Everybody Knows Leonard Cohen Has Departed

This is the song the first brought me to Leonard Cohen.  It played repeatedly (as I remember, but I know the brain plays tricks) in the movie Pump Up The Volume about a high school kid who sets up a pirate radio station in his house that catches on with the kids in his high school, but no so much with the principal.  I checked Netflix - they have it on DVD, but not streaming.*

I think you'll find this song pretty current.










*I did find Pump Up The Volume on youtube.  And "Everybody Knows" starts during the credits,  three minutes into the film.  This isn't a great copy, it looks like heads are cut off and it's got ads embedded  in the movie.

Snowden - The Movie

I've avoided posts about Edward Snowden.  Yes, I've mentioned him now and then, but I've held off from writing about him in much detail.  My dissertation was on privacy.  I've studied whistle-blowing.  Daniel Ellsberg is one of my heroes.  I knew I was primed to be supportive of Snowden and wanted to hold off.  (And whether I say something about him or not isn't going to matter in the bigger scheme of things anyway.)

I wanted to know more.  Well, I really wanted to drop by and talk to him for a couple of days and see if he was the guy I wanted him to be or not.

I've watched some of his tapes and I've pretty much settled, for the time being, on the Snowden the whistleblower side.  He's the good guy who believed in the ideals of his country and was willing to risk his freedom, even his life, to keep his country honest.  That's the narrative that fits most comfortably with what I've seen and heard about Snowden.


So we went to the 12:50 pm showing of Oliver Stone's Snowden today.  I did read a New York Times review when I was checking last night about when the movie played here.  After seeing the movie I'd concur with the reviewer.

This may be the movie that Oliver Stone has been practicing for.  It's restrained and straightforward.  It goes back and forth between the 'right now' and flashbacks.  The 'right now' starts with his arrival in Hong Kong.  The film is totally consistent with my sense of who Snowden is and why he did what he did.

The surprises for me were:

• how conservative he was politically and personally
• how he voiced concerns to others he worked with and for while he was an employee or contractor with the various security agencies
• that he suffered from epileptic seizures

So, until others can present a more convincing narrative - along with supportive evidence - I'm more than willing to call on Obama and others to find a way to let Snowden come back to the US honorably.  Don't make this like the Cuba sanctions that go on forever or our marijuana phobia because we can't admit we're wrong.

There are more thoughts, but I need to do other things and this movie is worth seeing.  It's well made and is entertaining.  At the very least, it should further open the discussion how we keep spy agencies accountable.  And how we treat those who call them on it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is great in the starring role. And I liked how the real Snowden's image replaces the actor's at the very end.

"Roy Cohn was one of the most loathsome characters in American history, so why did he have so many influential friends?"

Or,  how and why do 'good' people allow 'evil' to flourish?

I posted about the relationship between Donald Trump and Roy Cohn the other day.  But then I saw lots of other articles on line about Cohn.  From all accounts, Cohn was cold.  Heartless and ruthless.  Yet the rich and famous surrounded him.  Barbara Walters was a lifelong friend.  Nancy and Ronald Reagan had him (and his young boyfriend) over at the White House.

So, after noting his close relationship with Trump, and what that might mean about Trump, I started thinking about how a man like that was so well protected by supposedly respectable people.  (Of course, one possibility is that they weren't as respectable as people think.)

I  had this post part way done.  Then Wednesday I got an email from Netflix saying that Spotlight, the Academy Award winning film about the Boston Globe  reporters who exposed the breadth of the Catholic Church molestation  and its coverup, was now available.  It was a movie we'd missed and wanted to see.  (It's a very good film.  A modern day All the President's Men.)  It too raises the same questions - why did so many people - in the church and out - look the other way?

So back to the main question from Robert Sherrill at The Nation::

"Roy Cohn was one of the most loathsome characters in American history, so why did he have so many influential friends?"

Here are some excerpts from the Sherrill article that make my (and his) point:

"Von Hoffman reminds us that Cohn "lived in a matrix of crime and unethical conduct," "derived a significant part of his income from illegal or unethical schemes and conspiracies," and thrived "cheek by jowl with so many men of sharp practice and dim luster in business and politics" that Cohn's pal Joey Adams, the comedian, would say of Cohn's dinner parties, "If you're indicted you're invited."

Yet,  the 'respectable' showed up too:

But important unindicted people were invited, too. And they went. Large slices of the upper crust of New York and Washington snuggled up to him, laughed and entertained one another with stories about his crimes as though they were choice insiders' jokes, and wrestled for the privilege of partying with Cohn and his crooked and perverse friends. Why choose his company? The sleaze of Roy Cohn was no secret. Why ignore it? Why excuse it? The only important questions forced on us by these books have nothing to do with Roy Cohn, but everything to do with judges and lawyers and publishers and writers and TV stars and politicians and developers–the wealthy and the powerful people who for many years ate Roy Cohn's shit with a grin.

Unfortunately, despite reciting all the things that made Cohn loathsome,  Sherrill  doesn't actually answer the question of why.  Though he repeats the question:

"And what were people like Geraldine Ferraro and Alan Dershowitz ("who was a somewhat well-disposed acquaintance of Roy's") doing at other Cohn parties and showing up as character witnesses when he was about to be disbarred?"

Here are some hints from a long Life magazine memorial by Nicholas Von Hoffman:

Peter Fraser, Cohn's twenty-something New Zealand born lover in Cohn's final years:

"People would ask me how could I be associated with somebody who did all these awful things in the 1950s," he says. "I don't know about any of that."

In the early 50s, a high school friend has Cohn over for dinner and overhears Cohn talking to Walter Winchell on the phone,  about destroying another newsman:

"And here was Roy Cohn saying, "Now, Walter, we could play this up, and we could do that, "and listening to this thing, I should have said, if I had had any guts, "Roy, that's outrageous", please leave. "But I didn't." - Anthony Lewis, columnist for The New York Times"

Probably the most common reason - it was symbiotic, they helped each other:

"For 40 years Roy had been taking care of the Newhouses, billionaire owners of newspapers and magazines, and for 40 years the Newhouses had been taking care of Roy."

And

"Zion, a former New York Times reporter, admits that Cohn did many favors for him, including helping him expedite a liquor license for a saloon Zion was buying, and he admits that Cohn was 'the best source I had" for news tips. In return, says Zion, he gave Cohn "advice" on how to handle the people at The Times. As for other things Zion did for Cohn, he says vaguely, "He never asked me to do anything I wouldn't have done for him anyway.'"

From SFGate:

"Many of [Barbara] Walters' other friends were horrified that she would even talk to Cohn, but what Walters reveals for the first time in 'Audition" is that Cohn somehow got a warrant for her father's arrest dismissed. .  .
Cohn liked to hint that they were more than friends "because I was his claim to heterosexuality," Walters says. 'He never said that he was gay, he never admitted to me that he had AIDS. He was a very complicated man. He died, alone, up to his ears in debt. He had been disbarred and he was hated. And I might have thought the same way, but he did something when my father was in trouble, [and] I never forgot that.'" 

Some, suggests Elizabeth Mehren in an LA Times book review of von Hoffman's biography of Cohn, just didn't understand exactly who he was:

". . . many people knew vaguely who he was without knowing fully what he had done. Those who were of age in 1950 would remember strongly the workings of the McCarthy committee, in which Cohn, as chief counsel, was the man who routinely asked witnesses, 'Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party.' Younger people would recognize Cohn from the pages of People magazine: a regular at Studio 54, the frequent dinner companion of Barbara Walters, a guest at the White House, the lawyer of rich and famous divorcees."

Another quote from Mehren offers another explanation why so many hovered around Cohn's light:

". . . as Steven Brill, editor in chief of the American Lawyer and a longtime critic of Cohn has said, Roy Cohn was like an automobile accident, the kind that makes rubberneckers stop and stare. "People are drawn to Roy Cohn that way," Brill told Von Hoffman."

Ultimately, it would appear that there was a giant web of connections and favors and threats.  Cohn could help you if you helped him, and he could harm you if you crossed him.  Sort of like a mafia boss - at least one of whom was part of Cohn's circle.

And in the movie Spotlight, we see how the Catholic church dominated Boston.   So many people in so many important positions - in the police department, the courts, the newspapers, the government, the businesses -  were part of the Catholic club, had gone to Catholic schools, been altar boys, still were members of the church, gave to Catholic charities.  As some of the victims said, when a priest talked to you, it was like talking to God.  The web was more than human.

And the key people at the Boston Globe were also part of the club and had ignored evidence that several different people had left them years before the movie begins.  It takes an outsider - a new editor, a Jew new to Boston -  to assign the story to Spotlight, the investigative team at the Globe. And it's an Armenian-American attorney who's been doggedly filing lawsuits in the court system for victims.  Other attorneys had been settling cases directly with the church, yielding small monetary settlements that required confidentiality agreements guaranteeing the secrets would be kept.

Ultimately, I think that if we can get deep into another person's psyche, we can understand why they do the terrible things they do.  That doesn't mean we excuse them.  But unless we understand why people go bad - whether it's some inherent biological cause or environmental factors, or both - we can never design ways to minimize the number of people that go bad, so to speak.  Talking about 'God's will" or  "agents of Satan" doesn't cut it for me.  That suggests there is nothing that could have been done to set the individual onto a more positive life path.

And with Cohn, some argue it was feelings of insecurity in a society that looked down on Jews and did worse to homosexuals.  Michael Kruse writes in Politico:

"He was a tangle of contradictions, a Jewish anti-Semite and a homosexual homophobe" 

His self-loathing, in this narrative, made Cohn fearful of exposure and humiliation, and thus he covered his own vulnerability as a Jew with his own anti-semitism and as a homosexual with his own homophobia.


The Takeaway

Cohn - and to a lesser extent the Catholic church portrayed in Spotlight - is the example of this post, but not the main point.

That's the issue of how 'good' folks protect 'bad' folks.  That's the question we should all be asking about the people in the news today.  It's the issue also we should ask ourselves about the people in our own lives that we should be calling out, or at least not giving the cover of our approval.


[UPDATE May 14, 2018:  Here's a New York Magazine article from April 29,2018 that covers similar ground in more detail and explores why none of the prominent Democrats at that time called out Cohn and, in the years since, Trump.]

How We 'Know' Things Determines How We Handle Them. Old Age, Mental Health, Death

A book -

Atul Gawande's Being Mortal   

a movie

Healing Voices -  

and this

 LA Times article about medical error being the third highest cause of death behind heart attacks and cancer 

all have come together this week.  Their topics overlap somewhat, but more important, they all are great examples of the theme of this blog - how do we know what we know?

Being Mortal  is a doctor's reflections on how the medical profession thinks about and thus handles older patients.  Doctors, he tells us, are trained to cure people, but old folks aren't going to get better.  Doctors are technicians he tells us, so they fix the various discrete parts rather than the whole person.  By extension, as old folks begin to fall, get frail and forgetful, safety, not happiness, becomes the main concern of doctors and nursing homes.  What older folks need though, is to have some feeling of control of their lives.  Being ripped out of their environments and moved into sterile nursing homes takes away that control and all the cues that remind them of who they are.    

He writes extensively about the kinds of care available for people in the latter stages of life.  And he gives examples of places that are changing, compromising safety a bit to make being human the top priority - such as the doctor who stuck living (instead of the plastic) plants in every room, parakeets in every room, and dogs and cats throughout the facility and witnessed people coming back to life.  He had to overcome staff resistance as well as board and regulatory concerns, but it had huge positive effects on the people in their institution.   Here's an excerpt:

"The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant  The problem is that they have had almost no view at all.  Medicine's focus is narrow.  Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul.  Yet --- and this is the painful paradox ---  we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.  For more than half a century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns.  It's been an experiment in social engineering, putting our fates in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs.  

That experiment has failed. "

Having just watched my mother go through this, I find all this very compelling.  I first learned about the book about a year ago when my mother's neighbor recommended it and said, "Steve, keeping your mom at home was the right decision."  It was reassuring at the time, but I didn't start to read the book until it became this month's choice in my book club.

Keeping her at home where she could eat what she wanted to eat, when she wanted to eat it, at her own dining table, on her own dishes, seemed important.  Letting her sit in her wheel chair on her front porch among the plants and flowers she had tended for 60 years, seemed important.  We were incredibly lucky to find a caregiver she clicked with and to be able to pay for the caregiver and regular flights to Los Angeles.  That's a luxury.

And now I'm reading it with myself in mind.  How will my family and I deal with me when I get to that point of not being able to care for myself?  Ideally, I'll just sleep in one morning never to awaken just as I'm getting to that point, but that's wishful thinking.

Healing Voices  was a film we saw this week at the Bear Tooth about how the medical field thinks about mental health, the influence of the drug companies on doctors, and the need for patients to be treated as whole people and not to be labeled in ways that dismiss them as unable to be a part of their own recovery.  Here's the trailer:






Finally, the identification of medical error as the third highest cause of death after heart attacks and cancer, is another example.  Error wasn't considered a disease, so it wasn't listed as the cause of death, and so it wasn't identified as something to be addressed with the same urgency as diseases.  Again - how one sees the world, classifies what one sees, affects profoundly what one notices, and thus the options available for making effective changes.  An excerpt:

"The CDC currently has no good way of tracking deaths that result from medical mistakes, the authors wrote. The agency’s statistics are pulled from the International Classification of Diseases codes that appear on death certificates. These codes were instituted in 1949 and do not include any that indicate a death was the result of a mistake in the hospital."

All three examples involve a mental picture of the world that tells the person (or group of people) what the important values are and what parts of the world to pay attention to.  In each of these cases, those models left out very important aspects of the situations they were trying to improve.  Thus their solutions were inadequate and even harmful.

Each of us filter the world around us with various models that focus on some things and block out other.  I find no other explanation to why people watching the same presidential election, come to wildly different conclusions about whom to vote for.  It's important to constantly be testing one's own models.  It's also important to avoid simply dismiss the other guy as 'crazy,'  but to try to understand the model he's using to rationally get to his very different conclusions.  That's when communication and change can happen.

Where To Invade Next

We saw Michael Moore's Where To Invade Next Wednesday night.

It's simplistic.  It's silly.  The premise is that Michael Moore is going to invade other countries and take home their best ideas.  He plants an American flag in these various nations and claims their good ideas for the US.  And most of the people he talks with, tell him with a big smile, he's welcome to take the ideas.

In the end, I thought the films strongest point was that the different parts of the world are doing many things better than we do in the US.  While one could quibble that Moore cherry picks the best examples and ignores the problems, the overall impact is simply showing Americans the level of services that people get in other countries, and he quite cleverly gets many of his foreign informants to say that the idea originally came from the US.  Presumably to appease those Americans who can't deal with the idea that the US isn't number one for everything.

It reminds of me of when the Chinese showed American films that displayed the levels of crime and discord in the US, what the Chinese saw were typical American kitchens, that everyone had a car, etc.  That's what this film has to leave Americans with - the realization that there places around the world where they have figured out how to do things much better than we are doing them.   Even Trump supporters can't help but see that the rest of the world isn't living in poverty under evil socialist tyrants.

We see, for example, vacation time for workers in Italy,  school lunches in France, mid-day lunches at home in Spain, prisons in Norway, schools in Finland, drug enforcement in Portugal (no one is arrested or imprisoned there for using drugs;  instead they have treatment programs), and women's health clinics in Tunisia, as well as the position of women in Iceland where he interviews the first woman president who was elected back in the 1970s.  

I was wondering whether I should even try to write about this film.  And then I saw this article in the
 Los Angeles Times today by a visiting professor whose kid spent time in a Finish school.  It really backs up everything Moore was trying to present.

"In Finland, children don’t receive formal academic training until the age of 7. Until then, many are in day care and learn through play, songs, games and conversation. Most children walk or bike to school, even the youngest. School hours are short and homework is generally light. Unlike in the United States, where many schools are slashing recess, schoolchildren in Finland have a mandatory 15-minute outdoor free-play break every hour of every day. Fresh air, nature and regular physical activity breaks are considered engines of learning. According to one Finnish maxim, 'There is no bad weather. Only inadequate clothing.'”

"In class, children are allowed to have fun, giggle and daydream from time to time. Finns put into practice the cultural mantras I heard over and over: “Let children be children,” “The work of a child is to play,” and 'Children learn best through play.'”

Now we need more first hand experience articles say for Norwegian prisons and with American students getting free education at the University of Slovenia (well, Moore did interview some who went there to avoid the high cost of US college tuition.)

I suspect the segments that will irritate believers in hard work and discipline the most are the Norwegian prisons and Finnish schools.  For some conservatives, treating people with respect is difficult.  Kids and prisoners should be disciplined and punished if they disobey the rules.  But these examples suggest the hardline discipline and control models may not be as good as the decency and respect models.

Despite the political rhetoric, we aren't the best at everything.  We're good at a lot of things, but we can learn a lot from other countries.  This film is a good start for folks who consciously or unconsciously think, while complaining, that we are the best at everything.


After writing this I found the NY Times review, which is more or less on the same vein as mine.  Though he felt it was more a bad reflection of the US rather than a good reflections of the places Moore visited.

Updates On Old Posts - Porno Condom Use in LA, Paxson's Poster And Creole Cowboy

Life moves along and things I've blogged about evolve.

An LA Times story the other day says a settlement looks close in the lawsuit against an LA vote to require porn actors to wear condoms.  The original post was in 2012  when voters approved the measure, and there was a follow up in 2013 when the first court decision came out. Apparently the condoms will stay, but the enforcement will be weaker.





And this year's Anchorage Folk Festival poster was done by Paxson Woelber, who I interviewed in 2009 when two of his short animations were in the Anchorage International Film Festival.




And don't miss the last night of the festival - Sunday, starting at 7pm at Wendy Williamson auditorium at UAA.  Jeffrey Broussard & the Creole Cowboys will play again.  The festival is free and it's one of the events that makes Anchorage a great place to live.

Is this part an update?  Well, the poster leads to the festival and I've got posts from previous folk festivals.
2015.  
2014.
2011.
2011.  This one has Kabala Shish Kebab.
2008.  Cajun and Creole is pretty popular up here.


There's a bit of video from Friday night to give you a sense of what they're like.  And only a sense, since I recorded this with my tiny Canon Powershot.  If you go to the festival, you'll get to hear their sound for real.  They'll be a number of other acts before them, you can come when you want.  Friday the auditorium was packed.

Why Do People Confess To Stuff They Didn't Do?

We watched Making A Murderer on Netflix this last week.  I didn't know how to write about the show without talking about what happens.  But then I saw a short article in the paper yesterday saying that Steven Avery has filed an appeal.

So, if you are in the middle of watching Making of a Murderer, you probably should stop reading right now.  Not that I'm going to give any spoilers.

There's a newscast early on that talks, in the normal urgent, almost astonished tone of news broadcasts, about the confession of Brendan Dacey, the 16 year old burdened with guilt, who told investigators in gory detail how he went to his uncle's trailer and found a naked woman handcuffed to the bed.  She begged him to help her.  Instead, at his uncle's urgings, he raped her an slit her throat, and shot her in the head.  Then they burned in in the burn put out back."

Sounds pretty damning doesn't it.

But as the show continues, you see the hours it took to get the confession from this low IQ, quiet, introverted kid.  They didn't use physical force.  They didn't even raise their voices.  But they constantly told him they were there to help him - his court appointed lawyer wasn't there and his mom said she wasn't even told about the interrogation - and all he had to tell the truth.  He kept denying things until he starts guessing at what they want to hear.

"What did you do to her head?"
"Nothing"
"We know, we just need you to tell us."
On and on until
"Hit her."
"Is that all"
"Yeah."
We know there's more.
What else did you do to her head?
"Cut off her hair?"
It goes on and on until the detective asks if they shot her in the head.
"Yeah."

The cops were sure they had the right guy and they used every trick to get him to confess.  It wasn't hard with a very immature, slow, quiet teenager, with no record at all.  (At one point he's on the phone and tells his mom, "they said I was inconsistent.  What does that mean?"  His mom doesn't know either.)

Here are some pictures of his court appointed attorney's investigator interrogating Brendan.  This guy is supposed to be working for Brendan, but he's working hard to get a confession.

"Do you want to get out and have a family someday?"  Image from Making a Murderer

"Well, that means you have to cooperate with me" - Image from Making a Murderer

He tells Brendan to draw a picture of the woman handcuffed to the bed, and Brendan does as he's told.  In a conversation with him mom, when she asked why he confessed to something he didn't do, and where did he get these ideas from, he says, "I guessed what they wanted, like I do in school."

Here's that same interrogator, in the courtroom responding to Brendan's new attorney, one with experience in coerced confessions.  Remember, this guy was supposed to be on Brendan's side. He's talking about Brendan's family, the Avery's.

These people are pure evil  - image of Brendan's mother and grandmother

"A friend of mine suggested 'This is a one-branch family tree'"

"Cut this tree down.  We need to end the gene pool here"

 The only thing positive I can say about this guy is that he seems to believe in evolution if he's talking about genes.   He gets this guy to acknowledge that he was trying to get the confession to help the prosecutors' case against Brendan's uncle.  (I didn't use 'admit' because he doesn't seem to think he did anything wrong.)  Brendan's new attorney is incredulous about the interview and this testimony.

While Brendan's confession is not allowed in Steve Avery's trial, it is allowed in Brendan's.

The film makers clearly believe that Steve Avery is innocent and that Brendan's confession is coerced and pure fiction.  There's a lot they left out - the trials lasted weeks.  One tantalizing lead I would have like to know more about was when they asked if the story about the assault and murder wasn't true, where did he get his ideas.  Eventually he says he read it in a book and names the book.  The show didn't say if anyone followed up and found a copy of the book.


My flight to Seattle is about to board, so I'm going to post this, but I may add some more later.  Or make a Part 2. (My granddaughter said, "I want you to come to my birthday party."  What could I do but say yes?)  But I can say, I'll never 'hear' a reported confession the same again.



Confessions Part 2 is here.

UPDATE Jan 20:  Here's an LA Times article about LA settlements with two men wrongly convicted of murder who served 34 and 26 years in prison and who were awarded $16 and $7 million.  I don't think confessions were involved, but there was enough wrongdoing by police officers that city attorneys argued against going to court.

Potpourri: Brent Crude, Science Literacy, Burner Phones, And Hidden Netflix Codes

Some stuff that might interest folks.


1.  What is Brent crude?  When they talk about the price of oil, they mention West Texas Intermediate (WTI), and Alaska North Slope (ANS), they also mention Brent Crude.  What does that mean?  This Wikipedia post spells it out.  There's even a goose involved.


2.  Here's a good discussion on American science ignorance at Quartz, or put another way matching this blog's underlying theme, the American way of not knowing.  This physician begins by pointing out that the US as a country is one of the very best in science, but as individuals we've got a lot of ignorance. She picks out a study that defines scientific literacy in terms of whether subjects could identify 'correct' scientific facts.  She writes,

Scientific literacy has little to do with memorizing information and a lot to do with a rational approach to problems.

And she gives three reasons the fact based approach to scientific literacy is problematic.

• Facts change.  That may come as sacrilege to some, but she points out that old ideas get modified by newer experiments.
• It encourages people to dig in their heels about what they think they know.
• The interpretation of data requires critical thinking.  

Actually, I don't think Americans have a monopoly on scientific ignorance, but I suspect we market ignorance in a more sophisticated way than most other places.

3.  The Quartz page also had an article about El Chapo and Sean Penn and mentioned burner phones.  That led me to a post that explains the evolution of burner phones.   The Wire is mentioned as where many people first heard the term.  I watched The Wire but didn't remember that word.  So here's the burner phone post on PureTalk.

4.  Netflix codes for all their different categories.  This lets you get beyond what they think you'll like.

The Martian - Book or Movie?

When I read the book, I kept being surprised at the level of detail author Andy Weir took me through.  He didn't just say that Mark Watney created water using the oxygen and hydrogen he had, but he went through very specific details about how he did it.  I was amazed that he was doing it and also that I didn't get bored.  I got a general idea of what he was actually doing.

So the movie's glossing over the details was unsatisfying in the beginning.  I kept wondering how those in the audience who hadn't read the book knew what was going on.  Would they understand why he was doing this or that.  They didn't know why the MAV blew up or why he cut off the roof of the rover and stuck a bubble of plastic on it.

In the interview afterward screenwriter Drew Goddard said that he didn't understand all that Weir had explained in the book and that the audience didn't need to know exactly how he created water, just that he needed the water to survive.  And, of course, the movie doesn't have time for that kind of detail.  They even left out the huge storm that almost wipes things out toward the end.  But actually, in the book, that seemed like a plot device to add to the tension, and really wasn't necessary.  But then a number of the disasters, individually, weren't necessary.  But collectively they were needed to demonstrate how difficult surviving would have been.

In fact, after the film, the first question from the LA Times writer Meredith Woerner asked each of the panelists was how long they thought they could survive on Mars. Production designer Arthur Max said, after a pause, "About a minute." The others didn't give a lot longer. Radiation would do you in they said and a suit strong enough to protect you would be way too bulky to be able to do anything in. I think it was good to get that out of the way - hey, this is fiction and despite all the science used to get Mark out of each problem, the book and movie never deal with the fundamental problem of radiation.

In the end I was marveling at how manipulatable humans are, as we get emotionally involved in this
set of images on a screen that we know is made up. In a situation that couldn't have happened. Yet we go with it anyway.

Sorry about the quality of the picture, but it gives you a little sense of the four panelists and the interviewer. From left to right: interviewer, Meredith Woerner; screenwriter Drew Goddard; composer Harry Gregson-Williams; director of photography Dariusz Wolski; and production designer Arthur Max.

I'd like to add more about the discussion, but it's late and we fly home tomorrow and still have to get the house a bit more presentable for our friends who will be staying here.  Though I'd like to add that I didn't catch all their names at the time and had to check when I got home.  It was only then that the screenwriter's comment about having grown up around scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico clicked.  But after checking on Robert H. Goddard,

"American engineer, professor, physicist, and inventor who is credited with creating and building the world's first liquid-fueled rocket, which he successfully launched on March 16, 1926"

I could find no mention of him having any children.  Maybe there's a connection that I just didn't find, but it seems fitting for a Goddard to do the screenplay of The Martian.

Both the book and movie were worth watching.  I found the book much more compelling, but I think the movie would have been better if I hadn't read the book.

[UPDATE Jan 7, 2016 7:15am:  I forgot to mention that the credits went on forever, but apparently didn't list everyone involved.  At the very end the credits said something like "Over 15,000 people were employed to make this movie."  That's a good thing in and of itself I guess, but just think if we could mobilize whatever it takes to make school a positive experience for every child.]

From Ashes To Ashes And Flowers

Al Jolson's grave

The day started out taking my mom's ashes to the cemetery.  I did ask if I could have a few spoonfuls of ash to keep and they said, yes, of course.  Her ashes will soon be within 100 yards of Al Jolson's remains, so I'm sure she'll keep well entertained.   And if no one else has done it yet, she'll let him know that blackface doesn't cut it any more.  In December, on my brother's birthday, we'll do a small family ceremony.  I'm sure my mom and brother will be catching up on things. 

The day ended at a film showing sponsored by the LA Times of  Loreak (Flowers), the Spanish entry for an Academy Award for best foreign language film.  In one scene a key character's casket is put into the crematorium, burned up, and then the ashes are collected and put into a plastic bag, and slipped into an urn.  I don't think I've ever taken an urn full of ashes to a cemetery before (though I did go pick them up from the mortuary) and I've never seen such a detailed depiction of a cremation before in a movie.  Or maybe I have and I've forgotten, and this one caught my attention because of this morning's task.

Watching the film  I began to wonder why I couldn't catch a single word of the Spanish.  Nada.  Is Spanish Spanish that different from Mexican Spanish?  No, I've understood bits and pieces of other Spanish movies.  This sounded totally strange.  At the end, I thought it could be Catalan or Basque.  I thought Catalan was more related to Spanish and so picked Basque.

At the end of the film, an LA Times film writer Mark Olsen interviewed the two directors
Jon Garaño and José Mari Goenaga and more gentleman with the film whose name I didn't catch.  And the first question he asked was about having a Basque language film submitted for an Oscar.  (It's still got a long way to go since 81 countries have submitted films in this category.)

I enjoyed the movie.  It had a much slower pace than American films, but that was ok, and the filmmakers said afterward that was deliberate, because the film was about what was in the characters' heads and that takes time to understand.  The story line included a very clever intertwining of events.  It wasn't dense or obscure and if one takes a bit of time to think it through, one can get it, but it was nice to hear from the filmmakers themselves what they tried to do and why.   

This was a good warm up for the Anchorage International Film Festival.  By the way, my last posts never got Feedburned to other blogrolls.  I did a post on the documentaries in competition at AIFF this year.  If you missed that post, it's here.

AIFF 2015: Looking Back As This Year's Festival Nears- Link To Alex Gibney Interview

The first year I blogged the Anchorage International Film Festival (2007), I was already disagreeing with the judges. I was taken by Cam Christiansen's visuals in I Have Seen The Future an animated short that didn't get any recognition from the judges, but soon after got accepted at Sundance.   And I thought that Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side should have won the best documentary.  No doubt in my mind.  But it didn't.  However, it did go on to win the Academy Award for best documentary. The Anchorage International Film Festival has seen some great films.  Some have gone on to a wider audience, many others got lost in the fierce competition for screen space, and we were lucky to get to see them.  I've seen a few showing up in other venues - Wildlike, which was best feature in 2014 has been released in theaters recently, for example. 

I mention Gibney's film because there's an LA Times interview with him Wednesday on his winning the first Christopher Hitchens award. And this seems like a good introduction to the 2015 Anchorage International Film Festival which posted its selections for the December 4 - 13, 2015 festival. 


You can take your first look at all the films selected for the 2015 Anchorage International Film Festival.  You can also see which ones are "in competition" which means the screeners thought them worthy to go to the juries to be reviewed for prizes.  Here's the link.

And since this first post on the 2015 Festival was pushed into being by the Alex Gibney interview, here's a list of the documentaries in competition this year.  First the longer docs:

Children of the Arctic	Nick Brandestini	Switzerland	93 min.
Circus Without Borders	Susan Gray, Linda Matchan	United States	69 min.
Lost & Found	Nicolina Lanni, John Choi	Canada	82 min.
Love Between the Covers	Laurie Kahn	Australia, United States	83 min.
Madina’s Dream	Andrew Berends	United States	80 min.

 And these are the shorter ones:

Bihttoš	Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers	Canada	14 min.
Man in the Can	Noessa Higa	United States	38 min.
Superjednostka	Teresa Czepiec	Poland	20 min.
The House is Innocent	Nicholas Coles	States	12 min.

I'm not sure if the shorter ones are in competition with the longer ones or not.  I suspect that may be the case, though I think they should be in separate categories.


The Feature Films in Competition this year are all from outside the US - Turkey, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, and the Islamic Republic of Iran.   Should be interesting watching.

And here's the trailer for this year.  Last year's was a departure from previous years.  It was a compilation of clips from different films in the festival with some very catchy music that made me look forward to seeing (and hearing) it before each showing.  This one is the same genre though in the first couple of listens, I don't think the music is quite as catchy as last year's.  But take a look and as you see films in the festival you'll start recognizing the clips in the teaser. 


All this is a reminder that I need to get moving if I'm going to be ready by the opening date of Decemer 4, 2015. I have started a page in the header for AIFF 2015.

I've tried over the years to give general tips on how to best take advantage of having this festival in town as well as give specific guidance on what's playing each day and what things I like.  I'll also be putting up pictures and videos of film makers, AIFF organizers and volunteers, and audience members.  

[Feedburner probs, so reposting]

Anchorage Flirts With Snow

Tuesday was a bit hectic as I tried to finish My Name Is Red before my book club meeting (didn't make it), deal with insurance companies, and pack and clean the house for the house sitter before I trip south.

It rained most of the day and in the afternoon the rain alternated with snow flakes, but not enough to stick.  But our book club meeting was on the Hillside about 1000 feet above sea level.  And there, by the time I left (early to finish packing at get to the airport), there was snow sticking.









Back closer to sea level at the airport, the spotlight outside just after security highlighted the falling flakes.  I used a neon filter in Photoshop for this one.










We left late due to computer problems at the Anchorage Airport, which included reading each boarding pass to someone over the phone.  In Seattle?  She was too busy to ask.

But once again I was pleased with how Alaska Airlines has mastered the logistics problem of getting people's luggage into the terminal quickly.  And I wonder why other airlines can't match them.  Here's the carousel 15 minutes after the door opened on the plane.  The luggage is there, but not many of the passengers had made it yet.    Maybe because it was it was 6:30 am.  But it happens on almost all the flights we've been on and we've been on a lot lately.

 And Alaska Airlines gives out $25 vouchers for future flights for people whose baggage isn't there in 20 minutes from getting into the terminal.

We walked the mile from the bus stop to my mom's house (it will always be 'my mom's house' I think) then I got on the bike before it got too warm and rode out to the beach.  I felt like a puppy who'd been locked up inside all day.  It felt great.

I looked at this Quixote sign and wondered why it seemed familiar.  Then I remembered I'd just read an LA Times article online the other day about the CEO.

"Mikel Elliott is co-founder and chief executive of Quixote Studios, the entertainment industry's premier studio and equipment rental company, presiding over a fleet of Hollywood's most elegant talent trailers and motor homes as well as more than 1 million square feet of movie, TV and music soundstages, production offices and parking lots."

 This was in the parking lot just north of the Santa Monica pier.

In another Santa Monica parking lot there were cops on motorcycles driving through an orange cone obstacle course.  It looked like they were training - going through narrow curves.






There was a group waiting their turn.

Been cleaning out the room where my mom had her computer - hoping, but not really expecting, to find the keys to the safe deposit box. 

Corrected Post - Chris Dixon is NEXT Monday - Merchants of Doubt Today

I mistakenly posted that Chris would be talking today.  It's next Monday.  So I'm reposting this with the changes. 

Chris Dixon - UAA  NEXT Monday   Bookstore  - 4pm-6pm  Free Parking (just park, don't worry)

Merchants of Doubt - Bear Tooth - 5:45pm TODAY

Here's the online bio you find about Chris:

Chris Dixon, originally from Anchorage, is a longtime community organizer, writer, and educator with a PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He serves on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies and the advisory board for the activist journal Upping the Anti. He currently lives in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded Algonquin Territory. His new book is Another Politics: Talking Across Today's Transformative Movements and is published by University of California Press.

I'd add that I've known Chris since he was a classmate of my daughter's at Steller.  Though I haven't seen him for years. This guy was special as a teenager and has stayed special. More than special. He didn't give up his young idealism and vision to become an adult.  He's found a way to live his values.


Here's some YouTube of him talking in Winnepeg in January of this year. It's long, but at least look at the first few minutes after the intro. Oh, yeah, the intro was written by Angela Davis.





The other must see event today is the showing of Merchants of Doubt at the Bear Tooth at 5:45.

This movie looks at the cadre of 'experts' who are paid to attack public belief in things like toxic chemicals and climate change.  It's close to what this blog, at base, is about. 

Inspired by the acclaimed book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt takes audiences on a satirically comedic, yet illuminating ride into the heart of conjuring American spin. Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the curtain on a secretive group of highly charismatic, silver-tongued pundits-for-hire who present themselves in the media as scientific authorities – yet have the contrary aim of spreading maximum confusion about well-studied public threats ranging from toxic chemicals to pharmaceuticals to climate change.

Here's the trailer:




Here's the author of the book the movie is based on talking about the book. 

"This inability to think created the possibilities for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale" Chenault and Dunleavy - Meet Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was a refugee from Nazi Germany who had studied philosophy (and also had a long affair) with Martin Heidiger, getting out of Europe in 1941 to the US where she taught at various top ranked universities.  I had read her book The Human Condition as a grad student and was inspired by her discussion of the public and private realms to explore the concept of privacy in my doctoral dissertation.

So, when I saw a movie entitled Hannah Arendt listed on Netflix, I wondered how her life could fit into a two hour movie.

The movie focuses on her coverage of the Eichmann trial in 1961 and the publication of her reports in The New Yorker along with the backlash to some things she said in the articles.  Let me say early on here, that I'm no Arendt expert and a lot of my response is based on the woman portrayed in the movie, plus some follow up online at  here  and  here.  Having grown up with German-Jewish refugees in the US, I have a familiarity with that world as well, though the California settlers do seem to be quite different from those who stayed on the East Coast. 

There are a number of things that struck me as a I watched the film.  And of course the film touched on these topics very lightly and so do I.  But they are interesting starting points to pursue more. 

1.  Her ability to separate herself from the situation when she views people and interactions among people and to probe while suspending judgment.  As she says in the film,

"Trying to understand is not the same as forgiveness."  

This is significant in the film because people become outraged at their perception that she excuses Eichmann (on the grounds that he's just an ordinary, not particularly bright man and not a sociopath) and because she says that without some Jewish leaders' cooperation, there would have been fewer Jews who died.  To Arendt, this is merely unjudgmental fact of significant interest for anyone trying to understand the Holocaust.

2.  Her notion of 'the banality of evil' hinted at in 1. above.  Her observations of Eichmann in the trial came as a revelation to her, because he was so ordinary.  He had absorbed the Nazi propaganda and had let go of his own individuality and decision making powers and became an instrument of the Nazis.

"I hold no defense of Eichmann, but I did try to reconcile the shocking mediocrity of the man with his staggering deeds. . . Eichmann utterly surrendered that single most defining human quality, that of being able to think, consequently he was no longer capable of making normal judgments.  This inability to think created the possibilities for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which one has never seen before." [emphasis added.]

"The trouble with criminalizing a Nazi like Eichmann was that he insisted in renouncing all personal qualities and it was as if there was nobody left to be either punished or forgiven.  He protested time and again, contrary to the prosecution's assertion, that he had never done anything out of his own initiative.  That he had no intention whatsoever, good or bad, that he had only obeyed orders.  The typical Nazi plea makes it clear that the greatest evil in the world is the evil committed by nobody."

3.  Her point seems to be that this goes far beyond Eichmann and beyond Germany.  People give themselves up to world views, values, and beliefs of the dominant culture and just go along without any moral assessment of their actions.

"And not only in Germany, but in almost all countries.  Not only among the persecutor, but also among the victims." 

This last part is what upset so many people.  Her character says that if the Jews hadn't been organized and their leaders hadn't cooperated, fewer Jews would have died.  They too had been indoctrinated into following orders.  This idea also reminds me of the concept of internalized racism that infects the victims as well as the beneficiaries of racism in a society.  

4.  Points 2 and 3 (which overlap a lot) shout at me to explore how this might help us understand how that might be in play in today's world.  I raise that possibility gingerly, because, as in the case of Arendt and her article, people will likely misread it.  In Arendt's case, it was to see her as excusing Eichmann and blaming the Jews for their own demise.  In this case, some people will surely miss the finer points and see me comparing people today to Nazis.  That's not what I'm doing.  Rather I'm taking the notion of 'the banality of evil' that Arendt coined by studying Eichmann at his trial, and wondering how that might apply to the US today, and particularly to Alaska.

So, how might it apply?

Dunleavy, HB 44 - Erin's Law

Having just last week attended the Senate Education Committee's hearing on HB 44, I immediately thought of the total disconnect between what I saw and what the chair, Sen. Dunleavy said.  How might Arendt's thoughts fit here?

Dunleavy, for one thing, never acknowledged the possibility that what he was doing to Erin's Law (the original HB 44) might mean that there would be kids who would not be exposed to sexual abuse awareness, and thus when they were exposed to an abuser, would not know what was happening, how to respond, and how to report so it could end (if it did start) quickly.  He acknowledged no link between his actions and the fact that more kids would be abused because of his actions.   He even derided people who suggested he was even complicit in kids being sexually abused.

This sounds similar to me to the way Eichmann said he was merely doing his job, making sure people got on the trains.  He separated that task from the idea of where the trains were going and what would happen to the people at their destination.  It seemed to me that Dunleavy was doing something similar.  In his mind, he wasn't 'gutting' HB 44 as people charged.  Rather he was adding language about parental rights (and other things) that in themselves were good, without a sense of the effect these changes would have on watering down Erin's Law, on jeopardizing the passing of the bill altogether, and on the outcome of fewer kids getting abuse awareness training and thus ending up abused.  (Of course, only a relatively small number of kids who would get the training would be exposed to abuse. [updated:  actually the numbers people cite are one in four girls and one in six boys, so that would be not so small a number.]  But the numbers reported were still disturbingly high, so it wouldn't be insignificant.)

Of course, there's the possibility that he knows exactly what he's doing and he's lying, but I suspect not.  It's easy for people to call others liars because they can't believe they don't think exactly the way they think.  The more nuanced approach that Arendt takes requires more concentration and mental agility to comprehend.

Is there a different option than 'not too bright' and 'liar' that I'm missing?  Dunleavy has not offered an explanation that covers all the holes that I see as listed in this post.  He does have a lengthy FB defense, but it really doesn't address the details I raise.  Instead it just says things like other states don't make the training mandatory so what are you complaining about.  It doesn't address the issue of kids falling between the cracks because it's not mandatory and because it cuts out k-6.  Interestingly, he also seems to have dropped all the parental-rights rhetoric, but maybe I just missed it.


Chenault And The Budget

In this case, we could take Arendt's concepts to portray Chenault's world view as so pro-oil, his majority in the House so big, and his leadership power so strong, that he simply never has to think about the consequences of what he is doing.  Like Eichmann, his education is weak (though he did graduate from high school.)  I don't suspect he had many probing high school classes that forced him to deeply consider opposing points of view or how to think critically.  Instead, he mouths the slogans fed to him by the oil company lobbyists (all of whom are much better educated than Chenault) and groups like the Koch brothers supported Americans for Prosperity who tell him how smart he is, and what a good job he's doing, and how what he is doing is in the best interests of the people of Alaska.  He doesn't have to think.  (Think in the philosophical sense of pondering big questions that put his actions into a longer term and larger context, questioning what he takes for granted, considering the moral implications of what he's doing.)  To those who challenge him, he can respond, "If you're so smart, why am I Speaker of the House and you're out there whining?" A good question.  I'd respond:  "Because he thinks he's in the legislature and he's speaker all on his own merits, and not because his oil and construction industry supporters haven't greased the wheels for him.  He thinks they are supporting him because he's got the right values, not because he's absorbed the values they want him to have."

I'm not saying this is 'truth.'  I'm saying this is what Arendt's model suggests could be true. 

Can We Trust Arendt's Models?

I don't think we need to trust them or not.  Rather they are tools for measuring the world we see.  We use models to take measure of the world. It suggests things we should consider in our assessment. Does it accurately reflect what is happening?  If we gather the facts, do they line up as the model predicts?  Or is the model making us sort the facts to see what we expect to see?

Arendt's concept of the banality of evil has similarities to other concepts such as mob behavior or herd mentality;  such as group think and other situations where people give up their moral responsibility to the people around them.  We see echoes in The Lord of the Flies  and in 1984 and in Madmen  and The Sopranos.  The Milgram Experiments are another example that stem from Eichmann's trial, though, as this article states, Arendt said they showed something different than she was getting at.

There are lots of nuances here and getting inside people's heads to read their intentions isn't something I've figured out how to do well.  And there are problems with what people tell us they intended.

• They can be deceptive.  
• They can be wrong.  
• They might not know themselves.

So What Do We Do?

• The Believers
• We can listen to people respectfully and let them explain themselves as much as they are willing or able to do.  This gives us some insights.  Asking probing questions might yield more.  We aren't likely to cause believers to change any more they are likely to cause us to change.  Though when we interact respectfully it does change our relationship and allows people to consider each other more authentically.   (A study that seemed to confirm this approach when used to change the minds of people who voted against gay marriage in California, appears  to have been faked.  But the problems with that study don't mean this technique doesn't work.  But that study that seemed to validate the idea apparently can't be used now to do so.)
  
• Those Who Think Everyone Is Equally Corrupted
• There are lots of folks who have simply given up on everyone.  They've dropped out of serious participation and rejected their responsibilities, as citizens, to be informed and to vote.  These folks can be reached.  Mostly they would like to believe that democracy works and just need some examples of how they can have a positive impact.  Again, listening is the best tool.  Ask them to explain how they got to their conclusions.  Is there anything that could happen to change their minds?  What are the consequences of doing nothing?  And so on.   Grab a set of examples of people who have accomplished things against the odds.  For a quickly googled example.  I'm sure you can find ones more relevant to your cause.  And these folks have much to teach the political process believers as well.
  
• Those Who Unthinkingly Are On Your Side
• I find automatic believers of any group problematic.  They often have only the sketchiest idea of why they are supporting or opposing something.  It might be part of the dogma or something they read (without checking) that supports their world view.  It's important to shake up people who automatically support your position, but do so without thinking.