J's Theater

Dems Proceed on HCR09 + US in Shambles + Blade Closes + Partió Blas Jiménez

2009-11-21T15:17:00.000-08:00

I'm glad that the last two holdouts in the Democratic caucus, Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Blanche Lambert Lincoln (D-AR), have decided to vote with the rest of their caucus and allow the debate on the combined health care bill Harry Reid (D-NV) debuted earlier this week to proceed. Recalcitrants like these two, as well as Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) have repeatedly dispelled the illusion of party cohesion that the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Senate Campaign Committee love to sell; while the Senate Democrats have helped to pass some important, mostly small-bore legislation since taking power in 2006, they continue to slog along as if the GOP were still in control, failing again and again to show real leadership on any of the major issues that face the country. Instead, what the public sees is a glacially moving body, full of right-wing ranters and moderate milquetoasts, taking a scattered and often seemingly ineffective approach to everything. Above all, the needs of Congress's corporate masters come first.

Perhaps it has often, if not always, been this way, but the close-but-unfinished health care reform effort, the ongoing wars and related national security issues, and the economic crisis all throw into high relief how ineffective the United States' upper house continues to be. That said, it increasingly looks like the Democrats will pass a health care reform bill that, while not perfect, will be better than earlier indications suggested. Though the single-payer option is going, the final bill probably will have a public insurance plan; it probably will allow people to opt out of terrible current plans instead of being locked into them; it probably will provide adequate subsidies for a sizable portion of working- and lower-middle families; and it will stop insurance companies from some of their worst practices, such as dropping people because of "pre-existing" conditions, jacking up rates when people get sick, and turning the entire process of dealing with the health care system into a free-for-all lottery. The Senate bill, like the House bills, also includes horrendous anti-immigrant and anti-reproductive rights provisions, and it does not adequately address the for-profit nature of the system, which means that US consumers spend anywhere from twice to three times as much per capita per year as our industrialized peers, and it doesn't have enough in it to drive down insurance costs or drug prices, another baleful aspect of the current American healthcare landscape.

As the bill undergoes continual weakening and diminishment, it makes me wonder whether the Democrats, despite getting so far, will be able to pass it, either by majority with or without a single Republican vote, or by reconciliation, thereby taking a page from the GOP, and if they do so and President Obama in the end signs it, whether it will anything more than a mostly hollow victory. Continual public pressure on the Congress seems to be the only way ensure even minimal fidelity to the people's business, so you know what we all must do:

Call/write/fax your Representative
Call/write/fax your Senators

Urge everyone you know to do so to. Now is a very perilous period for the health care reform bill, and anything progressive.

===

Things are really grim economically across the US and much of the world; this isn't news. I see and feel it in varying ways, and often have to force myself not to dwell on how it's affecting so many people I know well, as well as those I don't. Then I read an article like the ones below and I start to feel more than a little worried; things are much, much worse than they seem, and yet the people running the government, corporate heads, the mainstream media all seem so blasé, indifferent, or incapable to getting their acts together.

Alternet.org: 15 Signs the Country Is Coming Apart at the Seams

Longer piece: Amped Status: The Critical Unraveling of US Society

Despite all the grim indicators--including the 123 banks that have failed so far this year--believe the country will turn around, but given the approach of those leading the government and many corporate leaders, it's going to be a painful process, and there's no guarantee that we won't be even worse off if the main perpetrators--their enablers remain in power--behind the mess we're in somehow inveigle their way back to full power using false-populism, lies, propaganda, and anything else that works.

One issue I've thought about a lot is the Congress's inability to reform the financial industries or sector. One key issue is the "too-big-too-fail" problem. As I've mentioned before on this blog, my first post-undergrad job was in banking, when commercial and investment banks were forbidden by law from merging or sharing certain key functions, when banks could not operate across state lines, and when certain other regulatory controls dating from the period of the New Deal were still strongly in place. Even with those safeguards, in October 1987, one month after I began my very brief banking career, stock markets across the world witnessed their biggest crashes in decades. This was also during a period when the US dollar was comparatively weak, and the country was struggling with the deficits that had built up during the previous 8 years of massive tax cuts, defense spending binges, rising deregulation, and gross underinvestment in public and private infrastructure. The US had seen two recessions under Reagan, I believe, and would see an even worse one in a few years under HW Bush. And yet a little over a decade later, in the late 1990s, after the economic upswing, financial policymakers led by Robert Rubin and Larry Summers would do everything they could to gut what remained of the New Deal safeguards, working hand-in-glove with people like Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) to repeal the Glass-Steagall Acts of 1932 and 1933, which had maintained one of the last walls prevent a return to 1920s-style laissez-faire capitalism. Many of these policymakers and their adepts are in place today; we have a libertarian Republican as Fed Chair. We have a neoliberal centrist from the Rubin school, who made disastrous bets at his previous job, coordinating economic policy for the administration. We have a lackey for longtime financial megagambler Goldman Sachs as Treasury Secretary. The already big banks are considerably bigger, and several will be handing out more in bonuses--record bonuses--this year than some states' budget deficits. How it all will shake out, I don't know. But as the Alternet piece suggests, things are pretty grave and could get ugly. Very, very ugly. I hope and pray they won't.

===

I recently participated in some heavy backchannel lamenting about the collapse of the Washington Blade, one of the nation's premier LGBTQ newspapers which had just celebrated its 40th birthday; its sibling newspaper, The Southern Voice in Atlanta, and of its parent company, Window Media, the owner of several other LGBTQ-focused newspapers and periodicials in the country.

The culprit, from what I can tell, is the current dismal economic environment. Several publications in New York and other cities have also fallen by the wayside over the last year. I agree with the argument that with the ongoing development of the Internet and new online media have come a range of new means for disseminating news, conducting investigations, and fostering advocacy and knowledge production around LGBTQ issues, but I also think we shouldn't underestimate the value and necessity of traditional news organizations, including the much smaller but once vital issues and identity-oriented ones, like the Blade. It and newspapers like it have played and continue to play an important role especially during a period when some certainties about how far the society has shifted on LGBTQ and other issues are being called into question. At her David R. Kessler lecture several weeks ago, Sarah Schulman noted, among her many wise points, that "we are dismantling" many of our longstanding institutions--or we are allowing them to be dismantled--at the very moment that we may need them more than ever. Perhaps these vivid manifestations of ongoing struggles remind us that we aren't yet in the post-everything (post-gay, post-race, etc.) worlds that have been proclaimed for quite some time.

Some articles suggest that the Blade may resume publication under different auspices, perhaps as an employee-owned paper or as a not-for-profit, the latter being a model I'm surprised isn't discussed even more as journalism in general takes hit after hit.

===

A friend, translator, scholar and librarian Herbert R., recently sent word of the passing of one of the Dominican Republic's important poets, Blas Jiménez (at left), on November 13. One of the most stalwart expositors and champions of the DR's African heritage--90% of Dominicans have African ancestry, a higher percentage than almost every other country in the Americas except Haiti, Jamaica, and the predominantly Black Caribbean islands--Jiménez had a rich and varied career, as an award-winning journalist; essayist; professor at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra; TV producer and host of Página Abierta, radio producer and host of La Mañana en Antena; as Secretary General of the DR's national commission for the United Nations Organization for Education, Culture and Communication (UNESCO). For over a decade he worked at the International Education Resource Center, where he developed courses on Afro-Dominican and Caribbean culture and literature.

Amidst all of this great work, he was also and perhaps best known as a poet, and especially as a "poeta de negritud." His works include the volumes Aqui... Otro Español (Here...Another Spanish), Caribe Africano en Despertar (African Caribbean Waking Up), Exigencias de un Cimarrón (Exigiences of a Maroon), and El Nativo (The Native). With highly regarded scholars Silvio Torres-Saillant and Ramona Hernández, he co-edited the book Desde la Orilla: hacia una nacionalidad sin desalojos (From the Edge: Towards a Nationality Without Evictions). His death, as this very brief note makes clear, is a major loss for Dominican, Caribbean, and African Diasporic literature and culture.

iDrawings (New Batch)

2009-11-20T23:57:00.000-08:00

How quickly the weeks whip past. I'll post more tomorrow, but in lieu of prose, here're are a few more iPhone drawings. I'm up to nearly 40; I have managed about 1 per day, all drawn from live subjects (=people), by thumb and index finger, the sketches preceding the filling in. A friend who's an artist thought that Elizabeth Peyton might be my inspiration, so I had to tell him that it has been, as I've mentioned here before, David Hockney. I've finally learned how to use the differing layers, despite years of working with Adobe Photoshop, and I even experimented with a real photo as a background; that image turned out to be a bit of a mess, so I'm holding off of more now. I may try a few caricatures, along the lines of the Sabathia image and the ones I used to do in high school--I should scan some of those in here just for the exercise--but for now, it's all electronic expressionism all the time.

Click on any for larger images.

Man on subway (I must draw these quickly, since I only have 2 stops from 42nd St. to 23rd St. on the F or V, or 3 stops from Fulton to Grand Central terminal on the 5 or 6, and the latter train is always horribly crowded and people do not take kindly to being viewed intensely, another way of saying "ogled," even if for drawing purposes)

Group portrait, on PATH (the first group drawing I've done)

Man on PATH

Woman on PATH (she kept giving me death stares, as if to say, you had better NOT be taking my picture--and I wasn't)

Man on PATH (I don't think he ever noticed I was drawing him at all)

Man on light rail

Man on light rail

Tan Lin's Chalk Playground, LitTwitChalk

2009-11-15T21:23:00.000-08:00

Performa 09, the biennial performance festival, has been taking place since the beginning of the month, and having missed the entire program in previous years, I've wanted to catch at least a few of the events, which include performances by the likes of Mike Kelly, Joan La Barbara, Adam Pendleton, Pauline Oliveros, Arto Lindsay, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster & Ari, and many others, so yesterday, despite the rain (from the nor'easter), I ventured over to the Lower East Side to catch, and participate, in artist and poet Tan Lin's Chalk Playground, LitTwitChalk.

The event took place in and on the concrete playground of PS 2, on Madison Street just off Allen Street, on the edge of Chinatown and in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, and involved a live street-chalking exercise, followed by Tan's and others' chalking of a Futurist manifesto, a Chinese manifesto, and a collaborative, and real-time poetry “line” installation piece and drawings by a wide array of writers. Since I'm rarely in this part of Manhattan, I found getting there like navigating a maze, which included a sidetrip of one stop into Brooklyn before I switched trains and reemerged from the subway essentially right where the PATH had let me out, just one block north of Ground Zero and the WTC site. My iPhone's enhanced GPS mapping system proved very handy (the pulsating dot that moves as you walk is entrancing too), and I eventually found the site, though the rain had begun to drench the pavement, though not the chalkwork, and a number of participants were still there, including Tan.

On the Performa site, Tan listed, among others, Felix Alarcon, Bruce Andrews, Anselm Berrigan, Jimbo Blachly, Lee Ann Brown, Ethan Bumas, Greta Bumas, Emilie Clark, Yina Chun, Kareem Estefan, Robert Fitterman, Sarah Gambito, Kenneth Goldsmith, Paolo Javier, De-Quan Jenkins, Ahn Lin, Joseph Legaspi, Saqub Naeem, Jason Perry, Elizabeth Sanchez, Brittany Sanders, Katherine Sanders, Olivia Shao, Phillippa Shao, Lytle Shaw, Jennifer Tsuei, Charles Yarbrough, and Helena Zhang. I saw of few of these writers and artists, as well as Gordon Tapper, above whose extended, multicolored line I, at Tan's invitation, chalked in one. (See video below).

I plan to revisit the site later this week, just to see how the chalking has held up. After several days of rain, and later tires and children's feet, it probably will be a blurry mess, but the collaborative, outdoor aspects of it, as well as its ephemeral nature, made it a lot of fun, and a great deal of the statements were thoughtful and provocative. I hope Tan does this again, on heavily trafficked sidewalks in parts of the city where the messages may spark immediate thought and commentary among passersby.

Some photos:

Tan Lin observing some of the handiwork

Little artists participating in the event

Participants chatting (Bruce Andrews in all black)

Lin videorecording some of the work (Pierre Joris in the trenchcoat and beret)

My first line

YouTube video I made of the first line I chalked (very short)

A video of one of the collaboratively chalked pieces (very short)

Ernest Hardy Interviews Sapphire + Tayari Jones & Breadmaking

2009-11-12T14:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I mentioned the author Sapphire, from whose novel Push director Lee Daniels created his new film Precious. Journalist, critic and critical thinker Ernest Hardy posted an interview with Sapphire yesterday on his blog, Blood Beats. It's excerpted, he says, from a longer version that appears in LA Weekly, which he writes for, and from an extended conversation that he and Sapphire had. It's definitely worth reading.

***

Continuing on the Precious tip, Tayari Jones recently noted on her blog that the controversy swirling about the film had gotten to her so much that she decided to bake a 7-Up pound cake--and she posted the recipe on her blog. (I am going to have to try it.) It looks delicious enough to calm anyone facing anything.

(BTW, Congratulations to Tayari also for having her new novel picked up by Algonquin Books!)

I can't claim similar grounds for my baking, but I do look forward to any excuse to create a loaf of bread. I don't know what is going on with this bread-baking mania, but I really enjoy doing it, and it really calms me down. I did finally make one of the bread recipes Miriam sent, for Irish soda bread--and then turned what was left of it into bread pudding with chocolate that was one of the best desserts I've made in some time. But before I post that, I'm going to post the basic bread recipe from which almost any standard loaf can be made.

I should add that a number of people I know either can no longer eat bread--at least store-bought bread--or deign to for dieting purposes, but I wonder if this homemade bread has the same effect. Recently when we had gone through several micro-sized baguettes I baked C bought some bread from Calandra's Bakery, and it molded after about 4 days (!?), while other store-bought bread--baguettes, Italian bread, etc.--turns to stone if left out of the refrigerator. The bread I bake 1) usually keeps for a week without mold if not refrigerated; 2) retains its flavor for weeks, even if refrigerated; and 3) maintains its consistency as well. I wrote to Calandra's to let them know about their bread, but I got a very terse, robotic response from some PR person, so if you're in northeastern New Jersey and shopping for what you think is homemade-style bread, you've been forewarned.

The Basic Recipe

I adapted my basic recipe from Mark Bittman's New York Times "no knead" recipe. It's a better bet than his book, How to Cook Everything, which is excellent but unaccountably uses "pounds" instead of "cups" for the basic recipe, which causes unnecessary confusion. There are several keys to getting consistently good bread with this recipe, I've learned. First, you should always use rapid-rise yeast. Second, mix the flour in a glass bowl, then cover it with a plastic shopping bag (which increases the heat and moisture in the bowl and yeast growth) held in place by a rubber band--it's far more effective than a loosely draped tea towel, a cutting board, etc. Third, keep the covered bowl in a warm part of your kitchen. Fourth, always use a little olive oil during the second (even if brief) knead period. It is essential to prevent the dough from sticking or burning, and it adds flavor.

Okay, so here goes. You start with:

1 packet of rapid-rise/quick-rising yeast (VERY IMPORTANT)
2 teaspoons of salt (Bittman says 1.5, but 2 give more flavor)
3 cups of bread/unbleached flour/whole wheat/rye flour
1/2 cup of pastry flour (VERY IMPORTANT)
1 1/2 cups of water (you can often use a little less but adjust according to the dough's consistency)

C figured out the pastry flour addition. It is essential because pastry flour has LESS gluten and is lighter than regular flour, so when the dough rises, it adds more air bubbles. Do not use self-rising flour, cake flour, or other kinds of prepared flours. Some combos to try are:

1) 3 cups of unbleached whole wheat bread flour + pastry flour = French/white bread
2) 3 cups of unbleached general purpose flour + pastry flour = French/white bread
3) 1 cup of stone ground whole wheat flour + 2 cups of unbleached whole wheat bread flour + pastry flour = lighter whole wheat bread (hearty)
4) 3 cups of stone ground whole wheat flour + pastry flour = fuller whole wheat bread (VERY hearty)
5) 3 cups of whole rye flour + pastry flour = rye bread (and darker than rye bread that you buy in the store--EXTREMELY hearty)

And so on. The proportions are key, and the heavier the basic flour (rye, whole wheat), the more important the pastry flour.

To start, you pour the yeast and salt in the bowl, then add the flour. I either gently stir or whisk these together to ensure that everything is well distributed. Then you slowly add the water. It may not seem to be binding into dough at first, but keep stirring and folding it, with a wooden spoon (you could use your fingers as well), and you will see that it starts to become shaggy, then more of a ball. I suggest not adding all the water if you can; you don't want the dough to be a wet mess, just moist. If it's too wet, then add a little more flour. But if it appears too dry after you'd added the suggested amount of water above, then add a little bit more water so that you can at least pull it from the sides of the glass. Create a little ball, and then cover it with a plastic bag (the basic supermarket ones are great), holding it in place with a rubber band. You don't want any air to get in or out. Let it sit for 3-4 hours. You could create it in the morning before work, and it'll be ready when you get home. It also can sit for longer (6-7 hours, etc.).

NOTE: Rye bread does not rise as much as other kinds of bread. Bittman says it barely rises at all, but with the pastry flour, mine does expand a bit. So don't be dismayed if it doesn't puff up like wheat/white bread.

After the dough has sat for the necessary amount of time and risen (you will see it double or sometimes triple in size), you want to pull it out and on a clean, lightly oiled (olive oil) cutting board, press it down and fold it into itself several times. I always do this by hand. Do not overknead it, but perhaps turn it into itself about 10 or so times. This is the stage at which you can add raisins, nuts like pecans, walnuts and pignoli, olives, herbs like rosemary or chives, garlic, chunks of sun-dried tomato, anything. I have tried many of these. The key is to make sure they're not oily or wet (so wash the pitted olives well and dry them). When you've kneaded or added ingredients and kneaded the dough, form it into another ball and return it to the plastic bag-covered bowl. Let it sit and rerise for another 1/2 hour. (You could let it sit for longer if you like, but usually 1 hour max is great.)

Now comes another important step. As the bread is rerising, you should turn the oven on and set it to 450°. If it takes your oven a while to warm up, start as soon as you return the dough to the bowl. If it warms up quickly, you can do this about 15-20 minutes before you bake the bread. You want the oven HOT, though, when the bread goes in. About 10-15 minutes before you bake the bread, you should put whatever you're baking the bread in or on--an ovensafe covered crock/French pot, a baking sheet, a bread stone--into the oven so that it warms too. I either use a covered crock pot or a baking sheet, depending upon the bread I'm making. Neither needs to be oiled because you've already oiled the bread, and loose oil in a crockpot or on a baking sheet will begin to smoke...bad news!

When the bread has sat for at least 1/2 hour and rerisen, remove the plastic-bag cover. Then remove the crock pot/baking sheet/bread stone and set it atop your stove. You should carefully place the rerisen dough into the crockpot (and cover, to keep the steam in, which will make the bread light inside and hard outside) or onto the baking sheet/bread stone. Form it into a boulle or round loaf, or stretch it out if you want a longish loaf. (For baguettes, break it into two pieces and stretch them out. Put it back into the 45o° oven and let it cook for 30 minutes. (During the baking process, you can gingerly score the top with a knife if you want to be fancy.)

If you put it in a crockpot, remove the pot top (a palindrome!) after 30 minutes, and let the bread bake uncovered for 15 more. It should be light/golden brown on top. If you cook it on a baking sheet, it will also be golden brown, but the crust won't be as hard. The trick to getting a harder crust if you bake the bread on a baking sheet is when you initially put the baking sheet in the oven, to place a pan underneath it, let it heat for a little bit, then CAREFULLY add water so that it steams. You can also spritz (or use your fingers to sprinkle) water on the hot insides of the oven and on the baking sheet to create steam. This creates a hard crust, and is essential if you're making baguettes.

Also, be VERY CAREFUL when spritzing not to splash water on the oven's light bulb. Why? Because it explodes! I can attest to how difficult it is to clean up the broken glass, and to having to throw out the bread for fear it's been pierced by glass shards. Not fun.

Remove the bread after more 15 minutes or it's browned on top. You don't want it to burn. Place it on a cutting board and let it cool to room temperature. Don't cut it right away, but let the inside cool. After about 5-10 minutes, if you want to try some with butter or olive oil, or something else, you can sample it. To keep it for a week, you just place in the same sort of plastic shopping bag you used to cover the rising dough, and let it sit out at room temperature. If your home (apt./house) is really warm, then refrigerate it after a few (2) days, but if not, it should keep for 5-7 days without refrigeration.

And that's the basic bread recipe! I'll post one for semolina bread, and one to make pumpernickel bread, very soon. Both are similar but involve a few more steps/tricks.

Some bread photos:

Olive loaf

Rye bread, cooled and sliced

Pumpernickel bread (first time--I added too much molasses, so it was too sweet and crumbly. The second time I got the amount right. Recipe coming soon!)

Two mini-baguettes

My standard pecan loaf

Semolina loafs

Bread pudding, made with leftover Irish soda and chocolate

White on Precious + College for Fewer + CC Reading + AAWW Awards

2009-11-11T20:46:00.000-08:00

I haven't seen Precious yet. I'm torn; on the one hand I feel I ought to see it, and on the other hand...I recall Sapphire's extremely disturbing book, Push, which it took every fiber inside me to get through. (And yet the other night Mariah Carey told Larry King she read it twice. Really? Okay.) I had some issues with the novel, but on the whole I felt the author was telling a story that she felt needed to be told, even if it often felt gut-gnawingly wrenched from deep inside (if not her, then someone else.) The book and film, I recognize, are different. Entertainment titans Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey have gotten behind it, and the kudos from cinetomanes has been strong and sustained. A filmmaker I admire tremendously went to see it last week and tweeted his praise. Yet not everyone is agog over it. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane and New York Magazine's David Edelstein weren't sold. And there's always Armond White, in the New York Press, to challenge the cheering chorus. His review is titled "Pride and Precious," and it is an erupting volcano of critical vehemence. Brotha ain't playing:

SHAME ON TYLER PERRY and Oprah Winfrey for signing on as air-quote executive producers of Precious. After this post-hip-hop freak show wowed Sundance last January, it now slouches toward Oscar ratification thanks to its powerful friends.Winfrey and Perry had no hand in the actual production of Precious, yet the movie must have touched some sore spot in their demagogue psyches. They’ve piggybacked their reps as black success stories hoping to camouflage Precious’ con job—even though it’s more scandalous than their own upliftment trade. Perry and Winfrey naively treat Precious’ exhibition of ghetto tragedy and female disempowerment as if it were raw truth. It helps contrast and highlight their achievements as black American paradigms—self-respect be damned.

And he continues:

Winfrey, Perry and Daniels make an unholy triumvirate.They come together at some intersection of race exploitation and opportunism. These two media titans—plus one shrewd pathology pimp—use Precious to rework Booker T. Washington’s early 20th-century manifesto Up From Slavery into extreme drama for the new millennium: Up From Incest, Child Abuse,Teenage Pregnancy, Poverty and AIDS. Regardless of its narrative details about class and gender, Precious is an orgy of prurience. All the terrible, depressing (not uplifting) things that happen to 16 year-old Precious recall that memorable All About Eve line, “Everything but the bloodhounds nipping at her rear-end.”

It starts with the opening scene of Precious’ Cinderella fantasy. Tarted up in a boa and gown, walking a red carpet light years away from her tenement reality, Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) sighs, “I wish I had a light-skinned boyfriend with nice hair.” Her ideal smacks of selfhatred—the colorism issue that Daniels exacerbates without exploring. He casts light-skinned actors as kind (schoolteacher Paula Patton, social worker Mariah Carey, nurse Lenny Kravitz and an actual Down syndrome child as Precious’ first-born) and dark-skinned actors as terrors. Sidibe herself is presented as an animal-like stereotype—she’s so obese her face seems bloated into a permanent pout.This is not the breakthrough Todd Solondz achieved in Palindromes where plus-size black actress Sharon Wilkins artfully represented the immensity of an outcast’s misunderstood humanity. Instead, Sidibe’s fancy-dressed daydream looks laughable; poorly photographed, its primary effect is pathetic.

It never lets up. In fact, the final paragraph includes a description that verges on being gratuitously cruel, even as it underlines a critique White has made more than once about other films that appear to traffic in the same toxic brew as this one.

So who knows, I may go see it. Or not. It would be great, however, to see some films and non-"reality" TV shows about middle and working-class and poor people, black, white, latino, asian-american, all races and ethnicities, that did not hinge on stereotypes, pathologies, criminal activity, and the like. Does anyone in Hollywood or New York or elsewhere in the US remember how to make those films anymore? (Or get financing to do so....)

+++

The United States has shed millions of manufacturing jobs over the last 30 years. Under conservative and neoliberal economic policies, union membership and influence have ebbed dramatically since their heyday half a century ago. Low-skill jobs, in the construction and service sectors, which abounded a decade ago, have evaporated with the national and global economic collapse. Leaders on the right and left are still urging people to "go back to school" for retraining, for jobs that might not be there, in an economic environment that has already seen dramatic structural transformation, and for which college-level study, and the social, political, economic, and cultural capital, and accreditation it brings, have become increasingly necessary. And financially out of reach of more and more students.

So the Chronicle of Higher Education last week asked: Are Too Many Students Going to College?

I thought the question was, How Will Most Students Who Want to Go to College But Aren't Rich Going to Afford to Do So? (When I was a freshman, my total tuition, with room, board and facilities fees, was about $13,150. When I graduated four years later, it was around $16,145. Though I have paid off my student loans, it seemed impossibly exorbitant, especially compared to state universities, like my home one, where a year's tuition was around $3,300-$5,000 over the same period. This upcoming year my undergraduate institution's tuition, with room, board, and facilities fees, will be $48,868. Insane, even if students whose parents earn under a certain amount can essentially attend for almost nothing. My former home state's flagship public university's costs, for 2008-9? $20,600!)

In case you haven't seen it, how people with and without high school educations and college degrees are faring in the current economic environment.

+++

Also taking place tomorrow, a Cave Canem event:

Angela Jackson & Patricia Spears Jones will be reading at Poets House!

Chicago-based poet Angela Jackson and New York City’s Patricia Spears Jones will read from their work and talk about their literary coming of age in the cities they call home. The Cave Canem Writers Foundation joins Poets House and Northwestern University Press in celebrating the launch of Angela Jackson's new and extraordinary novel Where I Must Go.

Thursday, November 12, 2009
7:00pm - 9:00pm
Poets House
10 River Terrace
New York, NY

Catch it if you're available!

+++

This weekend the Asian American Writers Workshop will host PAGE TURNER: The Asian American Literary Festival, in New York City. Events begin on Friday, November 13, with a cocktail party and gala dinner that will include special guest and Booker Prize-winner Michael Ondaatje, and the presentation of a Lifetime Achievement Award legendary Alfre A. Knopf Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Sonny Mehta

A full slate of readings, and the AAWW's 12th Annual Literary Awards ceremony will take place on Saturday, November 14, at the Powerhouse Arena in D.U.M.B.O., Brooklyn, at 37 Main Street.

This year's Asian American Writers Workshop Award winners and finalists:

The winner of the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Award in Fiction is Jhumpa Lahiri for her short story collection Unaccustomed Earth. The two finalists are Amitav Ghosh for Sea of Poppies and Ed Park for Personal Days.

The winner of the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Award in Poetry is Sesshu Foster for his collection World Ball Notebook. The two finalists are Monica Ferrell for Beasts for the Chase and Jeffrey Yang for An Aquarium.

The winner of the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Award in Nonfiction is Leslie T. Chang for her book Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. The two finalists are Kao Kalia Yang for The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir and Kavitha Rajagopalan for Muslims of The Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West.

Congratulations to the winners and finalists!

Politics + Yankees Win! + Se Pone Blanco + Kessler Lecture, 11/12 + iPhone Drawings

2009-11-10T21:14:00.001-08:00

It's been a week since I dropped in here, and every J's Theater reader knows the political business that's occurred since then, so I won't rage. But the results in Maine, which stripped away equal rights and ended Maine's brief experiment with same-sex, i.e., equal marriage, were very disappointing, even though the pre-election polling showed a close contest, and the Roman Catholic Church, among others, poured a great deal of money and energy into overturning the new law. As the chart below (straight from Matthew Yglesias/Think Progress) shows, marriage equality will eventually be part of the American landscape, but it may still be a ways off for most of the country.

(Click on table to enlarge)

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On Saturday, the House of Representatives made history by passing a Health Care Reform bill by a 220-215 margin. Only one Republican, Anh Joseph Cao (R-LA), who represents convicted Democrat Bill Jefferson's former New Orleans-area district, voted for the bill, while 39 Democrats, most Conservadems, a few ultraprogressives (Dennis Kucinich) voted against it. The historic legislation, ushered through by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her leadership team, does include some great touches, such as removing the tax penalty for same-sex domestic partners on the same plan and a considerably weakened public option. It also will go a long way towards covering the majority of the 40+ million who do not have and cannot afford health care insurance. But doesn't allow for a single-payer system, and includes extremist anti-abortion language that could conceivably be used by insurance companies to deny coverage to women who have miscarriages. It also does little to address one of the major problems of US health care, which is we spend more than twice, and in some cases three times what nearly every other industrialized nation does on health care. That is to say, it does little to remove the profit incentive from health care insurance, or to help drive down the cost of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, or hospital care. President Barack Obama removed himself from the discussion several weeks back, and seems concerned only with having something to sign, as opposed to the best bill possible. Or perhaps it's Rahm Emanuel whose conservative pragmatism is guiding the White House's approach. It's hard to know, because the White House sends out so many conflicting signals and operates in such a frustrating passive-aggressive manner it's hard to know what the President and his administration really stand for. Such are vicissitudes of 11 months of Obamatude. Well, we did get Sonia Sotomayor, didn't we?

Now the bill heads to the graveyard of the popular will, the US Senate. Republicans are mostly united against anything approximating reform. The Democrats probably have 50 votes, now that Al Franken is finally seated and Teddy Kennedy's replacement, Paul Kirk, also is present, but the main issue is a cloture vote, and it's unclear whether nominal Democrats like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln, or tantrum-throwing neocons like Joe Lieberman, will sustain a filibuster and prevent anything viable from coming to the floor. The Democrats have one of the wettest noodles leading them, if one can use the term, Harry Reid, who seems incapable of exerting any real power whatsoever. Dick Durbin of Illinois, second in command, seems to do little more than whine and beg, to little effect. It's beyond pathetic. In fact, Reid has even spoken recently of not getting anything to the floor before the end of the year! Meanwhile, the GOP, which is now witnessing its lowest level of voter identification in decades, makes threats, commands the media, and continues to draw stricter and stricter lines, all to the end of gumming up the legislative process and destroying our Hamlettian head of government and state. I'll say this: if the Democrats fail to push through a Senate bill, and if they leave in Bart Stupak's toxic anti-abortion amendment, they very well may have their "Waterloo," even if the President hangs on to middling popularity by the skin under his nails. They appear to want to fail, and they're doing nothing to prevent it. Meanwhile, as has been repeatedly noted, 45,000 people die each year from lack of health care insurance or inadequate coverage, and as someone who dealt with the health care industry extensively last year, I can say that the US's system is seriously screwed up and needs help, immediately.

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Friday I joined hundreds of thousands (a million?) people who crammed into the narrow streets of lower Manhattan to cheer on the New York Yankees, who won their 27th World Series. Responding to an online query, I predicted that the Yankees would win--against the St. Louis Cardinals, who were out after the first round of the playoffs. The Yankees had everything they needed, on the mound and in the field, including some production from the pulchritudinous but perplexing and scandal-plagued Alex Rodriguez for a change. Last year's champions, the Philadelphia Phillies, just could not crack Andy Pettitte or Mariano Rivera, or keep Hideki Matsui and Derek Jeter off the bases. With the Cardinals out, I followed--and watched, sometimes with C--most of the Yankees' games, and thought they'd pull off a 4-1 series in Philly, but the return to and victory in the Bronx only made the victory sweeter.

The parade was, in my experience, one of those rare times, like last November on Michigan Avenue and in Grant Park in Chicago, when vast throngs of people gather together and, because they're united in a common cause, they behave very well. Just a few days before, I'd told C about a near altercation I witnessed on the 5 train, in which a wacko ranted on about everything nearly bursting his rage-swollen head in support of another nut who ran his bicycle wheel over one woman's foot and into another's leg. On Friday, however, and I don't think it was just the presence of enough New York police officers to form a human bridge to Weehawken, people were acting quite kindly towards each other. I saw this again and again as people were polite when pressing through the dense crowds, and on the subway, there were more "Excuse mes" and "Pardon mes" than I've heard over the last 7 months. One unfortunate thought I had amidst all the good cheer, however, was there might be more people in that narrow corner of Manhattan (and in the tunnels beneath and on the other side of the Hudson trying to get there) than voted last Tuesday. (Michael Bloomberg only won by about 50,000 votes, and only 1.1 million of 4 million or so eligible voters cast ballots; I've so far spoken to at least one who didn't.)

Photos and video below:

At the parade (it looks like I was far away, but not really--not!)

The confetti being dumped from the cornices--it turned out that some of the celebratory paper included people's vital records and bank documents. Oops!

New York's finest penning people in like cattle

On a very crowded train--and the young woman in the middle of the photo was diligently reading and speaking her Hebrew text...only in New York!

Among the many, the proud, the Yankees boosters

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Speaking of baseball, Chicago, blackness, racism, the not-so-proud, and so much more, I'll just present the photos. Ughhh and arrrgghhh. Sad and tragic doesn't barely scratch the surface.

Vitiligo it ain't!

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On Thursday, playwright, novelist and activist Sarah Schulman will deliver the 18th Annual David R. Kessler Lecture. Her talk is entitled "Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences."

The event takes place at the CUNY Grad Center, at 34th St. and 5th Avenue, in Manhattan, in the Proshansky Auditorium. It runs from 6:30 to 8:30.

If you're in New York, don't miss it.

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The iPhone drawing continues. I'm addicted. I don't think I've drawn--or thumbed/index-fingered?--this much from life in many years. My new approach is to do as quick a sketch as possible, then fill in the details later. I've also been experimenting with different drawing styles, though I seem to be locked into train portraits these days.

I haven't yet figured out all the intricacies of the very popular Brushes program and have instead been using Autodesk Sketchbook for most of these portraits, which now total 23, or about 1 per day, though some days I do 2-3 in one shot. I do want to learn how to use the layers function in the former app, because I love Jorge Colombo's images.

Now if only AT&T would provide service anywhere near equal to the performance of my iPhone's apps, I'd consider the device essentially miraculous.

Man on light rail train

Woman on PATH

PATH conductor

Man on light rail

Man on PATH

Elections Today + Congrats & RIPs + Lee Trains It + iSketches

2009-11-03T18:08:00.001-08:00

It's Election Day, or Referendum on Obama's Presidency Day, or Republican Civil War Day, or something. I voted in a disorganized, mostly voter-free polling place in Jersey City for the incument, Jon Corzine, and his feisty runningmate, Loretta Weinberg (before Ms. Weinberg, he was considering Celebrity Apprentice-winner Randall Pinkston).

I felt he was the best of the three major choices, none of which was appealing; though he's been lackluster at governing, he is a committed social, political and ideological progressive, and his few legislative successes have come in this area. In terms of lowering the state's grotesquely high property taxes, he's failed miserably. He's also presided over--but not been linked to--the usual intractable corruption that has historically been endemic to New Jersey. Earlier this year a slew of local Democrats, and one Republican, were caught in a massive crime dragnet; a number of people here in Hudson County, including several people in and around Jersey City's mayor, were indicted, while Hoboken's newly elected mayor, as well as the mayor of Secaucus, were also forced to resign after bribery charges. The global economic collapse hasn't helped him either, though I see little sign that he's doing much to address it other than tacking close to President Obama's coattails. And Obama was here repeatedly, including just this past weekend, again.

But I doubt people in the counties Corzine needs to win heavily (northeastern and far southwestern New Jersey) are going to turn out as much as the middle-belt counties, which are more Republican. I also imagine that many suburbanites assume Christopher J. Christie, the Republican candidate, a Karl Rove protegé and W Bush US Attorney appointee who has been dogged by allegations of misuse of his office and repeated ethics problems, will be as socially liberal as New Jersey's last Republican governor, Christine Todd Whitman, who also turned out to be fiscally irresponsible, in typical late 20th-century fashion. She slashed taxes whenever possible, privatized as much as she could get her hands on and borrowed heavily, leaving the state in the woeful condition it's been in throughout the early years of this century. If he wins Christie will probably reprise this record, with th

The third major candidate, independent Chris Daggett, has offered some interesting proposals, and probably would have gotten my vote if I'd had any confidence that he could move his proposals through the legislature. So it was Corzine, who appears to be losing to Christie as I type this. Voter turnout in Hudson and Essex Counties, two in which Corzine needs to win big, appears to be tepid.

Update: Christie has won and is the Governor-elect of New Jersey. He received 1,132,689 votes, or 49% of the total, to Corzine's 1,026,899, or 44%. Daggett, the 3rd party candidate, received 132,181, or 6%. One wonders had he not been in the race whether Corzine would have eked out a victory?

Across the river in Manhattan, Democrat Bill Thompson, is running against Goliath himself, Republican-turned-Independent Michael Bloomberg. In addition to negotiating with the City Council to repeal the term limits law to give himself another four years, Bloomberg is spending somewhere near $100 million to return to office. And for what? To serve as a caretaker for a city that is visibly falling apart, with rising numbers of homeless families, empty storefronts, and crumbling infrastructure, after having spent 8 years trying to remake Manhattan into a playground for the super-rich, and before that catering to ? This is a record to run on? Were he running against any other Republican, I think Thompson could have won on the merits of his record as head of the Board of Education and NYC Comptroller, which Bloomberg and even New York's previous GOP mayor, the odious Rudy Giuliani, have praised. It does look like Bloomberg will win, but I am praying that the election is closer than anyone expected. I can say with certainty that John Liu will be New York City's next Comptroller.

BTW, it looks like the Thompson-Bloomberg race is closer than anyone thought. As of now--10:30 pm--it's Thompson 48%, Bloomberg 49%...

Update: Bloomberg has won, 51%-46% over Thompson. 50,000 votes separated them; only a little over 1.1 million people voted, out of possibly 4 million. Disgusting.

In the Virginia race, it looks like crypto-extreme right-wing Catholic Republican Bob McDonnell, who wrote a graduate dissertation decrying will defeat hapless Democrat Creigh Deeds, who initially ran away from President Obama to the middle and, it appears, right into the Chesapeake. As a former Virginia resident and voter, I'm not surprised; the state's voting trends concerning the governor's seat seem to swing from far right to moderate left, though never too far from the ideologically conservative vein. As I type this, McDonnell's victory is already being stated as fact.

Maine voters go to the polls today to decide whether to preserve equal rights for same-sex marriage; voters will have the option to ratify the legislature's and governor's passage of same-sex marriage, or to overturn the legislative decision. I think it's unfortunately going to be very close, but I'm hoping that despite the Roman Catholic Church's intervention, No on 1--to preserve marriage equality--will win out.

Update: Right now, the Yes on 1 is winning by a slender margin...

Lastly, two legislative races are unfolding today, though only one has gotten real attention. In New York's 23rd House district, moderate Democrat Bill Owens was facing RNC-vetted and socially liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava (a last name worthy of fictional treatment), until right-wing teabagger Republicans and libertarians decided to throw their support to Doug Hoffman, who'd gotten New York State's Conservative Party's support. This led a slew of high profile right wingers, including Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, to support Hoffman, sidelining Scozzafava, who withdrew and, in a mild shocker, threw her support to Owens. Though the district went for President Obama last year, it had not elected a Democrat to Congress since the 19th century! I am hoping Owens wins, just because it will throw water on some of the more ridiculous MCM punditry out there, which is casting every outcome unfavorable to Democrats as a referendum on the President, when it appears that local issues and the larger economic crisis, which the MCM has yet to address with any seriousness, are underlining today's voting trends. Speaking of local issues and important votes, California also has a special election today: John Garamendi, a progressive Democrat, is expected to replace Ellen Tauscher, a Conservadem, with ease, in a district that had been Republican since...the 19th century! Have you heard the pundits talk about this?

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Although I tweeted about all of these congratulations in real time (i.e., last week), let me congratulate once again all the recent recipients of Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Awards, including Professor Jericho Brown, a CC grad who was honored for his amazing poetry. Congratulations, Jericho!

Congratulations also go to prolific novelist Marie NDiaye, 42, who yesterday became the first black woman to win France's most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. NDiaye (at right, www.frenchculture.org/), living in exile of Berlin because of the conservative rule of Nicolas Sarkozy and his party, published her first book at age 17 and received the Goncourt Prize for Trois Femmes Puissantes (Three Powerful Women). Félicitations à Marie NDiaye.

Yesterday, two intellectual giants passed away: pioneering (post-)structuralist anthropologist and intellectual Claude Lévi-Strauss and anti-Francoite novelist and philosopher Francisco Ayala. Over the last few weeks, the world has also lost photographer Roy DeCarava, whose collaboration with Langston Hughes, Sweet Flypaper of Life, is one of my great inspirations; feminist artist extraordinaire Nancy Spero; Professor Ray Browne, the founder of pop-culture studies; Raymond Federman, one of the giants of experimental American lit, especially "surfiction," during my college years and before; and fashion photographer Irving Penn, among others.

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They are perhaps the best known song lyrics about a US city to appear in a movie. The movie was On the Town. It hit screens in 1949, was written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, who was one of its stars, along with "Old Blue Eyes," Frank Sinatra, and danceuse Ann Miller. The following four lines are unforgettable and, to anyone who's ever visited Manhattan and gotten lost, invaluable.

"New York, New York, a wonderful town,
The Bronx is up and the Battery's down,
People ride around in a hole in the ground,
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town."

And Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Cliff Lee, it turns out, took them to heart. After getting stuck in traffic in Harlem (Morningside Heights) during his taxi ride to the stadium, he hopped on the subway, switched trains at one point, and arrived with a good amount of time to spare to pitch and win the opening game last week against CC Sabathia and the New York Yankees. I can imagine they probably wish he'd been one of the fearful types who wouldn't deign to set foot underground.

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And I've kept on iDoodling, or is it iSketching? It's addictive. I think I'm up to about 1 a day at least. Are these copyrighted terms yet? A few more, all drawn on the iPhone, with thumbs and fingers:

Yankees Go to Series vs. Phillies + MR Daniel Music Tomorrow + Glissant at NYU

2009-10-26T11:09:00.001-07:00

I haven't posted anything on the baseball playoffs since they began nearly a month ago. In part my silence results from the swift and ignominious departure of the Saint Louis Cardinals, who fell in 3 straight games, marked by minimal hitting and maximal errors, to the Los Angeles Dodgers. So the Cardinals are out. The Philadelphia Phillies, however, took care of the Dodgers after walloping Colorado, and now face the American League's best team, the New York Yankees.

The Boss's businessmen in pinstripes have played with great efficiency and pop since dominating their division, reminding me of their late 1990s run, when they reeled off four World Series wins in five years (1996, and 1998-2000). After a spate of playoff failures against the Boston Red Sox, and the annual post-season disappearance at the plate of A-Rod, the Yankees are again taking the field and games like champions. Their off-season acquisitions have also paid off, in particular the multimillion-dollar contract they offered to CC Sabathia, the 6'7", 290 lb southpaw powerhouse who after a bumpy start in April won 19 games for them with a 3.37 ERA, growing stronger as the months advanced. Sabathia has been dazzling so far in the post-season run, and was name American League Championship Series MVP.

Also working out well has been two other acquisitions: switch-hitting first baseman Mark Teixeira, who hit 39 home runs and drove in 122, tops on the team, and righthander A. J. Burnett, whose 13-9 record helped put the Yankees atop the AL East. While Teixeira has been a factor in playoffs so far, Burnett hasn't. Another factor in the Yankees' run this year has been lefthander Andy Pettitte. One of the Yankees' aces during the late 90s, George Steinbrenner let him go despite a 21-8 season in 2003 and a 16-9 playoff record, and during his absence the Yankees' playoff hopes fizzled. Pettitte returned two years ago, however, and with Sabathia, Burnett, and very young pitchers Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes, constituted one of the best starting rotations in the American League. Last night Pettitte pitched another gem, sending the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, who also sank themselves with onfield mistakes, back to Orange County, and setting them up for a battle with the Phillies.

My iPhone sketch of CC Sabathia

This matchup could be called the Original US Capital Cities Series, or the Original Major League Baseball Teams Series, or the New Jersey Transit Series, or the New Jersey Turnpike Exit series, or Competing Jersey Media Market Series, or the Two Cities that Dominate New Jersey Series, or the Two Cities Hosting Ivy League Universities Equidistant from Princeton and Rutgers Universities Series, or something else altogether. It's been 59 years since the two teams faced off in the World Series, which the Yankees, in their most glorious era, won 4 games to 0. The 2009 Phillies have very good pitching, especially in starters Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels, and a dangerous lineup, with good contact hitters like Chase Utley, Shane Victorino, and Pedro Feliz and a slugger for the ages in St. Louisan Ryan Howard. They more than match up well with the Yankees. They will also have the edge in the games played in Philadelphia, since the Yankees will lose a bat in their order, though Sabathia's very handy at the plate; neither ballpark is particularly pitcher-friendly.

I'm going to give my nod to the Bronx Bombers. If they can get outstanding pitching performances out of Sabathia and Pettitte, some offense from A-Rod, and close games out effectively under the Chamberlain-Hughes duo before future Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera has to take the mound, they will win. This is asking a tall order, but I think it's possible. I'm looking forward to watching every game if I can. (And if you have free tickets, you know, you can always share!)

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Tomorrow, composer-critic-brilliant person MR Daniel will be presenting work at Princeton University, at 8 pm, at
Taplin Auditorium, in Fine Hall.

The Celestial Mechanics vocal trio will be performing her new three movement vocal piece, My Father and I Are Playing. She writes of them: "I've known the performers in this ensemble for a couple of years, and I'm really excited by what I've heard of their approach to the piece so far. And they're really excited to be doing the piece--always a good combination!" I can say that I've heard some of her work live (in Chicago, and online), and I'm really excited to hear more.

Daniel be accompanying the vocal trio with a live visuals mix, and is part of the Composers Ensemble program at Princeton University. Celestial Mechanics is also performing work by "members Lainie Fefferman and Anne Hege, along with Michelle Nagai and Jascha Narveson, and piano works by David T. Little."

Here's another wonderful thing: if you can't make it to the actual performance there will be a live video stream with link available through the Princeton University Music Department's website. I also hope the performance is archived, because another event I'll mention below is taking place simultaneously, and also because I hope more people will get to hear MR Daniel's work.

Lastly MR writes, "(If you watch the webcast, please do let me know about your viewing experience--this is a new offering from the department)." Please do so if you can [go to the Princeton University Music Department link for more info].

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The other event (and of course there are many) occurring simultaneously (well, a little before) with the Princeton Composers Ensemble concert is the first of four panels devoted to the work of critic-author-sage Édouard Glissant, whose Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation are two of the bedrock theoretical texts of contemporary Black Diasporic and global post(-post)-colonial thought and practice. The events, sponsored by New York University's Institute of African American Affairs under the heading One World In Relation, will be taking place on the NYU campus over a series of weeks. I've had at least four different people send reminders, so I will let all J's Theater readers know about them as well. Here's the flyer:

Institute of African American Affairs

at New York University

presents

Édouard Glissant:

One World in Relation

Four Conversations with Édouard Glissant

whose path-breaking work, according to Gilles Deleuze,

“Ties the knot between philosophy and poetry at their deepest and purest level.”

Tuesday, October 27th

Wednesday, November 4th

Wednesday, November 18th

Monday, November 30th

Édouard Glissant is one of the most important thinkers of our time. In the 1980s, his theories of créolization, diversity and difference, as elaborated in the book Le Discours Antillais, were considered seminal texts for the emerging studies of multiculturalism, identity politics and minority literatures. In the 1990s and 2000s, Glissant’s work moved beyond the mere consideration of meanings as circumscribed by the relation of the signifier and the signified and the recognition of otherness. In his recently published book, Philosophie de la Relation, the concept is used to meditate on the new meanings of globalization, chaos, violence, equality and justice. Whereas in France and parts of Europe, Glissant’s work has inspired critics, poets, artists, museum curators, musicians, philosophers and politicians, in North America, much of its scope is still limited to the circle of Francophone literary theorists. It is now time to bring his ideas to a broader audience in the Anglophone world. With Philosophie de la Relation, Glissant points us to a possibility where our differences are no longer considered as proof of an irreconcilable fact, but as part of what relates us, makes us beautiful, complex and creative. These four conversations with Édouard Glissant will bring together philosophers, social scientists, artists and humanists to discuss his ideas across disciplines and for the larger public.

Opacity, Stupidity and the History of Unintelligibility:

The Right to Opacity as a Prerequisite for Politics and Philosophy

Tuesday, October 27^th, 2009 @ 6:30 pm

Panelists: Avital Ronell, Francois Noudelmann, Joan Retallack,

Sylvère Lotringer, Tracie Morris, Manthia Diawara and Denis Hollier (Moderators)
Location: Kimmel Center, Rosenthal Pavilion, 10^th Floor

60 Washington Square South, 4^th Floor, NY, NY

Diversity in the Black Night: Chaos, Créolization and Metissage

Wednesday, November 4^th, 2009 @ 6:30 pm

Panelists: Michael Dash, Ulrich Baer, Patricia Williams,

Kendall Thomas, Arjun Appadurai, Manthia Diawara and Judith Miller (Moderators)

Location: Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8^th Street, NY, NY

Roots & Imaginary Offshoots: Ecstatic Difference

Wednesday, November 18^th, 2009 @ 6:30 pm

Panel: Theory of “Relation and Difference”

Panelists include: Francois Noudelmann, Mary Ann Caws,

Breyten Breytenbach, Fred Moten, Emily Apter,

Manthia Diawara and Avital Ronell (Moderators)

Location: Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8^th Street, NY, NY

De-capitalization and the Way of the World: Religion, Secularism and Multiplicity

Monday, November 30^th, 2009 @ 6:30 pm

Panelists: Richard Sennett, Avital Ronell, Francois Noudelmann,

Craig Calhoun, Arjun Apadurai,

Manthia Diawara and Avital Ronell (Moderators)
Location: Kimmel Center, Rm. 914-Silver

60 Washington Square South, NY, NY

Free and open to the public

Please RSVP at (212) 998-IAAA (4222)

Presented by Institute of African American Affairs

Supported by: L’Institut du Tout-Monde, The Institute for Public Knowledge,

French Department and Comparative Literature Department

Sarah Schulman's Book Event

2009-10-25T11:59:00.000-07:00

October is almost over, and it feels like it has raced by. It's been wonderful and at times disorienting to be back east for the entire month; usually I'm well immersed into the dizzying hive of the fall quarter, but so far I've had a chance to think and read and write (and yes, write letters of recommendation!) and go to conferences, with breathers in between every activity, and it feels almost unreal. But wonderful nevertheless.

Since I've been in town I've had an opportunity not only to see people I haven't run into in a while, but meet folks I've known of or even have corresponded with over the years but never met face to face. Such was the case earlier today when I attended a book launch party for author Sarah Schulman, someone I admire tremendously and one of my literary heros/sheros. In addition to writing novels, plays, and a variety of nonfiction work, Sarah has been relentless in her activism over the years, particularly around issues affecting women, queer people, people of color, and working-class and poor people. She doesn't just pay lip service to these issues, she writes and fights, to use Ishmael Reed's phrase. This year the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at CUNY named her to deliver the prestigious 18th annual David R. Kessler lecture, which she'll do on November 12. Its title is "Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences." She joins an illustrious group of previous eminents that includes Samuel R. Delany, Barbara Smith, Adrienne Rich, Cherrie Moraga, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, John D'Emilio, Edmund White, Isaac Julie, Judith Butler, Douglas Crimp, and Joan Nestle.

Sarah's new novel, The Mere Future (one of my September 2009 book picks, I believe) captures her critical and activist approach, in speculative, fictional form; despite its unassuming title, the novel perceptively and incisively extrapolates from present-day New York, with its luxe-mania and unhelpful bromides and megabillionaire mayor, into a dystopic Big Apple (and US), now run by proverbial "others" and which appears to be functioning utopically, at least on the surface, but which her protagonists soon discover is as rotten as the pilings underneath the FDR Drive. I'll write more about the novel when I've had a little time to think about it more, but it was great to see Sarah yesterday, and also to run into some fellow wordsmiths I hadn't seen in a while, like Doug Jones. I also met Jack Waters and Peter Cramer; I used to receive their emails for Allied Productions, Inc., and even caught some of their work years ago (they co-ran ABC No Rio back in the mid 1980s), but had never met either of them. Until yesterday. So that was great too. Please pick up Sarah's book and if you're around NYC in November, catch her Kessler lecture.

Sarah signing my copy of The Mere Future

Jack Waters and Dominic

Charles Rice-Gonzalez, whose first novel will be out next spring (2010) from Alyson

Doug Jones

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Despite Ronaldo mentioning it after his reading on Thursday, I misread an online note and thus missed the final day of William Pope.l's recreation of Allen Kaprow's seminal and oft-staged "Yard," an interactive tire sculpture that permits adults to become children and gleeful explorers again, at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery uptown.

In fact I've never seen Pope.l perform any of his pieces live, but I have been a fan of his for some time. (Interestingly I cannot recall if I've ever mentioned him on J's Theater, or just thought of him as I've expounded on someone else.) Here's a link to two YouTube videos which are about as close as I'll be getting to a real Pope.l performance for the near future. Enjoy.

And here's "jameskalm" participating in the interactive creation:

iPhone Drawings

2009-10-24T19:43:00.001-07:00

In lieu of the many posts I've been meaning to write, here are some iPhone drawings I recently completed using the Brushes and Sketchbook apps. I'm still learning how to use both, but I decided to try both out as a way of not always defaulting to snapshots. One of the challenges is using my index finger or thumb instead of a narrower-tipped instrument, like a stylus or pen or pencil because the iPhone screen responds only to electricity. Another was figuring out how to erase, undo marks, and resize the screen to add details. I want to try darker backgrounds and more colors.

I know some artists have been using the Brushes app extensively; in addition to Jorge Colombo's much talked-about May 2009 New Yorker cover, David Hockney, one of my favorite artists, has begun to produce daily Brushes drawings that he mails out to friends and followers, and one of Jersey City the artists whose studio I visited last month during the big local open house festival had a worktable full of them. I don't know of anyone else who's using Sketchbook (perhaps a simple Google search would answer that question), but I find it a bit easier to use, and more powerful as well.

Here are five of mine (pretty crude, but they were fun to create):

Man on the subway (this was the very first one I tried)

Still life (Cup and book on coffee table)

C

Woman on the subway

Kitty cat

Poems of the Black Object Book Launch at T&W Collab

2009-10-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

Last night I caught a really fresh poetry reading at the launch of Ronaldo V. Wilson's Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009). This collection, Ronaldo's second, is one of J's Theater's October book picks, and it's easily one of the sexiest and liveliest collections you'll find on bookshelves today. Teachers and Writers Collaborative hosted the event at its 8th Avenue offices, which I'd never visited before. (I had to cancel a Seismosis reading that coincided with university events during the first year I served as the undergraduate program director, and never was able to reschedule.) I really like the new space, which is roomier and has even more dramatic views (of the Hudson River) than the old Union Square offices.

After Futurepoem Books founder and head Dan Machlin introduced the book and described the process by which it was selected (Futurepoem Books has a revolving cast of judge-selectors), three outstanding writers--Frances Richard, one of the book's judges; Wayne Koestenbaum, one of Ronaldo's graduate school profs; and Meena Alexander, who also taught him at CUNY--spoke about Ronaldo and read and performed poems from the book before he came to the podium. This was a great set up that I wish more readings would try; each reader gave the poems different and distinctive shadings, while whetting the desire to hear the poet himself read them. Richard described hearing Ronaldo read in Provincetown like witnessing the ocean rush through a large glass background window into the room, and I would have to concur, both when he reads alone and when he's with his fellow Black Took Collective poets. Last night, like Serena he served up three straight aces.

I'd never met Machlin, Richard, Koestenbaum, or Alexander (in person), though I'd corresponded with the Richard and Alexander times over the years via email, and I have been known to quote Koestenbaum from time to time. (He wrote the best Bette Davis poem I've ever read.) I also got to meet Garrett Kalleberg, whose collection Some Mantic Demons was the first Futurepoem book I came across (via Chris Stackhouse). Also wonderful was running into fellow language-lovers Tonya Foster, Duriel Harris, Bakar Wilson, Erica Doyle, Khari Polk, and Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene, among others. As always, I took photos, which are below:

Ronaldo

Dan Machlin

Wayne Koestenbaum

Frances Richard

Meena Alexander

French Essay/l'essai français + Art & Project Bulletin @ MoMa

2009-10-19T18:08:00.000-07:00

Recently I finished and sent off a draft of an essay I'd been working on for a good portion of the summer. I don't actually write that many essays, especially because I find the process very time-consuming and difficult, no matter how rewarding the final product, but what was significant and different this time was that the Canadian journal I wrote it for publishes in French only, and so after I was asked to submit something, based perhaps on my praise of and fascination with Taïa, I decided and then agreed to write it in French rather than in English, to be translated by me or someone else later on. It was, to put it simply, a challenge, or rather a series of them, and that, I think, more than anything else, made me determined to complete it.

The first involved reading and taking notes on the book, Abdellah Taïa's Une mélancolie arabe (Seuil 2009, Taïa at left, from thehumpdaycrew.blogspot.com), which hasn't been translated into English yet. (One of his earlier books, L'armée du salut is now available in English as Salvation Army. If I had the time, I'd be willing to attempt it.) Taïa's French fortunately is fairly straightforward and contains little slang, so getting through the book wasn't hard. Moreover, the novel, though sometimes exasperating in its protagonist's sentimentality and self-dramaticization, was nevertheless engagingly provocative and broached a lot of issues that would serve further discussion. The second involved constructing an argument in relation to the journal issue's theme, which was the Théâtre de la Cruauté, which I read as referring directly back to the original version proposed by French visionary playwright and activist Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). I'd read a little of Artaud's work before, and enough about him, primarily I believe via Susan Sontag, and I knew something about his successors, such as Peter Brooke, to have a general idea of what his two manifestos on the Theater of Cruelty were saying, but I figured I ought to read the actual texts themselves, in basic scholarly fashion, before I began trying to tease out a relationship between Taïa's novel and Artaud's ideas. I did so, first in French and then in English, to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding them, and what struck me as always was the slippage in meaning between the original and the translation, though the gist remains. In Artaud's case, I think the gist is what's most important, since he was trying to get away from texts in and of themselves, towards a more experimental, gestural and visual theatrical experience, one in which a deeper metaphysics, and thus, he believed, an authenticity, might be accessed.

I saw several routes into this connection between Taïa's novel and Artaud's (at right, Guardian UK, Getty/Martinie/Roger Viollet) theories, and worked through them, particularly around the frequent deaths and almost-deaths that occur in Taïa's book, every major crisis portending or transforming into a confrontation with la mort, and their links to la cruauté as Artaud defines it. But it wasn't until I came across some commentary by the critic Peter Sloterdijk that I was able to formulate a way of reading Taïa's work, via's Immanuel Kant's 3rd critique readings of the sublime (though Sloterdijk reroutes the Kantian reading, as Jacques Rancière does, via Jean-François Lyotard), to suggest a melancholic ethics of becoming that the protagonist was engaging in. Then there was the third challenge, which was the most difficult of all: writing an essay in French. I have to make clear that I haven't written anything beyond letters or email in French since I was in high school. In fact, the last time may have been one of those French essay contests that the local Alliance Française sponsored, and I believe I wrote one describing Marseille, a city I have still never set foot in. The gulf between a high school essay and one written for an adult journal, however, is vast, so I did take the added step of reading some contemporary French journal and magazine essays, in order to get a grasp of essayistic idioms, and I realized that it was going to be an uphill climb. For just as it is often a struggle for most native English speakers who find themselves at someone's college to write a coherent and convincing essay on a given topic in English itself, so it is in French, especially for someone who is not a native French speaker and who in fact when encountering French mainly is translating it into English. What I especially strove to do was think in French, as much as possible, so as to be able to put those thoughts, in idiomatic French syntax, on the page.

A challenge that arose out of this one was vocabulary, and in particular, the difficulty of selecting certain words that had differing shades of meaning in the two languages, or that did not exist at all in French. To give one example, French has two words for knowledge, la connaissance (from connaître, to know someone, to be familiar with, from the Latin cognoscere, to know, akin by root to English to know, but also the noun, ken, a vista) and le savoir (from savoir, to know something, know how, from the Latin sapere, to taste of, have the scent of, be wise, discern, akin to the English words "savor" and "savory," both of French (Norman) provenance) At several points, I had to decide that it was la connaissance, based in part of la reconnaissance (recognition) that the protagonist Abdellah had gained, rather than le savoir, even though my initial tendency was often to choose the latter term, in part because of past readings of Michel Foucault (such as his 1988 interview, titled "Le Gai Savoir," for example, with its ironic, double-entendre riff on Nietzsche). Abdellah's knowledge is a knowledge of himself, rather than a learning or a knowing how, though when the latter is salient, I use the latter term.

Then there are English words for which there are no direct French equivalents (and vice-versa, of course, such as double-entendre, which English imported wholesale). French, from what I could tell, does not have an exact term for awe, one of the emotions produced by the sublime (or the Kantian sublimes to be exact). French has words that combine fear and reverence (la crainte, fear, apprehension from the verb craindre, to fear, be apprehensive about, being one), and astonishment (l'étonnement, astonishment, surprise, quite close to English), but not one that captures the melding of the two. So I used a compound term, la crainte mêlé d'admiration, which doesn't exactly capture the condensed power of "awe," but approaches it. But then it wasn't so much the response generated by the sublime as the recognition in life of sublimity creating a deeper sense of our mortality and the consequent sense of the aesthetic and the ethical that I was after, so the exact translation was less important, perhaps, especially since the sublime is le sublime and the ethical and ethics are both l'éthique in French.

All of which is to say that I have finished the French essay (or at least a draft), sent it off to the editor, and now have a deepened appreciation for anyone who does this sort of thing regularly, as well as for Taïa's book and the French language. When the essay is published, if there's a link, I'll provide it, so that you can read it yourself. And perhaps I'll send it to Abdellah Taïa as well.

***

While I didn't manage to get to the pricey Museum of Modern Art before the In & Out of Amsterdam conceptual art show was there--the Monday I and a friend had planned to go, MoMa was closed, so we ended up at the Met--I did finally get up there, on Columbus/Peoples of the Americas Day, no less, and saw the tinier, residual Art & Project Bulletin show. The exhibit presents the Art & Project Gallery Bulletin's entire 156-issue run, stretching from 1968 to 1989, as well as artworks by the European, American and Japanese artists who'd appeared in its pages and within, without or on the gallery's walls, literally or figuratively. Some, like the controversial performance artist-photographers Gilbert and George (above right, Sydney Morning Herald) are now quite well known, though I hadn't realized how they'd begun their careers, staging live durational performances as human statues and causing a sensation as a result. Others, like Robert Barry, are less well known but should be central to any discussion of contemporary art practice, which draws heavily from the conceptual well. What the show makes clear is that Art & Project's founders, Dutch artists Gert van Beijeren and Adriaan van Ravesteijn, created a vital nexus in the translantic conceptual art movement, putting Amsterdam on the map alongside New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, and other important sites in the development of an important vein of artmaking that remains central to contemporary practice.

I should add that reading the In & Out of Amsterdam show catalogue, which picked up after the show, I learned that the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, that city's major venue for 20th century art and one of my favorites, was a key institutional site in the trans-Atlantic late 1960s conceptual revolution, much as MoMa, in its earlier years, had been for a much earlier generation of artists. I also hadn't known that it was MoMa's legendary black curator, Kynaston McShine (what a name!), whose 1970 "Information" show introduced conceptual art as a major contemporary trend, and later curated shows on Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, and Andy Warhol, among others. He is still there, now as Chief Curator at Large, and co-curated the 2007 40-year-retrospective show of sculptor Richard Serra's work. Some photos and a video.

The explanatory plaque

The bulletins on display

A Daniel Buren striped strip--seeing this made me smile with glee. Buren once covered large sections of the interior of the uptown Guggenheim Museum with these, and also placed them all about Paris, London, and other sites. This is the first time I'd ever seen one up close.

Lawrence Weiner piece

David Robilliard drawings (the ones on the right show Gilbert and George)

And a video of David Askevold's "Catapult" (1970), Super8 film transferred to video

And, as I said, I passed the parade, so here's a photo:

Fire & Ink III Writeup + Natl Bk Award Nominees + Segue + Musik

2009-10-18T21:00:00.001-07:00

The weeks are whipping past. Last Sunday at this time I was returning from the amazing Fire & Ink III: Cotillion conference in Austin. I would try to recapitulate it, but I imagine my sentences would continually dissolve into a river of superlatives, which would only be appropriate because it really was a superlative experience. The conference brought together a great number of black LGBTQ and LGBTQ-friendly creative people, from all over the USA and world (Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America) for three days of conversations and discussions, presentations, and performances. The conference site lists presenters, but there were many more people who came just to see and listen and learn and teach. To be there. I want to thank the organizers once again for the wonderful job they did, from selecting the site itself--the Austin Hilton was great--to how well they organized and scheduled everything, to their patience, friendliness, helpfulness, resourcefulness, and kindness--and for the general ambience they established.

When I was describing the conference before it was held I kept suggesting that it was primarily literary, while its origins and thrust remained literary--and by this I mean literature in all its dimensions--there were filmmakers (and screenings), performers and a large performance (theory) contingent, and social scientists also in the room, expanding the conversation beyond the book and page. What underpinned a great deal of the weekend, and what I found so invigorating, in addition to seeing so many people I hadn't seen in a while and meeting many new ones, was the vibrantly activist tone, but activism in and through the arts, activism in a variety of modes, not just the most commonly understood ones. A review of the panel titles and workshops makes this clear; there was little of the aroma of the cloister I sometimes feel in academe, but instead a deep sense of continuum with the wider world. The stakes for what people have and are doing were quite clear, and we recognized this, even if others often don't.

I was unable to attend the first Fire & Ink conference, so it was particularly and personally important to me to be part of this one. So many strands of my own experience, and not just as a writer and teacher, came together here. There were echoes of the 1980s and 1990s (OutWrite and Black Nations Queer Nations), the various Black Writers Conferences at Medgar Evers College (they included the famous statement by black LGBTQ writers protesting that conference's treatment of LGBTQ writers, books and issues), the biennial National Black Arts Festivals in Atlanta, and the annual Celebrations of Black Writing in Philadelphia, my pre-academe years in the literary world, and my stint, over the last 15 or so years, teaching writing. At the conference were writers whose work I'd been reading for years but had never met, people whom I knew when I published my first stories and poetry, and writers whose work I was learning about for the first time. In much the same way that I felt about the Adfempo conference, I wish I could spend a lot more time, not just a fleeting weekend, with these folks.

My official presentations included a workshop on translating LGBTQ writers, which I made by racing from the airport, and which drew a small and interested group of people. I also organized two panels; the first was on Dialoguing Across the Diaspora, which included Tisa Bryant showing a wonderful clip with interviews on black LGBTQ arts and activism in the UK; Yoruba Richen screening a snippet of a film she worked on about the Sisterhood of the Good Death in Cachoeira, Brazil, and remarks about candomblé and an expansive view of art and activism; and Colin Robinson, who explored some of the ways Trinidadian Calypso has addressed and negotiated same-sexual desire. The other panel I organized focused on publishing today and the new technologies, and each of the panelists, Reggie Harris, Lisa C. Moore, and Steven Fullwood, offered cogent thoughts about the topic, while connecting it to their own work (Reggie as an author, librarian, event programmer, and sage, Lisa as an editor and publisher, and Steven as an author, publisher, librarian, and archivist, all three activists). As with Adfempo, I wish it would have been possible to catch all the concurrent panels, though I did attend many others, including ones on libraries and archiving, scholarship and archives, and the sources of writers' work.

I mentioned the role of performance at this conference, and it included a night of performances. We got to see a portion of Sharon Bridgeforth's play, Delta Dandy, which she is currently continuing to shape as a visitor this quarter (year, I hope) at the university; my colleague E. Patrick Johnson's performance based on his book Sweet Tea: Stories of Black Gay Men in the South, and during the piece he announced that he had been able to resume contact with one of the legendary figures in the book, the 90-year-old from New Orleans, Princess Vivian; and Daniel Alexander Jones's conjuration, as Jomama Jones, with her Sweet Peaches. The conference also included three conversations, under the title "Dash" and curated by artist Torkwase Dyson, that featured 3 pairs of writers and artists in conversation about links and reciprocal influences. The 3 were Tisa and Wura-Natasha Ogunji; Ronaldo V. Wilson and Carl Pope; and Nalo Hopkinson and M. Asli Dukan. Carl and Ronaldo also showed a short video made the night before, featuring Ronaldo at his most limber and liminal, and Dukan screened a clip from her film about Black female vampires that had me and others jonesing for some Grace Jones in Vamp--the full version, though.

All in all, as I tweeted, it was an amazing gathering. One of the videographers, Q, got me on tape rhapsodizing incomprehensibly about the proceedings, so I hope that doesn't appear in the final Fire & Ink Video, but I subscribe to my statements that the three days were soul-raising and that by Sunday, I felt like I and others had grown a set of special F&IIII wings and could take flight. Photos:

Lisa C. Moore and Steven Fullwood, two of the Fire & Ink III board members and conference organizers, before the performances

Poet Shelagh Patterson

Fire & Ink board member, conference organizer, poet, librarian, programmer, and longtime friend and correspondent Reggie Harris

Tisa and Wura during their conversation at the "Dash" panel

Samiya Bashir, introducing Nikky Finney

Walking to the event, past the Texas Capitol Building (my friend cartoonist and writer Victor Hodge is the near silhouette)

In the main hallway, Austin Hilton

***

Congratulations to all this year's National Book Award nominees, and an especial congratulations to this year's poetry nominees! They are:

Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy
(University of California Press)

Like last year's list, this one is really exciting; all five collections are very strong, four of the poets are known for pushing formal conventions, and, on a personal level, Carl and I were in the Dark Room Writers Collective together in the late 1980s, Lyrae and I were in the same Cave Canem group in 1999, and were there together also in 2001, and Keith was one of my favorite colleagues back in 2001-2002. Bravo to all of them, and I would not want to be one of the judges, because all are outstanding poets and most deserving of this year's award.

(H/t Reggie H.)

***

Last night, I had the honor of reading with Keith at the Segue Reading Series, at the Bowery Poetry Club, in New York. Every time I've read there, I have been with excellent company; the last time, I think, I read with the one and only Julie Patton. I read a sliver from the opening chapter of one of the books I've been working on, while Keith read from his nominated volume and several others, including his translations of Baudelaire's Paris Spleen. Our readings eventually be on Penn Sound's website, so when that occurs, I'll post it on here. My thanks to E. Tracy Grinnell and Laura Sims for inviting me, pairing me with Keith, and bringing people out!

I should add that before the reading, I got to meet a J's Theater reader, Joyce Russell (I hope I remembered your name correctly!), a Canadian poet who'd read with a group of other Canadian poets at the Bowery Poetry Club before the Segue Reading, and who was chatting with Djola Branner, one of the performers at Fire & Ink and a founder and former member of the groundbreaking Pomo Afro Homos troupe of the late 1980s and 1990s. (I still have my tattered PAH t-shirt and refuse to throw it out.) I'm sorry I missed Joyce and the other poets who read before us, but thank you for reading the blog, and maybe we'll get to read together one of these days down the road.

***

I haven't been listening to as much music as I sometimes do, especially during the winter--I blame Twitter!--when I'm in the car more, but here's my most recent fave playlist, stretched across 5-6 actual playlists on my iPhone (I have not used my iPod in over a year now).

Bebel Gilberto, "Bring Back the Love" (Brazilian Girls Extended Mix)
The Black Eyed Peas, "Meet Me Halfway"
Chrisette Michele featuring Ne-Yo, "What You Do"
Common, "What A World"
Franz Ferdinand, "What She Came For" (Drums of Death Remix)
Janet Jackson, "Make Me"
Jay-Z feat. Rihanna, "Run This Town"
Massive Attack, "Splitting The Atom"
Michael Daugherty, "Sunset Strip"
Miti Miti, "En Los Noventa"
Os Mutantes, "A Minha Menina"
Portishead, "Glory Box"
Q-Tip feat. Norah Jones, "Life Is Better"

Quote: Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

2009-10-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

"To render Marx disreputable was to suppress the truth that money, as a generalized value of exchange, is incarnated in civilization as waste, shit. If civilization, as Jean-Claude Milner states, is defined by its aptitude for dealing with garbage and waste, as opposed to barbarism which rejects the concept, or the insane who exclude themselves from it, I would say that the turning point of our civilization will come when we have recognized waste not only as leftovers and flaws, but as excess and superabundance. Money is the hygienic form of a superabundance of waste, a waste which is not a simple metaphor for garbage, but rather a waste which is the excess of production without any other end than its own superabundance – which also removes from production the prestige that Bataille wanted to preserve for it, the sacrificial prestige of a possible total benefit, of a cost-free expenditure. I would like to explain, building on Marx, at what point we can no longer delude ourselves with this kind of wet dream: we expected solace from it, and it is nauseating us instead."--Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, from "The Supreme Luxury," translated by Barbara P. Fulks, in Lacanian Ink 23, Wooster Press, 2004.

Fire & Ink III + Nobel Prizes + Michelle Obama's Ancestry + Nonsense Good for Brain

2009-10-09T07:27:00.000-07:00

I'm at the Fire & Ink III Conference in Austin, Texas, so my posting will probably be even lighter than usual. (Don't laugh.) So far it's been wonderful running into so many creative people I admire tremendously, and I want to extend a huge thanks to all of the organizers for pulling this conference off!

I managed to get from Newark to Chicago to Austin without any delays, and was able to make my workshop, one of the first ones on the event schedule, on translating LGBTQ writers from the African Diaspora. Many thanks to all who attended.

***

So Herta Müller received this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. Who knew? Actually, as I mentioned last night to Reggie H., the bookies at Ladbroke's, to whom I linked in my previous post. She turns up on their list. She's also been published by the university's press. Congratulations to her.

More astonishingly, President Barack Obama was awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Peace. When I heard this on NPR in the hotel room this morning I thought the commentators were playing an April Fool's joke many months too early. Congratulations to him and I do support him, though his inaction on many issues drives me up the wall. But with regard to the Nobel Prize, he's only been in office for ten months. It's really like the anti-Bush award. I hope he doesn't let his head get "swoll up" as we used to say growing up, and start believing his own press more than he already might. I imagine he realizes this, and will aim to live up to it from now on. That would include getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, pushing for a strong bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions and address climate change, closing Guantánamo, and resisting all neocon positions and actions, especially against Iran and North Korea, as much as possible.

***

I wanted to link to this series of articles and graphics (this too) in Wednesday's New York Times on First Lady Michelle Obama's ancestry. From the little I've read and seen in the media, save these responses, it's been greeted with surprise. But why in 2009 is this history still surprising? It's a history that millions of Americans, African Americans certainly, but Americans of all colors whose ancestors have been in the Americas--North America, the Caribbean, Central America, South America--and even in Europe. And this is true across the globe. No one is pure. We shouldn't ever forget this.

***

On another issue, I loved these articles, which suggest that puzzling, difficult or even absurd and nonsensical works of art can improve the intellect. To quote the Boing Boing piece:

New research suggest that exposure to bizarre, surreal storylines such as Kafka's "The Country Doctor" can improve learning. Apparently, when your brain is presented with total absurdity or nonsense, it will work extra hard to find structure elsewhere. In the study by the University of British Columbia psychologists, subjects read The Country Doctor and then took a test where they had to identify patterns in strings of letters. They performed much better than the control group. From Science Daily (Wikimedia Commons image):

"People who read the nonsensical story checked off more letter strings –– clearly they were motivated to find structure," said Proulx. "But what's more important is that they were actually more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story. They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did."

But many artists figured this out a long time ago. As José Lezama Lima wrote more than 50 years ago, "only difficulty is stimulating...."

Review: Capitalism: A Love Story & Nobel Prize Tips?

2009-10-05T18:25:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, C and I went to see Michael Moore's new film, Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), just as we'd caught his last two major releases, the prescient Sicko (2007) and the Academy Award-winning Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), right after they premiered. Like the two prior films, and very much in line with all of his cinematic and TV works, including his début film, Roger and Me (1989), this new film is a passionate, often upsetting and enraging, sometimes muddled, but ultimately very moving attack on the economic and political injustice that plagues this society. Whereas Sicko focused on the broken health care system, and Fahrenheit 911 assayed the Bush administration's misrule and warmongering in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, this film attempts and sometimes succeeds in taking stock of the economic calamity that has befallen us since the waning days of the Bush administration. But Moore expands the window in an attempt to show that last year's collapse, and 2007 initial moment of recession, actually date back to the Reagan years, when fundamental changes in regulation and the economic philosophies that had guided the country shifted, based on politics, to create the toxic brew that has caused a global disaster, and what was nearly the Great Depression 2.0. The film could easily be retitled Capitalism: A Horror Story, since Moore's relentless aim is to show the many depredations that capitalism in its untrammeled US form has wrought, and a series of horrors they are. But he does not, and cannot tie everything together, because he does not address the larger issue of global capitalism and capital flows, or go as far as he appears to want to in terms of the US's situation and propose a solution or alternative, and this, along with his understandably deep faith in Barack Obama's election as a real politically as opposed to symbolically transformational event, ultimately are the film's major weaknesses.

The strongest aspects of Capitalism: A Love Story are the many powerful, disturbing, though sometimes hilarious, set pieces. These include the jaw-droppingly macabre "Dead Peasants"--this is the actual name, not something either he or I thought up--insurance policies corporations take out on their workers; the workers at Chicago's Republic Doors and Windows who refused to accept the horrendous terms of their dismissal, staged a strike, and forced JP Morgan Chase's hand to ensure that they at least got the pittance they were owed before watching their jobs vanish before their eyes; the appalling imprisonment of teenagers with due process in a for-profit private Pennsylvania prison in which two judges overseeing the cases had a financial stake; the "shock doctrine" attempts by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, in collusion with the firm he formerly led, Goldman Sachs, to seize control of the entire Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, without any legal or legislative oversight, the popular outrage that temporarily stalled the bill, and the Democrats' capitulation and collaboration in making the theft possible only a little while later; and his designating a huge swathe of Wall Street as a crime scene, with police tape, a megaphone, and confrontations with the door people to boot. Other scenes, such as the ones of people being thrown out of their homes, were redolent of Roger and Me, and as Moore noted, many parts of the country were being transformed into versions of his hometown of Flint, Michigan. The set pieces do succeed in provoking your emotions: disgust, rage, awe, and revenge are among the responses, and validly so, since what becomes clear is that the unalloyed pursuit of money to the exclusion of everything else, which has become what American and global capitalism are, has left a trail of destruction in its wake, and our federal and many state and local governments (bought and paid for) and our mainstream corporate media (collaborators) have actively and passively colluded in making it all possible.

Moore interviewing Indiana Congressperson Baron Hill

Around and through these moments, Moore tries to construct a narrative that can offer a cogent account of how corporate and wealthy interests, in cooperation with both the Republican and Democratic parties, rewrote laws, pushed failed economic policies, robbed the country blind, and then, after devastating everything, managed to salvage as much money for themselves as possible. To his credit, he doesn't just slam the GOP nor does he omit the Clinton administration's participation in all of this. Though the country experienced an unprecedented period of economic growth and expansion from 1994-2000, Clinton's economic team also played a central role in gutting the economy's foundations by pushing for the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the imposition of NAFTA, championing outsourcing and the smoke-and-mirrors industrial-structural transformation to a service economy, and generally accepting the false logic of neoliberalism and conservative/supply-side macroeconomics. He only touches upon part of this, though, and he could easily have gone further back than Reagan; in fact, in the period after the US began large-scale industrialization, the fin-de-siècle battles around monopolization, the Gilded Age and go-go laissez-faire capitalism leading up to the 1929 Stock Market crash and Great Depression gave an instructive, unforgettable preview of what we would be facing if we followed the same terrible patterns of the past.

Along the way, the film identifies a few heroes in this horror story, chief among them Ohio Democratic Congressperson Marcy Kaptur, who clearly and defiantly lays out the stakes and makes clear who is really running the country. There are also some liberal-minded clergy people, including a veritable hippy priest, who condemn capitalism as contravening the Gospels. I really wish he'd gone further on this score, and pointed out not only the Christianist hypocrisy of the contemporary right-wing, but the silence of so many people of faith in the face of the growing economic inequalities we witnessed, the rampant unfairness, unethical and immoral behavior, the amorality of destroying others' lives to enrich one's own, and so forth. Where were the bishops, the rabbis, the imams, as W Bush was bleeding us all dry? Not only was the Iraq War a festering debacle, but also those tax cuts and the attendant spending binges and, even worse, insane borrowing, the refinancing and buybacks, the incessant building, and the shell games and Ponzi schemes that have left us trillions of dollars in the hole, and 7 million jobs poorer. The silence of these clergy people also was as "evil," if you accept the term Moore bandies about, as the hazy "capitalism" that he indicts. I take his point, but find the term, and those uttering it, too simplistic, since it shorts out any real discussion about the nature of economic systems and what they can and cannot provide. Yet Moore also suggests that we might have "capitalism" that isn't so out-of-control when he speaks with Socialist-turned-Independent Bernie Sanders of the "gay state" as he cheekily calls it, of Vermont. In fact Sanders calls himself a Democratic Socialist, and Moore points to European models that might offer a better, or at least more economically and socially equitable way. To get it, we may need a revolution, but in reverse from the one we've endured in unbroken form since the Reagan era. Moore however cannot bring himself to go that far--and doesn't much cite our own national history of early 20th century Progressives, American Socialism and Communism, as well as a much more empowered and radical Democratic Party, particularly during the 4-term tenure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Instead he suggests that "Democracy" is the answer. But that simply doesn't make sense, and I gathered throughout that Moore knows this. But to call for a socialist revolt beyond the ballot box would, unfortunately, be beyond the pale even for a man so vilified by those on the right. He wants--and I think we need--lots of Americans to see this movie. Badly.

Michael Moore callling out the robber barons on Wall Street

Perhaps his most misplaced hope in the film is on Barack Obama's election. On the one hand, it was a remarkable event, and if one were to have vaguely followed Obama's rhetoric during the campaign, he seemed to promise real change. But closer listening showed him to be a pragmatist at best (even if a progressive on some issues at heart), and he has followed his Democratic predecessor in doing little to dismantle many of the worst aspects of the right-wing apparatus he's walked into. In fact, he basically hired the people who helped initiate the economic collapse! Moore does point out that the financial industries showered Obama with cash once he became the nominee and later won the election, but doesn't delve deeply enough into this. We can see the effects with the health care debate; the administration, along with Democrats like Max Baucus, appear to want nothing more than a symbolic bill that would primarily reward their corporate funders. They pay lip service to their constituents, who are overwhelmingly in favor of a more progressive bill, but have done everything they could, as Reagan, HW Bush and W would, to appease the wealthiest and thus most powerful interests. Not even doctors or nurses have had as much input as the insurance, pharmaceutical, hospital, and nursing home industries and their lobbyists, and that input--influence--takes the form of money. I understand Moore's idealism, which is a powerful undertow here, as in all of his films, but more clearsightedness, on Obama as a politician like every other one, would have strengthened the film's overall argument.

Nevertheless, as I said, Capitalism: A Love Story, is a film I hope millions of Americans, especially middle, working-class and poor ones, do get an opportunity to see. I fear not enough of us will see this film; even with its problems, it provokes a great deal of thought and soul-searching, and its revelations, even though many of them are well known, are worth seeing set forth as only Michael Moore can do. As he might say, Thank God for him.

***

I must add a link to three New York Times stories on the private equity industry shell game that has now ensnared institutions like Harvard, Yale and Stanford Universities. Moore did not touch this at all, except tangentially, but as each piece shows, the people who engineer these disasters rarely if ever lose.

Private Equity Industry: Another Horror Story
Profits for Buyout Firms as Company Debt Soars
An Executive Who Ruled from Afar and Walked Away Rich
Videos on private equity industry

===

Congratulations to this year's Nobel Laureates in physiology or medicine, Elizabeth H. Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco; Carol W. Greider of the Johns Hopkins University Medical School; and Jack W. Szostak of the Harvard University Medical School and Howard Hughes Medical Institute for their "discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase." According to several reports I've read, their work is central to understanding the biological mechanisms involved in aging, as well as in cancer research. I also saw that their award marks the first time that two women have jointly received the Nobel Prize in this category.

Today's announcement of this year's first Nobel Prizes means that at some point later this week or early next, the Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded. Every year (or almost) that I've posted this blog, I've offered my speculations about the winners. Usually it's been a miss, though I did include Harold Pinter among my predictions--he was one of a vast cast--the year he won. Like most prognosticators and littérateurs, however, I was caught off guard by last year's award, J. G. M. LeClézio, who, from all that I can tell, remains in obscurity--not that fame or notoriety should ever be qualifications for this award. Still, his selection was surprising (especially over better known, influential French writers including Yves Bonnefoy, Michel Tournier, Anne-Marie Albiach, and Jacques Roubaud), and made me wonder what the committee, whose machinations have involved public uproars during the last decade, was thinking, and what the LeClézio pick might in terms of subsequent years.

In recent years the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in literature, has neglected poetry in favor of fiction; no author primarily writing poetry has received the award since Wyslawa Szymborska in 1996. Only two women have received the award over the last 10 years (Elfriede Jelinek in 2004 and Doris Lessing, two years ago). I'd thought these imbalances would be righted last year, but they were not, and so I believe they will this year. Also, despite Lessing's award in 2007, there have been very few winners from Africa; there has also been very few laureates named from Asia (only two from Japan and one from China), and in recent years almost none from the Middle East, Central America, South America, or the Caribbean. There are many reasons why, not the least being the Academy's European location and slant, another being the ways the global literary system works. Nevertheless, I think this year will be different, and am tipping a woman poet or playwright from South America or the Caribbean, Asia, or Africa, though at theOr another country in North America other than the US. One possibly and great choice, I think, would be Margaret Atwood. I'm not sure if Alice Munro's US links disqualify her, but I she ought to be a top candidate.

Other leading candidates include poets such as Claribel Alegria, Adélia Prado, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, and Shu Ting. Other leading candidates include fiction writers (some of whom write poetry and plays) like Assia Djebar, Hélène Cixous, Luisa Valenzuela, Patricia Grace (who received the 2007 Neustadt International Prize), Duong Thu Huong (above right, http://kobason.spaces.live.com/blog/) Mahasveta Devi, and Andrée Chedid. Despite the heavy Eurocentric cast of recent years, I wonder if it would not have gone to Danish poet Inger Christensen had she not passed away earlier. I also keep in mind that no writer from India, Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia, New Zealand, Argentina, Thailand, or many other countries, has ever received the award.

Considering male writers, Adonis/Adunis, who would be the first male poet writing in Arabic to win, remains a contender. Other less likely choices that I could foresee include: Wilson Harris, Haruki Murakami, Ko Un, Bei Dao, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Kamau Brathwaite, Jay Wright, Javier Marías, Homero Aridjis, David Malouf, Nuruddin Farah, Philip Roth, Édouard Glissant, and John Ashbery. Most are international known and renowned, some more so than others. Whether they're registering--well, Roth is--on the Swedish Academy's radar is another matter. There are former teachers, colleagues, and even some friends whom I think ought to at least be nominated, but you have to be on the Swedish Academy's hotlist to make that occur.

Reggie sends a link saying that British bookies have tipped Amos Oz, Assia Djebar, Joyce Carol Oates, Roth, and Adonis as their top 5. Oates? Really? (Among Israel writers, I think Aharon Shabtai, David Grossman, Yoel Hoffman, and even Aharon Appelfeld would be stronger candidates.) Among their other picks: Antonio Tabucchi, Claudio Magris, Murakami, Herta Müller, Luis Goytisolo (not Juan?), Pynchon (very unlikely), Ismail Kadare, Un, and Tomas Tranströmer. They put William Gass at 100/1...

Banned Book Week + Right Wing Rhetoric + Derrion Albert & The Children

2009-09-29T17:03:00.000-07:00

It's Banned Books Week (September 26-October 3, 2009). But you probably already knew this.

Why do we need a week highlighting the issue of banned books? Because every day all over the US, there are attempts to ban or suppress the sales and circulation of books.

Above at right is a map, drawn from cases documented by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Kid's Right to Read Project (a collaboration of the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression), of the book challenges or bans that occurred from 2007-2009 (courtesy of Banned Books Week). According ALA, at least 513 occurred in 2008, but the total could be higher since up to 80% are never reported. (For more information, you can review ALA's Books Banned and Challenged 2007-2008, and Books Banned and Challenged 2008-2009, and the Kids' Right to Read Project Report.)

In 2008, the 10 most challenged books were:

And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
(Reasons: anti-ethnic, anti-family, homosexuality, religious viewpoint,and unsuited to age group)
His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman
(Reasons: political viewpoint, religious viewpoint, and violence)
TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R (series), by Lauren Myracle
(Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
(Reasons: occult/satanism, religious viewpoint, and violence)
Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya
(Reasons: occult/satanism, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, and violence)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
(Reasons: drugs, homosexuality, nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit, suicide, and unsuited to age group)
Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily von Ziegesar
(Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group)
Uncle Bobby's Wedding, by Sarah S. Brannen
(Reasons: homosexuality and unsuited to age group)
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
(Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group)
Flashcards of My Life, by Charise Mericle Harper
(Reasons: sexually explicit and unsuited to age group)

Joan E. Bertin, Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship

, writes in today's Huffington Post about the ongoing problem of US book banning and challenges.

All over the country, libraries and bookstores are hosting events. If you can, please attend one this week. A major launch event, the Banned Books Week Read-Out, took place in Chicago (I wasn't there, so I couldn't attend.) There are a number of other things you can do as well, like these.

±±±

Just so we're clear:

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), using some of the most extreme rhetoric yet by a sitting member of Congress against President Barack Obama, yesterday called the president an "Enemy of Humanity" at Phyllis Schlafly's How To Take Back America Conference in St. Louis.

On Newsmax today John L. Perry wrote an article calling for a military coup against President Obama's administration; it urges this step to address the "Obama problem."

On Facebook some creep(s) started a poll asking whether President Obama should be killed, and the post received 700+ votes before being taken down. After blog The Political Carnival and others contacted the Secret Service, they finally began their investigation.

And today, at Schlafly's wackofest in St. Louis, North Dakota Eagle Forum head Kitty Werthmann is urging people to ready themselves with guns for a "bloody battle" against the President, who she claims is both a Nazi and Communist.

All of this is occurring on top of the extremist speech and behavior against the President and Congress, funded by corporations and right-wing groups, fostered and funneled into the wider discourse by major right-wing and mainstream corporate media figures, and furthered at extreme right rallies and gatherings, that we've seen since the height of the campaign last summer.

It is not harmless, it is not cute, it is not worthy of simply being dismissed as wacko or crazy or nutty and yet somehow benign.

Remember the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995?

I have given up hope that either senior members of the Democratic Party, be it the President, leading figures in Congress, or anyone in the party apparatus (especially now that Howard Dean has stepped down), will denounce these people or attempt to ratchet the rhetoric down. As for the mainstream corporate media, they're not worth the breath. Instead, things will continue to spin out of control, as they always do, and if something horrific happens, the question posed in the public sphere will be, How could this have happened? Why did we miss it until it was too late? Why didn't we take proactive steps to address it?

When will we take proactive steps to address it?

***

I heard about and then read this tragic story, and my heart sank. On Friday in Chicago, a group of boys beat 16-year-old honors student Derrion Albert to death, because he happened to pass by the wrong place at the wrong time, though according to other reports, he was killed because he was unwilling to join a gang forming near Fenger High School in the Roseland neighborhood. Albert's death is sickening whatever the trigger, but unfortunately, it's not a rarity. So far this month, two other Chicago teenagers have been killed this month, while at least seven more have been shot. During the last academic year, 36 students were killed and over 500 were shot. One child is too many, a truism so simple and simplistic that I wonder if it hasn't gotten lost in the shuffle.

This is an ongoing crisis that parents and guardians, school officials, representatives of the City of Chicago and Cook County, the State of Illinois, and the federal government, all need to get involved in. One of the chief issues with Roseland, as with so many parts of Chicago, like other urban areas, is the serious economic decline, and concomitant social breakdowns, that set in during the late 1970s and 1980s, and which have never been adequately addressed or turned around, even during the national economic expansion of the late 1990s. The current economic crisis has only worsened things, and while I know that there are ongoing attempts to address this particular situation and the larger social, economic and political issues out of which it's arising, but given that the President has chosen to jump on the folly-fueled bandwagon of bringing the Olympics to Chicago (which could use affordable housing, jobs, jobs, and more jobs instead of yet another Daley vanity project/boondoggle), he and his administration could and should expend some time and political capital on this issue, which is especially serious in his home city, but a problem elsewhere as well.

Poem: Mário de Andrade

2009-09-28T10:25:00.000-07:00

A quarter of a century before Frank O'Hara premiered his urban, pop-suffused, witty, giddy queer poetry, Mário de Andrade (1893-1945, at right, http://www.capoeira-palmares.fr/histor/turner/inform.htm) had pretty much gotten there first with his 1922 landmark declaration of Brazilian modernism, Paulicea Desvairada (Hallucinated São Paulo). A musician and musicologist by training, an aesthete by inclination and avocation, Andrade had by the 1920s become a leading presence in the country's artistic vanguard. In February 1922, he and several other young writers, musicians, sculptors, and visual artists inaugurated the Week of Modern Art in São Paulo, presenting a range of work that bemused and disturbed many of the city's major art patrons. In July of the same year, Andrade published his thin volume of 22 poems with its mocking preface, which dismisses the volume outright and also rejects the appellation of "Futurist" his fellow poet (with the same last name but apparently of no relation), Osvaldo de Andrade had given him, instead designating a new school, of "Hallucinism," which he promises to promptly cast off as well.

There is a great deal of Hallucinism in this volume, with its chains of concrete non-sequiturs and fragments, its curlicued rhymes (which have to be read aloud to grab the complete effect), its combination of precision and São Paulo-esque disorder--and its French and American modernity. Andrade's influences include not only his Brazilian and Spanish language predecessors, but predecessors to Modernism including Rimbaud, Verhaeren, Mallarmé, and Whitman, as well as the oeuvres of numerous plastic artists of this period, and the churning cultural mix of Brazil itself. He rejumbles all of them, adding his own sensibilities, to create what is in essence a new poetry on the Brazilian scene; certainly very few of his peers, let alone critics or readers, had read anything like it in Portuguese. The lyrical, campy yet sincere exclamations--so full of joy and wonder, and melancholy all the same--and lists, which would also dot O'Hara's poetry ("Oh! Kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes aspirins! all / the stuff they've always talked about...") are here, in similar service. They convey, the richness of the city's distractions, the depth-charges of momentary, ephemeral experiences, his continuous highs and lows, or as he says in the poem I translate below, the "tumult" ("comoção"--but also commotion, for it's important not to lose the sense of movement that the poem's form transmits) of his life.

Amidst the hallucination-provoking confusions and profusions of this almost otherworldly city, this Paulicea, Andrade, "our Miss São Paulo" as Osvaldo de Andrade snappishly labeled him, like many a poet in any city, found his first true inspirations.

And so, my translation of "Inspiração," the book's first poem:

***

INSPIRAÇÃO

____________________________
Onde até na fôrça do
verão havia tempestades
de ventos e frios de
crudelíssimo inverno.
Fr. Luis de Sousa
____________________________

São Paulo! comoção de minha vida . . .
Os meus amores são flores feitas de original . . .
Arlequinal! . . . Traje de losangos . . . Cinza e ouro . . .
Luz e bruma . . . Forno e inverno morno . . .
Elegâncias sutis sem escândalos, sem ciúmes . . .
Perfumes de Paris . . . Arys!
Bofetadas líricas no Trianon . . . Algodal! . . .

São Paulo! comoção de minha vida . . .
Galicismo a berrar nos desertos da América!

Copyright © The Estate of Mário de Andrade, 1922, 2009. All rights reserved.

INSPIRATION

____________________________
Where even at summer's
height there were storms
of wind and cold as in the
harshest winter.
Fr. Luis de Sousa
____________________________

São Paulo! tumult of my life . . .
My loves are flowers fashioned from the original . . .
Harlequinal! . . . Diamond suited . . . Gray and gold . . .
Light and mist . . . Oven and lukewarm winter . . .
Subtle refinements without scandals, without jealousies . . .
Perfumes from Paris . . . Arys!
Lyrical faceslaps in the Trianon . . . Cotton field! . . .

São Paulo! tumult of my life . . .
Gallicism bawling in the deserts of America!

Translation © Copyright, John Keene, 2009. All rights reserved.

NY Philharmonic Opening Night + Sports Roundup

2009-09-27T17:49:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago I did something I haven't done in a while: I watched a live classical music concert on TV. The occasion was the PBS Live from Lincoln Center's broadcast of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra's season opener, which marked the début of its new Music Director, 42-year-old Alan Gilbert. I'd even made a mental note of the broadcast primarily because I saw that it would include Renee Fleming singing songs not by Schubert, or Strauss, or Faure, all likely opening-night and maestro-début and audience friendly choices, but...Olivier Messiaen.

I almost didn't believe my eyes or ears when I heard and saw this after an episode of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, but then Gilbert, the son of two NY Philharmonic musicians, has from his earliest appearances with the orchestra shown an adventurousness that marks a change from the musty perspectives of his immediate predecessors, both consummate musicians, Kurt Masur and placeholder Lorin Maazel. Gilbert not only chose Messiaen's Poèmes pour Mi (1934), a serious of deeply religious, dramatic connubial songs written by the composer for his first wife, whose nickname was Mi, but also opened with a newly commissioned composition, EXPO, a continuously developing orchestral piece in a tonal idiom by the Philharmonic's composer in residence, Magnus Lindberg, and, after a break, concluded with...not Mozart, not Beethoven, not Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, or Schumann, but...Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique.

The Lindberg piece, with its echoes of Sibelius and Americana riffs, was pleasant enough to listen to, and Gilbert and the orchestra played it with assurance and verve, as if they were enjoying themselves. This was also the first time in over 45 years that the Philharmonic had included a newly commissioned piece on its opening night program. I'm sorry but that's pretty pathetic, so even more props go to Gilbert. But the Messaien riveted me. Not only did Fleming convey the otherwordliness of the nine song's scores, capturing both their highest and lowest registers and the churning colors between, but Gilbert pushed the orchestra to fully evoke all of Messaien's shadings without ever overshadowing the singer. Perhaps the most striking moment came when Fleming sang the grim "Éprouvante," a wrenching vision of hell that the music did not stint in reflecting. It was also exhilarating to hear work by Messaien, a highly regarded canonical composer whose music nevertheless remains on the other side of the symphonic mainstream, on TV, in prime time. This bodes well, I hope, for future NYPO and other orchestral concert broadcasts, though sometimes tells me they'll still be dominated by the late baroque-to-late Romantic German standards.

As Fleming sang, I intermittently wondered what subscribers and critics thought of Gilbert's choices. As a sign of a new vision, they left no doubt. To people used to a mostly late baroque-to-late Romantic German repertoire with a few outliers (19th century French and Russian, early 20th century European late-Romantic and tonal modernist, a few American composers, and commissioned pieces, never to be played again), was probably upsetting. To end with Berlioz's vast, forward-looking 1830 symphony must have felt like a shockwave. Gilbert and the orchestra showed that they knew the score and in most of its sections, went below the surface to portray the richness of the moods Berlioz was aiming for. I'm no expert on Berlioz's work nor an authority on how other orchestras have played it, but I could hear both Gilbert's and the players' skill and precision, but also passion. It was never mechanical, as Maazel's performances often were.

Anthony Tommasini raved about Gilbert in his New York Times review of the concert the following day. He praised the Lindberg for not writing a "gnarly, intimidating modern piece"--Mr. Tommasini, it's 2009, and there are so many contemporary composers who do not write "intimidating modern" or "post-modern" or "post-post-modern" or whatever pieces that also are not treacly, neo-Romantic, ersatz movie music outtakes--and rained down kudos for Gilbert's choice of the Messiaen and Berlioz, though he was less fulsome when he described Gilbert's conducting of the latter work, saying that some listeners probably liked to hear it conducted with more of a"sumptuous feeling for color or more fantastical freedom" than on display in this concert. He nevertheless lauded Gilbert's assured and effective conducting, which not only brought the symphony to life but worked well with the two prior pieces, both in French idioms, broadly construed. The article's comment section, however, reflected more displeasure than happiness: lots of complaints not about Gilbert's music-making, which seems unimpeachable, but about his program choices.

I've been wondering about this as I've followed Greg Sandow's blog on classical music for several years. Sandow is a composer and professor at Juillard, and is writing a book about the present state of the US classical music world. One persistent element in his blog commenters' responses is a denial that the US classical music world is any trouble; another is that its audience is aging; a third is that the standard repertoire is just fine. Keeping these frequent threads in mind, I wondered to myself how much outrage there would have been had Gilbert gone farther, and in addition to the Lindberg, programmed all new music to launch his tenure. What if instead of Messiaen (whose career spanned the early to late 20th century) and the 19th century Berlioz, he had played two contemporary, living American composers, like John Corigliano and Ellen Taaffe Zwillich? Or two contemporary non-US composers, like Toru Takemitsu and Thomas Adès? Or two 20th century American composers who weren't exactly mainstream any more, like Roy Harris and William Schuman? Or truly avant-garde 20th century, post-Second Viennese school American composers, like Morton Feldman, Terry Riley, and John Cage? Or a composition in a jazz or rock-inflected idiom by the likes of Elvis Costello, or Wynton Marsalis? Would people have walked out of and lustily booed the concert as occurred at the Metropolitan Opera's premiere last week of the warhorse Tosca, based on Luc Bondy's new staging and direction?

Perhaps a better question is, would it ever happen, even under someone as open to the new as Gilbert? (When the extraordinary conductor James Levine, who heads the Met Opera's orchestra, took over the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which long been moribund under his predecessor, he jumpstarted its formerly progressive repertoire under Fritz Reiner by performing a slew of "difficult" 20th century works. I don't think, however, that he touched the likes of Daugherty, say, or Todd Machover, or Tania León.) It remains to be seen. I should note that Gilbert's second concert as Musical Director was conducting Mahler's Third Symphony, about as standard as things can get. This week he conducted Brahms's Violin Concerto, another standard piece, but paired it with Arnold Schoenberg's less frequently heard Pelleas und Melisande, which Tommasini described in his Friday review, typically, as "formidable" and "demanding," despite it's having been superseded by far more formidable and demanding Schoenberg scores (Chamber Symphony? Fantasie? Violin Concerto?), as well as innumerable more complicated soundworlds including many in rock, jazz, ambient, etc. I take the slotting in of even a fairly old-style (for) Schoenberg piece as a good sign, though. And he spoke to the audience about it! Looking through the upcoming concerts--and Gilbert will be taking the Philharmonic on the road to Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Singapore for a chunk of October--through December, it appears as though there will be lots of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, unsurprisingly, but throughout the 2009-2010 season Gilbert has slated a range of post-Romantic fare into the main concerts, including performances of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (semi-staged), Ives's Second Symphony, Anton von Zemlinsky's Lyric Suite, and, as part of the end of 2009 concerts, Webern's Symphony. Additionally, such very up-to-date works as Christopher Rouse's new commission, Zhizn ("life" in Russian), H.K. Gruber's Aerea, and pieces by Nico Muhly, Matthias Pintscher, Lindberg, and others, will be in both the main and Contact: The New Music series concerts.

To me, this programming in Gilbert's first year is a clear sign that the NYPO is moving into both the present and future, much as Baltimore's symphony has done under Marin Alsop, and Los Angeles's will under Gustavo Dudamel. Since I spend a chunk of each year in Chicago, I'm curious to know which directions new Musical Director Riccardo Muti will take the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the five years of his contract. He is known as a strong conductor of Giuseppi Verdi, late baroque and early Romantic music, and of the standard repertoire, in a lean, recording-friendly idiom, and not so much of anything that new. At least since Mahler's time.

(I am skipping the Lyric Opera of Chicago's offerings this year; they aren't staging a single opera written since 1921--Leos Janacek's Kát'a Kabanová--while the Metropolitan Opera's tiny steps outside its narrow conventional doors are Alban Berg's Lulu, Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose, and Janacek's From the House of the Dead. The unparalleled season Gérard Mortier had planned for the New York City Opera is now nothing but a phantom, like that opera company itself.)

+++

The Saint Louis Cardinals are now officially in the playoffs, after defeating the Colorado Rockies 6-3 last night. They joined the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have also made the playoffs and currently have the best record in the NL. In the AL, the Yankees are now in the playoffs, having defeated their arch-nemeses, the Boston Red Sox tonight at the new Yankee Stadium 4-2. The Philadelphia Phillies and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim both seem bound for the playoffs with dwindling magic numbers and the Red Sox are well ahead in the AL Wild Card Race, but the AL Central-leading Detroit Tigers are hanging on for all their lives, and the NL Wild Card race is increasingly a toss up, as Atlanta surges and Colorado falters. I'm just glad the Cardinals and Yankees are in. Now they have to keep winning.

EAST RUTHERFORD, NJ - SEPTEMBER 27: Mark Sanchez #6 of The New York Jets runs upfield after catching a pass against The Tennessee Titans during their game on September 27, 2009 at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. (Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)

As of tonight, the New York Jets are 3-0; rookie QB Mark Sanchez's 3 straight wins are a league first, and the defense allowed more than 10 points for the first time this season in today's 24-17 victory over the Tennessee Titans. The Saint Louis Rams, however, are 0-3 after another uninspired, sloppy loss, this time to the Green Bay Packers. With the Detroit Lions' victory over the Washington Snyders, the Rams have the longest losing streak, at 13 games dating back to last season. They look awful enough to make it 29 if they maintain this abysmal level of play. But they're in good--or bad--company so far: Miami, Cleveland, Kansas City, Tennessee, and Tampa Bay have also lost 3 games without a win and Carolina has 2 losses without having won one. Which of this sorry group will turn things around first? I say Tennessee or Tampa Bay, but don't hold me to that.

Adfempo Conference @ CUNY Grad Center + Dangerous Mathematicians Show

2009-09-26T14:44:00.000-07:00

What an exciting, energizing two days the Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism: A Gathering conference was. I must offer my heartiest thanks to Belladonna, the independent bookstore/publisher/collectives, who conceived, organized and executed the event, along with the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for the Humanities, Center for the Study of Women and Society, PhD Program in English, and Poetics Group. There was such palpable intellectual and creative energy at the event, which explored and emphasized the necessity and possibilities of feminist poetics and activism today. I didn't attend a single uninteresting panel or reading during the event. It was also wonderful to see so many creative people--brilliant, visionary, socially and politically activist women in the poetry world!--I know and admire as well as those I've never met or seen but only read over the years. My only complaint arises from the concurrent scheduling situation; because of the multiple simultaneous panels, it was not possible to audit most of the intriguing discussions, and if you jumped from room to room (there were 4 panels per time slot for most of Friday) you very well might miss the people you were hoping to see. I do understand, however, the economic and logical necessities of fitting the event into two short days, so I'm looking forward to the videos of the panels, when those go online.

I also want to thank poet-scholar-activist Tonya Foster, a member of Belladonna's Collective Committee and the organizer of the panel I was on, which, as the Opening Plenary I panel, inaugurated the event on Thursday afternoon. Our panel had grown out of discussions we'd been having over a series of months, and focused on orality and literacy in relation to African American and Diasporic literature, but also had come to encompass discussions of "the commons," and in particular, the "feminist commons." Other panelists included Meta DuEwa Jones, who spoke about Erica Hunt and Tracie Morris; Evie Shockley, who talked about Sonia Sanchez's Do These Houses Have Lions?; and Julie Patton, who showed slides and discussed her creative, activist work with young people in Cleveland, as well as her mother's artwork. We ended up running short of time, and I went last, so my talk, discussing Kamau Brathwaite's, Jay Wright's and Marilene Felinto's strategies for utilizing orality and feminist-inflected oral and written discourses (historical, mythic, etc.) to subvert conceptions of aesthetic mastery, was smushed into pithiness, but I do feel like I did succeed in getting my points across. And I got to read a translated (though not by me) snippet of Felinto's work, so that was fun too.

Our panel was packed, as were most of the ones I attended, despite their concurrency; at the 12:45pm discussion on the "Body and Discourse," chaired by Kate Eichhorn and featuring Joan Retallack, Trish Salah, Laura Smith, Nathalie Stephens/Nathanaël, and Ronaldo V. Wilson, there wasn't even standing room for most of those present. This panel, like the others I attended, delved into the questions that people had been posing and hashing since our opening presentations, and involved some contention and argumentation, rather than an amen chorus, which was refreshing.

Two of my favorite moments at the conference were the Thursday night keynote talks-performances, and a reading, introduced by scholar-poet Kate Hinton, that Mei-Mei Berssenbruegge and Ann Lauterbach gave on Friday. At the former, Kathleen Fraser talked about her trajectory from newly-minted English major just arriving in a very male-dominated New York poetry world in the early 1960s to her move to California, her years of young motherhood, and her connections with some of the figures who would become so important for developments in feminist poetics and practice/praxis. Amidst this she wove in some unforgettable anecdotes, such as that Barbara Guest was the only female poet whose work she came into contact with in those earliest years, outside of the "modernist women," that Charles Olson was huge, dominating figure and not the sort of person for women to be alone with, and that George Oppen was a serious, but encouraging poet. Fraser concluded her comments by reading a moving pamphlet-long poem, whose title I wrote down as "hi dde violent i dde violet," that she had written for fellow poet Norma Cole. Erica Hunt, a writer and thinker I admire tremendously, followed and in a way only she could do, she managed to weave in a demonstration of her mother blind-folded and boxing to discuss the feminist projects feminist poets had engaged in and needed to continue to pursue, especially in light of the economic, social and political situation we all now find ourselves in, and which has been unfolding since Erica and the other writers in the auditorium began their work. She was sharp, witty, oppositional, elliptical, concise, and offered up a series of grace quotes. "We write what just might escape commodification" is but one of them.

The third speaker, Eileen Myles, gave a talk called "Yoga for Losers" which succeeded not only in reminding everyone that the "academy was a patron" and a fraught place and space for the poet's work, but also called out the Language poets, asking where was the great language poem on AIDS, and wondered whether the model of "schools" of poetry was less apt that "stores," decried the pervasiveness of pornography for girls' and boys' imaginaries, invoked some contemporary women writers doing what she thought was outstanding activist work, and even expressed her exhausting with the term "feminism," ultimately urging that the hard work continue, in a range of new forms. As more and more poets (and writers in general!) appear to view the academy as the route, as opposed to one of many, or even just a byway, to pursuing an avocation as poet, Myles's critiques assume even greater importance.

The Berssenbruegge-Lauterbach reading was also a highlight. I have seen both read a number of times; Berssenbruegge was one of the first of the younger generation "experimental" American poets (not counting some fellow students) I heard read and met in college, and she came to the university a few years ago as part of the Asian American Studies program's 10-year anniversary celebration. I had an account of Lauterbach and John Ashbery reading from the latter's long, double-columned "A Litany" at the Bowery Poetry Club a few years ago. This was the first time I'd seen them read together, and with the focus being on their art-inflected poems, they complemented each other perfectly. Berssenbruegge read from her collected volume I Love Artists (Univ. of California Press, 2008), which really should have received one of the major poetry awards, as well as from some new poems. Her quiet manner and soft voice require the listener's concentration, which the poems thoroughly reward. She also read lines and fragments from others, something poets never really do, in order to convey the spirit of the reading. Some of the fragments of lines I wrote down from the various poems were: "there are three dimensions of gray"..."your waking is a blue brushstroke creating a space"..."this color of being sentient, like seeing Venus in the day"..."where openness is form"..."but I am my contact with green"..."forest is the originary fullness of this presence"..."you turn back my words to stay in that region."

Lauterbach, whose work I believe always benefits from being read aloud, especially by her, traced her poetic development in relation to visual art, which has served as a formal rather than a visual source. She noted the centrality of the visual to most poetry, and her own attraction to resistance against or inquisition of the visual. She also read poems marking her stages of confronting the visual, including the first she'd written, some time ago, in which there was no visual description whatsoever. One of the poems she read, "The French Girl" (from Clamor?) struck like a lightning bolt this time. She finished with the poem "The Scale of Restless Things (Fra Angelica)," written after going to see that exhibit at the Met with a former student, Garrett Kalleberg, and it was a fitting conclusion to a great reading. Afterwards she and Berssenbruegge, along with Hinton, took questions, and Lauterbach provided one of the most succinct and thoughtful responses possible to the question of how to appreciate a poem, particular poems like hers, explaining how a poem is an experience that we ought enter like any other experiences we've never had, and how it negotiates the parallel subjectivities of the reader's I and the lyric/narrative voice's (I/we/multiples). That space of negotiation ought be fruitful and pleasurable, rather than merely a puzzle to be interpreted and solved.

Erica Kaufman and Rachel Levitsky

L-r: Evie Shockley (back turned), Julie Patton, and Tonya Foster

Kathleen Fraser, reading her poem to Norma Cole

Ronaldo V. Wilson (in tie), speaking to the panel (l-r): Nathaniel, Trish Salah, Joan Retallack, and Laura Smith (who spoke about Akilah Oliver)

***

After I left my dinner companions on Friday, I took up a friend's invitation to check out a fashion show/performance party, Dangerous Equations 101, at a small shop, Dangerous Mathematicians, on the Lower East Side. Unlike this events at Bryant Park a week ago, this was a low-key, non-industry affair; the shop's owner creates and sells innovative, sexy clothing for women with a geek chic edge. The "models" turned out to be practicing engineers, scientists and mathematicians and the clothing had a S&M-ish edge, which I doubt would probably go over better during the weekend or at clubs than at most workplaces. It appeared to be well-made, and really, the funnest aspect was just listening to the musicians and seeing another slice of New York I seldom see.

Dangerous Mathematicians store window

Advancing Feminist Poetics & Activism Conference

2009-09-24T07:14:00.001-07:00

The Advancing Feminist Poetics & Activism: A Gathering -- Conference begins today at CUNY Graduate Center!

The lineup:

Thursday, September 24, 2009

3:00PM-4:00PM
Registration
Location: English Department Lounge

4:00PM-5:00PM
Opening Plenary I: Why You Talk Like That? Between Orature and Literature
Chair: Tonya Foster
Panelists: Meta DuEwa Jones, John Keene, Julie Patton, Evie Shockley
Location: English Department Lounge
Description: One aspect of “black aesthetics” involves two ostensibly dissonant strands of poetics the oral and the literary (which may include the visual). Their challenging of visual and oral groundings of identity markers translates Black female iconography from its historical depiction within a “So Black and Blues” matrix into a “So Black and Beautiful”. One aspect of “black aesthetics” isn’t merely the transcription of the oral onto the page but an attempt to transfigure the page in such a way that it creates/suggests an alternate space which demands that the literary engage the oral, re-inscribes the literary nature of the oral and rejects the clearly articulated boundary between the two, and, in so doing, suggests a different sense of time: look at Mackey and Brathwaite’s A History of the Voice.

5:00PM-6:00PM
Opening Plenary II: Wedge & Suture: Critical Language Practices & the Imperialist Event
Chair: Laura Elrick
Panelists: Ammiel Alcalay, Cathy Park Hong, Anne Waldman, Rachel Zolf
Location: English Department Lounge
Description: On the “here and now” continuum, on the radically material cusp that articulates past and future, what methods of political thought can poetry uniquely perform? How can poetry (as radical anathema to imperialist language use, and as intellectual hope) resist the dead-end traps of reification and teleological thinking? Our discussion will center on the complexities and difficulties (and therefore importance) of radical language practices within our unevenly-developed but globalized relations.

6:00PM-6:30PM
Discussion
Location: English Department Lounge

6:30PM-7:00PM
Reception
Location: English Department Lounge
Wine and light fare will be served.

7:30PM-9:00PM
Opening Keynote Performance
Kathleen Fraser, Erica Hunt, & Eileen Myles

Friday, September 25, 2009

9:30AM-10:00AM
Registration
Location: English Department Lounge

10:00AM-11:45AM — SESSION I

Room 1 [Panel 1]:
Is Ground as to Figure as Ambience is to Body? Ec(h)opoetics of the Disfigured Landscape
Chair: Jennifer Scappettone
Panelists: Marcella Durand, Brenda Iijima, Linda Sormin, Kathy Westwater, Rita Wong
Description: Ranging across writing, visual arts, dance, installation, and epistolary exchange of ephemera, this discussion will sound reciprocal interference between the environment and marked (raced/gendered/polluted) corporeality in the face of landscape’s harm—mediation—digitization—withdrawal. Presentations will address a poetics of systemic crisis, stalking solutions, obliging recognition of ambient relations of authority and compromise as compass through a stupefying enormity of damage: Marcella Durand on race and ecological disaster; Brenda Iijima on Agnes Denes’s reclamation art; Kathy Westwater on bodily organization within transmogrifying ‘nature’; Rita Wong and Linda Sormin on ongoing toxicities.

Room 2 [Panel 2]:
Lacrimae of the Medusa; or, Cixous (33 years later) and Cruci-Fictions: Let’s Talk about Sex (Again)
Chair: Laura Jaramillo
Panelists: Dodie Bellamy, Kass Fleisher, Bhanu Kapil, Laura Mullen
Description: This panel will explore how womens' experimental writing re-inscribes female subjectivity and desire, how we ride the boundaries, borders, inter-species-genre crossings, body spaces through Cixous' Laugh of the Medusa.

Room 3 [Panel 3]:
Textual Migrations: Language, Media, Space
Chair: Corey Frost
Panelists: Caroline Bergvall, Latasha N. Nevada Diggs, Majena Mafe, Mendi Lewis Obadike, Kaia Sand
Description: As writers and readers, we are all affected by the multimedia functioning of communication technologies, their presence it our daily activities. As the concept of literacy changes, our understanding of poetics and our perceptions of identity also change. What does the specific role of language and of writing become? Should we envisage tomorrow's literature as a relay of processes, a combination of forms, of platforms, of environments, of media as well as discourses? What is the textual specifically in charge of recording, transmitting, transmediating? This panel invites 4 writers to present some of the methods and questions they explore when working with specific media and performative environments.

Room 4 [Panel 4]:
Conceptual Writings
Chair: Mónica de la Torre
Panelists: Nada Gordon, Vanessa Place, Sina Queyras, Kim Rosenfield, Christine Wertheim
Description: Conceptual writing, still under construction as a 21st century literary form, includes various kinds of work and techniques, such as appropriation, documentation, constraint, process, performance, polyvocality, collapsing search engines and the baroque. Panelists Mónica de la Torre, Nada Gordon, Sina Queyras, Kim Rosenfield, Christine Wertheim, and Vanessa Place will present/perform/comment on critical/creative work on conceptualism.

Room 5 [Panel 5]:
8 Minute Monographs, Part 1
Chair: Susan Briante
Panelists: David Buuck, CAConrad, Tom Orange, Rodrigo Toscano, Simone White
Description: David Buuck on “Bioperversity: on the gendered animal-body”; CAConrad will give a talk entitled “A Poetry of No Apologies” about Hilde Domin and Charlotte Delbo; Tom Orange will present “Recovering our Elders: The Case of Carole Korzeniowsky”; Rodrigo Toscano “On Duriel Harris”; and Simone White on Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs of a dutiful daughter, "my accomplice, my subject, my creature: hypermasculinity effects".

Room 6 [Panel 6]:
The Event in the Image: Poetry and Cinema
Curated by: Angela Joosse
Films and poetry by: Peggy Ahwesh, Lise Beaudry, Abigail Child, Margaret Christakos, Moyra Davey, Kelly Egan, Laura Elrick, Su Friedrich, Amy Greenfield, Shana MacDonald, Bridget Meeds, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Selene Savarie, Joel Schlemowitz, Nathalie Stephens, Souvankham Thammavongsa,Gariné Torossian, Cat Tyc
Description: This program of recent experimental film and video examines the productive impact to be found at the intersection of feminism, poetry, and the moving image. Sharing common concerns with rhythm, duration, and the slippage and condensation of meaning, experimental cinema and poetry have had rich relations since cinema's inception. Yet the avant-garde edge of these art forms does not rest with medium-specific concerns, but rather with the capacity to install the audience in a situation that enables a potent shift in one's very perceptions of embodied, social, geographical, gendered, political, and cultural locatedness in the world. Through poetic approaches to cinema and cinematic approaches to poetry, this program explores varying possibilities of the image as an event situation.

11:45AM-12:45PM LUNCH BREAK

12:45PM-2:30PM SESSION II

Room 1 [Panel 7]:
What Counts: Everyday Practices and Exceptional Practices in the Life of the Mind and in the Street
Chair: Jen Hofer
Panelists: Pamela Booker, Marilou Esguerra, Jill Magi, Metta Sama
Description: The politics of the everyday entails inventing exceptions to the rules in a range of contexts, from our bedrooms, kitchens, studies and gardens to our jobs, gathering spaces, and the streets of the cities where we live. The participants in this panel are all on the faculty at Goddard College, where a radical social justice pedagogy encompassing Thoughtful Action is a foundation of our teaching, learning and artistic practices. How do small-scale autonomous publishing, politically-inflected performance, objects and texts built to be functional as well as thought-provoking, public instances of poetic interaction and other externally-directed creative acts constitute Thoughtful Action—that is, how do we practice what we teach, and teach what we practice?

Room 2 [Panel 8]:
Body as Discourse
Chair: Kate Eichhorn
Panelists: Joan Retallack, Trish Salah, Laura Smith, Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël), Ronaldo V. Wilson
Description: This panel explores questions of the body, referentiality, remapping bodies and borders, intertextuality, narrativity, aesthetics, and the challenges of de-essentialization as we scrutinize “female,” “queer,” “raced” and “othered” bodies.

Room 3 [Panel 9]:
Multilingual Poetics, Feminist Implications
Chair: Sarah Dowling
Panelists: Julia Bloch, Angela Carr, Zhang Er, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Janet Neigh
Description: This panel will explore the ways women poets use multilingualism to engage in critiques of dominant language practices, and the ways in which such poetics evoke diverse publics and invite new possibilities for building community.

Room 4 [Panel 10]:
Disrupting the Page: Hybridity and Asian American Poetics
Chair: Tamiko Beyer
Panelists: Cythia Arrieu-King, Ching-In Chen, Sarah Gambito, Sohan Patel, Margaret Rhee
Description: This roundtable discussion by a group of emerging APIA women poets/critics/performers will open up discussion about how hybridities in current APIA poetry resist the notion of a homogenous feminist and APIA poetry and community. Speakers will address a range of contemporary formal and social concerns: mapping, the cyber avatar, queer, experimental and lyric poetry, “deterriorialized” writing, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's video poems, traditional Japanese zuihitsu. The goal is to provide a collaborative space in which to investigate the avant-garde poetic strategies of APIA women who write for social justice and against inequalities.

Room 5 [Panel 11]:
8 Minute Monographs, Part II: Inhabiting the Forms of An/Other
Chair: Emily Beall
Panelists: Louis Bury, Jeanne Heuving, Michelle Naka Pierce, Tim Peterson, Chris Tysh
Description: Each monographer will take up questions of form, form’s body, and how form can generate (instead of delimit) substantive, complex, productively unstable embodiments and identities. Tracing possibilities such as the “libidinized open field,” Oulipian exercises in style, Deleuzian sheets of time, the protean and the nomadic, panelists might themselves swerve importantly from the ‘monadic’ form of the monograph: Michelle Naka Pierce, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Migratory Identities in Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: A Space for Monsters” / Jeanne Heuving, “What's Love Got To Do With It?” / Tim Peterson, “Protean Bodies, Volatile Selves: The Transgender Poetics of Claude Cahun and kari edwards” / Chris Tysh, “Sheets of Time in Poetic Practice” / Louis Bury, “Embodied Constraints.”

Room 6 [Panel 12]:
The Event in the Image: Poetry and Cinema
Curated by: Angela Joosse
Films and poetry by: Peggy Ahwesh, Lise Beaudry, Abigail Child, Margaret Christakos, Moyra Davey, Kelly Egan, Laura Elrick, Su Friedrich, Amy Greenfield, Shana MacDonald, Bridget Meeds, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Selene Savarie, Joel Schlemowitz, Nathalie Stephens, Souvankham Thammavongsa,Gariné Torossian, Cat Tyc
Description: This program of recent experimental film and video examines the productive impact to be found at the intersection of feminism, poetry, and the moving image. Sharing common concerns with rhythm, duration, and the slippage and condensation of meaning, experimental cinema and poetry have had rich relations since cinema's inception. Yet the avant-garde edge of these art forms does not rest with medium-specific concerns, but rather with the capacity to install the audience in a situation that enables a potent shift in one's very perceptions of embodied, social, geographical, gendered, political, and cultural locatedness in the world. Through poetic approaches to cinema and cinematic approaches to poetry, this program explores varying possibilities of the image as an event situation.

2:30PM-4:00PM SESSION III

Room 1 [Panel 13]:
Writing from the Margins
Chair: erica kaufman
Panelists: Jennifer Russo, Tyler Schmidt, Jane Sprague
Description: This panel will explore the feminist politics and poetic experimentation of poets from earlier generations in order to better understand (and complicate) the activism and avant-garde aesthetics of our current moment. Collectively our papers aim to investigate the work of marginal, forgotten, erased, absent or orphan/overlooked poets and writers whose poetics embody a kind of “activism,” though our panel also seeks to trouble or assert ideas of activist poetics. In particular, our critical analysis will highlight the way these poets both engage and enact political critique through formal innovation; avant-garde writing strategies; polyvocal texts; and/or hybrid forms and genres.

Room 2 [Panel 14]:
Feminist Utopias
Chair: Margaret Carson
Panelists: Justin Parks, Divya Victor, danielle vogel, Steve Zultanski
Description: This panel will be exploring the possibility of a Utopian promise in contemporary poetry. We will be looking at the work of Renee Gladman, Lisa Robertson, Melissa Buzzeo, and Jewel in an effort to explore these authors' formal and political relationships to urban space, and to their readers. We don’t assume these writers share a vision, but rather that their poetics and poetry are in some ways at odds — suggesting that any recognizable Utopian impulse is not a fully-realized imaginative portrait of a better world, but a fractured and incomplete projection of a time yet to come.

Room 3 [Panel 15]:
Exile and Language
Chair: Anna Moschovakis
Panelists: Jennifer Firestone, Dana Greene, Dulcinea Lara, Jill Magi, Evelyn Reilly
Description: What are the challenges facing a writer who for one reason or another finds herself “exiled” from the generative artistic and cultural communities that sustain much of a writer’s activities? This panel brings together the diverse concerns of writers thinking from spaces of remove: motherhood amidst the event-heavy poetry community; activist pedagogy in small-town America; experimental poetics in workers’ education; and a genealogy and performance of Vulcan Poetics.

Room 4 [Panel 16]:
Visuality and the Image:
A Reading and Discussion with Ann Lauterbach, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Laura Hinton
Chair: Laura Hinton
Panelists: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Ann Lauterbach
Description: This session takes the form of readings by and conversation with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Ann Lauterbach, and Laura Hinton. Framed as a performative inquiry into women’s particular use of the image, both in feminist and activist contexts, we'll consider the stakes in image-making for a gender that Mary Ann Doane has suggested bears a socialized “close proximity” to the image itself.

Room 5 [Panel 17]:
Speed Youth Mourning
Chair: Rachel Levitsky
Panelists: Emily Abendroth, Tonya Foster, Kythe Heller, Kristin Prevallet, Michelle Taransky, Jennifer Scappettone
Description: The presenters, mixing performance, conversation and reading, will consider how the expansion of the prison, disaster capitalism, and the vertigo of speed culture implode the ambit of community. Can we as writers and actors-in-concert re-imagine the contours and relieved duration of a 'commons' in which we dwell despite our increased mobility, that is sustainable within our current spatiotemporal condition? Are there new opportunities for meaning, mutual succor, and collective action across identity/location/generation in these “liquid times”?

Room 6 [Panel 18]:
Performing a Poetics of Motherhood
Chair: Leah Souffrant
Panelists: Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Christine Hume, Hoa Nguyen
Description: Poets Hoa Nguyen, Christine Hume, Laynie Browne, Lee Ann Brown, and Leah Souffrant will present their work as performance, followed by a round-table discussion of the work and the significance of the intersection of motherhood, performance, and poetics. Christine Hume will perform “Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense”, an essay-poem with a soundtrack. Laynie Browne reads from The Desires of Letters, a long prose-poetry work. Lee Ann Brown will perform new and signature poetic works relating to the subject of motherhood. Hoa Nguyen will read new works and from Hecate Loche. Leah Souffrant will read from “Essay for Elsa”, a series accompanied by visual projections.

4:00PM-4:20PM
An interactive and performative healing ritual with Kythe Heller.

4:00PM-4:30PM BREAK

4:30PM-6:30PM
Closing Plenary: The Ongoing Event: An Open Discussion
Moderators: Rachel Levitsky, erica kaufman, Gail Scott
Description: Do we and how do we, continue the work we have done here? An open discussion tightly moderated.

6:30 PM-8:30 PM
Performance & Collaboration
Performers: Carla Harryman, The Institute for Domestic Research (Catriona Strang, Christine Stewart & Jacqueline Leggat), Sally Silvers, Lila Zemborain, Torino Collective

Click here for participant bios

All events will be held at The CUNY Graduate Center: 365 Fifth Avenue (between 34th & 35th Streets); New York, NY

phone: 212-817-2005...|...email: adfempo@gmail.com

Registration is free, on-going, on-site, and we will be asking for your generous donations.

Sponsorship and Organization
Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism: A Gathering was collaboratively organized and sponsored by the Belladonna Collective Committee*, CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for the Humanities, Center for the Study of Women and Society, Ph. D. Program in English, and Poetics Group.

*Members of this Collective include: Rachel Levitsky, Erica Kaufman, Laura Elrick, Tonya Foster, Laura Jaramillo, Akilah Oliver, Jen Scappettone, Kate Eichhorn, Emily Beall, and Anna Moschovakis. Other members of the General Belladonna Collective include HR Hegnauer (www.hrhegnauer.com) whose fantastic design can be seen at our website and on our books and Adah Gorton, Meghan Johnson, Elizabeth Crawford, Katy Jones, Austin Publicover, (ETC) all of whose labor with the project makes the project.

925 Bergen Street; Suite 405

Brooklyn, New York 11238

orders@belladonnaseries.org

Website designed by HR Hegnauer

All events will be held at
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
(between 34th & 35th Streets)
New York, New York
phone: 212-817-2005
email: adfempo@gmail.com

Registration is free, on-going,
on-site, and we will be asking for
your generous donations.

MacArthur Winners + Ayanbadejo Supports Marriage Equality + MCM 0-2

2009-09-23T17:09:00.000-07:00

I was very excited and happy to hear that among this year's recipients of MacArthur Foundation fellowships, commonly know as "Genius" Awards, were three writers whose work I greatly admire and whom I have had the good fortune to meet and hear read over the years: fiction and nonfiction writer extraordinaire Edwidge Danticat, who has played an invaluable role in introducing Haitian and history and culture into American literary discourse; razor-smart, innovative poet Heather McHugh; and my former professor and colleague Deborah Eisenberg, who has perfected her own distinctive long-form version of the fictional short story. (Both Heather and Deborah were writers in residence at the university within the last five years, and Edwidge will be also, I hope, when she's available.) They join an illustrious group this year that also includes mixed-media artist Mark Bradford, painter Rackstraw Downes, and 19 others working at various intersections of the fields in the arts, social and natural sciences, humanities, and public activism. A hearty congratulation to all of these extraordinary people, whose contributions have and will continue to resonate in the world for years to come.

Danticat, McHugh, Eisenberg (all photos from Macfound.org)

‡‡‡

Today Bernie sent a link to this Washington Blade story showing that Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo (right, LA Times, J. Pat Carter / Associated Press) has publicly and strongly supports marriage equality. According to Amy Cavanaugh's article, not only did Ayanbadejo state in the HuffingtonPost.com that same-sex couples should have the same rights to marry as opposite sex ones, noting the folly of Brittany Spears being able to get married in and then annul her marriage in a drunken heartbeat, but he attended the opening of Equality Maryland's new relocated headquarters in Baltimore. Ayanbadejo, a former Canadian Football League player and three-time Pro Bowler for the Chicago Bears, is one of the rare, high-profile, currently active NFLers to come out in favor of marriage equality. Other retired pro athletes, like Charles Barkley, Michael Strahan and Magic Johnson, and a few current players, like free agent and former Raven Will Demps, have also expressed similar support, but the reality remains that pro athletes like these have tended to be silent about or vocally against same-sex marriages. That they are isn't surprising, but I'm sure there are more members of the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and MISL, as well as major pro tennis players, golfers, skiiers, track and field athletes, female and male, who'd be willing to publicly support marriage equality if asked.

That got me thinking--and I rarely have an original thought so I imagine someone is already on this--but I wonder whether the various marriage equality organizations at the state and national levels (and international ones as well) have systematically identified pro athletes who are willing to go on the record in support of their efforts? When I consider that pro sports are a kind of lingua franca of sorts and deeply influential for a large swathe of our society, one element of a targeted effort to help educate and expand people's perspectives might include a series of commercials featuring athletes from major national and international pro sports, such as baseball, football, basketball, like Ayanbadejo? In the current battle to retain Maine's marriage equality law, has No on 1: Protect Maine Equality identified athletes affiliated with teams that might be popular up there--the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, Bruins, and Revolution--or athletes from the state who'd be willing to go on the record and champion equality? I don't think New Jersey's marriage equality folks, Garden State Equality, have done so. It couldn't hurt.

‡‡‡

A few ironic blips that haven't yet broken through (I wonder why?) to the wider MCM: first is that the bill the Congress testerically passed on a 345-75 vote to defund ACORN very well may result in barring government funding for...get this...some of the major corporations enmeshed in the military-industrial complex! That's right: Blackwater, Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, and other corporations, and any of their employees, that have been caught "breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency

" could be barred from pigging out on our tax dollars. Talk about poetic justice (forgive the cliché).

Now, you have to wonder whether this was just a Congressional flub or whether some sly member or members wrote the language so broadly that this transparently right-wing attempt at smashing a fly with an anvil--ACORN's main work in the world involves helping poor and working class people across the US--ended up ricocheting and bashing the bill's sponsors' masters as well. It really is brilliant. Given that House Minority Leader John Boehner was one of the chief figures behind it, I chalk it up to pure idiocy. But even a broken clock is...well, you know how that one goes.

Update: Glenn Greenwald speaks with Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) about the potential effects of this crazy new law, which is problematic as 1) the Constitution forbids Congress singling out a single entity without a trial and 2) the president is required to faithfully execute if it's been signed into law, meaning that the defense contractors would have to be defunded.

Another bit of information I hadn't heard until I read one of those messy blogs President Obama felt the need to decry last week: according to The Monkey Page blog, work by a colleague, Andrew Roberts shows that the missile defense system pushed by W that Obama scrapped last week and which has neocons and their MCM allies shrieking was never popular in either of the two countries, Poland or the Czech Republic.

Neither country's parliaments ratified the agreements, which were signed by the right-wing executives of each in conjunction with W, and according to Roberts' study, in the Czech Republic, 2/3rds of the public was against the installation of the radar systems and supported a referendum to certify the agreements. One thing that always struck me was the underlying illogic that these unproved systems, boondoggles really, ought be erected at all, let alone in Poland and the Czech Republic, because it made no sense whatsoever that Iran (as opposed to Russia, still viewed as a huge threat by neocons) would be targeting missiles at these former Eastern bloc countries, or much of Western Europe. Yet throughout the period that these systems were reported on, it seemed no one in the MCM asked even basic questions about this unlikelihood. But still, I haven't seen this reported at all in the MCM. That's 0-2, by my count.

And if I can remember them, there are several more. (HT/Matthew Yglesias)

Brick City on Sundance + Poem: Manuel Bandeira

2009-09-22T19:49:00.000-07:00

C and I have been watching Brick City the five-night Sundance Channel documentary series Forrest Whitaker, Mark Benjamin and Mark Levin, also its director, have produced about nearby Newark. At each episode's center is Newark's charismatic, determined young mayor, Cory Booker, who made his movie debut in 2005 in Marshall Curry's enthralling, Oscar-nominated documentary Street Fight, which chronicled his determined but unsuccessful run against longtime city head and now convicted felon Sharpe James and James' corrupt, municipal machine. Booker ran again in 2006 and defeated James's chosen successor, Ron Rice, and since then has worked tirelessly to improve the city and the lives of its residents. A great deal of his heroic effort, presented here in clips from 2008, is on display in Brick City; when he isn't fretting over how to plug holes in the city's budget or exhorting his police department to drive the crime rate even lower (murders, Newark's longtime bane, have fallen consistently) or addressing yet another negative article on the city he governs, Booker shows himself, to many residents' delight and his parents' pride and concern, to be the city's most diehard champion and booster, and, it must be said, a kind of quasi-coach, teacher and mentor to many of its denizens, going beyond parades and groundbreakings to play midnight basketball, ride sidesaddle with the police during bouts of insomnia, and cajole young people even to pursue their dreams.

But were Brick City the Booker show all the time it would certainly be engaging but hardly offer any real perspective into the city's ongoing problems. Instead, the filmmakers have selected some of the city's less famous residents, like couple Jayda, a sharp, charismatically gifted young woman and member of Bloods gang, and her sloe-eyed partner and expectant baby-daddy Creep, a Crip, who are struggling to maintain their relationship, take care of themselves and their two children, and imagine and experience new lives outside the prisonhouse of gang life, poverty and low expectations, and the penal system. Watching Jayda as she energizes the young women she works with has given me some hope about Newark's future, yet even this potential heroine, who is pregnant with her second child (and what will be Creep's as well), ends up finding herself on the wrong side of the law because of an old warrant she'd been avoiding. One of the realities the series underlines is this persisent, not always hidden trap, made of snap emotional responses we all feel combined with old and problematic, sometimes deadly ways of addressing problems, which ensnares so many of Newark's young people, including those like Jayda who are full of potential, and potential leaders. Instead of being able to enjoy their lives, so many of them are tagged early on and dragged quickly and inexorably down into a mire of drugs, failure, prison, and death.

Newark Police chief Garry McCarthy and Mayor Cory Booker (Photo, Sundancechannel.com)

Other residents of the city who make an appearance include principal and poet Ras Baraka, his Vice Principle Todd Warren, a grizzly bear of a man, and their crew at Newark's Central High School, which during the series moves into its strikingly new, $100 million complex, after some unfortunate and poorly defended delays; Newark's police chief, Bronx native Garry McCarthy, and others on his force, captured in strategy sessions and on the beat; and some ex-cons who've succeeded in turning their lives around but find current events tempting them to exact retribution that will return them to the very personal hells they've mostly escaped. The series has focused a lot more on the police than on City Hall, despite featuring Booker, and it's interesting to think about all of the corruption and sleaziness that came through in the earlier documentary, which preceded James's conviction, and the light touch with which the filmmakers have addressed such issues here. Instead, we are given more of a sense of what Newark's true challenges are, shorn mostly of any spectacle, and the tough conditions the majority of its residents face and endure, despite the best efforts of the new mayor, new police chief, and many of the city's indefatigable residents themselves, who are presented as subjects and authors of their own lives, and not the objects of beneficent but blind liberal concern.

A spectral presence here that I immediately associate with Newark, Ras Baraka's father, the renowned and notorious poet and author Amiri Baraka, has turned up once so far, to commemorate the 41st anniversary of Newark's uprising. In his brief appearance he manages to serve up some unvarnished old-style Marxism and denounce Booker as a "a white racist Negro," echoing of one of James's more outrageous criticisms of his opponent, that because of his upbringing and education (Stanford, Yale and Oxford Rhodes Scholarship) he wasn't really black or down (he is, yet some voters, despite all visual and other evidence, believed this). Despite this bitter burst of Barakatude, it's been fascinating to see Ras at the center of a film about Newark while his father, who played a key role not only in formulating a radical political and artistic agenda for Newark and black people in the late 1960s on through the 1980s, but also worked doggedly to elect Newark's first black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, remains only a ghostly figure. Two episodes are now finished, and I'm already wondering if we'll see Amiri Baraka again. It almost feels like the documentary's almost missing something key if we don't.

◊◊◊

Earlier this summer I completed and sent off a translation of Brazilian writer and media personality Jean Wyllys's collection of stories, Aflitos (Fundação Casa Jorge Amado; Editora Globo, 2001). I've published a couple of the translated stories in literary journals and I hope the entire book is published at some point, preferably in a bilingual version, mainly because I enjoy Wyllys's grain-of-sand prose and because the stories as a whole offer a different image of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil's 3rd largest city and one of its major cultural capitals, than one usually encounters anywhere. To open the book Wyllys chose a poem, "Desencanto," that happens to be by one of Brazil's very important 20th century poets, Manuel Bandeira (1886-1968).

Originally I looked up translations of "Desencanto" and even considered using one (with credit to the original translator), since I'd initially intended only to translate Wyllys's prose as well as the introduction, by Bahian journalist Antônio Torres, but after reviewing what I could find in books and online I thought, I have to do this myself. I like the result, though there's a prosodic issue in the second stanza that's bothering me, so I still have to work on it. Nevertheless, for the first time in a while, here is the original, and an original translation, of a poem.

DESENCANTO

Eu faço versos como quem chora
de desalento... de desencanto...
Fecha o meu livro, se por agora
Não tens motivo nenhum de pranto.

Meu verso é sangue. Volúpia ardente...
Tristeza esparsa... remorso vão...
Dói-me nas veias. Amargo e quente
Cai, gota e gota, do coração.

E nestas versos de angústia rouca
Assim dos lábios a vida corre,
Deixando um acre sabor na boca.

--Eu faço versos como quem morre.

DISENCHANTMENT

I write these lines like one who cries
In discouragement...in disenchantment...
Shut my book, if, for the moment
You have no cause for tear-filled eyes.

My poetry is blood.  Burning ecstasy...
Scattered sadness... vain regret...
My veins ache from it, bitter and hot,
Drop by drop it tumbles from my heart.

And in these verses, anguished, raw
So runs life from between my lips,
Leaving a bitter taste in my jaws.

--I write these lines like one who dies.

October Equality March + Carter's Comments + Sports Roundup

2009-09-20T16:39:00.000-07:00

A while back I believed I'd mentioned that I'd heard there'd be a march in Washington for Marriage Equality this fall. One of my former students, sailor and author Miriam (of the bread recipes, who also introduced me to "fan fic"!), asked that I post a more definitive link to the event, Equality Across America, which is set to take place on October 10-11. I don't think I'll be able to attend, because I'll be returning from a black LGBTQ lit conference in Austin, but everyone who supports true and real equality should attend if they can.

As you also may know, earlier this week Congressman Jerrold Nadler proposed repealing the abominable Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). If this is an issue that matters to you, please do call or email your Congressperson to urge her or him to consider cosponsoring and supporting this bill (along with the public option, investigations into the Bush-Cheney torture regime, repeal of the Patriot Act and Big Oil subsidies, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and anything else you believe is pertinent).

+++

The right-wing and mainstream corporate media's (MCM) hyperventilating reactions to President Jimmy Carter's statement that racism underlines a great deal of the conservative outrage towards President Barack Obama and his policies do not surprise me at all. Any thoughtful or considered discussion of race, let alone racism, in the wider media always dissipates like iron steam. What frustrates me, however, is the MCM's continual conflation of "race" with "racism," and their focus on the former, rather than the latter. The MCM cannot seem to untangle the two, willfully I often think, because speaking about the former allows them a way out of addressing the pervasiveness of the latter. Speaking about the latter might also force them to register several premises, which include that those in the MCM also belong to certain races and have experiences shaped by this fact, and that in regular social and political discourse, some people are raced and some are not, and that doing so often occurs through the prism of racism. What's I also find frustrating is the way that the MCM reduces every issue to numbing simplicity, especially when "race" is broached, and in doing so attempts to attribute it to a single cause, as if truly complex economic, political and social phenomena were as easily diagnosed as the mumps.

Bob Somerby, for many years now, and Glenn Greenwald and others more recently have been pointing out that the right wing, with tremendous MCM help, fomented extreme hatred against our last Democratic president, Bill Clinton. (One could go further back, of course; shortly before Kennedy's assassination, "Wanted" posters went up in parts of Dallas.) Almost immediately upon Clinton's election, the nutcases, often funded by extremely wealthy individual and corporate interests, some of the same ones behind the Teabaggers, did everything they could to ruin Clinton's presidency, often in conjunction with the Republican opposition. If anyone thinks it's possible to minimize the craziness Clinton faced, culminating the multiyear, multimillion-dollar investigation, aided eagerly by The New York Times, and for which both President Clinton and Hillary Clinton were exonerated, just recall the ultimate GOP-led act, the attempted impeachment in 1998. I can vividly remember when the uproar among Democrats from that insane spectacle seemed so great as to ever prevent anyone from the GOP ever winning the presidency again, and yet a year later, the GOP and MCM (reporters and columnists at the NY Times and Washington Post, figures from NBC, Fox, etc.) began their "War on Gore," and we ended up with the Supreme Court coup that installed the disaster known as George W. Bush on us.

I mention this history because while I am--as are, I'm sure, quite a few people around the US--quite aware that racism and white supremacy are always in operation in this society, I do believe that attributing the current derangements of the right solely or even primarily to racism denies this prior history, which was still firmly in place when Clinton left office. Racism, while a major source, is still only one of many behind the behavior on display at the town hall rallies, the recent Teabagger rally in Washington, and above all, on the right-wing/corporate propaganda headquarters-channel, Fox News. Had Hillary Clinton won, we wouldn't be seeing the same sort of direct racist and racialist animus (the Curious George T-shirts, the "birther" push, the signs of Obama as a witch doctor, etc.), though racism would be in the mix, as it was during the Clinton years (remember the obsessive push to end welfare, even though corporate welfare reached insane heights under Bush, and affirmative action, which, studies in the late 1990s showed, primarily benefited white women?). With a President Hillary in office, we probably would be seing even more and outlandish displays of sexism and misogyny, and not just from the right, but from the MCM, whose members (Chris Matthews is notorious) have long been among the worst offenders. But attacks on undocumented immigrants and "producerist" arguments, prettified by the likes of David Brooks, wouldn't be unthinkable.

Let me be clear: my aim is not to minimize the particular foci of some of the worst attacks on Obama, but to note that we had the militias, the anti-government nuts, the millenialists, and so on in full force from 1992-2000, alongside a GOP Congressional caucus that took political and personal destruction of the sitting president and complete repeal of the New Deal legacy as its organizing principle. Newt Gingrich did not simply want to stop Clinton's presidency in its tracks, he wanted to shred Clinton personally. Think of some of the most outspoken figures on the right during the impeachment drama and the revelation of Clinton's affair. When their efforts failed repeatedly, this led, as we now see, to even more thuggish tactics, such as installing a president and Congress, by hook or crook (or voting machine) who could just dynamite the government entirely. According to a recent Census report, according to almost every economic indicator the vast majority of Americans finished the 8 years of Bush's presidency worse off than before. The wealthiest .1 percent and many corporate interests--or at least the people running them, if not the shareholders--were the economic losers.

To quote The Atlantic on this topic:

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

The Census' final report card on Bush's record presents an intriguing backdrop to today's economic debate. Bush built his economic strategy around tax cuts, passing large reductions both in 2001 and 2003. Congressional Republicans are insisting that a similar agenda focused on tax cuts offers better prospects of reviving the economy than President Obama's combination of some tax cuts with heavy government spending. But the bleak economic results from Bush's two terms, tarnish, to put it mildly, the idea that tax cuts represent an economic silver bullet.

I'm hardly saying anything that most J's Theater readers don't already know, but I mention this record, all but buried by the MCM (tell me, when have you seen any of the major "liberal" or "progressive" MCM reporters or columnists discuss this record at any length, to inform the majority of people out there what's going on) to say that one of the great sources of the rage on display at last weekend's rally, is ignorance, which the MCM have only helped to deepen rather than dispel.

The reasons behind this are numerous, but one central one is that corporate interests (just like our Congress, which willingly works hand in glove with them) benefit by keeping people as misinformed as possible. There is also, as this telling clip of CNBC's scandal-plagued anchor Maria Bartiromo demonstrates, the fact of media personalities' own gross ignorance (again, cf. Chris Matthews). But rather than go on, I'll post the clip below, which has been making its rounds on the Net. It illustrates perhaps more powerfully than anything I might say here what I'm talking about. Please watch it till the end, because it shows, for a rare change, a reporter breaking the supposedly objective, journalistic frame and politely stating and clarifying facts for some of these people. Unfortunately, this happens so very rarely that it's hard not to be cynical. Whatever the source of the MCM's ongoing silence, it's a major problem and will continue to be for the rest of Obama's (or any Democrat's) terms. What's even more unfortunate is that I don't get the sense that he or many in his team, like many in Congress, have any clue or, worse, care at all about this. The results, however, could be something worse than the Bush administration. Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, Rick Santorum, and any number of other very dangerous characters are lurking out there, and with a heavily corporated-funded campaign with pseudo-populist aspects, we'd all be in very serious trouble. 2001-2008 might end up looking like the Coolidge years.

(Please watch to the end to see the reporter challenge the protesters' ignorance.)

+++

On the sports tip, the New York Jets have started the NFL season 2-0, defeating their nemeses, the New England Patriots 16-9 today, preventing a comeback by the media darling Tom Brady. The Big Green have a sharp new coach, Rex Ryan, and one of the most talented young quarterbacks in the league, rookie Mark Sanchez (at right, Nick Laham/Getty Images) of USC. The Jets don't have the toughest schedule this season, so they could conceivably go 12-4 or 13-3. That is, if they can keep playing like they are now, or even improve. Then the playoffs will be more than a mirage.

The Saint Louis Rams, however, are 0-2, losing 9-7 to a shaky Washington squad, and look no better than their 2-14 predecessors of last season. In fact, they look worse. 10 years ago they were known as the league's highest scoring teams, with iffy defense. Now they have middling defense and no scoring capability at all. Their quarterback is sacked at will, they cannot convert drives into runs, and they make countless mistakes game after game. I am starting to think the new ownership may be trying to once again ship a team out of St. Louis towards more financially beneficial (southern California?) climes. Looking at their schedule, they face both pushover and tough teams (though no AFC East teams, nor the Giants or Eagles, thankfully), but they still could conceivably go 0-16. They do meet the Detroit Lions at midseason, so a 1-15 outcome isn't impossible.

In the MLB, the Yankees have the best record in the AL, at 95-55. Perennial All Star Derek Jeter has broken Lou Gehrig's team hit record, CC Sabathia (at right, AP) is powering his way to a Cy Young Award at 18-7, and the team overall, like the finely tuned machine it has been for long stretches over its history, is humming along under manager Joe Girardi. The other top teams in the AL are the Boston Red Sox, who lead the Wild Card race (again), the Detroit Tigers, and the mouthful but ever talented Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. The Yankees and the Angels are the teams to beat, but the Red Sox are always dangerous.

In the NL, the Saint Louis Cardinals are again atop the NL West, though they don't have the league's best record. That honor goes to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Cardinals do, however, have the league's best pitching--two starters, Adam Wainwright (18-8, 2.59 ERA), and Chris Carpenter (16-4, 2.43 ERA), are leading contenders for the NL Cy Young--and its best overall hitter in Albert Pujols (47 home runs, 119 runs scored, 127 runs batted in, .328 average), a latter day Stan Musial. He and the pitching have kept the team afloat; the last week the Cardinals have staggered more than swaggered. The Dodgers, however, have more balance across their lineup, and could be dangerous in the playoffs. The other top teams are the East leaders, the Philadelphia Phillies, last year's World Series champions, who look powerful enough to go all the way, and the current Wild Card leading Colorado Rockies, who always have a strong home-field advantage and great batters. I'm rooting for the Cardinals, but this quartet is a toss-up.

The Cardinals vs. the Yankees (which last occurred in 1964, with the Cardinals winning four games to three) would be my preferred World Series matchup. Will it happen? Let's see.

At the Fashion Tent II

2009-09-19T14:05:00.000-07:00

More photos:

A self-described homeless man, sashaying down the walkway, displaying his own striking style (don't be surprised to see something based on this on the runway next spring)

Outside the main tent

A young woman at the models' entrance

Fashionistas

Some of the fashionistas

The paparazzo who was ready to punch someone's daylights out

Model approached by a photographer

The tough but friendly head doorperson

One of the fashion people arriving

Right after someone had been thrown out of the main tent for improper credentials (the guy looked very high)

Fashion people arriving with the goods

Toe-headed fashionista

Model leaving

One of the spectators

Another model departing

Ramona Singer of Real Housewives of NYC

Two stylish young guys in the park, checking out the happenings

Photographers, during a lull

Two important people (?) arriving

A model striking a pose

Model striking a pose

Leaving the Phillip Lim show

Siafa Lewis, of LXTV

Final day styling

Golden boots

The guard who parried my request to photograph the Anne Klein show's set up in the library's Celeste Bartos Forum

The Bartos Forum, post-Klein show

Breaking down the tents