After spending a lazy day in the sun with Aimee, napping in the park on Broadway and walking my lame bike (crippled, rather than sub-par) bike to Ace Wheel Works in Davis to get a new tube and a “tune and true” run on it in preparation for summer riding, I headed back to the Archive to help out with and watch a screening of The Weather Underground. Director Sam Green and Underground member Bernardine Dohrn were in attendance to answer questions after the screening, which was one of the more lively I’ve been to recently. Throughout the screening, both applause and hisses were heard from the audience, and ex-radicals and cineastes clashed: “sssssss” followed by the slightly different “shhhhh.” The film was well done, a very enlightening and thought-provoking look at a period and a group about whom I knew very little. Indeed, Sam Green mentioned in his post-film remarks the connection I had with the subject: when he told people about the film he was making, many wondered why he was making a film about the weather website, called “Weather Underground,” which we used extensively when I was teaching K-3 computer classes at GCDS. He had to inform people that his subject was instead the radical group that waged a low-level war against the American government in the ’60s and ’70s, a much more interesting subject than a website that, along with weather info, lists “Vacation Advice,” “South Florida Real Estate,” “Sleep Products,” “Lasik Eye Surgery,” and “Mortgage Info.” I’m not so sure we should have been using this as a teaching tool, but oh well.

After the screening, Aimee and I met at TT’s for Mara‘s show, which was fun. It was nice to hear her with a full band, and it gave me a chance to get her new cd. I love how both she and the band are called “Mara Levi.” I wonder what the three-quarters of the group that don’t share her name think. Lots of Amherst people in attendance, and a fair crowd, all in all, for a Sunday night show.