Legal dramas give us nice fantasies of the right thing happening at the last minute after it looked like a gross miscarriage of justice was completely unavoidable. The Good Wife is no exception. On last night's episode, Alicia Florrick's (Julianna Margulies) pro bono case has her defending a white man identified by a black eyewitness (Sterling K. Brown) as a convenience store robber. It isn't until close to the end that it is revealed that the black eyewitness is in fact the perpetrator of the crime, and the innocent man is set free.
Meanwhile, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baransky) decides that the firm must stop doing pro bono cases, and urges those attorneys with pending pro bono cases to plead them out. Diane goes to visit the legal aid clinic to tell them in person, but instead winds up offering them office space at her firm when learning that they're going to get kicked out of their current office.
That's nice, but I wonder how many law firms are actually doing that in real life. Another difference between real life and this particular episode: In real life, the black eyewitness would have been treated like a suspect from the get-go.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Friday, October 14, 2011
White cluelessness
Let me preface this by saying that I am white. I need sunscreen to go pick up my morning paper. So I can say things such as the fact that white people are clueless about many race issues. Really. I can read all of Maya Angelou's books and watch all of Spike Lee's films, it doesn't make me an expert on the black experience.
But, clueless as I am, I do know certain things: for example, if I am the coach for a basketball team, I know enough that I shouldn't call my players by a certain word even if they use that word amongst themselves completely casual. This has actually happened, the coach was on the news. Also, I know that if I am an art photographer, I shouldn't take a picture of a white man in blackface. Taking a picture of a black man in blackface is also taboo. But what about taking a picture of a black man in whiteface?
Apparently, white artist Nathaniel C. Shannon thought that yes, that is okay. Last week I went to an art show near Detroit's Eastern Market. Nathaniel there had a whole series of photographs of a black man in whiteface playing golf in unlikely locations around the city. It was titled "Detroit Community Golf Course," if I recall correctly.
Maybe the whiteface wasn't the most offensive thing about those photographs. Maybe it's the idea that Detroit as a setting for photographs is only good for pictures of urban decay and poverty, what is sometimes called "urban porn."
Now, I will confess that I don't know much about art. Why should I pay ten grand for a large canvas painted with a uniform shade of green with a red dot in the corner if I can drive to Home Depot and hire someone to produce something exactly like that for a fraction of what the artist is asking for? Art photographers are usually not much better. At another show, I think it was at CCS, there was a very blurry photo that looked like two men having sex. The tag said $500. A lot of these modern artists, it seems to me, are just using bold concepts as a means of compensating for weak technical skills.
Going back to Nathaniel's photos: the man has technical skill. If I had been at his side with my Canon Powershot taking pictures of the man golfing, my pictures wouldn't look anywhere near as polished as his. But, if he has skill, why does he need to resort to race-baiting to sell his work? Alonso Delarte wrote a very short article on Examiner.com about Nathaniel's work that prompted quite a few white people to bash the writer, spilling far more ink on the topic than the original writer.
If you had any doubt that Alonzo's Jewish, this proves it: Mark Penxa remarked, at the end of a long diatribe: "I hope you enjoyed the free food and drinks, you *seemed* to be having a great time the entire night." You can just imagine one of Adolf Hitler's friends in 1917 pointing out that the Jewish critic at his art opening last night ate all the mini burgers yet had the gall to write a negative review of Hitler's paintings.
Alonso was also taken to task for not asking the photographer about the meaning of his work. But why should he have? So that Nathaniel could spout off some clueless rhetoric pretending to understand what black people go through in Detroit? Or so that he could admit that it was just a ploy to sell off an entire series of photographs?
He did ask black men for their opinion (and they were tough to find in that gallery, at most there were five black men among three hundred people or so packed in there). But there is only one man who would have anything meaningful to say about those photographs, and that is the black man who agreed to have a make-up artist put him in whiteface so he could be photographed around the city playing golf.
So in summary, I won't be expecting an invitation to speak at an NAACP event any time soon. Neither should Nathaniel C. Shannon.
But, clueless as I am, I do know certain things: for example, if I am the coach for a basketball team, I know enough that I shouldn't call my players by a certain word even if they use that word amongst themselves completely casual. This has actually happened, the coach was on the news. Also, I know that if I am an art photographer, I shouldn't take a picture of a white man in blackface. Taking a picture of a black man in blackface is also taboo. But what about taking a picture of a black man in whiteface?
Apparently, white artist Nathaniel C. Shannon thought that yes, that is okay. Last week I went to an art show near Detroit's Eastern Market. Nathaniel there had a whole series of photographs of a black man in whiteface playing golf in unlikely locations around the city. It was titled "Detroit Community Golf Course," if I recall correctly.
Maybe the whiteface wasn't the most offensive thing about those photographs. Maybe it's the idea that Detroit as a setting for photographs is only good for pictures of urban decay and poverty, what is sometimes called "urban porn."
Now, I will confess that I don't know much about art. Why should I pay ten grand for a large canvas painted with a uniform shade of green with a red dot in the corner if I can drive to Home Depot and hire someone to produce something exactly like that for a fraction of what the artist is asking for? Art photographers are usually not much better. At another show, I think it was at CCS, there was a very blurry photo that looked like two men having sex. The tag said $500. A lot of these modern artists, it seems to me, are just using bold concepts as a means of compensating for weak technical skills.
Going back to Nathaniel's photos: the man has technical skill. If I had been at his side with my Canon Powershot taking pictures of the man golfing, my pictures wouldn't look anywhere near as polished as his. But, if he has skill, why does he need to resort to race-baiting to sell his work? Alonso Delarte wrote a very short article on Examiner.com about Nathaniel's work that prompted quite a few white people to bash the writer, spilling far more ink on the topic than the original writer.
If you had any doubt that Alonzo's Jewish, this proves it: Mark Penxa remarked, at the end of a long diatribe: "I hope you enjoyed the free food and drinks, you *seemed* to be having a great time the entire night." You can just imagine one of Adolf Hitler's friends in 1917 pointing out that the Jewish critic at his art opening last night ate all the mini burgers yet had the gall to write a negative review of Hitler's paintings.
Alonso was also taken to task for not asking the photographer about the meaning of his work. But why should he have? So that Nathaniel could spout off some clueless rhetoric pretending to understand what black people go through in Detroit? Or so that he could admit that it was just a ploy to sell off an entire series of photographs?
He did ask black men for their opinion (and they were tough to find in that gallery, at most there were five black men among three hundred people or so packed in there). But there is only one man who would have anything meaningful to say about those photographs, and that is the black man who agreed to have a make-up artist put him in whiteface so he could be photographed around the city playing golf.
So in summary, I won't be expecting an invitation to speak at an NAACP event any time soon. Neither should Nathaniel C. Shannon.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Really, Director Vance?
It must have been a couple of weeks ago that I got back into watching NCIS: Los Angeles. They've been rerunning the last few episodes of Season 2. In the season finale, "Familia," we learn that NCIS director Leon Vance (Rocky Carroll) backs up all his critical files on his Microsoft SkyDrive. He asks Nell Jones (Renée Felice Smith) to disable the keystroke recognition software on her computer before he types in his password—
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! Director Vance, head of an American intelligence agency, keeps his critical files on the Web just like that? Are you kidding me? Does this make any sense to you? It's one thing to hide things in plain sight, but this just seems idiotic to me. I don't keep critical files on the Web, and I don't even have a security clearance.
I don't know if this is true or not, but I'm told that at some places that deal with issues of national security, they remove the hard drives from the computers and store them in a vault at night. This on top of the fact that the janitors have to have security clearance: so, if one of them were to steal a computer, they would still not get any sensitive info out of it. Also, CIA and NSA employees can't even take cellphones, flash drives, etc., into the CIA or NSA Headquarters. I imagine similar measures are in effect at other intelligence agencies.
This takes the cake as the most ridiculous, stupid and awkward product placement I have ever seen in a TV show.
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! Director Vance, head of an American intelligence agency, keeps his critical files on the Web just like that? Are you kidding me? Does this make any sense to you? It's one thing to hide things in plain sight, but this just seems idiotic to me. I don't keep critical files on the Web, and I don't even have a security clearance.
I don't know if this is true or not, but I'm told that at some places that deal with issues of national security, they remove the hard drives from the computers and store them in a vault at night. This on top of the fact that the janitors have to have security clearance: so, if one of them were to steal a computer, they would still not get any sensitive info out of it. Also, CIA and NSA employees can't even take cellphones, flash drives, etc., into the CIA or NSA Headquarters. I imagine similar measures are in effect at other intelligence agencies.
This takes the cake as the most ridiculous, stupid and awkward product placement I have ever seen in a TV show.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Family drama on Family Guy
Do you still watch Family Guy? Last episode I saw, Meg stood up for herself when the other family started members their usual, boring use-Meg-as-punching-bag schtick. As boring as that shtick is, it is nowhere as annoying as the shrillness of Meg standing up for herself. Well, thanks for making it very easy for me to change the channel to CBS to watch The Good Wife, a show that now comes on on Sunday nights.
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