IF you’re searching for summer movie options midst the blockbusters SEE a film you’ve never heard of – or a film you’ve heard of, but forgotten was incredibly wonderful BECAUSE facets of light lie buried in my Cinemashrink DVD Trove  of gems.

Paper Moon, 1973 (USA)

Director: Peter Bogdanovich
Writers: Joe David Brown (story), Alvin Sargent (screenplay)
Cinematographer: Lazlo Kovacs
Starring Ryan O’Neal, Tatum O’Neal and Madeline Kahn

If children wise beyond their years hold a special fascination for you…

See an orphan and a conman in Paper Moon vie for honors at who’s getting the best of who – and laugh when they do, in fact, get the best of each other!

Because a girl who’s made up her mind and a grown up man who hasn’t construct a road of hope to the future on a whim and a prayer in 1930’s.

(Tatum would have surely gotten Best Actress nomination in our kid friendly Oscar nominations today.)

Le Havre, 2011 (Finland, France, Germany)

Director: Aki Kaurismaki
Writer: Aki Kaurismaki
Starring: Andre Wilms, Blondin Miguel, Jean-Pierr Darroussin

If you want to get your faith in humankind back on track…

See Le Havre turn one bleak certainty of doom into yet another reasonable probability of triumph

Because a good heart may ring as often as a bad one but good heartedness in action – well illustrated against personal and social odds – is truly welcome.

(I loved this film for all its unlikely but highly credible characters.)

 The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973 (Spain)

Writer and Director: Victor Erice
Starring:  Ana Torrent, Teresa Gimpera, Fernando Fernan

If you like allegorical tales that take you deep into soulful emotions difficult to capture in words…

See a curious little girl in The Spirit of the Beehive try to understand killing as her family suffers the aftermath of Spain’s civil war

Because why we kill, why we endure and why we care so much for one life, so little for another are essential questions that puzzle us from cradle to grave.

(It was the 1931 Frankenstein film that set this little girl’s search for answers to profound questions into motion, affirming my own belief in the power of film.)

You Laugh, 1998  (Italy)

Directors: Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani
Writers:  Luigi Pirandello (stories), Taviani Brothers
Starring:  Antonio Albanese, Giuseppe Cederna, Luca Zingaretti

If you love Luigi Pirandello and love the Taviani Brothers even more…

See You Laugh to contemplate why life isn’t worth living without being able to fulfill your dreams and why, in its second feature about kidnappings, life in the moment is worth more than life as it should be…

Because big questions are the only ones Pirandello and the Taviani Brothers bother with and they will, I promise, keep conversation going long into the night…

(Spoiler alert.  These are disturbing films about matters of great importance exquisitely filmed and drawn from profound stories.)

Man of Aran, 1934  (UK, Ireland)

Written and Directed by Robert Flahtery
Starring Colman ‘Tiger’ King, Maggie Dirrain, Michael Dirrane
Best Foreign Film, National Board of Review, USA

If you, like me, are wowed by visions a film poet who conjures up the genius of William Butler Yeats with black and white imagery,

See Man of Aran lift documentary to the level of myth, capturing the essence of an isolated Irish Islander’s struggle with primeval elements to make a home in hostile but magnificent environs.

Because the film shows one stunning scene after another that makes you gasp with awe.  No wonder thousands of people walk the surface of this Irish island Spring and Summer.  The magic of human resilience hides here.

(Man of Aran is a documentary of the human spirit.  Real woman carrying bundles of seaweed on her back.  Real men catching a shark the length of their boat. Real, not simulated waves looming and crashing against craggy cliffs.)

Facing Windows, 2003  (Italy, Turkey, Portugal, UK)

Director: Ferzan Ozpetek
Writers:  Ferzan Ozpetek, Gianni Romoli
Starring Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Massimo Girotti

If you’re not feeling love, you’re not feeling life and need the touch of encouragement to be smart about your choices…

See Facing Windows probe the soul of ambivalence, a passion submerged for lack of single direction but still stirring the heart,

Because the sweet sadness in the eyes, the ayes of recognition between lovers, friends and like spirits of love feel quite savory.

(A full on beautiful film about life in the ‘as is’ condition.)

The Story of The Weeping Camel, 2003  (Germany, Mongolia)

Directors: Byambasuren Davaa, Luigi Falorni
Writers: Byambasuren Davaa, Bathayar Davgadorj, Luigi Falorni
Starring: Janchiv Ayurzana, Chimed Obin, Amgaabazar Gonson & several camels

If you want to be transported to Mongolia, visit its native culture of goat and camel herders and change your sense of time…

See The Story of The Weeping Camel create a compelling family drama as they help a camel mother bond with her unwanted calf…

Because ‘Believe It of Not’ doesn’t do unbelievable realities any better than a mother camel who vibes to a violin!  You will be moved.

(Right up there in significance with the 1922 Nanook of the North, the first full length ethnographic film in such an odd corner of earth.)

Walk on Water, 2004  (Israel, Sweden with English, Hebrew, Italian, Turkish & German languages)

Director:  Eytan Fox
Writer: Gal Uchovsky (screenplay)
Stars:  Lior Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, Caroline Peters

If you like your films well done, grown up and personally provocative

See Walk on Water reject the Exodus edict in which sins of the father dictate generations of hatred for sons and daughters who refuse the ways of the father.

Because to break with traditions of revenge and live for the living picks up the task of evolving; a real man’s challenge.

(Great travel film.  Visit Tel Aviv and Berlin as if you were there.  Experience the contrast and differences for the one who visits, the one who lives as a resident.)

Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade,  1989  (USA)

Steven Spielberg
Jeffrey Boan (screenplay), George Lucas (story)
Harrison Ford and Sean Connery

If you truly want to escape the here and now, suspend disbelief and fling yourself into laughing out loud,

See Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade turn the Star Wars quest of a son for his father into a romp from Italy to Jordan, rescuing the Holy Grail from the bad guys and the world from bad guy domination.

Because it’s just such damn good fun to not have to worry about a good ending for the good guys – for a change!

(Harrison Ford and Sean Connery are so fabulous being the fabulous characters they’ve built for the big screen and there are so many references to iconic heroes, you might think Tarantino had a hand in this film.)

Article written by Dr. Jane Alexander Stewart

Newtopia staff writer Jane Alexander Stewart, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who writes essays about mythic themes in film, creates “Myth in Film; Myth in Your Life” seminars for self-exploration and travels a lot. Her film reviews have been published in the San Francisco C.G. Jung Library Journal, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture and Los Angeles Journal of Psychological Perspectives.  Jane’s popular essay on “The Feminine Hero in The Silence of the Lambs” appears in the anthology, The Soul of Popular Culture, and in The Presence of the Feminine in Film as one of its authors. She’s also presented myth in film programs at Los Angeles County Museum, University of Alabama and C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. A collection of her reviews and other writing can be found at www.CinemaShrink.com.

Mud, 2012

Written and Directed by Jeff Nichols

Starring Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Sam Shepard, Tye Sheridan, and Jacob Lofland

There’s only one good reason to see Mud — Matthew McConaughey’s performance as a primordial man with heart.

I will talk about the film’s story, but it’s not what kept me in my seat.  That honor belongs solely to McConaughey.

Mud sports one of the best across-the-board collections of real men — fathers, uncles and sons — you’re likely to see in one movie. A father gets past his silent pain of failure to talk openly with his son; an uncle takes responsibility for his adoptive son seriously, with sensitivity; an old man reveals his personal history to an adolescent boy; and a crazy man called Mud provides an alternative role model — one who’s strayed far from the path of sane, rational decisions, and scorns it — for boys who yearn to understand feelings of love and manhood. Even the bad guys consist of a father and son; their blind loyalty plays as a violent contrast to the caring we see in the other men.

Unfortunately, Mud is a straightforward narrative that gets over-explained and filled in with scenes and dialogue anyone could’ve just as easily imagined – and been better off for if you had. Without McConaughey, who lifts the character of Mud to the mythic dimension of a monster, a Minotaur who could eat the children and doesn’t, the film falls flat.

Two young teenage boys, Ellis and Neckbone (Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland), are good buddies who get a fair shake from the decent men in their lives, but little insight. The men care and they try. But they flounder, longing for a love that eludes them, and they’re lost without it.  Their women pass them by, substantial but a mystery, out of reach.

Modern times are bringing change to the shacks along an Arkansas river, and fishing is over as a way of life. Neither of the boys’ families do well; Ellis’ mom sees it’s time to move into town and dad’s hanging onto the old ways, still peddling fish caught in the river. A divorce is in the offing. Neckbone’s guardian uncle dives for oysters, gathering girls and pearls while playing the guitar in his trailer for fun. The two boys, with time on their hands and girls on their minds, take a flatboat across the river to an island to claim a boat that’s been caught in a treetop after the last flood.

When they find the boat, they find Mud. What kind of wise guy is this wild-haired man with only a story to his name? He’s definitely intriguing. Mud captures and holds the center of this film with a providential task for the boys: bring the boat down from the tree.

The boys say okay, making up their own minds about what’s right and wrong for once, outside the bounds of parental oversight. As they get involved with Mud, each choice moves them forward. He lays down the question of choice over and over for them, helping the boys define themselves. While they know it’s risky, they’re drawn in.

Mud’s odd name conjures up earthly, primitive notions about the beginning of man. He’s a fatherless, motherless man who grew up on the river and left. Now he’s come back, waiting for the woman he loves who’s promised to meet him. He’s killed a man who did her wrong and is on the run. Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) is as contradictory as the desert tree of her namesake, with a dead trunk and limbs in bloom, reaching for heaven. She eventually turns up, tailed by a gang of bounty hunters hired to kill Mud.

The boys help Mud with food and supplies, and when they spot Juniper in town they tell Mud. Ellis mirrors Mud in his younger days, an idealistic kid with an eye for the perfect girl, a hankering for love and one foot already firm on the path of the outsider. A crisis involving Ellis and a cottonmouth snake brings Mud into town and into harm’s way. The bounty hunters close in. There’s a shotgun shootout on Ellis’ parents’ houseboat in which an old man (Sam Shepard) who raised Mud rises like Clint Eastwood and saves the day.

And so we wonder about the larger story behind the coming of a new day for a couple of teenage boys. Crossing the river is a metaphor often employed to describe breaking away from the shore of conventional rule, entering the labyrinth of choice that leads to the core of being – or not being. It takes extraordinary courage to challenge the small vision of opportunity when society is crashing down around you. Boys like Ellis and Neckbone meet their inner crisis of manhood in the form of Mud, a rangy outsider with only a gun and the shirt on his back who’s taken refuge on an island where love is strung up in a tree. In Crossing to Avalon, Jean Shinoda Bolen describes the search for the mystery that births and sustains life:

“Once we enter (the labyrinth) ordinary time and distance are immaterial, we are in the midst of a ritual and a journey where transformation is possible; 

We do not know how far away or close we are to the center where meaning can be found until we are there;

The way back is not obvious and we have no way of knowing as we emerge how or when we will take the experience back into the world until we do.  

To return to ordinary life, we must again travel the labyrinth to get out, which is also a complex journey for it involves integrating the experience into consciousness, which is what changes us.”

As I crossed the river with Ellis and Neckbone, I searched for a way to embrace McConaughey’s magnificent performance. In fitting with the slow story of societal failings, the turmoil of family difficulties and stereotypical uncertainties, I envisioned Mud as an unlikely Minotaur, as a mythic impersonation who was not sure whether he was beast or man, bull-headed or a man following his bliss.

I merged my voice with the man of Mud, the movie with an irresistible mythic image of love stuck in a tree.

Mud speaks:

“For the love of a woman I’m a crazy son of a bitch, a misfit, a minotaur who lies at the center of his own labyrinth. Am I Modern Man coming of age or a disappearing fisherman? Love of a woman is like a boat in a tree, to be brought down from its cradle and restored by boys who came into my labyrinth with a rope tied round their ankle. They’re looking for refuge in a society bound up in cynicism; fathers lost without a way to make a living and mothers placing bets on a paper-thin future. The boys help me lower the boat out of the tree into the river. They reckon I’m deserving of their help because the woman who leaves me loves me, and I love her. Together, the boys and me, we’re onto something else. Though I’ve killed the beast he lives on, and he’s coming to get me. I honestly don’t know if I’m dead or I’m dreamin’ as I float through water. The old man next to me in the boat, the father I never knew, says ‘you gotta see this,’ so I climb up on deck to see. Once the snake bites, the shotguns fire and the sun rises, I see what he sees. An endless horizon beckons too far into the future.”

So, for the love of a river that brings some things of value and some evil things, I laugh.

It’d be okay if you do too.

Article written by Dr. Jane Alexander Stewart

Newtopia staff writer Jane Alexander Stewart, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who writes essays about mythic themes in film, creates “Myth in Film; Myth in Your Life” seminars for self-exploration and travels a lot. Her film reviews have been published in the San Francisco C.G. Jung Library Journal, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture and Los Angeles Journal of Psychological Perspectives.  Jane’s popular essay on “The Feminine Hero in The Silence of the Lambs” appears in the anthology, The Soul of Popular Culture, and in The Presence of the Feminine in Film as one of its authors. She’s also presented myth in film programs at Los Angeles County Museum, University of Alabama and C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. A collection of her reviews and other writing can be found at www.CinemaShrink.com.

This is Canada for sure, their new home, a vast country that looked good from the outside looking in. Once “inside” the family quickly learned that “opportunity” is a deeply ambiguous term. Back home in their urbanized village, some 65km from Bucharest, Romania, the Ilyanov’s would have called it a “class” concept. Low-income people, here as there, live in low quality apartment buildings; the difference here is that these buildings mainly house immigrants. Where you live plays a big role on the quality of life, here as there, with the good neighborhoods privileged with the best schools and social facilities.

“Opportunity” has different meaning for those with well-paying jobs and for those who don’t have work or who work in the countless fast-food franchises and convenience stores. The word “Opportunity” translates into a different meaning for those who have property and who hold “liquid assets”, thus allowing them to access and enjoy the natural and cultural richness of the country. Opportunities become real for the “haves”; for the others, they exist as quickly changing images on TV or in travel brochures of faraway places (excluding Romania). Opportunities are just unfulfilled promises, mere fiction.

For now, real life demands careful, often hard choices: what grocery items to buy, which brands to choose and which products to skip. The abundance of products shelved and lined up in the super-market only poorly conceals the fact that quantity and quality do not go together. If you buy the kids’ cereal on sale for $2.99, you get a big box of low nutrition, high sugar loops. The high fiber and nutritionally balanced cereal is never on sale: half the amount would cost you $4.69, more than a third of your daily budget. Buying meat is no different: pork and “regular” high fat beef is always cheap. Nobody informs you about the way this meat was produced or how many hormones were injected into the animals.

In the village back in Romania, no farmer could afford hormones. Although meat was not on the daily menu, when it was served up, it did have a healthy taste. Over here, fresh fish is unaffordable on a regular basis. So opportunity actually means that poor people in a rich country can eat plenty of tasty low quality food. But it is best not to think about the eventual health consequences. If people were only half-aware of the food-health relationship, they might decide to avoid growing overweight (more than 45% of Canadians and well over 50% of US residents are considered too heavy). They could also avoid having to wear ill-fitting clothes from discount retailers or used clothing stores. If the high carbohydrate diet makes people obese (and worse, given that a lot of processed food is saturated with hormones, preservatives and other chemicals) and leads to bad teeth too (dental plans are not easy to come by), at least people are supposed to revel in the freedom of choice between some thirty plus fast food joints on Merivale Road.

Another disgrace and insult to the poor is that pizza delivery drivers have to use their own, rusting and crumbling cars to do their underpaid jobs: jobs that so dearly depended on tips from junk-food consumers without dental plans. But at least, as long as they have cars, they can do more of their own grocery shopping at the cheaper, big supermarkets, avoiding the hefty price “premium” of the neighborhood grocery store. Nobody can explain what is convenient about those stores. Perhaps a pizza delivery guy can average $31.38 a day, minus car costs. Sometimes of course there is extra pizza to take home, but the kids no longer get much excited at the prospect of left-over pizza, five times a week.

Konstantin had promised to write home, by e-mail of course. He still does, bet less often than in the first two years since their arrival. It is hard to not be positive in his e-mails about how good he and his family have it here. If he’d describe the social and economic realities he has been thrust into, most relatives and friends simply would feel insulted. How could he, as one of the lucky ones who got away from the backwardness and bleakness of life back home, complain of hardship and lack of genuine opportunity? Of course, he has occasionally doubted himself, thinking it’s his own fault that he does not have a ‘good’ job, with benefits, and doesn’t own a nice little house (he is still under the illusion that being bound to a mortgage for 25 years, somehow equates to home-ownership). If they were given an immigration visa, all of his day-dreaming family and friends would come to join him here, ready to seize their ‘chance’ too.

In August, he will turn 50. If by 55 he can make a down payment on a semi-detached house, he would be 80 by the time he owned his abode; in any case, an old dwelling by then. He has begun to project his hopes for a better life to his children, the oldest now sixteen. For Konstantin and his wife, opportunity is just a lottery ticket away.

It is certainly comforting to know for those whom it may concern, that the vehicles meet safety standards. Perhaps interesting for the light-walleted as well to note that ‘Armoured Group’ sales offices exist even in places not commonly known as havens of wealth, such as Kenya, Ethiopia and Nigeria. Which leads me to this update to my January article in Newtopia on social inequality. Summer is in sight yes, but economic inequality is not posed to take a summer break. More and more reports have now been published that provide irritable evidence as to the income disparities that are eroding livelihoods and economic opportunities from Detroit to Dhaka.

Norwegian People’s Aid, a labour movement humanitarian organization published an ‘Inequality Watch report in September 2012.[i] The report offers useful reading to help comprehend trends and conceptual underpinnings of globalized inequality. Two statements to share here:

• Unequal distribution of power and resources undermine the fundamental values of people’s equal rights. It leads to structural oppression of large population groups. It also makes it much harder for poor and marginalized groups to gain political influence. Even if equal rights to vote and participate are formally granted in a highly unequal society, people’s real possibilities of political influence will remain limited.

• Resources are available, but extremely unequally distributed. We have also seen that social movements around the world have addressed the issue of inequality and demanded political action for a more just distribution of power, wealth, income, land and access to social services. For years it has been almost impossible to get dominant politicians and development institutions to discuss reduction of inequality or redistribution of resources. Today, we see a slow change, but not yet reflected in consistent new policies.

It is an open secret also the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) readily acknowledges: ‘wage gaps widened and household income inequality increased in a large majority of OECD countries. This occurred even when countries were going through a period of sustained economic and employment growth.”[ii]

The OECD goes on to note:

“In OECD countries today, the average income of the richest 10% of the population is about nine times that of the poorest 10% – a ratio of 9 to 1. However, the ratio varies widely from one country to another. It is much lower than the OECD average in the Nordic and many continental European countries, but reaches 10 to 1 in Italy, Japan, Korea, and the United Kingdom; around 14 to 1 in Israel, Turkey, and the United States; and 27 to 1 in Mexico and Chile.”

In the “Global Wage Report 2012/13: Wages and Equitable Growth” released by the International Labor Organization in Geneva, differences in wages around the globe are captured and analyzed.[iii] Again unsurprising to the growing number of informed anti-capitalist activists and occupiers, ‘real average wage growth has remained far below pre-crisis (2008) levels globally, going into the red in developed economies’.  However more telling than wage growth rates and percentages, are the reports’ illustrations, which reveal just how large the gap, now is between labor productivity and wages.

Without a doubt, such gaps are significant and at the individual household and worker level, they are painful to acknowledge and try to come to terms with:

‘Between 1999 and 2011 average labor productivity in developed economies increased more than twice as much as average wages. In the United States, real hourly labor productivity in the non-farm business sector increased by about 85 per cent since 1980, while real hourly compensation increased by only around 35 per cent.’

In other, plain words:  while the value of what an average worker produced per hour has nearly doubled in just over a decade, only a third of that increase was shared with the worker:  capitalists pocketed two thirds. Add to this that workers bear a growing burden of the general tax burden and that businesses, notably large corporations, (presuming they don’t succeed to totally circumvent taxes by escaping to tax havens), pay a relatively shrinking share, then the drivers behind the dismal state of economic equality around the world today, become easier to understand.

As a result of a prolonged erosion of wage incomes compared to capital gains and speculation income, maintaining living standards has fallen out of reach for many who  used to consider themselves ‘middle class’. Few people would readily like to admit this and may rather refuse to identify themselves as new members of the ‘lower class’ in the capitalist economy. However social circumstances and economic prospects for many who were once considered to be ‘white collar’ workers, correspond with what used to be the ideal of ‘upward mobility. We all know how entire generations of youth in countries such as Spain and Greece, but also in Italy, Portugal and in other countries throughout the European Union, find themselves unemployed for extended periods.

Many have even never been in the workforce at all after high-school, college and university (youth unemployment rates in the 18 of the 27 EU countries hovers above 20%)[iv].

Again, more and more studies are released, including in 2013 ‘Squeezed: Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility’, by the UK-based Institute of Development Studies and Oxfam.[v] The focus here is to demonstrate the failure of wages to keep pace with food price rises and how this is putting a strain on families and communities.

Squeezed Report

Among the key observations from the report, perhaps most discerning are that

• the poorest are eating too little and missing vital nutrients, and
• the urgent need for cash is taking priority over collective social life and values; the high price of essentials is contributing to growing individualism and family nucleation.

These issues are obviously global ones. They may not be openly manifest in wealthier economies, but what inequality and poverty mean when it comes down to chances to lead healthy lives, free from hunger and food insecurity, the parallels between poverty in Alabama, Guatemala or Angola may not be fundamentally different at all. Downward globalization has many dimensions, none pleasant:

“Food safety is a growing concern as families are forced to turn to cheaper, poor quality and sometimes contaminated food to stretch the budget.  Increased migration is occurring as people leave rural homes for the city or other countries for more economic opportunities. In Ethiopia, food prices were blamed for people moving to the Middle East.

Heightened family tensions are revealed in increased incidences of domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse as many men struggle to fulfill their traditional role as the ‘breadwinner’.  Unpredictable profits and higher costs mean a new generation of farmers are turning to riskier occupations, including gold mining in Burkina Faso and jungle fishing in Bangladesh.

Community life is breaking down as families cut back on important community events such as weddings and funerals in an effort to save money. The squeeze on family budgets is causing women to enter the workforce in ever greater numbers, and grandparents and older daughters are being forced to step in to help with childcare.  Families also report skipping meals, foraging or growing their own food. In Bangladesh people are turning to hunger recipes such as ‘pantabhat’, a watery fermented rice dish.”[1]

The myth of social mobility is quickly being replaced by rapidly spreading fear of losing one’s’ current socio-economic status and resulting limitations in partaking in social and cultural activities. It is now almost an unreal, distant memory that our parents and their parents embraced the notion that better education directly translates into better jobs, more income, and upward mobility. While there is still some truth in the notion that ‘better education pays’, it seems to be paying less and less: it is not uncommon today that college and university graduates work in fields which not too long ago only required a solid high school graduation degree.

This point has been well argued in a recent editorial by Jeff Madrick in Harpers’ Magazine.

The link made to the world of the capitalist oligarchy is not unsurprising, “As for the continued success of the One Percent, much of their ongoing gain can be attributed to financialization, as speculation and market making have surpassed manufacturing as the engine of the American economy. Investment bankers continue to rake in huge bonuses, and CEOs are still plied with stock options, which have soared in value along with the stock market.”

To complement the astronomical gains reaped by the few, this current-day ‘landed class’ is closely linked and interwoven with the realm of politics, where corruption has reached new, unsung heights. Our political institutions have long ceased to genuinely be ‘ours’: after all, that money rules has been a popular perception long before free-market economies have metamorphosed into a ‘free-for-the-rich’ system of politically sanctioned corporate immunity.

Under such ‘market economy’ conditions it is hardly far-fetched to speak of the ‘tyranny of the one per cent’ as Serge Halimi does in the May 2013 issue of LeMonde diplomatique. [2]

Halimi of course also has numbers to underpin his position, for example that “The minimum wage has lost 30% of its value since 1968; there has been no law to facilitate setting up a union in a workplace, despite Obama’s campaign promise; work is still taxed twice as heavily as wealth, 39.6% versus 20%”.

Yet more importantly, Halimi provides reassurance to inequality opponents and critiques when he sees emancipatory potentials and avenues for constructive dissent and change.

“Illuminating the real workings of what happens, the mechanisms through which wealth and power have been captured by a minority who control both markets and states, requires a constant effort to educate the public. It would remind people that any government ceases to be legitimate when it allows social inequalities to grow, ratifies the crumbling of political democracy, and accepts the subordination of national sovereignty.”

Next time one of those armored money transporters passes me by, I’ll try to not think about whose fortune it is that is being carted off to some unseen vault. Instead, I will take a moment to think about the driver and guard inside and whether or not they ever think of how their freight could almost immediately be put to inequality reducing uses. For families without health or dental plans, kids who go to school most mornings without lunches packed, homeless people who remain on society’s outer margins, many fading away well before they reach sixty. Thinking for a moment, will of course not make the driver take a wrong turn. However, those with the safe boxes and access to the underground vaults are the ones we should all be thinking about, as they try to stay out of our sight while having their Government allies, keep electronic eyes and ears on us.

The Lotus Temple in New Delhi (for Kristina, who insisted that I visit)

While we wait in the temple courtyard, we are welcomed, first in Farsi, then in English. We will enter the Temple while the previous group is exiting through the front of the temple. It is important to move quickly because the faster we find our seats, the more time will be available for the service, as a new group enters every fifteen minutes.

Once we are in the temple, the doors will be closed and we will not be able to leave except in the case of an emergency. There will be hosts at all of the doors to assist anyone in difficulty. The prayer service will last approximately five minutes. There are to be no photographs, no recordings, and all cell phones must be turned off and kept in our pockets or they will be confiscated. At the end of the service we will be directed to the exits by the hosts and it is important that we leave quickly because the next group will be entering behind us.

What is not mentioned is that there have been terrorist attacks at several sacred sites popular to tourists recently in India, and this is one of them. Ironically, because they are a multi-faith organization devoted to peace among all peoples and religions, they are a target for extremists of every religion. But the Baha’is who built the Lotus Temple refuse to shut it down because they believe that it’s important to keep open a temple devoted solely to peace among all races and tolerance for all religions, especially when temples are under attack and people are killing each other in the name of God.

Young women with brightly colored silk head scarves and white satin saris patrol the aisles inside the temple, wordlessly directing people with an open palm, using mime to remind us to turn off our cameras and cell phones, drawing a finger across their lips to remind us to remain silent. Whenever one of them catches me watching her, she smiles and raises her fingertips to her lips and mouths the word Namaste (“I acknowledge the divinity in you as the same divinity in me”) and slowly bows. Then she smiles again, and turns away. Since I am doing the same thing, for a moment we become mirror images of each other—and for me it’s a gesture that’s never felt so natural or as light-hearted and joyful as inside this temple.

Bluebirds glide through the silence to nest among the rafters.

The service begins. A young black woman with a head scarf sings something from the Torah. A western woman sings a prayer from the Koran. An elderly dark-skinned Arab sings one of Solomon’s psalms, and the service is over.

I follow Bill and his wife up and out of the temple back in the sun. At the top of the steps he turns to his wife and says, “Well, that was a waste of time.”

Khajuraho Temple

New Delhi Airport Waiting Room

Our group is getting smaller again. We became six when we flew off to Nepal, and now we are down to me and Susan and her friend. They live in different states but they met on a trip to Morocco years ago and were good travel companions and now often travel together.

We are the last ones from our group in the New Delhi Airport, waiting in the main airport lounge for our different gates to be announced, about to say goodbye forever,. They are entertaining me with stories from the trip. In one, they use a nickname that I don’t recognize and I stop and question them. When they tell me the real name behind the nickname, it is so deliciously nasty and at the same time spot-on and smart that I can’t help but laugh and gasp at the same time. So then of course I have to find out all of the nicknames and each one is just as smart and true, but when they get to the end there is one name missing. “Okay,” I say, “What’s my nickname?” They look at each other and shrug. They didn’t have one for me. “Oh, come on. Just tell me. How bad can it be?” They look at each other and make a face and Susan takes a deep breath and says, “Well, for the first few days, before we got to know you better, we called you Bubble Boy.” “Bubble Boy!?” “Well, it was like you were in a world of your own. You’d get on the bus, you’d get off the bus, you’d eat with us, but it was like you were never really part of the group. But that was before we got to know you better.” “So,” I sigh, “Bubble Boy.” “Yeah,” she sighs, “Bubble Boy.” Then she reaches out and gasps, afraid I might get the wrong idea. “But we never called you that!”

Light Study, Khajuraho Temple

Modern Non-Classical Music of India, Volume V

Mohit Chauhan: Mai Ni Meriye

Mohit Chauhan is an Indian ballad and playback (film) singer who has twice won the Filmfare Award for Best Male Playback Singer. He was born in Nahan in Himachal Pradesh. Although untrained in music, he has taught himself guitar, harmonica, and flute. He recorded two albums with the pop group Silk Route. Their album “Boonhein” (1998) debuted at number one in India and featured the hit “Dooba Dooba.” After Silk Route disbanded, Mohit continued to sing as a solo act until A. R. Rahman asked him to sing in his film “Rang De Basanti,” beginning his career as a film singer.

Bombay Dub Orchestra: Journey

Bombay Dub Orchestra is an electronica/orchestral group featuring Garry Hughes and Andrew T. Mackay.

Jasbir: Putt Jattan Da

Jasbir Jassi is a Punjabi singer and actor, born on February 7, 1970, in Dalla Mirjanpur Village, Punjab, India. He has a Masters degree in classical Indian vocal music from Apeejay College of Fine Arts (Jalandhar, India).

Ali Akbar Khan & Asha Bohsie: Guru Bandana In Desh Malhar

Ali Akbar Khan was born April 14, 1922 in Comilla, East Bengal (now Bangladesh) to a famous Indian classical musician and teacher, Allauddin Khan. He was a Hindustani classical musician who was taught by his father to play the sarod and other instruments as well. He made his first public performance at the age of thirteen, and first performed with Ravi Shankar in 1939, at the age of sixteen. With Shankar, he is credited with spreading Indian music throughout the world. He first came to the United States in 1955 at the invitation of violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and moved to California. In 1956 he established a musical school in Calcutta, and in 1967 he founded the Ali Akbar College of Music, now located in San Rafael, with a branch in Basel, Switzerland. He was also a professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He scored Satyajit Ray’s “Devi,” Merchant-Ivory’s “The Householder,” and Bertolucci’s “Little Buddha.” He was the first Indian musician to record Indian music in the U.S., and the first person to play sarod on U.S. TV. In August 1971, Khan performed at the Concert for Bangladesh along with Ravi Shankar, Alla Rakha, and Kamala Chakravarty. He was nominated for five Grammy awards and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts’s National Heritage Fellowship in the U.S., and was awarded India’s second highest civilian award, and was known throughout India in the last decades of his life as Ustad (master). He is quoted as saying, “If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist—then you may please even God.” Akbar died of kidney failure in California on June 18, 2009.

Asha Bhosle is a playback singer who has sung over 12,000 songs (by 2006) in 21 different languages in over 1000 films since 1943. She was listed as the “Most Recorded Artist” in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2009. She was born Asha Mangeshkar on September 8, 1933, in Sangli, Bombay to a father who was an acclaimed actor and musician. She has recorded with Boy George, Code Red, Kronos Quartet, and performed a duet with Michael Stipe for One Giant Leap. Cornershop’s “Brimful of Asha” is about her, and samples of her singing have appeared on tracks by Fatboy Slim, Nelly Furtado, The Black Eyed Peas, and Sarah Brightman,

Bombay Jayashri: Zara Zara

Jayashri Ramnath (known as Bombay Jayashir) is an Indian vocalist and composer, born in Kolkata into a family of musicians, and also plays the veena. She composed some of the music for Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” and received a Grammy nomination for one of her songs in that film.

Niraj Chag with Swati Natekar: Khwaab

Niraj Chag is known for his documentary soundtracks, including “One Night in Bhopal” (2004), “The Age of Terror” (2008), “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” (2008), and “The Story of the Continents” (2013). He has also composed music for the “Sex and the City” TV show. In 2006, he was awarded the Asian Music Award for “Best Underground Artist” for his album “Along the Dusty Road.” In 2008 he created a piece of music for the official Olympic Torch event on London’s South Bank with opera singers, a 40-piece brass band, and 600 vocalists. I have no information on Swati Natekar.

Sanjay Divecha with Kailash Kher: Naino Sey

I have no information on Sanjay Divecha. For information on Kailash Kher, see the January 2013 edition of “A Poet’s Progress.”

Satish Vyas: Homeward Journey

Satish Vyas is a santoor player who was born into a musical family, including his father, Pandit C.R. Vyas, one of India’s best classical singers.

Susheela Raman: Nagumomo

Susheela Raman is a British Indian Bhakti and Sufi musician born in London on July 21, 1973 to Tamil parents. The family moved to Australia in 1977. Susheela formed a funk and rock and roll band in Australia, and began to sing both blues and jazz as well. In 1995 she moved to India, and returned to London in 1997, where she lives today. Her first album “Salt Rain” was nominated for a Mercury Prize, and one of her songs were used in the film “The Namesake.” She has recorded songs by Bob Dylan, John Lennon, the Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart, Jimi Hendrix, Can, and Throbbing Gristle. In 2013 she appeared at the Alchemy Festival at the Royal Albert Hall.

Roots

 Article written by Randy Roark

Newtopia staff writer RANDY ROARK worked with Allen Ginsberg for the last 17 years of his life, first as an apprentice, then as his teaching assistant, and finally transcribing and editing 28,000 pages of Ginsberg’s poetry lectures, currently available on-line through the Ginsberg trust. Following Ginsberg’s death, he worked with artist Stan Brakhage, producing art events featuring his films until his death. Since 1998 he has worked with Sounds True as a producer, where he has edited artists such as Alex Grey, writers including William Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson, and a wide variety of spiritual teachers, including Alan Watts, Krishnamurti, Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, and Lakota Elder Joseph Marshall.

When I was in sixth grade, a solo runt raised by paranoid immigrants and beat up by classroom bullies, my writing was so good that on parent’s night the school covered an entire wall in the auditorium with my poems, guaranteeing my further victimization in middle school.

My father watched the proceedings and listened to the teacher’s compliments with a frown. As we walked across the dark playground where I had been bruised so often he took me by the hand, a rare occurrence.

I thought he looked handsome in his gray delivery driver shirt.  They allowed him to bring his truck home sometimes.  He was smoking a cigarette I wasn’t supposed to tell mom about; she was anxious enough, recuperating slowly from an illness that left a question mark on how long she’d be with us.

He explained that writing is a terrible vocation, or a hard piece of bread, as he put it.  I’d never be able to make any money at it.  So I shouldn’t make a habit of it.  What I had done was wrong.  He had that squint of a man who would climb until he owned half the company whose logo he wore on his shirt.

I tried to stop writing but it was an addiction now shameful as masturbation.  Yet I was clever enough to figure out if I wrote my parents trite poems for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day I could write the rest of the year.  Even as a child I thought of this as tribute extracted by tyrants, but I paid the price to have the freedom of my imagination.

As the tradition continued into the era of the first driver’s license I wrote those poems because if I didn’t it meant war.  I had tried before to substitute a simple card or a thoughtful gift for this outgrown childhood ritual, but lack of a poem outranked even my numerous acts of delinquency when it came to enraging the old man, so he’d remind me:

At the beginning of the war, still a child, he almost died, dragged onto a train where anyone who lost consciousness smothered underfoot.  A slave laborer at war’s end, when the death march halted, before the bullets reached his end of the line, he fainted.  He woke among the bloody bodies with no one around but the birds in the trees.

How did he survive in those death camps, one after the other?  He tried to stay clean, to comb his hair, hoping they would understand his dignity.  He said some guards took pity on him so they snuck him moldy bread. He was referred to by number not name.

His family of almost twenty was reduced to three.  He knew he was lucky to have survived, but he had to live the rest of his life with memories of babies thrown in the air for target practice.  His amputated toes bore unavoidable witness whenever he took off his left sock.

Decades later, retired in beautiful southern California, he would chase crows away from his pool because he remembered them eating the eyes of corpses.  He could understand neither the American fascination with gruesome horror movies nor the Christian obsession with the torture of Jesus.  Halloween made no sense to him.

The war made him an atheist. He told me he didn’t care if the whole world died as long as he wasn’t singled out again.  Like many atheists he was an ethical and honest man. Like all war survivors he was deeply troubled and troubling, refusing any therapy for the world of horrific memories he carried with him every day of his life.

Workers who caused problems or underperformed due to lack of self-discipline he berated.  But he also sent employees and their children through college. The loyalty he earned was so strong that when he died after two decades of retirement many of his former employees and their families attended his funeral to tell stories of his generosity.

My mother also fled to America from a childhood in war where she experienced the swollen belly of starvation.  She was proud of having grabbed back the stuffed bear the sergeant took from her when her family was arrested.  She saved a friend because she had the guts to ask the enemy for help; soon her friend died anyway, sprayed with bullets.

Though warned not to do it while the refugees around her slept she opened and heated up a can of soup she found in the cellar of a ruined house.  That was all the enemy needed to find them.  She escaped in the melee that led to the deaths of the people she hid with and the people hiding them.

Captured, she insisted she had been no more than a maid, and the officer’s interest in her was merely fatherly; after all she was still a child.  Yet she admitted he refused to leave her as he draped her in his fur-lined coat, the only girl on a military train retreating from the rebels.

After her protector became another casualty she reinvented herself.  As a student nurse she pretended to be Catholic, going to church every morning and evening. In the ward of wounded pilots they called her “the white angel.”

As a housewife in America, unwilling to acknowledge war trauma, conforming to the local norm, she obsessed on fashionable but economical clothes, a shoe collection, hair color, and manicured fingernails.

Picky about the culture she enjoyed she read Schopenhauer and Paul Valery in between trashy novels but preferred American soap operas to Shakespeare.  She hated modern art but she liked the Rolling Stones.

She said she wished the world could be the way the Impressionists saw it, while obsessing on the harsh details of her numerous illnesses, and of aging, which terrified her so much she became addicted to plastic surgery.

They waited a long time after they married to finally have their only child.  Later my father confided to me that they regretted the decision. My first disappointment for him was my immediate and permanent rejection of his plan to raise a physician.

At first I rooted for the good guys.  Influenced by world mythology, Earth First, and a William Blake book in the school library, when I was fourteen everything that I wanted to do with my life could be summed up in the word “imagination.” I wanted to make art, play music, and write poems that would re-imagine the world.

We had bitter arguments about how hard my life would be, how I was throwing away my intelligence and my responsibility to my family and society.  I tried to explain that for me there was no more pressing duty than serving the almighty imagination, the engine of human evolution.

Eventually our arguments degenerated to catch phrases delivered with bitter sarcasm. My father would dismiss my optimism with the curt remark: “I don’t have that kind of imagination.”  To him imagination implied delusion, effeminacy, laziness, the weakness of dreamers, the border of madness.

Soured by my fate, I found myself agreeing with the old man about a godless universe without a future.  This is what it means to be a man, I thought, to understand how hopeless and meaningless life is.  But unlike dad, who added the necessary corollary that you work hard and live decently anyway, I preferred the role of spoiler.

The story of my alchemical transmutation from dangerous teenager to civilized human or as close as I’ve been able to get to that ideal, can be read in The Maestro and The Boy: The Kindness of Manly P. Hall  <LINK>.  While my father at first welcomed this transformation it proved to be yet another alarming and irritating development for him.

As I began to study the history of religions I eagerly reported back to him my favorite gems of wisdom, including various perspectives on life after death. Such forays into speculation were always met with the bitterest performances of his catch phrase.  All such nonsense he dismissed as wishful thinking and childish fantasy.

Once he died in the hospital and was revived. I shared my own near death experience with him but it only made him angry.  He insisted he had experienced nothing.  Embracing nonexistence, he proudly proclaimed himself a hardheaded realist and dismissed my experience and any other like it as imagination.

He had been sickly all his days, burdened with numerous afflictions caused by starvation and exposure in the war, exasperated by his stressful relationship with my mother. After her attempted suicide and her incarceration in a mental ward, he decided to risk a procedure.

After hours of conversation in his hospital room I understood he did not expect to survive, and he wanted it that way. Even there taking his last few conscious breaths he refused the comfort offered by spirituality. The sweetest thing he could imagine was an end to suffering.

Afterwards, trapped in a coma, he showed consciousness only by moving one eye. Thinking of Poe, I tried to prepare him for the bardo.  I wiped his sweating brow with an iced towel talking about what he would see, and what he should look for. I promised reunions and horizons.  His eye followed me until they turned up the morphine.

Saddled with unexpected responsibilities, trying to do the best for my now mentally impaired mother, missing my father despite our lifelong battle, I suffered a slight but painful back injury symbolic of the camel and the straw. The chiropractor suggested I visit a man she knew who specialized in releasing trauma.

Feeling miserable I drove deep into Laurel Canyon where I met the healer in the closest thing to a cottage in the woods Hollywood can provide.  In the living room I browsed shelves of art books.  The therapy room had a window on a lush green backyard that looked more like sunlit English countryside than arid southern California.

I told him only that my father recently died.  With a peculiar expression he stopped the session.  “I’m not a medium,” he said, “I don’t channel.  I never have.  Yet I feel his presence so strongly.  He’s repeating an important message for you. Your father wants you to know he’s learning to enjoy his imagination.”

Article written by Ronnie Pontiac

Newtopia staff writer RONNIE PONTIAC is a founding member and primary guitarist of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War, Exile Nation, and the award winning animated short Cohen on the Bridge.  He associate produced The Gits documentary, and was art editor, then poet in residence for Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation . He’s a published author of works on obscure topics such as ancient Greek religion and the history of alchemy. Follow him on Twitter @AmerMysteries.

This place that is the soul consists of a large number of ingredients including but not limited to whatever blueprint and energetic influences we brought with us into this world combined with whatever energetic influences we’ve accumulated within this lifetime which culminates into the malleable and ever-flexing portrait of our individual karma. The soul is like an ever-morphing, shape-shifting mass that presents itself, moves forward, grows and evolves along to the tides of that which we choose to put into it. Although we can’t erase the historical or cumulative contributions we’ve already made to it over our lifetimes; or the inherited patterns and baggage that is ours to embrace, expose, reconcile and heal; we can choose to empower ourselves with the keen implement of discernment in our every conscious action going forward, eventually mushrooming our soul’s into a constantly blooming and miraculous mechanism of a fruitful life.

What this means is that we learn to be utter present and aware of our lives in a 360 degree fashion – slowing down enough to breathe through our existence within contemplative layers of thought, observation, silence, internal reaction, reasonableness, intention and directive action rather than operating in a trigger happy fashion to the people, places and things around us as if we were balls of molten lava traveling fast towards some unknown destination. We are, in fact, captains of our own destiny and once we spend some time in the practice of focused discernment, we quickly begin to see the effects of this existential art.

We should consider all areas of our life in this discernment. Who are we friends with and do these friends really resonate with who we are as human beings or do they serve an old purpose that no longer fits? Do we need to evolve any of our current relationships into a contemporary dynamic that meshes with who we are today? Do the clothes we wear and the colors we choose to paint our environs with mean something to us on a deeper level or are they just carelessly chosen from a mentality of need and purpose? When we walk out of the house in the morning, are we conscious of what the sky looks like and what the air smells like as we open the car door to get in and hustle off to work? Are we happy with what we are doing to make a living or is it just a numb and menial means to a paycheck? At a party on Friday night do we find ourselves authentically enjoying a conversation with a stranger that ignites our intellect or do we realize we only come to these events to go numb with a cocktail and get out of our lonely homes? When you first become extra conscious of your every moment, it’s not uncommon to find that you spend a lot of time in life doing things for purposes other than fulfilling your individual soul’s inherent goals. What you learn as you get older, is that life is too short not to focus your time doing that which truly does make your soul sing.

Every year I like to reevaluate where my soul currently resides. I take a piece of paper and write down the five most important things in my life and place that paper on my refrigerator. Currently, it says: art, writing, healing practices, physical health, and love. Every morning when I look at this while retrieving my almond milk for my daily cup of Earl Grey I am imprinting a stamp of intention upon my consciousness for that day. During the day, and with everything I do, I am constantly checking in mentally to make sure that the people I am with, the circumstances I am engaged within, and my environment is in line with those five things on my paper. If I find myself in a situation that doesn’t align with those intentions, I quickly find a way to disengage and get myself back on track while also pondering any lessons I might acquire as to why I was off track in the first place.  This uber-conscious filter system of discernment eventually turns into an automatic process after the initial practice is put in motion.

Sometimes the most obvious things in life become the hardest concepts for us to grasp. It seems odd that something as personal as our soul flits ethereally on the edge of comprehension even as it inherently pulsates within each of us individually. Heeding its call and learning to flow with its organic nature that mushrooms out from within itself as the ongoing product of that with which it has been fed is simply a matter of divine discernment—available to us all.

Article written by Kimberly Nichols

Newtopia managing editor KIMBERLY NICHOLS is author of the book of literary short fiction Mad Anatomy, a contributing editor to 3AM Magazine and has exhibited as a conceptual artist throughout California for the past decade. Her non-fiction articles have appeared in magazines and media internationally. She was a founding editor of Newtopia in its former incarnation where she was also a member of the NewPoetry Collective. She is currently at work on her novel King Neptune’s Journey and an art work titled The Fool. She has recently embarked on a journey of study in shamanic and medicine lore and wisdom under a series of respected teachers. Follow her daily beat poetry on Twitter @LITGFOA or her arts and literature blog.

I first noticed Marianne’s speaking skills when I was a kid hanging around with Manly P. Hall at the Philosophical Research Society. I watched Marianne grow wings as her lectures became popular, and I smiled when she flew the coop leaving the hen house clucking. I lost sight of Marianne after that, until I saw a story in the L.A. Weekly about Project Angel Food.  Having been brought up by untamed former hippie radical queer men of the San Fernando Valley I had already lost friends to AIDS.  Ronald Reagan helped create a silence around AIDS, with the stigma of a gay disease as a punishment inflicted by a wrathful deity. Marianne Williamson served a deity of love instead. She organized a meals-on-wheels program for homebound AIDS patients but she was giving them more than food. At a time and place where the slogan Silence = Death was born she helped bring hope and comfort to those dying forgotten.  The Project Angel Food table at my local market allowed me to remember my lost loved ones in a constructive way by donating food and necessities every week I knew they would have wanted.

Since then Marianne has taken on a series of projects of equally noble intent, supporting them with her formidable skills as a writer and public speaker. She’s a member of the board of directors of Results, a nonprofit grassroots lobby dedicated to ending hunger and the preventable horrors of extreme poverty.  She’s co-founder of The Peace Alliance, a grass roots campaign with the evolutionary idea of establishing a Department of Peace. And most recently with Sister Giant she’s helping women whose spiritual values are missing from the world of politics to organize and align.  According to Snopes a popular quote often attributed to Nelson Mandela is actually by Marianne: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

As a riot grrrl zine writer in the ‘90s I always wanted to interview Marianne about Project Angel Food. I’m delighted to interview her now for Newtopia.

What drew you to the Philosophical Research Society?  Do you have a Manly P. Hall story?

No, I was just one of many people who often listened to him speak in the auditorium at the Philosophical Research Society. He was a remarkable person and his books meant a lot to me.

Your book The Law of Divine Compensation brings hope to people who have been wiped out by the recent financial calamities tearing through the world economy. What is your best advice for people who find themselves without jobs fearing for the future?

The mortal world is a world of scarcity, but the spiritual world is a world of endless abundance. We attract abundance with every thought of love, and we deflect it with every thought of lovelessness.  The problem most people have is that they meet limited circumstances with limited thoughts: “Ain’t it awful,” “I’m a victim,” “It’s going to take forever for the economy to recover,” “There are no jobs for people like me” — as well, as “Damn the rich,” “Damn the poor,” all of that.  Miracles flow only through loving thoughts, so loveless thought deflects the miracle.

So many of us right up to the end of the ‘90s felt like the wind was filling the sails of reform, and then the Bush administration took office and not long after 9/11, two wars and financial crisis put us all into post traumatic stress. Your book The Healing of America published in 2000 was about the obvious next step in our collective psyche, and it still applies, since the principle is sound, that we as citizens are responsible for healing our republic. What was your reaction to the unexpected right turn that was the first decade of the new millennium?  Do you think we’re back on track?

Well, let’s not kid ourselves about the decade before that. We’ve been moving in a corporatist direction since the 1980’s; while some Presidents drove it, none of them stopped it. And absolutely we’re not back on track! Especially since the Citizens United decision, we’re now for all intents and purposes a system of legalized bribery. Moneyed sources – from corporations to unions to wealthy individuals – can give anonymously and in unlimited amounts to the advertising campaigns of our elected representatives. In order to get elected and stay in office, most elected officials see themselves as having no choice but to do the bidding of huge economic interests. This is worse than corrupt; it’s perilous to democracy. If financial leverage is what determines political power, then you can kiss the “government of the people, by the people, for the people” part good-bye. We’re living through the de-democratization of the United States. We need a pro-democracy movement.

Marianne Williamson speaks at March Against Monsanto, Venice Beach, 2013

In 1999 you were already warning that you felt the horizon was near when it could be too late to do something about impending but still preventable disasters, including the consequences of economic disparity, the collapse of education, and the environmental crisis. How do you feel about these challenges now?

Well that’s not exactly what I said. I believe in miracles, remember. What I said was that we were going to have either a spiritual awakening, or a catastrophe…that something was going to happen to take us back to our hearts. And on September 11, 2001, the catastrophe arrived.

Corporations have been villainized in America for generations, yet every business is made of people, and businesses that do bad things do them because of bad decisions people make.  Can corporate power become more enlightened in our lifetimes?

I don’t villainize corporations; they have an important place in a healthy economy and a healthy society. They just shouldn’t have the rights of personhood, and there should be appropriate regulations on their power. The bottom line for a corporation, particularly since the 1970’s, is short term economic gain for their shareholders. I don’t even think that’s the ethical way to run a corporation, but it certainly isn’t the ethical way to run a country. A country is not a business; we don’t feed our children because it gives us economic gain; we don’t take care of our planet because it gives us economic gain; we don’t provide for our elderly because it gives us economic gain. We do those things because they’re the right thing to do! The role of the government is to balance individual (and corporate) interests with a protection of the collective good.

A corporation whose only goal is to increase economic benefit for its shareholders has no soul, it has no conscience. Its success is predicated on financial gain, and people who run the corporation have a fiduciary responsibility to serve that bottom line. The government, then, should be a mitigating force that protects the common good against encroachment by corporate excess.

Sister Giant brings women and our spirituality into politics, for more compassion and common sense in our policy-making. What would you like to see Sister Giant accomplish?

I’d like to see more women run for office, but more importantly I’d like to see women entering politics to make a stronger stand for our children and for the earth. The United States has a 23.1 per cent child poverty rate; we’re second only to Romania. One in five American children are food insecure. We don’t have air quality safety standards in America’s public schools, and 30-40 % of our students and teachers are already thought to have adversely affected respiratory systems because of it. And 17,000 children starve on this planet every single day.

In every advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives, a common characteristic is the fierce behavior of the adult female of the species when we senses a threat to her cubs. Among the hyenas, which is a female dominant species, the adult females encircle the cubs while they’re feeding and don’t let the adult males get anywhere near the food until the young have been fed. Surely the women of America could do better than the hyenas.

What is Results working on now? With the new economic austerity is the fight against hunger and poverty more dire than ever?

With 46 million Americans living in poverty, you better believe it is. Their international conference is taking place in Washington DC on July 20-23, and I’ll be doing a daylong seminar on combining spirituality and political activism.

Having been raised by a leftist lawyer father who took you to Vietnam when you were thirteen years old so you could see for yourself “what war was” instead of being brainwashed by the “military-industrial complex”, you grew up to co-found The Peace Alliance which proposes the creation of a federal Department of Peace. What would people who work for the Department of Peace do to further peace in the world?

The idea of a Department of Peace is that there would a cabinet level department within the Executive Branch of the US government whose responsibility would be to research, articulate and facilitate non-violent solutions to domestic and international problems. You can view the Dept. of Defense like a department of surgery, but sometimes invasive measures are not such a good idea. In medicine we want to consider non-invasive options first, and in government we should do the same. We don’t just wait until we get sick, assuming there will always be a silver bullet to suppress and eradicate physical symptoms; rather, we know we need to proactively cultivate health. Similarly, we can’t wait until violence arises and then just incarcerate or bomb the offender; rather, we need to proactively cultivate peace. In medicine we’ve embraced a holistic approach, and we need one in politics too.

Thank you for Project Angel Food. Did you ever think back in the day when HIV was used to politically stigmatize gay people that in the early 21st century state after state would legalize gay marriage?

AIDS was a life and death issue. At the time, legalized marriage would have seemed a small issue in comparison.

Please name the two most influential people in your life, one past, one present, and why.

One is a spiritual entity, and one is my daughter: both because I love them.

Do you have a favorite prayer?

Dear God, Please use me. Amen.

What is your favorite dream (that you’re willing to share)?

You got me on the “willing to share” part. Sorry!

Article written by Tamra Spivey

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War and Exile Nation, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.

Director: Francois Ozon

Writers: Juan Mayorga (play), Francois Ozon (screenplay)

Stars: Fabrice Luchini, Ernst Umhauer, Kristin Scott Thomas

Ask yourself.  What’s happening In The House?  That is, who really knows what’s happening In The House?

“If you can think of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, study, and so forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of this house.  Certain occupants will be glimpsed only briefly.  Visitors come and go.  At some windows, you may wish to stay longer, but alas.  As with any house all within cannot be seen.”

–Preface to James Salter’s memoir, “Burning the Days”

No doubt we have all sat on park benches, looking at a house across the way and wondering about the family who lives there. In the driveway, a man bounces a basketball, his wife waves good-bye to him as she gets in her car and their son hops on his bike, a book bag slung over his shoulder. One could just sit and wonder… or one could figure out a way to enter the house and write a story like Scheherazade warding off death, captivating your audience as if your life depended on it. In the new film by acclaimed French director Francoise Ozon (Swimming Pool, 2003), a sixteen-year old student responds to a writing assignment asking for little more than what he did over the weekend with a cliffhanger story that draws his professor, episode by episode, into an edgy real life drama.

The opening scene of In The House takes place in the austere high-ceiling marble foyer of the prestigious Gustav Flaubert High School, where a professor sits alone – on a different kind of bench – waiting for a meeting. It’s a forbidding, cold atmosphere for a student like Claude (Ernst Umhauer) who doesn’t come from a privileged home. The next scene is of Claude putting on a school uniform that speaks of his enrollment status while masking his troubled emotional background and, unlike clothes of choice, hides personal identity. Claude, a gifted student, embarks on a journey that reveals a talent for entrancing his professor that’s a bit disturbing.

In response to the assignment to describe his weekend, Claude writes about his perceptions of a family — a longed-for “perfect family” of another student in his class, Rapha Artole (Bastien Ughetto). He volunteers to tutor Rapha out of voyeuristic curiosity about his “perfect family”, but as it turns out, Claude’s writing  about Rapha’s home life arouses hope in his teacher, Mr. Germain (Fabrice Luchini), a disgruntled professor known as a dispenser of C’s, D’s and F’s.  Mr. Germain’s demeaning attitude toward his students leads him to treat Claude’s writing with disdain. He often dismisses his depictions of the Artole family and pushes for more detail but, as he does, Claude rises to the challenge. Instead of getting ground down by Mr. Germain’s harsh critiques, he asks appreciatively, “Why are you helping me?”

The special mentoring continues as Mr. Germain gets caught up in the drama of Claude’s story.  Claude takes his professor’s lessons increasingly to heart and begins to incorporate, in real life and in his writing, the scenes Mr. Germain wants. The story itself comes alive – in Rapha’s house, in Claude’s writing and Mr. Germain’s mind. Mr. Germain shares Claude’s writing assignments with his wife, Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), who runs an offbeat art gallery. Claude’s stories spark erotic, slightly comical conversations between the two of them. Together they begin to speculate on what’s truth and what’s sheer imagination. Mrs. Germain believes Claude is reporting real events while her husband sees Claude as an imaginative writer with potential, a young version of himself before he gave up writing to become a professor. Soon husband and wife are caught up in Claude’s story; as the presence of Claude and his story expand into Mr. and Mrs. Germain’s relationship, the film audience is also drawn into the enticing question of what’s real and what’s not.

Claude rapidly evolves from Rapha’s tutor to his best friend, then to a family friend joining extracurricular activities and taking more liberties in order to give Mr. Germain a technically sophisticated story. He discovers x-rays of a spinal column in Rapha Sr.’s desk, spies Rapha’s parents having sex and examines Mrs. Artole’s shoe collection. Mr. Germain’s writing lessons push Claude to go further into his desires for inclusion in the family and relations with Rapha’s mother, Esther.  He pushes beyond the limits of protocol into perilous territory when he develops the particularities of character identity and, at least theoretically, stirs up emotional reactions in the Artole family.

As fabrication brings truth forward, the film pulls the audience in.  We see Mr. Germain appear in the Artole home, enacting his critiques of Claude’s writing as if correcting his work then and there. What’s real and what’s being expanded in Claude’s writing? Is he really kissing his friend’s mother?  Then what’s Mr. Germain doing in the kitchen critiquing him while he does? Is Claude pursuing personal desires or projecting his desires for effect? From what point of view are we seeing? The line gets pushed hard when Rapha fails to show up in class one day and Claude offers an explanation in his writing that scares Mr. Germain out of his wits. The writer’s power, of course, is to write a scene from one point of view and then to rewrite it from another. Claude blurts out that he knows Mr. Germain was not going to like his original version of Rapha’s reaction to seeing him kiss his mother so he writes it another way.

If you know a writer, you should know that, as their friend, you’re going to show up in their stories. For a writer, the line between a friend as a separate person and as fodder for a story is a fine one indeed. The line between the real and the imagined is simply not the writer’s focus. It’s the story that counts. And for a writer looking to develop quality writing, the skill to weave fantasy and reality into a compelling drama is the grand objective. Who didn’t read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code searching for the bloodline of Christ as if it would be revealed in spite of knowing the story was a complete fabrication? Fantasy is a land we inhabit as surely as it’s a place that doesn’t exist, especially when it enlivens us. And we like writers who draw from their own life experiences, putting tangible skin in the game.

Giving the Persian King his nightly dose of soul medicine extended Scheherazade’s life for 1001 nights – and gave many more nights of pleasure to readers with many more stories than the well-known Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad. Claude manages to get Mr. Germain to extend his private lessons with irresistible, “to be continued” Scheherazade-like endings until the professor, like the King before him, develops an addictive attachment to his student. Voyeurism does not have to be a sexual preoccupation to become an obsession; “I like women,” Germain declares defensively to his wife in bed one night when she speculates that he has erotic yearnings for Claude. No need for the Greek teacher-student notion.  Germain is hooked on Claude’s writing ability to break through his ennui. As movie lovers, we’re arguably diagnosable voyeurs.

As the talented Francois Ozon, charismatic Fabrice Luchini and quicksilver Kristin Scott Thomas lure us into an impatient anticipation of Claude’s next episode of his borderline diabolical portrayal of a family, we don’t know whether to resist or go all in. Voyeurism has its dark side. The more taboo the revelation, the more intriguing the explanation thereof. At times Claude, an unassuming young man who’s invading a friend’s family to satisfy personal desires, seems akin to a scary protagonist in a horror movie. Claude’s collaboration with Mr. Germain takes both of them further into the perils of curiosity than either ever intended. But, for good or bad, Claude revivifies the deadened lives of the Artole and Germain families with his imaginative powers.

How strong is the pull of fantasy in real life? Francois Ozon’s talent is to hover just above the real, reveal just enough to challenge the bounds of ethical reasoning and lead the viewer into temptation to try their own hand at this business of storytelling.

Lies or deep truth? Treachery or revelation? Mockery or comedy? Finality or (To Be Continued…)?

I liked the ending. It begs beginning. Go ahead, sit on a park bench, look into the windows across the way and risk the perils of curious fantasizing.

“ The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake. ”

— Oscar Wilde

Article written by Dr. Jane Alexander Stewart

Newtopia staff writer Jane Alexander Stewart, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who writes essays about mythic themes in film, creates “Myth in Film; Myth in Your Life” seminars for self-exploration and travels a lot. Her film reviews have been published in the San Francisco C.G. Jung Library Journal, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture and Los Angeles Journal of Psychological Perspectives.  Jane’s popular essay on “The Feminine Hero in The Silence of the Lambs” appears in the anthology, The Soul of Popular Culture, and in The Presence of the Feminine in Film as one of its authors. She’s also presented myth in film programs at Los Angeles County Museum, University of Alabama and C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. A collection of her reviews and other writing can be found at www.CinemaShrink.com.

In the next installments of “Tools of Transformation” I will explore what I believe to be the emotional roots of Anxiety and Depression: Shame, Guilt, and Fear. These three powerful energetic and emotional experiences have been identified by some of our leading psychological researchers, as central to the development of our personalities, among them Professors Thomas Scheff, PhD., Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Suzanne Retzinger, PhD.,  Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Antioch University, Santa Barbara. Both Scheff and Retzinger find Shame to be the Master Emotion, the emotion most determining our emotional and psychological development. I hope in this article to show the connections between the first of these powerful emotions, Shame, and the etiology of our experiences of Anxiety and Depression. I will also present some ways we can begin to understand and work with shame. I hope that this information and the tools I offer will be helpful to those of you who are suffering from ongoing depression, anxiety, and panic, and those who have friends or family members who face these emotional challenges. However, because hidden feelings of shame are almost universal, some of the ideas that follow may be of help to almost anyone who takes the time to read this.

My concern in writing these next blogs is that only a few people will want to read about the importance of Shame, Guilt, and Fear. These are unsavory experiences to be sure and they are not considered “positive” topics for discussion. Many of my clients who have suffered from Depression for much of their lives tell me that they experienced shame whenever they felt the need to express how poorly they were feeling. Most have experienced critical responses to their expressions of unhappiness, followed by badly timed encouragement to look on the bright side of life. In some ways this is an understandable response, because if you are not depressed yourself, it is hard to understand, let alone empathize with someone who is. The reality is, however, that if a depressed person could easily lift themselves out of depression, they would have done so long ago. The paradox that comes with this emotional territory is that because Depression is seen as something to be ashamed of, when someone becomes aware that they are depressed, they will immediately try to make a case for why their depression is legitimate. This effort can actually deepen their depression, as they try to validate their experience by enumerating everything that is going wrong and everything they believe is working against them.

 (Copyright Toby Landesman 2013)

Like Dr. Danie Beaulieu’s notion that Anxiety is a GPS type signal that we have taken the wrong path or made a wrong turn, Drs. Scheff and Retzinger believe, based on their extensive research, that Shame is a profound warning signal that indicates that we may be in significant danger. The shame signal is communicating that a primary relationship bond is being stretched or weakened to the breaking point. We human beings are the most dependent of all creatures on our caretakers for our survival. If we sense that one of our indispensable relationships is in jeopardy, the ground of our being starts to tremble. A kind of dread comes over us that can cause us to feel very small and extremely vulnerable. When this feeling comes over us we are likely to become apologetic, behave subserviently and perhaps try to hide. Because many of us do not even know the name of this feeling, we are likely to feel embarrassed, squeamish, and even nauseous. We may sense that danger is at hand, but we are most often not aware of what that danger is.

Shame is evoked by the prospect of rejection, abandonment, ridicule or humiliation. The feeling of shame in our bodies is potentially very strong, and it is usually translated either consciously or unconsciously to mean that we are fundamentally defective. There is something essentially wrong with us. It’s not that we have done something wrong. It’s that we are wrong. We feel instinctively that if we reveal how we are really feeling we will be unacceptable and therefore rejected. Shame is the ghost in the machine that brings on our apprehension of certain failure and rejection. It makes us feel insecure, inferior, and defective. The problem is that in our growing up years we develop defenses against feeling shame. When it starts to arise in the body, our defenses transform it into anger, fear, or sadness and these emotions are degraded energetically to irritation, apprehension or feeling down. We are out of sorts. Something feels wrong but we are not sure what it is. We feel bad.

What follows are a few paragraphs from a monograph entitled “Shame as The Master Emotion of Everyday Life,” by Drs. Scheff and Retzinger that elegantly summarizes what I have written above.

“We call shame the master emotion because it has many more social and psychological functions than other emotions.

1. Shame is a key component of conscience, the moral sense, since it signals moral transgression even without thoughts or words. Shame is our moral gyroscope. Since this function is well understood, we will give most of our attention to two others, both less well understood.

2. Shame arises in an elemental situation in which there is a real or imagined threat to our bonds; it signals trouble in a relationship. Since an infant’s life is completely dependent on the bond with the caregivers, this emotion is as primitive and intense as fear. The point that shame is a response to bond threat cannot be emphasized too strongly, since in psychology and psychoanalysis there is a tendency to individualize shame, taking it out of its social matrix. Typically in these disciplines, shame is defined as a product of the individual’s failure to live up to her own ideal. But one’s ideals, for the most part, are usually a reflection of the ideals of one’s society. Mead’s idea of the generalized other captures this notion perfectly. If one feels that her behavior has been inadequate or deviant, not only an internal gap has been created between behavior and ideals, but also a gap between group ideals and one’s self, a threat to the bond. The sociological definition of the source of shame subsumes the psychological one, pointing to the source in shared ideals.

3. Finally, shame plays a central role in regulating the expression, and indeed, the awareness of all of our other emotions. Anger, fear, grief, and love, for example, are not likely to be expressed outwardly to the degree that one is ashamed of them. One can be so ashamed of one’s emotions that they can be repressed almost completely, to the point that only unusual circumstances will allow them to come to awareness. In Western societies, shame is almost completely repressed and hidden, because one would be embarrassed that one was in a state of grief, fear, anger, or even embarrassment.”

Drs. Scheff and Retzinger go on to emphasize that the experience of shame and the knowledge of what is shameful is almost entirely unconscious because of the strong prohibition against emotion in Western society. As we grow up we are systematically learning not to feel. By the time I was a teenager, I experienced two emotions, anger and happiness and only happiness was really OK, unless I felt that my anger was righteous. This state of my emotional being apparently is not at all unusual. In spite of years of psychotherapeutic interest in what people are feeling, emotions remain to a large degree in the not OK category, especially when it comes to expressing them.

So Dr. Danie Beaulieu’s metaphor that we all have a “garbage bag” inside us that we have cinched up very tightly is very apt indeed. Dr. Beaulieu suggests that there are times when our Anxiety is trying to tell us that our bag is very full and that it smells. This reality is something to be embarrassed about for us, and unconsciously we will try to keep it more and more tightly closed. But, as she points out, even someone with surgery for not smelling, can recognize that the odor is getting worse and worse. The bag needs to be opened and emptied very carefully. Embedded here is a You Tube video of Dr. Beaulieu talking to a group of therapists about her use of this “Impact Method” with a young boy whose brother had been killed in an accident that occurred while they were playing together in a dangerous place.

(Copyright Toby Landesman 2013)

This is a brilliant reenactment by Dr. Beaulieu of her work with this young boy. She demonstrates how she uses the “garbage bag” metaphor to overcome the boy’s shame by treating an actual garbage bag full of garbage with tenderness, as a living metaphor for her care of him and his deep feelings of guilt, shame and grief. Together Danie and the boy open the bag and empty it little by little. Her work here mirrors the understanding of Scheff and Retzinger’s work that so much of our emotional experience is hidden from us. We can be deeply troubled and not know just what the trouble is. Instead we feel bad, inadequate, and apprehensive. We need to let something out, but we don’t know how to open up and express what we so desperately need to reveal, both to ourselves and to another caring, empathic person. Dr. Beaulieu’s session is a wonderful example of how we therapists need to approach people who come to us with major shame issues. The rule of thumb is that the more severe the trauma that a person has experienced, the deeper will be the feelings of shame, guilt, and grief. In the You Tube example, the boy felt that somehow it was his fault that his brother died. He should have known the danger. He should have been the one to be killed. If we throw into the mix how little permission we have in our society to grieve any major loss of a loved one, we can begin to see that this young boy being able to express the depth of his feeling on his own was utterly impossible.

Drs. Scheff and Retzinger make another important point. We know so little about our own shame and about other people’s shame, that just to begin talking about it is an important step. I took part in their online shame discussion group for a few years, when I first learned of their work from a dear friend of mine. The discussion was halting and awkward at times as we began to cognitively understand what shame was and how it operated inside us as a moral gyroscope and an indication of threat to our bonds. I began to be able to see shame in my depressed and anxious clients, but I was not yet aware of how pervasive an experience it is in each of us. So all of us must begin to learn more about shame and learn to identify our own shame, because it is much more pervasive an experience than we would ever imagine.

The more shame accumulates inside us, the more likely we are to feel depressed, anxious, and up tight. The fact that this process of getting trapped in shame is so out of our awareness, a good exercise is to begin to think about what we are ashamed of. What experiences most embarrass us? What kinds of events, requirements, and challenges do we shrink from? What emotions are we most uncomfortable with in ourselves and in others?

Here is an example from my childhood. When I was 11 years old, my family would stay for several weeks on a lake in Wisconsin. We had a motor boat that had a powerful enough motor to pull a water-skier, and one weekend two friends of mine came to visit who loved water skiing. I had never tried it and they offered to teach me. Instead of expressing how fearful I was that I wouldn’t be able to do it, I went into a long tirade about what a waste of time I thought it was, and that I had no interest in learning to water ski whatsoever. My friends tried in vain to change my mind, but of course they failed, because my mind wasn’t the problem. I was ashamed of how fearful I was and of how inadequate I would feel if I failed to master water skiing. I was not, unfortunately, in touch with any of these underlying feelings. Fear in boys was not allowed in my family. I was caught in a bind. I couldn’t admit my vulnerability, so I had to righteously defend my choice not to ski.

I give this experience as an example of how we can begin to learn about our own feelings of shame. If we think of the things we have rejected at various times in our lives, these remembered experiences can provide a clue to our feelings of inadequacy, embarrassment, and shame. This signal that an important relationship bond may be in jeopardy often inspires us to reject challenges and areas of interest that we might otherwise explore. In other words, what often causes shame to come to the surface is our hidden apprehension that we will not win the approval of our parents, teachers, siblings, or our closest friends. We do not want to be rejected for being a poor water skier and so we reject water skiing, or whatever the experience may be, in order to save face in the context we are in. The paradox is that our tirades rejecting what we are actually afraid of are often more embarrassing than the admission of our truth. I am afraid of disappointing you and myself. I feel vulnerable because I am afraid, and I am ashamed to express my fear.

(Copyright Toby Landesman 2007)

So what is the remedy for this almost universal situation? The simple answer is awareness, acceptance, and expression. In other words, we must become more aware of our shame and our avoidance of feeling it. We must become more accepting, not only of our experience of our shame, but of how prevalent it is in everyone. Finally, we must learn to express our vulnerability, rather than becoming angry, resentful, and rejecting of it. Take a close look at the Scheff and Retzinger monograph that I have given the link for earlier. In their analysis of a brief phone conversation and its consequences, they give several examples of what it would take for things to have gone differently. These examples, when compared to the awkwardness of the original conversation, reveal both the complexity of our interactions where shame is a factor, and the simplicity of resolution if we will only reveal our vulnerability.

(Copyright Toby Landesman 2006)

Next month I will take up the powerful feelings of guilt and fear that we are so often either out  touch with or simply do not have permission to express. Taken together, hidden shame, guilt and fear create an internal emotional landscape that is ripe for the development of Depression and Anxiety disorders. By exploring what we actually feel inside ourselves, accepting these emotions and situations without judgment or expectation, and giving expression to these feeling experiences in the company of a supportive and empathic guide can liberate us from the emotional traps that keep us from living our lives fully.

My thanks to you dear readers for your participation, to Dr. Danie Beaulieu for her skillful, empathic work and theory, to Drs. Scheff and Retzinger for their brilliant research and analysis,  and to Toby Landesman for her endlessly amazing photographs.

Dr. Beaulieu’s website. She also has several You Tube Videos that can be accessed by putting her full name in the search bar, Dr. Danie Beaulieu.

Toby Landesman’s photos are available on her website.

Google Drs. Tom Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger for access to their extensive and exemplary writings.

Please feel free to comment, critique, and expound !

 Article written by Tom Goforth

Newtopia staff writer THOMAS GOFORTH is a psychotherapist and pastoral counselor working in Chicago, IL. He was ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in 1967 and served as Chaplain to the Cook County Jail and the Chicago House of Correction while working for St. Leonard’s House, one of the first halfway houses in the country.. He did draft counseling and community organizing during the Viet Nam War, and was one of the founding members of the Lincoln Park Therapy Collective, an all volunteer organization which provided free group therapy for people living on the North Side of Chicago from 1968 until the mid 80′s.He helped organize the first crisis phone line in Chicago, and later helped train the staff counselors for Kool Aide Youth Emergency Services and Metro Help. He was an actor in the Free Theater Company and Rapid Transit Guerrilla Communications, two groundbreaking political theater companies performing in Chicago during the late 60′s and early 70′s. In the 80′s he helped found the Milton H. Erickson Institute of Chicago and became its third president and a member of its teaching faculty. At the invitation of Charles Shaw, he became the acting “Pit Boss” of the New Poetry Collective, the poetry arm of Newtopia Magazine in its first incarnation. Follow him at Twitter @thomas_goforth.