Dan Riley's Blog, page 35

The Goddam Movies

Unlike J.D. Salinger, one of my literary heroes, I do not "hate the movies like poison." Quite the opposite in fact. My love for the movies goes back as far as I can remember… even before TV and radio came into my life. I can remember my mother taking me by the hand to our local theater to see Chaplin mock Hitler in The Great Dictator. I can remember Saturday matinees watching John Wayne kill Indians or Japanese and racing home from the theater to retrieve "my rifle" (usually an old broomstick) to reenact all the killing in my backyard. When I got to college I took a job as an usher in a movie theater, where I worked with Lorna, the candy girl, 5 nights a week...on one of the other two nights I worked as a projectionist for the college film series and on the seventh day Lorna and I took advantage of the free passes we earned working in one theater to go see movies playing in other theaters. Since the advent of the home theater era in the early 80s, I’d conservatively estimate that the former usher and candy girl watch movies 80% of our nights together. (True story: when we got a VCR, the first film we went to rent was one of our favorites, the Albert Finney classic Tom Jones. In those days videos were boxed in black plastic with plain wrap labels--no studio marketing--which explains how the first thing that got played on our VCR was not the 18thcentury amorous adventures of a randy young man named Tom Jones, but a quite other Tom Jones in a tight sharkskin suit singing “It’s Not Unusual.”)
It’s not unusual for me to devote much of my holiday movie watching to oldies from the 30s and 40s (thank you, Turner Classic). Since Thanksgiving I’ve been through a spate of them (with those evergreens, A Christmas Carol and A Wonderful Life cued up for the next couple of nights). Revisiting films from the American past, however, doesn’t always elicit the reaction, “Now that’s entertainment!” In fact, it’s sometimes quite the opposite. Take these nuggets from my most recent visit to the archives…
•                Trader Horna 1931 jungle adventure starring Harry Carey: In it Trader Horn is on a mission to rescue a missionary’s daughter kidnapped by natives. When he and his protégé, Peru, come upon the first tribe in their journey, Peru exclaims, “Why, they’re not savages, Trader, they're just ignorant children.”•                Northwest Passage, 1940, set during the French and Indian War, starring Spencer Tracy—Tracy as Maj. Robert Rogers, leading his Rangers on a mission of vengeance, addresses them before their attack on a sleeping village, “Now we're under orders to wipe out this town, so see that you kill every fighting Indian - kill 'em quick and kill 'em dead, and for Heaven's sake, don't kill any of our own Indians and don't kill any of the white captives. Our own Indians will have white crosses on their backs, so keep your eyes open. Don't make any mistakes.”
You don’t have to be a fan of political correctness (and this blog is no fan of political correctness) to find those pieces of dialog risible. And they aren’t isolated bits of dialog. Throughout Trader Horn, our hero liberally uses terms like “black apes” to refer to Africans, and Maj. Rogers calls Indians “red hellions.” Deeper still, in both films a beautiful blonde woman who has developed empathy for the natives while in captivity has to be forced to abandon them “for her own good.” As Peru tells the missionary’s daughter who has grown up to be a goddess among her kidnappers and is reluctant to leave them, “Don’t you understand? White people must help each other.” (Ironic note: the actor who plays Peru and delivers that line, Duncan Renaldo, was an illegal immigrant.) White male fear of losing “his” women to The Other is palpable.
Moreover the overt racism in both films is not at all particular to them, and is repeated ad nauseam in the films of that period, from the juvenile Tarzan series to the highly esteemed Gone With the Wind. So, no, thankfully in certain ways, they don’t make movies like they used to. But they did, and the impact has been profound. No one film alone could have left much of a lasting impression on a culture. But to argue against the accumulated effect of many such films over many years selling the idea of white supremacy is to argue against the proven and profitable psychological foundations of advertising and propaganda.
When there is much ado about the movies as there has been in recent weeks over The Interview, the default posture of Hollywood is to shrug, “Aw shucks, we’re just entertainment.” Ironically, it’s then left to despots like North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, religious fanatics like the Taliban or Family Research Council, or mob outfits like the NRA to point out that Hollywood--if not the Great Satan itself--has a bit of the devil in it. Hollywood, as the greatest purveyor of myth in modern times, can and does shape culture. Authoritarians and fundamentalists have good reason to fear the movies because movies can crack holes in the fortress of their beliefs. Get an audience to laugh at your exalted leader and contemplate his mortality and suddenly he doesn't seem so exalted or immortal any more. And it doesn’t take a Steven Spielberg to puncture that wall…a Seth Rogen will do if the time is right and the message is repeated often enough.
But as my recent film watching reveals, those of us with a progressive philosophical and political bent can be rightly (and righteously) discomfited by the movies as well. Not only can a case be made that Hollywood has played a significant role in reinforcing the sense of white supremacy that has dogged our society for centuries, but--at the risk of allying myself with the scourge that is the NRA—an equally strong case can be made that Hollywood has had a major hand in making us a gun crazy culture. Since the late 60s and early 70s deluge of vigilante Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson films, Hollywood has persistently promoted the gun as the solution to our most difficult social, criminal and geo-political problems. 

To acknowledge the seemingly obvious connection between our romanticizing guns in our films and the pervasiveness of guns in our streets is not to call for censorship or chill free expression. It is a plea, however, for Hollywood to be a little less disingenuous on the role it plays in shaping our culture…and at least as conscientious about its use of gratuitous violence as it would be about dialog containing inflammatory expressions like black apes and red hellions.
   

The Greatest Story Ever Told...

Sorry, Jesus, I know it's your season, but your birthday was just the sequel. Adam's story is humankind’s Godfather I.
Think of it, in just about 2,000 Hemingwayesquewords—Genesis provides the template for most of the existential issues that would vex mankind throughout its history:
Vanity--1:26 God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”
Myth v. science—Defying biology, which tells us that all humans develop first as female and only later do some evolve into male, Genesis posits that man came first and woman came after (2:23 “The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She will be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”) 
Patriarchy—Adam is given dominion over the earth and would get to name the animals, while Eve is given butkis to do. 
Privatization—Despite the generosity of giving humans the earth, the skies, the seas and all the fruits, animals, fish and vegetables therein, God fences off one small piece of creation and tells them, “That’s mine, not yours. Don’t touch.”
Generational Conflict--2:24 “Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother, and will join with his wife, and they will be one flesh.” 
Sexism--3:16 To the woman he said, “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain you will bring forth children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
Body shaming--3:7 “Both of their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked. They sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”
The Blame Game--3:11 God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” 3:12 The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.” 3:13 Yahweh God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
Authoritarianism--3:17 To Adam he said, “Because you have listened to your wife’s voice, and have eaten of the tree, of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. 3:18 Thorns also and thistles will it bring forth to you; and you will eat the herb of the field. 3:19 By the sweat of your face will you eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” 

Murder and incest—There is no possible interpretation of Genesis that does not lead to the inescapable conclusion that mankind is descendant from the mating of a mother with her son who killed his brother out of jealousy.
I’ve written before (and since) about my admiration for the story of Genesis—from a literary standpoint it is a remarkable bit of writing in how well it encapsulates humanity’s essential duality—vassal or rebel--and core conflict—obey or question. It has application not only to the existential issues outlined above, but is highly revealing in regards to whom in the story we side with—God or humanity. If you side with God, I would say that it goes beyond piety and reverence, and speaks to a character more inclined to trust authority, play strictly by the rules, and be unforgiving of those who break the rules. If you side with man/woman, you are not simply declaring yourself irreverent or irreligious, but inclined to question authority, not leave well enough alone, and cut most every sinner some slack.
What’s instructive about that dichotomy is that it is pretty reflective of our current sharply divided political landscape in the US. And recent scientific studies seem to support that. In a fairly comprehensive, if slightly dense, article in Salon, Paul Rosenberg summarizesmuch of the work that’s been done in neuroscience to understand how differently “conservative” and “liberal” minds are wired. Most simply put, he writes, “…Conservatives score higher on conscientiousness, while liberals score higher on openness to new experience.” Or to spin it my way…it is the liberal in us that allows us to understand why Adam and Eve dared to eat of the forbidden fruit, and it is the conservative in us that believes they were rightly punished for it.
To drill down a little deeper into our daily headlines—it is the naturally conservative affinity for law and order that allows conservatives to side with authority figures like the police and CIA, even when those institutions appear to act excessively, because conservatives place a high premium on physical order. They want their Garden of Eden to remain inviolate. On the other hand, it is the liberal affinity for new experience that allows it to side with the victims of excessive force…to risk the tranquility of the Garden to see what it’s like to walk in the shoes of another…to risk the fury and punishment of authority to question that authority.

Much has been written as to how much race, class and politics have contributed to our endless nightmarish national debate we’re having on our identity as a country. It’s enlightening--albeit in a depressing way--to consider that these civic wars may be rooted further back in time before there were any such things as race, class, and politics…back to a time known as paradise.   

Losing My Religion….

Friend Barry Friedman recently asked me to submit a list to his popular weekly Facebook feature. Inspired by Barry's reference to Jennifer O’ Neill from Summer of 42 in an earlier list I got a sparkle down my leg and a tingle through my brain and thought, “How about a list of actors who corrupted our youth?” I’ve expanded it here from just actors to performers to accommodate those who may have had their fantasy lives awakened by, say, Soupy Sales or Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop (those lips...those eyes...). I offer an enhanced version of the list I submitted to Barry here as a little diversion from what we might call the Sturm and Dang currently going on outside our windows…a harkening back to a more innocent time when our innocence was just about to go up in smoke…or dissolve in unmentionable bodily fluids between our legs. Sadly the muse of this list, Jennifer O Neill, could not make the final cut once I realized that Summer of 42 was made in 1971, and by that time I had been married for three years and fathered a child, so biblically speaking I was already corrupted. Enough prologue...on with the list.
1.     Princess Aura, daughter of Ming the Merciless from the Buster Crabbe era Flash Gordon; Princess Leia for Boomers, not just for all the showy flesh, but for being a bad girl who goes good for the love of a man


 2.    Maureen O’ Sullivan as Jane in Tarzan the Ape Man...I still find myself freeze framing their first swim together to see if she’s wearing anything










3.     Brenda Lee, age 10, singing “Jambalaya” (watch video, no, really, WATCH the video)


4.     Brando, Dean, Elvis...hope I'm not being too gay here, but those three coming so close together aroused my awareness of boy sexy

5.     Jane Fonda in Tall Story introducing a torso to America which would hold its own for more than half a century


 6.    Ursula Andress emerging from the sea and submerging me in my own primal ooze in Dr. Yes!

7.    Mitzi Gaynor appearing on the Sullivan Show from Miami between two Beatles sets singing “Too Darn Hot” with her glistening, sweaty orbs turning in a mesmerizing performance; Fab Four meets Fab Two and goes down



 8.   Dolores Hart, Where the Boys Are...GF of Elvis, bride of Jesus as Mother Dolores, Prioress of the Abbe Regina...a woman with an obvious weakness for gods, so I never stood a chance

9.   Ann-Margaret…in long legs…in tight capris…in bright pastels…in crop tops…in flowing hair…in Bye Bye Birdie…in dreams both wet and dry.














10. Venetia Stevenson…she walks out of a tattoo parlor in Studs Lonigan and his gang of young toughs are there to ask, “Where’d you get it, lady?” She brazenly points to her breast, sending me and my brother running from the theater, down the street, and into the confessional to beg Fr. Forte for our penance. Four Hail Mary’s, two Our Father’s, one damn good Act of Contrition, and 55 years later, I still can’t get that scene out of my head…now THAT’S corruption.

The False God Before Us

Ana Grace Marquez-GreeneAfter an unseemly week of justifying the killing of another American child, perhaps this anniversary will help us get back to the realization that no matter how we choose to spin it our nation kills an unholy number of young innocents because we worship guns more than God.    

Grace

Thank you, Heavenly Father, for the narcissismnecessary to look upon this bounty of food spread out before us and believe it’s your blessing upon us while countless, faceless others go hungry. Thank you, Lord, for the gift of faith so we can accept without question what we’re told about existence without troubling our minds with the effort of logic and reason. Thank you, God, for making free will optional so we can apply it when we want to praise the recipients of vast good fortune but ignore it to condemn those who’ve failed due to faulty genes; flawed parenting; physical, social or natural calamity. Thank you, Almighty, for cognitive dissonance which allows us to declare Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior while perverting his teachings to love our enemies, forgive those who trespass against us, become peacemakers, show kindness to strangers, uplift the downtrodden, and keep our prayers to ourselves. Oh, Supremest of Beings, thank you for acting in Mysterious Ways so we can always explain away every hideous thing that happens in your creation, even as we harshly punish your creatures among us for the least of crimes and misdemeanors. Thank you, First Mover of All Movement, for giving us a sweet tooth for cheap labor--from slavery to indentured servitude to exploited immigrants to child labor to sweatshops to Third World labor to minimum-wage earners--so we can look upon our shining city on the hill this day of Thanksgiving and proclaim, “We built that! Hallelujah!” And finally, thank you, O’ Merciful One, for the great gift of the blind eye we can turn at will to our hypocrisies and shortcomings. Amen. 

Now You See It; Now You Don't

You and the air conditioner you rode in on.The rending of garments and gnashing of teeth filled the airwaves last week as my friends and allies in the political world dealt with ignominious defeat. Yet I remained largely immune from the hysteria (albeit not the carping)--thanks almost entirely to Steven Johnson’s PBS series How We Got to Now. I found the six-part series the perfect antidote to bad times…political or otherwise. Johnson built the series around six topics—cleanliness, time, glass, light, cold, and sound, all of which may seem like so much pablum, but the total effect, I dare say, was exhilarating. Whereas Neil deGrasse Tyson’s PBS series earlier this year, Cosmos, was more about the awesomeness of the stars, the planets and nature, Johnson’s series makes a case that humanity can be pretty awesome too.
Johnson begins each installment by referencing the motley crew of  “hobbyists, garage inventors, and obsessive tinkerers” who have so profoundly changed the way we live for the better…though not without some unintended consequences along the way. When you hear the stories--from the city engineer who came up with the brainstorm of lifting all of Chicago off the ground to properly install sewers that would change city living the world over to the poor orphan boy who would, with a 6th grade education, invent refrigerated trucking and make himself into one of the first few African American millionaires—you ask, why are these not the heroes of our school books rather than that long, tiresome parade of kings, queens, presidents, generals, dictators and con artists.
Moreover, so many of the stories Johnson relates run counter to our current facile narratives about human inclinations and aspirations, no matter what side of the political spectrum you swing from.
Appalled by animal exploitation and child labor? In the story of light we learn about the discovery of the oil from a harpooned whale that would illuminate rooms and thus enlighten society by allowing reading after dark…and after work. And we learn that the whalers harvested the oil by lowering young boys of 13-14 into the heads of the whales!
In the story of cold we learn that it was an ingenious Yankee who, upon visiting South Carolina in summer, came up with the idea of turning abundant New England ice into refreshment and replenishment for the American South…and he went broke and to debtors’ prison over a decade before he finally got his idea to work.
And we learn that ice became so important to the South during the Civil War that the North ran blockades against it…like nuclear secrets to Iran, plans for ice-making machinery had to be smuggled into the Confederacy.
Whether you like your state’s rights or despise corporate collusion, you’ll be shocked to know that it was the railroads that threw their combined weight behind standardizing time, thus taking a precious but problematic power out of local control.

Prefer fresh to frozen food? Well, who doesn’t, but Clarence Birdseye’s plan wasn’t to rob the world of freshness, but to provide the most reasonable facsimile of it to people regardless of geography or season.
As Johnson tells the story of air conditioning, it may be the most paradoxical for those bewitched by contemporary conditions. In 1902 William Carrier was hired by a Buffalo printing plant to try and do something about the heat and humidity that was smearing its print in summer. Carrier delivered air conditioning, which collaterally made the workers happy--because unknown to the bosses they too were suffering with the heat. Flash forward to 1925 when "liberal" Hollywood began installing air conditioners into its movie theaters, thus increasing an income stream while providing city dwellers with refuge from the summer heat. In due time, air conditioners--as with computers later--became smaller in size and the home AC boom was on. Residential AC, Johnson then relates, motivated mass US migrations between 1960 and 1980 to formerly inhospitable climes in the South and Southwest, thus tilting the Electoral College to the Sunbelt, eventuating in the election of Ronald Reagan. Thus the rise of America’s climate-change-denying Conservative movement virtually owes its success to Freon-12 poisoning the atmosphere. As they say, you can’t make this stuff up.
No one can actually…not Wall Street or Main Street. Not the Jihadists, The Tea Party, the Anarchists. Not the Church or Fox News, not The New York Times or the Heritage Foundation. It all happens with a touch of this, a bit of that…and Edison’s 90 percent perspiration. It also happens in spite of whatever the conventional wisdom of the time. Once upon a time no one had much interest in reading glasses until suddenly they were there right in front of their noses. In one of my favorite stories in the series Johnson tells about the glassmakers of Venice. In a pre-Marxist instance of state control of free enterprise, the Venetian Republic virtually imprisoned its glassmakers on the island of Murano. Rather than killing the industry, it would lead in time to one of the most important and far-reaching innovations detailed in How We Got to Now. But that's a story for another Nobby.
This Nobby ends with a sharp pivot to the world of football. In a roundtable last week halfway through the NFL season, one of the jocks on the panel suggested that an early season loss by the New England Patriots to the Kansas City Chiefs was the turning point to the Pats’ season, leading to their current 5-game winning streak. Another jock—another, more astuter jock I’d say--argued that it was too early to be talking about turning points of the season. He said you can’t tell what a turning point in a season is until you reach the end of the season. For all anyone knows, the beating the Patriots administered to the Broncos at the mid-season point could be followed by a 5-game losing streak. In a month everyone might be saying the Pats peaked too soon and the beating they put on the Broncos was a turning point of a different order. How We Got to Now teases out the sublimity of that logic over centuries and across nations and personalities and leaves you with two distinct impressions. The first is that there are things happening right now beneath our collective radar that will profoundly change the way people who come after us will live. The second is that there is a certain momentum to these changes that defies a range of factors—from political to economic to moral.  

In the next few weeks, the media will tell us that the collection of clowns in Washington D.C. who presume to rule our world are in deep debate over the fate of the Keystone Pipeline. It won’t really be a debate of course; it will be a battle of pro-pipeline money vs. anti-pipeline money. Whether it will ultimately be a boon to the nation’s energy needs or a disaster for the environment will be quite beside the point in the long run…as will the new blood we’re about to spill in the Mideast over oil. It will all be made moot by what’s going down in that building Steven Johnson guides us through in the video clip below. Because if we learn anything from How We Got to Now, it’s that later will look nothing like now.

A Failure to Communicate

The game goes by various names, but everyone knows how it's played: You write down a phrase and hand it to the person next to you, who then tries to illustrate your phrase before passing the illustration (but not your phrase) to the next person to guess by the drawing what your phrase was, and then that guess of what your phrase was is passed on to the next person who must illustrate it without seeing any of the phrases or drawings that came before the most recent one, and on and on it goes around the room until it reaches the end and everyone gets a laugh at how far off the final phrase is to the original message.  What most people don't know is that this is The Official Game of the Democratic Party. In fact Democratic consultants who draw six-figure salaries hone their skills by practicing  this game for thousands of hours. Because of my close ties to the Party, I was able to infiltrate one of their training sessions leading up to the latest mid-term election and donning my Edward Snowden dark glasses and fake mustache I walked off with some of their top secret worksheets which we present here as a Nobby Works exclusive:  





Now one more ballot to fill out before this election season comes to a close. In the famous movie clip above, vote for one of the following:

__ Strother Martin is The Republican Party and Paul Newman is Barack Obama
__ Strother Martin is the American Voter and Paul Newman is the Democratic candidate
__ Strother Martin is the Democratic candidate and Paul Newman is the Democratic consultant

As in all American elections, you are free to vote for the candidate of your choice, but here to help you is this. 

THE BITCHES OF EAST WICKED

What won't they do?
(let the catcalling begin…)

Standing on the Corner, Watching All the Girls Go By

There I was, half way through adding another 1,000 unsolicited words to the mid-term election discussion, when I was distracted. (Before I give myself over entirely to the distraction, I must say, “Really, Alison Lundergan Grimes, you couldn’t answer that question about who you voted for in 2012 like this: “I voted for the man who did not dismiss 47 per cent of the population as moochers; I voted for the man who went all out to provide millions of our fellow citizens with affordable health care.” My post was going to focus on Democratic strategists under the title, Oxymorons.)
The distraction was that video (above) of the woman who endured catcalls while walking around New York City streets for 10 hours. Hats off to Rob Bliss, the guy who made the video in collaboration with the anti-street harassment organization, Hollaback. Bliss specializes in making videos that designed to go viral, which is not all that easy as masses of up-loaders to YouTube can attest.
I decided to dedicate my 1000 unsolicited words to this distraction for a number of reasons. First, Bliss’s effort to document the gauntlet some women go through under everyday circumstances underscores a point I tried to make in a grossly misunderstood post some months ago. That point was that there are men who are active allies in trying to help women achieve gender equality, and to dismiss all men as complicit in the subjugation of women is both unfair and counterproductive to the women's movement.
I was also drawn to the video because it perversely echoed another previous post of mine, a reflection on my 50th high school reunion where my classmates and I joined in a raucous version of the Manfred Mann hit from our graduation year, Do Wah Diddy:

There she was just a-walkin' down the street,
Singin' "Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do"
Snappin' her fingers and shufflin' her feet,
Singin' "Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do"
She looked good (looked good), she looked fine (looked fine)
She looked good, she looked fine and I nearly lost my mind

Before I knew it she was walkin' next to me,
Singin' "Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do"
Holdin' my hand just as natural as can be,
Singin' "Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do" 

What transpires in Do Wah Diddy is essentially what happens in Bliss’s 1-minute plus edit of his actress walking down the street for 10 hours…with two notable exceptions: the woman is not singing Do Wah Diddy and none of the guys commenting (ahem) on how good and fine she looks actually score with her. Still Do Wah Diddy conveys the lighter side of the ritual captured in the video, and that lighter side is the one that has prevailed in our popular culture from Hollywood romantic comedies and musicals to cartoons to TV commercials, where armies of men in hard hats, tool belts, painter pants and cabbie caps trip over each other and fall off ladders ogling beautiful, smiling women as they pass by. The video attempts to expose the darker side of that mythic portrayal of American life.
Very long before this video went viral, I was introduced to the uncertainties of walking in public. In childhood we had a family friend known in certain quarters of our town as “Fat Ann” (this would be in the idyllic 1950s when such cruelties were more common than current memory might allow). One evening Ann and my parents went off to the local movie theater, which took them to the corner of our street and Main Street where The Midnight Spa stood. At that particular time The Midnight Spa was just coming into its own as a hangout for the local Brando-inspired leather jacket juvies with their chains and duck-ass haircuts. In my father’s telling of the story, as they turned the corner at The Spa, one of the punks sitting on the curb said, “Hey, Fat Ann, you’re breaking up our sidewalk here.” Ann reached down, picked the kid up off the curb, laid him out on the hood of a nearby car and warned him never to call her that again.
That worked for Ann, but for a long time whenever my route took me by the Spa, I chose to cross the street…twice…to avoid an encounter with the guys standing on the corner, which did not save me from having them call me a sissy for doing so. (Today I’m almost as averse to encounters with the guys who sell newspapers on our city streets. They man each major intersection…one to each corner, and if you’re stopped at a light they’ll approach with a friendly, “Hi, how are you?” in an attempt to sell you a paper.) 
In the 1970s I was walking out of Fenway Park after what would be my last Red Sox game as a resident of New England. Before me on Lansdowne Street were two young kids hand-in-hand with an elderly man in a Sox cap. From the roof above us came a loud, intimidating voice, “Hey, old man, what are you doing at our ballpark? We don’t want old men at our ballpark. Hear us, old man? Don’t come back here.” I looked up to see four teenage toughs scowling down at the man and his kids. I cannot recall who the Sox played that day and whether or not they won the game, but I can remember that incident vividly.
As recently as a few months ago, my wife mentioned a friendly guy coming up to her in the hardware aisle at Lowe's and attempting to spark up a chummy chat with her. Lorna is about to be of Social Security age, but she has always been a looker (certified by the Staples High class of 1966 as "Best Looking Girl") and both of us have had to live with random guys hitting on her for most of our 47 years together. Despite this arduous burden, I do not subscribe to that old pop song warning: "If you want to be happy for the rest, never make a pretty woman your wife." As for Lorna, although she recognizes all these overtures for what they really are, she treats them as what they pretend to be…courtesies. It's a strategy that's served her well as she's traveled the country on business for decades.
I mention these personal experiences because the message of the video implies that its only attractive young women who are at risk of drawing unwanted attention on our streets. I accept that attractive young women are probably more at risk than overweight older women or old men. How much more at risk we really don’t know since the makers of the video only focused on an attractive young woman. What results they may have gotten if they had chosen to follow an overweight woman around for a day or a disabled person or a an ostentatiously gay man, we don’t know.
There are some other factors that seem important to changing hearts and minds on the subject of street harassment as the video’s creators hope to do. For instance, in an Internet post after the video---and not as text within the video where it might provide crucial context--Rob Bliss admits: "Really it's a numbers game, 1% of dudes do stuff like this I'd say, so first we had to walk by the first 99%." Also, of those “catcalls,” how many might be objectively categorized as merely social and non-threatening, as in a “Good morning, how do you do?” kind of way? And if this experiment had been conducted 5, 10, or 20 years ago, would the number of catcalls and their tone have been different and how?
The last question is the most impossible to answer, of course, but would probably be the most helpful in our helping us determine whether society is getting better or worse in this regard. I personally was struck by the lack of vulgarity and hostility in the comments directed at the woman, which differs markedly from the tone of the discussion the video inspired on the Internet. Changing hearts and minds is such a nebulous undertaking. One never knows what’s going to work in attempting it. But there are numerous lengthy Internet threads in reaction to this video, and I’ve read a great many of them. If Hollaback believed its video was going to be a consciousness-raising experience it might be sadly disappointed in how the (ho-ho) dialog is playing out on the Internet.
In one 400+ thread I tracked, dominated by women, a dogged but seemingly reasonable fellow tried to argue that many of the comments in the video seemed benign, and questioned whether the fierce reaction to the video was only hardening the divisions in our society…especially between men and women. For this act of thoughtful inquiry, the guy was mercilessly savaged—getting hit with everything from the cliché of “not getting it” to the accusation of being unfit to raise his 19-year old daughter. What he “didn’t get,” he was told over and over again in the harshest language allowable, was that women daily walk our streets in constant fear of men as the agents of murder, rape and abuse. By merely suggesting that a man may greet a lady on the streets of New York as kindly as a man would, say, on the streets of Savannah, Georgia, you are proving yourself to be sexist at least and most likely misogynist.
White guys do it, tooAs I perused more male-dominated threads, the conversation devolved even further. The vulgarity and hostility the catcallers in the video mostly avoided was in full flower on the faceless Internet. The few women who dared to enter into exchanges were addressed in the crudest possible terms; both their attractiveness and sanity were called into question; and their requests for men to put themselves in the shoes of the woman in the video were totally ridiculed. And in the most depressing irony, a number of males sneeringly pointed out that the catcallers were mostly black and Latino, thus turning what was supposed to be an enlightening conversation on sexism into another excuse for engaging in racism.
As with so much in America these days, the video appears to have sparked more heat than light. I don’t know what Hollaback plans to do with their funds to raise awareness on this issue. It might be helpful if they supported some school programs to combat social aggression; it might very well be disastrous if they pursued some legislative remedy. It would certainly be outside the box if they tried to change the paradigm by promoting smiles and greetings for everyone…if Americans, especially urban Americans, made it a new source of pride to be friendly, so the next time someone records a young woman walking down a city street for 10 hours, its success can be definitively measured by the amount of civility it generates.
Then again, if civility is not your cup of tea and crumpets (and these days that seems more and more the case), perhaps comedy and satire will do you. 

Happiness is a Warm Woody

Rita Hayworth does the Bee Gees, created by et7waage1
Woody Allen’s obsessions with the meaning of life and young girls come in sharp relief in his gorgeous black and white paean to New York City (another obsession) Manhattan . The film seems to serve as a dry run for a significant life choice he will make 13 years later. In Manhattan 44-year old Woody’s character Isaac takes the socially acceptable course and breaks off his relationship with his 17-year old lover, Tracy (Mariel Hemingway). At the end of the film, he greatly regrets the decision…regrets it so much it seems that at age 56 he gives himself a do-over and reverses course to maintain his real life relationship with 19-year old Si-Yoon Previn.
The film ends with Isaac narrating this patented bit of Allen dialog:

Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um... Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. uh... Like what?... Okay... um... For me, uh... ooh... I would say… what? Groucho Marx, to name one thing... uh... um... and Willie Mays... and um... the 2nd movement of "The Jupiter Symphony"... and um... Louis Armstrong, recording of "Potato Head Blues"... um... Swedish movies, naturally... Sentimental Education by Flaubert... uh... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra... um... those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne... uh... the crabs at Sam Wo's... uh... Tracy's face...

That’s the elusive area between “Happiness is a warm puppy” sentimentality and “happiness is a warm gun” cynicism. Woody Allen’s writing lives there…it allows him to express sentimental ideas without alienating his largely intellectual audience. What he really wants to say in all that is Tracy’s face makes life worth living. But that kind of schmaltz is for everyday people, comfortably fitting into Valentine’s cards, wedding ceremonies, and endless Facebook posts. Woody’s people need to cut their sentimental feelings with a bit of an edge, and he’s been at it so long that he practically provides us with boilerplate. In fact, as a treat for our readers, The Nobby Works is turning this bit of Woody writing into a kind of Woody Mad Lib. Just fill in the blanks below as prompted by the brackets, and you’ll be well on your way to becoming an Academy Award-winning screenwriter:

Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um... Well, There are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. uh... Like what... okay... um... For me, uh... ooh... I would say... what, _____________________ [cultural icon], to name one thing... uh... um... and ___________________________[athlete or someone who made a mark through the grace and beauty of the body]... and um... the __________________________ [piece of classical music]... and um... ______________________[piece of popular music]... um... _______________________________________[art form], naturally... ____________________________________[book]... uh... ____________________________________ [two more cultural icons]... um... those incredible _______________________________[painting]... uh..._______________________________[food]... uh...____________________________________ [something personal]

Here’s mine

Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um... Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh... Like what?... okay... um... For me, uh... ooh... I would say... what? Dylan, to name one thing... uh... um... and Rita Hayworth dancing and um…"Beethoven’s Ninth" ... and um...Elvis singing “Don’t be Cruel”... um...Italian cinema... Love’s Body, naturally... uh...The Beatles and The Colbert Report... um... those sensual Georgia O’Keeffe flowers uh... Da Michele pizza in Naples... uh...my girls laughing.

Georgia O'Keefe IrisGeorgia O'Keefe Iris