The Cure for the Common Cold… (not literally of course, this is about theatre – what else?)

Recently, I read a story, dated February 22, 2012, in the UK Guardian that had the headline “Female playwrights still face sexism – it’s time we admitted it” in which the first line “Research shows that theatres are prejudiced against female playwrights. What can be done about it?” Here’s the link to the full article.

I have a problem with sweeping generalizations like this because it’s very hard to parse out what’s sexism (and any other “ism” e.g. agism) in decision making and really just how things get done in theatre. The lack of nuance in this article utterly annoys me.

I’ve repeatedly been frustrated myself re: getting produced, and theoretically I have very good credentials, yet I’m a man and it’s done nothing special for me. That’s because the truth is that personal – direct and indirect – connections are the driving factor first and foremost in play production. (Do a survey of literary managers and artistic directors and ask them this question: when was the last time you produced something blindly submitted through the mail by anybody male or female and the answer, I’m 99% certain based on the words of a couple dozen theatre producers I’ve heard answer this question, will be none or very few.)

Since many (assumedly most) of the ultimate decision makers (i.e. the artistic directors) are men, the sexism could be a by-product, not a motivating factor, of who’s in their personal orbit. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t also conscious or unconscious sexism in the decision process as well – but quantifying that is the hard part.

On the other hand, because theatre people, in my experience at least, do tend to be socially-conscious and politically progressive, they do attempt to deliberately diversify. Thus there are specific awards, contests, grants etc. and informally season slots, for women and various minorities. This is both good and bad. It’s good because it does guarantee at least some access and visibility to people who may never have had any. The bad part is that the “black play” or the “woman play” becomes a mark to check off, as in okay, we’ve done our black/woman/Latino/Asian play for the season so the other slots are for the people the A.D. knows or is familiar with and/or thinks his/her audience is familiar with and/or will relate to. (It’s in the latter assumptions regarding the economic viability of a particular play choice that the dreaded “isms” that everyone consciously deplores can often come into play in a decision, as in “my audience won’t come see that play about so and so / by so and so”. To make matters more complicated, sometimes these assumptions of an audience’s prejudice may actually be correct. I’ve heard Artistic Directors talk about the long term education of their audiences regarding style and/or content, i.e. what they couldn’t do in season 1 of their tenure, they could do in season 7.)

How much of this is self-fulfilling prophecy? Even if only partially a real problem (what an audience will accept) for an artistic director, as frustrated and depressed as I can be about my own career stasis, I sympathize with the difficult position these leaders are in during such hard economic times: too much risk and the theatre folds; not enough risk and the audience slowly withers away from boredom.

And, after all, artistic directors are making decisions about a season from a variety of motivations that mix in art, commerce and personal history in a complex manner. So to really get at the “why” of these decisions and therefore the “how” of fixing it would need to take into account more variables than what is presented in the above article. Now that’s a hornet’s nest of complexity to just figure out the management side of this imbalanced gender equation.

On the creative side, here’s a simple variable not quantified in the above – how many playwrights are women and how many are men? The article assumes more men submit plays but exactly how many more? To throw a wrench in figuring out this number, does one even try to figure out if all who claim themselves to be writers can be labeled “professional”? What makes a professional in a profession where most writers get “paid” not with money but with “exposure” that they “should” feel grateful they’re getting? That leaves separating the serious writer from the amateurish one by quantifying quality – a notoriously difficult thing to quantify.

(Maybe the problem is even worse than the writer implies – maybe there are more amateurish men filling up the script piles of world’s literary offices – I don’t mean that to be snarky – I was a script reader once. Most scripts are pretty awful, so I really don’t know since I didn’t differentiate the bad ones by gender at the time. Maybe there really are more bad male writers than female ones. Who knows! There’s just lots of assumptions and guesses.)

So, to study this gender imbalance correctly would take a lot of time and money. As theatre is an industry where there isn’t a lot of money to be made, comparatively, to other businesses – realistically, a nice complex, well-designed sociological study isn’t going to happen.

Metaphorically, is a cigar just a cigar here, or is it really something else? Personally, I’d love to see a theatre world, as well as a whole wide world, based solely on merit and quality rather than inheritance, connections and luck, but I’ve lived too long in this world to know that it’s inherently unfair.

So, do nothing?

Let’s remember one other thing, in the few places where plays are actually occasionally selected from reader recommendations, these play readers are low paid freelancers (often paid by the script, which only encourages reading something quickly without care), or are unpaid interns (often young and inexperienced college freshman), or of course unpaid volunteers in the smallest companies. Moreover, often it’s only a single reader’s opinion that is tallied before a year’s worth of writing work is assigned the rejecton form letter.

So, if one really is most concerned about quality as opposed to any particular quota, the first place is to change is to make sure the reading committees are experienced, relatively well-paid and are actually decision makers.

And in this new, utopian system, absolutely, set it up as a gender / race / age / sexual-orientation blind-selection system. That’s the way many orchestras hold auditions (where a curtain blocks off the player from the listeners). Unfortunately, that’s not the way plays (or movie scripts) are selected for production, or ever will be.

What I’m saying that there is no magic bullet for this problem, in the same way there is no magic pill to get rid of the common cold. You can relieve a few symptoms, but mostly it’s about following certain common sense procedures and slowly things get better. If your polemic has holes in it, then the whole argument can be rejected – even when a portion of it may be very, very right. Build a real case – don’t just make assumptions. And until you can prove actual intent, rather than say, “you’re being sexist” – it might be more effective, to ask, “Do you think you’re making any assumptions here that have to do with who this playwright is or is not, rather than the play itself?”

In the long run, the most effective change will come slowly if people are self-aware and question themselves – not just in picking a play for a season but in everything they do in life.

Theatre, Uncategorized

A Few Initial Thoughts About Some Very Good (or much more than that, or at the least very worthy) Films

There are so many film that I have missed this past year that seem like they are very worthy of seeing, while concurrently a fair number of the ones I did see (usually because they were a free Industry screening) qualify at best as only momentary entertainment without the resonances that truly make a film great art. (As one of my favorite lines of poetry puts it “Only in the beauty created by others is there consolation.” – Adam Zagajewski). Some like many of the documentaries, like “Pina”, are actually just getting their commercial releases and others, like “Incendies” are available on DVD.

But I make the above point as a qualifier for when I make the statement “one of my favorite films” or “one of the best films” of the year, i.e. I’m not a professional reviewer and have neither the time nor the money to see everything.

First my taste always puts top value on films that depict human beings with the complexity that human beings exhibit in real life, i.e. some combination of positive and negative traits with a mix of consistencies and contradictions within each character’s make-up. Plots are derived from character and flow organically. The engine of the story is the standard propeller in drama: conflict. Someone wants something and somebody/something gets in the way. Complications ensue. I most love stories that are dramas with humor, or comedies with drama.

Except in animation and to some degree also pre-1970’s movies where I’m more forgiving, I’m alienated by sentimentality in a movie. I always define this as “unearned emotion” – cheap, easy ways of pushing an audiences’ emotional levers… fast forwards to an audiences’ subconscious that avoid the messy reality of a character journey in order to get to that emotional place (for both the character, and the audience). A fairly innocuous example of sentimentality, is the frequent shots of cute animals in “We Bought a Zoo”. As the locale is a zoo, there is justification obviously, but these cut aways didn’t always have much to do with the story or character development but rather seem to be inserted for that general “aaaaaahhh” feeling most of us get from puppies and kittens. (Another example, less of sentimentality per se, but an easy manipulation of emotion – in this case fear and anticipation – would be in the same movie, the sudden breaking of the lock to the lion cage right when the zoo is getting inspected by the state… let’s call that one, convenient, and I’d be quite surprised if that actually happened in the memoir the film was based on, and wasn’t manufactured by the screenwriter.)

As points of comparison, some relatively recent films that are favorites are “Sideways”, “The Visitor”, “Sweet Land”, “The Last Station” and “500 Days of Summer”… obviously indie heavy. That said, I utterly enjoy fun, escapist and genre (except horror) films too – “Raiders of the Lost Ark” being one of my all time favorites for instance. I’m also a huge fan of film noir, screwball comedies and other black & white film classics.

So, it shouldn’t be surprising that “Win Win” – the indie comedy drama written/directed by Tom McCarthy and starring Paul Giamatti and the ever amazing Amy Ryan – is my absolute, very favorite film of the year. (Note, I haven’t seen “Beginners” yet, which I’m told by friends that I would like quite a bit.)

The surprise to me, at least, is that “The Help” would be on my current top ten list. I resisted seeing this film when it opened. The commercials and trailers screamed, “yuck”, that looks so sentimental.” The major reviews cemented this where they only praised the acting, in particular Viola Davis, and often criticized current flavor of the year Emma Stone (whom, by the way, I had already noticed as standing out in a mediocre comedy called “The Rocker” from 2008).

But as awards season is upon us, I felt I should see the movie that did get various acting and writing major nominations from the guilds: well just as trailers can make a bad movie look good, they can be very reductive concerning character-driven films that have more nuance than is initially apparent. More on this in a future blog post…. (i.e. TO BE CONTINUED)

Film Commentary, Uncategorized

2nd Day of the Year and oh, it’s so Depressing….

I’m linking here to an Alternet published piece: “7 of the Nastiest Scams, Rip-Offs and Tricks From Wall Street Crooks“

Honestly, as a warning, it’s too depressing to read the whole thing… basically a summary of the Wall Street created financial crisis… I could have posted this to Facebook but I didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news amongst my 500 or so Facebook friends on this 2nd day of the year. I’m always posting these kind of things, and frankly, I know people just want to get by and not be burdened. Life is already so hard. I get that. So, I’ll post it here for those voluntarily coming to my own site.

The depressing thing is not just that there are immoral, greedy people in Wall Street cooking up scams, it’s that it shows not only how bought off the Congresses and Presidents (as in all, no matter the party) but the very institutional, regulatory bodies like the SEC have been co-opted too.

Yes, I can vote for some no chance in hell of winning 3rd party as a protest, but won’t some mythical 3rd party that displaces the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum of rotating Republican and Democratic politicians (excepting such true rarities with integrity like Dennis Kucinich) be like the line in the Who song… “meet the new boss, the same as the old boss”, as long as the Supreme Court blessed 100 year old dictum of money equaling speech remain in effect?

Really in the face of such hopelessness, it makes sense that the 50% percent or so of the people in the world who are mostly decent and honest would rather be distracted by the pretty floats of the Rose Parade or so other ritualized extravaganza. After all, I have it on in the background while I write this post.

Uncategorized

SPAM BOT’s

I haven’t made a blog post in a while… saving my outrage and joy just for the 144 character Face Book status update. But here it is the last day of 2011 and I feel I must commemorate that with a longer observation on modern life.

One of the reasons I haven’t posted, besides because of the various distractions of actually living offline, is the Spam Bot’s that patrol the blog world. It leaves me with a gut of rancid bile that robs me of the motivation to blog. For, every other day, I have to clear away 1 or more spam messages from the teeth of my comment filter.

Since I set up this website primarily as a professional work site, but with occasional musings and new photograph posts as a kind of a frosting to the cake… something new or at least a bit different to round out the picture of who I am as an artist… and since I wasn’t trying to be a traditional blogger, I removed the comment box from most of my web pages (that took forever to figure out how to do) from the WordPress template.

However, that doesn’t stop one from commenting or accessing the comments if you click on such, i.e. IF I approve the comment.

Now, originally, I fully expected to never get a comment. But what’s disheartening is dealing with the spam robots who need none of those qualities to spread their guano.

I believe I have received exactly one legitimate comment, but I’ve allowed a few more to be published too, even though they are quite suspicious in their general-ness. The rest – scores of them – have gotten trashed or labeled spam. (I have yet to be faced with the moral dilemma of publishing or not publishing any vitriol regarding my opinions…)

In my pre-website creating innocence, I had no idea that these robot programs existed. I deduce that they apparently scour for any blog that exists and then deposit their droppings like so many mechanical pigeons.

There are the subtle, probable spam posts, that say something like “Great blog. I’ve been looking for something just like this” wherein the advertisement is simply getting their name and website (for exercise equipment and such things) listed after this generic comment. At first, I was snookered but then I saw the pattern where nothing specific from my blog was ever referenced. Worse is when one of these blah comments gets repeated, word for word.

I’ve also gotten a fair amount of spam in German, Italian and fractured English (this seems to be from Russia).

And then there are the grotesque paragraphs of spam advertisements for pain killers, porn, disreputable software or just junk characters that look like the bit and bite visual equivalent of a viral genetic helix

I fully expect lots of spam posts to this post about spamming.

I am tempted to actually allow them to be published to prove my point BUT that would be giving them too much power. Perhaps I will cut and paste these, removing the links and thereby foiling the Bot invasion.

One small step for Julius, one great leap for humankind!

More likely, I’ll just be too overwhelmed to bother.

And to think our ancestors were busy being devastated by things that could eat them and drag them away in the dark. Oh such petty and small complaints, huh?

Art in Between (life), Uncategorized

Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene

WARNING – I will try to be vague but if you’re clever viewer, my response to having seen this “Martha, Marc, May, Marlene” will have spoilers…

I saw MMMM this past Thursday night. I had an immediate, visceral reaction of distaste running through my body at the last frame and as the credits rolled..

In the immediate moment and for a few hours afterward I could be no more articulate than that it made me feel “yucky” inside.

Was it the seemingly ambiguous non-ending? While people all around me seemed to have different interpretations of what was happening or about to happen, I actually thought the ending was quite clear even if the director chose to not show us those horrific images about to come. It was a true horror movie ending … in fact, the whole movie could be characterized as an exploitative, horror movie.

On the surface, it’s a serious psychological drama exploring the damage wrought upon the members of a small cult and specifically the title character and protagonist – played by Elizabeth Olsen – of the film. But that movie is really only about half of the film – the flashback half of the film occurring on the collective farm in upstate New York. This half of the film is already harrowing to watch and filled with a constant sense of dread.

John Hawkes plays the cult leader, Patrick. He’s an amazing actor. Superlative. (In fact, ALL of the performances are very good to excellent in the entire movie…. script however is another story.) If you saw Hawkes in “Winter’s Bone” and thought he was a scary dude in that, he’s downright benign, an angel in “…Bone” compared to the alternately charming, manipulative, cruel and violent monster he plays in MMMM.

There is one thing that rings untrue about the scenes on the farm: there is no scene or image which shows the Hawkes’ characters directives on how to interact with anybody from the outside world.

Such information is vital to know because it would very much inform the audience on Olsen’s character’s interactions with her sister and brother-in-law after running away from the cult. That (whatever it is, SHOULD be the default pattern that she’s fighting to break out of. She’s been thoroughly brainwashed after all.

SPOILER in the next paragraph:

But there are also shorter flashback scenes occurring just off the farm in the nearby town, that takes the psychological terror closer to the realm of the Manson Family. While there is a certain logic that this cult could behave in this manner too, it also puts the movie more into the realm of melodrama and horror. And it isn’t really necessary. There’s already enough figurative and literal violence perpetrated upon the cult members, especially the women, to convey the idea that this is a very bad way to organize a group of people.

But it is really the roughly half of the movie happening in the “present”, at the Connecticut vacation home of the protagonists sister, where the exploitative aspect really comes to the fore. I say exploitative not because there is any violence perpetrated (there isn’t) but because of the way the writer/director exploits the audience.

The Olsen character never reveals to her sister that she was living in a cult. That would put her more in a state of self-awareness and shame, i.e. it is conscious volition that leads her to hide these facts… however, the writer/director wants to play it both ways… first she’s traumatized and disassociated… then she’s behaving with her sister in a hostile, alienated way that one can imagine was their relationship 2 years ago – prior to her joining the cult…. then she’s disintergrating into a paranoid, possibly delusional, mess… then she acts as if she doesn’t know what happened to her. Some of this feels organically true but a lot of it feels like effect to keep the audience off-balance and moreover to keep the sister and the brother-in-law in the dark.

And by the way, there has to be something good in the relationship between the two sisters… something at some point in their lives where they were kind to each other. Yet, I can’t recall a physical touch of concern or a touch of gratitude (the Olsen character is being sheltered and protected after all by her older sister) and not a word of gratitude from the Olsen character. She’s opaque to her sister.

SPOILERS in the next three paragraphs:

Also, it’s illogical that the cult would have let her get away. She’s in a diner. The chief henchman of the cult leader has found her and he inexplicably leaves the diner. This would only make sense if the cult fully expected her to return on her own because of the mind manipulations that had already occurred. And the movie initially shows the cult to be just that – evil but not murderous of human beings. But when that reveal occurs ¾ of the way into the movie, suddenly nothing makes sense.

The Olsen character knows too much. She could tell the police, etc. There’s no way the control freak Hawkes character would allow her to get away. So as I said, all of the Olsen character inconsistencies are necessary to create almost a false tension for the audience, a false mystery (is she or isn’t she crazy, is she or isn’t she seeing things, and so on) but moreover, the older sister and brother-in-law must be kept ignorant for the plot device that they will then be vulnerable to a surprise attack.

And that’s why I said MMMM is a horror film. Horror films are essentially disease films. A disease strikes randomly. It has no moral imperative. A victim of a disease is struck down just by bad luck. Horror personifies the disease into either the hockey mask immortal serial killer or other humanoid or non-humanoid monster. In MMMM, Patrick is the monster aided and abetted by his attendants. So MMMM as well as the innocents with her will be struck down the disease that is Patrick.

The one genre I dislike and almost never see is horror. There’s enough blood and disease in real life… I don’t want to see a more grotesque version of that as entertainment. Art exists to transform the chaos of life. Bad things can still happen to good people, but something about the experience creates meaning and not just random suffering.

One other side note, this is one of the most beautiful films, from an image point of view, that I’ve seen this year. The cinematography is just stunning. But once again, this is a deceitful pleasure. I assume the Writer/Director is making a point about the evil that can lurk beneath a pretty surface. Or hopefully that’s his point. So, that the pretty pictures are not part of the mind f-ck, there just to lull the audience…

Film Commentary, Uncategorized

Immorality or Isolation

Just a quick revisit to the “Blame Game” post… one that other site, another online conversation got started regarding financial regulations, Occupation Wall Street, morality and accountability.

One of the more interesting comments I got to that post (and I’m not sure if he’d want to be attributed here or not, and I stress that my paraphrasing could be inaccurate so mea culpa up front) had to do with objecting to the idea that the 1% are behaving immorally.

He made the legitimate point that wealth isolates people and sometimes creates a sense privilege that they deserve their wealth. He made it clear he knew this was nonsense, i.e., that the accumulation of wealth may or may be a result from just desserts, but that wealthy were not inherently immoral, that many are quite engaged with, and worry about the state of the world.

I really want to give this point of view its due. There really is an oversimplification with the sloganeering: we are the 99% and that the 1% is to blame and are immoral.

Clearly there are good, moral rich people as there bad, immoral poor and middle class people. And of those in the 1-ish percent that seem to have benefited directly and greatly from the recent run up to this worldwide financial crisis, some of what seems like immorality really can be attributed to isolation or isolation / arrogance.

A good example would be those who made a massive fortune by making bets on the failure of various investments (i.e. those who bought derivatives that were betting on all those foreclosures happening. These truly clever people didn’t create the system but they recognized its inherent flaws and made the proverbial killing exploiting those flaws. It wasn’t about wishing those people any ill will. It was statistical analysis of bad investments that they thought were likely to default. I really don’t see these people as evil in any sense.

Also, QUITE a few people within the 99% have enabled some of the worst behavior of a portion of the 1%.

However, I still hold true to my belief however that those within the 1-ish percent that actively lobbied to create or maintain this very rotten system do have a moral culpability, and should be held accountable. They wanted the Glass-Steagall act junked; they wanted the rules changed to be able to see investments to one party while betting against those investments with a different party; they wanted special treatment by federal government; they wanted their investment firms re-classified as banks to receive TARP funds, etc. They then funneled this money into their personal fortunes and have done everything possible to pay lower and lower taxes on these accumulated fortunes.

These people I will continue to classify as immoral and selfish. None of these actions are criminal, though a few them had been illegal prior to the lobbying to have certain laws changed, but yes I see these things as unethical. (Now of course, people have a way of compartmentalizing their behavior so they can be highly ethical and moral in one aspect of their lives and the reverse in another… so even here, there can be complicated patterns of black, white and a multitude of grays.)

Unfortunately in our mass media age, if a message isn’t simple – in black and white with no shades of gray – the mainstream media will ignore that message and the consumers of such media will not watch / read beyond the headline.

So it’s become an unfortunate necessity that OWS is so simplistic in its messaging, though I don’t know if that was planned or just a result of the non-hierarchal aspect of the movement. But the topic has quite fortunately been raised.

But thoughtful people everywhere have a duty to deepen the conversation, now that it has been begun.

Art in Between (life), New York City, Politics and Finance, Uncategorized

Meet the New Boss, the Same as the Old Boss

Any classic rock fan will recognize the above line as having been derived from the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” who assumedly re-phrased it from popular wisdom. Unfortunately, their generation got fooled again as did my generation and the next generation… up till perhaps the most recent generation. Many a pundit or just older person who has sympathy for the Occupation Wall Street movement have been impatient for them to develop a literal, hierarchal organization and have a direct political impact like the so-called Tea Party did/does (see my post from last week about what I think about the Tea Party).

I on the other hand am just happy that the OWS is just changing the conversation away from the Conservative dominated media.

(There I say it plainly: the mainstream media which includes NPR and PBS is NOT liberal; it’s centrist to very conservative. Period. I’ll probably blog about this fact at some point too.)

Very recently a respected organ of that mainstream media, THE WASHINGTON POST, published an extremely revealing article. It backs up something I’ve been saying from the beginning. President Obama is a pro-business president and a very good friend of Wall Street, just like George W. Bush was a pro-business president and a very good friend of Wall Street. (W. was also a particularly good buddy of the oil/coal industry and O. is just a friend to these, so as just one example, I don’t mean to make blanket associations and equivalents between them.)

But facts are facts and they’re well documented in this article – Wall Street’s profits are better than ever: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/wall-streets-resurgent-prosperity-frustrates-its-claims-and-obamas/2011/10/25/gIQAKPIosM_story.html

One could say that Obama fulfilled Bush’s plan (remember the Bush admin. set up the no-strings attached TARP plan) just as well as Obama also fulfilled Bush’s withdrawal plan for Iraq (i.e. we got out now sooner, or later, than the agreement previously negotiated during the Bush administration).

So, one shouldn’t make the jump that Obama is doing something different, more favorable to Wall Street… actually ever so slightly to the contrary since the Dem’s did pass modest Wall Street/banking reform (which the Republicans universally opposed).

Some one I know brought to my attention President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1936 rousing speech where he said “I welcome their hatred” regarding Wall Street http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nuElu-ipTQ It’s a great speech from FDR, and yes an enormous contrast from Obama and of course, Bush too, or any other potential Republican presidential candidate.

Despite any rhetoric from either Democratic or Republican or their associated allies, in practice, they’re all profoundly intertwined. In contrast, FDR actually backed up his rhetoric.

Unfortunately, what the FDR parallel probably also shows is that not much will change in the United States, unless we hit rock bottom and suddenly those in power become innately afraid of social chaos.

So many of the great changes of the 1930’s were essentially pre-emptive. The banking regulations, Social Security and other New Deal long term and shorter term programs like the WPA were as much about saving capitalism from itself as they were about relieving the suffering of the citizenry. Elizabeth Warren said this very nicely in a recent speech, but I’ll take it further: rich people benefit more, proportionally, from civilization and an orderly society than poor people. Innately this is true, and that’s why morally it is justified that they are taxed at a higher rate.

Additionally, in the private sector, GM introduced health insurance as a union benefit for reasons of labor peace. That was the beginnings of our current ad hoc health care “system”.

Even the not overtly economically connected, Fairness Doctrine (vastly underrated how Reagan’s ending of it has profoundly affected our current political culture and economic condition) was adopted as a way to keep Congress from seriously regulating the broadcast industry, as back then, many in Congress were so silly that they seriously considered the airwaves to be public property.

The Fairness Doctrine worked. News divisions at the networks did not have to justify their bottom lines; documentaries were also regular fixture on the big 3 networks and as result viewers got facts and not just opinion and salacious puff pieces. But the Fairness Doctrine wasn’t actual law so it was rather easy for Reagan to just junk it.

So instead, in our current political system, we get to have an elaborate theatre of the Democrats and Republicans sounding very different, while their actions keep overlapping. The basic problem is that the Supreme Court has long equated money with speech and now that corporations are “people”, that person or company with the most money has the loudest voice.

We Americans have a true dilemma of keeping the continued disaster of stasis, versus chaos. But one can’t hope for the suffering of another great depression. Chaos is never anything to wish for because you don’t know who will emerge from the muck. After all, there’s no guarantee another FDR is waiting in the wings as opposed to some neo-fascist.

Which once again, is why I think Occupation Wall Street offers true hope – not for any immediate political change but as hopefully the beginning of a cultural change. Just shifting our culture slightly away from the false smiling visage of Ronald Reagan, who truly was the emblem of greed is good (not the mythical Gordon Gecko), is something to hope for.

If we become more morally in favor of an economic system where all have a fair chance to succeed (through intelligent, strong regulations and intelligent, fair re-distribution of wealth through a graduated tax system… not just the income tax, but the entire tax system), and moreover that greed may not always be bad, but cooperation is always good.

Politics and Finance, Uncategorized

The ORIGINAL Boston Tea Party Impulse

If you were to Google my name, you might come across a couple of obscure law journals which name me as the Tea Party activist in a lawsuit against a particular California election law. This would seem particularly odd, since anyone who knows me, knows I am a die-hard liberal.

In fact, some of them only half-jokingly call me a socialist. That’s utterly untrue as I accept capitalism as a necessary evil. After all, it is the best system for creating wealth. However, as capitalism also tends to concentrate wealth, and wealth entwines into politics, unregulated capitalism leads to plutocracy, oligarchy and even fascism.

So yes, I particularly believe in strong regulation of capitalism, a graduated income tax and re-distribution of wealth and certain, yes, socialist institutions like a national health care system. Very not, Tea Party positions.

But I joined a lawsuit against a California election law that I think is bad for a number of reasons – one being that it doesn’t allow write-in votes, or rather the law allows them but specifically says that they will not be counted. So I proved useful to this suit because I live in a district that was having a special election. At the behest of the lawyer bringing this case forward, I registered as a Tea Party member and then tried to vote for myself in order to show that I was harmed by this law. To repeat, it was his idea that I register as a Tea Party member because it is not one of the parties officially recognized by the state of California, as well as for other strategic reasons legally and politically which are not for me to discuss.

However, why would somebody with my leftist political views make this profound sacrifice of identification??? Below is the partial explanation, made in an online comment to the writer of one of these obscure law journals. (Note – at the lawyer’s request, I ended up deleting one clause below, the one about the Tea Party being a re-brand of the Republican base… so my comment letter was published without it. I re-insert it here on my own website.)

An Activist Yes, But Not a “Tea Party Activist”

Dear Mr. Eris,

As I am the subject of the headline of your July 20, 2011 story (“Top-Two open primary faces legal challenge from Democrat-turned-Tea Party activist”), I would have hoped that you would have contacted me directly to understand the nuance of my actions, for now it absolutely behooves me to make a correction and clarification of that headline: while I am certainly an activist, in no sense could I accurately be labeled a “Tea Party activist”, as that term is popularly understood today.

In the first place, I do not adhere at all to the current policy positions of what the media typically labels as Tea Party issues, since such have become nothing more than the issues of a re-branded right-wing Republican base.

Then you may be wondering why I tried to register as a Tea Party member, an action that could so easily be misconstrued as making me a supporter of anti-unionism and the like, which I absolutely am not.

I agreed to this action of trying to become a “Tea Party” registered voter and potential candidate, not only because it would be an efficacious means to legally challenge what I consider to be an unconstitutional and unfair law, but also because it has a moral justification, as I do agree with the original Boston Tea Party impulse.

For it is important to remember that there is another, original aspect of the amorphous modern Tea Party movement that spiritually harkens back to that revolutionary protest in the Boston Harbor.

After all, this modern protest was partially born, at least amongst some of its initial adherents, of an inchoate rage that something with wrong with the System itself. This failure of the System was exemplified by the bailout of the banks and big brokerage houses while score upon score of ordinary Americans were losing their jobs, their pensions and their homes.

The Top-Two Open Primary law was deceptively sold to the public, and moreover disenfranchises Independents and the small parties – both in the “No Party Preference” label for such candidates and even more importantly, precluding a write-in candidate (thus a version of Lisa Murkowski’s write-in Senate victory could never happen in California).

The colonial Tea Party was not a protest against taxation per se, but a protest against taxation without representation. It was the lack of representation that was the motivation and rationale for the American defiance against the Crown. It is that original Boston Tea Party ideal for true democratic representation for which I am an activist and why I became a party to this law suit.

Thus a potential correction of your original headline would be “…challenge from Democrat-turned-original ‘Tea Party’ activist” but only if an explanation of my motivations were also included within the body of the article, that I am re-appropriating a piece of American history. Right wing conservatives do not own an exclusive trademark on patriotic American symbols after all.

Sincerely,
Julius Galacki

Art in Between (life), Los Angeles, Politics and Finance, Uncategorized

Absolutely, Play the Blame Game with the 1%

Below a long response (or call it a well-reasoned rant) I made in someone else’s blog. That person, who truly seems to be a thoughtful decent man as well as a successful businessman, was attempting to strike some kind of middle ground regarding Occupation Wall Street and the articulated goals of their consensus. I say “their consensus” because they operate along the line of a pure Athenian democracy, have only temporary facilitators instead of leaders, etc. So, for now, it’s clearly more of a social movement rather than a political movement like the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, and therefore, OWS has no hierarchy to present a truly articulated list of political goals.

Well, this business man wrote, to paraphrase, yes the system is broken and needs to be fixed and people have a right to be angry about that, but that it is not constructive to blame or specific people – in particular, doing such acts as marching in front of certain financial figures homes and condos as the OWS did about two weeks ago – and furthermore, people in the 99% had to accept responsibility for their own financial failures. He didn’t say this specifically but I think the implication was particularly if your home had been foreclosed, then it was your own fault.

While compared to so many who have denigrated and dismissed OWS, his civil tone and conciliatory admission of systemic fault was very welcome and should be applauded, I nonetheless immediately felt angry… I worked through that emotion and produced the following (slightly revised from the original for clarity):

“I disagree. It is absolutely essential to point the finger and actually create accountability and ramifications for their behavior that very, very nearly created a world-wide depression. The system is broken because of the greed, yes greed – no reason to play semantics, of those that benefited from the breaking of the system. Congress didn’t repeal the Glass-Steagall Act (legislation created after the Great Depression that had successfully regulated the banks for approximately 50 years), and other financial regulations for fun. It did so because wealthy contributors wanted them to do so. Then what had been illegal became legal and the floodgates were wide open for what has happened to our economy and much of the world’s.

The more than 1% deserve all of the social and moral approbation that they’re getting. And much more.

(Obviously, it’s not just the financial system that is broken – the Supreme Court’s equating of money and speech for the past 100 years, has logically created a democracy where the person with more money has more speech, and thus is “heard” more easily. Almost all politicians follow the money – nearly all Republicans overtly, and most Democrats in a combination of the overt and subvert – and are therefore in obeisance to the will of a moneyed elite. So, Republicans universally opposed re-regulating the Street, while Democrats put forward regulations that for the most part are more fig leaf than substantive.)

If there are neither financial ramifications (since the tax payers have done and will continue to do the bailing out, and in general, the financial decision makers have NOT lost their jobs or fortunes) nor any legal repercussions (since the laws were changed), a similar financial meltdown is going to happen all over again.

That is one of the great services that the OWS people are doing. Their righteous indignation – as amorphous and without nuance that it sometimes is – is creating an environment politically where it might actually lead to the politicians literally hearing those without money for a change, and actually re-instituting sane regulations on the banking and investment industries.

As for the responsibility of the 99%, certainly some home buyers were foolish in buying something well over their income level, but there was also quite of lot of deceptive practices in the real estate and mortgage industries, and/or understandable ignorance too. Plus, there are those who have gone “underwater” through no fault of their own even though they have been making payments. Or, those who were keeping up on their payments then lost their jobs (thus their homes) because of the domino effect from the worldwide financial meltdown.

In other words, real people suffered and lost everything they owned or everything they had for their retirement in totally unrelated industries because of those bankers and investment companies who profited from the inflated real estate and other investment markets, i.e. from all of the derivatives and credit default swaps and other convoluted, complicated financials instruments that finally collapsed upon themselves, precipitating a financial black hole that then led to bankruptcies and lay-offs and local, state and national government (Iceland!) defaults around the globe.

So, why shouldn’t someone who is losing their house, is being laid off through fault of their own, has lost their retirement savings, and all other losers in this glorified Ponzi scheme NOT blame the ones who both profited from this financial system, AND then were made whole by tax payer money when their financial house of cards collapsed? Yes, even Goldman Sachs could have gone under without a government bailout. So, why shouldn’t the losers say, “I didn’t cause this mess, so why not bail me too?” Or even: “Okay I messed up and made some stupid financial decisions but they did too, so why not me?”

Capitalism obviously runs on greed, but if there isn’t enough people in power to counter that greed with strong restrictions (including a sane tax policy) on that greed, in the long term capitalism will fail all but the very, very few and America will slowly corrode as a world power. It seems to me that Argentina which was of rough equivalence economically to the US at the turn of the 20th Century is a good example of what happens to a country when wealth is hyper concentrated.

You can say that greed is part of human nature, but another defining characteristic of what it means to be human, is cooperation. So, if the roughly 1% don’t acknowledge their culpability and accountability (and they certainly have not) and do things to make amends for the vast damage they have done to so many people not just in this country but the entire world, then somebody else has to create equilibrium. For that reason alone, I see the people of OWS as being great patriots.”

Of course, Fred disagreed with me. I followed up with this (and some more):

“So bringing this back to OWS and the Blame Game and personal responsibility. Blame IS a dangerous game. Throughout history, individuals and groups (usually some minority) have been blamed unfairly and incorrectly, and thus great evil has been perpetuated. BUT in the instance of the most recent worldwide financial meltdown, Wall Street is not a scapegoat but directly responsible. They can’t be prosecuted because they successfully lobbied to have the laws changed; they haven’t lost any power, influence, position or cash (except for Lehman Bros) because the TARP program was no strings attached. So there’s only one thing left, and that is, for a lot of people to say, no Lloyd Blankfein, you are not “doing God’s work”. You and the rest of the arrogant people in the financial industry are part of the problem. Social embarrassment is all that’s left to force these people to cooperate. Actual people, not a faceless “system” have to be held accountable.”

More disagreements. Dan’s comment: “And if you’re relying on “social embarrassment” to make people do the right thing, I have to ask, “Have you met these people?” As long as they’re making pantloads of money, they’re embarrassed all the way to the bank.” (I would say that I’m not relying on it but rather there just isn’t anything better. I am hoping, however, that the politicians get scared.) And Fred’s: “And maybe I am less quick to demonize those Wall Street titans because I actually know several of them and I know that they are mostly not indifferent and not immoral. Often arrogant, yes. But I don’t think that’s a hanging offense.”

Art in Between (life), New York City, Politics and Finance, Uncategorized

Love, Fear and “9-11”

This was first posted on Sept. 11, 2011 but WordPress’ servers must be on east coast time….

I have been trying to avoid these 9-11 remembrances, mainly because I think so much damage has been wrought upon American society and politics from the misuse of the fear that 9-11 engendered in the American public (not to mention the literal destruction from 10 years of two wars) that the current situation just depresses me too much. I feel rather helpless and a stranger in my own country as this Conservative tide drowns out reason and fact-based thinking, while simultaneously the rich get richer, economic criminality on Wall Street goes unpunished and swaths of our basic civil liberties have probably disappeared forever.

But I’ve been overwhelmed finally by one Facebook post after another of “where was I when” accounts, in addition to the unavoidable content on TV and the radio that I can’t avoid my own memories of a date that changed my own life very directly and personally.

September 10, 2001 into the 11th, I had been with Jenny till 4 AM in the emergency room, so I was deliriously tired 2 hours later when her brother Brian called to tell her to turn on the TV.

I eventually trudged out to the living room to join her. On the screen, I saw smoke coming from one Tower and just a haze behind it. I couldn’t conceive that one of the Towers had already fallen even though I heard the newscaster say those words. They simply didn’t make sense so I ignored those words. I couldn’t comprehend the fact yet. Yes, I recognized that this was a serious fire, but I had confidence that the N.Y.F.D. would take care of it. So, I said to Jenny, “It’s a fire. They’ll put it out. Come back to bed.”

But she didn’t join me: her brother’s call had more thoroughly woken her.

When I got up again about an hour or so later, yes all things had changed….

I loved Jenny before 9-11. Deeply, deeply, deeply. I still love Jenny five years after being divorced from her. (To clarify, this is NOT to say I still pine to be married to her again… we’ve both moved on in those matters.) But I am fairly certain, if it had not been for 9-11, I would have delayed that life changing decision to propose marriage. Would that delay have become permanent or not – I have no idea. Would that delay, if temporary, actually have improved the chances that our marriage would have lasted longer? Again, I have no way to know for certain.

I am only certain it would have been different if those jets hadn’t toppled the Twin Towers.

You see, I had been planning on buying her a ring – just a ring, as a surprise gift from a Native American Gallery in Vancouver simply because she had been so taken by them from an image in a magazine. The gallery person asked me if it was to be an engagement ring. Actually seemed to assume it would be.

That question took me by surprise – complete surprise – but instead of saying no, I let myself be torn by the idea. I said, “yes, go ahead, email me some pictures of engagements sets” and then proceeded to torment myself, yes or no, yes or no?

While I have NEVER been so compatible with someone who I was romantically tied to (about a 75% exact commonality of personality and interests and of the remaining 25%, most of that difference was made of things we were both willing to explore and learn from), there were nonetheless serious passion problems on her part for me. Thus, I remained resolutely unsure whether I would actually purchase an engagement set.

Then the Towers fell.

My entire young adulthood had been in New York. Enormous changes and consequential experiences happened and I consider it my other hometown.

One of the first things I did when I arrived to go to NYU was take a freshman tour that went to the Observation Deck. Over the years, I was in the subway shopping concourse repeatedly; I preferred going to the Trade Center to get half price theatre tickets rather than go to Times Square. The Towers were my map – quite literally as when I became directionally discombobulated, I looked for the Towers to know where south was and where the Empire State building was to know north. And just a month prior to 9-11, Jenny and I took a vacation to the City, staying in the Hilton right across the street from the WTC. And on and on, i.e. the World Trade Center and environs were very much a part of my New York City life.

And then when all that horrific pain and destruction occurred on 9-11 and mortality spread like a fine powder of ash over the country and blotting out a block of my own history, I believed with all my heart, the only thing that mattered in this world was love. That was the only thing that made all of the pain bearable. So, with new resolve, I ignored my justified fears and doubts that Jenny and I were missing an important ingredient that makes a marriage work.

Two years later I was in such a state of depression about that missing-ness, I had to change the situation or I felt we would grow to hate each other, and she agreed. However, in no way does the fact that we chose to split amicably and cooperatively make it any less painful. It was exceedingly agonizing, and unstuck me for about another 2 years after our split. After all, we may still be friends who talk regularly and see each other occasionally, but I lost my best friend whom I did everything with.

And as strange as this will sound, the end of my marriage is always accompanied by the thought in my head that Lonnie Anderson was right. Most people, I assume, when they think of Lonnie, they remember her ample endowments, her blonde hair and perhaps her comic gifts. But when I think of her, I think of her wisdom and how she shocked me to my idealistic core as a little boy. I was watching her on an interview show… maybe the Mike Douglas Show… and when asked about her break-up with Burt Reynolds, she said that one of the most painful lessons she ever learned was that love does not conquer all. Two people can love each other and it just doesn’t matter. I couldn’t conceive that could be so. It just didn’t make sense to me. (Postscript – I’m being told authoritatively that my memory is playing tricks on me, that I had to have seen this interview when I was older and that I’m conflating two memories… certainly possible, but no matter, the concept still holds true…)

When examples would pop up over the years (splits that occurred where there was no betrayal or cruelty), I suspected that perhaps their love was not deep enough or truly real.

Until it happened to us.

There is no magical umbrella from the reign of ash.

And yet love’s still the best thing we’ve got.

But back specifically to this 10 year anniversary of 9-11. As that event overwhelmed me with intense emotion that was very temporal that faded with the terrors of the everyday, so too that traumatic event ever so briefly created a false unity that quickly coarsened from shoulder to shoulder to eye for any eye, whether it be guilty or innocent.

The Towers fell and while a Pandora’s box opened to release misery and evil, trapped beneath that debris has to be hope… that we will love each other, even though we are all different, both within the nation, and beyond it. It won’t always work, but it’s the best thing we’ve got.

Tangentially related to some of my points, here is a very leftist, (ironically very) left brained analysis about right brain behavior by George Lakoff, Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics… at the least it, it intrigued my left brain:
http://www.nationofchange.org/use-911-consolidate-conservative-power-intimidation-framing-1315758288

Art in Between (life), New York City