Arts Express: Gretchen Mol Talks Family Man, Notorious Bettie Page

                          Gretchen Mol As The Notorious Bettie Page

** "We're in a tough spot right now, there's not enough jobs, we're in a huge, huge transition and I don't know what the answer is - but it's right to be a little afraid."

Actress Gretchen Mol phones in from LA to discuss her latest film, the workplace drama A Family Man. And that ruthlessly competitive and dehumanizing, money obsessed environment eating away at the soul of her spouse, played by Gerard Butler - while butting heads with Willem Dafoe as his sadistically inclined superior. Mol also weighs in on the complicated life of sexually provocative '50s pinup model Bettie Page and playing her in a movie, along with the challenge of refusing invisibility on screen and playing more than female wallpaper in movies.

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** "The city of Nantes memorial to the abolition of slavery, where above ground visitors walk on the names of slave ships - a Walk Of Shame and a reversal of the Cannes and celebrity walks."

Bro On The Art World Beat: Arts Express Paris correspondent Professor Dennis Broe on location in the French city of Nantes this week, in search of the slave trade as it played out in this port city and now a museum memorial. While along the way in search of Jules Verne and the connection of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea to deep sea drilling today; visionary contraptions and a depleted planet; Rembrandt, Melville, the black anarchist flag, Napoleon and slave reparations.


** "I feel that somehow I'm manifesting inner turmoil, the existential crisis of being a teenager, and facing that other pending disaster as millennials - a world with no jobs and the future every day that looks pretty bleak and scary."

My Entire High School Is Sinking Into The Sea: A conversation with young filmmaker Dash Shaw about his self-described 'disaster art film.' A kind of anti-bullying earthquake revenge fantasy, and at the same time somehow in pursuit of 'a poetic beauty with animation.' And seemingly cartooning through a surreal education system presided over by Henry Fool's Thomas Jay Ryan as Principal Grimm, and Susan Sarandon as cafeteria matriarch Lunch Lady Lorraine

** "There are no more two sides - there's one party, the war party, the Wall Street party."

Arts Express Best Of The Net Hotspot: An anti-establishment tutorial in reading beyond the propaganda of the NY Times - or at least between the lines. And connections in this particular case to Iranian yogurt, milk and chicken; poppy fields, prescription pills, and US "missile shaped democracy raining down on innocent civilians."

California Typewriter Review

Applauding those like Tom Hanks who embrace typewriters as a tactile and organic creative inspiration challenging this digital age, is the very eloquent documentary California Typewriter - a film about a Berkeley typewriter repair shop struggling to stay alive and fueled by an adamant labor of love. As both the computer age and concurrent typewriter extinction, along with the neighborhood invasion by corporate chains ensues.

California Typewriter is distinguished as well, as the last film appearance of literary icon and actor Sam Shepard, reflecting on the powerful significance of typewriters to his artistic body of work. Along with the inclusion of an unusual entity known as The Poetry Store, where San Francisco poet Silvi Alcivar fashions visitor thoughts, dreams and fantasies into verse on, of course, her typewriter.

Alcivar explains her unusual collective creative concept between audience and bard, what it's all about and why. While referencing unicorns, jellyfish, and a poem she helped someone compose at her Poetry Store that may have stopped a suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge. And just hpw "my poems emerge from the dark of you meeting I, then there is something more than light. There is life - in this life there are people wanting secret wishes to take shape in poems."

And though I'm more of an old school pen and paper person myself, there's no point resisting in this film Richard Polt's global movement ode to just how The Revolution Will Be Typewritten. Or for that matter, the insanely euphoric vintage machine improvised music of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra. 


Arts Express: Airing on the WBAI/Pacifica National Radio Network and Affiliate Stations.