Nancy’s Blog

Wall-E

I’m in Santa Fe — just ended a terrific photography workshop (which I’ll blog about).  Tired, and staying in a hotel across the street from a movie theater, I went to see Wall-E last night.  With mixed expectations, based on the reviews.

I loved it.  It is very well done; funny; and charming.  But also a political message.

Today’s NYTimes has a good op-ed by Frank Rich about Wall-E related to the current campaign.

I won’t recap the story — the reviews do, and Rich does.  The humans live in space in moving chairs, so they never have to walk. Which is good,  since they’re too obese to do so.  They travel around (to where?) sucking on super-sized drinks with screens in front of their eyes, chatting with their friends via the screen, surrounded by ads to buy things.

I left the theater and went to an Albertson’s to pick up a few things.  The mellifluous female voice making announcements about things shoppers might consider sounded much like those in Wall-E.  A kid in the child seat of his parent’s shopping cart was completely absorbed in a gameboy.  Then this morning I went down to the motel lobby to get “breakfast,” and the tables were filled with families with their eyes glued to some “family” movie on the big TV.  The family on vacation.

A man sitting next to me in the movie theater talked on his cellphone through all the previews.  (The theater sound was so loud, I could barely hear him.)

I’ve been hanging out at the town’s central plaza a lot, because I’m here for a workshop on photographing people.  What’s there for people to do around the plaza?  Shop and eat, of course.

The crisis of humanity in Wall-E is not just the way they’ve trashed the earth.  (When Wall-E hitches a ride on a spaceship, it has to break through a cloud of space debris — old satellites .)  It’s the lack of purpose.

Wall-E makes its point, not by being subtle, but by being charming.

I’m working on a remodeling project and have spent a lot of time this last week, including this holiday weekend, in and out of hardware stores. And they’re empty. Yesterday, Sunday, mid-afternoon at Home Depot, there were four employees at the paint counter with nothing to do.

A summer long weekend is prime time for home projects. The projections have been that fewer people will drive somewhere because of gas prices. New snow in the Sierra will have canceled a lot of trips to the mountains. So more people are home — able to do those repair and remodel projects.

And the hardware stores are empty?!?

There are people who influence us for our entire lives who never know us. One of these for me was Bruce Phillips, who died this weekend at 73 of congestive heart failure.

Most people knew him as the folksinger and storyteller Utah Phillips. For a long time no one knew who he was except hard-core folkies, but, to my surprise, the obits say he won a Grammy nomination for work with Ani DiFranco, and his death has gotten a fair amount of press coverage.

His performance at the Strawberry Music Festival, just a year ago, is on a series of YouTube videos, along with videos from other recent performances. I haven’t gone through them all to see what he’s performing — for a hilarious, very Utah Phillips-stype non-political story, see if you can find the story “Moose Turd Pie.” But any of these videos will give you a good sense of his performances, usually long, funny stories with songs, either traditional or his own, in between.

But I met him before that, in — of course — Utah.

In the summer of 1967, I was between high school and college, the anti-Viet Nam War movement was ramping up, and I was trying to define myself politically. Utah was (and is) dominated by the conservative Mormon religion, politically somewhere to the right of the right wing of the Republican party. The anti-war movement was small, with the feeling of a subversive movement, with the “brotherhood” and sense of moral superiority — and the anguish — of knowing you’re right while scorned by the majority.

That’s where I met Bruce. “Met” is an overstatment — Bruce could never have remembered meeting me, though I have remembered him all these years.

The Salt Lake anti-war movement was in some sense centered at the Joe Hill House, a Catholic Worker-style “hospitality house” (now we’d call it a homeless shelter) founded by former Catholic Worker and World War I draft resister Ammon Hennacy (pictured). As a young man, Ammon was involved with the Wobblies, the International Workers of the World, and went to jail for refusing to register for the draft in WWI. In jail, as he told the story, he had one book, Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is within You, which added Christian pacifism to his Eugene Debs-inspired anarchy. He met Dorothy Day and got involved with the Catholic Worker movement, but in time split with them. When I knew him he called himself a Christian anarchist.

Ammon and some other people he described as “pacifists, anarchists, subversives, and Catholics too radical for our bishop” founded the Joe Hill House in Salt Lake City. Joe Hill was a Wobblie who hopped freights and was framed for murder and executed in Utah. The JHH mostly housed railroad bums (as Ammon called them), men riding the rails the way they did in the 1930s.

Friday nights were a sort of open house at the JHH. People would come, Ammon would talk. A friend took me to the Joe Hill House one spring night when it was full of young people from the University of Utah. When I went back — first with a friend, then on my own — during the summer (I was finally old enough for a driver’s license), instead of the room full of people, there might be five or six of us. The regulars were Ammon, Bruce, a Frenchman named John, and me. I would come in, sit, listen, and leave without saying a word, happy to watch and listen. (I wonder what the guys thought of this very young, naive, quiet woman all by herself.)

Bruce was always there. Ammon was in his 70s then and not really up to handling the guys, especially around the first of the month when those on some form of public assistance got their checks, but Bruce helped Ammon deal with the guys.   Bruce, I now learn, came to the JHH as a freight train riding hobo himself, though at this time he was living in a completely empty suburban-style house with a girlfriend  (he invited us all out there for a party one night: I had my first beer and my first and very frightening experience of driving home drunk). I now read that Ammon had to close the JHH the following year — I do remember driving out there the following summer and finding it no longer there.

Ammon would always at some point bring out mimeographed copies of a Wobbly song book (what happened to political groups with songs?), and Bruce would play the guitar and we would sing. Bruce would ask Ammon questions about the music, the movement, all kinds of things. Sometimes Bruce would ask one of the bums (as he and Ammon called them) to “talk me a song” while Bruce played. This is where, I’m sure, Bruce learned a lot of the songs and stories that remained core to his performances.

I wasn’t sure about Ammon — he was either a saint or a nutcase, and I wasn’t sure which. But Bruce’s clear respect for Ammon (and the added safety of having him around) reassured me.

That summer, there was a series of kidnappings and murders of gas station attendants, which culminated in random shooting in a city “tavern” (bar) and the arrest of two men named Lance and Kelback for all those crimes. The cold-blooded-ness of these killings had many of us nominally anti-death-penalty advocates wondering whether there might be exceptions. Ammon, however, argued forcefully that even they should not be executed.

In 1970 Ammon died of a heart attack, picketing the state capitol (as he always did when an execution was planned) to spare Lance and Kelback from the death penalty.

Over the years, I followed Bruce’s career from a distance. He billed himself as U. Utah Phillps; then Utah Phillips. He performed traditional music (including what we had all sung with Ammon) as well as his own political (and funny) songs, and was a wonderful story-teller. He remained true (as much as I could tell from a distance) to his political beliefs and his role as an outsider.

Politically it looks like (from the YouTube videos and other evidence) Bruce stayed much closer to Ammon’s ideals than I was ever comfortable with. But I have always respected his consistency and his willingness to speak out, as I respected Ammon’s principled dedication and activism.

Utah Phillips continued to perform as long as he could, despite health problems: first something that made playing the guitar impossible (so he had to have an accompanist), then heart problems. And, when he could no longer tour and was settled in one place, his obituary says that he started a hospitality house in Nevada City, following in Ammon Hennacy’s footsteps.

I’m in Portland for a few days, coinciding with the shift in the Democratic primary race attention to Oregon’s upcoming primary. I realized this evening: after 2 days in Oregon I don’t think I’ve seen a single campaign sign on a lawn, in a home or store window — nothing. Nor any bumper stickers. From what little I’ve heard I think Oregonians are exhausted from the national primary campaigning.

Nor have I seen billboards or other “paid” signs. Have seen one or two TV ads, but then I haven’t been watching. And I’ve been listening to public radio.

But what’s most intriguing is the lack of private expressions of commitment.

David Pogue describes Pangea Day:

a one-day, global, cross-cultural film festival — a marathon of movies, amateur and professional, whose common thread was fostering understanding of ‘the Other’… as the organization puts it: “Pangea Day endeavors to bring the world together and promote understanding and tolerance through film.” Over 2,500 movies were submitted from 102 countries; the Pangea committee winnowed them down to 24 short movies, which will all be shown on May 10 in a four-hour marathon.

Shown online (among other ways) beginning at 11 am PDT May 10.

Using technology to generate a simultaneous, world-wide event that’s NOT on the major broadcast networks — but may have wide appeal.

Hear it performed!

Say a prayer for all the lost information. / Fight the growing entropy. / We’re on the lookout for divine confirmation; / But you know that things aren’t always what they seem. / If you believe in ancient wisdom, / Then gather up the knowledge still around. / When you receive it, check the checksum; / Make sure it’s what they really handed down. / Say a prayer for all the lost information. / Face the growing apathy. / An endless war rages against degradation / As distant as the local library. / If you believe in ancient wisdom, / Accumulate the knowledge that you’ve found. / When you receive it, check the checksum; / Make sure it’s what they really handed down.

I’m not saying it’s good, just that it exists.

Today’s news coverage of the Olympic torch run in San Francisco has made a big deal of the protests, of course, but also of the torch run: interviewing torch carriers, talking about people who planned their vacations around the torch run in SF — even people who had flown in just for the day, for the torch run. And no, they weren’t all Chinese-Americans.

In 2002, when the torch for the Salt Lake City Olympics came through Oakland, I went to see it, and the story was very different. I had trouble finding out the route — not because of security concerns, but just lack of PR. I went to 51st Street in Oakland, and hung around with a handful of people, waiting for the torch. When it came, it had a small escort, and again only a handful of people watching. There was a handoff from one carrier to another near me, and both, as I recall, were developmentally disabled people.

From Jeff Greenwald – I want to see this a couple of years ago at Freight and Salvage, and it was terrific. (He’s also going to be at Google, of all places, in April.) Jeff is mostly a travel writer. The performance I saw, he uses a big roulette wheel with topics; someone turns the wheel and he tells a story based on what topic comes up. Jeff’s been everywhere and tells terrific stories.

Dear Friends, Colleagues, and Fellow Travelers,

Great news for theater lovers and globe spinners! My solo performance in praise of wanderlust — Strange Travel Suggestions — returns to the stage next Thursday, for a month-long run at The Marsh in San Francisco. There will be shows every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday eve, at 8 pm, from April 3rd through April 26th (except for 4/19). That’s a mere 11 nights, in the upstairs Marsh theater, which seats just 75 people. So if you’d like to come — and I hope you will! — please get your tickets early!

Reservations can be made on The Marsh website: http://www.themarsh.org/strange_travel.html

The show is lots of fun, always different, and always an adventure. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Update: articles and comments about Greenwald in the SF Chron here and here.

The New York Times reports that Buffy is back in a comic book series created by Buffy’s creator, Josh Whedon. The series is titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 and picks up Buffy’s story after the TV series finale. The New York Times got interested because in issue #12 Buffy finds herself in bed with one of the other slayers — i.e., a woman. Well, why not. She’s slept with two vampires. Even when she fell in love with her straight-arrow TA in college, it turned out he had an embedded device that put him under the control of a military project aimed at harnessing demons and creating a super-bad Frankenstein. The only ordinary male she ever slept with was a one-night stand in college. So a female vampire slayer is pretty tame.

Relaxed attention

Originally uploaded by NVH

For other Meerkat Manor fans out there — I went to visit the Oakland Zoo’s meerkats.  More on my Flickr site.