Author: The Arts Are Life

These past couple of weeks I was looking for a new show because we are nearing the end of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and finished the last episode of Abbott Elementary season 2. My family kept talking about how good Ted Lasso was, and frankly I didn’t know really anything about the show other than people talking about how good it was and that it won a lot of awards, so I thought, This show must be really good. We ended up watching the first three episodes in one evening because it was that good.

If you haven’t seen the show yet, it is about a football coach from America who has a very optimistic nature but then gets recruited to go to coach football in England and people wonder, What is this guy and his cheery disposition doing thousands of miles across the Atlantic, especially because he doesn’t know anything about football in the United Kingdom, which is soccer here in America (they call Ted a “wanker” throughout the season, and at the beginning not in a good way.) Rebecca and her assistant, Higgins, are determined to bring down Ted and the football team. Rebecca wants to do this to get back at her cheating lying ex-husband Rupert, who Higgins let sleep with other women behind Rebecca’s back and who really treasured the football team. However, Ted has a cheery optimistic nature that ends up being quite contagious even if his football team doesn’t warm up to it well in the beginning. For the team they are really sick of losing, and they have an egotistic player on the team named Jamie, who is only focused on his own success and not about the team’s success. And then we’ve got the super hot Roy Kent (played by Brett Goldstein), who harbors a lot of anger issues but is dedicated to leading the team. Ted Lasso does what he can to encourage each of the team members, including the team assistant Nathan, or “Nate,” who gets bullied and ostracized by the soccer team. Ted and Coach Beard embrace Nate, who ends up providing a lot of moral support for the team and ends up coming out of his shell to become a more confident person. Roy even gets the other boys to stop picking on Nate, without Ted intervening. Ted doesn’t want to intervene because he believes that Roy has the potential to stop the bullying. Honestly, Ted reminded me of this chapter in The Lotus Sutra called Bodhisattva Never Disparaging. In this chapter this person named Bodhisattva Never Disparaging seeks to lead people to enlightenment by telling them they have a Buddha nature, which is our inherent potential to be wise, courageous and compassionate and to overcome any challenge that comes our way. The people in his environment throw sticks and stones at him and call him names whenever he tells them they have a Buddha nature and bows in respect to them, but while making sure to keep himself at a distance he continues to tell them that he would never look down on them because they are respect-worthy Buddhas. Ted Lasso reminds me of Bodhisattva Never Disparaging because no matter how down on themselves the people on the football team are, Ted never gives up on them and encourages them to believe in themselves. Honestly, I was surprised that Jason Sudeikis was at first going to make Ted Lasso a mean guy because Ted is so nice, but then I remembered that a lot of sports dramas I see the coach is serious and often harsh to the players in order to toughen them up, but I’m so glad the writers made Ted a nice guy because the political climate was divisive and there was (and still is) already so much anger in the world that it helps to have a character who is kind and gives people hope.

I really like though how the show is addressing the importance of seeking help for mental health. Ted is far away from his family, but it’s because his wife wanted emotional space from him. He tries to brush it off with optimism, but even he finds out that when you feel sad or worried, there is no shame in addressing it and being honest about it. Ted’s wife and son travel from America to visit Ted in England, but then he finds his wife crying and she admits that she isn’t happy in her marriage with Ted, and so she leaves him. This takes a serious toll on his mental health and he tries to come into the office and stay optimistic about it, but Nate and Coach Beard understand on a deeper level that Ted is suffering because his wife divorced him, and they do their best to support him through this tough time. Ted ends up having a severe panic attack because of the emotional toll his divorce from his wife has taken on him, and Rebecca finds him suffering from a panic attack and helps him. This was really touching because it showed me that mental health is a serious thing and it’s not something you can just tough out on your own, and it really does help to have friends who support you. I have definitely been in that place where I try to tough out the depression through smiling or not talking about my pain, but then I end up harboring a lot of my own anger and resentment inside and then when it explodes I feel worse about myself because I took out my anger on people who didn’t deserve it. I think this is why seeking professional help was so crucial because my therapist gave me a new way of looking at stressful situations and I found new healthier coping mechanisms for dealing with stress. I think especially it was helpful to visit therapy because the COVID-19 pandemic was stressful and traumatic for so many people, and I remember coming out of quarantine and having to face my depression and loneliness head-on. Depression has been a huge part of my life and I have gone through so many ups and downs with it, but watching shows like Ted Lasso that address mental health reminds me that I’m not alone and that a lot of people deal with mental illness even if they don’t talk about it. There is a really cool campaign that the Ad Council has done about talking about mental health, and there is one ad where teens are bombarded by messages of toxic positivity on their phones and by their family and peers, who tell them things like, “Why are you depressed? You have a roof over your head?” or “Men don’t cry.” or “Just think positive thoughts.” And then it showed these teens’ friends sending them empathetic supportive messages like, “Do you want to talk about it?” or “I’m always here to talk” rather than brushing over their feelings. As someone who has been in that camp of “just think positive” I have learned the hard way that you can’t just brush over someone’s feelings like that and addressing mental health isn’t as simple as “just think happy thoughts.” In fact, in my junior year of college I kept a journal with a message “Think Happy Thoughts” emblazoned across the cover with sunshine and butterflies painted on it. Anything but. The journal was filled with my deepest insecurities, anxieties and darkest thoughts. It contained depression, suicide, pain, anger, resentment but also gratitude, love, and some positivity. I wasn’t about to gloss over my suffering when I wrote that journal, because journaling was one of the few ways I felt comfortable talking about my pain because I didn’t think that others around me would understand what I was going through. I worried about being a burden on others, but I think that’s why I love my Buddhist activities because I get to support other youth who struggle with not just mental health but problems in general. That’s not to say that my mental health issues are gone; I still very much learned from this experience that there is no one size fits all magic cure for depression, anxiety, PTSD and other mental illnesses, and everyone’s experience with their mental health is different. But what Ted Lasso taught me is the importance of connection and knowing you have someone to talk to even if it’s uncomfortable to be vulnerable and honest with the person about what you’re going through. Ted is vulnerable and that takes courage because we are still living in a society where people still have to overcome a lot of fear, judgment and shame around talking about mental health. And I love how he encourages his team to be vulnerable as well, especially as young men, being vulnerable is such a valuable thing. I remember when I watched Blackish and in the next to last episode Junior, Pops and Dre go on a camping trip because Junior just broke up with his girlfriend, Olivia, and is still dealing with the heartbreak. Dre and Pops tell him to “man up” but Junior is sick of them telling him to man up because he is human and doesn’t need to be strong all the time. This is especially important because Pops and Dre didn’t get to be honest about their feelings growing up so it makes them uncomfortable at first that Junior is open and honest about how much pain he is in over breaking up with Olivia. This episode showed me the value of vulnerability.

Written: May 16, 2023

I watched the movie Elvis last weekend, and I must say it was pretty good. I first saw the trailer and thought, Man, this looks incredible. And I am a huge fan of the Academy Awards, and saw that this movie got nominated for several awards, including Best Picture. To be honest, I haven’t watched too many films directed by Baz Luhrmann, and I only watched a few minutes of his remake of The Great Gatsby. But I gotta tell you, it’s definitely a unique style of filmmaking because there are just so many stunning visuals in the film and Baz really incorporates a lot of modern-day music into this film. Honestly, I usually take notes when I am watching a movie but I realized that the bright colors and the flashy montages are a huge element of the film, so I felt I missed a lot by trying to dissect or intellectualize it during the first viewing.

This movie has a lot in common with movies I have watched about the music industry, and one common theme these biographical dramas about music show is the pitfalls of fame. There is a concept in Buddhism called the eight winds, and it basically says that people shouldn’t be swayed by neither favorable circumstances nor unfavorable circumstances. The four favorable winds are prosperity, honor, praise and pleasure, and the four adverse winds are decline, disgrace, censure, and suffering. Buddhist reformer Nichiren Daishonin wrote to his disciple, Shijo Kingo, who was a samurai with a hot temper, to keep practicing Buddhism and not let his anger influence his behavior, especially because Kingo was ordered to leave his estate because of his strong conviction in the Daishonin’s teaching. I had this idea that actors and musicians were happy because they became successful, but as I studied the concept of the eight winds, it taught me that a lot of successful people are unhappy and being successful doesn’t mean you don’t struggle or go through things. In the movie, it’s like the eight winds was so applicable because Elvis wins all this praise and fame but he ends up unhappy, and he has a toxic relationship with his manager, who wants nothing more than to make money from Elvis. Tom tells Elvis that he wants him to go on an international tour, but it ends up being a scam. Tom can’t leave the country since he doesn’t have immigration papers, so the international tour ends up being a tour in the U.S. Elvis’s doctor also prescribes him a lot of medications, and his health deteriorates as the film continues. His wife, Priscila, tells him she is worried about his health and that he is taking so many pills, and he tells her he is going to take care of it, but honestly, it’s hard. It made me think of the movie A Star is Born with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper because Bradley’s character, Jack, is depressed and struggles with addiction, and his wife, Ally, who he inspired to make a career of music, feels he is wasting his life away and feeling sorry for himself. But as someone who has struggled with their mental health, it is a day-to-day battle against your inner darkness. It really is, and it’s not easy. I haven’t struggled with addiction, but I have struggled with depression, and it is not as easy as just switching your thinking. It’s an illness, and like anything else I need to manage it. Elvis had to keep going, going, going, and didn’t have time to stop, and I’m sure back then it was tough because there wasn’t a whole lot of space to talk about mental health and there wasn’t any social media where people could feel ok being vulnerable about the challenges they were going through. There was another movie that reminded me of Elvis, and that movie was Judy, a biopic about actress and singer Judy Garland starring Renee Zellweger as Judy. Like Elvis, Judy Garland had a successful career but struggled with addiction and health issues and faced a lot of pressures early on with fame and success.

Something I wanted to address though, and I had read this in some other reviews, was how the film depicts Elvis’s adoption of Black music traditions and his recording of music originally by Black artists. I became more aware of this because I had seen the film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom a few years ago, and it addresses the exploitation of Black artists by record companies that were run by white executives. The movie is a film adaptation of a play by late playwright August Wilson, and it takes place in a Chicago recording studio and Ma Rainey is going to record her music but demands respect and autonomy over her music. She knows that the white record executives only wanted to make money off of her music, leaving her with no money for herself. She knows that the record company would make millions off of her recordings and leave her nary a cent, so she was going to demand that these white executives treat her with respect. In one scene, it’s a hot day in the studio and Ma tells them to go get her a Coke, and when the executives try to plead with her she tells them she is not recording anything until she gets her Coke. Then, when they finally get it, she takes her long sweet time drinking the Coke and then finally records it. Ma doesn’t just demand respect from the executives, she demands respect from her band as well. She isn’t willing to give up her music and voice to the record company that easily because she knows her worth as a human being and knows she doesn’t deserve that kind of unfair treatment. There is a member of her band named Levee, and he is the exact opposite. He sells his music to the record executives thinking they will make him a star, but my guess is that they end up selling his music and making all the money from it because at the end, an all-white band of musicians records the song and knowing the time period they probably didn’t give him any credit whatsoever or acknowledge he even wrote the music. It was not just sad, it was infuriating to find that the executives took his music and didn’t give him credit for it, but it showed me how music wasn’t free of the discrimination that was prevalent in society and how a lot of Black artists were not given credit for their songs. Ma was also just trying to survive, though, so she had to take ownership of her work because a lot of Black musicians, no matter how successful they were and how many commercial hits they produced, didn’t get the financial compensation they deserved and many of them struggled with poverty even after being successful. I remember watching a movie called Dreamgirls, and there is a scene where the Dreamettes record a song and then later find out that a white band copied their song without permission. It wasn’t until I saw that movie that I found out that Big Mama Thornton was the original singer of “Hound Dog,” not Elvis, but most people know Elvis’s version of “Hound Dog.” It got played on the radio, in stores, in the movie Lilo and Stitch. But it wasn’t until one of the characters mentioned that Big Mama Thornton was the original singer of the song that I started to think more about the issue of cultural appropriation. Elvis’s musical legacy when it came to the Black community is complicated, and there is probably so much research I need to do on this, but I think the film focused more on his relationship to Tom Parker. It touched on his relationship to the Black community and influence of blues and gospel on his music but it was mainly focused on Elvis the performer and his toxic relationship with Tom. Honestly I struggled to write this review without talking about Elvis and his relationship with Black musicians and the Black community because it’s been a huge discussion for so long and Black musicians did have a huge influence on Elvis’s music, and frankly I’m not a historian so I can’t really speak on this topic in length since I haven’t done as much extensive research as the people who have written about this topic in depth, but I was reading more about this aspect of the film in reviews such as this one in USA Today and this one on Slate and it definitely made me aware that I couldn’t just gloss over the topic of race when talking about Elvis or pretend like it wasn’t important to the storyline of the movie.

Written May 3 2023

Episode 3, “Typos and Torsos”

In this episode, Abe accidentally puts a typo in his work and it really bugs him. He ends up sharing with Ethan a graphic story about a plane crash that dismembered a lot of people and Ethan is scared to death. In 1984, Midge visits her son, Ethan, who is all grown up now, in Israel, where he is working on a kibbutz, or a communal settlement in Israel. He is working in the fields with everyone else, when suddenly he hears and sees a helicopter descend down into the fields, and his mother, Midge, gets out of the helicopter and surprises him with an unexpected visit. He seems embarrassed but glad to catch up with her. She catches up with him and he tells her he is training to become a rabbi, but is also getting married and he introduces her to his fiance, Chava, who joined the Israeli army and went to school in America, but doesn’t like Midge much and seems stuck up to Midge. Midge leaves and before leaving, she tells Ethan that she wishes he told her that he was getting married. He apologizes for not telling her earlier. It’s really hard for Midge to see her kids grow up so soon, and it was hard for me, too, because in previous seasons I just saw Ethan and Esther as little kids who had these loving but also crazy parents. But the final season was a reminder that change is the only constant in life, and no matter how successful our careers and lives are, we will have to face getting older and then dying.

The episode flashes back to 1961, and Midge and Joel are setting up Ethan’s sleeping area outside in the hallway because his therapist told them he needed a designated area to sleep outside of his room, so the two of them set up specific markers to designate Ethan’s sleeping area. Early in the episode, Gordon meets in the writer’s room and gives everyone feedback about the jokes they wrote for him to deliver on the show based on whether people thought they were funny. After watching this episode, I have so much more respect for writers in the writer’s room because in recent news this has become more evident because late night TV shows are going dark because the writers for these shows are going on strike for better pay. I really didn’t pay much attention to this at first. In 2007-2008 (more specifically, from November 5, 2007 to February 12, 2008), thousands of film and television screenwriters of writers’ labor unions went on strike. My older sister, who was really into journalism at the time, was reading the news and talking about it, and how this was going to have a huge impact on film and television production. The recent strike is the first in fifteen years, according to AP News, and this strike happened because many film and TV writers failed to reach a new contract with the trade association representing Hollywood studios and production companies. The union wants higher minimum pay, more writers per show and shorter exclusive contracts, and streaming has made it hard for these demands to get met because there is so much content that the writers have to produce and they are not being fairly compensated for it.

Another part that made me reflect was when Joel tells Midge that he thinks therapy is weak, but then she sees her mother, Rose, freaking out over hearing a clatter when there wasn’t any noise and Abe is losing it because an article he published has a typo in it, and it’s driving him over the edge, and even though Midge tells him to calm down he refuses to forgive himself. Rose is also on edge because the matchmakers burned down her tea room and she asks Susie if she can get a gun to protect her from the matchmakers. Honestly, I’m glad Ethan is seeing a therapist and I am also glad Esther saw a therapist later on in life, even though therapy isn’t easy and it’s tough bringing up trauma and childhood memories that weren’t all that great. Midge is also experiencing many ups and downs at work. It’s great because when she is working in the writer’s room, one of the men asks her for her jokes to submit for the show, and she is surprised because up until then they ignored her or told her she wasn’t supposed to write new material in between the show. But the fact that they let her share what she wrote is a big step. The team types it up and asks Gordon for his approval. Gordon looks it over and approves, and Midge is surprised that her joke is actually going to make it into the show.

Until Gordon makes a mistake when sharing the joke, that is. While delivering the joke, he purposefully botches the pronunciation of the punchline. Midge lets out an audible “Are you fucking kidding me?!?” groan and everyone hears her, including Gordon. She later confronts Gordon while he is talking with someone and interrupts their conversation to apologize to Gordon. Because he is busy talking, he reluctantly forgives her but then she tells him he should apologize for telling her joke wrong, but he insists he changed it on purpose. They end up getting in a huge heated argument with each other and it makes the newspaper headlines. Susie calls Midge with the news and Midge finds out she is about to be fired. When she comes in the next day, everyone in the writer’s room is staring at her silently because of what she did, and she brings a shoebox because she doesn’t have a lot of stuff she brought with her to the office. I kind of made me think of “Game Over,” an episode on the show Broad City. In the episode Ilana Wexler gets fired from her day job at Deals Deals Deals for tweeting a graphic bestiality video just days after the investor, Elizabeth (Vanessa Williams) promotes Ilana to run Deals Deals Deals’ Twitter account because of her expertise in Internet memes. She brings a large box to put her stuff in when she gets fired. But it turns out that unlike Ilana, Midge gets to stay at her job and is in fact not getting fired. It reminded me of when I was at my first office job and honestly I was cocky and thought I knew everything, and two years into the job I made a huge mistake that nearly cost the company and almost got me terminated. I didn’t get fired but it taught me a lesson, that I needed to ask for help whenever I didn’t know what to do on an assignment and to always take responsibility for my actions.

Meanwhile, Shirley, Joel’s mother and Midge’s mother-in-law, comes to Joel’s club unannounced. She drinks a lot, she chats up the guests and dotes on Joel, handing out expired crackers to people to cure them of their hangovers. Shirley doesn’t want to go home to Moishe, her husband and Midge’s father-in-law, or stay in the house with him since they are getting a divorce and neither of them is getting along with the other, so she pretty much hangs out at his club. She almost gets in a fight with Mrs. Moskowitz after insulting her. Mrs. Moskowitz has gradually shown how tough she is throughout the show, because honestly at the beginning I thought she was just this sweet little lady with a smile but it turns out that she is no nonsense and even wielded a baseball bat for people who weren’t allowed to come into the club but who tried to anyway. Shirley and Moishe still don’t know that Mei left Joel, and that there is no longer going to be a baby because Mei got an abortion and she also left for Chicago to follow her dreams of becoming a doctor. This blows over one night when Midge checks on Joel at the club and decides to do some stand up after Moishe insults Joel’s band and they walk off the stage, fed up with Moishe’s heckling. However, Midge doesn’t get off scot-free from their heckling, either. Whenever Midge tries to speak, Shirley and Moishe consistently heckle her from the audience and fight with one another, so she ends up having to cut her act short as they kept heckling her. When Midge is in the ladies’ room, Shirley approaches her and asks her if she knows what the deal is with Mei because Joel hasn’t followed up with them about the baby and Mei and him getting married (he announced this to them in episode 1 of this season). Midge knows Shirley will freak out if she tells her that Mei got an abortion and moved to Chicago, so she lies and tells Shirley that Mei moved to China. She tells Joel that she lied but he tells her he will tell them. When Ethan is still sleeping in the hallway, Abe decides to tell him to go back to his bed and debunks what the therapist told Ethan. He tells Ethan this horrifying story about a plane crash that killed many people and includes very vivid and graphic details about the crash, and at the end he tells Ethan that everyone is going to die someday, including him, and that he has to accept that fear is a part of his life and that he has to live with it. Honestly this sat with me because for a long time I have dealt with anxiety and depression, and I often thought about life and death a lot as I got older. Death is still an uncomfortable topic for me but I have realized that it is an inherent part of life rather than a transcendent state divorced from reality. Learning about life and death from a Buddhist perspective actually forced me to appreciate my life even more, because I had wanted to kill myself many times but after reading about what happens after death, I realized it was a better idea to just navigate through the good times and the bad times and to create meaning from them rather than just decide in the here and now that my life was meaningless. One of my close friends passed away early this month, and as difficult as it was to watch her nearing the end of her life, I had to accept that it was a reality and that the process of grief was going to be very difficult. I am very waterworks when someone close to me dies, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, which took many people’s lives, I tried to desensitize myself by reading statistics but at the end I had to understand the very traumatic scale of COVID-19 and how it impacted how I viewed life and death. Ethan ends up sleeping in his own room but has terrible nightmares after what Abe told him. At the end of the episode, they play the song “Mr. Big Stuff” by Jean Knight, which is one of my favorite songs.