by Mark Carney
Hemingway and Gellhorn, a big budget movie starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen, will be fi lming in Oakland for nine days beginning March 8. The movie, which will be shown on HBO, recounts the romance of the writers Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn as they wrote, loved, fought and traveled throughout Spain, China, Cuba, and the U.S. The entire movie, reportedly, will be fi lmed in the Bay Area.
Hemingway, of course, was one of the most famous American writers of the 20th century. With his short, taut sentences, shorn of modifi ers, a laconic style arising from his years as a journalist, and the precise cinematic narration of his introspective male protagonists, existing at once in the social world and in the realm of their rich, visual memories, Hemingway was a very good writer who also sold many books. But when, at last, he had become a macho alcoholic, a parody of his own characters, he committed suicide.
Gellhorn, though never a novelist of note, was a talented and insightful war correspondent who, throughout her life, covered wars all over the world. Indeed, after leaving Spain in the 30s, she went to Germany, where she chronicled Hitler’s increasingly autocratic power; during World War II, she covered battles in Europe and Asia, displaying a daring that Hemingway’s characters, but perhaps not Hemingway himself, possessed.
She and Hemingway were married during this time, although as Hemingway was living in Cuba, they saw little of each other. After fi ve years of long absences from each other, and fi ghts when, sporadically, they were together, they divorced. Like Hemingway, she committed suicide, but only after years of suffering cancer and blindness.
Grocery Workers Pressure National Chains
Both community and union activists held protests outside Safeway grocery stores in San Francisco and Oakland on Thursday, Jan.27, to urge that grocery stores continue to offer good wages and benefi ts to their workers and that the stores begin to carry healthier products for their customers. Safeway grocery stores are unionized in California, but Wal-Mart, perhaps the most notoriously and most successfully anti-union company in the US, will soon be opening many stores in the Bay Area. Workers in UFCW Local 5, which represents 26,000 members, most of whom work in grocery stories, are clearly concerned. “In many communities, Wal-Mart is trying to get access to new markets. What kind of job is it if you can’t earn above the federal poverty level? Not one of quality or one that can raise a family,” said Tina Mendoza, a Local 5 member.
Financial Aid Awareness Week in San Francisco
Last Tuesday, Feb. 8, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to proclaim Feb. 6-12 as Financial Aid Awareness Week in San Francisco. Despite the large amount of money available to low-income students, in 2007-08 fewer than 40 percent of community college students and a scant 25 percent of students at four-year colleges applied for Federal Pell Grants, according to a report by the College Board and the American Association of Community Colleges. The Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), a community-based, local economic development corporation based in the Mission District of San Francisco, is currently helping students to fi ll out the daunting and complicated applications for financial aid so that they might access this untapped resource.
