Living

The Boston Palestine Film Festival Proudly Presents A One-Night Only, Limited Engagement of the Oscar-Nominated Palestinian Film ... 

Omar  

by Hany Abu Assad

2013 | Drama | 98 min

Arabic/Hebrew with English subtitles, Rated R

Friday, February 28, 2014, 7:30 pm

West Newton Cinema

1296 Washington St

West Newton MA 02465

$11 General Admission

$9 Students

Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress
by Steve Early
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013

At the beginning of 2013, American workers were reeling from body blows -- in Michigan among other places.  How does that state transmogrify from being the heart of the labor movement to a "right-to-work (for less)" locale, taking its place alongside the Deep South?  This anti-worker plague swept through surrounding states.  Indiana, Wisconsin and Ohio, in that order, took away workers' right to negotiate their conditions, even though this tack was defeated by a vote of the public in Ohio in November 2011.  Indiana enacted a right-to-work law affecting private sector employees.  A year after the Ohio vote, workers in Michigan were defeated on two referenda concerning government workers' ability to negotiate.   At that stage, what happened in the latter state shouldn't have shocked anyone.

Whether or not you know it, you are familiar with the work of Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), one of the most acclaimed of America’s sculptors of monuments. His staggeringly successful career spanned two centuries and lasted his lifetime. Have you ever seen the Minuteman statue in Concord, MA? It was French’s first full-sized figure, done when he was 22 years old in 1875. Have you run into the Angel of Peace sculpture in Jamaica Plain’s Forest Hills Cemetery? French did that in 1898 at age 48.

The American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) is a Baltimore treasure housing the art of self-taught artists – many of them working class, some with histories of mental health breakdowns, of exile and genocide, of poverty and exclusion. This is outsider art that leaves you gasping with awe at the dazzling work people can create out of matchsticks or crocheted yarn remnants or broken dishes. Many of the exhibited pieces are sparkly and intricate and wrenching and extreme.