Month: March 2015

Hard Earned, about people barely making it . . .

Interview with Maggie Bowman, producer of Hard Earned

Hard Earned is a six-part documentary series produced by Kartemquin Films and Al Jazeera America that explores the hopes, fears and realities of low-wage American workers, following five families across the country trying to achieve the American Dream. The series is slated to air on Sunday nights beginning May 3rd on Al Jazeera America Presents.

The Hard Earned series producer is Maggie Bowman, directors are Katy Chevigny, Maria Finitzo, Ruth Leitman, Brad Lichtenstein, and Joanna Rudnick, with series editors & co-directors Liz Kaar and David E. Simpson, and executive producers Steve James, Justine Nagan, and Gordon Quinn.

Maggie Bowman talks about it:

Before that world TV premiere, Maggie Bowman, series producer, took the time to tell us about her experiences working on this landmark new series.

Questions and transcription by Mihaela Popescu, Spring ’15 Intern.

Why did you want to make this documentary?
We were in the great position of being approached by Al Jazeera America who had the idea for the series and so they approached Kartemquin. They knew they wanted something on this topic and (executive producer) Justine Nagan put together a team and asked me to be a part of it to try to capture these stories.

Personally, it’s been a topic close to my heart for a very long time, I used to be a Union organizer and spent 5 years working on campaigns to organize low-wage workers into unions so they can improve their wages and working conditions. So, through that work and the approach that Kartemquin takes to making films on social issues, I knew it was a project that I really wanted to be a part of. . . . .

more more more . . .

Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality

The history of our great state:

Public funds spent on jets and horses. Shoeboxes stuffed with embezzled cash. Ghost payrolls and incarcerated ex-governors. Illinois’ culture of “Where’s mine?” and the public apathy it engenders has made our state and local politics a disgrace.

In Corrupt Illinois, veteran political observers Thomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson take aim at business-as-usual. Naming names, the authors lead readers through a gallery of rogues and rotten apples to illustrate how generations of chicanery have undermined faith in, and hope for, honest government. From there, they lay out how to implement institutional reforms that provide accountability and eradicate the favoritism, sweetheart deals, and conflicts of interest corroding our civic life.

By a couple of people who know.

New by Cynthia Clampitt: Corn in the Heartland

Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the U.S. Heartland (Heartland Foodways)

Food historian Cynthia Clampitt pens the epic story of what happened when Mesoamerican farmers bred a nondescript grass into a staff of life so prolific, so protean, that it represents nothing less than one of humankind’s greatest achievements.

Blending history with expert reportage, she traces the disparate threads that have woven corn into the fabric of our diet, politics, economy, science, and cuisine. At the same time she explores its future as a source of energy and the foundation of seemingly limitless green technologies. The result is a bourbon-to-biofuels portrait of the astonishing plant that sustains the world.

Let’s hear it for corn!

(Cynthia is smart on top of smart, riveting when she talks corn. Book has to be good.)

Risen from the news grave: a social measurement that has been taboo

Consider this article summary (from Reboot Illinois) and ask yourself what’s really, really unusual about it.

Rauner’s juvenile justice team vows retooling to keep kids out of jail chicagotribune.com – Gov. Bruce Rauner’s Department of Juvenile Justice says it will retool efforts to keep low-risk juvenile offenders out of state facilities and help those who are incarcerated successfully re-enter their communities.

A five-point plan for how to do that was unveiled Friday. It relies on a new tool for measuring young offenders’ risk factors — including mental health, IQ and family history, among others — to determine whether a juvenile would be better served with treatment outside of custodial facilities.

Give up? It’s the reference to IQ! When is the last time you saw that reference?

Climate change denial from unexpected source

A man bites dog story to beat all. Greenpeace co-founder is a denier:

Editor’s Note: Patrick Moore, Ph.D., has been a leader in international environmentalism for more than 40 years. He cofounded Greenpeace and currently serves as chair of Allow Golden Rice. Moore received the 2014 Speaks Truth to Power Award at the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change, July 8, in Las Vegas.

I am skeptical humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future. There is no scientific proof of this hypothesis, yet we are told “the debate is over” and “the science is settled.”

My skepticism begins with the believers’ certainty they can predict the global climate with a computer model. The entire basis for the doomsday climate change scenario is the hypothesis increased atmospheric carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel emissions will heat the Earth to unlivable temperatures.

Lots here in important story . . .

Disappointed reader wants Eric Holder-style discussion of the blacks-only assembly

Plunging into my Wed. Journal yesterday as usual, though also looking for a letter I’d sent in — it wasn’t there! — I found myself absorbed by discussion of the recent blacks-only assembly at the high school, including a tantalizing next-day account of the special board meeting that had drawn 100 people.

Systematically going from page to page, I came to the page where the columns are, and saw two side by side about the assembly at least as background, and I thought, OK, it’s a hot issue with Oak Parkers reportedly of several minds on the matter, let’s see what’s here.

Unfortunately, it was time to move on because there was nothing there. Both columns, here and here, by citizens who care about their community, thought the blacks-only assembly was a good idea! Say what? Nothing from citizens who care about their community who thought it was a bad idea?

It didn’t help any when I did move on, to the next page, and found featured editor Ken Trainor’s regular column there, a rather lengthy meditation on the need to think hard about race relations, take a deep breath, and DO THE RIGHT THING.

But where was a guest-column pro and con on the previous page about what the right thing was in this black-assembly matter? Forget giving both sides of an issue as an ethical matter. Tall weeds there, I’ll take a pass if you don’t mind. I’m talking about reader interest. Does the Journal want readers’ eyes glued to the page or glazed over in the absence of — dare I suggest it? — disagreement on hot topic?

Concerned-citizen columns matter. Why not go with some side-by-side pro-and-con back and forth. I’ll tell you one person who will give three cheers. It’s Eric Holder, who preached open discussion some time back, calling us a nation of cowards. (That hurt, Eric.)

But forget Eric. Think of the reader, rather stopped in his tracks by an arresting debate!

Oh, about my letter that didn’t make it. Later, OK?

Jerked around by the melodramatic “Billy Elliott”

Just walked out on the 2000 film “Billy Elliott,” a sequence of cinematographic cameos in search of coherence. The boy wants to dance. The unsympathetic father and older brother, each tortured by his own failings, failures, and sufferings, blocks him, weakens, finds the value of dancing, and guess what?  . . .

After the umpteenth mini-climax demonstrating unbearable tensions of family life torn between bigotry and nobility, the film veers gradually, like a battleship trying to reverse course, towards a one per cent credible achievement of nobility. This melodrama finally did me in, repeatedly revving me up, for what? I asked myself, and went to my blog-writer and here I am.

Contrast it to the Alex Guinness and John Mills 1960 film “Tunes of Glory,” which I viewed recently on our amazing home movie machine, a TV set with built-in DVD player. In that film there was a beginning, middle, and end. Not that I am about to tell or even figure out where each part began and ended. Rather that the film ended, ker-plop, leaving me stunned and wondering.

A film that doesn’t have an ending artistically speaking but merely a final stop, that has merely jerked you around, plucking heartstrings or prompting chuckles and leading you nowhere that you hadn’t expected, is a viewer-exploiter. Nuts to that.