Now that my new book is out, I’m doing a series of public talks around the country to explore core issues of choice, reform, and community.
My first event was at the legendary DC bookstore, Politics & Prose, and they videotaped the conversation, which featured everything from high-stakes testing to E.D. Hirsch to a quick crowdsourcing of the core characteristics of the ideal graduate.
See for yourself, and let me know if it was helpful.
Imagine if more places were as concerned with integration (as opposed to separation) as the fundamental design principle of a great learning environment?
Who said youth is always wasted on the young?
You Don’t Know Jack | Morgan Spurlock (SPANISH Subtitles) from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.
I’d characterize this one as a pretty reasoned conversation about the issue — which is surprising, since it comes from Democracy Now, which is pretty clearly in one camp and not the other. I attribute that to Steve Barr bringing some nuance to the conversation.
Still, listen to both sides, and judge for yourselves . . .
Imagine if, kissing aside, we were always so present with one another?
We might be on to something here, people . . .
Is anyone out there watching the final season of Treme, David Simon’s underappreciated series about New Orleans and, by extension, us?
Since its debut in 2010, which followed perhaps too closely on the heels of Simon’s undisputed masterpiece, The Wire, most of the comments about Treme have focused on what it is not.
It’s not thrilling. It’s not suspenseful. It’s not exciting.
It’s true – Treme is not really any of those things. Then again, unlike just about every other drama on television, it’s also not about drugs, or counter-terrorism, or organized crime.
Two episodes into its fourth and final season on HBO, I’m struck by what this show is about – the silent, almost imperceptible shift away from something original, and raw, and dysfunctional, and towards something far more efficient, and generic, and mundane.
Treme is about modern society, in other words, and what it looks and feels like to be a human being at the equinox of reform-minded hope and change-inducing despair.
Consider the title of this season’s opening episode, “Yes We Can.” It’s 2008, and the central characters of the show – musicians and foodies most – are awash in the glow of Barack Obama’s historic presidential victory. But the glow lasts about five minutes before the reality of life in New Orleans intercedes to remind them (and us) of the work that remains to be done. A murderer escapes detection because the city’s crime cameras haven’t worked since Hurricane Katrina. A car gets eaten by one of the city’s gaping potholes. And someone arrested for a petty offense dies senselessly of an asthma attack in a holding cell. “I keep waiting for someone to come through and clean this place out,” says a frustrated detective.
There is, of course, a cleaning-out underway, but it’s the kind that comes with a cost. Developers and change agents of all kinds see in post-Katrina New Orleans a once-in-a-generation opportunity to remove the dirt and dysfunction of the past. Housing projects are closed to their former inhabitants. Charter schools apply fresh coats of paint to formerly rotting public school buildings. And corporate interests have plans for a gleaming new jazz center in an abandoned municipal hall.
Change is coming to the Crescent City. Who could argue with that?
A lot of people, actually. As one resident says at a contentious community meeting, “We all like getting sanctified, but we don’t like being gentrified!” But the genius of David Simon is that he doesn’t give us clear heroes and villains; instead, everyone inhabits their own moral shade of gray. As one of the developers asks earnestly, in the face of so much resistance, “Why is everybody so pissed off in this town all the time?”
Why indeed. And that’s why the tone of this show is so perfect. Unlike the crumbling levees of 2005, there are no undeniable alarm bells to signal the post-Katrina crisis at hand – which, at its core, is the diminution of New Orleans’ distinctive culture, particularly its twin anchors: music and food. Instead, the alarm of gentrification is a dog whistle; only some can hear it. Others see merely the beautiful convergence of profit and progress, leaving the rest of us to endure the disinfecting scrub of modernity, which spreads silently like Hannah Arendt’s definition of evil –with neither depth nor dimension, like a fungus, over the surface of all things.
In the face of such banal reforms, and amidst the death and the betrayal and the corruption and delay and disappointment, Treme reminds us of something that the rest of our popular entertainment seeks to skip over – that the circle of life is our lone constant, in all its persistence and pathology.
For better and for worse, our salvation rests with one another.
The writer Bruce Weigl makes a similar point in his similarly underappreciated Blues at the Equinox, a poem about its own form of strange bedfellows: two people moments after a motel hookup. “In the shadows the woman dresses quietly,” Weigl begins, “beyond the light the parking lot spears through thin drapes, her heart inclined towards the miraculous.”
What passes for love,
the miles and the years
and the rivers crossed no one could name,
what passes for love
is not always the fierce blessing
the mortal lovers give—and then grow pale—
but sometimes one heart robbing another
in a rented room, a great sadness
and a great happiness, at the same time, descending.
And so it goes.
(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)
(not to mention why arts integration is such a good idea . . .)
Last month, I gave a keynote address at the annual conference of the New Tech Network, and suggested that this seemingly innocuous question is one we might need to think more deeply about, and start to answer differently. The video was just released, so see for yourself:
Beats me. But for what it’s worth, here he is arguing with me about modern school reform on FOX News back in 2011.
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