[lbo-talk] Reporting from Oakland

[Joanna]

Went to the Grand Lake Theater last night. This is one of the last 
remaining white elephant movie theaters in Oakland, seats about six 
hundred, and has an organ player Saturday night.  Last night they were 
showing a movie about the black panthers. I went out of curiosity and 
nostalgia and was surprised to find 1) the theater sold out and 2) an 
audience made up of 90% young Asian men and women.

It turns out the movie was about Richard Aoki, field marshal of the 
black panthers, a japanese american who got radicalized by spending his 
childhood in a concentration camp and his adolescence in West Oakland. 
Here's a trailer for the documentary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZicbkEaJb5g

You can also look him up on Wikipedia. Anyway, it was great to sit in a 
sold out theater in Oakland, watching a film about a salty old radical 
that played a key role in arming and training the Panthers, in setting 
up an ethnic studies dept at UCB, and who simply never gave up.

Cheered me up considerably.

Joanna