You better tell your story fast...

Junot Diaz had an interesting article in the New Yorker about the lack of narrative in the year long presidency of President NeObama. Diaz argues that NeO has not been able to frame his legislative efforts inside a greater narrative of his presidency. Diaz cites the rethugs' use of 9/11 as a masterful example of how narrative can be used to drive policy.

To this, I have a few things to say:

1. The first year of the NeO presidency reminds me of how I felt after I watched the sequel to the Matrix: slightly disappointed. The Matrix ends with Neo ascending to a seemingly infinite level of power. He tells us that he is going to get rid of all the rules and boundaries. He crosses from the Rubicon of potential and (literally) flown into the realm of actualization. It might sound corny, but the first movie left me wondering if some large part of myself had not been just changed by what I had seen on the screen. Maybe everything was different now.

And then came the sequel. I've written extensively about the dreaded White Dreads from Reloaded, but let's just say that no matter what happened in the second movie, we were bound to be disappointed. The election of Scott Brown was my White Dread moment.

No, we don't use gel!

2. Diaz makes a good point about the importance of narrative in a presidency, but he doesn't recognize the genre that NeO is "writing" in. We are talking about the story of the Presidency of the United States here. Don't get it twisted, this is a Western. The main character has always been a White man. This particular White man has always had to bust his guns. The vast majority of the bullets have been caught by colored folk (whether they be Injuns or Hajis or Charlies or run-of-the-mill-Negroes) in the interest of "settling the land."

What? That's what I thought.

Bush and the Rethugs rode that narrative so well because they were traveling a well worn path that everyone could understand. On 9/11, once again the White man was under attack and answered the call, reluctantly, of course, to save the day. (The story got a little old near the end there, especially when it became blatantly clear that the rethugs were more apt to blast their friends in the face than smoke out and round up the offending redskins.)

That's why the Tea Partiers have it so easy. Hell, all they had to do was watch the first twenty minutes of Birth of a Nation to figure out their political platform.

Well, we don't care what Senator Brown said in his speech. His daughters are NOT available.

But there's no question about NeO's writing ability. On the campaign, he constructed one of the greatest political narratives the world has ever seen. He reached out as a beacon of redemption for an entire nation. If our country could put centuries of prejudice and hatred aside and take a leap of faith for this brilliant, special man (and his family), than maybe there could be hope that the vision of America we always here about could be real for all of its citizens. And if NeO had been able to fly into the clouds on inauguration day (high, high over Aretha Franklin's hat), that would have been the perfect ending of that story. But that's not what happened.

What's happened is that NeO is in the midst of about ten different narratives, from overt and covert wars on multiple continents, to health care, to immigration, to economic disaster, to natural disaster, to an education system in turmoil, to Scott Baio (!) trying to clown his woman. Trying to unite all of these these narratives within a single overarching structure is something that would even make Dickens shake his head. It also doesn't help that in the traditional POTUS western NeO would be the one wearing the feathers, shaking a tom-tom. Western's are all about the domination of the Other, and in order for NeO to be successful against his opposition, he's got to rally White support against the an Other that is White. That's complicated.

For real? Charles in Charge. Do you really want it? Because we can make it happen for you.

3. But in the end, I think Diaz is right. NeO has made some decisions, like state secrets, like the bank (giveaway) bailout, like escalation in Afghanistan, like the expansion of executive power, that cause me considerable pause. One of my favorite professors, Alexs Pate, used to always talk about the importance of discovering the "goodness" of a character. Goodness doesn't necessarily mean that the character is good, but that you have a firm grasp on the motivations behind their actions. They are consistent with who they are, even if that consistency makes you shudder. Dick Cheney may be many things, but his goodness is not difficult to grasp, though his narrative may be shallow. He is a satisfying villain because you know what he is going to do: evil. NeO, on the other hand, is harder to get a sense of because so many of the things that he has done, or not done, have gone against my understanding of who he is a character. Not that I've given up on him by any measure, but he's getting a lot more complicated than I imagined.

You just had to put on the black hat, right?

4. My hope for NeO, which I guess is the hope I have for all of us, is that he take the risk to evade the Western genre. It doesn't matter if you put Tyreese Gibson in the starring role, the Western is about domination. To regain the confidence of the American people in his POTUS narrative, some will advise that he needs to dominate, he needs to start collecting some scalps. Historically, during similar ebbs in popularity these scalps have been "scalps of color". (See: Clinton, Bill; Bush, W. George; Bush, George H.W.; et cetera)

Although I give NeO mixed reviews so far, I hope he has the courage to resist the trappings of the genre and take a stand that's principled, even if it costs him a sequel.

The Brother From Another Planet

Say what you will about President NeObama, he has given us the gift of some amazing iconography.

Don Belton: Truth teller

 

I first met Don Belton when he visited Bloomington to apply for the professor's job at Indiana University in 2008. I got to sit in on a dinner with some faculty members and I was immediately struck by the man's warmth and intelligence. You could tell this was a brother who had not only read and written extensively, but also had the life experience to inform his work and teaching. This was a wise, caring person.

He also had that James Baldwin aura about him: he was a truth teller.

On December 27th, Don Belton was brutally murdered in his home. Police later found a journal entry Belton wrote about a man named Michael, and how happy Belton was about their relationship. This lead police to Michael Griffin, a 25 year old former Marine. Griffin quickly confessed, but portrayed the murder as a revenge killing. Griffin, who served a tour of duty in Iraq, claimed that the 53 year old novelist was able to sexually assault him, not once, but twice, on Christmas day.

With all due respect to the judicial process and the rights of the accused, this is, of course, the worst kind of fiction.

Griffin, who has a girlfriend and a two year old son, says that he came to Belton's home seeking something. He says it was an apology, but maybe it was an absolution, or an answer to why what happened between them happened on Christmas. Whatever he found with Belton in that house left him disturbed enough to stab this man, this loving man, to death. 

Describing Belton as a loving man, I think of Baldwin. He once said, "love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within." According to Baldwin this love principle requires us to remove our masks and come to grips with the truth of what lies underneath. This principle also obligates us to share this truth with those that we share our love with, even when it painfully unfastens the masks they hold. The consequences of this truth telling are often great, and it takes a person of great bravery and integrity to uphold this standard. I'm not sure what happened between the two men, but it seems that Belton's faithful adherence to this love principle is what cost him his life.

 He will be sorely missed.

A candle light vigil is planned at IU from 5-6pm. Friends of Don have set up an excellent blog dedicated to memorializing Belton and bringing his killer to justice.

***Update after the trial

Tell me you're going to be...

Hopefully you're in the midst of people you love. My wife and I bought a house a few months ago and lately I've been thinking a lot about the nature of houses and homes. A lot about being thankful.



It's amazing to see Luther so self-assured, so powerful. Dude could sing.

The Way Mulattas Make Me Feel

After reading all of these good reviews about the new Michael Jackson movie, I think I'm going to jump over the cliff like the rest of the lemmings and go see it. I wrote a post about MJ's iconic Black or White video a couple months back and that lead one of my old IR compadres Hannah Notess to ask me to write something for the journal she's at, The Other Journal.

I always tripped off the video for Michael's "The Way You Make Me Feel" because it's such a sweet song, but such a strange video (which is often the case with Mike). Basically, it's off the BAD album and it's Michael's version of an NWA video. (As a matter of fact, I think the video's female lead went on to even greater success in Dr. Dre's "Ain't Nothing But A G-Thang" where she got 40ozs of St. Ides dumped on her head.) Anyway, the piece is called The Way Mulattas Make Me Feel. You can check it out here.

Max = Not Marriage Material

When I was in kindergarten my dad taught me how to feed insects to ants. In the backyard of our house we squatted down, looking for bugs and swarming ant's nests. If you found the right size bug and the right location in an ant's nest, you'd have a show that beat anything on Wild Kingdom. Years later, my parents divorced and I spent a lot of time turning over stones in the dry brush of our backyard, "playing" with bugs by myself.

Thinking back on it, I'm a little shocked at the cruelty of the pastime. I like to think of myself as a compassionate person. Torturing bugs is the recreation of sociopaths, after all. But my regret is tempered by an appreciation for how I was battling my own loneliness and trying to assert some control over a world that seemed so far beyond me.

And it's also true that you end up doing a lot of (strange!) mean stuff when you're a kid.

So, watching Where the Wild Things Are, I felt partially transported back to that backyard, with it's rough stones and soft dirt, and solitary malice. Spike Jonze's beautiful adaptation of the Maurice Sendak story is picture-perfect in creating a world that is somber, hopeful, cruel, weird, melancholy, menacing, and joyful. The experience is similar to one of those strange dreams where you're know you're sleeping, but the dream world seems real anyway.

But I was not Max. Although I missed my mom and dad because they worked so much, in the movie Max's father is absent. It's never explained, but the sadness that hangs over the family suggests that the absence is permanent. My dad was still there to show me how to hit a baseball or play chess or drive a stick shift.

Plus, I never tweaked on my mom like Max does in the movie. He jumps on a kitchen counter, in full wolf costume, yelling at his mom to "make my dinner, woman," (even though she's got company and it's obvious she's trying to get her groove back.) He later takes a bite out of her shoulder and runs off like a wild animal. My mother is a kind woman, but I was smart enough to know that the consequences for that kind of behavior would be unspeakable.

And quick word of advice for all the single ladies out there trying to get someone to put a ring on it: if you find a wolf costume, with a pointy crown, in the closet of the man you are dating, keep stepping. As much as I like Where the Wild Things Are, it might as well be called Portrait of a Woman Batterer as a Young Man.

One of my quibbles with the movie is that I wasn't clear how the movie wanted me to feel about Max's cruelty to his mother. Early on we get that she cares a lot for him and is sacrificing for her son. (The scene with him dictating a story to her to make her feel better was a very "writerly" moment by the way. Word to Dave Eggers.) But then we see there's some new guy in the house who looks kind of wormy and mom is giggling with him and they're popping bottles. When Max comes through looking for some loving attention, all he gets is frozen corn. Although we empathize with the mother (even mama should get to swerve), the scene sets the stage for a justification of Max's crazy behavior.

Later, one of the movie's most touching moments is also one of its most troubling. When Max returns home, his mom doesn't say anything. I thought she might at least shake the teeth out his head, and then give him a hug, but no. From her reaction, I thought she was going to apologize for hurting his teeth with her skin. And despite his incredible and harrowing journey with the Wild Things that taught him about empathy and family and love, he doesn't have much to say to his mom when he gets home. No Sorry about that. No My bad. No My fault. No See what had happened was...

As a matter of fact, the main lesson he learns is that if he wants a home-cooked meal all he has to do is go missing for a couple hours. He gets all of mom's attention (no swerve for her!) and a fat piece of chocolate cake. The grin on his face as his mother falls asleep from exhaustion is not chastened with regret, but emboldened by self-satisfaction. That doesn't seem like a good sign.

Despite these quibbles, the movie is amazing. Visually it's stunning, but the characterization of the Wild Things is even more so. In fact, I haven't had this much fun since the great stink beetle/ant hill battle of 1988.

Nobel Swagger

So what if he hasn't earned it yet. Your president has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Pop some bottles and stop all that vacillating, b*****s!

But seriously, the Nobel thing does seem a bit ill-timed. Obama's got a major decision to make about troop deployments in Afghanistan. Everyone knows the war is a losing proposition that is going to cost America more blood and treasure. But if they withdraw, the Taliban is going to be back to their old tricks, stoning women and planning terrorist attacks. Either way, NeO is going to get the blame.

And that's what makes the Nobel thing a little confusing. Ideologically, NeO seems to be a world apart from Bush, but on policy, whether it's Guantanamo, state secrets, privacy concerns, Iraq, corporate bailouts, etc, they are closer than I would have ever have imagined. I think part of this has to do with the ingrained corporate power structure that controls the presidency, but part of it has to do with Obama.

Accolades aside, NeO will be judged on his ability to step back from the Rubicon that has already been crossed by Bush (and Clinton). He has to pull back the power of the executive branch if that Nobel prize is going to mean anything because an unchecked Executive branch means war, war, and more war.

You may have guessed...

School started, y'all. Your homie is staying funky, but I gotsta get ready for these chilruns. In honor of the season:

Get it? They're bears.

Rick James & The Mynah Birds

Did you know that Rick James and Neil Young were in a band together back in 1965, long before the days of Super Freak? Strange, but true. The Mynah Birds featured James as frontman and Neil Young and Bruce Palmer on guitar. Apparently Rick was in love with Mick Jagger's sound, which is ironic because Mick was in love with Muddy Waters' sound. If you're keeping score at home, that's a Black man imitating a White man, imitating another Black man. Funk's got some serious layers (word to Margo Crawford.)

The Mynah Birds recorded a bunch of songs and were signed to Motown (don't forget that Rick's uncle was the Tempts' Melvin Franklin). But the album was never released because Rick had actually gone AWOL from the Navy and was on the run in Toronto when he started the band. Rick did a year in the brig, Motown shelved the album, and the Mynah Birds got their wings clipped. But listening to the songs, "It's My Time," and "I've Got You in My Soul," you can't help but wonder what might have been.





You can read about the whole sordid affair in this article on Spinner.

Rock Sex rocks!

It's Friday, so you should do yourself a favor and check out Rock Sex, a blog I stumbled on that charts the connections between blues, funk, rock, soul, and whatnot. Basically, it tracks how songs get adapted by different artists across different genres and features a lot of cool music so you can hear the similarities yourself. Instead of grumbling about how an artist has "stolen" a song from someone else (although the Beach Boys robbed Chuck Berry!), the site takes an enlightened approach. According to author Tym Stevens:

"Rock'n'Soul music is a baton relayed by everyone. ROCK SEX is about all of the creative connections that link our shared culture together."

A good place to start is Al Green's Take Me to the Water, which is a personal favorite of mine. Stevens shows how Bryan Ferry and the Talking Heads both made derivations of that excellent soul cut.

But you also got to check out how he tracks the development of "Tainted Love." I'm used to the Soft Cell Version, but I did not know that Gloria Jones recorded the Soul version first. Cool stuff.