Coca-Cola Building

Coca-Cola Building
Originally uploaded by franksutter.

My hometown of Staunton, Virginia is undergoing a renaissance of sorts these days, ever since they built the replica of the Blackfriars Playhouse to house a Shakespeare theater troupe. This old Coca-Cola sign was hidden behind a billboard for years before being rediscovered not long ago. One of my ongoing projects is to document Staunton over time to mark its changes.

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On Caffe Trieste & Bad Baudelaire

I'm sitting outside Caffe Trieste in North Beach this morning enjoying the balmy March weather. I quit drinking coffee for a week, but today I couldn't resist a latte here at Trieste and it is smooth and delicious. Currently, I'm trying to decide whether to go it alone as a full-time freelance writer or find a regular job like everybody else. Do I really have a choice, I ask myself? I have bills to pay and my bank account is dwindling fast. Are other people in this tight position? They must be, somewhere out there.

Here in the Bay Area we have plenty of homeless people, but everybody who can seems to put up a royal front, like they have no cares in the world. Maybe it's the climate. Reminds me of that line in the Grateful Dead song, "Going where the climate suits my clothes." I put on cargo shorts this morning because the temp is supposed to climb well into the 80s. The barista who pulled my latte told me and another guy at the bar, "I'm tired of hearing people tell me how nice the weather is today." Now that's San Francisco--tell it like it is and don't tout the obvious. This afternoon I'll be heading over to California College of the Arts to attend a writing seminar with ZZ Packer, a rising literary star who published the book "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere."

"A man's first loyalty is to his job," some old-timer is eschewing to his cronies at the table behind me now.

"When I first came to San Francisco, the girls could get a job right away, but the guys couldn't get a job at all," he also says.

"Same shit now, man," one of his younger cohorts seconds emphatically.

My latte glass is empty now except for a tiny bit of sweet brown foam in the bottom. I keep trying to drain every bit of wetness out of it. I could drink three more easily, but that would put me way over the edge.

"Emmylou Harris started out as a poet, but then she gave it up to write songs and perform them," another guy is saying, the same guy who earlier mentioned that he was friends with Kris Kristofferson back in the day (that's not his real name though, he confides). He is listing people who started out as poets, but went on to be famous at other things. These are the snippets you hear here. Now they are talking about Maya Angelou and what a genius she is at reciting her poetry in front of an audience.

"Adolph Hitler and Martin Luther King were the two greatest speakers of all-time," the first man is declaring now.

"Hitler wrote poetry," the young guy pipes up, to which Kris Kristofferson's old pal says, "That may be so, but I bet it wasn't any good."

"I read some of it on a website recently. It was pretty normal stuff," the young guy says of Hitler's poetry. "It was like bad Baudelaire."

Other topics covered include, of course, Michael Jackson (currently on trial), Charles Manson (just because), James Brown's ups and downs, how good some musicians in the penitentiary are, and back to the name of Michael Jackson's ranch, Neverland, and a discussion of why that was too much on top of the monkey, the glove, and everything else.

The sky above us is like a pure blue screen, with sunlight beaming off the light yellow church steeples across the street--so bright you can't look at them for more than a second or two without being blinded.

"I was in a mental hospital," a guy says from behind me, literally out of the blue. There's a short lull in the conversation.

"Welcome back," someone offers, right on cue.

Thirteen young women file by in a row like ducklings, clearly tourists complete with maps and cameras, and all I can think is, it's another perfect California day.

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Gunner Palace--The Sanitized War

I went to see the documentary "Gunner Palace" over the weekend and felt a need to write about it. First of all, I have to give major credit to filmmaker Michael Tucker of Seattle for having the guts to go make this film and live for two months with a group of U.S. troops (2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment or "2/3 Field Artillery") where mortar fire and other threats were part of the daily routine. Also, my respect for what the troops live with in Iraq and in other combat zones has only gone up because obviously it is not pleasant or easy to face every day.

Here's how Michael Tucker put it: "I walked into “Gunner Palace” in September 2003 with a simple desire to tell the soldiers’ story - to capture what we didn’t see on the news. To do so, I left my personal opinions and my preconceptions about the war at the gate and tried to get as close to the subject as possible. I looked at the subject not as news, but as living history; an experience, not an event."

I do think this film is valuable and tells a story that needed to be told. And Tucker probably believes that he was being as objective as possible. Having said that, and despite what the filmmaker claims, I think this is actually a very sanitized version of what is really going on, and evidence of this is present on the website for the film at www.gunnerpalace.com. One reason I say this is because there is virtually no blood shown in the whole film, only discussion of how it looks "black on concrete" by the soldiers at one point. We are told that several members of the 2/3 have been killed along the way, and there are memorials alluded to for these lost soldiers, but again we see no direct evidence so we remain one step removed. Tucker includes the following exchange after a screening of the film in Tampa on his website:

"A man in the back wondered why we didn't see more blood in the film--more evidence of suffering. I explained to him the reality I filmed: a place where you are neck deep in violence, you hear blasts night and day; firefights, the pleas of a squad under attack on the radio, but you are often not there. The film captures what I experienced, and only what I experienced while on routine patrols and raids. In the time when we were producing the film, 8 people connected to 2/3 FA were killed. Enough violence to last a lifetime."

However, elsewhere on the same site, in his diary, he includes the following:

"Iraqi Police and American MPs were wounded. I joined the Quick Reaction Force lining up to investigate the scene. As we waited for the order to roll, the wounded came in. One was a young female National Guard soldier. The IED exploded right in front of her. She took shrapnel everywhere—including one eye. Her fellow MPs spent the night in the Palace. In normal life they are policemen, mechanics and lawyers. Here, as they staggered into the Palace to bed down, they were soldiers—their T-shirts covered in blood, many of them shaking with grief."

He apparently witnessed this scene, yet in the film we see none of the details described. Now, I am not anxious to see the blood of real people by any means, but I can't help but wonder where his video camera was at this point, and why the footage wasn't included if he did film it. It just seems to play into other images we get of Iraq here in the U.S.--very sanitized as if Big Brother were filtering out all disturbing images for public consumption.

Tucker made a tour of the U.S. to prescreen the film earlier this year, and he appears to have chosen areas of the country where there is a large military presence. I can't help but think that he is pandering to the military in some way, trying to please them first and foremost. Maybe they deserve this attention, but it seems to indicate that Tucker's loyalty lies firmly in their camp and he may have gone out of his way to make a film that pleases them more than it challenges the reasons they are being sent there in the first place.

Despite my comments, I still found GP to be very moving in many different instances. Tucker befriends a young soldier from Colorado Spring named Stuart Wilf who plays electric guitar and cracks a lot of inane jokes. Wilf is the kind of guy I can relate to, and as the film wore on I couldn't help fearing that at some point we would be told that Wilf had been killed in the line of duty. Fortunately, that was not the case and on the movie's website there is a more recent photo of Wilf enjoying civilian life back in Colorado, very much alive and well. Of course, many others have not been so lucky, and I am very sorry for them and their families. So I think this film does put a human face on the war in Iraq in terms of helping us get to know our own soldiers better.

We also see Iraqis in the film, some being arrested on suspicion of bomb-building and other charges, and some helping the U.S. troops carry out their extremely hazardous duties. I found this aspect of the film to be perhaps the most compelling, and I would like to hear much more from the Iraqi perspective--something else that it feels like the current U.S. administration does not want us to hear. The bottom line is that this film is a starting point, and Tucker deserves credit for kicking off the conversation, but there are a lot of stones still standing ominously in the middle of the road, as yet very much unturned.

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