Category Archives: Americana

Goodby Jon Stewart, sob sob

Americana, Television

Jon Stewart B (1 of 1)Yesterday, I almost went the whole day without thinking about Jon Stewart’s last couple of weeks. I will miss our – almost – daily ritual of watching The Daily Show (usually, except for last week, one day later). More than just funny and topical, Jon Stewart – the Jon Stewart in my imagination, at least – is easy to like, and even easier to admire.

What I most admire about him, even more than his humor and attention to his craft, is Stewart’s generosity. His generosity with the limelight, his generosity in helping people grow-up and move on, his generosity in having obscure – or almost obscure – guests that don’t thrill the crowd but need the exposure.

The person that first came to mind was Doris Kearns Goodwin who, I read, has been on the Daily Show show eight times – no wonder they hugged when she showed up – and who was saluted with an appearance on one of Stewart’s last shows.  But he also had people like Cass Sunstein – billed as an American legal scholar, particularly in the fields of constitutional law – and Elizabeth Kolbert who I never would have heard of if he hadn’t been on Stewart’s show. He had Malala Yousafzai on, twice!

A person who I have heard of and have been reading for a long time is Ta-Nehisi Coates and I was thrilled when I realized he would be honored by being one of Jon Stewart’s final guests. As an aside, a couple of months ago, a friend asked on facebook, This is powerful! My question for Blacks is, How do I show support/compassion/connectedness for/with you without you thinking I am being condescending, ignorant, or offensive? (I’ve edited that sentence twice. Did I do ok? Did I use the “right” words?) and that question has troubled me, off and on, ever since. For anybody asking that same question – or one of its cousins – one place to start, I would suggest, is to watch Jon Stewart’s interview with Coates and another is read Coates’ columns in the Atlantic and best of all, read his latest book, Between the World and Me. End aside.

On sort of the same subject, another one of the things that I admire about Jon Stewart is, a couple days after somebody at SNL said We don’t have any black women on because there are no funny black women – I’m paraphrasing here – Stewart had Jessica Williams on for the first time. I read somewhere that Williams had been working the comedy club circuit in Los Angeles doing OK but not great when Stewart asked her to come to New York where she became the youngest Daily Show correspondent and the Alpha correspondent shortly thereafter.
The last three guests on the Daily Show were all comedians, Amy Schumer, Denis Leary, and Louis CK. I was left with the impression that Denis Leary is a friend of Jon’s and that Amy and Louis were comics that he wanted to honor. i

Now all that is gone and I will miss it.

The year of women living dangerously (in movies)

Americana, Film, Psychological Musings

Trainwreck

The game is a men’s game, all the rules are made by men, the feminine is not honored. A remembered, probably badly, quote from Coco Gonzo after seeing Mad Max: Fury Road (in 3D).

Michele and I saw Pixar’s Inside Out  last weekend. It was one of those children’s movies that are as much fun for an adult as for the intended audience. I thought it was excellent and, unusual for Pixar, the protagonist was female (for only the second time, the first being Princess Merida of Scotland in Brave, a movie I didn’t see). I say that the protagonist was female, but she – her name was Riley – could have just as easily been a boy. Her favorite sport was ice hockey and I’m not sure if there was anything particularly feminine about her.

A day before Inside Out, we saw  Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck. If you don’t know Amy Schumer, she is that girl from the television that talks about her pussy all the time – to quote from the opening sequence of the first video below – and she is pushing the limits of comedy and what is sayable in public (BTW, isn’t all  good humor pushing what is acceptable?) The two clips below are pretty typical of what she does and, if you haven’t seen her, these are a good place to start.

 

Trainwreck , is both a parody of a rom-com and an homage. It is also a string of joke set-ups that don’t always go together, but it is very funny. Amy plays the role of a womanizing heavy drinker, commitment-phobic and profane; it is the kind of role that would have been the man’s part five years ago (the body language in the picture on top of the post is a good demonstration). Bill Hader plays what would have been the woman’s part with LeBron James playing her best friend.

A couple of months ago, we saw Melissa McCarthy transmogrify from the Penny Moneyworth part to the James Bond part in Spy and before that it was Charlize Theron being the toughest sonofabitch around in Mad Max Fury Road.

Months ago, over dinner after Mad Max Fury Road, several of us got into a discussion over what makes a feminist movie and if Mad Max Fury Road was one (Mad Max and the other three movies pass the Bechdel test, BTW, if that was a question).  I think Mad Max is a feminist movie, but there was alot of disagreement and I am not as sure as I once was. Charlize Theron is the hero as well as the instigating agent in the movie but much of what she does is a woman acting as a man rather than through the feminine.

The operative words above is much, as opposed to all. Throughout the movie Theron is acting out of empathy for the Brides and she brings a humility and vulnerability that we don’t usually see from a man. When she talks about redemption, we sense it is because she almost lost her soul to become Imperator Furiosa. And Melissa McCarthy isn’t all testosteron either, she is reticent to step forward, a woman who has accepted her station. When she becomes the macha spy, she is still a team player, and – in the end – she shares the glory. In Trainwreck, Amy Schumer is only playing the man’s part in public, at home she is a softer, more feminine, Amy.

These four movies have got me thinking about women in a man’s world. When I say man’s world, I really mean the western, public, world in which the rules are men’s rules and the women have to conform. Both politics and business are basically run by men’s rules. They are combative, hierarchical, the rules are stable, and the main concern is for short-term gain. Women like Diane Feinstein do well because they, essentially, act like men.

What we need, it seems to me, are more feminine institutions (if that isn’t an oxymoron). Modern corporations measure success in how much they contribute to the top officers and big shareholders –  not in how much they contribute to the collective – and that takes perpetual and unsustainable  growth. What we really need today is a model for sustainability and that will require women engendering their feminine characteristics like coöperation and inclusiveness and long-term thinking.

 

 

After four years, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei is free to leave China

Americana, Around home, California, Local events

Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-2Until I saw Ai Weiwei’s Alcatraz show, I knew him more as a dissenter than as an artist. I am not normally a fan of message art – for lack of a better term – but this show was a surprise.

To back up, last April, we went to Alcatraz – for the first time, Alcatraz being one of the many, many, Bay Area attractions that we would see if we were tourists here, but have never gotten around to seeing because we live here – to see an Ai Weiwei installation. I’ve struggled whether to call it a show, protest, art installation, art show, or what, because it is really all of that.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and activist who was jailed and released but then confined to China for his art, well, actually for his activism. His show at Alcatraz was put on, in absentia, by the For-Site Foundation, a nonprofit that commissions artwork in public places, and the National Park Service and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy which run  Alcatraz now that it has been decommissioned.

It was a beautiful spring day in San Francisco and on the Bay when we went to the show and it was easy to feel superior about an art installation – to settle on one descriptor – that is being put on in the United States by a guy who is deprived of his freedom in China. But the show, itself, put a lie to that. After all, the installation was at Alcatraz, one of the most notorious prisons in the world, and the thick walls and ever present bars constantly reminded us that the United States is the World Champion of putting people in prison.     Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-4Walking around the island with its view of San Francisco, tantalizing close, seemed so pleasant. However, once inside the cellblock, the view shrunk to an unobtainable dream. We are free and can leave on the next ferry and the inside-out fortress still felt oppressive. Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-5 Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-6For me, the most powerful part of the installation was…well, here is the description from Weiwei’s website:

This sound installation occupies a series of twelve cells in A Block. Inside each cell, visitors are invited to sit and listen to spoken words, poetry, and music by people who have been detained for the creative expression of their beliefs, as well as works made under conditions of incarceration. 

Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)I listened to part of Study for String Orchestra which was written in Auschwitz by Pavel Haas Terezín, an unknown to me, Jewish composer. The music is disturbingly and beautifully upbeat  and, sitting in the empty cell, I wondered how anybody could keep themselves together in those conditions. A couple of cells over, I listened to Pussy Riot’s Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away, and then Martin Luther King, Jr’s plaintive call for an end to the war in Vietnam, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.  

Outside the cell, people were talking, some even laughing, and it was frustratingly hard to hear King’s speech. Sitting in that oppressive cell, with the paint peeling off of thick concrete walls and hard steel bars, prison felt real, less abstract. It is not just being locked up, prison is about having our humanity taken away. Prison is about having control of our own life taken away, it is about living without privacy or power or influence; even over ourselves. That is the point.

Michele and I both left the prison subdued. The size of the infrastructure required to sustain that kind of brutality is horrifying. I suspect that a visit to Alcatraz would always be disturbing but Ai Weiwei’s installation has given the passive ruins a new life.

 

The Woodside Junior Rodeo and Heritage

Americana, Around home

4th (1 of 1)-6Michele and I went to the Woodside Jr. Rodeo on the 4th and I kept thinking Nobody can look at this and not think that California is a western state in a way that I should have realized was already trying to talk myself into liking it. Less than 5 miles from our home is the home to The Mounted Patrol of San Mateo County and every year they hold a junior rodeo that Michele and I went to for the first time this year.

The parking lot was full of oversize SUVs and pickups towing horse trailers and people wandering around wearing cowboy hats.4th horses and parking (1 of 1)4th horses and parking (1 of 1)-34th horses and parking (1 of 1)-4As an aside, this was probably the first time in, atleast, ten years that I have been to a California event that the trash barrels were not segregated by recycling and trash. End aside.

California’s Rodeo Heritage goes all the way back to the late 1700’s when we were a province of New Spain. Less than a year after we became a state in 1850, the legislature passed the 1851 Act to Regulate Rodeos formalizing rodeos as part of our culture. As another aside, I grew up saying ro-day-oh  and people still use that pronunciation, which comes from the Spanish, when talking about the San Francisco Grand National Rodeo or the California Rodeo in Salinas, or the Beverly Hills street, but most of the time, rodeo is pronounced ro-dee-oh which comes from the Texan mispronunciation. End aside.

As Gail Cousins said, Rodeo is great entertainment, at a horrific cost to the animals. I’m not so sure about the great entertainment part, but it was hard for me to sit there, watching a rodeo and not think about racism and animal abuse.

For starters, when the contestants are introduced, the ones on foot are mostly Mexican-American and the ones on horses are mostly European-Americans.4th (1 of 1)-2I assume that is because, owning a horse is a rich person’s enterprise and, if you want to do something in a rodeo but don’t have a horse, you are left with bull riding (or calf riding since this is a junior rodeo). Calf riding seems terrifying for the kids and calves alike. Its one redeeming factor is that it has a long heritage – going all the way back to bull riding in Crete about 4000 years ago – going back to a time when we , humans, had a different sensibility. In my book, that doesn’t offer much redemption.4th (1 of 1)-44th (1 of 1)-5The horse events are more fun to watch, not because they require more skill, but because everybody, animal and rider alike, seem to be having a better time.  4th (1 of 1)-64th (1 of 1)-8Then came the pig scramble in which young children chase even younger piglets. This being Woodside at the hyper wealthy, northwestern, edge of Silicon Valley, the piglets were heritage – Red Wattle and Berkshire – free range, pigs from a local farm. My hope is that they return to a more peaceful life on the farm, but, while they were here, the squealing piglets were tracked down, for our pleasure, by the marauding children. It was fun in a sort of Why am I enjoying watching these pigs get terrified? way.  4th piggies (1 of 1)4th (1 of 1)-2Watching the rodeo, I kept thinking rodeo is part of California’s heritage, but I kept saying to myself, But it’s not our only heritage. As even another aside, rodeos are not just a Western US thing, somehow, the Germans became fascinated by Cowboys and Indians, over a hundred years ago, and now have their own rodeos as the picture of Gina Schumacher, the daughter of the great German Formula One driver from Germany, Michele Schumacher, riding in a rodeo on their family ranch in Switzerland, testifies to. End aside.Gina S

When I started this, the Confederate Battle Flag was in all the headlines and Heritage not hate was the shibboleth of the day for those people still flying that hateful flag. The combination of the rodeo and the flag got me thinking about heritage and, especially, California’s heritage. When the Europeans discovered California, it was already occupied by people who had discovered California about 15,000 years earlier.

There was no European Native American Thanksgiving, in California the opening sequence of our contact was for the Europeans to set up a series of slave camps. The indigenous people were rounded up and forced to build the Missions that we so love. When I was a kid, somewhere around the fourth grade, we were taught that the Spaniards were here to bring Culture to the Indians. Now, I am glad to say, the fourth graders – approximately –  are being taught the real story; that these were slave camps.

We must have liked those camps, however, because we re-instituted rounding up people and putting them in camps when World War II started. Once again, the people rounded up weren’t Europeans. This time, they were Japanese. To be clear, these were American citizens , most of their families having come to California before the Immigration Act of 1924 banned the immigration of almost all people from Asia, so they were second or third generation Californians (I am sure that alot of their families had been Americans and Californians longer than my family which only came here in the 1890’s).

Everything I read tells me that racism in California was and still is milder than most of the country, but we still redlined housing for all people of color until integration was shoved down our throats when the Feds started enforcing the The Fair Housing Act of 1968. All in all, much of my heritage, as a Californian and an American, is pretty shameful.That collective heritage is not something for which I am proud and I wonder why anybody would be.

I want to think that all the people who fly, wear, decorate their car or jet ski, or otherwise let us know their Mission Statement with a Confederate Flag, aren’t racists, but they make it hard. They keep talking about heritage, but that heritage is nasty, misogynistic, homophobic, and racist, pretending that it isn’t doesn’t change it. Still, as bad as I think our California heritage is, I am still very proud of being a Californian and I suspect that is the same for many Southerners.