A Review of OPIUM: DIARY OF A MADWOMAN

This is my review of Opium: Diary of a Madwoman, which will be published tomorrow in Edge Magazine.

In 2002, I was at the Foreign Theater in San Francisco for the American premiere of Jean Pierre Denis’ Murderous Maids. Denis’ superb film about incest and cold-blooded murder was so disturbing and fraught with treachery and suspense that, by the time Christine started banging her head against her prison-cell wall, I forgot where I was and blurted out to the absent director, “Could you give us a break here!” If you take something like that one head-banging clip – minus any intrigue or suspense – and stretch it out to 109 minutes, you basically got Janos Szasz’s Opium: Diary of a Madwoman.

This Hungarian film scatters its jabs so consistently that it becomes a pointless melee rather than a commentary on the history of mental institutions or a meditation on the connection between genius and insanity. The year is 1913 and Gizella (Kirsti Stubo), a mental patient who believes that the forces of evil have hijacked her brain and body, is subjected to every draconian treatment that a pre-World War I insane asylum could devise. Dr. Josef Brenner (Ulrich Thomsen) is a morphine addict, an aspiring man of letters and sexual deviant whom the asylum welcomes with open arms. Upon entering the gates for the first time, Brenner witnesses the head surgeon performing one of the institution’s many lobotomies in a graphic and gruesome scene involving a mallet and a needle. Later the same day, he meets Gizella for the first time when he finds her in the basement, masturbating and screaming about the Evil One. Brenner cannot help but feel he’s found his true love. Better yet, Gizella is also a writer, one who transcribes every word the Evil One dictates, be it on paper, the floor or the walls, depending on whether she has another of her many shriek-fest fights with the fascist nuns who confiscate her pens. Brenner continuously remarks on how he admires Gizella’s genius but the film gives few examples of the lunatic’s written ravings. We mostly just see her screaming, masturbating or getting strapped to many and sundry racks.

To keep his film from degenerating into gratuitous balderdash, Szasz dresses his sets and cast up in elaborate period décor and costumes. But, to quote Barack Obama, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” Opium: Diary of a Madwoman does not give us The Snakepit or Suddenly Last Summer’s searing expose of abuses in the mental-health industry. It doesn’t give us the Marquis de Sade’s trenchant writing and revenge in Quills. It gives nothing on the order of Salieri’s cathartic confession in the loony bin in Amadeus. Scene by scene, it just gives us more reasons to avert our eyes.

The First Family

My wonderful friend and former boss, Aurie Pennick, President of the Field Foundation, sent me this picture with the email caption, “It Just Looks Right.” Her message contained another pithy aphorism, “As It Should Be.”

It is indeed a remarkable image and a welcome and long overdue moment in our history.

To follow up on my last blog post regarding Proposition 8: after Aurie sent me this, I emailed her back, thanking her and saying that I look forward to the day that a gay president will be in this picture with his or her spouse and children.

Many people lost hope that they’d ever see a first family like the one above. Likewise, this picture should give hope to those of us who oppose Proposition 8 and long to see gay spouses and their family in the highest, elected office.

Proposition 8 Passed: Bummer Bigotry on Obama’s Big Day

So, amid my bliss over Obama’s election, I read the news a few minutes ago that California voters passed Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage. Can’t I ever just get an all-around Good News Day????

Says Frank Schubert, co-manager of the Yes on 8 campaign: “People believe in the institution of marriage. It’s one institution that crosses ethnic divides, that crosses partisan divides…People have stood up because they care about marriage and they care a great deal.”

Nice try at making marriage sound like an inclusive, ecumenical institution – “crosses ethnic divides…crosses partisan divides” – but it doesn’t cross divides in sexual orientation, does it? I guess it’s not supposed to. People on our side of the divide are dirty and deviant, aren’t we?

Oh, and “crosses ethnic divides”: clever, au courant way of inviting minorities to come on board and hate us as much as you and your kind once hated them.

Naturally, the Schubert camp will invoke the Bible, which condones all manner of bigotry.

Oh, yes, the Yes voters “care about marriage…they care a great deal”: and that’s why their divorce rates are over 50%.

Why is the (supposedly) straight majority so bent on claiming marriage as their own? How does commitment within homosexual relationships detract from commitment within heterosexual relationships? Why are some willing to go so far as to “concede” the right to civil unions to us (like we should even have to ask) but not marriage, as though we have no purchase on the sanctified term? John Edwards was one. Look how much respect he showed for the very institution that he said he would refuse to extend to gays – and he was cheating the whole time he was taking this moral high-ground, while his wife was battling cancer.

Meanwhile as Proposition 8 revved up in California, Arkansas voters approved a ban on unmarried couples from serving as adoptive or foster parents. Supporters did not hide that gays and lesbians were their chief target.

So, even with the hope that an Obama tomorrow brings, it does not herald an end to inequities.

Greeted as Liberators! (And, This Time, Rightly So…)

I’ll never forget where I was. It was 8 pm here in Brooklyn. Julius and I locked ourselves in place in our library. Julius was wearing his Obama t-shirt and Obama buttons. (And he says he’s not superstitious!) I supplicated myself before all the benevolent forces in the ethers. We both had our laptops out and CNN blaring.

First, CNN announced that Obama won Pennsylvania. I was hugging our cats and cheering, “We won!” Julius warned not to speak too soon. But then we won Ohio! Not even Julius could crab that. Still, it wasn’t official. A landslide of electoral votes poured into the Obama column. And then…Virginia! It was all over! For once, I can say that with relief!

Still, CNN was about to go on counting polls and I thought we’d have to wait until 1 am to get the official word. But, at about 11 pm, Wolf Blitzer stopped in midsentence to announce late-breaking news. A new screen broke in with Barack’s image. “Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States!”

I’m still trying to take it all in. We watched via satellite as Barack spoke before over 200,000 people in Grant Park in my hometown of Chicago. I became homesick, but Julius and I put our coats on and went to 5th Avenue. What can I say, it was a Par-tay!

Hope at last! Hope at last! Hope at last!

(Oh, yeah…And no more Sarah Palin!)

Kyle Thomas Smith

Brooklyn, NY

A Review of Toni Morrison’s A MERCY

By Kyle Thomas Smith

This is my review of Toni Morrison’s new book A Mercy.

It will appear this week in Edge Magazine.

In 1990, three years before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison said in an interview with Bill Moyers: “I rewrite and rewrite to make the books look like they were written in a matter of hours.”

That’s one of the things I love most about Morrison whom I hail as one of the world’s greatest living authors. In interviews, she might appear to be all intellect, but her greatest works—Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Beloved—are marked by simple, immediate prose that builds up to a burning tower of mythology, violence, calamity, deprivation and her characters’ tempestuous wills to survive. Over the course of her 38 years as a novelist, Toni Morrison has singlehandedly established a universe in which the black experience stands with one foot on the skids of America and the other in the anarchy of an ancient Greek tragedy. When I am hungry for inspiration, I often devour the fierce, possessive passages in Morrison’s books and find my imagination sated while my body quivers from aftershock.

Unfortunately, I did not experience such rapture upon reading her hotly anticipated new novel, A Mercy. When I first picked up the slim 169-page book, I rustled my backside into the couch, preparing for the ride of my life, but soon found myself turning over for a nap. Although lush and erudite, the narration runs like molasses. Pulling my attention back to the storyline was like wrestling the Good Year Blimp back to the ground with a lasso. Thinking that I might just have been having an off day, I gave the book another try the next day…and the next…and the next…and the following week. For the first time in my experience of Morrison, my attention consistently drifted away from the page and into the stratosphere. Oh, how I yearned for the reprieve of her past perfection! Alas, it did not come. No doubt Morrison deserves an A+ for effort and concept on A Mercy, but it’d take round after round of rewrites to give this book the momentum of her masterworks.

Like her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, Morrison’s A Mercy tackles the subject of American slavery. Where Beloved studied the catastrophic effects of slavery in the years before and after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, A Mercy is set in the 17th Century when slavery first took root in the Dutch, Scandinavian and English colonies on America’s eastern seaboard. In an August 2008 interview, Morrison told New York magazine that she “wanted to get to a place before slavery was equated with race. Whether [slaves] were black or white was less important than what [slave-masters] owned and what their power was.” Where Morrison’s prior works explored societies of people marginalized on account of their race, A Mercy is more of a historical tale meant to underscore Morrison’s scholarly contention that “there is no civilization that did not rest on unpaid labor—not Athens, not Russia, not England, no one.”

Yet the novel’s young slave Florens subsists under conditions that are idyllic compared to the unrelenting treachery in Seth’s life in Beloved. The book begins with Jacob Vaark, a Dutch trader, travelling on horseback through the wilds of Virginia to Maryland to settle a debt that a Portuguese landowner, Senhor D’Ortega, is incapable of paying. Vaark compromises by accepting D’Ortega’s offer to give him one of his slaves. A slave named minha mae begs Vaark to choose her own nine-year-old daughter Florens. Vaark and D’Ortega agree to the arrangement while Florens crumbles inside at her mother’s betrayal. However, Vaark turns out to be a kind, compassionate master who owns acres of forested land in a Dutch-inhabited colony. He has two indentured servants and a Native American worker named Lina, who gloms on to Florens, conferring on her the love she had for the tribe she lost to a smallpox epidemic. Morrison creates a setting where black, white and red seem to all be treated the same.

But when Jacob Vaark dies, his wife Rebekka goes mad with grief. Rebekka had escaped religious persecution in England and hoped to find happiness by marrying Vaark in the New World. Only, disease was so rampant and conditions were so untested that Rebekka ended up losing child after child on its soil. Vaark’s death proves enough to set Rebekka over the edge. She begins to lose faith in a personal God and exacts the role of plantation termagant: “The pleasure of upbraiding an incompetent servant outweighed any satisfaction of a chore well done and the housewife raged happily at every unswept corner, poorly made fire, imperfectly scrubbed pot, carelessly weeded garden row and badly plucked bird.” Moreover, the novel comes equipped with Sorrow, an orphan servant girl who is the repository for all the foreboding that brews in the back of all minds on the Vaark estate. Like Little Father Time in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Sorrow is the embodiment of a doom foretold in the days after Vaark’s death and in the formation of a nation where slavery will soon flourish in the uttermost cruelty. Yet having known life when Vaark, whom Florens refers to as Sir, was still alive, Florens comes to discover that her mother’s abandonment was, in fact, a mercy.

In A Mercy, Morrison tells the stories of more than half a dozen major characters from their own individual points of view. Yet, right up to the last page of the novel, the characters remain surprisingly underdeveloped. Where Morrison once packed her books with allegories that gave ample context to her characters and their strife, A Mercy has a prosaic monotony where precious little folklore and witchcraft lurk. Refreshing as it is that Morrison has presented an historical milieu in which different races coexist without racism—notably, at a time when so many Americans are eagerly waiting to elect Barack Obama—the narrative lacks the poignancy and piquancy that has put her on the pantheon of modern literature. Never did I expect that I would end up writing such criticisms of the beloved Toni Morrison. But what kind of reviewer would I be if I showed A Mercy too much mercy?

Nazi Skinheads, Al Qaeda on the Campaign Trail

When I was growing up, there were Nazi skinheads and anti-Nazi skinheads. To me, as a gay kid on the punk scene, both were equally heinous. The anti-Nazi skinheads’ politics were a little better, except with regards to gays as I mention in 85A. Both camps were bullies and could do a job on you with their steel-toed boots and sometimes broken bottles and knives. The difference between then and now: as far as I know – and I knew the stories – neither camp carried firearms.

Yesterday, I was both shocked and relieved to read the news. The FBI had foiled an elaborate plot that two Nazi skinhead youths – Paul Schlesselman, 18, from Arkansas and Daniel Cowart, 20, from Tennessee – had hatched to decapitate 14 black kids and otherwise kill 74 other black kids before assassinating Barack Obama.

Police had pulled Schlesselman and Cowart over after they’d shot out the window of a Tennessee church. Their car was scrawled with swatstikas, racial epithets, and the numbers 14 and 88, which hold special symoblism in white supremacy and which also signify (a) the number of blacks they planned on beheading (14) and (b) the total number of blacks they planned on killing (88) at an unnamed local high school. Police also seized an unspecified number of unregistered firearms from Schlesselman and Cowart’s car. The two were allegedly on their way to a local gun-dealer whom they were going to rob in an effort to stockpile weapons for their high-school massacre.

After killing 88 blacks, Schlesselman and Cowart planned to don white Tuxedos and top hats and drive off to find and kill Barack Obama. FBI agents doubt that they could have pulled off the Obama assassination. But they might have been able put a dent in their high-school assassination plans.

Schlesselman and Cowart are being held without bond.

This level of hatred, within 8 days of the likely election of America’s first African-American president, makes the Bradley Effect look like miscegenation.

This morning, I had a hard time waking up. That is, until Julius jumped out of the shower and ran into our room, forgetting his towel, to rouse me with the news that Al Qaeda has endorsed McCain. I yawned and said, “Well, why would they do a fool thing like that?”

Nine hours later, I’m still at a loss for answers. Liberals might say that Al Qaeda wants McCain to win so that he’ll get trigger-happy, drain our economy to the dregs, and leave us as sitting ducks for a terrorist arrogation of the United States. Conservatives might say they’re trying to turn Americans off to McCain so that we’ll elect a “weak” leader like Obama, who will let terrorists run roughshod over the nation and the world.

Julius believes that Al Qaeda wants McCain to win so that they can show the world that the Bush administration will essentially continue for a minimum of four more years.

We must recall, though, that Al Qaeda didn’t like Clinton any more than Bush. Their first attempt on the WTC was in 1993 during Clinton’s first year in office. It seems to me that Al Qaeda hates all Americans, Republican or Democrat.

Whatever their rationale, it’s no feather in McCain’s cap that he’s won an Al Qaeda endorsement nor that two Nazis sought to eliminate his opponent.

Before I make my next point, let me qualify that I love Barack Obama, he’s one of my heroes and he has my vote handsdown. I have to come clean and admit, however, that I do have some misgivings about him becoming president. I don’t have any doubt that he’ll do a bang-up job at defending our nation from foreign terrorists. But can he defend himself from domestic terrorists?

This is something we’re going to have to watch as McCain and Palin’s New Red Scare progresses.

Irina Palm

This was a WONDERFUL movie. A sleeper of the first rank. I picked it up several weeks ago from Reel Life Video and have been turning it over in my mind ever since.

Irina Palm is a Brecht drama for a new century.

Marianne Faithfull plays Maggie, a frumpy widow who lives in a village in the exurbs of London. Her grandson Olly is dying of a rare disease for which he can only receive treatment in Melbourne, Australia. Yet Olly’s parents are working class and cannot afford the cost of travel and other expenses. Maggie takes it upon herself as grandmother to raise the money even though she has no work history and almost no collateral by which to secure a loan. She goes to bank after bank and placement agency after placement agency in London, but nobody will give her a job or a loan.

That is, until she wanders into Sexy World, a sex club in the Soho District that is advertising for a “hostess.” Maggie meets Miki (actor, Miki Manojlovic), the club-owner who explains that, at Sexy World, “hostess” is a euphemism for “whore.” He asks Maggie if he can see her hands. Reluctantly, she complies and Miki finds himself favorably impressed by their texture before Maggie pulls her hands away. She walks out of the interview mortified but, recognizing the gravity of her grandson’s condition, returns the next day.

With evident misgivings, Miki offers her the job and takes her into the room where she will be working. It will be Maggie’s job to give handjobs to paying customers from the other side of a glory hole. With some training, Maggie finds that she is a natural at her new line of work and, by her second week on the job, men queue up all the way down the hall for her favors. They don’t see Maggie and thus do not realize that they’re getting their rocks off in a matronly grandmother’s hand. (The film does not show any penises and, as far as I can tell, the handjobs were simulated.) Within a short time, johns of all stripes agree that the faceless woman behind the wall has “the best hand in London.” Miki cashes in on Maggie’s fame by setting up a flashing marquee featuring Maggie’s newly assigned stage-name, “Irina Palm.” Upon inheriting this sobriquet, the hitherto unemployable widow finds herself pulling down 600 to 800 pounds a week.

At first, Maggie keeps her sex-worker status a secret from family and friends. Actually, it would be a stretch to call the women in Maggie’s social circle friends. They’re little more than a band of gossipy, bourgeois village housewives with whom she plays bridge once a week. They freeze Maggie out of their small talk, show little concern for updates on her grandson’s failing health and make it clear that, as a widow with dwindling resources, she is no longer of their station. Still, having no other friends, Maggie has somberly endured their company throughout the years. Now that she harbors a secret life as Irina Palm, however, she is too discomfited to return any of her frivolous friends’ phone calls or even speak to them on the street.

Her grandson’s health soon takes a turn for the worse and the family can no longer postpone his surgery. Maggie goes to Miki and divulges the crisis at hand. He informs her that, unbeknownst to her, he has “tried her out” and knows her talents. Naturally, this news dismays Maggie but she puts her mounting chagrin aside to press Miki for a 6000 pound loan for 10 more weeks of work. After much prodding, he agrees to her terms. Maggie gives the money to her son Tom (Kevin Bishop, L’Auberge Espagnole) and his wife in a lump sum, all the while refusing to reveal where and how she got the money.

After performing many unsuccessful interrogations, Tom resorts to tailing his mother on the commuter train to London and the Tube to Oxford Circus, only to find her walking into her job at Sexy World.

I won’t reveal what erupts as a result of this climax in Irina Palm (!). I will, however, disclose that ironically, as a result of her smutty practices, Maggie steps into her power and discovers that she contains the strength, valor and love to defy society in order to save her grandson’s life.

In two particular scenes toward the end, Maggie’s newfound strength emboldens her to renounce her outworn associations with the village women more powerfully than Hester Pryne and Proust’s Odette de Crecy, combined. If I ever manage to tell someone off like that, I don’t know how I’d keep the buttons on my shirt.

Irina Palm is a true, if unlikely, triumph of the human spirit.

And who better to play Maggie than Marianne Faithfull? After Mick Jagger made a mockery of their love in the late Sixties and The Rolling Stones cheated her out of royalties as co-writer of “As Tears Go By” and “Sister Morphine,” she grappled with the travails of addiction, depression and even homelessness. Faithfull is an artist who plummeted to and pulled herself out of the depths more impressively than any other major voice in music. She is a chanteuse sans pareil who sings from a soul marked by abysmal defeat and soaring redemption. What she’s lost in beauty since the days when London was her kingdom and Mick her king, she has recouped a thousandfold in soul and substance. Marianne Faithfull is a Brechtian goddess and she delivers a devastating performance as Maggie.

Even her speaking voice is exquisite, a rare trait among singers these days. If I could swing it, I’d walk around speaking in her smoky, raspy trill all day long. In fact, I tried a few weeks ago but Julius threatened to have me committed to Bellevue. Alas, that ended that phase.

But not even Julius could deny the greatness of Sam Garbarski’s Irina Palm. We both heartily recommend adding it to your next round of rentals.

Thoughts on Faith and RELIGULOUS

We saw Religulous last night at BAM Rose Cinema. I can only raise my shoulders and say, “Eh…so-so.”

I appreciate how Bill Maher provided stark evidence for how the story of Jesus’ life is not an original story; in fact, many b.c. myths in the Mediterranean region told similar and often the exact same tales about a virgin birth, a water-walker, an execution, and a resurrection with three female witnesses.

I like how Maher took many of our elected officials (like John McCain) to task for claiming that the founding fathers were Christians when, in fact, they were Enlightenment Deists, many of whom openly abhorred Christianity.

I appreciate Bill Maher’s debunking of gay conversions.

He wasn’t afraid to expose the messages of violence, intolerance, and hatred in the Bible and the Koran.

He wasn’t afraid to abjure certain Muslims who proclaim Islam a religion of peace and love while, at the same time, advocating genocide and Jihad. (This is particularly ballsy when you consider the fates of Salman Rushdie, who narrowly escaped death for denouncing the Koran in The Satanic Verses, and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, whose throat was cut in Amsterdam, almost to the point of decapitation, for releasing a ten-minute movie called Submission, which depicted violence against women in Islamic communities.)

But most of the time, Bill Maher came off as a cocky bastard, cornering even well-meaning, average Joe members of various religious faiths with gotcha questions. In the past, I have enjoyed his comedy. I agree with many of his political views, though I’m far more on the Democratic than Libertarian side of the leftist spectrum. I have no problem with him being a staunch atheist/agnostic. But, in his iconoclasm, he’s just as dogmatic as many of the people he condemns.

Religious intrusions into government are despicable. Scam-artist preachers deserve full exposure and, in many cases, prison. Rabbis who side with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are meshuga turncoats. Gay conversions: well, let’s just say I busted out my pompoms the day that call-boy called out Ted Haggard for their crystal-meth booty calls and I’ll be the first one to upload videos on Youtube when we find Fred Phelps in a leather bar.

But why should Maher go out of his way to condemn ordinary people who have a deep, abiding sense of spirituality and who find solace in their religions? Why does he have to bully them? He even claims that they’re enabling the destruction of civilization simply for having found spiritual outlets.

Interestingly, he did not seem to come down so hard on the Catholics – the faith in which he was raised, though his mother is Jewish. He spoke to two priests. One was an astronomer who flatly refuted the doctrine of creationism and fundamentalist approaches to the Bible. This priest was Maher’s ally in this regard and they seemed quite chummy. But I sense that Maher would not have found it so easy to stump that learned clergyman with his trademark smirk and touche line of inquiry in the same way he did with the hayseeds, rubes and moron senator in the Deep South. Maybe that’s why he didn’t try. The other priest was a grizzled Good Time Charlie who chuckled with Maher over how loony Catholics can get, treating saints like polytheistic gods, and how an impecunious itinerant like Jesus wouldn’t have established the Vatican of all places.

If he wanted to bust out the Roman Catholic church, he could have found plenty of opportunities. The plethoric scandals surrounding pedophile priests, for example, were left untouched.

As a Buddhist, I wondered what my favorite Buddhist teachers would have to say about Maher’s peacocking bravado. It was then that I went back to the book Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience by the wondrous Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg whom I saw lecture for the second time at The Interdependence Project last week. Here is her passage on skillful doubt:

In order to deepen our faith, we have to be able to try things out, to wonder, to doubt. In fact, faith is strengthened by doubt when doubt is a sincere, critical questioning combined with deep trust in our own right and ability to discern the truth. In Buddhism, this kind of questioning is known as skillful doubt. For doubt to be skillful we have to be close enough to an issue to care about it, yet open enough to let questioning come alive.

In the following paragraphs, she speaks directly to the kind of unskillful doubt that Bill Maher manifested in his treatment of the faithful in Religulous:

Unlike skillful doubt, which brings us closer to exploring the truth, unskillful doubt pulls us farther away…this kind of “walk away” doubt manifests as cynicism. Cynicism is actually a self-protective mechanism. A cynical stance allows us to feel smart and unthreatened without really being involved. We can look sophisticated, and we can remain safe, aloof, and at a distance. Maybe we are frightened and hold ourselves apart from life in order to comment on it, rather than grapple with difficult questions…We feel impervious and confident, knowing that we’re not gullible, we’re not going to be swayed…

The tendency to fixate on big, unanswerable questions – “Is there a God?” “How does karma work?” “Was there a beginning to the Universe? was characterized as “a desert, a jungle, a puppet show, the writhing entanglement of speculation” by the Buddha. Our obsessions with such questions would lead only to personal resentments and sorrow, not to wisdom or peace, he said. When feverish disputes on such issues rose up around him, instead of joining in and offering a theoretical answer, he urged everyone to find answers for themselves, in a way that would help them resolve the suffering in their lives. To arrive at that resolution of suffering is the point of skillful doubt.

I saw some informed perspectives in Religulous, but mostly rude, unskillful doubt.

And I don’t want his hectoring ass coming in my room, asking me why I’m on my meditation cushion. It’s none of his goddamn business.

(Note: documentaries that do far better jobs of revealing the disastrous effects of fundamentalism and orthodoxy: Trembling Before G-d, Jesus Camp, Hell House, and Jihad for Love.)

“In Hard Times, Tent Cities Rise Up Across the Country” (The Associated Press)

This is so sad. The Great Depression has already started. From The Associated Press, “In Hard Times, Tent Cities Rise Across the Country,” September 18, 2008.

By EVELYN NIEVES, Associated Press Writer

RENO, Nev. – A few tents cropped up hard by the railroad tracks, pitched by men left with nowhere to go once the emergency winter shelter closed for the summer.

Then others appeared — people who had lost their jobs to the ailing economy, or newcomers who had moved to Reno for work and discovered no one was hiring.

Within weeks, more than 150 people were living in tents big and small, barely a foot apart in a patch of dirt slated to be a parking lot for a campus of shelters Reno is building for its homeless population. Like many other cities, Reno has found itself with a “tent city” — an encampment of people who had nowhere else to go.

From Seattle to Athens, Ga., homeless advocacy groups and city agencies are reporting the most visible rise in homeless encampments in a generation.

Nearly 61 percent of local and state homeless coalitions say they’ve experienced a rise in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, according to a report by the National Coalition for the Homeless. The group says the problem has worsened since the report’s release in April, with foreclosures mounting, gas and food prices rising and the job market tightening.

“It’s clear that poverty and homelessness have increased,” said Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the coalition. “The economy is in chaos, we’re in an unofficial recession and Americans are worried, from the homeless to the middle class, about their future.”

The phenomenon of encampments has caught advocacy groups somewhat by surprise, largely because of how quickly they have sprung up.

“What you’re seeing is encampments that I haven’t seen since the 80s,” said Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, an umbrella group for homeless advocacy organizations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Calif., Portland, Ore. and Seattle.

The relatively tony city of Santa Barbara has given over a parking lot to people who sleep in cars and vans. The city of Fresno, Calif., is trying to manage several proliferating tent cities, including an encampment where people have made shelters out of scrap wood. In Portland, Ore., and Seattle, homeless advocacy groups have paired with nonprofits or faith-based groups to manage tent cities as outdoor shelters. Other cities where tent cities have either appeared or expanded include include Chattanooga, Tenn., San Diego, and Columbus, Ohio.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently reported a 12 percent drop in homelessness nationally in two years, from about 754,000 in January 2005 to 666,000 in January 2007. But the 2007 numbers omitted people who previously had been considered homeless — such as those staying with relatives or friends or living in campgrounds or motel rooms for more than a week.

In addition, the housing and economic crisis began soon after HUD’s most recent data was compiled.

“The data predates the housing crisis,” said Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for HUD. “From the headlines, it might appear that the report is about yesterday. How is the housing situation affecting homelessness? That’s a great question. We’re still trying to get to that.”

In Seattle, which is experiencing a building boom and an influx of affluent professionals in neighborhoods the working class once owned, homeless encampments have been springing up — in remote places to avoid police sweeps.

“What’s happening in Seattle is what’s happening everywhere else — on steroids,” said Tim Harris, executive director of Real Change, an advocacy organization that publishes a weekly newspaper sold by homeless people.

Homeless people and their advocates have organized three tent cities at City Hall in recent months to call attention to the homeless and protest the sweeps — acts of militancy, said Harris, “that we really haven’t seen around homeless activism since the early ’90s.”

In Reno, officials decided to let the tent city be because shelters were already filled.

Officials don’t know how many homeless people are in Reno. “But we do know that the soup kitchens are serving hundreds more meals a day and that we have more people who are homeless than we can remember,” said Jodi Royal-Goodwin, the city’s redevelopment agency director.

Those in the tents have to register and are monitored weekly to see what progress they are making in finding jobs or real housing. They are provided times to take showers in the shelter, and told where to go for food and meals.

Sylvia Flynn, 51, came from northern California but lost a job almost immediately and then her apartment.

Since the cheapest motels here charge upward of $200 a week, Flynn ended up at the Reno women’s shelter, which has only 20 beds and a two-week limit on stays.

Out of a dozen people interviewed in the tent city, six had come to Reno from California or elsewhere over the last year, hoping for casino jobs.

“I figured this would be a great place for a job,” said Max Perez, a 19-year-old from Iowa. He couldn’t find one and ended up taking showers at the men’s shelter and sleeping in a pup tent barely big enough to cover his body.

The casinos are actually starting to lay off employees.

“Sometimes I think we need to put out an ad: ‘No, we don’t have any more jobs than you do,’” Royal-Goodwin said.

The city will shut down the tent city as soon as early October because the tents sit on what will be a parking lot for a complex of shelters and services for homeless people. The complex will include a men’s shelter, a women’s shelter, a family shelter and a resource center.

Reno officials aren’t sure whether the construction will eliminate the need for the tent city. The demand, they say, keeps growing.

We can’t continue the Bush-McCain economy. Please vote for Obama in November.

Tina Fey as Sarah Palin

This was perfect! Tina Fey as Sarah Palin and, once again, Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton on SNL.

Shell sent this around yesterday:

* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you’re “exotic, different.”

* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Barack you’re a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you’re a maverick.

* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.

* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you’re well grounded.

* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you don’t have any real leadership experience.

* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you’re qualified to become the country’s second highest ranking executive.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you’re not a real Christian.

* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you’re a Christian.

* If you teach teach children about sexual predators, you are irresponsible and eroding the fiber of society.

* If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state’s school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you’re very responsible.

* If your wife is a Harvard graduate laywer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family’s values don’t represent America ’s.

* If you’re husband is nicknamed “First Dude”, with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn’t register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that hates America and advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.