Hasta La Gadget!

It’s great to be talented, but in far too many cases one’s talent can be as unwieldy as an extra-large penis. Size may be impressive, but what you do with your endowment is what really counts in the long run.

Ever wonder how lesser talents continue to survive? The answer can be found in this brilliant musical number composed by Jule Styne (with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim) for Gypsy: A Musical Fable.

Not all artists are limited to one form of expression. Performers like Tony Bennett and Zero Mostel were noted for their skill as painters. Polymaths like Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and Franco Zeffirelli were famous for designing the sets and costumes for many of their operatic productions and directing and filming some of them as well.

Storytelling is often underappreciated as an art form. But when great talents research, write, and tell stories in front of live audiences, the results can be electrifying. Since 1997, Mike Daisey has intrigued audiences with such brilliantly constructed and provocative monologues as The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, The Last Cargo Cult, How Theater Failed America, and American Utopias.

In June 2007, Daisey brought his tetralogy entitled Great Men of Genius (four separate monologues devoted to the lives of P.T. Barnum, Nikola Tesla, L. Ron Hubbard, and Bertolt Brecht) to the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. In October, he brought another tetralogy The Great Tragedies (which featured meditations on Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear) to the California Shakespeare Theater.

In the following fascinating interview with radio host Jian Ghomeshi, Daisey discusses Dreaming of Rob Ford (a monologue he created about Toronto’s notorious crack-smoking mayor).

Currently, the celebrated monologist is preparing Mike Daisey’s Moby Dick which, according to the press release, will tackle:

“….Herman Melville’s masterpiece of revenge, fate, and whaling terminology in a hilarious and breathtaking 90 minutes by weaving Melville’s epic saga together with the greatest and most perfect film of the 20th century — Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Ornate nautical slipknots, space worms that crawl into your ears, tattooed harpooners, and Ricardo Montalban’s rich Corinthian leather chest all combine with Melville’s gorgeous language to tell a sweeping story of revenge and what temperature that dish is best served at. (Spoiler alert: the answer is ‘cold.’ Also, the whale wins.) “

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While Daisey’s performance style has him sitting at a table with a glass of water and some handwritten notes in front of him, Hershey Felder’s monologues are more elaborately staged affairs. Felder has the distinct advantage of incorporating slides and film into his presentations while performing on a grand piano throughout his shows. Let me be honest: I am in awe of performers who can talk to an audience while they play classical music on an instrument.

Over the past two years, Felder has brought his one-man shows devoted to George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein (both 20th century American composers) to the Thrust Stage at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. He recently returned to town with his most popular show, Monsieur Chopin (which he has performed more than 3,000 times in cities around the world).

Because Chopin lived during the 19th century, this show gives Felder a chance to perform in period costume and display his skill with foreign accents throughout the evening. Upon entering the auditorium, he sets up the show’s basic premise: that Chopin has arrived late to teach a class to several music students. However, considering that this is their first time together, he is convinced that things will go better if he does all of the performing and lets the students listen to his compositions during their first class.

Hershey Felder in Monsieur Chopin (Photo by: John Zich)

As directed by his long-time collaborator, Joel Zwick, Felder leads the audience through Chopin’s life, following him from his early days as a child prodigy growing up in Warsaw to his later years in Paris (where Chopin settled at the age of 21). Together, they skillfully create the ambiance of a long gone historical era in which manners were important, talent was valued (although sometimes in the strangest ways), love was never guaranteed, and the gift of one’s genius could be a blessing or a curse.

Photo of Fryderyk Chopin taken by
Louis-Auguste Bisson in 1849

Monsieur Chopin deals candidly with the composer’s rocky relationship with George Sand (Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin), his financial sponsorship by Jane Stirling, his fateful visit to Scotland in 1848, and his death (due to tuberculosis) on October 17, 1849. The composer’s body was laid in a tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris but, as he had wished, his heart was enshrined into the wall of the burial nave of the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw. As part of his show, Felder tells the story of the soldier who rescued Chopin’s heart from the bombed-out church during World War II and returned it after the war ended.

Hershey Felder in Monsieur Chopin (Photo by: John Zich)

One might think that Monsieur Chopin would conclude with Felder’s performance of Chopin’s Polonaise in A-flat major, Op. 53, but the actor has a fascinating trick up his sleeve. Because he has studied Chopin’s life and music so intensely over the years, Felder is quite at ease opening up the event to a Q&A session with the audience. His advantage? Because Chopin is dead, he has the uncanny ability to comment on matters past, present, and future (which Felder does with a great deal of wit).

Some audiences members may prefer George Gershwin Alone to Monsieur Chopin (Felder has yet to perform Beethoven, As I Knew Him for Berkeley audiences). What I find so remarkable about his shows is the loving craftsmanship that he and Zwick have applied to create highly literate and entertaining evenings of cultural history and musicology that are accessible to contemporary audiences (an achievement much more easily said than done).

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The 2014 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival offered the California premiere of Argentinian filmmaker Hernán Guerschuny’s tricky little spoof of romantic comedies entitled El Critico. Rafael Spregelburd stars as Victor Tellez, a widely read (and severely jaded) film critic who, like his fellow movie reviewers, is suffering from professional burnout.

As a result of what he calls the “maladie du cinema,” Tellez has lost all patience with the standard formula for Hollywood-style romcoms. He can anticipate every cliché — from the big kiss with fireworks exploding in the background to the anguished confrontation in the midst of a heavy downpour and the desperate scene in which the film’s hero runs like crazy to try to salvage his romance with a mysterious woman. Tellez has seen it all and the standardization of this particular genre almost makes him want to gag.

Rafael Spregelburd stars as Victor Tellez in El Critico

While Tellez and his colleagues live in an infinitesimally tiny world of people who sit in darkened rooms tallying references to filmmaking trivia and petty offenses to their fragile egos (his editor describes him as “a terrorist of taste”), life outside the screening room has become increasingly difficult for him. Not only is Tellez battling a tight deadline to find a new apartment somewhere in Buenos Aires, he’s also short of cash. His well-intentioned sister has tried to hook Victor up with a local businessman who would pay him good money to write ten scenes for a film script that he might be able to produce. She also wants Victor to spend some time with his moody niece, who is driving her up the wall.

Poster art for El Critico

It doesn’t take long for the niece to insult Victor’s taste (which leans heavily toward French cinema) with her fondness for standard Hollywood romantic comedies and their happy endings. Meanwhile, Tellez is being stalked by a young filmmaker named Leo Arce (Ignacio Rogers) who accuses Tellez of publishing a severely negative review (that could destroy his career as an artist) without even having viewed the entire film.

One day, Tellez’s real estate agent, Pinni (Blanca Lewin), takes him to see an apartment which matches his desires in every way. There’s just one problem: An attractive woman named Sofia (Dolores Fonzi) seems to have gotten there first. In his desperation to rent the apartment, Tellez starts following Sofia, hoping that he can charm her into letting him have the apartment instead.

Sofia (Dolores Fonzi) and film critic Víctor Tellez
(Rafael Spregelburd) fall in love in El Critico

Sofia is the perfect mystery woman, a stereotypical manic pixie dream girl. Not only is she devilishly attractive, she’s a chronic kleptomaniac who is in town briefly for the unveiling of her father’s headstone. As Victor’s desperation to nab the lease for the apartment sends him in romantic pursuit of Sofia, he’s unaware of Leo’s villainous plan to take revenge on him by using all the clichés of romantic comedies that Tellez detests.

Soon, Victor finds himself living out each of those clichés in real life, culminating in a superb scene at a departure gate at Ministro Pistarini International Airport where Sofia is about to board her flight back to Spain.

Dolores Fonzi is Sofia in El Critico

Not only does Tellez fail to get his manic pixie dream girl to stick around, he finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to console and counsel the young filmmaker who intentionally broke the heart of Victor’s niece as part of his revenge on the critic (Leo has since discovered that he really loves her and wants to win her back).

El Critico is refreshing in its awareness of the weaknesses of the romcom genre as well as the vulnerability of professional critics who, at the height of their cultural snobbery, can discover that their impulses are just as venal and human as anyone else’s. Dolores Fonzi is especially appealing as the mysterious Sofia. Here’s the trailer:

To read more of George Heymont go to My Cultural Landscape

Firefox added its ‘Hello’ videochat feature to its experimental beta browser back in October, and now it’s taking on board user feedback to make it all a little more appealing. You can still use the feature without registering for the account, but th…

It’s been kind of amusing to watch what’s been going on online this past week in the wake of the release of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser trailer. And — no — I’m not talking about the faux controversy surrounding that lightsaber with those two mini-lightsabers coming off of its hilt. But — rather — the ridiculous response that certain Star Wars fans have had to John Boyega’s appearance in the teaser for this upcoming J.J. Abrams film.

As one irate IGN reader put it:

“So why is there a black storm trooper in the new Star Wars movie. They’re supposed be all white. I’m tired of this political correctness (expletive).”

Given that this Star Wars fan is complaining about a political agenda suddenly being foisted on this film franchise … Well, they clearly weren’t paying attention during Episode I – VIs. For — as Chris Taylor points out in his terrific new book, “How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise” (Basic Books, September 2014) — there has always been a political component to these motion pictures.

How so? Well, let’s go back to 1973. Which is George Lucas first began trying to turn his treatment of what was then known The Star Wars into a full-fledged screenplay. As Taylor reminds us, it was a time when the entire …

“… world seemed to be falling apart. The ceasefire in Vietnam broke down. US troops were heading for the exits. Watergate engulfed the Nixon White House. The Arab nations attacked Israel again. OPEC was withholding its oil.”

And George — who had spent the previous year toying with the idea of possibly directing Apocalypse Now for his friend & mentor Francis Ford Coppola — had all the research that he’d done on the North Vietnamese swirling around in his head as he began working on the screenplay for A New Hope. As Taylor recalled:

“Lucas was fascinated by the notion of how a tiny nation could overcome the largest military power on Earth and this was baked into ‘The Star Wars’ right from its earliest notes in 1973: “A large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters.”

(And given that George was an admitted television news junkie), Lucas channeled the news into his notes. With ‘Apocalypse Now’ (now) on hold until Coppola, then just its producer, could persuade a studio to fund it, ‘The Star Wars’ became the only place he could comment on present-day politics. Thus the planet of Aquilae becomes “a small independent country like North Vietnam,” he wrote in late 1973. “The Empire is like America ten years from now, after gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election … We are at a turning point: fascism or revolution.”

Mind you, Lucas didn’t just want his “$4 million space opera in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs” project (or at least that’s how George described The Star Wars when he was pitching the project to executives at United Artists, Universal and Disney. All of whom passed on the opportunity to make this motion picture) to have political relevance. George also wanted this motion picture to reflect what was going on American society at that time. But not for entirely altruistic reason. As Chris recounts in his book:

(George had) already gotten a lot of heat over the fact that ‘American Graffiti’ ended with on-screen text catching us up with the next ten years in the lives of the male characters, and nothing about the women. With the feminist movement growing more powerful with each passing month, ‘Star Wars’ seemed on track for similar criticism. In March 1975, Lucas decided to fix that (by changing) Luke (into) an eighteen-year-old woman.

Luke’s sex change only lasted for about two months. By May of 1975, Princess Leila (who had been relegated in the most recent rewrite of this screenplay to a glorified cameo) was now back in The Star Wars in a much more prominent role. No longer a damsel in distress that constantly needed to be rescued a la Dale Arden in Flash Gordon, Leila was now shown to be a leader of the Rebellion right from the very start of A New Hope. Which Lucas hoped would appease any woman’s libbers out there in the audience.

As Taylor points out in How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, there are all sorts of touches to Episodes I – VI that reflect the times that these films were actually made in. Take — for example — Emperor Palpatine. Which Lucas modeled after President Richard Nixon.

Did you notice something about the room in which we meet this character on the second Death Star (in Return of the Jedi ? As Lucas pointed out to Ian McDiarmid (the actor who played the Emperor) on set, Palpatine’s office is oval.

And this reflecting-the-time tradition continued as George began working on the Star Wars prequels in early November of 1994. Lucas was …

… interrupted eight days into the writing process by one of the most seismic midterm in postwar American history. Republicans took the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years. A resurgent GOP under House Speaker Newt Gingrich started pushing its tax-cutting, regulation-slashing “Contract with America.”

It was perhaps no co-incidence, then, that Lucas started writing about a “Trade Federation,” aided and emboldened by corrupt politicians, embroiled in some sort of dispute over the taxing of trade to the outlying star systems. We never learn what the dispute is about — whether the Trade Federation was pro- or anti-tax. But what we know is that the name of the leader of the Trade Federation — never actually spoken in the movie, but noted in the script from the start — was Nute Gunray. By 1997, when the GOP Senate leader was Trent Lott, Lucas named the Trade Federation’s representative in the Galactic Senate: Lott Dodd. We’re a long way from the subtlety of (George’s North Vietnam) metaphor.

This continued through Revenge of the Sith, which Taylor describes as having …

… more political references than any other movie in the saga.

Episode III … was written around the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In the Bay Area, protests against the Iraq War and (President) Bush were as hard to avoid as Vietnam and Nixon were during the writing of “Star Wars,” especially for a self-confessed news junkie like Lucas. Suddenly, after Anakin Skywalker is first dubbed Darth Vader and confronts Obi-Wan, we find him using this line: “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.” Few adult listeners at the time would fail to pick up a reference to Bush’s line in his speech to Congress on September 20, 2001: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Obi-Wan’s response would have cheered the heart of every voter who felt some nuance was lost in Bush’s black-and-white worldview: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” Promoting the film later, Lucas would declare his hostility to Bush for the first time, publicly comparing him to Nixon and Iraq to Vietnam.

So for Star Wars: The Force Awakens to now have John Boyega as a member of its cast and to then have this casting choice spur additional conversations about Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin … One has to assume that George Lucas — that TV news junkie who had previously deliberately slipped references to earlier difficult issues that America was facing into Episodes I – VI — has to be enjoying that his “space opera” is still having this sort of impact on our national discourse.

Now it’s happened again, this time in Phoenix — a white cop has shot down an unarmed black man, supposedly mistaking a pill bottle for a gun. Don’t expect any criminal prosecution or a legitimate grand jury investigation of this officer, either.

There are outrage and protests mounting over the grand juries’ failures to indict cops in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, fueled by the slaying this week of Rumain Brisbon. But it turns out that mainstream news outlets are less likely to give us smart, useful analysis and commentary about the facts on the ground than bloggers and their new “explainer” websites such as Vox.com and FiveThirtyEight , or even topically-oriented comedians such as Alonzo Bodden and Jimmy Dore. (Of course, left-leaning shows hosted by broadcasters such as Rachel Maddow and Amy Goodman have also been sharply critical of these shooting incidents and grand jury findings, but the detail-oriented bloggers and comedians are adding to our insights and awareness in fresh ways.)

In a review of grand jury trends after the Ferguson controversy, Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight website aggregated the most useful information and provided analysis largely missing from mainstream media news on the topic:

Former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.

Wilson’s case was heard in state court, not federal, so the numbers aren’t directly comparable. Unlike in federal court, most states, including Missouri, allow prosecutors to bring charges via a preliminary hearing in front of a judge instead of through a grand jury indictment. That means many routine cases never go before a grand jury. Still, legal experts agree that, at any level, it is extremely rare for prosecutors to fail to win an indictment.

“If the prosecutor wants an indictment and doesn’t get one, something has gone horribly wrong,” said Andrew D. Leipold, a University of Illinois law professor who has written critically about grand juries. “It just doesn’t happen.”

Cases involving police shootings, however, appear to be an exception. As my colleague Reuben Fischer-Baum has written, we don’t have good data on officer-involved killings. But newspaper accounts suggest, grand juries frequently decline to indict law-enforcement officials. A recent Houston Chronicle investigation found that “police have been nearly immune from criminal charges in shootings” in Houston and other large cities in recent years. In Harris County, Texas, for example, grand juries haven’t indicted a Houston police officer since 2004; in Dallas, grand juries reviewed 81 shootings between 2008 and 2012 and returned just one indictment. Separate research by Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip Stinson has found that officers are rarely charged in on-duty killings, although it didn’t look at grand jury indictments specifically.

The mainstream news coverage of Ferguson has been driven by a “balanced approach” that’s so balanced — the cop said this happened, some African-American eyewitnesses disagreed and contradicted each other — so we can never learn anything about what really happened. This is embodied by a New York Times article that looks at the doubts of a grand jury, and emphasizes ambiguities and contradictions in eyewitness accounts. We can only ponder these unfortunate and puzzling mysteries, the article contends:

But if the law has spoken, the questions surrounding Mr. Brown’s final moments — Were his hands raised? Why did he abruptly stop fleeing Officer Wilson and start moving toward him? Was he walking, staggering, running or charging at the officer when he was shot dead? — remain murky and unresolved.

Those questions may never be answered.

In contrast, Ezra Klein in Vox, and other bloggers and commentators, have picked through the details of the grand jury testimony to demonstrate the sheer improbability of the events provided by the policeman who shot Michael Brown, the story that comedian Alonzo Bodden has described as the canard of the demon-like “Super Negro” who must be put down with a hail of bullets. He made these points in his own “Who’s Paying Attention” podcast and a podcast interview I did with before a recent hilarious Washington, D.C. area nightclub appearance at the Arlington Cinema Drafthouse.

Similarly, Klein explained several ways that Officer Darren Wilson’s apparent fabrications are literally “unvelievable”:

We got to read, for the first time, Wilson’s full, immediate account of his altercation with Brown.

And it is unbelievable.

I mean that in the literal sense of the term: “difficult or impossible to believe.” But I want to be clear here. I’m not saying Wilson is lying. I’m not saying his testimony is false. I am saying that the events, as he describes them, are simply bizarre. His story is difficult to believe…

Wilson next recounts his thought process as he reached for a weapon. He considered using his mace, but at such close range, the mace might get in his eyes, too. He doesn’t carry a taser with a fireable cartridge, but even if he did, “it probably wouldn’t have hit [Brown] anywhere”. Wilson couldn’t reach his baton or his flashlight. So he went for his gun.

Brown sees him go for the gun. And he replies: “You’re too much of a fucking pussy to shoot me.”

Again, stop for a moment and think about that. Brown is punching Wilson, sees the terrified cop reaching for his gun, and says “You’re too much of a fucking pussy to shoot me.” He dares him to shoot….

But the larger question is, in a sense, simpler: Why?

Why did Michael Brown, an 18-year-old kid headed to college, refuse to move from the middle of the street to the sidewalk? Why would he curse out a police officer? Why would he attack a police officer? Why would he dare a police officer to shoot him? Why would he charge a police officer holding a gun? Why would he put his hand in his waistband while charging, even though he was unarmed?…

But the point of a trial would have been to try to answer these questions. We would have either found out if everything we thought we knew about Brown was wrong, or if Wilson’s story was flawed in important ways. But now we’re not going to get that chance. We’re just left with Wilson’s unbelievable story.

Equally as useful for fully understanding Ferguson, Klein also drills into the eyewitness testimony from the friend, Dorian Johnson, who saw Brown steal the cigarillos from the store and was in the street next to him when he was shot. As Klein explains it, Dorian’s version, even if it may shade the truth about his own role in the theft and who threw the first punch, creates a far more plausible alternative narrative:

“He said ‘Get the F*** on the sidewalk!'” Johnson tells the grand jury. Either way, on this next point, Johnson and Wilson agree. It’s Johnson who replies and says they’re just a minute from their homes, and they’ll be off the street shortly.

This is the break point in the story. This is the moment when, even though you know how it ends, you’re hoping against hope that things play out differently, because it so clearly could have gone a different way. But here is when Wilson and Johnson begin telling stories that only barely converge…

As Wilson tells it, he then asks, “what’s wrong with the sidewalk?”, and Brown’s response, as reported by Wilson, is “fuck what you have to say.”

As Johnson tells it, Wilson never says “what’s wrong with the sidewalk,” and Brown never says “fuck what you have to say.” Rather, both Johnson and Brown think Wilson is satisfied with Johnson’s answer and is driving off.

“We continued to walk and have our conversation,” Johnson tells the grand jury, “but almost a split second [later], we heard the tires screech, and the officer, he pulled back in the truck very fast at an angle [where] if we didn’t hear his tires screech, the back of his cruiser would have struck one of us.”

The story Johnson tells from this point is straightforward: a cop feels disrespected by two young men, he reasserts his power, and then things spin out of control.

Wilson, having almost hit them with his truck, delivers the classic line of authority: “What did you say?” But Johnson is adamant that Brown hadn’t said anything. Maybe he mouthed something silently. Maybe he stared Wilson down. Maybe he did something else that Johnson couldn’t hear. But Johnson was right next to Brown, and Brown didn’t say anything.

But if he didn’t speak earlier, Brown starts now. Wilson had almost hit him with a truck. Brown is pissed. And so is Wilson. Brown says something and then Wilson hits him with the door of his cruiser. “He thrust his door open real hard,” says Johnson. “We was so close to the door that it hit mostly Big Mike, but it hit me on my left side and closed back on him, like real fast. Just the same speed, boom, boom, that fast.”

Compare this moment to Wilson’s rendering:

I go to open my door, say, “Hey, come here.” He said, “What the fuck you gonna do?” And he shut my door on me. The door was only open maybe a foot. I didn’t have a chance to get my leg out. I shut the door and he came up and approached the door…

Klein’s second story quotes liberally from the eyewitness near Brown from the moment of theft to shooting death. Klein points out how the cop nearly ran them both over as they walked away and then hit Brown with the car door after summoning him to him. The broad sequence of events seems far more plausible than Wilson’s, about provocation by the cop leading to escalating encounters – -and all of it is consistent with the available blood and DNA evidence and bullet fragments, etc. But of course, because of the police failure to gather all evidence and the responding officers allowing Wilson to handle the gun after shooting it and permitting him to wash blood off his hand, there’s no blood /DNA on Wilson’s hands or gun or car exterior that can be used to verify his improbable claims.

The Washington Post explored all the ways the police and medical examiner failed to secure and inspect the crime scene and evidence, under a bland headline about “unorthodox police procedures.”

It’s hard to believe the prosecutor/Officer Wilson story is credible after you read through the scope of the grand jury evidence, and the multiples failures of Wilson’s police pals in gathering evidence. There were no photos of the crime scene because a battery failed as they left Brown on the ground for four hours [apparently they hadn’t thought of using their own cell phones or getting a battery]; the cop suspect in the deadly force incident, Wilson, was free to wash blood off his own hands and then take a shower; there was no independent evidence-gathering to determine if Wilson’s car had banged Brown first, spurring the violent encounter; Wilson was allowed to handle his own deadly shooting gun throughout the investigation and deposit it himself in the evidence bag; no one took notes in their interview with Wilson in first hours of incident — very convenient if he decided to alter his timeline of events. Just to make sure no one could determine the actual facts of the slaying, the crime scene investigator didn’t even bother to measure or photograph the position of the dead body, car, tire tracks, or any other evidence on the ground to see how it stacks up to the differing version of events. Why? “IT was all self-explanatory,” the CSI tech said. The Washington Post quotes criminal justice experts and police officials from around the country deriding it as blatant disregard of standard police practices.

A recent scathing broadcast by political comedian Jimmy Dore and his comic friends put it all together brilliantly, with the laughable samples from the prosecutor’s late-night, pre-riot news conference completely skewered here. As Dore explains: “We break down the blatant lies of the completely and transparently corrupt prosecutor in the MIchael Brown case.”

Sometimes the news is so horrible you just have to laugh at it — and comics and bloggers help raise awareness of what’s wrong in a system that sorely needs changing.

One starting point for reform could be requiring the use of independent “special prosecutors” with no ties to the local police department to examine in a public hearing whether a police officer who shoots a civilian should be prosecuted.

In the meantime, it’s worth looking to comics, bloggers and independent news sites to keep up on what’s actually happening.