The New York Times - USA (2020-06-25)

THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020 C1

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NEWS CRITICISM

3 NEWS

Court will hear Bill Cosby’s

appeal. BY GRAHAM BOWLEY

2 THEATER

A playwright tells his back

story. BY ELISABETH VINCENTELLI

5 BOOK REVIEW

Reclaiming a

rebellious Victorian

woman from the

footnotes. BY PARUL SEHGAL

Jon Batiste, the jazz pianist and “The Late

Show With Stephen Colbert” bandleader,

has spent the last three weekends marching

in the streets of New York, leading musi-

cians and protesters through hymns and

songs like “We Shall Overcome” and “Down

by the Riverside.” Those without a horn or

drum sing and, at Mr. Batiste’s exhortation,

say their names: George Floyd. Breonna

Taylor. And many others.

On June 12, however, Mr. Batiste opened

his protest concert, part of a series called

“We Are,” seated at an upright piano in front

of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, wearing

a mask and bright-blue protective gloves.

Unaccompanied, surrounded by hundreds

of silent protesters, he dug deep into a song

that he says demands reinvention: “The

Star-Spangled Banner.”

“We all know that Francis Scott Key

owned slaves,” Mr. Batiste said of the song’s

lyricist in a Zoom interview last week. In

Mr. Batiste’s hands, the national anthem

seethes, mourns and aspires, drawing on

the rollicking stride piano of Fats Waller

and the volcanic eruptions of Art Tatum.

“The way that Jimi Hendrix took the

song, the way that Marvin Gaye or Whitney

took it — that tradition is what I am thinking

of when I play it,” Mr. Batiste, 33, added.

“The diaspora that they infused into it is a

response to the toxic ideologies that are em-

bedded in the song and thus in the culture.”

The history of jazz is in many ways a his-

tory of protest, of celebrating blackness and

insisting on individual freedom. The com-

poser and bass player William Parker, who

HIROKO MASUIKE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Jon Batiste

Is Taking It

To the Streets

The jazz pianist and ‘Late Show’

bandleader gets his musical message out.

By ALAN SCHERSTUHL

Jon Batiste on the steps

of the Brooklyn Library

at a Juneteenth event

this month.

All wars are fought twice, the first time on
the battlefield, the second time in memory.
This is certainly true for what Americans
call the Vietnam War and what the victori-
ous Vietnamese call the American War.
Both terms obscure how a war that killed
more than 58,000 Americans and three mil-
lion Vietnamese was also fought in Laos
and Cambodia, killing hundreds of thou-
sands more and leading directly to the Cam-
bodian genocide.
In its own typically solipsistic, American-
centered, whitewashed fashion, Hollywood
has been waging this war on celluloid ever
since John Wayne’s atrocious “Green Be-
rets” in 1968, a film so nakedly propagan-
distic it could have been made by the Third
Reich.
Born in Vietnam but made in America, I
have a personal and professional interest in
Hollywood’s fetish about this war. Unfortu-
nately, I have watched almost every “Viet-
nam War” movie that Hollywood has made.
It’s an exercise I recommend to no one.
Watching “Vietnam War” movies is my
own personal “Groundhog Day” experi-
ence, because I know, without fail, how Hol-
lywood will represent the Vietnamese and
Americans. For Americans, Hollywood

Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods,” with, from left, Johnny Tri Nguyen (as a Vietnamese guide), Isiah

Whitlock Jr., Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis and Delroy Lindo, depicts a brotherhood

of African-American veterans who served together in Vietnam and return in country on a mission.

DAVID LEE/NETFLIX

Vietnamese Lives, American Imperialist Views

Spike Lee’s ‘Da 5 Bloods’ tells

Black soldiers’ stories, but falls

back on Hollywood war tropes.

By VIET THANH NGUYEN

CONTINUED ON PAGE C4

ESSAY

The turmoil coursing through cultural insti-

tutions around the country on the subject of

race has made its way to the biggest mu-

seum of them all: the Metropolitan Mu-

seum of Art.

A top curator’s Instagram post that

seemed critical of the Black Lives Matters

movement and protests over monuments —

shared on Juneteenth — has ignited objec-

tions by staff members, and a larger inter-

nal critique. On Tuesday, 15 Met staff mem-

bers sent a letter urging the museum’s lead-

ership to acknowledge “what we see as the

expression of a deeply rooted logic of white

supremacy and culture of systemic racism

at our institution.”

The episode is the latest example of how

arts institutions are grappling with issues of

equity and diversity amid protests over the

killing of George Floyd and an intensifica-

tion of activity by the Black Lives Matter

movement.

On Sunday, the American Museum of

Natural History in New York announced

that its equestrian statue of Theodore

Met Museum

Is Grappling

With Protests

A curator’s remarks prompt

charges of systemic racism.

By ROBIN POGREBIN

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