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The 2012 Long Beach QFilm Festival, which takes place Sept. 14 through 16, ends with a celebratory bang — well, at least an I Do.
I Do is a tear-jerker that begins and ends with a credo that morphs from wishful thinking to reflection and experience.
I do believe in fate. I do believe in family. I do believe in telling the truth and that your actions have consequences.
The rest of the film turns out to be about all of the above.
Gov. Jerry Brown has until Sept. 30 to act on 15 Sen. Ted W. Lieu, D-Carson, bills now on his desk; two additional measures took effect immediately because they did not require gubernatorial action.
The bills facing Brown’s endorsement or veto include:
Fur Dixon and Steve Werner’s latest CD, San Pedro Session, is the best of their previous three collections. This was recorded live at Alva’s Showroom in what has become one of the best rooms in Los Angeles to perform. In this near perfect space for the performing arts, Fur Dixon and Steve Werner and about 60 guests, friends and fans were engaged around an emotional campfire of song. There is not much more I can say about the event that I have not already said before. I was honored that the duo found my review good enough to be on the liner notes of the disc. The warmth of these songs sustains the performance even without being there. The honesty of the material and the connection from artist to audience is palatable.
The sidewalk repairs are a classic example of our dysfunction as a city
By James Preston Allen, Publisher
Every time I hear that the Los Angeles City Council is going to hire another consultant to study one of our multiplicity of problems, I just cringe thinking, “another over-priced report telling us what we already know.” So you may have heard that the suggestion coming out of Councilman Joe Buscaino’s subcommittee on Public Safety was to hire a consultant for what staff estimated was up to $10 million to do a survey of our cracked and crumbling sidewalks. Luckily some of the council members balked at this, but in the big picture of city budgets and city contracts $10 million isn’t a big number. It does however start to add up, and that seems to be the city’s biggest problem.
By Zamná Ávila and Lyn Jensen
The 2012 Long Beach QFilm Festival is less than a week away, offering some of the best in independent, queer-themed films recently released. Besides screenings, the schedule includes parties, discussions, a brunch, and numerous opportunities for attendees to mingle with filmmakers, actors, critics, and film industry professionals.
Back in my Orange County schooldays in the 1960s, I was bullied daily. Not only was I not part of “the” crowd—whatever that was—I wasn’t part of any common outgroup that can typically bond over a hard time in school. I wasn’t hippie or geek or goth or gay or anything like that. I was worse, as far as my fellow tweens and teens were concerned. I loved country music, and not even my parents shared my enthusiasm.
Sunday is the slowest day of Comic Con but the slowest day is rushed and hectic enough.
Exhibitors and attendees alike are often in glazed-eyes recovery from the first four days (the con runs Wednesday-Sunday). I hoped to have a meet-up with Ginger Mayerson of Wapshott Press but she got her business taken care of early and took the train home, so the day was just Comic Con and I—no appointments. A thing I’d like to change. Parking in the Padres’ stadium lot (the ideal place) was only $20, I suppose either because of the depressed economy or the decreased demand on Sunday.
Beer is best shared between two people.
I recently acquired two very interesting beers, so I called my buddy Andrew, with whom I brew beer, to share them with me and play some cards.
The beers in question are Samuel Adams’ Verloren Gose and Firestone Walker’s XV Anniversary. Both beers are very unique for completely different reasons and are reviewed below separately.
Gose is one of the least represented beer style categories you can possibly think of. With its history tracing back to ancient Saxony, what separates Gose beers from other beer styles is its defining ingredient: Salt.
All Gose beers are made with salt. It’s up to the brewers to decide how much salt to use. This is only the second Gose I’ve ever had, so I don’t have much to which to compare it. However, it still proves to be an interesting and decent beer. Clocking in at 6 percent alcohol-by-volume, Verloren is not a heavy beer. It pours with decent carbonation and the beer itself is a light orange color when held up to the light. It smells sweet. The notes on the back of the bottle tell the drinker it is a wheat based beer and it definitely tastes like a sweetened hefeweizen. The salt isn’t very noticeable, but it’s there if you really look for it. The one other Gose I had, The Bruery’s Salt of the Earth, was very salt forward. However, this was nice. Verloren is also made with coriander which blends nicely with the sweet, almost fruit like, notes.
Red Hook Summer is a coming of age story centered on 12 year old Flik Royale, played by Jules Brown, who spends the summer in the care of his grandfather, Bishop Enoch, played by Clarke Peters, the pastor of a small black baptist church in the town of Red Hook, New York. Flik and Enoch are diametrically opposed. Tethered to the net via an iPad, Flik is all tech, while tethered to the teachings of the bible, Enoch is all tradition. Disharmony should lead to resolution, and in most other stories that would follow. But this is a Spike Lee Joint and disharmony is Lee’s stock-in-trade.
For half a century or more, black nationalists have criticized the black church for retarding the process of black liberation, yet the success of the civil rights movement was based on the power of the pulpit and the power of religion being brought to bear in the secular sphere. Unsurprisingly, Lee’s take on this paradox lacks much nuance. At the film’s climax, the congregation finds out that they have misplaced their faith. Throughout the film, Lee taunts the congregants through the blue eyes of his white Jesus painting, as if to say, after everything you have collectively suffered, you must be crazy to believe in God’s love. More nuanced is Lee’s painful admission that little else holds embattled black America together.
It’s hard to tell if Lee’s choices reflect the confusion the director wants to impart upon the audience or if he’s simply unwilling to delegate authority to solid artistic partners. The cinematography is haphazard and inconsistent as was the art design. There’s a way to marry the look of cinema verite with tradition and Lee’s done it in several movies. Here, it just looks really sloppy and distracting.
Many of the actors in this film have talent despite their director’s attempt to make them seem like caricatures. It seems like Lee wanted to film a moving play, but forgot that dynamic voices at the edge of a stage are not the same as behind the curtain. Clarke Peters and Heather Alicia Simms share the film’s one slow and intimate moment though it is mostly ground up in the gears of Lee’s camera.
This is not a bad film, but it is a bad Spike Lee film. Generally edgy and unpredictable, here Lee seems exasperated and unwilling to pay attention to detail. The last two minutes seemed like a generic and sentimental slide show at the end of summer camp. With an unsteady quill and an inability to hold together a stable vision, Spike Lee may have lost his way. Maybe it’s time to go to church?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LksGNgOgLsY&version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0]
Aug. 31
2012 Juried All-Media and Small Treasures
Experience two of Palos Verdes Art Center late summer exhibitions — 2012 Juried All-Media and Small Treasures — through Oct. 7, in Rolling Hills Estates.
The exhibitions include art to please any taste from modern to traditional and from realistic to abstract. These eclectic exhibitions offer an appealing array of paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculptures, photographs and digital works.
The artists will be honored, and awards totaling over $3,000 will be presented, from 5 to 7 p.m. Aug. 31, during the opening reception. The 2012 Juried All-Media Exhibition will include more than 90 wall-hung works and three-dimensional pieces selected from more than hundreds of entries.
Each piece of art in the annual Small Treasures exhibition is either a two-dimensional piece with a perimeter of less than 50 inches or a three-dimensional item that fits within a 6-inch cube. Each piece is by a member of one of the eight artists groups affiliated with the Palos Verdes Art Center.
Details: (310) 541-2479
Venue: Palos Verdes Art Center
Location: 550 Deep Valley Drive, Suite 261, Rolling Hills Estates
Real people. Real news. Random Lengths is the Los Angeles harbor area's remaining independently owned progressive news magazine. We cover news in Carson, Wilmington, Long Beach, Lomita, Torrance, Rancho Palos Verdes and San Pedro.
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