The Servile Arts

Once upon a time, the world of education was divided into three spheres:  Fine Arts, Liberal Arts, and Servile Arts.  Fine (or “Beaux”) Arts means today pretty much what it meant when the phrase was coined.  Think of bohemians in berets on the southern bank of the Seine.  Painters, sculptors, poets, all making beautiful things.

Liberal and Servile Arts perhaps require a bit more historical context.  Imagine a bunch of rich lads in Genoa, drinking wine as they plot to spend their fathers’ fortunes.  Theirs is a gentrified world not unlike Downton Abbey (though predating it by at least six centuries).  Lots of leisure time for the upper classes, but with less indoor plumbing and more church attendance.  The fellows decide – more or less as a hobby – they’d like to know something about mathematics.  They pool a few ducats and pay some monk to teach them a little algebra.  Voila!  The University is born.

The subjects they choose are meant to better the minds and character of free citizens.  Artes liberales – the arts of liberty:  grammar, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, arithmetic, astronomy, and the like.  As Academia matures, these subjects expand to include the humanities and sciences.

Lesser known and spoken of today are the Servile Arts.  These are civilization’s necessary skills, practiced by… well… not free men.  A list of these Artes mechanicae from the ninth century includes weaving, cooking, agriculture, masonry, metalwork, and warfare (the martial art).  I'd argue that the class-informed division of Liberal Arts and Servile Arts persists and complicates instruction in a subject like Digital Filmmaking.

Serfing the internet

Imagine, Rachel, a first-year filmmaker is taught the meaning of the phrase “shooting ratio.”  She writes it on a flash card.  On the back of the card is a terse definition:  “the ratio between a film’s final edited running time and the total footage exposed or captured for the project.”  Her roommate quizzes her on it and other terms from her Cinema Appreciation course.  She recalls it on the final exam and even uses it once in class discussion.

Rachel believes her flash cards prepare her her for a 200-level production course.  The professor hands her a camera and tells to practice a focus pull.  Rachel sets the device on a tripod and twists the focus ring.  The frame’s clarity (and viewer’s attention) moves from the background of her shot to its foreground.  She pulls focus a dozen times during the class, until she achieves a satisfying take.  Rachel surrenders the camera to other members of her group.  The five of them take turns doing what Rachel did.  The ritual is repeated around three other cameras.  At the end of the period, all twenty class members will claim they learned how to do a focus pull.

But they are no more proficient at focus pulls than is a bricklayer who’s laid only a dozen bricks.  Who can say he’s “learned” to lay bricks?  A craftsman who can reliably repeat the action on demand, whose mortar lines are consistently even, whose resulting walls are level and plumb.  In short, the useful skills of the Servile Arts take longer to acquire than the knowledge of the Liberal Arts.

But the current paradigm of “learning” the Servile Arts is a bit like following a recipe.  Tom has limited kitchen experience, but is having a dinner party and wants to bake a cake.  He sifts through the internet, collects ingredients, and combines them as instructed.  He pulls the result from the oven and sets it before impressed guests.  They make appreciative yummy noises. 

Tom is not a chef.  He doesn’t understand which ingredients act as leavening agents and which offer flavor.  He has never substituted kefir for buttermilk.  He has not experimented with presentation or garnishes.

In this way, Tom is like Adam, an amateur editor.  Adam is assembling a music video and wants to dissolve from one shot to another.  He looks through the software’s help menu, then consults a YouTube tutorial.  Now he knows the recipe of function keys that will accomplish a given visual effect.  The result pleases him and perhaps even his audience of Facebook followers.

It would be overstatement to call Adam a learned editor.  Or Rachel a competent camera operator.  They each followed a recipe, a filmmaking tip.  Until they’ve done their tasks so often their fingers can perform without their brains, until they can customize their tasks to create meaning, they are amateurs.  They are walking, but they are looking at their feet.  They are dancing, but their lips still move as they count steps.

Rachel is frustrated.  She did so well in Cinema Appreciation.  But it’s taking her for freaking ever to prep for the camera quiz.  Her prof’s asked her to submit five well-executed focus pulls, five smooth pans, and five tilts – all while obeying composition’s Rule of Thirds.

Some of her frustrations arise from the sixteen-week term, the fifty-minute class period, the mythic ratio of “two hours outside class for every one hour in it.”  The Academy’s trusted timetables are better suited to acquiring the Liberal Arts.  Even basic competence in the Servile Arts requires more hours of practice.

Yet the pressure is on to increase the usefulness of a college degree.  Parents in this economy, fearful of considerable student debt, always question their child’s employment prospects.  They do not ask “What will Johnny know when he graduates?”  Rather, they ask “What can Johnny do with his degree?”  These customer inquiries are shoving the Servile Arts into the Liberal Arts mold – frequently to the consternation of students and teachers.

Good Enough

Picasso's Femme en Pleurs

A high school junior I know wants desperately to attend an art school.  Recently he asked me, “How do I know if I’m good enough?”

“Show your work to a teacher.” I said.  “To someone who’s good at what they do.  Someone who’s not related to you.  Someone who knows you, but maybe doesn’t love you.  Ask that person if your art is good.

“Maybe that person will talk about your art.  Maybe she’ll encourage you to experiment with color.  Or maybe she'll say ‘I like the way your sketches are composed,’ or ‘your photography is stronger than your sculpture.’  If she talks about your work, take that as a good sign and move forward toward art school.

“But if she talks about your personality, go slower.  If she says ‘I think you’ll want to be more disciplined in your work habits,’ or ‘Maybe you should focus more on meeting deadlines,’ then she’s talking about the kind of person you are, the kind of habits you have.  Even a high-dollar art college is unlikely to change those sorts of things.”

That distinction may also be helpful as families survey prospective schools.  Which colleges boast of award-winning student work?  Of internships and job placement?  Those schools may be very different from the ones which promote a safe campus, a satisfying college experience, or the sort of person you might become there.  Yes, it ought to be a false choice, but it isn't.  Schools set priorities -- some motivated by dollars, others by mission.

A Pretty Good Gatsby (B++)

Dramatic Script Analysis, Rule One:  The character who undergoes the most change is the story’s protagonist.  Seems almost self-evident, doesn’t it?  Scout matures in her understanding of racism.  Lawrence grows in his sympathy for Bedouin tribes.  Peter Parker becomes Spiderman.  It is chiefly from the perspective of these characters that audiences experience the plot.

This is, frankly, one of the problems with the Jesus narrative.  Immediately, audiences identify him as the central character.  But one of his chief attributes is immutability.  Indeed, a great many of his followers are comforted by the fact that he is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  He can’t change.  He can’t learn.  No one can surprise him.  So, as a dramatic character, he’s terminally boring.  (Please understand, I’m not faulting the salvific work of Christ.  I’m insulting no one’s Savior.  Don’t write me angry e-mails.  I’m talking only about the difficulty this character presents to storytellers.).

A lot of TV characters similarly threaten audiences with boredom.  Consider Gregory House.  He needs to be the same at the beginning and end of every story arc.  So even if it looks as if he might conquer his Vicodin addiction, he’s obliged to relapse.  Otherwise, he might cease to be the irascible addict that is the show’s reliable anchor.

To keep persons interesting who have a net character growth of zero, storytellers often opt for revelation.  House will always limp, but recollection (as in the excellent episode “Three Stories”) could show us how his leg came to be injured.  The continuous flashback that comprised all nine seasons of How I Met Your Mother demonstrates the principle taken to an extreme.  Such post-modern structural experiments can even make Jesus an interesting character (if you’re inclined to wince your way through Mel Gibson’s 2004 snuff-film-in-sheep’s-clothing, The Passion of the Christ).

Now imagine you’re F. Scott Fitzgerald.  It’s 1924.  Your editor, Maxwell Perkins, has just returned the draft of a novel you’re calling Trimalchio in West Egg.  Despite your attempts to produce "something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned,” Perkins calls it vague and asks you to spend a winter on the French Riviera revising it.

Your idea is to indict the emptiness of addictive decadence.  You wind the story around an increasingly hollow core of people.  You’ve set for yourself a thought experiment, to see if you can actually tell a story showcasing negative character growth.  The more readers learn about the book’s central personality, the less interesting he becomes.

Featuring characters that are neither likeable nor deep, the book is published to mixed reviews and sells a pitiful 20,000 copies.  You die 15 years later, believing your life to be a failure.

We know the rest.  In the wake of World War II, The Great Gatsby (as it was retitled), became the American novel and a must-read for every eleventh grader.  It also became a play, an opera, a Korean web comic, a theoretical economic model, a made-for-TV movie (twice) and a theatrical film (five times over).  Not one of the these re-tellings really wowed critics.  Indeed, the Wall Street Journal referred to Baz Luhrman’s 2013 version as “a spectacle in search of a soul.”  Which is precisely the point of the novel.  Accurately reflecting Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age ennui means, necessarily, making a movie which wins Oscar and BAFTA Awards for costume and production design – and nothing else. 

I once referred to Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient as the sort of book that couldn’t possibly be made into a film.  The threads of its plot were just too intricately woven.  But master editor Walter Murch made a liar of me.  Should have seen that one coming. 

Gatsby (in any of its incarnations) makes me think that perhaps character is a bigger challenge to storytelling than narrative structure.  I won’t say the book defies adaptation, but Jay Gatsby certainly resists audience empathy.  By design, he goes nowhere – neither forward through observable growth nor backward through expository revelation.  As Gertrude Stein famously observed “There’s no there there.”  Gatsby is nobody. 

And he’s a huge nobody.  At the height of his career in 1974, Robert Redford was Gatsby.  Leonardo DiCaprio was Gatsby in 2013.  Leo took home a $20 million paycheck to create a performance intentionally lacking charisma and depth.  To do otherwise would have strayed from the novel’s intent.  Audiences expecting star vehicles for their favorite heartthrobs were rightly confused.

 

Perhaps because of the bold nothingness at its center, I truly enjoyed The Great Gatsby.  I found Luhrman’s structure clearer than the book’s, the lines between people easier to map on screen.  The excesses of Gatsby’s bacchanals evoke the 1920s, yet seem pointedly lifted from “Rich Kids of Instagram.”  I wanted to go to these parties – yet the desire to do so colored me with guilt.  I wanted to visit these extravagant mansions, but only if it were possible to avoid their shallow owners.  I think I was lured to the precisely the scrutiny Fitzgerald hoped to engender.  Many times since (spoilers!) Gatsby’s funeral, I’ve found myself looking for the holes privilege might have dug in my own character.

Sterling Silver (Tarnished)

Donald Sterling is the rags-to-riches real estate mogul who's owned the L.A. Clippers since he bought the franchise for $12.5 million in 1981.  By all accounts, he's not a very good owner.  Apparently he can afford front-office screw-ups and nonsensical personnel decisions so long as he's not really committed to playoffs and championships

But Sterling's current problems are only tangentially related to sports.  A few days ago, celebrity gossip website TMZ.com came into possession of an audio recording.  On it, Sterling tells a woman (reportedly V. Stiviano) her public association with black men is negatively impacting her reputation -- and, by association, his own.

While I grant that Sterling's racism is disturbing, I'm not sure I'm able to focus on it to the exclusion of a larger context of craziness.  Sterling, 80, is married to Rochelle, his wife of 50 years.  Stiviano (nee Maria Vanessa Perez) is Sterling's mixed-race mistress.  In the recording, the 30-year-old woman is told it is acceptable for her to sleep with black men, so long as she isn't photographed with them.  

This complicated web of non-exclusive relationships is de rigueur for the Jerry Springer crowd.  It's a breeding ground (so to speak) of paternity suits and trailer park dust-ups.  But among the super rich, bed-hopping seems almost sophisticated in an Eyes Wide Shut kind of way.  So nobody's gasping with shock to hear the Sterling's taken a mistress.  And not even rabid feminists have objected to his permitting (or instructing?) "his" woman sleep with others.  Instead, the world insists on talking about how racism renders the guy unfit to own an NBA franchise.  Because if we start talking about how men in the professional athletic world treat women, I guess we're going to lose the moral authority to condemn Sterling as a special case.

All right, I'll play along.  Sterling's a racist.  He's been a racist for a long time.  And he can afford to be.  With a net worth of $1.9 billion, he can afford to treat a lot of people badly.  He can afford to pay "a record $2.725 million to settle allegations that he discriminated against African Americans, Hispanics and families with children at scores of apartment buildings he owns in and around Los Angeles."  He can afford to part with the largest settlement "ever obtained by the Justice Department in a housing discrimination case involving apartment rentals," according to a November 2009 article in The Los Angeles Times.

He's a sexist.  He's a racist.  But I'm not sure either of those should affect his ownership of the Clippers.  Mark Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks.  Cuban hasn't defended Sterling, but he has made the point that what a person says in private shouldn't threaten their ownership of property.  The Ford CEO, for example, might admit to his wife that he always hated the Taurus.

Is there something wrong, something false about the auto exec?  He doesn't like the Taurus, but seems to have no difficulty profiting from their manufacture.  He puts on a game face for the press.  He stands in front of the car for photographers.  Should he not be allowed to do so?  Do his privately held preferences disqualify him as spokesperson or shareholder?

Don't people you work with and for regularly profit from the labor of folks they dislike?  Yes, it's cheap and unethical to badmouth folks on the basis of their race or gender or what-have-you.  It's also cheap and unethical to gossip about their morals, their hygiene, their I.Q.  But privately held prejudices -- personal, performance-related, or even demographic -- don't disqualify the world's proprietors. 

This afternoon, Sterling was banned for life, a gutsy move by the NBA's new commissioner, Adam Silver.  Silver's in a tight spot.  He's hired and paid by team owners to police the league.  It's his unenviable job to bite the hand that feeds him.  And this is the sport's hardest bite ever.  The largest fine ($2.5 million).  The harshest sanction (though a lifelong ban for an 80-year-old...).  Silver swears he'll make Sterling sell.

In January, Forbes valued the Clippers at $575 million -- and that was before the Milwaukee Bucks (who?) sold for $500 million.  Forcing Sterling out would "punish" the man with no less than a 4600% return on his investment.  Additionally, the precedent of Sterling's ouster would weaken the grip of every other franchise owner.  Each of them would be one P.R. misstep, one night of pillow-talk away from the forced sale of their own team.  Of course, they must publicly support Silver.  But only a fool votes against his own wallet.

If the NBA owners' club blackballs its longest-tenured member, will there be ripple effects?  Will NFL commissioner Roger Goodell put thumbscrews to the Redskins' Dan Snyder?  It can easily be argued that Snyder's refusal to change his team's name constitutes a more public display of racism than any of Sterling's confidential conversations.

As right as it may feel to applaud the noble commissioner, surely we know there can be no such thing as a moral capitalism.

Get Busy Livin' or Get Busy Dyin'

Colleges fail.  They close.  "On average, five private 4-year non-profit colleges and universities have closed per year over the last ten years, with as many as 9 institutions closing in 2009" (Digest of Education Statistics, 2013).  They close because of low enrollment, small endowments, high debt, and deferred maintenance.  Among twenty indicators listed by Martin and Samel in their 2009 book, Turnaround: Leading Stressed Colleges and Universities to Excellence, a college risks closure when:

o   its enrollment is below 1000 students.

o   it depends on tuition for more than 85% of its operating budget.

o   more than 10% of its annual operating budget goes to servicing debt.

o   the average annual alumni gift is less than $75.

o   it can't develop an online program.

o   it hasn't developed a new degree program for at least two years.

o   the institution is on probation, warning, or financial watch with a regional accreditor.

Colleges close for reasons only tangentially related to leadership style, communication transparency, instructional quality, distinctive facilities, faculty commitment, student loyalty, or alumni nostalgia.  While those factors feel most central to institutional identity and constituent experience, none have the power to keep a failing college above water.

Furthermore (and perhaps harder to accept), loving Jesus exempts no business from the market forces that closed Circuit City, Borders, Woolworth, and Blockbuster.  In an April 2013 New York Times article, Jeffrey Selingo soberly quantifies the likelihood of institutional persistence.  "Only 500 or so of the 4,000-plus colleges and universities in the United States seem to have stable enough finances to be truly safe.  The remaining colleges… can no longer hold off the technological, demographic and economic forces quickly bearing down on them."

Idyllic Montreat College

Some vocal alums imagine they're owed transparent communication, that they merit a voice in a conversation of decision-makers.  But Montreat grads are a strange bunch.  Yes, survivors of the residential tradition return to the Barn for homecoming square dances, but so few of us offer the school our financial support that the low percentage of alumni donors recently threatened Montreat's bid for re-accreditation.  We don't give to the school.  And we rarely send our children.

Part of that is Montreat's own fault.  As one example, the school's recruitment strategy has historically privileged men's baseball over women's soccer.  To be blunt, baseball players often require significant tuition discounts.  Women's soccer players, by contrast, tend to come from the lucrative demographic of families able to pay the full cost of college.

Additionally, the school's selection of majors has long dumped graduates into low-earning professions. Degrees in Music, Religion, and Outdoor Education infrequently predict high-dollar philanthropy.  The satisfying but intangible nobility of those majors doesn't endow chairs or renovate dorms.

Yes, other college alumni typically have a place at the table.  They help to steer the legacy of their respective institutions.  But they pay for the privilege.

We might prefer that Montreat's leadership team explain the college ledger, line by gruesome line, to those who imagine themselves stakeholders.  But if the board is trying to secure a merger, a savior-donor, a new president, or even a larger student body, that's probably not the wisest public relations maneuver.  I'm not defending silence or obfuscation – of which there has been much.  But if I were desperately attempting to increase the college's curb appeal, I wouldn't simultaneously broadcast its every fiscal liability.

Instead, I'd play my financial cards close to my chest, publicly committing to no one option, yet investigating them all.  Yep. That's what I'd do if I held a hundred families in my palm.  That's what I'd do if a word from me could close a retirement account or end health coverage or send a sophomore scrambling to continue her education elsewhere. I wouldn't lie, but neither would I add to the fire of speculation.  I wouldn't injure or unduly panic any of my friends until no option remained.

That's how I'd play it if I feared Montreat would soon appear on a list of 130-odd closed or merged North Carolina colleges. That's what I'd do if I owned the school.  But I don't.  The trustees do.  As much as we may wish they were beholden to stock owners, they are not.  They are proprietors of a privately held business obliged to balance the books within the constraints of the law.  They are Ernst & Young, Publix Super Markets, Pilot Gas Stations.

I understand the instinctive need to embrace dear memories, to defend precious ideals.  I, too, wooed a sweetheart on the shores of Lake Susan. I cheered teams to victory from the bleachers of McAlister Gym.  I slept through French classes in Gaither Hall.  I cried at the funeral of Professor Bonnie Lundblad.  And I surrender not one of these memories to inflexible economic realities.  I begrudge no man his conscience.  I encourage no one to abandon the struggle to keep Montreat alive and kicking (though panic in the game's final seconds seems insincere when the need for a new and winning strategy has been evident since halftime).

Things end.  Often without dignity.  Seldom timed to our liking.  Many endings owe nothing to the Fall's corrosive influence.  They simply occur because God ordained time to work as a one-way, forward flow from one event to another.

Things end because the God of kindergarten is also the God of graduation.  The God of happy birthdays is the God of old age.  The God of flight is the God of gravity.  The God of rainbows is the God of rain.  Through starting pistols and finish lines alike, our God speaks his will into the world.  Selective proof-texting too often confines God to the cage of Alpha.  We should not forget he also merits worship for being, gloriously and authoritatively, the Omega.