Doc workers

For most of them it's a labor of love.  They know they won't get the audiences or the media coverage of feature films, or even be shown in many theaters. Many times documentary filmmakers don't even recoup the costs of production. They are not part of the Hollywood dream machine, letting us escape into the happy endings of romantic comedies or the cathartic adventures of fictional adventure and the supernatural.

Instead, they ask us to look at reality -- or at least the reality of the filmmaker -- and they're not popular with theater managers, who schedule films they think will attract young audiences looking for great special effects and lots of explosions.  In my community, we've had to lobby for theater showings of Michael Moore films, and we've had some success with that. The chain that runs the single multiplex in the county didn't think there was an audience for Moore's political films, but the manager responded to numerous requests and got respectable audiences.

The finalists in documentary features for this year's Academy Awards are Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, The Cove, Food, Inc., The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, and Which Way Home.

We've seen some of them at an underground venue, a monthly series run by a local woman who starts her fourth year of showings this month. She has tried showing a couple of feature films, but "they're just not wanted."  Her biggest audiences, 80-plus people, were for a locally made film by and about the Native Americans of the area and for Moore's Sicko. 

The opportunity to discuss films is as big a draw as the chance to see them, she says.  You don't get that in your living room unless you've invited a bunch of friends over for potluck and a DVD.  It makes me yearn for the big city art-house theaters with their lobby tables and espresso bars to encourage conversation.

The Cove, about a Japanese village where dolphins are ruthlessly captured for the tourist industry and killed for their meat, didn't do so well in the local showings, with an audience of only 12.  Perhaps that's because it's available on Netflix.

So is Food, Inc., which compares the pastoral image of farms promoted by the food industry with the reality of the industrial factories which dominate food production. 

The wider availability is reportedly affecting film festivals, a primary venue for the docs. A worldwide economic slump is certainly part of the reason for lower attendance, but another factor is the Internet.  Time- and cash-strapped distributors can find enough information on YouTube and other sites to make decisions without trekking to the festivals.

Which leaves the rest of us in small and rural communities to our own resources and their sometimes questionable legality. There are filmmakers who urge us to show their work to as many people as possible -- and others warn us that Interpol and the FBI are watching and we could be liable for steep fines. Maybe we should be lobbying for nominal distribution fees when our venues are the local senior center or a church.

Foodies expand beyond cookbooks

We've had a strong - perhaps unhealthy - focus on food for many years in this country, maybe because we have such an abundance and variety compared with most of the world. That focus has changed in the last few years from gourmet meals and the latest trendy recipes cooked up by the foodies to a concentration on local and healthy, driven in large part by authors like Alice Waters and Barbara Kingsolver.

The latest food guru is Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at the University of California Berkeley, who has just produced Food Rules. Some examples:

#19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.

#36 Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

#47 Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.

#58 Do all your eating at a table.

#64: Break the rules once in a while.

His earlier books are In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, winner of the James Beard Award, and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which was named one of the ten best books of the year by both the New York Times and the Washington Post; a young readers' version of The Omnivore's Dilemma: the Secrets Behind What You Eat; Second Nature, The Botany of Desire, and A Place of My Own. Pollan appears in Food, Inc., a documentary film on the food industry, and The Botany of Desire, recently broadcast on PBS. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.

Pollan doesn't like the dependence on corn as an ingredient in many prepared foods, he does like local production and buying and farmers like Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in Virginia, another foe of industrialized farming. There's a good recent interview with Salatin at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/31/food-industry-environment

Our damaging dependence on oil has much to do with the current shift in food concerns. It's estimated that much of what we eat travels 1500 miles to our tables, a huge consumption of energy that might be better used to heat and light our homes.

An epidemic of obesity is also a huge factor, with fast food being blamed for much of it. Morgan Spurlock's Super-size Me, about his very fattening month of eating only fast food, was a breakout hit at the 2004 Sundance Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.

This year, the Los Angeles Times says Robert Kenner's Oscar nominee Food, Inc., evokes the muckraking advocacy journalism of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. That's because some of the problems with early 20th century food production haven't gone away, he said. "It's shocking to see how far backward we've gone" in policing what we put in our mouths, he said.

A casualty of the new foods sensibility has been Gourmet magazine, shutting down after 70 years.

At the very least, the new food rules should give us second thoughts about what we snack on at the movies.

A painful pursuit of happiness

In her 1977 novel, "The Women's Room," Marilyn French raged against men and had her protagonist find a kind of happiness in earning her Ph.D. in English lit at Harvard, and in a circle of friends as angry as she was.  In her final novel (she died in May, 2009 at age 79), her protagonist finds happiness by insisting that she will be happy and by returning to what some would consider very traditional feminine roles of raising and cooking food.

"The Women's Room" sold 21 million copies worldwide, striking a spark with women who felt abused in misogynistic marriages or furious because their husbands had dumped them for younger women.

It's a classic of feminist literature, although a very bleak one. In the ‘70s, the media discovered the male midlife crisis, which often involved acquiring a new "trophy wife," to replace the one who helped them achieve some success. Apparently they had not heard about millennia of tribal life, which often included polygamy, or about concubines or the mistresses of many royals.

The contrast between French's first and last novels reminds me of nothing so much as the famous Freud quote: "The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'" (From Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, by Ernest Jones, 1953.)

Love Children (from The Feminist Press at the City University of New York), is set in the  '60s and up to 1976. French has dropped her protagonist, Jess, back into traditional women's roles -- farming and cooking a la Alice Waters-- to find her bliss. There's nothing wrong with farming and cooking, so I'm left wondering a few things: Is she being ironic? Was what she wanted all along just for women in those traditional fields to get a full measure of respect? Does she want us to notice that different women, and men, at different times in their lives, might want something new?Jess is an interesting character. Born in 1953, she'd have been 23 as the book ends -- perhaps a bit young to have packed in all the experience French recounts. But there is a lot of chronological confusion here, which could have benefited from some heavy editing and fact-checking at the Feminist Press. For instance, Jess is convinced that it was her generation alone which stopped the Vietnam War.

There were many reasons that war ended, and many people involved in ending it, including the-then chairman of the Bank of America, Louis B. Lundborg. In 1970 he told the country "An end to the war would be good, not bad, for American business. War is, as we would say in business, a low-yield operation." Then we got serious about getting out.
As she approached 80, French was interviewed on the PBS program Life 2. She said there were compensations for growing old, that one is no longer bound by the anguishes of youth. "Adolescence... the first job... not knowing how to act, not knowing how people felt about you, wondering if you fit in or not." At a certain age, you no longer care, she says. "What is there to be afraid of anymore?"That's a comforting thought, and it's a shame it isn't better expressed in "Love Children."

Crash course on Haiti

Voodoo, AIDS, Creole food, sex tourism – that's what most of us know about Haiti. It's not much help today in understanding why the island nation is in such desperate straits after an earthquake, and with so few of its own resources to care for its people.

The reasons are many and complicated, starting with the 1804 slave revolt against France which made it the first African-American republic in the New World. Then you've got colonialism, imperialism, over-population, dreadful education and health care, deforestation, inappropriate architecture – pacts with the devil don't enter the list.

One of the best resources is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared M. Diamond (New York : Viking, 2005.) the chapter One island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: the Dominican Republic and Haiti explains it: Crippling reparations paid to France after independence, isolation as a French-speaking nation in a Spanish-speaking region, the brutal reign of the Duvaliers, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, from 1956 to 1986. The Duvaliers followed an invasion by US Marines in 1915 which created years of repression of political dissent, and American-installed puppet rulers.

Diamond is a professor of geography and physiology at UCLA and author of Guns, Germs and Steel and the forthcoming book Natural Experiments of History.  Diamond was on Forum, the NPR show, Thursday, Jan.21 . Check their schedule for the podcast: http://www.kqed.org/radio/programs/forum/


For more recent history, see the story by John Maxwell of the Jamaica Observer at http://www.counterpunch.org

Censored 2006: The Top 25 Censored Stories (New York : Seven Stories Press, [2005]) includes Diplomacy by death squad.

Avengers of the New World : The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Laurent Dubois,

Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.

In a remarkable year in which the 200th anniversary of Haiti's independence collided with the undeniable recognition that Haitian politics are still being shaped by outside forces, Harvard University Press launched a retelling of the events and individuals who engineered the Haitian Revolution. Dubois (Michigan State Univ.) emphasizes the impact of French revolutionary principles (i.e., the Rights of Man) on the Haitian rebel slaves, as well as the inextricable influence of French politics on the fate of its Caribbean colony.

Haitian Book Centre was

founded in 1977 to spread Haitian culture in the United States. Their inventory consists of all the classics of Haitian literature plus all the newly published titles by Haitian authors here and abroad and can be browsed online. They carry numerous categories, including children's books, art, history and fiction. Their major customers are university and public libraries. Worth browsing, especially the tempting collection of Images of Haiti.

Haitian-born Edwige Danticat, now a Miami resident, has a breath-taking number of books and awards:

• Breath, Eyes, Memory (novel, 1994)

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  Krik? Krak! (stories, 1996)
  
  
  
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  The Farming of Bones (novel, 1998)
  
  
  
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  Behind the Mountains (young adult novel, 2002, part of the First Person Fiction series)
  
  
  
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  After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (travel book, 2002)
  
  
  
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  The Dew Breaker (novel-in-stories,2004)
  
  
  
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  Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490 (young adult novel, 2005, part of The Royal Diaries series)
  
  
  
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  Brother, I'm Dying (memoir/social criticism, 2007)
  
  
  
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  The Butterfly's Way (anthology editor)
  
  
  

Danticat wrote the foreword to Tram Nguyen's book, We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11.

She also wrote a foreword for the Harper Perennial edition of Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and for Pesea Book's Starting With I: Personal Essays By Teenagers, edited by Andrea Estepa.

Danticat wrote the introduction to Alejo Carpentier's novel, 'The Kingdom of this World', describing the legacy of revolution and its flaws. In 2009 she received the MacArthur Genius Award.

Much fiction and film on Haiti is, frankly, pretty cheesy. If you're in the mood for that, try The Comedians, best known for starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in an illicit affair (again?) but with a fine performance by Alec Guinness. Screenplay from his book by Graham Green (and of course the book is better.)

For how to create zombies, there's The Serpent and the Rainbow, from a much-criticized book by anthropologist and botanical explorer Wade Davis, Ph. D., who spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum. Serious stuff about medicinal plants; director Wes Craven has turned it into some pretty fine cheap thrills and nervous giggles. Stars Bill Pullman as the ethnobotanist and Zakes Mokae as Peytraud, the delightfully evil priest and chief of the Tontons Macoutes, Duvalier's dreaded secret police.

A gallant Soviet trickster

Traveler,teacher, gardener, cook, publisher and now novelist (novella-ist?) Barbara Baer of Forestville in west Sonoma County finds beauty, even comedy, in the darkest oppressive days of the late Soviet Union.

Grisha the Scrivener, based on a man she knew during her time of teaching there in Tashkent and Georgia, carries the tale of  “our miserable Russian century” in this heart-breaking and laugh-making tale. An exiled Georgian journalist, he seems to embody the spirit of the samizdat, the underground  self-published literature and news which brave dissidents passed on by hand. They were the Internet of that brutally controlled society.
Ghost Road Press of Denver published it.
Grisha, Gregory Gregorovich Samidze, hangs on to hope through imprisonment, TB, through 26 years by clinging to a fragile private life which can't be touched by the government – occasional decent food, love, family and friends. His life is a reminder of the German song Die Gedanken sind Frei, thoughts are free. (English versions by Pete Seeger, Leonard Cohen and others are on YouTube,)
Baer told Sara Peyton of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “In life the real Grisha, whose name was Guivi, was such a trickster, such a bundle of contradictions, such an odd man and such a dishonest man, that he became my muse. He's not real-to-life anymore than any character is, but when he died I just couldn't let him die in my imagination. I read and reread the last letters he wrote to me in desperation during the civil war but I couldn't do anything to help him and that always stayed with me. So I gave him a longer life.”

Baer appropriately introduced Grisha the Scrivener at the September 2009 Sonoma County Book Festival, of which she has been a major supporter.
A graduate of Stanford University in English Lit, she has long been passionate about pomegranates; her Floreant Press in 2006 published Pomegranate Roads:  A Soviet Botanist's Exile from Eden, by Dr. Gregory Levin, a botanist who trekked across Central Asia and the Trans-Caucasus in search of rare, endangered and mysterious wild pomegranates for more than 40 years,. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, he was exiled from his own hidden Eden and his collection of 1,117 pomegranates.
Floreant, at http://www.floreantpress.com/index.htm also has published memoirs and collections of memorable writing by California women.
A tireless traveler, Baer also has taught in India and recently celebrated a milestone birthday in Paris.

Have cleaver, will travel

Obsessive author Julie Powell, whose blog about a year of cooking  Julia Child's recipes became a popular movie, has a new obsession - butchery - and a new book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession.
Women of a certain age loved the film Julie and Julia for the sparkling performances by Meryl Streep as Julia, Jane Lynch as her sister and Stanley Tucci as Julia's appreciative husband.  We worried about demure Amy Adams, working so hard as Julie. And there was the nostalgia for the post-war days when Julia started cooking (my English companion gasped "oh, real butter!") and the '60s when we started cooking from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
There were some murmurs of sympathy at the time for her husband, Eric, who was portrayed as just a little miffed at all the attention he wasn't getting from his cooking/blogging wife. Reactions to the new book are less polite.  Critics are calling it a bloodbath, boring, clumsy, self-obsessed, embarrassing.  Okay, the briefest possible synopsis:  Success, infidelity, butchering, divorce, tell all in too much detail.  TMI du jour.
Dare we hope this signals an end to the dear diary confessional memoir by people with nothing much to say?
My review of the movie:  http://lakeconews.com/content/view/10164/42/

Bordering on madness

Thriller writer T. Jefferson Parker (at left) , a Southern California native, focuses on the gun suppliers on our border with Mexico for his new novel, Iron River. Los Angeles Times reporter Tim Rutten reviews it in the January 6 LAT books features.

And in today's San Diego Union,

Mater Dei student slain in Mexico

Teen gunned down in car near home

(If I hadn't sworn never to use the phrase “ripped from the headlines” this would be an appropriate place for it.)
Rutten writes: “Parker has said elsewhere that, because of its lax gun laws and indifference to their consequences south of the border, he considers the United States 'complicit' in Mexico's current agonies. 'Iron River' makes that point without a moment's descent into the didactic. This is gripping literary entertainment with a point.”

Mexican gun laws may also be partly responsible. The 1917 Constitution guarantees the right of Mexican citizens to own guns but subsequent amendments make it next to impossible for the average person - therefore, smuggling thrives.

The late author Gary Jennings (Aztec, and much more) once wrote to me in response to a fan letter that he had smuggled a rifle in for a farmer neighbor who wanted to shoot wolves and other predators which were killing his sheep.

No doubt I'll have more to say once I've read the book. Mexico, and my friends there from several years as an ex-pat, are never far from my heart and mind.