Friday Film: Control Room - April 25th at 7:00 p.m.

Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim (Startup.com) directs Control Room, a documentary investigating the ethics of media-managed wars. This film particularly focuses on the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Noujaim and her film crew travel to the headquarters of Al-Jazeera, the media leader in the Arab world, to find out what the news looks like in Iraq. She interviews several journalists and producers involved in war reporting for Al-Jazeera, including senior producer Sameer Khader, journalist Hassan Ibrahim, and producer Deema Khatib. Noujaim also interviews American correspondents David Shuster from NBC and Tom Mintier from CNN. Control Room premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004 as part of the American Spectrum program.


Boston Society of Film Critics
2004 Best Documentary

Broadcast Film Critics Association
2004 Best Documentary

Directors Guild of America
2004 Best Documentary Jehane Noujaim

Independent Spirit Award
2004 Truer Than Fiction Award Jehane Noujaim

Writers Guild of America
2004 Best Documentary

Cafe Rozella's First Night of Music

Cafe Rozella hosted its first musical event of the music season with a performance by Victor Puentes and company. The duo played a cool acid-jazz improvisational style reminiscent of Miles Davis. Very, very cool. As soon as we get a recording we will post it as well.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room - Friday Night Movie at Cafe Rozella - March 8, 2008 at 7 p.m.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a 2005 documentary film based on the best-selling 2003 book of the same name by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, a study of one of the largest business scandals in American history.

The film examines the collapse of the Enron Corporation, which resulted in criminal trials for several of the company's top executives; it also shows the involvement of the Enron traders in the California electricity crisis.

Interviews are conducted with former executives, stock analysts, reporters and the former Governor of California Gray Davis.

The film was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 78th Academy Awards.

As an analysis of corruption in corporations the film gives a realistic look at corporate culture and the inherent problems within. The movie presents two mechanisms for motivating a vastly immoral and profit-driven corporate culture; namely the vitality curve and the Milgram experiment.

The vitality curve is an idea of constant competition in the work place. Individuals are driven to out-perform each other wherever possible because the employees doing worst in a particular field will be fired. Enron constantly hired new staff because even with record profits it was firing people for making less than 1000 times what they were being paid. The atmosphere of the work place caused people to not only disregard the law, but also to act competitively in breaking the law.

The film features actual voice clips from Enron employees discussing the transfer of electricity from the state of California into nodes in other states where there was a surplus. California had signed legislation allowing for a free market in energy. As a response to this, Enron created a demand by causing blackouts across the state. Following this the price of electricity sky-rocketed, right in time for Enron to ship back the energy they took out of California back into California, making billions upon billons of dollars in profits. The controllers who were doing this discussed how much energy they had transferred knowing full well that it was going to blackout the cities in California.

The Milgram experiment was conducted to see how long an individual can take an order before they question that order. The test was set up so that a person is told that an individual will be shocked with electricity every time they push a button. The person is told to raise the voltage and push the button over and over until the person pushing the button decides to stop on moral grounds. On average a person would die three times over with the number of times the button was pushed.

With a goal derived from the pursuit of profit, Enron employees were constantly told to break laws or perform acts that could be considered immoral. Few Enron employees ever came forward to report the corruption. The factor that inevitably led to people coming forward was a "sinking ship" feeling, resulting in some of the Enron executives selling their shares while telling employees to keep their shares.

Panchito passed away

Panchito, otherwise known as Gary Francis Gray, died this week. Panchito was a vibrant, healthy soul who, though retired, still herded carts at the Westwood Target. He also spent hours walking through the neighborhood. During cold or rainy days he would stop by the café for a big mug of hot coffee and a maple bar. He spoke great Spanish and had recently taken up Vietnamese. He was only 62 years old.

Gary did not like his middle name, Francis. One day he found himself working with a group of Latinos who told him that in Spanish, Francis was Pancho (as in PanchoVilla). Panchito, which is the diminutive of Pancho, is what Gary liked to be called. He liked the name so much that he took it upon himself to learn Spanish. Panchito spoke the language flawlessly and we enjoyed conversing with him in Spanish.

Not one to be left behind by any immigrant group, Panchito had recently taken it upon himself to learn Vietnamese. In Spanish or Vietnamese, there was not a hint of an accent when he spoke. He saw what the immigrant community was doing for White Center and being of a broad mind understood that the area was being revitalized by immigrants. He welcomed the change.

We have lost a tolerant and vibrant being in Panchito. Sadly, we have also lost a gentle soul. I grieve for my friend and for this community.

Cafe Rozella Movie Night is Seattle Weekly Pick of the Week

The Cultured Cafe

Thought Fremont was the Center of the Universe? Café Rozella has been challenging that claim—championing its White Center location—since 2005 by offering an atmosphere of progressive politics, world music, literary goings-on, and films every Friday night. It's your typical coffee shop, where people still check e-mail and passive-aggressively flirt, but with a few more things on the calendar. Tonight, check out Final Friday Film Freakout No. 2, a new monthly film and noise (as in avant-garde music) series. Olympia's Devon Damonte, who has screened his direct-animation films at Northwest Film Forum and festivals around the country, will show recent work, along with films by Chris Ando. Damonte's are abstract motion graphics made by hand, without cameras, and he'll present a workshop on that process at the cafe on Saturday, March 1. In the "New Center of the Universe," you might discover another artistic one.

Café Rozella, 9434 Delridge Way S.W.

Donation requested. Fri., February 29, 8:00pm

Ruminating on the memory of Steve Cox

It’s been over a year since Deputy Sheriff Steve Cox was gunned down while investigating a shooting in White Center. For the White Center neighborhood the trauma refuses to abate. There is a dull pain that will not go away. I feel it and I know others do as well. Steve’s absence is like a missing limb –you feel its presence but when you go to use it, you find that it is gone. We keep waiting for Steve to swing around the corner in his cruiser and check in, like he used to and announce, “how are things goin’ here?” But there is no cruiser and there is no Steve Cox. There’s just his absence and that hollow pain.

I see Steve’s mother around the neighborhood. She still wears the grief that she clearly feels. I cannot imagine the pain a mother must feel burying her son. I wonder if the pain ever ceases.

Steve’s widow has sued Washington State for contributing to Steve’s death by failing to monitor the punk who killed him. The lavish funeral and the hero’s wake do not still the rancor that remains. And we, the survivors, are left to sort out Steve’s legacy.

Who speaks for the dead?

As I write this piece, various groups and individuals assert their entitlement to bear Steve Cox’s legacy. A memorial committee labors on but is deeply divided over issues both symbolic and trivial. To whom should we defer? Steve’s widow, Maria? Steve’s mother, Joan? Steve’s brother, Ron? Steve’s fellow deputies? Or the community that Steve served? Who should have greater say? Who loved him more and who is best suited to honor his memory. Antipathy grows.

White Center is today a divided community. The encomiums to Steve Cox’s legacy have exposed simmering rifts. Annexation becomes a flash point. Pro-Burien folks challenge the legitimacy of the pro-Seattle folks. Old timers challenge the legitimacy of newer arrivals. Other rifts are exposed: those between business owners and home owners; between black and white, immigrants and non-immigrants, professionals and craft-workers, Latinos and non-Latino, etc.

Ironically, the mass held on the anniversary of Steve’s death drew only a handful of people. Unlike the public ceremony following Steve’s death, at the mass there was no governor, no police chief, and no mayor in attendance at this mass. There were a few law enforcement colleagues and a few community members, but that was it. For some people, it seems that the time to honor the man, Steve Cox, has passed. What remains is the fight over his legacy, and for that we need no encomiums. So the battle begins.

Ghosts of Trolley's Past Lives on in White Center

Many of you may be aware that Seattle once had an extensive trolley system. In fact, the Rozella building, in which Cafe Rozella resides, faces a driveway between two buildings. The driveway was a turnaround for trolleys that went up 16th Avenue S.W. On the day that the U.S. entered World War II, the trolleys were decommissioned and the trolley tracks were torn up thus assuring us roads that would make cars essential. One wonders why the trolleys were decommissioned on such an auspicious event? Could it be that everyone was so focused on the cataclysm that was our entry into war that no-one would bother to query a relative political trifle like the death of mass transit in Seattle? I speculate here, but it is interesting timing.

If you would like to see the old tracks you can do so by driving on 16th Avenue SW between Roxbury Avenue and Henderson Street. In the middle of the road are concrete pavements covering the old tracks. It is now a full half century later and the City has yet to improve this stretch of road so that it is even. Instead, the space between the track pavement and the rest of road constantly yields potholes that occasionally swallow small cars. Given our current predicament ($100 a barrel oil) perhaps the better part of wisdom would be to just put the tracks back and bring back the trolleys. Next time you run into the mayor asks him which he prefers the ghosts of the trolley tracks, a driveable road or a new mass transit system.