Down The Rabbit Hole

 

Down The Rabbit Hole

This is Bad Bunny falling into a crowd. I hadn’t seen the half-time show, so, initially, I wondered if it was AI. Apparently, it was a stunt double. Photography has been an important part of the graphic arts part of Me; photographer, reporter, the publisher and editor of a newspaper where it and the arts played an integral part of our product. This photo I found to be the most important shot of the Super Bowl half-time show but it was lost in the deluge of images.

I used to do photography old school back when film and cameras were expensive. There was the ordeal of processing the images; the suspense of not knowing if you “got the shot”, whether it was in focus, and you waited for the wondrous moment when the image magically popped into your developing agent tray. 

Has the digital age sapped this art of some of its soul?  It’s different. But the delight of sharing your image with others who will appreciate your work must certainly still be alive. Whether analog or digital,  the viewfinder tells you that you've taken a “good” picture. It's both artistry and opportunity. You know it when you see the child running, set aflame by napalm or a Viet Cong being executed on the spot, bodies falling out of 9 -11, the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima or the liberation of Paris. Life is full of these moments and photographers capture them.

But sometimes it takes more than that to understand what it is about a seemingly mundane photo that moves you emotionally (and, also how it is you are being played, something not limited to photography).

Many moons ago I became obsessed with Brian Wilson Key. He was all about “subliminal advertising” and the idea that ad copy was being produced containing latent images designed to bolster the sale of their products. The ice cubes in your whisky glass were infused with images of sharks on the theory that these and other dangerous instrumentalities would subconsciously bolster an alcoholics' self-destructive nature.  

It’s probably not Key that moves artists like Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny in the presentation of their shows. They are not merely musicians but multi-disciplinary artists, and, also a product of the computer age where things like Easter Eggs make their products ever more tantalizing. By design, we now view everything they do for its hidden meaning, pixel by pixel. 

It’s not like they don’t stick it in your fact. There was so much symbolism in the half time show that mountains of explanations have spewed forth from pundits: Lady Gaga in a typical Puerto Rican dress, red Flor de Maga corsage, our flag colors. (But which flag?); the little boy that people misconstrued to be the little kid that got kidnapped by ICE was a tribute to his mom; conejo means rabbit, his mom’s maiden name - also the name of the little kidnapped boy (who was wearing a bunny hat) .................  .........................................(rabbit hole) 

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Yes,........... the picture. 

He is backwards on the ledge of the casita and falls backwards into a crowd who catches him and holds him up.  That’s called backward falling. It's a team-building, trust -inducing, fear-reducing experience.  That was a powerful message.

I have been, in the last weeks, suffering the same sort of mental exhaustion the rest of the country is experiencing.  I've had to talk to my kids, who are in the same way, and I try to keep a positive attitude. I have been getting angrier and angrier and lashing out at people unnecessarily. 

I didn't see the show, but I needed that picture.  It wasn't on an Iwo Jima scale. But it was therapeutic. I need that same sort of hope, resolve, and commitment.  I need the idea that we are here, that we can trust each other, that we have each other's backs. 

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The Road to Healing

 The Road to Healing

When it comes to football, like religion, I'm an apostate.  I watch Alabama football and maybe a couple of other college teams. But football? I generally abstain. It's robotic, like Tesla or CGI.  I don't think I've ever seen any part of the Super Bowl. The halftime show is spectacle that does nothing for me. Listening to music on a television is a perversion of the sound. Why sit through orchestrated thuggery to watch a marketing vehicle? You wont miss it. For the weeks that follow we will be bombarded with clips and opinions, etc.  

Add Bad Bunny to the equation.  I pass.

But that’s no slam on him. I have only recently thought of him as a positive. I had to overcome what I now realize was merely a resistance to change. Tropical music is a complex genre. It is melodic, well-structured, and respectful.  Bad Bunny had been the culmination of things with which I was not comfortable. Reggaeton. Rap, thug shit.  

His latest album set me on the road to Damascus. Bunny had made a conscious effort to link his music with my music and our culture and history. Rather than the gross sexist attitudes I had presumed were his, I saw the same sort of respect, romance, tenderness, sensuality and love that can be found in boleros, plenas, etc.  He is an upsetter and now my kindred spirit, mi compañero.

I can’t emphasize enough his significance to me or other Puerto Rican Boomers, especially if you were raised up North. My family left the island as part of the 40s diaspora. We are this country's Palestinians. We are part of the supposed unwashed, the unwelcomed. We have been displaced, discriminated, and dishonored wherever we go. From New York (where we were forced out so that they could build Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts)  to New Jersey, Florida, France, Denmark, etc. and so, we have a soft spot for immigrants; but for the vagaries of history, go us. 

I was surprised that Rita Moreno wasn't at the show. Puerto Ricans have a special attachment to her through West Side Story. The movie started telling our story and she was its blazing star. Benito quaffs our needy thirsts but Rita carried the initial water. She broke the self-deprecating Stepin Fetchit mold of Hispanics like Monty Rock III, Carmen Miranda, and Charo by being not just good but a wonder, the proverbial GOAT (EGOT if you prefer). Her portfolio culminates in the phenomenon that we're now seeing in Bad Bunny. He wields his power  - not abrasive, not vituperative, but nonetheless assertive. He is what the world needs right now, a gentleman who stands without pushing you down or keeping you back. 

The idea of putting Bad Bunny in the halftime show wasn't driven by any concern for our psyche. But for us he is a welcomed accident - the elixir, the balm, the Vicks - for the insecurities and psychological injuries inflicted on us and that we have begun to weather. We will continue to survive but no longer as just more road kill thanks to a Bad Bunny.

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Pravda!

 Pravda!

My wife and I lived with her parents back in the 60s while we were going to South Alabama.  Her father proudly labeled himself a “reactionary”. That was no understatement.  But most of us in the South learn, not only to tolerate, but to love the  things people elsewhere might not understand. Stockholm Syndrome?  He and I learned to tolerate each other and in the end, he told me he loved me.  

But getting there was fractious. There was, for example, the casual remark made by one of our friends that the “Star Spangled Banner” had been a British drinking song. She meant it as an aside.  It wasn't any kind of posturing.  She wasn't even talking to him. He lashed out. How dare she say something like that?  We didn't engage him. It wasn't worth it.  

That memory came back up for me recently with the flap over the student protest at Murphy High School and what was lost in the typical back-and-forth reactions. I congratulated the Murphy students. Others? Not. I assumed it was a Rocky Road-flavored TDS protest; a mixture of different but congruent flavors and nuts. Then I saw someone else’s response that answered the question I thought most germane. Why is the Secretary of Education, an agency that was supposed to be in the process of being dismantled, at Murphy? 

I went to bed last night pondering whether the fact that my feed was blowing up with posts touting the huge success - MILLIONS OF PEOPLE - going to the Turning Point Super Bowl counter-event. Could it be? Probably not. We learn from how groups act to look for what might be hidden, for the agenda, the “truth”. We are part and parcel of the (dis)Information Era. I remind myself; "be wary".

When the students became the only narrative, I set out to underscore what I thought was the salient point: that Linda McMahon is part of a progromme to completely whitewash history; that claims that it is some sort of leftist plot to accurately paint a picture of this country's past; that the Heritage Foundation, Carlisle, Hillsdale, Turning Point and others - the people obsessed with this supposed indoctrination programs like DEI and "wokeism" - were in the process of doing the very same thing and are using shadow techniques like Commission 1776  to sanitize our cultural and political history.  

The outrage over the “War on Christmas”, the inconvenience of  political correctness, the denial of the right of hate speech, got us here. The organizing vehicle was the making of a rump theory like critical race theory into something so worrisome that patriots needed to race to the barricades. THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD! “Our truth.” Pravda! Peddling a line that leaves out the inconvenient facts, that somehow panders to the notion that race and sex discrimination weren’t no big thang, that won't talk, much less discuss, the country's past blemishes because it is somehow "unpatriotic" is, at best, cowardice.  

        McMahon is only the tip of the spear. 

        Yesterday, a Mobile County School Board member posted a picture of himself with Linda McMahon and Bruce Pearl. I posted what I know about Turning Point, about the "1776 Commission", Hillsdale, etc. I gave him the benefit of the doubt because if you don't know, you don't know. “That’s what happens when you don't put educators on school boards,” I thought.  His response was emblematic of this whole issue. The coward erased my comments. If you are a willing accomplice - or perhaps more - in this cultural war, your complaints will ring hollow.

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