** "When the Wright brothers invented the airplane, they were not necessarily thinking that it would be used to transport bombs."
Ideology And Culture Corner: Socio-biologist Rebecca Costa, author of On The Verge, describes what she feels she's hit on as an innovation known as the science of predictability. Or has she? Actually, something known as scientific socialism has been doing just that for a century. Including Cuba protecting its population from hurricanes - unlike capitalist dominated countries - long before they're anticipated to strike.
LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE
** "When the devil comes, he won't be sporting a pointy beard, or pitchfork. Hell, no. He will appear in a fancy suit and lathered in expensive cologne, to hide the stink of sulfur. And live in a high tower where he will surround himself with gold.
Remember this, when the devil comes to steal your country..."
San Francisco Poet Laureate, short story writer and community activist Alejandro Murguía returns to reads from his work. And discussing as well The Other Barrio - a kind of gentrification noir film based on his short story of the same name. While shedding light on the shadowy politics of linguistics that has led to others being called refugees while Latinos are labeled immigrants. Julia Stein reports.
** "As far as millennials now, it's very hard. Everybody is struggling, everybody wants to stick it to the man and not be the underdog anymore - and I totally get that."
Going In Style: A Conversation With Actress Joey King. Weighing in on connections in this economic crisis cinema satire out now on DVD, to what elders and millennials have in common during these hard times beyond generation gaps. Along with referencing co-star Alan Arkin on the ukulele, meals on wheels, and swear jars.
** Lauren Ash Talks Superstore: The Canadian actress and Second City Alumnus is on the line from LA in a conversation about her starring role as an eccentric boss presiding over the perplexed proletariat, including America Ferrara, in the small screen workplace sitcom. Along with contrasting life as a woman in the workplace, compared to an actress in the film world. And the difference between the US and Canadian sense of humor - which seems to have more than a little to do with self-deprecation.
NY Film Festival 2017: Piazza Vittorio
With the ongoing world refugee crisis being reported mostly in statistical terms and the massive impact on its victims, expect the unexpected filmmaker Abel Ferrara has something more unusual and literally off the beaten path with his documentary, Piazza Vittorio. Burrowing into the individual lives of those affected, both desperate when not despondent refugees calling the plaza a kind of outdoor home, and the Italian born residents expressing diverse reactions along a spectrum from delight to displeasure and dismay.
As these nomads exiled from around the world, including Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America, mostly wander about in search of jobs, clothes, a place to sleep, a shower and food, Ferrara films their daily lives with curious fascination. Even insisting to the skeptical there that he somehow feels their pain because he's an immigrant himself, a filmmaker from Manhattan, but apparently not allowing their disbelief to diminish his fascination with their lives.
And among those initially caught on film is Mr. Bosa, a musician singing to Afro Beat, a homeless but proud African griot storyteller just like all his male ancestors preceding him, and many who just want to go home to their countries. The mood turns darker when others are captured sitting on street corners simply losing their minds from social and economic adversity, and an imigrant from the former Soviet Union breaks down in tears, recalling how jobs disappeared as the Western capitalist encroachment under Perestroika took over.
At one point, actor Willem Dafoe turns up shopping for food and staying for dinner with Ferrara, while describing in glowing about moving to the piazza himself from the US after finding a wife there while filming a movie. The filmmaker then visits with oddly anti-immigrant squatters of the right wing CasaPound Italia movement quoting Marx, who have taken over a building as living quarters. And remarking, 'The capitalist paradise doesn't exist, it's locked down in bank vaults and sotck markets.' Then off to a modest restaurant, which the immigrant proprietor from China has filled the walls with celebratory portraits of Mao as the most revered leader of her country.
Meanwhile, throughout Ferrara's quest for the refugee experience in Italy, music is to be found everywhere on the somewhat spontaneous soundtrack. Whether homeless Africans jamming outdoors for spare change; South Americans not about to lose their cool enjoying life, even though having fled the toxic ecological devastation of their countries by US business interests; and an intermittent actual soundtrack courtesy of activist folk singing legend Woody Guthrie, lamenting the historical plight of the nomadic US poor with strains of 'Do Re Mi.'
Piazza Vittorio blends tragedy, irony and humor for an alternating probing and eccentric transformative spotlight on what is described in the documentary as Rome 'isn't now Italy but the world.' Though with the unfortunate exclusion, which could have been added as a post-script, of Italian police attacking homeless refugees with water cannons, when evicting nearly a thousand from occupying and living in an office building this past August.
More information about the NY Film Festival is online at https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2017
Arts Express: Airing on the WBAI/Pacifica National Radio Network and Affiliate Stations.
Prairie Miller
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