Kalpen Modi on his Way Out

That's the news today, I guess (WaPo here). I'm interested to see who the replacement is, but not exactly edge-of-my-seat excited. After all, Kalpen Modi got us the 9/11 arts day of service, and... yeah. That's it.

Not that I'm complaining, since health care reform is the best thing artists have gotten for a while, but... I highly doubt that the next arts liason (if they bother to have one) is going to really shake the boat.

Also, I have him to thank for more flame mail than I've ever received in my life. So there's that.

And thinking about Kalpen Modi got me thinking about Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN, who was going to be the Surgeon General. Remember that? God only knows why he backed out -- probably his cozy relationship at CNN with pharmaceutical advertisers -- but I watched CNN during the Health Care Vote (sorry, I was on Jet Blue, that's all I could do) and basically, all of the CNN team was largely deferring to Sanjay Gupta who was fielding all of the questions about the health care bill's content. In a way, he basically fulfilled his public-relations role, except without being paid, and only on CNN. Which is a good bet, because it turns out that when important things are going on, that's really where we're looking.

Conference Call with Kalpen Modi, Americans for the Arts, and Corporation for National and Community Service

Sat in on a conference call between Kalpen Modi (previously Kal Penn), Americans for the Arts, and the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Some notes/reactions:

1. Although the arts are important to the Obama Administration in and of themselves (which I got from Arne Duncan in a conference call last week), Kalpen Modi underlined the instrumental benefits of the arts to the economy, to education, and to tie together economy (you can tell from how they speak that they've internalized the Obama heritage of community organizers).
2. The Obama Administration is not out to make artists.
3. The crux of Obama's approach to the arts currently is based around the Edward Kennedy Serve America Act. The act added arts to the types of community service supported, increased the amount of support for community service in a number of ways--especially in numbers of volunteers supported--and declared 9/11 a day of national service.
4. The 9/11 Day of Service is the current focus of arts policy, bringing together not only the Corporation of National and Community Service with Americans for the Arts, but also bringing together every branch of government that cares about the arts - Kalpen mentioned the Department of State's cultural ambassadorship program, and arts within HUD and Transportation (the latter two are departments I hadn't heard of any arts coming from, but I'm glad that I'm wrong)
5. Other programs on their way include the Social Innovation Fund (from the White House Office of Social Innovation) and a Volunteer Generation fund (to help nonprofits increase their ranks of volunteers). The appropriates for this have been passed in the House (which decreased the number) and in the Senate (which increased the number). Kalpen said that they were "looking with interest" to see how those two bills would be reconciled.
6. The 9/11 Day of Service comes with two websites: one is the general volunteerism website at Serve.gov, the other is the arts-specific website that Americans for the Arts set up, at Serve.artsusa.org. Arts volunteer organizations are encouraged to list their events on both, so that people can sign up, and post about their experiences.
   
7. Serve.artsusa.org also has two significant other attractions: one is a petition for the addition of Artistscorps to the current Peacecorps/Americorps/etc. within the Corporation for National and Community Service. The other is the United We Serve: Arts Idea Kit which is intended to serve as a springboard for ideas of how to mix art and public service.

That's really what you need to know. My sense, both from this conference call and the one with Arne Duncan, is this: the Obama Administration wants to create a grassroots arts policy, rather than a centralized, NEA-led policy. Given the difficulty in Congress of getting support for the arts, that's pobably wise for the moment, especially as he's neck deep in criminal prosecutions, healthcare, cap-and-trade, getting Ben Bernanke re-authorized, closing Guantanamo Bay and shipping the inmates to Kansas, and his coming legal battles around DoMA.

However, they recognize that we're crucial and they're willing to help us try to get boots on the ground. Where they see something effective happening, they want to duplicate it--the philosophy is the same as his proposal to duplicate the Harlem Children's Zone in 20 cities around America.

In a way, he's trying to use tools in the free-market to try and help promote the arts: increasing the incentives for success (for instance, part of the appropriations is that the education grants to students who participate in Americorps or Seniorcorps will be pegged to the level of Pell Grants, so that the benefit doesn't lag).

I left it reasonably happy: I'd have liked more direct support, but the general feeling was, "We'll provide some big infrastructure for volunteerism, and we'll put all our support behind the good work you do. Now get out there and do it."

To put it another way: "If you build it, we will come."

Benjamin Button?

I saw The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button today, and... well, I really liked it. I have seen various reviews from people whose opinions I respect alleging things about bad philosophical undertones regarding race relations, and a dislike of the use of Hurricane Katrina in the movie.

As to the first point, this is always a difficult thing to judge. I am an Israeli-American from Orange County--I can count on one finger the amount of black kids who were in my elementary school, and I didn't exactly wind up with a lot more. I wound up open-minded, I hope, but... well, okay. There's two kinds of racism. The first is actually believing one race to be inferior--hard racism.

Recently, I saw David Mamet's play Edmond performed. The ideological undergirding of that play appeared to be that... well, that black people are genetically predisposed to avoiding responsibility and doing stupid, short-term-enjoyment-oriented sinful activity, which ends them up in jail. I'm not kidding. White man decides to live like a black man for a day, and therefore winds up picking up hookers, killing a waitress, and going to jail. There he finds his true home, because he realizes that's where he was meant to be--because he wasn't born like all those other white folks. Again: I'm not kidding.

So, that's clearly over-the-top racist. My impression of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is not that. The black characters are shown to be no more or less caring, kind, gentle (maybe more so).

But there might be a case to be made about the second type of racism, soft racism. Does it portray accurately how black people lived in New Orleans over the span of the film, or does it fall into two dimensional Gone With The Wind stereotypes? The answer is somewhere in the middle. I winced when, early on, a black woman (whose identity was never properly explained to me) referred to "Miss Daisy" while trying to make her feel comfortable--if not a deliberate reference to Driving Miss Daisy, then a huge oversight by the director. But I didn't feel I was looking at watermelon eating, "what is I gonna do," minstrel blacks.

Did I notice that in the "modern day" period, blacks were still mostly serving the whites, and that this wasn't questioned? Yes. But this, like it or not, has been my personal experience. I went to the Irvine Train Station for the first time a week ago, and was surprised to find that all of the ticket staff were African-American. This in a town in which I have not met an African-American resident.

But I am not in a position to judge, seeing as I haven't lived in New Orleans, among either communities. I don't feel the movie was disrespectful to African-Americans deliberately, but it may have had some elements that were offensive (I have not read a nuanced argument detailing what exactly the qualms might be). Still, if they exist, they probably are the victim of either the original short story (F. Scott Fitzgerald is still a product of his times) or modern day ignorance--or even just clumsy storytelling.

As to the second point, I do feel more strongly that using Hurricane Katrina was actually the right choice. It actually reminds me of the way that 9/11 is used in 25th Hour. It's part of the fabric of New Orleans now, a historical moment. But more than that: it's part of why we're telling the story.

See, the fascinating aspect (for me, at least--but I think it's central to the story) is how we deal with death. Each of the character confronts more than one close personal death, whether from old age or war, whether alone or all together on the tugboat. Some of the death is metaphorical--Daisy's dancing life dies after the car accident, Benjamin's affair dies with WWII. But it's about coping with death (and with aging, the sign of looming death).

What was most overpowering about Hurricane Katrina was facing up to death, just as it was the hardest part of 9/11, and remains the hardest part of Iraq. People, en masse, are stripped of even the right to die with dignity, with purpose--they die suddenly, without preparation, without knowledge of what is going on. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is told as a story to that younger woman who is about to lose her mother. Now, her mother doesn't die from Hurricane Katrina, but the fact remains that after the Hurricane there will be many people who want to know things from their parents, who want the story of their lives, and may have lost it.

Whether or not the story could have been told better is a matter of debate. I was not perturbed by the length of the movie, although it was pushing it, because it earned the length from me the same way Marquez' Hundred Years of Solitude did: by offering me a world, not just a story, and letting me watch that entire world unfold.

I think this movie has gotten a bit of a bad shake. I liked it a lot.