Christopher DeSante:  If all we worry about is everyone's comfort at all times, then we can't really talk about serious questions and I think the thing that makes that easier is jokes.

Alex Chambers:  That's Christopher DeSante. Being a Political Scientist, he thinks about serious questions a lot, but when he was getting his PHD, he tried to convince his fellow grad students to watch Dave Chappelle instead of reading for their qualifying exams. How serious was he? I think more than half. Today on the Inner States, Christopher DeSante talks about the politics of humor. We have also got a return guest telling us about a micro opportunity you can find in most small cities and if you can't find it, it's pretty easy to make it happen for yourself. That's all coming up right after this.

Alex Chambers:  Welcome to Inner States from WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana. I'm Alex Chambers. There was only one person who could deliver the bad news to King Philippe of France. It was the Summer of 1340 and the English Navy had just destroyed a fleet of French ships. Hundreds of ships, thousands of soldiers. No one wanted to tell the King. So the Jester jumped in saying the English don't even have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French. It's a joke, but of course it's also a lot more than that. The story goes that Court Jesters were the only ones allowed to make fun of the King. They could speak truth to power but only because their commentary was dressed up in hats with bells on them. It's hard to take someone seriously when they're wearing bells.

Alex Chambers:  The futile system made it hard to challenge unjust power. In theory it's easier in a democracy. In the 21st Century we have more serious ways to challenge power, and yet, every year until the Trump administration, at the White House correspondence dinner, we still bring in a Jester to make fun of the most powerful man in the world. In 1964, Lenny Bruce spent months in jail for obscenity. In 2020, John Mulaney made a joke on Saturday Night Live that got him investigated by the Secret Service. Political or not, the best comedians often come from marginalized backgrounds or have gone through serious suffering. Comedy helps us claim some agency in situations where we feel powerless. Whether that feeling is the result of a personal tragedy or a political environment where most of feel like spectators.

Alex Chambers:  Christopher DeSante is an Associate Professor of Political Science at IU. He studies race and racism in American politics and right now he's teaching a course on politics and comedy. This week on Inner States he talks with intern extraordinaire, Kaity Radde about comedy, tragedy and power in contemporary American life.

Kaity Radde:  Welcome to Inner States.

Christopher DeSante:  Thank you so much for having me Kaity.

Kaity Radde:  I just want to start by asking what got you interested in the relationship between politics and comedy and made you see it as an important topic to tackle academically and take seriously?

Christopher DeSante:  I think that there's a tension in the ivory tower between things that people think are important and things that are actually important, and I think that a lot of my colleagues, not just in my department but in the college of Arts and Sciences might think that cartoons and stand up comedy have nothing to provide us and we should only read ancient books or sit in a library. But I think that modern stand up comedy and written comedy can provide some of the best social commentary available. I think that comedy allows us to do that in a kind of disarming way.

Kaity Radde:  When you talk about the role of comedy in social commentary and the way that it can be like disarming and therefore allow for more serious conversation, can you talk a little bit more about the relationship between power and comedy?

Christopher DeSante:  I think that the modern comic comes usually from one of the lower groups. So somebody who has had a different perspective on the world because they're not in the dominant group.It's something that allows people who come from either different points of view or have experiences that are only shared among a certain group of people to then share those experiences with a larger audience, so that that larger audience comes to understand their own lives. Both the comic's life and then maybe also how their life is different, maybe how the audience life is somewhat easier or better. So I know I've mentioned Stephen Colbert's rants about color blindness. People tell me I'm white and I believe them because, insert punch line, like Police Officers call me sir or I've never had a difficult time catching a cab in New York City. He's talking about the privilege that he experiences in a tongue and cheek way and I think that that's reminding people that, even someone who's at the top can see that there's an equality, can see that there are problems and then talk about them accordingly.

Kaity Radde:  One example of a comedian playing this role is Jon Stewart on Crossfire. Crossfire was a CNN debate show that was hosted by a Liberal pundit and a Conservative pundit, and they would bring on a guest and cross-examine them. Stewart thought what they were doing was political theater mascarading as journalism and he went on the show in 2004 and took it hostage. After over two decades on the air, it was canceled less than three months later.

Jon Stewart:  The interesting thing that I have is, you have a responsibility to the public discourse and you fail miserably I think. You need to go to one. The thing I want to say is, when you have people on for just knee jerk reactionary talk.

Tucker Carlson:  Man I thought you were going to be funny, come on, be funny.

Jon Stewart:  No, no I'm not going to be your monkey.

Jon Stewart:  I watch your show every day and it kills me.

Tucker Carlson:  I can tell you love it.

Jon Stewart:  It's so painful to watch.

Christopher DeSante:  And it's not even a bit he's doing. He's just being honest and it's so embarrassing for the people at CNN. Having someone who can either satirize or mock in a very intelligent way the things that they see in front of them allows a lot of us, or at least me, maybe not a lot of us, to feel somewhat sane when we look at the political theater on a lot of television and you see someone like Jon Stewart saying, "well you have to agree we should hold your show and my show to different journalistic standards". We're on Comedy Central, you're on CNN. Jon Stewart knows that when he's on CNN's Crossfire in front of a studio audience and on live TV, he has a much different audience held captive than he does on Comedy Central and I think he uses that in a very brilliant way to kind of talk about the state of media, the state of polarization in the media and I think that between Stewart on Crossfire, Stephen Colbert in character at the White House correspondence dinner.

Stephen Colbert:  My name is Stephen Colbert, and tonight it is my privilege to celebrate this President, because we're not so different he and I. We both get it. Guys like us, we're not some brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We're not members of the Factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now I know some of you are going to say I did look it up and that's not true. That's because you looked it up in a book. Next time look it up in your gut, I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works. Every night on my show the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, okay. I give people the truth unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the no fact zone. Fox News, I hold a copyright on that term.

Christopher DeSante:  You would get a totally different result if Colbert came out and put on his Liberal hat and just said, this is what I disagree with on this, this and this issue, but the way he does it just through jokes is I think far more effective.

Kaity Radde:  What stands out to me about those examples are that Colbert and Jon Stewart are expressly political comedians and they identify what is so tragic about our political situation and our media landscape and so I was wondering if we could switch to talking about the relationship between tragedy and comedy.

Christopher DeSante:  Sure. This is why I told you and your class mates that I'm going to be a lot funnier than they are because if comedy is tragedy plus time, not only am I twice as old as all of you, but I've also I think been through a number of pretty ridiculous things that could be characterized as tragedy. When people tell you their innermost story or their most personal stories and they're tragic, and I mean that in like they're sad, the hardships that people have gone through, the difficulties they've overcome, all of that. When you open up about those aspects of your life, you're actually getting the real person. You're getting like some truth that usually is difficult for the person to express and if they're able to do it through jokes, I think everyone recognizes that the person telling the story is human, that they're being genuine even if they think at the end they're being slightly glib. It's just an example of, you would have to laugh or you would go crazy.

Kaity Radde:  Can you give me an example of that from your own life?

Christopher DeSante:  I have a lot of funny things. By funny things I mean incredibly tragic things. In the Spring of 2017 I was in the middle of going through a divorce and I had some things happen with my parents and, long story short, I went to the doctor because I wasn't sleeping well and she asked me why this might be and I just kind of jokingly said, "oh it has to be stress". It just has to be and when she asked me why I thought that might be the case, I started listing things that had happened in the last few months and she basically told me, "we need to get you into the hospital immediately", and I just remember thinking no, I have other stuff to do, and she gave me a test or a battery of questions about stressful experiences you've had and I was pretty proud that I broke the record for a high score on that and in fact I took medical leave in the fall of 2017 to basically go to intensive outpatient psychotherapy and when I went to do my admit interview or intake I guess they would say, they said we went through and talked about things and kind of where I was and what had happened in the last couple of months.

Christopher DeSante:  The woman at the Community Hospital in Indianapolis said, "okay, so you need to start today, you need to stay right now" and I said "oh no, I can't" and she said "no, this is not a suggestion like you're going to stay", and I said "no, I made a promise, I have to go drive down to North Carolina, I'm finishing a book with my friend and I promised her that I would come down and sit in her kitchen and finish the book before you take me away to the hospital", and the woman at the community is like "no, you really need to stay", and I was like "yes, but I've been working on this book forever" and I don't think people understand just how, especially if you're depressed, especially if you're not even clinically depressed. If you're just having a bad day I think one of the easiest ways people cope with it is by telling jokes.

Christopher DeSante:  So I think at every opportunity, even in the introduction of our book where I talk about this pretty in depth. I even finish the introduction with a joke about how my co-author Candice really didn't like me when she first met me because that little remark at the end makes it a lot easier to swallow all of the things that came before it. Candice knew I wasn't going to finish the book. Candice knew that I wasn't working as hard on the book as I should have or could have been because owing her work was something that prevented me from killing myself more or less and she and I would talk about it all the time and she would tell me that we could just start over and things like that.

Christopher DeSante:  I think that a lot of examples from my own life come from having a sense of humor that's been shaped by having very smart and funny siblings but also coming from I would say a house that, my parents had different parenting norms than people might want to hear about on the radio. So I remember one time going into my ninth grade theology class and I went to an all boys Catholic school in Pennsylvania and I walked into class with a black eye. My eye was swollen shut and my theology teacher, you know it's an all guys school so he kind of joked and said "oh who did you get in a fight with?" And I just said "oh my dad punched me in the face", and he was startled and he's like, "are you serious?"

Christopher DeSante:  I was like "yes" and I was telling the truth, this is what happened and he just said, I remember him distinctly, he's like "well it had to be an accident right?" And I just looked at him and I said "yes Mr Germino, yes my dad accidentally, accidentally stood three feet away from me, looked me in the eye and punched me square in the face, broke my glasses, closed my eye. Of course it was accidental." And my class mates laughed and I laughed too because obviously it's not an accident, why are you dumb? But I also wasn't thinking about it the way an adult might think about it which is, oh this kid is being hit at home and that's a problem and it's just that not how I associated it, I was just this is what parents do because this is what I know and humor is how I'm going to deal with it.

Kaity Radde:  Does that experience or those kind of experiences inform the way you approach political science and politics in comedy?

Christopher DeSante:  Yes. So my co-author Candice Smith, she's now at Duke. She's a black woman, I'm a white guy and even when people would ask me how I got interested in studying race in America, and this is partly true but it's also funny that people said when Obama was elected in 2008 that this was the end of racism in America and I would tell people in conference presentations, in papers I wrote, I would say "oh I knew this wasn't the case because my parents were still alive." Growing up in a, I would say working class, lower middle class family, going to Catholic schools and having a, I wouldn't say isolating but just a different childhood experience than most people, I think humor was something that my brothers and I always tried to do.

Christopher DeSante:  Always tried to tell jokes with each other if nothing else just to make things easier and in terms of my teaching, I think that most professors take an approach to teaching classes that involves coming into class and regurgitating facts, reading facts off of slides that they have written, watching their students write down the facts before they move to a next slide and then repeat the process until you give a test and in my own life, when I was a student in undergrad, the things that I remember most about all the classes I took are not the facts or not the articles I read or the books I read, it's the stories that my professors told. It's the things that made them human instead of just a conduit for facts that you could have got reading the texts that the professors assigned.

Christopher DeSante:  If you can make a story humorous or if you can make jokes and get someone to reconsider their position on something, I think that aids in students intellectual growth and as I mentioned in the first day of our class that discomfort is part of growing up. The most important lessons people learn in life usually come at great emotional and physical expense and I'm not trying to rush any of our students through this growing process by inflicting harm but it's also nice to be cognizant of the fact that if all we worry about is everyone's comfort at all times, then we can't really talk about serious questions and I think the thing that makes that easier is jokes.

Kaity Radde:  So your empirical work is about race and racism in America and it sounds like a lot of the comedy that you funny is comedy that comments on that.

Christopher DeSante:  Oh yes. When I was in graduate school at Duke, one year we had a white elephant gift exchange at Christmas and I had purchased the entire Chappelle Show on DVD and I had printed out different DVD labels. I relabeled the DVD as Chris DeSante's video notes on race and ethnic politics in America. If you wanted to study for your PHD prelim in race and ethnic politics, you just watched the Chappelle Show. It wouldn't give you all the citations but it would definitely give you a sense of race and racial hierarchy in the United States and how people think about it.

Alex Chambers:  Alright, it's time for a quick break. When we come back, Christopher and Kaity have more to say about Dave Chappelle.

Alex Chambers:  Welcome back to Inner States, I'm Alex Chambers. This week we've got Political Scientist, Christopher DeSante talking with Kaity Radde about the politics of humor. I'll let Kaity take it from here.

Kaity Radde:  So far we've talked about comedy as a powerful tool for making social commentary and reclaiming agency over personal tragedy, but the fact that comedy can have social consequences is a double edge sword, because it can reinforce damaging and oppressive ideas just as much as it can challenge them. I asked Christopher how the public should deal with controversial or socially irresponsible comedy and we started off by talking about Dave Chappelle's decision to leave the Chappelle Show in 2005.

Christopher DeSante:  He left the show I think after two seasons. He turned down $50,000,000 and went to Africa and just tried to actually reflect on the things he had been doing and what he concluded is, he was being socially irresponsible with some of the humor because he could hear during some of the sketches that when he wrote them, he thought they would be taken one way and then he could hear people onset laughing at the wrong times. So laughing at the racial stereotypes of the caricatures that weren't necessarily intended to be funny, they were just kind of background strokes to fill out the skit and he heard people laughing at them and he thought, I think we're doing something wrong here.

Christopher DeSante:  In some ways that makes comedy and jokes a double edged sword because your friends or your neighbors can make a joke about something that's racist and that's a way of kind of sneaking in racial ideology, getting you to think that this is a socially acceptable thing to do. Especially when whites tell racist jokes it's something that is going to perpetuate racial stereotypes and things like that and on the other side when people talk about race and racism or how race itself is a social construct, it's made up and again I think Dave Chappelle does a really good job of this, especially in the Chappelle Show.

Christopher DeSante:  There's this skit where they do a racial draft. The Chinese delegation takes the entire Wutang Clan for example. Tiger Woods is officially drafted by the African American delegation. Colin Powell is white I think, Condoleezza Rice also becomes white and just this idea that some racial groups don't want members of their own group, they want to push them off on somebody else and there are others who want to take credit claim for members of their race. But just the idea that it's fluid or artificially constructed in some way takes the wind out of the sails of anyone who wants to say, no we're all so fundamentally different.

Kaity Radde:  We live in a world in which jokes and comedy can be racist or otherwise reinforced, oppressive hierarchies and given that how do we set boundaries and decide what to do about comedy that does have negative political consequences?

Christopher DeSante:  I would say I don't have a good prescriptive answer for it. I would say that when somebody crosses a line, I think the correct response is a conversation. There's something in some ways antithetical to our understanding of both freedom of expression and a liberal democracy to say that there's a line that we cannot cross, and in fact we did this in the first week of class. I posed the question, and the question I asked and I want everyone to hear this question because the way I worded it is very important to me. "Are there some things that nobody can every joke about, nobody?" And my students gave me about ten or 12 different things that they said "no, you can never joke about this", and one of the things that they said was, mental illness or depression.

Christopher DeSante:  I kind of rhetorically asked this question in class and said, "Nobody? Nobody can ever joke about that?" Well yes, it reinforces the stigma about people with mental illness and mental illness is actually a serious problem and we shouldn't joke about it and I'm like, yes man, I take pills every day. I go to therapy. The first time I tried to kill myself I was 12 years old. I remember that. Am I allowed to joke about stuff? Yes. If I can't joke about the way my brain works, I don't know where I'd be. To say that there are things that people can't joke about before they even make the jokes, that's dangerous. When I told people I watched the Chappelle Special, the closer, I had a few colleagues say, "I can't believe you watched that it's so terrible, it's so bad" and then I said okay, I didn't really get that, but I'll watch it again.

Christopher DeSante:  I'll sit with it again and I'll watch it, consider actually take your opinion and say, well maybe I missed some things and go back and watch it again and then as I've mentioned in class, I've lost a couple of friends who basically said, I won't talk to you because I can't believe you watch that show, I can't believe you're going to talk about Dave Chappelle in a college classroom and for me when you study race and racism in America, if I can't talk about or use Dave Chappelle as a touchstone for what racism could look like in America, what racism means for people then all I get to be is a guy sitting in a library reading books and not engaging with the world.

Kaity Radde:  So we agree that Dave Chappelle has racism in his cross hairs but as a side effect he is making jokes that a lot of viewers saw as transphobic, because you've mentioned that you see those jokes differently than your colleagues and broadly the conversation has tended to approach them. So can you just talk about how you see them.

Christopher DeSante:  I mean he asks this rhetorical question, which is, why is it easier for Caitlyn Jenner to change her gender than Cassius Clay to change his name? Why was it easier and the answer that Chappelle comes to is because Bruce Jenner's a white guy and he transitions and the world is expected to change. That idea that somebody could do that and then be celebrated in the same place where Muhammad Ali tried to change his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali and can't because he's a black man right, that still gets at the fundamental tension for Dave Chappelle.

Christopher DeSante:  You know why was it easier for Bruce Jenner to become Caitlyn Jenner legally than for Muhammad Ali to change his name, that's a very interesting question and if you hear that question and you immediately believe its false equivalence and you're being transphobic, I think you've missed the point.

Kaity Radde:  And have you encountered that attitude more from your colleagues than from your students, the I can't believe you're talking about this attitude?

Christopher DeSante:  Yes and I think that it's a simple thing to explain just based on who selects into my class. It's politics and comedy. When I mentioned Dave Chappelle, I don't think anyone walked out and said I can't believe you're going to talk about that in a comedy class and the craziest thing to me, Kaity, is that, the two people I'm thinking of in particular are both very well educated, they both have PHDs, they basically said, "you can't watch this, what you're doing is endorsing hate", which I thought was quite a strong statement and then when I told them that I watched it again and I still didn't quite see what they were saying, eventually they just admitted that they had actually not watched it.

Christopher DeSante:  One or two or ten or 20 people take offense with something and then write an article about how an artist is transphobic or hateful, whatever and then that causes a lot of people to feel as if they need to join that side, and I think it shuts down conversation. We see people on the right believe in alternative facts. People on the left like to roll their eyes and say, well we're not like that, we're the smart ones and then it's like, well I'm as liberal as anybody and I think that the great thing about being a person on the political left is that we make room for nuance and we understand that politics and relationships are complicated and we have to be able to talk about these things in shades of gray as opposed to black and white otherwise nothing is going to change.

Christopher DeSante:  People like an enemy and they like somebody to demonize. If you want to say Dave Chappelle is transphobic, go ahead, you're welcome to. Some people could reasonably disagree with you and if you disagree with that statement that some people could reasonably disagree with you, I would say you're part of the problem because in American politics, we are often looking for signs that somebody is on our side or on our team and they believe all of the same things we do and if they disagree with anything that we believe then they're automatically the enemy.

Kaity Radde:  So would it be fair to summarize the joke was ultimately about race in class and how for wealthy white people, even having one marginalized identity is not going to be hard for the world to accept compared to black people.

Christopher DeSante:  Yes, and not only that it's going to be because you're coming from a position of power, right? It's easier for people to accept you.

Kaity Radde:  Obviously this is kind of what we've been talking about the whole time, but to sort of zoom out. What do you think we can learn about ourselves and our politics from comedy?

Christopher DeSante:  What comedy does is it provides room for nuance, which we lack. We live in a huge country, there are reasonable people on both the political left and the political right. There are perfectly reasonably positions to hold on most issues. There are also absurd positions to hold. But I think if you give people the benefit of the doubt and you meet them half way and you understand that in any country as large as ours with the government that we have set up, we're going need to nuance. We're going to need people to be able to parse arguments as not just black and white, but actually see the nuance behind them and I think that that's what comedy does.

Christopher DeSante:  So you have in the last four or five years I've seen more non white comics with Comedy Central or Netflix specials, not for any other reason than they're really funny and the perspectives that they have about their communities and growing up either as a first generation American or as an immigrant, those stories speak to our nation and our nation's history and our politics much better than Jeff Foxworthy asking how you know if you're a redneck.

Kaity Radde:  Well Christopher, thank you so much for being here.

Christopher DeSante:  Well thanks a lot.

Alex Chambers:  That was Christopher DeSante, a Political Scientist at Indiana University talking with Inner State's intern, Kaity Radde who also produced that piece. After the break we've got a return visit from a guest I interviewed a little while back. We're going to talk about something small and we're going to talk about film, but we're not going to talk about microfilm. At least not this week.

Alex Chambers:  It's Inner States from WFIU where we're proud to have very sensitive microphones. I'm Alex Chambers and I'm going to turn it over to me actually of a couple of weeks ago. I don't know about you but I think I sound younger. Anyway, here's me.

Alex Chambers:  It's been a little while since we've talked movies and that's too bad because we like movies. So good news, the IU Cinema is just down the hill from our studios and that means so is the cinema's Director, Alicia Kozma and she's just shown up in the studio.

Alicia Kozma:  I just appeared.

Alex Chambers:  You just appeared.

Alicia Kozma:  I can't stay away.

Alex Chambers:  So what are we going to talk about?

Alicia Kozma:  We are going to talk about micro cinemas.

Alex Chambers:  Micro cinemas.

Alicia Kozma:  Do you know this term?

Alex Chambers:  No.

Alicia Kozma:  Okay. Well, if you don't know this term, which is not abnormal, my guess is you know or have maybe been to a micro cinema. So micro cinemas are really small scale, non theatrical and usually non commercial DIY exhibition spaces, which is just like a fancy way of saying they're pop up cinemas that aren't associated with a big institution or a chain theater. They are essentially temporary community movie theaters. I should say people use the term micro cinema and pop cinema interchangeably. In some cases those people who are really dedicated to the idea of micro cinemas or pop up cinemas will organize themselves and create something of their own, but it wouldn't be associated with something larger like an institution or a city initiative or state initiative or something like that, or necessarily even a non profit. So they really are, I call them single cell community groups. They kind of build themselves up for themselves.

Alex Chambers:  So it could be like some one showing movies even in their house to a group of people?

Alicia Kozma:  Yes, and that's an excellent example. I knew someone, a former colleague of mine at the University of Illinois who had his own micro cinema and it was called Hallways Micro Cinema and he would set up chairs and a projector and a screen in the hallway of his apartment building and once a month or every other month or whenever he had time, would show really cool experimental stuff that you couldn't see anywhere else and max 12 people could sit in the hallway and hence you had a Hallway Micro Cinema.

Alex Chambers:  That's amazing.

Alex Chambers:  Alicia said Micro Cinemas are not a new thing.

Alicia Kozma:  They really started to develop kind of en masse in the 1990s and they really hit their peak in the mid to late 1990s and the 90s were kind of this key moment for micro cinema because you have home video that's available for the first time and it's super available. Everyone can get their hands on it. But you also have this huge explosion of the independent film. It is really this kind of birth of independent film or I should say a rebirth of independent film in the US for the first time in huge quantities since the 1970s. So there's all kinds of content out there. There's all kind of stuff that mainstream theaters aren't playing and there's all kinds of stuff that people want to see and they have no where to see it.

Alicia Kozma:  So you're getting this generation of cinefiles or even casual to slightly more than casual film goers who want to see material, they can put their hands on it and they are just going to figure out a way how to show it. They really declined after the 1990s as these types of independent films moved into mainstream theaters, but they're starting to make their way back into popular culture, and over the last seven to ten years we're seeing them pop up in unexpected places. So I say unexpected places because in the 90s, micro cinemas were really an urban phenomenon and now micro cinemas are appearing more and more often in what we would call micro urban spaces.

Alicia Kozma:  Micro urban spaces are essentially population centers with 200,000 or less individuals that live there and they have the type of characteristics that are normally associated with large cities. They have a really vibrant arts and culture scene, a nightlife scene, an international population, a pretty expansive dining scene, lots of political engagement, prestigious education centers often, strong civic discourse. You start to see this idea of micro urban centers in the mid-west a lot where you got big R one and big ten schools that are generating this type of living environment which you would normally associate with a city outside of the geographic space of a city.

Alex Chambers:  Right.

Alicia Kozma:  So, you need a couple more things than just that to really generate a micro cinema. Most importantly you need people and in the instance of micro cinemas, we think of those people as programmers. Programmers are the people who are responsible for bringing the vision and executing the vision of what this space is. What are we putting up on screen, what does that say about us, how is that speaking to our community? And those programmers need to be really embedded with audiences. They need to be really embedded in the place that they live so they know it's going to resonate with people and maybe the most important identifier of the work of programmers is that it's a really difficult job and it can often be a really thankless job.

Alicia Kozma:  So, anyone who decides the world needs to see this film is curating, is programming in a sense of work, right? The more you program, the more random people will walk up to you on the street and be like "Hey have you ever heard of this movie the Godfather, I can't believe you've never shown it." Everyone wants to have an opinion and that's fine. Everyone should have opinions on movies but programming is really a lot bigger than just saying, oh I like this movie, everyone should see it and that is so important for micro cinemas because micro cinemas are responding to a need in their community, right?

Alicia Kozma:  They're giving their community something that doesn't already exist. They're trying to fill a gap and so it's not just saying, oh I really love this movie Killer Clowns From Outer Space and I think everyone should watch it so I'm going to throw up a micro cinema and show everybody. Maybe that's a lack, I don't know if it necessarily is. But more importantly, they're in tune with the needs of their community, they're trying to fill a gap. So it's not just saying everyone should watch Killer Clowns From Outer Space. It's saying, oh there's this amazing film that we should have access to, it means something, it's culturally important, I want to find a way to bring it into my community, I want to find a way to fill that gap.

Alex Chambers:  So, the micro habitats that micro cinemas flourish in are the micro urban areas that have active arts and culture scenes, political engagement, education institutions and I wondered if maybe Alicia might have an example of a place like that.

Alicia Kozma:  One place that has this magic ingredient of demographics and living conditions and cultural landscape and people who want to be a part of something like a micro cinema is very thankfully right here in Bloomington, Indiana, because we have our very own micro cinema, which I hope many of you, or at least some of you out there are familiar with and it's called Cicada Cinema. Do you know Cicada Cinema?

Alex Chambers:  I do know Cicada Cinema.

Alicia Kozma:  You do?

Alex Chambers:  I have been to I think only one, but I have been to a Cicada Cinema film.

Alicia Kozma:  Do you remember what film it was?

Alex Chambers:  The Last Black Man In San Fransisco.

Alicia Kozma:  Amazing movie.

Alex Chambers:  It's so beautiful.

Alicia Kozma:  Yes, and don't you feel better that that movie came to Bloomington?

Alex Chambers:  Yes, and it was a really nice event also. It was over at the Eiffel Building and there were all these chairs set up on the concrete floor and I think there was maybe a curtain to one side to sort of make the space a little smaller and screen set up, folding chairs. I don't know, maybe 30 or so, 30 or 40 chairs, they weren't all filled and I ran into a bunch of people I knew and found out later there had even been other people there that I knew and we were all talking about the movie afterward but didn't really know we had all been there. So it very much felt like a community.

Alicia Kozma:  It feels really intimate too, right? I went to my first Cicada screening last week and I've only lived in Bloomington for four months and I ran into somebody I know.

Alex Chambers:  I think that's also Bloomington.

Alicia Kozma:  It is, but it's also that type of space right? It really is a community space. So, Cicada began in 2016 and it was started by five of these really dedicated programmers, the type of person that I was talking about before. David Carter, Josh Brewer, Nile Arena, Charlie Jones and Eric Ayotte, and they looked around and they said, there is more opportunity to fill some of the gaps in film. We have IU Cinema, you have the Buskirk-Chumley that is showing films. You have something like the Rider Film Series which shows rad films all the time, but there's still more opportunity and very thankfully Bloomington is a movie hungry town.

Alicia Kozma:  So it is ready to accept the challenge of a really great pop up cinema like Cicada. They show all kinds of stuff. They show, as you mentioned, you saw the Last Black Man In San Fransisco which is a very prestige Indy art film nominated for lots of independent spirit awards. I saw a film that it called Radio On which is very little known, I'd never heard of it much less seen of it. It's a British road movie in Thatcher 1980s with great punk music and a weird cameo by Sting. Actually tonight they're showing a film called Sister Street Fighter which is an amazing 70s martial arts film with the legendary Sonny Chiba.

Alicia Kozma:  They are all over the place, they're great. But all of this are films that there's an audience for and all of these are films that you really still can't see in these various other venues, even though we have so many other venues in Bloomington that you really can't see. So, you can see at least one to two Cicada Cinema screenings a month. They're working on bringing in more. A lot of their screenings are anywhere between 20 and 60 people. The screening I went to was the weekend of that huge snowstorm we had and there was still 40 people there trudging through the snow to watch this movie that no one had ever heard of and it was totally worth it.

Alicia Kozma:  So, it is just this really great community environment and it's something that is both specific to Bloomington but also specific, I think, to a particular mid-west ethos of, what we want this thing so we're going to do it. It really is just this hardcore DIY culture and in fact they were inspired by two other mid-west micro cinemas. So, one in Cincinnati, Ohio called the Mini Micro Cinema and one in Franklin, Indiana called the Art Craft. So they are around. You don't need a giant university to have a micro cinema, they are in many places. So my guess is, for those of you who are listening who aren't in Bloomington, well if you are Bloomington you should be going to a Cicada Cinema screening.

Alicia Kozma:  But if you aren't, I don't think you would have to look that hard to find a micro cinema around you. Particularly if you have any type of arts and culture scene in your town, whether it's DIY or big and institutional or somewhere in between.

Alex Chambers:  And if you can't find one, you could probably start your own.

Alicia Kozma:  If you can't find one, listen, here's what you need. Some chairs, a hallway, some people who want to watch some cool stuff and that's kind of it. For those of you who are in Bloomington I can't recommend more checking out Cicada Cinema. They have a website, just cicada cinema dot com or you can follow them on Instragram at cicada underscore cinema and they're wonderful, they're doing it, it's just like a labor of love, and it's to everybody's benefit.

Alex Chambers:  Amazing. That's great. Thank you Alicia.

Alicia Kozma:  You are very welcome.

Alex Chambers:  That was Alicia Kozma, Director of the IU Cinema and this is Inner States from WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana.

Alex Chambers:  I want to take us out today with a couple more micro things. The first is a few words from Chuck George, who came to Food Truck Friday in Bloomington, Indiana one day in 2018. I asked him what he was eating.

Alex Chambers:  Is Gyro or Gyro?

Chuck George:  It was lamb meat. My wife, I hate salmon so every time she has salmon, I have deer and I love deer. I make a lot of it in home made jerky and I've got a dehydrator that I do that with. You get two pounds of ground deer and all I do is I put a little bit of liquid smoke in, a little bit of Worcestershire sauce, a little bit of Tabasco sauce and then chili pepper and I got a cocking gun that squirts the meat out in a perfect line, and it comes out great. Oh man, it's good. It is. You'd like it. Aren't you glad you talked to me?

Alex Chambers:  I am glad I talked to Chuck and he's right, I probably would like that jerky. I hate to say it though, but you will not be able to find that recipe on our website. Maybe we'll get some jerky on our sister show Earth Eats one of these days. They'll give you the recipe. Inner States isn't a food show but it is about how it all feels. So, the last thing I want to share today is a minute long list that in my opinion really captures how a list can feel. Here it is.

I’Nayha Brock:  Milk, can't forget milk. Eggs, milk, sausage. Shredded cheese. Eggs, cheese slices, bread, whole bread. Wheat bread. Blueberry bagels, cream cheese, strawberry cream cheese. Tortillas, frozen pizza, feta, Caesar salad dressing, ranch dressing, Italian dressing? Mayo, ketchup, spinach, lettuce, cucumber, limes and blackberries, strawberries, blueberries, bananas, Greek yogurt, soda, salt, pepper, chili powder. Mac and cheese, cottage cheese, small curd, small curd, apple juice. Where's the milk?

Alex Chambers:  That was made by I’Nayha Brock. I’Nayha is a student at Indiana University. I hope she found her milk. Inner States is a show about art and culture, so I want to end with a little prompt, something to get your own creative juices flowing. Think about a list, just something from your daily life. Grab your smart phone and record that list for a minute and then say what it's a list of. Maybe it's funny, maybe it's poetic, maybe political, then send it to us at WFIU dot org slash inner states. Maybe it will end up on the air. It would make me really happy to hear from you.

Alex Chambers:  Okay, that's it for this week. As always if you have a story for us or that list or some sound we should hear, let us know at WFIU dot org slash inner states. Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers with support from Eoban Binder, Aaron Cain, Mark Chilla, Michael Paskash, Payton Whaley and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is John Bailey. Special thanks this week to Christopher DeSante and Alicia Kozma and to Kaity Radde for producing that interview.

Alex Chambers:  Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music. I want to acknowledge in honor the Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi and Shawnee people on whose ancestral home lands and resources, Indiana University, Bloomington, home of WFIU is built, as well as the generations of workers who built it.

Alex Chambers:  Alright, let's go somewhere and listen to something.

Alex Chambers:  You've been listening to wind and marcecent leaves. That's leaves that have died but are still on the tree on a cool night in March in Bloomington, Indiana. Until next week, I'm Alex Chambers. Thanks for listening.