Products |
Weekend Butler: “Holiday” music you’ll hear nowhere else, a movie you don’t know and will never forget, Timothy Snyder on the most urgent issue we’re ignoring, and the summer I learned to drink beer
By
Published: Jul 01, 2021
Category:
Weekend
HOLIDAY MUSIC
Not feeling the marching band, the parade, the fireworks. Very much feeling “Knock Knock” by Mac Miller, a white kid from Pittsburgh who started rapping when he was 8 and turned pro in his teens. He was an oddity — a suburban white kid in an urban Black genre — and then kids heard him, and saw how gifted he was. His 2011 debut album, released when he was just out of high school, became Billboard’s first independently released No.1 in over a decade. He had drug problems — “I’m not on drugs… drugs are on me” — and died, of an accidental overdose, at 26. My daughter still mourns him. She’s not wrong.
The song begins:
1, 2, 3, 4 some crazy-ass kids come and knock on your door
Let em in, let em in, let em in
Rap? So not you. Then don’t watch. If you do, those lines might follow you all day, with cheerful effect.
—
THE WEEKEND MOVIE YOU”VE NEVER HEARD OF AND WILL NEVER FORGET:”SHOPLIFTERS”
from the Times review:
The Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda has the sensitive, calibrated touch of a master safecracker, and he’s a virtuoso of emotional and narrative buildup. His nuanced approach and self-effacing visual style give you room to breathe and to think; he doesn’t try to bludgeon you into feeling. (He knows the emotions will come.) His way of discreetly unwrapping stories and people is pleasurable; you never feel as if he’s gaming you…
I saw “Shoplifters” in 2018 in a theater with a 99% Japanese audience. Rapt silence. At the end, applause for one of the best films I’ve seen in a decade. [To rent the stream from Amazon, click here.]
—-
REQUIRED READING: “THE WAR ON HISTORY IS A WAR ON DEMOCRACY”
The big story today is climate. And again tomorrow. But just as urgent is this piece by Timothy Sndyer, the Yale historian who wrote “On Tyranny.” Terrifying… and coming to your neighborhood soon. Read it… and share it.
The subject is “memory laws” — banning the teaching of true history in order to preserve the authority of a omnipotent ruler. A summary:
This spring, memory laws arrived in America. Republican state legislators proposed dozens of bills designed to guide and control American understanding of the past. As of this writing, five states (Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma) have passed laws that direct and restrict discussions of history in classrooms. The Department of Education of a sixth (Florida) has passed guidelines with the same effect. Another 12 state legislatures are still considering memory laws.
The particulars of these laws vary. The Idaho law is the most Kafkaesque in its censorship: It affirms freedom of speech and then bans divisive speech. The Iowa law executes the same totalitarian pirouette. The Tennessee and Texas laws go furthest in specifying what teachers may and may not say. In Tennessee teachers must not teach that the rule of law is “a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups.” Nor may they deny the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, words that Thomas Jefferson presumably never intended to be part of an American censorship law. The Idaho law mentions Critical Race Theory; the directive from the Florida school board bans it in classrooms. The Texas law forbids teachers from requiring students to understand the 1619 Project. It is a perverse goal: Teachers succeed if students do not understand something.
But the most common feature among the laws, and the one most familiar to a student of repressive memory laws elsewhere in the world, is their attention to feelings. Four of five of them, in almost identical language, proscribe any curricular activities that would give rise to “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.”
History is not therapy, and discomfort is part of growing up. As a teacher, I cannot exclude the possibility, for example, that my non-Jewish students will feel psychological distress in learning how little the United States did for Jewish refugees in the 1930s. I know from my experience teaching the Holocaust that it often causes psychological discomfort for students to learn that Hitler admired Jim Crow and the myth of the Wild West. Teachers in high schools cannot exclude the possibility that the history of slavery, lynchings and voter suppression will make some non-Black students uncomfortable. The new memory laws invite teachers to self-censor, on the basis of what students might feel — or say they feel. The memory laws place censorial power in the hands of students and their parents. It is not exactly unusual for white people in America to express the view that they are being treated unfairly; now such an opinion could bring history classes to a halt.
—-
“PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM” WOULD NOW BE “PLAY IT AGAIN, SAMANTHA.” AND SAMANTHA WOULD BE PLAYED BY ROBIN MELOY GOLDSBY
Robin Meloy Goldsby’s father was in the jazz trio on Mister Rogers Neighborhood for thirty years. She’s just as durable: she’s played hundreds of solo piano jobs for 40 years. “I’ve played for lounge lizards, mobsters, and moguls; lovely ladies who love to lunch, jet-lagged bedraggled global travelers, the up-and-coming and down-and-out, princes and paupers, smooth talkers and potty mouths. I’ve played concerts for naked people in saunas, misbehaving children in elf hats, drunken tourists in coastal resorts, and for the future king of England at Buckingham Palace—where seventy white-gloved servers floated through the ballroom carrying silver domed plates of royal free-range chicken.” In “Piano Girl Playbook: Notes on a Musical Life,” the queen of the lounge and lobby delivers stories with humor, compassion, and just enough cynicism. What she’s learned about music and people and life is the exact opposite of easy listening. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here.]
—-
THE SUMMER I LEARNED TO DRINK
In my parents’ house, alcohol was for goyim. On rare occasions, my mother took a nip of Manischewitz Cream Red Concord — “a sweet but balanced wine with a velvety mouth feel and the flavor of fresh Concord grapes with confectionery notes” — but the next day she always spoke against her modest high. My father, well known for his disdain of fun, once ate two bourbon balls at a party and had to take to bed.
My parents married in 1940. Because they did not drink, a closet in our home was dedicated to boxes of their wedding liquor, distilled in the 1930s. When my brother and I came of age in the 1960s, he took it upon himself to drain those bottles, drinking better Scotch than he’d find in the next half century of searching.
My failure to join my brother can be explained in a joke.
“Why don’t Jews drink?”
“Because it dulls the pain.”
My late adolescence was about civil rights, Vietnam, aggressive scholarship, and trying to score with smart girls. I didn’t drink. Except at lunch. Before I was legal. With blue-collar guys, even.
In my 17th summer, I got a job as a copy boy at the New York Times. Not in the prestigious newsroom. In classified advertising. My job was to stamp the correct insertion date as ads came in from the agencies and the room of assistants manning the phones. The deadline was 3 PM. Naturally the pace was slow until about 2:30, when messengers dropped bundle after bundle on my desk. Management understood there was a time crunch and adjusted the Muzak accordingly; at 2:30, we were treated to Al Hirt’s “Java.” The guys in the composing room — union men, and true — knew the drill. And they schooled me: The afternoon rush passes less painfully if you’re in an altered state.
Lunch meant Gough’s. If you are, as Yeats writes, “old and gray and full of sleep/ and nodding by the fire,” you may remember this joint. It was right across the street from the Times, and it was dark, with a long bar in front and checked-clothed tables in the back room. You ordered a burger — I don’t believe they served anything else — and a draft beer. No need to specify the brand, because in 1964, beer culture wasn’t even a dream. You got Schlitz, and you said thank you.
The beer came in a schooner. This is not a small glass, suitable for children. It’s a blue-collar wine class, thick, stemmed, holding at least 10 ounces. Like ballpark beer, Schlitz started foamy, frigid and bitter; in ten minutes, it was just bitter. It was, therefore, to be downed quickly.
Blue-collar profanity, shrewd gossip, a powerful connection to the proud history of American labor — from day one, these accompanied the beer, they were as bound to it as hops.
Gough’s is long gone. I drink Corona Light now, in smaller quantities and smaller glassware, and never at lunch. But in my head, today’s first sip takes me back to that room on 43rd Street, where a callow boy learned how good men suck it up and get it done.
