Netflix Documentaries, Part Two

     Here are some more documentaries currently available on Netflix.

    The Silence of Others is about the ongoing push for justice for those who imprisoned, tortured, and murdered opponents of the fascist Francisco Franco, the dictator of Spain from 1939 to 1975. In 1977, the Spanish legislature passed a law that granted amnesty to anyone for any crimes committed on behalf of Franco and his government. The purpose, according to supporters, was to forget the past terrors - which continued throughout the entirety of Franco's rule - and move on. The effect has been that people who were tortured, imprisoned, and killed have gotten no closure or justice.  One of the major subjects of this documentary was a man who took part in anti-Franco demonstrations as a student. He was arrested and tortured by "Billy the Kid," one of the most notorious fascist interrogators. Today, they live a few blocks from each other on a street named in honor of one of the most brutal fascist generals. A couple of elderly women featured in the documentary have spent their lives trying to recover the remains of their executed parents for proper burials. Instead of forgetting and moving on, the crimes of the regime continue to divide Spaniards. The focus of the documentary is the effort to seek justice through a doctrine called "universal jurisdiction," a new concept to me. The Spanish victims group, blocked from using the courts of Spain, has turned to a judge in Argentina to collect evidence. The idea of universal jurisdiction is that in cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity, charges can be brought by any jurisdiction. This idea comes from the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following WWII and has been applied in more recent cases like that against Chilean dictator Pinochet and various other war criminals. It really is a moving an enlightening documentary.

    Back to music with Trainwreck: Woodstock '99. Full disclosure: I was not a fan of 90s music. I am hopelessly stuck in the 1980s, and I dislike almost all "Hit" music since the 90s, so the 30th anniversary of the original Woodstock concert did not register on my radar when it happened. I knew almost nothing about the huge fiasco that it was. The promoters, staff, and even a few of the musicians acted out of total stupidity, incompetence, and possibly criminal negligence. the hundreds of thousands of clueless and horribly behaved people who attended were lucky to leave with their lives. (Actually, three people did die sadly, of heat exhaustion, heart attack, and being hit by a car.) There was a lack of water, a lack of adequate security, extreme heat, and arson, not to mention reports of rape. Yet, the promoters intentionally covered up and evaded questions about any negatives, even as the venue (Poor decision #1) burned.

    Back to 1990, and This Is A Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist . In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as Boston policemen walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Art Museum in Boston, a quirky little private museum in the mansion of the quirky little Boston socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner. Thirteen works of art, with a value today estimated at between $250 and 500 million dollars, were stolen, seemingly singled out specifically since the robbers had over 80 minutes to "shop" for the articular works they took. The works have not been recovered, and no arrests have been made, 32 years later. The documentary series goes through all the theories and suspects, leading one to drawing conclusions. Unfortunately, it still looks like neither recovery nor prosecution will ever be possible. However, the documentary was extremely interesting as experts explained the world of art thieves and heists. 

    So who the heck is Jimmy Savile? I'd predict well over 90% of Americans were like me and had never heard of Jimmy Savile, who was treated as a British national treasure for well over 50 years. Maybe imagine Walter Cronkite, Dolly Parton, and Betty White, and Mr. Rogers level fame and love combined. He was a radio dj, tv presenter, and eccentric who was knighted for the many, many works he did for charity and philanthropy. He died in 2011 at age 84, and the entire UK mourned. Then, the next year, people started coming forward to accuse him of pedophilia. As it turns out, there were occasional accusations throughout his life, but these accusations were swept under the rug, and accusers were discredited. Since 2011, however, hundreds of charges have been investigated. This short documentary series examines the whole shocking episode.

        Finally, there's Final Account. As the WWII generation leaves us, this is an important documentary to watch. Released in 2020, it consists of interviews with Germans who lived in Nazi Germany. They were Hitler Youth Members, Brownshirts, SS soldiers, concentration camp guards, civilian workers in concentration camps, and citizens living near camps. They tell their story, and Germany's story during the Nazi years. When I visited Munich several years ago, I loved sitting in an outdoor cafe in the afternoon with an iced coffee or something, and I found myself watching older German me as they walked be and asking myself "What were you doing in the 1940s? Did you know about what went on at Dachau, about twenty or thirty minutes away?" Many of the subjects interviewed denied knowing what was going on. Some admitted that they had witnessed some of it. One SS and flat out denied that the Holocaust happened. Other SS men swore that the SS wasn't involved. A bookkeeper at a concentration camp said "but as I was a bookkeeper, I had nothing to do with it." Another SS man said he fully supports Hitler and all of his goals today. It was really disturbing, but a compelling watch.

Netflix Documentary Binge (Plus One From HBO) Part One

     This week, I went on a documentary binge and found that Netflix sort of knows what its doing by offering documentaries one might not see otherwise. I found all of these fascinating and really well done. I learned something new from each one and was disturbed in some way by each one. Aren't those all the characteristics of a good or great documentary? (All were made in the last 4-5 years.)

        First up was Descendant, about the identification and discovery of the last known slave ship to bring Africans to America, illegally, in 1860. The Clotilda brought  110 kidnapped people from the Dahomey Empire to Mobile Alabama. The importation of Africans to the American slave market had been illegal since 1808, but a Mobile businessman and planter named Timothy Meaher made a bet that could import enslaved people by evading Federal authorities, and the British Navy which had made capturing slave ships a priority in the previous few decades. The Clotilda, he wagered, was one of the fastest ships of its day. Meaher won his bet. The enslaved people were landed at a plantation near Mobile for hiding, and then the ship was taken upriver, set afire, and scuttled to destroy evidence and hamper prosecution. Although prosecution couldn't have been a huge worry, since the ship's arrival was announced in newspapers. The enslaved were distributed amongst several local plantations where they remained until emancipation. After the Civil War, these most recent arrivals, bound together by their shared experience and the fact that they were so new, worked, saved, and bought land to form their own community, Africatown. Many descendants remain in the area, and their story of remembrance of their ancestors and a desire to know their history is the focus of the film, which documents the work that has gone into the successful location of the ship.  

    Rumble: The Indians who Rocked the World is also about forgotten history, that of American Indian musicians who shaped rock and roll music. Mostly, these were people who were known to other musicians and people who were really dedicated fans, but they may not have been as well known to the general public, even though their contributions were major. Most of us know names like Jimi Hendrix (black, white, and American Indian), Buffy Ste. Marie, and Robbie Robertson - maybe even the American Indian band Redbone, with its hit "Come and Get Your Love," whose members dressed in tribal regalia and included traditional dancers in their concerts. However, there are so many more names like Link Wray, Mildred Bailey, Stevie Salas, Jesse Ed Davis, Randy Castillo, Charley Patton, and many others, who were either pioneers in music or members of more current bands who made a real impact on rock and roll. 

    

    Then, it was off to an HBO documentary series to be angered and disturbed. Unveiled: Surviving La Luz Del Mundo is the story of a 100 year old megachurch founded in Guadalajara Mexico in the 1920s. Today, La Luz Del Mundo, aka LLDM or The Light of the World Church, has multiple churches throughout the Americas and claims between 1 and 5 million members. Unfortunately, the grandfather, father, and grandson who have ruled the church since its founding, calling themselves divinely appointed and infallible "Servants of God," or the "Apostles," have all allegedly used their power to commit acts of sexual assault, rape, and pedophilia against girls and boys. Finally, victims are beginning to speak out despite being shunned by family members who still believe and even being physically attacked, and the latest Servant of God recently took a plea deal offered by incompetent California prosecutors and is serving a short prison sentence currently. Victims continue to work for further justice, and church officials and members continue to make pronouncements of innocence and loyalty to their Apostle. The church continues to make plans to expand. 

More doc recommendations next week....

Family. History.

     This summer has been quite the summer to reflect on family and family history. My wife's mother died in June, 14 years after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. Her father, now widowed after 55 years of marriage, had knee replacement surgery a couple of weeks ago, after having the surgery postponed twice. We are so fortunate to have been able to retire and move down here two years ago, to a house 1/2 mile from theirs in order to spend time with them and to be here to help out.

    A few weeks ago, a cousin created a new Facebook group for descendants of my maternal great great grandparents. It's already been great with cousins and relatives, many of whom I don't know, sharing pictures and stories, and the creator of the group has been a wealth of genealogical knowledge. When it comes to my own genealogy research, it comes and goes, in spurts. I'll build up a head of steam and put some time and effort into it for a while, and then other things come up, and I drift away for a while. The group is energizing me for another round. 

    On September 3, my Great Aunt Betty died at age 83. My maternal grandmother's sister, she was the youngest of eleven children. She was the type of aunt that made sure to keep track of the nieces and nephews, sometimes calling and saying, "Well, I just thought I'd check to see if you were still alive" if she hadn't heard from you in a while, and she was always pushing family members to keep in touch. That's her in the center of the family photo above. That leaves one of the 11 siblings still living, my Great Uncle Carl who is 94. Until recently, Uncle Carl was in fairly good health and still lived on his own. Sometimes I would give him a call and sometimes he would give me a call. Either way, I knew I was in store for a couple of hours of great family stories and recollections.

    Over the weekend, we went back to my hometown in southeast Georgia for a family reunion of my father's side of the family. We were getting together for the first time since the pandemic shutdown. My father was one of ten siblings, and we were a reunion-having family. When my grandmother was alive, we had two reunions a year, once on Mother's Day and once around Christmas time. In the late 80s, my cousin Bob and his wife Debbie, the greatest hosts ever, took on the responsibility of hosting the annual reunion, moving it to September. 

    We decided to make it a weekend and do a little family history stuff. We planned a few cemetery visits, and we went to nearby Brewton Parker College, a small Baptist college, which has a small historic village that includes a house built in the 1790s and a house built by my 4th great grandfather around 1842, along with a small chapel and a stable. The professor in charge of the Village graciously agreed to give us a tour, although the buildings are usually opened only a couple of days a year for special events. It was the first time I had seen any of the structures, and I was quite proud that my ancestor's house was a part of it. There are plans to make the Village much more accessible and meaningful, and I hope that comes to pass.

Cooper-Conner House, c. 1798

Berry Thompson House (my 4th great grandfather), c. 1842

    Then, we visited the house built around 1890 by my great great grandparents. My great grandfather and his siblings were born there, and it's still sitting on family land, next door to a cousin's house. One of my great grandfather's brothers and his wife raised a family there. In fact, she continued to live there until the early 1990s. I remember visiting there several times as a child. I always hoped that it would be restored and moved to an historic village or something. Unfortunately, at this point, it's too far gone, but I'm glad we went back to see it and take some pictures.

    But back to the reunion on Saturday. As I said, the first since COVID, and it seems everybody was ready. The turnout was pretty good for us, probably about 40 people, including some non-regulars. While I miss the homemade chicken and dumplings and 12 layer caramel and chocolate cakes and other great dishes the older generations always brought, but we still ate well , and I think everybody enjoyed it. A lot of family stories were shared. We're really seeing the changing of the guard, so to speak. I'm the youngest grandchild, by five years, and I have first cousins up to their early 80s. Neither my father nor any of his siblings are alive today, and only two aunts by marriage survive. The older of the two, Aunt Mary, is 96, and she wanted to come to the reunion, but unfortunately she is very frail and can't stand or really move. So, one of her sons drove her to the reunion and parked under the shelter where the cooking was going on. Aunt Mary stayed in the car, and her nieces and nephews took turns talking with her for a couple of minutes each. Then, he drove her home. Fortunately, she knew us all. It was a touching moment, especially when we remembered that at the last reunion, when she was 92 or 93, she schooled a couple of her granddaughters in a game of pool. 

9 of the 10  Burns siblings at a Christmas reunion, about 1983 or 1984

Most of the attendees, 2022

    What a summer. Enjoy your own family, if you can as much as you can, and go out and collect the stories. You'll be glad you did.

    

One-Man, One-Woman ... Plays

         People may not guess that I actually enjoy live theater - not musicals - theater. I mean, there are a handful of musicals that I have enjoyed, but I generally have a hard and fast rule against musicals. But dramas and comedies, I enjoy. While we were working, it was kind of difficult to get up and get going to see a play. After a day of teaching, the prospect of driving into the city traffic and parking situation was not always an appealing one, but, now, we have the time, and there are several great theater companies and venues for us to choose from, and they are roaring back from pandemic shutdowns. We've seen several very good plays in the past several months, and three have been one-person biographical shows about legends. We recommend seeing all of them if they are performed near you.

    The first was I Love to Eat, written by James Still, the life of cooking icon James Beard. Foodies all know the name from the extremely prestigious awards given to chefs, restaurants, and cookbooks annually. A James Beard Award is the pinnacle of culinary success, perhaps slightly eclipsed by Michelin stars - perhaps. In reality, James Beard was a master cook, cookbook author, and food critic. He starred in one of the very first cooking shows on television. He championed good food done well, and he enjoyed "rustic" food as much as gourmet food. The play is hilarious, and we were fortunate to see Matt McGee playing the role; he is apparently a bit of theatrical icon himself in the Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg area, and he was fantastic. While there was much humor throughout the play, there is a bit of tragedy as well. James Beard was a gay man in the public eye in the 1950s and 1960s, so he had to deal with keeping closeted or dealing with stigma that came attached to that identity at the time. As portrayed on stage, he also had to deal with issues of depression and loneliness that clung to him throughout his life, no matter how famous he became. 

    Tragedy apparently makes for great one-person shows, as the other two plays' subjects are two of the most tragic figures in the history of the 20th century. Their subjects are legendary icons who contributed so much to society, but society - specifically government authorities, with a little assist from addictions - destroyed them, leaving us to wonder what more could they have done in their lives and careers?  Lady Day At Emerson's Bar & Grill, written by Lanie Robertson, is a night in the life of singer Billie Holliday, performed in our case by the extremely talented Karole Foreman.  Technically, there is a second character on stage, Billie's pianist and music director, but it is all about Billie. In between the dozen or so songs sung during the play, Billie tells the nightclub audience all of the tragedies of her life, and that's a lot. 

    Finally, there's "I'm Not a Comedian...I'm Lenny Bruce" , written by and starring Ronnie Marmo as the comedian and social commentator who spent much of his career being arrested for obscenity and standing up for freedom of speech. With all of the current controversies surrounding stand-up comedy today, like the fear of cancel culture, the existence of trigger warnings,  and even the fear of physical attack, Lenny Bruce's life and career are so relevant today, 56 years after his tragic death by overdose. Marmo, as Lenny, takes the audience through his life and the demons that bring his end. It is an incredibly tragic tale, with some humor and keen insight along the way.

Different Genres, Different Stories?

     Last month, I got involved in two different true crime stories. They were totally entertaining and thought provoking from beginning to end, and I actually explored each one through two different media formats.

    The first was Under the Banner of Heaven, a book by John Krakauer and the dramatic series of the same name on Hulu. 

    Krakauer's book, first published in 2003, tells the story of the gruesome 1984 murders of  Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month old daughter in Utah. Their killers were two of her brothers-in-law who targeted her because they believed that she was preventing their wives and her husband, their brother, from living the moral life that their fundamentalist Latter Day Saints demanded. Krakauer juxtaposes the murder and its investigation with the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, from its founding by Joseph Smith to the fundamentalist sects that started breaking away from the orthodox Church. There were some fractures within the Church immediately following the death of Smith in 1844, when there were a few men who announced that they were Smith's chosen successor, but there were even more in the late 1800s when the LDS Church leaders agreed to strip polygamy as a tenet of the Church, in exchange for statehood. Several groups condemned this blasphemy and created their own communities in Canada, the US, and Mexico where they continued, and continue to this day, practicing polygamy. These groups have officially been excommunicated and condemned by the orthodox LDS Church.

    The Lafferty brothers found themselves drawn to the ideas espoused by some of these fundamentalist prophets, and they began living by what they called the "true" principles of Mormonism. This led them to murdering Brenda and Erica Lafferty.

    Both the book and the series were incredibly enlightening and stories well told. It was interesting that the makers took different approaches to telling the story. Krakauer spent a large portion of the book, close to the first third, delving into the history of the Church and of the fundamentalists. The tv series is more focused on the murder and the investigation, but there are flashbacks to moments in Mormon history.

    The Staircase is an even more recent story. In December 2001, writer Michael Peterson found his wife Kathleen dead at the foot of the staircase in their Durham, North Carolina home. Police quickly discounted the accidental fall and charged Peterson with murder, theorizing that the motive was Kathleen's discovery that he was secretly having sex with men. The revealed secrets and the murder trial, of course, took their toll on Michael and Kathleen's children. Kathleen's daughter from a previous marriage sided with her mother's two sisters against Peterson, while his two sons and two adopted daughters stood by their father. After his conviction and imprisonment for 8 years, it turned out that a couple of the state forensic scientists who had provided damning testimony were guilty of manufacturing harmful evidence, hiding exculpatory evidence and committing perjury, not just in his trial but in numerous other trials. He was finally freed, pending a retrial, but the wheels of justice turned very slowly over the next several years, and he decided to take a plea that allowed him to avoid a retrial.

    So there are two series on the case you can watch and they are somewhat intertwined. During the trial, Peterson agreed to allow a French documentary making team to cover everything. The team followed him around for years and years, and they had access in the courtroom, jail, his home, and prison that no other documentarians have ever had before or since. They interviewed everyone on his side, they filmed defense strategy meetings, they saw everything. And they added more material as events occurred. That documentary can be seen on Netflix.

    Just recently, HBO Max has created a dramatic series starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette as Michael and Kathleen.  It's obvious that the creators of this series saw the documentary because there are lots of scenes that replicate the documentary scene for scene and word for word. Also, the actors cast to play the real people are dead ringers for those people, with one exception. For some reason, the drama producers cast the part of the defense private investigator - an older white guy in real life - as a young black man. The drama producers also took some other liberties with the story which haven't made the documentarians very happy, and the makers of the documentary have taken to the press to denounce these changes and to demand that disclaimers be added to the series. It's a dynamite story, and I'm still not sure what really happened that night. Maybe we will never be.

"Ahhh, the smell of AP exam booklets in the morning....."

 

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    It's that time again. This week, the first week of June, a thousand or so Advanced Placement high school teachers and college history professors will be in downtown Tampa, Florida at the Tampa Convention Center, spending a week reading AP US History exam essays and short answer responses and awarding scores that may translate into college credits for the over 500,000 high school students around the world that take the AP US History exam each year in early May. Tampa is one of several sites that host AP readers of various subjects; other sites include Kansas City, Cincinatti, and Louisville.

(Tampa Convention Center, where the deed is done.)

    History teachers and professors from all over the US will start arriving in Tampa on May 31, and they will find their hotel rooms, meet up with new roommates or old friends, and find their reading assignment. Over the next week, they will report to their assigned reading room and their assigned table. More introductions as readers meet their table leader and tablemates; usually there are 8 table members. Each table is assigned a specific prompt to score. The table leader begins going through some training exercises, calibrating, it's called. The readers read some sample responses along with scoring commentaries provided by a few table leaders and question experts and creators. The point is to get the readers on the same page, so to speak, to build a consistency so that reading scores are less arbitrary, less subjective. The hope is that different readers will be able to score the same responses with close to the same score.

    Scoring happens over the next 7 days, from 9 AM to 5 PM. Readers move at their own pace, and table leaders "backread" often, that is, read essays and scores that tablemates have scored to make sure the scores are consistent. These are long days, with readers reading hundreds of responses a day. To break things up, there are stretch breaks and a lunch break. Some tables create games to play, and there's usually lots and lots of candy available. It is a long day. 

    In the evenings, there are sometimes best practices presentations, vendor tables, and maybe authors doing book talks. People also find others with similar interests or hobbies, so there may be groups of runners, walkers, musicians, etc, meeting up. Others check out restaurants. Still others just chill in their rooms, maybe reading, or, for a misfortunate few, even doing schoolwork (shudders).  

    I was fortunate to be a reader for several years. I had put off applying to be a reader for years, because I couldn't imagine reading hundreds of essays a day. Grading my own classes' essays was an arduous chore that I sometimes put off for too long.  However, I realized that readers were correct when they told me that I should go. It is a hard week, but it came with benefits. It made me a better AP teacher because I saw how the "sausage is made" so to speak, and I enjoyed meeting new people, and gaining different perspectives. I've always said that the best professional learning for teachers is always just getting teachers together to talk and to share.

    So, to my friends and roommate who are returning to Tampa this week: Good luck, have a great time. I'll miss you (but I live only a half-hour away now.....)

Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition

     Boy, was I misled. Or did I mislead myself?  A few weeks ago, I saw a notice of a Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Exhibit opening nearby. I could swear I saw the words "immersive experience" somewhere. I snapped up the tickets, enthralled by the two Van Gogh immersive experiences that we had recently seen. Maybe I just saw the words "immersive experience" in my own head.  In any case, we were in for a slight disappointment when we arrived.

    There were no projectors, no moving images, no musical scores. There was just a brief - but well done video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NadMZ-P93Ms ) from an interesting art education YouTube series and then blown-up reproduction canvases of many of the panels. 

    The pictures had nice explanations attached, and there was a good audio guide that paired with the exhibition well. The pictures were large and beautiful and powerful. The viewer had access to the works that he or she would never get anywhere else. I've been fortunate enough to have seen the Sistine Chapel in person; that experience was awesome and almost overwhelming, but it was also very crowded and had the guards loudly shushing the tourists when their whispers grew too loud. This was a good compromise. Although I believe it would be relatively easy  for skilled creative people to create a mindblowing immersive projected experience, this exhibit is worth seeing, whether or not you've seen the real thing.

Beyond Van Gogh

       We now live in the age of immersive exhibits.  Creative and business-minded people work together to create experiences by using projectors and music to bring artistic, architectural, or historical objects to life.  They either rent a big building, partner with a museum for gallery space, or put up a tent.

    A while ago, we went to the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida to see "Van Gogh Alive!", or first immersive experience. ( https://histocrats.blogspot.com/2020/12/van-gogh-alive.html ) It was quite an experience. In fact, we returned a couple of more times. "Van Gogh Alive!" focuses on the last ten years of the artist's life, and the gallery space created rooms that the visitor moved through while viewing the images projected on walls and floors. It was great.

    Because these creators deal with non-copyrighted material, it makes sense that there may be competing immersive shows, and there are. Recently, we went to see "Beyond Van Gogh."  This show attempts to cover the artist's whole life, instead of just a ten-year period, and it's venue is a giant tent. That adds a slight disadvantage because winds move the tent walls that are the projection screens.  Here's a short video:  

    Verdict: "Beyond Van Gogh" is a good show, and it's nice to see the whole career presented, but I think I prefer "Van Gogh Alive!" In my opinion, "Van Gogh Alive!" had better music and better storytelling for it. Also, there is something to be said for it's presentation in 3-4 galleries, instead of one big rectangle like "Beyond Van Gogh."  However, both are worth seeing, and I look forward to more immersive exhibits in the future.