violence

Teacher at Point Blank: Confronting Sexuality, Violence, and Secrets in a Suburban School

alicia — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

When Jo Scott-Coe began teaching in the same suburban California high school she’d graduated from four years earlier, she had to overcome her reluctance to call former teachers by their first names. Once that was accomplished, she set out to bring new life to the literature and writing classes she was assigned.

In seventeen essays Scott-Coe lays bare the disappointments and frustrations that marred her eleven years in the classroom. While the book is highly anecdotal—and cannot be read as a general indictment of the educational system--she does hit several general themes, including the way educators—eighty percent of them female—are mistreated by Boards of Education, parents, and students.

To begin, Scott-Coe notes society’s “schizophrenia of reverence and contempt” for teachers. On one hand, she explains, teachers are presumed to be “angels,” long-suffering nurturers and enablers of youth. On the other, they’re treated with contempt, disparaged as overpaid civil servants or lazy paper pushers. The real issues they face—in terms of educational policy, pedagogical proficiency, and their own personal and professional development—never see the light of day in these discussions.

Nowhere is this clearer than in an essay called "Recovering Teacher." In it, Scott-Coe painstakingly chronicles the decline, and then death, of her colleague Neil Webb. A scholar who began his career as a Latin and German instructor, Webb was arbitrarily reassigned to another discipline once the district gutted language programs in the late 1980s. Scott-Coe posits the shift as the administration’s way of emphasizing “the interchangeable nature of subject matter while also disrespecting his primary expertise.” Whatever the bureaucracy’s motivation, the end result was the same: Webb had no choice but to accept the transfer if he wanted to retain his job.

Still, after the shift ,Webb’s peers and students noticed his discernible decline: He lost weight and, always a heavy drinker, began coming to school drunk. When his driver’s license was suspended, they snickered, sidestepping conversations that might have addressed his out-of-control behavior. When he was finally terminated, people breathed a sign of relief, as if his firing was inevitable.

Somewhat later, his home burned down; not long afterwards he was found dead, alone in a seedy motel room. “I still wonder what might have happened if the school staff, as a community, had confronted Webb,” Scott-Coe writes. “We might have seen him as a struggling human being instead of scapegoating him as the problem employee, the exotic and tortured genius who would never fit in, or the pathetic colleague who made us feel less bad about our own problems.“

It’s a painful, if moving account.

Scott-Coe also writes of sexual tension in the classroom, and of the violent undercurrent noted by most of the teachers she worked with. That she and her colleagues had no forum to discuss these issues is absurd. Even more ridiculous, when legitimate questions were aired, administrators served up meaningless platitudes in lieu of practical advice. On top of this, Scott-Coe had to contend with preparing her students for a multitude of constantly-changing standardized tests and had to counsel them—with little-to-no prior training—for personal problems, from eating disorders, to cutting, to domestic abuse.

Small wonder that Teacher at Point Blank is angst-filled. A deeply personal and sad narrative, Scott-Coe lambastes the enormous commitment that is expected of teachers. It then begs the question: How can their stature be elevated while preparing them to cope more effectively with complex classroom and bureaucratic issues?

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, February 17th 2011

Why Girls Fight: Female Youth Violence in the Inner City

alicia — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Cindy D. Ness

New York University Press

Ness holds doctorate degrees in Human Development, Psychology, and Anthropology and in Why Girls Fight she blends the theories and research methods from these three fields to discuss female youth violence. Ness argues that the majority of studies tend to examine either individual factors in explaining and understanding youth violence or emphasize sociological, macro-level factors. Ness’ interdisciplinary approach allows her to address how individual girls respond to and navigate the racial and class constraints as well as the limited economic opportunities within their communities.

Ness problematizes previous research on female youth violence. She addresses the racist and classist underpinnings of the term “violent girl” used in studies, noting that much of this research has relied on a framework in which girlhood is viewed through the lens of white, middle-class femininity. Within this framework girlhood is mostly associated with passivity and relational aggression (mean-girl behavior) if any aggression at all. Moreover, within this framework girls are almost always constructed as victims of violence rather than as agents of violence. Failing to address issues of race and class in relation to youth violence, Ness argues that much of the research depicts girls as delinquents or sociopaths and focuses on faults within the individual.

In acknowledging the social realities girls face in two working-class Philadelphia neighborhoods, Ness is able to sidestep this type of moralizing and pathologizing that taints much of the research on female youth violence. Ness offers a brief history on the economic decline of working-class neighborhoods in Philadelphia, noting how once major industries folded and left the city, entire households and even neighborhoods suddenly found themselves without jobs leading to rundown neighborhoods and schools without adequate funding.

Ness also conducts an ethnographic study, interviewing girls from these two respective neighborhoods on why they fight. In providing a space for the girls’ own words, Ness uncovers a complex set of reasons for female youth violence within the two neighborhoods, reasons ranging from a lack of upward mobility within their communities to issues of physical abuse at home. Furthermore, almost all the girls Ness interviews recognize that street fighting is considered a necessary survival skill within their homes and their communities.

Ness’ book is groundbreaking in addressing how mother-daughter relationships relate to female youth violence. Sidestepping the typical mother-blaming that occurs in studies on this subject, Ness examines how the girls’ mothers’ own views on street-fighting affect how they raise their daughters and she sheds light on the unreported incidents of mothers stepping into fights in order to protect their daughters and at times fighting alongside their daughters.

In neighborhoods that value the ability to handle oneself over passivity, Ness’ work clearly demonstrates that a white, middle-class framework of girlhood cannot begin to explain female youth violence and with Why Girls Fight Ness provides a more adequate model for future studies.

Written by: Kristen Lambert, February 14th 2011

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States

brittany — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Kay Whitlock, Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie

Beacon Press

In their near-exhaustive catalogue of violence, discrimination, and systematic abuse of LGBT people in the United States, Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock outline the specific ways that the criminalization of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgendered people has perpetuated inequalities not only based on sexual identity but also within the complex interplay of race, class, and gender. While many leading texts in LGBT studies have argued that the policing of gender leads to toxic consequences for all members of society, this book reveals just how pervasive such policing of gender is and just how complicit we are in maintaining these systems of inequality. Most centrally, Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock argue that decriminalizing queerness has been sidelined by efforts to merely remove legal sanctions—a problem that fails to address the basic assumptions of queer deviance at play in our legal system.

Queer (In)Justice dispenses a legal history of LGBT oppression that spans hundreds of years, beginning with a sweeping review of the history of gender policing—indigenous abuse, constructions of African people as hypersexual, “contaminating” immigrant bodies, and even Biblical ideas about sodomy—and moving through a range of topics that collectively provide the most complete picture of LGBT criminalization I have ever encountered. Addressing queer criminal archetypes (e.g., the queer killer, sexually degraded predator, disease spreader, and queer security threat) early in the book, the authors then move to three stellar chapters on legal policing of gender in clubs and public spaces, courtroom battles about queer identity (where gender bending and violence are discursively linked), and, finally, the queering of prisons. This last chapter on prisons provides a haunting account of prison guards ignoring sexual identity-based violence, refusing care for HIV/AIDS prisoners, and constructing queer inmates as perverse. The authors conclude (in one of only a few hopeful moments of the book) that anti-police-brutality, the building of safe communities, prison solidarity, and community organizing must occur in order to tease apart the conflation of queerness and criminality.

At times devastating, provocative, explicit, and horrifying, this book will make you deeply sad, deeply angry, and more fully aware of how far we really are from full equality for sexual minorities. The authors argue, essentially, that cases like Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena are not isolated incidents of violent, hateful oppression, but rather, engendered by the very system that supposedly protects queer subjects. From senseless police brutality to justifying death penalty sentences based on sexual identity, from the fetishization of “lesbian killer” Aileen Wuornos to prison guards who allow continued sexual assault against “willing” gay men in prison, hatred of queerness exists at the heart of our criminal justice system. The question becomes: What legal, discursive, social, and institutional changes can we enact that more radically and permanently divides queerness from criminality? What stories must we tell (or learn) to communicate and understand the histories of violence lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people have endured? And, finally, what kind of queer justice should we seek?

Written by: Breanne Fahs, February 12th 2011

What A Wonderful World

mandy — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Faouzi Bensaidi

Global Film Initiative

In What A Wonderful World, director Faouzi Bensaidi attempts to bring together the incongruities of Moroccan urban life with elegance and intimacy. The film features a set of diverse characters whose lives intersect either by coincidence or choice. Thus, throughout the film one notices several intertwined little stories. However, the film’s main storyline revolves around a mercenary assassin, Kamel (who is played by Bensaidi), who falls in love with Kenza, a traffic officer by day and a prostitute by night.

Kamel’s job is driven by the world around him. Everything he sees is a potential sign he will use in order to obtain serial numbers as passwords that enable him to log onto a secure website where he gets his assignment—his next victim. Following every murder, Kamel calls Souad, Kenza’s best friend and prostitute. They meet in Kamel's rooftop apartment, which has a panoramic view of Casablanca. After he is done with her, Kamel literally dumps Souad from his bed. This scene is repeated more than once, yet Souad continues to answer his calls whenever Kamel desires.

I found these scenes to be quite disturbing because the director projects the idea that women and prostitutes are mere objects used for the sexual gratification of men. In other words, Souad’s body is transformed into an arena where institutionalized violence is accepted, and hence constitutes part of the spectrum of (dis)embodiment that is inflicted, and not determined, by the cultural, social, economic, and political setting of her world. Whether Bensaidi was conscious of the implications that this had, I cannot help but argue that What A Wonderful World reproduced dynamics of objectification and dissociation.

On another note, from a gendered perspective, one can argue that Bensaidi positions women against each other given the fact that Kamel falls in love with Souad’s best friend. Thus, rather than creating a mutual bond between women who are economically, culturally, and socially ostracized and oppressed, he constructs a form of competition that makes one question whether or not ‘sisterhood’ is actually possible. What A Wonderful World demonstrates that to survive in a world where crime is widespread and unemployment is evident, people might end up resorting to violence.

Written by: May Abu-Jaber, January 20th 2011

Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent

payal — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By AK Thompson

AK Press

My fascination with the anti-globalization movement, like my own baby steps into activism, is a late bloomer. I came of age when my peers were shutting down Seattle. I was reading Marx for the first time in college when IMF protestors took to the streets in DC. Yet throughout my extended adolescence, radical politics was background noise. I never paused to find out why globalization made people so angry. Like a lot of people growing up white and middle class, militancy was excessive and embarrassing. Admirable in heroes of the past, the world is civil now (I felt), with no need for insurrections or rage against the machine.

Yet most of the activists in the streets of Seattle also came from nice, white, middle-class homes in suburbia. In fact, this was a common critique of the anti-globalization movement in North America. Instead of multiracial inclusion, the movement seems to reproduce the same racial and class privilege so abhorrent in global capitalism.

This is precisely the criticism AK Thompson tackles in Black Bloc, White Riot. His response is not a how-to for recruiting people of color and/or those lower on the socioeconomic scale. Instead, his aim is to analyze the anti-globalization movement in its white, middle-class character. I.e., rather than complain that the movement is too white so let's find some black and brown people, he wants to account for why young white people came to the movement at all. After locating it in the particular experience of whiteness, he can proceed to the limitations of the movement's politics (as well as its strengths).

Referencing radical favorites like Paulo Freire, Audre Lorde, and Fight Club, and full of phrases like "the white experience of constitutive lack," the book reads like many a lefty intellectual's work. Whether you find this annoying or exhilarating, the arguments boil down to a few simple ideas. A key theme is turning toward a politics of production rather than representation, by which Thompson means focusing on how to get things done, not the symbolic significance of objects and images. For instance, don't worry that gas masks look monstrous in the eyes of the media; focus on the fact that wearing them allows protesters to face tear-gas-hurling police. It's about what one does, not how one appears.

Thompson also emphasizes the importance of violence. Violence, he argues, is a productive force like labor, which puts one in direct material contact with the world and explodes the representational politics that are deadly to the soul (when nothing substantial is accomplished) and deadly to the body (when unjust social structures persist in creating poverty, illness, and climate change). As force is monopolized by governments, historically it is only when groups proved capable of violence that they received political recognition and agency: colonized peoples, immigrants, and women.

In Chapter Four: “You Can't Do Gender in a Riot,” Thompson anticipates criticism that advocating violence amounts to accepting a sexist, patriarchal model. He argues the material fact that women can and have engaged in violent political struggle. Furthermore, participation in violence is one arena that allows activists to transcend gender. He quotes a female Black Bloc member, who explains how the baggy clothes and black hooded sweatshirt allows her gendered identity to disappear—a perfect example of the politics of production.

I wouldn't recommend this book as a first introduction to the movement. But if you are familiar with the stakes and the story of anti-globalization, it's an analysis worth considering, regardless of race and class background.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, December 24th 2010

Coexist

tina — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Directed by Adam Mazo

Amazo Productions

Coexist is a documentary that seeks to provide insight into the reconciliation process in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. The sheer scale and complex nature of the conflict provides a unique glimpse into how individuals and their communities recover from horrific experiences and the documentary questions whether reconciliation is even possible under such traumatic conditions. Recently, Rwanda was recognized for its stable political environment and for achieving one of the highest economic growth rates in the world. Through the voices of Rwandans, Coexist provides a means of examining how social and political reconstruction has been managed.

The documentary provides the context for which the genocide took place. Major ethnic groups were at the center of the genocide, despite there being little difference between the groups. Coexist does not highlight Rwanda’s colonial history. It is, therefore, unable to explore how this experience shaped political struggles in the nation. The documentary attributes the intensity and sheer scale of the genocide to fear, without providing a historical context of Rwanda. This deprives the viewer of vital insights into the extreme violence unleashed during the 1994 genocide. To its credit, Coexist does shed light on the role that the elite, at the national and local level, played in triggering and sustaining the genocide through the voices of victims and perpetrators.

The Adam Mazo-directed documentary also focuses on the nature of the state-backed reconciliation process which has required, among other things, the reintegration of perpetrators into communities. Touching on very sensitive issues, the voices of victims and perpetrators provide a very graphic take on a chapter of world history that continues to traumatize the population of this African state.

What strikes me as interesting is that the reconciliation process is depicted as being insulated from public debate. Coexist demonstrates the resilience of the victims and juxtaposes this against a latent resistance to the reconciliation imposed by the Rwandan state. The documentary succeeds in directly confronting the nature of the repressive Rwandan state. For instance, Coexist does illustrate how the Rwandan state has managed to maintain a façade of resolution in the midst of flashes of violence and political repression. This is further reinforced by a state-backed narrative glossing over the violence the (now ruling) Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel army unleashed on unarmed civilians during the conflict. The added fact that reprisal attacks continue on genocide survivors, who either testify or act as judges in the traditional Gacaca courts, illustrates that reconciliation is still uncertain.

Due to the scale of the genocide, the path to peace does imply that victims would have to tolerate some of the perpetrators. The question that remains to be addressed is whether the approach adopted provides a long-term resolution. The role that political struggles over property played in the genocide also received some attention in the documentary, but the issue was not examined closely. As a result, Coexist left me wondering if the distribution of power and resources in Rwanda has the ability to secure stability and peace for current and future generations.

Coexist attempts to universalize the message of tolerance in the midst of conflict resolution, but the lack of a reflection on Rwanda’s historical experience, which has shaped political struggles, deprives the viewer of understanding the depth of the conflict. The dilemma left for future generations to confront is how to repair the damage wrought by violence and Coexist succeeds in emphasizing the role tolerance must play in this process.

Written by: Hibist W. Kassa, December 14th 2010

Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant

tina — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Susan Supernaw

University of Nebraska Press

On the surface, Susan Supernaw’s memoir Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant is a story about an unlikely Miss Oklahoma winner and her trip to the 1971 Miss America pageant. The true story, however, is Supernaw’s struggle to escape a childhood marred by extreme poverty and violence and earn the Native American name revealed to her during a near death experience.

While reading the memoir, it was hard to keep in mind that Muscogee Daughter wasn’t a work of fiction. Supernaw’s struggles haunted me long after I finished reading the book, especially the image of her dying grandmother sharing a bed with Supernaw as an ill and abandoned infant.

Supernaw was the fourth daughter in a poor family and her birth was a major disappointment to her father. When she was just a baby her parents left her in the care of her elderly grandparents on a farm in rural Oklahoma so that her father could go back to college. It’s never made clear why her parents took the older girls and left their newborn, but whatever the reason it was ill conceived. By the time she was six months old, Supernaw’s grandmother had died and her mother returned to collect her.

Months of being confined to her grandmother’s bed and being fed cow’s milk and coffee by her inexperienced grandfather landed her in the hospital for many weeks. That would be the first of a handful of close calls in Supernaw’s life and each time she believed she was about to die, a beautiful woman appeared to comfort her. Supernaw believed she was a manifestation of the Corn Mother.

The second time the woman appeared she brought a small dancing bear, a personification of Supernaw’s Native American name. A community elder came to Supernaw’s bed side and advised her to follow her destined path in order to earn the right to her name and earning that name became her primary goal. Paralyzed after a horse riding accident, Supernaw fought to walk again and eventually, she became an athletic high school cheerleader, a Presidential scholar, an accidental beauty queen, and a unifying figure for the eastern and western tribes of Oklahoma.

Supernaw memoir reveals many painful and personal details about her life. We learn of the abusive father who left the family bereft and who was replaced by an even more tyrannical and dangerous step-father, though initially the four girls were happy to have him provide more than the ketchup sandwiches they had been accustomed to eating for dinner.

Supernaw seems to understand that her family’s story is representative of a piece of American history—one that is too often untold; however, it feels like too much was left unsaid. Though she was an anthropology major concerned with human rights, her attitude towards the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is puzzling. Supernaw says that it gave her white boyfriend “an unfair disadvantage and made me feel like I’d been given an unfair advantage.” In later pages she reveals that she “felt a lot of confusion over minority preference,” yet she also felt the sting of racism from her boyfriend who believed her Presidential award was the result of her being a minority. There were was also the cheerleaders’ parents who did not allow her in their homes; the Miss America pageant that treated her like an oddity; and the media that used offensive stereotypes to describe her.

Muscogee Daughter was both fascinating and frustrating. As a reader I wanted to know more about her family and her experience as a woman of color living between white and Native worlds. The importance of earning her Native American name is clear, but the significance of the milestone is not. Nevertheless, Susan Supernaw’s memoir is essential in the narrative of American history.

Written by: Stephanie Sylverne, October 29th 2010

We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008

admin — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 22:00:00 +0000

Edited by A.G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris, Void Network

AK Press

Consider what it might feel like if July 4th in the United States were celebrated not with fireworks and barbecue but with demonstrations and occupations to achieve a further social revolution. That's what November 17th is in Greece since a student revolt on that date in 1973 triggered the end of the dictatorship. In fact, because of the role of the students in achieving this, a law was passed by the socialist government in 1981 to establish academic asylum. Although the law has since been weakened, police are restricted from entering university campuses.

I learned these facts from reading We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008, a collage of interviews, oral history, chronologies, personal essays, manifestos, and political essays, edited by A.G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris, and Void Network. The format is similar to that used in the INCITE! collective's The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, which tells its story in a range of contradictory voices. In both books, the format results in repetition and a difficult-to-track sequence of events, but allows DIY interpretation and wide range of views, some of them way, way beyond the political discourse permitted in the United States, even in so-called progressive media.

Here is as good a point as any to complain about how the physical book under review—a wide ten inches on a six-inch spine—was difficult to read in bed. Perhaps this is in keeping with the direct action message of We Are an Image from the Future: get up and out and do something.

For those undeterred by these difficulties, there are rewards. The editors argue that their book is not a history, but is as close to a true account as can be achieved for the unexpected and multifaceted events sparked by the police murder of fifteen-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos on December 6, 2008 in the Exarchia section of Athens—a neighborhood known for countercultural and anarchist activity. A witness entertaining a guest in his apartment above the square (who calls the Athenian equivalent of 9/11), activists who admit to being frightened by the violence of the ensuing riots, radicals who experience the realization that a revolutionary moment can occur in unpredictable ways that don't match a theoretical scheme, and a veteran of the overthrow of the dictatorship who chastises contemporary revolutionaries for smashing shops all have their say.

We're definitely not in Kansas anymore—or even in New York. Greece, which experienced occupation during World War II but actually liberated itself and endured a civil war in living memory, has some far-from-tame political confrontations. In the United States, we are more likely to criticize Washington and Jefferson as hypocritical slaveholders than recapitulate their revolution with a little political rumble of our own.

We Are an Image from the Future provides an honest and unforeclosed discussion of political violence. There is room for differentiation among property destruction, self-defense, expropriation, and deliberate attacks on the authority of the state, without distinctions being lost in the mire of the ever-expanding catch-all of "domestic terrorism." After all, Washington and his comrades were insurrectionists to the British.

Written by: Frances Chapman, August 8th 2010

Happiness Runs

admin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Adam Sherman

Strand Releasing

I sat through this eighty-eight minute monstrosity two and half times. And the question that I’m still asking myself is, “What the fuck?”

Set sometimes during the eighties, Happiness Runs is the semi-autobiographical story of its tyro director. Happiness Runs centers on Victor (Mark L. Young), a teen who is desperate to escape from the hippie commune that he was born into. His terminally ill, inexplicably wealthy, and utterly disinterested mother (Andie MacDowell) has been brainwashed into single-handedly supporting the commune by Insley (Rutger Hauer), a creepy self-proclaimed “guru” who has impregnated most of the women on the compound. When Insley isn’t hypnotizing his narcissistic adherents into complete submission, he is training Becky (Hannah Hall) to serve as a sex slave. Due to Insley’s indoctrination, Becky has become a drug-addicted promiscuous mess, having sex with nearly all the boys in the group.

Victor, deeply in love with Becky, resents her naïve embrace of “free love” and repeatedly begs her to run away with him. To complicate matters, Victor’s mother absolutely refuses to give him any money. Because Victor doesn’t seem to understand that he can support himself by finding a job, he drifts from wild party to wild party with the other children in the cult, even half-heartedly drug-dealing, an enterprise which the adults hypocritically disapprove of. Due to their early exposure to drugs and sex, the children are all incredibly damaged, escaping the anger over parental neglect with varying forms of self-destructive behavior.

Just like a lot of movies with a “sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll” theme, the women of Happiness Runs are routinely objectified. There are several instances of full frontal female nudity—the exposed female bodies juxtaposed with male bodies that are always covered with at least boxer shorts, if they aren’t completely clothed. The men and boys routinely use the women sexually, an attitude that the women seem to encourage. Becky is referred to as “everybody’s girlfriend,” not seeming to understand that the males in the commune aren’t automatically entitled to access to her body. She even goes so far as to climb into Victor’s bed, saying, “You can do whatever you want to me.” The fact that Rachel (Laura Peters), the only girl in the bunch inclined to call the boys out on their disrespectful attitudes, is the “ugly” one that none of the boys seem to want is another slap at the women’s liberation movement.

And Happiness Runs marries sexuality and violence in an especially disturbing way, with no fewer than three shots of Becky’s nude body covered in blood. (Becky also gets her hip thrown out during a bout of passionate sex; an event that amuses the boys to no end.) It’s been a long time since a film managed to offend most of my feminist sensibilities. Then again, it’s been a long time since I saw a movie this bad.

I know I’ve spent entirely too much time critiquing the lifestyle choices of the characters. Unfortunately, this movie is so threadbare that I can’t adopt the Oscar Wilde standpoint of not concerning myself with the morality of the characters. The plot and character development are virtually non-existent. The pacing is slack with performances ranging from anemic to downright wooden; none of the actors are skilled or experienced enough to convincingly play world-weary addicts. The dialogue is so vapid and elliptical that it will put even the most committed viewer to sleep. And the cinematography is uninspired. And, like many movies centered on impressionable drug-addled subjects, Happiness Runs repeatedly sinks into surrealistic dream sequences, over-relying on the visions’ hallucinogenic quality to drive the story.

Please don’t waste your time with this one, kids. This movie sucked.

Written by: Ebony Edwards-Ellis, June 19th 2010

The Karate Kid

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 23:59:00 +0000

Directed by Harald Zwart

Columbia Pictures

Age has always been a dicey variable in the Karate Kid universe. In The Karate Kid, Part III — perhaps the most preposterous entry in the series — the twenty-eight-year-old Ralph Macchio passed himself off as a “kid” abandoning college, with his character dating the seventeen-year-old Robyn Lively (thus lending a creepy and statutory quality to the relationship). This time around, the “kid” is truly a kid — even if the “karate” is kung fu and not karate.

The martial arts here, a watered-down take on Yuen Woo-ping, are both hilarious and disturbing. Here is a film that asks us to celebrate Jaden Smith beating another twelve-year-old in the face — a move that would surely have disqualified him from the 1984 original’s All Valley Karate Tournament — shortly after he has pinned his opponent on the mat. The remake’s aggressive sound mix invites us to revel in the bone-crunching prospects of children being thrown into the air and viciously attacked, demonstrating that America’s post-Guantanamo moral laxity has expanded considerably since Jack Bauer first waterboarded a suspect. And I’ll certainly be curious if some family values moralist emerges from the log cabin to condemn the film’s fondness for having kids beating the shit out of each other.

Jaden Smith’s Dre Parker isn’t nearly as winning as Daniel Larusso. Where Daniel was a decent kid from New Jersey who immediately introduced himself to a crazy old woman in the apartment building and brought her dog a bowl of water, immediately securing audience sympathy, Dre is more of a spoiled brat who drops his jacket on the floor, whines too much, and doesn’t even have Daniel’s soccer ball bouncing moves to impress the girl. It also doesn’t help that Jaden Smith has an annoying habit of mugging for the camera. He rolls his eyes and folds his face to the spectator instead of inhabiting his character the way that Macchio did.

Even though it’s more entertaining than most remakes, 2010’s The Karate Kid can’t come close to matching the original. And that’s because the 1984 movie was something of a masterpiece. Aside from the original’s clever method of using the Protestant work ethic as a pretext for “training” (one might make a case that Daniel’s dawn-to-dusk shifts are one of Hollywood’s greatest portrayals of efficacious slave labor), the movie was a sneaky parable about cultural appropriation. Kreese (the Martin Kove character), the military man turned dojo master, and the Cobra clan, with its Erhardian “No Fear! No Mercy!” mantra, not only presented us with a shameful bastardization of karate’s peaceful roots, but it certainly helped that Kreese, Johnny, and the various lieutenants acted like a cokehead asshole brigade. Miyagi lost his wife and daughter for reasons that involved a Japanese internment camp — one of the most disgraceful moments in American history. And the class divide between Daniel and “Ali with an I,” when taken with the feminism of Ali pursuing Daniel (rather than the reverse) and clocking the boorish Johnny, created an environment where hard work and a commitment to discipline could pull you through the American nightmare.

All this is too bad. Because had the remake’s script considered the original film’s underlying principle — that resorting to violence is only applicable when there are no other choices — it might have packed a greater punch.

Excerpted from a longer, more detailed review at Ed Rants

Written by: Edward Champion, June 16th 2010

Dark Heart of the Night

admin — Sat, 08 May 2010 23:59:00 +0000

By Leonora Miano

University of Nebraska Press

The gross reality of genocide brings one’s spirit to feel a deep sadness for groups and individuals who don't understand different cultures. Delineating a brutal world of power and defeat, the author of Dark Heart of the Night doesn't hold back and the shocking truth of this topic engenders an incredulous curiosity in the reader: how can a village not support their people, even those who are related to some in the village? How can the world be so out of kilter that more energy is spent killing while refusing to understand others? The power of violence resonates throughout and accompanies the overriding story.

The author depicts the harshness and pain of this specific village to help us understand the ongoing brutality of a small tribe of people. In reading Dark Heart of the Night, a person may see parallels to oppressed groups through history. The sheer stubbornness and defiant attitudes of particular individuals in the village overpower the mass of followers in the village.

Nightmarish in its intensity, the novel opens with the brutal acts of a rebel force taking place within the country. As readers, we observe protagonist Ayané, who returns to her Central African village from France to assist her dying mother; she is continually an outcast—not understood nor understanding this culture to which she returns uneasily. As a more "worldly" individual, she confronts the local leader of the village after witnessing killing in her mother's village from afar.

Throughout Dark Heart of the Night, the author depicts an ongoing conflict within the self, among others, and in the overall world. Her stark imagery brings to light gruesome and harsh experiences. Deftly utilizing only minimal words, Leonora Miano shapes the storyline with the sheer power of her writing. She elaborates on the human aspects of communication and being misunderstood in a cross-cultural situation. All character interactions bring ideas of human survival to the forefront.

Miano is originally from Cameroon, and she lives in France. Both Tamsin Black and Terese Svodboda translate Miano’s work into English for their readers. Overall, Miano presents a hearty and challenging novel to surely move the reader to action to demand fairness for those people who find themselves under the proverbial oppression of misplaced power.

Written by: Carolyn Espe, May 8th 2010

Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States

admin — Sun, 02 May 2010 07:55:00 +0000

By Rickie Solinger, Paula C. Johnson, Martha L. Raimon, Tina Reynolds, Ruby C. Tapia

University of California Press

Surprise—it’s a real downer to read about prison. That glaringly obvious statement aside, Interrupted Life is quite an achievement. The book comprises eighty-seven pieces, which are written by scholars, activists, incarcerated women, and formerly incarcerated women and span breadth of generic types. There are poems, reflections, and essays; there are excerpts from research, a Bill of Rights, a United Nations Report; there are journal entries, excerpts from interviews, vocabulary lists, and letters to lovers. There are so many perspectives, experiences, reflections, assertions, and expressions that no one point of view is easily privileged, and the reader who may try to do so would have to try very hard to lump everything in this book into one picture of the "standard" incarcerated woman. This, of course, is one of the goals of this book: to resist readers' attempts to maintain a generalized view of who the incarcerated woman is or what she is like.

I admire the honesty of Ruby Tapia's introduction. She directly admits that any representation of incarcerated women—even of a single incarcerated woman—will necessarily fail to convey fully what her experience means to her and how it feels to her. Likewise, it will also fail to fully show how such a representation relates to the larger social, political, and economic problems of justice, the category of the "criminal," and the overwhelming homogeneity of economic class within prison populations. She insists that creating a representation of incarcerated women—even such a nuanced, heterogeneous representation as the book attempts—is still to reproduce the categorical violence done to incarcerated women by setting up a space in which "we" (non-incarcerated, non-criminal/criminalized readers) can take a leisurely look at "them"—"they" who exist outside of the laws that bind us into a group that can evaluate the criminalized other, who cannot evaluate us in ways that count.

Interrupted Life makes a provocative and accessible (if continually heartbreaking) book for the lay reader. The future professor in me can't help but imagine this book as a text for introductory level courses in philosophy, women's studies, multicultural studies, justice studies, political science, criminal justice, economics, or sociology. The readings are not too difficult for undergraduate students to understand and the many perspectives lend themselves to lessons in critical thinking. For advanced students, the readings in this book could challenge—or confirm—more highly theorized academic studies about justice, prisons, gender, and the experiences of incarceration.

Written by: kristina grob, May 2nd 2010

Kick-Ass

admin — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Matthew Vaughn

Marv Films

Kick-Ass, the movie, ruled. And though I thought the central character's journey was an interesting one, by far the movie appealed to me because of eleven-year-old Hit Girl. I had a big plan to dissect the movie here, but then this gal over at Jezebel totally stole my brain and wrote the most eloquent review ever. (I'll get to that in a minute.)

In a nutshell, this movie made me cringe, laugh, turn my head away from the screen in horror, and many times think, "I'm really uncomfortable with that," followed by, "I think. Am I?" For an action movie that originated in comic form, that's saying something. I usually have clear and distinct opinions about things, and use my mental arsenal of academic blatherings to back it all up. At the end of this film I knew two things for sure:

1) I liked it. It made me think. About violence, gender, and heroes.

2) I disliked intensely the parents who brought their kids (some of whom were as young as six years old) to this film. They didn't even seem distressed walking out of the theater. It was, like, no big deal that their young kids had watched a man being put into a giant microwave and exploding into bits. And now I had to feel shitty for vocalizing my love for gratuitous violence and vengeance-fueled murder because I just endorsed that ideology in front of kindergarteners. So thanks.

Anywayz.

I like super-violent films, I love comics, I love female characters, and so I tolerate a lot of crap movies and am willing to suspend a certain measure of disbelief and accept that some jerk-off was hired to "punch up" a script to sell the movie to a teen male demographic. And I know that if this movie got greenlit primarily because someone managed to get Halle Barry to play the female lead, you probably aren't gonna try to butch her up and have her wear something that would be more realistic for running after bad guys. I get that it's a business run by dudes, for dudes, and that it primarily showcases the fantasies of dudes. But for a small shining moment, we got Hit-Girl. And I am all for a sequel based totally on her.

"In Defense of Hit Girl" over at Jezebel should be read even if you never plan on seeing this movie. It's a great defense of the action genre by a feminist, and not the "it's just entertainment" or the "it's not a movie you should spend time thinking too much about" defense. And for the record, I'm a pacifist and a scaredy-cat. I've never been in a fight, nor do I plan to, but I ♥ violent cinema, especially warrior women characters. It's a thing.

I'm thinking this will make for an awesome Halloween costume, btw.

Cross-posted from Sweet Lady

Written by: Sandra Falero, April 25th 2010

"If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die": How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor

admin — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Geoffrey Robinson

Princeton University Press

In 1999, twenty-four years after the original invasion and occupation by Indonesia into the former Portuguese colony, 1,500 East Timorese were killed after a referendum in which the majority voted in favor of independence. Under the Indonesian occupation, hundreds of thousands of East Timorese had already been murdered, debatably, as an act of genocide. That independence was desirable was obvious, yet Indonesian paramilitary groups worked with oppressive diligence to incite fear into hopeful hearts after the country’s landmark referendum. During the outbreak of violence that followed the vote, a significant portion of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed and 400,000 people abandoned their homes.

Geoffrey Robinson—a history professor, scholar of the islands, former Amnesty International principle researcher, and former UN officer based in East Timor during the 1999 conflict—is arguably one of the most informed, compassionate outsiders to tell the story of the violence in the small island nation. In “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die”, Robinson frames the struggles of East Timor as emblematic of struggles against colonization worldwide. He also explores how Cold War politics impacted nations like East Timor, the intersections of militarism and extreme nationalism, and the overlap in debates over humanitarian aid and intervention.

Unlike some scholars, Robinson posits the theory that the violence in East Timor was neither spontaneous nor a final result of the long-standing ethnic tensions between the Portuguese, Indonesians, and East Timorese. Instead, he makes the case for larger international political and cultural relations that supported Indonesia’s militaristic actions and ideology, tracing several decades of history that led up to the violence of 1999.

In his writing, Robinson mixes historical fact with his own truth, careful to separate but respect both. He explains a complicated past in linear form and displays empathy for people with whom he shared such a life-altering experience. Even if you don’t have much baseline knowledge about the conflicts between these Southeast Asian islands, this book will illuminate the complicated history is accessible terms. Robinson offers crucial perspective on modern colonialism and explores issues of accountability and justice with aplomb.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, April 17th 2010

Hotel Iris

admin — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Yoko Ogawa

Picador

Having been forced to drop out of school to work at her family's seaside hotel in Japan, a young woman named Mari suffers through days marked by routine. She cleans rooms, minds the desk, and attends to the needs of the guests. The novel Hotel Iris explores what happens when a girl breaks free of a life of controlled repetition, only to fall victim to an even more brutal cycle of submission and domination. Taking shape slowly, like the way breath comes on a hot summer day, Mari reaches so far into the depths of her own fantasy that she eventually chokes on it.

The story begins when a translator and a prostitute have a fight in Mari's hotel. The seventeen-year-old is drawn into the sureness of the man's "beautiful voice giving an order, with no hint of indecision," as he barks insults and orders at the woman. "Even the word 'whore' was somehow appealing." This is the beginning of the end for both the translator and for Mari, as they enter into a secret affair.

Violence is found in every aspect of Mari's life, even the common procedure of styling hair is painful and brutal. Mari's mother is so controlling that she insists on doing the girl's hair, the force of the tugging dependent upon the older woman's mood. Eventually, Mari leaves one dungeon for another, thus transferring violence from the hotel to the translator's island, an isolated home off the coast that can only be reached by boat.

Publicly careful and timid, Mari's time on the island is full of pain, pleasure, and submission. As the translator's violence increases, so too does Mari's desire. The translator is decifering not only Russian pamphlets but also this young girl's body, expanding her worldview. The suspense in Hotel Iris is as suffocating as the heat, and metaphors are both abundant and rich.

The physical action of the characters says more than psychoanalysis could, and Ogawa does not overanalyze her characters' behavior. Many writers fall victim to saying too much, but Ogawa's chief strength is that she doesn't feel compelled to explain her characters' motivations. Instead, the iceberg is acknowledged without being examined.

The restraint shown in the early sections of Hotel Iris is sadly lost in its final few pages. Too much is explained at once, and the result is a rushed, incomplete closing to such a poetic and nuanced novel. The tension that held the story together ultimately dissipates with little pay off. Ogawa's patient weaving of an enthralling tale is what keeps the reader suspended, waiting to see if everything will drop and knowing that, if it does, the fall will be far and dangerous.

Written by: Lisa Bower, April 11th 2010