movie

I was back in Minneapolis this weekend for the National Conference for Media Reform, an annual event organized by the folks at Free Press, a nonpartisan group focused on media reform and policy.

She turned Brutha against Brutha!

Here in Northeast Portland is a place called In Other Words Women's Books and Resources, a nonprofit bookstore founded in 1993. I've only lived in Portland for a year, so most of what I know I've learned from talking to people and reading news articles, like this.

A few nights ago I went to a screening of a short documentary called Moving In: A nonprofit feminist bookstore and the politics of place. The documentary, created by Dawn Jones (who's on the board of Bitch; photographed below), examines the bookstore's 2006 move, which resulted from being economically displaced from their original neighborhood, to a historically African-American neighborhood. The film is fantastic; you should see it if you have the opportunity.

I finally got around to seeing The Business of Being Born, which means I got very intimate with Ricki Lake and her female powers. Lake not only produced this documentary about the ever-increasing medicalization of birth in the U.S. but also included up-close-and-personal footage of the birth of her second son, at home, in the bathtub, attended by a midwife.