The niece I am closest to, perhaps of anyone in my large family, is a sculptor. I don't have anything in particular against sculpture as an art form, though, as she was in school I tried to nudge her in the direction of painting. I thought it would give her a better chance of being able to do one of the hardest things that has to be done by anyone who goes into the arts, having a livable income. But I also thought she had more to communicate than sculpture lends itself to communicating. Statues as a form of communication leave a lot to be desired in all but a few cases. That is something I touched on in that piece I wrote about the oldest currently known depiction of a human form from 35,000 years ago and the stories that so-called scientists and scholar made up about it and the intentions of its creator or creators. We don't even know if the object, as we have it, was the product of one hand and, so, mind or if more than one person had a hand in producing what we've got today. We don't even know if a second, third or more people who shaped it had one idea of it or many, perhaps conflicting intentions. When you look at a photograph of the Mona Lisa that some 12-year-old, expressing his inner Trump has drawn on, that's an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Anyway, the babble and chatter about the removal of statues honoring and lying about racists like Robert E. Lee as "changing history" or "lying about history" is complete bull shit. No one learns anything about the real man or his role in history from looking at a an equestrian statue of him. Without knowing who the man on the horse was supposed to be from words, you don't even know it was supposed to be him.
I put up the photo of the St. Gaudens' relief, the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, showing Shaw on a horse with the Black 54th Regiment because it is the only statue I can remember seeing that informed me of something important about American history and what it informed me of was that there were regiments of Black soldiers in the Civil War at a time when they were entirely erased from grade school history books and the depictions of the Civil War in entertainment media. I was 7 when our grandfather took us to Boston to see the historical sights, all the others I remember having to do with the much falsified and romanticized Revolutionary War history found there. I remember being disappointed to find that Benjamin Franklin was not buried there with his family members.
But as important as seeing the Black soldiers in St Gaudens' bas relief* was, it told me little about the history of the 54th Massachusetts, even the defeat and murder of them by the Confederates had to be related to me, there was nothing said about the infamy of the unequal pay of the Black Soldiers,** or they being disappeared from history, the information I got from it was hardly enough history to justify calling it that. What I got out of it I got from what my grandfather and mother told us about it. If it had been just Col. Shaw sitting on horse, it would have taught me nothing at all.
History as found in objects, especially objects created for ideological and political purposes, is more likely to mislead, in the case of so much statuary of historical figures, it lies either through intention or ignorance. That statue of Lee in Charlottesville is a lie. Here's a short and incomplete list of what it covers up, including atrocities like what befell the 54th.
During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free blacks and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” with the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”
Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander A.P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”
The presence of black soldiers on the field of battle shattered every myth the South’s slave empire was built on: the happy docility of slaves, their intellectual inferiority, their cowardice, their inability to compete with whites. As Pryor writes, “fighting against brave and competent African Americans challenged every underlying tenet of southern society.” The Confederate response to this challenge was to visit every possible atrocity and cruelty upon black soldiers whenever possible, from enslavement to execution.
As the historian James McPherson recounts in Battle Cry of Freedom, in October of that same year, Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners with the Union general Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant agreed, on condition that blacks be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’” Lee’s response was that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” Because slavery was the cause for which Lee fought, he could hardly be expected to easily concede, even at the cost of the freedom of his own men, that blacks could be treated as soldiers and not things. Grant refused the offer, telling Lee that “Government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” Despite its desperate need for soldiers, the Confederacy did not relent from this position until a few months before Lee’s surrender.
I would say that the majority of statues ever raised to generals and many of them allegedly depicting heroic politicians tell similar lies that it takes real history to demolish. The other day I proposed melting down statues like the one of Lee to make sewer pipes. The lies they have inserted into the national consciousness are already serving that purpose, only in reverse. Maybe that's why Trump wants to champion them, it's imbibed sewage that has enabled his regime.
* A bas relief can contain more information of the type that produces history than a stand-alone equine statue does. It doesn't have to but it can, like a painting or photograph can.
** The story of the struggle for Black soldiers to equal pay and equal treatment is worth recounting. The boycott of the pay table by Black soldiers to protest the outrageous discrimination against them, culminating in the outrage of the Congress granting equal pay but only to those who had not escaped slavery to fight for emancipation is a story in itself. As is he story of Shaw's successor, an odd duck of a Quaker officer in the Army who, having to get the soldiers to swear they had been free and not slaves, devised an oath that is a masterpiece of turn-about, "You do solemnly swear that you owed no man unrequited labor on or before the 19th day of April 1861. So help you God" to which no slave would have ever, honestly had to say they did as slave labor is never owed to anyone.
Update: Editing this again, I can't help resisting pointing out, again, that historical fiction is an even worse way to learn history as it is, sorry to break this to you, trolls, FICTION. One of the worst pieces of sentimental crap about Lee, falsifying and covering up his evil was the goddawful piece of cloying, pseudo-sentimental crap, "Traveller," by Richard Adams. It tells the "history" of the Civil War and pseudo-biography of the "heroic" Lee from the point of view of his famous horse, perhaps appropriate because the image it builds of Lee and the Confederacy is horse shit. It is not the only thing that made me allergic to historical fiction but it is one of the strongest allergens in that genre I was exposed to If I recall correctly, it was in a period I couldn't escape someone else listening to the Radio Reader at lunchtime. Someone I had to bite my tongue around. It hurt.
Update 2: Editing again, it occurs to me that as "Traveller", narrating the novel after the war, believes that Lee won and is now the President of the country, it might, actually, have unintentionally said something about how the Confederates, manipulating the in-built slave power enhancing aspects of the U. S. Constitution, are still exercising a controlling hand on the American government, preventing egalitarian democracy from happening. That Constitution put the loser, Trump in the presidency and he put Jefferson Beauregard Sessions in the Attorney General's office, from where he's still waging the same war against equality.
Speaking of Robert E. Lee...
ReplyDeleteESPN pulled has removed announcer Robert Lee from calling a University of Virginia football game in light of recent events.
Lee did and said nothing controversial.
He went to college at Syracuse.
He's Asian, too.
But, that name, Robert LEE? Not acceptable.
Now I understand you hate football, and the fans of football, and probably even the people who don't hate football as much as you do, and while I think those statues should be removed and placed in a museum as a representation of the nadir people of race relations in the country, glib virtue signaling (a bit redundant, I know) like what happened to Mr. Lee is a good example of how ignorant and absurd the left can be on this topic.
This is our history, for better or worse, and tearing down statues isn't going to make people more aware anymore than keeping them up.
ESPN, that rings a bell... Oh, yeah, the network that thought Rush Limbaugh would be a good sports commentator until he said something disgustingly racist. I don't think the incident you relate has much to say except that people who run a cabloid sports network probably took too many head hits from footbal.
DeleteThere are plenty of fans of football I don't hate or people who don't hate football as much as I do. Though there are some I do. Making that kind of statement doesn't endear someone to me, I've got to confess.
The use of a statue can imbue it with a malevolence in present day life that makes its removal desirable if not imperative. Pulling down that statue of Lee and others like it is made imperative by the cover up of the real man and the real cause of slavery. With Jefferson Beauregard Sessions doing the old Ft. Sumpter attack on Black People and other minority groups' civil rights, that is an ongoing necessity. Though I think tearing apart the lying costume dramas of Hollywood and TV are more important.
"I don't have anything in particular against sculpture as an art form"
ReplyDeleteCourageous words, Sparky, and unminced.
You don’t know football, so this is going to be a little long but I think it necessary to understand where I’m coming from:
ReplyDeleteFar be it for me to want to defend Rush Limbaugh, and while his comment was poorly considered and worded, he was not the only person who called Donovan McNabb overrated. That he also thought the press did so because they wanted a black quarterback to succeed, while phrased in his typically crude manner, is not inherently racist any more than saying many progressives in the 40s wanted Jackie Robinson to succeed because of the color of his skin is.
Also, Limbaugh was canned for that remark. So the bell that "ESPN" rung was a bit muffled and distant. Limbaugh losing that job isn't nearly as absurd as the example I brought up, because it appears to some liberals, even if you're a minority from upstate New York, if you have the same name as a Confederate general...
The press, and that includes the sports' page, loves to virtue signal, as witnessed by their treatment of athletes like Jeremy Lin, Michael Sam and Robert Griffin III, public figures whose press coverage and accolades far exceeded their athletic abilities because of identity politics. Had Jeremy Lin been a black man from Chicago who went to DePaul, the press wouldn’t have glanced twice at him for his stat line. But being a Chinese-American who went to Yale? A-ha! That’s a story.
There’s a current controversy over Colin Kaepernick and how his political views have 86ed him from working in the NFL, but, the issue runs deeper than unpopular politics. A quarterback has to be the leader of the team, much the way the first violin does more than bow the strings. Overt political posturing isn’t something most quarterbacks do, especially on the field. Tom Brady of the Patriots supported Trump early in the campaign, but, quickly stopped talking about him. The press tried to goad him into saying more, but he refused. Why? Probably because he wants the team to a cohesive unit, and knew that talking about such a polarizing candidate would bring up issues they needed to leave out of the locker room and off the field.
Kaepernick, I should note, had a reputation as being athletically gifted but lacking social graces long before he refused to stand for the anthem. I think his personality is best summarized by his overt political stances coupled with his admission he didn’t actually bother to vote. Plus, he wore a Che Guevara shirt, a man who said, “The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink.” Woke but still sleepy I guess. But he's getting attention and praise from ESPN. Why? Identity politics and virtue signaling are easier and more popular than reasoned discourse and dealing with reality.
C’mon, you go from making a joke about “people who run a cabloid sports network probably took too many head hits from football” (which makes no sense – most if not all the executives who make those decisions were not players) to taking my hyperbolic comment about you hating everything about football way so seriously? I don’t think you hate people who don’t hate football, but man, you’ve posted a lot about something you don’t like and know little about.
Regarding statues, I’d be willing to bet most people didn’t know nor care about them or the people they’re meant to honor any more than they do the origin of the street names they drive on daily. Don’t forget that the greatest strides blacks made in acquiring rights long denied them came after those statues were erected. It didn’t stop the Civil Rights Act from being passed. That people take notice and take offense is something that I think should be discussed and acted upon, not just destroyed to pretend like they never existed, and certainly not by mob rule.
That I could make the joke about the consequences of repeated concussions is as much as anyone needs to know so as to "know football". On top of that there is the inherent violence of the game, the deaths, the injuries, the sense of entitlement that football players so often feel, especially when it comes to women.
DeleteMost of all, no one has ever been able to tell me why I should care who wins and who loses a game. No one has ever been able to tell me that, so, in addition to all of the above, the pseudo-moralistic postures surrounding football, the cloying sentimentality, the opprobrium that is attempted to be attached to non-fans and principled opponents, all of those are reasons for me to dislike the industry.
No, I mean you don't understand the game itself, and therefore thought Rush Limbaugh made a "disgustingly racist" comment. He has made comments like that before, but in this case, he was commenting on the player's skill set (overrated according to many journalists) and why they treated him as such (again, virtue signaling is not uncommon in the press).
ReplyDeleteFootball players have a sense of entitlement because of the meritocracy of their profession and the fame of doing something popular. It's nothing you won't find in any other profession that involves devoted fans. The term "prima donna" doesn't mean "skilled running back."
There is no why to those who have to ask.
Who is offering this opprobrium? Drunks at a bar? I don't think the media is actively telling you you're stupid for not liking football.
They've certainly never told me that about my apathy towards golf, the ballet, parades, New Year's, fine dining or fancy cars.
As I recall it, he said he was overrated because he was Black, I don't remember people ever saying another player was overrated because they were white. But, then, I don't follow sports.
DeleteI don't know, my area of New England isn't as over the top over football as some other areas are but if you're indifferent to the friggin' Patriots people don't like it. As far as I'm concerned, it's a generator of bad morals and concussions. As Walter Brueggemann said, it's the liturgy of the corporate-consumer state, all about violence, sex and money.
Here is Limbaugh's comment, quoted entirely: "I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. They’re interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well. I think there’s a little hope invested in McNabb and he got a lot of credit for the performance of his team that he really didn’t deserve."
ReplyDeleteNote the line about receiving credit that "he really didn't deserve." He was not the only person to argue that. Was it necessary to bring race into the conversation? No, he could have just said McNabb isn't that good a quarterback and that is why the Eagles missed playing in the previous Super Bowl despite the team having an excellent defense. He's Rush though, he makes his money being obnoxious.
But, I don't think it's racist to say (and he didn't use these terms) that the press loves to virtue signal and overrated McNabb's ability. Derek Jeter, a shortstop for the Yankees, was overrated, but because he made for good copy.
Again, let me repeat - Rush has said some thoroughly vile things in the past. But this was not one of them. Stupid, sure. But not racist.
I can understand you not remembering this as you don't follow sports, but Larry Bird, who played in Boston, was called overrated because he was white by Spike Lee. Isiah Thomas of the Pistons said the same thing. Thomas, in a rich bit of irony, later became the GM of the Knicks and ran the team into the ground. Great judge of talent, that guy.
Indifference, or do you tell them, "I don't watch football because it's the liturgy of..."
I've yet to find an institution or endeavor in which morals of all the participants are uniformly good. I love the Beatles, but the halo affixed to Lennon after his murder is ridiculous. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy 'The White Album.'
I have a very old friend, a man in his nineties, an African American man who regularly goes on a tear against Tom Brady in exactly the same terms you claim are at the bottom of this McNabb, including him being singled out for far more adulation than the one Limbaugh targed, including that it demotes the efforts of his team mates. However, my friend has never, in the many rants I've heard on the topic, put it in terms of race. When a racist mentions race, I don't see how you can tease the racism out of the racist mind which said both things.
DeleteOh, good heaves, I remember Larry Bird, he was all over the Boston media, I don't have the same objection to basketball or baseball that I do football, though I never could become interested in them, even so a player has to be mentioned a lot before I know their name.
I can say both things about football. As a sport, as a game, I am indifferent to it, as an inherently and intrinsically violent game which has been given an inescapable association with money and sex (in the worst possible meaning of "sex") I can criticize it on that basis, as well. The intrinsic violence of football, like that of boxing, makes it definitively of a bad moral character that other sports, even ice hockey, don't need to have in order to exist. There is no way to make American football non-violent just as there is no way to make boxing nonviolent in a way that even fencing can be. Though fencing did have to change the rules to accomplish that, in ways that took the bloodshed and death out of the actual game.
You can like the Mopheads and the White Album all you want. I love the music of Brahms even though he shot cats and there are other composers who had even worse morals. I can't recall which of the baroque guitar composers it was who was involved in the slave trade, that crosses my particular line. I haven't been able to read e. e. cummings ever since I learned he opposed the New Deal and hated FDR. That does do it for me. I haven't been able to find Woody Allen funny since I found out that some of what I thought was outrageous and over the top satire was, apparently, autobiography.
All due respect to your friend, he's very wrong. Brady's teammates receive plenty of adulation from the press and fans. As much? Well, here's the thing, Brady's first Super Bowl victory had an entirely different roster than his latest. Fact - the only connection between the two teams in terms of players is him. No matter how good the orchestra, someone has to conduct it. Brady is just that. When the Patriots received the ball in the overtime period of the Super Bowl, Logan Ryan, a cornerback (who plays defense) said that as soon as Brady got the ball, “I basically untied my cleats, and watched Brady like you guys did.” After the game, the running back LeGarrette Blount walked up to Brady, and said, on a hot mic, “You are the greatest of all fucking time!” Brady has played in seven Super Bowls, winning five. McNabb played in one and lost, to Brady! McNabb, I should also note, had the chance to beat the Pats, but was so tired at the end of the game he took too much time on the final drive and killed their chances. An Eagle’s receiver, when asked why they lost, said “All I know is I didn’t get tired in the 4th quarter.”
DeleteThe genetic fallacy comes into play here. Rush might well have based his take on McNabb and the press’s unwarranted accolades on his racist views. But, that doesn’t make them wrong ipso facto. I can’t judge a man’s heart, so while my first thought on hearing that was, “Ay caramba! He’s bringing race into this!” I can’t argue that he was wrong about McNabb’s ability.
Well, you remember Larry Bird, but you might not remember the jealousy many of his contemporaries showed towards him, sometimes blatantly using race as their excuse for downgrading his abilities. To repeat: Spike Lee says Larry Bird is overrated because he’s white. People shrug and he continues to work with ESPN and the NBA. Rush Limbaugh says Donovan McNabb is overrated because he’s black, he’s called a racist and fired. That’s your white privilege right there!
I get the money part, but sex? Not following on that one. Unless it’s that gay thing you mentioned in a prior post about an acquaintance watching football because “it’s all about the ass” or some such thing. I think football could be altered to make it less violent, and dangerous. But it would take a lot of changes, most, I’m sure, the league wouldn’t want to make. I’d start with making it about tackling and not hitting.
I actually was not a huge Brahms fan until I found out about the cat thing. I have horrible allergies. I told one of my clerks, who loved cats, about his hobby, and she told me she couldn’t hear his “Lullaby” afterwards without thinking of him with his bow and arrow. How horrible is wisdom…
But in the end, I can separate the art from the artist. Woody Allen’s work is overrated because, in the end, it just isn’t insightful. He thinks bringing up Dostoevsky or Bergman via his characters and allusions gives his work a gravitas it doesn’t earn. His early comedies are funny. Of course, there was an amusing irony in seeing the Academy pat themselves on the back honoring the film ‘Spotlight’ the same night they honored Allen.
I don't think I'm going to convince my c. 90 year old friend to fall in love with a guy he mocks as "The Golden Boy", nor would I bother because he voted for Trump and can go to hell for that alone as far as I'm concerned.
DeleteGood heavens, there is no more obvious gay spectacle than American football, it's practically pornographic, the enormous asses and padded shoulders, the physical contact, the skin tight tights, the exaggerated bulges, the stances, I think more straight identifying men get their denied gay thrills from watching football than gay men get from porn. I can assure you, straight women who watch football know what straight men deny, the whole thing is about sex and violence, the two mainstays of the American entertainment industry, and the money which is the motive for the players to participate in it. Not to mention the sex lives of the players and owners and coaches.
I don't see how much more obvious the sexual content of American football could get short of them having sex on the field.
Woody Allen is overrated, his pretensions are annoying though I had thought his movies were funny UNTIL I found out they were autobiographical instead of satirical. I don't follow the movies anymore so I didn't know about that particular combinations of honorings, doesn't surprise me, Hollywood is a brothel, pedophile abuse and rape has been part of the industry since pretty much the start. As have been racism, sexism, etc.
You've clearly not seen a pride parade if you think American football the most obvious homosexual spectacle in the land. I grew up in and around Los Angeles. My parents had friends who lived in West Hollywood and were the only "breeders" in the building. Even I was taken aback when I visited Provincetown, and by all accounts, that was just a typical Saturday.
DeleteFunny aside - it was my idea to go there, due to my admiration for Eugene O'Neill. My cousin and uncle made frequent jokes afterwards about what my "real" motivation to visit there was. LOL. I always reminded them that the ice cream was worth the trip, a point they could not deny!
Autobiography or satire? They're just not that funny or honest. But they take that superficial, faux-intellectual pose because, you know, they talk about Thomas Mann!
It's ironic that the Hollywood of racism, sexism, etc. still gave us better movies than the inclusive, multi-cultural nonsense of today. Few things are funnier than listening to Spike Lee criticize John Ford for his politics. While I'm far closer to Lee politically speaking, he can't touch Ford as an artist.
The gay pride parade is no less nor more obvious a gay spectacle than American football and it is more obvious that far more people watch it and feel a cult-like devotion to it than gay pride parades get noticed. I have seen one, as anyone who reads my blog probably realizes, it's nothing I want to have anything to do with. Vulgar, stupid and a really bad public face for LGBT people.
DeleteWoody Allen has, essentially the same use for high literature and culture that any social climbing fraud does, it's a form of name dropping. I would wonder what Thomas Mann would make of such use of him. I will give him this, the lines - "Wheat" - "Wheat" at the end of Love and Death did make me laugh out loud. So, maybe he knows what he's doing when he does that stuff.
As someone who is allergic to the falsification of history in the movies, I rather loathe John Ford. I have only seen a tiny amount of Spike Lee's work or thought and really have nothing interesting to say about him. I'd be more interested in discussing Ishmael Reed's thinking. Or Marilynne Robinson's. I'm really not interested in the movies.
Nope. I have watched football for years with friends, family, acquaintances - some of whom are female and others who are gay. I have never not once heard it spoken about as highly sexualized. Except the cheerleaders. My point is, those parades are gayer than football games. No one there that day would deny that was the gayest thing they'd ever seen. Maybe when Elton John wore that Donald Duck costume.
ReplyDeleteAll art engages in some degree of falsification. I don't read 'Henry V' as an accurate representation of Agincourt. Nor do I view Caravaggio's religious paintings as being perfectly rendered visuals of the actual events. 'Don Carlo' isn't exactly an historian's take on the Spanish Inquisition.
History is history and art is art. Trying to mix the two usually lends itself to making one suffer. I don't watch 'The Searchers' and think, "Ah, so this is how the Comanche lived!" I watch the film and marvel at the composition and photography. I've been fortunate enough to see it in a theater. Wow, what a movie. That ending gives me chills.
I actually prefer 'Bananas' and 'Take The Money and Run' to 'Death In Venus.' Mann isn't funny.
I've had any number of people realize that when I pointed it out, straight, gay, male, female. Gay Pride parades are explicitly gay, American football is unadmittedly homoerotic. Any straight woman who denies that football is an erotic spectacle is lying.
DeleteMovies falsifying history is dangerous in a way that Henry V, Caravaggio and Don Carlo aren't. Beginning with the propaganda of Birth of a Nation that reignited the moribund KKK and the movie propaganda that talked Americans into getting involved in WWI to the fascist chic movies starting in the Reagan years, etc. Not to mention the role that movies have played in promoting Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc. they are extremely dangerous. John Ford and the Hollywood Western genera is not much different in its effect here, among other things fueling gun mythology, rugged individualists, vigilantism. And that's not to mention lost cause crap like Gone With the Wind that has also had a politically repugnant effect.
Oh, come on Buddenbrooks has its moments.
Then I'm guessing there are a number of people that know less about football than you do! Or you've got projection bias. Actually, probably both.
DeleteBut you're dwelling on politics and ignoring the aesthetics. 'Gone With The Wind' is a romance first and foremost. That Mitchell had wrong views of history doesn't make the tension between Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh any lesser. I've never met anyone (mostly women) who loved that movie that talked about the Southern sympathies as being the primary reason.
I'm not a rugged individualist who carries a gun on me (though I can, living in Arizona) but I don't watch Ford to have my views coddled and indulged in. That some do? Well, they're not paying attention to the forest for the trees. And even if he was making those films as pure propaganda, they're much infinitely better movies than virtually all the "inclusive" PC nonsense I've been seeing at the cinema. I keep my politics and my aesthetic tastes separate. Mixing the two often always leads to spoiling both.
That our culture is unable to tell the difference between art and reality, fantasy and history, comedy from commentary, that's hardly the fault of the performers.
"Or you've got projection bias."
DeleteI don't know, maybe you're in denial.
Gone with the Wind is a racist movie, objectively. It is a movie that probably did at least as much as Birth of a Nation to poison progress against Jim Crow and segregation. Denying those political aspects of those movies is as unrealistic as denying the political content of Alexander Nevsky or Triumph of the Will or, more generally relevant to our discussion, Olympia.
As someone who has worked in the arts my entire life, I think the idea that art can be separated from life, including politics, is wrong. What you watch them for or, in fact, what anyone thinks they're watching them for doesn't change the fact that such things in movies as racism, as white supremacy, as class and regional derision, as anti-regulation, ridiculous and unreal fantasies about libertarianism, and a host of other things have real life effects, political as well as other effects and a lot of those are terrible. That effect of art and what should be more accurately called propagandistic kitsch has been noted over and over again since the time of the Greeks if not earlier. My guess would be that it is one of the most often reported effects of consuming art, literature, etc. in the history of human culture.
That YOU don't believe what you watch has an effect on you is contradicted by your reactions to Spike Lee. He, his movies, obviously have an effect on you.
The idea that what people watch doesn't have an effect on their behavior and their actions is one of the least attached to reality that there is. History is saturated with evidence to the contrary.
I've become convinced that people are unable to tell the difference between the things you contrast in your last paragraph may not be the fault of performers (though I would beg to differ on that) but it is definitely the fault of producers, directors and writers who are constantly blurring the lines between reality and nonsense. Donald Trump, "reality TV" phenomenon being elected by people who liked his "reality TV" fascist persona is absolute proof of that. Just as Ronald Reagan largely was constructed from his phony Hollywood created image. American democracy is being swallowed up by commercial entertainment, much of it geared to have that effect. Hollywood deserves to stand as the locus from which that cancer spread.
I’m reminded of the Redd Foxx joke where a man goes to see a psychiatrist and is administered a Rorschach test. He sees every picture as being overtly pornographic, and when the psychiatrist tells him he’s clearly obsessed with sex, he is indignant. “Me! You’re the one with all the dirty pictures!”
DeleteNo, ‘Wind’ is undeniably racist, but the ladies (and they are mostly women) I know who enjoy it care more about Rhett Butler than Jim Crow. I would also note ‘Wind’ was likely far more reflective of the era than a molder of it. Margaret Mitchell didn’t invent racism, nor was she influential in politics as far as I understand. But I have read that Victor Fleming was a Nazi, or at least wanted to be.
I’m saying I can separate art from politics. I cannot speak for others. Most people, I find, don’t take art seriously.
My criticisms about Spike Lee are in regard to his racism (subtle and reactionary as it is) and larding up his films with social commentary at the expense of story. I enjoyed his, ‘Crooklyn,’ immensely, and felt he managed the scope and at times unwieldy and contradictory nature of the subject matter in ‘Malcolm X’ very well. But something like ‘Bamboozled’ is everything he does badly all at once.
I also will defend his comment about not receiving an Oscar for his amazing documentary ‘4 Little Girls’ because he was up against ‘a Holocaust movie.’ You win more awards for right thinking grandstanding (the bigger the tragedy the better) than aesthetic achievements.
Why you do think John Ford, who won numerous Academy Awards, was never honored for his Westerns?
I blame the audience. There’s strength in numbers and a lot more of them than there are directors, writers and producers.
Trump won via myriad factors. The press and the way they humored him undeniably played a part, but as someone with ties to the Midwest, I think you’re underestimating just how much they disliked Clinton, and those are for reasons that have nothing to do with television.
Though having Lena Dunham be an integral part of her campaign didn’t help.
How did they have any means of coming to dislike Hillary Clinton except for what they got through the media? The same media that created the persona of Donald Trump as a public figure. And they gave him what has been estimated to have been billions of dollars worth of free publicity during the campaign, starting in the nomination phase of it.
DeleteI won't discuss Spike Lee because, as I said, I don't know that much about him.
I have no way of knowing the motives of "The Academy." One of my relatives cleaned house for one of the members of it and he told her he had hardly ever seen the movies he voted on. And then there are the notorious misses over the years. If I recall, they passed up the arguably great Eyes On The Prize for the stupid and trivial documentary The Ten Year Lunch about the Algonquin Round Table. It's one of the few times that I saw two of the movies up for the came category and the choice was absolutely stupid.
We've been through Lena Dunham, I wouldn't call her role in the Clinton campaign as "integral". I think she's more of a raspberry seed in your teeth than someone important. She is trivial.
I voted for Hillary, but to wonder why people dislike her except that they were told to by the media?
ReplyDeleteThat's one reason she lost.
You wrote, "That YOU don't believe what you watch has an effect on you is contradicted by your reactions to Spike Lee. He, his movies, obviously have an effect on you."
No, I have serious issues with Spike Lee, the person, and feel his obvious character flaws can spill into his films, which can give then a patronizing, heavy-handed tone. But that is my theory on why his films can be thus. But I can enjoy and admire a film by someone I wouldn't want to sit next to on a plane.
I'm not privy to the inner thoughts of individual members, but their groupthink, if you look at in retrospect, is pretty easy to decipher.
Integral? Hyperbolic, to be sure. But go on Youtube and search for the pair. That's more than a raspberry seed.
Then there is this piece from 'The Washington Post,' headlined, "Lena Dunham says she’s not to blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss."
Look, regardless of what your one niece told you, I work with more women than men, and the clerks/pages are younger than me, and I'm not that old. Lena Dunham isn't in the media because she isn't popular with young people. Not important? Aesthetically, I agree. And to too many, she's the paradigm of modern, out-of-touch liberalism. That's not a good thing.