Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Wanderlusting's Blurty:

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Monday, May 25th, 2009
4:08 pm	The Mountain So my father died today. Every day fathers die and the nebulas take scant note of yet another. Life pops in and out of existence at every moment (pun intended). POOF. This one such life was conceived one month before the Stock Market Crash and came into the Bronx smack dab during the Great Depression. It was a world, he would tell later, that seemed perfectly natural to him since he knew no other. There, in the streets of New York, he found many hours of joy and exhilaration in his youth despite the depravation. Here also, through the passions of his parents, he would learn of that the world was also a place of great economic and social injustice. My dad grew up with the giant rallies in the ‘30s: some Communist, some labor, but all intended to further the universal democratic rights of all beings on this planet. He was a veteran of these rallies by the age of seven, marching with his father’s compatriots who would soon be off with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting alongside the Spanish freedom fighters during their grisly Civil War—it's why anyone who gazes at Picasso's Guernica can’t help be moved for all push backs at fascism and tyranny anywhere it exists. I’ll always remember the Depression tales he told. They are of course funny now. How he was entrusted with a quarter to buy his family eggs, milk and bread and the quarter fell into the sewer. His mother went with him to the local Bronx police station and had them remove the manhole cover and go down to recover it. It’s impossible sitting in the luxury of this New Depression to realize how panic-stricken and relieved he must have been. There is a whole section of his life I don’t know much about. I knew he joined the Marines at the age of 16 (yes, you could join that early then) and I suppose school at the time must not have been his thing. He must have bounced around for a number of years “finding oneself” as teenagers of more recent generations are apt to do. He eventually, must have “gotten his act together” and enrolled in college in upstate New York. Somehow he managed to get his bachelor degree in three years. He met my mother, a Brooklyn girl, away from the city and her family for the first time. I can see why my mother fell in love with my Dad. In the 1950s, the two great tumultuous issues of the time was the terrifying Right Wing clamp down on the Left or anything they perceived as Communist-inspired and the nascent Civil Rights movement that was only then beginning to find its globalized voice. My mother shared that commitment to a creating a just world and the two of them became swept up in that era and each other. My mother got a job in Miami teaching inner city children while my father worked with early civil rights organizations. In 1955, he took my mother and her parents to some Everglades backwater black church to hear the fiery, impassioned oration of 25-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver a sermon. I can’t begin to imagine what the sight of my grandparents, two white European Jews, sitting in a black church must have been, but I would give away all my entire art collection to have been there and experience that day with my future family. My parents moved back to New York and lived a boho life in Greenwich Village with their scooter and artsy/political friends. It must have been a magical time. After my mom died, I got to read a number of letters he wrote to her. Amazing love notes to this amazing woman…with prose that I’ve never been able to duplicate. Reading the New York letters made me realize my parents as people, as lovers, as young souls whose future was endless and filled with countless roads ribboning to all horizons. The deal was that if they had children, my Mom got to name the girls and he got to name the boys. And they had sons. Three. He gave me the biblical name. Joshua. Back in the day before every sensitive soap opera character was named “Josh”, it was only meant as the successor to Moses and the one who would lead the hapless Israelites (40 years in the desert! C’mon already! The Sinai ain’t that big!) into Jerusalem. To nail the point, he also saddled me with Maccabee as a middle name. I don’t know if he ever got the warrior he tried to imbue me with. There was Darrow (after Clarence) Paine (after Thomas) and Lincoln Debs (after Eugene!!!! I still CAN’T BELIEVE Linc got a security clearance let alone rise to Lt. Colonel rank in the US Army!). My Dad wanted to make sure we all had an inferiority complex to have to live up to such luminaries of distinction. Boy, what a different world it became when JFK was elected. My Dad came to Washington to do his part to originating the Civil Rights Commission. When JFK was assassinated, LBJ was determined to do something that JFK couldn’t -- If there was ever anyone who believed in the promise of the Great Society, it was my Dad. Those years in Washington were exciting and wildly impassioned times for him. My Dad followed Sargent Shriver in the newly formed Job Corps, a program that was created to assist disadvantaged youths find meaningful occupations . This would become his meaningful PREoccupation for the rest of his time in DC. He poured his heart and soul into this organization and it helped hundreds of thousands of kids over the years. I could wax forever about what my Dad did for his country, but of course, he was my Dad. He did the things many a Dad did. He taught me to ride a bike and drive a car. He took me on long hikes through the forest and rivers of my Virginia and he allowed me to have an adventurous Huck Finn childhood. He led our Passover seders that had almost no religion and all politics. My brothers and I toured the poverty-stricken hollers of white Appalachia and the projects of black, segregated DC to see an America that to our suburban eyes was shocking and inconceivable. It’s because of him I NEVER take my advantages for granted and am so grateful for every opportunity that has come my way. When I got kicked out of my high school in my junior year for creating an underground newspaper, it was my Dad who got in touch with the ACLU. He stood by me the entire time and was probably even happier than I was when we finally had our day in court and won. My Dad taught me to empathize with others but despise Richard Nixon. His greatest gift was that he taught me how to use the library. I will never ever surpass the number of books that he’s read (he has a platinum library card from every place he ever lived). I know it started in the New York Public Library and he still was checking out books as late as Friday from his Podunk, Florida branch. This year, I finally got to teach one of his favorite books, CHRIST IN CONCRETE by Pietro DiDonato, to my students. He had me read that so early in my life and he kept coming back to it. The day-to-day horrors and life celebrations of those Italian steelworkers in the NY skyscrapers was written so lushly and poetically, the words could be eaten and drank right off the page. He loved reading my student’s blurtys on the book and I’m thrilled that they now own a piece of my Dad. Thanks for taking me to so many of those marches in the ‘60s. The Poor People's Campaign of '68. Moratorium Day. Thanks for all the books and the music and the films. Thanks for teaching me those haunting Americana songs of a long bygone era and seeing Pete Seeger play live. Thank you for taking me to see KING KONG when I was eight, and fuck you for telling me it was true. Thank you for allowing me tremendous amount of freedom to explore the world…bike ride with a friend for three separate summers a thousand miles through the back roads of the eastern states to Canada. Three days after I graduated from high school, I was going to head on my first cross country car trip. I remember being nervous telling him of this plan, but my mother told me that he was secretly happy that I showed such initiative and independence. My parents went through their own personal tumult with their marriage and when they divorced when I was 21, it was quite a blow. It was certainly the end of something. Couple that with the beginning of the Reagan years, and you can see what a complete downward spiral this was for everyone. I never knew, nor I guess wanted to delve too much into my parents lives’ and what led to the split. My Dad moved out to his own apartment in DC and I got a job teaching in Brooklyn…a job that I know made both of them proud. When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, I returned, along with my brothers, to our old house, and took care of her for the last year and a half of her life. It was a very emotionally grueling time. Everyone did their part and my Dad wanted us to know he was there for anything we needed…My mother confided to Katie at the time that “Stan was a better ex-husband than a husband.” Maybe. But I knew there was a time. There were those New York letters. My Dad was there with us all, in that March hospital room, when she passed. He later married a woman in the Labor Department. Lynda. Different from my mom but boy did she fiercely love my Dad. She had the tolerance to put up with his rantings at the various outrages and slings and arrows of every political inanity that has come down the pike. The only time I ever feared for my Dad was on September 11 when we couldn’t get in touch with Lincoln. It was a nerve-wracking few hours as we waited for any news that came out of the Pentagon. I was terrified thinking what was going on in his mind during that horrific day. Later in the day, when a spokesperson came on at the Pentagon briefing room to give an update of the situation, citing the extraordinary heroism of Lincoln’s rescues, all of us were swamped with phone calls and I knew three thousand miles away my father broke in gratitude that his son was safe, but the tragedy that had befallen the whole country. He had been there before. And we all know those dark years that followed. No one followed every nuance and grim march into the oblivion closer than him. Every phone call or visit was to hear the litany of stupidity about what had happened to his country. The nadir of course was the ’04 elections when the country actually sided with the fools. Let me go immediately to the thrill and joy of ’08. Of course it was and is something so extraordinary, it is still somewhat unbelievable. I am happy beyond all words that my father got to see that election. We spoke that night and I felt the love of, for once, a fairy tale ending. My Dad, always slim and in shape his entire life prided himself on his athleticism. He played tennis for four hours a day, five days a week. Although he gave up cigarettes 25 years ago, they finally caught up with him in January. Shocked to suddenly be laid low, he was unable to believe that he wasn’t going to be able to get back on the courts. Those last months were excruciating to witness because mortality was staring him in the face and, like all of us, he had to make peace with the inevitable. My Mother had to do it. I will too. So will you. I must say that these are the rules of life that I detest the most and probably need plenty more hours talking to a shrink to figure out my revolt…but I’m not holding my breath. I last talked with him on Friday. His voice was raspy, a shadow of its formal vitality. He used his waning energy to talk about his love of his sons AND deride the feckless Congressional Democrats for not backing Obama on Gitmo. So my father died today. I sit in a cafe in Kalispell, Montana just south of Glacier National Park. Came here for a weekend to get away from it all. I have my rented Mustang convertible, soaked in mud baths and hot springs surrounded by snow-capped mountains, danced at a cowboy honky tonk and was about to go out kayaking on a completely clear river. In that conversation, he told me he was happy I showed the intiative to go. He, of course, came with me. But the spotty cell phone reception...My brother finally got through...Bad news in Florida. So I learned my father died today. But Amnesty International lives. Barack Obama is working right now in the Oval Office. Dostoevsky survives in the libraries and is still constantly pulled from the shelves and there will be always someone who will smile when reaching the final line of the book he provided for me to love: “Hurrah for Karamazov!” And the struggle, eternal and maybe never-to-be-fully won, for social justice and both human dignity and decency remains. Stanley Leibner couldn’t take that with him although he tried his damnedest. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
5:27 pm	GRADUATION: Hail and Farewell! A man is always a story-teller; he lives surrounded by his own stories as well as those of others. Through them he sees everything that happens to him; and he tries to live his life as if he were fictionalizing it. --from NAUSEA, by Jean-Paul Sartre Time to wrap it all up. And what a sojourn it's been. I took time off to figure a lot of things out. Sometimes you have to do that in life. Put everything on pause. Cambodia seemed as good a place as any and I've definitely learned a lot from the experience. This is the first time in years and years I've been away from students for so long. Writing Wanderlusting has helped me find a new way of communicating with you yes, but with myself as well. I'm usually loathe to tell anything personal about myself, yet as I wrote Wanderlusting, I found myself talking more about my past and experiences then in all the years I've been teaching put together. As I talked about the things that are important to me: political activism, social justice, teaching, art and love, it helped me examine my life in total and try to reconfigure things. Often times this year i felt like a senior who just graduated high school...what now? Sometimes when you wander (sans lust) you don't know where you are going to end up and the journey and destination is a wonderful mystery. (Throw the "lust" in and God knows where you'll end up!) I have never written autobiographically in any of my writing or scripts--only thematically autobiographically. "Trust the art and not the artist," Pablo Picasso once advised. With Wanderlusting I have started to reshape and reform the world around me. Right now, my Dad is asleep up in the hotel room in Dalat, Vietnam. He shocked me by wanting to come over and visit me. Maybe because he's getting old and might never make a big trip again, he wanted the experience of traveling how I travel and see the world through my eyes. No tour buses or fancy hotels. Everything at ground level with people, smells, food, life smacking you in the face. When I picked him up in a tuk tuk at Phnom Penh International, I almost couldn't believe I was seeing my father in Cambodia. One thing I realize is that I never really talk about what happens to me when I travel and the nitty gritty of my adventures. I almost always say, "Yeah, it was a good trip." "Did some cool things." "Yeah it was pretty fun." I don't know why...maybe because some of the experiences are so personal that it is hard to communicate what these events have meant to me and my inarticulateness would sabotage my memory. It's better to say, "I wish you could have been there" and leave it at that. In my Philosophy class I always tell the students you can ask me any question on the last day of class and I'll try to respond to it honestly. I do enjoy explaining why I believe (or not) the things I do (or don't). That's fun. Our lives are defined by what we have experienced and how we processed those events. That's why EVERY SINGLE PERSON experiences/processes differently and one of the hardest things in the world to keep in mind is you have to give everyone else the same slack that you expect. Difficult. Very very difficult. I've tried to ponder over the milestones that I've lived through. In my Philosophy class at the end the students write the 50 things they will miss when they die. I have a lot of memories that now I've had the time to process. Some are: Being head-over-heels giddy flying in a four-seat plane over the ga-ga Plain of Nazca in Peru looking at those amazing, humongous five hundred year old drawings in the sun-baked clay. How the fuck did they do that?!?! Seeing thousands of Wilderbeasts up close stampeding through the wide-open Masai Mara in Tanzania. Exploring the favelas (slums) of Rio de Jenairo all day and then going samba dancing at a Copacabana club all night. After dragging myself through three showerless days running around Cairo and the Gaza pyramids, finally getting to the old city of Jerusalem in Israel to happily spray off the layered, caked-on dust of antiquity in a real shower. Hiking for three days in through China's Leaping Tiger Gorge looking down at the spectacular valley below and surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Being on the beach under a full moon in Nicaragua, watching thousands upon thousands of sea turtle hatchlings poke their head up through the sand all around, before beginning their mad scamper for survival to the ocean. Bike riding almost 700 miles when I was 15 with my friend from DC, seeing Niagara Falls for the first time, and then not being allowed in to Canada because the border patrol thought we were too young. My friend cursed out the lady and that ASSURED us of being banned from Canada for life. Having my senses and eyes dazzled in the phenomenal Ttsukiji Fish Market in Japan where tens of thousands of crazy, exotic and mammoth fish are bought and sold at auction each day. Running through Eastern Europe one year after the Berlin Wall came down and ending up in Prague blown away by its Kafka haunted austerity...at the time, they only served Pilsner Urquel beer and potato dumplings. One was good. Riding on the deck of a gigantic ferry from Italy to Greece for 14 long hour, but finishing two French novels, MADAME BOVARY and NAUSEA, that still "teach" me today. Talking to and shaking world renowned anthropologist Louis S. B. Leakey's hand when I was eight (i thought i'd be a paleontologist or an anthropologist like every boy). Freezing in March in Istanbul, but still compelled to go out into the night to look at the Blue Mosque as it blared its powerful Call to Prayer. Getting up at 4 am to ride a horse to the side of the volcano Mt. Bromo in Java before climbing it to watch the sunrise from its summit. Definitely worth the hassle. Celebrating my 21st birthday in Paris at Sacré Coeur church with my heart filled with love for someone. Being told by the House Mother of the University of Washington's chapter of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority (where I worked for a semester) that she didn't think I "had Kappa spirit" before firing me. She was right. Making tortellini from scratch with director Francis Ford Coppola (director of THE GODFATHER films and APOCALYPSE NOW) and his wife at his home in Napa the night of the Academy Awards and then winning the Oscar pool and a $500 bottle of Coppola wine. Spending two nights in jail in Rhode Island. Having the entire ancient city of Pompeii to myself one November night and running through all the lava-encrusted rooms laughing how crazy it was that I was here with no one else. Mulling with a seal on the rocks of an island in the Galapagos about nature, evolution and destiny. Interviewing the Ramones a few times (the single most world-wide, beloved, band of all-time). Traveling through the slums of Soweto before ending up at Nelson Mandella's house. Interviewing the great Beat author (and friend of Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg), heroin junkie, "murderer", philosopher William S. Burroughs. Laughing hysterically seeing Mt. Rushmore for the first time. I swear. You will too. Seeing Nicole Kidman naked before Tom Cruise (she was in an off-Broadway play where she appeared in the buff). Found myself riding in the back seat of a limo next to Senator Ted Kennedy. Caught in a subway car during a New York City blackout and had to walk through the dark, dank tunnel and climb out to the surface. Good horror film stuff. Drove Ray Bradbury, the greatest living science fiction writer, home in my car. Had him sign my dash board of my Ford to prove he was in it. Swam naked at the nude beach in Hawaii and then participated in the crazy, bare-ass hippie drum circle at sunset. Getting front row seats to a Rolling Stones concert. True satisfaction. Watched the Millennium get rung in at Sydney Harbor with mad fireworks blazing over the breathtaking Opera House. Met a dear teacher friend in London on a coincidental ten-hour flight lay-over and hit up as many art galleries as we could (See William Blake's paintings first!!!) and then gorged ourselves in the Indian district on the best curry I have ever had. Had to go to Monte Carlo for six weeks on a movie writing assignment but finally got bored of all the gourmet French food and ten thousand topless babes that I came home a week early to teach at Carson. THAT'S how much I wanted to be with you! Had no idea how to ski, but my friends in ninth grade took me to the top of Stowe Mountain in Vermont (the highest slope on the east coast) and by the time I got to the bottom (three hours later) I skied like a pro. Hitchhiked a thousand miles from Wisconsin to Montreal enduring one of the loneliest nights of my life on a barren Quebec highway waiting for a ride. Wandering repulsed, but fascinated, through the Auschwitz concentration camp outside Krakow, Poland but all the time realizing that if my Grandfather was there with me, he'd be anything but "fascinated". Spent a glorious Dia de los Muertos in a dusty town in inner Mexico where the zocalo was alive with a parade of skeletons and the cemeteries alive with flowers, tequila and loving, dedicated families. Interviewed Sting (never liked the pompous bloke). When I return to Virginia, if I see my old high school Journalism teacher, she STILL gives me shit. Also happy to still be in contact and dine with two favorite professors, one from undergrad and one from grad school. Still learning from my former teacher dudes. Hiked the Inca Trail and the four day exhaustion fest finally paid off with sunrise at Machu Picchu. Made it to all 50 states (Guam and Puerto Rico too!). Played in a college punk rock band called, um, Food Scrotum. Yep. I'm sure you have all our big hits on your iPod. Took a Carson group to New York a month and a half after 9/11 to the still smoldering rubble of the World Trade Towers. One of the most powerful group moments I've ever been a part of. Drove cross the United States almost 20 times. Interviewed Bruce Springsteen. Enchanted by the dazzling Night Market in Zanzibar where street vendors grilled any animal in God's creation on their bar-b-que. Camped for two weeks all throughout Alaska (the most gorgeous state of all by far!!!!) and ate the best salmon in my life. Was trying my hand at directing at 16-years-old and wanted to film the exciting climax at The Lincoln Memorial in D.C. Had fake guns storming the place, but the Secret Service didn't think it was funny. We were taken in our own separate screaming police cars through red lights to SS headquarters for interrogation. The bastards confiscated my film! A brilliant masterpiece forever lost to the fascist forces! Hung out on a stunning Thai island watching lots of westerners get incredibly f'd up...i didn't partake in that one. I did like the ocean and the food. Got to teach a class to excited, confounded Muslim school children in rural Indonesia. They didn't know what hit them. Watched Barack Obama with a completely enraptured audience give his thrilling 2004 address at the Democratic Convention in Boston (that speech launched him on his presidential bid). P.S. Was in the bathroom and in the next urinal over from me was Jerry Springer. I refrained from looking down and saying, "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!" I'm sure he gets that all the time. Leaping 15,000 feet out an airplane and giggling my fool head off hurtling to earth, mesmerized by the stunning New Zealand landscape coming up to quickly greet me. Both a profound Buddhist (the world and you are indeed actually one) and Physical experience (a body will fall at the rate of 32 feet per second per second). After viewing the magnificent glory that is the Taj Mahal, having to step over hundreds of homeless beggars to get to the train station. Winding my way through a mile long protest march in Lisbon, Portugal where everyone was demanding the head of George Bush. Didn't want to tell anyone I was American. Going through block after block, mile after mile, of utter hopeless devastation in New Orleans three weeks after Hurricane Katrina, but returning to participate in their Mardi Gras to show support for the most unique, fascinating city in America. Was very moved by a Hindu cremation ceremony in Bali. Being "attacked" by a band of wild prostitutes in a bar in Nairobi, Kenya; funny at first but also realizing how incredibly sad their situation was and what they had to do to feed themselves and their children. When I was very young, going to the Congressional House Judiciary hearings on the Impeachment of Richard Nixon and later as an adult sitting in the Senate Gallery as they argued the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Staring at "Guernica", Picasso's masterpiece, for an hour in Madrid. Under the Milky Way, feeling lonely and isolated after riding a camel into the Sahara Desert and getting lost that night gazing over the vast sand dunes that stretched for an eternity. Watching a full on, dramatic, glorious, definitely crazy, Catholic Easter Holy Week procession in Seville, Spain. My parents taking me to the Moratorium Day March on Washington, D.C. to stop the Vietnam War where I, so young, was swallowed by almost a million protesters. Hitchhiking a ride with a willing helicopter pilot. After buying some extraordinary, highly expressionistic, amazingly detailed and alive Voodoo Flags (and many other electrifying handiworks) on the island of Haiti for about $200, I was swarmed by a hungry and desperate mob who would rather eat than talk art appreciation. I was very lucky to get out of there unscathed except for my conscience. Taking my high school students from the Bronx AND LA to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, perhaps my favorite museum ever. Jumping off 30 feet high cliffs into a river. Happy when I came to the surface. Spending the day on the Great Wall of China and then going to a Beijing nightclub to see Easterners and Westerners hook up. One frigid February day venturing onto the frozen Potomac River with my skateboard and wind/skatesurfing down it for miles and miles using myself as a sail. Watching a Mama Gorilla give birth at the National Zoo at 3am. Started an underground newspaper at my high school...got kicked out for it...and got the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to take the case on First Amendment Constitution grounds. We won. Leibner v. Sharbaugh and the Arlington County School Board. You now have the right to have your own paper on a public high school campus with a few caveats... Playing on moving railroad cars in Pennsylvania grabbing onto them and riding them before jumping off. Hung out, drank and talked philosophy late into the night with my ex-students in New York, Boston, Berlin and South Africa. Watched a volcano erupt on Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua. All the books, the movies, the theater, the dance, the paintings, the music, the food. Art. Art. Art. Ad nauseum. Talking and sharing with you. All these memories tend to blur together in the brain like a cuisinart set on high. And then throw in that blender all the REALLY personal stuff...the loves, the losses, the loves...you have made yourself quite a Recollection Smoothie. Almost too much for one brain to handle and make sense of. But sweeties, I am really trying hard to do so. Make it all fit. And learn. As the other half of that Philosophy class assignment, you are to write down 50 things you wish to accomplish in your life. I still have so many. Talk to me in Ten Years. Here is what I DEFINITELY WILL DO by then! Hold me to it! See the Northern Lights. Visit Russia, the Philippines and Samoa. Vote for a Presidential Candidate who wins. Buy me a stunningly beautiful house and fill it with all my art. (Come over some time!) Learn how to ride a motorcycle (yeeeesh. i think we ALL better learn how to ride a motorcycle!). Direct a film from my own screenplay. Get to Antarctica and have some time by myself to think. Learn Spanish (finally!). And who knows...maybe even have a kid. Go figure. (Perhaps I can adopt one of you as a "starter project" since you can't mess up too badly with a 16 or 17-year-old!). Looking back over everything, I recall Philip K. Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, the first book you read when you enter your junior year. What is most powerful to me about the book is that it makes you question what exactly it means to be human...you rarely think about that in day-to--day life. The most chilling scene is where the replicant Kris pulls the legs off a living spider trying to get a rise out of her human friend. Some people rave about the film version, BLADE RUNNER. I think the book is a million times better because of its complexity, but one sequence in the film haunts me. After killing every other android, Rick Deckard watches his final assassination assignment Batty die: EXT. THE SECOND ROOF (LATER) Deckard is looking at Batty. Batty is partly crumpled, frozen in an unnatural posi- tion as though he had been writhing and stopped mid- writhe. He looks back at Deckard with eyes full of life and intensity. They stare at each other for a long time in silence, communicating something with their eyes... without expression. Finally Batty breaks the silence. BATTY I've seen things... (long pause) seen things you little people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium... I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. (pause) all those moments... they'll be gone. Batty holds Deckard's eyes like a hypnotist. CUT TO: EXT. THE SECOND ROOF (A LITTLE LATER) Batty is crumpled in a different position. It's light- er now and Batty's eyes are staring into infinity... almost lifelessly. A pigeon flutters down and perches on his shoulder. Batty doesn't stir. Deckard is watching motionless. The pigeon flies off. Batty doesn't move. Alive or dead? CUT TO: EXT. THE SECOND ROOF - DAWN A more distant perspective. Deckard is a small figure looking down at the dead body of Batty. DECKARD (V.O.) I watched him die all night. It was a long, slow thing and he fought it all the way. He never whimpered and he never quit. He took all the time he had... as though he loved life very much... every second of it... even the pain. Then he was dead. Rick Deckard realizes that this android, filled with millions of extraordinary experiences that has shaped who he is, helplessly and heartbreakingly slip into oblivion. We have such a pitifully short time on this planet so it DOES matter what we do with our time, our energy, our hearts. Yes, all those memories and experiences will be forever lost. The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, ends his most famous poem like this: Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. So my darlings, LIVE BIG! But more importantly, live the life that provides YOU the most JOY! That comes in different shapes and forms for all of us. I am going to take a break from Wanderlusting for a while. You can always leave a message here or just write me at leibdawg@hotmail.com if you wanna say hi. Tomorrow I'm going to walk with my Dad around this beautiful French colonial city in the Vietnamese hills. We'll drink some of the best coffee in the world (eat-shit-and-die Starbucks!) and really REALLY reflect on how grateful I am to my family, my friends, my fellow teachers at Carson...and you. In the very first Wanderlusting Blurty i said this isn't goodbye; it's a see ya later. I'd really REALLY like that. Maybe someday in the not-too-distant-future, I'll see you in an Athens cafe, a Chicago race track, an Argentinian rain forest, a hostel in Singapore, a Thai restaurant in Iceland....I hope so. Until then, play safe but play. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 14th, 2008
4:26 pm	SIGN MY CARSON 2008 YEARBOOK HERE! There’s THREE entries here... Beneath this is my MESSAGE FOR THE SENIORS and then there’s the MESSAGE FOR THE JUNIORS. Sorry Sophomores and Freshman. My only message for you is continue to look both ways crossing the street. Because I am a million miles away and far too cheap to actually buy a Yearbook, I would REALLY appreciate it if you all were to write a Blurty Yearbook Message to me. Seniors, this will be your LAST Blurty for the rest of your Lives! Whoot! Whoot! Yaaaaaaaaayyy!!!! As I check the Blurties, I’ll mark them as private so they’ll disappear from public view. Remember though, your day is my night. Pretty scary existential, huh? (Hmmmmm. Maybe I’ll use that as my new pick up line....”Yeah baby, how’d you like to make my night day?”...or “my day night” if she’s a Goth Chick.) If you can include a picture of yourself, that would be fantastic. I would really appreciate if the Four of you who are reading this Wanderlusting Blurty would tell the others to post here if they want! (Comment on this)
Friday, June 13th, 2008
4:06 pm	A MESSAGE TO THE SENIORS I know you think I’m gonna lecture you again. Forget it. You’re too smart for that. You’re seniors. I can’t tell you nuthin’. So instead, let me just say what a pleasure it was to get to know you and let me part of your lives. It was a true joy to have you in my English, Philosophy and Film classes. You were trusted with mature art and sophisticated works (Stephanie Guevarra termed many of them pornographic. Hahaha. BTW, never say “pornographic”, always use the term “sophisticated”...it makes the OTHER person look uneducated and a rube). You took those films and books and made yourself intellectually stronger. You know I like brains. I appreciate your brains. Brains are very sexy. Your brains are, um, quite sophisticated. It pleases me to know that you will use your immeasurable talents to go off into the world and challenge yourselves even further. The people you meet in college will be impressed by you and they’ll want to know what “private” school you went to to think the way you do. You’re Carson, baby. Keep the flame flickering. When you come back to visit, tell us about the world you discovered out there and tell us how the world is reacting to you. As you know from all the past alumni who have come back to talk about their college experiences, everyone has to live it for themselves. I hope your first year is full of powerful new thoughts and insights. Okay. I lied. Here’s my ONLY piece of advice: DON’T GET DISCOURAGED. Inevitably, you will have some bumpy times and you will feel over your head. That’s just YOU crashing into some crazy new dimension that you are not quite used to. You need to acclimate to your new environment. Take a breath. If you mess up, it ain’t the proverbial end of the world. More likely, you will devise a new strategy to get it right the next time. You ALL know that even though you leave Carson, you ALWAYS have us to rely on. If you need any help, advice or a kick-in-the-ass, write Ms. North, Dr. Schuetze-Coburn, Ms. Bottlik, Ms. (Needs-to-go-to-anger-management-counseling) Koletty, Mr. Aquino, Ms. Herrera, Ms. Harger, Mr. Mertens, Ms. Weir, Mr. Perman, Mr. Soltysik, Ms. Harris, Mr. Burger or ANY of your other wise teachers. One of the things that Carson should have taught you is that we all help each other. We all learn from each other. ASA is both a concept AND a practice. We LIKE you! We WANT to see you succeed. Your success and ultimate happiness makes us thrilled! Good karma begets good karma. A generosity of spirit and practical assistance never goes unrewarded; we all benefit from it and it should permeate throughout ASA. Hopefully, one wishing-on-a-star day, it will permeate throughout the whole world. Now Seniors, get outta here before you make me cry. Go out there and try not to have too much sophisticated fun. . (12 Comments |Comment on this)
3:40 pm	A MESSAGE TO THE JUNIORS My you have grown. Let me measure you. Look how strong your writing is now. Look how much you look forward to challenging books filled with ideas and creative ways to express them. Your sense of aesthetics has grown by leaps and bounds and your ability to perceive the world as a series of subjective truths that need to be taken apart, examined, analyzed, understood, reprocessed and put back together will help you throughout your entire life. Maybe your parents don’t even recognize you anymore when you try to explain how you think now...or they wouldn’t fully understand if you if you tried to explain the changes you’ve experienced. You junior year is when you metamorphosize and become almost adult. I love that about you. You’re ready. During Senior year and you will take all you knowledge and talents and push yourself even harder (okay, until AP’s are over...who am i kidding!) and see what else you are capable of. It will be a year of college application drama, frustration, anticipation and finally relief. This time next year, well, look at those lazy-ass seniors now and that will be you! Done! Obviously I am sorry I wasn’t able to complete this journey with you, but I have monitored your progress from afar (remember, I have cable TV and I’m CIA surveillance equipped) and you know that I am proud of what you have done in a bumpy circumstance. First off, I have to thank my brilliant colleague Dr. Schuetze-Coburn. I won’t go into all the ways he has made your Junior AP experience what it is...you already know. But also ask anyone of the Carson alumni who have gone to college, and they’ll say how eternally grateful they are to have been put through the rigors you all have. On another note, I have to make a personal comment about something that I’ve always found pretty amusing. It is generally perceived that my class is the artsy, free-flow class and Dr. S-C’s is the analytical precision class. I don’t know how many of you know this, but you will find no stronger appreciator of music, dance, theater and art than he. As an accomplished amateur photographer, Dr. S-C has an extremely keen eye for aesthetics. He puts all his skill in the meticulous detail he uses to examine all your Deconstructions for “completeness” in their vision, harmony and execution. And then there’s Ms. Bottlik. What more can I say about my beloved Ms. Bottlik except Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. And Thank you a thousand more times. Ms. Bottlik had the unenviable position of having to step into this role with very short notice, giving up another class in order to do so. And because she did, you all got to read two of the most memorable books of your lives. You were graced with her charm, her humor, her intellectual perspective and an extraordinary passion for life, adventure and art. Ms. Bottlik is the whole package. And beautifully wrapped. As you frantically rush to complete your final journals, you college essays and personal deconstructions, we all hope that you keep expanding your mind and hearts into the world BEYOND school. This year, if NOTHING else, should have taught you that you and the outside existence do a symbiotic dance that starts when you are born and is (maybe?) over when you die. But enjoy the moves, learn more steps and pay attention to the beat. Next year, YOU are the role models for EVERYONE in ASA. I think Carson is blessed with some extraordinary teachers. Many of you will be fortunate enough to have Ms. North for an encore performance. No teacher cares more about your achievements and your potential than she. Yeah sure she’s snarky, but don’t think you don’t deserve it. Sharp, funny, inquisitive, prodding...El Norte is your biggest cheerleader and will assist you in (almost) anything to see that you get to that goal you yourself may not be aware of yet. That’s it. Have a good time this summer, stay on top of your summer reading assignment, sign my goddamned Blurty Yearbook page and grow even more, my intellectual Paul Bunyans. When it comes to what we want you to be able to accomplish in terms of your eventual life’s satisfaction, you can’t be tall enough. Have a great summer and I hope you all get morbidly obese in knowledge, love and experience. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
1:37 am	Bumpin' on the Cambodian 405 Gas $4.50 a gallon? Not my problem! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Raukoc1Lo9A (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 9th, 2008
6:35 am	MOVING ON: Exchanging the Old for the New I know you seniors have given up already. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. Okay. I got it. In less than two weeks you'll all be in your seats sweating in your dopey polyester gowns barely listening to boring-ass speakers (EXCEPT of course for Jan!!!), have more pictures taken of you than Brittany getting out of a limo--and then after all the pomp and circumstance, you will be proclaimed: Graduated. You will stare at that piece of paper and say, "Now what?" Well buddy boys, your new life beckons. You are about to begin a very cool spelunking expedition into one dark, mutha-f'n cave of intense mystery. Some suggestions on what to bring: a pocket lighter (believe me, no torch is big enough, so even a little light will help), good climbing shoes, your favorite book, Ramen noodles, phone numbers of old friends when you hit a dank dead end (but make sure you have new numbers in your cell as well), a stupid-funny DVD and a photograph of yourself from 2008 to remember yourself as you go deeper and deeper into the mystery. Oh yeah...pack a sense of humor and PERSPECTIVE when things get really rough and scary. There I was, 17-years-old, three days after my graduation, in a car with my friends Paul and Emer (yeah, an odd girl's name--it's Celtic) pointed west on Route 50 in Arlington, Virginia not far from the Atlantic Ocean. Having never in my life gone in the direction of the setting sun I was bursting with desire to see what was out there. I had read a couple of books and seen a couple of films and, naturally thinking I was much smarter than I really was, gathered the fortitude (arrogance?) to say goodbye to my old life and enter the cave. My parents, God bless 'em, knew they couldn't stop me and didn't try. I knew I wanted to enjoy freedom and adventure and new experiences before I was a "proper" adult. In the final line of HUCK FINN, our hero remarks, "But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before." So Paul, Emer and I lit out. We let this wonderful country yawn before us on its fabulous blue highways. In Nashville we hit up The Grand Old Opry; in Memphis, the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated. On the great plains of Texas is the enigmatic folk art Cadillac Ranch...in Arizona you see the Grand Canyon for the first time and you just giggle in stooopid amazement. Rolling into the blinding lights of Las Vegas at two in the morning dazzled me (and I swear, to this day, I thank God that I didn't marry Emer there like we were planning on a lark. If you knew Emer, you'd definitely understand!). Then it was onto I-10 through downtown LA and straight on to Santa Monica where we parked, walked on the sand and stared at the fabled Pacific Ocean for like four hours. In LA. we ended up staying at this very cheap place on Sunset Blvd that seemed to have a lot of "character". It turned out to be a prostitute motel (hello Holden Caulfield!). Of course we thought the whole scene was hilarious. Took in a Tim Curry concert at the Roxy, went hiking in the Hollywood Hills, got lost in Boyle Heights, got REALLY lost in Mexico, Emer played tennis in a court next to Warren Beatty at the Beverly Hills Hotel (no sleazy whore house for her any more!) and we slept in the car somewhere off the 5 Freeway. We then drove up to San Francisco, ran around there, and then decided to visit some old friends who had moved to Sacramento. In my junior high in Virginia, I went to school with the kids of a NASA Apollo astronaut. It was kinda cool having these "celebrity" kids in the school and they were super nice too. When we got to Sacramento, we found out from their Mom that the kids had all went with their dad hiking in Yosemite. So, off we went to find them. Now for the rest of this story, you gotta remember this was a very different time than it is now. VERY DIFFERENT. Our friend, Ellen S. was working as a camp ranger in Yosemite and we found her easy enough. She knew the area where her Dad and the other three kids were camping so we went hiking down the trails to surprise them (remember this was the ancient days before cell phones!). A day later, it was a very happy reunion in this gorgeous valley where they set up camp. For the rest of that day. Paul, Emer and I caught up with our friends and later, we all threw off our clothes and went skinny dipping in a very cold, crystal clear lake. Later, their father who had let all of us alone all day to catch up and swim (boy, THAT wouldda been embarrassin' if he was there!), joined us for a campfire dinner. The stars in Yosemite were breathtaking and the entire Milky Way was on glorious display above us. Amazingly enough, this astronaut, who had circled the Earth and the Moon, took out a joint and began smoking it. It was funny because his kids didn't even bat an eye. The astronaut then proceeded to talk about the sky, the stars, his experience in space, and his thoughts on the universe and all of us listened in rapt attention. It truly was extraordinary being alive that night experiencing it all. I learned that different ways of living, of seeing, of being were all possible. We are NOT stuck on any particular path or any particular way of experiencing what it is to be human. We live. We change. We mutate. We take in. We give out. What we were yesterday is not destined to be who we become tomorrow. It was pure bliss running around like Aborigines in Yosemite for a few more days. Since I had to prepare to go to college, the time came for me to return home to my "old life". But I knew this trip across country had changed me forever. We bombed eastward across interstates. (Actually we went too fast--Paul crashed the car into the back of a Buick in Ohio and your humble narrator smashed his head into the windshield. I survived but it was an important lesson to be MORE cautious and that I wasn't completely invincible.) Later that August, I said goodbye to my old high school friends who were going off to strange new futures of their own. Now you have that diploma, don't even look back on it. That's the past. Keep looking ahead. Perhaps keep in mind the wonderful realization found in Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'” Seniors, enjoy the countdown, have a groovy Awards Night, enjoy your celebrity for the next few days. Then go on down into that cave and don't be afraid. You will be changed by what you discover and you will be a much more interesting human being because of it. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
12:07 am	WHY CAMBODIA? The toughest Blurty yet. Gonna take a deep breath here. Since I first came here at the beginning of March, I knew I'd have to write about this but I've put it off and put it off. I felt I still needed to learn more about what happened here. Talk to some more people. Try not to be such an outsider in just rattling off statistics and superficial thumbnail explanations. Why did I come to Cambodia? Out of all the countries in the world, why here? For the last two weeks, I've been travelling with an old college friend who came to visit. After running around Vietnam and the extraordinary Mekong Delta, we came back to Cambodia. I feel comfortable enough to now play "host" and I must say it was a complex experience viewing Cambodia through a newcomer's eyes. Of course she was ga-ga about the kooky traffic, the delicious food, the ornate wats, the smiles of the children...but other places in the world have those things as well in their own particular way. Cambodia though is special. It has been through something that few of us could ever imagine. When looking around and you see some of the poverty here, you feel sorrow. As I've said before, most of us are lucky never to have to experience anything like that. We are far luckier to never experience true "I-can't-fucking-believe-this-is-really-happening!" TERROR. No, no, no, no...this can't possibly be real! WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?!?! HOW DID THE WORLD GET THIS MAD?!?! AM I REALLY GOING TO DIE?!? LIKE THIS?!? Anyone who comes to Cambodia must pay their respects to the ghosts. Cambodia is a country haunted by ghosts. Some ghosts are awe-inspring...Yesterday, I wandered with my friend through the grand wonder of Angkor Wat. Your brain thinks, "What extraordinary genius culture created this marvel?" If Angkor Wat reflects a certain heaven-on-earth quality, then the Khmer Rouge was certainly the embodiment of hell. Unimaginable, grotesque, miserable, pitiless hell. Like trying to describe the history and rationale for the Vietnam War, a Blurty doesn't do it justice. Know that as I quickly go through the falling dominoes of events. In 1941, the French installed 19-year-old Prince Norodom Sihanouk on the Cambodian throne, on the assumption that he would prove suitably pliable. This turned out to be a major miscalculation as the years after 1945 were strife-torn, with the waning of French colonial power and their troubles holding onto their influence in Vietnam and Laos. Cambodian independence was eventually proclaimed in 1953. King Sihanouk (an epic movie character himself--king, patron of peasant education and even a film director!), would become sucked into the swirl of events that we know as the Vietnam War. Even though Cambodia was neutral in the conflict, in 1969 the United States, under the direction of President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, began the illegal secret bombing of the country. Because they supected communist base camps in Cambodia, the U.S. dropped more bombs on Cambodia then on Japan during World War II, killing thousands of civilians. King Sihanouk was overthrown in a military coup in March 1970 and his successor General Lon Nol moved closer to the Americans. Sihanouk forged an alliance with the "Khmer Rouge" (which in French means "Red Khmer"--as in Communists) and the small guerrilla force swelled to an army of thousands in a matter of weeks. Savage fighting soon engulfed the entire country, with Phnom Penh falling to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975. What happens next is one of the most insane, bizarre and vicious regimes in world history. POL POT, Khmer Rouge Dictator Pol Pot, a General educated in Paris, sought to turn Cambodia into a peasant-dominated agrarian cooperative country. It was to be a Utopia of the Common Man. Currency was abolished, postal services were halted, schools eliminated, the population became a work force of slave laborers and the country was almost entirely cut off from the outside world. Particularly targeted were anyone considered educated because they were termed "elitists". This could mean if you had a book, could speak well, knew facts or even just wore glasses. It would be a death sentence. Under the Khmer Rouge, even the calendar was abolished: The KR proclaimed it was "Year Zero". Almost everyone who lived in the city was put away or killed. In four years, the Khmer Rouge would wipe out an entire generation of scholars, teachers and scientists. To say over two million were killed, doesn't do the word "killed" justice. Most were brutalized in the most agonizing, dehumanizing away before they were mercifully put to death. When you go to the Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz or Buchenwald in Poland and Germany, you will see "Death Factories" on a grand scale. Systematic, methodical, efficient. It had to be to handle those numbers. As horrifying as that must have been, the Khmer Rouge definitely perfected genocide to an extraordinary degree. Death became fetishized. Relished. The more painful, the better. And it gets worse. Many of the executioners were children. The Khmer Rouge had children become "re-educated." They were used as guards and killers. They were used to torture prisoners. They were used to stab babies. They were used to dispose of the thousands and thousands of corpses. In Phnom Penh you will visit two sacred places. The first is the famous "Killing Fields". There, you will see a stupa (temple) filled with 8,000 skulls that seem to reach the sky. The ones at eye level stare back at you hollow and inert. You can see the punctures in the bone where they were hit and wounded. You walk around the pits of the mass graves with pieces of bone and cloth still sticking out, but you find yourself staring off at the peaceful bucolic fields where water buffalos diligently toil under the hot sun. There are still many bodies under those marshes and fields. The harder place to tour is Tuol Sleng. It looks like a high school because it was. The Khmer Rouge turned it into a prison known as Security Prison 21 (S-21). Over 17,000 people passed through here, men, women and children to face horrifying interogations and ghastly, sadistic deaths. Only seven people survived the four years of its existence. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge were meticulous in keeping records of their barbarism. Each prisoner who passed through S-21 was photographed before being tortured and then, terribly enough, right before they were about to be killed. For many, these pictures are the ONLY photographs they ever had taken of them in their entire life. Tuol Sleng, now a genocide museum, has these poor soul's photos on display from floor to ceiling. Many of the high school classrooms feature simply the frame of a metal bed. This is where people were brought, tied up, electrocuted, stabbed and brutalized for days on end. The blank walls with just the bedframe is shocking in its effect: You can literally HEAR the shrieks of the tortured. The Khmer Rouge bludgeoned to death to avoid wasting precious bullets. Amazingly enough, the world did nothing. The Khmer Rouge even had a representative at the UN! Because they were skirmishing with the Vietnamese on their border, it was the Vietnamese who invaded Cambodia in 1978, forcing the Khmer Rouge to flee to the relative sanctuary of the jungles along the Thai border. From there, they conducted a guerrilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government throughout the late 1970s and '80s. In mid-1993, UN-administered elections led to a new constitution and the reinstatement of Norodom Sihanouk as king. The Khmer Rouge boycotted the elections, rejected peace talks and continued to buy large quantities of arms from the Cambodian military leadership. (Sadly and tellingly enough, they even ransacked some of the remaining statues at Angkor Wat, their country's highest achievement, to buy weapons.) In the months following the election, a government-sponsored amnesty secured the first defections from Khmer ranks, with more defections occurring from 1994 when the Khmer Rouge was finally outlawed by the Cambodian government. Pol Pot himself was never charged with a single war crime. His peaceful death in April 1998 was greeted with fury; he never had to face the Cambodian people for what he perpetrated. It is only right now, in 2008, some of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge are facing an International Genocide Tribunal. Finally. Thirty years too late. There isn't ANYONE in Cambodia who hasn't lost someone. Everywhere you go, you will hear the stories...a father...a mother...brother, sister, child...taken away...never seen again. Gone. No goodbyes. Only the nightmarish images the mind conjures of what they went through in their final hours. Sometimes older people will tell you of thier harrowing accounts of escape...of eating bugs...drinking urine..feigning death among hundreds of rotting corpses in order to survive. And then there are the children. The children executioners are middle age now--dealing with what they did--what they were told to do--what they thought was right back then....how psychologically damaged are these people now? How do you look at the survivors of Pol Pot's dystopia? The remnants of the Khmer Rouge's monstrosity still lives on like this: a desperately poor nation, a government that is still corrupt and dictatorial and an education system that is a joke--where NOT ONE SINGLE COLLEGE DEGREE is up to any international standard and would be recognized. It will be years and years before Cambodia will be able to stand independently on its own without massive international assistance. To learn more about what happened, there are certainly plenty of books. A gripping historical account is WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER by Washington Post reporter Elizabeth Becker. Then there's a short autobiography Vann Nath called A CAMBODIAN PRISON PORTRAIT. He was an artist that the Khmer Rouge had paint pictures and ultimately was one of the seven to walk out of S-21. He later painted the graphic pictures of torture that are featured in the museum and posted here. There are also two excellent, but wildly different films on the subject. The first is THE KILLING FIELDS which is a true account of what one person experienced under Pol Pot in his frantic attempt to survive those years. The second is extremely interesting in an artistic response way...the brilliant performance artist Spalding Gray recalls his experiences in Cambodia and S.E. Asia while filming THE KILLING FIELDS. Gray sits behind a desk and talks. That's the whole film. It's called SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA and you will not only be delightfully/grimly entertained, but learn how simple storytelling can become raised to an art form. This has been my longest blurty to date. There is so much to cover and its hard to convey my feelings about living in a land that has borne witness to the worst moments of the last century. Of course we all know that replicas of these events can be found in many other places in the world...Darfur, China, Gaza, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Russia and the U.S. in the Guantánamo detention camp and other secret rendition centers scattered throughout the world. Keep ALL Human Rights in Your Mind ALWAYS! Amnesty International, the two time Nobel Peace Prize winning organization, cautioned that the biggest threat to the future of human rights is the absence of a shared vision and collective leadership to prevent abuses and "call out" those who are guilty of such crimes and practices. Get involved in college. Become globally aware. When you travel, learn the POLITICS of the places you visit. You will come to understand history and sociology in a much deeper, more meaningful manner. I LOVE the fact we have the Peace Coalition and the Human Rights Clubs as active participants on the Carson campus. My friend and I bid goodbye to the temples of Angkor and we tuk tuked to the airport together. After sharing a final Tiger Beer, I saw her onto her big jet back to America. I boarded my small Siem Reap Airlines propeller plane back to Phnom Penh. It was only me, two French guys and the stewardess. I looked out the window. The peaceful rice fields and houses rolled by. I imagine if I were flying over Cambodia a thousand years ago, it would look pretty similar to the wetlands I was seeing now. This country which has been my adopted home for the past few months has taught me much about survival and renewal. I turn from those rice fields that were not too long ago filled with blood and crushed bodies. I glance up at the stewardess. She is probably only 25-years-old, born after the Khmer Rouge time. Her parents obviously survived as well, and then had her. I'm sure this airline position is much better than any work her parents ever did. They must be so proud of her. How much have they told her about those days? What does she think about her future? And those of her kids? She smiles. It makes me ponder all the "Great Questions of Life." I will take her smile, and the smiles of all the children I've seen here, with me for the rest of my life. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
3:15 pm	TWO MAJOR SHOUT OUTS! I just wanted to take note of one major passing. Bo Diddley died yesterday at age 79. Now, other than Chuck Berry, there was no more important figure in rock 'n roll than Bo. I could go on and on about how influential his music has been to every single person who picked up a guitar, but i also think his adoption of various personas, his humor, his machismo, his playfulness and his great passion shaped the landscape of what it means to be an American performer. No one has matched his bravado since. Here is the LA Times appreciation...there will be thousands upon thousands more. I hope he gets a King's send off. I really REALLY loved Bo. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-diddley3-2008jun03,0,5485671.story Also, this was ALSO on the front page of the LA Times. This one is for our very own Andrew Johnson. He is off to Grinnell College with his posse in the fall. CONGRATULATIONS, smart guy. He proudly joins two former ASA alumni (Bruno Rodriguez and Kristine Pineda) both Posse scholarship recepients at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. May we place many more! Well done, A.J!!!!! http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-grinnell3-2008jun03,0,2789600,full.story May you be as successful and influential as the great Bo Diddley! (Comment on this)
Friday, May 30th, 2008
7:59 am	BEAUTY TIPS FROM LEIBS ON YOUTUBE Okay ladies-- You know I have your back. Thought you'd like this on Youtube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkaZK8N98_8 Have fun putting on the ritz! Love ya! --Leibs (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
1:36 pm	PROM NIGHT PAST AND PRESENT: Mr. Leibner Sits You Down to Give You "The Talk" Ahhhhhh prom night. It is one night I always look forward to. You all look so gorgeous and "old" in comparison to your usual sloppy selves (believe me, i ain't throwing stones). But with your cameras flashing and your top hats and your slinky glittery tight gowns and that hair that cost a fortune in time and money, it truly makes me smile and regret I will not be at this one in 2008. It is, in fact, the first gala I have missed in all my time at Carson (not counting a time when I showed up in a state where I was advised I shouldn't go in--and gratefully, they were right) in excluding me. Maybe I like going to your prom so much because I missed my prom. I should say, I didn't go to mine. I didn't have a girlfriend at the time and so on that night, I ended up with my friend Paul (who obviously also didn't go) at a Drive-In Movie. So while others were twirling gleefully on the floor waiting to crown the King and Queen, I was in a VW Rabbit watching SATAN'S CHEERLEADERS. Now with a film with one of the greatest names of all-time, you would think it would have been really great, but it was really cornball. In fact, you can find it in the camp section of the video stores. Anyway, even back then the movie was really stupid. The only enjoyment came whenever a cheerleader would lose her top, in a few cars over inhabited by drunk Marines, some Jarhead would scream out, "NIPPLES!" Then we went home. Prom night for Leibner was over. Romantic relationships were always awkward in the beginning. You're a lot better off than you were in junior high school when your body and brain were going beserk and your parents wondering when exactly you became possessed by Satan or one of his hoochie cheerleaders. In the short story "Hips" in Sandra Cisneros's fabulous collection HOUSE ON MANGO STREET, she writes about those blossoming thingees: "One you day wake up and they are there. Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the keys in the ignition. Ready to take you where?" I can not think of a better metaphor for either gender to understand our burgeoning (explosive?) sexuality. Right after puberty, it's hard to work out the brakes and the gas pedal of our vehicle. How much weight should be applied to each? And when? It's trying to be non-chalant over the harsh sound of gears grinding as your car lurches forward, stalls out, embarrasses you even as you try to remain cool with your arm calmly resting out the window, shades cocked, "Yeah I know what's up, baby." Even thought it is never really publicaly discussed, your sexuality will lead you unexpected places and determine some momentous events in your life. You will only realize this years later when analysis of these events leads you to a deeper understanding of your inner workings. Sex education is thought to be: this goes in here like this and to prevent a baby from coming out here, cover that thing there...etc. For those of you who got "The Talk" from your parents, you got probably the clinical essentials. It's rare in our cultures to discuss emotions, desires, pleasure, power, jealousy and control as part of the sex education process. All of these forces will pull at you throughout your life--sometimes YOU will be the object of these forces and other times it will be you who will utilize these "things" on others. Sex and love will play ferocious and wonderful tricks with you. There is not a single person who has ever lived who can definitively explain How and Why each works and their relationship to each other. No human has come through their love and sex experiences unaffected. Unlike other animals, we manifest our sexuality not only in our biology--but how we carry ourselves, what we think, behave, act out, dream and express ourselves in terms of the art we create. It colors how we see the world and other humans equally being enacted upon by their own sexuality. To continue with Cisneros's metaphor of the car, I'll throw out some advice. Because you are inevitably going to drive your car at some point, know that "accidents" are bound to happen. When they do, if the other person's at fault, it's a harsh but necessary lesson to learn but you'll be more cautious next time knowing to watch out for that sort of driver. If it's your fault, well, make whatever amends you can and learn to be a better driver. You don't want people fearing to be on the road with you. (Unfortunately, more than once, my license has been suspended.) No one gets through life with their heart unscarred. Many of you have had heartbreaks already (those who haven't, well, just you wait!) It helps to realize that every person you meet has at least one great heartbreak in their past that has shaped who they are now. Hopefully you will have many successes in love where your partner(s) teach you something and you mutually learn from each other how to give and receive pleasure (not the only, but certainly one of the sweetest parts about a romantic relationship). Invariably, you will gain confidence in this areas as you go through life. If you have many experiences, try as much as you can to drive conscientiously and never get in a situation where you are taken advantage of by someone else or that you are the one insensitive and exploitive of another's vulnerability. Never be deliberately cruel to someone who offers their heart to you. Boy, there were a lot of things about love and life I didn't know on that prom night all those years ago. I've always been impressed at the relationship of the sexes in general at Carson. There seems to be a lot of true friendships, compassion, honesty and trust between you guys. I think you are much further ahead in that department than the boys and girls of my senior class, so you have a great head start on me. You can imagine what a delight it was to discover that girls did indeed have nipples in real life. You all know I hope you have a really wonderful time at your prom. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 24th, 2008
3:35 am	VELVET RAPTURE Music. What really explains our extraordinary affinity towards it? Why does it have the power it does to affect us psychologically and alter our perceptions of time and the moment we’re in? Brain researchers are having a field day discovering the intricacies of our natural passion for notes and harmony and rhythm and a beat. Just think how important music has been in your life in shaping, comforting and defining who you are. Your CD and iPod collections are invaluable to you. Losing them would be like losing a part of yourself. Isn’t great to find someone who shares the same musical tastes as you? Someone else who is a “fan” in the sense that the same music that speaks to you so completely also touches them as well? Surely there must be a connection between you two as well. One of my favorite lessons in the Philosophy Class is when we play music from around the world to examine what images pop up in our mind and what we ASSOCIATE with when we hear a certain instrument or musical structure. It’s amazing what pictures the brain naturally conjures up upon hearing a certain mathematical structure of notes and how cultures are built around such aural iconography. All this blah blah blah introduction just to talk about one band. It’s a lazy Saturday here before I take off again to Vietnam to meet an old college friend who is travelling all the way over here to visit and I will run her around the Mekong Delta and back into Cambodia. I couldn’t think of a topic to write on when I thought, fuck it, i’ll write about the music I’m listening to right now: The Velvet Underground. Some of you may have heard of them already. Lou Reed, a Brooklyn poet who received shock treatments as a youth, formed a band in New York City in the mid-1960’s. This band would sell almost no records in their four year history, but long after their demise, many call them one of the most influential American bands in rock and roll history. Lou Reed, classical violinist John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison (who later would be a professor of mathematics at University of Texas) and Maureen Tucker (yes, a woman drummer way back then) created music so different and distinct from the bubbly, “groovy”, light music of that era. Their vision was dark, melancholy and filled with weighty literary images coupled with music at its most urgent and stirring. Look at the opening lines to their 1967 masterpiece “Heroin”: I don’t know just where I’m going But I’m gonna try for the kingdom if I can ‘Cause it make me feel like I’m a man When I put a spike into my vein Then I tell you things aren’t quite the same When I’m rushing on my run And I feel just like Jesus’ son And I guess that I just don’t know And I guess that I just don’t know. We’re not in Beach Boys’ America anymore. Throughout the entire song, Lou Reed adopts the persona of a suicidal heroin junkie seeking redemption. The music itself imitates the heroin experience as it rushes to its painful, feedback-filled climax before crashing suddenly back into its heartbreakingly failure set to the pretty guitar strums of "And I guess that I just don't know"...You’re led on a 7 1/2 minute epic journey played with only TWO CHORDS throughout the entire song. Listen... http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=G8VIXnTL6O0 ("Heroin" in a five minute acoustic take) http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=G8VIXnTL6O0 (The entire shattering original song) They only put out four official records: The Velvet Underground and Nico (with the famous Andy Warhol Banana cover), White Light/White Heat, The Velvet Underground and Loaded, but each recording is startling in its range of emotion and drama. Their songs have been covered by thousands of bands, famous and not. Particular favorites of mine include, “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Stephanie Says,” “What Goes On,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “Rock ‘n Roll”, "Sister Ray", “Lisa Says” and “I Found a Reason”. Perhaps their most famous besides “Heroin” is “Sweet Jane” which concludes with the Velvet's most heart-felt, struggle-to-reach-the light lines: Some people, they like to go out dancing And other peoples, they have to work, just watch me now... And there's even some evil mothers Well they're gonna tell you that everything is just dirt Y'know that, women never really faint And that villains always blink their eyes And that children are the only ones who blush And that life is just to die But anyone who ever had a heart They wouldn't turn around and break it And anyone who ever played a part Wouldn't turn around and hate it Sweet jane... Sweet sweet jane "Sweet Jane" live... http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=G8VIXnTL6O0 Now I know we can all go on and on about the music that has meant the most to us. Over the course of time, many of the musical love affairs dissipate, drift away, we find someone new, we move on...but this old flame is one I come back to time and time again. I’m yacking away about The Velvet Underground because they spoke to me as a teenager and here, all these years later, in wacked-out, dusty Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I am STILL finding relevance in their words and sound. If I could make the world as pure And strange as what I see I’d put you all in the mirror I put in front of me That I put in front of me Linger on, your pale blue eyes. Thanks Lou. Roll Over Beethoven, tell Tschaikovsky the news. P.S. "Walk on the Wild Side" http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=V4ditCW2TiA&feature=related (this is kinda fun/silly) Lou Reed playing with Luciano Pavarotti singing "Perfect Day" http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=kXgbN81zNG8&feature=related (it ain't TRAINSPOTTING!) A full concert of Lou Reed in April on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90226727 (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 19th, 2008
9:00 am	Charles Darwin and a Contemplation on the Why's of Life: WHAT IS TO BE DONE? Albert Einstein famously said, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Einstein's concept of God was not the finger wagging “Do this/Don’t do that” scold from on high, but a God of the entire universe in its mathematical and physical complete perfection and order. This God has absolutely nothing to do with human morality, but a universe as a whole that “works” in harmony and beauty. Ultimately, Einstein thought that if we could just find out all the “information that has gone into its creation,” then everything could be understood. The universe “makes sense”. It is not just random, “crazy”, happenstance. Charles Darwin, the sadly misunderstood British botanist, said that EVERYTHING LIVING in the world has been a progression of mutation and adaptation. The “universe” dictates to a species what it needs to survive, and the species biologically needs to respond in order to do so. Also, completely morality free in its emphasis on DNA (a concept Darwin didn’t know at the time, but what he’s really talking about). I spent the last weekend at the beach in Sihanoukville, a small town on the Gulf of Thailand. Having got my $10 beach cabana complete with deck, fan and mosquito net, I set out to chill on the beach with my usual accoutrements: Grilled Snapper, baked potato, salad, a beer and soda water. While hanging on the beach, the usual cast of characters appeared. Gave money to the double amputee crawling in the sand (there are an amazing number of landmine victims all over Cambodia), got a splendid one hour foot massage for $6 and turned down offers for marijuana and girls. As I was finishing my meal, a five-year-old boy came up to me and pointed at the remnants of my plate. I didn’t have much but I offered it to him. The boy proceeded to scarf down the remaining potato and salad and wolfed down the fish head (I know, I know, you Filipinos! A delicacy! But I’m not there yet!). After he drank the rest of my soda water, the boy then moved on. Watching him disappear into the night, I wondered what would anyone in America think if their small child was out scrounging for food like that anywhere he could? Where is his family? What condition are they in? I’ve seen enough poverty in my travels to last a lifetime, but even that is just a microscopic drop in the bucket of the scope of the desperation throughout the world. Why? How come this kid is born to scrape for food daily for his survival and other children won’t play with the toys they got a few months ago for Christmas because they’re bored. A few years ago I was on the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. The Galapagos, of course, were made famous by aforementioned Charles Darwin. What makes a trip there so stimulating and different is that because the islands have been preserved and the human element has been removed, the creatures there don’t look at humans as predators and you can get as close as you like to any of the birds, seals or those waaaaaaaaaaaay cool marine iguanas. They don’t care. The naturalist my small group was with came upon a nest of Albatross chicks. We were able to look at three little birds waiting for their Mom or Dad to arrive with food. We didn’t wait long. An albatross landed within moments with a beak full of yummy regurgitated food. The albatross opened wide and the three chicks began immediately to dive in their hungrily. Two chicks were engorging themselves while the smaller third kept trying to get some food. The other two chicks kept pecking at their “brother” and prevented him from eating. Soon, there was no more food left. Two chicks were quite well fed. The third got nothing. That one would die. Some woman in the group wanted to help that third chick but that is completely forbidden here. No interference with nature. The woman began to cry as we all stared at the helpless third chick knowing it will soon cruelly starve to death. It was a tough, nasty wakeup call that this is what life in nature is: The 17th Century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that all life was “nasty, brutísh and short.” He took a very dim view of human nature and molded his philosophy accordingly not giving humans much credit for compassion and virtue. (For those of you who read Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD, the prevailing theme is that humans will ultimately do whatever they can to survive, no matter how horrible.) In the early 20th Century, you might have learned in your history classes about a concept called “Social Darwinism” that preached that the world also operated this way and that everything in human society was also “the survival of the fittest”. It was certainly a convenient philosophy that allowed the status quo to continue meaning that those at the top of the human food chain were determined by nature to be there and those at the bottom were just suffering because of the “natural order of nature.” Human evolution dictates winners and losers. Among the many wonderful organizations I’ve come in contact with during my stay here in Cambodia, there is none more amazing than the Urban Poor Women’s Development program. This is a grass roots group of only seven Khmer individuals led by one dynamic woman named Sina. Their mission is to organize women, men and youth from the slum and squatter communities alerting them to issues of human rights, domestic abuse, health and AIDS awareness, housing rights and access to opportunities to better their lives through education. Right now, they are trying to secure a grant from the European Union that I’m assisting on. It is a small collective with huge goals and they’ve already done incredible good work with so little resources. The problems they face are daunting…I would like to take you all to the dump here so you can watch human existence at its most primordial. Here, when the trucks come to deposit the garbage, men, women and children fight for spots to sort through the dreck for anything useable or salvageable for re-sale…mostly bottles and cans. It’s almost like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. You would think you were witnessing the end of the world. Sina and her colleagues work in a dingy office near the dump. They each take turns spending the night here to protect the place from robbery and vandalism. They work from early morning until supper on the many projects they are operating. Without their assistance, many people’s lives would be much more miserable. There is a belief that if you can raise the education level of women throughout the world, you can make a huge dent in global poverty. As of now, many women have to stay at home to take care of kids or work all day and have no time to better their lives. They remain in this position of destitution forever and it dooms their children as well. The UPWD seeks to provide funds to get the women’s children some rice so they don’t have to work all day in the dump and can instead take English classes and learn a higher-level trade. Using a comprehensive rights-based approach and community organizing methods, their proposed actions will encourage poor women to use their voices to make political interventions at the family, local, and national level. Watch how the dominoes fall: Women’s lack of voice, power and respect in their families and communities is the result of a vicious circle of cultural bias that prevents education, income generation, and knowledge of self-care practices for women, which in turn reinforces the position of women as uneducated, weak, dependent, and susceptible to violence. Lack of formal education leads to disproportionately high rates of illiteracy for poor women which in turn leads to reduced capacity to earn income or to access government and other available resources for personal, health, shelter or food needs. The inability to earn adequate income and to buy adequate food leads to untreated health problems for women and their families which in turn discourages school participation for children as well as any other activity not directly related to subsistence. Social and political inactivity and disempowerment leads to indifference by local and state government officials, including denial of services in cases of criminal assault, rape, and domestic violence. By changing these women’s options, the hope is to change the options of their children…hopefully they’ll be slightly better off than their parents, and in turn, their children will be better off than them. Look at what’s happening at Carson High. Our hope is that by going to college, graduating and getting careers that you find engaging and rewarding, you will be able to live in a manner that many of your parents weren’t able to because of lack of opportunities. If you ever choose to have kids, they will be in an entirely different situation as well because of the knowledge you’ve gleaned. When staring at the dump, the question of fairness stares back at you. Why? Why them? Why that kid? In Philosophy class, we try to broach that question that has vexed many for centuries. In the Dostoyevsky novel THE BROTHERS’ KARAMAZOV, the passionate intellectual Ivan Karamazov demands from his religious brother Alyosha, “Why do children suffer? What is the purpose? If God exists, I can understand why he might allow adults to suffer—maybe it makes them better people ultimately, but what good does the deliberate cruelty towards children do who know nothing of these higher matters? Why should they know only pain and suffering when it can't teach them anything? The world just seems monsterous and vicious in its ability to inflict misery on the weakest, most helpless amongst us.” Alyosha, unfortunately, can’t speak for God. For those who believe in a “moral” and “just” God, the question is troubling. Any one of us thinking and rationale people would gladly trade places with our little children who suffer. It’s pretty convenient to think “God has a plan” if we are the beneficiaries of “good luck”. We say God “blesses” our lives and for whatever reason “dooms” others. That gets us off the hook. Is everything then just a matter of “luck” of where and when we are born and to what circumstances? Is the whole universe simply a roll of the dice? Random lucky winners and random unlucky losers? It’s almost easier and less upsetting to conceive of an Einsteinian God who has no say in human affairs and is indifferent to everything except the mathematical and physical workings of the universe. Organizations like UPWD sweat and toil and sacrifice to make the world better. They pick up the slack of passive governments, other human beings (and God?). Or maybe they are acting as God's representatives on earth. Again, a question for Philosophy Class. I can DEFINITELY SAY that I am always so proud when any of you become political and actively work to make things better through whatever method--The Peace Coalition, The Human Rights Club, The Black Student Union…and today, there are plenty of Carson students now out in the world seeking social justice. Richelle Penalba, a recent Berkeley graduate, is interning for an organization called Teach For America which places young, energetic and creative teachers in underserved rural and urban schools that are desperate to raise the level for kids everywhere and give them a fighting chance. The inequalities of education in this country are glaring and lots and lots of hearts and brains are going to have to go into the schools to make the changes necessary for success. I had the wonderful good fortune of hooking up with Leila Evangelista in Swaziland, South Africa a few years ago when she was doing her UCLA junior-year-abroad working on Health and AIDS policy there. Right now, she is still working here in LA in the education department of Relief International for almost no money but tremendous satisfaction. She is pursuing a life focused on international development for struggling countries. After graduating from Santa Cruz, Stephanie David came to Hawaii to work with poor school children, learning their indigenous culture and making them proud of who they are. In the school she teaches at now, the children get a cultural curriculum, meaning, instead of five senses, Hawaiians have six. She writes, "The last being 'na`au'...literally our inside, guts, feelings, intuition. Little thing but huge difference on how they carry themselves and understand the world...to have six senses." Janet Ajao just received a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to go to Nigeria to work in Health Policy there for six months. Bright, energetic and determined to do meaningful work in the country of her origin. And the most killer smile on this planet. Recent USC Masters graduate Vai (Queenie) is down in the college center assisting Ms. Koletty, committing her life to ensure other kids get the chance she got. Let her lecture you on "life"! Crystal Lopez at San Francisco State actively works with Hispanic organizations to end their disenfranchisement in terms of education, vocation and opportunity in America. Passionate in her convictions, Crystal seeks a more just system for all minorities and has committed her life to fighting (revolutionizing?) the system. And since we're on this subject, I would be remiss not to bring up the name of Audrey Castellanos, a true pioneer at Carson High who did so much to raise the political and social consciousness of the campus. As the founder of the Peace Coalition, Audrey honed her skills in Dr. S-C's debate club and found her voice by protesting the Iraqi invasion, military recruitment on campus and later at UC-Santa Cruz continued her community action by supporting a local bus strike, environmental action and involving herself in the Bay Area pro-choice movement. The two year aniversary of her tragic death only makes the loss harder knowing how much good work she would have done in that span. She is still missed terribly, but she touched the lives of hundreds of people. Any of us would be lucky to have such a legacy. These are just a few of our alumni actively doing things to change the world. Please let me know names of others! Also, if any of you plan to do work that contributes to a better planet I’m always interested because there are SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS to contribute. Probably most importantly, follow the Hippocratic Oath of doctors as you go through life: “Do No Harm.” The next day on the beach, a group of kids approached me. They were selling trinkets and asked if I wanted to buy something. A few of them were able to make intricate bracelets with someone’s name beaded on it. Okay…well I thought I’d name a few of my friends with small daughters who would like one. I gave the girls’ names to the kids, dividing up the work so I could give each some money. The kids started quickly on their task braiding the bracelets. A boy then came up to me. “What about me?” I thought of another friend’s daughter’s name. Off he went to work. And then, a whole other group of kids spotted the swarm around me. They came dashing over, descending on me, their hands waving their bracelet making material. “What about me?” “You bought from her, what about me?” “Please, let me have one.” “You give them business, how about buying a bracelet from me?” I look into all the eyes of these anxious kids. Now there are too many of them. One tugs on my arm and asks the greatest cosmic and frailest human question possible: “What about me?” And you’re forced to say the only thing that makes sense, “Sorry, you're too late. Bad luck.” (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 16th, 2008
5:49 am	FOUR NEW MOVIES IN LA YOU MIGHT WANNA CHECK OUT Hey y'all-- One of the BIG draw backs about being away from America is that I miss lots of films, music, art and theater that make up a big part of my life. You can't get everything you want in life *alas!* but if I was there, I would have a thrilling weekend in the dark. Never minded going to the movies by myself, but if any of you all wanna come along, you're more than welcome! I robbed these reviews from Friday's LA TIMES. There are so many good movies beging made, but they sure as hell ain't playing at Del Amo or Rolling Hills. Hope some of you can make the effort to track these down. I can't be there to see them but if anyone of you go to any of these films, write back and tell me how they are! ROMAN DE GARE A witty yet ultimately poignant guessing game in which nobody is quite what he or she seems -- is arguably Claude Lelouch's best film. Its title translates as "airport novel," and Lelouch pays homage to the lure of those high adventures by mining one of his typically extravagant plots for both humor and pathos, raising provocative questions of identity and of the confusion of truth and fiction. After a flurry of foreshadowing moments, the film settles on an attractive but insecure Paris hairdresser (Audrey Dana), who is ditched at 3 a.m. at a gas station by the fiancé she is taking to meet her parents. Along comes a middle-aged man (Dominique Pinon), whom she persuades to pose as her fiancé to save face with her family. But who is he? He could be a runaway high school teacher with a wife and two children back in Paris. Or he could be a serial killer. The second half of the film focuses on Pinon and the timelessly elegant Fanny Ardant, never better as a bestselling novelist whose encounter with Pinon sets off a series of dizzying developments, culminating in a breathtaking turn of the tables that explodes like a string of firecrackers. The freshness and originality that flow through "Roman de Gare" now burst into full flower, revealing the director's depth and perception. "Roman de Gare." In French with English subtitles. MPAA rating: R for brief language and sexual references. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes. In selected theaters. WATER LILIES A tender look at coming of age Céline Sciamma's absorbing, quietly illuminating "Water Lilies" depicts a group of high school students in the throes of coming of age with seriousness and sensitivity. The skinny Marie (Pauline Acquart) and her plump best friend, Anne (Louise Blachère), are frequent spectators of the graceful performances of the synchronized swimming team, and soon Marie becomes enthralled by its captain, Floriane (Adèle Haenel), a dark blond beauty who exudes self-confidence and a limitless sense of entitlement. Floriane is an enigma in which her surprising vulnerability vies with her reflexive manipulativeness. She is pursued by François (Warren Jacquin), the handsomest member of the boys' swimming team, who is viewed with longing by Anne. The three girls are naturally experiencing the full onslaught of sexuality and emotions, and it is Sciamma's particular gift in her assured debut film that she evokes how ill-defined these feelings are. The elegant "Water Lilies" is not about answers but about discovery of self and of others in all its pain and pleasure. "Water Lilies." Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 21 minutes. In French with English subtitles. Exclusively at the Nuart through Thursday, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 281-8223. INDESTRUCTIBLE More video diary than polished documentary, the gripping "Indestructible" is still one of the most intimate and challenging real-life depictions you'll likely see about degenerative illness. The film also rewards in perspective-altering ways, the kind sure to make viewers grateful they can perform basic tasks like removing a T-shirt or taking a bath without the Sisyphean effort of the film's courageous writer-director, Ben Byer. Byer, who at 31 was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) -- better known as Lou Gehrig's disease -- turns the cameras on himself as he charts a three-year quest for physical and spiritual healing that took him across the U.S., to Greece, China, Jamaica, Israel and Egypt. En route, the upbeat Midwesterner, a former actor and playwright, interviews such neurologists as "Awakenings" author Oliver Sacks and YongChao Xia, creator of the intense herbal remedy BuNaoGao, along with ALS sufferers. But it's Byer's bold decision to undergo a controversial fetal-cell transplant that offers the film's most powerful moments. The commitment by an atrophying Byer and his father, Steven, to battle this "Grim Reaper of neurological disease" poignantly underscores the roulette-wheel nature of human suffering. "Indestructible." Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes. In English, Greek, Mandarin, Cantonese and Tibetan with English subtitles. AND THE ONE I THINK LOOKS THE MOST INTRIGUING...! REPRISE Norwegian director Joachim Trier captures youth in all its idealistic glory. For all their emphasis on the youth market, American movies have never done a good job of portraying actual youth. The idea that young equals dumb prevails -- never mind that it's about the only time in life when reading Foucault or sitting through a Tarkovsky double feature is a viable task. What Hollywood tends to ignore is perhaps the central project of late adolescence and early adulthood -- the avid, voracious creation of identity through books, movies, music and cultural hero-worship. Norwegian director Joachim Trier's inspiring first feature "Reprise" joyfully tackles the process of self-creation, as well as the friendships that feed and sustain it. He captures, in a way that's cool and romantic and heady, the moment in life when nothing matters more than ideas, influences and the possibility of shaping one's life into a work of art. "Reprise" is the story of Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner), two friends who finish writing their first novels and mail them off together from the same mailbox. In their shared fantasy, which Trier tells in an artful, narrated fast-forward catapulting fashion, both books get accepted for publication. Low sales and cult authorship follow, along with tragic romances and moody trips to Paris. Then an accidental reunion, a cowritten project that sets off revolutions in faraway countries and draws the ire of religious leaders, a changed world. Of course, none of this happens, at least not in the way Phillip and Erik imagine. Phillip's book gets published and Erik's does not, but it is Erik who survives this particular calamity. Phillip's sudden minor celebrity triggers a psychotic episode and, within six months, their world looks very different from the one they had imagined. "Reprise," whose title is a play, I suppose, on the tendency in youth to play life out in the imagination as it plays itself out at a snail's pace in real life, uses things like possibility and projection into the future in the same way other films experiment with time. Unrealized potential plays a major part in the story, which is both propelled and haunted by what could have been, might have been, should have been, wasn't. Erik and Phillip are part of a larger group of friends whose dependence on one another is equaled only by their competitiveness with one another. Girlfriends also constitute a major threat to their insecure insularity. Erik keeps Lillian (Silje Hagen) at arms length for as long as he can, never involving her in any activity that will also involve his friends. Phillip's girlfriend Kari (Viktoria Winge) is partially blamed for Phillip's breakdown. (The narrator calls the relationship "obsessive," although there's no real evidence on-screen that it is.) The only person Erik truly pines for is his literary hero, the "reclusive author" Sten Egil Dahl. Erik's novel, which he eventually publishes, is called "Prosopopeia," a term from Greek drama that can mean several things: a face, mask or dramatic character; a figure of speech in which an absent or imaginary person is represented as speaking; or the personification of an abstraction. All three definitions apply to Trier's film (it's never clear what Erik's novel is about, except that it deals symbolically -- though perhaps not as symbolically as he would have liked, as evidenced by a disastrous TV appearance -- with madness), but the last definition may apply the most. Erik, Phillip and their friends spend their time and expend their imagination trying to personify abstractions, elusive ideals. It's pointless, perhaps, but they still have time to burn. "Reprise." MPAA rating: R for sexuality and language. Running time: 1 hour and 45 minutes. In limited release. Oh yeah...some movies recently released on DVD you might like: THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (but i wish you'd see it on the BIG screen...will be the first film I show next semester), I'M NOT THERE (The "mythologicial" Bob Dylan Story), THE SAVAGES (Really, really, really liked this brother/sister relationship film about hopes, dreams and a dying father...but maybe more when you're older?) and THE ORPHANGE (a creepy Spanish horror film...watch with your friends late at night). OK...HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND EVERYONE!!! P.S. If any of my gay friends wanna get married, CONGRATULATIONS!!!! (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
7:39 pm	Misc. Thoughts on a Wednesday Spent a very sad day viewing CNN International that has been covering the China earthquake almost non-stop. The images of parents outside the collapsed schools screaming for their kids is heartbreaking. One school had over 900 kids, the other had a thousand. The United States has been amazingly lucky throughout its history of avoiding any catastophe on the scale that other places have endured. About 2,900 people were killed in the World Trade Tower attack. About 1,500 died in Hurricane Katrina. Extremely traumatic incidents in recent American history for sure--but in China, at least 13,000 dead in this quake and in Myanmar's cyclone aftermath, some estimates go as high as 100,000. Don't know what more to say on the subject. Cruising around The New York Times brought these two interesting articles about the brain. If I was teaching there, I would be holding the Brain in my hand going over this with you! Don't Become a Creature of Habit! Brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can encourage a way to innovation. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/business/04unbox.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&emc=eta1&adxnnlx=1210731103-xmIXnSbP4ItGiFovmzZ9QA God in the Brain! Thought this column by David Brooks was also intriguing. It talks about the neuroscience (how the brain works) and its connection to spirituality and religion. It was titled "Neural Buddhists"...since I'm not teaching philosophy this semester, i thought i'd pass it along for consideration. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/opinion/13brooks.html?ex=1211342400&en=f1709d5171f59b95&ei=5070&emc=eta1 SILLY EXPERIENCE OF THE WEEK: Okay. So what could top the Giant Killer Catfish? Met with a sleezeball Indian movie producer (as big as Ganesh but with an enormous gold chain around his neck and hairy chest) and was pitched a story that takes place in the Khmer Rouge times in Cambodia...but with an Indian slant. A beautiful 24-year-old Indian woman comes to help save Angkor Wat from the American bombings in '73, but a few years later when the KR come to power, they take her hostage. Seems an Indian Delta Force is sent to rescue this gal who is being torturerd by the KR. Fine. Typical Dumb-ass action film. But the producer tells me that Indian audiences like a little comedy and wondered if I could throw humor in somewhere perhaps with screw up, "funny" Khmer Rouge guards who keep messing up during the torture sequences and blaming the other. I'm sure it was hysterical at Auschwitz. Honestly it is a seriously deranged business no matter where in the world you are. I'm not even going to tell you about the elaborate Bollywood dancing dream sequence set at Angkor Wat he thought would help add some "spice". What else... "I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art." --Robert Rauschenberg Oh, I see the artist Robert Rauschenberg died at 82. If Andy Warhol was the pop artist of the 20th Century with images that let you fill in the blanks, Rauschenberg was the pop artist with a more intellectual and thought-provoking bent. Constantly innovative, Rauschenberg was a wonderful role model for ANY artist. A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. All became icons of postwar modernism. “I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.” Good luck Juniors on the AP Exam! Use that No. 2 Pencil to make Art! (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 10th, 2008
1:38 am	Misc. Thoughts on a Saturday Lazy Saturday...went on a boat ride down the Mekong River to see an artist's gallery in a village. The artist teaches at the Royal University of Fine Arts here and survived the Khmer Rouge tyranny. One painting started me thinking because I'm standing next to this pot-bellied very short man who is pointing at a man in the painting who is very tall and thin being shackled by the Khmer Rouge. He said, "This is me." Isn’t it fascinating how we depict ourselves, or how we remember ourselves or how we “see” ourselves interacting with the rest of the world? There is this concept called “narrative theory” that states that we create our own story in our heads based on how we want to see the world. Since we can never get out of our own individual heads (ahhh Being John Malkovich!), we run the story that we believe and which “makes sense” to us. All things are really random and disconnected but our brain tries to stitch them all together in a way that has a narrative, logical flow like a movie or a novel. We are the heroes of our own drama, our life. Even though we don’t know what will happen next, whenever something does occur, our brain places it into our “story” and tries to understand how it “fits” into our life. Okay, Mr. Leibner. You probably should put it out now. Gotcha. So what else? May. AP Exams. Ahhhhhhh....memories. I remember when I was at this point in my senior year, I knew I was going to the University of Wisconsin (now home now to Carson All-Stars Kristine Pineda, Yazzmin Lizarraga and Bruno Rodriguez) and couldn’t wait to get out of high school. But, it was a time when my love of literature really kicked in. Reading took the place of Senioritis for me. I know you all know exactly what you want to do in life, but I was not so lucky. I thought vaguely about journalism or making a movie, but it seemed so far off, so distant, so adult. I hated the high school I went to (maybe cause they kicked me out) but at this alternative hippie school there was an English teacher whom I took an independent study from. She set up a special class that I could take probably based on her interests. It was called, “Literature of the West.” It included such works as MARTIN EDEN by Jack London, MY LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI by Mark Twain, DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathaniel West, ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac, and EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES by Tom Robbins. I still remember ALL of these amazing books, but the titles don’t matter. What does matter is that literature began to make sense to me because it made the world begin to make sense. You see a soap opera on TV and say well, there’s all you need to know about human beings. Everything is happy at first. They fall in love, they lie to each other, they cheat on each other, they backstab each other and then they fall in love. Then things really turn to shit. Repeat. Really, you can reduce anything to DAYS OF OUR LIVES. IRON MAN, THE SIMPSONS and the Bible follow the same tried and true formula. Literature tries to raise our understanding of our time on Earth to a higher level. There is no other point to someone writing to you. It is "their" take on what it means to be human. If it connects to you, it becomes A PART OF YOU. After that last semester of high school, it was one book after another after another. Hello Kurt Vonnegut. Hey there, William Faulkner. Howdy, Richard Wright. Good Morning, Thomas Pynchon. Bless You, Graham Greene. Put 'er there, John Dos Passos. You’re looking beautiful, Vladamir Nabokov. Nice to meet you, Patricia Highsmith. Hola Mario Vargas Llosa. And with each new introduction, it was entrée into a brand new existence. Traveling without perspiration. But what a truly fulfilling experience to close a tremendous book and know you are a changed person. Usually we only think of a person influence on us, but these authors who wrote these books create a psychic ripple effect throughout the universe. My teaching, my learning, my “way of seeing” is because of something Sylvia Plath, George Bernard Shaw, Leslie Marmon Silko and Art Spiegelman cast out into the universe. On a subway in New York, I bore witness to a lovely girl who was on the last page of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's THE BROTHERS' KARAMAZOV, my favorite novel of all time. I watched her as she finished (it's about 800 pages!) and she just shut her eyes, in what I'm assuming was blissful contemplation. When she opened them, I was able to quote the last line to her. We had such a wonderful discussion about the meaning of the book for the duration of our flight underground. Michelle Papilla (Carson '07), is now finishing up her first year at Berkeley. She gave me permission to quote from an e-mail she sent: “I have to say that I've fallen in love with everything here, what I study, the people, the culture....As far a reading goes, I've been doing a lot more of that than I probably should. If only I could read as much of my textbooks as I do other books, man! I'd be the genius setting the curves in class. But, I finished Burmese Days by George Orwell a few days ago--I should've expected a depressing ending, with it being an Orwell book and all. This semester I went through books from junior and senior (White Hotel, Handmaid's Tale, Do Androids Dream...and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) years and reread them, this time, understanding the stories a lot better. Other than that, I've read whatever novels my suitemates give me (we've started a little circle and just pass around our favorite reads) and right now I'm about halfway through Kite Runner. A year ago, I never would have thought that I would be reading novels for fun. It was such a pain to have to do whatever required reading you all gave to us, but now I have a hard time putting my books down.” Thanks Michelle!!! I remember in college, I raided every thrift shop, Goodwill, Salvation Army of their books and built myself a huge library for a quarter a pop. It was so fun going through and getting books for a fraction of the cost in a book store. They were novels I would pull off my books shelf and one day get to. And what is fantastic is that one book led me to another which got me thinking about this that sent me off in that direction that got me thinking about this and someday, because of some influence of some author upon you, it would be my personal dream to pull a book YOU wrote off a Barnes and Noble shelf. Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce's ULYSSES (1955) Okay. That's enough. Read whatever the hell you want, but you'll have no truer friend than a book. Malcolm X once said that wherever he went he carried a book so that he was never alone. Wish you could see this. The afternoon showers are here...gonna bring relief. Looking forward to some good dramatic lightning. Pizza tonight. Jeeez. I am living just like I lived in college. Wish my dad would send more money. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
2:59 am	TWO HAPPENINGS TODAY: One Huge and Tragic, the Other Small and Funny By now you probably heard of the catastrophe that has befallen Myanmar (formerly Burma), a country just west of Thailand. Cyclone Nargis hit this destitute nation and as of now, the death toll is over 22,000 and will probably go higher. This sad country has been under the brutal rule of a xenophobic military junta for the last twenty years. Myanmar was in the news about eight months ago when about 2000 Buddhist monks demonstrated against the lack of freedom and the Army crushed their protest movement. I was in Burma four years ago. It was a thoroughly amazing country, but extraordinarily creepy to visit. It was almost like the feeling of what it must have been like to live in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the Bad Old Days of the Cold War. Everyone watches everyone. Everyone is suspect. The government takes people away based on rumor that someone may have JOKED about the government. The military leadership is paranoid and, for my money, completely bonkers. They moved the capital of Myanmar from the ancient city of Yangon (Rangoon) to the jungles near Pyinmanato a year ago because of some astrologers warning. Had to hire a driver in Burma because foreigners are not allowed to rent cars. It is all state-run television, internet and newspapers. You have to stay on prescribed routes and most of the country is off-limits to tourists. Because of their financial mismanagement, Myanmar is one of the poorest nations in the world. Everywhere you go you see gentle people trying to eek out a living (the highest denomination of currency there is worth $1.07!). Teachers are paid about $15 a month. The government will not allow foreign journalists into the country. Now with this cyclone, the country is at a major crossroads. The Burmese government failed to warn the residences in the low-lying coastal areas of the impending storm. Thousands upon thousands are dead and missing. Disease and price gouging are becoming rampant. Because getting into Myanmar is so difficult, outside accounting is virtually impossible. Will the government let aid groups in? What will happen after the storm? Will there possibly be a revolution? Or will the Army clamp down even harder on their sorrowful citizens? It is also the place where Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, is kept in prison. She remains on house arrest for not promising to give up her democracy movement. The world demands her release but the junta will not budge. She is truly one of the modern heroes of our day. One day, maybe some of you will visit this country that is home to the jaw-dropping Shwedagon Golden Pagoda and the 9th Century city Pagan, whose temple complexes rival Angkor Wat’s in their awe, scope and drama. A truly truly truly phenomenal place that will blow you away. Wherever in the world you see government oppression it should make you furious. The major protests of this year of course will be centered in Beijing during the Olympics. Watch what length people will go to for democracy. And also watch what lengths governments will go to stop it. On a lighter note… Because I plan to do some more traveling, I had to go to the American Embassy here in Phnom Penh to get extra pages added to my passport (second time too!). While waiting, I got to watch something pretty funny and a welcome diversion from all those horrible pictures of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Condeleeza Rice. A Cambodian-American man was up at a window trying to get a passport for the woman he had recently married here in Phnom Penh. These are the questions he had to answer from the woman official doing the interrogation. Everyone in the waiting room could hear. You met this woman a month ago?: Yes. How old are you?: 53 How old is she?: 21 How did you two meet?: I saw a photo of her from my auntie. She introduced us. Where is your ex-wife: She lives in Long Beach. How many children do you have?: Four. How old is the youngest child?: 24 How do your children feel about you marrying someone younger than them?: They support me. They want me to be happy. Where do you sleep?: (He gives an address) No, no. I mean do you sleep in the same bed as her?: Yes. Have you been “intimate” with her?” Yes. Last night. Twice! Jeeeez. I then thought the inquisitor was going to ask him for proof! In the end, I think the poor dude got his wife a passport, but yeeeeeeeesh. Well, I guess it’s good for the wife that at 53 she had it twice. Let’s see what happens to that marriage when he’s 63! Anyway, I sure hope my children will be as supportive of me and want me to be happy! She didn’t ask me nothing but where’d you get that hat? I was kinda disappointed! But I do know now that when I go back there to get Mrs. Panan Sopheaon Leibner her U.S. passport, the magic number to be an American is “Twice!” (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
9:34 pm	Traffic Jam Today it's a bit of a downer report. While travelling, particularly in Second or Third World Countries, you see them everywhere: The girls. Standing on corners. Working in the bars. The friendly Tuk Tuk driver suggests a place you may want to go to enjoy yourself. Have a beer, unwind, relax...and the girls are VERY friendly... Yes, prostitution is the world's oldest profession and it probably has never been anything but ugly, tawdry and about simple, raw survival. If you have any means at all, you wouldn't "choose" it as a way to make money. You are all in high school, eyes set on college, a career, a big life beyond the one you know of studying, playing with friends, watching TV, listening to the iPod, talking on the cell...you know, normal life. What would have had to happen to you to be forced to sell your body to survive? What extraordinary calamity would have had to befall you, your family, "civilization" all around you to be "hoping" someone, anyone, chooses you to pay to have sex with? You are all products of very good fortune that you aren't in that situation nor likely to ever be. But when you have nothing--I mean NOTHING--and the only thing of worth about you is your body (a vagina if you're a girl, muscle and bone to labor if you're a boy)--then the economics of survival is relatively simple. You will be forced to use it. What makes it all even worse are the adults who prey on people who have nothing and because of their own personal greed (THEIR survival instincts), take children who have no clue nor formal education usually, and sell them out to "work" in unspeakably bleak situations where there is NO future. The human trafficking problem is GLOBAL. It is not just here in Cambodia and Asia where it is extremely prevelent. It exists in Eastern Europe, in Central and South America and in so many of the poorest areas of the First World. There are roughly two hundred million migrants today - migrants being defined as people living outside their homelands. The reasons for this are globalization, and wars, and new border freedoms, and, above all, disparities in economic opportunity. Along the nether edge of the huge movement of people, human trafficking thrives. Migrant smuggling is different from trafficking. Migrants pay smugglers to deliver them, illegally, to their destinations. The line into trafficking is crossed when coercion and fraud are used. (This line is not always clear, and many migrants endure varying degrees of mistreatment.) Trafficking can start with a kidnapping. More commonly, it starts with a broken agreement about a job promised, conditions of work, or one's true destination. Most victims suffer some combination of threats, violence, forced labor, and effective imprisonment. The commercial sex industry absorbs slightly less than half of all trafficked labor worldwide. Construction, agriculture, domestic service, hazardous industries, armed conflict, and begging are some of the other frequent sites of extreme, illegal exploitation. What makes some of the sex work sickening is that one sees so many Western men use the opportunity for cheap sex. You see these guys with their young girls and it definitely makes you queasy. All over are "girlie bars" where prostitution is completely out in the open. (Prostitution is legal in Cambodia--what is supposed to be illegal is anyone making a profit on the "labor" of another, ie. a pimp or a brothel madam...but it is almost never enforced.) So you can go into one of these places and your bill will look like this: Sandwich $4. Beer $8 Girl $7 Imagine being reduced to an item on a menu? Many of these girls have been coerced or forced into prostitution. Some were "sold" by a family member thinking they were really having some opportunity to work in a factory, others are orphans and then some may actually CHOOSE to become a sex worker because you can make more money with sex than say working sewing for a day or laboring shelling shrimp. Before I left for Cambodia, I saw a film shot here called HOLLY. It was all about an American who comes to Cambodia and meets a 15-year-old prostitute that has been sold into slavery. It is a heartbreaking film that is extremely well acted and written. There is a powerful ambiguous ending that leaves open some possibility of hope. I will show it in the Cinema Class at some point. Last semester I used the book SOLD by Patricia McCormick with my Ninth Graders. It told the tale of a young girl in rural India who is "sold" by her family into sexual slavery. It is a beautiful, lyrical tale told in first person and is quite heavy and sad. It is a marvelous book to introduce to teenagers that the world isn't always as wonderful as what it appears on High School Musical or Disney. It is very important that students NOT be shielded from the realities of the world and understand that they CAN be part of a solution. Prostitution has nothing at all to do with sexuality...(okay, scratch that. I can't say nothing because there is certainly an element of that in why the demand exists and its relation to power and fantasy--but Christ, that's another Blurty altogether!)...and prostitution is easier to stomach or argue when it's on a First World level where one makes a conscious decision of choice and free will to enter into it. Here in the Third World where its only poverty, hunger and destitution are the factors, it seems unconscienable. I wonder how the men who pay for sex with minors here can live with themselves KNOWING the girls are people like their mothers, their sisters, their wives, their daughters...and not just a vagina. Their risk of AIDS and STD's sky rockets. Many prostitutes are deemed over-the-hill by the time they're twenty-five. I wonder how people can use young boys for work knowing that they are forever denied an education and will never have an opportunity to break the chain of poverty. It is the basest most cruel form of exploitation there is: Completely robbing someone not only of their current life but making sure there is no chance for anything better. It is a squeeze everything out of this human being now, toss "it" aside, because there is always the next one right there...in front of the next...in front of the next... Desperation and poverty need to be eliminated in order for this scourge to begin to stop. The problem is that those of us who don't have to think about this kind of existence or fear that it will happen to us or our family or kids...well, we usually don't think about it for others. Sometimes it gets even more grotesque. Both very old women and little kids are trafficked to go into the cities and beg from tourists. Someone gets the largest percentage of their meager earnings and they must do it day in and day out. The boys and girls hustling bootleg copies of Lonely Planet to travellers are also, for the most part, trafficked. Add to it the problem of corruption in many of these country's governments, in their police forces and in the judiciary and sometimes the solution seems very daunting. Often, there seems no escape or justice for these victims that are abused by ALL parts of a system. On the brighter side, there are many organizations that work to stop human trafficking and the plight of the abused is becoming more well known. On the Carson campus, Ms. Weir and the Human Rights Group has made a point on becoming educated and trying to do bring it to the attention of others. That's what you can do now. And keep learning. Be informed. Know that everything in the world affects your life and vice versa. They don't teach you that in elementary and junior high...but now you know. The specifics on Cambodia can be found on this interesting spot with some important videos: http://traffickingproject.blogspot.com/search/label/Cambodia So, now that you know, keep it in the back of your mind. One day you may be in a position to help. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
10:06 am	Spring is in the Air! Twenty Films to Discover Love By Boy...all those AP Exams coming down on you but you're still thinking about that boy there. And that girl there just may like you--but probably not, but it's nice to dream. Yep. Spring and Love. The Earth's time to be reborn and the heart enjoys a good flutter--but of course it also gets its fair share of whooping as well. For no particular reason, I'm writing out a list of my TWENTY TOP LOVE FILMS. Many I've shown in Cinema class under various themes and guises. Your List is bound to be different from my list, but isn't it interesting to know what choices cause both our brains and our hearts to stir. For me, I can't have one without the other; so many of my choices are films that deal with love in complicated ways--having never experienced anything but extreme complications in that department. *SIGH* DOGFIGHT (1991) This film would be a very intense study of gender in regards to love and sex. On the last night before shipping out to Vietnam, four sailors seek out the ugliest women to bring to a bar for top prize. What happens in this very funny, very moving, very profane story is a battle whose stakes are much higher than either the tender, idealistic young woman or the arrogant, macho young man realize. The movie makes this list because of the powerful final minute that wordlessly "speaks" of the power of love through redemption and penitence. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004) Writer Charlie Kaufman's brilliant novelesque meditation on why we fall in love, with whom and what draws and repells us from the person we love. This film survives frequent re-viewings and you see something new you hadn't picked up before each time. What makes this film so compelling is that everyone in it displays a vile, petty, selfish side to them but, nonetheless, are often moved toward their angels by love. It makes me so happy that this film is such a huge Carson High favorite. I think it's the best American movie in the last decade. THE GRADUATE (1967) Often immitated, never topped. A magnificent film that somehow reflects gloriously on the confusing, topsy-turvy era that created it. Add to it some of the greatest dialogue ever put to screen and extraordinary camerawork and editing, The Graduate still provokes after all these years. "EEEEElllllaaaaaiiiinnnneeee!!!!!!!" HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971) A beautiful love story whose cult following is legion and well-deserved. Suicidal 19-year-old boy falls in love with a live-for-the-moment, bouyant 80-year-old woman. Just goes to show you there's a million ways to be. HEAD ON (2004) Love for the hopelessly fucked up. A drunk, loser Turkish immigrant to Germany arranges to marry a mentally unstable Turkish girl who is seeking to flee her domineering Old World family. The two set up shop together and though unrelentingly brutal throughout the relationship, you end up caring deeply for these two. The way their lives intersect and they change each other through their time together, despite the heartbreak, makes for one of the most profound cinematic experiences I've ever witnessed. HIROSHIMA, MON AMOR (1959) I first saw this film as a freshman in college and it has stuck with me ever since. This is a big idea film using two wounded people as a metaphor for memory and loss. A French young woman has spent the night with a japanese man, at Hiroshima where she went for the shooting of a film about peace. He reminds her of the first man she loved. It was during World War II, and he was a German soldier. Countries do not love. People do. And can new love fill in for the tremendous hurt of the past? JESUS' SON (1992) This film has less to do with the love of one human for another as it has to do with one human towards everyone no matter who they are and what they've done. The story disorients by jumping back and forth in time, stopping, then picking up again...all because the film is being told first person by a heroin junkie whose only name we're given is Fuckhead. Though tragedy and despair follow him like a curse, he learns to get his life slowly together again by understanding the Catholic state of "grace". Everyone on this planet is, of course, Fuckhead. It would do all of us good to remember that. KING KONG (1933) First saw it when I was eight-years-old. Fascinating film no matter how you view it. A tragic racial parable? A metaphor for America? Just a plain great adventure story? Or the best interpretation of "Beauty and the Beast" ever rendered. It features an ultimate love triange conflict that means somebody has to lose out. King Kong's heart was bigger than his brain. And he paid the ultimate price. THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN (1982) Okay. There have always been teen sex comedies. SUPERBAD is only the latest in a very long list. This film would have ended up completely forgotten if it didn't have such a radically different "take" on the age old male "gotta-lose-my-virginity-now!" problem. You're watching the movie following these loser guys trying to lose it, but one is the real nice guy who you're rooting for. Nothing prepares you for the ending of this film. Simply devastating and goes completely against the stereotype of this genre. LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1971) Okay. Don't expect you all to dig this very weighted film set in the City of Love. I offer it up because I do think it is one of the most sophisticated musings on how close love and death are related. Our hearts as fortresses and battlefields and what happens when a heart is broken. How do we go on? This film was X-rated when it first came out and some of the sex scenes are quite intense, quirky, but somehow quite real because the emotions behind them are so raw and dramatic. View it later in life, okay? MAELSTROM (2000) What can you say about a film that starts off with a philosophical talking fish, proceeds into a sequence where a woman is having an abortion, continues on where this woman kills a man while drunkenly driving home and through a series of random (or fated--if you are predisposed to believe in that) events that fall like dominoes, where she ends up falling in love with the son of the man she killed. We may have no clue why we live or die, but love certainly makes the time in between sweeter. MY SASSY GIRL (2001) One of the Carson all-time favorites. Gotta love this Korean film for its young exuberance, its humor, its giddy romanticism and its melodrama. Why can't American teen films be this fun and this moving? THE PIANO (1993) Extremely sophisticated tale about a woman "sold off" by her father as a mail-order bride to the wilderness of 19th Century New Zealand. Playing with grand metaphors of colonization and control, The Piano is a passionate tale of a heart that seeks freedom and companionship with another such heart. Art and love have never had such a suspenseful build-up (including the single most cruel scene ever filmed) complete with a wonderfully ambiguous ending that leaves debate possible. PROOF (1991) This is a small Australian film about an angry, loveless blind man, his desperate, love-hungry housekeeper, and a lost young man who never thought about the nature of the world until they all come together. Martin is a misanthropic blind man, whose unshakable mistrust of humanity compels him to compulsively take photographs of everything around him. So deeply-rooted is his paranoia that he believes his own mother rejected him because of his handicap, and so deceived him in her descriptions of the world. PROOF delicately makes the symbiotic connection that one must trust in order to love and love in order to trust. SLING BLADE (1995) Not a film about romantic love but the love of one human for another. A deeply unsettling film about a mentally retarded man and his relation with a troubled ten-year-old boy. The film seems more like a play as we watch the scenes unfold with long single shots and are compulsively drawn into the drama. SLING BLADE explores the nature of love and the sacrifices made in its name for the sake of others. TALK TO HER (2002) Everyone who takes 11th grade English has seen HABLE CON ELLA. We use it because it is a film so rich in story, in structure, in brazen imagery that Pedro Almodovar's masterpiece bears multiple levels of analysis. Not going to go into all that here. Suffice to say this film that provokes strong responses, uses multiple chains of love to bind all the characters together. Comedy? Tragedy? It has it all. And dance as the metaphor for the all the emotions love brings out in all of us. 2046 (2005) I'm putting this Hong Kong film on the list because I love it enormously but it is easily misunderstood and confusing. The main character is a writer of 'fiction' (this very movie) who through the process of embedding real life circumstances into his science fiction he also tries to determine if there is a destination this is all heading. 2046 is a place you visit to relive unchanging memories so that you will never change. Alternately, 2046 is also a time existent only within a science fiction novel when people will access substitute lovers without the haunts of what broke them in the past. So they think. So in his novel, lovers become characters. Feelings become fictional ornamentations in the future. In the present, he cannot connect with the women who come and go. In the fiction, the lack of connection is simply a matter of technological limitations. Think about what happens in the aftermath of a failed relationship or a missed opportunity. We may grieve, but also sometimes we obsessively construct a future fantasy based on what should have happened if things had gone right; if only some vital detail didn't change things how it did. We inhabit that imagined future and interact with our counterpart ghost, making plans and times and places accordingly. We might use this process as a shield and a warning. Or it sabotages, taking on a life of its own as a mental blueprint, directing the actual present and perceptions of new companions. I've spent the most time on 2046 because at some point in your future (after you've had your share of heartbreaks!) check it out. It really won't make much sense to you now. A WEDDING BANQUET (1993) Director Ang Lee got so much more attention for BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN but its A WEDDING BANQUET that is his true gem. A Taiwanese-American man is living a happy, comfortable life in Brooklyn with his gay partner when his traditional parents want him to marry a traditional Chinese girl. They proceed to invent an elaborate charade to "protect" his parents from the truth. A heart-felt story about love across generations, genders, sexualities and cultures to come to a definition of what love truly is. WEST SIDE STORY (1959) A thousand years from now, people are still going to be watching this magical film. Amazing dancing, extraordinary lyrics, glorious technicolor and the ultimate tragic love story. Tony and Maria Forever! Watch it on the big screen!!! WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF (1964) If you wanted to know why movies have ratings, it's because of this one. One married couple I know watches this film every Christmas to appreciate that no matter how bad things got in their marriage, at least it wasn't George and Martha's. I am always profoundly moved by this story of love at its extreme. The film is grotesque, horrible, mean-spirited, vicious and one of the most heart-wrenching tales of love I've ever seen. In fact, if a Martian came down to earth and wanted me to explain what love is for human beings, I would direct him to watch this movie. Love is more than a metaphor in this twisted tale. It is the reason that gets most of us through another day. Okay...that's the list. If you have other suggestions, let me know and tell me why. I wish you all luck on your AP exams! Enjoy those Noah's bagels and after all the tests are over, go to a dance, look for romance, see Barbara Ann and maybe take a chance.... Oh yeah...i didn't include THE TITANIC, but nonetheless, you guys know my heart will go on. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
2:06 am	Miss Landmines and the Meaning of Meaning If all goes “well”, Cambodia is hosting 2009’s Miss Landmines competition here. Sounds like something out of THE ONION doesn’t it? Check it out: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/22/cambodia.internationalaidanddevelopment Okay, a little background why the competition is even a possibility here. As you might have heard, landmines are an extraordinary problem in many places in the world. When countries go to war with each other, one of the most simple and effective destructive devices are landmines. If you plant them in roads or places where military vehicles or troops might advance, it definitely will slow your adversary down. But when the conflict is over and the opposing army goes home, the landmines stay behind. In Cambodia, the human wreckage from landmines is everywhere...you see them begging on the streets and, in this culture, there is a lot of superstition. People who are disabled are thought by many to be “cursed”. Remember, there is that belief of karma and the nascent Hinduism circulates in everything. Did this person DO something to deserve this fate? Don't bring this person around me! I don't want his or her bad luck! In Cambodia there should be no shortage of contenders for the 2009 title. There are 25,000 amputees among the country's 63,000 victims of landmines and blasts from unexploded ordinance left after 30 years of civil war. There are many who are opposed to this competition because they argue that it actually makes fun of these victims and is incredibly bad taste. Some reason that these women have suffered enough...why deliberately go out of the way to make them hurt further? How could people be so cruel? Others despise the objectification of women no matter what guise it comes in. It is a classic case of how one “sees” things. I never could understand beauty contests and "saw" pagents as the very definition of bad taste. And so ridiculously cornball on top of that. Perky tits? Check. Shapely ass? Check. Can sing a medley from “Phantom of the Opera” while waterskiing? Fantastic! Hand that chick a tiara and a ribbon and send her to speak at the UN about, um, landmines. Why your ASA teachers stress so much that you need to “crack open the world” and inspect it is because everything in your head or what you have been taught is constructed. It is the crucial understanding to ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. Once you realize this, the entire world shifts and becomes suspect. Good. It is precisely this higher level of thinking that will save you not only in college, but throughout your whole life. Alas, so few people ever realize this, merely accepting the world as presented as an absolute truth. When I was in Nicaragua late last year, I visited the house of a very poor student who I got to know. He had a younger sister who had drawings (actually tracings) of Snow White, Ariel, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty all over the place. I've likewise encountered the same Disney drawings by other young girls here in Cambodia. Wherever you go on this planet, those movies are ubiquitous. Every little kid sees them. But, so few will ever be asked to THINK about what those images represent. To most, those images just "ARE". That is how the world is. It just "IS". But the world isn't just IS and those images aren't just ARE. They were constructed and given to you to represent something that is DISGUISED as a Truth. They all have deeper shadings and ASSUMPTIONS that went into creating those images. Unless your taught to QUESTION those images, the ASSUMPTIONS remain as TRUTH that is never dissected, questioned, confronted or challenged. Your brain never gets to that level so you remain unable to "see" that it is a mask. You think the Mask really is a face. Cinderella is just Cinderella. She and her mean sisters says nothing about who and what girls in general are. Snow White is just a put upon step-daughter of the Queen. The personality, her situation, even her name signify nothing. Prince Charming who is threaded throughout all these tales is just a dude. Right. You can see how lengthy books and dissertations can be written on any of these subjects, but you, as just a little kid, would never even think to ask those questions. Well, i'm sad to report, that's how much of the world is. They have not crossed over to saying, "What the--?" Remember, ASA never tells you WHAT to think. All your instructions are geared simply to MAKE YOU THINK. (Actually, "simply" is the wrong modifier because as you've discovered, there is nothing simple about thinking.) Occasionally it can prove to be terribly painful. You are forced to ask, "Why is it i believe what i do?" Is it just because my parents said so? My church? My teachers? My culture? My economic class? My gender? My country? But you are better off for those questions even if they lead you in unexpected directions. You begin to understand who you are and why you are you. So I guess it's enough that you get the tools to begin THINKING. Boy, we would all do cartwheels if this sort of examination led you to lead a more generous, progressive, open-minded, spirited, adventurous, risk-taking and compassionate existence. And then pass your privilege and education on to others. So when I "hear" the debate back and forth about Miss Landmines Cambodia '09, it is envigorating to hear people confront a sophisticated concept and construct for themselves their reasoning for or against it. Because it is full of irony and is so multi-layered, the very act of the debate makes one smarter. It forces one to confront not only society's "take" on something, but yours as well...and hopefully re-evaluate it and ask WHY? And of course, beyond all the semantics, the issue of landmines is still a life and death problem no matter how you "see" it. Here's the Miss Landmine's Website from last year's competition in Angola, Africa: http://www.miss-landmine.org/misslandmine_candidates.html (2 Comments |Comment on this)