Valley Futures

Maybe it is something in the water (or oil?), but American imperial pop culture suddenly seems to have taken over by some strange apocalyptic vision. Novels like M.T. Anderson’s Feed and James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand; television shows like CBS’ “Jericho,” ABC’s “Lost,” and Fox’s “24;” and recent films like The Road, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by the deeply bleak but strangely compelling writer Cormac McCarthy all construct stories of a civilization teetering on the brink, or already engulfed in flames.

“Art mirrors life,” as the old saying goes, and sometimes, art even anticipates life, creating fictitious futures that, if grounded in some prescient or prophetic vision, may help us real-life denizens of this thing we call “reality” wrap our heads and hearts around the emerging realization that our new 21st century is shaping up to be very little like the 20th.

“The Book Of Eli” is such a film. Set in the not-too-distant future, the movie stars Denzel Washington as the aptly-named Eli/Walker, a lone and mysterious figure who makes his way westward against a blasted wasteland that once was American consumer civilization in all of its materialistic glory. Charred cars, blackened human bodies, emaciated kitty cats, collapsed bridges, the remains of KFC wrappers and mp3 devices – all the tropes of life after “The Flash” – are immediately brought to bear in scenes that look and feel very much like The Road. This post-nuke world is one Thomas Hobbes recognized: life is nasty, brutish and short, powerful men dominate, women are relegated to servants, sous chefs, and sex objects, and children seem completely absent. Lucky them.

Eli/Walker is well-equipped to cope with the frightening obstacles that immediately block his path as the film opens – most menacingly, marauding gangs of deformed men who pillage, rape, and kill at will. Turns out, Walker is handy with knives, bows, and guns – and proves his bad-ass mettle by dispatching two posses of bad guys in the film’s opening scenes with little more than a few whispered words and some well-timed martial arts maneuvering. Things get a bit more complicated, however, when Walker finds himself in a frontier town run by a sinister baddie named Carnegie (played with a bit of a smile by Gary Oldman). Carnegie serves as the town’s “mayor” (for lack of a better term), and works his will by – surprise! – physically abusing women, wielding threats through his organized gang of thugs, and verbally abusing his underlings. Ho hum. This has all been done before, and even Denzel Washington’s cool persona doesn’t quite kick in enough to keep the viewer from stifling a few yawns.

But then, things get a bit more interesting. Turns out, Carnegie is looking for a special book (hint: the Bible) that he believes will give him the power to restore civilization to the burnt-out landscape (in a brief but funny scene, we learn that The DaVinci Code doesn’t make the cut – when his men bring him several copies, Carnegie orders them all burned.) Eli/Walker is in possession of some sort of a book, as it turns out (See hint above), and Carnegie, deciding that this is the book he seeks, sets out to wrest the text from Walker, by femme fatale or force, if necessary.

How events play out I leave for you to discover. Suffice to say, though, in the Age of the Image, it is refreshing to have so much post-apocalyptic attention paid to, yes, a BOOK. While the film leaves this typography-might-save-humanity theme grossly underexplored, to its detriment, there are a few interesting surprises that unfold before film’s end. And it is somehow comforting to think that books – those tangible cultural, historical and even sacred artifacts that connect us with generations and civilizations that have come before, now ignored in a world of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube – might offer us some sort of continuity as we collectively move into what will surely be interesting times ahead.

And the film’s ending is actually worth the wait. To say more would ruin the surprises.

Can I get an Amen, brothers and sisters?

Tags: Arts and Media by Rob Williams
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The opening scene of director Jason Reitman’s new film “Up In The Air” features a soulful yet deeply ironic version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” – accompanied by aerial shots of Anywhere, USA from 10,000 feet up. The familiar tune, repackaged tongue in cheek, is quickly followed by a quick-cut montage of newly-fired anonymous company employees – the white collar workers of a troubled U.S. economy – unpacking their souls in front of the camera.

Their attentive listener is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a professional pink slip dispenser and occasional motivational speaker whose chief raison d’etre is to remain in perpetual motion, forever between places, time zones, and relationships. “To know me is to fly with me,” explains Bingham, who delivers “how big is your backpack” advice to rapt if road-weary conference attendees who quietly gather in random hotel conference rooms, when he is not deftly downsizing unfortunate white collar types in rapid-fire solipsistic sojourns to Dallas, Omaha, Miami, Chicago, and other cities from coast to coast. “I tell people how to avoid commitment,” he confides to the audience at one point.

“The Road” is Ryan’s home, and he much prefers a nomadic existence of permanent weightlessness as a so-called “transition specialist” – 270 days in flight – to the realities of living on the ground. Light on his feet, Bingham has made his peace with life “up in the air,” including a new-found occasional romantic rendezvous with a woman named Alex, a fellow “elite status” traveler, with whom Bingham enjoys witty verbal banter and casual sex. “Just think of me as yourself,” Alex explains to Bingham via mobile phone, “only with a vagina.”

All is well with Ryan Bingham and his quest to attain his goal of 10 million travel miles, until his world is rocked by a young and confident new consultant named Natalie Keener who convinces company management to embrace a “glocal” policy of “virtual downsizing” via tele-screen. Suddenly, Bingham’s bedouin-like suitcase-savvy happy-traveler world is turned upside down, but he sees an opportunity to educate Keener in the hows and whys of “making limbo tolerable” for newly-canned corporate
unfortunates. “I stereotype,” he explains to Keener in one of a dozen airports in the film. “It’s faster.”

Director Reitman has a knack for channeling the American cultural zeitgeist. His last film, “Thank You For Smoking,” arrived in theaters just as American public opinion turned on the tobacco companies in earnest. In a 21st century America marked by severe recession (we can’t use the “d” word – yet), massive job layoffs, and an uncertain future, “Up In The Air” explores difficult territory, especially when we hear the voices of those employees cast adrift by the impersonal vagaries of corporate misfortune (apparently Reitman captured interviews with the real-life downsized as fodder for the film.) And the arch-eyed, cynical, and slightly-off-kilter George Clooney, in his guise as Ryan Bingham of the Empty Backpack, is a near-perfect divining stick for channeling the mojo that infuses our post-modern Facebook-surfing, cellphone sporting civilization of yak yak, marked by euphemistic buzz phrases and a culture grounded in nothing but placeless-ness and shallow expressions of good will. “This is America, this is what we were promised,” one character confides to him toward the film’s end. “Oh, really?” Reitman seems to be asking.

And yet, oddly, Reitman manages some nods to our essential humanity here – in the drunken Cyndi Lauper karaoke, the perfunctory pillow talk via text messages, and his sophisticated if subtle sense that the transitory nature of “practicing protocol” might ultimately lead to something more lasting. “You have set up a life of permanent self-banishment,” Keener snarls at Bingham in one tense moment. Perhaps, and it is Bingham’s insistence on face-to-face firing over virtual axe-dropping that represents the last relational thread connecting him to his fellow man.

And in the real world of the U.S. Empire, with the airline industry in the throes of semi-permanent bankruptcy, job losses at 20 percent nationally, the federal government at the mercy of the Big Banksters, and the specter of Peak Oil knocking on the door, “exploring our options,” as Keener so happily phrases it, and turning to our neighbors and friends for deliberate community building on the ground, may be our best collective step forward, a more realistic 21st century alternative to life “up in the air.”

Tags: Arts and Media by Rob Williams
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Unless you’ve been living in the wilderness of the rural Vermont frontier, you probably have heard that uber-director James (Titanic and Aliens) Cameron is back with an incredible “game-changing” new film called “Avatar” that has imperial audiences and critics talking. Much has been made, and rightly so, of the movie’s brilliance: the creation of an entirely new language, for example, and the film’s iridescent three-dimensional visuality – a phenomenal spectacle – and well-worth seeing on the big screen. Equally interesting, though, is “Avatar’s” highly critical anti-imperial vision, dismissed by most mainstream critics, like the New Yorker’s David Denby, as little more than echoes of 1960s counter-culture. For anyone considering the United States as Empire, however, “Avatar’s” evocative and disturbing storyline – “Aliens” meets “Dances With Wolves” meets Lord of the Rings” – proves much more damning than not.

The story unfolds like this. Sometime in the future, a young and embittered U.S. ex-marine named Jake Sully (a convincing Sam Worthington) ships out to a remote mining colony called Pandora. Leg-less, Sully finds himself a mercenary working for the Company as a specially trained soldier who inhabits an “avatar,” a genetically hybridized creature designed to build relationships with the natives known as Na’Vi. Sully’s job is to “win hearts and minds,” as the old imperialistic propaganda goes. The Company’s ongoing goal? Profit-maximization through the pursuit of an element called “Unobtanium.” (I can see Cameron smiling.)

Tough-talking scientist Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) heads up the avatar program, and when she isn’t butting heads with the Company brass, she oversees training for Sully, who finds himself separated from his team on his first foray into the jungle. His life saved by a beautiful “barbarian,” he winds up in the hands of “the savages, and soon discovers that this indigenous community is defined by “the bond” – connections between all living things, The tall, lithe, tailed, blue, willowy creatures that Sully impersonates share a deep “hook up” (quite literally) to the stunning natural world of Pandora – cascading waterfalls, craggy chasms and canyons, and a diverse array of fascinating, marvelous (and ferocious) creatures.

The Omaticaya, as the natives call themselves, revere a mystical energetic force called Eywa, an animist Spirit that infuses all living things. “I have come to learn,” says Sully/Avatar to the “hostiles” at his first meeting. “It is hard to teach the Sky People,” one of the Na’Vi leaders responds. “It is hard to fill a vessel that is already full.” Sully soon finds himself torn between his attraction for the Na’Vi and their chief’s beautiful daughter, and his official avatar/marine mission – to convince the Na’Vi to move their village off of one of the largest Unobtanium deposits in the area. His training in “the flow of energy” and “spirits of animals” (“tree hugging crap,” Sully calls it at first) is by turns humorous and breath-takingly beautiful, helped along by the 3D/CGI throw down and the boundless imagination of Cameron and his team.

Most compelling, perhaps, is the oddly deja-vu-like quality of “Avatar.” Thematically, the scenes in the film – helicopter gunships thrashing down onto the green underbrush, muscled military men hoisting gigantic weapons, and the like – are eerie-ly reminiscent of moments from the Vietnam “police action” or dozens of other “theaters” of conflict that defined the 20th century, history’s bloodiest, and are quickly moving to define this next one. In the Age of Twitter, this time writer Wallace Stegner once called “the amputated present,” we are quick to forget our own history of violence against “the natives” and nature itself, and Cameron’s film brings back this history with disturbing three-dimensional vividness. By the time the rock-hard Company commander issues a “preemptive strike against the aboriginal horde” (“We will fight terror with terror,” he snarls) in an attempt to “blow a huge hole in their racial memory,” Cameron makes it clear to the point of cliché what histories he is retelling. When Sully and a small band of rogue Company employees decide to “go native” and mount an organized resistance campaign, it is hard not to stand up, remove the 3D glasses, and cheer.

How “Avatar” plays out I will not reveal here. The ultimate irony, perhaps, for Sully and for us all, is this: as we destroy the real world – beautiful, connected, sacred, organic – the only “place” many of us think we can retreat to is the world of networked electronic technology (Second Life, anyone?), itself a “Cyberia” created by the mining of the planet’s natural yet finite resources.

The ultimate form of Imperialism.

And it takes a Hollywood director to shock us back into our senses.

“All energy is borrowed,” Sully learns from his nubile and gifted young teacher, “and one day you must give it back.”

Bingo.

As we enter the 21st century and “the age of limits,” truer words have not been spoken.

At least not by Hollywood.

Tags: Arts and Media by Rob Williams
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My brother Christopher, a professional musician living in Nashville, Tennessee, is fond of saying that truly great songwriting is only obtained through intense suffering and personal pain.

While I have disputed his statement over the years, I grudgingly will admit that, in the case of a new sonic project from one of the Mad River Valley’s most prolific and hardest-working musicians, my brother may very well be dead on.

Let’s say you’ve been through a rough personal patch, and need to figure out some way of making sense of it all.

Many of us embrace therapy of one sort of another – a healthy response, to reach out and seek some support.

Multi-talented musician James Kinne of Fayston practices his own form of personal therapy.

But first, an aside.

To say that Kinne is perhaps the biggest holistic musical talent in the Mad River Valley – as an instrumentalist, a writer, a vocalist, and a producer with some remarkable ears – is probably a bald understatement (and I speak from personal experience, having performed with him for several years now.)

Simply put, Kinne makes music. Damn fine music.

From soup to nuts.

Here’s how he works.

He writes all the songs.

He plays all the instruments.

He records and mixes the whole project in his own home Stillwater Studio (with mastering help from Jim Bowen.)

And then, he puts his music out there for the world to hear.

“Aletheia” is Kinne’s third solo effort, and it is easily his most ambitious project to date, comprised of no fewer than seventeen songs.

OK, so back to music and personal suffering.

“Aletheia” is built around the collapse of Kinne’s young marriage several months ago, and his resulting journey towards healing and a deeper understanding of this complicated project we call “living.”

I know what you are thinking. Sounds intense.

And it is.

Yet, Kinne has managed to craft a CD of songs that is hopeful, forward-looking, and manages to be at once deeply personal and big-picture universal.

“This Side Of,” the CD’s first track, kicks off the project with some edgy electric guitar power chording, as Kinne anchors the listener in a transitional moment. “In Spades” and “Games,” tracks 2 and 3, both come out of the gate with some infectiously hooky bass and electric guitar grooves. Kinne has a tremendous ear for melody, and is able to build ear-engaging arrangements around a variety of riffs with ease. Quite impressive.

My favorite track (#7) is a tune called “All I Know,” in which Kinne sings of loss, redemption and moving on. “You could have been the one to save my life, point me in the right direction,” he observes. “I could have been the hero in your life, if not for this lost connection.”

And then the kicker.

“Even though the path was overgrown,” he concludes, “I’d rather have grown old with you…than be alone.”

Indeed.

I could on for pages about the virtues of each of the seventeen songs on this CD.

Suffice to say, Kinne’s writing, his musicianship, and the arranging on this CD are first rate.

A short review can do it little justice.

“Aletheia” has to be heard to be believed.

Listen to the whole record online – for free – and decide for yourself at http://jameskinne.bandcamp.com/.

And then, purchase a copy and support one of the Valley’s finest working musicians.

Tags: Arts and Media by Rob Williams
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Like many young readers growing up in the 20th century, I read Sherlock Holmes as a kid.

I liked the English formality of the story – the cape, the hat, the pipe, the assured but self-effacing wit of the gifted detective.

I even fancied myself as his able if somewhat less studied assistant.

Elementary, my dear Watson, I mean, Williams.

Indeed, London’s Baker Street occupied my young imagination in the same way that Hogwarts Castle, perhaps, does for young readers today.

The new “Sherlock Holmes” film, starring the irrepressible Robert Downey Jr. as the astute English sleuth and Jude Law as his assistant, injects the famous and much-loved series with a renewed vitality. Think Hercule Poirot meets a 19th century Iron Man, helped along by a script that positively crackles, and director Guy Ritchie’s hyper-speedy and occasionally artsy slow-mo editing, which makes 19th century London feel like “The Matrix” on steroids.

The celluloid version finds Holmes and Watson less mentor and apprentice and more collegial equals. In a predictable but smart move, Downey plays Holmes as an ass-kicking and slightly snarky smarty-pants, as interested in thrashing the tar out of much more heavily-muscled gents in the boxing ring as he is in the intricacies of uncovering his subjects’ personal details. The repartee between Holmes and his long-suffering Watson feels a bit forced, in part because Jude Law is a charismatic force of nature in his own right, and must play a restrained second fiddle to Downey’s undeniably magnetic personality.

When the Holmes/Watson duo help Scotland Yard bust Lord Blackwood (symbolic name alert!), a former House of Lordsman-turned-seeming-sorcerer who ensnares beautiful maidens for warlock’s sport, the stage is set for mystery and intrigue. Throw in a sensual and mysterious love interest/adversary, and an unfolding and exotic journey through the streets of working class London, and “Sherlock Holmes” makes for entertaining cinema.

There are problems with the film. The villains – Blackwood and an even more shadowy figure named Professor Moriarty (think sequel – Sherlock, Part 2) – don’t engage with our heroes much, remaining in the shadows far too much to be all that interesting. The love relationship between Holmes and his mysterious girlfriend/adversary never really convinces. The biggest flaw, common in many detective films, is director Ritchie’s constant and somewhat annoying habit of using after-the-fact flashbacks to solve various mysteries for the viewer after they’ve occurred. After the fourth go-round, I began to feel like even more of an idiot than usual.

The film is also lengthy, clocking in at 2 plus hours, but never dull. Action sequences abound, punctuated by a narrative arc that feels surprisingly fresh, combining mystery, science, the occult, and political intrigue. To say more would ruin the Sherlock story.

See it for yourself.

Tags: Arts and Media by Rob Williams
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Performances are Thursday, November 19 – Saturday, November 21, 2009; 7:30 p.m.
Harwood Union High School
$7 for adults / $5 for students

Playwright Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” is one of thespian America’s most famous dramatic stories. Ostensibly about the 1692 Salem Witch trials, Miller’s story was authored during the 1950s, against a repressive national political backdrop of anti-Communist “witch hunts” led by the infamous Cold Warrior, Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph “Tail Gunner” McCarthy.

Miller’s story has long been admired for its spare and unflinching look at a horrific moment in early U.S. history, when a variety of economic, social, religious, and political forces coalesced in an explosion of violence in the troubled Puritan Massachusetts Bay colony, resulting in the arrest of dozens of young women, and the hanging of more than 1 dozen souls and (oddly) a dog.

Even in today’s new millennium, “The Crucible” is often referred to as being the best single theatrical allegory in our canon for exploring the dangers of cultural conformity and political oppression, and the film version of “The Crucible,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, remains one of the best Hollywood-style recreations of colonial New England on the silver screen.

I was fortunate enough to catch a dress rehearsal of HUHS’s “The Crucible” on Tuesday night. It is to director Ruth Ann Pattee’s credit, as well as the courage of the Harwood Union High School cast, that they’ve chosen to wade into one of the most difficult plays to recreate on the high school stage. “We’ve really stretched ourselves,” explained Pattee during a quick break between acts. “I am really proud of the students and their hard work.”

Consider the challenges: the mature dramatic subject matter (from the trade-offs of life in a religious theocracy to the difficulties of marital infidelity), the stilted nature of colonial vernacular to our 21st century ear (“Dude, like, beware the witches!”), and the lack of any sort of dramatic distraction beyond the crackle of the colonial dialogue (not a single joke or song-and-dance number to be found in this production.)

No easy task, then, “The Crucible.” Despite the myriad challenges, though, the HUHS dramatic team has assembled a powerful and provocative collective performance. The costumes reflect the time, and the stage set is simple and unadorned, the hard lines of the few pieces of wooden furniture casting shadows across the stage. The acting, moreover, is sound – our young actors more than hold their own in delivering their three-century-old lines with intensity and passion. John and Elizabeth Proctor’s troubled marriage, in particular, forms the fulcrum around which revolves much of the play’s dramatic action – and Joe Mead and Tracy Guione admirably hold the ear and eye of the audience. The “poppet” moment remains one of the most intense scenes in the performance, testament to our young thespians’ hard work in preparing their roles.

My advice? Go see “The Crucible,” reconnect with one of the most interesting and most compelling of our historical/theatrical texts, and celebrate our young Valley thespians’ willingness to challenge themselves by tackling Miller’s greatest play. You’ll leave enriched – just in time for Thanksgiving week.

Tags: Arts and Media by Rob Williams
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Hear Allison Stanger in Mad River Valley at the Valley Players Theater at 7:00 pm on Thursday, November 5. Sponsored by the Green Mountain Global Forum.

“The American homeland is the planet.” – 9/11 Commission Report

Very rarely do I read a “policy wonkish” book in which I so clearly agree with the diagnosed problem, but feel like the solutions offered leave me completely at sea.

Allison Stanger’s One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy is such a book.

Stanger is no slouch. She is Middlebury College’s Russell Leng ‘60 Professor of International Politics and Economics, and directs the college’s Rohatyn Center for International Affairs. Her clear, concise, and thoughtful new book is “blurbed” by some high-powered people, including USMC General Anthony Zinni (who calls Stanger’s analysis “a superb work on government outsourcing and contracting”); Canadian Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff (“a clarion call to bring the business of government under more effective public control”); and Harvard University professor Joseph Nye (“well-reasoned”).

But her book’s conclusions left me scratching my head.

Stanger sets out to answer a big and crucially important question: In an age in which governments around the world have “outsourced” nearly everything to private for-profit corporations, how do citizens reestablish effective oversight over private-public partnerships? This outsourcing problem is so vast and extensive that even the Establishment New York Times, an overexuberant cheerleader for U.S. foreign policy if ever there was one, referred to contractors as a “fourth branch of government” in 2007, a sign of just how troublesome things have become.

Stanger’s extended case-study is the United States, a “republic-turned-Empire” (to her credit, Stanger is willing to entertain the use of the term “empire” to describe U.S. activities abroad) of 300 million citizens that has emerged over the past several decades as the richest, most powerful, most influential nation in the world, with as many as 1,000 military bases networked across more than 130 countries across the planet, 10,000 nuclear warheads, and an annual “defense” budget (read: “war-making”) larger than the next twenty countries combined.

Her conclusions?

What once was considered public oversight (the domain of Congress, the State Department, and other somewhat-publicly-accountable government organizations) for maintaining this emerging global “Empire of Bases” is increasingly being governed by the dictates of private for-profit corporate interests. In her book, Stanger examines what she calls “the evolution of military outsourcing,” including the privatization of U.S. matters diplomatic (which she rightly traces to the 1947 Congressional passage of the National Security Act), a process that has emerged in full dysfunctional flower with the 2001 creation of the so-called Department of Homeland Security, as well as the “slow death” of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Stanger is at her best when chronicling the waste, fraud, and abuse that has accompanied ongoing outsourcing. The U.S. government’s six year invasion and occupation of Iraq is the most recent reminder of just how nasty things can get: more than 1 million Iraqi lives lost, billions of dollars “disappeared,” U.S. tax-supported private corporate armies waging a mercenary war against entire Mesopotamian cities (Fallujah, anyone?) while U.S. diplomats hole up inside the so-called “Green Zone,” home to the new U.S. embassy in downtown Baghdad: the largest, most extensive, and most expensive embassy compound the world has ever seen.

And Iraq is just the tip of the “outsourcing” iceberg.

While I appreciated her diagnosis of the “outsourcing” problem, I have two big issues with Stanger’s book.

The first is her continual acceptance (not unusual for a U.S. scholar/policy wonk) of the U.S. government’s officially stated “party line” on all matters diplomatic. When she asserts, for example, that the U.S.’s primary interest in invading and occupying Iraq was to help bring “democracy” to the Middle East, I found myself scrawling the word “nonsense” in the book’s margin. Her unwillingness to push beyond presidential rhetorical rationales for U.S. actions abroad – Oil? Support for Israel? Profit for “Defense” Corps like Halliburton and KBR? – deeply undercuts the credibility of her argument.

Second, and more troubling, are her “solutions,” packed into the last few pages of the book, which seem utopian to the extreme, even for this idealist. She speaks of “cultivating an emerging market for virtue” built on the “creativity of free individuals”; of “radical transparency in all government financial transactions” (and oddly, points to Wall-Street-Bankster-Backscratcher President Obama as a model here); of “loosening the grip of special interests on American politics” (yawn); and more to the point, of “restricting the use of no-bid contracts” and “demilitarizing U.S. foreign policy,” both wonderful ideas that any D.C. insider will be the first to tell you will never happen.

In short, to this decentralist reader, Stanger’s book is right in its diagnosis of what ails the United States, but wrong on the cure. Only a radical devolution of political and economic power away from the center (Washington, D.C. and Wall Street) and towards the periphery (Main Street and individual states, with Vermont leading the way, perhaps) will be able to stanch the “outsourcing” and the complete collapse of this once-great constitutional republic at the hands of those wringing a profit from its ruin.

To explore that phenomenon, however, Ms. Stanger may have to write another book.

Tags: Announcements, Arts and Media by Rob Williams
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As you might guess, Michael Moore’s new film “Capitalism: A Love Story” is neither a study in “capitalism” nor “a love story.” Instead, Moore’s edgy movie chronicles the collapse of the middle class “American Dream” at the hands of a corrupt corporately-dominated financial, economic, and political system that, he contends, steals from the many to enrich the few.

“Capitalism: A Love Story” feels like two films in one. The film opens in typical Moore agitprop fashion – a series of jerkily-filmed security camera shots of seemingly random bank robberies intercut with the “dog eat dog” opening credits, followed by a didactic Encyclopedia Britannica voiceover of the excesses of the Roman Empire, montage’d with classical celluloid Hollywood fantasy and images of Moore’s favorite villains – George W, Emperor Cheney, and so on.

From there, Moore launches into what has become now-standard fare: MM’s ominous narration accompanied by creatively-interpreted selective moments from late 20th century politics – Jimmy Carter’s well-intentioned but downer malaise speech, and Ronald Ray-Gun’s sellout of Main Street to Wall Street (as personified by Merrill Lynch bogeyman Don “speed it up” Regan) – “we’re gonna turn the bull loose,” states Reagan. Mr. “Morning in America,” Moore concludes, unleashed the corporate dogs of privatization at the expense of the public good. Moore’s scattershot, almost random approach here is boring – we’ve seen all of this before, and if he intended his narrative to be a focused critique of capitalism, his slings and arrows miss their mark.

From there, Moore gets personal, segueing into a case study of his home town of Flint, Michigan as a microcosm representing the decay of U.S. industrial might. General Motors, a greedy corporate behemoth that placed profit ahead of workers’ needs and innovation, is an old trope for Moore – see his 1989 film “Roger and Me.” To be sure, his interviews with displaced workers are moving. “We put ourselves above and beyond for our republic,” says one tearful auto worker, “and our republic does nothing for us.” But again, what is missing is the bigger picture.

Things get more interesting in hour #2, when Moore focuses on the financial collapse and so-called “bailout,” which is a REAL story that deserves sustained scrutiny, a tale that cries out for Moore’s genius for confrontation. Here again, though, things fall flat. True, Moore does commandeer a Brinks armored vehicle and drive it to Goldman Sachs headquarters to demand our money back, and he does encircle Wall Street banks with crime scene tape. Yet, even these gags fail to set the film on fire, in part because Moore is a lone actor here, unlike his other films, where he finds collaborators. (Think of “Sicko’s” underinsured American workers in a speedboat off the coast of Cuba requesting access to health care, or the paralyzed “Bowling For Columbine” kid in the wheelchair in Wal-Mart’s corporate lobby, asking for justice in the wake of the retail giant’s sale of bullets to two high school assassins.)

Moore is at his most brilliant when he exposes the vagaries of the financial scams and swindles that have swept up and over us all. Watch him skewer slick brokers by capturing them on camera trying to explain “derivatives” – “complex betting schemes” driven by the “insane casino” called Wall Street. See him interview frustrated and courageous Congressional representatives – Ohio’s Marcy Kaptor is particularly heroic – who admit on camera that corporate financiers colluded with federal officials to engineer the national financial “collapse” to enrich their own bottom lines. Some may snort when Moore’s film suggests that Goldman-Sachs is now running the U.S. economy. But, Moore says, simply connect the dots and listen to the voices of people who were there and watched it happen. “Is this the United States Congress,” enraged Congressman Dennis Kucinich asks at one point in the film, “or the board of directors of Goldman Sachs?”

Good question. And I think we know the answer.

The biggest disappointment of the film is how little ire Moore directs at Barack Obama, a Bill Clinton-esque corporate-friendly Wall-Street-loving silver-tongued incrementalist if ever there was one. Instead, after drubbing financial “experts” Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in the film’s first hour, Moore sets up Obama to be the agent of “hope” and “change,” complete with weeping and relieved American voters on election day, without so much as a simple nod to the fact that Geithner, Summers, and the rest of their ilk now comprise Obama’s inner economic circle of advisors. Hello? Did Moore somehow miss this inconvenient truth in the editing room?

Some may consider Moore’s eye for the tragicomedy that is the collapsing U.S. economy worth the price of admission, though the story – angry, cruel, depressing – is not pleasant. More to the point – instead of just comically alluding to the Roman Empire at film’s begin, Moore might have alerted us to the fact that the United States is, IN FACT, no longer a governable republic, in which citizens have even a nominal voice in political and economic decision-making, but an out-of-control Empire, in which multinationals buy politicians on both sides of the “Republicrat” aisle to aggressively push their for-profit uber alles policies of privatization. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens – auto workers (of course), airline pilots (paid very poorly), and other worn out “peasants” – struggle to make ends meet and hold their underpaid, overworked, indebted lives together. At the end of the day, what is missing from Moore’s analysis, such as it is, is a nuanced look at some of the more egregious dilemmas in front of us: Peak Oil, imperial Collapse, the “tapeworm economy,” our broken electoral system – and how these converging crises are already shaping our common future.

Tags: Arts and Media by Rob Williams
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.

You can’t swing a dead cat(amount) in the Mad River Valley without hitting a talented musician.

And whenever one of our own releases a new CD, that’s cause for celebration.

Especially if we’re talking about Colleen Mari.

My guess is that you’ve heard Colleen before. She co-fronts (along with Liz Levy) the enormously popular MRV-based Big Basin Band, a blues/dance combo out of the wilds of Fayston that has been getting us locals to shake our groove thing for several years now.

Hearing Colleen perform solo on “Ledges” is a different kind of treat. Her ever-expressive voice is front-and-center on this four-song project, a mini-CD of sorts that showcases her remarkable abilities as a songstress. Reared on everything from her mom’s piano music, to church singing, to years performing in the Vermont Symphony Choir, Mari has a real sense of interpretive timing, and it really shines through in this project.

Her new CD kicks off with a tune called “What Ya Do To Me,” a Mari original. Wafting over the sound of an electric guitar comes harp virtuoso Johnny Reid’s harmonica, and then Mari’s ethereal voice, which quickly turns sultry. Mari possesses this really nifty gift – being able to change vocal horses in midstream, and the first cut shows off this ability quite nicely.

Track #2 of “Ledges” is a cover of the classic Fleetwood Mac tune “Songbird,” and I’ll be durned if Mari doesn’t perform it better than the original authors (blasphemy, I know, but there, I said it) – a sort of high, wide, and lonesome sound, backed once again by Reid’s fine harmonica work.

The third tune, “Change Her Mind,” is a mid-tempo rocker, Mari singing it straight ahead with just a bit of sass, backed by Reid and some fine electric guitar work.

The finale (I know, at four songs, I wanted so much more), a tune called “Fly,” does what the first song does– puts Mari’s incredible voice through its paces, from plaintive to edgy to full-on roar. Here, she really lets her hair down vocally, and the listener is all the better for it.

In the liner notes for “Ledges”, Mari pays tribute to a wide variety of musical influences: Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, Bonnie Raitt, Joss Stone, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, Janis Joplin, Christy Mcvie, Stevie Nicks, Maria Muldaur, Norah Jones, Susan Tedeschi, Billie Holiday, Willie Nelson,Tina Turner, George Jones, Natalie Merchant, Merle Haggard, John Prine, Johnny Cash and June Carter, and many, many more.

I think they’d all be pleased with Mari’s “Ledges” solo effort, and, like me, they’d probably have only one request.

Encore! More!

Support local music and order Colleen’s CD here.

Tags: Arts and Media by Rob Williams
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“NUMEN” FILM SCREENING!: Montpelier’s SAVOY at 7:00 on Saturday, October 10 and Sunday, October 11.

I have sat through many “talking head” documentaries in my years as a film reviewer, but never before have I found so much to laugh, cry and think about as when I screened “Numen: The Nature of Plants” for the first time just a few days ago.

Terrence Youk and Ann Armbrecht’s wonderful new 95 minute film explores the world of plants, their healing powers, and their central importance (largely forgotten, in this day and age) in providing us with the very building blocks of human civilization, from sustenance to healing. The word “numen” refers to the animating spirit or power infused in an object, and the film makes an impressive argument for reconsidering just how significant “plant power” is. “Herbalism is our oldest system of healing on the planet,” observes rock-star herbalist Rosemary Gladstar (if you’ve never heard of her, get your head out of the drug store aisle and medicine closet and pay attention). “Most parts of the world where you travel today you’ll still find people practicing some remnant of traditional herbalism.”

And “Numen” seems to have found some of the most eloquent herbalist voices from around the world to speak on behalf of the plants, along with many other plant-loving people. Like any good documentary, “Numen” assembles an impressive cast of thoughtful characters: medical doctors like Larry Dossey (editor of EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing); citizen activists like BIONEERS founder Kenny Ausubel; and even Maine-based herbal practitioners like Deb Soule. Youk and Armbrecht have done their research and their homework, capturing, in tightly-edited and thoughtful fashion, why plants matter so much.

But what really sets “Numen” apart is the balance of playfulness and candor with which the filmmakers approach their subject. “Numen” opens, for example, with a sped-up time-lapse sequence of plant shoots literally exploding from the ground, accompanied by a catchy funk-driven electric guitar. I was caught completely by surprise, and totally hooked. In another sequence, we see a sped-up “shopping cart camera” view of a modern grocery store, with harried consumers completely detached from the sources of their food. Refreshingly, there are some moving scenes, too – one researcher, for example, breaks down on camera as he reflects on the sheer beauty and mystery of the plant world. In another interview, a traditional herbalist from Hawai’i grapples with the “deep history” and cultural connections she shares with the plants. “Numen” is filled with powerful moments like these.

The special effects and animation work in “Numen,” too, is impressive – taking us on both a micro (inside the plants themselves) and macro (consider the planet from space) tour explaining why plants matter.

Perhaps the best part of the “Numen” experience, though, is how hopeful, positive, and forward-thinking a film it is. In an era when there is so much to be concerned about – peak oil, climate change, the endless “war on terror,” economic downturns, “too-big-to-fail” banksters, and that constant migraine headache that over-the-counter meds can’t quite chase away, “Numen” reminds us that the answers to many of these problems, magically enough, is growing all around us. It is our job, as 21st century citizens inhabiting a finite planet experiencing “limits to growth,” to reconnect with “plant wisdom.” If “Numen” provides the inspiration for us as audience members to root ourselves once again in the earth and amongst the plants, it will have provided an incredibly valuable service to our struggling 21st century world.

Tags: Agriculture, Arts and Media by Rob Williams
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