THE ORDER OF MYTHS, a documentary film set in my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, directed by Margaret Brown, is showing all day at Lumiere Theater in San Francisco. Brown will be in attendance at the 7:15 and 9:15 shows, along with moderator Sam Green (The Weather Underground).

THE ORDER OF MYTHS has received rave reviews everywhere from the New York Times (”a wise and soberly effecting documentary”) to the LA Times (”brilliantly captivating, an invaluable portrait of us-and-them America, a smart, generous, poignant, quietly disturbing movie”). The New York Sun calls it THE KIND OF ILLUMINATING WORK THAT SENDS AUDIENCES STUMBLING HOME IN A WIDE-EYED STATE OF ASTONISHMENT. A HAUNTING AND IMPORTANT DOCUMENTARY.

View Order of Myths show times here.

I wish I could be at the Toronto Film Festival to see GREEN DOOR, a short by Semi Chellas (who wrote the screenplay for Newmarket Films’ adaptation of THE YEAR OF FOG). From the Toronto Sun: As witty as it is demonic, Chellas’ film is an incisive adult comedy about twisted relationships.

Talk about flip-flopping! O’Reilly says teen pregnancy is the parents’ fault (unless it’s Sarah Palin’s daughter); Dick Morris thinks it’s okay to level blatant sexist attacks against Hillary, not okay to question Palin about anything, ever; Karl Rove attacks previous Obama VP contendor for having only three years gubernatorial experience and for being mayor of a town of only 200,000 (Palin has been governor for 2 years and was mayor of a town of 6,500).

Video via Huffington Post, which has excellent coverage of the convention.

Via Huffington Post, Sarah Palin is convinced it’s “God’s will” to develop the Alaska oil pipeline. Scroll down to watch her bizarre address to the Church of God congregation in her hometown, in which she urges the good people of Alaska to pray for the $30 billion pipeline. Palin is so radically to the right that she campaigned for governor on a platform of drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge–a position which even McCain opposes. (When asked in an interview what she thought of his position, Palin said that McCain was “evolving” and that he would soon see the light.)

Talking to a guy in the church audience whom she thinks “looks good, you red-headed Sasquatch,” she says that “people are gonna be drawn to Jesus because of the way you look.” She goes on to say that war is God’s will: I believe that Jesus himself operated from that position of war mode. Everyone say “war mode.” (This reminds me of that clip of Tom Cruise extolling the virtues of Scientology to an audience of rapt Scientologists.) Read all about it, and watch the creepy Pray-for-the-Pipeline video, here. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin and I went to see Steve Forbert last night at Freight and Salvage in Berkeley to celebrate Kevin’s birthday. The first time Kevin gave me a Steve Forbert song on a mixed tape–Fayetteville, Arkanasas, circa 1994, “Romeo’s Tune”–I was in my early twenties, fresh out of Alabama by way of Knoxville, and I couldn’t quite figure out this guy from San Francisco with such great taste in music. When I moved to New York City with Kevin a couple of years later, he took me to a Steve Forbert show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, and over the next couple of years we saw two more shows in the city, one at the Mercury Lounge. Not long after we moved to San Francisco, we went to see Forbert at a little church in Noe Valley. I was still in my twenties then, and I embarrassed myself pretty well at request time by shouting out, “Mission of the Crossroad Palms!”

Turns out that’s a whole album. The song I was hoping to hear was “Oh, To Be Back With You,” which is so beautiful and sad I can hardly stand it. Well, last night I got the title right, and Forbert did indeed sing “Oh To Be Back with You,” and it was the highlight of an all-around wonderful show. Kevin and I were in the front row over to the side, which gave us a nice view of Forbert’s harmonica table, which he kept returning to between songs. His energy was great, his voice was just like I remembered it, and yes, I fell in love with Steve Forbert all over again.

Forbert is from Meridian, Mississippi, and it just so happens that I was driving through Mississippi a few days ago, en route from Memphis to a little town called Brookhaven, where my parents grew up and where most of my extended family still lives. My dad, his wife, my sister and I were going down there for my granddaddy’s funeral. On the way we stopped at a 76 station in the middle of nowhere, and outside I got to talking to a gas station clerk in his early twenties about the heat, and the stillness of the air, and the sounds of the south (all those insects chirping and humming away in the middle of the day, so loud it feels as though you’ve landed on another planet), and I said to him, “Where are we, exactly?”

The kid dropped his cigarette and pointed down the empty highway and said, “Laurel’s down that way. I can’t wait to get out of here.” Just then I thought of Steve Forbert, and a line from one of his songs: “Goin’ down to Laurel, it’s a dirty, stinking town…”

Last night Forbert sang another one of my favorites, which was on that first mixed tape Kevin made for me when I was so young–”Song for Katrina”–You sure look good down in ol’ Canton/ With your new blue dress and your lipstick on. And he played “Middle Age,” which is funny and a little sad, given that Kevin and I are rapidly getting there. When he mentioned that he’d be going down to San Luis Obispo to play a show with Al Stewart, a lady got so excited she stopped the show and went up to the stage to talk to him. To his credit, Forbert was very gracious in the face of an amusingly awkward moment. Sometime between the peanuts and the pretzels and the Callistoga (no drinks at Freight and Salvage, which may have accounted for the somewhat subdued crowd), I picked up a copy of Steve Forbert: Best of the Downloads, which you can purchase here.

It turned out to be the night of two Steves…as we left the show, Steve Wozniak (a.k.a. Woz) was standing right outside the door. My friend Ben Fong-Torres recently said that he wished he’d taken photographs with all the fascinating people he’s interviewed over the years. Since the Woz was right there, and I already had my camera in hand, well…

Anyway, all of this leads me by a winding route to Outer Banks, a collection of three of Russel Banks’s early novels. In the preface, Banks writes,

It was so long ago, and I was such a different person then, that they seem to have been written by someone else. It’s as if the books were written, not merely by a younger version of my present self, but by a different writer altogether. He’s a man in his mid-thirties, which makes him thirty to thirty-five years younger than I am now. He’s not I, but he’s someone I happen to know rather well, almost intimately, the way one knows a much younger first cousin or favorite godson.

I was thirty years old when I published my first book, and looking back, just seven and a half years later, I too feel as if those stories were written by a different person. Forbert released Alive on Arrival in 1978, Jackrabbit Slim in 1979. When he catches a glimpse of those albums out in the world, it must feel a bit like meeting a stranger, but the kind of stranger who is achingly, eerily familiar.

Nice article in the Chronicle today about Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, the new book edited by Peter Orner, composed of the stories of undocumented immigrants. The stories were gathered and compiled by Orner and his graduate students at San Francisco State University. Underground America was published by McSweeney’s as part of the Voices of Witness series.

469 days after Madeleine McCann went missing from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, Kate and Gerry McCann continue to hold out hope that she is alive. Following the opening of the case files in recent weeks, there seems to be more reason than ever to believe that Madeleine was likely abducted by a pedohile ring. On his blog yesterday, Gerry McCann issued another plea for Madelein’s return:

Our investigators continue to explore credible leads and will continue to do so as long as Madeleine is missing. Now that the authorities are no longer looking for Madeleine we implore everyone who has provided information to the enquiry to contact us at investigation@findmadeleine.com or on + 44 (0)845 838 4699. We will guarantee that all information will be treated in the strictest confidence. You can help us find Madeleine.

Meanwhile, the McCanns have hired a private U.S. investigative agency made up of former CIA and FBI agents to continue the search. This article from the Telegraph outlines the significant disclosures made available to the press after the investigative files of the Portuguese police were opened. Among the disclosures, which included numerous previously unreported sightings, was this:

Madeleine could have been abducted by a stranger, seen by both a British holidaymaker and a British expat, loitering around the family’s holiday resort at the time. Pictures of the stranger and descriptions were not circulated by police.

An informant told police that he believed Madeleine had been abducted “to order” by a pedophile ring working out of Belgium.

Karen Templer has recently finished a brilliant redesign of her groundbreaking online literary community, Readerville. If you haven’t been to Readerville in a while, stop by to see great features like Most Coveted Covers, Ode to a Lesser Known Genius, and The Odd Shelf, wherein writers and readers talk about the unusual shelf in their bookcase, the one that houses books focused on a particular, often peculiar, subject.

My odd shelf is all about math. Read it here. Do you have an odd shelf, a coveted cover, a lesser-known genius about whom you’d like to spread the word? Then head over to Readerville and join the discussion.

Well, I’m taking the plunge into Second Life today and will be appearing in Athena Isle to talk about writing, my books, and whatever else the women at Athena Isle throw at me. The chat will be today at noon. Details here at the Athena Isle blog. If you’re a second-lifer, stop on by and say hello to my avatar. (I just set it up yesterday, and realized I can’t go by my own last name…my second life name is Michelle Mefusula). HERE’s THE SECOND LIFE LOCATION.

Not too long ago, I watched Fahrenheit 451, which is based, of course, on Ray Bradbury’s novel of the same name. In the film, the duty of firemen is not to put out fires, but rather to start them. Specifically, they are charged with setting fire to books. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which a book’s pages begin to burn.

THE EXERCISE:
Write a story or poem in which an ordinary term (such as fireman) is turned on its head, taking on an entirely different meaning within the world of the story or poem.

My twentieth high school reunion is coming up–class of 88, Murphy High School, Mobile, Alabama–and as I was browsing the reunion site yesterday I came across a familiar name, Margaret Brown. She was a year behind me in school, and now she’s all grown up, and it turns out she’s been busy. Months ago, I watched a wonderful film called Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt. My husband and I talked about it for days after, but it never occurred to me to put the director’s name together with my old high school days.

Now, Brown has a new film that’s making waves in the film world. Her documentary about Mardi Gras in Mobile, The Order of Myths, debuted to rave reviews at Sundance. Manohla Dargis, writing for the New York Times, had this to say:

Ms. Brown knows that there’s nothing black and white about race in America, and nothing specifically Southern about its calamities. Or maybe she’s just more honest…In contrast to the cloistered, all-white Mardi Gras membership group (called a mystic society) that gives the movie its poetic and freighted title, Ms. Brown has a beautiful grasp of gray.

Read the entire review here.

Dargis calls The Order of Myths “the documentary that left the strongest impression [at Sundance]…a story that is at once very site-specific and seemingly simple and as big and richly complex as the United States itself.”

In The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s classic novel about searching and longing in Louisiana, Binx Bolling, himself a less-than-enthusiastic participant in the better-known Mardi Gras of New Orleans, says that to see one’s own city on the big screen is, in a way, to have one’s own place and time validated, made real. I’m a long way from Alabama. It’s fair to say that, for a long time, I have not considered it home. In one of the stories in my first book, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, the narrator, Gracie, who has also left Mobile, remarks on how ill-at-ease she feels every time she returns there: “Some Mobilians don’t know that the party has long-since ended, clinging hard-heartedly to the notion that the Confederates won the war.” I was 25 years old when I wrote that, close enough to home to despise it, too young to understand the subtler nuances that Brown captures in The Order of Myths. This is a film for Southerners who’ve left home, and for those who have stayed, and for anyone who wants to reach a deeper understanding of a place and a culture that has been by turns mocked and mythologized for decades.

The film will be coming to the Bay Area on September 5. You can see it at the Lumiere or Opera Plaza in San Francisco, or at Shattuck Theater in Berkeley. View the trailer here.