On the Media: Errol Morris -- A Wilderness of Error

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"A Wilderness of Error"
On the Media



In 1970, the wife and daughters of a Green Beret doctor named Jeffrey MacDonald were stabbed to death, and MacDonald himself was found guilty of the crime. In his new book A Wilderness of Error, Errol Morris writes a revisionist history of the case, suggesting that MacDonald may actually be innocent. Brooke speaks to Morris about why, for him, the facts of the original case just didn't add up.

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Jeff Faux: Education Profiteering -- Wall Street's Next Big Thing?

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Education Profiteering; Wall Street's Next Big Thing?
by Jeff Faux
The Real News Network

The end of the Chicago teachers' strike was but a temporary regional truce in the civil war that plagues the nation's public schools. There is no end in sight, in part because -- as often happens in wartime -- the conflict is increasingly being driven by profiteers.

The familiar media narrative tells us that this is a fight over how to improve our schools. On the one side are the self-styled reformers, who argue that the central problem with American K-12 education is low-quality teachers protected by their unions. Their solution is privatization, with its most common form being the privately run but publicly financed charter school. Because charter schools are mostly unregulated, nonunion and compete for students, their promoters claim they will, ipso facto, perform better than public schools.

On the other side are teachers and their unions who are cast as villains. The conventional plot line is that they resist change, blame poverty for their schools' failings and protect their jobs and turf.

It is well known, although rarely acknowledged in the press, that the reform movement has been financed and led by the corporate class. For over twenty years large business oriented foundations, such as Gates (Microsoft), Walton (Wal-Mart) and Broad (Sun Life) have poured billions into charter school start-ups, sympathetic academics and pundits, media campaigns (including Hollywood movies) and sophisticated nurturing of the careers of privatization promoters who now dominate the education policy debate from local school boards to the US Department of Education.

In recent years, hedge fund operators, leverage-buy-out artists and investment bankers have joined the crusade. They finance schools, sit on the boards of their associations and the management companies that run them, and -- most important -- have made support of charter schools one of the criteria for campaign giving in the post- Citizens United era. Since most Republicans are already on board for privatization, the political pressure has been mostly directed at Democrats.

Thus, for example, when Andrew Cuomo wanted to get the support of hedge fund managers for his run for governor of New York, he was told to talk to Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform, a group set up to lobby liberals on privatization. Cuomo is now a champion of charter schools. As Joanne Barkan noted in a Dissent Magazine report, privatizers are even targeting school board elections, in one case spending over $630,000 to elect two members in a local school board race last year in Colorado.

Wall Street's involvement in the charter school movement -- when the media acknowledges it -- is presented as an act of philanthropy. Perhaps, as critics claim, hedge funders are meddling in an area they know nothing about. But their motives are worthy. Indeed, since they send their own children to the best private schools, their concern for other people's children seems remarkably altruistic. "Wall Street has always put its money where its interests of beliefs lie," observed this New York Times article, "But it is far less common that so many financial heavyweights would adopt a social cause like charter schools and advance it with a laser like focus in the political realm."

Yet, with the wide variety of social causes and charitable needs -- poverty, health, housing, global warming, the arts, etc. -- why would so many Wall Streeters focus laser-like on this particular issue? The Times suggest two answers. One is that the money managers are hard-nosed, data-driven investors "drawn to the business-like way in which many charter schools are run; their focus on results primarily measured by test scores."

Twenty years ago, one might have reasonably believed that the private charter schools, which are managed to produce the numbers, would produce better outcomes -- as measured by the numbers. But the overwhelming evidence is that they do not. The single most comprehensive study, by researchers at Stanford University, found that 17 percent of charter school students performed better than their public school counterparts, 46 percent no better and 37 percent worse. Stanford's conclusions have been reinforced by virtually all of the serious research, including those at the University of California, the Economic Policy Institute and the policy research firm Mathematica.

Nor do charter schools seem more efficient. Those promoted as the most successful examples have been heavily subsidized by foundations and Wall Street donors. The film, Waiting for Superman that portrays a heroic charter school organizer fighting a selfish teachers union was widely hyped in the media -- including popular TV shows like Oprah Winfrey's. Yet, as Diane Ravitch, an assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush and a former charter school supporter turned critic, noted, the film neglected to report that the hero educator kicked out the entire first class of the school because their test scores were too low, that the school was heavily subsidized by the pro-reform foundations and that the hero took an annual salary of four hundred thousand dollars.

Neither do the data on international comparisons support either privatization in general or charter schools in particular. The foreign education systems that out score America's are government-run, unionized, monopolies. Ravitch asks: "I look around the world and I don't see any country doing this but us. Why is that?"

Good question. Although the data do not support the supposedly data-driven privatizers' claims, their enthusiasm is undiminished. In response to an op-ed by Bill Gates that crudely misrepresented the statistics on school performance, education policy analyst Richard Rothstein observed: "It is remarkable that someone associated with technology and progress should have such a careless disregard for accuracy when it comes to the education policy in which he is now so deeply involved."

The Times' other guess about Wall Street's motives was that hedge funders are attracted to the anti-union character of the charter schools. This is undoubtedly true; the attack on the pubic schools is clearly a part of the broad conservative campaign to discredit government.

Wall Street has always loathed the labor movement. And in the last decade it has had even more of a reason since corporate profits now depend more on cost cutting and less on the creation of new products. The Chief Finance Officer of JP Morgan reports that some 75% of the net increase in corporate profits between 2000 and 2007 -- before the financial crash -- was a result of cuts in workers' wages and benefits. Given that unions are the only serious vehicles for resistance to the corporate low-wage strategy, Wall Street's antipathy has become even stronger.

But today unions represent less than seven percent of private sector workers. And the influence of public sector unions on the bargaining position of workers in profit-making corporations is, certainly in the short run, negligible. So while hostility to unions plays a role, is it is not quite credible to believe that Wall Street profit maximizers would be spending so much of their time and money simply to beat up on a proxy for the private sector unions that they have already so beaten back.

As usual, when looking for what motivates capitalists in a market system, the answer is likely to have something to do with making money.

Having been rescued from the consequences of its own folly by the Bush/Obama bailouts with its de-regulated privileges intact, Wall Street is once more on the prowl for the new "big thing" -- a new source of potential profits upon which to build the next lucrative asset bubble.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Dennis Lim: Time Has Been Kind to Heaven's Gate

To contact us Click HERE
Time Has Been Kind to Heaven's Gate
by Dennis Lim
The New York Times



...

Lee Kline, the technical director at Criterion, said, “It wasn’t an option to go back to the original negative because that was what was cut down to the short version.” The original 70-millimeter prints were also in poor shape. So in a costly, complicated process, the restoration team scanned each color separation negative individually and recombined them.

“Heaven’s Gate” may be a subject Mr. Cimino has avoided for years, but once he gets going, the floodgates open. He spoke fondly of the performances of Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert, which he feels have never gotten their due. And he recalled the genesis of the project: Researching the history of barbed wire and the cattle industry, he came upon an incident known as the Johnson County War involving cattlemen, hired killers and local ranchers. He described the epilogue — the weary hero, James Averill (Mr. Kristofferson), on a yacht off the New England coast — as “a prelude to ‘The Great Gatsby,’ ” with Averill as the mogul awaiting the arrival of the young James Gatz.

Mr. Cimino also recalled his obsessive quest for authenticity that led many to characterize “Heaven’s Gate” as a runaway production. (First budgeted at less than $10 million, the film grew to a cost of $35 million, or $44 million including promotional costs, according to Mr. Bach’s book. Mr. Cimino maintains that it was “all in $32 million.”) As he put it, “Everything was problematical”: the locomotive that had to be transported to the Montana location from a Denver museum; a horse-drawn buggy whose spokes and upholstery had to be made in different states. “The movie could not be made today, even if you threw $300 million at it,” he said. “All of that is being lost. The wagons don’t exist, the skills are gone.”

Present-day viewers may well find that time has been kind to “Heaven’s Gate,” which plays more than ever like a fittingly bleak apotheosis of the New Hollywood, an eccentric yet elegiac rethinking of the myths of the West and the western, with an uncommonly blunt take on class in America. (“It’s getting dangerous to be poor in this country,” someone says. The rejoinder: “It always was.”) But this defiant last gasp of the downbeat ’70s, opening two weeks after Ronald Reagan was elected president, was plainly a movie at odds with its time.

Reached at his home in Hawaii, Mr. Kristofferson said he believes the themes of the film, with its grim view of American capitalism, were what made it so unpalatable. “It was a political assassination,” he said. He recalled getting word that Reagan’s first attorney general, William French Smith, had told studio heads that “there should be no more pictures made with a negative view of American history.”

Mr. Kristofferson, sounding more rueful than bitter, said that the reception to “Heaven’s Gate” knocked him off the Hollywood A-list for good. “I never really recovered from that,” he said, but he acknowledged that it was worse for Mr. Cimino. “It completely destroyed him.”

Mr. Cimino continued to work, albeit infrequently; he has made four features since “Heaven’s Gate,” the last one, “Sunchaser,” in 1996. A painter who began his directing career in advertising, he said that at home in Los Angeles he rarely watches movies now (and prefers to reread Pushkin and Flaubert). But he does have a film project in mind, which he hopes to shoot in digital soon.

Ms. Carelli, who was with Mr. Cimino in Venice, said that while there remain misconceptions about the making of “Heaven’s Gate,” “I don’t want to revisit old erroneous stories and try to correct them.” She added, “Now the film finally speaks for itself, and it has the final word.”

To Read the Entire Article

More Resources:

The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate

Spike Lee's Bamboozled and the Representation(s) of Race

To contact us Click HERE


"How do images affect our hearts and minds? How do images influence our everyday lives, our techno-scientific practices, our connections and disconnections, our conscious and unconscious desires and fears? How do images show up in the clothes we wear, in the ways we walk, and the objects we want? How do images influence the foods we eat or don’t eat and the ideas and feelings we have about our selves and others? How do some images enter our flesh, captivate us, fascinate us, or arouse our senses? How is it that other images put us to sleep? How do images inform our habits and fantasies, pleasures and doubts, worries and joys, rituals and rebellions? How do images shape our personal, political, cultural, moral, and religious beliefs about nature and about justice? How do images influence what we imagine to be possible and what’s not? Visual images are today everywhere entangled within a complex and contradictory web of global electronic flows of information. Images are typically racialized, gendered, territorialized, eroticized, militarized, and class-driven. Some of the most powerful images are hooked-up to hi-tech machineries of war, surveillance, and the economic marketplace. Images also lie at the core of global corporate technologies of profit, control and advantage. How might such images be best understood? How might they be critically subverted, transformed, or remade?" -- Stephen Pfohl, "The Power of Images" (2011)

Bamboozled (USA: Spike Lee, 2000: 135 mins)

Baker, Courtney R. "Misrecognized: Looking at Images of Black Suffering and Death." [Dissertation: Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University, 2008]

Bellamy, Jason and Ed Howard. "The Conversations: Bamboozled." The House Next Door (February 25, 2012)

Benton, Michael Dean. "James Allen: Without Sanctuary; The Debate Over the Hanging of a Barack Obama Effigy on the Campus of the UK; The History of Lynching in America." Dialogic (November 3, 2008)

---. "Learning From "El Mexterminator" and "Cyber Vato": Social Anxiety as a Performative Pedagogy." Reconstruction 2.4 (Fall 2003)

---. "Response to a Lynching Joke in an Email." Dialogic (January 18, 2011)

---. "Theodore W. Allen: The Invention of the White Race." Dialogic (January 23, 2008)

Classified X (France/USA/UK: Mark Daniels, 1998: 53 mins)

Delue, Rachel Ziady. "Envisioning Race in Spike Lee's Bamboozled." Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader. ed. Janice D. Hamlet and Robin R. Means Coleman. NY: Peter Lang, 2009: 61-88.

Dyson, Michael Eric, Tavis Smiley and Cornel West. "The N Word." Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations [from the originals CD, reposted on YouTube: May 11, 2011].

Easton, Lee and Kelly Hewson. "Reflections on the Interplay of Race, Whiteness and Canadian Identity in a Film Studies Classroom.” Reception (Summer 2010): 116-148.

Elam, Harry J. Jr. "Spike Lee's Bamboozled." Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture ed. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Kennel Jackson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005: 346-362.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Originally published in French in 1952. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. NY: Pluto Press, 2008.

Feeling, Kara. "Passing for Human: Bamboozled and Digital Humanism." Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader. ed. Janice D. Hamlet and Robin R. Means Coleman. NY: Peter Lang, 2009

"Frantz Fanon." Wikipedia (No Date)

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks (United Kingdom: Isaac Julien, 1996: 70 mins)

Gilmer, Marcus. "The Controversy of Race in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled." Not Coming to a Theater Near You (July 17, 20004)

Gray, Herman. "Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000) and Black Masculinity and Visual Culture." [CCTP695: American Popular Culture -- History, Story & Analysis, Georgetown University] (Fall 2005)

Holden, Stephen. "Bamboozled (2000)FILM REVIEW; Trying On Blackface in a Flirtation With Fire." The New York Times (October 6, 2000)

hooks, bell. "Revolutionary Attitude." Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992: 1-8.

Lott, Eric. "Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy." Representations #39 (Summer 1992): 23-50.

The N Word (USA: Todd Williams, 2004: 86 mins)

Metzler, Jessica. "Genuine Spectacle: Sliding Positionality in the Works of Paulene E. Hopkins, Zora Neal Houston, Langston Hughes, and Spike Lee." [Thesis: Master of Arts in English, Florida State University, 2006]

Michael, Dennis. "Facing up to the past: Bamboozled offers unblinking look at race, perceptions." CNN (October 4, 2000)

Patton, Tracy Owens and Deborah McGriff. "Ya Been Took, Ya Been Hoodwinked, Ya Been Bamboozled: Mau Maus, Diaspora, and the Mediated Misrepresentation of Blackness." Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader. ed. Janice D. Hamlet and Robin R. Means Coleman. NY: Peter Lang, 2009: 89-102.

Pfohl, Stephen Images and Power (SC532 Course Syllabus, Boston College, 2011)

Powell, Gerald A., Jr. "A Rhetoric of Symbolic Identity: An Analysis of Spike Lee's X and Bamboozled." [Dissertation: Doctor of Philosophy in Communication and Culture, Harvard University, 2003]

Riggs, Marlon. "The Making of Color Adjustment." POV (1992)

Slaner, Stephen E. and Sandra Clyne. "The Use of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled to PromoteDifficult Dialogues on Race." Human Architecture (Winter 2008): 7-16.

Sutherland, Jean-Anne and Kathryn Feltey. "Introduction." Cinematic Sociology: Social Life in Film. eds. Jean-Anne Sutherland and Kathryn Feltey. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2013: 1-23.

Tinson, Christopher. Framing Blackness: African Americans and Mass Media in the 20th Century [Hampshire College: Spring 2011]

Ward, Jerry W. "Prologue to an Essay on African American Satire." Black Magnolias 2.2 (2003): 4-9.

Glenn Heath Jr. on Abel Ferrara's The Addiction (1995)

To contact us Click HERE
Glenn Heath Jr. on Abel Ferrara's The Addiction (1995)
Not Coming to a Theater Near You



It’s all theory and philosophy until someone gets bit. Abel Ferrara’s art/vampire film The Addiction, a dense and moody examination of fear and self-loathing in 1990s New York City, takes this credo to insane heights. In the beginning, words and ideas are modes of deflection used by characters living in an academic world where hypothetical thought rules. But their wake-up call sleeks through the night, appearing suddenly and without reproach, brutally executing a primal reckoning of faith. From here, a new language emerges written in jet-black blood, caked on the lips of sirens and streaming down the contours of swan-like necks. Here, the crisp texture of film and photographic images is crucial for Ferrara. He sees the jarringly blunt stylization of death and trauma as the only way to reveal highbrow banter as dangerous contradiction, doing so within a genre primed for social critique. But is the horror film itself part of the problem? It all starts simply enough with a nighttime stroll and a sudden proposition of fate.

“Tell me to leave you alone,” demands a stunningly calm vampire seductress to a shocked grad student in a dank New York City alley crisscrossed by sharp, bleeding shadows. What a dare! These haunting words are uttered before each brazen attack in The Addiction. It’s as if the various supernatural beings walking the dark streets must defy their prey to stand up for survival before jumping on a single bit of hesitation to justify the impending blood lust. But looking evil in the eye and failing to react is just one of the many philosophical and moral conundrums recycling throughout Ferrara’s black and white masterpiece about dependency, fear, and political outrage. In fact, there are so many competing ideological threads in The Addiction that the very act of verbal expression becomes a form of sadism.

Kathleen Conklin, the aforementioned tough-minded grad student played by Lili Taylor who gets attacked by a sleek vampire named Casanova in the opening moments of Ferrara’s film, initially defines her professional and personal life by historical revisionism. War crimes are her object of study, and she spends the film’s first moment studying graphic pictures documenting the Mai Lai Massacre. Kathleen views these images with cold detachment, listening intently to the droll voiceover of a lecturer: “The conscience of an outraged society was temporarily satisfied,” he dramatically muses, referencing the American public’s faux-appeasement after obtaining national justice against the guilty soldiers. But college life is just a façade, and Ferrara has big thematic plans for Kathleen. After being attacked, the deep bite marks on her neck and the blood streaming down her face, often framed within smooth, nearly slow motion dolly shots, begin a slow transition from theoretical dependency to literal acts of horror and extreme physical addiction.

To Read the Rest of the Response

Dennis Lim: Time Has Been Kind to Heaven's Gate

To contact us Click HERE
Time Has Been Kind to Heaven's Gate
by Dennis Lim
The New York Times



...

Lee Kline, the technical director at Criterion, said, “It wasn’t an option to go back to the original negative because that was what was cut down to the short version.” The original 70-millimeter prints were also in poor shape. So in a costly, complicated process, the restoration team scanned each color separation negative individually and recombined them.

“Heaven’s Gate” may be a subject Mr. Cimino has avoided for years, but once he gets going, the floodgates open. He spoke fondly of the performances of Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert, which he feels have never gotten their due. And he recalled the genesis of the project: Researching the history of barbed wire and the cattle industry, he came upon an incident known as the Johnson County War involving cattlemen, hired killers and local ranchers. He described the epilogue — the weary hero, James Averill (Mr. Kristofferson), on a yacht off the New England coast — as “a prelude to ‘The Great Gatsby,’ ” with Averill as the mogul awaiting the arrival of the young James Gatz.

Mr. Cimino also recalled his obsessive quest for authenticity that led many to characterize “Heaven’s Gate” as a runaway production. (First budgeted at less than $10 million, the film grew to a cost of $35 million, or $44 million including promotional costs, according to Mr. Bach’s book. Mr. Cimino maintains that it was “all in $32 million.”) As he put it, “Everything was problematical”: the locomotive that had to be transported to the Montana location from a Denver museum; a horse-drawn buggy whose spokes and upholstery had to be made in different states. “The movie could not be made today, even if you threw $300 million at it,” he said. “All of that is being lost. The wagons don’t exist, the skills are gone.”

Present-day viewers may well find that time has been kind to “Heaven’s Gate,” which plays more than ever like a fittingly bleak apotheosis of the New Hollywood, an eccentric yet elegiac rethinking of the myths of the West and the western, with an uncommonly blunt take on class in America. (“It’s getting dangerous to be poor in this country,” someone says. The rejoinder: “It always was.”) But this defiant last gasp of the downbeat ’70s, opening two weeks after Ronald Reagan was elected president, was plainly a movie at odds with its time.

Reached at his home in Hawaii, Mr. Kristofferson said he believes the themes of the film, with its grim view of American capitalism, were what made it so unpalatable. “It was a political assassination,” he said. He recalled getting word that Reagan’s first attorney general, William French Smith, had told studio heads that “there should be no more pictures made with a negative view of American history.”

Mr. Kristofferson, sounding more rueful than bitter, said that the reception to “Heaven’s Gate” knocked him off the Hollywood A-list for good. “I never really recovered from that,” he said, but he acknowledged that it was worse for Mr. Cimino. “It completely destroyed him.”

Mr. Cimino continued to work, albeit infrequently; he has made four features since “Heaven’s Gate,” the last one, “Sunchaser,” in 1996. A painter who began his directing career in advertising, he said that at home in Los Angeles he rarely watches movies now (and prefers to reread Pushkin and Flaubert). But he does have a film project in mind, which he hopes to shoot in digital soon.

Ms. Carelli, who was with Mr. Cimino in Venice, said that while there remain misconceptions about the making of “Heaven’s Gate,” “I don’t want to revisit old erroneous stories and try to correct them.” She added, “Now the film finally speaks for itself, and it has the final word.”

To Read the Entire Article

More Resources:

The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate

Spike Lee's Bamboozled and the Representation(s) of Race

To contact us Click HERE


"How do images affect our hearts and minds? How do images influence our everyday lives, our techno-scientific practices, our connections and disconnections, our conscious and unconscious desires and fears? How do images show up in the clothes we wear, in the ways we walk, and the objects we want? How do images influence the foods we eat or don’t eat and the ideas and feelings we have about our selves and others? How do some images enter our flesh, captivate us, fascinate us, or arouse our senses? How is it that other images put us to sleep? How do images inform our habits and fantasies, pleasures and doubts, worries and joys, rituals and rebellions? How do images shape our personal, political, cultural, moral, and religious beliefs about nature and about justice? How do images influence what we imagine to be possible and what’s not? Visual images are today everywhere entangled within a complex and contradictory web of global electronic flows of information. Images are typically racialized, gendered, territorialized, eroticized, militarized, and class-driven. Some of the most powerful images are hooked-up to hi-tech machineries of war, surveillance, and the economic marketplace. Images also lie at the core of global corporate technologies of profit, control and advantage. How might such images be best understood? How might they be critically subverted, transformed, or remade?" -- Stephen Pfohl, "The Power of Images" (2011)

Bamboozled (USA: Spike Lee, 2000: 135 mins)

Baker, Courtney R. "Misrecognized: Looking at Images of Black Suffering and Death." [Dissertation: Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University, 2008]

Bellamy, Jason and Ed Howard. "The Conversations: Bamboozled." The House Next Door (February 25, 2012)

Benton, Michael Dean. "James Allen: Without Sanctuary; The Debate Over the Hanging of a Barack Obama Effigy on the Campus of the UK; The History of Lynching in America." Dialogic (November 3, 2008)

---. "Learning From "El Mexterminator" and "Cyber Vato": Social Anxiety as a Performative Pedagogy." Reconstruction 2.4 (Fall 2003)

---. "Response to a Lynching Joke in an Email." Dialogic (January 18, 2011)

---. "Theodore W. Allen: The Invention of the White Race." Dialogic (January 23, 2008)

Classified X (France/USA/UK: Mark Daniels, 1998: 53 mins)

Delue, Rachel Ziady. "Envisioning Race in Spike Lee's Bamboozled." Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader. ed. Janice D. Hamlet and Robin R. Means Coleman. NY: Peter Lang, 2009: 61-88.

Dyson, Michael Eric, Tavis Smiley and Cornel West. "The N Word." Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations [from the originals CD, reposted on YouTube: May 11, 2011].

Easton, Lee and Kelly Hewson. "Reflections on the Interplay of Race, Whiteness and Canadian Identity in a Film Studies Classroom.” Reception (Summer 2010): 116-148.

Elam, Harry J. Jr. "Spike Lee's Bamboozled." Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture ed. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Kennel Jackson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005: 346-362.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Originally published in French in 1952. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. NY: Pluto Press, 2008.

Feeling, Kara. "Passing for Human: Bamboozled and Digital Humanism." Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader. ed. Janice D. Hamlet and Robin R. Means Coleman. NY: Peter Lang, 2009

"Frantz Fanon." Wikipedia (No Date)

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks (United Kingdom: Isaac Julien, 1996: 70 mins)

Gilmer, Marcus. "The Controversy of Race in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled." Not Coming to a Theater Near You (July 17, 20004)

Gray, Herman. "Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000) and Black Masculinity and Visual Culture." [CCTP695: American Popular Culture -- History, Story & Analysis, Georgetown University] (Fall 2005)

Holden, Stephen. "Bamboozled (2000)FILM REVIEW; Trying On Blackface in a Flirtation With Fire." The New York Times (October 6, 2000)

hooks, bell. "Revolutionary Attitude." Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992: 1-8.

Lott, Eric. "Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy." Representations #39 (Summer 1992): 23-50.

The N Word (USA: Todd Williams, 2004: 86 mins)

Metzler, Jessica. "Genuine Spectacle: Sliding Positionality in the Works of Paulene E. Hopkins, Zora Neal Houston, Langston Hughes, and Spike Lee." [Thesis: Master of Arts in English, Florida State University, 2006]

Michael, Dennis. "Facing up to the past: Bamboozled offers unblinking look at race, perceptions." CNN (October 4, 2000)

Patton, Tracy Owens and Deborah McGriff. "Ya Been Took, Ya Been Hoodwinked, Ya Been Bamboozled: Mau Maus, Diaspora, and the Mediated Misrepresentation of Blackness." Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader. ed. Janice D. Hamlet and Robin R. Means Coleman. NY: Peter Lang, 2009: 89-102.

Pfohl, Stephen Images and Power (SC532 Course Syllabus, Boston College, 2011)

Powell, Gerald A., Jr. "A Rhetoric of Symbolic Identity: An Analysis of Spike Lee's X and Bamboozled." [Dissertation: Doctor of Philosophy in Communication and Culture, Harvard University, 2003]

Riggs, Marlon. "The Making of Color Adjustment." POV (1992)

Slaner, Stephen E. and Sandra Clyne. "The Use of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled to PromoteDifficult Dialogues on Race." Human Architecture (Winter 2008): 7-16.

Sutherland, Jean-Anne and Kathryn Feltey. "Introduction." Cinematic Sociology: Social Life in Film. eds. Jean-Anne Sutherland and Kathryn Feltey. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2013: 1-23.

Tinson, Christopher. Framing Blackness: African Americans and Mass Media in the 20th Century [Hampshire College: Spring 2011]

Ward, Jerry W. "Prologue to an Essay on African American Satire." Black Magnolias 2.2 (2003): 4-9.

Glenn Heath Jr. on Abel Ferrara's The Addiction (1995)

To contact us Click HERE
Glenn Heath Jr. on Abel Ferrara's The Addiction (1995)
Not Coming to a Theater Near You



It’s all theory and philosophy until someone gets bit. Abel Ferrara’s art/vampire film The Addiction, a dense and moody examination of fear and self-loathing in 1990s New York City, takes this credo to insane heights. In the beginning, words and ideas are modes of deflection used by characters living in an academic world where hypothetical thought rules. But their wake-up call sleeks through the night, appearing suddenly and without reproach, brutally executing a primal reckoning of faith. From here, a new language emerges written in jet-black blood, caked on the lips of sirens and streaming down the contours of swan-like necks. Here, the crisp texture of film and photographic images is crucial for Ferrara. He sees the jarringly blunt stylization of death and trauma as the only way to reveal highbrow banter as dangerous contradiction, doing so within a genre primed for social critique. But is the horror film itself part of the problem? It all starts simply enough with a nighttime stroll and a sudden proposition of fate.

“Tell me to leave you alone,” demands a stunningly calm vampire seductress to a shocked grad student in a dank New York City alley crisscrossed by sharp, bleeding shadows. What a dare! These haunting words are uttered before each brazen attack in The Addiction. It’s as if the various supernatural beings walking the dark streets must defy their prey to stand up for survival before jumping on a single bit of hesitation to justify the impending blood lust. But looking evil in the eye and failing to react is just one of the many philosophical and moral conundrums recycling throughout Ferrara’s black and white masterpiece about dependency, fear, and political outrage. In fact, there are so many competing ideological threads in The Addiction that the very act of verbal expression becomes a form of sadism.

Kathleen Conklin, the aforementioned tough-minded grad student played by Lili Taylor who gets attacked by a sleek vampire named Casanova in the opening moments of Ferrara’s film, initially defines her professional and personal life by historical revisionism. War crimes are her object of study, and she spends the film’s first moment studying graphic pictures documenting the Mai Lai Massacre. Kathleen views these images with cold detachment, listening intently to the droll voiceover of a lecturer: “The conscience of an outraged society was temporarily satisfied,” he dramatically muses, referencing the American public’s faux-appeasement after obtaining national justice against the guilty soldiers. But college life is just a façade, and Ferrara has big thematic plans for Kathleen. After being attacked, the deep bite marks on her neck and the blood streaming down her face, often framed within smooth, nearly slow motion dolly shots, begin a slow transition from theoretical dependency to literal acts of horror and extreme physical addiction.

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George Monbiot: The Lairds of Learning

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The Lairds of Learning: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
By George Monbiot
The Guardian

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the Western world? Whose monopolistic practices makes WalMart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.

Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a Keep Out sign on the gates.

You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50(1). Springer charges Eur34.95(2), Wiley-Blackwell, $42(3). Read ten and you pay ten times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50(4).

Of course, you could go into the library (if it still exists). But they too have been hit by cosmic fees. The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792(5). Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I’ve seen, Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930(6). Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets(7), which means they have had to reduce the number of books they buy. Journal fees account for a significant component of universities’ costs, which are being passed to their students.

Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.

The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier’s operating-profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2 billion)(8). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles(9).

More importantly, universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can’t publish the same material. In many cases the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all. Perhaps it’s not surprising that one of the biggest crooks ever to have preyed upon the people of this country – Robert Maxwell – made much of his money through academic publishing.

The publishers claim that they have to charge these fees as a result of the costs of production and distribution, and that they add value (in Springer’s words) because they “develop journal brands and maintain and improve the digital infrastructure which has revolutionized scientific communication in the past 15 years.”(10) But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. “We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn’t be available.”(11) Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more(12).

What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.

To Read the Rest of the Essay and Access the Hyperlinked Sources

Damon Wise: Director Behn Zeitlin and Actors Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry on the Making of Beasts of the Southern Wild

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Beasts of the Southern Wild: 'I didn't expect people to like it'
by Damon Wise
The Guardian

Filmed among the driftwood and insects of the Mississippi swamps, Behn Zeitlin's film is being hailed as an Oscar contender. The director and eight-year-old star recall making it



...

This "it" is Zeitlin's debut movie, Beasts of the Southern Wild, which premiered at Sundance in January and has since swept across the planet, today hitting Cannes just as a violent storm sweeps in from the sea. Which is an odd coincidence, since Zeitlin's film, loosely inspired by the events of Hurricane Katrina, is a rites-of-passage story that depicts a bizarre, primitive swampland flooded by rain. At the centre of it are Hushpuppy (Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry), two local residents transformed by Zeitlin's production team into grimy, shock-haired rebels who must fight for their hometown and resist attempts by the mainland to assimilate them.

Henry and Wallis, in their everyday lives, are unrecognisable. Henry, 49, is the refined, sharp-suited and very charismatic manager of successful New Orleans eaterie the Buttermilk Drop Cafe and Bakery; Wallis's only previous brush with acting was playing at being Selina Gomez and Nicki Minaj with her friends. Onscreen, their chemistry is total, as Wink, suffering from a fatal illness, tries to school his daughter in the ways of the world.

And this is no world that we know, a world of rust and nails, sumps and driftwood, feral animals and insects – an anarchic paradise. "The first scene we shot was my most difficult scene," drawls Henry, "and we shot it in the Mississippi river …"

"It wasn't no pool!" Wallis interrupts brightly.

"… In 40, 50-degree water, all day. Because Benh wanted everything to be as real as it possibly could be, even with the animals that we had. The pigs, the chickens …"

"A horse!" chirps Wallis.

"… the birds, the dawg …"

"Everything was real!" insists Wallis."They were untrained before we started, and they were only trained to do what we needed them to do. So everything you see is real. Benh could have gone to California, to New York, maybe gone and got an actor to play my part. But what he wanted was somebody who actually, in real life, went through what we go through in the movie, with storms and the like. I'm from New Orleans, and this is something we go through every year. We have to deal with the possibility of a storm coming in, evacuating – family goin' all different places – so having someone that has gone through this brings a realness. I was caught in hurricane Katrina. I was in …"

"Neck-high water!" interjects Wallis.

"Because I had two businesses," continues Henry. "And when things like that happen, vandals come to your business, they loot it. And I refused to let that happen. So when Katrina came, I stayed down there, and I had to get out of neck-high water to save my life! That was a real thing that I brought to the movie. Versus getting someone from Hollywood who's never been through these things."

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Unwelcome Guests #4: Michael Parenti -- The Sword and the Dollar; Fernando Terran -- Sweatshops and Genocide in Central America

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Episode #4 - The Sword and the Dollar & Sweatshops and Genocide in Central AmericaUnwelcome Guests

We continue the lecture series with Michael Parenti. His talk this week, "The Sword and the Dollar", tells how American military might is used to secure cheap labor and materials in the third world for US multinationals.

In the second hour listen to Fernando Terran talk about the condition of sweatshop workers.

To Listen to the Episodes

What I've Learned at SXSW So Far

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The first thing I learned was that when people remind you all day to set your clocks ahead an hour on Sunday night, you should probably do that.  Instead, I woke up the next morning thinking I had plenty of time to make it to Paul Lamere's panel "Finding Music With Pictures: Data Visualization for Discovery" only to discover that it was, in fact, happening at that very moment, thanks to the ridiculous scam that is Daylight Savings Time.  Fortunately, Paul has posted his slides over at Music Machinery (linked from his name, above) and so when I have some more time I am going to try to piece together what he talked about based on a smattering of pictures and text.

I also learned that the SXSW Animated Shorts are not as good as the ones at Sundance that I was lucky enough to see a few years back, and in retrospect I should have skipped them entirely to attend the "Bloggers Fight Back: Legal Workshop for Music Bloggers" panel.  But since I didn't, don't be surprised when I start writing this blog from jail.

When I finally got into some panels, I learned even more.  Mainly, I learned that metadata is the magic word of the day.  First up was the "Love, Music & APIs" panel featuring speakers from Echo Nest and SoundCloud.  Their main point was that APIs are the new currency in music apps, and if you don't have one, you're not really playing in the same game as everyone else.  They had a slide listing all sorts of cool music companies with APIs - interestingly enough, Pandora wasn't listed.  I wondered why not, as they seemed to be in the heart of the music recommendation space, and my friend Lori quickly realized "they must not have an API."  I felt so sad for them.  The panelists talked a lot about Music Hack Days, finally answering the question of what actually happens at those things.  The answer:  a lot of smart people make a lot of really interesting and cool music apps in a very short amount of time, nearly all of them based around APIs.  And what do those APIs revolve around?  Metadata.  That was also the topic of the second music-related panel I attended that day, "Music & Metadata: Do Songs Remain The Same?"  The panelists here used a pretty broad definition of "metadata," using it to cover everything from the spelling of a song's title (apparently when users submit their own titles to most metadata repositories like MusicBrainz or the old CDDB, you can end up with 176 spellings of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door") to things like a song's cultural impact or a singer's unique and recognizable turns of phrase.  The main takeaway is that metadata may start out in the hands of the artist, but quickly becomes "owned" by listeners, users, remixers, etc.  Metadata is cultural currency in much the same way that APIs are technical currency.  Combined, they are helping make this a fascinating and wonderful time to be a music nerd.

The last thing I learned is that the line to see Surfer Blood was too long last night, so I will be trying again tonight.  Of course, there are about 50 bands (and a movie) that I want to see all playing at the same time tonight, so I have no idea what I'll end up seeing, but I'll tell you all about it here!

Web Developer's Lament

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This one's for all the web developers out there...

I'm on a "working vacation" for a couple weeks up in Belfast, ME, staying in a house on the bay.  Somehow working from here doesn't feel quite as much like work as it does when I work from my usual office location.  However, events have conspired to make it feel as much like work as it possibly could - namely, a client has been doing their best to make sure that no piece of code I write this week is ever actually done, due to the specifications changing daily, not unlike clouds shifting in a summer breeze.

So I wrote this song to explain how I feel.  [This isn't all about this particular project, but that was a good starting point.]

This is a live recording made down by the water.




Lyrics:
They changed the specs again
Just when I was nearly finished
Said the client changed their mind
I don't know if I can take this

They changed the specs again
I've already written so much code
And the thought of starting over
Makes my sanity erode

Chorus:
Why won't they just let me finish?
Why can't I just be done?
Why won't they just let me finish?
Is this their idea of fun?

They changed the specs again
Pushed the launch up by 2 weeks
They've added a shopping cart
God, my knees are feeling weak

They changed the specs again
To match the new designs
They want it to just "work like Google"
Lord, I'm losing my mind

[Chorus]

I give up, I give up.
I give up, I give up.

Let's add some features, I give up.
Let's build a CMS from scratch, I give up.
Let's refactor every function, I give up.
Let's start calling ourselves agile, I give up.
Let's have a status meeting, I give up.
Let's adopt a framework, I give up.
Let's add members' only area, I give up.
Let's change databases, I give up.
Let's review my timesheet, I give up.
Let's never document anything, I give up.
Let's outsource to India  

Still More Holiday Music That Doesn't Suck

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SK Holiday Open House by flickr user vastateparksstaff

"Christmas music."  "Holiday tunes."  "Mind-numbing winter-themed muzak pabulum."  Call it what you will, our ears are subjected to a lot of crap every winter.  Well, Wired For Music is here to help, with yet another edition of our patented "Holiday Music That Doesn't Suck" playlist.

This year's playlist has some songs that a lot of you will probably already know, but I've had enough people ask me about them in the past that I finally decided to put them on.  Hopefully there'll be some surprises on here too for more "advanced" listeners, whatever that means.  And it even features one song I swore I would never, ever include (it grew on me).

Enjoy, and be sure to check out the playlists from previous years!

1. Dean Martin - A Marshmallow World
   "The King of Cool" gives us his take on this sugary classic.  Dean's version was never as popular as Bing Crosby's, but it does feature some of his trademark near-drunken slurring, particularly on the last verse's "take a walk-with-yourfav-or-itegirl."  This song makes me wish it was snowing right now.
2. Gruff Rhys - Slashed Wrists This Christmas
   This is the first track of the Super Furry Animals' frontman's brilliantly titled "Atheist Xmas EP."  It's a bit repetitive, but then, so this this whole season, isn't it?
3. The Futureheads - Christmas Was Better In The 80s
   Not entirely sure why these guys are so nostalgic given that I think they're younger than I am, but it's still a great song.  Apparently it's a big deal in the UK to release a single at Christmas time, which explains the existence of a few tracks on this playlist.  Some of them work out great, and others...don't make it to this playlist.
4. The Gasoline Brothers - Hungover Boxing Day
   This Dutch band really nails that feeling of waking up on Boxing Day and realizing - wait, what the hell is Boxing Day?  Europe is weird.
5. Badly Drawn Boy - Donna and Blitzen
   This song definitely sounds like it was written a few days before the deadline for getting on the Xmas single charts or something like that.  The lyrics read like he was doing a holiday-themed Mad Libs and just plugged in words like "sleigh ride" and "reindeer" here and there.  But the music saves it, especially those massive timpanis.
6. Marvin Gaye - Purple Snowflakes
   Nothing says Christmas like (a presumably high) Marvin Gaye singing about "purple snowflakes" while his backup singers sprinkle phrases like "chestnuts roasting" and "tootsies toasting" all over the place.  This song is ridiculously good, and his voice is just angelic.
7. Okkervil River - Listening To Otis Redding At Home During Christmas
   I can't decide if this is more depressing than Tom Waits's "Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis" (featured on 2008's playlist), but it's damn depressing regardless.  Seriously, go read the lyrics, I'll wait.  Can you imagine if Jeff Tweedy still wrote songs like this?  Wow, that would be awesome.
8. Morphine - Sexy Christmas Baby Mine
   Still not depressed?  Listen to a dead man croon "Merry for you. Not too merry for me./I want you here with me. Misery loves company."  You're welcome.
9. The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl - Fairytale of New York
   I resisted this song for the past 5 years - in fact, I really hated it until late last year when it suddenly just clicked for me.  I don't know if it's living in New York or what, but one of my most-hated Christmas songs ever has finally wormed its way into my heart.  This one's a classic that I'm sure you've heard a million times, but it still belongs on this playlist.  
10. Barenaked Ladies - I Saw Three Ships
    Just a pretty little palate cleanser.  They really should have let Steven sing first, but that's being nitpicky.
11. Lord Nelson - A Party For Santa Claus
    Feeling chilly?  Let the hot island rhythms of Tobago (by way of Brooklyn) of this little ditty warm you up (or go drink some cocoa, I don't care).  I like the message of this song - how come no one ever gets presents for Santa?
12. The Beach Boys - Little Saint Nick
    Of course The Beach Boys would write a song about Santa's sled.  This song is stupid, but I love it.  And it features the brilliant line: "Christmas comes this time each year."  Deep.
13. Aimee Mann - I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up For Christmas
    A happy little song about getting off the ol' drugs for Christmastime.  Isn't that sweet?
14. Ella Fitzgerald - Good Morning Blues
    Leave it to Ella to have a bad time at Christmas.  "Don't send me nothing for Christmas but my baby back to me" - it's a great time of the year to be alone, isn't it?
15. dj BC - Waltz Of The Flowers (reflower)
    An interesting mix of a classic, from dj BC's "A Very Re:Composition Christmas."  Lots of interesting stuff on that album, it's really worth checking out if you like classical music, remixes, or both.
16. The Ramones - Merry Christmas (I Don't Want to Fight)
    A message of love and peace for the holidays from Joey Ramone.  [Presumably he and the person to whom he was singing were allowed to resume fighting on Boxing Day.]
17. Kanye West ft. CyHi Da Prynce & Teyana Taylor - Christmas In Harlem
    Despite famously being from Chicago, which does not include Harlem, Kanye does a serviceable job with this sequel to Louis Armstrong's "Christmas Night in Harlem" (featured in 2008's playlist).  I think the best verse here belongs to CyHi Da Prynce, who raps in character as Santa Claus.  This song gets extra credit for the part at the end when Teyana Taylor starts singing the melody of "Strawberry Letter 23."
18. Milly & Silly - Getting Down For Xmas
    Looking at Santa's outfit, I'd say that playing funk music at this time of year is pretty much a no-brainer.
19. Frightened Rabbit - It's Christmas So We'll Stop
    These guys really do a great job with the whole "suicidal but catchy" thing.  Sample lyric: "Oh it's Christmas so we'll stop/'Cause the wine on our breath puts the love in our tongues/So forget the names/I called you on Christmas Eve/In fact forget the entire year/Don't reflect just pretend and you won't feel scared."  Yikes.
20. David Bowie & Bing Crosby - Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy
    For a song that was conceived of, written, rehearsed, and performed in a little over an hour, this is pretty amazing.  If you haven't heard this before, you're probably going to like it.  I think it's all the more incredible considering the backstory (see link above).
21. Lovebyte - Auld Lang Syne
    I actually cut another electronic instrumental song off this list, but I just had to give a nod to the robot inside me with this overly upbeat, bizarre version of the New Year's classic.
22. Sarah McLachlan - Song For A Winter's Night
    Sarah McLachlan's take on Gordon Lightfoot's beautiful little song is spare and beautiful, and I find it really evokes the feeling of a cold winter's night effectively.  Great harmonies, too.

Like the list?  Download it!  [you can now download previous years' lists, too!]
Hungry for more?  Check out some of these awesome holiday playlists:

• Annals of Spacetime
• Fuel/Friends
• ilovethis
• Wired For Music

What are you listening to this holiday season?  Tell me in the comments, and have a happy December!

Friday Playlist: Baby's First Playlist

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My ridiculously cute daughter

My wife and I recently had a baby girl (Alison, pictured above sporting a stylish baby towel).  Parenting, of course, has its challenges, but it also has its joys - and a big one for me these days has been sharing music with my daughter.  Music is a primary way that I communicate with the world (hence this blog), and my communications with her have been no exception.  When I'm not singing her improvised lyrics to lullabies (or making up new songs entirely), I've been playing her different songs from my library and noting her reaction to various things.  For example, Metallica seemed to make her gassy.  She liked Aimee Mann, but only the early stuff.  And she absolutely loves Spiritualized.

So I've compiled her very first playlist, comprising some of her favorites for chillout time, dance time, and sleepytime.  I hope you enjoy it as much as she does.
PS A friend of mine gave me the gift of 3 albums from Rockabye Baby, namely lullaby versions of songs by Queen, Radiohead, and Led Zeppelin.  Those are all awesome, and have the added bonus of lulling me to sleep, but I prefer to save those as secret weapons when I'm trying to conk her out, as opposed to just putting on music for her to chill to or dance with me to, etc.

1. Spiritualized - Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space (Original Version)
   I first played this for Alison when she was only a few days old.  She had just finished eating and was in what baby experts call the "quiet alert state."  So I figured it would be a perfect time to play her some tunes.  I asked my wife what she thought a baby would like, and she said "Spiritualized?"  I said yes.  This is the original version of this song which includes lyrics from Elvis's "Can't Help Falling In Love" (the Presley estate made the band remove that portion of the song from this album's original release).  The lyrics to the whole thing are pretty perfect to sing to a new baby.  This is probably Alison's favorite song thus far (and one of my favorites, too).
2. Thievery Corporation - From Creation
   She wasn't too taken with other Thievery Corporation songs, but she really seemed to click with this one.  By "click," I mean she got quiet and stopped fussing and seemed to chill out a bit.  I assume she likes these guys because, like her parents, they're from DC.
3. K'naan - Fatima
   This song is actually kind of a downer, lyrically (it's about a young girl who was murdered, I think), but Alison really seemed to enjoy the rhythm, particularly in the chorus.  [Editor's note: I'm saying things like "seemed to," "appeared to," etc. a lot because when I asked her what she thought of all these songs, she gave me no answer, so I'm having to go on educated guesses here.]
4. Cat Power - Living Proof
   This is my favorite Cat Power song.  Alison definitely seemed to enjoy it, but I don't know if it was genuine or if she was just trying to please me because she knows it's my favorite.  Either way, she enjoyed being gently swayed in my arms to this song.  Who wouldn't?  Babies are supposed to like simple, repetitive melodies, and this one definitely fits the bill.
5. Yellow Ostrich - Mary
   She seemed pretty relaxed during this song, which seems to be about the singer's friend who's on drugs.  Alison overlooked the content and just focused on the soothing background, which definitely chilled her out.
6. The Snake The Cross The Crown - Cakewalk
   Alison definitely identified with this song's ethos of "I just want to do the things that I feel like doing, and I want to be rewarded for same."  Basically a baby's mantra.
7. The Beatles - Flying
   I've been told that when I was a wee tot, almost nothing would soothe my jangled nerves as much as when my parents would put the big headphones on me and throw on either a Beatles record or something classical.  Alison has a lot more Beatles to go (and classical, for that matter) but she seemed to take to this track - not a bad start.
8. Phish - Horn
   I first played her "Bouncing Around The Room" which I thought she'd love, but I guess it was a little too simplistic, even for her. But she loved "Horn," especially the intro/chorus. She says she's psyched to hear Trey's solos on some live versions when she's a little older.
9. Self - Uno Song
   I don't know a lot of Self songs after Subliminal Plastic Motives, but this one came up on shuffle the other week and she really dug dancing along to it.  And by "dancing" I mean "me waving her around in my arms."  Tapping out the beat on her back also seemed to help her burp, so hey - bonus.
10. Her Space Holiday - Sleepy California
    Despite this song being about the slow death of the singer's estrangement from his mother and the painful death of his grandmother, Alison really seemed to enjoy it.  She can be kind of dark that way.  Or she was sleepy, it's hard to tell sometimes.
11. The Postal Service - The District Sleeps Alone Tonight
    Another song that appeals to Alison because of her DC heritage.  Also because it's slow and soft and beautiful and has a cool beat.  And she likes when I sing along to it.
12. Jane's Addiction - Stop!
    The first time I played this for her, I bounced her up and down vigorously along with the music - taking her up really high on the downbeats, particularly during the intro and chorus.  My wife thought I was going to scramble Alison's brains, but Alison seemed genuinely happy.  And it's hard to tell if a baby's brains are scrambled anyway, they don't do all that much higher-level thinking at this phase.
13. U2 - Trip Through Your Wires
    U2 was another Amanda suggestion, and so far Alison has enjoyed most of what she heard.  This song seemed to be her favorite, meaning she fell asleep during it.  Right now her TTS (time to sleep) is a pretty indicator of how pleased she is with life overall.  Alison also seems to love "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" but I'm not a huge fan of that song, so it didn't make the list.
14. Grateful Dead - Box of Rain
    I think Amanda suggested this album, too, and Alison seemed to love every track, so I picked this one because it's awesome. And she just fell asleep to it while I was writing this, so that's one in the "plus" column.
15. Radiohead - 4 Minute Warning
    I mentioned above the lullaby version of Radiohead CD a friend gave us - it got me thinking about Radiohead songs in general, and I had an inkling that this song might be lullaby-esque enough in its current state to work on a baby.  And I was right.  I ended up playing this about 10 times in a row one night as she gently drifted off to sleep in my arms.  [Editor's note: the fact that she woke up crying 10 minutes later has nothing to do with this song, that's apparently just how babies are sometimes.]

What do you think?  For those of you without kids, what would you put on a baby playlist?  If you have kids, what have you put on a baby playlist?  What worked?  What didn't?  Tell me in the comments.

Jeff Faux: Education Profiteering -- Wall Street's Next Big Thing?

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Education Profiteering; Wall Street's Next Big Thing?
by Jeff Faux
The Real News Network

The end of the Chicago teachers' strike was but a temporary regional truce in the civil war that plagues the nation's public schools. There is no end in sight, in part because -- as often happens in wartime -- the conflict is increasingly being driven by profiteers.

The familiar media narrative tells us that this is a fight over how to improve our schools. On the one side are the self-styled reformers, who argue that the central problem with American K-12 education is low-quality teachers protected by their unions. Their solution is privatization, with its most common form being the privately run but publicly financed charter school. Because charter schools are mostly unregulated, nonunion and compete for students, their promoters claim they will, ipso facto, perform better than public schools.

On the other side are teachers and their unions who are cast as villains. The conventional plot line is that they resist change, blame poverty for their schools' failings and protect their jobs and turf.

It is well known, although rarely acknowledged in the press, that the reform movement has been financed and led by the corporate class. For over twenty years large business oriented foundations, such as Gates (Microsoft), Walton (Wal-Mart) and Broad (Sun Life) have poured billions into charter school start-ups, sympathetic academics and pundits, media campaigns (including Hollywood movies) and sophisticated nurturing of the careers of privatization promoters who now dominate the education policy debate from local school boards to the US Department of Education.

In recent years, hedge fund operators, leverage-buy-out artists and investment bankers have joined the crusade. They finance schools, sit on the boards of their associations and the management companies that run them, and -- most important -- have made support of charter schools one of the criteria for campaign giving in the post- Citizens United era. Since most Republicans are already on board for privatization, the political pressure has been mostly directed at Democrats.

Thus, for example, when Andrew Cuomo wanted to get the support of hedge fund managers for his run for governor of New York, he was told to talk to Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform, a group set up to lobby liberals on privatization. Cuomo is now a champion of charter schools. As Joanne Barkan noted in a Dissent Magazine report, privatizers are even targeting school board elections, in one case spending over $630,000 to elect two members in a local school board race last year in Colorado.

Wall Street's involvement in the charter school movement -- when the media acknowledges it -- is presented as an act of philanthropy. Perhaps, as critics claim, hedge funders are meddling in an area they know nothing about. But their motives are worthy. Indeed, since they send their own children to the best private schools, their concern for other people's children seems remarkably altruistic. "Wall Street has always put its money where its interests of beliefs lie," observed this New York Times article, "But it is far less common that so many financial heavyweights would adopt a social cause like charter schools and advance it with a laser like focus in the political realm."

Yet, with the wide variety of social causes and charitable needs -- poverty, health, housing, global warming, the arts, etc. -- why would so many Wall Streeters focus laser-like on this particular issue? The Times suggest two answers. One is that the money managers are hard-nosed, data-driven investors "drawn to the business-like way in which many charter schools are run; their focus on results primarily measured by test scores."

Twenty years ago, one might have reasonably believed that the private charter schools, which are managed to produce the numbers, would produce better outcomes -- as measured by the numbers. But the overwhelming evidence is that they do not. The single most comprehensive study, by researchers at Stanford University, found that 17 percent of charter school students performed better than their public school counterparts, 46 percent no better and 37 percent worse. Stanford's conclusions have been reinforced by virtually all of the serious research, including those at the University of California, the Economic Policy Institute and the policy research firm Mathematica.

Nor do charter schools seem more efficient. Those promoted as the most successful examples have been heavily subsidized by foundations and Wall Street donors. The film, Waiting for Superman that portrays a heroic charter school organizer fighting a selfish teachers union was widely hyped in the media -- including popular TV shows like Oprah Winfrey's. Yet, as Diane Ravitch, an assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush and a former charter school supporter turned critic, noted, the film neglected to report that the hero educator kicked out the entire first class of the school because their test scores were too low, that the school was heavily subsidized by the pro-reform foundations and that the hero took an annual salary of four hundred thousand dollars.

Neither do the data on international comparisons support either privatization in general or charter schools in particular. The foreign education systems that out score America's are government-run, unionized, monopolies. Ravitch asks: "I look around the world and I don't see any country doing this but us. Why is that?"

Good question. Although the data do not support the supposedly data-driven privatizers' claims, their enthusiasm is undiminished. In response to an op-ed by Bill Gates that crudely misrepresented the statistics on school performance, education policy analyst Richard Rothstein observed: "It is remarkable that someone associated with technology and progress should have such a careless disregard for accuracy when it comes to the education policy in which he is now so deeply involved."

The Times' other guess about Wall Street's motives was that hedge funders are attracted to the anti-union character of the charter schools. This is undoubtedly true; the attack on the pubic schools is clearly a part of the broad conservative campaign to discredit government.

Wall Street has always loathed the labor movement. And in the last decade it has had even more of a reason since corporate profits now depend more on cost cutting and less on the creation of new products. The Chief Finance Officer of JP Morgan reports that some 75% of the net increase in corporate profits between 2000 and 2007 -- before the financial crash -- was a result of cuts in workers' wages and benefits. Given that unions are the only serious vehicles for resistance to the corporate low-wage strategy, Wall Street's antipathy has become even stronger.

But today unions represent less than seven percent of private sector workers. And the influence of public sector unions on the bargaining position of workers in profit-making corporations is, certainly in the short run, negligible. So while hostility to unions plays a role, is it is not quite credible to believe that Wall Street profit maximizers would be spending so much of their time and money simply to beat up on a proxy for the private sector unions that they have already so beaten back.

As usual, when looking for what motivates capitalists in a market system, the answer is likely to have something to do with making money.

Having been rescued from the consequences of its own folly by the Bush/Obama bailouts with its de-regulated privileges intact, Wall Street is once more on the prowl for the new "big thing" -- a new source of potential profits upon which to build the next lucrative asset bubble.

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Dennis Lim: Time Has Been Kind to Heaven's Gate

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Time Has Been Kind to Heaven's Gate
by Dennis Lim
The New York Times



...

Lee Kline, the technical director at Criterion, said, “It wasn’t an option to go back to the original negative because that was what was cut down to the short version.” The original 70-millimeter prints were also in poor shape. So in a costly, complicated process, the restoration team scanned each color separation negative individually and recombined them.

“Heaven’s Gate” may be a subject Mr. Cimino has avoided for years, but once he gets going, the floodgates open. He spoke fondly of the performances of Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert, which he feels have never gotten their due. And he recalled the genesis of the project: Researching the history of barbed wire and the cattle industry, he came upon an incident known as the Johnson County War involving cattlemen, hired killers and local ranchers. He described the epilogue — the weary hero, James Averill (Mr. Kristofferson), on a yacht off the New England coast — as “a prelude to ‘The Great Gatsby,’ ” with Averill as the mogul awaiting the arrival of the young James Gatz.

Mr. Cimino also recalled his obsessive quest for authenticity that led many to characterize “Heaven’s Gate” as a runaway production. (First budgeted at less than $10 million, the film grew to a cost of $35 million, or $44 million including promotional costs, according to Mr. Bach’s book. Mr. Cimino maintains that it was “all in $32 million.”) As he put it, “Everything was problematical”: the locomotive that had to be transported to the Montana location from a Denver museum; a horse-drawn buggy whose spokes and upholstery had to be made in different states. “The movie could not be made today, even if you threw $300 million at it,” he said. “All of that is being lost. The wagons don’t exist, the skills are gone.”

Present-day viewers may well find that time has been kind to “Heaven’s Gate,” which plays more than ever like a fittingly bleak apotheosis of the New Hollywood, an eccentric yet elegiac rethinking of the myths of the West and the western, with an uncommonly blunt take on class in America. (“It’s getting dangerous to be poor in this country,” someone says. The rejoinder: “It always was.”) But this defiant last gasp of the downbeat ’70s, opening two weeks after Ronald Reagan was elected president, was plainly a movie at odds with its time.

Reached at his home in Hawaii, Mr. Kristofferson said he believes the themes of the film, with its grim view of American capitalism, were what made it so unpalatable. “It was a political assassination,” he said. He recalled getting word that Reagan’s first attorney general, William French Smith, had told studio heads that “there should be no more pictures made with a negative view of American history.”

Mr. Kristofferson, sounding more rueful than bitter, said that the reception to “Heaven’s Gate” knocked him off the Hollywood A-list for good. “I never really recovered from that,” he said, but he acknowledged that it was worse for Mr. Cimino. “It completely destroyed him.”

Mr. Cimino continued to work, albeit infrequently; he has made four features since “Heaven’s Gate,” the last one, “Sunchaser,” in 1996. A painter who began his directing career in advertising, he said that at home in Los Angeles he rarely watches movies now (and prefers to reread Pushkin and Flaubert). But he does have a film project in mind, which he hopes to shoot in digital soon.

Ms. Carelli, who was with Mr. Cimino in Venice, said that while there remain misconceptions about the making of “Heaven’s Gate,” “I don’t want to revisit old erroneous stories and try to correct them.” She added, “Now the film finally speaks for itself, and it has the final word.”

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The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate

Spike Lee's Bamboozled and the Representation(s) of Race

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"How do images affect our hearts and minds? How do images influence our everyday lives, our techno-scientific practices, our connections and disconnections, our conscious and unconscious desires and fears? How do images show up in the clothes we wear, in the ways we walk, and the objects we want? How do images influence the foods we eat or don’t eat and the ideas and feelings we have about our selves and others? How do some images enter our flesh, captivate us, fascinate us, or arouse our senses? How is it that other images put us to sleep? How do images inform our habits and fantasies, pleasures and doubts, worries and joys, rituals and rebellions? How do images shape our personal, political, cultural, moral, and religious beliefs about nature and about justice? How do images influence what we imagine to be possible and what’s not? Visual images are today everywhere entangled within a complex and contradictory web of global electronic flows of information. Images are typically racialized, gendered, territorialized, eroticized, militarized, and class-driven. Some of the most powerful images are hooked-up to hi-tech machineries of war, surveillance, and the economic marketplace. Images also lie at the core of global corporate technologies of profit, control and advantage. How might such images be best understood? How might they be critically subverted, transformed, or remade?" -- Stephen Pfohl, "The Power of Images" (2011)

Bamboozled (USA: Spike Lee, 2000: 135 mins)

Baker, Courtney R. "Misrecognized: Looking at Images of Black Suffering and Death." [Dissertation: Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University, 2008]

Bellamy, Jason and Ed Howard. "The Conversations: Bamboozled." The House Next Door (February 25, 2012)

Benton, Michael Dean. "James Allen: Without Sanctuary; The Debate Over the Hanging of a Barack Obama Effigy on the Campus of the UK; The History of Lynching in America." Dialogic (November 3, 2008)

---. "Learning From "El Mexterminator" and "Cyber Vato": Social Anxiety as a Performative Pedagogy." Reconstruction 2.4 (Fall 2003)

---. "Response to a Lynching Joke in an Email." Dialogic (January 18, 2011)

---. "Theodore W. Allen: The Invention of the White Race." Dialogic (January 23, 2008)

Classified X (France/USA/UK: Mark Daniels, 1998: 53 mins)

Delue, Rachel Ziady. "Envisioning Race in Spike Lee's Bamboozled." Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader. ed. Janice D. Hamlet and Robin R. Means Coleman. NY: Peter Lang, 2009: 61-88.

Dyson, Michael Eric, Tavis Smiley and Cornel West. "The N Word." Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations [from the originals CD, reposted on YouTube: May 11, 2011].

Easton, Lee and Kelly Hewson. "Reflections on the Interplay of Race, Whiteness and Canadian Identity in a Film Studies Classroom.” Reception (Summer 2010): 116-148.

Elam, Harry J. Jr. "Spike Lee's Bamboozled." Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture ed. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Kennel Jackson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005: 346-362.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Originally published in French in 1952. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. NY: Pluto Press, 2008.

Feeling, Kara. "Passing for Human: Bamboozled and Digital Humanism." Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader. ed. Janice D. Hamlet and Robin R. Means Coleman. NY: Peter Lang, 2009

"Frantz Fanon." Wikipedia (No Date)

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks (United Kingdom: Isaac Julien, 1996: 70 mins)

Gilmer, Marcus. "The Controversy of Race in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled." Not Coming to a Theater Near You (July 17, 20004)

Gray, Herman. "Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000) and Black Masculinity and Visual Culture." [CCTP695: American Popular Culture -- History, Story & Analysis, Georgetown University] (Fall 2005)

Holden, Stephen. "Bamboozled (2000)FILM REVIEW; Trying On Blackface in a Flirtation With Fire." The New York Times (October 6, 2000)

hooks, bell. "Revolutionary Attitude." Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992: 1-8.

Lott, Eric. "Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy." Representations #39 (Summer 1992): 23-50.

The N Word (USA: Todd Williams, 2004: 86 mins)

Metzler, Jessica. "Genuine Spectacle: Sliding Positionality in the Works of Paulene E. Hopkins, Zora Neal Houston, Langston Hughes, and Spike Lee." [Thesis: Master of Arts in English, Florida State University, 2006]

Michael, Dennis. "Facing up to the past: Bamboozled offers unblinking look at race, perceptions." CNN (October 4, 2000)

Patton, Tracy Owens and Deborah McGriff. "Ya Been Took, Ya Been Hoodwinked, Ya Been Bamboozled: Mau Maus, Diaspora, and the Mediated Misrepresentation of Blackness." Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader. ed. Janice D. Hamlet and Robin R. Means Coleman. NY: Peter Lang, 2009: 89-102.

Pfohl, Stephen Images and Power (SC532 Course Syllabus, Boston College, 2011)

Powell, Gerald A., Jr. "A Rhetoric of Symbolic Identity: An Analysis of Spike Lee's X and Bamboozled." [Dissertation: Doctor of Philosophy in Communication and Culture, Harvard University, 2003]

Riggs, Marlon. "The Making of Color Adjustment." POV (1992)

Slaner, Stephen E. and Sandra Clyne. "The Use of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled to PromoteDifficult Dialogues on Race." Human Architecture (Winter 2008): 7-16.

Sutherland, Jean-Anne and Kathryn Feltey. "Introduction." Cinematic Sociology: Social Life in Film. eds. Jean-Anne Sutherland and Kathryn Feltey. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2013: 1-23.

Tinson, Christopher. Framing Blackness: African Americans and Mass Media in the 20th Century [Hampshire College: Spring 2011]

Ward, Jerry W. "Prologue to an Essay on African American Satire." Black Magnolias 2.2 (2003): 4-9.