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Oakland’s Year of Living Revolutionarily by Doniphan Blair
Nine Faces of Oakland's 2018 Cultural Revolution (starting with left column): Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, writer/actors 'Blindspotting', Boots Riley, writer/director 'Sorry to Bother You', Ryan Coogler, director 'Black Panther'; (middle) Rob Nilsson, 'Heat and Sunlight' plus 50 more features, Jamie DeWolf, the very-Oakland 'Smoked', Cheryl Fabio, Oakland blues documentary; (right) Japanese romance, modern tribals, George Soros. photo: various
2018 WAS A REVOLUTIONARY YEAR FOR
Oakland film, filmmakers and fans but also its film magazine, cineSOURCE, now starting its eleventh year (subscribe here).
2018 was so ginormous cinematographically, in fact, it will go down historically as a cultural watershed, not only in Oakland but among cineastes of color nation- and world-wide:
You’re now free to do commercial blockbusters, over-the-top satires, political rom-coms, even.
The only downside: 2018 will be a VERY hard act to follow—unless, of course, Oakland can quickly evolve into a mature as well as visionary film and art center.
We kicked off the year with “The Perils of Production, Indie Style”, about the ill-fated filming of "Quest" (2017), before turning to three amazing filmmakers: one with only one feature under his belt, the other with over fifty, the third, a woman of color, who made a great documentary about the blues.
After years of activism and film study, Cheryl Fabio joined with Oakland's community TV station, KTOP, to make a detail- and music-filled epic about the blues scene which blew up West Oakland after Saunders Samuel King hit his first number one in 1942 (see "Cheryl Fabio Makes a Masterful Oakland Blues Movie” by Jerry McDaniel).
Indeed, West Oakland flourished for a few decades with supper clubs, fashionable boutiques and record labels, as well as blues men and women, the likes of which we're only now seeing again in Telegraph Avenue's monthly gallery-pub crawl (see "Can Oakland Save the World?"), or Fantastic Negrito's taking the award for Best Contemporary Blues Album Award at the recent Grammys.
“Smoked”, Jamie DeWolf's only feature thus far starts with a stunning introduction to Oakland and Shank, a charismatic OG (old gangster) played by L. Abdul Kenyatta, before turning to three hapless hipsters (one well rendered by DeWolf), who attempt to rob his medical marijuana dispensary. Given Shank's flamboyant thug crew, the three are obliged to flee for their lives while spitting out a stream of film-noir bon mots.
Rupert Estanislau, an actor with actual gang experience, doing the dispensary robbery that kicks off 'Smoked''s long chase sequences. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf
Since releasing “Smoked” in 2012, DeWolf became the director, writer, shooter and actor behind a slew of provocative shorts, see his hairpin-turn-filled story here.
How does one tell the story of an internationally-known indie, now 79, who won at Cannes with his first feature, at Sundance with his fourth, just finished touring the US with a revival of his second, and is hard at work on 52-54, collectively called "Nomad Trilogy"?
Answer: Subject him to a tour-de-force investigation, so revealing it shocked the lunch out of some of his colleagues, simply because Nilsson is THE OG of the improvised, edge-pushing feature, AND honesty and creativity are the beating heart of any art scene.
2018 marked a climax in Oaklandish art, from the stellar cinema—“Black Panther" is one of the top-ten grossing films of ALL TIME!—to achievements in its people-of-color, First Friday, Burning Man or sui generis as well as indie film communities.
But, to inform that work, to keep it at the cutting edge of insight and analysis, we need fresh perspectives and radical understandings.
"Elevated insight is required for art scenes to lead civilizations," noted Doniphan Blair, cineSOURCE's publisher/editor, who wrote the above four articles, with research assistance from his associates. "This has never more necessary than in today's Bay Area. We're oversaturated with culture and convenience, making us lethargic in that regard, while leading computer and social media companies have fallen prey to fake news, ersatz accounts and false flag operations—meaning we need alternative press."
Blair began 2018 with an essay about the Me Too movement and its unrecognized unintended consequences, “When Flawed Men Make Awed Art", before turning to three even more misunderstood and, therefore, dangerous socio-political problems.
Twenty-five years after Blair concocted 'Abstract Aborigine'—"we are all abstract thinkers native to this planet"—he met a tribal girl in Brazil, who liked photography and image making. photo: D. Blair
Although Barack Obama once proclaimed, "There's not a black America and white America... there's the United States of America," many Americans, including many Obama supporters, rejected that in favor of tribal identities, which empowered both Trump and DNA-based affinity groups.
A less racial lens through which to examine this phenomena, however, is tribe versus civilization, a tension ravaging the globe for five thousand years, according to Blair in his “Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto".
One big misconception: While we claim to adore our tribes, we're constantly voting with our feet for civilization, notably its tools for communication, war, medicine and travel, which the Islamic radicals worship, but also diversity, which they don't. If nothing else, we all love to eat out foreign cuisine.
Fortunately, the universality of tribe versus civilization makes comparative analysis easy. Blair initiated his own investigation by hitchhiking and busing from Europe to India, while periodically staying with tribal people. A few years later, he did a longer stint across South America, ultimately befriending the unorthodox anthropologist, Tobias Schneebaum (see "Interview with Tobias Schneebaum: Artist, Author, Cannibal?".
In "Romanticism and Its Discontents, East & West", Blair builds on an issue raised in his Me Too article, which is one of the central dilemmas of modern civilization: our desperate need for love and intimacy but our increasing inability to find it.
Surveying the love traditions of the ancients, he focuses on Japan, where the earth's first romantic novel, "The Tales of Gengi," was written by a women in the 11th century. The subsequent romantic movement liberated woman, poetry and dreams and led to samurais, geishas and the sensuous “floating worlds”, but also the messianic machismo of Imperial Japan, much as German romanticism was perverted by the Nazis.
Even so, the main deity and head priests of Japan's traditional faith, Shintoism, are female, while the home continued to be controlled by women. Naturally, the romantic ones were shocked by World War II, stupefied by the annihilation of their cities, and sickened by the phallocentrism, turning post-war to a readily-available means of opposing this: romance and sex.
A few academics, Asians and/or feminists have questioned Blair's capacity or right, as a Caucasian-looking cis male who hasn't toured East Asia or obtained relevant degrees, to address such a complex cultural enigma.
As with tribe versus civilization, romanticism is not unique to Japan and comparative research often uncovers insights inaccessible to more siloed students. Moreover, Japan's low sex, birth and romance crisis have been all over the news, as well as research journals, for decades.
Hillary Clinton was portrayed with a Jewish star and money illustration in a tweet by Trump, October 2016. image: D. Trump
As if tribe vs civilization and Japanese romantic problems were not hard enough, by the end of 2018, Blair felt compelled to expose yet another ancient taboo and mystery:
What's with the Jews and moneylending?
Of course, if you're sick of such provocative or problematic investigations, cineSOURCE's 2018 had plenty of other interesting news:
But, if you believe an advanced culture needs even more advanced film, art and ideas, and you’re familiar with rumors about Jews and money but never looked into it, Blair's Soros, Jewish Bankers and Interest Explained is for you. Sadly, it is a history so fraught with stereotypes, anti-Semitism and outright psychological disease as well as historical misunderstanding, it is almost never noted by the establishment press or even Jewish history scholars.
Fortunately, Blair has the DNA as well as research to back up his claims. The son of a Holocaust survivor mother, Tonia Rotkopf Blair, he started studying Jewish history in 1983 and produced the film "Our Holocaust Vacation" in 2007.
He returned to the subject three years ago, in the cineSOURCE article "Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed". It features groundbreaking analysis of how Jews were represented in early-twentieth-century literature, the symbolic meaning of Nazis in film noir, AND an answer to that troubling question "What's with the Jews and moneylending?"
Moreover, Blair is about publish "Love at the End of the World", his mother's collection of elegant and elegiac stories about another un-examined subject: enduring the Holocaust while remaining a loving and romantic teen. The book also includes one of Blair’s most important essays to date, “Darwin and Love: What I Learned Making a Holocaust Movie".
Although Blair's iconoclast Holocaust oeuvre has generated accusations of cultural insensitivity and anti-Semitism, with the massacre at the Pennsylvania synagogue in October 2018, he felt obliged to offer an explanation of Jewish involvement in moneylending over the millennia, to finally begin developing an honest historical understanding.
The cover of 'Love at the End of the World', by Tonia Rotkopf Blair, published by A Media Press. image: D. Blair
Heady notions to be sure, but what do they have to do with Oakland filmmakers and artists?
While a majority of Oakland's intelligentsia is understandably addressing race, identity and gentrification, if you get a flat tire in West Oakland, you are just as likely to be assisted by an artist as an ex-gang member. This highlights our obligation to elucidate our shared humanity and our hidden histories, which are stereotype manufacturing machines.
As it happens, Oakland is testament to people of all colors and income levels coming together to cohabit. Indeed, the recently-passed Frankie Robinson, the storied baseball player and first African-American manager, used to claim that growing up in Oakland the 1940s, he didn't experience racism and his family never even mentioned it.
After flipping between black and white majorities twice in the last fifty years, Oakland is now one of the world's most racially-balanced cities, with black, white and Latino having a quarter each, and Asians, First Peoples and others splitting the remainder (again see "Can Oakland Save the World?").
If Oakland fails in the fresh ideas department, our activists will founder fighting the tribalism of the Trump Era, our filmmakers will flee south to Hollywood and our artists will preach, but not sell, to the converted. Indeed, Oakland's grand multicultural experiment, which the Black Panther Party depended on for financial support, rallies and acquittals, will come to little without cutting edge consciousness.
When a tribe wishes to influence a civilization, the trick is not replacing the ruling cabal with another tribe, either through violence or defamation, but becoming that civilization's most creative and attractive cohort.
That is what Bob Dylan did, when he shifted from his radical early '60s' style to country music, or what Lin-Manuel Miranda achieved by retelling the founding fathers' story in his monster musical hit "Hamilton".
Indeed, creating a cool new American identity is precisely what Oakland was born to do, as Robinson noted. But biology and birth right are of little use when it comes to concocting brilliant new film, art and ideas. What is required is, well, brilliant new film, art and ideas.
Since we already have the brilliant new film and art, help us pursue brilliant new ideas by subscribing, or addressing our 50,000 monthly readers (average) with an ad, or making a comment at the bottom of an article.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .Posted on Feb 09, 2019 - 01:56 AM