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I just reviewed The 7 Stages of Grieving at the Skylight Theatre about Australia’s indigenous people and remarked on how fresh and original that production is. The same holds true for Circa Contemporary Circus, which coincidentally is based in Brisbane (where my daughter, the phenomenal Samoan singer Marina Davis lives) - it seems that people of European ancestry Down Under can be quite singular, too. Perhaps living at the Antipodes imparts a unique sensibility on its inhabitants - Black or white?

Be that as it may, Humans By Circa is completely different from Grieving, a one-woman show about the trials and tribulations of “Oz’s” Aboriginal people. However, both works are short one-acters minus intermission. But the similarities end there.

In a landmark letter organized by San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, twenty-two California mayors and several other public officials this week asked that Pacific Gas & Electric become a community-owned entity. 

PG&E was once America’s largest privately owned utility. But it is now on federal probation stemming from felony crime convictions due to a 2010 gas explosion that incinerated much of San Bruno, killing eight people. The disaster was caused by the company’s failure to properly maintain its pipelines.  

November 11, 2019, is Armistice Day 101 (or 102 if you want to be all mathematically accurate and elitist about it). Anyway, it’s been over a century now since World War I was ended at a scheduled moment (11 o’clock on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918).

For decades in the United States, as elsewhere, Armistice Day (in some countries it’s called Remembrance Day) was a holiday of peace, of sad remembrance and the joyful ending of war, and of a commitment to preventing war in the future. The holiday’s name was changed in the United States after the U.S. war on Korea to “Veterans Day,” a largely pro-war holiday on which some U.S. cities forbid Veterans For Peace groups from marching in their parades because only Veterans for war can be part of Veterans Day.

Last year we raised quite a fuss in opposition to a weapons parade through Washington, D.C. that Trump had proposed to hold in his own honor. It wasn’t held. Nor was it held on July 4th, as he later suggested. Nor is it being held now.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- In a surprise reversal, the Dalai Lama said his
Tibetan Buddhist tradition of reincarnated dalai lamas "should end
now" because the hierarchy created "a feudal system," a description
echoing decades of communist China's condemnation.

The Dalai Lama's public statement comes amid attempts by Beijing to
control who can be legally recognized as a reincarnated lama in Tibet
and what laws they must obey.

"Institutions need to be owned by the people, not by an individual,"
the self-exiled 14th Dalai Lama said in a speech at his residence in
McLeod Ganj, a small town on the outskirts of Dharamsala, India.

"Like my own institution, the Dalai Lama's office, I feel it is linked
to a feudal system. In 1969, in one of my official statements, I had
mentioned that it should continue...but now I feel, not necessarily.

"It should go. I feel it should not be concentrated in a few people
only," he told college students from Bhutan and India on October 25.

"The tradition should end now, as reincarnation has some connection
with the feudal system.

“Everyone wants to play with the big boys, and the only way to become one of the big boys is to have nuclear toys.”

Attention Planet Earth! Attention Planet Earth! It is time to grow up.

For many decades, any politician daring to fight for economic justice was liable to be denounced for engaging in “class warfare.” It was always a grimly laughable accusation, coming from wealthy elites as well as their functionaries in corporate media and elective office. In the real world, class warfare—or whatever you want to call it—has always been an economic and political reality.

In recent decades, class war in the USA has become increasingly lopsided. The steady decline in union membership, the worsening of income inequality and the hollowing out of the public sector have been some results of ongoing assaults on social decency and countess human lives. Corporate power has run amuck.

Now, the billionaire class is worried. For the first time in memory, there’s a real chance that the next president could threaten the very existence of billionaires—or at least significantly reduce their unconscionable rate of wealth accumulation—in a country and on a planet with so much human misery due to extreme economic disparities.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the President of Mexico, was not eager to accept Donald Trump’s offer to fight a war against drug dealers. In fact, AMLO replied as follows (in so far as I’m able to translate; see the video below to verify, and please send me your translations):

The worst that could be, the worst thing we could see, would be war.

Those who have read about war, or those who have suffered from a war, know what war means.

War is the opposite of politics. I have always said that politics was invented to avoid war.

War is synonymous with irrationality. War is irrational.

We are for peace. Peace is a principle of this new government.

Authoritarians have no place in this government that I represent.

It should be written out 100 times as punishment: we declared war and it did not work.

That is not an option. That strategy failed. We will not be a part of that. . . .

The 11th annual DTLA Film Festival took place Oct. 23-27. According to the Festival’s website: “Our programming reflects downtown L.A.’s vibrant new urbanism, the unique ethnic and cultural diversity of its neighborhoods, its burgeoning independent film community, its singular blend of late 19th and 20th century architecture, and the seminal role it played in the early days of American cinema (epitomized by the world’s largest group of vintage movie palaces located in the Broadway Theater District).”

DTLAFF screened features, shorts, documentaries etc., at two primary locations: Regal L.A. LIVE1000 West Olympic Blvd., L.A., CA 90015 while the Dome Series is at the Wisdome Immersive Art Park in DTLA’s Arts District, 1147 Palmetto St., L.A. or the Vortex Dome Theater at L.A. Center Studios.Panels, parties, etc., were presented at various Downtown L.A. locations. For info on the DTLA Film Festival see: https://www.dtlaff.com/.

KATHY GRIFFIN: A HELL OF A STORY

The Head of Her Comic Class: Doc Mocks Trump

One of my big bugaboos as a cultural historian and critic is originality, and today’s spate of sequels, remakes and copycatting of content from one medium to another usually rubs me the wrong way. But as soon as the proverbial curtain lifts at the Skylight Theatre The 7 Stages of Grieving kicks off with something most American audiences are likely to have never seen before in all of their theatergoing. Phosphorescent rocks glowing in the dark are poured onstage, the only thing visible onstage in the gloom, forming a circle around a mound of dirt which we glimpse, once the lights are turned on.

We also see our storyteller, Chenoa Deemal, a full-figured, pretty, youthful brown-skinned woman with long straight hair in a colorful dress. A sort of Down Under counterpart to African griots, Ms. Deemal proceeds to lead us through seven vignettes that shed light on the Aboriginal experience, after she has recognized the Traditional Custodians of the land here in Los Angeles - the Gabrielina, Tongva and Kich tribal peoples.

In spite of the fact that Israeli snipers continue to shoot scores of unarmed protesting Gazans every Friday with virtually no coverage from the media, there are some signs that the ability of Israel and its friends to control the narrative regarding the Jewish state’s appalling human rights violations is beginning to weaken. To be sure, The Lobby still has sharp teeth and is prepared to use them as in last week’s report of a Florida high school principal with 26 years of experience and an otherwise impeccable record who was fired because he said that “Not everyone believes in the holocaust.”