doloresflores_d's Open Salon Blog

when the devil came to california...

Sat, 12 May 2012 23:05:51 -0400

When the Devil came to California
He rode in on his fiery mare shook out his fiery hair
When the Devil came

When the devil came to California he brought along a bevy of hip, bejingled Berkeley dancers and musicians. Composer and performer Laramie Crocker and his partner, playwright and tarot reader Wend Elsen have created Redemption, the Acid Gospel Tarot Opera that traces the Hero’s journey through personal loss and horror in the backdrop of America’s apocalyptic War on Terror (which makes me wonder...what happens if they one day declare a War on Horror? Will zombies revolt?). I attended the Oakland Art Murmur premier performance at Uptown Auto last weekend, and was seduced by the ten songs in ten cards that veered between tenderness and a Persephone-like preference for the taste of Hades.

With the soul consciousness of Johnny Cash and a Pink Floyd-like flair for the surreal dramatic, Crocker is assisted by band mates Richard Berman on double bass, Ralph Granich on drums, Tom Huber and Phil Stokes on guitar. And Sam Weinstein, Wendi Olson, Carrie Davoli, Barbara Griesau and Eve Graham assist with vocals.

In addition to the musical feast, there's a basket brimming with visual candy for the audience to nibble, in no small part thanks to the lively performance of the Berkeley Morris Dancers, Tigris Dancing Joy and Gillermo Ortiz who add not only dancing feet but akido to the storyline.

If this sounds like a lot to digest, it is. But as the lyrics go, I don't know where I'm going and I don't know where I've been. If I find myself along the way I'll be sure to place a call to you from him.

For any who can't make it to a live performance, Crocker is also a software developer with a passion for the open source community and offers Redemption free of charge to listeners from the comfort of their own computers...

Open source acid gospel tarot opera!

But Bay Area residents won't want to miss the opera in three (or more) dimensions at the Hillside Club in Berkeley on Saturday, May 19, 7:30 p.m – 9:00 p.m. In the acid gospel tarot opera, your journey to hell comes with a return ticket. Just

Roll down the window
and breathe
breathe
breathe the air

Love sits at the table, plays hearts with a trick

but I've played that hand, now the anger comes quick

I wandered around in this all-night town

And I found a bar to call home

And there's music and laughter and lots of good cheer

and a barmaid named Mary who brings you your beer...

aung san suu kyi and the bumpy road toward democracy

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:04:25 -0400

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who weild it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those subject to it.” Aung San Suu Kyi

“Do you think you’ve transcended politics?” documentary filmmaker Robert H. Lieberman

“No. I think politicians who believe they have transcended politics are very dangerous.” Aung San Suu Kyi

The Lady

Luc Besson

They Call It Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain

Robert H. Lieberman

The only way to convey anything like the horror of a totalitarian regime is to show its reflection in the lives of ordinary human beings. Both her admirers and her detractors often portray Aung San Suu Kyi as if she is more or less than ordinary, and it was filmmaker Luc Besson's task to humanize her through his recent biopic, The Lady, and he partially succeeds.

Rebecca Frayn wrote the script over three years through detailed interviews with key participants, excluding Suu Kyi herself who was still under house arrest at the time. The script is most compelling when it focuses on the real life relationship between Oxford professor Michael Aris and Aung San Suu Kyi. Aris comes across as the most relatable, three-dimensional character in the film, a Tibetan scholar and teacher, who is lucky and unlucky enough to see history escape from the pages of books and into his mother-in-law's living room. It's through his eyes that we see Suu Kyi's transition from self-conscious domesticity into compassionate yet iron-willed, globally as well as nationally recognized, political leadership.

Michelle Yeoh, a Malaysian actress based in Hong Kong, who starred in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, has transformed herself into a dramatically thinner, more frail figure in order to play Suu Kyi, and she's extraordinary in the part. A key advantage any film has over life is the words-over, “three years later” or “seven years later.” So in the film, it's only through Yeoh's face, particularly her eyes, that we can see the toll that years in extreme isolation take.

The film would be stronger if it allowed a more through story for some of Suu Kyi's colleagues in the democracy movement, many of whom spent years in forced labor camps or cages, chained to walls. Particularly since it is the junta's overt strategy to cut her off from the other members of the party, asking how long can a tree survive if it's roots are cut off.

Yet Besson's film captures, in a more powerful way than I expected, the early excitement of the democracy movement. Suu Kyi is able, early on, to walk silently into a row of soldiers with their guns trained on her because she knows at that moment if they shoot her they will have a civil war on their hands. After Aris is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Suu Kyi is permitted to speak to her husband and teen sons for only a few minutes here and there before the line goes dead. Her most subversive act is unbowed survival, under austere conditions that continued for more years than she could have anticipated. On the other hand, the junta must have been flustered by the fact that her roots in Myanmar were not easily culled. In 2007, almost two decades after her initial arrest, thousands of Myanmar's monks rose up in the streets to protest huge increases in transportation costs. They marched to the gates of Suu Kyi's house with their alms bowls turned upside down, chanting her name.

Today, much rides on Suu Kyi's shoulders. Recently freed from approximately fifteen years, altogether, of house arrest, in a recent election, she saw her party win 43 out of 45 seats in parliament. The key election to watch takes place in 2015 where a far larger number of seats will be contested. Although the military regime still holds enormous power, and the right to suspend any parliamentary acts they dispute, in the age of social media, the junta may finally be realizing that many businesses may be reluctant to damage their brands through close relationships with the regime—should it continue to abuse the people of Myanmar or Suu Kyi, one of the most admired politicians in the world.

For all participants, the future holds a still dangerous, yet minutely more hopeful political pas-de-deux.

Robert H. Lieberman also takes Myanmar as his subject. Filming under cover where he was harassed even for trying to film vegetables in a market, he shows footage of child laborers and the people of Myanmar who seek medical treatment without resources. For those looking for an introduction to Myanmar, he offers unique on-the-street glimpses of a complex yet hauntingly beautiful land and people that have been cut off, for decades, from the larger world.

In 1997, I visited Myanmar, and I remember meeting people who asked me to bring back books about Myanmar, because they were so hungry for information about their own country. They must be grateful that more films are being produced, though it may take a long time before they receive a Yangon showing.

Walking out of the movie theater in San Francisco, I was also reminded of a Yangon taxi driver I met a long time ago, who pushed back the parephanelia hanging from his rear view windows in order to expose Suu Kyi's illegal-at-the-time photo concealed on his dashboard. He nodded toward it, hopefully, shyly.

“The Lady,” he said.

does it matter that mike daisey lied?

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:03:36 -0400

Breaking news: This American Life has retracted its Mike Daisey story because Mike Daisey admitted, in several instances, to fabricating details that were aired on the radio as a fact-checked, vetted non-fiction story.

The transcript of the retraction show is already available. It has a little bit of the feel of the Oprah and James Frey confrontation. Daisey admits to lying to Glass about being there in person for some things that it seems clear he only read about in news accounts, or heard about from protesters in Hong Kong.

Does this matter?

Of course it matters because Daisey has successfully gotten people to care about working conditions in factories far away from the U.S. Daisey told a story in which he personally witnessed particular injustices. And in part because of Daisey’s work, Apple is now employing an outside auditor, and there is a movement pushing for improved working conditions for factory workers overseas. Daisey was even willing to argue with Paul Krugman that sweat shops don’t have to employ the tactics they do in order to make money or to sell cheap products. Daisey argues that labor conditions changed in the U.S. primarily because we decided that it was inhumane for people to work under certain physical conditions. And then we exported these same jobs overseas without exporting any of the labor protections that went with them.

I anticipate a pile-on from traditional media. Glass, from the transcript, does not seem happy about any of this. Could Mike Daisey have gotten people to care about working conditions in Shenzhen, China while still telling a factually true story? The trouble is that we won’t ever know now. And yet, there’s something strange about this following on the heels of the Kony 2012 pile-on. Although Kony 2012 is factually true, detractors point out how it over-simplifies the story while creating a false expectation that justice can be rapidly achieved.

This is an interesting moment for journalism. And I find myself pulled between old ways of thinking and new ones. Traditional journalism stories have not had the reach that Jason Russell or Mike Daisey have had—to get people to care about injustices in factories, or in war-torn Uganda. By simplifying the narrative, and, above all, making the narrative deeply personal, both men have reached huge and emotionally receptive audiences. They have done this despite, or possibly even in small part, because of, the journalistic shortcomings of their story-telling methods.

The old-time labor agitators like Elizabeth Hurley Flynn and the Wobblies might have seen Mike Daisey and Jason Russell as heroes. The left wasn’t always straight-laced about the facts when it came to journalism. Sensationalism has always sold more copies. Charles Dickens employed tactics more emotionally along the lines of James O’Keefe than Walter Cronkite in describing the living conditions of people in nineteenth century London. Notably, of course, Dickens was also a fiction writer. And for Dickens, poverty was deeply and passionately a personal subject. At twelve he was sent to work 10 hour days in a shoe blacking factory, an experience he never forgot or forgave. Although, ironically, Dickens never told the non-fiction truth of his own childhood during his lifetime, preferring not to describe the time he spent in a factory, because he believed, probably correctly, that it would make people in class stratified Victorian England think less of him.

I’ve been thinking about Mike Daisey since his story first aired. I’ve been thinking about it because I, too, have had a deeply personal experience with harsh working conditions. And I haven’t found much of an audience for my story.But Daisey’s story gave me hope that maybe wider audiences do or can care.

I’m looking at the transcript of Ira Glass and here is where I differ with Ira. He writes (on page 21 of the transcript) that there are sort of two buckets when it comes to working conditions in factories. He says that one bucket is harsh working conditions. And the other is safety and life-threatening issues. Regarding the first, though, he writes, “I think that China is a little bit different and that the expectations, particularly as a developing nation of workers, are a little bit different. I don’t think holding them to American standards is precisely the right way to look at the situation.” (21)

This paragraph frustrates me. Dickens, at twelve years old, worked ten hour days in factories. Dickens was not an American. And Dickens was so embittered by this experience that he became the author of David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, etc. Dickens’ working conditions were easier than those at Foxconn. A ten-hour day would be small potatoes for those who working two 12-hour shifts, back-to-back.

Is it that capitalism itself rests on the twin pillars of racism and/or classism? The way that Glass is arguing that expectations are different if you’re Chinese, people said the same thing about the lower classes an immigrants when they did this work in the U.S. in the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries. As a way of rationalizing harsh factory conditions, in recent histories, sweatshops have been compared favorably to agriculture. As Krugman, in his famous 1999 defense of sweatshops, points out, poverty in agriculture can be just as searing. It’s just less visible.

And yet, what Charles Dickens knew and what Mike Daisey knows, and what I believe, is that human bodies are human bodies. In the age of social media and relatively easy travel, it gets harder and harder to pretend otherwise. And although there may have been farmers that have worked 24 or more continuous hours, it does not seem like part of the natural, historical rhythm or norm of farming life. What takes place in factories, on the other hand, isn’t limited, the way farming is, by daylight, weather, or nature. In fact, much of the deep poverty of farmers is a relatively recent event in human history. Mass production of food has created greater poverty among farmers. So the comparison of factory sweatshops to the poverty of agriculture doesn’t quite work.

The arguments in favor of sweatshops say that this is the way that nations build wealth. And I’m not exactly disputing this. But I’m not a strict materialist either. Or, the question of money is not the only question that I want to ask when considering factory labor. Elizabeth Hurley Flynn and others have argued for “bread and roses.” A group named Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior has noted that workers have said they have been coerced into doing continuous shifts, which means 2 12-hour shifts in a row. Many Foxconn jobs require standing or sitting in backless chairs—why do electronics factories require factory workers to suffer this much physical discomfort or pain if they don’t, strictly speaking, need to?

Glass points out that for $65 (or as little as $10) more, workers could work under U.S. labor conditions and wages. Labor costs are incredibly low when it comes to electronics. So why would factories require 24 hour shifts?

I also disagree with Glass that you can ever separate bucket one of harsh working conditions from bucket two, or basic safety. The sinking of the Costa Concordia brings this to mind. When workers are physically exhausted, dangerous or even life-threatening accidents happen more frequently. When I worked on a cruise ship in Mexico, I was surprised that only five people were required to do all the fine dining service and all of the room cleaning service for 102 passengers. And this was an American-flagged ship. One afternoon during a safety drill one of the ship’s mates pointed out to me that between all of us at the table, we has probably all had an average of around 3 hours of sleep. I know an engineer who worked as many as 20 hour days or more several days a week because the ships were run with old parts that had to be constantly repaired.

The American and British labor agitators who fought for 12 and 8-hour workdays weren’t just trying to piss off factory owners. They were fighting for the physical and mental integrity of people who didn’t have a lot of choice other than to take on very difficult work.

It’s frustrating that Daisey lied to Ira Glass. It’s also frustrating that Daisey doesn’t seem to acknowledge how misleading people can hurt the very cause he’s fighting for. I sympathize with Daisey’s desire to make an audience care. I just hope his audience still cares, when all the facts are laid out on the table.

on religious freedom

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:03:40 -0400

shock jock blames his hatred of women on

his hatred of hip hop……

I’m a man who’s easily bored

an Archie Bunker type—

minus the irony—

I believe marriage to be a sacred vow before God

between a woman and a woman and a woman and a woman

& me.

But I saw this pretty lady on t.v.

talking about her birth control pills—

I started thinking how it’s been two years

& my new woman already be tiring of me!

All my ladies ever want from me is cash!

Otherwise—they prefer to dash—

This t.v. law student was so fine.

I told the whole world what I’d do

were she mine—

I’d pay her for sex. And if she turned me down

I’d pay so I could watch.

All my womens ever want from me is cash!

$ the moment they collect a stash, I get a rash!

My advertisers pressured me to say ‘I’m sorry’

so I said, “I’m deeply sorry

she’s a ho.

That she’s a dirty dirty ho.”

Shhhhhh.

Don’t tell the don’t-love-me-no-mo missus

that I’ve been lusting for a liberal’s caresses.

I’m an Archie Bunker type

with 4 wives

and 9 lives.

“Religious freedom,”

means

“I like to watch.”

oh, I’m sorry she a ho. That she a dirty, dirty ho.

(thank god, she a ho! She a dirty dirty ho!)

I want to tell the world what I’d do were she mine:

I’d pay her for sex. And if she said no.

I’d still pay her. If I could watch.

I’m a man, way too easily bored,

with a microphone I wield

wilting

sword…..

from my new poetry collection, doggerel of the apocalypse

ones who carry the weight of the sun

Fri, 2 Sep 2011 20:09:38 -0400

Faceless job, circling,

un-Enola Gay fliers,

Fukushima bound.

“No morality

in war” Tibbets said.

No sentiment

in business; just a

geiger counter

and the fragile ground.

To force the body

not to flee—who remembers

Cherynobyl, mon

amour? 5.6

roentgens per second. “Off scale.”

Telyatnikov

received his medal

for bravery, two others,

posthumously. Four,

the number that burned?

Down’s syndrome up--Germany.

Deer racing from the

red forest. Cost of

oil wars or black lung. None

costless. Know us, then, we

breathing women, men,

pouring sea water over

icarus, the sun.