AiFF2025: Witty Youngman, Saturday Thoughts, It's Cold!

 Friday night (really went into Saturday morning) I was too tired to upload my video of Witty Youngman, especially knowing I was getting up early Saturday.  

Witty played after the movie Burt.  She'd been asked to play an original song from the movie Burt but said she got it fairly late and what she got wasn't too easy to listen to, so she made her own adaptation.  

But then she went on to play for another 40 minutes or more.  The combo of her exquisite voice and guitar work was enchanting.  I couldn't help but capturing some of it for you.  (And for me.)  So far, she has been the highlight of the festival for me.  

It's Sunday morning and I dropped our film maker houseguests off at the Alaska Experience Theater for bagels, networking, and the morning filmmaker panel (anyone can go to these.)  Yesterday I stayed because the panel was for first time feature makers and Nikolas and Katrine were on the panel for their

Katrine, Nikolas, Richie, Emelio

film The World Outside (Draußen die Welt) (the ß is a German letter for double ss).  The other two panelists were Richie James Rollin, whose film Crystal Cross plays tonight (Sunday) at 8:30pm at the Museum, and Emilio Miguel Torres, whose film The Ladder plays at the Museum at 6pm.  I think the moderator, on the left, was Joe Burke, who made Burt. 

This link gives more background on all the features being shown today (Sunday).

I have a bit of time to reflect on the Festival so far before I head back downtown.  

1.  This is the coldest festival I remember.  While the temperature yesterday wasn't terribly low - around 14˚F (-9˚C), the strong and constant wind made it feel (according to my weather app) like -6˚F  (-21ºC).  But at one point we took a bus home and waiting in the wind was brutal.  Fortunately Katrine and Nikolas are much younger and enjoyed the adventure of being in Alaska cold.  But I have to say that -6˚F without a wind is not as cold for me as it was yesterday.

2.  So far I haven't seen a movie that blew me away.  I enjoyed  Brut  on opening night very much.  It's quirky, the characters are great. I liked a lot of the images.  Even though views of cars driving along highways are pretty common in movies, there was one shot of the car going along a winding road that was just exactly right.  

 SPOILER ALERT:  The story is one that happens to a lot of people, particularailly older people (not the specific details, but the idea of a scam).  A plot flaw, in my mind, was Sammy's car.  He was supposed to have come to LA for a few days from New York.  It's unlikely he would drive his own car to LA for a few days.  But if he did, he would have had a New York license plate.  And even Burt would have noticed that he had California plates.  

2.  In The Wake of Justice Delayed was a well-made and effective film focused on the impacts of violence against Native women in Alaska.  Survivors  talked about the impact on them  of losing someone this way.  We joined them in their own space to share that impact.  

Remaining Native was another important film that followed the great grandson of a survivor of Indian Boarding schools.  There were two related stories.  The first was about the boarding schools ("No school should have a cemetery.") and how his great grandfather had run away three times.  The third time he ran 50 miles home.  So Ku Stevens decides to set up a 50 mile run for people to remember their ancestors who had been in boarding schools.  The second story was Ku's own life as a long distance runner on his rural tribal land high school, and trying to get the attention of college recruiters.  While the two stories are clearly related, I would have liked to see them better integrated in the movie.  That said, I don't have suggestions so I don't know how to do it better.  

Both these are important movies.  But I'm waiting for the films about what motivated the school teachers and administrators to treat the Native American kids so badly.  And what causes the men to commit terrible violence on Native women?  Because I think those stories would help us understand what motivates people to join ICE, and a lot of the people who support Trump.  What happened at the boarding schools is happening today to immigrants, transgender folk, women,  and everyone else who doesn't support those in power.  And what kinds of childhoods did the men who torture women have that led them to their evil deeds?  

That isn't the responsibility of the filmmakers of In the Wake of Justice Delayed and Remaining Indian, but I'm hoping someone steps up to address those questions.  (Yeah, I know, I should do it.  I'll put it on my todo list.)

3. Drink And Be Merry:  I'm not a fan of movies that feature alcoholics and bars.  I don't drink more than a glass or two of wine and that not very often.  Watching alcoholics drinking and doing stupid things is like watching a kid playing much too close to a cliff or someone driving a car way too fast.  I'm uncomfortable the whole time.  But Nikolas and Katrine thought it would be better than most such films and so we went.  I could have skipped it. But if that topic is your thing, then you might well have enjoyed it.  My cynical self thought, "The Bear Tooth is playing it because people watching others drink will sell more wine and beer in the theater."

4.  Nikolas and I went to the Alaska Experience Theater to watch Fucktoys.  I'd looked it up and thought it might offer us some insights into people's sexual hangups, but I didn't catch any insights.  We didn't learn anything about the motivation of the men who were paying to be sexually hurt and humiliated, for example. And it seems the curse was never lifted.  But then she substituted a goat for a lamb and I'm not sure it was ever sacrificed.  

5.  Finally, the Thriller shorts.  Again, this is not my genre at all and I should have stayed home.  Most, if not all, appeared to be scenes of a future feature film.  None told a whole story.  The acting in Confidential Informant was strong, but I wasn't thrilled watching a female cop coercing a reluctant informant by threatening to place her child into foster care.  It seemed abusive and while that technique may yield some names (it didn't get that far in the short film), it causes a crisis for the child.  Do cops have the moral right to do that to mothers and their children?  Maybe getting people to ask that question will be the point of the feature film if it gets made.  I like Charon because as I was watching I remembered that Charon

 "is the boatman who ferries the souls of the dead across the waters of Hades to the judgement which will determine their final resting place." (From World History Encyclopedia)

6.  I got to talk to Tony Sheppard- the man who started the Anchorage International Film Festival 25 years ago.  He's here until Monday.  I should have taken a picture and if I see him again, I will.  

At film festivals you see so many movies and meet so many new people from all over that time warps.  Already yesterday (Saturday) the opening night movie seemed to have happened a week ago.  And so not having seen my favorite dilm yet isn't a big deal.  It's only been one day plus an evening show.  

But Witty Youngman's guitar and voice stand out as my highlight so far.  

AIFF: Sunday Offers Impressive Crime/Prison Lessons

 I missed the noon movie Sunday.  I just needed a little more time to recuperate. 

Saturday morning had a great set of Alaska themed or made films.  I was very pleased that we are past the days when Alaska films were any Alaskan project where someone writes a story and goes out (usually) into the woods and experiments with how their cameras and mics work.  

That elation didn't survive Sunday's Alaska Shorts Program.  There were good ones mostly.  And that's all I'll say.  

The afternoon Documentary Feature - The Body Politic - was a riveting look at Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott.   We see Scott elected into office as a young Black man who saw his first shooting at 10, and vowed that the basic approach of mass arresting of Black men had to be replaced.  The alternative was to give people options in life other than crime and prison.    He comes into office after 327 (maybe it was 37) people had been murdered in the previous year, vowing to cut murders by 15%.  But pro-active reaching out to folks is a long term strategy and takes a while to work.  He monitored every murder as they outpaced his target.  The Republican governor, who controlled prisons, parole, and critical social services, refused to meet with Scott and said he needed to beef up the police to stop the crime.

The discussion afterward included director Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough, film subject Erricka Bridgeford, and another film maker whose name and role I didn't quite catch.  Ida, the director of the festival is on the right.  Ericka is in the middle.  

You can read more about the film from a Baltimore paper and read an interview with the director here.

The next shorts program began with another excellent film - The Bond - which was short and packed a powerful punch as we see an incarcerated woman having her baby, shackled, and then having the baby taken from her.  The filming, the story, the acting were all just right.  

The last program were three films related to prison and domestic violence.  

Infraction told the true story of an inmate who the judge had, at some point concluded was innocent, but was still locked up.

Seeds of Change told the story of a farmer who takes on the project of setting up a farm adjacent to a prison and then utilizing prisoners to work on the farm.  The fresh food is served in the prison.  The film shows the effect of the farm work on the prisoners who worked there and the effects of having fresh food prepared well on the prisoners. 

Where I Learned Not to Sleep  - The camera follows two retired police who grew up with domestic violence, doing training programs for police on how to approach domestic violence situations.  

The whole afternoon and evening illustrated the need to treat citizens, abused women,  and prisoners with dignity and respect to break the cycle of violence and criminality.  

There's much more to say, but this at least gives you a sense of what I got out of the festival on Sunday.  

Not Getting Vaccinated And Not Wearing A Mask Is Like Letting A Terrorist Hide In Your House

 I know that's a pretty wild claim, but hear me out.  

Terrorists randomly kill and maim people when they have the opportunity, just like the COVID virus.  And they also need safe places to rest in-between terrorist attacks.  They don't kill everyone they come in contact with.  But no one would willingly open their home for a terrorist to rest between attacks.  People don't allow terrorists into their homes because 

•  they fear the terrorists might harm them and
•  they don't want to give assistance to terrorists to go on and harm others. 

(Of course, the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is in the eye of the beholder.  MAGA folks see BLM people as terrorists and vice versa. Some some US citizens would help MAGA folks and others would help BLM folks, because they don't consider them terrorists.)

So, let's think about the COVID virus as a terrorist.  

The virus needs a human body to survive in until it gets to the next human body.  The body it takes refuge in may not be seriously affected by the virus.  For various reasons - genetics, health, diet, and who knows what else - different bodies react differently.  And when a terrorist hides, he might not harm his hosts either.  They may not even know he's a terrorist, just like someone doesn't even know they have the virus.

The virus gets into a body and tries to infect.  Even if the infection causes no symptoms, just being in that body allows the virus to survive and then, if the virus is lucky, get transportation to another body through the breath.  

If it keeps getting transport from body to body, it will eventually find bodies susceptible to the virus.  A body that will get mildly sick, severely sick, or even die.  

Vaccines are highly effective in keeping the vaccine out.  Staying away from other people prevents the virus from jumping to other human sanctuaries.  Masks make it harder for the virus to get from one human to another,  

These are simple measures, just like keeping your house locked, setting up security cameras, and getting a guard dog are ways to keep  out terrorists.  

Analogies only work so far. Not everything about the virus and terrorists match perfectly.  Terrorists have the intention of killing people.  Viruses, presumably, are just trying to survive, and killing their hosts is not their intent.  Also, viruses are invisible for most people.  Though many terrorists walk among people invisible in the sense that people don't see them as terrorists.  

We are in the late stages of this pandemic in the US, but not in other countries. But people are still getting infected daily and getting sick enough to be hospitalized.  And to die.  It's not over yet. 

And the longer the virus can keep finding new human hosts, the more chances for the virus to mutate into deadlier forms and sicken and kill more people.   Like terrorists getting deadlier weapons.  

 

". . .forced labor camps that were politely called plantations," From Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

As I'm reading Caste I'm struck by so many things I never saw before.  The title quote is probably the most profound.  Of course, plantations with slaves were forced labor camps.  The workers had no choice of anything - when to work, what work to do, how hard to work.  They had no control over their own bodies or their spouses or children.  All those decisions were made by their owners.  And, of course, they didn't get paid.  How come I never thought of that before?  But our history books never use that description.  Plantations are such genteel places with pretty green lawns, magnolia trees,  white columns and mint juleps.  But that was all cover up.  But Wilkerson rubs off the cosmetics our historians have applied to what happened in the United States.  

This is an important book.  I'm not yet finished, but I've already been changed.  This is one of several posts I expect I'll do on the book.  For those who haven't read the book, consider this an appetizer.  

I'll start with some quotes from the early part of the book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.  After researching and writing a previous book, she decided that focusing on race doesn't capture the extent of the conflict that's usually depicted as a racial conflict in the United States.  Race is relevant, but the real issue, she tells us convincingly,  is CASTE.    

"Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone based on their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy." (p. 70)

The rest of the book defines caste, looks at caste systems in India, the US, and Nazi Germany.  Outlines the 'eight pillars of caste' and more.  It's a very thorough explanation of how the hierarchy - with white on top and black on the bottom and shades of gray in between - permeates how we think even if our caste system is not explicit like the Hindu one.  

In this post I want to look at a few quotes from the beginning and relate them to police treatment of African-Americans.

"The slave is entirely subject to the will of his master," wrote William Goodell, a minister who chronicled the institution of slavery in the 1830s.  "What he chooses to inflict upon him, he must suffer.  He must never lift a hand in self-defense.  He must utter no word of remonstrance.  He has no protection and no redress," fewer than the animals of the filed.  They were seen as "not capable of being injured, "Goodell wrote.  "They may be punished at the discretion of their lord, or even put to death by his authority."

"This fact is of great significance for the understanding of racial conflict," wrote the sociologist Guy B. Johnson, "for it means that white people during the long period of slavery became accustomed to the idea of 'regulating' Negro insolence and insubordination by force with the consent and approval of the law."

The vast majority of African-Americans who lived in this land in the first 246 years of what is now the United States lived under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath, subject to people who faced no sanction for any atrocity they could conjure.  

I think these quotes should help us understand some of the videos we've seen in the last couple of years of police beating and killing Blacks who have done little more than ask questions about why they were being stopped, who have hesitated when told to do something by the police.  If you watch many of those videos again, you'll see cops who totally lose it the moment there is any resistance whatsoever by the person they've pulled over.  There is little or no tolerance for the slightest disobedience.  

"He must never lift a hand in self-defense.  He must utter no word of remonstrance.  He has no protection and no redress."

That was the rule throughout slavery and very much the rule in the post civil war South.  Whites expected blacks to be polite, to get out of the way if they met on the sidewalk, to accept what the whites told them without question.  To not even question the change they got from a white cashier.

Studies of why people become police officers show that " social-capital motives (i.e., power and authority, prestige, influence by media & friends)" (from Motivations for Becoming a Police Officer)  regularly play an important role. 

I would argue that for a number of police the authority of the badge and a gun plays a big role.  And for them, respect from suspects - obedience and subservience - is important.  And if these people come from families that have historically expected such obedience from Blacks, then their behavior can be better understood.  

Just watch this video of how these officers speak and act compared to the black man they have stopped.  It's consistent with the expectation that Wikerson says whites had for Blacks during slavery and Jim Crow.  

This is a black military officer who has not actually stopped until he's pulled into a gas station nearby so that there would be light and other people around.  While the cops seem to be reacting to his not instantly getting out of the car, the suspect is clearly worried he's about to be killed by out of control white cops.  

As long as the judge or jury only had the word of the cop versus the word of the suspect (just the word suspect raises questions about the person's truthfulness), officers could pretty much do what they wanted with impunity.  The rapid growth of small videos recorders and then phone cams, changed all that.  And that's where we are today.  

These behaviors and reactions are probably unconscious for most cops.  They haven't been aware that they were treating white and black traffic stops differently.  Or if they were, they believed that the blacks they were stopping were more of a threat and thus justified being tough or pulling out their guns.  

So I urge people to look at the videos - old ones, and ones that will be shown next week and beyond on social media - to see what triggered the cop to become violent.  And compare that, if you can, to how cops treat whites.  

That's the key connection I wanted to make in this post, but I offer some other quotes from this same section - pages 44 or so to 49, where Wilkerson is trying to demonstrate the extent to which Blacks were considered a subservient class, lesser human beings, than whites.  

"What the colonists created was "an extreme form of slavery that had existed nowhere in the world," wrote the legal historian Ariela J. Gross.  "For the first time in history, one category of humanity was ruled out of the 'human race' and into a separate sub-group that was to remain enslaved for generations in perpetuity."

"The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium , the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, soon in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner's debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate.  They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them.  Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil."

"Before there was a United States of America, there was enslavement.  Theirs was a living death passed down for twelve generations."

"The slave is doomed to toil, that others may reap the fruits" is how a letter writer identifying himself as Judge Ruffin testified to what he saw in the Deep South.  

"As a window into their exploitation, consider that in 1740, South Carolina, like other slaveholding states, finally decided to limit the workday of enslaved African-Americans to fifteen hours from March to September and to fourteen hours from September to March, double the normal workday for humans who actually get paid for their labor.  In that same era, prisoners found guilty of actual crimes were kept t a maximum of ten hours per workday.  Let no one say that African-Americans as a group have not worked for our country."

"For the ceaseless exertions of their waking hours, many subsisted on a peck of corn a week, which they had to mill by hand at night after their labors in the field.  Some owners denied them even that as punishment and allowed meat for protein only once a year.  "They were scarcely permitted to pick up crumbs that fell from their masters' tables," George Whitefield wrote.  Stealing food was 'a crime, punished by flogging.'"

"Your slaves, I believe, work as hard, if not harder, than the horses whereon you ride,"  Whitefield wrote in an open letter to the colonies of the Chesapeake in 1739.  "These after their work is done, are fed and taken proper care of."

"Enslavers bore down on their hostages to extract the most profit , whipping those who fell short of impossible targets, and whipping all the harder those who needed them to wring more from their exhausted bodies."

"Whipping was a gateway for of violence that led to bizarrely creative levels of sadism," wrote the historian Edward Baptist.  Enslavers used "every modern method of torture," he observed, from mutilation to waterboarding.  

"Slavery made the enslavers among the richest people in the world, granting them "the ability to turn a person into cash at the shortest possible notice."  But from the time of enslavement southerners minimized the horrors they inflicted and to which they had grown accustomed.  "No one was willing," Baptist wrote, "to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture."

Slavery so perverted the balance of power that it made the degradation of the subordinate case seem normal and righteous.  "In the gentlest houses drifted now and then the sound of dragging chains and shackles, the bay of hounds, the report of pistols in the trail of the runaway," wrote the southern writer Wilbur J. Cash.  "And as the advertisements of the time incontestably prove, mutilation and the mark of the branding iron."

"The most respected and beneficent of society people oversaw forced labor camps that were politely called plantations, concentrated with hundreds of unprotected prisoners who's crime was that they were born with dark skin.  Good and loving mothers and fathers, pillars of their communities, personally inflicted gruesome tortures upon their fellow human beings." 

"This is what the United States was for longer than it was not.  It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United states that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil.  No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaed.  That will not come until the year 2111."

Another example of this still today, Blacks are considered inferior, less mentally capable, we have this recent story From the AP:  Retired Black players say NFL brain-injury payouts show bias

"PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Thousands of retired Black professional football players, their families and supporters are demanding an end to the controversial use of “race-norming” to determine which players are eligible for payouts in the NFL’s $1 billion settlement of brain injury claims, a system experts say is discriminatory.

Former Washington running back Ken Jenkins, 60, and his wife Amy Lewis on Friday delivered 50,000 petitions demanding equal treatment for Black players to Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody in Philadelphia, who is overseeing the massive settlement. Former players who suffer dementia or other diagnoses can be eligible for a payout.

Under the settlement, however, the NFL has insisted on using a scoring algorithm on the dementia testing that assumes Black men start with lower cognitive skills. They must therefore score much lower than whites to show enough mental decline to win an award. The practice, which went unnoticed until 2018, has made it harder for Black former players to get awards."