Let Them Eat Cake!

In Which Victory Means What's Next?

2011-05-09T21:20:00.000-07:00

For those of you who don't know, I am - pomp and circumstance! - a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley and a quiet, if impassioned, member of Academic Workers for a Democratic Union. (AWDU is the progressive caucus within UAW Local 2865, which represents graduate-student instructors, readers and TAs throughout the UC system.) Over the last few weeks and months, we at AWDU have been campaigning for seats on the state-wide Executive Council - and for campus-level positions at each of the UCs as well. Elections were last week and now - after an unfortunately bitter and partisan vote-counting bonanza - it's official: we've won.

There are many brilliant people involved in crafting AWDU's message, and there are many insightful commentaries out there on the 'webs on what we do and why. I have little to add here. I'd merely like to say that I am inspired and humbled in equal measure by the people I've had the privilege of working with in AWDU. Their courage, tenacity and take-no-prisoners approach to social justice are exemplary. While I'm sure that many among the old guard of the union care deeply about the same issues that concern us, I have no doubt that AWDU will do a better job of standing up for student workers and their rights and dignity in the workplace. I look forward with joy and abandon to standing with my friends and colleagues and fighting the good fight for the next year (and maybe longer if they'll let me).

There are those, perhaps, who would pooh-pooh our movement as inconsequential. I would only say this: American higher education (and especially public higher education) is in deep crisis. The entire system needs to be radically reformed if it is to fulfill its mission of creating an informed and engaged citizenry. It's simple: we need more and better teachers, from K through Cal, and we need them now. All of us at AWDU - indeed, all of us in graduate school, and in teacher-training and -accreditation programs everywhere - are committed to doing our part to fill the gap. Working to ensure that student teachers are treated fairly is only part of our ongoing effort - in solidarity with our students, our faculty mentors, and the incredible support staff that make our work possible - to fix the system. If you know us at all, you know that we won't stop, ever, until our schools and colleges and universities are the havens of justice and inclusion, ingenuity and curiosity, diversity and debate they were always meant to be.

So look out. Because victory for AWDU in this election doesn't just mean yay. Victory means what's next. And what's next - to invoke Donald Trump - is gonna be huge.

In Which Bin Laden Isn't Voldemort

2011-05-02T18:32:00.000-07:00

When the news broke yesterday that Osama bin Laden had been killed by American special forces in Pakistan, some of the nerdier precincts of the internet lit up with the realization that Mr. bin Laden, Adolf Hitler and Lord Voldemort all met their end in the general environs of May Day - Hitler on the 30th of April, bin Laden on the 1st of May, and Voldemort in the dawn hours of May 2nd. (Yet more proof, if any were needed, that organized labor - celebrated, as my unionist readership no doubt knows, on May Day - will always eventually triumph over evil.) But while it's no doubt interesting to speculate on what effect Mr. bin Laden's death might have on the zeitgeist as manifest in the impending release of Deathly Hallows Part II, our tendency to subsume Mr. bin Laden into Voldemort's villainous mystique is dangerous - and not only because it's bad Photoshop. It's dangerous because it gives the impression that with Mr. bin Laden's death, the story is definitively over - that, in in the haunting words with which J.K. Rowling closed the Harry Potter series, "all is well."

The appalling violence of 9/11 and the subsequent declaration of "war on terror" occasioned, as many have intuited, a spate of American myth-making that has set the tone of public discourse ever since. Mr. bin Laden was cast as the enemy, as a figure of absolute alterity, of pure evil, who had to be captured, in then-President Bush's turn of phrase, "dead or alive." I do not wish to deny, by any means, the obvious fact that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th, 2011 were monstrous and disgusting asks of indiscriminate violence for which Mr. bin Laden was at least partially responsible. I further do not wish to deny that Mr. bin Laden was a bigot, a sadist, and a mass murderer who deserved to be held accountable for his actions. But his casting, in the wake of 9/11, as Public Enemy Number 1 did enable the forgetting of all sorts of things - among them the fact that the United States had armed him (and the Taliban) in the first place, and that the West's coercive regime of economic sanctions and debt colonialism had impoverished and alienated the Muslim world - that ought not to have been forgotten. "Terrorism," in al-Qaeda's case, was stripped of its political content and reduced to unthinking barbarity, while America's - subtler, but still brutal - military/intelligence/foreign-policy machine was accorded the rights and privileges of the avenging hero.

In recent years, this dispensation had largely been discredited, and rightfully so, and so it was with some surprise and not a little sadness that I turned on the TV last night and saw crowds outside the White House and in Times Square chanting "USA! USA!" when news reached them of Mr. bin Laden's death. Apart from being a macabre way to greet the news that someone - a monster, no doubt, but still, as the line from the Talmud that a very wise friend of mine sent me reminds us, a man who was "the work of...[God's] hands" - had been shot in the head, the impromptu celebrations seemed a return to the jingoistic rhetoric I thought we had moved beyond. More than that, the scene immediately recalled for me, in eerie symmetry, the grotesquery of the street parties that followed in some quarters of the Muslim world after 9/11. Indeed, a look back at the YouTube footage of those celebrations showed that commenters had already made the connection themselves, albeit in a different, and horrifying, way: "FUCK YOU PALESTINIANS, YOUR HERO IS NOW DEAD!"

To which I would reply, as I know others have and will continue to: have we learned absolutely nothing since 9/11? Haven't ten years of waste and hurt and sorrow impressed upon us how useless all this hate is? I of course sympathize with those who lost loved ones on the hijacked planes and in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and share with them their desire to have some justice and closure, but justice and closure are not the same as bloody revenge, and the memories of their loved ones are ill-served by parties in the streets that almost cannot help but further radicalize those who looked to bin Laden for inspiration and now count him among the martyrs of their cause. Indeed, it strikes me as all the more sad and unfortunate that this is how we've greeted bin Laden's death when I think that events in Tunisia and Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world over the last few months had already given the lie to al-Qaeda's twisted theology. Think of how much better it would have been if we had greeted bin Laden's death with a statement of solidarity for our brothers and sisters in the Muslim world who have stood up against tyranny and oppression and with a pledge of renewed commitment to counter exploitation, bigotry and violence here in our own country and abroad with cooperation, respect and peace.

Because bin Laden isn't Voldemort. The story isn't over. And the only way we can expect an end to hatred and terror is first to stop resorting to it ourselves.

In Which Courage, Big & Small

2011-02-11T10:45:00.000-08:00

I'm reminded today - as Egypt continues to show the world what democracy looks like - that courage takes all shapes. Sometimes it takes the shape of fed-up workers and students, mothers and sons, Islamists and atheists packing into a crowded square and staying there for days to demand the ouster of a dictator. Sometimes it takes the shape of a young soldier, or a police lieutenant, refusing to use force against his countrymen - and even stripping off his uniform to join the sloganeering crowd. Sometimes it even takes the shape - yes, Mr. Mubarak, alright - of a used-up old oligarch finally admitting to himself that his time has come, his people have spoken, and it's best to swallow his pride.

Are there tough days ahead? Yes. The headiness of revolution fades quickly, and the real business of state-building takes time. The Egyptian people have to guard against this military interregnum becoming a permanent police state, as military interregna are wont to do. But what cannot be extinguished, no matter what's to come, is the idea that's taken old and made itself manifest again: when the people speak as one, remarkable things can happen. It's tough for me to work my way through the layers of jingoistic guck that usually coat utterances like that here in America, but for now at least it seems justified to hope.

In this connection, I'm reminded of quieter news that I read the other day: Brian Jacques, one of my favorite authors as a child, has died. His, of course, was another kind of courage - the courage it takes to believe in, and act upon, the absurd conviction that it's worthwhile to try to add a little beauty to the world. But then there's more to it than that. I may be wrong, but I'm reasonably sure it's people like Mr. Jacques - with his armed menagerie of warrior mice and badgers, all of whom had an unfailing, almost quaint, faith in the power of goodness and loyalty and peace - who convince children the world over that there are things worth fighting for, and that the fight can someday be won. Like the crowd's in Tahrir Square, his courage was exemplary.

In Which Some Things Are For Certain (The Thank You English Muffins Song!)

2010-08-09T17:51:00.001-07:00

I know, folks. It's rough out there. The crazies are out in force to protest people - the nerve! - um, wanting to build mosques and Muslim community centers, all the way from New York to California. My personal go-to anti-GOP strategy - Bush-bashing! - don't got the juice no more. And Elena Kagan might be a "dodgy lesbian" sleeper-justice out to make sure Walker's Prop 8 smack-down stays on the books when the inevitable appeal gets to the Supreme Court. Oh, wait. That last one's a GOOD THING - even if the nutso (not so?) Right's reaction to it is a wee bit terrifying.

But never fear, loyal reader(s). There are still some things you can count on. Here are two!

1.) Let Them Eat Cake! is back in business. Huzzah! And our tag line is still Thrice Weekly! so that's apparently what we're still going to try to do.

2.) The nooks and crannies are safe! There was a plot afoot to steal Thomas' English Muffins' ridiculously closely-guarded secret formula and sell it to Hostess - the maker of Twinkies, for God's sake! - but it's been foiled. Or maybe it never really happened. But still. Breakfast is safe. You can all sleep in peace!

In all seriousness, citizens: it's good to be back. All new on Wednesday. Until then, question everything - and don't smoke in bed.

In Which, When It Comes To Riots, This Blogger Will Take What He Can Get

2010-07-09T22:01:00.000-07:00

Well, good news, I guess. The scene in Oakland last night wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. Only 87 arrests and minor property damage - and (personal victory!) none of my students were involved. So I'm kind of in the mood for a little celebration, and - you know, since I'm a nerd - this is the sort of thing I inevitably gravitate toward:

College Humor's "Font Conference!" (Sorry, they don't allow embedding, and I'm not technically competent enough to bootleg.)

Enjoy! Or should I say: Mailbox. Open mailbox.

Have a great weekend, everyone! Brand new on Monday, I promise.

In Which Oakland Holds Its Breath

2010-07-07T19:41:00.001-07:00

Now, I know that, for many of you, Lindsay Lohan's 90-day prison sentence is the biggest legal news of the week. (What, prison inmates "are often donned in dark blue uniforms," and "the food is horrible?" Shocking news!) There is another story in the works, however, and it might be of just a little bit more consequence: the murder trial of Johannes Mehserle.

For those of you who don't live in the Bay Area and haven't had the story in your homes 24/7 the last few weeks, Mr. Mehserle is a former transit police officer who is accused of killing Oscar Grant III, a young man from Hayward, at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland last year. Mr. Mehserle claims Mr. Grant was involved in some sort of altercation on the train and needed to be subdued; he further claims that he meant to taser Mr. Grant but mistakenly pulled his gun and shot him dead instead. A Los Angeles jury is now tasked with deciding whether Mr. Mehserle is guilty of murder in the second degree, voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, or none of the above.

It is that eventuality - that the jury may well find Mr. Mehserle not guilty - that makes this case so fraught. Indeed, the reason that the trial is taking place in Los Angeles and not in Oakland is that public sentiment is running so high that the authorities felt Mr. Mehserle would not receive a fair shake closer to home. You see, Mr. Mehserle is white and Mr. Grant was black - and young, and unarmed at the time of the shooting. The city of Oakland is already bracing for riots.

There will, of course, be much more to say on this topic in the next few days, once the verdict is released. In the meantime, however, I would like to express my hope - inconsequential though it may be - that this does not come to blows. As an educator working in the Oakland public schools, I of course stand in solidarity with Mr. Grant's family, and the people of Oakland and Hayward. It is clear to me that Mr. Mehserle's actions were at the very least incompetent and irresponsible, and he should of course be held to account. That being said, however, there is absolutely no sense in rioting. If Mr. Mehersle is found not guilty, should there be protests? Absolutely. Should there be vigils for Mr. Grant, regardless of the verdict? Of course. But violence should be avoided at all costs, as it would inevitably compound what is already a tragedy for everyone involved. So, you know, if you're reading this, and you're thinking of rioting tomorrow (or whenever the jury reaches a verdict): don't. Please don't. If nothing else, think of it this way: do you really want to hand the police yet another opportunity to brand you mindless thugs, and beat and taser you at will? We need constructive, open, proactive engagement with the police (and other civic authorities) - for our safety, and theirs, and so that Mr. Grant's unconscionable death may at least serve some small purpose in the furtherance of peace. I know, I know - there can be no peace without justice. In this case, however, we need peace to have justice to have peace.

In Which This Blogger Comes Late To The Outrage Party, But Still Manages To Make A Few Points About Hinduism & Its Future In The US Of A

2010-07-05T22:24:00.000-07:00

From the desk of Mr. Behind The Times:

Last week, Joel Stein, a regular columnist at TIME Magazine, published this outrageous "humor piece" in which he lamented the loss of the Edison, N.J. of his youth to an inexorable tide of Indian immigration. Oh, really, Mr. Stein? Meeting new Indian-Americans helped you "to understand why India is so damn poor?" I'm sure they were glad to be of service!

The response from my brothers and sisters in the blogosphere was swift and emphatic. 8 Asians and Bangla Nation came out swinging, and then Kal Penn weighed in on The Huffington Post. By the time I got wind of the story, the bloggers on the front line had already been attacked by racist readers and had fired back; major news outlets like The Wall Street Journal and, um, Jezebel had covered the whole hullabaloo from top to bottom; and the original article had been amended with apologies (if somewhat roundabout, halfhearted ones) from both TIME and Mr. Stein himself. Glad to hear you feel "stomach-sick," Joel. (I guess being racist is like eating spicy food!)

There's really not much for me to add, since the ground is already so well-trod. But never fear, faithful reader(s)! I always find something new and exciting to be outraged about - and this time is no exception! Here goes!

I find it interesting that one of the most truly offensive, xenophobic moments of Mr. Stein's article finds its smarmy raison d'être in the now-familiar (and familiarly racist) suggestion that the outré imagery of Hinduism marks it out as irresolvably foreign: "In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if 'dot heads' was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose." Setting aside the fact that a well-regarded journalist is using his national media platform to urge people to come up with better racist slurs, this moment is indicative, I think, of a larger trend. If Islam is the most demonized religion in America, then Hinduism is surely a close second. (Other Middle Eastern and South Asian religions, like Sikhism, Zoroastrianism and the Baha'i Faith are close behind - or they would be, if more Americans knew of their existence.) And if the ugliest, most prevalent stereotype about Islam is that it somehow breeds terrorists, the corresponding stereotype about Hinduism is that it is a polytheistic cabal that requires its devotees to worship a bewildering array of elephant-nosed, multiple-armed idols. (You know, like in Indiana Jones!) Both of these images - the Muslim jihadist and the Hindu idolater - are cast in diametric opposition to America and what it stands for; it is this re-figuring of the terms of the debate that allows racists like Mr. Stein to make claims for why Muslims and Hindus should be denied entry to the United States in terms that wouldn't stand if the God-fearing Irish, or Jews (or even Mexicans) were the immigrants in question.

I mean, c'mon, people! Why do you think President Obama has had to work so hard to convince voters that even though his middle name is Hussein, he's still a Christian? Why do you think the only two Indian Americans to come to prominence in national politics - Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley - are converts to Christianity? (Am I cynical enough to believe that Piyush Amrit Jindal and Nimrata Randhawa Haley cultivate their perky American nicknames because otherwise people will be reminded they're not "real" Christians? Am I jaded enough to believe that Nimrata married a Methodist so she could ditch Sikhism without seeming like an opportunist? No, not quite. But Mr. Jindal and Ms. Haley are without question shrewd politickers, and they undoubtedly are responding to the will of the electorate on some level.) Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs aren't American enough, the logic goes, to live in our cities, let alone represent us in national politics. Which, of course, suggests an interesting twist to the incredibly disheartening debate that consumed the media during Hillary v. Barack, and undoubtedly will eventually make the rounds again before too long. Will we have a gay president before a Muslim one? A Christian woman before a Hindu man? Only time will tell, but for now let me say this: Is it hard to be non-white, non-male or non-straight in American public life? Yes, of course. But being non-Christian may well be the highest and most durable glass ceiling of all - and for a country supposedly founded on the principle of religious freedom, that's really pretty pathetic.

In Which Happy Birthday, America!

2010-07-02T22:37:00.000-07:00

So here we go again. Another 4th of July weekend! And what better way to celebrate than watching Joe Biden sing (ish) "God Bless America" (ish)...IN SPACE!

Have a great weekend, everyone. Watch out for them sparklers! And tune in Monday for some thoughts on Joel Stein and why he's "very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J." Oh, snap. Who knows where we'll go from there! (Thanks, G., for the hot tip!)

In Which Camille Paglia Misses The Sexual-Political Boat

2010-06-30T22:21:00.000-07:00

Now, I know Camille Paglia enjoys a little controversy now and then. A few gems from her post- Republican National Convention 2008 ode to Sarah Palin:

"In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment."

"A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit."

Oh, and my personal favorite:

"One reason I live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington is that, as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life. I frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall, and periodically visit Wal-Mart (its bird-seed section is nonpareil)."

Okay, so Prof. Paglia is an ornery, self-satisfied ideologue whose pronouncements sometimes come around and bite her on the caboose. Who isn't? I'm down with that! If that were all that was going on with her, I wouldn't have any reason to complain - and up until recently I didn't. But then last Friday's apalling New York Times op-ed - "No Sex Please, We're Middle Class" - came along, and everything was made plain. It seems Prof. Paglia's penchant for Harold Bloom -esque self-aggrandizement masks some serious problems with her scholarship. Oh no, Mr. Bill!

As far as I can tell, this scattershot, thinly-argued fantasia of an opinion piece blames incipient demand for female Viagra on a certain white, upper-middle-class brand of sexual stultification that's apparently rampant in our culture, and that arises from women doing "mind-based work" alongside men, men wearing "bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers," Hollywood favoring nudity over screwball innuendo, rock 'n' roll losing its blues-derived erotic edge, and everyone and their mother forgetting that in pre-Victorian agrarian societies everything was way raunchier than it is now. Oh, and lest I forget: there's the well-worn, semi-racist suggestion, here and there along the way, that poor women of color have healthier body images than their rich white sisters, and that they get it on way more because they shop at Victoria's Secret. Got that? Good!

That Prof. Paglia is just plain wrong most of the time is hardly worth noting here. (If anything, popular culture in America seems to me to be trending towards a more aggressive, and markedly gendered, sexual ideal. Hasn't Prof. Paglia seen Mad Men? Nip/Tuck? Doesn't she know who Barney Stinson is?) No, what is truly disconcerting is that Prof. Paglia - despite her "dissident feminist" credentials - neglects to consider what is perhaps the most important question that's in play in the debate over female Viagra: namely, whether or not the disorder that that drug is supposed to treat is actually as prevalent as industry researchers claim, or even if it exists at all. I mean, c'mon, let's face it. Modern medicine - and particularly psychiatry - does have a certain history of pathologizing sexual behaviors / states of being that have later turned out to be not so pathological after all. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that at least part of the reason so many women supposedly suffer from low libido is that our culture has trained them to believe that if they're not randy 24/7, there's something wrong with their insides. (A cursory, and admittedly totally arbitrary, peek at Cosmopolitan Magazine's "Sex and Love" webpage yields a deluge of high-stress reads: "7 Kinds Of Sex Every Couple Needs," "Do You Really Know How To Kiss?," "The Trick To Hotter Sex," "What His Sex (And Sleeping!) Positions Mean.") Now, I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with women learning about, and taking charge of, their own sexuality. Quite the contrary. There are undoubtedly women who would benefit from treatment with whatever sort of female Viagra eventually becomes available. But there are also surely other women who are in fact perfectly fine but who will be persuaded by Big Pharma's inevitable Female Viagra Publicity Push that they're not - and that is a real concern. Surely feminists of all stripes can agree that stigmatizing and pathologizing the female body is a lamentable - if time-honored - tack for the medical establishment to take.

So what's the deal, Prof. Paglia? Do you really believe all this stuff you're putting out there, or are you just in it for the shock value? If it's the latter, I'm not that shocked, just disappointed. Sorry. If it's the former, well, then maybe you should quit spending so much time in the bird-feed section at WalMart and get out there to see how people really live these days. (For one thing, I'm pretty sure Beyoncé does some Pilates - or, you know, something - to get to look so "bootylicious.")

Just a thought. Nothing but love.

In Which Check It Out! This Blogger Is Back!

2010-06-29T21:13:00.000-07:00

Well, hello there! Many, many apologies to all my loyal fan(s) for not having written in what seems now like a bazillion years. These last few weeks have been exciting, to say the least. Not one but two count 'em two Family Happenings (one very happy and the other not so much) obliged me to wing my way back home to Boston - and then there was the small matter of AIDS/LifeCycle, that trifle of a sporting occasion, which saw me pedal my mechanical Rocinante all the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles. So I've been busy! Rest assured, though, that I am back and better than ever! You can expect full-on Thrice Weekly! posts to resume tomorrow.

In the meantime, though, I would like to take just a moment (a wee self-aggrandizing paragraph, if you'll permit me) to thank all of those who supported me on AIDS/LifeCycle and to impress upon all of you how fantastic an experience it was. The ride was tough, to be sure, but it was well worth it to be able to spend a week in the company of such amazing people. I will remember the courage, grace, humility and irrepressible good humor of all my fellow comrades-in-spandex for a very long time. Together, we raised over $10 million for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center. Isn't that incredible? If more people in this world were like my fellow LifeCyclists, we wouldn't be in nearly as many messes as we are.

Right, then. I leave you for now with this glorious image of me, cyclist triumphant! (Other, more appealing pictures of AIDS/LifeCycle participants can be found here.) Tune in tomorrow for a hotheaded screed against Camille Paglia and female Viagra!

In Which Save The Dinky!

2010-05-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

Okay, for those of you who don't know - and man, oh man, am I outing myself with this - the Dinky is a mini-train that runs from a mini-platform on the campus of Princeton University (right by the Wawa convenience store, blessed be its name) to Princeton Junction, where commuters and hipster urban wannabes can catch the train to New York. As anyone who has ever partaken of the Dinky can attest, the ride is short but sweet - a delightfully absurd interlude in the midst of the sweat- and pleather-smelling boredom/chaos that is New Jersey Transit. I myself enjoyed the Dinky's comforts many times during my college years - which, in case you were wondering, might best be described as "Fitzgeraldesque" - and it is for that reason that I am shocked and appalled that there is a movement afoot to replace it with a bus system. A bus system. My God.

Now I really, really hope that I'm not secretly - you know, in my heart - one of those pipe-smoking elder Ivy Leaguers who come out of the woodwork now and then to speak out against coeducation and the New Deal. I hope that this call for the saving of the Dinky isn't one of those pleas for gentility that is ineluctably also a perversely nostalgic lament for those whiter, richer, maler days when gentlemen wore hats. The Dinky qua Dinky - preposterous conveyance of lazy-ass Organization Kids that it undoubtedly is - is elitist, that much is certain. But there is also such a thing as charm, tainted as it is these days with the cloying rosé of preppy chic, and the Dinky has it in spades. It's a cliché, I know, but the more efficient the world becomes - and by efficient I mean efficient, damnit - the more soulless it will tend to be. If Princeton has much to gain from replacing the good old Dink with a bus system, it has much to lose as well. And so I say, as unironically as I am able, Save The Dinky - and also please don't stop reading Let Them Eat Cake! now you know I'm such a fuddy-dud.

In Which This Blogger Is Shocked That "Pygmy" Is Still An Acceptable Word

2010-05-12T23:09:00.000-07:00

Riddle me this. How is it that this feature got past the editorial staff at The New York Times and made it onto the front page? How is it that veteran reporter Thomas McNeil Jr. - who is obviously both well-informed and well-intentioned - didn't balk at filing a report about AIDS in Uganda that fell back on pretty much every single cliche imaginable for this sort of journalism? Really, I want to know: how is it that this still happens, and routinely, and apparently in good conscience? Why aren't more people hopping mad like me?

Now, don't get me wrong. The global fight against HIV and AIDS is in crisis, and much must be done - and soon - to prevent a calamitous backslide into the sort of epidemics we saw in the '80s and '90s, particularly in the developing world. But that's no excuse for shoddy, bordering-on-racist reporting. In fact, what we need now is just the opposite: non-shoddy, non-bordering-on-racist investigative journalism that shows the AIDS crisis in all its true complexity, and in-so-doing demonstrates, with the inexorable force of moral imperative, why we must act. In the meantime, though - you know, while we wait for The New York Times to get its ever-loving act together - might I venture to clear up a few of the misconceptions to which Mr. McNeil and others appear to cleave? I'm under no illusion that my outrage will make all that much difference - but still, you know, damn, it'll feel good to get this off my chest.

1.) It's not okay to lead off a story about HIV/AIDS donor countries and their operations in Africa - or, to be more precise, the video you produce to accompany said story - with a troupe of seropositive Ugandan youth singing a song called "America, Thank You So Much." I know it's hard to believe, but black people the world over don't just sit around being grateful to rich white people for trying to better their lives. Ugandans' sole occupation - besides being sick, weepy, or dancing, of course (see #2, below) - is not randomly coming up to nice white lady doctors to thank them for trying to save their lives. As a matter of fact, Ugandans - like pretty much everybody, actually! - don't have a sole occupation. They do lots of things - and one of those things just happens to be trying to save their own damn lives, thank you very much. If you're American, and all you do is write about poor black people loving Americans just oh-so-much, all you do is come off looking preening and self-satisfied. Yes, they love us! Let me bask in the glow of their love! Never mind that Western foreign aid is a mere pittance compared with military spending! And never mind that PEPFAR was not so much into condoms and thus not so much into prevention! I think someone's coming over to shake my hand!

2.) It's not okay to write an article about AIDS in Africa and have a slide show to go with it that features crying "native" women, crippled and/or emaciated "native" women and children - or, my personal favorite, a photogenic white lady doctor looking harried but still somehow beatific as she struggles to cope with the human tide of black suffering that's washed up at her clinic door. Photojournalism is about showing us what else there is to see, not about trooping all over the countryside to find the most salacious - and therefore stereotypical - scenes you can get on celluloid. The Suffering Black Person(s) photograph is sui generis now, and it tells us nothing except that that is what we want to see. And - let's just think about this for a moment, shall we? - if we like black people to be suffering-looking in the photos we take of them, then what impetus is there, really, for us to try to relieve that suffering in real life?

3.) It's not okay to reference the proximity of "pygmy" settlements - and their proximity to gorilla-trek resorts - as proof that the part of the world from which you're filing your report is remote, backward and/or alive with contradictions. Seriously. Again, you know, the preening thing. Also, you sound a little racist.

4.) It's not okay to make the claim that if everyone in the Third World who is living with HIV/AIDS were American, they'd all be receiving treatment - as if the U.S. had no AIDS problem to speak of, and was full-on treating anyone and everyone who showed even the slightest sign of being infected. As a matter of fact, the latest estimates put the number of Americans living with AIDS at 1 million, give or take, with African Americans making up the lion's share of new infections (around 55,000 total a year). You think all those people have health insurance? You think if they tried to get insurance once they got sick and the actuaries found out they had HIV they'd have much chance of getting a plan? (At least that's changing, thank goodness!) Before we congratulate ourselves too much on all the good we're doing in the world, we might want to have a look at the skeletons - I know it's macabre, but hey - in our own closet.

5.) It's not okay to feed the jingoistic rabidity of your more rapacious commentators - some of whom apparently actually believe that AIDS is nature's way of weeding out poor, weak, disadvantaged black people from all of us strong, rich, evolutionarily superior whites here in the West - by playing the whole African-governments-are-corrupt-and-therefore-don't-deserve-assistance card. Last I checked, governments were corrupt the world over. (The fact that Hamid Karzai's opium-warlord brother probably stole the election for him doesn't stop us from doing business in that part of the world, now does it?) Saying African countries like Uganda are corrupt (because they want to build roads! and have some sort of national defense!) inevitably leads to the suggestion that we should just leave them alone to get a taste of the real world - to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, if you will, like we supposedly did, rooting out corruption and establishing the rule of law and pestilence-less democracy (see #4, above) all by ourselves - and that, my friends, is just plain ignorant of history. Because, you know, the West's rise to economic dominance had nothing at all to do with the systematic exploitation of the entire rest of the world. And, you know, because the pitiful outflow of foreign aid we so self-righteously dole out isn't totally dwarfed by the outrageous inflow of debt repayment from all those super-corrupt totally poor countries (like Uganda!) we can't trust to know the value of a dollar. That makes total sense! Cut 'em off! Hang 'em out to dry!

I could go on and on here, but I think you get the point. It's time to stop rehashing the same old stereotypes and misconceptions. If we are to stop what Mr. McNeil is right to suggest is an impending catastrophic defeat in the war against HIV and AIDS, we have to act. But before we act - indeed, in order to act - we have to get our act together.

In Which Favorites On The Interwebs Part The Second

2010-05-09T21:49:00.000-07:00

So I'm back. And better than ever. Read my lips: the days of my delinquency are decidedly of yore. I absolutely pinky swear.

To celebrate my return to Thrice Weekly! publication, I've decided to put together a second edition of sorts of what my vanity stats on Analytics tell me is my Most Popular Post Ever - namely, that totally rad entry from a little over a month ago in which I touted the multitudinous merits of Ming Doyle and the fine persons of Pomplamoose. (Is the popularity of that post an indication that people genuinely like to know what I like? Or is it just that I bogeyed other people's buzz a little more effectively then than I have on other occasions?) Of course, this time around the whole thing will be that much more caliente, since there will be some embedding up in this piece, and it will be grand. So. Without any further ado, Four (More) Things On The Interwebs I Think Are Awesome.

1.) Ke$Ha's performance of "Tik Tok" on SNL.

Did anyone stop to think maybe we are the aliens? That's a good question, K$. Of course, I'm not so much interested in the answer as I am digging the fact you asked it so un-ironically. I also really like how your performance manages to incorporate a Stars & Stripes Evel Knievel cape, astronaut go-go dancers in silver spandex, and a Wurlitzer controlled by green lasers - all the while still seeming somehow sweetly amateurish and stage-frighty. Much more fun than your vaguely offensive (and not coincidentally Avatar-esque) glow-in-the-dark-warpaint-and-feathers routine for "Your Love Is My Drug!" (I was almost going to give you a by there for your excellent use of keytar, but then I thought that wouldn't be fair. I am nothing if not impartial.) So, you know, kudos! More of the former, less of the latter, and you could go far!

2.) "Bitchslap: A Column About Women and Fighting" and "The Conflicted Existence Of A Female Porn Writer" on McSweeney's. Yes, I know, you probably already knew that I like to read McSweeney's. Yes, I do seem the type. Us over-educated johnny-come-lately hipster-wonks do have a pretty strong herd thing going on these days, and we do love experimental fiction and literary satire like they're going out of style - which maybe they are. But my love for McSweeney's - and especially its Internet Tendency - goes beyond such obvious objects of vintage-plaid affection as "Norse History For Bostonians" and "Letters From An Earth Ball To, Or Concerning, Sean Hannity." No, I like the serious stuff too, and the two more-or-less semi-monthly columns to which I made reference above are prime examples of how good the old ex-clown McSweeney's is getting to be in that department. "Bitchslap" is a wonderfully written, endlessly compelling entre into the life and opinions of Susan Schorn, who is a feminist and also a karate black-belt from Texas. For a taste of her wit and warmth and penetrating wisdom, I heartily recommend taking a look at "Pain Is Womanly, And Other Bullshit Myths Of Childbirth" and going on from there. Lynsey G.'s "Conflicted" column - which chronicles her still-unfolding career as a reviewer of adult DVDs - is perhaps more one-note than the work Ms. Schorn is doing, but it is by no means one-trick-pony. The internet sets the bar pretty low for interesting / non-obnoxious commentary on gender issues, but even if they were found in more enlightened habitats, "Bitchslap" and "Conflicted" would be impressive. So get reading! Change your mind about things you didn't even know you'd made up your mind about! You won't regret it!

3.) The Lawrence Hall of Science's daily TimeLapse videos of the view from the Berkeley Hills. (I mean - speaking of wonks, right?) Here's yesterday where I live, in two breathtakingly beautiful minutes:

Some of the videos in LHS' archive are even more spectacular - and then of course there's this one, which shows for once and for all why goats, and not that strangely fem lumberjack bear Smokey, should be the public face of fire safety. But I kind of like the peaceful, Zen-like quality of unremarkable days like yesterday. I mean, who needs crazy-pretty sunsets when ordinary weather looks like that? (Potential side effects of tuning in each day include wanting desperately to move to the Bay Area - which is not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but still. You have been forewarned.)

4.) ZeFrank.com. Ze Frank is a pretty interesting guy, what with all the wacky projects he comes up with almost every day. But what I appreciate most about him is not his obvious creativity but his genuine concern for other people and their well-being. Case in point: when a fan wrote to him to tell him how anxious and unhappy she was, he took it upon himself to write her a song and then get a whole bunch of people (probably from all over the world) to sing it for her. Here's the final cut he mixed from all of the source recordings people sent in:
<a href="http://zefrank.bandcamp.com/track/chillout">chillout by zefrank</a>
I know it's cheesy and everything, but think how much it must have meant for that woman - lonely and sad as she was - to know that not only did this total stranger write a song to make her feel better, he also invited ordinary people (dozens of them! whom neither of them had met!) to participate - and participate they did. If that doesn't make you feel less alone, I don't know what will - and if, goldarnit, that's not what the internet is, or should be, for, then I don't know what the heck we're doing here.

On that note - be well, everybody. Until Wednesday!

In Which Fragrant & Hot Marxism

2010-05-04T20:09:00.001-07:00

Let Them Eat Cake! has found its new motto. Fragrant and hot Marxism, coming right up.

(For more images from the Times' Chinglish feature, click here.)

I have lots more characteristically inconsequential thoughts to share, but Glee is on in a few minutes and I absolutely must go. Until tomorrow, then! Farewell!

In Which, Even In The Midst Of All This Mess, Some Waldo-Esque Glimpses Of Why I Love To Be Alive

2010-04-29T18:44:00.000-07:00

So there's plenty of discouraging news in the world today - from the massive and growing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the really pretty sad fact that even the U.S. military is as dependent on (and burnt out by) PowerPoint as the rest of us - and I could go on and on about it all (in all its mood-killing splendor), but G. and I are leaving for Big Sur in a few minutes, and somehow I'd rather focus on something that makes me happy. So. Check it out:

Amazing, no? Even if you try to rain on my parade and tell me that isn't really Werner Herzog, which maybe it isn't, I don't care. This is amazing stuff - and it's just that little bit of proof I needed that maybe there's hope for all of us, after all. At this point I'll take what I can get.

Have a good weekend, friend. Keep fighting the good fight. Next post on Tuesday.

In Which This Blogger Subjects The Tea Party, In Absentia, To A Litmus Test Of Leadership

2010-04-28T00:07:00.000-07:00

Let's start off today by taking Rush Limbaugh at his word. (Don't worry, people - it's just a thought experiment!) Mr. Limbaugh alleges that the Tea Party movement is all about love - they're "full of love," he tell us! - and that it constitutes the first time since the Civil War that "everyday citizens" have "risen up." For the full effect, sit back, relax, close your eyes, and lose yourself in the melodious psychosis of Rush's silky growl:

Let's set aside for a moment the perverse way in which Mr. Limbaugh dispenses with the Women's Suffrage Movement, the Labor Movement, the Peace Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the LGBT Rights Movement, the Disability Rights Movement, and countless others, and discredits their protagonists as un-ordinary and un-American. The question still remains: in what way are the Tea Partiers "full of love?" How does being an anti-tax activist committed to returning the United States to the vision supposedly enshrined by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution make one so lovey-dovey? Is there some social-justice component to the TP platform that I'm missing?

Now, please believe me that I'm trying my commie best to understand the good people that make up Mr. Limbaugh, Ms. Palin and Mr. Beck's Grand Army of the Republic. Still, though - and perhaps its shell-shock from the Bush Jr. years - I can't quite bring myself to believe that the Tea Party's anti-tax rhetoric isn't just a front for jingoism and Big Oil. And so today I'd like to submit a three-point litmus test of leadership and good faith to the Tea Party, whereversoever it abides, in order that it may prove to this skeptic that it really is just a tax thing - that it's all about the love. So read on, brave souls, Tea Partiers or otherwise, and if you know of anything that could enlighten me vis-a-vis these my concerns, by all means let me the heck know!

1.) Immigration Reform. Charles M. Blow, of the New York Times alleges that the Tea Party's claim that it is not an all-white movement is pretty much bull, and überblogger Tim Wise's fierce little piece on The Party and white privilege has gone viral on the 'webs. But just because 98% of Tea Partiers are white doesn't mean that they're racist, does it? It all about the taxes! And the love! The litmus test here is whether or not the Tea Party comes out against SB 1070 in Arizona and for meaningful federal immigration reform that - and this is crucial - includes a guest worker program and a path for citizenship for illegal aliens already in the country. The logic here is simple. Illegal aliens do not pay taxes and yet they use public services. That means everyone else is paying taxes to support them. If all the people who are in the country illegally were given a path to citizenship, many of them would take it - and thus become tax-paying citizens who are doing their share to subsidize the services they're already using. A formalized guest worker program would - you guessed it! - further reduce the tax burden on American citizens. Imagine the sort of revenue that would be generated if every migrant farmhand who wanted to work a harvest in the U.S. had to pay $50 at the border for a six-month work permit. That's money in the bank! And, what is more, if all migrant workers were properly credentialed, they'd have to be paid at least minimum wage, which would mean that there would be no incentive for employers to hire illegal aliens instead of U.S. citizens. So - you know, to recap - sensible immigration reform means lower taxes, more jobs, and an end to the fear and violence and mistrust that the current system (to say nothing of the crazy crap that will go down if SB 1070 goes into effect) necessarily entails. It's sound policy, and if the Tea Party is in fact about taxes and love - and not, say, gun-totin' vigilante bigotry - it should be right up their alley.

2.) Financial Regulation. The specifics of the floor fight going on in the Senate about financial regulatory reform aren't really the point. The point is that if the Tea Party really is serious about its oft-stated opposition to using tax-payer money to bail out Detroit and Wall Street and so on, it needs to get behind a regulatory overhaul of the financial system. As with immigration reform, the logic here is simple. You have to either restrict the type of risk big firms can take on, so that major financial crises like the Great Recession never - we hope! - occur again or you have to be ready to use government money to rescue the markets when that unregulated risk goes bad. Since preventive medicine - regulation - costs a pittance when compared to full-on E.R.-style blood-and-guts surgery - bail-outs - it makes pretty damn good fiscal sense to give the regulators their bite back. Ordinary conservatives watched and did nothing as successive Republican administrations let our financial watchdog's teeth decay and fall out, and then - under Reagan and the Bushes - stole the poor pooch's dentures altogether. If Tea Partiers really hate the Bush/Obama stimulus package as much as they say they do then they should be out on the steps of the Capitol screaming bloody blue murder for the Senate to stop their middle-school bickering and get something passed already.

3.) Energy and Climate Change. Thomas Friedman had an interesting column out on Saturday - and a follow-up yesterday - that raised the prospect of a Green Tea Party. (What's with the New York Times and its stupid tea-related puns?) Most people I know agree that it's reasonable to act on climate change merely because inaction will lead to what Dr. Joe Romm appropriately calls "Hell and High Water" - last I checked, Armageddon was a pretty good motivator! - but for all those climate-science skeptics in the Tea Party there's a few added bonuses to ending our dependence on foreign oil and building up a green grid. First off, a "Patriot Tax" on imported oil will raise a ton of money - lowering our taxes! - and in the process stick it to some of the most totalitarian and corrupt governments on the planet. Yay! Second, the aggressive promotion of green technology will create jobs and keep America competitive in a new global market. Double yay! And, finally, reducing the carbon-based pollutants in our atmosphere will make us all healthier, and thus less likely to need rationed Obamacare! Triple yay! If the Tea Party is really pro-love and anti-tax - and not, you know, in the sweaty pockets of Big Oil - this is the issue for them.

So there you have it. I'm waiting. Any day now, if these people really mean what they say, we're going to see Sarah Palin standing in UN Plaza with Gavin Newsom touting San Francisco's boycott of Arizona, Glenn Beck broadcasting his call for substantial progress on financial re-regulation from the steps of the Capitol Building, and Rush Limbaugh touting the many benefits of new off-shore wind-farm projects like the one that just got approved for Nantucket Sound on his radio show. (Honestly, Kennedy-s, I don't think it's gonna ruin your view.) Is all that really gonna happen? I don't know. I hope so. The ball's in the Tea Party's court. Let's wait and see if they deliver, or if they're really what they say they're not.

In Which What A Difference A Day Makes

2010-04-23T22:23:00.000-07:00

So I was originally planning today's post- Earth Day blog post as a sort of tribute to the wild and woolly wonders of the world - including the civet, which, um, produces a particularly wonderful kind of joe (beans go for $227 a pound!) by eating coffee cherries and dispensing with the un-digestible bits just as you might expect it to. But then, well, this happened, and I had to switch gears. (Sorry in advance that this post is a little spare citation-wise; I thought it best to strike while the outrage was hot, even without my usual cornucopia of links.)

Now, I know that pundits of all stripes were expecting Gov. Brewer to sign this legislation. But somehow I thought politics in America - even politics in Arizona, the home on the range of John McCain's demented drive Ever Rightward - was better than this. Somehow I thought we were above passing a law that authorizes the police to detain anyone they have "reason to suspect" is in the country illegally. Somehow I thought this wasn't the sort of country that would require people to carry papers proving who they are and why they should be allowed to remain. Evidently I was wrong, or just naive, and either way it's heartbreaking.

Even if we put aside for a moment the obvious legal challenges that can and should be made to this law - for one thing, setting immigration policy is and always has been an exclusively federal prerogative, for a whole bunch of readily-apparent reasons - it remains terribly flawed, and irretrievably stupid. For all Gov. Brewer's exculpatory insistence that the enforcement of SB 1070 will not require racial profiling, it is beyond obvious that only Latinos will be targeted by the police for identity checks, especially if they're wearing illegal-alien-type shoes. These brute squad tactics will only worsen the already frayed relationship Arizona Latinos have with law enforcement - you know, since they live under threat of humiliation and imprisonment already - and make them even less likely to cooperate on border-crossing issues of legitimate concern. Or, to put it another way: all this bill does is empower the police to harass law-abiding Latinos and in-so-doing deprive the DEA and the FBI of key witnesses to drug-smuggling and human-trafficking cases that would have been a cinch to prosecute otherwise. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Add to that the fact that Latinos are a huge voting block, particularly in the Southwest, and you have the perfect set-up for Arizona conservatives to shoot themselves in the foot about ten million times.

Of course, any satisfaction I might have that this will almost certainly backfire on the GOP is dwarfed by the grief - and it is real grief - I feel at the inhumanity of it all. Accusations of fascism and Nazism fly around a lot these days, and I am tempted to make the connection here. But in point of fact this law reminds me much more of the discriminatory ethos that sustained European colonialism well into the late-twentieth-century, and even (apparently) beyond. Lest we forget, it was a similar fear of being supplanted, overrun, made irrelevant, that prompted a remarkably similar white landowning class to institute the radically exclusionary policy of apartheid in South Africa. The Afrikaners were on the wrong side of history then, and Gov. Brewer and the other supporters of this bill are right there with them now. They deserve much the same treatment. Boycott Arizona; vote Ms. Brewer out; and repeal this bill. You know it's the right thing to do.

In Which Who Said Magnanimity Had To Be Ho-Hum?

2010-04-21T22:01:00.000-07:00

So today, for the first time ever on Let Them Eat Cake!, I've decided to start embedding the videos I link to. Nerd joy! (I may have waffled to one or more of you at one time or another about how embedding videos would infringe upon the "design" of my blog, but - let's face it - that was total bull. I just couldn't figure out how to do it.) To celebrate, I'm sharing the following snippet of talkie-motion-picture goodness with you. Prepare your minds to be blown.

That's right. That's the Policy and Government Partnerships department of Save The Children UK - a bunch of high-minded British wonks if ever there was one - getting down to Katrina and the Waves. No fooling. And they shot it one take! Of course, it's all for a good cause. You can show your appreciation - show your appreciation! - by making a donation to Save The Children here. Go ahead. Be magnanimous. You know you want to.

Speaking of magnanimity, I wanted to piggyback on Monday's post and offer up two stellar examples of what-the-crap I was talking about vis-a-vis standing up to the Tea Party and sending them packing - with love. The two gentlemen to whom I am shortly to refer are, at least from where I sit, top-notch human beings. And they've managed to fight back against the the Right Wing Noise Machine and its nasty little army of conservathugs - props to the good people at The Joshua Blog (outstanding name, by the way!) for coming up with that one - without losing track of their civility. So, role models! Yes! I love me some of that!

Here goes:

1.) Jon Stewart. Okay, yes, it's gotten so that Mr. Stewart is Public Enemy Number 1 over at Fox News - Bill O'Reilly went so far as to call him "the point man for the left wing media in America" - and not without good reason. After all, Mr. Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show staff have been fairly relentless in their (I think courageous) lampoonery of the Tea Party movement and its baby-daddy Fox, upbraiding it early and often for its hypocrisy and its, you know, tenuous grasp of the facts. Last night, Mr. Stewart even went so far as to hire a mini gospel choir for a song-and-dance number telling Bernie Goldberg and others at Fox News to go f--k themselves for being "cynical" and "disingenuous." What's that you say? Embed the video? Well, by all means!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Bernie Goldberg Fires Back

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

Now, you may well ask why I consider someone who gets down and funky while calling people names a role model for how we might defuse our ticking time bomb of a political culture. I'm glad you asked. It's because after he finished laying into Fox News - or, as Mr. Goldberg put it "throwing spitballs at a battleship" - Mr. Stewart had a long, substantive sit-down with Tea Party apologist and crazy-young author John O'Hara. That's what I'm talking about, people. By all means, poke fun at Fox & Co. But be prepared to follow that up with some real conversation - if only because, once you let them talk, they can't hold it against you that they never get to share their point of view. Boom! Two birds, say hello to one stone!

Which brings me to my second role-model-of-the-day:

2.) California State Senator Leland Yee. For those of you who haven't been following the story, Mr. Yee is now facing death threats - to say nothing of an avalanche of racist and homophobic hate mail - because he had the audacity to inquire about Sarah Palin's upcoming speaking engagement at California State University Stanislaus. You see, California's public education system, as you may have heard somewhere or other, is in the crapper money-wise, and Senator Lee - plus, you know, the intrepid CSU-Stanislaus students who went dumpster-diving to find Ms. Palin's contract - thought maybe the University should be honest about precisely how many thousands of dollars Ms. Palin was being paid to appear. (The pages from the contract those commie dumpster-divers found didn't mention a dollar amount, but they did specify that the former governor will require bendy drinking straws and pre-screened audience questions at the event.) Let me reiterate this point. Mr. Yee did not seek to stop Ms. Palin from speaking. He merely inquired how much public money she was being paid. It was Palinophiles that ramped up the rhetoric, what with all the death threats and all; Sen. Lee has stayed remarkably cool, saying only that "It is unfortunate acts like these that demonstrate why we must continue to be vigilant against hate and intolerance." Lesser public servants than Mr. Yee might be cowed by the abuse he now faces, or else provoked into anger. It takes far more guts to take the moral high ground, as he has - and for that he should be commended.

So that's it - the moral of the story. Engage with your whackjob Right Wing friends, but don't be intimidated by the strength of their convictions. Keep your sense of humor about the inane things they say, but be open and civil and honest about the stuff that makes at least a little sense. Little by little, person by person, we'll ratchet this conversation back down to a reasonable decibel level. At least then our neighbors won't complain.

In Which This Blogger's Hiatus Is Semi-Accounted For, And The Tea Party Is Deservedly Mocked

2010-04-19T20:54:00.000-07:00

Okay, yes, I know. Let Them Eat Cake! took a totally unacceptable eight days off last week, leaving all its loyal fans high and dry - at least when it came to screechy liberal screeds and grouchy fulminations on the sorry state of The American Music Video. So sorry! Won't happen again! It was just that it was G.'s birthday last week, and work was so crazy it made me feel like I was living in a nuclear non-proliferation conference photo montage, and, well, I got a wee bit lazypants. But! We're back! And we're better than ever! So. Yes!

I wanted to ease myself back into the swing of things today - warm up a little in the bullpen, so to speak (which reminds me: um, everything okay, Red Sox?) - and so I thought I might take a few shots at everybody's favorite Tea Party. I mean, that's sort of like taking candy from a baby, isn't it? It's the liberal blogging bunny hill. Perfect to get up and running again. A few cracks about their spot-on spelling and Kelsey Grammer's snotty turn as pitch-man for their new "anti-mainstream" media outlet and we're off to the races! The jokes practically write themselves! I mean, even the President is using old material - that's how easy it is! Watching The Centerfold Senator flail about in his pretty much hopeless attempt to please his handlers and retain his seat is really just icing on the cake. I have no idea what Mr. Brown meant when he told Bob Schieffer "I’ve heard illegal immigration is going to come forth. When we’re in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the only thing they talked about from the Presidents all the way down to the poorest farmer were jobs. Since I’ve been here, I’ve heard zero talk about jobs," but it sure is funny. (Almost as funny as when he voted with the Democrats to, you know, actually do something about that pesky jobs problem he's so concerned about these days, and all his erstwhile Tea Party friends went totally ape on his Facebook wall!) Good stuff, that. It's great to be back.

Leave it to Bill Clinton to rain on my parade. Today's the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing? Timothy McVeigh was inspired to blow up the Federal Building by rhetoric that bears a striking resemblance to the Tea Party's talking points today? People take this ridiculous stuff seriously enough to actually hurt people over it? Way to be a welcome-back buzz kill, Bill.

Of course, President Clinton's sobering assessment of the state of right-wing dissent raises a very important question. If the Tea Party and its anti-government sloganeering really are at least partially to blame for some of the threats that progressive lawmakers and civil society activists have faced in the last few months, then how should we respond? In other words, and paraphrasing Gandhi: with what sort of "soul force" should we meet, and overcome, the brute force of the Tea Party movement? Is it better to treat their grievances as legitimate, no matter how rabid and mean-spirited they seem, and risk lending credence to bigotry and paranoid hoo-ha in the name of defusing their anger? Or is it better to just make fun of them, as I have happily done time and time again, in the hope that ridicule will show them up for who they are, and not push them into a darker, more marginal space, in which to nurture increasingly explosive resentment? Or is it better, in the long-run if not always in the short-term, to meet their self-righteousness and fear-mongering with courage, humility, and grace - the sort of courage, humility, and grace it takes to demonstrate, in our daily lives as much as in our political discourse, that being open-hearted and broad-minded is always better than being petty and willfully insular, that embracing hope is not the same as abandoning reason, and that caring for one another is and always will be our highest calling in this world?

Ugh. No one ever said Papa Don't Preach. But you know I'm right. We've made fun of the Tea Party enough. It's out of our system now. (And besides, it was way too easy to begin with.) Let's move on, and - in the spirit of Gandhi, Mandela, and King - let's get down to the business of showing the world why we're in the right, and not just how they're in the stupid.

In Which A 50¢ Addendum

2010-04-10T17:05:00.000-07:00

I know you're probably all sick of my music video -inspired pontifications, and I promise to cease and desist forthwith, but I just couldn't resist adding the following to The Badu/Rihanna Screed Of Not-Quite Yore:

50 Cent's "Ayo Technology," featuring Justin Timberlake.

This one's a real winner, people. Yet more proof - if any more proof were needed - that the tawdriest performances by the tawdriest female pop performers pale into insignificance when set alongside the juvenile fantasies of their male counterparts. The point of "Ayo Technology," as far as I can see, is that all women are nymphomaniacs - or, more to the point, Fembots, whom men can control (even remotely!) with their almost supernatural powers of sexual charisma. The fact that 50 first establishes contact with / control over his inamorata by taking a gander at her in his rifle scope is, let's face it, indicative. (Oh, yeah, I forgot that women wear lingerie and nothing else when driving little red sports cars! That's like a rule, isn't it?) This is violent, stupid, misogynist trash that would be funny if the people who made it weren't so pleased with themselves. But even the night-vision sex-tape -looking stuff is for real, which is just pathetic, and Justin Timberlake's wry little grin as he square-dances around 50 in his suspenders isn't enough to redeem it.

C'mon, fellas. Please don't tell me Justin Bieber is our best and only hope for a male pop star whose music isn't demeaning to women. Because that would be sad - if remarkably pimple-free.

In Which, In Case You Were Wondering, Rihanna Is Totally Way Tawdrier Than Erykah Badu

2010-04-08T15:48:00.000-07:00

It all began innocently enough. Erykah Badu, the Grammy Award -winning neo-soul singer, watched indie darlings Matt and Kim's video for "Lessons Learned" - which features them getting naked in Times Square, tackled by police and (Kim, anyway) run over by a bus - and got inspired. She proceeded to make her own guerrilla-style video for her new single "Window Seat" - featuring (you guessed it) a perambulatory striptease in downtown Dallas and (maybe you didn't) her miming getting shot on the very spot where John F. Kennedy was. Not a big deal, right? A little public nudity never hurt anyone - and both videos duly pixelate the naughty bits. No harm done.

Well, not according to Ida Espinosa, a witness to Ms. Badu's shoot, and not according to the Dallas Police Department, to which she made a complaint. Matt and Kim may have gotten away bruised but otherwise scot-free from their run-in with the police, but Ms. Badu is facing a disorderly conduct charge - according to Yahoo and BBC News - and that means a fine of up to $500. Hmmm. I'm intrigued. And because I'm intrigued, and because I have a blog, I'm going to subject you to my Thoughts On The Matter. So strap yourself in. This is gonna be a long one.

First off, let's dispense with the notion that we should feel bad for Ms. Badu vis-a-vis said $500 fine. Artists (and this is art, people) who appear naked in public in order to challenge conformity - or, as Ms. Badu puts it (in blue blood seeping from her head), "groupthink" - are fully prepared for charges of indecency, and even welcome them as a further means of making their point. In her ex-post-facto Tweets, Ms. Badu seemed to take special pride in the fact that people yelled at her to put her clothes back on even as she continued with her performance. In my view - and it's a view shared by others out there on the 'webs - the provocative thing about the "Window Seat" video isn't that Ms. Badu is naked by the end, since many artists have used nudity to make similar points, but that she re-enacts the iconic moment of JFK's assassination in such a visceral way. That said, the issue of how and to what extent women's bodies are present in public life is and probably always will be fraught - I'm thinking everything from miniskirts to burqas here - and I don't mean to dismiss it out of hand. And I still haven't answered my own question: why is Ms. Badu being penalized for her art when Matt and Kim weren't for theirs?

Well, for one thing, Matt and Kim had a permit to shoot (if a dubious one) and Ms. Badu didn't. There's also a difference, permissiveness-wise, between New York City and Dallas, Texas; Matt and Kim shot their video on the Naked Cowboy's territory. Also, Matt is a man, and ever since our parents' streaking days in college, male public nudity has been more palatable than female. And then, of course, there's the humongous elephant in the room: Ms. Badu is black, and Matt and Kim are skinny, white, American Apparel -wearing hipsters. John Cheney-Lippold has a very interesting piece on Truthdig in which he argues that Ms. Badu has had to face the music more than Messrs. Matt and Kim have because she's black, and because black sexuality - and in particular black female sexuality - has been pathologized in the West for centuries. In his view, Ms. Badu is a latter-day Saartjie Baartman - better known, perhaps, as early 19th-century freak-show attraction The Hottentot Venus; it is the very fact of her body that makes it scandalous. Mr. Cheney-Lippold is absolutely right to point to the importance of race here; racial prejudice is hardwired in all of our minds, like it or not, and we ignore it at our peril. However, in this day and age, there are many more black female bodies "on display" than there were in Saartjie Baartman's time, and if we acknowledge that part of the uproar surrounding Ms. Badu's performance has to do with race, we must also ask ourselves why she has been singled out for indignation while other black female performers haven't.

In this regard I turn, I hope not illogically, to Rihanna. The video for Rihanna's latest smash-hit "Rude Boy" was feted upon its release two months ago as a return to the singer's Caribbean dance-hall roots. Maybe that's MTV's coded way of saying that she looks and seems more black in this video than she did, say, in "Hard" - you know, what with all the lions and zebras and high-fashion send-ups of African and Caribbean style. So, okay, another black female performer. But the only controversy swirling around "Rude Boy," as opposed to the media-storm surrounding Ms. Badu and "Window Seat," is that Rihanna's latest bears a striking resemblance to M.I.A.'s videos for "Boyz" and "Galang." (Um, sidebar: did M.I.A. really Tweet that Rihanna sold her soul to the Devil? Awesome!) No one - okay, no one except the Barbados Free Press - seems to care that "Rude Boy" is so blatantly about sex you don't even have to work to see it. I mean, really? "Come here, rude boy, boy; can you get it up? / Come here rude boy, boy; is you big enough?" Now, I know that Rihanna didn't perform any of the dance moves in the video nude in front on children on the street in Dallas - that would probably get her booked for disorderly conduct too - but still. Her shtick seems way, way tawdrier than Ms. Badu's to me, and there's nary a peep of protest. Is it just that she's famous? Is it just that she panders to stereotypes instead of trying to dispel them? Or is that we Americans somehow need black women's bodies to be dressed up in innuendo and hype, because the real thing - even when it's put out there without any discernible sexual agenda, as Ms. Badu's was - is much too much to handle?

It's impossible to say, although I have my suspicions. In the end, the most eloquent voice on the matter may well be Ms. Badu's, in the new, backwards, version of "Window Seat" she's posted on her website. Watching her clothes fly back onto her body as she moves backwards from her death is strangely hypnotic - and may constitute the most beautiful, graceful act of defiance I've seen from an artist in quite some time.

In Which Opening Day At Fenway Park Is Likened To Some Druidic Fete At Stonehenge

2010-04-06T01:05:00.000-07:00

It's not all gloom and doom. Yes, there was yet another earthquake this past weekend, and it was a whole lot closer to home than the last couple were. And yes, there was bad news out of Pakistan today - and plenty more that didn't get reported out of Afghanistan, and the D.R.C., and Palestine, and Haiti. And yet, possessed as I no doubt am of a prone-to-brooding mind, I just couldn't wallow in all the fear and uncertainty Dick Cheney wants me to wallow in today. It's not the nature of the world to be entirely without hope. No matter how bleak our outlook seems - indeed, no matter what - there's always some sort of yes, but also. Or, to put it another way: it's your party, you can mope if you want to, but that won't stop your wife from bringing home a National Science Fellowship (!), and you know you're gonna be happy about that.

G. is too modest to let me wax lyrical about her ridiculously prestigious award, so I'll move right along to the other reason I felt good today, despite, you know, the state of the world. Let me set the scene: Opening Day at Fenway Park. Red Sox and Yankees. Beantown and the Bronx. And the Sox come from behind and take it, 9-7. Boom.

Now, you may be asking, isn't it, well, ironic - okay, fine, here's the link, sing along all you want - that I'm invoking one of the longest-standing and bitterest rivalries in modern sporting memory in support of my claim that there's still peace and justice and sunshine in the world? Well, yes. And isn't Major League Baseball probably the most tradition- and testosterone-soaked of American sports, with the possible exception of football? Um. And doesn't the MLB have a particularly ugly history of doping, gambling and racism - from which I can't exactly exempt the Red Sox? Well, yes, but.... Here's the thing. I'm from Boston, so after a certain point none of that computes. Opening Day at Fenway Park, especially when it coincides with those ancient rituals of bunny-birth that early Christians grafted onto Easter, is a marker of change and renewal, like the summer solstice at Stonehenge. And if the Sox are playing the Evil Empire? And if they win? We're talking major cosmic event.

Of course, there are many, many games - until well into the fall, if you catch my drift - left to be played this season. And, the way things are going in the world these days, good news may be hard to come by. But still, I've got a good feeling that I just can't shake. As we used to say, before we were good again: this'll be the year.

In Which Isn't This What The Internet Is For?

2010-04-02T23:38:00.000-07:00

So when I was growing up, the then-fledgling internet was a place where creepy lonely people were trying to connect. The introduction of AOL and AIM narrowed the circle, so to speak, carving out a space in which naturally paranoid pre-teens like me could interact with pre-approved friends and acquaintances. The internet was about people then, real people, creepy or not, and our ridiculously slow dial-up didn't make them any less real. (The fact that Jamal had dial-up didn't make Ghostwriter less real, did it? Did it, Julia Stiles?)

Nowadays, though, OKCupid aside, the internet isn't really about people. It's about content, speed, and commerce. (Which I suppose was inevitable - this slickification of the 'webs - given the sick genius of our corporate sector and its hardwired instinct for profit.) Nowadays, fortunately or unfortunately, it's all about weed-whacker selection on Amazon.com, and Rihanna's channel on VEVO, and Google's (um, Topeka's) decision on whether or not to give super-high-speed internet to Topeka (um, Google), Kansas. In college, most of the fun of the internet was sitting around with friends and having them dude-you-gotta-see-this Will It Blend? and Homestar Runner. These days, though, you can keep current on the latest viral videos by watching Inside Edition, and there's nothing fun - or friendly, or communal - about that.

But never fear, friend(s). There are still real people out there on the interwebs, and they come complete with delightfully quirky bouts of self-expression. Today, in the spirit of a bygone age, I come as their ambassador. (There are only two of them for today's post, but hey. I'm grandiose.) And so, without further ado - dude, you gotta see this:

1.) Pomplamoose. Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte's DIY hipster-music duo has suddenly become almost famous for their covers of Lady Gaga's "Telephone" and Beyonce's "Single Ladies." But the real heart and soul of this ensemble is on better display in lesser-known tracks like "If You Think You Need Some Lovin'" and their outstanding cover of "September," by Earth, Wind and Fire (complete with Grover and a ridiculously groovy grandma). Ms. Dawn and Mr. Conte are pioneers of a brave new web-music genre called the VideoSong, in which every sound on the track is made by the performers and documented in the video. That's right, people, the industrious man and woman of Pomplamoose made those recordings themselves, in that curiously wallpapered room. (The multitracking alone must have taken days!) However they pull it off, though, their music really is the antidote to all the overproduction and AutoTuneage out there on the 'webs. Support them when and how you can!

2.) "The Loneliest Astronauts." This delightful web comic, written by Kevin Church and drawn by the fantastically talented Ming Doyle, chronicles the adventures of two grumpy astronauts stranded on an uninhabited (?) moon in THE FAR REACHES OF SPAAAAACE, and is glib and cheeky, and sometimes unexpectedly deep, and always thoroughly wonderful. Ms. Doyle's atmospheric inks make the strip for me, to say nothing of the almost Hans Christian Anderson way she draws aliens. (Oh, no, I gave it away!) It's clear that Ms. Doyle is going places, since she contributed a chapter's worth of art to the graphic-novelization of Jennifer's Body, and since - rumor has it - she just did some (probably awesome) work for Marvel. I can't wait to see how that turns out, but for now I'm plenty happy with "The Loneliest Astronauts" every Tuesday, and the kick-butt legacy it's leaving behind on Earth.

So there you go. The iPad is out today, so the interwebs will probably be slicker and more razzly-dazzly than usual. Watch your step! And if you need a break from the hype (and if you've already danced your way through Pomplamoose and laughed your way through Astronaut), why not check back in at Let Them Eat Cake! to see what shenanigans I have in store? All new on Monday, I absolutely promise.

In Which, Ladies and Gentlemen, Hats Off, Please, Hats Off

2010-03-31T22:36:00.000-07:00

Fortunately or unfortunately, there are precious few moments in life in which all the cynicism and guardedness that are our daily stock and trade give way to something deeper, rawer, more true. Everyday, it seems, we convince ourselves that we're realists, you know, like so beyond sentimentalism, because these moments - of what? transcendence? - are so rare. But then one day you're just walking along, minding your own business, and BAM! - down comes the Berlin Wall, or your baby daughter learns to laugh, or those crafty little whiz kids at Pixar put that growing-old-together montage into the opening of Up. Maudlin, you say? Hallmark-infested? Well, just wait until it happens to you. You'll be firing off wisecracks left and right, cocksure of your invulnerability to sentiment, and then you'll duck in to see a performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company last Saturday night in Berkeley, and BAM!, here come the waterworks. Let me tell you, people, and this is on the level: it's really pretty hard to eat your words when there's a lump in your throat the size of Texas-and-a-half.

What made Saturday's performance of Nearly 90² so lump-in-the-throat-inducing? Well, it was partly the haunting music by Sonic Youth, ex-Zepellin John Paul Jones, and Takehisa Kosugi. It was also the realization that this was the last - and indeed the only - time I would get to see the late Mr. Cunningham's work performed live, as his company is already midway through their farewell tour. Merce Cunningham was one of the greatest dancers and choreographers who ever lived - indeed, his influence on the 20th-century avant-garde in general, let alone in dance, is surely incalculable - and it was a privilege to have been able to see his last work performed by those whom he himself had taught. That moved me. And so did the sheer virtuosity of the dancers in the company: at one point in the evening, G., who is herself an immensely talented dancer, sort of jumped in her seat and began to rub her eyes with the flats of her hands; as it turns out, she had been so riveted by the performance that she had forgotten to blink for several minutes.

But there was more to it than that. What got to me (and lumped up my throat) wasn't just my aesthetic feeling, my connection to the material - which was considerable, of course - but also the dancers'. What moved me, more than anything, was their love for what they were doing. There was a moment towards the end of the piece when the mostly atonal, arrhythmic score went quiet and still and a series of open chords, almost bell-like in their relative sweetness, floated out of the orchestra pit. Onstage were several groups of dancers moving in unison - and then upstage, by herself, and moving to a radically different beat, another dancer, who, with her slight figure and military buzz-cut, reminded me uncannily of a Holocaust survivor. In that lush, ringing moment of serenity and pause, the dancers downstage stopped and turned - the men lifted the women up - and made a sort of unison bow to the woman upstage, who was still dancing beatifically, obliviously, by herself. Now, I don't know anything about the provenance of that gesture, or what Mr. Cunningham was thinking when he choreographed it, or even what the dancers onstage were thinking when they danced it, but in that moment I felt certain that that little bow was Mr. Cunningham's farewell to his art, and his dancers' farewell to him. And that, my friends, was tremendously moving. It was almost as if the great master himself, with characteristic charm and humor and grace, had doffed his hat, and quietly taken his leave.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love the little things. I love all the guts and indignation of my life. But none of that would mean anything if it were not for moments like the one last Saturday in the Cal Performances house in Zellerbach Hall. In that moment, I was stilled by the beauty of Mr. Cunningham's life and work - and for that, to say nothing of the myriad other gifts he so willingly gave over the course of his extraordinary life, I doff my hat. Godspeed.

In Which The Best Of It Is Courageous

2010-03-26T23:32:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post tonight, I'm afraid. (I know I've been coming on strong these last few weeks, so maybe this is a nice change of pace for all my beleaguered fans, whoever the two of you are!) Try not to be too gleeful.

Right, then. Hot off the presses: the Museum of Modern Art has just opened "Rising Currents," a stupendous-sounding architecture show for which a number of prominent designers were charged with imagining how the Apple might respond to climate-change-induced rises in sea levels. Hipster eyeglasses and bevy of architectural friends aside, I'm no design expert. Still, though, some of the solutions these blueprinters have come up with sound pretty great, especially the one that has Brooklyn turning the Gowanus Canal into an oyster hatchery - which my pal the extraordinary K. totally thought of way before these famous chappies did.

I haven't seen the show, so there's not much more I can say. Except this, I guess: that the very best art, as I've yammered and re-yammered for months, is art that has the courage to engage with what's happening in the world. I hope - indeed, goldarnit, I have confidence - that we will be able to turn the tide of climate change before it's too late and radical solutions like floating buildings become necessary. But, nevertheless, I admire and celebrate this show and what it represents, to whit: that brand of creativity that says yes, I will think about this. I'll imagine the unthinkable and see past it. I won't turn away. I'll make an effort. I'll do my part. And, moreover, what I make - what I make to save the world - will be just as beautiful as it would have been if we still had time.

That's the kicker right there. It will still be beautiful. What a wonderful thought.

In Which The Question Is What Sort Of Childhood Do We Want Our Kids To Have?

2010-03-24T23:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, so remember high school? Can you picture what it was like? Chances are, if you're like most people, you've got a sort of cheesy John Hughes-y montage running through your head right now: food fights on the marching band bus, hopeless crushes gone hilariously wrong, the way you and your friends thought your trig teacher's mustache made him look like Kermit the Frog. But do you remember any of the trig that Mr. Kermit taught you? How about all that French you took? (Don't know much about history? Don't know much biology? Neither does John Belushi.) But, that's alright, right? You learned plenty of things in high school, and the things that spoke to you - that sparked your passion, so to speak - have stayed with you. (Like everything you learned in Drama class, right? Right?) Moreover, even if you didn't learn very much trig from Math Master K., he taught you something about how to think analytically, and that certainly serves you well, no matter what you're up to these days. What's my point? Well, it's just that, actually: that an education should be about making you into the person you want to be, as much as it is about making you remember what the Missouri Compromise did and didn't do for Maine.

Now, I'm no expert, but it seems to me that in recent years the discourse on higher education, as advanced by the Powers That Be, has shifted appreciably towards an instrumental view that values schooling purely in terms of the future competitiveness of the labor force that high schools, colleges and universities produce. Attempts at social-political conditioning in Texas classrooms aside, most people seem concerned with whether We (whoever We are) are producing enough Scientists, Doctors and Engineers to keep Us competitive in the brave new world to come. The tell-tale phrase to look out for, as in this otherwise excellent op-ed by Susan Jacoby, is "the needs of a 21st-century nation competing in a global economy." And nowhere, or so it seems, is the mania for producing competitive 21st-century workers more apparent than in India, where high school students sacrifice the greater portion of their young lives (in school and out) to preparing for grueling examinations - on which one has to score well over 90% to be guaranteed a spot in a prestigious college of science, engineering or medicine. Now, I do think that the Times article to which I just linked - not unlike Thomas Friedman's recent piece on high-achieving Asian-American high-school scientists - is sustained by a faintly jingoistic fascination many of us in America seem to have with Asian and Asian-American students' aptitude for science and math. That little Asian kids are all four-eyed, violin-playing nerds is a stereotype, and a racist one, and it needs to be dismantled for anything worth saying to be said. Nevertheless, it is true that students in India are often absolutely fixated by upcoming exams - and that teachers and parents alike are often (understandably) worked up about how their kids' performance will affect their chances for a good job after graduation. I taught in India for a short while a couple years ago, and I was struck in this regard by a story that a veteran colleague told me: a boy's father came to her one afternoon worried sick because he had overheard his son, all of nine years old, talking with a friend about - wait for it - aliens. His (the Dad's) concern was that either his son had gone crazy, or that - with two to four hours of private tutoring a day on top of all his school work - the little boy had too much free time on his hands and was whiling it away in nonsense.

I don't fault students (or their parents) for wanting to do well in school, or for wanting 16+ years of hard work to translate into a comfortable life after graduation. I was - still am? - an irredeemable dork who pursued academic success like a Pez-junkie Pez. But there has to be a limit. In recent years, there has been a backlash against the pressure-cooker of Indian schooling - best exemplified, perhaps, by Hindi film icon Aamir Khan's recent smash-hits Taare Zameen Par and Three Idiots. While those films certainly do peddle their own stereotypes and quixoticisms, at least they're presenting an alternative perspective. (See them if you have the chance! They're tearjerkers!) The big question, in the end, is what sort of childhood, and adolescence, and early adulthood, we want our children to have. I, for one, want my kids to remember the marching band bus. So let's not let the members of the Texas Board of Education be the only people concerned with - as retired educationist Joane Yatvin put it in her Letter to the Editor in response to Ms. Jacoby's article - how to help "young people to lead successful personal and professional lives and [inspire them] to become informed and caring participants in a democratic society." Yes, and: let's not be afraid to let the kidlets have just a little bit of fun.

In Which, After The Tactile Dome, This Blogger Thinks About Bipartisanship

2010-03-22T13:04:00.001-07:00

I had a lovely weekend, thanks for asking. So lovely, indeed, that I am utterly unrepentant for my lackadaisical delinquency vis-a-vis This My Blog. I mean, we had a house guest and Congress passed landmark health care reform! Nothing can put a damper on these my days of jubilee, not even my favorite designer (the Oaklandish Amy Sarabi) getting eliminated from Project Runway. (I know she'll bounce back in no time - expect to see her at Fashion Week before too long.) In sum, then, happily: life is sweet like jam.

And yet.... And yet....

I must confess that as I spent the last few days having a tremendous time in San Francisco with my wife G., our friend N., and our other friend the fantastically lovely and talented C., there was a doubt that nagged at me. It first reared its shifty-eyed head, this doubt, on Friday, when our merry little band hit up the incredible Exploratorium and then went out for noodles on Haight Street. (Sidebar: I was raised on the Museum of Science, in Boston, but the Exploratorium (complete with - dum-dum-dummmm - The Tactile Dome!) takes experiential science learning to a whole new level. Kudos.) Somewhere around the fourth or fifth forkful of House Pad Thai at the Haight Street noodle joint it hit me: my life is exceedingly liberal-elite. But what did you expect?, said my brain, perplexed by this new-found anxiety. Raised in Boston, transplanted to the Bay Area (via London and South India) - how did you expect to turn out? But that's just the point, said that sneaky little doubt, blithely. In everything you do, you're blinkered by your politics. Whoa, said my brain, I think you might be right. And I, mid-fork, watching this intellectual ping pong match with trepidation, said um, excuse me, this is only going to make me more neurotic, but by then it was all over. We were already off to the races.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am proud of who I am, and I believe I believe what I believe for the right reasons. I've had extraordinary good fortune in my life so far - and that good fortune (born white, straight, male, middle-class, American, reasonably intelligent and a Red Sox fan) has helped make me who I am. In other words: I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. But that doesn't mean I didn't come prepackaged (batteries are included!) with a number of liabilities, among them certain ideological prejudices. Of course, I've come to this very realization many times before, and have often had to make peace with my limitations - so you would think that re-realizing I'm a member of the liberal elite wouldn't be much of a thing. And you'd be right, except that this little doubt of mine came right smack dab in the middle of one of the most bitterly political weekends in recent politics, and I was definitely gonna let it shine.

It soon became clear, as my wife and I watched the endless hours of debate yesterday on MSNBC.com, that the Pelosi-Reid-Obama victory on health care was going to be an emotional roller-coaster ride for me. I was triumphant, of course, that the damn thing passed, and jubilant that - as the distinguished Mr. Krugman put it - the politics of hope won out over the politics of fear. I was also more than a little delighted (yes, I know, I'm horribly vindictive, but more on that later) to learn that David Frum, former Bush Jr. speechwriter, considers the Republicans' defeat on this measure to be a Waterloo for the party. At the same time, and in almost equal measure, I was perturbed (and even appalled) by the conservative backlash - which included everything from Douglas Holtz-Eakin's "Fiscal Frankenstein" op-ed to reports that GOP members of Congress refused to condemn the racist and homophobic slurs leveled at their progressive colleagues by anti-reform protesters. Of course, all of that delight and perturbation was to be expected - it was par for the course - but there was more to it this time. This time, for the first time - thank you very much, post-Exploratorium doubt! - I was possessed of an unease. Or, more to the point: this weekend, as the battle raged, I admitted to myself - for the very first time, I think - that I really didn't understand the conservative movement at all. And that, I knew, was a problem. Because the ideological divide in this country (and elsewhere, for all I know), is growing wider and wider each day - and if we don't find some way to bridge it, someone's gonna get a-hurt real bad.

Unfounded doom and hoo-ha, you say? Well, not really. I've yammered a lot on this august blog-roll about how the conservative movement has - deliberately, perhaps - misunderstood progressive ideology. (Call us fascists? I'll show you!) But - full disclosure here - I'm guilty of plenty of misunderstandings too. I'm thinking mostly of my post on the Texas curriculum controversy, which, while not as rabidly liberal as Mark Morford's column on SFGate, betrays the same prejudices. The truth is that I have a lot of trouble conceiving of the present-day GOP as anything but the bastard child of fiscal conservatism and Christian fundamentalism (strange bedfellows, those) - and, even more problematically, I sometimes have problems understanding why individual conservatives do the things they do without pinning the whole fandango on the lovingly exploitative ministrations of Fox News' brainwashing squad. If the Tea Partiers only spent some time in England, I find myself thinking - or even read some of the sweetly perplexed commentary on the BBC - they would understand why the American health care system needs to be reformed. But that amounts to saying that conservatives are stupid, or at least provincial, and that's an arrogant, disingenuous thought that's, quite frankly, unworthy of me. If any conservatives have stumbled onto this page, I'm sorry for even bringing it up.

So what to do? I'm sitting in a café here in Hippieville as I write, surrounded by green-tea-drinking hipsters, awash in a strange sea of guilt, exhilaration and caffeine. And maybe it's the mocha, or maybe it's legislative-victory-induced optimism, but - in spite of all the doubt that's been nipping at my heels for days now - I still have hope for the future. I'll just have to work harder, that's all. In the weeks and months ahead, I'll try to be more Fair and Balanced - for my own sanity, if not for the good of the world. (You'll have to keep me honest, loyal reader(s)!) And while I have absolutely no interest in switching sides, I expect I have much to gain for taking a closer, and hopefully more open-minded, look at the enemy camp. Because the little angel of doubt on my shoulder tells me the way things work isn't going to work much longer - and if you're not part of the solution, you're helping fudge things up.

In Which Lady Gaga Goes All Out For "Telephone," & The Rest Of Us Pick Up Glitter In Her Wake

2010-03-18T12:36:00.001-07:00

Once again, dear friend(s), apologies for the late post. My wife and I have a thoroughly delightful house guest at the moment, and (shock and awe!) hanging out trumped blogging last night. Not to worry, though - the three of us talked (and maybe, um, sang) about the topic-du-jour well into the wee hours, so it's all to the good! Field work, don'cha know?

And the topic-du-jour, you ask? Why Gaga, of course!

Last week, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé debuted the video for "Telephone," the hotter-than-hot single that's been wall-to-wall ubiquitous on the radio for months. The song, as you may well know, is a fairly banal piece of club crap that's kissing cousins with Rihanna's "Don't Stop The Music" and Gaga's own freshman hit "Just Dance." But the video? The video is another story. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out here. Surprised? Weren't expecting a song that's about not answering the phone while you're on the dance floor to spawn a video that features strip searches at the county "prison for bitches," a Wonderbread and Miracle Whip -sponsored poison-making cooking show, and the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill? Well, you're not alone. Judging from the flurry of (mostly delighted) surprise on the entertainment infowebs - check it out here! and here! and here! - a lot of people were not expecting "Telephone" to be what it so spectacularly is.

But what is it, really? And what do I - eminent culture critic that I am - think of it? I've had a few hours and several conversations with my smarty-pants wife and our equally smarty-pants friend N. to mull it over, so here goes. Three totally unimportant thoughts:

1.) The pop music video is now more independent from the song to which it is linked than it ever was before. It's no longer a given that artists are just going to lip synch and dance around the whole time (and maybe show off a little green-screen action, like Bell Biv DeVoe). Now that the internet offers virtually limitless distribution at extremely low cost, producing a video with "Thriller"-level ambition is no longer out of the question for most headlining artists. Lady Gaga explored long-form video herself just last year with "Paparazzi" (another collaboration with "Telephone" director Jonas Akerlund) - and the Black Eyed Peas' recently-released ten-and-a-half-minute video for "Imma Be Rocking That Body" adds yet another awesome layer to their technofuturist aesthetic: enormous break-dancing robots. Expect to see more of this in years to come - and expect to start thinking of the music video as an artistic genre in its own right, and not merely a made-for-MTV auxiliary.

2.) Lady Gaga - what with her Virgin Mobile (and Alexander McQueen) product placements - exemplifies the sometimes paradoxical interaction between art and commercial enterprise that I blah-blah a lot about on this blog. Love Gaga or hate her, there's no getting around the fact that she is extraordinarily talented and extraordinarily market-savvy. Of course, it's an open question whether her creativity flows from, or is actually constrained by, the money she attracts. For my part, I think The Philidelphia Enquirer was right on target when it called "Telephone" "pop-cult spectacle redux." No doubt, the product placements in the video earned Gaga a fair amount of money. But somehow they come across as almost pop-art-esque; in Lady Gaga's world, as in Andy Warhol's, commercial imagery is a convenient shorthand, a lowest-common-denominator notation for home, on top of which can be built the most outrageous - and subversive - fantasies imaginable. Let them eat cake, indeed.

3.) But the politics. Ah, the politics. It's not just about the fashion trends, is it? Jim Schumacher and Debbie Bookchin seem to think that Gaga should be banned for polluting the minds of young people - and plenty of others agree. I, of course, find their argument absurd - yet another example of far too many cultural conservatives' knee-jerk inclination to restrict free speech instead of engaging in the (admittedly far trickier) business of teaching kids how to process what they see on the internet. I'm also curious as to why Gaga would be a target for such recriminations, given the (I think) tawdrier and far less ambivalent stuff coming from fellow burlesque act The Pussycat Dolls, to say nothing of such luminaries as David Guetta and Akon - or J-Shin, whose "Baby Mama Drama" video is actually explicit. (This is a family blog, people. I'm not linking to it here.) Is Lady Gaga provocative? Definitely. But the provocation she proffers - inspired as it clearly is by Quentin Tarantino, and David Bowie, and Madonna - is not the actually quite un-provocative brand of salaciousness that has women strip down to their skivvies just to sell songs. (If you have any doubt about Gaga's feelings on the matter, consider the fact that someone tries to buy her in the "Bad Romance" video, and she sets him on fire. Boyfriends also die in "Papparazzi" and "Telephone" - you know, to drive the point home.) I, for one, think the Lady is provocative because she makes the exploitation of women an uncomfortable thing to watch (which, sadly, it usually isn't, at least in music videos) and because - more than any other mainstream artist in recent memory - she has worked to Queer femininity as it is imagined in pop culture. (See Prison Scene, Make-out.) Mr. Schumacher and Ms. Bookchin may find that uncomfortable, but I think it's admirable - politically, artistically and morally.

So bravo, Ms. Gaga. I don't know how do it, but you do it well. Don't change a jot.

In Which The Newest Of The Old, The Oldest Of The New

2010-03-15T23:13:00.000-07:00

So I've had the extraordinary luck these last few weeks to get to see three count 'em three great pieces of live theatre. First up, at the Berkeley Rep, there was Naomi Iizuka's Concerning Strange Devices From The Distant West - a wonderful puzzle-play to do, mostly, with photography in 19th-century Japan. Then there was Slaughter City, a delightfully ghastly piece of magical realism about slaughterhouses by another Naomi (Wallace), at Cal's Zellerbach Playhouse. And then, as if that weren't enough, just the other day: John Doyle's visionary production of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the American Conservatory Theatre. I tell myself I have to go see all these things because I'm a theatre PhD student now and I need to be professional, but the simple truth of the matter is that it's the Bay Area's remarkably low ticket prices that make such extravagance possible. I'm a very lucky thespian.

What strikes me now about these three productions is how very new they all were, and yet how very old. Concerning Strange Devices is a brand-spanking-new commission for the B-Rep and yet it seems to have quite an old soul. The scenes in Meiji-era Yokohama that bookend the play are somehow both edgy and quaint. And how interesting to write a play so obviously dependent on 21st-century digital technology (lights, video, etc.) about an analog art form approaching its 200th birthday. (I was particularly impressed, as was the crew at SFist, by Mimi Lien's set design. The sliding panels really did make me feel like I was inside a camera - which made for some really stunning trompe l'oeil moments.) Much the same could be said for my new best friend Catherine Ming T'ien Duffly's production of Slaughter City - which is, after all, about both the timelessness and the relentless modernity of labor exploitation. (Not sure what to make of the review in Berkeley's student newspaper, The Daily Californian, especially choice bits like "When Roach finds her co-worker Brandon (Daniel Petzold) passionately devouring one of the dead cows in search of a sexual outlet, the audience realizes that these characters are not completely put together.") And then of course The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a classic - but then Doyle somehow managed to make it fresh (and emotionally satisfying) with his by-now customary Poor Theatre (-ish) economy of style. (Additional, and mostly positive, reviews of the production can be read here and here.) I was particularly struck - back again to this idea of the newness of the old - by the fact that Doyle's ruined-theatre set was partially inspired by photos of the A.C.T.'s beautiful house on Geary Street after it was damaged by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

Were these perfect productions? No. Each had its own flaws: Concerning Strange Devices' multifaceted intrigue didn't quite cohere, at least not to my taste; Wallace's script for Slaughter City was a little overstuffed with hot-button material, to the point of overearnestness; and ACT's Chalk Circle suffered from some sound-balance issues that made it difficult to hear bits and pieces of dialogue, at least in the nosebleeds. But none of that bothered me all that much. Instead, I really did feel - for the first time in a while, to be honest - that the new work I had the privilege to be witnessing, and even in my own way be a part of, was connected to all that came before. Which was nice.

So. Moral of the story, as far as I can tell: we want to be so new all the flippin' time, and that's fine, but sometimes the best way to envision the future is to remember we have roots. Buy that? Well, alright then.

In Which Texas Messes With Our Kids & This Blogger Calls For Action!

2010-03-13T19:00:00.000-08:00

Loyal reader(s), I am sorry to be late (for the very first time so far!) with my third post of the week. A whole day late! Calamitous! Please accept my apologies - and rest assured that I've stored up plenty of moral indignation and vitriol with which to make this post humdinger-y enough to make for the delay.

In the news today: the Texas Board of Education approves a flurry of conservative amendments to its standards for K-12 social-studies curricula in public schools. As you can probably imagine, this has me practically apoplectic with rage. And what is it that has so incensed your otherwise reasonable blogfidante? Is it the right-wing majority's push to establish a link between American law and Biblical principle? No, not really. The framers of the Constitution were Christians, after all, and religion did play a role in their moral and judicial calculus. I object to the self-aggrandizing grandstanding that makes of the United States a Christian nation - which is patently isn't - but that's sort of small potatoes at the moment. Is it the fact that the conservative bloc on the School Board consistently overruled the liberal minority - which just so happens to be 100% black and latino - on the inclusion of important men and women of color in state curricula that's got me so mad? Well, yes - and also the good dentist Don McLeroy's smug suggestion that it was men who got women the vote in 1920, and white people who passed the Civil and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 (see the ABC News video embedded here) - but that's still not what's really got my goat. I mean, okay, yeah, that stuff is bad - it's horrible - but it's still just your regular old garden-variety (racist, sexist, classist) right-wing demagoguery. Nothing we haven't seen before.

No, what's got me going - and on a day when David Brooks was actually reasonable, of all days! - is that the Republican wing of the Board of Education is using the schooling of millions of Texan children, and the countless others nationwide who will use the textbooks that educational publishers tailor to Texan school districts, to (pardon my French) cover the conservative movement's ass. Interested in a for-instance? By all means! (I suppose the following will be discredited as liberal bunk, since I'm drawing on the New York Times article I linked to above, but what the hey. Here goes anyway.)

1.) Under the School Board's plan, teachers will be required to inform their students that Republicans voted for civil rights legislation too, and - ready for the bait-and-switch? - that black activists in the 1960s weren't all nice and peaceable like the Rev. Dr. King. What, you mean Republicans voted - you know, out of the goodness of their hearts - to extend the franchise to black people even though Malcolm X was all uppity and violent? Wow! What real American heroes!

2.) Okay, what about Joe McCarthy and HUAC? Reliably confined to the naughty corner of American conservative history? Think again! Recently uncovered evidence shows that (good God no!) the Soviets had spies right here in the good old US of A the whole time! (Um, sidebar: didn't we know that already? Apparently not.) So, you know, hauling screenwriters in for questioning really did save us from the Reds! That's totally what that means! Thanks, McCarthy!

And, of course, speaking of Reds:

3.) "In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the 'free-enterprise system.' 'Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,' said one conservative member, Terri Leo. 'You know, "capitalist pig!"'" Ah, yes. We understand. A few impoverished third-world-types called you a name and, you know, insulted your dominant world economic system, and now you're going to go home and cry about it, aren't you, Terri. You're going to change the name in all the textbooks so nobody makes fun of you on the playground. So what if a generation of economics students sound like idiots? At least you won't have to take your teddy bear to PTA meetings! Great job!

People, if you wanted proof of how dangerous - and how insidious - the 21st-century conservative movement is, look no further. This is no idle cause for Ms. Leo and her compadres: they are looking to win the hearts and minds of young people nationwide. And here's the kicker - there isn't even a single education expert among them! I mean, I'm all for community participation in the setting of school district standards, but do you really want a dentist, and one who airs his views as incoherently as this, deciding what to teach your kids? Fortunately, Dr. McLeroy - the dentist in question - is already out for the next go-around; he lost the Republican primary for his seat a few weeks ago. But there's still a lot to be done. We still have an opportunity to stop this particular runaway train. The Board of Education's recommendations have been adopted, but there is still a period of public review and comment before the thing becomes official in May. Stay tuned for advice as to how to get involved. We'll show them community participation, crazy-commie-secularist-women-of-color-style! Because this is too big of a deal to sit back and let happen.

Okay, loyal reader(s)? Time to cowboy up. (And it's Texas, so that's topical!)

In Which, Let's Face It, The Oscars Were A Snooze

2010-03-10T21:44:00.001-08:00

It's indicative, I think, that I gave myself two extra days to think about the Oscars and I still don't have all that much to say. Granted, I didn't really watch them straight through; I was at a party at a friend's house Sunday night and the TV was on, but most of us were only interested insofar as the broadcast offered opportunities for catty commentary. (Which it did a lot of the time this year! What was with the dance numbers?) I hate to say it, but I don't think there's any getting around the fact that Hollywood's self-stimulus package - yes, I know, a dirty pun - was way more fun for them than it was for us. I mean, honestly, there wasn't a single surprise the whole night. Don't believe me? I'll prove it to you. Let's recap the "big news" coming out of the Oscars' 82nd:

Steve Jobs came! He wore a tux and not a turtleneck! Wow!

Up won for Animated Feature. Mo'Nique and Christopher Waltz won Supporting. Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock won Lead. Wasn't that pretty much what every single entertainment editor the world over was expecting? (Lots of catty commentary about Ms. Bullock's win. I haven't seen The Blind Side yet, but I'm sure her performance was deserving. After all, she plays a nice white lady who saves a disadvantaged black man from certain, inevitable doom with a mixture of pluck and Southern-ness. How could that fail to be fresh and provocative?)

Kathryn Bigelow won Director, and The Hurt Locker stole Film right out from under Avatar's big blue nose. (Don't get me wrong, I am as thrilled as anyone that a woman has finally won Best Director - that is long, long, long overdue - but the whole suspense of the thing was, like, totally blown when Barbra Streisand, of all people, came out to open the envelope and gave a little speech about how a woman hadn't won yet. I mean, let's be honest: weren't you sort of expecting the Academy to snub the overproduced sci fi schlock-fest in favor of the gritty, topical war movie? (For all his avowed support of his ex-wife, I don't think James Cameron was expecting to lose; check out the photo just beneath the by-line on this page!))

Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were funny but not very. There was a teary In Memoriam montage with music from James Taylor. People wore nice clothes. Sorry, I just dozed off a little there.

But then maybe I'm being a little unfair. There are lots of artists - and many, many non-artists too - all over the world whose dream it is to wind up at the Oscars. And that Oscar nod can mean a great deal; Burma VJ's nomination for Best Feature Documentary this year may well have re-energized the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar. (The Cove took home the statuette - but hey, who's counting?) Which only shows to go you: even the chintziest, most celebrity-encrusted art form on the planet - even when it comes complete with hours of televised self-congratulation - has the potential to do some good. And that's why you watch, right? Yeah, I thought so. Me too.

In Which Hilarious!

2010-03-08T21:46:00.000-08:00

So I've had a whirlwind couple of days and am still processing all the (very good) things I've heard and seen and been lately. So a coherent post isn't really in the cards today. (Sorry!) Instead, I offer you a link to one of the most wonderful blogs I've ever come across on the interwebs:

The Tiny Art Director.

If you have any doubts at all as to whether or not the creativity of children really is the antidote to all the boredom and cynicism in this big bad world we live in, the pure joy and whimsy of Bill Zeman's efforts to collaborate with his daughter will clear them up for you. Spend some time poking around; get re-inspired; and stay tuned for an onslaught of thoughts about the Oscars, health care, slaughterhouses and Naomi Iizuka, starting on Wednesday. Oh boy!

In Which This Blogger Struggles With Idealism & A Shockingly Short Attention Span

2010-03-05T22:21:00.000-08:00

I don't know, maybe they were lies our hippie parents told us. I expected student protest to be an all-consuming, radical affair - a full-on revolt, if you will - a do-or-die feat of legendary proportions in the execution of which students cease to be students and become anti-establishment guerrillas, cultural revolutionaries, sloganeering Che-s. If student protest (or at least student protest in America) was like that back in the '60s - and somehow I doubt it really was - it's not like that anymore. I have a lot of friends who've taken to the picket lines and the streets in support of education finance reform here in California these last few months - I've even been sort of marginally involved myself - and none of them carry themselves like Malcolm X, or even Willie Nelson. That's not to say they're not passionate about public education, and socioeconomic equality, and so on. In fact, the friends that I've made here in the Bay Area are among the most outspoken and politically engaged people I've ever met. (Don't worry, they aren't the ones trying to occupy Interstate 880. Those people are the exception. For a little perspective, check out the coverage of the latest protests here, here and here.) It's just that the Organization Kids that are in school these days - and again, I count myself among them - don't have room in their schedules to devote themselves full-time to mayhem. Can you imagine those '60s loons - at least the way our parents tell it - saying "Well, we've got our riot tomorrow, but on Friday we're back in class?" Different times, huh? Different times.

(Incidentally, I reject as false, disingenuous and downright offensive ex-Reagan-stooge Peter Robinson's claim that this year's protests at California colleges and universities represent a self-serving attempt on the part of the relatively well-off to secure exorbitant funding from the state even while ordinary people tighten their belts. It takes some real gall to make the case that fighting for public education is somehow elitist - especially if you're a Reagan Republican. (Oh, yeah, I forgot - trickle-down economics are populist now! My mistake!) Add to that Mr. Robinson's ridiculous claim that Berkeley protesters are dishonoring "the struggle for decent conditions for migrants and other exploited workers" by adapting union slogans for totally non-union ends - like, um, fair pay for University staff and affordable education for lower- and middle-class families - and we've really got ourselves a ball game. "[Protesters have] replace[d] the idealism of youth with the crassest self-pleading." Pitiful, Mr. Robinson. Just pitiful. "Self-pleading" is the lamest coinage I've come across in a long, long time. Weren't you supposed to be a speechwriter?)

Grouchy old cranks aside, what I find interesting about the new style of student protest is that it actually doesn't sit well with the stereotype everyone seems to have of Generation Y as a bunch of ADDled overachievers, raised on NPR and Red Bull. You would think that because we try to cram civic engagement into the nooks and crannies of our schedules we would expect instantaneous results: if we riot on Tuesday at 6:00PM, you would think the logic would go, Yudoff will post his resignation on his Facebook Wall at 6:30, and by 7:15 Schwarzenegger'll be tweeting about the new budget. But that's not how it's gone down, at least not so far. In fact, the strategy that the leaders of student protest here in California have followed so far has been remarkable, by and large, for its long-term thinking and even (dare we say it?) patience. What we've got going here is workable, and I think it's going to work. Which only goes to show you: we're not that different from our hippie parents after all. We can still get it done. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: don't count us out just because we can't sit still!

In Which The Fact That Life Is Complicated Prompts This Blogger To Get On His Bike & Go

2010-03-03T22:32:00.000-08:00

So, yeah. Life is complicated. It seems to have become increasingly complicated as I've gotten older and started to be more frequently confused with an adult, but that's probably because I'm more and more aware each day of its complicatedness and not because it ever was simple, way back when. Take today in the news, for instance. The New York Times reports that same-sex marriage is legal in Washington D.C.! (Hooray!) The 14,000 marriages that are expected to occur as a result of this victory for decency and civil rights will make the city $5 million and create 700 jobs! (Hooray part two!) The D.C. Archdiocese's Catholic Charities cut off health-insurance benefits for same-sex couples in retaliation! (Wait, what?) Or how about the San Francisco Chronicle's report on Starbucks' policy allowing its notoriously grouchy customers to openly carry guns (holy crap!) but only when and where local laws make open carry legal (um...hooray?)? (The furor around Starbucks and guns has driven the coffee giant's share price down 1.2%, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on how much you like your Frappuccino. So: booray!) I feel pulled every which way! Which side was I on again?

In many respects it's entirely to the good that the media these days is so nimble, and intrusive, and eager: I like feeling that I can keep abreast of what everyone thinks about everything just by turning on my computer. But then again, that's really just a pipe dream. The media - even including the blogosphere - has huge blind spots, as anyone who thought to wonder about how things are going this week with the recovery effort in Haiti can attest. And the all-pervasive he-said-this, she-said-that can be numbing to the point of paralysis. When every effort at progressive reform is met with fear-mongering screeds from Fox & Co. and pushback from the (certainly not) Right, it's no surprise that so many of us give up. What's the point, we ask ourselves, of working for marriage equality when Christian organizations - I mean, honestly, Christian organizations - are waiting to deny newly-happy couples the benefits they married to secure? Shouldn't we just give up?

No.

No, we shouldn't. Progress is never easy - and it is always, always, attendant on an overcoming of doubt, of uncertainty, of ambivalence. That's why, after reacquainting myself with the horrifying statistics for HIV/AIDS prevalence in the United States, I decided to jolt myself out of my media-induced paralysis by registering for AIDS/LifeCycle 9 to benefit the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Because, you know, biking from San Francisco to L.A. to help support those living and dying with HIV and AIDS is a whole lot better - no matter how you spin it (zing!) - than sitting at home on my butt. Now, I don't mean to toot my own horn here. But I really do think it's true that sometimes the only way to move forward is to shut out all the doubt and get down to business. Don't know what sort of business to get down to? Turn off the TV; shut down the computer; and give it some thought. You're a better person than you think you are. It'll come to you, I swear.

In Which Athol Fugard's "Coming Home" Inspires A Few Questions About Politics & AIDS

2010-03-01T23:35:00.000-08:00

Last night, my wife and I had the pleasure of seeing the very last performance of Gordon Edelstein's production of Coming Home, by Athol Fugard, the incomparable South African playwright, at the Berkeley Rep. I'd never seen a Fugard play performed before, and the experience was thrilling. I confess I hadn't realized how lyrical his writing is - but then when top-notch actors like Roslyn Ruff and Thomas Silcott start to speak the words, their beauty and magic are obvious. (Okay, Ruff and Silcott could make the phone book sound good, but Fugard is way better than the Ls.) And Coming Home is plenty moving: it picks up where Valley Song, Fugard's first post-apartheid play (1995), left off, with the sad story of Veronica Jonkers' return to the home of her impoverished childhood with a young child and an AIDS diagnosis in tow. Quite a few not-so-dry eyes in the theatre by the end.

Mr. Fugard's exceptional, exhilarating talent aside, I did have a few issues with the play - mostly to do with its handling of AIDS. Most of the reviews of Coming Home I've seen - whether of its world premiere at the Long Wharf in New Haven, or of its West Coast premiere at the Fountain in L.A. (check this out as well), or of the production I saw at the B-Rep - heap praise on Mr. Fugard for his delicate touch. Now, I don't fault him for not "raising his voice," as The Times' Charles Isherwood would have it; there's no reason every play about AIDS (or poverty, or war) has to come out guns a-blazing. No, what bothers me - and it bothered my wife too, and she's smarter than me, so there's no getting around it - is that the whole story Veronica Jonkers tells of how she got AIDS is so saturated in cliché I couldn't quite believe that Mr. Fugard had written it himself. I mean, are you really going to have your heroine contract HIV after her fiancé dies and she "turns to drink" (and the attentions of strange men)? Are you really going to take a crack at Thabo Mbeki's AIDS denialism, which has been the outrage-of-the-month in the global health community for nearly ten years already, by having a character joke that the government thinks you can get well again by eating bananas and taking your vitamins? I'm not saying we should let Mr. Mbeki or his government off the hook - this report out of Harvard is as chilling as it gets - but aren't there other tacks we could take? The issue of HIV/AIDS in South Africa is complicated enough, and Mr. Fugard certainly talented enough, that Coming Home could have deviated from the usual talking points a little and still gotten its message across. After all, as Mr. Fugard himself has so aptly pointed out, there is a difference between a play and a public health symposium - and that can be to an artist's advantage.

But then, maybe AIDS was never really the point. The second act of Coming Home, once all the big-ticket revelations have been made, is a quiet, poignant affair. Veronica Jonkers' son and the man she's chosen to take care of him once she dies, as die she will, get over their mutual distrust and learn to live with one another despite their many differences. The little boy is then visited by a vision of his great-grandfather, who teaches him a few lessons as only the ghosts of great-grandfathers can. This stuff is the real deal: masterful, subtle, beautifully done. Which only goes to show you that all the old chestnuts are in fact bang-on: treat your characters like individuals and not talking point machines, and everything else will follow. Who knows, you may even get your politics out there without really having to try. Case in point: in that second, simpler, act, Mr. Fugard unequivocally succeeds, even if despite himself, in making HIV/AIDS more human - and that's a good deal more than only half the battle.

In Which Grit, And Grace!

2010-02-26T09:13:00.000-08:00

So last night, after a dazzling gold-medal performance by Kim Yu-Na of South Korea, Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette took to the ice for her free skate. Even clueless neophytes like me could tell she was enormously talented - but that wasn't all. Rochette was skating for a medal four days after her mother, with whom she was close, died of a heart attack. (You can watch the video of her performance here, if you missed it live last night.) Kind of puts that last moment, when she blows a kiss up at the rafters, into perspective, doesn't it?

In its own way, Ms. Rochette's performance embodies the spirit of this wacky little blog - just like that kid with the ukelele did a few weeks ago. You know, like whatsername said, the one with the wig: The people have no bread, so let them eat cake. Ms. Rochette was visibly devastated by her mother's death - she was obviously running on empty, emotionally speaking - and yet she took to the ice because that was what she knew, what she and her mother loved. I can think of no better emblem of the quixotic absurdity of art-making than that free skate. No one would have faulted her for bowing out of the competition, and yet she went for bronze and got it. She had no bread, but still she tried for cake. (Zing! Take that, extended metaphor!) So, for those who think art is a luxury, a wouldn't-it-be-nice afterthought, I'll say only this: go talk to Joannie Rochette.

On Monday it'll be March, and in the spirit of Ms. Rochette's incredible courage and grace, I'd like to issue a challenge. (Untold masses, I'm talking to you!) Let's try and make March our month of gettin'-her-done. In like a lion, out like a lion, that's what I say! Government types: let's have the courage, and the grace, and the good sense, to finally pass health care reform and then get the heck going on clean energy, Don't Ask Don't Tell, and jobs. Artist types: go after that thing you thought you couldn't do. Order that 12-foot chunk of marble. Get cracking on that novel. Remember, this is what you love. Don't let fear hold you back. Everyone else types: don't be a New Yorker, play with your kids! Be good to your neighbors. And if you've always wanted to learn to crochet, or build a car from scratch, give it a try! What do you have to lose? You won't even have to stop watching Survivor, I promise. If you're brave like Ms. Rochette, then you'll achieve as she has.

Alright. Enough cheeseball inspiration for now. Have a good weekend, everybody. See you next week - same bat time, same bat channel!

In Which The Braver Thing Is To Speak

2010-02-24T21:39:00.000-08:00

Serious (but uplifting!) post today, guys. Sorry. Couldn't be helped.

Some writers, like Samuel Beckett and the remarkable poets Just Magazine has brought together for its inaugural issue, turn inwards when faced with the incomprehensibility of the world, and write - as Just would have it - "under severe constraint." When you read Beckett's Three Novels - or Timothy Liu's remarkable poem in Just, which uses a handful of the most commonly-used words in the English language to create an arrestingly truncated Lord's Prayer - the impression you get (or at least the impression I get) is that Beckett can only convey the brutality of life as he sees it by insisting, more and more emphatically, on the frailty of the body and the limits of language. When you read Beckett you feel penned in, even hopeless - and that's exactly the point. (Let no one tell you Beckett was apolitical; his work is actually among the most political the 20th century saw, because it provided a visceral literary corollary for the radical disempowerment so many people the world over faced in the form of totalitarianism, poverty and war.)

There is another choice, though, and in some respects it's braver. Instead of turning inwards, writers can open themselves up and attempt to process - and in so doing come to terms with - the traumas of our time in all their awful, real-life detail. And that's what Maaza Mengiste does, in her incandescent debut novel Beneath the Lion's Gaze. (Full disclosure, as the praise it starts a-rolling: Maaza is a friend of mine. She was already a superstar when I met her, though, so I don't think I'm all that biased.)

Ms. Mengiste's novel - which came out last month to rave reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker and Vogue (one of "ten cultural resolutions for 2010?" I'm loving it!) - tells the big-picture story of Emperor Haile Selassie's ouster by a military junta in 1970s Ethiopia through the lens of a small, upper-middle-class family and its everyday experience of upheaval. I don't want to give too much away here, because I want everyone who reads this to go out immediately and buy the book, but the point generally is that revolution is always a total event, in that it makes even the most private experiences public. (One of the book's many strokes of genius is that while the day-to-day lives of ordinary people take on extraordinary importance, Haile Selassie's story - which is told with incredible courage and lyricism - becomes increasingly circumscribed by the man's own psyche as he faces deprivation after deprivation under the new regime. Men become legends and legends become men.) The technique is not new, but what does that matter - it suits Ms. Mengiste's ends, and it makes for wonderfully compelling reading. After all, Beneath the Lion's Gaze is one of the very first works of fiction to be published anywhere, including in Africa, that deals with what is essentially the defining (and obviously traumatic) moment of modern Ethiopian history. In giving us a splendidly human account of that moment, Ms. Mengiste hasn't just written any old book. She's written something brave and true, something that seeks to articulate a trauma, and in so doing begin to come to terms with it. That the book is very, very good is really just icing on the cake.

So. 10 out of 5 stars. If there's anyone out there who actually counts on Let Them Eat Cake! for culture advice, 1) what's wrong with you? and 2) go buy this book. You'll love it. I promise.

In Which This Blogger Airs A Few Doubts About The Modern Moneylympics

2010-02-22T16:55:00.000-08:00

As you might have anticipated, I'm still compiling the list of superlatives I'll need to finish my post on Maaza Mengiste's Beneath The Lion's Gaze - expect that on Wednesday. In the meantime, I have a few quick, crotchety thoughts about the Olympics that I'd like to subject you to. So strap on your skates and meet me at center ice!

The Vancouver Olympics are now pretty much at their center point, and I wish I could say I was enjoying myself. Granted, there have been some pretty spectacular moments so far - including Team USA's surprise upset in men's hockey last night. Still, somehow I've been disappointed. It's not that I've been put off by some of the logistical problems that have dogged these Games - some commentators have actually started calling Vancouver 2010 "The Glitch Games," which I think is just plain petty - or that the (admittedly shocking) death of the Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili somehow cast a shadow over everything that came after. No, it's that these Games have made it clearer than it's ever been before (at least to me) that the Modern Olympics are all about winning - and, even more discouragingly, the money it takes to win.

I can understand why the Canadian slogan for 2010 is "Own The Podium," even if it's a little tacky; it's only fair that the host nation should want to do well at its home-town Games. Conversely, that the Canadians are probably not going to make it to the top of the medal tables is not a cause for shame - or for glee, depending on your perspective. What gets to me is something far more, well, philosophical: why is it that the national teams that take home the most medals are always - always - the ones that have the resources (read: $) to supply their athletes with plenty of schwag? (For an idea of how much it costs to be an Olympic athlete, and of how hard it is to succeed without a sponsor, see this article on 17-year-old American ski jumper Peter Frenette.) A quick look at the all-time medal table for both the Summer and Winter Olympics drives this question home: the United States - which, by virtue of its unprecedented wealth, has been able to support its athletes better than any other country in modern history - has won 2,511 Olympic medals since the Modern Games began in 1896, more than twice as many as its nearest rival (the Soviet Union, with 1,204). Many poorer countries - including India, with four times the population of the United States - are still in single or double digits, and 79 countries (among them the poorest and the most ravaged, like Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo) haven't yet won a single medal.

I don't mean to minimize the achievements of American, or Soviet, or Chinese athletes. The men and women who have medal-ed in the Olympic Games these last hundred-odd years are all, without exception, extraordinary competitors. But for every American athlete that has taken home the gold, there is a surely a Congolese or Palestinian athlete who maybe would have given her a run for her money, if only there had been money for her to run. The Olympics are supposed to be - indeed, they should be - the most egalitarian institution in the world. After all (is it just me, or is there an echo of last Friday's post here?) there is nothing more meritocratic than fair athletic competition. But we don't have that in today's Games - and we will never have it as long as the deep structural inequalities that persist in the world dictate the size and quality of the teams that countries can send to the Games. In other words, for the Olympics to live up to their beautiful, radical potential, something has to be done about the Benjamins. Perhaps a little financial assistance for cash-strapped country committees? Or a cap on spending for already-competitive teams? Think about it. It's a conversation we should be having.

In Which Vampire Weekend Runs Circles Around David Brooks

2010-02-19T20:38:00.000-08:00

So I'm stuck in bed with something flu-ish this beautiful California evening, and there's nothing I'd rather do than tap out this missive to you, my loyal reader(s). You should be flattered! It's not every blogger who's so attached to the idea of Thrice Weekly! self-publication that he's willing to hack and sniffle through a Friday night post about hipster rock!

This evening, like most evenings, I'm filled with a sort of reflexive disgust for David Brooks. He came out with this absolutely delightful column in the New York Times today - which, in addition to being intellectually anemic, is disingenuous to the point of absurdity. His point, as far as I can tell, is that the diversity of the Ivy League meritocracy these days makes the cultural and political elites of the moment less effective than their Country Clubbing predecessors two or three generations ago were. Of course, he doesn't have the gumption to actually come out and say something that politically noxious, though, and so he sticks with the passive-aggressive wafflery that's become his trademark:

"This is not to say that we should return to the days of the WASP ascendancy. That’s neither possible nor desirable. Rather, our system of promotion has grown some pretty serious problems, which are more evident with each passing day."

Well, gee, Mr. Brooks. Thanks for that. I wasn't aware that since today's Wall Street (so full, apparently, of black people! and women!) can't count on passing the wealth on down the family tree like the Rockefellers did, it's more reckless than ever before! I also didn't know that since government has become more transparent since Watergate, that's why we mistrust it! Everything is clear now! Despite your conscientious protestations, I think we really should go back to good-old-fashioned "WASP ascendancy!" That's all that's ever really worked!

Repulsive, Mr. Brooks. Even for you.

That today's Ivy League meritocracy is something far more interesting, and problematic, and complex, than Mr. Brooks is capable of imagining, is borne out by the up-and-coming New York band Vampire Weekend. (It's also borne out by this blog, thank you very much!) Vampire Weekend, which features four young men who became friends while studying together at Columbia University, refers to its style as "Upper West Side Soweto" - a moniker that's so audacious that they'd really better be good enough to live up to it. And - remarkably - they are, at least to my ear. I haven't listened to either of their albums straight through yet - what? you thought Thrice Weekly! bloggers made enough to blow $9.99 on iTunes? not on your life! - but what I have heard is tight and light and interesting, a sort of latter-day Paul Simon sound. (The New Yorker made the same point early on: this stuff is Graceland 2.0.) But for all its evident musicianship - and especially its commendable interest in and familiarity with non-Western musical idioms - Vampire Weekend is a deeply ambivalent phenomenon. On the one hand, I'm as enthusiastic as anyone about cross-cultural art-making; on the other, to be a well-off American from Columbia University and claim any sort of allegiance at all to Soweto may well be hubris on a colossal scale. (Christian Lander has called Vampire Weekend, which is 3/4 Caucasian and 1/4 Indian, today's whitest band.) But - and here's my point - therein lies the charm. It's fun to watch a band sing a song about the Oxford comma while flirting with a musical style developed by poor, black South Africans under apartheid. Fun like watching a trapeze act, I guess: most of the excitement comes from knowing that, at any moment, those suckers might fall.

All of this is lost on poor David Brooks. Today's meritocracy is inquisitive, worldly, arrogant, jaded and naive all at once. It's capable of stunning acts of reconciliation and preposterous attempts at appropriation - sometimes all at once. And that's what makes it so much more dynamic and unpredictable than any staid, reactionary nostalgia could conceive. The book has not yet been written on this generation of elites. Stay tuned for a surprise ending.

In Which This Blogger Goes Off-Topic With Teen Pregnancy & R-Rated Movies

2010-02-17T20:39:00.000-08:00

So, folks, I'm going to do it again. It was probably inevitable. (After all, I've got the attention span of a goldfish!) I'm pushing the rest of My Week Of Reviews Of Things I Think Are Awesome back a little - so tune in on Friday for some thoughts on Vampire Weekend, and then again on Monday for a look at my friend Maaza Mengiste's astonishing debut novel Beneath the Lion's Gaze.

What's got my goat off-topic today is this post on The Motherlode, The New York Times' account of its "Adventures in Parenting." (I don't make a habit of reading this blog, although its title is sweetly amusing; rest assured, I'm not expecting.) The post's author, Lisa Belkin, cites a study appearing in Human Communication Research that shows that women aged 18-25 find teen-pregnancy story arcs on The OC more compelling evidence in favor of using contraceptives than those sex-ed videos narrated by Walter Cronkite sound-alikes that we all watched in Health Class. (The study found that for men in the same age group Walter Cronkite and The OC were equally effective - or ineffective, I guess, since the lads weren't really into contraception; Ms. Belkin postulates that if Jack Bauer found some time in his schedule for safe sex, primetime programming would win out over carefully-conceived edutainment for that demographic as well.) The jury's still out, as several Motherlode readers commented, on shows like MTV's 16 & Pregnant, which presumably provides sex educators with the best of both worlds.

When I say that this thing got my goat, I mean that it stuck with me more than anything else did on my daily stroll through the blogosphere; the Motherlode tab stayed open on my Firefox all day yesterday and today. For a while I couldn't put my finger on why it nagged at me - or bothered me, even, for bother me it did. It wasn't that I was somehow a fan of teen pregnancy. It also wasn't that I begrudged health educators a new tool in their toolkit - if The OC works, that's fine by me. I just couldn't figure it out. What was wrong with me? (Besides the obvious, I mean.) I finally gave it up as a bad job and started to bang out a post on Vampire Weekend when it hit me: The Juno Effect. Serious light bulb moment. The whole thing reminded me of that pregnancy-pact story the year before last - remember? a whole bunch of high-school girls in Gloucester, MA got pregnant all at once so they could have their babies together? - and, especially, of the way some commentators linked it back to movies like Juno and Knocked Up, which supposedly romanticized pregnancy out of wedlock. The moral of the story, then as now, was that there was no more powerful reason to do something (get pregnant) or not do something (don't) than because Hollywood told you to.

Now, I've got a screenplay like everybody else. I love the fact that art can change your life. But if we're making decisions about whether or not to get pregnant, or even whether or not to try smoking, based on what's on TV or at the Cineplex, then there's clearly a problem. Somewhere along the line we've forgotten to teach our kids that there's a difference between movies and real life. That's the real problem. And the solution isn't to require TV shows to feature sorrowful teen-pregnancy story-lines - or to relegate smoking, along with frontal nudity, to R-rated films. The end-game there is censorship, and an emptying of our cultural life. The solution - in our schools and in our homes - is to talk to our children. Maybe if we talk to them, just a little bit more, they won't have to get their role models from The OC. I mean - come on. The OC. It doesn't get more vapid than that.

Just a thought.

In Which Glee Jazz Hands-es Its Way Into My Heart

2010-02-15T14:52:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I announced that I would spend this week doing reviews of things I think are excellent. But before I start in on Glee, the breakaway musical-comedy hit on Fox, I wanted to highlight the efforts of all those artists that have given their time to the 25th anniversary remake of Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie's "We Are The World" in support of disaster relief in Haiti. For all the justifiable cynicism (and valid artistic critique) out there on the interwebs, this is an important project. Like it or not, overproduced celebrity sing-alongs like this one do raise an enormous amount of money for worthwhile causes; I can't think of a single instance of art-for-social-justice that's had a larger audience or (we can only hope) a more profound impact. Watch the video here and follow the directions that follow as to how to download the song and donate money. And keep Haiti in your thoughts - not only now, while the tragedy is still fresh, but weeks and months and years down the line. There is more to do - and there will still be more to do a year from now - than we can possibly imagine. And it must be done.

Speaking of overproduced sing-alongs: on to the main event! Fox's Glee, a delightful concoction of a musical comedy (sprinkled here and there with teenage drama), was the runaway hit of the fall TV lineup. It was nominated for a whole bunch of Golden Globes, and won one - for best musical or comedy television series. If, like me, you're waiting impatiently for the next batch of episodes - April 13th! April 13th! - may this review (and this amazing promo for Glee's syndication on Japanese TV) serve as a reminder of why you fell in love with Mr. Schuester's ragtag band of misfits in the first place. If, on the other hand, you've never seen Glee - lucky you! Stop reading right now and go watch a few episodes online.

In a nutshell - by which I mean the zanier plot-lines (I'm talking to you, hysterical pregnancy) aside - Glee is about Will Schuester (played ably by Broadway veteran Matthew Morrison) and his attempt to resurrect the once-great Glee Club at the Ohio high school where he is a Spanish teacher. Joining Mr. Morrison in almost every episode is a wonderful cast of young performers, many of them drawn from the musical theatre, who play the flotsam and jetsam of teenage life in the Buckeye State - plus the wonderful Jayma Mays as a neurotic guidance counselor and the incomparable Jane Lynch as the megalomaniacial coach of the nationally-feted cheerleader squad. As you can imagine, the show is chock-a-block with song-and-dance numbers with a heaping side of teenage romance, but - here's the shocker - it's actually not bad! Sure, it's hit a few bumps, made a few freshman mistakes (I'm still talking to you, hysterical pregnancy) - but its charm is undeniable and its future bright. In other words: it's a bona-fide hit!

For my money, what makes Glee great is not its show-stopping dance numbers. It's not Mr. Morrison's fresh-faced earnestness or Ms. Lynch's pitch-perfect, bone-dry delivery of absurdity after absurdity. It's not the guest appearances from the likes of Kristin Chenoweth - or Neil Patrick Harris, who's rumored to be booked for sometime this spring. It's not the writing or the directing, despite the way these have come together in a zesty synergy that clearly surpasses antecedents like High School Musical. (For one thing, Glee's characters, although certainly archetypes, still have the capacity to surprise - as Kurt's father (Mike O'Malley) did when he took his son's coming-out in stride, or as Artie (Kevin McHale) did in his show-stealing turn in "Wheels;" this stuff is more Breakfast Club than Disney.) What makes Glee great is the alchemy of all of these things - and the fact that what emerges from the sausage factory is not a hodgepodge of talent and good intentions but a tight, lean comedy that stays sharp without losing its heart. Nowadays, there is a razor-thin margin between whimsy and escapism, emotional sincerity and cornball schlock; Glee comes very, very close to this line - even seeming on occasion to flirt with it deliberately - but never quite goes over. What we're left with is a welcome diversion in these troubled times that is nonetheless au courant, and even provocative. Like its puffed-up cousin "We Are The World 25," Glee proves that a little feel-good diva-off now and then can be both fun and relevant. That's why we love to watch.

So kudos, Glee. You've got us hooked. Keep up the hard work. Truth be told, we need you - and we need you to stay good.

In Which Joy!

2010-02-12T11:12:00.000-08:00

These last few weeks I've really been down in the dirt of politics and pop culture - and that's been great. Trust me, I love talking about the many "breathtaking act[s] of staggering hypocrisy" perpetrated by the Republican Party - and hating on the way the Top-40 hit machine replays "Replay" (at least once an hour on San Francisco radio!) is pretty fun too. But it's important not to lose sight of what this blog is really, fundamentally, about: the joyful, bombastic, exhilarating audacity of making art. To whit:

The Kid With The Ukelele.

This little kid, whoever he is, rocking his way through Jason Mraz in his parents' stationery closet, gives me hope for the future. This is what it's all about - and it's important none of us forget that. I defy you to watch "I'm Yours (Ukelele)" - what a great, almost Dada-ist, title! - only once. (In my own small way, sharing this video is also my tribute to the late designer Alexander McQueen - whose work, though sometimes brutal, was remarkable for its unabashed creativity. The Sartorialist, an excellent fashion and photography blog, has a moving personal reflection on Mr. McQueen's death.)

I'm signing off for now, but I'll be back next week with a series of reviews of outstanding new work in music, television and literature. (I know, right - you can't wait!) In the meantime: be well, and have a lovely Valentine's Day!

In Which Screwball Films Of The Great(er) Depression Whip Us Into Shape

2010-02-10T18:35:00.000-08:00

It should be clear by now that I'm no economist. I basically believe everything Paul Krugman tells me, and that's never led me wrong. (I used to think Alan Greenspan had good ideas, but now it seems he's discredited - and he looks more like a Muppet than ever!) What I lack in fiscal know-how, however, I more than make up for in righteous indignation. You might even say I'm a connoisseur of populist rage! So imagine my joy when President Obama vowed to go after Wall Street for its criminal culture of risk at our expense. And imagine my disappointment - as usual, I got this via Mr. Krugman's blog - when Mr. Obama seemed to walk back some of his more aggressive language vis-a-vis CEO bonuses during an interview yesterday with Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Really, Mr. President? Are you really going to compare multimillion-dollar bonuses for bailed-out bank CEOs with Derek Jeter's take-home pay?

Now, I have a lot of friends - of all political persuasions - who are either in business school or out there swimming in the shark-infested waters of High Finance. And, like the President, I don't "begrudge" them the money they make. But the fact remains that government exists, in part, to protect the interests of the people at large by restricting the freedoms of individuals. That's why we have things like Two Hour Parking zones in our cities and towns: the government infringes on your right to park your jalopy wherever you damn well please and for however long you damn well like so that, you know, other people can avail themselves of public parking as well. Bankers are naturally predisposed to like risk; it's by risking other people's money - and being okay with it - that they drive our financial system forward. It's the government's job to restrict what sorts of risk are acceptable (and what sorts of pay-outs are conscionable) given the interests of the people and the state of the economy in general - because otherwise the banks will run amok, Vegas bachelor party -style, in a gleeful spree of risk-taking. (Which is exactly what they did, in the run-up to this crisis, in the regulation-free playpen of Reagan stupid-nomics.) It's not that bankers are bad people; it's just that - given the chance - they'd rather park their car in the handicapped space in front of Starbucks while they're at the movies. (Just about exhausted that metaphor, I think!) I know President Obama is concerned with seeming anti-business; given all the wackjobbery about socialism these days, I can understand that seeming too populist might be an albatross around his neck. But come on, man. Just because these people make a lot of money doesn't mean they should be able to do whatever they want.

Since I'm no economist, and still only a minor-league rabble-rouser, I'm going to take the moral of today's story from something I do know a bit about: screwball comedy. It's really remarkable how many of the classic films that came out during the Great Depression (and the anxiety-ridden period during and immediately following World War II) are about class - and, specifically, about Wall Street -types coming to realize that their wealth does not consist of their money, but rather of their connections to their fellow human beings. It's there - this populist meme - in Holiday, with Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, and in Sabrina (which came out quite bit later but is stylistically much the same), with Humphrey Bogart and that other Hepburn, What's-Her-Name. But most of all, it's there in You Can't Take It With You, Frank Capra's other movie - in which Lionel Barrymore's free-spirited, free-thinking, quasi-socialist, ne'er-do-well family man convinces Edward Arnold's stuffy, old, suspender-ed banker to give up on a socially unconscionable business deal by playing a duet with him on the harmonica.

Our films aren't so straightforward anymore, and our politics never were. But still I can't help but wish President Obama would sit down with a few of these CEOs and say: "Look. First we're going to play the harmonica for a little bit, okay? We'll play the harmonica a little, the two of us, and then we'll get all this regulatory stuff done and everyone will be better off. That alright? Okay. 'Old McDonald' in B-Flat."

In Which, Faced With Decline, This Blogger Calls For (Shock And Awe!) Hope, Not Fear

2010-02-08T08:55:00.000-08:00

A lot of Americans have been gloomy for quite some time now. Understandably so, right, with the economy down the celestial commode, and the tragedy in Haiti wearing on our hearts. But behind these anxieties of the moment, there is a more general and longer-term malaise that gnaws at us: America, we are told, will soon no longer be preeminent among the nations of the world. Now, I find America's imperialist bellicosity as repugnant as the next guy, and sincerely wish there may come a day when global power is in true (and peaceful) balance and nationality is mostly a question of whom you'll support at the Olympics. But still - I'll be honest - whenever I hear that America is doomed to be second-rate, or worse, I feel a little flutter of unease. This is my home, after all, as international as my experiences have been, and I want to see it continue to thrive. (We pinkos are still patriots, after all - or didn't you know that?)

Of course, if I feel this way, you can imagine what the right-wing Noise Machine has to say. It's not just the wild-eyed sloganeering of Sarah Palin (just the other day, at the National Tea Party Convention: "We need a Commander-in-Chief, not a professor of law") or the racist screeds Glenn Beck directs at some of America's new competitors (a few months ago, on his show: India has no "flush toilets" and the sacred Ganges "sounds like a disease"). The entire GOP, which used to be (at least occasionally) a reputable political body, has jumped on the bandwagon. The whole caucus seems happy as can be with what Paul Krugman, in his new column, calls its "[descent] into nihilism" - its blanket policy of petty, filibuster-fueled obstructionism in the service of parochial interests, humiliating the president, and a few vague, knee-jerk "principles" of protecting the United States' future and its standing in the world. Faced with the anxiety we all feel about America's prospects, the Republican Party has chosen an odd combination of scare tactics and wishful thinking; these days, the venerable old elephant is acting more like a flatulent ostrich: it's got its head in the sand, but it's still farting fear.

I can't think of a clearer example of this phenomenon than ex-reasonable Senator John McCain's flip-floppery on the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. (It must be pretty lonely being a bigot - or at least, in the Senator's case, a sell-out to bigots - in the McCain household, given Cindy McCain's new-found support for marriage equality in California.) Now, I can understand how good and reasonable people might oppose same-sex marriage on religious grounds - wrongheaded as that seems to me - but I just can't understand how conservatives like John McCain, who pride themselves on their patriotism and their support for our men and women in uniform, can come out against the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense and the Commander-In-Chief in their efforts to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Stephen Colbert is right on the money, as usual: what we're seeing from the Right here is hypocrisy on an absurd scale. (SNL also had a pretty hilarious sketch on their show the other night lampooning Fox News for the sort of coverage of this issue we might expect from them - complete with a weepy Glenn Beck!) Someone please explain this to me. Why, if the GOP is concerned with America's military might and its prospects for future ascendancy, would it seek to deprive the Armed Forces of men and women like Lt. Dan Choi and the other members of Knights Out? Why, if the GOP really is concerned with winning in Iraq and Afghanistan and then going straight on into Iran guns a-blazin', would it seek to perpetuate divisions within the military that threaten unit cohesion and morale? Surely they realize, as Frank Rich pointed out in his column over the weekend, that DADT is vastly unpopular and straight-up wrong? Do they really believe the homophobic tripe coming from the Family Research Council?

It's in situations like these that I'm reminded of one of the most affecting scenes in Moises Kaufman's play The Laramie Project, which chronicles the real-life efforts of the people of Laramie, WY, to come to terms with the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student. In the play, a group of young people, led by a woman named Romaine Patterson, put on angel costumes with "big-ass wings" and stand, silent, in front of a minister who is availing himself of the bully pulpit afforded by the trial of one of Mr. Shepard's murderers to spew anti-gay hate. The angels, who Ms. Patterson equipped with earplugs, "just turn...[their] backs on him and...stand there...a group of people bringing forth a message of peace and love and compassion."

That is the alternative, people. Romaine Patterson and her angels with earplugs and "big-ass wings" is the alternative. Whenever you feel that anxiety about the future - about what will happen if our economy slips from biggest to second-biggest, or if the Russians beat us in gymnastics - don't go with the little Republican voice in your head that tells you to stock up on bottled water and make the immigrants go home. Don't be a John McCain, or a Sarah Palin, or a Glenn Beck. Reach out instead. Help your neighbors. Stand up to injustice. Make art. Pass the health care bill. And - for the love of Pete - repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. We have no idea what the future holds for America - but we can be sure that if we do these things, we will be the richer.

And as for all you Republicans: I doubt any of you is reading this, but if you are, then listen up. FEAR IMPOVERISHES. Cut that crap out right now.

In Which Apple's iPad, Amazon's Kindle And Google's Google Books Raise Some Questions About The Future Of Reading On Both Sides Of The Digital Divide

2010-02-05T16:06:00.001-08:00

Today's report in Wired on the future of Google Books and its continuing tussle with writers and publishers makes for interesting reading, especially coming on the heels of Apple's unveiling of its iPad and the continuing, unprecedented success of Amazon's Kindle. (This week's rampant speculation on what Bezos and Amazon might do with their Kindle to compete with the iPad is also very interesting, if a little hysterical.) Now, I'm no troglodyte - I mean, come on, I have a blog - but I'm also not a straight-up geek. I don't know the first thing about the technical specifications of the iPad or the digitization process Google has developed to render e- all the world's books. But I do love literature and reading, and I do have plenty of opinions about literature and reading and their future. So here goes: A Few Pressing Questions About E-Readers And E-Reading, And My (Probably Horribly Wrong) Answers.

First off, the question (seemingly) on everyone's lips: do people even read anymore? My answer: yes. Obviously, they do. They might not be reading what you want them to read (I'm talking to you, Harold Bloom, hating on Harry Potter and Steven King) but they read. People even read "good" literature - the kind that pompous elitists like Prof. Bloom make a big show of liking: Jane Austen, Hemingway, Flaubert - in spades. And that's not going away. So chill out.

Second: will Google Books and Amazon and Apple's iBook store drive my beloved corner bookstore out of business? This is a harder question to answer, but I'm still going to go with "no." I mean, yes, of course, a lot of beloved corner bookstores have closed, and more will. At the same time, though, Amazon is keeping a lot of small used booksellers afloat with its Marketplace service, which effectively indexes available copies of books you're looking for at bookstores across the country and allows you to order direct from the seller. So maybe your corner bookstore is actually being kept alive by Amazon - you never know. Also, don't forget that all of the hipsters and yuppies that buy trendy things like the iPad also shop at Whole Foods, ride hand-made bicycles from Vanilla, and wear the latest vintage clothes. They're not going to want to give up on their corner bookstores - especially institutions like Politics & Prose, in DC, or Shakespeare in Company, in Paris - if only because of their cultural cachet. (Sorry to say, but Barnes & Noble is totally not hip.) Many bookstores will survive on used sales and author's book tours alone - and many more will tap into the e-reader market in ways we can't anticipate yet.

Third: are e-readers really better than plain ol'-fashioned books? Answer: no. Or at least not yet. The book, as Jeff Bezos explained in the Newsweek story I linked to above, is an amazing technology that it will not be easy to surpass. I mean, you can't exactly flip through an e-book (at least not on a Kindle). It's a real pain - if and when it's even possible - to e-take notes and e-underline the dirty bits. And, perhaps most importantly, you're not going to take your $500 iPad to the beach and throw it in your bag with your suntan lotion and your seaweed-encrusted flippers. It'll take a long time for Jobs and Bezos, brilliant though they are, to come up with a gadget that is as versatile, durable and - crucially - economical as a book. So if you're worried you're going to have to make the switch to paperless any time soon - I like the fact that I've made you, my imaginary interlocutor, like Red Alert -level paranoid - relax. It's going to take a good long time. (Another plus for your neighborhood bookstore!)

So what, you might ask, is all the fuss about? From where I sit, it's not the iPad or the Kindle that's really remarkable, but the extraordinarily audacious vision that underlines projects like Google Books, American Memory and Project Gutenburg. E-readers are the future, maybe, but e-books are the revolution. And the model we should have in our minds as we envision what's coming for books and reading shouldn't be that put forth by Amazon, which is essentially an enormous corner bookstore, but rather that put forth by Google Books, which has fashioned itself after the great public libraries of the world. Libraries, not bookstores. Access, not acquisition. It's not that I think commercialism is a bad thing when it comes to literature; after all, writers need to eat just like everyone else. It's also not that I think intellectual property is an arcane concept; as important as open-source principles of remix are, I think it's incumbent on all of us to give credit where credit is due. That being said, the prospect of a global e-library is thrilling, especially given the challenges that many poorer communities the world over face 1) in accessing the sort of cultural resources that most of us avail ourselves of everyday and 2) in making their voices, their stories, heard in a marketplace that pays them no heed. Of course, a great deal of work still has to be done to bridge the "digital divide" between those who have access to computing technology and those who do not; the One Laptop Per Child project is a good beginning here, even if it is somewhat flawed in its approach. (As a friend reminded me: schools in poor communities need technology, to be sure, but technology isn't much use without good teachers, nutritious school lunches, and so on.) Nevertheless, if there's one thing we should be excited about as the internet floods with prophecy on the future of reading it's that the technology that's now in play could eventually mean the end of unequal access to our cultural patrimony. Someday, everyone will be able to read everything.

I'm with you, Keanu Reeves. Whoa.

In Which Scott Brown Channels Will.I.Am (And I Gotta Feeling I Know Why)

2010-02-03T15:44:00.000-08:00

Like everyone else, I'm only just beginning to digest Scott Brown's calamitous victory in Massachusetts two weeks ago. I guess I shouldn't really be surprised he won; after all, for much of my lifetime, Massachusetts voters elected Republican governors with depressing regularity (anybody remember Bill Weld? Paul Cellucci? Mitt Romney?) - and most of the Democrats that did make it into national office (with a few notable exceptions, of course) came from ancient political lineages beloved of the people. For many of the great Bay State politicians of recent years - of whom Kennedy was the first and the bravest and the best - it was who they were, and not what their talking points were, that got them elected. Of course, that doesn't make me feel better. If anything, I feel worse. We Massachusetts Democrats (I accept some of the blame myself, insofar as I was born and raised in the Land of the Bean and Cod and voted in its elections until recently) grew far too passive and complacent under year after year of Kennedy and Kerry landslides. Scott Brown's rise to power should be a wake-up call in Boston - as it certainly has been in Washington - that Democrats need to get fired up. (Or, as Yankee-Fan Curt Schilling might have put it, "cowboyed up.") If Obama's new strategy of combative engagement with GOP obstructionists is any indication, there's still hope left for the progressive agenda.

But what concerns me, at least for the purposes of Let Them Eat Cake!, is the pageantry of the Brown campaign - which even David Axelrod called "very clever." I'm not talking about the hokey I Drive A Truck ads, or even the Date My Daughters gaffe that prompted Glenn Beck to go ahead and rain on the Tea Party's parade. (Chastity belt? Dead interns? That man is seriously bats.) No, I'm talking about the fact that Senator-Elect Brown chose the Black Eyed Peas' song "I Gotta Feeling" for his pre-speech lead-in at his victory party in Boston on election night. (You can catch a snippet of the song at the beginning of this clip.) Innocuous choice of Top-40 hit, you say? Harmless feel-good tune for rich white people who can't dance? Not on your life.

Let me play John Nash for a minute and try to decode the secret messages Scott Brown was trying to implant in our brains during his look-at-me moment on national TV. The Black Eyed Peas features Will.I.Am. Will.I.Am made a series of music videos during and after the 2008 presidential campaign endorsing Barack Obama and his vision for change. (If you've been under a rock somewhere and haven't seen them, here they are: #1, #2, and #3.) What could the Massachusetts GOP do to horn in on that action? Obviously Will.I.Am wasn't about to produce a collage-style video with lots of attractive people of different ethnicities singing about Scott Brown's truck, so Mr. Brown had to settle for the next-best thing: Will.I.Am's performance of "I Gotta Feeling" with the decidedly less political (but still au courant) Black Eyed Peas. Don't you see what's happening here? Mr. Brown is trying to position himself as a change agent - as a white, conservative Obama - and, in-so-doing, to stick it to the Democrat's political brand. Government is too big, goes the song he's singing; clean energy is for sissies; if you're too poor to buy health insurance, well that's just too bad for you. Now that's change I can believe in. Done and done. (Jon Stewart was right on the money, as usual, with his piece on Scott Brown's inevitable White House run in 2012.)

But rest assured, folks, there's an upside. A little glimmer of silver lining. I know I made you do this with Taylor Swift on Monday, but bear with me one more time: take a look at The Black Eyed Peas' video for "I Gotta Feeling." Now, it's pretty clear that the Republicans are working hard to re-brand their party, but I wasn't aware that they wanted to be the party of thongs, vandalism, lesbian make-outs, tighty-whitey fashion shows, and drinking so much you pass out on Hollywood Boulevard. They may well enjoy such things in private, but in public they're pretty much uniformly anti-"p-p-p-party[ing] every day." Just a little irony to savor in the days ahead - and maybe the tiniest of insights into how we might cut through all the hype and hypocrisy in politics today and hold those who presume to lead us accountable for their ideas and not the million-dollar bows they wrap them in. Mr. Brown isn't anything new. Yes, he drives a truck; and yes, he knows the music that you like. But his positions on the issues that matter - at least the ones he's aired so far - are old and tired and just plain wrong. It won't be long before he's sitting in "the people's seat." Let's not give him an inch.

In Which Taylor Swift's Newfound Glam Prompts A Few Inconsequential Thoughts On Fame, Image And Passion

2010-02-01T18:18:00.000-08:00

Let's face it, folks. Who was going to pick up a Grammy last night and who wasn't was pretty much a foregone conclusion. You might have been rooting for someone else, but you knew Beyonce was going to win. Ditto Taylor Swift. (Okay, fine, you knew T-Swift would pick up a few, but you didn't think she'd drop one and break it - turns out you can have your cake and eat it too!) Other than that, though, no surprises at all.

I mean no disrespect to Ms. Swift (Kanye's got that covered), especially since she seems so sincerely thrilled to be doing so well. I'm just a little surprised - and chagrined, I guess - at how quickly she's been swallowed by the business-as-usual machine. The real nail in the coffin for me came when I saw her host SNL - and perform her now-trademark song "You Belong With Me" on the big Grand Central stage. She didn't flame out like Ashlee Simpson did; in fact, she did quite well. But compare the video from that performance with the official video that made the rounds on MTV. Now riddle me this: why perform a song that's about not being the girl who wears high heels and short skirts while wearing high heels and a short skirt? (Okay, fine - high heeled boots and a short dress.) Why, Ms. Swift - and especially in the middle of a comedy show in which you played a teenage girl in orthodontic headgear - did you go for the lowest-common-denominator notion of attractive female pop star? Truth be told, you came off looking a lot more like your supposed nemesis Mean Cheerleader Girl than your spectacle-d, band-geek self.

Now, I know the girl in the Nancy Reagan glasses dancing like a fool in her bedroom isn't the real Taylor Swift. And I know the video ends with a cop-out Grease-esque ending that proves she really was pretty all along. (Of course, Mr. Football Player had to have liked her before the slow-mo moment at the party, though, since he'd already written the I Love You placard and stashed it in his jacket.) Yes, fine, the video is about wanting to be noticed - as beautiful, as fun, as passionate, and even (Ms. Swift's character does seem to spend a whole lot of time singing into her hairbrush) as a certain kind of celebrity - and in that sense the SNL performance is not so far off the mark. But what happened to the sense of humor? What happened to that healthy dose of self-deprecation? It was there in the headgear bit - but then, when Ms. Swift was herself again, out there on stage singing her song, it was gone. Moral of the story: there's no room for ordinary people in the business. Silver and sequins is the way to go.

I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon. The situation is obviously far more complex than I'm making it out to be. And - like I said - Taylor Swift is really not all that bad. I mean, come on, David Guetta and Akon have a song in which they announce they're "trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful," and then settle on "sexy bitch." (Which, just for starters, is pretty much the lamest thing I've ever heard. Weak sauce, fellas. Honestly.) I just wish there were a space in popular music for people - like Benjamin Zander and Itay Talgam in the classical music world - who are so passionate about their art that image is an afterthought. But perhaps that's naive. Image has always been huge. (For all I know, the rumpled, floppy-haired white guy look is like money in the bank at Carnegie Hall.) But I keep on hoping. Maybe next year at the Grammys I'll be surprised.

In Which A Pie-In-The-Sky State Of The Union Fantasy Points Toward Broader Considerations Of Government Funding For The Arts

2010-01-29T12:48:00.001-08:00

Let me tell you about my dream State of the Union speech. President Barack Obama, the thoughtful and well-respected centrist, stands in the well of the House of Representatives, in front of a collegial (and bipartisan) body of 535 elected Democrats and Greens, the nine justices of the Supreme Court (of whom Sotomayor is the most conservative), and a number of distinguished guests (including newly-reinstated Lt. Dan Choi and Paul Krugman, incoming Chairman of the Fed). After detailing his plans for universal healthcare and marriage equality, the president proposes a marked increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, because - and here I quote the Obama in my head - "America's extraordinary literature and art, its incredible music and dance, its phenomenal theatre and film should not, cannot, must not be only for the few and not the many, the rich and not the poor, the entitled and not the disenfranchised." Everyone cheers wildly; the bill passes unanimously the next day; and, within a few months, most museums and concert halls have free or subsidized admission, grants abound, and artists starve no more.

As my friend Sebastian B. pointed out in his witty and erudite comment to my first post on Monday, "cake-making" in the United States is an industrial process. Record labels and big-name concert venues control the music scene; publishing houses monopolize book production; and a handful of Broadway theatres (and their regional-theatre affiliates) determine which plays make it on stage. The money and prestige that these institutions bring to the projects they take on make them influential tastemakers - often to the exclusion of other voices. (Which, if you'll allow me, suggests a hot-button political analogy. If you have any doubt that the real-life Supreme Court's preposterous decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission really will make it more difficult for ordinary Americans to express their political will, ask yourself this question: how much easier is it to find a showing of a big studio film (like, say, Avatar) than an independent short (like, say, Wanuri Kahiu's Pumzi) in your average American town? Hasen's question is apropos: should we really let economic inequality create political inequality?)

Now, I'm a reasonable guy. I'm the first to admit that the system we have in place - and have had in place for many years - has produced some outstanding "cake." Where would the late, great J.D. Salinger be without the helping hand of The New Yorker? Where would genuinely talented musicians like Alicia Keys and Beyonce Knowles be without their labels? Where would the great museums of the world be without the private collections of the various Guggenheims? Fair enough. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. (As Sebastian B. would say: too much cake makes you sick!) Museum admission - to say nothing of tickets to the Theatre, or the Opera, or Sundance - is often prohibitively expensive. And young artists, writers and musicians are often forced to abandon their dreams of careers in the arts because the work they do is not "marketable" - and is therefore not of interest to the Cake Barons in New York and L.A. Can the government solve this problem? Not totally, no. But it can do a great deal, in the form of subsidies and grants, to ensure that 1) new (and potentially great) work is undertaken in the first place, even if it is unprofitable and 2) that ordinary people have access to their cultural heritage.

Of course, expanding NEH and NEA is probably a pipe dream. And, with my luck, if the government ever decided to get serious about supporting the arts, the whole operation would probably be taken over by some Rush-loving McCarthy-ite who would turn around and reinstate the Blacklist. For now, like most liberals, I'll have to content myself with opposing backwards progress. The New York Times ran a story last week about how some in Europe are seeking to walk back public financing for the arts in the hopes of developing "'a US-style culture of philanthropy.'" The author of the article, Michael Kimmelman, takes a balanced view - except for the flash of elitism that prompts him to extol the exclusivity of empty museums in Germany at the expense of, among others, the Tate Modern in London, which he compares to Wal-Mart on Black Friday. When I lived in London, the Tate Modern was one of my favorite destinations. The hubbub that greeted me whenever I went there was invigorating and exciting precisely because it was proof that free museum admissions - subsidized in large part by Parliament - mean increased attendance. When ordinary people have access to art, they take advantage - even art as supposedly inscrutable as abstract painting and sculpture. Europe must work to preserve and extend their culture of public support for the arts - and we must follow in their footsteps. Not the other way around.

Come on, Obama-In-My-Head. You can get it done.

In Which A Cruise Ship Off Of Haiti Recalls Jazz In Post-Katrina New Orleans

2010-01-27T13:48:00.000-08:00

Tourism is a funny business. A week-and-a-half ago, a Royal Caribbean cruise liner - the Independence of the Seas - dropped anchor off of Labadee (sometimes spelled Labadie), a secluded, and heavily guarded, beach resort on the north coast of Haiti. This was, The Guardian reports, a regularly scheduled stop for Royal Caribbean - except that it came only a few days after a catastrophic earthquake rocked Port-au-Prince. Several online news-and-commentary outlets - including The Huffington Post and BoingBoing - carried the story, and highlighted the extraordinary surreality of affluent tourists sunbathing and frolicking in the shallows only a few miles away from total disaster. Granted, the Independence of the Seas did deliver 40 pallets of food supplies - and Royal Caribbean promises more, in addition to $1m in humanitarian relief. And, granted, Labadee has been held up in recent years as a model for how outside investment could revitalize Haiti's economy; The Guardian reports that UN Special Envoy Bill Clinton made a stop there last October.

All that aside, though, the socio-economic (and moral) grotesquery of Royal Caribbean's BBQ party on their private beach while millions starved in the ruins of their homes drives home an uncomfortable point about the expectations tourists have of the places they visit - even after disaster strikes. In 2007, The New York Times ran a story about Labadee Beach that seems, in light of recent events, hauntingly prescient. My take-away from the article was that Patrick Delatour (Haiti's Tourism Minister), Royal Caribbean and Royal Caribbean's loyal customers seemed almost in cahoots in their determination to ignore the desperate poverty of Haiti as a whole - to say nothing of the history of exploitation that created, and now sustains, that poverty - in order to tout the amenities at Labadee. Mr. Delatour can in some respects be excused his perspective, as his goal seems to be the worthy one of creating opportunity for his fellow countrymen and -women in the form of jobs, trade and investment. But what of Royal Caribbean's fantasy notion of an unspoilt paradise in "Hispaniola?" (Interesting, isn't it, that an American cruise line tried to resurrect Colonial Spain's terminology for the island because the name militant slaves gave the country they founded there was too, well, political? Isn't imperialism grand?) And what of the cruise-ees who are all too willing to ignore what they know is being hidden from them (behind fences and armed guards), all in the name of enjoying their vacations? Can they be excused?

"Any reservations that visitors have about Haiti seem to disappear once they set foot here. 'You think of Haiti, you think of poverty,' said Dave Scott, who runs the resort for Royal Caribbean. 'You think of violence. You think of politics. You think of a suppressed people. But when they actually sail into the bay and they see the pristine sand and the blue seas and the smiling people, their whole attitude changes.'

“'I don’t want to see poverty,' acknowledged Helen Murphy, 66, of St. Paul, who was shopping in the tourist market one morning. 'I’m on vacation. I don’t want to think that these people don’t have enough to eat.'"

I don't mean to single out Mr. Scott and Ms. Murphy in particular. It is the strange, twisted logic that underlies the culture of tourism that gets to me.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many came to the aid of New Orleans - and not least of all to the aid of its extraordinary artists and musicians. This was of course important work, as the cultural heritage of the city - its jazz, its food, its Mardi Gras - was, and is, eminently well-worthy of preservation. But some of the ads that have come out since then inviting tourists to return to the Crescent City seem to give the impression that it was jazz, and food, and Mardi Gras, for which the city was saved. The question of saving the city - indeed, the question of whether the city has been saved - for the ordinary people who live and die there is nowhere addressed. Don't get me wrong: I love me some zydeco. But I doubt very much that a whole lot of money trickles down from music tourism to New Orleans' most destitute citizens. A great deal more has to be done to ensure that they have adequate housing, health care and education - if only (if only!) so that children growing up in New Orleans today can become the Wynton Marsalis-es of the future.

Which brings me back to Haiti. The time will soon come when the relief effort in Port-au-Prince turns to broader considerations of how Haiti will reconstitute itself in the aftermath of this disaster. It remains to be seen whether the goodwill of the world will work to the benefit of ordinary Haitians. If Royal Caribbean's behavior at Labadee is any indication, it will take a good deal of effort to ensure that Haiti's redevelopment - and especially that of its tourism industry - is in the interest of its people. We Americans - with our benefit concerts and celebrity telethons - must be vigilant. We must do our very best to help Haitians make Haiti what they want it to be, and not what we think looks good from the lido deck.

In Which Marie Antoinette's Place In This Boondoggle Is Explained, With Passing Reference To Avatar

2010-01-25T12:22:00.000-08:00

3D aside, James Cameron's Avatar is boilerplate film-making. It's a made-to-order blockbuster: statuesque aliens with cut abs out to oust the Empire; rampaging monsters with huge teeth and indiscriminate taste; megalomaniacal jarheads on a flamethrower bender; scruffy scientists whose warnings no one heeds; and (honestly, what else did you expect?) a cross-cultural love story involving misunderstanding, sacrifice and eventual redemption. The visual lushness of 3D, spectacular though it is, goes right on into the film's grab-bag of kitsch as well, not least because it forces its audiences to cram on those still-hokey glasses - which of course just adds to the rinky-dink fun. (If you think you somehow looked cooler in your glasses than President Obama did in his, you're sadly mistaken.)

Don't get me wrong. I love me some inspired schlock. But what really interests me about Avatar - at least for the hoity-toity purposes of This My Blog - is the spate of wacky interpretations that have sprung up around the film. (It's not just fan-boy stuff, either: this just ran in The New York Times.) Personally, I think Annalee Newitz hit the nail on the head when she called Cameron to task for recapitulating the old (and very tired) White Guy Joins, Then Saves The Noble Savages shtick from The Last Samurai and Dances With Wolves. But beyond that, I am impressed - and gratified - to see that so many people have chosen not to go the It's Just A Movie route and instead have grappled with what the film can be taken to mean. Crackpot as some of the stuff out there undoubtedly is, it's great to see people engaging with their entertainment.

Which brings me to Marie Antoinette. Whenever I think of the state of the arts in this country, I think of her (probably apocryphal) quip: "So the people have no bread - let them eat cake!" Ordinary people in America are told - when we go to the movies, or watch TV, or read a book - that what we are doing is 1) mindless and 2) politically inert. We are, in short, dismissed as "eating cake" - where "cake" is taken as a cipher for everything trivial and unhealthy we consume in the name of "entertainment." (Not exactly what Marie intended, I know, but roll with it. She also could not have anticipated that the carb-counting creme de la creme ten generations down the line wouldn't even touch bread, let alone cake - so what does she know?) It follows, then, that in order to get at the man behind the curtain - in order, really, to live fully as citizens of our Consumer Republic - we must be mindful of our cake. If, like the countless armchair critics who have gone after Avatar in recent weeks, we start to question the implications of our entertainment, we will begin to see that the arts are not trivial, not meaningless, not dessert, but rather the bedrock of our political life.

That's what I intend to do with this blog. Eat a bunch of "cake" and think it over. It's my feeling that if I do, not only will I feel better about the world - I'll actually enjoy it more. And hopefully so will you, whoever you are, if you check in from time to time. Next post will be Wednesday. Bring your powdered wig, your Solzhenitsyn, and a fork.