Category: Culture

The Wolf of Wall Street: Greed, Sex, Cruelty and Martin Scorsese

I understand about Martin Scorsese.  I really do.  From Mean Streets to Taxi Driver, Raging Bull to Goodfellas to Boardwalk Empire, much of his work has been dark and violent.  Decent people don’t show up very often and when they do, they seldom prevail, so when we went to see The Wolf of Wall Street this weekend, I wasn’t expecting a pleasant experience.  I was not expecting what I got, either.

By the end of the film I was so angry I was shaking.  After three hours of unrelenting greed, emotional violence, ruthlessness, the cynical exploitation of the weak, casually abusive and emotionless sex, indescribable disregard for and destructive treatment of women, it was tough to walk out of the theater without throwing something.  


It was excess beyond anything that words could describe; images, sadly, are more successful.  There’s nowhere to hide and there are so many moments where we wish we could.

I was a broadcast producer in the and 80’s and covered the excesses of that time.  I knew that, in Bonfire of Vanities, Tom Wolfe was demonstrating his skills as a reporter as well as a novelist.  

Even so, the rank, brittle ugliness of this film, of these people and of the fact that much of the story really happened turned what we know into what we wish we didn’t.  The criticism by the daughter of one of its main characters, that it glamorizes the Belfort universe and makes them some sorts of rakish sweetie pies wasn’t what I saw. The are all reprehensible from first to last.

Of course the film wouldn’t have had the impact it did if it hadn’t been so well-made.  Its impact is indisputable.  Even so – maybe his next undertaking, after all this darkness, will bring us the Scorsese behind The Last Waltz and Concert for New York City.  After all, they say music tames the savage beast, and in this film, he certainly unleashed a hell of a creature.

iVillage Heard Women’s Voices Before Anybody Else Knew How to Listen

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Women need tribes.  Need each other.  

Two of the first online people to figure that out were Nancy Evans and Candace Carpenter Olson, the co-founders, along with two others, of iVillage.  Together they built the best online home women will ever have.  Parent Soup, where I worked for four years, was a mommy site before mommy bloggers or Babble or BlogHer.  Vibrant, warm and well-led, it served – and listened to – women with inclusiveness and respect.   

Well before blogs or social media, iVillage's topical message boards,  conceived as support communities like those in AA, engaged the site's visitors and provided a sense of home and ownership that didn't seem to appear anywhere else online.  They shared parenting and relationship advice and once, right before my eyes, rescued a woman from a terribly abusive relationship as all the members of the board came together to support her.

Today we learned the site will "be shuttered" and folded into the TODAY SHOW Online  under its current owner, NBC News.  

It's sad.  To get an idea of how wonderful it was to be part of what we created there, consider the deluge of comments  that followed a single post earlier today.  All of us are, I suspect, as surprised as I am at the depth of emotion this news has evoked.  We were all so proud to be part of what we knew was a remarkable creation.   And we learned so much.

My own first assignment was to design an education site for parents.  (The logo for "Education Central" appears at the top of this post.)  I took the initial outline to Nancy, who was Editor-in-Chief.  Looking up from her desk, she asked  "Have you looked at the message boards?"  I shook my head.  "Well go read the message boards, use what you find there, and then bring me what you have" she said.  She wouldn't even look at it I did that, and she was right.  

Rule one: listen to the community.  There was so much within those conversations that revealed what should appear on the site.  I've been preaching that lesson ever since.

iVillage believed in its communities, in their hearts and minds.  It gave countless women voices they would never have otherwise had and paved the way for the powerful women bloggers who have emerged after them.

Its leaders also believed in us, from novices to old hands like me, and in our mission: give women a home online and hear what they say there.  Believe, more than anything, in them.

 

 

 

 

 

Sarah Palin, The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Tea Party



This is a sincere and committed couple. I am not mocking them. It does demonstrate the depth of anger in our country in a dramatic way though. What do you think?

(Thanks to @Lizardoid who retweeted this from a tweet by @JamesUrbaniak and @boloboffin)

Carrying our Burden: The Military and the Rest of Us

NOTE; From my archives (one of my first posts) August 8, 2006

Military family The National Military Families Association is an old client of mine and today I'm meeting their former CEO for lunch. She and I had hoped to use her site and some of the "women's" content sites to begin to bridge the chasm between military and non-military families. Who if not the women would be capable of that? I had just read Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point, a wonderful book about West Point and leadership so was particularly interested in removing the stereotypes and isolation suffered by the military in my formative, actively anti-war youth. We were unable to interest most of the women's sites into doing anything without payment though; it was quite sad.

When I think of 9/11 and of the Iraq War – and remember how my parents used to talk about the "GIs" and their position in the world during World War II, it's particularly unfortunate that we now have a "military class" that is separate from the rest of us in so many ways – and whose parents and children were also likely to be military — so much so that we're worlds apart. Today Oliver Stone told the Washington Post that he thought combat experience "softens you, if anything. It makes you more aware of human frailty and vulnerability. It doesn't make you a coward, but it does teach you. " Yet, as he noted in this interview, none of our current political leaders has any combat experience at all. I know we need to end this division, but I have two sons and what seems sensible in the abstract is horrifying in the concrete. I have many friends whose kids have gone to live in Israel, for example, and they seem to accept the fact of their sons' military obligation with equinimity but I don't know if I could. And I"m not sure if it's the scars of Vietnam and even more recent futile endeavors or rank selfishness on my part…. More later.

Days of Future Past

NOTE: From my archives: Today: January 2, 2006

Edge_question_2

Some radical thoughts about the future from people who actually might know what they're talking about:  I have always been fascinated by the smart, smart people who live from the center to the edge of the cyberthinker world.  Because I was present in LA for much of the early conference/thinker gatherings when they weren't so exclusive and you could get a press pass if you knew your way around reporter vocabulary, I met many of them — often humbling but exhilarating experiences.

Over the years one of their most resourceful thinkers, John Brockman, has built a foundation called The Edge, where thinkers gather to "ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."  The annual question founder Brockman has asked this community of thinkers (albeit more than 6 times more men than women) is "What Are Your Optimistic About?  Why?"  It's worth a look.  Some of those I know the most about, and respect, whose ideas might intrigue, include Whole Earth Catalogue publisher Stuart Brand, Microsoft pioneers Linda Stone andNathan Myhrvold , Jaron Lanier, the man who named "virtual reality, Howard Gardner, the Harvard professor who has had such an impact on how we see learning differences and help the kids who have them, and one of the earliest Web thinkers, Esther Dyson.

Take a look; you might actually find a route to some optimism yourself!  I was surprised by how much "good news" these people deliver.  If we can just get some political leadership to follow up on it we'll be better able to leverage these possibilities but either way, it's nice to get some good news once in a while.  Happy New Year.

 

Greece’s Pain: It’s not Greek to Us – It IS Us!

 

 

Immigrant solidarity English onlt

See this?

Looks like home, doesn’t it?  And sometimes it feels like we are the only country struggling with these issues of immigration.  But guess what.  This poster isn’t from Arizona, or Florida, it’s part of a sign on a wall on Ermou Street in downtown Athens.

Immigrant solidarity poster

It’s not the only one, either.  The country is under terrible economic pressure and it’s fraying things. According to our very sweet taxi driver,  despite the rumors of wild spending on services, Greece does not provide for the homeless or the poor – at least not enough.  And the people coming into Greece want jobs and “a better life” but “they aren’t taking any food from me!”   He’s with the marcher s- but there are plenty on the other side too.  We know it’s true in France and Germany — and that Mohamed is one of the most frequent names for new babies in many European countries.  But as you can see the sympathy hasn’t completely eroded.  In addition to these posters, there are many stencils, borrowed from Paris, look like the one below, also from a wall in our neighborhood here.

For more evidence of how bad things are  — look at this sure coal mine canary: Squeegee men vintage NYC in the 1980’s – all over town.

Squeegee man Athens style

I’ll keep you posted as we move through the islands – assuming things will be different there.  Would write more but it costs the earth to use the web on this “yacht.”

RIOTING IN AFRICA? STRIFE IN IRAN? You Have to Read This

You’re not going to believe it but this was written by
Sheldon Harnick in 1958 and recorded by theKingston Trio.  Does
anything sound familiar?   I couldn’t find a decent video but it was too good to waste.

They’re rioting in Africa (whistling)
They’re starving in Spain (whistling)
There’s hurricanes in Flo-ri-da (whistling)
And Texas needs rain
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch
AND I DON’T LIKE ANYBODY VERY MUCH!!

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
For man’s been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud
And we know for certain that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off

AND WE WILL ALL BE BLOWN AWAY!!?
They’re rioting in Africa (whistling)
There’s strife in Iran
What nature doesn’t so to us —
Will be done by our fellow “man”