Hollywood and the Sounds of Empire

21 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Acting, British Accent, British English, Commonwealth English, Cultural Imperialism, Da Vinci's Demons (2013-15), East vs. West, Historical Lies, Hollywood, Imperialism, Leonardo da Vinci, Linguistic Imperialism, Paris Climate Summit, Tom Riley, TV Shows, World History

Da Vinci’s Demons Season 3 Poster, October 2015. (Starz via http://www.ew.com/). Fair use due to direct connection with subject matter and non-commercial use.

I finished catching up on the Starz series Da Vinci’s Demons over the weekend, which included me watching the final episode via Xfinity On Demand last night. I will not provide any spoilers. But, I am at a loss regarding the one constant with most period pieces or fantasy TV series and movies. I simply do not understand the need for a British accent in everything that isn’t American in Hollywood or its near-equivalent. If my understanding of history is correct, Romans didn’t speak in British English with English colloquialisms like “Needs must” or “bollocks.” Alexander the Great was never “knackered” or “gobsmacked.” And Leonardo da Vinci as played by Tom Riley saying “codswallop” or “fortnight” or any of a hundred British sayings with a nasally, pretentious accent is about as accurate as firing a shotgun at a barn’s broadside from 1,000 meters away.

Brit Slang Explained: Translation Chart for a British Slang Bus Blind T-shirt Design, December 21, 2015. (https://anglotees.com.

In general, I love hearing and reading the differences in British and other forms of English when not spoken by Americans. With so many TV series and movies now done with international casts, though, it has turned into a form of cultural imperialism. Especially since I know that until two centuries ago, the average Brit sounded more like the average Canadian or American than like James Bond while attending Oxford. The change in accent was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain’s rise to superpower empire status during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anyone who wanted to become part of the British gentry class — including newly monied industrialists and merchants — hired speech coaches to train them to speak English in the manner that we hear from most British English speakers in 2015.

Even with the rise of the US as the world’s leading superpower and its gigantic cultural and economic footprint, British English still is the language and sound of empire. At least where Hollywood is concerned. Because British English sounds imperial, high-class, important, urgent, and intelligent, according to the ears of many an English speaker, whether in the UK, the US, or elsewhere in the world. It doesn’t matter if the modern version of f–k didn’t exist until the eighteenth century. It doesn’t matter if some shows like Game of Thrones or movies like Lord of the Rings are complete fantasy and should have no adherence to any particular language or sound. British English is all that and a bag of chips, the cat’s meow, is dope for the English-speaking world.

For me, though, all I’m hearing with shows like Da Vinci’s Demons, Rome, Spartacus and The Borgias (the Showtime version), and with movies like 300 and Gladiator is a narrative framed by imperialism and the triumph of the West. It’s not just the British English accent and the imperialism it represents. It’s also how producers, directors, and actors consistently frame period pieces in the West vs. East, civilization vs. savagery narrative. Be them Ottoman Turks, Germanic barbarians or Persian emperors, they’re all simplistic antagonists for cinematic fodder that reinforces the West as good, godly and victorious. Or, rather, to quote Pittsburgh Steelers’ head coach Mike Tomlin, those without British accents are “the dead Indians” in these modern-day “cowboy” movies.

“Linguistic Imperialism” – what the world might look like if borders were based upon the 10 major languages, May 10, 2014. (The Economist via http://pinterest.com ).

And like Tomlin, in the case of screen entertainment, I’m kind of tired of the same theme running over and over again. Not only is depicting the Ottoman Empire or Achaemenid Persia as evil heathens when compared with Italy in the 1480s or Greece in 480 BCE a historical lie. It also reinforces the idea that when the West wields its power and imperialism, the world is always a better place. If the climate summit in Paris demonstrated anything, it showed how much damage the West has done to the world.

A century or two from now — assuming our globalized world doesn’t fall apart due to wars and climate change — entertainment will likely be highlighted with accents unfamiliar to today’s Western ears. Even if one of entertainment’s primary languages remains English, it will likely have another accent. Ace!

“Stupid Atheist” Meets Truly Stupid Christian

06 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Acting, Activism, AP American History, AP US History, Arrogance, Atheism, Atheists, Christianity, Contradictions, Doing, Evangelical Christianity, Faith, Giving, Hope, Hypocrisy, Jay Sekulow, Mary Zini, Masturbation, Pat Robertson, Prayer in Schools, Stupidity, Teenage Angst, Teenagers, Televangelism, Televangelists, Trust, World History

Screenshot from HBO show The Leftovers title sequence, September 5, 2014. ( yU+co via http://news.creativecow.net). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws — low resolution and relevance to subject matter.

I’ve written about Mary Zini and our classroom incidents before, here and in Boy @ The Window. It’s been thirty years since she was my tenth-grade World History teacher. Yet most of what I remember from this class has little to do with Plato, NATO, or anything in between. It’s mostly Zini’s condescending personality, my new Christian arrogance, and that people’s personalities and actions are often walking and talking contradictions.

It was the beginning of October ’84 when we had our first incident. It occurred after what was the first of an endless cycle of fill-in-the-bubble Scan-Tron exams.

Honestly, I had no idea at that moment why I said what I said. I supposed that a summer of Jay Sekulow and the American Center for Law and Justice, all via Pat Robertson and The 700 Club had done the trick in making me a one-time prayer-in-public-schools advocate. I knew that Zini was raised a Catholic, so on some level, didn’t that make me a stupid Christian for calling her a stupid “atheist?”

That incident was also the beginning of seven months of starting to figure out how to be me and be a follower of Christ at the same time. I approached it the same way I approached how to be me in my first few months of seventh grade and Humanities at A.B. Davis Middle School in the fall of ’81. With the naiveté of a child, the hubris of a teenager, and the callousness of a human with alien superpowers.

Jay Sekulow lecturing, Regent University, December 15, 2006. (Juda Engelmayer via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via GFDL.

It was evident in my outward actions. I packed my red-pleather-covered King James Bible every day. For school. For Subway trips down into Midtown Manhattan when me and my older brother Darren worked for our father Jimme. For when we washed clothes every Saturday or Sunday at the laundromat on the Mount Vernon-Pelham border (it’s a yoga studio now). The Bible was my constant companion, my shield protecting me from this mad world of almost bottomless sin.

In the process, I read everything from Genesis to Revelations at least twice. (some books, like the Gospels, as many as four times). I learned a lot from reading all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. That the Israelite God Yahweh was stern and pretty unforgiving. That Jesus was a radical, not just spiritually, but politically as well. And that Paul was not exactly the most enlightened of the apostles when it came to women, children and slaves.

Mostly what I learned was that readings and understanding The Bible wasn’t like living out my beliefs at all. I was still a teenager, a fifteen-year-old living in the midst of welfare poverty, at 616 with an abusive womanizer, a wounded mother and a gaggle of siblings between the ages of eight months and five-and-a-half years. Not to mention my alcoholic cuss-factory of a father that I had to hunt down for money nearly every weekend. What all that meant was feeling lust for a young woman one minute, hate toward my idiot stepfather Maurice the next, and imitating Jimme’s slurred language and mannerisms the minute after that.

This new walk was very confusing, so much so that I often hid my emotions in much the same way I’d already been doing to protect myself from yet another abuse episode with Maurice. My emotions couldn’t stay bottled up, though. I frequently humped my way to sleep once our living room at 616 had become my bedroom during and after the months in which Balkis Makeda had lived with us.

By the spring of ’85, when Zini granted me her full support in getting me into AP US History for eleventh grade (this despite my 84 average in her class at the time), I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t stand being in the same room with Zini much of the time. Yet she did for me what few in my life had done — she opened up a door for me to walk through, albeit a relatively small one.

Hands of God & Adam, fingers about to touch, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican, Michelangelo, 1508-1512 (via Wikipedia). In public domain.

What did it all mean? That devoutness is meaningless without action, without giving and receiving, without trust, without taking risks. That even supposed atheists can act and give in ways that should shame many arrogant Christians. That Christianity isn’t a transactional relationship or process, but a journey with many pitfalls and lots of contradictions along the way. That who I/we say God is, well, at best an infinitesimal guess, because God and this universe is so much more that I as a human male living in the context of Western culture can only begin to understand.

Most of all, I had just begun to learn that spiritual liberation wasn’t supposed to be a yoke, but an opening to see the world and myself stripped bare of narrative and pretense. A strict adherence to the principles of Pat Robertson would bring me no closer to enlightenment and no further out of poverty than wishing on a star or avoiding cracks on Mount Vernon’s blue-slate sidewalks. Work, trust, opportunities, and not just Romans 8:28, was the beginning of the key for me.

Where’s Giancarlo Esposito’s “Breaking Bad” Emmy?

31 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Aaron Paul, Acting, Albuquerque, AMC, Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston, Crystal Meth, Drug Cartel, Eminem, Emmy Awards, Emmy Nominations, Giancarlo Esposito, Grunge, Gus, Gus Fring, Gustavo Fring, Hip-Hop, Hollywood, Jesse Pinkman, Joel Kinnaman, Macabre, Methamphetamine, Racial Privilege, Racism, Rage, The Killing, TV Series, Walter White, White Entitlement, White Male Angst, White Privilege

Gustavo “Gus” Fring, screen shot from Breaking Bad episode, Season 3, August 30, 2014. (http://geeknation.com). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws – lower resolution and relevance to subject matter.

Last Monday, Breaking Bad, a drama series that finished its final season ten months ago, took away six Primetime Emmy Awards out of its sixteen total nominations. Despite the fact that the producers had stretched the show’s fifth season over two years (2012 and 2013), Breaking Bad‘s Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul and Anna Gunn all took home Emmys for lead actor and supporting actor/actress in a drama series — again, in Cranston’s and Paul’s case. And all I kept thinking was, “Where’s Giancarlo Esposito’s Emmy?”

Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad, Season 5, September 2, 2013. (http://www.businessinsider.com).

Giancarlo Esposito, for those of you who still remember, played Gustavo “Gus” Fring, a mastermind of a drug lord and pillar of the Albuquerque, New Mexico community. His character was on for a few episodes at the end of Season 2 of Breaking Bad, and for all of Seasons 3 and 4. His character was so serene yet so single-minded, full of rage like Walter White. Yet Fring’s was a rational, focused, disciplined rage, handed out and practiced, like an usher handing out programs at a Sunday church service. Esposito’s Gus Fring was the character upon which Cranston’s Walter White pivoted, rising and falling like a pirouetting ballerina on a spin top. Without Fring, Walter White and Breaking Bad doesn’t make it past Season 2. The character’s dead or in jail long before he has a chance to truly make his mark.

Joel Kinnaman as Det. Stephen Holder in The Killing (2011-14), Vancouver, BC, Canada March 29, 2012. (http://www1.pictures.zimbio.com/). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws -- relevance to subject matter.

Joel Kinnaman as Det. Stephen Holder in The Killing (2011-14), Vancouver, BC, Canada March 29, 2012. (http://www1.zimbio.com/).

But I guess the Emmy voters didn’t see how central Gus Fring was to the Walter White story. I mean, why else give multiple Emmys to a five-foot-four-inch version of Eminem in Aaron Paul instead? Yes, Paul as Jesse Pinkman is pretty good at being a conflicted affluent hip-hopster, but his Pinkman isn’t even on par with Joel Kinnaman, the taller Eminem-esque reject-as-cop on the series The Killing (which came to a conclusion earlier this month on Netflix). The idea that Paul and Esposito competed for the same award in 2012 was an insult to the acting profession, like comparing fresh squeezed, no-pulp orange juice to Orange Kool-Aid made with high fructose corn syrup.

Really, in thinking about Cranston’s Walter White and the arch of the character, one cannot do it without a serious consideration of Esposito’s Gus Fring. Without Esposito’s Fring, the show is what the Emmys and Hollywood says it is, a story of a man at fifty, a “brilliant yet foolish has-been-who-really-should’ve-been-somebody high school chemistry teacher.” One who became a desperate crystal meth maker and dealer while going through chemotherapy for Stage 4 or Stage 5 lung cancer. A man who turns bad, first in a dark comedic way, then later, as a just plain macabre and dangerously sad character, leaving a trail of bodies along the way.

That version of Breaking Bad, though, doesn’t become the most watched TV series of all time. The real version, with Esposito’s Fring, gave us the full complexity of Cranston’s Walter White, especially his White male angst. Though not as obvious as the White male angst of ’90s grunge as exhibited in Pearl Jam, Nirvana or Live, Cranston’s Walter White is one that until his cancer had lived a life of quiet but smoldering rage, a rage that found its outlet in making and dealing methamphetamine so pure that Ivory Soap and Nazi Germans would be jealous. Only to be second fiddle to an Afro-Latino who’s in control of a billion-dollar drug ring? If that doesn’t bring issues of White entitlement and White resentment to the fore, then we’re in an alternate universe.

2013 Emmy trophy, January 29, 2014. (http://radiodelta.fm).

That’s why Breaking Bad‘s Seasons 2-4 were so worth watching, and the extended Season 5 so anticlimactic. The very reason it was inevitable Cranston’s Walter White would get caught and lose everything is the reason why Esposito’s Fring never did while he was alive. Fring knew that he had to always be in control, to always look as if he was a part of an illusion of suburban White Americana, even though in reality his was a world of constant duality. Fring could never risk being as unabashedly arrogant as Cranston’s Walter White precisely because Fring lacked the protections that came with racial entitlement. As Fring knew, the assumption that Black and Brown skin equated with criminality was ever present, and Fring would never confirm that stereotype, even as he personified it.

Walter White, his resentment about how his career and life turned out, this sense that though he was part of the Whiteness club, he hadn’t reap the material benefits of it, left him hopelessly in search of wealth and respect. But more than that. Cranston’s Walter White couldn’t carry that wealth and respect quietly like Esposito’s Fring, at least once White obtained them both. No, White had to let the world know that he was Heisenberg, that he was in charge. That was one of the reasons why he came to resent Fring in the first place.

To play a character like Gustavo Fring as well as Giancarlo Esposito did, to camouflage as much as he revealed, to juxtapose Fring’s humanity and callous disregard for such was what earned Esposito an Emmy nomination in 2012, at least. To also juxtapose his sense of quiet triumph and control in the midst of the world of Whiteness against Cranston’s Walter White and the White resentment and rage that could explode at any moment? That’s Breaking Bad even in Season 5, even minus Esposito’s Fring being present.

Once again, a person of color’s genius has gone unrewarded, and others received rewards on the backs of our work, while we are to be forgotten by most, after being killed off. It’s such a shame.

All Work and No Play

28 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Acid, Acting, Atheism, Balance, CIS, Computer and Information System, Evolution, Falcon Crest, Fringe, History Major, Intolerance, John Noble, LSD, Neal Galpern, Pitt, Religion, Robert Foxworth, Sexual Harassment, University of Pittsburgh, Walter Bishop, Yin and Yang

Yin & Yang symbol from Taoism, good symbol for balance in life, January 28, 2013. (http://taoism.about.com).

As those high schools students I taught through JSA at Princeton in the summers of ’08 and ’09 either have come to realize or are realizing now, finding balance between school, full-time or part-time work, family and some semblance of a social life is just a tad difficult. Sometimes, it’s even impossible. So it was for me the spring of ’89, the last spring before I’d put together what I came to call my “16-week strategy for success and a social life.”

It was the semester where in which I worked 36 hours a week over a seven-week period and faced sexual harassment from a co-worker who was the BFF of my supervisor of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning labs for Computer and Information Services (CIS) (see my post “On People and Stress” from February ’09). It was the last semester in which I had to worry about my mother and my younger siblings from afar because of the possibility of domestic violence, as my idiot stepfather Maurice still lived with them at 616.

This was my first set of classes as a History major, but I also had some general ed requirements to fulfill (see my post “Major Change” from October ’10). It would’ve been a tough semester even if I hadn’t worked, but with the CIS schedule the way it was, I was in for an interesting ride. For Macro, the chair of the Economics department was our professor. The class was at nine o’clock in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a discussion section at 8 am on Tuesday to boot. It was almost as if he wanted folks to fail. With my schedule the way it was, I rarely made it to class on Tuesdays, and I only made it to one discussion section all semester long. To make up for that, I never missed the class on Thursdays, and often participated in the lecture discussions, such as they were.

Actor Robert Foxworth on Broadway in August: Osage County, August 2008. (Joan Marcus/Playbill).

Shakespeare was later in the day on Tuesdays and Thursdays, taught by Wion, who looked like the actor Robert Foxworth from the CBS show Falcon Crest, only not quite as handsome. He delivered lines from Taming of The Shrew and Othello like he’d been a wannabe actor in a previous career but realized teaching was more of his shtick. Wion often used Freudian pop psychology to explain the motives of characters in Shakespeare’s plays, and as he did, all of our eyes glazed over. This analysis for us was so ’70s, especially for the second-wave feminists in the class.

My Bio and Philosophy classes seemed to fit under the theme of “questioning God,” as there were students in both who had an ax to grind against “dumb Christians.” Bio in some ways was easier, at least because we had a professor who understood why some of us who were Christian might find evolution difficult to swallow. After several yelps from students during one of his lectures on evolution, mutation and reproduction, he said, “just because there’s evolution doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist. Who’s to say that evolution isn’t a higher being’s method for the creation of life?” I appreciated that answer very much.

In existentialism class, especially the discussion section, no reconciliation was possible. My discussion section instructor was an Australian man in his late-twenties, with curly hair like the lead singer from Simply Red, except my instructor’s hair was a dirty blonde. He spent discussion after discussion railing on Christians as “people who refuse to believe that God doesn’t exist.” One of our discussions was so anti-anything other than atheism that I found it just as bigoted as anything I’d heard from Hebrew-Israelites or out of a televangelist’s mouth, and said as much. I was ignored.

No class that semester drove me nuts like my History majors writing seminar with Neal Galpern. We met on Monday and Wednesday afternoons for about an hour and a half, and it was the most boring hour and a half on my schedule. Galpern was an aging hippie complete with comb-over who graduated with doctorate in hand from Berkeley in ’75. He sometimes acted like he was still dropping acid. His stuttering starts and stops and numerous “Um”s could stop his lectures and our discussions cold. He wanted each of us to write a research-based paper of no less than twenty papers on any comparative topic in history that we could come up with, as vague as the man himself.

John Noble as Dr. Walter Bishop on Fringe, Season 5, after dropping acid, December 2012. (http://fringetelevision.com).

I couldn’t stand Galpern and his constant skipping over my hand in class and his snarky comments to all of us as if we were all dense and he was clearer than Antarctic ice melt. I didn’t challenge Galpern in class, at least not directly. I challenged him with my project. I decided to do a paper that compared the main features of the Civil Rights Movement in the US to the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa. Admittedly it was too big a project, but it was Galpern’s job to help me narrow the topic into a doable chunk.

Instead all the advice he gave me consisted of “You need to find another topic, um . . . because, um . . . I’m afraid . . . I don’t, um . . . know much . . . about this.” I refused to budge. I wasn’t about to do a stupid paper on medieval Europe just because that happened to be his area of alleged expertise. After a meeting where Galpern finally gave in to me, I went across the hall to our classroom on the third floor of Forbes Quad and imitated my professor’s halting style of conversation. Galpern walked in, and I just kept going until I finished my, um, sentence. Yeah, it would be safe to say that he didn’t like me too much either!

I finished that semester with two A-‘s in my writing seminar and in existential philosophy, a B+ in Shakespeare, a B in Biology, and even pulled out a C+ in Macro, despite my lack of attendance. It was a difficult time. Yet it was also the start of my growth into early adulthood, and understanding that finding balance would be the key to sustained success.

If Boy @ The Window Were A Movie…

10 Saturday Dec 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, My Father, Pop Culture, Youth

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Acting, Actors, Alison Arngrim, Boy @ The Window, Brad Dourif, Brian Dennehy, Clarke Peters, Gabrielle Union, Harold Perrineau, Humanities, James Avery, Jesse L. Martin, Khandi Alexander, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Nathan Fillion, Ray Liotta, Rita Moreno, Rob Brown, Thandie Newton, TV Shows

Not So Young Man @ His Window, December 10, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins).

…who would I hire to play the characters in my memoir? Especially if I could reach across space and time to pick actors with the range necessary to play complicated characters, like yours’ truly, for instance. Hmm. I have a few ideas:

Rob Brown, ala Finding Forrester (2000) – He’d been a perfect character to play me during my high school years, between the blank stare and face, his height, and his ability to show awkwardness around Whites in authority.

Rob Brown as Jamal Wallace in Finding Forrester (2000) Screen Shot. (http://filmdope.com).

Khandi Alexander, ala The Corner (2000) – While she isn’t nearly as tall and is a bit chestier than my mother, her affect as the down-and-out West Baltimore mother on the groundbreaking HBO miniseries fits here.

James Avery – He would be in the role of my idiot ex-stepfather, with his bulging eyes and belly, and with his flashes of rage, yeah, he’d been perfect.

Clarke Peters, ala The Wire, Treme – I thought about someone like Sammy Davis, Jr. playing the role of my father, Jimme, but Davis’ acting range wouldn’t have been enough to capture both my father’s drunken rage and the comedy that often served as an overlay to my encounters with my father growing up.

Clarke Peters at Edinburgh Festival 2010, August 6, 2010. (Ausir). Released to public domain via GNU Free Documentation License.

Jesse L. Martin – The man’s acting range is enormous, and would capture the complexities of playing someone like my older brother Darren, a super-shy kid who himself played the role of someone mentally retarded while also having taught himself to read at the age of three. Only, Darren didn’t know how to stop.

Jesse L. Martin at Annual Flea Market and Grand Auction hosted by Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, September 26, 2006. (Insomniacpuppy). Released to public domain via Wikipedia.

Harold Perrineau, ala Oz – His face alone captures a lot of emotion, and show does the way he says his lines, something that I’d want from someone playing my best friend from elementary school. Perrineau’s face would also capture duplicity, a necessary ingredient for betraying a friendship. Just like many of the characters in the HBO series Oz.

Thandie Newton – This was a tough one, as I also thought about Rosario Dawson in the role of Crush #1. But Newton has quirkiness as an actor that Dawson lacks at times, and for all of the wonderful traits of the character known as Crush #1, quirkiness is key.

Thandie Newton at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, September 2007. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gdcgraphics/1639139527/in/set-72157602744288487/). Released to public domain via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Ray Liotta – Not nearly as tough, this despite the fact that the real “A” had blondish hair when we were kids. Liotta’s meanness, his laugh, his Italian coldness easily capture what “A” was like as my tormentor in seventh grade.

Nathan Fillion, ala Firefly (2002-03), Serenity(2005) – the near-perfect actor to play the contrarian one, “JD” (see my post “The Contrarian One” from February ’11), his aloofness, his sense of superiority, his maverick affect throughout our years in Humanities together.

Nathan Fillion as Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly (2002-02). (Wikipedia.org).

Alison Arngrim, ala Little House on the Prairie (1974-82) – She played Nellie Olson on the show, a bratty, well-off girl who only knew how to view the world through her own selfish lens. She could play any number of my former White classmates, especially many of the ones who left Humanities between the end of eighth and the beginning of tenth grade.

Little House on the Prairie's Nellie Olson as played by Alison Arngirm, circa 1977. (http://www.flickr.com/3595/3433153010_b5f3cae12a.jpg).

Gabrielle Union – as this actor has done the affect of pissed off and Black preppie well over the years, she’d be great for the role of Crush #2, the one the main character (me) becomes obsessed with in the six months after graduating high school. Like the character, Union can crush hearts.

Rita Moreno – A fixture in the acting business for more than sixty years, one of a handful to win an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony Award, she could easily slip on the role of a guidance counselor like the chain-smoking, stereotyping bigot Sylvia Fasulo. The only other person who’d fit this role is Callie Thorne from the USA show, Necessary Roughness.

Brian Dennehy – There aren’t many actors who could play my late AP US History teacher Harold Meltzer. You see, you’d need to be able to spit, to tell long and strange stories, to have moment of macabre laughter and moments of bitter rage. Dennehy, though, has experience doing all of those things, though not in one role. Plus, he’s tall and rotund enough for the part.

Brad Dourif, ala Dune (1984), Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) – He’s weird enough to play the role of Regis, one of my older friends from my undergraduate days at the University of Pittsburgh, someone who was there for me the semester I went through homeless and three months without money.

Brad Dourif at the Lord of the Rings-Convention Ring*Con in Bonn, Germany, November 23, 2002. (Diane Krauss). Released to public domain via GNU Free Documentation.

I could go on and on. But that’s unnecessary here. This ensemble cast, with the right script — and a time machine — would make Boy @ The Window come alive, and have me blushing and crying over and over again.

I’m Not Happy Feet (or Ted Williams)

21 Monday Feb 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Movies, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Acting, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Class, Classism, Dancing for Dinner, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Entitlement, Gender, Happy Feet, Homelessness, Hustle, Hustlin', Hustling, Poverty, Prince Zuko, Race, Racism, Shuckin' an' Jivin', Tap Dancing, Ted Williams, The Soloist, Trained Seals, Uncle Iroh, Voyeurism, YouTube

Happy Feet Big Dancing Scene Screen Shot, February 19, 2011. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as screen shot is of low quality and illustrates the subject of this post.

Happy Feet Big Dancing Scene Screen Shot, February 19, 2011. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as screen shot is of low quality and illustrates the subject of this blog post.

Remember that homeless Black guy who kicked off our new year a few weeks ago through the power of YouTube and some folks who recorded him and his golden voice on their smartphone? Yeah, how could any of you forget, really? Ted Williams had a whirlwind ten days, as thirteen million people watched the YouTube recording, companies and individuals offered him jobs and money, his family came back into his life. And then, of course, Williams became violent, relapsed into drug use, and is in the midst of rehab — again.

But it all started with his YouTube performance for the good folks of voyeur America. The whole incident made me cringe from start to finish. It also made me think about something that has always bothered me about race in America. Why? Especially since the video surfaced a man who’d been on a downward spiral for three decades? Because it seems that in order for a Black person to be taken seriously in this society, we have to perform like trained seals in order to get the attention we need and deserve.

Ted Williams, Columbus, OH, January 3, 2011. AP. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution and use as subject in blog post.

This isn’t about some metaphorical relationship between excellence and success, or displaying intellect at school and in the world of work. No, this is actually about giving a performance, acting, or as the older folks would say, shuckin’ an’ jivin’, or hustlin’, to grab the attention of mostly Whites in high places. While this isn’t always a bad thing, it also is mostly not good. For it also seems that many of us must experience hardship, prison, drug addiction, abuse and homelessness in order to get attention in the first place.

That’s why it pisses me off when hearing about journalists shadowing the homeless in order to learn about life on the streets. Or when writers sit down with a homeless man or woman to learn about their ironic life story. It also bothers me when I see lists of the “50 Most Successful X” and the “100 Most Innovative Y,” knowing before I read one word that the only Blacks who made these lists were entertainers (I include professional athletes in this category, by the way). It’s disheartening to know that, for all of my writing ability and intellect, the only way I’ll likely be as successful as I hope to be will be by delivering a performance that allows Americans — mostly White — to be voyeurs of my life beyond my words and deep thoughts.

It all came together for me in the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode (Season 2, Episode 4) “The Swamp,” where Prince Zuko and his uncle Iroh sit at the side of the road in an Earth Kingdom town begging for change. One man forces the once proud general to dance for a gold coin — “Nothing like a fat man dancing for his dinner,” the man says. It speaks to shameful classism — or, at the very least, a sense of class and race entitlement — that we in this country engage in every day.

So, here are a few more thoughts. I look at Ted Williams, The Soloist with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx, even the Pixar/Disney movie Happy Feet (2006) — which me and my wife made the mistake of taking our son Noah to see (he didn’t like the movie, by the way) — and see lots of shuffling across a floor for the attention of Whites (and some people of color) in high places. Do two million penguins really need to tap dance ala Savion Glover in order to get attention from White scientists trying to save life on this planet from our global warming ways? No, but Blacks have had to literally tap dance for food and spare change in the exact same way.

I felt this way in grad school and at various times throughout my career. That I needed to sing, dance and do flips and cartwheels to make myself stand out for my middling White professors and supervisors. It would explain why some of them would ignore my grades, papers and awards to ask me if I could palm or dunk a basketball — out of the blue! Or why a muckity-muck at the Academy for Educational Development would walk by my office, notice the PhD on my name plate, and say, “Wow! You have a doctorate! I thought you only played softball!” I said, “Yeah, that’s why I’ve been working here for three years, just so I can play on the organization’s softball team.”

We ignore those suffering the most, whether because of race or class or gender or a combination of the three (or more) until they do something that impresses us. That’s when they deserve a chance, at least from the perspective of those laughing at them. And that’s shameful, demeaning, and yes, racist and elitist in a very specific way.

Why Ferengi Are Jewish & The Maquis Are Latino

17 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Pop Culture, race

≈ 3 Comments

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Acting, Actor Roles, Anti-Stereotype, Archetypes, Armin Shimerman, Aron Eisenberg, Avery Brooks, Cultural Stereotypes, Deep Space 9, DS9, Ferengi, Jr., LeVar Burton, Martin Luther King, Max Grodenchik, Michael Dorn, MLK Day, Racial Stereotypes, Reggie Miller, Robert Beltran, Roxann Dawson, Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, Stereotype Threat, Stereotypes, The Maquis, TNG, Tony Plana

Ferengi Characters, Star Trek: DS9, "Little Green Men" Episode Screen Shot, January 16, 2011. Image qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law because of its low quality and limited use nature.

Maquis Characters, Star Trek: Voyager, "Caretaker, Part I" Episode Screen Shot, January 16, 2011. Image qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law because of its low quality and limited use nature.

In honor of Martin Luther King Day ’11, it’s my privilege to discuss Star Trek and stereotypes. For whatever reason, I’ve spent the better part of the past six months watching episodes of different Star Trek series in my spare entertainment time. Whether the theatrically great DS9 (Deep Space 9), the ever-goofy TNG (Next Generation), or the uneven and mediocre Voyager, the Star Trek franchise that made runs of four different series between ’87 and ’05 had at least one theme consistent with our much less harmonious twentieth and twenty-first century times. Playing to stereotypes seemed to be a common undercurrent, though with great makeup artists — and at least with DS9, good writing and acting — those stereotypes were light and subtle.

In watching, it amazed me that nearly all actors who played the alien Ferengi were Jewish. Yes, the actors who played the Ferengi characters were supposed to be short, but I didn’t know that Jews had cornered the acting market for people under five and a half feet tall. Armin Shimerman, Aron Eisenberg, Wallace Shawn, and Max Grodenchik all played the main Ferengi characters on DS9. Not so ironically, the Ferengi culture centered itself on making profit by virtually any means necessary, a pretty vile stereotype for an entertainment franchise based on a future and better human race.

Reggie Miller, Potential Ferengi

Even while watching DS9 in the late-90s, when all of the episodes were new ones, I commented to my friends that NBA Hall-of-Famer Reggie Miller could easily play a Ferengi, even at six-foot-seven, because the makeup artists would have very little work to do. Of course, that wasn’t to be.

Tony Plana as Maquis Character, Star Trek: DS9, "The Maquis" Episode Screen Shot, January 16, 2011. Image qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law because of its low quality.

It wasn’t just the Jews-as-Ferengi that I picked up on the first or second time around. On both Voyager and DS9, the Maquis, a guerilla group fighting for disputed territories, had a disproportionate number of Latino actors playing those lead characters. Robert Beltran, Roxann Dawson and Tony Plana (mostly known these days as the father on the recently ended TV series Ugly Betty) were among the Latino actors playing these characters. I guess that the passionate or hot-blooded Latino stereotype played a role in the selection of these quality actors to play passionate or hot-blooded rebels in the relatively placid paradise of the Star Trek galaxy.

Of course, Black men on these shows found themselves emasculated for the most part. From LeVar Burton

Anthony Montgomery as Travis Mayweather, Star Trek: Enterprise, January 16, 2011. This screen shot qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because it is of low resolution screen shot and is a minimal use.

as the blind engineer to Michael Dorn as the semi-defanged Klingon, and from Tim Russ as the more-emotionally-repressed-than-normal Vulcan to the milquetoast twenty-second century human played by Anthony Montgomery, these characters seldom were provided the opportunity of a higher level of complexity beyond stereotypes or in playing an anti-stereotype. The one notable exception was Avery Brooks’ character Capt. Benjamin Sisko, who became one of the Bajoran Prophets at the end of the DS9 series, destined not to enjoy the fruits of his god-like work in the here-and-now.

I’m not bringing all of this up to denigrate the Star Trek franchise. I actually love DS9, still like TNG, and can tolerate an occasional Voyager episode. Rather, this is about the battle over racial stereotypes, living them down, defying them, and being surprised when others don’t exhibit them. The fact that a franchise as optimistic and progressive as Star Trek couldn’t avoid major stereotypes says a lot about how deeply ingrained they are in our advanced culture.

Here’s a stereotype-breaking thought. Let’s make most of our images of alien humanoids out there somewhere in the Milky Way into folks who have various shades of brown skin. I know that this wouldn’t play well on any future Star Trek series. But this has about as much of a chance being true as the pink-skinned humanoids that characters in the Star Trek franchise constantly encounter. This first-contact stereotype, of course, is the hardest one of all for the Hollywood set to break.

It still amazes me that people are amazed that someone like me, a six-foot-three Black guy, has a doctorate, teaches, writes and still likes to play basketball. It also amazes me that many are still waiting for President Obama to slip into a stereotype, even though he’s bent over backwards to be neither a stereotype nor an anti-stereotype. Or, for that matter, the amazement of Blacks or others of color in watching a fast White guy play football or a tall one dunk a basketball. Stereotypes, like perceptions, are real, but not as real as the human capacity to defy them. Anyone who doesn’t believe that doesn’t believe in anything that Martin Luther King, Jr. stood for.