Burmese Film, Total Denial

Despite its subject matter, a very upbeat film opens today in New York. It's Total Denial, Milena Kaneva's bold, courageous documentary about
the lawsuit fought--and won-- by 15 Burmese villagers against UNOCAL, in the State of California . The plaintiffs invoked an Alien Tort law that dates from 1789 in which human rights abuses (9 counts) committed by a US corporation in a foreign country can be prosecuted in the US. The villages were destroyed and the villagers forced to perform slave labor for UNOCAL during the installation of their pipeline.

Bermuda Triangle

In California fires are raging. One
million people evacuated and counting. In an increasingly menacing cyberspace, barbed emails fly, triangulate between Crown Heights, Madison and Connecticut defending the corporate process over the last prepress details. Brush fires all day from all quarters. I'm checking the 38-page index for the book which the indexers spun from 19 pages of suggestions I submitted at their request. Under United States, there is a curious entry which says, US filmmaking vs Iranian filmmaking. I examine the page number of the entry. The words "United States" are not on the page at all. The page, page 79, is an introduction to Jafar Panahi's first feature film "The White Balloon" and refers to the collaborative tradition of Iranian filmmaking, specifically in the context of how that film came about. In fact the only reference to anything stateside on that page is the New York Film Festival where the film was shown.. No comparison with any other filmmaker of any nationality was made or intended.

Departure

Shipped dog-eared stack of pages to Madison; received voluminous index file from publisher's outsourcee. More close scrutiny of antlike colonies of tiny type. Meanwhile ....
in Burma thugs crush monks' heads against the wall, so what's a broken pull quote in the overall scheme of things? Orphaned lines? Or a mean, saw-toothed typeface showing battle fatigue? The Casablanca "hill of beans" syndrome kicks in. Embroiled in the minutiae of page proof mark-up, I'm on Greenwich Mean Time while across the Atlantic in northwest London, Golders Green, friends mourn the harsh passing of a mutual friend, writer co-worker from the Sixties and situationist, urging us to the Paris barricades in 68. Bye, Dave. You made us laugh and we'll miss you.

Photo: David Robins, June 2005, 37 years later,
all too brief reunion with Dave in David Bieda's Soho garden,
London. The two friends were editors of Circuit,
known in the 60s as a subculture 'zine;
I joined the ranks on several issues before
leaving for New York. Robins went on to write
several books about troubled teenagers, including
"Cool Rules" .

The Rake's Progress

Photo: Dick Connette


Mary Forrester, a fellow gardener, and I rake leaves from the bocci court in M'Finda Kalunga Community Garden at Chrystie and Rivington.

Cleaning up sheafs of papers, residue from eight months working on the book, is much harder than raking leaves, which is partly why I'm not at home doing just that. Outdoors, there are bright skies and white rumps of mocking birds flashing through sycamore trees: it's the citywide parks clean-up day.

Harder too is keeping hold of New York's few remaining public meeting spaces. Like the landmarked northern plaza at Union Square, which Union Square Business Improvement District threatens to scale back with its belligerent development plans. There's nothing deciduous about public space; it doesn't regenerate itself year by year. (See Jack Taylor's letter to the editor in this week's The Villager , and also M'Finda Kalunga co-chair Kate Webster's letter re : the Bowery. )

While we rake--a Sisyphean task in early fall--we talk about Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, Mary Jordan's very good documentary. Mary Forrester, a performance artist /urban anthropologist who has lived on the Bowery for decades, worked closely with Smith in the 70s. After 9/11 she held salons in her loft with live French music and sweet crab apple shishkebobs to cheer people up.

Serra Armada

EAST VILLAGE, NEW YORK--As I was locking up my bike at the bike rack in front of the 24-hour deli on the corner of Third Street and Second Avenue just before 2am today, I witnessed an amazing sight. A fleet of oversized tractor trailers with blinking lights each carried a torqued section from the huge Richard Serra sculpture at MoMA. Dismantled in this way, each section looked almost weightless like a gigantic steel sail, stealthily gliding down the avenue like a giant Armada. It's making its way in this fashion to Los Angeles.

Yes, I forgot to mention. One of the trailers has a camera rig on it and although the operators denied they were making a film about the Serra transport, (said they were making a commercial) the evidence was right there. A girl running on the sidewalk trying to take still photos of the trailers at the traffic lights also confirmed her friends were making a film about the cross-country trip.

Taking the One Train

After the party, everyone else took cabs to Brooklyn.
Photo (c) Liza Bear 2007

Managing Marketing

Red slide turtle in Liz Christy community garden on Bowery and Houston. Photo (c) Liza Bear 2001. My plot is at M'Finda Kalunga on Chrystie St. Despite good intentions I garden about as much as I blog.


Publisher pays lip service to book as joint venture with author (sic), but the reality is elsewhere. Literary chores and email pleadings take up all week. So I miss the Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Abel Ferrara screenings at NYFF. It's hard for DIY ers to give up freedom of choice. Marketing rules the roost! Still, I chip at the fortress. Production manager breaks silence and agrees to meet author half-way on use of sans serif for display type and sizing of photos. :)

I'll let the rain water my plot.

Of the bewildering array of people supposedly responsible for PR (here they call it "marketing product management") one is on maternity leave, another has broken her wrist, a third is on vacation. So the task of writing the copy for the website falls on my editor and me. We ping pong drafts furiously across the internet. By Friday at five, when it's a wrap for the corporate world, we've agreed on the wording, but now marketing says copy has to fit back cover of book as well .... I go to my bookshelf and study closely the Penguin edition of Gertrude Stein's Writings and Lectures.