Goodbye 2008, Hello 2009...

A few thoughts as we begin this historic year. Let us make the most of it together.


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Previous Year-End Posts:

• 2007
• 2006

Greetings Austin!

So hey I'm in Austin for the holidays and won't be posting much until then. See you in a few days y'all.

Have a safe and restful weekend.

Seeing "Milk" where it all happened...

So last night, my girlfriend and her best friend (in town from Eugene, OR) went to see Milk at the Castro Theatre, on the same street where Harvey Milk had his camera store,  in the same neighborhood where Milk built his base, became the first openly gay city official in American history and led the modern gay rights movement from Stonewall into political maturity.

We know how this story ends. On November 27, 1978, fellow San Francisco supervisor Dan White shot and killed Milk and Mayor George Moscone. More than 30,000 San Franciscans turned out for the memorial service. An an anniversary march seven years later, Milk's friend Cleve Jones conceived of the AIDS Quilt, the largest community art project in human history.

Its an amazing life story, the basis for an equally amazing movie, funny, warm, beautifully acted and firm without being hysterical. I'm sure there's already Oscar talk for Sean Penn in the title role and should be also for Josh Brolin, who plays Milk's killer. The film's 93% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes is well deserved.

But something about seeing it where it all happened rung deep within me. We so rarely get that chance these days, often seeing movies on whatever technology is most convenient when the desire strikes. Seeing it in Milk's old neighborhood, beneath the long shadow of Proposition 8 felts like someone grabbing my rib cage and shaking.

After the movie, my girlfriend and I stood across the street from the Castro, waiting in line for the ATM. I thought about what had happened in our city 30 years ago and the fight that continues today. I thought about what great things Mr. Milk accomplished in middle age not propelled by the indignance of youth and the terrible senselessness of his death.

And I cried. And cried and cried. I mostly felt dumb, weeping over an event that happened when I was in kindergarden, 20 years before I moved here. I felt as though I was co-oping the suffering of a community I didn't belong to as my own.

But I cried anyway, hugging Cariwyl and just repeating "It didn't have to happen this way."

I will never fully understand what it meant to be gay in 1978. But I do understand what kindness snuffed out by rage and misunderstanding feels like, like kicking over a flower pot or yelling at a kid on their birthday or just being cruel and violent when its so simple to be otherwise. That's a loss we all feel as human beings, when we fail to rise to the better angels of our nature and instead give up and act like savages. 

It did happen this way. Some say Harvey Milk dying pushed gay rights into the national spotlight. That's a fair interpretation. But I wish he were still here, reminding each of us, gay and friend of alike, to fight, not with our fists but with hope. To fight for the chance to be better than we think we can.

Read Recently: "The Shawl: A story and Novella" by Cynthia Ozick

Title: The Shawl: A Story and Novella

Author: Cynthia Ozick

Origins: I've enjoyed Ms. Ozick's essay collections for some time. An interview on "Forum" here in San Francisco informed me of her fiction.

A short book, I used is as a breather between longer reads.

 

Synopsis: A short story then a novella, set several decades in the future, about the same character, a Jewish immigrant named Rosa Lublin. In "The Shawl" (first published in 1981 in The New Yorker and anthologized dozens of times since), Nazi death camp guards pry Rosa's infant daughter from her arms and murder the baby by throwing her against an electrified fence. In the novella, Rosa is an old woman living in South Florida, suspicious, angry, sniffing around the edges of a world she feels ingored her suffering so many years ago.

Verdict: "The Shawl" is devastating, the horrible, flat unfurl of a nightmare, like a pirate flag inching up a mast. Small wonder it gets reprinted and taught. Structurally, its as tight as a gun barrel and about that dangerous.

"Rosa", the novella published three years later, also in The New Yorker, does not sustain as well. Ozick's insistant jabbing prose which works so beautifully in her essays (each feels as thick and necessary as a long-hanging tree branch) feels shrill in a story as much about defeat as about fear. Too often, Ozick gets in her characters way by telling of her in barks rather than narrative. The setting and mood are sublimely textured, deep enough to sink into and drift about. But Ozick is too pushy with the plot, using an essay voice when a storytelling one is a better fit, yelling to make an argument when there isn't one to be made. This makes her, enduringly a pleasure to read, but not so much to listen to.

Did Ya Know? The British Comics Industry

DYA? One of the main reasons Great Britain has produced so many outstanding graphic novelists in the last two decades (Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, to name but two) is the weekly comics anthology 2000 AD, where many of England's young comics writers and artists made their debuts and honed their talents. The publication, going strong since 1977, has showcased so many young bucks later picked up by the American market that, upon hearing of them for the first time today, your humble narrator dubbed them "The Motown Records of British comics."

To which the proprietor of the world's coolest comic book store nodded in agreement, making your humble narrotor (who knows as much about comics as others tell him) feel very smart on a rainy San Francisco afternoon.

Thought of the Day: "Experience"

"Experience isn't just what happens to you but what you do with what happens to you."

--Carlton Pearson (via This American Life)

Did Ya Know? Jane Austen

DYA? All six of Jane Austen's novels were first published anonymously with only "A Lady" appearing in place of the author's name (via The Writer's Almanac).

Writing the Way Forward:

Wherein we discuss what this site will look like in the near future.


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One Sentence Movie Reviews: "FLOW: For Love of Water"

FLOW: For Love of Water (2008): "There has never been a more appropriate movie to drink a glass of water while watching and thank G-d you still could."

Notes: A documentary on fragile state of the world's fresh water supply and how it will be as precious, politicized and killed for as oil is now. Some of this I knew already from reading the book Blue Gold which focuses on attempts by large water bottlers like Nestle and Vivendi to buy up water rights in communities around the world and charge the citizenry on a "per serving" basis to get access to their own rivers and lakes. But the footage of large dam construction, often funded by the World Bank, knocked me on my ear. Seems that the World Bank is a single largest funder of giant dam-building projects, many of which render hundreds and thousands of people homeless and put whole cities and towns underwater, in the name of getting water to those who need it.

Seems a compelling reason if that's the only way to distribute water. But it isn't. Organizations like Charity:Water can build a well to serve an entire community for around $4000. Innovative technology like playpumps create both playground equipment and aqua-self sustainability for nearly 2 million children.

My understanding is that getting poor communities the water they need via giant damn projects and privatization is like sending an army to give a kid a spanking. If wells are cheap, if citizens can manage them themselves, the problem seems to be political will and capital for thousands of small solutions not multi-large ones that steamroll the populations they claim to help.

Flow is produced by the Beastie Boys company Oscilloscope Laboratories which has its hands in a number of strong documentaries this year. I've already got Frontrunners  and Dear Zachary (both of which played at the San Francisco Film Festival in April) in my Netflix queue for when they hit the streets.

See this movie. It's more than worth it.

Word of the Day: "Atelier"

Atelier (noun): "A workshop or studio of an artist or craftsperson."

Uses:

• A knitting shop in San Francisco where my friend Erin worked.

• A very nice restaurant in New York that no longer exists.

Heard: on the "Reconsidering Crafts" episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge.