“Duke Snider” by Jay Mercado
April 2006 | Dock of the Bay
Diamonds of Spring
Nine years ago, the George Krevsky Gallery began organizing annual April exhibits devoted to the art of baseball. An avid Oakland A’s fan, Krevsky is no less a connoisseur of the national pastime than he is of 20th century American figurative art (his gallery’s specialty). And if tradition holds, you may spot him in an A’s cap passing out crackerjacks at this year’s vernissage for Top of the Ninth: The Art of Baseball.
Krevsky’s April gallery features work by more than 30 artists including Claes Oldenburg, John Dobbs, Linda Masotti, Guy Diehl and Arthur K. Miller. Miller’s The Catch, a stunning oil painting of New York Giant Willie May’s spectacular 1954 world series play, is the show-stopper. And Masotti’s assemblage, Muybridge at the Ballpark, pays delightful homage to the English-born, 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
Muybridge, whom some consider the father of cinematography, was famous for his freeze-frame photographic studies of animals in motion. It is unlikely that he ever saw a baseball game, but Masotti’s miniature box sculpture suggests that he would have found the game as worthy a subject matter for photographic proofs as the stop-motion images he used to advance appreciation of the galloping horse. Masotti uses a sequence of five toy-like players fielding a grounder to show what it means to keep your eye on the ball. It appears out of nowhere in the last frame, and you don’t need steroids or a degree in art history to appreciate why.
April also brings National Poetry month and the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake. So you may want to hear a group of talented young urban poets who will be reading during opening week (April 6-9) at SBC Park. Their talents have been nurtured through the SF Writer’s Corps (since 1994, this group has brought together writers with disadvantaged and disregarded young students in creative writing classes). Their work is being published by a local independent, Aunt Lute Books, in an anthology called Solid Ground. The book’s sections, as well as the poems, mirror earthquake cycles and themes: Bedrock, Faultline, Stress, Upheavel, Shock, After.
WriterCorps poets will read at Bay Area bookstores and on April 19th at Intersection for the Arts. The Krevsky Gallery is at 77 Geary St. in SF and the baseball exhibit runs March 29 through April 30. It’s free, Tues.-Sat., 11-5:30. — Carlotta Blanc
Hollywood Speaks Truth to Power
Folks who have characterized the 78th Academy Awards ceremonies as “the Gay Oscars” have missed the point, says Hollywood film historian Ed Rampell. What the awards demonstrated, Rampell says, is that the US film industry has just made the biggest “left-turn” since the Great Depression. “Not since the 1940s, when the pro-union The Grapes of Wrath and the antifascist The Great Dictator were Best Picture nominees, have so many left-tilting studio features, indies and documentaries been in Academy Award contention,” Rampell argues. He should know: He’s the author of Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the US.
According to Rampell, “Tinseltown’s first period of conscience” produced WW II-era populist and anti-Nazi films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Casablanca. A second-wave of conscious cinema broke in the ’60s and ’70s with “power-to-the-people pictures like Arlo Guthrie’s antiwar Alice’s Restaurant.”
Just look what happened this year. The mega-blockbuster King Kong went bust, snagging only a few Oscars in the technical categories. Meanwhile, small-budget indie films stomped all over the big ape on Oscar night.
Here’s Rampell’s scorecard on the Big Winners: George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck, a salute to fearless media journalism, was made for $7 million and has earned $30 million. Best Picture, Crash, “a nitty-gritty look at racism in LA,” was made for $6.5 million and has netted more than $83 million. Steven Spielberg’s Munich, an unflinching portrayal “terrorism and the Arab-Israeli conflict,” cost $70 million and has grossed more than $100 million worldwide. Brokeback Mountain, produced for S14 million, rounded up $73 million in ticket sales.
And the list doesn’t end there. North Country focused on “America’s first workplace sexual-harassment lawsuit,” The Constant Gardener dealt with “an activist challenging big pharmaceutical companies in Africa,” A History of Violence focused on “America’s penchant for resorting to violence to resolve problems,” and Syriana offered a searing “Middle East thriller that critiques US foreign policy.”
And what does Rampell see in the future? “Once again, progressives behind and in front of the cameras are creating compelling, politically aware works.” And, with audiences showing up to buy tickets, the film community “is sitting up and paying attention.” In a phrase: “Escapism is out and thought-provoking topicality is in.” The trend is expected to continue with such coming attractions as Michael Moore’s Sicko and Sean Penn’s All the King’s Men. — Gar Smith
A Special DVD Offer for our Readers
The folks at Cinema Circle, a mail-order business for DVD fans, specialize in films with a spiritual bent. “We seek out films that warm the heart,” says Spiritual Cinema Circle (SCC) co-founder Stephen Simon. One recent addition to the Circle’s cockle-warming catalog was The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, the only-in-San-Francisco tale of Mark Bittner, an underemployed musician who befriended a flock of wild birds and, in the process, became both an expert in avian lore and a local legend.
“Our members enjoy movies that make them feel better about being human, and Parrots does that,” Simon says. SCC has millions of members in 82 countries who depend on the small company to find “inspiring shorts, documentaries and features from around the world” — with an emphasis on spiritually-themed films that “have gone virtually unappreciated and unseen.”
April’s selections include: Kumbh Mela: Songs of the River ; Heaven’s Bookstore (a metaphysical love story from Japan); and three shorts — Within, Without (a child’s animated journey into her own cells), Smudge (a Native American documentary), and Behind the Scenes (on the making of Conversations with God ).
SCC is offering Common Ground readers a free one-month trial subscription to their up-lifting DVDs (you only pay $3.95 shipping and handling). If you don’t wind up with a beatific smile on your face, you can cancel after the first month. spiritualcinemacircle.com — GS
Get Active: Stop Tax-paid Propaganda
According to the Government Accountability Office, the Bush administration has spent $1.6 billion on overt and covert media PR since 2003. Four GAO investigations have found that the White House has employed “fake news” reports and “covert propaganda” to push its policies at the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
This pot of tax-plunder was used to promote the war in Iraq, to encourage unemployed youth to enlist in the Armed Forces, and to fight efforts to legalize the purchase of cheap prescription drugs from Canada.
The problem, says Center for Media and Democracy (CMD, prwatch.org) watchdog Diane Forsetta, is that “government-funded ‘fake news’ — such as video news releases” isn’t identified as paid political propaganda.
“The American people are fed up with this administration’s relentless attempts to manage and manipulate the news,” says Free Press Campaign Directror Timothy Karr (freepress.net), who calls Bush’s penchant for “pre-packaged reporting at the expense of real news and information” little more than “a scheme to make US taxpayers pay for their own deception.”
Get Active: Free Press and the CMD have presented 40,000 signatures on a petition calling for an independent investigation into the White House’s use of “fake news” and they have called for “truth-in-labeling” laws to identify Bush-backed propaganda. Perhaps it’s time for the White House to provide $1.6 billion to the administration’s critics to spend on PR. You might call this the “Equal Dime Provision.” — GS
Mind Over Marlboros
Willpower alone may not be sufficient to snuff out a smoking habit, but problem-puffers are having success deploying strategic mind-games against their cigarette addictions. Guided imagery — the practice of using visualization exercises to spur change in the brain and body — more than doubled the abstinence rate among smokers in a recent 71-person study.
After three weeks of imagining themselves as healthy and smoke-free, the Journal of Nursing Scholarship reports that 10 of the study’s participants quit smoking and were still smoke-free two years later. The study’s control group received anti-smoking education and counseling sessions but did not practice guided imagery. In this group, only four people quit and remained abstinent at the two-year follow-up.
The guided-imagery team practiced their visualization exercises 30 minutes every day with the help of psychotherapist Belleruth Naparstek’s audio-recording, Stop Smoking–Health Journeys.
“Imagery affects physiological and psychological activities,” explains study author Christine A. Wynd, PhD. “These images appear real to the brain and nervous system, and they create the same behavioral and mental sensations as would an image from reality.” — Elizabeth Barker
Save the Napkins
People say you shouldn’t waste money because it doesn’t grow on trees but what about wasting paper napkins that do come from trees? After witnessing people grabbing a handful of napkins at cafes and only using one or two, bilingual special education middle school teacher Paula Ginsburg came up with a way to stop it. For the past 14 years, kids in her student-run Ecology Club have been working with Ginsberg to create awareness about environmental issues while improving academic skills. On a recent morning in the Mission, 15 Everett Middle School students were leaning intently over their desks, designing colorful postcard-sized signs for the club’s “Save the Napkins” campaign.
“These kids might have learning challenges in reading, writing or math, but with this project, they can express their creative, interpersonal and kinesthetic intelligence, which helps them build confidence,” says Ginsburg. A seventh-grader named Victor says he loves creating the art and seeing it posted at cafes. It gives the children pride to contribute to a better neighborhood environment and to see their work displayed, says Ginsburg. The Ecology Club also runs the school’s recycle-reduce-and-reuse campaign and its members work in the school garden.
The charming laminated signs are placed on napkin and paper towel dispensers to discourage waste by reminding people that: “Napkins come from trees. Take only what you need.” Rachel Hebert, who displays the signs in her SF-based Dolores Park Café, says they make a difference because the are “cute and friendly and personalize environmental issues.”
The club’s signs are displayed in 150 Bay Area cafes. Ginsburg also takes signs wherever she travels. So far, she has spread her students’ message to other states and to Costa Rica, Mexico, and Spain. To widen awareness about the project, Ginsburg has written a children’s book that she’s shopping to publishers. — Angela Priven
Celestine on the Big Screen
It’s not everyday that a self-published novel sells 14 million copies in 40 languages and tops the New York Times bestsellers list three years in a row but it’s now a matter of record: James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophesy is quite possibly the most popular American book ever published.
The amazing cascades of coincidence that lead Redfield to write and publish his tale of an unemployed school teacher whose trip to Peru leads to the discovery of a set of ancient scrolls, take a new turn when the film version of the book debuts in April. Following his self-publishing tradition, Redfield also co-produced and co-wrote the full-length feature film.
“We couldn’t put all of the book into the movie,” Redfield confesses, but he’s convinced that the finished film will “be viewed as a kind of model for the deeper spirituality that we all sense we can reach.”
The World Premiere is set for April 18 in San Francisco at the Lumiere Theater. Will Redfield’s success as a director match his skill as a writer? If you can’t wait for the film to debut in your town, you can check out the trailers online at: thecelestineprophecymovie.com — GS
Triple Bottom Line: Coffee Relief Fund
In October, Hurricane Stan raked Mexico and Guatemala with winds and torrential floods that washed away roads, homes, hillsides, and crops. The hurricane arrived at the worst possible time — just as the regions’ small-scale coffee growers were preparing to harvest their beans.
Ordinarily, such a loss would mean instant poverty. But for the fortunate farmers linked to the US-based Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers, there was an immediate response: this alliance of good-hearted Yankee Java Barons raised $182,000 for a Coffee Relief Fund. One company, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, came up with a $80,000 in relief funds.
“Our role as a coffee importer is to find ways to help our supply partners,” says David Griswold, president and founder of the Portland-based group which includes Peet’s, Whole Foods, Newman’s Own Organics, Allegro and Green Mountain. Quicker than you can say “Gimme a double-decaf-vanilla-soy-cappucino,” these companies went to work brewing up a storm-relief package of food, shelter and medicine and managed to save a “significant portion” of the storm-damaged coffee harvest.
Sustainable Harvest is North America’s main pipeline for organic, fair-trade coffee, shipping more than 8 million pounds of eco-beans from small co-op farms in Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Ethiopia and Rwanda. Rick Peyser, Green Mountain’s Director of Social Advocacy credits the fund with “helping the producers rapidly regain what they may have lost.” Griswold proudly notes that, “every dollar raised has gone directly to relief and rebuilding efforts.” That’s something to remember, the next time you go shopping for your morning buzz. Sustainableharvest.com — GS
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