By Marilyn Ferdinand

As our long nuclear winter of human rights abuses continues with authorization to build the Great Wall of the Rio Grande as well as desecration of privacy rights, particularly of the people we honor on this Memorial Day weekend, there comes a glimmer of sanity from the North Side. Beginning this evening, the Human Rights Watch Traveling Film Festival stops at Facets for a one-week engagement.
Human Rights Watch, the festival’s sponsoring organization, started its international film festival in 1994, “in recognition of the power of film to educate and galvanize a broad constituency of concerned citizens.” Organizers rigorously fact-check
selected films for accuracy, though no point of view is censored. Until four years ago, the festival played only in New York City and London. Recognizing that the enemy of freedom is ignorance, HRW started making a sampling of the best of the fest available to venues anywhere in the United States and Canada that wanted to host them. Facets has been showing them ever since.
The 2005-2006 selection of 12 films includes both features and documentaries. I caught two of the films on The Sundance Channel and both are worth a look. The Education of Shelby Knox focuses on the attempts of a conservative, evangelical Christian teenager to force her Lubbock, Texas, school district to offer sex education classes to stem the high rate of teen pregnancies and STDs. Shelby Knox proves that, yes, conservatives have brains, too, and can use them in the service of the common good – she’s really a remarkable person. I saw Mardi Gras: Made in China on the eve of New Orleans’s first such celebration after Killer Katrina drowned its streets. I became the official killjoy in my office when I rejected the beads my co-workers were handing out by saying, “I know the near-slave who burned herself putting those beads together is very happy for you.” Yes, definitely don’t invite me to your next party. But do see this movie.

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Posted on May 26, 2006

Date: March 26, 2006
From: Wicker Park
To: Navy Pier
The Cab: Relatively clean, but with the sound-and-feel of a workhorse, with its bumpy suspension and telltale squeaks and harrumphs. A real respectable piece of work, though, like a hard-working family cab just trying to do its best for its cab family.
The Driver:“Navy Pier!” were the only words he uttered. It was hard to tell what he meant by that. He was driving silent when he picked me up, but, perhaps upon spotting my armful of newspapers, he quickly switched on the radio – to Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!
He also wore a satisfying fishing hat that was not quite the measure of Lt. Col. Henry Blake’s, but slightly better than this one.
The Driving: Full of the quick stop-and-gos that tend to make me nauseas. Poor timing of (Dunkin’ Donuts) coffee-drinking imperiled safety. Fumbling for CDs almost put us into the back of a stopped school bus. Music was hard to place: Dido meets Shakira. Latin but not revolutionary.
Overall rating: 2 extended arms
– Steve Rhodes

Posted on May 26, 2006

By The Beachwood Public Affairs Desk

JOBS AMERICANS WON’T DO:
1. Work 80 hours a week picking fruit in the Florida heat for $2 a day.
2. Learn the names of their political representatives.
3. Be Naomi Campbell’s personal assistant.
4. Certain wrestling smackdowns.
5. Clean hotel lobby restrooms used by conventioneers for $7/hour.
6. Bat .210 for less than $2 milllion a year.

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Posted on May 16, 2006

By Marty Gangler
One of America’s most underrated mascots is dead, and hardly anyone, it seems, is mourning this tremendous loss.
Well, I am. Let this be a tribute then, a tribute to a man I took for granted. A guy I thought would always be there for me, always there with my fix, my jump, my edge.
Farewell, Hostess Pie Magician.
You graced the waxy packaging of Hostess fruit pies for as long as I can remember, reporting to work in top hat and tux, blessing each pie with your special pixie wand.

And now you’ve been replaced by a small bushel of fruit.

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Posted on May 1, 2006