Cancel culture is the new form of pillorying. But instead of showing up in the town square, we in essence cancel our relationship with the alleged perpetrator — for our purposes here, the artist — ostracizing them as a way of extracting penance. Careers have been ruined by a tell-all documentary, fairly or not…because doesn’t it depend on who’s doing the telling, what their motivation is? Will I ever watch a Woody Allen movie again? Rock out to Michael Jackson? Maybe. Probably. Most likely. Okay, yes.
But sometimes it’s personal.
My close friend was married to a musician, a household name, though I choose not to name him. He left my friend — his wife of 40 years, the mother of his three children and grandmother of five — for a woman half his age. What a cliché. But because of what he did to my friend, now I can’t listen to his music without my feelings affecting my appreciation of it. Without choice, sometimes I happen to hear it — while grocery shopping, for example — and while I acknowledge his artistry and maybe even hum along for a moment, my knowledge of what kind of person he is makes it impossible to enjoy, and I stop humming,
Maybe you CAN separate the art from the artist. But you can sure as hell choose not to.
Michael Jackson’s actions were so unforgivable that I cringe when I hear his music. But now that he’s gone, is it okay to dance? I’m not sure. Read More
The house I grew up in had many lovely architectural features – a fireplace, a lovely stairwell, and a beautiful oval stained glass window that was in my mother’s closet.
I loved sitting in that closet. It was a cozy and private place for a child to play, and the light coming through the stained glass would bathe the closet floor in lovely colors as I sat between the windowed wall and the wall opposite that held a rod for my mother’s clothing and a shelf below for her shoes.
My mother wasn’t much of a clothes horse, and I don’t remember that she had any really memorable outfits; she used no make-up other than lipstick; and the only jewelry she usually wore were earrings and a stand of pearls. But I do remember she had a pair of strappy, alligator shoes that she prized and were probably rather costly.
In fact Fluffy often followed me into my mother’s closet, and we were playing there once when I heard her call me to dinner. I ran out leaving the dog behind.
Hours later I was upstairs in my third floor bedroom when I heard my mother cry out from my parents’ bedroom a floor below, “Look what that dog has done! She’s been in my closet and she’s destroyed my pair of alligator shoes!”
“Ah Jess,” I heard my calm and ever-conciliatory father say, “don’t be too hard on Fluffy, and don’t exaggerate. She only chewed up one shoe, not the pair.”
