waking life
richard linklater's animated film. it's pretty amazing.

mill valley film festival
so it's not toronto, and it's not chicago, but it's a pretty good festival. greg and saw 4 movies on saturday. first was abbas kiarostami's abc africa, about the uganda women's initiative to serve children orphaned due to civil war and AIDS. really interesting and well done, i thought. then we saw jyll johnstone's throwing curves: eva zeisel, about the pioneer industrial designer. entertaining and well done, too. that was accompanied by two shorts. one was a story about a 92-year-old woman who loses her license and has to give up driving her hotrod belaire, and the other was a documentary about a russian jewish couple married for 50 some years, enduring horrifying loss during world war II and then coping with alzheimer's in their old age. that one made me bawl my eyes out. i kept quiet, but man, the tears just flowed.

women & social movements in the US, 1820-1940
an excellent research and educational site on US women's history organized by all-star historians thomas dublin and kathryn kish sklar. click on projects to find source documents on a range of women's reform movements, from anti-lynching campaigns to women workers under the new deal.

thank you, edward said
thank you for being so thoughtful and eloquent and even and clear. thank you thank you thank you. and thanks for the archive, too.

a midwife's tale
i linked this on my diary page, but it's super cool so i'm linking it here, too. it's about an 18th century new england midwife, but it's also about a 21st century historian the artistry of the historian's craft. super cool.

coverage from the guardian.uk
one smart thing i heard on npr recently was a media critic complaining that since the 'end of the cold war', all the major US news networks have been insufferably inward looking and self-obsessed. that is, they offer little information or analysis of events taking place beyond the united states (unless of course it's a surface report on the US flipping off kyoto or durban). so it's difficult to find mainstream sources of information about the comlex history that led to the wtc/pentagon attacks. and even more difficult to locate meaningful debate about what options there are for response. it's simply, "we're at war, we're at war." i get angry at the people i see mouthing off ignorant shit, but when i think about what information is easily available to most americans, can i really be surprised? angry + not surprised = depressed. (yeah, there's the internet, you can find out anything on the internet, and that's why i'm throwing this link up here, but i don't know how many people click beyond yahoo.) oh, and PLUS, i go around feeling like i'm surrounded by ignorant people, but what the fuck do I know about anything? and when someone does try to explain shit to me, i usually feel like they're oversimplifying everything and that irks me, too.

i guess i just feel caught in this circle, immobilized. i'm trying to fix that, though, slowly, slowly, by reading what i can. greg just ordered history books that we're going to study, maybe that will help. anyway, go look at the guardian page and scroll down to the press reviews, where you'll be able to see what papers are saying all around the world. pretty interesting. the bbc site has similar stuff but they're more europe-focused. i'm going to look around today for more sites, maybe thenation.com or other alternapress sites will have stuff.

world trade center, as it was
from greatbuildings.com. i've never thought much about modern skyscraper architecture, but looking at these photos is like reading an obit. makes me sad. i know everybody keeps repeating it, but the towers really were such a part of the skyline in new york. it's hard to imagine that they're gone.

michael moore: death, downtown
from pam who got it from merritt. the more time passes, the more the media frenzy kicks in, the more difficult it is to find thoughtful words that capture and speak to the mix of emotions i feel as a result of tuesday.

high school
i caught part of this documentary by frederick wiseman on pbs last night. have you seen it? it was filmed in 1968 at a mostly white high school in philadelphia. there's no narrator, which i appreciate. the camera simply records teachers and students and parents in a 100 different high school settings -- classes, assemblies, after school sports and activities, in the hallways, in the guidance counselor's office, in the principal's office, in detention. man. almost every single authority figure in this movie is completely fucked up. watching it made me 1) realize how much really has changed since the second wave feminist movement (you will not believe some of the adult behavior you'll see in this film. like the boy's sex ed teacher who says he's a gynecologist and "gets paid to stick his finger up girls' vaginas, ha ha ha" and the girls' fashion teacher who tells all of them that their legs are too fat) and 2) have a little more sympathy for some of the more essentializing elements of 70s feminism. if i went to that high school i might have turned into a cultural feminist, too, who knows. i mean, in that environment, how could you not feel like all men are assholes? oh wait, i still sometimes feel like that. anyway, it's really interesting. makes me want to see his other films, too.

toronto international film festival
greg and i are going this year! yay! i so cannot wait for this. if all goes well and we get the tickets we requested, we'll see a total of nine films. (we can only go for one weekend because of my school schedule. rats.)

portrait of black chicago
in 1973 and 1974, john h. white, a 28-year-old photographer for the chicago daily news, worked for the EPA photographing chicago's african american community. the photos are collected here as part of the national archives online exhibit hall.

the new american history
my favorite book of the summer. a collection of historiographical essays by "leading historians", edited by eric foner, on various time periods and themes in US history: reconstruction, progressive era, depression, etc; social, intellectual, women's, african american, etc. really useful for getting an idea of what has been written in each field in the last 100 years, what the major debates are, where the field is heading in the future. great for peeps like me trying to figure out what to study.

our song
i really loved ghost world, but when i saw our song, i kept thinking how ghost world would have been better if it had been more about the relationship between the girls than about the relationship between enid and seymour. there aren't enough movies about relationships between girls. still, both movies ruled.