Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

TRUE WORDS FROM TRUE BLOOD.

It's no secret that HBO's supernatural hit series True Blood is a thinly veiled critique of homophobic and racist bigotry in America. The fact that it's pulled off four quirky seasons without getting preachy is a testament to the talent of the show's creator Alan Ball and some of its irreverent writing.

One exchange I watched last night, from season 2, hit particularly close to home -- it won't be surprising for those I've subjected to my previous rants about racism, homophobia and intolerance.

Here's the exchange I loved between nerdy mama's boy Hoyt and his mama:

Hoyt: Why do you have so much hate in you?

Mama: I don’t!

Hoyt: That’s a flat out lie.

Mama: Who do you think you’re talking to?

Hoyt: My mama, who hates Methodists.

Mama: I got my reasons.

Hoyt: And Catholics.

Mama: Just priests… and nuns.

Hoyt: African Americans.

Mama: Hush. That’s a secret.

Hoyt: People who don’t take care of their gardens. And people who park their trucks up on their lawn. And ladies who wear red shoes.

Mama: It looks cheap.

Hoyt: Families with lots of kids. And checkered curtains. And cats. And dogs. And bait. And every girl that I ever liked. And the more I like ‘em the more you hate ‘em.

Mama: I simply object to a girlfriend who will kill you and eat you. I think that’s reasonable.

Hoyt: You don’t even know her. Full of hate. I see you now.

Mama: Well it’s not my fault. It’s the way I was raised up.

There are least two insightful tidbits addressed here.

The first is Mama's admission that's she's a racist but that it's a "secret." When opponents of Barack Obama's pretty centrist policies -- policies that in many cases mirror those of Republicans -- attack him as a Muslim socialist America-hater born in Kenya, there's no doubt in my mind that what's going on here is racism. But it's the kind of racism that racists have gotten good at. The wink-wink, secret kind. Racists may be hateful but they're just smart enough to know they can't get away with declaring their hate publicly so they now resort to coded attempts at getting their point across. It also reminds me of the anti-Semitic remarks I hear out of people's mouths in front of me when they don't realize I'm Jewish. Racists and bigots still exist. They may spew their hate in less than obvious ways, but they're still out there and we shouldn't have any naive allusions about it.

The second insightful tidbit was the last line of the exchange: Well it’s not my fault. It’s the way I was raised up. The cop-out is another handy tactic used by bigots. It's the claim that, because they grew up with hatred or violence around them, they can't help themselves. They just don't know any better. Sorry but many of us are raised less than ideally and taught facts along the way that are provably wrong. In the end it's up to each of us to have the courage to overcome our bad habits and experiences, and relearn what we've learned wrong. If members of your family, for instance, have a habit of calling Jews greedy or blacks lazy or Asians sneaky or gays pedophiles, summon up the courage to call them on their hate.

If you need some help, have them watch a little True Blood.

 

THE NATURE OF BUSINESS.

There are two interesting looks I see on the faces of colleagues I used to work with at big box ad agencies when we talk about my new work life working from home. One is a look of fear -- they're thinking "But how do you do it? Isn't it dangerous? Uncertain? Scary?" The other look is one of resignation -- they're thinking "I wish I could do that but I'm trapped here. I missed my chance. I don't know any other way to work so I'm basically screwed."

Change is scary, there's no doubt about it. It's wrought with uncertainty, distress, pain. Failure. But if the last five years have taught us anything about the state of our economy and the way big companies deal with little employees during hard times, it's that our professional futures at these places are always uncertain, distressing, painful. Big companies may pay lip service to the concept of caring for employees -- they may even have managers who lose sleep over the need to lay off members of their team. But in the end business decisions always trump personal ones. That's not meant to sound cynical, although it does. A lion doesn't kill because it's mean. It kills because it's in its nature. The good of the company, the need for profit, rules. That's the nature of business.

Is my (relatively) new life working on my own scary? You bet. My stomach more or less churns every morning thinking about it. But in the end I've chosen a scary for which I have some tiny measure of control over a scary for which I had none.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY XANAX: 140 WORDS ON 'CONTAGION'.

Seeing Drive and Contagion within 24 hours of each other was a useful exercise in helping frame how sometimes trying something different works and sometimes, err, it doesn't. Drive does big time, Contagion doesn't mega-big time.

Whereas Drive's controlled calm and underlying tension make it compelling, thrilling and mentally exhausting, Contagion's calm is never quite tense enough. This is a movie, after all, about a worldwide lethal pandemic that kills millions and a team of scientists trying to stop it in its tracks, yet everyone walks around like they're pumped with Xanax. And not just the scientists. The Chinese son whose mother dies. The woman pictured above who gets kidnapped. And the husband of patient zero who watches his wife frothing at the mouth in their kitchen. They might as well have all been clipping their toenails in the bathroom. Come to think of it, I might have as well. It would have been way more thrilling.

TIFF 2011: 140 WORDS ON 'LIPSTIKKA'.

What's reality? What's fantasy? What's the truth? There are usually at least a couple of answers to most metaphysical questions like these, particularly when it comes to the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But as I watched Lipstikka on the last day of the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival -- a tender, nuanced and, at times, riveting and intense story about two Palestinian lesbians, one an alcoholic, the other raped by an Israeli soldier, written and directed by a Jewish Canadian ex-pat and starring a Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jew -- the question most on my mind was this: could this movie have ever been made anywhere else in the Middle East other than Israel? 

Much criticism of Israel's policies in the West Bank and toward Palestinian Arabs is warranted but I think that even Israel detractors and apartheid-mongers grudgingly know the answer.

INTENSITY: 140 WORDS ON 'DRIVE.'

IMDB describes Drive this way: "A Hollywood stunt performer who moonlights as a wheelman discovers that a contract has been put on him after a heist gone wrong."

That's a bit like describing Titanic as "A boat sinks after bumping into some ice."

What's missing are the two elements that make Drive maybe the best movie I've seen all year: style and tension.

The opening credits in hot pink Mistral paired up with Kavinsky's haunting Nightcall give the film a sad, brooding early 80s New York City feel. I'm not sure what director Nicolas Winding Refn's intentions were (the film takes place in present-day LA) and film buffs may understand the references better than I did, but the effect was a palpable sense of angst, as if transported back to my early teens. Refn, who's nearly my age, moved from Copenhagen to Gotham in the late 70. Maybe there's a clue.

Style aside, it's Ryan Gosling's disquietingly quiet Charles Bronson/Clint Eastwood performance punctuated by -- shall we call them -- the Robbery Scene, the Hotel Room Scene and the Elevator Scene, that managed to drain every last molecule of cortisol in my system.

THE POWER OF POINT OF VIEW.

When asked by a non-Jew, the legend goes, to relate all the Torah had to say while standing on one foot, the great sage Hillel is reported to have replied: "Do not unto your neighbor what you would not have him do unto you. This is the whole Law. The rest is commentary."

Strip away all the silliness about what kind of hat to wear, what kind of food to eat, what day to keep holy, and this so-called Golden Rule is the core essence and teaching of every religion.

Yet, bombarded as we are from an early age with this message in every culture around the world, we still hurt each other, take advantage of and lie to each other, and kill each other. The trouble it seems, for a lot of us, is an inability to empathize with the other, to put ourselves in his shoes.

It's how a Palestinian suicide bomber doesn't stop himself from blowing up children on a bus. It's how an Israeli soldier shoots at a rock-throwing child. It's how Christian fundamentalists believe their religion is the final word and Muslims insist on the same. It's how Americans act as if their definition of freedom trumps all others. It's an inablity or refusal to see through someone else's eyes, to consider another answer may exist other than our own.

Recently, in a writing course I've begun taking, I was introduced to author Tobias Wolff and yesterday came across an interview in which he says the following:

"I think reading is deeply humanizing for us ... it allows us to grow. It's the most radical transformation that I think can happen in a human being -- to be able to see from another person's point of view." -- Tobias Wolff

There are no quick fixes to our problems on this earth. But I suspect the solutions we're looking for can be found in reading, in learning about others, and in experiencing how other's view and experience their world.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON LIVING.

"It ain't possible to live unless you crossin' somebody's line."

                    -- Lafayette, Season 1, Episode 7, True Blood

ONE TRUTH, MANY ROADS: REFLECTIONS ON 'THE HELP'.

Nobody likes to be accused of racism, especially racists. I learned that a few months ago when I wrote a blog post calling out (mostly) white gays for discriminating against blacks and Asians.

White gays mostly defensively told me their rejection of non-whites was simply a "preference" while blacks and Asians thanked me for speaking the truth.

Take a friend of mine who's white. He was offended when I told him that disqualifying black men from his dating pool was racism. He didn't use the N word, he said, he had friends and coworkers of color, he was respectful toward them and considered blacks his equals. In other words, he was a good person, so he couldn't possibly be racist. (Interestingly, a few weeks later he somewhat bashfully told me he was going on a date with a black guy. Small steps.)

Conversations with my friend and others on the topic of racism were on my mind this week when I watched The Help, Tate Taylor's movie based on the book by Kathryn Stockett, about Jackson, Mississippi, during the civil rights era of the late 1950s and early 60s. Many of the white characters depicted are good people, kind and loving to their husbands and wives, to their children and even to "the help" -- the African-American women and men they'd hired (albeit one step removed from slavery) to raise their children, cook their food, clean their homes and mow their lawns. Some of the whites in the film are clearly racist in their words and deeds, but what of those who didn't create the Jim Crow segregation reality of that era but still accepted it, either because they knew no better or were afraid to speak up?

If a tree falls in a forest, the riddle goes, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a person commits a racist act, even through ignorance or intimidation, is he not still a racist?

There's been criticism, mainly from the African-American community, that this movie is a sham, that the fact it was written and directed by whites makes its message illegitimate, dishonest. I disagree. Certainly if Spike Lee or John Singleton had written or directed The Help, it would have hit harder and spoken something closer to the unvarnished truth, certainly the truth the way blacks see and know it.

But the movie still serves a useful purpose, as I discovered from the reaction to that blog post I mentioned earlier. Some people when confronted forcefully with the error of their ways immediately see the light and change. Most do not. That's because most people don't like to be told they're wrong or bad, even when their actions clearly suggest they are. They get defensive and shut out your message. But present it in a more palatable way or give people some time to reflect -- if they have the capacity to do so -- and many if not most will come around, even those you'd never dream would.

The fact behind that psychology is why Martin Luther King is beloved in America today and Malcolm X is not. X might have spoken more truthfully and channeled African-American anger more viscerally, but King managed to speak the truth and enlist the growing core of progressive whites he needed to help spread his word. Barack Obama is the first African-American president but he would never have been elected without the votes of Martin Luther King's white children.

Black critics have said The Help sugarcoats the racism and racists of the era. Maybe it does, but maybe it needs to for a generation of whites ignorant of what their grandfathers and mothers did to fellow human beings. White Americans need to know about the crimes their ancestors committed because, in spite of the black man in the White House, American society still rests on a foundation built on those crimes and many of its structural problems are a direct result of the shadow cast by slavery and Jim Crow. But even if all this is true, pointing fingers and screaming bloody racism only works for some and it may only serve to alienate most who, given a little help and the right message, are aching to come over to the side of light.

THOTS ON THE EVOLUTION OF SPELLING.

Because most languages evolve rather than being created from whole cloth -- Esperanto and Klingon would be exceptions -- they retain artifacts from days of yore, usually related to how they were pronounced and then written down way back when.

For instance, words like 'bought' or 'ache' or 'lieutenant' were all at some point pronounced as they were spelled. Their pronunciation evolved but their spelling didn't. Because this evolution -- like its biological counterpart -- happens over the course of generations and centuries (or eons), we don't usually notice the change -- though there are exceptions, with words like 'often' and 'schedule,' where we still hear older and newer pronunciations coexisting. (Some of us even pronounce these words interchangeably.)

But while we've gotten used to spelling certain words in particular ways, there's no reason we need to do this in perpetuity. One area of our lives where we're seeing spelling actually evolve -- some might say devolve -- is in texting, on Twitter and to some degree in emails.

'U' has nearly ubiquitously replaced 'you' in text messages, for instance. And I've found myself quite naturally writing 'tho' instead of 'though', as well as completely abandoning contractions -- dont tell me theres anyone who doesnt understand what words theyre reading when we lose apostrophes.

There are two forces at work here, tho. While I'm advocating we take a fresh look at reforming spelling of archaically spelled words like 'though,' and 'bought', and even finally giving in and adopting the more sensible and concise US spelling of words like 'color,' 'traveling' and 'dialog,' I'm not suggesting we turn the language into a string of abbreviated words like 'txt' and 'pls' and 'm8' and 'lv.'

I'm not calling for anything radical here. But I think our texting culture may have found a way to help spelling take a few steps forward to catching up with how we speak.