Jimmy Carter’s Funeral and the Postmodern World

The photo you see here has been making the rounds of the leftie press of late.  It shows the VIPs—Joe and Jill Biden, Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George and Barbara Bush, Barack Obama, Donald and Melania Trump, Al Gore, and Mike and Karen Pence—as Jimmy Carter’s coffin is carried past them at yesterday’s funeral service.

Why did Curmie specify the leftie press?  Look at Donald Trump.  His hand isn’t on his heart, but it appears to be on what a friend of Curmie described in a Facebook post as “his prodigious gut.”  Mr. Trump is not exactly renowned for his respect for literally anyone outside his inner circle, so the photo seems to play into his pattern of hubristic petulance.  But is that interpretation accurate?  Perhaps, but Curmie has his doubts.

Notice that Mike Pence’s, Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s hands are also a little lower than heart-high.  That suggests at least the possibility that at the instant the photo was taken, Trump was just a little later than the others to raise his hand or a little sooner to lower it.  (We can’t be sure exactly when this still was taken.)  If that’s the case, then Trump falls well short of being sinister in this instance.  Curmie has sought in vain to find video footage that would either confirm or deny his suspicions.

Certainly the leftie press is not above taking a cheap shot (more on that, and why Curmie believes they contributed significantly to Trump’s victory in a later post… probably).  Similarly, Donald Trump is unquestionably the politician least willing to adhere to normative practices of civility.  We’re left, then, with a question of interpretation, and it’s unsurprising that a photograph, something that might have a claim to being called an artwork, is at the center.

In modernist art, the artist would create and then inscribe meaning into the work, and the reader (the term is used in this context to include spectators, auditors, et al.) would ferret it out.  In the postmodern world, however, the roles change.  The artist no longer creates meaning, but rather catalyzes it; meaning is created by the reader, and therefore is different for each receiver.  This can be a function of personality, political perspective, or a host of other variables.

Postmodern artworks often bombard the reader with multiple simultaneous images, enough to prevent the complete reception of all of them, and perhaps even to the de facto exclusion of one or more.  Does it matter, for instance, that several of the people pictured above appear to have their eyes closed?  Perhaps.  And, if so, what does it mean?  The answers to those questions, Gentle Reader, are likely to tell us more about ourselves than about the folks in the photo.

This idea has, of course, appeared in countless works of art, from Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashōmon” to Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.”  As the latter would have it, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”  This, of course, is very much a function of confirmation bias: you despise Trump, so the photo proves that he was being disrespectful to the deceased at a funeral; you distrust the media, so they’re taking an instant in time out of context to further an agenda unrelated to truth-telling.

Curmie, of course, fits into both categories, so he’s particularly intrigued by the mystery.  Yes, he has a working hypothesis, but that’s it.  Curmie suspects that a lot of people—too many by far—will have made up their minds about the photo’s significance almost immediately. 

That tells us a fair amount about why the nation is as fractured as it is.  We (well, not Curmie, but you know what I mean) just elected the most divisive political figure of Curmie’s lifetime.  This recent election was decided more negatively than any other: millions upon millions of voters chose the President-elect based not on who he is, but on who he isn’t.  (A lot of people voted for Kamala Harris using the same logic.)

Someone is going to have to bring our perspectives together for the betterment of the citizenry, not just of “our side.”  It won’t be Donald Trump or J.D. Vance or Chuck Schumer, and it sure as hell won’t be Elon Musk.  Richard Foreman, the auteur and impresario whose recent passing affected Curmie more than he thought it would, is desperately needed right now.  He wouldn’t have made us all see the same thing, but he’d at least have reassured us that it was okay that we didn’t.

There Is No Job 3

 

There are other things to write about today.  There is nothing else to write about today.

For the second time in this brief New Year, one of our greatest cities is under attack.  Last week, it was New Orleans; now it’s Los Angeles.  Curmie isn’t going to pretend that there aren’t other issues, other crises, out there… but right now the fires around Los Angeles are the story.

Curmie has spent little time in that area—roughly 6/100 of 1% of his life—but, of course, he has numerous friends there.  As might be expected from his line of work, Curmie knows colleagues at area universities, former classmates and students, and of course folks in a totally different profession who just happen to be located in that particular urban area instead of in Pittsburgh or Atlanta or wherever.

One of those friends recently posted on Facebook that she and her partner “are safe and evacuated.  EXHAUSTED keeping up with these fires. It’s like WHACK-A-MOLE.”  [Edit: here’s part of a more recent post by a different friend: “Everyone is on edge. No one really feels safe because just when you take a breath, another fire randomly appears. We’re all in shock. We can’t let our guard down. It’s not over.”]  That is the issue here.  Not just the destruction of property, not just loss of life (although that’s obviously the worst part of the ordeal)—the exhaustion, the not knowing, the stress, and the loss.

Naturally, as has been the case with every headline-making tragedy in recent years, the Manchurian Cantaloupe has taken every opportunity to politicize the event, blaming everyone from Governor Gavin Newsom to the firefighters themselves for failing to anticipate a literally unprecedented catastrophe.  Virtually no rain in months, coupled with hurricane force winds… that’s a recipe for disaster if some idiot drops a lit cigarette or whatever (we know the fire started in a residential area, not that unraked forest we heard a lot about last time).  Curmie here antiphrastically avoids using the phrase “climate change.”

And, of course, we heard nothing about how the Republican governors of those states battered by hurricanes this fall should have been better prepared.  No, there was Trump, interfering in the relief effort and suggesting that FEMA workers were the enemy. 

Of course, our less than beloved President-elect has a somewhat less than amicable relationship with the truth.  Curmie rather suspects that if Mr. Trump were to utter an entire paragraph that was both coherent and honest, the result would be something akin to the Wicked Witch of the West being doused with water.  Here’s a rebuttal from Brian Krassenstein, who at least apparently knows more about what’s going on than either Trump or Curmie do:

After millions of views spreading lies about the Palisades firefighters lacking water because of regulations, the boring truth comes late like usual and wont be shared. Here it is: 

1 - Reservoirs and water tanks were at normal levels and completely full before the fire. 

2 - All 114 city water supply tanks were fully stocked pre-fire. 

3 - A 15-hour surge at four times normal demand reduced water pressure. 

4 - High demand at lower elevations slowed refilling tanks at higher elevations. 

5 - This unprecedented fire was fueled by 8 months of no rain and 85 MPH winds. Water is being brought in continuously. 

6 - Even if, like Trump claimed, the protection of the Delta Smelt caused over regulation by California, it's the FEDERAL Endangered Species Act that requires the protection of endangered species like the Delta Smelt and their habitats, not Gavin Newsom or California.

Here's the thing.  Perhaps, perhaps, there is a grain of truth in Trump’s allegations (insert stopped clock analogy here).  Apparently many insurance companies recently (before this situation, but recently) dropped coverage in the area because of the high risks involved.  If they could anticipate disaster, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that state officials should have been able to do so, as well.  Of course, Curmie’s own homeowner’s policy was cancelled a few years ago because… wait for it… there were apparently newly-discovered 30-year-old trees on the property.  (They also sent out an “inspector” who claimed to have found “mildew”; it was dirt.)

Irrespective of the legitimacy of the critique, however, the time for that reflection has not yet arrived.  Job 1: get people to safety.  Job 2: do what we can to protect property—homes, businesses, etc.  As of now, as the title of this piece suggests: There Is No Job 3.   

Curmie was about to say that all he can do, Gentle Reader, is to send good and healing thoughts to those whose lives and property are in danger, and thanks and admiration to the fire-fighters and others who are struggling to limit the damage.  That isn’t quite the case, though.  He can also help a little: here’s a link to make a donation to the cause.  Curmie contributed; you know Donald Trump won’t.  We can’t even get him to STFU.

Three Stories from the OnStageBlog, Part 2: The Professional World

Curmie is finally getting to write the second half of his two-parter on stories from the OnStageBlog.  This one involves the casting of the musical Elf at Broadway at Music Circus in Sacramento.  OnStageBlog’s founder Chris Peterson often gets what Curmie’s grad school mentor would call “foam-flecked,” and his editorial here is no exception.  But he does have a point.  Sort of.

The company came under criticism when they announced the cast list for Elf; although a number of the leads were non-white, the entire chorus (seen above) looks pretty vanilla, i.e., white-passing. Actress (or is she the “social media manager for major hotel brands”?) Victoria Price is one of those who led the charge, pointing to the difference between the Broadway ensemble and the one in Sacramento, and noting that any comments critical of the casting were being deleted.  (Curmie assumes she’s telling the truth about this.)

Tony nominee Amber Imam joined the fray, writing that Price’s criticism of both the casting and the removal of negative comments was “absolutely right.  A show that takes place in NEW YORK CITY cannot… CAN NOT have an ensemble that LOOKS LIKE THIS!!!  Do better.  Have you learned nothing?????”

The company’s CEO Scott Klier issued a response that made the situation much, much worse: “cover-up worse than the crime” worse.  Here’s part of it:

Inclusivity has been and remains my casting and staffing goal for every production.

I fell short of that goal for ELF. There is an uncomfortable truth here: Our industry as a whole has largely failed to attract, train and foster the artists necessary to meet today's demand, and I fear this conversation will continue until it does. It will unfortunately take time. The painful reality of ELF’s casting process was that both the casting submissions and audition attendance revealed few candidates of color and, while those few were undoubtedly talented, they did not meet the dance, music and acting criteria set by our team.

Hoo boy… Claiming inclusivity as a “goal” and then going 0-for-15 at fulfilling it?  Blaming other people while admitting the decision was yours?  Admitting there’s a “demand” and then ignoring it? 

Price responds that the standard for Broadway is surely higher, but they managed to assemble a significantly more diverse cast.  True, but one might also note that the talent base is considerably both wider and deeper in New York than in Sacramento, which is not exactly the first city one thinks of when contemplating the American theatre.

Price then accuses Klier of “writing lies,” and asserts that “we will continue to be here and not just be here, but excelling in everything we do bc (as you basically said in your response) we are expected to be TWICE as good as our white counterparts to even be SEEN.”

Ultimately, she launches into a rather odd commentary, complaining about tokenization.  So having one black ensemble member is somehow a bad thing… even worse than having none, perhaps?  I don’t get it.

So let’s talk about casting decisions.  They’re sometimes extremely complex; other times they’re easy.  There are some shows that require actors of a particular race to play a particular role.  When Curmie directed “Master Harold… and the boys” a few years ago, Hally had to be white, and Sam and Willie had to be black.  Full stop; no discussion.  When he did Trojan Barbie, the male roles had to be played by two blacks, one white, and one Latino; the women’s roles were much more flexible in terms of race.  The majority of roles in most plays, of course, can be played by actors regardless of demographics, with the only considerations being things like blood relatives being of the same race (and that’s only true in realism).

Is casting the actors the director (or producer, or whoever is making the decisions) honestly believes are the best available an ethical strategy?  Of course it is.  Is attempting to employ a cast that represents the time and place in which the play is set reasonable?  Again, of course.  In this approach, it doesn’t matter which actors are white or BIPOC, only that some of the latter are included somewhere.  If you’re going to claim diversity as a goal, then an all-white chorus is probably a bad idea.  The key word here just might be “probably,” however. 

Often—by no means always, but often—there are two actors who are essentially equal.  For his last twenty-something shows, Curmie was always casting at the same time as a colleague, and we were discouraged from casting the same actor twice in a semester.  Unsurprisingly, we’d often want the same actors, leading to negotiations: “you can have Actor X if I can have Actor Y.”  But I remember one time in particular when I said “I need one of these four actors.  You can have whichever three you want, but I get one of the four.”  In this sort of toss-up situation, a director who doesn’t need to accommodate a colleague might reasonably think, “why not make a choice that adds to the diversity of the cast?”  

That said, sometimes one actor is just flat-out better than another in auditions.  A director would be remarkably stupid not to cast that person.  The thing is, there’s no way of knowing whether the actors cast in the Elf ensemble were clearly the best, or whether Klier’s interest in inclusion extends no further than a marketing blurb. 

Is there still some racism in the business?  Of course, there is.  Does Klier have a spotless reputation in terms of providing opportunities for non-white actors?  No.  But is Price’s claim about black actors having to be twice as good to even get noticed a gross exaggeration?  Yes, at least in terms of the industry at large.  And we might reasonably suspect that she’d be less insistent on an authentic depiction of the people who’d be in a particular place at a particular time if a production of Fiddler on the Roof had a couple of black folks in a small town in Tsarist Russia.

Curmie recalls overhearing one actress telling her friends that the reason I hadn’t given her a callback was because she was black.  I called back ten women; three were black.  She didn’t make it four because… wait for it… her audition wasn’t very good.  And, as Curmie wrote a couple of years ago, his “own experience as a director has included both casting BIPOC actors in roles obviously first played by whites and ending up with all white actors when he went into auditions thinking he’d almost certainly get a multi-racial cast. It works out how it works out.”

In other words, the original casting decisions might have been—as opposed to were—inappropriately exclusionary to non-white performers; the fact that there was some diversity in the leads mitigates but does not squelch the criticism with respect to the ensemble.  Some of Price’s arguments were legitimate; others were overblown at best.  Klier’s response to the controversy was sufficiently incompetent that he made matters considerably worse.  It’s rather a mess; Curmie suspects that the one objectively true statement in all of this is Klier’s claim that a reasonable resolution “will unfortunately take time.”

The good news, such as it is, is that the production got a positive review on the Broadway World site.  But there is not a word about the ensemble; indeed the list of principals is said to “round out the incredible cast.”

<Sigh.>

What the Hell Was ESPN Thinking?

There’s a lot of brouhaha at the moment about ESPN’s coverage of yesterday’s Sugar Bowl game in New Orleans, or rather of the pre-game.  The game was postponed for a day in the wake of the horrific events of early New Year’s morning only a few blocks from the Superdome, where the game was played.

So why is the photo for this piece of a baseball game?  Allow me to explain.  Curmie has been a fan of the New York Mets since 1962, the year of the team’s inception.  I can tell you that the biggest home run in Mets history had nothing to do with their World Series championship years of 1969 or 1986.  It was Mike Piazza’s two-run, come-from-behind, homer in the bottom of the 8^th inning in Shea Stadium on September 21, 2001. 

It was the game-winning hit and it came against the best team in the division, the arch-rival Atlanta Braves.  Vastly more importantly, it was during the first major league game to be played in New York after the attacks of 9/11.  And, for the first time in a week and a half, the locals had something to be happy about.  That night, anyone who wasn’t a Braves fan per se (and probably a fair number who were) needed that home run.  Not just Mets fans.  Not just New Yorkers.  Americans.

We’d been told the everything was going to be OK, but we needed more.  David Letterman going back on the air helped, but everything was still somber.  The Bush jokes that would cement the resolve—you don’t joke about the President if your country is in crisis—were to come later.  But first, there was Mike Piazza.  Sometimes, sports matter.

In the winter of 1980, Curmie lived in a small town in rural Kentucky.  He remembers watching the “Miracle on Ice” Olympic hockey game on the TV.  After the incredible upset of the powerhouse Soviet team by a bunch of American college kids, after the most famous line of Al Michaels’s career—“Do you believe in miracles?  Yes!”—there was a lot of noise outside, loud enough to be not merely audible but intrusive in Curmie’s second-floor apartment.

Outside, there was a string of cars with horns blaring; their windows were down (even in Kentucky it can get a little nippy in February), with a bunch of mostly teenagers leaning out and chanting “USA!  USA! USA!”  I’m willing to bet that Curmie was one of fewer than a dozen people in the entire town who’d ever seen a hockey game live, but here were these kids who didn’t know a poke check from a blue line getting excited about the Olympic semi-final.

In the midst of the Iranian hostage situation, with the country only showing the slightest signs of emerging from the energy crisis (is it any wonder the incumbent President was routed in the election a few months later?), we—again, all of us—needed something to grab ahold of, something to suggest that we’d weather the storm.

There have, of course, been other moments that transcended sports: Jesse Owens dominating at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmeling in the first round, Billy Miles appearing from nowhere to win the 10,000m in the Tokyo Olympics, we might even add Spiff Sedrick’s improbable sprint to glory in the women’s rugby 7s in this year’s Olympics.

But this year’s Sugar Bowl was most like that baseball game in September of 2001: what made it special wasn’t who won, or what political statement could be wrangled out of the victory, but the mere fact that the game went on was a sign of determination and perhaps a little bit of defiance.  If you’re a Georgia fan, you’re disappointed that your team lost, but you were reminded before kickoff that there are more important things than football games. 

Well, you were reminded of that fact if you were at the game in person.  You’d have less of that perspective if you… you know… watched on TV.  ESPN, which had exclusive broadcasting rights, cut away from the moment of silence, from the Star-Spangled Banner, and by extension from the “USA!  USA!  USA!” chants at the end of the anthem.  Needless to say, a lot of folks on the political right attributed the obviously intentional omission to anti-American “wokeness.”  (Here’s one example.) Whether the decision was in fact a product of political orientation or garden-variety incompetence may be up for discussion, but this has to rank among the biggest blunders the network has ever committed… yes, even worse than hiring Bill Walton, and that’s saying rather a lot.

Please remember, Gentle Reader, that this is Curmie saying this: the guy who decried the “unrelenting jingoism” of NBC’s Olympic coverage in 2012, and the “ultra-nationalistic bleatings of Peyton Manning” at this year’s opening ceremonies.  Curmie is no fan of pretending that “nationalism” and “patriotism” are synonyms.

Except.

The attack in New Orleans was a body blow to the American psyche.  It didn’t knock us out, but it staggered us for a moment.  (Curmie mentioned last time out  that there was a “what if” scenario for him personally on this one.)  There’s a difference between moving forward despite what happened the previous morning and pretending that those events hadn’t occurred.

We, as a nation, need to proceed with as close to a normal routine as is possible.  That’s obviously impossible for those most directly affected, but I was pleased to see that our favorite New Orleans restaurant re-opened last night after closing for New Year’s Day.  And the game went on: with heightened security, but it went on.

Everyone—players, coaches, officials, television crews, concessionaires, fans—who showed up for the game a day after it was scheduled to be played had to have been at least a little apprehensive.  But there they were.  They got a moment to ponder the essential truth that someone who cheers for the other team isn’t the enemy: assholes who intentionally plow into pedestrians are.  Television viewers didn’t get that moment.  And whereas Curmie was unimpressed with the rendering of the national anthem, on this particular occasion he’d have liked to have seen it, especially given the image you see here of New Orleans mayor LaToya Cantrell.

The crowd’s chanting “USA!  USA!  USA!” at the end was unscripted, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been anticipated.  ESPN sideline reporter Laura Rutledge was widely and appropriately praised for her reporting of events in New Orleans from the initial attack all the way through the game.  She could have told the bosses what to expect, but perhaps she was fooled into thinking there was a decision-maker with more savvy than a dead flounder.

The chant may have been trite, it may have been was certainly eminently predictable, but it was above all else a communal monodigital salute to those who would attack us.  Ultimately, we’re family.  We can disagree, loudly and stridently, about everything from politics to what team to cheer for, but if you come at any of us just for being us, you’ll have to deal with all of us.  We are bloodied but unbowed.  We are legion.  Messing with us is contra-indicated.

(BTW, don't ask why that one paragraph is formatted differently than all the others.  Blogspot is inscrutable.)

Donald Trump Shows Why He’s Unfit for Office (Again)

Like millions of other Americans, Curmie learned this morning of the horrific, presumably terroristic, attack in New Orleans.  Obviously, we all grieve for the casualties and sympathize with their loved ones.  As this essay is being written, there are still lots of unanswered questions, but we do know some things with reasonable certainty.

Gentle Reader, you will notice the modifiers in the previous paragraph: “presumably,” “some,” “reasonable.”  Those words are there because Curmie really doesn’t want to claim as fact something that isn’t true.  If only the President-elect would be as honest circumspect… but then, he never was.

True, no intelligent person believes that Donald Trump is anything but a narcissistic, mendacious, blowhard.  His post on the ironically titled Truth Social is presented here in what Curmie presumes to be its entirety (you didn’t think I’d visit that site to check, did you, Gentle Reader?):

When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true. The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department. The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!

The first thing to notice is that whereas any normal person would lead with his sympathy for the victims, Trump always opens with political posturing; basic humanity is an afterthought, if it shows up at all.  Even if the conjecture about “criminals coming in” were accurate, the statement would mark Trump as an absolute asshole.  But we knew that, of course.  What we didn’t know but certainly should have suspected as a possibility is the fact that Trump’s bluster was 100% wrong on the facts… and that the so-called leftist media scrupulously avoided highlighting his bullshit. 

Yes, Newsweek does mention in paragraph five (!) that the suspect, Shamsud Din Jabbar, was a Texas-born American citizen.  Oh, and he was apparently a US Army vet.  Ah, but the headline proclaims only that “Donald Trump Says New Orleans Terror Attack Proves He Was Right.”  Anyone not reading past the first two sub-heads might be led to believe that Trump was spewing something other than his usual brand of xenophobic drivel.  Well, anyone who has been asleep for the last dozen years or so might be so tempted.  Those of us branded as “Trump deranged” by the MAGA apologists, of course, knew better were prepared to disbelieve a serial prevaricator.

To be fair, The New York Times did (finally) headline their story as “Trump Falsely Suggested New Orleans Suspect Was an Immigrant.”  Of course, the MAGA crowd wouldn’t believe the NYT if they said NBA centers are tall.  But you can bet the ranch that the truth that Donald Trump yet again made a false allegation will be ignored by most and dismissed as either leftie propaganda or irrelevant by most of the rest.  Curmie, unlike Trump, doesn’t claim to be the sole source of truth, but he’s right about this one.

The discussion will (and should) focus on what could have been done differently and what can be done to prevent a recurrence.  The answer isn’t easy.  Better training for cops: needed, but not enough.  Stricter gun laws, even if none of the deaths were caused by shooting (the two wounded cops definitely were): useful, but not enough.  And no, smug asshole right-winger, no one is calling for tighter restrictions on rental trucks.  We need to recognize that we can’t solve every problem without creating worse ones, but we damned well better do a little creative thinking.

One side note: Curmie and Beloved Spouse are grateful for a friend who asked us to look after her cats while she spent the holidays in Maine with her partner.  We otherwise might well have tried to head to NOLA for New Year’s… and our go-to hotel is about 20 yards from where that truck crashed.  It was almost certainly one of the hotels evacuated by authorities.  Curmie is fine with missing that particular bit of excitement.

 

Three Stories from the OnStageBlog, Part 1: High School

The recent writer’s block and attendant dearth of posts is when Curmie turns to familiar topics… like theatre, for example.  There will be, I hope, a more complex piece forthcoming, triggered by a thought-provoking editorial a while back by JoelGrey in the New York Times.  For right now, though, it’s three stories from this fall that appeared on the OnStageBlog site.  Curmie is going to take two posts to cover the three stories—two here, one to come—lest the posts get too long even by Curmie’s standards.

A scene from the Dog Sees God dress rehearsal

The first two, from the world of high school theatre, are, as Stevie Nicks might have said, hauntingly familiar.  We start with Santa Rosa High School in California, where school officials shut down a production of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead after opening night, capitulating to complaints that play is “obscene” and “offensive.”  The complainants were, of course, unidentified.  They always are.

Curmie read Bert V. Royal’s dark comedy, which imagines the Peanuts kids as dysfunctional teenagers, not long after its first production in 2004, and saw a production of it a couple of years ago.  He admits that he found it more vulgar than iconoclastic, more pretentious than profound, and frankly rather boring.  But it got great reviews from a lot of New York publications.  More importantly, small-town sexagenarian curmudgeons aren’t exactly the play’s target audience.  You know who it resonates with?  Adolescents and post-adolescents.  Go figure.

So… is Dog Sees God “obscene” or “offensive”?  Maybe.  After all, one of those reviews calls it “raunchy,” and the Dramatists Play Service blurb (linked above) suggests that “Drug use, suicide, eating disorders, teen violence, rebellion and sexual identity collide and careen…”  All that stuff does in fact appear on stage, but Curmie doesn’t remember ever finding anything offensive, per se.  Of course, he’s not easily offended, and he’s not the parent of a teenager, so he may be missing something. 

It’s also worth mentioning that the parents of all the students involved in the production had been informed of the play’s content and had given their consent for their children to participate.  Ah, but you see, the school hadn’t warned the parents of other kids.  Oh, bloody hell.  And of course, the decision to shut the play down had been “not made out of censorship but out of caution and concern.”  Translation, if you’re not familiar with educational bureaucracy-speak, Gentle Reader: “we absolutely censored the play because we’re afraid of idiots who are unwilling to stand for their beliefs openly.”

The point here is that some caution might be appropriate, but the time to impose any restrictions is much earlier than opening night: before spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars on scripts, royalties, sets, costumes, advertising, and all the other expenses involved in producing a play, and before the thousands of person-hours spent by faculty and students in rehearsal and in technical support.  It’s also worth noting, as Chris Peterson does in the article linked above, that another school in the same district did the play two years ago, placing second in a high school theatre festival. 

Given the fact that the cancelation was apparently ordered by district officials rather than by, say the school’s principal, that’s a rather significant indictment of the decision-makers.  If the previous production was “obscene,” then this one should not have been allowed to proceed (note: the theatre teacher didn’t write a personal check for the royalties).  If the earlier show was deemed acceptable, then the board is clearly signaling that they will be swayed by a heckler’s veto.  Not a good look.

Theatre people being a somewhat canny lot not given to submitting to authoritarian stupidity, the company proceeded to find another venue, the privately owned Mercury Theater in nearby Petaluma, whose owners volunteered their space after hearing of the cancellation.  (Hats off to them!)  They did two shows there, at least one of which was sold out to the point of turning people away.

The good news, such as it is, is that the board backed down, at least somewhat, following community uproar and nationwide humiliation upon reconsideration.  Their compromise solution, that the play could continue but only to audiences over 16, would have made sense as an initial decision, provided, of course, that those under 16 could see the show with parental approval (or perhaps if accompanied by a parent).  It’s unclear whether Santa Rosa High includes 9^th graders or not.  If it does, then there’s a reasonable chance that 15-year-old freshmen could work the show but wouldn’t be allowed to buy a ticket. 

This, alas, wouldn’t surprise Curmie.  School boards do all too often represent the perfect storm at the nexus of authoritarian impulses and intellectual cowardice.  Quoting Paul McCartney this time: “La la how the life goes on.”

Curmie was tempted to cite yet another popular song from decades ago to introduce the second OnStage article in question.  But with all due respect to Herman’s Hermits, “Second verse, same as the first” isn’t quite accurate, although it’s pretty close.  There are indeed similarities between the Santa Rosa situation and one at Cesar Chavez High School in Phoenix.  

In the latter case, officials from the Phoenix Union High School District delayed the opening of the school’s production of The Laramie Project only hours before the scheduled opening, citing “the need for additional time to better prepare our audience and the public for the seriousness of the play’s content. So there’s something akin to censorship by a school board who should have done their jobs earlier in the process.  A little communication between the theatre director and district officials would have gone a long way.

Here’s where Curmie’s profession may get in the way a little: no one in my line of work doesn’t know that The Laramie Project is about the torture and murder of Matthew Shepherd in Laramie in 1998 (well, Curmie had to look up the date, but you get the idea, Gentle Reader).  The play, constructed by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project, consists of statements by Laramie residents, company members’ journal entries, and news reports, all transcribed verbatim and presented by a small group of actors, each of whom play several roles. 

But, as Curmie is reminded every time he and Beloved Spouse watch the Macy’s or Rose Parades, not everyone is expected to know everything: “Who the hell is that country singer who’s apparently so popular?”  So it’s not exactly dereliction of duty for school officials not to recognize the title of the play.  True, given the fact that reading as much as a one-sentence description of The Laramie Project would tell administrators pretty much all they’d need to know, that level of supervision doesn’t seem overburdening.  And if students’ claim that the board had initially signed off on the project is accurate (as opposed to the board not explicitly forbidding the show), then there’s a real problem.

Still, the theatre faculty certainly should have known that the material might require a warning to prospective audience members; that they didn’t initially provide one or (apparently) consult with the board doesn’t show them in the best of light.

Students, of course, started throwing around words like “censorship.”  But the board’s actual press release [] doesn’t seem outrageous.  Here’s part of that statement:

The themes and language in the play need additional acknowledgments and disclaimers for families and students in attendance. Many of our students have younger siblings, and we must properly inform families about the content they are going to see so they can make informed decisions about whether younger family members attend. In addition, we want to ensure proper mental health support is in place for those in the audience who may have strong feelings about the play’s contents.

That’s fine if they meant it, and if they were really talking about a delay rather than a cancellation… and it turns out they were.  The play went on a week after the scheduled opening.  According to one report, it was unaltered, although the director had apparently agreed to excise “bad language”  (over the strenuous, and absolutely legitimate objections of many of the students involved: “If you change all the language that was said, is it really even a hate crime anymore? You're censoring it. These real things were said about this person that died because of a hate crime.”)  It is unclear (to Curmie, at least) whether the bowdlerization ultimately occurred, or, if so, if it was approved by the rights-holders.

It seems that the production was originally scheduled for only a single performance.  That seems odd, but plausible.  If that’s the case, then the single show a week after schedule with appropriate content warnings almost, almost, solves the problem.  The good news, of course, is that there aren’t a lot of high school productions that get nationwide publicity.  We take our triumphs where the come.

More Annoying Commercials

 

Curmie has written a couple times in the past year or so about television commercials that annoy him—a pair of ads for the well-known board game Monopoly and one particular spot for Red Baron pizza.  Now it’s time for another round.

We start with the trio of ads that came out this fall for the Hello Apple Intelligence campaign, featuring actress Bella Ramsey.  Curmie never watched “Games of Thrones” and can’t remember her from “Resistance,” the only one of her credits he’s actually seen, so he doesn’t know whether or not she’s truly as horrible an actress as she appears to be in these commercials… but this post isn’t about her histrionic abilities. 

One of the ads, “Custom Memory Movies” (which Curmie never saw on TV, only online in doing some quick research for this piece), in which she comes to the rescue of a father trying to deliver a eulogy for his daughter’s beloved goldfish, is moderately cute and actually pretty inoffensive, if not exactly plausible. 

The other two, though, present some ethical issues.  AI has its uses, but, as Curmie mentioned last time, more than a few of those uses are to make deception easier, whether we’re talking about plagiarism or a different kind of misrepresentation.

In one spot, “More Personal Siri,” Ramsey uses her spiffy new iPhone to remember the name of someone she met “a couple of months ago at Café Grenel.”  At one level, this would appear to be a pretty innocuous use of the technology.  But whereas she could have responded to the man’s surprise that she remembers him with a platitude about seeing him again, she launches into a lie, “as soon as I saw you I’m like, it’s Zac.”  (Curmie is particularly amused by the error in the subtitles: how better to show off how great your product is, right?)  True, there are worse things, but this isn’t exactly a white lie, either… call it pearl grey.

The remaining ad, “Email Summary,” is more troubling.  Here, Ramsey, presumably as herself, uses her phone to pretend to have read an email pitch from the woman (producer? agent?) she’s apparently lunching with.  Not least of the problems here is that she may have just expressed interest in a project that if she’d actually read the email she’d dismiss out of hand.  Of course, the other woman would have to be pretty much of an imbecile not to notice the evasion, so how does that sell the product?  “If all you need to do is fool an idiot, we can help”?  But even if the subterfuge were a little more elegant, it’s difficult to see how “we make it easier to lie to your colleagues” scores very high on the Our-Product-Makes-the-World-a-Better-Place scale.

But Curmie hasn’t seen those Apple ads in several weeks.  What he has seen, often several times in an evening if he and Beloved Spouse happen to be watching old TV shows on Hulu, is a commercial for Kesimpta, a medication for those suffering from multiple sclerosis.  The spot features actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler, best known for “The Sopranos” (another show Curmie didn’t watch), who actually has relapsing MS and, one presumes, actually uses Kesimpta to control her symptoms.  I truly hope the product does work; I wouldn’t wish MS on anyone.

Curmie has two problems with the ad, however, one general and one specific.  The general one has bothered Curmie for decades: what is to be gained by advertising a prescription medication to the public?  Are we really ready to believe that the cost of advertising is offset by patients walking into their doctors’ offices and saying, in effect, “Look, I know you’ve got a medical degree and all, and I flunked high school biology, but I saw this ad on TV the other night, and I think you ought to prescribe this stuff for me.”  Any doctor who’d pay any attention to that argument deserves to lose their license.

But, Gentle Reader, what really drives Curmie crazy about this ad in particular is something else.  The spot proceeds predictably.  We see Sigler now able to lead a pretty much normal life: she takes a walk with a friend, does an interview, plays cornhole, and plays catch with a boy we presume to be her son.  It’s this last thing that I want to talk about.

As the photo above shows, she’s about to catch a baseball that’s coming in about sternum high.  But her glove is facing up, not out, and she pretty much catches the ball with her bare hand: not the best way to protect her hand in general or those nicely manicured fingernails in particular.  Or to demonstrate proper technique to her young companion, for that matter.  Yes, the ball was lobbed, but come on…

It’s also telling that Sigler’s father-in-law is Lenny “Nails” Dystra, a good-fielding centerfielder for several major league seasons.  In 1986, he was one of the stars of the last New York Mets team (Curmie’s team since their inception) to win the World Series.  It would be unkind and no doubt erroneous to attribute Nails’s stroke earlier this year to seeing that ad, but it is certainly embarrassing.  Sigler should know better.  The director should know better.  The corporation marketing exec who signed off on the commercial should know better.  Hell, the kid should know better.

The Apple ads seem intended to encourage deceit, but the Kesimpta ad actually annoys Curmie more.  It demonstrates that ineptitude is its own special variety of unethical behavior.

Musings on Returning to the Classroom

Curmie retired from full-time teaching in August of 2021.  It was August instead of May because I was hoping—to no avail, as it turns out—to do one more iteration of a Study Abroad program in Ireland; the trip had already been postponed from the previous summer.  I did teach one course per semester in the 2021-22 academic year, but then not at all for two years.

I assumed that I’d never be in a classroom again except for an occasional guest appearance to be, apparently, the local authority on absurdism.  But then a colleague got a one-semester sabbatical to work on her book.  It would be extremely unlikely to find someone who had both the ability to teach all the courses in question and the willingness to move to small-town East Texas for a one-semester gig at crappy pay.  The powers-that-be then decided to try to staff those courses locally.  I suspect I was the only available qualified person in a 75-mile radius, so I was asked if I’d teach Theatre History I and II this semester.  I agreed.

There were a lot of changes for me, completely apart from the two-year hiatus.  I’d taught both courses numerous times, but never in the same semester, and always on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule; this time it was Tuesday/Thursday.  Back in the days when I was the only person teaching these courses I could insist that one of the research papers be on a certain type of topic; that’s no longer a requirement.  And I ditched the expensive anthology I’d used for years, switching to things that were available online.  This also allowed me to choose the plays I wanted to teach instead of necessarily the ones in the anthology: critics may agree that the The Cherry Orchard is Anton Chekhov’s best play, for example, but there is absolutely no question that The Seagull is far more important to theatre history, so I used that.

Anyway… what caught my attention?

First, the students were incredibly polite.  I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not.  There’s an obvious upside, but it also suggests that they were less comfortable talking to me.  And, of course, there’s always the lurking suspicion that they’re trying to manipulate me somehow.  I’m pretty convinced that was sometimes but by no means always the motive.

Second, the majority were… well, “lazy” isn’t quite the right word, but it’s close.  They were interested in doing the minimum amount of work to get the requisite C in the course.  This phenomenon wasn’t new, of course, but it appeared in a significantly higher percentage of students than I’d seen before in 30 years of full-time teaching (plus a bunch of part-time work).  Part of the reason may have been an increasingly anti-intellectual, or at the very least not pro-intellectual, leadership at all levels of the university.  If university leaders and faculty advisors treat these courses as hurdles that must be cleared rather than as the source of valuable information, we can’t blame the students overmuch.

I mentioned “requisite C” earlier; majors must receive a C or better in both these courses. The percentage of students who dropped the course or got a D or an F this semester was probably three times as high as I’d ever seen.  Doing the work just didn’t seem an option.  Yes, one student in particular was overwhelmed by other responsibilities (that happens), but another dropped the course after receiving a C on the first test, worth 11% of the final grade, because doing the work to do better just didn’t seem to be on her radar as a possibility.

All that said, however, it’s extremely important to note that my best students were not only more numerous than average, but they were really outstanding.  They’d not only done the reading; they’d thought about it.  They asked pertinent questions and made intriguing comments, often analogizing (appropriately!) to other plays, novels, films, or historical events.  Most of all, and this was especially true of a couple of them, they were intellectually curious.  They’d read things that hadn’t been assigned, and then they’d ask me questions.  There is nothing more energizing for a professor than having to be on your “A-game” to stay ahead of your best students.

So the best students were truly wonderful.  But there was a paucity of good (as opposed to excellent in one direction or OK in the other) students.  These being upper-division courses taken almost exclusively by majors and the occasional minor, I’d guess that perhaps about 40% of the grades pre-COVID were B’s.  This time, it was fewer than half that number, and a couple of the ones that did exist were either barely a B or barely not an A.

This phenomenon appears to be pretty much universal.  My colleagues all note the same thing: “there’s no middle,” or, rather, not much of one.  We suspect that COVID contributed in a variety of ways.  This year’s juniors and seniors in college were sophomores and juniors in high school when schools were shut down, with lessons switched over to Zoom or the equivalent, and without any opportunity for teachers to adapt to the new strategies. 

Theatre, being by definition a function of sharing the same physical space, was hit particularly hard, both in the commercial world and the academic world.  We’re beginning to see some improvement with incoming freshmen, but many upperclassmen are still struggling, having lost a lot of momentum at a critical time of their development. 

We’re also a non-flagship state university.  COVID lost us a lot of money, not just in tuition, but especially in room and board fees.  Enrollment went down, and the obvious (not intelligent, but obvious) way to remedy that situation was to lower admission standards.  Probably 15-20% of the students in my classes this semester, in courses that (allegedly) require multiple pre-requisites with grades of C or better, wouldn’t have been accepted pre-COVID (well, unless they had a sweet jump shot, or something equally promising for success in the classroom).  But we’re also a lot cheaper than private schools, so we get a strange combination of really good students who can’t afford to go elsewhere and weaker students who shouldn’t be at a university at all.

But there’s another aspect at play here, too, one suggested by a young colleague.  She argued that the lack of a middle, while the number of excellent students remained the same or even increased, was also attributable to COVID.  Whereas the average student’s academic development was thwarted by online courses, inadequate supervision (generally not teachers’ fault, Curmie hastens to note), lack of social interaction, etc., the intellectually curious ones had no distractions, and therefore spent more time reading plays and novels, watching films that were intended to be more than simply commercial successes, going down rabbit holes of history or science, or otherwise becoming more engaged with what stodgy old professors such as Curmie call “the life of the mind.”  There’s no little merit to that observation.

Finally, of course, there’s the question of academic integrity.  There are multiple studies that suggest that students don’t think cheating is a problem, and that faculty either agree with that perspective or that they’re too beaten down to fight what they suspect will inevitably be a losing battle.  Computerized solutions don’t work.  A few years ago Curmie had a student who argued that his paper wasn’t plagiarized because he’d run it through a website that said so.  What he’d done was to figure out that the site he was using looked for five consecutive words used in some other paper, so he changed every fifth word to a synonym.  Curiously enough, I became suspicious of his multiple references to “Juliet and Romeo.” 

I have argued for years that it isn’t my job to catch every case of plagiarism.  My job is to make it harder to get something past me than it would be to write the damned paper.  This student might have done well to heed that warning.

Some cases are easy to catch, of course.  The student who lifted a sentence from an online source and cut-and-pasted it into his paper without checking to see if the font matched would be a good example.  But whereas that form of plagiarism is easy to prove (if they can Google it, I can Google it), AI technology, which didn’t really exist the last time I was in a classroom before this fall, creates a new set of problems.  You’d have to use exactly the same prompt to exactly the same program to get a copy of what the student generated through AI.  Luckily, AI likes to cite authorities that don’t exist at all, or books that our library doesn’t have.  Inter-Library Loan is a thing, but it takes time, and I know you didn’t even have a topic a week ago…

There are two (at least) ethical concerns I’m noticing in what I’ve described above.  One is the ongoing battle against plagiarism and other kinds of cheating.  It’s exhausting.  Once upon a time, you caught someone violating academic integrity, you gave ‘em an F, and you told your boss what you’d done and why.  Now there are forms and hearings and on and on. Yes, due process.  “Innocent until proven guilty,” even.  But there are so many cases: one of my former students, now a professor herself, noted on her Facebook page that she spent eight hours this week filling out the forms her university requires.  None of us signed up for this, and the power structure is always going to side with the one paying the tuition.

The other ethical issue is how to treat students who aren’t prepared to do the level of work required, through no (or very little) fault of their own.  Do we say, in effect, “well, under the circumstances, this was pretty good work”?  Or, alternatively, do we say “this just isn’t of sufficient quality to merit a good/passing grade”?  Curmie is an advocate for the latter, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand the other argument.

What I’m totally confident of is one thing, Gentle Reader: for all the joy Curmie felt working with that handful of really exciting young scholars, re-retirement looks absolutely awesome.

 

Athena, Whataboutism, and Retribution

We could use her about now.

There’s a fair amount of consternation that President Biden has used his authority to pardon his ne’er-do-well son, Hunter (they’ll be JB and HB hereafter if there’s any chance for confusion) after promising not to do so.  The outrage is mostly from the right, as might be expected, but there’s also no little anger emanating from the left, mostly from those who believed, probably naïvely, that JB would show respect for the law, keep his promise, and thereby differentiate himself, and by extension his party, from Donald Trump’s openly stated imminent campaign of retribution.  Curmie is disappointed but hardly surprised at his reversal of course.

JB’s defenders argue that the pardon of his son is legitimized by the fact that Trump had pardoned many of his minions who had been convicted of worse crimes than those of HB.  Did Trump do that?  Yes, of course, he did.  Is that a defense for JB’s actions?  Not in Curmie’s books.  It’s difficult to say what was going in in JB’s mind when he made the vow—did he really believe that he would keep his word, or was that just another lie told by a politician looking to appear objective and above the fray of partisan squabbling? 

Did he think he would win re-election and could then “change his mind”?  Was this a strategic move intended to suggest that the prosecutions of Trump were other than politically motivated?  Curmie can’t answer those questions with authority, but let’s just say he has his suspicions.

That said, two things: 1). Trump is indeed a convicted felon.  However much those charges may have been motivated by something other than a concern for justice, the guy who crows incessantly about hiring only the best people had a legal team that really screwed the pooch if he really was innocent.  They were present for the trial, including the voir dire of prospective jurors.  All they needed was one juror who wasn’t convinced beyond reasonable doubt that the actions were not only criminal but felonious, that it was reasonable to have 34 indictments, and that Trump was guilty on all counts.  That… erm… didn’t happen.

2). JB’s announcement was ill-timed politically because it became the lead story across a compliant and lazy media who might otherwise have been noting that Trump’s nominees for important government posts are the greatest collection of rogues, scoundrels, and scalawags since Catwoman, the Joker, the Riddler, and the Penguin joined forces to form the United Underworld.  Trump also threw in a couple of idiots and wackadoodles: his version of an inclusion initiative, apparently.  (Can Vivek Ramaswamy really be so stupid that he misses the irony of his disparagement of “unelected bureaucrats”?)

The problem is that the majority of the allegations on both sides are, well, true.  Both candidates for the Presidency (well, all three if we count Biden along with the two finalists) babbled incoherently on the campaign trail, lied about themselves and their opponent, and generally proved to be unfit for office.  Both are intentionally divisive; both significantly threaten First Amendment freedoms. 

Curmie has already noted that he voted for NotTrump in three consecutive elections, not because he was particularly impressed with any of the Democratic candidates, but because he believes that Donald Trump is indeed an existential threat to democracy.  (Note to any right-leaning readers: the fact that Biden and Kamala Harris may also qualify for this description does not mean the Trump does not: not all situations are either/or; some are both/and.)

Over the years, Curmie has collected more than a few posters of shows, museums, and the like: far too many to be able to display them all, although virtually none have actually been discarded.  One that always finds its way onto a wall somewhere in the house or apartment we’ve lived in is from the London production of Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia, directed by Sir Peter Hall.

The principal reason it has a place of honor at Chez Curmie is that the play was the standout production (against some pretty solid competition) that he and Beloved Spouse saw on their honeymoon <mumblemumble> years ago.  But for the purposes of this essay, it’s more than that: the poster declares The Oresteia to be “the world’s first dramatic masterpiece,” and Curmie has no argument with that description. 

What is remarkable about the trilogy is that the cycle of violence and retribution perpetuates itself until it is finally resolved by divine intervention.  King Agamemnon of Argos had sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, believing it to be the only way to get to Troy and thereby to return Helen to her husband, Menelaus.  In the first play of the trilogy, Agamemnon, the title character returns victorious, only to be killed, along with his concubine Cassandra, by his wife Clytemnestra and her consort, Aegisthus.

In the middle play, The Libation Bearers, Agamemnon’s other children, Orestes and Electra, egged on at least indirectly by the god Apollo, conspire to kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.  They succeed, but Orestes ends the play hounded by the Furies, the chthonic goddesses who believe no crime to be worse than matricide.  The fact that only he can see them may be a practical dramatic necessity, but it also renders the moment all the more terrifying: a tactic later employed by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, who knew that the unknown can conjure a level of dread that no literal representation can match.

Finally, in the Eumenides, Orestes is brought to trial.  The judge is Athena, the goddess of wisdom.  The immortals—Apollo and the Furies—state their respective cases, with the ultimate issue being trying to rank the evils of filicide, regicide/mariticide, and regicide/matricide.  Athena has appointed a jury of the leading men of Athens, the Areopagus, to decide the case.  Their vote ends in a tie; Athena casts the deciding vote for mercy, but assures the Furies (now re-named the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones) that they will henceforth be appropriately honored in exchange for their benevolence.

Athena thus effectively ends the spiral of retribution and whataboutism.  As we prepare for a radical change in government in January, we desperately need an Athena.  The chances that Joe Biden will morph into such a figure in his last days in office: one in a million.  The chances Donald Trump will ever do so: zero.

Alas.