So I went to see The Other Boleyn Girl, this afternoon, with a few acquaintances of mine. I’ve been a bit out of the loop, lately, and if I hadn’t happened to overhear half of a satirical SNL sketch, last night (’Excuse my ruddy color, I’ve just come back from the field — where I was having sex with a horse’ — a dig at the film’s legendary ‘Thighs’ scene) I’d be able to say that I walked into the film with no preconceptions, whatsoever — I hadn’t even seen the official movie poster before I sat down to watch the film.

If you’re arching an eyebrow at the word ‘film’, I’ll wholeheartedly agree that the plot of this movie left much to be desired. Melodramatic, salacious, facile, glib, torrential without ever reaching depth… I love history, but I’m not a tremendous buff of the Tudor period — a History Channel special, The Six Wives of King Henry VIII, is about the extent of my knowledge, here — and yet, even I knew that the storyline had taken an exceptional degree of poetic license in interpreting history into a two hour motion picture.

Anne Boleyn has historically been described as intensely contradictory. She was the individual who pressured Henry VIII to secede from the Catholic Church and the authority of the Pope, which the movie I saw today attributes to nothing else aside from her sheer lust and aim for power. And yet, Anne, a consumate courtier, a lover of cards and revelry, and a dauntless power broker, was also intensely religious. She owned one of the very first Bibles written in the English language, and worked quite hard, via her later courtly influence, to save the lives of Protestant reformers who had been condemned to death for heresy. She was quite well versed in both the spiritual and political ramifications of the religious turmoil of her age and had a very clear, quite heart-felt position that the Catholic church’s corruption and weakening of both integrity and authority was damaging to the one true faith. To portray Anne Boleyn’s push towards severance with the Roman Catholic Church as little more than petty and rashly spontaneous power-grabbing is to erase at least half of the exceptional woman that she truly was. One might as well portray Voltaire as an empty-headed fop or Anne’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, England’s Virgin Queen, as a mere frigid figurehead.

Which brings me to a more general complaint — that of Natalie Portman’s quaking, quivering ‘nervous breakdown’ moments in the film, which reminded me quite a bit of Milla Jovovich’s quivering, quaking and hyperbolic fits of crying in 1999’s story of Joan of Arc, The Messenger. They both represent the sort of portrayal which says that, well, obviously women can vie for power, but just as obviously they can never truly handle it once they have it and, moreover, the indisputable reality is that they simply cannot create anything as solid or as sensible as a plan to carry them through the thick of things once they’re in them. What trade-offs we modern women accept to see an iconic figure played up in lights. It quite makes one wistful for the late Katherine Hepburn.

Having said all that, The Other Boleyn Girl is visually and thematically stunning. The rich, lush backdrop of the set, combined with the gorgeous period costumes, luscious photography and lighting, and the full commitment of the cast to their dialogue and characters, creates a strange and fantastical hybrid-beast of a film — half low-brow camp, ala Valley of the Dolls, half reverential mysticism.

Which is why I might even half-heartedly recommend it — given an understanding that it’s the film and not the lady the film portrays which is the truly insubstantial eyecandy.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

- Rumi

So, so much love…

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Sweet Sister Taser of Serene Harmony. What’s yours?

In the face of violent protests, New Orleans City Council yesterday moved to demolish thousands of low-income houses as the city continues the agonisingly slow process or rebuilding from Hurricane Katrina.

Demolition crews will now move in to dismantle the 4,500 brick buildings that generations of poor people lived in. The outburst of violence came amid concerns that the authorities intend to reduce the numbers of predominantly poor, black people living in New Orleans.

“It is beyond callous, and can only be seen as malicious discrimination,” said Kali Akuno of the Coalition to Stop the Demolition. “It is an unabashed attempt to eliminate the black population of New Orleans.”

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to replace the units badly, which were old and in reed of demolition even before they were damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It intends to replace them with new mixed-income housing.

The decision to demolish was made after hours of debate between residents, activists and preservationists - and clashes in the street outside where police used chemical spray and stun guns on the dozens of protesters trying to force their way into the packed City Council chamber.

One woman was sprayed and dragged from the gates and carted off on a stretcher. Another woman was stunned by a taser gun. “I was just standing, trying to get into my City Council meeting,” said the woman, Kim Ellis, who was taken away in an ambulance.

“Is this what democracy looks like?” Bill Quigley, a law professor who opposes demolition.

 

Many of the city’s poorer residents repeated during the day-long debate that they welcome the plan to replace buildings with mixed-income housing.

Shortly after Katrina struck, the Republican Congressman Richard Baker told lobbyists in a Baton Rough Red Cross shelter: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

~~ Story from The Independent/UK

Meanwhile…. on Wall Street

Nightmare Before Christmas

Article
By BOB HERBERT for The New York Times
Published: December 22, 2007

Christmastime is bonus time on Wall Street, and the Gucci set has been blessed with another record harvest.

Forget the turbulence in the financial markets and the subprime debacle. Forget the dark clouds of a possible recession. Bloomberg News tells us that the top securities firms are handing out nearly $38 billion in seasonal bonuses, the highest total ever.

But there’s a reason to temper the celebration, if only out of respect for an old friend who’s not doing too well. Even as the Wall Streeters are high-fiving and ordering up record shipments of Champagne and caviar, the American dream is on life-support.

I had a conversation the other day with Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union. He mentioned a poll of working families that had shown that their belief in that mythical dream that has sustained so many generations for so long is fading faster than sunlight on a December afternoon.

The poll, conducted by Lake Research Partners for the Change to Win labor federation, found that only 16 percent of respondents believed that their children’s generation would be better off financially than their own. While some respondents believed that the next generation would fare roughly the same as this one, nearly 50 percent held the exceedingly gloomy view that today’s children would be “worse off” when the time comes for them to enter the world of work and raise their own families.

That absence of optimism is positively un-American.

“These are parents who cannot see where the jobs of the future are that will allow their kids to have a better life than they had,” said Mr. Stern. “And they’re not wrong. That’s the problem.”

Record bonuses on Wall Street at a time when ordinary working Americans are filled with anxiety about their economic future are signs that the trickle-down phenomenon that was supposed to have benefited everyone never happened.

The rich, boosted by the not-so-invisible hand of the corporate ideologues in government, have done astonishingly well in recent decades, while the rest of the population has tended to tread water economically, or drown.

A study released last month by the Pew Charitable Trusts noted that “for most Americans, seeing that one’s children are better off than oneself is the essence of living the American dream.” But for the past 40 years, men in their 30s, prime family-raising age, have found it difficult to outdistance their dads economically.

As the Pew study put it: “Earnings of men in their 30s have remained surprisingly flat over the past four decades.” Family incomes have improved during that time largely because of the wholesale entrance of women into the work force.

For the very wealthy, of course, it’s been a different story. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the after-tax income of the top 1 percent rose 228 percent from 1979 through 2005.

What seems to be happening now is that working Americans, and that includes the middle class, have exhausted much of their capacity to tread water. Wives and mothers are already working. Mortgages have been refinanced and tremendous amounts of home equity drained. And families have taken on debt loads — for cars, for college tuition, for medical treatment — that would buckle the knees of the strongest pack animals.

According to Demos, a policy research group in New York, “American families are using credit cards to bridge the gaps created by stagnant wages and higher costs of living.” Americans owe nearly $900 billion on their credit cards.

We’re running out of smoke and mirrors. The fundamental problem, the problem that is destroying the dream, is the extreme inequality pounded into the system by the corporate crowd and its handmaidens in government.

As Mr. Stern said: “To me, the issue in America is not a question of wealth or growth, it’s a question of distribution.”

When such an overwhelming portion of the economic benefits are skewed toward a tiny portion of the population — as has happened in the U.S. over the past few decades — it’s impossible for the society as a whole not to suffer.

Americans work extremely hard and are amazingly productive. But without the clout of a strong union movement, and arrayed against the mighty power of the corporations and the federal government, they don’t receive even a reasonably fair share of the economic benefits from their hard work or productivity.

Instead of celebrating bonuses this Christmas season, too many American workers are looking with dread toward 2008, worried about their rising levels of debt, or whether they will be able to hang on to a job with few or no benefits or how to tell their kids that they won’t be able to help with the cost of college.

It’s not the stuff of which dreams are made.

I am a Canna What Flower Are You?

Go, now, and check out Luz: Girl of the Knowing! Then come back and tell me how it awesome it is

From the creatrix, Claudia Davila:

"LUZ was inspired by my first ever (self-published) comic book, SPOILED, a tale about the relationship between humankind and nature in relation to peak oil — the end of the petroleum era. Unlike the comic book, this web strip will contain practical skills to learn for when fossil energy ends. Our heroine is Luz, a girl on a mission to gather "the knowing": knowledge and experience about sustainable survival for humans, specifically in urban centers. Occasionally we’ll glimpse into Luz’s musings about the human condition and our connection, or lack thereof, to the natural world. I hope you enjoy this bi-weekly strip, while accumulating "the knowing" for yourself as the post-petroleum era approaches."

Admittedly, I read this book several months ago, yet it’s had such an impact on me I wanted to turn back time and review it here.

Plenty is the story of James and Alisa Smith, a Toronto couple who spend a year eating nothing but local foods. Their joint decision is set off by an impromptu gathered feast they share with friends while temporarily stuck in their summer retreat in the mountains. When they return back to their normal workaday life in the city, James, who’s documented some less than appealing facts about the sugar trade and other aspects of the global food supply for his day job, talks his girlfriend into attempting this experiment with him: to only eat foods that have traveled 100 miles or less from source to dinner plate.

And though James and Alisa do no planning whasoever — they discover that no one in their region grows wheat so they go without flour for nine months until stumbling over some rougue farmer in the area who not only grows wheat but mills it, too — the sincerity and tenacity of this couple makes for an absorbing story.

The two are talented writers who take turns narrating chapter by chapter. They talk about the changes that have occurred in their region from the early 1900’s to the present, they talk about the challenges they faced with this diet, living in an apartment in a big city, trying to work with local foods while honoring their previous commitment to a strict vegetarianism in which they eat no meat, dairy or eggs (but do eat fish — to my mind, their definition of vegetarian is a little loose to begin with and becomes progressively less strict through the book) yet the whole of the book culminates in an invitation to join them in their adventure.

Local eating has an immediate impact on the environment through reducing carbon emissions from lengthy transportation (most foods travel a minimum of 3,000 miles from field to plate). It also helps to keep communities interconnected — just consider that your average customer has 10 times as many conversations at the local Farmer’s Market as at the local big box supermarket. Farmer’s Markets help ensure that farmers and their help receive a living wage and relatedly this helps to reduce our need for cheap and frequently illegal labor — which means local foods may help us with the security of our borders.

I can’t resist pointing out, however, the difference between the two versions of this book that were released in Canada and in the US. The Canadian version is a straightforward description of what this book is about. The US version, on the other hand, is almost a plea before the reader can look any further — "Bear in mind that we have plenty right now — this book is not about depriviation! Here, look at this big juicy tomato!" And it really isn’t about deprivation. It’s about an  awareness that will hopefully lead to revitilization.

At least it certainly has been for me. A few things I’ve discovered along the way: our two local Farmer’s Markets, the Old Guilford Mill which was originally built in  1767 and  not only currently makes local flours, grits, dried fruits, and baking mixes but also supplies it’s own power, as well as Local Harvest which connects individuals to local farmers and CSA programs and Slow Foods the organization which will supply any interested visitor with information about their own regional resources.
 

Herland, a nearly-lost feminist Utopian novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a hundred years later, is still an absolute romp.

The nut-shell synopsis:

The era is Victorian. Three gallavanting, adventurous men, one with a small fortune, a gadget collection and an ego that will remind future generations of James Bond minus the day job, stumble upon a lost nation composed entirely of women that the trio cheekily nickname Herland. Herland  was suddenly cut off from the rest of human civilization over a thousand years prior in the midst of a civil insurrection and a landslide that deprived the early city-state of it’s men. Those first women managed to survive when one of the women experienced spontaneous parthenogenesis, a literal virgin birth. And Voila, the world is gifted with a true Mother Country.

This is heady material written by a real Victorian feminist agitator (who also ran her own newspaper and authored several other critical texts). Yet it’s also a comedy written in the classic satirical style of Enlightenment writers like Voltaire and Jonathon Swift.

Only here, as opposed to using a naive and wide-eyed outsider along the lines of Voltaire’s Candide or the Ingenue, Gilman has created a whole nation of naive and sincere outsider women to act as a cast of straight-ladies who ask disturbing and only somewhat artless questions of our visiting Victorian gentlemen. For instance, if women shouldn’t work why is it that, in the outside world, over 3/4’s of the female population are employeed in paying labor? Is poverty meant to be a statement on individual worth? Who does marriage benefit and what is it’s true purpose? There are real comic gems in our explorer-narrator’s hapless responses.

But the most intriguing questions Gilman asks are the ones she never actually puts into words — what would happen to our world if we valued nurturing over competition or insight over personality?

 

Direct Action is the highly entertaining, narrative quasi-fictional history of the Livermore Action Group, or LAG, a highly prolific anti-nuclear political collective that gathered together in the early 80’s to protest Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, specifically, and a laissez-faiere culture that could support a weapons technology with the capacity to obliterate life-as-we-know-it, in general.

I have to admit I’m still fascinated, weeks later, with the process of Consensus decision-making, the combination of radical spirituality with radical politics and the fact that the rag-tag group of vastly disparate individuals described in this book managed to work together as diligently and loyally as they did.

Lavishly illustrated with a bit of eye candy on every page or so, the novel was a quick and delicious read even at 700 pages+.

(I have to admit, however, that since I was carrying this book in my pack to and from work while using my bicycle for transit, I was really glad when I reached the end!)

Ever since I read a few lines about FDR’s influential appointee to the New York State Power Authority, Leland Olds, and then later, a few words about E.F Shumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of liberal economics — not something I’ve heard much about.

Which is why I jumped on Deep Economy the moment I found it in my local library’s collection.

Admittedly, Deep Economy is not a lesson in economics — at least, not in the fashion of tedia which you might apply to your tax return. It is, however, a fascinating overview of the ways in which the US economy and, more specifically, our beliefs about that economy and the imperative of economic growth, intersect with the health of the planet, the viability of our communities and the elusive nature of human happiness.

In that sense, Deep Economy picks up the threads and interweaves the philosophies of Deep Ecology, the Local Foods movement and what is shaping up to be the Local Community movement into one decisive and pondersome whole.

Paired with another book I’m currently reading, Your Money or Your Life, it’s almost enough to usher in the new Age of Sincerity.