Starting in the late 1960s, a motley group of young poets and painters took over abandoned shacks bordering the mouth of the Skagit River within walking distance to La Conner. They lived there for a decade without the burden of rent, running water or electricity.

As a fellow-traveler from that time observed in the catalog for Fishtown and the Skagit River, an exhibit at the Museum of Northwest Art, through Oct. 3:

I never lived in Fishtown. I couldn’t afford the rent.

Yeah, I know, the place was well beyond the reach of landlords and realtors, but let’s face it, the wages of Zen are not inconsiderable: all that chopping wood and hauling water.

Fishtown disappeared as property values rose, bulldozed out of existence in 1980 and leaving a number of curatorial choices for its examination. Curator Kathleen Moles chose inclusion. Anybody with mud on his (or more rarely her) cracked boots who lived lean and wet on that river has a place in the show, if anything he made happens to survive, even on a postcard.

Full story…

A billion here, a billion there, before you know it, we’re talking about real money. The Associated Press reports:

A U.S. audit has found that the Pentagon cannot account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraq reconstruction money, spotlighting Iraqi complaints that there is little to show for the massive funds pumped into their cash-strapped, war-ravaged nation.(more)

Ninety-five percent of the funds missing isn’t lax oversight. It’s a heist.

Add this to the long record of missing weapons, massive cost overruns for projects that go nowhere (in both Iraq and Afghanistan) and the billions in unaccounted for funds that may or may not have been paid to contractors — or Lord knows who — and you might see a pattern here.

Full story…

The other morning, my wife saw a yellow Wilson’s warbler perched in the old, cracked apple tree in front of our house. When she told me she had seen the bird, I thought north to the Canadian boreal forest where it had probably fledged, and to a third-floor office in Seattle’s 1913-vintage Securities Building.

It’s in that Seattle office from which the Pew Charitable Trusts have engineered a deal that may be a giant step toward saving huge swaths of that forest. At the end of May, Pew, eight other environmental groups and the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC) announced an agreement covering 180 million acres of boreal forest, which has been called the largest conservation agreement in history.

Read the full story at crosscut.com.

Seattle Film Guide: July 23-29

Opening this Week

 Dinner For Schmucks ”francis veber’s original was fundamentally on the side of the idiots, Not so Dinner, which turns the original’s snobbish cruel editor into paul rudd” Dan Kois, The Weekly

South of the Border  Read Bill White’s Seattle PostGlobe Review

Countdown to Zero  ”at any moment, the human world could go up in smoke” Charles Mudude, The Stranger

 Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore  ”the bloody race war between cats and dog reaches a temporary truce” Lindy West, The Stranger

Charlie St. Cloud  ”zac efron plays baseball in a cemetery with his dead brother’s ghost” Lindy West, The Stranger

Limited Runs 

Stonewall Uprising (Metro, July 30-Aug 5) “laid out with the simplistic certainty of the best propaganda” David Schmader, The Stranger

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo (Grand Illusion, July 30-Aug 5) Read Bill White’s Seattle PostGlobe Review

Dog Star Man (NWFF, August 4 only)   Read Bill White’s Seattle PostGlobe Review

Special Program

 The Genius of Insanity: Five Films From João César Monteiro (NWFF, July 30-August 5)

 “I think my film represents above all the proof, to those who want to understand and accept it, that poetry can’t be filmed, that it is useless to try.” —João César Monteiro 

 Look at a photograph of the underappreciated Portuguese auteur João César Monteiro, who died in 2003, and you will see a man resembling a cross between Nosferatu and Woody Allen. Its no wonder then that his cinematic fingerprints are some of the most memorable you’ll ever see. It’s not clear under what influence Monteiro worked, but he was certainly international cinema’s randiest rapscallion. Practicing his own brand of slowed-down slapstick, his films puncture preconceptions about power and age, beauty and desire. Never has the cinema dared to depict obsessiveness so unblinkingly and with such contained irony. Join us in sharing these indelible images as we honor the legendary man from Portugal who is remembered both for his madness and for his acts of overwhelming cinematic charity.

 Now Playing

Agora  What went wrong?  Chilean born Alejandro Amenábar  has been such a reliable director, with “Open Your Eyes” and “The Sea Inside” being  two of the best Spanish pictures of the last decade.  Even his first English language film, “The Others,” was distinguished, so we can’t blame the total failure of “Agora” on  a language or cultural problem.  Even discounting the total sham and shambles of a script that attributes the discovery of elliptical orbits to a woman who lived 12 centuries before  Johannes Kepler set down the laws of planetary motion,  “Agora” is a lousy picture, with Rachel Weisz’s Hypatia being the most ludicrous historical impersonation  since John Wayne played Genghis Khan in “The Conqueror.” Everything in “Agora” is off the mark and over the top, from the thick black eyebrows that look like they were etched upon the  actors with pieces of coal, to the soundtrack that sounds like it is signaling the end of the world every time something exciting is supposed to be happening. The story begins in 391 AD, with the Christians storming the library at Alexandria, and ends  some years later with Cyril’s plan to exterminate the Alexandrian Jews. Spanning these two events is the love story between   philosopher Hypatia and her admirer Orestes, who proclaims his love by sticking two flutes in his mouth and  blowing  them simultaneously like Roland Kirk.  In truth, it was the relationship between these two that was blamed for Orestes’ resistance to Cyril’s way of running things in Alexandria,  a situation that was barbarically resolved by Hypatia being ambushed and skinned alive.  In the movie, she is stoned for witchcraft,  apparently because she disputed the geometry through which it was believed God designed the universe.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo (Grand Illusion, July 30- Aug 5)

Is it true that putting a hornet into a jar of sake will increase its strength from fourteen to fifty proof? Are the fireflies gathering on the willow tree the spirits of recently deceased ancestors? “Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo,”  a documentary taking a view of insects that is closer to “The Secret Life of Plants” than “Starship Troopers,” is more intent upon free-floating supposition than scientific evidence,  Director Jessica Oreck  discovers the  relationships between insects and the Japanese people  in this curious  exploration of  science, folklore religion, and, perhaps above all, collecting.   She begins by profiling the  people who collect beetles and other bugs to sell to city-bound people who can’t go bug-picking themselves. Later, we see the customers in the insect stores selecting their future beloved pets. We Westerners, with our cultivation of worm and ant farms, should not laugh at those  who covet the queen beetle.  After all, they are learning the mysteries of life in a microcosm, while we witness nothing but the industrious labor of the over-burdened ant.    Oreck illustrates how a  haiku is the expression of the natural world as illuminated by the studious  observation of insects, and how Buddhism incorporated the insectology of Shinto belief into its philosophy of life, death, and rebirth.  Although the insect footage never approaches the stunning detail of the 1996 French documentary, “Microcosmos,” there are enough shots of  weird looking bugs to  keep the viewer visually engrossed.  Oreck is more interested in the philosophical ramifications of bug watching than mere insect voyeurism.  However, when she catches  the struggle of a dead insect to be reborn as a living one, her camera gets as involved in the process as a midwife.

Dog Star Man (NWFF, Aug.4)

Twenty years after Stan Brakhage completed “Dog Star Man,” non-narrative filmers were still making new works from  his tools. Whereas peers such as   Bruce Conner had created  finite systems that contained remarkable if limited visions, Brakhage offered a new physics of the cinema that would prove the foundation of an empiricism that over-ruled the interpretation of its sensory images.  “Dog Man Star”   also suggested the patterns of neo-structuralism that informed the liberation of words from grammar in John Cage’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1988-99.  The game of identifying the repetitive images of the film is contrary to the non-representational role  they play.  One cannot argue simply that this is a  solar flare and this the rotating moon, this a man with his dog climbing a snow-clad mountain and these  the lights of modern transportation, this a pregnant woman and this a wet red membrane of the body.  None of this means anything. The bloody heart is simply an ocsillation of red shades, the solar flare a means of pulling the color away from its source. Those who try to read “Dog Man Star” as an allegory of man’s futile journey up the mountain are liable to come away from the film with nothing.  The meaning is the immediate experience, not in reflection upon or analysis of the experience. This one time showing of the film in its original 16 mm projection is an opportunity to experience the film as Brakhage intended,  and those who carelessly apply  terms like ‘painting’ to anything  visually superior to television will see what it really means to paint with film.      

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We  in Gringolandia receive  little news regarding our friends to the South.   Unless one of the leaders down there does something to tick off one of the leaders up here, we are pretty much in the dark  as to the policies and positions of the many countries with whom we share this hemisphere. Oliver Stone, with his portraits of seven elected  South American presidents, takes  a remedial step towards bringing us Yanks up to date on  the subject.

“South of the Border”  is by no means a comprehensive essay on South American politics, but it does give presidents Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Lula da Silva (Brazil), Cristina Kirchner (Argentina), her husband and ex-president ex-President Néstor Kirchner, Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), and Raúl Castro (Cuba) an unprecedented opportunity to  present themselves and their ideas to the world media without censorship.

While the cumulative impression of a Bolivarian revolution sweeping the continent is somewhat farfetched, it is closer to the truth than the general perception that Chavez’s social reforms in Venezuela are the maniacal impositions of a renegade dictator.  The time spent with Chavez reveals a man much different from the one George W. Bush and the North American media concocted. One would be naïve to blindly accept Stone’s presentation of Chavez as an objective portrait, but the important thing is that the president is given the opportunity to present himself as he  wishes, outside of the prejudicial and antagonistic  perspective of a hostile press.

While Stone’s non-judgmental approach is admirable,  it sometimes  results in interviews that are less incisive than what  a more probing mind might have achieved.   But  the casual banter of these fireside chats  has a disarming openness that might be denied a more aggressive interviewer.  Stone is no William F. Buckley, or even a David Frost, nor is he  pretending to be.  What he accomplishes in “South of the Border”  is a humanization of political leaders who have been demonized by the North American press.

Sometimes the difference in North and South perspectives can be illuminating.  For example, the idea that Venezuela  is interested in exporting revolution is decried as something that could only be fabricated by a  country with a propensity toward  exporting its own ideology.  The claim is made that each country in South America has its specific needs and what will work in Bolivia is not necessarily right for Peru. If this is true, then the whole idea of Allende’s Chili being an extension of Castro’s Cuba has been a sham all along.

In the 1967 Mexican comedy, “Su excelencia.”  Cantinflas played the ambassador of a fictional South American country that was voting on whether to side with the United States or Russia. In his final speech, the ambassador states his belief that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the ideology of either country, but it is the way such ideologies are implemented and used to exploit smaller countries that make both of them equally unattractive, and he suggests they vote for neither, but  maintain their own independence.

This is essentially the position of  the seven presidents interviewed in “South of the Border.”  They demand  the autonomy to find their own solutions to their own problems, regardless of whether the seeds of the solutions are to be found in socialism, communism, or capitalism. This is what the U.S, finds so subversive in leaders such as Chavez, and why they are labeled as dictators when in fact they have been democratically elected.  It is also why “South of the Border,”  the most important film of the year, was unceremoniously  dumped into the Meridian Theater  and, after an ignominiously brief two-week run,  sent back to the vaults.

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From Larry Johnson’s blog: Looking for Trouble.

The following material about what it means to be an American is an excerpt from an article by Valeria Fernández, at 90DAYSTOPHOENIX. You can read the full story here. This is part four of an ongoing series of videos I’m using with permission. To read part one, click here; to read part two, click here; for part three, click here.

90DAYSTOPHOENIX.com is an independent media project that has been documenting Arizona’s ongoing struggle to “sift through the truth and lies behind the immigration debate.” Journalists, photographers, filmmakers and others are working together to give a real-time on-the-ground account of Arizona’s controversial new immigration law – SB 1070 – that will take effect tomorrow. Another goal of the project is to show as large an audience as possible how this new law will effect people throughout the state.

According to the Associated Press,  “A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the most controversial parts of Arizona’s immigration law from taking effect, delivering a last-minute victory to opponents of the crackdown. The overall law will still take effect Thursday, but without the provisions that angered opponents — including sections that required officers to check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws. The judge also put on hold parts of the law that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times, and made it illegal for undocumented workers to solicit employment in public places.”

What does it mean to be an American?

Is it defined by being born in a place? Is it the color of your skin? Is it the papers you carry? Is it marked by the desire to defend the Constitution? Or is it to be a Tea Partier?

More important, can a person who crosses the border illegally be an American?

Our politicians don’t think so. They want to banish 460,000 people, some of whom have lived here for decades, for not having the papers to prove that this is where they belong.

I have seen the anti-immigrant climate escalate over the past three years as I’ve worked on a film about the politics of immigration in Maricopa County with director Dan DeVivo. And recently we created wwww.90daystoPhoenix.com to document the three-month period before SB 1070 goes into effect on July 29, barring a successful court challenge.

Latinos have a reason to be upset, worried and even fearful about a law that is breeding hatred and resentment against them.

Yes, I know there are provisions in SB1070 supposedly intended to prevent racial profiling, but the other language of the law encourages it. I donʼt believe that all police officers in the state want to racially profile people. But they are required to enforce SB 1070, and if they don’t, their bosses–the cities, counties and the state itself–face citizen lawsuits.

The police find themselves between a rock and hard place.

Just watch this video of Juan Miguel Gonzales, a U.S. citizen whose wife was detained and deported after they were pulled over for a questionable traffic infraction last month. Despite being a U.S. Citizen he feels this will result in his own “deportation” because now he has to leave Arizona to reunite with his wife.

Other harsh immigration laws in the state target the economic migrant and mistakenly racially profile Latinos citizens too. Such cases have already made their way into federal courts in Arizona.

A law like SB 1070 didn’t  happen overnight, it took a long time for politicians to convince Arizona voters with the idea that we are being invaded by “illegal aliens” who sell drugs, cause mayhem and take American jobs and deplete public benefits.

These lies have become sound bites that voters believe. In truth, crime is down in Arizona and unauthorized migrants are barred from most public benefits.

For more information on the 90DAYSTOPHOENIX project, click here.

From former P-I health and science writer Tom Paulson’s new blog Humanosphere:  

Dengue fever, also known as “breakbone fever,” used to be confined to a small part of the tropics. As a recent outbreak in Florida illustrates, it is no longer so confined.

In fact, dengue is now the most common and the fastest-growing mosquito-borne disease in the world, currently threatening a third of the world’s population.

Read more here: 

King County’s $140 million dollar plan to rebuild the Youth Services Center has made it another step closer, with the King County Council moving to place the issue on the fall ballot.

Voters will get the final say whether to increase the county’s sales tax by 0.1% to fund a new building to house juvenile and family courts and associated offices.

Read more here: