Events for Thursday, July 19, 2012 through Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Posted on 2012-Jul-19 by Jason Olshefsky

Thursday, July 19

I don't get out too often to the lunchtime shows, but I do enjoy the very good bluegrass from the String Theory Bluegrass Band, performing today at 12:15 p.m. at Granite Mills Park (at High Falls). [source: RocWiki Events Board, 2012-Jul-16]
Tonight at Highland Park Bowl is the Free Movies in the Parks series with The Artist at "dusk". [source: Freetime website, 2012-Jul-16]
More likely you'll find me at the Dryden to see Miracle Mile (Steve De Jarnatt, US 1988, 87 min.) at 8 p.m. The Eastman House calendar sells it thusly:

Greatly admired by the few people who saw it upon its initial release, this unsettling boy-meets-girl romantic comedy unfolds over the course of a single night — the last, it may turn out, of life on earth. Tangerine Dream provides the dark, dreamy soundtrack.

[source: Dryden calendar, 2012-Jul-16]
I'm not going to get out there, but I do appreciate the humor of comic Jim Gaffigan who'll be at CMAC tonight at 8 p.m. [source: WBER website, 2012-Jul-16]
I forgot about it, but the Hill Cumorah Pageant concludes this weekend, daily at 9 p.m. through the Saturday. [source: Freetime website, 2012-Jul-16]
After I get out of the movie, I'll likely get a chance to catch rockin' rockabilly from Krypton-88 at Star Alley, probably starting sometime around 9 p.m. [source: flyer, 2012-Jun-19]

Friday, July 20

Update: Over at the new 1975 Gallery (89 Charlotte St. where the Little Bakery was) is the WALL\THERAPY Kickoff from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. See the events later this weekend for a litte more info. [source: The Yards e-mail, 2012-Jul-19]
I'm probably not going to see Boss Tweed at Abilene for Happy Hour around 6 p.m. but I may get over there late for Bear Bones, and my friends in Anonymous Willpower. Although, you know, see also Sunday at Boulderfest … [source: Abilene e-mail, 2012-Jul-16]
The Dryden is showing Jaws tonight at 8 p.m. and again on Sunday at 2 p.m. [source: Dryden calendar, 2012-Jul-16]

Saturday, July 21

At 8 p.m., the Dryden will be screening Stilyagi (Hipsters) (Valery Todorovsky, Russia 2008, 115 min., Russian w/ subtitles). Curator Paolo Cherchi Usai will introduce the film described by the Eastman House calendar:

It's a comedy! It's a musical! It's Russian! The unlikely match of these words finds a buoyant realization in this rip-roaring mix of Grease and Moulin Rouge, with a gentle touch of political undertones. A sure-shot crowd pleaser, artfully blending virtuoso camerawork, rock 'n' roll, and a dispassionate view of Soviet society before the glasnost.

[source: Dryden calendar, 2012-Jul-16]
Over at the Bug Jar is the reunion of long-time favorite rock band The Priests with The Bloody Hollies, and St. Phillip's Escalator all starting around 10:30 p.m. [source: Bug Jar calendar, 2012-Jul-16]

Sunday, July 22

Update: The Yards is hosting a WALL\THERAPY Street Art Block Party today from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Pennsylvania Ave. north of the Public Market. [source: The Yards e-mail, 2012-Jul-19]
Although going on all weekend, I'm just highlighting some of my favorites playing today at BoulderFest: good country-based rock from The Josh Netsky Band at 5 p.m., nice sounding acoustic duo Dave & Marissa at 6 p.m., Anonymous Willpower at 7 p.m., new-to-me Epilogue at 8 p.m., and finishing with wicked fun, saxophone-driven, percussive groove-rock band The Buddhahood at 9 p.m. [source: Boulder Coffee calendar, 2012-Jul-16]

Monday, July 23

Auke de Boer and Adolph Rots (Groningen Duo) of the Netherlands [despite that I stumble to pronounce their names] will be leading a performance of the University of Rochester Carillon in Eastman Quadrangle tonight starting around 7 p.m. [source: University of Rochester Events Calendar, 2012-Jul-10]
Since the Dryden's closed, I often head to the Little on Mondays since the films are five bucks. I hear Your Sister's Sister is pretty good and I was kind of intrigued by the trailer, so I might stop by. It's playing at 7 p.m. and 9:20 p.m. tonight. [source: Little Theatre e-mail, 2012-Jul-18]
Just because I like the name, I'll consider checking out Vince Dynamic with This Life, and Kneptune at the Bug Jar starting around 8:30 p.m. (doors at 7:30 p.m.) [source: Bug Jar calendar, 2012-Jul-16]

Tuesday, July 24

The Dryden will be screening Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, US/UK 1971, 118 min.) at 8 p.m. tonight in which:

Pacifist American mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) gets a lesson in local customs when neighborhood thugs assault his wife Amy (Susan George) in their Cornish farmhouse. A politically explosive demonstration of the dangers of standing on the sidelines in a violent age, Straw Dogs remains controversial for the havoc it wreaks upon conventional notions of feminism, pacifism, and art.

[source: Dryden calendar, 2012-Jul-16]
Tonight at the Bug Jar is Tony Nelson, friend, and all-around excellent musician Ian Downey is Famous, great multi-faceted "gypsy folk" band The Pickpockets, and A.K. starting around 9 p.m. (doors at 8 p.m.) [source: Bug Jar calendar, 2012-Jul-16]

Wednesday, July 25

Update: WALL\THERAPY continues at School of the Arts with a Community Dialogue with the Artists tonight starting at 6 p.m. [source: The Yards e-mail, 2012-Jul-19]
I haven't seen Julie Donofrio perform comedy in a while, but she'll be hosting the Young Comedians' Open Mic (featuring 11 to 18-year-olds) tonight starting around 6:30 p.m. at Writers and Books [source: Writers and Books website, 2012-Jul-16]
Tonight at 7 p.m. at the Little is another screening of short films in the NY Filmmakers' Quarterly. It's also playing on Saturday at 2 p.m. [source: Little Theatre e-mail, 2012-Jul-18]
Meanwhile, the Dryden will screen Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, US 1948, 126 min.) at 8 p.m. From the calendar:

A band of desperate gold prospectors — including the director's father, Walter Huston, in what is arguably his greatest role — head for the remote Sierra Madre where they come face to face with bandits, federales, and their own basest instincts.

[source: Dryden calendar, 2012-Jul-16]

The Fraud that is Truthland

Posted on 2012-Jun-21 by Jason Olshefsky

So I heard about this film Truthland which is purported as a response to GasLand by Josh Fox. While I think Gasland barely scratches the surface of the issue of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas extraction (hydrofracking or fracking) — and promotes the most sensational aspects — I think it is overall a service that it raises awareness and encourages people to explore further.

So having "drank the Kool Aid" so-to-speak, I was skeptical of Truthland. I watched the trailer and it looked pretty good. But then I was thinking, "I wonder where the website is hosted" so I looked into it. It came back "clean" in the sense that it wasn't hosted at a gas company like I expected but by Linode.com. But then I thought, "man, that website looks really good". It'd probably be around $5K to $20K to make something that looks that good. That seems kind of unusual for a family to be able to afford (and without even a mention on IMDb.com, much less media attention or even a Kickstarter campaign.)

And then I thought, you know, the footage in the trailer looks really good too — like too good. I mean, I think it's possible that a mom in Pennsylvania knows how to produce a top-notch documentary, but it seemed kind of unlikely. The quality demonstrated in the trailer ain't from some off-the-shelf Canon no matter how much money you spend: shooting obviously included a recording engineer, someone with fill lights and reflectors, a good cinematographer, and at least two cameras. For instance, at about 1:30 in the trailer interviewing Joseph Martin: note the gap between Shelly DePue and Martin where you can see the tree trunk between them, then in the close-up, the camera is to the left of the first and zoomed, obscuring the tree? A digital zoom after-the-fact would show the same angle. Plus there's obviously wireless microphones to record the interview and reflected light to key their faces in the shade of the trees. These are not things the average person thinks of — only an extraordinarily exceptional person would.

So way at the bottom of the page are two links: one to Energy In Depth, and the other to The Independent Petroleum Association of America. Well gee, that seems weird. Most documentaries give thanks to friends and relatives who ponied up the thousands of dollars it would take to shoot it, but this one cites a couple industry groups.

So I Googled it and a few links down is Fracking Industry's Answer to 'Gasland': Devised by Astroturf Lobbying Group and Political Ad Agency. And that pretty much puts a lock on it. I don't mean to just make an ad hominem fallacy of it all: there is big money at stake, and the central deception (that this started from DePue wanting to find the truth) calls into question everything that is said. And if everything that's said can't be believed, why say it at all?

God Bless America at the Dryden

Posted on 2012-Jun-17 by Jason Olshefsky

Curiosity got the best of me, I guess, and I headed to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see God Bless America. It's billed as a black comedy "revenge fantasy" although I think the philosophy runs deeper than that. Yes, it's a story that threads the needle of disbelief so we can have a "hero" who takes it upon himself to successfully go on a killing spree of people who, well, annoy him — "revenge fantasy".

Early on, Frank meets up with Roxy — a disaffected teen who hungrily insists on joining him. The mechanics of the plot force the revenge killings to continue unabated, but there's bound to be at least one that's just a little too close to the viewer's own behavior. That, and as Frank and Roxy discuss their guidelines of who to kill, it's clear that it's all way too subjective: each individual has jeir own set of behaviors that jee deems wholly intolerable.

But there is one common thread in it all — one thing that I think everyone can agree on: those people are most responsible for irresponsible and immoral behavior today. You know who they are.

See, the thing we all have in common is the "problem" is with "others", not ourselves. And if we identify some behavior that is part of the problem, we are certainly not the worst offender: we have a plausible justification for our behavior.

So that leads me to three questions: how can I tell if it's me?, are you sure things are bad?, and why am I even thinking about this?

One thought experiment is to ask, "if everyone in the whole world behaved as I do, would that be okay?"

If everyone in the whole world used 4,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity in a year, would that be okay? Hrmm … probably not.
If everyone in the world didn't own a car, would that be okay? That would probably improve things a bit.

Another experiment is to think of how complicated an explanation is necessary to defend your argument. I mean, I don't even see a need to justify holding the door for someone behind me. Or how about, "the other day this guy just walked out into the crosswalk and he almost got himself killed — I mean, what was he thinking? Didn't he know to look both ways before crossing the street? It's not like I could have stopped to wait for him because I was in a hurry because my presence is critical at my destination." And don't you think it's more consistent and straightforward to think that greed is more to blame for the problems in the world than some convoluted logic that somehow leads to homosexuality?

But a lot of times we should step back and think, "are things that bad?" I remember going on the highway with my parents in the 1970's. When traffic was moderately heavy, the whole highway stunk of gasoline, oil, and smoke. I mean stunk — like if you spilled some gas in your garage, only it was hot in the summer and the vapor just lingered there making everyone just a little queasy. But you can barely smell them now (except on a steep race track like the steep grades on I-70 west of Denver) even though there are literally twice as many cars now as in 1972.

And finally, what's the deal with finding someone to blame anyway? Why is our culture so hell-bent on doing that? It seems entirely counterproductive: it's so bad to be "ruining the world" that we are compelled to create convoluted explanations for our own behavior rather than just going, "yeah, that thing I'm doing is doing more harm than good so I'm going to change it."

See, the only way God Bless America makes any sense is if we are fully committed to shame so we feel absolutely justified in targeting someone else to blame.

Thoughts on Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?

Posted on 2012-Jun-11 by Jason Olshefsky

I decided to head to The Little (240 East Ave.) to see Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? Filmmaker Frances Causey, and author David Cay Johnston were there to discuss the film with moderator Julie Philipp.

Of course, because I can't remember facts, I'm heading to Heist's Official Website with this outline of the central point:

Beginning with background on the New Deal, HEIST explores how Franklin Delano Roosevelt's progressive policies were derailed by Ronald Reagan and subsequent presidential administrations, benefiting only the wealthiest investors and CEOs. HEIST exposes the full story: how corporate leaders worked with elected officials of both major political parties to create the largest transfer of wealth in history, looting the economy to create a gap between rich and poor previously seen only in impoverished colonial nations. The film is structured as a political thriller, showing the shift from FDR's New Deal reforms to an ideology where the free market reigns. It reveals the impact of the infamous Powell memo of 1971 entitled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," which was a call to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for American business to defend its interests against criticisms of unregulated capitalism. The Powell Memo and the 1000 page Mandate for Leadership document published in 1980 by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which were written to promote business interests and deregulation, serve as the starting points of the story to show the roots of the class warfare unleashed by big business, and how wealth in the U.S. was transferred from workers to corporate interests over decades of policy shifts.

I walked in there brimming with confirmation bias. The facts presented in the film and the theories behind them fit exactly with my own experience and observation of corporate expansion of scale and power, the behavior of the media, the exploitation of journalistic standards, government, and taxation — pretty much everything.

The other day I was in a restaurant with a TV on some news network, and the on-screen personality was presenting — as news — changes to the contract plans of one of the cell phone companies. To me, this was just the flat-out reading of a press-release generated by that company. I argue this isn't news (but I think I'm more likely to get people to agree that it's the reading of a press release so I'll stop while I'm ahead). This doesn't violate journalistic standards per se — where the goal is to accurately represent statements from an individual or organization. But there's something there that misses the spirit of journalism … perhaps the spirit that journalists are the watchdogs of democracy rather than the lapdogs of the aristocracy [a phrasing that is not exactly right, but far too clever for me to omit].

Heist, however, confirms my suspicions. One of the goals of the 1971 Powell memo was to control the media in exactly this way. Modern journalists don't just go out and pick their own stories: morning e-mails outline the stories they are to cover. Those e-mails are sent by the managers which are driven by their managers, and so on, until you get to realize that there are only a half-dozen media companies making these decisions. A few years ago, I recall watching the nightly news and flipping between channels — horrified that every single story was being reported on the other stations in exactly the same order. The simplest explanation was that the schedule for all three stations came from the same source.

I thought Heist presented a solid case, but it's also affirming what I believe already, so how can I be confident that the theory it presents is an accurate one? I was thinking that people bring their own biases, and they're more likely to be swayed by something that agrees with their established ideas than by something that does not. So why would someone be influenced by this film? I muddled my way through asking a question of the panel and got most of it across.

Frances Causey made a point to say that she had been a journalist at CNN, but left to work on more in-depth projects like this one. She said she spent an extraordinary amount of effort confirming that every fact — especially the most sensational ones — were verifiable and accurate.

What's omitted in all the discussion, though, is the underlying theory. I'm going to take as given that the facts are true, and the sequence of events is as depicted (i.e. corporations are using the 1971 Powell memo as a playbook). But Heist answers the question, "is this good?" with a resounding "no." In fact, it basically presumes that this is not good.

Individually, I think this kind of world sucks. I hate having to constantly be an outsider simply because I observe the world directly and draw my own conclusions.

Working outward, I also think that centralized power and wealth creates an inhospitable society for people to live. I think the core argument opposing that opinion is that the system we have at present provides slightly less than what people want, and that encourages them to work more and work harder, propelling progress. It doesn't actually let people starve (for the most part) but it does ensure people are in a constant state of indebtedness.

What I mean that it's inhospitable is that it could be much better. If all the wealth and power tied up in making more wealth and power were instead used to foster individual household energy independence, health care for all, true theoretical scientific research, elevating everyone's education, and so forth, I think we'd be far better off.

There is a fear — and rightfully so — that this may lead to a bunch of idle hands that become the devil's playthings, but it's entirely possible to get back to some of the good parts of the 1950's: particularly the possibility of income from a 25th percentile individual providing all that's needed to raise a family. Is it not absurd that two college graduates must both be employed to earn a decent living?

Some Smoothies are More Equal than Others

Posted on 2012-May-30 by Jason Olshefsky

Last night I had a hankering for a fruit smoothie, and I decided to swing by Equal=Grounds (750 South Ave., formerly Hunt's Hardware). I got a mixed berry with mint — ordinarily I'd go with blackberry with mint, but "mixed" is really black+rasp, so it was a pretty acceptable substitution. It was perfect: so full of flavor that any more would have been too sweet, and blended so smooth it all fit through the straw.

Contrast that to tonight when I stopped by Starry Nites Café (696 University Ave., formerly Moonbeans) for a light dinner before the movie. Although the peach smoothie was acceptably flavored, the chunks of ice were too big to fit through the straw, leading to the unpleasantness of ice jams.

I tolerated the ice jams worse than average because Ali had called that Lucy (the dog) was getting stitches after having been bit by a Rottweiler. The other dog had a sketchy past and had broke its collar; its owner was horrified and shaken. Lucy will probably be fine: she got bit pretty good in her front leg, but they managed to pull off the Rottweiler before it did any mortal damage.

Something Like Therapy

Posted on 2012-May-23 by Jason Olshefsky

I can't stop thinking about my personal ramifications from watching the movie Bully last week. I mentioned one sentence in my essay about it last week, but it just opened up a big can of worms.

Perhaps most recently, I was working on writing a proposal to speak about the solar system I had installed last year, but I quickly grew disinterested as I worked through my estimates of return-on-investment. But what was really stopping me was my painful "to hell with them" attitude. I've never been much of a salesman — and notoriously anti-good at marketing (owing to my desire to permit people to make an informed decision). I feel like I'm constantly fighting the status quo on big-picture issues: I talk with enough people who wring their hands over increasing energy costs and blame "the man" for ripping them off, but then fail to see they can just walk away from "the man", get a solar system, and do away with a big chunk of variability. The debate, see, gets quickly personal for me when I have a solution and they won't listen — as if they're actually calling me stupid.

Or like a few years ago when I abandoned my "mileage maximizer" project for, essentially the same kinds of reasons: "screw them." I still think that idea would work, and possibly be a significant step toward winning a 100 mpg X-prize. But there's really two outcomes: either it works, and then either I fail to market it correctly, or someone else takes it away from me and turns it into a "Bad Thing" — or it doesn't work and I'm ridiculed for being so foolish. In no way does it work out that I gain any satisfaction from it because I can't help but hear the critical voices. And the last thing I want is to give something useful to my critics.

Another thing that comes up often enough is my hair-trigger on people taking advantage of me. I probably missed out on a pretty fair number of dates in my past: if a woman was sweet to me, I always assumed she wanted something. I'd hook up her stereo, or drive her somewhere, or fix her car, or help with her assignments — all with a begrudging pleasure at the certainty that this was my lot in life. In retrospect, I can deduce that each of them probably just kinda liked me and wanted to get to know me, but even now, I can't fully internalize that was even possible. And I still can't believe it — I'm still skeptical when I meet someone who (to anyone else) clearly likes me, and the stronger the attraction, the stronger the skepticism.

And then, I take an excruciatingly long time to trust someone. And that trust can dissipate instantly if I even start to believe the relationship has any ulterior value. It's a constant struggle to balance on that razor edge: a combination of denial and suppressing evidence, and a desire to really feel trust — trust where I don't even consider that I'm being played. That's how my closest relationships work: my best approximation to what real trust must be like.

In high school (and most of college) I found my niche skating by with minimal effort. I graduated 4th in my class, and I was very pleased at that because it absolved me from the responsibilities of being valedictorian or salutatorian, particularly giving speeches. My whole point was to try to be invisible; to get attention from nobody, good or bad.

Farther back, things get more hazy, and all lumped together. Was it first grade or fifth grade that I sat in back of the bus solely to endure (unsuccessfully) the psychology cruelty of the "bad kids" who sat there? Did some kid wreck my diorama on the way to school or was that Lisa Simpson? Why do I remember so few good times on the bus? Why didn't anybody do anything about the misery I was going through?

I went into the world with an open heart. I have learned to ferociously guard that kid in me who believes people are good and they want to help others. But then I met my peers and they were sometimes cruel. And the adults in the world would say, "well that's the way the world works, Jay." They sided with the evil. And it is evil. And wrong. Being good and nice is natural to all of us, and it's the way we should all be all the time — it should be exceptional to ignore someone who is hurting. Yet it's always the story of someone who takes five minutes to help that is treated as exceptional. Well God damn it: you're all wrong.

And to me, that's the take-away from Bully: these kids who are bullied, they are the best people in the world. To coddle the bullies is tantamount to child abuse — it's teaching that cruelty is okay, that rudeness is okay, that abuse is okay, that stealing is okay, that rape is okay: they're all part of the same family, grown from the same kernel. We get the chance to build a new society every day, but we keep supporting the ugliest parts and wondering why it doesn't get better.

Watching Jeff, Who Lives at Home, and Bully at the Little

Posted on 2012-May-14 by Jason Olshefsky

I headed out to The Little (240 East Ave.) to check out a couple movies. On Mondays, they have been running a $5/movie promotion, and since the George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) is closed, there is no film at the Dryden. Too often I let the Little's schedule slip through my fingers and I miss out on things I wanted to see.

I was tempted to see Jiro Dreams of Sushi as I heard good things about it (and I missed it at the Dryden last month.) But, since I was running a little late, I opted instead to see Jeff, Who Lives at Home and then Bully.

I remembered that Dayna Papaleo gave "Jeff" a lukewarm-positive review in the City Paper so I gave it a shot with relatively low expectations. I found it a bit rough around the edges. As I told a friend later, it tends to really shove hard on suspension of disbelief which did not quite break me out of the movie: my advice is to stick with it and let it flow because there's a multi-layered story going on that's worth examining. I'll also warn that I found Ed Helms acting to be a bit too broad … at least at first: I often suspect that shooting schedules for movies tend to be set up by location, but also loosely in script-order, so his earlier scenes in the film seem like a caricature portrait, but he does improve as the film goes on.

At the surface, the film is about an easily-dismissed stoner, Jeff (Jason Segel) who believes that the underlying nature of the universe is revealed through subtle messages that he believes he is tuning himself to see. Meanwhile, his brother Pat (Ed Helms) leads a much more conventional life, suppressing any belief in a purposeful world by focusing on the minutia of day-to-day life. Jeff lives in their mother Sharon's (Susan Sarandon) basement — who is struggling to find meaning in her own life as a widow, unsatisfied with her sons. Oh, and it's designed as a comedy with a lot of really quite funny moments.

But take away the mechanicals of the plot ("a stoner goes on a wacky adventure struggling to complete a simple task") and what's left is a painting of the way family is inexorably connected; how they are similar in deep, subtle ways that transcend their outwardly tremendous differences. Without giving away too much, I found it unexpectedly tender when Jeff is sitting the basement watching TV listlessly eating an uncooked PopTart.

With just a short break, I stuck around to see Bully. In case you didn't know, it's a documentary about bullying in primary schools in the United States … sort-of. Its candid portrayal of day-to-day school life resonated with me, and made me wonder if I'm repressing some memories of being bullied — I vividly remember moments that echoed Alex's dialog with his mother and with school administrators. I suspect that some part will resonate with everyone.

By my interpretation, in American society, it is considered normal for kids to establish their individuality by saying cruel things to one another. Most form a callous that protects and strengthens from each cruel remark. But some do not, and the cruelty strikes their heart each time. And because it hurts so very much, it's not something they wish to inflict on others, so they never become adept at cruelty. And then their unwillingness to be cruel becomes itself another difference that is attacked, and the pain just builds and builds.

The movie paints the picture of this seemingly unavoidable torture and then finds hope in things that parents and children are doing to turn the tide. But in my gut, I knew the speeches, the discussions, and the rallies would handily be derided by any half-clever fourth-grader — and much to the amusement of jeir peers, continuing to feed the cycle.

In one scene, Alex is talking with his assistant principal, he doesn't believe her actions will help. He cites a previous case where he was bullied by getting stuffed into the seat cushions of the bus and her actions failed to stop the bullying. She has the audacity to bully him to reinforce her belief in the petty authority she holds: she begs the question by asking if that specific circumstance ever happened again, knowing that she'll be able to steamroll poor Alex who doesn't have the skills to call her on her bullshit.

That, and the principal of the same school's reprehensible reaction to Alex's poor parents led me to think of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. A common criticism of the film is that Ferris is an anti-hero because he fails to respect the authority of Principal Ed Rooney who is played to be a petty dictator — and an incompetent one at that. But watching Bully, I can't help but believe Rooney's portrayal may be less of an exaggeration than it seems. As an adult, thinking of the advice given by my own guidance counselors, teachers, principals, and any other "school authority" seems, at best, to be the good-and-bad mix of advice you can get from anybody over the age of 21, and downright buffoonish at worst.

But when I said the film is about bullying "sort of", I meant that there's an undercurrent of hope from people doing things they never thought possible. And in a way, the bullying and attempts to stop bullying seem trite compared to the profound personal changes in the lives of people confronting adversity.

I was talking with a friend the other week and we were commenting on how the lilacs seem more fragrant this year, probably because of the stresses of the weather. She commented that stress makes things beautiful. I thought it wasn't quite right — I've seen people who are stressed and they're not pretty — so I said it's adapting to stress that is beautiful.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song Too Hot for the Dryden

Posted on 2012-May-04 by Jason Olshefsky

I headed out to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. I had been joking that I was going to see a blaxploitation film with a bunch of white people under the guise of watching for "educational purposes". In at least one way I was incorrect: Sweetback is not a "blaxploitation film" unto itself. It's more of a pressure release on a tense period of strong, established racism on all levels: individual, institutional, and systemic. It follows a black male prostitute running from a racist police force out to get him.

The film has its own cinematic style that draws from counterculture examples of the late 1960's and early 1970's. Vanishing Point, released the same year, comes immediately to mind as well as Zabriskie Point, released the year prior. Sweetback isn't just some simple story to write off, but a pointed [despite lacking "point" in its name] and poignant condemnation of the flagrant racial stereotyping permeating the entirety of commercial cinema. It transcends its story and calls attention to the power that mass media holds, and how that power — when exploited in response to fear (e.g. fear of a powerful black man) — can fuel hatred and abuse.

But the amusing anecdote in the whole thing was, just as Sweetback himself was becoming a man, the fire alarm sounded in the theater and we had to be evacuated.

Too hot for the Dryden

Even 40 years later, the system still fears a black man.

A Faster JayceLand

Posted on 2012-May-02 by Jason Olshefsky

A month ago a friend of mine wrote a blog titled The real Killroys. In it she outlined how social media sites are, essentially, the nightmarish big brother we once read about. Basically, if you put a Facebook button on your site, whenever someone views your site, Facebook knows jee was there. In other words, Facebook has a dossier on every one of its users. And it doesn't matter if you log out of Facebook, you're still tracked. The same goes for Tumblr, Google, Digg, and all the others (but man, especially Google Analytics.) She noted that site owners either didn't know or didn't care that this was going on.

I also recall that Chris Guillebeau once wrote something about how when a website visitor sees ads on the site, jee naturally assumes that the site owner endorses (if not at least vets) the quality of the products advertised. I have been using Google Adsense which theoretically produced a few pennies of revenue, but I never got any control [well, technically, a little control] over what ads were placed.

And then there was the speed issue. I would often notice that although stuff from JayceLand.com would load quick, if the page stalled, it would be "Waiting for" digg.com, or google-analytics.com, or ecx.images-amazon.com, or pagead2.googlesyndication.com, or googleads.g.doubleclick.net — but almost never JayceLand.com.

So I stripped all that stuff off. I left the Weather Underground image. I know they also track, but at least it's something directly useful. So now it loads fast.

Salt of the Earth at the Flying Squirrel

Posted on 2012-May-01 by Jason Olshefsky

I was kind of suspicious of how the "general strike" from the Occupy Wall Street folks happened. While I support organized labor, this was something different — more of a protest than a strike, and certainly not something the 99% got to vote on first.

But speaking of strikes, I definitely wanted to see Salt of the Earth at The Flying Squirrel Community Space (285 Clarissa St. Just recently, I read somewhere that it was banned in the U.S., fueling more curiosity. It's based on the real Empire Zinc Mine strike in New Mexico, and employs many people involved in the strike as actors. The reason it was banned is it was made during the time when Joseph McCarthy was performing what can only be described as witch-trials, and made by blacklisted people in Hollywood.

It's a powerful and moving account of the desperate need for unions. But the thing I found more intriguing was that it was realistic about what it takes to actually start a strike. Most fictionalized accounts focus on the outward conflict and its resolution. But this spent almost all its time with the people who, by striking, lost their livelihood and had to rely on handouts. To me, it's quite unfathomable: to decide that spending whatever savings I had, and then being at the mercy of the kindness of strangers is preferable to my working conditions is not a situation I've experienced. This is the decision Ramon must make when facing a wife and two children (with a third on the way) who rely on him as the sole breadwinner. They have nothing without him — literally, as the company also owns their home.

Their demand?: that Mexican-Americans be treated equally to Anglo-Americans.

1950. In America. And there are some who regard that decade as the most wonderful. Amazing.

Of course, it's not like today is necessarily any better: there are still millions of people who are working but either don't earn enough to survive, or their working conditions are dangerous or otherwise inhumane. Unions — and the legal protections for unions — are critical to the survival of the American people.