["Open Mike" is the Editorial page of TOP, wherein Yr. Hmbl. Ed. recklessly wades into frays.]
The snow squalls up here are really something. One minute it's clear and sunny, and the next minute the wind is gusting and swirling and the snow is dancing in the air moving up, down, and sideways like schools of tiny fish. Visibility plummets to a few hundred feet and the headlights of oncoming cars are all you see of them at first. Then all of a sudden the road on a distant hillside is glowing with sunlight amid the gray melee, small patches of blue sky begin to open and close up again, the wind and snow abate, and ten minutes later the squall is gone and it's bright and clear again.
Never mind trying to take a picture of it—the amazing thing about it is how it changes all around you and how you can drive from one kind of weather to the next in an eighth of a mile, and then to another. When the skies in different directions look like different days. It can go from peaceful to stormy breathtakingly quickly.
In his obituary
...Speaking of which, I'm feeling sorrowful about the Will Smith imbroglio.
I have two questions: first, did Chris Rock know Jada Pinkett-Smith suffers from alopecia? Because if he didn't, and he thought Jada's hair was just a fashion statement (she looked good, right? Sure looked like fashion), then it was a very different joke. Second question, did Will Smith realize that G.I. Jane was a movie in which the female lead shaved her head? Because if he didn't, that could explain his initial laughter. Just laughing along at Chris Rock giving his family a call-out from the stage. I mean, Chris had just said, "Jada, I love ya."
If Chris knew it was a medical condition, then he went too far. It's a cheap shot, even if the affliction is hardly the worst thing in the world. The Academy Awards isn't a roast. And shouldn't he know not to insult another guy's wife? Yet Smith's response was an order of magnitude worse. Misdemeanor battery in front of ten 16.6 million people? I feel sorry for him. He has damaged his own reputation. Probably not irreparably, but at the same time, it'll be mentioned in his obituary, probably. And, painfully, he cut the legs out from under his own moment of glory, which should have been the triumphant culmination of a worthy career—his first Oscar for Best Actor—which, now, no one will be talking about. Didn't he have a solid image as a person of cheerful intensity, warm good humor, and positive energy? Has anyone ever seriously suggested that's not his real nature? To see him act the way he did on such a huge stage was so bizarre it was no wonder people thought it was a performance, a skit, planned out ahead of time.
One thing that really annoys me is that racist America is going to have a snark- and smirk-up. Ya hate that. And finally, the Academy saying, "We do not condone violence in any form." What?! Do they not go to the movies? Hollywood not condoning violence...now that's rich. Hollywood practically exists to condone violence. It could be mistaken for its very mission.
Will apologized in writing. But what should happen (well, in Mike-world, and we all know I have my head in the clouds, at least when it isn't in a snow-squall) is: Chris and Will should meet, talk it out, then hold a joint press conference in which Chris apologizes to Jada and Will apologizes to Chris. In that way the two of them would show their fans, young people everywhere, and the whole world how real men handle themselves in the wake of unfortunate and all-too-human lapses of temper and judgment—how real men act, in other words, after it gets too real.
But then, I don't follow Hollywood. I have no idea about the histories between the players, the state of the Smiths' marriage, other pressures, anything. To be honest, while I'm a fan of Chris Rock's standup (and of Everybody Hates Chris, and I'm surprised there have been no jokes), I've never seen a movie with Will Smith in it. I just know he's a top star. And that it's easier to do what he did to Chris Rock than to The Rock.
Don't like Gauguin
'Kay, now I have a very serious question, something that's been bothering me, and that I've been thinking about, for quite some time. Is it okay to separate the art from the artist? When we know an artist is a pig or worse, does that make it not okay to like the art? Bill Cosby's comedy records, Woody Allen's Annie Hall? Did Kevin Spacey taint American Beauty after the fact?
Composer Percy Grainger was an anti-semite. Paul Gauguin reportedly took three child-brides in Tahiti...and gave them all syphilis. And the less you know about the British sculptor Eric Gill's incest, the better. Pablo Picasso was probably really dreadful to women. Is it easier if it's farther back in history? Carravaggio was a murderer, and his rap sheet and court record reportedly filled many pages.
I'd be interested in your opinion. I'll give mine later.
Let me just make one (again: sorrowful) prediction...that there will be a spike in assaults on comedians.
Hope I'm wrong, hope I'm wrong.
Mike
Book of Interest this Week
Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past. TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.
This book link is a portal to Amazon.
Today at B&H Photo
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Michael: "Once you learn that some artist had some deep flaw and had acted badly, even abominably, you may never be able quite to set that thought or judgement aside. But if we recognize that the line between good and evil runs through the heart of everyone—I think that's Solzhenitsyn—then we might retrieve the excellence in their work, even if that excellence is darkened by the artist's works beyond art. 'Let he who is without sin....' Or put this another way: what would we lose if we let our acceptance of 'Guernica' be wholly eclipsed by our censure of Picasso's behaviour with women?"
Mike replies: For me it's even neater and more excruciating, because it's 'Mother and Child' at Chicago, a painting that bowled me over. So then I'm dealing with a beloved expression of motherhood painted by a man who used and mistreated women...gak.
Michel Hardy-Vallée: "Well, since you asked...
"The ethics/aesthetics problem is often approached from a 'clean slate' perspective, suggesting that the general case is people consuming art in the blissful ignorance of their creators' assholery. And so it becomes a big turning point when taa-daaa! that so-called genius turns out to be despicable.
"But that is not true at all. We always know that such-and-such is shady, we already know that to get there, they made actions that are wrong on a spectrum. So we're constantly negotiating some kind of willful denial in exchange for entertainment or enlightenment.
"Gifting innocence and genius to artists has always been the most dangerous inheritance of aesthetics. No, I'm not asking for Plato's exclusion of artists from his Republic on moral grounds, but I'm calling on people to be reminded that we never give a free pass to ordinary people the way we tend to do with artists. You hate your bigoted uncle, and will grudgingly share a holiday meal with him, but you won't praise his genius, and ask others to 'separate the art from the man,' whatever his art may be.
"Denying agency is exactly at the heart of the Oscar kerfuffle. If understand the twisted macho logic of the event, it means that a wife is a property to be defended? The person targeted by the joke was unable to stand up for herself and had to be 'protected' like an object? She could not respond in a way that reflect her point of view, and someone had to think for her? You mean, like a child? F*ck this paternalist sexist shit.
"If I were to try to 'protect' my partner from a stupid joke, she would be the one kicking my butt for denying her the agency of responding in the way she saw fit! And she'd be right. There's a big difference between helping and patronizing."
Mike replies: ...Except if she's the one implicitly demanding that he do it. She apparently had a well-publicized affair a few years ago, and he acceded to a period of "non-monogamy." Now imagine if that "period" was her idea and he had to swallow it to keep up appearances, and that one of her criticisms of him was that he wasn't "man enough" and would never stand up for her when it counted? That would put her agency into the mix. This is conjecture, and I'm not disagreeing with your astute take on the matter—just pointing out that the true dynamics of a couple can really only be known to the couple themselves. He did appear to do an about-face once he saw her reaction to the joke. He was laughing at first, and next thing you know he was striding up to the stage.
Speed: "Mike asks, 'Is it okay to separate the art from the artist?'
"Is it okay to separate the speech from the speaker? Is it okay to separate the donation from the donor? Is it okay to separate the politician from the philanderer? Is it okay to separate the touchdown from the runner?—home run from the batter?—basket from the shooter? No. And it not okay to separate this act from the actor.
"Actions have consequences and people are more likely to behave themselves if those consequences are certain, meaningful and in proportion to the act. The Oscars are an institution by and for the motion picture industry to recognize its art. But they have been turned into a money-making marketing device to boost sales of their product. The correct public response would be to not patronize the movie industry products and thereby discourage it from happening again. But...it's not gonna happen."
Mike replies: It could...Gallup said last January, "Movie attendance was...down among moviegoers. In 2021, those who attended a movie saw 3.6 films on average, compared with 6.9 in December 2007 and no fewer than 5.7 in any other Gallup survey," and The New York Times said last November 29th, "Nearly half of the prepandemic audience hasn't returned, research shows, and 8 percent may be gone forever." On the other hand, 16.6 million people watched the Oscars this year, said to be an increase of 58% from 2021, and viewership spiked in real time after "the slap." Tough to separate those numbers from the influence of the pandemic, though. I'm part of the "quadrant" that doesn't go to movies much (older males, the least movie-attending of the four quadrants the movie-marketers target), but the last movie I went to see in the theaters was Richard Linklater's 2014 movie "Boyhood." I'm not purposely boycotting (I just don't like fantasy or comic-book or sci-fi or action films), but I kind of am. I used to try to see all the nominees for Best Picture every year, but since 2009 there are too many for that so I no longer try.
Margaret R: "Re 'One thing that really annoys me that racist America is going to have a snark- and smirk-up.' On the other hand, imagine how much worse the furore would have been had one of them, in that exchange, been white.... So small mercies, perhaps."
Timothy Auger: "In response to your question as to whether you can/should like art by unlikeable people: I rather like the style of architecture promoted by Mussolini in Italy during the Fascist era. It is far more successful aesthetically than most 'modern' architecture, and it's widely respected. Does that allow me to like the style of classicism promoted by Hitler in 1930s Germany? I marvel at the architecture of the Greeks and Romans of ancient times—but their rulers were no saints. The pyramids in Egypt were built by slave labour. Should they be struck from the tourist brochures? There is no consistent solution to this dilemma. The only thing you can say is the more distant the work is culturally or historically, the easier it is to ignore nasty aspects of the people who produced it.
"P.S.: And I still enjoy Woody Allen films."
Zyni Moë: "You have to. 'Baby Driver' is wonderful and Spacey is wonderful in it. It does not become less wonderful when you know what Spacey did. Gill's sculpture is wonderful as is his typography. When you can't is when the art is about the awfulness. Apart from being 935 hours too long and just not very good (yes, I have listened to it, in several recordings) The Ring (operas, not the great Japanese movie) is all about awful Germanic-supremacist myth-making, made by an awful Germanic-supremacist, antisemitic man. People who like it are making excuses all the time for something which is just not excusable. If you want overlong late-romantic pseudo-mystical gubberish, Mahler is just over there, and he really was a genius (and he would still have been a genius if he had not been Jewish). (Whenever posh people deride pop music for being shallow, mention opera.) Same: Miles Davis beat his wife but his music was not about assaulting women and is very great."
Mike replies: John Lennon: "I used to be cruel to my woman I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved." And apparently that was true with his first wife....
James Allen: "Re 'One thing that really annoys me that racist America is going to have a snark- and smirk-up.' Really? I have lived and traveled across America for all of my 59 years, and I haven't found this mythical place called racist America. I have met individuals who are not bastions of racial harmony, but they are rare and unpopular. I find America to be a welcoming country to all people far more than we get credit for. This ongoing self-flagellation about race is puzzling to me. I'd wager that no other country has tried as hard as the USA to live up to its ideals regarding racial harmony. Are we perfect? Nope, and I'll bet we never are. Is any country? Also nope. I love this country and the people who live here, and I think calling it 'racist America' is an unearned slur."
Mike replies: Okay, that's your opinion, and I hear it—even have some sympathy for it—but we disagree.
Are you Black?
I'm not using the phrase to say all of America is racist. I mean there is a portion of America that is racist.
We have a persistent problem with police flat-out murdering Black people. Watch the Walter Scott video online (a case I followed closely). That cop is now serving 20 years. It's not an isolated incident: look at the selected sourced list Renée Ater compiled. I asked a former police chief friend about it, expecting that he would be affronted, but he immediately agreed. He said (I'm paraphrasing), "It's a constant problem. It's a violent job and it attracts violent people. You always have to be on the lookout for the bad apples. Officers in the field don't have much oversight. You have to keep alert and keep trying."
A racist President was elected in 2016. Northerners fly Confederate flags on their pickup trucks and hang them in the windows of their homes where I live—where local town squares and parks still feature statues with lists of locals who died in the Civil War, a war fought over whether new territories should be slave or free. How is it possible to see that as anything but fealty to white supremacy? You might say that that black-and-white U.S. flag with the one blue stripe in it is merely "pro law enforcement," but others will disagree and call it anti-BLM. Racists are a minority, I do believe that, and I used to think as you do. Not any more.
Anyway, assuming you're white, it's kinda not for us to decide. In college we had a public hearing on the school's (now former) American Indian mascot, and I spoke up saying it wasn't that big a deal. A young Native American woman came up to me after the program and asked to talk to me. We wandered the streets for two hours and talked intensely. She convinced me that the oppressor's viewpoint isn't the important one. It's for the oppressed to say what their experience is. As soon as you can get Black people to agree with what you say, then I'll give it credence. I doubt that would be easy for you right now. The rallying cry "I can't breathe" speaks their opinion. How many times during your 59 years of travel in America did you ask Black people whether "racist America" exists? You and I should probably listen to them. If you don't agree, okay, but that's my take.
By the way, one of the authors of Without Sanctuary, a book of lynching photographs that's too expensive for me to own, is named James Allen.
JOHN BOUR: "Re 'Whenever there are two patches of blue that appear in the middle of a stormy sky, leaving the impression that the storm is about to break, that’s also referred to as the Dutchman’s Breeches. The expression is part of traditional sea-going weather lore where it’s believed that in bad weather, two patches of blue sky is a hopeful sign as long as the patches are big enough to 'mend a pair of Dutchman’s breeches.' Back in the day, sailors wore wide trousers, and Dutch sailors were known to wear even wider trousers which just happened to be blue like the the sky on a clear day. As a private pilot we still use the expression; 'it's overcast, with some Dutch pants.' (I'm Dutch.) Keep up the good work. ;-) "
Mike replies: That's charming, thanks for that. I have a number of photographs of Dutchman's breeches. It's a minor theme for me—seems to symbolize a little patch of hope in grim darkness.
Christopher Perez: "Yes, Picasso was pretty bad to the women in his life. Add to the list Dali, who supported Franco. And how about Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Italian Futurists and their support of Mussolini? Why is Tissot considered a minor artist when his works are filled with light, beauty, and are wonderfully composed? Many people see white marble statues and don't realize the great Greek and Roman works were painted. It only been in the last five years that Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette's portraitist, has been exhibited in a large show dedicated to her in France. Demonstrably great women artists need to be 're-discovered' (Artemisia Gentileschi, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, or Suzanne Valadon). Closer to photographic home, why did Saint Ansel carry a Portland lens for many years after denouncing the pictorialist movement? Further, the more I learn about Ed Weston and his women, or Saint Ansel's long love affair with Nancy Newhall. the more I question their culturally recognized deification. Either out of complete ignorance or as memories of certain things artists have done or the ways they behaved fades, perhaps we can simply look at what they've accomplished? Art appreciation sure seems to have many and long cultural, social, historical, memory feeder lines."
