Cultural Appropriation

 It's bad if an acting role which is specific to an ethnicity, culture, or gender identity is filled by a straight white person?  But it's good if the musical 1776 or Hamilton is performed by a diverse group of actors?

In the ideal world we shouldn't bar anyone from auditioning for a performance of any role in a standard* play or film.  And we should allow a director to intentionally cast against type if she wants a nonstandard* play or film.

But our world isn't ideal, so how do we deal with that?  We know the available roles aren't representative of the world: too many sexy blondes under 30; too few women over 80, etc. We also know roles vary greatly in the degree to which they're specific to a particularl identity.  So I think the reality is we work towards the ideal, knowing we'll never get there.  You tilt the playing field a bit, or like a guerilla, advance here and withdraw there, testing the limits of what's possible, which means what people will support with money and time.  

* "standard" means a play or film whose casting would be described by a critic without attention to the identity characteristics of the actor.  So a director who wants to try a Shakespearean play with all male actors (as it would have been in his time) is doing a nonstandard version.

Suoer Bowl Ads

Watched the first half of the Super Bowl last night.  Turned it off when Mahomes was injured, knowing the Chiefs were done for.  Besides, I tuned out of all the ads because mostly they included people I didn't recognize.  I realize I'm almost totally disconnected from popular entertainment and celebrity culture. 

When Did Ass Become (Semi-)Proper?

 An article in the Harvard Magazine described the Harvard Law experience of a woman who preceded RBG (Orin Kerr linked to it in a tweet).  The author describes a class where women were grilled over past legal cases with language which would be embarassing.  Hers was a case involving a farmer's ass (donkey) who got out onto the road.  This happened in 1956, a year I remember well enough to know that "ass" was never mentioned in polite society; neither was "butt" for that matter, except in the context of cigarettes.  

I've been struck by changes in language usage over the years--"ass" being one.  These days it seems pretty common in the print media, much more so in entertainment.  So I decided to do an ngram search. In America its frequency of usage seems to take off in the mid '90's, reaching a peak in 2014 and declining slightly since.  (The British usage pattern differs.)

I Remember the Lord's Prayer

 Sometime in the early 1950's our morning routine in my school changed.  IIRC at just before 8 am the principal would come the loudspeaker system (in each classroom) with any announcements.  Then we'd all stand with hands across our hearts and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.  (A pledge changed to add the words "under God" during those years.)

The change was adding the Lord's Prayer to the routine. At various times my mother and sister both taught Sunday School.  My paternal great grandparents and my grandfather were all ministers. Early on I was very into Sunday School and the singing in our local Methodist church (no nearby Presbyterian churches). But by the mid-50's I turned against religion, considering myself to be an agnostic.  (Now I claim to be an atheist.) So at sometime I stopped saying the Lord's Prayer.  It was a bit uncomfortable.  I don't remember whether anyone conforted me; if they did the fact my father was school board chair was protection (though I never told dad of my stand).

Why Do We Need?

 

As a UK man living in a mostly gun-less society answer me this America. Why do civilians need guns like this? pic.twitter.com/O2tB65pTB3

— Paul Samuel (@PaulSteveSamuel) January 16, 2021

That tweet, and the associated thread, got me to asking this question:  Why do Americans need guns, and pickup trucks, and McMansions, and lawns, and...?

Mostly IMHO it's a matter of signaling to ourselves and to others our status and self-image.  

The Wearing of Hats

One of the things which fascinate me is the wearing of hats in the US.

If you look at pictures showing massed men in the 1920's/30's, as in unemployment lines or baseball stadiums, you see all the men wearing hats.  There also seems to be a lot of uniformity in dress, like business suits, but the hats are the easiest to see.

Recently I noticed a picture of Abraham Lincoln addressing a crowd, I think the 2nd Inaugural, and noticed his audience was also wearing hats.  The picture wasn't as clear as more modern ones, but it looks as if there's a bit less uniformity in the types of hats being worn.  In another photograph his audience in front is hat wearing, the big shots behind him are hat carrying, mostly top hats.

When you google "when did American men stop wearing hats" the first result is an Esquire article saying hat wearing started to decline in the later 1920's.  Why--perhaps because more people were in cars so they were less needed and some were more awkward to wear.

This NPR page has good comparison pictures and blames Ike but also cars.

Neither of the pieces comment on the change which seems apparent to me--fewer hats correlates with greater variety in menswear.

Then and Now--II

Some additional thoughts on the differences in America between the 1950's and now as I experienced them:

Culture

• in the 1950's we still had the remains of an older cultural world, a world of "high art" and distinct social divisions.  There were serious novels and books on the best seller list: works by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Nabokov, and Pasternak.  The Book of the Month Club was riding high.  Leonard Bernstein was on TV.  A boy in rural New York got a definite sense of a defined hierarchy, ruled over by the NYTimes, the New Yorker, and the Saturday Review of Literature as gatekeepers and New York City as the center of the universe.
• in the 1950's "mass culture" was a rising concern--the TV "vast wasteland"  was a concern before Newton Minow so labeled it in 1961.  Comic books were becoming popular among the boomer youth, but were viewed as a threat to the culture and a cause of juvenile delinquency by Dr. Wertham, resulting in establishing the Comics Code Authority, to self-regulate the content. (This might have been modeled on the Motion Picture Production Code  and the effort by the Catholic Church to censor movies. People saw the popularity of books like Peyton Place was seen as a threat to standards.
• in the 1950's you had classical music, jazz which was starting to get some serious attention, and popular music--Sinatra, Crosby, et.al.  Rock was just appearing, but it was a threat to the morals of the youth. Folk and country were niches.

Culture Today

• today I don't see the structure we had in my youth, in books, in music or generally. The best seller list more rarely seems to contain "serious novels",  There are several more niches, niches which have more attention to them from serious critics. 
• it seems to me that's a generalization: today there's lots more variety, more niches in all aspects of culture and much less of a pecking order in evidence.

Majority Minority World in Future?

This article got me thinking about our future in the US as a majority minority country.  That's inevitable regardless of any government policy.

But then I thought--just looking at the US is limited--the world is already majority minority, and it has been for millennia, likely since humans left Aftrica.

I'm comfortable saying humanity is in the process of reuniting. What will the reunited world look like and act like.  Looks is relatively easy--the majority will be African-Asian.  Acts is hard, but I'd argue that based on the imprints left on former colonies, the European influence on culture and society will remain disproportionate to their descendants representation in the population.

Changing Standards: Tight Versus Loose

I think I've mentioned this book before.  It ties into my post of yesterday.  My memory is the writer believes there can be systematic differences in how tightly or loosely societies adhere to social norms.  To apply it to our history:

• my memory is in the 40's-60's white middle and upper class Americans adhered quite tightly to a certain set of social norms, and as a counterpoint, we looked askance at those who didn't fit that description, either not being white middle class or not adhering to the norms.
• over the next years that changed, partly the norms changed, partly the tolerance for non-conformity broadened.
• more recently we've become more concerned about non-adherence to the norms, less tolerant of the less tolerant among the white middle and upper classes, still tolerant of those excluded from that universe. 

Changing Standards

Over my life standards of behavior have changed, a lot.

In my youth both cancer and homosexuality were not fit topics for discussion, cancer being just a bit more acceptable because more prevalent.  One addressed one's elders with Mr. and Mrs..' There were standards of propriety, at least for the white middle and upper classes.  Teenagers were viewed with alarm, as they/we got into Elvis and rock and roll and discovered the privacy of cars.  Everyone, at least every boy, wanted a car.  For any couple in a car the man was driving. College students still faced a hierarchy of classes and at least informal rules on dress.  Campus life still involved panty raids.  Serious students were concerned about nuclear war, though as the 60's started  some got into civil rights movement. And the remnants of "loco parentis"

The boomers started establishing new norms.  The Berkeley Free Speech movement seems in retrospect a turning point.  Notably the movement was still the Silent generation; the very first boomers were just starting college. The Cuban missile crisis was another, and the third was Mississippi Summer. In my memory the 60's meant the undermining and dissolution of old standards of conduct, of hierarchy, of dress, of how people could express their views and obtain some power.

Fast forward to the present.  It seems most of the changes have stuck, have been deemed valid and useful in our society.  What does seem different to me is what the conservatives call "political correctness". I could trace the idea back to the student left, perhaps imitating their parents, who had fierce debates over what ideological stances were proper.  But that was a minority view; more common was live and let live, chill, mellow.  Now however,, many, perhaps most, people believe there is something that's proper, and people should embrace it.

The Proliferation of Popular Culture References

My wife and I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime and watch regularly.  Maybe I'm just feeling out of it these days, but it seems to me there are more and more popular culture references in what we're watching, more and more of which I don't get.

Sometimes it's musical, which since I've not kept up with popular music since the Beatles it's understandable I'll miss them.  Often it's what critics like to call "homages" or "call-outs" to other programming.  Those I miss as well.

I think it's "Billions", the third season of which we just finished, which made me particularly aware of this.  It's possible it's just the writers of that show who are especially into references to other pieces of popular culture, but it seems more pervasive.  Although there are fewer directors' commentaries these days now that Netflix is shifting from DVD's to streaming, they're another way I become conscious of things I'm missing.

It seems a logical trend in our culture: the more time people spend watching and listening, the more likely creators will cross-reference things.  I suspect the trend also means fewer references to the older sources of reference material: the classics and the Bible. 

Trump as Quintessentially American

Trump has gained attention for his noting to KJU the potential of NK beaches.  While there's derision, it strikes me as quintessentially American.  Perhaps my opinion is swayed by my exposure to the "frontier thesis" of Frederick Jackson Turner which pointed to the impact of "free land" on the development of American society and culture.

Pointing out the parallel--Americans historically have found opportunity existing in new frontiers, first in land, later in new areas of endeavor.  So it's typically American for Trump to see development opportunities in an area which might become newly available to entrepreneurs.

Starbucks and Casual Fridays

One of the big changes in American culture since my youth is clothing.  Back in the day jeans and overalls were working class clothes.  Sailors for example wore jeans and white t-shirts.  Veterans home from the war maybe wore their khaki dress uniforms, or parts thereof, and the style migrated to others. My father, for example, wore overalls and blue work shirts on the farm, while when he headed to Greene for the weekly shopping trip and to pick up cow and chicken feed at the GLF store he would wear khaki, or gray twill styled something like a uniform. And hats.

When I went off to college in '59 my older sister was consulted about proper attire, resulting in a trip to Robert Hall, a now long-defunct clothing chain that might have been just a hair above Sears or Monkey Wards. Sports coats, dress pants and shirts were the uniform, or so I was told.

Meanwhile office workers wore dress clothes, suits and such.  Housewives wore house dresses, while secretaries dressed up.  Bottom line: you could make reasonable guesses about the class of any person by seeing how they dressed.  You could get a confirmation by looking at their car, always American and with distinct steps up the ladder.

Today those distinctions have faded, and I think in most cases have been obliterated.

That brings me to the Philadelphia Starbucks incident where the manager called the cops because two African-American men were waiting there without buying.  My intuition is the situation would never have arisen back in 1958.  Not only did we have no Starbucks, but if we'd had one most African-Americans would likely not have patronized it, out of financial concerns.  But, and I come to my point, hypothetical African-Americans in a 1958 Starbucks would have been well-dressed.  Their clothes would have said to the manager: we abide by your norms and conventions, we're "good Negroes", and don't be concerned.    Because of the fading of signals of social class, there's less certainty today, meaning more tension, and tension, IMHO, triggers racist thoughts and actions.

Hugh Hefner and Ayn Rand

New Yorker piece on Hefner. My first memory of Playboy was my freshman year at college.  My roommate had arrived earlier, and had decorated his bookshelf with a recent centerfold.  As a naive rube from upstate NY it was both shocking and intriguing.  Not enough of either for me to ever subscribe to it, but it continued to be a presence in my mental world.

For some reason now I pair Hefner and Ayn Rand, both libertarians.  I was probably more influenced by Hefner than Rand, since his views seemed more mainline than hers.  I don't know if that's a common linkage; googling doesn't seem to bring up that many hits.  Her general influence seems to have persisted more than his, at least intellectually, though his impact on the culture was greater.

Changes in Culture: Swearing

This New REpublic piece discusses research into the frequency of swearing in America, specifically the use of the seven words in American books.  The research found a vast increase (28 times) between the early 50's and the late oughts.

The article is dismissive of the research, claiming it's not good social science.  That may be, but as  someone has lived over those years, the prevalence of swearing is to me just a sign of the changing culture.

I'm tempted to say "standards are falling" but I'll just say changing.

Chicken Feed (Sack) Dresses

Slate has a post on a 2009 scholarly article about the use of chicken feed sacks to make clothing back in the day, my day as it happens.  (It's even a thing on Etsy.)

I remember our getting feed in 100 pound bags.  Usually the bags were burlap and were returned back to GLF (the co-op we patronized and my dad was a board member of) for re-use.  But in my earliest memories (1945 or so) there are some cloth bags with patterns.  My sister remembered mom sewing her dresses from them.  The article says such clothes were a sign of poverty, and they certainly were to my sister.

But the times were such that people did re-use things.  I remember scavenging old nails from boards and trying to straighten them so they could be used again.  Mom had a rag bag where the unwearable old clothes went, someday to be pulled from the bag and cut into pieces, possibly for use in a rag rug, or in a quilt.  The innards of the quilt would be another example of re-use: milk strainer flannels. Much to my surprise, a similar thing is still available--description says "gauze" where my memory is of flannel squares.  When pouring a pail of milk into the milk can, you used a large metal funnel with a filter square at the bottom, the filter intended to filter out foreign materials (i.e., manure and bedding) which could have gotten into the milk pail.  (It's not only sausage-making that the layperson wants to remain ignorant of. :-)  Mom would wash the filters, which by regulation could only be used once, and use them for various purposes.  Stitched together they'd be a towel for drying dishes; stacked four or five thick, they'd become the basis for a quilt.

While I think I've adapted pretty well to changes in our culture over the last 70 years, except for pop music, the change in attitude towards material things still bothers me.  What I mean is the way people, perhaps mostly kids, will leave pieces of clothing out--presumably they've lost track of their shoe(s), or socks, or shirt and don't care to spend the time to search them out and retrieve them, and their parents are willing to buy new.  It bothers.

"The Olds"

Ran across a phrase in the Post this morning: "the olds".  It's the "s" which makes it different; not sure why, maybe someday a language person will explain.

Anyhow, ran a google search, and found the Post has an explanation and a quiz.

As one of the commenters on the piece/quiz says: "I am an old. I do not object. More of these questions should have included the option "I have no idea what this means" so that I could have qualified as "super-old."

The explanation: "In popular Internet parlance, "the olds" are essentially people who don't quite get "it," whatever "it" may be: the funniest meme, the latest Internet slang, the fact that you shouldn't comment on your child's every Facebook post. It's less about age, and more about digital zeitgeist."

Dirty Jeans

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline repeats and expands on the Nordstrom dirty jeans (for $425), which Sen. Ben Sasse has called the end of the American experiment.

"Nordstrom advertises the jeans this way:

These heavily distressed medium-blue denim jeans embody rugged, Americana workwear that’s seen some hard-working action with a crackled, caked-on muddy coating that shows you’re not afraid to get down and dirty.

Sen. Ben Sasse tweeted that selling dirty jeans signals the end of the American experiment. Mike Rowe describes the dirty jeans as “a costume for wealthy people who see work as ironic.”

Paul's not a whippersnapper, but Sasse is, so he doesn't know the true end of the American experiment was not selling dirty jeans, but pre-washing jeans, particularly stone-washing, where people paid a premium for jeans with an artificially shortened life. It's been down-hill ever since.

Our Heroes: Cowboys Versus Superheroes

Just saw "Dr. Strange", which was only redeemed by Mr. Cumberbatch and some humor. I think it counts as maybe the only superhero movie we've seen.  Got to thinking: back in the day our heroes were in Westerns.  They stood out because of courage and usually moral status and being fast on the draw.  Children, boys at least, could aspire to that status.

I don't know what lessons or models our modern superheroes present for children.


(My, I sound like an old fogey.)

My Alternative for the Hamilton Cast

Much discussion about Pence's attendance at the Hamilton musical performance, some boos from the audience and a post-show statement from the cast.  My position:  no big deal, I wouldn't have done either, but it's within the realm of civil society.  But it is a bit too self-righteous for my taste.

I'd rather have seen the statement after the show say something like: " the cast members in the spirit of supporting diversity....blah blah.. in today's world, are donating their pay for the night to [some charity]."  That would have been a stronger statement IMHO.