1968 – Page 3 – Don't Gel Too Soon

Patti Smith, Big Eyes, Mr. Turner and Into the Woods: Women and Art

How do the artists we admire find their way? What do they sacrifice to share their vision with the rest of us? How does it feel? Were they ever satisfied with what they made?

The great Patti Smith answered many of these questions, and more, in her 2010 memoir Just Kids. It was, to me a real gift – a peek behind the curtain that stands between the journey and the outcome. It was a long time before another such revelation turned up. But first, consider this:

“Of course women aren’t as creative as men,” he said. “After all, they create children. They don’t have the same drive to do anything else. How many female composers do you know of?”

That wasn’t some 21st century sexist. That was a professor at Smith, the excellent, committed, women’s college where I spent four years in the late 60s. He was sitting in the “housemother’s parlor” after dinner, speaking with whomever of us had turned up for coffee. I remember thinking “Huh. That’s interesting.” and feeling, at his declaration, not outrage but sadness — and humiliation.

I remembered this moment for the first time in decades as a rash of holiday films raised questions about creativity and art, agency and power, commitment and sacrifice. Into the Woods offered a grim view of women’s lives, where mothers imprison their daughters, daughters abuse their sisters, bakers long to become mothers and deliver their most important lessons after they’re dead, and it’s all the witch’s fault. Steven Sondheim’s beloved musical includes some lovely songs and I went mostly to see Anna Kendrick but still…

No witches but a desperate mother who sells her soul for her art (and, kind of, for love) emerges in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes. It’s the story of American painter Margaret Keane, whose husband Walter stole her art, her talent and her reputation and took them for his own. The cost of continuing to paint and still support herself and her daughter was to surrender the right to take credit for her own work. A woman in the 50’s making art for a living was unthinkable, or so he told her. Her story is a bridge – she owned her creativity but not the product.

Then came Mr. Turner, an exquisite profile of the brilliant JMW Turner, a maker of art, no matter what the cost. The film is a journey through his life as a painter of sea and landscapes and the invincible drive to create images of the beauty he saw. His singular vision, the decisions he made to preserve that vision, his almost Asberger’s detachment from most people and his startling depth of commitment to the two people he truly loved combined in a thrilling consideration of art and love and living with both: a portrait of what is required of any artist, woman or man, to share what they see and feel and understand.

And so we return to Patti. She and Turner are bookends on this shelf. As with Mr. Turner, we learn what she lived and learned and made and what she left behind to do it — a woman slamming through barriers with commitment and with love. An woman’s tale of what must be done – and of a woman expecting, demanding and embracing — as did Turner — all it took to share what she sees with the rest of us.

Ferguson, Age, and Loss

Very seldom do I notice my age. But as I have read the outpouring of grief and rage (which I share) over the Michael Brown grand jury verdict, I am deeply aware of the decades I lived before most of these friends, and other writers who are otherwise strangers, were born. Things they learned about, but I lived through.

With deep sadness and disgust, I watched Robert McCullough in his starched white shirt and dark suit with his half-glasses perched on his nose like a college professor and knew what he would say. His endless prologue foretold what was coming with an ego and naked self-interest that was dreadful to see. But it wasn’t a surprise. I expected nothing else.

I remember the murders of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner,, (see Awesomely Luvvie) of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Dr. King, Viola Liuzzo. Brutality, incarceration, death. I remember George Wallace in the school-house door,

and Willie Horton

and the ads that NC Sen. Jesse Helms, in a re-election bid, ran against African-American candidate Harvey Gantt .
I remember scores more for every one of these.

It’s really terrible to witness, and share, the heartbreak described by so many I love. Read this post by Kelly Wickham that expands on that, or this by Rita Arens. Or go back and hit the #ferguson and #blacklivesmatter hashtags one more time if you can bear it. A Greek chorus of agony.

I am by no means connecting this weariness of mine with reasons to stop taking action and writing and reaching out and making noise. No. I’m just thinking about how different it feels when you’ve sat in front of black and white TVs and listened on transistor radios the first times you learned of each desperately painful incident of even the past half century. We know we will keep working, trying. Even so, how hard it is to feel shock or surprise or anything other than a bone-chilling validation of the presence of those ugly creatures of hate and injustice that still hide between the stars and stripes that represent our country.

Facing the Political Future: a Sadly Personal Perspective

I’ve been hiding from the news, which is weird since I spent most of my life as a journalist. I’m not sure though, that after 8 agonizing years of W and then 6 frustrating ones with President Obama (much of it not his fault) I can face what the next congress will do.

Do you remember the various, endless Clinton hearings? Even more than the impeachment battle, the moment that I keep remembering was deeply personal: Sen. Alphonse D’Amato questioning Deputy Chief of Staff (and my longtime friend) Harold Ickes, whose father, also Harold, had been Secretary of the Interior in the Roosevelt Administration, and credited with implementation of much of the New Deal.

His father, D’Amato told Harold, would have been ashamed of him.

I had worked with Harold when we were all young, so along with political anger came real pain that, beyond the issues, he had faced such very cruel personal grandstanding.

That’s not important in policy terms and is probably mild compared to the harshness that any witnesses at the pending, inevitable deluge of hearings under a Republican congress will face: two years of destructive power escalating the politics of obstruction to that of destruction. Beyond what that will mean to our country, poor people, women, immigrants, ACA users, voting rights, Supreme Court nominations, and the jeopardy we face around the world, none of which will receive much attention except as political weapons, it’s just not something that will be easy to watch, especially for an unrepentant dreamer like me.

Mo(u)rning in America: 2014

I spent W’s eight years in political despair. It was hard to watch the news or read the paper, harder still to think of all our fellow Americans without resources who would, and did, suffer on a very concrete level. Our kids were educated, our mortgage getting paid; we had work and health insurance and political and religious freedom but for many the pain of those years was personal.

Barack Obama’s election felt like the turning of a corner. This morning, as we face the unremitting and successful (and un-American and cruel and racist) assault on voting rights, the prospect of Joe McCarthy-like hearings in both bodies about almost everything that this president has been able to accomplish despite unprecedented, treasonous opposition, certain continued and brutal safety net cuts, violation of workers rights, a terrifying, determined erosion of the rights of women, a near-caliphate level of fundamentalism among even some of our newly elected members of Congress, the now-certain, veto-proof approval of the Keystone Pipeline, obscene power grabs by wealthy oligarchs and their ALEC, Americans for Prosperity operations not only nationally but state-by-state and unimaginable foreign policy attitudes, it’s a grim day.

Friends of mine have posted look-ahead messages and I admire them for it. For me, it’s going to take a little longer.

Justice on Television: Way Before Good Wives and Even West Wings!

Movies stay with us; they’re great historic documents, but television is intimate, and when it’s good, television is us.

My own early understanding of injustice and race and poverty and social change came from television. For example:

The child of a black couple in Harlem in the early 60’s was bitten by a rat in the tenement where they lived and no cab driver would stop pick them up to take them to the hospital ( East Side, West Side (1963-64) ( George C. Scott (Patton, Dr. Strangelove) and Cicely Tyson (The Autobiography of Miss Jane PIttman, The Help) as a social worker and his secretary.) It was cancelled after one season because no Southern stations would carry a show featuring interracial colleagues.
A tragic battle over the insanity defense in a death penalty case: a two-episode story on The Defenders* (1961-65) , starring Robert Reed, later the dad in The Brady Bunch.

There are plenty of others but this is #microblogmonday so I’m about done: consider though the WWI episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs, and Route 66.

* The Museum of Broadcast Communications called it “perhaps the most socially conscious series the medium has ever seen”, a show”singularly resonant with New Frontier liberalism.”

Bruce Morton: a Master Journalist and a True Gentleman

CBS News camera platform at the March Against the Vietnam War, April 1971

Bruce Morton died yesterday. He was a sensitive and deeply moral man. He never raised his voice and when I asked him why he told me that he had seen so much violence when he covered the Vietnam War that he didn’t want to be responsible for inflicting any more – even verbally. Those years had left a deep mark on him, but that reply was about as far as he would go in discussing it out loud.

He was smart too, and funny, and brilliant. He won an Emmy for his coverage of the 1970 trial of Lt. William Calley for the 1968 My Lai Massacre. It was tough for someone who had been so affected by the war to cover this tale of atrocities and shame, but he did it elegantly and well, as he did everything.

I learned so much from him; some of it really unexpected. Once at a party in the studio for the guests who had appeared on a just-completed live broadcast, we got into a terrible fight about Lyndon Johnson. I was part of the anti-war movement before I went into journalism and was only 23, as you can see in the photo of the two of us ( along with hundreds of thousands of marchers.) I hated Johnson, blamed him for the war, of course, and had very little perspective on the rest of his history.

With the kind of passion I learned to expect from him but that was really scary then, Bruce ran the litany of Johnson’s Poverty Program, Civil Rights accomplishments and background and insisted that I take another look. He was, of course, right. Like every other story, this one had two sides and I had only seen one. That never happened to Bruce.

He was really nice to me; he and his wife Maggie even hired me, since I was usually short of cash, to babysit for their two fabulous kids Sarah and Alec. And their Great Dane. And their cats. It was a real privilege to be invited into their very exciting lives and be trusted with their kids. All those times are memories I cherish.

As I remember this lovely and remarkably talented man, (I once saw him ad lib a 1:30 live radio report and get it right, beautiful and to the second) I can’t do much better than our colleague Joe Peyronnin:

Bruce Morton was a brilliant political journalist, and a superb writer and reporter. He wrote a script faster than anyone I have ever known. His writing was imaginative, incisive and informative. We worked together at CBS News on many stories in the 70’s and 80’s, and got the scoop of the1984 Democrat Convention, that Walter Mondale had picked Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate. Bruce was a truly remarkable man. RIP my friend.

Ferguson, Bloggers and Race in America: Even if We Think We Know, We Don’t

One of the bloggers I admire most is Kelly Wickham, who writes Mocha Momma. I “met” her online 7 years ago because she was a reading specialist and, as the parent of a dyslexic child, I was so grateful for the committed, loving, determined way she wrote about her work. I kind of stalked her in comments until we met at BlogHer in 2007. (Actually I also stalked her after that, too, but at least by then she knew who I was.)

She writes, with honesty and rage, about race. About family, and love, and education and whatever else occurs to her, but also about race. I’ve learned a lot from her, including how much I didn’t know. As the years have passed, and more women of color have joined BlogHer and Kelly’s Facebook feed, I’ve learned from others, too. The BlogHer community grew and widened, and with it the gut understanding of the whole community. On our blogs we tell the truth, and the different truths shared by the bloggers who are now a part of my life have been an immeasurable gift.

Of course it is beyond wrong that, in 2014, we still have to seek diversity, to go out of our way to learn lessons we should have learned long ago, and that those most in pain still experience so much that we haven’t figured out how to learn.

The trouble is that there hasn’t been nearly enough intersection between us and those experiencing the harshest emotions that emerge in response to American racism.

I remember once talking with author Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, who said to me “Don’t you see, we black mothers must be lionesses to protect our sons.” I thought of her statement often as I was raising my own.

I remember a colleague describing to me, when we were both pregnant, her fear of the first time someone called her not-yet-born child a “n*$%#&r” – of what she would say to him, what she would do.

But despite having African-American colleagues and friends, I’m not sure I ever, until these past days, completely heard the depth of anger and despair that lives within so many.

It’s not that I didn’t know; most people I know care about and have seen plenty of racial injustice and have worked, in our own ways, to change it. But that’s different from opening someone else’s door and walking in. It’s on fire in there. And it should be.

Listen to these:

Everyone can’t stand up the moment something pisses the off and we’re all different in how we react. Some people shut down because they don’t even know where to start. Some people just need a nudge to be emboldened to speak. Some people need to know they’re needed before they speak.

Well if you need that nudge, here it is. If you’re afraid because you don’t want to say the wrong thing, push past that fear. Because right now, your silence about the continued devaluation of Black lives is wrong. Your lack of acknowledgement is not ok. If you need tips before speaking out here’s 3: don’t blame the person who was killed. Don’t say you’re color-blind. Acknowledge the racism at play.

Speaking up when it matters is usually when it’s also the hardest. When your voice shakes, that’s when you’re standing in truth. But that’s usually when it is most needed. And when you do it, someone else might be encouraged to do the same. Do not be silent. Awesomely Luvvie

I am outraged but I do not know what to do with my outrage that might be productive, that might move this world forward toward a place where black lives matter, and where black parents no longer need to have “the talk” with their children about how not to be killed by police and where anger over a lifetime of wrongs is not judged, but understood and supported. Roxanne Gay

Black bodies matter. Black bodies matter. Black bodies matter. Say it with me: Black bodies matter. This isn’t a question. This isn’t a euphemism. This isn’t an analogy. This is a fact. Black cis and trans boys, girls, men, and women and non-binary folks, they all matter. Until that fact becomes a universal truth due to the precise liberty and justice the Constitution of this country promises, I won’t stop fighting and neither should you. Jenn M. Jackson

But it wasn’t what I could see and hear as Ferguson residents fled and were pursued into residential areas that gave me chills. It was what I couldn’t see. Because behind the walls of those smoke-shrouded homes were parents comforting their frightened children. I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there. They could have been me. They could have been my children.Kymberli Barney for Mom 2.0

This is what I need, dear friend.

I need to know that you are not merely worried about this most tragic of worst case scenarios befalling my son; I need to know that you are out there changing the ethos that puts it in place. That you see this as something that unites us as mothers, friends and human beings.

My son needs me, as much as yours needs you. Sadly, my son needs me more. He needs someone to have his back, when it seems that the police, the men he’d wave to with excitement as a little boy, see him as a being worthy only of prison or death.

I need you, too, because I can’t do this alone. Keesha Beckford “Dear White Moms” on BonBon Break

This is where the story gets tricky. This is where our son paced up and down the stairs—in his under shirt, gym shorts and crew socks—telling us about the police who came to our door and handcuffed our son and pulled him outside. “Why?” It was the only question I could come up with — “why?”

His hands ran over his face and found each other behind his head. I knew this look too. The one of lost words—of previous trauma—of discouragement.

“I don’t know. There’s some robberies in the area? I guess? And they saw me here—I don’t know. They thought it was me. They thought it was me and wouldn’t listen. They didn’t believe me that this was my house.”

He shook his head and looked at me. “It didn’t even matter that I had a key, moms.” Elora Nicole

For each of these there are dozens and dozens more. No more to say.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/20/white-people-black-people-michael-brown-death-ferguson

Margot Adler Sang at My Wedding

Margo in the foreground; that's me in the back. — Margo in the foreground; that’s me in the back.

It was 1971. The song – no surprise to anyone who was young then, was Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Ed McCurdy’s anti-war anthem. We knew we couldn’t get married in the middle of the war that had defined much of our lives without acknowledging it, and the song was the perfect way. Margot was amazing, her voice clear and passionate; people even cried as we two 20-somethings stood, mid-ceremony, and Margot sang. She had a great voice, had actually been a music person forever, and attended the famed Music and Art High School in Manhattan.

We met cute. A friend brought her into the Senate Radio-TV Gallery, just off the press balcony overlooking the Senate. Reporters wrote their spots there, and there was a small studio where Senators could come and make statements for the cameras. I didn’t know Margot, but her Pacifica Radio friend knew she had a question that any pal of Margot’s would have loved.

“Pacifica (the progressive, listener-supported NY-based FM radio station) wants to hire me to cover the White House. I’ve just come back from Cuba where I was helping the Venceremos Brigade harvest sugar cane. Will that be a problem?”

This was Richard Nixon’s White House she was asking about. You can imagine my answer.

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

From then on, until I left Washington with the man who is still my husband, our adventures were many, and varied and intense. The moment that rises to the top though, is a small one, very Margot – precise and painful.

We had seen Love Story, the shameless, sentimental, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” Love Story. (Yeah, I know, but everyone went – even politicos like us.) She was quite upset, more than I would have thought – and I never go by Mt. Sinai Hospital on Fifth Ave without remembering it. “What I hated most” she said, “was the scene on the street outside the hospital where my mother died. It was like they threw it in there to make the whole thing extra painful.”

It’s a small story but it always stayed with me. Along with the time we came to NY after we had moved to Palo Alto so Rick could finish school. We were staying with her and we walked in and there in the front hall was her altar. It was the first time we learned of her decision to follow her Wiccan self and it was such a weird way to find out. She kind of said “Well I couldn’t just put it in a letter, right?”

She was, of course, a brilliant reporter and writer and thinker. She was fun and alive and full of curiosity and political brilliance and personal warmth and charm. I hadn’t seen her in a long time, but this week, she’s very much with me, along with the memories of that day, and of course, this song.

Obvious Child: So Much More than an “Abortion Movie”

My hands were shaking as I left the theater. Obvious Child is not traumatic, exactly, it’s just so real. There’s even a line about “old men in black robes.” You already know the story. What you don’t know — can’t know — until you see the film is that the story is just a frame upon which to hang a remarkable set of truths, some painful, some still painfully true, some funny and touching and surprising.

At first I wasn’t even sure I liked our heroine, Donna. She was careless and immature (but also lovable and self-deprecating) and — funny. Of course in some ways she had to be. These circumstances can’t be picture-book or the movie is propaganda instead of the affecting work of filmmaking that it is.

I am closer to her parents’ age than to hers, so the role that they, particularly her mother (SPOILER ALERT) played was especially moving, as she told her “kitchen table abortion” story and, when it counted, flattened the wall that had kept mother and daughter apart for so long. It was a stark reminder not only of the realities that all women share, but also of what women my age knew to be true when we were young: termination of an unintended pregnancy was a risk to our lives. A risk many of us fear has returned.

Right now, today, we face assaults on all sides: contraception, equal pay, voting rights, civil rights and of course, abortion. The quiet, sometimes funny, sometimes incredibly sad, journey through this film evokes grief over the threats we know are emerging with more and more power. It’s one woman’s story from one wild night to shock to truly loving families and friends who can’t quite compensate for the crisis to the inevitably sad, lonely moment as the procedure unfolds to the life that lies ahead.

The difference, the reason Obvious Child is so much more than “that abortion movie” is that it offers characters we come to love, a crisis we all recognize, a family clearly a product of the open child rearing that many of us chose over the stratified parenting we experienced as well as loving, truth-telling, strong friends and fully-developed principal characters with depth and, under all that irreverent Millennial camouflage, deep sensitivity and honor.

Through the Looking Glass, 21st Century RFID-Style

iTunes stations2 Equation of the day: Cognitive dissonance = searching for travel accessories that will hold a passport and credit cards AND provide RFID protection AND go under one’s clothing — while at the same time listening to the “If You Like the Grateful Dead” Channel on iTunes Radio. OR I could switch to the Leonard Cohen one for the same result. I’m usually pretty good at avoiding over-60 vertigo but this…

We can’t take our laptops or iPhones overseas without the capacity to completely cut off data and email. Everything but text. The data pirates I first met all those years ago in Neuromancer are legion now, having moved from (fictionally) stealing corporate data to (really) pulling infinite amounts of information from our passports, phones, laptops and credit cards. At least the kind they use in Europe.

Pretty dark, and way beyond simple identity theft, right? Now available: where we’ve gone and for how long, what we’ve bought and from whom, phone calls, emails, passwords and personal information out there like a big buffet just waiting for them. As I listen to the music, I keep thinking of anthem-saturated marches, pot-scented dorm rooms, grey afternoons with the Sisters of Mercy and a vital, curious, well-educated self who could never have imagined, much less understood, our modern vulnerabilities. Even in the 90’s, with its “Information wants to be free” mantra didn’t prepare me for this.