(a post from last summer on the day after Harvey Pekar died)For a few blog posts now I've been banging on about the portrayal of the working classes in Anglo-American culture. Because institutions like the BBC, The New York Times, Hollywood, The New Yorker etc. are dominated by middle and upper middle class white males we seldom get anything but patronising and phony images of blue collar people in the films and novels which are presented to us for mass consumption. I don't find it charming or interesting that in England the establishment is largely run by men who went to boarding/prep school (although I think it explains how Harry Potter became popular). Similarly it bores me that the East Coast establishment in the United States is a closed club of elitist pseudo liberals who are, in fact, reactionary defenders of their hegemony. Scratch an Upper West Side Sarah Palin hater and you'll soon find that the real reason for their enmity is because of her vulgarity.
...
It's a miracle then that Harvey Pekar's epic vision of ordinariness became so well known. His multi volume comic book American Splendor was a paean to everyday life as an office drudge in that most unglamorous of American cities, Cleveland. Pekar had no car chases or superheroes in his comic. He was the superhero himself, a superhero who got up in the morning, went to work through the biting cold, dealt with bureaucracy and tedium, his aches and pains, his petty humiliations, his angst and suffering...you know, life. Pekar had a rare intelligence and a gift for irony and my God he was funny. Pekar was a poet and an artist. I remember watching that ghastly, false Clint Eastwood film Million Dollar Baby and being amazed by the conniving, cheap, unpleasant working class caricatures. That's how they really see us, I thought to myself. Trailer trash. Scum. Harvey Pekar was the man that we sent out to redress the balance. He was our knight errant in K Mart jeans. Pekar spoke for the losers, the failures, the grifters, the bums, the working poor, the unworking poor. He saw beauty where others saw only despair, he saw abominations where the powers that be saw slum clearance schemes and new developments. When future generations want to know what life was like in the late twentieth century I don't think they'll bother with the Pulitzer Prize winners and the deluded hipsters profiled in the NYT, no, I think they'll read American Splendor instead.
...
RIP Harvey.
63 comments:
Very nice. This is the loss that Cleveland should really be mourning.
Seana
It should but it wont be.
I'll be interested to see what the obits say. Philip Larkin now regarded as the greatest poet of the twentieth century (at least by me) was largegly pigeon holed in his obits as the voice of the petit bourgeoise, hardly in the pantheon with Yeats and Eliot. Time has corrected that view.
Similarly I expect Pekar will not get the Saul Bellow treatment in his obits.
I don't know. I think the film with Paul Giamatti may have launched him into hipster awareness. I know hipster Santa Cruz embraced it, though that's not quite the same thing.
I remember the film segments about the Letterman segments. It's funny about seeing people interviewed later. You often get what they're saying better than the interviewer does, but that's because you come into it informed rather than cold. The first time I noticed this whas when I saw a Malcolm X interview long, long after the fact. It's like if you don't say something that fits into the interviewer's box, you are branded as an eccentric, or worse.
Seana
I completely forgot about the film which I shouldnt have done because it was good.
No you're right the film will make it so the obits are respectful and long, if Hollywood deigns to notice you then you must be worth noticing.
Dude:
Cleveland is not that most whatever of American cities. Cleveland is really kinda cool, with the R&R Hall of Fame and that cool submarine with the skull souvenier t-shirts and nearby roller-coaster parks and the burning lake. I can think of lots of uncooler cities. Like Dayton.
Only Chrissie Hynde comes from there. God bless Harvey Pekar.
God bless Mrs. Pekar. And all the little Pekars. Wherever they may be tonite. Lift one to the old man. Original indeed.
PKL
Pat
Yeah its not Detroit or East St Louis but in my brief time in Cleveland I avoided the RRHOF and Shaker Heights for a stroll around Pekar country which is still as wonderfully unglam as it portrayed in the comics.
And yes a glass for Harvey and the clan.
How can the fact that "in England the establishment is largely run by men who went to boarding/prep school" possibly explain Harry Potter's popularity? Nonsense.
Then we have the East Coast establishment in the United States as "a closed club of elitist pseudo liberals who are, in fact, reactionary defenders of their hegemony". This is ghastly late-Marxist jargon. What establishment does not defend its position?
As for Palin, as with Pauline Hanson, most people dislike her because she is both stupid and vulgar.
Sam
Well exlaining a joke is always tedious but I'm a kindly man and I shall do it for you.
Harry Potter is a book about sending your children off to boarding school. This is a demonstrably perverse thing to do only done these days by the nutcases in the English uppper classes. To avoid the guilt associated with such strange, selfish and solipsistic behaviour they have endorsed and promoted a book which actually celebrates boarding school! Harry Potter gets promoted everywhere as a wonderful series by these eejits and thus it becomes popular. There, did you get it? Or are you still in the dark? I can also explain knock knock jokes.
Which word offended you as Marxist in the other paragraph? Hegemony? Elitist? Or was it the fact that I ran them all together like that just like I was ordered to by masters in the Kremlin. And it seems that you're agreeing with me there, no?
Alas I'm afraid I'll also have to take issue with your final point too. There are plenty of stupid liberals - the entire Sheen family comes to mind - but they are not disliked because of that. No, what gets the goat of the snobs is Palin's vulgarity. She comes from "working class fly over country" a crime which cannot be forgiven.
Don't be patronising, Adrian. It doesn't suit your working-class persona. Your Potter explanation is either a weak joke or rubbish. And don't duck the issue of establishments defending themselves.
Adrian,
I only know Pekar from the Giamatti film, but I'll check out the comics if you can get them in Australia.
Sam,
You got owned, mate.
Sam
If you think Harry Potter is a good book, say so and give your reasons; this kind of thing "It either has to be rubbish or a bad joke" is not an argument. I do hope that you wont consider this to be patronising when I explain that what you have there old chum is a false dichotomy. I shall demonstrate: You are either JK Rowling or the headmaster of a boarding school. See? I'm sure you are neither. False dichotomy. I happen to think that my argument is a good joke with a surprising amount of truth in it.
Perhaps my pinko red flag waving rhetoric confused you on the issue of establishments defending themselves. This is my point: a closed liberal elite will pretend to be liberal but in fact it is a reactionary self protecting aristocracy. As I said above "the East Coast establishment in the United States is a closed club of elitist pseudo liberals who are, in fact, reactionary defenders of their hegemony."
Finally in the words of Karl Marx "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
Oh wait that was Groucho.
Mal
You can special order them from Readings and Borders and from most good comic book shops.
Tragically the last one I read of his was called "Our Cancer Year". Fortunately it was as good as all the others.
Seana
You were right. Its a long, good obit. Much better than the two and a half paragraphs they gave to Philip K Dick
Harvey Pekar obit in the New York Times
I remember watching that ghastly, false Clint Eastwood film Million Dollar Baby and being amazed by the conniving, cheap, unpleasant working class caricatures. That's how they really see us, I thought to myself.
And then they pat themselves on the back and tell each other how great they are for understading people so well and give each other awards for such "genuine" performances.
And Adrian, always remember, if it's really, really popular it must be really, really good.
I loved Pekar. His passing will likely be acknowledged more in the comic book stores - I know he attended the Toronto Jewish Film Festival this spring and a couple of the local comic shops did exhibits on him.
He and Letterman had a terrific long-running 'spat', he was on the show maybe half a dozen or ten times? And I remember NBC banned him because he took a lot of shots at GE.
Did you see the BBC4 documentary last night with US comedian Rich Hall basically looking at the Hollywood misrepresentation of the people in the Deep South of America?
I think if you have many many years of seeing people being portrayed a certain way it does have an affect. I went around for years thinking Irish people kept horses in council flats, taking them up in the lifts- can't remember what film I got that idea from now.. anyway i was little bit gutted to be told that wasnt true.
They do still at least have the horse market in Dublin on one Sunday a month, Frankie, or did five or six years ago when I was there. Much later in the day I still saw boys walking their horses through the street as if they were slightly larger dogs. I don't know where the horses slept at night, though.
By the way, I think the film was Into the West, which I happened to see just a couple of years ago at an Irish film festival here in town. I believe the horse in the flat bit was supposed to be a bit idiosyncratic, though.
The film is The Committments.
"You're not taking that horse in the lift, are you?"
"I have to, the stairs'd kill him."
I don't think it's in the book, though.
It's a good obit, Adrian. I guess the world has changed a bit since Philip K. Dick left us.
I don't think you've entirely explained the fascination with boarding school books, which seemed to have existed as a popular subgenre well before HP. I think for the American audience it's largely the exoticness of the concept.
The Palin hating I think you're dead right about, though. Although I'm not in the right demographic to be a fan, I don't really understand how anyone could think she was stupid. She's got to be one of the most savvy people around. And as a politician she probably ranks on the genius scale. Because what counts in that world is to have a complete understanding of your power base. She doesn't care what someone like me thinks or all the rest of the left who mock her or throw up their hands in frustration at her--she knows she's never going to have our vote anyway. And her vast gaps of knowledge about the world are quintessentially American. It doesn't mean she's incapable of learning about anything she finds it's in her self-interest to know.
This is hard to take. Pekar leaves readers feeling that they really know him.
Pekar, Steinbrenner and that basketball guy. Not a good wek for Cleveland.
"East Coast establishment in the United States is a closed club of elitist pseudo liberals who are, in fact, reactionary defenders of their hegemony."
Well put. And after reading the comments, I have to say, it's nice to find people as cynical as I tend to be.
John
Yes that bugs me too. Why is it that everything has to come down to money. Why should we care what the top 10 box office films are each week? I suppose its a shortcut for finding out whats popular and what's playing but I wish people didnt bang on about it so much as a sign of a film's quality. Avatar led the box office for 8 weeks but that meant nothing because it was total shite.
Matt
Yeah he dared criticise GE so he had to go. Did Letterman pay tribute to Pekar last night? I know he FINALLY did the right thing with Bill Hicks.
Frankie
I would loved to have seen that. I shall look for it on YouTube.
One of my neighbours kept a goat in the garden of his council house, does that count?
Seana
Oh yes it was a popular genre well before Rowling. From Jane Eyre to Nicholas Nickleby to Tom Brown's Schooldays to Billy Bunter.
George Orwell has a wonderful little essay called Boys Weeklies all about Bunter and another one about life at Eton called Such Such Were The Joys.
Rowling is interesting because her boarding school is a generally positive environment whereas Orwell, Bronte, Dickens, Hughes etc. showed what an absolute nightmare these places in fact are.
Glenna
Well mine is a tongue in cheek, plague on both your houses, kind of cynicism.
Peter
Yes you're right. It's a little bit like losing a relative that you dont see that much. I'll miss Pekar.
Less so Big Stein.
I'd forgotten that it was the GE stuff rather than a feud with Letterman himself that got him bounced.
It's funny, but explains a lot I think, that when Potter fans come over to England, as I know from my sister and a woman I met on a plane, they don't take them to say, Rugby, but to Oxford. It's the hallowed halls, banquet room experience they are looking for, I guess.
No, nothing I've ever seen or read about British boarding schools has ever made me think I'd want to go to one. The sports alone would do me in.
Why should we care what the top 10 box office films are each week?
Wait, you mean the Big Mac may not be the greatest food ever?
One of the things Harry Potter did do very well was capture that feeling that most kids hitting adolescence have that they aren't living their proper life - that point in most of our lives when we think maybe we're adopted or were left here by aliens or whatever.
Kind of in the same way Harvey Pekar captured the moment at the other end of adolescence when adult life fully kicks in and we realize we weren't adopted or left by aliens and that this really is our life.
It's not really surprising one sells a lot better than the other, there aren't many adults in the world.
Wait a minute, John. You mean you're convinced that you're living your real life? I didn't think anyone actually felt that way. Most people agree either that a)this is just a sim, or b) we live in a fallen world.
Well, yeah, I do know a couple of well-adjusted adult type people, but I'm not one of them.
I think you've hit the nail on the head about why so many people like Harry Potter, although it doesn't float my boat. Its just escapism from the banal everyday life.I love the Twlight movies (sort of ashamed but not really) because adventure and romance is lacking and you've got to get it from somewhere.
I sort of understand working-class kids getting a kick from the Harry Potter Public School ethos. I guess I go back more years than most of youse, but I never thought twice about the unreal (to me) public school setting of "Boy's Own" Annuals, or the "Billy Bunter" books I used to read (looking back now they probably ticked every non-PC box there is).
But I did get a "here, hold on a minute" minute reading my other favourite series, the "Just William" books. That came when the rascal I identified with very strongly turned out to have a "COOK" in his house.
Seana, Frankie, Phil
This is from Orwell's Boys Weeklies (written in the 30's I think)
And here it is worth noticing a rather curious fact, and that is that the school story is a thing peculiar to England. So far as I know, there are extremely few school stories in foreign languages. The reason, obviously, is that in England education is mainly a matter of status. The most definite dividing line between the petite-bourgeoisie and the working class is that the former pay for their education, and within the bourgeoisie there is another unbridgeable gulf between the ‘public’ school and the ‘private’ school. It is quite clear that there are tens and scores of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a ‘posh’ public school is wildly thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that mystic world of quad-rangles and house-colours, but they can yearn after it, day-dream about it, live mentally in it for hours at a stretch.
You can rest of Boys Weeklies here:
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys
John
One of the reasons I like Breaking Away so much is because the working class family is so joyous and so funny. Modern movies mostly dont have working class characters you laugh with but quite a few that you laugh at.
“When future generations want to know what life was like in the late twentieth century I don't think they'll bother with the Pulitzer Prize winners and the deluded hipsters profiled in the NYT, no, I think they'll read American Splendor instead.”
As the son of an East Baltimore nurse and electrician I say right on.
I’ve been picking away at a long piece on the movie Blue Collar with Richard Pryor, Yaphett Koto, and Harvey Keital. A brilliant movie that understands what blue collar meant before it got appropriated by an IBM mainframe engineer.
The Orwell piece nails it. Thanks.
Philip, for some reason your experience reminded me of an interview with either Amy Tan or Maxine Hong Kingston, both with a Chinese-American author saying how much she had loved and identified with Little Women until she came to some negative stereotype around the Chinese launderer or something. She realized then that the book had never been meant for her and it took her right out of the story for awhile.
Brin, I'm looking forward to your piece on Blue Collar. I remember Pauline Kael's review when it came out (she was friends with Paul Schrader, wasn't she?), mentioned that Richard Pryor's character couldn't afford braces for his daughter and yet the UAW had one of the best dental plans going.
That's the kind of thing I'm on about here - that subtle elimination of the sources of working-class strength and pride like unions.
I forget how Blue COllar got around not mentioning the UAW, but somehow I think those guys were working at a non-union car plant (Yellow Cab, I think).
I guess the idea of a union really doesn't line up very well with that American, "rugged individual" ideal.
And P.G. Wodehouse, too, got his start writing school stories.
One of Harvey Pekar's Letterman stories skewers Letterman for thinking himself cool because he cracks jokes about Robert Wright's personal habits even has he scrambles to stifle any criticism of GE. That's another near little feat of Pekar's. He could tell stories like that and make them compelling without ever lapsing into tired polemics.
John,
The main reason it's on hold is that I've been trying to jump through the hoops to interview Yaphett Kotto (the others haven't responded to me). I figure its worth running down since none of the three principle actors ever really talk(ed) about the movie. Blue Collar is life fight club for these guys.
And yes, it was filmed at a Yellow Cab plant but the fictional plant was union. The plant owners wife was a fan of Pryor's comedies and Schrader and Co. were more then happy to let them think that. Anecdotally the plant owner and his wife are said to have stormed out of the theater when they finally saw the finished product.
Brian
Yes I think it would be good to have Yaphet on board. Loved him in that great Baltimore show Homicide too of course.
Of course being the geek that I am I would spend the entire interview asking him about his fights with Ridley Scott on Alien.
Peter
Did you happen to see Letterman last night? Did he mention Pekar? I mean the guy was on his show many times. And the Letterman stuff was a big part of the movie.
John
One of the things that drives me mental is when people like Bill O'Reilly bash the UAW for ruining the US car industry. Not the incompetent owners, not the poor designs, not the shoddy quality control, not the investment in lemons like Hummer. No, its all the fault of the union.
Sure the UAW was inflexible when times were fat in the 70's but the UAW in and around Detroit has been quick to adapt in the recent financial crisis. Ford and GM by the way do VERY well in Australia because they have clever management, imaginative products and excellent cooperation between the blue and white collar staff.
You're exactly right, Adrian. The sudden drop in quality of Toyota vehicles doesn't have anything to do with the workers, it was a senior management problem and a design problem.
I recorded the last couple of Late Shows but haven't watched them yet. I did read Paul Shaffer's book today though, which is a terrific show-biz memoir. A mensch.
On the topic of Bill Hicks, I few years back I sent a donation to the wildlife rehabilitation centre set up in his name by his family, and in return I got a t-shirt and a handwritten note of gratitude from Bill's mother. Classy.
Adrian, I watch Letterman only if my arms are tied to a heavy chair, my head clamped against its back, and my eyes forced open. I have not been in that position recently, so I don't know if Letterman said anything about Pekar.
To my pleasant surprise, my own newspaper published the Associated Press' Pekar obit. I also found out that at leat two of my colleagues are Pekar fans, and I bought the last American Splendor trade paperback, Another Dollar.
==========================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
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Peter
I'm pleased about both of those things.
Another Dollar looks like an interesting book: Plenty of little everyday ephiphanies, but also Pekar looking at himself unsparingly as he ages and grows pessimistic about the state of the world.
QUOTE Ford and GM by the way do VERY well in Australia because they have clever management, imaginative products and excellent cooperation between the blue and white collar staff. UNQUOTE
AAAAAA!!! This is eye-wateringly wrong. All car manufacturers in Australia have been propped up for many, many years. Most recently, in November 2008, the Rudd government handed them another $6billion. They lose money on every car they make. Car-making is a giant make-work scheme funded by the taxpayers of Australia.
That's not an opinion. It's a fact.
C
GM (Holden) and Ford made profits in 2009 and 2010 and it looks like 2011 will be profitable too.
The cars are excellent (I've driven quite a few of them) and I like the fact that they are appreciated by the general public (many Ford and Holden owners clubs, meets and jackets everywhere).
It would be one thing to subsidise a disaster like the British motorcycle industry in the 1970's but giving tax rebates and loan guarantees to Ford and GM seems like a very good idea.
And do you really believe that Toyota, Subaru etc. dont get subsidies? What dream world are you living in?
No call me crazy but I'd like to see these cars made in Australia by skilled Australian workers.
Not crazy, Adrian, perhaps just ill-informed.
On April 1, 2010,GM Holden posted its worst results in decades, revenue falling by one-third and losses tripling to $211 million. This was Holden's fifth loss in a row and the biggest for 20 years.
In 2010, Ford announced that it made $13m in 2009, its first profit since 2005, and a pathetic return, achieved by dazzling feats of bookkeeping sophistry.
We're not talking about tax rebates and loan guarantees. We are talking about billions in direct subsidies. And as an industry insider, Bob Manning, put it, assistance to foreign car makers in Australia "will just go into the companies' global accounts blender and be dressed up to look like it's compliant with the endless guidelines that only Canberra can develop".
C
Yeah I guess I was misinformed by my mate who works for. . .Holden.
Funnily enough I was reading The Age today and Holden came joint last on their mid year review of the 2010 autos. Ford however came second.
Dont you think it would be terrible though if they let Holden wither on the vine? When I was a kid there were 20,000 people working in the shipyards in Belfast, now there are less than 500 in ship repair. And as for cars look at poor old Coventry and Birmingham...Thats a huge skill set that has just vanished forever. I'd hate that to happen to Holden too.
I DO take your point though. Where does it end?
And I suppose its (to continue with my Belfast shipbuilding metaphor) only rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. When the Chinese decide that they are going to start making the world's cars then it's game over for everyone.
Adrian, It's a tragedy to see any skills lost. But the skill-set in car-making – and in making most products – has become narrower and narrower. Almost everything is automated now, which is why low-skill, illiterate labour can produce cars in China.
Marx wasn't right about too many things. But he was on the money when he said capitalists would sell the rope that eventually hanged them. We wanted everything to be cheap but we had no idea what it would cost.
C
In a pretty entertaining talk Hans Rosling says that its game over on July 27 2048:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_asia_s_rise_how_and_when.html
HP's story 'Toby Saves The Day' is one of my favourite things in the world. Top man and top obit.
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Once upon a time 'hegemony' was a perfectly ordinary word, a little-used synonym for dominance. I believe that's the sense in which you used it. But it has a different meaning now. Thanks to an Italian twat called Antonio Gramsci, who explained the working classes' failure to adopt Marxism as due to what he called 'manufactured consent', hegemony is now one of the favourite words of the academic vareity of those East Coast pseudo-liberals that you're talking about. I'm sure it was inadvertant, but hitting out at those idiots in one breath and using their vocabulary in the next breath did'nt help convey your message in the way you intended
You've probably read The Intellectual Life Of The British Working Classes by Jonathen Rose and The Intellectuals And The Masses by John Carey. If you haven't, you'd probably enjoy them.
Adrian
I'm new to your blog;I hope it's not too late to thank you for criticizing the New York Times. I'm an unskilled, low-wage worker, and I think I understood what you were saying. This past Sunday, the NYT Magazine ran an article about the American dollar store phenomenon; maybe I'm too sensitive, but I found the writer's attitude towards the managers and the growing clientele of those stores to be pretty snide.
Although I wouldn't vote for Sarah Palin, I respect her intelligence - I think she's got a journalism degree from the University of Idaho, and I figure she must be at least as smart as Maureen Dowd.
I'll have to check out Harvey Pekar soon.
Anon 1
Thanks for the book recs, I havent read either of them but I will check them out.
As for hegemony? Ach, its just a word.
Anon 2
The NYT is at its most revolting in its annual pre Christmas story on how much you should tip your doorman, butler at the country club etc.
Adrian
Do you remember the NYT's coverage of Gerry Adams'first visit to the US? Were you bewildered by it, as I was?
As for Hollywood, I'm glad I'm not the only one who disliked "Million Dollar Baby". But there are two good independent movies about American poverty, and both of them were made by women: "Frozen River", starring Melissa Leo of Homicide, and "Wendy and Lucy". You might like them.
Anon
I dont remember what the NYT said but Maureen Dowd has had an unseemly girl crush on Adams and his fellow sociopaths for decades.
I've seen Frozen River and I thought it was great.
I havent seen Wendy and Lucy but it seems like my cup of tea as does her more recent Meek's Cutoff but of course its not playing here.
Adrian
One thing I remember is a profile of Adams by Edna O'Brien in the Op-Ed pages. Of course it was beautifully written, but it verged on reverence; I think she even compared him to the monks who made the Book of Kells. I know his visit was important for the peace process, but no one seemed to wonder if he had blood on his hands, or if his eventual renunciation of violence, though welcome, was at least twentyfive years overdue.
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