Bryan Farrell is a New York based journalist and activist. His work is focused on nonviolent peacemaking and environmentalism.

September 5, 2008 | Published by Voices of Central Pennsylvania

When it comes to replicating war, films like Saving Private Ryan or even the video game Call of Duty have nothing on a football game at Beaver Stadium. Underscoring George Carlin’s famous rant describing the sport as a “20th century new-world-order paramilitary power struggle,” fans at last spring’s Blue-White Game were treated to more than just the typical combat metaphors of “blitz” and “aerial assault.” At halftime, attendees were asked to applaud the choice to join the military during a mock swearing-in ceremony held at midfield for high school students who had recently enlisted [...]

May 24, 2008

This is the first of two talks I gave at the Building A New World Conference , which was held at Radford University in Virginia. The panel was on climate change.

May 24, 2008

This talk was delivered at the Building A New World Conference, which was held at Radford University in Virginia.

I just came upon a lost gem of a movie–recommended by my dad–called Mindwalk. It was released in 1990, but has never made its way to dvd. After watching it, I’m not surprised, given that–as the Washington Post described it at the time–the “film has virtually no action, no drama and no narrative.” With that sort of criteria, a film would have to be some sort of touchstone French new wave art house classic from the ’60s to get released on dvd. But really, it’s a wonder that Mindwalk ever got released in the first place.

The film is essentially a two-hour conversation between three characters: a politician (played by Sam Waterston), a physicist (Liv Ullman) and a poet (John Heard). The setting is the medieval island of Mont Saint-Michel, where all three characters have converged to escape from their respective midlife crisis. But what this movie lacks in Hollywood elements, it makes up for with an intense existential dialogue on the very meaning of life–but more than just that, it’s the clashing of two distinct ways of seeing life.

Although it is structured like a dialogue, the movie is in large part a monologue or–perhaps more accurately–a forum for the physicist to espouse her new world views upon a reluctant old world politician (described as a conservative democrat) and his generally open-minded poet friend. This approach definitely comes off as a bit too didactic at times, but I’m willing to forgive the filmmakers because it’s clear they too were aware of this pitfall and attempted to compensate by inserting a daughter character, who periodically pops in to remind her mom that no one wants to hear her crazy boring ideas about how the world should work.

Nevertheless, the physicist–whose withdrawl to the island stems from the realization that her work was being fed to the U.S. Defense Department–begins her lecture by telling the politician that he suffers from a mechanistic view of life that dates all the way back to Descartes [...]

April 27, 2008

I spoke to a group of confirmation students at the Ascension School on W. 108th St on the subject of sustainability.

Even as a student, during perhaps the bleakest years of an otherwise dominating half-century of college football, I knew my school was just as likely to be called “Linebacker U” as Penn State. Yet, upon recently returning to my alma mater, I noticed that Beaver Stadium isn’t the only building on campus where a strong defense is revered.

I attended a rather lackluster debate on Wednesday night between former NY Times Middle East correspondent Chris Hedges–who was promoting his new book I Don’t Believe In Atheists–and writer/communist Sunsara Taylor–who was representing Communist party leader Bob Avakian and his book Away With All Gods!–on the provocative topic of “Atheism, God and Morality in a [...]

I’m not sure how to preface this, so here it is: I like a Nickelback song. Yes, I’m talking about the band that sounds (and looks) like all the worst elements of the grunge era were dumped into Pro-Tools and produced by the CEO of Warner Music himself. I discovered this rather shocking truth [...]

One question has been coming up a lot–although, perhaps not explicitly–on this blog recently: How should the antiwar movement engage in the 2008 election?
I’ve danced around this question–essentially saying that we need to push Democratic candidates to take a harder stance against the war and military spending. But my message could certainly be more articulate [...]

Yesterday was the annual Good Friday Way of the Cross march through midtown Manhattan, sponsored by Pax Christi–a leading group in the Catholic peace movement. The several hundred who participated–including myself–walked from 47th and 2nd to Times Square, stopping at fifteen symbolically-significant places along the way to reflect on the suffering and injustices going on [...]