Arts & Culture

The 34th annual AFI Fest is arguably Los Angeles’ biggest and best film festival and this year it is taking place virtually through Oct. 22 (see: https://fest.afi.com/). The closing world premiere of the American Film Institute’s yearly fete is the Showtime documentary My Psychedelic Love Story, wherein Timothy Leary - the High Priest of LSD – meets Errol Morris, the High Priest of documentaries. Their meeting of minds on celluloid is a collision of cosmic consciousness, as Morris is to nonfiction cinema what Leary was to mind expanding drugs.

Leary, of course, was the counterculture’s guru, a psychologist who went beyond Freudian boundaries by adding psychedelic drugs to the study of the brain as part of an elusive odyssey for enlightenment. The enormously famous – and infamous – elder statesman of the Flower Power generation urged American youth to: “Turn on, tune in and drop out.”

America is currently experiencing a historic surge of protests igniting a cultural awakening and racial reckoning. Shorts, documentaries, animation and features by and about the Pacific Islands’ indigenous peoples are being highlighted at the 36th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (https://festival.vcmedia.org/2020/). Since 1983 Visual Communications, a nonprofit organization, has presented LAAPFF, dedicated to its mission “to develop and support the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives.” This year due to the pandemic the Festival is online.

America is currently experiencing a historic surge of protests igniting a cultural awakening and racial reckoning. Shorts, documentaries, animation and features by and about the Pacific Islands’ indigenous peoples are being highlighted at the 36th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (https://festival.vcmedia.org/2020/). Since 1983 Visual Communications, a nonprofit organization, has presented LAAPFF, dedicated to its mission “to develop and support the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives.” This year due to the pandemic the Festival is online.

America is currently experiencing a historic surge of protests igniting a cultural awakening and racial reckoning. Shorts, documentaries, animation and features by and about the Pacific Islands’ indigenous peoples are being highlighted at the 36th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (https://festival.vcmedia.org/2020/). Since 1983 Visual Communications, a nonprofit organization, has presented LAAPFF, dedicated to its mission “to develop and support the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives.” This year due to the pandemic the Festival is online.

America is currently experiencing a historic surge of protests igniting a cultural awakening and racial reckoning. As what has been called “Columbus Day” arrives, shorts, documentaries and features by and about the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands are being given their day in the sun as part of the 36th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (https://festival.vcmedia.org/2020/). Since 1983 Visual Communications, a nonprofit organization, has presented LAAPFF, dedicated to its mission “to develop and support the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives.” This year due to the pandemic the Festival is online.

Your sisters stayed in their palaces
With golden chains and shameless lies
Some grinned and aided criminals...
Others chose to veil their eyes
Some justify rape and expulsions
Others prayed to their silent gods.

When you thought they had their fills
In that dry June of decays,
They climbed over the hills
To finish the ghastly deeds

Sickening became the violations
Dark masses on your strong arms
arms that gently lifted orphans
Armenian, Circasian, Hebrew and Druze
Fractures on your white breasts
That gave milk to hungry babies
Bruises on your gentle fingers
That wiped the tears from so many eyes
Your sad eyes bear their marks
on a kind face that gave millions hopes

Maddening deafening sounds
Of violent bloody rapes
Of countless lengthy reports
Of motions, plans, and resolutions
that sacrificed justice and truths
at the altar of greedy egos

Where goes the hope of children dreams?
In awakening consciences?
In olive trees or returning cactuses?
In time, distance, or struggles?

So far, MSNBC’s “new” program presented by Joy Reid is arguably to the public discourse what the 1950’s The Donna Reed Show was to housewifery: nice, middle of the road, safe, conventional television. Of course, one was a TV sitcom and the other is a news-oriented program, but the main difference between the two eponymous performers is in form, not content. While Reed was lily white, Reid is Black, and as such at this time of urban uprisings she is intended to bestow street cred and legitimacy on her network.

The new film, The Vow From Hiroshima, tells the story of Setsuko Thurlow who was a school girl in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the first nuclear bomb. She was pulled out of a building in which 27 of her classmates burned to death. She witnessed the gruesome injuries and agonizing suffering and indecent mass burial of many loved ones, acquaintances, and strangers.

Setsuko was from a well-off family and says she had to work at overcoming her prejudices against the poor, yet she overcame an amazing number of things. Her school was a Christian school, and she credits as influence on her life the advice of a teacher to engage in activism as the way to be Christian. That a predominantly Christian nation had just destroyed her predominantly non-Christian city didn’t matter. That Westerners had done it didn’t matter either. She fell in love with a Canadian man who lived and worked in Japan.

I would like to announce the publication of a book, which discusses the excessive weight that our total human population and economy has imposed on the global environment. The book may be freely downloaded and circulated from the following link:

http://eacpe.org/app/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Malthus-Revisited-by-John-Scales-Avery.pdf

Malthus' “Essay on The Principle of Population”

In 1953 author Simone de Beauvoir asked Must We Burn De Sade? regarding the French Marquis and his sadomasochistic books. Today, as the twin plagues of Covid-19 and police brutality disproportionately ravage African Americans, we’re likewise asking: Must Gone with the Wind be gone?

On June 10 - the birthday of Hattie McDaniel, who won one of the 1939 epic’s eight Oscars, including Best Picture - HBO Max blew GWTW off the streaming service’s lineup. As statues of historical figures linked to slavery and racism are being razed, removed and defaced at Bristol, London, Montgomery, Richmond, Boston, Philadelphia, Louisville, Barbados, Antwerp, Belgium and beyond, the question is being raised: What should be done about televised/ cinematic systemic racism and bigoted, Confederate TV/movie monuments, like GWTW?