The corporate media went into overdrive reporting the outrage expressed by members of the Canadian political establishment after Brigette DePape, a 21 year old university student, executed a direct action protest during a political ceremony in Ottawa.

Hundreds of newspapers and TV stations, working from the same script, described Brigette as a “rogue page.” They reported that she had “betrayed Parliament” and “taken a shortcut to power.” One journalist declared that “you don’t accept an invitation to someone’s house and spit in the soup.”

Brigette’s middle aged critics, culled from a pool of elected officials and journalists, stood in stark contrast to her relaxed, youthful non-conformity.  

Hours after being fired from her job on Parliament Hill, Brigette appeared on national TV to discuss her protest and critique the policies of the Conservative government.  She turned the interview into a job search and told the country she was looking for work. The TV show host told her she was “feisty.”

I caught up with Brigette in October 2011 on Gould St in Toronto before she delivered a speech at a social justice rally on the Ryerson University campus. We spoke about her vision of Canada, her inspiration as an activist and the neoliberal soup that is served on Parliament Hill.

Brigette DePape stood against the wall in the Senate Chamber on Parliament Hill in Canada as Governor General David Johnson read the Speech from the Throne, outlining the government’s agenda for the next session of parliament.

As a parliamentary page, Brigette’s job was to deliver water and messages to the senators. Her place was against the wall.

Judges of the Supreme Court, Members of Parliament, and Prime Minister Steven Harper listened as His Excellency the Right Honourable Johnson spoke.

To serve as a page in Parliament Brigette took an oath of allegiance to the Queen.

“I do swear that I will be faithful and bear True allegiance to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors. So help me God.”

Before the Speech from the Throne is delivered, Members of Parliament slam their office doors to symbolize that the Queen of Canada is forbidden to enter the House of Commons. The Queen is the head of the executive branch of government while the Senate and House of Commons are part of the legislative branch.

The House of Commons can get a little wild. Politicians heckle one another and debates deteriorate into shouting sessions. From time to time journalists comment on the “disgraceful behaviour” of the MPs or they celebrate the yelling and screaming as “free speech.” For many Canadian tax payers, a little of this quirky and ribald political tradition goes a long way.

Since the Governor General is the Queen’s representative, he or she is also forbidden to enter the House of Commons.

The Speech from the Throne has to be delivered somewhere, so the Usher of the Black Rod – the traditional head of security in parliamentary systems that follow the British model –  knocks on the slammed doors to summon the MPs to the Senate Chamber.

The Queen of England is assumed by the people of Canada to be present in the Senate during the Speech from the Throne, even if she is in Buckingham Palace when it is delivered. The presence of the absent Queen adds to the solemnity of the event.

No one on Parliament Hill expected Brigette to use the Speech from the Throne as a platform for a direct action political protest against the Prime Minister. Solemn political events in Canada are rarely, if ever, interrupted by cries of dissent.

With the speech was well underway, Brigette walked onto the Senate floor and pulled a red sign from under her skirt and held it up with both hands.

The message on the sign said, “Stop Harper”.

As soon as Brigette held up the sign one of her friends emailed a prepared statement to the press.

“Harper’s agenda is disastrous for this country, and for my generation,” Brigette wrote. “We have to stop him from wasting billions on fighter jets, military bases, and corporate tax cuts while cutting social programs and destroying the climate. Most people in this country know what we need are green jobs, better medicare, and a healthy environment for future generations.”

Brigette’s direct action protest, during one of the most solemn events in the Canadian parliamentary tradition, caused a shit storm of talk on TV and the internet.

Canadian journalists and politicians castigated Brigette mercilessly. The establishment appeared united in its disdain for her behaviour and outraged that she had used the Speech from the Throne, and her coveted position as a page, to promote her personal political views.

“She walked back and forth with her STOP Harper sign until the Sergeant-at-Arms from the House acted to remove her,” said Senator David Tkachuk in a prepared statement. “She betrayed those who put their trust in her – and she insulted this institution.”

Green Party leader Elizabeth May reminded everyone of the presence of the Queen and the solemnity of the event.

“Inappropriate. That is the most solemn moment in a parliamentary democracy. We’re essentially in – in theory, we’re in the presence of Her Majesty and the Sovereign,” she said.

Veteran Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett called the protest “an abuse of parliamentary privilege.”

Senator Noel Kinsella said he “deplored” DePape’s behaviour “which constituted a contempt of Parliament.”

Bob Rae, leader of the Liberal party, said, ”She’ll have to live with the consequences.”

Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party, said that Brigette’s protest was “wrong.”

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney derided Brigette as a “lefty kook.”

Senator Tkachuk transposed Brigette’s skirt onto her jacket.

“I don’t have to tell you what would have happened if she had something else inside her jacket instead of a poster,” he said.

Brigette was fired from the Senate Page Program and banned from Parliament, as well as the Senate and the Library of Parliament.

A few people on Parliament Hill repsonded to Brigette’s protest in the context of democratic tradtion.

“One of the principal rules” in the Senate is “free speech,” said Senator Pierre Claude Nolin.

“Dissent is part of our democratic system,” said Justin Trudeau.

“It’s probably one of the more exciting things I’ve seen in the Senate in a long time,” said Senator Jim Munson.

Maude Barlow, chairperson of the Council of Canadians, described Brigette as “adorable and brave” while the Council of Canadians issued a statement dismissing criticism by Conservative minister Peter Kent that Brigette’s protest was a “breach of security.”

Jian Ghomeshi, the host of Q – a CBC cultural affairs radio program – suggested that the reaction to Brigette’s protest was “kind of sad.”

“Maybe there is another way to look at this. Maybe it is about acknowledging the courage of a young woman who is willing to ruffle feathers and take a stand. Maybe it’s about celebrating the political passion of someone who is a member of an allegedly dysfunctional and apathetic generation. Maybe its about remembering that historical change has come from citizens who are brave enough to take a stand and break the rules. Maybe its about wanting our younger generations to think big, believe in change and to invest themselves in the direction of the country.”

Brigette’s protest only lasted 20 seconds before the Sergeant-at-Arms removed her from the Senate but the story of the “rogue page” went viral on the internet.  Brigette’s critique of neoliberal economic policy and her call for a “Canadian Spring” was heard around the world.

“During the days leading up to the action, I was nervous,” said Brigette in “Thinking Outside the Ballot Box”, an essay she wrote for the Council of Canadians. “But as the Governor General read his speech, I felt calmness. All of my frustrations with the neoliberal agenda flashed in front of me. These thoughts carried me to make the first steps past the desks of the Senators. As a Page, my place was against the wall behind the desks of all the Senators. When I planted myself in front of Harper, I was precisely where a Page should not be, but felt like I was exactly where I should be.”

Neoliberal economics is characterized by the deregulation of industry by legislation, the liberalization of trade from tariffs and the privatization of public assets. In Canada neoliberalism has resulted in lower tax rates for corporations, decreased spending on health care and education and the sale of public assets to private corporations.

Neoliberals and neoconservatives both promote corporate freedom and the deregulation of markets but neoconservatives attempt to regulate society with law enforcement, privatization of prisons and military power.

The photograph of Brigette holding her “Stop Harper” sign in the Senate contrasts her direct action protest during a period of gobal economic crisis and social upheaval with Canadian parliamentary tradition and protocol. The image of Brigette’s direct action protest is prefigured in Canadian history by the photo of Pierre Trudeau pirouetting behind the Queen’s back during a G7 summit at Buckingham Palace in London in the late 70’s.

“He planned it hours before because he strongly opposed the palace protocol that separated heads of state from heads of government,” Jim Coutts,  Trudeau’s Principal Secretary in the 70s, told the Ottawa Citizen. “The well-rehearsed pirouette was a way of showing his objection without saying a word.”

Brigette DePape was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba on September 14th, 1989. She holds a degree in international development and globalization from the University of Ottawa.

Her engagement with people impacted by neoliberal economic policy began when she was a teenager at Collège Jeanne-Sauvé, a French immersion high school located in south-central Winnepeg. Brigette immersed herself in a four year project to raise money for impoverished residents living in a West African village. In her graduate year, Brigette travelled to the village in Senegal and met people who had benefited from the school project.

“I know things I can teach other people,” Brigette told journalist Lindor Reynolds about her teenage experience in Africa. “It’s not just pictures in a magazine anymore. For me, it’s real.”

After high school, Brigette won the prestigious Loran Award and enrolled at the University of Ottawa. The Loran Award, named after the antiquated LORAN navigation system, is granted by the Canadian Merit Scholarship Foundation to students who “show promise of leadership and a strong commitment to service in the community.”

The biography of Brigette published on the Loran Award website reveals a teenager actively involved in social justice issues.

“A member of Students Without Borders, Brigette has organized information sessions on Senegalese culture. She has also helped to raise over $100,000 for a village in Senegal. Brigette has performed and written plays for the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, and was a member of her school’s basketball team and president of its social justice committee. She plans to study international relations.”

During the summer of 2009, as part of the Loran scholar program, Bridgette worked at a children’s camp in Bosnia.

At 21 Brigette graduated from the University of Ottawa but she missed the convocation ceremony because she was busy speaking to the press about her direction action protest in the Senate.

“I’m affected by all of those around me,” said Brigette when I spoke to her on Gould St.  “I think a huge catalyst for my activism has been seeing youth rising up in Egypt, in Greece, in Chile. It’s incredibly inspiring. I realized that I can’t continue to keep watching and letting this happen, I need to take action.”

“The government is cutting corporate taxes, allowing companies to evade their taxes by investing in foreign banks and all of this instead of investing in us, in the public good, in health care, in child care and social services.”

“A major issue here in Canada is that inequality is growing so rapidly. There is an enormous gap between the rich and the rest of us. Between the 99% and the 1%. Wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of the top 1%. And we are really feeling this here in Canada. Inequality is growing here even more than it is in the States.”

“This whole tough on crime agenda that Harper is putting forward is really just getting tough on Canadians, it’s getting tough on average people, on most marginalized people in society and locking them up rather than addressing the fundamental root causes of crime which are poverty and inequality.”

Many people around the world oppose the Alberta tarsands oil project because of the environmental damage caused by the oil extraction process and then again when the fossil fuels are burned.

“We are seeing very real impacts on our communities here in Canada because of the tarsands,” said Brigette. “It’s really undermining the rights of indiginous peoples. Most of these developments are on indigenous land. It is extremely harmful, not only for those frontline communities who are directly impacted but it is also harmful for society at large. It’s really putting at risk youth and future generations. It could lead to stopping the conditions for life to be able to happen on the earth because it’s leading to climate change. The tarsands are the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.”

From the stage on Gould St Brigette spoke to several hundred students, First Nations activists and union members. Yellow Steelworkers Union flags rippled in the autumn breeze hehind her.

“Anyone can be an activist,” she said. “We are all leaders. And as we come together in the streets to take action we become a living, breathing force for change. As we see Harper’s agenda go forward we see our social and environmental fabric being eroded. It’s getting harder and harder for average Canadians to get by. But we say no longer. Change will not happen in Parliament. It is outside that we will make change. It is the only thing that has ever led to fundamental changes in our society. We see young people rising up from Egypt to Greece to Chile. And now we are rising up right here in North America. In Canada.”

Listen to Jian Ghomeshi talk about Brigette DePape.

Read Thinking Outside the Ballot Box: How People Power Can Stop the Harper Agenda and Create Fundamental Change by Brigette dePape.

Watch the June 3, 2011 Throne Speech.

Christopher Hitchens, who died of cancer in Houston on December 15, 2011, spoke at public events in Los Angeles many times. I was fortunate to catch a few of his appearances and see him in action.

Five days before the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, Hitchens spoke at the Wiltern Theatre in Koreatown. He was debating the upcoming war with Robert Scheer, Michael Ignatieff and Mark Tanner. The event was billed as “American Power & The Crisis Over Iraq.” The house was packed.

At one point during the debate Hitchens nailed Robert Scheer for misquoting Karl Marx.

“Christopher always talks about religion as being the, I guess what, the … what was the thing Marx said?  Opium of the people …” said Scheer.

“No, he didn’t. No, he didn’t,” said Hitchens immediately.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, when it was his time to speak, Hitchens corrected Scheer.

“What Marx said about religion, by the way, was that it was the heart of the heartless world, the sigh of the oppressed creature, the spirit of the spiritless situation, an opiate for the people, and that criticism had plucked the flowers from the chain not so that men could wear the chain without consolation, but so that they could break the chain and cull the living flower.”

The poetry of Karl Marx is rarely heard in the concert halls of America. Like a lustre from the page, Hitchens’ brief recitation of Marx expanded the edge of the debate and set him apart from the others who now seemed to fumble with notes and rely on disfluencies to transition from thought to thought. Hitchens, more than the others and whether you agreed with him or not, had the ability to make you wonder what he was going say next.

He chastised the audience for applauding his fellow panelists and he infantilized Michael Ignatieff by interrupting him to point out that he had confused “moral perfectionism” with “moral relativism.”

At UCLA’s Royce Hall in April, 2004 during a debate billed as “U.S. And Iraq One Year Later: Right to Get In? Wrong to Get Out?” Hitchens, who supported the war, responded to the hisses and jeers of the audience by telling everyone to “fuck off.” The room fell silent.

From the stage he was charming but slightly vicious. He could evoke the street as well as the academy and he added a touch of menace to an event.

Hitchens’ support of the war may have been rooted in the anti-totalitarian principles of his youth but he was chilling as a cheerleader for the unwholesome characters who he believed would set his dream of a democratic Iraq in motion. His war cry was tempered by the charm of his trademark irony and obscenity.

Hitchens knew how to seduce a room. The hostility he excited in his detractors, he once told a reporter, “washes off me like jizz off a porn star’s face.”

In June, 2007 Hitchens spoke at the Los Angeles Public Library to promote “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” He drank what appeared to be scotch from a clear glass and slurred his speech throughout the evening.

At one point he lamented the loss of a golden age.

“We can recover the lost connection – the one that monotheism severed – between Athens and Jerusalem, and we could get back a world where philosophy was valued, the beauty of science considered worth studying, worth revering even, where literature would be the key to the study of ethics and morality. If you wanted the transcendent, you’d have love and sex and music, and you wouldn’t need supernatural permission. I miss it terribly. I feel as if something was torn away from me before I was born.”

At the end of that June evening Hitchens got into a dispute with an audience member who felt deeply insulted that Hitchens had refused to take his question about the attacks on September 11, 2001.

Hitchens would only tell the man that he was a “witless fool.”

Rattled by the insult, the man stormed the edge of the stage to confront Hitchens. As the two men shouted at one another library security arrived to remove the audience member, but Hitchens intervened. He told security that although the guy was a “witless fool” he did not want to see him forcibly removed from the theatre.

Security, not about to take orders from Hitchens, told the man to leave with them. Hitchens took the arm of his antagonist, pulled him up onto the stage, offered him a cigarette and escorted him toward the backstage exit.

“You are a witless fool,” he said. “But I do not want them to arrest you.”

Christopher Hitchens: ‘the consummate writer, the brilliant friend’ by Ian MacEwen.

Christopher Hitchens: Reason in Revolt by Robert Scheer

Christopher Hitchens Is Hailed by Stephen Fry as a Man of Style and Wit

Hitchens at the LA Public Library

Hitchens at the Wiltern – American Power & The Crisis Over Iraq (transcript)

Canada’s residential schools were created by the federal government in the 19th century to force indigenous people to conform to the economic, linguistic and religious system that was imposed on them by the British during the process of colonization.

Native children were wrenched from their families and detained at residential schools across the country. Legislation enabled the government to jail parents if they did not serve their children up to the residential school system.

Children suffered corporal punishment if they were caught socializing in their native language or practicing family customs in the schools. The government expected detained children to speak English or French.

To subvert traditional native culture, kids were forced by residential school employees to attend agriculture classes which the government thought would ready them for the capitalist mode of production that had been introduced by colonialism.

On July 29, 2011, survivors of Canada’s residential school system and their children started walking from Cochrane, Ontario to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

“We walked from Cochrane, Ontario for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission national event in Halifax,” said Patrick Ethrington, Jr at the Occupy Nova Scotia encampment on the Grand Parade in Halifax on October 25, 2011. “We’re walking to raise awareness of the impacts on both the survivors and their families of residential schools.”

Ethrington Jr was joined on the 2200 km walk by his father, Patrick Ethrington Sr, Francis Wiskeychan, Robert Hunter, James Kioke and Sam Koosees.

“Residential school has impacted all of our lives, especially as the children of survivors. They were taken to those schools when they were very young. They were deprived of the basic necessities of life. They were deprived of the love that only a parent can give. They weren’t allowed to practice their own language.”

Children were detained for 8 to 10 months at a time. Since the detention facilities were far from family homes, many children lost contact with their parents and brothers and sisters. Kids were forced to write letters home in English, a language their parents could not read.

Silenced by the prohibitions and punishments that prevented them from communicating with their parents, children found themselves vulnerable and alone. Many were raped in the residential schools.

“A lot of sexual abuse happened there,” said Ethrington Jr. “Fuckin’ right. Excuse my French. Priests were the ones who ran it, they’re the ones who did it.”

The day to day operation of the residential schools was out-sourced to the Catholic, Anglican and United churches by the federal government, which underfunded the program and relied on the forced labour of indigenous children to maintain the detention facilities.

Indigenous activists and historians have made the hidden history of the residential schools visible and changed the language that is used to discuss the issue.

The language of Government policy – terms like civilization, enfranchisement and assimilation – has been replaced with the language of social justice. Canada’s residential school system is now discussed in the context of racism and cultural genocide.

“Long time ago imagine being taken away from your parents,” said Etherington Jr. “Your head is shaved and you are deloused and you are thrown in with a bunch of other kids that don’t know nothin’ except to bully you. You’re not allowed to communicate with your brother or sister. You are not allowed to say “meegweetch” – thank you – in your own language.”

Canada’s Justice Minister Irwin Cotler described the placement of indigenous children in residential schools as “the single most harmful, disgraceful and racist act in our history.”

The last residential school closed in 1996.

“Residential schools had a very negative effect on the survivors. Our parents grew up with a lot of substance abuse – alcohol and drugs. We were taught nothin’ really. We don’t know how to express love to our own kids.”

Survivors of the system sued the Canadian government and the churches that ran the schools. In 2006 a $2 billion dollar class action settlement was awarded. In 2008 Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a formal apology to the indigenous people who had been forced to attend the federally funded residential schools.

Harper’s apology draws attention to Duncan Scott Campbell, the bureaucratic leader of the Department of Indian Affairs from from 1913 to 1932. Campbell described the residential school program as an attempt “to kill the Indian in the child.”

Mortality rates at the residential schools soared during Campbell’s reign. Many students contracted tuberculosis and were forced to sit through classes as their health deteriorated, ensuring that healthy students would be exposed to the virus.

Campbell addressed the issue in 1924 in one of the most chilling statements in Canadian history.

“It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habituating so closely in the residential schools and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this does not justify a change in the policy of this Department which is geared towards a final solution of our Indian Problem.”

Patrick Etherington Jr received two standing ovations when he spoke to the audience at the Truth and Reconciliation conference in Halifax.

Time is on the side of the survivors and their children.

“We had a lot of time to think when we were walkin’, said Etherington Jr. “Every time I saw a church I’d get mad. They call it truth and reconciliation, right. So you have to at least attempt to reconcile. I’ve come to realize I’m not mad at the church anymore. It’s sick people that did that. Not the church actually. Gets me angry every time I think about it. They did that shit to my dad.”

Read Terrified: Twentieth-Century Education for Native Americans – Residential Schools by Dan Paul.

Check out Broken Circle: The Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools by Theodore Fontaine and Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools by J.R. Miller at your local library.

About Duncan Scott Campbell

As head of the Department of Indian Affairs from from 1913 to 1932, Duncan Scott Campbell was responsible for the direction and management of Canada’s residential school system.

The Encyclopedia Britannica reports that he “allowed school staff to use a variety of inhumane punishments to implement and enforce the assimilation of these children.”

Campbell left a record of his thoughts during his 20 year command of the Department of Indian Affairs. His duplicitous writing reveals a carefully crafted policy of cultural genocide. It is chilling to realize that Campbell wrote the following policy statements in the 1920′s.

“The policy of the Dominion has always been to protect Indians, to guard
the identity as a race and at the same time to apply methods which will
destroy that identity and lead eventually to their disappearance as a
separate division of the population.”

“It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habituating so closely in the residential schools and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this does not justify a change in the policy of this Department which is geared towards a final solution of our Indian Problem.”

Scott’s role as a Department of Indian Affairs bureaucrat enabled him to travel on Indian territory at tax payer expense and write pretentious lamentations about the people he was determined to destroy. In one of his so-called “Indian Poems”, Scott wrote:

She stands full-throated and with careless pose,
This woman of a weird and waning race,
The tragic savage lurking in her face,
Where all her pagan passion burns and glows;
Her blood is mingled with her ancient foes,
And thrills with war and wildness in her veins;
Her rebel lips are dabbled with the stains
Of feuds and forays and her father’s woes.

And closer in the shawl about her breast,
The latest promise of her nation’s doom,
Paler than she her baby clings and lies,
The primal warrior gleaming from his eyes;
He sulks, and burdened with his infant gloom,
He draws his heavy brows and will not rest.

On Saturday March 26, 2006 the largest protest in the United States since the Vietnam war unfolded on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles.

Following the refusal of the Senate to pass legislation to criminalize undocumented workers and those who associate with them, people gathered in public to express the growing need for immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for undocumented workers.

People in LA were mobilized to hit the streets by Eddie “Piolín” Sotelotalk, the host of a popular Spanish-language morning radio talk show. Following Sotelotalk’s lead, other Spanish-language radio and TV personalities encouraged people to participate in La Grand March, resulting in a massive turnout.

The subway trains that rolled into the downtown area on the Saturday morning of the protest were packed with men, women and children carrying banners and signs. A few cafes along Broadway offered free cups of coffee. Volunteers picked up trash as soon as it hit the steet.

These photographs were taken on Broadway during La Grand March.

Three films starring Ludivine Sagnier screened in Los Angeles this spring and summer. Love Crime and The Devil’s Double were shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June. Lily Sometimes was shown at the City of Angels, City of Light Festival in April.

I met up with Ludivine at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills to talk about the wounded souls she brings to life in her films and where she finds the freaky stuff to feed them.

In Love Crime Ludivine Sanginer plays a young woman working in a corporation at La Défense, the cluster of skyscrapers in metropolitan Paris constructed to separate the corporate world from the cities famous arrondissements.

Isabel Guérin is a creative young executive overflowing with ideas but oblivious to the duplicity of people in the corporate environment. Her boss steals her ideas and manipulates her emotions. She does not have the capacity to realize she is being exploited.

In the absence of the hard won social skills that would enable her to deactivate her bosses behaviour, a cauldron of emotion starts to boil beneath the surface of their relationship.

La Défense – named after La Défense de Paris, the famous statue commerating soldiers of the Franco-Prussian war – becomes a battlefield where Isabel’s payload of emotion explodes and she turns her creativity to strategies of revenge.

“Isabel is based on desires that it is not easy to express,” said Ludivine. “I think Isabel is someone who is very good at what she does, she is excellent, she is a very brilliant person. I think we all know the sort of person who has been targeting their whole life towards one single goal and you know she has been obsessed with studies and success but humanly speaking she is completely immature.”

“She has no friends. Never went out. She is no good at feelings at all. She is not street wise. She doesn’t know anything about human relationships. She cannot control the thing she feels for her boss and she is a control freak. The sexual tension is beyond her ability to figure out. When she kills she realizes her desire.”

Ludivine Sagnier was born into a literary family in 1979. Her father was an English professor and her mother studied the classics. She grew up in Sèvres. Both parents loved movies and encouraged Ludivine’s interest in theatre.

Ludivine has appeared in 33 films. Her first role was in Cyrano de Bergerac with Gerard Depardieu when she was 10. Over the years she has established herself as one of France’s great actresses with an uncanny ability to reinvent herself on screen.

“Ludivine is an actress who gives her all without any restrictions,” said Fabienne Berthaud, director of Lily Sometimes. “She works without a safety net. She doesn’t act, she is. She never cheats and is very generous. She has the ability to forget herself and take on another persona to the point of physically changing.”

To prepare for the role of Isabel, Ludivine visited her brother-in-law at a La Defense skyscraper.

“It was an environment I needed to be familiar with,” said Ludivine. “To work in an office, which I had never done.”

The sado-masochistic themes at work in Love Crime are reflected in the sterility of the modern office where the use of language is restricted to project status updates and strategy sessions. Emotion is suppressed and people cannot be trusted.

Ludivine explained that a lot of “inner cooking” was required to build Isabel’s character and understand her personality.

“I think she must have missed a lot of affection and you know she must have come from a very cold and not loving family,” said Ludivine. “You know sometimes it is enough to ruin a whole life. Usually all of the sociopath that society is full of, they just look like regular people.”

Love Crime was directed by Alain Carneau. Carneau, who also directed Tous les matins du monde (All the Mornings in the World), died before the film was released.

“I felt a bit like a soldier at war obeying the captain,” said Ludivine of her experience working with Carneau. “We didn’t have the space of creation. It was more like obeying the general and trying to set up this strategy as precisely as possible.”

“I tried to observe more and more Alain’s personality in order to get some freaky stuff to feed my character. Usually for actors I think it is quite a good trick to observe the director. It will lead you directly to the lead part.”

Working with Carneau was grueling. Ludivine’s mastery of acting technique, as well her sense of humour, came through as she recalled the experience.

“The scene where Isabel has a breakdown and she cries in the office and in the elevator and then in the parking lot, we shot it during 5 different days, throughout 3 weeks.

I was like, my god. I complained. I said, you know, it’s really difficult to get the continuity of the kind of emotion. And they say, “Sorry.”

Love Crime is structured like a viscious circle with a series of gestures that are repeated throughout the film to symbolize Isabel’s breakdown and descent into madness.

In a particularly chilling scene, Isabel watches herself apply lipstick in a bathroom mirror at her bosses home. “Beautiful aren’t we,” she exclaims to her reflection.

“She’s completly crazy doing this,” said Ludivine. “When her boss initiates Isabel to being the shark in the company world, she gives her some lipstick, looks into the rearview mirror, and says, “We’re beautiful aren’t we.” Isabel is infatuated with this statement. She’s flattered and thinks they have something in common. When she does it at the end I think it is really freaky. Becoming a criminal leaves some stains here and there.”

In another scene Isabel repeats a gesture made by a male colleague by pinching his lip.

“That was my idea to do that,” said Ludivine. “You know something, it’s really thugish to do this to a woman. It is a virility gesture that is humiliating, you know. So I thought it was kind of interesting to play around this viscious circle to do it another time. I’m glad you noticed it.”

In The Devil’s Double Ludivine plays Sarrab, an Iraqi prostitute who has been selected by Saddam Hussein’s son Uday to serve as his mistress.

Sarrab, whose name means “mirage” in Arabic, has multiple identities and her accent changes as she moves from the clubs of Bagdad to Malta in an effort to escape Uday’s domination. In Malta she reveals the strength of her will to survive and her capacity for betrayal.

“She’s always hiding behind this sexy image that she’s sick of,” Ludivine told the Independent. “She’s like a lot of women in Middle East countries, who have to deal with male oppression and have to pretend they like to be dominated even if they don’t.”

Ludivine was director Lee Tamahori’s first choice for the role of Sarrab.

“Everybody in this movie is not what they seem to be,” said Tamahori following a screening of The Devil’s Double at the Los Angeles Film Festival. “Everybody, because of fear and terror, is acting out. Everyone is hiding behind another character. It’s the nature of this movie. Sarrab is very much like that. For self preservation, she is playing multiple roles which is why I had her in multiple personas. She wears wigs a lot, she looks different all the time because Uday wants to see her as a different sexual construct every day of the week. She is always performing a role for somebody.”

Devil’s Double producer Paul Breuls told The Independent that Ludivine was the obvious choice to play Sarrab because British and American actresses are too inhibited when it comes to sexual acting.

“The role (of Sarrab) is very demanding sexually and it’s difficult to find actresses who are willing to take that leap into the sexual unknown, especially in the States or in England,” said Bruels.

Ludivine’s appreciation of British actresses, on the other hand, is generous, insightful and cunning.

“I love British actresses,” said Ludivine. “They are very subtle and don’t have to do much in order to express a lot. I am very impressed by their subtlety and wildness. They’re soft and kind of withdrawn but like a tiger can jump at you and cut your throat.”

Ludivine Sagnier on Lily Sometimes

Ludivine was surprised that I had seen Lily Sometimes, which was shown at the Director’s Guild in April but has yet to find a distributor in North America.

“This is a very special character,” said Ludivine. “I must maybe pitch it for you. It’s the story of two sisters who live in the countryside. The other sister is played by Diane Kruger who also speaks perfectly in French and the movie starts at the death of their Mom.”

“My character is socially retarded. She is not able to have a normal social life and she is growing up being completely secluded in her own bubble of creation. She is like a primal artist. She doesn’t know that she is an artist but she is still an artist. She does a lot of stuff with animals because she is living in the middle of nature.”

“She finds dead animals in the forest and all that and she does all kind of stuff with them but I think she is an over sensitive person and she is so fragile that she builds a world around herself in order to protect herself somehow.”

“What I like about this activity is that usually people that do things with dead animals are usually sordid and morbid and what I like about it is that it’s always joyful and a tribute to life rather than to be a tribute to death.”

“The girl must be in her early twenties, we don’t know how old she is. She is very charming, she has a very childish attitude, everyone calls her the retard because it’s so easy to give her a function, a status, you know. She’s been completely traumatized by death and that’s the way she fights back you know.”

“I think its a very poetic way of putting it and I really love this movie because it’s full of tenderness. I think the relationship between the two siblings is great, very moving. I enjoyed working with Diane Kruger so much.”

“It didn’t get a distributer yet. Maybe it’s a bit too indie for the U.S. audience, you know. I’m glad you saw it.”

Sirens began to wail as soon as Misha Glouberman started speaking at Trampoline Hall in Los Angeles. Red light from the trucks on the street below mixed with the chartruese glow of a nearby building, creating a surreal effect in the second floor windows.

“The siren means everything is Ok,” said Misha. “The fire is elsewhere. Fire does not spread.”

Trampoline Hall arrived in Los Angeles as part of a promotional tour for The Chairs are Where the People Go, a miscellany of Misha’s observations typed up by Sheila Heti. Topics include improv, bars, neighborhoods, gyms, relationships and domesticity. The book blurs the distinction between author and subject, with Heti serving as Glouberman’s amanuensis.

“Misha sat across from me at my desk. As he talked, I typed,” wrote Sheila in the Forward.

Trampoline Hall is a Toronto-based lecture series with roots in improvisational theatre and comic books. Sheila Heti came up with the idea after attending a multi-media presentation in 2001 by Ben Katchnor, an American cartoonist.

“Trampoline Hall was just one little detail from his comic but the name stuck with me,” said Sheila. “At the time it felt like you couldn’t really go and see people talk unless they had some kind of distinction or something. So it was nice to just get regular people on stage to talk.”

Trampoline Hall lectures are fun and people can play around a bit with the idea of authority and the way it is projected. The shows experiment with communication and social status.

“I’m interested in things like failure,” said Misha. “Some of the improv stuff comes from an improv teacher named Keith Johnston. He has a wonderful book called Impro. He has a wonderful thing in the book about going on stage and trying to be boring. He thought people got on stage and constantly tried to be interesting. He would scream, ”Be more boring. Do something more obvious.”

In Los Angeles, Busy Philipps spoke on “Is Monogamy a Trick?” and Ezra Buzzington spoke on “Impostor Syndrome?”.

Both speakers are Hollywood actors – Buzzington appears in the movie Fight Club and Philips was in ER, the TV show. The topics they chose were loosely based on chapter titles from The Chairs are Where the People Go.

Questions and answers are an important part of Trampoline Hall. At the start of the show Misha challenged the idea that there is no such thing as a bad question.

A bad question, Misha suggested, can be identified by the emotional state you are in when the question surfaces. If your question releases a sense of wonder and curiosity, you probably have a good question. If the thought of your question ignites feelings of pride, then it’s most likely a bad question.

“Part of what energizes the room is the sense that if you are in the audience at Trampoline Hall you could also potentially be on stage,” said Sheila. “You have more empathy for the person who is lecturing and you understand that the person who is lecturing is like you, not an expert, not somebody who has credentials. Something interesting happens.”

A few hundred alumni from the University of Toronto gathered around the swimming pool at Canada House in Los Angeles to celebrate the creation of the Norman Jewison Stream of Imagination and the Arts, an academic program at Victoria University in Toronto.

Norman Jewison, the Academy Award winning director of In the Heat of the Night, Jesus Christ Superstar, and The Hurricane, graduated from Victoria College in 1949.

In video footage rendered on elevated screens, Jewison recalled that his “whole sense of social justice was incubated at the University of Toronto”.

Paul Gooch, Professor of Philosophy and President of Victoria, spoke about Norman Jewison’s commitment to social justice and how the Norman Jewison stream was designed to explore social justice and encourage creativity. The program derives its energy and vision from two academic courses: The Arts and Society and Artistic Creation and Public Issues.

In his autobiography, This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me, Norman Jewison reveals that his sense of social justice emerged during a period of travel in the United States after the Second World War, before he enrolled at Victoria College.

Jewison was 19 years old, on leave from the Canadian Navy, and hitchhiking in the deep south. He was impressed by the hospitality of black people in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

One day he took a seat at the back of a bus heading out of Memphis. The driver announced that the bus was not moving until Jewison changed his seat. A black passenger pointed to the sign: “Colored persons to the rear”. Jewison got off the bus.

“I think it was then, along the highways of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, that the desire to make films such as In the Heat of the Night and A Soldier’s Story took root … Racism and injustice are two themes I have come back to, again and again, in my films,” wrote Jewison.

A Canadian military band cranked out smooth jazz tunes as Jewison mingled with the poolside crowd. Dan Aykroyd, perilously close to the water, chatted with guests and posed for point-and-shoot photos.

Overdressed souls formed two solitudes on either side of the forgotten swimming pool. The dark suits and heavy dresses seemed funereal in the white California sunlight. Jewison’s baseball cap added a touch of mirth.

“Ah, dear father graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?”

Chancellor David Peterson, former premier of Ontario, reminded everyone that Dan Ackroyd is not a graduate of the University of Toronto.

“I actually have the power to give Dan Ackroyd a degree, if he would come up and kiss my ring, which I keep in my back pocket. I want you to know the kind of power I have,” said Peterson.

The surface of the blue water rippled and cracked.

Peterson, not without a touch of magniloquence, told the expatriate crowd that the University of Toronto aspires “to make contributions in all corners of the world”.

The number of University of Toronto alumni living in the Los Angeles area is a mystery. The university does not “share” information about the brain drain. Yet, everybody knows that Canadians, like Mexicans, stream into California looking for work. Mexicans pick up the agricultural work that Americans won’t touch, while Canadians toil in the fields of entertainment, sports and technology.

In the late 50’s, Norman Jewison quit a secure job with CBC-TV in Toronto and moved to New York to direct television. In the early 60’s he moved to LA to direct movies.

A just society provides a basic social platform for all members. Everyone has access to education, health care, water and sanitation. Adversity is mitigated by a social safety net and laws are applied fairly, regardless of race, class and gender.

Social justice, the key to social stability and global prosperity, is achieved when human rights are secured for individuals by law. The goal of social justice is to create a diverse and equitable society.

Social justice expands and contracts as social pressures change: environmental pollution, dangerous financial products, crimes against humanity, immigration rights, health care, natural disasters, human migration.

Forget about charity on the smoking bank.

“Only a crisis produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”

The ideas “lying around” are always fire proof.

When the principles of social justice burn, societies become totalitarian. This can happen anywhere in the world.

Norman Jewison’s feel for social justice permeates his films.

“I have tended to show humanity as fallible, sensitive, befuddled, misled, but redeemable rather than mindlessly, relentlessly violent,” wrote Jewison.

In Rollerball he shows the connection between corporate culture, violence and profit. In F.I.S.T. he examines the betrayal of a labour union by it’s leader. …And Justice for All looks at how the search for truth in the American judicial system has been usurped by legal maneuvers and plea bargains. In The Hurrincane he dramatizes the life of Rubin Carter, a black boxer wrongfully convicted of murder. With In the Heat of the Night he explores racism in the southern United States.

“The whole idea of a class struggle, the excitement of worker solidarity against the oppression of capitalism, captured my imagination. No matter how naive or unsophisticated I was in 1948, these ideas influenced me in one way or another for the rest of my life,” he wrote.

Jewison was involved in many of the key social justice issues in North America during the second half of the 20th century, often putting himself at risk by speaking truth to power and participating in the civil rights movement.

In the mid 50’s he discovered that the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklist had seeped into Canada. He hired Reuben Shipp, a writer from Montreal, to work on the The Barris Beat, a variety show he was directing for CBC. Shipp had been deported from the United States a few years earlier after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Jewison was told by his Canadian employer to get rid of him.

“I told Rueben that he could keep writing, but his name would be changed on the credits. I felt angry and ashamed that the blacklist also existed in Canada,” wrote Jewison.

In the 50’s, Jewison obtained a green card and moved to New York to direct a variety show for CBS called Your Hit Parade. The weekly show featured America’s top ten hits. Lucky Strike Cigarettes was the sponsor.

It’s All in the Game was creeping up the charts. Jewison scheduled the song for an upcoming segment, hoping it would reach the top ten. The singer, Tommy Edwards, was black.

Jewison was called into a meeting at an ad agency on Madison Ave where a Lucky Strike executive from North Carolina laid down the law: “we never had a black, and young fella, we ain’t about to start now”.

Jewison pointed out that Lucky Strike would not look good if a story about the companies anti-black policy were to appear in the New York Times. Tommy Edwards appeared on the show as scheduled and It’s All in the Game hit the top ten.

“The lesson, though I didn’t quite see it then, was to push back, to not let injustice persist, to understand that bigots often don’t like the light to shine in their dark corners,” wrote Jewison.

On New Years Eve, 1965 Jewison was introduced to John Wayne at a party in Newport Beach, California. Wayne starred at Jewison for an uncomfortably long time before shouting, “What are ya? One of those goddamn pinkos?”

Jewison attributed the wrath of John Wayne to the fact that he was the only guy at the Orange County party wearing a beard.

Bobby Kennedy encouraged Jewison to make In the Heat of the Night, assuring the Canadian director that the time was right for a movie about racial conflict in the U.S..

Kennedy’s instincts were right. In the Heat of the Night received six Academy Award nominations.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on April 4, 1968 and the Academy Award ceremony was postponed. Jewison joined Bobby Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Harry Bellefonte, Sammy Davis Jr and hundreds of civil rights activists in Atlanta for Dr King’s funeral march. A few days later In the Heat of the Night won 5 Academy Awards, including best picture.

On June 4, 1968, Jewison, his wife, and Melina Mercouri – the Greek actress and political activist – were having dinner in a Chinese restaurant in Santa Monica. Later in the evening they planned to meet Bobby and Ethel Kennedy at director John Frankenheimer’s place in Malibu. The Kennedy’s were on the other side of town at the Ambassador Hotel, celebrating Bobby’s California primary victory.

Jewison watched the news of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination break on a TV in the restaurant bar.

After the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Jewison decided that he could not live in the United States any longer. He renounced his permanent residency status and moved to England.

“I did a stupid thing we all would later regret. I sent all four [green] cards back to the U.S. Department of Justice, informing them that we no longer wished to reside in their country. How stupid a protest was that? I later asked myself. My two boys never really forgave me,” wrote Jewison.

Jewison lived in LA with his wife and three children. What happened to the fifth green card?

Toronto used to be considered a city of neighborhoods in which the majority of people were middle class, but the fabric of the city has changed dramatically. Now geographers speak of three Toronto’s and the death of the neighborhood.

The first Toronto is primarily white. Lets call this downtown Toronto. People live close to subway stations, have access to social services and enjoy high incomes. Victoria University is downtown.

The second Toronto is physically close to the first but people have has less money. Many have been displaced from the downtown area due to rent increases and tax rates, but they do not live in poverty.

The third Toronto is populated by immigrants who live on very low incomes. Lets call this suburban Toronto. People living here have limited access to public transportation and job opportunities. A disproportionate number of Black and Chinese people live in suburban Toronto. Urban planners have warned that suburban Toronto is in danger of becoming a no-go zone, like the outskirts of Paris.

Tax relief, rent control, income supplements and transportation options would help immigrants living in suburban Toronto transition from objects of the city to subjects of the city.

Social justice transposes grammatical terms and liberates language. Characters speak differently in the final scene of a Norman Jewison movie than they did in the beginning.

Norman Jewison talks about Victoria College

Norman Jewison talks about Bobby Kennedy

Listen to Allen Ginsberg read A Supermarket in California, the source for “Ah, dear father graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?”

Read The Three Cities within Toronto.

Michael Jack Lawlor graduated from Victoria College in 1994 and moved to Los Angeles in 1999.

Autumn de Wilde is an American photographer who has worked with artists such as Beck, The White Stripes and Kate & Laura Mulleavy. She immerses herself in the lives of her subjects and has produced an innovative body of work that demands attention.

Autumn has the uncanny ability to channel the history of photography in refreshing ways. A recent self portrait, shown above, mixes the warmth of a photographic print – uncommon in our digital age – with the presence of a contemporary woman.

I met up with Autumn at Intelligensia on Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles to discuss her work. Images from Death Cab for Cutie, her recent book, hung in black frames on the cafe’s red brick walls.

Over coffee, we talked about her approach to photography, the impermanence of Los Angeles, and the uncanny lushness of Nova Scotia in the summertime.

Autumn de Wilde is often described in the press as a rock photographer who has worked with Beck and The White Stripes. Yet rock photography is just one aspect of her work. Autumn channels different styles from the history of photography and refreshes them in the context of music, movies, fashion, and advertising. She also directs music videos and advertising campaigns.

“I started out as a rock photographer but I have a fascination with artists at work,” said Autumn. “I started looking around to prove that what I did was not exclusive to music, that my process was storytelling through the imagination of the artist I was studying.”

Artists bring Autumn into their worlds and trust her to document their creative lives. She in turn immerses herself in the lives of her subjects.

Autumn toured Canada with The White Stripes in 2007 and published Under Great White Northern Lights, a collection of photographs from the tour. She is currently working on a book about Beck, who she has photographed off and on since the 90′s. Her most recent book, Death Cab for Cutie, covers seven years in the life of the band.

“My favourite subjects are the long term ones,” said Autumn. “I come and go from their lives to document or do portraits. Sometimes it’s creating an imaginary world to represent a record. Or, you know, I work with Rodarte to create an imaginary world to represent that season’s designs.”

Search the Internet and you will find Autumn’s portraits of Shirley Manson, John Doe, Elliot Smith, Karen O, Fiona Apple, Michael Gondry, Wilie Nelson, Kate and Laura Mulleavy and many others.

“I collaborate with artists, I bring their ideas to life, add my ideas in, whatever is needed to make sure the artist’s work is remembered properly,” said Autumn.

Photographers garner a lot of information about their subjects when they are shooting. Photography, afterall, is part hunt, part seduction.

In the afterword to Death Cab, Autumn describes her creative strategy in a passage that evokes the mood of vulnerability that photography can produce.

“I imagine myself walking in a circle. The subject is in the center, and we don’t really know each other. I take a picture. They notice for a second, and then continue on with what they are doing. I continue circling and shooting. With each circle, we know each other a little better, and I get closer.

Finally, I am shooting hands, fingers, a shoe, an eye, a mouth, the creases in their clothes. After awhile, I don’t notice when I take a picture, and they don’t notice either.”

Knowledge breeds power and photographers learn a lot about their subjects when the camera is transparent. Autumn maintains a balance of power with her subjects by exchanging roles.

“Sometimes I’m following and sometimes I’m directing,” said Autumn. “I like going back and forth with that. We change roles.”

“Sometimes I really am just using my invisibility cloak to the best of my ability so that they forget I’m there and sometimes they tell me what they want me to shoot and sometimes I tell them what I want to shoot.”

“It’s just knowing who should be in charge at any given time and when no one should be in charge. We fill in the spaces that need to be filled, but don’t overfill them. I’m not always telling someone which direction to look, but I sometimes am.”

Los Angeles wardrobe stylist and costume designer Shirley Kurtara has worked with Autumn on advertising campaigns and editorial shoots.

“Autumn has a natural ability to connect with people,” said Kurtara. “She knows how to make subjects at ease in front of a camera. Autumn really makes an effort to have the person’s natural self come out, so the photograph is a reflection of who they really are.”

Autumn’s portraits have a spontaneous quality and her style evolves from subject to subject.

“I don’t walk in with a set of ideas, like I always shoot people this way,” said Autumn. “Sometimes it’s an idea they had and sometimes it’s my idea, I want it to be confusing, like, who thought of this.”

“It’s really important that artists trust that I am listening and not just taking something away from the room. Sometimes I’m documenting the blood, sweat and tears.”

Autumn grew up in Los Angeles and credits the city as a source of her creativity.

“LA is my original inspiration,” said Autumn “When you vere off the major veins in Los Angeles you find these strange worlds. Parts of LA look like Tijauana, parts of it look like Rome. Much of the city is rotting sets built by set designers and not meant to last. The crumbling altars of Hollywood are fascinating to me.”

“Los Angeles is gonna always change. We’re never gonna be able to count on anything staying the same here. It’s so frustrating and so beautiful. Depending on the frame you are looking through, LA can become anything, which is what is amazing about it, but it’s also why people can feel really lost when they move here.”

Like LA, Autumn’s photographic style is always changing.

“I love experimenting with color either by taking it away and making it really monochromatic or overdoing it,” said Autumn.

Her photographs often have a surreal, dreamlike quality. Beck standing with ballerinas in a mansion with a woman dressed as a piano lying on the floor. Shirley Manson wearing a red dress in a swimming pool on sunny day. A bearded man in a dress, holding a parasol and a dog, strolling through the background of a portrait of musician M.Ward.

“There’s definitely a cinematic approach to her photography,” said Shirely Kurata. “It could be whimsical and fantasy-like, it could be a raw documentary style, it could be shot in different ways but it has the magic and creativity you see in films.”

“Sometimes I’m hunting down a moment that I have experienced with a person and recreating it with lighting,” said Autumn. “I’m inspired by a personal moment I’ve had with someone and then I’m creating a fantasy world to renact that feeling, which doesn’t mean I renact that moment. I spend a lot of time observing.”

Autumn belongs to a tradition in American photography that puts the relationship between the photographer and subject at the forefront of the creative experience.

In the 60’s Robert Frank, the great Swiss-American photographer, mentored Autumn’s father, Jerry de Wilde, telling him to to “shoot your people.” Jerry produced an important body of work that includes photographs of Jimi Hendix and Coretta Scott King.

Frank also mentored Allen Ginsberg, who photographed his friends over a 40 year period. Ginsberg wrote descriptive captions below his photographs and considered his subjects to be “sacred.”

Diane Arbus photographed people with unusal physical characterisics and lifestyles. She uncharitably referred to her subjects as “freaks” but returned to them again and again with her camera.

Nan Goldin and Larry Clark have also produced impressive bodies of photographic work by immersing themselves in the lives of their subjects.

In the work of these photographers the relationship between the photographer and the subject is present in the compositon. The photographs have the potential to raise interesting and disturbing questions about what we are viewing and why we look.

“I never assume I have someone’s complete trust,” said Autumn. “I really value it everytime I feel like I have achieved it. I never take it for granted because I’m very stressed out when someone takes my photo so I always remember that no matter how successful an artist is, it is a very fragile moment when they are having their photo taken. I’m very much a touchy-feely photographer.”

In the summer of 2007 Autumn joined The White Stripes on their cross-country tour of small Canadian towns and cities.

She immersed herself in the day to day life of the tour and photographed performances, audiences, rehersals and backstage scenes. She also photographed airports, highways, bowling alleys, and graveyards.

In the preface to The White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights, Autumn describes the city of Iqaluit on Baffin Island:

“One school, one hotel, a hockey rink, a playground, and a graveyard.”

In the book we see the local kids playing in the playground, The White Stripes performing in the hockey rink, and Jack and Meg strolling through the graveyard.

At the Savoy in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Autumn photographed Jack and Meg waltzing at the end of the show, to the wild applause of the crowd.

“I had to run to the center of the stage during the encore,” said Autumn. “I didn’t want to disturb the moment. Knowing it was the tenth anniversary show and seeing how the audience had been reacting at the end of the shows when they were taking their bows. I knew it would be special.”

“I’d like to spend more time in Nova Scotia,” said Autumn, “It’s so lush in the summer. The bluish green.”

Mixed in with the photographs of the artists are candid images of fans.

In a photograph, taken at the rink in Yellowknife where The White Stripes performed, three boys give it up for the camera.

In Death Cab we see ecstatic fans – unaware that they are being photographed – rock out as the musicians perform on stage.

“I’m fascinated with crowd dynamics,” said Autumn. “At a baseball game if the whole stadium does something all at once it makes me cry.”

A photograph taken on Death Cab’s 2003 Transatlanticism tour shows a fan screaming ecstatically, oblivious to those around him.

“I like seeing the difference between the type of fan that studies and the type of fan who is in ecstasy,” said Autumn.

These memorable photographs not only document the rock concert experience, they also record how technology has changed the way people experience live music events.

A fan on Death Cab’s Narrow Stairs tour in 2008 holds her cell phone above her head so a friend can hear the band play.

“She’s so sweet,” said Autumn. “She’s in the front row. Her friend on the phone can also hear the music. Now everyone is filming the event instead of watching. Technology has changed the audience. Now I just look at a sea of iPhones. It’s kind of a drag, honestly.”

Autumn’s photography is characterized by diversity and innovation. Her photographs could easily be mistaken as the work of several photographers.

“Sometimes things are planned ahead that involve interesting backdrops and sets, other times it comes spontaneously from being on location, but it always calls for something interesting and creative,” said Shirley Kurata.

A definitive collection of Autumn’s photography has yet to appear. A retrospective show at a major museum or gallery would put the significance of her work in perspective.

“Everyone wants to look good but the really great artists want the story,” said Autumn. “The story is more important than their vanity.”

All photographs courtesy of Autumn de Wilde.

Visit Autumn de Wilde’s website.

Check out Autumn’s Tumblr site.

Visit Jerry de Wilde’s website.

Check out Autumn de Wilde and Jerry de Wilde: Two Generations of Counterculture Photography.

Visit Shirley Kurata’s website.

See highlights from Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg shown at the National Gallery of Art from  May 2 to September 16, 2010.

Read Robert Frank’s Masterpiece: The Americans at 50, published on Transmopolis in September, 2009.

Flip through The Photography of Diane Arbus.

Check out highlights from Larry Clark’s Kiss the Past Hello which was in Paris at the Musée d’Art Moderne from 8 October 2010 until 2 January 2011.

On Saturday February 5, 2011 dozens of Egyptian families living in Las Vegas traveled by bus to Los Angeles to attend a public demonstration and show their support for family and friends in Egypt.

“All of my family are still in Egypt with ther children and spouses. I call them daily,” said Dr Osama Haikal, a Las Vegas physician who made the journey.

Shortly after the buses arrived, the Muslim travelers formed two prayer lines on the lawn beside the Federal Building on Wilshire Blvd.

“Muslims pray five times a day,” said Dr Haikal. “Because we are traveling our religion allows us to combine the afternoon prayer with the noon prayer. This gives us plenty of time to protest and ask for freedom for our brothers and sisters in Egypt.”

Amplified by mics and megaphones, organizers shouted rhymes of dissent that were echoed loudly by the enthusiastic crowd:

“From the Nile to the sea
The Egyptian people want to be free”

Blase Bonpane, director of the Office of the Americas and host of World Focus on LA’s KPFK radio station, spoke to the protestors.

“The people in Tahrir Square are speaking, not only for each other, but for the entire world, and we are very proud of them. This is the moment that the world has been waiting for. To see the people speak up and say ‘we do not need a dictatorship’.”

The consensus amoung Egyptian professionals living and working in the U.S. is that Mubarak must leave office immediately.

“Mubarak has to step down,” said Mona Hila, an Egyptian pharmacist who lives with her husband and children in Las Vegas. “The people are not leaving until he does.”

Najid Moori, originally from Afghanistan, now a U.S citizen living in Las Vegas, traveled on the bus to LA with the Egyptians.

“It’s one of the best travel I ever had,” he said. “Different people, different culture. I brought my family. The human being have a right to live in this world, have the right to live with freedom and dignity. That’s why we came here. We don’t want dictatorship like Hosni Mubarak.”

The peaceful demonstration in Los Angeles was a world away from day twelve of the uprising in Egypt, which has become increasingly violent and uncertain.

“People are getting mixed up between the peaceful civilians who are making their point and what’s happening with the government,” said Mona Hila. “The people have always been peaceful. They never wanted to do something that was bullets or guns.”

The loss of the Internet, killed by the government, was stressful for Egyptians in Las Vegas who use Facebook, Twitter and e-mail to communicate with family and friends.

“I’m a Facebook person,” said Mona Hila. “It was very crazy when it was down. Thank God it’s back. I can make sure my parents in Alexandria are good and my cousins are fine.”

“I call on the land line,” said Dr Haikal. “I don’t know if the cellphones are back or not.”

The possibility that the Egyptian government will use violence to crush dissent is a constant concern amoung Egyptians living in the U.S..

“You see thugs, hired thugs, for money, riding on the horsebacks, riding camels and they beat,” said Dr Haikal.

“You saw it on TV, I am sure. Come in on the horse and start beating people, and Molotov cocktails, and machetes and cut ears and do this kind of things. This is the intimidation that allowed Mubarak to claim legitimacy to his reign.”

“As a medical student I used to protest for the same rights that our brothers and sisters are protesting for now,” said Dr Haikal, who studied medicine in Cairo in the 70’s.

“My major concern really is that the Mubarak regime will resort to massacre like what happened in Tianamen square. I pray that he has a little bit of common sense and step down.”

The Two Escobars is a documentary about the rise and fall of narco-soccer in Colombia in the 80’s and 90’s. Drug lords with a deep love of soccer – and the need to launder cash – poured money into the game. Colombian players, who had been obscured by poverty, suddenly emerged on the world stage as winners with an exciting new style of play.

The Two Escobars was made by filmmakers Jeff and Michael Zimbalist as part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series. The film unfolds at the crossroads of sports, crime and society, mixing archival footage with interviews that show how Colombian athletes, politicians and criminals feel about narco-soccer today.

I called Jeff Zimbalist in New York to talk about the film. He revealed a passionate interest in the developing world and how war torn countries are represented by journalists, filmmakers and artists.

The Two Escobars was screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival on on June 18 and 20, 2010.

Pablo Escobar, Columbia’s notorious drug lord, bankrolled his countries national soccer team at the height of his power, creating the conditions for coaches and players to transform the sport and the way the world perceived their country.

The mix of drug money and athletic talent produced an explosive soccer team that seemed to appear out of nowhere on the world stage. The Colombian players took creative risks on the field and emerged as  World Cup contenders in 1990 and 1994.

“Colombian soccer didn’t exist,” said coach Francisco Maturana, in The Two Escobars. “Then suddenly everyone knew about us. We rose so fast people got suspicious. Two factors converged. One, we had an exceptionally strong team. Two, we had the money to keep our good players. When people saw our situation, people said, but couldn’t prove, ‘Nacional is backed by Pablo Escobar’.”

The Colombian model, however, was not sustainable and the team flamed out at the 1994 Word Cup in California. Behind the scenes, drug lords were betting on games and manipulating the roster. The team played under threats and, back in Medellin, a player’s brother was killed to revenge Colombia’s loss to Romania.

“Drug money, blood money, though it may bring temporary success, inevitably, somewhere down the road, it always ends in tragedy,” said journalist Cesar Mauricio Velasquez, in the film.

Candid interviews with athletes, politicians and criminals from the Pablo Escobar era provide multiple perspectives for the many layers of this complex story.

The filmmakers show that the rise of Pablo Escobar and the success of the Colombian national soccer team were deeply related aspects of conditions in Colombian society.

“When you sit down with people often they would say I don’t want to talk about narco, I’ll talk about sport or I’ll talk about politics but if you so much as mention the word narco, I’m going to get up and walk out of the room,” said Jeff Zimbalist.

“But as soon as you sit down, within 10 minutes of talking about soccer, they’re talking about narco-soccer. That’s because the two are inseperable. You can’t talk about the Chicago Bulls in the 1990’s without mentioning Michael Jordan, just like you can’t talk about the suspiciously rapid rise of soccer in Columbia during the late 80’s without talking about narco.”

Andrés Escobar, no relation to Pablo, was born on 13 March 1967 in Medellin. Andrés was a professional soccer player employed by the Colombian national team. Fans referred to him as “Football’s Knight” (El Caballero del Futbol).

During a FIFA World Cup match against the United States on June 22, at the Rose Bowl in Pasedena, Andrés deflected a pass from an opposing player into his own goal. Columbia lost the game 2-1 and were eliminated from the tournament in the first round.

Back in Medellin at 3 AM on the morning of July 3, Andrés was shot to death by a gunman in the parking lot of the El Indio nightclub. The killer mocked Andrés as he shot him, shouting “Goal” each time he pulled the trigger, as if he were providing play-by-play commentary during a soccer game.

There has been much speculation that Andrés was assassinated by drug lords who took revenge for the heavy gambling losses that resulted when Andrés scored on his own goal, causing Columbia to lose to the United States in the World Cup.

“In prison, I heard inside information,” said Jhon Vasques in The Two Escobars. “Andrés mistake was talking back to those guys. It had nothing to do with betting. It was a fight, that’s all.” Vasques, aka Popeye, was Pablo Escobar’s right hand man in the Medellin cartel.

Pablo Escobar was born in Medellin, in 1949. He grew up during La Violencia (The Violence), a period of guerilla warfare that tore apart the Columbia countryside. Millions of people were displaced from their homes during the conflict, which was characterized by conspiracy theories and murder. The judicial system broke down during La Violencia and journalists were silenced.

Pablo studied political science at university but never graduated.

Early in his criminal career Pablo stole cars, ran confidence games, recycled gravestones and orchestrated kidnappings. He entered the drug trade in 1975 and within 10 years, emerged as the leader of the Medellin cartel, controlling 80% of the global cocaine market.

In it’s 1989 mashup of capitalism and crime, Forbes magazine listed Pablo Escobar as the seventh richest man in the world. Pablo’s ROI was believed to be 200%. He could earn 50 million dollars a day.

Figuring out what do with the cash was a problem. Storage issues caused him to write off 10 percent of his earnings due to mould and rodents. He seeded piles of money with coffee beans to offset the stench produced by mounds of dormant paper.

Pablo enforced his business model in Columbia with a reign of terror. He bribed police and politicians with an offer that couldn’t be refused, the notorious “plata o plomo” (silver or lead). People either accepted the bribe or they were shot.

He was responsible for the assassination of political candidates and judges. He ordered the bombing of Avianca Flight 203, killing hundreds of passengers in a failed attempt to assassinate a political rival who was not on the plane. Several American citizens were killed in the attack, making Pablo public enemy number one in the U.S..

The New York Times reported that the Medellin cartel were behind the bombing of the Administrative Department of Security (DAS) headquarters in Bogotá. The blast killed 52 people, injured 1000, levelled city blocks and destroyed hundreds of commercial properties. The cartel’s target, DAS director Miguel Maza Márquez, was not injured in the blast.

Pablo’s appearance in the Forbes top ten billionaire list reflected an insatiable demand for cocaine in United States. George Jung, aka Boston George, worked closely with Pablo to create a market for the drug in the U.S. by developing smuggling routes and distribution networks

Boston George had a working knowledge of the laws of supply and demand. He wanted to contain the risk of getting busted by keeping supply low and prices high. The Medellin cartel had other plans.

According to Boston George, the Medellin cartel began to see cocaine as a weapon that could be used to undermine American society.

“Carlos [Lehder] had the concept where he wanted to flood the country with cocaine and destroy the political and moral structure of the United States. As he stated, cocaine was the atomic bomb and he was going to drop it on America,” said Boston George in a Frontline interview in 2000.

Crack had a devastating effect on American cities. Crime rates soared as people scrambled to feed cocaine addictions. The huge sums of cash involved in cocaine trafficking made drug deals violent. Drug traffickers understood that marijuana deals were conducted with a handshake, cocaine deals with a gun.

Flooding the U.S. with cocaine proved to be an unwise business decision. Pablo lost control of the operation as the scope expanded. He also incurred the wrath of the U.S. government.

“Pablo was still known as the head of the cartel but I think in that sense he really became a figurehead. It all grew beyond his comprehension,” said Boston George in 2000.

By the early 90’s Pablo found himself at war with the United States. The American military worked with the Colombian police and a paramilitary organization to destroy his infrastructure, leaving him vulnerable and alone.

Pablo Escobar was killed in Medellin on December 2, 1993 by forces employed to take him out.

Yet, Pablo was a folk hero to many poor people in Colombia. He built houses, schools, churches and health clinics in areas of the country neglected by the government. He built homes for 700 families living in misery on a municipal dump. The community is called Barrio Pablo Escobar.

He built soccer fields in communities that did not have recreational facilities, giving poor people a chance to enjoy sport and forget their troubles. Many of the players on the Colombian team grew up playing soccer on fields built by Pablo Escobar.

“The deaths of Pablo Escobar and Andrés Escobar mark the end of the glory years of Colombian soccer,” said Jaime Gaviria, Pablo’s cousin, in the film.

Colombian soccer players redefined the image of Columbia in the world by expressing themselves on the field with discipline, creativity and grace. Francisco Maturana, Columbia’s coach, encouraged the players to be creative on the field.

Maturana emerges as the philosopher-poet of Colombian soccer in the film. He speaks of soccer in the context of Columbia’s national identity and muses that the creativity of his players was an expression of the spirit of the Colombian people.

“When I was a player we always played from a place of fear,” said Maturana in the film. “As a coach, I wanted my players to express themselves and let’s see what happens. When fans saw that personality they said, ‘Yes that’s who we are. That’s our team. Our identity. They embraced us and infused us with the joy that is the heart of our people. We manifested their dreams, ignited their passion. No longer were we Medellin or Cali. No. We were Columbia.”

Colombian soccer restored the self-esteem of the nation by showing that there was more to their country than drugs and crime.

“Francisco Maturana was willing to discuss with his players the society they were living in at the time just as he was willing to discuss it with us on camera,” said Jeff Zimbalist.

“He knew that it was a part of their experience and he knew that it needed to be embraced, that it couldn’t be ignored, that it couldn’t be separated, it had to be an integrated part of the experience of coaching and rallying and unifying his team. He had some vision and insight into using one’s emotion, using one’s pain and one’s fear as an asset, as an opportunity. He had an incredible group of players at the time and he had some money to work with. It was a remarkable, unexpected confluence of all these factors that led to a squad that just played from heart and memory.”

The scorpion kick, invented by Columbia’s goalkeeper Rene Higuita, symbolized the inventiveness of the Colombian team. To realize a scorpion kick a goalkeeper must leap forward, pull his legs back over his head and kick the ball away with his heels.

“The scorpion kick is one of the more famous and daring moves in soccer history and I think that reflects one of the most daring, outlandish, creative and imaginative teams in the history of soccer,” said Jeff Zimbalist.

The Two Escobars begins and ends with the story of Andres Escobar deflecting the ball into his own goal. The filmmakers frame the story of Colombian society in the late 20th century with that unfortunate mistake.

“When you’re dealt so many characters, so many protagonists, so many different layers of story, like in this case, you have sports, society, politics, then you have the international image of a country, you know the United States involvement, all of that, it’s real important to use structure and to know structure,” said Jeff Zimbalist. “We apply the rules and logic of screenplay structure to documentary story telling.”

One of the themes in the film is the danger of building cultural forms on corrupt foundations. The phenomenon of narco-soccer blazes triumphantly across the screen before crashing and burning in the white heat of it’s own intensity.

“It was important to us that the film also speak to a portrait of Colombia as a place that is coming together successfully, that is transforming it’s situation, that is full of people who, like Andreas Escobar, have a vision for the country that is not based on illicit money, who understand that if you build a structure on a faulty foundation that it’s destined to collapse,” said Jeff Zimbalist.

“Shortcuts like drug money in the sport of soccer is a microcosm of what happens when you take shortcuts at the societal level.”

Archival footage is presented in standard definition with a chartreuse color correction that lends historical imagery a slightly lurid tone. Interviews with athletes, politicians and criminals are presented in high definition, which creates a sense of clarity as people reflect on Columbia’s past.

The filmmaker’s worked with composer Ion Furjanic to develop a  blend of hip hop beats and middle eastern rhythms that propel the narrative.

“It was important to us from the beginning to make sure that we didn’t just extend a negative stereotype of Columbia,” said Jeff Zimbalist.

“Most, if not all, mainstream media portraits of Columbia that we have access to in the United States are of a place falling apart, a hot bed of violence, corruption and drugs, and while I’m not gonna deny that there is a lot of that in existence even today, and there was far more so back in the late 80’s early 90’s that we are dealing with in the film, Columbia is overwhelmingly a country full of peace loving and hardworking people.”

“Our experience, my brother and I, living and working in Columbia and living and working in the developing world in general is not one of fear and violence. It’s actually a love affair with these places. We fell in love with Columbia working there.”