Vermont and the Turpitude of Others

sonnyboo — Fri, 09 May 2008 04:31:34 +0000

Vermont and the Turpitude of Others

Well we went to Vermont last weekend and did the shoot. A 12+ hour drive in an oversized SUV that guzzles over $75 of gas in a tank will make John Mayer songs more strangely appealing as the cabin goes crazy.

I have never been to Vermont. It’s beautiful, but not that different than Ohio especially in the Hocking Hills area. One tidbit learned on the trip was that Vermont supposedly is not that well off. They have a lower gas tax so people from the neighboring states like to fill up on their side of the border.

We setup and shot on Friday morning. Gil Whitney was my shooter and he lit the show too. Meredith gripped then got started on a scanning of photos that are over 60 years old. The subject matter was not “up”. We were dealing with the Holocaust and being a Jew in Germany and Poland under the Nazi’s with one of the precious few survivors, and one of the very few ones with us today.

I helped mostly as a “producer”, or as that job’s capacity more commonly gets done. Brandy AKA My Sexy Fiancé Veronica ™ directed. We stayed in a motel only a couple miles away from the shoot. Shockingly, at the end of the first days shooting, we had a lot more footage than I had anticipated. We wrapped at about 5:30PM and decided to see IRON MAN. Brandy was none too pleased, but everyone else was jazzed about seeing IRON MAN. We had a nice dinner out in Hanover New Hampshire on the campus of Dartmouth. It was only 6 minutes away from the motel. I loved IRON MAN. Jon Favreau rocks as does Robert Downey Jr.

Saturday equally went smooth. We started at 10:00AM and went on until about 5:30PM again. We pretty much had everything I thought we needed and Brandy agreed. We tore down lights and duvetyn that was blocking out natural light from the windows. We covered all the war years of this German Jew’s life and her years hiding in Poland. Somehow, I find the story uplifting in many ways. All I can say is that hope exists in the human spirit.

That night, we saw a Woody Allen film from 2007 I had never even heard of called Cassandra’s Dream with Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell. It reminded me of Match Point in many ways, but Woody is in his UK phase where he’s making movies set in and shot in England. It’s revitalized his creativity in many ways. The movie was average for a Woody Allen film, but his average represents better than most people’s best movies.

We set off home a whole day early which was nice. Saved money and had bonus time, except immediately upon arrival I was bombarded with edit work. My freelance work has not subsided, but increased.

After buying a new car recently, I spent more on it than I had intended and it has drained my savings. Now the economy appears to be crashing hard. As burned out as I am right now, I need to take as much paid work as I can because I see some hard times for everyone on the horizon.

In between gigs, I found the time to finish Uncle Pete #7. I like these. I think they are funny, but as I mentioned before, they still have not found their audience. In many ways I think some conservative folks really don’t like the pot shots. Go figure, but still, it’s just a joke and everyone needs to lighten up. What’s even stranger is when people watch it & think I have these ultra conservative values, and then they react poorly to the shorts… Now that is surreal.

The organization of the 9+ hours of footage for the documentary is being sorted through. We’ve got months of work to go on this. Brandy has a project that means something to her, so it carries weight with me and I have a lot of that to spare still.

Your faithful narrator,
Peter John Ross

POLITICS: Truthers In Our Midst

videowilliams — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:30:10 +0000

If you go to KarmaCritic's latest Radio Broadcast blog (http://www.karmacritic.com/node/2339), you'll see a heck of a debate brewing down in the comments. It's one of the most politically charged questions of our time: "September 11th- Attack or Conspiracy?" Dawn and I could keep on going blow for blow on the subject there, but I'm going to lay my cards on the table here, because my answer just outgrew the comment box.

I really believe that all you 9/11 "truthers" have it wrong. It's not a question of what conspiracy theory you believe, but of WHY you feel the need to believe in a conspiracy at all. Do you really find it easier to believe that your own government perpetrated this atrocity than a bunch of hate-filled terrorists? If so, why? I'm trying to get my head around it.

September 11th shook up many people's world views- certainly mine. And one of the commonest questions going around America in the traumatised days afterwards was a plaintive "Why do they hate us so much?" Yet many people- particularly those on the left of politics- don't want to believe in hate as a force. They want to believe in a world where all of humanity can talk it through, embrace our differences and go wandering into the sunset holding hands and singing kum-ba-ya. The idea of fundamentalist Muslims who hate the West and all we stand for, who want to see us destroyed for no better reason than because their religion says so, just doesn't fit. Hence, 9/11 must have been an inside job.

Appropriately enough, this whole debate grew out of a thread concerning Nazis. There, a similar thinking comes up. Why did so many Jews (including several of the branches of my mother's family tree) allow themselves to be herded up like so much cattle and carted off to the concentration camps to be killed? Why weren't there more uprisings in the ghettoes? Why did so many intelligent people buy the transparent cover story that they were being "resettled" in the east? Well, for many Jews in Europe, the very idea that they were going to be exterminated as a people was preposterous. They couldn't believe they were hated that much- it simply didn't fit their world view. There must have been something else going on...

Oh, there are none so blind as those who will not see.

One commentator I've seen has likened those on the left who claim "America did this to itself" to a guy who's always bitching about his wife. He's always complaining, but you figure that deep down he really loves her. One day you're having coffee in a restaurant with this guy, when suddenly outside the window you see a gang of thugs grabbing his wife and beating her up. You jump up and say "They're beating the shit out of your wife! Aren't you going to help her?" And he says "Naaah, she probably deserves it" and continues with his coffee. At that moment you realise "Wow, you really do hate your wife." Substitute "truthers" for "guy" and "America" for "wife" and you get the analogy. You guys really do hate your own country.

Certainly I agree with EvilDirector that the Bush administration used this attack in later years to justify their own nefarious neocon agenda, spy on people, suspend legal protections, torture prisoners, re-invade Iraq, and various other creepy stuff. But they were hardly smart enough- or evil enough- to plot the death of over 3,000 of their own people in advance, then cover it up and make it look like terrorism, just to get America fearful and compliant. This is fantasy. The attack itself was just that- an attack.

Like Dan Gadberry, I believe what happened that day is basically what we've been told happened. A highly organised group of fanatical Muslim terrorists, backed and trained by Al Qaeda, took control of four aircraft on September 11th, 2001- the anniversary, correct me if I'm wrong, of some particularly hated Middle Eastern peace agreement that had been brokered at Camp David years before. Two of them slammed into the World Trade Center towers, whose resulting collapse caused destruction beyond even Osama Bin Laden's wildest dreams. Another plane went into the Pentagon, then word got out through mobile phones about what was happening, and the passengers on United Flight 93 retook the controls of their hijacked plane and turned it away from the White House or Camp David where it was headed, bringing it down instead in a Pennsylvania field. There were no government agents on those planes, no controlled demolition of the towers, no secret white house master plan.

It should be noted that conspiracy theories about September 11th are more popular in the Muslim world than anywhere else on earth. Typically, they feel a need to evade responsibility and paint themselves as victims rather than aggressors. "It's America's own fault." I'm sorry- that doesn't wash with me.

I don't watch Fox. I don't like Bush. Heck, I don't even live in America. But you truthers are kidding yourselves.

The terrorists did it.