If you are either from or of the Philadelphia area, chances are you know much better than to bring up Mumia Abu-Jamal in mixed company. From a distance, the Mumia case might appear to be a harsh study in race politics … completely polarizing along surface lines. But a closer inspection reveals there’s something much deeper at work here; something indicative of the ongoing struggle between institutional thought and revolutionary opposition.

Was Mumia Abu-Jamal guilty? Was he a victim of the system? Should Mumia be afforded the right to a new hearing? Despite the fact Mumia was both tried and convicted more than 30 years ago, the public outcry – ringing out across both bows – has not quieted one smidgeon in the three decades since. At the center of it all is Mumia himself, left to rot in Mahanoy Prison, after his death sentence was commuted in early December, 2011.

As a result of his incarceration, Abu-Jamal has come to symbolize much more than he ever might have on the outside. Yet, the man is still considered an irrepressible scourge by local critics, many of whom (e.g., Buzz Bissinger, Michael Smerconish, and Ed Rendell among them) refused to be interviewed for Revolutionary, a documentary which – despite some effort on the part of Stephen Vittoria – falls decidedly pro-Mumia.

Long-Distance Revolutionary does not concern itself with whether Mumia is innocent or guilty. It does not dawdle over evidence, nor devote more than a few spare frames to the early morning hours of December 9, 1981 – hours during which Mumia was subsequently convicted of shooting Daniel Faulkner at close range. Instead, the film tends to focus on who and what Mumia was in the years leading up to his arrest, and – more importantly – who and what he has become in the years since. Vittoria covers Mumia’s induction into the Black Panthers, his affiliation with the MOVE Organization, as well as his rise to become President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and his well-documented fall from grace. Revolutionary plays that off the strong-arm tactics of Frank Rizzo, a pair of ultra-violent confrontations between Philadelphia Police and the MOVE Organization, and the ongoing prevalence of white supremacist beliefs originally outlined in The Philadelphia Negro.

If Long-Distance Revolutionary is striving to make any case, it is the case for what Mumia Abu-Jamal could have been … would have been, had it not been for violent waves of hatred; had Abu-Jamal continued his ascent, had he not been black-balled by bureaucracy, spurned completely by white colleagues … had he not been parked along the dark side of 12th & Locust on that cold and fateful evening; or – perhaps better still – had that cold and fateful evening never happened altogether.

The only real sticking point being, it did.

It did.

And, depending upon your perspective, that is either the eternal shame or the eternal rub of it.

(Mumia: Long-Distance Revolutionary opens this Friday, February 1st, at New York City’s Cinema Village.)  Continue reading →

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Somewhere – and I mean somewhere deep – inside the movie Knife Fight, there is a well-constructed, albeit infinitely retold, play on morality. Unfortunately, the screenplay feels so bloated, it completely fails to make the point. Here we find some slick pol’s wife, refusing to let his team of handlers “Kobe Bryant” a young girl. There we find the slick pol himself, uncertain whether to go “Sonny or Michael” on said young girl’s ass.

In one way or another, the screenwriters of this film (Bill Guttentag, Chris Lehane) are guilty of stealing from just about every worthwhile movie or TV show that’s come along during the past 40 years. “You have to be the one who’s prepared to bring a gun into a knife fight.” (The Untouchables). “I once dreamed of playing shortstop for the Giants.” (The Sopranos).  “Zero. That’s my offer.” (The Godfather, Pt. II). “This is a no-spin zone.” (The O’Reilly Factor). Combine that with an entire rogue’s gallery of caricatures built out of presidential composites dating back to 1920, and it all adds up to a grossly unoriginal screenplay, written with unoriginal flair, starring unoriginal actors, many of whom are more than game to reprise hybrids of their roles from a long-deceased TV series.

Not good. Not good at all, I’d say. Perhaps even worse when you consider this alphabetized list of 15 completely over-the-top metaphors Knife Fight uses to describe what running an average political campaign might feel like:

1. A bare-knuckle brawl
2. Blood sport
3. Bringing a gun into a knife fight
4. Jihad
5. A legal colonoscopy without anesthesia
6. Major League Baseball
7. Making kings and queens
8. Making the news
9. Making the world a better place
10. A military guy in Virginia piloting a drone over Afghanistan, launching a missile
11. The NFL
12. Running a con
13. Running a Red Sox flag up Yankee Stadium
14. A steel-cage death match
15. A video game.

Despite all of this, I would be remiss if I did not mention how utterly fantastic Carrie Anne-Moss is in this film. She somehow manages to rise above the mediocrity, delivering a delightful turn that is both welcome and refreshing, to say the least.

(Knife Fight opens in select cities this Friday, January 25th, and will also be available via the majority of OnDemand platforms as of January 28th.)  Continue reading →

You know that friend whose tastes are highly suspect? Whose interests run afoul? Who laughs out loud at subtitles? Who loves Norwegian death metal?

This, this is the friend who Don Coscarelli made John Dies at The End for. What is John Dies at the End? Glad you asked. John Dies at the End is a good old-fashioned mindfuck; a psychotropic leap into the rabbit hole, complete with parallel planes of being and bad guys built out of lunch meat.

Is it good? Why, no, it sure isn’t. Not by any reliable standards, at least. The lead acting is abysmal, the comic timing’s even worse, and the dialogue’s trying way too hard to force something in between. In fact, the only bright spot here would have to be Paul Giamatti – a full-on Oscar nominee whose reasons for agreeing to appear in this film are actually more intriguing than the film itself.

John Dies was both adapted and directed by Coscarelli, whose previous claim to fame was Bubba Ho-Tep. This allows for a key distinction, in that Bubba Ho-Tep is a cult classic, while John Dies is really nothing more than a cult film.

Believe me when I tell you there’s a whole world of difference between the two.

(John Dies at the End arrives in limited release this Friday, January 25th. It is also currently available via Video OnDemand.) Continue reading →

“The British satirist Auberon Waugh once wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph asking readers to supply information about his life between birth and the present, explaining that he was writing his memoirs and had no memories from those years. I find myself in the opposite position. I remember everything. All my life I’ve been visited by unexpected flashes of memory unrelated to anything taking place at the moment. These retrieved moments I consider and replace on the shelf. When I began writing [Life Itself}, memories came flooding to the surface, not because of any conscious effort but simply in the stream of writing. I started in a direction and the memories were waiting there, sometimes of things I hadn’t consciously thought about since. Hypnosis is said to enable us to retrieve past memories. When I write I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just there. I think of the next word no more than the
composer thinksof the next note.“

1. Your entire ideology is based on dated precepts. Let us assume for a moment you’re a young parent, trying to decide where to send your first-born child off to school. There are any number of variables that might enter into that equation, including: each school’s local district, full-time faculty, special services, demographics, cost, facilities, state resources, rating, ranking, reputation, test scores … the list goes on and on. Here’s one factor that no person in his or her right mind would ever consider when weighing the pros and cons of a decision like that: What the young parents of a first-born child way back in 1776 might do. Do you know why no person in his or her right mind would ever think to consider a hypothetical like that? Because time is progress. That’s why. And progress alters context. I mean, who among us would opt to carry water, assuming we had full access to a sink? Who among us would rely on hearsay, assuming there was DNA evidence to the contrary? Who among us would allow some half-ass crank to cut us open with a bucksaw, assuming there was an entire team of surgeons in the waiting room next door? 

As a general rule: Before attempting to defend your modern stance with ancient precepts, take out a legal pad and make a list of every leap in evolution that has occurred between that time and now. I guarantee you’ll run clear out of space long before you’ve had a chance to reconsider.

2. You protect the indefensible, while casting out the bold and honest. Regardless of whether one’s referring to an institution or an organization; an infrastructure or a corporation, the very same logic still applies: From the moment a ruling body begins rewarding its at-fault members, while simultaneously shunning those who speak to truth to power, it slowly shifts to operating from a cowering position of fear. This is the real-world equivalent of placing one’s finger in the dike to keep the entire dam wall from falling. When, at last, all that sorry shit comes crashing down (and believe me when I tell you all that sorry shit will come crashing down) this despicable type of behavior never, ever winds up boding in the ruling body’s favor. 

As a general rule: “If Woody had gone right to the Police, this would never have happened.”

3. Your membership is based more on exclusion than inclusion. At its essence, this dynamic is the unfortunate result of age-old institutions tending to splinter over time, creating a critical divide between rival factions: young versus old, tradition versus progress, liberal versus conservative, etc. Despite the fact every faction remains loyal to the core, the central house is still divided. For a time, the village elders will endure. They’ve earned their just deserts, after all. And – more to the point – they incorrectly assume that seniority alone will be enough to keep the fringe elements at bay. Meanwhile, these emeritus members have grown so eerily out of touch with their staunch base, it not only renders their crass cloud-screaming null and void, it may also render the entire charter in contempt. 

As a general rule: Any organization that has gone to extreme lengths to keep the homosexuals out and the pedophiles in is almost definitely an archaic – if not altogether irrelevant – institution. Which, of course, brings us to …

4. Your arguments are so short-sighted as to diminish all credibility. In a day-to-day sense, these arguments represent the little white lies most people tell themselves to avoid a deeper inventory. “I believe it because God tells me so.” “I did it because I love this country.” “The only answer is more guns.” We’ve seen this type of entertainment through and through … so many times it’s laughable, in fact. More often than not, this unique brand of logic actually causes membership to soar, as people rally around the rote convenience of it all. But eventually, the entire ruse gives way to reason. In its wake, what one is left with is the desperate, gut-sick feeling that he or she has been Chuck-Ponzied, made the fool, wholly duped in the false service of someone else’s agenda. 

As a general rule: Any organization that is not a well-known branch of the military, yet still dedicates a ridiculous amount of time and resources to “recruiting” new members, is more than likely an archaic – perhaps even harmful – organization. 

5. You refer to any higher moral standing as being “elitist.” There is a reason intellectuals are called intellectuals. It’s because they’re pretty smart. Intellectuals who are not smart go by a different name. Those people are called faux intellectuals. Faux intellectuals – by definition – are not so intelligent. But they very often put themselves out there to be. Example: Every time some windbag takes to pulpit, describing intellectuals as an unsavory group of assholes who ride the subway while thumbing their noses at the status quo, not only tips the audience to the low brow of his hand, he simultaneously reveals himself to be … a faux intellectual. Fancy that. 

As a general rule: If you seem completely hung up on how horribly aloof the mainstream intellectuals are, then take heed. For you are more than likely the furthest possible thing from an intellectual on the modern evolutionary scale.  

6. You’re almost exclusively quoting dead people. Not that there’s anything wrong with dead people. I mean, let’s be honest, there’s a whole lot more of the deceased out there than there is living, and that distance keeps on growing every day. But it’s also worth noting that each and every deceased person out there was once living in a time and  place that is now completely gone, during which an entire laundry list of brain-dead concepts did very readily apply. This is by no means an effort to discredit the past and/or the practical utility of history. But it is to say that every argument requires more than some weak catchphrase, tagline, or slogan – taken almost wholly out of context – in order to hold weight. 

As a general rule: If your only justification for action (or a general lack thereof) is based upon some tagline from a fallen hero – lifted wholly out of context, several decades after the fact – now may be a good time to reevaluate what you’re fighting for.

7. You fail to make any worthwhile distinction between being an American and being in the right. Acknowledging there is a clear difference between the two does not necessarily mean someone: A) hates America, or B) loves America any less than a person who believes the polar opposite. All it really means is that we – as Americans – are fully capable of making mistakes. Keep in mind, this is a country that once sentenced its poor people to death, for fear they might afflict us all with epilepsy. It’s a country that once lynched its own black citizens for little more than random sport. It’s a country that once rounded up its Japanese and confined them to internment camps. Was that wrong? Sure. But it happened. And upsetting though it may be, you really can’t label that type of behavior as being anything but American. There is no shame in admitting culpability, even if that culpability just so happens to exist upon the most biblical of scales. At our best, we as a people learn from our mistakes and continue moving forward. At our worst, we sweep those inconvenient truths beneath the stars and stripes, doomed to repeat them time and time again, until the pain is too much to bear. 

As a general rule: If you regularly tend to read, quote, or forward unsubstantiated emails, written by anonymous sources in 19 different fonts and colors, you more than likely make no worthwhile distinction between being an American and being in the right.

“I got out of college and came here hoping I might make a reasonable living writing for magazines. It seemed like a crazy dream when I was in high school, something so glamorous and grand that you had to be very special to do. But then this happened and that happened, and it began to seem less ridiculous. I wrote a music column for New York after I graduated, then I did the same thing for The New Yorker, then I wrote books. I never wanted to be a millionaire or a billionaire or anything at all like that, because the happiest thing would be doing what I love. Which is how it turned out, and so it goes with talented and thoughtful people who move to places like New York and L.A. and Chicago and Austin and wherever else you take your wits these days. It isn’t just creative types, also public­-interest lawyers and public-­intellectual academics and political thinkers – collectively, the professional class. In a city, these are the people who make the place vital and fun. They work hard but still have time to try a no-­reservations restaurant on the Lower East Side or to check out the small boutiques in Nolita and help interesting young designers get off to a start. Mostly, they make six-figure incomes and somehow manage. And they are happy for the privilege. But these are people who soon won’t exist anymore. Soon New York will be nothing but a metropolis of the very rich and those who serve them – and the lucky and desperate still hanging on. All of the fun jobs are disappearing.” – Elizabeth Wurtzel, 2013

“I have a little speaker [on my balcony], so I can make up tapes and play them. So I get up, around 10 or 11, I mosey out there, and I start writing the next scene. Later, I’ll get in the pool, and I’ll swim around and think about what I’ve done. If I know I’m really not done with a scene, I think, ‘OK, what do I want to do? How can I make it better?’ If I am done with it, then I’m in the pool doing the same thing: ‘What’s next? What happens next?’ And I’ve got to tell you, it’s as close to bliss as I’ve ever achieved, in that space, doing that.” – Quentin Tarantino, 2012

“When I was a kid, I had one of these Hot Wheel devices designed to look like a little gas station. Inside the gas station were two spinning rubber wheels. One’s little car would weakly approach the gas station, then be sent forth by the spinning rubber wheels to take another lap around the track, or, more often, fly out and hit one’s sister in the face. A story can be thought of as a series of these little gas stations. The main point is to get the reader around the track; that is, to the end of the story. Any other pleasures a story may offer (theme, character, moral uplift) are dependent upon this … So, if the writer can put together enough gas stations, of sufficient power, distributed at just the right places around the track, he wins: The reader works his way through the full execution of the pattern, and is ready to receive the ending of the story.” – George Saunders, 2007

“The word success, my earliest understanding of the word and the way it imprinted itself on my mind, has always been so divorced from anything having to do with me. I recall a cheerleading tryout where we had to spell the word success accompanied by a series of claps (I did not make the team). I recall school teachers using the word in sentences and my feeling like it was a completely alien concept. Success is a measurable achievement. It implies a finish. ‘There, that’s done.’ That has nothing to do with my writing. Writing is never done. When I first answered this question I typed, ‘I want to create an object that shows how I uniquely experience things, how the world looks to me and what it sounds like,’ but I am cutting it (sort of) because it sounds not quite right. It’s more like there’s a rhythm that I hear in the hum of the world. I just like to take note of that rhythm and how strange it seems to me. I like to try to get it down and then read it back and try to match it – what’s in my head, what’s on the page. If I hear it coming up from the page (which doesn’t happen often) in that moment it isn’t success, it’s relief, like hearing a song I wanted to hear. It might not be a good song, but it’s my song.” – Deb Olin Unferth, 2006

“I think I was 40 before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all. I’m not editorializing, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.” – Stephen King, 2000 

“I could go on at length about how I write to convey my anger at all I think is wrong in this world, or I could speak of the mystery of the novelist’s aesthetic – ah, to be able to create a world that exists on the terms one has given it! – or I could even, unlike Jean Malaquais, be able to say, ‘When it’s a matter of making a living, you can’t beat the hours.’ But finally, I subscribe to his reply. For me, it has the advantage of being incontestably true. The only time, right or wrong, that I feel a quintessential religious emotion – that the power of the truth is in me – comes on occasion when I write, no, even better: The only time I know the truth is at the point of my pen.” – Norman Mailer, 1998

“Advice? Somebody should have told me not to join a fraternity, but to hang out with the independents, who were not then numerous. I would have grown up faster that way. Somebody should have told me that getting drunk, while fashionable, was dangerous and stupid. And somebody should have told me to forget about higher education, and to go to work for a newspaper instead. That is what a lot of the most promising and determined young writers used to do back then. Nowadays, of course, you can’t get a job on a newspaper if you don’t have a college education. Too bad.” – Kurt Vonnegut, 1995

“I’ve never written anything in my life or done any project that wasn’t what I wanted to do at the time. You really have to forget about what they call ‘career moves.’ You just do what you want to do for your own sense of your creative life. If no one else wants to see it, that’s fine. Otherwise, you’re in the business to please other people. When we did Stardust Memories, all of us knew there would be a lot of flack. But it wouldn’t for a second stop me. I never thought, I better not do this because people will be upset. It’d be sheer death not to go through with a project you feel like going through with at the time. Look at someone like Strindberg – another person I’ve always loved – and you see the reaction he got on certain things … just brutalized. When I made Annie Hall, there were a lot of suggestions that I make Annie Hall II. It would never occur to me in a million years to do that. I was planning to do Interiors after that, and that’s what I did. I don’t think you can survive any other way. To me, the trick is never to try to appeal to a large number of people, but to do the finest possible work I can conceive of, and I hope if the work is indeed good, people will come to see it. The artists I’ve loved, most did not have large publics. The important thing is the doing of it. And what happens afterward – you just hope you get lucky. Even in a popular art form like film, in the U.S. most people haven’t seen The Bicycle Thief or The Grand Illusion or Persona. Most people go through their whole lives without seeing any of them. Most of the younger generation supporting the films that are around now in such abundance don’t care about Bunuel or Bergman. They’re not aware of the highest achievements of the art form. Once in a great while something comes together by pure accident of time and place and chance. Charlie Chaplin came along at the right time. If he’d come along today, he’d have had major problems.” – Woody Allen, 1995

“When there is no censorship the writer has no importance. So it’s not so simple to be against censorship.” – Susan Sontag, 1977

“What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discovery a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightnings carry your messages. To be the first – that is the idea.” – Mark Twain, 1869

All pics taken with a jet-black Canon PowerShot A1300 digital camera.

(Good Pictures/Bad Camera is a regular feature on IFB.)   Continue reading →

A man sits in a room. Someone begins shouting through his window, informing him of conditions in the house next door. Our man’s mind inflects: That is, he begins imagining that house. What are the factors that might affect that quality of his imagining? That is, what factors affect his ability to imagine the next door house as it actually is?

1. The clarity of the language being used by the Informant (the less muddled, inarticulate, or jargon-filled, the better);
2. The agenda of the Informant (no agenda preferable to agenda-rich);
3. The time and care the Informant has spent constructing his narrative (i.e., the extent to which his account was revised and improved before being transmitted, with more time and care preferable to less);
4. The time allowed for the communication (with more time preferable to less, on the assumption that more time grants the Informant a better opportunity to explore, explain, clarify, etc.).

So the best case scenario for acquiring a truthful picture of that house next door might go something like this: Information arrives in the form of prose written and revised over a long period of time, in the interest of finding the truth, by a disinterested person with real-world experience in the subject area. The report can be as long, dense, nuanced, and complex as is necessary to portray the complexity of the situation.

The worst-case scenario might be: Information arrives in the form of prose written by a person with little or no firsthand experience in the subject matter, who hasn’t had much time to revise what he’s written, working within narrow time constraints, in the service of an agenda that may be subtly or overtly distorting his ability to tell the truth. 

Could we make this worst-case scenario even worse? Sure. Let it be known that the Informant’s main job is to entertain and that, if he fails in this, he’s gone. Also, the man being informed? Make him too busy, ill-prepared and distracted to properly assess what the Informant’s shouting at him.

Then propose invading the house next door.

Welcome to America, circa 2003.

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