DAY FIVE: Skin Like Shiny Parchment
"There are only activists and unactivists."
Mimz and I went to the Independent Documentary Association's (IDA) "DOCU NIGHT." The traffic was light, and I was glad as I have never driven that far, in the dark, in Los Angeles, before.
By the time we'd gotten parked, the first film, "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" had already started. The Writer's Guild of America theater is old and feels like a dignified place. You try to think of how many Oscar-winning bums have sat in those seats.
We sat in the way-back, and Shane joined us. The DOC took me a wee while to get. It was strange to hear Richard Nixon's voice, sweaty, swearing, paranoid, trying to contain Daniel Ellsberg. It was exhilarating, knowing that 17 major newspapers were willing to publish segments of The Pentagon Papers, Robert McNamara's true confessions on what was really perceived to be going on in Vietnam.
Mostly, I felt sad, and nostalgic for a time that seems so unlike these times. When Ellsberg got busted for stealing and revealing government secrets, the Court overturned his prison sentence.
You wonder if stuff like this could happen now, in a time when newspapers are dying, infotainment is blooming, and people spend more time on computers than with soft dog-eared pages.
It freaked me out when Daniel Ellsberg and his wife magically appeared with the film-makers afterward for a "Q&A." Ellsberg has a voice like light rain. His complexion is white, like a refined old parchment. His wife is soft too, like a dove. They had a holy magnetism to them, like ghosts of another time come back to haunt a room.
I wonder if it will take some mysterious Republican inside the whole political boondoggle, to become the whistle blower. Like Joe Don Baker was, in the original "Edge of Darkness.' Bless 'em.
Then saw "THE COVE." I recommend this one highly, chaps. Everything you have heard about the painfulness of the slaughter of dolphins IS there. But there is so much more. And Mimz and I agreed that if ever there were a sense of activism that we could understand, it was to be found in this movie, where people pool their skills and actually DO something to shake up those who are doing the slaughter.
Sometimes a person gets weary with the news that animals are dying, the planet is dying, people are apathetic, blah blah blah.
Makes me want to eat chocolate, take a nap, and retreat into my own little musical den to escape the voices. THE COVE's director, however, was funny, upbeat, positive, encouraging.
If people are gonna do anything to change the miserable situations around the world, heck, we need to be around the funny, hyper buzzed-up happy go-for-it types, not the sad miserable end-time Joes.
I am heading off to DOCU 2 tomorrow. Will try to relay highlights.
Rain is coming. Off to Beverly Hills. Your freeway phobic fool friend Feef
Mimz and I went to the Independent Documentary Association's (IDA) "DOCU NIGHT." The traffic was light, and I was glad as I have never driven that far, in the dark, in Los Angeles, before.
By the time we'd gotten parked, the first film, "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" had already started. The Writer's Guild of America theater is old and feels like a dignified place. You try to think of how many Oscar-winning bums have sat in those seats.
We sat in the way-back, and Shane joined us. The DOC took me a wee while to get. It was strange to hear Richard Nixon's voice, sweaty, swearing, paranoid, trying to contain Daniel Ellsberg. It was exhilarating, knowing that 17 major newspapers were willing to publish segments of The Pentagon Papers, Robert McNamara's true confessions on what was really perceived to be going on in Vietnam.
Mostly, I felt sad, and nostalgic for a time that seems so unlike these times. When Ellsberg got busted for stealing and revealing government secrets, the Court overturned his prison sentence.
You wonder if stuff like this could happen now, in a time when newspapers are dying, infotainment is blooming, and people spend more time on computers than with soft dog-eared pages.
It freaked me out when Daniel Ellsberg and his wife magically appeared with the film-makers afterward for a "Q&A." Ellsberg has a voice like light rain. His complexion is white, like a refined old parchment. His wife is soft too, like a dove. They had a holy magnetism to them, like ghosts of another time come back to haunt a room.
I wonder if it will take some mysterious Republican inside the whole political boondoggle, to become the whistle blower. Like Joe Don Baker was, in the original "Edge of Darkness.' Bless 'em.
Then saw "THE COVE." I recommend this one highly, chaps. Everything you have heard about the painfulness of the slaughter of dolphins IS there. But there is so much more. And Mimz and I agreed that if ever there were a sense of activism that we could understand, it was to be found in this movie, where people pool their skills and actually DO something to shake up those who are doing the slaughter.
Sometimes a person gets weary with the news that animals are dying, the planet is dying, people are apathetic, blah blah blah.
Makes me want to eat chocolate, take a nap, and retreat into my own little musical den to escape the voices. THE COVE's director, however, was funny, upbeat, positive, encouraging.
If people are gonna do anything to change the miserable situations around the world, heck, we need to be around the funny, hyper buzzed-up happy go-for-it types, not the sad miserable end-time Joes.
I am heading off to DOCU 2 tomorrow. Will try to relay highlights.
Rain is coming. Off to Beverly Hills. Your freeway phobic fool friend Feef
posted by Tea and Tales at 5:54 PM
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