Culture posts

From George W.S. Trow's “Within the Context of No Context,” about American culture/pop culture, which was originally published in The New Yorker in November 1980:

The most important programming deals with people with a serious problem who make it to the Olympics. It is the powerful metaphor of our time—babies given up for dead who struggle toward national life and make it just for a minute. It's a long distance to come. People feel it very deeply and cheer the babies on.

That's dead on, prescient even, since coverage of the Olympics was fairly straightforward back in 1980. One wonders, though, if this Olympic moment is still the most powerful metaphor of our time. In some ways, it's been usurped by Simon Cowell and the “X's Got Talent” showrunners, who play down their talent, let it stand before Cowell's withering gaze, and then let it shine (and watch Cowell melt, with dollar signs in his eyes). The most famous of these is Susan Boyle. The most extreme version is probably from “Korea's Got Talent”: the homeless boy, abandoned at an orphanage at 3, who fled the beatings there at the age of 5 and lived on the streets, selling gum, and now doing manual labor; he makes the pretty lady judge cry with his western opera. It's a long distance to come.

As the year ends, I'm clearing the digital house and I came across this photo that I meant to post earlier. It came to me via my sister, Karen, an editor at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, who got it from a colleague. It shows the two men who first applied for a same-sex marriage licenese: Jack Baker and James McConnell. It happened in Hennepin County, Minn., in 1970. They were denied, of course, sued, and were further denied by 1) the Court of Appeals, 2) the Minnesota State Supreme Court, 3) the U.S. Supreme Court. This last one, I assume, didn't even bother to hear the case.  

This year, of course, the Obergefell decision, just six short months ago, recognized a federal, constitutional right to same-sex marriage. We've come a long way, baby. 

And the man standing beside the men applying for that 1970 marriage license? My father, Bob Lundegaard, reporting for The Minneapolis Tribune. 

“Yeah, that's me,” he said when Karen and I asked him about it. “Always in the front lines of history. No, I don't remember anything about it. Who knew it was such a big deal?”

Front lines of history.

Crossing a line? On the one hand, without Depp's interest in playing Tonto, the movie wouldn't have been made; on the other hand, the movie wouldn't have been made.

In a recent New York Times piece called “On Acting, Race and Hollywood”  actor-comedian Aziz Ansari (“Parks and Recreation”) recounts his first experience seeing an Indian actor on a movie screen; it had a profound effect on him. Years later, it had a more profound effect on him when he discovered the actor wasn't Indian. The movie was “Short Circuit 2,” and the actor was Fisher Stevens. So Ansari’s first movie encounter with his own kind was a fraud. It was a white guy in make-up using a funny accent. 

That’s his initial complaint about acting, race and Hollywood, and it’s two-fold:

1. How come we don't see more Indian characters on screen?
2. When we do, how come they’re not played by Indian actors?

Then things gets trickier.

At one point, Ansari wonders why Max Minghella, “a half-Chinese, half-Italian British actor,” was chosen to play Indian-American Divya Narendra in “The Social Network.” If I were a struggling Indian actor I’d wonder that, too, but it raises a whole host of questions—the usual questions, to be honest—about acting and border crossings and what constitutes racial theft. 

Essentially: When is it OK for an actor to stretch and when is he/she engaging in a modern minstrel show?

Here are a few follow-ups to try to narrow things down:

1. Is it OK for Chinese to play Japanese, and vice-versa?
2. Can Italians play Spaniards, and Spaniards Mexicans, and Mexicans Iranians?
3. Was it cool for Robert De Niro, an Italian-American, to play a Jewish gangster in ”Ca$ino,“ or Javier Bardem, a straight Spaniard, to play a gay Cuban poet in ”Before Night Falls,” or Al Pacino, an Italian-American, to play a Cuban gangster in “Scarface”?
4. What about all the white actors and opera singers who have played Othello over the years?
5. How South do you have to be to play someone from the South? How Boston do you have to be to play someone from Southie?

I’d be curious where Ansari puts up his own artistic border guards. It’s a trickier topic than people admit.

This afternoon I read Lizzie Widdicombe's piece on entrepreneur (I guess) Bethenny Frankel, who has parlayed a gig on “The Apprentice with Martha Stewart” into a regular turn on “The Real Housewives of New York,” on which she began to promote her Skinnygirl products: margaritas and other adult beverages, as well as chips and popcorn and salad dressing. It's not my thing—none of it—but it's a good window into the world that runs things now.

Here's Frankel with her assistant, Alexandra Cohen, blonde and 26, in a black SUV on the way to a promo appearance:

Frankel would be meeting a group of life-style bloggers who had been hired by [Jim] Beam to act as “influencers” for Skinnygirl Cocktails. “These are ten bloggers who are going to share with every single follower that they met you, and that you're inspirational,” Cohen said. She added, firmly, “It's important that you message the right things to these people. Because these people have a ton of followers.”

“O.K.,” Frankel said. “Why did they only pick ten, though?” She's active on Twitter, but the nuances of social media sometimes escape her. (An agency called DM2 manages most of her social-media accounts.)

“Because they're the most influential.”

“Influential of what?”

“Messaging of cocktails,” Cohen said.

Amid the awfulness, comedy.

I read this last night in Michael Medved's “Hollywood vs. America,” from 1992:

“Welcome to the new clod worship, a pop culture deification of the asinine,” writes Jan Stuart in a recent issue of FanFare. “Been to the movies or theater lately? The joint is jumpin' with blowhard anti-role models who combine Trump-size arrogance with the grace of Al Sharpton ... turning the ethos of the jerk inside out until jerkiness becomes a kind of heroism... By and large, that behavior takes as its ideal the iconoclasm and unformed moral code of adolescent boys.”

Meet the new clod worship; same as the old clod worship.   

Here's Evan Osnos on Trump, the GOP frontrunner. (Great illustration, btw, by Christoph Niemann.)

• Fireman who didn't die on 9/11.
• Soldiers who didn't die or get wounded in Afghanistan, Iraq, et al. Also captured, of course.
• Yankee teams that didn't lose the World Series. Not like those 2001 bums. And just when the city needed them, too. 
• “Rocky II,” “Rocky III” and “Rocky IV.” Go the distance, my ass. 
• Kreese. None of this wax-on/wax-off shit. I pay people for that.
• Old men in the sea who know how to land a fucking fish.

From his comments yesterday about John McCain's war hero status: “I like people who weren't captured.” Feel free to add your own. 

ADDENDUM: Jon Stewart, of course, did it better. On his show Monday night, he played the above clip, and said, as Trump, “And if I may ... fuck cancer survivors, too. Hey, let me just say this. I like people who don't get cancer.”

I do not understand all the love “Breaking Bad” star Bryan Cranston is getting for his “your mother” joke at the San Diego Comic-Con this past week. 

Here's the video.

And here's the conversation:

Nervous teen: How was [Albuquerque]? Cuz it's ... my hometown, So I just want to know, how'd you like it? Did you have fun there?
Cranston: Yeah, I'd go and visit your mother once in a while!

The audience erupts in laughter and applause, and Cranston basks in it before feigning a mic-drop.

Is there a context I'm missing? Is it Bryan being Walt or Bryan being Cranston? More importantly: Why does the kid deserves this slam? 

Since then, the applause has continued on most major (or at least ad-heavy) web sites. It's as if Cranston has just delivered an Oscar Wilde-ian bon mot instead of the most adolescent of comebacks. It's a line worth of apology, not a mic-drop. 

This culture sometimes, I swear. 

Two quotes. Who's the mass murderer and who's the GOP candidate for president?

• Person A: “When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're sending people that have lots of problems. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.”
• Person B: “'I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country.”

Answer in the comments field.

“On Monday, Dolezal resigned, in a statement that didn't answer questions about what she referred to as 'my personal identity,' though it did refer obliquely to 'challenging the construct of race.' That answer is clearly inadequate; many people have challenged the construct of race without lying about their lives. But there is something more worth discussing here. ... In truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn't mean that Dolezal wasn't lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie.

”Rachel Dolezal is not black—by lineage or lifelong experience—yet I find her deceptions less troubling than the vexed criteria being used to exclude her. ... Dolezal was dishonest about an undertaking rooted in dishonesty, and no matter how absurd her fictional blackness may appear, it is worth recalling that the former lie is far more dangerous than the latter. Our means of defining ourselves are complex and contradictory—and could be nothing other than that. But if the rubric is faulty it remains vital. The great majority of Americans recognize slavery as a figment of history, interred in a receding past. But, for black people, that past remains at the surface—close at hand, indelible, a narrative as legible as skin.“

-- Jelani Cobb, ”Black Like Her," The New Yorker. Cobb's is the first article I've read that has referenced John Howard Griffin's seminal book of the 1960s, which I never read, but which was everywhere when I was growing up. And don't forget the Lois Lane version, as much as all of us have tried. 

On movie comedies: “Most comedies aren’t really movies – they’re just vehicles for the funny person that’s starring in them. No one cares where the story’s going, and if it doesn’t work, they’ll just throw in another set piece. But with 2 Days, the jokes come out of the drama. Woody doesn’t make comedies – he makes sad dramas with jokes.”

On Scott Rudin, Rock's “Top Five” producer, whose Sony-hack emails included jokes about Pres. Obama's watching typically black films such as “The Butler” and “12 Years a Slave”: “He had my back the whole time so I was able to go into a bubble and write the movie I wanted without dealing with anyone else. Scott Rudin's not racist. Scott Rudin hates EVERYBODY.” 

On Bill Cosby: “I haven't talked to him in a long time. The whole thing is just sad. What can you say? I'm not gonna defend him and I'm not go Judd [Apatow] on him. You do still have to wait, he hasn't been convicted. But it's sad.”

On being black while driving: “I've always been stopped by the cops. Cops stop black guys who drive nice cars.”

On Pres. Obama: “Oh yeah, he's been good. Great, even. He wasn't going to solve America, but the country was off the rails and he was like Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, you know? He really sorted shit out.”

-- from Chris Rock's interview with Hadley Freeman in The Guardian.

Really just another excuse to upload another photo of Rosario Dawson. 

From my brother-in-law Eric, via Facebook. Jordan is this Jordan; he's 13 now. Ryan (this Ryan) is 11:

Jordan started giving Ryan and I lateral puzzles he had been doing in school (like riddles) on the way to play rehearsal. I came back with the only one I remembered from my childhood. A father and son are in a car accident. The father is killed. The boy is rushed to the emergency room and the doctor says, “I can't operate on this child, it's my son!” The answer I remember is the doctor is the mother, which, at the time I learned it, exposed my own biases. Ryan, without skipping a beat, shouts from the back seat, “The fathers are gay!” Yep, worked for me.

Last year my sister and I bought my mom, now in her 80s, a condo in a 55-and-over building in south Minneapolis. It's both in my name and my mom's name, so I assume that's the reason my mom received some junk mail from the Neptune Society at my home in Seattle. It came in a pale yellow envelope with her name mock-typed on the front, so at first glance it seems like personal mail. At first I thought someone sent us a card.

Inside there's a return envelope and two small, pale yellow pieces of stationery with a lavender banner. One of the pages is a letter from Tim Nicholson, President/COO, using a cheesy, near-cursive font. Here's how it begins:

Dear Betty,

For a variety of reasons, more and more people are choosing to plan for a memorialized cremation over traditional funeral arrangement—and the numbers are increasing every year!

The other page includes a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt about today being a gift (which is why it's called “the present”), a photo of an elderly man playing ring-around-the-rosie with his grandkids at the beach, and an offer to WIN A PRE-PAID CREMATION.

Thoughts:

• You mean over *a* traditonal funeral arrangement?
• I would've lost the exclamation point.
• I seriously doubt Eleanor Roosevelt said that.

I have other thoughts, too.

Last night I watched “Generation Like” on PBS's Frontline and wanted to kill myself afterwards. It's about the online world, and social media, and how corporations pitch to kids and kids pitch to each other, and how little starlets are made from all this. And how money is made from all this.

A lot of it is obvious—your likes are added to the pool of likes and constitute market research which is monetized—so why did it depress me so? Perhaps because it shows some aspect of my own desires (attention, fame, hits) turned to 11. Perhaps because it reveals how bad I am at this game. (Of course, I still think people want to read.) Perhaps because there doesn't seem to be anything else. It's just this airless, clueless world.

I think the most depressing moment was when author Douglas Rushkoff asked kids about being a “sell out” or the concept of “selling out” and they didn't know what it was. They couldn't define it. They had no clue.

Identifying yourself by what you like is an old concept. Milan Kundera wrote about identifying yourself by the method of addition (likes) or subtraction in his novel “Immortality” but he goes further:

Here is that strange paradox to which all people cultivating the self by way of the addition method are subject: they use addition in order to create a unique, inimitable self, yet because they automatically become propagandists for the added attributes, they are actually doing everything in their power to make as many others as possible similar to themselves; as a result, their uniqueness (so painfully gained) quickly begins to disappear.

Wanting to be liked is an even older concept. But that's all there appears to be in this world. To like and be liked by dozens or hundreds or thousands or millions. For doing what? Skateboarding? No, harassing girls. For singing? No, just talking. For pushing this or that corporate product. For being the person with 300K likes. It's all turned up to 11. It's icky.

After it was over, and not learning my lesson, I tweeted something about it, and that tweet was immediately “favorited” by someone else. But it was one of those fake Twitter accounts, with the pretty girl on it, and the garbled tweets, and a decided lack of followers. It was someone pretending to be human. There was no one there.

Three days ago The New York Times offered us this headline: “Obama Pursuing Modest Agenda in State of the Union,” which, since the address is tonight, shows us once again that the news isn't what's happened but what's about to happen. Shame. The news should be so five minutes ago.

Today, the Times is offering us ... well, us: user-generated content. How Would You Describe the State of the Union?: “Please share your opinion with us on Twitter by adding the hashtag #TellNYT to your tweet.” Friends on Facebook are doing the same. “The state of the union is ___________” one asks. Since he lives in Georgia, he's getting all kinds of answers.

Here's my answer. I came across it last night reading on the planeride home from New York:

Seems to be a deep seated dislike for most things America is and stands for.

That's not the current state of the union; that's FBI analysis of the movie “State of the Union,” as reported in John Sbardellati's book, “J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War.” The movie stars Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn and was directed by Frank Capra.

Of course, to the FBI, Capra, a Norman Rockwellseque figure today, who made movies steeped in Americana and schmaltz, was suspect. Among other FBI reviews of Capra movies:

• Mr. Deeds Goes to Town: “Gary Cooper sides with the underprivileged.”
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: “First Hollywood movie to show tie-up between Congressmen and Big Business.”
• It's a Wonderful Life: “The picture represented a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers.”

Plus ca change. You can still be suspect by siding with the underprivileged, showing the tie-up between Congress and Business, and attempting to discredit bankers. And now more people are taking notes.

Un-American activities.