If You Get a Chance to See...

Canadian documentary-maker Avi Lewis's film from 2004 about the occupied factories movement in Argentina, The Take, do check it out! The DOCUMENARY CHANNEL runs such great things so often and this one is so moving; it's like Zola's Germinal but it's real, not fiction, and you feel for the people so much.

It's eerily prescient too of the global meltdown that we're experiencing. Someone eerily hands the documentarian a letter upon arrival in the country that ends with the phrase, "What you see are the ruins of a globalized nation...and the future of the rest of the world..."

This has a (somewhat) happy ending, but I'm afraid to read about what's happened in the country since then, and afraid the happy ending might prove to have been an illusory one.

I hope not!

Here are Wiki entries on two of the "recovered factories"...no bosses...assemblies...one voice, one vote...I'm happy to see these cooperatives continue to thrive...the rascals took the money and ran, and the workers rebuilt their lives with the capital left behind...I like that sort of capitalism...APOYA A LOS OBREROS! Power to the People!

Brukman was the first...

Zanon Ceramics is now FaSinPat...

If you lean to the right when you stand in the wind, you'll probably just see this docu as a paean to socialism, but I think it's much more than that. To me, it's about survival and brotherhood and about the usual evil subsidies by which the rich destroy the working poor. If it's socialism (and I'm not sure they would deny it is, but don't tag it such) it's a new model: bottom-up instead of top-down. So it lacks the negatives that go along with that top-down form of socialism. It struggles more as a result.

This is a really spiritually moving documentary about large groups of people living ethically under governments which are morally bankrupt. You really come to care for the people the documentary follows.

Hence, this film could be about America or any other country. It just happens to be set in Argentina. But the same things that happened there happened here. ENRON to ZANON (if you see the docu you'll see what I'm talking about.)

The Documentary Channel reruns things a lot so you can probably d.v.r. it if you're interested.

I'm living offline more since it's so gorgeous these days. I got out and about today and loved the weather here.

Plus, I started a new exercise regimen and work out for about two hours every day. I'm surprised to see how quickly things click back into place and how the body forgives you for the lapses. My pulse jumped back to where it should be very fast!

There are some things that just aren't happening yet lol. I can do the pushups, the mountain crunches, I love my bike, but the situps are still funny. It ain't happening just yet.

And I'm on a drastically reduced caloric intake and following a strange diet I am inventing as I go. 90% of what I eat is vegetables right now. But tuna and salmon are included occasionally. I have this obsession with asparagus lately. My body craves it.

I feel really good on these things.

I want to see that 9.99 movie where they did Claymation adaptations of the short fiction of that Israeli writer. That looked good in the review on CURRENT. It's like Short Cuts in clay lol. That's another t.v. channel I enjoy watching: CURRENT. That's like the YouTube Channel on t.v. Up to the moment coverage of what's happening important. They were all over that tasering out in California. And they have ROTTEN TOMATOES on there as a show--that has always been my favorite movie site.

We've been renting mostly fun crap from Netflix. The Despereaux movie was really cute. Grudge 3 was alright. It served its purpose. Some cute queer teen movie with Chance in the title. Chance was the main character. They always do that. Make a pun with the main character's name for the title. It's such a queer teen movie convention now. It was set at an international high school in Europe. The kid lived with his father on a military base. The best character in the movie for me was his little sister, about eleven, who affected a fake English accent and vocabulary to perfection all the time. It was set in the eighties so they poked a lot of fun at bygone fads. When faced with a typical eighties band, his little sister turned up her nose and referred them to the Carpenters: "Why don't you try to sound more like The Carpenters? Karen Carpenter has a luv-uh-ly voice..." Okay, you had to be there. She cracked me up through the whole movie.

Tonight I read forty pages of Kovels' on antique porcelain: dating, categorizing, pricing, etc. It's funny the things you know, and the things you think you know. I never pretended to be smart on porcelain, pottery, etc. in thrift stores on hunting these things (I'm best on early- to mid-twentieth-century and that's what I mostly encounter anyway). Well, beauty is one thing. Anybody can tell when a piece of Staffordshire is going to have collectors who want it. Rarity is another. And of course there's always those horrid limited edition plates released by the millions of Annie, Elvis, or whatever the fuck. It's not like I find Meissen or Bennington ware everyday. I have found Toby jugs and Royal Doulton so old it still said just "Doulton" on it. I found a fragment of ancient Delft on a New Jersey beach once. I still have it. It felt weird and creepy. I wondered if it was all that was left of a shipwreck, if everyone died. Maybe it just broke and they jettisoned it. The dating of the whole Haviland/Limoges convoluted relationship thing could be written out and it would probably be longer than Buddenbrooks.

There were a bunch of weird facts. I need to blog them later.

Some were really creepy.

Many people in my family urged me to be an auctioneer. Because of my love of antiques, and the speed with which I talk. I once sent a tape of me reading the opening of Genesis with a letter of inquiry to The Guiness Book of World Records because I beat the guy they had in there, by word count and speed. But they make you have it verified through some sort of rarefied speech specialist; there were no such professionals in my state that I could locate. This was pre-net. The nearest one was New York City and I said fuck it. I was a teenager at the time. It's easier for me to just speak superfast when I'm reading something, because I read really fast. But just in casual conversation I don't think I sound anywhere as fast as I used to. I bet many people assumed I was on drugs or something. I was a pretty high-strung kid anyway. When I worked as a reading tutor in a college learning lab I liked to fuck with the tachistoscope.

I still have the audiocassettes with me reading that and some Shakespearean passages, again breaking Moschitta's (or whatever the guy's name was at the time...think that's it) speed. It's at my mom's house. I read a variety of passages by different authors to show it wasn't a fluke. People who have listened to the tapes (years ago) always marveled that "you can understand every word." Uh, that's the point or you aren't doing it lol. Now, I mostly just use it (infrequently) to make people laugh. They don't believe I can until I do it. Then they do the "oh my gawd!" thing.

Use it when you want something, you know...that sort of thing hehe....