based on a true story

The couple that had breakfast with us was older, but not too old. They weren't the soft, aged retirees that one sometimes sees in bed & breakfasts, having blown in to celebrate the 10th year anniversary of a friend's restaurant in Williamstown, had gone to bed at 3AM the night before on the tail end of an all-night bender and were looking to repeat the same feat tonight. No, their livers were still running, their party endurance was still up, and they didn't act old, even if the wrinkles and crow's feet said otherwise. They still called us babies when we mentioned our age.

A light morning snow shower swirled outside and the woman of the couple visibly shrank into her shawl, saying that she didn't want to go outside in this weather and couldn't imagine how people could live here.

"You should understand," she said, "I'm from Maryland. It doesn't get that cold down there. Days like this, you stay indoors."

but still they asked what we were planning on doing, and when we said that we were planning on going hiking, they laughed and shook their heads. Though, when we said that we were from Canada, she said, "oh, well, that's ok then. You all are used to it. But when you get to a certain age, weather like this just hurts, you know? I sound terrible, like some big lazy slob, and you know I get my own exercise in. I try to stay fit. But I don't go outside¹."



And, yeah, hiking around Mt. Greylock with an icy wind that slices right through you doesn't fit into most of our definitions of "fun" but walk far enough and you can stop and listen to nothing. You can't hear the chatter of people or the jets of planes. You can't hear the noise of traffic or the sounds of population. You can find peace and solitude.

Then the wind starts up again and you want to hustle back to town and get a cocoa.



This year's iteration of the Banff Mountain Film Festival wasn't quite as interesting as the previous years. Maybe I'm just getting inured to all of the Teton Gravity Research skiing movies. You can only watch so many extreme heli-skiing runs before the lot start to blur together. There were a couple of neat films about Himalayan villagers and 10 year old female rock climbers; but I'm used to seeing a more consistent string of interesting films in the festival and this year was pretty hit-or-miss.

One neat thing is that I won a raffle and picked up a free membership to the Applachian Mountain Club. So, I've been spending my lunch hour going over their website, tempting myself with courses on ice climbing or a winter mountaineering package. Like, I don't have enough to do this year.

¹ We later found out that they were professional ballroom dancers, and that they dance for 15 hours a week. That's pretty hardcore in its own way.

I remember seeing a brief blurb for Control Room in a schedule for the Harvard Film Archives last month, and had my interest piqued. A documentary on al-Jazeera's coverage of the Iraq war, Control Room was pitched as this counterbalance to the image popularized in America of a biased pulpit for terrorist sympathizers. I wanted to go see it but forgot about in the whirl and confusion of travelling and packing. Then two weeks ago, rojagato mentioned that it was still playing at the Kendall and that she was gathering a posse to go see it. So I went and I was impressed, though not for the reasons that I was expecting. I was expecting this massively sympathetic and possibly slanted portrayal of the Arab news network, and I got some of that. Control Room's portrayal of al-Jazeera is as a news network staffed by former BBC journalists¹ who sympathize with their Arab audience, but also want to wake them up from the stupor of state sponsored propaganda. Yet, as journalists operating in societies that do not have traditions for objective reporting, they frequently fall into emotional traps of politicizing their stories, and I was surprised to see that the film didn't gloss over these inconvenient facts. There are interesting conversations where anchors have to repeatedly lecture their staff on staying unbiased, and there's a telling moment where the American ambassador to Qatar admonishes al-Jazeera's editors against "repeating another 1967" where the Arab media grossly exaggerated the progress of the Six-Day War and contributed to a massive sense of popular disappointment when the Israelis had driven the Egyptian and Syrian armies from the field. It's a moment that's a harbinger for the shock over the rapid fall of Baghdad.

There's also a surprising amount of time given to a Marine spokesman² whose conversations with al-Jazeera journalists would come to represent the essential disconnection between American and Arab views of the war. It all makes for a wonderfully nuanced portrayal of the war in Iraq that foregoes lecturing and trusts its audience in being able to make up their own mind.

I pulled a Windows Media Player clip of Truth Uncovered from vulgarlad's journal. This is another documentary, made with the assistance of MoveOn, that deconstructs the Bush Administration's push to war. What's remarkable about Truth, though, is that it's completely based on interviews with career diplomats, spies and journalists who, taken together, represent an impressive collection of experience in foreign affairs. I mean, it opens with an introduction of Milt Bearden, for chrissakes -- the man who basically ran the mujahideen campaign against the Soviets, and you've got him saying that the Bush Doctrine is a bad idea. It goes on from there with CIA imagery analysts knocking Powell's presentation of satellite photos to the UN, and weapons inspectors talking about inconvenient facts of Iraqi compliance that were covered up in the march to war.

Part of what's interesting about Truth Uncovered is that it went through this odd form of distribution, where instead of going to theatres, it was distributed via Internet coordinated house parties, where activists were encouraged to download or order the film and show it at their homes. While that means that the film won't get the same exposure as F911, it does mean that the film gets to end-run the bottlenecks of theatrical distribution and all the costs that this implies. It's a model that's being followed by Outfoxed, an upcoming documentary on the inside machinations of Fox News as told by former journalists who left after getting fedup with Rupert Murdoch's dictatorship. And the main point for this entry is to ask:

"if I get the DVD, will folks want to come over and watch it?"

¹ after all, al-Jazeera was essentially staffed by journalists from an aborted BBC Arabic news channel. Which makes the BBC's efforts to resurrect a pan-Arabic news network kind of poetic in a "Luke, I am your father" kind of way.
² and yes, I have to agree with the female consensus. Lt. Rushing is way dreamy.

A light rainstorm settled into town on Friday night. The drops felt like a cold sigh on my face, and I would've enjoyed it if not for the fact that the rain on my glasses caused light to refract in many interesting and dangerous ways. Headlights burst like brilliant kaleidoscopes, obscuring the road in front of me, and darkness was a muddled, many aspected thing illuminated by the dim bulb mounted on my handlebars. So I rode to the first traffic light, slowing down purposefully to catch it switching to red and took off my glasses so I can dry them off. I felt something give, a sickening crack and my glasses fell apart in my hand.

( on riding blind, having faith and that fucking Passion movie )

Earlier this summer, I was sitting in with rojagato in a half crowded theatre to see the debut of the MFA's kung-fu retrospective, Heroic Grace. One of the selling points for opening night was the live DJ soundtrack for the silent films Red Knight-Errant and Swordswoman of Huangjing. Hunger got the better of us after the first film, and as we bailed and walked down Huntington looking for dinner, I turned to her and said, "goddammit, I could've done a better job of soundtracking that film. Did the DJ even watch it before his set?"

and as I started to nitpick the details, rojagato just said to me, "you know, you guys should do your own silent movie thing."

So tonight is the culmination of that idea, and the test to see whether or not I'm going to eat my words.



Mon., 29 Dec 2004
from 9-10pm
Ceremony
and
An Tua Nua
present
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
w/ score by DJ Cris