Articles » Jason Cochran

“Oklahoma!” is one of the dirtiest movie musicals of all time

Articles

Dec 062011

Fire down below: Laurey and Curly reach the climax

You may think the musical Oklahoma! is a sweet little show about friendly farmers and cowmen, but I’ve got an arousing awakening for you. Oklahoma! is drenched in sexual innuendo, rape metaphor, and bestiality references. After all, the whole plot revolves around who gets to take Laurey to the “box social” — a coded consummation metaphor if ever there was one.

Many years ago, I wrote this (don’t worry, it’s pretty short and it moves fast) about the 1955 Fred Zinnemann movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein‘s 1943 Broadway musical Oklahoma!. As I decode this assumed G-rated masterpiece for torrid subtext, I guarantee that you will never look at that chestnut the same way ever again.

I wrote this for a film studies course at Northwestern University. It’s a little-known fact that the history and writing of the American musical is a special discipline of mine. I don’t talk about it much, but it’s true. I even have an MFA in music theatre from New York University, a lot of good may it do me.

I wrote this mostly as a lark to see what I could get away with, but it holds up. May my perspective make this old snoozer recharged with sexual energy for you.

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Much has been written about the significance of Oklahoma! in the history of American musical theatre. Most historians place it as the milestone in the integration of the musical’s construction in conveying themes, plot and character. Its reputation among laymen is one of a simpleminded, quaint musical. What both factions ignore in their analyses, however, is that Oklahoma! is full of subtle but rough-hewn sexual and violent undertones that in fact contradict its reputation as mere mild entertainment.

Oklahoma! was released in 1955 after the New York and touring companies had closed and introduced the new wide-screen process called Todd-AO. It was re-released in 1956 by 20th Century Fox in CinemaScope. It tells story of Curly McLain (Gordon MacRae) and Laurey Williams (Shirley Jones), who, in a fit of coquettish spite, accepts an invitation to a social from the brute farmhand Jud Fry (Rod Steiger). Laurey’s ensuing self-torment plus the tension between Jud and Curly drives the plot from that point on. True to the Rodgers and Hammerstein style, there is also a contrasting subcouple in the form of Will Parker (Gene Nelson) and Ado Annie (Gloria Grahame), who pines for any man with a seductive intent, including the peddler Ali Hakim (Eddie Albert).

Oklahoma! has reached the status of an enduring classic, thanks mostly to its mainstream proliferation through the Fred Zinnemann film. While its bumpkin characters seem homey and charming in light of modern musical works, the film itself remains fresh and entertaining. The songs and dancing are in part responsible for that, but one might argue that its nearly perverse subthemes of sexual desire and violence help the film maintain a gripping, if subconscious, appeal.

The primary sexual themes of Oklahoma! play themselves out in its characters. There is Laurey, the virginal girl coming of sexual age; Curly, the suave, sexy charmer clearly obsessed with bedding Laurey; Ado Annie, the girl, recently come of sexual age and unable to control her sexual impulses — a victim of her own Freudian id; Jud Fry, who represents an unfettered, unchivalrous sexual carnality that contrasts the cultural expectations of Claremore; Ali Hakim, also a victim of his own id but, unlike Annie, quite aware of his manipulatory manner of obtaining gratification; Will Parker, who is like Laurey in his virginal, wide-eyed view of sex; and Aunt Eller, the matriarch-cum-madam of Claremore, wise in the ways of sex and lust and engrossed with matchmaking her Laurey with a suitable sexual partner — the handsome Curly.

It is Aunt Eller who carries out the first sexual act, which, like everything else in Oklahoma!, is disguised with a down-home flavor. She is seen daydreaming and churning butter (a subliminally phallic gesture), no doubt dreaming of her younger, sexual days. When Curly chats with her, she keeps her eyes focused on him, surveying him and continuing her phallic strokes. The first thing she says to him also indicates her sexual desire for the virile Curly: “If I wasn’t an ole woman, and if you wasn’t so young and smart-alecky, why, I’d marry you and git you to set around at night and sing to me [i.e. be intimate with me]“ Aunt Eller’s churning halts when Curly mentions Laurey, her niece. Although Aunt Eller wears a smile as he mentions her, she promptly stops her action and opens up the churn — in essence, castrating Curly in any hopes of making love to such an “ole woman.” In a moment, she’s scooping out globs of butter and saying “you young ‘uns!” (The dairy product metaphor for sex is repeated during “I Cain’t Say No”: “S’posin’ ‘at he says ‘at you’re sweeter’n cream/ And he’s gotta have cream er die?” And later, women’s home-cooked meals are auctioned to their suitors at the Skidmore Ranch.)

The butter metaphor is by no means the only sexual undertheme perpetrated by Aunt Eller. In fact, throughout the film, Aunt Eller is the only person in Claremore who seems to be wise to the ways of sex and appreciates fully the sexual goals of the courtship ritual. Her primary function is that of matchmaker for the girls, helping them obtain a suitable sexual partner.

Nice basket: Curly is obsessed with getting into Laurey's hamper

For example, she opens her home to all the couples on the way to the Skidmore Ranch. Once inside, the ladies undress and primp themselves in preparation for their evenings with the menfolk. Not only is the “Many a New Day” scene voyeuristic on behalf of the viewers, but it is a depiction of how Claremore girls pride themselves on catching a man. The number itself represents contradiction — it’s a feminist stance yet sung while in underwear. Although Laurey may deny the idea that her world centers around a man, we also discover the shallowness of her decree when she nearly breaks down at song’s end. During the song, there are a number of sexual issues: girls try to outdo each other with attractiveness and showiness, women tie their corsets with thrusting, rhythmic pulses and two pubescent girls become frustrated with their own lack of expertise. While the girls primp and preen inside, comparing undergarments and discussing sexuality, the men are outside, dipping their heads in a horse trough. The statement of who’s luring who is more than implicit.

Aunt Eller in essence affects the whole plot. She uses Jud to make Curly jealous enough to try harder for Laurey but when Jud’s obsession becomes apparent, she gets worried.

Aunt Eller also endorses the men in their own pursuit of more vigorous sexual satisfaction. In the “Kansas City” scene, she reacts to the assumed pornography inside the “Little Wonder” first with the expected, gender-ascribed disdain (“The hussy!”) but then gives the men approval from the other side of the sexual fence of experience when she says “How do you turn the thing to see the other pitcher?” Plus, underneath her grey dress she wears a flaming red petticoat, which she flashes along with her legs to the camera in “Kansas City.” Later in the number, Will Parker chooses Aunt Eller over the two adolescent girls, presumably because of her knowledge in sexual matters. The lyric of the song depicts sexual awakening (i.e. the stripper in Kansas City) and sure enough, soon the two adolescent girls are petting Will and sheepishly trying to get him to notice them. At the point when he does embarrassedly notice the two girls, Aunt Eller vanishes off the left of the screen into the train office. It’s almost as if she was making herself scarce to matchmake Will with the young ladies.

She matchmakes at other times, too, stressing physical contact over romantic courtship: (“Why don’t you grab her and kiss her when she gets that way, Curly?”) When Laurey and Curly finally do wed, she protects their intimacy within the house by halting the shivoree crowd at the stoop.

Aunt Eller seems to be very much in control of the townspeople and supervises their mating. During “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top,” she is shown as the only object in the Todd-AO vista, gazing intently at Curly and Laurey. In “Kansas City,” she escorts the ensemble to the far end of the train platform with outstretched arms, as if pushing them. In “The Farmer and the Cowman,” she whips out a pistol and forces everyone to dance. Also, even though Curly is about to be killed by the “Little Wonder,” Hakim wastes time in telling Aunt Eller about the hidden knife, and she is the one to save Curly’s life; the matchmaking must go on, and by her hand. She even literally auctions off the girls at the social like a whorehouse madam. Yet, however in control she may be, as when she threatens Ali Hakim with an eggbeater down his windpipe, she retains her sexuality, getting a pair of garters in the bargain.

Violence is hardly scarce in Oklahoma! as far as sex goes. In fact, Oklahoma seems to be teeming with an undercurrent of unfulfilled sexual desire and violence waiting to emerge, be it between farmer and cowman or two eligible ladies. Each man seems willing to kill to obtain his love. Curly tries to convince Jud to commit suicide. Jud tries to kill Curly twice (once with a sexual toy). Will tells Ali he would kill him for Annie. Gertie Cummings has fights with both Annie and Laurey (rolling on the ground, of course).

The community structure of Claremore revolves around obtaining sex through appropriate societal channels. Marriage is usually the way to get that sex. When a marriage proposal (and thus the promise of sex) arrives, it is monumental. When Annie is engaged to Ali, she promptly goes to report it to the other girls in the community. Laurey and Curly’s marriage is also a community spectacle.

Premarital sex is often alluded to, however, particularly through the lusty characters of Annie and Ali, who would be termed “sexual addicts” in today’s America. Says Will: “I’m goin’ t’marry her!” Ali: “On purpose?,” implying the famous Oklahoma shotgun marriage. Obviously, any moral code isn’t apparent to Ali. He wants to bed Annie in the Claremore Hotel. He also suggests that he, Laurey and Annie engage in a menage a trois by skinny dipping together. He’s been “feeling up” Annie behind the haystack (his confession that results in his shotgun engagement to Annie). At the end, he’s caught in illicit (by Claremore standards) sex and forced by shotgun to marry Gertie Cummings. Finally, he sells garters and bloomers and other forbidden delights like drugs (the Egyptian smelling salts).

In Oklahoma!, women obtain sexual fulfillment when in a semi-drugged state. “Laurey’s Dream” is the most obvious example. Ado Annie, too, seems ever-comatose and virtually unresponsive, doggedly singing her number “I Cain’t Say No.”

This is how movies audiences knew Gloria Grahame before she played Ado Annie: As a sex addict of another kind

Also, the sexuality of women is related to beasts in Oklahoma! During “Kansas City,” as Will describes the round shape of the burlesque queen, the non-diagetic sound of a horse whinny is mixed in. Later in the number, he sings to his horse as one of the pubescent, sexually-unready girls faintly tries to grab his attention. Before the reprise of “I Cain’t Say No,” Annie compliments Will’s manner of roping horses in between his sexual advances. He also tells Annie that roping steers all day makes him think of her. The connection between beasts and sex is obvious. Later, after “All ‘Er Nothin’,” he pens Annie in with a farmyard fence like a common hog before kissing her. Even Ali Hakim joins in, describing Annie’s “soft, round tail.” At first glance, these allusions seem rustic and apropos for the midwestern setting, but in actuality they are blatant objectifications.

As in other film musicals, dance implies sex. In “Kansas City,” Will tries to teach the young girls how to dance — i.e. how to become sexually mature enough to capture his attention. In her dream, dancing with Jud symbolizes Laurey’s moral decay and at the social, she reels in disgust at the prospect of dancing with Jud. Also at the social, Annie and Will go from dancing together to immediately and furtively sneaking away for hanky-panky — the natural progression. Also, Annie laments Will’s own fidelity after he dances with the two pubescent girls.

Unlike other film musicals, however, blatant objectification of sex is not used much. It is cloaked instead under the character and custom of the Oklahomans. Lusty observation of the opposite sex is frowned upon. Jud peeps on Laurey twice in the film but that act is in no way presented as positive or does it instill desire in the audience. The only time the women are put on pedestals for the men in the town is during the hamper auction. Although the metaphor of the woman’s sexuality as a scrumptious meal for her suitor is striking (and it is repeated when Will compares Ado’s mouth to ripe berries in the reprise of “I Cain’t Say No”), it is hardly as blatant as, say, a Ziegfeld girl, showing legs and bosom with come-hither glee. Like all sexuality in Oklahoma!, the sexuality of the girls is obscured by the charm of local custom. As an audience unused to such coding, we see the custom but not the actual sexuality itself, mistaking it for chivalry.

Each character fits into this chivalric custom. Jud is ostracized not for his sexual desires (even Will owns the “Little Wonder”) but mostly for his selfish and coarse refusal to cooperate with the chivalric code. Curly is attractive because he tries to turn its tables and have the women proposition him. Romance comes when we sense his intense desire to abandon egocentricity and conform to the code, which he eventually does when he proposes humbly to Laurey. Annie’s sexual drive is not reprehensible because she is unaware of her indiscretions and is instead fulfilled by them. Furthermore, she obeys the chivalric code and promptly responds to all gentlemanly advances. Laurey is the perfect ingenue — virginal and a victim of a man’s romantic system, resorting to dreams for her sexual fulfillment. Will, intent on obeying the code at the cost of $100 total, is just discovering the wonders of romance and thus excusable from his reckless tendency to woo every available female. Ali Hakim is a rascal for his shrewd manner of circumventing the code, and also forgivable because of his pure wheedling, con-man ability.

Oklahoma! is not without out-and-out innuendo, however. Take, for example, Will’s “Oklahoma Hello,” in which Annie is straddled (like a horse — the woman as a beast theme) about the groin. Later, at film’s end, a disheveled Will and Annie have clearly been screwing around behind the house: “You missed all the excitement!” someone says. Annie responds, dazed: “No, we didn’t. Hello, Will,” and Will giggles. Did they engage in sex during the trial scene? The audience must guess, but given Annie’s insatiable appetite and Will’s hankering for Annie, we imagine they have.

Naturally, such open-ended presentations and cultural cloaking was the only way that Oklahoma! could appeal both to New York’s sly but conservative audiences and later slip by the film’s censors. Like Cole Porter’s famous double-entendres, Hammerstein’s suggestive script (which was adapted almost word for word by Sonya Levien and William Ludwig for the film) managed to carry off dozens of sexual themes under the pretense of a simple, enigmatic culture.

There’s a storehouse of sexual activity swarming in Oklahoma! and enough to fill several ten-page papers. In overview, however, it suffices to note the several main themes in the film: the cloaking of continual sexual pursuit beneath local custom and chivalry, the dependency of each character on that custom, the matriarchal presence of the madam Aunt Eller and the existence of other major themes such as the sexual linkage of beasts and dancing as they relate to Oklahoma!‘s setting and genre. In those themes alone there is enough to give any Rodgers and Hammerstein fan pause as she or he considers Oklahoma!‘s innate sexuality and perversity.

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Gertie Cummings? Really?

College is hot.

It's not "Porky's." It's R&H: Laurey bathes in front of Ado Annie

Inca Trail trek to Machu Picchu, Peru: What you need to know

Articles, Blog

Dec 102010

My recent silence has everything to do with travel. I was on The Golden Trudge.

I took a trip to Peru, where I visited Cusco and did the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. When I tell people what I’ve been up to, many of them coo and instantly ask to hear all about it. So here are some basics that I wish someone had told me before I left.

The Incas built trapezoidal doorways to guard against earthquake damage. And because they're slimming.

The Inca Trail, if you don’t know, is a pathway through the mountains that linked Inca settlements along cliff faces and in valleys. One of the principal destinations was Machu Picchu, which was a sort of university-and-palace town of its day. What we call the Inca Trail is actually just 26 miles of what was once a paved man-made system of roads that threaded up and down western South America. Its paving stones were laid more than five centuries ago. These days, tourists do the 26-mile segment of the Trail in about four days of steady up-and-down walking, although shorter snippets are available for wimps and pussies.

Like several other precious attractions in South America, such as the Galápagos Islands, you have to be guided to get in. So like it or not, even if you elect to carry all of your own clothes, you will need workers to get you onto the trail. They carry your food, your tent, the cooking implements — and they carry it back out again, too. No one takes the Inca Trail alone.

The first thing to know is that not all tour companies are equal. Many of them will appear equal to the visitor, because they all strive to provide essentially the same service. But they differ behind the scenes. Peru is a nation of subsistence living and few worker protections, and those two facts combine to create an ideal environment for exploitation. So you must make sure the company you pick pays their porters fairly.

Our guide, Hubert, is from a farm town in the mountains. He’s been working the trail off and on for about 11 years. When he began, he was 19, and conditions were deplorable. He was tricked into carrying a leaky kerosene tank, and at night, he was told to go find a cave to sleep in. The conditions were so humiliating that he swore he’d never go back onto the Trail again. But with time, the Peruvian government realized what was happening, and to both protect the Trail and to protect Peruvians, it began to regulate more carefully, starting by implementing a humane weight limit for each porter. The fuel source was changed, too.

Hubert came back as a porter, a job that requires men to race past all the tourists with 50-pound packs on their backs and set up camp at the next night’s base by the time they catch up. Eventually, Hubert went to study English and tourism in Cusco, which enabled him to rise to the level of group leader. Now, he’s in charge of the displaced farm boys who are starting as porters.

Hubert swore to us that his company, Peru Treks, was one of the best, and in saying it, implied some rivals were secretly unethical. He said it pays even its lowest workers fairly, and instead of bundling the company profits out of the country, as so many tour companies do, it re-invested in Peru. Hubert said the company even helped build schools in impoverished hometowns of some of its porters. I saw our porters sleeping underneath our restaurant tent at night, and they talked and laughed with each other by night, so I can only assume he meant what he said and they were well treated. They seemed content.

Peruvian trekking companies are some of the most active spammers of American message boards, and part of the reason is tourism is an industry that’s till in its infancy there. Not everyone understands what good form is. They just know what tourism dollars can mean to their communities. I came to Peru Treks through the recommendation of an American acquaintance who recently moved to Cusco after living in Los Angeles for many years. If a company was a swindler, she would have heard about it.

Ankle-breaker: The Inca Trail has far outlasted its warranty

My tour company promoted very clear communication in excellent English from the very start. One oddity was that it demanded it was paid in U.S. dollars that were absolutely, positively, unquestionably perfect. No rips, no matter how teeny, would be tolerated. Apparently, it’s the only way a Peruvian can ensure a dollar is accepted at the bank. This took some doing on my part. First I had to get immaculate bills from my bank. Then I had to get them to Cusco in the same condition. I accomplished that with a money belt. Two of my bills had mini rips that I hadn’t even seen before, but I had thought ahead and had extras. My trek cost a total of $505. That was a $175 deposit (by PayPal, months ahead), and the rest in cash in Cusco. For that, all my meals were prepared for me, I had a tent (shared with a friend) over my head, and a guide to keep tabs on each member the group as we walked, at our own speeds, over the Trail.

I saved $15 by bringing my own sleeping bag (a Lafuma rated to freezing, and I was cozy every minute), which was lighter and smaller than the one the company would have provided. That’s important because the company’s bags weigh two kilos, and you’re only allowed to saddle your porter ($40 if you use him) with 6 kilos. One kilo goes to the sleeping pad, which they supply.

Bringing a lighter, better sleeping bag allows you more breathing room in packing. More things to pack: a flashlight and a spare, compression shorts for every day, big crazy fat thick hiking socks for every day, sandals for visiting the gawd-awful fetid holes that are offered for toilets, wet wipes for the butt at said sewer maws, some Clif bars or something (Customs didn’t seem to care). Bald guys, pack a sweatband for your head. Bring clothes that layer, because it’ll go from cold to hot in 30 minutes, especially in the morning. Bring earplugs because the tents are staked beside each other, and after days of strenuous exertion, even girls snore. Don’t bring reading material; you won’t have the energy, the light, or the will to be distracted from your surroundings.

I packed but didn’t use (but would still bring if I were you): moleskin for blisters, Potable Aqua for purifying water (you can buy bottles at way-stations along the way, and sometimes the crew boils water for you). I wish I had brought a truly waterproof jacket, not a kinda waterproof one that I had. You want the water to bead off you, because it mists and rains here and there, and you don’t want to have to bother with a plastic poncho. You can buy a walking stick (really a broomstick with a fabric tip) for about $2 on the morning you start — don’t neglect it, because it will become your third leg, and you’ll wear the bottom to a nubbin.

Cusco is at a very high altitude. Way higher than Tahoe or Albuquerque or anything American. When I first got off the plane, I saw a few faint stars for some minutes as my brain struggled to recalibrate its oxygen needs. They even sell oxygen canisters by baggage claim, although I think they’re intended more for panicky types than for actual medical amelioration. Some of my traveling companions made some classic early errors: they ate a lot (altitude causes you to digest slower, since your blood is working harder to oxygenate), and they got really drunk (I won’t say who, but one companion had a double-digit number of drinks that first night). Even if you can easily do that back home, those mistakes can cost you at altitude. Fortunately, after three drinks in four hours, I went back to the hotel (Rumi Punku — it’s lovely and pristine and I recommend it) to play Angry Birds. I don’t like finding my limits the hard way.

Every day of the trek involves getting up at the crack of Mother Nature’s ass. You will not sleep in. You will go to bed shortly after dusk daily. You will want it that way. That’s because the physical demands are tough. The food will be very good for the sparse resources available, but it will not be rich. There will not be beverages served with dinner (bring your water bottle), but there will be tea and lots of it. The guide tries to stuff you full of tea at every opportunity because you need to stay hydrated.

The first day of the Trail had a few fleeting moments of ardor, but we all knew that Day Two was going to be the real killer. Anyone without hiking and climbing experience can do the Trail, but you’d better have a few things. One is a patience for stairs. More than once, we wished the Incas had invented ziplining instead, because just as soon as we’d slaved to mount a never-ending spindle of stairs threading up to some heavenward vanishing point, we’d have to descend on shaky knees on the other side. Losing everything you’ve just gained, knowing full well you have to regain it somewhere down the line, is positively Sisyphean, which is to say negatively.

The Golden Trudge of the First Pass (Dead Woman's Pass) is behind me! I wore my Nepalese trekking hat for luck

The first thing you do on Day Two, right out of the sleeping bag, is start climbing, because the first and most difficult of three passes is ahead of you. And it goes like that for hours. I have to say that if I had truly known how much of a struggle Day Two was before I signed up, I might not have signed up, which is why I hesitate even discussing it, because you should ignore what I’m saying and sign up.

Up, up, up, as trees gave out and I found myself on a cliffside, looking down at alpacas and feeling jealous that they got to stand there and eat grass.

The air got thin as we approached 14,000 feet. There’s no predicting how anyone will handle altitude. I was a decided middle-of-the-packer, but even the front of the pack could only walk at a pace of about a foot every two or three seconds, and then stop to catch some breath every minute or so.

I started calling the hike “The Golden Trudge” because I knew what was coming at the end. My nickname gave me permission to admit it was grueling, but it also reminded me that it was do-able — and worth it. (And it was, on all counts.)

I would have had a harder time if the group had always been together. But everyone goes at their own speed, and every 90 minutes or so, the guide waits up for everyone to bunch back up again, drink water, and cool down.

It reminded me of one of my favorite maxims: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

By late morning, after cruel periods during which the destination seemed to stretch away from us with every step, we had bested the first pass (high fives all around!), and we knew it wouldn’t get any worse than that. And it didn’t. The worst had passed. I for one have no issues with coming down — it’s up I hate. But if you do have Going Down problems, get ready for Day Three, because after some truly wonderful passages through jungle paths and through an original tunnel carved by the Incas, there’s a long segment that’s said to include 2,000 steps down, as jangled as the porters’ teeth. Every time you put your foot down, you’re navigating around a messy fracture. Every moment’s an ankle-breaker.

So make sure those shoes have ample toes, or you’ll mash your toenails with the repeated downward motion. Test your shoes before leaving home to make sure you can point them down an incline and still feel comfortable. (I am now so in love with my shoes, which were Keens from REI, that I’ve taken to wearing them when I’m on Fox or out at bars.) Those thick socks will help, too. Day Two is the most grueling day, but Day Three is the longest (11 hours– but Day Three is so beautiful, and so full of heart-filling moments that the first two days weren’t, that I not only didn’t feel like it took that long, but it also made me resent Day One for being so relatively lame). What would take me four days, some maniacs do in six hours on the Inca Trail race. I envy their bodies but not their brains.

Our walking sticks were our best friends. They started new. By the end, they looked like this.

Then there’s the matter of coca leaves. At the start of the trek, you’ll be given a chance to buy some, and you’ll wrap 8 or 10 leaves around a morsel of lime ash that acts as a catalyst to release the mild stimulant that Peruvians have been using for centuries. You will stuff that packet in your cheek and drool, annoyed, while you wait to feel like Cheech and Chong or something. But you will not feel stoned. They are not the same as cocaine; that’s the result of a scientific refinement process that some Swedish guy came up with. In fact, I couldn’t be sure if I was feeling the effect of the coca leaves or the effect of altitude and exertion. It was that faint. Then again, lots of drunks don’t realize they’re drunk, either, and if the Peruvians swear it helps them climb mountains, I guess I’ll have to believe them, because I saw them haul past my ass with 6 kilos of my stupid crap on their backs.

Yes, for sure, they deserved tips. Some people say that the Peruvians are better built to handle altitude — something about good calves and oxygen-rich blood — but I’m not so sure people don’t say that to get out of a decent gratuity. Peru Treks was clear about everything but this, partly because it probably doesn’t want to come across as greedy. Its instructions on how to tip the staff was confusing, and if laid out on paper looked like an algebra formula.

All 16 of us spent some brain-bending moments deliberating on what an appropriate and human amount would be for everyone. I think we settled on the about 55 sols total for each porter, and about 15 from each person for the assistant guide, and 30 or so from each person for Hubert, and I forget what for the cook, but it was good because we loved his mad mountaintop skills. I think there were around 22 porters to consider, and I think that when all was said and done, each of us distributed about 100 sols amongst the staff. That’s about US$35. It’s nothing considering how hard these Quechua guys work — up before us, asleep after us, beating us up the mountains in sandals — and the fact that we have so much and they have so little that they are willing to leave their families for days at a time to do this work in the elements. We gave each porter his share, pressed right in his hand, so that there was no chance he could be cheated out of it by his colleagues. It also was humanizing to recognize each man as an individual. (Actually, I’m surprised that thinking about this, and about the looks on their faces, has brought tears to my eyes.)

Whatever it we gave, I didn’t feel like it was enough, but few of us had planned well enough to have loads of cash. Most of us were out, because we forgot how much water we would drink and that it would cost another 2 sols for every day we walked deeper into the mountains: 4 then 6 then 8 then 10 for a bottle. If I were to do this again, I’d have at least $50 American (about PEN 140), if not more, just for tips. More, preferably. Consider it part of the budget, because really, it means far more to them than it does to you. You should also have it all in the local currency, since many of these guys don’t even speak Spanish, let alone have access to a bank. (The local bills don’t have to be as minty fresh as the greenbacks do.)

I’d take about 300 sols into the mountains. That lets you err on the side of abject generosity when it comes to tipping, and it gives you a buffer to buy lots of water, and also to buy a meal for yourself in the town of Aguas Calientes after seeing Machu Picchu. Meals there are pricey — in the mid-20s and low 30s for a main. Although there are ATMs in town.

The clouds lift, giving me my first glimpse of Machu Picchu

The last day, you’re up around 3:30, which sucks. Then you’re waiting in line at the back gate of the Machu Picchu park entrance, which also sucks. Then, at 5:30, you’re in, and you hike two challenging hours (which Hubert had lied about, calling it “a gentle up,” which sucked) until you reach the Sun Gate, which overlooks the ruin. When we arrived on the Incan-made structure at the rim of the mountain, it was raining. And the clouds below meant we couldn’t see a thing, although despite the cover, we could sense an enormous empty space below us. “It’s over there,” Hubert promised, but frankly, after 25 miles of mountain hiking, we’d tackled so many other obstacles that we really only envisioned Machu Picchu in the abstract, anyway. I’d almost forgotten that it was the point.

We walked another mile or so, and the we arrived at the top of the ruin. It was still cloudy. It wasn’t visible. Hubert told us to wait. “Just wait,” he promised. And sure enough, the clouds teasingly lifted, giving us our magical first look at the object of our desire.

Is there something else you’d like to know? Ask it, and if I can, I’ll answer it.

The goal. All pain instantly forgotten, all accomplishments cherished.

The Statue of Liberty is an Embarrassment

Articles, Blog

Nov 182010

At least, it was when it began.

It was in the Depression of 1873. A few years before, a bunch of greedy New York bankers artificially jacked up the price of gold, causing a financial panic and sending America into a slump that lasted for years. (Sounding familiar yet?)

Going topless used to be more noble in France

Anyway, at the time, France was best buds with America, or at least it was better at pretending to be. It had helped us win our own Revolution less than 100 years before, and French war heros such as Lafayette were still household names Stateside. Back when getting a statue was the equivalent of landing a Nike endorsement contract today — the highest honor a society could bestow — someone European got the idea that there should be a statue to freedom. Things were looking dicey in France at the time, and America had just come out of its own Civil War, which finally emancipated the slaves at great cost.

Suffice to say that at that time, freedom was looking a lot like something that ought to be preserved as a statue in case we forgot about it once and for all. (Still not familiar yet?)

It was decided that the French and the Americans would go Dutch. The body of the statue would come from France while America would foot the bill, so to speak, for the pedestal. The sculptor, Frédéric Bartholdi, built some of the torch-bearing arm as a sort of teaser for the final thing.

In 1876, the right hand of the Roman Goddess of Liberty, which knew not what the left was doing because it didn’t exist yet, was uncrated in New York City’s Madison Square. It was hoped that the sight of 12-inch fingernails would inspire Americans to donate money to the construction of the colossus.

But there it sat, by the side of the road, a hand eternally begging.

That begging hand of Liberty sat there for longer than anyone could remember. It became a nothing but a big joke, and an embarrassment. A colossal embarrassment, in the literal sense. No one could afford to donate. Worse, they thought it was in poor taste. The newspapermen, who were the Bill O’Reillys and Gawkers of their day, mocked it every chance they got: Americans shouldn’t let the French build their monuments, they said, and everyday Americans shouldn’t have to pay for New York City’s follies, and we can’t afford frivolousness like this in these times. Even the committees assigned to raise funds never met. It became hard to tell if Americans didn’t care about freedom, or if they just had very specific tastes in neoclassical anthropomorphic polythestic art.

New York parks have always been weird places

The depression ground on, and still that stupid hand stood in the park, weird and brown, just feet off the ground, ignored like hallway furniture. Meanwhile in Paris, Bartholdi tried displaying a disembodied head to get crowds excited (well, it worked with the guillotine). But apathy reigned.

It was the age of the railway barons, but no big donor stepped forward to give the goddess of Liberty her perch. Not a big grant from the ranks of the Robber Barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, from the entrenched political machines like Tammany Hall, or from art collecting titans like J.P. Morgan.

In the end, that creepy hand gathered scorn in Madison Square for six long years, which is a very long time no matter how you look at it, but is a stubbornly long time to endure blistering P.R.

It took nearly 20 years for Liberty to find her place in New York Harbor. She was paid for the hard way: penny by penny out of the savings of a people clawing their way past the nightmare of the Civil War and a chilling economic depression. After one newspaperman, Joseph Pulitzer, pled its case in the press, some 120,000 people contributed, many of them schoolchildren. Most donations were less than a dollar. Mind you, it’s entirely possible they just wanted the ugly thing taken out of their park once and for all, but regardless of why they did it, people got together and bought Liberty a pedestal.

Naturally, when she was completed, the pinstripe-suited crowd jostled each other to be first in line to take the credit. There was a parade, showered by the ticker tapes of the financiers who had mocked the high-minded project from the start. President Grover Cleveland, busily hurrying toward his well-deserved posthumous anonymity, arrived in New York to mark the occasion.

The lesson, of course, is to always be patient. Things will change. Laughingstocks can become icons. Even when things look bleak, or when you can’t envision the path forward, or when your idea appears to be so detested that all hope is gone, you can eventually come through and create something enduring to be proud of. Liberty can take its sweet time.

She couldn't get a hand, not even stereoscopically

The corporation commands you to admit it’s 1:37 pm

Articles, Blog

Nov 102010

Long before you lived here, America was a land of many towns. Our expansive “agrarian society” was barely a society at all, really, save for a loosely connected sense of similar place and purpose. And each place had its own time on the clock.

The view of the 10:22 from the locomotive of a departing 10:19

When it was 9:00 am in your town, it could be 8:42 in the town next door. It had to be that way, because there was not yet a way to unify our communities — no widespread phones, no telegraph to speak of — and the sun itself could only indulge men on the ground with the roughest sense of its place in the sky.

Many cities in the world, such as Edinburgh, Ottawa, and Hong Kong, could induce their citizens to agree on the current minute by means of cannons fired daily at noon on the dot — “noon-day guns,” they were sometimes called, some of which still operate out of the undying human demand for nostalgia and tourism (one scared the crap out of me daily at lunchtime when I lived in Cape Town) — but across the vast unsettled land of America, cohesion was still a dream.

The difference of a few minutes really didn’t matter much when it took an hour to travel two miles, and when the main daily pressure would have been to get you business done by dark. But when the trains began running, the shuffled deck of our various systems became a true mortal threat. A train couldn’t leave one town at 9:00 and arrive in the next one at 8:43. Apart from severely confusing the passengers and creating schedules a foot thick and requiring conductors to use an abacus, there was a real opportunity for collisions.

So in the 1860s people began agitating for everyone in America to adopt a standardized time system. Many of them stood to make a fortune from the new steel highways, as many men did. It started with a joker named Charles F. Dowd, who was the head of the Temple Grove Ladies’ Seminary in Saratoga Springs, New York (back when upstate New York was still a world player thanks to the Erie Canal — but the trains, ironically, would soon fix that). The year the famous Golden Spike was sunk into Utah, Dowd started pressing for the adoption of four American time zones. And to get those accomplished, we’d have to start putting our heads together on what time meant to us. We’d have to pin it down, once and forever, like a butterfly under glass.

Hill Valley never quite adhered to standardization

It took a while. Americans didn’t really object to the hands of the federal government on their pocket watches, largely because the proposed change was at the behest of the newfangled railroad companies instead. As the equivalent of the Internet companies of their time, they had lots of devotées — most of whom conveniently overlooked the drawbacks and consequences and instead fixated on the benefits of the brave new world they could bring.

But by 1883, we had the tools we needed to proceed. The telegraph was established enough so that signals could be sent between towns and clocks could be adequately synchronized. The National Railway Time Convention was held, and it was agreed that November 18 should be the day that time zones were implemented and everyone’s noon would be noon. It was called the “Day of Two Noons,” after the places that would have to live through one noon before correcting themselves to the “right” one, forevermore.

The day passed, and apart from a little Y2K-style fretting that the seams of the natural world would come unsewn, everyone peaceably made their adjustments and forgot about it. It was completely optional, yet we all agreed that, for the sake of a greater good, time itself should be redefined.

How I admire those old Americans for their good sense.

In that case, industry led the advance of the greater good. The train companies put us all on the same track. A recent episode of PBS’s History Detectives uncovered a clock that was used as a timekeeping nerve center, keeping precise time for train stations throughout the Midwest and Mid-South.

The Williamsburgh Savings Bank, at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, still flaunts its naughty 'H'

Unfortunately, the mania for standardization was contagious, and in 1890, President Benjamin Harrison (who will never be an action figure) convened the Board on Geographic Names. As described in Bill Bryson’s superlative Made in America, the Board’s mandate was to beat the individuality out of the rich tapestry of eccentric names that America had cultivated for itself over the centuries. The Board’s job was to command all government agencies to spell things its way. Fierce Americanization was the order.

Prior to 1890, British spellings in place names was far more common. After all, at that time, many of our grandfathers would have been born British. But the Board beat the Centres in to Centers, suffixes of -borough were dulled to -boro, and sprightly hydra-headed New Castle and La Fayette were tamed into Newcastle and Lafayette. San José was robbed of its aigu, thus excising the Spaniards from the story of what they began.

The Board and the Post Office lost one notable battle. In 1891, the edict came down to start using Pittsburg. The city, no doubt puffed up with steely pride, refused. Not the University, not the Stock Exchange (which existed, and which during the city’s industrial heyday wielded considerable power). For 20 years, the Board and its arbitrary grammar police commanded the loss of the rambunctious H. It never took. On July 19, 1911, Pittsburgh, with that wasteful 10th letter, became the official spelling per official law.

But most places in America complied, perhaps out of a starry-eyed wonderment for the brave, uniform, industrial age they were supposedly enjoying. I wonder how many towns would sooner burn to the ground than comply with a government order like this today.

The Disney Store Times Square opens. I’m without words

Articles, Blog

Nov 082010

On Tuesday, the Disney Store makes a triumphant official grand opening in Times Square, shutting down the so-called “Crossroads of the World” with an appearance by a rodent that’s huge even by Manhattan standards.

The store has been open to customers for the past few days. I went, and although I’m pleased to see that something is finally taking over that eternally empty Bar Code arcade space, the geek in me found little to hold him in the two huge levels of merchandise.

You wouldn't know it, but Mickey is older than two of those iconic buildings.

When you walk in, you will be reassured by piles of banal New York City stereotypes: tee shirts with yellow cabs, big apples, Minnies who have stolen Lady Liberty’s crown. You can even buy Spider-Man action figures now that the Mouse-Marvel marriage is complete.

How appropriate that there’s a Disney store in Times Square! After all, the neighborhood played a central role in the career of Walt Disney himself (isn’t that how you have to describe the Disney Diety now? “Walt Disney himself”?). After all, Steamboat Willie premiered at the Colony Theatre (now the Broadway, where Promises, Promises is playing) on November 18, 1928. And he World’s Fair of 1964, in Queens, was where “its’s a small world” was born (the original is now at Disneyland) and it was the father of Epcot.

You’ll find nothing at the Disney Store that would tell you any of that. In fact, you won’t even find a single piece of information, not even for sale, about what happened where you are standing. Buzz Lightyear costumes, princess outfits, Vinylmation allowance gobblers… but not a single page in a single book about Disney art, Disney animation, Disney history, Disney biography. I know because I asked three employees if there were any.

Hat's entertainment

“Oh, I have some really great Disney books at home!” chirped a very young woman (everyone who works there is about 21 years ago, which usually tells you something about the wages). “But we don’t have any here.”

Yeah, I know. I’m being crazy. I shouldn’t expect a profit-making enterprise to give up even a foot of floor space to something that may not make much money. The Disney Store is a money machine, not a museum. I’m too sensitive. I demand too much morality from my publicly traded companies.

And I do. The American memory is failing, and we’re standing on the shoulders of previous generations just so we can reach the momentary purchases on the top shelf.

It’s a hot button for me. And it’s the modern Disney company for you. Up until three years ago, there was a single, solitary bookstore in all of Walt Disney World at which you could reliably find books about the great achievements upon which this billion-dollar empire rest. But then the stewards of that empire converted it into a Hanes-sponsored tee-shirt shop.

After it closed, I went to The Emporium, the largest souvenir store on the Florida resort property, and asked a worker (elderly) where I could learn about Disney and how it got that way. She told me I could maybe find some stuff at the Virgin Megatore. I went. I couldn’t.

Now even that store is closed, so there’s truly no dedicated bookstore or even bookstand on Walt Disney World’s 30,000-odd acres to purchase a book about the craft that brought you there.

Walt built this, but don't tell: The new store

I don’t mean to single Disney out. Almost all the major American parks dishonor their own heritage. Many Hollywood studios do, too. I recently took a tour of the Sony Pictures Studios lot, which was once the mighty MGM, and although I begged the guide for background about the things that were shot on the soundstages I visited, I got mostly shrugs. He could barely name anything that Sony didn’t want to sell at the cinemas or on DVD. (“Spider-Man?” he offered.) Then again, in the 1970s, even MGM itself dumped most of the historical evidence of its formative and glory days into a landfill. Entire movies were lost forever. Last week, MGM went bankrupt once and for all, and now there’s no one to play steward to its legacy unless there’s a buck in it.

When Cypress Gardens opened in Winter Haven, Florida, in 1936, it put Central Florida on the map. People came to the godforsaken Florida swamp from thousands of miles away to watch its water ski shows, in which pyramids of pretty girls, bearing flying pennants, soared past gathered crowds snapping Rolleiflexes. My great-grandfather, Tracy W. O’Neal, was a newspaper photographer, and his albums (part of his archive is at Georgia State University) was full of images from Cypress Gardens because the spectacle was so singular.

Cypress Gardens changed the destiny of billions of people, not just who have ever lived around Orlando but also who have ever vacationed there. But when I paid a visit to the park four years ago, there wasn’t a lone historic postcard, book, magnet, brochure, or sign noting it. Not even gathering dust in a corner in the otherwise deserted gift shops.

Cypress Gardens, which so dishonored its place in American culture, closed permanently soon after. Now Legoland is taking over the property. I fervently hope they can find at least six inches of shelf space between the personalized key chains and jelly beans to remember what brought us all to this place.

I’m fond of saying that if the Disney parks ever closed, the National Park service would have to take them over. They are that central to our national identity and our shared experience as Americans. Is there anything else we all have in common, except maybe Pop Tarts and Pringles? And when you are the stewards of such an intensely historic, culturally indelible enterprise, I think you have a moral obligation to honor it and share the history.

Cypress Gardens' famous Florida-shaped pool: They'd rather you never saw this

Sure, Disney has a membership club for fans, D23, but it comes with a steep annual membership fee. Besides, it’s for people who already love the history.

Country music fans, interestingly, are really great at preserving their cultural heritage despite the fact the genre is a commercial enterprise. Sun Studio in Memphis has been meticulously maintained. The Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville is gorgeous. You can even visit Jerry Lee Lewis’s house, which I regrettably have, because I saw a dead mouse in a wine glass in the dining room.

Some parks are better than others at honoring their position in the history of American recreation. Many of them, oddly, are in Pennsylvania (Kennywood in Pittsburgh, Knoebels in Elysburg) or Europe (Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen), but all of them have something in common: a devoted local fan base. That may explain why Disneyland in California is the lone Disney property that’s getting good at it. Its guests tend to be more of a hometown crowd and are more likely to spend their money on nostalgia items.

But many of our greatest national entertainment brands are well past nostalgia. They are part of the American fabric. Unfortunately, their bosses are more interested in continuing to capitalize on the product than take a few inches of shelf space to thank the forebears who changed the way the world dreams — and laid the groundwork for their fat paychecks.

‘Scottsboro Boys’ protest: It Ain’t No Minstrel Show

Articles, Blog

Nov 062010

Today was the only time I have ever had to cross a protest line to see a musical. As I approached the Lyceum Theatre on 45th Street for today’s matinée of The Scottsboro Boys, I could see the shapes of banners, and I could hear a chant emerge from the noise around Times Square:

Scottsboro Boys is no minstrel show!
Shut ‘em down! They got to go!

Most Americans are not familiar with the Scottsboro Boys anymore. That in itself is a good reason to write a piece of art about them. Most Americans are also not familiar with art anymore, either, though, which is these protestors’ reason to protest.

Although I’ve never had to break a picket line to see a musical, I’ve also never seen the area in front of the theatre so empty before showtime. A line of police between the shouting protestors and the entering audience kept the area clear, and once inside, most of the patrons hastily took their seats, not wishing to engage in a potential fray. Something about the moral challenge of a protest line can instill a sense of quiet shame in whomever is on the other side, even if they have nothing to be ashamed of.

'The Scottsboro Boys' protest: Racism reversed

I was one of the few theatregoers who asked for a leaflet from the protestors, who identified themselves as being associated with something called the Freedom Party (tellingly, the name of the group was written much more prominently on signs than the substance of its complaint about the show). As soon as I read it, I knew these people didn’t understand what was actually happening inside this theatre.

The musical authors of The Scottsboro Boys are songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb. Kander and Ebb crafted a career out of writing about issues of injustice and personal freedom, including Kiss of the Spider Woman (1992), Chicago (1975), Cabaret (1966), and Flora, the Red Menace (1965). Both writers were children of the early 20th century but their work possesses modern sensibilities, so (generally speaking) it uses vaudeville or burlesque styles as a counterpoint to modern themes. That’s how Roxie and Velma can winkingly wrap up Chicago for us by singing ‘”in 20 years or so/ it’s gonna change you know” and how Cabaret‘s satanic Emcee, a stand-in for rising Nazism, insidiously mocks the blithe characters around him simply by singing a song that appears to be, on the surface, cheerful and depraved.

It’s called a “concept musical.” Kander and Ebb’s work uses the jolly tunefulness of American musical traditions as a weapon against the lies with which America, and humanity in general, flatter themselves. In The Scottsboro Boys, which retells the true story of nine young black men falsely convicted of rape in 1930s Alabama, they (with bookwriter David Thompson) have taken for their language that most poisonous, all-American musical form: the minstrel show.

Toe-tappin', cotton-pickin' American ugliness

Artistic patriots cherish the all-American genres of jazz and musical theatre, but minstrelsy is America’s forgotten grand tradition. Blackface was once dominant in our culture, but we are now too ashamed to so much as hint at it. In it, singers (both black and white) alike portrayed African-Americans and simple-minded, lazy, fun-loving, watermelon-eatin’, chicken-pickin’ — and adorably inferior. Considering that the imprisonment of the real-life Scottsboro Boys depended on exactly such toxic assumptions about them, minstrel songs are an apt idiom for the tale.

Even the title is apropos. “The Scottsboro Boys” is not the patronizing name Kander and Ebb have given these men, although the diminutive nickname instantly indicates the show is about the dehumanization of racism. It’s the actual patronizing name given to these men in the ’30s by do-good liberals who took up their cause (and later dropped it, when they tired of it) in the North. In the South, all black men were called “boy.” White men, of course, were “sir.”

“You’re not allowed to write about that”

Would the Freedom Party complain that Cabaret is about Nazism, or do they object to the show’s pointedly anti-Semitic number? No, and the protest against The Scottsboro Boys clearly seeks to divide along racial lines. The flyer reads, “white producers, writers, directors, and the media are attempting to turn Black people’s [sic] suffering from racial terrorism into a mockery. They think by hiring a Black case they can cover up their insults by claiming “Blacks work here.” YOU CAN’T – the plantation is the plantation.” To these people, art is exploitative if it’s about something that happened to someone else.

“When is Racist Terrorism Musical Entertainment?” asks the flyer, under photos of the real Scottsboro Boys and a horrifying Xeroxed copy of a real-life lynching. “Where is the Song and Dance Musical about Gas Chambers, World Trade Center or Japanese Internment Camps?”

It’s funny they ask that. There have already been World Trade Center musicals. A college classmate of mine, Elizabeth Lucas, recently directed Clear Blue Tuesday, a film musical written about the emotional response to 9/11. Although the songs were penned by people with direct connection to the tragedy, Lucas and her film were assailed by people ignorant of the film’s true content in the comments section of an article in The New York Times‘ blog. Most of the objections seemed to rise from the pithy thumbnail description movie musical about 9/11 than what the movie actually was: artistic expression about what happened to us then. Many more asserted that Lucas had no right to write art about 9/11 if she hadn’t personally been at Ground Zero that day.

The protestors don’t recognize that although they want everyone to honor the black experience, they won’t let any person talk about it unless they themselves went through it.

Just as minstrel acts tell us far more about the self-identity of the performer than of the people being mocked, protests like these tell us more about the shoddy state of the protestor’s worldview and prejudice than about the target.

Above nearly everything else, Americans excel at claiming they stand for one thing when, in fact, they stand for nearly the opposite. That’s what the Scottsboro Boys found in the supposedly free country of their birth, and that’s what the Freedom Party teaches when it is quite plainly in favor of anything but freedom, at least as far as art is concerned.

“You can’t do that. Otherwise you’re perfectly free.” They might as well add “boy” to the end of that, such is the sentiment about knowing your place.

The protest also teaches us that perhaps our culture has become over saturated with commercial product that few of us can identify symbolism when we see it. When everything in a society is exploitative, and when everything exists to be sold and to make profit, we lack the critical thinking skills to know when something exists simply so we can process our shared experience better.

Neither Clear Blue Tuesday or The Scottsboro Boys is likely to make fortunes, which helps remove the stigma of exploitation — but even if they were, their authors would still have the perfect right to create them, at least in the America I know, which flatters itself by telling itself it’s free and capitalist.

Back to the old Grind

This sort of protest has happened before. Spike Lee got slammed for commenting on minstrel acts in the daring but flawed Bamboozled (2000), but similar battles have happened in musicals, too, and the battles were usually lost. Kander and Ebb themselves were forced to change a lyric in Cabaret in which a despicable character pointedly compared Jews to gorillas. And in 1985, my friend Larry Grossman, with his lyricist Ellen Fitzhugh, was forced to cut his own brilliant-anti-racism song, “We All George,” from his Broadway musical Grind. The premise of the song, a peppy ditty, was akin to the word “Boys” in the Scottsboro Boys: Since white men think all black men look alike, they need not worry themselves with the real names of their porters and bellboys, and they they can just call them all George.

The CD for 'Grind' lacks its most subversive song

It was savage, it was ugly, it was of course aware of its own hateful ridiculousness — and it made the cast so nervous they didn’t want to perform it. (Director Harold Prince, who was the one who caved on the Jew line in Cabaret, caved on this one, too. Another do-good liberal accidentally doing the wrong thing, or only willing to go so far with his principles.)

With The Scottsboro Boys, in which characters break into Jim Crow shufflin’ as a way of starkly rebutting their humanity rather than disguising it, “We All George” is now officially a quarter century ahead of its time.

But really, it’s not the line or the song or the show these protesters object to. It’s the racism itself. It’s the mirror. It sucks to admit what we all come from, because we all came out of evil.

This show has been a live wire since its inception, and it took a long time to reach the stage because of it. In fact, lyricist Fred Ebb died six years ago — on a September 11. But in The Scottsboro Boys, I imagine his hand popping out of his grave to lob one hell of a grenade at all the small, hateful minds of the world. (His committed Broadway cast and creative team cleanly pull the pin.) His most obvious targets are the racist and/or insular Americans who still control parts of this country, and the people who assume small lives can’t have large effects.

But in defiantly choosing to use minstrel songs — the old perversion gets further perverted and becomes, almost, a corrective — he’s also thumbing his nose at the small minds on our own doorstep who don’t understand satire, symbolism, or art itself. Evoking minstrels is the ultimate subversion of all-American themes that he, with Kander, was working toward for 40 years. It’s a gut punch, and I love it. I love anything that reminds Americans when they’re lying about something. We lie about so much.

It hurts to look at brilliant things

My performance, which I noticed was far more integrated than most Broadway musicals I’ve attended, had the audience hooked, eliciting more gasps and sighs than you hear at most matinées. It got a standing ovation — not unusual these days for any show, sadly — but as I left, I listened for the reaction as people started talking to each other. More than once, I heard voices say they didn’t get what the protestors were complaining about.

The protestors, I also noticed, didn’t have the courage to be in front of the theatre after we came out, disarmed of our ignorance. It’s a good thing, because they would have earned themselves arguments from more than a few people who were devastated by their first exposure to the story of the Scottsboro Boys.

The complaint is the same old song and dance, but in a new costume: People who allow a simplified phrase such as “musical about the Scottsboro Boys” to define the width and breadth of their understanding of the topic. People who think in headlines and bumper stickers and tweets and respond in what they must assume is useful outrage. Prejudice of any kind is repulsive indeed, but like minstrelsy, it says more about the actor than the object.

The protestors are correct about one thing: The Scottsboro Boys certainly ain’t no minstrel show. But thanks for the publicity, sirs.

From the Lyceum's lobby, but only before our education

Update: I read a little more about the show since writing this, and I learned that after Ebb died, John Kander finished the project by uncharacteristically writing a portion of the lyrics himself. I have to give him more credit. I’m also not satisfied with the credit I didn’t give to director Susan Stroman, whose flourishes (Haywood’s coon song affectations in “Nothin’”, the fierce group bum rush and roar at the climax of “The Scottsboro Boys” song) immeasurably enrich the show with razor-sharp double meanings. Their contributions make the intentions of the whole searingly clear. Simply listening to the cast album, which spotlights the songs divorced from their talents, proved that to me.

[I think I have a way of exploding with thoughts after seeing important Broadway musicals. I wrote this post (click here) in 90 frenzied minutes after seeing Lincoln Center's marvelous South Pacific revival.]

The good old days weren’t always good

Articles, Blog

Sep 072010

My mother and I have an ongoing argument.

“Life was simpler in the ’50s, Jay. It really was,” she says.

I call baloney on that. Just think about what the ’50s offered Western culture: atomic bomb terrors, the HUAC, segregation, women who lived in fear of unwanted pregnancies and could only choose from a few professions, Cold War passive aggression, Europe and Asia in ruins, and people still suffering night sweats from the horrors of the Holocaust and World War Two. Feel free to join in with more of your own.

“No, mom,” I usually say. “They just seemed simpler because you were a kid.”

“No,” she usually says ruefully. “They really were.”

(Right, I think. While your mom slaved to cook dinner nightly for your father or face hell to pay. They were so much better.)

Nostalgia! I love you dearly, mom, but it’s killing us.

I look at this Dadaesque charade that Glenn Beck & Buddies are putting on right now. These are not people who thrive on specificity. Instead, they invoke fuzzy nostalgia. Just a few days after his rally in Washington, Beck was already showing images from it that were doused in soft focus, the way they shoot old ladies like Barbara Walters on television. The engine of his “change” platform runs on fuzziness, because it runs on nostalgia, and nostalgia is always fuzzy. Especially when it’s based on something that never was.

Our first Beck? George Whitefield, of the first Great Awakening, knew the power of bizarre theatrics

Their platform, as expressed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, is fuzzy, too. They didn’t really propose anything specific. Instead, they referred constantly to an America that they feel is being lost. One that needs to be “restored” with “honor,” which doesn’t mean anything in practical terms, so is fairly unassailable by anyone with facts in hand.

These words, uttered by Beck, are something like a refrain:

“They actually want you to believe that this nation was not built on faith by men of good character. They want you to believe a nation can survive without faith, character and integrity.”

To him, then, there’s something we’re departing from and something more odious we’re approaching. To accept his imagining of our pluralistic society, you have to accept that what we’re departing was good. That’s where nostalgia is necessary. A nostalgia free of slavery, monopolies, inequalities, greed, and other assailable truths.

We Americans are good at nurturing delusions of nostalgia. We treasure Main Street, USA, at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, which presents a version of America that never really was. We build planned communities of curtain-shuffling inhabitants in an attempt to re-animate the Leave It to Beaver world that our Hollywoodized upbringings convinced us we left behind. We keep the shape and look of our currency just so. We invoke the Founding Fathers as if we could divine their will from beneath their graves, though of course the average American couldn’t tell you the first thing about Jefferson or Washington or Dickinson. Not that many of them depended on slavery, defended secularism with an almost animal passion, or even that Adams himself defended the British in the Boston Masscare — the 9/11 of its day.

Nostalgia is mythology. Times were not that great back then — especially if you weren’t white and holding some money, but even if you were. And times are not particularly awful now. May I direct you to the Black Plague?

Why is fact-checking of nostalgia so important?

For one, if your eyes are open, you can dismantle a perception of an event. You realize that the way we choose to see things doesn’t always testify to what really happened. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle lives through the people who recorded history for us, because they were born with the biases of their day, and similarly, we are born not knowing the petty politics of another man’s day. But more importantly, nostalgia can be used to rally people around whatever notion you care to attach it to.

Several times in American history, we have responded to tough economic times by springing toward nostalgia. A return to normality, to prosperity, is possible! Depressions and recessions have often been accompanied by Great Awakenings, or spiritual revivals, in which Americans terrified for their futures could cling to the soothing fancies of their simpler and more secure pasts. Pasts painted rosier than they really were — Main Street fantasies.

Norman Rockwell, 1964: It wasn't all soda shops and baseball

Glenn Beck is, believe it or not, a secularized version of the weirder-than-life firebrands that America produced during various Great Awakenings. George Whitefield. Jemima Wilkinson. Lyman Beecher. Billy Sunday. As humans, it seems proven that we need to believe in our purer selves, especially when times get bad. Unfortunately, those with political aspirations can frame the nostalgia in terms of any group that has been perceived to have usurped our purer selves.

A recent piece by Michael Atkinson in In These Times put it this way.

“As long as American politics remain a matter of simulacra—of rhetoric and persona—the storytellers will dominate the discussion, doing what myth has always done—supply order in place of chaos and uncertainty. This is our modern tragedy: Recent history offers a parade of evil fabulists, from Hitler to Karl Rove to Kim Jong-Il, all of them bewitching storytellers.”

Of course American politics will remain a matter of rhetoric. They always have. The question of states’ rights might well have been carved into our national seal from the moment of our inception, and since the embrace of that issue has enduringly fired all sorts of issues, from slavery to spot immigration checks to gay marriage, there are many of us who work to harness it, and it pays to convince the rabble that it was ever settled, when it never was.

If you can make people believe that it was they who made us veer from the path (in the last century, the alcohol drinkers were the they), then you’re halfway home to building political power.

Nostaglia, then, is also one of the most powerful weapons in American culture, and knowing the whole truth of history is your shield.

In almost all cases, there was never one path, never one truth. In our fuzzy, Barbara Walters-style soft focus, where our depth of understanding can be summed up in a tweet, we can be tricked into thinking there was. But the good old days were not as simple as we enjoy believing. And because we were never really fully there to experience them, we can’t know that, and we can only embrace nostalgia and mourn what we would like to believe has been lost.

Why they sobbed at ‘South Pacific’, and why we see only corn

Articles, Blog

Aug 192010

PBS showed a live telecast of the Broadway revival of South Pacific tonight as the show prepares to close. I saw this production, which opened two years ago, for the first time last Tuesday, and I liked it so much I made sure to watch it again tonight. I know there are a lot of people who roll their eyes, thinking that it’s just another fuddy-duddy, old-style showtune cheese plate.

But that’s truly unfair. It was a product of a different time, and we are all just tourists to that time. That’s why we don’t understand it. It’s not corn. It’s culture shock.

P.T.S.D in the S.P.

To understand any piece of popular entertainment, you have to understand the society that produced it. And to understand South Pacific, you have to understand two things: the Pacific military theatre of World War Two and its reverberations in American culture in 1949, when the show premiere at the Majestic Theatre, where The Phantom of the Opera is now.

I could write an entire book on this topic. But start with this: In 1949, the people sitting through the theatre had only recently gotten through the war. By the opening strains of the overture, I have read, many of them began sobbing. The memories flooded back both for servicemen and the families who had stood by them. It was far too close to them and brought up the most visceral emotions a human can confront. Many of them had fought in the Pacific, which made the miseries of Europe look pale in comparison. There’s no way to exaggerate what the Pacific battles were like: the gore, the mental and physical torture, the fearful waiting, the doomed sense of being trapped, hemmed in by encroaching killers.

In Italy, a G.I. stood a chance of hiding in the forests. On the ocean, though when torpedos struck your submarine or your Navy ship — the men in South Pacific are mostly SeaBees, charged with building airstrips and the like on newly taken islands — there was nothing for you but a vast sea with sharks beneath and Japanese planes and blistering sun above. The islands were rigged with explosives and snipers’ nests. There was not enough water, nor reliable supply routes for food. There was disease, there was the stench of rot. And above all, there was the feeling of being absolutely trapped, and of waiting for your eventual doom. When one island was gained, usually with an unspeakable loss of life, the men packed up to another island where it began again. It was because of the deadening accumulation of Pacific battles that America felt it had no choice but to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to end it completely.

That was the real South Pacific, and that is the information that every single American carried heavily in their minds when they attended the show. So the wallop that South Pacific packs came from what Rodgers and Hammerstein were not saying. The dissection of racism in “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” has been exhaustively discussed because racism became the United States’ obsessive issue in the 1950s and 1960s. There’s a reason the musical was only the second to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which back then meant something, and that song certainly played a major part.

south-pacific-broadway-movie-poster-1010409325

The original window card

But there are other, less explicit messages, and America’s post-war, Hawaii-fed style obsession with anything Polynesian may have overshadowed many of them. Largest of them, in my mind, is that at the end of the show, everyone marking time on that island (which is unnamed in the script) is finally called up to board ships and go fight the Japanese. Students of history, and modern audiences who paid attention to the giant campaign map onstage, noticed how close the base was to the island of Guadalcanal. So when the SeaBeas, pilots, and nurses march offstage at the end of the show, they are not going to dance a jig and kiss each other in Times Square. They are going to one of the most savage campaigns in the war: 29 ships lost, 7,100 killed. To give a clue of how brutal it was, the Japanese took only 4 prisoners. These characters are going to die. People in 1949 knew that all too well, because they probably loved people who suffered over the six months in Gudalcanal.

That includes our reckless Luther Billis, whose unspoken love for Nellie Forbush has been denied — the surest sign of a tragic hero, literarily speaking. Many of those young men died in the dirt without having ever known love. Knowing that, “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” becomes, to me, a heartwrenching keen. The Lincoln Center production captures this eerie truth without saying it. There are no words on the page for it because the original writers didn’t need to say it. Instead, the company, marching in battle fatigues, reprises “Honey Bun” with a distant, almost lethargic softness. They are already dead. The song they choose to sing, as they go to their torturous deaths (or at the very least, life-changing pain), is, intentionally, the silliest one in the show, and it makes us realize that up until now, they have been teasing each other because they know, deep down, a truth they cannot openly discuss. Their island was not a paradise after all. They’re marching to their likely ends, under the scorching sun. The audience knew it, which was what made the preceding frivolity so beautiful and so poignant.

It’s not just the leads whose unspoken stories would have wrenched viewers in 1949: Bloody Mary, who seems at first like mere comic relief, a Tonkinese Stepin Fetchit, in fact schemes to prostitute her own daughter so they can escape “paradise” and cash in on the American Dream. The character of Liat is so eager to subjugate herself for the hallowed American, Lt. Cable, that she never speaks. Her entire character, then, is an embodiment of hungry desperation for American wealth. Former Navy seamen would have met many such people, living stranded on their islands, during their own military waiting games. Thirty years later, in Vietnam, they’d discard women like them again for the same reasons, abandoning them rather than fitting them into the jigsaw of their consumerist/racist lives back home. (For more on that, see Miss Saigon.)

Late in the second act, Luther Billis tries selling some medicine to one SeaBee, who rejects the transaction because the pills are actually standard issue. A moment later, Billis tries the same sale on a nurse, who tells him that the pills are junk and officers use something else now. It’s a subtle complaint of the military power structure, and the feeling that enlisted men were cannon fodder, that is lost on most modern audiences.

"Here am I, your special island": Guadalcanal, where Billis & co. ended up

Nellie Forbush’s change of heart about Emile de Becque’s dead Polynesian wife might seem undeveloped by Hammerstein’s and Joshua Logan’s script. First she’s opposed to marrying him, and suddenly she’s wishing him back. But every audience member in 1949 noticed the critical moment. They saw what she had just gone through: She hears about the death of an airman friend, which causes her to envision the death of her love. Every person in America had lost someone they knew in World War Two, and everyone knew the power of personal transformation, the rueful sense of lives never lived, that the experience brought to them.

The audience knew why Nellie had changed: She had brushed near death, as had nearly every living person on the planet. And so the audience wept.

If someone had written a masterpiece about 9/11 in 2008, we might have a slight sense of how they felt in 1949. But even that wouldn’t compare, since so few of us actually lost loved ones in that attack. There are many things about 9/11 that we still find too painful to describe, and images we collectively agree not to show — and because we are all well aware of the dark nuances of what happened, we wouldn’t have to anyway. R&H felt confident skirting the shadows, too. The word “Japanese” is barely spoken in South Pacific.

Nellie, in the end, chooses to stay on the island with Emile. Turned off by her own shallowness, which was bred by American culture, she decides to isolate with her Frenchman and adoptive children. Think about that in 1949. Most of the servicemen came home. She stayed. She didn’t come back to America because she found something more real. Can you imagine what a bittersweet message that was, coming off the fervent patriotism whipped up during the War Years? It was both a rejection of the United States and and embrace of the values we’ve always assumed we held dear, but may actually not.

I had only seen one other production of this before last week, and in it, Robert Goulet, playing de Becque, strutted around the stage like Ron Burgundy. It was a bad show. South Pacific is often done poorly because it’s not understood, and it’s not understood because Rodgers and Hammerstein understood their audience so well, and left the most important undertones off the page.

I’m always struck about how self-centered we are about our entertainment. We forget everything always comes from its time, and seeing something made for another generation ideally involves the same mental preparation you’d make when traveling to another country. It’s culture shock. It’s a form of travel. And to navigate your way, you must always adjust what you think you know — and never assume you know more than the people in the past. They knew. They just didn’t have to discuss it.

Danny Burstein and a pre-'Glee' Matthew Morrison, in the revival's original cast, 2008

How ‘Blogger Brands’ win by undermining their colleagues

Articles, Blog

Aug 152010

One of the changes that has come upon the writing business in the past few years is the rise of bloggers. Four years ago, if a writer wanted to work, he or she had to find someone to edit, publish, and distribute them. For that, they got paid.

Now, though, anyone who thinks they can write can write. Anyone who thinks they’re an expert in a field can publish. In fact, you don’t even have to be able to write or know stuff — you just have to be able to convince other people that you’re worth following.

This week at Aol, I published an interview with a traveler who makes money this way: He travels and he writes about it online. He also writes downloadable books about it and other subjects. So to make the money he needs to live, he has to convince as many people as possible that he’s worth listening to. That means putting himself out there on Twitter, at conferences, on the social scene, and so forth.

Hobart, Australia. January 2003.

It’s the new way: Do a podcast, get onto Huffington Post, build the Twitter followers — whatever it takes to be a “Blogger Brand.” Although the information you bring to the table isn’t incidental, because poor information will always bleed followers, it’s no longer the primary concern. This is not to take away from any of the people who really know their stuff, but the appearance of expertise, and of productivity, is what’s paramount. Expertise is becoming increasingly illusory, or at least, it has the potential to be.

Over the past few days, the travel blogging world has seen a lot of in-fighting. I’ve seen a several bloggers try to lift themselves up, and try to garner fans and applause, by stepping on the faces of their colleagues. One blogger accuses another of being a snob. A third highlights the fight in his own blog and asks “are we being snobs or thin-skinned,” while a fourth and fifth pile on in the comments section. It’s like high school with category tags.

Nearly everyone in the fray has something to sell. One of the combatants also pointed out that nearly everyone in the battle began travel writing in the Blogging Age and has little publication experience, where, at least for the little guys, the rules were different, more congenial, and more purely merit-based. In this week’s battles, every Blogger Brand player has a dog in the fight because they want to have the most fervent followers and devoted downloaders.

When print ruled the world, the story was the thing. Now, it’s the brand. Writers engage in in-fighting and jealous smack-downs, which may almost seem designed just to make followers’ tails wag in agreement. Win the smack-down, gain followers, and ding the competing brand.

I predict this kind of pettiness is going to be more and more common across all areas of the Web. If Blogger Brands are the new commodity, then you can’t always win by having the best material. But you may win if you undermine your colleagues.

It’s terribly unhealthy. Where is it heading?

Is Sarah Palin the second coming of Andrew Jackson?

Articles, Blog

May 282010

I saw Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at the Public Theater. It grabbed me. Musicals that portray little-known aspects of American life strike a chord in me: Floyd Collins and Dreamgirls are two of my favorites, and my thesis musical at NYU, Americo Presents the Stars and Stripe Cavalcade, was a Cabaret-style skewering of all those milky American myths we’re force fed throughout grade school.

It also grabbed me because of what it managed to do: make Andrew Jackson a character who sings. Brendan Milburn and I struggled with how to make John Brown sing (I mentioned this a few weeks ago after my visit to Harpers Ferry), but Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson solved it by making its subject a rock star. Old Hickory was a young emo dude in tight, tight pants, and who spouted vulgarities as he guided his own outsized ego around the stage like a parade float. John Brown would be a rock star, too, I decided.

But BBAJ was more than just a diversion to me. It was a very clear metaphor. Although its first drafts were written before we’d ever heard of Sarah Palin, it seemed to warn about the American tendency to nurture cults of personality into positions of power, where they can really do some awful damage, such as creating the Trail of Tears.

Good grief, I thought. Are we going through this again? I began to see a lot of similarities between Old Hickory and that woman on Fox News. They were both the products of their own vicious, divided, violent times, when old ways of doing things were falling apart and a new way was clearly demanded.

• Both Palin and Jackson rose from the wildernesses of their nation
• Palin claims to be the choice of the people. Jackson, too, was swept to office with a rally cry of populism
• Jackson was known as a fierce military man; Palin can shoot a moose from the sky
• Both came from modest families, had weak educational backgrounds, and began political careers in lowly posts
• Both Palin and Jackson gained support by claiming to despise elitism, federalism, and business-as-usual Washington; both deeply mistrusted those in power
• They share fierce nationalism, and both implied they were the right kinds of patriots, as opposed to the people who disagreed with them; for both, humble roots are the noblest pedigree of a true American
• Palin has a persecution complex, and a paranoia about a constant tide of enemies — or at least, pretends to in many speeches. Jackson did, too, and his letters prove it
• Palin’s private life turned into a major campaign issue; Jackson’s wife Rachel was dragged through the mud for being a bigamist; the validity of the marriages of both were eternal topics of debate
• Both paid attention to political details, gathering supporters in a broad range of classes and occupations, and collecting the support of crucial news organizations to paint their opponents as undemocratic, elitist, and exclusive
• Jackson was about the preservation of the white yeoman gentry; Palin is the heroine of the middle-class Christian
• Palin quit the governorship mid-term, Jackson quit the Senate. He did it to run for president later. (He was also the governor of Florida for just nine months)
• The morality of both were intensely questioned while, ultimately, it was their values (less than their abilities) that earned them followers. Every move Palin makes is examined for its propriety; so were Jackson’s
• Palin and Jackson both derive(d) power by whipping Americans into a state of furious anti-Federalism
• Both were widely judged to be incompetent for the presidency, with little state and legistlative experience
• Jackson mocked his opponents with sneering nicknames such as “the aristocrats” and “the Monarchial party”; Palin employs derisive nicknames routinely, such as with “fatcats”
• The fortunes of both turned on the actions of an unemployed painter: Joe the Plumber’s antics may have cost McCain/Palin points, while an unemployed house painter tried to assassinate Jackson on the steps of the Capitol (he had two guns, but both misfired)
• Both had sons who required special attention; Palin’s son Trig is well-known, but what’s largely forgotten is that Jackson adopted an Indian, Lyncoya, who was orphaned after Jackson and his men killed some 850 in the Creek War. (I can only imagine that caring for these children absolved some inner conflicts, and at the least softened them to criticism for their political actions.)

Andrew Jackson

Sarah Palin

Although he was responsible for many military deaths in the name of his various causes, he was also fond of duels. He murdered a man, a political rival named Dickinson, in a duel once. He let the other guy shoot first. “Great God, have I missed him?” Dickinson asked his second. But no, Jackson has taken the bullet, right near his heart, and now that his rival’s shot was spent, he took his turn. He pulled his trigger and polished Dickinson off.

Yeah, Jackson was a badass; there’s no doubt of that. But being a badass does not make you fit for anything except a bottle fight. But one can never underestimate the American tendency to elect the person they wish they were like, rather the one who is probably most fit to lead.

Because Americans thought it would be a great idea to vote for the underdog, he eventually won the presidency in 1828. Upon his inauguration, he threw the doors of the White House open for all Americans to celebrate. They trashed the place, smashing the china soiling the furniture, and nearly collapsing the floorboards.

That turned out to be one of American history’s greatest metaphors. In truth, he was not well equipped to navigate Washington, the rules of our government, and his own murky beliefs about just how far the Federal government should extend into states’ lawbooks. When push came to shove, and when it came to implementing his agenda, he couldn’t hack it.

He wound up creating the Trail of Tears — an abhorrent act of genocide, a national shame forever — and because of the deaths and destruction he approved and enabled, many call him the American Hitler. He ratified dozens of treaties but pretty much broke them all. He also had a big hand in creating the system in which the President rewards the party die-hards by giving them positions in his government. We all know what kind of fanaticism and divisive gamesmanship that can breed now.

Some people say he averted a civil war over the role of federal power. This, though, had much to do with the machinations of the people around him, and let’s not forget that a real civil war came 30 years later, and he also did nothing to eliminate slavery, which would have averted that, too.

BBAJ suggests pretty strongly that maybe it’s not a great idea to let the people decide everything that governs them. You don’t elect someone who plays outside the rules and still expect them to advance the game. It’s probably not any better an idea than letting corporations and business take over the government and wriggle out of regulation, as has happened in the past 30 years and which has now resulted in two ongoing wars over oil and an entire sea turned into a garbage pool by BP.

Even though the crowd that attends New York theatre is a bit more versed in American history than Mom and Pop Walmart usually is, most of them didn’t know that much about Jackson. How could we, when our mythology has done so much to expunge his sins from the record? After all, Jackson is enshrined on the $20 bill despite the fact he worked tirelessly to abolish the national bank entirely, going as far as taking federal money out and giving it to state banks. (Mostly unregulated, they frittered it away, causing a depression).

Looking forward, what is Sarah Palin capable of? Jackson thought any attack on him was an attack on his people, and Palin sure talks that way, too, showing the same steadfast ambition for the highest office that he wanted, and eventually scored twice. She’s certainly a rock star to her followers, and her platform and snide verbiage is every bit as effective as Jackson’s was in the 1820s and 1830s.

I do see one difference, besides the fact Jackson hated corporations: He was adamant that no state had the right to “nullification,” meaning it could not strike down, individually, any federal law it wanted. But Sarah Palin has already come out in defense of Arizona’s immigration papers law, saying the federal laws were not to Arizona’s satisfaction. In that, even though I can’t stand the guy, I lean toward Jackson’s side. Defending unity has its benefits; Palin’s version, though, sounds more like anarchy.

She hasn’t given us a Trail of Tears, and she may never do so, but history is almost always a guide, at least of what’s possible. And history is always a warning never to underestimate the underdog in a bottle fight.

Older Entries

“Oklahoma!” is one of the dirtiest movie musicals of all time

Inca Trail trek to Machu Picchu, Peru: What you need to know

The Statue of Liberty is an Embarrassment

The corporation commands you to admit it’s 1:37 pm

The Disney Store Times Square opens. I’m without words

‘Scottsboro Boys’ protest: It Ain’t No Minstrel Show

The good old days weren’t always good

Why they sobbed at ‘South Pacific’, and why we see only corn

How ‘Blogger Brands’ win by undermining their colleagues

Is Sarah Palin the second coming of Andrew Jackson?

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