Here she is...Mr and/or Miss America.

Turning water into child’s play.

[[This is a truly inspiring article related to a piece I saw last night on PBS’ Frontline]]

www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2005/10/south_africa_th.html

In rural villages across South Africa, some 5 million people don’t have access to clean drinking water. To get a sense of the severity of the water scarcity there, you have to go back to the early 1800s when Europeans and others started colonizing the country.

When these settlers arrived, they brought with them nonnative seeds and plants with the idea that they would be able to re-create the thick forests and vegetation of their homeland.

Two hundred years on, the pines and eucalyptus trees, along with 161 other invasive plants introduced to the country, are soaking up billions of gallons of water that used to flow into mountain streams and support wetlands and other precious arteries in this largely arid country. Add to that the needs of South Africa’s growing population and you have a situation in which the competition for water has become fierce.

Which brings us in a roundabout way (no pun intended) to this week's Rough Cut—reporter Amy Costello’s surprisingly upbeat tale about a canny entrepreneur who decided to tackle South Africa’s water woes in his own novel and enterprising way.

Trevor Field, a retired advertising executive, had done well in life and wanted to give back to his community. He noticed that in many rural villages around the eastern Cape, the burden of collecting water fell mainly to the women and girls of the household. Each morning, he'd see them set off to the nearest borehole to collect water. They used leaky and often contaminated hand-pumps to collect the water, then they carried it back through the bush in buckets weighing 40 pounds. It was exhausting and time-consuming work.

“The amount of time these women are burning up collecting water, they could be at home looking after their kids, teaching their kids, being loving mothers,” Field tells Costello. He knew there had to be a better solution.

Field then teamed up with an inventor and came up with the “play pump”—a children's merry-go-round that pumps clean, safe drinking water from a deep borehole every time the children start to spin. Soup to nuts, the whole operation takes a few hours to install and costs around $7,000. Field’s idea proved so inventive, so cost-efficient and so much fun for the kids that World Bank recognized it as one of the best new grassroots ideas.

In true ad-man style, Field's next idea was to use the play pump’s water towers as makeshift billboards, selling ad space to help pay for the upkeep. He reserves a spot for the national loveLife campaign, which helps educate children about HIV and AIDS. “We've got to get the message through to them before they become sexually active,” he says. “It seems to be working.”

In the film, Costello and producer/photographer Cassandra Herrman drive out to a small village where the taps have been dry for a week. There, a crew sets to work installing a play pump near a children’s play area, boring 40 meters down until they hit the fresh water table below. As soon as the last colorful piece of the puzzle is in place, dozens of children show up to play—much to Field’s delight—pumping cool, clean water to the surface as they spin.

The indefatigable entrepreneur wants to build thousands of these pumps to help water-stressed communities across South Africa, then expand to other African countries. He says, “It would make a major difference to the children, and that's where our passion lies.”

Pan’s Labyrinth.

Wow. Not for the meek. Unfortunately, this film has moments of such incredible beauty, but is probably unwatchable by people sensitive to graphic violence. We’re talking about pre-Franco Spanish fascists here, and one of the main characters is one of the baddest of a bad bunch. One of the most total bastards ever portrayed on film, I think.

Briefly...little girl’s mother marries the fascist, is pregnant with his child. She and her beautiful, amazing little girl go to live with him in a house that has been commandeered from people who, unbeknownst to the fascists, are suporters of the popular resistance. Mother isn’t doing so well with the pregnancy, little girl escapes into fantasy—or does she?

The fantasy parts are SO well done. The power of the little girl’s belief in the possible. The faun (Pan is “Fauno” is Spanish) creature is brilliant. Amazing. Guillermo del Toro is the man.

The mix of the very real non-moviefied banality-of-evil violence...ordinary cruelty, and the incredible fantastic otherworld of the labyrinth and the Underworld is immaculate.

If you can stomach a little well-placed (but extreme) violence in service of the story, don’t miss this on the screen. I heard a college-age girl say—“I kind of liked it, but I could have done without the violence.” Fascists is as Fascists does, baby girl...

An unslakable kind of curiosity.

[[I nice thing to have said of you in the end. From Writer’s Almanac a few weeks ago. I like this word unslakable—it’s one of those ones you see so rarely that even spelt correctly it looks wrong. Where does one go to see a “neo Nazi punk synthesizer band” these days?]]

It’s the birthday of essayist and cultural critic Susan Sontag, born in New York City (1933). She was an intellectual even as a child, buying the Partisan Review and reading Trilling, Rosenberg, and Arendt. She graduated from high school at age 15 and became a serial academic. She took classes at Berkeley, then earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago after only two years of classes. She earned two master’s degrees from Harvard, studied at Oxford and the University of Paris, and then, in 1959, moved with her son to New York City. During the course of her studies she had married, had a child with, and divorced Philip Rieff, who had been one of her professors at the University of Chicago.

Susan Sontag said that she preferred to think of herself as a novelist. Her first novel, The Benefactor, was published in 1963. Her most popular, The Volcano Lover, came out in 2002. But it is her essays that made her famous.

In her early essays, Sontag wrote criticism of art and culture. Other critical essays of the early ’60s were dry and academic—hers were not. Her essay “Notes on Camp” was first published in the Partisan Review in 1964. The essay had a huge impact on the New York intellectual world, and Susan Sontag became a sort of spokesperson for the American avant-garde.

Susan Sontag’s son, David Rieff, said his mother had “an unslakable kind of curiosity, of interest in the world. She is someone who can go to an opera, meet someone at two in the morning to go to the Ritz and listen to some neo-Nazi punk synthesizer band and then get up the next morning to see two Crimean dissidents.”

Fishtailing out of control.

Things we like—Yo La Tengo.

One of the best cheeky-monkey album titles ever goes to the Hoboken 3-some’s recent “I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass.”

Hard to believe these kids have been mixing up melodic beauty, git-tar noise and Prince’s hot chicken for over 20 years now. Aided and abetted for quite a few of them by the keen producer/engineer skills of Hoboken-to-Nashville transplant, the lovely Roger Moutenot.

One of my classic memorable Nashville shows was these guys at the Belcourt with Lambchop a few years back.

Does anybody miss the Cold War?