Chattng With Guterson, Brunelle, And Hinman At Bainbridge Island Bookstore

We wandered into downtown Winslow and stopped at the bookstore (Eagle Harbor Book Co.) where we ran into three local Bainbridge Island authors on display with their books.  I guess this can be anywhere from author hell to heaven, trying to get people to buy your books.  And for me it was a chance to talk to three writers.

Gutterson with Problems With People and Cedars

I had read David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars long ago - it won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.  It weaves in Bainbridge Island's complicated history of Japanese-Americans' relationship to the white population on the island through a murder trial.   It deals with the essential topic of this blog - how do we know what's true?  Did Kabuo kill Carl over old family feuds?  There's also a pivotal role for a journalist who has his own history with the families involved.  

David's new book is short stories titled, Problems with People.  We talked a bit about the difficulties of writing about people you know.  He offered that when it's fictionalized, no one really knows what is true and what is not.  Except, I suggested, those involved, and they might not agree with the writer's view of events.  Personal experiences are critical fodder for a serious writer.  It's a dilemma.   





Lynn Brunelle, was enjoying the opportunity to talk about her book Mama Gone Geek.  As I understood her,  it's about figuring out ways to talk to her kids about big questions - like why Grandma was forgetting things, but really was into Santa Claus when her son was starting to question Santa Claus.  Using science.

She used DNA to help explain where babies come from.

My daughter told me when we got home that Lynne was one of the writers for the Bill Nye The Science Guy television show.





The third author was Wendy Hinman.  From the title of her book, Tightwads On The Loose, I thought this was going to be about how to live cheap.  It is, in a way, but it's really about her seven years of sailing adventures with her husband on a 31 foot sailboat.  The route our discussion focused on was from Japan to Seattle - a 49 day trip that was a little south of the northern route that freighters take.  I asked if she seen the Pacific Gyre - the continent of floating plastic in the north Pacific - and she said no.  It tends not to have good winds and they were sailing.  Their radio went out fairly quickly, so all they had in case of trouble was an emergency beacon.

Since I'm from Alaska, she mentioned her friend's book, Treadwell Gold.  We had been to the mine back in 2010 when Dennis, a Juneau local with long family ties to the mine, took us around.


Here, from the Hinman's book, is a map of their travels.  Sorry it's not a little clearer, but you make it bigger and clearer by clicking on the image.

[Update Nov. 30, 2015:  I once told an ADN reporter it would be nice to have an editor to catch my typos.  He told me, no, I was better off without one.  He was talking more bout choice of what I wrote and and how I wrote, not about typos.   That's all a preface to a mea culpa to Wendy and David for misspelling your names.  Wendy's caught while I was posting, but left it wrong in the title.  I put an extra t in David's.  But I think I've got it right now.]

Who Are The Real Crybabies?

Here's the column headline that spawned this post:

• Epidemic of sensitivity populates US colleges with crybabies*

Really?  Black students complaining about mistreatment on campus are 'crybabies'? (I've given my thoughts on the Missouri protests already.) What better way to avoid talking about the issues and to dismiss their complaints, than simply calling them names.  It seems to me that name calling and crybabies are both common in primary school.

By high school, some students learn logic and the common logical fallacies, like ad hominem attacks (from Logically Fallacious):

AD HOMINEM (ABUSIVE)
argumentum ad hominem
(also known as:  personal abuse, personal attacks, abusive fallacy, damning the source, name calling, needling [form of], refutation by character)
Description: Attacking the person making the argument, rather than the argument itself, when the attack on the person is completely irrelevant to the argument the person is making.
Logical Form:Person 1 is claiming Y.
Person 1 is a moron.
Therefore, Y is not true.

I googled crybabies.  The first couple of pages yielded two more stories calling black students crybabies.   (And more links to a podcast called Crybabies which, from what I can tell, celebrates people actually showing emotions.)

• The Ululations of Radical College Crybabies
• ‘Mizzou students are crybabies’ bathroom graffiti denounced as ‘hate speech’

This reminds me of the old stories of conservatives sending out the daily soundbites for media to use and you'd find the same words and stories repeated over and over again.

I did find one from a leftist perspective:

• “Douchebag says what?”: Stephen Colbert unloads on CNBC, GOP crybabies

The GOP crybabies for Colbert are the Republican candidates complaining about getting difficult questions at the CNBC debate.  Presidential candidates who can't deal with media questions does seem a lot more petty than black students standing up to continued racial discrimination on campus.

I also found a Salon article about Republican Crybabies that helps us understand where this is coming from:

Why Are Conservatives Such Whiny Crybabies? From Fox News to angry police, the right's stock-in-trade is predictable and lame.
Paul Rosenberg
February 5, 2015
 Over the years, Salon columnist Heather “Digby” Parton has written repeatedly about GOP/conservative hissy fits, most notably in her 2007 classic, ‘The Art of the Hissy Fit,’ where she noted that, “the right’s successful use of phony sanctimony and faux outrage…often succeeded in changing the dialogue and titillating the media into a frenzy of breathless tabloid coverage.”  It first caught her attention in the late ’90s, when top GOP adulterers Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston  ”pretended to be offended at the president’s extramarital affair” as well as being outraged that Democrats raised campaign money just like they did.   .   .

“[I]t’s about more than simple political distraction or savvy public relations. It’s actually a very well developed form of social control called Ritual Defamation (or Ritual Humiliation)” Digby wrote, linking to this explanatory article, and quoting the following passage:

Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. For the purposes of this essay, the central element is defamation in retaliation for the real or imagined attitudes, opinions or beliefs of the victim, with the intention of silencing or neutralizing his or her influence, and/or making an example of them so as to discourage similar independence and “insensitivity” or non-observance of taboos. It is different in nature and degree from simple criticism or disagreement in that it is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by an organization or representative of a special interest group, and in that it consists of several characteristic elements.

There's a lot more, that was just an appetizer.  One could argue about the title of this last piece using the word 'crybabies' too, except that here that really is the topic - having typical crybaby hissy fits over stuff that really isn't anything serious, in an attempt to defame the person being attacked.  


*[This was the headline in the Alaska Dispatch News, but I haven't figured out how to get non-subscriber links to their syndicated columns and articles.  This Washington Post version has a different title, but includes crybabies in the first line.]
I'd also note that this article then goes on to blame it on the "Everybody Gets A Trophy culture,"  which, I'm willing to bet, is not something most black college students grew up with.  If anything, that was a white phenomenon.  Black kids have had their self-esteem denigrated every day in school, in the media, and everywhere else.  And black mothers are known for preparing their sons on how to deal with police.  They aren't just making this up.  

Happy Thanksgiving Political Correctness

'Real'* political correctness is when the government punishes people who do not follow the prescribed way of behaving or who criticize the government's ideology.  It's not about opinion, or about tolerance, it's about having the power to impose one's ideology on others.

The term 'politically correct' is surfacing a lot once again.  Generally it's used to criticize attempts to purge offensive language.   The current campus protests over the term "black lives matter" is a case in point.  Ben Carson calls this 'political correctness going amok."

And Thanksgiving regularly brings on its own 'political correctness' battles.

• Thanksgiving and Political Correctness  - this one eventually gets to complaining about a school that decided to drop the Thanksgiving and Christmas and just call their days off  'school holidays.'

• Have a Politically-Correct Thanksgiving  -  this one complains about how traditional Thanksgiving stories sugar coat what really happened and leave out the genocide of Native Americans.

• Social Commentary: A ‘politically correct’ Thanksgiving? - This one weighs the inaccurate story of the original Thanksgiving, the genocide of Native Americans, and says kids need to know the awful facts.  It then concludes that these really have little to do with what Americans celebrate on Thanksgiving, so go eat your turkey. 

Perhaps this last one is most indicative of the media's role in the debates over  'political correctness':

• LIBERAL POLITICAL CORRECTNESS RUINS THANKSGIVING 

Actually this one only mentions political correctness in the title and complains about liberals talking politics at Thanksgiving dinner.  I'm guessing the editor stuck political correctness in the title simply  because it stirs people up and they'll click on it.  And that media use here, like in other controversies, may be the biggest issue here.  But that's another post.

But those emotions do indicate a conflict.  Mostly about how things have 'always' been and challenges to the stories that paint the US as the greatest nation ever, papering over little aberrations such as slavery, income inequality, and the attempted decimation of Native Americans who were in the way of Manifest Destiny.

That's clearly the case for Thanksgiving:  "Dammit, let's just sit down and eat our turkey and watch football and stop yammering about the poor Indians" versus "Thanksgiving celebrates the Europeans being saved by Native Americans just before the Europeans took all their land and killed most of them off."


My take on 'political correctness' in general is that in the past, the US was dominated by white, male, Protestants of means.   They had the economic power and political power and could dictate not only what was going to happen, but also the stories about what had happened in the past.

There were a number of encroachments starting with Andrew Jackson's election, the abolition of slavery, Irish and Italian immigration, the Seventeenth Amendment (direct election of Senators), and the Nineteenth Amendment (women's right to vote).  In the mid 20th Century,  school desegregation and the Voting Rights Act were big changes.  Immigration reform in 1965 that ended the dominance of European immigrants, the Vietnam War, the election of a black President, and eventually gay rights and same sex marriage all whittled away at the perceived power and privilege of white, male, Protestants.  The wealthy found ways to keep their power and used their affinity to poor, white, male Protestants to rally their political support with appeals to anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, anti-tax, and anti-immigration themes.  All the while attacking any comments about economic inequality as 'class warfare."


Today, it's bad to be called a racist.  The term PC is most often used when people are chastised or even lose their jobs for using terms that are deemed racist or offensive to people based on group, rather than individual, characteristics.  But in the 1950s and beyond, being labeled a communist could cost one one's job.  Same thing for being labeled a homosexual.  During the 1960's, the use of certain four letter words was forbidden in most formal settings and Vietnam war protestors were called traitors.

Political correctness has been with us forever, but the term has been associated particularly with efforts of people on the left to promote their values.  The same actions by people on the right have been seen as 'normal,' as simply protecting traditional values.

The underlying concept of political correctness is to prevent someone from doing or saying something that is not in line with those in power.

When conservatives attack gays or limits on government displays of religion, no one calls that 'political correctness', but it is precisely that.  It's trying to prevent people from doing or saying things which do not agree with their belief system.  It gained the label of PC only when the conservatives no longer had the power to impose their values on everyone else.

I attribute this to a changing balance of power.  In the past, the political, social, and economic systems all supported things like oppression of blacks, of women, of gays.   So much so that people assumed that it was the normal, natural way things were supposed to be.  They didn't recognize that such oppression was simply the imposition of the ideology and/or personal interests of those in power over those without power.

When those traditionally without power began to challenge them, the challengers were seen as the people imposing political correctness and the power holders couldn't even see their own long term imposition of political correctness.  

Wikipedia has a detailed article tracing the evolution of the term 'political correctness.'  In the 20th Century, it was first used to mean following the Communist Party line.  Then, it started being used in arcane leftist academic debates.  Next,

[t]he previously obscure far-left term became common currency in the lexicon of the conservative social and political challenges against progressive teaching methods and curriculum changes in the secondary schools and universities of the U.S. Policies, behavior, and speech codes that the speaker or the writer regarded as being the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy, were described and criticized as "politically correct".  .   .
After 1991, its use as a pejorative phrase became widespread amongst conservatives in the US. It became a key term encapsulating conservative concerns about the left in culture and political debate more broadly, as well as in academia. Two articles on the topic in late 1990 in Newsweek both used the term "thought police" in their headlines, exemplifying the tone of the new usage, but it was Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991) which "captured the press's imagination."

To me, political correctness is not a good thing.  People in a democracy should be able to debate and make decisions based on a wide ranging consideration of the pros and cons of any situation.  I've commented on the recent resignations of college presidents over how people of color are treated on their campuses.

I get it that middle-class white folks, who used to have things pretty good, are upset because their economic situation is eroding, or for many, the belief that they could always do better is eroding.  Laws and policies that kept women and people of color from power did give white males privileges and power that others just didn't have.  As the playing field levels, I'm sure it's scary.

But what does it mean for Thanksgiving?

I like the idea of a holiday in which we stop and give thanks for what we have.  And as we notice what all we do have, we might also notice that others are doing without, and that we can share with them.

That this holiday is linked with a particular story about history that makes everything seem warm and fuzzy, when this was not the case, is problematic.  Can Native Americans truly be comfortable with this holiday?  I suspect not.  That's the most serious issue.

Is there a way to delink the holiday from the Pilgrims?  Maybe.  Is there a way to retell the story that would be more accurate and satisfy most Native Americans?  I doubt it.  Is there a way to recognize what the European settlers did to the original North American population and makes satisfactory amends?  Maybe, but the damage was so massive, that I doubt it can be repaired, or that voters would approve it if it could be.  Is there a symbolic way to make amends?  Probably lots, beginning with respect and recognition of the damage done.

And finally, I have to address the question whether I too am guilty of exploiting the term political correctness for Thanksgiving hits.  That may be some small part of my motivation here.  I had been working on a post about political correctness already, and it seemed appropriate to tie these two together.

Happy Thanksgiving.


* Of course, with issues such as this, 'real' doesn't quite exist.  The meaning of things is interpretation and different people interpret things differently.

"Fair and Moral Compensation" - A Followup Post

It's Thanksgiving week and we're gathered with both our kids and their families so my blogging time has been limited.  Happy Thanksgiving to you all.  Today would also be my mother-in-law's birthday, so we are thinking of her too.

This is a quick followup to the last post on getting government agencies to compensate people who are innocent victims of security and other kinds of measures - say people falsely arrested, or in situations like the internment of US citizens of Japanese ancestry during WW II.  We recognize both the need for security and the rights of individuals. Sometimes innocent folks will get caught in the security net, but let's treat them decently if they turn out to be innocent victims.  Let's give them fair and moral compensation.  Without them having to sue.

The original post was a quick thought piece with no real research, just based on what I knew in my own head.  There were two laudatory responses (thanks Dr. Kayt and physicsmom) and one that questioned the feasibility of getting insurance companies to cover such things.

So rather than a lengthy response in the comments, I thought I'd put up a few more thoughts - based on some quick googling - about this.

Kathy in KY, thanks for the challenge to flesh out this idea a bit more.  You’ve gotten me to check out examples, which I vaguely know about, but didn’t document.  Lots of government units have different kinds of insurance - like for vandalism or other damage.

But they also can get liability insurance to protect them against claims against the city or other governmental unit.  The Georgia Municipal Association offers various kinds of such insurance to its members.  .

In some cases, high level government employees get professional liability insurance for situations when their employing agency won’t defend them against lawsuits.  

There is a group of folks working on a ballot initiative to require police in Hennapin County (Minneapolis is the county seat) to have personal liability insurance, on the belief that individuals with bad records will not be able to get such insurance and will have to leave the force.  The city would pay the basic rate, but if individuals had their rates increased because of previous incidents, they'd have to pay the amount above the basic rate.  

I also found out that Portland, Oregon had a policy to give ‘fair and moral’ compensation for city caused damages, which has fallen by the wayside.   

Fair and moral.  That's really what this is all about.  

So, How About Wrongful Treatment Insurance?

An idea that came to mind as I read Leonard Pitts' column today, that started out, "Let’s stop worrying about people’s rights.” Bear with me as I spin out this quick thought exercise.

The country's all tied up in debates about people being treated wrongly by the government.

Basically, we have competing, important values.  We want security and safety, yet we also believe in individual liberty.  To what extent can we suspend someone's liberty because we feel it's necessary to promote safety and security?  Pitts gives a long list of times when the US has done just that, and lots of people suffered serious harm.

When we fear a big security threat, we get fuzzy about the liberty part.

We've got police who've been shooting unarmed citizens.  Some because they've got personal issues that lead them to abuse their official power.  Others because they are legitimately fearful of their safety and react in fear and haste, but not necessarily unreasonably.

And fear of terrorists leads some politicians and not a few citizens to brush aside the rights of fellow citizens for what they see as everyone's safety.

Aside from these issues, there are innocent people who get arrested after a crime is committed because they look like the suspect or because they're in the wrong place at the wrong time, or any number of other reasons.

At this point, we mostly say, "Sorry, Charlie, that's the cost of justice" and send them on their way.


But what if we just decided that people who were wrongfully treated by the government were automatically entitled to be made whole?  "Hey, sorry we put you in jail for three weeks, here's money to cover the losses you incurred.  That's the price of a just society.  We make whole those who turn out to be the by-catch of our justice system."   It could be back pay for the work they missed.  And if they were fired during that time, support until they get new work.  And whatever physical or mental health treatment they or their family require due to the incident.

Why should a few people have to pay huge personal costs because the police arrested the wrong person or because we want to detain certain people because we think they might be terrorists?

Some of this already happens, but usually because someone sues.  Why did the Americans interned during WW II because they were of Japanese descent have to wait forty some years to get a token compensation?  Why didn't they all get paid for their losses when they left the camps?  And if the government knew ahead of time that compensation would be required, perhaps they would have done more to protect the internees' property while they were interned.

Besides being fair to the victims, I suspect that there would also be much more accountability for individuals who made bad public decisions.  If a city had to pay, automatically, for false arrests, I suspect that slowly, but surely, there would be fewer of them, and the victims would be detained for shorter periods.  And that people who might lose their houses because they couldn't pay the mortgage while in jail, might have those payments made by the government, to keep the eventual reimbursement lower.

And knowing that, say, today, every Muslim who might be interned if some fearful (or pandering)  politicians had their way, would have to be reimbursed for their inconvenience, would mean that not only would we weigh such proposals against the loss of rights, but we'd also weigh them against the cost of future reimbursements.

Would government bodies have to have a compensation fund from which they could compensate victims?  Would insurance companies offer policies?  If they did, they'd also start rating the efficiency and fairness of organizations like police departments so they could set profitable rates.  And those ratings would probably be a better measure of departments than we get now.

Nobody and no agency is ever going to be perfect, is ever going to make mistake-free.  And if they were,  it would mean they weren't pushing hard enough to do what they were supposed to do.  But, why should mistreated individual citizens have to pay an extraordinary price so that all the rest of us are safer?  If it's true that the number of such victims is small, the price for compensating them shouldn't be all that high.  But if we find out that number isn't that low, then the cost of compensating them will be incentive to make sure it's as low as it can be and still allow police and others to do the work of protecting everyone adequately.

See  follow up post.

Expanding Humpty Dumpty For 2015 And Beyond

We're in Seattle with our daughter and granddaughter.  The other night I read one of her books which included Humpty Dumpty.  So far so good.  When I was done, she said, "I want to watch the Humpty Dumpty video on your computer."  I'd forgotten about that.  We'd found some Humpty Dumpty videos on a previous visit.  You'd be surprised how many there are.  The top ranking one on Youtube is this Indian version:





And then there's this version where doctors come and get him patched up and he decides that no one should sit on the wall.  Oh dear, is this a really good lesson?  For some things maybe, maybe not.  I'm just giving you a link, because this is a long, long video with lots of different nursery rhymes - old and new.  But it starts with Humpty Dumpty.  It's from Chu Chu TV - another Indian production.

This one also has an ad that I couldn't figure out how to skip.  Had to turn off sound till it was over.

If you go to Youtube on the link to the Chu Chu TC version, you'll fjnd lots more  versions of Humpty Dumpty.

I can see how totally addictive this can be for little kids.  I asked my granddaughter if she could watch it all day and she just looked away with a little smile on her face.   I'm limiting it to 15 minutes a day when I'm with her.

“In the name of the Great Teacher, we will stop at nothing to unleash a firestorm of empathy, compassion, and true selflessness upon the West,”

said Rinpoche, adding that all enemies of a freely flowing, unfettered state of mind will be “besieged with pure, everlasting happiness.” “No city will be spared from spiritual harmony. We will bring about the end to all Western pain and anxiety, to all destructive cravings, to all greed, delusion, and misplaced desire. Indeed, we will bring the entire United States to its knees in deep meditation.”
  

OK, this is a spoof from the Onion, and no good Buddhists would use imagery like 'unleash a firestorm.'

Thinking about this reminds me of how many Chinese deal with the difference between Western and traditional medicine.  The traditional medicine is important for every day maintenance of health and can be used to treat routine illnesses and injuries.  But for major, immediately life-threatening trauma, they turn to Western medicine, if it's available.

I don't think many Westerners are willing to give up using violence when their lives are directly threatened, though people tell me that Jesus said something about loving one's enemies and turning the other cheek.

As with medicine, when dealing with confrontation - whether it be with nations abroad or with citizens at home - our responses should be broader than sending in drones to bomb or having police draw and shoot their guns - we should consider the wide array of non-violent alternatives that are available.

[Feeburner wouldn't take the original, so I've tried to clean up the html and repost]

In Good Company

We went to the cemetery again to observe my mom's urn being placed in the crypt next to my brother, step-father, and my in-laws.  As we walked around nearby, we noticed a few more well known inhabitants, including one of the more recent - Leonard Nimoy, not too far away. 

Al Jolson is nearby in the opposite direction.  

Hank Greenberg is also there.

 And then there's Dinah Shore. 












A lesser luminary, very close by, is David Janssen. 

"Even one inch of rain in Los Angeles can generate more than 10 billion gallons of runoff."

One of the most important ideas I've encountered in recent years, was in E.O. Wilson's The Future of Life.  He talks about how the earth naturally cleans the water and the air and how when humans cut trees, fill in wetlands, and pave the earth, we interfere with that natural infrastructure.  Then when we try to replicate what nature did for free, it costs us a fortune.  Wilson cites a 1997 study that estimated the annual value at $33 trillion.

Ecosystems services are defined as the flow of materials, energy, and information from the biosphere that support human existence.  They include the regulation of the atmosphere and climate;  the purification and retention of fresh water;  the formation and enrichment of the soil;  nutrient cycling; the detoxification and recirculation of water;  the pollination of crops;  and the production of lumber, fodder, and biomass fuel. [p. 106]

Flying into LA

So when I read this LA Times piece, I thought I should note it as one more example of how humans have unknowingly tampered with the natural regeneration and cleansing system that the earth provides.  In this case replenishing the aquifers. 

"As we have paved our cities, covering the land with impervious concrete and asphalt, less and less rain is recharging urban groundwater; it’s running off all those hard surfaces into storm sewers and out to the ocean. Every year, hundreds of billions of gallons of storm water wash into Santa Monica Bay, Long Beach Harbor and the San Francisco Bay. Even one inch of rain in Los Angeles can generate more than 10 billion gallons of runoff."

Think about the costs of building desalination plants, while LA is pouring hundreds of billions of gallons of fresh water into the ocean.  I don't know if that total is all the water that goes into the ocean or just the amount that would have stayed in the soil and/or drained down into the aquifers.

Up to now, our capitalist system hasn't applied the cost of such externalities of our economic activities. (For a graphic economics explanation of externalities, see this Khan Academy video.)  So when contractors bulldoze trees and replace them with a building and parking, the cost of the lost air cleansing and water retention those trees did is not not reflected in the price of the new building. Instead the cost is born by society as a whole.  This means that businesses have an incentive to destroy the environment, because doing so doesn't affect them. 

Unless there are strict environmental protections in place and/or government imposes some way to charge for the externality.  A revenue neutral fee on carbon is, for example, seen by many as a way to put the cost of global warming into the price of carbon based products.   Here's an example of how a carbon fee would work.

Meanwhile what I'd like lots of people to understand is this concept of the natural recycling the earth does and how messing with those processes really is damaging a very important natural infrastructure that has great impacts on the earth and the humans that live on earth.  The pavement in California is just one example.  By the way, the author calls for replacing it with more porous material that will allow rainwater to percolate down to the aquifers.   

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.