My Introduction of Michael Moore’s Sicko (2007) for the Centre for Free Expression’s Film Series at Ryerson University

Posted on March 28, 2020 by

On March 10th — just before things in Toronto began to shut down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic — I introduced and led a post-screening discussion of Michael Moore’s hit 2007 documentary Sicko at Ryerson University as part of the Centre for Free Expression’s 2019-2020 Film Series. I’m publishing my introduction below for anyone who might be interested. As I say in my remarks, the screening was eerily well-timed considering what was happening with the Democratic Party presidential primaries at that moment. Quite a few conversations at the event also revolved around the preparedness of our global health systems in the face of Coronavirus. In short, the timing of the event made it plainly obvious that Sicko — a funny and impassioned plea for free, universal healthcare in America — has lost none of its urgency or relevancy in the thirteen years since its release. Indeed, as epidemiologist Danya M. Qato wrote just last week for Jacobin: “COVID-19 teaches us why Medicare for All should be the floor of our demands not the ceiling. To truly address this pandemic, and any other smaller and bigger crises that might follow, we need to create and deploy a public health infrastructure that listens to and is accountable to the people who have long been foreclosed from care.”

I was delighted when the IMA’s Dr. Blake Fitzpatrick invited me to introduce tonight’s film, Sicko — Michael Moore’s 2007 take on the woefully inadequate U.S. healthcare system. But then I started to think about the task before me: introducing a Michael Moore film…for a series on “Truth, Evidence, and Disinformation”…under the auspices of the Centre for Free Expression. What have I gotten myself into?

From the very beginning of his career, Moore has been a controversial figure. His first film, 1989’s muckraking Roger & Me, documents the devastation his hometown of Flint, MI, faced after General Motors closed several large plants there. As impactful and indelible as the film is in this regard, it was really its framing device — Moore’s comic and Quixotic quest to get a meeting with then-GM chairman Roger Smith — that captured the movie-going public’s imagination. Not only did this shtick come to define Moore’s style, it has certainly had ripple effects on popular documentary cinema. (We could spend the better part of this evening listing the various folks and projects that have clearly been influenced by him, both for better and worse.)

You probably know the rest: after experiments in television and narrative filmmaking, Moore went on to win an Oscar for 2002’s Bowling for Columbine, his look at gun violence in America. After being booed off the awards stage for denouncing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he then turned his attention to the “War on Terror.” The resulting film, 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11, failed in its goal to prevent George W. Bush’s re-election, but did become the highest grossing documentary film of all time — a distinction that it retains to this day (with nothing having come even remotely close to taking its place). The success also made Moore public enemy number one in the eyes of the American right: at the Republican National Committee that same year, the late John McCain called him “a disingenuous filmmaker” to thunderous applause.

If that zinger had more staying power than most, it might be because it built on preexisting concerns about Moore and his work. At the time of Roger & Me‘s release, for example, noted critics Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert sparred over the filmmaker’s ethics, in particular his loose approach to chronology. Moore’s unapologetically leftist politics have also marked him as a figure of suspicion among not just the right wing, but also those who uncritically hold fast to the belief that documentaries should (or even can) be “objective” or “neutral.” As ticket sales for his films have sharply declined, it’s become downright fashionable in both academic and critical circles to pooh-pooh the man and his work. “He’s an artless polemicist,” the line goes. “A self-righteous populist. A bigmouth. A blowhard. A gadfly. An antic-prone wise-ass.” Two Toronto writers, Will Sloan and Luke Savage, even host a podcast called Michael & Us, which began as a concerted effort to skewer each and every one of Moore’s projects from the left.

At the same time, there have been attempts by some to rehabilitate Moore, or at least ensure that he and his work are getting a fair hearing. For example, no less than Thom Andersen, director of the classic 2003 essay-film Los Angeles Plays Itself and a professor at the California Institute of the Arts, has argued that Moore’s 2009 film Capitalism: A Love Story is “the most remarkable documentary” of the first decade of this century. (I’d agree that it’s definitely one of them.) And in a recent interview with Film Comment, the School of Image Arts’s very own Dr. Brett Story called Roger & Me “a masterpiece” and sang its praises. In addition, Moore’s last film, the anti-Trump screed Fahrenheit 11/9, received some of his most glowing reviews in quite some time, which may inspire further re-examinations of his oeuvre.

On that note, the CFE could not possibly have chosen a more appropriate moment to offer a look back at Sicko. In an interview just last night with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, Former Vice President Joe Biden, one of the two remaining candidates in the Democratic Presidential Primary, said that, if elected, he would veto any Medicare for All legislation that came across his desk. And tonight’s primary in Michigan will very much determine the continued viability the other candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders — whose enormous popularity (and Michael Moore endorsement) have a tremendous lot to do with his unwavering support of Medicare for All.

From our vantage point in 2020, Sicko looks very prophetic indeed. Then as now, it’s hard to disagree with Moore when he says of healthcare in the U.S.: “We’ll never fix anything until we get that one basic thing right. And powerful forces hope that we never do. And that we remain the only country in the western world without free, universal health care.” If that sounds a little too partisan for your taste, Moore’s Canadian relatives are brought in to reassure us: “We’re not criticizing your country, we’re just giving you the facts.”

That said, I definitely think there are things to critique about Sicko. For instance, one thing that has always irked me about it is the comparison that Moore draws between the medical treatment of 9/11 rescue workers and prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. Invoking a term from the Bush Administration, he jokingly refers to the detainees as “evildoers.” But, of course, many of these prisoners are being held at Guantanamo Bay precisely because the U.S. does not have sufficient evidence to charge them with any crime. As funny and effective as this bit is in some ways, it also reifies a dichotomy that is very problematic from both a civil libertarian and anti-war
perspective.

And, of course, at the time of Sicko‘s release, Moore was criticized from many corners for his (arguably) idealized depictions of health care systems outside the United States. I imagine we’ll talk a bit about this in the discussion afterwards; for my part, though, I do think the filmmaker has handled himself extremely well in the face of these attacks. In a tense exchange with a Canadian reporter at the Cannes Film Festival, for example, Moore was berated for not saying more about hospital wait times in Canada. After listening calmly to the reporter, Moore asked, “…Would you be willing to trade your Canadian health insurance card for our [U.S.] health insurance…?” The reporter’s reply? “No.”

Please enjoy the film. I look forward to talking with you all afterwards.

Posted in Documentaries, Events, Lectures | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Interested in Purchasing Books Discussed Here? Find Deals on My Bookshop Affiliate Page, Which Supports Both Independent Bookstores and My Work

Posted on March 12, 2020 by

Screen shot of my affiliate page on Bookshop.

Bookshop, the “online bookstore with a mission to financially support independent bookstores and give back to the book community,” has finally launched. To mark this momentous occasion, I’ve joined their affiliate program. You can find my page (with a curated list of the books I’ve blogged about in my series of “Notes on…” posts) here.

I joined Bookshop’s affiliate program for two reasons. First, I generally do what I can to support independent bookstores — and I think you should too. It’s also especially important to do so right now, as so many bookstores are having to cancel events or close altogether in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, as Slate senior editor Sam Adams put it on Twitter, “the places that are closing now to stem a pandemic will need your support. The ones that won’t don’t deserve it.” Bookshop, not to mention Libro.fm, Kobo, and Hummingbird Digital Media, offers a way to support independent bookstores even as we all stay home and practice social distancing.

Second, I like doing what I do — thinking about and making work at the intersection of oral history and the documentary arts — and I want to be able to do as much of it as I can. At the same time, I don’t like the idea of generating necessary income to do that through pay-walls, ads, and the like. But I’m OK sharing a little revenue with independent bookstores if and when you buy a book because of one of my posts — and I hope you’re OK with that too!

Again, my main affiliate page is right here, and the running list of the books that I have blogged about as part of the “Notes on…” series is here. In addition to continuously updating the “Notes on…” list, I am hoping to add other lists of books in the future: recommended readings for neophytes, key texts in particular areas, and so on. So please do keep an eye on my little corner of Bookshop. (And buy some books!)

Posted in News | Tagged , , , , , , , ,

A Solidarity Statement in Support of Wet’suwet’en Jurisdiction and Governance from Ryerson University’s MFA Documentary Media Students and Faculty

Posted on March 6, 2020 by

Over the last several months, the Unist’ot’en Camp in Northern British Columbia has been very much at the center of the news here in Canada. As Alleen Brown and Amber Bracken describe it in a recent (and excellent) piece for The Intercept, the camp “for a decade has stood in the way of fossil fuel pipeline construction through the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s unceded territory in British Columbia.”

Their article continues:

Unist’ot’en, which has grown [from a single cabin built by Freda Huson in 2010] to include a bunkhouse, a traditional pit house, traplines, and a three-story healing center, is associated with one of 13 houses that make up the Wet’suwet’en Nation. The camp is the oldest and most remote of a series of Wet’suwet’en camps established along an old logging road as an assertion of the nation’s right to decide what happens on their territory. Until this month, members controlled access to the area with gates constructed in the middle of the road.

Brown and Bracken go on to explain that, in spite of the camp’s presence, “TC Energy, formerly known as TransCanada, has forged ahead with the Coastal GasLink project…[and] obtained an initial injunction to force Unist’ot’en members to get out of the way of construction in December 2018.” They pithily break down what has happened since then:

Royal Canadian Mounted Police commanders claimed “lethal overwatch” was required, according to documents revealed by The Guardian, and instructed officers to “use as much violence toward the gate as you want.” After the RCMP arrested more than a dozen pipeline opponents that January, a strained peace was established. Police maintained a presence in the area, spending more than $3 million to establish a station halfway up the logging road to the camps. Unist’ot’en members negotiated access for pipeline workers as long as they followed an agreed-upon protocol, but TC Energy claimed the checkpoints continued to slow their work.

In the latest court order, the judge argued that the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s title claims and jurisdiction remained unresolved. In response, pipeline opponents abandoned the access agreement, and the hereditary chiefs demanded that Coastal GasLink vacate the territory immediately.

On February 6, Unist’ot’en members watched on social media as the RCMP mounted a dramatic raid before dawn on a smaller support camp down the road, arresting six people. But rather than serving to quell the resistance, the arrests inspired a wave of solidarity protests and transportation blockades across Canada. Protesters shut down ports, roads, and railways from Vancouver to Saskatchewan, and a blockade set up by Indigenous-led protesters from the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory in Ontario halted commuter rail traffic between Montreal and Toronto.

As Brown and Bracken detail in their article — and you’ve probably heard — there have been further police actions at the Unist’ot’en Camp since early February, as well as further protest response across Canada and beyond.

One such response comes from the amazing first-year students in the MFA Documentary Media program at Ryerson University, whom I have the privilege of teaching this semester. They have composed a powerful statement expressing “solidarity with the Hereditary Chiefs representing the clans of the Wet’suwet’en Nation,” and “[condemning] any action interfering with their right to defend their unceded lands.” I am proud to join several faculty members in signing on to it with them.

You can read the statement in full here, and find a list of other solidarity statements on the Unist’ot’en Camp’s website here.

#WetsuwetenStong #WetsuwetenSolidarity

Posted in News | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Notes on Tibetan Resettlement Stories: Voices of Boston (2019)

Posted on February 15, 2020 by

Knowing about my past work in Buddhist studies, and current work on oral history, one of my students very thoughtfully loaned me a book: Tibetan Resettlement Stories: Voices of Boston (2019), an oral history assembled by members of the eponymous project. I dug into it with immediate interest, and discovered that it’s an excellent example of what is often called “community history.” As editors Cliff Mayotte and Claire Kiefer explain in their book Say It Forward: A Guide to Social Justice Storytelling (2018), oral history projects of this type are guided by questions such as “What are the stories and events that have shaped our community’s history and identity? What has impacted how we see ourselves? What is our dominant narrative and how does that complement or contradict personal experience?” (pg. 12).

And indeed, as we can read on the official website for Tibetan Resettlement Stories, the organizers describe the project’s efforts this way:

Our mission is to listen, record, share, and preserve the stories of the first Tibetan immigrants to settle in Boston. In their own words, these narrators tell the story of political exile and resettlement. Hearing these accounts of first-generation immigrants has opened our eyes, touched our hearts and truly deepened our understanding of what it means to leave Tibet, to be refugees in India or Nepal, and to begin a new life in the United States of America.

In the book’s preliminary notes, the organizers also speak to the issue of how the collected voices “complement” and “contradict.” As they write (pg. ix):

Occasionally, factual details gleaned from multiple interviews might contradict each other; we believe that this is the nature of nature of oral history, which relies on imperfect, and sometimes genuinely conflicting, memories. However, all efforts were made to convey accurate accounts within each story. Other materials in the book have been verified by thorough research.

These “other materials,” interspersed at useful points throughout the book, include “brief essays” that “[describe] Tibet during its vibrant period of sovereignty, and the chaos of fleeing Chinese-occupied Tibet, living in exile in neighboring Himalayan countries, forming the early Tibetan community in Boston, the challenges and surprises of adapting to life in the U.S., the dream of building a better future through work and education, resilience and changes within Tibetan families adapting to American life, and reflections on the meaning of home for those living in exile”; as well as “a historical map of Tibet and surrounding countries, displaying birthplaces of all narrators, a glossary that defines Tibetan terms and elaborates on key concepts, organizations, and places mentioned in the text, and a timeline detailing the history of Tibetan immigration in Boston” (pg. ix). In addition, Tibetan Resettlement Stories features narrator portraits, and several archival and other photographs handsomely laid out on a series of glossy pages. (To get a sense of how all these parts of the book look on the page, do take a look at the sample images included in the product listing for the book, which can be found on the project’s official website.)

As for the interviews themselves, what we get are “excerpts” from original interviews of varying lengths “selected in order to explore particular themes,” such as those mentioned above. (I took a very similar approach with the exhibition component of the Chinese Jamaican Oral History Project, and when I wrote about it for the Oral History Review blog.) The organizers explain that “the editing of these narrative has been guided by the goals of clarity and readability, and each of these abridged versions was carefully reviewed and approved by each narrator.” They also note that “translations from Tibetan to English were made by a highly esteemed Tibetan translator.” In addition, “complete versions” of the interviews “will be archived with the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, India, and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.” (pg. ix).

The end result of all these efforts, as I say above, is an estimable and impactful work of community history: bolstered by the volume’s careful arrangement and rich supporting material, the voices in Tibetan Resettlement Stories inform, evoke, and effect. By focusing in on the experiences and stories of those Tibetans whose diasporic journeys led to the Boston area, the book achieves the kinds of ends that Barbara W. Sommer and May Kay Quinlan articulate in the third and newest edition of The Oral History Manual (2018). Speaking about the possibilities for community history projects, they write (pg. 6-7):

In many cases, while documenting the community’s history is critical in itself, an oral history project or a set of life interviews can become a catalyst. It can provide an avenue to correct long-held misconceptions about an event or a time period, help collect information that balances the existing record, and become an impetus for developing community pride through the telling of people’s stories in their own words.

Fittingly, these are very close to the stated aspirations of the project itself: “Just as these stories engage, educate and inspire us, we hope they will have the same impact on Tibetans everywhere, and on everyone interested in political exile, immigration and resettlement.” I may be just one reader, but — on the terms the project has set for itself, and in view of best practices for community history projects — Tibetan Resettlement Stories seems to me a resounding success. So much so, in fact, that if I were ever to decide to produce a companion book for the Chinese Jamaican Oral History Project, I would be utterly delighted if it came out anywhere as well as this wonderful book.

By way of closing, I should point out that Tibetan Resettlement Stories — in addition to selling copies of their book — accepts donations in order to “make it possible to collect, translate and transcribe the stories of first-generation Tibetans and to share these stories with Tibetans across the globe, other groups of refugees and immigrants, and the wider public.” If so moved, you can make a donation to support their efforts here.

Posted in Book Notes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Notes on The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests (2016) by Chris Smith

Posted on January 31, 2020 by

Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgJust a couple of issues ago, in the pages of the Oral History Review, Troy Reeves offered an exacting appraisal of Chris Smith’s New York Times bestseller The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests (2016). While I presume it will not shock readers to learn that this write-up in the “U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history” hammers away at the fact that Smith’s book “does not stand up as a work of oral history according to the OHA’s Principles and Best Practices,” its closing might come as something of a surprising provocation. In it, Reeves writes:

What are the boundaries between traditional oral history and popular culture? Can they ever overlap? What are the minimum components that make oral history legitimate? Do those of us who call ourselves oral historians have exclusive rights over the term? Does the popularization of oral history enhance or debase the field that we hold dear?

While I enjoyed the book through my acolyte (or loyal follower) lens, I cannot consider it oral history. Nowhere within the pages will interested oral historians see mention of methodology, recording medium, full transcription, or archival location, four main principles that separate our work from journalism or reportage. So, as one might imagine, anyone looking for oral history insight should look elsewhere. And that is my moment of Zen.

To be clear, I think it is quite useful indeed to draw distinctions between more traditional/OHA-compliant oral history projects and things like The Daily Show (The Book), just as Reeves does here. This is not because I’m worried that not doing so would foster confusion — I’m doubtful that the two are erroneously conflated very often (or really at all) — but because I think we should talk much more about (and celebrate) the many different types of oral historical work.

One of those types is certainly what has been called “oral history as journalism” — or, work that presents a single story pieced together out of snippets from a wide-ranging collection of interviews. I discussed this approach a bit in my last post, and The Daily Show (The Book) is a word-perfect example of it. Smith follows the well-established template for “oral history as journalism” that has been set by many other books, including Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s Live From New York: An Uncensored History Of Saturday Night Live (2002), which very similarly gathers together on- and off-camera voices from Saturday Night Live‘s now nearly fifty-year history. So the comparison to journalism isn’t exactly off-beam either.

Where I do think the review goes too far is with its suggestion that if a work neither discusses “methodology, recording medium, full transcription, or archival location” nor explicitly follows the OHA’s Principles and Best Practices, then it “cannot [be considered] oral history.” Obviously, as someone with a scholarly interest in what we could call the “oral historical mode” within the documentary arts, this rubs me the wrong way. Furthermore, such a notion ignores arguments for a more inclusive outlook that have come from within the field of oral history itself. For example, in my post about Studs Terkel’s “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (1984), I include a snippet from Alessando Portelli’s essay “Oral History as Genre.” The passage, which is contained in the great historian’s 1997 book The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, definitely applies here as well (pg. 18-19):

Speaking to specialists implies the use of a more rigorously technical language (including bibliographies, footnotes, etc.); speaking to the community or to the general public requires a more pointed effort toward communication; the former will be more interpretive, the latter more narrative. Ironically, the originary orality of the sources tends to be retained much more extensively in works not intended primarily for a scholarly audience.

Speaking to the community, or targeting a broad, nonacademic audience, then, does not necessarily subtract from the quality of the work. One of the things that makes oral history different is its democratic potential, which can make an oral history project academically relevant at the same time that it is accessible to the general public, not only through readable books, but also through community projects, exhibits…film, video, the theater. Rhetorical strategies vary significantly, however.

As a mass market title that tells the story of the eponymous and enormously popular “fake news” program, The Daily Show (The Book) necessarily requires a “rhetorical strategy” that speaks to “the general public” and not just “specialists” within the field of oral history. This might at least partially explain why “nowhere within the [book’s] pages will interested oral historians see mention of methodology, recording medium, full transcription, or archival location,” among other things.

As I’ve also mentioned before, the Oral History Association notes that its membership represents “various [academic] disciplines” and includes those from “both inside and outside the academy.” Essential texts such as Ronald Grele’s Envelopes of Sounds: The Art of Oral History (1991); David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum’s Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (1996); Donna M. DeBlasio, Charles F. Ganzert, David H. Mould, Stephen H. Paschen, and Howard L. Sacks’s Catching Stories: A Practical Guide to Oral History (2009); and Elizabeth Miller, Edward Little, and Steven High’s Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice (2018) also underscore this by including editors and/or contributors who come from a wide variety of disciplines. As such, I think we all need to make a special effort to receive things like The Daily Show (The Book) in good faith, taking care not to be too dismissive of them for not being what they never set out to be in the first place.

All of that said, I do have my own criticisms of Smith’s book, though these have more to do with its content than its form. I also agree strongly with one of Reeves’s major critiques — but more on that later.

First, though, I do want to saw a few things about what I think The Daily Show (The Book) does well. At its very best, Smith’s book — which is much more an oral history of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (1999 – 2015) than it is an oral history of either The Daily Show with Craig Kilborn (1996 – 1998) or The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (2015 – the present) — fills in knowledge gaps about the epochal news satire. Sometimes it does this by simply allowing its many narrators to reminisce and really dig in on points in the show’s history that generated a lot of conversation, publicity, and/or gossip. The sheer range of voices heard from on things like the formation of The Daily Show‘s writers union, Stewart’s full-court press on behalf of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010, or the much-discussed dustup between Stewart and writer/correspondent Wyatt Cenac, for instance, is remarkable, and adds depth to our understanding of these and other red-letter moments.

Other times, it fills in those knowledge gaps with what we might call “shoptalk” or “inside baseball” stuff. For instance, prior to reading the book, I hadn’t been aware of SnapStream, a company specializing in TV monitoring software. Interviews about The Daily Show‘s collaboration with them to develop tools for monitoring the many news shows the program draws from illuminate just how much work went into simply gathering clips before 2010. “It absolutely changed the way we produce,” supervising producer Pat King tells Smith. “It could take hours to find the clips we wanted, and then it used to take ten or twelve minutes to get a clip into an Avid editor. SnapStream cut our production time down by about 60 or 70 percent.” Executive in charge of production Jill Katz adds: “It turned out to be an incredibly expensive investment, but I really saw this as a way of changing everything that we do and reducing so much of the legwork so we could spend more time being creative” (pg. 260). (As Smith seems to indicate, it’s probably not a coincidence, then, that “experiments” like Stewart and partner-in-crime Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” happened shortly thereafter.)

In addition, the narrators are well-drawn by Smith from the transcripts. As both the show’s leader and primary on-air talent, Stewart comes across the same intelligent, funny, self-effacing presence he does on TV, but also cuts an appropriately complicated and complex figure. Among others, executive producers Rory Albanese and Jen Flanz also emerge as particularly compelling “characters,” due in no small part to the evolution of both their professional roles on the show and personal relationship to one another.

But despite these strengths, The Daily Show (The Book) often feels like something of a vanity project — an opportunity for Stewart, his colleagues, and others to take a victory lap without having to do much in the way of sober, critical reflection.

Consider the ten pages devoted to the aforementioned “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” — the Washington, D.C., rally that Smith explains as “a plea for rationality in an increasingly irrational political and media landscape” (pg. 261). Though we hear about the staff’s initial misgivings, and a tiny bit about the subsequent criticism, the whole event is essentially looked at through rose-tinted glasses. Smith himself even writes that “[Stewart] and Colbert were an excellent fit for the jittery moment in American politics — a moment very much in need of a few laughs and a dose of civility,” and characterizes Stewart’s closing speech as “a welcome, hopeful appeal to Americans’ better nature, and a borderline-prophetic warning that things could get worse if sanity didn’t make a stand” (pg. 265; 268).

In reality, though, there were quite a few of us at the time who felt — and still feel — that the rally was recklessly wrong-headed, and its underlying thesis bunk. Indeed, as Alex Shepard put it in a recent look back at the event for the New Republic:

…From our darker vantage point, what really sticks out is Stewart’s denialism. The backlash to Obama was a terrifying expression of the anxieties — both racial and otherwise — gripping America’s increasingly unhinged conservatives. Bill Maher, of all people, got this. ‘When Jon announced his rally, he said the national conversation was dominated by people on the right who believe Obama’s a socialist and people on the left who believe 9/11’s an inside job,’ Maher said on his show. ‘But I can’t name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11’s an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama’s a socialist? All of them.’

This kind of thinking was not limited to Stewart and Colbert or the people holding signs about how political moderation is sexy. It was shared by Democratic leadership, most prominently by Obama himself, who spent the first precious years of his administration mistakenly convinced that he could find common ground with the right. The myth of unity remains a trope in much of the legacy media, while at least two leading candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary are selling themselves as uniters, not dividers.

The idea that the left has enemies who must be roundly defeated remains too gauche for many Democrats. That disdain for political combat is all on display at the Rally to Restore Sanity, but coated with smug condescension: It’s elaborate political theater that nominally appeals to better angels but really signals that liberals are smarter and gentler than conservatives and that, deep down, the rest of the country agrees with them.

That it came from Stewart and Colbert, who were otherwise in the midst of a decade-long hot streak, should have been the real warning. Facing growing right-wing hostility, the best they could offer was patting the backs of 200,000 people who probably would have been better off knocking on doors.

But none of the narrators meaningfully contend with critiques of this sort, and the only criticism that isn’t glibly brushed aside is Salman Rushdie’s complaint that one of the featured musical performers, Yusuf Islam, “had endorsed the fatwa against [him]” (pg. 269).

Smith seems similarly disinterested in interrogating The Daily Show‘s rather queasy “frenemies” status with partisans from across the political divide, including especially the late Senator John McCain. In fact, both he and his widow Cindy are narrators in The Daily Show (The Book). Though the highs and lows of his and the show’s relationship are all recounted by the narrators, their mutual cordiality is never really in doubt — McCain himself boils any perception of fractiousness down to “one bad interview I had with Jon” (pg. 293). One might well ask, then: how biting and/or effective a satire was The Daily Show really if it was able to maintain such a chummy rapport with one of its targets?

In addition, such cutesy media relationships betray what Nima Shirazi and Adam H. Johnson have called “liberals’ obsession with the phantom reasonable Republican,” which is certainly something that has played a role in pulling the political center more and more to the right. Considering that a trusted source of liberal “info-tainment” like The Daily Show tacitly signed off on John McCain — who, among many other sins, cheerled the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; voted to “deprive millions of access to health insurance”; unrepentently used a racist epithet; chose Sarah Palin as his running mate; and callously called for the bombing of Iran — is it really that much of a surprise that we eventually wound up with Donald Trump in the White House? That seems like a question worth asking.

But even those criticisms that might present opportunities for Stewart and company to more easily and constructively fall on their swords — such as the persistent call-outs of The Daily Show (and The Colbert Report) for transphobic (and atypically mean-spirited) jokes — go undiscussed. The only faultfinding here is that which comes from within the inner circle; if there were attempts to cut through the narrators’ groupthink and mythologizing, it’s not apparent in the text. The show’s co-creator and former executive producer Madeleine Smithberg feels the most like a wild card here, expressing opinions that are often out-of-step with the rest, but no one seems caught off-guard by anything she has to say either.

Ultimately, I think Reeves is exactly right when he suggests that The Daily Show (The Book) exists principally to “evoke nostalgia”; it’s a work of “oral history as journalism” designed to give fans of the show the warm fuzzies. If that’s what you’re after, there’s a very high probability that you will love Smith’s book. But if you’re looking to read an unsentimental and unsparing document of the program and its cultural impact, you will want to wait for another book, a significantly revised new edition, or a companion volume.

And that — with apologies to Messrs. Stewart and Reeves — is my moment of Zen.

Posted in Book Notes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Notes on September 11: An Oral History (2002) by Dean E. Murphy

Posted on November 28, 2019 by

Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgAhead of reading Garrett M. Graff’s newly-released The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (2019), I decided to take a look at another oral history of the tragedy — one I’d not read before: then New York Times reporter (and now Associate Managing Editor) Dean E. Murphy’s 2002 title September 11: An Oral History. I’m very glad that I did, and for more than a few reasons.

Published a little less than a year after the terrible events of the eponymous date, Murphy’s book is a very different sort of oral history than Graff’s. For one thing, while The Only Plane in the Sky questionably purports to be “the first comprehensive oral history of September 11, 2001” (more on that when I write about the book), September 11 takes the opposite approach. Speaking to CNN at the time of its publication, Murphy explained that he was deliberately not trying to write “the definitive record of 9/11 reminiscences.” The article goes on:

“I view [the book] as a foundation stone,” [Murphy] said. “Decades from now, when someone has a new tidbit, I hope something here can allow them to draw from” [sic].

Generally speaking, I’m wary of attempts at “comprehensiveness” or “definitiveness,” especially when it comes to enormous subjects like the attacks of September 11, 2001: invariably, it seems, projects that claim to include every relevant party wind up excluding some pretty important voices. This is one of the reasons I am personally more inclined toward approaches like Murphy’s. With that being said, I do think September 11 in and of itself makes a compelling case for observing and embracing limitations; it demonstrates the considerable virtues that come with the modest effort of laying a “foundation stone.”

In addition, when examined side-by-side, September 11 and The Only Plane in the Sky helpfully delineate at least two distinct paths of oral history practice that can be found within the world of mainstream book writing. The Only Plane in the Sky is clearly an example of what has been called “oral history as journalism” — or, work that presents a single story pieced together out of snippets from a wide-ranging collection of interviews. September 11, meanwhile, is much more in the vein of literary oral history — or, work which usually looks like an anthology of individual monologues, each with their own unique stories and perspectives.

Admittedly, the line between these two types can sometimes be blurry — it is in September 11, as we will see — but Murphy’s book ultimately has much more in common with works of literary oral history such as Studs Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) or Wallace Terry’s Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1984) or Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (2005) than it does with The Only Plane in the Sky or another example of “oral history as journalism.” (I say this despite the CNN article’s perplexing claim that it “is not a Studs Terkel-like collection of interviews.” Murphy’s book might be dissimilar from Terkel’s in terms of content, but definitely not in terms of form.)

September 11 is built around forty-one interviews with survivors of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Readers will not find any interviews having to do with United Airlines Flight 93, however. (The flight crashed in a field near Somerset County, PA, after the airplane’s crew and passengers struggled to wrest back control from its hijackers.) While including the voices of first-responders, air traffic controllers, family members, locals, and others affected by the crash of Flight 93 might have helped to underscore something about the diverse experiences of that tragic day, their memories would be somewhat dissimilar from those gathered together in Murphy’s book: as he explains in the introduction, it is squarely focused on “eyewitness” accounts. Given each person’s respective proximity to a point of attack, all of the survivors/narrators featured in September 11 are eyewitnesses in the most conventional sense of the word (pg. 5).

Murphy’s approach to interviewing these eyewitnesses hearkens to some longstanding debates about oral history. As a mentioned in my notes on Terkel’s “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II, popular forms — including but not limited to “oral history as journalism” and literary oral history — are sometimes regarded with suspicion in scholarly circles. Specifically, critics have voiced concerns about the authors’ perceived lack of (academic) rigor, as well as their editing (however judicious). To his credit, Murphy is up-front about his methods (pg. 5):

[These are] first-person accounts of that day, but they are not verbatim transcriptions of tape-recorded conversations. They are mostly composites based on interviews, telephone conversations, e-mail exchanges, faxed letters and documents sent through the postal service. In some cases, people felt more comfortable writing down their thoughts in their entirety than speaking them aloud. In others, they turned to me to make sense out of a series of rambling conversations and written communications that retraced old ground, broke new ground and sometimes went entirely off track.

This may shock the more pedantic historians, but it’s worth pointing out (again and again) that that this does not mean Murphy is playing fast and loose with the verbatim material he has gathered. As he continues (pg. 5):

The flexibility ended, however, when it came to accuracy. I had one uncompromising rule: In their final form, the accounts had to reflect the best and most truthful recollections of the people who told them.

And the proof is in the putting: in each and every case presented in September 11, you can discern the unique “voice” of the narrator — in all of their fascinatingly human unpredictability. Murphy may have taken a stronger hand than usual in the editing process, but the result feels (for lack of a less troublesome word) authentic. There is no obvious authorial embroidery here, nor are there telltale signs of dramatic license; he has clearly been very careful and thoughtful about his work. In fact, Murphy goes on to note that when he would share drafts with the narrators, he often had to curtail their attempts to punch things up. “That could not happen if the history was to be accurate and credible,” he explains. “And in the end, they all concurred” (pg. 6).

This is not to say that September 11 does not include some striking creative flourishes — indeed it does. One especially brilliant device that recurs throughout the book is a kind of seed-planting: a memorably strange or unexplained detail in one narrator’s testimony pays off later in another’s. For example, the first narrator, Teresa Veliz, describes escaping the North Tower of the World Trade Center by going down a stairwell with hundreds of others, and seeing the surreal sight of a blind man and his guide dog among the crowd (pg. 12). Incredibly, Murphy follows her interview with one with that very man (Michael Hingson) and the colleague (David E. Frank) who helped him and his dog escape.

Similarly, many of the civilian narrators recall hearing repeated explosion sounds, unlike those that came from the impact of the planes and the collapse of the towers. For those readers who weren’t physically there — like myself — this is a somewhat mysterious detail. It’s not until fairly late in the book that these explosions are fully explained by Captain Anthony R. Whitaker of the Port Authority Police Department (pg. 188):

There were explosions everywhere. They were causing mass hysteria. Everyone started screaming about car bombs. What it was though, were hot pieces of structural steel from Tower 1 flying through the air like toothpicks. The steel was so hot that when it hit a vehicle it ignited the gasoline.

Ernest Armstead, an emergency medical specialist with the New York Fire Department, further adds in his interview that among those exploding vehicles were at least a couple of police cars and even a fire truck (pg. 154).

Murphy also wisely orients things around geography and (when appropriate) particular ordeals. The book’s sections include “In the North Tower,” “In the South Tower,” “On the Outside,” “To the Rescue,” “Narrow Escapes,” and “In the Pentagon.” Each of these zones of experience has its own unique, shared aspects, as the narrators reveal in their interviews. “In the Pentagon” is the only portion of the book dedicated to what happened in Washington, though it’s more robust that I initially presumed it would be. In fact, the interviews are hugely clarifying about things that are probably comparatively fuzzier in the public consciousness; it may be just one section, but it likely won’t leave readers wanting.

One choice that hasn’t aged especially well, though, is Murphy’s decision to begin each section of the book with a quote from either Rudy Giuliani or George W. Bush. As the de facto spokesmen for the tragedy, this might have made some sense at the time of publication; but today it seems to give their words a kind of authority that they don’t deserve, and to ignore their propagandistic qualities (which where plainly obvious then as now).

Still, this is really the only noticeable blemish. And there is at least one more major strength to be enumerated, and that is the amazingly short time-span in which this book was researched, written, and published. Murphy did all of his preparations, conducted these interviews, and had the book in print within a year of the attacks. This means that the memories, stories, thoughts, and feelings contained in September 11 are alive in a way that they might not have been if the book were written, say, last year. Furthermore, it speaks to his incredible efficacy, resilience, and ability to roll with a colossal story as it unfolds. In this regard, it reminds me of Spike Lee’s masterpiece When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), a massive documentary film in the oral history mode that was miraculously completed by the one-year anniversary of its subject: Hurricane Katrina.

I’ll be interested to see what The Only Plane in the Sky is able to do in terms of illuminating aspects of the attacks of September 11, 2001, that previous histories (including other oral histories) have not been able to illuminate. That said, I’m sort of rooting for it not to become recognized as “the definitive record of 9/11 reminiscences,” if only because I would hate for readers to miss out on existing (and future) oral histories on the subject, including especially September 11. It’s out-of-print as it is — an ignoble fate for what I would say is an essential and irreplaceable document.

Posted in Book Notes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My Post about the Chinese Jamaican Oral History Project for the Oral History Review Blog

Posted on November 22, 2019 by

I am incredibly honored and excited to be able to share the news that I have written a blog post about my M.F.A. thesis, the Chinese Jamaican Oral History Project, at the invitation of the Oral History Review — “the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history.”

Dr. Janneken Smucker, the digital editor of the Oral History Review, describes my contribution this way:

Oral history provides the opportunity to explore intersubjectivity and positionality. Here, Daniel Clarkson Fisher shares his work with the Chinese Jamaican Oral History Project centered in Toronto. The moving video excerpts from interviews below demonstrate shared authority in practice.

Check out the whole post, including those video excerpts, right here.

Posted in Articles, News, Oral History | Tagged , , , , , , ,

Notes on Notes from the Field (2019) by Anna Deavere Smith

Posted on November 21, 2019 by

Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgI started blogging about oral history as a mode within the documentary arts not just to “teach” about this kind of work, but also to educate myself; though I’m already actively working in this mode, there’s still a lot that I don’t know and want to learn. While it may not seem like that vast an area, there are definitely certain aspects I’m somewhat less well-versed in than others. Case in point: verbatim theatre.

I have long been interested in what Drama Online defines as the “form of documentary theatre which is based on the spoken words of real people,” but, until recently, didn’t really know much about it beyond the small handful of plays I’ve seen over the years. And I only knew about those because I have so many family members and friends who do or have worked professionally in the theatre. For example, an actor friend was featured in a production of Robin Soans’s Talking to Terrorists, and that was how I found out about that particular title. Similarly, I was introduced to Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues through a staged reading of the play that quite a large contingent of friends at Denison University participated in. And I first encountered Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project‘s The Laramie Project by way of a production at nearby Kenyon College that included my sister Anna among the cast. (Later, during my time at Naropa University, I also got to meet Moisés and several members of the Tectonic Theater Project when they came to workshop verbatim pieces produced by friends in the M.F.A. Contemporary Performance program.)

So I knew that as part of my self-directed studies here, I wanted to look much more closely at both verbatim plays and theoretical/practical materials about the art of verbatim theatre. A natural place to start seemed to be one of the most obvious “holes” in my knowledge: the work of National Humanities Medal recipient Anna Deavere Smith. I’ve been aware of Smith’s pioneering plays for years, but had only ever seen bits and pieces of them; for quite a while now her output has been on the list of things I promised myself that I would get to some day, and it jumped to the front of the queue when I started blogging again. Because her most recent play, Notes from the Field (2019), was just published (by Anchor Books) and televised (on HBO), I decided to start there.

Within the constellation of creative efforts that we categorize as verbatim theatre, it’s fair to say that Smith’s star shines both brightly and distinctively. While many of the (sub)genre’s hallmarks are present in her work — her building blocks are the transcripts of the interviews she conducts with various individuals, for example — it is unique in at least one significant regard: hers are one-woman shows, in which she herself performs all of the voices that make up each play. (The other verbatim plays mentioned above have full — and sometimes, depending on the production, sizeable — casts.) The quality of this performance work is very well described by Decider’s Jade Budowski in her review of Notes from the Field:

Smith is almost eerily natural in every role she plays; each person is performed with a lived-in quality, a true embodiment of the individual. Her voice booms and goes down to a whisper, her demeanor shifts from upright and confident to bitter and resentful, her face morphs and molds to whoever’s turn it is to make themselves known. We aren’t watching Anna Deavere Smith. We are sitting down with the individuals affected by these terrible systems. No one is ever presented as a caricature – we need to see these people. And that’s exactly what Smith allows us to do.

While she is not the only solo performance artist in the documentary theatre space, Smith has unquestionably been a singularly effective and important innovator.

Not only that, her work has had an appreciably large impact on theatre broadly. The various honors her plays have received certainly attest to that. For instance, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (1992), based on interviews about the 1991 Crown Heights riot, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993), based on interviews about the 1992 Los Angeles riots, received back-to-back Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding One-Person Show. In addition, the former was a finalist for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the latter nominated for the 1994 Tony Award for Best Play. Both were filmed and televised on PBS as well.

“Notes from the Field is the most recent installment in what I consider my life’s work: a series of plays I call On the Road: A Search for American Character,” Smith writes in the introduction to the play’s text (pg. xv). This series includes Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, as well as her other well-known works in this vein that cover a wide range of topics. She further explains that Notes from the Field puts its special focus on “the school-to-prison pipeline” — or, what the American Civil Liberties Union defines as “a disturbing national trend wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.” The organization continues:

Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse, or neglect, and would benefit from additional educational and counseling services. Instead, they are isolated, punished, and pushed out.

“Zero-tolerance” policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules, while cops in schools lead to students being criminalized for behavior that should be handled inside the school. Students of color are especially vulnerable to push-out trends and the discriminatory application of discipline.

In view of this trend, and some other very troubling and relevant data, Smith argues that “this is a time for people to cease being spectators and to instead be moved to get out there and do something to effect change” (pg. xix). She goes on (pg. xix-xx):

It is time to ask ourselves, “Who are we? What do we believe in? What kind of country do we want to be?”

I believe that art can inspire action. It can motivate us to reimagine a world where schools are more than sorting mechanisms for the haves and the have-nots, where they can function as centers for a culture of learning in which teachers, staff, administrators, parents, and students from all communities are respected and nurtured intellectually, physically, and creatively.

But that is a type of reimagining that needs to include all kinds of voices, especially those that have been historically discounted. It is a reimagining that requires courage, empathy, and action. And it has to start with listening.

Though the content of Notes from the Field is definitely very powerful all by itself — as usual, Smith has gathered together an elegantly varied and remarkably informative collection of voices — the play’s particular form manages to convey its voices in such a way that their potency gets a considerable boost. Expanding on the idea that her process starts with “active listening,” Smith explains (pg. xv):

My goal is to pay careful attention to the people I interview and then to reflect back what I have heard in the hope of sparking a conversation, of making change possible. I aim not to merely imitate but to study people closely enough so that I can embody them on the stage, using my own voice and body. When I was a girl, my grandfather told me, “If you say a word often enough, it becomes you.” People speak of putting themselves into other people’s shoes. My way of doing that is to put myself into other people’s words.

Smith’s aim in doing all of this is to give these voices a more lasting impact than they might have if they were presented to audiences in other ways. For some, though, Smith’s approach might seem like the kind of thing that would be doomed from the start. Newsday‘s Verne Gay speaks to exactly this point in his review of Notes from the Field, writing:

The idea of a one-woman show, or one-man show or one-anything show is tough to get your head around because of the finescapable fact of that oneness. TV viewers have long grown accustomed to the many. We’re used to seeing lots of people say lots of things because that’s what we’re used to in real life. Also, by cutting out the role of the imagination — ours — TV does our work for us.

What’s more, as Budowski adds: “Due to the inherent difficulty of successfully creating a one-woman show, it would undeniably be quite easy for Notes from the Field to venture into hokey territory…” And yet, as she ultimately concludes, “there’s never a moment here that doesn’t work.”

Part of the reason for this, of course, is the fallacy of presumption that a one-person show is inherently some kind of non-starter or hard sell. Gay is quite right to note that

…Broadway figured out the magic of “one” long ago, or at least Hal Holbrook, Spalding Gray and [Smith] did. Largely nourished by the primal elements of story and music, the one-person show can have a power and beauty all its own. As spectator, the novelty soon wears off and the trance begins. You are in somebody’s spell and have no idea why.

Those last couple of sentences provide quite an apt description of what happens when you experience one of Smith’s plays; there is indeed a wonderfully mysteriously alchemy at work in her performances, and it’s not the easiest thing to explain. Using the language of “spells” and “trances” feels right on to me. It may be a cliché, but it’s also true: you kind of have to see one of her plays (even on television) to appreciate the full, hypnotic effect.

Consider the monologue derived from Smith’s interview with Taos Proctor, a man described simply as “Yurok fisherman/former inmate” (pg. 41). It was at the end of this monologue that I noticed the “trance” had begun for me: Smith represents this narrator very simply — wearing waders and speaking in an idiosyncratic timbre and cadence — but the effect is so powerful that the distinction between Smith as the interpreter and Proctor as the primary source blurs to the point of almost dropping away completely. Between her selections from the transcript and subtle use of artifice, I essentially forgot I was watching a performance — I was completely drawn into the monologue. In cases like this one, it really feels as though her narrators are being conjured rather than performed.

In other instances, when Smith portrays well-known public figures, she wisely tends to zero in on the essence of their character, rather than their most recognizable characteristics. Her closing incarnation of U.S. Representative John Lewis (D-GA), for example, has much more in common with, say, Anthony Hopkins’s discursive rendering of Richard Nixon in Nixon (1995) than Daniel Day-Lewis’s uncanny channeling of Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln (2012): Smith doesn’t look or sound much like Lewis, so she instead goes for and absolutely nails his immense sense of perspective and the way he speaks truth to power from a place of deep experience.

As I begin my exploration vebatim theatre, I’m thankful to have started with Anna Deavere Smith, whose work has done so incredibly much to underscore the medium’s tremendous capacities for bringing memories, stories, and oral testimony to life. Her plays, including and especially Notes from the Field, set a intimidatingly high bar for work in this area, yes, but I think that those of who want to create things that “spark conversation” and even “make changes” would do well to try to follow her assiduous and inventive example. We may not reach their heights, but why not aim for that? And as Smith reminds us again and again, making verbatim theatre starts with a simple act indeed, and one that those of us making documentary art in the oral historical mode are already working on: “listening.”

Posted in Book Notes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

On the Passing of Branko Lustig

Posted on November 18, 2019 by

Branko Lustig’s autograph in Daniel Clarkson Fisher’s paperback copy of Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List (1982)

Last week, Branko Lustig, the double-Academy Award-winning producer of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), passed away. A Holocaust survivor, he was also a driving force behind the awe-inspiring USC Shoah Foundation, whose mission is “to develop empathy, understanding and respect through testimony.” (The organization has recorded tens of thousands of audiovisual oral histories with Holocaust survivors and many others.)  As they explain in their remembrance of him:

Shortly after [Schindler’s List‘s] 1993 release, Lustig — who witnessed horrific atrocities at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and other concentration and labor camps — led the drive to implement Steven Spielberg’s vision of collecting 50,000 Holocaust testimonies for what was then called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

“Branko was an essential guide throughout the production of Schindler’s List and the subsequent establishment of Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation,” said Stephen Smith, USC Shoah Foundation’s Finci-Viterbi Executive Director. “He helped set the tone for the organization so his fellow survivors – witnesses from around the world – would feel comfortable to come forward to share their stories.”

I met Lustig at the Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis many, many years ago. He signed my copy of (Thomas Keneally’s novel) Schindler’s List (1982), and left me struck by his kindness in the brief few moments that we talked. I was, after all, just a dopey teenager with a tunnel-vision interest in “the movies,” and no sense that I would later become far more interested in the kind of work Lustig was doing with the USC Shoah Foundation. He didn’t have to be quite as warm and generous as he was, which make his warmth and generosity that much more impressive in retrospect.

I’m sad to note his passing.

Posted in Reflections | Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

“Show and Tell: Series Introduction”

Posted on October 28, 2019 by

As part of my efforts to blog thoughtfully about all things at the intersection of oral history and the documentary arts, I’ll be dropping periodic video essays. Each one will offer a deep dive on a work that is representative of what we might call “the oral historical mode in documentary filmmaking.” Here’s a “series introduction” to better explain what I’m driving at…

Posted in Video Essays | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,