Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 299

Notes from a trailing spouse: I’ll tell you what makes a home!

(Credit: Getty/Shutterstock/Salon)

Normally, when flying back to Abu Dhabi, where because of my husband’s job we’ve been living for the past two years, we break up the trip by stopping off in either London or Paris. This is probably not a good idea. But it seems I am a sucker for punishment and so I willingly steep myself in the rich, rank atmosphere of some old French café before throwing myself back into months and months of having my coffee in a corporate French knock-off, in a mall, in a desert, in a city that’s younger than I am.

This year, however, we flew straight back. I’m home having just left home. This isn’t a story about the woes and worries of managing two places; this is trying to figure out what makes a home.

When I was growing up, we lived on the top floor of a triplex in Montreal. My mother, rather than buying furniture, just seemed to conjure it up. There were amazing decorating phases she went through, like the time she dragged me to see a film about the British Raj and rather than using that moment to school me in the horrors of colonialism, she was in raptures about the hanging couches and walls covered in printed fabric depicted on the screen. No sooner had she said “Shazam!” than our couches were swinging from ropes, making us all a bit seasick when we sat down to watch telly. The walls too were now festooned with Indian bedspreads, most stolen, and none too clean, directly off our beds. My father was no better. He fancied himself a bit of a master. Of what was never quite determined. But he strode forth once deciding the kitchen should resemble a Lego concoction with all the components interlocking. The only trouble with that was that if one part of his shoddy construction failed, the whole kitchen — tables, shelves, with all the crockery and glasses, pots and pans — came crashing down. I think my bum right ear is the direct result of being close at hand for one of those spectacular implosions.

Home was jerry-built and jury-rigged. But for kids it was great. No worries about leaving water rings on the table or breaking some family heirloom.

Then I left that home, as one does, and moved to New York. More importantly, I came to America. Questions of home arose in the years that I lived there, not so much centered on the place, but my place in America. The whole ethos of “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” “Love it or leave it,” and “Greatest country on earth” left me feeling a bit rattled. For a country that worships independence and manifest destiny, I must admit I felt a little bullied by it all. Those days seem quite innocent now.

But I married a Yank, and his home became my home. Again, the furniture seemed to find us, not vice versa. People die, their end tables have to go somewhere. Why it had to be to our apartment I could never figure out. I don’t even have any memory of hauling the damn things in and then standing back to assess whether the gold-leaf paneling looked urban chic now that it was in Brooklyn or if it still managed to hang onto its long pedigree of tacky suburban. After years of the slow drip of dead people’s furniture, I found myself looking around and asking, “Is this my home?”

For all this doubt, I have been accused of being a domestic goddess. True, I am fanatical about my sheets and have been known to rouse both sleeping spouse and dogs so I can shake out the sheets if, god forbid, I feel even the hint of grit. I move about my kitchen with the obsessive enthusiasm of someone whose first thought in the morning is, “What am I going to make for dinner?” In fact, the best days are when I wake having dreamed my way through making some dish like homemade spiced lamb ravioli. I say my kitchen, but I live in a pre-war building, which means it has a history; it’s not just the smells from my vats of bone broth or the grease from my roast chickens that have sunk into those porous walls. None of this I mind; actually I love it. But I am aware of the ghosts of Christmas past, not to mention Easter, Thanksgiving and the thousands of ordinary meals cooked up long before me.

When we moved to Abu Dhabi, needing to hang on to our Brooklyn place, we arrived with just some clothes and a few precious books. We only had one night to sleep off the jet lag before a realtor showed up at our door. Deeply efficient, she gave us three hours to find a place to live, a home. We immediately nixed high-rises. And if you’ve seen the news out of Dubai lately, wise choice. Apparently, those things are wrapped in flammable material. Most apartments we were shown were brand new, no grease in the rafters, nor the possibility of a murder in the guest room or even an illicit affair raging between neighbors. At least not yet.

Hour three found us on Saadiyat Island, which we were told means Happy Island. All I could think of was that scene in “Jaws” when the mayor reminds a reporter that Amity Island means “Friendship.” I do have a view of the Persian Gulf, so I presume the shark can’t be far off.

My husband took one look at the place and said, “I’ll take it.” Note the “I’ll.” For the first time in nearly 30 years of marriage, I thought, “Uh oh.” What if he wields this “I’ll take it”  through the whole daunting process of filling the damn place up with stuff, stuff that apparently makes a home?

I need not have worried. It was just jet lag and the need to pee that had him being so brusque.

There we were in a brand new, completely empty apartment. Nothing, not even a worker’s forgotten tool or bottle of water. At moments like this, you can’t help but ask. “Who am I?” Then I looked at my husband and thought, “And, who the fuck is he?”

I can be pretty adamant. For instance, on the long flight to our new life every time my husband wasn’t reading or actively ignoring me, I’d issue another edict. “There is no fucking way,” I told him, “we are going to Ikea. Not one Ikea box will cross our threshold!”

“We don’t have a threshold.”

“But we will.”

Now we did. Two bedrooms, four bathrooms, a living room, a dining room, and a bizarre windowless box that the realtor had called a maid’s quarter’s — and, of course, a kitchen. All empty. Want to know the first thing I bought, mostly out of nerves? A salad dryer. Not so good for sleeping on. Hence the next few nights in a hotel.

Every morning before we headed out to furnish our home I’d asked: “What if we have no taste?”

It turns out we do have taste. Damn impractical, expensive taste. Who knew? To be fair, it was mostly a timing thing. We had bedside tables before we had a bed. A beautiful inlaid Indian cabinet, perfect for storing our booze before we had wine glasses or even knives and forks. Bookshelves and rugs before a couch and some chairs. As each thing was delivered, unwrapped, assembled, there was this sinking feeling. “This stuff is far too good for the likes of me.”

Finally, the considered buying of fancy-pants pieces had to stop; we just needed shit, and lots of it. There was just no avoiding Ikea. But before we dove in, I demanded we visit just one more store, a kitchen store, a good one. Oh boy. For the first time since we had arrived, I was in my element. And pity the poor girl who helped us. “Which knife do you think is better balanced? This one? This one? How about . . . What’s the heat conduction of this pan? As opposed to this one?”

As I write I am in our home at our heavy wooden table that seats six. For the last two years, I’ve treated the thing like it was a Ming vase. I hate it. I need to rough the place up. There, I just did it. Put my sweating glass of water directly on the table. There’s a ring, a huge ring! Thank god. Do I feel more at home now? A bit. At least, home enough to head into the kitchen and attempt to make that spiced lamb ravioli I dreamt of back in New York.  

RuPaul wins big at 2017 Emmys

RuPaul’s hit reality show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” won three Emmys last weekend.

The show, which just wrapped its ninth season, won awards in the costume and editing categories, as well as the award for “Outstanding Host of a Variety, Nonfiction Or Reality Program” (RuPaul’s second time taking home the prize).

Ahead of the ninth season’s premiere with special guest Lady Gaga, RuPaul sat down with Salon to discuss the deeper meaning of drag, beyond all of the fabulous fashion ensembles.

“Drag is a physical embodiment to say, ‘Remember, this is all a dream.’ It’s an illusion. Don’t take anything too seriously. Don’t do anything too harsh to hurt yourself, it’s an experience,” RuPaul told Salon.

For Ru, dressing in drag is about having fun with who you really are, even if it makes those around you uncomfortable.

“The whole point of drag is that we are not separate from one another; each of us are in drag. You’re born naked, the rest is drag,” he laughed. “Ain’t no two ways about it. It’s not just about little boys who want to play in girls’ things. It’s about the identity that each of us assigns to ourselves, and that’s why it’s political. That’s why it’s really important. That’s why it ruffles so many feathers, because a shape shifter — drag queen — is telling you you’re not who you think you are.”

“RuPaul’s Drag Race” is also up for an award at the primetime Emmys on Sunday, September 17 for “Best Reality Competition Series.”

Everything we thought we knew about Devo’s “Whip It” was wrong

(Credit: Bloomsbury Publishing/Salon)

Go forward, move ahead, try to detect it, it’s not too late.

Let’s get one thing clear about Devo’s biggest hit of all time: “Whip It” is not a song about masturbation, or S&M. At least that’s the story that everyone involved is sticking to, and it seems unlikely that a band who in 1974 had recorded a demo with the lyrics “I need a chick to suck my dick” (later released on Hardcore Devo: Volume 2) would demur on this point.

According to Jerry, who wrote the lyrics, “Whip It” is a tongue-in-cheek pep talk satirizing hollow American optimism. “I had been reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and he had these limericks and poems in there that really made me laugh, where he was making fun of all the American, capitalist, can-do clichés—Horatio Alger—‘there’s nobody else like you,’ ‘you’re number one,’ ‘you can do it.’ And I was just trying my hand at it.”

While it would certainly be consistent with Devo’s methods to include a knowing double entendre, they are adamantly ambivalent about the common misunderstanding, which both goosed the song’s popularity and made it ever more clear that the masses would never quite get what the band were trying to do. “We wrote it as a ‘you can do it, Dale Carnegie’ pep talk for President Carter,” says Mark. “We were afraid that Republicans were going to get in there [in 1980], and they sounded very nasty at the time. They were running this guy, Ronald Reagan, that seemed like a total—he seemed like he didn’t even have a brain. We were like, ‘How could that be our president? That’s impossible, that they choose him to run for president.’ So we were writing this music that was like, ‘You can do it, Mr. President.’ And then, of course, we were doing lots of interviews back then, and we’d have to get up at seven so we could go be on a morning talk show while people are driving to work. And we’d be sitting in the other room waiting to go in and talk to the disc jockey, and he’d be on the air, going, ‘You know, I whipped it just the other day, haw haw haw haw,’ and we’re like, ‘What an asshole.’ We felt very misunderstood. And then it just gave us more reasons to be crabby.” But when it came time to make the song’s now-legendary music video, Devo ran with the S&M theme to absurd extremes.

If you know nothing else about Devo, you know “Whip It,” the band’s only gold-certified single, which reached No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became a defining anthem of new wave’s rise. The song’s drumbeat and primary guitar and keyboard lines are each so distinctive that they could likely be identified, even in isolation, by anyone who’d heard the song a few times. That each part stands so well on its own is probably because Jerry says he assembled “Whip It” from two separate sketches—the famous five-note climb and the slower, three-note descent—that Mark brought to the group on cassette tape from his at-home writing sessions. “I asked him when he did that ‘doon-doon-doon-doom-dong’ riff, and he goes ‘well, I’ve had that for about six months,’” says Jerry. “I said ‘Really?’ and he goes ‘yeah, it’s just “Oh, Pretty Woman” cut in half.’”

Mark had been living with his brother at the house of Bob’s girlfriend’s mother, who rented him a small bedroom for sleeping while not on tour and writing music. “I had been listening to Roy Orbison, and I really liked the song ‘Oh, Pretty Woman,’” says Mark. “And then I started thinking about how you take things apart, and reductive synthesis, so I just took part of the riff, and I wrote another ending. I just took some basic, generic thing and put an ending on it that was a different sound and from a different place.”

The motorik drumbeat grew out of another collaboration, with Captain Beefheart’s drummer Robert Williams, who shared a house not far from Mark with Go-Go’s drummer Gina Schock. “I didn’t really have a good set of drum loops or drum machines or anything, so what I used to do is lug my tape recorder with me over to my friend Robert Williams’s house,” says Mark. “The Go-Go’s would rehearse there. Captain Beefheart would rehearse there. I would take my tape recorder and play a drum beat, and get Robert to play it for, like, four minutes on a tape so I could write music to it. And so, he was the first person who played the ‘Whip It’ drum beat, and he played it without any music.” Alan Myers then added fills and made the quick, relentless rhythm his own; it’s one of the best examples of Alan’s ability to be, as Jerry called him after his death in 2013, a “human metronome and then some.” The song absolutely relies on the beat’s consistency and drive.

For the all-important whipping sounds, Devo and Robert Margouleff used an EML ElectroComp 500 synthesizer, Neumann KM 84 and U 87 condenser mics, and a lot of space. “There was a long hallway at The Record Plant that was actually outdoors between two buildings, but only about three and a half feet wide,” says Margouleff. “We used that hallway to go from Studio A to Studio B and then back into the back of the building. It was very reverberant, and that’s where we recorded that whip crack.” There’s also a whipping-back-and-forth quality to the vocals, which Mark and Jerry decided to trade off. “It was a call and response,” says Jerry. “Kind of like white boys rapping.”

Unlike artists who grow to hate their biggest hit (see Robert Plant vs. “Stairway To Heaven”), Devo don’t begrudge “Whip It” its iconic status, though they would have liked more of their songs to achieve it. “I’m glad it was ‘Whip It,’ because it’s certainly twisted and original,” says Jerry. “Those are the hallmarks of Devo, that you expect something different or witty or twisted, a little off. It has all that. And it came from a good place; it came from a pure, creative, open collaboration, and that’s to me when all the best stuff comes.”

Lots of love for driverless cars, just not from drivers

(Credit: AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

As tech companies and automakers, cheered on by the federal government, race to test and promote autonomous vehicles, several surveys show that most motorists don’t want to drive, ride in or be on the road anywhere near them.

What’s more, as development efforts pick up steam, the level of public skepticism seems to be mounting.

This week, in the latest federal effort to encourage driverless vehicles, the Department of Transportation announced a largely hands-off strategy for testing them on public roads. The voluntary guidelines came just days after the House approved legislation to allow testing of thousands of the robot cars on public roads over the next several years. Senate action is still pending.

The driving public, however, appears far more cautious, according to a string of studies by organizations including AAA, Kelley Blue Book, J.D. Power, the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Instituteand the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In May, an MIT white paper declared that “comfort or trust in full automation appears to be declining” after “numerous strides and setbacks … on the path to highly automated vehicles.”

Over time, MIT reported, the reality of autonomous vehicles has begun sinking in with the development of self-driving Tesla hardware and hands-free highway driving for 2018 Cadillacs — and such cautionary tales as the May 2016 death of a motorist using Tesla’s “Autopilot” system that steered his car into a tractor-trailer truck in Florida.

In the latest MIT AgeLab survey, a mere 13 percent of motorists said they would feel comfortable with features that fully released them of all control of their vehicles — down from nearly 25 percent the previous year.

Trust is declining

The findings mirrored those in a larger 2017 study by J.D. Power, which showed declining trust in automated technology among “Gen Z consumers” (born between 1995-2004) and “Pre-Boomers” (born before 1946).

“In most cases, as technology concepts get closer to becoming reality, consumer curiosity and acceptance increase,” said Kristin Kolodge, executive director of driver interaction research at J.D. Power, when the study was released in April. “With autonomous vehicles … the level of trust is declining.”

But Kolodge said this could change. “As features like adaptive cruise control, automatic braking and blind-spot warning systems become mainstream, car buyers will gain more confidence in taking their hands off the steering wheel.”

The AAA reports a similar sense of wariness: More than three-quarters of Americans are afraid to ride in a self-driving vehicle, according to a national survey this year.

Last year, Kelley Blue Book reported that 80 percent of people surveyed said they should always have the option to drive their vehicles and two-thirds said they preferred to be in full control of their car at all times.

And in August, the research firm Gartner Inc. released a survey showing that more than half of respondents in the U.S. and Germany would not consider riding in a fully autonomous vehicle.

“Fear of autonomous vehicles getting confused by unexpected situations, safety concerns around equipment and system failures and vehicle and system security are top concerns around using fully autonomous vehicles,” said Gartner research director Mike Ramsey.

One of the few outliers was a survey by the Consumer Technology Association, a leading trade group which last year released a poll showing that 70 percent of U.S. consumers want to try out an autonomous car. The association represents 2,200 companies in the consumer electronics industry, some with a stake in the development of self-driving cars. Technology association spokesman Tyler Suiters said in an email to FairWarning that his group’s survey “asked about interest in the benefits that self-driving cars will deliver, and interest in test driving and owning” a self-driving car.

A February letter from the association to federal transportation officials attacked proposed federal guidelines aimed at reducing driver distraction from electronic devices. But its leaders also suggested, “The risk of distracted driving may one day entirely be eliminated by increasingly automated vehicles and, ultimately, self-driving cars.”

On Tuesday, in issuing the Trump Administration’s voluntary guidelines for testing driverless cars, Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao said the new technology could help reduce the annual toll of about 40,000 U.S. traffic deaths that mainly result from human error.

Lack of “system safeguards”

Also this week, the National Transportation Safety Board released findings on the deadly May 2016 Tesla crash in Florida. NTSB Chairman Robert L. Sumwalt III blamed the “driver’s inattention” and said that “system safeguards, that should have prevented the Tesla’s driver from using the car’s automation system on certain roadways, were lacking.”

“While automation in highway transportation has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives, until that potential is fully realized, people still need to safely drive their vehicles,” Sumwalt said.

These findings are more critical of Tesla than those of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration , which in January declared there was no specific safety-related defect in the Tesla technology.

This week a consumer group, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, criticized what it called “a hands-off approach to hands-free driving,” saying that the Tesla case underscores the need for a tougher regulatory approach.

By merely issuing voluntary guidelines, federal authorities are dodging their responsibilities, said Cathy Chase, vice president of governmental affairs for the Advocates group. “The Tesla crash, sadly, will likely be just the first example demonstrating why the federal government needs to give AV [autonomous vehicle] manufacturers clear rules and regulations as they roll out this new technology into the marketplace.”

“Talking Heads: 77,” released 40 years ago tomorrow

Talking Heads (Credit: Sire Records)

Last year, the rumor mill went into overdrive with whispers that Talking Heads might be reuniting. The very idea was momentous: Save for a 2002 appearance at their Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, the beloved post-punk quartet — guitarist/vocalist David Byrne, bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz and guitarist/keyboardist Jerry Harrison — hadn’t done a proper gig as Talking Heads since 1984. (Byrne and Harrison joined Frantz and Weymouth at a Tom Tom Club gig to play “Psycho Killer” in 1989, however.)

The rumored reunion never materialized, of course — the source was a dubious satirical news site, and Frantz further told BlastEcho, “I wish it were true. It should be happening but [frontman] David [Byrne] is holding out” —  but the fervor illuminated the enduring affection toward Talking Heads. Formed in 1975 in New York City, the band combined surrealism and whimsy in smart, inventive ways that were aligned with a multi-cultural rhythmic backbone, forward-thinking genre hybridizations and an askew approach to sounds.

This legacy began with the band’s debut LP, “Talking Heads: 77,” which was released on September 16, 1977. The words “minimal” or “minimalist” were often used at the time to describe Talking Heads, which is entirely correct. The record’s music is spacious, almost self-indulgently so, and deliberate. Every sound — a frayed guitar riff, a lurking bass line, confetti-shower piano, a rattlesnake drum roll — has a purpose and place and works in meticulous tandem with its surroundings. Even the cover’s stark nature is streamlined: It’s a brilliant tomato-red color with green text spelling out the album’s name in a classic typeface that recalls a storied newspaper.

Because things are so orderly, “Talking Heads: 77″ possesses an aura of simplicity. On the watercolor soul-funk jam “The Book I Read” and the deceptively carefree “Don’t Worry About the Government,” this austerity is soothing. During other moments — the self-explanatory “Psycho Killer,” the haywire twirl “New Feeling” — Talking Heads’ methodical approach drums up tension. The push-pull between these moods gives “Talking Heads: 77″ a balanced sound that speaks to the band’s instinctual bent; the album is never too rigid or laissez-faire.

“None of us read music,” Weymouth told Vivien Goldman in the June 26, 1977 issue of Sounds. “We all suspect technique, because so much of that early ’70s technical prowess just turned out boring. I have a basic idea about what a rhythm section, bass and drums, should do. I dislike flashiness, I think it’s ridiculous. If people clap because it sounds good, that’s the point.

“It doesn’t matter that they don’t realize you’re playing something complicated which sounds simple,” she adds. “I’d sooner play something which sounds simple and repetitive than clutter up the sound. It’s all a case of keeping the beat and carrying momentum.”

Indeed, “Talking Heads: 77″ has its own singular internal rhythms and structures governing the music. Calling the record post-punk or new wave makes sense, because it’s a pastiche of granular influences (e.g., soul, dub, tropicalia, folk, ’60s rock) stitched together in precise and different ways. Harrison’s keyboards cushion the main melodies and instrumentation, buoying the music without taking up too much space, while hints of exotic percussion or unorthodox instrumentation add subtle accent colors.

Such an economical approach also permeates the lyrics, which resemble running narrations from omniscient protagonists. “Uh-Oh, Love Comes Town” describes in matter-of-fact terms what happens as someone falls into a romance; “New Feelings” reads like a detailed monologue dissecting nostalgia and the progression of time; “Happy Day” is a charmingly child-like recounting of a special memory. The most effective song is “No Compassion” — a timeless tune about having zero patience for people who wallow in problems rather than solving them — which ends several verses with the brusque statement, “They say compassion is a virtue, but I don’t have the time.”

Yet “Talking Heads: 77″ is also full of subtle complexities: “Tentative Decisions” is a mirror image of sorts, with lyrics that flip genders halfway through in order to illustrate a relationship’s shared anxieties, while “Don’t Worry About the Government” scans like naïve, misplaced trust in leaders (“I see the laws made in Washington, D.C./I think of the ones I consider my favorites”) and illusory comforts.

The concerns detailed on “Talking Heads: 77″ feel universal, perhaps because Byrne uses a detached, observational tone and shares concerns without being preachy. Still, the record’s dispassionate edge is mitigated by his rubbery delivery: Byrne uses wordless noises for effect on the tropical “First Week/Last Week . . . Carefree,” and employs clenched-teeth wails, animated vibrato and theatrical exhortations. It’s catharsis that’s indicative of the band members’ insistence on resonance.

“One of the reasons why we decided to take the risk and make the band, even though we weren’t sure at all how we would be received and we knew it would be a lot of work, was because we were very disgusted with the art world,” Weymouth told Big Star magazine in 1977.

There was so much heroizing, and the artists that we met were so inflated with themselves — not all of them, but a number of them — and so full of themselves. People really looked up to them as though they were magicians, real heroes, and they thought of themselves as elitists: fine artists, and therefore very noble, and I think that kind of turned us off.

It really made us decide we don’t like heroes; we don’t like any of that, and we’re certainly not going to be heroes ourselves. We’re not gonna do that; we’re always gonna be normal people. We’re not gonna be pretentious and try to have people look up to us as though we’re something special. We try to stick to that pretty much.

Despite such self-effacement, Talking Heads were special. Critics, to their credit, tried to dig into Talking Heads’ nuances and how the band fit into the burgeoning New York scene. For example, the Rolling Stone review of the album wrote, “Dressing like a quartet of Young Republicans, playing courteously toned-down music and singing lyrics lauding civil servants, parents and college, Talking Heads are not even remotely punks. Rather, they are the great Ivy League hope of pop music.”

The band members themselves also resisted being lumped in with the punk movement, as they recognized such a monolithic tag didn’t make sense. “We don’t feel that in our performance we typify that angry attitude,” Byrne told Melody Maker’s Caroline Coon in the May 21, 1977 issue. “We don’t eschew the primitivism — you know, the less is more and the more is less — but that’s not quite what we’re doing.

“They tend to believe that if you do something in a slick way, then it has no feeling. We don’t hold that to be true. That doesn’t necessarily mean we want to be real slick. At the same time, just not being slick doesn’t mean that it’s coming from the heart.

“I like to leave it up to someone else to say whether we’re New and that’s Old,” he adds. “I didn’t think of the band as joining the new wave but I did start out by thinking that I’d like to do something a little fresher than what you see in the chart!”

“Talking Heads: 77″ did sound fresh, and it didn’t take long for people to catch on. Although the album stalled at No. 97 on the U.S. album charts and “Psycho Killer” reached No. 92 on the singles charts, the band’s next record, 1978’s “More Songs About Buildings and Food,” peaked at No. 29 on the pop charts and spawned a Top 40 hit with a cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.” Talking Heads added depth, texture and shading on future records, but the sturdy foundation the band built with “Talking Heads: 77″ lingered for the rest of their career.

Why “South Park” is perfectly armed to fight the alt-right

South Park (Credit: YouTube/South Park Studios)

“South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are harboring a dirty secret: Much of their audience, the 18- to 34-year-old demographic, overlaps with a certain young, male, white slice of President Donald Trump’s base. You know, the ones who troll liberals online and proudly rock MAGA hats in public.

It is perhaps the reality of this ugly Venn diagram that led Parker and Stone to announce that “South Park’s” 21st season, which debuted last Wednesday on Comedy Central, would avoid satirizing the president. In an interview with Bill Simmons, the cartoonists claimed that they had grown tired of mocking Trump, whom they compared to a monkey “running himself into the wall over and over.”

While Trump has been low-hanging fruit for comedians, a particularly nasty segment of the president’s base is no laughing matter. Known as the alt-right, these online trolls get a kick out of transgressing liberal sensibilities. They not only dabble in sexism and anti-Semitism; they have built an aesthetic based on white supremacy and claims of reverse racism. Founded and subsequently nurtured on 4chan and other anonymous online communities, the alt-right gleefully breaks modern-day taboos as a form of protest against normative ideals.

It is this counterculture that can often be found in “South Park” — especially in the earlier seasons. “South Park” created a cult following through an unabashed, irreverent humor that spared nothing and no one. Indeed, the show has even been labeled “racist” for its abuse of ethnic stereotypes. Hell, one of its few black characters is named Token.

The alt-right revels in what they see as an unapologetic contempt for all that others deem holy. In truth, the creators are far more nuanced and progressive than most give them credit for. Token, for instance, amplifies the fact that, yep, TV shows employ token, often one-dimensional characters of color in a practice that is often more a disservice to underrepresented groups than a benefit to them. Still, parker and Stone cannot deny that “South Park” has fans in the some of the darkest, most hateful corners of the internet.

When the duo said it would no longer parody Trump on their show, The_Donald subreddit, an online basket for the president’s “deplorables,” rejoiced over the news. “Fuck yea. Finally looking forward to a new season of South Park,” one Reddit user said. “Its only fun when the snowflakes get bashed [sic],” another user chimed in. “THEY LIVE! Matt Stone and Trey Parker are COMING BACK TO REALITY!,” an enthusiastic redditor proclaimed.

While this decision appeased Trump’s base, Parker and Stone absolutely did not preclude them from the scope of their ridicule.

In the season premiere on Wednesday, Parker and Stone set their sights on a big sector of Trump fans — the kind of white, blue-collar voters who blame everyone but themselves for their economic status. The episode, which Deadline called a “subtle takedown of white supremacists,” had two narratives: the town’s Confederate flag-waving rednecks protesting Amazon’s Alexa for taking their jobs, and Randy’s feud with the protestors for disrupting the set of his HGTV-inspired TV show, “White People Renovating Houses.”

Randy concocts a plan to replace all Alexas in town with the aggrieved white nationalists, thereby ending the Confederate-themed demonstrations. When one of the protestors refuses, calling the labor demeaning, Randy fumes, “Sorry you didn’t go to college so you have to take the jobs you can get. Coal mining and truck driving are not exactly jobs of the future. You’re stuck in another time.” The protestor runs off, yelling, “Muslims trying to kill us, black people rioting, Mexicans having babies – I say, ‘Kill ’em all!'”

The political satire was admittedly muddled, but it succeeded in crystallizing the absurdity of white, blue-collar entitlement. The target of the premiere was older Americans, those who have seen the new economy pass them by. Yet “South Park” has an unusual opportunity in future episodes to use its comedy to enlighten young, disenchanted white men who have embraced the alt-right ideology.

Parker and Stone did not create “South Park” to push a political agenda. The self-described libertarians are in it for the jokes. They also likely despise liberals as much as these new-age conservatives — a healthy, fair position. But because “South Park” spares nobody its scorn, Parker and Stone can — and perhaps should — do the country a solid and employ the alt-right’s tactless humor against them. As a Trojan horse, “South Park” can finally demonstrate to members of the alt-right just how pathetic and ultimately self-destructive their dead-end worldview is. They’re watching, after all.

Although the alt-right frequently bemoans the liberal bubble, they are just as guilty of confining themselves to their favorite channels. “South Park” has been a safe space for the alt-right since its inception. It would be only appropriate if the show turned around and devoured its own viewers.

“Strong Island”: A family’s navigation between loss and injustice

“What they spent time on was investigating his background,” Barbara Dunmore says of her son William Ford Jr. in the new documentary “Strong Island.”

“Strong Island” tells the story of the murder of 24-year-old Ford, a black teacher killed by a white 19-year-old mechanic named Mark Reilly in Long Island in 1992. The film, which arrives to Netflix Sept. 15, is directed by Yance Ford, William Jr.’s brother. “Strong Island” charts the Ford family’s tragic loss, as they mourned the murder of their loved one and navigated the racism that resulted in William Jr.’s past being investigated rather than the perpetrator.

“Countless number of times, and all hours of the night, during the summer after my brother was killed, I could look outside the window, and there was a car parked across the street,” Yance Ford says in the exclusive clip for Salon. “That car, and whoever was in that car, was watching our house and trying to intimidate my parents.”

In the clip, the phone incessantly rings as a backdrop to Yance Ford’s voice. “The phone rang in the middle of the night, every night for months,” he explains, “When I was home, I unplugged all of the phones in the house, except for the one in my room, so that my parents could sleep through the night.”

A murder is devastating enough, but “Strong Island” shows how a family was forced to endure far more, as injustice from investigators and the criminal justice system prevailed. “Having grown up in the South where the cops and the Klan were one and the same, my parents didn’t turn to the police for protection; they had already felt that the police had turned their own son into the prime suspect in his murder,” Ford says. “But there was the growing sense that the DA is going to actually let this kid get away with murder.

A grand jury declined to indict Reilly.

Rostam’s long-awaited debut solo album “Half-Light” is out today

Rostam (Credit: Alex John Beck)

Vampire Weekend was a near-instant hit in late 2007 thanks to internet buzz and music blogs. Their debut record came out the following year and mixed highly catchy indie-pop with African and Caribbean influences. It was lead singer/guitarist Ezra Koenig’s brainy but slyly emotive lyrics that got a lot of the attention.

In the background, multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij existed more in the shadows, but he did much to shape just what people loved about Vampire Weekend. He co-wrote much of the material with Koenig, and served as the producer of the first two records: “Vampire Weekend” (2008) and “Contra” (2010). It was a peculiarity of the band dynamic that being a member seemed to detract from his unique contribution to the record’s aesthetic.

His production and collaboration skills have always been a major asset. That’s obvious now. Since “Contra,” he’s stepped away to work with other artists, many of whom are in totally different genres, like Haim, Frank Ocean and Charli XCX. The results have been consistently top-notch. He was so involved with the Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser’s “I Had a Dream That You Were Mine” album last year, that he got shared billing on the record.

Now the name Rostam can be added to a short list of producers that have gennuine star-power. It’s a strange turn of events f0r Batmanglij, but one that makes sense to him.

“Producers either get credited for everything, or they get credited for nothing. I’m OK with that,” Batmanglij says when I ask him about becoming well-known for producing. “When I work with artists, I want it to be about the artist. I love helping them realize their vision. I love us realizing a shared vision. I don’t really care about the perception.”

Early last year, Batmanglij announced he was leaving Vampire Weekend, saying in a Twitter post: “My identity as a songwriter and producer, I realized, needs to stand on its own.” He made it clear that he would still be working with Vampire Weekend in the future, but days after his announcement he released the solo track “Wood,” giving folks a sense of what his songwriting identity standing on its own might sound like.

It’s a tripped-out pop song that mixes sitars, orchestras and Indian percussion, one that expresses a gentle vulnerability about love. Surprisingly, the melodies so closely bring to mind Vampire Weekend, it really begs the question: Just how much did Batmanglij contribute to the band’s songwriting and overall sound?

Batmanglij’s album gets released today, and it’s a phenomenal work of art. On his website there’s a link to a Spotify playlist that includes everything he’s ever worked on, including his solo material, Vampire Weekend and songs by other artists that he’s produced. There is a clear cohesion to all of it. (“I think of that as my body of work,” he explains.)

“I don’t like to think that suddenly this record changes my career and that I’ll never produce other artists, because I don’t see my career that way. I think what I do see going forward is being able to do a lot of things. And I think that’s a healthy way to live,” Batmanglij says. “I think what’s different about this record is that the lyrics were coming from me and I don’t think that any of these songs would make sense if anyone else was singing them.”

Folks got a glimpse of “Wood” back in 2011, when Batmanglij  posted the song to his Tumblr page. (He also posted the song “Don’t Let It Get to You.”) That’s the last people heard of his solo work until 2016 when he remastered and re-released “Wood.” During that time, he maintained a busy schedule as an increasingly in-demand producer, plus Vampire Weekend’s third album “Modern Vampires of the City” in 2013, which he plays on and co-produced.  

“This record was something that I would pick up and put down. There were times I had doubts that it would come out, but I never stopped working on it,” Batmanglij says. “I think what made me want to release it was feeling like probably having a little bit more self-esteem than I had had prior in some ways. I knew I wanted to talk about some things that were hard to talk about, lyrically. It took me time to figure out how to say those things.”  

The impetus for the record goes all the way back to the early years of Vampire Weekend, between the first and second album. Vampire Weekend may have entered 2008 as the hot new guitar-based indie-rock band, but they — Batmanglij in particular — had always wanted to fuse electronic elements in the group. Batmanglij’s other project, Discovery, which predates Vampire Weekend, was electronic.

“I was trying to push that marriage of the electronic and the organic to the point where there really is no line between the two,” Batmanglij says. “I think it was an underlining ethos on this record. It’s something that, I’ll be honest, I haven’t thought about too much in the last nine years. I guess it’s been in my subconscious.”

There were certainly strides toward bringing in more electronic elements to “Contra.” Even more so to “Modern Vampires,” which Batmanglij considers to be an electronic album. “Half-Light” not only further blurs these lines, but he manages to mix a sound that’s simple and complex in a way that intuitive and surprising at once. Multiple layers of instrumentation exist in a way that isn’t overbearing. Pop melodies butt up against the experimental edge of music. His quiet, non-invasive voice, while it might not seem an obvious choice for a pop lead singer, blends beautifully with the music on “Half-Light,” almost like another instrument in the orchestra of sounds.

For Batmanglij, it’s been a unique experience to be the center of focus and the primary creative drive, one he seems currently comfortable with, but it’s taken a lot of time to get there. Part of why he released a couple singles in 2011 was that he started working with producer Ariel Rechtshaid, who is known for his production and collaborations with Adele, Beyoncé, and Carly Rae Jepsen. The two would casually listen to songs Batmanglij recorded, Rechtshaid would give feedback, and if they had ideas, they’d head over to the studio and record them.

“He had a lot of material, and I just thought it was great. It’s a funny thing, the process of making music; so often you’re just working on music, and you’re not quite sure what it’s going to be for necessarily until it’s done,” Rechtshaid says. “I can’t remember the exact conversations we had about it, it was effectively me hearing stuff, lots of stuff that he was working on, and going, ‘this is fucking great.’ He was like, ‘really?’ Like yeah.”

In thinking about his time working with Rechtshaid, something that really sticks out for Batmanglij it is how he helped him become a lead singer. (“What Ariel gave me was a confidence in myself as a singer I would say, first and foremost.”)

They did work a lot, but the full-length album wouldn’t be ready to release for another six years — Batmanglij had extremely high standards for his solo work. The two had such a good dynamic, that they co-produced the next Vampire Weekend album together. And more recently, they worked as co-producers on Haim’s second record.

“He’s a very talented musician. He’s got a lot of ideas,” Rechtshaid says. “He’s got a really uplifting energy too. And on top of that has the knowledge to craft sounds in the computer and in the studio. As a producer, he’s powerful.”

“Half-Light” is meticulously crafted. The line that separates its pop elements and experimental ones are hard to define. Genre-wise, no label quite fits, which makes sense since he works with artists of all genres. Batmanglij attributes his desire to blur these lines to his age, as someone that was born in the ’80s and had immediate access to all music as a teenager.

He laughs at one point when he recalls the buzz around Vampire Weekend in 2008, and how interviewers would ask him about his favorite indie rock bands, the assumption being that he was obviously an indie rock guy.

“I could give a shit about indie rock. If there’s one genre that speaks less to me than any other, it’s indie rock. I never felt like, ‘oh this is my music.’ I didn’t know what the website Pitchfork was until I got to college when I was 18,” Batmanglij says. “I loved experimental music and electronic music, but I didn’t come at it from certain angles that you might expect.”

The fact is, his background in college was studying classical music. He describes to me a memory of one professor dissecting the sound of waves crashing and showed how an orchestra could replicate that sound. As a kid, he would gleefully read interviews with producer Nigel Godrich. But a key element to how his process developed as a child was observing his parents. His mom wrote cookbooks, and his dad was her publisher.

“I probably saw something in my parents that was akin to a producer/artist relationship,” Batmanglij says. “I think a lot of what being a producer is about is translation.”

In a way, what’s so special about this solo record is that it’s the least collaborative project that Batmanglij has ever been a part of. It took him nearly a decade to tweak every element, but it really gives you a window into who he is as an artist on his own merits.

Trump’s DACA deal has angered some supporters, but unlikely to harm him with GOP

Carlos Esteban, a nursing student and recipient of DACA, rallies in support of DACA. (Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin)

President Donald Trump angered angered many of his loudest supporters this week with his seeming willingness to come to a deal with Democrats to keep many illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

Anti-immigration pundits like radio host Laura Ingraham and columnist Ann Coulter are positively fuming at Trump.

Coulter even appeared to endorse impeaching Trump and seceding from the United States:

Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa who frequently makes statements that connect him to the “alt-right” (such as his claim that deported illegal immigrants can go back to their native lands to teach how “civilized people interact with each other”), was similarly apoplectic. “Trump base is blown up, destroyed, irreparable, and disillusioned beyond repair,” he tweeted after news broke that the president may have cut a deal.

“A party this out of sync with its voters will collapse and splinter,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson warned on Thursday night.

Despite the anger of Trump’s hardcore media supporters, however, the available political science data suggest that their predictions are likely to be wrong.

Long before Trump’s political star rose, the Associated Press conducted a poll in May 2015 which indicated that a majority of Americans favored keeping in the country those who were protected by former president Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. 55 percent of Republicans in the survey said they would be willing to vote for a candidate who kept DACA in place.

As the issue has come further into the national political conversation, the Republican numbers have not been moving in a more enforcement-oriented direction. In a March poll released by CNN, just 21 percent of respondents who leaned Republican said they favored making deportation the top priority on immigration. In a Politico poll released last week, just 24 percent of self-identified Republicans said they believed that “Dreamers,” those protected by DACA, should be deported.

While Trump is unlikely to offend most of his Republican base by agreeing not to deport DACA protectees, that does not mean that Congress will necessarily go along. That’s because Republican politicians frequently cast votes that run contrary to public opinion. They do so because a sizable enough number of hardcore activists use their intensity to push the GOP to adopt their views, as Harry Enten and Perry Bacon noted on Tuesday at FiveThirtyEight:

A DACA-like bill could be approved by Congress. But there’s a big force in the way: Anti-immigration sentiment in the Republican Party. DACA may be popular, even among some Republicans, but hardline immigration policy has been growing as an animating force in GOP politics for years. It helped put Trump in the White House. …

Immigration is similar to guns in that the Democratic position on many specific immigration policy questions is more popular than the Republican position, but Republicans hold their own on immigration more generally. Much of Trump’s immigration agenda doesn’t poll well: For instance, there isn’t broad support for building a border wall with Mexico, limiting legal immigration or ending DACA. …

Additionally, immigration tends to be an issue that is more important to Republicans than Democrats. The 2016 national exit poll found that Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 31 percentage points among voters who said immigration was the most important issue facing the country. The 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study found that 73 percent of Trump voters said immigration was of “very high importance” to them, compared with 24 percent of Clinton voters.

Trump may be willing to cut a deal with Democrats on DACA, but that doesn’t mean that congressional Republicans will let him do so.

Air Force chaplain: Don’t let non-Christian service members practice their faith

(Credit: Facebook/United States Air Force)

Captain Sonny Hernandez, a chaplain at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, has become the subject of a formal complaint after he published an article claiming that Christians who serve in the armed forces should not support the rights of non-Christians to practice their faiths.

“Christian service members who openly profess and support the rights of Muslims, Buddhists, and all other anti-Christian worldviews to practice their religions—because the language in the Constitution permits—are grossly in error, and deceived,” Hernandez wrote in an essay for a Christian nationalist website.

He continued:

“Counterfeit Christians in the Armed forces will appeal to the Constitution, and not Christ. … This is why so many professing Christian service members will say: ‘We “support everyone’s right” to practice their faith regardless if they worship a god different from ours because the Constitution protects this right.'”

Hernandez is a part of a growing movement within some fundamentalist armed forces chaplains to openly defy military policies governing political activity and sectarian worship while in uniform.

According to Newsweek, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has filed several requests that the Department of Defense investigate Hernandez for inappropriate conduct.

In a statement, the MRFF said Hernandez’s latest article “blatantly and indisputably advocates the subordinating of the U.S. Constitution to his personal Christian ideology and violated his Oath of Office as a commissioned officer, as well as Title 18, U.S. Code § 2387’s criminal prohibitions against counseling or urging insubordination, disloyalty, or ‘refusal of duty’ to other military members.”

Complaints of military chaplains engaging in overtly sectarian behavior have doubled since Donald Trump became president, according to MRFF.

“America’s military members look to the president for direction and inspiration,” Weinstein told Newsweek. “Trump’s statements and actions have fully endorsed and validated this unbridled tidal wave of fundamentalist Christian persecution, which is now more inextricably intertwined into the very fabric of our Department of Defense than ever before.”

Perhaps Hernandez is trying to horn in on the turf of Gordon Klingenschmitt, a former Navy chaplain, who currently is the most notable Christian nationalist chaplain. Klingenschmitt became a minor Religious Right celebrity after he unsuccessfully and falsely claimed that punishment he faced for engaging in political activity in uniform was somehow a religious persecution, as Americans United for Separation of Church and State reported in 2014:

In the spring of 2006, Klingenschmitt appeared at a right-wing rally in Washington, D.C. He was wearing his uniform at the time. Had he attended the event in civilian garb, there would have been no problem, but Klingenschmitt’s use of his uniform was a clear violation of military regulations.

Klingenschmitt’s appearance at the rally was the final straw for Navy officials. He had been causing trouble for a long time and was not considered an effective chaplain. A 2004 poll of service personnel on the USS Anzio, where Klingenschmitt then served, reaped numerous negative comments, among them “worst CHAP I have seen in 17 years,” “would never seek counsel from CHAPS,” and “he is one of the worst CHAPs I have seen.”

Navy officials decided to ease Klingenschmitt out of the service. After the Evangelical Episcopal Church pulled its endorsement of Klingenschmitt, Navy officials decertified him as a chaplain, and he was separated from the U.S. Navy.

Unhappy about this, Klingenschmitt filed a number of administrative challenges and lawsuits, but they have not been successful. Last week, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims rejected his most recent suit.

Judge Elaine D. Kaplan noted that Navy officials outlined in detail the reasons why they sent Klingenschmitt packing.

“Based on these recommendations and the entire record, the Assistant Secretary (acting pursuant to a delegation of authority from the Secretary) determined that Dr. Klingenschmitt was ‘professionally unsuited for further service as a naval officer and chaplain,’” wrote Kaplan in the ruling for Klingenschmitt v.United States of America.

Kaplan noted that Navy officials scored Klingenschmitt’s “performance and disciplinary record (including his fitness reports and court-martial conviction) as well as the lack of support for him in his chain of command.” The judged cited a 2006 fitness report that graded Klingenschmitt “below average in the area of military bearing/character.” The same report found that his “recent professional performance has been unsatisfactory.”

Klingenschmitt created a myth around himself that he was persecuted for trying to pray in the name of Jesus. After Klingenschmitt was removed from the Navy, he turned his fake story into a web and local television show. He later successfully ran for the Colorado House of Representatives, serving a single term, in the process becoming legendary within the state for his numerous erratic and offensive statements.

Sonny Hernandez could be well on his way.