Rev. Danny Fisher

Visit http://www.wecansolveit.org.

This courtesy of the Religion Blog at the Dallas Morning News: At the Death House Door, the new film by Steve James and Peter Gilbert, director and cinematographer, respectively, of Hoop Dreams, will debut on the Independent Film Channel at 8 p.m. on May 29th. The film looks at the death penalty through the life of Huntsville prison chaplain Carroll “Bud” Pickett. From 1982 to 1995, Rev. Pickett accompanied 95 Texas convicts to their executions.

I’ve blogged about Huntsville before in this post. The city is frequently referred to as the “Death Capital” because Texas executes more prisoners than any other state and all of those executions happen in Huntsville.

Hoop Dreams is quite simply one of the most astonishing films I have ever seen in my life. And chaplaincy is, of course, my career. I’ve also been an anti-death penalty activist for ten years. I’m very, very interested to see James and Gilbert’s look at Chaplain Pickett.

You can watch the trailer for At the Death House Door here or below.

My dear old friend Michael Abbott runs a very popular blog devoted to “thoughtful conversations about video games.” It’s called The Brainy Gamer, and if you’re even slightly interested in video games I really must insist that you swing by and read what Michael has to say. You’ll thank me.

I’ve mentioned Michael before at the blog. Specifically, I mentioned in a previous post that I shamelessly steal podcast design ideas from him. If you like the way my infrequent podcast has changed, you can thank Professor Abbott for that.

Anyway, Michael, who practices mindfulness meditation, recently offered a post entitled “Meditative Gaming” that really got me thinking. I don’t know much of anything about video games–I haven’t really played them since I was a kid–but I’m interested in this idea of meditative gaming and want to understand it better. So I decided to ask Michael a question about it all. I recorded my question in MP3 format, sent it off to him, and he responded to it in his latest podcast. Check it out here.

In the latest issue of The Nation, Jordan Davis reviews The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (edited by Michael Rothenberg). For the uninitiated, Whalen was not only one of the most notable of the Beat poets, but also a Zen monk and the former abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center. He was also the basis for the character “Warren Coughlin” in Jack Kerouac’s essential novel The Dharma Bums.

Davis dubs the collection “a beautiful book,” writing:

Until [the release of his book On Bear's Head in 1969] [Whalen's] work had circulated much more in the usual manner for poetry than that of his famous contemporaries: broadsides, chapbooks and small-press editions. Between the scarcity and the word-of-mouth publicity, incredibly enough, there came to be loud public demand for a work based entirely on the sensation of coming and going. Here is the entirety of “Early Spring”:
The dog writes on the window
 with his nose

[...]

…the connection between his writing and Zen practice [is] that he constantly makes a conscious issue of what for most writers would remain unconscious material.

[...]

In his prose, Whalen follows the stream of his character’s associations from shiny surface to surface, illuminating to claustrophobic effect the lengths frustrated characters go to to avoid being present in the moment and making something of their lives. In his poetry, this deeply silly alternation of lines of inquiry and argument falls into place more relaxingly, as polyphony or comic dialogue.

The New York Times is reporting that Dith Pran, photojournalist and subject of the 1984 film The Killing Fields, has died at the age of sixty-five from pancreatic cancer. Mr. Dith contributed to crucial reporting of the Khmer Rouge takeover of his native Cambodia. His efforts helped earn Times writer Sydney Schanberg a Pultizer Prize for Journalism. (So much so that Mr. Schanberg accepted the award on Mr. Dith’s behalf as well as his own.) After the takeover, he was a prisoner of the regime from 1975 to 1979. The Times credits his survival to “nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.”

Mr. Schanberg wrote about Mr. Dith in newspaper articles and in The New York Times Magazine, in a 1980 cover article titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” (A book by the same title appeared in 1985.) The story became the basis of the movie The Killing Fields. The film, directed by Roland Joffé, portrayed Mr. Schanberg, played by Sam Waterston, arranging for Mr. Dith’s wife and children to be evacuated from Phnom Penh as danger mounted. Mr. Dith, portrayed by Dr. Haing S. Ngor (who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor), insisted on staying in Cambodia with Mr. Schanberg to keep reporting the news.

A dramatic moment, both in reality and cinematically, came when Mr. Dith saved Mr. Schanberg and other Western journalists from certain execution by talking fast and persuasively to the trigger-happy soldiers who had captured them.

But despite frantic effort, Mr. Schanberg could not keep Mr. Dith from being sent to the countryside to join millions working as virtual slaves.

[...]

For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, except for a false rumor that he had been fed to alligators. His brother had been. After more than four years of beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of a tablespoon of rice a day, Mr. Dith, on Oct. 3, 1979, escaped over the Thai border. Mr. Schanberg flew to greet him.

If you’re moved to remember and support the ongoing work of Dith Pran to raise awareness about genocide, I recommend visiting The Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, Inc., to find out how.

I also recommend taking a look at The Killing Fields if you haven’t seen it. It’s a rare bird–an important “message movie” that is also an excellent film. The trailer is below.