Archive | Country Matters

‘Schindler’s List’ in Trump’s America

The first time I saw Schindler’s List, it enraged me.

Admittedly, this was not a typical response. Upon its release 25 years ago, the film was touted as the crowning glory of director Steven Spielberg’s career and 1993’s greatest cinematic achievement. At the Oscars that year, the adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s historical novel about true-life figure Oskar Schindler won seven Academy Awards, including Spielberg’s first for best director.

It wasn’t just that the 3-hour-and-16-minute film was expertly crafted. Though documentaries like “Night and Fog” (1955) and “Shoah” (1985) had already catalogued the ravages of the Third Reich, Spielberg’s feature about a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand Polish Jews ignited younger generations’ commitment to “never again” just as Holocaust survivors and witnesses were beginning to die out. In a 2013 interview, the director said, “The shelf life of ‘Schindler’s List’ has renewed my faith that films can do good work in the world.”

Really, as an introduction to both the horror and the goodness of which humans are capable, it was the ultimate Spielberg vehicle. And that was my problem in a nutshell. As the film’s credits rolled and people around me sniffed, I stormed out of the theater, saying, “Leave it to Spielberg to find the feel-good story of the Holocaust.” Continue Reading →

The Desert Dystopia That Is Now

Pictured here please find the AV materials I made to accompany last night’s dream. It was one of the worst I’ve ever had.

I was stuck in the California desert in some sort of sprawling hotel-convenience store complex in which I was nonetheless expected to look and act camera-ready for a tv show for which I was about to get picked up though I had to walk six miles in the desert to meet the car. Also the show itself was morally bankrupt and as I was walking there I got attacked by a bunch of white teenaged male meth addicts with huge seeping herpes lesions on their faces and penises hanging out of their zippers like stunted third legs; naturally these young men were slinging huge guns over their shoulders. I got away by insulting their intelligence and the size of their organs–through humiliating them, essentially, which is how I have resisted most male sexual assault and harassment in my waking life–but I lost my way in the process. I was walking in circles having lost my phone computer clothing wallet and o my context; was bleeding and naked and dangerously deydrated and sunburnt; and was sorry but not shocked that the only response of the tv people, when they finally stumbled upon me, was annoyance that I was not more camera-ready. Continue Reading →

Not Giving Up Just Yet

“I’m a wild seed again/Let the wind carry me.” I woke with such a strong urge to listen to the whole For the Roses album. I fear it’s because Joni is slipping from us for good—she’s been in between worlds for a while now—but more I think it’s because her tranquil turbulence, her third eye in the storm, is exactly what we need right now. I love you, Joni Mitchell. I love everyone else too.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy