Check, Double Check, Triple Check, etc.

Ok, so, I figured I'd approach this week's reading and film separately. I'm sure there's overlap between the two, but I leave that to class discussion.

I have to say that, before this class, I was almost completely unaware of the racism towards Irish immigrants. And, hey, I've got plenty of Irish roots. I should have been a redhead (like lots of others in both sides of my family). The extended quote on page 104 of the longshore were especially poinant to me. I remember studying the post civil war South, the stories of poor whites hatred for black folks. I remember thinking that socio-economic class has to trump color, that the poor whites and the poor blacks should have realized that they had so much more in common than they had in differences. Their day-to-day lives certainly matched more closely than poor whites did with middle class or upper class whites. I guess that's why I really loved that quote - "Let's go after the white bastards." That's what I'd wanted my ancestors to say.

I think that Lott has plenty of points that are simple and ring true. The working class did take the rhetoric of equality seriously. Whites impersonating blacks did bring blackness toward the main stream. Capitalistic societies do manufacture the popular. I just don't think there's much to argue with Lott's assertions.

Now for the ol' Amos N' Andy tagteam.

The comedy itself, for the average viewer who hasn't been trained to view critically, seems fairly traditional. The "dumb" guy paired up with the "smart" guy is evident even today with SNL's Will Ferrel and Chris Katan in A Night at the Roxbury. The "dumb" guy ends up being smart. The "smart" guy is actually just a showoff who's not especially useful for anything.
Here, Andy is our Dandy. He puts on airs, pretends he's important, that he has more power as "the boss" than Amos. But, we quickly see that he just shys away from work and cowers before anyone with any real importance in the community, like the Kingfish. Amos is caricatured as the Jim Crow; he misses his ole massa in de south. He wears patchwork clothes, does what he's told, stutters into the phone, is, seamingly, easily duped by Andy. But, we see quickly that Andy is duped by others in the community (10% ring a bell?). And, Amos ends up being the one with the smarts and ability to execute a plan to bring about the happy ending of the story. Go Amos.

Anywho, there's the setup; so, I'll just breeze through a few things I noticed about the film.

Animal cruelty wasn't shown, as the child abuse of The Jazz Singer wasn't shown. I guess it tells us abit about the cultural moment of the film, what was exceptable to be seen even when beating your child was still considered a cultural norm.

The montage in Harlem was telling and had quite a different tone than the one we find inside the taxi office. There was an element of truth in the montage that was evidently lacking in the blackfaced pair. And, it seemed intentional. The young boys shining shoes, playing baseball in the grassy alley, the mother carrying the baby all rang true to life, to a real life.
The office of the taxi company is altogether differnent and sticks out in the Harlem backdrop as different. The letters of the sign were backgrounds. The language inside seemed forced and unreal. It's interesting to me that Amos and Andy are situated within Harlem when they seemed an obvious juxtaposition. In Harlem, it was easy to see they were just caricatures.

I also noticed, I guess as a writer, the convenience of plot. Amos and Andy just happened to run into the man's son who they "worked" for in the south. Oh, and he was akindly master. The blackfaced duo got quite choked up when they hear about his death and remember how he "raised" them, and wouldn't shared his last loaf of bread. quite convenient.
They go well out of their way to catch Richard? before he gets on the train. He never calls on them as he said he would do. What do they get for their trouble? A piece of the cake, literally. I did notice, however vague the reference to "working" for the old master, as slaves, as hired help, that the white folks in the movie did seem to talk to them as equal humans, as though even the characters were aware it was simply the black face mask talking and not a black man.

Harlem is talked about as the bad part of town, a place to be extra cautious in, a place not safe for a white man to go after dark.

There were obvious and nicely detailed differences between the poor world of the blacks and the upper middle class world of the whites. It seemed even the images themselves reflected this. The white world is glossy, opaque, uplifting. Harlem is dark and dirty; rain falls there. You must shield yourself against it.

And, of course, Duke Ellington and cotton club orchestra. One would have never know if you didn't read the credits. There are no close ups of Ellington. He remains seated with his back to the audience through the rather short interludes where the orchestra plays a simple love song that only the way Richard can tell the girl his feels. And the girl is just a girl, not important enough for me to even remember her name. I remember more about her mother who was much less important to the plot.

Oh, well, see you all tomorrow.

The King of Jazz?

Since there are no readings this week to anchor and contextualize our readings, I feel that there's no real lense through which to view this week's film. The last few weeks, I feel that the readings gave me a place from which to watch the movies, a place to start, a vision to work the movie into. So, this week, I'll just mark a few things I thought noticeable, probably most of which the rest of the class, you all, will also probably remark upon.
The first, and most obvious, has, of course, to do with the very different definition we find of jazz within the film, The King of Jazz. Looking with the clearer vision of almost a century now, we are able to easily categorize music, jazz included. It exemplifies an era to us postmodern types. It's a people, a place, a type of clothes, a hairstyle, the way a tie is tied. It's a jazz hall; it's both the music and the instruments played. It clearly definable, clearly distinguishable from other kinds of music, or emotions, or times. But, within The King of Jazz, the producers, director, actors, etc. all work from an obviously different definition, one that exemplifies for us the context of the time period. The film was created much closer to the beginning of jazz as a type. They were so close, in fact, that the form and style was not a neatly categorized type. It was still a blurry amalgamation of what was considered "other" in America. It was music from all places, as characterized by the last big scene, the melting pot. It was music of England, Holland, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, Russian, even the American revolutionary drums of the marching soldiers. It was the cowboys of the wild west, the East Coast flappers, the sailors of the ports. All these places and people were shown to us through their costume, their instruments. Bagpipes and plaid skirts, Violins, harps, lutes. Salsa dancers, sombreros. All the nationalities that made America the melting pot. This was the vision of Jazz, the blurry, uncategorized notion of Jazz of white Audience to a white audience, the Whiteman's scrapbook that were the pages we gleamed through the various scenes and sections of the show, The King of Jazz.
Through these postmodern eyes, the film looked more like a show from the sixties with family singing troupes and comedic interludes of boys in overalls with sticks of hay in their teeth. It didn't seem like it was meant to be taken seriously; it's singular purpose seemed to be to entertain. But, it was obvious that some extravagance had been allowed in costumes and sets. The revolving main bandstand, the various costumes, the piano big enough for five to play and an entire orchestra to inhabit. This calls for a bit more than lavish entertainment, maybe. Maybe.
These were just a few things.
I'd be interested to know the context of this film. Who watched it? Where was it advertised? It what cities was it well and not so well received?
I think the film was useful in the purpose of studying film. It showed a lot of things we hadn't seen before. The fade-ins, the fade-outs, the shadowing, the lighting (colored and black and white), the intentional use of these new film techniques, like the ghost bride procession and the picture that came to life. They were new and interesting moments.
I'm sure we'll cover many of the other things I noticed in class. Look forward to hearing what you all thought.

Short Films/Performance/the Star

The short films I found most interesting were the two Louis Armstrong pieces, A Rhapsody in Black and Blue and I'll Be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You. The first piece was interesting for the elements we've already talked about in class, that Armstrong is a sort of jungle king, and the bookends of the story. We get to see what life is like on the inside of a black household. But, even inside the household, the characters are types. From the domestic context, the couple seems like either a husband and wife couple or a mother and son couple. With the sexual ambiguities, the familial eroticism we discussed in class last week seems within the context of this short film also. But, there is no physical affection between this couple in the way that we got to see in The Jazz Singer. The man does refer to the wife as honey. There also seems to be a bit of an age difference. If anything, the action itself gives us this impression. The mother or wife, in full mammy fashion, is full breasted and aproned up for housework. She is also dressed in a simple house dress with a common pattern. Maybe from "honey", they are married, and we are supposed to assume that the life of hard manual labor has aged her a bit faster than her Jim Crowish counterpart. The Jim Crow character is obviosly a production of his type. He is first on the scene, grinning big, banging on pots and makeshift instruments. And, he's listening to jazz, Louis Armstrong. He's avoiding the mopping his mother/wife figure is adament in demanding that he does. He, however, is not interested in work. We accompany him in a daydream of sorts where he is a king, dressed less like a monarch in traditional robes and more like the leader of a marching band, complete with headdress and uniform. He goes to heaven where clouds bubble similarly to the mop bucket and Louis Armstrong and his band play for him in attire that is, I suppose, intentioned for us to take as traditional African attire. I think that the obvious articles that could inform these images are the Goffman and Dyer pieces, but the Carlson chapters also, to a lesser extent, inform. According to Goffman, Armstrong has to, somewhat, believe in the image he is presenting as his character. Opposingly, Dyer would have us believe that he has more power over his image because of his "star" quality, his ability to influence because of his popularity. I think that both of these pieces come into play by emphasizing that this short film came early in Armstrong's career. Because of this position in the chronology, we can possibly assume that Armstrong has less of the influence of "start" power that he will have later in life which means that he has less control over the characteristics of his parts. With this in mind, he may have been less concerned with the image he was portraying and more concerned with the fact he was getting paid and could add this to the publicity that would allow him to attain more "star" power.
Besides these things, I think it's important to notice the nature of the heaven that we see a Jim Crow type envisioning. This may or may not have influenced this image, since we know that most who were doing minstrelsy and film careers had little actual contact with South, but slaves were taught that the highest heaven they could acheive was a kind of black heaven. If they were loyal and hardworking for their masters, they could go to a heaven that was lower, hierarchically, than the heaven of their white masters and mistresses. With this in mind, it is interesting to see that there are no whites in the heaven of the Jim Crow. It's simply leisure, music.
Interesting.
I don't want this to be too long, so I'll quickly visit the second film, I'll be Glad When You're Dead You rascal You. There's a few things that quite obviously stick out as cliches of this genre. The white chick gets kidnapped by the local "savages" who are characterized as grinning cannibals, a commonly held assumption at the time. But, I think the fading between the face of the singing Armstrong and the disembodied head of the thick lipped and animal like tongue of the "savage" is quite interesting. Not only are we supposed to assume that the "savage" and Armstrong are not just similar but the same, but the movements of lips and tongue of the "savage" and armstrong are almost in sync, which pulls this image and juxtaposition of this image.
Anywho, I'll sure we'll discuss this more in depth during class. I'd also like to see what people have to say about the Bessie Smith short film as well as how these readings play off and inform each other.
That's all folks!

The Jazz Singer/Catchup Readings

Because we had so many different readings, I will try to just hit on what was interesting to me, and, hopefully, we can discuss lots of other stuff covered in class.
I was really interested in what Lott had to say about capitalism and blackface. I was sad that the chapter on the working class was missing. (Although, don't get me wrong. I felt overwhelmed by getting caught up on the chapters and articles of the coursepack this week, well, few days.) It got me thinking that slavery would probably not, might not, have happened if our country wasn't so strictly capitalist and anti socialist, both those things. In fact, what I found myself thinking through our few class discussions thus far was that the actors of vaudeville and blackface were completely controlled by the fact that they were making money doing blackface, and, to live as a member of a capitalist society, one has to make money to simply live. As we learned fromAnn Douglas' Black Manhanton, that possession of money changed the way people lived their lives. There was an especially potent line from her, something about the number of alcoholics in the white and black communities during the Harlem Renaissance. Two out of about ten black literary types had been alcholics; whereas, only two of about ten white literary types had not been alcoholics. I think this bit of statistical evidence tells a helluva lot about both white and black people. The burden of capitalism, having to make money to be able to survive, is trying on the soul. There was another line, I can't exactly remember which reading it was from, may Douglas again, that Hurston? didn't find any nurishment for her soul among the white community. I can really see this; it rings true to me because the white community has a longer history of capital investment than the black community ( as far as I know, which might not be right. I'm not sure how capitalism figured in a traditional west African setting.)
This following is a sort of aside. I believe it's okay to do a bit of rambling in the blog setting, right?
Anywho, my girlfriend made a comment this week that really brought my attention even more so to this subject. She moved here about a month and hasn't yet found a job. She's been listless, unhappy, moping about meaninglessly in the house. At first, I thought it was because I did the horrible thing of letting her move to Lubbock. But, we talked about it, and it's because she doesn't have a job. And, I thought about how her and most of America 's (especially your traditional bring home the bread sort of masculinity) meaning and purposefullness in life is mixed up in how much capital they are able to provide for themselves and their families, how much money they make. It was really disheartening.
And, I heard these same sentiments in how Douglas discussed those Harlem Renaissance writers- how they, unlike their white counterparts, could not make a living off a literary endeavor. Hell, we know it's still hardly possible today, whether one's white or black. In fact, it might be argued that, because of the revival of the cannon, it may be more possible to make it, i.e. make enough money to live off, being a black writer. That argument could easily be disputed by simple statistics of black college goers.
Okay,
I was also glad that a few of our readings noticed the seductive and romantic quality of Jak and his mother's relationship. When he kissed her on the lips, I was uncomfortable. When he did it again, I just thought it was weird or some cultural difference I didn't quite understand. But, the oedipus complex makes a lot of sense for me here. This makes Lott's ? discussion of how Freudian theory could mostly not be applied to African American families even more interesting.
I don't want this to be too long, so I won't go into the things I noticed about The Jazz Singer. Some of them were covered in our readings, and I'm sure that others in the class noticed some of the same things I did it.
I would like to say that, in my copy of the Jazz Singer, there was a Plantation act, vaudevillian in nature, of Al Jolson and a cartoon that I thought would be helpful for all of us. The Plantation act was discussed in Blackface, White Noise, but, still, it's something to see. His unsuccesful dialect was just hilarious. The whole picture was absurd. There was a cotton field in the background. there were chickens around his feet. His outfit was a plaid shirt and overalls. I think all of us should see it.
Anywhoooo, see you all tomorrow.