I haven’t taught in a few years but I’m looking forward to it. Doing a Harvard Summer School class starting in a few weeks (basic journalism) and hammering away at my syllabus. Not sure what to tell them about job prospects. Not sure what to tell me about job prospects. Sigh.
Recent movie thumbnails:
T4 (or whatever they’re calling it) – Missing the magic of storytelling, but not so bad.
Days of Heaven (just caught up with the Criterion edition) – Not sure if a better- looking movie has ever been made.
The Hangover – The studio minions will hunt me down and do evil things if I say too much, but I love me some Todd Phillips. If you can see his first doc, Frat House, do so. Then drop and give me twenty.
Why is it so easy to not blog? I mean this thing has been sitting here for three weeks, waiting to be fed. I keep doing things and thinking “Yep, gonna blog about this when I get home.” Then I do something like read a book. Or, more frequently, get drunk and watch SportsCenter.
The problem gets at the rough road traveled by the the print media practitioner en route to the second-nature Web world. You can hold a newspaper, book or magazine in your hands. It’s tangible. It’s there. It clutters up your apartment. But the blogged word floats into space. You can track your stats, you can commune with other bloggers. But somehow it seems ethereal. So the nagging voice in your head says “Blog, damn it.” But, like Bartleby, you’d prefer not to.
So what have I been doing? I went to see the Lakers beat the Celtics, the fulfillment of an ’80s boyhood sporting obsession. I went to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo and left floating on vocal harmonies. I have fretted with my fellow fellows about heading back into the real world. Mostly I’ve checked out a lot of Hahvahd classes and tried to keep up with the reading. Southern Literature; Postmodern Literature (love me some White Noise); The American Novel (Sister Carrie makes me want to pull my hair out); history of documentary film; and R&B, Soul and Funk. I checked out a Civil War graduate seminar and came to the shocking conclusion that Harvard graduate students are really smart.
Paul Schrader (pictured here with the ever-sartorial Harvard Film Archive director Haden Guest) was a young film critic when he first saw Robert Bresson’s classic minimalist crime film Pickpocket. His first thought: “This is great.” His second thought: “I could do this.” Thus a filmmaker was born.
Schrader, perhaps still best known for writing the quintessential film of American male loneliness (Taxi Driver), is at the Archive this week for a retrospective of his work. Saturday’s program included his directorial debut, Blue Collar (1978), and the moody 1991 drug-dealer-in-midlife-crisis drama Light Sleeper (1991), the third chapter of Schrader’s trilogy on, well, male loneliness (after Taxi Driver and American Gigolo).
Schrader, who will bring his new film Adam Resurrected to Berlin next week, has had a spotty directorial career, including some recent duds (stay away from Dominion: A Prequel to the Exorcist). But I was easily swept into the early-’90s pre-Rudy New York atmosphere of Light Sleeper, even if I share Schrader’s opinion (shared during the post-film Q&A) that the conclusion falls flat.
A subdued Willem Dafoe plays a middle-age narcotic delivery boy in the service of a high-end dealer (Susan Sarandon). The Schrader staples of alienation and redemption are in full effect, accompanied by the religious symbolism well known to fans of the filmmaker raised in a strict a Dutch Calvinist family (he didn’t see his first movie until he was 18).
But it seems all religious symbolism is not created equal. Where Light Sleeper (which takes its title from the New Testament) suggests the sacred through scarves, anointing with cologne and the like, Schrader wasn’t shy on Saturday in his criticism of films and filmmakers that get too overt in their Christ imagery. Among the sinners according to Paul: Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, in which Mickey Rourke sports a Jesus tattoo and Marisa Tomei rhapsodizes over the Passion of the Christ; and Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, in which Clint’s bullet-ridden body assumes the position of a crucifixion.
The Schrader HFA docket concludes Sunday with American Gigolo, Patty Hearst and Hardcore. No, they’re not showing his Exorcist prequel, though William Friedkin will be here next month to show the original. May the power of Christ compel him.
This is the last week of the fall semester, which means my fellowship is damn near half over. Sadness accrues as profs sum up their classes on the final day, usually met by the traditional round of applause, and the better ones find a way to both summarize and look ahead.
Philosophy and Af-Am professor Tommie Shelby is among the better ones (the cover of his book We Who Are Dark is shown above), and the finale of his Black Nationalism course offered some pointed questions about the subject. Here’s one: what does the election of a black president mean for a movement that thrives on racial solidarity and the assumption of inequality?
That wasn’t the actual subject of the final week’s reading, which featured feminist critiques of a staunchly masculine ideology offered up by Angela Davis, E. Frances White and Wahneema Lubiano. But those critiques aren’t irrelevant to the rise of Obama. Feminist critics of Black Nationalism argue that a movement that insists on collapsing the differences within a large group of people (say, African Americans) fails to account for individual difference and varying subsets. In other words, where is the space for difference within the larger group? What about black women, who have concerns all their own? And what about a half-Kenyan, half-American political master who rises to the highest office of the land? Does Obama mean, as Matt Bai has suggested, the end of black politics?
Doubtful. One election, no matter how historic, does not erase racism or identity politics. But the point is well taken. It’s a little harder (but obviously not impossible) to rail against the racist white power structure with a black man in the Oval Office. Shelby suggests that Black Nationalism, which had already seen a decline since the late-’60s/early-’70s heyday of the Black Arts Movement, may need to adjust its parameters and account for other variables – gender, class, power, sexual orientation -to roll to changing times. Race and ethnicity are still important, but as racism becomes rarer, or at least less overt, a monolithic conception of blackness becomes less useful.
And now, I figure out what to do with the next six weeks.
So I finally got me a Flip HD Mino, a tiny and ridiculously easy video camera that even the likes of me can use. Seems like a good occasion to start introducing you to some of my fellow Nieman Fellows. First up: Ernie Suggs, Enterprise Reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
I am slightly embarrassed to report that I am in all of Ernie’s classes (although I like to think it’s the other way around). What can I say, we’re both all over the African-American Studies offerings. Fortunately he’s a very cool guy, even if he’s making the rest of us of look bad by doing most of his course work (dude, what ‘s up with that?). He went to North Carolina Central University, and he is allegedly studying historical black colleges here this year. We’ve been collaborating on a hip-hop presentation that we’ll drop on the Niemans this week. Word. Ernie is one of those genuinely curious and friendly guys who seems to have a kind word for everyone. Where I tend to shy away from people I don’t know well, Mr. Suggs is a social chatterbox (but far from a windbag).
In this video we talk about how the year is going, how cool it is that Ted Kennedy is speaking down the street from the party we’re at and other riveting subject matter (I’m definitely out of interview practice). The supporting player is one Alvaro Jimenez, husband of fellow and documentary filmmaker Margarita Martinez and a leading figure in the movement to ban land mines in Colombia. Also – sorry to be so predictable – a first-class mensch whose English is improving by the day.
My best class of the semester has been Black Humor: Literature, Art and Performance, taught by Glenda Carpio. (I previously referenced the course in the post What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Abe Lincoln). Carpio is a great teacher at a university where many profs care more about publishing and schmoozing that instructing, and you can’t beat a syllabus that features generous doses of Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock and The Boondocks.
This week the class sat down to analyze a skit I’ve probably seen 50 times over the last few years: “The Racial Draft” from the second season of Chappelle’s Show. (My apologies for the bad sound/image sync on the YouTube clip). The premise is a typical Chappelle comedy land mine: with so many people claiming multiple racial identities, we need an NFL-style racial draft so each race can snag its own stars and end the arguments once and for all. One by one, representatives of the blacks, whites, Jews, Latinos and Asians step to the podium and draft their newly exclusive members as a trio of announcers (including Chappelle) offers, uh, color commentary.
Funny stuff, and, it seems, fraught with social commentary. We studied the Racial Draft in tandem with Paul Beatty’s novel The White Boy Shuffle, a rudely funny but tender riff on the commodification of multiculturalism – a theme that also dominates The Racial Draft. To wit:
The Racial Draft depicts multiculturalism as a sort of mass marketplace, where athletes, pop singers and political figures can be swapped on the open market. For instance, the whites (represented by Chappelle in pancake make-up) claim Colin Powell, America’s most mainstream black political star until the rise of Obama (who would doubtless be a hot commodity in a 2008 Racial Draft). But the blacks, led by Mos Def’s hustler figure, agree to the deal only if the whites also take Condoleezza Rice. The blacks respond by demanding Eminem. No go, respond the whites, but you can take OJ Simpson. Wonder if they all get sneaker deals.
Tiger Woods (Chappelle again) is taken with the first pick by the blacks. Chappelle’s Woods is a cuddly goof with an overbite. In the booth, Chappelle remarks that it’s good Woods likes being 100 percent black – because he just lost all of his endorsements. In other words, the golf legend’s biracialism isn’t a problem – on the contrary, it’s a marketing bonanza, a reminder that we often like our black stars to be as un-black, and as safe, as possible.
Kitsch and faddery dominate the proceedings. The announcers wonder if the Jews might take Madonna, to finish off what the Kabbala started. (They take Lenny Kravitz instead). The Asians claim the Wu-Tang Clan, who came to Asian culture by way of kung fu flicks. In the Racial Draft race and ethnicity are little more than commercial symbols and flavors of the month, to be claimed on a whim or a lark.
As the GZA says at the draft’s conclusion, konichiwa bitches.
You may have noticed that Abraham Lincoln is now a publishing industry unto himself. Something about a 200th birthday coming up next year. You want Lincoln as Author? Try Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer. How about Lincoln as Warrior? Check out James M. McPherson’s Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (and if you want to read an incomparable single-volume history of the Civil War get McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom). You can’t read an Obama transition article these days without drowning in references to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. And we’re just scratching the beard here.
But what about Lincoln as Ironic Comic Foil? Coincidentally (I think) the last two texts from my Black Humor class have used Honest Abe as a source of gallows humor. Sacred cows, after all, make the juiciest steaks.
The more irreverent of the pair is Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, a postmodern fantasia/parody of the classic slave narratives. Reed delights in elaborate anachronisms, including a slave escaping on a jumbo jet and a “Slave Hole Cafe” emblazoned with a Pabst Blue Ribbon sign. He depicts Lincoln as a brazen hustler and opportunist (or, as the second section of the novel is called, “Lincoln the Player”) who swigs Old Crow with a wealthy plantation lord and hatches the Emancipation Proclamation as a matter of political gamesmanship. Lincoln: “We change the issues, don’t you see? Instead of making this some kind oratorical minuet about States’ Rights versus the Union what we do is make it so that you can’t be for the South without being for slavery!” Well played, good man. Well played.
In a more tragicomic vein is Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer-winning Top Dog/Underdog. Two black brothers, Lincoln and Booth, share a dingy apartment and dredge up old familial resentments. Booth is a petty thief and three-card monte hustler. Lincoln? He makes ends meet by playing, well, Lincoln, complete with fake beard and whiteface makeup, in a shooting gallery/carnival. Yes, he gets paid for getting his brains blown out again and again and again in a cycle of faux-history doomed to repeat itself. (He also cons a kid into buying an autograph for 20 bucks. Hey, he is an ex-president).
It’s not hard to see why the late, great Abe would appeal to caustic (and, in these cases, brilliant) black humorists. He freed the slaves, for reasons of expediency and benevolence, then got gunned down before Reconstruction became a complete sham and racism resumed its national dominance. He doesn’t star in these books so much as he haunts their barbed explorations of American history.
So happy Bicentennial, Abraham Lincoln. You’re worth some serious green to the publishing world but
that doesn’t mean you’re immune to funny business. (Image courtesy of Salon.com).
So I have now finished reading Revolutionary Road. Which is not to say I have recovered from it. Every once in a while – maybe every five years or so – a novel will flip my world upside down and quietly snicker as my guts spill out. After finishing RR Sunday evening I spent most of that night and Monday in a sort of existential panic, wondering what the hell I’m doing with my life, interrogating my romantic mishaps and generally feeling not well. Isn’t literature grand? As I said in James Wood’s class Monday afternoon, RR psychically damaged me even as I reveled in its considerable craft.
I can’t say exactly why the novel crawled under my skin so, but here’s an attempt.
Frank, the suburban office drone at the heart of the book, uses words to delude himself as he rails against the phoniness of the world (paging Holden Caulfield) and leaves his wife – hardly a saint herself – a nervous wreck. But Frank isn’t a confused adolescent. He’s a 30-year-old salary man in ’50s suburban Connecticut, stuck in a loveless marriage and cursed with a toxic talent for rationalizing away everything that eats at his soul. He is also, as Richard Yates fiendishly demonstrates through long passages of articulate but shallow self-absorption, a prime example of everything he hates. He’s enough to give any wordy, 30-something emotionally stifled man the willies.
And there’s this: Revolutionary Road is a tragedy without a drop a catharsis. No purging of pity and fear. No redemption. No light at the end of the tunnel. Just a nasty dose of self-aware literary realism that never gives you pause to breathe. And damn it, it’s also funny. That’s not fair.
So today’s class was actually therapeutic. Listening to Professor Wood coolly analyze Yates’ realism in the context of Madame Bovary, breaking down the asides and bracketed passages and superfluous quotes, I was able to take a step back and observe the book’s artifice. Wood’s main point was that Yates, in brutally portraying his characters’ self-conscious ways, is also critiquing the self-conscious style of his own novel. This observation had a soothing effect on me. it allowed me to say, in effect, “It’s only a book. It’s only a book.”
Was it worth it? Of course it was. As Victor Shklovlovsky once wrote, “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life: It exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” In short, it reminds us that we’re human. That’s not always fun. But no one ever said it was supposed to be.
You’re reading a novel, say, Revolutionary Road. You are immersed in the purest pleasures of fiction. But, coincidentally, a movie adaptation of said novel is on the near horizon, and you know the casting.
So it is that Frank Wheeler, the stifled, self-deluded suburban Connecticut denizen of Richard Yates’ masterpiece, morphs into Leonardo DiCaprio in your mind’s eye. And suddenly you’re not so engaged in the magical mental alchemy of reading.
Damn you, Leo.
I’m reading RR for James Wood’s post-war fiction class. It’s a wrenching book, even if you’ve done the lost-souls-in-suburbia dance a few times already (The Ice Storm, Little Children, American Beauty, etc.). On the page Frank comes across a generically handsome lump of clay. Unless you know that Leonardo DiCaprio will soon get Frank on the big screen.
Nothing against Leo D, one of the most versatile and underrated stars around. It’s just that I don’t want him invading my books.
The funny thing about the book/movie psychic interference is that it can work even when there is no movie (perhaps an occupational hazard of the movie critic). For instance, as I read Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe trilogy (The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land), I kept seeing a slightly less haggard Nick Nolte as Ford’s sports scribe/realtor Everyman. And I’m so convinced Pablo Schreiber should play the hero of The Given Day that I’ve been tempted to write Dennis Lehane, or maybe Sam Raimi, who’s slated to direct the movie adaptation. (Something about the damaged sense of decency Schreiber showed as Nick Sobotka on The Wire).
None of this makes any kind of sense, but it does say something about why we read. You engage with the author when you consume words from the page and recreate the images of characters and actions in your head. It’s a bracing act of silent, collaborative creativity.
Now you’ll have to excuse me. I have to go out and get a DiCaprio v-chip for my brain.
Georgetown sociology prof and charismatic public intellectual Michael Eric Dyson is at Harvard this Wednesday through Friday to deliver this year’s Du Bois Lectures. His subject was supposed to be hip hop kingpin Jay-Z, but that was scheduled before Barack Obama was elected America’s first black president Tuesday night. So bye-bye Hova, hello Barack.
The shift was a bit of a disappointment to me; I was pretty geeked up to hear about “Che Guevara with Bling On: Hustling, American Ideals and Jay-Z’s Complex Vision of the Game.” But hey, history calls, and Dyson delivered some impassioned observations on Obama and the fine art of racial perception. Among his better points: Obama’s much-noted cool demeanor is wielded by many whites as a cudgel against other forms of black masculinity (as in, “why can’t they be more like Barack Obama?”).
Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. is the man behind the Du Bois Lectures; he was also the target of some friendly barbs from the guest speaker. Example: “Barack has to suppress that black masculine intensity even more than Skip Gates does. Except Skip has a built-in pimp walk.” Hallelujah. Some Big Pimpin’ after all. (Photo courtesy of CNN.com)
Posted by Chris Vognar 
