Direland on the French "Non" EU Constitution Vote

This past Sunday, a major political convulsion took place in France, when a majority of voters in that country, one of the founding members of what has become the European Union and the second most populous country in the EU (after Germany), rejected by a 55%-45% margin the option to ratify the EU's new constitution. It must be ratified by all 25 member states to go into effect, so the French "No" vote effectively iced it, at least for now; the winning vote's ripple effects include empowering "No" voters in the Netherlands, where ratification appears increasingly in doubt, and in Britain, where Euroskepticism has been a feature both of the conservative Tory Party and of the left wing of Tony Blair's Labour Party.

Journalist and author Doug Ireland has been following it closely on his always engagingly analytical Direland blog, and breaks down what the vote means more thoroughly and thoughtfully than almost any other non-French account I've read so far. One of the things he discusses is how much the vote was a rejection not only of an excessively bureaucratic, anti-democratic, anti-national sovereignty system that the EU hoped to extend, but also of France's haughty, imperious, scandal-ringed, conservative president Jacques Chirac, whom the US media at times have lumped together with left-leaning anti-war sympathizers because of his unyielding opposition to George W. Bush's neo-con war in Iraq. (Germany, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, India, China, Nigeria, Egypt, and any number of other major allies also openly opposed the war in Iraq, but the French became the right wing's chief bullseye, in part because of Chirac.)

Chirac staked his reputation on a victorious "Yes" vote by national referendum, when he probably could have followed the example of Germany and the other 8 ratifiers (including Spain, Italy, Slovakia, and Slovenia), and passed it by parliamentary action. But his hubris wouldn't allow this. After each of his TV appearances to promote the "Yes" vote, public support fell. Now his chances of reelection to the French Presidency (which combines in various ways the power of the US presidency and the more figure-head of state positions in other parliamentary systems) in two years look nil, and he is being forced to reshuffle his cabinet, which began with his ousting of the deeply unpopular Jean-Marie Raffarin, though as Ireland notes, instead of naming as Prime Minister the leading conservative candidate, and one of his chief rivals, Nicolas Sarkozy, whose rhetoric and policies have been redolent of the US Republican Party's leading figures, he installed the aristocratic, exquisitely maned Dominique de Villepin to the post. (Villepin was the Foreign Minister during the run-up to the Iraq War, and France's leading anti-war champion at the United Nations.) Sarkozy, meanwhile, now heads the Ministry of Interior, and thus is second in command to Villepin, a man he (and many in the Gaullist party) dislikes. Ireland actually unravels much more about Chirac, Villepin, and Sarkozy (including his current marital scandal), and the mainstream French media's pro-"Yes" position, providing what I would imagine is an excellent early signpost to the next French presidential and parliamentary elections, as well as an insightful overview of the French public's current mood.

Yet if I read Ireland (and other accounts) correctly, the success of the "No" vote also signaled the ongoing impotence of France's mainstream leftist parties. The Socialists, along the the Greens, had also campaigned publicly on behalf of the "Yes" vote; Socialist-identified voters overwhelmingly rejected its pro-market ideology and threats to France's liberal social welfare system. Although one major Socialist figure, Laurent Fabius, supported the "Non," many of its strongest adherents came from the far left: the Trotskyites, Communists, union-affiliated figures, and anti-globalization spokespersons such as José Bové, the McDonald's-protesting farmer and politician. I found it interesting to note that while Left or left-leaning parties have in the last few years taken power in a number of countries, like Argentina, Brazil, and quite notably Spain after its 3/11 attack a year ago, or have extended their rule in somewhat weakened form, in Germany and Britain, the mainstream left in France has been out of power both in that country's parliament and its presidential palace for several years, not unlike the far more right-leaning US Democratic Party. Ireland asks some compelling questions about the possible integration of the French far left parties after their victory that are worth thinking about, particularly in terms of future geopolitical scenarios; unfortunately, the other victors in the "No" vote were the nationalist far right, most openly identified with the racist, anti-Semitic extremist Jean-Marie LePen. Anything that one might see as legitimizing him is cause for concern.

(This Libération map also shows that while Paris, Brittany, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Caribbean and (most of) the Pacific départements carried the "Yes" vote, much of rural, Southern and Eastern France voted no, with the strongest "No" regions on the Belgian border (ironies never cease), in Burgundy and the Auvergne, and along the Mediterranean coast.)

For US citizens, the French "No" vote isn't an event of merely Francophilic or academic interest; the political and economic fortunes of the EU have a direct impact on US political and economic policy, especially given that most our country's closest and wealthiest allies belong to this union and there is extensive integration of our economies. One of Chirac's cherished goals was a European military force to rival the US's. I'm not sure whether there was anything in the EU Constitution about this, but a severely weakened Chirac may also stall that this aspect of European integration too.

PS: There is so much more interesting material on Ireland's blog, including information on the possible reopening of an investigation into the death of one of Italy's greatest contemporary figures, the openly gay, leftist fiction writer (Ragazzi, A Violent Life, Petrolio), poet (Roman Poems), essayist (Ashes of Gramsci), journalist, and filmmaker (Canterbury Tales, Teorema, Porcile, Saló) Pier Paolo Pasolini (b. 1922), who was slain under brutal, mysterious circumstances in 1975. He also probes New York Republican mayor Michael Bloomberg's ties to none other than Lenora Fulani....

Memorial Day: 54th Massachusetts Regiment

Though Memorial Day has come to honor all of America's war dead, it was initially established in 1868 by Union Army general John Logan to commemorate soldiers who perished in the US Civil War. (The 11 former Confederate states didn't acknowledge the holiday until its tribute was generalized after World War I.) I thus think it's appropriate to dedicate this post to the first all-Black regiment in that war, the Union's Army's 54th Massachusetts Infantry, whom the poet Robert Lowell memorialized in a somewhat backhanded way in his famous poem, "For the Union Dead," and who gained even greater public fame as a result of Edward Zwick's 1989 film, Glory, which starred Denzel Washington in the role of Pvt. Trip. His unforgettable performance earned him his first Academy Award, in the best supporting actor category.

The 54 Massachusetts Infantry, as is well known, came into being as the result of several years of agitation by notable abolitionist figures, including Frederick Douglass, to allow Blacks to serve in the war ("Men of Color, To Arms!"), and through the leadership of Massachusetts' White abolitionist governor, John A. Andrew, who felt that Blacks should be allowed to fight and die for their freedom. In 1863, the year President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Andrew, after gaining approval from War Secretary Edward Stanton to organize regiments that could "include persons of African descent. . .", selected the White officers for the company from his state's richest and most prominent abolitionist families, with 25-year-old Col. Robert Gould Shaw serving as the company's commander, and enlisted prominent free Blacks such as Douglass, William Wells Brown and Lewis Hayden to field Black infantrymen. The 100 soldiers who'd signed up just six weeks after the training camp opened at Ft. Meigs in Readville Massachusetts comprised free Blacks and former slaves; 47 alone came from the small Black population (4,500 in 1863) of Massachusetts. Two of Frederick Douglass's sons, Charles and Lewis (at right, courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University) and one of Sojourner Truth's grandsons were among them.

There was considerable public and political opposition to and disbelief in the idea of an armed, Black Union company (as well as a fear about enlisting escaped slaves in the battle), and considerable doubt then as now about Black people's ability even to function at the level required to be soldiers, so the regiment's White and Black supporters strove to ensure that the the men were properly funded, accoutered, implemented and trained. They knew that any problems would be used as an excuse to prevent further Black regiments. The 54th Massachusetts passed its first test on July 16, 1863, when it participated with the White troops of the 10th Connectictut Infantry in repelling an attack on James Island, South Carolina. The soldiers' bravery and fearlessness impressed numerous critics, including skeptical White Army generals. Its most famous moment came soon thereafter, on July 18, 1863, when Shaw chose to have the regiment lead the assault on Fort Wagner, a Confederate installation on Charleston's Morris Island. One of Shaw's best remembered statements was his address to his company before launching their charge: "I want you to prove yourselves. The eyes of thousands will look on what you do tonight."

250 troops, including members of the 54 Massachusetts regiment and its commander, Shaw, died during or as a result of the assault, but the survivors participated in the eventual capture of Fort Wagner. Sgt. William H. Carney (pictured at left) became the first African American to win the Medal of Honor for his valor and patriotism in the battle. The infantry company subsequently fought throughout the final two years of the war at Olustee, Florida (with the 35th Colored Regiment), and at Honey Hill and Boykin's Mills, both in South Carolina.

Their exemplary fortitude and bravery on the beaches at Fort Wagner and their subsequent successes (despite being paid less than White troops) paved the way for the enlistment of more than 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors throughout the remaining years of the conflict. I've always considered the 54th Massachusetts Infantrymen, and all of the other Black Union military servicepeople, among the most heroic figures in our nation's history; as with their predecessors in the French-Indian and Revolutionary Wars, and their heirs in subsequent wars (before Vietnam), they served despite widespread societal hostility, terrible odds, and appalling circumstances that many White soldiers would or could not condone. And if they were captured, most knew they faced certain death at the hands of Confederate troops or marauders. (Eerily enough, a 2004 Guardian UK report on the insurgents-resistors in Iraq noted that they took special pleasure in killing Black American and British troops, whose presence on their soil they considered to be a particularly serious offense.) Still, an extraordinary number of men (and women) did serve in the Civil War--they literally were fighting for their freedom--and for their vision, courage and leadership, and for all similar freedom fighters in our history, I offer this tribute today.

Sunday Quote: Evgeny Zamyatin + Oscar Brown Jr. RIP

"True literature can only exist where it is created, not by painstaking and reliable clerks, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics."
--Evgeny Zamyatin, author of We

***
Watching the Chicago-area news tonight, I learned of the passing at age 78 of Oscar Brown Jr., a musician and playwright whose work spanned several genres, including jazz, soul and rhythm & blues. Among Brown's best known songs are "The Snake," "Work Song," "Signifyin' Monkey," and "Watermelon Man"; he also wrote the lyrics for Miles Davis's composition "All Blues," and in the early 1960s sang alongside musical greats Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane. Some of his most notable standards are "It Ain't Necessarily So," "One for My Baby/ One for the Road" and "Where and When." Additionally, he hosted a talent show in Gary, Indiana, that initiated the career of a local group that became the "Jackson Five."

I remember hearing "Signifyin' Monkey" at home when I was little, and for a long time thought it was a children's song. It wasn't until I was older that I figured out the many dimensions of the song, which led me back to Brown's other works. Brown's early style links him, I think, to figures like Eddie Jefferson, Betty Carter, and Nina Simone, though his voice, which combined a rich tone, precisely enunciated diction and earthy execution, is inimitable; once you've heard him you can always pick his works out, even after he moved more into the soul arena. I always felt Brown was one of those artists whose talents exceeded the boundaries of any one area or artistic form; he also wrote plays, poems and essays, and was actively involved, artistically and politically, with numerous communities in Chicago. Over the years, he performed his music across the globe.

His songs and other works remain, but his death is a tremendous loss, not only for the Chicago area, but for music lovers everywhere.

Dérive à Chicago (Qu'est-ce que c'est?)

For each of the last two falls, I have taught an undergraduate course called "Aesthetics and Literature." Adapting Thalia Field's concept, it's an "impossible" course. The university is structured in nine-week quarters (followed by reading and exam weeks). And nine weeks is a very short amount of time to cover anything, but enough to create a feeling of relentless, forward movement, a kind of frenzy of activity that is more draining mentally and physically than a long, four-month semester. (In fact, in a teaching development and improvement fellowship program I was enrolled in during 2003-2004, we learned that it usually takes most students between 2-3 weeks just to assimilate what they've learned. And if you're striving for "deep" learning, nine weeks is far too brief for this to occur. But hey, you do what you gotta do.)

In this impossible course, we read a wide range of philosophical and critical texts by the likes of aestheticians beginning with Ellen Dissayanake, Plato and Aristotle, and ending with Audre Lorde, Robert Farris Thompson (thanks Mendi!) and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. We also read texts by literary figures starting with Shakespeare (his "Sonnets") and concluding with Harryette Mullen, Marjane Satrapi and Theresa Cha. Because of the course's brevity, I assigned too much reading and had to omit countless works I'd loved to have included. Both times, at least in terms of the philosophical-critical material, we bogged down on Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Bourdieu (while Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, and Thompson are always the favorites); and yet the students zipped through what I think is one of the most difficult aesthetic movements I've included both times, mainly because of my own fascination with it, Situationism.

We read several texts by Guy Debord, the polemarch of the Situationist movement and author of the landmark Society of the Spectacle, including "Theses on Cultural Revolution" and "Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency." It would require months of blog entries to define Situationism fully, but suffice it to say that it consists of a series of Marxist-derived liberatory theories and practices--as praxes--that aim to respond to the "decomposition" stage of bourgeois society by resituating practioners (particularly the economically, socially and politically alienated) as participants in a reconstituted lifeworld through their active individual and collective constructions of reality, and in particular time and space, so as to reclaim an autonomy of authentic experience, and organize the "higher senses" to "produce" oneself. Situationism first appeared in France in the mid-1950s and spread across Europe and the United States in subsequent decades, constituting what Debord envisioned as a guild of workers in an advanced cultural sector, or a "collective avant-garde." I particularly appreciated the irony that one of its tenets, in Hegelian fashion, denies the continued existence of literature as a functional art form. One can see the problems in such theories right away, and yet situationism has had a profound influence on punk rock, and on a wide array of performance artists.

One of the chief Situationist practices is the dérive (French for drift or drifting). It entails a voyage on foot and by other means, ideally lasting a day, through a cityspace (though not a stroll, a march or flânerie), mapped according to a series of pre-existing data and maps, as well as self-constructed geographical and temporal coordinates, and may involve other linked and affiliated activities (ludic, political, etc.) as so deemed to ensure a transformative, relational, psychogeographical experience. Rendez-vous may be either fixed or "possible." One can even have "static" derives. A dérive thus requires both planning as well as an openness and flexibility. In both classes, I had hoped to include a dérive, or as I called it, a "neo-dérive" (since I wanted to call attention to a certain nostalgic and reinstitutive aspect in my sense of the term and practice). The first year, it turned out that I had to be away for a conference, and worsening weather situation made such an adventure unworkable. This past fall, I made it a possible but not required activity, but we ended up spending so much time on certain figures (cf. Kant above) that I kept postponing a date, and then, the quarter was over. I had whetted that first class's interest, though, and so, a year and a half later, a small group of 6-7 students, most of them former students in the university's creative writing program, actually undertook a dérive in the city of Chicago!

The leader of the excursion was a terrific poet named Chris Shannon; the journey would begin from a cafe in Lincoln Square. I knew of the initial coordinate and two others, one at 2-2:15 pm, near Graceland Cemetary at Cullom and Clark, and at 5 pm at Winnemac Park. Because I was running last-minute errands, I wasn't able to start with them, but at 2, I arrived at the appointed coordinate, only to find no one there. I called Chris--mobile phones didn't exist, of course, when Debord first set forth his theories--and learned that it had taken them a little while to hash out exactly what they were doing. (Reading Debord, I have had the feeling that this was the case for him and fellow Situationists as well.) He also told me about another coordinate, at 3:30 pm, which would either be located at Belmont Harbor or across town, depending. At any rate, I asked him to draft me an account when he could, because I'm particularly interested in his interpretatioon of Debord's theories, the group's ideological and theoretical understanding of what the dérive aims to accomplish and whether or not they achieved this in constructing it and in practice (or how closely they approximated their own defined goals). I want to know how it went. After I hung up with Chris, I tarried in front of Graceland's tall brick wall for a little while, watching people and thinking about how, when I return to the New York area this summer, I'd like to organize a dérive myself. Perhaps July will work best. I'm wondering, are any readers of this blog interested? If so, let me know, and I'll try to make it happen, very likely in Manhattan or Brooklyn, since I sort of have a sense of both places. Or maybe even Jersey City, which is walkable as well.

It was very gratifying, however, to witness and actively participate (if even in a minor way) in what had resulted from what I thought of as an obscure part of a very difficult course. This unperformed class activity--this "potential act"--had captured the imaginations of (former) students, to the extent that they were willing to realize it several years later. Isn't this what teaching is all about?

Sports Round Up

Folks who know me well know I love following sports of all kinds. From the American professional major league sports (especially football, baseball, soccer, golf, boxing, and to a far lesser extent these days, basketball), to college-level sports, to amateur sports, to obscure athletic pursuits (fencing, team handball, badminton, rugby, squash, lawn tennis, etc.), I can enjoy almost any athletic competition. Well, almost any--I am not a big fan of car racing (I've never been able to get into any of its categories or offshoots), curling, or synchronized swimming. Now that summer is approaching, here are some of my sports interest updates:

MLB Baseball: My favorite team, the St. Louis Cardinals, are leading their division (Central, NL), the biggest in baseball, by 7.0 games, and have won 4 straight. They've gotten solid pitching from their starters (4 have at least 5 wins, and two have 7) and excellent relief, and the sexy engine named Albert Pujols (right) continues to power the team forward, with a batting average above .320, 11 home runs, and 39 runs batted in. These place him in the upper ranks of National League hitters, where he's been since he entered the majors four years ago. The Cards have also gotten production from veterans Jim Edmonds (who initially was a little off-pace this year) and Reggie Sanders, and from newcomers David Eckstein and Mark Grudzielanek. The biggest surprise has been catcher Yadier Molina, who stepped in as a rookie this year, and after a dismal spring, has been in a rave, raising his average to .250. The Cardinals have the talent to win the pennant again, though they've been playing .500-ish ball of late. The combo of new starter Mark Mulder (7-1, 3.72 ERA) and vet Chris Carpenter (7-2, 3.78 ERA), if his arm holds up, might allow them to avenge their humiliation last October at the hands of the Red Sux and win them the Series.

Yes, it's odd to have a second favorite team, but I have one in each league. In the AL, I root for the dreaded...New York Yankees. It's been a two decades-long allegiance, beginning when leggy Hall of Famer Dave Winfield, dubbed "Mr. May" by the Yankees' loudmouthed, Nixon-loving owner, joined the Bronx Bombers back in 1981. Every year Yankee fans expect the team not only to be competitive, but to dominate, and they started out this season as if they were all on ice--it was almost unbearable. They weren't really hitting (except Derek Jeter), the starting pitching was awful, even though they'd gone out and gotten Randy Johnson, their closer was looking incredible vulnerable, and they just seemed to be playing as all the fizz of recent years had died and they'd flatlined. But then several weeks ago they went on a tear, winning 10 in a row and bringing themselves back from the dead. They're still 4.5 games behind the Orioles, who've occupied the AL East basement in recent years (after a storied period in the 1970s and early 1980s), but A(donis)-Rod (pictured at left, AP) is hitting on all jets (his 17 home runs and 49 RBIs lead the league), Gary Sheffield is also punching the ball around, the pitching has stabilized, and they have one of the best managers in baseball.

Totally amazing are the White Sox, who've had occasional good seasons over the last 20 years but who traditionally are Chicago's second team (the first playing in that yuppie bandbox at Addison and Clark on the North side--you know, the cursed team, the goat, Bartman, etc.). This year they have the best record in baseball so far. They also have an adorable manager, Ozzie Guillén and some of the best starting pitching in either league, which they've shown can carry a team even bats are relatively silent.

Also fascinating are the Detroit Tigers, who have the most African-American starters of any team, four (Dmitri Young, Craig Monroe, Rondell White, and Nook Logan) which is particularly noteworthy given the declining percentage of non-Latino Blacks on Major League rosters. Several teams, like Minnesota, Atlanta, Toronto, and the Chicago Cubs have 2-3 regular African-American starters, while others (Baltimore, Oakland, Houston, Arizona) have none, a reality in 2005 that would have been inconceivable in 1995 or even 1965. There are even fewer African-American starting pitchers this season than at almost any other point in the last 30 years, though one of them, Dontrelle Willis of the Florida Marlins, is proving himself one of the best, surpassing even his 14-6 rookie season. He's currently 8-1 with a 1.55 ERA, second only to future Hall of Famer Roger Clemens's Gibsonesque 1.19, and 50 Ks in 64 innings. The high-kicking, body-corkscrewing right hander has threw consecutive two shutouts to start the season. The other African-American starting pitcher, 6'7" C.C. Sabathia of the Cleveland Indians has a 3-3 record, though he has thrown decently in his last few starts, and hit his first home run in an interleague game last week.

Tennis: I haven't watched one French Open match so far this spring. Back in the 1970s when I was a little kid and was learning how to play tennis, it seemed like either Bjorn Borg or Chris Evert Lloyd won at Stade Roland Garros every year or at least every other year (Borg also won Wimbledon five straight times). Then in 1984, Yannick Noah won, and I immediately began fantasizing about sitting in those Parisian stands when I was a grown-up. But in recent years, I can't say there's a player whose last name isn't Williams who's interested me in the least--well, maybe Guga Kuerten, but he hasn't won in a few years. It's like the winners of the tournaments now are on automatic shuffle--who can keep up? I was cheering Andre Agassi's endurance, but now he's faltering too. Serena Williams, one of my faves, chose to sit this French Open out after winning two years ago, while her sister, the cygnine Venus, was again consistently inconsistent and lost badly to an unknown today. Poor doll James Blake, who suffered Job-like trials last year (broken vertebrae, the death of his father, shingles, etc.) and was publicly insulted several years ago by Lleyton Hewitt (for which I will never forgive that creep), was sent packing pretty swiftly yet again. I've given up wondering where the next Arthur Ashe is, or even if any talented, dominant male American players of any color (Michael Chang II?) will emerge anytime soon, but then maybe the absence of the latter isn't such a bad idea, given the US's problematic image both in Europe and across the globe. Anyways, I hope Serena is ready to throw down at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. Her power-charged game and fierce original outfits (that catsuit has yet to be topped!) both make me want to watch, though I wish Venus could find her best game again--soon.

NBA Basketball: Are they still playing? Since the New Jersey Nets suffered through a butchering at the hands of new owner Bruce Ratner, I tuned out. Actually, I tuned out a few years ago during the lockout, when the owners showed how greedy they are (no surprise there) and Kenny Anderson was complaining about not getting his check. Excuse me, but you're a millionaire, so, are the majority of the rest of the country--including me--who aren't rolling in the dough really supposed to care about your not having money to make multiple luxury car payments? The gall! It was only the Nets' championship appearances that drew me back; I only know half the players in the league anyways, and the season drags on way too long. Fewer teams in shorter playoffs might be more interesting, but then again, I'm beginning to think I'm over b-ball at this level. In fact, I actually am sick of seeing Black men in particular associated with basketball, though given the NBA's steady move towards European and South American athletes (with a Yao Ming thrown in for good measure), young brothas better start picking up a book or a baseball bat again! Chicago's brief burst of success was compelling, especially after their bottom-dwelling post-Jordan period, but they faded.

Oh well, here's my hope. The team with Shaq and Zo and the very attractive Dwayne Wade (above, Slam!) on it wins the title. That's Miami, right?

The WNBA is about to start up soon, or have they already begun? They've started. My interest in their games rises and falls, sort of depending upon...the weather? I can never remember who's on which roster nowadays; my WNBA memory is stuck back about four years ago. I'll wait till the playoffs.

PGA Golf: I never followed this sport before Tiger Woods. Okay, that's not true. I actually knew who won the major tour tournaments (Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Payne Stewart, etc.), but rarely watched more than a few minutes of a match, because, before You-Know-Who, golf was as boring as a drying wall. And then came the Cablinasian (?--BlackThaiNativeAmerican) superstar, Tiger Woods, and he redefined the game, becoming in half a decade one of the greatest golfers of all time. His first Majors win, at the age of 21 at the Masters (could you make up such a name?), was absolutely thrilling--I can still picture him striding up the green, that bucktoothed smile filling his face, after he'd won by a record 12 shots and blown those MFs away. Of course supremacist Fuzzy Zoeller had to try and ruin it with some racist comments, but you know, you can bring a cracker to a golf course, but-- After watching that riveting final round, I was hooked. Since then I really only watch a golf match if Tiger is in the hunt. My favorite Woodsoscopic period was from 1999-2002, when he won seven of nine majors, including his extraordinary 15-shot win (-12) at the 2000 U.S. Open. Then he got rid of his former coach, Butch Harmon and engaged in a public spat (since concluded) with him, which seemed to precipitate a drop-off in play in 2003 and 2004. I also thought it was some bad mojo from that Swedish nanny he hooked up with (could she be more Aryan?). But he came back to win this year's Masters in a playoff, which marked his 9th Major win. I will be following him and the Black man who replaced him at number 1 last year, Vijay Singh, as they compete at this year's U.S. Open, British Open (which is always a challenge), and the season-ending PGA Championship.

College Lacrosse: Say what? Okay, I rarely follow this sport any more (okay I never really did, except for a brief window in college when I knew a guy on the lax team). But this year, three of the semi-finalist teams have Black stars. The New York Times' Pete Thamel profiled Johns Hopkins's Kyle Harrison (pictured below, Johns Hopkins University--those children are in his thrall!) and other black collegiate stars yesterday. Maryland has a star goalie in Harry Alford, while John Christmas (isn't that the best name? Is he descended from the Faulkner character?) plays on Virginia's team. I'll probably be too busy getting ready to leave town this weekend to catch the championship game, but if I can remember I'm going to try to catch it (no TiVo, so...). I also just learned the other day that this year's womens' collegiate champion was the university I teach at; this was their first NCAA championship since a men's fencing title in 1941!


Track & Field: If they're running sprints, I'm watching.

NHL (No-Hockey League) Hockey: I used to complain because the ice hockey season staggered into June. But the idiot players and owners fixed that. The NHL, as we knew it, no longer exists. Oh, it exists in name, but they've lost so much money and shed so many fans that when it comes back, if it comes back, it'll command as much attention, at least south of the US-Canadian border, as cribbage. Good riddance, though I will miss seeing some of the players like Jamal Mayers, Bryce Salvador, Jarome Iginla, and Anson Carter (and reminding myself that I knew what the nonsensical +/- stat meant).

Soccer: Four years to wait for the World Cup is cruel.

I do follow MSL soccer a bit, though I'd probably be a bigger fan if I actually watched some games on TV or even attended a few. Or even knew who was on which team--cf. WNBA. There is a New York-area team and one in Chicago, so it's not like I can't get to a match. But then I only realized the other day the season wasn't over yet. I think MSL is the forgotten stepchild of American professional sports. It needs a superstar or something to boost it up, someone larger than life. With one name. That's essential. But it can't be Preki, because he's been playing since I was in...grade school? I was following the English Premiere League a few years ago, mainly because of London's Arsenal club, which has one of the most diverse, exciting and handsome rosters I can think of (cf. Arsenal's star Frenchman Thierry Henry at right, BBC), but then they dropped out of first, and, fickle, mind-clogged fan that I am, I drifted away. This year they won the FA Cup Final, but when I checked today, they're second after Chelsea (hunh?), so I'm not sure what that means. What else do they play for, and when? I've got to figure this out. To tell the truth, I don't really get how the European leagues function in those trans-national tournaments--I mean, is it the top team in the national leagues that play for the European championship? So then why did Liverpool win it...oh, I give up. I also was trying to follow Brazilian soccer for a while, but it was too confusing as well. There are so many teams, several different leagues, various Copas, and my teams (one in Bahia, Vitória, one in Rio, Fluminense) never came out on top. Based on the newspaper articles I was reading, it always seemed like a São Paulo City or State-based team was dominating, which a Federal University of Bahia soccer site confirmed. Last year, the top 5 teams were all Paulistas: Santos, Atlético, São Paulo, Palmeiras, and Corinthians. This would be analogous to California's baseball or basketball teams dominanting the MLB or NBA. And, São Paulo's Santo Andre (not listed above) won the 2004 Copa de Brasil!

So the World Cup, which is coming up again in 2006, is much easier to follow, and always exciting. Will Brazil win it again, or will other team challenge next year? Henry was on France's 1998 championship team; Germany, the site of next year's cup went to the finals last time against Brazil, while Turkey finished third and 2002 co-host South Korea finished in fourth. And what about the ever-improving U.S. squad?

Poem: Linh Dinh

No time to write anything substantial today, so instead, here's a short, substantial poem by Linh Dinh, whom a colleague and I have been talking up day after day. Dinh has published two highly original books of stories, Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press, 2004) and Fake House (Seven Stories Press, 2000), a poetry collection, All Around What Empties Out (Subpress, 2003), and three chapbooks of poems, Drunkard Boxing (Singing Horse Press, 1998), A Glass of Water (Skanky Possum Press 2001), and my favorite, Renee Gladman's handsewn Leroy Books 2001 volume, A Small Triumph over Lassitude, which features a cover illustration by Layla Ali, and some of the most playful poems this side of Thomas Sayers Ellis.

A PERIPATETIC PURVEYOR OF NOTHING

by Linh Dinh

On The Avenue of Idleness, there is a man who pushes a pushcart around with nothing on it. He rings a bell to announce his arrival. Children and other undesirables like to throw rocks at him.
‘I was never made out for this. I don’t want to sell nothing. I don’t even want to buy nothing.’
‘So much for nothing today?’
‘You better know it.’
‘A little cheaper by the dozen perhaps?’
‘Not at this weight, ma’am.’
‘But my children are grossly underweight!’
‘Like the billboards say, We can’t modernize overnight.’
‘Please wrap it up then.’

Copyright © Linh Dinh, 2001, 2005.

Wednesday Quote: Miriam Alves

"I have a commitment to myself regarding my sensibilities. I am a harp with well-stretched strings, and when the call comes, I play. My antennae are out to the world. If the world is disturbed, so am I. If the world is at peace, so am I."
--Miriam Alves, "Interview with Jean Franco"

Drawing: Rachel Blau DuPlessis

"Hairy stars refracting under the surface of water." One of the highlights of a conference I attended two springs ago at the University of Iowa was hearing the poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis read her work and deliver a lecture on the long poem and Pound. DuPlessis is an important poet-critic who lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University (where Samuel R. Delany and Sonia Sanchez are also on the faculty), and though I'd been following her work for years, I'd never heard her read. In addition to many books of poems, including the marvelous, monumental Drafts 1-38: Toll (Wesleyan, 2001), she has also published several important book-length studies, including Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry (Cambridge, 2001) and Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth Century Women Writers (Indiana, 1985).

DuPlessis's lectures had me scribbling furiously--both notes and fragments towards other pieces--and one of the points her creative work (I'm thinking here of Drafts, which is like a felt-and-fat-and-dirt-and-muslin maze I like to linger in every so often) I am particularly fascinated by (there are many) is how she manages to make "marginality" an aspect of her work, to embody it in the work itself, various kinds of margins and edges and othernesses and folds and the interstices of folds, what issues in and around the shifting registers of the margins of (her) consciousness, drafting a flow that is thrilling and, as another critic has suggested, "anti-monumental."

"Poem be mine": after her reading of "Draft 56: Bildungsgedicht with Apple," I mentioned how much I admired it ("the mind is clamped with questions"), and she handed me the draft she was reading from to me, signed in red with a little note.

Here is a quote from it, the poem performing as it will(s):

"This poem is not you. Except as if you are
yourself in doubt. The poem is doubt itself made evident.
Your trembling begins;
you guzzle at the twinkling beak of stars.
Marginality?
nothing I say can give the feel of it."

and it concludes, after the dialogue between the apples:

"Because in single language, the poem
could not be complete, but since it craves
a multi-lingualism it barely earned,
let it fantasize, for then it flew unwrappt,
and rose enraptured, then it came to flow
amongst its several wilder tongues,
floating bolts of uncut cloth
that did not care for top or back
but draped and few and blew like clouds
and grew and plunged like waves."

Nothing you can say, while giving the feeling of it, freeing languages metamorphosing as you open it: "O poem, sweet, sweet poem be mine, be yearning nodules rich, or touching, or lucid, or economic, analytic, chrysophantic with hairy stars refracting under the surface of water...":

"The long poem is heterogeneric."

Drawing: Man on V Train, NYC

Another drawing, from three years ago. I think I originally started this one in pencil, then inked it in. It was on the V train, so I can't remember where I was heading--I can't even remember where the V train goes. Brooklyn? It would have been early summer, right after I'd gotten back from Chicago, so maybe it was the bkyn (a great but now defunct online journal edited by artist and critic Paul Laster) reading, with Thomas Sayers Ellis, although come to think of it, that was in 2003....

Drawing: Duriel Harris

BTC II: Here's DrPomoFunk, Duriel Harris. Words (sounds, phonemes, morphemes) "billowed" around her as they did around Ronaldo, spoken, sung, screeched, spat, shattered, and sprung, in the brilliant formal structures she's been devising over the last few years, some of which appear in her book Drag (elixir press, 2004), which was one of the freshest creative texts I've come across in years.

This weekend she's been instrumental in the AfroGeeks 2005 conference taking place at the University of California-Santa Barbara, where omniartists Mendi + Keith Obadike are performing two works, "The Sour Thunder" and "4-1-9." Both have online components and are worth checking out!




i will
answer
live
she knew
a shadow
pirate
woman
billowing.....

Drawing: Ronaldo V. Wilson + Ricoeur, RIP

On my old Website, which I still haven't resurrected, I had a page featuring some of my drawings and sketches. I used to draw a lot, especially when I was watching semi-rapt as someone threw down science at the Dark Room Collective's reading series, or when I was riding on the not-so-jerky Red Line T trains from Cambridge to Dorchester. Another favorite place to draw was in MIT's old Rotch Library during my lunch hour during my years at the LMP, as Course 4, 11 and 16* students quietly filed in to read the newspapers and magazines. Now I only do so when the feeling grips me, and in the last few years, it's mainly been at readings or lectures. (One of my favorite stories is of drawing Mark Strand when he read at U.Va., and later showing him the picture, to which he responded, after a smile, "My shoulders aren't that narrow." Perspective, perspective.)

Here's one from 2002, when I went to see the Black Took Collective (Duriel Harris, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Ronaldo V. Wilson) perform their work at a reading Christopher Stackhouse organized at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. I arrived too late to catch and capture Dawn, but here's a rendering of Ronaldo (I did draw Duriel::DrPomoFunk, who is barely visible in palimpsestic fashion if you look closely enough at Ronaldo's face--but I'll post the drawing of her soon), reading one of his poems.

The words hovering around Ronaldo (Serena) like so many shuttlecocks or tennis balls I fetched from his performance, or maybe I dreamt them after opening holes in his chronophotographes (serenatopes?). The balloon features authentic quotes, though (probably) altered a little.

He also chatted on his cellphone (with Dawn?), and (break) danced, which I sort of drew on another page of my book. (I can't remember if he sang, though Duriel did.) They were wonderful.

To really get a sense of how alive and fun it all was, I'd have needed a video camera (showing live feed),

which makes me think
the Black Took Collective
ought to issue
some videos/DVDs
cause this is one of DrPomo's
many points of expertise.

This upcoming Monday, May 23, 2005, Ronaldo will be at the Poetry Project, creating a moment entitled "Hand/Eyes/Coordinates," which is described in the newsletter (by him?) as a "talk-performance" that'll "explore the relationship between drawing and tennis as vehicles that can inform writing: in what ways do the hand and eye work together?"

the poem a naked prince
make an epistle
but penetrate....
---
*Points to anyone who has a clue about what these refer to.

*****
Thanks to Modern Kicks for links to the AP obituary of former University of Chicago professor Paul Ricoeur, one of the leading contemporary continental philosophers and thinkers. Ricoeur's work spanned many areas in philosophy, including hermeneutics and phenomenology, which he trained with great success upon an array of topics. Several years ago I used his essay on time, narrative and plot, "Narrative Time" (in WJT Mitchell's still valuable volume On Narrative (Chicago, 1981)), in an advanced fiction writing course, and often think of it and Ricoeur's subsequent work, the remarkable three-volume Time and Narrative (Chicago, 1984) as essential to understanding how texts--in the broadest sense of the term, including ourselves as narrating agents and narrative objects in time--function and cohere.

Film Trailer Sites + Cannes

Since it's unlikely I'm getting to Cannes anytime soon and since I usually manage to catch at most only 1-2 of the new films showing at the New Festival or Chicago International Film Festival (I'm no longer in the NYC area during the runs of the Mix Festival, or the NY or Tribeca or African Diasporic Film Festivals), I usually scout Internet Movie Database (IMDb) to find out what's new, who's starring in what, when films are completed, as much filmographic information as I can, and so on, so that I'll be able to keep an eye on when they appear onscreen, on DVD, or, like Steven Chow's Kung Fu Hustle (a wild, hilarious, cartoonishly violent film, by the way, pictured at right), I can alert friends who might have other means of accessing them.

For many of the newest films IMDb posts trailer links, but when they don't I go directly to:

Movielist
The Movie Box
Play.dk (a Danish site)
1000 Films (a French site)
Moviemaze (a German site)

There are even more trailer sites, but between these five I've been able to find most of the films I'm looking for.

The Cannes Film Festival site itself also features some trailers. David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, Carlos Reygadas' Batalla en Cielo (Battle in Heaven), Hiner Saleem's Kilometre Zero, the Dardennes' L'Enfant (Le Fils [The Son] is a great piece), Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers (I really liked some of the episodes in Coffee and Cigarettes, particularly the tea session involving Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan), and Dominik Moll's Lemming are among the films in competition there this year I definitely want to see. But the one I anticipate the most perhaps is Michael Haneke's Caché, which has no trailer showing yet; Haneke's imagination is operating on a completely different and troubling frequency. Another film that looks fascinating and promises to be disturbing is Lars von Trier's Manderlay, starring Danny Glover, Isaach de Bankolé, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Willem Dafoe. Manderlay is the second work in his (anti-)American trilogy that began with the stunning, conceptual retribution fantasy Dogville, and has drawn lukewarm or outright negative reviews from some of the American critics there.

If anyone knows of trailer sites that post lots of underground films, please forward the information!

Malcolm X's Birthday

Today is the birthday of one the major figures in 20th century American history, and in particular African-American history, Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, pictured at right, Laurence Henry, Laurence Henry Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library). Born Malcolm Little in 1925, he was assassinated a little over 40 years ago (February 21, 1965), in the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, New York, a few months before his 40th birthday, but in that short time he accomplished almost a lifetime's worth of work, becoming one of the leading religious figures, public spokespersons, and a nationalist and pan-Africanist icon for millions of Black people in America and across the globe.

Outspoken and fearless, a born leader, intellectual and organizer, Malcolm X viewed the survival and political, social and economic liberation of African-Americans as one of the leading goals of his life. His autobiography (written with the late author Alex Haley) is a classic of African-American literature. Traveling the country and working through the Nation of Islam, particularly in New York, Malcolm X articulated the new militancy, racial pride, diasporic consciousness, and push for socioeconomic autonomy that would mark the most significant period of the Black Civil Rights movement of the 20th century. He spoke out against the Vietnam War and against imperialism in general; before his assassination, he traveled the globe, visiting many of the newly liberated countries in Africa (in Nigeria he was named "Omowale"), as well as Canada and the Caribbean. A devout Muslim and member of the Nation of Islam, he also made the Hajj, to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. His death was a terrible blow, though many of his ideas about self-protection and social autonomy were taken up by subsequent groups like the Black Panthers, and remain in the African-American and Diasporic imaginary.

Only three years after Malcolm X was killed, the other truly major Black leader of this period, whose vision and activism often competed with Malcolm X, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., perhaps the greatest Black American leader who ever lived, would be assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, and one could argue that, despite the many subsequent gains we as a people have achieved, we've yet to recover fully from this dual loss, and certainly have never found another leader or combinations of leaders to match, in intellectual, spiritual, political and social stature, either man.

At the end of his life, Malcolm X had shifted his views, in keeping with a concomitant religious shift into the mainstream tradition of Islam, and it may very well have been this personal turn, which also included a change in worldview, and the rift that it marked with the NOI, that led, in part, that to his death. (FBI involvement has also been alleged.) The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture currently has an exhibit, "Malcolm X: A Search for Truth," which provides extensive information on his life and work. It also features many previously unseen personal effects, which were nearly sold off a few years after the rental locker in which they'd been stored went unpaid. I definitely will be viewing them when I get back to the New York area soon. (Thanks Larry K., for the reminder!)

*****

Updated, thanks to a post on Blackgriot's site: He links to betterdays, who reprints an obnoxious, high problematic Guardian UK article by Peter Tatchell about Malcolm X being a "gay black" hero. (Thing can't even get the characterization right--as racially proud as Malcolm X was, it would have to be "black gay" or more likely "black sgl," wouldn't it?) The article is a bit of a minefield from start to finish; truly annoying are his presumptions to know what would be best for young LGBT people of color. He also wrongly states there is not a single, living "world famous" black LGBT person. Peter, there's Angela Davis, if it's activism you're talking about, but what about Frankie Knuckles, RuPaul, Samuel Delany, Alice Walker, Cecil Taylor, Isaac Julien, etc... No, none of these folks embodies in combined form all the greatest of Malcolm X's traits, but there's no guarantee that anyone else, self-identifying as LGBT or not, ever will, and in any case, each offers a possible model to young Black LGBT people. Above all, reaching our young people is an immediate issue that we have to address whether or not there's a global icon. That's the important thing to keep in mind.

Poem/Essay: "After C (3): Tayloriana"

Soon June will be here, and so, in advance of its arrival and the freedom it'll bring, I'm posting one of my favorite pieces I've ever written, "After C (3): Tayloriana," from the manuscript with artist (and poet/critic) Chris Stackhouse: Seismosis. We initially collaborated on this project several summers ago, and we both think of it as ongoing. I have since written more little "essays," as I also call them, and not long ago, for a pending publication in the Indiana Review, Chris completed a new drawing. The text below appears in New American Writing (No. 21) and is currently online. (Seismosis itself appeared in a lovely, tiny, limited, letterpress edition from the Center for Book Arts in the fall of 2004, and we've been discussing a larger version with another potential publisher).

As for the poem itself, "drawing like flying open alone"--Cecil and Chris and Adrian and Mendi and Eric and Jerry and Tisa and Kevin and any number of other voices, conversations, dialogues, came into play here. Not academic, but involving "looking as some other thing." Another form of knowledge production, (critical) practice, abstract and phantasmal, but still you can, if you look at the sign hard enough, call "the depth extraordinary." A hopeful copy.

AFTER C (3): TAYLORIANA

I have to find it again, an extreme music. Inspired by voicings: out, but I may lose it again. That I may live it, utterly beautiful in its rendering. The brink of composition, brink of the hand called looking. And open, drawing like flying open alone, broken without having to take me. Musically it was composition of a distant whiteness, where absence too was thrown, by concentration alone, but not in the listening. Drawing. A profound transitional, kaleidoscopic, where the axes of decay were really the depiction. Dark seisms really come to mind, the first death and the last one, each darker, these first, these powerful, arranged as a collection. Arranged, not solo. At that time I was collecting other pieces, hands, the electronic composed as an album. Looking as some other thing. But I may pick another break, piece the track. In concert. I've since thrown it. He called the depth extraordinary. A fearful copy.

Copyright © John Keene, 2004-2005.

Afromexico Films Website

Talk about talking things up: over the last few days I've posted several times about Mexican President Vicente Fox's racist, classist comments and the international uproar they provoked. I suggested that we set aside the issue of Afromexicans, who didn't appear to factor at all into his thoughts.

Today Bejata sent me an e-mail on the Afromexico Films Website.

It says:

From: Rafael Rebollar Corona
Sent: Mon, 16 May 2005 19:36:08 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [free4filmmakerz] AFROMEXICO FILMS WEB SITE

We are pleased to announce the publication of our brand new web page

www.afromexico.org

This site's intention is to become an informative tool based on discussion about the different aspects that characterize the African heritage in Mexico.

The core of this project consists in the realization of a series of video documentaries that explore different aspects of the african-mexican people. So far the first two documentaries of the series have been finished and published which are, LA RAIZ OLVIDADA ( The Forgotten Root) and DE FLORIDA A COAHUILA (From Florida to Coahuila).

Presently we are working on our third documentary CORRERIAS EN EL MONTE (Incursions into the Mountains) and we are seeking financial support in order to finish the work in progress. We are raising these funds in the form of co-production, sale of rights of distribution and support from organizations with the objective of promoting projects of cultural character. Another way to support us is by buying our documentaries which are available in a subtitled version in English from our distributor in the US, Latin American Video Archives.

In Mexico the role of Africans in the development of the nation is not oficially recognized, and one of the main goals of our project is to fight for that recognition. We hope that you have a chance to take a look at our site, and if you can provide us with feedback thatwill be most helpful for us. Please feel free to forward this mail to anyone you consider might be interested in our project. This would allow us to meet our goals in a timely manner, goals which help, to some extent, to the development of a culture of tolerance and the vision of diversity as the main asset of humankind.

The site looks fascinating (it has photos like the one above of Orlando [El Quizás, Guerrero], great links, and English-language pages as well), as do the films.

For those interested in Afromexican culture, another site to explore is Stanford graduate student Bobby Vaughn's Black Mexico Home Page, which focuses on Afromexicans in the southern (Pacific Coast) Costa Chica area of Guerrero and Oaxaca states. It's very informative and thorough.

Modernism & the Classical Music Audience

This past week a colleague, who's primarily a literary scholar, and I were discussing the persistant aesthetic conservativism we encounter in many quarters around these parts (though usually not among students, who despite their training tend to devour things they haven't seen before, whether it's the fiction of Samuel Delany or the poetry of Sianne Ngai). We both expressed frustration with the recalcitrance towards change or openness that we've butted against, and have concurred that in addition, other factors such as racism and ethnocentrism (the inexcusable failure, in 2005, to select any non-white authors for a contemporary novel-writing course, for example), homophobia, class issues (only works about the middle and upper classes are chosen, etc.), are still too operative. In fact, some of the people we were discussing wanted to act as though entire whole traditions of Anglo-American writing, from Sterne through the post-Language school of authors, had never existed. Even modernism as a practice informing the present is a problem for them, though specific works by the canonical Modernists (Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Moore, Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway, etc.), especially the males, interestingly enough, are less so.

In thinking about our discussion, I recalled composer and critic Greg Sandow's very thoughtful and thought-provoking March entry on Arts Journal, titled "Modernism (Sigh)," which looked at the strong resistance among the mainstream American "classical music world" to what he calls "modernism" in Euro-American classical (or art) music. His specific point of reference was the ongoing negative response, among some American critics, audiences and many orchestras, to the 12-tone or dodecaphonic, and subsequent serial methods of composition of the Second (or New) Viennese School, comprising the composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951; pictured at right, in a self-portrait from 1911) and his pupils Alban Berg (1885-1935) and Anton von Webern (1883-1945), which made its first appearance in the post-World War I period. (Schoenberg had previously broken major ground first with densely harmonic pieces that pressed the tonal system to the breaking point, and followed these with a series of expressionistic, increasingly revolutionary works between 1905 and the outbreak of the war). I emphasize American, because a number of European orchestras do play these composers' and their successors' works; conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, whom I've previously written about, founded the Ensemble Contemporain in part to perform and record such music.

Though I'm not a musicologist, I believe you could also quite easily make the argument that, in addition to 12-tone composition, a number of other innovative developments, such as those pioneered prior to the Second Viennese school by Liszt, Wagner, Dvorak, Mahler and Scriabin, and contemporaneously with 12-note composition by Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky, Ives, Satie, Varèse, Weill, Schulhoff, Villa-Lobos, as well as others within this Euro-American classical matrix, and certainly outside it, in musics traditions and genres that informed some of these innovations, such as ragtime, jazz, blues, and a range of other Western and non-Western musics and forms, and so on, also constitute versions or expressions of what we could label "modernism" or even "Modernism." Some of these "modernisms," particularly the ones falling into variations on traditional tonality, have entered the canon, but others linger on the periphery. None of them excites the passionate rage, though, among critics and, supposedly among the mainstream of concertgoers, of the Schoenberg school and its defenders.

What provoked Sandow's piece in particular--and he has written quite sympathetically, I think, on Schoenberg's music--was a San Francisco Chronicle commentary, "Modernist Music Masters Flail Their Batons at Evil Music Critics," by Josh Kosman, on a New York Times interview, titled "Schoenberg, Bach and Us," that reporter Daniel Wakin conducted with the acclaimed Metropolitan Opera and Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor James Levine, and two leading and highly lauded composers, John Harbison, and Charles Wuorinen. Wakin wanted the trio to chat about the state of contemporary music and their respective musical visions on the eve of a Levine/BSO performance at Carnegie Hall of new works by each composer. The interviewer framed the state of contemporary Euro-American classical music as still being riven by a division between tonal composers and serialists, which was certainly reductive (since such an ahistorical reading leaves out whole swathes of composers and reinscribes a dichotomy that was challenged decades ago) but if provocation was the aim, it did its job.

Levine, one of the major contemporary enthusiasts of the Second Viennese School and its offshoots, and Wuorinen, an avowed and uncompromising serialist, defended their purview in a dismissive, obscurantist fashion, in part blaming the audience for the failure of certain kinds of serialist and avant-garde composers and works to enter the standard repertoire, while also framing the composer-audience relation as quasi-sacerdotal. On the other hand, MIT professor Harbison, in my opinion, sort of muddled along. Though cast as a tonalist, he has used dissonant harmonies (cf. his opera The Great Gatsby, which I saw at the Met) and occasional serialism as well, so he could have emphasized the crossing of these two contrasting strands, which in any case first appear already in Berg's music from the 1920s (cf. his operas Wozzeck and Lulu).

Sandow, following Kosman's lead, compared popular acceptance and assimilation of modernist and even post-modernist developments in other artistic genres--and he cited the Abstract Expressionist painters--such as visual art, literature, dance, drama, film, and architecture to the classical musical audience's resistance to the work of Wuorinen and others championed by Levine, like innovative American composer Elliott Carter (who nears his 100th birthday). His reasons were:

• "First...music takes more commitment than visual arts." That is, you don't have to sit for hours in front of a Pollock painting, you can just zip into a gallery and race through it. But what kind of "commitment" does he mean? Temporal? Sensory? Cognitive? Adrian Piper says in one of her essays that she likes to stare for a long time at a visual work of art, as an experience in and of itself, as well as a means to understanding and interpreting it. And Piper, in a somewhat Deweyan turn, is right--to experience Pollock truly, you do have to do more than glance and run. Sandow's argument also doesn't take into account that nowadays you can now listen to snippets of Schoenberg's or anyone else's music in digital form, and "ignore the rest." In fact, because of the resistance of orchestras to playing a lot of this music, you now have few options for hearing much of it except in album or CD or purely digital form.
• "Second, music depends on performance." This is an excellent point, though even in Schoenberg's day, performances and options for hearing his and his adepts works were just as scant and at times so awful that listeners had no chance of hearing what he had actually written. (When they did, they sometimes rioted.) It helped Mahler that he conducted some of own music and had excellent interpreters; Webern also was a talented conductor of his fellow composers. In any case, poor or shoddy performances or highly idiosyncratic ones may throw a listener off. Sandow states that the audience may pick up on "something tentative" in such manglings of some of the more difficult works (though one could also quip "How would they know the difference"?), especially if the orchestra is still in its learning stages. He thinks that an orchestra probably wouldn't do so with the works of Beethoven or Shostakovich, though the truth is that an incompetent orchestra can butcher anything, and this is 2005, not 1955. Orchestras, and musicians themselves, have had half a century to encounter such works--"modern" in such parlance refers to rather old artifacts now, and "new" and "contemporary" classical or art music is in some cases quite different. Do audiences regularly hear the major orchestras performing even the newest, highly tonal work that's out? Not on your life. When Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie first began pioneering in bebop, or Thelonious Monk began his pianistic experiments, or even later with John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler, such music struck many as difficult and strange, though now performers have a much better handle on what these geniuses were up to and can replicated it if they want to (though Wynton Marsalis doesn't touch the latter). A top pianist should be able to perform Schoenberg's Piano Concerto without a hitch, I would think; certainly there are very difficult scores, but 56 years after Schoenberg's death, is this score still that forbidding? I have heard it performed on CD by Brendel and Uchida, and both sparkled. Are they rarities and exceptions? Aren't there standard works that require more technical expertise? Can't musicians manage those? If so, I assume the same I would think would be true of Schoenberg and other experimentalists, though I am not that exactly cognization of how formal undergraduate and graduate musical performance education works, so I could be quite wrong.
• "Third, music may be more encompassing -- and more emotional -- than visual art." Maybe this is true, and since I'm not a cognitive scientist, I admit my limits, but "encompassing" of what? One's spatiotemporal, cognitively ontological experience of the work? Empirically is this true? What about films or television, the latter of which at times generates brain wave functions that approach a trance-like or alternatively comatose state--isn't that about as encompassing as you can get? Aren't some classical compositions now frequently deployed as background music, achieving what Satie aspired to, musical "furniture"? Think about all the times you've heard not rock or pop or hiphop piped in a store, but Handel or Vivaldi. There must be emotional and affective responses, but are we "encompassed" any more than when a large painting hangs near or a TV movie is playing beside us as we're doing something else? On top of which, aren't some convenience stores actually playing the likes of Mozart to drive away loiterers? If Mozart is so, well, pleasant, how is this possible, except as a demonstration of the fallacy of universal appeal of certain types of music, and the issue of socialization. The thuglets and loiterers aren't reared hearing Mozart, Haydn, etc., but other kinds of music, and hearing this "beautiful" stuff blaring, in essence auditory bug spray, drives them away. Sandow underlines his point when he says it "hurts us more to listen" to certain works than to look at unfamiliar and potentially unpleasant paintings, but I'm not so sure--and in terms of cinema, well--people can really be unnerved, since film combines a number of other artistic genres, including music, into a continuously unfolding whole. The disorientation caused by a work like Repulsion or Eraserhead or Ichi the Killer, or the nausea-inducing dissonant music, swirling camera action, and blurred optics of the gay-bashing scene in Irreversible, like that film's horrifying 1o-minute brutal rape scene, outdo almost all unpleasant music I've heard, except perhaps some works of Milton Babbitt. But Mozart alone was enough for those kids. so....
  
• "Fourth, the classical music audience may be notably conservative." I believe this is true, or perhaps it is true that the classical musical establishment, like most establishments, is conservative, and has more sway over a large number of its adherents. Sandow adds that they might be "preselected," and that "they tend to be people who aren't very interested in new directions in art," though I again am not so sure about this. Isn't this then an issue of socialization? If you're taught--with constant reinforcement--to enjoy certain kinds of art without experiencing other kinds, particularly in such a controlled environment as the classical musical world has become, aren't you more likely then to gravitate towards what is championed? With the destruction of public musical education, many people have fewer options for learning to read music or appreciate it, and no sense of the history of Euro-American music, let alone other American musical forms, except as they're popularly received and marketed. On top of this, the constant bashing of Schoenberg and the refusal by many orchestras even to regularly program numerous composers (take your pick), including a long list of 20th century tonalists, also must play a role. (Reggie H. tells me that the TV show The West Wing recently got in its licks, though inexplicably against one of his earliest, beautiful, tonal compositions, the Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), which is one of the few of his works in the repertoire.) Do these conservative audiences freak out when they hear William Grant Still? Roy Harris? Marc Blitzstein? Amy Beach? Walter Piston? Alan Hovhannes? Ralph Shapey? In fact, a number of these orchestras appear stuck in a pre-1900 mode, which is bizarre and one of the reasons many are in trouble. No other artforms have stopped a century ago, particularly in the United States (think again of the numerous developments in American film, dance, literature, architecture, etc.) and, in fact, neither has what we now label classical music, though you'd never know it if you studied subscription series.
  

Kosman and Sandow both posit that there may be cognitive auditory aspects to why this music hasn't "caught on," and perhaps they're correct. 12-note music challenges the auditory system's expectations--it is, in a sense, artificial or unnatural. But some of it parallels tonal music quite well, and then there is the case of works that mix the two and other kinds of tonal systems, or in which the tonal performance approximates 12-note composition, as in Berg's early and stunning String Quartet. But let's also keep in mind that in some cases jazz, rock, ambient and other genres of music have assimilated some elements of polytonal, polychromatic, and even expressionistic pantonal music successfully, drawing new listeners, so ideally, it should be possible for the classical music crowd also to adapt, unless it is that case that many simply don't want to go beyond the boundaries of what the establishment and they view as "classical."

Kosman and Sandow also both point to Schoenberg's infamous argument that his discoveries (which, incidently, Joseph Matthias Hauer also settled on around the same time) represented the "future" of music. Actually, Schoenberg, who had an ego bigger than the Matterhorn, claimed that his 12-note method would secure the supremacy of German music for centuries! I think it's important to situate the man in his tumultuous time, a period of tremendous change, two world-shattering wars, and one of the worst regimes in the entire annals of humankind. We should also consider that he had Wagner as a fairly immediate model and Schopenhauer in part on the brain, and, though he did not hesitate to leave Berlin at the first sign of overt racism and anti-Semitism from Hitler's government, had earlier want to secure his place in a system that essentially--this word is key--wanted to erase him and others like him from its ranks. The strangeness and disorientation of his music always conveys this to me, which may be in part why I like so much of it--there is always something dreadful churning up behind it, even at its most beautiful, and in some cases this is the subject of the works itself, as in the Erwartung. Furthermore, American orchestras play Wagner without hesitation despite his grossly anti-Semitic statements; they don't hesitate to program Strauss, who toadied up to Hitler as well, nor Orff, who remained in Germany too; few people take these composers' actions or words as the ultimate measure of them (though until recently Wagner's music wasn't performed in Israel), so why should Schoenberg's far less disturbing commentary not be historicized and contextualized as well?

The hubris of his American successors is another issue, which needs to be decoupled from his work. Their careerism, their attempts to create music that was more systematic than aesthetically pleasing, their pronouncements about their and their adherents' importance, and the network they created, deserve criticism, but this group should also be historicized and contextualized as well. They weren't operating in a political or social vacuum either. But it seems that many in the classical music world are unwilling to forgive some of these people just yet, and automatically start the blame game at Schoenberg's door. Yet it's not just the serialists, as I said above. There are as many mainstream tonal composers, some of whom I listed above, as serialists, who are not performed, so the argument about conservatism goes beyond aesthetics and cognition to something deeper and broader, which I believe is a fear about breaking outside the narrowly established boundaries of what the establishment deems important. In one of the most diverse nations on earth, with a diverse musical culture, this repertoire is excessively German and Austrian, and heavily slanted upon the early 20th century-heading-backwards. There are other composers--and I've mentioned some like Still or Nathaniel Dett or Rufus Hailstork, who are rarely performed, in part I think because they're black, and thus get overlooked or also don't meet the expectations of "black" music. And what about the paucity of performances of works by women? Or what about the other American traditions--I'm thinking of George Antheil, or Cage, Feldman, Wolff, etc., or the minimalists and post-minimalists and microtonalists, and on and on, who are performed far less than Haydn or Mendelssohn, or younger composers like Michael Torke and Thomas Adès, who is highly praised in his native Britain. What about Tan Dun, Tania Leon, Paquito D'Rivera? Philip Glass's work is both demanding and popular, yet concert halls aren't playing his appealing Violin Concerto or his best symphonies every season. I think it's fear, and it is probably going to spell the end of the classical system as we have known it, which might not be a bad thing.

Sandow does declare that perhaps some artists will only draw a coterie. This has always been the case. People who don't really know that much about art are drawn immediately to Norman Rockwell, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Andy Warhol, who about as different as artists can be. Yet the fan bases of Elie Nadelman or Jane Freilicher or Bob Thompson, I would imagine, are much smaller. Look at Christo and Jeanne-Claude: they draw millions, while other artists, for a variety of reasons, simply don't gain a lot of adherents at all. There is nothing wrong with this, and such things change too. Artists who drew condemnation, scorn, and few spectators in past years are now celebrated. It may never happen for the Schoenberg crowd, but then again, who knows? I would imagine that his Erwartung, despite its specific subject matter, mirrors quite well the topsy-turvy emotions many people feel, both here and overseas, at some of what is going on all around them. All those shrieks and yelps, shifting notes, and the unhinged quality of the drama--it's a hell of a lot more appropriate than Mozart's Jupiter Symphony.

Finally, I should add that once I went to a concert at Carnegie Hall with Byron M., a friend, composer and musician, to see a performance of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, an extremely lush, late-Romantic work whose style the composer had already abandoned by the time it finally premiered in Vienna. Outside the concert hall, a guy was selling tickets--basically scalping them--for Schoenberg! I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, but I did. The hall was packed, as at every performance of Schoenberg's music I've ever attended, including the Met's revival of Moses und Aron, his tough, astonishing, unfinished opera. Obviously there is an audience for this music that so exercises the likes of the New York Times' critics, and many concert subscribers. If the orchestras knew what was better for them, they'd be trying to reach more of the possible audiences out there instead of catering to an increasingly aging, and diminishing one.

An addendum: In the New Statesman, Joseph Horowitz has written an interesting though cursory article, "A Culture of Performance," on the history of American classical music. He lays its demise at the doorstep of marketing culture, writing,

"These culture consumers were sold a bill of goods - that all great music was old and European - by the "music appreciation" movement, a commercial enterprise whose chief exponents included David Sarnoff of the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). Notwithstanding the efforts of America's composers, of whom the most voluble was Aaron Copland, an avalanche of music appreciation bibles, recordings and broadcasts sidelined the quest for an indigenous musical voice earlier pursued by Ives, George Whitefield Chadwick (yet to be acknowledged as America's first symphonic nationalist) and (even earlier) Louis Moreau Gottschalk, with his saucy Caribbean delicacies."

I'm not sure I buy all of this, but it is interesting. ("Caribbean delicacies"?) As far as an "indigenous musical voice," it's quite clear what that was...and is. Both Dvorak and Delius clearly saw its source: African America.

Fox Update + Poem: Hemphill + Cioran Quote

I can't claim any credit, but Yahoo! news is reporting that a "redfaced" Mexican President Vicente Fox is backing off his racist comments about Black people. It appears he did so after being labeled "racist" by Mexico's daily El Milenio in a headline; in an editorial, the newspaper condemned his comments as ""shameful, undignified, unacceptable," and columnist Yuriria Sierra added: "Can someone remind him of the race to which Kofi Annan, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice belong?" (I won't go there.) Rev. Jesse Jackson, lately of the St. Schiavo shenanigans, beat everyone in Congress to the punch, noting Fox's comments' "ominous racial overtones." The White House's response--well, who knows. I haven't heard anything. But the US government, via the State Department, did officially note that this "level of dialogue doesn't merit comment. President Bush's commitment to immigration reform that is rational, legal, common sense, decent and compassionate is well documented." But I'd have to disagree with the State Department's appraisal (where was the dialogue? the Emperor's immigration commitment has been "compassionate"???). Fox now finds himself with less credibility in Mexico and the US, and less ability to influence the problematic immigration policies that are soon to be federal statutes.

* * * * *

I frequently link to the mainstream media, but I just as frequently criticize them for their timid, shoddy, poorly-informed, unprofessional approach to the profession of journalism. The last five years alone have demonstrated repeatedly the impact of even an inept, misguided and gullible press; from the steady drumbeat of misinformation and outright lies about the reasons for the War in Iraq, to the timorous accounting of the Emperor's and his administration's series of dissimulations and disinformation campaigns, to the execrable coverage of the most recent presidential election, the mainstream media have gone out of their way to show how lost and disoriented they are, and yet still manage to influence the public discourse and even more dangerously, real events, to a significant degree. Most recent example: Now we learn that numerous people may have died because Newsweek published a "brief item," by reporters Michael Isikoff (one of the key cogs in publicizing what became the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal) and John Barry, that may have erroneously claimed that US officials at the notorious Guantánamo Bay Prison tore pages out of the Muslim's most sacred text, the Holy Qu'ran, and flushed them down the toilet.

News of this alleged outrage sparked violent protests first in Afghanistan, causing 16 deaths and more than 100 injuries. The protests have since spread to Pakistan (in both countries it is a capital crime to desecrate the Qu'ran), Indonesia and the Gaza portion of Palestine, and provoked condemnation from a host of nations, beginning with Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam's holiest cities. It turns out that the off-the-record government source was unable, when pressed, to back up the claim that he had seen the charge in an official report, though Newsweek noted that former detainees have made similar allegations. Based on the existing detailed accounts of abuse, torture and manipulative techniques supposedly used there and at other military prisons since the "War on Terror" began, this would not seem excessively farfetched. Still, shouldn't someone have pinned down a factual, textual source for such an explosive charge? Wouldn't multiple verifications be in order? Or are our media still that gung-ho on relying upon tainted or inaccurate sources (cf. Curveball, etc.) and just that tin-eared when it comes to other cultures' values, expectations and assumptions. (Well, yes, but....)

Newsweek has now apologized, but according an account I saw somewhere, the periodical will be firing no one over this. I guess in addition to following the employment practices of this administration (not punishing those whose lies or ineptitude lead to others' deaths) they've got to keep Isikoff on board in case a Democrat reoccupies the White House in 2008.

* * * * *

Many thanks to Caesar N., President of NYPLC, for forwarding this Essex Hemphill poem to the group list. After seeing it again for the first time in a while, and after thinking about some recent experiences and converations I've had, I think it's extremely apropos.

FOR MY OWN PROTECTION

by Essex Hemphill

I want to start
an organization
to save my life.
If Whales, snails,
dogs, cats,
Chrysler, and Nixon
can be saved,
the lives of Black men
are priceless
and can be saved.
We should be able
to save each other.
I don't want to wait
for the Heritage Foundation
to release a study
stating Black men
are almost extinct.
i don't want to be
the living dead
pacified with drugs
and sex.

If a human chain
can be formed
around missile sites,
then surley Black men
can form human chains
around Anacostia, Harlem,
South Africa, Wall Street,
Hollywood, each other.

If we have to take tomorrow
with our blood are we ready?
Do our S curls,
dreadlocks, and Phillies
make us any more ready
than a bush or conkaline?
I'm not concerned
about the attire of a soldier.
All I want to know
for my own protection
is are we capable
of whatever,
whenever?

Copyright © Essex Hemphill.

* * * * *

And on a not so blue, but final note, the saturnine Cioran:

"Klee liked to quote: 'the art of drawing is the art of omission' (Liebermann). Which is how one might define the art of the aphorism.
For me, to write is to omit. That is the secret of laconicism, and of the essay as a genre."
--E. M. Cioran, from Cahiers

Fox: "Jobs not even blacks want do" + 299 Missing Black British Boys

So it's like this. The president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, who was supposed to represent a new era in his country's politics but who's turned out to be a dud, decides to appeal to a group of US business people in Mexico City to resurrect a guest worker/amnesty program for the millions of nationals from his country who are resident in the US without documentation or legal approval. We know he made some kind of deal with the Emperor W, not only because the mainstream media have reported it, but also because big business interests in the US benefit tremendously from cheap immigrant labor, W's closest friends, along with the Fringe Right, are the Corporatists, and W wants more Latino votes (and got more in the past election).

But the Emperor W has had to dance around that earlier agreement because of the 9/11 suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which pointed to, among other things, the bankruptcy of the immigration system. And the Emperor W has also backed off his earlier pro-amnesty stance because the right-wing elements of his party have decided they don't want the 10-12 million undocumented or illegal non-English-speaking arrivants, a good many of them mestizo and Indian people, a good many but not all of them from Mexico, being afforded the same kinds of amnesty opportunities that many of their own ancestors received. (If they were from Germany or Ireland or, let's say, Latvia, I doubt there'd as much opposition.) Because not all of the right-wingers can trace their ancestry to Charlemagne, like the Emperor W.

But anyways, Fox is meeting with these business leaders from Texas. Maybe they're Mexican-American or Latino, though I'd guess they're white folks. Maybe they're white-identified Latinos. I don't know. But I seriously doubt there are any Black folks, Black Americans, Black Mexicans, Black Latinos, self-identified Black anybody in the room, because as part of his plea, he stated that Mexican immigrants "do jobs that not even blacks want to do," so that's why the US has to resuscitate the guest-worker/amnesty program, and why W shouldn't sign into law the recently approved tougher new driver's license provisions or the extension of the "security" fence dividing the two countries. (Is it a fence, haven't the right-wingers also been talking about Pat Buchanan's proposed wall? And what about those armed Minutemen?) Unfortunately, Vicente Fox, your "friend and partner" W is planning to sign these riders to another bill into law, without blinking an eye. But back to Fox: Now, let's set aside for a minute that Mexico has its own Black people (thousands of them)--a marginalized population by many measures--some of whom are among the undocumented workers in the US. Let's also set aside the fact that the second largest group of self-identified Black Latinos in the US, according to the 2000 US Census, come from or have ancestry from Mexico.

Did Fox really need to make this statement? Whom was this supposed to convince or impress? The American business leaders? The Mexican press? The US press? The foreign press? The Mexican people? Mexican undocumented immigrants? Mexican legal immigrants? Mexican-Americans and other latinos? Americans? Blacks? See, he wanted to invoke a standard he was sure those business people would understand--we "blacks," the descendents of slaves, the "mudsills," no longer the largest "minority," are, in Fox's (and American society's) eyes, the absolutely lowest benchmark or standard. And if "blacks" don't want and won't take the jobs, then you know the jobs must be bad, but hey, you've got his fellow Mexican citizens who are willing to do them. And so America had better find a way to let them stay, because who else then will take them if the Mexicans are barred from working or sent back? Can't expect "blacks" to. Nor, one assumes, the thousands (millions?) of "other latinos/hispanics," "asians," "arabs," "native peoples," "others," and above all, not the "white" people! Lord knows, not them! Not only was Fox's statement offensive, to Black people (we're people, Vicente Fox, not just some nebulous figments of your rhetorical argument, we're in your country too) and Mexicans, but it was also just plumb ignorant.

First of all, many "blacks"--by which I assume he means African Americans, but let's take the the increasing number of Black people from north Africa and sub-Saharan African, from the various Caribbean nations, from Central and South America, from Europe, etc. as our example--do take extremely low-wage, exploitative jobs. They do work in tobacco fields, in orange groves, on farms, they do work in underpaying factories, they do serve as cooks and maids, and so on. There are more Mexican documented and undocumented immigrants now filling these roles across the country, but there are more immigrants from Mexico than any other group. Since NAFTA and Mexican governmental incompetence devastated whole sectors of the Mexican economy, and since Fox has been ineffectual in creating opportunities for vast numbers of his country of 100 million people, and since the border between the United States and Mexico is as porous as pumice (despite fence and border agents and militia men), and since despite the best (or worst) efforts of the Emperor, the US economy has not fallen apart, it stands to reason that this would be the destination for Mexicans seeking work opportunities, just as it's the destination for millions from other countries as well. But the truth of the matter is that many of the "blacks" who are not considered or do not consider themselves African American actually do take these jobs, and there are probably more who would if they could actually get here and not be deported.

As for African Americans, whom I believe Fox was referring to, many of us also take these jobs. Still. The last time I looked, there were poor African-American people working in all kinds of extremely low-wage, un-unionized jobs across the country, including taking care of white people, which has been the case since the 1600s. In the Chicago area. In northern New Jersey and New York. In the upper South. And so on. The Gaullist Bill Clinton decided he would "end welfare as we know it," and so that remains nothing more than a chimera for the right-wing to conjure up--these days, folks got to work or find some way to get by, after a certain period of time. As I said above, there are more Mexican undocumented immigrants in many of these positions, but they're not the only ones. So Fox's comments were not only insulting to African Americans, all the other "blacks" in this country, and his own fellow Mexican immigrants, they are just ignorant. But ignorance passing the lips of international leaders, especially about Black people, should hardly be surprising. Fox's very good friend, the Emperor W, once asked the President of Brazil, a country that has the largest Black and African-descended population outside of Africa, whether it "had blacks too?"

Now I wonder, since Fox obviously didn't think he said anything offensive ("jobs not even blacks want to do"), will he apologize? Will anyone in the Mexican media, which traditionally has demonstrated very little interest in the Black population or history of that country (despite the fact that one of its early presidents, Guerrero, was Black, that it had a sizable slave population in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and that one of its greatest heroes, Emiliano Zapata, also had African ancestry), press Fox on this? More importantly, what will the response from the Emperor W or his minions be? Will Condoleezza Rice (one of the "blacks"), the play-acting Secretary of State, request an apology from her Mexican counterpart? Will they remain silent and hope it blows over? Will it take a Black member of Congress (one of the "blacks") to call attention to Fox's ignorance? Will someone on the right (maybe even one of "the blacks") use this as part of their campaign to derail even sensible guest-worker/amnesty provisions? Since the mainstream US media has reported, will they now let it pass into silence, since it insults two groups they really couldn't give a damn about, the "blacks" and Mexicans?

*****

Finally, on another note, I came across this extremely disturbing story, on Raw Story, in the London Evening Standard (via This is London): "Fears of Trade in Children as 300 Disappear." According to the article:

Scotland Yard today revealed it has been unable to trace all but two of 300 black boys aged four to seven reported missing from school in a three-month period.

Child welfare experts say the number highlights the scale of the trade in children brought to Britain as domestic servants and covers for benefit fraud.

The figure emerged through the murder inquiry following the discovery of a child's torso in the Thames in September 2001. The identity of the victim, named "Adam" by police, is not known but his background was traced to Nigeria, it is believed he died in a ritual sacrifice.

Say what? What is going on over there??? 299 Black boys go missing over a three-month period, and they can't be found? The "trade in children brought to Britain as domestic servants"? Huh? Didn't I just post something two days ago about "unforced labor" and servitude? Is there a public inquiry, let alone public outcry, over this?

Let me just say, there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. Maybe these black boys--is it really only boys, and why?--belong to undocumented families that are trying to elude the immigration authorities, and so they've moved to other parts of Britain, or other countries in the EU, or gone back home, or something reasonable and not horrifying. I hope it's something reasonable, some explanation other than the gruesome one that appears in the article. I also plan to check some British Websites, and especially Black British Websites about this. And poet Christina Springer is over there with her family now; I know she's encountered hostility from the NHS when she was trying to get treatment for her infant son. (She's also encountered coldness from some Black Britons.) Maybe she's heard something it appears the mainstream media in the US haven't (yet?) picked up on.

Sorokin's Blue Lard

Imagine a novel in which a clone of FDR roughly tops a clone of John F. Kennedy. Or maybe a Teddy Roosevelt clone has his way with the well-tanned, horsebroken backside of a Ronald Raygun double.* (Okay, maybe not!) Each scenario could, however, serve as an analogy of one of the most notorious scenes in Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin's (pictured at right, AFP) Goluboe Salo** (Blue Lard or Blue Bacon Fat or Gay Lard, etc.), an obscene satirical novel that provoked a public protest by Moving (or Walking) Together, a pro-Putin youth cult.

These young patriots, reacting in particular to a scene in which a clone of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin sodomizes a clone of post-war Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev, labeled the novel "pornography," and destroyed copies of it in front of the Bolshoi Theater, which they were striking against because it was planning to use one of Sorokin's librettos. The Moving Togetherites promptly filed a complaint with the Office of the Public Prosecutor. Officials then began legal proceedings based on Article 242 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code, criminalizing pornography, which in turn led to a police investigation of Sorokin.

Unlike during the Soviet era, however, the majority of the public did not side immediately with the authorities. In fact, Sorokin's supporters argued on behalf of his freedom of speech, a new and tenuous right in democratic (or should I type "democratic"?) Russia, and snapped up the Blue Lard, making it a bestseller. (A 2002 article by Ilya Milstein in Novoye Vremya implied a more cynical reason for the support; Sorokin's commercial success outside Russia led his fellow writers to defend him.) The brouhaha in any case embarrassed the Kremlin, which eventually cleared Sorokin, who was facing a two-year prison sentence. He has continued to publish works full of obscenities and scatology, and wrote the libretto for composer Leonid Desyantnikov's "Rosenthal's Children," which deals with, what else, clones, this time of famous European classical composers, sex, and degeneracy. Moving Together (pictured below, Dennis Sinyakov/AFP), has duly protested for several years now outside the Bolshoi, where the opera premiered this past March to packed crowds. (Naturally, a member of Russia's parliament, based on a TV report (!), initiated an investigation of this newest work by the author of "dirty poetry"; he claimed the popular opera's "sexual intimacy...[made] it not good for [the Russian] public." A ban is pending.)

At least one of Sorokin's books, The Queue, has been translated, though it's out of print. That book is reputedly more conventional and less "post-modern" in many ways than Blue Lard, and lacks the outright catalogue of perversions that so exorcised the critics of the later book. One Amazon reader compares The Queue favorably to Sorokin's later work, with its "excessive exploitation of sex/drug/alcohol abuse scenes." Which of course makes it sound appropriate to contemporary post-Soviet Russia--and the USA, especially the Bizarro-America we move about in every day. (This thought took me back to the final section of Peter Ho Davies's talk, with its emphasis on fantastic work that would be appropriate for the current political and social climate.) And it really makes me want to read it.

Because, truth be told, I've never read the novel, but I am dying to. But I cannot read Russian. I cannot speak Russian either, except that I know about 10 phrases, some of which proved functional enough to startle my former Russian students at NYU. When I was in college my friend Paull H. actually taught me those Russian phrases; I'd taught myself the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet years before. (Digression: Russian actually has a consonant that fascinates me to no end, "shch," which always evokes the image of a coal-powered train pulling out of an icy station.) Paull was studying Russian in the last years of the Cold War, not long before the Soviet Union began its process of disintegration, and student interest in learning the language of the U.S.'s greatest Enemy, as it was then constructed, was still high. Condoleezza Rice, now play-acting as Secretary of State, apparently had the same jones only a decade earlier. But I neither had the time nor interest then in mastering Russian, which is highly inflected, a fact that makes its literature, especially the poetry, difficult to translate into English. That several famous Russians, Nabokov and Brodsky, actually moved from writing fluently in Russian to writing fluently (or at least more so than most native speakers) in English has always been testimony, in my opinion, to their genius. But I had no genius for Russian. So I've always had to rely on translations.

And no English translation of Blue Lard (pictured at right) exists. Yet. I know this because not far from the university, where one of the best independent bookstores in Evanston once stood, a Russian-Slavic bookseller now holds court. I've popped in his joint several times to ask about translations of Blue Lard, but each time, he or another knowledgeable member of the staff tells me that no, the book has not been translated into English. In fact, they don't have the book in stock. Nor does the university's library. And even if either the bookshop or the library did have Blue Lard, I unfortunately know no one who translates Russian. (I don't think I know even one of the Slavicists at the university, nor can I recall ever having attended or been invited to any event hosted by that department.)

So this is a call: does anyone out there know if anyone is translating Blue Lard? It sounds like the kind of book Grove Press would have published years ago, before they became respectable. But it also sounds like it might be bursting with too much transgressiveness to be taken up either by many of the larger, conglomerated US presses, most of the university presses, or many of the distinguished smaller, independent ones. I think it would probably sell well, given the tensions that now exist between Putin's backsliding Russia and our own US, the Christian-Republican Empire of W Bush. Oh, and then there's the graphic sex/drug abuse, etc. Michel Houellebecq's extremely graphic, philosophically grim gems are now on American bookshelves, but their outlook is quasi-right wing, quasi-libertarian, and intermittently racist, so maybe they aren't the best model. Perhaps a small and daring press like Akashic or Soft Skull will publish it. But first they'd have to find a (good) translator. As many Russian-English speakers are there are in the US, there's got to be one. And when s/he translates Blue Lard, this reader will definitely check it out.
--
*There is J. G. Ballard's (in)famous short story, "I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," which appears in his non-sequential limit-text, The Atrocity Exhibition. When he learned of the pending publication of the collection (which also was later circulated at Republican convention), publisher Nelson Doubleday supposedly grew so upset that he pulped the entire press run. Grove later published it, and Re/Search has reissued it in a terrific illustrated format, with commentary by Ballard, a sort of textual DVD.
**Also transliterated as Goluboye or Goloboye Salo.

Forced Labor Conf + Neptune Dying + Black Studies Conf Online

Freedom, freedom, freedom. How many times did the person passing as president use this word in his 2005 State of Dis Union speech? It turns out that millions of people across the globe are far from free. I don't just mean economically, politically and socially disadvantaged or marginalized, but actually enslaved or forced into labor without relief or compensation. During the latter years of the Clinton presidency, the plight of contemporarily-enslaved black Africans did briefly pierce the mainstream media bubble. Several nations in particular, Mauritania and Sudan, which is now hovering in and out of international attention because the genocide in its Darfur region, often received harsh criticism for abetting or overlooking the forced enslavement of people in the respective countries. In fact, Mauritania has engaged in diplomatic and military skirmishes with Senegal, its neighbor to the south, over abductions of Senegalese and other black Africans for enslavement and forced labor purposes.

Yet the problem of enslavement and forced labor goes far beyond Mauritania and Sudan. Numerous reports over the years have pointed to forced labor in China, Myanmar, Haiti, and many other nations. According to the International Labor Organization's 2005 report, 9,490,000 people--or around the the population of New Jersey--are believed to be in forced labor situations in Asia and the Pacific alone; over 12,000,000 people total across the globe are in various forms of bondage or forced labor.

This upcoming Saturday, the MIT Center for International Studies will host a "Symposium on Forced Labor in the Global Economy." This gathering marks a collaboration between the BBC World Service Trust and the Program on Human Rights and Justice at MIT's Center for International Studies, and BBC and WBUR, one of the local public radio stations, will tape several programs as part of the event.

The lineup of speakers includes some major activists and scholars, including Jean Robert Credet, a former child slave in Haiti who now teaches at the University of Cincinnati; Columbia University-based philosopher Jagdish Bhagwati; Terry Collingsworth of the International Labor Rights Fund; and Kevin Bales, director of Free the Slaves.

Anyone can attend to attend this special event, which will include the taping of WBUR's On Point program, which will air during the week of May 16, 2005 (between 7:00 and 9:00 p.m. in the Boston area), and a BBC World show, which will air the MIT debate on Saturday, May 21, 2005, and later offer the tape to public television stations in the U.S. (check local listings for airdates and times). Those in the Boston area who want to attend should RSVP to phrj@mit.edu or call 617.253.8306). The event will run from 9 am to 12 pm at 9:00 a.m. at MIT's Kresge Auditorium (Building W16). MIT World, the university's video-on-demand site, will also be broadcasting the programs.

*****

Speaking of Haiti, Yvon Neptune (pictured at right), the former Prime Minister under democratically elected-but-illegally deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is being illegally detained in a Haitian prison, and has been on a hunger strike since February 20, 2005. He was recently rushed to the hospital in critical condition, and some news sources state he is close to death. Neptune is alleged to have masterminded the slaughter of anti-Aristide supporters in the coastal city of St. Marc on February 11, 2004, just before President Aristide left the country, but Neptune has vigorously denied this charge. At the time of the incident pro-and-anti-Aristide forces were clashing frequently, so it is possible that Neptune did not have a direct hand in the deaths.

Still, though Neptune been in prison since June of last year, he has not been officially charged with any crime. Haiti's Constitution bars such summary imprisonments without charge. Neptune has said he will not eat unless he is cleared unconditionally and released; as he starves to death, Haiti's interim prime minister and ally to the current American administration, Gerard Latortue, who has presided over a steadily worsening public and political situation, dithers. The U.S., which may have aided the coup-plotters and insurrectionists, and which flew Aristide out of the country, has not pressed the interim government to act either way.

The Miami Herald's editorial page came out yesterday on behalf of releasing Neptune, before it's too late.

U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), who recently visited Neptune, issued the following statement: "The conditions that I observed in the prison where Prime Minister Neptune is being held were deplorable. Prime Minister Neptune was weak and could only speak in a whispering voice. He insisted that he had been jailed without justification and that he had committed no crime. He has not been allowed to go before a judge to challenge his confinement as required under the constitution of Haiti, and he believes he has been targeted to be killed."

If Neptune's plight matters at all to you, please contact your Congressional representatives, and urge them to act. As far as I know, the current Secretary of State has not discussed the turmoil in Haiti publicly since she took office.

*****
Recently I got the following e-mail, which I am reproducing verbatim (the language is Tobin Klinger's):

May 3, 2005
From: Tobin J. Klinger
419.530.4279
University of Toledo, Public Relations Office

Historic African-American Studies Conference Lives on in Cyberspace

In February 2003 a group of scholars converged on New York City's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for what would be an important three-day dialogue about the past, current and future of black studies around the globe.

While the participants and panelists were among the nation's leaders in the study of African-American culture, the gathering came and went. Until now, that is.

Thanks to a groundbreaking collaboration between eight universities, the entire event can now be accessed by anyone with a computer and the World Wide Web.

Each institution, including The University of Toledo, Central Michigan University, The College of New Jersey, Florida State University, Knox College, Northeastern University, Seton Hall University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has posted its share of the more than 60 hours of conference audio and video, which can be accessed through a single Web site: www.eblackstudies.org. The site is now live and will be available for use by scholars and the general public from any location in the world at 12 p.m., Wednesday, May 4.

The conference, "The State of Black Studies: Methodology, Pedagogy and Research," was co-sponsored by the Schomburg Center, the CUNY Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and Caribbean, and Princeton University.

"This has never been done before," said Dr. Abdul Alkalimat, director of Africana Studies at The University of Toledo. "The passion and cooperation that each of the participating institutions has displayed for keeping this conference and this discussion alive has been overwhelming."

Twenty-seven sessions in all, this is the largest undertaking of its kind, according to Alkalimat, who led the project. Previously, the UT professorled a similar project with the audio from a conference on civil rights leader Malcolm X in 1990.

'"This is much bigger," remarked Alkalimat. "Those visiting this site can virtually re-live the event. The subject matter here is as relevant today as it was in 2003. Through this collaborative effort, we are able to disseminate this knowledge that had previously only been available to conference participants."

"This kind of knowledge based on a virtual experience should be available to everyone," said Alkalimat. "Today's technology allows us to make that a reality and lets thebrowser participate in the discussion. This is a perfect example of a group of scholars using the Internet with that thought in mind."

For more information, contact Alkalimat at 419.530.7252 or abdul.alkalimat@utoledo.edu.
###

Peter Ho Davies & Fiction's Geneology

What is it with Chicago weather? Yesterday it was above 70F, as if summer had crept by spring and was ready to spread out along Sheridan for a while. Then last night and early this morning we had a spectacular twilight thunderstorm, which kept threatening to leap through the bedroom window, though it did cool things off, and by the time I stepped out of my office at 3 pm to grab a quick lunch, it was barely 40F, as if fall were stumbling back into winter's arms! It was so cold that my hands froze as I walked to downtown Evanston, eating my apple and trying to figure out, for the umpteenth thousand time how Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, or his predecessors, the native peoples, had lasted for more than a week during the winter and "spring" months on the shore of Lake Michigan. (When a certain excellent writer's book on the city's Black founder appears, I guess I'll find out.) I finally ducked into Barnes & Noble, which was nearby, and as usual did not find any of the books I was looking for (though I almost bought a second copy of Thomas Sayers Ellis's new collection The Maverick Room but said I'd let someone else happen upon it and leave with a book they wouldn't want to put down for a while), so I purchased a fiction collection I'll be teaching next fall and then headed next door for some tacos before returning to the university.

This afternoon at 4, I went to hear a lecture by Peter Ho Davies, one of the most acclaimed younger British novelists and a professor at the University of Michigan. He is serving as the distinguished visiting writer at the university's Center for the Writing Arts, and gave a strong reading several weeks ago. Today, Peter delivered a lively, brief talk on his idiosyncratic geneology of the short story. Though I admit to a wandering mind because of residual sleepiness (that thunderstorm last night and this morning), and not because of any longueurs or deficiencies in Peter's talk, here's my summary: he decided to teach a course at Michigan on the history of the short story because it interested him, naturally, as a fiction writer. He found little critical work on the short story (the English novel has received considerable treatment by Watt and others, and I have come across some articles in the media of late with other kinds of geneologies of the short story, but in general they're not so common). So he taught the course and the talk, like a precipitate, resulted.

This led to his major point, which was, paraphrasing Fyodor Dostoevsky, that contemporary short story writers (and not the Russian short fiction tradition) emerged from Nikolai Gogol's "Overcoat." In other words, that story, which appeared in the 1840s, has served as the foundation, in Davies' view, for the two major strands of contemporary short fiction, as it was both a realist and fantastic story written into one.

In the realist sense, it contained historical and political issues in a manner he described as submergence, and he went on to talk about how realist short fiction provided a means for addressing the concerns of all kinds of submerged groups, in terms of class, race, religion, sexuality, immigration, and so on. Yet a parallel aspect of "The Overcoat" was its incorporation of fabulist elements, as in Gogol's subsequent "The Nose," thus begetting an alternative tradition from Franz Kafka through Jorge Luis Borges to George Saunders. Although Davies mentioned Poe's influence as well, Gogol he argued took precedence over Poe, who Davies saw more as the originator of the detective story, though I would also point to horror fiction and Gothic strains in American realism as Poe's direct prodigy.

This notion of the short story as an initial, exploratory, politically infused form in which to insert particular, submerged minoritarian concerns that were not aspects of the pre-existing nonfiction or fictional discourse was fascinating, though I don't think it always holds--what about African-American literature, for example, where the earliest fictional works, from what we can tell, were novels, the longer prose fictional form that Davies rightly suggested existed in a symbiotic relationship with short fiction? Although there were some early short stories written by African Americans, I believe the prose tradition primarily includes sermons, the slave narratives and autobiographies, and, beginning in the era of Gogol and Poe, a few novels. Could chronology, and the subsequent models be the issue here? (Or am I totally spinning his argument into something else?)

Another interesting detail was his discussion of the conte, a French form perfected by Turgenev, which tended to be brief and open-ended. (A colleague, in the question and answer session, pointed out that Russians had a culturally specific term for the long, open-ended fiction of Chekhov: the povest [повесть]*.) He concluded by proposing that although the "hysterical realism," to use critic James Wood's term, of such writers as Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith was in vogue, and served as the template for what might be called (or derided, depending upon your orientation) as the "workshop story," with its techniques of avoidance and foreberance (formal perfection, easy irony, etc.), perhaps given the bizarre and absurd political conditions we were living in, more fantastical fiction might be appropriate. (I have been thinking along the same lines since around 2001.)

Davies' argument was tidy, provocative and persuasive, and got me to thinking about a lot of things, including where many writers I admire might fit into his bifurcated system. Some of them just wouldn't fit at all. And this results from the fact that not only is the model too simple (though useful), but I think he left out a number of short-fictional predecessors to the short story tradition, including oral myths and folk tales, fables, various kinds of personal accounts, histories, case studies, and so on. I imagine when he publishes the talk at some point he'll have worked through some of these, or other points. A student asked about Washington Irving, who provides a more direct line in the American tradition, but Davies suggested that no one reads Irving any more (hey, I did a few years ago), another way of saying, I think, that that link was lost, though I'm not so sure. I actually cannot remember any of the other questions, because I was starting to slump in my chair. Then after speaking to some colleagues and students I headed out to my car, and that cold air rushing off the lake woke me right up.

It's good for something, I guess.
---
*I tried to find this word online, but it appears to have the broader meaning of "legend, tale, novella/novelette," etc. If anyone has any clues about the definition in relation to Chekhov, I'd greatly appreciate them.

The Young Moroccans

I just had to post this picture (by Jonathan Player for the New York Times) from today's edition of the Gray Lady. It accompanied an article, "Christian Rock for Muslims," by Samuel Loewenburg, on Christian evangelical rock bands' participation in a concert in Morocco.

In what passes for our mainstream media, especially our televisual media, we rarely see images of young Muslims, or Muslims of any age, who look like this. Accoutured in the garb of hiphop and rock-influenced youth culture, with their hair colored and picked ('froed) out, flashing signs... (They remind me of [young] people I see in Jersey City, New York and Chicago, that I've seen in Santo Domingo and Rio de Janeiro and Paris and Toronto.) In fact, we rarely see depictions of the Muslims--the millions of them--who live next door to us.

Some many questions arise as I look at this picture. Who are they? What are their lives like? What are they thinking? What influences are shaping their lives, and how do they articulate these influences, their experiences in the world? How do they see themselves? How do they view and talk about their cultures, their society, their country, the world? What do they see in their future?

The image: I can't stop looking at it.

Here's a link to a really engaging but brief exploration, with great links, of the intersection of pop culture and the Middle East on Bill Sebring's FFactory Arts Site.

A Room of Your Own? (Novel: A Living Installation)

When I'm working on a short story, poetry, my novel, or even just preparing lecture notes, I often like to be in a mostly quiet environment, with little sound beyond the ambient. (This means many cafés these days are out, because they pump music like they're discos.) I also realize that it's tough to complete longer prose fiction texts while I'm reading lots of student writing, which is usually the case from late September through mid-June (the university's standard three working quarters). So a certain amount of quiet solitude, away from everything, especially the teaching, always is an ideal.

On the other hand, I love being able to spend time with my partner, our two new kittens, friends, family members, the world at large--I like being able to explore my home, get out and about, especially when the weather's decent and I'm in the New York area. To me there are few things as exhilarating as strolling the streets of Manhattan or Jersey City, especially at a fast clip, with nowhere set I need to be, just wandering where time, chance, and my internal compass guide me. Debord attributes profound psychogeographical effects to the Situationist's more carefully structured dérives, but mere flânerie has its own numerous benefits and rewards.

So I wondered about the performance art piece qua novel-writing bootcamp experience, "Novel: A Living Installation" at the Flux Factory, that Julie Salamon describes in her article, "Would You, Could You, In a Box (Write, That Is)?" in the Arts section of today's New York Times. (Subscription required.) "Novel" entails three published writers, Laurie Stone, Ranbir Sidhu, and Grant Baillie lodging in "pods," built by selected architect-artists, in designated space on the Flux Factory's premises, where they'll each be working on completing a novel (or more realistically, I think, a draft of one) by June 4. The enforced isolation sounds like a good prescription for getting a lot of work done, except that the viewing public can view the authors at work (or at least in situ) during selected time periods (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 3 pm to 5 pm; and Saturdays and Sundays from 12 pm to 4 pm). So if you can't bear having strangers observe you for extended periods as you work, you got a real problem. Also, all three are scheduled (required?) to read selections of what they've written at 8 pm on each of the next few Saturdays, and to participate in 2 public discussions this upcoming Sunday, May 15, and again on May 22. (There's lots of information on the Flux Factory and on the Olde Towne Review sites.) It's isolation, of a particular sort, and doesn't approach what you might encounter at MacDowell or Hedgebrook or Yaddo.

On top of the spectactular aspects of the art piece, there's another really tough element, at least in my opinion: Stone, Sidhu and Baillie are being allowed only a 90-minute daily excursus from their pods, and they're required to note on cards the reason why they're leaving. (Talk about flashbacks to hall monitors! And if they tarry, then what happens? Demerits? Expulsion? Hmm....) They will, however, share a communal dinner prepared by a guest chef every evening.

According to Salamon, "Novel" was the idea of Morgan Meis, an artist, ABD graduate student and founder of the Flux Factory. Originally he was thinking of performing a similar piece to complete his dissertion on Walter Benjamin. Instead, with with fellow Flux-resident Kerry Downey, he opened it up to a competition, and landed the three authors and the architect-artists who built their writing-houses. If nothing else, it represents a fascinating art-world recuperation of the "reality" phenomenon, which of course the artworld pioneered decades before, but now structured along the lines of frameworks established by relational aestheticists like Rikrit Tikravanija. (I actually had suggested and written up a proposal for poet, visual artist and singer Krista Franklin to perform a similar project, called "Bed," for Studio Group A [qvp.] in Chicago a few years ago, but it went nowhere.) All three of the authors will get tremendous publicity for participating, and viewers may at least get to see three relatively unknown authors "performing" the act of writing, whether they're actually something or not--imagine a writing workshop where you're given an exercise and instead of the teacher and perhaps a classmate watching you as you scribble something down, you've got unknowns staring and pointing, placing you in a position sort of like Kafka's Hunger Artist--, but I wonder if any substantive fictional work will come out of it. Each author should have good notes towards a non-fiction work, at least, so perhaps they'll each write write something along the lines of Sylvia Molloy's En breve cárcel (Certificate of Absence). I think I'd take a few months in a Thoreau-type cabin in the woods (or maybe just in Harlem!), but then again, this could provide a jumpstart to a completely new and exciting project....

Gay Life, Yes?; Gay Lifestyle, No.

Today is Mother's Day, so let me first wish all the mothers and grandmothers, and those who serve as de facto mothers, a Happy Mother's Day. Mothering certainly isn't an easy job these days, but then it never was. I spoke with my mother this morning, and we had a great conversation.

One thing she never talks about in our conversations, thankfully, is "the gay lifestyle" or "homosexual lifestyle," though she has become more comfortable speaking about my partner and me, and is, to a greater extent than before, able to discuss LGBT issues. Some straight, and even self-identified gay people (and quite a few gay Websites, as a recent Google search showed) I know, however, do refer to a "gay lifestyle." They tend to speak of it as if it's some fixed, objective thing, though neither I nor anyone I know is living "it." We may consider ourselves "homosexual" or "gay" or "lesbian" or "same-gender-loving" (this is the term I adopted some years ago for political and racial pride reasons), and in fact there are "lifestyle" magazines that appeal to gay and lesbian and sgl people, or in a more limited sense ways of living shared by groups of gay people (people who practice BDSM, people who like to go dancing a lot, etc.), but I think these are qualified meanings of the term. There is no one set "gay lifestyle" or "homosexual lifestyle."

When I hear homophobic and heterosexist people use this term, I tend to correct them, and suggest they speak about "gay lives" or "gay people" or be more specific, because I find the term reductive and empty; what in fact is this "gay lifestyle" that far too many people, and especially homophobes and right-wingers, like to bandy about? Or that even too many homosexual people mention so casually? (For example, in February, a Fairfax County (VA) School Board Member denounced the "homosexual lifestyle" as "destructive" as a pretext to injecting his homophobic agenda into the school.) This term, steeped in the most ignorant, reductive stereotypes, has become a major organizing point for the anti-gay right and its allies; denunciations of a "gay agenda" often are based on the foundation of a belief in a "gay lifestyle." But is a "gay lifestyle" as the homophobes suggest something that can be properly categorized or quantified, subjected to a taxonomy and defined? I think not.

Let's accept for the moment the equation of "gay" as "homosexual personhood," which I'll define below. (And in using "gay" I mean lesbian and gay broadly; I knowledge that I am working with the particular European-American, bourgeois model of homosexuality as it developed from the period of the Industrial Revolution, and not speaking more expansively and carefully about the wider historical array of same-sexual practices; and I also acknowledge that there are self-identified homosexuals who utilize other labels for a variety of reasons, including political, ideological, cultural and other ones, as I suggested above with the term "same-gender-loving." I also admit that I am bracketing off transgender issues, which are related but really do deserve a discussion of their own.) Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, 10th edition, describes "lifestyle" as "the typical way of life of an individual, group, or culture." The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as "someone's way of living; the things that a person or particular group of people usually do." The Compact Oxford English dictionary says a "lifestyle" is "the way in which one lives." So is there a typical life for gay people in America? Are class, racial, ethnic, gender, and other social categories simply elided in this happy (or as some people like to suppose, unhappy) pursuit? Is there a common or shared way that we all live? What is it that gay people "usually do"? Is it just having sex (or even thinking of having sex) with a person of the same sex or gender, which more than a few people, some of them bi or ambi or polysexual;, some who do so because of the given social context [prison, same-sexual environments, etc.] who don't consider themselves homosexual or gay do; some of them actually homosexual but deluded or afraid or confused; etc., quite frequently? Is regularity or duration a factor?

Does it mean being in a relationship with a person of the same sex, or aspiring to? Living with said person of the same sex? Wanting to marry them, or, following the liberatory models of the 1970s, not? Patronizing gay bars, clubs, or really any gay institutions? Reading or writing or being interesting in literature by or about gays or with a gay subtext or at least semi-homotextual, or perhaps showing some interests in such things as they might be found in the arts in general? Being interested in fashion, gardening, Capri pants, lapdogs, same-sexual porn? Trying to butch it up, or femme it up, or act or perform in some way that differs from what's considered the social norms of behavior in your society? The word "gay" itself is encoded, as I say above, with particular historical and social resonances, and often is viewed normatively as white, middle-class, and male. Is it even possible to construe the lives of homosexual men and women so broadly as to assume they share a common lifestyle? The deeper one probes (!), the more the notion falls apart. And yet people cling to the idea of a "gay lifestyle."

Well, okay, the truth of the matter is, people who talk about a "gay lifestyle" usually are extrapolating from the basic fact of same-sexual practices, meaning same-sex and same-gender sex. Homosexuality for them equals same-sex sex, and the pursuit and practice of same-sex sex constitutes a "lifestyle." (Peggy Noonan, the speechwriter for Ronald Raygun, recently remarked that when a young man she met on the dance floor told her he was gay, she didn't want to know about who he had sex with.) It's an insidious, but commonly held idea that many homosexual people internalize, since it's reflected back to us on a daily basis via the media. A few years ago I tried to spell out on a listserv frequented primarily by LGBT people but open to everyone that we needed to unpack this idea of gay or homosexual personhood--and again, I understand that both terms are historically, socially and politically inflected, and that some people who might consider themselves to be defined in some way by these terms may reject them for a variety of reasons.

But back to the unpacking, as I see it, you could break down homosexual personhood in the following ways. First, there's

• Sexual orientation, which may or may not be acted on, and which isn't binaristic, but in fact falls along a spectrum. You cannot choose your orientation, despite the claims of anti-gay or ex-gay critics. (This is different from gender orientation.) I would imagine that most people who consider themselves homosexual or gay base it on what they perceive to be their sexual orientation, though it is also the case that some people may claim a homosexual identification for political reasons (as some lesbians, have done, say), and conversely, may deny being homosexual despite the realization that they have a homosexual orientation.

Related to sexual orientation are the following:

• Sexual identity and identification, which may square directly or vary dramatically from one's sexual orientation, since they depend on a variety of factors, including socialization and social, political and cultural contexts, one's subjective position and self-regard, and so forth. Identities have both subjective and objective aspects, and are fluid, and may not always be publicly performed. Also sexual identity differs from gender identity (though at times they're conflated);
• Sexual object choice, meaning the sex of the person you sleep with, which may flow or result from sexual orientation, or not, depending upon the circumstances;
• Sexual practice, which may differ from one's orientation, and may include a unity or variety of chosen sexual objects (by which I mean people), or no activity whatsoever.

Then, there's another aspect that in fact is quite salient:

• Social performance, which is to say, the ways one performs one's subjectivities and identifications in the world. "Straight-acting" versus "fem" for gay men, or "butch" versus "femme" for lesbians, or queer or gender-fuck or DL, etc., let's say, are all forms of social performance. Such performances are fluid, often contextual and contingent (based on a range of factors, such as socioeconomics, politics and ideology, cultural affiliations, etc.), and may not square at all with sexual or gender orientation. They have subjective and objective dimensions.
  

Much of this is probably old-hat to many people. But much of the public discourse around gay people, at least in my experience, fails to explore these elements (or other versions of them) with complexity, and in fact speaks of them as if they constitute a coherence. It's especially the case that homophobes who speak of "gay lifestyles" or "homosexual lifestyles" are fusing and confusing and conflating all of these things, creating an essential category, with little regard for the complexity of people's lives, especially people who consider and label themselves "gay" or "homosexual" (or same-gender-loving, two spirit, etc.). Of course if your perspective proceeds from a very delimited heteronormativity, and your aim is to demonize, oppress and repress, you're not going to worry about nuances. "Gay lifestyle" or "homosexual lifestyle" is going to be where you start, and anything and everything you believe falls within that category will fit, whether it does or not.

The truth is that each of the aspects of homosexual personhood I've delineated above provides a nexus for homophobic and heterosexist oppression. In addition to individual or group discriminatory actions (deriding people because they admit to a homosexual orientation, because they appear too effeminate or too butch, etc.), state-sanctioned oppression also can occur based on any of these. For example, despite Lawrence v. Kansas, which decriminalized same-sexual sex (and some sex acts performed by people of differing sexes) across the country, LGBT people across a broad swathe of America lack civil protections against discriminatory statutes or discrimination based on 1) being perceived to have a homosexual orientation; 2) perceived to desire a person of the same sex or gender; 3) for being known to have sex with a person of the same sex or gender (though the sex act itself is no longer grounds for prosecution; 4) being perceived to be "gay" or "homosexual" or something other than what a boss or landlord might deem to be outside the socially sanctioned (community) norm. Many of the discriminatory statues and acts--or the lack of protections against them--and the statutory bases or judgments for them were based on the view of homosexuality, and gay personhood, as being constituted solely as same-sexual sex. Yet as I've said, though same-sexual sex, between consenting adults, is no longer criminal anywhere in the United States, these other aspects of gay personhood remain unprotected from discriminatory laws or discrimination by individuals and groups.

"Gay(ness)" or "homosexual(ity)" is not merely a concept or idea, but has become a socially realized, ontologically valid category around which homosexual people--not all, but many of us--and our allies have organized aspects of our lives. We speak of "gay rights," "gay liberation," "gay pride," "gay marriage," etc., and it is out of such associations that we develop forms of identity, solidarity, and so forth. Yet we also realize how variegated and complex anything labeled as "gay" really is, how complex homosexual personhood is, how problematic even the covering terms "gay" and "homosexual" are. (The gender, racial, ethnic, class, religious, health status, and other kinds of differences that mark LGBT people lead to friction and conflict in and of themselves.) "Gay" has also become a socially realized category around which homophobes and heterosexists can rally. Yet they usually don't want to look at our lives with complexity; a reductive notion of the "gay lifestyle," and what homosexuality is and how we live it often lies at the core of their discriminatory aims and actions, and as such, should be challenged and corrected whenever possible.

Which brings me to note that I'd been working on a post inspired by the recent death of Jack Nichols (May 2, 2005) at age 67. One of the major pioneers in the lesbian and gay civil-rights movement, he was a founder with Frank Kameny in the early 1960s of the Mattachine Society, one of the most important pre-Stonewall gay rights groups, and helped to organize the first lesbian and gay protest at the White House, in 1965, and the first lesbian and gay civil rights demonstrations in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York from 1965 through 1969. (In fact the first one was held on Independence Day 40 years ago, in Philadelphia.) At that moment in history, the federal government would not hire lesbians and gays, and the American Psychological Association (APA) still classified homosexuality as a mental illness. Ultimately, Nichols played a key role in pushing the APA to remove homosexuality from its list of illnesses in 1973. Lastly, he and his partner Lige Clark were the publishers of America's first gay weekly, GAY. In my typing I didn't get beyond linking Nichols's activism to the nascent notion of a gay collectivity, but I hope to write more on this in the future, and also to talk about "queerness" as concept and practice. But not now. Gay life, perhaps, gay lifestyle, no.

Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn

If I've argued that Michelangelo Antonioni's (1919-) films of the early 1960s represent one of the possible ends of the cinematic art form for that era (while remaining benchmarks against which all cinematic art can be measured), then Taiwanese director and auteur Tsai Ming-Liang's (1957-) works over the last ten years represent another terminus of aesthetic possibility for films of today.

Recently I watched the Wellspring Films DVD version of Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Bu San), which appeared to great acclaim--and I would imagine, a matching level of exasperation--in 2003. The film ostensibly depicts the final evening (at least temporarily) of a large, old film theater in Taipei. Goodbye, Dragon Inn narratively consists of a series of loosely linked scenes of patrons in the theater watching the King Hu film "Dragon Inn," wandering through the theater's bowels, interacting or not interacting, and then, once "Dragon Inn" ends, the film itself soon ends. It is essentially plotless, and what plot you might discern seems almost too threadbare to sustain an hour and 20 minute movie. But, like Tsai's best prior movies, What Time Is It There?, The River, Vive L'Amour, and Rebels of a Neon God, it is a work of high artistry, with some of the scenes achieving what I'd term a contemporary sublimity, and it confirms him as one of the finest and most original directors of the early 21st century.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a distilled version of almost every previous Tsai film. Its subject, like the others, is the overwhelming alienation and difficulty of connection among people in contemporary capitalist society. Taiwan (and more specifically the capital Taipei) is the setting of most of Tsai's films, though What Time Is It There? also takes place in Paris, and the alienation could be extrapolated more broadly. In this film as in the others he employs his alter-ego, played by the handsome Lee Kang-Sheng (pictured at left), as well as one other actor from his earlier films in a role not unsimilar to ones he's played before. Goodbye, Dragon Inn like its predecessors uses long--and here extremely long, to the extent of 5+ minutes--unbroken shots, often employing mise en scène and deep focus, that are usually linked associatively, rather through traditional narrative plot points. There is even less of the minimal dialogue here than in his other picture. In fact, almost all the dialogue comes from "Dragon Inn," and the first line of character-spoken dialogue doesn't appear until 40 minutes into the film! It also uses almost no soundtrack music, except in key spots, like the very end, where the old Chinese song's nostalgia is so plangent that it's almost heartbreaking; most of the music we hear also comes from the theater's screen. Its humor is deadpan, and often ironic. And then there's Tsai's usual deluge--in his works, it's often raining outdoors and indoors. In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, it storms outside, with some of it leaking through to an upper storey.

As for the characters, they wander around in bubbles of isolation, though here the bizarrerie of characterization one finds in some of Tsai's other films is muted. One of the protagonists is a halt young female ticket taker (Chen Shiang-Chyi, pictured at right), one of whose legs is shorter than the other. As we eventually realize, she is pining for the projectionist (Lee) and clumps around the empty halls of the theater, first to deliver a heart-like pear delicacy to him, which he doesn't touch, and later to clean up after the movie is over. The other is a young Japanese spectator who unsuccessfully cruises various men in the theater. We learn he's Japanese only because he announces this in one of the rare verbal exchanges--but this connection is fleeting and goes nowhere. An elderly male character has brought what we assume is his grandson to the movie, though one can't be sure, given that this is a Tsai film; only at the end do we learn his link to another elderly male who's been the object of the Japanese man's attentions.

In fact, a queer undercurrent underpins almost all the characters and the film itself, as in Tsai's other movies; we are never told directly that this is a cruising theater, or has become one, but everything--including a scene in the bathroom that includes a funny twist, and several scenes of evidently same-sexual cruising in storage areas--points to it. Yet though the queerness is partially literalized, its economy is global. It also works towards the larger theme, which is the difficulty of desires that do not fit traditional molds or models and thus struggle to be realized, particularly in a world in which everyone is emotionally and socially detached. The young woman wants a man who doesn't really see her, the young foreigner seeks out various men who seem impervious to him and he to them, the two older men don't recognize each other for a long time, others in the theater demonstrate a complete lack of social etiquette (smacking on food or toasted watermelon seeds), and everyone's experiences are rendered basically as individual, monadic, alone. It is the space of the theater itself that provides the place of community, and Tsai, I think, is saying it's precarious, community is fragile, always beset by external storms and our frequent incapacity to look beyond our own self-regard.

The tone of the film combines loneliness, yearning and anticipation, matching the profound lonesomeness and unrequited desire the characters struggle with. The dark tone also parallels the looming end of the theater, which will mark the end of an era and ways of living. Tsai literally and glacially tracks the entire theater itself, a strategy of obliquity that serves as a kind of proxy for the distanced and thwarted emotions. The theater's interiors also can be read for the bleak, urban landscape outdoors, I suppose. Goodbye, Dragon Inn brims with shots whose formal perfection and duration surpass almost any film playing in theaters today (thought very similar, it's now clear to me, to Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Sokurov, or Welles, for example). He also utilizes ambient sound, so we see what is almost a still shot of an empty stairwell or hall, but hear the ticket taker's boot clopping well before she enters or exits the frame. Indeed, at times because of the use of the image durée, both in interior spaces and on the actors themselves, who froze their expressions and gestures--who became statues, or stills--the movie felt like a series of photographs that were only intermittently animated. And what gorgeous photographs. Most of the scenes are bathed in darkness or shadows, or conversely in harsh, industrial light, as befits the inside of a cinema (and a Tsai film), but the colors are vibrant, especially the reds and, need I say it, blues. In the scene most reminiscent of L'Eclisse or Nostalghia, the camera lingers on the empty, lit theater and its tiers of red seats--it lingers and then just keeps on looking, and looking, and looking.... (It's at moments like these that I imagine some viewers have grown exasperated, and I've seen online reports of people walking out. If you have a short attention span, require a plot-driven narrative, want to hear lots of lively dialogue, or manifest any revulsion towards sexual ambiguity, this film may not be for you.)

Tsai has once again created an existential poem in images, this one more lyric than the others in its unfolding, its reliance on thematic plot and imagery, and in its depictions--a long, almost silent poem, of yearning, and mourning. A yearning that suffuses every aspect of these lives, the waterstained walls, the guttering shadows, the empty seats, yet can never be satisfied, not even at the end, when the projectionist learns his fortune and finally searches for the young woman; and a mourning, as the two elderly men note in their conversation, of a way of life that is now disappearing. Gone. Except, of course, we have it, on DVD, as Goodbye, Dragon Inn.

Poems: Blackburn

A few weeks ago as I wandered in the labyrinth of the university's main library searching for a text I couldn't find and can't remember, I spotted Paul Blackburn's (1926-1971) The Cities crammed atop a row of books and pulled it down. I'd come across Blackburn's work in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry, but have never perused a whole collection. I'm slowly making my way through this one and enjoying it quite a bit. Here're two very short poems I thought I'd post by this important poet of New York City, who in 1966 helped to found the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, in the Village.

THIS COULDN'T HAPPEN AGAIN

the heavy pressure
of the presence of your body in the room
moving
O love,
is the end of my
imaginings
this late afternoon
feeling again at hte window
the sensation of weight received
in that displacement
the small waves
lapping against me
constantly

FLEXIONS

the rivers of afternoon
flowing about you as you
move . stop, standing
afterward in my bathroom
naked among the young plants
in the green light singing
softly to yourself

Both from The Cities (New York: Grove), Copyright © Paul Blackburn, 1967.

Today....

Today is Cinco de Mayo, a Mexican national holiday honoring that country's military's defense, under General Zaragosa, of the city of Puebla from French forces sent by Emperor Napolean III in 1862. (He would successfully establish a puppet imperial regime of three year's duration under Maximilian and Carlota in 1864.) Once celebrated in this country mainly in the Southwest and West, which were once part of Mexico, the holiday has become increasingly popular elsewhere in the US, I would imagine, because of the geographic diffusion of the growing Mexican-immigrant and Mexican-American populations, and a openness, at least in certain parts of the country, to cultural pluralism and diversity. Given that the French forces were defeated and the GOP's stated desire for increased Latino support, I wouldn't be surprised if Republicans started reciting annual paeans to cavalry leader (and later leader of Mexico) Porfirio Díaz. He was a dictator, don't forget.

Today also is National Holocaust Remembrance Day. I often think that there's little possibility anyone who's semi-sentient will forget how horrific the Holocaust was, but the truth is that historical education in this country is so crap-poor that many people cannot even discuss, let alone remember, the basics of American history and civics, such as what our Constitution is and how it came into being, nor when George Washington first took office or the city of Washington was established and why, nor the dates of the U.S. Civil War, nor the chronological window when slavery putatively ended in both the North (yes, Virginia, there were slaves in Maine and New Hampshire) and the South--or should I say, slavery as an official institution, nor the era of the Great Depression, etc. In fact, many Americans cannot locate the nation's capital on a map! So knowledge of events taking place elsewhere on this earth more than 50 years ago, even if as abominable as the Holocaust should not be taken for granted. And even with the presence of Holocaust museums and memorials in many of the major American cities, there still are many who have no clue. (Holocaust deniers or minimizers don't help.) Ignorance, Orwell once ironically wrote, is bliss, at least for some--but the truth is that promoting it is a sure means of gaining and maintaining power.

Today the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island held its general elections. The lapdog sitting Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who eviscerated the Labour Party all the way to two straight national wins, appears likely to win a third term, though I've read repeatedly that it will be a slender triumph. Exit polls predicted a drop of 100 seats, a number of them going to the anti-immigrant, racist-harboring Conservative (Tory) Party, which before Blair's charge in 1997 had held the reins of Britain for a generation. (Yet exit polls, as the 2004 U.S. presidential election showed, can be grossly wrong, especially with electronic voting machines that are easily hackable.) My late adolescence and early adulthood coincided with the dreadful reigns of Raygun the Ronald (who claimed he fought in World War II, though he was actually on a movie set) and the horrid, helmet-haired Thatcher Woman, who gutted Merry Olde England like there was no tomorrow, though she did show the dictators in Argentina a thing or two in successfully holding on to Britain's lone colonial patrimony in South America. The U.K. is still picking up (or through) the pieces; meanwhile, Blair has taken his party, once Britain's Social Democratic opposition, steadily to the right. As is well known, he has hewed as closely to W as Beethoven's beloved "trouser button," and was recently revealed to have been co-plotting the Iraq War with his Master in 2002, well before it was launched. (Big surprise!) He's also a devout Christianist who claims to never lie, though his record shows he's as slippery with the truth as his buddy, the horse masturbator.

There actually is a third major party in Britain, the Liberal Democrats, who once were the Liberals and the main, centrist party of the country (Gladstone, Asquith, Lloyd George, etc.), but since the mid-1950s, they have been relegated to third place status. (On the right there is the fascistic National Party, which would feel right at home with the likes of a total nutcase like Pat Robertson, who recently claimed that "activist judges" (meaning Republicans like Anthony Kennedy appointed by Republicans like Raygun) were a greater threat than, oh, Hitler and Osama bin Laden!) Oddly enough, since Blair has turned Labour into a catchall, Clintonian mush, the Liberal Democrats have become the major left-leaning party, and openly opposed the Iraq debacle. Right and sensible as that position is, the Liberal Democrats and their flame-haired leader are not expected to gain much traction.

A bizarre sidelight was the explosion of two grenades, early this morning, outside the building housing the British Consulate in New York City. New York's mayor and stadiophile Michael Bloomberg quickly reassured the public with blandishments, because, well, we can't have anything but business as usual, can we? (The Caterpillar Corporation also has offices there, and has been the object of past protests because, according to the New York Times, the Israeli military uses Caterpillar bulldozers.)

***

Other things that happened at various points in the past today (according to the Gregorian calendar) that I've basically cribbed from other Websites:

• 1818 Karl Marx is born, in Trier, Prussia
  
• 1891 Carnegie Hall (then known as Music Hall) opened in New York City, with Peter Tchaikovsky as guest conductor.
• 1905 Robert Sengstacke Abbott establishes the Chicago Defender newspaper, still in existence, calling it "The World's Greatest Weekly"
• 1925 John Scopes is arrested in Tennessee for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution (and in 2005 Kansas is debating whether to teach it or not)

• 1927 Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, is published, to tepid reviews (it is now considered one of the great achievements of 20th century literature)
• 1941 Emperor Haile Selassie I, Lion of Judah, (right) returns to his capital, Addis Ababa, five years after it had been occupied by Italy, then led by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini
• 1942 As World War II rages on, Japanese forces landed on the Philippine island of Corregidor
• 1961 Astronaut Alan Shepard becomes the first American space traveler as he made a 15-minute sub-orbital flight in a capsule launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

And in my lifetime:

• 1969 Moneta Sleet becomes the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of Coretta Scott King and her daughter at Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral
• 1970 US troops capture Snoul, Cambodia, which had been held by the North Vietnamese, but found no North Vietnamese troops there
• 1972 North Vietnamese turned back a South Vietnamese relief column that was trying to re1lieve the siege at An Loc
• 1975 Hank Aaron passes Babe Ruth's RBI record on his way to becoming the all-time home run and RBI champion in Major League Baseball (and he's never been honored enough for his greatness, in my opinion)
  
• 1985 President Raygun led a wreath-laying ceremony at the Bitburg Germany military cemetery, which included Nazi graves (cf. above under "Holocaust" and "Raygun")

Today it was easier to rattle off what happened today than come up with anything original. Sic transit...

Appendx (1997-1999)

So far, only four issues have appeared. I keep holding out hope that a fifth issue of Appendx will materialize, either online or in my mailbox, though the last online issue dates from pre-millennium 1999, and so far as I know, no new pages are in the offing. A long while ago I sent a query to one of the editors, scholar and architecture Darell W. Fields, who taught at Arizona State University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design and who's now on the faculty at Northeastern University. That e-mail traveled via my free, once-favorite, now defunct Africana.com account, and though those messages may be archived somewhere, I don't have access to them....
But back to Appendx, why my interest? As the three founding editors--Fields, Stull & Lee designer Kevin Fuller, and then- Arizona State assistant professor Milton S. F. Curry--declared in their explanatory preface, this journal of "Culture | Theory | Praxis" had mad goals:

Appendx is intended to mark a new beginning for architectural discourse. Seeking a space for the diffusion of multiple voices and disciplines on the subject matters mentioned, the challenge was to "position" the journal relative to market forces in the publishing arena without compromising the radicality of its prospective contents. In so doing, we quickly realized that we were constantly being overdetermined and categorized by those who cared little or nothing about our most passionate intentions for the project, but were more concerned with its "packaging."

"A new beginning for architectural discourse...radicality of its prospective contents." They were going to be talking about architecture, space, built and imagined environments, in innovative ways, and in particular, given that all three editors were Black and Fields's own work utilized race in interesting ways, through the lens of race. They went on to conclude

Within the life of the journal, we hope to present a multiplicity of views, reflections, and ideas that invigorate and initiate a rigorous approach to questions of cultural theory, difference, and so on. Far from laying claim to any single identity such as black, male, heterosexual, homosexual, female, etc., it is our hope that the journal will become home for a great number of voices, articulating intersubjective positions and theoretical proposals in as free a context as we can provide. This means holding issues of "political correctness" at arm’s length and suspending moral judgment of other identities that we—or potential contributors—consider to be non-negotiable. The projects that will appear in these pages appear on their own terms and are readily exposed to the consequences of their actions. Let us state very clearly in this inaugural issue that those who speak in these pages are speaking first and foremost for themselves.

The eclectic introductory issue included Fields' polemical "Black Manifesto," an exploration of race, architecture and aesthetic practice/praxis, which ended with the statement, "For all I know, I am silenced and lost already"; Milton Curry's "Emancipation Manifesto"; Kim Anne Savelson's feminist reading of architectural theorists on race and gender; Bryan Reynold's brief interpretation of the (de)queered space of the Harvard Science Center's men's room stalls (and his view of the editors' heterosexualizing impulses); a James Baldwin excerpt; and artwork by Dallas-based artist J. Juarez Hernandez. Whether or not it completely cohered wasn't, I thought, really the point--there were so few (no?) other journals or group projects tackling these particular theoretical and creative spaces that its presence and execution, however flawed, was necessary. And being a pioneer, weren't flaws expected? Though edited at Harvard, and rostered by Harvard-affiliated people, it seemed in the initial issue to augur a broader conversation, so I was excited to see where the editors and contributors would go.

Subsequent issues (2-4) included Fields's harsh Gatesian (auto)fable, "Living a Slow Death...or Porch Monkeys in the Dust," as well as pieces by Matthew Grant on gangsta rap; Richard Ford on the "three strikes" law; David Theo Goldberg on the architecture of conferencing; online art by Renee Cox; interviews with Cornel West and Anna Deveare Smith; digital videos by Philip Mallory Jones, Fields, and Steve Jaycox; and a few more bits tossed in for good measure. The second issue included a perceptive and constructive critique by RM Colina (?), on the initial issue's failures and aporias, and how it might make the kinds of interventions it set out it in that visionary preface.

And then...there were no more issues. The possibilities proposed by that preface never had a chance to be fully realized. We got a taste, and then.... So as I said, I hold out hope. I'm not sure where Fuller and Curry are these days, but maybe Fields will launch this craft again, even if for only a few more voyages. Given the current, degraded state of public discourse of all sorts, and of intellectual discourses and rhetorics in particular, not least on architectural themes and topics (cf. the debacles of "Ground Zero," the Iraq War, of the looming US-Mexican border-wall, etc.)--a new Appendx would be very welcome.

Shattuck's Portrait of "Choreographic Partners" Rhoden and Richardson

Kathryn Shattuck has written a sharp article, "After the Breakup, Still Choreographic Partners,"* in the Arts Section of today's New York Times, on the transformed intimate and artistic relationship between choreographer-dancers Dwight Rhoden (42) and Desmond Richardson (35) (pictured at right, photo by Heidi Schumann for the New York Times).

With a minimum of spectacle and stereotype, Shattuck addresses the topic of two amazing, Black, gay/sgl male artists who were a couple** for 17 years but split up last summer, though they are still close and have continued their working relationship in the group they cofounded in 1994, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, which opens a run of eight shows at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea beginning tonight.

It's a refreshing read, particularly for its critical, candid treatment of these men's complex lives and for its exploration and appreciation, even in such a brief space, of how private experiences often inflect upon but also differ from public expression and performance. In this case, the spiritual, psychological and emotional, social, political, and aesthetic exchanges that occurred in their relationship--the partnership they developed--have translated, in part, into the powerful onstage work that both men created together and individually, though Shattuck does challenge the simplistic equation than some journalists, biographers and fans make between the artist's life (or lives) and her or his work.

I've seen Richardson dance before--though not Rhoden--and afterwards was at a loss to convey my awe. If I can, I'm going to catch one of their sets.
___
*The NY Times requires registration.
**I cannot remember the last time I read about a Black or POC LGBT/sgl couple--whether in an intimate relationship, an artistic partnership, or both--let alone a relationship of this length, in a mainstream news publication, in the mainstream LGBT print media, or in the non-LGBT Black and non-white print media. It almost goes without saying that we are just as rarely portrayed in the televisual media.

The Encyclopedia Project

An exciting new joint, arriving this summer, encyclopedic in scope, edited by Tisa Bryant, Miranda Mellis and Kate Schatz.

The Encyclopedia Project: Vol I (A-E)

In the editors' own words:

Encyclopedia is a series of five annual literary/arts print publications that will constitute an encyclopedia of and about fiction. This first issue spans the letters A-E and addresses the question, what occurs under the sign of fiction? That there is no singular answer to this question allows for a wide-range of responses that invigorate genre, form, and content.

Encyclopedia will feature short stories, cross-genre work, visual art, translations, collaborations, plays, lyrical essays, and criticism. It combines the aesthetic, socio-political, and cultural merits of a high caliber literary arts journal with the educational and pedagogical functions of the reference book. With a commitment to accessibility as well as experimentation, Encyclopedia adds a vital publication to the literary/arts world.

What occurs under the sign of fiction, indeed? Encyclopedia will certainly give us some ideas. One of mine is even part of the mix....

Sunday Quote: Anthony Braxton

"My hope is that we will use this time space to renew our relationship with cultural dynamics and begin again the fight for the challenge of composite existence and positive experience. We must rededicate ourselves to the hope of world peace, human rights, and cosmic destiny. Creativity is the engine of evolution and healing. We are now in a new era and there is everything to do."
--Anthony Braxton, responding to the tragic events of 9/11/2001