I suspect that Abigail will also comment, but the Vulture profile of Neil Gaiman is as gross as you’ve been led to believe:

In The Sandman, the DC comic-book series that ran from 1989 to 1996 and made Gaiman famous, he tells a story about a writer named Richard Madoc. After Madoc’s first book proves a success, he sits down to write his second and finds that he can’t come up with a single decent idea. This difficulty recedes after he accepts an unusual gift from an older author: a naked woman, of a kind, who has been kept locked in a room in his house for 60 years. She is Calliope, the youngest of the Nine Muses. Madoc rapes her, again and again, and his career blossoms in the most extraordinary way. A stylish young beauty tells him how much she loved his characterization of a strong female character, prompting him to remark, “Actually, I do tend to regard myself as a feminist writer.” His downfall comes only when the titular hero, the Sandman, also known as the Prince of Stories, frees Calliope from bondage. A being of boundless charisma and creativity, the Sandman rules the Dreaming, the realm we visit in our sleep, where “stories are spun.” Older and more powerful than the most powerful gods, he can reward us with exquisite delights or punish us with unending nightmares, depending on what he feels we deserve. To punish the rapist, the Sandman floods Madoc’s mind with such a wild torrent of ideas that he’s powerless to write them down, let alone profit from them.

As allegations of Gaiman’s sexual misconduct emerged this past summer, some observers noticed Gaiman and Madoc have certain things in common. Like Madoc, Gaiman has called himself a feminist. Like Madoc, Gaiman has racked up major awards (for Gaiman, awards in science fiction and fantasy as well as dozens of prizes for contemporary novels, short stories, poetry, television, and film, helping make him, according to several sources, a millionaire many times over). And like Madoc, Gaiman has come to be seen as a figure who transcended, and transformed, the genres in which he wrote: first comics, then fantasy and children’s literature. But for most of his career, readers identified him not with the rapist, who shows up in a single issue, but with the Sandman, the inexhaustible fountain of story.

I’m a late-comer to Gaiman (I only read American Gods last year and never really had the opportunity to become a fanatic), so this isn’t psychologically catastrophic for me in the way it is for some of his more dedicated fans. I also know a few people who are personally acquainted with Gaiman and pretty much all of them have indicated that they only find the revelations surprising in degree rather than in kind.

Where are we with respect to the artist and the work at the dawn of this post-woke age? In the future I don’t plan to avoid any Gaiman-related project because of Gaiman, but at the same time I don’t think I’ll want to read or watch anything specifically because it’s Gaiman. I make no judgment of how anyone else approaches; if digesting the work of a creep is too creepy for you, I’m in no position to tell you that you’re wrong and that you need to read American Gods or watch Sandman.

Photo credit: By Kyle Cassidy – By email, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37378819

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I moved to Albuquerque 25 years ago this summer. Crazy. One of the first places I discovered there was Alpahville Video, your classic arty based movie rental store. It was good. They had all kinds of things. Of course, the rise of Netflix killed it a few years later and what has been better for cinema in the last quarter-century than that company…..Anyway, at the time they had VHS and DVD and I had both players. So I would do what the goddamn algorithms–a technology to create the worst and most boring version of yourself possible–can never do, which is allow you to browse and explore and pick things up and consider and then make a choice.

Well, one day, I was looking at their Asian section and I wanted something that wasn’t Japanese or from one of the relatively few arty Chinese directors whose films were available in the US. I picked up a VHS tape of a film called Turumba, directed by a Filipino guy named Kidhat Tahimik and released in 1981.

What I ended up watching was the best film about globalization I had ever seen or still have ever seen.

The story goes like this–there’s a family in a small town in the Philippines, probably not all that far from Manila, but far enough without a highway, which happens to be under construction. The time is 1970 or so. The family is really artistic. The father teaches music and is the lead cantor at the town’s religious festivals, called Turumba. The grandmother created a really advanced way to make the papier-mache toys popular in the town. Grandma is still around teaching the craft with an emphasis on craft. One day a German woman comes to town and sees the toys. As it turns out, she’s a scout for German manufacturers. She buys everything they have. Those things sell, she orders more, and pretty soon, she’s making big orders. Out goes the craftsmanship and in goes mass produced toys to commemorate the Munich Olympics in 72. Out goes spending time playing music and in goes long days in the nascent factory, not only for the kids (it’s told through the 10 year old or so son of the cantor/head of the household who becomes the factory owner) but for the kids of town. Out goes hanging out at night and in comes electric fans and TVs and cars. Out goes the joy of life and in comes the sadness of capitalism, a sadness that few actually want to reject because of the material upsides.

What makes the film so brilliant is the ambivalence. It isn’t romanticizing the people or place. They already exist in a globalized world. The kid loves his Batman t-shirt. It’s just starting at a given time–a time when globalization already is impacting a community in one way–and demonstrating what happens when that globalization goes into overdrive. It’s also not propaganda. It’s certainly a critique of neocolonialism, yes, but done the right way. The film really is about ambivalence. It’s funny. There are little asides that amuse. It’s filmed like a documentary but is not ham-fisted at all. It’s super cheaply made–the subtitles take up half the screen and Criterion Channel pretty clearly just did the best they could with a VHS copy since I am pretty sure this was never put on DVD. I would absolutely recommend watching this. I was amazed to see it show up and I was so happy. I watched it a couple of times, then the video store closed, and I hadn’t seen in 20 years. It was just as good as I remembered.

This leads to me two additional points. One is that for as wonderful as Criterion Channel is, it’s quite striking how even film buffs just want to watch 80s and 90s big budget films they remembered liking back in college. The monthly programming now is deeply skewed in that direction, with very little on foreign films. This month includes a Nicole Kidman retrospective, a collection of films called “Surveillance Cinema,” which is a way to organize The Truman Show and Minority Report and Gattaca into a respectable Criterion thing; and three Cameron Crowe directed films. There’s also a couple of collections around older Hollywood films, but it’s pretty clear that there really is no market for foreign films, even among cinephiles, in this country. I get that Criterion is responding to the market. The problem is that it is very hard to search for films otherwise unless you are looking for something specific. If you try, you can search by country and if you put in Philippines, a bunch of things come up, but you have to think of that yourself. If I hadn’t seen this film in the Recently Added category, I would probably have never found it.

The other thing rewatching Turumba made me consider is how villages become centers of a specific type of craft. I’ve been in Oaxaca for nearly two months. You might be familiar with the alebrijes that come from here, the fantastically artistic wooden animals. They are cool, I grant you. I have a few. The story of these here seems to be similar–something a few people did, then a British filmmaker brought some of these people abroad, they got popular, and now the economy of two entire towns is making these things. I very slightly know an anthropologist who has written a book on this and I guess I should read it. How do specific towns rearrange their economies to produce what were once crafts for a mass global market?

Anyway, watch this film.

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I would guess I don’t fly very much compared to a lot of the LGM community. I’ve probably averaged something like five flights a year in recent years. So I was taken aback last week when flying back from the holidays in Michigan to Colorado by the following experience.

I had the middle seat in a three-seat row. This is because I was too cheap to pay to “upgrade” to an aisle or window seat on the United Airlines flight. (I suppose this kind of thing is economically efficient, but I bet the constant nickel and diming on everything in this world of hypercapitalism is a big reason why everybody is in such a bad mood).

I had just sat down in awkward proximity to the two total strangers on each side of me, when the 30ish woman in the window seat said something to me about my elbow being on the armrest. I don’t remember her exact words, but I was, absurdly in retrospect, embarrassed and slightly flustered, and apologized for not knowing the relevant etiquette. I mean I don’t fly much, relatively speaking, but I’ve still taken hundreds of flights over the last 45 years or so, so I probably shouldn’t have immediately assumed I was in the wrong, but hey that’s how we ended up with January 6th I suppose.

Then this person did something so odd that I still can’t quite believe she did it. She showed me the screen of her phone, which featured a text to someone that read “I”m sitting next to Elbow Guy,” under a photo of my elbow on the armrest! This made me feel even more disconcerted by my apparent faux pas, although a little light went off somewhere in my mind, or in the back of my mind, that maybe this person was a little off her rocker, or “quirky” as we say in Boulder if the person’s net worth is at least eight figures.

Anyway, I later Did My Own Research ™ and discovered that I had a largely if not universally recognized right to BOTH armrests, which if I had done the math at the moment should have been deducible, since if I didn’t then the other two people in the row would each get two armrests, and, along with the privilege of not sitting in the middle, enjoy perfect armrest hegemony.

But the part of this story that still feels disconcerting was the texting of the photo of my elbow, along with my transformation into Elbow Guy. This felt somehow invasive of my privacy/space in some way related to larger issues with the information economy.

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A couple of years ago, I saw the superb Mali Obomsawin play with her jazz band. She is Abenaki. She started talking about land acknowledgements and called them “corny” before going on to say that the real land acknowledgment is knowing that her ancestor was imprisoned in Boston for practicing his religion. That got pretty well at the absurdity of land acknowledgements. What do they actually do? The answer is usually nothing. At first, one might argue they were useful in the sense of reminding folks that the land does have a Native history. But pretty quickly they became a way for whites to engage in performative liberalism without any kind of commitment and then they became a way for corporations and wealthy institutions to give lip service to something progressive while doing absolutely nothing for Native Americans here today, including people of the tribes being mentioned! This has bothered me for years now.

The excellent historian of Native America Kathleen DuVal had an op-ed yesterday in the Times about getting rid of this ridiculousness and focusing on actually working toward justice for the Tribes today.

If you work at a university, large corporation or left-leaning nonprofit or have attended certain performances, you have probably heard a land acknowledgment, a ritual that asks you to remember that Native Americans were here long before the peoples of Europe, Africa and Asia. The New York City Commission on Human Rights, for example, on its website “acknowledges the land politically designated as New York City to be the homeland of the Lenape (Lenapehoking) who were violently displaced as a result of European settler colonialism over the course of 400 years.”

The point is to make us more aware of the dispossession and violence that occurred in the establishment and expansion of the United States. But they’ve begun to sound more like rote obligations, and Indigenous scholars tell me there can be tricky politics involved with naming who lived on what land and who their descendants are. Land acknowledgments might have outlived their usefulness.

Instead of performing an acknowledgment of Native peoples, institutions should establish credible relationships with existing Native nations. In the United States, there are 574 federally recognized tribes, plus many state-recognized tribes and communities that own and manage land, operate social services and administer federal programs, much as counties and states do. They run tribal businesses and make small-business loans to their citizens. They provide jobs and revenue that help drive regional and rural economies. What they need from universities, corporations, nonprofits and local and state governments is partnerships that acknowledge and build on their continuing sovereignty.

…

The Native Governance Center notes that land acknowledgments often “become an excuse for folks to feel good and move on with their lives.” The journalists Graeme Wood and Noah Smith have criticized them as “moral exhibitionism” and ethnonationalism. In an interview Keith Richotte Jr., the director of the University of Arizona’s Indigenous peoples law and policy program and a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, told me that if land acknowledgments “are treated as the only or last step of one’s commitment to Indigenous peoples and nations, then they can become more harmful than beneficial.”

Land acknowledgments tend to reinforce the myth of Native disappearance and irrelevance. In calling attention to dispossession, they often miss the point that Native Americans survived and are having a renaissance in culture and sovereignty. The vanishing-Indian myth has deep roots in American history. As part of taking Indigenous land, 19th-century Americans found it useful to believe that Indians were fading away. They described precolonial North America as a wilderness — “occupied by a few savage hunters,” as President Andrew Jackson put it, who “were annihilated or have melted away to make room for the whites.” Jean O’Brien, a historian and citizen of the White Earth Ojibwe Nation, called it a “narrative of Indian extinction that has stubbornly remained in the consciousness and unconsciousness of Americans.”

Tribes are still here and have had to go to court to defend their remaining sovereignty and property, spending their revenue to buy back land that once was theirs. In 1996 the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians bought back one of their sacred sites, the Kituwah mound, which once sat at the center of the Cherokee Mother Town, and the Osage Nation has saved the only ancient pyramid mound remaining in St. Louis by buying its summit. In its 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the treaty-defined boundaries of the Muscogee, Cherokee, Quapaw, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations remain in full force because Congress never disestablished their reservations. Yet the State of Oklahoma has continued to fight tribal jurisdiction over criminal cases. If tribes didn’t have to spend revenue buying back land and defending their interests in court, they could use more of it on the health, education and criminal justice programs that benefit their citizens and their neighbors.

My colleague Amanda Cobb-Greetham, the founding director of the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, Okla., and a citizen of the Chickasaw nation, told me that instead of lengthy discussions about whether and how to write land acknowledgments, institutions should engage in active and meaningful relationships with the Native nations that are now or were on the lands those institutions occupy. Florida State University and the Seminole Tribe of Florida have established such a relationship, which started with the tribe’s involvement in designing the mascot’s regalia but now extends to other partnerships, including creating a Native American and Indigenous Studies Center.

I know some of these people and respect them very much and I can’t agree more. Have your land acknowledgement if you want, but if you aren’t actively doing something within your power to remedy injustice today, then it’s totally worthless. If you are a university, are you offering free tuition and fees to the Tribes in your area? If you are a professor, are you assigning work by Native scholars or centering Native voices? If you are running a corporation, are you engaging in affirmative action plans for the Tribes? There lots of things we can be doing. But mostly, land acknowledgements exist to make whites feel good about themselves.

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