Brooklyn Museum's "Art off the Wall: Decoding Basquiat" Reading Tonight

King Holiday
(Photo © Randy Pressman)

Tonight, I'll be reading poetry with some of my favorite writers, Erica Doyle, Christopher Stackhouse, and Harmony Holiday, along with the 10-piece band King Holiday, as part of the Brooklyn Museum's "Art off the Wall: 'Decoding Basquiat'" event. This reading and musical performance accompany the Brooklyn Museum's Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks exhibition, which runs until August 23, 2015. The events begin at 6:30 pm and run for three hours.

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UPDATED: Here are a few images from the reading, which took place in the Brooklyn Museum's vast and rather loud atrium. Upstairs things grew so crowded that we were told people waiting to see the show and hear the band, King Holiday, would probably not get in. Poet Harmony Holiday unfortunately could not join us, but Chris, Erica and I did our thing, and it was encouraging to see some familiar faces on what turned out to be a very busy night for poetry in New York City.

The crowd before we began 

Erica, reading her
poem about gentrification

Chris reading from his
"In Parts" series

Basquiat: The Unknown
Notebooks catalogue

Brazil's First Black Chief Justice + PR Votes for Statehood

Brazil's new chief justice, Joaquim Barbosa

Brazil passed a milestone last month when Joaquim Barbosa, Brazil's only black current Supreme Court justice, ascended to the post of Chief Justice on November 17, 2012, becoming the first Afro-Brazilian ever to hold that post.  He is the third person of identifiable African ancestry to sit on Brazil's Supreme Court; the other two served in the early 20th century. Barbosa, who attended the University of Brasília and the Université de Paris II, and served as a visiting scholar at several US institutions (Columbia University and University of California-Los Angeles), initally assumed his Supreme Court seat in 2003 after being nominated by former president Inácio Lula da Silva in 2003. Despite the patronage of Lula, Barbosa has electrified the Brazilian populace and press through his role as the leading figure in the prosecution of the potentially worst corruption crisis in the country's history, the Mensalão scandal, which has engulfed a number of prominent members in the administration of former president Inácio Lula da Silva, and has led not only to prosecutions, but perhaps as well to the death of São Paulo State mayor, Celso Daniel of Santo André.
Barbosa's background differs little from a sizable portion of Brazil's Afro-Brazilian communities, which now account for 52% of the country's total population of 192 million people; he was born in the small town of Paracatu in Minas Gerais state and grew up in a working-class household, and after completing his studies served in various capacities for several of Brazil's governmental departments. With the retirement of his colleague Ayres Britto, also appointed in 2003 by Lula, Barbosa automatically became Acting President of the Court, but he already had been chosen to hold the seat, for a two year period, by his fellow justices in October, as part of a tradition in which the oldest justice who had not already assumed the post would do so. According to the Latin American Herald Tribune, in addition to inviting Brazil's first woman president, Dilma Rousseff, Barbosa also made a point of inviting notable Afro-Brazilians to his installation. Roberto Gurgel, Brazil's attorney general noted that "“In a society like ours with a large presence of blacks, it speaks very
well of our country, of our democracy, that for the first time a black
man becomes chief justice of the Supreme Court." Time indeed.
***

Puerto Ricans holding up their flag (File photo) 

I think I've missed the commentary on this, but I thought it significant that this past national election day, November 6, 2012, for the first time, a majority of Puerto Rican voters cast ballots in favor not of independence or continued Commonwealth status, but for statehood. So the dream of Dr. José Celso Barbosa (1857-1921), the (Afro-Rican) father of Puerto Rican statehood, has moved from background to the foreground. The plebescite involved two votes. In the first, by 54% to 46%, Puerto Rican voters rejected Commonwealth status, and in the second, 61% of voters called for statehood versus 33% for "sovereign free association" and 6% for full independence. About one-third of all the ballots, however, were left blank. Despite the vote, Congress must follow the US Constitution's provisions under Article 4 to take the steps it has for every state that has entered the Union since Vermont in 1791, and which it last did in 1959, when Hawai'i became the 50th state. There is no guarantee that the current Congress will do so.

Dr. José Celso
Barbosa (Wikipedia)

In CNN.com's article on the vote, Puerto Rico's Secretary of State Kenneth McClintock stated that the motivations behind the pro-statehood vote included the Commonwealth's ongoing economic crisis and its falling population. As of this year, 58% of Puerto Ricans live on the mainland instead of Puerto Rico's islands. With statehood, McClintock appears to suggest, might come greater economic integration and certainty for residents and businesses. Additionally, the 4 million Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico would be able to vote in national and federal elections just as the 5 million who live in the US mainland can now do. But is this what Puerto Rican voters really want? Another approach was not on the ballot, Jorge Benítez, a scholar at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, noted, citing those blank ballots and pointing out that many voters would rather that authorities review an Obama administration report that offers possible non-colonial options, an approach favored by the party that will assume the governorship.
Just a few days ago, on December 11, 2012, the Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico enacted a concurrent resolution asking the Congress and President Barack Obama to respond swiftly and seriously in response to Puerto Rico's voters, thereby ending once and for all its territorial status and, like Alaska and Hawai'i, incorporating it fully into the United States and making it the 51st state. Last year President Obama became the first sitting president in 50 years to visit Puerto Rico, and he received overwhelming support from Puerto Ricans living in the 50 states, so he very well might press Congress to consider getting the process leading to statehood underway. Whether that squares with the wishes of Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico is another matter. There is also the question of a possible 52nd state which would provide numerical, if not ideological balance: The District of Columbia. It too should be given full consideration by the Congress. One problem, however, would be that between the two entities, there might not be a balancing of Democratic and Republican Congressional votes, though Puerto Rico has repeatedly elected conservatives to its governorship, including the last before this most recent election. Post-colony or independent? El estado nuevo or lo mismo de siempre? 

The Music of Roberto Sierra

Roberto Sierra

Earlier this year I came across a contemporary classical music composer whose music I wasn't previously familiar with but which I've been returning to of late, Roberto Sierra (1953-).  Born in 1953 in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, Sierra studied composition in Puerto Rico and in Europe, including at the Hochschule für Musik in Hamburg with György Ligeti. Sierra has since gone on to compose in a range of forms, including opera (El mensajero de plata), works for full orchestra (Missa Latina, Júbilo, Sinfonias 1-4, Concierto Barroco), chamber orchestra (Doce Bagatelas for String Orchestra, El éxtasis de Santa Teresa for soprano and Chamber Orchestra), chamber pieces (Flower Pieces, Concierto de Cámera), and works for solo performers (Ritmorro for clarinet, Bongo O for bongo), and orchestras all over the world have both played and commissioned his music.

His Missa Latina, premiering in 2006 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, with Leonard Slatkin conducting the National Symphony Orchestra, garnered tremendous praise, and he's received a range of awards, including the 2004 Kenneth Davenport Competition for Orchestral Works, for his Sinfonia No. 1, commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Albany Records received the Serge and Olga Koussevitzky International Recording Award (KIRA), for its recording of his Sinfonia No. 3, "La Salsa."  I like the way Sierra's music synthesizes many different influences, ranging from the Spanish, Indian and African of his native Puerto Rico, to contemporary Spanish and European, and American art music, to jazz. In the Sinfonia No. 3, "La Salsa," or the Fandangos, one can hear links with popular Puerto Rican and Caribbean music, and the musical currents of predecessors like Joaquín Rodrigo, Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados. He wrote several of his most recent compositions, the Concerto for Saxophones and Orchestra and Caribbean Rhapsody, for the saxophonist James Carter. Like nearly all classical composers these days, he also teaches, and is professor of music at Cornell University.

You can find Sierra's music on labels such as Naxos, EMI, New World Records, Albany Records, Koch, New Albion, Koss Classics, BMG, Fleur de Son, and others. I often listen to the few offerings directly available on the Naxos site, which I subscribe to, and have purchased some of his CDs and selected works from iTunes too. Most are available on the iTunes store. If you are a practicing musician and want to play his works, you can get them directly from Subito Music Publishing, G. Schirmer, or Editions Orphee depending upon the piece.

Here are a few videos from YouTube featuring excerpts of Sierra's work. Enjoy!


Piano Trio #3, 4th movement, played by Trio Arbós
Mambo 7/16, played by Cuarteto Latinoamericano

Concierto Barroco (part 2), guitar soloist, Rémi Barrette, with orchestra

Tumbao, from Sinfonia No. 3, "La salsa," performed by the Eastman Wind Ensemble
Fandangos (excerpt), Robert Franz, conductor, Mansfield Symphony

Flower Pieces (excerpts), Valerie Potter, flute, and Anne Eisfeller, harp
Concierto de Cámera (premiere), Imani Winds, Miami String Quartet

Bongo o

Junot Díaz Wins Pulitzer Prize + Poem: Forrest Hamer + Review: Dos Caras de Jano/Two Faces of Janus

What great news came down today: Junot Díaz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, roughly a month after receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. As I've said on here before, this one of the best novels I've read in some time, particularly one of the best contemporary novels, and it's also one of the important contemporary works on the issues of Dominicanidad, nation, history, Diaspora, immigration, class, race and, in particular, blackness, that I've come across. Many of the reviews I've read lose sight of this, but it's all there in this remarkable book. Díaz's articulation of Diasporic nerd-dom also is incredibly fresh, as is his use of a postmodern formal structure and his often plangent realism, which makes the stories of the characters so vivid that their sufferings break your heart, not just figuratively, but by the end of the book, literally. It took Díaz 11 years to complete this novel, and it's one of the best responses to the notion that any writers--poets, playwrights, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, anyone--should be churning out work like paper airplanes. Like any lover of great art, I'm grateful, very grateful, that he published this book when he and it were ready, and I'm delighted to be able to congratulate him on this extraordinary honor. As I wrote of the lovely and extremely talented Natasha Trethewey and her collection, The Native Guards last year, the honor went to a truly deserving writer and work.

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Forrest Hamer's most recent collection Rift (Four Way Books, 2007), a past Book Choice here, is so full of great poems, possessed of tremendous lyric force and philosophical depth, that it's hard to choose one to feature this month. So I think I'll choose one of the ones that I keep coming back to, a poem written in a style I would venture is Forrest's own, which is to say, a poem whose title, highlighted, nests in the body of the poem. This small but substantial gesture reorients the eye and mind when reading the poem, making you think about, among other things, embodiment itself, the relation between the poem and how the poet names it, how it functions in terms of the body of the lyric. Forrest, who's a trained and practicing psychoanalyist, is very interested in and writes with great skill about the mind and body, bodies, his, others, ours, but also, without the freight of religion or an established metaphysics, about soul. He was on a panel at this year's AWP that I heard was great, and I wish I could have heard it, and him. He's a poet you don't want to miss. So here is one of several poems titled "Someone I Know." Enjoy!

A woman late in her eighties began once more to feel desire.  She said a
fever came over her so strong at night she would not sleep: she would imagine
all sorts of men, and some women, and all of them left her the sense she
probably was dying, the flushes one last rally to keep her self intact.

Some people can feel full only when passion is strong, so they provoke
others into making them feel.  Others can feel only themselves when feeling
is calmed or seems gone.  And there are others whose sense of being comes
from not being selves at all.  Someone I know doesn't yet know what there
is to tell, and I spend hours with him waiting for the song there is when I hear
best:  sung by me in a language I do not recognize, listening fills me with the
closest I have come to being satisfied.

I would not be beautiful, for that would be another curse; nor would I be on
fire.  The first curse, of course, is knowing.

Copyright © Forrest Hamer, 2007, 2008, from Rift (New York: Four Way Books, 2007), all rights reserved.

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On Saturday afternoon I eagerly traipsed down to the Chicago Latino Film Festival to catch Las Dos Caras de Jano (The Two Faces of Janus), Edmundo H. Rodríguez's film based on Puerto Rican anti-colonial activist and progressive author Wilfredo Mattos Cintrón's fourth novel of the same name. I'd first heard about the film's screening on Blabbeando (mg/ Andrés), and the plot, focusing on a serial killer of gay men in San Juan and a black Puerto Rican detective investigating them, or at least one, was enough to bring me to the theater.

So what's my verdict? Perhaps I should begin by filling in the plot a bit more. The film really comprises two storylines: the background one focuses on the grisly serial murders of gay, mostly middle-class men in San Juan, by an unknown but extremely disturbed "Angel of Bachelors," and the viewer learns about 3/4ths of the way through who the killer is, as he commits one of them, along with the likely motivations behind them. But the foreground story, which links to this larger, more disturbing narrative, centers on a formerly closeted and now openly gay man, whose murder also appears to be part of the serial spree. A friend of the murdered man asks handsome but often-frowning detective Isabelo Andújar Jr. (Modesto Lacén, above right, after the screening) to investigate, and he quickly homes in on the trio of close friends, from university days, of the murdered man. One is a wealthy, pompous, and unabashedly racist banker (who refers to Andújar at one point as "Buckwheat"); the second is a Marxist university professor; and the third is a DL architect. Andújar also looks at the boyfriend, a former student of the murdered man; a male hustler who, we learn, is servicing a powerful member of the Puerto Rican Senate; and the murdered man's ex-wife, who is a prime but not very convincing suspect. Along the way, Andújar also has a discussion on gay identity, being out, and self-hatred with a young gay male employee of the pharmacy where his girlfriend, a blonde Puerto Rican woman, works, that keys him in to the film's title and the idea behind it; for closeted men, their existence is like the two faces of Janus, one turned towards the light, the other one, hidden, towards the darkness. Ultimately, through a series of revelations, about the sorts of accommodations that married couples make and the nature of the closet in Puerto Rico's machismo society, Andújar identifies the killer, with even more tragic consequences.

I appreciated the many themes and topics the film addressed or attempted to address. It dealt with class, race and racism, sexual orientation, identification and gender roles, internalized violence and sexual repression and oppression, the power of social and political capital, failed political dreams and accommodation, and so much more. In the short space of the film, Rodríguez (and the screenwriter Gilberto Rodríguez, drawing from Mattos Cintrón's work), portrayed a fairly rich portrait of contemporary San Juan, showing it to be more diverse and cosmopolitan than I might have imagined, while also portraying some of the longstanding retrograde attitudes that still exist. The portrayal of Andújar captures this. While he evidently harbors residual homophobic attitudes--he cannot not bring himself to say the word "gay," choosing instead, as others in the film did, to say "homosexual," until he was corrected by a gay man--his general outlook was portrayed as somewhere between benign and indifferent. Even when he's being aggressively macked by the murdered gay man's boyfriend, his response is to deflect it, and not, as might be the case elsewhere, to go plumb loco. Ultimately, we see that he grasps the true sadness and sorrow at the core of the murderer's actions, but he doesn't grasp the despair, which tips over into sentimentalism and melodrama, that has led to the crime. It's also apparent that he, nor anyone else, for that matter, appears to care about the more extensive series of murders that have occurred; ultimately the film ends with a scene of domestic bliss, in which the black detective and his white girlfriend--both Puerto Rican, of course--can finally come together and find a place within this society, while gay men, we gather, will continue to be killed off, without any recourse to anything beyond partial acceptance and the threat of violence.

Rodríguez, following Mattos Cintrón, draws a parallel between the social hostility and actual and symbolic violence against gays and the various manifestations of racism. One of the film's running jokes is that some people, fellow Puerto Ricans, including some who are visibly of African descent, do see the very dark-skinned Andújar (Lacén at right, with Rebecca Hazlewood, as Chandra, photo from Rojo Tomate) but don't really seem him, except as an alien, an outsider, or a stereotype of one sort or another. But in the case of the latter, not the kinds we might first imagine. In one case, he's mistaken for a babalawayo (santero); in another, a child thinks he's the wise man and king Melchior; in yet another moment, he's thought to be a caddy, a scene that could easily appear in a mainstream US film. In yet another moment, a little boy is terrified just by the sight of this black man, something I've personally experienced in the US more than once, though thankfully it doesn't happen that much any more. Andújar mostly parries this racism, but in an argument with his girlfriend, he articulates his frustration, both with religion and Christmas, but also with the ignorance he has to deal with, noting that the black king he's been mistaken for is actually Balthazar, and that, when his girlfriend offers to celebrate Hannukah and even Kwanzaa if that will inspire some holiday spirit in him, he rejects both, citing the latter as an "American" invention, inauthentic and no remedy for the malaise in the heart and soul he's carrying around. Just as Andújar is the antithesis of racist stereotypes of blacks, the film's portrayal of gay men mostly avoids stereotypes as well, though the narrative of self-loathing resulting in violence and melodrama, though based on a real story, harkens back to deterministic, pre-liberation narratives of gay male life.

While the digital video cinematography is admirably crisp, the filmmaking itself feels little clumsy at times, with shots and effects not really adding up as they could and the editing not as tight as it could be. The gauzy flashbacks are a particular problem. Another issue is the acting: many of the actors over-emote, or act a bit more stagily than is necessary, which I take to be an issue of direction rather than anything else. One example is Mr. Tagore (Vik Kumar), the DL South Asian (see, I said the film showed San Juan as cosmopolitan) storeowner, who klieglights his closetedness fairly quickly, or rather his wife's obvious unhappiness, in combination with his theatricality, does so. Just a little more restraint would have gone a long way. Lacén unfortunately has to spend a good deal of the film trying to look and act as glum, disaffected and serious as is humanly possible, but when he's got something to work with, he's great, and he's a glory to look at, a force field of beauty at the center of the film. What I told C when I recounted my thoughts on the film was this: while there are some obvious faults with the acting, directing and script, the overall ideas and freshness of the story outweighed them for me, and I was glad I saw the film and suggest others do to if it comes through where you are. As one of the producers, Iván de Paz, who was present with Lacén after the screening noted, the film tackles issues that are still very controversial in Puerto Rico (not just homophobia, but also classicism, racism, and "interracial couples," to use his words), in a fairly direct way.

At the top of this review is a photo I took of Modesto Lacén, chatting with someone who was in the screening and afterwards was talking up black film festivals in California. If you want to see Lacén these days, catch the off-Broadway production of Celia: The Life and Story of Celia Cruz, in which I believe he said he plays the great salsera's husband, Pedro Knight (photo at left from the NY Post, Xiomara Laugart, at left, as Celia Cruz and Modesto Lacén, at right, as her husband.) I hope he gets on the Diasporic bandwagon and gets even more roles both in PR and on the mainland: he's a winner.