Conscious Choice: Reviews

September 2007 | Art & Soul

Reviews

FILM

Commune
Directed by Jonathan Berman
78 minutes
communethemovie.com

In the late 1960s, in Siskiyou, California, miles and miles down a dirt road from anything resembling the American mainstream, a few bearded men and bare-breasted women — children literally stripping themselves of their buttoned-up fifties upbringing — began living in the wilderness on land surrounding an abandoned gold mine. Dubbing the place Black Bear Ranch, “Free land,” they promised, “For Free People.” Word, like fire, spread, and turners-on, tuners-in and droppers-out descended to try their hands at creating a genuine counterculture utopia.

Using grainy Super-8 footage, old photographs and present-day interviews with some of Black Bear’s participants (among them actor Peter Coyote, herbalist/author Michael Tierra and Chinese medicine pioneers Efrem Korngold and Harriet Beinfield) Commune depicts not only the abandon with which these twenty- and thirty-somethings attempted to live, powered by sex-drive and ideology, but also the difficulties that inevitably beset such an experiment. What happens when some group members regard the commune’s only cow as holy while others see it as mere meat? What happens when an incoming group asserts itself as more utopian than thou? What happens when free love comes to seem more costly than monogamy? What happens when the flesh-and-blood products of such love are in need of education and stability? What happens to sex-drive ideology when everyone is forced… to grow up? — Eric Larson

Unborn in the USA: Inside the War on Abortion
Directed by Stephen Fell and Will Thompson
101 Minutes
firstrunfeatures.com

In this age of politically-charged documentary filmmakers who make no secret of their slant, directors Stephen Fell and Will Thompson deliver just what the genre promises: a document that leans neither to the right nor the left of the Great American Abortion Debate. Anyone who saw the 2006 doc Jesus Camp will recognize familiar feelings of frustration welling up as they watch the film unfold.

The story opens at the Focus Institute in Colorado Springs (affiliated with the left’s perennial nemesis, Focus on the Family), where 88 young pro-life provocateurs are earning college credit to memorize and recite the Christian right rhetoric of the pro-life movement. They pray for their god to give them courage. They travel to Colorado State University, accompanied by gigantic and gruesome photographs of aborted fetuses and round up red-faced pro-choice students to engage them in supposed “dialogue” about the American “holocaust.”

This is a gentle lead in to the rest of the film, which is rounded out by interviews with dozens of other pro-life activists, including (mostly middle aged white male) so-called journalists; artists; priests; “sidewalk counselors,” the sort who lurk at the gates of abortion clinics; all of whom have singularly devoted their lives to overturning Roe v. Wade. Paired with footage of some of their most troubling activities, including an especially upsetting final scene, the film adds little to the debate itself, but might serve to remind those on both sides of the need for a more measured and intelligent cultural conversation.— E.L.

BOOKS

Ghetto Plainsman
By Jarid Manos
(Temba House Press)

Jarid “Jihad” Manos’s memoir doesn’t begin where most environmentalists’ stories begin. Born and raised in the ghetto, Manos struggled with violence, crack addiction and a dark slide into male prostitution. His is not a tale for everyone — the language and description of sex and violence in these pages are just as intense as any good hip-hop album — but those who can stomach the depths will be more than rewarded by Manos’ ascent to ardent environmentalist, hopelessly in love with the plains of Texas.

The nimble, brutal language that Manos uses to describe the hustlers and lost souls of New York and Los Angeles works equally well in capturing the delicate beauty of a yucca plant, a sunset along an impossible horizon or the mysterious animal life that populates his adopted home. Manos founded the Great Plains Restoration Council, a non-profit organization dedicated to restoring a million acres of plains land, and Ghetto Plainsman also serves as an Inconvenient Truth-style call to action.

Really, the best part of this book is its juxtaposition of urban hip-hop culture with both Manos’s homosexuality and his conservationism. Ghetto Plainsman’s cross-cultural joy shines in its chapter headings, where quotes from Alice Walker, Black Elk and Rupert Sheldrake intermingle with lyrics from Public Enemy, Nas and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. Not since Edward Abbey have I seen such an improbable writer so hopelessly in love with nature, and so gifted in describing its bounty. — Paul Constant

The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-it-Yourself Guide to Placemaking
By Jay Walljasper
(New Society Publishers)

In three years, there will be more urban citizens than rural on the face of the planet. Among other things, this means most of us live in a neighborhood. But how many people can actually say that their neighborhood is a community, the kind of place where people know each others’ names and come together in times of crisis or celebration?

Project for Public Places is a nonprofit organization that’s working internationally to create non-commercial spaces for community gathering. This book compiles a number of PPS’s neighborhood-building ideas in the form of short, magazine-article-style chapters that cover just about every urban topic from lessening traffic to fighting crime to increasing the number of evening strolls. Every idea is based on a real-life example that produced actual results, from neighborhoods as near as right down the block and as far as Brazil and Australia.

As with any compilation of dozens of ideas, there are some problems — a few of the chapters treat homeless people as only an obstacle to remove, for instance — but most of the book’s suggestions are less about gentrification and more about unification. After reading this book, it’s impossible not to feel an immediate desire to get to know the people living around you, and it’s empowering to see that something as mundane as sitting in a public square or sharing food with strangers can be a revolutionary act. — P.C.

MUSIC

Breathing Under Water
Anoushka Shankar and Karsh Kale
(Manhattan)

With Breathing Under Water, two of India’s most talented artists have created a twenty-first century masterpiece that speaks as much to the future of music as its wide-eyed and experimental present. Raised and trained by her homeland’s groundbreaking sitar player Ravi Shankar, Anoushka Shankar, who now lives in San Diego, applies her classical training while fearlessly allowing her beloved lute to be chopped up, ProTooled and layered into new and exciting soundscapes. Karsh Kale, born in London but New York City-raised, has been thinking ahead since he was working his tablas into low-grade PC software in the early ’90s. With the help of technology and a fierce passion for creation, they’ve upgraded in sound with nudges from guests like Sting, Norah Jones, Vishal Vaid, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and the MIDIval PunditZ. Under water or no, this is a breath of fresh — and invigorating — air. — Derek Beres

100 Days, 100 Nights
Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings
(Daptone Records)

Scanning the list of artists this Brooklyn-based powerhouse has worked with — Ghostface Killah, Amy Winehouse, Mark Ronson, Lou Reed, They Might Be Giants and Kanye West among them — it’s clear Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings are more than capable. The full tale, however, is told on their debut full-length follow-up to the successful EP, Naturally. The album returns us to the soulful and seductive days of Motown, where vintage gospel hooks merge with deep bass and mind-blowing guitars. Upon first listen, you might swear you’ve heard these sounds somewhere before, in the work of legendary alumni like the Supremes or the Jackson Five, with even a little Marvin and Stevie prowling the perimeter. You can’t distinguish between Jones or her band, as all fingers of this industrious hand are relevant, and essential. But in a world where computers are employed to make tracks sound classic, 100 Days, 100 Nights is no attempt to scour the past. Rather, it’s soul in its finest hour — an extension of the great soul records we have known, and will continue to know, for some time. — D.B.

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