Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 20

Marching Toward The Promised Land

When he was a child in the 1960s, Simon Yisrael Feuerman’s father told him that Jews and African-Americans, though both minorities, were not oppressed “in the same way.” He reflects on how that ambiguity worked itself out as Jews joined the civil rights movement:

Most notably, our cousin Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously marched in Selma in 1965. For religious and secular Jews alike, the cause was a moral imperative. Their story, the African-American story, was in some way our story. We knew what it meant to be hated. What’s more, they had their very own Moses, Martin Luther King Jr., a man who quoted and infused life into scripture better than any rabbi I ever knew.

But the fight for civil rights also offered the Jewish community an opportunity. It dovetailed with a deep messianic urge that had been both reborn and transfigured in 20th century America. American Jews had become mesmerized, intoxicated even, by the idea that we no longer had to live life in humiliating passivity waiting for the Messiah. Instead, we, like our black brethren, could become active in ‘forcing the hand of the Messiah’ through overt action and protest. In other words, we could shape our lives with our hands, feet, mouths, and hearts as American blacks did the same. And so we marched with them.

Perhaps the rift between blacks and Jews that began in the late 1960s was rooted in the idea that some African Americans sensed that with all our good intentions we had piggybacked on them. We had used the muscularity of their cause not purely out of a Jewish love of righteousness, but because it gave us a chance to establish our own house in America, cashing in our secularized messianic yearnings on their backs….

Mental Health Break

Behold the ermine:

Quote For The Day

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, – is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate,” – Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.

The View From Your Window

Wiesbaden, Germany, 2.15 pm

Ralph Waldo Embarrassment

Micah Mattix lays into the celebrated American philosopher:

His central idea, of course, is “Trust thyself.” In his earlier essays, he encourages his readers to disregard the past, institutions, and dogma, and to obey “the eternal law” within. “I will not hide my tastes or aversions,” he writes. “I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints.” But in a later essay on Napoleon, who seems to have embodied the “deep” self-trust Emerson lauds, he states confusingly (after praising Napoleon) that what made Napoleon’s egoism wrong was that it “narrowed, impoverished and absorbed the power and existence of those who served him.” And whose fault is this?

It was not Bonaparte’s fault. He did all that in him lay to live and thrive without moral principle. It was the nature of things, the eternal law of man and of the world which baulked and ruined him.

Read that again. It was the “world” that ruined Napoleon, not Napoleon who ruined the world.

To live “without moral principle” is a bad thing for Emerson. He writes in “Self-Reliance” that the “rejection of popular standards” is not “a rejection of all standards.” Yet he refuses to state how we are to decide which ones are good and which ones are bad other than by, again, looking within. The “law of consciousness abides,” he writes—except, of course, when it doesn’t, which is why Emerson concludes his essay on Napoleon with a confusing warning on the dangers of being (you guessed it) selfish: “Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual or selfish aim, will fail.” In short: “Trust thyself, but not always!”

(Image: Emerson in 1857, via Wikimedia Commons)

Rubens’ Catholic Canvas

Robert Kiely praises Willibald Sauerländer’s The Catholic Rubens: Saints and Martyrs for reminding us that the painter’s “baroque passions” should not become “an excuse for ignoring his expression of religious and ethical sentiments and ideals”:

Many of his paintings are of religious subjects. Yet they are so bright and cheerful, so crowded with buxom women and muscular men caught in swirls of light and color, that his work, even his religious paintings, must be considered baroque (in the dismissive sense of the term)—decorative, theatrical, busy, pagan, and only superficially Christian. But, in the arts, as in life, simplistic classification gets in the way of actually paying attention. How refreshing it is, then, to read this scholarly, accessible, and beautifully illustrated book by the German art historian Willibald Sauerländer. …

According to Sauerländer, calling Rubens a master of “baroque passions” is not altogether wrong unless—as too often is the case—it becomes an excuse for ignoring his expression of religious and ethical sentiments and ideals. “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that art history has appropriated Rubens as one of its greatest figures by wresting his art free from the church”—that is, from theology, liturgy, history, and his own faith. Sauerländer’s project is to put the seventeenth-century church back into the picture by giving particular attention to Rubens’s paintings of subjects—the Eucharist, saints, and martyrs—that were criticized by Reformers and intentionally reemphasized by the church.

(Image: The Judgement of Solomon by Peter Paul Rubens, 1617, via Wikimedia Commons)

Face Of The Day

Christian Berthelot photographed babies born by C-section in their first 20 seconds of life:

Berthelot said witnessing so many births has changed his perspective about the process and has decided to focus solely on the first few moments of life, though he knows viewers may find the images a bit raw and tough to look at.

“I know there are people who react very badly, who find it disgusting, they tell me that I do not have the right to show the children in the bloodstream,” he said.” Some even told me that it is not real, it is not true. This is absurd. Children are not born in cabbages or roses. And there are those who are fascinated, I give them the opportunity to observe in detail the violence of birth, but there are also people like my wife, who encouraged me to do this work, because caesarean is beautiful birth.”

“What continues to amaze me is that it never stops. With each passing moment, a child is born, from all over the world, all the time, births never stop.”

See more images from the series here. The project will be shown in Paris, France during the Festival Circulation(s) Exhibition from January 24 to March 8, 2015.

Broad Humor

Lenika Cruz praises the second season of Broad City, which premiered this week:

[T]he show isn’t getting complacent, subject-wise: The first few episodes weave rape, sexual experimentation, discrimination, death, and socioeconomic privilege into their storylines, but avoid shoehorning commentary or moralizing. [Show creators and co-stars Ilana] Glazer and [Abbi] Jacobson proved in the first season that they could pull off outrageous without being tone-deaf or relying on stunt scenes—an admirable achievement for a show that centers on two self-absorbed female millennials. Sweet (flatulent) Abbi is often passive and self-doubting, given to bursts of energy and gall at the urging of Ilana, who is equal parts bullshittery and sincerity, and whose deep ignorance and irony are only sometimes redeemed by her sensitivity and good intentions.

In a profile of the two comedians, Rachel Syme appreciates that “as broad and slapstick as the comedy on the show can be, Glazer and Jacobson ultimately traffic in precision; their jokes could not be anyone else’s jokes.” She notes that “sex is a big part” of the series:

They both seek it, desire it, and talk about it constantly (in one episode, Ilana tells Abbi her detailed fantasy for a sexual position featuring them both, called the “Arc de Triomphe”). They treat sex with no judgment or sneers; Abbi and Ilana’s carnal victories are always shared. In the new season, when Abbi decides to “peg” one of her hookups with a neon-green dildo, she immediately calls Ilana (who happens to be at her grandmother’s shiva). Ilana screams, “This is the happiest day of my life!” What’s funny about the sex on Broad City is not that women are openly having it (we have Sex and the City to thank for that, as well as just about every cable show that has followed), but that when Abbi and Ilana do it, things tend to go horribly wrong. In the case of the strap-on triumph, Abbi quickly finds a way to melt the apparatus in the dishwasher and must embark on a Chaucerian quest to find a new one before the clock runs out.

Stephanie Boland compares the show to Girls:

While Girls – a frequent point of comparison – is known for its characters’ awkwardness, the cast of Broad City are framed as likeable even, or perhaps especially, when their behaviour is questionable. The shame which is one of the central emotions of Girls is almost entirely missing here. Broad City’s surrealism lets its creators play disgust for laughs while also revelling in its truth. At one moment, the girls accidentally get a sixteen-year-old high school student stoned; another scene shows Abbi using a blow-dryer on her genitals before the aforementioned heat wave sex. At no point, however, does our revulsion transmute into dislike for the protagonists – and rarely do they suffer consequences.

This is the central contradiction at the heart of the show. Unlike Dunham’s wonderfully unlikable Hannah Hovarth, Broad City demands we find its women charming while they do terrible things. When Hannah quotes Missy Elliot during her break up with Donald Glover’s character Sandy, he is rightly horrified. By way of contrast, the intern Ilana pictures singing slave spirituals still seems happy enough at the end of the skit. The difference is partly one of absurdity, but also one of politics. Drugs, sex, and troubling attitudes to race and gender are part of the texture of city life, and Broad City suggests to sanitise would be remiss. It’s a winning feature for the show’s young demographic, and the programme has already been renewed for a third season.

Meanwhile, Nate Jones looks back at the web series that inspired the Comedy Central series. He highlights “VChat,” the episode above, as especially worth revisiting:

There’s one thing about friendship that the web-cam segments of Broad City get at so well: the feeling that life is just one long conversation punctuated briefly by the interruption of outsiders. “VChat” is the first of these—the format would later turn into a spinoff series, Hack Into Broad City—and it sees Ilana advising Abbi on a potential hookup. Their interactions are gold; you get the sense that the actual things that happen to the two of them are secondary to the experience of talking to each other about it.

Defining Deviancy Up

Adam Gopnik looks back at the work of the iconoclastic sociologist Howard S. Becker – who also spent many nights in clubs and strip joints as a jazz musician. Those two aspects of his life came together in his famous 1953 paper in the American Journal of Sociology, “Becoming a Marihuana User”:

Becker insists that his accomplishment in the paper was no more than the elimination of a single needless syllable: “Instead of talking about drug abuse, I talked about drug use.” “Deviance” had long been a preoccupation of sociology and its mother field, anthropology. Most “deviance theory” took it for granted that if you did weird things you were a weird person. Normal people made rules—we’ll crap over here, worship over here, have sex like so—which a few deviants in every society couldn’t keep. They clung together in small bands of misbehavior.

Becker’s work set out to show that out-groups weren’t made up of people who couldn’t keep the rules; they were made up of people who kept other kinds of rules. Marijuana smoking, too, was a set of crips, a learned activity and a social game. At a time when the general assumption was that drug use was private and compulsive, Becker argued that you had to learn how to get high.

Smoking weed, he showed, was most often strange or unpleasant at first. One of his informants (a fellow band member) reported, “I walked around the room, walking around the room trying to get off, you know; it just scared me at first, you know. I wasn’t used to that kind of feeling.” Another musician explained, “You have to just talk them out of being afraid. Keep talking to them, reassuring, telling them it’s all right. And come on with your own story, you know: ‘The same thing happened to me. You’ll get to like that after a while.’ ” In the sociologese that Becker had not yet entirely discarded, he wrote, “Given these typically frightening and unpleasant first experiences, the beginner will not continue use unless he learns to redefine the sensations as pleasurable.” He went on, “This redefinition occurs, typically, in interaction with more experienced users, who, in a number of ways, teach the novice to find pleasure in this experience, which is at first so frightening.” What looked like a deviant act by an escape-seeking individual was simply a communal practice shaped by a common enterprise: it takes a strip club to smoke a reefer.

A Short Film For Saturday

Jason Schafer captions Dick Fontaine’s 1967 jazz short, Sound??:

I’d be doing it great disservice by describing it as anything short of importantly badass. The piece, a collaboration between highly influential multi-instrumentalist musical madman, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and avant-garde sound artist John Cage, explores the very nature of sound and music itself as the piece shifts between the two pioneers. Kirk does his thing. He plays onstage with three saxophones at once, and a flute and a whistle. He hands out whistles to the audience at one point and calls for a participatory “blues in the key of W.” He plays with animals at the zoo. The footage of a performance at Ronnie Scott’s in London is incendiary. Cage, for his part, is interspersed throughout the film reading rhetorical questions in a variety of city locations about what it means to make music. If music is just noise, can anyone do it? What’s the point in making it? “Sounds are just vibrations,” says Cage, “why didn’t I mention that before? Doesn’t that stir the imagination?” The whole thing, if nothing else, certainly stirs the imagination.

In an earlier review, Eric Magnuson remarked on the “wild juxtapositions” between Cage and Kirk:

The two iconoclasts didn’t have much in common composition wise. But they did share the optimistic view that music could be derived from just about anything that made a sound, whether it was a child’s toy, a passing truck or Cage’s musical bicycle. Throughout this 27-minute film, Fontaine mixes Cage’s philosophical questions on what constitutes music with live footage of Kirk playing a lively, experimental set at Ronnie Scott’s, deftly highlighting how each man’s credo can seamlessly bounce off the other. The whistle scene is especially enlightening.