The Penny Post - 02/02/2020
https://www.patreon.com/PsychologyInSeattle/posts
https://psychologyinseattle.squarespace.com/
The best podcast. Every person, on turning sixteen, should be mandated to listen to a handful of its foundational episodes. It's a podcast about psychology and mental health hosted by a therapist of thirty years. I don't endorse every stylistic decision or every stance opinions are spouted from, but it is an invaluable resource for understanding, perhaps, the most important thing you can learn in the modern world. The best episodes (the audiobook length deep dives on a single topic) are behind a paywall, so if you're on the fence for paying I can link you a deep dive of your choice. For this, email me at thepennypost22@gmail.com.
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Slave Play
I saw Slave Play on Broadway. It's an insane, provocative, trigger-happy play about race and relationships in modern America written by a relatively new playwright; Jeremy O. Harris. It's easily the best play I've seen on Broadway. Our Town and some of Arthur Miller's stuff may have had the verve that Slave Play has on release, but those scripts' formal or stylistic novelty have deadened over time. Their content is still great but I prefer Slave Play over Ivo Van Hove's recent production of The Crucible; one, because its themes are the stuff of today's most heated Twitter debates; and two, because its form feels like it's beating the war drums on the frontline of theatre's future. It's a crazy play, the same way Angels in America and Pulp Fiction are crazy. It lands nowhere near as many of its leaps as either of those, but it makes a lot of them and has so much to say that you're forced to reckon with its themes. This reckoning is invaluable because white Americans rarely reckon with the nature of race beyond a binary understanding of racism, or beyond a national conversation about demographics effected by a specific instance of racism. That microaggressions have come to be widely understood and acknowledged is great but they're only one part of understanding race beyond a binary and a limited number of instances.
Important takeaways -
- Racism is not binary. Everyone lies somewhere on the spectrum.
- Just because you believe or hold the ideal that all people are equal doesn't mean you don't have ingrained racist impulses. You can dislike it about yourself but, for some people, a subconscious emotional response can still be there, even if it's small or about something more specific than the other person's overall value. This doesn't mean you can't change that impulse over time though.
- Your relation to race doesn't just exist through racism. There are infinite ways that your relation to people of various races can manifest, and only one of them is about an overall "single-axis" quality assessment of their value.
- "The violence of amnesia." That people who aren't affected by racism are able to forget the history of racism is a privilege. Harris sees that "amnesia" as a violence towards those forced to live the effects of that history every day. An upper-middle-class white person born into relative wealth has a responsibility to face that wealth's history and a responsibility of acting on empathy towards the victims of that history.
Sorry to leave this till the end but the play is now, tragically, closed so you'll have to wait till the script is released or the next production to see it. I don't remember the details but Harris said it will be going up again, somewhere other than New York, later this year.
It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders (podcast) - Interview: Broadway Playwright Jeremey O. Harris On 'Slave Play' - January 14th
Great interview with the playwright. Spoiler laden (and this is a play in which spoilers are very important) so don't listen unless you've seen the play, or unless you don't want to wait until you can. An FYI, I think I feel some narcissism colouring Harris's ideas. This doesn't devalue the importance of what he's saying or many of his ideas at all, and I could be completely wrong, but it's a good demonstration of how I'm not seeing eye to eye with him on everything. This podcast in general though is great. If you're looking for a breakdown of the previous week and some interesting conversations from an intelligent and knowledgeable host, it's up there.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8qgm9g/decolonizing-my-desire
To conclude, an essay Jeremy O. Harris wrote about part of his own internalized racism.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrhrXTDeue0
Lindsay Ellis is wonderful and you should watch every single one of her video essays if you haven't. This is her latest one, examining the history of a Persian character in the original 'Phantom of the Opera'. This character (unnamed but central to the plot) has been omitted from or "Orientalized" in almost every adaptation of Phantom including the stage play. She examines the racist creation of the aesthetics of the "Orient," gives a history of Phantom's adaptations in relation to it, and asks and answers some questions about how that racism still impacts us today. People are very willing to accept, without examination, even half-remembered archetypes. I'd need more evidence to see the direct lineage from Orientalism to modern racism towards Iran though.
She seems to have turned her humour up a couple notches for this video and I found it a bit grating at times so be warned.
This is all very interesting in relation to the Jeremy O. Harris essay. Someone in casual conversation a couple weeks ago asked whether the word "Orient" is racist. It's such a forgotten part of western culture that still has space in the back of our minds. To what degree do instances of racism like this affect us today? What responsibility do we have towards "the violence of amnesia" here? To what degree is this racism ingrained subconsciously in westerners vs racism towards black people in modern America? I was going to write a short response to Harris's essay talking about my own experience being "internationally" raised but I think I'll do a larger piece of writing in a later newsletter. There is a lot of complexity here and each individual has to discover the complexity within them for themselves.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S97kpqv9eQo
I'm just now coming off of a phase of deep-diving into the youtube parkour community. Mostly I watched the videos for the thrill of executing hard tricks. In some cases, though, there's the extra pleasure of seeing people break the conventions of a space. This can be breaking social conventions but the best is when they defy "official" rules and find ways to interact and move across restricted places. It's not just frigging cool to see, it also feels like an expansion of what's possible in the capitalist spaces we live in. The video above is the most awesome example I saw of this.
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Mubi of the week: The Raid
I plan to have these longer in the future but I don't have too much to say here. The Raid is a 2011 action movie set in a single tenement building in which a team of special forces are trying to capture the mob boss running the building. It's often called visceral, spare, perfectly paced, and one of the best action movies out there. I didn't like it. Here's a short summary of my problems copy-pasted from elsewhere: "The plot of the raid is really thin, the characters were really thin and I didn't care about any of their motivations, the worldbuilding felt like cardboard cutouts to me, and while the action was cool it started to feel repetitive after a couple similar fistfight sequences." I see where people are coming from when they say the exposition is ruthlessly efficient and only contains what's absolutely necessary but what it is setting up just feels totally empty and meaningless to me. As a result, I didn't feel invested in the stakes at all. When it came to the action it was extremely well choreographed and put together. I think that if I had been watching this movie stand alone I would have appreciated this part more. But I went into it with its comparisons to John Wick framing the action. The choreography of individual fights is on the level of John Wick, perhaps even surpasses it, but it's almost all knife/fist fights between characters. John Wick has so much variety of action that I found myself getting bored with the same type of fight scene repeated five or six times. There is a final battle fistfight which I liked but other than that it felt samey to me. I think that with a higher budget to provide more variance in even basic set design I would've started buying into the world more, but overall my criticism of the movie is that it just felt thin.
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Music of the week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_XJ_s5IsQc
The keyboard solo from Cory Henry is amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5REJ1SXNDQ
Here's a music theory analysis of it. It's music theory so it's not so accessible but still interesting.