The disaster of poverty

The Freep Film Festival is underway. For those not from these parts “Freep” is the nickname of the Detroit Free Press newspaper, which puts the program together. All of the films are documentaries with some sort of connection to Detroit or Michigan. There are more than 50 films that get their own screening and four sets of short films. I attended two of them today.

This afternoon I saw Cooked: Survival By Zip Code by Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand. As Hurricane Sandy approached New York she was amazed at all the disaster preparations her brother did. That got her looking into the business of Disaster Preparedness. And that got her into what started that business – the Chicago Heat Wave of 1995 in which 739 people died.

She documents the magnitude of the calamity – the city morgue had to bring in a fleet of refrigerator trucks because all those bodies didn’t fit into standard morgue storage. And then she showed that the most of the deaths happened in impoverished neighborhoods. The rich can turn on the air conditioner or turn on a fan or open a window. The poor can’t afford the AC or fan and they’re afraid to open the window because of who might crawl through it. There were cooling spaces at police stations, but what poor person trusts the police?

Chicago can now show off their disaster emergency equipment – a shiny truck that does this, another shiny truck that does that, and lots and lots of other shiny (and expensive) things.

Helfand attends an elaborate earthquake preparedness training exercise – in Kentucky where the last major earthquake was in 1812.

Helfand keeps coming back to her central question: Yeah, being prepared for a disaster is important, though expensive training for a disaster unlikely to happen seems too much. But what about the long-term, slow-moving disaster of poverty? Poverty kills about 3,200 people a year in Chicago. That’s about the same number of people who died on 9/11, which produced a flurry of activity. But the same number of deaths in poor sections of Chicago? Nothing. What’s worse is this is a man-made disaster. Humans created the construct of racism. Humans created the laws, such as redlining, that prevent some people from getting out of poverty. Humans could solve this. If they wanted to.

Helfand proposes having poverty declared a disaster in hopes of getting disaster relief money or at least drawing attention to the plight of the poor. She even proposes a version of that idea to a disaster relief leader. He talks about the law needing to change, is she up to it? – and then comments that people should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. There was quite a reaction to that well-used line from this Detroit audience. During the panel discussion afterward an audience member rhetorically asked, “What if your boots don’t have straps?”

I’m very aware that the nasty guy and the current GOP are not going to do anything to relieve poverty. They want the poor to be poor and at times I think they want the middle class to be poor. Making other lives miserable is their way of enforcing their own superiority.



The evening film was a lot more than a film. Yes, there was documentary film. But there was also a live narrator and live music. The whole event is titled A Thousand Thoughts and is about the Kronos Quartet. The live music was provided by the Kronos Quartet. So, yeah, things feel a bit weird with the subjects of the film right there on stage doing what the film talks about.

The concept was developed by Sam Green and Joe Bini. Green was the narrator. He talked about some things for which there was no audio. And people on screen talked – including members of the quartet. Sometimes the quartet played background music, demonstrating action on screen. Sometimes the action paused to let them play. And a couple times they played along with another musician on screen.

The Kronos Quartet – two violins, viola, and cello – formed in 1973. David Harrington, who formed the group, wanted to play the really modern music. So they modernized the whole idea of a quartet, starting with getting rid of the formal clothes.

In addition to getting to know the musicians we also meet a few of the composers. The Kronos Quartet commissioned music from a lot of today’s composers. Those we meet include Terry Riley and Philip Glass.

The whole show was excellently done. We went from narrator (with memorized script) to video to music seamlessly. Lighting was well controlled to show the narrator and musicians when they were on. It was an enjoyable evening.

This show is a traveling show – other venues can book it and get the film, narrator, and live music.

I think I have one album by the Kronos Quartet. So much of their stuff is so far out there that I don’t enjoy it, and thus I’ve stayed away from nearly all of it. I may have to check out some of their recordings – though with the quartet in operation for 45 years now, there are a lot of recordings to sort through.