.

I am an artist. I have 20 big ideas, and, until I go to the grave, I am going to keep on pitching, as you say.

One of my big ideas is about making movies by the Bay, little independent films, like what Pat [Gilles] and Bill [O’Keeffe] made with you. I find that is great.

This movie is going to be big. We are going to Los Angeles on the 4th to the 12th [of November].

That is fabulous. That is when you are going to find out something?

All the big wheels are going to be there. It costs $40,000 to get your movie in.

The American Film Market?

The thing of it is they got a rich, white man involved: Bill O’Keeffe. He ain’t gonna accept no.

How about some of the other incredible stories from that period? Remember the Marin Courthouse Takeover from 1970 with Jonathan Jackson.

I think that was crazy. I am not going to fight no losing battle.

You know Angela Davis?

Personally. I know all of them.

They proved that she bought all the guns that Jonathan Jackson used [in the Marin Courthouse Takeover]—

That’s what THEY say. If they made the mistake of letting her come in there with a gun, that’s their problem.

They say she had a gun in her hair but I don’t believe that.

They proved the paperwork for all the guns was in her name but she was acquitted. One of the jury members said, “All the state could prove is that she loved George Jackson, that she was a romantic.” It’s a pretty amazing story.

I am not going into the jungle to fight a lion with a switch [blade].

That is what you compare that to, you see it as a Don Quixote thing?

It’s stupid.

Now you did some time. Did you run into Black Guerrilla Army members in prison?

I was there three years, I took over. I had everything, all the dope and all the money.

Scott Farnsworth [the waiter interrupting]: Don’t look at me like that.

What did I do now?

Scott: You are looking at me like you are in love with me but I know you are not.

I love you darling.

Scott: I know. Are you going to have anything more? [All Charlie and I had was a lentil soup each.]

I am good.

I thought they were crazy, George Jackson and all them. I knew them. Like I know OJ Simpson.

When his momma died, I went to the funeral—she was a friend of the family. I told him. I said, ‘Hey man, the white people are going to kill you. If you want to die, do what you want, otherwise they are going to lock your ass up.’

He said, ‘Why do you say that?’ I said, ‘One of white man’s biggest hangups is white women. They don’t like that.’

He didn’t kill [Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman] and they know he didn’t. The people didn’t hear all the testimony and the press wouldn’t print the whole story. He didn’t do that; he couldn’t do that.

Yeah? He didn’t kill—

Hell, no. I know who did.

Do you want to tell me?

No. You know that was a ‘Colombian neck tie.’

Like piano wire?

That’s all that was. That boy [Goldman] was an athlete. He stood around and said, ‘When you get through killing her let me know I am ready for mine?’ No, it didn’t happen like that.

She bought dope on credit, didn’t pay the bill. He had been paying, he said, ‘I’m not paying anymore.’

Coke?

Yeah. ‘If you don’t pay we are going to kill that bitch.’ He said, ‘I am not paying,’ so they killed her. That’s all.

But he said he was going to search for the killer but—

They told him, ‘You better stay the fuck out of there.’

You are still in touch?

No. We never were friends, I just knew him when he lived in Protrero Hill. But I got common sense. I knew that he was going to be killed or locked up. What he did was a misdemeanor. Just like me.

How many Black people went to jail for perjury? That is what they put me in jail for, perjury, lying to white people, that’s all. My base case was perjury. The slave ain’t suppose to lie to the slave master, you know.

The [Folsom Prison] warden told me, ‘I don’t know why they sent you here. I don’t want you and no one else wants you so I am going to keep you. But if you start a problem, I am going to have you killed. Do what you want, but keep your nose clean.’

I did what I wanted but kept my nose clean.

But you said you dealt drugs in prison.

Look, drugs come in. I worked in the recreation department. If your woman brings some drugs in, I am not going to tell her, ‘Don’t leave them. Don’t put them over there under the flowerpot.’

And when the guy comes in, I say, ‘The flower pot or the heater.’ And that was it. You keep peace with everybody. It was very simple.

I knew all of them in there and most of them were dummies, most of the Blacks. They were dumb, that is why they were there.

[Senator Dianne] Feinstein told them, ‘I want a favor. I want you to take that n****r and lock him up.

Feinstein said that?

The warden told me that. I stopped her from doing what she thought would solidify her reelection: moving all the porno movies, clubs and everything to Bayview-Hunters Point. That was not good for my daughters and my wife or the Black women out there.

I said, ‘Naw, you’re not coming out here with that shit!’ I got with an Italian guy and we said, ‘We’ll burn ‘em down.’’ So that was it. She came to me one night and said, ‘Do me a favor.’ I said, ‘Naw, we ain’t gonna do that.’

Uh-huh. Now was there ever a fully developed mafia in San Francisco, Italian, Black, Irish?

Yeah, they were here but they didn’t bother me; I didn’t bother them. They all loved me. I knew how to make money. I knew how to do the trucking business. I knew how to do a lot of things. They fuck with you but I wasn’t scared

They never asked you for ten percent?

Naw, the only person who did that was Eldridge Cleaver. He asked all the Black bars and liquor stores to give him five percent of their income.

I said, ‘You come over to get your five percent and you will get a bullet with it. Get the fuck out of here with that bullshit!’ And that was the end of that.

Eldridge came to you personally?

Naw, I think it was Bobby Seale. I didn’t care, I just told him, ‘No!’

Have you see Bobby lately?

No.

He’s making a movie. I looked him up on Facebook, sent him a note, he responded, ‘I am very busy.’ He’s about 80.

Yeah, I know.

I said, ‘I would love to interview you a little about the history and the movie.’

Good for him.

But he never got back to me. Bobby seemed the most together of them.

He’s a dummy, all of them. They are not business-minded. You always got to have a business-minded person. Just like all of [the mafias]—Al Capone, the Godfather— had a Jewish guy who took care of the business. Someone’s got to look out for the business.

Huey knew a bunch of rich, white people down in LA and when he got out of jail he could have become business-minded.

He could have but he didn’t.

He decided to become a gangster that was kind of tragedy because he seemed like a very smart guy.

He never was smart, none of them. They got thrown in a position in life and once they got there they didn’t know how to handle it. White people get mad at me because, when I get thrown in a position, I know how to handle it.

And what are your basic tricks for handling that?

I just handle it. If I have to get a Jewish boy or a white boy to do what I need done, I pay him whatever he wants.

You just find a professional and pay him his hourly and get the job done?

Yeah. That is just common sense.

That’s good advice for anybody.

And with that Mr. Walker was on his way, leaving me with the bill of $71.24 for a beer, a glass of wine and two lentil soups, certainly the most I've ever paid for such a repas but, even with the generous tip for Scott, well worth it.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Jan 20, 2023 - 05:18 PM
Meet the Kids of Maidan Part II
by Doniphan Blair

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Rodion, a Russian-speaking costume designer from the Donbas, was very happy with Ukraine's recent progress and very angry with his Russian relatives. photo: D. Blair

Continued from 'Meet the Kids of Maidan Part I'

Ukraine’s digital success was also extolled by Rodion, a high-cheek-boned, dark-complected, oft-smiling man, who works as a film costume designer and looks like he just did a shoot himself, given the black leather duster and ornamental earrings he was rocking. I met Rodion, his old friend Catherine, a jeweler, and her teenage son, glued to his phone, near one of Kyiv’s many large, low-rent flea markets, where they were looking for vintage jewelry.

“Everything government related, from getting identity documents to filing taxes, is now online,” Rodion said, over a cappuccino. “It is easy to start a business. Both Catharine and I have our own.” They also detailed how well their socialized medicine works, suggesting Ukraine could become a model for social services as well as free markets and democracy, a socialist-capitalist hybrid achieved on the cheap, given it is still one of Europe’s poorest countries.

“Ukraine has been improving since Zelensky became president,” Catherine said. “I feel like the government cares about me now.”

Out of the blue, however, they began venting bitterly about Russians, even though both are from mostly Russian-speaking families, as were many of the creative people I met. “We speak Russian at home but not on the streets after February 24th,” Rodion explained. “We had to flee eastern Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in 2014—supposedly to save us,” he added, shaking his head and looking grim.

Rodion and Catharine blamed average Russians, not just Putin, an opinion shared by many Ukrainians and dating from 2014, when their Russian friends and relatives, which many Ukrainians have, gloated over social media about Crimea, feelings now compounded by massive war crimes. Adding insult to injury, many of those Russians claim the evidence for those crimes was faked.

“The Russian teachers’ union sent volunteers to brainwash Ukrainian children,” noted Catharine. “Unpaid volunteers?” I asked. “Of course not!” interjected Rodion, “Nothing in Russia is without pay these days!”

At the very moment Catharine, Rodion and I were chatting on September 16th, Putin was at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, meeting with the Chinese and Indian presidents, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi. They told him—Modi to his face—they weren’t happy with his unnecessary war now threatening their economies and world food supplies, not to mention nuclear holocaust.

A week earlier, Kyiv had hosted its first conference since the war, an attempt to understand the war, in fact: the 17th annual Yalta European Strategy summit, named for the Crimean city where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill strategized the final defeat of Nazi Germany, in February 1945. A few months before, however, the Soviets had deported to Siberia all the Crimean Tatars, about a quarter million people, half of whom died, a small fraction of whom returned. Ukraine's democracy gave them full legal rights, but that ended with the Russian reconquest in 2014.

Some of those attending the Lviv Art Center's "Artists and War" conference, with Kerill (far left), Alem (3rd fr lft) and Dirk Grosser, who produced it (5th fr lft). photo: D. Blair

Dirk had organized two mini-conferences in Lviv, the second at the Lviv Art Center, which has classes, a small gallery and a nice café. Also about what artists should do during the war, it was attended by Kirill and nine others, including a Tatar-Ukrainian woman in her early 20s. Alem accentuates her wide-set eyes with aggressive makeup slashes, works for NGOs, and lives in Lviv, although she was raised in Washington DC and is also American. “People say it’s impossible,” Alem told us, “But my dream is to liberate Crimea.”

Y.E.S. is the brain child of Victor Pinchuk, an oligarch and philanthropist, who is sometimes called the Ukrainian George Soros, because he’s Jewish and supports culture, but rarely in the crazed conspiratorial sense. Indeed, the Pinchuk Art Center, a half a mile from the Maidan, is universally well regarded. Both Dirk and I found its contemporary collection impressive and its current show, “Russian War Crimes”, a tour de force of artists addressing war, Dirk’s subject. We lingered a long time in the substantial show, including the devastating video in the last room, a hurricane of quick-cut atrocity shots, sometimes using split screens, until we were interrupted by an attendant, who ushered us down to the street due to the air raid.

“Is there a bomb shelter we can go to,” I asked the guard in front. “No need, it was false alert," he said, laughing. "Insurance makes us evacuate everyone and wait for all clear.” “But what if there was an attack?” “The metro is right there and very, very deep.” Indeed, it was built for nuclear war.

In addition to organizing seminars and shooting a documentary in Ukraine, Dirk planned a performance piece. He enacted it on September 17th, in the middle of the Maidan, on the same spot graced by the dancers, which was dry, since it hadn’t rained for over a day. As I filmed, Dirk arranged on the ground 20 posters for the “Kunst Krieg” (“Art in War”) conference he arranged a month earlier in Berlin, each poster emblazoned with the word “cancelled,” since that’s what happened, for reasons he didn’t fully explain. Then he began calling German galleries to reschedule the conference.

The two-day Y.E.S conference was titled “Ukraine: Defending All Our Freedom” and featured banners with “I need ammunition, not a ride,” President Zelensky’s famous quip, which may have been written by his legendary media team. Hosted by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Y.E.S attracted to a hardened Kyiv basement some 400 international and Ukrainian notables, including Polish, British and American lawmakers, Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt, who commended Ukraine’s digital prowess, and Professor Snyder, who emphasized the war was colonialist, which Europeans don't quite get, due to their own recent colonialism. Also in attendance was another one of our best and best-selling scholars of Ukraine and Russia, the journalist Anne Applebaum, along with General Wesley Clark, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and the Azov commander Serhii Tsisaruk.

After welcoming them, Victor Pinchuk noted we were witnessing the final collapse of the Soviet Union—“Dinosaur can take a long, long time to die and, during this time, he will try to drag us back to his prehistoric past”—before introducing President Zelensky.

"Russia is doing everything to break the resistance of Ukraine, the resistance of Europe, and the world,” Zelensky said, wearing his standard khakis and military-green T-shirt. “The 90 days ahead will be more crucial than 30 years of Ukraine's independence. These 90 days will be more crucial than all the years of the existence of the European Union. [This] winter will determine our future.”

Ukrainian prayers for peace are joined by members of the Hare Krishna, seen here in Lviv's Old Town. photo: D. Blair

“No negotiations with the Russian Federation regarding the end of the war are possible," Zelensky explained, since “There is no confidence that they will keep their promises.” In fact, Russia's invasion of Crimea and the Donbas violated the U.N. Charter’s Article 2 on sovereignty and the 1994 Budapest Agreement, which was signed by the U.S. and Great Britain as well as Russia and guaranteed Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for giving up all of their nuclear weapons and much of their conventional ones. Less well known is the Battle of Ilovaisk in 2014 when the Ukrainians surrendered their weapons for safe passage but the Russians resumed shooting.

While fears of escalation are understandable, appeasement encourages rash action and agreement violation. A few weeks into the war, during negotiations hosted by Turkey, the Ukrainian delegates offered fresh security arrangements: Ukraine would stay non-aligned, Crimea negotiations would be postponed for 15 years, and the 2014 Donbas invasion would be addressed separately. In response, the Russian delegates called them Nazis and offered to withdraw from Kyiv, where they'd already been repulsed.

“We must fight," Zelensky continued at the Y.E.S. conference, articulating his ascent as Europe’s de facto wartime commander. “Endure the winter. Help those who are weaker. Protect those who need protection. Limit ourselves in what can be limited. And limit Russia in everything that should limit it. The unification of Europe is impossible without Ukraine." Most Ukrainians have wanted to join the E.U. for decades, and they even amended their constitution to that end in 2019. “It will be an honor for Europe to welcome our state," Zelensky concluded, "The state that wins!"

Dirk’s performance goes well. Standing in front of his colorful pile of “Kunst Krieg” posters, he calls the galleries, introduces himself politely and leaps into action—“You remember the Maidan Revolution, eight years ago? I am standing on Maidan Square right now!”—before asking if they can host a one-session conference on artists and the Russo-Ukrainian war. After chatting with a baritone gallery owner, Dirk grins at me, shouts something unintelligible, and starts cleaning up. It takes him three trips to haul away the paving stones he used to hold his posters down in the autumn breeze and, eight years ago, the kids of Maidan lobbed at police.

As I pack up the camera tripod, sliding its legs together, it dawns on me: “I take the train to Lviv tomorrow, so this is my last time on the Maidan.” I look around: Berehynia smiling down from her column, the multi-colored pigeons (black, white and mottled), the smattering of Kyivers going about their day, and the regulars, the yellow-blue wrist-band vendors and two tourist-photo hustlers, one wearing a cartoon horse outfit, the other covered with tattoos and carrying two large, white show pigeons, to whom I nod, since I got some photos earlier.

“What an incredible place, a cool architectural space, a symbolic place,” I muse, until I work myself up and start yelling to myself: “In the middle of a fucking genocidal war, the goddamn Ukrainians are so democratic, they don’t mind anyone coming to their central square and saying whatever the fuck they want—including the likes of Dirk, a half-crazed German performance artist!” During my five or six times on the Maidan, in fact, I don’t recall seeing a single soldier, police officer or even untoward stare.

Dirk Grosser doing a performance piece on Kyiv's Maidan Square, on September 17, 2022. photo: D. Blair

The next day, Dirk and I bade each other adieu with repressed emotions. Suddenly involved in each other’s lives—we also took meals together and roomed in a deluxe, rococo one-bedroom on Pushkin Street ($24 a night and four blocks from the Maidan!)—we were unable to understand what that might mean in the middle of our generation’s most destructive and divisive war, now slicing through countries, ideologies and friendships as well as mass murdering Ukrainians.

It was 1 a.m. by the time I hit Lviv. The cabbie raced the three miles of curfew-cleared streets from the train station to downtown, which is next to Old Town, where I had a spartan room in a 19th century building. In Ukraine, what that usually means is the building's entrance, stairs and hallways are falling apart—a comment on undemocratic collectivism, perhaps—but, once inside an apartment, they’re nice, large, luxurious even, having been renovated by the actual owner. At Kirill’s, for example, which he rents for the equivalent of 400 bucks, we walked up three flights of decrepit stairs, along a pealing balcony, and into a lovely, high-ceilinged duplex with a wrought-iron staircase, which leads to a big bedroom with a claw-foot tub and view of the city.

And spotless. Ukrainians are hygiene freaks who take their shoes off at home and in some businesses, like dental offices, and put on slippers or disposable shoe coverings.

Donning my slippers and stumbling down the dark hall, past five other rented rooms, I was happy to see my small room and tiny bed, which obliged my toes to stick out the slats at the bottom, as well as the chair, desk and large window, which looked out on Kryva Lypa, Lviv’s well-known courtyard crammed with cafes, now deserted during wartime at 2 a.m.

Kryva Lypa means “crooked linden tree,” which is still here, three stories tall, right beneath my window and surrounded by a circular, wrought-iron bench often occupied by women laughing, hipsters arguing, parents rocking kids or soldiers enjoying peace. Instead of the tourist trap I had assumed Kryva Lypa to be, when I moved in, it’s an old bohemian hang- and hide- out, protected by its two access tunnels, which can be easily blocked. Indeed, Kryva Lypa is where Lviv’s first movies were shown in 1903 and hippies and punks first congregated.

An eight-foot, punk-era turntable sculpture still hangs in the brew pub Bratyska (“bratyar” means brothers), which features 30 beers on tap, including a tomato one I didn’t try, and a famous borscht I did, every day for a week, in fact, after catching a cold. Prepared daily by Pani Lida (“pani” means missus), the no-nonsense, middle-aged woman I saw taking smoke breaks on the front porch, the borscht was both tasty and had great sides: cloves of garlic and slices of onion and pig fat, in addition to the standard sour cream and dark bread. No wonder Bratyska is so popular with college students, especially from the National Academy of Art, two miles away.

“I’m taking the interior design curriculum but hate, hate it,” said Pauline, whom I met on Bratyska's porch and is tall and stunning, despite the acne she doesn’t hide with makeup. “It was the only department I could get into with my small portfolio. I only draw or paint sometimes. My passion is performance art.” “Oh, that’s cool,” I effused, trying to seem so myself, “A friend of mine just did a performance on the Maid—” but Pauline interrupted me. Her friends from the Academy, easily recognizable by their distinct dress and greetings, had arrived.

Girl posing with a sculpture of their beloved 'babuskas' (grandmothers), Kyiv. photo: D. Blair

Next to the Bratyska was a well-appointed nightclub and jazz venue, which just reopened as a comedy club. “Lviv’s fourth,” I was told by the ticket taker, a twenty-something Ukrainian-American woman raised in Sacramento, which is near where I live in California, who moved back after the war started. “What can I say? Ukrainians love comedy,” she explained. “People under threat of death need humor?” I offered, " Perhaps the gallows humor thing," and, “Or they’re honoring Zelensky,” which finally got a laugh.

In fact, Zelensky did do standup around Kyiv, Ukraine and Russia, where he also acted in a number of films, including playing Napoleon in the Russian comedy feature “Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon” (2012). Although poorly reviewed and a box office flop, the film’s kooky plot or mere existence suggests that conquering Ukraine was not foremost on most Russians' minds at that time. Meanwhile, Zelensky’s experience in Russia, from being a comic on the road to a more respected actor or his one meeting with Putin, provided him invaluable insight.

“We know for sure that we don’t need the war,” Zelensky pleaded with Russian listeners, during his February 23rd, eve-of-destruction broadcast. “Not a Cold War, not a hot war. Not a hybrid one. But if we’ll be attacked… if they try to take our country away from us, our freedom, our lives, the lives of our children, we will defend ourselves."

"You are demanding security guarantees from NATO, but we also demand security guarantees. Security for Ukraine from you, from Russia and other guarantees of the Budapest Memorandum. [If there is war] nobody will have guarantees of security anymore. Who will suffer the most from it? The people. Who doesn’t want it the most? The people! Who can stop it? The people. But are there those people among you? I am sure.”

Across from Microbrew Bratyska, in one of Kryva Lypa’s access tunnels, is one of its lesser lights: Dizzy Coffee, a tiny shop with two tables and a small upstairs loft but a powerful interior design using Piet Mondrian's colored squares. After my late-night return from Kyiv, I dropped by Dizzy for a quick cappuccino but got into an in-depth discussion with the barista, Andrii.

Thin, dark haired and 23 years old, with a sweet face beneath a light beard, Andrii has a degree in economics and a penchant for machine-gun-fire speech and wild gesticulation. As I learned over the next few days, Andrii is the elder in a crew of voracious-reading, pop-culture-consuming and debate-loving kids, who also listened to their grandparents. It was Andrii, in fact, who informed me of the Holodomor’s three rounds—1932-3, ’45 and ’46-7—hands flying around the espresso machine for emphasis but not spilling a drop.

“My grandmother worked in bakery,” Andrii said, during our first chat, which went high speed between coffee customers for over an hour. “Soldiers came every day and took 90 percent of bread. It’s a problematic. It goes for few years after war.” The Soviets also murdered almost 300 Ukrainian writers in the 1930s—"They are called 'executed renaissance,'” he told me—and kept killing intellectuals into the ‘70s.

Andrii, economist, historian and barista, at his post in Kryva Lypa's Dizzy Coffee, where he headed up a crew of young Lviv intellectuals. photo: D. Blair

“She was Jew, Holocaust survivor from Warsaw,” Andrii added about his mother’s mother. “Her name was Mandelbaum, popular Jewish name,” although his family didn’t find that out until perusing her papers after she died. As it happened, her husband was a member of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who had been arrested and did time in Siberia before they met.

“Did they know each other’s stories?” I asked. “They must have,” Andrii said, “They lived together for many years.” “Did they love each other?” “They must have, they had four children.” “Is your mother loving?” “Yes.”

Somewhere around then, into Dizzy’s cramped confines strode Andrii’s best friend, Vasyl, 22, all boots, skinny jeans and unkempt, curly black hair. A programmer for a German company, who does comparatively well, I learned when he told me about his life two weeks later, Vasyl grew up poor in one of the Soviet-style apartment blocks that speckle the suburbs of eastern bloc cities. When he was sixteen, he worked in a factory for eight months, learned not to romanticize proletariat life, and bought his first computer. He also plays classical piano, loves heavy metal and punk, often reads or listens to books on tape, and writes poetry. Andrii writes prose. Vasyl also told me about his grandparents, speaking almost as fast as Andrii but with less gesticulation.

“He was very, very against war,” Vasyl said about his grandfather, Mykhailo (Michael in Ukrainian). “He was born few years before the Great War and saw many terrible, terrible things as a kid: dead people, dead animals, bombed buildings, bombed streets, bombed whole cities, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera”—Vasyl’s trademark expression in English. Andrii’s is “problematic,” used as a noun.

“He wrote it all in his memoir, which I read, which was hard to read, because it is written by hand and had many strong statements. Some too strong for publication,” although that could be cleaned up by his daughter, Vasyl’s mother, a book editor. “He died last week,” Vasyl added, to which I offered condolences. “He had good life. He was 85. We will have cemetery thing on Sunday.”

Vasyl’s parents are religious, which is how many older Ukrainians addressed the terrible trauma of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism and genocide, although his mother is Jehovah’s Witness. “It was her way of rebelling against grandfather, who was Orthodox,” Vasyl explained. Somewhere in there, he noted that, “She and I are the only ones in our family to graduate from university,” although Mykhailo was a renown building crane operator.

Vasyl (rt), another one of Lviv's young intellectuals, having a beer with Andrii at the popular Bratyska brew pub. photo: D. Blair

“When the war started, Grandfather thought we should surrender, surrender right now, surrender as soon as possible,” Vasyl said, getting excited. “‘We are going to lose anyway,’ he kept saying, ‘And that will stop killing.’ But after a week, Grandfather changed his mind. ‘We have to fight,’ he said, ‘To stop killing in the future.’”

Andrii tried to enlist in the Ukrainian Army but was rejected and did extensive volunteer work near Kyiv. Vasyl didn’t bother, since he’s been plagued with health problems since childhood and figures he can contribute more in other ways. What he calls his “homemade NGO” recently bought a car, 70 pairs of socks and some shoulder bags for rocket-propelled grenades, which a friend drove across Ukraine to “their unit.”

For the next three weeks almost daily, Andrii, Vasyl and I embarked on a broken-field run across Western civilization, from “The Bible” and Plato to Poe and Crowley, the filmmakers Lynch and Tarantino, or the philosophers beloved by twenty-somethings worldwide: the Slovenian leftist Slavoj Žižek and the innovative evolutionary psychologist but also rightwinger from Canada, Jordan Peterson, both of whom Andrii and Vasyl find interesting but too extreme. One of them, I can’t remember which, read and enjoyed “Tropic of Cancer” by Henry Miller, the other Gregor Von Rezzori’s “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite”, two of my favorite books.

We lingered over Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”, which I hadn’t read, I was ashamed to admit, but knew of as the great farce of Russian literature. Bulgakov was from Kyiv, it turned out, and fought in the Russian Civil War, first for the czar, then the nationalists. His satire is so dry, according to Andrii and Vasyl, critics are still arguing whether Bulgakov was sending up or supporting Stalin.

“Satire doesn’t work with conspiracy theorists, because they take it literally,” I pointed out. "Are you familiar with ‘The Illuminati! Trilogy’ by Robert Anton Wilson?” “No,” said Vasyl. “It’s about a secret group called the Ill—” “We know about Illuminati!” “OK, great, and how ‘bout QAnon?” “Of course!” “Anyway, Wilson, he was only joking about the Illuminati, which is why he put an exclamation point in his title, but readers believed him anyway. Actually, he was trying to put people off believing in conspiracy theories, like McCarthyism... the communist scare in the '50s?" "Yes, yes, we know about McCarthyism!"

“We don’t worry about such bullshit!” interjected Andrii, “We have too many conspiracy problematics from Russia.”

At any moment, of course, we would switch to breaking news or reports from the front, which I was now getting from an American with a literary bent and checkered past who was fighting with the Ukrainian Foreign Legion near Kherson. Paid the same as Ukrainians, foreigners can reject orders or quit fighting. Over hours-long phone calls—one of which Vasyl listened in on—or text dialogues, Terry, 53, from upstate New York, regaled me with pithy stories about firefights or his international comrades: the short, gorgeous Norwegian of tribal Sana heritage, who was tough as nails and drove a Porsche, the Jewish woman medic from Texas, who hauled a wounded man almost twice her size to safety, or his close friend Paul Kim, 1997-2022, whose death devastated him. A Korean-American from Oklahoma, Kim was a dedicated democrat, an up-for-anything warrior, and perhaps the first ex-US military officer to die in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

The Lviv youth debate team: (rt-lft) The 16-year-old Evelina, Andrii, Vasyl, Marion and Yaroslav. photo: D. Blair

Or we’d analyze Putin’s psychology, that of the leftists supporting him or the rightwingers opposing him. After beers at Bratyska one night, we retired to my meagre quarters, and Vasyl delivered a dissertation on Ukraine’s neo-Nazi punks: how they emerged from the punks of Russia, a society defined by its anti-Nazism, which makes those symbols an easy way to rebel; how a popular Russian punk musician moved to Kyiv and developed a following; how they want to destroy the state, like anarchists, not strengthen it, like actual National Socialists; and how it was better to keep talking to them rather than letting them stew in alienation.

Stepping into Dizzy once, I found it empty except for Andrii and Vasyl arguing loud and fast and gesturing wildly. “What are you debating?” I finally interrupted. “Equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome,” Vasyl said. “Which side are you on?” “Equality of opportunity.” “So Andrii is still a leftist?” “Sort of.” “Does Dizzy’s owner ever worry you’re driving away customers?” “No. He sits right there,” said Andrii, pointing to where I had seen a quiet, amiable fellow, by the name of Volodya, Vasyl told me. “I buy a coffee or two a day,” he added, “As do all our friends, which keeps Volodya in business.”

Indeed, Dizzy was often half full of their friends, working on laptops, chatting quietly, debating loudly or getting caffeinated. They were mostly young women like Maria, a sweet, smart and hardworking translator, to whom Vasyl would call out mid-sentence for help with a word in English, Anya, the elegantly-dressed, redheaded photographer, who did their photo shoots, or Zosia, an artist, graphic designer and adventurous spirit as well as Dizzy’s weekend barista, who once told me, “Lviv is all hippies."

Some of them were helping Andrii and Vasyl on their new magazine, Фрайдей найт. Pronounced “fraydey nayt” and meaning Friday night, it references an older magazine, Четвер (“chetver” meaning Thursday), edited by a popular modernist writer from the Carpathians, Yuriy Izdryk. Friday Night's logo—a slab of meat taped to a Ukrainian embroidery, a la Maurizio Cattelan’s "Banana" (Art Basel Miami, 2019)—was designed by Andrii’s girlfriend, Stasia (short for Anastasia), who is talented, bright-eyed, beautiful and, it so happens, blonde, and may be all of 20.

“Andrii will do more editing and content creation,” Vasyl said, “And I will do tech and funding. We will focus more on ideas, poetry and philosophy, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, since war is already discussed everywhere.” The first issue will probably be printed in February, they told me, and be accompanied by a social media presence.

Some of Dizzy’s denizens were only 16, I was surprised to learn, and still in high school, where they’d read but didn’t quite get Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, one admitted to me. A few joined the debate club Andrii and Vasyl attended and toured with around Ukraine. They invited me to the club once, which met weekly at a youth center across Old Town, and debated in English, so I could participate. Watching Evelina, a tall, innocence-exuding, almost albino-blonde 16 year old defend the proposition “Is nostalgia beneficial?” in high-speed English—on top of hanging around Andrii, both her parents are lawyers—I thought, “My god, the kids of Maidan are getting younger, fiercer and more articulate!” No wonder Putin is petrified.

The ruins of the 16th century Golden Rose Synagogue is one of Lviv's only Jewish memorials and a popular teen hangout. photo: D. Blair

The next day, September 26th, was Rosh Hashana, the beginning of Judaism’s high holy days, which I usually honor by going to a synagogue for a few hours, even though I'm agnostic. Although Lviv has one synagogue left, the Beis Aharon V'Israel, near the train station, which has been run for the last three decades by a lovely New York Hasidic rabbi and his wife, I decided to tour the city’s synagogue ruins, of which there are many. After searching online and extensively on the ground, I found the weathered plaque marking the largest, the Great Synagogue, now an empty lot with a small playground but a majestic colonnade of trees. I also found the Tempel Synagogue, no sign but again an empty lot, which suggests some respect for the half millennium when Lviv was almost one third Jewish.

Then I headed to my favorite, the Golden Rose Synagogue in Old Town, a wonder of medieval architecture from 1582 until August 1942, when the Nazis destroyed it, except for the floor and back wall. Aside from the memorial for the Jewish ghetto, which has a nice park on a main avenue with a menorah and large sculpture, the Golden Rose is Lviv's only Jewish memorial. It features extensive explanatory signage, in Ukrainian and English, and a modest row of waist-high black stones engraved with photos and quotes. One stone has a famous 17th century rabbi, Joel Sirkis, declaring, "[Lviv is] a grand and glorious city, full of scholars, writers and teachers... the source of wisdom and foundation of prudence."

In addition, for the last 30 years at least, the Golden Rose has been a hangout for teenagers, perhaps because there’s no one to chase them away. In all kinds of weather or times of day, up to a hundred kids of Lviv are at the Golden Rose, playing music, goofing around, flirting and drinking, sometimes to excess, sometimes relieving themselves in the destroyed sanctuary, since no toilet is readily available.

They breathe life into old stones, I find, which is why I had already visited the Golden Rose three or four times. And why I spent a few hours there the afternoon of Rosh Hashana, gazing into its grassy remains, reading about the Jews of Lviv and their annihilation, and thinking about my own mistakes and trespasses during the last year, which is the spiritual assignment of the last day of the ten-day holiday, Yom Kippur. "Were there any major errors I was missing?" I wondered.

The kids didn’t pay me much mind, despite my being over three times their age, until I felt a presence behind me: a short, stocky young man. Speaking decent English, Valter, 23, a soldier on leave from fighting near Kharkiv, invited me to drink with his buddies. I begged off, explaining I’d rather not since it was a Jewish holiday, but he kept repeating his invitation and, somewhere in there, noted his grandfather was a Nazi.

“A Nazi from Germany?” I asked, incredulous. “Yes,” Valter said. “Was he an OK person?” “Yes.” “Did he give you candy as a kid?” “Yes.” “Did he treat your mother well?” “Yes,” he said and added, tentatively, “It is weird. My grandfather fought the Russians. Now I am fighting the Russians.”

I looked into Valter's unassuming gaze. Facing physical death or the moral dilemma of dehumanizing the enemy is not a walk in the park at any age. Indeed, my Foreign Legion contact, Terry, tough as he claimed to be and over twice Valter's age, mentioned both of those difficulties. Finally, I said, “It’s good you are talking about it,” and gave him a hug, which he accepted. “Keep talking about it, I would say, just keep talking about it.”

Valter’s friends were Oras, six-foot-seven, about 20 and with an excellent command of English; Adriana-Maria, younger and blonde, who poured me a paper cup with some hard alcohol and an energy drink, which I held but didn’t sip, and two 14 year olds, Ruslan and Nazar, who attended high school nearby. The nattily-dressed and dark, shoulder-length haired Ruslan didn’t speak a word of English, but the skinny, scruffy and nerdy Nazar did, expressively if haltingly. Ruslan and Nazar seemed to be enjoying Lviv’s dreamy, vibrant youth scene, even in the middle of a deadly, disastrous war, which Valter must have had told them about, and to which they may have to eventually go.

Valter (cntr), a 23 year-old soldier, shows a drawing of him at the front by a 9-year girl, who gave it to him, and (lft-rt) Oras, Adriana-Maria and Ruslan, the Golden Rose Synagogue memorial, Lviv. photo: D. Blair

Indeed, beyond the Golden Rose Synagogue, a brutal geopolitics was unraveling with alarming alacrity:

• Six days earlier, on September 20th, President Zelensky addressed the U.N. Assembly by video. “What is not in our formula? Neutrality,” he said. Later, he asked, “Why [is] the Russian military so obsessed with castration? What was done to them so that they want to do this to others?” but ended on a hopeful note. “We decided to provide humanitarian aid to Ethiopia and Somalia… additional amounts of our wheat.”

• The next day, Putin ordered the immediate mobilization of 300,000 soldiers and repeated his big lie: Russia will “liberate [the Donbas] from the neo-Nazi regime, which seized power in Ukraine in 2014 as the result of an armed state coup.” Russia will also defend itself, including territory incorporated after the upcoming “referendum,” by any means necessary, he said, voicing yet another nuclear threat, which started on February 28th, when Russia’s nuclear forces went on high alert.

• Within hours, there were arrests, riots and shootings at Russian draft centers, including authorities by draftees. Mostly non-Russian, they were well aware they will become part of the standard Russian strategy of throwing large numbers of troops against better -trained and -equipped opponents. Within days, up to a quarter million military-age men had fled Russia, choking airports and border crossings from Finland to Kazakhstan.

• On September 24th, the so-called referendum "asked" Ukrainians in Russia-controlled territory whether they wanted to become Russian, with soldiers going house to house coercing votes, even from 13 year olds. The same day, Zelensky announced that surrendering Russian soldiers “will be treated in a civilized manner, in accordance with all conventions,” while a United Nations panel reported that Russians had tortured civilians and raped children.

• Four days later, the referendum passed by a supposed 97% and, the following day, a video went viral of a Russian soldier surrendering after finding himself at the front without proper equipment, three days after being drafted off a street in Moscow.

• On September 30th, the Kremlin celebrated “Ukrainians rejoining the motherland” in Moscow’s Red Square with pop music performances, a military spectacle and speeches. “Western elites deny national sovereignty and international law," Putin said, using the common conspiracist trick of accusing enemies of one’s own crimes. "Their hegemony has a pronounced character of totalitarianism,” he claimed before calling on Kyiv “to end the war that they unleashed back in 2014.”

• That same day, Zelensky stood on a Kyiv street empty except for a small desk on which he signed Ukraine’s official application to NATO.

That same night, the last one of September and a Friday, coincidentally (considering Andrii and Vasyl's magazine), the rain pisses down, as it has almost constantly for three weeks. I think of the soldiers. It must be brutal soaked to the bone, trying to move through swollen streams and muddy fields, especially when on the attack, as many Ukrainian fighters have been since a few days before the deluge started on September 10th.

My room is cold, and I have a bad cold, although it’s not Covid, I know, since I just took a test. Ukraine did not miraculously escape the pandemic, as it sometimes seems, it's just that Covid's mortal threat is far overshadowed by that of war. Hence, no one mentions it, unless someone actually gets sick, and only one in a thousand on the street masks.

The Bratyska's famous borscht, replete with its fabulous side dishes. photo: D. Blair

The sirens start around midnight and howl for a half an hour straight, longer than the four or five other air raid signals I've heard in Ukraine. “Does that mean a real attack?” I text Andrii on Instagram, their preferred communication platform. “It’s bullshit,” he responds. “Should I go down to the basement?” “No. You will get sicker.”

The sirens wail intermittently until 4 a.m., long enough for me to entertain dark-night-of-the-soul scenarios: What if the Russians bomb Kryva Lypa to punish Ukrainian free thinking at one of its sources? “Kryva Lypa is old. Its buildings have big walls,” Andrii said earlier that day, tapping a wall, “Only direct hit breaks this.”

It strikes me as tragic but also absurd and then disgusting and grotesque that my new friends and I, the community of Kryva Lypa, the people of Lviv, the people of Ukraine, a burgeoning, nation-building democracy, are now ensnared in a modern, mass-murderous war.

“It is already World War Three,” according to some Russia analysts, like the preeminent English-American Fiona Hill, who was Trump’s Russia expert but provided damning testimony at his first impeachment, which was all about Ukraine, oddly enough. Indeed, it concerned Trump’s attempt to blackmail President Zelensky, whom Trump considered corruptible, but then Trump's exposure as corrupt by a Ukrainian-American, ironically, the U.S. Army intelligence officer Alexander Vindman, who listened in on Trump’s “perfect phone call.” Trump's scam—to withhold essential weaponry until Zelensky enacted or merely announced a phony investigation into President Joe Biden's son, Hunter, who was paid $11 million from 2013 through 2018 by the Ukrainian company Burisma—was probably suggested by his so-called Ukraine expert, Paul Manafort. Trump and company also repeated Kremlin conspiracy theories like Ukraine is not a real country, it is the most corrupt country in world, and it, not Russia, hacked the Democratic National Committee's emails in 2016.

Putin has worked with conspiracy theories his entire professional life, first as a K.G.B. agent, then as president. Shortly after his appointment, in fact, he blamed Chechens for the highly suspicious Moscow apartment bombings of September 1999 in order to start the Second Chechen War. Wars work well with the conspiracist formula that reality is an illusion, enemies are out to get us, and only I can save you.

“In my opinion, the reason [Putin is] at war in Ukraine is not a fear of NATO enlargement or because he’s trying to build a bigger Russian empire for his legacy,” remarked William Browder, who is from a famous leftist American family but became the biggest hedge fund manager in Moscow until he crossed Putin, on Ukrainian television (10/22/2022). Instead of following the zeitgeist shift to post-modern kleptocracy, Browder blew the whistle on corruption. After he was almost extradited to Russia from Spain, on a phony Interpol warrant, Browder developed the Magnitsky Act, which was adopted by the U.S. Congress in 2012 and then by Canada and the European Union. It facilitates the sanctioning of foreign officials who violate human rights, and the freezing of their assets, and is named for Browder's lawyer, the Ukrainian-born Sergei Magnitsky. In 2009, the F.S.B., the successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., arrested, tortured and killed Magnitsky.

"I think he’s at war because he’s a dictator who has stolen so much money over the last 22 years from his people that he’s afraid the whole thing will explode,” Browder concluded. “I believe he started this war in Ukraine, very simply, to distract his people away from him towards essentially a fictitious enemy, the Ukrainian people.”

“After Crimea, his popularity was at 90 [percent] and so life was good for Putin,” noted the Russian economist Sergey Guriyev, now living in France (Global Economy Meeting, 1/12/23). “Then it started to come down—because of raising retirement age, because of pretty successful anti-corruption campaign, and social media campaign by the opposition, so his popularity came to 60 again—and so he thought it was time to do something like 2014, something like Crimea.”

Yet another 'art during war' piece depicting the Russian president, at Kyiv's Military Museum. photo: D. Blair

Donald Trump has long allied with Vladimir Putin and other conspiracy theorists and promoted false narratives, from birtherism to election denial, but some of his followers have tired of the deceit, as indicated by Republican losses in the midterm elections. Putin, however, has state media and police and military power at his disposal, plus 70 years of classical Soviet indoctrination and 20 years of the modern Russian version. As it happens, the former's noble fantasies, propaganda and double speak was easier to deprogram than today's cyber-powered cynicism, grievance-baiting, what-about-isms and conspiracy theories, which complement the ubiquitous graft. The Kremlin elite believe they have crafted a powerful enough narrative and gravy train and conned enough people, in Russia and abroad, with the big lies of "Ukraine is Nazi" and "America overthrew Ukraine and is using it to destroy Russia," to legitimize yet another one of the region's prolonged bloodbaths, either in a years-long war or nuclear attacks.

As dawn breaks over Kryva Lypa, I finally realize what's been bugging me since Rosh Hashana.

When I was 12 years old, I did a school presentation about and solicited donations for Biafra, where two million people eventually starved to death in Nigeria’s civil war (1967-70). In 1983, I started reading the history and literature of the Holocaust and attending conferences, in an attempt to heal myself, my family and my community. To a limited degree, I spoke out about the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, as I wish more people had for European Jewry. My first published piece, “Interview with Bruno Lowenberg”, was about a Berlin bookman and survivor of Dachau and won a North-West Journalism Award (1983). I co-created “Our Holocaust Vacation” (2007), a documentary about my family’s return to Poland with my mother, Tonia Rotkopf Blair, an Auschwitz survivor, which showed on PBS, and I edited her book, “Love at the End of the World: Stories of War, Romance and Redemption” (2021, Austin Macauley, available through all major outlets).

But I neglected Ukraine.

As the first of October brightens into a gray, rainy day, I realize: Not only did Obama and Merkel drop the ball on Ukraine, I had. When Russia voided the Budapest Memorandum by invading Crimea and the Donbas, there should have been more governmental sanctions—if not military intervention or at least arm shipments by the Memorandum's signees—but also people protests. That I didn’t recognize Ukraine's Woodstock-nation moment in 2014, nor its harsh repression by a colonialist overseer, or that I can't even convince some of my hard-left friends that is what has happened—even after telling them about my two-month encounter with Ukraine (my loud exchange with Lyudmila, an 80-year-old physics professor and Russian-Jewish-American, at a Hanukkah party in the Oakland hills, was embarrassing)—is a personal failure of grotesque proportions, given one of my life projects is to oppose genocide.

I only started reading Snyder and Applebaum after February 24th—ordering their books that very day, in fact—although I had read about and endorsed Snyder’s thesis, detailed in his “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” (2010), that both Germany and the Soviet Union sought to colonize and depopulate Ukraine. I raced through his “The Road to Unfreedom” (2018), even while taking 25 pages of notes, so gob smacked was I to learn that the American conspiracist movement, which I had been researching and opposing since 9/12, and writing and publishing on since June 2020 (see "Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs"), borrowed many of its methods and claims as well as hacked emails from Russia.

All authorities lie constantly is the radical, new Russian worldview, according to Snyder, who observes that, “[Russian] politicians first spread fake news themselves, then claim that all news is fake, and finally that only their spectacles are real,” on page 11 of “The Road to Unfreedom”. That they are both more honest about the spectacle and better at it is how they sell it simultaneously to a naive public as well as conspiracy professionals. In their post-truth world, as well as perpetrate endless conspiracy theories, they can erase bothersome facts, assuage enormous suffering through denial, and endorse evermore outrageous fantasies, including their hybrid of postmodernism, socialism, fascism and Russian traditionalism, which will save the world, they claim, from western imperialism, decadence and gender dysphoria.

I also gobbled up Applebaum’s “Twilight of Democracy” (2020), a precise, personal and comprehensive view of liberal democracy's decline in Europe. Poland's lurch to the right surprised me since it seemed to be doing a great job of integrating with Europe, when I visited in 2005, and it had made immense progress since 1997, when I was there filming "Our Holocaust Vacation". Applebaum had a ringside seat, since her husband, Radek Sikorski, was Poland's Minister of Defense from 2005 to 2007 (he also led the E.U.’s admirable attempt to mediate between the Maidanites and Yanukovych). She details how the Poles were overcome by “the politics of resentment,” polarization, anti-democratic practices and what has become a worldwide religion, conspiracy theories. “’[T]here was no such thing as an accident [to him],’” a friend of Applebaum told her about Lech Kaczyński, Poland’s president from 2005 to 2010, “’If something happened it was the machination of an outsider. Conspiracy is his favorite word.’”

Along with Snyder, Applebaum has long reported on related problems in Russia—notably in her books "Gulag: A History" (2004, Pulitzer Prize winner) and "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" (2017)—and foreshadowed or predicted the current catastrophe.

The goddess Berehynia on her column surveying the Maidan, including a field of Ukrainian flags honoring fallen Ukrainian and foreign fighters. photo: D. Blair

The all-clear siren sounds around 7 a.m., and I hear doors opening and chairs scraping as Kryva Lypa’s waiters and baristas start another business day during wartime. That's when my thoughts turn to the Maidan.

“If the Russians go nuclear,” it suddenly hits me, “The Maidan will surely be ground zero! If the Russians are already attacking libraries, memorials and other cultural institutions, they will obviously want to destroy the central symbol of Ukraine's independence movement.”

I feel like crying, but the tears don't come.

As horrific, unimaginable and destructive as nuking the Maidan will be for Russia, Europe and the world, as well as of course for Kyiv and the people of Ukraine, those are the Kremlin's stakes, which it has been raising since a few days after the war started. Given Russia's systemic corruption, poor weapons, untrained soldiers and tradition of extreme violence, there will eventually be nowhere else for them to go for a path to victory. Nuking the Maidan will be counterproductive, politically, strategically and militarily, most analysts agree, but more militant and angry Russians, like members of the white supremacist mercenaries, the Wagner Group, now central to Russia’s war effort, get a perverse pleasure from being world-class killers.

"Never Again" seemed like a reasonable goal when I was coming up, but history suggests there will always be more genocides, that all weapons eventually get used, and some sort of nuclear attack is just a matter of time. Contemplating those conclusions can be psychologically devastating but we have to embrace the possibilities.

Nevertheless, the horror can't go on forever, history also indicates. Someday it will end, and Ukrainians will rebuild, restore and heal, as they did after the Holodomor, the Great Terror and the Nazis. Indeed, the kids of Maidan grew up hearing how their grandparents did exactly that, they just enjoyed three decades of democracy, which they refuse to renounce, and they love each other dearly.

It may take a decade or two to vanquish the Russian Federation, to give them enough death to inspire treaty adherence, to scrub Kyiv of radioactivity and reconstruct the Maidan in all its glory—to put Berehynia back on her golden pedestal—but Ukraine will survive, of that I suddenly feel certain, having gotten to know the kids of Maidan.

I lull myself to sleep in my tiny bed, which finally warmed up, imagining how the Maidan will look during its first Victory Day celebration, which I am determined to attend. I see happy faces, despite the horrific death toll and suffering, because surmounting that soul-crushing sorrow is an obligation of Ukraine's geographical-historical destiny. I hope my decades of Holocaust and mystical studies are enough to offset my own sadness and help them with theirs, especially when I see some of my Ukrainian friends and, if the road to peace is long and they survive, their kids. I also hope to meet an incredible crew of freedom fighters and lovers from around the world, including, I hope, anti-fascist Russians.

Drifting into dreamland, I fantasize about the speakers and performers on the Maidan’s proscenium for Victory Day. There will be some fantastic dancers, I assume, as well as performances and art shows around the square and across Kyiv and Ukraine. There will surely be seminars and conferences addressing how to restore a devastated economy, infrastructure and environment, augment psychological services or develop dialogues in polarized societies, which Americans would do well to attend. I also hope there will be presentations on the Roma crisis, LGBTQ rights and Jewish history tailored to Ukrainians.

I left Ukraine on October 9th, the sky still dark with impending storms. Eighteen hours later, the air raids in Lviv and Kyiv were real, as Russia began its strategic bombing campaign against power and water facilities. In Lviv, the missiles did not kill anyone directly but the electrical blackouts did. None of my friends were seriously affected—they claimed it was nothing new, or they posted photos of candle-lit dinners—but I felt I had deserted them.

Things will get bad as temperatures drop, surgeons operate by flashlight, the elderly and young freeze, and World-War-One-style trench and artillery battles rage across the 500-mile eastern front. Meanwhile, the Kremlin keeps upping its ante: more infrastructure bombings, more relentless attacks, more soldiers mobilizing, more torturing of civilians, and more threats of their nihilist nightmare, nuclear holocaust.

Imagine what a populous, prosperous and peaceful country Russia would be today if they hadn’t killed so many of their own people as well as others. Despite their world-class literature, their leaders appear unfamiliar with a central fact of human history: If bullies were so successful down through the ages, we'd still be living in caves.

It will be tragic, it will be brutal, it will be genocide, even without the detonation of nuclear devices. Unfortunately, the efficacy of our ideas—and how they trickle down to civic society, culture, technology and discipline—are periodically tested by those who fantasize that extreme amorality and brutality can bring victory. Sadly, the only way to prove them wrong is by force of arms. During this difficult moment of historical transition to a digital, diverse and civil-rights-supportive world, the kids of Maidan may end up saving not only Ukraine but the spirit of democracy.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on Dec 22, 2022 - 01:33 PM
Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution
by Doniphan Blair

The author at the Golden Rose Synagogue memorial, a popular youth hangout in Lviv, Ukraine: guy giving gang signs is a refugee from Mariupol, where he witnessed terrible massacres, and the woman, Anne, is a pianist, who said she's never play Russian composers again. photo: D. Blair
• PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover travel expenses for this article.

• Although published in January 2023, this has good reportage on a variety of Ukraine issues and was picked up by Redaction Politics and Reader Supported News.

• For comments, use cineSOURCE's Facebook.

AFTER A TEN-HOUR HAUL IN HARD RAIN,
Dirk Grosser driving like an amphibious drag racer, the storm breaks, the sky clears, and we walk the five blocks from our funky hostel onto Ukraine’s main stage, Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti or Independence Square. It is a momentous feeling.

This is where it all began, both the massive, months-long protests in 2013, which stopped the kleptocratic, Russophile president, Viktor Yanukovych, and started what can be called Ukraine’s renaissance, and the escalatory overreaction. After the killing of over 100 protestors didn’t stop the movement, Russia's President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Crimea and Ukraine’s eastern provinces and, eight years later, the entire country, which is now Europe's worst war since World War Two. Putin had to attack the democracy developing on his doorstep simply because, if Ukrainians and Russians are so alike and integrated, as he keeps saying, Russians will want democracy, too.

Ukraine isn’t releasing casualty figures for security reasons, and the Russian Federation’s are unreliable, but total deaths have probably passed 400,000, according to recent estimates, notably by the renown historian, Yale professor and Ukraine expert and language speaker, Timothy Snyder. Ukraine may have suffered as many as 200,000 casualties, around half civilian, some of whom were also victims of torture. Almost a third of all Ukrainians have taken refuge, some four million abroad and eight million internally, with up to four million deported involuntarily into Russia. On October 10th, 2022, Russia began a strategic bombing campaign against infrastructure, which will kill many more civilians during the winter.

As it happens, the Russian tanks barreling down Ukraine’s highway M-07 toward Kyiv on February 24th, 2022, were also trying to get to the Maidan.

It is bigger than I expect, over two football pitches, with 19th century buildings on one side and modern ones on the other. This being Sunday—September 11th, oddly enough—and with the sky still full of dark clouds, the Maidan is empty save a smattering of soldiers on leave, tight-skirted women sipping Ukraine’s ubiquitous strong coffee, and vendors of patriotic, yellow-blue wrist bands with sad eyes. There are no soldiers on guard, as far as I can see, but scattered around like overgrown toy jacks are tank barriers, the so-called “hedgehogs,” or “yizhaky” in Ukrainian, some painted like child toys, others stacked like modern art. They are the only indicator of the war raging 250 miles to the east or south.

“There were many business people on Maidan,” I was told by Kirill, a handsome, bearded and genial 34-year-old, who directs and edits television commercials and is writing a romantic comedy—he loves old Woody Allen movies. I met Kirill a week earlier in Lviv, the quaint, cobblestoned café city in Ukraine’s west which serves as its San Francisco and is somewhat shielded from the war in the east. I’m omitting last names in the nightmarish event of a Russian takeover.

Kirill invited me to his place with a cordial “I have wine, beer and cannabis” and recounted his many days and couple of nights on the Maidan in 2014, to which he commuted from the south-eastern city of Dnipro, now under Russian bombardment. “I saw head of Ukraine’s Microsoft on Maidan. There were many older people,” he said.

The statue of Goddess Berehynia and an art show in Kyiv's Maidan Square, which remains a public space for free speech, despite the terrible war 250 miles away. photo: D. Blair
Ukrainian doesn’t have articles of grammar, so Ukrainians often omit them in English, including the “the” in their country’s former name, The Ukraine. “I still translate from Russian to Ukrainian to English,” admitted Kirill, who was raised speaking Russian, as were a third of his compatriots, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, part of Ukraine’s long tradition of being bilingual, trilingual or quadrilingual. Middle class Ukrainians often speak some or decent English, which they start studying in high school and continue while listening to rock. Kirill is a fan of Creedence Clearwater Revival, to which he was introduced by his father on cassette tape.

“There were even babushkas,” grandmothers in Ukrainian and Russian but also Yiddish, added Alena, Kirill’s girlfriend, who is in her early 20s, paints and is studying web design but could side hustle modeling. There were also priests, doctors, lawyers, teachers and entrepreneurs, although the vast majority were young people, not as many women as men, workers and students (including high schoolers), nationalists and anarchists, skinheads and hipsters.

Ukraine has a large cohort of tattooed-pierced, who wear their story on their skin: men with significant neck or face work, often referencing girlfriends, women with colorful “sleeve” murals and multiple piercings. A 40-something cashier at a small supermarket near where I lived for six weeks in Lviv, who had a ready smile when ringing me up, had a Chinese character on her neck.

“It was like a big family,” I was told by Artur, 22, whom I met on the Maidan six days later. Artur is a graphic designer, skater and fan of all things Californian, including the spiky hairstyle he sports. After two weeks battling baton-wielding police, the Maidan protestors settled into a few months of occupation, punctuated by marches, rallies and more police attacks. “There were big pots of tea cooking everywhere, people playing football, playing music, discussing politics, which I did not understand,” Artur explained, “I was only 14.”

“Then fighting started again. Yanukovych started shooting people. That really shocked us. We weren’t used to Ukrainians killing Ukrainians. That building was set on fire,” he said, pointing at a government office which protestors occupied and turned into a community center. “They restored it last year. Then Russia invaded Crimea.”

“Before Maidan, there was no Ukraine. After Maidan, there is a real Ukraine,” Artur concluded. “Most Ukrainians had friends on Maidan. Everyone knew we were no longer part of Russia, and we were a real country, a real democracy.”

It was called the Maidan Revolution or Euro-Maidan Revolution, because protestors gathered on the Maidan on November 21st, 2013, the very day Yanukovych cancelled Ukraine’s Association Agreement with the European Union in order to pivot to Russia, and they flew E.U. flags. The call to protest on the Maidan was first made by an Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, Mustafa Masi Nayyem, in a heartfelt Facebook post, which he closed with “Likes do not count.” After the killings, it became known as the Revolution of Dignity or simply the Revolution.

I saw photos of the martyred Maidanites on the fence of the National Art Museum. Called the “Heavenly Hundred,” they were a near even mix of youth and middle aged, working class and intellectual, albeit over 95% men.

Ukraine already had three democracy movements or revolutions, as they like to call them. The Granite Revolution of 1991 helped get out the 90% vote to secede from the Soviet Union. The less successful Ukraine Without Kuchma tried to oust Leonid Kuchma, the corrupt ex-communist, but he remained president until 2005, when he declined to stand for a third term. The 2004 Orange Revolution started after Yanukovych or his cronies tried to poison his opponent and steal the election but were stopped by Ukraine’s supreme court as well as the protests.

Kirill, a television commercial director, participated in both the Orange and Maidan Revolutions, of 2004 and 2014, respecitvely. photo: D. Blair
Kirill also participated in the Orange Revolution, when he was 16, which also involved fighting the police and camping on the Maidan in winter, but “It was not same,” he said.

Ukrainians continued to use mostly Russian in school, watch Russian television, and support Russophile candidates, including Yanukovych, whom they elected president in 2010, fair and square, even though he was a convicted criminal and notoriously corrupt—his son, a dentist, was one of the country's richest men. But Ukrainian politicians were often mired in corruption scandals; Ukrainians are understanding; and Yanukovych reinvented himself by hiring a hot-shot political consultant for a decade. That would be Paul Manafort, eventually Donald Trump’s campaign manager, a Russia security risk and a convicted fraudster.

“We have victim mentality from so much suffering,” Kirill told me, referring to Ukraine’s annihilation by the Germans during World War Two, when six and a half million people died, about a fifth of the population, but also by the Soviets. Nine million Ukrainians and perhaps many more died during the Russian Civil War (1917-22), the Great Terror (1936-38), and the Holodomor, when Soviet authorities starved to death about four million people to punish supposed counter-revolutionaries. Denied to this day by some Russians and Russophiles, the forced famine of 1932 to ’33 had two more iterations, in 1945 and ‘47, I was surprised to learn from a young intellectual I met working in a Lviv coffeeshop, Andrii.

“After Maidan, all that changes,” Kirill said, his voice rising slightly. “We understand we can change our life, and our life is in our hands. It is not what some people do to us—we can do what we want!” No wonder Putin was petrified.

As I pondered their incredible achievement on the Maidan, I recalled that many Ukrainians revere Stepan Bandera, a 1940s-era independence fighter and the leader of the more violent wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who is controversial but widely considered Ukraine's political founding father.

“Bandera? We love him,” replied Kirill, the first Ukrainian with whom I felt comfortable enough to ask about him, which precipitated an argument. As the son of a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor, I was painfully aware that some O.U.N. members had mass murdered Jews, Poles and Russians, the kernel of truth in Putin’s “Ukraine is controlled by Nazis” conspiracy theory. In fact, O.U.N. members brazenly slaughtered a few thousand Jews right on the streets of Lviv, some not far from where Kirill and I were sitting, the day the German Army entered the city, June 30th, 1941.

Kirill and I parted even closer friends, however, able to discuss difficult subjects. The genocideers numbered around 12,000, I later learned, from one of Professor Snyder’s Yale lectures uploaded to YouTube, while almost seven million Ukrainians were in the Red Army fighting the Nazis, a ratio of almost 600 to one. And two and half million of them died.

Contradicting another Russian conspiracy theory—that "Ukraine is not a real country and never existed”—they've been fighting for independence since the end of World War One, over a century ago, when they declared a state. Unfortunately, World War One morphed into the Russian Civil War, which swamped Ukraine in a ferocious free-for-all between the nationalists, czarists, anarchists, peasants and three foreign armies as well as the communists, who had to invade three times and use extreme violence to prevail (for this author's survey of that history go here).

The author at Lviv's memorial to those murdered by the Soviets after its 1939 invasion: 48,867 Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish ethnic people. photo: D. Blair
Given that sanguineous, two-part slaughter and then the Holodomor, the Great Terror and World War Two, 1914 to ‘45 in Ukraine was the bloodiest period in one of the bloodiest regions in history. In a desperate bid to carve out a country, the O.U.N. planned to expel the Soviets by siding with the Nazis, on whom they would eventually turn, while some members murdered Jews, Poles and Russians, in keeping with the eliminationist nationalism then popular across Europe.

As the war's outcome became obvious, however, much of the O.U.N. had a change of heart. Driven by a rank and file devastated by fascism, totalitarianism and the resulting wars, the leadership whitewashed that history and liberalized their platform, while their guerrillas kept fighting the Soviets into the 1950s. After the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the O.U.N. reemerged, supported right-wing parties, and remained central to Ukrainian culture, including through songs, street names and posters celebrating Bandera. Indeed, their greeting, “Slava Ukraini, heroyam slava,” glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes, is still popular, and the army made it their official salutation in 2018.

Nevertheless, after the fall of the wall, when hard-right parties became popular across Eastern Europe, not much in Ukraine. In fact, only the Svoboda party passed the required five percent vote, and only in 2012, to take seats in the Rada, or parliament, a half mile from the Maidan. Although Svoboda has a Nazi-like insignia and started as an extreme ultranationalist party, it had moderated some of its positions by then and won 38 seats, eight percent of the Rada.

“There were not that many on Maidan who were extremists,” Artur told me. “And they were not that extreme, like extremists in U.S. or Germany. I know one.” Ukrainians often have friends across ideological divides, which can be fungible, I learned, and some O.U.N. officials were friends with, married to, or themselves Jews.

There were a few neo-Nazi skinheads on the Maidan, mostly part of the punk movement popular across the ex-Soviet bloc for its ability to express anger. The founders of Right Sector, a hard-right party, met on the Maidan, where they helped lead its defense against the police. Republican Senator John McCain and Victoria Nuland, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, visited the Maidan and met with Svoboda and Right Sector leaders—Nuland famously handing out cookies. Although Nuland was supposedly managing American manipulation of the Maidan, the scandal surrounding her leaked phone call was mostly about her saying, “Fuck the E.U.,” and wanting to work around the institution so beloved on the Maidan.

Despite the Maidan’s diverse and vocal right-wing, however, they were vastly outnumbered and overshadowed by its liberals, leftists and anarchists, which is a powerful faction in Ukraine, one of the few countries where anarchists have mounted major parties or armies. Indeed, Svoboda lost all of its seats in the fall 2014 elections, despite its high-profile participation on the Maidan.

“There were a lot of poets on Maidan,” interjected Roman, Artur’s friend and fellow skater, who hadn’t said much until then. There were also many hippies, replete with long hair and colorful clothing, a movement dating to the late-‘60s in Ukraine, especially in Lviv.

During the Soviet dark ages, Lviv’s hippies lived underground, sometimes literally. They hid out in Lichakiv, the enormous cemetery for World War One soldiers but also politicians, authors and artists, who were often honored with large tombs and sculptures. I toured Lichakiv with Yarema, a photographer and artist with a gentle manner and shoulder-length hair, who wanted his photo taken next to the tomb of the sculptor Mykhailo Dzyndra, with its impressive abstract piece. Lviv’s most famous son is arguably Leopold Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), a respected writer on Ukrainian and Jewish life as well as romance and eroticism (his name was borrowed for “masochism,” oddly enough, considering the longsuffering Ukrainians), but he is buried in Germany.

Yarema and I dined at the nearby Jerusalem, one of two Jewish restaurants in Lviv, which was almost a third Jewish until 1942, on a tasty mushroom-barley soup and gefilte fish, served by an interesting woman of color. I thought she might be Roma, given Jews and Roma sometimes ally on the edge of European societies, but Yarema learned her mother is Ukrainian and father Nigerian.

Yarema appears younger than his 31 years but has had gallery shows, teaches life drawing, does web development and carpentry, and recently produced a “jam festival” with friends, cooking kettles of fruit over a bonfire at his family’s run-down property outside Lviv, which he’s fixing into a small artists’ retreat.

Yarema, a photographer and artist, at the tomb of the sculptor Mykhailo Dzyndra, Lviv's Lichakiv cemetery. photo: D. Blair
Lviv’s hippie history was also recounted to me by Bhodan, a 24-year-old artist and illustrator, who has read Jack Kerouac and Carlos Castaneda but also Amnesia.in.ua, a Ukrainian website run by “enthusiastic ethnologists,” and discussed it with his elders, like the director of Lviv’s Artists Guild.

During the ‘70s and ‘80s, people involved in "samizdat," the Soviet bloc’s clandestine free-expression movement, used tapes to share music, and they held small, illegal performances. Lviv had its first music festival after glasnost in 1989, Chervona Ruta, named for a popular love song and meaning a species of flowers or perhaps "red regret." It featured punk, pop and communist-era acts and became biennial, while the city became known for festivals. A well-respected jazz festival, originally called Alfa, now Leopolis, has been mounted every June since 2011, although this year’s was postponed “until immediately after victory,” according to its website. There are some great local jazz players, notably pianist Igor Yusupov.

The hippies took over Virmenka Street, in Lviv’s closed-to-cars Old Town, where they still preside in cafes like the homey Facet, which fills the street with tables in summer, or the massive, multi-roomed Dzyga, built into the city’s mediaeval walls and now one of its premier jazz venues and art galleries as well as cafes. Yarema had a show there of photos from his Turkey road trip. Hippies also started going to the Carpathian Mountains, 250 miles south of Lviv, especially a waterfall called Shypit, meaning to whisper, “to camp out, play music and run around naked,” according to Bhodan, who hitchhiked there with his girlfriend a few years ago, for the summer solstice celebration.

“Up to one thousand people… gather and make a big fire and celebrate life, or whatever, using psychedelics, marijuana and music… There are little customs. No matter of the time, if you meet someone, they tell you ‘Good morning.’ Some people wake up in the evening because they were partying all night… You can join any small conversation with people you never met before—you can have heartwarming discussions.”

Considering the Maidan protesters' dedication to freedom and their months of street fighting, which culminated with police snipers shooting about 100 of their comrades, Yanukovych fleeing to Russia, and the Roda voting unanimously for fresh elections, they were enraged when Russia attacked Crimea on February 20th, 2014. Insignia-less and masked soldiers poured out of the Russian naval base in Sevastopol, which dates to 1772 and was being rented from Ukraine. Evidently, two pro-democracy revolutions in one decade was too much for a Kremlin turning autocratic under Putin. Crimea’s governor chose not to fight, since the state had become almost entirely Russian-speaking after the Muslim Tatars were deported to Siberia in 1944, and it had substantial autonomy from Kyiv.

Sanctions were levied and the ruble collapsed, but President Barack Obama, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and other western leaders accepted the conquest of Crimea as a real politic fait accompli. Citing its Russian-speaking population and Russia's lingering superpower status, they rationalized it was not worth significant protest or an escalatory arming of Ukraine, especially so soon after the disastrous Iraq War, and that stable relations would encourage Russian democracy.

Across Ukraine, there were also Ukrainian speakers, generally older and male, who opposed the Maidan and its related protests nationwide and supported Russophile politics. Some Russian speakers claimed discrimination by a Ukraino-centric establishment, but it's hard to distinguish valid complaints from opportunism or corruption by Russian patronage and conspiracy theories. In the eastern states of Donetsk and Luhansk, Russian language speakers and some paid agents started separatist rebellions in April 2014, using small squads of ragtag fighters. But they soon obtained weapons from the Russian army, which quietly invaded four months later, even as Putin categorically denied to Obama’s face any involvement with the “little green men.”

A mohawked, middleaged soldier checks his phone in front of St. Michael's Cathedral, Kyiv. D. Blair
Militant Maidanites ran to the army or the paramilitary outfits organized on the Maidan by older veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War or younger Russian speakers, which belies allegations of widespread oppression. The latter were often soccer hooligans, also called “ultras,” or, to a lesser degree, white nationalists or punk intellectuals. The first commander of the now notorious-famous Azov Battalion, Andriy Biletsky, had a degree in history and decade experience organizing those three groups. The Azov debuted as a lightly-armed militia to oppose the separatists threatening Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city and next to Russia, but came of age in another large city, Mariupol on the Azov Sea, off the Black Sea, hence their name. After Ukrainian Army units in Mariupol proved poorly equipped and commanded, Biletsky led his fighters south and defeated separatists in open battle, in the summer of 2014.

More pacifist Maidanites often supported their friends and relatives who were fighting with supplies, equipment, medical or cyber services, or money. A journalist, Miriam Dragina, started a flea market, Kyiv Market, specifically to donate its profits to the army, which recalls the old joke: What if the library got funding and the army had to do a bake sale? Some simply bought sport rifles and drove to the front. The Azov and other independent brigades were integrated into army command by the end of 2014, but the war is still a very popular, anti-imperialist insurgency, much like the American Revolutionary War or Vietnam-America War, involving people from all walks of life and political persuasions. Almost everyone I met was helping supply a unit with food, automobiles, ammunition and more.

Another testament to Ukrainian democracy is the 2019 election of President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish—as were two of Ukraine’s six other presidents—in a landslide 73% of the vote, due to his anti-corruption stance but also charmed life-follows-art story. Four years earlier, the accomplished comic, actor, writer, dancer and producer had created and starred in a hit television series, a combination sit-com and political satire with surrealist touches, “Servant of the People” (2015-19, available on Netflix). Zelensky plays a bumbling high school history teacher, living at home with his taxi-driving father and professor mother, whose students film him ranting against corruption. After it goes viral, they file the papers for his presidential run, which everyone regards as a joke until—spoiler alert—he wins and takes on the establishment with the help of family and friends.

Also appointing friends as ministers, the real-life President Zelensky, whose political party is called Servant of the People, had a shaky start. Despite successes countering corruption, he was accused of nepotism and favoring the oligarchs backing his large media company, and he made egregious accusations against his predecessor, which earned him low approval ratings. Doing his fictional character one better, however, Zelensky matured into a charismatic commander who refused to flee, rallied his constituents amid catastrophe, staved off defeat, and assumed a starring role in the ancient contest between democracy and fascism.

Also determined to stop Russian expansion are the 20,000 or so foreign fighters, notably the Georgians, whose nearby nation Putin invaded in 2008, due to their Rose Revolution five years earlier, and who have their own brigade, and the much more brutalized Chechens. Indeed, the Chechens endured not one but two vicious wars with Russia (1994-96 and 2000-01), which killed over 100,000 people, fully seven percent of their population. There are also fighters from America, Scandinavia, Britain and other regions, including an increasing number of Russians.

A small cadre of foreign volunteers covers the gaps in citizen care left by governmental and international agencies and Ukrainian self-help networks, often focusing on communities with emergency needs, helping disabled refugees and delivering lost pets, which can be considered therapy animals. Dirk and I met eight of them for beers at an upscale pizzeria, in the park next to Kyiv’s urban velodrome, a lighthearted but dedicated crew of Australians, Canadians, Europeans and one American.

Another democratic indicator is that the ultranationalists haven’t held a Rada seat since 2019, when Biletsky lost his, and Zhan Beleniuk became its first African-Ukrainian representative. A wrestler who took gold at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Beleniuk was number ten on the list for the Servant of the People party, which won 125 seats. The Azov, meanwhile, received funding from a Jewish oligarch, sacked a commander for antisemitic speech, and accepted Jewish fighters. Most importantly, they’re fighting to defend Ukraine against an imperialist invader committing genocide.

Genocide, as defined by the United Nations, is the attempt to eliminate a culture, language or nation as well as people. Russian intentions are clear, from their officials' overt references—“Ukraine is not a country”—to military actions: the bombing of civilian infrastructure and cultural institutions, the destruction of monuments, including to the Holodomor, the use of rape as a weapon of war, the deportation of children and young women into Russia to be Russified and estranged from their families, and the sadistic torture of civilians, using amputation and castration.

Oksana, who works as a recruiter for the Georgian Brigade, takes a selfie in front of a destroyed Russian tank in Lviv's Old Town. photo: D. Blair
No wonder the Azov enjoy nationwide adulation, notably the big banners honoring the “Azovstal Defenders” in downtown Kyiv, Lviv and other cities, for their second defense of Mariupol, from March 1st to May 20th, 2022, when they fought the Russians to the death.

“They are like gods!” I was told by Oksana, an effervescent woman of about 22, whom I met in Lviv, after offering to take her selfie in front of the city’s display of destroyed Russian tanks. Oksana studied computer programming but much prefers working as a recruiter for the Georgian Brigade.

The Stalingrad-like siege of Mariupol destroyed or damaged over 90% of the city’s structures and may have killed up to 85,000 civilians, according to recent reports, including almost 600 sheltering in a theater marked “children” in large letters on March 24th. About 3,000 fighters, some foreign, and 1,000 civilians, including children, retreated to the massive, Cold-War-era bomb shelters beneath the city-sized Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, which is owned by a Muslim-Ukrainian oligarch. As gangrene, black mold and starvation set in, under constant bombardment, including by thermobaric bombs, with only a few helicopters flying supplies in and wounded out, 20 feet above the water to evade Russian radar, the mostly Azov fighters endured for 11 weeks.

Mariupol’s Thermopylae cum “Blade Runner” cum reality TV show was watched by many Ukrainians on videos uploaded thru the Starlink satellite system, which was largely donated by Elon Musk and is also essential for operating drones and artillery. The siege ended when the surviving defenders received safe passage in exchange for a few high-profile Russian prisoners, although 53 Azov were murdered in a Donetsk P.O.W. camp on July 28th. They were killed by Ukrainian shelling, according to Russian officials.

“How did you grow up so healthy in such an environment?” I asked Kirill, the next time we hung out. “Was your father an optimist?” “Yes,” he said. “He was a good man, nice man. He liked rock music and was devout Christian. And he was Jewish.” Kirill only learned that fact after his father died and, just last year, that his mother is as well, a secret they kept iron clad due to Soviet and Ukrainian antisemitism.

Nevertheless, the secret Jewish parent or grandparent story is fairly common in Ukraine. I met many Ukrainians with Jewish heritage, and Kirill once joked, “Half of Lviv is half Jewish.” And Jews date to the eighth century, when the elites of the Khazar Empire converted to Judaism, over a century before the birth of either Ukrainian or Russian culture. Despite the many gruesome pogroms—by the Cossacks in the 17th century, which included extensive rape, the czarists in 1920, and the Nazi genocide of one and a half million Ukrainian Jews—and today’s small number of publicly professing Jews, about half a percent, they remained somewhat integrated and represented throughout the country. Indeed, Ukraine still has Europe’s second largest Jewish population: coming after Poland before World War Two, now following France.

President Zelensky, 45, hails from a modest city in central Ukraine and studied law before going into entertainment. Natan Khazin, a 50-ish rabbi from Odessa, Ukraine’s third largest city and historically Jewish, was on the Maidan and helped its fighters with his experience in the Israel Defense Forces. Khazin even calls himself a “Zhido-Bandera,” a Jewish follower of Stepan Bandera. Nayyem, the Maidan organizer of Afghan extraction, married a Jewish woman and is raising his children Jewish. Meanwhile, the annual number of antisemitic incidents in Ukraine is often less than in France or England.

Kirill adores his mother, as becomes obvious when he takes her calls with a dulcet “Yes, Mama?” In fact, he moved her to Lviv, and her own apartment, when he and Alena evacuated Kyiv in December 2021, two months before the war. “I was listening to BBC and your president,” he explained. Kirill thinks Zelensky may have to answer for why Ukraine was so unprepared for the invasion: “They were building roads, when they should have been building rockets.” “But only after the war,” he added.

A troupe of dancers proved the Maidan was a place of freedom of expression, despite the nearby war. photo: D. Grosser
Ukrainian women seem extra loving, as is often the case in oppressed communities. I noticed on the streets of Lviv and Kyiv how they cared for children, who often clutch stuffed animals, due to the anxiety of war, or walk with beaus, holding hands and laughing, or girlfriends, in pairs or groups, also holding hands and laughing or chatting animatedly while out for coffee. Or when they cry and hug. Many seem to be Eastern European romantics, cautiously hopeful in the face of adversity, a worldview I learned about from my Polish mother and on four trips to Poland, Ukraine’s sibling society (Lviv was Polish until the Soviet invasion of 1939).

Their literary romanticism, meanwhile, dates to the poet, painter and folklorist Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), who was born an enslaved serf near Kyiv but secretly read books and studied art and became the country’s cultural founding father, honored many times more than Bandera with street names, statues or on the currency, the hryvnia (pronounced “ravinia”). Other luminary local authors include Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), who became a titan of Russian literature by inventing “the grotesque," an essential genre for understanding Eastern Europe, Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), whose tales of Jewish life inspired “Fiddler on the Roof” and Mark Twain, and Isaac Babel (1894-1940), also from Odessa and also Jewish, one of the Soviet Union’s most respected authors and journalists as well as modern stylists, until the secret police murdered him, in keeping with their grotesque tradition of problem solving through killing.

As Dirk and I walk out on the Maidan that glorious September 11th morning, I am struck by its large, open space but also strange structures, like the glass domes or comedic sculptures at its north end, where we entered, or the tall column capped by a figure in the distance. Despite the storm clouds, a wan sun shines, people are smiling, and there’s an eerie peace.

Unbeknownst to us on the Maidan at that moment, 250 miles to the east, around Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv, Ukrainian Davids are on the march. Indeed, they retook more territory in days than the Russian Goliath conquered in months, driving the invaders into a panicked retreat and to abandon immense amounts of equipment and ammunition. President Zelensky announces this battlefield success that very evening, in his nightly national address, the first good news Ukrainians have heard since their storied defense of Kyiv, six months earlier.

“They used special forces, drones and ‘maneuverable warfare’ to get behind the Russians and spook them into running,” a military analyst on CNN explained on September 13th, although he forgot to mention their masterful military feint. For weeks, President Zelensky had been talking up a counterattack in the south on Kherson, the only regional capitol conquered in Russia’s most recent invasion, which tricked them into withdrawing troops from the north near Kharkiv. Already known as a brave and funny commander in chief, Zelensky was proving to be a brilliant one.

“We love our president,” Alena had told me with a smile, which suggested a romantic-sexual side to national struggle.

Zelensky pushed his generals to attack, even though the Americans kept vetoing their battle plans, as the two militaries computer war-gamed during the summer in Ramstein, Germany. They had to break the entrenched front lines before winter, obviously, as a frozen war of attrition would benefit better-armed Russians. But they also had to prove to citizens and allies alike that the cornucopia of donated war materiel was being put to good use. As of September 11th, the U.S. had provided about $19 billion worth, five times the annual allotment to Israel, including advanced HIMAR missiles and promises of much more, although that could be reduced or decimated by a Republican-controlled Congress.

Filmmaker/performance artist Dirk Grosser interviews a survivor of Russian war crimes with translator Nadia (standing) in Bucha, north of Kyiv. photo: D. Blair
Dirk and I thread our way across the six lanes of Khreshchatyk Avenue, Kyiv’s main shopping street, which intersects the Maidan, since we neglected to notice the pedestrian tunnel for that purpose. We ascend the Maidan’s block-wide steps and approach its centerpiece, the gold-plated column crowned by Berehynia, the Slavic fertility goddess. Only then do we see, in the middle of the square’s proscenium, the dance troupe. It consists of a dozen women, including one of color (Ukraine has a substantial Roma population as well as some African immigrants), two men and a camera crew. Between takes of turning, jumping and gesticulating, the dancers goof off and giggle, although still well aware of the fierce battles raging five hours drive east or south. Each one probably has a cousin or friend under shellfire, at the front or already in the earth.

Kyiv seems normal, except for the passport control on the roads entering town and at the train station, the sandbags and plywood around important buildings and statues, the machine gun nests at official entrances, and the occasional air raid sirens, which oblige museums to evacuate, but everyone else ignores. People laugh in the streets, and the restaurants are full—up to a 30-minute wait at the most popular—but few openly celebrated Zelensky’s announcement of battlefield success on September 11th, as was reported in the American press. Almost everyone I met was still nervous, some were traumatized, and a few were having panic attacks.

Fifteen miles north of the Maidan is Bucha, whose residents reported the first Russian war crimes spree. Bucha bore the brunt of Russian bloodlust because it was where their once-vaunted armor was ambushed by Ukrainian regulars but also townspeople tossing Molotov cocktails. The Ukrainians destroyed up to a dozen tanks and vehicles which triggered a 25-mile-long military traffic jam and ruined Putin’s plans for a one-week war. Amazingly, the Russian soldiers carried dress uniforms for a victory parade, while many officers booked reservations at Kyiv’s premier hotels and restaurants.

Dirk Grosser is of medium height, strong build and open demeanor. He favors plaid shirts and hiking boots, perhaps in deference to his practical people from the once-East German city of Dresden, where he lives in a three-story townhouse he renovated himself. On our deluge drive from Lviv to Kyiv, Dirk told me how he raced all night from Germany to Ukraine, after a late start due to house guests, to attend a seminar he organized about what artists should do during a war. A performance artist and filmmaker by profession, Dirk started doing small conferences in this vein after learning some of his leftist friends supported the Russian invasion. In addition, he was shooting a related documentary, tentatively titled “Exile”.

Amazed by Dirk’s ambition and hard work as well as interested in the cause, I volunteered to production assist: find translators, do second camera and the like. Three days after our first Maidan visit, we drove the M-07 north to the once-bucolic commuter town of Bucha. We set up next to its verdant central walkway in the outdoor tables of a fast-food joint, which had umbrellas to ward off the light rain.

Every person we asked had had harrowing experiences. “I was in a basement for weeks,” a towheaded, ten-year-old boy, riding around on his scooter, told us, “I was very scared.” After calling his mother on his smart phone, which almost all middleclass kids have, he said, “She doesn’t want me filmed.”

Between wiping her eyes, a thin, expressive, perhaps 50-year-old Roma woman named Nadia told us about the rapes, including of underage girls, the men trying to remove their military tattoos, a death sentence under Russian occupation, the summary executions, which sometimes included torture or amputation, and the often audible screaming. The interviews were conducted in Ukrainian, which neither Dirk nor I understand, but our translator, an aid organizer from Kyiv also named Nadia, provided periodic summaries in English. At the end of the interview, most of us were crying, and we all hugged Bucha Nadia.

Bucha’s streets were littered with bodies for weeks, since the residents were too fearful to collect them. The kill count now exceeds 450, almost 2% of the population but will probably go much higher. Mass graves full of civilians, some showing signs of torture, amputation and even castration, have been uncovered in the liberated towns around Kharkiv like Izium.

A colorful children's synagogue on the edge of Babyn Yar, where Nazis killed 90,000 Kyiv Jews and many others, is part of the Ukrainian attempt to use art to address suffering. photo: D. Blair
“We were given orders to kill everyone we see,” a Russian soldier told his girlfriend by phone from Bucha, according to call transcripts published by the New York Times on September 28th.

Evidently, the Kremlin intends to terrorize the Ukrainians into submission, including the ethnic Russians they're supposedly saving, and escape recrimination through propaganda and conspiracy theories. This strategy will work, they assume, by virtue of their long expertise with such subterfuges but also the current popularity of conspiracism worldwide and cyberspace's capacity for disinformation. Hence, the Russians keep claiming they're fighting Nazis, even as they become like Nazis. Despite the obvious hypocrisy, their repetition of big lies allows them to not only dodge the bad press but transfer it to their enemies.

As if on cue, when the Bucha story broke on April 1st, Russian diplomats and media figures began accusing the Ukrainians of lying and fabricating evidence, using actors, ketchup and Photoshop, a gaslighting calumny that many Russians and Russophiles continue to repeat ad nauseam today.

On our way back from filming in Bucha, to complete our atrocity tour, we stopped by Babyn Yar, the ravine four miles north of the Maidan better known by its Russian name, Babi Yar. This is where the Nazis, also compulsive conspiracy theorists, slaughtered some 33,700 Jews in two days, still considered a record. Now located in a large, popular city park, Babyn Yar features an imaginative, multifaceted memorial. Right on the ravine’s edge, in fact, is a two-sided synagogue adorned with colorful animals, clouds and Hebrew phrases, a fantasy version of a traditional Ukrainian synagogue. The walls are hinged and there is an oversized hand-crank, the guard showed me, which folds the entire structure into a 20-foot-tall wooden case, suggesting children’s theater or the Jewish need for portability.

Some people were probably offended when the Babyn Yar Memorial foundation—formed in 2017, after the Soviets downplayed the Holocaust for decades, with an all-star board chaired by the Russian-Israeli scientist and dissident Nathan Sharansky and featuring rabbis, artists and politicians—decided to build a psychedelic, fold-up synagogue to commemorate what is traditionally marked by dark stone memorials or anguished sculptures. I myself was confused. But as I walked around and mulled it over, I realized: This is where Ukrainian middle schoolers are brought to look down into that monstrous death hole and, if you want to get metaphorical about it, what the souls there see looking up. Surely a positive image of Ukraine’s millennia-old Judaism provides some solace.

Dirk and I hiked down the path behind the synagogue into the ravine, which must have been deep, given it now holds around 90,000 Jewish bodies, almost all of Kyiv’s pre-war Jewish population, and a similar total of Roma, Russian and Ukrainian nationalist bodies, an irony not lost on some Ukrainians. Dirk can be contrarian, but he readily joined me in a meditative “om” chant. As a Holocaust survivor’s son, who has long grappled with this apocalyptic nightmare, I felt a certain peace in Babyn Yar’s death hole: Ukrainians were finally healing from that national trauma using sophisticated art and psychology. Tragically, it was just in time for the next atrocity.

Babyn Yar’s memorial complex also has an eight-foot, dark stone menorah, which serves as its centerpiece, and a large, black stone wall, although unlike anything I’ve seen at other Holocaust memorials. Titled “Crystal Wall of Crying” and installed in 2021, it was designed by Marina Abramović, the legendary Serbian performance artist, and has dozens of large crystals, which glow with light and are embedded in the wall. A football pitch away, there is a large, circular, silver platform with a dozen silver pillars, each fitted with an eyepiece for viewing archival Holocaust footage—everything riddled with bullet holes. The Holocaust in Ukraine was largely by bullets. Neither “Psychedelic Synagogue” nor “Riddled Silver Pillars” are listed on the Memorial’s Wikipedia page, and I’ve yet to find their creators’ names or installation dates.

The 'Silver Pillars' piece at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial riddled with bullet holes, Kyiv. photo: D. Blair
“When Bucha happened, we were all crying,” I was told by Marina, a 20-something woman who works in the arts, including promoting her reserved painter boyfriend, and has an irrepressible laugh. “But we can’t stay that way. If we let them depress us, they will win.” Many Ukrainians told me they were depressed for a week or a month after February 24th but were energized by friends, the exigencies of war or Ukraine’s stoic tradition.

Marina, whom I met in Lviv but is also a refugee from Dnipro, which is half way between Kharkiv and Kherson and was being shelled as we spoke, just returned from the U.S., where she visited her mother in Minneapolis and could have applied for refugee status. “I saw only a few Ukrainian flags or signs of solidarity,” she said. “At a club, the singer said she wanted to dedicate the next song to those who have suffered. I thought she meant us, but she was referring to George Floyd.” Marina also spends all her earnings to support Ukraine’s economy.

“Some people say this being happy is wrong,” Kirill told me. “But my friends who are soldiers say, ‘We have to protect this. You must do your normal life because we are in stress, and sometimes we need to go enjoy this.’” Kirill’s friends reminded me of the Babyn Yar installations, which I came to see as suggesting we appreciate life even as we mourn mass death, learn about horrific history and fight fascism, which I also learned from my mother's experiences in the Holocaust and my father's during World War Two. The Ukrainians perfected this philosophy, evidently, over a century of being butchered mercilessly by the Soviets, Germans and now Russians.

“Some people outside the Maidan were angry with us, saying, ‘It was like a festival, not a protest,’” said the Ukrainian popstar Ruslana Lyzhychko in “Winter on Fire” (2015), an excellent documentary about the Maidan Revolution (available on Netflix). Ruslana, as she is known, was also a center-right Rada representative but fell in love with the kids of Maidan and became their celebrity spokesperson.

As the Maidan dancers prance and gambol across Ukraine’s main stage, with no official minders and only Dirk, myself and four or five others watching or filming, I realize I’m witnessing a minor miracle: Ukrainians expressing freedom, fancy and joy in the shadow of a gruesome, genocidal war. When they take a water break, however, I continue my exploration and wander up the steps to Berehynia, standing resplendent in the slight sun, gold leaf gleaming off her column and the foliage she holds above her head.

That’s when I notice, behind Berehynia’s column, the art show: two dozen, ten-foot-tall, artistic iron easels with pages from a graphic novel, "Dad" by Oleksandr Komiakhov, I find out by Google Translating a photo of the credit. The title page surprises me. It has a man and woman seemingly straight from the Burning Man festival: him heavily bearded, wearing a motorcycle helmet and holding a baseball bat; her with pierced lips and a furry cat hat and cradling a box of Molotov cocktails.

“If these are the mythical heroes of Ukraine,” I think, or something along those lines, “They really have achieved a certain free speech absolutism, and freedom in general, a democracy which enshrines art and ideas, which many Ukrainians have been enjoying for almost a decade… Many of the kids of Maidan must be in government by now.”

A street poster from Lviv is an example of the excellent, war-realted fine and graphic art in Ukraine's streets, galleries and museums. illo: #Neivanmade
“They are all phonies, patsies and spies!” would the rebuttal of many Russophiles and hard rightwingers but also some leftists, including friends of mine. Sandy Sanders, a neighbor, artist and seemingly decent guy, whom I’ve known for 20 years, denounced one of my heartfelt Facebook posts from Ukraine by insisting the Maidan Revolution was a “U.S.-financed coup” and the separatist struggle in the Donbas was a “neo-Nazi civil war.” Since he doesn’t seem like a Machiavellian manipulator, Sandy must be utterly unaware that he’s parroting Putin’s conspiracy theories, that people power is organic and hard to manipulate, or that fascist societies can't be paragons of liberty.

In fact, there’s precious little police presence in Ukraine, although martial law was declared on day one and they’re in a duel to the death with an adversary thrice their size and with a long resume of atrocity and spy craft. Indeed, three teams of pro-Russia Chechens tried to kill President Zelensky early in the war, the attack on Kyiv's secondary airport by Russian paratroopers and over 100 helicopters delivered special forces to decapitate the government, and they continue attempting to infiltrate spies, saboteurs and assassins, or to enlist them in sitio.

Nevertheless, in all of downtown Lviv, I saw only two soldiers standing guard (the 24-hour sentries at the central bank), while the nationwide curfew of 11 p.m., widely adhered to by Ukrainians, was barely enforced. On my many walks home at midnight or later, I saw few police patrols and no stops.

Five days after my first Maidan visit, I was stopped by a soldier who saw me take a selfie near a trainyard and demanded my phone and passport. I braced myself. “There is still a lot of corruption,” a few Ukrainians had warned me. Fifteen minutes later, however, I was chatting amicably in English with his commanding officer, who asked me to delete the photo and dismissed me with “Have a fun visit to Kyiv.”

Also defending Ukraine from Russian espionage is their “safe city” system, using surveillance cameras and artificial intelligence, Kirill told me. Amazingly, at the start of the war, Ukrainian cyber security held off the onslaught of Russia’s notorious hacker army. Others referred to their long, painful learning curve with Kremlin agents. “The K.G.B. killed my grandfather,” a long-haired Lviv waiter told me with a laugh, “It’s a sad story.”

As I review the Maidan's graphic novel, I am struck by the quality of Komiakhov’s drawings and visual storytelling but also that I’ll need a translator to make sense of it, so I circle back to Berehynia. Sitting next to her majestic column, surveying her sacred domain, the quarter-mile oval of Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, the name it was given after the 1991 Granite Revolution, I think about what Kirill, Artur and the others said, or I have read or viewed. Bit by bit, I begin to imagine how the Maidan looked eight years ago: teaming with tens of thousands of demonstrators—up to a million on some marches—waving signs and E.U. flags and chanting, “Ukraine is part of Europe!” “Together to the end!” and, after the police attacks, “Convict out!” directly at Yanukovych.

They also carried plastic sheets for the torrential rains. Within a few weeks, that plastic was woven into a sea of tents, barricades, lean-tos and kitchens, inhabited by a vast cross-section of Ukrainians, from tech workers and academics to dirty, young men carrying bats. One young man told me his dad went to the Maidan because “he always had to be in middle of everything,” while another said his dad promised to take him, but his mother intervened—he was only 14. The protesters discussed and debated, played guitars and drums, and DJed and danced, even though there was almost no alcohol on the Maidan. When temperatures plummeted and snow blanketed the vast encampment, they gathered around 50-gallon-drum fires.

As I ponder this critical history, about which I knew little before entering Ukraine on August 24th (its Independence Day from the Soviet Union, coincidentally), a moving moment from the Maidan Revolution—one I just learned about from the documentary “Fire in Winter”—comes to my mind.

After two weeks of protests, the Berkut riot police tried to clear the Maidan a second time. Their first attempt, on November 30th, 2013, merely shocked the protestors, who fought back fiercely or called their parents, some of whom joined them on the Maidan. The night of December 10th would be different, they realized, as they watched police buses pull up on Khreshchatyk Avenue and spit out hundreds of officers with helmets, shields and cement truncheons. As the women went to the proscenium for protection, some of the men—some wearing helmets, many carrying bats—went to face the Berkut. Meanwhile, a lone figure sprinted away, a theology student named Ivan Sydor.

The author with the military law student Diana (2nd fr rt) and her colleagues (lf-rt) Margherita, Christina and Maria. photo: D. Blair
As it happened, the official bell ringer for the 11th century Cathedral of St. Michael, on the hill north of the Maidan, was Sydor. Undoubtedly gasping for breath as he topped the belfry stairs around 1 a.m., he began ringing St. Michael’s bells furiously, as had his forbears during the Mongol invasion. Sydor rang for four hours and roused thousands, who ran to the Maidan, surrounded the Berkut and scared them off.

Thinking about Sydor’s desperate appeal, the Kyivers’ stalwart response and the bravery of the Maidan fighters, I pull my cap over my eyes, lest one of the dancers or Dirk see I’m crying.

Ukraine was much like Russia in the 1990s, devastated by “perestroika," the switch from central planning to a market economy, and plagued by bribery, mafias, assassinations and oligarchs, whose acquisition of immense wealth was inevitable. Whoever learned the tricks of post-Soviet capitalism first, from using armed gangs to seize industries to leveraging loans, manipulating laws or simply providing a decent product or service, made millions or billions. As Russia kept turning more authoritarian, corrupt and kleptocratic, however, Ukraine had three democratic revolutions, each of which increased to some degree political representation and economic opportunity and decreased corruption but especially the last.

As well as being pro -democracy and -Europe and anti -corruption and -authoritarian, the Maidan Revolution was sophisticated and centrist enough to galvanize a majority of Ukrainians. Indeed, it stimulated civic responsibility and cultural creativity, from governmental reform and motivated soldiers to music, fashion and art, and it unified Ukraine’s left, right and center. So much so, I took to remarking, “The Maidan is where Ukrainians fell in love with each other,” often to approving nods from Ukrainians.

I met another Maidan offspring extraordinaire at a bookstall in a Kyiv park, after its proprietor waved her over to translate. Clad in a camouflage uniform and cap, Diana, 22, seemed like a scout or soldier, if perhaps an officer, given her poise and long, single braid, in the Ukrainian fashion. Also from Odessa, a town laurelled for its multiculturalism and intellectuals as well as Jewish heritage, Diana and I were soon discussing current events.

“You get inspired to do something when your neighbor goes…” Diana said, gesturing wildly. “Boom?” I said. “Yes,” she said, “We learned a lot from our revolution.” “You mean Maidan?” “Yes,” she said, “We learned we can do great things. We learned that if a president doesn’t do what we want, we can take him out.”

After I invited Diana and her camo-ed colleagues, Margherita, Maria and Christina, to tea, she explained they were studying to become military lawyers. “Soon to be a growth industry,” I said, “In light of Russian war crimes,” to which Diana laughed loudly but her friends smiled politely. The Ukrainian Army is around one fifth women, some serving in combat.

“Ukraine is building a digital state,” I was told by Varvara, or Barbara, since the Ukrainian “v” is the western “b.” “It is more advanced than most of Europe—and I’ve been to Europe.” I met Varvara as she photographed food for the website of Cukor Black, a restaurant in Kryva Lypa, one of Lviv’s many courtyards or closed streets full of restaurants, bars and especially coffee shops. I was wolfing down a dish of their waffles, poached eggs, fish balls and arugula, all drizzled with crème fresh and accompanied by a delicious double cappuccino.

In fact, Lviv’s downtown and Old Town have more coffee shops per capita than any city I’ve ever seen, and a great cappuccino can be had from a kiosk on the streets of Kyiv for under a buck, thanks to the coffee craze that swept the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early 1800s. Middleclass Ukrainians can be quite foodie, with tastes ranging from sushi and stir fry to pizza and pesto or borscht, pierogi and herring, which is also traditional Jewish food.

Varvara photographing food for the website of a restaurant in Kryva Lypa, Lviv's famous food courtyard. photo: D. Blair
“I have many friends who are programmers for German companies,” continued Varvara, whose half-dreadlocked, blonde bob gives her round face an idiosyncratic beauty. “All good restaurants have this,” she added, tapping my table’s QR code, which brings up the menu on a phone. Most patrons also pay by phone, I noticed.

Another burgeoning Ukrainian business is modelling, I was told by Hanna, whom I also met in Kryva Lypa, at the record and DJ equipment shop Vinyl Club. Two days before, I saw three fashion shoots in Old Town, when it was bathed in golden afternoon light, before the onslaught of autumn rains. Hanna, who is petit and favors the blond-but-approachable look, recently returned from a shoot in Portugal but has modeled all over Europe. “Ukrainian models are popular,” she said, “Because we work hard.” Also playing a part, I suspect, is that Ukrainians are romantic, select for beauty and intermarry.

'Meet the Kids of Maidan' continues here

Posted on Dec 21, 2022 - 09:05 PM
The Benefits of Commemoration
by Doniphan Blair

Irena places a family photo on the monument at the mass grave in southern Poland containing her family, with her Uncle Nick and Cousin Stefan. photo: D. Blair
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.

I COULDN'T STOP CRYING, ALMOST
since I arrived in Mszana Dolna, a resort town of 7,000 in the scenic foothills of southern Poland’s Carpathians Mountains, probably more tears than I had shed in the entire last 20 years. Not only is Mszana Dolna where my grandfather Mendel, grandmother Miriam, aunt Irena and uncle Salek Rotkopf were murdered by the Nazis, it is the site of an ambitious attempt to memorialize, remember and revive Polish Jewish history.

Called Sztetl Mszana Dolna (see Facebook page here), the project is led by Urszula Antosz-Rekucka, a theologian, high school ethics teacher and town resident, and supported by her daughter Rachela, son Jakub, and husband Mark but also the town’s mayor, Anna Pękała, her staff— notably the tireless, always smiling Agnuska—and other Mszanians, as well as some Polish NGOs.

My family—my brother Nick, daughter Irena, nephew Stefan and niece Willa—and I decided to travel to Mszana after my mother, Tonia Rotkopf Blair, died last December 9th. We wanted to spread her ashes on her family’s mass grave but also be there on August 19th, just as we were in 1997 and 2005, to commemorate the killing of almost 900 people on that day in 1942.

We hadn't seen anyone at the site before, but this August 19th, which was a Friday, there was a crowd: Urszula, her daughter, who was translating, her husband, Mayor Pękała, and a few others, including a young Sztetl Mszana Dolna participant named Tomasz, I believe. He told my daughter he may have some Jewish roots and me that he was interested in art and was doing a lot of drawings.

That so many people showed up was no surprise. We had contacted them and told them we were coming. But it was also the 80th anniversary of the slaughter and the first meet-and-greet of an ambitious, multifaceted two-day event, which Urszula and her team had organized. It would start two days later, on Sunday, so as not to interfere with the Jewish Sabbath.

"As soon as I saw Urszula, I started crying," my brother told me.

The memorial for almost 900 people in Mszana Dolna, Poland, that the Blair family has visited since 1980, recently rebuilt by Sztetl Mszana Dolna. photo: D. Blair
Actually, we had only just found out about Urszula and the Sztelt project from Nick’s old friend John Glenn. Before driving up from Hungary with his new Hungarian wife, Judit, to chauffeur us around in his van, he had wisely thought to google “Mszana Dolna” and found Urszula’s page. “The pre-war Mszana Dolna was a typical shtetl where both Christians and Jews lived,” she writes in its heading, “We want to save the memory of it. Help me if you know anything.”

After Nick messaged her on August 18th, she responded almost immediately.

Although I was not as effected as my brother, initially, I was astounded to see the memorial, set in a small bosque on a picturesque hill two miles from town. Where there had been no sign and a dirt path into the small ravine, there was now a detailed sign at the road, a row of freshly planted trees, and a wide, 150-foot-long, brick walkway. Moreover, the memorial, built in 1946 by Jakub Weissberger, who had escaped to the east but whose entire family was slaughtered there, looked refurbished. In fact, it had been completely rebuilt the year before in an exact replica of Weissberger's original design.

“In memory of 881 Jews from the lower Mszana neighborhood murdered by Hitler’s thugs on August 19th, 1942,” Weissberger had the masons inscribe it, “Whose last words are the silence of this place.”

After our meeting at the memorial, which is called Pańskie, Polish for "our Lord's meadow," Uzrsula led us down the hill about a mile to the old Jewish cemetery. There they had built a brand new memorial honoring the four "small" mass graves geolocated by experts. Soon after our arrival, my brother told me that he felt our grandfather must be buried there. We know from a list provided to us by an older mayor of Mszana that Grandfather Mendel died before the August 19th, 1942 massacre, either of natural causes or, for some infraction or other, what can be called "bulletosis."

After the old Jewish cemetery, Urszula led us into town, behind a factory, to a third mass grave, interred with 22 Jewish youth. They had acquired a couple of guns, were planning an attack, and were probably ratted out.

Actually, we had already visited the Jewish graveyard and rebel's mass grave in 1997, while filming “Our Holocaust Vacation”, our documentary about our mother and our family, which played on American public television. We also met the mayor back then, having gone to the mayor’s office unannounced, cameras blazing. The mayor at that time, Antoni Rog, was undaunted. He calmly welcomed us in and started recounting the town's history, and opening its archives. He knew a lot about its Jewish aspect. Ultimately, he took a half a day off to show us around the graves, train yards and other sites related to the Holocaust in Mszana.

The Blair family, (lf-rt) Stefan, Willa, Nicholas, Doniphan and Irena, at the new memorial built by Sztetl Mszana Dolna at the old Jewish graveyard, where forebear Mendel Rotkopf is probably buried. photo: Kinga McInerney
Back then, the rebel memorial was in a thicket behind a factory, completely overgrown. Now the brush has been cleared and the memorial cleaned, but the factory remained, and the owner didn’t like people parking in his lot.

Generally speaking, however, the Mszanians have been extremely welcoming to my family—post-war, of course. In addition to Mayor Rog, there was Jadwiga, the woman who helped my mother and my father, Vachel, when they came the first time, in December 1980. They were sleuthing the lead of the postcard my mother received from her family in 1941—many postal services still operated during the war—which was postmarked Mszana Dolna. Jadwiga took them through the fields to the memorial and, when my mother started to cry, embraced her.

Jadwiga also invited them for a meal at her house, a quarter mile away, and did the same when they returned in 1997, along with me, my brother and his wife, Tania. We kept our cameras in their cases then, having decided to let my mother enjoy a quite chat in Polish with Jadwiga.

That was also when, walking back up the dirt path from the memorial, my father told me, “This is the last time I will be coming here. But I want to be cremated and my ashes brought here,” which we did in 2005 and why we decided to follow suit with my mother.

Although my father was an Ohio-born Protestant, he developed a strong affinity for his Jewish in-laws and their culture. His statements at the mass grave, notably “It’s a disgrace to civilization,” which we did film, are some of the more moving moments of “Our Holocaust Vacation”. When he died, we found his subway reading in his hand bag: Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz”.

I assumed I had Jadwiga’s last name and address in my address book, but unfortunately I didn’t. Before leaving New York, I should have looked through my mother’s address book, although we had trouble enough remembering her ashes and the required death certificate.

Somewhere between Pańskie and the Jewish graveyard, Urszula invited us to attend the two-day commemoration, which we were just then learning about. Alas, the rest of my family had a pretty tight itinerary, on route to Hungary, the birthplace of my brother’s mother-in-law and where my niece and daughter were flying back to America in four days. But I accepted. In fact, it was all expenses paid, I was amazed to find out, including meals and a room in the lovely hotel and spa Janda. Mszana is known for its mineral baths, massages and hiking.

Guests and onlookers at the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the mass grave in Mszana Dolna. photo: D. Blair
After meeting with Urszula, her family and the mayor, and our whirlwind tour, it was after five, and we hadn’t had lunch. They directed us to Mszana’s premier modern restaurant, The Perla, replete with a “veggie burger,” which Irena had: grilled vegetables on an organic bun with sweet potato fries. "Delicious," she said.

Then we headed back up to Pańskie and some serious sobbing.

Walking down the new brick path, Nick and Willa each carried a dirt-filled pot with the wild-looking flowers Irena found, while we were eating at the Perla, and thought Tonia would like. Although she also used Google Translate, Irena has some basic Polish, a famously difficult language, which she started learning in 1997, when she was 16 and hanging out on the streets of Lodz with the Polish kids.

By the time I took out my guitar and started singing “Si Mi Quieres Escribir”, the Spanish Civil War love song that Tonia and Vachel courted each other with, we were all crying. I was bawling so hard, the usually-reserved Stefan even came over from his father’s side to give me a hug.

After singing some of my mother’s favorite Yiddish and Spanish tunes and one Beatles song, “Help”, I read the long chapter about her family, “Miriam and Mendel”, from her book, “Love at the End of the World”, which was published when she was 95 and is available through all major bookstores. Just as when I read her chapter “Auschwitz” in the back of Birkenau death camp, her precise, poignant words conjured her spirit. This time her words also brought to life her family, noted John, who was sitting with Judit on a tree stump to one side of the grave.

By then the sun had set, and it was time to spread Tonia’s ashes, speak our piece, and do our family’s traditional meditation, a long “om.” Although I neglected to prepare, I decided to say how, no matter how difficult dealing with the Holocaust is, it was still easier than not dealing with it, largely addressing my nephew and niece, 23 and 21 respectively. Having visited Auschwitz two days earlier, Stefan and Willa were embarking on the noble quest of tackling that horrific history, as I could see be their many questions.

As tortuous as it may be, we can learn to move beyond the hate, nightmares and recrimination to a modicum of understanding. The love and beauty our family—as well as individuals across the entirety of humanity, including on the opposing side—have produced can sustain us through the darkest degenerations of humanity. In her moving, poetic statement, Irena said something similar.

People walking to the old Jewish cemetery in Mszana Dolna for the unveiling of the new memorial. photo: D. Blair
In fact, it was Miriam and Mendel’s love and my mother’s determination to build on it that led her to become the youngest nurse in the Lodz ghetto and work diligently, with almost no medicine and little food, to help heal. It also inspired her to explore romance and relationships with young men (some kissing but otherwise chaste) in the middle of history’s most massive outpouring of hate and death, including with a German pilot in the airplane factory in Freiberg, Germany. Despite the terrible trauma of losing her family and enduring Auschwitz and five and half years of total, genocidal war, that spirit of love, romance and hope somehow sustained her.

As she wrote in “Miriam and Mendel”, and I read through a blur of tears in the waning light: “My parents provided all they could but especially their ideas and their love. Although their names and identities will eventually disappear, their values will remain in my children and their children.”

As it happens, however, their names and identities will not disappear, due to the efforts of the Sztetl Mszana Dolna project. In fact, Urszula made a point of mentioning Miriam and Mendel and their experience, which she had only just learned of, as she did with the forebears of all the descendants in attendance, during the two days of commemorations, events and dinners.

It started on Sunday with a trip to the Jewish cemetery. I walked the mile and a half from town, carrying another pot of wild flowers to honor what we now believe is the grave of my grandfather. A Polish scholar living in Hamburg, where I assume she is married to a German, gave a dissertation on the cemetery, which has headstones dating back to the 17th century. She even translated some inscriptions from the Hebrew, which she reads but can not speak.

On the way back to town, I rode with the talkative Polish woman we met on Friday at the graveyard, where she was painting enamel black the cemetery fence in preparation for the event. Named Kinga, after the 13th century Polish queen who renounced royalty to become a good Samaritan nun, her last name is McInerney, since her husband is Irish—yet more intermarrying, although they're both mathematicians.

Kinga hails from an upper-class Polish family, which lost everything except a vacation home in Mszana, due to their obsession with art and painting. A devout but modern Catholic, who can’t abide the literalists, Kinga is fascinated with the stories of the Old Testament.

To fortify ourselves against the inclement weather, which was producing a light rain, we dipped into a sweet shop with her husband and two cute, precocious daughters. Then we went to the teach-in part of the Sztetl Mszana Dolna program. Held in Mszana’s open air marketplace by the river, there were kids' activities, like learning to write Hebrew letters, and adult explorations, like Urszula’s recounting of Mszana’s history.

Jakub Antosz-Rekucka translates for his mother, Urszula (lf), and a Polish scholar on Jewish culture at the old Jewish cemetery. photo: D. Blair
“Mszana was co-created by Jews, who were a quarter of the population, some figuring among the community’s leaders,” she said, or something in that vein, a few times over the course of the weekend.

The market event climaxed with a performance of an excellent Klezmer band, which consisted of a woman singer/violinist and an accordionist and bassist. They did “Tumbalaliaka” and “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön”, two songs Tonia and I used to sing together, although not with their jazzy overtones.

Afterwards, we repaired to Mszana’s famous “wine cellar” restaurant, a welcome relief since the temperature had dropped, and I was in shorts. Ironically, that was where we ate after filming in Pańskie in ’97 and found their large, fancy chairs funny.

The dinner was for about 50, including the musicians, the organizers and the descendants of the victims: Hanna, granddaughter of Jakub Weissberger, who built the original memorial, Saul, who recited the Kaddish, and his wife Denise from Florida, Svi and his wife and her two sisters from Israel, and others. As is Urszula’s modus operandi, she thanked everyone by name, cited a few details about their forbears and expressed preternatural warmth.

The actual commemoration was the next day. Since it started at 3:00, I had time see Antoni Rog, the ex-mayor, and his son Jakub. We met at the Perla, over another excellent meal. Rog looked great, after some shoulder surgery, although he still smoked, which remains popular in Poland. Now retired, he keeps busy taking care of his grandson, building him an elaborate play structure, but also helping resettle some of the 200 Ukrainian refugees housed in Mszana.

“Although we have taken in almost three million refugees,” he told me, Jakub translating, “We don’t have any refugee camps. They are mostly with families.” He also gave me some pessimistic prognostications on the war.

The commemoration at Pańskie was attended by well over 100 people, including over a dozen of the victim's descendants, three rabbis, two Hasidic brothers from the U.S. and one from Israel, the German consulate in Cracow, many other dignitaries, and dozens of interested Poles from the community. It featured the Israeli rabbi’s sonorous recitation of the Kaddish and an honor guard of Polish scouts, boys and girls.

It continued at the Jewish cemetery with the unveiling of the new monument, the rabbi doing “Psalm 23”, one of my favorites, and an open mic. I took the opportunity to thank the generosity and vision of Urszula and the other Mszanians, whom I noted had always treated my family well. As we were leaving the cemetery, Urszula grabbed my hand and held it as we walked back to the car, a silent but solid and deeply appreciated expression of solidarity and affection.

POlish kids learn how to write Hebrew at a teach-in at the town's open air market that included a history lecture and a Klezmir band. photo: D. Blair
Later that evening, at the group dinner at the Mayor’s office, Urszula delivered an hour plus lecture, worthy of a PhD dissertation, on the Jews in Mszana. She went into detail on many of the families and figures, like Jakub Weisberger, who built the memorial and whose granddaughter Hanna was in attendance.

“He build the memorial,” Hanna had told me earlier, “so the Poles couldn’t say they did it, which is good—unless they were like Urszula,” she added.

Urszula also told the story of a Jewish man who moved to Mszana, fell in love with a Christian woman and married her, even though his family disowned him. Then, during the war, when it became apparent what was afoot, he convinced a gentile friend in Cracow to claim he had an affair with his wife, and write a letter to that effect, which would prove to the Nazis their daughter was not genetically Jewish.

The theme of deep intimate relations between Jews and gentiles, and how it formed Mszana, was one Urszula kept repeating. Apparently, it was something she had to work hard to uncover, as it was only recently Mszanians started to open up about it. Although Mayor Rog showed us in ’97 a book written by a Mszanian by hand about the war years, Urszula’s quest for living testimony had to wait until one elderly man began talking. Then others joined in.

Having become interested in Judaism and Jewish culture while studying theology at Cracow’s famed Jagiellonian University, Urszula hit upon her bold historical project around 2000.

Another amazing story she told concerned Mszana’s Catholic pastor, Father Stabrawa. Apparently, he had been somewhat antisemitic before the war, caught up in that evil spirit, which seized Poland in the 1930s, after Marshal Piłsudski, who was a dictator of sorts but friendly to the Jews, faded from power.

Once the war started, however, Stabrawa reconsidered his views and became friends with the rabbi of the synagogue across Mszana’s main square from his church. Indeed, his feelings and actions advanced so far, he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, about 60 miles away. He was executed on August 17, 1942, two days before the rabbi and his congregation were mass murdered at Pańskie.

I cracked a tear as Urszula related that story, which highlighted both her interest in Jew-gentile connections and her fearlessness in addressing Polish malfeasance, when she noted Stabrawa had been an antisemite. As it happened, I was in Auschwitz on August 17th and saw some priests carrying flowers to honor Stabrawa.

Urszula Antosz-Rekucka speaks with Hanna the granddaughter of Jakub Weissberger, who built the first memorial for the mass grave in 1946. photo: D. Blair
It is the redemptive journey through harsh opposition or radical change that really tugs the heart, rather than the steady path to sainthood. Indeed, the only time my mother cried during the filming of “Our Holocaust Vacation” was when she recalled her chaste but romantic interaction with the German pilot. He brought her silk stockings, no less! Although she really needed a loaf of bread, his gift reminded her that romance can bridge the impossible divide, which feeds the soul.

Since Urszula does not speak fluent English, her torrent of words were translated by her daughter Rachela but mostly by her son Jakub, a herculean task he enacted with humility, grace and passion. Indeed, I got to know Jakub in those three days, starting with sitting next to him at the first dinner on Saturday night. That was when he explained the noise from upstairs at the restaurant was a Polish wedding, which I snuck up to see for myself. It included blasting music, strobe lights, wild dancing and serious drinking.

Jakub started helping Urszula in his teens, about 15 years ago. Now he is taking his PhD at the 650-year-old Jagiellonian University, which his sister and father as well as mother attended. His dissertation: How Polish singers misinterpret Bob Dylan’s lyrics when singing his songs, which are popular there.

He also works for a medical journal specializing in the issues surrounding Auschwitz. In the early 1960s, it was the first to publish the Jagiellonian researchers who identified “survivor trauma.” American psychologists only followed in 1964.

At the commemoration at Pańskie, between bouts of translation, Jakub whipped out an accordion and played a haunting melody of his own composition. In the course of our time together, we had fascinating discussions about his mother, the Holocaust, current Polish politics, the Polish psyche, Dylan and Witold Gombrowicz (my favorite Polish author), often accompanied by Justina, his also very interesting and beautiful fiancée.

Doniphan with Antoni Rog, the old mayor of Mszana who befriended the family when they were making their movie 'Our Holocaust Vacation' in 1997, who now works placing Ukrainian refugees around Mszana. photo: Jakub Rog
What a weekend, from copious tears and transcendent truths to feelings of kinship and community and, perhaps most important, how to wield the redemptive power of commemoration. One week later, I am only beginning to absorb it, which is fortuitous for the next leg of my journey.

On Wednesday August 24th, I entered Ukraine.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on Aug 27, 2022 - 03:32 AM
Planting a Tree with Ferlinghetti
by d’Arci Bruno

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, circa 1955, put his money where his mouth was in terms of literature, law and love. Photo: courtesy City Lights
With Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s passing, on February 22nd, 2021, when he was 101 years of age, the last of the big beats passed into history. Arguably not the movement’s greatest writer or painter, he was one of its greatest individuals, its strongest stand-up guy and its most responsible organizer.

Ferlinghetti started City Lights Bookstore in 1953, legally defended Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” from censorship prosecution in ’57, and helped hundreds of other authors, artists, friends and causes. While Jack Kerouac died at 47 from alcohol poisoning and bitterness, the Italian-Jewish American Ferlinghetti, who was orphaned as a child and raised by relatives in Europe, where he studied the classics and became a poet and painter, lived a long, lovely life, exemplifying the best of humanism as well as beat culture.

cineSOURCE has covered Ferlinghetti before, here and here. We’re honored to have the Bay Area artist d’Arci Bruno tell her story of how Ferlinghetti touched her life.

Author d'Arci Bruno beneath the famous Bixbee Bridge which marks the entrance to 'the real' Big Sur and is near the property of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Photo: courtesy d. Bruno
IN 2005, I WAS LIVING WITH MY THEN BOY-
friend, Al, an Italian musician and designer, in the carriage house behind a famous musician, who knew quite a lot of artists, musicians and literati of note in the San Francisco Bay Area. The house was located in Bernal Heights and had a large, lovely garden, in which many parties were thrown, and it was there that we were lucky enough to meet many special and talented people.

I am not exactly sure on how Al met Mr. Lawrence Ferlinghetti or the subject of carpentry at his Big Sur cabin came up, but I do know that a work deal was sealed when it was discovered that Al and Lawrence’s son shared a name: Lorenzo. Kismet!

As Italians go, this was all that was needed to ensure all would be well. I was added to the mix as the “helper,” a good cook and organized camper, with many useful skills listed on my growing resume. I am also Italian, so there you go—perfetto!

At the time, I was the overworked manager and merchandiser of a popular women’s clothing store in Half Moon Bay owned by one of my best friends, Danette Pugliese, the bedraggled new mother of twin boys. I was also taking care of another best friend, Diane, who was losing her year-long battle with ovarian cancer. Hence, the prospect of spending two weeks of solitude in Big Sur sounded very appealing.

A plan was made to go to Lawrence’s property to scope out the needed work on May 7th—the Saturday of Mother’s Day weekend, 2005—and meet Lawrence there on Sunday.

The drive down to Big Sur is a beautiful one, and it was a glorious sunny day when we set out down the coast. We stopped at the Carmel Highlands General Store for some snacks and a bit more gas—the Coast Highway is a bit desolate between the little settlements—and, by the time we got to the turnoff at the Bixby Bridge, we were ready for a beer and a snack.

After our refrishments, we had a gate code to figure out, halfway down the dusty dirt road, and another one at the property gate. Al was always nervous with codes and alarms, since he tends to set them off, but these went without a hitch. We were let into a sunny clearing surrounded by trees, with two darling, slightly rundown cabins sitting right next to each other.

Ferlinghetti circa 1987. Photo: courtesy City Lights

I had to pee, so I went looking for the outhouse, down a short path through some trees. It was old, and the wood had turned dark and silver over time from the elements—a classic! I swung open the door and scanned for spiders and critters and installed the TP roll I brought. I left the door open to take in the view, which was peaceful, sunny and full of spring.

As my eyes adjusted to the dark inside, I began to notice visitor’s names carved into the wooden walls. Suddenly, one stood out—Jack Kerouac. Before that moment, I must confess, I had not really made the connection to where I was. But sitting there, with my pants pulled down, I was hit by a lightning bolt of historical awareness.

My mouth hung open in awe. I reached out and touched the name with my finger. I don’t know if it was actually carved by him, or done in homage or as a joke, but still—this WAS the place he stayed! It WAS here he wrote the book “Big Sur” (1962).

I ran back up the path to tell Al what I had found, and we began to explore the rest of the property. There were three structures in the compound: the Old West Hotel, which was Lawrence’s cabin, the Kerouac Cabin, located about 15 feet to the right, and another cabin across the clearing and up a short path, the Meditation Cabin. We were there to work on the Old West Hotel and the Meditation cabin.

The Old West Hotel is a two-story structure designed to look like the Old West, with a bedroom with a balcony on the top floor and a fireplace and main room on the bottom, with a wrap-around porch perfect for staying cool when the sun is high and playing guitar and drinking wine/whiskey when it gets low.

It was very charming on the outside, but bare-plywood, cold-bachelor, anti-chic on the inside. No heat, insulation or running water—rustica, molto rustica!

The Kerouac Cabin, on the other hand, was the opposite: very plain and square on the outside, but extremely charming—though completely rundown—on the inside. It had been overrun by mice and other crawly creatures over the years and had that musty, unmistakable rodent urine smell as soon as I opened the door.

Ferlinghetti in front of the 'cabin' he called the Old West Hotel, circa 1998. Photo: courtesy City Lights

It was dark and slightly damp (foggy, wet coastal air) but there was a stone fireplace, a little bed, dresser, some shelves and table and chair. The romantic me imagined living there: chopping wood for the fire, gathering berries for a pie, drinking tea by candlelight, while reading a good book in the evening—a little like Steinbeck’s Doc in “Cannery Row”.

I fell in love with it, but it was way beyond any modest help that I could give it, so I shut the door. But I could not for one minute imagine the surly, drunk writer who had made it famous ever living there, or loving it for what it was.

We unloaded the rest of our stuff from the truck and decided to go and find the beach while the sun was still out, shoving a couple of beers and the bag of chips into a backpack. We found a little path to Bixby Creek, where we could get water, and followed Lawrence’s directions to the beach by walking along the path at the end of the gated road, and then going down under the Bixby Bridge.

The first house directly behind Lawrence was a giant, modern concrete-and-glass monstrosity, with fancy landscaping going out to the surrounding poison oak, coastal trees and scrubby plants. It looked way out of place amidst the old vacation cabins and small older houses.

The path started off in the dark canopy of trees, surrounded by lush ivy and sloped gently downward, nestled next to the creek and winding through the canyon under the bridge to the beach. There was a funny, little altar near the end of the trail, a place where people tied and propped up things that they found on the beach. It was a fun and whimsical art gallery of sorts, and I enjoyed looking at all of the treasures.

Just after the “Treasure Tree,” the path opened up to the beach and view of the ocean right underneath the beauty of the bridge. Al and I poked around the whole area, skipped rocks, took off our shoes and sat on a log and drank the beers in the afternoon sunshine—heaven!

As the sun began to fade, we wandered back up the path and set about getting some food ready and sorting out our sleeping gear. The cabin was cozy warm from the fire we built, and the bottle of wine we shared did not hurt.

Bruno hard at work on the Old West Hotel. Photo: courtesy d/ Bruno
I slept great, a heavy, dreamy sleep that you only get with crickets and fresh air. In the morning, I made some good strong coffee on my camp stove and we got ready to meet our host, who was due to arrive at 11 am.

I had never met Lawrence before, so I was a bit excited. I set about tidying stuff up, while Al got out his measuring tape and began to take notes regarding the job: insulating and covering the walls of the Old West Hotel with cedar tongue-and-groove—a live-in cigar box, I thought!

Mr. Ferlinghetti arrived right on time, with a big tree sticking out of his truck. He got out, waved and smiled and shouted, "Hello!" He grabbed a couple of Trader Joe’s shopping bags from his passenger seat and set them on the porch: tins of black beans, some tortillas and a few bottles of Two Buck Chuck Cabernet Sauvignon.

He was very spry for his age, which I guessed to be mid-80s. His eyes were pale and a bit watery, but they held a mischievous sparkle and you could tell that he liked to laugh and have a good time. He was tall and in good shape, which I think he must have owed to his spartan diet of beans, tortillas and wine. His handshake was firm and warm and he grabbed my offered hand with both of his at once.

This is going to be OK, I thought. I asked him if he wanted any lunch, and I fixed us all something while he and Al went over the details of what he wanted done. I called them over when lunch was ready and Lawrence opened a bottle of Chuck and began to tell us stories and tales about all the happenings in Bixby Canyon.

And then he asked me if I would like to help him plant a tree.

“The tree in your truck?” I asked. That was the only time I saw him vexed, as he began to talk about the changes happening in his backyard: the big modern concrete house, the noise, the trucks, the dust, the monstrosity of it all—progress in all of its ugly glory.

Ferlinghetti (rt) and Jack Kerouac in San Francisco, circa 1957. Photo: courtesy City Lights

He wanted to plant a quick growing, bushy tree to block the view of the big, ugly house. He had bought a buckeye, and he told me a story about why this particular tree, but I can’t remember it now.

At the spot where he wanted to plant it, all I saw was fountains of poison oak spurting out of the ground and spilling off of the bushes. I asked him if he owned any dishwashing gloves, and lo-and-behold he scrounged a pair up. I began to gingerly snip and chop a clearing so we could dig a big hole. I was snipping away, using pruners with the long handles, to remove each offending piece. My only goal from that point on was TO NOT GET Poison Oak.

Al, in the meantime, was on the phone ordering supplies and finding out where to get what in the area, and making lists of lists, and more lists, of stuff we would need. Lawrence also wanted some work done on the Mediation Cabin—mouse proofing and stair fixing—so that had to be measured, too. Lawrence opened a second bottle of Charles Shaw’s finest and got a shovel.

Lawrence began to ask me questions about myself and offered me a glass of wine, which I declined until Operation Poison Oak was finished. He pulled up a stool and told me about his son and his friend’s visit to the cabin. I had noticed two surfboards at the Old West Hotel, one yellow and one purple. I imagined the boys carrying them through the woods on the windy trail to the sea for some fun on hot days.

I asked him about running the book store and we chatted a lot about that. I had been a customer for many years and told him that City Lights was always one of my SF Tour highlights when anybody came to town. We talked about the city changing and both got a little wistful.

I began to dig, mainly because I liked hearing his stories, and I wanted him to keep talking. I took him up on the offer of a glass of vino and we spent a good two hours chatting and flirting (thanks Chuck!) and taking turns digging. When the hole was big enough, Al helped him get the tree, and they put it into place. We replaced the dirt and went to the creek and got a couple buckets of water and gave it a good drink. I often wonder if the tree grew big and bushy enough to hide that awful house from his view.

After we were done planting the tree, we made a plan to begin work the following week, and we all left to go back home to the city. I never met Mr. Ferlinghetti again.

Ferlinghetti's guitar in the Wild West Hotel after Bruno and her boyfriend Al toungue-and-grooved the walls. Photo: d. Bruno
Al and I worked hard for two weeks on the property. I removed quite a bit of poison oak but never got itchy once. We did a really nice job on the cabins, and I heard afterwards that Lawrence was very pleased with the result.

Every morning that I was there, I touched the name Jack Kerouac in the outhouse like a ritual. It was like touching history, and I am part of this history, even though hardly anybody will ever even know I was there.

Maybe the Buckeye remembers.

d’Arci Leigh Bruno Rhine is an artist, educator and all-around adventurer taking a break from the Bay Area in Seattle, who can be reached .

Posted on Jul 07, 2022 - 03:54 PM
Ukraine Fights for Freedom in Song, Film and Television
by Doniphan Blair

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Members of the Kalush Orchestra, winners of this year's Eurovision festival, in their trademark ethnic punk. photo courtesy: the Kalush Orchestra
AMID THE DELUGE OF NEWS FROM
Ukraine, much remains hidden. One little known fact: Ukrainians fight so fiercely because they were slaughtered so mercilessly, literally eight times in the last century, from the Nazi invasion and Holocaust to the Soviet Revolution and fabricated famine (see cineSOURCE article).

Nor do we appreciate how they assuage trauma through art.

On top of Ukraine’s many museums, opera houses and folkloric art centers, there has been an explosion of youth culture, from bands and raves to skaters and fashionistas, and regular culture, from television shows and films to comedy clubs—even during the war—or Kyiv’s lauded PinchukArtCentre, four floors of contemporary art capped by One Love, the popular espresso bar.

In fact, a renaissance started after Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution, the ousting of a pro-Russia president in 2014 by months of street protests—not a US-financed coup, as some of my lefty friends continue to claim. It was precisely Ukraine’s robust, 60s-style democracy that drove "Pootie-Poot”—W’s pet name for the tyrant—so mad, he invaded Ukraine days after the closing of the Sochi Winter Olympics, his lavish showcase of Russian success.

In other words, the Russo-Ukrainian War is also an “art war,” pitting creativity, democracy and hope against cynicism, oligarchy and conspiracy theories.

No wonder Ukraine’s entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, “Stefanie” by the Kalush Orchestra, won on May 14th. Or “Klondike” by writer-director Maryna Er Gorbach took best director and grand jury prizes at Sundance and the Seattle International Film Festival, respectively. Or two months earlier, Netflix started streaming “Servant of the People”, a television series starring none other than Volodymyr Zalenskyy, the comedian who became president, first in fiction then in real life, a post-modern success story binding art and politics.

The Kalush Orchestra epitomizes Ukraine’s traditional combination of ancient and current, in this case folk music and hiphop, replete with a break dancer in an ethnic-art body suit, MC KylymMen, which means “carpet man.” Even though Eurovision is half decided by popular vote and Europeans had a pressing, nonmusical reason to support Ukraine, Kalush’s “Stefanie” was infinitely more authentic than England’s operatic extravaganza, Sam Ryder’s “Space Man,” or Spain’s third placer, a standard, Latin-rhythmed seduction song.

Written by front man Oleh Psiuk about his mother, “Stefanie" evokes motherland but doesn’t mention war, as per Eurovision's prohibitions against politics. The day after Russia’s invasion, in fact, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which runs the contest from the safety of Geneva, Switzerland, ruled Russian musicians could still compete. They recanted the next day.

This is the third time Ukraine took Eurovision gold, in fact, rather impressive for a 30-year-old country competing against 44 others, some with world-famous music industries like England. It was the eighth time, however, it triggered political controversy, according to a Politico article.

Dustups ranged from Ukraine’s 2019 nominee being forced out for having performed in Russia—the Russo-Ukraine War was five years old by then—to criticisms of the single-named Jamala, who won in 2016 with “1944”. About Soviets deporting to Siberia a quarter million of her people, the Crimean Muslim Tatars, “1944” obviously referenced Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, but EBU ruled it fact and history not politics.

Ironically, Ukraine’s first Eurovision win, in the spring of 2004, was with an utterly apolitical tune with nonsense lyrics. But a few months later, after a pro-Russia candidate tried to steal the election, street protests started and turned into the Orange Revolution. When Ukraine hosted the following year, as per Eurovision's tradition, and the Ukrainian band Green Jolly sang “No to falsifications, no to lies,” the EBU made them censor the fraudster’s name.

After Russia was excluded from this year’s Eurovision, its hackers tried to disrupt the vote, in standard Russian tradition, but failed, according to Italian police. Hours after Kalush’s closing performance, Psiuk kissed his girlfriend goodbye and flew home to join the army and Carpet Man. Already in uniform, he wasn’t even granted leave to perform at Eurovision.

With “Stefanie” booming through bunkers and trenches as well as clubs and headsets across Ukraine, Kalush’s efforts both artistic and military will help determine the outcome of the struggle. Sadly, its brutality and probable longevity convinced EBU to cancel the 67th Eurovision next year in Kyiv, and hand that role to runner-up England. On May 30th, Kalush sold their crystal microphone Eurovision trophy for $900,000 to WhiteBit, a cryptocurrency firm, to buy drones for the Ukrainian Army.

Oksana Cherkashyna, playing Irka, in front of her bombed out house in Eastern Ukraine, from the new Ukrainian movie “Klondike”. photo courtesy: Maryna Er Gorbach
"Klondike”, by writer/director Maryna Er Gorbach and produced by a Turkish filmmaker, Mehmet Bahadir Er, who happens to be her husband, is an indie masterpiece, in the manner of Cronenberg’s 1996 “Crash”: spooky, realistic and artistic, but with the added slam of being pointedly political and matriarchal.

I was lucky enough to catch it at the San Francisco International Film Festival on May 1st, after racing across town to grab my pro-Ukraine T-shirt and convincing the Berkeley Museum Theater staff to let me in, even though I just lost my driver’s license, which was required for entry along with a vaccination card.

Gorbach uses a slow, dramatic build of human interactions, in perfectly framed shots, often filmed at the glowing height of magic hour, to portray the bloated-with-baby Irka trying to run a small farm with her gruff but loving husband, Tolik, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. That was where the war started in 2014 and today is the site of a World War Two-style artillery duel killing thousands.

Irka is played to smoldering, slowly empowering effect by Oksana Cherkashyna, in her first starring role, who showed up to the Berkeley Museum screening as if this was a regular film festival tour. Unfortunately, her co-star Sergey Shadrin, who rendered Tolik rather nicely, couldn’t make it, having died of natural causes shortly before the film’s final cut was finished.

“Klondike”, the title of which suggests the Russian invasion is a resource grab, starts in low light and mystery, in a 360-degree pan around a large, modestly-modern farmhouse which, we eventually realize, is missing its front, sheared off by a shell. Bit by bit, more and more war intrudes, from Russian soldiers appropriating livestock to a body from Malaysian Flight 17—shot down on July 17, 2014, by Russians not Ukrainians, as some Russophiles still say—landing on their doorstep, or a wing of the shot-down airplane being hauled away in the background.

There is also the dramatic and horrific denouement, which wraps up the story of the pregnancy, and the arrival of Irka’s brother, inspired by the Euromaidan Revolution a few months earlier, who shows up to bring her back to Kyiv for safety and a normal childbirth. One lovely bit has Irka filling the samovar for tea only to, when her brother and husband come to blows, douse them with boiling water, as Gorbach tightens the noose on a political, personal and character-driven story.

Gorbach graduated from the Andrzej Wajda School of Film Directing in Warsaw, Poland, after studying at Kyiv’s National Theatre and the Cinema & Television University. Barely 40, she now has four features under her belt, including “Omar and Us” (2019), about a Turkish soldier’s tough return to civilian life, written by hubby Mehmet, with whom she codirected two more, the 2013 “Love Me”, a lushly-detailed, trouble-in-paradise romance, and the comedy “No Ofsayt” (2009).

At the screening, Cherkashyna was beautiful and bubbly—so unlike her bedraggled Irka as to be unrecognizable—until I asked her if the filmmakers got push back from portraying successionist, Russian-speaking Ukrainians sympathetically. Humanizing villains is standard to drama but hard with war-torn audiences. A dark cloud descended and her explanation drifted through a few questions until she said something like, “I didn’t realize until this invasion that so many of my country people were heroes.”

She is one of them, of course, along with Gorbach, attempting to hold murderers accountable through imaginative storytelling in our new era of hybrid warfare, where we must fight cyberwar and conspiracy theories as well as tanks and missiles. Given the success of “Klondike”, Gorbach will undoubtedly go on to produce an epic about Ukraine’s underdog army and their Churchillian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who played the president in his production company's 'Servant of the People', in the apartment his character shares with his mother, niece and father. photo courtesy: Studio Kvartal
Obviously, the most incredible art war achievement emerging from Ukraine, if not history in general, is how a comedian created a television show that launched him into the presidency just in time to become a fearless wartime president, a tricky turnaround he executed brilliantly.

Zelenskyy plays Vasily Petrovych Goloborodko, a high school history teacher, who is filmed ranting to a colleague about the upcoming election and how no one cares, “we always vote for the lesser of two assholes,” and he could do a much better job. When the kid with the phone camera uploads it and it goes viral, his students enter him unbeknownst in the presidential election.

“Servant of the People”, which ran for three seasons (2015-19) and 51 episodes, 40 to 90 minutes in length, is a sophisticated satire, dry humor marked by occasional absurdity and elevated by Zalensky’s excellent acting and resonant voice, skills which translated well to his war-time performance (see it on Netflix here).

It also includes a family sitcom, since Goloborodko, undoubtedly a joke name in Ukrainian, lives at home with his cabbie father, professor mother, and comely niece. Indeed, although the first episode opens with mysterious power players agreeing to let the Ukrainians choose their own president for once, its first major scene starts with Vasily’s father arguing in front of their flat, which wakes him up.

Realizing he is late for class, Goloborodko has to hustle to make coffee, iron his shirt, and usurp his niece to get a turn on the toilet. Indeed, it is there, reading peacefully, that he is interrupted by the arrival of the slick, statuesque Prime Minister Chuiko, played to perfection by Stanislav Boklan, and his entourage who inform Goloborodko he’s been elected president.

Even before that opening, however, the title sequence shows a Kyiv not unlike my hometown of Oakland, with ships and cranes, industrial and all-glass buildings, multi-laned freeways and bike paths, along which Vasily bikes to school—portraying a normalcy that makes the country’s collapse into total war that much more poignant.

While President Goloborodko is the central story, “Servant of the People” keeps flashing back to his life as a teacher or at home, where his family immediately starts leveraging his new position and income. Even though it periodically slips into farce or slapstick, Ukrainian life is satirized slyly, contrasting the opulence of being president and corruption of the oligarchs with an average honest man simply doing the right thing.

Ukrainian politics is skewered mercilessly, however, from an opposing candidate refusing to concede to the former president refusing to leave, hardly a joke in today’s America. The latter impasse leads to Episode 4’s tour de force climax as Prime Minister Chuiko tries to coax his old friend the ex-president—now drunk, dissembling and exhibiting the homoeroticism common but denied across Eastern Europe—to exit the presidential palace.

When Chuiko gives up, saying “Send in the SWAT team,” Goloborodko takes over, drawing on a technique he used to oust his predecessor at the high school: a hilarious pissing contest with each trying to out-quote the other with old sayings.

“Servant of the People” was so immediately popular, Zalenskyy and his production company produced a feature film, “Servant of the People 2” (2016), between season one and two. About President Goloborodko outsmarting the oligarchs in order to reform the country and get IMF aid, it gives the lie to claims that those aspirations were imposed by the West.

Zelenskyy is a talented producer as well as entertainer and actor, who started a comedy troupe, Kvartal 95, with his high school friends, and helped it grow into Studio Kvartal, the producer of famous film and television shows. He also toured Russia doing standup (he's a native Russian-speaker), won Ukraine’s “Dancing with the Stars” in 2006, and acted in eight movies.

Not only was “Servant of the People” smack on the nose, Zelenskyy campaigned for president by presenting his comedy act. While this oddly parallels Trump’s use of his “Apprentice” fame and character to win the American presidency, Zelenskyy clowned honestly and then put joking aside to voice sincere anti-corruption and humanist views, the very opposite of the cynicism and conspiracy theories of Trump and Putin. Indeed, Zelenskyy is the archetypal anti-Trump as well as anti-Putin, neither of whom can give let alone take a joke.

Ukraine also figured in the Trump Administration, of course, from Trump hiring to manage his campaign Paul Manafort, fresh from his years promoting pro-Russian Ukrainian candidates, to his blaming Russian election interference on Ukraine and the notorious “perfect phone call,” when he tried to blackmail Zelenskyy to dig up dirt on the Bidens in exchange for desperately needed military equipment. Zelenskyy held the American president at bay with comparative ease, however, given he was a good Jewish boy who got a law degree before venturing into comedy.

As if “Servant of the People”’s making-of story wasn’t spectacular enough, it morphed into the Servant of the People political party whose head has become an international hero, leading not only Ukraine’s storied defense against the most terrible tyrant of our time but a new enthusiasm for democracy, after it has been in decline from Hungary and Poland to Brazil and The Philippines. Yes, Zelenskyy needs high tech artillery and other supplies as soon as possible, but Ukrainian song, television and film is more than able to inspire his people as well as the rest of us, telling that story for the near future and perhaps all of time.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on Jul 07, 2022 - 02:34 PM
Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs
by Doniphan Blair

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Trump's speech on January 6th, 2020, will surely go down as one of the greatest public brainwashing performances in history, equal to Hitler at Nuremberg. illo: D. Blair
With all the recent revelations, from Trump's multipronged conspiracy and attempt to lead his armed militia's march on the capitol to the reemergence of Q on June 24th, this article, written for publication on January 6th, 2022, would be begging for an update if most of its basic facts didn't remain so pertinent.

PEOPLE WHO BLAME DONALD TRUMP'S
behavior on narcissism or authoritarianism often neglect to note his political career has been based entirely on conspiracy theories. Indeed, he endorsed birtherism, the allegation that Obama was born in Kenya, specifically to bolster his 2012 presidential run. It may seem like an odd plank for a political platform, but conspiracism had become popular on the left, after 9/11 and among the anti-vaxxers, and on the right, with prejudices and phobias dating back to the 1950s and beyond.

Moreover, Trump is the scion of a conspiracy theory dynasty. He was best friends with Roy Cohn, the notorious New York lawyer and fixer but also national player and righthand man of Senator Joseph McCarthy during his ‘50s witch hunt for communists and gays. McCarthy’s political career was also based entirely on conspiracy theories.

Whether or not there was a sexual relationship, Cohn knew McCarthy intimately. McCarthy’s big mistake was not destabilizing America during the darkest days of the Cold War, according to Cohn, nor being addicted to gambling, alcohol and morphine, but drinking his own Kool-Aid. Believing CTs is for followers, Cohn realized, while CT leaders must remain free to invent and adapt. They also have to avoid the self-destruction of believing their own lies.

It was love at first sight in 1973 when Cohn met the 27-year-old Trump, who was searching for a lawyer to beat a federal probe of his company’s racist practices. Along with hiring Cohn, Trump adopted his transactionalism and public tactics—attack first, counter attack twice as hard, never admit error or defeat, always blame someone, file endless law suits, delay or deny payments, don’t pay taxes, donate to politicians, and manipulate the media—but also his secret hand: conspiracy theories.

According to McCarthy’s latest biographer, the deep-digging Larry Tye, in “Demagogue” (2020), “The aging Cohn taught the fledgling Trump the transcendent lessons he had learned from his master, McCarthy—how to smear opponents and contrive grand conspiracies.”

After becoming birtherism’s celebrity spokesperson, Trump went on to develop “grand” conspiracy theories about Mexicans and Muslims, but he came to specialize in voter fraud. Conspiracy theories about election theft are comparatively easy to initiate since the vote counting appears hidden in back rooms or on hard drives. Indeed, immediately after the 2012 election, Trump tweeted that Barack Obama "lost the popular vote by a lot," even though he won by five million votes, and that the Democrats stole the election from Mitt Romney. At the 2016 Iowa caucus, he denounced Republican Senator Ted Cruz for ballot stuffing and, a few months later, insisted the Democrats would steal the general election if he won.

On Election Day 2016, Trump supporters scrutinized polling places and trumped-up minor irregularities, which was promoted as “Stop the Steal” by Republican trickster Roger Stone, Trump’s campaign manager but also an old friend and fellow disciple of Roy Cohn. Trump won, mooting that point, but still availed himself of the opportunity to accuse the Democrats of stealing the popular vote, simply because such claims abide a cardinal rule of conspiracy theories: reinforce them relentlessly.

Although his allies and opponents alike attributed his narcissism or fear of losing, four years later, he campaigned on the conspiracy-based proposition that Democrats would cheat again, and he claimed a “landslide” victory on Election Night. He then proceeded to mount one of the greatest false narrative indoctrination campaigns in history, despite having failed to show a shred of evidence for election fraud in scores of court appearances.

Trump debuted his CT team on November 19th, 2020, at the Republican Party headquarters, a foreboding sign for that venerable institution. In addition to his blundering but equally conspiratorial lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, it featured the fast-talking Sidney Powell and her elaborate stories about votes being changed by Venezuela, China and voting machine companies. Powell’s CTs came directly from influencers in QAnon, the dark-fantasy conspiracy cult, which had hit the news six months earlier and shocked many Americans with its strangeness and number of adherents.

Trump unveiled his own “in depth” conspiracy analysis on December 2nd. Although his speech was so lie-laden not even Fox News carried it, its repetitive, declarative sentences were a master class in public brainwashing. Trump’s CT was based simply on voting law changes and mail-in ballot fraud, but he allowed Powell to introduce elaborate international intrigues two weeks earlier to provide his fans a full-service CT emporium replete with the fantastic stories CTers love to entertain.

When Trump didn’t concede, many Republicans and most Americans were stunned, and they found his theories ludicrous. Alas, he had been working on CTs for years; he knew his audience intimately; and he persisted monomaniacally. Assisted by Republican politicians and lawyers but also dirty tricksters and CT professionals, from his old friend Roger Stone to America’s premier conspiracy monger, Alex Jones, who started the popular show “Infowars” and pioneered the theory 9/11 was an inside job, he easily convinced naïve Trumpers, radical rightwingers and mystical QAnons. Indeed, many of all three cohorts were overjoyed when he announced the Stop the Steal movement was back, and he was holding a rally for it in Washington D.C. on January 6th.

The Insurrection became America’s biggest political crisis since the Civil War and the largest crime scene outside of 9/11 but also proof of Trump’s CT powers. It fulfilled many of his predictions and provided a dramatic performance piece around which to build a “saving democracy” fantasy. As crazy as it was—and Republican leaders and Fox commentators were frantically begging Trump to call it off, to save their very lives or legacy not to mention their sanity—later that night, eight senators, led by Ted Cruz, and 139 representatives endorsed Trump’s Big Lie by refusing to certify the Electoral College vote.

Republicans unfamiliar with conspiracy theories and Trump’s ability to manage them were understandably nervous. Nevertheless, despite a year of investigations and exposes about January 6th, from the strongarming of Vice President Mike Pence and the adoption of the fake electors strategy to the many judgements or cases pending against him, Trump is still able to rationalize to partisans his behavior, using euphemism, misdirection, lies, threats and, of course, conspiracy theories.

The big problem facing Trump, Trumpers and their facilitators, as well as those of us attempting to understand and oppose them, is: Once people allow themselves to believe one unsupported conspiracy theory, it is almost impossible to unbelieve, and they generally adopt others, since CTs operate almost entirely in the imagination.

Actual conspiracies, in distinction to the made-up variant, are common among criminals and spies, and not uncommon with politicians, business people, religious leaders and lovers. At any given time, therefore, some people are scheming and others are watching and wondering what they are up to—conspiracy theorizing, in other words.

For the professional conspiracy theorist, however, finding actual conspiracies is secondary to influencing public opinion and accruing power. Moreover, the conspiracy they are actually interested in is the one they are perpetrating themselves, using the conspiracy theory itself. As CT professionals, they finetune it to their followers’ psychology, introducing child abuse accusations, for example, to trigger QAnon’s obviously numerous abuse survivors.

Of course, “conspiracy theory” is also a standard slur against any unproven hypotheses. In addition, fanciful notions are central to religion and art, and they figure in science, business and romance. But when esoteric ideas pertain to religion or love, they must be more spiritual than materialist to operate, and those involving art or business are generally recognized as fiction or speculation.

In politics, however, CTs masquerade as fact.

Trump is not stupid or crazy, despite all appearances. Hardly “a very stable genius,” as he once bragged, he does have emotional intelligence, cracked charisma, and mad publicity and law-skirting skills. In fact, he often outflanks rivals or enemies, particularly those who see him as an idiot, instead of idiot savant, or who fail to imagine the depraved depths to which he can descend.

Largely on that account, Trump acquired a football team, three casinos and an airline, in rapid succession in the ‘80s, even as he bankrupted them with aggressive business strategies, mismanagement and profit skimming. He stayed one step ahead of catastrophe by hustling tax abatements and high-interest loans, by threatening to sue, and by spinning sales pitches and stories, like the notion he was a “disruptor,” who was actually improving a given business, or that his failures were actually successes.

Hence, it can be said that Trump’s middle-to-late business career was also based entirely on conspiracy theories. “It is literally all a fraud, his life,” summarized the hard-working investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, author of three revealing books on Trump, in a 2016 interview.

Once a CT leader convinces followers of their authenticity, facts become fungible, and they can say the opposite of what media or authorities report, what can be called “conspiracy mirroring.” Claiming innocence and that one’s opponent is a criminal monster may seem like a schoolyard tactic, but it is psychologically astute and can give an established narrative a new interpretation simply by flipping a few facts. Conspiracy mirroring is central to conspiracism, in fact, as George Orwell pointed out in “1984,” with his fascist state’s slogan, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Trump learned to manipulate media from Roy Cohn, who started feeding leads to gossip columnists as a teen and had three high school friends become media moguls. Trump used Cohn’s media connections but also roleplaying aliases to plant stories about himself and threats of law suits to repress reports portraying him poorly. He especially opposed those impugning his inflated worth, which he deflates in turn for taxes. During the 2016 presidential campaign, the tabloid National Enquirer, owned for decades by Cohn’s childhood chum, Generoso Pope, buried over 50 damaging stories, including a Playboy model’s detailed allegation that Trump raped her.

“Bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity,” Trump explained in his “The Art of the Deal”, which became a bestseller for the mega-publisher Random House but was entirely ghostwritten. “Controversy, in short, sells.” Even the liberal press profits by covering Trump’s transgressions to excess, which may provide their audience extremely popular schadenfreude but, even more significantly, gives him free advertising.

Using his spectacle-making superpowers, Trump shifted from struggling real estate mogul to selling lifestyles, at first by licensing his pseudo-opulent brand to other developers. Then he ran beauty pageants, starred in a middling-popular reality television show, “The Apprentice”, and became a politician, starting with running for president, naturally, given his ego and ability to sell worldviews but also apprenticeship to Cohn.

Re-registering as a Republican, Trump tossed his hat into the ring a second time in 2011. Unlike during his brief 2000 campaign, as a pro-choice candidate with the Reform Party, he had a powerful trifecta of support mechanisms: the popularity of his TV show, the disciplinarian character he roleplayed on it, and the birtherism conspiracy theory. Although he soon realized Romney was a notably moral and capable Republican, and dropped out and endorsed him, he continued to explore his presidential ambitions through birtherism.

While modern life is based on science and facts, conspiracy theorists exploited a growing desire to oppose global, governmental or intellectual authorities and to embrace alternative views and fantasies. These interests started on the left, with the individualism, rebellion and truth questioning of the ‘60s, but were eventually adopted by the right and amplified by the digital age’s flood of information, social media algorithms, fake news and secretive side. The very year the internet blew up, 1995, so did rightwing conspiracism, with the white nationalist bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, Newt Gingrich’s scorched earth takeover of Congress, Rush Limbaugh’s conspiracy theories about President Clinton, and the growth of evangelical millenarianism in the final days of the millennia.

Trump is not unique. Many of today’s political and cultural leaders are accomplished CT developers or manipulators, from Vladimir Putin to Fox commentators Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, or public conspiracy theorists, like Alex Jones and Q, the anonymous oracle behind QAnon.

Q’s bio has yet to be conclusively established, but there is strong evidence “he” is not a government insider with “Q-level clearance,” and there were a number of Qs, who usurped the group from each other. In point of fact, QAnon is not an actual cult or political movement but a type of “live action role playing game,” sometimes called an “alternative reality game.” A form of large group play, often based on scavenger hunts or costume play, LARPs were invented in 1996 by corporate creatives for use in advertising.

Q’s LARPing has been known since 2018 but has only been documented in full by one major news outlet, The Financial Times of London, in its 15-minute, October 15th, 2020, video, “Is QAnon a Game Gone Wrong?” That video has only been viewed on YouTube 72,000 times, as of this writing (83,000 as of 3/7/25), which suggests that most people doubt something as earthshaking as QAnon could come from a LARP, run by a twenty-something on their phone. Nevertheless, journalists at The Washington Post and NBC News and researchers at Wikileaks and Cult Research Institute of New Jersey, who have investigated QAnon, have often used terms like “game-like” or “possible LARP.”

The most famous corporate LARP was “I Love Bees,” which promoted “Halo 2,” Microsoft’s megahit video game, in 2004. By that time, many gamers, hipsters and Burning Man attendees had started their own LARPs, some of which became popular or cult-like. By the time video games were grossing more than Hollywood films in 2010, gaming was dominating aspects of American culture. Meanwhile, the rest of us acquiesced to the internet’s intrinsic roleplaying and espionage, from inventing online aliases or dating profiles to making anonymous comments, snooping on each other, or fighting fraudsters.

Also around 2010, LARPs crossed into politics on 4chan, a bare-bones soc-med platform devoted to free speech and anonymity. Notorious for its porn and neo-Nazis as well as conspiracy theorists, 4chan also provided an internet commons for more normative rebels including Anonymous, the white-hat hacker association which started there.

In keeping with that nomenclature, people roleplaying intelligence agents turned leakers used aliases like FBIAnon and CIAAnon. Incorporating LARPing’s scavenger hunt and puzzle traditions, they encouraged followers to do their own research, decipher their cryptic posts, and uncover evermore conspiracies.

Indeed, CT proselytizing is itself a LARP. If you act the part of an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist, even though no one knows what you really believe, you can attract followers, attack opponents and manipulate the zeitgeist. LARPing increases audience participation, communication and innovation, along with in-group attachment. These abilities empowered QAnon to operate far beyond the methods and hierarchies of traditional political movements, religious cults or conspiracy theory mongers.

Trump was probably not that aware of LARPing by name, but he was a pop culture maven who had been performing most of his life. Having roleplayed a politician since the late-‘80s and worked with Cohn and conspiracy theories even longer, he applied that expertise to his third presidential race, which he wasn’t actually trying to win, according to many observers, just build brand awareness for his declining empire.

After his dramatic descent of the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he unveiled a colorful CT about evil Mexicans before a surprisingly large crowd of young people. They turned out to be actors paid $50 each, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Themes like “make American great again” seemed cliche, but he sharpened them with his three-decade-old refrain of “America is in danger” and “only I can fix it,” which is Conspiracy Theory 101. Indeed, “Things are not as they seem,” “Secret enemies are plotting,” and “Only I can save you,” i.e. only an authoritarian leader who knows the game can succeed, are the trinitarian tenets of conspiracism.

Running mostly for the publicity, Trump was liberated to be irreverent and spontaneous. A seasoned performer as well as megalomaniac, he flourished on the campaign trail, especially against a lackluster field of Republican candidates, who knew nothing of his tactics, let alone how to counter them. Seeing his strongest opponent as the similarly-conspiratorial Cruz, Trump bombarded him with CTs, from the claim he stole the Iowa caucus to the one about his father helping Oswald kill Kennedy, no less. The liberal press took Trump literally, lambasting him for lying, but many Americans viewed his statements figuratively or at least plausible and not unlike those of other politicians.

After the election, Trump kept vote rigging in the news with allegations the Dems stole the popular vote and by forming the Commission of Electoral Integrity, which failed to find any significant evidence and soon closed. It seems silly until one realizes: Trump was carefully crafting a robust stolen-election conspiracy theory and cementing it deep into the American psyche, along with supporting notions like “lying press” and “deep state,” a cany insurance policy for his new-found career in politics.

Indeed, Trump told CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl in 2016 that his attacks on the media were designed to "discredit" journalists in order that negative reports on him would lose credibility (she said at a journalism Deadline Club Awards dinner in 2018).

Conspiracy theories had come a long way from the ‘50s. By 2016, they ranged from routine, like “Hillary Clinton is hiding a debilitating disease,” to unhinged, like PizzaGate or “most birds are surveillance drones,” which was started as a joke by the barely-20-year-old Peter McIndoe (as he admitted in December 2021).

In October 2016, Wikileaks published the emails of Clinton’s campaign chairperson, which were hacked by Russians six months earlier, and PizzaGaters “deciphered” them to “discover” a subterranean realm of Democratic devil-worshippers. Given Russian troll armies were promoting fake news favoring Trump, we had arrived at a free-for-all, cyber world war, where a conspiracist with online expertise could besmirch almost any one or thing.

By expressing fears creatively, CTers can join forces with hipster skepticism and reactionary prejudice to earn low-cost entry to community leadership and, if they excel in the disinformation marketplace, real political power.

Much like religious faith, CTs help people manage life’s vagaries. By replacing informed speculation with a simple explanation of hidden forces, CTs generate a form of low-level mysticism, hence their popularity among yoga teachers, massage therapists and other new agers. For the true believer, CTs relieve existential angst, boost status, and provide both a noble quest and base outlet for anger. The unfulfilled predictions and Kafka-esque claims can be disappointing or disgusting, and some truthers drop out, but the vast majority continue to enjoy their community’s ability to provide psychological relief, entertainment and defense against ridicule. And they are constantly re-energized by new theories, fostering inflationary levels of fantasy.

In such a competitive CT market, the original Q—a twenty-something living in Nevada named Manuel Chavez, according to The Financial Times, whose first post, in October 2017, promised that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested—decided to incorporate not only PizzaGate but almost all previous conspiracy theories.

Although Chavez claimed he did it as satire, to expose those repeating his lies, he and the other Qs fashioned the first super conspiracy theory, based on the keystone concept America is controlled by a secret society of Satanic, pederast Democrat politicians and celebrities. As if that were not perverse enough, they added cannibalism. Strange as it sounds, it was an easy sell to evangelical Christians, who truck in those metaphors, but also radicals on the right or extreme left, who see opponents in different terms but similarly evil.

After Trump’s inauguration, rather than becoming more presidential, as advisors suggested and opponents hoped, he decided to govern through CTs. Cohn’s “ten commandments” guided how he broke with allies and international organizations, cozied up to Russia, started a trade war with China, and dominated the media with his dumpster-fire, news-making methods. Moreover, Trump kissed the conspiratorial ring on InfoWars in October 2016, telling Alex Jones “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down,” and began forwarding QAnon tweets only a few weeks after Chavez started roleplaying Q in late 2017.

Trump doubled down with the pandemic. Hoping to keep alive the economy, his main transaction on offer to Americans, regardless of loss of life, he used every CT in the book: deny, exaggerate, blame others, and discredit authorities, while floating evermore CTs. Sure, Trump vocally supported rapid vaccine development and quietly got vaccinated, but that didn’t stop him from proselytizing quack cures and Covid CTs. Indeed, they were the low-hanging fruit he could use to feed his overall CT indoctrination, which he ramped up as the election approached while returning to his big CT project: election fraud.

As Trump increased his conspiracism, and QAnons became a colorful contingent at his rallies, the person roleplaying Q decided to renounce leadership, one of the few big CTers in history to voluntarily relinquish a mass movement. In his 2021 HBO documentary, “Q: Into the Storm”, the ever-dogged director Cullen Hoback exposed the last Q as Ron Watkins, whose father owned 8chan and 8kun, the 4chan-like website where Chavez posted. Platform ownership gave the Watkinses upstream tech control.

Watkins denies this charge vehemently, but he was a well-known QAnon influencer; he resigned as 8kun’s administrator on Election Day, 2020; and Q stopped posting that day as well, except for four short posts. Watkins resurfaced as a “conspiracy theory analyst,” sometimes consulted by news organizations, and he supported the Insurrection, but he advised his followers on Inauguration Day, “We have a new president sworn in, and it is our responsibility as citizens to respect the Constitution.”

Having probably been Q for over three years, Watkins considers himself a CT grandmaster. Indeed, after years living unconventionally in the Philippines and Japan, he moved back to the United States and declared for Congress, as a Republican in Arizona. Watkins obviously assumes he can excel in a party where many leaders spout bizarre fictions, many voters believe them, and the best theorist often wins.

Trump also had the option of bowing out gracefully on Election Day, especially after most of his staff accepted he lost the election, but decided instead to launch his unprecedented CT indoctrination campaign. It provided hope to millions of QAnons desperate for guidance after Q stopped posting, turning Trump into the de facto Q.

Under pressure from his risky gamble and all the CTs flying around, Trump converted from Cohn’s roleplaying CT management to McCarthy’s full believer. Although it opens him up to delusion and his followers to mass psychosis, “true belief” binds CT leaders more tightly together with followers. While Trump didn’t seem to believe birtherism, 9/11, or most other CTs, he obviously believes his vote-stealing charges, at least his simple mail-in ballot version, and that he can run it for years for his own benefit, if not that of the Republican Party, let alone America.

Many QAnons were discouraged or distraught when Trump didn’t retake the presidency during the election, the Insurrection, the Inauguration, on March 4th (Inauguration Day until 1933), or an undetermined summer, fall or winter event, as predicted by QAnon influencers or nonaligned CT celebrities like My Pillow owner Mike Lindell, who is still insisting Trump’s reinstatement is but days away.

By the end of 2021, one QAnon contingent was holding a vigil for the long-dead John F. Kennedy Jr, who their influencers claimed would emerge from hiding to become Trump’s vice-presidential candidate in 2024. Another faction was insisting the pandemic and/or vaccine are a “plandemic,” a genocide organized by the deep state, even as the unvaccinated, including many anti-vax activists, expire in ever greater numbers. Others have joined fascist militias or believers in the “secret space program,” or its ontological opposite, the “flat earth.”

Adding insult to injury, a QAnon hero, lieutenant general, ex-National Security Advisor and convicted felon Michael Flynn, denounced QAnon as “total nonsense” and a “disinformation campaign” developed by the C.I.A. Then Alex Jones attacked Trump for supporting vaccines, although that is a standard Jonesian ploy to roll back Trump’s CT market share and augment his own.

Alas, Trump is the best coifed, most plainspoken and agile conspiracy theorist America has ever seen. Despite his many obvious errors, he makes the often hysterical and disheveled Jones, as well as the sleazy Cohn, country lawyer McCarthy, triple-agent Flynn or porn-addicted Watkins, look like pikers. By roleplaying a tough president, a jocular celebrity or a side show barker, often in quick succession, while winking at QAnon and white supremacists, Trump is running multiple conpiracist cohorts with amazing effectiveness, as exemplified by January 6th but also his spectacular rebound as the leader of the Republican party.

Nevertheless, many people still find it hard to believe Trump’s strategy is based largely on conspiracy theories, and the media doesn’t emphasize it. In The Atlantic’s otherwise excellent “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun” (12/6/21)), author Barton Gellman mentions conspiracy theories but only a couple of times.

In point of fact, Trump will go down in history as the CT master who almost pulled off the perfect conspiracy mirroring operation, using a CT about a stolen election to nearly steal an election, a tactic he will obviously repeat in the midterms, in 2024 and beyond. Along the way, he will make endless mirroring claims, like “The real insurrection was on November 3rd not January 6th,” and “They are making the Big Lie, not me.”

Given many Republicans have authoritarianism and CTing in their bones, a majority have come to believe—or they are roleplaying belief, or they don’t believe but have cravenly resigned themselves to—the notion of operating in the sweet spot between plausible deniability and CT psychosis. They hope that will provide the workaround to their party’s sinking voter rolls, inability to craft major policy, and abandonment of conservative values, even though the tactic is absurd on the face of it and risks destroying the Republican Party or even American democracy while literally driving many people crazy.

Like Trump, they drank the Kool-Aid. And it may take years of additional deaths from Covid, gun violence, opioids and amphetamines, or a low-intensity civil war—or for the progressives of either party to concoct a compelling enough counter narrative—for them to learn that lesson. Ironically, it is the one Roy Cohn tried to teach them: Believing unproven conspiracy theories is for chumps.

While believing conspiracy theories is a recipe for psychosis, preaching them without belief, as so many Republicans and rightwing media figures do, breaks all the basic social contracts, from simple honesty to the Golden Rule.

Truth and justice will probably prevail, as they have in the past. It may take years of suffering and a degradation of democracy worldwide, but history shows that Americans became fixated on CTs four times over the last two centuries, in about sixty-year cycles. Hence, the Republican embrace of deception and delusion should burn itself out, eventually, and inoculate us for the next half century, hopefully.

Posted on Jul 02, 2022 - 03:53 PM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner June ‘22
by Karl Cohen

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

'Lightyear', Pixar’s new film, includes a same-sex kiss restored due to staff pressure after its removal due to Disney's problems with Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. photo: courtesy Pixar
Hollywood Reporter Applauds Pixar’s Return to Silver Screen

“[Lightyear] is a funny spinoff with suspense and heart, a captivatingly spirited ‘toon take on splashy live-action retro popcorn entertainment," according to The Hollywood Reporter. "The title character is given splendid voice by Chris Evans, balancing heroism and human fallibility with infectious warmth.” The reviewer nitpicks minor things and doesn’t feel "Lightyear" is a great film, but it sounds to me like a long-awaited, welcomed treat.

Jerry Beck, a noted animation historian who teaches at CAL Arts, said, “Saw Lightyear—loved it.”

Pixar’s ‘Lightyear’ banned in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait

Disney has fallen foul of the censors once more. “Lightyear”, Pixar's Toy Story prequel spinoff movie, has been banned in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and at least 12 other countries as the film includes a same-sex kiss! The scene was originally cut from the film, but reinstated following an uproar.

A statement from Pixar employees claimed that Disney had been censoring “overtly gay affection” and the company evidently agreed.

Apropos of this or nothing at all: A Pixar chief noted: "All of our films start out as disasters."

Disney Responds to Supreme Court Abortion Decision

Disney made a statement saying they are committed to financially supporting employees who need to travel out of state to seek abortion care. Hopefully they will also stop funding politicians who campaigned to take away reproductive rights.

Pixar Co-Founder Catmull joins Baobab Studios

Although it only started in 2015, Boabab Studios has already won nine Emmys.

Their credits include innovative virtual reality projects like “Invasion!”, “Crow: The Legend”, and “Baba Yaga”. They are working with Disney Branded Television on “The Witchverse”, an anthology series for Disney+ based on the “Baba Yaga” short. Their creative talent includes Erick Oh, Jony Chandra, Hayley Porter, Michael McCormick, Brian Tinsman and now Pixar co-founder and former Disney animation boss Ed Catmull.

Maureen Fan, CEO and co-founder of Baobab Studios says, “I have followed Ed’s work for years and am proud to welcome him to our board of directors. Ed’s leadership and innovative genius in the world of animation is unparalleled, and his insight will be invaluable as we imagine new characters and worlds, as well as an active role for our audiences inside of them.”

Catmull says, “I’m honored to join the board of directors of Baobab Studios and to be part of their creative journey. Baobab is at the forefront of telling incredible stories across mediums, and I look forward to supporting the entire team as the company evolves into the preeminent animation studio of the future.”

Catmull was an early pioneer of computer animation. He became the vice-president of George Lucas’ computer Graphics division called Lucasfilm in 1979 (part of ILM). In 1986, Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm's digital division and founded Pixar, hiring Catmull, Lasseter and the rest of the gang to run it.

Pixar was acquired by Disney in 2006. He was president of both Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar from 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar, through 2019. During his tenure, the studios released several iconic films including “Big Hero 6”, “Frozen”, “Finding Nemo”, “Incredibles 2” and “Toy Story 4”, among others.

A scene from Signe Baumane’s latest and highly-praised film, "My Love Affair with Marriage". photo: courtesy Pixar
Signe Baumane’s New Film

Signe Baumane’s "My Love Affair with Marriage" opened in New York City to excellent reviews.

The visuals in “My Love Affair with Marriage” are being praised with words like “stunning,” “incredibly clever,” “deeply funny,” “socially conscious” and “a sharp satire.” One reviewer said, it was “reminiscent of German Expressionism” and called “an endearing beacon of hope.” In addition to excellent positive reviews in New York, the film won a jury prize for features from Annecy, animation’s most highly respected international festival.

Signe is from Latvia and lives in New York and this, her second animated feature, combines handsome miniature sets with dramatic theatrical lighting, with distinctive looking cel animation. It was over five years in the making and was well funded, thanks to money and support from several countries and a highly successful fundraising campaign. I’ll be writing more about this film after the first Bay Area screening is announced. One reviewer called it, “Essential viewing for all.”

Two Smurfs Go to Church

Two Smurfs suddenly appeared on pedestals about 18 feet above the entrance to the Sint-Gertrudiskerk church in the center of Ternat, Belgium in June. People loved seeing them there, thinking the church might be getting ready for a street fair.

Unfortunately, they became a short-lived attraction as the annoyed pastor had a crew remove Papa Smurf and Jokey. Nobody has confessed to creating the prank.

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .
Posted on Jul 01, 2022 - 12:06 AM
US Government Forgives $6 Billion Student Debt
by Karl Cohen

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

The Academy of Art became notorious for allegedly foisting immense loans upon unprepared students. photo: courtesy Academy of Art
FORMER FILM AND ANIMATIONS
students who will benefit from this act of forgiveness include people who went to the for-profit Art Institute chain of schools and the Academy of Arts, both which I have covered (see article "Academy of Art’s Disastrous Loan Program". (The San Francisco Art Institute is not involved because it is is a non-profit.)

Although the latest grant relief action, which was announced on June 22, is only a tiny fraction of the $1.7 trillion in student loan owed by 43.4 million Americans, it is one of many actions that will be needed to keep our nation’s economy going in the right direction.

Under President Trump, people who applied for debt relief from student loans were mostly turned down, but now President Biden’s Department of Education is coming to the rescue, knowing full well that, if they don’t do the right thing, the student loan crisis could cause an economic meltdown of the nation’s economy. The situation could become as bad or as worse as the subprime mortgage crisis that caused a recession in the economy in 2007, a slump that lasted at least until 2009 and malingered much longer.

The current round of debt relief is going to students who attended for-profit schools that promised great educations and job placement but failed to do so. For-profit schools saw the potential in making enormous profits by recruiting student with false promises. Recruiters were hired and trained to tell every prospective student whatever was necessary to get them to enroll in the supposedly fabulous education that would lead to a well-paying job.

Some students did have the aptitude needed to succeed and find high-paying employment, but others were accepted who weren’t qualified and failed. The recruiters were coaxed in how to deceive potential students into believing they would be great achievers if they only got the needed education at the school they represented. Yes, they sometimes knowing lied to people who didn’t have the needed abilities. That was well documented in a series of Congressional hearings into the abuses of the for-profit school industry.

To make it easy to attend the school, potential students were told they could take out loans that would be easy to pay back, as there were lots of great jobs awaiting them on graduation. I once knew a teacher who had a desk down the hall from such a recruiter. She said she cringed every time a prospective student showed their portfolio to the recruiter. My friend knew she would hear the recruiter make the same false claims that the potential student had wonderful samples of their work. That would often be followed by a discussion of how to get a great low-cost loan with no payments due until… not that long after, as the fine print explicated.

Moreover, many people misunderstood the small print accompanying the easy-to-obtain, low-interest-rate loan saying it absolutely had to be repaid. Indeed, there were almost no exceptions to that clause. Statistics have shown that students who attended less-expensive community colleges and state universities and had borrowed fairly small amount to get their education, were most likely going to be able to repay their loans. The area where the greatest repayment problems occurred were with former students who attended the more expensive for-profit colleges. Sadly, the government let schools abuse the system for several decades.

Senator Elizabeth Warren says the $1.7 trillion student debt crisis was caused by “deliberate policy decisions.” Fortunately, the nation finally has a president that is working to reverse the problem by creating an aggressive loan forgiveness program. He has already forgiven over $25 billion and, on June 22, added another $8 billion. Unfortunately, it took years of hearings to even understand the problem, while any action to correct it under Trump stalled. Now at last progress is being made to make partial or complete student loan cancellation.

The government is making slow, but steady progress. Student loan borrowers have obtained relief by filing “borrow defense claims” with the Department of Education. They should claim they were misled or defrauded when applying for student forgiveness. June 22nd’s proposed settlement will provide student loan debt relief to students from more than 50 mostly for-profit colleges.

If you or somebody you know might benefit from this information, they may need to apply by October for financial forgiveness.

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .
Posted on Jun 30, 2022 - 12:08 AM
Ukraine’s Tragic, Complex History
by Doniphan Blair

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

NOTE: Although published in May, 2022, this article's complete summary of Ukraine's uniquely brutal history remains extremely relevant. Indeed, it was complimented by Yale Ukraine and fascism scholar Timothy Snyder and only required one update after the author visited Ukraine in late 2022 and again in 2023: paragraph 23 about Lviv.

WITH UKRAINIAN CITIES BEING BOMBED
flat and tens of thousands killed, including in obvious war crimes, stopping Russia’s war and helping its victims are primary. To find a long-term strategy, however, we have to recognize Ukraine’s intricate history, multicultural breadth and monumental suffering, which is not well known. In fact, this is the NINTH major war, mass killing or genocide “event” Ukraine has endured in the last century.

Coveted for its flat, fertile “black” earth and lucrative trade routes, Ukraine has long been a “borderland”—which is what “ukraine” means and why it was called “The Ukraine”— between empires, which makes issues about N.A.T.O. almost inevitable. It is also Europe’s breadbasket, growing up to 30% of its wheat and meaning war will bring food scarcity.

Russian territorial claims date to Vladimir the Great of Kyiv, who actually was Ukrainian but started the Russian tribal confederation around 1000 AD and led its conversion to Christianity. But a millennium is a long time. The land was conquered in turn by Mongols, Poles, Lithuanians, Ottomans, Russians again, Soviets and Nazis.

Hence, Ukrainians range in ethnicity from majority Ukrainians and one third Russians to minority Poles, Jews, Cossacks, Greeks, Roma, Germans, Tatars and other Muslim and tribal groups, who intermarried to some degree. A multiethnic community is not an easy fit for nationalism, suggesting why some people accept Vladimir Putin’s postulate Ukraine is not an actual country.

Imperial Russia repressed Ukrainian culture, even outlawing its language, but its 19th century poets had romantic dreams of independence, like their counterparts in Poland, Greece and elsewhere. Taras Shevchenko was born an enslaved serf near Kyiv but became a folklorist and painter as well as poet and founder of modern Ukrainian literature.

Thus inspired, many Ukrainians fought a fierce, five-year war of independence during and after World War One, first against the Austro-Hungarians and Germans, with whom they made a separate peace, in exchange for massive amounts of wheat, and then in the bloody, chaotic Russian Civil War. Indeed, four different Ukraines operated between 1917 and ’22. Their west was eastern Poland, generating a zero-sum battle between two sets of nationalists, although the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918-19, with a mere 25,000 casualties, was a minor blip compared to the brutal world war or Russian Civil War. As if that were not enough, the 1918 influenza pandemic swept the planet and killed as many as 50 million people.

The Red Army, led by the Jewish Ukrainian Leon Trotsky, had to invade Ukraine three times to defeat an array of opponents in a kaleidoscope of alliances: Ukrainian nationalists, the White Army of czarists and Cossacks, the anarchist Black Army, and the peasant Green Army but also an English-French-Greek expeditionary force and armies from Germany, Poland and a half-a-dozen other countries. Many resorted to atrocities. Rationalizing that revolutions require killing, Lenin ordered his secret police to enact the “red terror,” which put hundreds of thousands to death. Although he finally relaxed a bit on the Ukrainians, he maintained a staunch opposition to their self-governance.

Despite the organizational limits of anarchy, the Blacks were popular. Indeed, they brought together Ukraine’s industrious peasants, worldly traders and dreamy intellectuals better than the Reds, and fought fiercely. One storied commander, Maria Nikiforova, was a seasoned revolutionary, gorgeous or ugly, depending on accounts, and possible user of cocaine, then popular among European literati. She fought valiantly, sometimes using terror tactics, until her capture by the Whites, trial and execution, along with her husband and fellow commander, in 1919.

After centuries of repression, Ukrainian Jews, Europe’s largest community after Poland, emerged as full citizens. The socialist Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917-20) made Yiddish an official language and put Hebrew on their money. Many Jews joined the Russian Revolution including Mishka Yaponchik, a colorful Jewish gangster from the storied seaport of Odessa, who became a Red general.

Alas, the modern practice of pogroming Jews also started in Ukraine, when 50 people were massacred in 1881 and another few thousand in 1903. In the Civil War, however, Jews were butchered by the thousands by all factions, including the Reds but mostly the Ukrainian nationalists and the Whites. About 100,000 were killed in over 1000 incidents, a shocking development which set a tragic precedent for European Jewry, according to professor Jeffrey Veidlinger, author of “In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust” (2021).

The pogroms triggered some emigration, including the forbears of Bob Dylan and Noam Chomsky to the United States and others to then Palestine, but some two million Jews continued to live in Ukraine. Indeed, they contributed disproportionately to its cultural renaissance in the 1920s as well as to building the new socialist civilization of the Soviet Union. The horror of the pogroms did not way so heavily given it was eclipsed by the 100 times greater barbarity of the Revolution, which killed about nine million across the region. Moreover, the Russian famine of 1922 killed two to five million which, added to flu pandemic, World War One and Civil War, meaning an insanely unprecedented decade of butchery in the Ukraine from 1914 to 1922—until, of course, one and two decades later.

Dominating Ukraine was central to Soviet strategy, given the proximity of the Russian and Ukrainian languages and their histories but also presumed Russian superiority—they call Ukrainians “little Russians.” As Russia’s southern lands and sea ports and Europe’s eastern flank, Ukraine was more romantic, open, diversely civilized, and rich than its northern neighbor, making it the prize possession between feuding cousins. Stalin began arresting Ukrainian intellectuals en masse at the end of the ‘20s, which culminated with the killing of many writers in Kharkiv in the 1930s, the so-called “executed renaissance” and a tragic foretelling of what was to come. In fact, Ukraine soon suffered not one but two genocides.

Also in the ‘20s, Soviets tried to collectivize work. They were especially hard on the prosperous peasant farmers, or “kulaks,” and killed about a half a million nationwide. When Ukraine’s kulaks refused to nationalize their harvest in 1932, authorities confiscated it, triggering a years-long famine. While some people also blame communist central planning, the boasting of party bosses, and Kremlin paranoia, which led authorities to assume there was a surplus and that farmers were hoarding, Stalin definitely wanted to break the Ukrainian kulaks, bourgeoisie and dreams of independence, and he liked killing people.

Holodomor means “death by hunger” in Ukrainian but oddly parallels “holocaust,” from the Greek for “burnt offering.” While it’s tricky drawing comparisons to the Holocaust, which also hit Ukraine hard, the Holodomor rates. Death tolls range from three and a half to ten million, a horrific national trauma by any measure but exacerbated by its erasure by Soviet censorship and propaganda—indeed, many Russians deny it to this day—and international ignorance. Eventually the Holodomor was investigated and, a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was recognized by Russian institutions and the U.N.

Diana Soline Chornenkaya, a Ukrainian-Russian-American friend of mine, told me stories she heard from her grandmother, Vera, a teen during the manufactured famine. Vera experienced the descent into cannibalism, a taboo term that is difficult to discuss but well-known to have transpired during the Holodomor. While visiting a friend once, Vera was accosted and trapped by her mother, although the friend helped her escape being killed and eaten. Another girlfriend, after giving birth, ate her own infant to survive. Another one of Vera's girlfriends, while they were hiking to Kyiv, said, “I don’t feel well,” and lay down and died. There were bodies everywhere, Vera told Diana. Fortunately, she found safety and babysitting work in Kyiv, which had greater access to food supplies, but she lost two younger brothers and other family and many community members.

Recent studies estimate four million Ukrainians were starved to death, with another six million lost to “birth deficits.” Ever resilient, Ukrainians attempted to recover and rebuild their society within the socialist system. Vera’s friend, who ate her newborn, went on to raise two healthy children, despite Soviet propaganda portraying them as cannibals or, conversely, claiming they faked the famine. Unfortunately, the Holodomor was immediately followed by more mass murder events.

Stalin’s “great terror” or “purge” started in 1936. About a million Soviet citizens were executed, sometimes after show trials, and many more were sent to the gulags, where a large percent expired. Some estimates put the Great Terror’s casualties at four million or more, including many Ukrainians, all for naught, since almost no conspiracies were uncovered. As if the Holodomor and Great Terror weren’t physically, socially and psychologically annihilating enough, World War Two started, making 1914 to ‘45 in Eastern Europe the most pernicious period in human history, bar none. It centered on Ukraine.

Germany’s Operation Barbarossa, the biggest invasion in history, brought blitzkrieg and total war to Ukraine but also the Holocaust in late-June ’41. In lieu of their practices in Western Europe and Poland, where the Nazis organized a comparatively efficient and discrete herding of Jews into ghettos, cattle cars and death camps, they used bullets and mass graves.

In two days in September, they slaughtered 34,000 Jews at Babyn Yar, a ravine in a Kyiv suburb, which is considered a record. Over 100,000 Christian Ukrainians and Russians soon joined the corpses. Around one and half million Ukrainian Jews were eventually murdered, including tens of thousands by Ukrainian police and nationalists, often affiliated with the powerful Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

The more radical wing of the O.U.N. was led by Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with Germans before the war but was interred in a concentration camp during it for declaring Ukrainian independence. Despite the O.U.N.’s monoethnic authoritarianism, they tolerated a few Jews, especially as wives, while still practicing eliminationist nationalism. Indeed, they butchered thousands of Poles and Russians, as well as many Jews, especially communists, although they moderated some of their policies after the war.

A polarizing figure among Ukrainians, Bandera has streets named after him and is honored as one of the nation’s founding fathers by many rightwingers but also some liberals, including to some degree by President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish and a second-generation Holocaust survivor but recognizes Ukraine’s need for a big-tent society. The O.U.N. provides the grains of truth behind the “Ukraine is controlled by Nazis” conspiracy theory promulgated by Putin.

Yes, many Ukrainians joined the German army or Waffen SS, as did fascists from France and Sweden to Croatia and Romania, some murdered Jews, and a few became notorious concentration camps guards in Poland, where they were sent because it was nearby. John Demjanjuk, who raised a family in Ohio before being deported in 1993 to Germany to stand trial, worked in three extermination camps, Sobibor, Majdanek and Treblinka, where he was known as the sadist "Ivan the Terrible." After the grotesqueries of the Holodomor and the Great Terror, many Ukrainians wanted to expel the Soviets by any means necessary and win independence, even if just in Nazi Europe, as had the Croatians.

(NOTE: The following two and a half sentences were added after my on-location research.) It is also understandable that some Ukrainians, whose great-grandparents were enslaved serfs only 80 years earlier, were radicalized by Europe's two decades of extreme "isms," increased education and anger with the region's upper and middle class Poles and Jews. In the center of the brutal cauldron of World War Two, those feeling manifested as the butchering of thousands of Jews in the streets of Lviv, during the days following the Germany Army's arrival in late June 1941, one of the most frightening episodes of Holocaust (they also massacred many more Poles at Volhynian in 1943).

On the other hand, many people in Lviv, from the religious Patriarch to peasants, helped or hid Jews, and over a thousand Ukrainians are honored as “righteous gentiles” by Israel’s Yad Vashem. Millions more joined the partisans or Soviet Army, where four and a half million Ukrainians fought the Nazis the most sanguineous battles of World War Two. In fact, a battalion of Ukrainian SS men of mixed ethnicity sent to fight the Allies on the Western Front killed their commanders and joined the French resistance.

Estimates differ but as many as 25 million Soviets died during the war, albeit only a third fighting, when they were sometimes sacrificed by commanders who marched them into unswept mine fields or fortified machine gun nests. The remainder was from disease and famine, due to Germans confiscating food, or being deported to Germany, where they were worked to death, plus Soviet reprisals against collaborators. Over a fourth of them were Ukrainian.

Stuck between the genocidal Nazis and mass murderous Soviets, Ukrainians suffered history’s greatest hell. I have long awarded that horrific honor to Poland, given its proximity to Germany, the presence of all the death camps, and that I am of Polish-Jewish descent, but we lost six million to Ukraine’s seven. From the Black Sea to the Baltic is called “bloodlands” by scholar Timothy Synder, in his 2010 book of the same name, because both Hitler and Stalin wanted to depopulate it. From 1932 to ’45, about 14 million civilians in a half-a-dozen countries were murdered.

For someone like me, who lives in California, which has had only one mass killing event in its history, the genociding of its first people, it is almost impossible to imagine the healing, rebuilding and kindness needed to recover from eight nationwide, years-long atrocities in a mere three decades: World War One, the Russian Revolution, the Red Terror, the Pogroms, the Holodomor, the Great Terror, World War Two and the Holocaust.

Ukrainians finally had peace at the end of the “great war.” Although nationalists kept up guerilla attacks, and were killed or deported by the thousands, and the Soviets carried on arresting people for “crimes against the state,” Ukraine became a central Soviet state. Indeed, it was the site of many civic projects, universities, factories, resort towns, heritage site cities, and nuclear missile silos and reactors, including Chernobyl, which suffered history’s worst melt down in 1986. It was also the birthplace of the Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev and many intellectuals and professionals, many who moved to Moscow.

But when the Soviet Union dissolved by Russia in 1991 and a plebiscite was held over 90% of Ukrainians voted for independence, despite 30% being Russian speakers. Although they elected to lead them a Communist Party apparatchik, the vast majority welcomed improved consumer goods, democracy and the opportunity to join the European Union or perhaps N.A.T.O., perfectly understandable given their horrific history. Betting on peace, their new legislature renounced nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from Russia and the U.S., no less, as per the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

Like all former Soviet states, Ukraine endured the dislocating turmoil of “perestroika” economic reform, from disappearing staples to widespread corruption and the vast industrial looting of the oligarchs, which was almost inevitable given the difficulty of transitioning to capitalism and how people close to power could easily and quickly take advantage of it. “Glasnost” brought welcome freedoms of expression and movement but also a confusing cacophony of news and political parties, from communists and nationalists to reformers, charlatans and conspiracy theorists.

Like Russia, Ukraine had assassinations. In 2000, the muckraking journalist and publisher of an anti-corruption news site, Georgiy Gongadze, was murdered. Four years later, there was an attempt on the life of reform candidate Viktor Yushchenko using poison. An ancient Russian tradition, Russian agents think poison is undetectable and plausibly deniable, despite easily traceable toxins and their trademark use of them.

The poisoners were not identified, but Ukrainians took to the streets to protest the electoral fraud noted by local and foreign observers. Although Yushchenko was up double digits in the polls, his opponent, Viktor Yanukovych, the anointed successor of the disgraced previous president and himself known to be corrupt, won by three points. Thousands of young people joined peaceful strikes, sit-ins and marches in what was called the Orange Revolution, the second of Eastern Europe’s half-a-dozen “colored revolutions,” after neighboring Georgia’s in 2003.

Ukraine’s young democracy pulled through when its Supreme Court ruled for Yushchenko, who recovered, although his face was disfigured for years, and set about integrating Ukraine with the West. His wife is Ukrainian-American. He also compromised with the former communists and Russophiles by appointing as his prime minister none other than Yanukovych, despite Yanukovych’s accusing him of being a Nazi during the campaign.

In point of fact, Yushchenko was embraced by Ukraine’s Jewish community of about 150,000, Europe’s second largest after France; his mother hid three Jewish girls during the Holocaust; and his father was a Red Army soldier incarcerated in Auschwitz.

The Orange Revolution was opposed by older people, Russian speakers and conservatives, as well as those concerned that Ukraine’s dream of joining N.A.T.O. was prohibitively provocative, even though all of its neighbors to the west, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, had by 2004—not to mention by an increasingly belligerent Russia. Putin began killing journalists and opponents in 2006, airing “lost empire” grievances the following year, and launching brutal wars, supposedly to protect Russian minorities, starting in Georgia in 2008.

While Yushchenko walked that tightrope, Ukrainians flip-flopped. In the next election, they handed power back to Yanukovych, after his makeover and aggressive campaign headed by American political consultant and future Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Yanukovych slowed his predecessor’s reforms, emphasized religion and honored nationalist heroes like Bandera, even as he favored all things Russian. When Yanukovych refused to ratify a treaty with the European Union and joined the Eurasian Economic Union established by Russia, which offered him an enormous aid package, Ukrainians took to the streets yet again.

It was called the Revolution of Dignity or Maidan Revolution, after the Kyiv’s central square—“maidan” means independence—which was occupied for months in late 2013. The massive “Euromaidan” protests were driven by a new wave of nationalist youth, including some skinheads but also hipsters and progressives. “Young people realized that they needed to do something for themselves and not depend on the government,” according to Miriam Dragina, a journalist who launched the Kyiv (flea) Market a year later to raise funds for the Ukrainian Army, which by then was fighting Russians in the country’s east.

Yanukovych got his allies in parliament to pass laws restricting the protests, but they only increased. Indeed, demonstrators were joined by older people, including veterans and Jews, while younger activists occupied government buildings across Ukraine. After a few were killed on January 18th, 2014, the entire opposition, from the rightwing Right Sector to the anti-corruption Maidan People's Union and various student groups, organized a “peace offensive” on February 18th.

With columns of protesters advancing on the Rada Parliament, which was about to vote on rewriting the constitution, a suitable-for-cinema struggle ensued. Protesters threw Molotov cocktails and paving stones and stormed buildings, setting some alight, including the office of a pro-Russia party. Police responded with batons, stun grenades, tear gas and, finally, bullets, mostly fired by snipers. Over a hundred demonstrators were killed, along with a dozen police. Yanukovych fled to Russia.

Outraged by so much ‘60s-style democracy on his doorstep as well as Ukrainian interest in joining Europe, Putin called it a coup, claimed it was fomented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and ordered an invasion. By February 27th, unmarked and masked Russian troops emerged from the massive Crimean naval port, leased by Ukraine to Russia, and captured strategic locations across that state. In nearby Odessa on May 2nd, rightwing activists trapped pro-Russian counter-protestors in a building, spray-painted it with swastika-like symbols and set it alight. Forty-two died. Four months later, Russophile Ukrainians and out-of-uniform Russian soldiers seized parts of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk states, starting a war which killed 14,000 people from 2014 to ’22 and remains the main battle front today.

Among those fighting the Russians is the Azov Brigade, who are labelled neo-Nazi for their swastika-like logo, connection to an ultra-nationalist party, and white supremacist leaders and members, approximately a fifth of their total. Alas, the Azov is not unlike some American militias, and Ukraine has freedom of speech. Moreover, they are fighting to defend their nation’s government not against it, as with some American militias, and they reportedly came to accept some Muslim and Jewish fighters. The Azov Brigade also earned immense respect by being among the fiercest defenders of Mariupol during the April 2022 battle to the death with Russian forces.

The vast majority of soldiers fighting the 2014 Russian invasion, however, were typical young men, including some anarchists and artists, who were also inspired to defend their nation during the Maidan Revolution, which galvanized Ukrainian youth and a spirit of renewal. Indeed, culture in general and youth culture in particular exploded.

Kyiv and most other cities saw increases in coffee houses, clubs, galleries and youth hostels, earning buzz on the world traveler circuit as Eastern Europe’s new Prague. Ukraine’s myriad cultural institutions expanded, while established music, art and film scenes developed avant-gardes. Famously beautiful women made it a go-to location for ad agencies. Good facilities at lower cost attracted students from Africa, Asia and the U.S.

One artist riding that wave was the comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukrainians love comedy, especially gallows’ humor, due to their brutal history. A talented producer as well as entertainer and actor, Zelensky started the popular comedy troupe Kvartal 95, won Ukraine’s “Dancing with the Stars” in 2006, toured Russia doing standup (he’s a native Russian speaker), and founded Studio Kvartal, a successful film and television company. After appearing in eight movies, he starred in the hit TV series, “Servant of the People” (2015-19), about a teacher whose anti-corruption rant was filmed by his students, went viral, and propelled him to the presidency.

“Servant of the People” was so spot on, life followed art, and Zelensky was soon president himself, after winning over 70% of the vote in 2019, the biggest landslide in Ukraine’s young democracy. During the campaign, Zelensky didn’t emphasize that he was Jewish or that most of his father’s family died in the Holocaust. But that and the fact that no ultra-nationalist parties got enough votes to earn representation in the Rada, indicates most Ukrainians have matured beyond antique notions of nationalism toward those of a modern, multicultural state. Moreover, the Euromaidan Revolution also inspired changes in banking law and military organization.

Shifting from entertainment to politics is not easy, however, and Zelensky’s approval ratings slid to almost 30%. Accusations of nepotism emerged after he appointed fellow entertainers to head ministries. As a studio head, he had dealt with media oligarchs, leading people to wonder why he didn’t sanction them, save for obsessively attacking his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko. One of Ukraine’s biggest oligarchs, the so-called “chocolate king,” Poroshenko was charged with multiple counts of corruption and fled the country.

Zelensky also entered into bizarre negotiations with the president of the United States, who allied himself with Putin but also right-wing Ukrainians, due to his campaign manager Manafort. Indeed, he claimed Ukraine was completely corrupt and tried to blackmail Zelensky into digging up dirt on the Bidens by withholding weaponry essential to the ongoing war with Russia. Zelensky held his own, however, having studied law before going into comedy. Moreover, despite also coming to politics from entertainment, he is Trump’s opposite, morally, temperamentally and politically.

Everything changed on February 24th as Zelensky evolved into a leader of historic proportions, and Ukrainians of all political persuasions and ethnicities—from anarchists to nationalists, from Jews to descendants of Cossacks—joined together. Three decades of democracy inspired both a profound love for each other and revulsion at returning to Russian autocracy. Even Poroshenko flew back to help.

In addition to drawing on all aspects of society, Ukrainians are fighting with every conceivable weapon. Their army, redesigned into nimble squads of equals by the old defense minister, Andriy Zagorodnyuk, has mastered small force tactics, handheld missiles and drones. Their young Minister of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, is using everything from hackers and YouTube live streams to cryptocurrency, TikTok influencers, texting Russian soldiers or calling their families. Diplomats and parliamentarians reach out relentlessly. Zelensky addressed almost one national congress a day in March, the Grammy Awards on April 2nd, and the United Nations on April 5th.

“They cut off limbs, cut their throats,” Zelensky told the U.N. General Assembly from Kyiv, referring to the atrocities reported on April 2nd from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. “Women were raped and killed in front of their children. Their tongues were pulled out only because their aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear from them.”

When rebuttals of “false,” “staged” and “fake dead bodies” were made by Russia’s foreign minister and its ambassador to the U.S., they proved how Russia, which they say is standing up to the decadent West, maintaining Christian values and rooting out Nazis, is in free fall. In addition to suffering deindustrialization, depopulation, emigrating young people and intelligentsia, and severe alcohol and heroin addiction, Russians are suffused with “false narratives.”

More than friends or allies, Putin and Trump are fellow high priests in the cult of conspiracism, the former drawing on conspiracy theories dating back to the czarist police’s “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and the Soviet’s “Tanaka Memorial,” the latter as a disciple of Roy Cohn and Joseph McCarthy. Indeed, Putin and Trump are not just helping each other by influencing elections or dismantling N.A.T.O., they are encouraging their bases to believe the two biggest Big Lies in recent memory: the election steal and Ukrainian Nazis.

Many more Buchas will tragically emerge, as Putin tries to terrorize Ukrainians, Europeans, and the world into accepting his conquest in lieu of World War Three, meaning we have arrived at Ukraine’s ninth mass murder event in a century. Within mere months, it trashed the country, begot dozens of war crimes, and killed tens of thousands.

One conciliation prize: Ukrainians have the spirit, unity and leadership to prevail. Indeed, democracy, although it comes later to violence then fascism, can unify a diverse population, which can sustain a long struggle. Although they will pay a terrible price—and we must accelerate all possible efforts to offset that—they will either become a Christ among nations or win not only their freedom but help restore democratic ascendancy and lead us out of the cynical, conspiratorial and authoritarian age advocated by Putin and Trump.

Posted on Jun 15, 2022 - 07:43 AM
2200 Gang List

510 220.2126. Doniphan Blair 320 Posted on Mar 24, 2022 - 11:41 AM
The Scientific Origins of Star Wars
by Celik Kayalar

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) bellies up to the bar in the new 'Solo' (2018) part of the 'Star War' series. image: G. Lucas
THERE'S A THROUGH LINE FROM THE
great Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung to Han Solo, Princess Leia and Jaba the Hutt in George Lucas’s masterpiece movie-saga, the “Star Wars”.

Dr. Carl Jung, an early protege of Sigmund Freud who later broke with him, inspired Professor Joseph Campbell of “Follow Your Bliss” fame, as well as the author of “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (1949) and “The Hero’s Journey” (1990), and the star of “The Power of Myth” (TV Series with Bill Moyers, 1988).

The famed filmmaker George Lucas was, in turn, inspired by Professor Campbell in creating his “Star Wars” saga (Lucas Films, Northern California, now owned by Disney, Hollywood). Indeed, Lucas has noted many times that his script drew heavily the “hero's journey” story.

The hero’s path is generally thought to go like this: call to adventure, supernatural aid, mentor/helper, challenges/temptations, the abyss, revelation/transformation/atonement, and return.

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) at age 49. image: B.S. Wise
Although I discussed this on July 18, 2020 at my WebSeries’ Facebook site [Facebook.com/TheTraffick/], I’m revisiting this fascinating and a now archetypal insight here, while adding a new wrinkle.

Jung is the father of the original idea of “collective conscience,” which led to his proposal of “archetypes,” such as hero, trickster, shadow, etc, which he thinks exist in every culture throughout history. Being a big Jung fan myself, I started thinking about the possible connection between the concept of collective conscience and the “universal grammar” idea of the distinguished linguist and MIT professor, Noam Chomsky, who happens to be a friend.

Both ideas are universal. Hence, I thought they could be rooted in the DNA of all humans, regardless of culture, geography and history (i.e. innate or nature, not nurture). In other words, both collective conscience and universal grammar could have the same basis in the human brain’s physiology and biology, which evolved through a common Darwinian natural selection process.

When I mentioned this idea to Chomsky about two years ago, he was very intrigued; said he never thought of it; nor was it ever pointed out to him before. Surprised by his admission, I attributed his disconnect mainly to his well-known aversion to “Hollywood” as well as mysticism in general.

Painting portraying Jung and his life by author Celik Kayalar. image: C. Kayalar
I believe this Jung-Chomsky connection is worth exploring further by linguists, evolutionary psychologist, psychiatrists, philosophers, and even artists and filmmakers.

Much to be done; many bridges to be built.

Celik Kayalar is a PhD. bioscientist as well as filmmaker, painter and educator, who runs Film Acting Bay Area in Berkeley, California. You can learn more about him here or reach him .
Posted on Feb 23, 2022 - 01:35 PM
Tonia Rotkopf Blair: Holocaust Survivor, Matriarch, Author
by The Blair Family

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Tonia Rotkopf Blair, Brazil, 1949. photo: unknown
After this general obituary, a short version of which is in The NY Times, Doniphan Blair provides a personal remembrance.

TONIA ROTKOPF BLAIR DIED ON
December 9th, 2021, at 96, at home and surrounded by love, after a life so varied it seemed like nine. Starting in another era and enduring the Holocaust, she traveled through Europe and South America before settling in New York City and becoming a beatnik, homemaker, administrative assistant, Columbia graduate and, finally, writer.

Indeed, her book, “Love at the End of the World: Stories of War, Romance and Redemption”, was published in 2021. She was also the subject of the 2007 documentary “Our Holocaust Vacation” made by her sons and shown on PBS. Both feature her unique perspective on kindness and relationships during the Holocaust.

Born in Lodz, Poland, to Mendel and Miriam-Gitla Rotkopf (nee Sonenberg), who were socialists and secular Jews, Tonia was raised in one room without plumbing or electricity, along with older sister Irena and younger brother Salek. Poor but not deprived, they attended the progressive Yiddish Medem Schul.

After the German invasion, Tonia became the youngest nurse in the Lodz ghetto’s Lagenitska Hospital, which saved her from deportation with her family. They were all killed in 1942, in Mzsana Dolna, southern Poland. Despite this tragedy and the world war raging around her, she remained a teenage woman, who fell in love and learned about romance.

After the ghetto was liquidated in August 1944, she was shipped to Auschwitz and survived three weeks there. She was then sent to work in an airplane factory in Freiburg, Germany, where she was reunited with her best friend and fellow nurse, Bluma Strauch. Liberated from Mauthausen camp, Austria, by the Americans, they crossed to the Soviet side.

Returning to Lodz and finding no Jews but plenty of anti-Semitism, they hitchhiked back to the West and got nursing jobs in a refugee hospital in Landsberg am Lech, Germany, for almost two years. After moving to Paris, they travelled to La Paz, Bolivia, where Bluma had brothers. Continuing solo, Tonia lived with a wealthy cousin in Rio de Janeiro, right on Copacabana beach, another one of her varied lives. She finally arrived in Manhattan in 1950, where she felt right at home and started school, studying art, and working as a secretary.

Tonia at age 3 (far right), with her mother Miram, sister Irena and four Plonski cousins, 1928, Lodz, Poland. photo: professional
As an au pair for filmmaker Sidney Meyers, she met Vachel Blair, a cinematographer, veteran of the Spanish Civil War and WW II, and a gentile. They shared interests in multiculturalism, art and social justice.

After marrying and having two sons, they moved to Morningside Gardens, an experimental, integrated housing project near Columbia University. Tonia became an administrative assistant at the Interchurch Center and then Teachers College. She also went back to school, attending Columbia and graduating at 62 with a Sociology degree.

They bought a fixer-up country house and travelled extensively to visit their sons in California but also Brazil, Israel and Poland, where a 1980 journey awoke Tonia's ability to discuss the Holocaust. She also attended the second international gathering of Holocaust survivors, in Washington DC, in 1983, and joined a child survivor group, NAHOS.

After her husband died, in 1999, Tonia became part of a writers’ workshop taught by Susan Willerman and wrote some 40 stories longhand. Recognizing the strength of her style and insight into the female side of war, a son edited them and secured publication with Austin Macauley.

Tonia continued to travel until 2013, often to visit a son or granddaughter or attend a NAHOS gathering. After entering an assisted living facility in 2019, the pandemic inspired her family to bring her home. Taken care of principally by her granddaughter, she lived the last of her nine lives in comfort and community and passed peacefully, from complications due to Alzheimer’s.

She is survived by two sons and three grandchildren.

Tonia Rotkopf Blair, with her sons, Nicholas (lft) and Doniphan (rt), circa 1970. photo: Vachel Blair
Doniphan's Personal Remembrance

My mother, Tonia Rotkopf Blair, who resisted the Nazis with kindness, who travelled the world to find her people in New York, and who endured my teen years with permissiveness, died a month ago. Although she was 96, and we had the luxury of time and she the privilege of passing at home, her death is a gaping hole, freighted by the abyss of the Holocaust and the immensity of the love.

My mommy—our tribe’s great matriarch—is gone.

Sometimes depressed, she put a brave face on it, and I grew up feeling very cared for, adored, and safe. I thought this was standard mothering until I noticed deficiencies among some friends.

Since I had to break free early to start my own wandering, it took me decades to recognize her achievement, powered by a long tradition of humanism and romance, Jewish, Polish and female. Indeed, the atrocity that stained her, me, you, European history, was mitigated by her firm belief in humanity's general goodness.

I long knew she’d endured unworldly horror, including losing her family and surviving Auschwitz. Family lore has my younger brother and me racing into the living room, waiving wooden blocks with drawings of guns—we were forbidden toy guns—and yelling “We are going to kill a lot of Germans and run away.”

But the Holocaust wasn't taught in school in the '60s and she didn't mention it much, so I knew no details except pleasant stories about making a friend or getting a meal.

Through those anecdotes, I learned she travelled a long, hard road after the war, including hitchhiking across Eastern Europe, living in a garret in Paris, sailing to South America and settling in Bolivia, all with her best friend and fellow nurse Bluma. After La Paz, Tonia lived with her second cousin Manashe Kryzepicki, who had become a banker in Rio de Janeiro, which generated many evocative tales of wealth, art and vacations in the jungle.

I didn't realize the half of it until I visited Rio and Manashe's wife Hilda, with whom Tonia became close, told she often went to the beach where she would be surrounded by young men. Then it dawned on me: My own mother was an attractive young woman on a great adventure. After a year there and another in Miami, she settled in New York City and became what I now see was a beatnik, given she took up drawing and guitar and attending art and film shows, especially after meeting my father, Vachel Blair.

Tonia and her husband Vachel Blair, circa 1954. photo: Vachel Blair
Although quite different—Jew-gentile, quiet-garrulous, immigrant-American—they shared interests in art, adventure and socialism, and adored each other. As a cinematographer, he sometimes worked out of town, including two months shooting a documentary in the South Seas, leaving her to parent two rambunctious boys.

My mother's quest, I eventually learned, was carrying through the darkness the light of familial and romantic love, typified by the Blake poem she liked to recite, which ends, “Remember that in former times love, sweet love, was called a crime.” She remained so innocent, one of my parents' friends, a real beatnik named Jay Bell, would ask her to leave the room when he told dirty jokes.

I got more glimpses of robust femaleness when we returned to Poland, in 1997, and shot the film "Our Holocaust Vacation" (see trailer). I saw how romantic and loving the Poles were, especially the women, who had to help their men endure life between two oppressive super powers. “I don’t know why I have such a weakness for Polish men,” Tonia said during that trip.

I finally realized the extent of her female power, however, when I edited her book, “Love at the End of the World”. Over a dozen stories, especially those from the middle of war to marrying my father in 1954, involve or feature men and romance, from distance and chaste to fireworks.

Tonia working as nurse holding her best friend Bluma Strauch's daughter Hanna, 1947,Landsberg am Lech, Germany. photo: unknown
In "The Good Germans" she recalls secretly flirting with a young German pilot. He brought her silk stocking, the most romantic gift of the day, although food would have been better. “Dr. Nabrinski" is about going on a date to the opera after the war. Another is titled, simply “Men Who Fell in Love with Me”.

The most striking story, however, is “Stefan” about being shipped out of the Lodz ghetto in a jammed cattle car and meeting a young man. They recited poetry and kissed until the train arrived at its unknown destination: Auschwitz. Given that was the first story she wrote for the writing class she joined in 1999, it seemed be an experience she wanted to highlight, or attempt to emblazon in literature.

Even in that horrific period, Tonia pursued the young woman’s sacred troth of studying and enacting romance. It was not a magical shield, but it nudged some people, including some Germans, toward respecting life.

It took me ten years to get Tonia to tell me about her first lover, who is mentioned but not named in her story “The Russians”. A Christian Pole about her age, also liberated from Mauthausen camp in Austria, Stanislav was quite the romantic. He wrote her poems, two of which she carried to New York, and caught a fawn in the forest for her to pet for her 20th birthday.

Tonia was also an adventurous aficionado of books, art and film, who would scour the NY Times for interesting work. Her dedication once brought my father, me and her to the Film Forum for the US premiere of “Will It Snow for Christmas?” (France, 1996). Afterward, my father and I teased her about its slow pacing and lack of professionalism, until it dawned on us: It was a masterpiece about female life, family and betrayal.

Tonia with a copy of 'Love at the End of the World', published by Austin Macauley in May 2021. photo:D. Blair
When it came to actual adventure, like when my brother and I starting hitchhiking around the North-East when we were 14 and 15, Tonia would worry—undoubtedly extensively—but we didn't know, because she put on that brave face. She didn’t want her issues to limit us. And she was a great adventurer on road trips with my father to Maine or Florida, or with me to the hinterlands of California or Mexico.

As Tonia got older, she assumed the role of a mature matriarch, enjoying her status, including the teasing she missed dishing out as a shy girl in a dark age. But that didn’t eclipse the young matriarchal magician, who uses romance, beauty and dreams, especially when I read her book to her.

Her last year and half was a spectacular blessing. My daughter Irena and brother Nick brought her home to her Manhattan apartment from an assisted living facility in New Jersey, where she was confined to her room due to Covid. Indeed, Irena had carefully set up fully professional care taking, replete with hospital bed, all the needed supplies and a comfort cat, Etsu. She even created a TikTok channel about her.

Her last months were like a second infancy. Along with my sister-in-law Tania and many dedicated friends and caretakers, we joined in feeding her, reading to her, playing her favorite songs or discussing favorite topics, like “Who wrote The Bible?” We would rejoice when she ate well or had a good day, not so bothered by the back pain from being wheelchair bound or the increasing mania of Alzheimer's.

It was a fantastic, final chapter to a long, intricate and loving life, one which had long outdistanced the Holocaust. "I don't think about it anymore," she told me.

Tonia salutes the photographer's (and your) health, circa 2017. photo: N. Blair
When it ended, on December 9th, 2021, Irena led us in a home vigil, including her Peruvian prayers and death doula techniques, our tradition of chanting "om" and the Jewish "sitting shiva." Finally, her physical body was taken to the lab, to which she had donated her brain for Alzheimer's research, and a few days later to be cremated, a family tradition started by my father. We accompanied it every step of the way.

Now, in my moments of loneliness or despair, I recall the power that carried her through the fires and fired her tenderness and love. It is enough to enable me, her, us, to carry on those noble dreams and flourish.

Thanks mom, Tonia, grandma, Tunia, cool chick, Tonuska.

To Leave Comments: go to where I posted this on Facebook.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Jan 13, 2022 - 04:10 PM
The QAnon Game, Conspiracy King Trump and Us
by Doniphan Blair

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

The author near Roswell, New Mexico, on his six week journey around the American West during the 2020 election. photo: D. Blair
This was going to be our feature article in November 2020, posted from Texas, since I was driving around rural America researching it. Unfortunately, cineSOURCE had a malware attack on Election Day, so we published it on our Facebook page. Then I decided to update it and sell it as an article or book.

AS IF THE QANONYMOUS FOLKS DIDN'T
didn’t have enough on their plate these past few weeks — their hero Trump defeated, their oracle Q mistaken, their webmaster Ron Watkins quit — The Financial Times released a video on October 15th, “Is QAnon a Game Gone Wrong?” It details how QAnon, a movement with as many as fifteen million people, depending on how you calibrate participation, started as a live-action, role-playing game, or LARP.

The Financial Times’ scoop on the origins of the right-wing phenomena, which also has social, spiritual and commercial aspects, has yet to be corroborated by other major news outlets. But it was prefigured by Wired Magazine in a September 22nd article about Adrian Hon, a computer game designer, who observed QAnon adheres to the common LARP format of scavenger hunt.

“Deep state propaganda,” would probably be the response of most QAnons. Nevertheless, it is common knowledge that their three-year-old community is guided by piecing together clues posted by “Q,” supposedly an intelligence officer with “Q-level clearance,” which refers to working with nuclear secrets, now more likely a live-action, role-playing master.

Also called “alternative reality game,” or its ungainly acronym ARG, the LARP was pioneered in California by Wizards of the Coast to promote their video game “Netrunner” in 1996. The Wizards needed advertising magic since video gaming had blown up that decade, adding three dimensionality, role-playing — from becoming a medieval knight in “Final Fantasy: IV” (1991) to a “first person shooter” in “Doom” (1993) — and “massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” or MMOs, with the arrival of widespread access to the World Wide Web.

Live-action role-playing was the next logical step. A cool combination of storytelling, technology, play and actual human beings, LARPs were adopted by ad agencies and media production companies, to advertise movies as well as games, but also gamers, hipsters and attendees of Burning Man, who developed their own.

LARP-like activities are universal among children, of course, but they are not common in adulthood, outside of games like Dungeons and Dragons, the acting profession, sex, crossdressing, criminality and undercover police or espionage work. This stimulates intense interest.

In the 1990s, European anarchists came up with “Luther Blissett,” a “multiple-use name… used to organize pranks, media stunts, and hoaxes,” according to Wikipedia. Although this doesn’t seem like the work of Blisset, “he” did publish a novel in 1999 titled “Q.”

A sample of the multi-generational and -cultural folks interest in the QAnon conspiracy theory, circa July 2020.. photo: unknown
I covered a LARP for cineSOURCE magazine in 2012. It was created by Jeff Hull, who consults on game theory for nonprofits like Greenpeace and co-founded Oaklandish, an art movement and clothing line with a store in downtown Oakland. Hull calls his LARPs “participatory arts projects” and had just completed “The Jejune Institute.” An excellent documentary on the year-long endeavor called “The Institute” (2013) was directed by Spencer McCall.

In 2008, Hull and his crew attracted more than 7,000 people to their faux Jejune office in a San Francisco office building, using paper flyers with tear-off phone numbers posted on poles. Combining high tech and old school, Jejune “officials” provided about five hundred participants clues in maps, props built into public property and post cards, which led to a protest by 250 people, exploring Oakland’s underground sewage system and solving the mystery of Eva, a punky, young runaway.

Sensing Jejuners might get too involved — “jejune” means naïve, simplistic or superficial, by the way — Hull brought them back to earth at their last meeting by explaining everything openly, after which they had a good laugh over tea and cookies.

Q took “his” LARP in the opposite direction, toward increased mystery, control and politics, when “he” began posting on 4chan, an anonymous, freewheeling forum for hackers, outlaws and pornographers, during the Trump Administration’s first year.

By the mid-2010s, there were all sorts of roll-playing games, from the multiplayer online games to real-life, dress-up fantasies — like “the furries,” people who wear animal costumes — private sexual ones or an online variant called the “anons,” such as CIAAnon, which was orchestrated by an imaginary spymaster.

Q — or what turns out to be a number of Qs, as control of the game was contested — came to widespread attention after an early post announced the impending arrest of Hillary Clinton. It didn’t happen, of course, but fulfilling predictions was not as necessary as expressing the fantasies suggested by Trump’s campaign chant, “Lock her up.”

“When you offer people a story that validates some core beliefs or resonates with their view of the world — or view of their imagined word — it has a life of its own,” Hull told me, when I called him on November 13th. “Suddenly you have followers who are activated by this content in a way that is entirely unpredictable.”

Logically labeled QAnon, Q’s LARP integrated right-wing conspiracy theories, Trump’s embattled presidency, his accusations against “the deep state,” and PizzaGate, the CT popular during the last election. QAnon validated core beliefs not only of aggrieved Republicans but some folks on the far left.

In case conspiracy theories had not yet intruded on your life, those four, long years ago: PizzaGate exploded across the web in October 2016 after a New York City lawyer and white supremacist tweeted he had evidence that Anthony Weiner, the disgraced Democratic congressman and soon-to-be-divorced husband of Clinton’s assistant, was part of a pedophilia ring. Already busted for sexting, the tellingly-named Weiner would do two years for sending a 15-year-old girl “dick pics.”

The author finds a perfect writing retreat in an in-law building behind a friend's house in Tucson, Arizona. photo: D. Blair
From one pervert who happened to be a Democrat, a pedophile ring was born. It was built from clues “deciphered” from the emails of John Podesta, the Democratic Party Chairman, which were hacked by Russians in March 2016 but only made public by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, a month before that Election Day, coincidentally.

PizzaGaters became so convinced Clinton and her colleagues were Satanists running a child sex ring out of a DC pizza parlor, a North Carolina man raced up in December 2016 and peppered a locked door in the back with rounds from an AR-15 assault rifle (no one was hit) to free the children trapped in the basement (which did not exist). He got four years.

Expanding from PizzaGate, QAnon includes Obama and other leading Democrats, celebrities, like Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey, and one banker (George Soros). It also has them commit much more lurid crimes AND run the deep state.

“Why so over-the-top,” you might ask? Well, if a story like PizzaGate is gobbled up, the next conspiracy theory has to be more titillating to win adherents.

Hence, Trump was recruited by military brass to run for president and take down the cabal. Plus, he would soon reveal the entire sordid saga, order mass arrests and heal the nation.

Along with its dystopian views, QAnon promises peace, love and happiness, through what they call “The Great Awakening,” people waking up to the truth and standing up to the ruling elites of Satanists, pedophiles and cannibals (derived from the claim they ingest children’s blood). That utopia is now on hold due to Trump’s near miss of a second term.

Admittedly, “only a fraction of [QAnons] believe the conspiracy theory’s most outlandish claims,” according to an article in Wired’s October 6th issue, which cites a recent poll. Some people may even see them as metaphors for corruption and decay, not actual fact.

Nevertheless, “some 56% of Republicans believe that QAnon… is mostly or partly true,” reported Forbes Magazine on September 2nd, providing plenty of belief to go around. QAnon-related Facebook pages leapt over 600% after the Covid-19 shutdowns in March 2020, when many people were fearful, frustrated and desperate for explanations.

QAnons are known for their aggressive proselytizing, getting friends and family to swallow the “red pill” (of difficult knowledge, from “The Matrix,” 1999). This is to bring them onboard the secret squad that will save the world, or, from a more practical perspective, to protect themselves from intrusions on their fantasy life. QAnon evangelists includes YouTube advisors, book authors, swag manufacturers — hats, flags, shirts — and outright scammers.

Their theories have also been multiplying. The pandemic is a hoax but the new 5G networks are causing the disease, although the vaccines will be fraudulent, in accord with the anti-vaxxers. John F. Kennedy Jr didn’t die in 1999, when his plane crashed in the ocean with two women onboard: he’s been hiding, will soon go public, declare war on the cabal and take over from Pence as vice-president.

QAnons are admonished to do their own research, which allows them to role-play cryptologists and academics, while the movement itself fosters dreams of heroism and revolution in the face of confusion, ridicule and catastrophe.

QAnon enthusiasts at a Trump rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, in 2018. photo: unknown
Top researchers are considered the movement’s saints and called “bakers,” for their expert analysis of Q’s “bread crumbs.” Although they disagree on the details, pretty much all pre-existing CTs — chemtrails, 9/11, the moon landings, Kennedy and Roswell — are considered factual, which makes QAnon the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories.

Unlike a 9/11-conspiracy theorist, who can only bore you to death at a party, QAnon was categorized a domestic terror group by the FBI, in April 2019. That rating stems from the 2016 PizzaGate attack, a June 2018 Nevada police standoff with an armed man who blocked the roadway on the Hoover Dam his armored vehicle, and a murder.

In March 2019, a New York Gambino family boss was killed by a QAnon-addled kid, who thought the CIA had corrupted the Mafia (instead of vice versa, as in the Kennedy-assassination conspiracy).

QAnon’s absence of actual violence is outweighed by its size, up to fifteen million people, its influence, from Trump rallies and Save the Children marches to extensive indoctrination, in person, through the web and now overseas, and its members’ violent view of what is happening right now, hidden away.

Over a year after the FBI assessment but only two weeks before Election Day 2020, Facebook, Twitter and, to a lesser degree, YouTube closed down most of the tens of thousands of accounts related to QAnon, which digital activists had been requesting for years.

Instead of algorithms favoring vetted sources or hiring enough people to manage more detailed review, those platforms were programmed to send viewers more exciting examples of their interests and what is trending worldwide. If someone searches for “QAnon,” their inboxes are eventually inundated by related material, which can lead depressed, anxious or otherwise susceptible people down the so-called “rabbit hole,” Alice’s way into Wonderland.

The same week QAnon was blocked from social media, it was sanctioned by the House of Representatives, every member except for 18, most of whom cited free speech concerns. They can now discuss those issues with their new QAnon colleagues.

In fact, QAnon had two victories among its losses on Election Day. Out of almost 100 candidates adhering to aspects of QAnon, who ran for posts across the country, the Republican congressional candidates Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and gun-fanatic Lauren Boebert of Colorado won their races. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy insisted, on November 12th, that both women had withdrawn fealty to Q, but Boebert only distanced herself and Greene didn’t even bother.

“QAnon is not just on the internet anymore; it’s in the US Capitol,” emphasized Kailyn Tiffany, a journalist with The Atlantic, which published the first major expose of QAnon in May 2020, albeit three years after its emergence.

“It is not just a conspiracy theory anymore; it’s a voting bloc. And it is not going anywhere.”
Although most major news outlets covered QAnon from 2017, aside from The Atlantic, they didn’t start in depth investigative reporting until August 2020, which generated some frenzied catch-up but little actual news. Now that the movement has become of such public concern, however, even staid financial news organizations are taking it seriously and doing good research.

Also on Election Day, Business Insider, a respected site since 2007, referred to QAnon as a game but didn’t elaborate. Their article was investigating Q’s identity through an in-depth analysis of “his” clues, so-called “Q drops.”

Business Insider fingered Ron Watkins or his father Jim, who owns Q’s current hoster, 8kun. Q moved from 4chan to 8chan, when the former instituted some censorship. After Watkins bought 8chan, they morphed it into 8kun last year, after bad press from posting racist manifestos, notably by the New Zealand and El Paso mass murderers (51 in March 2019, 23 in August 2019, respectively).

Ron Watkins emphatically rejects such accusations. But, after years’ hard labor in the outlaw internet, he quit 8kun on Election Day, supposedly to devote more time to his wife and favorite hobby, woodworking, as it happens.

Coincidence is not causality, of course, but Q, too, went silent on Election Day after noting, “Trust the plan not the polls.” QAnons were overjoyed when Q returned on November 12th, but “his” Q-drop, “Nothing can stop what is coming,” was not that informative.

As if that wasn’t bad enough for the symbol-obsessed QAnons, two weeks earlier was the debut of “Is QAnon a Game Gone Wrong?” Produced by The Financial Times, which is based in London and “the leading global business publication” (by its own account), the 16-minute video was directed by Izabella Kaminska, a star reporter and the editor of their award-winning web division, FT Alphaville.

That QAnon is a rogue LARP will have enormous implications for its FBI task force, researchers studying cults and anyone observing with trepidation its mercurial rise and excessive fantasy. If we hope to crack its code and come up with counter measures, how it emerged and operates is critical intel.

“Is QAnon a Game” is a fantastic first step, which I will examine below (see it on YouTube here), but it was overshadowed by real-life events, as so often happens in Trumpian times: a bitter presidential campaign, voting made difficult by both the pandemic and Trump Administration, and the lingering, unresolved aftermath.

Although the administration finally opened up to the Biden transition team on November 23rd, Trump didn’t concede, which could still lead to the Supreme Court, a constitutional crisis, fighting in the streets or a coup, according to extremists on the right and left.

Trump remains adamant he won in a landslide, that there was vast voter fraud and that American democracy is under attack by an enormous, octopussian conspiracy, directed by “the deep state,” another conspiracy theory Trump endorses. It may also be the Satanist pedophiles identified by QAnon.

Trump has winked at QAnon a couple of times, notably his August 18th news conference. After insisting he knew nothing, he admitted, “I’ve heard these are people that love our country. I don’t know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me… If I can help save the world from problems, I am willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there.”

Trump typically avoids outlandish conspiracy theories, like 9/11 or aliens, but he has built his life around devious deals and outright lies; he suspects the same from others; and he is a trained trafficker in conspiracy theories.

In fact, his main mentor after his father was Roy Cohn, the rancid New York lawyer who entered the public eye as an assistant to Senator Joseph McCarthy, fabricator of the allegation that the US government was riddled with communists, the conspiracy theory which tore apart America in the ‘50s.

Along with obstructionist legal strategies, Trump learned from Cohn how to use conspiracy theories to introduce doubt, sow fear and threaten enemies, while maintaining distance and deniability — in fact, not even believing the theories themselves.

It is no coincidence then that Trump kicked off his political career by promoting the Birther conspiracy, his presidential campaign by accusing Mexicans of coming to America to rape and rob, not find work, and his presidency by claiming Clinton won the popular vote by having her minions plant three million fake ballots.

Another conspiracy theory Trump has advanced by endless repetition is that the liberal media was distorting and fabricating so much about him and his administration, they were “fake news.” Conversely, only he could provide an honest assessment, and he came to be revered by supporters for his candor and authenticity.

Republicans have long been the paranoid party, from McCarthy to Nixon and their obstinate opposition to President Obama. After the 2012 attacks on the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, conspiracy theories flourished about Secretary of State Clinton, even after the Republican-led congressional investigations found them baseless.

Even so, most conservatives still can’t conceive that Trump’s go-to strategy is conspiracy theory. Jeff Flake, a Never Trumper one-term senator from Arizona remains perplexed, even though he noted on November 20th, “He probably didn’t believe [Birtherism] but knew some Republicans would.”

Most Republicans see Trump’s conspiracy obsessions as the character flaw of a political outsider and narcissist, who can’t bear to lose because his brand is based on winning and fantasy. Actually, winning through fantasy is the main benefit of conspiracism and Trump. Before becoming president, of course, he was the star of the reality television show, “The Apprentice” (NBC, 2004–17).

Trump has indoctrinated his 88 million Twitter followers with his own tweets and those forwarded from others, including QAnons. By identifying clandestine criminality everywhere, he stokes fear and presents himself as the only viable savior, a boast repeated ad nauseam during his presidential campaign.

Trump has supported 29 conspiracies, according to Wikipedia, from global warming is a hoax to the deep state, which emerged from the Left, or foul play in the deaths of Vince Foster and Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile and Democrat, which reflects the kernels of truth CTs use to build on.

Trump almost always piggy-backs on other conspiracy theorists — Birtherism was the invention of a Chicago gadfly attacking Obama in 2004 — but his piece de resistance is entirely his own: The Democrats can only win in 2020 if they steal the election. Many of us laughed when he started hyping that one, not realizing he was a conspiracy theory master.

Even at the 2016 Iowa caucus, Trump claimed Ted Cruz stole votes. To solidify his Clinton-votes conspiracy, he established the Voter Fraud Commission in May 2017, an apparent exercise in futility, especially after it died eight months later due to absolutely no evidence. But Trump was playing the long game. He prepared the Clinton-votes conspiracy in anticipation of his 2016 defeat and, after winning, switched it to shore up his CT strategy for 2020.

Cohn would be proud. His acolyte Trump has done an A-plus job of making his voter-fraud conspiracy theory stick, even as Republican and Democrat officials testified “it was the most secure vote in American history,” the courts threw out almost all cases, and more and more celebrity Republicans and business people begged him to concede.

Regardless of America’s respectful transfers of power dating back to Washington, the majority of ranking Republicans and rank-and-file are still standing by Trump, although his followers are famous for taking him figuratively, not literally. Hence, Secretary of State Pompeo, Senator McConnell and others imagine they’re indulging his inability to process loss, even as they grossly underestimate him, as did New Yorkers and Democrats before them.

Trump’s low-brow demeanor and even idiocy serve to conceal an elevated emotional intelligence and ability to manage chaos. While it is confusing for most people, Trump has learned to take advantage of chaos, what some have called “creating controversy and watching it play out.”

Secret consultants didn’t help Trump win in 2016 or take over the Republican Party, since he generally rejects advice in favor of “gut feelings,” as he calls it. Indeed, he has developed a technique of pitching ideas, no matter how stupid, reading the room, crowd or media, and, if he feels a benefit is to be gained, plowing forth. While this system hasn’t been that effective in business or international negotiations, it worked well in reality television, celebrity culture and a political party drained of ideas and ethics.

Although the Biden Administration has started to get briefing, meetings, office space and funding, Trump’s insistence he will still prevail through the courts, even though his legal efforts have been a farce rejected out of hand by conservative Republican judges, perplexes many right-wingers, while liberals ridicule it as a scam for donations. Few recognize they are being out-chaos-ed.

Sure, Trump looks frazzled and is laying low, mostly playing golf, watching TV and tweeting frenetically, with few public events since Election Day. He’s in toughest con of his life, searching frantically for a way through, and weighing a possible end-run around all imaginable norms.
Given Trump’s long reliance on conspiracy theories, I doubt he will leave the West Wing without attempting to harness the biggest CT in American history, especially since its adherents see him as their savior.

The first real toe in this water came on November 12th, the same day as Q’s reappearance. Trump tweeted IN ALL CAPS a conspiratorial claim QAnons took from a far-right cable news channel and had been trying to get to him for a week: “Dominion Voting Systems, a company that makes voting machines, ‘deleted’ millions of Trump votes,” (as reported by NBC News).

Although the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency dismissed it, QAnons reject representatives of the deep state and were ecstatic. 70% of all tweets about Dominion, including the proposition Venezuela’s leaders Chavez and Maduro used its equipment to rig their elections, were coming from Q-related accounts. There’s also renewed chatter about how they should stop mourning Trump’s loss and resume their work to save America.

QAnon prayers were answered on November 19th. Since all his more reputable lawyers had quit, Trump made Giuliani captain of his legal team tackling the voter-fraud conspiracy. Giuliani in turn tapped his top associate Sidney Powell, who ranted about Dominion’s diabolical deeds, how Georgia’s Republican governor colluded with the CIA to steal the election, and concluded, almost in tears, with “stick to the plan,” Q’s catch-phrase.

She was fired two days later, indicating Trump did one of his gut feeling pitches, read the room and backed off QAnon, although perhaps not permanently.

Powell is the second senior Trump administration official to come out completely Q, after Michael Flynn, for whom she also provides legal counsel. Briefly Trump’s National Security Advisor, until his removal for failing to admit meeting with Russians and arrest after the Mueller Investigation, Flynn posted to YouTube — on July 4th, 2020, no less — his recitation of the QAnon pledge: “Where we go one, we go all.”

Flynn’s complete pardon by Trump on November 25th, will be seen by QAnon as another affirmation of their cause.

“Taken at face value, at the heart of Q is an effort to generate distrust,” notes Kaminska, at the beginning of “Is QAnon a Game Gone Wrong?”

“Whether it as a state disinformation campaign or something more spontaneous, it is hard to say. Simplifying it, as most of the media currently does, as a far right conspiracy that worships Trump and believes his opponents are Satanic pedophiles, probably misses the point.”

With that deserved dig at mainstream media, Kaminska sets out to decipher QAnon’s methods, history and roots, an epic as fascinating as it is frightening.

Her biggest download comes from Adam Curtis, who became her primary source. A reputable English documentary filmmaker, he has made almost a film a year since 1983, often focusing on social control by big money or computers but not conspiracies. Curtis has done his research and has been doing performance pieces about QAnon.

Conceptually, he traces it back to ’60s radicals Kerry Thornley (1938–98), his childhood chum Greg Hill, and their founding of Discordianism, a parody religion which worshipped chaos. Eventually, an author and ‘zine and magazine publisher, Thornley was also a seminal hippie whose Army buddies happened to include Lee Harvey Oswald.

Thornley and Hill started “Operation Mindfuck,” which involved sending to the Forum page of Playboy Magazine, a progressive periodical at the time, anonymous letters promoting the Illuminati conspiracy theory.

As you may recall from Conspiracy Theory 101 (soon to be required in college), the Illuminati were a secret, 18th century subsect of the Masons in Bavaria, who attempted to advance society through science and democracy. But instead of armchair radicals, a couple of popular books by conspiracy theorists of the day portrayed them as the hidden hand behind the French Revolution.

In Operation Mindfuck, Thornley, Hill and late addition Robert Anton Wilson claimed the Illuminati were involved in almost every war, revolution and assassination since 1789, an exaggeration so egregious they assumed no intelligent person would believe it.

In fact, they thought their Illuminati story could be used as a form of mass psychology, exaggeration as “aversion therapy,” to heal the “paranoid style in American politics,” left over from ‘50s’ McCarthyism and Red Scare and identified by Richard Hofstadter in his respected book of the same name (1964).

Thornley didn’t go when he was subpoenaed to the Kennedy-assassination conspiracy trail in New Orleans, but he told all in his book, “Oswald” (1965), which supports the “lone gunman” theory.

Later in life, however, hard luck, government interference and reading the “dual state” analysis of European lefties Ernst Frankel and Franz Morgenthau, who postulated democracies need fascist substructures to function in the modern era, turned Thornley toward conspiracism.

Hints also emerged that he was mistaken about Oswald. That the Kennedy assassination might have been a Mafia conspiracy is suggested by Oswald’s murder by a low-level but in-debt mafioso, Jack Ruby, and government documents declassified in 2017 (with one last dump postponed to 2021 by Trump, as it happens).

Despite Thornley’s disenchantment, his anti-conspiracy ideas were advanced by others, notably Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007). A prolific author, agnostic mystic, Berkeley activist and friend of Timothy Leary and William Burroughs, Wilson happened to be the Playboy Forum editor who published Thornley’s letters.

Not only did they become close friends, Wilson was anointed the saint of Discordianism by Thornley, who loved statements like, “Belief is the death of intelligence,” or “You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.”

In turn, Wilson and his Forum co-editor, Robert Joseph Shea (1933–1994), fictionalized Thornleyism into an 800 page, award-winning, sci-fi bestseller, which Wilson called “a fairy tale for paranoids.”

“The Illuminatus! Trilogy” is a tour de farce as well as force — the inserted exclamation point giving it away — which surfs from a New York City cop thriller through sex, drugs and mysticism to aliens, monsters and even post-modern asides to the reader. There’s also plenty of conspiracy, including a scene set in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, home to the historical Illuminati.

Wilson and Shea considered conspiracy an intellectual stress test, which fortified your morality and humanity, if you didn’t take it literally, but condemned you to confusion, fear and hate, if you did. Neglecting, however, to recall H.L. Mencken’s observation that “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,” their attempt to cure “the paranoid style in American politics” backfired completely.

Ask around, you’ll find widespread belief in the Illuminati. Indeed, we’re in a golden age of conspiracy theories, with more conspiracists and theories per capita than any time in history.
A similar series of shifts and reversals happened to QAnon.

According to Kaminska, the LARP was concocted by Manuel Chavez, AKA Defango, of Nevada. A likable but lackluster YouTuber, Chavez posts his “Citizen Zone” reports almost daily, rarely tops a thousand views, and has little Q qualities, in content or charisma. He is, however, known to smear people with accusations of pedophilia.

“[Chavez] claimed he created Q as an alternative reality game mostly for the LOLs,” narrates Kaminska, “but also to smoke out bad journalists in the alternative media space,” to see who reported his stories as truth, another stress test or satire like Operation Mindfuck.

Alas, Chavez lost control of Q to Thomas Schoenberg, who might be a musician but is obviously a brilliant programmer — since he largely scrubbed himself from the web — and a LARP master. In fact, Schoenberg sharpened his skills by usurping another internet game, Cicada, which involved riddles, puzzles and advanced or esoteric theorems.

That plot twist is detailed by Kaminska’s other main informant, Jim Stewartson, an Emmy-winning producer and creative technologist out of Los Angeles (according to his LinkedIn profile), who is also well versed in LARPs.

Schoenberg wanted to “radicalize smart people” through Cicada and QAnon, according to Stewartson, using complex challenges and codes and intriguing stories and images. Alas, he drifted into transgressive topics, including Nazism and the CT Himmler formed a secret mystical sect, supposedly extant today. Schoenberg also emphasized the deep state.

Chavez and Schoenberg remained comrades-in-conspiracy, according to possible Nevada State racketeering charges (reported by SDNY.org). They started a company using “targeted chaos,” bots and smear campaigns to defame opponents for clients, one of which was right-wing activists planning to surveil the family of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee employee murdered in July 2016. Rich was about to spill the beans on Satanist pedophiles, or it was a robbery gone bad, according to police.

As sophisticated and shadowy as Schoenberg might be, he, too, lost control of QAnon, out-programmed by a party with greater access, perhaps Jim or Ron Watkins, although Q’s identity remains a mystery.

While the Qs were battling, there was also a struggle among “his” hosters. When Q’s original hoster, 4chan, began banning some discussions in 2018, “he” migrated to 8chan, the creation of Frederick Brennan (1994-).

A talented young programmer and graphic designer, Brennan is wheel-chair confined, due to severe brittle bone disease, and dreamt up his libertarian site while tripping on mushrooms in 2013. A year later, Jim Watkins saw Brennan in an Al Jazeera documentary and recruited him to The Philippines to run his internet empire. Watkins had either bought out or commandeered 2channel, a Japanese pornography site, leading to wealth and child pornographer accusations. Brennan sold 8chan to Watkins in 2015 but continued to work for him, until their falling out three years later.

The fight for QAnon outlines a William Gibson-esque, sci-fi thriller, although it can only be produced in 2030, after we have recovered from the real-life game being played across America and increasingly England, Germany, Brazil and elsewhere.

Stewartson lays out those twists and turns calmly and professionally in “Is QAnon a Game,” but his article on Medium.com, published in August, is significantly more aggressive and explicit.
“QAnon is a death cult preparing for mass violence,” he writes. “It is being run by a group of theocratic fascists, ruthless grifters and literal sociopaths in conjunction with Russian intelligence. Each of these actors is equally hell-bent on creating as much chaos as possible leading up to the election.”

That wake-up call was too inflammatory for Kaminska, but she references it in her section on spy service dropouts or expellees. They form a large cohort of injured cyber warriors, scammers trying to monetize state secrets and nation-state spies, according to Steve Hassan, an ex-intelligence officer she interviewed.

The Russians’ 2016 election interference did not repeat in 2020, since Putin — also an expert in managing conspiracy theories — had no need. His efforts to generate distrust were already being enacted by unwitting double agents.

I doubt Putin is literally running Trump. Although he may have blackmail material, the so-called “Pee tape,” it is immaterial since Trump is a metaphysical “Manchurian candidate,” no brainwashing or blackmailing needed. In this way, Trump is a bit like James Jesus Angleton, the CIA counter-espionage chief during the 1960s, writ large. Angleton tore the agency apart searching for high-level moles, based on McCarthy’s claims of communists, clues from an unstable Soviet defector and his own paranoia.

Trump’s devotion to conspiracism automatically partners him with Putin, since it is essentially a religion. Instead of a monotheist universe ruled by a just, benevolent lord, they believe in a dog-eat-dog, Darwinian world, run by like themselves or even more evil parties, whom they must stand against, hence, the Satanist angle.

The little guy watching the elephants fighting understandably interprets it as “the global cabal theory,” according to the best-selling Israeli historian, Yuval Noah Harari, who finally revealed his analysis on November 20th.

The most critical issue not covered by Kaminska in her brief 16 minutes, in my opinion, is the collapse of community consciousness. Society has been long been atomizing, due to alienation, distancing, digitization, mechanization and fake news, to which we can add pandemic isolation and infection fears. But it began in the ‘60s.

Fifty years ago, psychotropic and birth-control drugs, the freedom to choose your own identity and personal behavior, and other anti-establishment ideas were welcomed by many, including myself, as innovative developments for empowering individuals and improving society. It also fertilized the ground for out-of-control fantasy.

Our minds operate by constructing inner universes from our culture, experience and dreams, according to the ancient Hindu sages, who called our private worldviews “maya,” Sanskrit for illusion or magic. Their thesis was corroborated by Plato, with his cave shadows, and Descartes, who existed because he could think, but it was only integrated into Western canon by ’60s philosophers like Derrida and Said, who developed deconstruction and multiculturalism, respectively.

A vibrant fantasy world is mandatory for creativity and hope, as well as sexual satisfaction, but we still have to connect with our neighbors and societies through agreed-upon, shared realities, which was easier in simpler times.

The digital age made good on its promise of interconnectivity and information, but it divided us into unmediated groups, led by innocent influencers, experienced celebrities, full-on cult leaders or secret agents. With our lives more scheduled, monitored and machine-based, even as we are at loose ends, anxious and disconnected, many of us look to fantasy play with a like-minded community, just as children do or people in the ’60s did.

“This exact phenomena [of conspiracies] and the things going on with Trump is the reason I don’t do that kind of work right now,” Jeff Hull, the LARP master, explained to me. “Ten years ago, that was fun, that was playful. We were activating the public space in a way to turn people on to a whimsical reality.”

Hull noticed a change during his LARP “The Latitude,” which came after “The Jejune Institute.” It was a secret society where people shared personal information in a magical realist format. Although he only invited participants personally and managed it closely, of the 3,000 people involved, many came to view it as a religion, a few dozen became fanatics and a couple tried to take it over.

“Now playing with fact and fiction is scary,” concluded Hull. “There is no room for us to fuck around, to distort truth in that way. It is not a game any more.”

And so went the LARPs two-decade rollercoaster ride from advertising and “whimsical reality” to takeover by “theocratic fascists, ruthless grifters and literal sociopaths.” Stewartson’s assessment is hard to verify, but we are definitely in one of the most dangerous intersections of politics, culture, technology, espionage and mental health EVER!

To be sure, 2020 America is not 1930s Germany, barely out of a catastrophic war and depression, with only one decade of democracy under its belt, and obsessed with cabaret, homosexuality and drugs (OK, we do share the last three). Moreover, Trump is hardly Hitler, which cripples his capacity to enact a traditional coup, along with the fact that much of the military thinks he’s dishonorable and a draft dodger.

But a coup in consciousness is not farfetched. Up to a quarter of Trump’s 70 million voters support QAnon concepts; Trump is a master at manipulating conspiracy theories, which can flip a loss to a win through fantasy and repetition; and “Paradoxically, conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century,” according to the respected columnist David Brooks (November 26th).

History’s greatest conspiracy kingdom, the Third Reich, was built on conspiracy theories about Jews: they betrayed Germany in World War I, controlled the banks, were taking over Germany, were seducing Christian women. CTs came to rule the regime as neighbors, friends and even children, as well as the Gestapo, SS, Abwher and the other intelligence services, spied on, denounced or threatened to denounce each other.

As crazy as Nazi thinking was, it is not as irrational, technically speaking, as some QAnon allegations: sex-slave children held in caves, reptilian alien overlords, time travel. Although they don’t believe every theory and most are not like Germans in thrall to Hitler, we have entered a conspiracy kingdom.

Until I viewed The Financial Times expose, I assumed QAnon was the work of a malevolent mastermind, who could be tracked and stopped. Seeing it as an interactive game, with multiple leaders, able to adapt like a virus and evolve evermore strange — but still enlist average Americans and folks on the far right and left — makes it a mob mentality of a higher order.

You see, I am Jewish and my mother is a survivor of the Holocaust, which was inspired by German conspiracy theories but also Europe-wide ones, notably “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Fabricated by the tsar’s secret police in 1903, “The Protocols” were purported to be the notes of a meeting of Jewish power brokers. Even though it was outed twenty years later as a plagiary, taken from a French satire with the word “Jew” switched in, it was taught as history in the Third Reich and many people believe “The Protocols” today.

QAnon seemed like those old obsessions in modern garb. Indeed, their claim that Democrats and celebrities are harvesting children’s blood for adrenochrome (a commercially-available adrenaline-derived medication), which they inject for alleged fountain-of-youth properties, brought to mind medieval accusations about Jewish people killing Christian children and using their blood for Passover matzo.

Of course, pushing rational limits is common to conspiracy theories. Since the creators are writing fiction, they want the most powerful stories, but which still ring true from existing narratives. Their struggle to tailor them to the dark corners of our collective consciousness makes QAnon a Rorschach test for our times.

Thornley and Wilson hoped to correct conspiracy fantasies through satire, by humorously tricking the mind back to rationalism.

Unfortunately, unlike the Johnson Administration (1963–68), which was trying to do some good and admitted some mistakes, the Trump presidency is full-on farce. Double unfortunately, most of the 47% of Americans who voted for Trump vigorously disagree, preferring to see him as a truth teller and corruption fighter, who will “make America great again” in a warranted second term.

One slip further down that rabbit hole is QAnon, which flourishes in direct relation to the delusions of Trump and Trumpers but also the actuality of the pandemic, the absence of functional fantasy, and the unintended consequences of LARPs, social media algorithms and postmodernism.

Two of the greatest satirists of our day are Steven Colbert and Seth Meyers, likable guys who’ve been eviscerating Trump for decades. Meyers hosted the Washington Press Club gathering in May 2011, which roasted Trump and featured President Obama’s hilarious takedown of Birtherism, which Trump pushed until 2015.

That was supposedly when Trump decided to run for president, although Obama notes in his new book, “A Promised Land” (released on November 18th), it may have come in 2010, when Trump offered to redecorate the West Wing and was politely refused.

Colbert, Meyers, Bill Maher and other comedy theorists have postulated that shaming humor
would destroy Trump. Alas, aggressively attacking Trump, Trumpers or QAnons plays into their perceptions of persecution by their intellectual, social or even metaphysical betters. Only Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che teases Trump with empathy, which can open a butt of ridicule up to the humanist realization, “We are all idiots.”

Since satire doesn’t work in a system-wide farce, sincerity, forgiveness and charity might, as naïve as that sounds.

Credible threats of or actual violence are crimes, which can be prosecuted. But QAnon operates mostly in the realm of cyberspace, free speech and fantasy and must be addressed there. Taking down QAnon pages or flagging disinformation is sensible, in a brick-and-mortar way, but it is reactive, minimally effective and hard to enforce.

“8chan is the only [online] platform featuring a full commitment to free speech,” insisted Jim Watkins in 2019, according to ABC News.

Although “8chan had banned nearly 48,000 users, deleted more than 132,000 posts and 92 discussion boards… [and] complied with 56 U.S. law enforcement requests,” Watkins explained, it is still “a one-of-a-kind discussion board where anonymous users shared tactics about French democracy protests, how to circumvent censorship in repressive regimes, and the best way to beat a classic video game… and a small minority of users post hateful and ignorant views.”

That’s surprisingly articulate for Watkins, who is accused of many nefarious deeds, including by his former programmer, Brennan, who must have some inside dope. Indeed, Brennan and Watkins are currently suing each other; their respective legal machinations have forced each other to flee The Philippines; Brennan has become a vocal critic of QAnon and a proponent of the postulate Watkins is Q or close to “him.”

2017 brought the debut of Parlor, the free speech Twitter, which opens with the inevitably intriguing disclaimer, IN ALL CAPS: “Warning!! This site contains adult materials or materials that may be considered offensive in some communities.” Then came Gab, MeWe and Rumble, two networks championing free speech and a libertarian video-sharing site, respectively.

It has been almost two decades since the start of 4chan and the dark web, suggesting we can’t rely on a strategy that depends on controlling speech. Plus there’s the argument against censorship. Prohibition pushes people underground, where they are harder to monitor, communication with outsiders is limited and their moral senses atrophy even further.

Perhaps QAnon should be considered a self-inflicted, society-wide psy-op, which reflects our malaise but could be countered by more enlightened, insightful and creative speech, dialogue and art. Such content could be amplified by sophisticated strategies, web influencers and regular folk, like suburban women or the Tiktok teens who swamped sites with hits to stop trolls.

The Conspiracy of Love — that there has always been a secret cabal of people working for good, even in terrible times — is a concept I proposed in articles and a performance piece of the same name. In the latter, I relate some of my experiences and research; I read from the Gettysburg Address and my mother’s book, “Love at the End of the World,” about being a romantic teenager in the Holocaust; and I conclude with audience dialogue.

Since I know only a couple of QAnons personally, I base my approach on many discussions with friends and acquaintances who believe 9/11 was an inside job. While I have only succeeded a few times, there’s always a way to maintain dialogue, propose fresh perspectives and translate them into terms acceptable by a given individual.

With Trump’s defeat, many QAnoner are starting to have doubts.

On November 9th, both the NY Times and Washington Post ran articles covering their election disappointment and fear they’ve been conned. Of course, unfulfilled predictions are common to CTs and other QAnons are recalibrating to fit, a standard practice among end-time cults.

I applaud Kaminska’s use of a few of her 16 minutes to examine how to heal conspiracy fanaticism, by interviewing an ex-Moonie cult member turned deprogrammer. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining relations, of not treating culters as enemies, of seeing delusion as a disease that can be cured.

“We have to step back from the demonization of each other and ask what role we can play in building social trust,” President Obama told an NPR interviewer on November 16th. We don’t have to encourage views or actions to accept people as human beings. We are, however, obliged to be more tolerant and understanding, if we hope to bring them back from the polarity brink or conspiracies of hate.

President-elect Biden personifies this quest with his big-tent tolerance, his Vice President-elect Harris (the first Black, woman AND second generation immigrant in that position), his calm attention to the details of the dangers facing America, his disregard of Trump’s defiance, and his reaching out to Republicans, even as they rebuff him.

QAnon blew up in the time of Corona and Trump, when people had time to kill and phobias to channel and he was fanning the flames of divisiveness, fear and conspiracism.

As those factors fade, so will the siren call of Q and T. It will be close, like the election, but we will eventually transit through Trump’s expertly assembled voting-fraud, media-misinformation and deep-state conspiracy theories.

At least that’s what we’re being assured by many public figures, including Michael McFaul, Obama’s former ambassador to Russia (in a November 12th NPR interview). McFaul, who is from Montana and has Trump-supporting relatives and friends, pointed out that some of them voted for Obama and that radical right-wingers did almost nothing on Election Day.

The Proud Boys did appear in Washington DC on November 14th at the MAGA Million Man March — only attended by tens of thousands — which featured a Trump drive-by, QAnon speakers and fellow travelers. Despite a significant counter-protest presence, however, there were only 21 arrests and one serious injury.

“People are less polarized than it seems in the media,” I was told in New Mexico by a North Carolina man, who goes by the trail name Eternal and is hiking the 5,000-mile trail circuit of the western United States. “Most Americans vote red or blue depending on a few hot-button issues but are not fanatics.”

I was in Texas the week before Election Day and saw only a few pickup trucks flying big Trump flags and little of the thirst for violence that plagued 1930s Berlin.
Obviously, I need to get this right. One of the most pointed tragedies of the Jews of Europe was their intellectuals’ failure to analyze the Nazis adequately, despite having Freud and other psychiatrists and philosophers close at hand.

Trump’s attempt to split the country through conspiracy theories will surely continue through the Electoral College vote on December 14th and even Biden’s inauguration, perhaps to his possible 2024 presidential run. Naturally, he will also continue to wreak havoc with government regulations and employees, overseas relations and executive orders and pardons.

Although he will surely leave the White House on January 20th, he will probably re-join mass media and come to lead a grievance cult attempting to block all of Biden’s initiatives, as he did with Obama’s achievements, which could make the Tea Party seem tame.

This will serve as a second referendum on Trumpism, the final stress test of the Trump Era.
If we prevail, if Biden is able to rebind the factions, it will lead to legislative protections against demagogues, intellectual ones against conspiracists, and enthusiasm for the democratic process, which a majority of us just saved through increased voting and faith in our system as well as humanity.

If not, many Americans will continue to believe in Trump and some will go full QAnon, which could become even more popular if the group rejiggers its objectives, if Trump openly identifies with QAnon, or if he essentially becomes Q, who is more a concept than a person. QAnon could conceivably shift from being guided by a hidden character dropping cryptic clues to a well-known one tweeting IN ALL CAPS.

Yes, a lot of people are hurting emotionally, financially and spiritually. Yes, conspiracy theorists will keep exploiting that, inventing ever more insane notions, like QAnon is a CIA creation to identify radicals for future arrest.

We can’t correct role-playing, mind games by indoctrination, rationalism or even satire. It requires a change of heart in the believers but also in us. If we dismiss our opponents, they will dismiss us and their team doesn’t have the visionaries, psychiatrists or healers to make up the difference.

We have to bet on the Conspiracy of Love, which is where the radical multiculturalism of the new era meets the onrushing road.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on Jan 13, 2022 - 12:53 PM
Cinephile Confessions in the Time of Covid
by Alli Antero

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Helen (Helia Rasti) and Phineas (Douglas Allen) in Alli's 'The Alchemy of Sulphur',. image: courtesy A. Alli
BACK IN 2003, AFTER MAKING UNDER-
ground feature films for eight years, I sent a series of DVDs to various agents in Los Angeles. I was hungry for any feedback they might offer and for the off chance they might buy or find distribution for my movies.

Of the nine or so I contacted, only one replied; he actually called me on the phone! The agent said, “We love your work but your films are marketing nightmares. We wouldn’t know how or where to place them.” And then, the punchline, “Would you consider working within an existing genre?”

I thanked him for his feedback but no thanks, my creative processes wouldn’t work within any prefab format. In parting ways, he said, “Good luck. I mean that. Don’t take this the wrong way but your films are too original for the market.”

Too original for the market? That became my mantra for the next few days as I tried processing what it actually meant. WTF?! This was my wake-up call. It meant... Fuck LA, fuck genres, fuck agents and fuck their market politics. Whatever latent fantasy I harbored about “being discovered” or “hitting it big” or seeing my films achieve national release — all evaporated into the void.

In Alli's 'Vanishing Field', the Oracle (Nita Bryant) confronts Jacob on the astral plane. image: courtesy A. Alli
I was now free to create on my own terms without any subconscious drive to impress or please anyone but myself. Over the next twelve years and seven features later, I was on a burning mission from God, or the Muses (sometimes, they’re the same thing), making films under oath of zero compromise and total artistic control.

I toured my movies up and down the west coast between San Francisco and Seattle paying my way by selling DVDs and splitting the admissions with the hosting venues.

After fifteen years of almost nonstop film and music production, my wife Sylvi and I were burnt out and in late 2015, we relocated from Berkeley, California, to Portland, Oregon. Portland is a city surrounded by forests; one of them, Forest Park is larger than Central Park, NY. Our daily forest walks gradually rejuvenated us to the point of finally considering a new creative project (Sylvi and I have been artistic collaborators since first meeting in 1989; it’s who we are and what we do).

Over the next four years, we reinvented ourselves through the creation of five experimental theatre productions, each one featuring text by my favorite poets: Rimbaud, Bukowski, Hilda Doolittle (HD), Blake, and Plath. What made these productions experimental was their visceral and physically ritualistic style of achieving extreme states for performers and audience alike. This approach was initially inspired by my early exposure to the paratheatrical work of Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski in 1977 and has been documented at paratheatrical.com.

Filmmaker, theater director and other arts worker Antero Alli. image: courtesy A. Alli
This experimental theatre process came to an end when I could no longer find performers to meet the demands and standards I had set for myself. It also coincided with the end of a forty-year era of directing groups in these experimental theatre and ritual processes.

I was in my late sixties and had outgrown this part of myself. I needed to let go of something I had been clinging to. I decided to post all my films online as free views on YouTube and Vimeo, a giveaway compelled by a final renunciation of commercial gain for or with art. My gift to the world.

In the Fall of 2019, the Muses finally called with a vision about an astral-travelling subversive Zen monk. This triggered memories of a traumatic out of body experience I suffered in my early twenties, a shock that annihilated any previous identification with my physical body.

In my final experimental theatre production, “Escape from Chapel Perilous” (Dec. 2018), I invited a local Zen monk to play the disembodied spirit of a monk wandering the bardo between incarnations. A year later, in the Fall of 2019, I cast him as the astral-travelling Zen monk in my next film, “The Vanishing Field”.

He agreed and invited me to shoot the movie in the Zen monastery where he lived and worked along with other monks who agreed to appear in this chiefly improvised film. “The Vanishing Field” was completed over four months and received favorable reviews before its Portland premiere was covid-cancelled; it went straight to YouTube with my other films.

After “The Vanishing Field” was released, I wrote a book distilling the paratheatrical methods I had developed over the past four decades. The book was published as State of Emergence by Original Falcon Press in late 2020. I started wondering if the Muses of Cinema would ever call again. My life as a theatre director was over and I was feeling the earth and sky open up before me.

From Alli's 'The Alchemy of Sulphur', Calliope (Cynthia Schwell) appears in a dream. image: courtesy A. Alli
Sylvi and I continued our almost daily forest walks, along with our wonderful river walks. Besides its densely forested regions, Portland is bordered and contained by the great Columbia and Willamette rivers with nearby Mount Hood and Baker watching over us.

A year later, the Cinema Muses sent me my next vision about a writer who writes herself into a story with unexpected real world consequences.

This psychological romance of a woman falling in love with a figment of her imagination in a story she was writing ignited new fires in my ongoing obsession with mystical themes. Exploring a story of how the power of imagination shapes our experiences and our beliefs became my compass for navigating the Covid Bardo.

The term “Bardo” comes from the Tibetan Buddhist idea of an interim dimension between incarnations — when we die, our soul enters this limbo state, this bardo, where it drifts until incarnating, again, into the human condition.

“The Alchemy of Sulphur” was made over six months in 2021 during the challenging quarantine era of social distancing and masks. Four of the five actors were vaccinated and since most of the scenes were filmed outdoors at a nearby wildlife refuge, we were happy to play in a mask-free environment.

Moment from 'Soror Mystica: Ritual Invocation of the Anima'' a ParaTheatrical ReSearch performance, 2017: courtesy A. Alli
Unless we’re shut down by covid or State regulations, as of this writing the world premiere of “The Alchemy of Sulphur” is scheduled for Sunday night November 7th at the Clinton Street Theater in Portland. This new film will be also posted on YouTube on November 11th.

For more details on any of the above, see my site Vertical Pool, or my book, "State of Emergence".

As a love slave to the Muses, Antero has helped them create fourteen feature art films and numerous documentaries and shorts since 1992 and be reached here

Posted on Jan 10, 2022 - 09:56 PM
What Happened to cineSOURCE?
by Doniphan Blair

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED CINESOURCE
hasn’t been in your inbox lately—we missed you, too, and happy new year!

In the middle of celebrating Trump’s defeat, on November 3rd, 2020, cineSOURCE was hit with a malware attack. Although we rebuilt our site, cineSOURCE had long been having difficulties—its software needs an expensive upgrade—and I was busy with other writing projects. Indeed, I had recently edited and got published the book “Love at the End of the World".

But we kept putting up articles, mostly on film festivals or by our regular authors Karl Cohen and Don Schwartz, which was good, since Don bowed out last month (see story). Thanks for your great work, Don!

I also wanted to keep covering our specialty subjects, notably the conspiracy theory movement and Oakland, both of which are in their most severe crises since the McCarthy ‘50s and Crack ‘80s, respectively.

Indeed, we featured an Oakland article or issue every April since cineSOURCE’s start in 2008. Sorry for running eight months late but please check out “Letter from Oakland: A Progressive City in Crisis", and let us know your thoughts on cineSOURCE’s Facebook page.

I also lost my mother, Tonia Rotkopf Blair, in December, peacefully at age 96, but she lives on in her book, “Love at the End of the World: Stories of War, Romance and Redemption", which was released by Austin Macauley in May, 2021. See her obituary here.

In addition to editing it, I included “Darwin and Love: What I Learned Making a Holocaust Movie", my own attempt to make sense of that history, which appears in this cineSOURCE here. We also include one of my mother’s stories, “Stefan".

I am honored to present a new cineSOURCE issue, with a dozen new articles, some by stalwarts like Don's Blog and Karl, who has three ( The Computer Game Problem,, the Academy of Art’s Loan Rip Off , and Cartoon Corner), and our “unhoused correspondent,” Eric Moseley's story. Others are by new authors, from the incredible indie filmmaker Antero Alli, who offers a perspective on his entire oeuvre (here), to the philosophy of filmmaker/painter/teacher Celik Kayamar (see article on detecting BS or Darwinian evolution) or filmmaker Leslie Streit (see her article).

Despite the red ink, headaches and hackers, cineSOURCE has been one of the best projects of my life, from starting it as a paper magazine in 2008 to it becoming my entree to film showings, filmmaker interviews and film festivals, but most importantly my master’s class in writing.

Hence, I have many more articles, books and podcasts in the hopper. So, if you enjoyed cineSOURCE over our last decade, please subscribe or support me on Patreon.

I will do my best to keep cineSOURCE going.
Posted on Jan 10, 2022 - 04:23 PM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner: Jan 22
by Karl F. Cohen

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Spiderman and love interest (Tom Holland and Zendaya) from 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' (2021). photo: courtesy Marvel/i>
20 Million Risked Omicron to See Spider-Man

Ever since the pandemic brought movie going to a halt, Hollywood has been consumed with fear of the demise of the mega blockbuster industry. With the arrival of “No Way Home”, the new Spider-Man film, which 20 million people in North American risked the new Omicron variant to see on its opening night, there is hope for the future—if a film is colossal and exciting enough.

“No Way Home” took in an estimated $253 million over the weekend of December 17th, according to Comscore. That means about 20 million tickets were sold. Indeed, it was the highest opening-weekend in the 19-year history of the eight-film, live-action Spider-Man franchise. It was also the third highest weekend EVER in Hollywood records, behind “Avengers: Endgame”, with $357 million, and “Avengers: Infinity War” with $258 million.

“No Way Home”’s big weekend gross is impressive, but the film will need more weekends to break even. The film probably cost Sony and Disney at least $200 million to make, plus there was enormously expensive marketing campaign. Will Covid 19 could ruins the film’s success?

Unfortunately, the weekend was not good news for other big productions. Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley”, a lavish noir thriller with an all-star cast, opened in 2,145 North American theaters. It bombed and it probably cost Disney about $60 million to make.

Also, let’s hope that December 17-20th didn’t turn out to be a super-spreader disaster.

Scene from Erick Oh’s new film 'Namoo'. photo: courtesy E. Oh/i>
Oh’s New Namoo Explores Life and VR

Erick Oh’s new Oscar contender is “Namoo”, Korean for tree, and the tree symbolically captures the beautiful and heartbreaking moments of his life. Oh created last year’s Oscar nominated “Opera”. He is from Korea and has worked at Pixar.

His new film is more personal and intimate than his last work. Oh was inspired to make “Namoo” while grieving the loss of his grandfather, and used his life as its centerpiece.

“I went on a journey to ask questions,” Oh told me. “I asked questions. Of course, I document my thoughts and provide a room for the audience to probe it and think about themselves too. That being said, I think I discovered a lot about who I am while making this film.”

The film shows the passage of time with changing color to represent the passing seasons. Oh says, “The tree is a symbol of your self-motivation that drives you internally, or it could be your unconsciousness with the tree and the guy interacting with each other. Sometimes tree gives stuff to him or takes away stuff or reveals something that he has forgotten. Sometimes he does something to the tree. That’s who we are. We keep talking or battling with our inner self and constantly making different decisions. That’s what makes life at the end of the day and who you are.”

“It forms in a heart shape when you meet the love of your life. Sometimes there’s a huge hole in the middle that probably represents those moments of emptiness. And then sometimes it goes super distorted, and it feels like everything’s falling apart. But after so many versions of your tree, you find a balance.”

Oh also commented that animating in virtual space and in real time with the Oculus headset was a new experience for him. Once he got up to speed, it saved him a lot of time. It took him a while to learn the “uninterrupted, 360-degree narrative flow of VR” but, fortunately, he had six experts to assist him.

The project began as a virtual reality experience created using the VR tool Quill, “which made transferring to a short much easier using the same animated workflow. One of the many reasons I was able to do VR was Quill software,” he said. “This enables artists to get into virtual space to draw and paint very intuitively. All the layers were done in Quill.” Indeed, the modeling, rigging, animating, shading, lighting are merged into one program

While the VR experience consisted of watching the tree grow in front of you, the short naturally contained a narrative flow that escalated with tension. “Thanks to Quill, the painterly, 2D-look was convincingly achievable in CG.”

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .
Posted on Jan 10, 2022 - 04:16 PM
How Bad Are Video Games for Children?
by Karl F. Cohen

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

The Girl Queen from Tencent Games popular game 'Honor of Kings'. photo: courtesy Tencent
UNTIL AUGUST OF LAST YEAR, I PAID
little attention to the video game industry.

Suddenly, however, I was reading all over about China cracking down on the game industry to combat child addiction to their products. Authorities were calling for parents, game developers and manufacturers to work together to combat the scourge of the game industry, which grossed $173 billion in 2021. Indeed, the stories were scary enough for game companies’ stock to tumble up to 10% in just a few hours. What was going on?

I read with amazement news articles that proclaimed, “No industry, no sport, can be allowed to develop in a way that will destroy a generation.” Several articles even called gaming “spiritual opium.” Chinese authorities were labeling e-sports and games the “opium of the mind” and digital games “electronic drugs.”

They called for more restrictions to prevent greater widespread addiction among children. One article claimed children were spending food money on games, and playing them for up to seven hours a day, resulting in their school grades dropping.

Tencent, a Chinese multinational entertainment company and the world’s biggest gaming developer (“Call of Duty: Warzone”, “Fortnite”, “League of Legends”), responded by saying new measures were needed to protect minors.

Tencent wanted to show they were socially responsible, but only suggested weak measures for another of their popular game, “Honor of Kings”. They did, however, support prohibiting kids under 12 from spending money on games and suggested limiting playing time to under 1.5 hours on weekdays and 2 hours a day on holidays and weekends.

The Chinese government responded to Tencent’s suggestions by issuing much tougher restrictions. Online gamers under 18 are now limited to only one hour on Friday through Sunday and on holidays. Play must be between 8 AM and 9 PM and is not permitted on Monday through Thursday.

Also facial recognition is becoming required to insure the player is 18 or older, to prevent children from using the IDs of adults to sign on. BBC news estimates China has “tens of millions of young gamers.” Tencent has also developed a facial recognition system to limit late-night gaming by children.

It is obvious the company admits their product is dangerous, so why doesn’t China take it off the market?

Both boys and girls are attracted to The Girl Queen from 'Honor of Kings'. illo: unknown
The World’s Most Lucrative Market

“Honor of Kings” was the world’s top grossing game in 2019 and 2020. According to Tencent, it had the equivalent income of $22.7 billion in revenue from smartphone games and $6.9 billion from PC games. And gaming is just part of Tencent’s total revenue of $74 billion. Gaming has been called “the world’s most lucrative market.”

Wikipedia says, “’Honor of Kings’ is a multiplayer online battle arena developed by TiMi Studio Group and published by Tencent Games for the iOS and Android mobile platforms for the Chinese market.” Interestingly, downloading the app is free but to upgrade characters or costumes to advance levels, players must pay.

The BBC says the crackdown by Beijing is based on a reaction to the rapid growth of capital and technology and the potential adverse effect on the well-being of the country’s young generation. The government is also concerned about “celebrity fan culture and private tutoring,” and is trying to create “positive energy” and restore “correct values.”

Game companies do develop ways to addict players. Obviously, they make the games as exciting as possible, which entices players to return. And they offer additional incentives, including daily or weekly use-it-or-lose-it quests, login rewards for continuous streaks of play, season passes and other incentives. Explicitly or not, they want to dominate the lives of their players.

Computer Game Addiction Also Serious Problem in US

Playing computer games is fun for millions of people. When that pleasure becomes excessive, it can be annoying to others, but it doesn’t qualify as a computer game addiction unless other areas of a person’s life become adversely affected. Unfortunately, that is precisely what is happening to many players all over the world.

An industry of health professionals has developed to try and help those with this serious compulsive disorder. Indeed, it is now recognized as a mental addiction in the World Health Organization’s “International Classification of Diseases” (2018).

The lure of e-sports is quite enticing to many people. E-sports players who get involved with competitions can be rewarded with big money and titles like “pro” or "grand master." Successful individuals and teams can achieve fame. Some people wanting to be great e-sports players say they spend 8 to 12 hours a day in training.

Some of the games are what are called massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs), which are designed not to have a fixed ending, so new players can join in and others can leave or take a breaks as desired. Games often have levels of achievement that encourage you to try and rise in your ranking. Players of many games can earn points or “wealth” simply based on the numbers of hours they have spent playing. This fosters the concern that if you stop playing, you may fall behind other players.

Another kind of lure are the gaming programs that adopt gambling concepts. Instead of using chips some games let you buy or win things to put in your “loot box.” Other types of games, including e-sports, have people getting excited by betting money or things called “skins.” There are lots of other ways to wager online that don’t seem to be like old fashioned gambling. Software designers are on the search for new innovative concepts to get you involved.

Some of the avatars, that players use in a type of cos-play, from the popular 'Call of Duty'. photo: courtesy Tencent
Symptoms of Addiction

Symptoms of a computer addiction include not being able to quit, being upset or angry when you can’t play, thinking a lot about playing and believing that playing makes you feel better. Other signs that someone has a serious problem include the loss of other things you used to enjoy, having trouble with your job, relationships or schoolwork, and lying about the amount of time you spend on gaming. And there are physical symptoms that can develop from a sedentary lifestyle.

Treatment

Treatment programs at mental health clinics exist in the United States, China and other nations for people who spend way too much time doing things like playing games, web surfing or even online chatting. The treatments range from group therapy to one on one counseling and outdoor experiences called “wilderness therapy.” There are also more severe interventions including shock treatment and in China militaristic “boot camps.”

China has also established legal regulations. Prior to establishing the most recent rules, they had outlawed online gaming in 2019 for kids under 18 between the hours of 10 PM and 8 AM. There were also restrictions established in 2017 limiting the numbers of hours a kid could play on Tencent games.

If you type into your computer’s search bar “video game addiction treatment” you will find dozens of businesses offering the public their services. You may also find interesting statistics like “as many as 12 percent of boys and 7 percent of girls are addicted to gaming.” The number of kids playing video games is said to be 70 to 80%, and 41% say they spend too much time playing video games. In the United States, spending money on video games grew by 30 percent in the second quarter of 2020, to a record $11.6 billion.

Should the animation community and public be made aware of computer game addiction

I believe computer game addiction can be harmful to the player and possibly others close to that person. I don’t know what to suggest, except that friends or family of people with that condition do the necessary research and try to convince the player to understand their problem and seek help. Animation can be a great art and I hate seeing it used in a way that harms others.

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .
Posted on Jan 09, 2022 - 03:00 PM
Honoring Don Schwartz
by Doniphan Blair

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Don Schwarz, circa 2010. photo: courtesy D. Schwarz
CINESOURCE IS SADDENED TO REPORT the closing of “Dr. Doc”, our 13-year -running documentary column by Don Schwarz, who has been with the magazine since its founding in 2008. After doing almost 700 mini-reviews, and over 20 full interviews or articles—which makes him our most prolific author—Don is retiring due to the onset of aphasia. He intends to fight the word-and-meaning-scrambling disease with alternative therapies, with which he has long taken an interest in and worked with.

Indeed, Don holds multiple degrees, including a PhD in psychology and counseling, which allowed him to serve for 21 years as the director of the Trager Institute.

Fortunately for cineSOURCE, Don just finished a number of his doc blogs, which can be seen here, Dr. Doc. The last is fittingly named, “Into The Night: Portraits of Life and Death”. He also just did a great interview with the Greek-American filmmaker, Stavroula Toska, which can be seen here. Indeed, Toska thanked cineSOURCE as well as Don profusely on her Facebook page.

Since 1977, he has written for a variety of publications and projects, including The Pacific Sun, Marin County’s alternative weekly, and some film scripts. Moreover, as an actor he has been seen as an extra in a number of feature films shot in the Bay Area, starting in the 2000s.

A strong advocate for local film and TV production, Don was a member of the Scary Cow film cooperative, the storied indie film incubator, which was sadly forced to close during Covid. Other interests include music, his twin nieces, and promoting natural healing through scientific research.

Don got into film criticism writing for Film/Tape World, which flourished in the Bay Area from 1984 to 2007. Joining cineSOURCE right when it started in 2008, he became our most a dedicated film reviewer and writer, including 38 of his mini reviews in the last six months.

A quiet and modest man as well as careful observer and deep thinker, he lives in Marin County, and we wish him well.

Thanks for your great work, Don!

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Jan 09, 2022 - 12:54 PM
Filmmaking in the Pandemic
by Leslie Streit

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

A landscape that inspired and appeared in Leslie Streit's new film '95 Days'. photo: L. Streit
Leslie Streit, who has made feature documentaries and short films, was challenged by the pandemic to make a film.

2020 and 2021 brought devastating drought conditions to the San Francisco Bay Estuary and its surrounding locations. This area is a delicate living ecosystem of marshland and wildlife. My film “95 Days” chronicles its journey from a lush spring through the progressive heat and dryness of summer when the lack of rain and humidity gives way to nearby wildfires. Using photos and videos taken from May to late August 2021, often overlaying imagery from archival sources, I documented a changing landscape that is at once colorful, abstract, poignant and threatened.

I live only minutes from the San Francisco Bay Estuary and spend spare time walking its trails and photographing its flowers, grasses and birds. To my eye the landscape translates as interesting lines, patterns and color fields punctuated by colors and textures beyond what the camera could ordinarily see. I've tried to capture those images in the hopes that others might see what I see. There is beauty even when there is damage to the land and even as climate changes before our eyes.

Although much of my work in the past 13 years has been focused on feature documentaries, “95 Days” was a return to my roots in visual and performance art which was often considered experimental. Working with my long-time editor and producing partner, Robin McCain, we chose to make every frame melt into the next one with changing color, depth perception and point of view. There are 3 sections accompanied only by music within the film’s 5 minute length. No dialog was needed to tell this story.

When it was time to send “95 Days” out into the world we found that the Covid pandemic and resulting turmoil it brought with it have radically altered our way of viewing content from live theater to virtual screenings.

The poster for '95 Days'. photo: L. Streit
As we start to come out of the pandemic it is still a time of great uncertainty. There are people who are desperate to socialize in real world situations and they are anxious to return to the experience of seeing film in a movie theater surrounded by a live audience. Recently I’ve received numerous invitations to preview screenings with live Q & As and live audiences inside an actual screening room.

On the other side Netflix, Apple, Hulu and many others are distributing theatrical films and series and have been producing their own big budget content. The big award shows (Emmys, Golden Globes, and Oscars) reflect the continuing importance of the streaming media providers well beyond the days of pandemic isolation. For many people this is still the best way for them to see movies.

There also seems to be a pandemic/post-pandemic trend for films to focus on content that reflects disturbing issues: disease, famine, politics, apocalypse, racism and inequality, gender issues, crime and corruption, mental illness, poverty. And an endless stream about the lives of celebrities has taken over the documentary scene as well as a looming fear that things we used to laugh about are now off limits.

But there are many new film festivals opening internationally and short films especially those about subjects like the environment and climate change are very much appreciated in many parts of the world. Our “95 Days” has already won several awards and special mentions in the only three months that it has been submitted to festivals. It has had a cross cultural impact—video art, stills, and music are universal.

Right now the short film format seems ideally suited for many things. Short films can be made with all levels of budgets – high to low – by individuals in isolation or crews and teams working together. They can be issue oriented, comedy, animated or many other genres, suitable for all age groups. Most importantly they can be self distributed. Festivals can program them in between longer films and audiences can see them comfortably on a variety of devices from television to mobile phones.

For the last many years I had only been creating short format films as teasers for feature films. But “95 Days” has changed my entire outlook on filmmaking. It is my invitation to enter a joyful world of experimentation and I think the experience of making “95 Days” has given me a new freedom to tell all kinds of stories going into the future.

"95 Days" went on to win a total of nine awards at international festivals including two for best female director and others for best experimental short and best film about nature and the environment.

Leslie Streit is a filmmaker, writer and producer, living in San Francisco who can be reached here

Posted on Jan 09, 2022 - 03:20 AM
Letter from Oakland, Part II
by Doniphan Blair

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

One of Oakland's largest unhoused encampments, home to some, a den of thieves to others, is in West Oakland. photo: D. Blair
Continued from Letter from Oakland, Part I

Indeed, Oakland is rich and talented enough to fix its problems, according to my neighbor Jermaine, who was raised in a Chicago hood by a drug-addicted mom. The gang war he witnessed from our loading dock comes from increasing lawlessness, he told me. Heading Jermaine’s fix-it list are the homeless encampments, which are common up and down the West Coast but over the top in Oakland, where they include fully 1% of the population. Although aggravated by gentrification, the homeless camps only started after the Occupy movement established that camping in public spaces would be tolerated, and then they distributed tents.

Many of the town’s biggest camps are in West Oakland. While they provide a release valve for society’s rebels or outcasts, they are rife with addiction, theft, sex abuse and the dangerous tactic of torching rivals’ tents, according to my friends who work with the unhoused as activists, social workers or firefighters, or who live nearby.

Oakland never burned during the nation-wide riots of 1964 through ’68, the last year because the Black Panthers advised against it. By the time Vice President Kamala Harris was born here in ‘64, it was becoming a remarkable multicultural and artistic city, the center of the Bay Area Figurative Movement (of painters) with a world-class art school, California College of Art.

Times were tough for Oakland's proletariat, due to downturns at the port and in many industries. Nevertheless, most residents still had access to elevated opportunities for friendships, education (the University of California at Berkeley is four miles down Telegraph Avenue from downtown Oakland) and employment. When the Rodney King riots erupted in Los Angeles in 1992 and spread to San Francisco and Berkeley, there were no riots in Oakland.

America’s history of slavery and ongoing racism are important subjects for study and debate, especially when contextualized within America’s democratic evolution, but making it the centerpiece of Oakland’s current catastrophe belies the obvious. Indeed, critical race theory can sometimes sound like a conspiracy theory—a monstrous unaddressed evil is sabotaging society—which is problematic in Trumpian times, when so many Americans believe his Big Lie about election fraud and other conspiracy theories.

In point of fact, Oakland has been a “chocolate city” for fifty years, having birthed the Panthers in 1966 and, in 1977, elected its first Black mayor, Lionel Wilson, another McClymonds High School graduate. He served for 14 years, the second longest term in Oakland history. (Panther co-founder Bobby Seale ran for mayor in ’72 and came in second out of nine.) And there have been two more Black mayors: Elihu Harris, 1991 to ‘99, and Ron Dellums, 2007 to ‘11.

While whites continued to hold the vast majority of power and African American Oaklanders dropped from 47% of the population n 1980 to 29% today, many people of color became city employees, entrepreneurs, politicians, professionals, artists, and professors, as was the case with Newton’s brother and Harris’s parents. They also became cops.

Ersie Joyner, who was still recovering two months later from the unbelievable 22 gunshots he survived in October, emerged from poverty in East Oakland to become a respected officer. He was involved in a police shooting a decade ago, for which the department paid a wrongful death settlement of $75,000, but he claimed he was confronting an assailant about to commit a murder. Not only did Chief Armstrong and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf praise Joyner highly after he was shot, he was an early advocate of defunding the police.

“My whole entire career I have been taught, I have trained, and I have worked towards eliminating gangs,” Joyner told a reporter from The Guardian in 2019. “That has failed miserably for us for decades.” For most of the last decade, Joyner led Ceasefire, Oakland’s anti-violence program, which is known nationally and was instrumental in reducing Oakland’s murder rate.

Ersie Joyner: ex-OPD captain and head of Ceasefire, a gang intervention program, as well as, more recently, cannabis entrepreneur and shooting victim. photo: courtesy TGTime
What Chief Armstrong is calling for—for Oaklanders to take to the streets and internet to militate against the slaughter—did happen in 2006, after murders jumped to 145, 20% over the previous year. Pastors, politicians and teachers walked the streets to send a strong personal and public signal. My graphic studio submitted a proposal for an ad campaign using photos of funerals and street memorials and the slogan “Murder is fun for the whole family,” although it wasn’t funded.

Little of that ilk has been organized of late, save for the OPD’s small march in July. I’m guessing activists assume such efforts would cast aspersions on last summer’s hard-won reforms, hand critics a wedge issue, and be of little use, due to ongoing systemic racism.

There is also the class question. Middle class African American families, from which many activists hail, famously give their kids “the talk,” about what to do when harassed by cops. Often left unmentioned is their more frequent lectures on thugs and gangs. Indeed, they have to fight harder on that front, since some of their kids like to prove themselves by running wild. Caught between those two mortal threats, they are understandably reluctant to get involved in gang abatement.

Defunding a police department, or reforming it and redirecting some monies, is direly needed in jurisdictions which militarized or failed to integrate their police or increase social services. But that doesn’t really describe the OPD, which has long had some innovative practices, including collaborating with activists and therapists, but has struggled to find sufficient funding for decades.

When the notoriously liberal but also pragmatic Jerry Brown served two terms as Oakland’s mayor in the 2000s, between his four respected terms as governor, he tried to expand the force by 100 officers. Many Oaklanders of color liked Brown and voted for his additional-police ballot measure, but the measure funding it was defeated. With 681 officers today, the department is about 50 officers below Brown’s hoped-for levels 15 years ago.

OPD was docked $14 million during BLM Summer, with another $22 million lost from pandemic-related tax revenue drops, equaling five and seven percent of its budget. In the meantime, OPD’s case-solved rate went from a half to a third, although Armstrong did shift six detectives to homicide, and he recently claimed the department had cracked ten murder cases. OPD fields up to 2000 911 calls daily, one of the highest calls-per-officer rates in the country. After hearing the shots that killed Rashad Brinson, I called 911 three times before getting through.

Although the city shifted another $18 million to social services in June 2021, it did allocate $38 million for more police academies, i.e. classes of recruits, to cover the perennially low levels and the many officers who are quitting. One academy will graduate in January 2022 and another in May. A big problem, however, is those recruits, an Oakland friend recently told me, since the vast majority are not from Oakland, let alone its inner city.

Be that as it may, the OPD has been comparatively well integrated for decades and now includes some Asian officers and members of the city’s artistic community. Jinho Ferreira (Black/Latinx), who rapped as “The Piper” while an OPD officer, also wrote the well-received, one-person play, “Cops and Robbers” (2012), which examines its opposing protagonists notably sympathetically.

Police killings, especially those resembling executions, instead of fog-of-war errors, are criminal, culturally corrosive and incendiary offences, naturally alienating people from authority and society and fueling the anger of volatile young men.

A June 2020 Black Lives Matter march passes in front of Blair's building on West Grand and Adeline, West Oakland. photo: D. Blair
According to the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Oakland-connected cops killed 102 people from 1970 to 2015. Of the 93 victims that could be racially identified, 97% were of color and around two thirds Black. But those police murders are still small, by factors of 30, 40 or more, compared to inner-community killing. Indeed, in those 45 years, over 3000 Oaklanders of color were killed by each other.

Moreover, fratricide is more difficult to process psychologically than outsider aggression since it hits in the home. While external enemies can be criticized aggressively and publicly, as demonstrated during BLM Summer, internal oppressors are often downplayed or denied. Then the repressed anger is transferred to a more palatable opponent, hiding the injury and making it harder to heal.

Oakland’s Black community has hundreds of churches, large and small, and their pastors and parishioners do a fantastic job. I have seen them hand out food, provide medical services, set up a community recording studio, and even save the elderly parishioners living next door to my building from a fire, before the arrival of the fire department. But to address our current crisis, which is aggravated by the two major crises of our era, the pandemic and Trumpism, they don’t have much street cred.

For that, the organizers of an “Oakland United Against Violence,” or similarly-named march, concert or social-work symposium could turn to Oakland’s many famous rappers or basketball stars. Or they could tap Alicia Garza, a founder of Black Lives Matter (who was born in Oakland but moved to wealthy Marin County and returned at age 27), Angela Davis, the internationally-known thinker, professor and friend of the Black Panthers, or Boots Riley, the brilliant indie rapper turned filmmaker, who shot his masterful and scathingly satirical debut feature "Sorry to Bother You" around Oakland in 2017 (see cineSOURCE article).

Many of Oakland’s creatives and entrepreneurs have the skills to organize concerts, clinics or neighborhood fitness or media centers, preferably located on or near crack corners. Or to contribute fresh ideas. The Oakland Occupy drew denizens from all walks of life and hoods to fruitful encounters and discussions in front of the mayor’s office. Alas, Mayor Jean Quan, a woman, Asian and longtime activist, was unable to find a way to channel that energy or hybrid it with city services.

“Blindspotting”, another excellent Oakland indie feature, which builds an interracial bromance into a political and operatic epic, was written by and stars Oaktown homies and old friends, Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs, the latter fresh off his New York star turn as Thomas Jefferson in “Hamilton” (see cineSOURCE article). Filmed largely in West Oakland, also in 2017, they set their white cop’s murder of a Black man on West Grand and Adeline, my corner. Alas, there have been no police murders here in the last three decades, while well over 150 of my neighbors in a few block radius have killed each other.

“Blindspotting”, “Sorry to Bother You” and other recent films artfully address police killings and institutional racism, but when it comes to Oaklanders butchering each other, it’s slim pickings. Nevertheless, there were a couple of spectacular, low-budget films wading into that morass, notably “Licks”, which is slang for the corner liquor stores the film’s protagonists like to rob, and “Everyday Black Man” by my friend Carmen Madden.

“Licks” was directed in 2012 by Jonathan Singer-Vine, a white, Jewish twenty-something from Berkeley whose Oakland friends, some living deep in the hood, obviously loved the project and worked incredibly hard on it. With a largely amateur cast, they produced a striking, professional film which delves deep into thug life.

Big John, played by Steve Joel Moffet Jr., is one of the toughest characters in 'Licks', the groundbreaking Oakland movie by Jonathan Singer-Vine. photo: courtesy J. Singer-Vine
Singer-Vine made the proprietor of his “lick” Black for story telling purposes, but the vast majority of corner liquor store owners are Arab-Americans, often Yemeni, which typifies Oakland’s advanced multiculturalism. Due to the demand for credit and prevalence of alcoholism, Blacks are disadvantaged running liquor stores in their own communities, but Yeminis are Muslims whose culture discourages drinking. A friendly, well-adjusted group, but also quite traditional, even though many of their grandfathers immigrated in the ‘70s, the Yemini-Americans are also very well-armed.

For thirty years, I have known the members of the extended family which owned and worked in my corner lick, where Rashad Brinson was killed in October. Indeed, their saga is central to local gossip, giving me a leg up at local gatherings. In addition to brandishing weapons to defend themselves on many occasions, they have shot a few assailants, and one, Willy, accidentally shot himself (he survived).

“‘Licks’ is so studded with the N-word and local slang, like ‘whip’ for car, as to be almost unintelligible,” I wrote in my 2017 review of the film for cineSOURCE. “[I]ts denigration of women—many of its protagonists are pimps, although they adore their mothers and grandmothers—makes it almost unwatchable.” But also accurate, it would seem.

When Singer-Vine finally found a distributer, the suits wouldn’t release “Licks” unless he cleaned it up—the commercial wing of the PC police. He refused, hence its four-year delay before appearing on Amazon Prime in 2017. “Licks” still hasn’t gotten proper promo or viewing, even around Oakland, despite its elevated insights (see it here). As is commonly known, as well as well confirmed by research, people respond to honest stories about their issues.

In contrast, “Everyday Black Man”, shot in Oakland in 2009, was by a woman about men. Madden, who is African American and grew up mostly in Oakland’s suburbs, started as an actress and became an accomplished teacher, writer and director. “Everyday Black Man”, her first feature, tackles the even thornier subject of corruption among community leaders (see it here). Although the story follows another Black lick owner and his hiring of a Black Muslim man, who turns the store into a front for drug dealing, Oaklanders knew Madden was referencing the murder of Chauncey Bailey.

A well-regarded reporter and the editor of The Oakland Post, who was African American, Bailey was killed downtown in 2007 by a paid assassin with a long gun. He was about to publish another article exposing the criminal activities of the owners of the once-popular Your Black Muslim Bakery. After the hit man turned state's evidence, they got life without parole.

Many of Oakland’s progressive elite also oppose full freedom of speech, if it reflects poorly on a disenfranchised community. Almost 20 years ago, Ron Dellums, the first Black congressperson from Northern California, who was also an anti-war activist and socialist, and the mayor of Oakland in the late ‘00s—as well as a West Oaklander who attended McClymonds—led the campaign to cancel “Gentlemen of Leisure”, a proposed television series.

It was based on “American Pimp”, the critically-acclaimed 1999 documentary about West Coast pimps, many from Oakland, by the Hughes brothers, who are Black. To have been shot in Oakland, the show was supported by Madden and other creatives and would have been a feather in the cap of the city’s fledgling film business, perhaps even paralleling what “The Wire” (2002-8) did for Baltimore.

But “Gentlemen of Leisure” would not have looked good for the airbrushed Oakland Dellums and other city elders were trying to sell gentrifiers to revive Oakland’s tax base. (Mayor Brown said he would build 10,000 dwellings, Mayor Dellums 100,000.)

Oakland is cursed by the California conundrum of being comparatively rich, beautiful and liberal, which makes its poverty, ugliness and repression more grotesque. That very quality, in fact, drives its disadvantaged to more extreme anger, envy and ambition. As the poorest of the fabulous cities by the bay, Oakland is an automatic loci of crime, simply because ambitious poor people will always sell two very popular products and services: drugs and sex. As painful as that is for my more bourgeois or politically-correct neighbors to contemplate, it requires in-depth exploration through research, sociology and art.

The Oakland mayor's office put up lackluster billboards, while more creative submissions were rejected. photo: D. Blair
Prostitution has long been a popular profession in semi-matriarchal societies, where it is not as stigmatized, and all oppressed groups are semi-matriarchal, since the men are injured, removed or absent. In addition, many tribes are semi-matriarchal, including in West Africa, traditions which helped African Americans endure the destruction of the family during slavery.

The “talented tenth” of Black men rebuilt their personal patriarchies through hard work, the arts or professions, but the less skilled looked to boom towns, like Oakland during World War II, to become fully vested family men. As those jobs waned, they suffered, while women joined the workforce, sometimes with notable success. The revival of matriarchal traditions is largely why out-of-wedlock births are now hitting historical highs among African Americans and why the lure of becoming a gangster, with increased reproductive opportunities, is so attractive. It also seems many of the inner-communal killings are jealousy driven, as appears to have been the case with the young man killed behind my building on June 25th, 2021. During the pandemic, many murders were inspired by watching rivals have fun on social media.

It is no surprise that Oakland became the center of Northern California’s enormous legal as well as illegal marijuana industry, which is mostly white owned (even though the legacy busines until 1980 was largely Black and Latino). Oakland has Harborside, one of the biggest weed stores in the world, Oaksterdam University, the world's first cannabis college, and many related classes, services and stores, from supplies and equipment to dispensaries and manufacturing.

Indeed, retired-Captain Joyner now runs the Joyous Recreation and Wellness Group, a cannabis edibles manufacturer, located in an unmarked warehouse four blocks from my house. Since the cannabis industry, which started legalizing in the US in California in 1996, is still not permitted banking services, its workers often carry large amounts of cash. This led some journalists to speculate Joyner was not a random robbery victim.

With Oakland an ongoing prostitution and drug center, people assume some of its police simply must be on the take, an opinion which increased after the OPD’s spectacular sex scandal of 2016. That imbroglio was made even more memorable when Mayor Schaaf, who had been special assistant to Mayor Brown and assumed office in 2015, fired three police chiefs in one week.

Captain Sean Whent had been doing a decent job for three years, according to “The Force” (2017), a documentary by Emmy-award-winning Oakland filmmaker Peter Nicks, which has some good clips on Armstrong. Nicks's previous film, the acclaimed “The Waiting Room” (2012), was about the emergency room at Oakland’s main hospital, Highland, which is known nationally for its gunshot surgery miracles. (I was waiting for treatment once when a young Black man was wheeled in, bleeding but bragging into his phone, “I was shot, I was shot.”)

Unfortunately for Nicks, he wrapped principal photography just before the story broke about a suicide, a murder, and dozens of cops being involved with a 17- then 18-year-old woman of color with an hourglass figure, known by her assumed name, Celeste Guap. As it happened, Ms Guap’s mother was an OPD dispatcher and had many friends on the force, including Officer John Hege, who helped her escape an abusive husband and was beloved by Guap. Both were devastated when Hege was one of the four Oakland cops killed that same day in 2009.

Coercion by powerful figures and child sex abuse were the issues raised by Guap’s lawyers to win her $1 million dollar settlement from the city, and they remain her talking points today, but the actual affair was probably a bit more, well, Oakland.

The story starts with a white, increasingly-disturbed rookie cop named Brendan O’Brien, whose Latina wife committed suicide, after they argued about him possibly having an affair. But her family thinks he killed her, and ex-OPD detective Mike Gantt agrees. Indeed, he was pushed off the case by department brass protecting their own, he says, and he filed a related claim against city officials. The intricate evidence was reported at length in The East Bay Express, by Darwin Bond Graham and Ali Winston (see it here), but the facts remain somewhat ambiguous to me.

Celeste Guap (her working name): a young Oakland woman who had family friends and boyfriends in the Oakland police and was also a sex worker. photo: courtesy C. Guap's Facebook page
At any rate, O’Brien was exonerated and went back to work. A year after his wife died, he encountered Guap on International Boulevard, the Latinx neighborhood where she liked to sex work, since her family is Nicaraguan. Guap was being harassed by her pimp and hailed a passing patrol car. “He saved me,” she said of O’Brien, although he didn’t bring her to one of the many related social services or turn her over to a guardian, as recommended by Oakland’s progressive sex trafficking directives. Meeting again two weeks later at a taco truck, no less, they started dating. She was 17, he mid-20s.

Whether the relationship was coerced or consensual, we won’t know until Guap does a podcast, book or movie, but there must have been some romance, given the rumors and fantasies that started flying around. Indeed, Ms Guap became the object of rapt attention of dozens of police officers from departments around the Bay Area, an adulation she evidently enjoyed.

After a months-long, half-bromance, half-serial orgy, O’Brien killed himself after Guap threatened him—during a drunken phone call from Puerto Rico, where she was vacationing—that she would reveal she was screwing lots of cops. Instead, O’Brien’s suicide note brought that fact to the attention of authorities.

As soon as Mayor Schaaf heard, she fired Chief Whent. But when she tried to replace him with a lieutenant captain, it came out he recently had an extramarital affair. When her second appointee realized he wouldn’t fare well in the spotlight and resigned, Schaaf took over managing the department herself, through the mayor’s office. Eventually, her staff recruited from Spokane Anne Kirkpatrick, whom Schaaf must have hoped would help with the OPD’s testosterone problem.

The scandal was enormous, involving cops from as far as Livermore and San Francisco. Yet the OPD only expelled four officers, suspended seven, and left a dozen unidentified. The released version of the department’s long internal report, completed in 2019, is over half redacted. Eyebrows shot up again when officials running the flawed investigation were promoted, and two incriminated officers stayed on the force. They had had sex with Guap and texted lascivious notes to fellow cops, but after she turned 18.

Guap’s mother told a retired cop who was a family friend about the abuses, but he didn't report it. Alameda County filed numerous charges, but almost all were eventually dropped.

The OPD’s 2016 sex scandal is one back story illuminating an aspect of Oakland’s descent into violence. Another is the Black Panthers.

The Panther’s three founders, Newton, Seale and late-arriving but brilliant and already-published Eldridge Cleaver were visionary, hardworking and innovative. In a spectacular bit of political theater, they took over the California capitol, in Sacramento, in May 1967, brandishing their trademark long guns (see cineSOURCE story). As well as providing inspiration and ideas to Black people across America and then the world, they started a children’s breakfast program, newspaper, medical clinic and other essential services. Along the way, they were confronted by relentless attacks from authorities and infiltrators but also Newton’s proclivity for violence.

After two juries failed to reconvict Newton on appeals of his cop-killing conviction, he was freed in 1970. Picked up from San Quentin Prison by his close friend Bert Schneider, a Hollywood producer in a white Cadillac, he was driven to a heroes’ welcome in Oakland, where he hopped on a car, stripped to the waist and exhorted revolution. Newton proceeded to tour the nation, China and elsewhere as America’s most acclaimed revolutionary. After another arrest, for allegedly murdering two women, he fled to Cuba but returned and was found innocent again.

In 1980, Newton earned a PhD from U.C. Santa Cruz with his easy-to-research thesis “The War Against the Panthers”, although, by that time, he had long been a gangster. Vying to become Oakland’s top pimp daddy, he took up residence in a fancy penthouse overlooking Lake Merritt and the Oakland court house, where he spent so much time. Even while maintaining his grueling schedule of writing and public appearances, he led a hard-nosed crew which allegedly extorted protection money from bars and other businesses, ran coke, to which he became addicted, and pimped some Panther sisters.

“I probably would have killed Huey myself,” remarked his erstwhile-best-friend Seale. Newton was finally murdered in 1989, about a mile from my building, a few months after I moved in. It was considered a standard Black-on-Black attack until it came out he had been killed by a member of a rival revolutionary group, the Black Guerrilla Family, in a coke deal gone bad.

Memorial to Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers, who grew up and died in West Oakland. sculpture: Dana King photo: D. Blair
Although Newton is honored in many books, classes and murals around the country, not a single monument was erected in his home hood of West Oakland for fifty years. When the Panthers held rallies at DeFremery Park, the crowds were mostly white kids from Berkeley, San Francisco and the Oakland hills. The Black middleclass families, of which there were many in West Oakland’s beautiful Victorian houses, opposed the Panthers’ sex and drug use as well as radical politics, and struggled to keep their kids away.

A friend of mine, Rick Moss, told me how the mother of a friend of his stridently blocked their attempt to join the Panthers’ San Francisco chapter in the ‘70s. As the director of Oakland’s African American Museum and Library, Moss mounted a Panther show in 2016 to commemorate their 50th anniversary but edited out Newton’s “posturing and showboating.”

Of course, the Oakland chapter of the Panthers was under constant attack by FBI double agents, through its notorious Cointelpro program, as well as by pseudo-revolutionaries, hustlers and local cops, which put them under immense pressure and fomented paranoia. Nevertheless, Newton was egregiously violent. Indeed, his revolutionary hero status and gun-slinger style—which Cleaver captured in his iconic portrait of Newton sitting on an African wicker throne, holding a spear and a gun—contributed to African American gun culture, which ballooned in the ‘70s and led to thousands of deaths.

A small mural of Newton appeared on a West Oakland side street in 2017, but it hardly compares to the deluxe, bronze bust of him without a shirt—Newton liked to strip to the waist to show off his prison pecs and play the rock star, even though that is an odd pose for a radical thinker—which was dedicated in October 2021. Organized by his widow Fredrika and sculpted by Dana King, the golden statue sits in the wide greenway in the middle of Mandela Avenue, a block from where Newton was murdered. The city also named the nearby 9th Street Dr. Huey P. Newton Way.

Before the statue was placed, its stone plinth and accompanying sign were defaced by graffiti tags and the words “fraud” and “fuck you.” Fredrika didn’t call the police, which community members are loath to do, but the community did identify the young male taggers, who apologized, saying they didn’t know what the rock was for. They also helped with the cleanup.

Except for its proximity to where Newton was murdered, the plaque does not reference his gangsterism. While he achieved many successes and wrote a substantial body of work, including the plaque’s quote—“I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people”—actions speak louder than words when it comes to ethical instruction.

Some of my Oakland friends, as well some radicals, rappers and thug culture aficionados, or actual thugs, are expressing renewed reverence for Newton in statements, songs and T-shirts. But is he an appropriate hero for young Oaklanders? Imagine hearing Newton venerated while growing up but learning his unexpurgated biography in college, say, especially if you lost friends or relatives to gun violence. As with the great writer Gertrude Stein, another larger-than-life Oaklander with feet of clay (she was revealed to have collaborated with French Nazis), we have to examine our heroes and forbearers honestly, just as our woke friends are doing with Columbus and Jefferson.

Would Newton applaud Oakland’s new radicalism or lawlessness? Or would he recognize the US is under attack by entirely different revolutionaries, the Republicans and conspiracy theorists who are threatening democracy and whose policies are decimating poor communities, white as well as Black. Indeed, poor whites are plagued by opiate and amphetamine addiction, the deaths from which doubled during the pandemic to over 93,000 in 2020, and the anti-vax movement and QAnon conspiracy theorists, which have led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary Covid deaths.

An Oakland muralist, who uses the nom de art 'Yellow Peril', salutes a Black Lives Matter march, June, 2020. photo: D. Blair
Back in Oakland, there are so many car break-ins on some streets, residents pot their trees with broken glass. Graffiti bombing is rampant, with celebrity taggers coming from out of town. A few Black men have taken to wearing their pants so low around their thighs, a prison style proving thug bona fides, they could serve as runway models for the fancy underwear they now wear. There are enormous “side shows,” street parties attended mostly by African Americans, involving automotive performances, like doing “donuts” or “ghost riding the whip,” where drivers walk alongside their coasting vehicles. Side shows tie up traffic, frighten locals and sometimes trigger violence.

The latest innovation by Oakland gangsters is brazen assaults by large groups, like the gang of 50 found burglarizing buildings in West Oakland. On November 19th, 2021, stores around San Francisco’s premier Union Square were looted by a “flash mob” wielding crowbars, smashing glass cases and teargassing security guards. A day later, the high-end Nordstrom store in the Oakland suburb of Walnut Creek was swamped by 80 “shoppers” who suddenly metamorphosed into smash-and-grabbers. On NPR on December 20th, California Attorney General Rob Bonta explained how the thieves coordinate on social media like crime syndicates and sell stolen goods in online markets, which are failing to police themselves.

Similar attacks have transpired from large Home Depot stores to small marijuana dispensaries, despite increases in security personnel and Bay Area counties joining to share information and policing duties. And they are spreading across California and the US.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, well-armed caravans marauded across Oakland and two people, who attempted to mount a defense, were murdered. Retired-OPD sergeant Kevin Nishita, who was Japanese-American but had an interracial family, was working as a security officer for a KRON 4 camera crew, covering a rob-mob incident, when gunmen tried to steal their cameras. Nishita intervened and was shot to death.

Twenty-eight-year-old Erik Davis, an African American from Los Angeles, who had lived in Oakland for a few years and was known for his affable personality, was also shot and killed for confronting brazen thieves, this time those breaking into cars in a public setting. Indeed, it was 3 pm, Thanksgiving Sunday, on an avenue alongside Lake Merritt, a hundred yards from the city’s popular promenade.

Those two murders, combined with the flash mob attacks, two bullets fired directly at police, and the Thanksgiving weekend's tsunami of 911 calls brought OPD to a fever pitch that required calling in off-duty cops. “We were entirely overwhelmed with the staff we had, even by bringing in those officers,” said Barry Donelan, the OPD union’s president, who is white. He also wrote an op-ed piece in The East Bay Times warning how low morale threatened the force with complete collapse.

Mayor Schaaf, for her part, thanked serving officers profusely on camera, offered new recruits a $50,000 signing bonus, and said she would petition Governor Gavin Newsome, another Jerry Brown acolyte, for more resources. Around December 10th, she appealed for more state police and technology, including license plate readers on freeway ramps.

Vice Mayor Kaplan, meanwhile, developed MACRO (Mobile Assistance Crisis Responders of Oakland), the city’s response to clamors for police alternatives, which will be run through the Fire Department. With an emphasis on recruiting community members with lived experience, it intends to provide “an effective civilian response option,” according to an October 20th press release, although it is just a 15-member pilot program. A friend of mine, who used to live in West Oakland and does body work, herbalism and activism, applied but said his odds were slim due to over 1000 applicants.

Also starting around Thanksgiving, Guillermo Cespedes, head of Violence Prevention, organized Town Nights, events held in four parks in tough hoods on four successive weekends. Combinations cook-outs, clothing giveaways, pickup basketball games and community gatherings, they seemed successful, despite the skepticism voiced by Chief Armstrong and others that such festivities could reach violent individuals. The plan is to do a lot of Town Nights in the summer, when violence is the highest, according to the SF Chronicle (12/31/22). Armstrong also announced the allocation of 40 additional officers to East Oakland, where three-quarters of the murders transpire.

Despite the murders and robberies, Oakland’s always-multicultural, often-hipster and sometimes-marijuana-fueled party continued. The week after Thanksgiving, I attended my first First Friday art crawl since the pandemic. Now organized by Oakland First Fridays (.org), it restarted in October. As usual, it was fun, intercommunal and occasionally visionary, with some great people, performances and art but a fraction of its once-enormous crowds.

Street memorial for 28-year-old Cameron Windom, Oakland's first murder victim of 2022, killed by a 23-year-old after an argument at 34th and Hollis, a half a mile from Blair's building. photo: D. Blair
Race is a large part of the American story. But making it the central theme impugns our robust multiculturalism and egalitarianism, which is especially strong in Oakland, a young city with less hierarchy and racism and more artists, activists and intermarriage than Albuquerque, Nashville or Detroit. Despite the gangsters among our police and radicals as well as illicit-activities entrepreneurs, Oakland’s recent renaissance and current crop of artists, progressive politicians and decent cops suggest we can solve our killing-each-other problem.

As well as prevent the murder of more Rashad Brinsons, Lai Dangs or John Heges, Oakland could provide guidance to other communities. For that to happen, however, even more Oaklanders will have to join their neighbors across cultural, racial or class lines, and develop even more innovative methods in education, social work and the arts, as well as policing. Lecturing or arresting will not mollify enraged neighbors willing to seek satisfaction through the barrel of a gun, we have to inspire and offer alternatives.

To comment on this article, go to cineSOURCE's Facebook page.

To see the author's article on Black Lives Matter from July 2020, go here.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached Posted on Jan 08, 2022 - 03:15 PM
Letter from Oakland: A Progressive City in Crisis
by Doniphan Blair

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Oakland police carefully count the 73 rounds discharged on October 15th, 2021, right behind author Doniphan Blair's building in West Oakland. photo: D. Blair
Jump to Part II here

ON OCTOBER 20TH, SHORTLY AFTER
sunset, I was at my desk in West Oakland, California, when I heard that telltale, deep-throated sound—boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—six shots, very loud, in front of my building, or so it seemed.

I crept to my window. No yelling or tires screeching, traffic passing normally. I called the police, although some of my Oakland friends say never do that, due to the Oakland Police Department’s long record of abuse, corruption and murder. After two busy signals, I got through.

I went into my hallway. A young Chinese woman, who moved into the building last year and goes by Jasmine, since she thinks no one can pronounce "Mengjiao," her Chinese name, and a friend were coming up the stairs, chatting. Had they heard shots? “No, we just parked and must have missed them.” Did they know about lying down when they hear shots nearby? “Yes, of course,” Jasmine said, laughing.

It turned out Rashad Brinson, a 28-year-old African American man, had been murdered in front of our corner liquor store. That makes him at least the twelfth person killed there in my 32 years living here. Brinson was "unhoused," i.e. homeless, so he didn’t get the traditional street memorial with flowers, balloons, stuffed animals, and tea candles spelling out his name, like most young Black murder victims in Oakland. But at least we have his name.

Brinson was killed in a drive-by shooting for no apparent reason, it turned out, which surprised me, since I assumed he was a casualty of a turf war over the crack corner a block away. Indeed, less than a week earlier, on October 15th, that corner was hit with a military-style assault in broad daylight, although no one was actually hit.

My space is on the far side of the building and I was in a storage room, so I didn’t hear the 73-round barrage fired right behind our parking lot, which must have sounded like a war. About an hour later, however, I did notice the cops had closed all three west-bound lanes of West Grand Avenue, which runs along the side of my building. A bit rich, I thought, until I got closer and met another new neighbor, an African American man named Jermaine, who saw the entire incident from our loading dock.

A car pulled up and out stepped a 20-something African American man with an assault rifle and a few teenagers with pistols, who seemed scared, Jermaine said. They went to the corner and started firing toward the crack corner a block away, hitting mostly cars, including one belonging to Jermaine. He waited over two hours, while the cops marked where those 73 shells landed, to see if they wanted his eyewitness account. They didn’t. It is no longer unusual for shootings in Oakland to involve dozens or hundreds of rounds.

A street memorial for a young man killed around June 25th, 2022, in DeFremery Park, where the Black Panthers used to gather. photo: D. Blair
Oakland is not unique. Murders leapt up across America during the pandemic, 30% on average, although that figure is 47% in Oakland since the prior year the city had an extra low murder rate. Nevertheless, if we look at Albuquerque, Nashville and Detroit, three cities slightly larger than Oakland, which have tiny, medium and large Black populations, respectively, we see that Oakland’s 2019-21 per capita murders are similar to Albuquerque’s and Nashville’s and about one third of Detroit’s. But neither Albuquerque, Nashville nor Detroit is located on the prestigious San Francisco Bay.

The killing increase is obviously due to pandemic-driven poverty, isolation and depression, which also added to the suicide rate, and the ability to move around masked. But there are many other factors, like Trump’s machismo and rejection of rule of law. Although African Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic, some Black men support Trump; their numbers increased about 6% from 2016 to 2020 (see BBC report); and they included figures like superstar rapper Kanye West.

Five days after those kids bullet-sprayed my street, there was a shootout at a gas station about a mile away, also in broad daylight (1 pm, October 20). It killed Desoni Gardner, also known as “Li’l Theze,” since the 20-year-old from Vallejo, 25 miles away, was a rapper. He was also African American.

Gardner’s crew wounded the man who shot him, Ersie Joyner, a retired captain in the Oakland Police Department, also African American. The station’s security cameras showed them rifling Joyner’s pockets, making it a robbery until Joyner whipped out his gun. But one of my Oakland friends thought it might have been a vendetta against a dirty cop.

Four months earlier, on June 25th, a young man was murdered on that same street behind my building, due to an altercation between a father and his baby momma’s current boyfriend, according to my neighbors who heard it. The dispute involved a child and someone getting in or out of a car, they said, although they were unsure of who murdered whom. My neighbor Hannah, an emergency room doctor and white, heard the shouting and shots and ran down to see if there was anything she could do. There wasn’t.

Within a day or two of that murder, a young man was killed six blocks away on the basketball court in DeFremery Park, where the Black Panther Party used to hold rallies. The Panthers started in West Oakland in 1966. The closest court to my building, I have been playing there for three decades almost without incident. Going to shoot around a few days later, I was surprised to see a street memorial courtside, although the candles were scattered by then, and I couldn’t make out the name. I called the OPD to see if they knew the names of those two young men. They didn’t.

Six months earlier, in January, four miles from me in East Oakland, Dinyal New lost both her teenage sons, Lee Weathersby (13) and Lamar Broussard (19), within three weeks of each other. Horrific tragedies by any measure, they were especially egregious since there was no apparent motive for either murder. There were no arrests, since community members are reluctant to “come forward,” i.e. snitch, and murders are hard to solve without motives or eyewitnesses, even by the best-funded police departments. Lee and Lamar did get street memorials, however, as part of the rituals enacted by the kids, families and communities to address the trauma of losing so many, so young.

Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, who took over at the beginning of the crisis in 2021, is from West Oakland. photo: courtesy Oaklandside
It’s not just young men. On January 22nd, the house of LeShawn Buffin, a 52-year-old grandmother, was bullet sprayed for no reason. She died. On October 6th, the same thing happened to the car of a man who got into an argument with another motorist. His 15-year-old niece died. On November 8th, the passengers of two cars were having a firefight as they hurtled down Interstate 880 in Oakland and accidentally hit an Asian-American toddler. He died.

Many of Oakland’s young men are extremely angry, obviously. Not mature enough to control their rage, minor disputes often trigger major arguments, which easily escalate into shootings, since so many are packing guns. Sure, they are casually taking a life and throwing away their own, if arrested and convicted, but they are desperate for what the killings provide: elevated status and self-expression. It gives voice to their own immense trauma. In this way, the inner-city killings parallel America’s increasingly frequent mass shootings, although those are perpetrated almost exclusively by angry white men.

“It’s like a war zone,” said Oakland’s Deputy Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong at LeShawn Buffin’s funeral, according to the San Francisco Chronicle article of February 2nd. “We’re seeing a huge increase in the number of high-powered firearms.” The killings don’t follow identifiable trends, Armstrong said, in terms of gang violence or victims’ race or age, which is another frightening new national trend.

Random killing also increased in Albuquerque, which has a 3% African American population, ruling out that subgroup’s cultural factors. The randomness appears to be driven by the chaos of the pandemic and Trumpian times, plus the new availability of “ghost guns.” Assembled at home and with no serial numbers, ghost guns are impossible to trace.

“She was a loving mother to her daughters and grandchildren,” said Armstrong, also African American, who was a family friend of Buffin and called her his “god sister.” “She was a caring person in the community, who would open her home to help anyone. She will be truly missed.”

Armstrong was born and raised in West Oakland, where he lost a brother to gun violence. He attended McClymonds High School, six blocks from my building, and asked to be sworn in there, a nice nod to our hood, when he was appointed chief of police, shortly after Buffin’s funeral.

Armstrong has had a stellar career since joining the OPD in 1999, both as an officer and advocate of progressive policing. An early participant in Ceasefire, Oakland’s highly innovative violence intervention program, he led the Stop Data Collection Project, which cut police stops of African Americans by over half, and has participated in numerous national programs and classes, and taught some himself.

Chief LeRonne Armstrong and his predecessor, Anne Kirkpatrick, who came to Oakland in 2017 from heading Spokane's police force. photo: unknown
On April 8th, 2021, Chief Armstrong was the only law enforcement official invited to Washington D.C., for the announcement of new executive orders on gun control, where he met with President Biden. Armstrong succeeded the three-year-tenure of Anne Kirkpatrick, who headed the Spokane, Washington, police department but was way out of her league in Oakland—for perfectly understandable reasons, not merely because she is a woman and white.

“It’s just overwhelming,” said Guillermo Cespedes, the head of Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention, who has a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University, according to the same SF Chronicle article. Cespedes was an anti-gang activist and city official with that portfolio in Los Angeles, which has many gangs, including Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, the vicious El Salvadorian super-gang. “These have been the most difficult conditions I have ever worked under.”

For over a year, Oakland residents have been hearing—if not seeing, if they don’t live in the hood—their city descend into chaos: a lot more sirens, shots and helicopters. There were other indicators: stores not stocking shelves due to shoplifting, people running red lights, the respected 170-year-old Mills College, which borders on a tough hood, announcing it would close (it will continue in diminished capacity under Northeastern University, Boston), and increased attacks on Asians.

For comic relief, Oakland’s entire school board was forced to resign after some of its members bitched out parents for pleading with them to open the schools, saying, “Parents wanted their babysitters back” and “more time to smoke cannabis.”

Most Oaklanders see their city is in distress, although many are reluctant to discuss it. Why bring each other down with useless complaining? And the threat is comparatively small if you are white or if you don’t run with drug dealers or argue with road-ragers. To add insult to injury, you never know where people stand on the intricate issues involved, meaning a discussion can easily slip into politically-incorrect territory.

On a few occasions, I have been criticized for opining on the affairs of my hood because I am white. Skin color, speech and other cultural attributes do form large parts of our first impressions of each other, but to privilege them above the overall relationship or our ethics or insights, or to value racial categories and histories more than shared humanity and equality is a big mistake, I feel.

I learned this philosophy from my neighbors growing up in New York City across the street from Grant Houses, one of the tougher projects in Harlem, and playing in the Harlem Little League, during the riots of the summer of 1964, and in the Pop Warner football league, where I was the only white kid. I have also called West Oakland home for almost half my life, which provided me some unique experiences: mostly fun, a few harrowing, many revealing.

Politically correct self-censorship proved problematic when Trump’s China-insulting and race-baiting helped trigger unprecedented attacks on Asians. Residents of Oakland’s large Chinatown endured a rash of robberies, beatings and a few murders.

A graffito in praise of Molotov cocktails by a member of Oakland's large anarchist community. photo: D. Blair
In July 2020, a 32-year-old Vietnamese-American man, Quoc Tran, was shot in neighboring “Vietnamtown” when his driving annoyed a handsome, 25-year-old Oaklander with a long rap sheet. Tran died from his injuries 16 months later. In March 2021, Pak Ho, a 75-year-old man originally from Hong Kong, died two days after being shoved down during a robbery by a man whose arrest record indicated he targeted elderly Asians.

Significantly stranger, Lai Dang, a 58-year-old man of Chinese heritage, was murdered in cold blood seven blocks from my house in broad daylight on January 11th, 2021, for no apparent reason. Surveillance videos and witnesses indicate a father and son were driving through West Oakland, stopped to urinate, spotted Dang, shot at him, ran him down and killed him—open season on Asians. They were arrested four days later in Tracy, 50 miles from Oakland, and held without bail.

That the anti-Asian assailants were almost entirely African American men was usually omitted from news reports or statements by representatives of the Asian community. Excluding racial descriptors is an understandable attempt to limit implicit bias or the fear some Asians have of African Americans, while allowing Asian spokespeople to maintain people-of-color solidarity. But it puts potential victims at a disadvantage doing threat assessments; everyone was already talking about the races of the individuals involved; and to pretend that is not a relevant fact is a fantasy. Some of the attackers also appear to have mental health issues.

Along with discussions about inadequate health care, institutional racism, endemic poverty, and pandemic-driven job loss and school-dropout rates, we need to broach the subject of Black Lives Matter. Considered the biggest activist movement in American history, Black Lives Matter helped inspire fantastic changes in corporate, media and overall culture, in America and around the world. In Oakland, many residents readily adopted its tenets, joined marches and posted BLM signs on their properties or vehicles. But there were also negative repercussions: reduced police services, the partial destruction of downtown, increased tribalism.

Focusing on racial justice issues, without fortifying it with democratic successes, in a mixed and egalitarian community like Oakland, pushes people to tribe up and displace their grievances onto the “other.” A problematic position in general, this is more dangerous in Trumpian times, given the racialized fearmongering of Trump and many Republicans. Moreover, once othering is established as a practice, it can be applied to internal divisions.

Othering people from different hoods, gangs, races and social classes is one factor fomenting Oakland’s murder spree. Another is: after a prosperous period diminished the need for gangsterism, a new generation of thugs is taking the opportunity to accrue power. Throw in political upheaval, which put the police on their back foot and reduced morale and leg work along with funding. Last but not least, a scofflaw spirit is sweeping America, from ex-president Trump on down.

“If multiculturalism can’t work in Oakland, with so many activists and artists of all races and mixed races, as well as the immense number of social services and political organizations, what hope is there?” I’ve heard a few Oaklanders say, or something like that. Indeed, Oakland has to take a leadership position in this regard, given it is one of the most racially-mixed cities on the planet, with a 29% Black, 27% white, and 21% Latinx population, according to the 2020 census. In addition to its plethora of talent, Oakland is comparatively wealthy.

Illegal dumping in front of Stay Gold Delicatessen, one of West Oakland's best as well as few beer/sandwich shops. photo: D. Blair
The 16% of Oaklanders who are Asian are disadvantaged by their large number of recent arrivals and English-limited elderly, and their lack of thugs or martial artists, who could help with community defense. Ad hoc accompaniment of old people shopping and patrols soon began, but Chief Armstrong asked them not to arm—one man was arrested for brandishing a weapon at attackers—and said the OPD could provide protection. Many Asians fear it can’t, however, and that “Oakland has become the wild West.”

Local newspapers with limited budgets, like The Oakland Post or The East Bay Times, were slow to cover Oakland’s civic collapse, although the latter has done excellent longform reporting on the OPD, as has Berkeley’s left-centric Pacifica Radio station, KPFA. Colorful crime stories out of Oakland have long made Bay Area or national news but the new, unprecedented levels were not emphasized until recently. When I began mentioning the rash of murders around my building, a few friends dismissed it as typical—“Oakland bats last against gentrifiers,” as one put it—but some longtime neighbors said it is the worst they have ever seen.

In November, Rebecca Kaplan, a liberal council person and Oakland’s vice mayor, was talking up her initiative to cleanup illegal garbage dumping, which is a notorious blight across West Oakland. Then she moved on to the huge homeless crisis. While both are terrible, they hardly compare to the slaughter, although all three can be connected through the “Broken Windows Theory.”

Some progressive pundits and friends of mine blame the OPD for not doing enough to investigate crime in the hood, despite the 10% budget cuts, and for retaining bad officers. In fact, the OPD remains under the Federal supervision imposed in 2012, as part of the 2003 trial of a gang of corrupt cops. In 2016, the department was rocked by another massive scandal, when over a dozen officers were found exploiting a young, woman-of-color sex worker. That precipitated three police chiefs in one week.

Be that as it may, the primary person addressing Oakland’s killing crisis is Chief Armstrong, who was opening press conferences at the end of 2021 with over two minutes of silence, one second for each lost Oaklander. “We can be vocal about certain things, but I just don't understand why this community cannot be vocal about 100 lives lost," Armstrong said on September 21st, on the occasion of Oakland’s 100th killing in nine months, almost as many as the entire previous year.

"We can scream and yell about anything the police department does wrong but, in this time, we can't speak up about what's plaguing all of us—and that's gun violence.”

On July 10th, between 60 and 200 people joined the OPD’s march, “Stand Up for a Safe Oakland,” around Lake Merritt, the large lake which serves as the town’s centerpiece and site of its intercommunal Sunday promenade. The small march ended up at a lake front park, which became Black Oakland’s weekend gathering spot and street fair during the lockdown. It was also where seven people were shot, one fatally, three weeks earlier during Juneteenth, the celebration of liberation from slavery, which President Biden declared a federal holiday that very day.

Also on July 10th and at the lake, the Anti-Police Terror Project had organized a car caravan and barbecue. Shouting ensued.

A family enjoys the weekend street fair favored by Black Oaklanders that emerged during the pandemic on Lake Merritt and featured minimal masking and social distancing. photo: D. Blair
Oaklanders responded to the anti-Asian violence with a 1000-strong, mostly-Asian showing at a park near Chinatown on February 13th, 2021. Black activists joined with their Asian counterparts, especially after the March 16th mass murder of six of Asian women and two others by a white man in Atlanta, Georgia. But Asian and Black activists broke over whether to support or defund the police.

It is not lost on the kids or gangbangers as well as Chief Armstrong or many Asians that in 2020 there were dozens of BLM marches, which attracted tens of thousands of people and crisscrossed Oakland, to protest the brutal police killing of George Floyd thousands of miles away but not for Lai Dang, the Chinese-American murdered near my house.

The root cause of inner-community violence is institutional racism, poverty and poor services for kids of color, which can’t be solved by additional police, according to proponents of BLM tenets. Indeed, Albuquerque, Nashville and Oakland have one officer for every 550 to 625 residents, while Detroit, where the murder rate is three times Oakland’s, has twice that, one cop per 300. Hence, we have to switch our policing, education and social work, according to defund-the-police supporters, and accept some collateral damage until it takes effect.

Oakland’s murder rate almost doubled in 2021, from its record low of 72 in 2019, a level only last seen from 1998 to 2001 or in the ‘70s, to 137. Although mortality peaked in 1992, with 165 killings, comparing the crack epidemic to today is like contrasting apples and oranges, given Oakland’s recent renaissance. The 2010s were probably the city’s most prosperous decade since the ‘40s, including for many low-income locals—if they weren't displaced by gentrification, of course.

Along with pushing up rents and homelessness, gentrification brought hundreds of new businesses, many of them restaurants, which provided jobs as well as places to get a decent bite. There were also scores of new music venues and art galleries, welcome outlets for local artists, including those driven here by the much higher rents in San Francisco, which has been occupied by overpaid techies. The first Friday art crawl, started in 2006 by the Art Murmur gallery association, blew up over five years from a few hundred to over 20,000 attendees. The majority were Oaklanders enjoying each other’s company, but the bridge and tunnel crowd’s copious eating and drinking, if not art buying, turned it into a cash bonanza.

Gentrifiers can be disgusting and destructive, of course. Unscrupulous house-flippers preyed on impoverished families. High rents exacerbated the homeless crisis. Foodies drove up taco truck prices. Black families were forced out to distant suburbs, like Tracy or Vallejo, where they sometimes felt like foreigners. I had to bitch out white new home owners, on a couple of occasions, for whining about petty thievery which bordered on racism. Didn’t they look around before plunking down a half a million dollars, say, for their house?

Other times, it’s tone deafness. Two blocks from me, in the opposite direction from the crack corner, is a brewery and pub called Ghost Town after the nearby neighborhood. Alas, Ghost Town didn’t earn its moniker by having a quaint, old graveyard (see cineSOURCE interview with a local activist).

Oakland hasn’t become a hot art market, except for a couple established galleries, like the nationally-known Creative Growth, which features artists with developmental disabilities. But the galleries often have work by, and a few are run by, people of color. Ditto the scores of vendors with tables, booths or trucks that feature everything from art and handicrafts to fashion and food. There are also performers doing music, magic, juggling or “fire arts,” since Oakland is home to many organizers and enthusiasts of the world-famous desert festival, Burning Man.

Oakland's famous First Friday art crawl/street fair, which drew a diverse crowd of 20,000 before the pandemic, restarted in October, 2021. photo: D. Blair
A buddy of mine from art school, who is also a West Oakland neighbor, Richard Felix (white/Jewish), sets up large canvases and pots of paint, which attract Black middle schoolers from Ghost Town, only a few blocks away, alongside white suburbanites and tattooed-piercers. Indeed, those six blocks of Telegraph Avenue had become a fantastic monthly carnival, impressing even seasoned world travelers, until the pandemic shut it down.

In the last decade, West Oakland became imminently livable. Once a food desert, it now has Mandela Foods, a Black-owned, collectively-run, organic grocery store in its 12th year, haute cuisine like Korean fusion or Middle Eastern, or the unfortunately-named but airy and pleasant Ghost Town Brewing.

Oakland also has a burgeoning film scene, which I tried to cover and support in this magazine, cineSOURCE, which I started with some friends in 2008.

After Oakland’s decade-long boom, I assumed it could endure the pandemic. I was inspired when I walked around Lake Merritt on March 26th, 2020, one week after the statewide shelter-in-place order was issued, which I covered in a cineSOURCE article, "Oakland in the Time of Corona". My socially-distanced fellow strollers were Black, white, brown and even Asian, which is not always the case; they were straight and LGTBQ, bolstered by Oakland’s large lesbian community; some were even bridge-and-tunnelers. Surely, we were creative, resilient and tolerant enough to handle Covid-19, I thought. Alas, the Oakland promenade didn’t include a few critical groups.

Although the vast majority of Oaklanders masked up, helped their neighbors and eventually got vaccinated, the economic shutdown and switch to online teaching hit poor Black kids especially hard, feelings aggravated by political upheaval. As amazing as BLM’s achievements have been in white-dominated towns, industries or police departments, the combination of illness, poverty, protest and reduced police services proved catastrophic for Oakland.

Protests have been popular in Oakland since 1946, when a city-wide strike by 146 different unions, against discriminatory hiring of African Americans, shut the city down. By nightfall, however, it had become a party, with union officials getting bars to put their jukeboxes on the street, where interracial dancing ensued.

Oakland was long been known for its adventurous, artistic and activist working-class types, typified by its premiere native son, author and socialist Jack London. During the Depression and war, it attracted poor Blacks from Texas and Louisiana and poor whites from Oklahoma, and vice versa. A rugged and less-educated population, that immigration fed the Black Panthers, on one hand, and the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, also based in Oakland, and the police force, on the other.

In the ‘60s, there were demonstrations against the draft and for Huey P. Newton, a co-founder of the Panthers, who was from West Oakland and convicted of involuntary manslaughter for killing a cop a mile from my house. More recently there were large protests against the murder of Oscar Grant by a BART (subway) cop, in 2009, and during the Oakland Occupy, two years later. In addition to outraged activists and sympathetic liberals, recent demonstrations have attracted rowdy young men who are Black, and sometimes associated with gangs, or white, and sometimes associated with Black Bloc, an anarchist movement, or suburban hooligans.

After one night of looting, on May 29, 2020, the dozens of other Oakland marches protesting George Floyd's killing were peaceful, even festive. photo: D. Blair
On May 29th, during Oakland’s first march protesting George Floyd’s murder, those two male cohorts and a smattering of women broke hundreds of windows and looted at least a hundred stores across downtown Oakland and in neighboring Emeryville, where the malls have more goodies. One of my radical friends was almost gleeful as she insisted it was a legitimate expression of rage, a minor inconvenience for shoppers, and an insurance write-off for stores. But the looters also broke into small, Black-owned businesses, according to my research and an article cowritten by my friend Aqueila M. Lewis-Ross for Oakland Voices, a respected site.

Some marchers tried to stop the looters, I was told by the Palestinian-American owner of The Twilight Zone, a large smoke shop on Broadway, Oakland’s main march route, who had over $70,000 of glass cases and inventory smashed. Some marchers also came back the next day to help him clean up, he said.

Unfortunately, a year and half later, downtown Oakland, which the city has been struggling to revive for 30 years, remains partially boarded up. Those boards are covered with magnificent murals by local artists, which are sometimes toured by tourists, but many businesses are not coming back; some people have moved out; and that one night of destruction—almost all the other dozens of marches were completely peaceful—ended some much-needed jobs.

One Black Lives Matter march I attended was organized by the Oakland Black Officers Association, then headed by Armstrong. It consisted almost entirely of people of color, in contrast to most of Oakland’s other BLM marches, which were often largely white, and it had elegantly-dressed women in front belting out gospel. Armstrong didn’t speak at the central police station on 7th and Broadway, where the marches often ended, but the officers who spoke did an artful job of explaining their competing concerns.

Alas, neither they nor most other BLM spokespeople seemed to find the sweet spot between aggressive activism and sophisticated civil society development, an error in the time of Trump, I believe. Indeed, the general discourse of the Black Lives Matter movement was suffused with talk of white people in blanket terms, without the balancing spirit of equality and goodwill established by King and Obama as well as Lincoln and Jefferson.

All humans are created equal; judge not by color of skin but content of character; there are not two Americas. In addition, defining people through DNA is a slippery slope; shame is not a stable motivator; and multiculturalism is about accepting people from groups you don’t like, not just allies.

“All Lives Matter” is considered racist for good reason. Who is to tell anyone what to call themselves? The BLM organization started in 2012, long before the national movement. And “All Lives Matter” was adopted by racists in a mimic-and-ridicule game.

But, of course, all lives do matter. And that would have been a better name for the movement by virtue of its emphasis, right in the name, on building a cooperative community instead of protecting one tribe. All lives matter would have better modeled equality, in contrast to fetishizing privilege or adjudicating racism. If organized by African Americans, it would have implicitly conveyed the message “Stop murdering Black people” and tacitly included Black-on-Black violence.

Most BLM activists do not mention, let alone emphasize, Black-on-Black violence, as far as I know. They seem to feel that broaching the subject in the same breath as state violence would be a copout, whataboutism or straight up racism. It is certainly true that everyone fights with their family and neighbors more than strangers, and those commonplace crimes need increased investigation and abatement by the police and community.

Speakers from a BLM march of Black police officers and their families, in front of the Oakland Police Department's central station. photo: D. Blair
Nevertheless, Black-on-Black violence does kill massively more people than the police. And it has played a major role in traumatizing both African Americans, who have lost a horrific number of family and friends per capita, and police of all races, who fear a well-armed, trigger-happy citizenry. In 2009, an African American parolee, trying to evade arrest and automatic return to prison, killed four officers within as many hours in East Oakland, surely shocking even the most enlightened cops.

The longstanding conflict between police and African Americans is a direct result of slavery, systemic racism and endemic poverty, but it is often aggravated to an extreme by the need of both parties to obtain respect in the moment of confrontation. While policing is based on respect, so is the self-esteem of many men, and some women, who have little else.

Growing up as a white kid in Harlem, I have been mugged over a dozen times. Hitchhiking as a hippie through thousands of miles of redneck country, I was stopped by cops dozens of times and jailed a few. Along the way, I learned to respect the powerful players, be they muggers, cops, gangsters, border guards, convicts or rednecks, while maintaining a semblance of dignity. Groveling invites abuse from deranged machos of any profession or race.

Even a minor gesture can escalate an average traffic stop or thug encounter into suicide by cop or mugger. If we research the interactions leading to cop killings, I think we will often find some trigger of disrespect. Indeed, that is also what leads to most Black-on-Black murders. Yes, American laws and culture entitle us to speak our minds, but it is ill-advised to play disrespect chicken with deranged machos.

The flats of Oakland were thought to be pretty tough in the 1970s, when I was living in hippie San Francisco. But I knew and visited a couple there, an enormous, ripped Black guy named Wetback, who was from a California border town, favored red bandana headbands and had done time—although he didn’t mention it much and our chats were more about Buddhism, fitness and weed—and his young, white girlfriend, Donna, the daughter of a police officer. They seemed to accord both sides respect, while enjoying the already-developing, hipper side of Oakland.

If you treat people with basic respect, typified on the street by a glance and nod in passing, they will often return the courtesy. When confronted by thugs or muggers, if you honor them with warrior status, while remaining calm and respectful, as difficult as that might be, you usually get a pass. If not, just hand them your wallet, while casually asking for a few bucks back to get home or buy milk. One time, I stepped into my corner liquor store on a Saturday at midnight, a massive mistake, I realized upon seeing it was full of severe-looking Black men. When one said loudly, “How’s it going?” I responded at a similar volume, “Slick as a dick,” and won a wry smile from him and some of his crew.

Oakland did have a corrupt white mayor in the early ‘60s, John Houlihan. A nationally-known expert on urban issues and a liberal Republican, he presided over the construction of the Oakland Museum and other major projects but had to resign during his second term for embezzling. He served two years in prison.

Oakland had a large Ku Klux Klan chapter until 1924, and racist sympathizers long after. In the ‘60s, the OPD was only 2% Black, notoriously harsh, and its officers often tormented and sometimes killed men of color, which inspired the formation of the Black Panthers in 1966.

Huey Newton deduced his innovative tactic of police monitoring in the Merritt College law class of Edwin Meese, eventually Reagan’s Attorney General, no less. It consisted of following patrol cars, observing their stops at a legal distance, advising detainees of their rights, and standing by with legal long guns, in case problems arose. Until California repealed open-carry a year later, neither side fired a single shot. Respect.

BLM marchers listen to speakers at an amphitheater on the edge of Lake Merritt, Oakland lovely' centerpiece and intercommunal promenade. photo: D. Blair
There was a cabal of corrupt cops, the Riders, which preyed for years on West Oaklanders. After I moved here in 1989, I often saw Black men face-down and spread-eagle on the pavement during cop stops. As part of the OPD’s 2003 settlement for the Riders’ abuses against 119 plaintiffs, who received almost $11 million total, it was put under federal management.

Despite these correctives, some of my Oakland friends suspect there are still bad cops, that the court-appointed monitor is benefiting somehow, or that the nine-citizen police commission, which was established in 2016 and can discipline officers, direct policy or sack a chief, is still mired in Oakland’s old patronage political system.

On the other hand, Oakland is in Northern California, a center of progressive politics, environmental beauty and immense wealth. In addition to state assistance, Oakland has an enormous number of not-for-profits, faith-based social services, art organizations and political-activist groups. Although Oakland is the most income polarized of any Bay Area city, with a substantial number of hill dwellers in large houses with bay views, they often help with the philanthropies.

Article continues here.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Jan 07, 2022 - 01:32 AM
Academy of Art’s Disastrous Loan Program
by Karl F. Cohen

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

The Academy of Art provides a massive presence in downtown San Francisco, through its 32 properties. photo: courtesy the Academy of Art
THE SF CHRONICLE RAN A FRONT
page story on November 5th about how the Academy of Art, San Francisco’s largest art school, made millions off of convincing students—including some who were unqualified to attend the school—to take out government loans to fulfill their dreams of becoming successful artists.

The long article, about how the school finally settling the case that dragged on for 12 years, ended with: “Meanwhile, The Chronicle spoke with 17 former Academy of Art students who had independently contacted the paper after reading stories about the lawsuit. Students were not part of the suit, but protecting their interests is why the government regulates recruitment schemes.

Of those ex-students, 12 said they owed more than $50,000 in student loan debt, including eight above $100,000.

One of them was Shaun Dunn, a 2019 graduate who earned two degrees from the Academy of Art over many years, including a master’s degree in animation and visual effects. Unable to find a job in his field, Dunn, 40, owed more than $431,000 in student loans.

The Academy’s recruiters were egged on by school officials, who allegedly dangled Hawaii trips and pay hikes to get them to be more aggressive.

Dunn said he felt tricked by the school, which he described as persistently urging him to stay even though he couldn’t afford it and enticing him with promises of a lucrative career.

“’It’s ruined my life,’ Dunn said.”

Academy of Art officials declined to comment for that story.

Where’s a reputable, responsible and creative Bay Area art school when we need one?

Oh yeah, we let the Art Institute close last year.

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .
Posted on Jan 05, 2022 - 06:38 PM
SF Docmaker Takes Red Nation Feature Award
by Renée Alexander

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Humberto Concepción Pérez, a farmer from Oaxaca State, Mexico, in Gustavo Vazquez-Orozco's new doc 'Los Guardianes del Maíz'. photo: courtesy G. Vazquez-Orozco
SAN FRANCISCO FILMMAKER GUSTAVO
Vazquez-Orozco recently brought home the Best International Documentary Feature Film award from the 26th Annual Red Nation International Film Festival in Hollywood.

Having known him for years, I decided to call him up and ask him about the film, “Los Guardianes del Maíz” ("The Keepers of Corn"), which I was privileged to see an advance copy of. It combines scenic views of rural life in Southern Mexico's La Chinantla region with in-depth interviews of indigenous farming families, food sovereignty activists, agricultural organizers, and genetic scientists.

“Los Guardianes del Maíz” explores the resiliency of corn-growing communities and the fragile systems that secure their survival in the face of threats from corporate colonialism, toxic chemicals, climate change, and even Coca-Cola. Ultimately, it reveals the interdependent relationship between corn and humans, which have cultivated each another, as it were, over hundreds of generations.

The film will screen on April 9, 2022 at the Brava Theater, 2781 24th Street, in San Francisco’s historic Mission District. It is a collaboration with Executive Producer Jonathan Barbieri, an artist and alcohol spirits producer Vazquez-Orozco met 45 years ago, while both were students at the San Francisco Art Institute. Vazquez-Orozco is a professor in the film and digital media department at UC Santa Cruz.

The film has shown in numerous festivals around the world, including the Seattle Latino Film Festival, International Multicultural Film Festival in Australia, Festival de Cine Amazonia del Plata in Argentina, SUNCINE Environmental Film Festival in Spain and Mexico, Sustainable Living Film Festival in Turkey, in Canadian festivals and elsewhere.

I caught up with Vazquez-Orozco recently by Zoom.

Vazquez-Orozco (center), Executive Producer Jonathan Barbieri (right) and Online Producer Yira Vallejo (left). photo: courtesy G. Vazquez-Orozco
cineSOURCE: Who would you say is the hero of this film?

Vazquez-Orozco: The heroes and heroines of the film are all the members of the traditional indigenous communities in Oaxaca [Mexico]. When I would ask a question, such as ‘What do you think about this or that...' consistently the answer was, ‘I don't speak for myself, I speak for my community.'

While the film surveys traditional indigenous agriculture, as a model that can be applied where industrial mono-cropping failed, it is also about people. It explores the cultural continuity that links today's corn farmers in Oaxaca [State, Mexico] to their pre-colonial ancestors.

In the course of our three-year journey, we learned that—even under the stress of bio-piracy, the aggressive promotion of glyphosates [fertilizers], natural disasters, broken promises and the incursion of Maruchan instant soups and Coca-Cola—traditional farming communities have been surprisingly resilient.

Two things make that resilience possible: ‘el tequio,’ and food sovereignty, which are secured by the collective ownership, preservation and diversification of seeds.

What is ‘tequio’?

‘El tequio’ is a term anthropologists use as an approximation for the French word, ‘corvée,’ a form of traditional labor. Westerners tend to think of ‘corvée,’ or statute labor, as some form of unpaid, involuntary conscription.

That could not be further from the truth in the indigenous communities of Oaxaca. Whether for public works such as clearing roads or forest management, or for planting and harvesting corn, ‘el tequio’ is essential to getting things done.

It is actually considered an honor to be called upon to help out, or provide some special skill for the sake of a cause greater than one's self. The practice is as old as agriculture itself and it is critical to the principle that, within the collective, the individual finds meaning.

Where was it shot?

We surveyed Mixtec, Zapotec and Chinantec families in the coastal Sierra Mixteca, Valles Centrales and the lower Chinantla regions [of Oaxaca State]. We got to know Chinanteco farmers and organizers who, for years, have struggled to build a community germplasm bank as a means of protection against chronic seed loss caused by flooding and high winds.

Poster for 'Los Guardianes del Maíz'. photo: courtesy G. Vazquez-Orozco
Various institutions have periodically dangled promises of grand projects, but the funding seems always to evaporate before a single stone is laid. Currently, the [seed] bank consists of the plastic storage drums you'll see in the film. The communities in San Mateo Yetla and Plan de las Flores have the land, the labor—el tequio—and, most importantly, the desire to build a model seed bank, if they could secure the necessary funding and access to certain technologies.

How long have those seed banks—

Seed banks in one form or another have been around as long as natural disasters—now, unnatural catastrophes [laughs].

In San Mateo Yetla and Plan de Flores, the destruction of crops by plague, wind or flood means not only the momentary disruption of food supply, but also the loss of the seeds a farmer will need to perpetuate a particular strain of corn, grain or legume. Through painstaking selection, year after year, they have been optimized not only to flourish in the conditions of a particular region, but for the particular wedge of land being cultivated.

It is widely accepted that in Mexico there are about 60 varieties of native corn. More than 35 of those known varieties, some 59% of the total diversity, are found in Oaxaca. But the real number is far greater. Just as Oaxaca's complex landscape has fragmented its 16 indigenous languages into more than 170 tongues, the state's convoluted topography translates into literally hundreds of distinct micro-ecosystems.

The altitude, seasonal rains, soil pH, direction that slope is facing—all of these and more play a part in the evolution of a strain of corn. But, a kernel of Native corn is more than just a package of genes that has evolved over time. It is the culture and history—the intellectual property—of the people who grow it.

The most important factor is the selection each year by the humans who are, to this day, co-evolving alongside that corn. I personally prefer to use words like Native, heritage, or ancestral corn for what has evolved over 350 generations.

Corn does not exist in nature. It cannot self-propagate. Its seeds do not fall naturally to the ground. Vigorous human intervention is required to free the seed from the husk and, through the selection process, humans perfect their corn. Those plastic drums you see in the film—with their limited capacity, sitting on a porch in San Mateo Yetla, Valle Nacional Chinantla—are the only thing standing in the way of the possible destruction of that great legacy.

In the spirit of the tequio, each farmer who wishes to participate in the seed bank makes a deposit of highly selected seeds into the community bank. The seeds are lent out with interest, the return being additional seed. For every kilo lent, two kilos are returned to the bank after the harvest.

Building a secure and operational seed bank in the rainforest conditions of the Chinantla will be no easy task. Heat, humidity, mildew, moisture, weevils, rats, snakes, scorpions, massive storms, earthquakes, power outages, spotty Internet, dengue [fever] and chikungunya [virus] represent just a few of the challenges.

Vazquez-Orozco with Mescalero Apache dancers at the Red Nations Film Festival in Los Angeles, 2021. photo: courtesy G. Vazquez-Orozco
The building will require sophisticated humidity and temperature control: at what cost? What would the ventilation system look like? How would the seed be stored, labeled and accounted for?

How about the farmers?

The farmers in these two communities are eager to take on these challenges. All they lack is funding and guidance. As filmmakers—as artists—we are adamant interventionists, friends of the people we filmed, advocates and fundraisers. By making the film, we became morally bound to the communities we studied.

Our goal in producing ‘Los Guardianes del Maíz’ is to raise outside awareness and bring these communities into a world conversation. We hope to leverage ‘Guardianes’ to attract state-of-the-art materials and technologies, along with the funding needed to create in the Chinantla a model of what a community seed bank can be. The will and the manpower are already there.

Renée Alexander is a San Francisco-based freelance journalist and travel bug collector who has published stories about food, booze, science, and culture from four continents. Her portfolio is here and email.

Posted on Jan 02, 2022 - 10:20 PM
Darwin and Love: What I Learned Making a Holocaust Movie
by Doniphan Blair

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Author Doniphan Blair filming his mother Tonia in Birkenau camp, during the making of 'Our Holocaust Vacation', a PBS-screened documentary co-created with his brother Nicholas. photo: N. Blair
This essay first appeared in the new book, "Love at the End of the World: Stories of War, Romance and Redemption" published by Austin Macauley. Composed of autobiographical stories by Blair's mother, Tonia Rotkopf Blair, it provides a fresh look on how people of goodwill, notably a romantic, loving teenage girl, survived WWII.

OURS WAS A FAMILY OF THREE
filmmakers and one Holocaust survivor, my mother Tonia, which obviously meant we had to make a movie about her. The time finally came in August 1997 when my younger brother Nicholas, his new wife Tania, our father Vachel, a retired cinematographer, and my sixteen-year-old daughter Irena as well as my mother and I boarded a plane to Poland. Midflight, my brother fiddled with his new video camera, the small size of which we hoped would help us tell a more intimate story, and I gave the family some directions.

“Just be yourselves,” I said, little imagining what making a Holocaust movie might mean personally, artistically, metaphysically even, or in terms of factual discovery about the Holocaust but also Darwin's theory of evolution.

A decade of editing later, that twenty-two-day trip became "Our Holocaust Vacation", an eighty-three-minute documentary shown over 500 times on Public Broadcast Service stations. It features my mother recalling her experiences, at or near where they occurred, our reactions — particularly my daughter’s, who is the same age in the film as her grandmother was in the middle of the war — and a family fight. Worried that audiences were tiring of “survivor return” stories, we added a half-dozen performance pieces, like the family walking through a German town wearing Jewish stars, which precipitated that fight, or the family handing out loaves of bread on a town square in the Czech Republic. (See the film or trailer here.)

"Our Holocaust Vacation" was well received by viewers, according to their letters and emails — only one anti-Semitic comment on the film’s trailer on YouTube — but not so much Jewish film festivals, regular festivals or Holocaust survivor gatherings. This may have been due to its title, which suggested Nazis in need of a vacation from the Holocaust, according to the staff at the Cleveland International Film Festival. It could have been because my mother flirted with a German soldier, which is taboo in many circles. Then there was the story itself, a concern I shared.

How my mother lost her family at fourteen and endured Auschwitz is heart-breaking, and she relates it with verve, sometimes spitting out her words, but it involved little I considered heroic. She hid some children but only for an afternoon; she didn’t join the resistance or commit any sabotage; she was severely beaten but only once.

It took me years of studying my mother’s experiences, filming her recounting them, and reviewing the footage to finally realize that hers, too, was a hero’s journey. Working as a nurse in the Lodz ghetto with almost no medicine and little food, helping her friends and preserving not only her humanity but her female, even feminine, spirit in the middle of a masculine world at war was, in fact, a Herculean achievement.

The Blair family visits the memorial at Birkenau. photo: T. Prybyskli-Blair
Regardless of cinematic success, making "Our Holocaust Vacation" was cathartic for the family. Such a trip will be traumatic, warned some of my mother’s survivor friends, but she found recalling her experiences where they happened while the center of the family’s attention to be therapeutic, enjoyable even.

My daughter, on the other hand, was not overjoyed to be stuck with her family for so long. Still, she ended up learning and expressing a surprising amount. “Having a camera stuck in your face interrupts flow, dude,” she complained on a couple of occasions but making the movie eventually did inspire her. Indeed, it compelled us all to action, to express ourselves as best we could, and to make extraordinary requests of each other and the people we met, which also facilitated field research.

As we gathered the footage which became "Our Holocaust Vacation", we unearthed insights, facts, and documents crucial to our family history, history in general and, I have come to believe, hard science. Some of our discoveries we could not find a place for in the film; some we did not recognize until after the film was finished; others were immediately obvious.

When Antoni Róg, the mayor of Mszana Dolna, a town in southern Poland, gave us a handwritten list bearing over eight hundred names, including those of my grandmother Miriam, my aunt Irena, and my uncle Salek, my mother cried out — a loud, uncontrollable gasp.

Walking into Birkenau’s main building, the one with the train tracks running through it, that warm night in August, barely lit by a crescent moon, I had little idea what to expect. The sleepy guard waved us through nonchalantly, my brother, my daughter, then myself, but I flashed I was frog-marching them into the actual death camp. As we stepped out of the main building, the camp’s rows of long, low barracks faded into the dark ominously, to say the least.

We could get jumped by Polish skinheads was my first thought, so I snapped open my pocketknife and grabbed my daughter’s hand, to reassure her but also keep her close. We started fifty yards from the main building, my daughter peering through a barbed-wire fence, me raking her with a battery-powered light, my brother filming what we thought could become a provocative cutaway or an artistic montage.

Gradually growing accustomed, we wandered among the barracks, entered one and asked my daughter to climb onto the top of a two-tiered, rough-hewn bunk. When she obliged and I closed the barn-like door, so my brother could film it opening to reveal her on that tear-stained wood, I felt I was locking her in a charnel house. Those few seconds of pitch-black darkness and thick, musty smell were enough to last us both a lifetime.

We soldiered on, filmmakers fulfilling their shot list. Next up: the crematoria, a half-mile back into the bowels of Birkenau and far beyond the guard’s earshot. We walked in silence, my brother and daughter undoubtedly as fraught as me. When we filmed her sitting in the rubble of the destroyed gas chamber, looking around, staring blankly, I assumed I was scarring her for life.

Irena Blair, in a scene from 'Our Holocaust Vacation', filmed at in Birkenau. photo: N. Blair
Hiking back to the main building, however, I had time to reflect. Polish hooligans, good Catholics all, would probably be reluctant to enter Birkenau during the day and more so at night. On two earlier visits, I had seen almost no vandalism or graffiti. The ghosts they would fear were our relatives, I realized, and, while they might have cause for alarm, we didn’t. If spirits exist, I rationalized, they would know we were here to honor them; if they didn’t, we were just paying our respects, regardless of the hour.

In that light, Birkenau came to feel like my place, a Jewish place, a good place to contemplate life and love as well as death and the destruction of civilization, especially in the quiet of the night.

Returning to my worries about my daughter, I hoped she would come to appreciate this adventure as a way to engage the ineffable, the extreme, the totally terrorizing. Growing up in the 1960s, I learned only a vague outline of the Holocaust from my mother and eavesdropping on adult conversations and nothing from the largely Jewish, private high school I attended, which left a massive, mysterious wound. The reverse would be healthier for my daughter, I hoped.

“The trip helped me to feel close to my family, my dead one, and my alive one,” my daughter said about a week later, in an on-camera interview. Years later, she talked about that night specifically, “I felt something, a presence, but I wasn’t afraid. They were family, and I was with you and Uncle.”

Walking back from the crematoria, I also envisioned a white-domed building across the road from Birkenau or perhaps from Auschwitz, Birkenau’s work camp, which is a mile away and houses the museum and visitors’ center. Such a building, with a large, white and unadorned hall, would be a good place for post-camp contemplation or prayer, or meetings of ecumenical or world leaders. Even if it didn’t become an icon of world peace, such a building would be an appropriate architectural response to all that gray barbed wire, barracks, and ash.

My own Holocaust studies had started fourteen years earlier with an actual vision, one of the few of my life. Until that time, which was when I was almost thirty, I had not read a single book, not even Anne Frank’s diary, nor had I viewed many movies, although I did feel informed enough to speak on the subject and would sometimes harangue people mercilessly. The Holocaust was a vast kingdom of crime, which killed almost half my family, severely injured my mother, and bequeathed me a sense of suffering but, aside from its burdensomeness, concerned me little.

Hence my surprise when I was meditating one sunny afternoon and saw, in the corner of my mind, what seemed like an electrical storm but with black lightning instead of white. What could that be? I wondered. “Your relatives,” a voice inside of me said.

Within days, I was driving to the Holocaust Library of Northern California, on 14th Avenue in San Francisco, and within months to Washington, D.C. with my family to attend an international gathering of 20,000 survivors in April 1983. For about a decade, my family became a de facto Holocaust study group fed by the avalanche of books and films, which started around 1980, many of which we saw together or read in tandem. Once, when driving around with my family and a high school chum, Stephen White, he exclaimed, “Is that all you ever talk about, the Holocaust?”

Sketch of a Contemplation Building proposed for the Auschwitz camp in Poland by Doniphan Blair. Illo: D. Blair
My mother joined a group of child survivors and grew comfortable recounting her experiences. I got involved with children of survivors and began collecting books: scholarly, bestseller, vanity, anything I could lay my hands on. Reading or talking about the Holocaust was comforting, oddly enough, a welcome relief from the anger and tension, which I only just realized I had been keeping concealed and bottled up.

But thinking about it is one thing and being there another. Flying to Poland on my first trip, a year before we made the movie, I had a moment of panic. What if being in Auschwitz is categorically different from hearing about it from my mother or reading about it or seeing it in a movie?

Poland is both a normal nation — vibrant, ever-striving, recently right-wing-veering — and one big graveyard. In addition to Birkenau, there were five more German death camps, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek, Bełżec, and Sobibor, hundreds of “regular” camps and thousands of a “small” mass graves. Pull off the road almost anywhere in Poland, throw a stone and you will probably hit a memorial to one. Touring those sites can be depressing, panic attack-triggering, a shamanic death ritual even, even for a typical tourist, whom you will sometimes see sitting in the shade of a camp structure, sobbing uncontrollably while a guide pats their back.

To avoid such ignominy, young Israelis often perform their Auschwitz pilgrimage draped in their national flag. The sight of them, almost always men, running through the camp, blue-and-white capes fluttering across the gray, while a group of Christians prays loudly next to the main building, say, is striking, totemic, almost sacramental.

The Holocaust was history’s biggest forbidden experiment I came to believe. Hence, within all that brutality, destruction, and death, something meaningful had to be hidden which might serve as a modest recompense, something more profound than “Never again” or “Make love not war.” But am I smart or strong enough to uncover or endure those terrible truths, I worried until that night in Birkenau, walking with my brother and daughter.

It was 4:30 in the morning by the time we got back to the small hotel on the outskirts of Oświęcim, the Polish village for which Auschwitz is the Germanized name. My father, mother, and sister-in-law were still up, I was surprised to find, the women in states of high anxiety. It’s not easy to sleep, evidently, when your son, granddaughter, or husband is wandering around a death camp in the middle of the night.

We rose early and boarded a train west, following the same route my mother did in late September 1944. Next stop: Freiberg, a university town near the medieval, eastern German city of Dresden where she was a slave laborer in an airplane factory. In the hotel room the next morning, I took out a scissors, needles, a spool of thread, and a piece of yellow cloth.

“What are those for?” asked my sister-in-law.

“First, we’ll sew six stars, one for each of us and for one each of the six million,” I said, stating the obvious. “I got the measurements from an actual star at Berkeley’s Jewish Museum,” I added by way of explanation before dropping the bombshell. “Then we’ll put them on and walk through Freiberg,” which took my sister-in-law visibly aback.

Some of the Blairs wearing Jewish start, in a performance piece for the film 'Our Holocaust Vacation' in Freiberg, Germany. photo: N. Blair
The family enjoyed cutting and sewing the stars, an arts-and-crafts break from their death camp tour. But wearing them while walking around Germany would be a challenge for anyone, and springing it unannounced to get their unadulterated reaction naturally increased stress. My sister-in-law feared not only being attacked by neo-Nazis, of whom there were many in eastern Germany — one of their main towns, Chemnitz, was twenty miles away — but simply strangers staring. My daughter didn’t like being told what to do or wear, especially by her father and a large religious icon. When my father weighed in with, “It seems like a civics lesson for the people of Freiberg,” we were in a full-blown family argument.

My daughter and sister-in-law were just being themselves, of course, exactly as I had recommended on the plane to Poland. But my brother and I were, too, since we really wanted that shot. My brother would be filming, leaving five of us, but that was how the inmates were marched, five abreast. Indeed, the family walking with stars would nicely illustrate how my mother and 250 fellow slave laborers were marched twice a day between the barracks at the edge of Freiberg and the airplane factory near its center. We argued for almost two hours, my brother filming throughout until he handed me the camera, entered the scene, and attempted to convince my daughter to don her star.

“The Argument” and “The Walking with Stars” scenes were hard days on the "Our Holocaust Vacation" shoot. Months later, they became a nightmare for my brother who edited the film. Nevertheless, after many rough cuts, he fashioned a portrait of a family dealing with a difficult disagreement, ever so slightly like what so many families endured during the war. The two scenes even combined into what could have been a poignant climax if rain hadn’t compelled us to put away our camera.

About halfway through the walk, with just my mother, my father, my brother, and me wearing our stars, the socked-in skies over Freiberg began to sprinkle. As the drops grew, we sought shelter in a covered area near the road which happened to be in a graveyard. It also happened to be Sunday. As we carried on arguing, Germans darted through the drizzle or walked slowly with umbrellas, bearing bouquets of flowers to pay respects to their dead, undoubtedly including some Nazis.

“Please put on your star,” my brother begged his wife as an older couple walked by shooting him an admonitory glance, “Just one quick shot — please!”

“It would not be true to myself or to the movie,” my sister-in-law said, fighting back tears. “It would not be right because of my fears and the fact that I’m not Jewish. But I will keep walking with you in solidarity with the women — and with you!”

My father, also not Jewish, stood by silently, stoically, chagrined at the spectacle of a public argument, in a graveyard no less. But he continued to wear his star and accept his family’s and the movie’s unique needs. Somewhere in there, my daughter put on her star, using a safety pin. When the rain stopped and we resumed walking and filming, she took my hand, which became the scene’s last shot.

My mother wore her star without complaint, although she, too, expressed fears of neo-Nazis. She was probably comforted by having three six-foot-plus men in attendance, but she was also dedicated to making the movie. Indeed, she readily followed our more difficult directions, like lying down on a sidewalk in Lodz to show how she had been kicked down by a German soldier, or again in Birkenau to show how she spent a night on the ground, naked, in a pile of bodies. She said nothing about following our directions, however, to her daughter-in-law or granddaughter.

Stationmaster Antonin Pavlick (left, 1892-1960) and restauranteur Antonin Wirth (rt, 1901-1976), who defied the Nazis to feed Jewish inmates in April, 1945, in Pilsen, Czech Republic. photos: courtesy Wirth Family
For me, wearing a Jewish star in Germany brought it to life. Instead of the large stone or wooden Stars of David in synagogues or the small gold ones worn around the neck, that yellow cloth star became my star. I wore it until we left Germany two days later and would have liked to have continued, given the reactions of the Germans.

Walking in downtown Freiberg, a parked car appeared to be an aquarium full of tropical fish until they morphed into teenagers, crawling over each other to see the guy wearing a Jewish star. A large garden restaurant became a human sea after I passed through, waves of people popping up their heads to stare or comment furtively. I was mollified the next day, however, by a burly, working-class guy who walked out of a bar, noticed me and my star, looked me in the eye, and nodded slowly.

The day after “The Walking with Stars” scene, we filmed my mother in the basement of the ruined factory where she once worked. She told us about the air gun she used to put rivets into the wings of fighter planes, the loud and dusty conditions, her “master,” a decent German with a glass eye, and the Dutch “free” forced laborer who rolled her an apple across the factory floor, the first fruit she tasted in years. But the highlight was the pilot.

Romance and sex are not discussed much in the context of the Holocaust, especially that involving Germans. “We don’t support films about fraternizing with the enemy,” I was informed by the man from a Jewish funding group when I mentioned that chapter of my mother’s story.

But romantic issues are often of interest to young women, and my mother’s teenage years correspond almost exactly to World War II. She had already told us many anecdotes: going to the ghetto cemetery with boys, or with girls to talk about boys; the parents of one boy serving them a meager meal but with candles and a dessert flavored with coffee grinds, so they could experience a date once in their lives; meeting a young man named Stefan in the cattle cars, as the Lodz ghetto was being liquidated, and falling in love on the way to Auschwitz.

The Stefan story, which my mother told for the film as we rode in a regular train from Lodz to Oświęcim, was surreal, romantic, heartrending. But it was eclipsed by the pilot story.

“His work station was about thirty yards away,” my mother recalls in the film, her voice softening. He was about twenty years old, a member of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, and his training apparently included a few weeks working on airplanes.

A day or two after the pilot arrived, my mother continues, he called out to her master, “Send her over because something fell into the wing,” which he could not reach with his large hands. Soon the pilot was becoming quite clumsy and calling for my mother often, almost daily, and flirting, discreetly.

“Hey, what a wonderful war, isn’t it a great war?” he exclaimed one time, my mother recounts in the film. “‘Everyone is burned, burned — your mother, your father, your sister, your brother! Isn’t it a wonderful war?’ He didn’t talk so loud. He was looking away from me.”

“He even did a little dance,” she added off-camera, moving her feet and grinning at the absurdity. How else do you come on to a Jewish hottie in a concentration camp, I thought. “I had a crush on him,” she told us, in another interview.

The pilot brought her a gift once, which he hid in one of their dropped-tool spots: silk stockings. Utterly useless, since you cannot eat them, concentration camp inmates do not wear them, and discovery could mean death, silk stockings were the most romantic present a young man could give a young woman at that time. Evidently, the pilot wanted my mother to know exactly how he felt.

Good Samaritans bring food to starving Jewish inmates, Pilsen, Czech Republic, April, 1945. illo: D. Blair
Then there was the extra-long air raid. Instead of scurrying down to the basement bomb shelter with the other Germans, the pilot hid and joined my mother at the large factory window. They embraced, him holding her gently from behind, no kissing, although embracing was still a crime punishable by death, my mother notes in the film. Out the window, they were entertained by a fantastic pyrotechnical display: an entire city on fire. It was February 13th, 1945. Fifty miles away the American and British air forces were firebombing Dresden to hell.

“I feel very sad now,” my mother whispers in the film, “I feel like crying. I don’t know if it is for the lost time, the lost youth, for the pilot.” It was the only time on our twenty-two-day trip my mother cracked a tear.

I had heard the pilot story a few times before but hardly at this level of detail or emotion. Why would recalling the pilot be more moving than last seeing her family? I wondered, or standing naked in Birkenau, being poked with a stick by Mengele, or being beaten by the Unterscharfuhrer, Freiberg’s commanding officer? As usual, it took me a few years to figure out.

Survivors generally attribute their emergence from the maelstrom to luck, influenced to a degree by the determination needed to withstand such a dog-eat-dog world. The more I examined my mother’s experience, however, as a timid teenager afraid to speak up, let alone struggle for every scrap of food or spot on line, the more I saw something else. Her survival seemed to be about romantic dreams, both hers and those helping her, not only young men but often enough.

My mother was part of a cohort of young adults, the reproductive remnant of Lodz’s 130-year-old Jewish community, which the leader of the ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, swore he would do anything to preserve. While he directed his Jewish police to brutally suppress dissent, to rip children from their parents’ arms, and to drive the elderly under blows to the deportation trains, he strove mightily to keep alive the teenagers and twenty-somethings until the end of August 1944 when the Lodz ghetto, the last of the Nazis’ large ghettos, was liquidated.

My mother sat on Rumkowski’s lap once, a troubling image, since he ran an orphanage before the war and was a known pedophile. As the youngest nurse on the hospital ward he was visiting, and rather comely, my mother must have been a picture of innocence and beauty amidst the annihilation of the Jewish people.

And that became her survival strategy. My mother and her girlfriends would finger-comb their hair and pinch their cheeks to make them rosy. In the camps, she folded and slept on her tattered dress to make it appear ironed; she sacrificed an occasional cup of watery, ersatz coffee to wash her face; and she fashioned a bra from a strip of cloth to hold her ample bosom, maintaining not just her dignity but her femaleness.

The pilot’s recognition of my mother not only as a human being but a woman worthy of ironic banter across their gulf in status and under the threat of death obviously touched her deeply. Perhaps the pilot proved love would survive the Holocaust, even among the perpetrators, and that she was worthy of it, even from a perpetrator. Perhaps returning to the airplane factory with her beloved husband, children, grandchild, and daughter-in-law honored the romantic quest the pilot had so valiantly kept aloft.

The next day, we boarded a train south to Pilsen, Czech Republic, home to the famous beer, where my mother’s cattle car had been sidetracked for three days near the end of the war. Jammed one on top of each other with no food or water, the one thousand women started to whimper, call out, expire.

After one night of such sepulchral lament, the stationmaster, Antonin Pavlicek, decided he had to do something. Enlisting a friend who owned a nearby restaurant, they gathered ingredients and assistants and cooked about a ton of soup and bread.

The family with the good Samaritans and their family members, (lf-rt) Vachel Blair, Yarka Sourkova, Tonia Rotkopf Blair, Jiri Sourkova, Vera, Vera's husband, Nick Blair, Irena Blair and Tania Prybylski-Blair, at the memorial to the Jewish women who died in the Pilsen train yard. photo: D. Blair
“It was the most wonderful food I ever ate in my life,” my mother told the mayor of Pilsen, Vdenék Prosek, as she presented him the first loaf in our performance piece, “The Bread Giveaway.”

My mother liked to tell my brother and me about the occasional positive events during the war, so I had heard this story many times. Indeed, when I was around thirteen, I remember thinking, I have to go to Pilsen someday and hand out soup and bread.

Soup seemed unwieldy so I got Roman, the lovely man helping us from the Pilsen-America Foundation, to recommend a bakery. There I ordered 225 loaves of bread packaged with a note which honored the Czechs and included a drawing of them handing out the food. We advertised “The Bread Giveaway” in local newspapers and on the radio, adding an appeal for information about the good Samaritans. Two showed up, Yarka Sourkova, whose father, Antonin Wirth, owned the restaurant, and Vera, her best friend since high school, who had also helped deliver the food.

“The Bread Giveaway” became the moment of reprieve all Holocaust films should feature at least once. My sister-in-law joined in joyfully, smiling at strangers and giving them bread. My daughter began a mad handing out of loaves with a “Thank you very much,” for which she learned the Czech, to all passersby. My mother talked openly and at length with the mayor, the people of Pilsen, of whom there were about a hundred, and the dozen reporters, mostly local but a few national.

“They gave me more than bread,” my mother told a woman radio reporter, “They gave me the spirit and the hope. Maybe there is still goodness in life, maybe there are other good people — not only evil and bad.”

The next day, Yarka, and her son, Jiri, who owned a van, took us all to the train yards on the outskirts of Pilsen. As Yarka recounted her experience of the event and we visited a memorial to the women who died during those three days, the fun faded from “The Bread Giveaway.” While the pilot was a daring, young man acting romantically in secret, the Czechs were average citizens expressing goodwill in public. Why they risked their lives during a total war when millions did nothing and thousands were shot for much less perplexed me. Yet, here they were: Yarka and Vera.

As Yarka and Vera became comprehensible, the Germans who permitted the food delivery turned unfathomable. Pavlicek and Wirth had bribed the officers with bottles of cognac, but is that all it took to interrupt the Holocaust? The soldiers at the train had stopped the kids pushing the wheelbarrows but insisted that they themselves would feed the starving women. Not believing them, Pavlicek stood his ground. From inside the cattle car, my mother was amazed to hear Pavlicek arguing with the Germans, given how they had cowed so many people for so long. Finally relenting, the soldiers slid open the cattle car’s large doors and Yarka, Vera, and their friends threaded their way in, passing out bowls of warm soup and chunks of fresh bread to all one thousand women.

This confused me. I had assumed the Nazis would want to win their war against the Jews at all cost, given they had already besmirched the German name with so many atrocities and lost the war on its two other fronts. If allowed to live, one thousand Jewish women could obviously birth a Jewish town. There was also the obvious evolutionary fact that if you subject people to such brutal treatment but keep selecting the healthiest among them, who go on to survive and reproduce, you will have bred a super-Jew. Instead of allowing the Jewish women a life-sustaining meal, why didn’t the Germans set up machine guns, drive them to the middle of the train yard and mow them down? This absence of bloodlust amid so much mass murder became my main Holocaust mystery for a few years until I finally heard, echoing down the generations, what the pilot was trying to tell me.

Germans are famous record keepers. In the course of six years of totalitarian rule and two years of total war, the Nazis researched mass murder and became its experts. Starting with machine guns and ditches, they soon graduated to “gas trucks,” which piped engine exhaust into the rear compartment, and in 1941 reached their masterpiece, the gas chamber. Using Zyklon-B gas, they could kill up to a thousand people in about fifteen minutes, disposing of the corpses conveniently in the nearby crematoria. Linked to rail lines and using slave labor, such industrialized slaughter not only saved time, money, and manpower, it solved a little known snag in their scheme to exterminate the Jews.

Tonia Rotkopf Blair, as a nurse taking care of children in Laganetska Hospital, Lodz, Poland, circa 1944. photo: Henryk Ross, Lodz Department of Statistics
It is not that hard to convince young men, particularly those indoctrinated since childhood in the Hitler Youth, to kill old people: simply explain that they are members of an “illegal group” and “useless eaters” and give the order. Nor was it that much more difficult to get such young men to murder middle-aged women if they had been starved and stripped of all dignity. Middle-aged or young men, meanwhile, could be enemy combatants, the slaughter of whom no explanation was necessary, while children would suffer grievously under total war conditions and may as well be put out of their misery.

It is hard, very hard, however, to get young men to murder young women, even “enemy women,” especially if they are good or innocent looking, qualities which carry special premiums on putrid battlefields. The proximity of so much death, in fact, increases opportunities to save life or foster grace if only occasionally or momentarily, which means wars are awash in inchoate dreams, especially among unconsummated youth. As it happens, the first poets of Europe’s powerful Romantic Movement were German. While their ideas were perverted by Wagner, Hitler, and others, their romantic ideals were not so easily obfuscated.

Indeed, when ordered to murder young women, many young German men would have preferred to flirt, fornicate, even marry. “Battlefield marriages” transpire surprisingly often in war but are rarely reported due to taboos against breaking tribal rank. Such unions happened in the camps, in a few instances, and in the ghettos but more so in hiding or on the death marches, where Jewish women were more accessible.

“A German from the factory who was in love with [a] girl had followed our column, and under the cover of darkness had snatched her quietly away,” Gerda Weissmann Klein writes in All But My Life (1957). Despite being beaten, Klein and her fellow death marchers did not divulge how that couple — the grandma and grandpa of what is probably now a large clan — got together and escaped. Whether that couple even told their own children is doubtful, the stigma being so severe.

Some of my mother’s guards were also susceptible to bouts of romanticism. Whenever you have a thousand young women in one place, some are bound to be pregnant and a few coming to term, as was the case in the Pilsen train yards. Within minutes of meeting Yarka in the town square, she blurted out one of her fondest memories from that time: a baby girl was born in a cattle car, completely healthy, a story my mother also told. Birth is a vivid symbol of life, especially in a land drowning in death, and even the German guards, especially the women, were not immune to its appeal. Indeed, they laughed and shouted the good news to their comrades.

After the war, my mother crossed the ruins of Eastern Europe, sometimes hitchhiking, and was not raped by Russian soldiers, who were notorious for that atrocity. Raping enemy women is a well-known spoil of war, considered fun by many soldiers, but raping victim women is not.

The German women suffered immeasurably, especially the young and good-looking, some enduring multiple attacks daily for weeks, even months, which is almost unimaginably traumatizing. Nevertheless, in an article in Germany’s Stern magazine around 1995, a German woman, who had been raped and impregnated by a Russian, said something like, “After so much death, I was happy to have a child and new life.”

As critical as killing is to war, particularly a war of attrition like World War II or a genocide like the Holocaust, some respect for life must be retained simply for societies to operate. After a war, humanity re-emerges, not in everyone — the sadists and suicides are legion — but a sufficient majority. While the eliminationist strategy of the Nazis suggested a massacre would be mandatory at Pilsen, the officers knew full well that if they forced their soldiers to pierce those Jewish women full of holes, until their blood ran like a river in that train yard, it could destroy their ability to become the healthy husbands, fathers, and citizens Germany would need for its own rebirth.

Tonia Blair during her first return to Auschwitz/Birkenau, with her husband in 1980. photo: Vachel Blair
The gas chamber was invented, therefore, to serve as a prophylactic, to protect the butcher from the abattoir, a distancing needed most by young men forced to murder young women. Hence, even during the German army’s chaotic collapse at the end of the war, as they raced troop trains full of adolescent and elderly conscripts into the maw of the Soviet and Western Allies’ armies, they were desperately trying to ship one thousand Jewish women 250 miles from Freiberg, Germany, to Linz, Austria, where Mauthausen concentration camp was still operating a single, small gas chamber.

Over the years, the good Samaritans of Pilsen expanded in my mind from a seemingly random miracle to something natural, inspired by human nature and achieved by regular people. Even the German soldiers who allowed the Jewish women to be fed crossed over to my column marked “good.” When this happened, I found the redemptive morsel for which I had long been searching. To my surprise, it involved Darwinism, a concept often bandied about by Nazis.

Indeed, Darwin’s theory of evolution was the main modern idea the Nazis used to rationalize their conquest of vast swaths of territory, their murder of millions of people, and their extermination of the Jews. After a decade of reading their references, it dawned on me I should review Darwin myself, and I located a used copy of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in a dilapidated bookstore in Oakland, California. First published in 1859, my reprint was from 1941, the first year of the Holocaust, suggesting the publisher had come to the same conclusion I had. On the Origin of Species can be overwhelming in its detail, but my edition also included Darwin’s second treatise, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), so when I got bogged down in the former, I skipped ahead to the latter.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection concerns killing or its avoidance and how excelling at those tasks drives evolution. Often simplified as “survival of the fittest,” it simply means the obvious truism: successful things tend to continue. In this case, successful individuals, genes, or groups (geneticists differ on exactly which or in what combination) pass beneficial traits to their descendants using the mechanism of D.N.A., which was discovered a century after Darwin, but more importantly through sex.

Sex has been recognized as central to the life cycle since prehistoric times, but Darwin elevated it to evolution’s second principle, sexual selection. From choosing a mate, hence the name, to copulation and nurturing offspring, until they are mature enough to repeat the process, sexual selection governs reproduction.

But “evolution is natural selection,” nothing more or less, according to Richard Dawkins, one of the premier evolutionary theorists of our day, in the opening pages of his bestseller, The Selfish Gene (1976). Of special interest to Dawkins is how natural selection drives altruism, notably a mother’s dedication to her children, which appears to contradict the survival principle. Nonetheless, he waits until the end of his book to mention Darwin’s second theory and then only in passing. This is because evolutionary theorists classify sexual selection as a subset of natural selection, even though they will occasionally note that success in the latter is irrelevant without accomplishment in the former. Indeed, no matter how successful or domineering an individual or group may be, if it doesn’t pass its D.N.A. to the next generation, it is nothing, evolutionarily speaking.

Evolution is one of the top two or three theorems of all science, yet its details are still being discovered and disputed, and not just by religious fundamentalists. Darwin waited decades to publish On the Origin of Species, until the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace corroborated his findings, to avoid committing a catastrophic scientific error or irresponsibly injuring the Christian sensibilities of his beloved wife, Emma. He waited another twelve years to publish The Descent of Man and held off to its last chapters — probably further than most Nazis read — to mention how completely sexual selection affects human romance, marriage, and birth.

Epigenetics, a field identified by geneticists in the 1940s, but which came of age in the 1990s, covers how genes turn on and off in response to the environment. This recalls the discredited theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, circa 1800, who postulated that giraffes got their long necks by stretching to eat leaves higher in the trees and passed that trait to their offspring. Food scarcity would be an epigenetic trigger and giraffe necks obviously evolved due to environmental pressures, but could there be another factor? What if giraffes were sexually attracted to Modigliani-like necks?

Tonia and Doniphan at the memorial for the 960 buried in a mass grave in Mzsana Dolna, Poland, where are also buried Tonia mother Miriam, sister Irena and brother Salek, in 1997. photo: Vachel Blair
Evolution’s big picture becomes clear when we look at the peacock, as Darwin does in The Descent of Man. While the peahen is little more than an overgrown pigeon, her mate is endowed with the animal kingdom’s most regal tail. Classified as a secondary sexual characteristic, its fantastic size and colors evolved over the eons by virtue of the peahen’s preference for fancy feathers, which turns out to be surprisingly strong. When the two peahens Darwin was observing were moved to a new farm and abstained from mating with the new farm’s peacocks, he was shocked. Why would a healthy female forgo reproduction for one entire season? Doesn’t that contradict natural selection?

Moreover, why would peacocks even have such exaggerated tails? It makes them easier to hunt by inhibiting escape through flight, for which show feathers are not suited, or on the ground, where they provide a convenient handle for grabbing. Darwin discovered, documented, and believed in sexual selection, which Wallace rejected out of hand, but he failed to fathom its full power.

In fact, having an enormous, psychedelic tail is a fantastic asset for both the peacocks, since the peahens like it, and the peahens themselves. Indeed, such a tail makes it easier for her to evaluate his health and age at a distance, without risking unwanted attention, and to decide whether to fornicate or flee. Since Darwin’s peahens preferred the cocks at their former farm, they hid at the new farm, leaving the new cocks to less discerning hens. The survival cost of fancy feathers is more than offset by the evolutionary benefits of choosey sexual selection at which peahens came to excel, probably more than any species on earth — except humans. We, too, are obsessed with beauty, reproduction, and romance, sometimes to the detriment of simple survival, as the pilot proved with his gift of silk stockings.

World War II, I came to believe, was a referendum on Darwinism and not simply which side was stronger. The fact that the Nazis proclaimed themselves determined Darwinists but didn’t force their soldiers to finish off my mother, or every last Jewish woman they had in their clutches, even though a rudimentary understanding of evolution indicates they must, means that they, too, realized sexual selection beats natural selection over the long term.

Aside from contradicting Dawkins and most neo-Darwinists, sexual selection’s supremacy has implications across many fields and arguments, notably the nurture- nature dialectic, which is the modern version of fate versus free will. Nurture-nature has become even more involved of late, given spectacular developments in genome sequencing, gene splicing, twin studies, gender identification, and more, all of which have produced oodles of data. Nevertheless, as many evolutionary theorists have noted, genetics proposes and the environment — or epigenetics or, when it comes to humans, culture — disposes. In this light, Darwinism will need a new summary, “evolution is natural and sexual selection,” or perhaps even “survival of the lovingest.”

My grandparents loved each other and their children dearly. My mother reveled in their love and observed similar in her community, read about it in literature and saw it on the silver screen, which provided a certain psychological stability and helped her to become a romantic Polish beauty as well as to survive the war. Despite the horror of the Holocaust and the harshness of its legacy, my mother was very loving to my brother and me, noticeably more than many of my friends’ mothers were to them.

Conversely, almost all major Nazis — Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and those are only the Hs — were brutalized by their fathers whom they came to hate, consciously or subconsciously, and felt abandoned by their mothers, who failed to protect them, a critical point pioneered by Alice Miller in For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (1983). Growing up with Jewish neighbors, classmates, or even friends, as most Germans did in the early twentieth century, they could easily compare their own brutal upbringings to life in more loving families. This absence-of-affection trauma also pertains to many depressed or easy-to-anger people with seemingly decent parents or from privileged backgrounds who, nonetheless, feel they were not loved enough.

After about a decade accruing my findings, I outlined them to my mother. She laughed in my face. “What are you now, a Ph.D. in evolution?” she quipped.

While my mother remained a romantic — indeed, late in life, she wrote this collection of poignant and tragic but still-believing-in-love stories — she also became quite snarky. She would often crack wise or take the piss out of people, which could put off acquaintances, friends, even family members, especially grandchildren. Generations of Jews had used dark humor to maintain their wits in the face of the unspeakable, I would try to explain. In fact, that was the style of her “camp boyfriend,” the pilot; and now she had enough power and status to fully enjoy such kidding around. It was a healthy antidote, I concluded, to her childhood as the quiet sibling of an outgoing older sister, her teenage years under the Nazi jackboot, and her marriage to a tall, garrulous, and gentile American.

As if those three factors were not enough, my mother worked for almost three decades as the secretary for Harvey Hornstein, a nationally known social organizational psychologist, at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Hornstein specialized in psychological violence in the workplace and authored a number of books on the subject, notably Brutal Bosses (1996). As it happened, Hornstein himself was a brutal boss who would demean, criticize, or verbally attack my mother, sometimes on a weekly or even daily basis. She didn’t mention this at home, however, for the obvious reason that one, two, or all three of her immediate relatives would have immediately marched to her office and confronted Hornstein. Rather, she learned how to stand up to him in her own way, contradicting him as needed, or enjoying a good laugh at his expense with her co-workers.

Doniphan and mother Tonia in front of the stairs to her family's one room apartment in Lodz, Poland. photo: N. Blair
The last day of the "Our Holocaust Vacation" shoot found us in the foothills of the Austrian Alps, among the massive stone walls and buildings of Mauthausen concentration camp, which is where my mother was liberated by the Americans on May 5th, 1945. The weather was dark and rainy, but our mood was light. After filming one last, heartfelt testimonial, which my mother dutifully delivered, we repaired to a restaurant in the nearby town to enjoy a delicious meal and our favorite discussion, now featuring the insights of my sixteen-year-old daughter. She even took on her grandfather in the classic Holocaust studies debate, “Did the Nazis know they were being evil, or was genocide part of their morality?”, advocating for the latter. Kvelling at her granddaughter’s newfound knowledge, my mother looked on admiringly while enjoying a thick slice of warm strudel.

The film concludes with the sexual selection that inevitably follows natural selection: my mother’s journey halfway around the world to New York City where she met and fell in love with my father. A few nights after we finished shooting, something related transpired between my brother and sister-in-law. While enjoying a belated honeymoon in Budapest, Hungary, where my sister-in-law’s mother grew up, they conceived a son. They named him Stefan, for the young man my mother fell in love with on the train to Auschwitz.

The efforts of Stefan, the pilot, the Czech good Samaritans, my mother, and many others may seem small in the ocean of atrocity that was the Holocaust, but it was enough to keep the spirit of love alive. Slow to react, gather allies, and marshal its forces, love and sexual selection only beat hate and natural selection gradually, over time, person by person. But triumph they inevitably do as indicated by the survival of kindness and the fecundity of life.

“Some good things came from the Holocaust,” I told my mother once, during a phone call around 1995.

“Like what?” she demanded.

“Without the Holocaust, you probably would have continued to live in Poland and would not have come to the United States and met my father,” I explained.

“So what?” she retorted, “You would have still been your father’s son.”

Alas, that is not how the universe, not to mention sexual selection, reproduction, or love, work.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Nov 10, 2021 - 06:25 PM
Cutting Through the Crap
by Celik Kayalar

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

'Also a painter, Kayalar sees the BS problem visually. image: C. Kayalar
BS DETECTORS, EVERYONE NEEDS A
good one. Mine works overtime. It starts beeping and getting louder and louder if what I’m reading or hearing is bullshit.

If it’s not, it quiets down… usually after I look into it further by some careful fact-checking and research.

I’m sure it happens to you too. But, it looks like it does not happen to everyone: maybe their BS BS Detector is not functioning. I hate to think that they do not have one.

Examples that trigger and make my BS Detector beep quite often are: politicians, especially some of the Republicans (Rep-reps is the term I coined for reprehensible Republicans); Trump-defenders in general; anti-vaxxers; race hustlers; some Evangelical Christians and other religious zealots; global-warming deniers; and Fox News for the loads of BS they broadcast.

Here, I’d like to elaborate on a specific but lesser-known case: The allegation of sexism in breast cancer funding by certain feminists. I don’t mean to pick on feminists—I am a staunch feminist myself—just to show how they, too, can overreach, sometimes. And, they end up misleading others and deluding themselves in the process.

Some years ago, I was watching Sheryl Crow (a revered musician and one of my favorites) on TV, talking about her battle with breast cancer. Felt very sorry for the lady, of course.
Among many relevant and true points, she also made this one: breast cancer would be better funded by the government (and Congress), if it wasn’t a predominantly women’s disease.

Therefore, according to her thinking, there was obvious sexism against women, perpetuated by men who populated the medical funding institutes such as NIH and NCI (and, the Congress).

I remember nodding in agreement as I listened to her. Yet, I suddently started hearing in my head, my BS Detector beeping and getting louder and louder. Hence, I had to do my own research and fact-checking on what she was alleging in regard to this funding bias.

I though a good starting-point would be to compare the funding level of breast cancer to that of an exclusively men’s disease: prostate cancer.

I discovered (very easily, from the public records) that the facts were not on Ms. Crow’s side. Breast cancer was more generously funded than prostate cancer by all the relevant Government agencies despite the fact that more men died of prostate cancer than women of breast cancer— every year, on a consistent basis.

Let’s fast forward to September 18th, 2019. The highly educated, accomplished and no-doubt, well-meaning journalist Ms. Linda Ellerbee made basically the same “sexism against women by men” claim on CNN, upon the death from breast cancer of her close friend and colleague, Ms. Cokie Roberts.

"Cokie Roberts is gone and I'm angry as hell,” (source here)

This time, I called Ms. Ellerbee on her false claim of “sexism” in my Facebook outlet “The Traffick”, on September 24, 2019. I cited the following facts which were one simple google-search away from anyone’s reach:

A) National Cancer Institute spends twice as much money on breast cancer than on prostate cancer, on a consistent basis. B) National Institutes of Health spends almost three times more research-money on breast cancer than prostate cancer.

Sexism in funding? Maybe, but it is in the opposite directions these ladies, Ms. Crow and Ms.Ellerbee (feminist icons in their own right) have been claiming.

It’s psychologically hard to even be skeptical about the claims of such admirable women, let alone to go ahead and do the research and the fact-checking on their claims. Yet, if you happen to have a good BS Detector, and an honest interest in the truth (not in political correctness), you just might do it. And, everyone will be better off for it.
Because truth matters!

For further clarification, my point here is not to argue that the Federal funding should not be more for cancer research. On the contrary, I’d personally prefer to spend more money on medical research of any kind, including breast cancer. And, perhaps less on “defense” via Pentagon and on building weapons.

I’m simply pointing out the falsehood that’s believed in and promoted by some that there is sexism against women in the funding of medical research by the government agencies such as NIH and NCI (as approved by the US Congress).

How about the BS Generators? Some well-known individuals who possess great BS Generators are Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Laura Ingraham (Fox News), and Marjorie Taylor Green (Republican Congresswoman) among many other—watch out for them!

Thank you for your interest and please continue to listen to your BS Detector in good health.

Celik Kayalar is a PhD. bioscientist as well as filmmaker, painter and educator, who runs Film Acting Bay Area in Berkeley, California. You can learn more about him here or reach him .
Posted on Nov 10, 2021 - 06:17 PM
A Low-Budget Film That Almost Cost Me My Life
by Eric “Protein” Moseley

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Unhoused filmmaker Eric Moseley hard at work in downtown Los Angeles. image: E. Moseley
AS AN ADOLESCENT, I WAS ALWAYS
fascinated by footage captured from wars. I was attracted to film of historical combat but the most devastating stories to me would come from what was going on at that time, mainly the footage and photos from the unexplainable Vietnam War.

For some reason, I was fascinated by the raw footage of reality captured on the battlefield by photojournalists risking their lives to bring those stories, that hadn't been regularly reported before on local broadcasting, directly into our living rooms. Through a 19-inch, black-and-white television, I had the opportunity to witness how the reporters put their lives alongside soldiers trained to kill.

The war correspondents' position carried them to the most devastating areas of the planet. Once there, they endeavored to draw near enough to the activity to give composed records, photographs or films. Accordingly, this is commonly viewed as the riskiest type of news coverage. The risk alone is what made it so exciting.

No one who likes raw footage will ever say to a risk-taking documentary filmmaker, "I liked your film, but only if the lighting would have been a little bit better when the lion attempted to attack the local villagers.” Or, "If you could have just held the camera still when you were filming the shootout between the LAPD and the bank robbers.”

But it doesn't matter. You can get away with low-quality production when you know your content is what the audience is in search of. The riskier it is, the more compelling it will be.

Several years later, I became a single parent of my daughter Erica. I also developed an addiction to the powerful drug of crack cocaine, a complex descent which took us on travels from coast to coast and caused us to be unhoused in many different regions of the country.

By the grace of God, however, I was able to turn my life around, give Erica good education (she is a media worker and activist for the homeless in San Francisco) and become a social impact documentary filmmaker. Like the Vietnam war photojournalists, I found myself filming in a warzone that was somewhat different but had some similarities, what has been called “the war on homelessness.”

I have always been a risktaker. I believe that it is crucial in in documentary filmmaking but also many lines of work. Of course, the soldiers in the Vietnam war were courageous risktakers. As the soldiers shot each other with rifles, the journalist shot at both parties with a camera.

Those risks were responsible for me becoming known for what I do in different regions of the world. That led to me becoming part of the book “Unsung Hero: 25 Inspiring Stories of Kindness During the Covid-19 Pandemic", one of people covered for their extra kindness during the Covid-19 pandemic which was created by Story Terrace (a leading memoir writing service), which came out in 2020.

Moseley with the new book 'Unsung Heroes', which features his story. image: E. Moseley
In reality, it almost cost me my life. Sure, I could have strived to become a documentary filmmaker who covers stories such as how Disneyland makes their cotton candy, or how blue jays fly south to escape the winter. No disrespect to those types of documentary filmmakers, but for myself, I had to be a little more adventurous.

Hence, I have produced several documentaries concerning raising awareness of homelessness. As a filmmaker, I, too, found myself in some dangerous areas alongside some dangerous individuals.

I have been taking a risk ever since I first picked up a camera and began shooting. My first experience with that process happened while making my debut documentary, “Skid Row Journey” (which was supposed to be a pilot for a reality show). The underground documentary was shot on location in skid row Los Angeles, New York, and Georgetown, South Carolina.

My life was on the line almost constantly while shooting in LA and New York, but not so much in Georgetown. Not only the conditions were much better, in comparison to the big cities, but I knew many people there. Thanks to Grandma Thompson (R.I.P.) and Barbara Thomson for providing me a safe place to shoot inside their home on Duke St.

Also, I would like to thank my ‘Li’l’” brother from another mother, Antonio “L.I.F.E.” Thompson for appearing in the film’s dream sequences.

Just being in LA at times can become risky. But if you add being surrounded by people who have nothing to lose and were accustomed to using violence to survive, that can pretty regularly put you into harm's way. Not to mention my camera was a Hi-8 video camera, the top of the line for homemade productions.

Even though I knew many people among the unhoused who line the streets of downtown LA, that was not cushion enough in such a teeming metropolis. Nevertheless I got about 2 1/2 hours' worth of raw footage of compelling homeless stories.

I soon after traveled to New York and found myself living in the back of Port Authority, near 42nd St and 8th Avenue. My daughter and I had done the Big Apple a couple of times before, but this time around, it was just me, God, and my camera,

I recall standing on a corner looking for someone who I could trust to hold my camera as I did an introduction. The man who I asked to assist me looked at me strangely said. "Do you know where you're at?” I said, “Yes, I do, but do you know where I've been?”

I then showed him the footage that I had previously captured from skid rows across the country. Fascinated, he gave me a “hood pass.” I knew that I had to complete what I had started and I was willing to do it by all means necessary.

Later, I produced several other documentaries. Some of the films had higher production values but with no comparison to my three latest films as far as notoriety. While it was bad enough dealing with the lonely and forgotten, I was faced with an even deadlier situation, Covid-19.

At the end of filming my latest documentary “In Correspondence With Eric Protein Moseley”, I began to feel ill. I immediately took a Covid test and tested positive. I cannot say for sure exactly where I contracted it from because I deal with all walks of life. To me Covid-19 was comparable to seven days of death, while still being alive.

Nevertheless, when making a documentary, you have to put it all on the line in order to get a good story, perhaps even putting your life in harm's way.

Ultimately, you are the storyteller. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how big your crew is. According the director Ron Howard, "It doesn't matter how much money you have to spend, it`s what you're capturing inside frame lines that going to have an impact on the audience or not."

Eric “Protein” Moseley is a filmmaker, actor and homeless consultant who lives in Los Angeles and can be reached

Posted on Oct 24, 2021 - 02:53 PM
Filmmaking from Greece to New York: Interview with Stavroula Toska
by Don Schwartz

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Greek filmmaker and innovator Stavroula Toska. image: courtesy S. Toska
FILMMAKER STAVROULA TOSKA WAS
born and bred in the small town of Sindos, Greece. She spent her childhood and schooling there. By the time she was 21, she was in drama school pursuing a career in acting. She worked in Greek television, playing in soap operas.

Although Toska feels a strong connection with Greece and her family, America called. She was in Manhattan by the age of 23. A few years into her time in New York, Toska met Academy Award and Golden Globe winner Olympia Dukakis, the daughter of Greek immigrants, at an event. The two connected as friends and soon collaborated on Toska’s award-winning feature documentary ‘Beneath the Olive Tree.”

Toska has directed three films so far:

‘Switch’: a TV series based on true events that takes place in the world of professional domination (BS/DM) in New York City.

‘In The Vice’: a glimpse into the world of a high-powered Wall Street woman who resorts to an unorthodox way of enhancing her work performance, while trying to keep up with the challenging demands of the corporate world.

‘Beneath the Olive Tree’: a documentary covering the hidden atrocities perpetrated on Greek women caught up in the Greek Civil War in 1946-1949. This war was much longer than three years. It went far into the 1970s and was backed by the US and British governments.

Mysterious circumstances and my simple curiosity about the title, ‘Beneath The Olive Tree’, brought me to Toska. When the film stunned me to my core, I reached out to her and luckily connected.

Stavroula Toska working on the documentary 'Beneath the Olive Tree' at the Parthenon in Athens . image: courtesy S. Toska
cineSOURCE: Stavroula, how were things like for you when you first arrived in the US?

You’re taking me all the way back, Don. I arrived in New York in September of 2000, with about $400 in my pocket, which was the most money I ever had in my life at that point.

That was a lot of money back then in Greece and I expected to rent an apartment, sign up for school, start paying my tuition, and then I’d find a job. I quickly learned that $400. won’t take you far in New York.

So, I stayed at the American Youth Hostel which was charging about $20. a night, on the upper west side. Within a month or so I started working as a waitress in a diner in Manhattan, and began putting money aside to pay for school.

Looking back now I might not have taken the chance if I knew how hard things would have been. But, I was young, and I thought, oh, whatever, I will go to America, if something doesn’t work out within a year or two, I’ll just go back to Greece, or I’ll go to London, whatever, the world is my oyster—but, I stayed in America. and I’m very glad I did.

What part of New York did you settle down in?

Soon after the American Youth Hostel I found a room to rent at an apartment on the Upper West Side. I got really lucky because I had an amazing roommate, an American girl, who was extremely supportive and understanding of my circumstances. She and I are dear friends to this day, we’re more like sisters, actually.

Then I started working and attending acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, I did a little bit of acting in off-off Broadway plays, and then I got my work papers. I started working for corporate America because I wanted and needed to make some real money. I didn’t want to be a struggling artist.

A few years later, when I decided to quit my corporate job and make my first film I moved to Riverdale, a residential neighborhood in the northwest portion of the New York City borough of the Bronx.

Did you always know you wanted to be a filmmaker?

Not at all. I actually started out wanting to pursue a career in acting. I was a little girl, in a small town, watching movies that came to Greek television from America. I remember watching ‘Coming to America’ and thinking ‘I’m going to grow up, go to America, and work at McDonalds!’.

Toska won the Most Innovative Filmmaker Van Vlahakis Award at the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival. image: courtesy S. Toska
This was like a dream of mine, Don (with a big smile). We didn’t even have McDonald’s in Greece at that time. But, it was images of big cities, and the type of people I would see in the movies that called me.

Fast forward to a few years later, I had graduated from school with a degree in Marketing and Public Relations, and then went on to study acting in Athens. I worked on Greek television doing a couple of soap operas and some guest appearances on shows but I quickly decided that I wanted to come to the States and have a career here.

I look back now at the things I wanted to do, and the career I was hoping to have 20 years ago—I was a girl with a really heavy accent from Greece, my English wasn’t so good, had no connections, didn’t know anybody in America, let alone trying to find an agent or a talent manager, trying to get auditions and build a career as an actress.

I’d say I was pretty naïve about it all. The truth is it’s been a long journey full of adventures, good and bad experiences, life changing moments and countless lessons. Things started changing for me when I realized that I needed to create my own opportunities and build my career step by step; that was what led me to getting behind the camera to tell my own stories, what brought meaning into my life and what I truly feel more aligned with.

Tell me about your encounter with your distant relative Olympia Dukakis.

I went to an event where Olympia Dukakis was speaking, and she was talking about how she never really sat around waiting for Hollywood or anybody to knock on her door and give her the opportunities to play the big roles that she wanted to play. So, she started her own theater company in New Jersey, and she decided what were the big productions that they were going to put on.

And that really spoke to me, it made me feel like ‘OK, I can totally take control of the stories I want to tell, and make it all happen.’ The woman had so much passion and conviction. She was beyond inspiring and I got high just from hearing her speak! Needless to say that before the event was even over I ran after Olympia to introduce myself and asked her for advice. I had no idea at the time how my life was about to change because of that one encounter.

Tell me how ‘Beneath the Olive Tree’ came about in the first place.

Well, I approached Olympia that night at the event and told her I had started writing, that I was taking writing classes, and that I wanted to find my voice as a storyteller, as a woman, as a Greek woman in particular, as an immigrant. We just hit it off, and that was the beginning of a very special friendship and mentorship.

What led me to my first directing job was Olympia handing me a book one evening as I was leaving her home; the book was called ‘Greek Women in Resistance’. This was the first time I was reading about Greek women fighting in the resistance movement during World War II against the Germans. Soon after the war was over these same women were being persecuted and accused of being Communists, enemies of the state.

I was in quite a shock because I had grown up in Greece, went to school in Greece, and yet I knew nothing about the Greek Civil War and the stories of these women. I had no idea that Greek women who had fought in the Resistance were later persecuted by their own people, their own government. I became fascinated with this story and started doing research.

Toska with well-known actress Olympia Dukakis (with white hair on her left) and cast and crew during the filming of 'Switch' the series. image: courtesy S. Toska
At some point I didn’t go to sleep for three nights in a row, was completely taken by this story and couldn’t get away from the computer, reading everything I could find online about that period in Greece. That led me to go back to Greece to make my first documentary ‘Beneath the Olive Tree’ which Olympia executive produced and narrated.

And then you went on to direct a short fiction film and a series. Tell me about that.

Soon after ‘Beneath the Olive Tree’ was completed I wanted to try my hand at directing fiction. That’s when ‘In the Vice’ came along. I was looking for something to direct, but I didn’t want it to be something that I had written. I wanted to find a story I was interested in, something that another person had written and would trust me to direct, take it from the page and make it come alive on screen.

A woman I’d known for a while and I met at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. We were catching up at an event when she mentioned a script she had written—a short film. She was looking for a director, and I said ‘I’m looking to direct something. Let me read the script, see if I’m a good fit for it.’ I went back to her a few days later with ideas about how I wanted to shoot it. She agreed and that’s how ‘In The Vice’ came about.

What is ‘In the Vice’ about?

‘In the Vice’ is inspired by a true story that has to do with a woman who is very successful in the world of finance, Wall Street, and the stock market. The film is about what she does behind closed doors in order to be able to cope with all the pressures of that world. The film is about addiction, about the face we show to the world, who we really are behind closed doors, and what it takes to survive in New York City when you’re really hungry for money.

And ‘Switch’?

‘Switch’ started out as a documentary project. I had gone out for dinner with a friend, and we started out talking about different projects, and he brought up the word ‘dominatrix.’ We had just gone by a place downtown, and he said, ‘that used to be a BDSM establishment.’ I had no idea what any of that meant. To be honest, I thought he was talking about prostitution. I did not have a clue about the world of professional domination and that it’s all legal because there is no sex involved.

I became fascinated with finding out who are these women who do this work for a living, and what type of men go to them as clients. What is the psychological turn-on, the appeal? What are these men looking for if they are not looking for sex? What is it that draws a woman to become a professional dominatrix, and what is it that makes a man a regular client? I thought this was going to be my next documentary.

Toska at the Santa Fe Film Festival, where she won the Best Narrative Award for 'The Sounding'. image: courtesy S. Toska
I had discussed this with Olympia at some point. She knew nothing about this world, but the idea was fascinating to her as well. Everyone I spoke to about this project was genuinely curious and wanted to know more. I was determined to do some research, find a few professional dominatrices and their clients, put them on camera, and explore the psychology behind all of this.

Well, it sounded easier than it was…I wasn’t able at the time to find people who’d allow me to follow them with my camera inside their work environment, and also when they go home, pick up their kids from school, attend a family gathering. So, I decided to sort of go undercover and experience this mysterious and stimulating world for myself.

I began training and then working as a dominatrix for a couple weeks to see where it’d take me. The plan was to make some contacts, build some friendships so that people could trust me, and allow me to put them on camera for the documentary. After my first week of training and working I was completely hooked, and I did this job for about five and a half years.

I took those experiences, and turned them into a scripted series called ‘Switch’ which became my third project as director. We got to work with an incredible cast, including Olympia Dukakis, and the series has found an audience around the world and has won 17 awards and honors in the US and abroad.

I want to go back to ‘Beneath the Olive Tree’, which blew me away.

Thank you, Don. That means a lot to me, and I appreciate you taking the time to watch it twice—there’s a lot of information in the film for someone who doesn’t know this part of history at all.

The very first time you learned about the Greek women and the horrors and deaths they suffered. What was that point?

That was when Olympia handed me the book called Greek Women in Resistance. That was early in 2010. By June of 2010, within a few months after Olympia and I were talking about this project, and what we could do with this story, my business partner, Sophia Antonini and I took our first script to Greece to meet with the women, and start filming interviews.

Mind you, these were the same women who as teenagers were sent to concentration camps and accused of committing all sorts of crimes that the government was never able to prove they committed, but that was the excuse for keeping them in the camps; torturing them and teaching them how to love their country again.

I don’t want to give too much away, but I really hope that people will watch ‘Beneath the Olive Tree’ so they can understand the propaganda that was used by the Greek, US and British governments in order to keep these women exiled in the camps or even imprisoned in various prisons around Greece.

Stavroula Toska speaking on a Zoom interview. image: courtesy S. Toska
So, I found myself reading about these women, and on one hand feeling so proud and inspired by the stories of these young women who dared to speak up for what they believed to be right and fair, for justice, for equality and on the other hand feeling completely heartbroken about how the Greek government punished them, destroyed their lives and took away their best years. I was in disbelief for a while…I honestly could not believe that all this had taken place in my country just a few decades before I was born.

‘Beneath the Olive Tree’ is a very important film and I highly recommend it to anyone who is a lover of history or interested in social and justice issues, women’s issues and history.

Thank you so much, Don. We had a very successful festival run in the United States. For close to four years we had festivals reaching out, asking to set up screenings for the film. It was overwhelming at first, but then it was really incredible to see people who are not of Greek background to come out and watch the film, and then come up to me at the end with tears in their eyes—talking about the women and what they had to endure, how moved they were, and that they knew nothing about this part of Greek history, and how blown-away they were by it all.

You can imagine how much it meant to me and the whole team to experience the film through other people’s eyes.

What’s on the horizon for your work?

This is an interesting time for me as I am ready to take my work to the next level. At the end of 2019, and then into 2020, I was going back and forth to LA frequently because I was interested in getting into the networks and the studio system.

I no longer want to work as an independent filmmaker. I am ready to get into the studio system and work on bigger productions where I can put my skills and talents to even better use, create projects for the networks, and be able to reach a wider audience. This is the reason why I started my own production company, The Toska Matrix, and have been developing IP [intellectual property] through it, but also producing other people’s works under the company.

Now, as I started to make this transition, Covid hit. I was in LA last in March of 2020 looking at apartments, and they put us into lockdown. It was like, ‘oh my god, what am I going to do now?!’

But, long-story-short, I got back to New York and focused on staying healthy and developing various projects. I have a couple of documentaries I want to produce because I love documentary filmmaking, and I have some scripted and reality shows I’m working on. And, I just optioned a book that I want to adapt into a series; I can’t say more about it at this time, but I’m very excited about this project as well.

Are there any specific projects you wish to mention?

I’m under contract with a well-known production company in Hollywood. We have a development deal for a show that explores human nature, human sexuality, and all that. I can’t say anything more about it until we get the green light, but I will say that this has been a really great experience for me and one that shows me I’m on the right path.

I absolutely love creating, developing, producing and I’m blessed to be doing that with a great team of people by my side.

I imagine that a narrative version for ‘Beneath the Olive Tree’ will be high on your list.

Yes! It’s on my to-do list. Olympia, soon after receiving her Oscar for ‘Moonstruck,’ was approached by studios asking what she would like to do next. She wanted to work a narrative about the Greek women, based on true events. They hired a scriptwriter, and it turned out to be very Hollywood. They wanted to leave out the politics, the fact that these women were brutally tortured or killed.

Olympia was disappointed, and that was the end of that project. She, Sophia and I agreed, though, that we should produce the narrative film. Olympia is no longer with us, but I am determined to produce this project in her honor and for all the incredible Greek women featured in ‘Beneath the Olive Tree.’

Thank you, Stavroula, for sharing your life and work with me. I’m in awe of your work, and for all that’s coming next in your career.

If you’re interested in learning more and viewing Stavroula’s work, visit these links:

See her documentary 'Beneath the Olive Tree'
See another interview
See her site or a related site

Don Schwartz is an actor and reviewer living in Marin County who can be reached .

Posted on Oct 01, 2021 - 02:18 AM
October Festival Report
by Karl F. Cohen

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

A scene from the imaginative new French animated feature 'The Bears’ Famous Invasion'. image: courtesy L. Mattotti
What’s Up at This Year’s Mill Valley, Oct 7-17

“The Bears’ Famous Invasion” (France, 2019, 82 minutes, dir. Lorenzo Mattotti) is a colorful and innovatively designed animated film based on the 1945 Italian children’s book by Dino Buzzati. In it, the Bear King Leonzio gathers his clan to a uniquely creative war against the land of man to save his son from a human circus. In French with English subtitles. Recommended for Ages 10+.

“The Bears’ Famous Invasion” uses bold colors, angular shapes, and reaches an exceptionally high bar with its creativity. Narratively constructed around a fictitious war between humans and members of the animal kingdom, the film has fighting but is free of bloodshed and generally gentle in its presentation of the fantastical encounters with ghosts, charging boars, a sea monster, and more.

The film is framed with a wandering storyteller who awakens an old bear in a cave and relays to him the tale of Bear King Leonzio whose son, Tonino, is swept downriver while fishing and becomes a performer in the human circus. Moving beyond his anguish, Leonzio calls the bears to arms with a surreal bear dance that wondrously opens an imaginary door to where anything can and will happen.

How will the conflict between man and animal resolve? What additional perspective may the older bear provide to the storyteller? This is the type of animated film that doesn’t get made anymore: a fairytale that is visually enrapturing yet also explores complex themes for young audiences around the function of storytelling and how humans relate to nature.

The film’s director is Lorenzo Mattotti, an Italian comics artist and illustrator whose work has been published in numerous magazines such as Vogue, Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Le Monde. He won an Eisner Award in 2003 for his graphic novel “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The Bears’ Famous Invasion is his first feature film. US Distributor: Pathe International

Rakel, the cartoonist character in 'Ninjababy', encounters an 'uninvited tenant. image: courtesy Y. Flikke
A Norwegian Feature

"Ninjababy" (Norway, narrative feature, 2020, dir. Yngvild Sve Flikke), Rakel is a 23-year-old cartoonist with an irreverent sense of humor and an unexpected baby on the way. Wanting nothing more than to evict her uninvited tenant, yet forced to carry it along, she finds herself joined in her schemes, exploits, and romances by an increasingly (and literally) animated Ninjababy. In Norwegian with English subtitles, this is its West Coast premiere.

Shorts

“Are You Okay?” (Ryan Cannon, US 2021, 9 mins) Addresses the rampant problem of cyber-bullying, highlighting the positive impact bystanders can have by simply reaching out to support their peers. Age 9+

“Blanket” (Marina Moshkova, Russia 2020, 6 mins) When a grumpy polar bear gets an unexpected visit from a perky brown bear, he gets an unexpected lesson in friendship and simple pleasures. Age 5+ Nonverbal

“Blue Cooler” (Laura Margulies, US 2021, 8 mins) A playful spirit and local color bring Hawaii to life through beautiful watercolor-style animation.

“Cinema Rex” (Mayan Engelman & Eliran Peled, Israel, 2020, 7 mins) In Jerusalem in 1938 a Jewish boy and Arab girl transcend language to find a common love for film. Age 5+ In Arabic, Hebrew, and English with English subtitles

“Distanced” (Cassy Callari, US, 2021, 1 min) “I made this animated short film during quarantine to express my feelings about the current situation. I felt that this rotoscope animation process of past memories of hanging out with my friends, helped shed my voice on the current events.”

“Golden Age Karate” (Sindha Agha, US, 2021, 5 mins) Jeff Wall is a teenage martial-arts pro excited to share his passion for the dojo with an unlikely group of students: senior citizens.

“Louis’s Shoes” (Marion Philippe, Kayu Leung, Théo Jamin, & Jean-Géraud Blanc, France, 2020, 5 mins) The first day at a new school presents unique challenges to autistic eight-year-old Louis. For ages 5+, in French with English subtitles.

A moment from the French Nina Bisiarina's 'A Lynx in the Town'. image: courtesy N. Bisiarina
“A Lynx in the Town” (Nina Bisiarina, France/Switzerland 2019, 7 mins) When a curious lynx ventures out of its forest lair, the locals don’t quite know what to make of the colossal cat. Age 5+ Nonverbal.

“Matilda and the Spare Head” (Ignas Meilūnas, Lithuania, 2020, 13 mins) A drive to be the smartest person in the world leads Matilda and her mom to the misguided conclusion that two heads would actually be better than one. Age 9+ In Lithuanian with English subtitles

“Shooom’s Odyssey” (Julien Bisaro, France/Belgium, 2019, 26 mins) When a baby owl hatches amidst a fierce storm, she embarks on a determined quest to find her mother. Age 5+ In French with English Subtitles.

My friend Nancy Phelps has seen “Shooom’s Odyssey” several times at festivals in Europe and says:

“It is a wonderful film. Meant for children, but has been equally loved by adults here in Europe. Beautifully animated! It is about a little bird and his unmatched baby brother in a terrible storm trying to find their mother. Don’t want to ruin the story for you because it is so charming. It has won many awards here in Europe and not just in the Best Children’s category. It is one of my top films of the year.”

Marty McNamara saw Shooom’s Odyssey at Stuttgart and considers it a five-star winner. See trailer at here.

Star Bound” (Richard O’Connor, US, 2021, 3 mins) NASA engineer and his outer space-obsessed six-year-old nephew have an animated chat about why space is so darn cool. Age 5+

“Try to Fly” (The Affolter Brothers, Canada, 2020, 8 mins.) When a baby owl gets pushed from her nest it triggers a darkly comic existential crisis that takes her from anxiety to ambition in rapid succession. Age 9+

“Tulip” (Andrea Love & Phoebe Wahl, US, 2020, 9 mins) A miniature garden world comes to life as a tiny flower child tries to find her community. Age 5+

Dance comes alive in the mythical and beautiful 'Coppelia', based on a comic ballet from 1870. image: courtesy unknown
Coppelia Premieres at SF Dance Film Festival

The film's imaginative adaptation of the classic ballet focuses on the cosmetic surgeon Dr. Coppelius (Mazzeo), whose lure of superficial beauty poisons a town. Swan (DePrince) must uncover the truth about this newcomer and save her community from his deception. As Swan and the townspeople come to learn, in the age of social media and an increasingly image-conscious culture, it’s never been more important to be yourself.

“Coppelia” will have its U.S. theatrical premiere at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival (SFDFF), on Saturday, October 16 at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture’s Cowell Theater, The film’s innovative combination of animation and ballet make it ideal for families as well as serious dance fans.

“Coppelia”’s themes of self-acceptance, alongside its “Disney-esque charms” (Screen Daily), will be sure to inspire dance aficionados and future generations of dancers alike at this family-friendly screening.

“As a mother of two children myself, I look forward to sharing this film with fellow families,” says Greta Schoenberg, SFDFF’s Founder/Director of Programming. “After so much virtual programming, it will be a treat to safely gather at the Cowell, watch this sumptuous film together, and be inspired by DePrince.”

Prior to the premiere screening, SFDFF will be posting a virtual Q&A with the filmmakers and Ralph Guggenheim, the San Francisco-based founding member of Pixar who says of the film: “this modern retelling blends dance and animation, using to good advantage their common roots in pose and pantomime."

SFDFF will also release an episode of its podcast, Dancing Through the Lens”, featuring Coppelia” producer Adrienne Liron. Both of these interviews will be available for free on SFDFF’s website. Coppelia will be released in a Blu-ray TM+DVD combo from Shout! Factory on October 19, ensuring that those who love it at the screening can rewatch it at home.

The Cowell screening will open with “Fly me to the Moon”, a short dance film by Bay Area filmmaker Kate Duhamel.

“Coppella” screening details: Saturday, Oct. 16 - 5:00–7:00pm Location: Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture’s Cowell Theater 2 Marina Blvd, San Francisco CA 94123 Tickets: $15 general admission, $75 VIP ticket (includes private reception with guest artists).

Contact Website, info: or call 844.567.3333
Social Media: @SFDanceFilmFest @TheCoppeliaFilm #SFDFF2021 #CoppeliaFilm

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .
Posted on Sep 30, 2021 - 06:16 PM
In Praise of Evolutionary Psychology
by Celik Kayalar

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

'The Naturalist' by the scientist Edward O. Wilson, who helped develop Evolutionary Psychology in the '70s. image: E.O. Wilson estate
WHY DO VERY FEW PEOPLE UNDER-
stand social developments? Because they don’t have the right scientific paradigm (basis, method) for it. For example: If you think the underlying cause or driving force in sociology is the “class struggle” only (like Karl Marx did), you will miss what’s been going on.

Another example: if you think every current conflict in America stems exclusively from racism or “white privilege,” you will overlook other causes and inevitably miss out on some possible remedies.

A useful analogy from the hard sciences:

Can one understand modern biology, especially Molecular Biology: that is how DNA, RNA, proteins (enzymes) work; how living cells function; how the immune system works, with the new mRNA vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, and on and on… unless one knows and understands Organic Chemistry?

No, one cannot.

Organic Chemistry is, of course, a more complex form of basic chemistry: atoms, chemical bonds, molecules, and reactions between them. Without knowing and accepting the atomic basis for matter, the whole cellular life-processes will be a total mystery. Any speculation about them will be wrong. For instance, no practical results in medicine, such as vaccines (mRNA-based or otherwise) will be possible.

Isaac Newton was the greatest physicist of his time (1642-1726), but he couldn’t make any progress in chemistry. Not that he didn’t dabble in it as an “alchemist”. He failed because he didn’t know nor could he come up with the atomic basis of matter: The essence of chemistry.

A painting by this article's author Celik Kayalar symbolizing the importance of science. illo: C. Kayalar
Aristotle (384-322 BC) was even worse in “chemistry” of course, with his simple, naive and inevitably wrong notions of what matter consisted of: fire, air, water, earth.

This is not surprising: scientific knowledge takes time to develop and advances incrementally, as it builds on prior scientific knowledge (as opposed to “revealed” knowledge).

It took Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) and John Dalton (1766-1844) and their meticulous laboratory research to start establishing the correct atomic-basis of chemistry, in the 18th Century.

So, what is the correct scientific basis of paradigm for sociology and the ongoing social developments in human history?

In my opinion, it is Evolutionary Psychology.

Another painting by Celik Kayalar ttitled 'Ascent', is a 'Layerist Painting' done on 4 layers of canvas. and depicting the evolution of species from from frog to human. iillo: C. Kayalar
It was originally called Sociobiology by the great Edward O. Wilson (around 1975). The term was quickly dropped by him and others, cause it was deemed to be rather inflammatory and “politically incorrect”. More on that at a later essay.

Without a clear appreciation of Evolutionary Psychology and its principles, most sociologists and like (political scientists, political philosophers, social economists, pundits, politicians…) will be at a loss, whether they realize it or not. They will capture an aspect of social reality, here and there, but never the complete picture.

The complete picture is difficult to capture anyway, but without the paradigm of Evolutionary Psychology, it is impossible to really understand and make true advances in Sociology. It will be akin to an Alchemist tying to explain how the Living-Cells actually work.

I will elaborate on this in a future essay, and thank you for your time and attention.

Celik Kayalar is a PhD. bioscientist as well as filmmaker, painter and educator, who runs Film Acting Bay Area in Berkeley, California. You can learn more about him here or reach him .
Posted on Sep 27, 2021 - 06:19 PM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner: Oct 2021
by Karl F. Cohen

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Poster for Bill Plympton's new short 'Demi's Panic'. image: courtesy B. Plymptom
Plympton Rock’s the Roxie

Bill Plympton's new short "Demi's Panic" will be shown at the Roxie for a week starting Friday Sept. 24th, ant it’s not what you expect from him. Instead of a comedy, it is a mature, sophisticated study of Demi's fears that arise from living in a world threatened by an epidemic.

Touching on feelings most of us have experienced since March, 2020, it is an impressive work. It drew me into Demi’s subconscious feelings, an unexpected and unusual experience I wasn't expecting. I highly recommend it.

The short will show with "Prisoner of the Ghostland" starring Nicolas Cage. It’s about "a ruthless bank robber sprung from jail by a wealthy warlord whose adopted granddaughter has gone missing,” according to its description. “Strapped into a leather suit that will self-destruct in five days, the bandit [played by Cage] sets off on a journey to find the young woman—and his own path to redemption."

This last-minute, week-long run has been added so it can qualify for consideration by the Academy Awards. Please check it out to help the Roxie as well as Plympton.

San Jose State Film Class Completes Big Film

Professor David Chai and his San Jose State students have completed ‘CMYK (Colors You May Know)".

Image from San Jose State's new film 'CMYK'. image: courtesy D. Chai
“It's our friendly reminder to love one another and embrace our differences, inspired by all of the killing, hatred, and division that was such a big part of 2020,” Chai wrote me.

Once again his projects take us in a new and unexpected direction. Indeed, they are quite varied in look and content, and there are 14 different ones awaiting you here.

Pixar’s Surprising New Short

Pixar has released ‘Twenty Something”, a short about the insecurities of millennials becoming adults. Aphton Corbin, who worked on “Soul” and “Toy Story 4” and is one of Pixar’s rising Black female story artists, was motivated by professional insecurity to make her debut Spark Short on Disney+.

“Twenty Something” is a clever, funny 2D short about Gia, who imagines herself as a stack of kids hiding in a trench coat during a frantic 21st birthday celebration at a club.

Scene from Twenty Something”, a short by Aphton Corbin from Pixar. image: courtesy A. Corbin
“The original idea stems from me being a 20-something entering the workforce for the first time at Pixar and feeling all of the inadequacies that are coming at you all at once,” Corbin said. “Am I a successful adult, or am I bunch of kids running around to make it work? This was fun to visualize as a short.”

Steve Segal’s New Animation

Steve Segal has been animating for years. The trailer for “Misfit”, his latest film, can be seen here, where it is followed by some of his historic film moments.

A pioneer of computer animation, Segal made “Dance of the Stumblers” in 1987 using the Amiga 1000 computer and Aegis animator, and rendered it by aiming a 35mm camera at the screen and shooting one frame per second.

There is also a behind-the-scenes, hand-held video he made on the making of the “Brave Little Toaster” (1987) in Taiwan. It shows life inside a studio where people actually drew and flipped pages of paper. There are brief shots of a young Joe Ranft, who went on to help Henry Selick develop “Nightmare Before Christmas” and on to Pixar, where he worked on of their classics.

Also in the short are Kevin Lima who directed “Tarzan” and “Enchanted”, Brian McEntee, art director for “Beauty and the Beast”, Steve Moore, who got an Oscar nomination for directing “Redux Riding Hood”, Chris Wahl supervising animator in “Beauty and the Beast”, Rebecca Rees. a writer on “Aladdin”, Randy Cartwright, who supervised the magic carpet in “Aladdin”, Ann Telnaes, a highly regarded political cartoonist, and director Jerry Rees, who has supervised building many of the most popular theme park attractions.

Steve has also created an interactive performance piece, “Outside the Box”, that is fun. See it here.

Brad Uyeda puppet for his stop-action horror movie. image: courtesy B. Uyeda
Japanese Internment Story Coming

Brad Uyeda is developing an animated feature about his grandfather, who was in a WWII Japanese internment camp.

“My next project underway is a personal one for me about my grandfather, from whom I get my artistic talent,” Uyeda emailed me recently. “He was one of the Japanese Americans that were relocated into internment camps in 1943 following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”

“I will be hiring artists in the winter for pre-production work.” If anyone has questions and or would like to submit their portfolio, they can send it to .

“They did more than defend America,” said President Bill Clinton about the 442nd Infantry Regiment composed of Japanese-Americans, many of whom volunteered from the deportation camps. “They helped define America at its best... Rarely has a nation been so well served by people it has so ill-treated.”

Uyeda Finishes Horror Film

Brad Uyeda is also finishing up his stop-motion horror film. Although he spent the long year of Covid doing non-stop freelance work, he found time to finish the animation of his powerful, evil-looking creature, a puppet created with Midnight Studio FX in Scottsdale, Arizona.

He says he is very pleased with the results as well as the quality of the animation, noting, “It really comes alive on the screen.” Uyeda is a graduate of SF State’s animation program went on to work as an animator on a series of projects for other directors and on personal projects.

Shot from Tippet's new work, 'Mad God'. image: courtesy P. Tippet
Tippett Premiers Life Work Film

Phil Tippett premiered “Mad God” at the Locarno Film Festival, held every August in Locarno, Switzerland, since 1946.

Tippet’s experimental feature set in the “ghost world of mankind,” took him 30 years to make. Individuals descend in a corroded diving bell into a ruined city where they explore a labyrinth of bizarre landscapes inhabited by freakish monsters, mad scientists, and “war pigs.” Tippet made it in segments over a 30-year period and funded parts of it with Kickstarter campaigns.

He premiered the final cut at Locarno in August with two other films he did special effects for, “RoboCop” and “Starship Troopers”. The festival also gave him a lifetime achievement award.

Tippet says much of it is based on his subconscious. He kept notes of his dreams and found many had beginnings, middles and resolutions. In Variety he said that “not everything gets resolved.” He adds that the visuals somehow make sense to him, but they might not make sense to everybody.

He admitted he can’t clearly define the film’s premise. But he is pleased that, at a work-in-progress screening years ago, a few people walked out and they told him it gave them anxiety attacks.

“I wanted to make something that grabs people’s attention and takes you some place where you had never been before, and you have no idea where it’s going. That’s very clear to some people. Others who are in it for a more conventional theatrical experience are going to be disappointed. I’ve moved through these different environments before, and I’m thinking what’s next.”

A review in Film Stage says, “The world is at various times an industrial nightmare, a psychedelic C.S. Lewis mushroom garden, a scene from a torture movie, and a pseudo-WW1 battlefield.”

“If there is an arc, it involves those unfortunate explorers being harvested by psychotic surgeons who relieve them of a strange cargo that is then offered as a sacrifice to a nightmarish alchemist who might be the devil—or something else,” the reviewer continues, concluding, “It is a unique achievement; a mad opus from one of American cinema’s liveliest minds.”

The High on Film.com website calls it, “A bizarre, surrealist cinematic experience [which] squarely falls in the league of the rare posse of films that redefine and stretch the bounds of filmmaking. It would not be amiss to put it in the same breath as “2001 Odyssey”, or even “Koyaanisqatsi”.

He thinks his next project will be something “I could complete in a couple years. It’s designed to be a lot more audience friendly with characters and plot. In vibe, it’s like a 1940s Warner Bros. color cartoon. It has that savage insanity to how the energy flows. I spent a good chunk of COVID time writing a narrative, I’ve designed all the characters, drawn all the storyboards, so it’s just sitting there in case I get any traction.” For more info go here.

From the new short from Art We Trust Fund. image: courtesy Art We Trust
Mind Bending Special Effects Work

A strange, surreal video was made for the In Art We Trust Fund campaign. I hope you enjoy seeing this and the next work or two that shows up on the internet after it.

Smith Tells Computer Graphics History

Alvy Ray Smith talks about the history of computer graphics, an hour-long talk on the subject of his new book about the history of the pixel. The last 10 or 15 minutes of it focuses on his pioneering work for George Lucas and a little company he helped found, Pixar. When they needed major funding they brought on Steve Jobs, who arranged it for them. It ends with the release of their first feature, "Toy Story".

Cartoon Art Museum

First of all, there are lots of cartooning classes for kids online after school and on weekends at the Cartoon Art Museum, see their website.

The "Wonder Woman" comic from DC is highlighted in a great Cartoon Museum Show. image: courtesy Cartoon Museum
Secondly, the museum, located in San Francisco, proudly presents “The Legend of Wonder Woman”, an exhibition celebrating 80 years of DC Comics’ iconic amazon.

“The Legend of Wonder Woman” features comic books, merchandise, and original illustrations by many of Wonder Woman’s most prominent artists, including H.G. Peter, who co-created the character in 1941, alongside writer William Moulton Marston; Trina Robbins, legendary underground comix artist and herstorian; George Pérez, who revitalized and redefined Wonder Woman for the 1980s; Robyn Smith, artist of the critically acclaimed YA graphic novel “Nubia: Real One”; and fan favorites including Colleen Doran, Phil Jimenez, and Liam Sharp; as well as costumes by The Bronze Armory.

The exhibit runs till the end of December 2021. Galleries opened daily (except Wed).

Another of their shows is “A Treasury of Animation”. From the earliest hand-drawn cartoons to today’s blockbuster CGI films, all animation begins with an artist and an idea, “A Treasury of Animation” showcases original production art following the evolution of animation from the 1920s onward from the Cartoon Art Museum's permanent collection.

Jantz Celebrates 25 Years

Michael Jantz is celebrating the 25th anniversary of his comic strip “The Norm”. He posts his “daily sanity” here. Or you can see what his first strip was like here.

Plus he has cool stuff for sale here.

New political cartoon from Mark Fiore. image: courtesy M. Fiore
Fiore’s New Stuff

Mark Fiore has new Covid-19 and withdrawal from Afghanistan cartoons online that are excellent. You might enjoy seeing his latest critical comments about anti-vaxxers and work about our withdrawal from our 20-year war on his website. Lots of animated work to contemplate here.

Fantastic Flip Book

See a video of what may be the world’s most expensive flipbook, part of a deluxe limited edition of Gogol’s “The Nose” published by Arion Press, illustrated by William Kentridge. He has created sets for the opera “The Nose”. See it here or buy it here.

Disneyland Gets Sued

Twenty-five thousand Disneyland employees sued for better pay which is obviously needed given reports of homelessness and food insecurity.

While working at the Disneyland Hotel for 15 years as a valet, Gabriel Sarracino earned only minimum wage while supplementing his income with tips. Considering himself fortunate since his wife and two children have affordable housing, not every cast member (as employees are called by Disneyland) can say the same.

According to a 2018 survey, 11% reported experiencing homelessness in prior two years, 68% were food insecure, and 73% said they do not earn enough for basic expenses, which the recent pandemic and gentrified real estate market made worse.

According to SF Gate (9/21/2021), “Sarracino is one of the 25,000 cast members who are participating in a class action lawsuit that alleges Disneyland is legally obligated to pay a living wage.”

Karl F. Cohen—who added his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .
Posted on Sep 23, 2021 - 04:50 PM
Indigenous Brazilian Territory Threatened
by Brazilian Activists

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

Brazilian Natives protest new laws. image: Counsel for Indigenous Mission
OUR PROBLEMS ARE MANY, AND OUR
pain is deep. We have surpassed 500,000 deaths from COVID in our country. Our government, led by the Trump-like Jair Bolsonaro, has been obstinately ineffective against the pandemic and only 13% of us have been vaccinated. Having turned totally right wing, it is also supporting the attempt of agrarian, industrial and financial elites to seize Native land.

The destruction of indigenous people, who are dedicated to using the forests responsibly, also harms the environment. Since they have the right to a sustainable way of life, these actions resemble Nazism.

The ethnic and cultural diversity of Brazil is being threatened by several actions in the Brazilian Congress and Judiciary, but most notably bill PL 490. Its purpose is to take away rights to land marked as part of Native people's territories.

A legal loophole called “Marco Temporal,” which means “time frame,” could legalize theft of their lands unless the Brazilian Supreme Court stops it. If they can’t prove they occupied those territories in 1988, when Brazil’s constitution was ratified, the so-called time frame, the areas will be open to agriculture, mining or other extractive industries.

There have been many protests, see more information here.

PL 490 would violate their ability to sustain life and future generations. The bill also violates Brazil’s Constitution and mocks Brazil’s signature to international treaties, like the Convention 169 of the ILO (International Labor Organization) on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, the UN International Indigenous Rights Declaration and the UN International Human Rights Declaration.

Brazilian Natives protest new laws. image: Counsel for Indigenous Mission
There are two crucial actions taking place in the judiciary at this moment, which are about to go before the Supreme Court. On June 30th, 2021, a key process concerning the demarcation of the territory of the Xokleng, will be judged. The Xokleng, who live in the southern, more European-settled part of Brazil, experienced an extremely violent colonization, which continued up through the dictatorial governments that ended in 1988.

If the bill against the Xokleng passes, all Native Peoples who have been violently expelled from their territories during national colonization will be threatened with complete extinction. For more on this story, see the Greenpeace article.

The national institutions which should protect them, like the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI) or the Ministry of Environment, act against their interests. In this context, death is not only physical, but also cultural.

The attack of their basic rights and human dignity invested from the executive power is already being consolidated in other ways. In some places, this degradation is supported by evangelical Christian missionaries, who promote the division of the communities by criticizing their shamans and healers. Unfortunately, they get support and motivation from the federal administrative structure.

It’s urgent, that authorities and people of the world protest or at least do not compound these ecocides and genocides. Your help is of great relevance.

One way to help is send an email to the following email addresses, saying “No to PL 490 and No to the Marco Temporal.”

President of the Chamber of Deputies/Presidente da Câmara dos Deputados:
President of the Federal Senate/Presidente do Senado Federal:
President of the Supreme Court/Presidente da Suprema Corte:
Minister of Agriculture/Ministra da Agricultura:

Or you can express yourself in any way you find suitable for the cause. Singing, dancing and blessing with the fraternal love Tupã, God in the native Brazilian Guarani language, is also appropriate.

We are very grateful for any kind of positive contribution. Thank you!!
Posted on Jul 06, 2021 - 10:27 AM
Cohen’s Cartoon Corner: Jun 2021
by Karl F. Cohen

Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!

From Ben Ridgeway's 'Formless Form', 2019. image: courtesy B. Ridgeway
Ridgway Next Masterpiece

Ben Ridgway has completed another exquisite work of animated art. Ben, who teaches animation at San Francisco State University, has been creating visionary animated films and sculptures for many years.

He recently finished "Formless Form", and he says he hopes you enjoy watching it here..

Poster from Geoff Clark’s 'Tragic Magic', 2019. image: courtesy G. Clark
Local Animator Makes Good at Festivals

Local animator Geoff Clark’s “Tragic Magic”, a stop-motion film that was completed in 2019, is doing well at film festivals. It tells the story of Greygaunt the wizard and his apprentice and when their day is interrupted by the arrival of Death. Will their combined magic skills be enough to defeat him? Geoff made the film in his home studio and it has been shown in ten festivals.

“The most notable being Montreal’s Animaze International Film Festival,” he said. It has won awards at the New York Animated Film Awards and the Los Angeles Animation Festival. It was shown in May at FilmQuest in Provo, UT. “The film showed at Animation Chico in 2019. I had a blast at that show. The organizers are really great.” See it here.

Poster from ‘Pepito’ the animated dog opera from Muttville. image: courtesy E. Guevara
Pepito the Delightful Cartoon Dog

‘Pepito’ is a delightful, animated dog opera made for Muttville, a nonprofit dedicated to rescuing and caring for senior dogs in San Francisco. This heart-warming work features cutout animation directed by Espranza Guevara, who is a graduate of University of Southern California. The music was composed by Nicolas Lell Benavides and the libretto was by Marella Martin Koch for New Opera West, a LA area group. The opera was commissioned by Emily Thebaut, a co-founder of Muttville. It really is a delightful film and can be seen here 🐩 🐕

From Fluffy White Clouds new short about the Yellowstone Fire of 1988. image: courtesy LFC
Fluffy Clouds At It Again

"Yellowstone 88: Song of Fire " is a short by Little Fluffy Clouds is a 2D hand drawn animated short that tells the story of the devastating fires that engulfed Yellowstone Park for five months in 1988. The fires didn’t end until winter storms extinguished them. Despite the horror and devastation, life returned and continues for the plants and animals of the area.

It is a handsome work with a soft-spoken poem by Betsy de Fries read by Peter Coyote. Song of Fire was created by Betsy de Fries Little Fluffy Clouds’ director/producer and co-founder and her co-founder and director/animator Jerry van de Beek. The music was composed and performed by Mark Murphy, who is part of the Irish rock and roll band The Devlins, and recorded at Secrets and Machines in Dublin.

Martha Gorzycki. image: courtesy M. Gorzycki
The art in the film was first drawn using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro and cleaned up using Illustrator. Then each illustration was split up into hundreds of flat elements and recompiled in After Effects, carefully placing each element in a different depth layer to create a multiplane effect when there is camera motion. It can be viewed here.

After viewing the film scroll down as it provides all kinds of facts about the fires (costs to put it out, numbers and kinds of mammals killed, number of fires caused by man, by lightening, etc.). Here is a link to an informative article about the production in Stash Magazine.

Martha Gorzycki Featured Burma Fest

Martha Gorzycki’s “Voices from Kaw Thoo Lei’ was part of the Burma Spring Benefit Film Festival. This powerful film experience has won 20 film festivals awards and most recently it was part of a major online fund raiser to raise money and awareness of the bleak situation happening in Burma. The benefit featured over a dozen speaking events and over 30 films (shorts, features).

Martha heads San Francisco State’s animation program. You can see this powerful work here.

Phil Tippett. image: courtesy P. Tippett
Locaron Festival Honors Phil Tippett

The Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland) will honor U.S. animator and visual effects artist Phil Tippett, with a lifetime achievement award. The festival is honoring him for his work behind the scenes that has “has extended the horizons of filmic iconography.” Phil, whose studio is in the East Bay, won two Oscars for his work on “The Return of the Jedi” and “Jurassic Park”. The upcoming festival (August 4-14) will host the world premiere of Tippett’s experimental stop-motion film “Mad God”, that has been in development for years. It is set in a world of monsters, mad scientists and war pigs, and was funded by fans through Kickstarter. Locarno will fete Tippett with its Vision Award.

Hank Azaria and Apu are getting divorced. image: courtesy M. Groenig
Azaria Apologizes for Playing Apu in Simpsons

He has been paid well for playing that role since 1989, but now that he is being criticized for being politically incorrect Hank Azaria says he is sorry—not to you but to people who are from India who watch the show. The Guardian reports the actor has apologized “to every single Indian person” for his portrayal of Apu in The Simpsons. Azaria, who is white, voiced the role of Apu, an Indian-American shopkeeper. The character has now been terminated from the show amid criticism of racial stereotyping. Azaria accepts being accountable for any “negative consequences.” He also said that, although he believed the show was founded on good intentions, it contributed to “structural racism” in the US.

When he accepted the role, “I really didn’t know any better, I didn’t think about it. I was unaware how much relative advantage I had received in this country as a white kid from Queens. Just because there were good intentions it doesn’t mean there weren’t real negative consequences to the thing that I am accountable for.”

Awareness that the character was an insensitive and offensive portrayal was stressed in the 2017 documentary, “The Problem with Apu”, made by the Indian American comedian Hari Kondabolu as a look at “how western culture depicts south-east Asian communities.”

Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons”, told the BBC the show was striving for inclusivity. Last year he announced that non-white characters would no longer be voiced by white actors, and in February he said the Black actor Kevin Michael Richardson would assume the role of Julius Hibbert, an African American doctor, from Harry Shearer, who voices characters including Mr Burns.

“Bigotry and racism are still an incredible problem and it’s good to finally go for more equality and representation,” says Groening. “There was no intention to sideline or offend ethnic minorities.

Karl F. Cohen—who decided to add his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .
Posted on Jun 19, 2021 - 09:50 AM