The Nightingale Project

         

             

             Clay Johnston is a businessman and physician and was the first dean of the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas, the position from which he retired a few weeks ago. The custom of heaping praise on a departing high-ranking academic can be skipped entirely in Dr. Johnston’s case, if you’re a member of a minority group in Texas—because outcomes have not been good. 

            When Dean Johnston started out he made no promises in that regard, actually. In an interview as he took the position of Dell dean five years ago, Dr. Johnston refused to be held to any firm numbers regarding diversity in the student body. And a good thing too, because he did a poor job on this crucial front of minority access to health care, on both ends, as patients and as practitioners. He and his right hand Vice Dean Mini Kahlon have been absolutely M.I.A. on race during their tenure in Austin. At the conclusion of last semester the Dell website announced that the proportion of minorities in class was 17 percent. In a state that is more than half black and brown. Shame, and shame again.

Interestingly, however, at the time of the interview when Dr. Johnston refused to commit, so to speak, lo those five years ago, he criticized the diversity profile of the institution he had just left, the University of California San Francisco, the most prominent health-related public university in the world. “I’m certainly not going to defend UCSF and its track record,” he said, rather huffily, at the time of is hiring at UT. “We both know it needs to be better.” It is better, actually—better than Dell’s. 

Dean Johnston promised to create in Austin a new and fairer way of choosing students—through greater emphasis on interviews and on non-traditional backgrounds. That hasn’t happened. Upper middle-class white male has long been the norm in American medical schools, previously it was white guys but now at Dell it’s a lot of white girls. As incoming dean, Dr. Johnston also promised to evaluate potential students’ problem-solving skills instead of relying merely on test scores and grades. But the faculty members who judge the students for admission are still white, as is two-thirds of Dell faculty (black and brown faculty membership is 12 percent), including a key administrator who is a white South African physician, an odd choice to assure increased diversity for blacks and Latinos in health care in the Lone Star State. That means the same old outcomes are achieved as previously, or worse. 

Of Dell Medical School’s 14 department chairs, under the good Dr. Johnston, 11 are white and three are Asian, again in a state that is more than half black and Latino and, the U.S. Census just reported, is getting blacker and browner every day. The context of Dr. Johnston’s time at Dell has to be considered as well, if one is interested in these poor outcomes for minorities in admissions. He came on board (as dean and as UT vice president of medical affairs, at a salary of $750,000 a year) at a time when the university was reeling from an admissions scandal, an issue that may be particularly pertinent here. The then-university president was found to have offered places to unworthy undergraduates who were politically-connected to Texas elites.

A second admissions scandal erupted three years into Dean Johnston’s tenure—code-named “Operation Varsity Blues” by the FBI—involving eight major higher education institutions, across the country, including UT but not the medical school. A corollary question arises therefore, given this history, and given what should be higher numbers of minorities at Dell Medical School. What are the chances that these very prestigious and very sought-after places, at Dell Med, have been awarded in some cases to the well-connected, as has happened in the past at UT and at UCSF also, btw, whence Dean Johnston came? It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. Considering the university’s non-diverse past, you might say. 

Although former Dean Johnston criticized his ex-employer the University of California, a lot of faculty at Dell are actually ex-UCSF, including the above mentioned Associate Dean Kahlon. Before and during the pandemic there’s been an exodus from San Francisco to Austin and also from UCSF to Dell. The danger here is that while people flow from the University of California, so does the culture in Baghdad by the Bay, which is not good. An NPR report recently quoted a former UCSF medical student saying that he was still hearing black patients referred to as niggers on rounds there just a few years ago. There’s also a lot of UC propaganda in cyberspace, which is a sign that administrators know there’s a problem but are trying to hide it. For example the University of California’s common practice is to show photos of happy-looking isolated black students on its website, to make the student body appear more diverse than it really is—a practice that has been adopted wholeheartedly by Dell. Bad behavior has flowed from Texas to the Bay Area also. UC System’s Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, Dr. John Stobo was fired for sexual harassment of an assistant just last year. He arrived at UC from UT Medical Branch on Galveston Island where he was president (John Stobo’s signature is on my nursing diploma from Medical Branch, btw, for the record.) And then there’s Dr. Johnston himself, who has shown a particular talent for ethical not sexual compromise.

While still at UCSF, the Dell ex-dean authored a paper arguing the novel position that prices for medicines are not high enough and he co-authored another in which he bemoaned conflict of interest accusations against medical researchers. 

That is Dr. Johnston's legacy, you could call it, at the University of California San Francisco. His favorite business case, btw, when he's presenting papers or giving talks, is the growth of the American railroad industry, back in the day, during the Industrial Revolution or whenever, and he likens that history to American medicine today. Here in the Live Music Capital of the World, among his first efforts was the unsuccessful attempt to lure pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to the city in order to harvest healthcare data from minorities.

Traditionally one of the biggest holes in Big Pharma’s data resources involves blacks, Latinos and Asians, while whites are overrepresented. To design treatments and meds, companies like Pfizer need as much representative data as possible, and that means minorities need to be in the mix. And it is there that Dean Johnston’s reputation and his legacy at Dell Medical School may have just been rescued by history. Pfizer took a lot of heat and eventually dropped plans for a hub here but was soon replaced in the enterprise by Google Health and its Nightingale Project. With an assist by Dell Medical School and the good Dr. Johnston, who has done what he was brought in to do, basically, to create a Big Medicine-UT axis, which may help to save all of our lives one day, actually, whether Dean Johnston is a good guy or not. 

He was brought in to do a job—to establish the university’s business ties with Big Pharma or Google, or whoever, as the case may be, like back in the day with the railroads and the Robber Barons and all that—and let’s all hope he got it right. 

Specifically, Dell Medical School and its partner Ascension Seton, which is a Catholic non-profit and operates a dozen hospitals in the Austin area, have teamed up with Google to transfer information on patients. Everything from zip code to hemoglobin level, for Big Data analysis. Before the pandemic this agreement was made public—revealed by the Wall Street Journal just before Covid broke out, to widespread horror on the part of privacy activists. This Big Data agreement was considered yet another Big Tech invasion and an attempt to profit from patient information. Which it was, in another era. But since the pandemic the ground has shifted under everyone’s feet. As we enter the second wave of Covid-19, one can only hope that data is flowing like the Mississippi, from hospitals and labs. The danger of the dreaded Big Tech-Big Medicine hookup, facilitated by academics like Clay Johnston—the Nightingale Project, as the endeavor is called by Google, or by any other name—pales in comparison to the danger of the next virus, which could feature a more virulent strain or a faster-moving outbreak. Big Pharma (Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and others, companies synonymous with the vaccine makers) have actually performed well in the COVID-19 crisis. You have to give the devil his or her due.

A lecture delivered last semester at UT by a Big Pharma scientist revealed that the Moderna vaccine was designed in a day-and-a-half—with the succeeding months, before rollout, spent on testing, production, and regulatory approval. The Nightingale Project preceded the pandemic, and was a bad idea then, but it’s a great one now, hopefully Dr. Johnston took care of business, like the professional he is. There is a risk that Google or whoever will become even more powerful, through access to raw patient data, much of it from minorities—who are being denied access to seats in the Dell Medical School, by the way, not that there's anything wrong with that. But that risk can be lessened by de-identifying healthcare data and making it a public good, free to everyone. The fear of medical data release—like the fear of masking and of vaccination—is real and may be just as deadly. 

Throwing out DaBaby with da Bath Water

             

             What about Eric Clapton? That would probably be DaBaby’s question if anyone asked. DaBaby—a rap artist whose music is happily unknown to me—was cancelled last week, literally, when concert impresarios C3 Presents struck his name from the famed Austin City Limits festival in October. Stop me if you’ve heard this before—for homophobic and highly ignorant comments. And justifiably so. But Eric Clapton who is white and is rock ‘n roll royalty has said a lot worse and will still be performing in Austin this September at the University of Texas’s Special Events Center. There’s been no call to cancel his visit, by promoters or by fans. In fact a good argument can be made that Clapton’s comments (“Stop Britain from being a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white . . . .”, hmmm), which led to the Rock Against Racism movement, actually, are worse, because they were directed against the very black people to whom Eric Clapton owes his music. There’s a silver lining to this episode, however, because DaBaby's time-out presents such a rich environment for puns—and also shines a long overdue light on the murky world of concert promotion in Austin, Texas, the World Capital of Live Music. 

C3 Presents is da baby of Charlie Jones, Charles Attal and Charlie Walker—the 3 original C’s—and was born in this burgeoning River City fifteen years ago. An early backer of the company was said to be cyclist Lance Armstrong. His longtime agent, Bill Stapleton, who is a former Longhorn swimmer and Olympian is somewhere in the early C3 mix too. Connection to Lance Armstrong is not necessarily a good thing, considering the famed athlete’s recent troubles, but we won’t get into that here. Indeed C3 has some very impressive credentials. Because the company also puts on the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago, and came to the attention of the Obama clan, C3 was picked later to put on events at the White House. My source who has worked as a contractor for C3 said that regarding the company’s use by President Obama, “They did everything for him from rallies to his acceptance speech in Grant Park and Easter egg hunts at the White House.” C3 is described as highly non-diverse (and declined to respond with its minority employment breakdown.) What’s interesting is that the company that cancelled DaBaby—and rightfully so—and also puts on a lot of shows in casinos—was bought out by Live Nation which previously merged with Ticketmaster. (It was the Obama administration, btw, that allowed Live Nation to take over C3, despite antitrust fears.) Live Nation’s former chairman is music mogul Irving Azoff, the former manager of the supergroup The Eagles. Azoff is also former CEO of Ticketmaster, and is founder, together with Tim Leiweke, former CEO of AEG—the largest sports promoter in the world—of “Oak View Group” which together with Live Nation has a $338 million contract to build and manage the new Moody Center in Austin to replace the old University of Texas Special Events Center where Eric Clapton will play next month. If it sounds like a small world, it is, and it gets smaller. The Moody Center will be home of Longhorn men and women’s basketball and music events. Enter Matthew McConaughey. Per Musicrow.com: “McConaughey, University of Texas at Austin professor, Distinguished Alumnus (BS ’93) and Academy Award-winning actor, has signed on as Minister of Culture of the Moody Center and will work on ideas including but not limited to suite designs, bar placement, color schemes, and other concepts, to create a symbiotic relationship between the arena, the city, and the university.” You couldn’t make this up.

In addition C3 Presents has the contract for the Moody Amphitheater in the newly reopened Waterloo Park, smack center of downtown Austin, a couple of blocks from Irving Azoff’s new special events center on campus and a stone’s throw from the state Capitol and Greg Abbott’s crib. If the governor opens his windows he can probably hear the music. Interesting that these deals, which have led to Mr. Azoff becoming the single most important guy in music in Austin, in a very short time, through public-private partnerships, were done without apparent bidding or public scrutiny? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Mayor Steve Adler who will soon preside over the reopening of Waterloo Park has declined requests to explain what the public is getting out of all these music industry machinations. It’s like the privatization scandals of a prior Republican era, except instead of prisons it’s music. This template (creation of a new music venue at a public park, and handing over management of the venue to a non-profit that does not have to explain its contracting process or answer open records requests) will soon be applied to Zilker Park. That is corruption City of Austin style. The UT deal was executed, btw, by former university President Greg Fenves, in consultation with Mayor Adler, among others.

However everything shakes out, this is likely to be a big payday and another increase in power for Irving Azoff who is a legend in the music business and who has also been accused of a monopoly-like control in the industry in the past. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, either. (Mr. Azoff would not comment.) The music industry may have made the correct call with DaBaby but it’s weird that what is right or wrong or not permissible, regarding race or culture, in live music in Waterloo Park is now in the hands of a bunch of white guys, mostly living in L.A., who have made no effort to diversify a very Caucasian group of music industry businesses. Back to DaBaby, who is presently in time-out. It’s been noted elsewhere that his recent gay-bashing was not his first offense and that the LGBTQ community is trying to make a stand against longtime prejudice in the music industry. How gays do that is a gay rights call and should be supported by the black community, because it ill-behooves blacks to complain about use of a social revolt playbook that we wrote. You feel me? What one would like however is more consistency in how sanctions are applied. 

Unfortunately, Eric Clapton may not be the best artist to start with. First, his comments were made almost half a century ago, during a time in which he has described himself as “semi-racist,” whatever that means. Even if you drop the semi—and add his recent anti-vaccination comments, he is simply, on one level, an unrepentant old white guy, age 76, who happens to be a CBE, courtesy of Her Majesty the Queen who is also dotty. Be that as it may. As for DaBaby, he needs a spanking now—that’s the best argument—while it may have an effect on future behavior. Which is unlikely to be the case with Clapton. Now we can address the real determinant of forgiveness and punishment in the culture wars, Eric Clapton’s artistry. “Layla,” “Cocaine,” “Lay Down Sally,” the Yardbirds, Cream, Derek and the Dominoes among his former associations. DaBaby may have a biography like that too one day but Eric Clapton already does. This is Slowhand himself, people. There are fans who would push their own grandmother out of the way to get the ticket. He’s not God but he plays electric guitar like Him or Her. Anybody who can see Clapton play now—live—should.

George Clooney's Diversity Vehicle

  

Everyone has a favorite movie but how many people have a favorite movie scene, as in all-time, in the history of cinema or cinema that you’ve seen? Not many of us can narrow it down. People have lists but not one single favorite, the single scene that you would absolutely want to be marooned with? But mine is unique. It’s from Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 film Out of Sight, starring George Clooney, and does not have Clooney in it even though he was star of the movie. And it’s short, there’s no time for over-acting, instead it's a couple of minutes in a Detroit rowhouse between Isaiah Washington—who is from Texas btw, not that that’s important here—and Jennifer Lopez who is from the Bronx. 

Also featured but not seen is Tuffy who is Isaiah Washington’s character’s dog, or was until he got run over, we are informed. Before that Tuffy liked “a good bone,” which is what Isaiah Washington is trying to interest JLo in too. Washington’s character calls his The Monster and he plans to introduce JLo whether she wants it or not.

The difference in performing style between these two actors, who are both underrated as actors btw, is also unique. Washington plays the scene like in a theater—delivering a eulogy for Tuffy not Caesar—and then talking about boxing, which JLo also knows a bit about. She tells him that she’s a flyweight. Washington’s character was a boxer—until his retina “got detached two time”—and he gestures at his own eye so that the back row of the theater can see. The critics would call it a “certain physicality,” like a black Brando, you feel me—something like that. JLo on the other hand plays her role like an actor who has grown up in movies. In this scene she is a woman who’s not interested in a brother’s come-on and who shows a certain fear, yes—while also being fearless. Her empowerment as a female in modern cinema comes from the knowledge that she has a collapsible baton and a Glock in her shoulder bag. 

The reason the scene appeals to me is that it is in one of the rare major theatrical releases, back in the day, just before the millennium, in which two minority actors got time to go at it and talk real shit, without the mediation or interference of the white star.

White stars generally want to be in the scene with a Negro or Mexican in order to show that the white guy or white girl is cool and can hang with the oppressed peoples of the earth and all that. Clooney didn’t do that here, presumably because he’s not that insecure (he hangs these days, we are told in the popular press, with Barack Obama) and besides he already had some good scenes earlier in the film with Don Cheadle and with JLo herself who is Clooney’s love interest when he’s not robbing banks. It says everything that needs to be said about the confrontation in Detroit that it is my favorite scene of all time in the movies, not to repeat myself. As judged #1, by me, for each of the last few years. The scene actually begins with a lead-in by Viola Davis who plays Moselle and who is Isaiah Washington’s presumable squeeze or sister or something and who he has just sent out to get some chicken so that he can be alone with JLo and introduce her to The Monster. That’s all the background you need. Viola Davis is on screen just long enough to open her eyes wide, in foreboding, a beautiful thing to see, and my point is that if the cast is so strong that Ms. Davis is just the set-up, that means it must be a great scene, which it is. You have to see it. Probably the JLo-Isaiah Washington showdown won’t affect you the way it did me, but it might.

If you ask me for my second all-time favorite scene it would be the meeting in the board room in Margin Call, from 2011. Everyone is good and it’s smart moviemaking, explaining an idea not a corpse on the ground. It’s believable in the sense that a bunch of mostly white actors pretending to do wholesale generalized evil—well, these actors are right on the money: Jeremy Irons, Zachary Pinto, Kevin Spacey, Simon Baker, Demi Moore, Aasif Mandvi, they're all about to pull out The Monster, too, but it’s a different one than Isaiah Washington has in Out of Sight. What about the whole movie, you may ask? 

Why not watch it? 

The answer is about not having the patience to sit still for two hours anymore, the length of the average Hollywood release, that can happen as you get older, especially the more movies you’ve seen. Watching a script unfold that—even before it starts—you know how it’s going to end? Not to be a purist, or puritanical, not to be Old School or anything. There was a word that critics used to use a lot, “derivative,” as in one work is derived from another? We’re so far past derivative now, what’s the point? The unsurprising exception is anything with another actor named Washington—Denzel. With Denzel, you have to see the whole film. Literally, he can read the ingredients on a cereal box and it’s watchable, but my favorite is when he’s racking up the body count, especially if he’s doing white guys, not to be mean-spited or anything. The vibe he always gives off is justice. Killing can be beautiful art, especially when it's deserved. 

Historically the two movie scenes that have stayed with me through the decades, since my childhood, are the “I-could-have-been-a-contender” cab ride with Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront and the final shoot-out in the saloon in Shane (1953). There’s a dog in the saloon and the animal steals the scene from Alan Ladd and Jack Palance. In terms of sheer cinematic beauty there is the escape across the snow to Switzerland, at the end of La Grande Illusion, which has a brisk and beautiful narrative, not to sound artsy or anything but it really is a cool example of moviemaking. Being an action fan myself and seeing my share of war movies, one must consider the Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now of course. But each of these moments in cinema was picked at a time when the whole movie experience was important to me. Now it’s just scenes on YouTube.

Maybe it’s age, young viewers don’t know that the new movie is derivative of a prior film because they never saw the old one, you know? 

For me, it means no new favorite movies. It’s like a video diet, actually, and the results have been surprising. Revising my number one or number two scene is occasionally required but not as often as you might think. 

Right now a revision of number two is being considered based upon my number of viewings online. The challenger to Margin Call’s board room drama is a scene that also came my way entirely by way of YouTube, from a movie that very likely will never be on my list to see. There is just this one scene, it’s in a meeting room too, like Margin Call, but instead of being a real ensemble work it features a soliloquy, more or less, by none other than Sean Puffy Combs. Instead of the late lamented Tuffy of Out of Sight the animals here are cockatoos. The film is Get Him to the Greek, about the music business, a subject that does not interest me in the least. Again, as in the case of Isaiah Washington, the scene is basically a brother talking shit, there ought to be an Academy Award for a particular scene like this, different from the award for the whole movie. My sincere wish is to thank George Clooney for backing off in Out of Sight and sipping his bottle of water, or whatever, behind the camera, and letting the supporting actors get in some quality time in front. You have to thank the director or whoever who let a good black actor and a Latina star show their stuff and didn’t leave the film on the cutting room floor. And lastly of course you have to thank the writer. It was Elmore Leonard, what can you say?

Leonard also wrote Get Shorty, btw, which has a few good scenes too. In a career spanning decades. Leonard first wrote Westerns—Last Stand at Sabre River and Valdez is Coming, to name a few, with the great Burt Lancaster in the latter. When Leonard's books were filmed in urban settings, Miami or Detroit for example, he has a better ear for multi-ethnic urban dialogue than anybody in the business. Which is what JLo and Isaiah Washington were doing, btw, having a dialogue.