Black on Black: The Remix of Pop, Politics, and Power

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

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Pop your collar, give me some dap… and tell me what’s next in black cultural iconography.

We now have a President who has not only broadened the audience for but shown the power of black cultural tropes in a national and international context.

I asked a few friends, bloggers, and thinkers to give their take on the remix. Here’s a sample of what they had to say:
Artist Susan Smith Pinelo

“My friend told me that her husband was “Gonna buy a flag on Wednesday.”  Hm. Wow. This crunked out, beer drinking black garbage man who don’t think much about nothing felt proud. Not proud to be black—he already was—I think. Not proud to be finally free—he already was. He was proud to be American. Hm. Wow.

So I started thinking, what if just half of the Black Americans started being proud about being Americans. Maybe we start figuring things out with a new perspective—the perspective of not being victims, second class citizens who are angry with the man—the government—the police.

We stop being angry with the system and start combating with the stereotypes of our drug dealing, welfare cheat baby mommas, and cousins who don’t pay taxes and fathers who are serving time in the “university.” Maybe, just maybe, we can become captains of their own destiny. Hm. Wow.

Thank you Barack for commanding that we think that we can.”

Alyson Palmer, musician/mother/activist

“Having a Black president lifts the racial profile. However, the fact that Barack Obama is the child of a Black African, not a Black American should not be overlooked.  There is none of the downtrodden, hopeless, already beaten-by-The-Man gene in him that I’ve seen in all my relatives, even the most successful. I am praying that he becomes a new Daddy to all African-Americans, a new paradigm of personhood and fatherhood and citizenship.  If we slave-descended Americans can look at him as to a mirror and see reflected somewhere in us that ease with power, I think our inner strength can grow beyond any transitory economic concerns.

At least, that’s what I’m hoping for in myself.”

Tamika Morrison, marketing guru for The Writestylz PR Firm

“As a 30-something person who’s African American, I do believe blackness is “so over” in a sense that’s it can’t be used as an excuse for mediocre living and behavior.  We now have proven evidence as a minority, particularly, African-American, that you really can live the ultimate American Dream if we apply ourselves. Our identity is now woven in the fabric of ALL Americans—Black, White, Red, Orange and Yellow—and it’s imperative that we learn how to relate across the board or else.”

Carmen Dixon, All About Race

“I haven’t seen blackness so celebrated since the days of ‘Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud’ in the late 60’s. Even then it was black folks awakening to their beauty and power. Now you have Larry King’s son wishing he was black, and I heard an MSNBC commentator saying that her daughter wants to be Sasha or Malia! That is so powerful especially when I remember that I wanted to be Marcia Brady when I was a youngster.”

Princeton University political scientist Melissa Harris Lacewell gave some wonderful deep answers too but I had to laugh at this:

“I think light-skinned brothers are coming back into style. After an era of Michael Jordan-inspired worship of the bald, athletic brown man, I think we will see a re-ascendance of the light-skinned brothers. Al B. Sure is making a new album!”

;-)

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TV Beat: The Remaking of the Cop Show

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

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After The Wire perfected a new urban social realism, and CSI (and its offshoots) took Law and Order’s procedural drama to absurd technical heights, the cop show had to get a new angle. The answer: Police the realm of the spirit and cast a non-American English-speaking actor as a brainy detective with a life-changing problem and no easy love interest, and watch him struggle to make sense of life and of time. This is the strategy taken by both Life and Life on Mars.

The past week saw two metaphysical detective dramas return. After a seven-week break in its second season, Life’s Zen detective Charlie Crews resumed unraveling why he’d been framed for a triple murder (NBC, Wed., 8/9c). After an out-of-order episode aired last week, Life on Mars (ABC, Wed., 10/9c) finally delivered the belated conclusion to its mid-November mid-season cliffhanger and brought its contemporary cop, Sam Tyler, a step closer to figuring out the nature of reality-and why he’s stuck in 1973.

Life is the more straightforward of the two. Los Angeles detective Charlie Crews (played cucumber-cool by London’s Damian Lewis) spent twelve years in prison for allegedly killing his business partner and his wife and son. By the time DNA evidence exonerated him, his friends and family had turned against him, and he’d been brutalized by inmates with grudges against the police, fallen hopelessly behind on technological matters, and found comfort in Zen Buddhism. Crews is slowly piecing together why he was set up as a killer, sporadically pining for his since-remarried ex-wife, and gingerly dealing with his partner-in-policework Dani Reese (The L Word’s Sarah Shahi), whose no-longer secret boyfriend is their captain and whose father is connected to the set-up. Zen gives Crews a wealth of  koans to use as ambiguous comebacks—and a sense of peace and interconnectedness that keeps Crews calm as he faces the fact that he’s been screwed out of life (which his $50 million settlement doesn’t nearly make up for.)

Based on a British series of the same Bowie-inspired name, the David E. Kelley-initiated Life on Mars (currently helmed by Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec, and Scott Rosenberg, the trio behind the short-lived but watchable writer-can’t-go-home-again drama October Road) has a lot to live up to. Dubliner Jason O’Mara—he’ll pass for The Wire’s Sheffield-Irish Dominic West if you squint—plays Sam Tyler. A detective with New York’s fictitious 125th Precinct, Tyler was hit by a car when rushing to investigate a case. When he gets up, he’s still Sam Tyler of the 125th, but it’s 1973. Is he in a coma in 2008 dreaming that it’s 1973, or does his head injury just make him think so? Is something even stranger going on, or is this just how strange life is anyway?

The coma explanation initially seems most likely; that turned out to be the truth in the BBC version, from which the ABC show is already diverging. Within that framework, Tyler goes about his police duties as he tries to get back to 2008 by learning whatever life lessons or enacting any time-traveling plot-changes the universe is demanding of him. He dreams of his 2008 love and fellow detective, Maya (Lisa Bonet)—we assume the allusion to the Hindu concept of maya as a veiling, illusory reality is intentional—while maintaining a careful distance with his 1973 animas, a pioneering lady cop who serves as his confidant (Gretchen Mol) and a sagely hippie neighbor who opens his mind (Tanya Fischer). He encounters his parents, his young self, future mentors and criminals, real or products of his mind.

1973’s primitive technology is a continual source of amusement for Tyler; 1973’s police force, less so. Michael Imperioli plays a detective who thinks Tyler stole a promotion that should have been his. Harvey Keitel, in the casting coup of the century, nearly reprises his Bad Lieutenant role by playing the hard-drinking, suspect-beating station captain. If the show is largely missing the opportunity to revisit the crime-infested, recessionary New York that may be the future, it balances an infatuation of the style of 1973 (in terms of both visible fashion and a late-hippie aura of freedom) with a rear-view moral righteousness that rarely exceeds its place. Sam Tyler is the voice of progress and tolerance, yet he’s painfully aware that 2008 is little better than 1973. When he dusts himself off after being hit by that car, he barely registers that the housing projects that had surrounded him have been replaced by rubble and by billboards announcing that new apartments will be available on the site in 1974; it’s only when he sees the World Trade Center in the distance that he begins to understand the full magnitude of what’s happened. He rails against his colleagues’ treatment of women, gays, minorities and anti-war protesters; but when he speaks against the war in Vietnam, he also means the war in Iraq, and he has to hint to 1973 of horrors yet to come.

Life is, unsurprisingly, a bit more detached: the closest we get to a sociopolitical history is watching Crews’s former cellmate, pension-raiding ex-CEO Ted Early (Adam Arkin) humbly teaching business school and managing Crews’s money during a recession.

Next week, both shows deal with crimes against musicians and try to figure out what the Russians have to do with their heroes’mysteries. We’ll be hoping that Life on Mars, with all its shadow-dwelling robots and shadowy conspiracies, isn’t going to start emulating Lost and its nonsensical twists, but will continue probing inner and outer realities; and that Life will more fully communicate its Zen mindfulness as its arrow approaches its bullseye. A good detective or two of the human experience might be just what we need.

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Amuse Bouche: SNL Has New Album & Video “I’m On A Boat”

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

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Weird Al Yankovic has some competition. The guys behind Saturday Night Live (SNL) skits are dropping their own album, Incredibad, on February 10. Their latest video, “I’m On A Boat,” features SNL staffers, Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer, and hip hop, megastar T-Pain (You have to include “The Pain” on the track because his sound equals instant hit.) The video is ridiculous and it’s nice to know T-Pain can laugh at himself (because we sure are).

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Ted Haggard: Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

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The little preacher who poked around with Sideshow Bob back in the day says he no longer has those pesky, God-forsaken homoerotic urges that led to his demise in November of 2006—he’s worked through them.

Ted Haggard recently told Larry King that he considers himself to be “heterosexual with issues.” How. Convenient. Forget the gay sex. Forget Mike Jones, the male prostitute who first went public with Haggard’s hypocrisy. Forget Grant Hass, the 20-year-old male who now says that Haggard masturbated in front of him two years ago. Forget the fact that Haggard confirms all of these allegations. Forget it all.

Haggard is back to announce that he’s fundamentally heterosexual, y’all—just the way God likes us: normal, with a few “issues” to boot. Amen.

Actually, Haggard is hitting up the media circuit to promote “The Trials of Ted Haggard,” a documentary by Alexandra Pelosi (daughter of Nancy Pelosi) that debuted on HBO late last month. If you missed it, no worries. HBO will give it plenty of face time throughout the month of February. See the trailer below:

The film follows the months when Haggard, his wife, and children were banished from the state of Colorado and sent into “exile” in Arizona, where they either bummed a place to live from “nice strangers” or holed up in a cheapy motel.

We see Haggard repeatedly try to find a new job—to no avail, as his tainted reputation always gets the final say. So the man who once headed up a church of 14,000 congregants ends up working as a door-to-door health insurance salesman. And he’s not exactly making any money while he’s at it.

“I’m a loser, a first-class loser,” Haggard admits.

He’s been aware of his homosexual urges since high school, he says. When asked why he kept it a secret for so long, he says, “I feared my friends would reject me, abandon me, kick me out, and that the church would exile and excommunicate me—and that’s exactly what happened.”

At one point, Haggard talks to the camera while driving and sucking on—of all things—a long, flavored Popsicle. And out of the other side of his mouth he later claims that he’s no longer at risk for gay play. (Who’s he fooling?)

Haggard participated in a portion of the “restoration” process arranged for him by the New Life Church after the Mike Jones scandal broke and has continued therapy. He claims that the therapy has helped him work past the compulsions that made him dial up male escorts for sex. He admits, however, that he’s not fully restored—hence, those “issues”—but he’s fully happy with the relationship he shares with Gayle, his wife of 30 years.

When asked what he would be, if he had to choose between being gay and being evangelical—Lord knows you can’t be both!—Haggard answers, “Well, I am what I am. I am an Evangelical.” Of course.

Peek-a-boo! We see you, Ted Haggard.

But Haggard won’t come out—not without his bible at his side. His Bible is his weapon and he knows he can’t win any holy war without it. Problem is: The Bible condemns gay sex. So the only way to escape being the “loser” he is today is to cling to God’s truth, and deny, deny, deny his own.

Haggard may regain some popularity with his fellow churchgoers this way, but his strategy is ultimately flawed. Falling in line with unjust church propaganda is no different from falling to one’s knees in defeat. And a denial of one’s sexuality results in a loss of self, so—Mr. Hetero has weaseled himself into a lose-lose situation.

“I’m a loser, a first-class loser,” he says.

Well, at this rate, Haggard may be onto something.

“The Trials of Ted Haggard” shows repeatedly throughout February.

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Waltz With Bashir: An Artful Dance With The Trauma of War

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

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When movies usually mix animation and wartime violence, they become action flicks (think GI-Joe cartoons), bloody horror shows or somewhere messy in-between. Yet, Waltz with Bashir (2008) —which is up for an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category—is surprisingly neither of these. Instead, the beautifully done animation makes the difficult issues in the documentary–such as death, torture, post-traumatic stress disorder, war and suffering— a bit easier to swallow, watch and understand. The cartoon images managed to soften the blow of the sad and troubling story of the first Lebanon War and the Palestinian massacres in Sabra and Shatila.

After hearing about his friend’s recurring dream of being chased by 26 vicious dogs, movie director Ari Folman and his friend connect this nightmare to their experience as soldiers during  the 1982 Lebanon War. It is at this point that Folman realizes that his mind is blank. He doesn’t remember his participation in the war, nor his witnessing of the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinians. This conversation then sparks his first flashback into the times his mind helped him forget.

The movie unfolds beautifully as Folman attempts to bring back his memories of the war and the massacres by interviewing and speaking with others who were involved.

Although an interesting choice to use animation for a film with such deep themes, Folman’s decision turns out to be both extraordinary and appropriate for showing the depth of these issues. The use of animation and cartoons allowed the movie to artistically depict the tricks that the mind can play on people who survive wars and those that witness and commit countless acts of violence.

In this movie, flashbacks, dreams and moving in and out of the past and present are the name of the game. In fact, the memories create the story—they are the story. There is a naked blue woman who appears out of the sea to rescue a soldier, who then climbs upon her stomach and leaves his fellow soldiers back on a ship. This boat is then blown to pieces in an attack as the soldier wearily looks on. These types of flashbacks, or the mind’s attempts to move past traumatic events, are woven into the storyline, which addresses the wounds of soldiers and the pains of war.  The movie’s animation gives us, the viewer, an up-close-and-personal look at post-traumatic stress disorder, without the sharp vivid images of real pictures and images. However, Folman does choose to show a few minutes of the actual video footage of the Palestinian massacre. These powerful images will be painted into the minds of the audience, and serve to reinforce the very depths of horror and trauma endured.

Surprisingly, Bashir isn’t political.  It doesn’t make Israel or Palestine into a hero. Through the interviews with the war’s survivors, Folman paints an animated picture of the emotional and human realities of war as he recreates his own memory. The documentary doesn’t point political fingers. It explains the trauma of war and the Palestinian massacres of Sabra and Shatila by providing first-hand accounts from the people who witnessed it. On screen, Folman interviews a military leader whose soldiers say they saw Christian Phalangist soldiers murder innocent Palestinians by shooting them at gunpoint. No political blame—just animated images that mesmerize the viewer of the human accounts of these times.

And strangely, even without a prior understanding of the history of the Palestinian massacre or the first war of Lebanon , the movie is still able to achieve its goal—to transport the audience into the hearts and minds of people affected by the war.

This documentary could have easily been made today to depict the current Gaza battles because it transformed the viewer into a space of compassion for all of the people involved—Palestinians and Israelis alike. We understand. War is hell.

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