JACK BERNARD'S TRAVELS

In 1954 the United States Supreme Court literally opened the door for people of color to attend the same public schools as their white peers. In 1964 Congress further acted against discrimination by opening doors to the workplace, public accommodation, and voter registration. In 1965 it followed up by passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In the fourth volume of his biography of LBJ, (The Passage of Power) Robert Caro describes in detail how Johnson, following the assassination of JFK, moved an ossified, entrenched Congress dominated by segregationist Southern Democrats to pass his Great Society package, reform the tax code, and, most significantly, push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This week, two documentary films at the Seattle International Film Festival brought the Civil Rights Act back into focus for me. Although neither of the films addresses the legislation directly they do so obliquely. The films are Venus and Serena; a film about tennis’ Williams sisters and Anita, a look back at Anita Hill’s testimony in the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court.

For those of us who were present during the civil rights era of the 1960’s and 70’s this is important territory to revisit and a reminder that though we have made monumental progress and can now proudly celebrate the election of an African-American President, issues of race and gender are still front and center in America’s dialogue with itself.

These films are about race and gender. None of the featured players is a groundbreaker in the sense that Jackie Robinson was in major league baseball. Althea Gibson broke the color barrier in women’s tennis in the mid-1950’s and Arthur Ashe did it on the men’s side in 1965. And, Clarence Thomas was not the first African-American Supreme Court nominee or appointee. Thurgood Marshall holds that distinction with his appointment to the court in 1965. But, the stories and the films tell intense and relevant stories about significant historical eras and events. The Williams sisters journey from a California ghetto to Wimbledon is a rags to riches family drama full of twists and turns that is still being played out on the world stage, and Anita Hill’s calm reflections on the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings show us a woman of thoughtful integrity speaking truth to power whose life was changed because she stood up for what she believed and believed that Thomas did not meet the high standards for appointment to the Supreme Court. She came forward to testify because she believed that her testimony was important for the nation.

When it comes to tennis it is indisputable that the Williams sisters have raised the level of play on the women’s tour over the past 15 years. Venus, the older of the two, was the first to win a Grand Slam event and though plagued by health problems and injuries in recent years has continued to be an attractive and gracious person on and off the court. Sister Serena surpassed her sister in number of Grand Slam wins a few years ago and is unquestionably the most dominant figure in women’s tennis today – possibly the best woman player of all time. Her power and tenacity are legendary, but like some other champions (Conners and McEnroe come to mind) her take-no-prisoners approach has an ugly downside. She’s a snarky loser and not quite believable as a gracious winner. As a humorous aside in the film, Serena acknowledges her behavioral problems and blames a dark alter-ego she calls Taquande who takes over her persona. At least she has a sense of humor about it, although the referees and line-judges may not share the joke.

The dark side of the Williams sisters story is not Serena’s bad behavior; it’s their father, Richard, their first coach and the one who charted and managed their careers. He is greedy, devious, authoritarian, confrontational, racist, and, to me, thoroughly despicable. There is plenty of footage to document all of Richard’s flaws, but his daughters continue to honor and respect him which contributes to and promotes Richard’s claim that “it’s them against us.” It’s hard to watch but it’s part of the story.

On the other hand, Anita Hill, volunteering to testify comes under attack by 14 white US Senators, as if her character and credibility were the issue not Thomas’. She never faltered under the withering character attack during several days of testimony on the Thomas nomination. She was direct, forthright, and calm as she answered every question the Judiciary Committee asked, no matter how accusatory or demeaning. Everyone agrees that one of the principals – either Thomas or Hill – lied under oath. It was a classic case of “he said, she said” and no one but the two of them knows the the truth. In the end, the Judiciary Committee rejected Anita Hill’s testimony and declined to call four other witnesses who offered to testify about other instances of Thomas’ sexual harassment.

Was Clarence Thomas the most qualified candidate for the position of Associate Justice to the Supreme Court? The consensus is that he was not. In his 22 years as an Associate Justice he has rarely asked questions of counsel during oral argument, has a exhibited a worldview driven by revenge against “liberal elites” and has promoted a judicial philosophy that is more radically conservative than any in history. This Justice, whose education and career were supported and advanced by affirmative action now rejects the policy and believes that it hurts people of color because it places them in situations where they are doomed to fail. Self-assessment?

Imagine what a difference it would have made if George H.W. Bush, a middle of the road Republican President, had put forward a like-minded nominee instead of Thomas. In the last 22 years Thomas has been the most conservative of the 9 justices and the unswerving lynch-pin in conservative 5-4 decisions during his tenure. Ironically, many of those decisons have aided conservatives in rolling back the gains of LBJ’s Great Society and the Civil Rights Act. What would American jurisprudence look like today if a moderate had been elevated to the court in Thomas’ place. It’s difficult to know but it would surely be different.

Anita Hill left her tenured position at the University of Oklahoma Law School in 1997 and is now a Fellow at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management.

The most personally provocative question raised by these films is not about the subjects but the intensity of my feelings about the villans. Is there a racist component to my dislike of Richard, Clarence and Serena? I have such negative feelings about both men and I find myself consistently rooting for Serena’s opponents. I don’t want to believe that there’s a racist component but I have to acknowledge that there may be. I hope that this awareness might at least help offset whatever unconscious prejudice is at work.

The Seattle International Film Festival is one of the largest and most widely attended events of its kind. I’m particularly attracted to the documentaries that may or may not come to theaters during the rest of the year. These two films, Venus and Serena and Anita, by respected filmmakers, were good entertainment but also help remind me of important social changes and personalities in my lifetime. Last night I was turned away from a sold out showing of Terms and Conditions May Apply another documentary at SIFF. This one is about the dark side of “free” services and the continuing disappearance of online privacy. It’s about what happens to your privacy when you check that little box that says “I Agree” at the bottom of the Facebook, Twitter or other internet sites. It’s a must see but it looks like I’ll have to wait until it comes around in general release. Got to keep showing up; there’s good stuff out there.

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How can you personalize and internalize an experience – especially an art experience? How can you give it legs and make it more than an entertaining night out? How can you share the experience with others in a meaningful way?

Publishing houses answered those questions years ago when they realized that personal contact between author and reader created buzz and sold books. The book tour is now a sophisticated marketing tool designed to introduce the author, create a following and provide feedback. It isn’t just a way to sell books to the devoted junkies that attend the readings. Local radio and TV interviews expand and draw the audience to the author’s work and expand his or her reach beyond the range of the NY Times Book Review. Lately publishers have seen gold in book clubs and added reading group discussion guides as addenda to the paperback versions. Museums, symphony orchestras and stage companies have jumped on the bandwagon and are personalizing the audience experience by having the curators, directors, actors, and artists meet with their audiences following a performance to discuss their work.

These Q&A sessions can be interesting. The audience members who attend them are serious, curious, and appreciate the effort. They’re hungry to discuss the performance with others and to question the writers, directors, actors, musicians, and artists involved about the intent and meaning of the art. At the end of an evening Q&A I feel more involved and more knowledgeable about what I have seen, heard, or read, and I’ve internalized the experience.

For example, on Friday night Marilynn and I attended the opening night performance of a play called The Language Archive. The play, at Seattle Public Theater’s Bathhouse, is an oddly provocative inquiry into communication and interpersonal connections. The main character in the story is a linguistics professor who speaks a dozen languages but is clueless when it comes to communication with his wife. His interest in communication is purely academic. His wife is equally clueless and displays her feelings through wordless, tearful episodes while performing simple household tasks like ironing or washing dishes. The professor’s academic interest in preserving dying languages leads him to two elderly research subjects, who speak a soon to be extinct language, but who revert to English profanity whenever they get upset and their own language doesn’t give them the power to insult, slander, and abuse.

California based playwright, Julia Cho, the daughter of Korean immigrants, already has an impressive list of playwriting credits, and if I see her name again I’ll be sure to see whatever it is she’s doing.The Language Archive may not be great theater but it is entertaining, and live theater is an intimate personal experience – this one included. After the opening night performance the director, Shana Bestock, stayed for a Q&A and the audience was able to ask questions making the evening an even more personal experience.

The Weekend section of the Seattle Times lists local stage offerings every Friday and I’ve been surprised and impressed by the quality and variety of Seattle theater productions. We’ve seen three plays at the Bathhouse in the last year and two of the three were better than two of the three plays we saw in New York On Broadway in December. The Language Archive runs through June 9th at the Bathhouse Theater at Green Lake.

In the same vein; SIFF, the Seattle International Film Festival opened over the weekend. Film festivals provide excellent opportunities to experience the same up close experience through Q&A with actors, directors and writers. I always find it hard to choose from the extensive catalog of festival films in spite of the fact that there is good online and local print coverage of the the festival. Sometimes an interesting subject or a film with a good publicity machine behind it will pop up or someone will make a personal recommendation and make it easier to choose. That happened yesterday when What Maisie Knew was presented.

Maisie is an adaptation of an 1897 novel by Henry James adapted, updated, and modernized for the screen. I might have missed it but one of the co-directors is a close friend of a friend of mine and we have been following each others progress for 30 years. David Siegel is a Berkeley grad as is co-director, Scott McGeehee. Neither one is a film school graduate but the two of them have been writing and directing as a team for years. Their credits include The Deep End with Tilda Swinton, Uncertainty with Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, and Bee Season with Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche. None of them have been blockbuster hits but they get enough good reviews to keep making the films they love. A.O. Scott in his New York Times review called What Maisie Knew “a brilliant, haunting adaptation” of the James novel.

Maisie is the story of a 6 year old child of uncommonly narcissistic parents who are coming undone as a couple. The mother is a rock musician, the father an international art dealer and businessman. Both of them love Maisie when it’s convenient or when they want to punish each other. The rest of the time Maisie is an inconvenient obligation subordinate to the narcissistic pursuit of their other interests. The two other characters who emerge as the story develops are her nanny/stepmother and bartender/stepfather who become convenient after-market caregivers that solve the parents caregiving problems after the divorce. It’s not a pretty story. I have to say it did make me look at my own selfish behaviors over the years. Still, this is Maisie’s story and not everyone in Maisie’s life turns out to be bad news. You’ll have to see the movie to find the outcome. The film opens nationwide next week. See it.

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When I started to blog about it I figured that living in Seattle required a survival mentality. I grew up here and was carrying a lot of baggage left over from when the town was in the clutches of a handful of families who fancied themselves as aristocrats and acted as if the town was their personal fiefdom. I was wrong. Things are different now. Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, and dozens of biotech firms have changed the demographic and sucked some of the swell out of those heads. In the 1950’s Sir Thomas Beecham called Seattle the “cultural dustbin of the world.” In February 2013 Seattle was named the 2nd most literate city in America (close behind Washington, DC). Nice change.

My mental shift notwithstanding, the weather is a challenge and a good reason to maintain the survival mentality. When the weather drives me indoors survival depends on finding ways to fight the dragon. It means checking out the art, theater, music, and bookstore scene, and those elements have been particularly rich this past two weeks – the Metropolitan Opera’s live HD performance of Giulio Caesare, Seattle Rep’s 1970’s French farce Boeing, Boeing, an Art of Jazz event at SAM and last weekend’s release of Baz Luhrman’s film The Great Gatsby. I’ve seen them all but was particularly struck by the contrast between the jazz concert at SAM and the Jazz Age laid out in the Gatsby film.

Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby is tumultuous, raucous, glitzy, stylized, and over the top. It’s a frontal assault on the senses visually, aurally, and musically – and I didn’t even get to see the 3D version. With music as crazily different as Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Jay Z’s $100 Bill the soundtrack helps propel the action forward. Gatsby is all about the excesses of the Jazz Age and anomalous as it seems Jay Z’s thumping hip-hop beat fits the manic action at Gatsby’s extravagant parties very well. I reread the novel just before I saw the film and was surprised at the fidelity of Luhrmann’s adaptation. Much of the dialogue is lifted directly from the novel and the use of Nick Carraway’s voiceover makes it easier to remain faithful to the text. Lately the novel has been getting hyped as the Great American Novel. I disagree, but it has endured. This is the fifth film adaptation and two years ago I saw a stage adaptation. It is right up there with To Kill a Mockingbird, The Old Man and the Sea, The Scarlet Letter, and A River Runs Through It as one of the great short novels in American fiction. I think its real strength is the way it captures the senseless hedonism of the Jazz Age and the seeds of it’s own destruction. The greed, duplicity, racism, pretense, anti-Semitism, disparities in wealth, and pursuit of pleasure are all there. The book was published in 1925 within four years the party was over, the stock market had crashed and breadlines were forming. The picture was beautifully painted but Dorian Gray’s portrait was hanging in the closet the whole time.

I’m in the camp that believes a novel has more power when left to the reader’s imagination. I think that’s especially true of The Great Gatsby. I like my own rendering of the characters but this film is well worth seeing. – much better in my estimation than the airbrushed, romanticized 1974 Robert Redford, Mia Farrow version or any of the earlier adaptations. It’s obviously the same story but DiCaprio is a more complicated Gatsby as he obsessively devotes his attention and wealth on Daisy’s capture.

In contrast to the glitz and glamor of the Gatsby film, the Dutch saxophonist, Tineke Postma, who performed at the Seattle Art Museum’s Art of Jazz concert last week was supremely understated. Her appearance, as part of the month long Earshot Jazz Festival was the essence of cool. The Seattle Art Museum is not an intimate club, and I would like to have seen her in that setting but the museum’s ground floor with its surreal installation of hanging automobiles and flashing lights played more like a sacred space than a museum foyer.

Ms Postma, backed by three local journeymen musicians, played two sets of her own compositions about evenly divided between soulful and raucous. She is a unique talent whose work shows the influence of Wayne Shorter and others. When I closed my eyes I could hear echoes of Miles and when she played the soprano sax Ornette Coleman was right there at times. Jazz, like everything else (except politics), is global and eclectic these days. Nothing Ms Postma played was hummable, but it was rhythmic and oddly beautiful. Some of it could have been right out of the Eric Satie catalog.

The Art of Jazz is a regular feature on the second Thursday of every month, but not every performance includes an artist of Ms Postma’s international stature. As a museum member the Art of Jazz serves up a little something extra and if you choose to walk the galleries on the second floor the music provides a compliment to the museum’s modern collection. Frankenthaler and Postma went very nicely together last Thursday.

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Now he lives in the islands, fishes the pilin’s
And drinks his green label each day
Writing his memoirs, losin’ his hearin’
But he don’t care what most people say

Through eighty-six years of perpetual motion
If he likes you he’ll smile and he’ll say
Jimmy, some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic
But I had a good life all the way

The last verse of Jimmy Buffett’s He Went to Paris

I love the lyric. It captures my feeling about the “magic and tragic” that is the essence of our lives.

In January I wrote an essay called Who Will I Be in 10 Years after hearing an NPR feature with the same title. I can’t answer the question now. Maybe I won’t be able to answer it at all. I’m in what climbers call “the death zone,” the upper reaches of the mountain, above 8000 meters, where thin air, low temperatures, high winds, unpredictable weather and ice present a matrix of threats to life. It isn’t ice or thin air that creates the death zone for me; it’s stealthy predators like cancer, heart disease, Parkinson’s and stroke that challenge the longevity calculus. As well as I am at the moment, there is always the possibility that the predators will strike. They creep in to steal the future, but, like the climbers on Everest, we don’t focus on the risks. Instead, we continue toward the summit. We continue to plan, set goals, and drill on into the night.

The trigger for these reflections was a performance of Tracy Lett’s play August: Osage County, the 2008 Tony Award winner about a family dealing with the death of its patriarch and all the tangled emotional family issues it brings into focus. It’s unique as modern theater but deals with the same complicated family drama brought to life in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Mercifully, it only takes 3 hours and 40 minutes to deconstruct the Weston family in Osage County versus the almost endless undoing of the Tyrone’s in the O’Neill play.

As Tolstoy said in the famous opening line of Anna Karenina “Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Weston and Tyrone families in Osage County and Long Day’s Journey are riddled with alcoholism, drug addiction, envy, and incest – a litany of modern family problems. But these problems are symptoms of the underlying existential angst and stress created by their tangled and knotted family relationships. What is it about these plays that compels our attention aside from the brilliant portrayal of their flawed characters? I think it’s that they lead us back to our own family dynamics. My criterion for evaluating a film or theater piece is the durability of the conversation that follows. In the case of these plays, extreme as the situations are, the conversations and reflections are driven by comparisons to our own families and the discomfort we find in the common elements.

In Asia, where I have spent most of the last four years, the family is still the most important social unit. Gish Jen, the Chinese-American writer, in her book Tiger Writing: Art, Culture and the Interdependent Self asserts that Euro-American culture with its focus on individualism is categorically different from Asia’s emphasis on the collective interdependent self. The family is the context for community and growth. Elders are venerated and holidays dictate a return to the family home which is almost always geographically close. In the West, we encourage our children to be independent and to question authority – and we scatter.

Divorce, geography, and lifestyle are all challenges to family harmony and communication in the West. My immediate family (children and grandchildren) has spread itself between Seattle, Saigon, Sun Valley, Salt Lake City, Bellingham and Brisbane, Australia. None of my children live close to me and I have not shared a holiday with any of them in more than 5 years. We live separate lives with separate networks of friends.

I have always admired writers that mine their own experience but I’m also mindful of the pain they cause when their friends and family see themselves in their work. My friends, Dick and Kit, have been treated harshly in fiction written by their son, Dan, and James Salter used his neighbors, the Rosenthal’s, as models for an unflattering portrait of a disintegrating marriage in his novel Light Years. My wife is uncomfortable when I even nibble at the edges of writing something personal. I want to be honest and not hold back, but I feel protective. Still, there is an open wound and ongoing pain with two family members. That’s where the Osage County, Long Day’s Journey stuff comes in; when I look at my family I see reflections of the same discord I see in those plays.

My family doesn’t have alcohol, drug, incest or domestic abuse issues like the families in August: Osage County or Long Day’s Journey Into Night but like many families we have sticky issues that emanate from the Euro-American emphasis on self. I take responsibility for some the distance between us. I was an only child and always self-absorbed. I still am. I could do better at reaching out to my children – but so could they. I hear from my oldest on a regular basis but almost nothing from the other two. I hate the telephone and use it mostly for housekeeping tasks like making appointments or doing things I can’t do by email. I like the written word so I communicate by email, even though I know it is easily misinterpreted. I rarely see my children or grandchildren and our visits are getting rarer – once a year maybe. They began to separate, individuate and differentiate themselves as teenagers when they went away to boarding school and then to college. My then-wife and I encouraged it. They were all different then and have grown to be independent and successful in their different ways now.I’m proud of them.The two that have their own children are good parents and all three are good friends to each other and to their friends but it’s not enough to make us into the Brady Bunch or the Beaver Cleavers. Neither are we the Westons or the Tyrones.

All families are dysfunctional to some degree. I thought mine was different but now I realize this was self-serving and delusional. My daughter said it first; our choices and priorities are different. Is there anything I can do to change it? Yes, but I want it to be mutual. I want them to want it too. I don’t think of myself as needy but I guess I would like a little more Asian interdependence. At this point we all have reasonably normal, successful lives within our own spheres. Would I like to feel closer to my children? The answer is yes. Would I l ike to have healthier more frequent communication with them? Yes. Would they answer the questions the same way? I don’t know. Interesting isn’t it? I really don’t know them well, nor they me, at this stage in our lives. In the abstract we all want “better” relationships with better communication, but families are complicated and the divorce, distance, and lifestyle issues are always at play.

It is what it is. For now, I think Jimmy Buffett says it best; “

Some of it’s magic. Some of it’s tragic. But I’ve had a good life all the way.”

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