Good morning. Hello. How are you? #807
Teaching kids about racism, some GMHHAY classifieds, Francis Ford Coppoloa's Volume issues.
Good morning! Hello, there, friend. How are you? All well? Wednesday, is it? That’s good. I like Wednesdays. When I was a kid it was choir practice and piano lesson day, Wednesday. I’d get out of school, my mom would take us to Wendy’s and then drop me off at the grand old house in downtown Fairbanks that was built by a nephew of Louis Comfort Tiffany or something like that. It was for sale recently. I kinda wanted to buy it. I’d do my piano lesson then walk the two blocks to the church to do choir practice. Choir practice was a lot more fun once I joined the adult choir and could sing as a Bass instead of in the kids choir where they made me sing in falsetto. Not a fan. Bell choir was kinda fun too, where we just rang bells. That was a good time.
I suppose I should talk about the racism and kids and education thing a bit more, as I got a lot of pushback on my sort of offhand comments on the topic. Well, not offhand, but not comprehensive. Yes, Jane has all the great books about various topics of injustice in the world. She has books about Martin Luther King Jr and the Hidden Figures and on and on and on. Dozens of them. And we do talk about these things. We are sort of laying a groundwork. She knows that the world has greedy people and hungry people and she knows that stealing is wrong and hate is wrong. We’ve talked about how we don’t like billionaires and why greed is not good and how some people have too much money and some people have not enough. We just got through the part where she learned about hate, started using the word saying she hated things, and us explaining the power of the word and how we endeavor not to hate. She knows there are people who hate and that that is not good.
She is, herself, very aware and comfortable with various skin colors, I’m 90% sure she’s not a kid that would walk up to a black or brown child and say “why do you look different?” Her dolls are diverse, her playground times show us she treats all kids equally. As much as we live in a white bubble in our neighborhood, and as much as she’s been locked in for a few years, we work very hard at this.
I think we’ve done a good job with her understanding that there are people in the world who are unkind and unjust in various matters including racism. What we’ve not really yet tackled is systemic racism, anymore than we’ve yet tackled systemic financial inequality or war or other intractable societal issues. When I say we’ve not tackled them I don’t mean to say we haven’t begun. But… it is slow going. Jane is hugely, hugely empathetic. Pain, suffering, even small ones make her very, very upset. She keenly, painfully feels unfairness in all forms. I gingerly tried with the famine and it went okay but not great. But this is where we are at now. It’s not where we’re staying. We are getting there.
I think a lot about Mr Rogers vs. Kitty Genovese. Both are right, both are wrong. Mr. Rogers said his standard answer to a child asking about bad things happening was “to look for the people who are helping.” That you would always find people who were running to help. The Kitty Genovese incident, of course, was regarded as evidence of the opposite: that people didn’t rush to help. It has since been debunked: The New York Times basically just made that shit up.
Mr. Rogers, then, is mostly right. But not always. There are times when no one helps. And, of course, the help is often not enough.
I don’t want Jane to live in ignorance. But nor do I want her to share my darker instincts about the intractability of the planet’s problems. I desperately want her to believe these issues can get better. I believe that hope and optimism is necessary for things to ever get better. And to get there, I feel like a lot of this stuff needs to be taught to her in the right order. A foundation laid. Ha, in fact just the other day I taught her about actual foundations, on buildings. And that lead into metaphorical foundations, as part of our discussion of physics, but also of humanity. The fundamental forces of gravity, intertia, momentum but also of love. This seems academic but I feel like one has to teach your child about systems before you can teach them about anything systemic. The interconnectedness of things. Is that overly academic? I don’t know. But it feels right, and we are progressing.
Anyway.
My friend Helena is starting a newsletter about the challenges of being a founder. It looks like it’s going to be pretty intense but also pretty harrowing. I think it took me about ten years to fully recover from the PTSD of running Barbarian for ten years, of living with the weight of the responsibility of so many people’s jobs, of living with the constant financial dread.
Check it out if this is part of your life.
In other Substack news, they have started private Substack newsletters, which is pretty brilliant. You can make it Subscriber only, but you approve each individual subscriber. I think if that feature existed when I started this, I might have used it. As it is, this one is public, has readers whom I don’t know, and I think it is pretty rewarding. But I approve of this new feature. There are plenty of things I don’t feel comfortable writing in here still, and I still write my 750 words every day in addition to this for that reason. Some days I don’t need them, but every week I do.
Actually, let’s do a quick GMHHAY classifieds here:
A friend is looking for an animator for a quick job that pays well.
Another friend is looking for an engineer familiar with the OpenAI API for a quick job that seems fun but does not seem to pay very well, lol.
And here’s one: People are constantly looking for freelance web designers these days. Does anyone still do this work? Does anyone still like doing this work? Small sites, not much more than brochureware? The kind that dozens of us used to make, but who makes those in the year 2023. If you’re one of these people I imagine you have a steady stream of work, but if you would like some more, drop a line.
Have you been following Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film? Dude is dropping like $175 million of his own cash to make his final masterpiece or something along those lines. Didn’t want to deal with getting it financed from the studios because they have no vision. It’s filming now in Atlanta. He bought a motel and refurbished it so they’d have a place to stay. The cast is awesome and insane.
Anyway, there are all these rumors swirling around the film, about how it’s a production nightmare, about how he fired the VFX team and the art director. A friend of a friend is working on the film and says that there’s no evidence of a mess on the actual film set, though. Apparently Coppola was shooting originally with The Volume, the high-tech giant cylinder of LED screens on which you project all your VFX and sets, so you can shoot with all of that in place. This was invented for The Mandalorian, sort of. Or Jungle Book. My friend Ben was involved. But apparently Coppola — and this seems to be a first — decided he didn’t want to use the Volume and went back to shooting against green screens.
And this, to me, is really interesting. It… kind of makes sense? Like I’ve been very into the idea of the Volume since it was made, and I really enjoy the more naturalistic VFX it offers in shows like Andor. But it never occurred to me before: of course you have to have your VFX, or at least a lot of them, anything related to the scenery and backgrounds, locked down before even shooting. The pre-production process must be, I imagine, substantially more lengthy.
It seems quite understandable that a director who is, oh, I don’t know, fifty years into working with green screens and the immense amount of post-production flexibility they provide, decide that this aspect of working with The Volume would be a serious drawback. You can’t “fix it in post,” or at least not nearly as cheaply. It doesn’t particularly strike me as insane that someone might give it a shot and then decide to play it safe and switch back to green screen. Especially if there is some problem with your art director, or the thing you’re shooting is potentially very epic but not completely locked down yet.
I’d never thought about that before.
Finally, I’d just like to say that the last two episodes we watched of His Dark Materials — season 3, episodes 5 and 6 were so good, radically better than the entire rest of the show, and had it all been that good it could have been a truly great show. But I’m glad they got a chance to show us its true potential before it ended.
Club mix for you today. Let’s get up and shake our booties. Ow. My back hurts already. Lotta remixes. What can I say that’s what spotify serves up. Or, like, what it serves up for electronica to me isn’t particularly dancey anymore, but the remixes are. Hrm. I wonder what an actual club plays these days. Like Avalon or something. Or, like, Vegas. Encore at the Wynn. Is it all just celebrity DJs playing the same stuff? God. Maybe I don’t wonder this.
Until tomorrow!
Turns out I missed this yesterday so thanks for the reminder in today's offering. I'd actually been percolating since Tuesday, though I'm not sure I have great thoughts or words yet and I want to first acknowledge that my experience as a white person parenting a Black and Indigenous person is just not the same as families of color navigating these topics.
That said, even with deeply empathetic kids like Jane (and Sebastian for that matter) talking about systemic racism in age appropriate ways can't ever start too early - and I use my thought process about Jesiahlynn's knowledge base around personal safety to help guide the depth of understanding S has as a protective factor for both kids.
At least some of the EBR out there says that by age 4, basic ideas about race have been internalized and by 12, solidified. I guess my take on this whole conversation is that people of color don't have the option to delay these kinds of conversations, and it's truly a matter of life and death. Thus, we are guided to dismantle our own privilege and not delay those conversations simply because we can. ( in text this sounds judgy, but I promise that if we were sitting over a cup of coffee I don't think that it would. I can't find the right words right now! And I think you're a great dad!)
So, here's what I've got: you've already identified some understanding on Jane's part related to unequal distribution of resources and hatred, she has some burgeoning knowledge of power and using power for wellness vs using power for harm, and finally, she has some recognition that people of all ancestries exist.
To me, you are one small conversation away from the foundational knowledge that in this country (and in many places in the world), sometime people don't have things only because of the color of their skin. Certainly there may be big feels, there may even be uncomfortable 'but why' rabbit trails, and you know...I think you can do this and that it makes a difference around stepping beyond what's in a book vs what is the real-life experience of people around us. ( I hope any of this makes sense and comes across as constructive meanderings of the brain. I appreciate that I had the opportunity to think about it the past couple of days in application to my own life.)