Censorship and Speech

I had composed a pretty good (if I may say so myself; at any rate it took some effort) entry for my first post after what I think has been my longest hiatus from this platform since I began, in recognition of Day 101 of the current presidential administration.  It covered some of the events since the election, including national and international reactions, and wrapped with a parallel to Orwell’s Room 101.   But that batch of writing and linking was lost to the vagaries of the internets.  And so it goes.

Rather than try to recreate that, what I’m posting today is a set of two different perspectives on free speech and restrictions to speech published recently in the Times. 

From the first piece, by insistent dissident Ai Weiwei

The most elegant way to adjust to censorship is to engage in self-censorship. It is the perfect method for allying with power and setting the stage for the mutual exchange of benefit. The act of kowtowing to power in order to receive small pleasures may seem minor; but without it, the brutal assault of the censorship system would not be possible. 

For people who accept this passive position toward authority, “getting by” becomes the supreme value. They smile, bow and nod their heads, and such behavior usually leads to lifestyles that are comfortable, trouble free and even cushy. This attitude is essentially defensive on their part. It is obvious that in any dispute, if one side is silenced, the words of the other side will go unquestioned.

And from the second, by Ulrich Baer, vice provost at New York University. 

What is under severe attack, in the name of an absolute notion of free speech, are the rights, both legal and cultural, of minorities to participate in public discourse. The snowflakes sensed, a good year before the election of (the president), that insults and direct threats could once again become sanctioned by the most powerful office in the land. They grasped that racial and sexual equality is not so deep in the DNA of the American public that even some of its legal safeguards could not be undone. 

The issues to which the students are so sensitive might be benign when they occur within the ivory tower. Coming from the campaign trail and now the White House, the threats are not meant to merely offend. Like (the president's) attacks on the liberal media as the “enemies of the American people,” his insults are meant to discredit and delegitimize whole groups as less worthy of participation in the public exchange of ideas.

Both are worth a full read.  I have tended to be something of a free speech absolutist, though maybe not exactly the variety branded by Baer; however, Baer's points (or more accurately, points he distills from decades’ worth of writing and public discussion on the topic) are valid, and essential to consider when forming opinions - and policies - concerning, for example, speaking events on campuses. Baer hosted a fascinating panel at the NYU Law School “In Defense of Truth” a couple weeks ago, concerning the concept of truth - not least, the durability of ideas that feel true, across any spectrum you care to name - as seen through the lenses of art, journalism, and the law. 

For now, I'll leave you with a few more images touching on surveillance, education, infrastructure, and public protections from the Ai Weiwei show we saw at the Tate Modern a while back.

Junot Díaz at Yale

I haven't been able to confirm this text, but it has been popping up all over the internets (I think I first saw it here and here, among other places.)  It certainly reads right.

Life is going to present to you a series of transformations. And the point of education should be to transform you. To teach you how to be transformed so you can ride the waves as they come. But today, the point of education is not education. It’s accreditation. The more accreditation you have, the more money you make. That’s the instrumental logic of neoliberalism. And this instrumental logic comes wrapped in an envelope of fear. And my Ivy League, my MIT students are the same. All I feel coming off of my students is fear. That if you slip up in school, if you get one bad grade, if you make one fucking mistake, the great train of wealth will leave you behind. And that’s the logic of accreditation. If you’re at Yale, you’re in the smartest 1% in the world. […] And the brightest students in the world are learning in fear. I feel it rolling off of you in waves. But you can’t learn when you’re afraid. You cannot be transformed when you are afraid.

This appears to be part of an address Junot Diaz gave at Yale on November 12, 2013.  At first glance, I'm not finding a complete transcript, or any 'official' source for that quotation, but it does mesh with the articles I was able to find.

And even if it's a little off, it's a damn good quote.

Sesame Street goes Upstate

This has been around for a few months, but I just ran across it recently.  Of course I'm behind on most things: it's a problem.  But in this case I feel more or less off the hook, in that, having no children and not likely to become a parent anytime soon, I don't feel much responsibility to keep up with the details of kid's TV.  But this is significant on a few levels, so I was impressed when I found out about it.

Meet Alex, a new character on Sesame Street (or at least an online version of Sesame Street) whose father is in jail.  It says something pretty important about the World We Live In that this platform is necessary – as this Pew Research article mentions, some 2.7 million American children currently have a parent in jail or prison.  That would be 3.6% of American children with an incarcerated parent.  Incarcerated, one might add, in a correctional system that is arguably ineffective, weighed down by misguided drug laws, and inescapably, profoundly, maddeningly racist and classist.  Oh, and well nigh devoid of any noticeable corrective element.

But this piece is for the kids.  And of course Sesame Street being Sesame Street, they find a way to deal with this unbelievably tough-to-even-wrap-your-mind-around topic with not just kindness and sensitivity, but with a "did they just pull that off?" sense of humor.

“What’s ‘carcerated,’ and why was your dad in it?”

Well played, Children's Television Workshop.  Well played.

'Prison-Industrial Complex' is one of those terms that rubs me kind of wrong, being that too clever for its own good brand of inflammatory.  But America is out of balance - way out of balance - in the way we handle corrections, and the penal system is so seriously in need of reform that I'm willing to accept the provocation.

More materials and more video is on the Little Kids/Big Problems section of the Sesame Street website.

There Goes the Neighborhood

Ok, I might not agree with every single one of these "reasons," but check out an interesting list of infobits about one Mr. Fred Rogers, courtesy the good people at Project Argus.

15 Reasons Mister Rogers Was the Best Neighbor Ever

1. Even Koko the Gorilla Loved Him
Most people have heard of Koko, the Stanford-educated gorilla who could speak about 1000 words in American Sign Language, and understand about 2000 in English. What most people don’t know, however, is that Koko was an avid Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fan. As Esquire reported, when Fred Rogers took a trip out to meet Koko for his show, not only did she immediately wrap her arms around him and embrace him, she did what she’d always seen him do onscreen: she proceeded to take his shoes off!

2. He Made Thieves Think Twice
According to a TV Guide profile, Fred Rogers drove a plain old Impala for years. One day, however, the car was stolen from the street near the TV station. When Rogers filed a police report, the story was picked up by every newspaper, radio and media outlet around town. Amazingly, within 48 hours the car was left in the exact spot where it was taken from, with an apology on the dashboard. It read, “If we’d known it was yours, we never would have taken it.”

3. He Watched His Figure to the Pound
In covering Rogers’ daily routine (waking up at 5; praying for a few hours for all of his friends and family; studying; writing, making calls and reaching out to every fan who took the time to write him; going for a morning swim; getting on a scale; then really starting his day), writer Tom Junod explained that Mr. Rogers weighed in at exactly 143 pounds every day for the last 30 years of his life. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t eat the flesh of any animals, and was extremely disciplined in his daily routine. And while I’m not sure if any of that was because he’d mostly grown up a chubby, single child, Junod points out that Rogers found beauty in the number 143. According to the piece, Rogers came “to see that number as a gift… because, as he says, “the number 143 means ‘I love you.’ It takes one letter to say ‘I’ and four letters to say ‘love’ and three letters to say ‘you.’ One hundred and forty-three.”

4. He Saved Both Public Television and the VCR
Strange but true. When the government wanted to cut Public Television funds in 1969, the relatively unknown Mister Rogers went to Washington. Almost straight out of a Capra film, his 5-6 minute testimony on how TV had the potential to give kids hope and create more productive citizens was so simple but passionate that even the most gruff politicians were charmed. While the budget should have been cut, the funding instead jumped from $9 to $22 million. Rogers also spoke to Congress, and swayed senators into voting to allow VCR’s to record television shows from the home. It was a cantankerous debate at the time, but his argument was that recording a program like his allowed working parents to sit down with their children and watch shows as a family.

5. He Might Have Been the Most Tolerant American Ever
Mister Rogers seems to have been almost exactly the same off-screen as he was onscreen. As an ordained Presbyterian minister, and a man of tremendous faith, Mister Rogers preached tolerance first. Whenever he was asked to castigate non-Christians or gays for their differing beliefs, he would instead face them and say, with sincerity, “God loves you just the way you are.” Often this provoked ire from fundamentalists.

6. He Was Genuinely Curious About Others
Mister Rogers was known as one of the toughest interviews because he’d often befriend reporters, asking them tons of questions, taking pictures of them, compiling an album for them at the end of their time together, and calling them after to check in on them and hear about their families. He wasn’t concerned with himself, and genuinely loved hearing the life stories of others. Amazingly, it wasn’t just with reporters. Once, on a fancy trip up to a PBS exec’s house, he heard the limo driver was going to wait outside for 2 hours, so he insisted the driver come in and join them (which flustered the host). On the way back, Rogers sat up front, and when he learned that they were passing the driver’s home on the way, he asked if they could stop in to meet his family. According to the driver, it was one of the best nights of his life—the house supposedly lit up when Rogers arrived, and he played jazz piano and bantered with them late into the night. Further, like with the reporters, Rogers sent him notes and kept in touch with the driver for the rest of his life.

7. He Was Color-blind
Literally. He couldn’t see the color blue. Of course, he was also figuratively color-blind, as you probably guessed. As were his parents who took in a black foster child when Rogers was growing up.

8. He Could Make a Subway Car full of Strangers Sing
Once while rushing to a New York meeting, there were no cabs available, so Rogers and one of his colleagues hopped on the subway. Esquire reported that the car was filled with people, and they assumed they wouldn’t be noticed. But when the crowd spotted Rogers, they all simultaneously burst into song, chanting “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.” The result made Rogers smile wide.

9. He Got into TV Because He Hated TV.
The first time he turned one on, he saw people angrily throwing pies in each other’s faces. He immediately vowed to use the medium for better than that. Over the years he covered topics as varied as why kids shouldn’t be scared of a haircut, or the bathroom drain (because you won’t fit!), to divorce and war.

10. He Was an Ivy League Dropout.
Rogers moved from Dartmouth to Rollins College to pursue his studies in music.

11. He Composed all the Songs on the Show.
And over 200 tunes.

12. He Was a perfectionist, and Disliked Ad Libbing.
He felt he owed it to children to make sure every word on his show was thought out.

13. Michael Keaton Got His Start on the Show
As an assistant — helping puppeteer and operate the trolley.

14. Several Characters on the Show are Named for His Family.
Queen Sara is named after Rogers’ wife, and the postman Mr. McFeely is named for his maternal grandfather who always talked to him like an adult, and reminded young Fred that he made every day special just by being himself. Sound familiar? It was the same way Mister Rogers closed every show.

15. The Sweaters.
Every one of the cardigans he wore on the show had been hand-knit by his mother.



Seriously.

Advancements in Journalism

Oh, there are so many things wrong with this, from an Oregon Daily Emerald review of Sasquatch!

Bob Mould, a forty-something with thinning hair and no other musical accompaniment, hit the stage first. He tore off a brisk 45-minute set, warming up the crowd with his electric, Ted Leo-esque sound. Although he wasn’t well-known, Mould has collaborated with Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and Foo Fighters. The surging crowds, fresh off a full day in the sun, met him with equal intensity.

That someone who would write this would choose to (or be allowed to) go into rock journalism might be the wrongest thing of all. But really (really): minimal research (even a quick trip to the internets) would have at the very least allowed this guy to minimize the damage. It's just a student paper, but still...

Sigh...

While we're on the subject of music festivals, let me take this opportunity to raise a glass to Sherin, JP and Annie, and the other 78,997 people on their way to Bonnaroo this week!

And another glass, to continued journalistic excellence. And continued academic success.

R.E.M. Sleep

First of all, a shoutout to Carrie for getting through finals; and a special shoutout to Sherin who is somewhere in the final stages of her Master's (so thoroughly embedded in research and writing that I don't even know exactly what's left for her, but I know she's nearing the finish line, if not yet across it).

And so here's a testament to one of the presumed, if elusive, rewards of getting through grad school, which is also a nod to the screening/talk with Michael Stipe (about the very cool short 'films' curated by Stipe to accompany the songs on Collapse Into Now) Cory and I went to a couple weeks ago.

New York November

There's been a lot going on so far this month, and we're just getting going.

Rehearsed for a reading on All Saints' Day (nothing like seeing the 'walks of shame' the morning after a New York Halloween.) The reading happened last Wednesday - a very academic play, but I was happy to do it, and got some really good response, including from the playwright, and one person who may make use of my services as a voice teacher.

The next night I saw Broke-ology, which features a friend of mine, at the Mitzi Newhouse. Then on Friday Cory and I met some friends for dinner at Westville East (wrap your mind around that.) Saturday was an engagement party for a friend in the afternoon, and Armitage Dance at BAM that night - got mixed response from the critics and from our group, but I quite liked it. Was especially apt to hear music by Lukas Ligeti after having seen Morphoses dance to music by his father the week before. (Oh yeah, I probably should have posted about that... we saw Wheeldon's company the week before. Wow, that was a really good show!)

THEN - I taught a voice class on Sunday (I'm teaching voice classes these days - feel free to send people my way) after which Cory and I went to the Giants game in Meadowlands. Oy. For lessons in how to lose a football game, check out the highlight reel from that disaster.

Monday was the Major Cultural Event of the New York Neo-Futurists Benefit performance/party. It's hard to believe that I've barely written about them here, since they've been kind of a big part of my life for a while. The event was good, and they raised some good bucks. Good food and drink; a fun, abbreviated performance; I won one silent-auction item, and donated another.


This photo is totally purloined, and kind of out-of-date, I think, but I need to give these guys the emphasis they deserve!

Went to a brilliant Schubert concert with Terry on Tuesday, and we hit a good new spot in Hell's Kitchen afterwards to talk about some potential projects for both of us. The place is called Stecchino, and I had a very nice cocktail and a good bowl of carrot orange soup and Terry had an anchovy appetizer and a beer. Liked it a lot. It's still really new, so get in on it to be ahead of the curve. Or something.

And tomorrow, we leave for T-day in Boston. Which is, of course, the most - won-der-ful time - of the year...

Talk to you when I get back.

More Adventures in Video

Perhaps you enjoy the music of the Beatles.

It's possible that you harbor some fondness for the Muppets and their Show.

Maybe, just maybe, you like BOTH of those pop culture touchstones.

If so, look no further. The good people at Saturday Morning Central have put together a collection of the Muppets covering Beatles tunes on their TV show. Well worth a click.

Are You Kidding Me?

Because I just read this, about a California court ruling that a school can expel students for being lesbians (or rather, get this, for having "a bond of intimacy" that is "characteristic of a lesbian relationship") and it's all just peachy.  I can't even deal with it.  It's wrong on so many levels.  

California: when did you become the poster child for intolerance?  Do you guys sit up at night thinking of ways to ruin people's lives?  Innocent, underage Lutheran School students?  Just for kicks?

I Heart Michelle Obama...

...Which will surprise very few of you.

I was pretty lame last night, and was doing stuff around the house and editing/processing/uploading all those photos and didn't tune in to Michelle's speech when it was broadcast live, but holy crap, how amazing:



It takes about 17 minutes, but it's worth watching if you're interested in, oh, the country we live in. I still haven't seen all the other highlights from last night's installment of Conventionfest '08 - the Kennedy Speech, the Family Bonding, Barack's Response - but I understand it was really very good, as far as this sort of jingo juggling goes. And it's always tough for me to get too excited about someone who actually wants to be a politician, but I'm letting hope in a little bit this time. A little bit.

On the other side of the coin, I had a revelation while reading Overheard in New York the other day. Came across this entry:

Anyone Else Hope She's Buying Birth Control?

Annoyed sexy girl: This is stupid! I don't see how you can just think one city is older than another!
Embarrassed boyfriend: Think about it. Can't you see how Rome would be much older than, say, Provo, Utah?
Annoyed sexy girl: Well, I've never been to either of those, so how would I know?

--Duane Reade, Columbus Ave

And I'm thinking - ha! This is the kind of thing that would get those Republicans to change those wacky notions that birth control = abortion. Maybe even get them to encourage effective birth control, sex education, and education in general.

But then it struck me - this is the revelation part - they sort of WANT everybody to be this stupid. Dumb little rule-following consumers are their total wet dream cup of spoo.

I mean, I'm making a funny; but kind of not, you know?

Then a little later I ran into an even better Republican Breeder Fantasy:

Laguna Beach, Encapsulated

Girl #1: Do you like money? Cause I like money!
Girl #2: I like money, I really like money!
Girl #3: No, no, no, I love money! I love it!

--6th Ave & 26th St, Outside Nightspot

Of course you do.

School of Rock

Oh, I've been a baaaaad blogger lately. Twelfth Night is in full rehearsal swing; some great people involved, I'm thrilled to say. Not that it's been without its challenges - there have been many. Always an interesting experience to deal with a whole group of new personalities and processes.

And it's the end of a long day right now. The only reason I'm up and able to tap away at this entry is that the All-Star Game is in the 13th inning and I don't feel like sleeping through the end of it. Might be sorry 'bout that call tomorrow, but I'm going with it.

SO - have you seen The School of Rock? The Jack Black movie about the guy who takes over a middle school classroom under false pretenses and turns them into a rock band? Or maybe you've even seen Rock School, the (gasp) documentary about Paul Green, who actually did start a music program for kids in Philadelphia. Well, this year's batch of those real-life kids took a mini-tour to New York several weeks ago. I caught their Jethro Tull set (I know, I know - it was the show that fit into my schedule) at The Cutting Room. Dr. Green makes sure his students understand the importance of theatricality: costumes and attitude shared center stage with musicianship. When covering a band like Tull, that meant medieval references, wizards, knights and animals, and a healthy dose of cross-dressing.

I felt kind of weird taking pictures, because the light was too low not to use a flash, and flashes are a pain to performers. But by the end of the set I relented, since so many people (I'm guessing they were mostly parents) were taking flash photos. Here's the best of the bunch - Aqualung, as sung by this, what, eleven-year-old? Complete with English accent, I should add.



With apologies to John Hall, I'm sorry but: I love this kid's energy! He totally sold this song about an old homeless guy with a snotty nose ogling the children. He put himself out there and hit it out of the box.

Which I wish someone would do in the Stadium tonight. It's now the 15th inning, and I just want someone to win it. Preferably via another J.D. Drew knock. Sheesh! So much for that asinine World Series home field advantage nonsense, right?

English anyone?

Well, this is the kind of thing I could do a lot more than I do, but it seems borderline unkind...
Today however, the dayjob is sufficiently annoying and crazed, that I will indulge the smug snotty side of myself and share with you a comment included in an email having to do with sales at a particular retail outlet:

They stores we extremely!

This was written by a native English speaker with (I think) a college degree. Even in the world of texting and e-speak, I really can't figure what she is trying to say.

Tee hee!

What are blogs for?

I was wondering why we do these things, and for whose benefit. Typing onto some website that some few or some many, or maybe no one will ever look at. And it may or may not mean anything to any of them, even yourself. Not exactly like a journal or a diary, because there is the possibility and even the hope that others will read it (as opposed to the presumed privacy of the thoughts one puts in that notebook he totes around in a satchel along with a subway map and this week's village voice; or some cleverly and maybe cutely bound book [with a lock?] one keeps in her top desk drawer next to photos of her last five boyfriends...)

And by some random turn of the psyche, that got me thinking about william arrowsmith. He was a serious classicist, by which i don't mean he taught priviledged white kids how to read homer (although he did that too). No, the thing is that he wrote important and alive translations of euripides and seneca and many others, while also writing plays and film criticism and teaching ancient languages, poetry and drama. He also turned me on to antonioni - via a simple twist of free association: a line in a lyric in a play i was in led me to a film director, who just happened to be the subject of a course taught by one of the greatest minds of his generation the following semester. So i took his class and opened up a visual aesthetic in myself. (i knew college was good for something)

Of course i wasn't aware of any of this until it had already happened. Odd like that. Anyway, he was one of the best teachers i ever had. Hero worship? No, fuck that. He taught me a lot about film and literature, drama and art (and more about writing than almost any english professor i ever had) and we got along well. But we didn't stay in touch much, and then, well, he died (may he rest in peace).

But one thing he used to refer to came back to me today - the 'great western intellectual butter slide.' Pretty self-explanatory, and perhaps a tad alarmist; but it's true that what is considered genius, brilliant, smart, even competent has, well, slid. We're at a point where starting and finishing a book, i mean reading one - in your native tongue - can be considered a significant intellectual achievement by altogether too many people.

SO maybe these blogs are an attempt to reach out to others, and bust out of this pattern. To escape from the habit of tv, mass-produced, commercially-driven advertainment. To cease to be a passive observer/consumer and actually do something, make something, say something.

Or maybe not. Maybe it's just some shit that people do.

Cause what are they saying? I had an entry typed out reacting to an article in the eyebeam journal on open source theory as it relates to fashion design (two areas about which i know almost nothing at all) but figured that it would be boring, not to mention ridiculously uninformed. But maybe that is just what this forum is best suited for. And after all, what do i typically end up posting? Plenty of nothing about haircuts and the shows i've seen lately. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

And of course, all of this rant may just be part of the butter slide. I could go on, but instead - one last quote from arrowsmith: “an alarmingly high proportion of what is published in classics—and in other fields—is simply rubbish or trivia.”

How 'bout that?