An Array of Utopian Flowers
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Reclaiming Land, Culture, & Narrative Through Black, Indigenous, & Queer Stewardship
Posted on October 3, 2022 | 1 Comment - Historic Political Transitions in Honduras, Colombia, and Haiti
Posted on September 26, 2022 | No Comments - Cultural Fire: Native Land Management and Regeneration
Posted on September 20, 2022 | 3 Comments - Tales of the Fifth Dimension – The Fifth Fedora Anthology
Posted on September 19, 2022 | 1 Comment - How to Establish a Food Forest with Jim Gale
Posted on September 11, 2022 | No Comments
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WilderUtopia in 102 Languages
‘Medicine Walk’ Featured in SBLitJo
Santa Barbara Literary Journal released ‘Bellatrix: Volume 3’ in June 2019, which among adventurous fiction, poetry, essays, and lyrics, features an excerpt of Jack Eidt’s psychic-animism fiction, Medicine Walk. Buy the book!
film Archive
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Slamdance Unstoppable: Disability, Justice, & Climate in Film
Posted on September 17, 2021 | No CommentsEcoJustice Radio talks with Juliet Romeo and Taylor Miller from Slamdance Unstoppable Film Festival, promoting disability and diversity inclusion in film. -
Cinematic Cultural Change in West Africa with Idrissa Ouédraogo
Posted on June 3, 2018 | 2 CommentsIdrissa Ouédraogo, whose simple, carefully observed movies about cultural change in Burkina Faso and elsewhere in Africa, brought him international acclaim and a top award at the Cannes International Film Festival, recently died. We share his first film, Yam Daabo (The Choice) about a family facing famine in the Sahel. -
Gogol’s Vision of Metaphysical Unraveling Amid the Dark Arts
Posted on August 9, 2017 | 1 CommentWatch the 1967 supernatural horror story "Viy" based on the 1835 novella by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, where a student philosopher from the Christian seminary encounters a young woman with dark powers who can summon the ogre, King of the Gnomes, which the author claims comes from Ukrainian folklore tradition. -
‘Solaris’ – Tarkovsky’s Vision Beyond an Urban Future
Posted on April 3, 2017 | 2 CommentsA startling vision of the future, somewhere in the cosmos on a planet yet unknown, Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky investigates apparitions of the irradiated mind in a nostalgic view of humanity looking into it's own mirror. -
Epic of Cruelty and Revolution in Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin’
Posted on October 25, 2016 | 3 CommentsBattleship Potemkin is a 1925 Soviet silent revolutionary propaganda film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm. It presents a dramatized version of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers. -
The Bear: Grizzly King and the Wilderness Homeland
Posted on March 3, 2016 | No CommentsWatch the 1988 French film The Bear, by Jean-Jacques Annaud, the story of an orphaned cub and a grizzly in the end of the 19th Century wilderness of British Columbia. The story is based on the 1912 book by James Oliver Curwood. -
Film: Carlos Reygadas Meditates on the Mennonites of Mexico
Posted on February 6, 2016 | 1 CommentCarlos Reygadas, the Mexican surrealistic filmmaker known for confounding audiences with somnolent landscapes and stark visions of humanity melding among the wily breeze, the flow of a silent river, and the meander of children wandering through tall grass. He has created a subtle masterpiece with his 2007 film Silent Light. -
The Big Short: A Culture Charmed by a Smiling Oligarchy
Posted on January 8, 2016 | No CommentsGuy Zimmerman, in reviewing the new Wall Street film The Big Short, muses on the desperate conformity required in today's entertainment in this new Gilded Age of oligarchy and disempowerment that has overtaken culture in the U.S. -
Vision LA Climate Action Arts Fest: The Road Through Paris
Posted on November 25, 2015 | 1 CommentLos Angeles comes alive this November and December, sponsored by SoCal 350 Climate Action, in calling for global climate agreements at the upcoming UN conference in Paris. This includes the Global Climate March (Nov 29) at L.A. City Hall, the Vision L.A. Climate Action Arts Festival (Nov 30 to Dec 11), the California Nurses Association Climate Convergence (Dec 3) at Pershing Square and Building Blocks Against Climate Change (Dec 12) along Wilshire Blvd. -
‘Selma’: Martin Luther King Jr. as Radical Peace and Anti-Poverty Activist
Posted on December 28, 2014 | 1 CommentThe 2014 film controversially reinstated the radical legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., where he spoke out against war and poverty and was marginalized by the political establishment as a result. This review of Ava DuVernay's Selma is by Zaid Jilani. -
Charles Bukowski: Madness is Never Ordinary
Posted on September 25, 2014 | 2 Comments"In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. If I write of "sadism" it is because it exists, I didn't invent it, and if some terrible act occurs in my work it is because such things happen in our lives. I am not on the side of evil, if such a thing as evil abounds." -- Charles Bukowski -
Orson Welles: Tragic Hero, Sacred Monster, Profane Clown
Posted on July 3, 2014 | 3 CommentsOrson Welles, the cinematic genius who ended his days selling cheap wine, was both noble and feeble, titanic and pathetic, sacred monster and profane clown, says Peter Conrad. We take samples from his oeuvre, his noir thriller The Stranger and his stylistic fragmentation, Othello. -
Walkabout: Following Songlines Beyond the Western Frame
Posted on May 2, 2014 | No CommentsWalkabout, vision quest, walking in Dreamtime, all of it refers to a particular rite of passage from the indigenous Australians, but also in evidence in animist cultures throughout the world. The 1971 film of the same name narrates a young woman and her brother's journey beyond their Western frame, but never quite able to follow the ancestor paths, or songlines, of the land. -
Lady Lazarus: The Hurt Imagination of Sylvia Plath
Posted on April 25, 2013 | 3 CommentsRobert Pinsky on Sylvia Plath: "Thrashing, hyperactive, perpetually accelerated, the poems of Sylvia Plath catch the feeling of a profligate, hurt imagination, throwing off images and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open." -
Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Subversive Champion of the Disinherited
Posted on March 11, 2013 | 4 CommentsAlmost forty years after his violent death, Pier Paolo Pasolini, filmmaker, poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, painter, actor, and all-around intellectual public figure, remains a subject of passionate argument. Best known for a subversive and difficult body of film work, loaded with Renaissance and Baroque iconography, he championed the disinherited and damned of postwar Italy, mingling an intellectual leftism with a fierce Franciscan Catholicism. -
The Battle of Algiers: A Brutal Portrait of Urban Guerrilla Warfare
Posted on January 26, 2013 | 2 CommentsGillo Pontecorvo's 1966 masterpiece, "The Battle of Algiers," as a study of the brutality of urban guerrilla warfare, serves an Arab-street-level counterpoint to Kathryn Bigelow's US-imperialism-centered, torture-driven war propaganda film, "Zero Dark Thirty." -
Ingmar Bergman: A Tenuous Searching Faith in “The Seventh Seal”
Posted on January 22, 2013 | 4 CommentsThe Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet) is a 1957 Swedish film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set in Sweden during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight and a game of chess he plays with the personification of Death, who has come to take his life. -
Overcoming Cultural Colonialism: Journey to Understand “Ikland”
Posted on January 12, 2013 | 2 CommentsIkland recounts a quest to re-connect with the Ik people. For producer Cevin Soling, they represented the last outpost of imagination in a world devoid of myth. Soling and his crew risked their lives by traveling through war-ravaged northern Uganda to reach them. Their experience was alien and surreal in ways only Jonathan Swift might have imagined... -
Beasts of the Southern Wild: Bayou Culture Sinking into the Gulf – By Jack Eidt
Posted on August 28, 2012 | 1 Comment"Beasts," a hard-knock ecological fairy tale about the disappearing Louisiana bayou coastline, highlights the fragility of the region's hurricane defenses and the resulting devastation of communities and cultures living on the flooding margins. -
Dirty Realism: The Anti-Social Satire of Charles Bukowski
Posted on August 18, 2012 | 4 CommentsI go outside - and all up and down the street - the green armies shoot color - like an everlasting 4th of July, - and I too seem to swell inside, - a kind of unknown bursting, - a feeling, perhaps, that there isn't any - enemy - anywhere
