Food, Inc. (2009)

When I moved to Philadelphia for a brief hiatus from post-graduate life in Denver in 2002, which was at that point the only major city I had come to know intimately, I wanted to experience something new. Wiping the slate clean, I left for northeast Philadelphia on a one-way flight with two suitcases of belongings. I knew no one in the city except for a handful of extended family members in the suburbs, so it would be up to me to navigate this neighborhood, a place called Port Richmond, the place where both my parents were born and raised within six blocks of one another, and where my ailing grandmother kept a house while she resided in Colorado with my parents.

Her empty home was my ticket to Port Richmond. In its heyday, the neighborhood was an eastern European enclave of row homes with movie theaters every few blocks, clothing stores, shoe stores, and candy shops; now it was quickly falling victim to poor infrastructure and declines in local businesses. There were still a few shops--mostly Polish butchers and bakeries--left in the area when I arrived, but the elderly population that had been living there for the past 60 years or more were dying out. Almost all of their kids, the generation that includes both my parents, had a long time ago abandoned the area for the western or northern suburbs.

Outside of a local 24-hour restaurant, the Aramingo Diner that touts the best cheesecake in Philly, and an IHOP, there were not many places to dine out. About eight or so blocks to the west at the El station at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues--"K&A," a corner of the city that, depending on the time of day, looked like an abandoned demilitarized zone--you could find fast food places selling fried chicken; and greasy hoagie and pizza joints were scattered every few blocks from there eastward, too. In short, Port Richmond, Philadelphia is an economically depressed area that offers few options for healthful diversions (its parks and sidewalks lay mostly in disrepair, especially the further westward you travel), and even fewer for healthful dining. One of the first things I noticed in my mail delivery was an Acme supermarket flyer advertising buy-one-get-one-free promotions on Oreo cookies, Doritos, and 2-liter bottles of Coke or Pepsi. If the people of Richmond and the surrounding neighborhoods are on a tight budget, I wondered then, how could they afford anything else but this kind of food?

The reason for this backstory leads me to my afternoon yesterday that was spent watching Robert Kenner's new documentary Food, Inc., where this, one of the film's many points was reiterated to me: fresh vegetables and fruits have become a luxury of a more financially stable class. You don't necessarily have to be rich to buy a bunch of broccoli, but as the Burger King-fed family of four in the film demonstrated, the price of those green, healthful bunches buys them more "filling" food like chips and soda in their place. And if the dusty abandon of Richmond's Acme produce section (at least how I left it in 2003) is a measure of how people are forced to eat, there is a national health epidemic in the U.S.

In a lot of ways the revelation of facts in Food, Inc. is not that revelatory. I am not the only one who has come of age and noticed the discrepancies between supermarkets' promotional products and what its customers need. Getting more for your money is the calling card of the working class, but that motto is ingrained widely in collective American thought too. It's a matter of cheapness, not quality. It's a matter of seeing things in terms of volume, rather than in measures of what's actually needed. This mentality isn't limited to the food industry either. If you've ever been to the Gap and found multiples of a $40 t-shirt on the clearance rack for $6.99 you can see this clothing behemoth operates under the same business model. It's a very American thing to make sure we have a lot of something, regardless of need or quality. So many corporations wouldn't be in business if this was not the case.

Yet as Food, Inc. helpfully reminds us, there are plenty of people who have no alternatives to the fast foods and junk foods on promotion. People have to eat. When the privatization of food sales is narrowed to five or less companies countrywide, as the beef, pork, chicken, and corn industries are in the U.S., the gargantuan supplies they are able to produce must be sold. And so, those genetically modified foods get marked down and the health of the consumer, some of whom have few or no alternative products in their economic reach, suffers. A Belarusian woman who I made friends with during my stay in Philly told me a saying she has in her country: "I'm not rich enough to buy cheap things," meaning, as a working class woman, she didn't have enough money to buy products that needed to be repeatedly replaced because they were made with sub par materials, or were constructed poorly. The ideal being that you spend money on a few good things and you have them for a long time, perhaps a lifetime. It's an investment. And if the long-term benefits of a healthy diet mean people have more energy, feel better, and get sick less, it is about time we think of our food in the same way.

How we concretely resolve this issue is, however, something only lightly touched upon by the film. On the one hand, it's wonderful to see a documentary that lifts the veil from this superpower exhibited so widely, on over 50 screens in its second weekend; that means the message is getting out to audiences that are historically unlikely to see a documentary at all, let alone for ten dollars or more on the big screen. On the other hand, there is something redundant and boring about the spoon-fed nature of the documentary's structure. As discussed with my movie companion yesterday, this kind of documentary is becoming a genre in its own right. It's the sort that proceeds with a multitude of stories that can somehow only be connected with separate introductory titles on a black screen. Personally, I admire documentaries that simply begin. The Maysles brothers and D.A. Pennebaker perfected this art, and they did it just by turning on the camera to begin a scene. There doesn't have to be a didactic link pointing us from one scene to the next; modern film audiences have come to understand the edited course of time to know when they've moved from one topic to the next in a different space.

There was a recent Frontline episode that covered a similar topic as Food, Inc.'s in greater depth, where their investigation unfolded organically and quite engagingly. While I don't expect a popular documentary to be written with the intellectual rigor of a Frontline special, I still hope that in its colloquiality it can cover all of its highly-related main topics in one narrative arc. When Food, Inc.'s momentum was halted by the numerous and distracting fade-to-blacks, it seemed like a shot of one of its primary authorities, Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) could have easily bridged the gaps with further dialogue. And perhaps because of this jerky structure, Food, Inc. never covered one point in enough depth to help incite real, concrete action from its audience. It seemed instead like a well put together public service announcement, never answering the question: What does the average consumer do to demand healthful change?

Chipping away at this cause individually is truly a self-defeating action, which is why Food, Inc. was a lost opportunity to discuss the needed proliferation of local farming operations, both urban and rural, that would be able to sustain communities across the nation without an oppressive conglomerate.

A couple of years ago I worked briefly with filmmaker Judith Helfand on just this issue, local urban farming that sustains small populations in low-income communities. In our work together we met urban farmers whose goal was to grow produce and sell it from a truck that makes its rounds daily through the neighborhood. These are areas on the south side of Chicago that have no access to a Whole Foods, or even the more affordable Trader Joe's. It would provide people in disadvantaged areas of the south side with fresh organic herbs and vegetables instead of corner convenience store foodstuffs like chips, candy and other processed foods. Food, Inc. comes close to addressing the benefit of these farms with the gleeful introduction of Virginia-based organic farmer Joel Salatin. His customers drive from as far as 300 miles away for a fresh chicken, and he admits he isn't sure how he'd maintain the integrity of his farming methods if an increase in demand took hold. This was an immediate entrance for Kenner to discuss the implementation of many local farms per area, versus using only one that keeps consumers stagnant in our current food production system, keeping organic food out of reach from working class people.

This is one of Food, Inc.'s missed chances at depth of subject matter rather than breadth, and the movie ends quietly. A fade to black with a new round of dissolving title cards concludes the show with a web address I can't remember. Then again, if each night's audience goes home to prepare a healthy dinner in place of delivery, maybe its mission has been accomplished. But that pat on the back will hardly suffice in the long run. What happens next?

Seriously, Are You Serious?

Bravo, Burger King, bravo.

A Layoff, a Wedding, The Wire, and the ABCs

It's been a busy week. Busy for me, with work, travel, and other details too trivial to detail here, but which nonetheless distracted me from dear Madam Scarlett. So while I regain my bearings, here are a few hot topics alive for me in the world of cinema and media.

Top of the list: Andrew Sarris was fired? I get it, I get it, newspapers are sinking and the staff must go--I know, it's not really news anymore. Still, Sarris's termination is kind of like the Catholic Church firing the Pope. Do not take my word for it, Mr. Sweeney at Movie Morlocks writes up a fine appreciation of the critic who defined what it meant to be one. Sweeney couldn't find a copy of The American Cinema on shelves out there in New York City, a reminder of how scarce these resources have become (upon Manny Farber's death his text Negative Space became equally difficult to find for a less-than-inflated price), so I feel lucky that I've got my own trusty copy here for a fresh re-read. Here are a few sentences from his introduction, "Toward a Theory of Film History" that influenced me greatly:

The film scholar should see as much as possible and write about as much as possible. To avoid passing judgment on a film because of lack of sympathy is an act of intellectual arrogance. Nothing should be beneath criticism or contempt. I take a transcendental view of the role of a critic. He must aspire to totality even though he knows that he will never attain it...Eventually we must talk of everything if there is enough time and space and printer's ink. The auteur theory is merely a system of tentative priorities, a pattern theory in constant flux.

The printer's ink may actually be running out, but the Internet--for all of its flaws--is infinitely large. Isn't there room for fine criticism, then? Yes.

Secondly, a follow-up on friend of Scarlett, Josh Weinberg, director of the wildly popular viral video "The Website is Down," won a Webby Award! Here is his five word acceptance speech from the June 8th award ceremony hosted by Seth Meyers:



Weinberg was married last weekend, just days after the big award show, and it was an honor and a delight to attend his ceremony. I offer my congratulatory cheer to Weinberg and his new bride Ruth!


Thirdly, it's done. It's totally, totally complete. I have watched all of The Wire. Minutes ago the final show of its final season 5 faded to black and I am giddy over the experience. And a bit melancholy! It took roughly a month's time to dedicate to it and now that it's over I feel paralyzed--Now what do I do with my evenings? But the Netflix queue does not yield to such complexes. I anticipate a few days of postpartum depression--no more McNulty, Stringer, Omar (!), Daniels, Lester, Kima, or Bunk. No more of the vicious Marlo! I mourn you all. I'll also miss Baltimore, a fascinating city of political and social strife that still hangs in the shadows of the U.S.'s more ubiquitous cityscapes, New York, L.A., Chicago, etc. I think this means a John Waters movie marathon is an appropriate next move...


Finally, Marlene Dietrich offers her thoughts on...

Electricians
The electricians who populate film studios are all out of the same mold, a mold which, happily, has not been thrown away. They are the backbone of the studio. Great individualists, craftsmen with an extra eye for detecting phoniness. They are not impressed by fame, only by excellence. This holds true for every nationality. One can work in a film studio anywhere and be home.

Back to Bayside, sans Peter Engel

When I arrived at my first apartment in New York City, my roommate and I, still friendless, jobless, and sweating through the August heat, found a kind-hearted companion: Saved By The Bell on DVD.

Our apartment on St. Mark's Place was very small and had an even more diminished level of air circulation. There was no air conditioning. There were windows in only one of the apartment's three rooms. To get any air at all, in fact, the front door had to be propped open to allow for a our own pathetic and mildewed version of cross-ventilation.

Thus began the month of the utmost happiness and, alternatingly, shame. With our door wide open the Brrrrrrring! of Saved By The Bell's opening theme song echoed up the ceramic floor corridors for all of 102 E. St. Mark's residents to hear. If the sounds offended, the sight may have been worse. If one walked past our door at the right hour, they might have caught a glimpse of our choreographed dance to the song, in full shorts-and-tank-top regalia, and occasionally, with ice cream pints or a bottle of water in hand as accidental props. It was the dog-days of summer, after all.

We watched seasons one and two of SBTB at a ravenous pace, memorizing lines of every character from almost every episode, and always, always analyzing producer Peter Engel's terribly inconsistent series arc. Characters arrive onto the Bayside High scene to disappear by the next episode. Hunky Zack Morris gets into trouble that should have long ago resulted in expulsion. Everyone despises Screech but hangs out with him anyway. And who in the world administers drivers ed classes in the math classroom with a golf cart?

That may be a reference to another illogical instance from seasons three and four, which were released a month or two after the original set. It doesn't really matter. To get any enjoyment from SBTB one has to resign themselves to the fact that nothing makes sense either spatially or temporally on this show. I'm not talking about a simple suspension of disbelief, I am talking about the ability to enjoy the fact that Principal Belding could ever possibly authorize and abet the playing out of a subliminal advertising joke, played over the school's own PA system, wherein Zack finds fifty plastic heart name tags hung like a noose around his neck from the zombie-like student body hungry for him as their date to the Sweetheart Dance.

Ha ha. Remember when that happened in 10th grade? We all had a good laugh about it.

Peter Engel, who contributed recorded commentary on a number of the SBTB episodes, then, became the central target of our meaningless criticisms. Sure, there were writers involved who devised these outright absurd circumstances for Zack, Kelly, Jessie, Lisa, AC (Albert Clifford!), and barf, Screech; but the producer Peter Engel is truly the guiding light of the series. You can almost feel the misinformed joy he feels for this impossibly quirky teenage gang. For Engel, high school is like a Maya Deren film at Disneyland--no one knows where the story ends or begins, but there are so many pretty colors in the sets, and such funny spiral effects in the credit sequence!

So you throw up your arms and say, "Fine, yes, Jessie Spano, I believe you got addicted to caffeine pills in 24 hours. I believe, I believe, I believe." And then you hope that the heavenly gods send you something like this and you can make peace with Saved By The Bell's impossible narrative gaps:



A Saved By The Bell reunion? I've already RSVPd

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: D is for Dishwasher

I think I've got Marlene figured out as a strong progressive-minded woman and then I read this:

Dishwashing
A woman can stand at the sink, damp under the spray of her dishwashing, the steam in her hair. She, like Phoenix out of the ashes, can emerge and be utterly desirable afterward. She has magic powers. The man has not. Anyway, not when he is being domesticated. A man at the sink, a woman's apron tied high around his waist, is the most miserable sight on earth. No woman should make her man wash dishes.
She did not find him at a kitchen sink when he first caught her fancy--or, if she did, he was the plumber.

Baffling. Where did Marlene the no-nonsense feminist go to? Maybe she will reveal herself again in chapter E?

Bruce McClure and Stochiastic Resonance

Last month the cinema ate me. An hour long series of assaultive flickers from Brooklyn-based filmmaker Bruce McClure up and swallowed me whole. In the first minute or two I felt afraid that I might really, truly have a seizure from the hard flashing light on screen that pulsed over the heads of the audience. When I arrived at White Light Cinema one night in late April, the ticket taker handed me a pair of foam earplugs with a warning that "you'll need them," which was neither a lie or an exaggeration.


McClure's self-made percussive music crashes and buzzes through your ear drums, burrowing through your brain until it begins to effect the way you see. Somewhere, someone who is fluent in scientific jargon will be able to explain this phenomenon, that of Stochiastic resonance, which McClure copycats in his presentation of live light and sound.

Watching is an abstract experience. As you watch the screen there are a series of shapes and apparent splotches or scratches in the projected image. There's a sense that something, an object of some sort, is coming into focus, so your eye is constantly looking for form within the frame. Sometimes the rectangular frame of the projection is the only line your eye can decipher, and I noticed my eye wandering toward it at various points during the screening, half to keep myself focused and not dizzy, and half because it was sometimes the only steady line I could make sense of.

I was thinking as I watched of how one finds rhythm in everyday sounds: a train barreling by, steady traffic on a road, lights buzzing in a room, etc. I don't know what that phenomenon is called, when your ear starts to hear rhythm in a sequence of sounds that doesn't have any, but McClure's film was a visual equivalent of that to me. It was a moment of searching for visual form and meaning where there is none, and eventually, without knowing it, giving yourself over to the pulsing light and sound unconsciously.

The venue for the White Light Cinema series is the definition of underground. A bare one room area that houses the projector and audience in the same space, folding chairs and found couches along the wall's perimeter, and filled to the brim with the arty hipster type--think vintage flannel shirts and dark rimmed glasses as the fashions of choice. The room is attached to an apartment building that housed people right above us (I believe Christy LeMaster, the head curator of the program struck a deal with those people to use the space for free as long as the audience kept away from the stairs and out of her living space. We found this out as one guy tried to scale the stairs for a makeshift balcony seat).

The front door is unmarked and surrounded by a dark metal gate. There is no marquee. So when McClure arrived and began his introduction there was a sense that I was witnessing something historic, underground and historic and completely of the moment. And McClure's performance pieces are never duplicated. Each show is altered by virtue of the changes he makes in his music and those made behind the projector. It was ephemeral. Exactly what cinema is essentially--a fleeting series of pictures that you can't index in a book. Only this time, there's no DVD copy to replay at leisure in your living room.

For an awesome interview with McClure at the Brooklyn Rail click here.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: C

Happy Monday for the week of May 18, 2009. Here are two short and sweet quotes from Dietrich's chapter C to help the day along. I checked for "Cannes" in her dictionary since it's that time of the season and all, but sorry, nothing on it. Enjoy these instead:

Cigarettes
I started smoking during the war. I have kept it up ever since. It keeps me healthy.

Complexes
I am getting tired of people alibiing for their bad manners by citing their complexes.


On the latter quote, I say ditto and that starts with D, the next letter up!

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

I just finished watching The Night of the Hunter with Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish and think I have found my center of gravity for all movies past and present. I should explain, as I watched Charles Laughton's directorial shock wave of all things horror, terror, suspense and melodrama, I was reminded of scores of movies that had both come before and after it, like it's a breathing time capsule of everything the movies are. By the movie's midpoint I spotted scenes akin to F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927), heard melodies that sparked memories of The Wizard of Oz (1939), and I couldn't for the life of me remove the image of Martin Scorsese's eyes endlessly flickering over the black and white reels, his heart skipping beats with each cut. For some odd reason this movie is visible to me in every piece of film the followed it. It's as if all of production history from 1955 to the present could not have happened if it weren't for the demonic Mitchum, here, in The Night of the Hunter.

A psychotic conman dressed like a preacher, Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) has tattooed across his fists the words "LOVE" and "HATE," the two fists put together symbolizing the biblical struggle of Cain and Abel in his ever-twisted mind. They're the same two words in melded gold knuckle rings that adorn Radio Raheem's (Bill Nunn) outfit in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing (1989). It's an observation that I offer without further explanation, but that I would be pressed to believe is coincidental either. As the two stowaway children meander down river away from their terrorizing step-father, a sky of stars as bright as Christmas bulbs hang above them, a giant bullfrog sits riverside on a rock watching them float by, a pair of rabbits do the same, and the pleasant and escapist artificiality of the sequence makes you feel like you've entered a fairy tale, something fantastic like Alice in Wonderland (1951).

Mitchum hulks around the family grounds hunting the children like a wild gorilla, and in one scene madly tears through bushes, bare-handed, like he was King Kong (1933) himself. It's not the only horror movie monster we're reminded of as we watch: Mitchum's inarticulate groans and grunts, his plasticky face contorting with no normal correspondence of emotion, makes him seem like a slightly-evolved (if unreasonably blood-thirsty) monster a la Frankenstein (1931).

And then there was the German Expressionist lighting, shooting structurally impossible daggers of shadow and light in the family bedrooms, the most frightening of all in Willa (Shelley Winters) and Harry's own chamber of traumatized abstinence. In the scene of Willa's death she appears in a coffin of artificial light, laying in bed as still like as a corpse, her arms folded across her chest; radiating outwardly from her head is a brighter halo of light: she is an angel, or maybe a saint. She's at the very least a holy martyr juxtaposed with a stark background of hard white light and black shadow as we've seen in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).

When the children arrive at a makeshift orphanage we're immediately transported to the veritable origins of cinema, in the introduction of the house mother Ms. Cooper, played by the great matron of American movies, Lillian Gish. Gish, the unspeakably great actress of the early screen, doesn't break form here in this latter-day picture either. If her work in D.W. Griffith's films were characterized by melodramatic roles and moral tales, this is just what her character is concerned with here, even offering first-person narration--in scenes she is at the moment a part of--of the virtues of youth and childhood.

Perhaps the most frightening scene of all is where Harry, the devil incarnate himself, whistles his way down the lane and into the lives of Willa and her family to kick off the whole show. It's the original mold for Kane (Julian Beck), a preacher from his days on Earth, but now a tormented ghost stuck between worlds in Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986). In this movie, you'll find what is still the most frightening shot that, for me, was ever printed on film: Kane humming a hymn down a sunny street that suddenly turns stormy in his presence. His eyes are fixed on the child, Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke), playing on the front lawn; she, and we too, become paralyzed in our gaze on his figure in preternatural fright.

Mitchum is equally transfixing in The Night of the Hunter. Maybe that is why Laughton's movie felt like such a significant signpost in cinema, because I simply could not look away.

Interview with Lena Dunham up Today!

I was as shocked as filmmaker Lena Dunham to realize when we spoke recently that our last chat had taken place over a year ago. Time flies when you've just graduated, completed a feature film and had it premiere at the SXSW Film Festival, apparently. Dunham's Creative Nonfiction opened at the fest last March, just under the year mark from her own college graduation, an ambitious and heady feat that went as smoothly as she could have expected. As the cherry on top, Ms. Dunham even met her crush, Andrew Bujalski. (As she peered through the seats at her festival screening, she's pretty sure he enjoyed her work as much as she does his. Unconfirmed as of press time, but he might have even been laughing at her film.) To hear more from the delightful, whip-smart, and highly un-pretentious Lena Dunham, head over to The Rumpus where our latest--our 2nd annual--interview is up today!

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: B!

Slow times have arrived again and I am still jet lagged. It's a strange feeling not to sleep, like ever, isn't it? Well, the Milanese adventures were worth the extended lack of sleep. Before I forget about Scarlett though, below find a selection from section B of Marlene Dietrich's priceless dictionary. I'm trying to pick only the gems, but that's a harder task to tackle when each one is so pleasantly entertaining.

Maybe two this time? Yes, good plan, PK. Below is one B dictionary entry for those married and mother-to-be friends (who seem to be popping up like wild flowers these days), and one entry for the singles. You can figure out which is which.

Baby
The all-important. The wonder. The never-disappointing. The reason for enduring anything and everything. Living confidence. The epitome of trust. A fragile, helpless Hercules.

Bloomingdale's
My Mecca. The harbour of supplies for demands SOS'd to me by family, friends, acquiantances--usually ten minutes before closing time.