Unknown Speaker  00:00
I try not to worry because it's fine

Unknown Speaker  00:16
for me, I want to hide her. I'm sure most of you recognize. So my title from Missouri and my notion in taking that title was that as a journalist, and independence, my notion has pregnant, it ships with the best come together into identities, rather than the general term cultural. If you're working in Japan and taking the title, my feeling is that you are as has memories of these two groups, constantly, in fact, watching in terms of culture, my culture is speaking to the larger culture, particularly the heart, because I am back to the viewer and the culture and you are watching continuity, precession. Stars, transiting women in particular as very much the objects, a country's obsession, and interests and passions, sometimes is the subjects. But as you will see, as I talk, I'm particularly interested in limited as performers. performing artist is an honor heard, it gets a great deal of attention, and often very many cultural rewards. But the price you pay was a certain lack of autonomy, both in terms of how history records your contributions, and in terms of how you actually work. If you're a performer, you're always using some levels, to always be corrected by somebody else. And in some ways, your own answer to your particular individuality, you're often working against what you would be good, if you have certain principles, you want to communicate, even just a certain sense of, of your character, if you if your gifts go counter to the cultural fashions of the moment for piety, you will again find a way to close what's unacceptable in various costumes. And that, you know, is is just the sheer culture and the fact that we have been pushed for various reasons more into this peculiar performing, performing well, and it's also true in your classical use analysis, we tend to be more nuanced in the subject. And so my hope is that it's a more secular culture. Okay. Now, what I'm interested in last, this may turn out to be not to be the case. What struck me about these different identities is that in some way, during this day, if you think of journalism as one of many professions, we we Oui women, even hippies are all in the sense, Hindu class as you enter the world of luxury, it is basically a middle class profession, you can be I let me take mainstream and it can be upper class and return in terms if you want to sell we may all sneer at this idea, but that is a generally generally acknowledged that it can be fringe, it can be bohemian, but essentially, it can be rebellious that it's a profession for so called Ubik. It began as a precaution for educated men to use Virginia Woolf started to pay attention to the daughters of educated men and women, the educated was injured. Tom so you enter this world where you are literate, you tell yourself and your child by your employers that you are important. You keep climbing, keep the culture. You are it's reporter often with some punches. You are supposed to win the mythology of it be an outsider and an inside designer, every journalist imagines that she or he can mix within and sit down Um, you know, Draghi or any poet on the street corner in the gutter and talk can move to the White House and such as your desire and be that

Unknown Speaker  05:11
it to some extent means you are willing to say we were always committed always in some way pretending understand, you know and camaraderie with someone will be next door because I don't need to add that often it's not a someone who would it might be it may not by the time that religion will encounter the person you're writing about the trend, the reciting the event, by the time that original thing finds its way into credit, including given to you by the editors, by your own sense of what the market can bear what the audience wants to hear. So it sounds very shady, unstable and professional, it has more in common than we would like to face. When I say this, partly because I now work for a women's legal team with the conditions of a certain kind of female status about social life, such as many of our markets in the world have closed since that incident who are according to what your husband was, and what profession he has, and how you were judged by all sorts of things, how you talk to that person, how you dress, how you carry yourself, it's out, you know, you're, you're reading a lot of signs, signs and symbols along the way. It's not a clear, not a clear path to your transaction to never, never particularly, as I say you really know, finally, in some way cultural journey. It's true, if only in that. And this is an odd pull against feminism, to be a journalist of any sort moves in some way to do your job. You're always you're in constant state of receptivity, sin may be simulated to the culture will always suppose the suppose to be in the position to be seduced. Follow that for what's that trend, this person's interested in what's going on there. You're constantly supposed to be open to any any set of emotions that come in nothing human seconds. At the same time, all the people who are a critical director says we're cultural nerds, you are supposed to be judging that you're supposed to be shaping opinion, but also conceded. Now in terms of the arts, in journalism, for a woman,

Unknown Speaker  07:45
the arts have a

Unknown Speaker  07:47
slightly unstable position in journalism they, in terms of regular newspaper journalism, a new very close to humans. But actually, recipes. And historically, we don't really often lie next to each other often. And it is therefore not surprising that when women first began interviewing with the large numbers, many of us who are disproportionately trained in the art and also it's the field in which you can be most easily simulated without throwing anything. Real journalists like to think of critics having viewers and have not been serious to fake and to judge them is opposed to going out after a hot compute news story is considered really quite genuinely a little iffy. Not you're not not the gentleman that we just mentioned. But the main kind as I say, give me some right out. So you know, you're a little little at the bottom of your profession for injury that only other kids you have the advantage of being you have more access in some ways to start a major pain reliever organized this release that you are selling us something that entertains and I really am talking more about ways to begin even at the place as central but with a history of proud Federation as say the voice. You are presumably never free to free to express even within you the labor contract, or you're at least selling being something outside. But you are that opposition involved. Supposedly analyzing making people see and think about things in new ways. Now we lose what aren't you supposed to do? Again, it's easy I sang in a way that amazes that it makes it makes you both the consumer reporter and also you can see in some ways that this is a culture template for a certain kind of ownership. How are we talking about? Yeah, but you really must never forget, you're really all out because we cannot, we cannot resist and so the thing to remember is always in this in this world what is supposed to be most important to you? What's supposed to be purist? Your mind your opinions or concepts, your feelings are the things that are around you. And therefore, both subject to the vicissitudes, vicissitudes, political and ecological sometimes something that cannot make all right now you move into this room as soon as a feminist presumably is populated recently either from within the cattle times, how would you do that is assuming human nature you are an appointment against the grain you are your original feminism that means in baseball 60s, was a resistance to seduction to do so, or at least in the condition seduction, you were resisting the typical the usual things you will take for granted. And I think that habits the mores of a culture are always in some way. seductions, you know, if you're not in a position to be blatantly oppressed in all moments, you're always seduced by what habits what mores and folkways anthropologists used to say you're going around, you're at least collaborating in that if not profit. So you move in, you're essentially supposed to question as it goes. Every thing was taken for granted about the great seducer culture, which is which is presumably hard to do. They may be very serious, they may be challenging, but they don't take the lessons on the way they seduce. Again, when I don't need to tell you, I don't need to do a history for why we would miss out on all the ways take movies take music take from take literature, in which the seduction inherent in the art form and usually considered necessary to its greatness or at least its commercial appeal works against you in some way in your head past the eyes.

Unknown Speaker  12:51
All right. Now, where does being a feminist and who you are, what does that have to do with? How do you come into journalism to retire? You're beholden to the professionals around you today. You're certainly beholden and you genuinely are as it is to certain standards of feminism, but also feminine at this point is also kind of classes in Ted's various paths working within, you know, schools of thought you're holding, essentially, to what the feminist community deemed appropriate today for this particular moment about getting fit. I may remind you of the notorious contrast to savings in the masochism several years ago, you know, a very, very good example of what's permissible in hearing what's not permissible to say they give you your benefits and what arguments have blown, you are apt to be particularly if you are balancing a non politically correct journalist which is mostly against it and it is more you know, you are likely you always run the risk of not saying something you should have being expelled for something you had said well, you know, not living up to those to those. So, those are those are also we know that and for bad reasons, in the face of the interviewer job again if you cannot create to be set up to look at let me say to take a trivial example, someone like Madonna and not just that, well she wears about that says boy toy around the neck. She clearly married for money. But you know her and she writes songs, you know, like the word you're just in this little sort of bubblegum seductive song. You got a little to say only that is true in some way falsify. First of all, why did you move? Secondly, who is she has the product of certain kinds of working with Italian American moved into a traditional arena for upward mobility rock, or another traditional arena for female upward mobility, nice body. You know, what does what does this mean? How do you look at that without instantly patronizing Madonna whose real name by the way isn't enough? It's not a joke, that's your given name. So, you know, you want to get are always Valentino's. And as I intimated in the Madonna comparison, you are in all cases being shaped by who this is one of the things that feminism really didn't pay enough attention to when you were bringing your class identity to all of this and reading, nutrition, religious identity to read, you know, a minor thing presumably, but none of that all combined with class and race and all of those things, usually on acknowledged class, ethnicity and race are constantly shaping. It seems to be in the early stages of feminism, the feminist analysis that found its way into arts criticism, do journalism and criticism was usually the, we are you know, we are a group of a united group of feminists who are identified sexier, which can be considered a slightly more superficial word for that I say apprenticeships and I see them as usually, to my mind a more conservative, you know, kind of social manifestation, we are identifying it, we are naming it we are chest, criticizing it, we are exploring it, that was what you did, you looked at a movie you said, it is sexist because of x y&z, you you identify the, the symptoms and obvious hobbies.

Unknown Speaker  17:07
That's all very well and good. But if any of you read criticism, newspapers these days, every magazine, you will find that very quickly, which is something that always happens with any political, a set of political conceptions, feelings, documents, moves into the mainstream, people get voice and declare their voice very quickly. That means that kind of rhetoric, not using rhetoric to do or falls out of fashion. How many pieces have you read recently that said, I suppose you could say this film this nexus. But, you know, that's not really terribly. You know, let's look at some let's look at some serious academic criticism in mainstream criticism, you find the kind of backlash against the old fashioned very straightforward feminist analysis that says essentially, its own sophisticated, take aesthetics, which are higher up on the hierarchy than politics, always, when you're talking about get into a camp, happy, stop complaining. It's always interesting to me who these people think it is, it at least is boring for any of us to see that this is still going on is it is for them to read it. No, that's, that's really not the way it works. So you are faced with to keep up with changing fashions and changing culture, the fashion may be simply an editor who refuses that say if it's a respectable journal to accept because of this analysis on the ground that isn't this a little course we do in structure. Or it may be an editor, though, neither of those are clues. But those were for this, but a lot of that is an attempt and a strategic attempt to heat up to master the the legitimate jargon so that you will continue to have a place in a mainstream in a mainstream publication. It may be but he's such a sophisticated writer is the sexy isn't really the main point. You know, I read that novel also. And I, you know, that the conflict between XY and Z you know, so you go back. So now when he's engaged in the plan, always to keep the rhetoric not necessarily becoming more sophisticated, though that can be an interesting byproduct, but to keep it palatable in some way to a market that is losing interest. Who's losing interest in it? I once was at a panel discussion that raised pain was the only woman on the panel and they were all discussing politics and the arts in the 70s and Freeman in the 70s has been completely nothing has happened political will to kind of be reactionary, you know, it's all me and self help and all of that anyways, can you sit up and say It seems to me one of these, it's now fashionable to say the sentences were boring because that was an impediment, you know, became a really important political movement. Yes, show in some ways, but very much very much. So, even literally non existent in the consciousness of the speakers or I daresay in the consciousness of because you will be going into a long race pace. Can Satish you know that kind of instant journalistic analysis on? Well, you know, it's the just disappear the ever disappearing present, which has become the past, I was here before the newspaper review page showed itself, which I always thought was very good when someone came from now on in many ways, but all right, this was a review that was imposed by the central message, which essentially, Parrish invented affair outside your marriage. And we felt that we needed to move it to the to the fact that the thing that stayed in my mind was the journal, the newspaper reviewer, to decide his name, if they didn't know that, he said, a fact we all decided not to acknowledge this is good. And then he went on to say, and it's a delicate, you know, when inappropriate to mention it and therefore, say certain things about life behind you there. Forget just the fact that we decided not to acknowledge the fact that I'm, when you read, we are now going to say in the kind of non lecture, anti feminist theory of how, you know, to read certain people on, let's say, a filmmaker like Woody Allen, and whether or not humans women, is to see a level of a debate that simply, you know, seems to presume that certain feminist principles don't exist. Just visit here. And so, you know, that's another reason we were always having to find a way to keep the thing alive, even when the language of yesterday's papers has potentially been excluded or been forgotten. You're never told, in you know, Americans, supposedly free journalism, you are rarely told outright, this political opinion, you will always

Unknown Speaker  22:21
hold on, you don't really have room for that I had to take that paradigm about, you know, you're told something that genuinely makes you feel it was probably that you put the thing to coarsely and I'm really not speaking over myself, personally, a general analysis, this is what's called repressive power, you put the thing to force late or you're being a little old fashioned, and that's not funny, anymore, and figures assignment and reader statistics. You know, and then once again, one moves on the repercussions of this, in some ways only see worse in politics. But you know, I assure you, they finally are just as bad in our if you think back to just a simple thing, like how fitting is pretty it's first revised in the credit literature, which meant simply ensure that decent to first rate women writers were read and discuss regularly and review who kept their books on the way into paperback, which let people read them and they didn't have to wait 15 years to be published by Verado. Simply that very ordinary thing. The brouhaha that ensued simply to widen the number of books that people could accept as serious hopes they should read. Yeah, it was it was extraordinary, probably take it to where we are now. But you didn't used to be small presses that you published anyway. You know, when I came to Newsweek, as a book reviewer in seventh grade, partly chose the world there, but that hadn't ever been don't need to tell you the meaning and document you have the cream of the crop, you're lucky and if it was a choice between a first rate limited person, you know, so you know, it's we're passing elements of variables to that restricted screen. And that's, that's essentially the same for me right now, finding a way constantly to move to larger landscape. My feeling right now, my conviction is that the best future for feminists who are also journalist and critic lies in something that I think the cultural equivalent of what I do see the way was politically feminist, which is, you aren't in any way weakening or diluting your feminist analysis. You are very, very aware of what aligns with other That's a compatible unambiguous. Migrate Trinity is always your race, race slash ethnicity, class and gender. One can certainly add. You can add religion though I often think that religion is as much of a race to race and ethnicity as anything else. It's always to look at how feminism shapes and is shaped by class and racial identity, these things are often working at odds with each other, which is one thing that makes our work as feminist kind of hard. It is quite possible to do any feminist analysis on the subject that is extremely porcelain and brutal and oppressive, let's say on perhaps the classical relational front, let me take an example.

Unknown Speaker  26:03
How many of you have seen here now, how many of you have read the book?

Unknown Speaker  26:15
All right, it is possible taking this movie to do as we have seen in the, in the reviews of it, you may do a good liberal male analysis, which will be very human beings, you know, I've never seen anything like it's beautiful, you know, Whoopi Goldberg, Steven Spielberg, you know, integration on all these levels? What did you challenge and say, if it should be against the law, you know, just like secondary toilets used to be against the law not to receive this analysis has some, as a liberal male analysis always does the use, I would say, as is that if the caller pervy, very, very good argument that it's true, if the color purple is successful at the box office, in theory, it might make I don't say sure, but it might make it possible for more movies that might be better involving black minority subjects with black and minority input to be made. There is also a series a sneak peek at all the fashion, free feminism, middle of the road, middle class, National Urban League, conservative wing of the National Urban and NAACP analysis. That one is the Moynihan Report was a very political game in this black men, particularly bad back then their reputation is very bad in commuting to the United States to say anything, writing anything, or making movie that in any way institutionalizes some of our worst stereotypes about black men, roughly that they beat their wives, which means they may be that other people don't really care enough to live up their wives their Bastille Day, you know, they don't work very much. Well, these people are farmers, but you know, they're proved they're loud, they're desperate. They don't even treat their own women. Well, so how can they function? Well, in the larger community? Role Brookvale course it's the George field argument. You know, if women say, if women don't stay in the house, all men will become like black men, which is built to direct his wives and wives in the street. If we do anything that encourages that analysis in a public way that encourages those perceptions and art, you know, small recession, we are doing harm we are giving ammunition to the enemy. I find that protests against the movie, very hard to stomach, I understand historically, where it becomes well good to make it a little closer to home. I would say defendants who often has the same problem with that, we will often refuse to discuss certain issues that might have to move out remember the John and matter rocket book was written by that case. Married couple of she accused him of rape was going to be a great issue because there's going to be the first time Columbia Law impact command could raise the client and then she went back to him. This was wildly embarrassing. We were more of a public. You know, we really didn't want to talk about it. Everything public that that case raises a link between SEO certain types of sadomasochism and sexual relationships, women's collaboration in a certain kind of abuse, all of these things We scroll right back in our face. They are, they are interested, they're an intrinsic part of the feminist analysis because no other group of people more than women, because no other oppressed group is is woven into society as we are no one who works in federally collaborates mirrors, in their visual as women. You know, there's no such thing as a feminist analysis based on totally pure female, a woman as a victim in the total victim in the sense that she had absolutely nothing to do, she had she oppose her oppression at every point as violently as she could and have nothing to do but it just doesn't exist. So the analysis of oppression has to change to accommodate. Now we get back to the back to the color purple.

Unknown Speaker  30:49
Here is an academic feminist analysis, a highbrow feminist analysis, which essentially says, as most cultural highbrow analyses, we compare books and movies, the book was infinitely more complicated that many people ought to be doing movies, you know, as a part of mass culture, subject, you know, to all sorts of financial corruptions and just, you know, crafts or, or always in some way going really dilute. And keep it a seriousness. You know, that's, that's what's going on, people have to go back to the book. They'll use the movies there. There is a black feminist analysis, which if any of you read Michele Wallace, it's basically voice recently essentially says, you know, yes, rah, rah, you know, I'm certain certain forms of oppression within the black community of oppression of women are being exposed, but essentially, in such a Walt Disney, Technicolor happy in the way that we are left with a kind of dramatic version of Amos in me, which means you've got a lot of very colorful, no pun intended, larger than life, black characters who seem to be at the mercy of a lot of raw emotions. And it's very interesting to watch and you get the same kind of cheap thrills you get and malodor. And everything comes out. There is another analysis that I've heard from a number of non intellectual with wider challenges, women, often black, which simply said, you know, look, anything that popularizes in the world, the story of a certain time, claiming to self put resisting a certain kind of oppression, is abuse. And there's a strictly out there is also a kind of, there's an end, there's a class now, you know, we can go on and on and on and on and on. Do you blame it largely known Steven Spielberg, as the white director? Do you blame it on the actors? On presumably, in concert, I don't pay by the way, as you can see that the color purple music, I think it's pretty awful. Do you blame it on the actors who presumably in concert without a walker, would have asked for some real change? You should have let us say, as black people, as black women in this been more sensitive to something that was going off, you live it to a constant cheapening of a fairly complicated message. Do you blame it on Quincy Jones to has made a career as a certain music producer out of taking authentic black music and making it as cheap and glittery and diluted as possible? That's who he is. I think he's as much as Steven Spielberg, but I can't throw them away. What is classes in some sense, because he is always interested in taking the real products of a small culture of a folk culture, if you will. And lifting you know, that whole corny notion of on public view the folk music and making it palatable by adding 25 violins, but you're making it in some way symphonic operetta like whatever. Maybe it's a kind of racism, but it doesn't really give me any character useful in this case. And there's so implicitly in all of this, there is an intellectual quota code, which is a kind of class identification versus a people. argument for all the black people like me, and Michelle was he ate this movie of, you know, who we sit near where we theater and feel better than the largely in the next, say, over 50% of black audiences who may be going and getting a lot out of it. And how do I say that without saying, My secretary really likes me for her? No, but these, these are real, these are real things. I used to joke with a friend at Newsweek about what we call the bourgeois feminist tone of voice which is always used when the woman in at the waist was Hello, Martha, how are you today? Me us too. So many of our children, we were very polite about the taking, taking the waste. You know, in a sense, it's the wastebasket analysis, you know, how do you how do you come? You know, how do you come to terms essentially, with, with all these constituencies? What hasn't I haven't yet seen, in fact, I thought Michelle Wallace's pieces were interesting, I haven't yet seen or produced a really useful analysis of this. And the fact is, the culture is already taking care of the movie will or will not win a certain number of Academy Awards. And it will or will not have some good in terms of making possibly future better projects.

Unknown Speaker  35:42
Once again. But you know, once again, the major you know, who is who is the who has the power in the hands up, it's potentially in the hands of students feel their identity, Quincy Jones. So it's in the hands of two extremely powerful men who have shaped something to their liking, and very much to their benefit, Steven Spielberg supposedly became who really adult filmmaker, by doing this, which we remember this area that Dustin Hoffman is Tootsie, I became a better man for playing with some way, always enlarge his horizon is by putting on blackface and going down south and by beyond what it's like to live as a black or really, you know, getting in touch with women. You know, that's a common cultural piety, somehow or another, if you deal with women, as a man, you're always a little more interesting. And if you deal with them, as as a woman, and Quincy Jones, he made himself a major power broker on a scale to do with us. Along with who we are the World, so you can say that a very rich and powerful man has made a great deal of money on the marketing of marketing of a certain book, his people, starvation, in the case of We Are the World. It's true. It's true, though, for their own good and a certain, you know, picturesquely sad part because these people's history, facts and profits from that too complex. In any case, now, let me move on, because what I wanted to do is give a series of those examples today of different cultural phenomenon that require, I think, a series on analysis. And when I finish talking, I hope that that you will want to participate. So I'm going to move from this let's we left it at 30. We're going to manage property things alter and how will you address that? So I think at this point, there hasn't been a successful addressing on the color vertical issue. Let me move on to another magazine for which I work. Full time I had an issue to men, especially an issue on men. I don't quite know what this means. I don't know whether it's going to be some real attempt, you know, to look at relations between the sexes is feminism going backward? Or whether it's going to be you know, another version of your fashion magazine is a health issue, there's a main issue, there's a dating issue. I was asked if I wanted to do a piece, have many of you seen that had no sisters, and this is what he owns a movie on how comedy had changed from Jackie Gleason, who many of you may know is a great public figure on radio be on TV was Chobani out and I said whatever had to do with each other. And this is in the wake of a series of interviews that are called Woody Allen, our major where they said the main thing about him is that he loves animals and essentially said do real cultural experience. How have your movie life this year? Give me my take our series this is this is a movie is Hannah and her sister, you know don't look any further for what American movies aren't American movies can give you about healing life. You know here that. Oh, I said why did you ever use in the mirror when I do? Well, it turned out a very powerful man, a magazine, a very rich, powerful man who said Jackie Gleason, you know, he hated women. He was always being abusive to his wife. And that used to be the standard for funny how many with women. Woody Allen loves women. Let's take this apart. Translation from Holland a very rich and powerful Jackie Gleason's comedy is how is a certain kind of worldly stereotype working class? working class men the joke about you know the common belief among the bourgeoisie is that the real sexes are always in some version with your class. And our Latin men, you know, it's always worse somewhere opens Word for Jackie Lucent, milkfat for some years so to this man, you know, that was the cynic one on of oppression of comic oppression of women of using women as a bunch of comics had Woody Allen represented a kind of cultivated intellectual appreciation. You know, like you trade report when you use what

Unknown Speaker  40:23
you understand. And I, you know I'm making a joke, but I really think that's exactly what it was. The fact is if you look at the jagged nation, so which I'm not a fan, I was family does a whole lot better than a lot of us did since you appeared on the boardwalk feed. And of course, my sitcoms and DVD movies over the years, she actually does do somewhat that he is at least exposed regularly as a kind of way. So I said, Look, I don't think that works, because let's be real, we're not going to get them to go, you know, my class analysis of Dr. Perez in some way, it's not entirely to do with also who, in terms of comedy, the history of comedy is not really to do with what many other comes out? So I said, Well, I got some real reservations about what women? What would I do Woody? You know, let's just do that. So you begin to approach and my boy is one going to do Woody Allen doesn't love women, why you start talking to all the women, you know, and the answers are clear. Now we're going to start running down some, you know, very few categories. And I asked you to bear with me, because this is really the way it really the way it ran, I began to talk to people and what was happening was this, a number of women, most of the women who are very involved in relationships with men said, listen, not only does he romanticize women, his male characters are stupid, you know, I learned did Woody Allen because he isn't, he also isn't intelligent about men. It's true. Most of the Jewish women I spoke to said on he is completely obsessed with a certain kind of shiksa a certain kind of wave like, you know, delicate blow he often blonde, but not necessarily last woman who is always along with her family. Second, contrast to a kind of loud, maybe benign, the kind of press will give Jewish family is always leaving that world behind. And usually, if you think any Hall in Manhattan, leaving in these two Jewish lives by you know, and moving into the world of Manhattan, me about Alright, fine, but one of my Jewish men said I'm sick of this, you know, women, blacks and Jews, when already is always in some way refusing Klan members the right to it has to do with sexual sexual obsession, desire, whatever the right to move out into the larger world, you know, you wouldn't deny anyone the right to move out into it intellectually any other way. So what part of sexuality heroes was an obsession with the other? At all, I said, maybe it's partly a class issue in that Woody Allen is always interested in a certain kind of upper middle class cultural life that he tends to associate with and it's most desirable form with an Anglo Saxon study. She said maybe I can but you know, you got it. You gotta stop the pie the about you know, it's always simple with himself way, you know, the Jewish man only likes was for the black men, only whites whites because to the extent that we as feminists are doing that we're buying into an old fashion when womanly, we've got to protect our men, they haven't gotten right to find out who's more desirable for you. You know, I took that down. I talked to somebody else, women who are film people, what they were interested in was the fact that it's been a Woody Allen made his way from stand up comedy into moviemaking, and that he always sacrifices the movie itself today's oceanic as a stand up comedian, well, fine. I think that that's true, but where does that where does that fit in with the rest? So at this point you've got now and also why is Woody Allen currently being considered how major American filmmaker, my film friends you know, who do film and cultural history say, look, Americans contribution to film is essentially popular mass commercial film, it is not art in the sense that Hudong Antonioni or you know Fellini, or may be more of whatever pioneered intellectuals and Americans who are still very insecure about our place in Cultural Landscape, he gets those critics on all the intellectual references they will because he's always said I really admire

Unknown Speaker  45:09
I'm not just because stand up comedian used to say, you know I'm a serious artists he gives them all in one he gets from the references to play with anything to the sheer entertainment that you've been doing since you saw things like It Happened One Night, you know or skip anything you know our tradition of American comedy, but you know Woody is has carefully set the language of criticism up so that you can talk about it as a serious thing and get all the easy laughs that you get from time to time isn't necessarily to be anything but what it is that we know it can be more even without crying. So, you know, you've got again, you've got so what have you got? You've got an art class quest, which is Woody Allen, who began as a as a stand up comedian, who had a certain intellectual patina that he brought into that world. You know, Borscht Belt jokes. You also have a Woody Allen who though he talked about in kitchens, and sex and Alex, you know, generally was not doing the kinds of really dangerous he talked about neurosis, but he wasn't on a psychotic finish, like a linear. He wasn't a flagrant social critic, like a degrade. He wasn't a crazy, like, say Richard Pryor, he doesn't have a real kind of humanist interest in the underdogs likes a really common he's really the champion of a kind of I have adjusted to my life, neurosis, you know, the Romans, if you will. Well feel I'm doing fine. And under crazy. You know, I got a single trade five days a week. So that's what it's for. You got already you bought a certain kind of intellectual daring into comedy, but you didn't really agree social or emotional material that is dangerous, injured. All right, we move up another we move up and understand. What do you decide to get out of that performing lowbrow area, he makes himself into a writer and just one step up the art class ladder. He gets points for that. It's a classic Horatio Alger story, you know, I make myself even do to remember all of this, he makes what would normally be in the process of that he is able to turn himself from a schlemiel who is always talking about how pathetic into in meeting them has the stars in his own movie. And he, by virtue of that become desirable, anyone who is starring in the movie becomes the meaning that if you are a man with it, we all know if all it requires, if you are a man is power, you don't have to be good within power in a certain kind of cleverness, you know, so he overcomes that he buys into the world of heroes and heroines. And finally, he buys out of the Borscht Belt into a larger, larger Jewish Grimoire. It's basically just essentially a class and intellectually divided into that puts himself on that. And finally, you are left with what you're always left with, which is how do women symbolize that and help him move it. Women are the vehicle whereby he not only as I said a minute ago, become a hero and add man. They are the vehicle whereby he remains utterly the given epicenter of using the universe. My friend who said Woody Allen didn't like men wasn't far from he never puts himself women are in fact, a cover so that he never has to actually compete or deal. So he becomes the man who loves women, because he is the different you know, he's the one that used the powerful logic within their world. He's writing the scripts, he's directing them, he's always got three of them in his movie, they might be rejecting him, but there's always another coming. He's in Canada, as you remember, he's envisioned at the beginning of the movie. No, he's in Florida. And the woman is pregnant at the end, at the end of the movie, he fulfills a series of bad disease and women in essence, allow him as Tootsie allows us to evolve to be a more powerful man who up a service. So does he love women? Yes, they stimulate his imagination and they allow him access to a kind of power as an artist and a man that he would have to get in some other way. He would have to do it strictly by with by putsborough by daring, you know by by a lot of things, and he doesn't.

Unknown Speaker  49:56
He also happens to be willing to do it directly in comedy so that that helps him as well. So now when he doesn't love women, but he loves what women can do for him and he is women are a fascinating other to him also as a man whose neurosis is the center of his comedy, which if you're a comic is the center of your being. neurosis becomes arrows between limited memory and also becomes the great equalizer. He is always bonding with the most neurotic woman in medium film neurosis is just think of the history of psychoanalysis. Think of Freud and his various patients and the number of women or a psychoanalytic tradition, the roses is essentially feminine as a feminine edge to him. It's a feminine disease, if you will, Woody the Emperor check what are you the guy with no body who can't be sport. So he makes this liability first into stand up comedy that that still leaves it, a victim even makes it into an elaborate romantic comedy. When the roses finally becomes the way it has, with, say Clark Gable good looks and guts behaving the way with what a neurosis and the smart tongue becomes the way that he wins women and Congress over on this. I think it's really I think it's a brilliant strategy. But what it leaves you with is Woody episode driven. They had what it needs you if there's one type of woman who owns mostly play off against? I wouldn't I think it's worth noting that he almost never picked actresses who shaped themselves before a Woody Allen movie he creates

Unknown Speaker  51:48
Well, let's say she has a modest career usually play a kind of pathetic way. Rosemary's Baby was her best movie. She then proceeded to adopt and have nine or 11 children. Basically I think she was formed by remotes there at the say by Malaysian we would have to first Frank Sinatra, oh, she was also an papers and she played ocean news in the movies. And basically, we will catch the rice and I'm hungry, and adopted masses of children, which is really the only thing you saw written about it for nine years. Then she met Woody Allen and became a movie star again, in an extension of this origin roll. Diane Keaton, who have to judgment or tour or a man partly by the shape the women he's working with, I loved it. Diane Keaton is an interesting character that she hadn't been practicing. Since she left running out. She shows up in various cultural events in dark glasses with a bandana wrapped around your head looking a little fake. When she does it to me and Pharaoh. I happen to think very fair enough Americans she's the sort of airy space, you know, where you see blonde hair, and, and but this you know what this is worth thinking about? What have you got, you've got people new shapes, to His words, to do His direction, calm, and then he moves on to us on to something else. But always he is beginning and they often lose your mind. But he has managed to pull off is sort of perfect. And in that way, it's interesting because the feminist analysis is so linked to the class and in some cases, in some way, the ethnic analysis, he's pulled off as an artist as a man. And it's and you know, some of my friends would say, as a certain as, as an ostentatious Jewish type, certain kind of Jewish man. He's pulled off, you know, the Mormons that competed. You know, again, I say, it's Horatio Alger. It's a little bit like the Quincy Jones say, I don't think you know, if I presented his argument to him, I really don't think he would particularly care. I think he seems to be a very he seems to be a somewhat smaller, solid submit. You know, I think by the time you're on tour and a director, that's really what you're interested in. I have absolutely no idea. I think he's very sad with his ways. Basically, nothing has changed over the years. You know, there's also the fact that this world of the upper middle class west side, west EQ across town bus below 96th Street in adulthood, is the only world that seems to be interested in, you know, count the number of things that don't find their way into his movie count. And the fact that as a friend of mine said, 10 years ago, there might have been a little joke made about the Black Mages have, you know, moving in and out of this movie, I mean, there might have been some little exchange that didn't take her entirely for granted. And she just You know, walk through it. You know, here's, here's a movie that starts off with a woman who's a mother, saying she prefers to go back to motherhood after being tempted into playing war and the doll's house. You know, tell me that's not funny at a circuitous joke on put down a certain kind of pious feminist history, you know, this is the great first feminist, like in modern European theater, and really sort of turns it on its head, and then proceeds to show us a woman who's an actress and a Mongolian, everything he's doing has an effect. And everyone's very busy and demanding more, I think that unless his life changes, his workload changes and think he's, he's really, he's really weighs on people, which is, it's true of all of us, if your life doesn't change, the work doesn't change, or criticism doesn't change, nothing does. And if you don't lay all of those things out on the table, there's only for yourself, you know, as a writer, what's operating, every time I do these kinds of things, or every time I as even an unprofessional critic, look at cultural phenomenon, you know, where is class bias coming into, you know, conflict with feminist analysis with, you know, why am I being softer on this? Because they're black? Or because, you know, if you don't always need to do that with a little bit new culture.

Unknown Speaker  56:19
So did you know? Yeah, yes, you're gonna be in June. I didn't know when I guess so. But really, I'm not I'm not trying to advertise. I really wasn't, it's one of several issues that did it that it kind of didn't come up, I suppose. The other thing to always consider is, you know, if my editors have to know how much these will get through, I'm not even sure. So with that, boy, do you take it elsewhere? Do you allow it to be cut? You know, those are always going to have to pay for that, as well? Do you say things as clearly as I would say to you, I'm not going to say that? I talked with my Jewish friends. And they say, you know, I don't want the blackmail, because I because my notion is, you know, that in some ways go it's, well, maybe I will try to say it's generally considered a little too crude, that kind of observation to find its way, you know, into the, into the general market that goes with an aesthetic analysis exam, because, you know, this character, and even you don't, even a nosy person to the audience is going to say, Why is she there? So it's constantly going back and forth in front of our eyes? And not you exact like a thread? Yes, exactly, they'll probably that one will have to go to make the point that maybe we'll have to go to make a point about me, if you pick your target, then you can't get everyone. But you know, sure, and another and another piece, which you're right, if you don't make it to an aesthetic analysis, the whole thing. Because what it is aesthetically, a ruler. Now, I want to move to one more thing where you will actually now be able to listen to things and talk which is this theme that I hope I pointed up at the beginning but that also is obviously existing between the makers of The Color Purple, the actors, and these poor little book characters have certainly Woody Allen and his actors isn't what I said at the beginning about you to the problematic of being a performer. It also means I said first you're using someone else's words, you're directed by them, you're produced by them, whatever it is, it also means that your contributions are probably not reported historically, in an acting situation, it's been said that Woody Allen used to submit all his books today and again, and he always try language on order and some of you seem to improvise shorter the cutting room floor, remember how much he owes to the app will never go you know, in any of these cases, you know, unless again, it's me animals or enter directories, no phone for any musicians, you know, direct how much any of these performers are the sounds, particularly if they are women, for the final creation or for what went counter to the most reactionary, the most stereotypical, you know, aspects of it. So some of this is simply in terms of women performing artists lost to us unless they were also if they were dancers, choreographers, more or less de compose the songs or we know they picked the musician. So you know, you are often left analyzing the texture of a performance, which is, you know, to be a thing of great pleasure, you know, really Nothing pleases me more than good performing artists. But you know, that whole question of we valorize in our culture, the people who control the author, the thing whatever it is,

Unknown Speaker  59:54
so you are often of necessity left particularly in mass culture because more than In high culture, people are censored and compromised by the version of high culture they've been taught and how they internalize that. In mass culture, often there can be more freedom on those bands because you don't have those very strict aesthetic prohibitions. You aren't necessarily always debate about yourself and your pride and use into history, but what replaces that is a larger variety of commercial, practical economic considerations. So in mass culture, in particular, it's very hard to, you know, tell where the producer or the record company, the magazine, you know, when we leave off and they already begin, but once again, you know, they need to constantly chart how these women performers, as individuals, as products of certain social cultural, ethnic religious pieties sensor you know, censoring devices at the time, how they were working with the material they were, they had, what it meant for them, is fascinating. And what I'm wanting to turn to now because we feminists do a lot of this kind of analysis with, with literature and with movies, we don't do it is with music. So what I want to share with you now is this, you know, is American popular music that I ever heard, and that is, again, along with movies and jazz is considered America's great contribution and architecture, to your to the arts, these these are what we use for what we build our contribution to the world Art Museum was by popular music, I mean, the music that a civic grew out of various folk music, country music, news, you know, every every kind of every kind of music Ragtime, which is an urban folk music, if you will, but became the music 1010 musical comedy popular as a popular romantics only the people who know best it would be people like Florida, Rodgers and Hart be great to hear the American musical comedy tradition. Um, I'm picking this because in the field of popular music, which overlaps with jazz, which is popular music, but not entirely, it's also in contradiction with jazz with blues with country music with rock and roll. Women predominantly in popular music has in classical have been forced into the performance. Generally think it's much, much more often seen as and finances, there are a lot of reasons for that. Some of the courses being you know, even sometimes it's easier to say we play an instrument, it is very involved with the decorative, which is always important. One of the things that's always injured, the marks how it doesn't, since it always comes from the person, it doesn't threaten people with, with abstractions to women involved with any kind of abstracting are intended to be a threat, a woman choreographer is more threatening that there will be dance, they will be playing a saxophone is more threatening man and woman singing in a pretty dress, you know that a woman Woody Allen would be more threatening than a male.

Unknown Speaker  1:03:22
So there we are. So, women have dominated and in many ways really just made an extraordinary contribution to the article popular American with their wonderful singles. It's really women who pioneered the use of the voice that moved away from the operatic and opera and, you know, fine versions that we had been bequeathed by European classical music, who brought a kind of singing in all of these forms of music that really could imply a whole, a whole world a whole set of social circumstances, outside of just the lyrics of the song. In terms of popular music, you are, however, a tradition that tends to limit itself in terms of lyric largely to lyrics about romance. So of course, women can fit beautifully up into like a little pretty romantic tradition, for reasons that are unclear to me in a world that you know, in which jazz, rock all these are very, very are dominant. Now, this kind of popular art music has come back with a vengeance. You've seen this excessively, the neurons seem to suggest carry to Carlo, you know, they opera singer who days to sing our popular music, Barbra Streisand, this is this is a kind of renaissance that is tied to a general interest as it is all figures in romance, the return of romance is is always promulgated that music become poursuit routed you know, rock is so sexually low there and you know, women have kind of, you know, gotten loud and chorus and let's move back to this period of when American music was pristine, popular but Jinty with positivity. We're not here to talk about romance and love and people what really costumes it's, I love a lot of his music, but it is a general kind of retro grade reaction, you know, to things in the culture things in the musical culture even it might be a little rougher, a little uglier, a little a little more challenging to have the pretty woman singing. I'm just a little girl was looking for a little boy just looking for a girl to love may very well be attributed to George and Ira Gershwin. But you know, it's also a real safe move back into, you know, a lot of things if presumably, we had met fine, it's a very it's a very limited set. Let me show you a couple of albums, because when Linda Ronstadt he's in any case, I think of really well singer made rather a bus of moving out of a rock and roll back into the northern love romantic zones associated to France and onto another Fitzgerald, arranged by Nelson Riddle, who is one of the premier Hollywood big studio arrangements. The Rangers sorry, this was considering again, think of what we've been talking about before a kind of upwardly mobile move, you know, not only was she showing that she was decorative her lovely her know, as any any of the old the old, Hollywood musical way, she was showing that she had moved out, kids use how to rock and roll how to, you know, kind of rough hurricane as if she were ever into into a more sophisticated, more sleek way. And that is very much built into the history of this music. Your this the story of the singers from the 20s on is a women often coming from, you know, ordinary little working class families all over the world coming to New York all over the country, losing their regional accents, getting rid of the southern accent, getting rid of the black accent, getting on to a Broadway show, being a Ziegfeld girl accepting a certain kind of homogenized was was a five, beauty decorative Miss whatever, that was very much associated with bourgeois romance, which is really what the songs are about. But it was a way of of becoming upwardly mobile in show business man, assimilating to a certain height that said, you're a female, creating this propriety designed with a reason definitely your rougher folk countries. So let me for one thing, show you this. Video, this the Nelson orchestra, we no longer with the fans who come before. You know, we're going back to the kind of kind of 50s style here's the Paleo from the 50s, Peggy actually looks you know, rather more alive and worldly than.

Unknown Speaker  1:08:20
So it's very deliberately a backward backward glance, and again, a way of taking well, but rock and roll first emerged, and I want to valorize rock and roll. But when it first emerged, it really was Ben and excluded and fought against by all of the major musical conglomerates and concerns, it really was considered dangerous, crude, sexually explicit, low class music and what was held against it, what was held up against it, as Virgil was this traditional, pretty popular voices that sounds like newscasters, to us sponge, you expand your living through the cooler regions, you know, that was because of music a good investment because it represented America. So you know, you must remember that even jazz, which is in many ways, as much a middle class as it is a folk art form. Even jassie in this context was sometimes considered dangerous because the essence of impure of jazz singing is improvisation. So a singer might change, the melody might change the tempo will might play around with it in a way that once again, see more dangerous, less, less proper in the case of women really allow for a greater vocal and a way to singing range and greater personality range. So what I want to do is play you some tapes that ask you to listen to them in terms of a number of things I'm going to be playing solely from the 20s, the 50s and the 70s. And I want you to Want to listen to? You know, first of all, which ones really seem to have vitality for what reason we're going to be playing very standard on torchy ballot. I mean, they're extinct you really can't get away from you know, when you're alone, who cares for starlet size, when you're alone, even some, you know, when your love life can't mean anything, when your lover is all you know, you can't get away from that kind of zero, or from that kind of imaging of a female, which is the romantic, political, put upon by Love Addicts at its mercy, woman and that's what do you do? How are the singers working with that working against it? How are they doing it in terms of their addiction, their sense of what is proper? What kind of character they are creating within the song? How are they doing it by improvising their voice by changing the tempo? And why? What are you hearing in the contemporary ones I'm going to play for you are they doing anything that hasn't already been done? And why are they why are they bringing us that my theory is that they're much better than their predecessors because in some way this music except as museum music can't be in a museum piece of music now society being what it is it simply can't be brought back in a Living Social form it has to at this point simply be brought back you know in a kind of in a kind of art which are pretend it's it's real life masking tape

Unknown Speaker  1:11:51
first, we're going to play the

Unknown Speaker  1:11:54
first three versions of the song called Love Your lover has. The first one was sung by alpha waters, who was a black blues singer from Philadelphia, who made her way through black air Warfield into whiteboard video which is considered an upward upward move at a time when lose reference was so basically in the black market, this popular kind of America pure American diction Broadway show music was sold in the larger white market and where she sounded like two different people who she was recording with black musicians versus like musicians within the black community, she was considered you know, both a wonderful singer, our you know, our person who moved into the integrative world, but by some people also a bastardization it and dilution of the kind of very earthy, Southern indigenous blue singing, represented by a bass and Smith. That's false and true, you must remember that other waters is from Philadelphia, so she never even when she sang blue. But it's significant that the version that I play was done with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra and with all black and white musicians, sorry, at a time when very few black singers were recorded, we're allowed to record. So listen to that. The next one you will hear that's 1931 will be Billie Holiday in the 1956 version with a small jazz band. I also want you to think about it what it means when a female voice is placed against a large manipulated and range orchestra versus the smaller Jazz Ensemble and the theory version. You will hear it his or her Linda Ronstadt her coming out and help. Yeah, oh, it's a question. Yeah. Okay. It's a question for actually I was thinking of essentially as a question they will from the same kind of benefit, which was, you know, working class street background where church and showbusiness shirt turned in tent and missile show, and blogville were really overlapping. But SEC was caked on a Southern tradition that really came out of country boots. She was part of the group of Southern women took a country blues to the city. Alpha One is by the time blues came up north to Apple waters who was also a little bit younger. It was already mixing as it had been mixed by people like Bessie and Ma Rainey with Tin Pan Alley you know with Ragtime with vaudeville songs, so she was never you know to be a woman you know, to be at the box to be a black working class woman in Philadelphia still met you were Eric in a different tradition, entity prediction. Pushing a different kind of voice You have a handy little girl voice Always work

Unknown Speaker  1:15:19
friends

Unknown Speaker  1:15:54
My God

Unknown Speaker  1:17:07
We really meant to be there almost also a period when using is torn between that and sort of hot jazz and people like that is now just about seven years

Unknown Speaker  1:18:19
when you know Spanish Spanish

Unknown Speaker  1:18:41
Man

Unknown Speaker  1:18:48
Ray Ray When with memory night me first scan the man said day AUD shadow every now we let me stop performing

Unknown Speaker  1:23:11
three versions of that song and ask you what you know you're hearing in terms of how to characters of a song are created through the voice, the tempo, the fact that Billie Holiday changes the validate, does it do twice which is really more what musicians do rather than doing it once and then the musician step in and finishing it off.

Unknown Speaker  1:23:34
The first thing that saddens me with these two, F two was part of an arrangement. Yes, the voice is simply conveyed to an existing ranch. And

Unknown Speaker  1:23:46
I'm standing because it

Unknown Speaker  1:23:47
sounded like Exactly, yes. And plus the diction made it sound like

Unknown Speaker  1:23:52
that's the interesting thing about this. What was the bill? Right, Billy,

Unknown Speaker  1:23:57
was that not only was she

Unknown Speaker  1:24:00
the voice live the response of this Sunday. So basically,

Unknown Speaker  1:24:06
what she said she said the shape and the mood.

Unknown Speaker  1:24:11
But she would is described in my experience as having been an urbanized city. And yet it seems to be more nearer our streets.

Unknown Speaker  1:24:20
Yes, I think partly because of the global tambor because hyper rivers are partly based on the kinds of shadings that speaking actresses and performers use to give tech a possible net.

Unknown Speaker  1:24:31
Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  1:24:34
Voice and tamper or they can choose? Yeah, I think that that's

Unknown Speaker  1:24:38
true, which also means there's more room. Also, she does two different versions musically, so you're even just changing going up a fourth instead of down the third thing change the character of the song she often worked in that song against the sort of God part but he or she do something else just changing the melody It was all of the change the character emotionally it

Unknown Speaker  1:25:02
has to do with Brexit. And it was also. So it got the blues, yeah. Yes, yes.

Unknown Speaker  1:25:11
Which tends to be a somewhat more, it's no less involved with, you know, the same old landscape of male female relationships. But it tends to be a more realistic with a slightly even tragic edge which, you know, will allow the females they were they were more I think you know your point about part of the arrangement versus setting it was really, I mean, everything you

Unknown Speaker  1:25:31
said, is too beautiful. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  1:25:35
This is to the forensic function or the artists because honestly, the first one is functioning like you've demonstrated as you move back and forth. You could just been to the staff report and really suggested this work. Well. Yeah, which is there to really listen to the artist, rather than it's a, it's an it's a nice voice, it's a nice degree for me. The other one seemed like a club and you really don't get out. That's an interesting

Unknown Speaker  1:26:18
point. Because what what, you know, history you're also linking into is the history of the emergence of jazz, popular jazz, as, if you will, listening art music, as well as a social associated, you know, I think otherwise. And I love what you said about it, being an orator was a very conscious artist, she wasn't just a stand up singer, but, you know, whole function of the art had changed. And Billie Holiday was a real, a real pioneer in that.

Unknown Speaker  1:26:54
Yeah, and see how they look since her voice in a way when she's talking to something, and I felt that that version in the scene, you know, it conveys a lot of truth to it. And I felt you know, this person knows what it feels like. And that is really coming across the way and you can really understand every word and like it was just said, like saving hours, you know, it really gave Yes, exactly. Whereas in the first one, I felt like that line was, like, was sort of lost

Unknown Speaker  1:27:32
in the declamatory and I hate it. It's, it's

Unknown Speaker  1:27:38
hard. You know, I'm and I like, better because, you know, I could imagine

Unknown Speaker  1:27:49
I think it's true. The other thing, I think, that occurred to me when I was listening in terms again, uh, you know, how what your relationship is to the orphan struggle with a bed. It's known that Billie Holiday basically said she sort of modeled yourself after she wanted Louie Armstrong sound and Bessie Smith's emotion, but she worked a lot with boring books. And you know, she was really a musician. It seemed to me that Apple Potter is actually Billie Holiday often has moral horns rising cup of water and a lot of the time it seems to be following or kind of violence

Unknown Speaker  1:28:30
Yes, and it has a different kind, it's a brand new it has a different kind of ability to phrase and, and shape in terms of the human voice and the violin often has a lot of trouble in jazz because it's, you know, its whole essence is somewhat different. I actually think that like, you know, like the struggle you know, it's a different Yeah. Yeah, so it's voice. Yeah, it's true. It's true. It's true. Now the neurons and you know, some real misses really has to come from viewers imagine this to be real Oh, I'm sorry. I'm a little worried that there's an audience and then there's on another tape