• Eagles in the Chicken Coop: fun concept – juxtaposing serious art with porn – asking the question ‘What would it be like to try to make the one in the genre and marketing requirements of the other’? Felt a bit long, but still inspiring for anyone interested in cross-genre work, which I am.
• Tall Tale Tanner: this short was just OK
• Superheroes: this was significant – I didn’t like the formula approach (show us how kooky real life superheroes are in the first 75% of the film, then humanize them for the last 25%). I’d like to have seen more even portrayal throughout. But still fascinating.
• 40 Years: great short – substantive treatment of trauma, loss, and guilt – good special effects – creepy
• Beware of Christians: a fundamentalist tract disguised as an indie film – this purported to be about a group of kids challenging conventional fundamentalist evangelicalism by going to a different part of the world (and seeing how others do it) – instead, it was a bible verse every 5-minutes, devolved into talk of “what god thinks” about things, and “what god wants from us” – in other words, a fundamentalist sermon, with all the presumption untouched by ‘doing’ Europe. What they did in Europe was look for examples, on location, of sins to attack. For materialism, a futuristic car. In other words, they didn’t change – they spent their time doing what fundamentalists do – worrying about what other people are doing wrong. I walked out of this filth.
• Tourette Syndrome: informative documentary short – in the first 2min, I thought it was going to be a mockumentary and I wouldn’t like it – but it was a bite-sized piece elucidating the condition and its affect on kids physically, emotionally, and socially – I would like to have seen more about the other 360 days/year of these kids’ lives in the context of a conformist public school system, to compliment the focus on the wonderful camp some of them can go to
• I Do, I Don’t: this documentary was non-judgemental, and I liked that – I would like to have seen more challenging of the assumptions behind fundamentalism and how it conceives of marriage – it struck me as quite weak on that point – I couldn’t give it a fair viewing though, after being set up by “Beware of Christians”. Even the festival producer noted that maybe it was the wrong arrangement. Still, I think the trend toward completely unbiased portrayals of potentially destructive communities leaves us without enough of that ‘investigative journalism’ approach of looking at the tough questions. The film synopsis asks “but to what end?”. Yeah, but it was disappointing to be left without any attempts at answers to that question. Maybe a better question is less open-ended – “does fundamentalism set up relationships for either a loss of meaning or complete failure?” I dunno. But I’d had about enough after 4hrs (with the previous feature) of hearing people talk about “what god wants”.
• Stay With Me Jesus: Can’t say much about this. Sort of incomprehensible. Shadow puppet Jesus character set to a pop song.
• Bottle: Fun, romantic, bleak in the end – suggests that romance is great, but when you act on it, things tend to go permanently awry.
• Eat the Sun: A portrayal of how stupid people can be, and how easily they can get bilked. This was fairly non-judgmental in the first 85% of the film (What is it with that trend? Has this generation of filmmakers lost the ability to ask questions or challenge underlying presuppositions?) but in the last 15% it exposed the guru as a probable fraud, and then focused on how people believe what they see on web sites, because it sounds convincing (to their presuppositions, again). I found it kind of tedious, but not bad.
• The Philosopher: Jean Reno was in this one and, as always, he’s a superb comedic actor. It’s like being pleasantly surprised by Kevin Kline. The film, though, regardless of casting, was superb. For a 16min short, it asked substantive questions. It was light on answers, but I still liked it a lot.
• Gabi On the Roof: I found this one vulgar to the point of being tedious. It’s one thing to show us the struggles of people living in NYC who can’t afford to – it’s another to just show us their unrelated struggles based on being the shallow, insipid people that they are. Dumped this one early.
• Holy Rollers: I commented on this one [here].

So far, the festival is pretty good. It’s hard for indie film fests to be bad. I’d like to see more attention to the voting – a common weak point at festivals. Tulsa’s Dead Center did better this year, but consistency is the key, and I disapprove of letting people vote for the same film as many times as they’re able. That was actually encouraged at Southern Winds Film Festival, which made the awards seem a bit corrupt. Nothing like that here, but I was disappointed that there were no ballots available after The Philosopher and Eat the Sun. I wanted to register my enthusiasm for the former, and ‘meh’ for the latter. And once the voting seems tainted, I usually stop voting, so it kind of detracted from the festival for me.

I do have to say the guy who brought the films to Tulsa is doing an admirable job. I found him receptive to feedback on the arrangement, and he seems to be deeply interested in putting together something of substance. The venue also, was superb. The Circle Cinema in Tulsa is a bit pricey on refreshments, and could use healthy options like fruit, pure juices, and crunchy granola bars, hey also made it very comfortable and professional – far more impressive than a lot of Oklahoma venues I’ve been in. For that matter, Living Arts was great, too. They actually ran after the people who left early to ask for their feedback on the film selection. How open-minded is that? Good job, guys.

Overall, a great festival.

The thing is, we are children of Piaget and Erickson, philosophers of child development now thrown by better and more recent science from their high horses for all that their myths live on in the textbooks. We know now that what parents and teachers, school administrators and government  officials claimed to know – that children are incapable of complex cognitive processes and moral reasoning – was never known – it was, in fact, a delusion – or worse, a bigotry. Children live in rich, robust, thorough worlds of the mind, ones which can surpass, by reducing the very distractions that later “education” will produce, the clarity so elusive to adults. Why then, do we assume a child cannot truly weigh her life against an intangible value – the concrete over the discrete?

What’s more, why do we persist in valuing one human life over another, younger over older, white over non-white, 1st world over 3rd world, rich over poor, educated over skilled, official over unofficial, cerebral over creative? The idea that somehow a child’s life is of greater value goes unquestioned in this culture – but it’s an assumption that carries the premise that lives can be differently weighed and unevenly valued – rather than that each life is of limitless value and is irreplaceable. Far from being universal, or even very old, this Victorian-borne attitude is but the persistent vestige of  a particular people in a particular locale at a particular time. It is not an objective truth, and so it is the job of art, among other things, to question it, to ask “what if” or “what about this” or “what are we missing” or “what if we’re wrong?” or better “what if that’s not the whole story”.

And yet a film that asks such questions about such taboo subjects,  a film that questions the unaccountable absolutes of the dominant culture, that challenges the preeminence of the critical cul de sac, will not play in mainstream theatres or make it to cable or satellite TV, for all the channels and “choices” you may think you have. You rarely have the choice to hear such questions asked effectively. That’s what this film does.

What’s funny: in some conservative, whitebread Midwestern homes across the US, children are taught to defend the home and the family. Young boys are taught to protect their mothers. Well? Doesn’t this imply that children can put themselves on the line for adults or for an intangible value? Is it so unheard of? Among the ancient Christians who gave their lives in the Roman pogroms against them (under Diocletian, or example, in the 3rd and 4th century), were whole families. Children were counted worthy among the adults, who presented themselves unbowed and unsubmitted to the authority of Caesar, to likewise give their lives alongside adults to the lions and the flames and in the mines – to make the ultimate sacrifice. They were all ages, and they understood the world in varying ways, as adults do (despite the myth that children understand only dimly and adults grasp the world completely). Who of us, in fact, ever understands the world fully, so clearly and so well that we ever achieve a clarity that cannot grow and learn – that’s one of the myths about adulthood that compliment the Piagetan and Ericksonian myths of childhood. As St. Job said, “Wisdom is not always with the aged.”

For that matter, can a mentally handicapped person give his life for others? Think The Green Mile. What about someone in a coma? We have organ donors who do it all the time. And it’s a fair question that if sons are trained to stand for their families – consisting also of adults, and we send them off to war arguably trained in violence since they were weaned and given a rifle before they even have all their whiskers, and we aren’t gender-biased, then why not also daughters – why can’t girls make choices about life and death?

Not flinching from this at all, this film makes the liberal choice of a female heroine as the child. I met the daughter of the filmmaker, who starred in this film, and I told her that one day she could look back on this film – and her participation – as making a case for the full humanity of children everywhere, and particularly of little girls (at once the most protected and the most vulnerably prized members of our culture). That’s just the point: the full humanity of someone is not expressed if she is regarded as incapable of buying, with her total self, something transcendent. If she cannot give her life for something she holds great and true, then she’s not a person, in the fullest sense in which we mean it. So this film is a tacit argument  for the full, unabashed personhood of children, specifically pre-pubescent children, and specifically of pre-pubescent girls.

This is something the sexualization of young girls in our culture has pretended to acknowledge, but actually denies and for darker purposes – precisely because it revels in the presumed cognitive and moral innocence of children, and even transforms that (as corporate marketing interests do) into a commodity. It’s time we equipped young boys  and girls with greater cognitive and moral sophistication precisely by acknowledging them capable of real depth in the first place. Denying them this perpetuates young girls as objects to be variously protected even from themselves or preyed upon by unsavory institutions – instead of expecting them to live as full persons. In other words, making girls out to be perpetual innocent imps, far from protecting them, makes them more dangerously vulnerable to exploitation in the world. I think, subtly the film addresses this – after all, it juxtaposes the older, rough man who wants something, something illicit, from a young girl wearing schoolgirl clothes and angel wings  - and yet, it gives her a unique vision that the adults in the story don’t have. Whatever is working in the filmmakers’ shared subconscious, I think these core issues aren’t missed. To those who ask the director how he could let his daughter star in such a role (something he mentioned to me after the showing), I think he might say that he’s doing it precisely because he’s her father, and this is both a gift and a way of protecting her by not denying her personhood.

Think about this: if we don’t acknowledge that young girls have, effectively, full personhood – morally and cognitively, what does that say about the massive corporate marketing efforts that we allow – indeed that every sector of our society is in some wise involved in upholding and sustaining – aimed at young girls. Ever seen the Hannah Montana clothing lines? What has your daughter asked you to buy recently? You can’t have it both ways. You can’t claim little girls can’t make fully human moral decisions, don’t have the framework or capacity for doing so, and still justify allowing them to interact with a monolithic engine of manipulation aimed at reshaping their values in the name of fashion and ‘art’.

In fact, it is only when you acknowledge that they do have the necessary apparatus to make moral decisions that you make sense of helping them develop a moral sophistication, an intellectual one, that is capable of discriminating between influences from the culture. I think it’s actually the fact that moral and intellectual education is ‘hard’ and requires much patience, concentration, and real work that’s behind the general abdication of responsibility by parents in this area. Justify letting your child become the pawn of corporate marketers by saying she’s not morally sophisticated enough to receive any really complex cognitive education (in logic, rhetoric, etc.), and yet “protect” her from having to consider and weigh choices and values that are presumably ‘too hard’ for her – so we perpetuate a world in which, for women, often, everything – or at least the general  pattern of her life – is decided. I don’t buy it. And neither does science, anymore. And neither does this film.

So I congratulate Chris and his class on producing a film that, far from morally ambiguous, asks a number of excellent questions for the dominant culture which generally responds, as it does to most things independent, by ignoring them and making sure you and I don’t get a chance to see them. Hence those of us who seek out independent theatres, films, and festivals and will keep doing so as a means, if nothing else, of at least hearing those questions.

Oh, and I know this is not the only time this particular question has been asked. Speculative fiction (think Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, and others) asks such things all the time. Likewise in the young adult speculative fiction genre, the robust life of children is acknowledged. But film is a special medium. You can ignore the books on a shelf at a bookstore. But if you sit down in a theatre, turn out the lights, and the visual and auditory reality of the screen fills your senses, all you can do to escape it is walk away – and then you know you have walked away – and the cognitive dissonance of that is just as effective, haunting you with what you know you turned away from, while it interests or delights or provokes those who stayed. And we don’t ask these questions of each other in our films. We ask made up, bullshit questions, like those in Losing Isaiah or Indecent Proposal. We ask “what if, you are still who you are, but you’re in this situation?” We rarely succeed in asking, “what if we as a people, or as a group, or as yourself are not who you think you are?” I think this is why Shyamalan is given such a hard time. He’s a great, epic filmmaker, who blunders sometimes, but keeps rising to the challenge to ask unusual questions about what a person is vs. what the culture says it is. This film does that.

Other venues: Seattle : Dallas

I’d have liked to have seen more interviews w. bohemian barristas with dreadlock bags instead of the high-end types who dress like table waiters. They should visit Portland, not Seattle – that’s so yesterday. The part with the two Starbucks girls (at #1 in Seattle) was like watching Miss Teen South Carolina (“because, uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps”) all over again, but in stereo. Like, toe-duh-lee. “Wow, like, how much bigger can we get? I think it’s about bringing people together…” I was hurling my version of insults at the screen (“You’re Blockbusters! You’re McDonalds! You’re Walmart!”

By the way, a maxim I put into play some years before that beauty pageant: “If you have to say the words ‘she’s actually quite intelligent’, then she actually isn’t. Even if she was on the honor roll. Even if she got straight A’s. Even if she took AP English. Intelligence is self evident.”

The statistics in this film didn’t drown you, but were artfully reduced to a helpful and thoughtful stream instead of a barrage. The Black Gold web site (google it) likewise has a coffee calculator. Too bad they weren’t able to draw the connection though, with the Bear Stearns types. The same farks who put so many people out of their homes during this larceny we’re calling a “recession”, ensure that coffee growers in South America actually pay *us* 30cents/kilo, while they starve as we drink their coffee. Suck that down in your “frappuccino”.

OK, so now for the politics: I prefer fair trade coffee to direct trade coffee, where direct trade means the US coffee house runs its own farm. Quite simply, I don’t think the answer to having starved Ethiopians to death for so long is to just buy my coffee elsewhere. I think it’s to give them an honest price. Not a “fair” price, either. Ask 50% of the US what’s fair, and they say it’s whatever the market bears – in other words, whatever slightly more clever people can get it down to on Wall Street, and we’re back to slavery again. Yes, slavery. Just because the chains are invisible, doesn’t mean they aren’t twice as effective. What do you call people who generate luxury items for us while their own children go malnourished, uneducated, and sick? I call it slavery. I don’t like prettying thing up so I can feel good about my hair and my clothes, like Miss South Carolina.

I also am not very fond of this crap being pulled by coffee houses like one near me that says “Ours is 60% fair trade.” What the heck is that? That’s like saying ‘I’m 60% honest. 60% ethical. I don’t rob, starve, and bankrupt people 60% of the time.’ If AIG sold coffee, that’s what they’d say. Imagine, ‘Our securities are 60% secure.’ Thank God they’re not making condoms.

I’m not saying everything has to be “certified”. We’ve seen how well that works with the fake organics out there, like Horizon products. Enjoying your high priced lie, you Nordstroms-wearing yuppies? Buy Stremicks Heritage dairy. But I also think “fairly traded” can be a similar cover for inside deals. So you get these ethical nihilists who say we can’t know anything and nothing is pure, so do what you will. They’re like ethical mules (think about it). I think a smarter answer is that you can’t rely on labels and catch phrases by themselves. There’s absolutely no substitute for paying attention, knowing exactly where your food comes from, and caring about what it means. That’s the whole thing – yuppies are about labels and tags. Why do you think they buy shirts with other people’s names on them, and call that quality? If you’re no smarter than a billboard, or not willing to be, you’ve got nothing to say that isn’t a tautology. This is Old Navy. That’s Banana Republic. There’s nothing that replaces actually paying attention, thinking, and being mentally involved in the logical process that generates what you touch, take, and tell.

Oh, and one more designation “single origin”. Sure that’s important but, by itself, it’s like Starbucks’ “Fair Trade Blend” (as if a sprinkle of goodness turns a mountain of shite into pretty, lovely, fairy dust with smile sprinkles and rainbows). It’s like saying something was produced with ‘voluntary labor’. That’s very sweet, but it doesn’t mean they weren’t starving to death while they were laboring. We’ve all seen this nonsense with 3/4 of the “green energy” advertising. Think “happy cows”.

Anyway, the Black Gold forums have some interesting discussions (in terms of topics). A lot of the actual talk is bluster, obfuscation, and disinformation, but you get that in most forums.

We were talking last night about this, and I reaffirmed that we can’t fight everything, solve everything, but we’re not absolutists who then insist on that or nothing, and so crash and burn into a nihilistic, valueless, no fight at all attitude. The absolutists and nihilists are essentially the same in their initial assumption of all or nothing. I care about my coffee being organic, shade-grown, fairly traded, sustainable, high-quality (why buy swill just because it’s technically certified in one of these areas?). But the fact that we will never achieve all we want, does not excuse us from seeking it, or from doing anything. I look around my house and guess its contents and materials contain several thousand devastating and harmful substances that have wreaked untold suffering on the poor. And havoc upon the world, which is havoc upon the poor, because the poor are more symbiotically affected by the world than the rich who spend their wealth on insulating themselves from it. You and I don’t drink directly from a river, or bathe in it. We can afford to ship water, filter it, treat it, or drink something else. I will do something. It won’t be enough. But I will do something, and seek to do more, and constantly work on growing my response. I was born rich, among a people that consume most of the world’s resources, luxuriating in excess provided by the slavery of others. As our diplomats say, “We *will* open markets, by whatever means necessary.” We’ve observed those means, regardless of the party in power, and still observe them, whether its napalm on someone’s village or trade sanctions against their farm. I can’t go back and undo the context into which I was born. But I will refuse to let up pressure to change that context and, at a minimum, reduce my contribution to harming others and the world. As Our Lord said, “Whatever and whenever you have done to the poor, it was me as much as them.” Lord have mercy.

[Best article] I’ve read on this is from the owner of Intelligentsia coffee in Chicago.

Full documentary is here:

Remember, this kind of censorship still goes on. Nova documentaries before 1996 (before Exxon/Mobile became a primary underwriter), like The Deadly Deception (about human experimentation on syphilitic black sharecroppers) have been removed from the Nova archives online, made unavailable on video, and nearly all mention hidden, as though Nova didn’t start broadcasting until the late nineties. Again, if you want it badly enough, you can still get it.