Dear Mr. Critic, Speak for Your Frakkin' Self

There is thing that critics of the arts do that has bugged me for a long time.  That is when they take some deeply subjective response to a work or experience and project it onto all of their members of the audience.

David Bianculli, the TV critic for NPR (whose commentaries I enjoy), did that this week while reviewing the new FX series, The Americans.  The show is about Russian spies planted in the United States during the 1980s,  under cover as a happily married couple.  Bianculli liked the show, but he took exception to one of the songs selected for the pilot. (You can read all of his comments here.)

"As they set off -- without saying a word to one another as they go through their various spy motions -- we hear on the soundtrack one of the most iconic cues in all of TV history.  It's an homage, certainly, and a song that is true to the '80s era.  But when I heard it, instead of pulling me more deeply into the drama, it made me laugh.  If you were around during the decade when The Americans takes place, it's impossible to hear Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" without thinking of Miami Vice.  Other period music is used more effectively, but that's one that should have been avoided."

Um... it IS possible to hear that song without thinking about Miami Vice.  In fact, I think about that show only when I see grown men wearing pastel colors and loafers without socks.  And that is pretty much never.

I lived in the '80s, and I owned that Phil Collins album, Face Value.  But I never watched that show.  In fact, millions of people did not watch that show.  Sure, millions did, but more millions didn't.

If I associate any music with Crockett and Tubbs that would be Jan Hammer's somewhat cheesy tune that plays over the opening credits.  Can you say keytar?

"In the Air Tonight" was apparently used in the pilot episode (1984) and again in the Miami Vice film  (2006) -- but the film version was a cover by Nonpoint.

I believe this is the scene in question:

More recently, the song has also been used in Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters (2007) and in The Hangover (2009).

That means Bianculli thinks one episode of a television series has burned itself into the collective memory of the United States so deeply that the song has been ruined for all other uses.  That is asking a lot, isn't it?

In other words, the song rattled Bianculli's memory banks in a way I doubt it did for other viewers of The Americans.  But he assumes his experience is shared by all viewers and takes the time to crab about the song selection.

This is a common problem with arts criticism.  So much of it is subjective, but it gets presented as objective fact.  The critic has seen, read, and heard much more than the typical audience member, which means the critic can serve as a useful guide or commentator to compare the work in question with other works; but too many times the critic assumes everyone has seen, read, or heard everything he has and, worse, assumes everyone agrees with his observations.

Now... if someone wants to talk about a really bad soundtrack choice (in my humble opinion) it is "All Along the Watchtower" in the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica.  It was not only used in the soundtrack, several of the characters sang it in key scenes.  When I thought the show was set in the future, I might have believed Bob Dylan's song had survived for centuries.  Somehow.  But when I realized the show was set in the past, and that the survivors of the Galactica became the ancient ancestors of the human race on Earth?  That means Dylan's song remained intact for a hundred thousand years.

No frakkin' way.

That one song choice nearly ruined the whole series for me (because it was a central plot device toward the end), just as Bianculli says the Phil Collins pulled him out of the viewing experience rather than drew him in.  But I am not willing to say anyone shares my opinion, because I have heard no other complaints about the Dylan song.

In Canada, the Natives are Restless

"Idle No More" in Ottawa (The Toronto Sun)

There is something going on in Canada that most Americans are not aware of.

Of course, that is true about most of the things going on in Canada.  But this one involves my First Nations friends up there -- First Nations in Canada are what is known as American Indian tribes in the United States.  And these events involve two ideas that I think are important to keep in mind here, South of the Great White North.

1. The legal and Constitutional obligations that exist between those groups in the United States and Canada and their federal governments.

2. The importance of environmental restraints on industrial and commercial development.

My Canadian friends have been waging a campaign called "Idle No More," a grassroots protest against C-45, a bill recently passed by the Canadian government that makes some sweeping changes in environmental protections of the many, many waterways in Canada.  Many of those rivers, streams, and lakes are on First Nations land.  (You can watch a CBC report on "Idle No More" here.  There have been demonstrations in the United States, too.)

In The Mall of America (lastrealindians)

By "sweeping changes," I mean the Canadian government is removing hundreds of waterways from the previous oversight that limited industrial and commercial development.  These changes were made without consultation of the First Nations effected, and many First Nations people feel those changes are a violation of the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982.  That act states, "The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed."

If a treaty between the Canadian government and First Nations group recognizes its right to a river and, for example, the salmon resources in that river, then that First Nations group needs to be included in any regulations that will impact that river.  If rights to that river are unilaterally reduced or removed, then the government has failed to recognize and affirm those legally binding treaty rights.

Although this issue is immediately impacting First Nations, it should be important to all Canadians.  If a government cannot be trusted to keep its word, to obey its own rules, then no group of citizens is safe from abuse or injustice.  

Sometimes my students and friends in the United States express surprise or puzzlement at this idea of "treaty rights."  At times they object to the idea that a group of Americans will get "special treatment" from the federal government.

This is because they are misunderstanding the situation.  They are understanding the situation in terms of ethnicity rather than the rule of law.  They think a group of people are being "granted" special privileges because of their ethnic status.  (This is an easy mistake to make, and I am not criticizing them for this.)

But the rights accorded to federally recognized American Indian tribes are based upon legally binding agreements between the federal government and the governments of those tribes. Those legally binding agreements arise from the Constitution, which states that "Congress shall have the power to regulate Commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes."  This grants tribes a status rivaling foreign nations -- or at least the states.  

Those rights recognized in treaties extend to the citizens of those tribes, as defined in part by the tribes and by federal government.  This definition is based largely upon descent; one must be descended from a member of that tribe to be a citizen of that tribe -- in much the same way that American citizenship is extended to the descendants of American citizens.  (A major difference is the lack of naturalization for tribal membership.  Someone might be "adopted into" a tribe -- such as Johnny Depp was recently adopted by the Comanche Nation -- but the rights of citizenship are not extended to that person.)  

I say that citizenship is defined by the tribal government AND the federal government because before those treaties membership in a tribe was often not contingent upon descent.  A person could have been accepted as a participating member of that tribe regardless of descent.  The notion that the rights of tribal citizenship depended upon descent was enforced by the federal government -- as a way of limiting its obligations to the tribes with which it signed treaties.  However, today those tribes have exercised the right to determine the degree of descent required for citizenship.

Actor Adam Beach joins Red Hand Singers in Los Angeles

That is how I am a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Most of my ancestry is white, but I am descended from someone (my mother's father) recorded on the federal census for the Cherokee in 1907. Therefore, certain rights and privileges are extended to me that are not extended to other American citizens.  (Since I live in California, I generally cannot take advantage of those rights and privileges.)  The key is not whether I am ethnically white or Cherokee (or Choctaw on my father's side), the key is my legal status as a Cherokee citizen.  

Some people believe it unfair for me to have certain rights and privileges not available to others.  But this is not that much different from the varying rights and privileges available to citizens of different states.  For example, a same-sex couple in Massachusetts can be legally married, whereas a same-sex couple in Oklahoma cannot.  They are all American citizens, but they have differing rights according to their states.  

In Alberta (photo by Blaire Russell)

My friends in Canada are fighting for what they believe to be their Constitutionally guaranteed rights as Canadian citizens AND as First Nations citizens.  These rights are not "special treatment" nor some kind of "welfare" or "charity" extended to First Nations by the federal government.  The treaty rights are real, and they are legal, and they are important so long as Canada wants to be a nation governed by the rule of law.

As for the importance of restraints on "development," which can be another word for "rapid exploitation and degradation of an ecosystem"....

I like to believe that each of the many cultures that compose the United States has an important contribution to make.  I believe the most valuable contribution from American Indian cultures is the respect for the world that surrounds us and from which we are made.  This world includes the land, the sky, the water, the plants, and the animals.  This world is not just something that surrounds us, it is something that feeds us, and therefore it is something that quite literally makes us.  Our  bodies are made up of those things.  The water you drink, the air you breathe, the plants and animals you eat -- they become you.

And when correctly appreciated, this relationship leads to a reciprocation.  Those things contribute to making our lives, and so we should contribute to making theirs.  In this way, we can mutually support each other and contribute to our mutual health.  

Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005)

American Indian philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. stated it this way in an interview: "If you see the world around you as a collection of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, you will inevitably destroy the world while attempting to control it.  Not only that, but by perceiving the world as lifeless, you rob yourself of the richness, beauty, and wisdom to be found by participating in its larger design."   

"Idle No More" is fighting for that vital relationship between humans and the world.  "Idle No More" sees that C-45 opens the way for the industrial and commercial exploitation of the land and the water. 

During the recent presidential election in the United States, there was much debate about the kinds of economic policies and  philosophies we should have in government.  There was much simple-minded discussion about socialism vs. capitalism, and there was a lot of chest-thumping from the talking heads on CNBC and Fox News about the virtues of free-market capitalism.

But someone is being truly naive about capitalism (and the industrialization that supports it) if he speaks about its power only in the positive.  Capitalism IS powerful, but capitalism is neither good nor bad; that is determined by how and to what ends its power is used.  The industrialization we have seen unleashed by capitalism in North America has destroyed ecosystems, poisoned rivers, drained aquifers, demolished mountains, wiped out species, and blackened the skies.  Capitalism is too powerful to run loose in the land.  Restraining it is a sign of respect for that power.  I believe capitalism can work with a conscience; but that takes some restraint and humility.

The type of capitalism practiced in North America has too often emphasized immediate, maximum exploitation of a resource -- which ultimately destroys that resource and deprives future generations of its benefits.  It violates that sense of mutual support and respect that I mentioned.

"Idle No More" fears that C-45 will clear the way for the destruction of waterways, especially as corporations work feverishly to exploit the Tar Sands oil reserves. Canada is blessed with many, many rivers, and that means many rivers will need to be crossed by the pipelines needed to get that Tar Sands oil to markets.  "Idle No More" fears that the people behind the Tar Sands see only dollars and not the people and the land that are threatened.

America still has the urge to purge

If you are tempted to say "This changes everything!" then odds are good that it doesn't.

This came to mind when I saw Esquire magazine's The Culture Blog entry titled "Texas Chainsaw in the New Age of Violence."  Stephen Marche notices that "massacre" is missing from the usual title for this franchise, the latest installment being Texas Chainsaw 3D.  He suggests the deletion was strategic, a post-Sandy Hook omission.  He writes, "It is a horror movie that seems totally unaware of the current nature of horror."

He continues: "Horror movies exist to allay our fears through purgation.  But this is a film that scratches an itch that no longer exists..."

All fine and good, except for this: Texas Chainsaw 3D was the highest-grossing film last weekend.  Granted, its ticket sales of $23 million are not astonishing, but this does suggest American moviegoers have an itch such horror films can scratch.

Marche complains that Texas Chainsaw 3D is a "palimpsest of cliches," and I imagine he is right (I'm certainly not going to find out by seeing it).  But I think that is what horror-movie audiences want.  Such bloodfests are somehow reassuring in their predictability, like baseball but without George Will's bow ties.

Marche notes that Gangster Squad (either the dumbest or the most precise film title in a few years -- or perhaps it is both) was delayed after the Aurora shootings because the film features a shootout in a movie theater.  He writes: "The producers felt it was too close to reality for comfort.  Texas Chainsaw 3D has the opposite problem.  It is completely out of touch."

The problem, Marche says, is that Hollywood's monsters, such as Leatherface, are not as scary as the real monsters we face -- psychotic young white males with access to semiautomatic weapons and lots and lots of ammunition.  He feels films such as this no longer offer Americans that purgation they desire because their monsters are so unbelievable and unrelatable: "The vision of evil in this movie is too ridiculous even to be amusing.  Right now, in the middle of a time glutted on real-life horror, the ridiculousness borders on the offensive."

Implicit in his blog entry is the idea that "everything is different" after the events in Sandy Hook and Aurora.  I doubt they are.

The purgation he attributes to horror films is not designed to realistically deal with those things we find frightening in our real lives.  The purgation may excite audiences, but it has always left their world unaltered.  That is, it purges the audiences of anxieties and so re-establishes the social order they live in.

If monsters were realistic, the films might be imagining solutions to real-world problems.  Then they would not offer the cathartic experience Aristotle supposedly prescribed for the theater; they would offer catalyzing experiences, inspiring or inciting action from the audience.

Films such as Texas Chainsaw 3D may scare audiences, but they are designed also to reassure audiences that everything is OK.  While you might be jealous of the perfect bodies of the movie's victims, you certainly would not want to be chopped up with power tools -- and you probably don't have to worry about either.  It is unlikely you will keep your New Year's resolution to visit the gym more often, and it is even less likely you will be attacked by crazed killers in the woods.

There is another side to this argument.  While Hollywood reassures audiences that monsters do not present real threats to their safety, in other movies Hollywood reassures audiences that there are easy solutions to big problems, and these solutions usually involve high-caliber guns.  And that brings us back to Aurora and Sandy Hook.  (But that is the subject of a different blog entry.)

I do not think audiences will hunger anytime soon for realistic villains and monsters. Nor do I think Hollywood will offer us solutions to the actual threats we face every day.

Kidnapped in America's Time Machine

We have all seen it in movies.  A person, perhaps our protagonist, is walking down the street when a speeding van pulls up, the door flies open.  Masked men jump out and pull a hood over the person's head.  The victim is tossed into the van and it speeds off.

Kidnapped!

American Indian authors and artists must feel that way at times.  They may be doing their work, representing their lives in the United States in the 21st century when BAM, out of nowhere, they are snatched away -- driven off not in a van but, more appropriately, in a DeLorean with a functioning flux capacitor.

Kidnapped!  And taken back in time!

Even Sherman Alexie, the most famous American Indian author at the moment, has been snatched off the street this way.  In The Los Angeles Times, no less.  But even The New York Times is not immune to this time banditry.

Alexie is a writer of poems, short stories, novels, and films that are by turns inventive, funny, angry, poignant, and ironic.  His autobiographical novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2007.  War Dances, a collection of stories and poems, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2010.

He is perhaps best known for exploding stereotypes of Americans Indians and mainstream America's desire for natives to fulfill mythic roles in everyday life.  What is he NOT famous for is representing tribal customs and traditional lifeways in his fiction; he famously avoids doing that.  If anyone wears feathers in his stories they are either acting like a fool or they are updating some notion of traditional culture with contemporary flavor.

For instance, a character in "St. Junior" takes his college entrance exam while wearing his grass dance regalia, reminding himself that a native warrior in modern society fights for his people with a pencil rather than a bow and arrow.  In "Do Not Go Gentle," the father of an ailing newborn creates a new healing ceremony in the hospital by beating a drum with a dildo.

Nearly all of his stories are firmly established in modern, urban, media-saturated America.

That is why is was so odd to see this sentence in the Los Angeles Times review of Blasphemy, Alexie's new short-story collection:  "Reading Alexie is like listening to a man tell stories by a campfire."

Out of nowhere -- kidnapped!

Campfire?  What about his fiction -- in style or subject -- suggests a campfire?  There is nothing rustic or unsophisticated about his stories.  His stories are more like those told in a crowded kitchen at a house party -- loud, profane, and funny.  Or perhaps told in a quite booth of a brew pub -- the confessions of someone puzzled by life and love in the big city.  Or maybe while seated beneath the basketball hoop between pick-up games -- Alexie loves basketball and refers to it many times in his prose and poetry.

The reviewer's campfire statement seems very much out of place in a review of Alexie's work, but I can guess where it comes from.  There is this impulse in the United States to confine American Indians to the past, some region that is pure and simple and enviable to the stressed and disillusioned American.  (I have written about it in relation to contemporary American Indian art (and here) and in images of the "stoic Indian.")

That notion of the Indian as pre-modern is so firmly established within the American national mythos and psyche that it can emerge when there is no evidence to support it; in this regard, reality must conform to the assumption.

These thoughts were further impressed upon me when the same writer, a week later, reviewed a new book about Edward Curtis and his famous images of American Indians from the early days of the 20th Century.  I have written before about the conflicted relationship Indian Country has with Curtis.

On the one hand he created important archival images of American Indians intended to depict them as they would have appeared before being inundated by the tidal wave of Americans, their military forces, their religions, and their material culture.  This was remarkable when you consider that not many years before his photographs, the U.S. government was waging genocidal warfare against the same people Curtis photographed.

On the other hand, he altered the appearance of many of his subjects to more closely resemble his assumptions about American Indians, assumptions that confined them to a disappearing past.  An example is when Curtis altered this image to erase the clock his subjects had posed with.  (This image accompanies an essay, "Taking Identity," by my friend Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair about the current conflict between the First Nations and the Canadian government.)

When Curtis was taking those pictures, he was hurtling into the 20th century, adapting to a rapidly changing world, just like his subjects.  But he didn't want to record that intriguing experience of American Indians adapting to new conditions, forging new relationships and identities -- just as they had always done, long before the Europeans arrived.  Instead, perhaps with a kind of envy, he wanted to photograph them NOT changing, NOT entering that new century.

The LA Times reviewer says this about Curtis's photographs: "His portraits, especially, have a timeless quality."  Timeless is an appropriate word here, not because Curtis's photographs transcend the interpretative limitations of historical moments (time), but because they try to stop time, to erase the process by which American Indians entered the 20th century.

He wanted to toss them into a time machine -- just a decade removed from H. G. Wells's novel that gave us that concept.  That was a century ago, and a lot has changed since then, but, with the LA Times as evidence, apparently Curtis's DeLorean still has some gas in its tank.

Campers Give Their Lives for Black Friday Bargains

Perhaps I am suffering from a willful amnesia, but I do not recall in previous years people camping out on Wednesday for their Black Friday shopping binges.  But this year I was struck by how widespread this has become.

Perhaps the camping is made more attractive because more stores are starting their Black Friday bargain-bin orgies at midnight instead of 6 a.m.  So really those campers consumed by consuming are out in the cold for just a little over 24 hours.  So it's no big deal, right?

But the campers are not ALL lined up at the stores opening at midnight.  Some will be spending two nights (some more than that) outside, waiting to get the latest gadgets and toys at the lowest prices.

I wonder, though.  Are they saving that much?

Sure, they can get flat panel HD televisions for half price, saving a few hundred dollars.  Similar discounts on other items abound.  But shouldn't the cost analysis include the time they spent camping out?  (Not to mention the time away from their families on the holiday.)

Henry David Thoreau

When I saw those early images of the retail devotees, I thought of Henry David Thoreau and what he said in his book Walden: "... the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it."

That is, the price of an object is not counted merely in the number of dollars you must sacrifice, but also in the time required to earn those dollars, the time required to travel to the store and obtain the item, and, especially for Thoreau, the amount of time required to maintain the object once it is acquired. 

What is the true cost, then, of that smart phone or Furby?  If the campers had to calculate the amount of their life they exchanged for those hot Christmas-list items, would the deals be worth it?

The bargains become especially dubious when we consider just how many gifts are returned -- last year about $46 billion in gifts were taken back.  Economist Joel Waldfogel thinks gift-giving is bad for the economy, partly because so many of us are bad at it -- "on average gifts generate 20 percent less satisfaction than items we buy for ourselves."  All those unwanted presents?  According to him they are destroyed wealth.  The time you spent earning the money (and perhaps the time spent camping out) to buy the present that winds up returned or stored in a closet and never used?  It is worth nothing.  Wasted.

However, I imagine a great deal of the shopping that happens on Black Friday is more hedonism than altruism.  That iPad is going home with the camper and not being sent to a cousin.  At least in that case, Waldfogel would not call the purchases commerce rather than destruction, so that is good.  But Thoreau would ask whether the bargain was worth it.