God Wears Lipstick, by Karen Berg (Kabbalah Centre International, $17.95.)
There is no getting around it. This book has a catchy title and clever cover design that is hard to ignore. Author Karen Berg and her husband Rav are equally hard to overlook as they have built an international network of more than 50 Kabbalah Centre locations. The whole movement of studying the Kabbalah has its critics. One reason is the conservative stand that only Jewish men over 40 should learn it. Another point of contention is that the Bergs have invited more than a few celebrities into their circle.
Berg writes that this book is intended as “the first Kabbalistic Bible for women, to help you become aware that you don’t have to be a 40-year-old man — and a Talmud scholar to boot — to learn Kabbalah.”
That the Bergs and Kabbalah Centre have been adept at marketing and branding, no one disputes. This book exemplifies more of the same. Berg has brief, conversational chapters with titles such as “The Light Bulb Principle,” “Guilt is a Four-Letter Word,” “Be Happy or Else” and “What Your Therapist is Too Well Paid to Tell You.”
The second part of the book covers what Berg calls “Kabbalistic tools” for, among other things, sharing, effort, astrology, listening, conflict, honesty, tolerance, parenting, friendship, sex and, in the final chapter, prayer. This format makes the book easy to skim and sample, which one can imagine is what Berg has in mind. — Andrew Mulholland
The Oracle: The DVD
Oakland-based Regent Press is lighting up computer screens with a new DVD — a digital re-creation of The Oracle, Allen Cohen’s legendary psychedelic newspaper, published between 1966-1968, in the heady days leading up to SF’s historic Summer of Love. The Oracle only published a dozen issues but the unfettered free-form design revolutionized tabloid art by paying homage to spontaneous, unstructured impulse, unprecedented splashes or full-spectrum colors and art that ranged from intricate line drawings to mind-bendingly complex collage.
The SF Chronicle called Cohen’s Oracle the “cannon… of the New Age movement,” a seminal journal-as-art-form that covered it all, “from the Aquarian Age to Native American shamanism, Eastern mysticism, communal living, utopian revolution, sexual liberation, ecological awareness and the socio-spiritual implications of LSD.” The Oracle, a singular blossom in the garden of print, deserves the honor. Not even the staid New York Times could remain immune to the glory of The Oracle “in all its opulence. Open any page and you are back on the streets of the Haight Ashbury,” the Grey Lady gushed, recalling that blessed moment in time when “that tiny urban spot was the Olympus of the newborn world.” In addition to providing viewable — and printable — reproductions of every page, the DVD also includes an interview with Oracle founder and editor Cohen and Claire Burch’s loving, trippy video, “Oracle Rising.”
The $24.95 DVD is available from Regent Press, 6020-A Adeline, Oakland, CA 94608. Regentpress.net — Gar Smith
The GMO Trilogy — A DVD/CD Set
In recent years, a new threat has emerged that challenges our ability to make the most basic choices about our food. Genetic engineering (GE), coupled with an unprecedented concentration of corporate control over the processing and distribution of food, has cast doubt on the safety and integrity of some of the most common foods we eat every day.
Thus far, genetic engineering on a large scale has been largely limited to soybeans, corn, cotton and canola. Hawaiian papayas, some varieties of summer squash, and milk from cows injected with Monsanto’s recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, are also affected. But when we consider the pervasiveness of soy and corn extracts in processed foods — even “natural” processed foods — the broad extent of the problem is revealed.
Amid the growing public debate about the effects of GMOs, the Iowa-based Yes! Books has introduced The GMO Trilogy, a multimedia package that features two videos, a comprehensive audio CD, and lots of clickable extras.
The centerpiece is an hour-long documentary, Unnatural Selection. produced by Bertram Verhaag and Gabrielle Kroeber, two filmmakers with a long history of documenting GE and farming issues. Unnatural Selection takes us on a world tour of some of the places directly affected by GE agriculture.
Canadian canola grower Percy Schmeiser plays a prominent role in the documentary. Schmeiser’s future was irrevocably altered when his fields were contaminated with pollen from Monsanto’s GE variety. Monsanto then sued him for the “crime” of having a contaminated crop. The case went all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court (See: percyschmeiser.com).
The scene shifts to central India, where a hyper-aggressive marketing campaign, featuring giveaways and Bollywood-style TV ads, persuaded farmers that “Bt cotton” was the answer to their bollworm problems. They mortgaged their farms to embrace the new technology but the bollworm resistance failed, crop yields fell dramatically, and thousands of farmers committed suicide. Now, whole communities are organizing to vent their rage at the multinational seed companies.
Unnatural Selection exposes disturbing experiments with genetically engineered animals, — from monstrously deformed pigs given a human growth hormone to fast-growing GE salmon. The company that “invented” these salmon, has applied for permission to sell them commercially. Meanwhile, Purdue University scientists warn of the disastrous effects if these “super-salmon” ever escape into wild fish populations.
“[This] is a technology that cannot exist with nature. It is a technology that invades, pollutes, contaminates, and ultimately destroys the natural species,” explains attorney Andrew Kimbrell of the Center for Food Safety. And, finally, we meet a group of SF chefs in who have rejected the use of engineered ingredients.
The second disk in the trilogy, Hidden Dangers in Kids’ Meals, offers a fast-paced introduction to the health consequences of GE foods, focusing on the case of UC Berkeley professor Ignacio Chapela, who made world headlines with his discovery that indigenous corn varieties in the remote mountains of Mexico had been contaminated with DNA from GE corn imported from the US.
We travel to a Wisconsin high school once ridden with chronic behavioral problems. One weekend, all the junk food, sodas, and highly processed ingredients were removed from the school’s hallways and cafeterias and replaced with wholesome, nutritious meals and snacks. Teachers and school officials interviewed in the film reported a sudden transformation in the students. The atmosphere became calmer, behavioral problems and dropout rates plummeted, and students’ academic performance increased dramatically.
The third disk contains an hour-long audio of Jeffrey Smith, the best-selling author of Seeds of Deception and producer of The GMO Trilogy, recorded during Smith’s international speaking tour following the publication of his book.
“We’re feeding the products of an infant science to millions of people and releasing them into the environment where they can never be recalled,” Smith warns. But the presentation ends on a hopeful note, with reports of newly created GMO-free zones around the world, the systematic removal of GE ingredients from most processed foods in Europe, and examples of people are organizing to resist this technology. — Brian Tokar, who directs the Biotechnology Project at the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont.