Day 02 (Round III) "In the trenches" (what do the best teachers do? edition)

Very, very jammed-up day today:

to bed around 12:15 last night;

6:00am can't sleep, get the hell out of the rack and get my elderly ass over the to the cross-trainer elliptical machines at the Rec Center, which is (fortunately) now back on its regular during-the-semester schedule and actually opens that early;

6:45am head home (still goddamned dark out--I hate living at the far western end of the time-zone), feed Mister Man "Second Breakfast" (cf Lord of the Rings), gently wake Dharmonia, who's coping with the same damned sinus infection as half our building, make our own breakfast, clean up, get to school by around 8:15am;

9-10:30am executive committee (basically, advisory-to-the-director committee) meeting. Attempt to grapple with the quite-astonishing asinity of directives from an outside-our-college committee ("a committee is a beast with no head and four hind legs");

11-11:45am consultation with student (classical guitarist who's getting seduced to the Dark Side of the mando-family);

12:30-1:50pm first meeting of upper-level/graduate "American Music" seminar, a course in my own area of research, which I've taught several times before, and which (as a result) I know real well--but which I am entirely re-writing this time around;

2:00pm Summer Reading Program committee meeting--which, fortunately, got its business done in about one-fourth of the allocated 60:00 minutes;

2:25-3:30pm cram lunch while editing, publishing, and uploading the Breeze (Flash-based) slideshow version of the seminar's Powerpoints, and writing the "further to today's class" email. I do this with each meeting of every class I teach in a given semester, so that the kids in each class prepare the material (mostly reading and listening) in advance, encounter it again during the session, and then see my own summary (email) and the same slideshow (Breeze) of the material just addressed. This helps keep them--and me--on track. But it's quite a juggling act: more-or-less have to get the email and the Breeze slideshow done immediately after the meeting, or I fall behind and lose track of what the heck we specifically covered.

Around 4:15pm, collect Dharmonia and head home. Feed Mister Man again (or possibly twice more), cook dinner, watch the BCS Bowl game (who the hell do you root for when you don't really like either?!?) while spending the Last...Five....Hours...writing more stuff: critique, promotional materials, program notes, schedules, three courses' next lectures, getting ready to review Ph.D. candidate's latest draft and colleague's Irish music textbook, and, the material below:

As a member of our Teaching Academy (basically, a campus-wide organization whose mission is to recognize, facilitate, and reward top-notch teaching--don't know how the hell I wound up a member (Groucho: "I wouldn't belong to any club that would have me as a member!")--I've been asked to deliver a presentation in their monthly series entitled "What Great Teachers Do." I am highly self-conscious about being numbered in these ranks--I attend Academy colleagues' presentations whenever I can, and am consistently gobsmacked (read: "impressed and intimidated") by the insights, expertise, and imagination of what they do--but, one of the Academy's full-time staffers is a DMA music recipient who had to sit through various of my seminars and coachings. So she is (perhaps unwontedly) persuaded that I have insights to offer. Have been scuffling and procrastinating supplying her with a title and descriptor, because--God's honest truth--I couldn't really conceptualize ways in which the (I think) effective but (I know) idiosyncratic classroom techniques I employ might translate beyond the music history classroom.

But the deadline was looming, even though my DMA person was being very tactful and patient, and I really didn't want to hang them up with their promotions. So I had to sit down and try to grind out something that was (a) honest about what I do, despite the temptation to razzle and dazzle and try to seem cooler than I am, (b) provide actual value to people who are already really good teachers in other disciplines, and (c) provide at least a modicum of entertainment (nothing is more boring--or less apposite for non-musicians--than a musicologist who's in love with his own approach).

Below, I'm pasting in the results, in the approximate stages at which I created them, beginning with the rough-ready-and-random notes I started from, including the various random bullet final-presentation bullet points that occurred to me as I was beginning to draft the title and abstract, and--finally--the complete title and abstract that I sent in about an hour ago.

As my buddy Steve-the-Plumber (about six times tougher and eight times realer than that asshole Joe-the-"Plumber") would say, I'm kind of "showing my ass here"--this isn't a particularly pretty process, but perhaps it might provide encouragement, or at least consolation, to those of you out there who might sometimes likewise struggle in getting from request to final result.

To wit:

First notes

Base in world-music rhythm presentation? Emphasize that the point here is that interactivity results not only from subject, but also from mindset. What are the archetypal approaches to teaching? How can we re-engage with this old patterns of teaching-learning, to which students will viscerally respond even if they haven’t previously encountered.

The power of patterns, templates, consistent procedures; modeling (thought processes, modes of interaction, personal conduct); tagging

Culture <-> context; “traditional” methods; the power of narrative arcs (chronological or otherwise); context reveals content—content reveals context;

Looking for the “reason ‘why’”?

Problem-solving and investigative methods

Observations about 21st century students strengths and weaknesses in processing information; strong: assimilation, subjective interpretation, “deep-reading,” visual sources, “collage”; weak: synthesis, understanding differing experiential perspectives, structural understanding, texts, linear progression

Teaching to students’ preferred multi-tasking mode

Moving through material in a “hyper-card way”

Differing paradigms for “literacy”: exploiting “new” literacy, remediating “old”

Points noted along the way that I want to make in the final presentation

What insights do you consciously convey in your teaching field via non-verbal and/or non-prosodic methods? What insights might you be sub- or unconsciously conveying in similar fashion? How can you make those non-verbal, demonstration-imitation-critique methods more intentional, conscious, and effective.

Based in my own work as a student in non-verbal situations; years later, thinking about how to bring those insights from “outside the Ivory Tower” back into the classroom. Recognizing that post-literate classroom students share some key weaknesses—and strengths—with pre-literate learners.

Cite past publications and research; practical hands-on training, ways in which teaching outside the classroom and according to oral/aural methods have been brought back into the classroom.
Shaman; knowledge-bearer; teaching with the whole body

Look at past articles, language, demonstrations, blog-posts.

Realizing that writing a daily blog on the philosophy & practice of teaching might be helpful: PRICELESS!

I went back to the blog, clicked on the "Education" tag, and re-read those blog posts that might provide ideas, content, "pegs" upon which to hang the presentation.Here are the links, with my incipit tags to help me remember individual posts' content:

Boom or bust: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/12/day-462-round-ii-in-trenches-palpable.html

Pattern language: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/11/day-43-round-ii-in-trenches-pattern.html

Balancing familiar & unfamiliar teaching styles: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/11/office-workstation-series-122-winding.html

Minimalism/participation: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/11/office-workstation-series-120-go-light.html

Body-knowing: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/11/office-workstation-series-119-dancin.html

“SHMRG class”: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/09/day-20-round-ii-in-trenches-visual.html

Chunking-out in-class versus outside-class work: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/09/day-18-round-ii-in-trenches.html

Presentations as learning tools: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/04/day-69-in-trenches-2-more-minutes.html

Biorhythms of admonishment versus encouragement: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/04/day-66-in-trenches-coasting-and-coping.html

Schoenberg via context/content: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/04/day-55-in-trenches-bad-blogger-bad.html

Wikis and SHMRG worksheets: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/03/day-39-in-trenches-whatre-you-lookin-at.html

Ellington via context/content: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/02/day-33-in-trenches-jump-in-line-edition.html

Exams, fear, feedback: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/02/day-30-in-trenches-aftermath-edition.html

TMEA as IWW street-corner: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/02/day-28-in-trenches-jiggity-jig-edition.html

Learning-by-ear at TMEA: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/02/day-26-in-trenches-go-time-edition.html

Senior faculty forgetting the pain: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/02/day-19-in-trenches-oscillation-edition.html

Exams to enhance effort: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/02/day-17-in-trenches-knockin-em-down.html

Discussion sections to lessen fear: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/01/day-16-in-trenches-blue-norther-edition.html

***post-literate and highly visual: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/01/day-15-in-trenches-isms-edition.html

***”I Can Show” diss references: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/01/day-13-in-trenches-buckling-down.html

Caricature/iconography: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/01/day-12-in-trenches-happy-hour-edition.html

Critical reading/Summer Reading: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/01/in-trenches-day-09-street-fighting-man.html

Wiki’s and peer-review: http://coyotebanjo.blogspot.com/2008/01/day-06-in-trenches-quick-hit.html

Here’s the Final Abstract

Pre-literate pedagogies in the (post-)/(multi-)literate classroom

The 21st century undergraduate population has wider access to, and greater expertise with, a range of information sources than, arguably, any other era in human history. In a wired world, in which access to information is comparatively instantaneous, intuitive, and upon-demand—far less laborious, logical, or assiduous—students’ ability to read, learn, process, and synthesize linearly, critically, and individually can be neglected. Similarly, their ability to focus and respond in the one-to-one and one-to-many environments of the college classroom can suffer, simply because they are comparatively unaccustomed to the modes of critical thinking, reading, writing, and speaking which the classroom both models and inculcates.

The great jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, asked to “define jazz,” paused, and then, in typically gnomic fashion, “I can show it to you better than I can explain it to you.” In its brevity and indirection, Monk’s statement also articulates a significant insight—that certain types of information, insights, and intellectual tools, in a wide variety of teaching situations, can only be taught or learned via non-verbal demonstration-imitation-critique techniques.

This presentation recognizes that 21st-century “post”- (really, “multi-“)literate learning styles both demand, and respond to, diversified teaching styles. It suggests, further, effective and rewarding models can be rediscovered, and recovered, from the most ancient, demonstrative, and narrative teaching/learning sources. Interactivity in the classroom results not only from teachers’ & learners’ agreement upon topics but also upon mindset—from a visceral, tactile, proximate shared response to topic, insight, and narrative. The presentation further suggests that useful models for teaching post-literate students can, unexpectedly, be located in pre-literate knowledge traditions.

Drawing on Dr Coyote’s 30-year experience as a student and teacher, in and outside the classroom, within and beyond the university, in the post-industrial West and around the world, and employing interactive exercises, discussion, and demonstration, this presentation provides examples, anecdotes, tools, strategies, and philosophical premises which can energize teaching/learning across the university curriculum.

Day 01 (Round III) "In the trenches" (lemme-at-'em edition)

First day of the Spring 2009 semester.

I really, really, really like my job. Not every day, not every aspect, not every element. But the parts that I do like are in the vast majority and are vastly more satisfying than the constituent elements of any other job I've ever had.

And I even like the repetitious nature of the work: the fact that, on each annual academic cycle, we get to revisit at least some portion of the same work we did last year, and put into practice the insights we gained in last year's iteration. For reference's sake, here are links to Fall 2008 and Spring 2008 opening day "Trenches" posts. As I said in each of those, I really enjoy the energy at the start of the semester: the chance, as a teacher, to get stuck-in at the actual central content of the job--which is the face-to-face interaction in the classroom and, as an observer, to see the off-the-charts nervous energy (not all of it positive, but all of it full of potential) of the kids returning.

Am particularly looking forward to this semester's teaching, for a bunch of different reasons, in addition to all the "let's get this party started" Day 01 activities I've blogged about before:

2009 brings another iteration of my "Ireland" seminar, a kind of culture-studies course which is simultaneously open to upper-level undergraduates and grad students from across the campus (all disciplines) but also fulfills an upper-level Musicology requirement for music majors--a neat trick, that. I've been playing these musics for a little over 30 years, and a student of Ireland's folklore and traditional culture for probably 20, and teaching them in a quasi-academic setting for about 15, but it's only in about the last three years that I have been enabled to teach an entire 15-week semester specifically on this particular world culture and with this particularly wide a cross-disciplinary swath. One of the principle texts is Henry Glassie's magisterial Passing the Time in Ballymenone, about which my old friend the General said, "I think if Fermanagh was to cease to exist, you could recreate it just from that book." That's kind of what I hope this class, which I've now taught three times and capped with a two-week May field trip to the West of Ireland, can do for my kids: provide them some means, some circuitous route, some Spiral Journey that can help them find their way into this culture which is so rich, so complex, and has given me so much--and then find their way out again, bearing at least a few of those insights as lasting gifts. I get to do this course almost every year,; in that sense, it's a little like planting a garden: each year I learn a little more, fine-tune a little more, deepen the insights a little more. I feel very grateful to have the extraordinary privilege of teaching this topic again; can't wait to get started.

2009 also brings an interesting, challenging, valuable shift in our boiler-plate teaching of the 4-semester undergrad history sequence: when I took over the gig in 2000, we taught music history in 2 two-semester sequences: in the freshman year, a two-semester more-or-less "Music Appreciation" course, and in the sophomore year, a two-semester more-or-less "Ancient to 1750/1750 to the Present" chronology. It was simultaneously redundant and too simplistic: the freshman sequence was rather cursory (for God's sake, the textbook was actually/literally Classical Music for Dummies) and the sophomore sequence had far too much material to cover feasibly in two semesters. Pretty quickly we reoriented that curriculum to the 1- plus 3-semester format I've described in the past, which front-loads the tools & skills stuff into the first semester, and buys us more time, detail, and concentration for numbers 2 through 4.

For several years, the 1-(2-3-4) sequence has been taught by myself and one colleague: numbers 1 + 3 in the fall semester, numbers 2 + 4 in the spring. This has worked well for the students, as it means that any given student can access any given increment (1, 2, 3, or 4) within one academic calendar year, and at the same time, a student entering as a freshman and proceeding linearly can take the courses in the sequence (1,. 2, 3 and 4) which best serves the material. But, the corrollary has been that my colleague and I each had to teach an undergraduate section (myself, 1 in the fall and 4 in the spring; herself, 3 in the fall and 2 in the spring) every semester--and that in turn limited the range of other or upper-level courses we each had time to offer.

Now, with a retirement and a new hire, we've inaugurated a shift so that each of the four Musicology faculty members teaches one semester of the 4-chunk sequence. This has several advantages: it opens up one additional slot per calendar year for my colleague and myself to teach a special topic, it provides our other two colleagues the opportunity to engage with the large-enrollment undergrad courses, it lets each of we four teach in our respective periods of particular expertise, and, perhaps most centrally and essentially, it provides every student the opportunity--and the requirement--that s/he engages with each of 4 different professors and 4 different teaching styles.

This is incredibly important: it is essential that every undergraduate student be exposed to--have to cope with--a range of quite-contrasted professor profiles, approaches, styles, priorities, vibes. It is very easy for a young person to decide that s/he likes or dislikes a particular approach, and then attempt to avoid any other approaches that are less comfortable or familiar.

That is not what college should teach. What it should teach young people is the focus, flexibility, patience, and pure-D stick-to-it-ivity to succeed in the courses and acquire the information for which they are responsible regardless of whether the professorial approach is familiar or unfamiliar, comfortable or un-. A student who can't, won't, or doesn't believe that s/he can learn from such uncomfortable, unfamiliar, or less-desirable situations is damned sure never going to be able to hack it out in the big world, where the people who control your job may display analogously uncomfortable, unfamiliar, or less-desirable managerial styles.

So the four discrete semesters / four different professors template both diversifies the load for us and, more importantly, diversifies the experience for the kiddos. This is the first semester we've been able to put this into play and I look forward (I hope I can look forward) to the results.

I like this annual cycle. I like the work--that it's all, fundamentally, about enhancing understanding, increasing possibilities, deepening experience, creating human value. And that we do it on an annual cycle that actually lets us learn from--because at least we start by remembering--the insights of previous years.

Kind of like the farmers of Ballymenone.

Day -01 (Round III) "In the trenches" (blind-review edition)

Well, here we go again. For reference's sake, here are links to this time last semester and the semester before that.

When I began the "Trenches" series (an increment-by-increment recounting of the daily tasks that cross the desk of a musicology professor), I hadn't any intent of continuing it past a single semester; it was more in the way of a semester-long snapshot of what we do and how we might think about it (part of the "being a public intellectual" role I've blogged about before). But, I've continued to find it useful and challenging, and, ideally, valuable for others, and so I continued into a second semester, and am now looking down the barrel of a third.

One way I know that's true is that my sleep patterns have fallen apart. There was a time when I could sleep almost anywhere nearly at will, but as I've gotten older, I've found I sleep a lot lighter and wake much more readily. And, with the range of stuff to think about that the new semester brings, if I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the john, I have to say mantras just to keep myself from starting to problem-solve. And it doesn't always work. And then I'm usually up for a couple of hours. I've learned that, at that point, the best thing I can do is just suck it up, get out of the rack, and go do some work. But you have to watch out: if you work 'til you're ready to fall back to sleep, and then do, the REM fog will persist through the rest of the day.

So to today. Went to bed around midnight, got shocked awake by some noise around 3:45, and decided, since I was stressing about looming deadlines, I might as well get out of the rack and start working on at least one of those looming projects: a requested chapter for a collection on depictions of Southern US culture in film. It's an outgrowth of a paper I gave a couple of years back at a professional organization's national conference, focusing on portrayals of the blues in Hollywood film, and in the wake of which the collection's editor approached me and asked for a print version. As sometimes happens, the editorial team wasn't able to give very specific or concrete guidelines for the various authors, because the shape/profile/tenor of the collection was going to be revealed only after the various topics were finalized.

So one had to go off and expand the reading text, essentially writing in a vacuum, because there wasn't any guidance. So you say "well, they came to me on the basis of the reading text, so I guess something that expands on that fundamental approach is most likely to be right." And, of course, in the event it turned out not to be what they wanted--at least initially. Which would be OK, because sometimes you as an editor don't know what's right until you get some things that are not-right.

But, I gotta say, what frosts my bacon is when the editorial team comes to me, says "we'd like a version of the paper you gave," you develop the article based on that paper, and then they say "well, we think this isn't what we want, but we don't really know anything about this topic, so we're going to farm it out to anonymized outside readers." Which would still be OK, because after all anonymous reviewers are a fundamental part of the process--there's no other way to ensure that personal relationships are kept out of the author-reviewer dynamic.

The problem is that this doesn't always work. For some reason (maybe it's the venerable jobsite syndrome), there's a small percentage of those anonymous readers, on any given project, who just cannot keep their own biases out of the review. For years--decades really--I resolutely declined the opportunity to review CDs, even though I was repeatedly asked and I knew lots of folks who did it for the free discs, because I couldn't see any way to be both a recording artist and a recordings reviewer--the conflict of interest just seemed too flagrant.

Eventually, after years, I agreed to write a book review here and there, in AMS's principal journal, because the format allowed for really extensive and detailed essay-reviews. And even there I spent weeks working on those reviews, and re-drafted multiple times, because I so much wanted to do justice to the books and present as balanced a perspective as possible.

And so I don't really understand why some blind reviewers interpret the job, not as editorial critique, but rather the attempt (usually biased and not-very-well argued) to convey, almost literally, "I don't like your article because it's not the article that I wanted to read". My great mentor Peter Burkholder had a metaphor for this: he said that, in almost any Q&A session in almost any scholarly meeting, you could sub-title almost any question posed: "Me." "Me." "Uh, Me." "No, no, no, Me."

Now, the fact of the matter is that, in a live, Q&A-type session, such transparent egocentricity is something you can cope with: if you get one of those patented, pedantic, egocentric inquiries which is more accurately troped as just one more opportunity for the questioner to draw attention to him/herself, in the live situation you can come right back at them. I actually relish those situations, because I like to be able to counter and riposte, and I am enough of a Socratic adherent to believe that point/counterpoint does actually make you think better.

But the anonymous reviewer situation is not that: it's more like you're hung out there on the fence, and some jackass who resents the fact that you got tapped for the article, instead of him or her, can take manipulative potshots at your work without any accountability. It's not that I can't take the critique. I love being edited: I was raised in a hard, brilliant school, by people who were some of the great writers, full stop, in the history of my discipline. But this idea of using the blind review as a cheap-jack opportunity to take fundamental issue with somebody else's work, simply (and transparently) because you resent them, is weeny and stupid and exemplary of the kinds of petty tyrannies that make people outside academia look on us with contempt. You want to reach through the fibre-optic cables that brought the anonymized comments, grab the reviewer by the throat, and say "motherfucker, tell me where you don't understand, tell me where you don't agree, tell me where the structure or expression or usage or explanation fail; that helps me. But keep your envy to your fucking self, OK?"

It's tougher to do this because, sometimes, the sniping manipulative bullshit I'm talking about is interwoven with critique, from the same person, which can solid, acute, and essential. You just have to learn to weed out, and distinguish between, the bullshit cheap shots (or cheap motivations), and retain, and respond constructively to the apt criticisms. It's a fine line to walk but, as with so many things, it's a hell of a lot easier when and as you learn to separate the ego whose feelings are hurt from the intellect that can actually benefit from the critique.

And I love getting stuff off my desk.: vastly, densely, word-for-word revised draft goes in tomorrow.

And, oh, by the way: this is post #1000: three-and-a-half years (first post June 8 2005, on "Radical Pedagogy") later, it's been an interesting progression.

Day -02 (Round III) "In the trenches" (kicking-out-the-chocks edition)

Years ago, when I worked as a framing carpenter, we had an old Ford panel van to carry the tools, sawhorses, and other gear. It belonged to the company, but occasionally I would be tasked with driving off to the 7-11 at break time to pick up the Big Gulps and Little Debbie Snack Cakes and what-not. And I'd always have to remember that the thing had no reverse left, so that it was necessary to park either nose-up an incline (so that you could put it in neutral and roll backwards via gravity out of the space) or nose-in to a space that you could drive forward out of.

Likewise, it was missing a parking brake as well, so if you were stuck in a situation where you had to parallel-park nose-down on a slope, you had to make damned sure that you cut the wheel hard toward the sidewalk, so that the front tires were jammed right up against the curb; otherwise, the thing was sure to start rolling downhill when your back was turned. This also meant that, when you were ready to pull out, you had to wrench the steering wheel away from the curb by main force, because that thing was going to start moving as soon as you did.

On the other hand, in such situations, you never had to worry about whether the starter would work, because you could always count on gravity to turn the crank and give you a rolling start. The only alternative was to do what the road-crews and big-rig drivers do, and carry a couple of triangle wooden chocks to wedge in against the front tires--because there was so much gravity behind those wheels that, whenever you kicked them out, that thing was going to start rolling downhill.

Seems apposite now: Coming up on the new semester now--we start Wednesday, but the report date was today, which means we're back into work-week think up in this crib. Energy is ramping up: our proximate-to-campus neighborhood, empty of cars, lights, and noise for the 3 weeks or so of the break, is starting to see signs of life--and thoughtless fraternity parties--in the last 48 hours before school starts. Mostly, in the next 10 weeks, the typical undergraduate is going to be thinking a hell of a lot more about making the gym and getting ripped in hopes of a lot of cheap opportunistic sex over Spring Break, but they'll also be getting more and more excited, and less and less focused, in the same period.

Ah well; Dharmonia and I have lived in college neighborhoods for so long that we more-or-less know how to cope with the infantile behavior which tends to crop up in them. This year's no different--and we'll know how to deal this year too.

Happier news is the recurrent sense of joy and anticipation that comes from returning to a job, and a job situation, that you actually love. Had a party this past Saturday evening: putatively, for Dr Coyote's half-centenary, but in the event, I think the high turnout was at least as much a product of everyone realizing that this was the last chance for a don't-have-to-go-to-work-in-the-morning party before--gulp--April 28th, more or less. Whatever the reason, it was a good party (single malts, Dominican cigars, and a whole ton of great home-cooked potluck), and a pleasure to be able to offer some hospitality. Not just to School of Music colleagues and students, but to other old music friends, and even neighbors (those few who are grown-ups who I might actually want to hang with) at a loose end.

Next day, same neighbor came by to say "that was such a great party. I can't believe how interesting those people were--I could have just sat and listened to those guys tell stories all night." Which reminded me of the very first reason I actually wanted to be a musician--even before I thought I might have the capacity to accomplish that goal: because I wanted to be able to hang with musicians. Because they seemed like such cool people. Because the prospect of being able to spend my life in those worlds, and those activities, was almost unbearably attractive.

To come back to work here, every semester, is to be reminded of that. And, forty years later, it still strikes me as a good reason.

Below the jump: dusk, and whole-wheat.

Fuzzy people 48

Nice one from the General: elderly elephant and dog as best friends.

One more indication that animals are superior to people: they bond, love, worry, and rejoice. That's why we should care for them.

Not kill them.

Crankin' up/Crankin' out

Years ago at the Catskills Irish Arts Week (1999?) in East Durham, NY, I was sitting in the big festival tent on a day of about 100 degrees when James Kelly, who I'd met that week while sitting in on his "advanced" fiddle classes (after having gotten thrown out of the banjo class, in the nicest possible way, for being "too advanced"), during his solo set got stumped for the next tune to choose to play. So he said to the audience "what should I play next?" and I, having just purchased his great Ring Sessions CD (great fiddle-playing even if the guitar "accompaniment" damned near drowned it out), yelled out the name of my favorite tune from that disc, a real "let's get this session started" pedal-to-the-metal D reel called "Crankin' Out."

That's kind of what this chunk of time feels like: Dharmonia and I returned from points East on Wednesday, crashed Thursday, played a session last night, host a Capricorn birthday party tonight, and report for work (10am faculty meeting!!!) on Monday. It's been a damned short break and it's a damned early start to the Spring 2009 semester and, while I expect I'll be really glad of it on April 28 when things finish, right now it feels damned early to be cranking it up again already.

Oh well. "Let's get this session started," I reckon. Time to start doing what we do.

Below the jump: Raccoon-Boy's coat in full winter splendor.
----------------
Now playing: Solas - The Yellow Tinker / Cranking Out / Master Crowley's #2
via FoxyTunes

"It's not my area"

The above is the kind of thing a smart academic says when someone asks him/her to hold forth on something on which the expertise is lacking. It's what Ferenc Szasz, a professor of history at the University of New Mexico who specializes in American and Scottish culture, should have said about hip-hop, instead of the following:

Examples of flyting, a kind of verbal dueling in which opponents would trade rhyming (and often obscene) insults with each other, date at least as far back as the 16th century; Mr. Szasz said Scottish slaveowners brought the practice to America, where it later evolved into hip-hop.

Now, I'm the last person to underestimate the glorious gumbo of colliding cultures that gave rise to American popular entertainments, but to root hip-hop in flyting, ignoring any apparent awareness of Jamaican toasting, dub poetry, and studio production, and their impact in the South Bronx, is to betray just how much you're "out of your area."

Lazy on-vacation photo blogging

Travelin' day

Traveling the usual rainy, slick New England roads to visit relatives. If you're on the road, stay safe. If you're home, stay warm. And may it be so for all beings.

The point of it all

There is a key for everything, and the key to Paradise is to love the poor.

Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him), as reported by Ibn Umar

Outside-the-rotation movies blogging: The Big Sleep

I was never that big a fan of true noir or of Raymond Chandler: noir always struck me as Hollywood's inverted moralizing about a stratum of life that, in the '30s and '40s, it knew fuck-all about, and Chandler was, for sure, a Baroque stylist imitating--and, to be honest, perfecting--a formula pioneered by earlier writers. Chandler, the imitator, was the one who made a fortune out of the genre that Dashiell Hammett, an authentically tough man who really did know the worlds he depicted, had pioneered.

And, let's face it and though it pains me to say it, Bogart wasn't a great actor. For his time, he was an unusually real actor--when you put him up against the '30s leading men--though most of his great "performances" consisted of tics and twitches and hitchings-of-the-belt that were really remarkably formulaic. He was shorter and balder than they showed him in the films and his fight scenes were almost comically stilted (never more than in this outing).

But the thing that made Bogie stand out against the other "tough guys" of the era--and made the Ronald Reagans and John Waynes of the era look like the posturing pansies that they were--was, I think, the man's pure integrity. He played a number of different types of roles in his glory years--many more types than people tend to remember--but the iconic performances were of the bruised, battered men, mostly good but with a strong admixture of bad, who, when the chips were down, fought their conscience and never quit: Sam Spade of Maltese Falcon, Harry Morgan of To Have and Have Not, Frank McCloud of Key Largo (which contains the scenes, on board small boats, that probably show Bogart at his happiest in any film), and, of course, Rick in Casablanca.

That's what differentiated Bogie from Reagan or Wayne or, for that matter, so many other Hollywood players in the conservatizing Hollywood of the late '40s and early '50s. Elia Kazan, Walt Disney, that punk-ass bitch Reagan, Adolphe Menjou, and dozens of other Hollywood types who played or pretended to be "tough guys" when it didn't matter--when they were posturing in front of the cameras--strapped on the knee pads and gave Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Richard Nixon, and the rest of the fascist witch-hunters on the House Un-American Affairs Committee every bit of falsified information they could find or make up.

Bogie didn't. John Huston didn't. Betty Bacall didn't. Pete Seeger didn't. They acted like Americans--like the Americans who stood up against Thomas Gage, Lord North, and George III in 1775--and told McCarthy, Nixon, and the rest of those opportunistic cowards to fuck off.

That's why I'll forgive him the bad "acting" and the stylized tics, in a way that I'd never forgive Reagan or Wayne or the rest of them--because the toughness of the characters Bogart played came from inside him.

Bogie was real.

Outside-the-rotation travel blogging

Xmas eve travel. For somebody like me, who doesn't really care about this particular holiday but is acutely conscious of how large it bulks for older relatives, traveling at Christmas is a fairly ambivalent experience. Dharmonia and I have been "going home for Christmas," separately or together, for twenty-nine years, usually in conditions of considerable meteorological, navigational, or economic hardship. When you're 25, that feels fairly reasonable and fairly inevitable--and when you're 18, you can't wait to go home so that Mom can cook, launder, and coddle for you.

But by the time you're 35, it's not so much a vacation as an ordeal. When you have kids, I imagine the pressure must be pretty much insurmountable--you pretty much have to take the young'uns home for the grandparents' sake, though I sure don't even the exhausted and harried young parents I see, at this time of year, hoicked little ones through holiday-trafficked airports.

By the time you're 45, it's become obvious that "going home for Christmas" was never something (after adolescence, anyway) that you did for yourself--it was always something you were doing for the older folks. Either they didn't like to travel, or didn't feel up to it, or were too infirm, some of which are reasonable excuses. But when, in your late 20s or 30s, the older folks say "well, as soon as you have kids, we'll travel to you," and you realize that wouldd have been the truth--for a few years--specifically because they would have been willing to undergo the hardship, to see the grandkids, that they would refuse "merely" to see you. And when you don't have kids, that excuse is even thinner.

And then you get to be pushing 50, and it's really truly not possible for the old folks to travel--hell, in some cases, they can handle about 2 hours of your company before they are physically or mentally exhausted--and you realize that a whole new set of reasons mandating that you undergo the holiday schlep has come into play. When the elders get to a certain age and level of infirmity, you realize that you damned better make that bi-annual trip home because, not only is it impossible for the oldsters to travel, you don't know what the next year will bring. And you realize that, should you stand on your rights after 30 years of the schlep, and say "no, goddammit, this year, for the first fucking time in my life, I am staying home at the holidays," then that is the year when Something Bad will happen. And then you will really really regret staying home.

So you suck it up and say "OK, I guess this was never under my control, and was never about a 'fair exchange' or 'taking turns'"; they were never going to come visit you--even if they'd guilt-trip you for declining to come visit them. And you realize that the universe doesn't care what's fair; rather, it is asking you to put forth some effort in order to make an older person's life a little happier, even if only for 2 hours, at a season when you've never in your adult life ever been able to stay in your own home. The universe doesn't care--because it is dealing with larger issues than what is convenient for you. And it's asking you to remember that life is short and regret can be long. And that you do some awkward, frustrating, stressful, and unrewarding things because they make some other, older people happy.

And, at this season, which may be one of "comfort and joy" but can also damned sure include some loss and sorrow, it's a very small sacrifice to make.

May all beings be peaceful.

Below the jump: Mr Man's infallible instinct for the warm sunny spot:

Doesn't feel like anywhere else...

...when the balding, barrel-shaped, overly- (if you're from New England, unnervingly) talkative guy at the Recycling Center, after telling you at length about the Christmas gifts he hopes to get, says,

"Well, I'm just an old hippie from Lubbock. I'm the only person I know who was a devotee of John Deere and Timothy Leary."

Sure doesn't feel like anywhere else!

Outside-the-rotation blogging: Top-26 films (youtube sampler)

What can I say? The meme is going around.

Not necessarily the greatest, or even necessarily the ones I most enjoy upon occasion. But, rather, these are the desert-island discs: the ones I can imagine watching over and over again in isolation from other films, and babbling their dialog to myself in the absence of other conversation. In other words, they’re the ones that tell the most classic stories with what I believe to be the most beautiful and effective writing—the ones that would speak (and have spoken) to me over the decades. Also, and for the same reason, heavily skewed toward English-language films—much as I would like to claim the aesthete-cred of prioritizing foreign films, that’s not mostly where I hang out.


40-year-old Virgin
Maybe the most effective updating of the screwball comedy I’ve seen. Great character acting out of the Apatow stable, Carell is both comic and courageous, and it has the utterly enchanting grown-up appeal of Catherine Keener.

Apocalypse Now
It’s not really about Vietnam as it was (for something closer to that, I’d maybe plump for Full Metal Jacket—at least in the Michael Herrian madness of that experience) but it’s a past-brilliant portrayal of what Vietnam meant in American consciousness—of just how crazy we went in those years. And it’s the best version of Conrad I’ve ever seen on screen. The African Queen is a lovely film story but Katherine Hepburn hasn’t worn well for me. American Splendor is a virtually perfect film, but that’s more due to the acting than the writing. The Apostle is magnificent but it’s mostly not about the dialogue, but about the feral intensity of Duvall’s title character. American Beauty is a bit exploitative (of suburbia and its discontents) but it has one of the greatest closing lines ever written in the movies. Amelie is right up there but it’s less about the dialog and more about Audrey Tatou’s luminous presence.

Big Lebowski
Has all the strengths of the Coen Bros.’ genius: fantastic, word-by-word quotable dialog, great characters written for great character actors out of the Coen stable (Goodman, Buscemi) plus fortunate fellow-travelers (Moore, Gazzara, Flea, Elliott), and some of the realest how-people-talk comedy I’ve ever seen. Butch Cassidy is magnificent but it too hasn’t worn all that well outside its own era.

Citizen Kane
The man was 25 years old at time of filming, OK? That’s pure-D genius, right there. And it’s a fantastic (and deserved) takedown of Randolph Hearst, the man who created the modern rationale for American imperialism. Cool Hand Luke is beautiful and accurate but it’s just too damned sad for repeated viewings. Same with Crumb, which is beautiful, sad, but also transcendent: the purity and clarity of his commitment to making art under all circumstances, no matter how neurotic.

Duck Soup
For my money, still the greatest of the Marx Bros. films, not least because they harnessed their patented, past-brilliant vaudeville-and-Yiddish-theatre slapstick to a political satire. Pretty much every scene is iconic. Dr. Strangelove is brilliant but it’s not quite the right story for a desert island, is it? Dead Man Walking is magnificent and courageous but too harrowing to watch on a daily (or even annual) basis.

Enter the Dragon
The baddest of the ‘70s martial artists in the greatest of his films. Looking back 35 years later, he’s still the baddest; and Bolo Yeung, the great Shaolin practitioner, is still the most persuasive heavy. The initial tournament scene, where he hits the Anglo heavy “O’Hara” faster than the eye can follow, made Dharmonia a martial-arts fan.

Fargo
In some ways the archetypal Coen film (and the one that, preceding the friendlier O Brother, Lebowski, and Intolerable Cruelty, should have warned those shocked by the darkness of No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading): imagining a genre film (noir, basically) set in an atypical but very strongly characteristic geo-cultural locale. They did the same thing with O Brother and Lebowski, to equally brilliant effect).

Godfather Part II
Less of Pacino, more of De Niro, and—crucially—Coppolla’s beyond-brilliant of pre-WWI Little Italy. Reached past the text of the book to tell Don Corleone’s back-story more brilliantly than Puzo ever did. Only competitive candidate would have been Groundhog Day, one of the sneakiest and most effective “skillful means” applications of Buddhist teachings Hollywood ever let slip by. The other might be Gone Baby Gone, one of the only Hollywood films that ever got either my home town or the working-class right. If I was stuck for a documentary, Genghis Blues would undeniably win best in category.

Harder They Come
A stone masterpiece. No money, less professional talent, but still the best movie ever made about Jamaica, about reggae, or about pop-music stardom and its cost.

It Happened One Night
I steadfastly refuse to include any Harrison Ford or Steven Spielberg film, here or elsewhere. I like the insurrectionary quality of Capra’s ‘30s films, and Claudette Colbert was adorable.

Jeremiah Johnson
By no means a perfect film, but infused with Redford’s earliest (and deepest) love for the wild places of the Far West—and, once again, proof that the very best stories are found in history, not fiction.

Kundun
Like Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead, this a deeply religious, deeply spiritual film that uses the medium to tell an honest story about experience, suffering, acceptance, and compassion. Much as I love and admire the Coens, Scorsese is the greatest American director of the past 60 years.

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
I loved the books, while recognizing their manifest flaws (though I would resist inscribing Tolkien as any more of a racist than anyone else of his age, era, class, and intellectual training), but have come to believe that Jackson and his writing team made an even better story. TT is my favorite (darkest) of the films, as it’s my favorite of the books, because—to me—Tolkien’s roots in the Eddas and Sagas are clearest here. And God, would I like to see the Jackson Beowulf! The Last Waltz was right up there in this category, as was Lightning in a Bottle—the two greatest concert films ever made. Little Big Man’s a contender as well.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail
The best Python film, and the best ever made about how we moderns see the Middle Ages (best English-language portrayal as it was is The Name of the Rose—which I definitely do not want to watch alone on a desert island). Man Who Would Be King and the first half of Million Dollar Baby would be the only serious contenders in this Letter category. Maltese Falcon is up there but ultimately its genre conventions sink it for me—though Sidney Greenstreet’s masterful speech describing the history the “Black Bird” is one of the most wonderful portrayals of the voluptuous pleasures of history in cinema.

Nashville
Gotta give it up for Altman, and this is the Letter category that was available—though I think Gosford Park is an even greater (and angrier) film, and both McCabe and MASH make (and deserve) anybody’s top-100 list.

O Brother Where Art Thou?
As the good Dr Masbrow put it, how can any critic not like the most perfect movie ever made?

Paper Moon
Not a perfect film, again—and both Peter Bogdanovich’s and Ryan O’Neal’s relationship with pre-pubescent Tatum’s was obviously beyond creepy—but it is a wonderful evocation of the grey-and-white world of the Dorothea Lange ‘30s. And the book is even greater.

I’m rigorously not listing Pulp Fiction here, because despite the brilliance of Samuel L Jackson’s Jules, Quentin Tarantino, to quote Kevin Murphy again, has no soul.


Quiet American
Brendan Fraser is underrated as an actor, Michael Caine is reliably solid in anything (like Morgan Freeman) but perfectly cast in this, and Graham Greene was, with Michael Herr, the most acute writer about Vietnam ever.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
This would be “Letter R” even if I hadn’t seen a production (my first Stoppard) at the Young Vic in 1975. The other candidate in this alphabetical location was Run Lola Run, and, as much as I love Franke Potente (unquestionably the best part of the Bourne franchise, itself a pretty darned good value), there’s not enough dialog in Lola to recite to oneself in all the desert-island hours when the solar-powered plasma TV wasn’t playing.

Seven Samurai
The other most perfect movie ever made. Took in the archetype of the American Western and coughed it back out infinitely deepened, rooted, and enriched. Kurosawa is, with Scorsese, the other greatest director of the past 60 years.
[cheating here—couldn’t resist listing 2 under Letter S]


Shadowlands
Tremendously effective and courageous realization of the real message behind C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, a beautiful and naked parable of the arithmetic of the universe’s relentless and transformative balance of joy and sorrow. One of Hollywood’s truest and most honest articulations ever of Buddhism’s First Noble Truth. Also, the best I have ever seen Hopkins, by several orders of magnitude. Leaves the related characters in Remains of the Day and other Merchant/Ivory epics in the dust.

To Have and Have Not
Another run at the Casablanca trope which is, for all the iconic status of that film, even more effective. Howard Hawks stable is well-represented—Sidney Greenstreet, Walter Brennan, et al—and the mocked-up Caribbean locations are nearly as effective Morocco; Hoagy Carmichael (and the great Oscar Aleman) certainly take up the slack left by Dooley Wilson’s absence, but overwhelmingly, it’s the mind-bendingly greater chemistry of Bogart and Bacall—20 years old at the time, and already (and still, 64 years later) the smartest, sexiest female lead the studio system ever coughed out. No wonder Bogie fell in love with her.

Unforgiven
Not too many in this Letter category—and it’s the only Western on the list. If I was cooler, I’d probably list something like Ugetsu, but since I’m not, I’ll leave the samurai/continuum to Letters Y and Z. For me, the watershed when Eastwood became a great director; presence of long-time Eastwood cohorts amongst the character actors, and the bleak, bleak darkness of the narrative arc, as well as the reliably-brilliant Morgan Freeman, confirm that. Usual Suspects is a pretty close contender, though—and its dialog is even better.

V for Vendetta
Mostly as a place-holder for the Letter V, but I also love at least the premise, if not the realization, of this film—particularly the “people shouldn’t fear their governments…governments should fear their people” line.

Waking Ned Devine
My favorite film about Ireland, about which Kevin Murphy wrote the most powerful, beautiful and heart-felt chapter in his great A Year at the Movies (the day after 9/11). Matchless writing, capturing both the beauty and the banality of life in the West of Ireland, and, as Murphy says, one of the most eloquent paeans to friendship ever written. Right up there is The Wild Bunch, the greatest Western ever made—and the one whose crazy-laughter ending is the truest realization of Kurosawa’s translation of the Western; only other Western even within hollering distance is The Long Riders.

Malcolm X
Cheating a little bit here, in order to account for the Letter X—but this is Spike Lee’s greatest film (Bamboozled would run a close second except for Spike’s typical self-righteous copout of an ending) and some of Denzel’s greatest acting. And of course, the beautifully-written story of the one of the most extraordinary Americans ever.

Yojimbo
Not Kurosawa’s greatest (for that, see Letter S, above), but certainly Mifune’s. A classic fable, partaking of the greatest of the post-WWII Italian realists, while at the same time occupying the starkness and archetypal symbolism of Noh drama. This, along with Samurai, made the modern American Western film genre possible.

Zatoichi
There are a lot of other samurai/ronin/martial-arts flicks I might select for Saturday morning fun, but this one is the greatest, and subtlest, and boasts easily the most affecting and engaging hero of them all.

That's the list. With those, I might could survive the desert island.

Outside-the-rotation movies blogging: Charlie Wilson's War

There is something fundamentally dishonest about Charlie Wilson's War, Aaron Sorkin's entry into the big-screen All the President's Men or Wag the Dog political tragicomedy sweepstakes. Coincidentally, my old friend The General (who knows a whole hell of a lot more about film than I ever will) had just mentioned it to me over the weekend, after this event, and then it was broadcast on cable last night--so I finally gritted my teeth and watched it. It's beautifully filmed, with great camera work and (some) wonderful casting, acting, and writing, but it's riddled with those glossy, yet essentially cowardly and blinkered choices which also eventually put me off The West Wing.

The true story behind CWW is sufficiently wild to explain its attraction for Sorkin: a drankin' and wimmenizin' Congressman from a safe Houston district runs headlong into the cynical global politics of the US response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: e.g., give the Islamic resistance (mujahadeen) only minimal support so that the Soviets are enticed to hang on in that mountainous kingdom which has always been death to imperial hopes--Greek, Persian, British, Russian, American. The intent was to in turn bleed the Soviet infrastructure dry--a lesson the mujahadeen promptly learned, applied, and, after the Soviet retreat, turned against the American infidels who had first armed and then abandoned the resistance.

Wilson was so struck by the magnitude of the Soviet-inflicted human suffering he saw in the Pakistani refugee camps that he woke up out of the cocaine-and-Jack-Daniels haze and put his considerable powers of persuasion to work on changing US arms policy. Drawing on the same lunatic Forest Oaks and Sugar Land far-right Christian fundamentalist millionaires and DOD appointees who three decades before had conspired at the assassination of John Kennedy, Wilson successfully doubled and redoubled the budget and scope of covert arms-dealing by the US to the mujahadeen, and along the way indulging himself with the worst, most-ridiculous, "all hat and no cowboy" Texan dress-up (up to and including riding with the freedom fighters), playing at "the Great Game" the way that George W. Bush played at being a fighter pilot.

And then, within a few weeks after the Soviets' much-trumpeted withdrawal, watched Congress likewise withdraw all support--effectively ceding Afghanistan, much of Pakistan, and entirely too much of Arab consciousness to the radical elements who had used the Soviet war to build for holy war--and who promptly turned that jihad on the west. The story was beautifully told by Molly Ivins, who knew and was amused by Charlie Wilson while never losing sight of his essential disconnect regarding the long-term consequences of his actions, in a series of columns for the Dallas Observer...and, who, in those 1500-word columns, articulated a hell of a lot more insightful, prescient, and mature perspective on Charlie and his War.

The film is not nearly as realistic. It's got all the "guilty pleasures" of West Wing, including fantastic, intelligent, sharp-as-a-tack comic dialogue (the scene that introduces Philip Seymour Hall's brilliant portrayal of "Gust Avrakotos," the upstate NY-born foul-mouthed CIA analyst who serves as Wilson's marvelously contemptuous Afghan advisor, is as good as anything WW ever did), and (some of) the aforementioned casting--principally, that of Hall--is wonderful.

But the damned thing suffers from every flaw of West Wing, only now writ large, in what I have come to think of as Sorkin's essentially, fatally, and cowardly "liberal apologetics."

There's a great scene in my hero Ross Thomas's Chinaman's Chance, an otherwise very simple and cursory political thriller, in which the young Socialists who are helping a political operative, on the run, comment that self-described "liberals" cannot be trusted, because they are the "kind of people who work for Dow Chemical during the day and then sneak off to stuff envelopes for Common Cause at night. The kind of people who would be herded into the corporate concentration camps wearing buttons that read 'We meant well'." In West Wing, and here in Charlie Wilson's War, Sorkin tries to have it both ways: he wants us to know that he knows just how corrupt, venal, greedy, stupid, and criminal most politicians and corporate types are, and to invite us (and profit from our desire) to revel in his fantasy world, where the anomalous Great Men (never women) stand up to such types and call them, in marvelously articulate and scalpel-precise invective, on their bullshit (Jeb Bartlett eviscerating Christian fundamentalist hate-radio broadcasters with his greater-than-theirs knowledge of scripture, and his closing line "Now get your fat asses out of my White House," Josh Lyman telling the President "Let's take a walk" up to the Hill to face-down a defiant Republican congress). And by writing those latter, incredibly gratifying, but ultimately fantasy scenes, provide us the illusion that just watching the program, or quoting it to one another, is the same thing as actually making a difference.

And it is not. Liberal apologetics are designed, by cynical intent or simple "well-meaning" wish fulfillment, to make people occupying relatively privileged and protected positions feel that the improved conditions they sincerely believe they desire for those less privileged can be obtained through little effort, small sacrifices, and--especially--no risks. Through "meaning well." To appeal to those people who, like Sorkin, come from a socio-economic background where the actual exploitative rubber of policies disenfranchising the poor and the marginalized never really hits the road. He wants to show us a fantasy of a better world, and make us think that by watching and laughing and cheering, we're making a difference, without having to experience any of the pain, suffering, or, at the very fucking least, sacrifice (No, Junior, "be brave and go shopping" in the wake of 9/11 was not "sacrifice") that might actually change those circumstances.

And this is false. And it was never more false than in those WW episodes in which Sorkin framed the Bartlett Administration's decision-makers with dilemmas about which they would elegantly, articulately agonize--and then fold. The Death Row-inmate over whose impending execution Martin Sheen (a great presence, but an absolutely outrageous rug-chewer) spent 40 minutes deliberating--with the help of another generation's Hollywood substitute for a conscience, Karl Malden as a Catholic priest--and then folded, allowing the execution to go forward. The Chinese communist pianist who wants to defect, over whom Bartlett agonizes, before folding. The list goes on and on.

And the problem is that Sorkin writes the stuff as cheap, no-cost, "skip the hard stuff" therapy: by making us identify with the elegantly articulate, rumpled-yet-appealing members of the Bartlett administration, and then putting them through the "moral dilemmas" (which really aren't dilemmas at all--just challenges to liberal privilege, comfort, and conviction of moral rightness) of the audience, and then showing those avatars folding when the going really gets tough, he makes it OK for us to fold as well. There's a kind of legerdemain that occurs when an artist portrays the world we desperately wish existed--though we know it doesn't--and then shows impossibly appealing people also folding when the tough gets going. It lets us off the hook. Sorkin lets the West Wing audience off the hook, lets them avoid that others are suffering while they themselves are enjoying outrageous privilege, and he does it over and over and over again.

He does it again in Charlie Wilson's War. It starts with the casting of Hanks: a terribly personable, generous actor, who's had moments of greatness (bits of Saving Private Ryan, bits of Road to Perdition, Philadelphia, much of the otherwise-manipulative and sexist A League of Their Own; I exempt the execrable You've Got Mail, Forrest Gump, Sleepless in Seattle, Castaway, etc) but who ultimately is never going to be able to play a character with much darkness or moral ambiguity. They call him the Jimmy Stewart of his generation--but that is not necessarily a good thing, in any period of greater moral ambiguity than the Hollywood '30s (that would be every other period). Especially not when he's playing Charlie Wilson, who himself admitted that he, and the people he worked with in first arming and then abandoning the mujahadeen, were as responsible as anybody in the West for 9/11 (which I would argue: I think there's enough guilt to go around, and lots left over for the incompetents--Rice, Cheney, and Rumsfeld among them--who ignored over eleven warnings about precisely the form the attacks would take). Hanks is just too damned likable to pull off either Charlie Wilson's force of character (as confirmed by Ivins), which armed the mooj, or the bleak darkness of his realization about how stupid they had been in doing so the way they did. The damned movie ends with a bullshit triumphalist montage, of helicopters exploding, mujahadeen celebrating, the Soviets departing, and a fucking awards ceremony for Charlie Wilson.

The problem continues with the casting of Julia Roberts (America's "sweetheart"?!?) as Joanne Herring, the lunatic heiress who funded the covert Afghan war as an act of resistance against the "godless Communists," which motivation has almost always led to absolutely, criminally stupid and ill-informed American foreign-policy choices. Letting Joanne Herring cobble together the funding for the covert Afghan war was like letting Oliver North run illegal arms & drug sales in the basement of the Reagan White House--in both cases, because people who were supposed to be supervising (covert and overt) foreign policy were too stupid, lazy, ideological, and ill-informed to do their fucking jobs. And thousands--tens of thousands--died because of that stupidity. And Sorkin glosses it. And Julia Roberts--who all reports would suggest is actually a very sweet and nice person--isn't the actress to carry off the inherently dishonest characterization--any more than she was equipped to carry off the fictional "Kitty Kieman"--or the accent--in Michael Collins.

Of course, there's also the fact that Sorkin appears to be congenitally incapable of writing a mature, effective, confident, and competent female character. Even when he explicitly set out to do so, in, say, Allison Janney's press secretary "C.J. Craig" or Stockard Channing's First Lady "Abbey Bartlett," he wound up alternately treating such characters as figures of mockery (C.J. falling into her pool and "talking like a chipmunk" after a root-canal, or Abbey Bartlett oscillating wildly and unpredictably from Earth Mother to Joan Crawford Ice Queen). Here, his main sexist potshots are reserved for the sweatered, big-chested office staff Wilson was renowned for.

And, finally, Sorkin suffers from the same fucking problem as almost every other high-powered, highly-skilled Hollywood writer, producer, or director who tries to depict either working-class, Third World, or wartime experience. Because almost none of them have actually undergone it, and probably because of the bubble of wealth and privilege in which they pass their lives, almost none of them have any idea about what any of those three realms of experience is actually like.

You don't learn what minimum wage is like, what combat is like, in film school, or in reels of past Hollywood classics. Spielberg in Schindler's List and Private Ryan, Sorkin in this and West Wing, Michael Mann in Mohicans and Miami Vice, fucking Ridley Scott in Black Hawk Down, even Hanks himself in Band of Brothers, and on and on and on--they don't actually know what it's like to work hard physical labor, go hungry, or risk your life So they romanticize, idealize, sexualize these things--even when they're subjecting us to virtuosic, excruciatingly accurate detail, which they think "keeps it real," they still don't get what it is. They just can't resist making it look "cool," making the good guys better, making the bad guys worse cartoons, or, most significantly, giving the middle-class audience the feel-good ending that real life lacks. And (in the case of Spielberg and his protege Hanks) their only real cultural or historical experience is filtered by the movies--so the writing of secondary characters, working-class characters, "ethnic" characters, in films like Ryan or Brothers or Charlie Wilson's, is embarassingly naive and simplistic.

And by doing this, and hiding under the guise of "keeping it real" and putting Good Liberal Sentiments in the mouths of people who "meant well" but folded the moment they either got what they wanted, or the going got a little too tough--or "too real"--and inscribing such story arcs in the Hollywood narratives that are the only version of the story that most Americans will ever even be aware exists, they sell out reality.

And people die.