That's Capital

The Grand Guignol

If there's an artist who might understand how to capture the Israeli-Lebanon war it's French dramatist Antonin Artaud, known for his Theater of Cruelty, a company producing highly visual, wildly murderous stories, sometimes known as Grand Guignols. Dramas that were spectacularly bloody and horrific.

Artaud's work was rooted in the following ideas: most human beings are incapable of understanding the violence that drives us, but once we see it externalized, we can finally process it, then act with compassion and grace. Artaud viewed his Grand Guignols as a spiritual effort to bring the most horrific of our psychic fears to the surface.  Like ancient rituals of animal sacrifice, he thought such theater could reflect back to us our own vulnerabilities under a mysterious and sometimes terrifying God. 

I wonder if everyone involved with this war, from its civilian victims to willing soldiers to even those of us watching outside are all part of the actors in a piece of similarly bloody theater. Only instead of a God in the heavens, this theater piece seems to have us driven by absolutist bureaucracies in America, Israel and Iran, non-state terrorist actors and ideologies, and a general fear of a future that promised the erasing of more and more of the world's boundaries.

As an anthropologist told me when I talked to her about 9/11, the fear from terrorists weren’t started by that heinous act, only exacerbated. Rather our horror was growing organically with the rise of globalization. “People seem to like fences,” she said. “When they can’t see boundaries it is very frightening for many. Very frightening.”

That’s about the only story I can find that explains things. But then I’m probably as guilty as anyone of looking for easy narratives for a very complex story. Unfortunately, easy narratives are ruling the day, at a time when such stories are too often just inspiration to legitimate violence.

A few examples. This last Sunday (Aug. 05th) CNNs Media Matters host Howard Kurtz interviewed Thomas E. Ricks. One of America's most respected Pentagon journalists, Ricks is the author of Fiasco, a devastating account of the Bush Administration’s handling of the Iraq War.

Ricks claimed he’s heard two theories from American generals about Israel’s Lebanon campaign.

1. Israel's military is deliberately ignoring certain Hezbollah positions, allowing them to keep firing rockets. Why? So long as the rockets are flying into Israel, the IDF has an excuse to attack Lebanon.
2. Israel is targeting journalists, or giving them the sense they are, to frighten them.

Ricks has stature and seems like a no-nonsense guy. Is that reason enough that even though he offered no proof, names, or anything more substantial than a few sweeping accusations, the CNN host let them pass without an ounce of examination?  As the head of a program that explores media accuracy, Kurtz showed no capacity to embrace his responsibility.

At the least, he should have pointed out clearly, if accurate, Ricks’ statement would be enough to do what Hezbollah has failed to do, namely create mass hysteria in Israel. It would mean that this Israeli government isn't just lying to foreign journalists, but that it has asked its citizens to accept the possibility of its soldiers dying, as well as demanded that hundreds of thousands of Israelis spend the last month either in bomb shelters or leave their homes... all less motivated to protect its citizens than wage war.

When Ricks claims he heard this all from some anonymous generals, I doubt he's lying. I also think Ricks knows the difference between rumors, innuendo, and truth. Well, here he was spreading innuendo, with Kurtz playing uncritical facilitator. Given the gravitas of the situation, this makes both men as bad as liars, if not worse. Because without offering context or substance they were breezily tossing inflammatory charges towards an arena which is in a raging fire.

Listening to such careless accusations, Ricks and Kurtz seemed eager to group the Israeli citizenry and its government as a monolithic block. It reminded me of the miserably provincial Europeans who I’ve met overseas who lump Americans together as all enthusiastic followers of every single policy taken by our government. 

Sunday’s program made me think that we’re creeping to a similarly hyped-up period, one in which the media world is so lost in creating a clear narrative that they will grasp at anything, no matter how shallow, to come up with some analysis that momentarily sounds logical.

Earlier last week on NPR's To The Point, host Warren Olney interviewed political scientist Robert Pape. The interview followed an NYTime’s Op-Editorial Pape published that suggested that Israel can never defeat Hezbollah because it is a social movement akin, as he put it, to America's “Civil Rights movement.”

Pape’s inference was clear. Given the history of America’s Civil Rights movement, he was suggesting that if it’s a "social movement" it automatically has integrity, and thus certain success. Someone might want to remind Pape that the Klu Klux Klan was also a social movement. The fact that it had roots in a particular society did nothing to legitimate its existence or survival.

Pape has spent the last year selling a theory based on quantitative research on suicide bombers, the results published in a book that concludes that suicide bombing and terrorism only grow out of situations where people are occupied by aggressive powers. Though his Op-Ed piece didn't categorically state it, he inferred that if Israel would quit its violence against Lebanon, Hezbollah would leave Israel alone. While highly suggestive of solutions, Pape's essay had offered nothing to substantiate it.

On NPR, both he and Olney had a chance to explore or, as anthropologists say, “unpack” the theory. Instead Olney approached Pape with a brush as wide as the Hudson River. Basically, "give us what you think." So Pape simply gave boilerplate, namely such startling insights as the following: Hezbollah grew out of Israel's 1982 Lebanese invasion. That Hezbollah runs schools and hospitals. And that every day of the fighting, more and more non-fundamentalist Lebanese will become members of Hezbollah.

No argument from me. But anyone who has listened to the news about this violence for more than three minutes would have heard it all before.  You'd think Olney and Pape might want to explore deeper issues motivating Hezbollah. Given the way they have never proved themselves big friends of Lebanon's own huge Palestinian refugee population, their  attack on Israel at this point deserves thorough examination.

Here are some things Olney and Pape might have examined: perhaps Hezbollah was simply driven by a momentary political gain within Lebanon. Perhaps beyond Shaba Farms they are after more territory that are is part of Israel but which were open to question in the 1948 armistice. Perhaps the return of "all the prisoners"  (the specificity of exactly who they are a wee little fact of which no media outlet seems willing to question, but a phrase Arab scholars like Fawaz Gerges seem to repeat without question) was really about smaller scale political interests.

But Olney or Pape didn't seem interested. In an exchange that reminded me of one of those late night infomercials that pose as talk shows, Olney turned to Joel Greenburg, reporting for the Chicago Tribune from Israel, and asked whether Israel understands Hezbollah's depth as a social force in Southern Lebanon. Greenburg answered a quick "too often it gets lost." It was as if the three men were unconsciously or consciously conspiring to sell one big idea: Israel is led by people with absolutely no idea of what they are doing, and with little morality to guide them.

That same week, on PBS Television's News Hour, host Margaret Warner interviewed two "experts" about the view of "who is winning?" The first guest was Mark Perry, part of a British-American based group called Conflicts Forum, which "promotes dialogue between the West and Islamist groups like Hezbollah." The other guest was Gal Luft, executive director of the "Institute for the Analysis of global Security," and a former lieutenant colonel in the IDF.

Luft was most convincing about his inability to do anything except toe a party line. At least Perry was animated, his pent-up posture giving him the look of an angry coach paralyzed on the sidelines by hapless referees. According to him, Hezbollah has “made it clear they're ready for a ceasefire, but they need a trade to pull that off, and they want diplomacy.” As he put it, “they made it very clear to me -- we met with the leadership of Hezbollah over the last two-and-a-half years -- that they're ready to talk, and they're ready to do a political negotiation. I don't see what's wrong with that."

At that point, I thought Warner would examine exactly of what Perry's sense of what Hezbollah's "political negotiation" consisted. She didn't. Why? Perry raised something that demanded answers. Like exactly what drives Hezbollah. Warner listened to Perry with a pained expression, as if frightened or embarrased to ask. I was hoping Luft might be inspired to inquire, himself. Instead the Israeli analyst sat there staring ahead like a man incapable of any discussion that didn't have a formulaic answer.

Honestly, if I sound upset only about Israel’s media image, it’s not just the image that worries me; it’s their entire military campaign. Honestly, Pape’s research strikes me as being about as “scientific” as a professional “Pepsi vs. Coke” marketing study; lots of data but, as the expression goes, “big whoop." Ricks seems smugly manipulative, as in, "I know what I know, and I don't have to tell you how I know but you have to believe me!" As for Perry, he seemed to have real information but, for whatever reason, not quite willing to share it. 

All that said, Israel’s air war against Lebanon strikes me as indefensible. Not only have they spent far too many weeks destroying the infrastructure and lives of their neighbors, but what the hell have they accomplished for themselves? The man designing the military strategy, Dan Halutz, is the same guy who once said, so long as Israel gets a “targeted terrorist” he slept soundly despite sending his men to drop bombs that kill innocent civilians. Watching him last year interviewed by Bob Simon on CBS 60 Minutes, I remember he laughed about the craziness of Palestinian suicide bombers. At the time, he came off to me as a very careless human being. Someone whose bigotry is sold as professional certainty.

As someone who cares about Israel, their  “strategy” seems to me to have a basis in nothing tangible, outside of a small country with an over-supply of air-power and human will showing how frightened it is of getting extinguished. All just seems like blind wrath.  From Hezbollah I expect nothing but the worst. As Israelis find Iranian Revolutionary Guards fighting next to them, Pape may prove correct about them as social movement. What he ignorantly fails to acknowledge is it’s a social movement with deeply violent and imperialistic ambitions.  A movement whose rhetoric, and  history, seem to make them willing to exterminate any rivals, regardless of whether they’re Israeli, Druze or even Shiite.

Regardless, the Israeli air war seems totally blind to Lebanese suffering. There will be an awful lot their leadership must answer in coming weeks and months. I would hope there was a professional press out there doing a better job of making them accountable.  Not by taking strident positions but by the slow, difficult work of looking at whatever is found to give clarity. The agonizing detail work that define the value of real world detectives. 

For now, in the urge “to get the story,” the media is too eager for seamless narratives to the detriment of creating any accuracy. While there’s been great coverage of the human costs of this war to both sides, on the military and political front, our media leadership is looking to put away the suspects before they even know what they have for evidence. Worse that they’re operating according to a paradigm that demands the most superficial aspect of “clarity.” Namely creating clear bumper sticker type thinking for sides to root for.

Talking with my That’s Capital colleague, Titus Levi, he pointed out the way pressures to “fill up a news hour” leads to frantic and shallow news-gathering. It’s a process that has a similarly uncontrollable momentum as a heroin addict addicted as much to ingesting himself with drugs as the effect. No longer feeling any real high, he is still willing to stick himself with infected needles, simply to maintain a psychic routine. Ultimately such folks don’t just hurt themselves. Their carelessness helps spread plagues. Like AIDS.

Finally, Israeli editors have done an awful lot of complaining about bias from the foreign press, but given that they keep their complaining hermetically sealed by restricting it to their own papers, it all sounds like whining. If they're monitoring the foreign media and have a problem with it, they should request air time. For me, the only trustworthy voice exploring what drives Hezbollah comes from Lebanon’s Daily Star, namely editor Michael Young. For some interesting viewpoints, read the links below.
Jonathan Field
August 9, 2006

Michael Young's piece in the Times - excellent

Matthias Küntzel - about Iran's Ahmadinejad, who apparently was interviewed by CBS' Michael Wallace who in publicity cheerfully reports that he "found him very intelligent." He may well be, but Kuntzel finds his type of intelligence suicidal on a massive scale.

Meron Benvenisti - an Israeli geographer and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, scathing about modern Zionism

Amotz Asa-El - an examination of this war from a Jerusalem Post writer who seems honest and accurate

Avi Sagi and Yedidya Stern - a long but excellent portrait of why Israelis may travel the world, but they are rooted where they live... someone should send to leadership in Iran, Hezbollah, and the too often-myopic so-called supporters of Palestinian rights who so often view Israel's Jewish population as some temporary visitors to a foreign land.

Imad Shaku - a remarkable piece by a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council

Robert Fulford - a more biting review of media coverage from a Canadian journalist. 

Muneer Karram - from an Israeli Arab who is a doctoral student in history

Riad Ali - from an Israeli Arab news commentator

Danny Rubenstein - another remarkable piece from a terrific Israeli reporter who here writes about better times between Zionists and Lebanese Shiites

Yitzhak Laor - Israeli analyst critical of what it sees as his country's over-reliance to military solutions to political problems

Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff - a piece showing a particular Israeli take on Nasrallah

The Thinking Lebanese - a Lebanese blog co-written by Faysal Itani who may be the bravest and disciplined man who ever showed up on a New Republic message board.

Annia Ciezadlo - a Beriut writer who shows up in The New Republic and may be the bravest reporter in Lebanon. Excellent piece about Nasrallah.

Radio Open Source - while a previous post of mine criticized some of their shows, they've been refreshingly open to exploring all sides. This program featured two novelists, one Israeli and another Palestinian. It was about the only media I've heard that has offered long term hope about co-existance.

Ari Shavit - another Israeli Radio Open Source has interviewed, someone worth reading

Bitter Lemons - a dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. One of the producers, Yossi Alpher, is particularly good at examining Israeli politics.

Anything by Amir Oren and Aluf Benn in Haarutz or Barry Rubin in Jerusalem Post.

Bits of a Puzzle - Part II

Hollywood. In your imagination, what is it? What happens there? The making of television? Movies? Video games? Music? Who walks its streets? Strivers from all over coming to make a name? Or is it just a mass of smog tinted boulevards crowded with passing cars but few people?   

It's hard to say. But through much of the 20th century, the phrase "Hollywood" projected an over-riding image. It was "the dream factory." A place producing cinematic stories devoured by all the modern world.

Those stories had their own specific arenas. The movie theater.

Initially, the experience of moving pictures on a huge screen in a dark room was so powerful that shots of a moving train could lead audience members to faint. By the time "the talkies" emerged, mass swooning over "going to the show" made film entertainment America's fourth largest industry.

A related thought.

For the last 100 years, Hollywood delivered seamless fictions for the plebians and elites, alike.  Heroes, heroines, and bit players whose cinematic journeys and antics provided coda to live by. Navigation for living happier or better or more meaningful lives.

If what they delivered was seamless and fiction, the emergence of the industry was more like a series of real world bumps and turns. Hollywood, previously a rural landscape populated by retirees and apricot farmers, became a haven for movie making only because of crews escaping the vigilant eyes of an East Coast monopoly looking to control the price of film. 

Today's film studios are outraged by bootleggers of DVDs. The early movie titans only created the industry by using bootleg film stock. In the beginning, it was an awfully shaky business.

Until the industry exploded in the 1920s, Hollywood actors were confined to boarding house and midnight curfews, watched over by owners intent on keeping the sleepy Hollywood Hills... sleepy. The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1917 almost killed this nascent business, people terrified of public gatherings.   

Some background on the culture which would embrace the movies and spread it far beyond our shores.

Since the Civil War, America had seen cycles of boom and bust. Around the railroads and expansion westward. Around waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Europe. Around industrialization, which drew other waves of migration from the nation's rural heartland to the cities. In the process generating economic vitality and all that goes with growth... dislocation, medical problems, and crime.  In the background, the United States was a center for the emergence of science (including Darwin's theory of evolution) creating tensions with prevailing notions of religion and its proper social role.

Note: Some social scientists point to American ideals of romance as a 19th century creation. Their take - Protestant evangelists saw marriage as an institution that could address rips in the social fabric of our once-agricultural nation. Rituals around courtship, leading up to "living happily ever after," became part of a conscious process to counteract the chaos that seemed to be erupting all around.

Particularly threatened by what Old World European tribalism, this influential (and in their own way, progressive) sector of Christian America viewed finding God as connected to finding a single idealized partner. The end result: procreation, family... becoming part of the larger community and, by extension, nation. A country where perpetual change has always been part of its intrinsic character, in ways that were both charmed and cursed.

The movie business was not in the hands of such Christians, but it was driven by its own evangelists. A core group of urban-oriented immigrants who, more than making money, seemed inspired by the chance  to create an alternative cosmology to the ragged Jewish ghettos from which they'd come.  Not to mention, create a universe divorced of any overt connections to the ethnicity and religion of their roots.

Take the story of a man like Samuel Goldwyn, someone half the bulk of my last post's hero, Tony Soprano, only with three times his ferocity. Legend has it Goldwyn walked from the slums of Warsaw to the ports of London to catch a cross-Atlantic ship. Then, wary of immigration laws in the United States, he jumped off the boat in Newfoundland, walking the rest of the way to New York.

A penniless but energetic immigrant, he didn't get into the movies because they were an easy business. Before Goldwyn, there was no movie "biz." He was a relentless force in the creation of the industry, itself. He was a man obsessed.

If you got in his way, you'd find a fight. And he found a lot of people to fight with. According to his own daughter, he was a cold hearted brute. But he was enormously passionate in his search for creating worlds of fictional human beings who would deliver audiences emotional and moral fireworks. 

Goldwyn epitomized Hollywood's Jewish moguls, out to produce a set of fundamental narratives around a mythic American identity. An identity most everyone - believers in religion, atheism, or even communists, would come to adore. Mythic in proportion and also because this identity was less accurate of anything in existance than the yearnings of anyone seek transcendence. 

The DNA of many of these myths tended to be a powerful patriarchical figure, someone who prized the sanctity of family and community, but if their individuality was  ever threatened, would end up riding off in to the sunset alone. Of course, not before saving others from the bad guys.

In between, there were also women of fiery independence and communities of colorful characters who acted as a chorus or comic foils.

Hollywood's stories were kinetic poetry as well as tall tales. They offered a magic and a grittiness. They delivered the sacred and the profane.  The industry that produced them, with its own characters, techniques, and technology, pollinated collective rituals around courtship, aging, and death.

And where religion (or even politics) were often centered on singular authorities leading tight-knit congregations, film moved the collective to the neutral space of a movie house. The movies were  fiction. But their stories tapped into something that struck audiences as basic to modern life, namely  the spirit of independence for which so many people longed.

Not that the movies were free of a belief system. Belief in "a system" is what myths provide. It's that the system Hollywood offered was so seamless and engaging. Partly because of the spectacle of technology. But also because these spectacular stories were, at heart, open to interpretation. 

On visceral as well as intellectual levels, 20th century film embodied the radical notion of two of democracy's core values: individual choice and individual responsibility. As a whole, the stories identified ideals of authority within figures who stood up for maintaining free will.

Equally important, the theater itself provided a regular place to get those stories. It wasn't just cinematic spectacle for individuals. Hollywood gave individuals the delight of enjoying their stories as members of a crowd. 

Movie houses were owned privately. But they were also totally public, as in the end, it was the audience who commanded their seats. You could say that it was a tabernacle 30 years in the making, its congregants the urban swarm who had been steadily been growing the cities through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The movie theaters became palaces. They promised eternal truths and air conditioning. Sometimes double features for a pittance. A private/public sphere where friends and strangers could gather.  In the anonymity of the dark, the mass would collectively share a story and, to some extent, a similar perspective.

Whether the end result was laughter, crying, or just awe. Authority was liberated from the clear sight lines of a lecturing religious or political figure. Rather they seemed to rest in democratic polis of the story and the audience and the theater.

For my interest here, what is most significant is the way the movie house became a place to create a sense of authority and public order. An arena that gave anyone in the audience a sense of access to the power of the sum total of all the parts within our messy world.

The theater was a self-contained interface, offering a package that was seamless. A place where people didn't "have to" suspend disbelief. Rather, it was a sacred space where suspending disbelief was an element of pleasure. More on that in later posts.

Right now, let's just say the artifice was part and parcel of the show. Along with the popcorn, part of the ritual. You "bought the story," literally and figuratively. Everyone knew it was “just actors.” They knew such stories took millions of dollars to produce. And the public made aristocrats of their stars, knowing that all of them were "just like us" but also just like Martians.

For all the artifice, when the right balance of effective plot, dialog, and sound tracks echoed in the darkened theater, people were profoundly moved.  In turn, a "bad movie" was not so much about showing artifice but seeming phony.  “Hard to believe.” A good movie was “honest” or “truthful.”

Within the movie screen, we saw reflections of our own lives, completed by the promise of either comic or tragic ends.

In the last few years Las Vegas may have replaced Hollywood as an American totem. Granted, to some extent the comparison is "apples and oranges." Hollywood's infrastructure was built to produce movies. Las Vegas was built to produce tourism. Or something between "suckers" and happy families out for a good time. Regardless, both Hollywood and Las Vegas have a role in the global imagination. Iconic places that represent this nation's own essence as geography for escape and transformation.

Hollywood's image is fractured. It's hard to know its composition. Who gives it resonance... where is the magic of celebrity: among the lawyers and MBAs who now run studios, or Paris Hilton and reality television stars?

By the late 1990s, movie revenues had been eclipsed by games. Las Vegas may not ever hold the magic as Hollywood once did, but it's created an aura. And a definition: a place where you don't just watch the action but are the action.

It's late. My brain is working slower than I can type. Or maybe vice versa. Let me get to the point. For the next few years, I doubt movies will deliver the same power as games. Movies are a relic of a more stable, industrial world. It's not that they were perfect, or we have lost our innocence.

Rather it's something else. Around the descendence of collective myths, and the ascendance of games over narrative in commanding mass attention. Identifying patterns amid chaos rather than enjoying stories that make sense of chaos for us.

It's all part of a larger social instinct around dealing with less stable infrastructure. Which changes not just entertainment but how we live and produce. As well as how we market what we produce. More to come.

by Jonathan Field

I WANT MY PBS!

After the last post, I realized we just offered the audience a lot of praise for July '64, but it's not something they can now go watch. Given the digital distribution nature of today's world, the inability to see this terrific film is... well, ridiculous. On every level. First, because it offers no value sitting on a shelf somewhere. Second, because it's so much better than 99% offered on our 500 channel universe. Third because the documentary, itself, is the best of an emerging digital genre that combines cinematic simplicity (the story is generated less by images than the voices of people who lived the tale) with equal measures of smart juxtoposition (archival footage) and smart editing.

Most frustrating is the internet offers the distribution platforms to get this seen. Atom Films & iFilm, for instance have been around since the dial-up dark ages. But here's what makes the inability to see it as interesting as it is irritating. Check out Revver.com, a site where video producers from around the globe can upload their content... and earn revenues. Given how seamless the designers have made Revver for producers of content to show it as well as for audiences to see it, now the site just needs better material. For my taste, a lot is American's Funniest Home Video-reject caliber, about as compelling as credits for an infomertial. With worse production values.

On the other hand, the basic framework of Revver is brilliant. It offers three things critical to evolve digital distribution: easy streaming, tagging (see Delicious) and a marketing model (in this case, ads that are automatically coded and patched-in by the site, itself, to play at the end of each video). It has the promise of providing content-users and content producers a highly useable interface to trade their work.

And that's what makes it interesting. Think about the possibilities of a genuinely networked world. Not the network model of giant media conglomerates. But a constantly evolving networks of users who find each other and pollinate, nurture, and share content. In such a world, aggregators (the middle-men) actually become even more important. Sites like Revver may be doing a second-rate job of attracting great content, but they've done a terrific job of building platforms for producers and audiences to share that content. And while we don't need a monopoly of media outlets who will decide what is best for the audience (as the record industry tried to suggest was their role while fighting Napster), brands who recognize their market value as a combination of brokers and interface designers are critical.

Which is where brand organizations like PBS have a place, a resonant brand being exactly that - brokers and interface creators. PBS, as one great media brand, already has the content. They also have the other important piece. Audience. Think about it. Twenty years ago, MTV became a brand by tapping into a collective ritual. Music videos. Such media became associated with a generation. Youth. Well, that doesn't preclude other generations, or at least sub-cultures within it, from having their own rituals around media.

In the last five years, PBS has seemed to be on a hyper-aggressive marketing kick to galvanize a Baby Boomer following. The process isn't always heartening. From my perspective, it has produced its own portfolio of noxiousness: namely deadly dull programs like Antique Road Show, too many forums featuring positive thinking gurus or concerts featuring ancient Pat Boone boy groups and their off-rhythm fans whooping it up in the aisles, and a Friday night lineup that almost gives the periodic dead air (or pixels) on sites like Revver a good name.

Indugle me a rant. For someone who loved Bill Moyers, can the sincerity of liberals be as off-putting as the sincerity of the right? Yes! Just watch the sad remains of Now in a post-Bill Moyers era, followed by the  Journal Editorial Panel - a group of stiff necked pontificators like Paul Gigot and Dororthy Rabinowitz basically doing a botoxed vanilla version of "that's what I'm talking about" concerning the dangers of liberals. Actually, it looks like Paul and Dotty are headed out to other pastures (God bless Rupert Murdoch - he's usually a fox but not this time around - as these guys will only bore his slice-bloody-and-dice audience). Now if only David Brancaccio would only do something surprising for impatient clods like me - ex. get a buzz cut, take up smoking cigarettes on-air, or just get angry.

Anyway, between non-ficture features like Nova, Frontline or Independent Lens, and a bunch of superb British dramas, PBS really offers must-see television that's broadly relevant, proudly adult, and (other than our taxes and donations) free. Why shouldn't that content have a place on the web?  Money? If the tech-smart but content-deficient folks at Revver can create a business model, why can't PBS?

Jonathan Field

PS: For another video site, try Devil Ducky. Whether you want smart or saucy, the work is usually compelling. On the other hand, unlike Revver's amateur-auteur flavor, Devil Ducky basically takes the best of the ad and television shorts world and puts it online. It's not the user-generated content promised by the web. And the truth is, Revver has a few promising gems.  Some of it sweet, other wonderfully silly, what struck me was the editor's picks were frequently no worse or better than the audience's top rated choices. Maybe Revver could hire someone from their audience to curate content.  Or someone, yikes, from public television!

Money and Meaning

If you can, catch PBS's recently broadcast July '64. It's a terrific documentary that starts with the reading of Langston Hugh's poem, "A Dream Deferred," a pungent portrait of the connection between value and identity, and the violence that can erupt when such ties are ignored. A film about the 1964 Rochester race riots that sparked the first National Guard intervention in a northern city, the documentary's elegant simplicity inspires thought about race, class, cultural assimilation (or its opposite), and even film making or media. But ultimately it had me mulling over the powerful human relationship to money that is less about objective "things" than about what those things provide, namely meaning. 

Composed primarily of basic interviews (head shots) with survivors of the riots, it's only other narrative is periodic sprinkles of archival news footage. And beyond the film's poetic beginnings that frame the post WWII northern migration of rural southern African-Americans as well as some 1960s footage promoting Rochester's economic vibrancy, this is a film whose power is rooted in listening to story tellers who speak with authority. There are genuine visual fireworks just in watching the emotion in the eyes of the folks who lived this tale. Here are the basics of their story.

It's the early 1960s. An economically vibrant Rochester is busy selling itself as a city of stable, clean industries and stable, clean people. Kodak, Bausch & Laumb, Xerox, are a few among the many that make Rochester the Silicon Valley of its day, a center of new-tech thinking and progressive brands. But political pundit Jack Germond, who started off in this city, tells the film makers that along with the success came a pervasive smugness - an overwhelming sense that nothing could go wrong in Rochester because there was absolutely nothing in wrong in Rochester. Everyone's kids were supposed to be pretty and grow old living pretty (remind anyone of Palo Alto and Redmond, or the American tech brands and China?).

As other of the film's narrators recall about 1960s Rochester, life was not so good for everyone. In 1964, there were fewer than 9,000 black people in this bustling upstate New York city, an amount so small that one participant remembers being greeted by an Episcoplian priest her first day in town with "hello, you're new here, aren't you?".  But for all its unemployment, there was little welcome for these African-American newcomers from the vibrant industries that surrounded them. Ultimately, with little money for housing, they found themselves segregated to a few "wards," exploited by market-savvy real estate landlords, who got them into one family homes suddenly divied-up to make room for multiple dwellings.  Again, watching the film's story tellers share their memories, soft and gentle voices belie eyes that generate enormous amounts of emotion: sadness, anger, and confusion.

A man whose father worked as a garbage man, remembers being a teenager repeatedly trying to get a job at Kodak.  Initially stonewalled, he was finally told to go away. Constance Mitchell, a lifelong activist who remembers a warm relationship with the then-police chief, talks about the epithets tossed at her by other policemen when she tried to visit him after he was injured. It should be said, such emotion is across the board, whoever is talking, white or black (including musician Chuck Mangione and his brother, whose father owned a small grocery store in the poorer section of town). If Rochester was thriving, a growing population within it was not taking part. Well, as they say in the claustrophobic backstages of the theater, "murder lurks." One very hot night in July, things exploded.

The logistics were classic. A party doesn't end. Someone gets drunk. Cops show up. Comments are made. Someone reacts a bit too much. And then... bedlam.  In the violence that breaks out, you can see something characteristic of all such explosions. The word that captures it is this: glee. Whether it's the wards of Rochester, the back alleys of the West Bank, or the suburban ghettos of Paris, initially it's always the same. Not so much the clear sadness of poverty. Rather it's the momentary esctasy of a mob who has suddenly found a way to cut psychic chains bestowed by a simultaneously abstract and specific unaccoutable authority - (ex. "whites," "Jews," or "the French").  Energy unbound. Passion liberated. The joy! In the news reel footage of Rochester (which includes whites rioting as well as blacks), except for grim faced cops what we see is the excitement of the rioters.  Such violence, whatever the logic, rationale or pathetic excuses, ultimately is self-destructive. But at that moment, life (judging from a lot of the film footage) is an adrenline rush. Even if the aftermath is the opposite, in this movie showing stunned, sorrowful middle-aged white shopowners, one of them bursting into tears. 

Whenever someone repeats the old maxim "it's all about money and marketing," I cringe because the "it" suggests that by dint of being born we are slaves to such conditions, and it's far from true. Riots are testament to the intrinsic need not for money or object but to belong and be acknowledged. Such violence ultimately defeats itself, because it robs all involved of dignity and worth. And it does so in piercingly long term ways, whether it's among black and white Americans or Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. As the film points out, conditions for African-Americans in Rochester have only gotten worse. Of course, the conditions for whites, working and middle class, have also suffered. Much of the city's problems are due to the changing nature of global business and technology. And perhaps that is one of the areas where the film is especially pertinent. Kodak and Xerox may continue to be strong brands, but not in Rochester. Economies change. So does the culture. Did the riots impact these businesses? Probably a lot less than they impacted the populace, whatever color, who were left when the big companies moved on.

A few of the speakers point out that African-Americans continue to be unseen. That their dreams will constantly be deferred by a system that can't acknowledge them. The larger challenge to me (indeed the global question) is less about confronting racial barriers than those involving class and culture. An illustration. A few hours before watching the film, I talked with Ray Montoya, a friend in Albuquerque whose family has roots in New Mexico dating back to the Spanish land grants and to Geronimo. When a Montoya gets married, they sometimes have to hold the wedding at the Convention Center. Some of Ray's cousins are cops. Some of them are outlaws. Most of them are just hard working New Mexicans.

I met Ray working on a building crew in the 1980s. He taught me how to frame houses. But his real love was classic cars. He drove a '55 Chevy that he had restored to give to his daughter (now a mom, herself). Ray had left school at age 16 to work in New Mexico's uranium mines. After five years he returned to Albuquerque and bought a piece of land on Coors Blvd., off of the old Route 66, and a mile from the garage his dad owned where Ray had grown up.

Ray built himself his own garage, and then he started rebuilding old convertibles, cars he'd find anywhere between the flats of West Texas and the mesas of eastern Arizona's Indian reservations. Ray scouted the land for ancient cars with the same pleasure some of his Apache anscestors hunted. And with equal reverance for that which he hunted and the land on which it lay. Behind Ray's own property lay empty miles of land, acreage on which he had raced horses and hunted as a child. As time went on, builders started developing those lands. The suburban developments raised property taxes.  The state started to try to kick Ray off his land to widen the road outside his house. This part of Albquerque, the so-called South Valley, was traditionally Chicano, while the Anglos took the more California like eastern edge of the foothills. "Jonathan, they're trying to get all us Chicanos out," Ray told me a few years ago.

Last night Ray told me he was finally ready to move on. He'd traded some cars for acreage in a rural area down around the Plains of Saint Augustin. Recently, his dog Raggy (who is half-wolf) had gone after a dog-catcher. When the dog catcher went after Raggy, as Ray remembers, then he "went after the dog catcher, and then the cops came after me, and then my wife went after the cops, and it was looking like we were gonna have a good old party when I forget what happened but we decided to let our foolishness die down and just pay a bunch of damn tickets." I asked him about what he'd do with his car business. "There's things more important than money" he told me. "You can't just live around here and be who you are. Time to move on. A lot less people down there."

As That's Capital explore today's post-Rochester world, specifically our post-Katina America, it will be useful to look at where money and economics plays out racially and culturally as groups confront dangers, opportunities and change.  The memories of those who experienced Rochester's 1964 riots, and Ray Montoya's experience as a Chicano in a modern Southwest city may be years and miles apart. But they both point to the way dignity and meaning are rooted in a tapestry of parts - whether it's decent jobs, refurbished American cars, or just the ability of us, our children, and our dogs to roam free.   

Jonathan Field