You get what you pay for.

Is Li-Young Lee's Behind My Eyes as bad as it sounded on NPR?

I heard this story on NPR and was surprised at what sort of poetry wins whole mantels full of awards. I'll hold my fire until I actually get one of his books in my hand (from a library), but my trigger finger is twitching. I know he can't help who likes his poetry or how they express themselves, but I thought this from Robert Bly deserved a guffaw:

Bly says it's rare to find a poet in America who has such a "tremendous connection with culture."

"Tremendous"--the culture-man's "very." Also, poets in America generally have less tremendous connections with culture. What he seems to be trying to say is that poets in America are generally not remotely connected to people who have shaped history (not culture) in any material way. Li-Young Lee's poetry is so tremendous, you see, because his father was Mao's doctor and he seems to have had a genuinely tough childhood. And now for something completely different check out Bly's modest homepage:

In his numerous roles as groundbreaking poet, editor, translator, storyteller, and father of what he has called "the expressive men's movement," Bly remains one of the most hotly debated American artists of the past half century. What is it about Bly and his ideas that inspires such impassioned responses from readers and associates? The psychologist Robert Moore believes that "When the cultural and intellectual history of our time is written, Robert Bly will be recognized as the catalyst for a sweeping cultural revolution."

Cultural Revolution indeed.

Edge v. TED

TED wins. It's not just that the presentation is better, although that is important, but I find the whole philosophy of TED (ideas worth spreading) better than Edge's (to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society). Edge is thoroughly self-regarding and self-satisfied. Take a look at the right-hand column where, in the style of bestsellers or blockbusters, they excerpt around 50 blurbs from newspapers and other old media. It might give you the impression that for all their assuredness ("The Third Culture ...[is] taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.) they crave validation like a child working on an art project who gets his real joy from the pat on the head he gets from his teacher rather than the art itself. TED, on the other hand, is more democratic but the greater openness and inclusive spirit (shown in everything from allowing comments on the videos to their more user-friendly interface) does not lower the discourse. There are some gimmicky TED presentations, but the best of them stack up well against the best Edge has to offer.

Bananas, a Woody Allen film

For the first ten minutes or so, I enjoyed Bananas. It starts with an assassination-as-sporting-event gag which is funny because it's more true than ever. I have watched the last few Democratic candidate debates just as less geeky people (or an earlier version of myself) watch sporting events. Both politics and sports tap into our tribalism. In sports, tribalism is defensible because there really is nothing more at stake than who won (unless the Cowboys or Yankees are playing, in which case their loss is cosmic retribution for their inherent evil). Politics should probably be different since what (in terms of policies) prevails is the important question, but the truth of course is that politics often aren't different. The media is partly to blame and Woody Allen's gag at the beginning of Bananas makes that clear.





These schticks are great for ten minutes or so, but I get tired of them after that and don't bother to hit pause when I get up for a bathroom break. Same thing with Monty Python really. They would be better as 2-5 minute YouTube clips than 90-minute awkward amalgamations of 2-5 minute gags.

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.

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[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.