Thursday at The Mill

"Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming out tonight. I'm Sarah ____ _____ and I'm gonna play a few songs for you and then I know you're all looking forward to hearing Willy Porter. I am too. He's a talented musician. Yeah, I like him a lot. Well, this first song is kind of autobiographical in nature. And if you pay real close attention at the beginning you can figure out how old I am. So here it is. I hope you like it.

Ten years-old back in '74,
Free school lunches and long bus rides,
...
But a view of the ocean from my bedroom."

The crowd didn't clap.

"This next one is not one I wrote myself. It's a good one. Have a listen." She played Eleanor Rigby. The table next to mine resumed talking at more than conversational volume about their favorite Willy Porter numbers. The consensus favorite was Rita. The singer bent her knees to the beat and as she sang the refrain, "Awww, look at all the lonely people," she stretched her neck and sang into the mic. When she was finished the crowd clapped.

"Thank you. I appreciate that. Thanks. I had to put some change in Michael Jackson's pocket for that one. He owns the Beatles' catalog. Did you know that? Anyone out there ever watch that MTV program Made? Yeah? Oh, maybe you'll know this next song then. Did you ever see that episode with the soccer player and stuff? Yeah, MTV chose one of my songs to use on there. I haven't seen it. I can't seem to find when it's going to play. So here's the song that MTV used."

She played a forgettable song without vocals that sounded a little like Will Ackerman. When she finished she told how she remembered when MTV first came out. Then she played a song inspired by imagining what life would have been like if she had married her high school sweetheart, which "Thank God" she hadn't. It was called Baggage.

"I like Iowa City. I've performed here about five times. Is anyone here who saw me last Fall? The Female Songwriter's Festival? Oh, whole new audience. Is Mo here? Woman I met the last time I played at the Mill? You out there Mo? Ok, well, I just have one more song to play for you and then Willy will be out for you. I wrote it the day I quit my day job, so it's real important to me. If you send me an email, I can send you a link where you can download it and of course CDs are by the door. Thanks for coming out tonight."

Willy Porter came out and went straight into his set without talking. Sarah's manager had saved her a spot at a table with him and two others across the stage from me. She barely clapped for him while everyone else in the bar laughed at his effortlessly witty jokes and soaked in his musical talent. A few times she slipped over to her manager's side of the table and it looked like she was discussing how she could incorporate things from Willy's act into her own. Then she would slip back to her own side and assume a very contemplative posture. Her tablemates had their eyes turned to the stage and Willy, but although she sometimes moved her head to the beat, she was usually not looking to the stage. When Willy finished his set she and her tablemates went for the door. The crowd instigated an encore and Willy came back to play Rita at the vocal insistence of the table sitting next to me, but Sarah was gone.

For the second time in as many months, the person driving in front of me has been involved in an accident. In December someone spun out on 218 during a snowstorm and tonight a U of I Cambus broadsided a wee compact car at the T-intersection of Melrose and Burlington by the law school. No one was seriously injured.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic

Jesus is Magic consists of a Silverman stand-up routine interspersed with a handful of musical numbers and bookended by scenes setting up and resolving the premise. The premise is that she's sitting around talking with two friends who are disgustingly successful and to top their accomplishments she concocts a story that she has sold a show and will be doing it that evening. She walks out of her friend's apartment and busts into a singing soliloquy in which she tries to figure out how to make her impromptu fabrication into reality. The show wisely doesn't dwell on the premise much. Silverman is a stand-up comic, not a comedic actor, at least not yet. The scenes where she is playing the character, rather than telling stand-up jokes or singing stand-up jokes, are just not that funny.

The stand-up is funny. It made people in the audience laugh, both the live audience and the movie audience. That's not the end of the story with comedy like Silverman's or Chappelle's or South Park's because at some level it feels like there's something not quite right about laughing at some of these jokes. On the one hand, laughing when Silverman says that the best time to be pregnant is when you're a black teenager seems to show that the person laughing is beyond racism. A racist might respond with a bitter guffaw rather than a laugh. On the other hand, the racist might also just laugh because the joke works on a misdirection that is independent of the race element. One can laugh at the joke either as a reinforcement of racist attitudes or because one is so un-racist that it's ok to laugh at anyone. It's difficult before the fact to tell whether the influence of these comics will be positive or negative.

Andrew Sullivan has lately been singing the praises of this comedy which he calls part of post-PC culture. Here he excerpts an email recognizing this type of comedy cuts both ways. Apparently one of the reasons Chapelle hung it up was that someone, in a scene like that of Bamboozled, laughed a little too loudly. This from What would Phoebe do? is insightful:

The Sullivan reader who writes in that "post-PC" humor is nihilistic is mostly correct. It can't be embraced by anyone for political reasons, because anyone with sincere concerns, left or right or gay-libertarian-right-center, is a loser.
...
Margaret Cho and Sarah Silverman both have some good jokes. But the problem with "post-PC" comedy is that it has--and this is where nihilism comes in--made a fool of anyone who cares about the world. By "problem" I mean problem for Sullivan, who sees this comedy as somehow indicative of his own politics coming into fashion. I find plenty of comedy both horribly offensive and hilarious ("Annie Hall," much of "Seinfeld"), so for me this isn't especially problematic.
...
I happen to prefer comedy which preserves a bit of political correctness, albeit in a subtle form, and think--outside the realm of comedy--that the message of tolerance sent by even dippy-sounding jargon is often overlooked and surprisingly valuable.

I sort of agree. I think that making an effort to respect people's feelings as part of a deeper respect for people in general is a Good Thing. When does the Good Thing become less so? I'm not sure. I'd need to think about it.

Update: Sullivan mocks this critic's take on Silverman's comedy because he or she is a poseur. Sullivan is right, but the critic is also right too, once you cut the crap. I've done my best to do just that below.

Seriously, even if one takes these arguments at face value, what does Silverman's meta-bigotry have to say about authentic bigotry? Generalizations don't work all that well? Racism is stupid? How searing and insightful.
...
My initial white-hot adoration gave way to knotting qualms and nagging questions. I wanted to unambiguously 'get' her, but kept coming back to thorny moments where I felt like I was simply being probed and exploited by someone looking for remnants of reaction.
...
I think Silverman probably falls much more squarely in with Jimmy Kimmel's The Man Show or Matt Parker and Trey Stone's South Park where giving the middle finger to the tired old guard of tolerance is its own nihilistic end game.
...
Both the impolitic and the "politically incorrect" are themselves market norms; so common that everyone from Dennis Miller to Coulter can envision themselves heavyweight shadow boxers with the ghost of political correctness.

Telling the story of Emmett Till

Tonight the Bijou gave a free showing of The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till as part of the offerings to mark Human Rights Week here.

The film is a documentary about a black 14-year old boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, who went to Mississippi in the early nineteen-fifties to visit family. After walking out of a store, he whistled at a white woman whose husband tracked him down at his great-uncle's home that night. The husband and his friend took Emmett out into the night. A witness heard screams from a barn belonging to one of the men and saw one of them.

He was found three days later in a nearby river tied to a heavy machinery fan with barbed wire. After identification by his great-uncle, his body was put in a pine box and the sheriff ordered it buried. Back in Chicago, Emmett's mother pressured the Chicago authorities to stop the burial and have him brought back to Chicago. In one of the most memorable scenes, his mother tells how every part of his face had been mangled. The eyes: one missing, the other on his cheek. The bridge of his nose was broken and gashed. There were two teeth left. His tongue had been cut. They had used an axe and split the top of his head from side to side. Above his ear his head had been shot through. His mother insisted on an open casket, so that everyone could see. Film of the funeral shows people walking past the casket, then rushing outside where they faint with overwhelming disgust, anger, and sorrow onto rickety chairs set up outside the church.

The men who took Emmett Till that night were cleared of both murder and, not even making it past the grand jury stage, of kidnapping. The lawyer for the defendants claims indignantly after the grand jury ruling, not that his clients were innocent all along, but that it was a result of the meddling of the NAACP in the internal affairs of Mississippi. Shortly thereafter the defendants confessed to a journalist for $4000 knowing they couldn't be tried again for the same crime[1].

But his death, and his mother's refusal to cloak the depravity of racial hatred beneath a casket lid, motivated the civil rights movement of the fifties which has led to where we are now. That generation's accomplishments are even more remarkable when I consider how quickly they happened. Emmett Till was killed in the mid fifties. Twenty-five years later I was born and in the space of another twenty-five years the country has progressed so much that the scenes in this film from fifty years ago are almost unrecognizable. There is still a great deal of work to be done and in some ways it's more mundane, more difficult, less dramatic, less rewarding job but it's good to know and see that people change the world for the better even within lifetimes.

---

[1] As a matter of law, I'm not sure why this would be so only for a grand jury ruling, but law may not have had much to do with it.

I found this blog called Swapatorium via Belle Waring. Here's a post of mugshots of women arrested for solicitation in the 1940s.

The Ricky Gervais Show

This podcast is hilarious if you haven't heard it. Ricky Gervais is the creator of the original "The Office" which I'd really like to see. Highlights over the past weeks have included discussions of the Cambodian Midget Fighting League, Plato's untimely death from getting an egg dropped on his head by a bird, toffee shops, cobblers, and the weekly Monkey News.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the motion picture

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye. I don't suppose it'll come to the theaters in Iowa City, but I'll be looking forward to it on DVD. The NYT says,

Even when viewed secondhand in a movie, these photographs are something to see. Their formal elegance is balanced by an intense, pulsing humanity. In all his photographs, Cartier-Bresson says, "geometry is the foundation."

I went to an exhibition of his photography in July '04 which has moved to Amsterdam.

Cartier-Bresson was known as the photographer of the ‘decisive moment’. This exhibition provides a retrospective of his work and his life as a photographer, as well as examining what was in his mind at the ‘decisive moment’ and what influenced him.

There are four of his pictures at the bottom of that page. This site has fifteen, but they really butcher one of my favorites and cut off approximately the right one-third of the picture. Here is a larger version of the original (which is at the top of this post and also hanging at my house. Come on over.). Comparing the two gives a person an appreciation of what Bresson could have meant by 'geometry is the foundation.' It wasn't just bullshit. The one that is cut off is inferior for a number of reasons, but at least one is because it fails to capture the length of the wall as the uncut version does. The street sign in the true version balances with the three men and highlights the line of the wall in a way that doesn't happen when the wall just sort of spills out of the picture in the cut version. Beyond this geography, the sign demonstrates the unnatural interruption of life that was the wall.

He was also famous for his portraits and this one of Truman Capote I think is great.

This is what is going on here.

February 29, 2008: In May 2007 I moved to Wilmington, Delaware, so Culture Hawk is no longer about Iowa City. It didn't turn out to be about much at all. This time I have no intentions about what this space will be like or what I'll include. We'll just see if it's anything at all.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Iowa City has been my home intermittently since the fall of 2000. From the beginning our relationship has been complicated. I only came here because the school I really wanted to attend put me on a waiting list. I stewed and pouted during my first two semesters. Then I moved away and commuted. I moved back for a semester. I studied overseas for a year. I moved back for a semester. I studied overseas for a semester. For a year I was neither in Iowa City nor overseas. Last fall I moved back and started law school.

Despite the fact that I kept hopping around and had at first harbored a childish bitterness about being here, somewhere along the line I really started to appreciate Iowa City.

The purpose of this blog is to chronicle its cultural life. I take a wide view of culture and intend to talk about everything from the street layout to the coffee shops to the grocery stores as well as high culture events like readings, plays and whatnot.

It will take in things from the wider American culture or from other countries that are accessible in Iowa City. No city is an island, not even a small one in the hinterlands of the US.

I'm not aiming at a strictly Iowa City audience and I hope others will find it of interest as well. If you end up moving here because of my stirring descriptions, please let the City Council or Chamber of Commerce know. Maybe they'll set me up with a nice salary for my service.