Day 373…
Michael is beginning to lose roles that he auditions for, to men of color.
That’s a skewed way of stating what’s happening. A better way is to say that men of color are starting to be cast in roles that, in the past, they may not have been considered for.
To be fair, Michael doesn’t get cast all the time. That is the natural state of a working actor. If there is one role and 100 people audition for it, 99 of them are not going to get the part. Those 99 people did not lose the role as it was never theirs to begin with. Michael does still get cast plenty of times. In terms of his work in television and films he doesn’t seem to be working any less these days. If anything, he seems to be getting more auditions than usual.
As a member of the Screen Actors Guild, Michael has to vote for the SAG Awards. We are beginning to work our way through all of the nominated films of the year. This year, the films that have been put up for awards seem to tell the stories of a far wider range of people than I can ever remember being told before.
Two women were nominated this year for directing Oscars. Two Asian-Americans were nominated for directing Oscars. There are multiple people of color in the acting categories. There are still white nominees, plenty of them. Nothing has been lost by including everyone else, instead much has been added.
If the 1976 film Network was released this year, Marlene Warfield would have almost certainly been nominated for her performance. She played the fierce underground revolutionary who buys into the corporate greed structure with, if anything, a greater ferocity that she had used in her fight for racial equality. In a film filed with astonishing performances, hers is one of the best.
Back in 1976, however, she did not get a nomination or even much notice. Instead, the Oscar went to Beatrice Straight for a very good performance in the same film, but at no where near the level that Warfield’s was.
Yesterday, I walked down into the Meatpacking District and went to the Whitney Museum. A major new exhibition of work by Julie Mehretu is being previewed there.
Mehretu, who is a few years younger than me, was born in Ethiopia to an Ethiopian College professor and an American Montessori schoolteacher. She and her family fled from Ethiopia when she was seven to escape political unrest. She then grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. She now shares her studio with her partner who is also an artist named Jessica Rankin.
Julie Mehretu was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2020. Until yesterday, I had never even heard her name.
Her work is epic and compelling. She works on enormous canvases and much of what she does is intensely political. In some ways, her work reminds me a bit of Anselm Kiefer, but really what she is doing seems unique.
Julie Mehretu is not taking an exhibition away from another white male artist. The space that she is occupying is hers. Nobody lost an opportunity because it wasn’t their opportunity to have. If anything, including women and people of color in the pantheon of artists in the world can only increase the quality at the top. By opening competition for gallery space and press coverage attention to all, we are only giving ourselves a bounty of astonishing choices to pick from.
The thing about art is that you don’t need to choose one over the other - you can experience both. There is not a finite amount of space at the top - it’s limitless.
“He was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” Those, of course, are the words of Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office Captain Jay Baker about the young man who slaughtered 8 people in a rampage through three massage spas in Atlanta. The victims of his spree were mostly Asian women.
Yesterday, because of the nationwide backlash that erupted, another Cherokee County official announced that Baker was no longer going to be the spokesperson on the case explaining that Baker misspoke because he had a, “difficult task before him, one of the hardest in his twenty-eight years in law enforcement.”
Because the women who were murdered were Asian as well as reportedly being sex workers, their basic humanity is lost on both the killer and the law enforcement officials charged with bringing him to justice. The women aren’t people to these white men, they aren’t even really there. The murderer had no problem blaming his victims for having tempted him nor did the lead officer in the investigation have any problem understanding that.
Racism is the fallback position of the weak.
Merriam-Webster defines the word compete as “to strive consciously or unconsciously for an objective (such as position, profit, or a prize): to be in a state of rivalry.”
It is our natural state. Every living creature on the planet competes for food and dominance so that they can procreate. One-celled animals compete. Plants compete. Animals compete. People compete. Marginalizing whole segments of the population lessens the competition. It makes winning easier.
Republicans know that they cannot win elections if everyone votes.
Rather than adjusting their goals to more closely align with the will of the people, they, instead, choose to cheat. They do everything that they can to tighten the playing field so that they do not have to compete with all of the multitudes who stand against them.
The new voting laws that they’ve just passed in Georgia were only passed to keep people of color from voting against them. They serve no other function at all.
Rather than viewing the women at the spas as people, the killer sees them as somehow less than. He doesn’t have to change who he is. He can just get rid of the people who are tempting the part of himself that feels ashamed of.
Shame is the great motivator.
The World’s Oldest Profession is called that exactly because it is. We are sexual creatures who Freud would say are driven solely by our sexual impulses. Societal and institutional structures that supposedly keep us from acting out on all of these impulses do no such thing. They just drive this basic impulse down into the darkness of shame.
People want and need to have sex but everything around us strives to make that a shameful thing. It is absurd as stigmatizing eating.
How many virulent anti-gay lawmakers get caught with male prostitutes? So many that it is actually a joke. The louder the noise the more certain it is that it is coming from someone who is ashamed of feeling that way themselves.
Earlier this week, the Pope came out against same-sex unions, calling them a sin that the Roman Catholic Church cannot bless. Is that going to stop homosexual behavior? No, of course not. Homosexuality is not a choice.
Instead, what the Pope has done with this announcement is to increase the shame that homosexual members of his flock already feel. It will drive their behavior further underground, and, potentially, turn them into the same kind of people as the murderer who took the lives of all of those people in Atlanta. People can’t stop being who they are.
When Michael auditions for something, he never really knows why things turn out the way that they do. What was it about what he did got him the job or didn’t get him the job as the case might be? Whether or not he is competing against 50 people or 2, the odds don’t really change. He either sparks the person who is casting’s attention, or he doesn’t. One show that he’s auditioned for but has been never been cast on, keeps calling him back to be seen for other roles. They clearly like his work, but they just haven’t matched him up with the right part yet.
I don’t know if the Whitney chose to exhibit Julie Mehretu’s work because they felt pressure to showcase a woman or a person of color or whether they would have done it anyway. I am guessing that they felt the pressure and all I can say is, good. Her work isn’t easy. It is complex and layered. It deserves the exhibition. I couldn’t be happier that I now know who she is and can experience it.
Did SAG and the Academy feel pressure to include women and people of color? Again, if they did, good. I’m not going to like everything this year any more than I like everything any year. This year, though, there are a lot of films up for awards that don’t seem like stories I’ve heard before. New voices, new stories and new points of view might be challenging, but they’re also exciting.
When we were doing the original production of Jersey Boys in La Jolla, Leslie Odom, Jr. was the first cast replacement we had. Tituss Burgess left the run early to do something else. There have been several Jersey Boys cast member over the years that have become well known.
The track that Tituss and Leslie performed is a somewhat thankless one. The other ensemble tracks at least cover one of the lead roles, but Jersey Boys hasn’t gotten to that place yet. Nobody above can quite envision a black Season. Yet.
That ridiculously talented people like Tituss and Leslie are among the whole array of other truly remarkable performers who have played this track is astonishing. It shows far more about the lack of opportunities that were available for these performers when we started, than it does about the challenge of the role. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t play the part - a gig’s a gig. What has changed somewhat in recent years, though, is that it isn’t one of the only roles open anymore.
Leslie Odom, Jr. has been nominated for a SAG Award for his performance in One Night in Miami… He’s also not only been nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor for the movie but also for another one for best song that he wrote and performed.
Back in 1976, we may not have paid any attention to him. Like Marlene Warfield, he may have remained in the periphery of the industry. Back in 1976, it is unlikely that the film that he is in would even had been made.
Opening up the arts to everybody just means that we all get more. The same is true of our society as a whole. The President is starting to put together a Cabinet that looks more like the United States of America than any former cabinet ever has. The film nominations this year also look more like what I see when I go out for a walk through the city than they ever have before.
Some of the roles that Michael auditions for will go to other people and, yes, some of them will be to men of color or even to women. When that happens, those people will have the same elated experience that Michael has when he gets cast. When they don’t get cast and Michael does, they will feel the same fleeting disappointment.
There isn’t just one pie.
We can make as many as we want and enjoy countless different flavors.
That’s a not a problem, that’s a feast.
A definite feast, as Giselle pointed out... Most excellent post, thank you!
💞❤️And this post is a feast! thank you, Richard it is as inspiring as the knowing of spring...aren’t we lucky that we are choosing to win, be kind, be honest, be truthful, be giving
We don’t have to cheat. We are genuine.
My faith in life has been renewed today, yes even after the horrific outcome of someone’s “bad day”... some ones untreated sex addiction, someone who killed because he dying inside.
How courageous it is, how crucial it is becoming to look within ourselves
COVID has given me all the time & space to do that. It’s devastating to realize that some people are not capable or simply refuse to. God Bless those who can look and see and do help to change our world 🙏