Cheap Perfume

"I'm a New Yorker," he said. "I live in New York City. I walk the streets like everybody else does." -- a recent candidate for Mayor.

If you're guessing the speaker of the quotation above is Mike Bloomberg, you're almost right. It was Ron Lauder talking to the NY Times back in his 1993 campaign for Mayor --one in which TERM LIMITS was his big issue, which of course, he has since reverved himself on, like so many "Mike-a-like's."

Ron Lauder was whom I first thought of when I saw Mike Bloomberg. A thin slice of colorless salmon. A man addicted to his pose for his Bar-Mitzvah photos -- the one that makes him look young and promising and a little like Harry Truman.

I couldn't see any reason to get excited about him, until I heard him say on television that some parents don't realize how just how bad the education their children receive is. For a flicker, I thought, "Hmmn. An academic elitist! Someone who might have the courage to go out there and tell a group of immigrant parents that they should expect more from schools here than they received in the places from which they fled. Or just that, "Good penmanship does not equal good writing." The latter is a hard one to dispel even from immigrants of my mother's generation, whose women especially have had their hands invisibly bound in such a way that every curl looks like a bakery bow. How can you concentrate on what you are trying to say when you are so busy decorating a cake? I know people do, but my point is, that I once had to explain this to a parent who honestly did not know --- that her child had no understanding of sentence structure so, in fact, her English was very poor, not excellent as she had been told by her still-colonialist style school "back home". I promised her she would learn and she did and she graduated a much better writer, no less sloppy a calligrapher.

Candidate Bloomberg, I thought, would never open a school called, "Ghetto Film School." He would see that there is no remaining irony in that title. That it is a travesty, no matter how good the offerings might be --even if the school (which is slated to open next year) offers a six-week film course which sounds suspiciously like the for-profit courses of that kind all over Manhattan. Was Spike Lee made in six weeks?

40 Acres and a Mule. Now that's an honorable -- in your face -- reclaiming my nation title. I would love Spike Lee if only for the name of his production company, but of course, he has talent, intelligence and diligence.

I know, someone is going to write to me that this is a wonderful school with amazing people....And I'm sure it is. I just think that if I had a kid I would know how insulting that title was. Yes, the "Ghetto" has been branded in Rap Videos and Holocaust movies. That's another reason not to use the word.

Back when Alan Lomax crossed mountains and strata of class to record music, the word, "Folk" was used to describe struggling, working people. I imagine that is a major aim of this school.
So, why not do something daring and call the school, "Twenty-First Century Folk Films." It would embrace so many histories even in that clumsy attempt at a title. And it would acknowledge, too, what Mother Jones published in its Jan/Feb 2009 issue: "Class is the New Black." You can go to that article via this link: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2009/01/class-is-the-new-black.html

The year of our first president of African-American descent shouldn't be the year that Ghetto Film School opens. I know that I am making a big deal over a title -- but I think that unless they have some outrageously good historian on staff who puts a big exhibit on all of the ghettos of history in the lobby and then asks, "What is a ghetto?" the name will always give me chills. Maybe that's the point. But, I asked myself, what if I started a school called, Clinical Depression Writers Academy. I promised that it would be devoted to giving voice to the suffering in the same way that Prozac Nation, The Noonday Demon, The Hours and Crime and Punishment had. Would you send your kids?

I used to think you named a school to inspire those who entered into it. What about naming the school after Oscar Michaux, one of the first African-American filmmakers?

No matter what anyone thinks of Bloomberg's rapid closing of schools, attempts to cut veteran teaching staff and change the culture of our public schools, they might look at "Ghetto Film School" as a representative statement of the current Dept. of Education Aesthetic.

I can't think of anyone, parent, child, teenager...whom I can say that name to without feeling shame.

Let's not even go into the other facts of the week:
If Bloomberg fires 16,000 teachers he will be cutting all the young people and faculties of the small schools he said were so important. All THAT MONEY spent will have been wasted as if in a Ponzi scheme. Maybe that was the point -- to bankrupt the DOE so that it could only run on the least number of teachers possible and maybe he doesn't care if they're experienced or novices. He just wants our schools to have as little as possible.

Then, there's the brilliant and frightening possibility posted on re-posted on Ednotesonline.org from Accountable Talk: http://accountabletalk.blogspot.com/2009/01/trading-tenure-for-jobs.html