the giant buddhas: a brilliant doc

Anyone who has ever attended the San Francisco International Film Festival knows that selecting films to see is akin to rolling the dice. After viewing a couple of decent, though ultimately unsatisfying narrative films last Sunday, I got lucky today with a documentary, The Giant Buddhas, by Swiss director Christian Frei.

Frei tells the story of the Taliban's destruction of the stone Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan from a multiplicity of persepectives: Sayyed (pictured above), who belongs to a refugee group that lived in the caves near the Buddhas, until the Taliban wiped out most of the clan; an Al Jazeera reporter who risked his life to document the demolition of the Buddhas; Xuanzang, a Chinese monk from the 7th century whose journey from China to India took him to the valley where the Buddhas once stood (in his journal he not only describes two Buddhas but also a third reclining statue that perhaps has gone undiscovered for centuries); Dr. Tarsi, an Afghan archaeologist, a university professor in France, who organizes a dig to discover the missing 300-meter-long Buddha; and Nelofer Pazira, an Afghan/Canadian author and actress who lives in Toronta and travels back to her homeland to visit the site where the Buddhas once stood and retrace family history.

Okay, that turned into more of a summary than I'd like. But I wanted to hint at this documentary's marvelous complexity. What is harder to convey is how emotionally moving it was. I recall reading in The New Yorker about the Taliban's decimation of the Buddhas and being terribly affected and saddened by the wanton destruction of the statues and being frightened by the intolerance of their actions. Frei, with a very even-handed voiceover, tells the story of these statues and the fallout from religious fundamentalism, as he travels to locations in Afghanistan and China. This film manages to be very affecting without ever coming close to being polemic. Don't miss it, if you get the chance to see it.

tending the garden

How do you lose credibility in the blogsphere? Easy. Letting your blog languish untended like a garden rife with weeds. So, where I've been? Well, in the literal garden, pulling weeds like nobody's bidness. Therapy of the soil. It's been feeding me on a beautifully unanticipated deep level. Here's how much I love pulling up the unwanteds: Got home at quarter of eight last night from work, dog tired of the computer keyboard and the airless office. The last rays of the sun were still in the sky, so I got in about 20 minutes in the garden. Somehow, this proved more grounding (okay, pun very much intended) than the hour that followed watching American Idol. Why that should be mysterious, I don't know.

Here's another wonder: Just got back from my temple, Yoshi's Nitespot, home of worldclass jazz. A fellow jazz compadre and I went to hear Dave Douglas and his quintet play tunes from their latest recording, Meaning and Mystery. My friend, Paul, bless his open-minded self, was willing to accompany me on faith alone, since he was unfamiliar with the great trumpeter, DD. How cool is that?

Dave Douglas and his quintet delivered a great set of what I dubbed tonight white boy intellectual jazz. Not to say there wasn't funk and soul -- there was -- but mostly when Uri Caine was playing the Fender Rhodes. Nevertheless, it was a pleasure trying to follow Douglas's aural thoughts, accompanying him on the sometimes sweet, sometimes edgy ride. These guys (Donny McCaslin on trumpet, James Genus on bass, Clarence Penn on drums, as well as Caine and Douglas) were so tight, so incredibly in sync, in the way that the best musicians are. Kind of seems like a miracle when the music is that good, but it's not, of course. Dave Douglas has a new music label, Greenleaf, which is an old family name he told the audience tonight. Honestly, not the herb, mon, no. Dave Douglas is also penning a blog, a real jazz lover's nectar.

fanfare for the common man

This country of ours is fame crazy. That's not news but I got an up-close-and-personal introduction to one fame-obsessed man who really should know better. Barry Welsh is an astrophysicist, ferchrisakes, who became driven to grab his piece of the limelight. His notion of success? He nabbed a slot for himself and his family on the Fox Network's reality-TV program "Trading Spouses."

I interviewed Welsh, who works at UC Berkeley's Space and Sciences Lab, by phone. He was a bit over the top (or OTT, as they say in England, from whence Welsh hails) but I initially found him charming. Well, not so, after I viewed the first of his two episodes last Friday. Obnoxious and narcissistic were the two words that kept popping into my head. If you want, you can read a bit about Welsh and find out how "Trading Spouses" works.

This also seems like an opportune moment to cop to the fact that I've succumbed to watching "American Idol." While some of the singers may be talented in a generic way ("Hey, you've got a great voice! Wow!), none of the participants that I've heard this season have voices that seem noteworthy, exciting, or uniquely interesting. Maybe I'm drawn to "AI" (like artificial intelligence, a coincidence?) because it's one big popularity contest. Like one that a good portion of the country has bought into (Note: I haven't started to vote for contestants. Yet.)

Not to get all insider baseball here, but last week when Mandisa (a large black woman with a soulful voice who had been told by the judges that she could sing the phone book and people would listen) was eliminated, I was stunned. I actually shed a handful of tears, no common occurence for me. Judge (and oftentimes scathing critic) Simon Cowell, when questioned by puppy dog MC Ryan Seacrest about Mandisa's dismissal, chalked it up to Mandiva's poor choice of country song. That rationale didn't quite work for me. Plenty of the other contestants had chosen dopey country songs (Taylor sang John Denver's cloying "Country Roads" -- it doesn't get much worse than that). Is Mandisa just too unapologetically fat to be an AI? Maybe. We'll never know.