"You gotta give it to him, John Legend tries very hard to look serious as Jesus Christ … it’s not his fault if he’s physically incapable of it!"

How come I — who read the news every day — never noticed there was a "Jesus Christ Superstar: Live in Concert" until the day after it aired? Anyway, this morning I'm reading "Jesus Christ Superstar Live: The Highs and the Lows," in New York Magazine, which I only went to because it has a cover with a pig's nose photoshopped onto the face of Donald Trump. See:



Here's a sample of the show — featuring 2 of the "highs" — "The priests’ geometric black coats. Just look at this gorgeous thing, designed by Paul Tazewell (Hamilton) — an homage to Issey Miyake’s Bao Bao bag!" and the "gorgeously layer[ed] 'he is dangerous'... around the one-minute mark" of "This Jesus Must Die":

"Over the last week or so, local television news anchors across the the country have joined together to paradoxically warn viewers about the 'troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country.'"

"The identical, seemingly earnest editorial messages paid lip service to the importance of fact-checking and unbiased reporting, but they also complained about 'false news' and 'fake stories.' If that seems to echo the rhetoric of President Trump, it’s probably because the statement was written by one of his allies. The anchors were forced to read the so-called journalistic responsibility messages word for word by their employer, the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of television stations in the country. The features were one of Sinclair’s now infamous 'must-run”' segments, consisting of conservative commentary that every Sinclair-owned station is required to air.... Deadspin’s Timothy Burke published... a.. terrifying version... which at one point shows 30 of the segments synced up in unison," writes New York Magazine, about this chillingly hilarious viral video:



ADDED: Trump responded on Twitter: "So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased. Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke."

AND: Scott Adams periscoped about it.

"My personal sense of the show was that the first half dozen episodes were too freighted with Presidential heroism."

"It seemed that every episode was an exercise in saving the world, with virtually no attention paid to the reality that even the most powerful person on earth – the President of the United States – is faced daily with the frustrating limits of that awesome power. Their were other issues as well, including overly melodramatic 'B' stories involving the President’s children – an eight year old daughter and twin teenage siblings (brother and sister), as well as a whole bunch of satellite characters who were truly under characterized and under served. Nevertheless, as fantasized as the show ['Commander in Chief'] was, and as much as there were elements in it I didn’t much care for, there was something fundamentally appealing about the show. It had a good heart. It wanted to be a hit, in spite of itself. It had real stars in Geena Davis, and the remarkable Donald Sutherland, as her antagonist....

"Donald Sutherland... had had strong opinions and feelings about every single word of every single script we wrote... And yet... [h]e was a delightful man, erudite and intelligent, and we often found ourselves engaged in deep conversations about world affairs, politics, and our personal lives. Geena was altogether another story. I would get long, detailed critiques of our scripts, and copious notes and questions about every scene she was in. Okay, I get it. She’s the star of the show. She’s being protective of her character. Fair enough. But I would almost always get these tomes about particular scenes on the morning of the day we were to shoot them. It was virtually impossible to carry on a dialogue since a) she was on the stage already doing the work, and b) there simply wasn’t time to intelligently debate and/or alter the scenes without stopping production.... Geena was severely undermining our efforts on her behalf, and it was clear that while she wouldn’t outright say it, she was definitely not on board with the direction in which I was steering the show. It was inevitable then, that the network started hectoring me about the scripts, in eerie lockstep with Geena’s objections...."

From "Truth is a Total Defense: My Fifty Years in Television," by Steven Bochco, which I just put in my Kindle, for reasons discussed in the previous post.

Questions I invite you to discuss:

Was there any sexism in Bochco's comfort with Donald Sutherland and resistance to Geena Davis? Do you think a powerful man might accept critique from another man but experience the same kind of contribution from a woman as annoying and chaotic?

Do women — or did just Geena Davis — tend to have a more chaotic, irritating way of attempting to contribute to a joint project?

Do you think that playing the role of President of the United States affected the mind of Geena Davis, creating something of a delusion that she could, even at the last minute, imperiously expect that things would be done her way?

Do you think that being President of the United States creates a delusion that you can instantly and imperiously expect that things will be done your way?

Do you think the actual President of the United States feels something like an actor playing the part of President of the United States and that has created something of a delusion that he's doing a TV show and a TV show President of the United States would act like a major film-star diva given a TV show where she gets to play President of the United States and acts like a big drama queen annoyingly, chaotically, and imperiously expecting everyone to go along with whatever spontaneously rises to the surface of her big brain at any given moment? (By the way, both Geena Davis and Donald Trump are people who claim to have a very, very high IQ.)

Do you think that the Trump presidency suffers from the same problem Steven Bochco detected in the scripts for "Commander in Chief" — and makes every episode "an exercise in saving the world, with virtually no attention paid to the reality that even the most powerful person on earth – the President of the United States – is faced daily with the frustrating limits of that awesome power"?

"When Did You Realize TV Could Be Art?"

Asked Matt Zoller Seitz, back in 2012. Seitz was born in 1968, so he didn't live through "The Twilight Zone," 1959-1964. I was 8 to 13, in those years, and even today, seeing that question — "When Did You Realize TV Could Be Art?" — I'm inclined to say, I never "realized" it, because I don't remember a time when I didn't know "The Twilight Zone." I immediately thought of the episodes "Eye of the Beholder" and "The Monsters Are Due on Main Street." And just the opening credits.

But maybe you think "art" is more about serious adults in complicated, serious situations and rule out anything that accepts the label "science fiction." That's a conventional viewpoint adopted by Seitz:

As an American boy in the seventies, I saw plenty on TV that scared, disturbed, or upset me: the bigotry and brutality of Roots; naked prisoners being led into a gas chamber on Holocaust; Farrah Fawcett's torment in The Burning Bed. But I didn't realize commercial TV could be art, or even aspire to artfulness, until I started watching Hill Street Blues.

Seitz was 13 when that show premiered (in 1981, the year Ronald Reagan became President).

In many ways the godfather of today's melancholy, morally ambiguous cable dramas, the Steven Bochco series imported seventies movie values to NBC. There were content restrictions, some of them jarring (the cops never used any curses milder than "damn" or "hell" )...

TV meant, for nearly all of us, broadcast TV, subject to government censorship, despite the First Amendment....

... but for the most part, the show's situations were rougher and rawer than TV's norm. The stories dealt with adult issues — sex, race, class divisions, petty office turf wars, political chicanery, alcoholism, drug addiction, you name it — and while some of the characters were more sensible and ethical than others, the show never seemed to judge any of them. There were no bad guys on the show, just people living their lives according to whatever personal code they'd cobbled together....

I'm reading that this morning — and thinking about TV art — because it's quoted — sad to say — in a tribute— written by Fred Barbash in WaPo — to Steven Bochco, who has died (at the age of 74). The most interesting material from that tribute is quoted from Bochco (from this book):

“The idea of almost every other cop show was that the private lives of these folks was what happened the other 23 hours of the day that you weren’t watching them,” Bochco told the New York Times, “and we turned that inside out. 'Hill Street' was a show where their personal lives kept bleeding profusely, hemorrhaging if you will, into their professional lives. Where you had ex-wives coming in inappropriately and disrupting proceedings. You had Furillo’s lover getting into horrible arguments with him about the law. And you had an alcoholic, J. D. LaRue. All of this stuff just kept intruding and informing how these men and women went about their business.”...

“On our scripts,” Bochco once said in an oral history, “we had double columns of dialogue, ’cause we scripted everything in the background. EVERYTHING in the background. We realized we had so many characters that the only way to service all those characters was to have multiple story lines. The only way to service multiple story lines was to let them spill over into subsequent episodes. So half the time, things that were going on in the background were in fact the elements of stories and character relationships that would emerge in the foreground two episodes from now.”

In “Trial by Fury,” for example, the rape of the nun and the confessions weren’t enough for Bochco. When Bochco first saw the script — featuring only that sequence — he felt there was something missing, “some sense of how life isn’t fair.... So we added a small story about another murder, of a bodega owner named Rodriquez, who had been gunned down in a robbery. It happens every day on the Hill....and is far less sensational than the rape-murder of a nun, which is why the bodega murder doesn’t get the cops’ full attention.... What we come to realize is that the bodega murder will go unsolved: the price of catching the killer of the nun …. The kind of systemic cynicism that the two stories, side-by-side, exposed dramatically made the hour terrific conceptually."

Topics I'm inviting you to discuss: What is art? Is cynicism or complexity or density the key to answering the question? Does it matter whether television can be art and whether a particular show was art or do you only want to talk about whether television is great? When is television art, but bad art? When is television not art, but nevertheless great? Was there ever a TV show that made you think, like Seitz, hey, wait a minute, this isn't just TV, it's art!? What's your favorite episode of "The Twilight Zone"? Is it the same episode that would make you say, that one was art!? Did you watch "Hill Street Street Blues"? What impact did it have on you? Did it open up new vistas of what television could be? Do you realize now — with our endless access to complicated, adult dramatic series on HBO and Netflix and Amazon — how different and important "Hill Street Street Blues" was in its time? Do you think it had anything to do with Reagan?

I'm interested enough in that last question, that I just bought Bochco's book so I can see what he says about Reagan. If the answer's interesting, I'll do a separate post. If it's not, I'll update here, very soon.

UPDATE: Bochco never mentions Reagan in his book. I did a separate search for the word "President," and what I got were lots of mentions of various corporate presidents, a risky Obama joke...

I have been pissing, vomiting (lot of dry heaving — almost as much fun) and leading from the rear (apologies to the President) for about three or four days.

... and something about the TV show "Commander in Chief," in which Geena Davis played the first female President of the United States. Bochco was asked to take over, 2 years into the show's run (in 2007). I'll make a separate post out of this part.

CORRECTION: Bochco was asked to take over after 6 or 7 episodes had been filmed and only 4 had aired. The show had been getting great ratings, but there were production problems, that the original show runner couldn't handle, which is why they brought in Bochco, who replaced the writers and changed the show, and the ratings crashed.

"Belgian artist Jook... turned her house into one giant doodle pad so there’d be no barriers for her drawing."

"Whenever she feels inspired she can just pick up a pen and go wild on the walls. The bathtub is covered with wipe-away doodles by Jook and her son, and every room has been transformed into Jook’s doodled world. Jook even doodles on her clothes, so every part of her life can be filled with her creativity. Take a look...."

"That night, it didn’t take long for some rather prominent coughing to break out, before the crowd let loose with less subtle forms of protest: boos and catcalls..."

"... the agitation growing over the course of the piece’s 15-plus minutes. At one point, an older woman approached the stage, took off a shoe, and banged it on the stage, imploring the ensemble—which included [the composer Steve] Reich and [the conductor Michael] Tilson Thomas—to stop. Someone else sprinted down an aisle, yelling, 'All right! I confess!' Other aggrieved patrons simply left. With the commotion escalating, the musicians could barely hear each other play, forcing Tilson Thomas to call out the beats over the noise. This was no easy task... The musicians continued on, and after it was all over, the audience exploded—with plenty of bravos to counter the detractors’ boos. When the musicians walked off the stage, Reich was, as he remembered it, 'as white as a sheet.' Yet Tilson Thomas was practically gleeful: 'I said, Steve, this is the greatest thing that’s happened. Nothing like this has happened since the premiere of The Rite of Spring. For sure, by tomorrow, everyone in the world is going to know about you and your music. And that’s just what happened.'"

From "Organ Grinding/When the audience revolted at Carnegie Hall" by Sudip Bose — about a performance of this Steve Reich piece at Carnegie Hall in 1973:



Imagine acting like that at Carnegie Hall!

"People from the African Diaspora are frustrated w/white people being gatekeepers of our narrative."

A tweet quoted in "Museum slammed after hiring white curator for African art exhibit" (NY Post).

The museum, the Brooklyn Museum, is standing by its choice and just saying things like "We’re listening and we hear you" and "we want to assure you that you can count on us, as ever, to continue working deeply on equity within our institution and beyond."

BETTER HEADLINE: "Brooklyn Museum Welcomes Two New Cultural Colonizers for African Art and Photography"

Seriously, @brooklynmuseum? There goes the neighborhood for good. https://t.co/Ssdt4FUofI

— Ernest Owens (@MrErnestOwens) March 27, 2018

Any way the wind blows.

In the comments on the post about the smelliness of a particular city in Iowa, stever writes: "I lived in Pampa,TX for awhile in the late 70s. There was a paint plant on one end of town and a rendering plant on the other. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, you only needed a nose to know which way the wind blows."

So Bob Dylan wrote, wrote "You don't need a weather man/To know which way the wind blows," which is about understanding what's happening. It brought a similar phrase to mind — "Any way the wind blows" — which means just about the opposite, more unknowing than knowing. It is closer to another famous Dylan phrase "no direction home." If you go any way the wind blows, you go wherever outside forces take you; you're an aimless wanderer. So it's not surprising the phrase comes up again and again in songs — most notably in Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."



And thanks to Queen for putting that video up on their official YouTube feed and with no ad. That shows some nice respect for their fans, and I hope I'm returning the favor by embedding them here and inviting all the love possible for this overflowingly generous band.

Now, I can't wear on your patience long enough to point out how many different songs have the title "Any Way the Wind Blows"...



But look at Doris Day — so wholesome, but kind of dirty:



And here's a different song with the same title. It's the one that's stuck in my personal memory bank — in 2 really different versions. You've got the Mothers of Invention of "Freak Out"...



... and the insanely, delightfully slowed down rendition by the Mothers in the form of Ruben and the Jets...



But maybe you like this kind of thing, slick country rock from the 1980s. Same title, but again, a completely different song:

"Some laud Asperger’s language about the 'special abilities' of children on the 'most favorable' end of his autistic 'range'..."

"...speculating that he applied his diagnosis to protect them from Nazi eugenics — a kind of psychiatric Schindler’s list. But this was in keeping with the selective benevolence of Nazi psychiatry; Asperger also warned that 'less favorable cases' would 'roam the streets' as adults, 'grotesque and dilapidated.' Words such as these could be a death sentence in the Third Reich. And in fact, dozens of children whom Asperger evaluated were killed.... At least 5,000 children perished in around 37 'special wards.'... Killings were done in the youths’ own beds, as nurses issued overdoses of sedatives until the children grew ill and died, usually of pneumonia. Asperger worked closely with the top figures in Vienna’s euthanasia program.... He would probably have been a footnote in the history of autism research had it not been for Lorna Wing, a British psychiatrist who tracked down Asperger’s 1944 article on autistic psychopathy. She thought it lent important context to the narrower definition of autism then in use, and by the early ’80s, 'Asperger syndrome,' and the idea of a broader autism 'spectrum,' had entered the medical lexicon.... Naming a disorder after someone is meant to credit and commend, and Asperger merited neither.:

From "The Nazi History Behind ‘Asperger’" by Edith Sheffer, author of "Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna."

Federal judge orders the city of Sibley, Iowa to stop threatening to sue a man who has a webpage saying the city smells bad.

I'd never heard of Sibley, Iowa, and I doubt if I'd have found this website, but now I'm reading it:

We're not just talking an "oh, that was a little stinky" kind of smell. We're talking a rotten blood, stale beer, "I wonder if I should see a doctor after breathing that" wall of fumes. The putrid air seemed to hang over much of the town for 3-4 days every week. It was particularly nasty on hot and humid summer days.

At the time I lived very close to the offending facility. It was absolutely terrible, we couldn't open our windows in the spring, summer or fall thanks to the seemingly malignant stench. Driving down 10th Street would make you instantly regret using your vehicle's air conditioner. And need I mention: the facility is located right down the block from Superfoods, the only grocery store in town.

Great example of the "Streisand effect." Now, the website — titled "Should you move to Sibley, Iowa?" — or news of the lawsuit is likely to come up in searches for Sibley.

Here's the Courthouse News article about the judicial decision, which is also describe a the top of the "Should you move to Sibley" page.

It's worth noting that the plant that emitted stink is gone (as the "Should you move" page says).

"Today, I rarely hear teens show any desire to have anything I’d consider a normal adult life."

"Yes, I know, even that word—normal—triggers teens these days.... I’ve overheard my oldest daughter and her friends discuss their post-college plans. They all say they want to get married, for a few years, get divorced, travel the world, be single in their 40s, date both guys and girls, just to try it out, even if they aren’t bi, and never, under any circumstances, do they want to have children. Ever. They actually show an open contempt for anything that connotes permanence or settling down. They want careers that will allow them to jump from company to company. They don’t want to own a normal house. That’s too much of a commitment. They want something temporary, like an apartment, or something small, like a tiny house on wheels.... When I was a teen, I wanted a permanent relationship. I wanted a life-long career with the same company. I wanted a house. I wanted kids. I wanted to be 'that guy' who retired from his place of employment with a nice farewell party after 35 years of service, and spent his retirement babysitting his multiple grandchildren in the same house where he raised their parents. And right now, half of the teens on Quora read that last paragraph and shuddered. It sounds like a nightmare for them."

From a Quora answer to "What’s the most frustrating thing about getting older?"

Andrea Mantegna's "Resurrection."

"From 1456 to 1459, Mantegna devoted himself to the monumental altarpiece commissioned by Gregorio Correr, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of San Zeno in Verona."

(Click to enlarge and see many amazing details. I especially like the specificity in the faces and demeanor of the roused soldiers and the stylized radiations surrounding Jesus.)

"HAPPY EASTER!... NO MORE DACA DEAL!... Mexico doing very little, if not NOTHING!... stop their cash cow NAFTA! NEED WALL!..."

A man with 50 million followers only has 6 "Moments"... just one of the many inexplicable things about Trump.

Did he go to church on Easter? I notice there's a 2 hour gap between "HAPPY EASTER!" and  NO MORE DACA DEAL!... Mexico doing very little, if not NOTHING!... stop their cash cow NAFTA! NEED WALL!..."

Is he eating too much candy?

HAPPY EASTER!...  NEED SALVATION!...

"Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a Being lack?"

"The answer? Limitation," writes Jordan Peterson, recounting "an old Jewish story." He continues, now with his own insight:

If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be. Everything that could be already is, and everything that could happen already has. And it is for this reason, so the story goes, that God created man. No limitation, no story. No story, no Being. That idea has helped me deal with the terrible fragility of Being. It helped my client, too. I don’t want to overstate the significance of this. I don’t want to claim that this somehow makes it all OK. She still faced the cancer afflicting her husband, just as I still faced my daughter’s terrible illness. But there’s something to be said for recognizing that existence and limitation are inextricably linked.

Peterson proceeds to talk about Superman, who got boring when the plotline was that he had powers that worked on anything that could happen. His story was revived by giving him limitations:

A superhero who can do anything turns out to be no hero at all. He’s nothing specific, so he’s nothing. He has nothing to strive against, so he can’t be admirable 

AND: I feel a pop-song cue to the Talking Heads' "Heaven." That link goes to Lyrics Genius, where you can play the song, read the lyrics, and see line-by-line commentary on the lyrics. On the line, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens," someone has added:

This refrain at first seems nonsensical, or perhaps tongue-in-cheek: Why would the most perfect place in all of creation be so…well…boring? However, consider: Once a state of perfection is reached, anything deviating from that is then imperfect. And if Heaven is imperfect, what’s the point? How’s it any different from Earth? This at first frustratingly rational take on spirituality also serves as a reminder of how boring life would be if things really were perfect: In the immortal words of Dolly Parton, “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”

If those Dolly Parton words really are immortal —  omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent? — why did I keep finding them only in quotes (like that one) and not in song lyrics? Because it's a paraphrase, I think. People haven't remembered the words, only the idea. I think I found the song, a song for children, "I Am a Rainbow." The line is, "To make a rainbow you must have rain/Must have sunshine, joy, and pain."

This is my favorite rendition of a song about rainbows — it's never boring...

And when you’re a female, they let you do it. You can do anything. Just bite. Don’t even wait. You can do anything.

Female privilege.

I'm reading "Sanaa Lathan confirmed as star who bit Beyoncé" at Page 6:

[Tiffany Haddish] describ[ed] the scene to GQ, “There was this actress there that’s just, like, doing the mostest. She bit Beyoncé in the face.”...

A source who was at the bash tells us, “It was a big thing in the moment at the party, everyone was talking about how anyone would dare to do that....

"Beyoncé’s at the bar, so I said.., ‘Did she really bite you?’” Haddish revealed, adding she told Beyoncé she was ready to beat down the barbarian... "[Bey] was like, ‘Tiffany, no. Don’t do that….. She’s not even drunk. . . Just chill,’” Haddish recounted.

Lathan has strenuously denied biting Bey, tweeting on March 27, “Y’all are funny. Under no circumstance did I bite Beyoncé and if I did it would be a love bite.”

Violence by women is brushed aside — a joke, a catfight, a quirky expression of "love." It's a privilege, but it's also how women are subordinated. What we do doesn't really matter. It's just a silly game. Move on. Compare Trump's silly playfulness that is the basis of my post title.

Resurrection.

The post title is the name of this 1483 painting by Piero della Francesca.

Writing in his Lectures on Fine Art on the portrayal of Jesus in the Christian visual tradition, Hegel is doubtful whether it lies within the capacity of painting to represent those awesome moments in which the specifically divine aspects of Christ are revealed in the resurrection, the transfiguration, or the ascension. Painting has no difficulty in showing Christ in his human or earthly aspects, as a teacher, a preacher, a leader, a man of anger and forgiveness, and of course as a man capable of terrible suffering. But where "his Divinity should break out from his human personality," Hegel writes, "painting comes up against new difficulties." It is easy enough to say, in words, that Christ was at once man and god, but to show this complex metaphysical nature in a way that is visually convincing tested the powers of a painterly tradition that defined its achievement in naturalistic terms....

Piero della Francesca's Resurrection... overcomes Hegel's difficulties.... Piero has shown us what it must have felt like to be the subject of a resurrection.... Christ recognizes that something undeniable has taken place, which nonetheless strains the limits of credibility. He is shown at an instant of stunned triumph. His is the expression of someone who accepts, and is even awed by, what he has no way of doubting but cannot altogether believe.... The guard at the extreme right seems to have awakened, even to have seen the miracle that he must have interpreted as a dream, for such is the torpor of his body that he seems to be sinking back into sleep, having raised himself on one arm. Only Christ is awake, but in a sense of "awake" that contrasts not so much with "asleep" as with "dead."....