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Now Playing: The Who--"Glow Girl"
I Am Rachel Corrie: Rachel Corrie, an American human rights activist, was killed in March 2003 in the Gaza Strip when an IDF bulldozer, involved in demolishing Palestinian homes, ran her over as she protested the forced removal of the local population. When I first heard about this, shortly after it happened, it was unbelievable in a way that sadly seems all too quaint four years later. Corrie's writings--letters, emails, and journal entries, were eventually collected and edited into a one-woman show by (that) Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner, originated at the Royal Court Theatre in London by Meghan Dodds (I think; best known, perhaps, as Drew Barrymore's hilariously nasty stepsister in Ever After--or as I used to know her, the one who wasn't Melanie Lynskey), and now at the Residential College at the University of Michigan, featuring Anna Rose Kessler Moore and directed by my friend Carol Gray. I was a little nervous going in, a tenth of me worrying that it would be simple agitprop (in the service of ideals with which I mostly agree, but which wouldn't make for very good drama), and was pleasantly surprised. Moore is excellent, but I have to say that due to her very status as a college student, she probably embodies the character better than most "professional" actresses might. Somehow the editing of the occasionally self-absorbed but always searching and curious writing brings out the passion for social justice to which Corrie effectively gave her life. Her progression from a (self-confessedly) privileged middle-class student at a small Washington State college to a committed activist in Rafah, transformed and haunted by what she finds even before her untimely death, mirrors the spectator's (well, my) view of Corrie (and in many ways myself), obsessing with the character over the deceptively trivial mundanity of the personal life and then becoming involved in a larger communal struggle for dignity. Good job, all!

The Ultrasounds: Afterwards, I wound up at the Neutral Zone to hear the Ultrasounds. I'd heard them once before, opening for Starling Electric, and they delighted me with a rather straightforward rock style that I find is a lot rarer these days than people think. So many groups seem to have a dominant schtick that takes over their sound and image; sometimes it's beenficial, but more often it isn't, locking a group into a pre-conceived cage that forces them into playing music with (I suspect) less than their whole hearts. The Ultrasounds (Christopher Smith on bass and vocals, Sara Griffin on drums, and Patrick Conway on lead guitar) play their music and play it well; there was a healthy, stripped-down ambience that evening which played very well with the songs. The latter were a refreshing mix of different styles, something I'd found striking at their last show that I saw. They played a couple of covers--the White Stripes and Kings of Leon--byt the rest ran the gamut, soft and fast numbers, remarkably variant drumming and guitar styles that managed not to veer to wildly from one mood to another.

Down and Dirty Pictures: Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls was, in retrospect, something of a guilty pleasure. The rise and fall of the "New Hollywood" in the 60s and 70s produced some of history's greatest movies, and cinema's most entertaining gossip, but Biskind's telling managed to do it a sort of justice. Pictures covers the rise (and floundering) of independent American film from the 1980s to the present and employs much the same narrative method and structure that he did with Bulls, but with a much narrower focus, concentrating on the Weinstein brothers and Miramax. The latter come in for quite a pasting, to such an extent that it sometimes throws the book off-kilter. The quibbles range from the minor--occasional factual errors (and simple stuff at that; Danny Boyle's zombie epic was 28 Days Later, not 28 Days), Biskind's irritating and borderline insulting insistence on rendering quotes from Billy Bob Thornton and Spike Lee in quasi-Dickensian "Southern" and "black" dialect (British filmmakers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory don't come in for similar treatment)--to the major--the subject matter didn't have as big of an impact as Biskind's earlier purview, the book becomes a lopsided anti-Miramax tract (and God knows they've got their issues)--and easily makes it inferior to Bulls, though no less entertaining.