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blackfreethinkers · 4 years ago

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A racial realist IS a white supremacist!!!

By Greg Miller

In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.

After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.

Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.”

When challenged on these views by subordinates, Trump has invariably responded with indignation. “He would say, ‘No one loves Black people more than me,’ ” a former senior White House official said. The protests rang hollow because if the president were truly guided by such sentiments he “wouldn’t need to say it,” the official said. “You let your actions speak.”

In Trump’s case, there is now a substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words.

Over 3½ years in office, he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.

His immigration policies hark back to quota systems of the 1920s that were influenced by the junk science of eugenics, and have involved enforcement practices — including the separation of small children from their families — that seemed designed to maximize trauma on Hispanic migrants.

With the election looming, the signaling behind even second-tier policy initiatives has been unambiguous.

After rolling back regulations designed to encourage affordable housing for minorities, Trump declared himself the champion of the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He ordered aides to revamp racial sensitivity training at federal agencies so that it no longer refers to “White privilege.” In a speech at the National Archives on Thursday, Trump vowed to overhaul what children are taught in the nation’s schools — something only states have the power to do — while falsely claiming that students are being “fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism.”

The America envisioned by these policies and pronouncements is one dedicated to preserving a racial hierarchy that can be seen in Trump’s own Cabinet and White House, both overwhelmingly white and among the least diverse in recent U.S. history.

Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him

Scholars describe Trump’s record on race in historically harsh terms. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president and helped Southern Whites reestablish much of the racial hegemony they had seemingly lost in the Civil War.

“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”

A second White House official who worked closely with Trump quibbled with the comparison, but only because later Oval Office occupants also had intolerant views.

“Woodrow Wilson was outwardly a white supremacist,” the former official said. “I don’t think Trump is as bad as Wilson. But he might be.”

White House officials vigorously dispute such characterizations.

“Donald Trump’s record as a private citizen and as president has been one of fighting for inclusion and advocating for the equal treatment of all,” said Sarah Matthews, a White House spokeswoman. “Anyone who suggests otherwise is only seeking to sow division.”

No senior U.S. official interviewed could recall Trump uttering a racial or ethnic slur while in office. Nor did any consider him an adherent of white supremacy or white nationalism, extreme ideologies that generally sanction violence to protect White interests or establish a racially pure ethno-state.

White House officials also pointed to achievements that have benefited minorities, including job growth and prison-sentence reform.

But even those points fade under scrutiny. Black unemployment has surged disproportionately during the coronavirus pandemic, and officials said Trump regretted reducing prison sentences when it didn’t produce a spike in Black voter support.

And there are indications that even Trump’s allies are worried about his record on race. The Republican Party devoted much of its convention in August to persuading voters that Trump is not a racist, with far more Black speakers at the four-day event than have held top White House positions over the past four years.

This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials, including some who have had daily interactions with the president, as well as experts on race and members of white supremacist groups. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a desire to provide candid accounts of events and conversations they witnessed without fear of retribution.

Coded racial terms

Most attributed Trump’s views on race and conduct to a combination of the prevailing attitudes of his privileged upbringing in the 1950s in what was then a predominantly White borough of New York, as well as a cynical awareness that coded racial terms and gestures can animate substantial portions of his political base.

The perspectives of those closest to the president are shaped by their own biases and self-interests. They have reason to resist the idea that they served a racist president. And they are, with few exceptions, themselves White males.

Others have offered less charitable assessments.

Omarosa Manigault Newman, one of the few Black women to have worked at the White House, said in her 2018 memoir that she was enlisted by White House aides to track down a rumored recording from “The Apprentice” — the reality show on which she was a contestant — in which Trump allegedly used the n-word. A former official said that others involved in the effort included Trump adviser Hope Hicks and former White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

The tape, if it exists, was never recovered. But Manigault Newman, who was forced out after clashing with other White House staff, portrayed the effort to secure the tape as evidence that aides saw Trump capable of such conduct. In the book, she described Trump as “a racist, misogynist and bigot.”

Mary L. Trump, the president’s niece, has said that casual racism was prevalent in the Trump family. In interviews to promote her recently published book, she has said that she witnessed her uncle using both anti-Semitic slurs as well as the n-word, though she offered few details and no evidence.

Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, has made similar allegations and calls Trump “a racist, a predator, a con man” in a newly published book. Cohen accuses Trump of routinely disparaging people of color, including former president Barack Obama. “Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a s---hole,” Trump said, according to Cohen.

These authors did not provide direct evidence of Trump’s racist outbursts, but the animus they describe aligns with the prejudice Trump so frequently displays in public.

In recent months, Trump has condemned Black Lives Matter as a “symbol of hate” while defending armed White militants who entered the Michigan Capitol, right-wing activists who waved weapons from pickup trucks in Portland and a White teen who shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin.

Trump has vowed to safeguard the legacies of Confederate generals while skipping the funeral of the late congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon, and retweeted — then deleted — video of a supporter shouting “White power” while questioning the electoral eligibility of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the nation’s first Black and Asian American candidate for vice president from a major party. In so doing, Trump reanimated a version of the false “birther” claim he had used to suggest that Obama may not have been born in the United States.

These add to an already voluminous record of incendiary statements, including his tweet that minority congresswomen should “go back” to their “crime infested” countries despite being U.S.-born or U.S. citizens, and his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” after torch-carrying white nationalists staged a violent protest in Charlottesville.

In a measure of Trump’s standing with such organizations, the Stormfront website — the oldest and largest neo-Nazi platform on the Internet — recently issued a call to its followers to mobilize.

“If Trump doesn’t win this election, the police will be abolished and Blacks will come to your house and kill you and your family,” the site warned. “This isn’t about politics anymore, it is about basic survival.”

As the election approaches, Trump has also employed apocalyptic language. He recently claimed that if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected, police departments will be dismantled, the American way of life will be “abolished” and “no one will be SAFE.”

Given the country’s anguished history, it is hard to isolate Trump’s impact on the racial climate in the United States. But his first term has coincided with the most intense period of racial upheaval in a generation. And the country is now in the final stretch of a presidential campaign that is more explicitly focused on race — including whether the sitting president is a racist — than any election in modern American history.

Biden has seized on the issue from the outset. In a video declaring his candidacy, he used images from the clashes in Charlottesville, and said he felt compelled to run because of Trump’s response. He has called Trump the nation’s first racist president and pledged to use his presidency to heal divisions that are a legacy of the country’s “original sin” of slavery.

Exploiting societal divisions

Trump has confronted allegations of racism in nearly every decade of his adult life. In the 1970s, the Trump family real estate empire was forced to settle a Justice Department lawsuit alleging systemic discrimination against Black apartment applicants. In the 1980s, he took out full-page ads calling for the death penalty against Black teens wrongly accused of a rape in Central Park. In the 2000s, Trump parlayed his baseless “birther” claim about Obama into a fervent far-right following.

As president, he has cast his record on race in grandiose terms. “I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said July 22, a refrain he has repeated at least five times in recent months.

None of the administration officials interviewed for this story agreed with Trump’s self-appraisals. But several sought to rationalize his behavior.

Some argued that Trump only exploits societal divisions when he believes it is to his political advantage. They pointed to his denunciations of kneeling NFL players and paeans to the Confederate flag, claiming these symbols matter little to him beyond their ability to rouse supporters.

“I don’t think Donald Trump is in any way a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi or anything of the sort,” a third former senior administration official said. “But I think he has a general awareness that one component of his base includes factions that trend in that direction.”

Studies of the 2016 election have shown that racial resentment was a far bigger factor in propelling Trump to victory than economic grievance. Political scientists at Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts, for example, examined the election results and found that voters who scored highly on indexes of racism voted overwhelmingly for Trump, a dynamic particularly strong among non-college-educated Whites.

Several current and former administration officials, somewhat paradoxically, cited Trump’s nonracial biases and perceived limitations as exculpatory.

Several officials said that Trump is not a disciplined enough thinker to grasp the full dimensions of the white nationalist agenda, let alone embrace it. Others pointed out that they have observed him making far more offensive comments about women, insisting that his scorn is all-encompassing and therefore shouldn’t be construed as racist.

“This is a guy who abuses people in his cabinet, abuses four-star generals, abuses people who gave their life for this country, abuses civil servants,” the first former senior White House official said. “It’s not like he doesn’t abuse people that are White as well.”

Nearly all said that Trump places far greater value on others’ wealth, fame or loyalty to him than he does on race or ethnicity. In so doing, many raised a version of the “some of my best friends are Black” defense on behalf of the president.

When faced with allegations of racism in the 2016 campaign, Trump touted his friendship with boxing promoter Don King to argue otherwise. Administration officials similarly pointed to the president’s connection to Black people who have praised him, worked for him or benefited from his help.

They cited Trump’s admiration for Tiger Woods and other Black athletes, the political support he has received from Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and other Black lawmakers, the president’s fondness for Ja’Ron Smith, who as assistant to the president for domestic policy is the highest-ranking Black staffer at the White House, and his pardon of Black criminal-justice-reform advocate Alice Marie Johnson, expunging her 1996 conviction for cocaine trafficking.

In his speech at the Republican National Convention, Scott used his personal story of bootstrap success to emphasize the ways that Republican policies on taxes, school choice and other issues create opportunities for minorities.

Trump “has fought alongside me” on such issues, Scott said, urging voters “not to look simply at what the candidates say, but to look back at what they’ve done.”

For all the prominence that Scott and other Black Trump supporters were given at the convention, there has been no corresponding representation within the Trump administration.

The official photo stream of Trump’s presidency is a slide show of a commander in chief surrounded by White faces, whether meeting with Cabinet members or posing with the latest intern crop.

From the outset, his leadership team has been overwhelmingly White. A Washington Post tally identified 59 people who have held Cabinet positions or served in top White House jobs including chief of staff, press secretary and national security adviser since Trump took office.

Only seven have been people of color, including Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who are of Lebanese heritage. Only one — Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development — is Black.

Under Trump, the nation’s federal courts have also become increasingly White. Of the 248 judges confirmed or nominated since Trump took office, only eight were Black and eight were Hispanic, according to records compiled by NPR News.

Retreating from civil rights

Trump can point to policy initiatives that have benefited Black or other minority groups, including criminal justice reforms that reduced prison sentences for thousands of Black men convicted of nonviolent, drug-related crimes.

About 4,700 inmates have been released or had their sentences reduced under the First Step Act, an attempt to reverse the lopsided legacy of the drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which disproportionately targeted African Americans. But this policy was championed primarily by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and former officials said that Trump only agreed to support the measure when told it might boost his low poll numbers with Black voters.

Months later, when that failed to materialize, Trump “went s---house crazy,” one former official said, yelling at aides, “Why the hell did I do that?”

Manigault Newman was similarly excoriated when her efforts to boost funding for historically Black colleges failed to deliver better polling numbers for the president, officials said. “You’ve been at this for four months, Omarosa,” Trump said, according to one adviser, “but the numbers haven’t budged.” Manigault Newman did not respond to a request for comment.

White House officials cited other initiatives aimed at helping people of color, including loan programs targeting minority businesses and the creation of “opportunity zones” in economically distressed communities.

Trump has pointed most emphatically to historically low Black unemployment rates during his first term, arguing that data show they have fared better under his administration than under Obama or any other president.

But unemployment statistics are largely driven by broader economic trends, and the early gains of Black workers have been wiped out by the pandemic. Blacks have lost jobs at higher rates than other groups since the economy began to shut down. The jobless rate for Blacks in August was 13 percent, compared with 7.3 percent for Whites — the highest racial disparity in nearly six years.

Neither prison reform nor minority jobs programs were priorities of Trump’s first term. His administration has devoted far more energy and political capital to erecting barriers to non-White immigrants, dismantling the health-care policies of Obama and pulling federal agencies back from civil rights battlegrounds.

Under Trump, the Justice Department has cut funding in its Civil Rights Division, scaled back prosecutions of hate crimes, all but abandoned efforts to combat systemic discrimination by police departments and backed state measures that deprived minorities of the right to vote.

Weeks after Trump took office, the department announced it was abandoning its six-year involvement in a legal battle with Texas over a 2011 voter ID law that a federal court had ruled unfairly targeted minorities.

Later, the department went from opposing, under Obama, an Ohio law that allowed the state to purge tens of thousands of voters from its rolls to defending the measure before the Supreme Court.

The law was upheld by the court’s conservative majority. In a dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that voter rolls in African American neighborhoods shrank by 10 percent, compared with 4 percent in majority-White suburbs.

The Justice Department’s shift when faced with allegations of systemic racism by police departments has been even more stark.

After the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991, Congress gave the department new power to investigate law enforcement agencies suspected of engaging in a “pattern or practice” of systemic — including racist — misconduct. The probes frequently led to settlements that required sweeping reforms.

The authority was put to repeated use by three consecutive presidents: 25 times under Bill Clinton, 21 under George W. Bush and 25 under Obama. Under Trump, there has been only one.

The collapse has coincided with a surge in police killings captured on video, the largest civil rights protests in decades and polling data that suggests a profound turn in public opinion in support of the Black Lives Matter cause — though that support has waned in recent weeks as protests became violent in some cities.

A Justice Department spokesman pointed to nearly a dozen cases over the past three years in which the department has prosecuted hate crimes or launched racial discrimination lawsuits. In perhaps the most notable case, James Fields Jr., who was convicted of murder for driving his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, also pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges.

“The Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice is vigorously fighting race discrimination throughout the United States. Any assertion to the contrary is completely false,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband. “Since 2017, we have prosecuted criminal and civil race discrimination cases in all parts of the United States, and we will continue to do so.”

But the department has not launched a pattern or practice probe into any of the police departments involved in the killings that ignited this summer’s protests, including the May 25 death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, who asphyxiated after a White policeman kept him pinned to the ground for nearly eight minutes with a knee to his neck.

The department has opened a more narrow investigation of the officers directly involved in Floyd’s death. Attorney General William P. Barr called Floyd’s killing “shocking,” but in congressional testimony argued there was no reason to commit to a broader probe of Minneapolis or any other police force.

“I don’t believe there is systemic racism in police departments,” Barr said.

Deport, deny and discourage

Days after the 2016 election, David Duke, a longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted that Trump’s win was “great for our people.” Richard Spencer, another prominent white nationalist figure, was captured on video leading a “Hail Trump” salute at an alt-right conference in Washington.

People with far-right views or white nationalist sympathies gravitated to the administration.

Michael Anton, who published a 2016 essay comparing the country’s course under Obama to that of an aircraft controlled by Islamist terrorists and called for an end to “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,” became deputy national security adviser for strategic communication.

Ian Smith served as an immigration policy analyst at the Department of Homeland Security until email records showed connections with Spencer and other white supremacists. Darren Beattie worked as a White House speechwriter before leaving abruptly when CNN reported his involvement in a conference frequented by white nationalists.

Stephen K. Bannon, who for years used Breitbart News to advance an alt-right, anti-immigrant agenda, was named White House chief strategist, only to be banished eight months later after clashing with other administration officials.

Stephen Miller, by contrast, has survived a series of White House purges and used his position as senior adviser to the president to push hard-line policies that aim to deport, deny and discourage non-European immigrants.

While working for the Trump campaign in 2016, Miller sent a steady stream of story ideas to Breitbart drawn from white nationalist websites, according to email records obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one exchange, Miller urged a Breitbart reporter to read “Camp of the Saints,” a French novel that depicts the destruction of Western civilization by rampant immigration. The book has become a touchpoint for white supremacist groups.

Miller was the principal architect of, and driving force behind, the so-called Muslim Ban issued in the early days of Trump’s presidency and the separation of migrant children from their parents along the border with Mexico. He has also worked behind the scenes to turn public opinion against immigrants and outmaneuver bureaucratic adversaries, officials said.

To blunt allegations of racism and xenophobia in the administration’s policies, Miller has sought to portray them as advantageous to people of color. In several instances, Miller directed subordinates to “look for Latinos or Blacks who have been victims of a crime by an immigrant,” then pressured officials at the Department of Homeland Security to tout these cases to the press, one official said. Families of some victims appeared as prominent guests of the president at the State of the Union address.

In 2018, as Miller sought to slash the number of refugees admitted to the United States, Pentagon officials argued that the existing policy was crucial to their ability to relocate interpreters and other foreign nationals who risked their lives to work with U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“What do you want? Iraqi communities across the United States?” Miller erupted during one meeting of National Security Council deputies, according to witnesses. The refugee limit has plunged since Trump took office, from 85,000 in 2016 to 18,000 this year.

In response to a request for comment from Miller, Matthews, the White House spokeswoman, said that “this attempt to vilify Stephen Miller with egregious and unfounded allegations from anonymous sources is shameful and completely unethical.”

As a descendant of Jewish immigrants, Miller is regarded warily by white supremacist organizations even as they applaud some of his actions.

“Our side doesn’t consider him one of us — for obvious reasons,” said Don Black, the founder of the Stormfront website, in an interview. “He’s kind of an odd choice to be the white nationalist in the White House.”

Trump’s presidency has corresponded with a surge in activity by white nationalist groups, as well as concern about the growing danger they pose.

Recent assessments by the Department of Homeland Security describe white supremacists as the country’s gravest domestic threat, exceeding that of the Islamic State and other terror groups, according to documents obtained by the Lawfare national security website and reported by Politico.

The FBI has expanded resources to tracking hate groups and crimes. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified Thursday that “racially motivated violent extremism” accounts for the bulk of the bureau’s domestic terrorism cases, and that most of those are driven by white supremacist ideology.

Major rallies staged by white nationalist organizations, which were already on the upswing just before the 2016 election, increased in size and frequency after Trump took office, according to Brian Levin, an expert on hate groups at California State University at San Bernardino.

The largest, and most ominous, was the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

On Aug. 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists, neo-fascists and Confederate sympathizers descended on the city. Purportedly there to protest the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, they carried torches and chanted slogans including “blood and soil” and “you will not replace us” laden with Klan and Nazi symbolism.

The event erupted in violence the next day, Saturday, when Fields, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, tossing bodies into the air. Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old Virginia native and peace activist, was killed.

Trump’s vacillating response in the ensuing days came to mark one of the defining sequences of his presidency.

Speaking from his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., Trump at first stuck to a calibrated script: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” Then, improvising, he added: “on many sides, on many sides.”

In six words, Trump had drawn a moral equivalency between the racist ideology of those responsible for the Klan-like spectacle and the competing beliefs that compelled Heyer and others to confront hate.

Trump’s comments set off what some in the White House came to regard as a behind-the-scenes struggle for the moral character of his presidency.

John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was just weeks into his job as White House chief of staff, confronted Trump in the corridors of the Bedminster club. “You have to fix this,” Kelly said, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “You were supporting white supremacists. You have to go back out and correct this.”

Gary Cohn, the White House economic adviser at the time, threatened to resign and argued that there were no “good people” among the ranks of those wearing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In a heated exchange, Cohn criticized Trump for his “many sides” comment, and was flummoxed when Trump denied that was what he had said.

“Not only did you say it, you continued to double down on it,” Cohn shot back, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “And if you want, I’ll get the transcripts.”

Trump relented that Monday and delivered the ringing condemnation of racism that Kelly, Cohn and others had urged. “Racism is evil,” he said, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups”

Aides were briefly elated. But Trump grew agitated by news coverage depicting his speech as an attempt to correct his initial blunder.

The next day, during an event at Trump Tower that was supposed to highlight infrastructure initiatives, Trump launched into a fiery monologue.

“You had a group on one side that was bad,” he said. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” By the end, the president appeared to be sanctioning racial divisions far beyond Charlottesville, saying “there are two sides to the country.”

For all their consternation, none of Trump’s top aides resigned over Charlottesville. Kelly remained in his job through 2018. Cohn stayed until March 2018 after being asked to lead the administration’s tax-reform initiative and reassured that he could share his own views about Charlottesville in public without retaliation from the president.

Kelly and Cohn declined to comment.

The most senior former administration official to comment publicly on Trump’s conduct on issues of race is former defense secretary Jim Mattis. After Trump responded to Black Lives Matter protests in Washington this summer with paramilitary force, Mattis responded with a blistering statement.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis said. “Instead, he tries to divide us.”

In some ways, Charlottesville represented a high-water mark for white nationalism in Trump’s presidency. Civil rights groups were able to use footage of the mayhem in Virginia to identify members of hate groups and expose them to their employers, universities and families.

“Charlottesville backfired,” Levin said. Many of those who took part, especially the alt-right leadership, “were doxed, sued and beaten back,” he said, using a term for using documents available from public records to expose individuals.

“When the door to the big political tent closed on these overtly white nationalist groups, many collapsed, leaving a decentralized constituency of loose radicals now reorganizing under new banners,” Levin said.

Some white nationalist leaders have begun to express disenchantment with Trump because he has failed to deliver on campaign promises they hoped would bring immigration to a standstill or perhaps even ignite a race war.

“A lot of our people were expecting him to actually secure the borders, build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” Black said.

“Some in my circles want to see him defeated,” Black said, because they believe a Biden presidency would call less attention to the white nationalist movement than Trump has, while fostering discontent among White people.

But Black sees those views as dangerously shortsighted, failing to appreciate the extraordinary advantages of having a president who so regularly aligns himself with aspects of the movement’s agenda.

“Symbolically, he’s still very important,” Black said of Trump. “I don’t think he considers himself a white supremacist or a white nationalist. But I think he may be a racial realist. He knows there are racial differences.”

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tyra423 · 5 years ago

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Graffiti Expression

Due Date: September 20, 2019

Readings: Fischer (2017), “Reading with a Crayon: Pre-Conventional Marginalia as Reader Response in Early Childhood” and Miller (2013), Chapter 1, “Guiding Principles

Reading with a Crayon

Main Idea: Children’s book marginalia is more than graffiti as it displays the unique and investigatory interactions of early readers with their texts and the world around them.

Nugget: Children draw as a kinesthetic and aesthetic way to get to know and interact with the world and themselves.

Reading with Meaning: Chapter 1

Main Idea: As teachers, it is pertinent that we develop our classroom routines, strategies, and environment around researched based evidence and our educational philosophy so that we can meet the needs of students and provide them with an education that is good for them.

Nugget: Debbie Miller says that children need time to practice what is taught and so she spends one-third of classroom time teaching and allots for two-thirds to be used as time for students to work and explore on their own.

Readerly Exploration: Graffiti Expression

1 Readerly Habit- Read a wide variety of genres and formats of texts to grow in their knowledge and experiences as a reader

1 Corresponding Task- Find a fictional text that communicates the same or similar big ideas of the assigned reading and choose an excerpt that represents those shared ideals

Reading with a Crayon (article) & The Masterpiece by Francine Rivers (ficitonal text)

Dr. Fischer’s article, Reading with a Crayon, mentioned how many view marginalia in a children’s book to be graffiti. Recently, I have been reading, The Masterpiece, by Francine Rivers. Graffiti happens to be a main focus of the book which is how I initially thought of the following connections between the article and the book. While this novel is not children’s book and is in no way focused on the specific topic of children writing in books, the word “graffiti” used in the article reminded me of Roman, the main character in the book and got me thinking about why graffiti may be so embedded within him. The novel starts off with a high intensity scene in which Roman is graffitiing a building. He is an adult and a professional artist by trade, but when he was younger, he was in a gang. Graffiti offered him a way to remain in the gang without having to participate in any gang missions that would require him to carry a gun. He was in the gang for the community of a gang, not necessarily for the gang lifestyle. Roman’s mom was heavily involved in substance abuse and was shot so he had no sense of family or community. He turned to art as a way to interact with his world and he continued to graffiti into adulthood. The gang gave him community and safety and graffiti gave him notoriety in his society and a purpose. In Fischer’s article, Reading with a Crayon, Elijah and Hannah used crayons as a way to interact with and to respond to the messages their texts were relaying to them. For Roman, the text of the world told him a story of hurt, pain, abuse, and violence and his readerly response was to graffiti on the walls of his town. His art, though illegal, allowed him to express himself and tell his story.

This excerpt from the text displays the messages that Roman (referred to as Bobby-Ray) was taught through reading his world. They are messages of loneliness, pain, independence, violence, and fear.

He shoved the door open and slid into a desk at the back. Mr. Newman was lecturing again on the Civil War, but Bobby Ray’s thoughts drifted to the Ellis Street building. He’d like to paint it end-to-end with heads, each a different color, all with dark window eyes, doors like gaping mouths screaming, laughing, baring teeth. How many cans of paint would that take? He’d need a crew working with him. He’d have to keep the design simple so others could fill in color. He’d need lookouts and time. Problem was he liked working alone, with one guy on watch. (Rivers, 30)

In this excerpt it is evident that Roman (Bobby-Ray/ The Bird) used his graffiti art to interact with the world. He came from a broken childhood filled with substance abuse, murder, and more. He has come from a world of pain, and his graffiti is a way for him to respond to that hurt, just like children’s marginalia is evidence of them responding and interacting with the messages they receive from the texts that surround them.

Rivers, F. (2018). The masterpiece. Carol Stream, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

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chiseler · 6 years ago

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GERALDINE PAGE: Octopus Lust

In her first lead film role in the John Wayne western Hondo (1953), Geraldine Page takes the space around her physically in a very definite way, but her squinting face and high, persnickety, slightly whiny voice don’t quite have the same authority as her body does yet. She was 29 years old here and already known as a promising theater actress, and she gets a special “introducing” credit for Hondo, for which she was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar even though she is Wayne’s unconventional leading lady.

“I am fully aware that I am a homely woman,” Page tells Wayne in Hondo, almost boastfully, or at least in a way that seems proud of her own self-awareness. Hers was not a face or even sometimes a sensibility made for the camera, but as a middle-aged and then older woman she made the movies respect her talent. At the Actors Studio in the 1950s, she worked and worked on her thin voice until it became a notably flexible instrument that she could use for practically any effect she wanted.

In a somewhat sparing feature film career, Page would rack up eight Oscar nominations in all, four in the supporting category and four for lead actress, and at least three of her supporting nominations don’t make too much sense. There isn’t much for her to do in Hondo, and she has even less to work with during her jokey short appearances in You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), where she is a cartoon smother mother in an oversized black wig, and Pete ‘n’ Tillie (1972), where she is a society matron in an oversized blonde wig that gets pulled off by Carol Burnett during a low comedy catfight. (Page does have one genuinely funny moment in Pete ‘n’ Tillie where an official asks her age and she gets stuck behind the sounds “For” and “Fi” until she finally collapses, the sort of comic routine that lands precisely because of how overdone it is.)

Page was known for her love of acting, her zeal for it, her lack of shame, and sometimes her lack of control. Critics occasionally chided her mannerisms, the way she strangled words when she was angry or broke them up into separate syllables for hammy emphasis, and as she got older she couldn’t seem to keep her hands off of her face: cupping her cheek, rubbing her eyes, fluttering her hands up and away, almost disconnectedly, from her own deep feelings. She sometimes crosses her eyes slightly when she’s mad but pops them in moments of extreme stress, and she tends to sink into her knees as she walks, as if bright spirits were always being weighed down by worry. Page often falls into physical and vocal grooves and can’t seem to get out of them, and at her worst (and even sometimes at her best) she wallows in peculiarity and freakishness.

She liked food a lot (she called herself “Greedy Gut”), and she made many meals of scenery, too. In the performance that won her a fourth and richly deserved supporting actress Oscar nomination for The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), Page has only two scenes as former cleaning lady and racing enthusiast Mrs. Ritter, the first of which is a brief interaction with her son. In the second scene, which lasts a show-stopping three minutes and 42 seconds, the police are interrogating Mrs. Ritter about the death of her son. She does not want them to go through his room, and so Mrs. Ritter uses every intimidation and distraction tactic she can think of to keep them out. Page smokes a cigarette here and blows the smoke out of her mouth with a steam engine puff for emphasis, and this isn’t her only prop; she also fingers and kisses a rosary to show her piety and sips from a glass of whisky to show her Irish toughness. Page pours a very broad Noo Yawk accent all over her dialogue and enjoys the outlandish sounds she can make with it, particularly when she says “yoose.”

Page’s Mrs. Ritter looks over and away from the cops but then stares straight at them when she wants to scare them. “My Walter was as tough as a bar of iron…and he didn’t get that from his father,” she warns. In the last 20 seconds of the scene, violins on the soundtrack alert us that she will drop her mask once the police leave, and for about 16 seconds Page shows us Mrs. Ritter’s grief, which is still fairly tough, for this is a woman who exerts control over everything, even her own feelings. Page’s Mrs. Ritter is virtuoso work, like the performance that finally won her a lead Oscar the following year, The Trip to Bountiful, and it is simultaneously absurd and riveting, campy yet also deeply real and imagined.

There is a similar reality to another brief performance she gave at this time that did not get Page an Oscar nomination, her dying poet Jean Scott Martin in I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can (1982), a Jill Clayburgh vehicle about Valium addiction. Page has about twice the time for her Big Scene here as she got for Mrs. Ritter’s Big Scene, and so she really shoots the works and practically shuts the whole movie down with it. A hole seems to open up in the film during this scene and everything else that happens later falls right into it.

Page’s Jean has just watched a documentary Clayburgh’s Barbara has made about her life, and at first she is quietly livid at its sentimentality. But then she begins to tell Barbara off in very profane language, and her anger starts to build and expand, and Page makes the shock of this expansion truly scathing and harrowing, and inescapable. Jean (and Page) can do a lot with words, sticking them like knives and then twisting them, or making them land, explode, and destroy until Clayburgh nearly seems to swoon in response. We see Jean later in the film and she makes up with Barbara, but this doesn’t diminish the intensity of Page’s tirade, or the rage this woman feels about the prospect of dying and then disappearing.

Page had a wide range, but she was typecast when she was young as neurotic spinsters, a trend that began with her performance on stage as Alma Winemiller in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke in a 1952 production credited with spurring the whole Off-Broadway movement in New York. In the 1950s, Page played on stage with James Dean in The Immoralist and played lovelorn spinster Lizzie Curry in The Rainmaker while making occasional appearances on TV. At 37, she was allowed to play Alma on screen in a 1961 movie version of Summer and Smoke that suffers from the casting of Laurence Harvey as her unappealing leading man and love object.

Page doesn’t let Harvey get in her way in Summer and Smoke, and this is a good case of what might be meant by the word “technique” when it comes to acting. Harvey doesn’t give Page anything at all to work against as a scene partner, but she stays focused and listens and hears what she is supposed to be hearing from him, somehow. She delivers her Alma to the screen with care and tact and occasional sensual detail, helped along by a sensitive score from Elmer Bernstein and the pale blue colors of her clothes, the frozen ground that her Alma retreats across in the penultimate scene, and the florid writing itself.

When she played the faded movie star Alexandra Del Lago on stage in Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, Page penciled lines on her face and seems to have emphasized the grotesque and solemn side of the play. But in the 1962 movie version, Page made a crucial adjustment for the screen, steering her part into imperious comedy and doing lots of nutty things with her eyes and with her vocal delivery. The redheaded, egoistic Alexandra is supposed to have been “the sex symbol of America,” and Page almost makes you believe that she was that, but not quite. Daring you to think she is miscast, Page laughs and howls full-throatedly here, always staying highly conscious of her outré effects because Alexandra is conscious of them too, even when (or especially when) she’s drunk or stoned. “The camera doesn’t know how to lie!” Page’s Alexandra cries, but she herself puts the lie to that statement, for this is a risky performance dedicated to tricking the camera, routing it, leading it on a wild goose chase with sinuous poses and emphatic declarations. Everything Page does in the film of Sweet Bird of Youth is primed to make you ask, “Who is that?” or even “What is that?”

This is one of the campiest performances in film history, every word underlined three and sometimes four times in purple ink. Speaking to Paul Newman’s gigolo Chance Wayne, Page’s Alexandra purrs, “Make me almost believe that we are a pair of young lovers…without any shame.” He smiles at that, and it’s easy to smile along with him. Chance in turn amuses her Alexandra, and she is even modestly touched by him, but only modestly, and Page is scrupulous about showing the smallness of that feeling, even when Alexandra is drunkenly calling his name outside their hotel room, each “Chance!” more plummy and piss elegant than the last. Page gives this role an opulent sort of size, festooning it with cheerfully unaccountable and facetious vocal pyrotechnics, but she also somehow grounds it in a recognizable psychological reality, and this balancing act is no small feat.

In her last big scene on the phone in Sweet Bird of Youth, when Alexandra finds out from the columnist Walter Winchell that her latest movie comeback was a success after all, Page overflows with vulnerable yet blissful “I knew it all the time!” nervous relief, and this phone monologue is a real star turn that again is grounded in emotional truthfulness. Page shows that you can go as high, wide, and handsome with over-embroidered acting as you want as long as you have done the work beforehand to make the character real and specific underneath. “Page beautifully intertwines inner steel and insecurity, cannily conceived as two sides of the same coin,” wrote John DiLeo in his 2010 book Tennessee Williams and Company. “Beneath Page’s flourishes of self-centered bravado is the more fragile Alexandra, the woman mired in the indulgences of self-pity and self-gratification.”

Page turned down the role of Martha in the original 1962 theater production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a large mistake on her part. On screen, she played a high-strung spinster with incestuous longings for her brother in a film of Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic (1963), giving the kind of overbearing, headlong performance that doesn’t work well for the camera, though it might have had some power on stage. She was a spinster again in a much softer key for the modest romance Dear Heart (1964), and then she went back to TV to deliver what might be her finest performance of all, the kind and loving Sook in adaptations of the Truman Capote stories A Christmas Memory (1966) and The Thanksgiving Visitor (1967). She won Emmy awards for both.

The remarkable thing about her work in those Capote TV movies is that Page never emphasizes the fact that Sook has the mind of a child, which Capote himself tells us in his narration. She makes Sook mischievous and sly, a good-hearted hedonist like Page herself was, a lover of pretty things and movie stories, and there is never any pathos in her interpretation; she doesn’t underline or show us Sook’s childlikeness but embodies it, a much more difficult thing to achieve than her colorfully overstated yet grounded work as Alexandra Del Lago. In the last scene of A Christmas Memory, when Sook is flying a kite and talking about life and death, Page breathes quietly and totally opens her face up to the camera until a purely soulful expression steals across it, like the sun slowly moving behind clouds, and she lets this happen rather than making it happen, as she does in some of her lesser work.

The Beguiled

On stage she played Olga in the disastrous Actors Studio production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and the recording of it shows that she is the only member of the cast who gives an even remotely acceptable performance amid much reckless self-indulgence from the others. She took a rewarding, even daring lead on film in Don Siegel’s The Beguiled (1971), a psychosexual western where she presided over a band of lusty young ladies after the manhood of Clint Eastwood as if she were running her own school for neurotics. Her character is horny for Eastwood but she also has a thing for one of her charges, played by Elizabeth Hartman (at one point she kisses Hartman full on the mouth). After that Page’s career deteriorated for a while to guest shots on TV shows like Night Gallery, The Snoop Sisters and Kojak, where she could be relied on to act up a storm while wearing caftans and frowzy wigs.

But in 1978 Page picked up another lead Oscar nomination for her subversively funny performance as another neurotic in Woody Allen’s Interiors, where she plays Eve, a perfectionist in the domestic sphere who finds herself abandoned by husband and children. In the back of a cab, with her hair pulled back tightly and heavy make-up on her face, Page’s Eve resembles a weary female impersonator. A micro-managing tyrant, Eve descends to grotesque twitches and facial collapse shortly after her husband of many years, Arthur (E.G. Marshall), tells her he is leaving her, but her self-pity and self-destructiveness often retain a kind of physical elegance even in the midst of breakdown.

When Eve attempts suicide after taping up her windows and turning on a gas oven, Page spreads herself out on a divan to await death in an amusingly sulky, almost sexy way. “I have an inner tranquility!” she insists at one point, and the comedy here comes from someone vehemently denying the most obvious reality. When Eve is watching TV by herself and drinking some wine, Page allows her the open face that she gave Sook at the end of A Christmas Memory, because this woman is only free to be like that when she is alone. And Page memorably rises to the grandstanding moment when Eve smashes candles in a church after Arthur squashes her notion of reconciliation for good.

There were small film and TV roles after that, often as exuberantly frumpy women, and these were sometimes little more than bits, but then came the movie she knew would win her that elusive Oscar, The Trip to Bountiful, a 1985 adaptation of a Horton Foote TV play originally done with Lillian Gish, expanded with all the trimmings for Page’s swan song. Her Carrie Watts is a stubborn old woman who runs away to her hometown of Bountiful after living in bickering discontent in a two-room Houston, Texas, apartment with her weak son Ludie (John Heard) and catty daughter-in-law Jessie Mae (Carlin Glynn). Page’s hand-to-face mannerism is out of control here sometimes, but such surface idiosyncrasies do not distract from her inventiveness, her heightened emotions of elation and relief, and the specificity of her performance, the way she can make you see and hear a person from Carrie’s past, as if Page has done extensive back story work for every name Carrie mentions.

Page had a stormy marriage with bad boy actor Rip Torn (the card on the door of their Manhattan townhouse read “Torn Page”) that produced two talented actors, Tony Torn and Angelica Page. In Nazi Hunter: The Beate Klarsfield Story (1986) for TV, Page clearly looks ill and tired, and she died of a heart attack the following year at the age of 62 while playing Madame Arcati on Broadway in Blithe Spirit. At a tribute shortly after her death, Anne Jackson said that Page “used a stage like no one else I’d ever seen. It was like playing tennis with someone who had 26 arms.” And in her best movie work, Page finally made the camera bow to her octopus talent, her greedy, gutsy ardor for acting.

by Dan Callahan

#Dan Callahan #Geraldine Page #The Chiseler #Beguiled #Hondo #John Wayne #A Christmas Memory

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things-xin · 2 years ago

Text

Major Project (Tutorial 1) - 9/12/22

Corporate Crafts

Situation: Corporate work and corporate London.

Site: Not sure

Method: Oral History of work; crafting as resistive practice; collective making - to be confirmed.

Reference

Form into a body

Industrial Revolution

Mass Produced Variation

Education / Labour interaction

Artist’s practice group.

Craft as a resistive practice.

AMICA

Arts and Crafts! John Ruskin's thought on work and the ideas he passed onto William Morris all centre around this issue. Arts and Crafts was a resistance to what they saw as the dehumanising practice of (then) contemporary industrial and clerical work. Dinah Birch is one of the best contemporary scholars craft. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/john-rusking-more-important-than-ever-essay-dinah-birch/

Adam Sutherland: The Land We Live In, The Land We Left Behind https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/6232-the-land-we-live-in-the-land-we-left-behind/

Glenn Adamson. The Craft Reader, gender is a huge topic in contemporary craft studies. There is an essay in the book by two leading feminist craft scholars.

David Pye: The work of risk and the work of certainty.

Sympathy of Things - I made a documentary for BBC Radio 4 about the politics of craft a few years ago.. its here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000xqs

Look af the reference we sent to your colleague also looking at work (Jiting)

DAVID

I love it and it sounds brilliant. I would encourage you not to work with bankers. Where is your attention best spent. The drudgery of work, where people are working without the benefit of shit loads of money. What is un-rewarding work: call centres? Delivery, fulfilment? Oral histories:

Stuts Torkel? What Do People Do All Day? Can you shift?

Carol Faye - whoes utopia? Exuberant fantasies about work.

Crochet could be much and amazing framework. Knit and natter.

JANE

How do we define craft? Can you go into a co-poration and use craft to actually organise around work and working conditions.

A film: the body politic - The Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film)

Hayley Newman

David Graber: Bullshit Jobs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs#:~:text=Bullshit%20Jobs%3A%20A%20Theory%20is,associates%20work%20with%20self%2Dworth.

Liz Diller: Bad Press: https://dsrny.com/project/bad-press

Sewing Circles of Herrat https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sewing-Circles-Herat-Personal-Afghanistan/dp/0060505273

#craft

0 notes

techcrunchappcom · 4 years ago

Photo

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/allegations-of-racism-have-marked-trumps-presidency-andbecome-key-issue-as-election-nears-the-washington-post/

Allegations of racism have marked Trump’s presidency and become key issue as election nears - The Washington Post

In Trump’s case, there is now a substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words.

With the election looming, the signaling behind even second-tier policy initiatives has been unambiguous.

“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”

A second White House official who worked closely with Trump quibbled with the comparison, but only because later Oval Office occupants also had intolerant views.

“Woodrow Wilson was outwardly a white supremacist,” the former official said. “I don’t think Trump is as bad as Wilson. But he might be.”

White House officials vigorously dispute such characterizations.

White House officials also pointed to achievements that have benefited minorities, including job growth and prison-sentence reform.

Coded racial terms

Others have offered less charitable assessments.

These authors did not provide direct evidence of Trump’s racist outbursts, but the animus they describe aligns with the prejudice Trump so frequently displays in public.

Exploiting societal divisions

None of the administration officials interviewed for this story agreed with Trump’s self-appraisals. But several sought to rationalize his behavior.

Several current and former administration officials, somewhat paradoxically, cited Trump’s nonracial biases and perceived limitations as exculpatory.

Trump “has fought alongside me” on such issues, Scott said, urging voters “not to look simply at what the candidates say, but to look back at what they’ve done.”

For all the prominence that Scott and other Black Trump supporters were given at the convention, there has been no corresponding representation within the Trump administration.

Retreating from civil rights

Months later, when that failed to materialize, Trump “went s—house crazy,” one former official said, yelling at aides, “Why the hell did I do that?”

Later, the department went from opposing, under Obama, an Ohio law that allowed the state to purge tens of thousands of voters from its rolls to defending the measure before the Supreme Court.

The Justice Department’s shift when faced with allegations of systemic racism by police departments has been even more stark.

The authority was put to repeated use by three consecutive presidents: 25 times under Bill Clinton, 21 under George W. Bush and 25 under Obama. Under Trump, there has been only one.

“I don’t believe there is systemic racism in police departments,” Barr said.

Deport, deny and discourage

People with far-right views or white nationalist sympathies gravitated to the administration.

As a descendant of Jewish immigrants, Miller is regarded warily by white supremacist organizations even as they applaud some of his actions.

The moral character of his presidency

Trump’s presidency has corresponded with a surge in activity by white nationalist groups, as well as concern about the growing danger they pose.

The largest, and most ominous, was the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

Trump’s vacillating response in the ensuing days came to mark one of the defining sequences of his presidency.

Trump’s comments set off what some in the White House came to regard as a behind-the-scenes struggle for the moral character of his presidency.

“Not only did you say it, you continued to double down on it,” Cohn shot back, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “And if you want, I’ll get the transcripts.”

Aides were briefly elated. But Trump grew agitated by news coverage depicting his speech as an attempt to correct his initial blunder.

The next day, during an event at Trump Tower that was supposed to highlight infrastructure initiatives, Trump launched into a fiery monologue.

Kelly and Cohn declined to comment.

“A lot of our people were expecting him to actually secure the borders, build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” Black said.

Julie Tate, Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey, Dalton Bennett and Josh Partlow contributed to this report.

#allegations #become #issue #marked #presidency #racism #trump #Politics

0 notes

bighousela · 5 years ago

Link

Free VIP Day passes to our full days film screenings available to all whom register for this free event with Gerry Fialka, The list of films screening will be available as the films are selected to screen, updates to film blocks screening at the festival social media pages, and website:

https://www.facebook.com/filmfestla/

https://www.instagram.com/bighousela

https://www.filmfestlalive.com/

Nov 7th. Sat "Film Fest La & L.A. LIVE" presents FILM CAN'T KILL YOU BUT WHY TAKE A CHANCE from 3:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M. at Regal Cinemas 1000 W Olympic Blvd, LA CA 90015, Info: 310-306-7330 Laughtears.com Free workshop and day passes sponsored by BigHouse-la.com Paramedia ecologist Gerry Fialka's fun interactive workshop explore cinema's hidden psychic effects via Marshall McLuhan's Menippean satirized percepts: "We shape our tools, then they shape us." and “The Balinese have no word for art, they do everything as well as they can.” and "How about technologies as the collective unconscious and art as the collective unconsciousness?" Delve deep into Live Cinema, Neurocinema and the metaleptic heart of movies. Read the OtherZine article: sticks-and-stones-may-break-your-bones-but-film-will-never-hurt-you.Gerry Fialka has been praised by the LA Times as "the multi-media Renaissance man." The La Weekly proclaimed him "a cultural revolutionary." His new book Strange Questions: Experimental Film as Conversation, with a foreword by David James will be published soon. His new feature The Brother Side of the Wake (BroSide) is the experimental documentary about the people of Venice, California. It probes the cliché: "Is the journey more important than the destination?" Watch the preview on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBj0UdpFEWo

Laughtears Press is proud to announce the new book,

Strange Questions: Experimental Film as Conversation

by Gerry Fialka, Edited by Rachael Kerr, Foreword by David James.Publication date: SoonContact: Gerry Fialka

310.307.7330

[email protected]

http://laughtears.com/

Compelling interviews with notables in avant-garde cinema offer insights into moving image art--its creative processes, formative influences, and hidden psychic effects. Through interviews with George Manupelli, Chick Strand, Tom Gunning, Lynne Sachs, Jay Rosenblatt, Martha Colburn, Evan Meaney, Mike Hoolboom, Robert Nelson, and Nina Menkes,

Strange Questions

links powerful personal stories with the contemporary media-scape.

Questions addressed in this collection include:

What role does the audience play in the creative process?

Can art-making be egoless?

Is perception reality?

What is the role of intention in the creative process?

What counts as storytelling? Are experimental filmmakers telling stories a different way or doing something completely different?

What was the motive of the cave artists?

What is more important: conviction or compromise?

Is ambition based more on fear or joy?

+++++++++++++++++

Accolades from award-winning experimental filmmakers:

"Fialka is a damn good interviewer. His questions are sometimes so precise that it tickles and sometimes so grand and thought provoking that one feels on the edge of a new spiritual awareness." --Lynne Sachs

"Fialka asks unexpected Questions about important Ideas, eliciting Answers that can surprise even those doing the answering. My Interview with him taught me something about myself; it was a Gift." --David Gatten"Fialka's was the funniest interview I have ever had. He has developed a very wise way of triggering thoughts in the interviewee." --Leighton Pierce"Fialka's interview had me buzzing inside with thoughts and memories that his engaging questions set in motion. Super stimulation." --Larry Gottheim"I thank Gerry Fialka so much. I really enjoyed his interview with me, especially his unjaded joie de vivre, hearty laugh, and endless pursuit of knowledge sparked by social curiosity." --Phil Solomon."Gerry Fialka is a master interviewer. Working out of his natural sympathies and his erudition, Gerry cannily and cheerfully guides his interviewees along a path of Socratic inquiry that goes far deeper than the average Q & A and possibly deeper than the interviewee thought himself/herself capable of going. With Gerry at the helm, the journey really is about the destination and not just the journeying." --Fred Worden"Fialka is a meteor shower in the contemporary media arts discourse. He's blowing my mind." -- Craig Baldwin

++++++++++++++

Gerry Fialka, artist, writer, and para-media ecologist, lectures on experimental film, avant-garde art, and subversive social media at NYU, USC, UCLA, Cal Arts and MIT. He has been called "the multi-media Renaissance man" by the

Los Angeles Times

and "a cultural revolutionary" by the

LA Weekly.

Fialka's interviews have been published in books by Mike Kelley and Sylvere Lotringer. They have been heard on Pacifica KPFK radio, and have appeared in magazines:

Canyon Cinema, OtherZine, CineSource,

Artillery,

AMASS magazine, LA Jazz Scene, Jazz News,

Bird, Flipside, Venice BeachHead.

"Gerry Fialka is Los Angeles' preeminent underground film curator." - Robin Menken, CinemaWithoutBorders

Rachael Kerr is a filmmaker, writer, and researcher. She is a 2017 graduate of the University of Michigan Department of Screen Arts and Cultures. As a student she collaborated on the feature documentary

The Big House

, now slated for theatrical release in Japan. In Winter 2017, Rachael was part of a UM course taught be Terri Sarris and supported by the University's Bicentennial Committee, which explored the AAFF's long relationship to the University.

David E. James has written or edited a dozen books on avant-garde cinema and other forms of non-commodity culture, especially in Los Angeles. His latest publication is

Rock ‘N’ Film: Cinema’s Dance With Popular Music

(2016). His films have screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles Filmforum, and Canyon Cinema in San Francisco.

+++++++++++++

SoonSunday 7pm at Beyond Baroque

681 Venice Blvd Venice CA

FREE Admission

MOM - Movie Or Manuscript on Mother's Day -

Celebrate the publication of Gerry Fialka's new book

Strange Questions: Experimental Film as Conversation

http://laughtears.com/strange-questions.html

and

his new feature film

The Brother Side of the Wake (test screening). Facebook=

https://www.facebook.com/events/173605590088661/

VIEW Youtube Clips=

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlhspvI86Z8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vso1cEAUYRs

LilyCat Radio Show - Gerry talks about both book and film -

https://archive.org/details/20180225LilycatGerry

+++++++++++++

Upcoming volumes in the

Strange Questions

book series:

Experimental Film as Conversation, Continued.

This volume includes interviews with filmmakersDavid Gatten, Frank Mouris, P. Adams Sitney, tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE, Bill Brand, Pip Chodoov, Craig Baldwin, Bill Morrison, Braden King, Naomi Uman, John Smith, Patrick Turrant, Madison Brookshire, Tony Gault, Bill Daniel, Vera Brunner Sung, Alexandra Cuesta, Tooth, Fred Worden, Mark Street, Leslie Raymond, Jason Jay Stevens, Ben Russell, Bryan Konefsky, Owen Land, Peter Rose, Alfonzo Alvarez, Jesse Lerner, Terri Sarris, Chris McNamara, Oren Goldenberg, Jesse Drew, Roger Bebe, Jon Jost, Betsy Bromberg, Thom Anderson and more.

Michigan Aesthetics as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with Mike Kelley, George Clinton, Sam Green, Jack Epps Jr, Grace Lee Boggs, Marshall Crenshaw, Ari Weinzweig (Zingerman's), Steve 'Muruga' Booker, John Sinclair, and Mary Jane Shoultz.

Venice Aesthetics as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with

Venice artists

Rip Cronk, Earl Newman, and Carol Fondiller.

Art as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with artists William Pope.L, Alexis Smith, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, George Herms, Doug Harvey, Winston Smith, and Robert Branaman.

Poetry as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with poets Amiri Baraka, SA Griffin, Suzanne Lummis, ruth weiss, Linda Albertano, Les Plesko, Harry Northrup, and David Meltzer.

Political Activism

as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with political activists Grace Lee Boggs, Tom Hayden, Haskell Wexler, Bill Ayers, Skip Blumberg, Jon Rappoport, Lila Garrett, and Marcy Winograd.

Jazz as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with musicians Horace Silver, Jon Hendricks, Annie Ross, Oscar Brown Jr, Hadda Brooks, David Amram, Perry Robinson, Theo Sanders, and jazz writers Kirk Silsbee and Greg Burk.

Literature as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with writers Eric McLuhan, John Bishop, Chris Kraus, Kristine McKenna, Janet Fitch, Brad Schreiber, and Johanna Drucker.

Comedy as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with comedians Paul Krassner, Ric Overton, Paul Provenza, David Misch, Roy Zimmerman, Wes Skoop Nisker, Lady Lord Buckley, and Darryl Henriques.

Rock N' Roll as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with musicians Mac Rebennack (aka Dr John), Pamela Des Barres, Steve Vai, Van Dyke Parks, Barry Smolin, Bruce Langhorn, Jeff Mosier, Roger Steffans, Paul Zollo, Billy Vera, Del Casher, Baby Gramps and John French.

Avant Garde Music as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with musicians DJ Spooky, Carl Stone, Patrick Gleeson, David Ocker, Blue Gene Tyranny, Frank Pahl, and Veronika Krausas.

Documentary Film as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with documentary filmmakers Ondi Timoner, Marina Goldovskaya, Rodney Ascher, Jay Weidner, Tiffany Shlain, Mary Jordan, William Farley, Chris Felver, Chris Metzler, Stan Warnow, and Jon Alloway.

Performance Art as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with performance artists Ann Magnuson, Heather Woodbury, Gordon Winiemko, Joseph Keckler, Mark Pauline, and Ed Holmes (aka Bishop Joey).

Dance as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with dancers Simon Forti and Rudy Perez.

Hollywood as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with Hollywood people James Harris, Orson Bean, Timothy A. Carey, Mews Small, Abraham Polonsky, Jeremy Kagan, Jay Cassidy, Steve DeJarnatt, and Steve Fife.

Animation as Conversation.

This volume includes interviews with animators Bruce Bickford, Karl Krogstad,and Gary Schwartz.

++++++This first book is the beginning of a 22-volume series.Upcoming

Strange Questions

will cover:More Experimental Film as ConversationMichigan Aesthetics as ConversationVenice, California Aesthetics as Conversation

Art as ConversationPoetry as ConversationPolitical Activism as ConversationJazz as ConversationLiterature as ConversationComedy as ConversationRock 'n' Roll as ConversationAvant-Garde Music as ConversationDocumentary Film as ConversationPerformance Art as ConversationDance as ConversationHollywood as ConversationAnimation as ConversationMedia Ecology as Conversation

Sculpture as ConversationPhotography as ConversationLive Cinema as Conversation

Gaming & Coding: Information Technology as Conversation

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kstanley400spatial · 5 years ago

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If you live in Glasgow, you are more likely to die young. Men there die a full seven years earlier than their counterparts in other UK cities. Until recently, the causes of this excess mortality remained a mystery.

The phenomenon has become known as the Glasgow Effect. But David Walsh, a public health programme manager at the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, who led a study on the excess deaths in 2010, wasn’t satisfied with how the term was being used. “It turned into a Scooby-Doo mystery but it’s not an exciting thing. It’s about people dying young, it’s about grief.”

He wanted to work out why Glaswegians have a 30% higher risk of dying prematurely – that is before the age of 65 – than those living in similar post-industrial British cities. In 2016 his team published a report looking at 40 hypotheses – from vitamin D deficiency to obesity and sectarianism. “The most important reason is high levels of poverty, full stop,” says Walsh. “There’s one in three children who are classed as living in poverty at the moment.”

But even with deprivation accounted for, mortality rates in Glasgow remained inexplicable. Deaths in each income group are about 15% higher than in Manchester or Liverpool. In particular, deaths from “diseases of despair” – drug overdoses, suicides and alcohol-related deaths – are high. In the mid-2000s, after adjusting for sex, age and deprivation, there was almost a 70% higher mortality rate for suicide in Glasgow than in the two English cities.

Walsh’s report revealed that radical urban planning decisions from the 1950s onwards had made the physical and mental health of Glasgow’s population more vulnerable to the consequences of deindustrialisation and poverty.

Shifting theories of city planning have profoundly altered people’s lives everywhere, and particularly over the past half-century in Glasgow. The city’s population stands at about 600,000 now. In 1951, it was nearly double this. Glasgow’s excess mortality, the report suggests, is the unintended legacy of urban planning that exacerbated the already considerable challenges of living in a city.

Studies have consistently linked city living with poorer mental health. For example, growing up in an urban environment is correlated with twice the risk of developing schizophrenia as growing up in the countryside. By 2050, 68% of the world’s population will live in cities, according to UN figures. The consequences for global health are likely to be significant.

Can we learn from what happened in Glasgow? As an increasing number of people move to or are born in cities, questions of fragmented communities, transient populations, overcrowding, inequality and segregation – and how these affect the wellbeing of residents – will become more acute.

Are urban dwellers doomed to poor mental health or can planners learn from the mistakes of the past and design cities that will keep us healthy and happy?

Many in Glasgow were relocated from tenements to new high-rises on large housing estates. (Credit: Getty Images)

In post-war Glasgow, local authorities decided to tackle the city’s severe overcrowding. The 1945 Bruce Report proposed housing people in high-rises on the periphery of the city centre. The Clyde Valley Report published a year later suggested encouraging workers and their families to move to new towns. In the end, the council did a combination of both.

New towns like East Kilbride and Cumbernauld are now among the most populous towns in Scotland. Many of those who stayed in Glasgow were relocated to large housing estates like Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Castlemilk.

The rapid change in the city’s make-up was soon recognised as disastrous. Relocating workers and their families to new towns was described in mid-1960s parliamentary discussions as “skimming the cream”. In an internal review in 1971, the Scottish Office noted that the manner of population reduction was “destined within a decade or so to produce a seriously unbalanced population with a very high proportion [in central Glasgow] of the old, the very poor and the almost unemployable…”

Communities which had a social fabric were then broken up – David Walsh

Although the government was soon aware of the consequences, these were not necessarily intentional, says Walsh. “You have to understand what sort of shape Glasgow was in, in terms of the really lousy living conditions, the levels of overcrowded housing and all the rest of it,” he says. “They thought the best approach was to just start afresh.”

In the early 20th Century, cities were meant to show us how to live. Modern urban planning would make people in the world’s cities healthier and happier. In 1933, the influential Swiss-French architect and urban planner Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, published his blueprint for the ideal city. In contrast with the past, he said, the city would now be designed to benefit its residents “on both the spiritual and material planes”.

In his plans for the Radiant City, industrial, commercial and residential zones would be segregated to allow workers to escape pollution; homes would be surrounded by open green spaces to allow residents to meet; wide roads would be set out in a grid system; and high-rise blocks would help clear the slums, remnants of the rapid industrialisation in many cities during the 19th Century. These slums were overcrowded and insanitary, and their inhabitants were, as the architect put it, “incapable of initiating ameliorations”.

Glasgow was among the first and the most enthusiastic to adopt these new buildings. In 1954 a delegation of councillors and planners visited Marseilles to see the Unité d’Habitation, an 18-storey block of flats and amenities resting on concrete stilts, designed by Le Corbusier and finished two years before. Glasgow soon had the highest number of high-rise dwellings in the UK outside London.

Sighthill’s ten 20-storey tower blocks were meant to herald the future. North of the city centre, set in parkland, with a view over the city, they would house more than 7,000 people drawn from the tenements and the slums.

The last of Glasgow’s infamous tower blocks was demolished in 2016. (Credit: Chris Leslie for Mosaic)

But when the tenements went, something else went, too. “There were communities which had a social fabric, if you like, which were then broken up by these processes,” says Walsh.

By the 2000s, the tower blocks were infamous for deprivation, violence and drugs. Many residents had moved out. Empty flats were used to rehouse asylum seekers. Fractures within the community were worsening.

Glasgow Housing Association decided to condemn the buildings. The towers were demolished over eight years; the last one came down in 2016.

But the roots of Glasgow’s excess mortality stretch back further than new towns and high-rises – to the Industrial Revolution, argues Carol Craig, who has written two books on the subject. In Glasgow, then called the Second City of the Empire, factories and the docks needed workers. Overcrowding coupled with a culture of drinking produced an explosive situation.

Faced with the prospect of returning to a cramped tenement, many men preferred to visit the pub; there were few other public meeting places. “You’re more likely to have violence, you’re more likely to have conflict, even sexual abuse is much higher in households where there are drinkers,” Craig says.

Being exposed in childhood to stressful events like domestic violence, parental abandonment, abuse, or drug and alcohol addictions is thought to be linked to poor mental and physical wellbeing in later life. The higher a person’s number of Adverse Childhood Experiences, as they are called, the more likely they are to suffer from mental illness or addiction. In turn they are more likely to expose their children to similar types of experiences, says Craig. “ACEs tend to cascade through the generations.”

Since Le Corbusier, we have learned more about how the design of buildings can affect behaviour. In an oft-cited study from 1973, psychologists looked at how the design of two student dormitories at Stony Brook University in Long Island changed how the 34 residents in each interacted with each other.

In the first design, all the students shared common lounge and bathroom facilities along a corridor. In the second, smaller groups of four to six each shared bathrooms and lounges. They found that the first design was a “socially overloaded environment” which did not allow residents to regulate who they interacted with and when. Being faced with too many people, at times not of their choosing, led students to experience stress; they became less helpful and more antisocial than those in the second design as the year went on.

The more people share a communal space the harder it is for them to feel they can control it. (Credit: Getty Images)

Perhaps the most famous case study of buildings’ effects on their inhabitants still referenced today is Pruitt–Igoe in St Louis, 33 11-storey towers inspired by Le Corbusier. Finished in 1956, it was initially seen as a miracle solution to inner-city living. Less than 20 years later, the social problems the blocks seemed to have spawned were deemed so irreparable that the buildings were imploded by the local authorities.

The architect Oscar Newman toured the complex in 1971, a year before demolition started. He argued that the design of a building affected the extent to which residents contributed to its upkeep. If people feel responsible for both keeping an area clean and controlling who uses it, it is likely to be safer. He called this sense of ownership over a territory “defensible space”.

“The larger the number of people who share a communal space, the more difficult it is for people to identify it as theirs or to feel they have a right to control or determine the activity taking place within it,” Newman wrote. Pruitt–Igoe was not designed to accommodate defensible space. “Landings shared by only two families were well maintained, whereas corridors shared by 20 families... were a disaster – they evoked no feelings of identity or control.”

Tower blocks with more wealthy residents are less likely to have issues with defensible space: they can pay for cleaners and security guards. Children, on the other hand, are often most affected: these common areas – communal corridors, or landings, or the nearby park – are usually spaces for play.

During his inauguration as rector of Glasgow University in 1972, the Clydeside trade unionist Jimmy Reid argued powerfully that working-class communities left behind by economic advancement were being stored out of sight. “When you think of some of the high flats around us, it can hardly be an accident that they are as near as one could get to an architectural representation of a filing cabinet.”

Living in a city can alter our brains and make us more vulnerable to social stress. (Credit: Getty Images)

Inequality is at its most conspicuous in cities: the very poor and the very rich live side by side, yet separately. Relative social status is more likely to be the first measure by which we judge people in places where communities are more transient and inequality starker. This has been shown to have an impact on our psychological wellbeing.

In their book The Inner Level, epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard G Wilkinson argue that inequality not only creates social rupture by highlighting people’s differences but also encourages competition, contributing to increased social anxiety. They cite a 2004 paper by two psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles – Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny – who analysed 208 studies to find that tasks involving some threat of social evaluation affected stress hormones the most.

Pickett and Wilkinson argue that this type of stress harms our psychological health. “The more unequal countries had three times as much mental illness as the more equal ones.” This affects people of all social classes. In high-inequality countries, such as the USA and the UK, even the richest 10% of people suffer more anxiety than any group in low-inequality countries except the poorest 10%.

Mental health is almost uniformly worse in cities – Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg

Research has also shown that living in a city can alter our brain’s architecture, making it more vulnerable to this type of social stress. In 2011, a team led by psychiatrist Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of Heidelberg University’s Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, looked at the implications of urban living on brain biology in one of the first experiments of its kind.

The scientists scanned the brains of 32 students while they were given arithmetic tasks and simultaneously subjected to criticism on headphones. This was designed to simulate social stress. A further 23 performed the same test but were subjected to a different kind of social evaluation: they could see the frowning faces of invigilators while completing the puzzles. The results of the test were stark: the participants who lived in a city demonstrated a greater neurophysiological reaction to the same stress-inducing situation. The amygdala, an area of the brain which processes emotion, was activated more strongly in current urban dwellers. The test also showed a difference between those who’d grown up in cities and those brought up in towns or the countryside. The former displayed a stronger response in their perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, which regulates the amygdala and is associated with stress and negative emotion.

Meyer-Lindenberg’s previous work on risk mechanisms in schizophrenia focused on genes. But these are only thought to account for a 20% increased chance of developing the illness at most – and growing up in a city is associated with double the risk.Stressful experiences in early life correlate with reduced volume of grey matter in the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, a factor often seen in people with schizophrenia. “Mental health is almost uniformly worse in cities… that’s just what the data shows,” says Meyer-Lindenberg. “There isn’t really a bright side to this.”

Lack of agency – the feeling that we don’t have control over a situation – is one of the core mechanisms determining how strongly social stress is experienced, says Meyer-Lindenberg. “People who are in leadership positions tend to cope better with a given amount of stress.”

In a city, and particularly if you are poor, you are far more dependent on other people and the urban infrastructure, whether it’s waiting impatiently for a bus or a lift, wondering who you’ll have to share a lift with in your high-rise complex, or hoping the local council will not choose your neighbourhood for redevelopment.

Creating more pedestrianised areas in cities is good for wellbeing. (Credit: Getty Images)

Cities can also be liberating. “The flip side of being more stressful is that they may be more stimulating,” Meyer-Lindenberg says. “This tighter community that you have in a village, say, can be very oppressive if you don’t feel like you belong, if you’re an outsider of some sort.”

Inequality has been shown to lower trust in others and damage social capital – the networks between people which allow societies to function effectively. People are so worried about security that they’re mentally building walls around themselves, says Liz Zeidler, chief executive of the Happy City Initiative, a research centre based in Bristol. “We need to be doing the opposite: we need to be creating more and more spaces where people can connect, learn across their differences.”

Happy City has designed a way to measure the local conditions shown to improve well-being. Its Thriving Places Index looks at housing, education, inequality, green space, safety and community cohesion.

If designed well, cities can be good for us

Perhaps, however, a good measure for the happiness of a place, Zeidler says, is the status of the “indicative species”. For ponds, she says, it might be that the presence of a certain type of newt tells you whether or not the water is healthy. In cities, the newts are children. “If you can see children, it’s probably a healthy and happy city.”

The way a city is laid out can foster this environment, she says, by “closing of streets, making it more pedestrianised, more green spaces, having more what urban planners would call ‘bumping spaces’, where you can literally bump into people. Slowing places down is really good for everybody’s wellbeing and, obviously, you then see more children on the streets.”

If designed well, cities can be good for us. “If you look at urban dwellers epidemiologically they tend to be richer, better educated, [with] better access to healthcare,” says Meyer-Lindenberg. “And they also tend to be somatically healthier.” They also tend to have a smaller carbon footprint. “You can’t raze cities to the ground and rebuild them,” he says. “You have to find ways to maximise people’s wellbeing.”

Meyer-Lindenberg is currently tracking how different parts of the city affect our mental wellbeing, using a technique called ecological momentary assessment, in which participants repeatedly report on the environment around them in real time. Various studies have suggested that nature – be that a tree or a park – has an important impact on people’s mental health. The app he is currently designing will allow people to plan their routes through the city in order to maximise their exposure to nature.

“The most beneficial nature is the one that looks like the kind of nature that humans would have encountered during their early evolution,” he surmises. Perhaps the manicured parks of the type preferred by urban planners may not actually be that effective at improving our wellbeing.

Children exposed to nature at lunchtime are better able to pay attention in the afternoon. (Credit: Chris Leslie for Mosaic)

In 2012, Emily Cutts realised the importance of these kinds of green spaces when the meadow overlooked by her second-floor flat in west Glasgow was threatened with development. Once used as an informal football pitch by locals, the meadow had mostly been frequented by dog walkers and drug addicts since the council, who wanted to sell the land, removed the goalposts. Then it finally looked as if a plan to build 90 luxury flats might pass.

Cutts decided that the only way to save the meadow was to launch a campaign. Over the next few years, the community organised petitions, events and a three-month vigil in St George’s Square in the city centre. Eventually the Scottish government stepped in. On 21 December 2016, it was determined that the meadow would remain undeveloped. It’s known locally as the Children’s Wood and is managed by a charity.

But why did Cutts and her fellow campaigners fight so passionately for this dingy meadow? Her neighbourhood, about ten minutes north of the Botanic Gardens, already had plenty of green space. Was it simply a case of not wanting development on her doorstep?

When I meet Cutts, in the community garden, she is deep in discussion with the gardener, Christine, about the possibility of using a wormery to transform dog faeces into compost for the trees. There are raised beds for planting, a bathtub with upturned earth for children to dig and an “edible” teepee (pea shoot tendrils will soon be climbing up the twigs). It was planted by a 12-year-old boy who, Cutts tells me, is regularly excluded from school.

Cutts is slight with long blonde hair, a soft Glaswegian accent and an eager countenance. She has an MSc in positive psychology. It was while working as Carol Craig’s researcher, compiling and presenting research on how to improve wellbeing, that she grew to understand the meadow’s potential to make her community healthier and happier.

Today, more than 20 schools and nurseries from the local area use the meadow. During my visit, Kelvinside Academy is having a forestry lesson. Children are playing around the thin birch trees, tying ropes around them, swinging friends vigorously in hammocks that look like laughing body bags, and digging in the earth. They learn to use knives for woodland tasks.

Cutts collaborated with a researcher at the University of Glasgow on a series of tests comparing the attention spans of children who spent their lunchtime in the meadow with those who stayed indoors or played in the school’s concrete playground. The attention of children exposed to nature was “significantly better”. Attention restorative theories argue that nature can have an impact on our attention span by engaging our indirect attention; this allows the type of attention we use for more challenging cognitive tasks, such as mathematical problems, to recuperate. The team also performed a similar experiment looking at children’s creativity in art. “Children who came here used more colours, used more texture, made more depth to their pictures than those who hadn’t played outside,” says Cutts.

Repeated contact with nature over time could make us less vulnerable to mental ill-health. (Credit: Chris Leslie for Mosaic)

Richard Mitchell, a professor in the Social & Public Health Sciences Unit at the University of Glasgow, has also been looking at how exposure to nature affects stress in deprived communities. Despite previous research showing a beneficial impact, his own findings have shown it to be slight. “These are all very deprived communities with a whole range of other problems going on, and the detrimental impact of life in poverty and other stressful situations is not outweighed by access to green space,” he tells me over the phone. “I think what we have to understand is that at a population level it may not have an absolutely spectacular impact straight away, [but] it is important.”

Further study, however, showed that one aspect of exposure to nature “had pretty strong protective effects on mental health in adulthood”, Mitchell says. Those who had been part of youth groups like the Scouts or Guides, and had repeated contact with nature over a long period of time “where they’re learning a whole variety of skills including being outdoors and appreciation of nature”, were less vulnerable to mental ill-health.

The Children’s Wood charity runs a regular youth club where they bring young people to help with the gardening. Many of the children come from deprived families: “That’s what always interests us about the space,” says Cutts. “It’s bang right in the centre of inequality – there’s so much poverty and there’s a lot of affluence around. So, we feel it’s sort of a level playing field and everybody is welcome.” Unlike in parks, which can be anonymous, here you have “a committed community who are involved in the space,” she says.

We go up the road together to visit a GP at home who works in Possilpark, one of the poorest districts in the city. She prescribes visits to the Children’s Wood, in addition to other treatments, due to the benefits of “peer support, getting out of your house, talking to others, getting more engaged in your community, watching things grown, nurturing other things, nurturing oneself and self-care”. She says that when her patients talk about the wood, it is one of the few times she sees them smile.

Reclaiming the land for community is definitely the way forward – Emily Cutts

Over 60% of Glasgow’s population lives within 500m (1,640ft) of a derelict site. A 2013 study found that vacant land and deprivation were linked to poor mental and physical health. It recommended that the city council grant the more than 700 hectares (2.7sq miles) available to highly deprived communities to be used for community good.

“Reclaiming the land for community is definitely the way forward,” Cutts says, as we both look over the meadow in the drizzling rain. “You can tell there’s a need but it’s not happening all over and it could be.”

In some parts of Glasgow, it feels like things could be changing, though it is mostly testament to the resilience of those who live there.

In the evening after my visit to the Children’s Wood, Cutts shows me the youth programme where 40 or so children are learning how to trampoline. As I wait for the bus, in the soft grey evening, I see some of the children leaving, mostly boys who are about 13 or 14, jostling and pushing each other playfully in the middle of the wide road. This is why we have to make our urban spaces happier and healthier. They are the newts in the city.

MacDonald, Fluer

BBC Future,

October 2019

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