Borat - A Slight Return

Well, I guess there’s either not a lot of people who read this blog/journal thing or else not many people want to hear a bout Borat anymore. Can’t say as I blame them. I mean, you hear one toilet joke you’ve heard ‘em all.

I’ve been looking into this. A lot people who I expected better things from have come out in favor of the B Movie. (That’s what I‘ll call Borat – it seems to fit…) I spent a while digging around out there in Google Land – and there’s quite a bit of good critique, so I’m not alone after all. And I’ve watched a few of the You Tube pieces – Borat and Ali G. You know the ones – Pat Robertson, Northern Ireland, sitting around with the scientists, learning to play football. I think he’s lazy. If nothing much interesting happens right away the shit and porn jokes kick in. That stuff hasn’t been funny since I was in junior high school. It not original, it’s not insightful, it’s not clever, and it’s boring. Boring. Is that where “Borat” comes from?

But back to the main subjects from last time. 1. Exploiting the Romanians. 2. Impersonating a Kazak, with all the anti-Islamic and Russo-bashing that it may entail. I’ve noticed that most people don’t answer those questions, they ignore them. So once again:

1. Is it okay to trick poor people? Put words in their mouths, stories around their lives, turn them into rapists, abortionists, and prostitutes? Would you do that in Appalachia? Would you do that to people who live close enough to matter? Would you do that to people who have enough political clout to fight back? How about going into Dignity Village in Portland? Or Tent City? Would that be okay?

2. Is it okay to impersonate a drunken Indian? To put on face paint and feathers and dance around with a bottle of fortified wine in your hand? Would you tell me that it was a tool to expose racism and that you chose that nationality because it was obscure? And when somebody from that nationality got mad at you would you say that they don’t have a sense of humor?

Would you expect me to swallow all this?

Okay… My buddy Tim says, “Anyone who can get people to mime horns and ‘chant throw the Jew down the well’ while in character as something as absurd as Borat is a fucking genius.” Really? A genius for that? Anybody could do that, and what did you learn that you didn’t already know? That some people are racists? Duh. Isn’t it just a tool to make you feel a better about yourself because at least you’re not as stupid as those people? Is this all we settle for? Is this the best we can expect? How sad.

Personally I can’t keep my attention on fecal humor and porn jokes for very long. They repeat, there’s not much there. And I feel insulted that I was considered to be worth only that much. And I am amazed that so many people think it’s deep. It’s not. Unless you mean deep pockets, because that’s what this is all about. Money, and lots of it.

I think we deserve better than a B Movie and I think we’ll get it. It’ll take some work but I’m willing to wait.

Borat

Am I the only one who didn’t like “Borat?” You know, that wildly successful comedy that’s supposed to make you urinate on yourself because you laugh so hard. That’s what it said on the DVD box. So what happened to me? Everybody else seemed to enjoy it. One of my friends, a fellow who I usually associate with intelligence and an adult grasp of complexities, thought it was the funniest movie he’d ever seen. I worry about him now. So, is it just me? Do I have personal problems? Am I too PC? Do I just not have a sense of humor? Am I on drugs? Should I be? Bear with me for a while as I try to formulate my argument. Maybe it’ll make sense, and maybe you’ll have to call out the loony brigade. We’ll see how this goes…

In case you don’t know, Borat is a character created by Sacha Baron Cohen, a British born Jewish comedian, and a Cambridge graduate no less. I say “no less” because Cambridge is a class act, like Harvard only older. It’s not just your neighborhood community college. Anyway, in the movie the character Borat comes from Kazakhstan, but not just anywhere in Kazakhstan – he comes from a dirt poor village where nobody speaks English and everybody happily has sex with Borat’s sister, or any available barn animals. There’s a town rapist. People have donkies in their kitchens. Its kind of like an over-thinned gene pool, a brood group of morons. The trouble is, for me anyway, they are people of an officially hate-able nationality. You know – Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan - all those “-stan” countries that the US likes to mess around with. Its so much easier to mess with them when they’re inferior. You can laugh at them while you steal their oil. Uh-oh, I’m showing my PC. Sorry.

Anyway, that would all be well and good except that they weren’t actors and they weren’t Kazakh and they had no idea what Borat was up to. Nobody told them that they were going to be rapists and barn animal sexualizers. That came out later when Hollywood put stories around them so that we would all piss our pants. Now, my friend tells me to just lighten up about that, everybody knew it wasn’t real, it was too preposterous. And besides, they got paid. Yeah, but that’s not the point. Some people have a deep running morality that won’t allow for that sort of thing, even if it’s fake. And you really should ask them first. That was a mistake. Now the whole town is suing Borat.

Ha! There, I laughed. That felt better.

Now to get back to my friend who used to be smart… He likes the way Borat goes through the movie pretending to be a backward bumpkin from Kazakhstan making a documentary on the US and A. That’s the way he gets real people to do real things and expose themselves. Like the holy rollers in the church who talk in tongues and pray for him. Or the drunken frat kids who talk drunken frat talk. Well, yes, he does get them to do that, but so what? None of them do anything you haven’t seen before, and none of them are as stupid as Borat, the guy from the little village in Kazakhstan. That’s the through line. That’s the center of the whole movie – the incredibly racist, misogynist, stupid, fucked up, sexually egotistical, moron from the dirt poor mud streets of one of the “-stan” countries. And the really messed up thing about it is that Borat - Sacha Baron Cohen – isn’t from there at all. He’s Jewish. He’s from England. He graduated from Cambridge. So this is just the same tired old story – Mister Privilege making nasty fun of the people in the tenements.

This is where they tell me to “lighten up” again, I’m just not seeing the humor. But I am seeing it, I just don’t think its funny. I think its mean. When Redd Fox made fun of working class Black people you had to let it go because he was Black. He had that right. When Lilly Tomlin takes on women, well, she has that experience. But this guy? I want to ask him, why don’t you play a Jewish character? That would be funny, wouldn’t it? Some dumb guy from a backward, inbred Hebrew community out in the sticks somewhere where they all have sex with animals and nobody has any brains. That would be hilarious, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, I don’t mind being in a minority if it means that I don’t have to laugh at bad humor. I learned a long time ago that it takes guts and intelligence to aim at the powerful, to construct a humor that deflates class pomposity and reveals the tiny underbelly of the big thieves. Some of them are your bosses and landlords and they might get mad. But its cowardly and small to make fun of the powerless. They are your tenants and day laborers and all they can do is complain, while everybody pisses their pants laughing. But things are different if you’re the court jester. When you go to the king’s hall you want to have your comedy aimed in the right direction. You want the butt of those jokes to be in line with the Man’s agenda. That’s a kind of humor that panders, that’s the comedy of complicity. And that’s not funny.

But maybe I just need to lighten up.

After the Moisture Festival

This was the last night of the Moisture Festival. Seattle’s own. And wasn’t it wonderful. You got more for your money than anywhere else in town. Clowns, jugglers, magicians, singers, dancers, aerialists, mimes, sword swallowers, people who sawed other people in half, people who made city sounds with their mouths, someone who blew real good soap bubbles, someone who plays real good spoons, a chorus line of dancing posterior bares, a can-can troupe, a great ensemble orchestra to follow your every whim, and an emcee who sometimes wore an antenna and spoke in circles and sometimes wore sequins and played country guitar. Maybe you had to be there but damn, it was something. It’ll happen again.

It all takes place at the Hale’s Palladium on Leary Way, just outside of Fremont, on the way to Ballard. I don’t know how many people it holds. 200, maybe. It’s packed all the time and it goes on for three weeks. It’s great because it shows you the wonders to be achieved by ordinary people. This is not Ringling Brothers. This does not have a seven figure budget and corporate sponsorship. The sponsors are all local and the budget might actually be hundreds of dollars. I never asked. But I do know that the performers all do it for the love of it, and that’s deeper than any Wall Street marquee.

It’s real important to understand that we – ordinary people, all of us – we are the masters of our craft. And our craft involves laughter and awe, fumble and stutter, the daring intoxication of high wire tom foolery and the sublime floatation of dancing on feathers. And it’s we – the ordinary people, who can do it the best because we can drop that fumble and laugh, and everyone laughs with us. If you don’t see that you can do it then you won’t try. We have to try.

It all started in the rain soaked past of Seattle’s invisible music scene. Way back in those days of broken cars and low rent. The early 70s. It was a sidewalk town back then, with lots of buses and tree lined back streets. And music. Lots of music. You never would have heard about it if you weren’t there. There was no music press and you couldn’t get famous unless you left. But it was magic.

I got here in 71 and broke right into it. The last folk club closed and I started carving out a reality in the anything-goes world of the already happening night life. And the day time life too – the campus and the streets. But the rock clubs were happening at night and the music was good. Bands like Butter Fat and The Doily Brothers. Mojo Hand and Lance Romance. Anyway, in 74 along comes Rose and The Dirt Boys – they’re out of Oklahoma and they just moved right in and made themselves at home. You could do that here in those days, it was that generous. Well, one of the brains of the dirt boys was Ron Bailey, or RB as they called him. A compact little Scotts Okie with a great voice and an unstoppable mind for invention he began collecting talented friends. He became kind of a magnet around which a lot of interesting people revolved. When The Dirt Boys broke up RB went on to the Dynamic Logs – a band that was larger or smaller depending on the circumstances. And that’s when things began to get real theatrical.

Anyway, making long stories shorter… Ducaniveaux was born somewhere in there, involving strange shadowy figures in Spain and Paris and New York, and they all started going to the Country Fair. So did a lot of jugglers and magicians and dancers and singers and all the rest. The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Tom Noddy, Faith Petric. So It was a natural progression if you look at it that way. It just had to happen. And where else could it have been?

The first Moisture Festival happened in a tent in a vacant lot in Fremont. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know how well they did. But the next year, at the Hale’s Palladium, I played at it and that was it, I was hooked. So, you have to go to it next year. It’ll happen again, probably in the same place around the same time of year. Check out the web site: http://www.moisturefestival.com/ It’ll lift your spirits. And that’s no mean feat.