EXPLORING THE MYSTERIES

Early Lewis and Morse

Recently I confessed that I watch cop shows, but am not fond of “Blue Bloods” which is mostly an excuse to see Tom Selleck wearing Ralph Lauren — curiously, not Tom Ford.  Most of my favs are BBC Oxford-located series (Morse, Lewis, et al — not so much the BBC Manchester shows), which I love for the scenery and the pretence of being intellectual.  I’ve also have watched all the CSI programs I can access, which is why I can understand articles about the genome.  

There’s enough cross-over among actors and shared context in the West to make “Longmire” and “Saving Grace” sort of like loose repertory, which is something I really appreciate, esp since it delivers us from the Manhattan and Hollywood hegemonies.  In my undergrad years at NU, repertory was as much an ideal and goal as Method acting.  In fact, much of the pleasure of cop shows is watching the careers of actors who recur again and again, not just in the good guys who manage to stay alive, but also the bad guys who only get a few episodes before they are either shot dead or put away for good.  I love all the incidental scrawny old women and aproned shop-keepers.  Each of these shows develops a kind of philosophy and special knowledge.  “Longmire” directly deals with rez issues and “Saving Grace” picks up bits around the edges of rural life.

Longmire

By now I’ve become aware that the writers for TV series are serving the ends that once used to be the work of churches.  The stories are like sermons that explore moral consequences and suggest theories for reform.  It’s not just the cop shows — though they’re more likely to look at serious life-and-death issues.  Doc shows can do the same.  But there are differences between what is produced by one pulpit occupier with a particular denominational education, and the conclusions reached by a set of worldly people arguing out plot points around a table.  The latter are far more likely to have lived through some knotty situations and to have spent time speculating on what they meant.

Script writers, esp. for television and cable shows, do address that limiting Dunning-Kruger effect, the one about not only having a limited knowledge and understanding of the world, but also not knowing that their world is so limited, so circumscribed, so blinded by lack of experience.  Really not KNOWING.  It’s a major problem with techies who are constantly designing platforms for writers who deliberately challenge the limits of public experience.  The techies invent labels (boxes) and tags and impose them to function automatically but could NEVER think of the real and multiple categories that writers use.  

Luckily, they understand enough to leave some free space — partly because of indignation on the part of writers— but those tags added-by-author tags are category-busters.  Techies like categories.  Or the writers want to add fifty possible tags for Google.  But techies need limits.  They deal in IO.  In or Out.  They love questionnaires with four questions, a range of answers with five possibilities.  They put in a space for comments, but I’m betting they don’t read them because they don’t make sense to them.

I’m finding that it’s very hard to describe Dunning-Kruger to people with a limited experience of the world — it’s like trying to write an essay on the keyboard of an ATM.  AND, as the researchers said plainly, the people who believe in the Dunning-Kruger effect and know far more about the world than the people around them, will label the limited people IGNORANT, in other words punish them for not knowing that they don’t know.  

Around here, ignorance is considered willful.  It’s like refusing to accept knowledge and is related to the missionary’s conviction that THEY know what is to be known, without any interest in what their potential converts already know and which may be the reason they resist proselytizing.  People say to me, "Don't tell me stuff.  I worry enough already."

“Showrunners” introduced a new job concept that is particularly relevant in election season.  These are the people who make the product work.  We suspect Hilary is using high-powered (possibly covert) show runners and we don’t like her for it — but Trump’s showrunners can’t get a grip on him and we love the spectacle of it.  Television news is now going in and out of reality.  Elections are the long-running cliff-hangers.

The cop shows pick up on it.  “Awake” has a split but interacting story that even has double shrinks, one for each of two realities.  One is practical and one is sympathetic, but the protagonist won’t accept either one of them.  His own experience is double; he has a Mini-Me.  

“The Tunnel”  (BBC bicoastal) begins with a double corpse: top half of one victim and bottom of another — half on the English “side” and half on the French side, even though the space itself is in the English Channel under water, not land — and two teams of detectives, one Brit and one French, a pair who are the usual blundering but intuitive male with an unusually strict and nonglamorous woman.  They break stereotypes and introduce us to new concepts, for more existentialist than we are used to.  Still, neither has achieved the strangeness of politics, which are just as baffling on the Euro-side. 

The Wire

So far, few have reached the educational and moral significance of “The Wire” or “Oz.”  Those were worlds we didn’t know, but should have.  What others are out there?  We’ll probably never know.  The tangle of funding, recognizing quality, popular taste that is puerile and vulgar, critical feedback that is either wrong or missing, and constantly shifting means of access from huge flat-screens to pocket handhelds, make everything a game of hide-and-seek.  It’s possible to mount a production with almost no money but how do you distribute it without money?  It’s possible to marathon-watch a series all day long, for as many hours as you have the tush for, but then what do you do with that experience?

How do you keep the shaped and edited experience of second hand lives separated from what really happens to you, esp. if your job is repetitious, your home is okay but not special, your friends are boring?  Your family is — well, probably strewn across the continent.  My brain-damaged brother’s reality was "Seinfeld."  My aging mother’s was her memory.  Mine?  I don’t know until I’ve had my first morning coffee.  Until then, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.  But there are landscapes, indigenous people and sometimes lovers.  I don’t mean sex.  There is a lot beyond that.

MARKETING TO WRITERS

When I was in high school, there was great concern about the war of misunderstanding -- more marked by gaps than conflicts -- between science and humanities.  Which had more authority, which was more “real,” which was more prestigious, which could get all the money.  Over the decades this dichotomy has been eroded and overwhelmed by technology, even the humanities.  As for science, it has ventured into traditional humanities fields like religion and history.  Everything is up for grabs.  That’s the Zen of Physics.

Boundaries, value inclines, and how they change -- not just becoming different but also moving around the planet -- has become a huge dancing puzzle.  I see bits and pieces everywhere.  For instance, the “cowboy” mystery series called “Longmire,” based on a set of givens developed by Craig Johnson, has split into two genres: the book and the vids.  

Johnson writes a familiar easy-going sort of world, very much the way ordinary folk in the West like to see themselves.  His books go in and out of the Valier library all the time.  Doing catch-up (because I only knew the vid series), I read the anthology composed of his annual Christmas short stories, “Wait for Signs.”  Each had a clever little premise, explored with brand-name vehicles and clothing to keep us located. 

One story managed to make a sheep joke polite by using bits of local tales about “flock quitters,” the kind of destructive leader ewes who mislead gullible lambs into leaving their herders and taking the owners profits with them, and about “markers” which help keep track of all those wooly backs by including some that are naturally black -- or in some circumstances those that have been dyed bright red.  

The genetics for the tendency to stay with the flock and genetics for fine wool don’t always go together, so those (like my relatives) breeding for wool quality keep them in fenced fields.  Meat sheep live in flocks.  Johnson’s story revolved around a mutated color marker in the wool that looked like a Petunia, so that was the name of the sheep.  She was a flock quitter who wouldn’t stay put.  The solution, of course, is conversion to supper, the same as mean cows.  

In another story, Johnson managed to make pop mysticism about Native American symbols and determined black bears into a funny story that wasn’t dirty so much as cloacal -- there’s a great horned owl stuck down a porta-potty and a bear who’s paying too much attention.

In order to escape Manhattan presuppositions about the way the world works, I look for Scandinavian or Australian stories, so it seemed natural for Longmire himself to be played by an Australian, Robert Taylor.  I didn’t realize until I looked him up that Lou Diamond Phillips is Filipino with a Cherokee grandmother, but I’ve taught kids who were Blackfeet/Filipino mixes, so I don’t scoff.  He’s small for a Standing Bear, but he’s an excellent actor.  The series uses the best of the Master Indian Actors, mostly from Canada where there are repertory theatres and training opportunities, specifically for First Nations people.

What I want to point out is that the media -- the contrast that has developed between the expectations of people who read cowboy mysteries and the expectations of those who follow the same characters as vids -- has changed the content.  For instance, the print readers overlap with romances in which sexy young women take men’s jobs and fall in love with their big handsome competent bosses.  But the people who will marathon streaming film series, will follow much more political and visual content, playing landscape off against political machinations.  And they will tolerate female love-objects who are mature and independently competent.

A different kind of value schism has developed in platforms for free-lance writers.  The techies, who write the codes and envision what the platforms should do, are like high school kids who play chess.  They are high-achievers in terms of strategy and pattern, but they are nerds.  When the goths and the terrors or even the queer folks come around, the techies get a little freaked.  They are “nice” people whose folks read The New York Times and don’t even know that VICE exists.  But the real content energy is in the VICE stories about crime, breaking stereotypes, taking risks, telling it like it is.  Edge stuff.  The only accurate Blackfeet stories I’ve seen -- the ones about disappearance of women and trafficking of kids.

Many techies are California Asians, that is, suburban computer geeks whose laser focus on achievement means they can’t detect anything a laser doesn’t detect -- which is cultures.  There is a huge culture gap between those who read intelligently and widely and those who write because they assume that will bring them acclaim and maybe even as much wealth as a computer platform coder.

Writing is not what they think it is.  Sex is not what they think it is.  Violence and suffering are not what they think it is.  Far more multiple, far more schismatic, often working as much against conformity as with it.  Different kinds of writing with different kinds of content -- haiku about season change and sadness, unsparing grisly war or crime detail, explanations of how microbes interact, immersive fancy writing about coming of age (by far the most likely content for beginning writers) need tech support quite unlike bells and whistles for business hustlers.

It's not the subjects that give value.  When my mother died, I wrote an essay I thought was brilliant and certainly made me feel better, and I sent it to Ms Magazine because that’s what I read at the time.  They sent me back a patient but rather exasperated rejection.  Did I realize how many essays about dying mothers they got?  Hundreds and hundreds.

When I wrote a biography of my “famous” cowboy sculptor former husband after he died (Bob Scriver), the problem was opposite. (Check out Google Images.)  There is a whole genre of this writing and it is expected to always be the same: a recitation of virtues that make the art work more valuable.  I wrote a lot of description about how it felt to create the sculptures and how it was seized by opportunistic wheeler-dealers who organized auctions rather than running galleries.  It WAS published, but almost accidentally, by people who cared nothing about cowboy art.  

At the moment writing is like a gold strike.  The pick and shovel explorations, the sifting of the gravel, is done by the writers.  But the money has always been made by those who sell the tools and back the grubstakes.  Writers desperate for success will pay a lot. Not earn a lot.  And they will not be managed according to improving their writing because having a manager means you must earn enough money for two people’s careers.

Actual success is unpredictable, because it’s about the culture, the receivers whether they are readers or watchers.  If they are girls who want to know how to go out West and snag a husband, that’s one thing.  If they are seasoned Canadian film stars old enough to worry about opportunities for their grandchildren, that’s different.  No one knows how to market to an assortment, so they aim at market research: numbers.  Counting heads.  Because the money all comes from advertising and that’s what makes sales numbers.  It’s also the way our political system works, not by insight or reasoning, but by commodification.

Counter to that, readers and watchers respond to content according to their own hearts and goals, sometimes surprising even themselves.  Personally, I’m finding all the wisdom and meaning on the dark and dangerous side of the street.  But then, I’ve always been a bunch-quitter with red hair.

WHY BLOOD QUANTUM IS NOT ABOUT BLOOD

An Easterner who knew nothing about "Indians" questioned the title of one of my short stories:  “Blood Quantum,” which was meant to be a fictionalized tracing of how the US Army originally tried to impose order on a population they had just “conquered” and were therefore obliged to record and feed.  (In modern times conquerers feel no such obligation.)  The People were lined up, their names written down (though these People had several names each without counting nicknames or translations and they belonged to an oral culture unacquainted with writing which is different from being illiterate in a writing-based culture) and that original list became the provenance (the genealogy) and fate of all the following generations.  They were LEGALLY  pure Blackfeet, no matter that there were Cree, even  enemy Shoshone, maybe a few Irish and several other categories on the list.

“Tribe” was a European concept and so was Nation.  So was “legal.” The People just traveled together, partly because of being related and partly just because they liked each other.  There was no boundary, as there is for the category called “citizen.”  The reader asked “quantum what?”  He’s used to hearing about quantum physics, I think.  We can only interpret new things via things we already know -- unless one has means of inquiry that opens both cans of worms and the sky after storm.  This guy will try to fit “quantum” into “genome” but basic blood types hadn’t even been discovered when the first list was made.

The biggest problem is the courage it takes to look at something that may challenge one’s assumptions, which is the basis of one’s identity and relationships.  Trying to go farther and deeper has destroyed a whole sequence of communities who thought they had it all -- including me.  The main thing I learned is that to learn some things will mean a death of illusion.  For instance, the more I learn about my family, so sure it was fairly virtuous and educated, is that it wasn’t.  This makes me unwelcome at family events, but there are few of them now anyway -- they’re out of fashion and I have never met the people under thirty.  Even the denomination that claimed it accepted everyone turned out to be as prosperity-worshipping and proselytizing as any others.

My terms of understanding are drawn from fields so far from what most people know that to them I sound like a stuttering idiot speaking nonsense.  (Blood quantum -- WTF?)  The assumption of our times is that people exist in friendship networks which they are proud to extend and which mean good commercial skews.  Prosperity and proselytizing in their devil’s bargain.

The first of my favorite two fields is methods of indigenous thought -- both by and about and inclusive of a number of “disciplines” like paleogenetics, cell morphology, disease and language patterns, neuropsychology -- stuff we’re just defining as we come capable of perceiving them.  The two main principles are that everything is related, even interwoven; and that everything is a process -- it’s all constantly changing in some random and surprising way.  Someone recently suggested that if we knew the genomes of everything, we could make the world be the way we want it: safe, luxuriant, and easy.    They haven’t understood anything.

The other field of method and awareness I’ve internalized is that of theatre.  Not just naturalistic portrayal of humans, but also the landscape and illusion projected on the kuppelhorizont of our minds, which means all the aspects of religion from the rigid and politicized “organized” religions to the drug-propelled visionary sensorium people sometimes call “spirituality.”  On the one hand, all this stuff is just a kaleidoscope of broken glass making patterns in a handheld tube.  On the other hand, it’s the only focus and meaning we have and we must hold on despite the tumbling.

Lou Diamond Phillips in place

Indians just seem so different.  Are they better or worse than us?  Should we imitate them or run from them?  By now isn’t their blood quantum so diluted, their cultural context so broken, their competence so challenged, that we ought to just dump the concept of indigeneity -- people shaped tightly to their location -- altogether?  Movies begin to be about the entirely pristine tiny groups in the Amazon forest who have never made contact with the larger world.  How do we know ANYTHING about them?  Should we send an envoy?  Sting? (To “help” them -- i.e. control them.)  In there somewhere is the hope that they really are magic.

I’m interested in the series called “Longmire” that’s based on a wagonload of procedural mysteries by Craig Johnson.  I was startled that our librarian dislikes the video series on grounds that it portrays tribal people as corrupt and avaricious.  It took me a while to understand that the show uses the point of view of actual "indians" and from the tribal point of view right now people are obsessed with corruption among their own people.  So is the larger world, which makes the issue worthwhile.

Graham Greene in "Clearcut", an early Canadian film

Graham Greene in "Longmire", current

The fact that many roles are played by NA’s with chops means that there’s a “real-feel” that can be disconcerting.  I mean, watching Graham Greene’s career and personal life can be wrenching.  On the other hand, the idea of an old woman who is an authority and a mystic at the same time, is absolutely convincing when the battered hat and impossible shelter belong to Tantoo Cardinal.  Lou Diamond Phillips is plainly at the heart of all the plots, sometimes more than the sheriff.

I haven’t talked to any local tribespeople about these things.  The ones under thirty or even forty are nearly indistinguishable from small town whites, all wrapped up in  music and celebrities.  The ones with whom I used to discuss these ideas are dead -- not long ago.  They used to be travelers, widely-read, linked to people who knew things.  More political than anthropological.  It is lucky that I saw my solitary state coming and prepared for it.

But I’m disappointed in all cultures most of the time.  They’ve forgotten so much and refuse to learn anything at all.  The movement called “political correctness” has created much evil with their idea that people can only speak for people just like themselves.  Instead of creating an even playing field it has opened a litigious abyss.  Publishers and producers are afraid of such poison -- it costs money.

Australian and Filipino = contemporary American West

Theatre teaches me to enter other people, to feel their spines in my own back, to look out through their eyes. There is so much stored in people of the land, even now, but not for much longer.  Not because they are disappearing but because their land is disappearing, industrialized, poisoned by agriculture, and now dried and burnt by cities sucking up every resource.  The cities make the laws, the cities still want us numbered, recorded, controlled.  The cities are the Matrix.  They know nothing, John Snow.

EXAMINING CSI FRANCHISES FOR TRACE

Vancouver, BC

“Da Vinci’s Inquest”, a Canadian series, was the first CSI show I watched regularly.  That was decades ago.  At the beginning the hero would declare, “I speak for the dead.”  He did so well that he became Mayor of Vancouver, BC.  Well, on the show -- not in reality.

The cluster of recent American CSI shows (CSI:Crime Scene Investigation; CSI:Miami; CSI:NY; CSI:Cyber; NCIS:Naval) are structured very much like those Fifties cowboy shows we all used to love: Gunsmoke, Paladin, Rawhide, Wagon Train -- but I hadn’t really thought about it much until I ran across someone commenting that CSI shows are the “comfort food” of series.  This is not a literal comment, since there are often autopsy scenes that are not meant to be watched while you eat lunch.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation  (Las Vegas)

Each has a strong central character, glamorous females (a little more adult than is usual), and bantering buddies -- at least in terms of the team members.  The “vics” as they say on CSI Miami, but we are cautioned it's an undignified term on NCSI.  In spite of female characters who demand respect, the vics and the background women tend to be Hollywood cannon fodder willing to do anything, even wear nothing but sushi or a g-string.  That version also has the most spectacular homes and fabulous tropical ocean clouds.  I have yet to notice any academics like those who populate Morse and Lewis.  No matter.  Though it’s interesting to speculate about CSI Harvard vs. CSI Berkeley, if they were to invented.

I read recently that the conviction rate for murder has sunk from maybe half to one-third.  Of course, the really successful murderers are never detected in the first place: it's the murder itself that is never detected.  On a rez there are never accurate statistics about most anything.  I wonder whether a CSI Rez could fly.  Maybe Longmire has it covered.  That program really IS a resurrection of the Fifties formula except WITH Indians.

Longmire

All these shows (except the Cyber one) revolve around the main man, who explicitly defends respect for human life and justice.  The whole conceit is that technology means we can know much more about how people do bad things.  There have been two real world consequences.  Juries today have no tolerance for technicians who don’t come through and criminals are fascinated by all the neat tricks they can learn.  Evidently there has been no change in the level of funding for technical criminal investigations.  Nor has it affected the tendency of juries to decide whom they like, who looks dodgy, and to base their decision on that rather than any evidence.

Most of the plots are ripped from the headlines by educated writers with an taste for contradictions and philosophical quandaries.  They’re in league with the media, esp. the part that is barely separated from “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”  Here are two powerful local cases, one for "CSI Park Ranger," and a second for "CSI Great Falls." The July 5, 2015, GF Tribune features a story about criminal cannibals -- not Bar Jonah but rather two scruffy and deranged young men who killed and a third young man who gave them a ride when they were hitchhiking.  It was July 5, 1970.  

Three years earlier, 1967, was the “Night of the Grizzlies” in Glacier Park, and the descriptions of the two events are very similar: night, sleeping, sultry weather, thunderstorm, and eating the victims.  The two men were supposedly taking LSD and the bears were suspected of having been shot with PCP in tranquilizer guns.  These are vampire stories that need magic.

The bears were killed.  One of the deranged hitchhikers, now 65, is today serving eight years for intent to distribute meth.  He served two years for the dismemberment murder.  The other guy claimed he did it all, in fact had the vic's fingers in his pocket, and was convicted of manslaughter.  He served sixteen years and died of liver cancer in 1994.  (I was going to link to this story, but I’ll just let you do it.)

This is a time in history in America when we have no consensus about grievous harm -- even when the vics or perps are animals.  We find juries guilty of wrong convictions, don’t trust ANY authorities, and are from a hundred cultures and subcultures.  Law and Order is another franchise that operates in the same formulaic terms as the CSI shows, and since our high schools no longer teach civics, they are a needed educational tool, particularly the ones that deal with sex crimes since high schools don’t teach sex education in any thorough way either.  Anyway, both democracy and sex are being sharply questioned and revised.

The investigators are the ones we respect and they show it by being beautiful and enhanced by excellent makeup.  (Even Caruso wears a little dab of mascara.)  Even the Medical Examiners on these shows mostly give up the English model of crusty old seen-everything philosophers.  I love the one on CSI Miami, a beautiful woman who is actually a fine dancer, tenderly holds the vic’s heads and talks to them, calling them “baby.”  The shows rely on “trace,” which at first thought was the name of a character:  “I’ll take this swab to Trace!”

All the CSI’s are in cities with gorgeous helicopter views at dawn and dusk.  Modern crime seems to be a creature of population density, while the problems of the Westerns happen out in open country with harsh weather that destroys “trace.”  More Westerns are about politics and personal relationships.  CSI Cyber was supposed to move in this direction but evidently the producers were getting bored because the reviews were scathing.

The discussions of what’s right in terms of justice at the heart of “Law and Order,” are replaced in the CSI shows by the explanations of evidence and how it is handled, illustrated with pulsing graphics of guts and wires. There are just enough car or boat chases and shootouts to keep the jejune watching and give the rest of us a chance to go check the refrigerator.  Once in a while there is something that’s a bit preposterous: like a tsunami that is deliberately used to enable the theft of gold bars that would be almost impossible to transport otherwise.  But it was mixed with actual post-tsunami and hurricane footage -- very real.  I liked the one about the world's most toxic snake venom (Australian) being infused via DSMO into newly cleaned uniforms.

Lately there’s been a buzz about “dad bods.”  These are at their heart "dad shows" -- “Father Knows Best”.  We miss dads.  The impossible bosses are replaced by heartless FBI agents.  David Caruso is a straight connection to NYPD Blue, but there is no equivalent to the Dennis Frantz politically incorrect wild man unless you count the ditsy Pauley Perrette.  Mark Harmon links to hospital franchise serieses.Gary Sinise was unknown to me and I see that’s because he’s been “doing” astronauts and sci-fi.

I'd be tempted to say these men are fantasies, that men in charge these days are neither compassionate nor just.  But my experience is different.  They do exist -- they’re just not school administrators nor are they likely to be pastors.  Strange considering the contexts.  The most vicious and incompetent bosses I’ve had were female.  I’ve always fled from management roles.

The tentpole men in these CSI stories are top management.  Even Morse was held back by a boss.  They are products of experience.  Mr. Favor from Rawhide was the reflective one who considered all possible solutions -- in those days Rowdy Yates (Clint Eastwood) required a LOT of management.  

“Wishbone” provided wise but salty commentary to Mr. Favor.  There is no such character in the CSI series.  I suspect it’s because there’s no such thing among the writers these days as freedom.  I wonder what Canada is doing in terms of CSI right now.  There is an abundance of characters who comment on “Game of Thrones.”  Those English are so self-reflexive.  More likely the good crime shows are Swedish.