All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace. 

~Richard Brautigan, 1968. The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster

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THE EXILES

I want to write about THE EXILES, but I'm not sure I'm worthy. Other Cinema screened this until-recently-lost classic of independent film last night here in San Francisco, while The Mission district was still just thinking about swallowing more than it could handle in a massive rainstorm. (As for moi, I'm starting to get the picture: it doesn't matter where I live, lovely, brilliant film nuts will wind up handing me paper cups full of anonymous hooch and calling me family, sooner or later...)

So THE EXILES gives us a gorgeous, dense tour-- through incredibly subtle camera work and sparkling nighttime photography-- of one night in the late-1950s Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the lives of the Native Americans who lived in its bona fide Decayed Hollywood Mansions. The neighborhood is now gone, but at the time, former mansions of the fallen rich and famous were turned into tenement houses for Native Americans lured (sometimes with cash) from Southwest reservations to live "a better life" in the city. Although THE EXILES is scripted, Director Kent MacKenzie threads dialogue from recorded interviews with several young Indians through re-enactments of an average day/night in their pretty much skid row lives. As a picture of gentrification-in-progress (Bunker Hill was razed and developed not long after the film was shot), aspects of THE EXILES brought a fine polish to the truly bizarre, present-day opulence of my own city just outside the theatre. And I had to wonder whether this relocation project was a grim effort to simultaneously continue the Southwestern landgrab from reservations by reducing their younger generations, while ensuring that those young people basically self-destructed. It sure looked that way.

Sherman Alexie called the film, "Gritty, realistic and far ahead of its time (in a period when Hollywood films featured noble savages), the script for THE EXILES was created exclusively from recorded interviews with the participants and with their ongoing input during the shooting of the film. Native American writers and activists have long considered the film as one of first works of art to portray modern life honestly and as an important forerunner for the cultural renaissance of American Indian fiction, poetry, filmmaking and theater starting in the 1970s." Was THE WIRE an actual documentary, it might look something like this.

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CONVERGENCE / DIVERGENCE EXTENDED + Symposium Upcoming

December 8, 2012
10am - 1pm West Coast USA

The Convergence / Divergence Symposium will be held online, and in California at the Los Medanos College. It will feature artists from around the world who have a work in the exhibition as well as scientists and students. Highly successful and attended, the exhibition has been extended til February 1, 2013. More information is available on the Waterwheel blog.

CONVERGENCE / DIVERGENCE is an exhibition featuring a broad perspective from environmental artists on the theme of water and its global and local roles; it includes my video, Experiment 2, above. The choice of Los Medanos College as a site for the exhibit is not accidental; the college is the only institute of higher education  in the delta area where the San Joachin and Sacramento rivers merge before entering San Pablo and San Francisco Bays. The challenges and sensitivity of the eco-systems in the region is one reason for Los Medanos’ Environmental Studies curriculum. In addition to its Art Gallery, the campus features a native plant preserve and a centralized water re-use pond.

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