Believing in a Safe World

I'm interested in a return to a belief that the world is safe. When you talk with people about child-rearing, one of the fondest memories is of unfettered play in childhood--walking to and from school without an adult, playing with the kids in the neighborhood until mom called you home for dinner.

But today's middle class parents keep their children under close supervision. They are dropped off and picked up from school sometimes until their senior year. Their orbits are very small for the first 13-14 years of life. Many kids are not allowed to even run down the block to a friend's house without an adult for fear of being snatched.

My experience is that it's a safe world. I have never been snatched and no one I know has ever been snatched, except by a noncustodial parent. Yet the news would have us believe that there are predators around every corner. That we are bad parents if we let our children have freedom of movement. That it is criminally negligent to let your child play in the neighborhood outside of the watchful eye of an adult.

I have these questions:

• Is it really a less safe world?
• At what point does our own experience get to contradict what we're being fed by the media?
• If we have a nostalgia for another time, why don't we re-create it?
• How does a generation of children raised in a culture of fear govern?

More on this later.

Four Snouts up for Bridge to Teribithia

(:)(:)(:)(:) for Bridge to Teribithia the new Disney flic playing everywhere. I loved this movie. I really did. Of course, part of this is a function of low expectations. I hadn't read the book. And it's a kids film and it's Disney. But the reviews have been mostly positive, so I was hopeful. It wasn't like I was going to see Norbit (the thought of which just terrifies me).

Bridge to Teribithia is about two remarkable 6th graders who create a kingdom that shimmers in the ambiguity between imaginary and real.

Part of my enjoyment is that I took 3 remarkable 6th and 5th graders to see the film. I loved watching them watch it. The movie is perfect for this age group because the story line lives on the edge between "reality" and "imagination." Between the cruel social world of school and escapism of after school play. That edge is the true realm of my 6th grader, who spends his days at school battling the cruel tyrant of the lunch room and his afternoons battling mythical creatures in novels, video games and with his friends.

The story has complexity and depth, more than you'd expect. It's uncomfortably, tragically sad in parts and silly and sweet and in others. I'd recommend it for anyone except children under 8 or 9, depending upon emotional maturity.

My California Day

8:00am Rise, dress, brush teeth, quickly revise flyer for Unconditional Love movie night
8:30 Drive to and attend personal recovery meeting, don't hand out flyer because may be precluded by recovery tradition
10:20am Return home and make calls to neighbors in my intentional community
11:30am Eat lunch of fresh organic greens with tuna, organic apple and organic peanut butter
12:30pm Pray and meditate in park
12:45pm Random Senagalese man asks for help in park, tell him he'll have to wait until I'm through meditating. He sits down next to me and says, "I will meditate with you."
1:00pm After meditating with him, help Senagalese man fill out job application for busboy position--he would rather sell drums
1:30pm Run 3 miles in park
2:00pm Take hot tub with sick child
2:30pm Review recovery literature with sick child's head on lap
3:00pm Head toward natural food co-op to pick up wheat and dairy free necessities, make phone calls on cell
3:05pm Abrupt U-turn into free "psychic fair"
3:15pm Receive free aura cleansing
3:30pm Receive partial psychic reading
4:00pm Sit in car and make notes from psychic reading, make cell calls to people to tell them to come down to the free psychic fair
5:30pm Return home from natural foods co-op, make wheat and dairy free dinner, with vegan option
6:45pm Eat dinner with family--quiz well child on spelling words
7:30pm Clean kitchen wearing ipod and headlamp
8:20pm Clean intentional community Common House wearing ipod only--if only I had brought the headlamp!
9:15pm Kiss children goodnight
9:30pm Watch HBO netflix DVD episode of Six Feet Under with husband...
11:30pm Download old gospel music to itunes and burn to disk for New Thought Gospel Choir Director
11:50pm Blog about it

Term-inator II

(say this in a movie announcer voice):
they terrified you last summer when they teamed up to
terminate real campaign finance reform. Now they're back at it again--Term-inator II: term limits extended.

Okay, Sara, speak English--it's this: it made news today that the Chamber of Commerce, California Teachers Association and Sacramento Democratic political consultant Gale Kaufman
have created "an unholy alliance" to extend term limits for state legislators.

Trouble is, no one reported that this alliance is not new. As recently as 3 months ago, the exact same players (with the exception of Schwarzenegger strategist Matthew Dowd), CTA, Chamber of Commerce and Kaufman put their heads and their budgets together to defeat Proposition 89, the measure on the California ballot that would have given the bums' rush to political corruption in this state by creating publically funded elections.

It's powerful to couple the friendly face of teachers with big business money and GOTV know-how and they intend to do it again.

I happen to think that term limits should be extended. Not so members of the legislature can keep their jobs, so voters have a chance to elect legislators capable of passing complex legislation.

What brings this alliance together in both instances is the need to protect entrenched power. Maybe they can use that rallying cry to name their committee. You know, "paid for by Sweet Innocent Teachers To Protect Entrenched Power" or, just Term-inator II

Hair on DVD: Flawed Movie with Amazing Scenes & Score

(:)(:)(:) for the movie Hair on DVD, directed by Milos Forman and starring John Savage and Treat Williams (yum).

(:)(:)(:)(:)(:) for the music, and the scene of Black Boys, White Boys.

This is one of those movies that clearly strove for excellence and missed the mark, but contains some dynamite screen moments that are a shame to miss. Director Milos Forman attempted to make the most of the transition from a relatively low budget groundbreaking Broadway hit to the silver screen.

Trouble is, he did it at the just the wrong time: 1979, after the anthems to drugs, free love, racial equality, clean air and anti Vietnam War message had lost their shock power and long before nostalgia for the 60's/70's set in. 1979 was also during that 2 decade stretch when every live action movie musical flopped, long before Chicago revived the possibility.

Still, the movie is beautifully filmed and the score is in my judgment better interpreted (at least for modern audiences) than the Broadway recording, with stronger talent, harder rock sounds and driving beats in some key numbers, and just stronger dramatic choices.

A perfect example is "Easy to be Hard"--which is performed with consequence in this movie by a pregnant churchgoing middle class girl, abandoned by her hippy boyfriend, as a heart-wrenching inquiry into the hypocrisy of the left:

"Easy to be hard. Easy to say no. Especially people who care about strangers, who say they care about social injustice, do you only care about the bleeding crowd, how about a needy friend, I need a friend. "

But the single best number in the movie, and one of my very favorite scenes in any movie ever, is "Black Boys, White Boys" in which Forman chose to cut back and forth between formidable teams of black and white women singing in Central Park while ogling passing boys and an all male (black and white) draft board singing about how they love "black boys" and then "white boys" while inspecting nude recruits reporting for duty. It is hilarious, musical, sexy and perfectly edited.

Okay, enough about Hair--if you get a chance to see it, you're lucky, it doesn't sit on many video shelves.

Make Mine Vanilla

Food bugaboo of the week:

You see it everywhere now, vanilla milk, vanilla yogurt, vanilla creme, but not many people know that vanilla is the new codeword for sugar. In fact, if you scan the ingredient list on a "vanilla" item, there's a decent chance you won't find "vanilla" listed as an ingredient, but it's a lock that you'll find sugar (aka corn syrup, cane syrup, cane juice, rice syrup--sorry, it's all sugar).

My particular favorite is soy "milk." Regular soy milk is already loaded with sugar. Many health conscious people, who wouldn't dream of putting chocolate milk on their cereal or feeding it to young children buy vanilla soy milk, which has almost as much sugar as chocolate milk.

...and if it says "very vanilla," do not pass go, go directly to diabetic coma.

Four Snouts up for Quinceanera

(:)(:)(:)(:) out of a possible five snouts up for Quinceanera on DVD. This bittersweet film captured my heart by depicting a small but completely unexplored subject for mainstream America, the latin American rite of passage for girls on their 15th birthday.

By weaving together the difficulities in a 14 year old girl's life with the realities of gentrification in Echo Parque, Los Angeles, this movie gives us a peak into a tender, bittersweet, but credible situation. The casting was sublime, especially the role of Tio Tomas--our heroine Magdalena's great great uncle with whom she comes to live as her Quinceanera celebration approaches--he absolutely is the old guy who for years has sold everyone in the neighborhood some delicious concoction from thermoses in a shopping cart.

See this movie: it's sweet, it's got drama, sex, ambiguity, and humerously unusual culture clashes.

Some cynics will lament the happy ending, or question whether the ending can really be so happy when it embraces a Hummer Limo? I say si, si, a mi me gusto La Quinceanera!

Political Consultants Need to Be Reigned In

With it now looking likely that there will be a February presidential primary next year in California (adding a third election to the regular June primary and November general election), our political consultants are beginning the mad feeding frenzy for the cash laid out in any new round of ballot initiatives.

Yes, for some reason our Constitution allows ballot initiatives every time there's an election. These animals called political consultants are completely unregulated and make big money off every dollar contributed to any campaign in the state.

What does the public get in return? In the couple of months before elections: vast amounts of negative television and radio ads in our eyes and ears and voluminous manipulative direct mail pieces in our mail boxes--especially pernicious are the misleading slate mail pieces that endorse all your favorite electeds linking them to the wrong position on a given initiative or two.

And in the slow times? Mystifying full page ads "thanking" Governor Schwarzenegger for his support.

Enough. It's time to regulate these political parasites. I'd suggest taxing political consultants as a great funding source for public financing of elections if it didn't ensure that every political consultant in the state dropped everything to defeat that idea.

Sigh. I gotta go. I have an urgent email to respond to from Ahamed Ahamed--apparently he's got a sick brother and needs my help with a banking matter...

All Republicans are saying...

is give General Petreaus a chance. Can't you just picture them holding hands and swaying together?

What they aren't saying, mind you, is support our President. The Republicans in Congress who still support the escalation, are rallying around the new and supposedly highly respected general.

BTW, whenever I think of people holding hands and swaying I can't help but flash to the Brady Bunch's cover of "American Pie"--grinning broadly and belting it out as only the BB's can "and as I saw him on the stage, my hands were clenched in fists of rage..."

Diana & Cynthia's Excellent Venture

I am now well acquainted with the Ultimate Hair and Nail Salon at 23rd and J Street in Sacramento. It's owned by Diana, who runs it with her sister, Cynthia. Diana and Cynthia were born in Vietnam, moved to Seattle as teenagers with their families. They put themselves through college and set out to create success for themselves.

Diana moved to Sacramento first, got married, had a baby and bought the Ultimate Hair and Nail Salon, a run down looking business which had operated for some 40 years in what's now a trendy section of Sacramento. She spruced it up a little, not a lot, rented back a station to a haircutter from the old establishment and started pulling in clients.

"It was hard at first," says Diana. "I got a lot of clients and I needed assistance. I hired several people but they say they'd come, and then not come. They were not reliable. They would call in sick. Sometimes not call in at all. I kept asking Cindy, when you gonna move from Seattle? She say maybe next year. Finally, it next year, she came. There's nothing like family, it is so great that she's here."

Diana and Cindy live near each other. They're both married, both have children. Their husbands both work for larger corporations in far flung suburbs. One of them, I forget which, lives with their parents. The parents cook for all of them every night and watch the children while they're away at work.

They are Buddhists, but they always have a Christmas tree. As Cindy put it, "Christmas not really religious. Christmas is about being American. We want to be American, so we have a Christmas tree."

They like me a lot because they can talk me into anything,

"Sara, how about you have an eyebrow wax before your hair cut?" okay
"How about you have a facial?" okay
"How about you bring your daughter in for pedicure?" okay

I pretty much do whatever they tell me to do.
And they do a great job at everything. They keep their appointments. They do great nails, great hair. They charge very little. They never complain. They never run anyone down. They appear to love their work and they resist my efforts to speculate as to the ages of the clients who have been coming to their station renter for 40 plus years ("They good clients. Longtime clients.")

I wouldn't be surprised if I'm coming to Cindy and Diana when I'm 85 too.

800,000 Privileged Youths Enlist To Fight In Iraq

This is just way too funny--plus mentions my alma mater:

800,000 Privileged Youths Enlist To Fight In Iraq

WASHINGTON—"I didn't realize you could just sign up," said 26-year-old Brookline, MA resident and law-school grad Daniel Feldman.

Five Snouts Up for "Groundhog Day" 17 years later

(:)(:)(:)(:)(:) out of a possible five snouts for Groundhog Day the 1993 movie starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. Tonight my kids and I started a new tradition of watching it annually on February 2nd--important because in other respects our Groundhog Day observance went lacking (groundhog is only safe for O blood types to eat and I've discovered I'm an A).

An amazing 17 years after it was made, the movie endures. My 10 and 12 year old love it for its BillMurray silliness and mulitiple suicide attempts--"play the part where he runs off the cliff with the groundhog again!" I love it for its profound spiritual lesson: what do you do when every day is pretty much the same?

Stage one: eat, smoke, drink and fuck everything in sight.
Stage two: try to manipulate the people around you into thinking you're a good person so that you can get what you want
Stage three: attempt suicide
Stage four: accept that now is the only moment you have so make it count--learn to play piano, speak and read French, master brain surgery, ice sculpture, and above all love every single person you meet beyond reason, without expectation, and with true humility.

Then and only then do you get to move on.

I fully expect to be watching and learning from this film in 2024.

I'll Miss Molly Ivins

There's no way I can do justice to Molly Ivins' passing. As a bold, large, sassy, hilarious woman who was one of the most insightful political commentators in the country, she was one of my heros. She was one of those people who just by being herself gave other people permission to be themselves.

She dubbed Bush "dubya" and "shrub," she wrote about the hilarious and horrible happenings on the floor of the Texas "lege."

Go out and buy one of her collections of columns and just savor every word.

Should I join the movie bloggers?

I have been "discovered" in the blogosphere. That is to say, some program that sweeps around looking for movie bloggers has contacted me to ask me to join "movie bloggers.com" whereby my movie reviews would be co-posted on this site.

At first I was flattered--they like me, they really like me! Then I linked. The good news: the actual reviews posted there are not embarrassing company to keep. The bad news: the ads. 1 ad was for Venezuelan brides, another for bizarre sex aids, another for singletarians (unmarried Unitarians)--do I want to be associated with this?

Tonight, however, I notice that ads have changed to wireless surveillance cameras--an upgrade? Stay tuned...

Come Down with Clown Syndrome

My insanely funny and successful friend Russ Haan is at it again. This time, he's trying to spread Clown Syndrome across the land.

Don't check out the website and watch the hilarious uTube videos. If you do, you'll find yourself, like I did, ordering a clown kit, planning to videotape a sequence of yourself in a clown costume, going about your business.

Next time Bill is in a photo op with Arnold, he's wearing the clown suit.

Ask yourself this: what will you do as a clown?

Four Snouts up for When the Stars Fall

(:)(:)(:)(:) out of a possible five snouts up for the travelling production of Lacandona or When the Stars Fall which I saw at Cal State Sacramento billed as children's theater. For the most part, this amazing performance art of dance, song and unparalleled computer-graphic scenery went straight over the heads of the fifth graders I was chaperoning.

This production is a road show from Mexico City--possibly coming to a city near you soon, look for it. If you're Katie Laris, don't just look for it, see it. The two performers dance, sing and interact with a series of moving opaque screens which have computer graphics projected on them. Sometimes the performers actually seem to move the things on the screen, throwing things to each other that dart across the screens, arranging the sometimes abstract, sometimes representational objects.

The story is an environmental theme following a trip with mother and daughter through the rain forest, to find out why the stars are falling. Our performance was bilingual, heavily accented English, all songs in Spanish. Some performances are Spanish only. It made me wonder, will constructed, painted sets one day be a thing of the past replaced only by holographic computer projections...

Get real about the real estate market

Is it just me, or is ridiculous for people to talk about not selling because of the downturn in the real estate market? I'm talking about people who have owned property in California for years. This is just sillyness.

You don't hold on to your house, when you would otherwise want to sell it, because it's worth 2.8 times what you bought it for instead of 3 times what you bought it for.

I could understand holding off if you bought it for more than you could get for it, or if you bought it predominantly as an investment property and it's not worth your while to convert your investment, but if you bought it to live in and you've lived in it and it's more than doubled in value, in what sense is it a bad decision to sell it now?

The market could theoretically make your property quadruple in value too. Does that mean that you don't sell it at the peak of the market because it's only worth three times what you paid for it?

In 1992 we bought a beautiful row house 7 blocks from the U.S. Capitol for $222,000. In 1997, we sold it at a loss for $212,000 (which for us was the right decision because we needed to get our equity out and had enjoyed living there for 5 years prior to selling). Today, if the woman who bought the house from us for $212,000 in 1997 decided to sell she might only fetch $500,000 for it in the "slow" real estate market of Washington, DC, instead of the $600,000 she could have gotten last year; should she hold off?

Closely related, some of those who do put their houses on the market complain that the property doesn't sell. Why doesn't it sell? Because they they're asking too much for it. If they lowered the price, the homes would sell.

It never ceases to amaze me that people don't understand the fundamental principle of the real estate market: a property is only worth what people will pay for it, nothing more, nothing less. There is no independent concept of "what the property is worth."

3 Snouts up for Curse of the Golden Flower

(:)(:)(:) out of a possible 5 snouts for Curse of the Golden Flower now playing in art houses everywhere.

This film like many directed by Zhang Yimou has everything you would want in a big Chinese epic: Chow Yun Fat, Gong Li, glorious color and costume, insanely improbable fight scenes, jealousy, plots and most of all incestuous royalty.

There is more personal intrigue and less fighting than some of these things, so that held my interest a bit. Also the sheer scale and color is visually arresting, if, like the fighting completely improbable and distracting. Mostly, though, I was bored by it and had trouble caring. If you're going to see it, see it on the big screen. Better yet, stay home and watch the Sopranos on DVD.

Sigh. Should I perhaps stop seeing movies?

Three Snouts Up for Syriana on DVD

(:)(:)(:) out of a possible five snouts up for Syriana, executive produced by George Clooney. I was disappointed in this movie.

I expected a sort of freshness and honesty or something shocking or a sort of critical quality that was beyond what I had seen in other Hollywood international suspense movies--didn't get it.

I also expected a level of sophistication and complicated intrigue that went out of fashion a couple of decades ago. You know with the movies that you had to follow really closely to be able to know what was going on--also didn't get it.

What I got was a confusing, and largely not intriguing, set of interlocking plot lines, sprinkled with a heavy dose of didacticism. Rather than keeping me on my toes, no one was taking any chances that I wouldn't grok the interlocking interests of big business, oil, U.S. Government and middle east princes--thanks for the education, Clooney.

I'm sure there are people who learned things about the lengths to which the US government might go to protect American business interests, but I wasn't really one of them.

I'm sure there are people who cared whether the middle eastern princes lived or died, and who succeeded whom, but I wasn't really one of them.

I'm sure there are people who understood why we had to learn so much about the Clooney character's wife and son, the missing missle, Matt Damon's travails (not to mention the virginal pakistani boys) only to have all this information rendered largely if not completely irrelevent in the last few minutes of the film, but I wasn't one of them.

Because of my love for George Clooney, from his politics to the tilt of his head (my neighbor maintains that there is a national network of straight men that are "queer for Clooney"), and an inexplicable Matt Damon fetish, I am granting this DVD one more snout than it may deserve.

Otherwise, I might suggest that you wait for it to come out on toilet paper.

3 Snouts Up for "Freedom Writers"

(:)(:)(:) out of a possible 5 snouts up for Freedom Writers starring Hilary Swank and directed by Richard LaGravanese playing in movie theaters everywhere now.

This is one of those films that is driven entirely by narrative--a great story to tell. It's well-acted and reasonably well-written. Beyond that, it has little to offer as a movie. It's predictable as hell. It seems to have had the budget of an ABC after school special (although Hilary Swank executive produced or I'm guessing it wouldn't have gotten made, and it obviously had a decent promotional budget).

Nonetheless, I am such a sucker for the spunky dedicated school teacher who takes a bunch of ne'er do well kids and inspires them story. And this story, being true, and being told in a way that genuinely makes you truly care about these kids, is really worth seeing.

I cried...several times...something I rarely do in movies (but often in weddings).