2021 is refusing to be a decent year, it seems, what with now the omicron surge of the COVID virus and the determined refusal of so many people to take public health measures seriously. It’s a shame that so many people are having to deal with this at a time that is supposed to festive and joyful. But pretty much since 2016, the country has had any joy that comes its way stolen by any number of grinches. The latest of which is a millionaire from coal country who lives on a yacht.
A lot can be written about yet another Manchin betrayal- but that can wait for another time. Instead, I’ve been using my December days to catch up on a lot of reading of both books and documentaries that have caught my eye, starting with a plane trip I took last month to the Pacific Northwest. Since then, I have been working through several reading/study projects. I thought I would share a few of the best of these efforts here.
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While on the plane to and from SEATAC last month, I had a chance to read this book, Beautiful Country, by a lady named Qian Julie Wang. In 1994, when she was still a little girl, her parents came to New York – an act of desperation by her father, who was fed up with China’s communist government. Mother and daughter followed and became visa overstayers sliding into the darkness of Chinatown and doing whatever jobs they could get in order to survive in the shadows. Deportation back to China with the attendant punishment that would ensure was always in the background for them. Qian writes the story from the child’s point of view, trying to assimilate a whole new set of experiences into her consciousness and learn an entirely new language and a way of life. She was doing this while her parents were working nightmare jobs. Without proper work visas, they cannot get “normal” jobs and become ripe for exploitation by unscrupulous Chinese and non-Chinese alike. The book is a telling commentary on America’s immigration mess, showing how the “system” helps contribute to the misery this one family experienced replicated 1000 times over.
The book’s title comes from the Chinese Kanji characters for America, which literally means “beautiful country.” (美國 – MEIGUO in Mandarin. In Japanese, the Kanji for America is similar but also different. It literally translates into “rice country,” 米国. I never understood how they got to that, but that is what it is.)
I had heard an interview with the author and knew immediately that I had to read the book, and I am glad I did. She tells a well-written story that highlights the struggle that new immigrants in the US face, regardless of where they come from. It also points out our genuine need for comprehensive immigration reform, something two different presidents tried to accomplish over the course of 16 years. Qian Julie Wang makes no secret of her desire to see the US change its immigration stance, but she writes the book in such a way that the political statement does not overtake a really moving story. A story that highlights just how much Americans take for granted in the US and maybe shouldn’t. I strongly recommend the book; it is well worth your time.
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Another project that I completed this month was to finish the second of two histories of Apartheid in South Africa. I became interested in the subject when I was in Romania working over a decade ago and had rewatched the movie Invictus. After the advent of the orange monster, I plunged back into the subject, off and on, because I remain convinced that there are many similarities to the election of 2016 in the US and the 1948 election in South Africa.
Apartheid 1948-1994, by Saul Dubow, is a hard but worthwhile read. The book is long- and written in a smaller type than I would have preferred, but it is full of detail explaining the background to the rise of the National Party and how it came to power. It also lays out well the increasing authoritarianism under which it governed until F.W. DeClerk recognized that the system was unstainable in 1990. Saul Dubow refamiliarizes and defamiliarizes apartheid so as to approach South Africa’s white supremacist past from unlikely perspectives. He asks not only why apartheid was defeated but how it survived so long. It’s from Oxford Press and definitely a well-researched academic book that takes a fresh look at the subject using recently released texts from the South African archives.
Besides being excellent historical research, it’s a warning. The similarities of the Afrikaners to the Trump humpers are rather amazing.
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In addition to my reading assignments, I also had the opportunity to watch two excellent documentaries. One that was on HBO, but was produced by CNN, was about the evolution of late-night TV from its beginnings in the ’50s until today. For someone of my age and era, it was a fascinating trip down memory lane. Particularly because I can remember as a kid being only allowed to stay up late enough to watch Johnny Carson only on special occasions, I can still remember when the Tonight Show was filmed in New York and the movement of the show to “beautiful downtown Burbank” was a really big deal.
The documentary is broken up into six episodes. It chronicles the late-night shows from Jack Paar in the ’50s through the rise of Letterman, Leno – the feud over who was going to take over the tonight show when Carson retired -and into the new century when stars like Jon Stewart, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel and a whole host of others came on the scene. Having lived through all of it- it made for fascinating viewing and binge-watched the whole thing in one night.
Here is the trailer:
The series had been around for many months this year – but as is my want – I only got around to watching it just recently. There are two parts that I found especially interesting; first was the way the show took a look at Johny Carson and the transformation of the genre that he made from the days of Steve Allen and Jack Paar; the second was the rise of streaming services and more networks available and how they now work their show material to be “packaged” as it were into YouTube clips that one could watch in “byte-sized” chunks of 5 minutes or less. The shows also reflect the US history that was occurring while the Late Night shows were on and how the tastes of the audience changed over time. I marveled at how I was now a consumer of these “packages. For example, I seldom watch The Late Show live, but I will come to the TV after dinner and watch Stephen Colbert’s monologue on YouTube. The late-night hosts are aware of this fad, and you can tell how they have worked to adapt to the change. Jimmy Kimmel, in particular, has used the clip phenomenon very effectively.
It makes for good TV and fascinating history.
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Finally, on the plane ride back, I had the chance to watch the documentary on the life of Anthony Bourdain, Roadrunner. It was more than a little sad to watch, and I found myself feeling strongly, the sadness that his friends and fans felt when they each learned the news of his tragic death. I enjoyed his shows and had read his book Kitchen Confidential many years ago.
Critics’ reviews of the documentary have been mixed, but I found the movie both engaging and disturbing. They tried and, in my opinion, only semi- succeeded in examining the complex person that was Anthony Bourdain. I loved his commentary in his shows and his rich appreciation of the places he went. The film is also unsparing at examing the dark side of Anthony Bourdain, which is appropriate – especially given the fact that almost all really great artists have a dark side, which is what makes their work so great. Bourdain had a dark side, he beat a drug addiction in the ’80s, but his dark side is one of the features that made him a great observer of the human condition. I admire him precisely because he had that dark side and was a complex personality.
The New York Times review of the film is worth a read:
Neville told me about a scene that didn’t make the final cut of “Roadrunner,” drawn from behind-the-scenes footage from the Amsterdam episode of “The Layover,” which aired in 2012. “They went to a coffee shop and ate hashish brownies, or whatever. They were filming, they were talking, and then Tony stopped. He didn’t say anything for thirty seconds. Tom [Vitale, Bourdain’s longtime director and producer] went up to him and said, ‘Tony, what’s wrong?’ And he said, ‘Everybody’s looking at me.’ And it’s, like, yeah, because they’re filming you, but it was his paranoia coming out: Everybody’s always staring at me.”
It may be trite to say, of a famous person, that people felt like they knew him; that sense of one-to-one intimacy is arguably inherent to the modern version of celebrity. But Bourdain stood out for his directness, his everyman-ness, the candor with which he acknowledged his own flaws. Neville sees his approachability as something that eventually wore him down: “Everybody would go up to him, and everybody would want to talk to him or buy him a beer. He was always gracious about it, always appreciative. And that’s a burden. I think that was part of his agoraphobia, his feeling of, like, how can you be an observer if everybody’s looking at you?” Still, Neville told me that he doesn’t see his film as a cautionary tale about the costs of Bourdain’s immense fame. “The things he was wrestling with went back long before he was famous, and those things never really changed,” he said.
Because one knows how Anthony Bourdain’s life ended, it’s probably wrong to say one enjoys the film, but I think it’s quite all right to say that it’s a necessary thing to watch. In the end, though, the film never answers the real question that was on everyone’s mind: Why did he take his own life?
From the Times again:
Crafting the story—or, at least, a story—of Bourdain’s death raises other ethically murky questions. The final years of his life were defined by his tumultuous relationship with Asia Argento, the Italian actor and filmmaker. In “Roadrunner,” Argento is portrayed as a human intoxicant, with whom Bourdain developed an all-consuming infatuation. His former colleagues and friends recall the disastrous filming of an episode, in Hong Kong, on which Bourdain had installed Argento as director. They describe how she influenced his decision to abruptly sack a longtime colleague, and his devastation when she began to tire of his attentions and romantically pull away. The last thing Bourdain posted to Instagram before his death, his friend and colleague Helen Cho points out, was music from the film “Violent City,” a 1970 poliziottesco about a man seeking revenge on the woman who betrays him. I was surprised to learn that Neville hadn’t attempted to interview Argento for the film. The lead-up to Bourdain’s suicide, he explained, is “like narrative quicksand. People think they want to know more, but you tell them one thing more, and they want to know ten more. And none of those things actually bring you closer to understanding Tony. I realized that it would be a bunch of she said, they said: ‘This happened,’ ‘No, that happened.’ That’s not the film I wanted to make. Somebody else can make a film about his last relationship, the last year of his life.”
I found myself holding back tears at a couple of points in the film. One of the most haunting parts is this one: “You’re probably going to find out about this anyway, so here’s a little pre-emptive truth-telling,” Bourdain says, in disembodied voice-over, in the movie’s first few minutes. “There’s no happy ending.”
Watch the film if you can.