Polygon, the Dancing Bear

Occasional notes on politics, history, technology, architecture,
and the life of a county clerk

2002:
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2003:
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April / May / June / July
August / September / October
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2004:
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April / May / June / July
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November / December

2005:
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2006:
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November / December

2007:
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August / September / October
November / December

2008:
January / February / March
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Current entries

Friday, November 25, 2002, 5:10 pm

I have received the latest issue (#100) of Derogatory References, Arthur Hlavaty's highly regarded personalzine. Arthur, who has turned 60 but disdains the title of Curmudgeon as "too flattering," has turned many a brilliant phrase in DR, and this issue doesn't disappoint:

A major function of the mass media is to deflect envy away from those with power to those with ability. The way most people use the word elitist shows how well it's working.

[Andy] Warhol represented scrap irony, the cheapest kind of negativism.

I think this whole "Silence Is Consent" meme is a bad one. There are times one is trapped in a situation where that is true, but that is the pathological case. Silence Is Consent goes with a lot of bad ideas, from blaming everyone in a country for the evils that go on there to feeling obligated to tell strangers on the street that they are too fat or don't really need their canes.

Depending on the kindness of strangers may not be as bad as depending on the competence of strangers.

The anti-downloading thing reminds me of that good old sexual warning, "If he gets free milk, he'll never buy the cow." Makes as much sense here.

And there's lots more, from the peculiar self-hatred of the Velvet Underground to the humor of the NFL Player Draft. To get an electronic copy, send email to hlavaty at panix dot com; to get the print version with artwork, send $1 to Arthur D. Hlavaty, 206 Valentine Street, Yonkers NY 10704-1814.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

Friday, November 25, 2002, 12:49 pm

Back to Detroit. A few weeks ago, my class at Wayne State University Law School had a reunion; my classmates and I were invited to write some comments about our experiences in law school and since then. I wrote, in part:

We were at Wayne during the absolute nadir of Detroit's history, a moment when any hope for the city seemed foolish and misplaced. When we emerged from the law library in the evening, the smell of abandoned buildings burning was in the air; car alarms, ignored, would wail sometimes all night long; huge billows of foul-smelling steam poured from every street grating, since there was no money to fix the leaking steam pipes.

Longtime Detroit institutions were dying: the downtown Hudson's [department store] closed during our school years; the stately old train station was abandoned in favor of some temporary aluminum structures; the vast Ford Rouge auto and steel plant, which once attracted visitors from around the world, ended all public tours. Student life was a bit like the Samuel R. Delaney novel Dhalgren, which portrays a handful of eccentric holdouts living in the ruins of a big city.

Those images returned to me quite vividly yesterday when I saw the new movie 8 Mile, set and filmed in Detroit and showing the familiar scenes of abandonment and devastation. A couple of scenes are even set in the old Michigan Theater, a 1920s movie palace crudely converted to a parking garage, where the domed plaster ceiling, the proscenium arch, and even the tattered remains of the curtain can still be seen above the top parking deck.

As a law student, I didn't live the life of Eminem and his friends, but my classmates and I knew the same shattered neighborhoods, lived in the same run-down apartment houses, rode the same oh-so-familiar Detroit buses -- except that the real buses are much more infrequent, crowded, and noisy than the ones in the movie.

I'm not at all familiar with Eminem or his music. I only just found out that he was also known as "Slim Shady". I knew already he was a big rap star, a white guy in a predominantly black genre. Judging by the reactions of my fellow viewers -- a group of middle-aged Ann Arbor Jewish men as unacquainted with Eminem as I was -- the movie served as an effective introduction to the world of rap. Indeed, the rhythms rang in my head for some time.

Coincidentally, on the same day I saw 8 Mile, Maureen Dowd published a scathing column about Eminem fans among the middle-aged baby boomers. I'm sure such people exist, but I don't think I know any of them. My friends and I enjoyed the movie, but I doubt any of us will buy any of his records.

The group that Eminem hangs out with calls itself "313", for the Detroit telephone area code. It may be overly geeky to imagine an allusion to "414", the gang of early-1980s Milwaukee computer hackers who also named themselves for their area code.

When I lived in Detroit, in 1979-82, 313 was the area code for the entire region of Southeast Michigan, Detroit and all of its suburbs together -- the entire media market or metro area. In those days, I frequently traveled between East Lansing and Detroit; the Dorr Road overpass on I-96 between Howell and Brighton was something of a landmark to me: the actual boundary and symbolic gateway to 313. I visualized a billboard at that location: "WELCOME TO AREA CODE 313: PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY."

But southeast Michigan now has six area codes; with all the other territory peeled away, 313 is confined to Detroit and a few enclaves and close-in suburbs. I would guess that no other U.S. area code territory has a population as predominantly African-American as 313 -- not even Washington DC's 202.

And Eight Mile Road (Detroit's northern city limits) is an area code boundary. At one point in the movie, another character jeers at Eminem, "you're not 313, you're 810." Since Detroit has no mobile home parks, the trailer where the Eminem character lives with his mother and sister was presumably in Macomb County -- north of Eight Mile, in (what was then) the suburban 810 area code.

Back in 1969, when Arlo Guthrie had become famous, he got to make a movie called Alice's Restaurant, in which he was the hero and musical genius, struggling to do the right thing, unappreciated by the world but adored by all the girls; it seemed just interminable. 8 Mile is Eminem's version of this same project -- every bit as hagiographic, and just one minute shorter, but a lot more successful as entertainment.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

Comments:

sim shady, 2/5/2003: Does anyone know the name of the song during the opening credits of 8 mile? it has a close up of the rappers mouth. Who is it also? ...
koolkid88, 11/20/2003: Eminem is the hottest guy on earth!!!!!!!!!!! NO JOKE!! I have liked eminem for 3 and a half years now. He is the best rapper I know. I look up to eminem. I think of Eminem as my role model.
Allison, 5/22/2004: What is the song from 8 mile called when eminem is driving around with his buddies. The lyrics go something like "you don't know" I can't remember it and I desperately want it. Fonzlev@excite.com
bling bling, 11/10/2004: What is the song that is playing while M is riding around on the bus> When the lady is staring at him???? On his way to work after his car breaks down?
kecko_20987@yahoo.com, 11/7/2005: hey i just wanted to know the first song that comes up on tha movie....its tha one that hes listening to on his headphones in tha beginning..

Friday, November 22, 2002, 1:15 pm

Grand Trunk Station. Some months ago, the editors of a literary magazine called Fourth Genre (published by the Michigan State University Press) chose one of my late father's photographs ("Grand Trunk Station") for the cover of their Fall 2002 issue. Normally, they also publish an essay by the photographer; since my father is gone, they asked me to write it.

Now the issue has appeared. Since the editors assured me that it would be all right to put the text on my personal web site, I include it here:

My father, Justin Kestenbaum (1925-1995), was born in New York City. Following the separation of his parents, he grew up in a series of foster homes and (after he got into trouble) in Pleasantville Cottage School, in Pleasantville, New York. It was there, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, under the tutelage of German refugees from Nazism, that he began his lifelong passion for photography.

In 1943, following graduation from high school, he lied about his age to join the Army, and was sent to the Pacific to join a unit already in the thick of hostilities.

After the war, my father and his brother Al, who also had photographic skills, worked in nightclubs from New York to Buffalo to Chicago. "Photo girls" would go from table to table taking pictures of patrons, while my father and his brother worked behind the scenes in a tiny darkroom, developing and printing the photos. later on, they settled in Chicago, where the two brothers worked at places like Lakeview Photo. In those days, photo processing was still done largely by hand, and required a lot of skill.

Eventually, my father, with the helo of the GI Bill and a William Randolph Hearst fellowship, pursued graduate work in American history at Northwestern University. In 1963, he accepted a faculty position in the history department of Michigan State University, where he remained a professor for the rest of his life.

But all this time, in each of the apartments or houses where we lived, he always had a darkroom full of sophisticated equipment and plumbing that kept the water at exactly 68 degrees Fahrenheit, considered ideal for developing black-and-white photographs. He mixed his own chemicals and even formulated his own developer, which he called "Justinol."

I disappointed him by seeing photography as a pragmatic means to an end, and took little interest in the details of darkroom work. But he generously shared his skills with many others, who came to our house and his darkroom to learn. I remember the little aphorisms he often repeated, such as "Expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights" (he always scoffed at the recommended settings) and "Film is cheap!" (that is, go ahead and make multiple images with different exposures.

He took pictures, too, but at first the picture-taking was almost casual, an adjunct to his darkroom work. We have boxes and boxes of hundreds of pictures he took of my sisters and me when we were kids.

By the 1960s, he was snapping candid, unposed pictures of his friends and colleagues, using only available light. Some of these portraits became quite memorable. One of the greatest was his picture of John Robison, founder of Jocundry's bookstore in East Lansing, showing John in a wide-brimmed hat with a twinkle in his eye. No other picture quite captured that twinkle. When John and more than two hundred others died in a 1979 plane crash, my father's portrait of John Robison became one of the main images used by the national media.

By the 1970s, he took a great interest in the photographers who traveled the country for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression, such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lenge. They made documentary photographs that transcended documentation, often unpeopled images of buildings and storefronts and signs that expressed the poverty and dignity and humor of America at that time.

He made a slide show of many of these images, accompanied by music and commentary about the United States in the 1930s. And pretty soon he and I were driving around the countryside looking for similar kinds of images he could photograph: abandoned barns and houses, the paint weathered off, old windmills, schoolhouses, and cemeteries. He would take the pictures; I would carry the cases and lenses and film. As I became more interested in architectural history and preservation, I guided our tours toward the most interesting (and threatened) old buildings of the region.

He and I visited both of the old railroad stations in Lansing while they were still in use for passenger trains: the Michigan Central station on East Michigan (now Clara's Restaurant) and the Grand Trunk station on South Washington. Both were built in the era when the railroads were far and away the dominant form of transportation in the country. A whole new architectural motif was invented for the train station: the wide roof with the sheltered platform to protect passengers from the weather; the large and very high-ceilinged space inside the terminal to provide glorious relief froi a long trip cooped up in a train compartment.

By the time he and I were exploring these places, they were no longer appreciated. Passenger train service was fading away, and the ornate, high-ceilinged train stations were seen as ugly as well as outmoded. So many of the old buildings of Lansing were being demolished at that time that we did not expect the train stations to survive.

In my 13-year-old pragmatism, I had a clear documentary purpose in photographing them, but my father was an artist. He considered the interior photograph of Grand Trunk Station to be one of his best.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

Comments:

ken long, 9/24/2005: an obscure web search for your father led me to this post; i had the very great privilege of being a student of his while i attended MSU from 1978-1980; he was my faculty advisor and i had several classes with him; he encouraged my independent research in history and my desire to teach. i spent many hours in discussions with him and he stands out in my memory as one of the most influential people in my life (i just turned 48 a few days ago, retiring from the Army after 25 years). He taught me a lot about integrity, intellectual courage and honesty and the virtue of independent inquiry. It was a great priviledge to know and work with him, and i just wanted to let you know i think your dad was a helluva man

sincerely,
ken long
longke@yahoo.com

Tuesday, November 19, 2002, 2:43 pm

At the movies. As parents of a four-year-old, we don't get to go out to see movies very often, but just in the last few weeks, we have seen a couple.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a fun movie, mostly deserving of the widespread praise it has received. But there is one thing strikingly odd about it.

The movie portrays a large extended family of Greek immigrants and their children in Chicago. They have small businesses: a restaurant, a dry cleaners, a travel agency, but they are basically working class. Apparently the heroine is the first in this large family to go to college. We see this family through many private moments at home, at work, at play.

Yet never once does anyone smoke!

It's not that I enjoy watching people smoke cigarettes -- quite the contrary. I saw my mother (a native Chicagoan and granddaughter of immigrants) smoke herself to death by lung cancer in 1985. At the county board meeting tomorrow, I plan to vote in favor of a proposed measure to ban smoking in most workplaces in Washtenaw County. But it strains credulity that the entire family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding would be nonsmokers.

As I commented earlier, smoking is now seen very negatively by television and presumably movie audiences, so that "if you put a cigarette in a character's hand, you're saying that he smells bad and doesn't take care of himself." That impression, at least among middle-class viewers, would interefere with the sympathetic image of the Portokalos family that the movie seeks to convey. So that aspect of realism was quietly excised from the picture.

I'm not even sure there's anything wrong with that. Including a lot of cigarette smoke would have made it a darker movie, even from a stylistic standpoint. And arguably smoking rates are declining to the point that the total abstinence in this context is, or soon will be, merely improbable, instead of inconceivable. Still, given all the in-your-face family foibles that the groom and his parents have to confront in the movie, it is ironic that one of the most commonplace is omitted entirely.

Bowling for Columbine. A few weeks ago, we went to Royal Oak to see a preview screening of Michael Moore's new movie, "Bowling for Columbine." Afterwards, Michael Moore himself was on hand to answer questions about it.

Those of us who grew up in mid-Michigan have been aware of Michael Moore for a long time. He's a radical kid from Davison, a working class town just east of Flint. He got elected to the local school board at age 22 (another friend from Davison explains: "It was a low turnout election"), started the Flint Voice alternative paper, which reached a statewide audience and was renamed the Michigan Voice. In Flint, he discovered and published a column by Ben Hamper, a/k/a "Rivethead", a marvelously funny writer about life on the assembly line.

Then he went off to San Francisco to become editor of Mother Jones, which turned out to be a debacle. So he turned himself into a filmmaker and made a documentary about the decline of Flint titled Roger and Me.

I wasn't too impressed by Roger and Me (maybe because I had already seen almost all of it in the pages of the Michigan Voice), but a lot of people liked it, and it made Michael Moore into a national figure. He had a TV show and a couple other good gigs since then.

Now he's come out with a new film called "Bowling for Columbine". It's won some awards, and supposedly it's breaking box-office records for a documentary (though that may not be saying much).

I guess this is what you might call an "argumentative documentary". Moore explores the Columbine incident, not the details of what happened there (though we were stunned to see graphic security camera footage from inside the high school during the massacre), but the Why questions. What makes the United States such a violent society?

At first, he seems inclined to blame guns, but then he discovers that guns are even more plentiful in peaceful Canada. Others interviewed in the film point to the U.S.'s violent history, but other countries have much bloodier histories. Moore's answer seems to be our "culture of fear", a topic which is rarely addressed these days.

Moore is surely older than me, but he still looks and carries himself like a kid: a fat, sloppy kid from the wrong side of the tracks, dressed in a limp t-shirt and jeans and baseball cap, with a patchy beard that is grotesquely unflattering. Perhaps because he looks like a harmless slob, so seemingly gentle in his questioning, his interviewees are unguarded, sometimes startlingly so.

"How did you get people to open up to you like that?" I asked him after the movie. I didn't record his exact words, but he said approximately: "That's the $64,000 question. You'd think they would know who I was. Really, nobody should talk to me. Hell, I wouldn't talk to me. But they probably thought I would be lucky to get on community access."

Moore has a paranoid's fixation on coincidences, and there are a number of them here, all useful for connecting parts of the story together. The Columbine massacre took place the same day as the biggest day of U.S. bombing in former Yugoslavia. One of the two creators of "South Park" was a student at Columbine High School, and hated it. And on and on.

The political line of the film is not simplistically pro-gun-control. But the NRA is not presented positively, to say the least, and Charlton Heston, leading a pro-gun rally in Denver only days after the Columbine killings, is the heavy. The climax of the movie, the part you have already heard about, is where Moore confronts Heston is his Beverly Hills mansion, and Heston hangs himself on camera, with some racist comments about "our ethnic problem", which gets even worse when he tries to clarify it. A moment later, Heston flees, with Moore pursuing him Colombo-like with just one more question.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

Comments:

Laurie Mann, 11/27/2002: Smoking in Movies

Before the '80s, smoking in movies was common. All kinds of characters smoked. In the '80s, it seemed like only evil characters smoked. Beginning in the '90s (particularly in Pulp Fiction), evil characters and "cool" characters smoked. While I am as fascist a non-smoker as they come, I think movies and TV should reflect real life, which means that about 23% of all kinds of people should smoke - old and young, cool and uncool, good and bad.

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December