30 Days Animal Rights

Lots of you will remember the documentary film “Supersize Me” directed by Morgan Spurlock.? After seeing that film all those years ago, I became an admirer of Spurlock’s work and a frequent reader of his defunct blog. Some years after Supersize Me, he started production on the show “30 Days” which aired on the FX cable network in the US. Though I wasn’t around to watch it on TV at that time, I remember reading Morgan’s recounting of how production was going and of course, through the magic of the internet, I was able to get my hands on the entire first season.

The show itself is about spending 30 days in someone else’s shoes.? Someone else- usually meaning someone who lives differently or opposite what one person might see as normal or correct.? Or just different somehow.? The higher message in this show seems to have always been to make you see things differently, and understand some of the often misunderstood lifestyles and life circumstances.

Now in its third season, the most recent episode dealt with an avid hunter and meat eater, living 30 days with a Vegan family working as an animal rights activist.

Initially it may seem like this isn’t going to be worth anything or even interesting.? The gentleman is very polite and very candid about his opinions about animals and activists, and seems like the month will be nothing but disagreements and unspoken hatred.? As an audience member it probably all seems a bit forced, cause of course – it is for television.

But the animal rights episode has some very interesting moments, no matter how made for TV it may have been.? Example, riding along with an animal rescuer, who patrols factory farms for sick and abused animals, taking them to a rescue farm where animals are rehabilitated and allowed to live without abuse.? The video footage captured just from outside the fences of factory farms in California was nothing short of shocking, even if you think you have seen animals in some gross situations.? It was also interesting to hear the debates between the family and the gentleman, about diet, about the place of animals on earth and in our lives.? It wasn’t that he was proven wrong or that he was totally converted, what got me was how this man was able to have discussions and both make points and aknowledge points he had not fully considered previously.

I highly recommend 30 days. Not every episode or situation is golden, but when it is good.. it is great.? The kind of programming we should show our high school and grammer school students, to stimulate a more developed understanding and questioning of what is presented to us as reality.

If you use bittorent at all, here’s a link to the Torrent for the latest episode of 30 days.

bm267 Empowering Cambodian Children with Friends International

Friends International is a very unique organization doing some very revolutionary work in an often overlooked part of the world with the most overlooked people on this planet- street children. While in Phnom Penh I stumbled upon one of their restaurants by luck and asked about doing an interview.  One day later, I was sitting down with Sébastien Marot, the international coordinator of friends international.  Following the interview, he introduced me to actress, activist and concerned citizen Leslie Hope who also sat down for a drink with me to talk about the film she had just completed about Friends entitled – What I See When I Close My Eyes.  After this surprise interview, I joined them both at the film screening and had one of the more unforgettable nights of my visit to Cambodia.

Music in this episode:

  • The Breeders – Wicked Little Town
  • Utah Phillips – Kid’s Liberation
  • Phil Ochs. – Outside of a Small Circle of Friends

Evidence to Convict A Murderer

Many visitors to this site and readers of this blog are no doubt listeners or watchers of democracy now, perhaps the most important 60 min of audio one can consult in the average day.  Well last friday’s show is one I had to listen to a second time.

People often fall back on slogans like, “the past is the past” and “its time to move on” whenever you bring up an uncomfortable or unresolved conflict.  I hear it very often in both the mainstream media and mainstream political conversations when it comes to impeaching the president.  Beyond impeachment, even the demand to arrest the current president of the United States and his inner circle on the charge of mass murder and fraud seems to have become some crazy idea, too far fetched to be worthy of discussion.

Why exactly doesn’t anyone want to talk about it? That part isn’t so clear.  People are still dying everyday while carrying out his orders.  An entire nation is still living under occupation while their national funds are being held hostage by that same administration.  The US itself is, even as I write this, being drained of all its resources, wealth, and young minds, again for the whims of that same president. But perhaps like Eddie Izzard used to say, when one murders tens of thousands it is as if people don’t know what to do with you or how to respond.

Last friday’s democracy now featured the man who led the case against Charles Manson, the infamous American serial killer.  He’s now laid out the case against George W. Bush, for the crime of murder; mass murder. To learn the details of the case itself is important and worth your time, so give it a listen.

What I found particularly eye opening was the document called “the manning memo”.  This memo, written by a Tony Blair advisor, provided details of the conversations that included Bush, Blair, and Condi Rice among others.  In those details it is revealed by Manning, that Bush was worried that the case for war in Iraq was too weak, and he discussed a plan to fly a US air force plane low over Iraq, painted with UN colors and insignias.  In doing so it would provoke Iraq to fire, and the plane’s destruction would outrage the international community and further garuntee the desire to go to invade the country.

The evidence of the murders and fraud was already significant, but looking at the manning memo and seeing the premeditated, fraudulent, and blantent thirst for blood, this cabal needs to be arrested and kept from comitting anymore murders or other haneous acts.  The world cannot wait for the next election, just as you don’t wait 6 months before picking up a serial killer til he is finished with his current job. This is not a time for moving on, or keeping the past in the past… this is the present and there is a series of criminal acts that got us here, and something must be done about it.

bm266 Finding Cambodia’s Lost Culture

Bophana is an organization based in Phnom Penh, dedicated to finding and archiving video, audio, and text documentation of Cambodian culture.  Throughout the decades of war and the destructive Khmer Rouge regime, much of the nation’s audio-visual archives were lost. But Bophana has taken on the task of gathering this material, from private individuals in the country, or institutions and film companies abroad.  I was given an informative tour and a demonstration of how the archive works, later we recorded this podcast interview.

We Discuss:

  • What is Bophana
  • Who is behind this organization
  • Why should Cambodia need such a place
  • Types of activities and areas of interest
  • Funding sources, funding problems
  • Difficulties with finding skilled workers for this type of work

Music:

  • Apostle of Hustle – Folkloric Field
  • Kanye West – Heard’em Say

Talking about the Killing Fields

Although I’ve arrived back home in Amsterdam, my mind still drifts regularly back to Cambodia.  In conversations with friends and day dreams as I ride my bike around town, I think most about the killing fields and that horrible torture prison known as S-21.

It was last friday that Mr. Lee and I set out on the motorscooter for the 25 or so minute ride out to the killing fields of Choeung Ek. Along the way I caught my first long glimpses of the country side, and the boggy farms that dot the landscape.  Mr. Lee  chimed in “Mr. Mark, you want go firing range and shoot machine gun?”  – I tried to control my laughter and calmy replied, no, no, I’m ok, I don’t need shooting range. Noticing my disdain for the question he redirected, “many tourists like, they come and they shoot the guns.”

Eventually we arrive at the killing fields late that morning, on the way in -oddly enough-, greeting someone I met the night before at the Foreign Correspondents Club. Looking past the modest shrine, that I can already see contains many levels of skulls stored behind Plexiglas, I noticed the covered areas of land.  Having heard the stories of the mass graves, of the more than 8,000 people that were killed at Choeung Ek, I knew those covered areas where some of the biggest mass graves.  Slowly reading and moving past the wooden boards explaining how people were brought to this plot of land from the S-21 prison, to be slaughtered using various types of weapons and methods, I made my way to the covered areas.  There in the pit of muddy water and wild grasses, I could see remnants of fabric, the collar of a shirt, perhaps the edge of a pant leg, almost too hard to tell at that point.  Eventually I found myself staring at what could only be pieces of bone, somehow still there, sticking up out of the ground.  I kept thinking, nooo.. thats not bone. But Iooking again, yes… yes it was; all that was left of some of these thousands of people killed between 1975 and 1979, the year of my birth.

Whether it was walking quietly and slowly through the killing fields, or staring at the floors and walls of the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, my mind would not stop trying to recreate the sounds and smells of these places in those days.  Prisoners being tortured, guards torturing prisoners out of fear of their own lives and that of their families. The muffled screams as prisoners would only be further punished for crying out.  The requirement of all prisoners to ask before drinking water or even just going to the bathroom right there in their own tiny cells.  All this within rooms that had originally been built and served as places of knowledge, a high school, a place of great hope for the future.

It was nothing short of humbling to see these places. They alone merit the long journey of anyone anywhere in the world who can afford to come; to see, to learn and remember, to visualize what it was like and think about how something like that can happen, just 28 years ago…. my lifetime.

It is easy to say, never again. Yet how often have people been rounded up, tortured, and mass murdered since 1979? Right at this moment, it is happening. THAT is perhaps more disturbing and horrifing than any former prison or field of death – that people are unable or unwilling to mobilize to stop history from repeating itself. Sadly there will be more S-21’s and more Choeung Ek’s in this world. The lone silver lining one could point to, after having also seen how the Cambodian nation is dealing with both the past and present to some extent, is that they have resolved to never repeat that part of history again.

bmtv86 Arrival in Cambodia

Going back a few days, this vlog entry is from my first day in Cambodia.  It includes footage from my arrival via Tuc-Tuc, to me Royal Palace visit.

On that note, I’m off to the airport for the long long flight back to Amsterdam. It has been, well, overwhelming to say the least.  A fantastic experience that has left me profoundly happy and hungry for more journeys like this one.