At their meeting this evening, the members of the local Veterans for Peace (Ernest Gruening Chapter) pledged $500 toward publicity for the EWO exhibit to be held on Oct. 13. In addition, several members will be volunteering on the day of the exhibit.
The members also pledged $100 for the purchase of the brochures beings stocked in the area high schools by the Truth in Recruiting folks. We take our hats off to the dedicated volunteers who have made great strides in reigning in military recruiting in our schools.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Monday, September 24, 2007
Movie Co-Sponsorship 9/28: WHEN I CAME HOME
Movie Co-Sponsorship w/ Alaskans for Peace & Justice
WHEN I CAME HOME, FRI, 9/28/7, 7 PM
WHERE: UAA, Social Sciences Building, Room 118
Iraq War veteran Herold Noel suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and lives out of his car in Brooklyn. Using Noel's story as a fulcrum, this doc examines the wider issue of homeless U.S. military veterans-from Vietnam to Iraq-who have to fight tooth-and-nail to receive the benefits promised to them by their government.
Dan Lohaus is the maker of the film: click here
WHEN I CAME HOME, FRI, 9/28/7, 7 PM
WHERE: UAA, Social Sciences Building, Room 118
Iraq War veteran Herold Noel suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and lives out of his car in Brooklyn. Using Noel's story as a fulcrum, this doc examines the wider issue of homeless U.S. military veterans-from Vietnam to Iraq-who have to fight tooth-and-nail to receive the benefits promised to them by their government.
Dan Lohaus is the maker of the film: click here
VFP Meeting, Thursday, Sep. 27, St Mary's Episcopal
Vets,
Ernest Gruening Chapter (Southcentral
Thursday, Sep. 27, 7 pm, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Tudor & Lake Otis, Room 3 (downstairs)
- Introductions & Discuss Agenda
- Chapter Business-Finances
- Coordination with Eyes Wide Open
- Plans for the Eyes Wide Open exhibit around the state—
- Financial help with publicity
- NEXT MEETING--Thursday, October 4, 7 pm, in Rogers Park
- http://akcountermilrec.blogspot.com/
- Movie Co-Sponsorship
- WHEN I CAME HOME, FRI, 9/28/7, 7 PM
- WHERE: UAA,
- Iraq War veteran Herold Noel suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and lives out of his car in
- Dan Lohaus the maker of the film: "When I Came Home" www.whenicamehome.com
- Upcoming Events
- SEPT 22- 29: Encampment in front of Congress - Cut off the War funds - Build a People Peace Congress--Congress will not end the war, Marches alone will not end the war, It's time to shut down Washington DC -No more business as usual! http://www.troopsoutnow.org/sept2207call.html
- No War, No Warming (October 21st -23rd);
FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE, NOT WARS FOR OIL! Join a global movement rising up against war and global warming by participating in a massive intervention in - October 27 Massive Regional Actions to End the War in Iraq Regional Mobilizations being planned by United for Peace and Justice and member groups http://www.unitedforpeace.org/
- Pressure on Politicians Congressional Delegation- What can we do?
- Next Meeting on Oct. 25th (4th Thursday of every month)
See you on Thursday—let me know if you are coming on the 27th.
Jon Lockert, 250-4986
- Peace Events: http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=qcq21ir6k6f56vll38aorgltic%40group.calendar.google.com
- Veterans for Peace: http://akpeacevets.blogspot.com
- Peace Coalition: http://alaskans4peace.blogspot.com
From: Taylor Brelsford [mailto:brelsfot@alaska.net]
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 7:49 AM
Friends,
All the components of the Alaska Eyes Wide Open exhibit are now in place. Those of us who gathered last week to attach name tags to the military boot and civilian shoes have some idea of how powerfully this exhibit will touch the people who come to "engage in the encounter." The first showing is late this week in
Thanks to all,
Taylor Brelsford
for the
Friday, September 21, 2007
The War Tapes
From: Anchorage Museum Movies [mailto:newsletters@movie-previews.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 1:51 PM
Subject: Anchorage Museum Movies for Your Mind
September 22-23 at 6 PM
The War Tapes
USA documentary 97 minutes
MPAA RATING: Not Rated (language, gruesome scenes of carnage)
Starring Zack Bazzi, Duncan Domey, Ben Flanders, Mike Moriarity, Steve Pink, and Brandon Wilkins
Directed by Deborah Scranton
In March 2004, just as the insurgent movement strengthened, several members of one National Guard unit arrived in Iraq, with cameras. THE WAR TAPES is the result – a uniquely collaborative film from a team that includes Director Deborah Scranton, Producer Robert May (THE FOG OF WAR) and Producer/Editor Steve James (HOOP DREAMS). Straight from the front lines in Iraq, THE WAR TAPES is the first war movie filmed by soldiers themselves. It is Operation Iraqi Freedom as filmed by Sergeant Steve Pink, Sergeant Zack Bazzi and Specialist Mike Moriarty and other soldiers. Zack is a Lebanese-American university student who loves politics, traveling, and being a soldier. Steve is a carpenter with a sharp sense of humor and aspirations to write, which he does with insight and candor. Mike is a resolute patriot and father of two, who rejoined the army after 9/11. All of them leave women at home—a mother, a girlfriend, and a wife.
While they battled unconventional forces, they recorded events that conventional journalists have been unable to capture. They mounted tripods on gun turrets, inside dashboards and used POV mounts on their Kevlar helmets and vests. They filmed all of the footage in Iraq, which amounted to over 800 hours of tape.
Zack, Steve, and Mike’s unit, Charlie Company, 3rd of the 172nd Infantry (MOUNTAIN) Regiment, was based at LSA Anaconda in the deadly Sunni Triangle, under constant threat of ambush and deadly IED attacks. They traveled, as a unit, 1.4 million miles during their tour, and lived through over twelve hundred combat operations and two hundred and fifty direct enemy engagements. That’s almost one a day.
The soldiers were not picked by casting agents or movie producers. They selected themselves. One hundred and eighty soldiers in Charlie Company were given the opportunity. Ten chose to take it on, and ultimately 21 soldiers filmed for the project, volunteering to share their eyes with America, not knowing where this experiment would take them. “There was something incredibly profound about the soldiers being the ones to press the record button in Iraq that allows us into their world in a never before seen way,” said director Deborah Scranton Producer Robert May adds, “These soldiers were doubly courageous—as soldiers at war, and as human beings willing to share that experience in an honest, powerful and personal way.”
The filmmaking team shot an additional 200 hours of tape documenting the unfolding lives of the soldiers’ families at home, both during deployment and after the soldiers returned home. The families and girlfriends and mothers had also signed on, ensuring that THE WAR TAPES—like any true story about war—is not just about life inside the war, but the life left at home, and the always difficult and sometimes beautiful way the relationships develop and change.
Finally, the prodigious task of distilling over 1,000 hours of tape into the finished 97-minute film took an entire year. “We had to figure out how to preserve the complexity and rawness of their experience in the course of telling their story—a story we truly believe has not been told before,” said producer and editor Steve James. Although five soldiers filmed their entire year’s deployment with one-chip Sony miniDV video cameras, in the end, the film follows the lives of three. “We wanted to tell a compelling, cohesive story—to focus on just a few soldiers so that, most importantly, audiences will truly get to know the soldiers seen in the film,” said producer Robert May. “After watching this film, we want people who don’t know soldiers in their personal lives to feel as if they know Zack, Mike, and Steve. And to accomplish that, we all had to cut scenes and soldiers that we loved.”
In the end, THE WAR TAPES is a complex, heartbreaking, and completely unique opportunity for millions to witness first-person experiences of war—a modern-day Odyssey—and the experience of homecoming. –Official Website
September 29-30 at 6pm
Snow Cake
Drama Canada/UK 112 minutes
MPAA RATING: Not Rated (language and sexual situations, a car crash scene)
Starring Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Fox, Jayne Eastwood, Emily Hampshire, and James Allodi
Directed by Marc Evans
Marc Evans' small-scale drama focuses on the offbeat relationship between a chronically depressed man and an autistic woman, and with a lesser cast it would be insufferable. But Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman imbue screenwriter Angela Pell's characters with a quiet authenticity that's surprisingly moving.
Middle-aged Englishman Alex Hughes (Rickman) is having a quick lunch before resuming his drive across Canada to meet a former girlfriend when aggressively offbeat teenager Vivienne (Emily Hampshire) sits herself down at his table and initiates a largely one-sided conversation. His efforts to freeze her out fail, and he eventually agrees to give her a lift to Wawa, the tiny town where she lives with her mother. Alex is growing to like Vivienne's cheerful, prattling company — much to his own surprise — when, in an instant, it's snatched away. As they wait at an intersection, the car is broadsided by a truck and Vivienne is killed on the spot. Though he's not to blame in the accident, Alex is so guilt-ridden at having walked away unscathed that he forces himself to look up Vivienne's mother, Linda (Weaver). Vivienne had alluded to the fact that her mother was unusual, but Alex is unprepared for how unsettling her behavior — the product of autism — is. Though Linda is, with help, able to live on her own, she's obsessive, easily distracted, self-centered, impulsive and subject to disconcerting verbal and physical tics. She seems more disturbed that Alex is tracking dirty snow into her home than at Vivienne's death, and Alex's intense aversion to confrontation and excessive displays of emotion render him particularly ill-equipped to deal with her eccentric outbursts. But Linda's own parents are on a hiking trip and can't be reached, and Alex can't in good conscience leave her alone to plan Vivienne's funeral. So he agrees to stay for a few days. During that time, he comes to admire Linda's intelligence and fierce independence, and even forges a tentative relationship with her next-door neighbor (Carrie-Anne Moss).
Taking her cue from Pell's screenplay (Pell's son is autistic), Weaver doesn't play Linda's eccentricities as cute or charmingly childlike — her performance is authentically abrasive. Rickman has the less showy role, but his Alex is just as damaged and their prickly relationship feels awkwardly real. The story comes to an end that is as inconclusive as life itself, gently buoyed by a glimmer of hope that Alex, at least, has taken a step towards engaging with the world. --Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 1:51 PM
Subject: Anchorage Museum Movies for Your Mind
September 22-23 at 6 PM
The War Tapes
USA documentary 97 minutes
MPAA RATING: Not Rated (language, gruesome scenes of carnage)
Starring Zack Bazzi, Duncan Domey, Ben Flanders, Mike Moriarity, Steve Pink, and Brandon Wilkins
Directed by Deborah Scranton
In March 2004, just as the insurgent movement strengthened, several members of one National Guard unit arrived in Iraq, with cameras. THE WAR TAPES is the result – a uniquely collaborative film from a team that includes Director Deborah Scranton, Producer Robert May (THE FOG OF WAR) and Producer/Editor Steve James (HOOP DREAMS). Straight from the front lines in Iraq, THE WAR TAPES is the first war movie filmed by soldiers themselves. It is Operation Iraqi Freedom as filmed by Sergeant Steve Pink, Sergeant Zack Bazzi and Specialist Mike Moriarty and other soldiers. Zack is a Lebanese-American university student who loves politics, traveling, and being a soldier. Steve is a carpenter with a sharp sense of humor and aspirations to write, which he does with insight and candor. Mike is a resolute patriot and father of two, who rejoined the army after 9/11. All of them leave women at home—a mother, a girlfriend, and a wife.
While they battled unconventional forces, they recorded events that conventional journalists have been unable to capture. They mounted tripods on gun turrets, inside dashboards and used POV mounts on their Kevlar helmets and vests. They filmed all of the footage in Iraq, which amounted to over 800 hours of tape.
Zack, Steve, and Mike’s unit, Charlie Company, 3rd of the 172nd Infantry (MOUNTAIN) Regiment, was based at LSA Anaconda in the deadly Sunni Triangle, under constant threat of ambush and deadly IED attacks. They traveled, as a unit, 1.4 million miles during their tour, and lived through over twelve hundred combat operations and two hundred and fifty direct enemy engagements. That’s almost one a day.
The soldiers were not picked by casting agents or movie producers. They selected themselves. One hundred and eighty soldiers in Charlie Company were given the opportunity. Ten chose to take it on, and ultimately 21 soldiers filmed for the project, volunteering to share their eyes with America, not knowing where this experiment would take them. “There was something incredibly profound about the soldiers being the ones to press the record button in Iraq that allows us into their world in a never before seen way,” said director Deborah Scranton Producer Robert May adds, “These soldiers were doubly courageous—as soldiers at war, and as human beings willing to share that experience in an honest, powerful and personal way.”
The filmmaking team shot an additional 200 hours of tape documenting the unfolding lives of the soldiers’ families at home, both during deployment and after the soldiers returned home. The families and girlfriends and mothers had also signed on, ensuring that THE WAR TAPES—like any true story about war—is not just about life inside the war, but the life left at home, and the always difficult and sometimes beautiful way the relationships develop and change.
Finally, the prodigious task of distilling over 1,000 hours of tape into the finished 97-minute film took an entire year. “We had to figure out how to preserve the complexity and rawness of their experience in the course of telling their story—a story we truly believe has not been told before,” said producer and editor Steve James. Although five soldiers filmed their entire year’s deployment with one-chip Sony miniDV video cameras, in the end, the film follows the lives of three. “We wanted to tell a compelling, cohesive story—to focus on just a few soldiers so that, most importantly, audiences will truly get to know the soldiers seen in the film,” said producer Robert May. “After watching this film, we want people who don’t know soldiers in their personal lives to feel as if they know Zack, Mike, and Steve. And to accomplish that, we all had to cut scenes and soldiers that we loved.”
In the end, THE WAR TAPES is a complex, heartbreaking, and completely unique opportunity for millions to witness first-person experiences of war—a modern-day Odyssey—and the experience of homecoming. –Official Website
September 29-30 at 6pm
Snow Cake
Drama Canada/UK 112 minutes
MPAA RATING: Not Rated (language and sexual situations, a car crash scene)
Starring Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Fox, Jayne Eastwood, Emily Hampshire, and James Allodi
Directed by Marc Evans
Marc Evans' small-scale drama focuses on the offbeat relationship between a chronically depressed man and an autistic woman, and with a lesser cast it would be insufferable. But Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman imbue screenwriter Angela Pell's characters with a quiet authenticity that's surprisingly moving.
Middle-aged Englishman Alex Hughes (Rickman) is having a quick lunch before resuming his drive across Canada to meet a former girlfriend when aggressively offbeat teenager Vivienne (Emily Hampshire) sits herself down at his table and initiates a largely one-sided conversation. His efforts to freeze her out fail, and he eventually agrees to give her a lift to Wawa, the tiny town where she lives with her mother. Alex is growing to like Vivienne's cheerful, prattling company — much to his own surprise — when, in an instant, it's snatched away. As they wait at an intersection, the car is broadsided by a truck and Vivienne is killed on the spot. Though he's not to blame in the accident, Alex is so guilt-ridden at having walked away unscathed that he forces himself to look up Vivienne's mother, Linda (Weaver). Vivienne had alluded to the fact that her mother was unusual, but Alex is unprepared for how unsettling her behavior — the product of autism — is. Though Linda is, with help, able to live on her own, she's obsessive, easily distracted, self-centered, impulsive and subject to disconcerting verbal and physical tics. She seems more disturbed that Alex is tracking dirty snow into her home than at Vivienne's death, and Alex's intense aversion to confrontation and excessive displays of emotion render him particularly ill-equipped to deal with her eccentric outbursts. But Linda's own parents are on a hiking trip and can't be reached, and Alex can't in good conscience leave her alone to plan Vivienne's funeral. So he agrees to stay for a few days. During that time, he comes to admire Linda's intelligence and fierce independence, and even forges a tentative relationship with her next-door neighbor (Carrie-Anne Moss).
Taking her cue from Pell's screenplay (Pell's son is autistic), Weaver doesn't play Linda's eccentricities as cute or charmingly childlike — her performance is authentically abrasive. Rickman has the less showy role, but his Alex is just as damaged and their prickly relationship feels awkwardly real. The story comes to an end that is as inconclusive as life itself, gently buoyed by a glimmer of hope that Alex, at least, has taken a step towards engaging with the world. --Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide
Anchorage Eyes Wide Open Exhibit October 13 - Town Square
Vets,
Several VFP members have been working on the Eyes Wide Open Exhibit that is touring the state and will be mounted in
- For more info on: Eyes Wide Open -
I am attaching the PDF of the
In addition VFP will be co-sponsoring a movie on Sep. 28:
WHEN I CAME HOME, FRI, 9/28/7, 7 PM
WHERE: UAA,
Iraq War veteran Herold Noel suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and lives out of his car in
Dan Lohaus the maker of the film: "When I Came Home" www.whenicamehome.com
See you next week.
Jon Lockert, 250-4986
- Peace Events: http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=qcq21ir6k6f56vll38aorgltic%40group.calendar.google.com
- Veterans for Peace: http://akpeacevets.blogspot.com
- Peace Coalition: http://alaskans4peace.blogspot.com
From: Taylor Brelsford [mailto:brelsfot@alaska.net]
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 7:49 AM
Friends,
All the components of the Alaska Eyes Wide Open exhibit are now in place. Those of us who gathered last week to attach name tags to the military boot and civilian shoes have some idea of how powerfully this exhibit will touch the people who come to "engage in the encounter." The first showing is late this week in
Thanks to all,
Taylor Brelsford
for the
Monday, September 10, 2007
Film: WHEN I CAME HOME
WHEN I CAME HOME
WHEN: FRI, 9/28/7, 7 PM
Dan Lohaus the maker of the film: "When I Came Home" www.whenicamehome.com
The Dog Days of War
beneath the radar by Gary Younge
The Dog Days of War
[from the September 10, 2007 issue]
On Friday morning, August 17, Nick Travis protested in
It's been two years since Cindy Sheehan set up
In that time we have also seen an escalation of US troops, no letup in the vast number of civilian and combatant casualties (including US troops) and the exodus of Iraq's professional class. In short, in the past two years most people's views about what needed to happen changed and what actually happened did not.
Given the outlook in August 2005, even this is no small feat. Back then, demonstrations in Crawford were about more than just a physical presence. They marked a political moment. All the polls suggested that public sentiment on the war had shifted from frustration to despair but had found inadequate and inconsistent expression in Congress and the press. The mainstream had effectively been marginalized.
Then along came Cindy. Packaged as an Everymother just looking for answers, she made the cable shows and supermarket magazine covers. She had in fact been around for quite some time. (The Nation had featured her on the cover four months earlier.) But now the word was flowing beyond our ideological shores. In the space of a month, Sheehan went from being an activist with energy and a compelling story to a household name who could spark 1,627 local vigils in solidarity.
In the absence of a cohesive, media-savvy antiwar movement, she became the face of protest. As such she did not so much lead public opinion as embody it. Her prominence illustrated the actual weakness of the left as much as it did its potential strength. In the American public, progressives had a receptive audience; but we have failed to meaningfully reach them. "It's rare when people seriously publicly engage," Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, told me after Bush announced the "surge." "They watch it on TV. They read about it in the newspapers. They get angry, but that doesn't necessarily mean they engage."
That disconnect remains both our greatest challenge and our weakest link. We may toast Karl Rove's departure and Bush's woes and tout polling figures that show increasing backing for withdrawal and against occupation. But the fact that the Republicans are losing public support for the war doesn't necessarily mean that we have won the argument against it.
For the mounting opposition is primarily informed less by a mass conversion against imperialism than by a far more basic factor:
True, it would be churlish not to delight in the demise of the neocons and the now-dominant consensus that this war was a mistake. But it would be equally deluded to pretend that we got here by dint of our reasoning and rallying alone. Opposition to the war is broad, but it is not deep. A change of fortunes for the
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue," wrote George Orwell in his essay "In Front of Your Nose," "and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."
Which brings us back to Cindy Sheehan. Exposed and increasingly exasperated with the lack of political leadership following the Democratic midterm victory, Sheehan recently retired from campaigning, only to return to the fray soon afterward. But this time she transformed the object of her ire from Bush to House leader Nancy Pelosi, whom she is running against in
This is a strategic error. Not because Pelosi should not be confronted--"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will," said Frederick Douglass--but because the most effective confrontation the Democratic leadership will understand at this point is not electoral; it is political.
Democrats have already proved themselves an inadequate and ineffective vehicle for our antiwar hopes--most of their senators, including all of those now running for President who were there at the time, voted for the war. But they are also the most responsive to pressure from the antiwar movement. Pelosi may prove to be an obstacle--but she is not the enemy. It will take the engagement of the angry at every level to force the conversation in
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