JFK: 3 SHOTS THAT CHANGED AMERICA THE MOVIE

Watching a documentary film of the Kennedy assassination, JFK: 3 SHOTS THAT CHANGED AMERICA (2009). Oswald asking for legal representation while the police were pushing him past a group of reporters with cameras and microphones, Oswald: "What's this about? Because I went to Russia? I'm just a patsy." From what I see of Oswald asking over and over for legal representation, he looks and sounds like somebody too slack and too dumb to make three head shots from that distance with a moving target. A little bit earlier a recorded police dispatch was included concerning finding Oswald in the movie theater. "He's supposed to be hiding in the balcony." Curiously, that's where they found him, where he was "supposed to be hiding." Good man, followed orders well. The volume of papers behind the Warren Report, the "truth" about the assassination, is due to be revealed in 2029. I don't think anybody cares what's in it.  By now, historians have found that LBJ "gave the nod," which was the theme of Barbara Garson's play in that time, MAC BIRD!, a modern day MacBeth with LBJ as MacBird and Lady Bird as Lady MacBird. By now, half a century later, I see it a coup, arrived at by the maxim, Follow the money. Jack Ruby was another good man who followed orders well.

The question comes up over and over about "solving" the case. From half a century later, I can say the case has never been solved. Our government shut down any investigation at the start and commissioned the book to tell us what we are to believe. Rush to judgment is the name of this story. We've seen other rush to judgments in the World Trade Center towers, another (follow the money) coup. LBJ and J Edgar put a stop to possible investigations of the assassination. Sounds kinda familiar with WTC instant cleanup of ruins, investigation shut down, the official book produced to tell us what we are expected to believe. A citizen's investigation of the Kennedy assassination in the early years was shut down definitively. Oliver Stone made the film telling the story of the Kevin Costner character in the film JFK, Jim Garrison, who was investigating a little too far and was shut down with serious threats. I read an article he wrote in Esquire magazine back in that time. I wanted to see what more this guy, a New Orleans prosecutor, could uncover. Never heard of him again until a long time later when I saw his story in Stone's film.

Some of the documentaries of either story that point out how they were done and who done it are convincing, yet our government dismisses them, which makes it all the more clear to me no independent investigation is welcome. Must be some reasons why. Johnson (Texas Oil Cartel coup) took power by assassination. Bush W (corporate coup) took power by fraud and judicial fiat. I also find it peculiar that democrat congressmen and senators running for office die in private plane crashes during campaigns where the black box gives no clue to what happened. This has happened several times. It never happens to republicans. So much for law of averages. It's not a matter of one more than the other. It is one and not the other, consistently. Any investigation is discouraged with threats that silence the accusers for life. So many of the details in the 9/11 remains are so obviously not as we were told, yet corporate government and its corporate media call independent investigations subversive "conspiracy theories." By now, this is so obvious it seems redundant to bring it up.

This documentary is made from b&w video and television reporting. Interviews with chief of police, who favored J Edgar Hoover in appearance before the bulldog folds took over his face, made me suspicious just by visual association. He had the look of the profile right-wing block-headed white male Texas racist, who aint got no use for no damn nigger-lover. This was the South in the latter years of the Old South. The New South was yet to be. The right wing at the time was seriously concerned about Kennedy for being a liberal in the time before Reagan made liberal "the L word." Then, it was Hawks and Doves. Now it's conservatives (hawks) and liberals (doves). I was just out of high school a couple years with a head full of confusion. The issue then was rights for black people. The white man again was threatened in a supposed democracy by the black vote. The corporatocracy is white man seizing control "nonviolently." Corporations do not function democratically. The Supremes interpreting corporations "people" was another corporate coup.

Then went Martin and then went Bobby. Who would be next? That was the question at the time. Another coup of corporate power: shredding the Constitutation and replacing it with Patriot Act that miraculously turned up on time, out of nowhere, no questions asked, no time to read it, passed unanimously. Tells me repeatedly our government is not ours. Our government is not FOR the people, OF the people and certainly not BY the people. Corporate people are the only people that count for anything. This surely is the Xtreme of Capitalism with USA cutting edge, getting there first, from which serious change will result. The present moment Xtreme of Capitalism is that the upper 1% has more money than the lower 50%, the people living in poverty, the working class, the working poor. These are the people that say, "I'm only getting $8 an hour. But I have better self-esteem about my work than at Hardees where I enabled the obese." If the change does not come by legislation, it will happen by revolution. Legislation isn't happening, yet. Occupy Wall St has tremendous potential for revolution, the reason the corporate news networks never make any mention of their demonstrations and corporations pass laws to criminalize them. The right wing is calling for revolution. We're at a place where it's no telling what yet will be. I was thinking while watching the film footage of Texas people in the early1960s, how very much cityscapes and fashions have changed, how pop culture has changed, how very different we are now from then. At the same time, we people are the same as then, just different fashions in hair styles, both men and women, and clothes.


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SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT HOME

robert rauschenberg, untitled, 1954

Today I started reading in Kent Nerburn's The Wolf At Twilight again and couldn't stop, went all the way through to last page. The last half of it didn't allow me to stop anyplace, except to get up and pour a refill of green tea. It is the beautiful writing, the 90 year old Lakota man Dan, who had been damaged for life by Indian school in his childhood, like all the other kids there, was searching to find what happened to his sister after they were separated as children. He wanted to know before he died. He called on Nerburn, who had written the earlier book of Dan and his world, his friend Grover, his granddaughter, Wenona, his dog, his bare essentials way of living. It's several years later, Dan wants Nerburn to find what he can of what happened to his sister, Yellow Bird, or Sarah after Indian school. Dan wanted to know if she was living, and if so wanted to find her. The first half, Nerburn sets the scene that we're in a culture totally different from our own, different way of thinking, different way of seeing. The last half is the search. Dan gave him a postage stamp size photo from when she was little. That picture was all Nerburn had to go by, and her name.



Nerburn was the one to call. He'd promised Dan he'd do what he could to find her. The Indians around Dan didn't believe he could do it. In the meantime, Dan talks to Nerburn while the cassette recorder is recording. He told the history of the Indians being eradicated from sea to sea by the boat people. He told a bit of experience in the Indian school, the kids dying, the kids killed. The martial treatment was off the track for Indian kids. Indians didn't hit their kids. They respected their kids. They saw the kids and the old people the ones closest to the Creator. He told the story of separation from his sister. Old Dan was using a walker in this volume. Ten years before, he declined someone lending him a hand to help him out of a chair, or in awkward places. By this time, when he's 90, he allows an assist with grace. Another volume in the history of the Native people, the story of a man in the last years of his life telling the history from the side of the people living on reservations in degraded conditions. A century later, they continue to have FBI for law enforcement on the res. People kept down in poverty in concentration camps, denied basic human dignity.



When I read the last page, I didn't want it to be over. Nerburn is a subtle writer. You think he's just giving a reading of what the weather is like at a given moment. Yet it's told in a perfectly clear sentence that when you pay attention the sentence is a little haiku of poetry. Several times I read over a sentence that pushed my Awe button for its beauty as as sentence in the English language. Through the spidery branches I could see the daylight fading. These two volumes are something on the order of documentary films. I'd love to see a film made of the story, drama or documentary, either way would do, without Robert Redford, Brad Pitt or Matt Damon, please. These are more along the lines of Black Elk Speaks, a record of what a Lakota man has to say at the end of his long life. It's not mysticism. It's history.



Then I caught a whim that I wanted to see Oliver Stone's W. with director's commentary. Had an idea it would be interesting to hear Stone talk about his film, scene by scene. It was. Very interesting. It's like the one thing I would like to ask a director of a film I appreciate to do for me, take me through it scene by scene, tell me what you were doing. Who's going to do that for a schmo in the mountains? Stone may have visited people at Roaring Gap some time along the years, was in driving distance to come over to my place, put the movie in and explain for me all the way through it what he was up to. Thank you, Mr Stone. Most gracious of you. I'll be your fan forever. Can I have your autograph before you go? Since I don't see that happening before the end of my lifetime, imagine how much I anticipated seeing it with Stone's commentary. I enjoy hearing an artist talk about his work in ways that illustrate his/her thinking. Stone has always made interesting films, whether or not I like the subject. It's Oliver Stone's vision that makes me want to see more, that made me take W home.



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OLIVER STONE'S W

cy twombly



In town today I went into Dollar General to get some lighters and a smell-good candle to neutralize the scent of dead mouse in a wall killed by d-con. This too will pass. I found a display of $5 DVDs. Only one looked like something I'd like to see, though with much reservation. It was W by Oliver Stone, released 2 years ago. I respect Stone's film making so much I thought I'd take a chance with it. As usual, Stone did it right. When it was finished, I concluded we've had the average American 4th grade little rich boy for President. We actually had a child for "the decider" for 8 years. When Reagan was doing his 8 years, I thought it couldn't be worse, then it was. I felt like the film followed W and let him be himself in his private life as well as in office. The choice of music was light-hearted happy music while we're watching our country being brought to its knees by Cheney, Rummy, Rice, and W through Karl Rove's ventriloquism. Dubya, as Molly Ivans called him, was Charlie McCarthy to Rove's Edgar Bergen.



Most poignant of all in the music was at the end when the credits rolled; Bob Dylan's Masters Of War played all the way through. The first music in the film that was not light hearted, that I noticed. I took the soundtrack to add some levity to the weighty story and I felt it was about the same as children's rhymes that tell where W was coming from inside himself. It gave him a tra-la-la touch: What Me Worry? Josh Brolin, the actor playing W, became him. Oliver Stone did a great deal of research into W's life. He came out true to the W remembered from those frightful years. Stammering at press conferences was the same in the film as then, leaving out the worst of it, like the time someone asked him a question about India. He started a sentence with a word or two, over and over, unable to answer because he didn't understand the question. He finally was so frustrated he turned around and walked away, leaving the press conference. You can see that on YouTube.



When he was governor of Texas, he said he believed God wanted him to be president. I thought: God the destroyer, of the 3 aspects of God; creator, preserver, destroyer. I can see it his way when I consider this is the time for the breakdown of everything in civilizastion, somebody was needed in the  most influential position on earth to kick the downward spiral into motion. Reagan, guided by God the destroyer, set up the decline and fall of the American Empire, and W's legal team took the election 20 years later, not by popular election, but by judicial fiat in a supreme court packed by the Reagan Revolution with right wing ideologues, and it paid off. Since Reagan, the courts all over the country have been shifted to the right by putting right wingers in as many judge positions as possible. The word Liberal, meaning somebody who believes in democracy and equal rights for all, has been changed to mean subversive. Alas, subversive to fascism only, which is why they want defenders of democracy out of the picture. Fascism is a word the corporate media won't use, though fascism means right wing militarism.



Yesterday on the news I heard you can't blame just one side in congress, you have to blame both sides, when it's only the republicans breaking down the democracy in congress. It sets my blood to boiling when I hear some media mouthpiece saying both sides are to blame. It's only both sides in that democrats are not about taking from the poor to give to the rich. That's just not a democrat principle, while among the republicans it is the driving purpose. The way republicans are winning elections tells me the American people want the end of what we have of democracy, at least 51 percent do. When it's gone, it's not given back. Attempts to get it back would be reaching to catch a falling knife.



At lunch with friend Jim Winfield yesterday, he was saying "we" about the fascist takeover of our government, and I said I can't join in the We, because I do not want American democracy overtaken by fascism. That I am powerless to change the direction back toward democracy makes it all the more They, not We. I am not a post-Reagan republican; therefore, not a member of We. I am We among American We The People, but not among the corporate powers sweeping democracy aside to get it out of the way for more money to take from We The People to help them work all the better against We The People. Talk, now, about democracy is called socialist, something far far away, forgotten in our past if we ever had democracy. In the time when democracy is going away, it seems like it has never been. Maybe it was an oligarchy / plutocracy all the way along. Reflection says it was, leading me to believe the democracy experiment in America has failed. Failed to the point that the republicans are goose-stepping toward putting the democratic party out of existence, because it has the same name as democracy. Shut down democracy as a goal and rule without opposition. Homeland Security.



We the people are so manipulated by propaganda that propaganda has become truth. In a cabinet meeting in Oliver Stone's film, the Gang of Four were talking about Middle Eastern dictators. Of Saddam Hussein, on of them said, "He's no Hitler." I thought, But one of you in that room is. Even better than Hitler, more sophisticated control machinations with at least equally effective propaganda manipulation. We the people have become we the suckers. If they were ever brought to court to be tried for UnAmerican Activities, they'd use for their justification: the dumb-asses should have known better. There was an awful lot of non-corporate press telling the truth of what they were doing. It was out there. Of course, they'll never be tried. It would cost the government too much after they've drained our resources. Ayn Rand is a novelist, not a philosopher. Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer, not a philosopher. These are the great minds, the guiding darkness for them that lurk in the dark.



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OLIVER STONE ARTIST

nicholas cage in wtc


I watched WORLD TRADE CENTER again last night and liked it a lot more than the first time. I'm able to see the artistry in a film better the second time when I know the story, know what to expect, and know its worth paying closer attention to. I wanted to hear Stone's running commentary, so today I watched it the third time, with Stone talking. I used subtitles for the film, because the volume was almost all the way down while Stone talked. He'd be commenting on something that was happening, and I wanted to know what they were saying too, because that was part of it. I've watched so many foreign films with subtitles, I use subtitles now with movies made in English, because there is so much whispering going on in movies, muttering and mumbling. I figure script writers get paid pretty well and they have a reason for being involved in the film. It tells me they're pretty good writers or they wouldn't have that job, though I have seen movies I'd prefer silent.



Listening to Stone talk about his film was the same as listening to an artist tell how a painting was inspired and painted, or telling about how he wrote a given work of fiction. I like having these director's commentaries. There is no way I could ever be acquainted with Oliver Stone and have enough time with him to listen to him tell about making WTC. He wouldn't do this conversationally. I hear an artist telling his decisions along the way in making the film. Seeing it with him telling it, I was able to see it more scene by scene and pay better attention to details in a given scene. I appreciated it all the more the 3rd time with commentary. The Marine evidently drawn to the wreckage by prayer lived someplace else. From the wreckage next morning he cellphoned his workplace and said he wasn't coming back. The man this character represented reenlisted and did tours in Iraq since 2001.



Not only did I learn much about Stone's process as an artist, what he looks for visually, how he and the crew work out problems. He noted that all the characters in the film were individuals who were involved in the original incident. In some cases, the original person played himself. The man Michael Pena played appeared in a few scenes as a cop. All of the scenes in the film of the two towers on fire and falling were done by computer animation. He said they didn't use footage from that time of the towers falling. A lot of the scenes on the street were filmed in LA. They had a certain amount of time to work in NY, so they had to do the scenes that had to be NY, then computer graphics in LA, and at the studio where they created a rubble heap to rescue the 2 men from. They did it so well, it seemed documentary. He said the wreckage covered 16 acres. That's a major chunk of ground.



At one point, Stone said while he was making the film, his motivation was "to help, in some way, the human condition." He's been like that from the beginning. He wants to participate in making the world a better place. Whatever that means. It means something different to each individual. He's not the only one. An awful lot of people are guided by a need to help, in some way, the human condition. Every individual has a particular purpose. One way I saw Stone helping the human condition in this film is understanding. He brought forward the human perspective, two love stories running parallel to each other, honoring working men as valid human beings, drawing attention to the heroic element in individuals when called upon. Especially, I felt, the American response to Emergency is where we see true democracy. Any race, religion or class will assist any race, religion or class at terrific risk in America.


I liked seeing the film with attention to the creation, scene by scene. He broke it down into three acts. First act was getting to know everybody, a New York morning, people getting up, going to work, the city in different early morning lights, Stone talking about how he loves the sky in NY. The sun coming up. The second act, the collapse, the darkness of being buried alive in 16 acres of wreckage. He went with the symbolism of coming out of the darkness into the light when they were rescued. From the dark pit to a flash of bright white light, white walls of hospital corridor scenes. He said he wanted to get through the hospital scenes as briefly as possible. There is absolutely nothing new that can be done with a hospital that hasn't already been done on television. The third act, the rescue and return, he talked much of how filming darkness required various lighting issues and close quarters issues. I feel like Stone transcended something with this film, something within himself as an artist. The next time I see it, I'll turn on the commentary of 4 of the actors. Maggie Gyllenhaal is suddenly my favorite American actress. There with Mira Sorvino and a few others. Sure enough, Oliver Stone saw CRASH and discovered Michael Pena there.



I have to give it to Oliver Stone. He is, indeed, a major American director. No two ways about it. I'm surprised by my own fascination with this film. I've noticed after seeing it 3 times, it is rewarding to watch several times for the subtleties throughout, for the brilliant photography throughout. Mostly, I have found Stone's films hard hitting, poking holes in the propaganda we're controlled by, assisting the human condition with understanding. Stone is a multi-talented artist I can't help but respect. I believe a beautiful work of art is an assist to the human condition, the same as Stone does. He's a fortunate man. His entire adult life has been lived doing what he wants to do. And he's done it well.