Author Archive
Strayhorn Catharsis
Lately I’ve been listening to the music written by Billy Strayhorn. For those who might not know Strayhorn was the principal composer and arranger for Duke Ellington from the 1940’s till his death in the 1960’s. Many of the most famous and enduring songs from Ellington during that era were composed or co-composed by Strayhorn whether attributed to him or not. Songs like “Take the A Train,†“Satin Doll,†“Lush Life,†“Chelsea Bridge,†and many others, capture the jauntiness, sensuousness, wit, and lusciousness of this man who was quite content to sit in Duke’s shadow. More to the point he was an “out†gay black man during an era of segregation when homosexuality was frowned upon during the black community. Of course you still find homophobia, ridicule, taunting and bigotry against gays in the black community, but imagine a time when you could not get out of your black community because of segregation. Strayhorn found a wary niche within the jazz, artistic and specifically Ellington communities.
There is a good biography of Strayhorn (Lush Life by David Hadju) if anyone is interested but I want to talk about one cut from one album by Duke Ellington. The album is “…And his Mother Called Him Bill.†It is the first album Ellington recorded after Strayhorn’s premature death at 52 in 1967. It is a musical tribute album made entirely of Strayhorn songs at a time when most of his band mates were still mourning his death. The selection I want to talk about is “Blood Count.” (Click on link to listen) “Blood Count†is the last song he wrote during his final illness (cancer). Even as he lay ill he expressed himself musically by composing a song based on a medical procedure he was undergoing. In fact you can here the blood flowing through the tubes in the melody. It was not the only “classic†he composed based on his medical experiences. He wrote “U.M.M.G (Upper Manhattan Medical Group)†based on the place where he went to get tests. It is this incorporation of his life, both good and bad, into works that stand the test of time that marks the true artist. It is making your experience into a universal one in which others can find themselves, can feel what you felt, can “relateâ€, that is found in great music, great art, great literature.
The Ellington band was unusual in that it lasted so long and musicians stayed in it so long. Ellington’s genius was in hearing the uniqueness of the “sound” of each band member so that he could write features that put each in the best position to sound as good as possible. Johnny Hodges was for most of the time the band’s alto saxophone soloist. If you have not heard him please do. He had a tone on his horn that was so sensual, singing and expressive that no one else sounds like him. He was great on uptempo swingers like “The Jeep is Jumpin'” but it is on the slow ballads especially those written by Strayhorn that he is superb. All of Strayhorn’s ballads incorporate beauty, world weariness and a longing that takes your breath away. They transport you to a time of late nights, cigarette smoke and perhaps some alcohol. On this album and on this cut all of those things come together. Hodges is the main “voice” stating Strayhorn’s theme with more than his usual balladic grace. His sensuality and Strayhorn’s mesh perfectly so that you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends. His solo changes however as it reaches its climax into, at least to my ear, an angry cry maybe against having Strayhorn taken from them too soon. At once you hear the raw grief behind the polish and professionalism of the Ellington band. No longer is it just the well oiled machine. It is a group of individuals who have gotten together to share their remembrances and loss together. While the cut ends with a return to Strayhorn’s (and Hodges’) sweet sensuality it is now different with that quick glimpse of what is behind it. Its sensuousness, elegance and yearning is taken to a new level. All in all the cut is a both a catharsis and a heartfelt memorial to a great artist.
It is that catharsis we all search for when we must cope with the loss or serious illness of a loved one. If you are like me you have learned to hold it in so that you can get done all that needs to be done in such situations. It always finds it way out however whether it is days, weeks, months or years later. We need to let it out and then move on as the Ellington Orchestra does here.
I was thinking the other day about how many jazz artists I had seen “live” and it is quite a few. I saw my first in 1967 (unfortunately after Coltrane had passed) and have seen many of the legends of the genre. Living in New York was a great advantage; after I turned eighteen I could go to the clubs and the Newport Jazz Festival was even held there for a few years. But I digress…It is the some anniversary of some milestone in Miles Davis’s career and I was thinking back to the one time I saw him perform live. It was in the spring of 1971 at my undergraduate college and he was scheduled to perform on Saturday evening but his equipment (much electronica) had not arrived from his last gig. I happened to be near the entrance when he came in with Ken McIntyre our local jazz artist and professor. Upon surveying the crowd of hundreds who had come to see him, he said in that gravelly voice of his he would stay the night and perform on the next day (Sunday) “after church.” True to his word Sunday afternoon he and his quintet performed a concert that is etched in my memory. I remember being proud that aside from his bass player (Dave Henderson) and Miles, the other members of the group, Keith Jarrett (keyboards), Gary Bartz (sax) and Jack Dejohnette (drums) had all performed at the college during my four years there. I recalled Jarrett and Dejohnette had performed as members of the Charles Lloyd group. Dejohnette had become part of memory when during a drum solo he reached down into a gym bag to grab a towel to wipe the sweat that was rolling down his face. He then picked up the gym bag and played it as a percussion instrument hitting the floor with it as part of his drum solo while his other hand and foot were striking other parts of his drum kit. He concluded his solo by raising up the gym bag and letting it hit the floor so that its final thump punctuated the end of his solo. The crowd went wild…but I digress.
Miles’ group was superb that evening and in many ways the culmination of my undergraduate experience. If you want to hear what they sounded like check out his Live at the Cellar Door albums which were recorded with the same group at about the same time. I had of course heard Miles on record for years, but what struck me upon seeing him play was the physicality of it. He wore an armless shirt so the muscles in his arms were visible and he had the “guns” of the middleweight boxer he wanted to be. More than that he bent backwards to play and it seemed like all of his strength, his essence, his self was being poured into the horn to emerge as the purest sound I had ever hear a trumpet produce. Now way back in my history I had played the trumpet in the junior high school band and at no time had I heard a trumpet sound like that. It was not just that he was blowing hard, it was that all of his being was focused through the horn, not on being loud but on being pure. He had stripped away any wasted effort, any knowledge of the world outside his group or his immediate vicinity, any past or future. The music was all that existed for him in that moment.
More than the memories of a glorious afternoon concert with the sun streaming in all around, it is that laser focus that I took away from that performance. That one should put your all, your body and your soul into a task, was the lesson I learned that day and have tried to emulate ever since. I learned that it was the quality of what was produced not its “loudness” that counted. Over the last forty years that intensity was sometimes obscured by the laid back persona when one doesn’t sweat the small stuff to concentrate on the important stuff.  That was the first lesson learned from Miles but not the last. But I digress…
The book I read the most during my undergraduate career decades ago was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In it Kuhn analyzed the difficulties of changing from one set of scientific (read ideological) accepted truisms to another. Scientists might howl at calling their systems of thought “ideologies” (a word they associate with religion or other “false” systems of thought from which they want to differentiate themselves) but if it quacks like a duck treat it like a duck. Kuhn believed that each scientific ideology whether that of Ptolemy that the sun revolved around the earth or Newtonian physics could resist failures because of built in “fail safes.” These fail safes explain away (or not) the inabilities of the ideological system to account for certain phenomena. It might be something as simple as “God’s will” which was used to explain anomalies that don’t fit the system. He hypothesized that it was only when these anomalies built up so that too much remained unexplainable, that a new “system” of explanation was considered and eventually adopted. Thus the Copernican revolution (the earth revolving around the sun) succeeded the Ptolemic or quantum physics followed Newtonian physics.
Kuhn’s book has been justly criticized over the years and I want to point out it does not consider the social context of ideological change enough either on the micro or macro levels. How does an individual undergo ideological change? How does an entire society change ideologies? I was reminded of these things while watching the new movie Moneyball about Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane. The movie and the book it is adapted from consider the latter of these two questions. How does baseball “society” consider a new ideology based on sabermetric statistical analysis which flies in the face of accepted baseball “faith.” The baseball traditionalists who have their jobs, self-worth and view of the world conditioned by the old ideology are immediately threatened by any challenge to their system. Of course Beane is ridiculed and disparaged at first but as anyone who has read the book or followed baseball knows, eventually many of the principles he implemented are adopted by others once he demonstrates that they can be successful. That is the arc of the movie. For me the interesting thing is that the ideological change is driven not by the repeated failures of the old system as Kuhn would predict. Indeed the old system fails only as often as it always has but still succeeds enough to be firmly in place. This is not uncommon among ideologies; we still have Newtonian physics don’t we? The reason for Beane’s conversion and for the system’s acceptance is not system failure but fiscal constraints. The “small market” teams cannot compete for the most “valued” players (they seem to always windup on the Yankees or lately the Boston Red Sox) so they are willing to at least try a new baseball “ideology.” The fact that Beane shows that a team can be competitive with this new strategy is quickly adopted by other team owners who see a chance to become profitable as well. The key ingredient for its widespread acceptance is that you can get lower paid employees and still be competitive.
As a parable of ideological change I cannot help comparing this to the current conservative political ideology. Since the “Reagan revolution” fiscal conservatism has been the dominant political ideology among both Democrats and Republicans albeit with differences between them. The liberal “traditionalists” have gone the way of the dinosaur as the recent passing of Charles Percy reminds us. Both Democrats and Republicans have vacillated on how deeply conservative and libertarian to be. Republican spending on items dear to their hearts coupled with an ideology of tax relief has driven the budget into the deficit they say they abhor. Deregulation for business is offset by the extreme government snooping embodied in the Patriot Act that makes any true conservative turn white with fear, red with anger or blue with frustration. The Tea Party wants to implement an even more stringently conservative ideology which calls for minimal government intrusion in the nation. My point is that none of these ideological revolutions from Reagan to the Tea Party are based on the failure of the old system. Furthermore there is no evidence that the new systems produce jobs, economic prosperity for the middle class, a better educational system, adequate health care for the masses or any other benefit for the majority of Americans. The best they produce is lower paid employees without health care as in Rick Perry’s Texas. As in Moneyball the only constant is more profitability for the “team owners,” those rich folks at the top of the system. Politics is different than baseball and that to succeed a plurality of voters must be convinced of your ideology rather than one Billy Beane. Over the last few years this has led to a Republican effort to restrict voting, a politics of fear, the injection of irrelevant so-called social issues into campaigns, and to a politics based on emotions rather than issues. As time has shown us this will benefit the team owners more than anyone else. Just look at the economic numbers about income gain and wealth distribution.
Billy Beane’s teams have never won a championship and the tax cut ideology will never produce the kind of society we say we want in this country.
One of the great problems in online education is the low completion rates for classes and subsequently programs. To be sure this is certainly partially the result of overeager recruiters and administrators who are in it for the buck or the developers and teachers of online classes who have not made them interesting enough to hold users’ attention in both the short and long terms. We should certainly take steps to police the recruiters and administrators as well as develop best practices for online courses to make them better. The third leg of the stool however is the student him or her self. The high dropout rate is not the result of some moral failing from the student, but rather the failure of motivation and time devoted to online education. Sometimes this is the most rational choice given the other demands on a students time. The reward, for example the increased job options versus expenditure calculation, both in time and money, does not persuade students to continue or even possibly to start. The difficulty or ease of the course may not match the commitment of the student.
The question arises how much pressure should there be on the educators to lower the barriers to students and how much should it be the students who have to raise themselves above the barriers? When I was in the classroom I recognized but always resented the fact that being an entertainer and keeping the material interesting to students was one of my jobs as a teacher. Sometmes some students didn’t realize the importance of the information quite apart from the method of presenting it. To make them realize was of course part of my job. In any teaching you have to show students that it will be worth their while to put in the effort to learn something. Many times however while it was apparent to me that this stuff was important students might find it less so. With online learning we still have this responsibility but need to be more explicit about it and also present material in a way that keeps the student’s attention despite a greater number of distractions than even the classroom allows. Educators have a responsibility to make their material as attention grabbing, interesting, clear and pointed towards the end goals as possible.
Students for their part need to act too:
Allow enough time to complete online classes. I have a friend who says that the real time to complete something is what you have allowed times pi (3.14). That is to say that things usually take much longer than one plans and online education is no exception. Online students usually have many other things going on in their lives and if they are not careful online education will be one of the things squeezed out.
Online education takes away some of your time doing other things. When we first entered childbirth class many, many, many years ago, they had us do an exercise. We wrote down all the things we spent time doing in a day before the birth of the baby. After we had completed the list they asked us to consider which of those things we could do less of in order to care for the baby. I would suggest you do the same before choosing to pursue online education. You never find time to get things done; you make time. What things will you have to give up or cut back on to pursue online education?
Meet deadlines. Most things in life have deadlines, some hard and fast, some soft. In a course however once you fall behind it becomes increasingly difficult to do. Meeting deadlines is one of the best and most useful skills one learns in school. If in the world outside school you become someone who can be depended upon to meet deadlines you will go far.
Always try your best. There will be many times when you feel you can’t do something, spare the time for something, are tempted by shortcuts or are just too tired. You need to fight through those times to do the best you can do within the time you have to do it.
Keep your eye on the prize. At times the minutia of a course may seem a long way from the prize you are seeking. Just like the “wax on, wax off” scene in the original Karate Kid, tasks that seem to have no connection to the final goal may indeed be training you in ways that are not apparent. Persevere through the times that seem the most distant from your ultimate goals and you may find that those goals are closer than you think.
Lately I have been working researching Walter White. White was brought into the national office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people in 1918 as an assistant for James Weldon Johnson. He served the NAACP for the rest of his life first as Johnson’s assistant and then as acting executive secretary of the the Association and actual secretary from 1929 till his death in 1955. Over the period of his service he helped shape the NAACP and the national civil rights agenda more than anybody else in the country. Hardly a saint he bullied people, sometimes acted ruthlessly, and had an off and on affair throughout most of his marriage. He was thoroughly narcissistic yet utterly devoted to the advancement of African Americans. As W.E.B. Du Bois once wrote,
“He was absolutely self-centered and egotistical to the point that he was almost unconscious of it. He seemed really to believe that his personal interests and the interests of his race and organization were identical.”
Yet, because of what some would see as a character flaw, not in spite of it, he was in many ways an admirable man. He was an untiring worker putting in many hours, traveling many miles, speaking and writing in many forums to see that his cause and the cause of his people was brought to politicians and the general populace. His narcissism led to his intensity and probably the limited though amazing success he had against overwhelming odds. His overwork probably led to the heart trouble which felled him in 1955 and caused the breakup of his marriage. All of this is further complicated by the fact that Walter White looked white. With his dirty blond hair and blue eyes he could have passed for Caucasian and avoided all the caste infirmities of being black in the America of the first half of the twentieth century. Despite this he steadfastly continued to wear his blackness as a badge of honor even when others considered him white.
To their credit his biographers Kenneth Janken and Thomas Dyja have not tried to conceal his weaknesses. They have examined him in his totality and complexity.  To be sure there is a long history of the imperfect hero. The ancient Greek heroes had a tragic flaw, that is, a weakness that also made one great. Oedipus’s search for the truth is what made him discover that he had killed his father, married his mother and thus reach his tragic fate. The hard boiled detective heroes of Dashiell Hammet and the like maintained their integrity in a world of questionable ethics and immorality. The modern anti-hero, the ambiguous and “accidental” hero are staples of contemporary text, stage and screen.
However in today’s atmosphere of “gotcha” journalism and media glare there is also a practice of putting heroes on pedestals then gleefully watching them fall as they demonstrate human frailties. Once brought low there also seems to be some limited rehabilitation if they come clean, admit their transgressions and seek forgiveness from us. Marion Barry was re-elected mayor of Washington D.C. when his transgressions were caught on tape. Those who are unrepentant about their fall from grace are confined to the purgatory of fallen heroes or forgotten. Think O.J. Simpson here. Rarely the heroic actions are so great and the transgressions so small like with Martin Luther King’s infidelities that they do not tarnish the hero at all but also time lends some historic perspective and so William Jefferson Clinton remains a hero to some..
The question I face is how much of his weakness and how much of his strength to show in my online project about Walter White. My historian’s knee jerk reaction is to present him warts and all so that the chips will fall where they may. This is especially true for Mr. White whose weakness “narcissism” is the source of his greatest strength “tenacity.” If he were a Greek hero it would be his tragic flaw. However the audience for this online project is a large and general one. Would high school or younger youth be better served by emphasizing his strengths and achievements or how his flaws made him a control freak micro-manager, difficult to work with if you differed with him, and ended his marriage? His narcissism wedded him to the Progressive era tactics he had grown up with and prevented him from making the Association more democratic and concerned with economic issues as Du Bois said in the 1930’s and later others would counsel. As Janken points out the slow legalistic tactics of the NAACP under him left the Association ill prepared for the the mass action civil rights movement that was to come after his death.
At the end I guess I come around to the position that his weakness was his strength and the shortcomings of his tenure were what they were. This is probably true of all of us (including me of course) and it may be the most important lesson any biography can teach. I’m going to present it all.
When academics especially humanists think of using the web we use as our model the printed page. We have online “journals” and are looking for ways to produce online “books”. This is of course natural in that these are things most familiar and that have made up most of our lives. We have learned how to analyze, produce and teach with these printed materials and are loathe to relinquish these things in which we have invested so much. Much of the the current stage of digitization has been about being able to reproduce printed materials for easier dissemination. Yes non-printed materials like photographs and to a lesser extent audio, video and film have also been reproduced but they are just the tail on printed materials digital dog. This digitization has allowed archives and libraries to reach a much wider audience and have made research so much easier that it would be foolish to bemoan this occurrence. However other attempts at the digital humanities from “Anthologize” to “Sophie” have also been attempts to reproduce print forms and analogues with varying degrees of success.
While I wish all of these projects success (after all when it comes to the digital humanities let a thousand flowers grow) I wonder if the “book” as model is too limiting and we should build new models around what the web does best. One such could be the network. As David Theo Goldberg point out at a workshop recently if one looks at the “Acknowledgments” for any book one can see that a book itself is a network that has involved many people including helpful librarians and archivists, colleagues who have suggested ideas, and others who have helped produce the book or simply tolerated the author while the book was being produced. The book itself links materials found in various archives and ideas drawn from scholars or books the author has encountered most of which are listed in the footnotes and bibliographies. In the best books these links have been subjected to the author’s own analysis and then frozen in time in the book format. This analysis has generally gestated over several years as the materials were collected and then sat in the book publishing process for from six months to several years. Some have benefited from this process and aged like fine wine; others have stagnated and seem stale when released. In the resulting publishing process most often the books concerning current events are those hurriedly pushed to press and those meticulously researched and analyzed do not concern current events. This also can be a blessing as well as a curse. Many books produced in the flush of current events can be timely and accurate while those produced later can be more reflective, considered and take into account consequences and manifestations of current events that do not occur immediately. Although the publishing industry is struggling to adapt to the digital domain the book is not dead and will inevitable be a part of the landscape for many years to come.
I would like to suggest another model however: the networked web site which links many of the same sources that a book would use, provides analysis, produces an immediacy that books necessarily lack and can change in an agile fashion to create a “non-frozen” end product that can be brought up to date as circumstances warrant. Let me take each of these things in turn. I am a historian by trade and the process of visiting archives never fails to give me the thrill of holding the same (or a copy of a) letter that an important historical personage held or the personal insight into a person or event. The digitization of materials only gives an attenuated version of this thrill if one at all but that digitization has made those materials available to a much wider audience. In fact this digitization has made so many materials available that it threatens to drown us. A scholar provides a selection of and a guide through such materials whether in the printed form of a book or in this new form of a website. This collection of material can itself be actual or virtual with the scholar either creating an archive of actual materials, notes on materials, or links and footnotes to such materials.
The web site as well as the book privileges the author’s analysis even as it may disguise its nature as one person’s opinion beneath the “authority” which the form conveys. The difference of course is that the publishing process usually provides a “vetting” of the writer’s analysis while the Web does not necessary have that restriction. In this “vetting” process at the very least the author’s production, collection and selection of data, his or her logical inferences and the form of assertion should be examined. The author should be able to answer the questions, “Why do you think this is true?” and “Why should we believe you?” The written piece should respond “These pieces of evidence lead me to believe that such and such is probably true and you should believe too.” This is no less true for the website. The difference is that instead of having a panel of “professionals” do the vetting, it in effect “crowd sources” the vetting. The crowd should not accept whatever is presented uncritically, a lesson too often demonstrated by its omission. The user of the web site must examine the author’s analysis, use of logic, assumptions and implications. Through analysis the scholar points out which materials are relevant and which are only marginally so. Data give analysis its support but analysis gives data its importance as well. The author’s use or misuse of logic, underlying assumptions and the implications drawn from the analysis must also be carefully scrutinized. Of course one should do this with books or articles as well, but too often reliance on the vetting system is the normal approach particularly for those who feel they know little about the subject. The web site lacking this system calls for user to do it themselves.
A web site with rich media can do things that a book or article can’t. Ever since Woodrow Wilson called Birth of a Nation “history written with lightning,†people have recognized the impact that multimedia can have on the presentation of “history.†In a world where we are constantly bombarded with images from movies and TV, where Youtube has become a part of everyday life, where the increasing digitization of text, video and audio has occurred, and where the Internet has become the fastest and widest disseminator of information; the gaining of knowledge through reading alone is not the preferred or most effective option. The abundance of historical media that begins with the 19th century development of photography and the 20th century developments of the motion picture, radio and television has created abundant resources. At the same time the formation of the web, social media and generations X, Y and beyond, have prepared an audience for multimedia history. Multimedia history creates an experience that is more real than reality; more in line with the way reality is perceived; and more easily absorbed than written history. Rather than spending pages of text describing something with rich media we can show or demonstrate it. By networking things in a specific database or by linking them to virtual databases we can draw a variety of sources into our analysis. We can use text, photographs, audio, video, feature films, graphic art, documentaries and such to name a few.
The web site is extremely flexible. The collection of media can be changed or augmented as new things become available, analyses are changed, or things become obsolete. Unlike books it is not frozen in time as long as maintenance is periodically done. Like books users can proceed at their own pace, go into depth on some parts which are of interest, skim or omit those which aren’t, and go back for repeated viewings. Unlike books users can also drill down through links that take one away from the web site to follow interests that they may develop through the web site and still return. The web site is therefore not only a product in itself but also a gateway to other places and media. It is the equivalent of reading a book in a well stocked library where many of the books, articles or media are right at hand.
Finally the web site should allow for the democratization of knowledge. Not only will it be disseminated and widely available but it will allow for other analyses as well. The author of course controls his analysis which is embedded in the site in both obvious and subtle ways. Many users will go to the site just for such guided analysis and to bring the work of the professional historian into the public domain is a worthy goal. Other analyses using the same or different media are of course also possible. By allowing for other analyses, filtered along qualitative and not ideological grounds, the web site can grow as users add new media or analyses to it. It becomes a living thing that occasions revisits to note changes and new parts.
Recently while reading Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg’s article “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age” I read a sharp criticism about the viability of digital enhancements to teaching. Davidson and Goldberg’s future book extols the virtues of a digital future which allows students to be educated in a way that spurs their independence, curiosity, and connection with the world. I will discuss their argument in a future post. Right now I want to address one of the criticisms of their view on Amazon.com by Kevin Nenstiehl (here).
Though some students love learning enough to be self-motivated, they are not the majority. Many, if not most, regard classes, even within their majors, as a nuisance. I would love it if my students had enough ambition to undertake the kind of team tasks Davidson and Goldberg describe, but anybody who has taught more than one or two semesters knows that if you get three students per class who don’t need to be prodded, you are one lucky cuss.
In other words most college students would not be interested in the new educational opportunities offered by those who evangelize for the use of digital educational enhancements. While my experiences hardly constitute a scientific sample they are instructive. I taught for thirty years at one of the most highly selective liberal arts colleges in the country. In that environment the number of self-motivated students who took advantages of opportunities to pursue independent interests, learn collaboratively, and use different learning methods, was quite high. Colleagues who came to my school from other colleges remarked about how much better our students were than those at their former institutions. Colleagues at other institutions often complained about students at their schools in much the way Prof. Nenstiehl does. My son has attended two private universities and his complaints about his peers also find them to lack the self motivation, interest in learning for learning’s sake, and preparation to take advantage of any digital enhancements to courses.
Does this mean that the people who will take take advantage of the utopian virtues of digital learning that Davidson, Goldberg and many others have extolled will only be the students at the elite, highly selective institutions? Are we seeing a class division of those who will get and use digital enhancements in their education or at least a division between the digital haves and have-nots? To answer this we need to understand the causes of student disinterest in what the digital progressives have in mind. There is unquestionably a crisis in American schools in which we are not producing as many as we of the students who could take advantage of the digital age in education. This crisis is much more complex than the proponents of No Child Left Behind have acknowledged and their educational reforms don’t address it at all. Standardized testing, calls for teacher accountability for student failure and restricting school funding are fixes that don’t get at the problems and won’t fix education. Wide income disparities, unequal educational funding, teacher unions and the misallocation of our best teachers are just some of the issues not addressed. There are students who rationally choose to look at college education only for how it will affect their material well being. There is also an anti-intellectualism in America (as Richard Hofstadter explained long ago) that mitigates against the students who Davidson and Goldberg believe will take advantage of their proposed changes in education. The “digital natives and Gen-Y’ers” not withstanding, the issue is not only who is prepared for the digital age in education but who is interested in having it.
In short the digital education reforms that Davidson and Goldberg want to see at the tertiary level will only happen if we find a way to prepare more students for them at the K-12 levels. How can we do that and how likely are we to see it happen? First of all the cost for doing it has to come down and it has to be distributed at more schools. As with any technical innovation it has to be accompanied by training in not only how to use new equipment but in how that equipment can be used to enhance a teacher in the classroom. Some of that educational exploration is already happening among teachers who are both forward looking, concerned about their students and willing to give of their time to develop techniques or communicate them to others. These teachers have to be enlisted and listened to and part of any change in the schools. The reward structure has to be revamped so that rewards are given for more than student success on standardized tests. Release time has to be financed so that they have the opportunity to develop new methods.
How likely is this to happen? Given the current debate about education not very likely. The shrill volume, hysteria, political in-fighting and personal stakes involved hamper rational discussion of the real issues and the grabbing at what appear to be solutions when they are not. But as the Africans say “No condition is forever.” One day if we continue to say it, if we continue to develop new ideas, if we continue to work at it, someday we may be heard.
Facebook is good for some surprising things. Lately I have reconnected with friends I have not seen since junior high and I joined a group called “You’re probably from Jamaica, Queens if…”. I haven’t been back to Jamaica in 6 years nor back to my old neighborhood for 17 years. I haven’t lived there for almost 40. It is interesting therefore to hear the remembrances of those who have grown up there in the many years I’ve been away. There are some things we remember in common e.g. theaters that have been turned into churches and blue light parties in the basement, and some things that I don’t, the rise of hip hop for example. That was to be expected but there was something else I didn’t anticipate. The layers of successive age strata’s memories also provide a history of the neighborhood that will never be written or even understood because no one will ever put it together and no one would publish it if it were. These memories are micro oral histories collected on a random basis not a scientific one. I suppose one could go to the records to back up some of information and look at long range trends in race, employment and income, but it would be a much drier history than these recollections and stories. The story of going to Mr. X’s corner grocery or repair shop, the creepy man down the block, or restaurants, diners and dives long since gone, provide an entertainment, colored by nostalgia it’s true, but which no book history could hope to equal. A book would chronicle the transformation during my lifetime of a once mixed race neighborhood into one of the most segregated African American areas in the country and I am sure provide a model of that transformation which undoubtedly occurred in other parts of the country. For those who grew up there it was simply home. It was a place in which we kids snatched enjoyment from life and either failed to notice or took as given the low incomes, the growing violence, the scuffling to make it.
It is hardly unique, in fact it is an old story. Immigrant groups cluster together in an area using networks to find support and others like them. Whether it was Italian, Jewish or Irish groups whose remnants were still there when I first moved into the neighborhood in 1959 or the black migrants from the south and Caribbean who came while I was growing up there and after I left, Jamaica has seen them all. The difference has been that once these were just stops which individuals or successive generations made on a path to something more. While a host of people have moved on nowadays many have not and probably never will. The successive mini-memoirs in “You’re probably from Jamaica, Queens…” show a deteriorating neighborhood behind the smiles and stories. Not only have the movies moved away to the suburbs, until recently the big box stores, supermarkets, and chain stores had too. The neighborhood adapted and smaller mom and pop stores proliferated, people in the neighborhood followed the stores across the county line into nearby places like Valley Stream, and in fact the entire black southeastern Queens neighborhood is creeping there as well. The neighborhood has always been the home for much of the lower to upper black middle class. They are mostly hard working people, many who have several jobs, just trying to raise their families and capture a part of the American dream. The dip in the economy has hit the neighborhood but most are holding on even if only by their fingertips.
As Gladys Knight has said on one album, “As bad as we think they are these will be the good old days for our children.” Facebook has many “You’re probably from X if you…” pages. It is a good way to connect with memories and a format that probably will not be preserved beyond those pages. I urge you to start one if there isn’t one for your area and join one if there is. It is producing a kind of oral history that contains the voices of those previously unheard. It’s also a lot of fun.
I recall taking my son to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie when he was just a kid. After the movie he asked me what I thought of it and I had just started started into a long discourse on the racial stereotypes, sexual politics and racial implications, when he interrupted me and said, “Dad, it was just a movie.” Nowadays after making a couple of documentaries, studying film criticism at two major film studies programs and having written college papers about films, television and even social media, he has of course changed his tune. We can have long conversations about how each member of an audience brings to the film life experiences, knowledge of other films and cultural baggage that make film viewing a different experience for each viewer. I am reminded of this because I just saw the latest Planet of the Apes movie. As “just a movie” it is pretty good. It uses its computer graphic effects to build character and contribute to the story rather than just to blow things up. The first half hour is so tightly written and directed that it just flies by even though it has to do a lot of exposition. Once it hits its stride the film does slow down to let the script, tropes, stock characters and metaphors do their job to carry the story along. It has some great visuals (the leaves falling to indicate the passage of the apes through trees rivals Speilberg’s vibrating glass of water in Jurassic Park) even though apes crashing out of windows is done once or twice too many times. It slyly mixes in references to the original movie not only so that film buffs and nerds feel included, but also to provide continuity as this prequel and its inevitable sequels lead to the original movie. Finally Andy Serkis’s motion capture acting is exquisite and the moments without dialogue rival the best silent acting. The special effects here are amazing and make you forget they are there.
It seems not in my nature, however, to let the film be “just a movie” and I would argue it is in no one else’s nature either. I inevitably bring my own life experiences, film knowledge and cultural baggage to the film. The images of the apes stolen from Africa, the ape raised by paternalistic whites, incarceration, brutality by and against them, ape on ape violence, even spear throwing, make me reflect on centuries of images of Africa, Africans and African Americans that were for thirty years part of my stock and trade. The movie itself tries to avoid any accusation of racism by having a multiracial cast. Its main villain, a stock greedy corporate executive, is played by an African American, whites play all the other villains and a beautiful Latina plays the underwritten lead female role. The history of African Americans is however the elephant in the room. In both films we are led to identify with the underdogs (under-apes?) and it is the greed, brutality and shortsightedness of the human race (particularly the Western society branch) that is the real villain. Unlike the first film in which Charleton Heston was the protagonist, an ape is the protagonist here. This skews the film so that it is the revolutionary apes with whom we sympathize even though we could just as well call them terrorists. Can this be a metaphor for potential revolution but perpetrated by the crass Hollywood machine to turn even potential opposition into money (see music, hip hop)? Is it just a fantasy for animal rights activists, sixties black radicals, or class revolution proponents warning us of a possible reaction to our society’s callousness, greed and brutality? I choose to believe it is more than either. The lesson for the apes in the movie is that they have to be smarter, realize their common interests, work together and sacrifice to get anything done. Hmm…I wonder if that is not a metaphoric lesson intended for all of us that I can live with.
Neal Gabler, with whom I seldom agree, has written a recent article in the NYT Magazine bemoaning the lack of “big ideas” in American society. One passage in particular struck me:
It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief.
He goes on to argue that it is the flood of information from the internet and social media that has squeezed out the the analytical modes of rationality, science, evidence, logical argument etc. to open the floodgates to superstition, faith, orthodoxy and opinion. Continue Reading