Cultural Gulfs Tribute to Lucille (I Love Lucy) Ball, Chica Brava

The Woman Behind the Clown

Honorary new member of Chicas Bravas.  Lucy passed 25 years ago.

Sunday AM tribute in the vein of "Cultural Gulfs", and how urban USA markets create an incubator for diversity and equality to triumph in.  USA television became a vehicle for women's rights, cultural integration, and spawned a "Star Trek" culture where the vision of the future is cooperative diversity - the exact opposite of Hitler's Nazi Arian monoculture and Sharia etc.   Thanks, Lucy.

(PS: Funny, I wrote and posted this without even realizing it was the 25th anniversary of her death, I was just inspired by laughing at a rerun of I Love Lucy, and started blogging..."Like laundromats heros are sometimes right under our noses"... written with no clue she's on the cover of Huffington Post today)

Hispanic husband 6 years younger? So?

Rising on my list of heroes. Lucille Ball.  An honorary Chicas Bravas.

Hardest working woman in 1950s showbusiness.

Lucy's insistence on better quality led to invention of live studio taping, multi camera editing rooms. She and Desi negotiated to pay (rather than network pay) for the higher quality in return for the first "syndication" (rerun) ownership rights of their own I Love Lucy show, a smart move that paid for their own studio. She strong-armed Hollywood into accepting America would accept a bicultural husband-wife sitcom, and carried the ball.

What brought them down? Divorce didn't help. But according to this article Lucy got leveraged on production costs for these weird expensive production shows... Star Trek and Mission Impossible - which all the other studios had passed on.

She was scorned by many older, more powerful, Hollywood men. A real glass ceiling pounder. If we had had stronger womens equality in the 50s and 60s, and a kickstarter campaign, Lucy would probably be bigger than George Lucas.

Another Desilu production passed over by bigger Hollywood Studios?  Carl Reiner's Dick Van Dyke Show, which I grew up loving.  She sold Desilu to Gulf and Western in 1967, which combined it with Paramount pictures, a studio G&W bought a year earlier..

And I would add that it was Lucy who muscled in the inter-cultural marriage which made Loving vs. Virginia, the Supreme Court case legaizing all interracial marriages, easier for America to swallow.

Search periodicals like "The Economist" for insights into how Womenomics works.   Glass ceilings (and bamboo ones) hold back Japan, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

How Lucille Ball Made STAR TREK Happen

Published September 08, 2013 by Devin Faraci

Cultural Gulfs in Emerging Markets 8: Tooth Repair in Kowloon's Walled City

33,000 people
8,000 homes
1,000 businesses
2.8 hectares

That's 1.2 million people per square kilometer (Manhattan is 27 thousand per square km)

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating 18 minute video (Greg Girard and Ian Lambot) documentary on Kowloon's "walled city", the slum which formed outside of Hong Kong, as rural peasants and refugees sought shelter in a place that was closer to Hong Kong's growing economic power in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s.  It was condemned in the late 80s and torn down in the early 90s, as Hong Kong became too prosperous, land values increased, and people became embarrassed and self conscious of the towering slum, which typically housed four families to an apartment.

This fits with the "Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets" blog series.  There are equivalents to Kowloon's walled city today, counterparts in Cairo, Lagos, Kinshasa, Lima, and Mexico City.

The move from spacious rural poverty to dense urban poverty is a mind trip, an incredible social and cultural shock.  It explains the demand for hundreds of millions of SKD televisions (small TVs made from reused USA computer monitors in the 1990s-early 2000s).  It explains the growth of internet, ten times the rate of growth in nations earning 3,000 dollars per year as in the "developed world"

The documentary begins with some of the "bad jobs" the walled city became known for, and the early "poverty porn" (before the term) in kung fu movies and Jean Claude Van Damme and Jacky Chan films.

During my life, living and working with people who know these city-slums intimately, bringing my family close by or inside these places, or to eat with families who once lived in these places and have now moved up on on, I'm sad that there has been so little documentation of the "tinkerers blessing".   The WSJ documents heroin and opium trade, prostitution, and primitive dentistry (a form of repair)... though it does later briefly allude to how good the dentistry became, how the dentists progressed.

Laptop repair and cell phone repair is a form of bloodless dentistry.

Enough, click to watch.

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets 7: The Rusty Radiator Awards

Although I had a degree in International Relations, had spent a semester at the UN, and made a career in the science of development, I racially profiled someone in Singapore in 2005.    I know it now.   I deserve a rusty radiator for racism.

On my way back from Guangzhou, where I had gone for a second visit to see the second-hand shops of Foshan and the "Big Secret Factories" of CRT reuse, I stopped in Malaysia and Singapore for a couple of days.   Armed with my camera, I decided to hunt for some "exotic photos" to prove that I too, like Jim Puckett of BAN.org, had "been there".  Now, Interpol is trumpeting their act. with a project to describe their efforts to arrest "criminals" I refer to as the "geeks of color".

I understand where David Higgins' group at Interpol is coming from.  E-Waste is in the news, and we want to show our credibility, show we have been there, walked the streets, and have seen the problem.  We work for the (world) government, and are here to help. 

The shop below I presented in a Powerpoint slide at a NERC.org conference as an example (an olive branch to Puckett and Westervelt) of clearly bad imports.   I had stayed on the street, waiting for the man who owned this shop (Mr. Teck Recycle) to roll up the metal door.  He had a ladder on the inside, which he needed to physically climb up to the ceiling to start to descend items for resale on the street. 

I acted like I knew where this guy's material came from.   I didn't.

It seemed the guy had packed this 4M x 10M street shop "to the gills" with imports, and was never going to be able to reuse it all.  I represented this person as an example of "toxics along for the ride", of being an example of the primitive importer, and contrasted him with the SKD (semiknockdown or semi-knock-down) factories I wanted to "reform", in our view.

I confess that I assumed this was all recently imported material.  I had absolutely no evidence of that. We now know that the 6 billion people in the "non-OECD" generate far, far more used electronic scrap than the OECD does.

Lets teach them all the missionary position, put them in top hats, and certify them as non-primitives.

Was Mr. Teck Recycle importing at all?   Singapore, though not "OECD", was already as wealthy then as California.   It had become wealthy via the "Tinkerer's Blessing", the reuse and refurbishment trade, which evolved into contract assembly, then into ODM (Original Design and Manufacture).  Sure, some of this material may have been imported, but I had no idea how long before Mr. Teck Recycle got it.   What percentage came from residents of Singapore, which at that time had a higher percentage of engineering degrees, and higher percentage of online high speed bandwith, than the USA's Silicon Valley?   Why did I immediately assume the Singaporean shops were filled with USA "toxics along for the ride" (a phrase I pounded at the NERC audience?)

Sure, it was a sound theory.  Maybe some of this stuff did come "along for the ride".  But I had no proof, all I had was a need to position myself not-too-distantly from Basel Action Network's "80% Primitive Recycling" export statistic, which we now know is no more true than 80% of Los Angeles black teenagers are gang members and high school drop outs (BTW that's said tongue in cheek, it's obviously untrue, but the fact I have to apologize and point that out shows the root of whitey's problem).

Ghana TV repair 2014

Profiling.

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets #6: Nneka Egbuna

Last week, between snow shovelling, I posted a little blog with a video of an interesting cover of Outcast's Hey Ya, by Obidiah Parker.   While shuffling around youtube for the link, I happened upon some African pop videos, and got arrested by Nneka Lucia Egbuna.  According to her Wikipedia biography, Nneka was raised in Warri, a petroleum ("resource curse") pothole turned "cosmopolitan city" of 312,000 in the delta of Southern Nigeria.

Nneka grew up in Nigeria, but went to university in Hamburg at 18... a big cultural gulf.  In the theme of gangstagrass / cultural melting pots and urban music, I listened to several of the songs on her "Soul is Heavy" album last night and this morning.



I'm posting more about Nneka for two reasons.  First, I like a couple of her songs a lot, especially the title track of Soul is Heavy (which I posted below the Outcast cover).   It was only when I listened/watched the video a second time that I realized the background of the chorus "teach me lies" is adorned with old African television sets.

I don't pretend to know Nneka's position on the Interpol crackdown vs. the "geeks of color" whose cause I've embraced, but in a second video, "My Home", she poses as two things - a conflict metal gold mining worker (the place Western mercury from recycling programs gets sold, for alleuvial gold mining) and then a city trash worker (I presume in Lagos, wearing .A.W.M.A- LAGOS STATE WASTE MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY, on an orange PPE - personal protective equipment uniform).  Damn.  Must watch.

Below... at least watch through the coltan mining and public solid waste worker shots.

That's a pretty good snapshot of what's going on in Africa.  Junk televisions rank about as high on Africa's priority list as they did in the USA and Europe in 1990.  The "e-waste export crisis" makes as much sense as the Radiator-Aid humorous videos.  Recycling stereotype after stereotype.

(*Much more to come, in a future blog, about the RustyRadiator.com project).  RustyRadiator project is another northern-Europe / African collaboration, like Nneka, whose moniker reminds me of the #1 hit 30 years ago, when I boarded the flight to Africa to start my Peace Corps career (give up?  Nena - of Germany - 99 Luftballoons but that is a "punctuation level digression", or "third level digression" sorry... I've lost a lot of readers on those turns.... end digression*).

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets #2: Guilt Kittens

Well, if ever there was a blog title to discourage readership, I think I found it - "Morality of drowning kittens".  The proper thing seems to be some warning of the subject matter on the relativity of "cultural morality", and giving the proper weight to the moral decisions of the rural and unempowered.  I don't want to lure a reader inside and shock them.  The alternative title to Cultural Gulfs #2 was "A Load of Clue".

When I was four or five years old, I lived in Columbia Missouri, a college town.  My dad and mom were both from Taney County in the Ozarks (Land of Taney, Elmo Ingenthron now $55-210 on Amazon), both studying at the University of Missouri.   Each was the only person in their respective high school classes to go to college (though my mom, a female valedictorian, did not get a scholarship to MU.  The rotarians gave her one to a secretary school in Springfield.  She married my dad instead, at 18 years old, and left the county).

We lived in the basement of my auntie Maude Freeland (dad's aunt), who grew up on Indian reservations in the southwest with her father, a teacher in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  My great grandfather was a onetime liberal converted to Republican newspaper editor by the "unintended consequences of charity".  He disliked FDR and the TVA, thought government bureaucracy was always worse than private sector development, and he basically fought to keep the TVA out of the Ozarks.  One year, my mom's brother Eddie lived in the basement with us as he went through his freshman year at MU.  It was cozy.  Auntie Maude never married, worked as a photographer for the newspaper and wrote editorials for the Taney County Republican.

Columbia Missouri was the "big city".  Well, really St. Louis and Chicago were not that far away, but for people whose parents grew up in homemade shoes, Columbia had electricity and running water and was a symbol of American progress much earlier than Taney County.  I imagine it wasn't that different from a rural Chinese family moving closer to Guangzhou, living in the basement of an aunt's house, putting up an adult brother from the farm.

(there's a great video posted at the bottom of the blog, John Jacob Niles singing over old film of mining, stay tuned).