Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 207

In Photos: The Explosions in Brussels

Explosions in Belgium’s capital struck an airport and a subway station, killing dozens and injuring many more. The first explosion at Zaventem Airport went off at approximately 8 a.m. local time, followed an hour later by a blast at Maelbeek metro station, which is close to the main buildings that house the European Union. Belgium has raised its terrorism threat to the highest level. All flights to Brussels were cancelled, according to the BBC, and Eurostar has cancelled all service to and from the city. So far, no group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Prime Minister Charles Michel said the attack at the airport was caused by a suicide bomber. The blasts took place less than a week after the capture of Salah Abdeslam, the man authorities believe planned the Paris attacks.

U.S. Politicians React to the Attacks in Brussels

Updated on March 22 at 11:41 a.m.

As Belgian officials scrambled to respond to attacks in Brussels Tuesday, American politicians scrambled to react to the attacks.

Republican candidates quickly delivered strong statements, promising a tough response to terror if elected. Though not as large as the November attacks in Paris, the carnage in Brussels could shake up the presidential race just as the killing spree in France did, and candidates jockeyed for position, just as voters in several states cast votes or caucus to select a nominee. Two Democrats in the race, meanwhile, were slower to respond.

Even before Belgian officials had publicly stated that Islamists were to blame for the attacks, Senator Ted Cruz pinned the deaths on jihadists and argued that the U.S. must more forcefully label such violence.

Our hearts break for the men and women of Brussels this morning. Make no mistake -- these terror attacks are no isolated...

Posted by Ted Cruz on Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Governor John Kasich delivered a longer if less pointed statement.

Gov. John Kasich's statement on the terrorist attacks in #Brussels. pic.twitter.com/6gwCCMwJcy

— John Kasich (@JohnKasich) March 22, 2016

Donald Trump, who leads the Republican race, appeared via phone on Fox and Friends, where he reprised his call for tighter controls on who is allowed into the country. Trump’s comments were characteristically both the most expansive and also hardest to pin down.

“I think it’s absolutely horrible,” Trump said. “Look at Brussels, Brussels was a beautiful city, a beautiful place with zero crime, and now it’s a disaster.” He said the Belgian capital “is an armed camp” and added that “Paris is no longer the beautiful City of Lights.” (Residents of those two cities might object.)

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What We Know About the Explosions in Brussels

Just as he did after the Paris attacks, Trump said the U.S. had to be far more discriminating about who it let into the country, though he didn’t make any designation about whether he meant refugees, immigrants, or Muslims in general, speaking in innuendo and generality. He blamed lack of assimilation for violence.

“We have to be very careful in the United States, we have to be very vigilant about who we allow into the country,” he said. “I would close up our borders to people until we figure out what is going on.” He added that “there is a certain group of people that is making life impossible.”

Trump had little optimism to offer: “This is going to get worse and worse.” On Today, meanwhile, he called on Belgian officials to use torture to extract information.

The November attacks in Paris reshuffled the Republican race. At the time, Ben Carson was gaining or passing Trump in polls. After the bloody evening, security took precedence in the race, and Trump regained his position as Carson fell. Trump’s suggestions at the time drew widespread condemnation, including his call for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. and his apparent endorsement of a registry for Muslims in the U.S. But the backlash from Democrats and some Republicans did nothing to blunt Trump’s popular appeal. That poses a challenge for someone like Cruz, who projects a tough image on terror but is hard-pressed to outflank Trump.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, were slower to issue statements.

Clinton struck a similar tone to Kasich, mourning the dead and offering solidarity with European allies:

Terrorists have once again struck at the heart of Europe, but their campaign of hate and fear will not succeed. The people of Brussels, of Europe, and of the world will not be intimidated by these vicious killers. Today Americans stand in solidarity with our European allies. Our thoughts and prayers are with  the families of those killed and wounded, and all the people of Belgium. These terrorists seek to undermine the democratic values that are the foundation of our alliance and our way of life, but they will never succeed. Today's attacks will only strengthen our resolve to stand together as allies and defeat terrorism and radical jihadism around the world.”

Late Tuesday morning, Sanders issued a statement as well, taking a similar approach:

We offer our deepest condolences to the families who lost loved ones in this barbaric attack and to the people of Brussels who were the target of another cowardly attempt to terrorize innocent civilians. We stand with our European allies to offer any necessary assistance in these difficult times. Today's attack is a brutal reminder that the international community must come together to destroy ISIS. This type of barbarism cannot be allowed to continue.

Terror attacks offer a ready-made response for conservatives like Cruz, who insist that the biggest problem the U.S. has is President Obama’s alleged reluctance to label the attacks as the work of Islamic extremists. Democrats face a different sort of quandary: They tend to oppose wide-scale profiling of Muslims and aggressive security measures, but still wish to be seen as responsive and engaged on terrorism.

What Does Obama's Picture in Front of a Che Mural Mean?

If many American conservatives were already agitated and colicky about President Obama’s trip to Cuba, a photo op in Havana Monday pushed them into full-on apoplexy.

Obama went to visit a memorial to national hero Jose Martí, and was then photographed standing in front of a huge mural of Che Guevara, the leftist guerrilla who along with Fidel Castro was a leader of Cuba’s Communist revolution. The reaction was harsh. (The liberal site Talking Points Memo gathers a good sampling.) The Drudge Report went with subtle innuendo and a funny callback to the Bush administration: “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.” One writer tweeted, “Finally, our POTUS is able to honor the mural of a racist, terrorist, mass murderer who oversaw concentration camps.” Jay Nordlinger fumed, “In Cuba, the Castros’ island prison, the American president has been photographed with looks of delight on his face in front of a Dear Leader-ish image of Guevara.” (He doesn’t look all that happy to me, but your mileage may vary.)

One of the more interesting reactions came from former House Speaker and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich:

Obama's standing in front of Che Guevara giant mural deliberate endorsement of Communist revolutionary or bad staffing?I bet deliberate .

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) March 21, 2016

Was it bad advance work by presidential staff? Perhaps, though this being Cuba, it might be difficult to avoid being photographed with icons of Marxist repression—starting with President Raul Castro, with whom Obama gave a brief shared press conference on Monday. As Peter Ubertaccio wryly noted on Twitter, Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were also photographed with portraits of iconic brutal Communists:

We simply cannot have a US President appear in a Communist country in front of image of a murderous revolutionary pic.twitter.com/0EojdnVRMG

— Peter Ubertaccio (@ProfessorU) March 21, 2016

In other words, getting your photo taken with monsters of the 20th century is an occupational hazard of diplomacy. Perhaps that’s reason enough not to go. There is a good-faith critique from some observers, especially on the right, who contend that no American president should go to Cuba while the Castros retrain power. They worry that visiting, shaking hands, and being photographed this way ratifies the regime. A crackdown on dissidents on the eve of the trip shows how, despite some reforms, the Cuban government remains unacceptably repressive. (The fact that Castro was asked about political prisoners by CNN’s Jim Acosta, and his puerile denial, show how the trip might positively affect that.) Although a majority of Americans now oppose the embargo, one can mount a case for why Cuba ought to remain isolated and why visiting Cuba at all (setting aside the photo) is unwise.

That is not what Gingrich is doing here with his not-so-subtle (and not-so-grammatical) suggestion that Obama is a secret Communist and Che-lover. But what if he’s right? What if this isn’t just a product of being in Cuba, and also not—let’s grant for discussion, since Obama hasn’t had any U.S. political prisoners gunned down yet—evidence that Obama is a Communist sleeper agent sent to dismantle American democracy?

If Guevara could see Obama standing in the plaza and making this trip, it’s hard to imagine he’d be pleased. Obama’s visit follows, and flows from, years of market-based reforms, mostly instituted by Raul Castro since he took over from his ailing brother in 2008. Those reforms do not a market-based economy or a liberal democracy make, but they are unquestionably movement away from the doctrine Fidel Castro and Che Guevara once promulgated. When the BBC surveyed experts on what Che would think about Cuba’s recent moves last year, the general consensus that he’d be unhappy. “He felt total detestation” for the United States, said his biographer Lucia Alvarez de Toledo, though she thought he might be pleased that the U.S. was coming to recognize the futility of the embargo. Another described Guevara’s “very, very wary” attitude toward Cuba’s northern neighbor. Most biting was Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

“Che Guevara was an idealist, and he may say that Raul is betraying the revolution. [But] in Cuba no one is thinking about what Che Guevara may think,” he said. Mesa-Lago even derided the very image in front of which Obama was pictured: “You can see portraits of Che Guevara everywhere across Latin America. Of course there is a big portrait of Che Guevara about 10 stories high in the Plaza de La Revolucion, where Fidel used to address the people. But it's like a joke. This is simply a myth of the past.”

Guevara’s famous slogan was “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!”—until victory always, roughly. Whatever the outcome of Obama’s trip, it’s hard to imagine that Guevara would feel that Obama landing on the island in his big, imperialist plane, rolling through the streets in his big, imperialist motorcade, and meeting with figures in the island’s nascent private sector were doing anything but pulling Cuba away from that victory. Che might be even angrier that Newt.

In Defense of Louis C.K.’s Artistic Portrayal of ‘Transphobia’

During the first six episodes of Horace and Pete, the comedian Louis C.K., the drama’s creator, writer, and director, presents an array of characters who all see the world differently. They inhabit an old Brooklyn bar, a place out of time, where plot lines unfold through dialogue. Uncle Pete, an elderly misanthrope, romanticizes tradition—the bar has been run by his family for seven generations. His middle-aged niece is repelled by the same history, knowing that many of her forefathers beat their wives. Yet her contemporary, Cousin Pete, suffers from a mental illness that renders the outside world a terrifying place. For him, the bar is the safest place of all.

Meanwhile, bar patrons include a white woman who explains what it’s like to live with Tourette syndrome, a black man who laughingly relays his attitude toward a bar-mate’s racism, bickering men from all sides of the ideological spectrum, a gay hipster looking for a drink, a once-glamorous alcoholic staving off loneliness, and many people and themes besides that no single writer could render from personal experience.

In this, C.K. proceeds as all fiction writers do, writing for characters who are mostly unlike himself. He keeps this up in episode seven (spoiler alert), when his character, Horace, sleeps with a woman customer. The next morning, she jokes—or is she serious?—that she used to be a man. And this prompts a heated debate: If a trans woman wants to have sex with a straight man, is she obligated to reveal that she was born male?

There are a few more spoilers in this clip of the exchange:

Both characters are portrayed humanely, in the fashion of nearly all of the diverse individuals who appeared in previous episodes. But after the scene about trans issues was released, Vikram Murthi declared at The A.V. Club that it was “problematic”:

Let’s get this out of the way: It’s problematic for a cisgender writer/director to examine transphobia, especially without explicit participation of any trans performers or writers, even with the best of intentions; no matter which way you slice it, it’s an attempt to tackle a pervasive, deeply-ingrained issue from an outsider’s perspective. As much as I love C.K.’s comedy and writing, he’s occasionally guilty of over-reaching outside of his own perspective, not just with regards to gender, but also with race and queer issues. This over-reaching isn’t inherently troubling, and it’s almost always rooted in a working-through of his own cultural biases, but it can produce mixed, often cringeworthy results, this being no exception. Ultimately, there is little to be gained artistically from hearing C.K.’s opinions on trans issues simply because he doesn’t have the necessary lived experience to best explore them.

That’s a wrongheaded paragraph. It deserves to be rebutted, for the sake of good art, for the sake of wayward critics, and for the sake of trans people. Let’s take them in reverse order.

For the Sake of Trans People

The size of the transgender population is unknown, but one rough estimate puts it at roughly 0.3 percent of Americans. Many are closeted. The community as a whole shares something with gays and lesbians in the era before Will & Grace—it’s still something of a victory when pop culture shows treat trans people as fully human individuals with equal dignity, rather than freaks or caricatures. It is wildly counterproductive to append the stigma “problematic” to all treatments of transphobia by cisgendered writers, which is to say, perhaps 99.7 percent of writers. The likely effect is to dissuade the very writers most invested in the dignified treatment of that community from rendering such characters in television shows and movies.

And substantively, Murthi’s standard seems to imply that trans people share so little in common with their neighbors that cis writers shouldn’t attempt to portray trans issues even as they explore conflict with characters of different ages, races, classes, religions, sexual preferences, mental abilities, professions, personality types, and education levels.  

That is unintentionally dehumanizing.

For the Sake of  Wayward Critics

The label “problematic” is a crutch used by critics who ought to name an ostensible problem as specifically as possible rather than vaguely declaring that one exists.

It assumes objective, widely shared standards that are typically fabricated or illusory.

As the blogger Karen Mead put it in “Why I Hate the Word ‘Problematic’”:

...intelligent people can disagree over whether or not a given piece of media is promoting harmful ideas or not. I believe that you can think something is racist while I do not or I can find something sexist that you do not, because we all have different ways of processing the oodles of contextual information that inform these concerns. I think we can, and should, discuss these things. The word problematic kills discussion by conflating a bunch of very diverse issues together, and subtextually, communicates a “them or us” mentality; either you get why the thing in question is problematic, or you’re a bad person who’s against the cause of achieving a greater social justice. Subtext is always subjective, so you may not agree with me there, and that’s fine; what’s not really debatable is that problematic is generally less useful than the words it tends to replace.

It is no coincidence that in the A.V. Club article, as in so much criticism that uses the word “problematic,” Murthi describes the same episode as “cringeworthy,” another label that often assumes shared standards that don’t exist, assigns stigma, and doesn’t identify what exactly was wrong, just that something was. It is particularly inapt as a criticism of C.K.’s drama, which is often meant to induce cringing.

Finally, “problematic,” as it is now used on the Internet, “seems to treat that which is possessing of problems as verboten,” Patrick Gerard comments at The Awl. “Problems are desirable … are they not? They provide us with things to unpack. They provide grist for art. A problematic play, in its conventional use, is one that I would choose to stage because it raises questions and arouses discomfort.”

For the Sake of Good Art

Horace and Pete could have rendered trans issues in a manner that seemed true-to-life or contrived; humane or mean-spirited; simpleminded or nuanced; dramatically satisfying or unsatisfying; thought-provoking or boredom-inducing; but whatever metric is being judged, that judgment should be rendered based on the art itself, not its creator’s identity. Just as Middlemarch is a masterpiece of novel writing, no matter whether a man or a woman put pen to paper in writing it, episode seven of Horace and Pete would be equally good or bad if Louis C.K. came out as trans today.

Insofar as fiction is judged based on the identity of its creator, it will be misjudged. Good art is true to life, while identity politics is inseparable from the reductive falsehood of stereotyping. Here it assumes an illusory trans perspective. In fact, insofar as the Horace and Pete scene in question is neither hateful nor bigoted, there is every reason to think that lots of trans people would like its treatment of transphobia, if that’s the right word for what Horace is feeling; lots of other trans people would dislike it; and still others would have mixed feelings or be ambivalent. Put more simply, trans people are diverse individuals with as many intra-group disagreements about art as any other human beings.

That said, everyone wants to be treated with dignity, and that often flows from greater empathy. And Murthi underestimates the degree to which C.K. has stoked it.

He writes near the end of his review:

On some level, it’s just arrogant for someone like C.K. to think he can tackle these issues in depth or with any kind of clarity, evidenced especially by his unfamiliarity with the accepted cultural language (he frequently employs “transgender” when he really means “trans”). On the other hand, what better way for C.K. to explore transphobia than by basically admitting his own limitations in the discourse, and how he really doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Again, there’s little to be gained from C.K. tackling this culturally relevant issue, like the veteran comic that he is, but it’s also strange to discuss artistic texts in terms of “gain” at all.

Actually, there is much to be gained. Said a commenter in a Reddit thread on Horace and Pete, “After watching that clip I am exhausted. The mental gymnastics were insane. I felt myself in Louis’s shoes, simultaneously tying and untying the knot that he put himself in while having an internal dialogue about a topic I was not prepared to think that deeply about.” As best I can surmise, the episode caused a lot of viewers to think more deeply about a complicated subject and to see the world from a perspective––a trans woman––that they had not encountered before.

That’s the sort of empathy-building result that honest fiction can achieve, even while tackling “a pervasive, deeply-ingrained issue from an outsider’s perspective.” It matters not if the creator is “best-positioned” to explore a subject, a standard unmet by every writer who portrays diverse characters and themes. At the very least, the effect of C.K.’s approach is far more salutary than dubbing art  “problematic,” a label that assumes away diverse perspectives and short-circuits pondering.

New iPhones, for the Small of Hands

On Monday afternoon, from its headquarters in California, Apple did something it has never done before: It announced a new iPhone with a smaller screen than the last model.

The phone, which it dubbed the iPhone SE, has the same innards as the iPhone 6S, the jumbo device that the company released last year. Its processors are just as fast, and it comes in 16 and 64-gigabyte versions. Its camera even has the same number of megapixels (12) as the 6S.

But in place of the 6S’s 4.7-inch screen is a four-inch screen, just as the iPhone 5 had. (iPhone screens are measured by their diagonal.)

The new phones end what was essentially a long game of chicken played between Apple and its customers. Since September 2014, when the company first released iPhones with big screens, some users have pleaded for smaller devices. (I wrote a story that month asking if the new phones were too large for many women’s hands.)

Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, has used jumbo-sized smartphones to show the consequences of involving few or no women in a device’s design process.

“Increasingly, on the latest versions of the kinds of phones I want to use, I cannot type one-handed. I cannot take a picture one-handed. I can barely scroll one-handed,” she wrote. Tufekci cited research that the average male hand was about two centimeters longer than the average female hand.

On Monday, Greg Joswiak, an Apple vice-president, said that the company sold 30 million four-inch iPhones in 2015. The scale of that number convinced Apple to update its smaller iPhone line.

Hand size also correlates with height. As Apple continues to grow into international markets, it needs to market itself to customers with smaller bodies. The average Chinese man, for instance, is three inches shorter than the average white American man. Joswiak said the majority of iPhones sold in China were outdated four-inch models.

As of April 2015, China eclipsed the United States to become Apple’s largest phone market.

The iPhone SE is also less expensive than the iPhone 6S. A 64-gigabyte version of the new device will cost $499; a 6S device with similar capacity costs $749. They will go on sale next week.

Beyond the new iPhones, the company updated other products at the Monday event. It introduced a new, smaller version of the iPad Pro, and dropped the price of its least-expensive smart watch by $50. It also previewed the newest version of its mobile operating system, which will include a feature that makes the screen less glaring at night.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, began the event by noting that Apple was founded nearly 40 years earlier, on April 1, 1976. To celebrate the anniversary, Cook aired a video, which was surprisingly low-key.

Apple usually makes a bigger deal about major anniversaries of the Macintosh, its first personal computer, released in the winter of 1984. Next year, however, it will have a different kind of birthday on its hands: On January 9, 2017, the iPhone will turn 10.  

Pay and the ‘Lady Players’ of Tennis

Over the weekend, Raymond Moore, the pro-tennis executive and former player who heads the Indian Wells tournament in California, became the latest prominent 69-year-old CEO to make his misogynist musings public. In remarks made ahead of the women’s finals match on Sunday, Moore had this to say about the supremacy of men’s tennis:

You know, in my next life, when I come back, I want to be someone in the WTA [Women’s Tennis Association] because they ride on the coattails of the men. They don’t make any decisions, and they are lucky. They are very, very lucky. If I was a lady player, I’d go down every night on my knees and thank God that Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal were born because they have carried this sport. They really have.

Serena Williams, arguably the game’s biggest star, was among the many to  responded to Moore’s comments. Shortly after her finals loss, she condemned his statements, calling them “very, very, very inaccurate.”

“Obviously I don’t think any woman should be down on their knees thanking anybody like that,” Williams said. “I think Venus [Williams], myself, a number of players have been—if I could tell you every day how many people say they don’t watch tennis unless they’re watching myself or my sister, I couldn’t even bring up that number.”

Williams noted that just last August, ahead of the U.S. Open, the women’s final sold out before the men’s final for the first time in history. Following Williams’ press conference, Moore apologized for his earlier remarks, saying they were in “poor taste and erroneous.” (Demands for Moore’s resignation on Monday as more attention was paid to some of his other comments.)

In theory, the story might have ended there. However, Novak Djokovic, the world’s No. 1 men’s player and winner of this year’s Indian Wells tournament, also waded into the controversy by suggesting that professional tennis, whose biggest tournaments offer equal prizes for men and women, should offer higher pay to men because they attract high viewership. Adding that the conversation about women’s pay was “delicate,” Djokovic then decided to go indelicate.

“I have tremendous respect for what women in global sport are doing and achieving,” Djokovic added. “Their bodies are much different to men’s bodies. They have to go through a lot of different things that we don’t have to go through. You know, the hormones and different stuff, we don’t need to go into details.”

(Inadvertently or not, this was a callback to heavily criticized remarks made by the French player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in 2013 in which he blamed “inconsistent” play in women’s tennis on “bad things” like “unstable” emotions and “hormones.”)

Of course, pay equality in tennis isn’t a cut-and-dry issue. In Grand Slam tournaments, men have to win three sets to advance while their female counterparts have to win two. The irony of Sunday’s remarks is that they came at a tournament where both male and female play their matches in a best-of-three set format. On Sunday, Williams played 20 games in her loss to Victoria Azarenka while Djokovic played 14 games in his win over Milos Raonic.

One reason frequently given for the lower viewership in women’s tennis is its failure to produce an echelon of top-level players who consistently win tournaments. A data dive by Carl Bialik at FiveThirtyEight last September seems to show that if women played in best-of-five matches, the game’s top contenders would emerge victorious on a more frequent basis.

Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped Serena Williams from winning more Grand Slam titles than any of her male counterparts. That’s also true for Margaret Court, Steffi Graf, Helen Wills Moody, Martina Navratilova, and Chris Evert.

Bernie Sanders's Global Victory Over Hillary Clinton

Bernie Sanders keeps arguing that the United States should look abroad for policies that would make the nation more equitable—and it seems that Americans who live there agree with him.

Results from the Democrats Abroad primary show the Vermont senator cruising to a big win over Hillary Clinton among ex-pats, taking 69 percent of the vote to her 31. That’s good to net Sanders nine delegates and Clinton four. Nearly 35,000 Americans overseas cast ballots, a 50 percent increase over the 2008 total.

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New Zealand Feels the Bern

Clinton has pushed back against Sanders’s praise for Scandinavian countries. “We are not Denmark,” she said in October, hastening to add: “I love Denmark.” It turns out that affection wasn’t reciprocated by the  American Democrats there. Sanders whomped her in Denmark, 358-89. In Sweden, Sanders won 513-202. In Norway, he won 328-102.

Clinton won in only three sub-areas: Nigeria, where she took four of the five votes cast; Singapore; and the Dominican Republic. (The Asian city-state is of course a model of neoliberal authoritarianism, so make your own jokes, Berniebros. Clinton and her husband have a long history of involvement in Haiti, which shares Hispaniola with the D.R.)

As I wrote back in February—or March on the other side of the international dateline—the first balloting occurred in Wellington, New Zealand, where Sanders beat Clinton 21-6 in a midnight meet-up at a pub. The final total in the country was 476-63.

Republicans don’t hold an equivalent contest for ex-pats, making the Democrats Abroad tally the only real guess at how Americans overseas are thinking about the election. The largest totals come from exactly the countries one might expect: Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. An openly unscientific poll conducted by Military Times found that members of the armed forces back Trump and Sanders most, but those numbers are not statistically sound nor broken out by those living at home or abroad.

Democrats Abroad also get four superdelegates—or rather, eight superdelegates, each worth half a delegate. Clinton has secured commitments from three and Sanders one.

The results provide an interesting snapshot of opinion abroad, but its meaning is less than clear. It seems likely that Americans who live abroad are a more liberal group, which would explain their tilt toward Sanders. But he’s been criticized for his foreign-policy stances, which critics call vague, especially on the Middle East. Nonetheless, he handily won each Middle Eastern country, including Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, the UAE, and Israel. He also won five of the seven votes cast in Afghanistan. As for Clinton, her term as secretary of state doesn’t appear to have won her much favor with the ex-pats.

Sanders vows to fight Clinton all the way to the convention, despite his steep delegate disadvantage. The nine delegates he picks up from overseas should help him some, though he still trails significantly.

Language as Art in Pittsburgh

We caught up with our friends at the City of Asylum in Pittsburgh recently, to see what was new in their part of Pittsburgh’s Mexican War Streets, named for battles and generals from the Mexican-American War. The City of Asylum, which we first wrote about here for the American Futures Project, was started by Henry Reese and Diane Samuels as a sanctuary for exiled writers from around the world. They have sponsored writers and artists over the past dozen years, from China, Burma, El Salvador, Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, and they are expecting the arrival of others from Bangladesh and elsewhere.

Houses for writers on Sampsonia Way, City of Asylum (Renee Rosensteel)

The programs continue to grow and flourish, and to be embraced by the generous communities in Pittsburgh. The writers have a place to live and work, with a modest stipend that varies with family size, for two years. They return the favor, and then some, to the people of their neighborhood and the city of Pittsburgh in public gatherings and exhibits of all sorts.

Several of the projects that have come out of the City of Asylum have centered around words. As a linguist, I was interested to see what had become of the earlier projects, which were designed to be temporary, and if there were any new ones.

Here is what I have learned:

Door from River of Words project (Deb Fallows / The Atlantic)

River of Words

As a public art installation, the Venezuelan writer and poet Israel Centeno chose 100 words, relevant in some way to Pittsburgh. Neighbors were invited to host a “word in residence,” meaning that they would display a representation of their word, designed by the Venezuelan artists Carolina Arnal and Gisela Romero, on the wall, or door, or window of their houses. River of Words became wildly popular. It was meant to be up for a year or so, but the people who hosted the words became so fond of them that they didn’t want to give them up. As Reese writes:

Intended to be temporary, the neighbors who gave a home to the words asked the artists if they could keep their words and the work became permanent. Initially, this caused a problem with the Historic Review Commission, but the community—the associations and individuals—on their own rallied and negotiated with the commission to keep their words up. During the appeal process, the Allegheny Central Civic Association wrote that “To date, the ‘River of Words’ installation is the best example of public art that has been executed and embraced by the whole North Side community.”

The project has taken on a second life, this time in the form of oral history. Caitlin Bruce, a communications professor at the University of Pittsburgh, interviewed the word owners and recorded their responses.

People reflected, among other things, on how the words came into their lives, how their experience with the words changed their perspective of the neighborhood, and about the impact of public art on the community.

Here is just one selection of Bruce’s interviews, this one with Lynn Kosegi:

Caitlin Bruce: ... I wanted to turn now to the River of Words project. Can you tell me what word you have, how you got involved, and kind of what that experience was like?

Lynn Kosegi: Sure. I have two words: “Use” and “Equation.” ... “Equation” I think I chose for a couple of reasons. Just because, I’m pretty involved in healthcare, very interested in healthcare delivery, work for a software company, so, you know, mathematics and tech is very big in our minds, and using it to improve healthcare and to improve life for patients and then coming to the War Streets, sort of seeing how the different pieces of this particular neighborhood fit together, and how diverse it is, and how there are such interesting things right down the street like City of Asylum and the Mattress Factory and Randyland. I just kind of thought “Equation” was something that brought everything all together.

Bruce: Great. And so can you tell me what it’s been like having the words on your house? Have any stories come about because of the words? Have you met anyone new?

Kosegi: Oh! I happened to have been home the day that they [the artists] came by to put them [the words] up and a lot of people in the neighborhood, they hadn’t read about it, and particularly my next door neighbor, she came out and was kind of just wondering what was going on and so I told her, and so the artists came over and were talking to her and where she’s been—they were from Venezuela, and she had been there several times, so she asked “Oh, can I have a word too?” so she picked a word too, and then it turned out that some people across the street saw it, and everybody was just asking about, “Well, what are these words,” and here, when they put the word “Equation” up it was actually spelled wrong, so instead of having a “q” it had a “c” and I kind of kept my mouth shut and was thinking, “Oh, maybe that’s how its spelled in Spanish?” I don’t know, but then one of the artists pointed it out, and were like “Oh no!” it was kind of half the Spanish spelling and half the English spelling so they brought back another piece of metal later on to turn the “c” into a “q.” So, it was kind of funny. So that was funny, just the reactions to that, and then the reactions from the neighbors, it was just fun. We were all just standing outside on the sidewalk on a summer’s day and it was just fun. I don’t intend to take them down. I like them.

Bruce: So the last question I have is about public art more generally. Can you tell me what you think the role or the social function of public art is both in the North Side and then in Pittsburgh more broadly?

Kosegi: Oh gosh. I think helping to both create an identity for a community. I think it actually helps to create the community. Especially for a city like Pittsburgh that, I mean, I was a teenager in the ’70s and I can remember when the mills started leaving and when Pittsburgh was really suffering, and I really think the arts and that kind of culture is part of what helped turn this city around and to turn it into the kind of city that ends up on every “Best Something or Other” list that is out there right now, and I think art plays a huge part in that, both in creating the community that we are and in communicating who we are to the rest of the world.

The Alphabet Reading Garden

It’s at the corner of Sampsonia Way, where the exiled writers and Henry and Diane all live. It is just around the corner from the Mattress Factory, an avant-garde art museum. The Garden, which was in the planning stages when we first visited, is open and welcoming now.

A brick from the Alphabet Reading Garden (City of Asylum)

There are two language features in the garden. One is the alphabet bricks. Over the years, over 1,500 visitors have written out the alphabets, or some character sets, from their native languages. From these records, the artist Laura Jean McLaughlin handcrafted and ornamented 750 different bricks for the garden.

The City of Asylum co-founder and artist Diane Samuels took 800 of the letters and wove them into a fence that runs the length of the garden. In addition there are 800 bricks, each with a unique letter.

Alphabet Fence at the Alphabet Reading Garden (City of Asylum)

When you enter the gate of the garden, you see the panel pictured below. The phrase on the panel, “Joy is an act of resistance,” is from a poem by the Pittsburgh poet Toi Derricotte. Reese says the phrase was inspired through a conversation he and Dianne were having with Derricotte about the Chinese exiled poet Huang Xiang, who has an almost unearthly quality of exuberance, despite the imprisonment and torture he had endured. As Reese once described it to me: Huang didn’t just recite a poem, he danced, shouted, waved, and lived that poem with his entire body and spirit. We had the great good fortune to hear Huang Xiang read—just like that—at the 10th anniversary of the City of Asylum at the end of 2014.

Panel on the gate of the Alphabet Reading Garden (City of Asylum)

Alphabet City

The newest project, underway since last September, is the restoration of the former Masonic Temple into a neighborhood literary center, which will house a restaurant, a bookstore, offices for the City of Asylum, apartments, and spaces for performances, writing workshops, and community gatherings.

Former Masonic Temple now under construction for Alphabet City (Tom Little)

Stoop Is a Verb

In a masterpiece of placemaking—drawing in the community to participate in the creation of art—the saxophonist-composer-poet-performance artist Oliver Lake drew on 10 years of his residencies at the City of Asylum. In February 2014, he met with diverse groups residents of Pittsburgh’s North Side, where the City of Asylum is located. The interviewees represented the Fair Housing Coalition, the Mexican War Streets Society, residents and teens at the YMCA, the Young Men and Women’s African Heritage Society community, and more. Their topic was to discuss what it’s like to live on the North Side, answering questions and comments such as:

If the North Side was an animal, what would it be?

Describe the feelings and emotions the North Side evokes in you.

Why did you choose to live or work in the North Side?

What are the key issues dividing the community?

What are the issues that bind the community together?

Celebration on Sampsonia Way of Stoop Is a Verb (City of Asylum)

From those transcripts, Lake drew on phrases to create lyrics for songs he composed. He assembled musicians, dancers, poets, and actors to perform the works. The piece premiered in the City of Asylum tent, free to the public.

Tyler Perry’s The Passion: A Perfect Bourgeois Jesus

In The Passion, the live, televised musical “event” hosted by Tyler Perry Sunday night on Fox, Jesus, played by Jencarlos Canela, did the following things:

Get bread, presumably for the Last Supper, from a food truck
Belt a Creed song to an audience of his disciples, who were dressed like models from a Land’s End catalog
Exchange (unintended?) flirtatious looks with Peter as they sang a duet of Phillip Phillips’s “Home”

There’s so, so much more. Judas, played by a black-leather-clad Chris Daughtry, performed a moody Evanescence solo in a warehouse. Jesus told Peter, played by Prince Royce, that he will be the rock of the church—in what looked to be an upscale coffeeshop/bar complete with flavored syrups in the background, just in case the disciples like their lattes with a hint of vanilla. The music selection was definitely aimed at people who came of age in the early aughts—remember Hoobastank? Not really? Well, Peter mournfully sang one of the band’s only hits, “The Reason,” right after Jesus was arrested. Trisha Yearwood was, as ever, a magnificent performer. But when Mary, mother of Jesus, wears giant diamonds on her ears, something’s a little off.

In some ways, this was the perfect portrayal of Jesus for the 21st century. It was rich in the familiar imagery of urban bourgeoise consumerism (there wasn’t a poorly dressed person in sight). It mostly subbed in top pop songs for tunes with explicitly religious messages (only a few numbers actually referred to angels or God). The Passion was heavy on spirituality, with only light pepperings of theological specificity. As Canela told People, “We make the mistake of attaching the word God to religion,” he said. “The word God is way bigger than religion.”

From a religious perspective, this represents low expectations about what people are interested in with regard to theology and faith. The special was definitely a creative way to tell the story of Jesus, and it’s arguably remarkable to see the story of the crucifixion and resurrection broadcast on primetime television. But the trappings also seem to suggest that the middle- and upper-middle class people watching at home will most resonate with the story of a poor fisherman if they see him dressed and coiffeured like he’s headed to Starbucks. It mainly tells the story of the gospels through music that has nothing to do with the gospels, hoping that the emotional register of dramatic pop songs can serve as a clean substitute for religious fervor.

Perry orchestrated the special from a stadium in New Orleans, alternately narrating the story of Jesus and cutting over to Entertainment Tonight’s Nischelle Turner, who walked with a crowd carrying a giant, lit-up cross in a creative recreation of the Stations of the Cross (the Christian name for stops Jesus made along the path to his crucifixion). It’s that time of year—some Christians pray or reenact the Stations on Good Friday or at other points during Lent, the 40 days preceding Easter. The Passion seems, in part, an attempt to make that tradition cool—complete with Hatch Show Print-style posters for each of the Stations.

Turner tried to make her segments political, talking about the destruction and redemption of New Orleans after Katrina. As Perry said at the beginning: “From suffering can arise love and renewal—that’s New Orleans.” But mostly, Turner’s segments had the feel of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Eve—highly orchestrated woman-on-the-street reporting in the middle of a very expensive, highly inorganic spectacle. To their credit, the people in the streets weren’t afraid to speak about their faith. Several of those carrying the cross and walking with the procession spoke about their belief in Jesus. The people caught on camera in the stadium often did seem moved; many sang along to hits likely not heard on the radio in a decade, and several had wet-looking eyes. At least a few clergy were in the crowd; the camera crew seemed particularly apt at picking out shots of the few men and women in collars.

But if the show’s creators, Mark Bracco and Adam Anders, had truly wanted to make a powerful political statement, why didn’t they make Jesus—the man who is portrayed and arrested by police—black, instead of Pontius Pilate, played by the musician Seal? If they had truly wanted to make a statement about faith, why didn’t they feature the homeless and poor of New Orleans, inviting them to carry the cross?  

Toward the end, there were moments of religious frankness—at one point, Perry stared directly into the camera and explained exactly how Jesus was crucified, complete with graphic descriptions of each of his wounds. He narrated the burial of Christ in a tomb, and his rise three days later—which got immense cheers from the crowd. Weirdly enough, Perry was the most religious figure in the whole special, speaking about Christ directly rather than in pop-song euphemisms. “For millions of us, then and now, it summons feelings of deep faith, of a promise fulfilled, and our personal salvation,” he said.

This heartfelt moment, though, was followed by a rendition of “Unconditionally,” arguably the worst Katy Perry song, and one that probably wasn’t written about God or Jesus. The performance of it was undeniably stunning: Jesus sang from the top of an office building near the stadium, accompanied by a impressive choir in the stadium itself. From an entertainment perspective, that moment was a fair summary of what The Passion was trying to provide: strong performances, glitzy visuals, and perhaps a nostalgia for the early years of American Idol. It was a solid take on this relatively new genre of television, which has sometimes succeeded (as in the case of Grease) and sometimes flopped (as in the case of Peter Pan).

But there’s an inherent tension between entertainment and faith: The former thrives on glitz and glam, while most religions explicitly reject that kind of showmanship in favor of humility before God. ​The Passion​ may be a creative vision of what the resurrection can look like, but it’s an unfaithful vision of faith—one that assumes TV audiences need to be dazzled and soothed into believing, rather than sticking to simple conviction.

Tyler Perry's The Passion: A Perfect Bourgeois Jesus

In The Passion, the live, televised musical “event” hosted by Tyler Perry Sunday night on Fox, Jesus, played by Jencarlos Canela, did the following things:

Get bread, presumably for the Last Supper, from a food truck
Belt a Creed song to an audience of his disciples, who were dressed like models from a Land’s End catalog
Exchange (unintended?) flirtatious looks with Peter as they sang a duet of Phillip Phillips’s “Home”

There’s so, so much more. Judas, played by a black-leather-clad Chris Daughtry, performed a moody Evanescence solo in a warehouse. Jesus told Peter, played by Prince Royce, that he will be the rock of the church—in what looked to be an upscale coffeeshop/bar complete with flavored syrups in the background, just in case the disciples like their lattes with a hint of vanilla. The music selection was definitely aimed at people who came of age in the early aughts—remember Hoobastank? Not really? Well, Peter mournfully sang one of the band’s only hits, “The Reason,” right after Jesus was arrested. Trisha Yearwood was, as ever, a magnificent performer. But when Mary, mother of Jesus, wears giant diamonds on her ears, something’s a little off.

In some ways, this was the perfect portrayal of Jesus for the 21st century. It was rich in the familiar imagery of urban bourgeoise consumerism (there wasn’t a poorly dressed person in sight). It mostly subbed in top pop songs for tunes with explicitly religious messages (only a few numbers actually referred to angels or God). The Passion was heavy on spirituality, with only light pepperings of theological specificity. As Canela told People, “We make the mistake of attaching the word God to religion,” he said. “The word God is way bigger than religion.”

From a religious perspective, this represents low expectations about what people are interested in with regard to theology and faith. The special was definitely a creative way to tell the story of Jesus, and it’s arguably remarkable to see the story of the crucifixion and resurrection broadcast on primetime television. But the trappings also seem to suggest that the middle- and upper-middle class people watching at home will most resonate with the story of a poor fisherman if they see him dressed and coiffeured like he’s headed to Starbucks. It mainly tells the story of the gospels through music that has nothing to do with the gospels, hoping that the emotional register of dramatic pop songs can serve as a clean substitute for religious fervor.

Perry orchestrated the special from a stadium in New Orleans, alternately narrating the story of Jesus and cutting over to Entertainment Tonight’s Nischelle Turner, who walked with a crowd carrying a giant, lit-up cross in a creative recreation of the Stations of the Cross (the Christian name for stops Jesus made along the path to his crucifixion). It’s that time of year—some Christians pray or reenact the Stations on Good Friday or at other points during Lent, the 40 days preceding Easter. The Passion seems, in part, an attempt to make that tradition cool—complete with Hatch Show Print-style posters for each of the Stations.

Turner tried to make her segments political, talking about the destruction and redemption of New Orleans after Katrina. As Perry said at the beginning: “From suffering can arise love and renewal—that’s New Orleans.” But mostly, Turner’s segments had the feel of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Eve—highly orchestrated woman-on-the-street reporting in the middle of a very expensive, highly inorganic spectacle. To their credit, the people in the streets weren’t afraid to speak about their faith. Several of those carrying the cross and walking with the procession spoke about their belief in Jesus. The people caught on camera in the stadium often did seem moved; many sang along to hits likely not heard on the radio in a decade, and several had wet-looking eyes. At least a few clergy were in the crowd; the camera crew seemed particularly apt at picking out shots of the few men and women in collars.

But if the show’s creators, Mark Bracco and Adam Anders, had truly wanted to make a powerful political statement, why didn’t they make Jesus—the man who is portrayed and arrested by police—black, instead of Pontius Pilate, played by the musician Seal? If they had truly wanted to make a statement about faith, why didn’t they feature the homeless and poor of New Orleans, inviting them to carry the cross?  

Toward the end, there were moments of religious frankness—at one point, Perry stared directly into the camera and explained exactly how Jesus was crucified, complete with graphic descriptions of each of his wounds. He narrated the burial of Christ in a tomb, and his rise three days later—which got immense cheers from the crowd. Weirdly enough, Perry was the most religious figure in the whole special, speaking about Christ directly rather than in pop-song euphemisms. “For millions of us, then and now, it summons feelings of deep faith, of a promise fulfilled, and our personal salvation,” he said.

This heartfelt moment, though, was followed by a rendition of “Unconditionally,” arguably the worst Katy Perry song, and one that probably wasn’t written about God or Jesus. The performance of it was undeniably stunning: Jesus sang from the top of an office building near the stadium, accompanied by a impressive choir in the stadium itself. From an entertainment perspective, that moment was a fair summary of what The Passion was trying to provide: strong performances, glitzy visuals, and perhaps a nostalgia for the early years of American Idol. It was a solid take on this relatively new genre of television, which has sometimes succeeded (as in the case of Grease) and sometimes flopped (as in the case of Peter Pan).

But there's an inherent tension between entertainment and faith: The former thrives on glitz and and glam, while most religions explicitly reject that kind of showmanship in favor of humility before God. ​The Passion​ may be a creative vision of what the resurrection can look like, but it's an unfaithful vision of faith—one that assumes TV audiences need to be dazzled and soothed into believing, rather than sticking to simple conviction.