From Astrid of the band Winter Flowers:

“There are two fluffy girls and one non-fluffy, very independent and climb-y boy…”

If you live in the Los Angeles area and are interested in adopting one (or more) of these darling 8-or-so-week-old kittens, contact Astrid via myspace.com/winterflowers…

A Summer in the Cage began with a chance meeting between the filmmaker, Ben Selkow, and the subject, Sam Murchison, in the summer of 2000. What began as their collaboration to document life on and around the West 4th Street basketball courts in Manhattan – affectionately referred to as “the Cage” – evolved into a portrait of Sam’s battle with bipolar illness as seen through the lens of Ben’s camera. Using interviews and personal video diaries shot on mini-DV, Hi8 and Super 8mm cameras, as well as archival video and film footage from the last six years, A Summer in the Cage is highly subjective storytelling. The film begins by depicting the seeds of the original street basketball story, with Sam as collaborator and his photographs as the storytelling device. But once Ben (and, by extension, the audience) witnesses Sam’s increasingly manic behavior, caught by accident on video, the film transforms into the story of Sam’s illness. The film subsequently follows Sam over seven years as he lives with this disease, retraces his father’s battle with mental illness and his ultimate suicide, develops an intimate confidence with Ben through their periods of filming together, flirts with suicide himself, and tries to come to terms with the uncertainty of his future. The filmmaker-subject relationship explodes in 2006 with Sam’s third manic episode. Ultimately, the film asks the question, When do you turn the camera off?

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American kids, dumber than dirt

Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who’s seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career.

And he often writes to me in response to something I might’ve written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be.

His response: It is not bad at all. It’s absolutely horrifying.

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don’t spend enough time outdoors and don’t get any real exercise and therefore can’t, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.

No, my friend takes it all a full step — or rather, leap — further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.

We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

It’s gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

Now, you may think he’s merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It’s a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there’s been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn’t really hit home.

He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid’s basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, “It’s like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it.”

But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens’ decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words “agriculture,” or even “democracy.” Not a single student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he’s taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It’s not the kids’ fault. They’re merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.

Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.

Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don’t arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.

This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I’ve argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they’ve ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems.

I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are.

Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation’s top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?

My friend would say, well, yes, that’s precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled … and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America — and many more who aren’t — now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?

As for the rest, well, the dystopian evidence seems overwhelming indeed, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better.

What, too fatalistic? Don’t worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means.

Note from the the director!  please help get this film available via Netflix!!

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Drumming up an absolute storm last night; my ears are still ringing. And I need a new camera…

“So where is the hope that you talked about going to spring from?”

“From young people, like I said. From their ability to organise. I believe the internet may have an even stronger influence than people have realised. Albert Einstein said that when you join an organisation – and that could be anti-war, anti-pollution, or pro the rights of lesbians and homosexuals – Einstein said that, once you join, you have more individuality, not less. Because you are another person who wants to count.”

Studs Terkel: The world’s greatest interviewer
He met everyone from Martin Luther King to Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams to Bob Dylan. He survived the McCarthy era to record a unique oral history of his country. Now in his nineties, the great US chronicler is still raging against George Bush, Hillary Clinton and the death of radical America

The Robert Chalmers interview
The Independent
Published: 21 October 2007

“You are God,” I tell Studs Terkel. “Re-create the world.” The writer says nothing for a couple of seconds, which is not like him. “As you seem to know,” he replies, “that’s a question I used to ask people. I think the best way I can respond is to tell you how one young kid answered it. He said: ‘I don’t want that job. That job is impossible.'”

“And these days, when you listen to the news, I imagine you can’t help thinking that boy was right. How does it feel when you’re 95 and almost every ideal you ever cherished is under threat; when your nation’s government has become less peaceful and more bloodthirsty; less equitable and more shamelessly driven by greed? What’s it like, towards the end of a lifetime devoted to civil-rights activism, to find your country led by a president more right-wing and nakedly acquisitive than any other in your memory?”

“It’s true what you say. I can’t deny it. At the same time, I once wrote a book called Hope Dies Last. I believe that. I might feel hopelessness, except for one thing: the young. I don’t mean the young as they’re portrayed in TV commercials: whores, bimbos and dummies. There are many who do not fall into those categories. The big problem is that there’s no memory of the past. Our hero is the free market. People forget how the free market fell on its face way back in the Depression. And how the nation pleaded with its government and got help. Today, all these fat CEOs say we don’t need government. And these fat boys get away with it, because of our collective Alzheimer’s, and the power of Rupert Murdoch and CNN. There is despair in this country, sure. At the same time, we are waiting.”

“For what?”

“For new voices.”

We are talking in the living-room of Terkel’s house in Chicago, near the shore of Lake Michigan. In 1996 he underwent a quadruple-bypass operation; three years ago he broke his neck when he tripped over a pile of his own books. He is physically frail to the point that the last of his beloved Romeo y Julieta cigars has long since been smoked. But age has not extinguished his mental alertness or mischievous energy. He is wearing the red-and-white gingham shirt and red cotton socks that have been his uniform since the 1950s. Terkel, who can manage a few steps using a cane, apologises repeatedly for not being strong enough to take me downtown for dry Martinis.

The word genius – grotesquely overused in most areas of the media – is not a term you hear disinterested observers use to describe an interviewer. But Terkel – a man with the wit, the longevity, but none of the compliant orthodoxy of an Alistair Cooke – has been the greatest American broadcaster of his, or any other, generation and he has done more than enough to earn it.

Over the years Martin Luther King, Billie Holiday, Tennessee Williams, Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong and Dorothy Parker, among others, have sat where I am now, face to face with the best-loved figure in Chicago. Woody Guthrie used to stay in this house. True, that was in the days before you had to bellow at Terkel in the kind of voice that, given a calm night and a favourable wind, might be audible across the state line in Indiana. It’s ironic that a man who defines his role as “listening to what other people tell me” can’t work his hearing aids any better than he could his tape recorder, a device he could never be trusted to operate unaided.

“I realised very early on,” he says, “that the conventional way of approaching an interview was useless; that taking in a notebook full of questions, for instance, only made people feel interrogated.”

Terkel broadcast daily for the best part of 50 years on Chicago station WFMT; his last regular show was 10 years ago. He developed a discursive style of interviewing, his energies devoted to capturing the voices of what many radio presenters persist in referring to as “ordinary people”. One of his favourite films is Miracle in Milan by Vittorio de Sica, at the end of which a group of slum-dwellers suddenly levitate and soar into the clouds: it’s as good an image as any to represent Terkel’s life’s achievement.

“I set out,” he said, “to swallow the world.”

“Like last year we having video projections and a toy raffle. We are
also having a circuit bending workshop at 1pm.This year we are having
Evil Moisture (Andy Bolus) from France play the show. The lineup is:

Evil Moisture
Xdugef
Univac
Igor Amokian
Phillip Stearns
Rocker Parlour
and
Caveat Emptor”

BEND THIS TIMES THREE
OCT 20TH 9PM
at
IL CORRAL
662 no. heliotrope dr
los angeles, ca 90004
http://ilcorral.net
http://cannedbeefrecords.com/bendthis3x