The BusBoys

Does anyone else remember this group? I first heard them when I was in high school, in the early 1980s, and used to go to the dances hosted by the Black students at several of St. Louis's premiere Roman Catholic girls' schools (Nerinx Hall and Rosati-Kain). (Did they do this in any other city?) Black folks from the county and city would show up to hang out, be seen ("feature") and dance. There were few fights or violence, and the prep style was in. The DJs would play both contemporary and classic R&B and soul (Chic, Cameo, Kool & the Gang, Earth Wind & Fire, the Commodores, Stacy Lattisaw, etc.), New Wave and post-punk music (Devo's "Whip It" and the B52s' "Rock Lobster" would always draw everyone to the dancefloor, as would Blondie), and they'd occasionally throw down tracks people considered "out there" but loved to hear, like Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express." This was the era when hiphop was just catching on, so you'd only really hear Sugar Hill & the Gang, Kurtis Blow, Afrika Bambataa, and a few other rappers, if any.

One of my favorite songs that I always waited for at these parties was the BusBoys' "Did You See Me": opening with a bouncy, infectious hook, a repetitive little ditty hovering between New Wave, punk, funk, and R&B, with a beat that made you want to not only dance, but bop till you almost started hopping, I would sing the words without thinking:

"Did you see me
I saw you
did you see me, oh yeah
I saw-aw-aw-aw you...."

This was one of those songs that I, even though a total nerd--as these posts surely make clear--had to dance to, and so I'd either ask my cousin or later, when I got my own jalopy, my female running buddy, to dance to, or in the event that some man had already snapped them up, I'd beg some poor girl to join me on the floor, or worst come to worst, I'd dance all by myself (I hadn't yet heard about the Warehouse or the Garage, where people danced by themselves all night long). And though I'm a total klutz, I knew how to dance and love to do so, especially to songs like this. Part of it was the beat, part of it the lyrics, and for whatever reason, I always perceived an x-ray aspect to the song's refrain--it was as if the Busboys' lead singer were singing directly to me, telling me that despite the fact that I felt and was totally invisible (I didn't have on the freshest clothes and kicks, especially nothing with labels, had no social graces, wasn't particularly handsome, didn't have a flashy car, wasn't rich or the son of someone famous--all the things everyone else seemed to value--and above all, I was deeply in the closet, and felt utterly like a phony, since not one of those beautiful girls, and St. Louis had many, sparked even the smallest flame), he--or someone--saw me. Talk about wishful thinking! But that's what the song communicated to me.

I also liked that their album was called Minimum Wage Rock & Roll, with songs like "Johnny Soul'd Out" and "KKK," which carried an air and aura of social consciousness. But its irony and humor and boldness also distinguished them because this was the era (the Reagan era, to be specific) when Black folks were being written out of rock & roll history, and to be into Black and into rock & roll might get you called "weird" or "not black" or something else kind of ridiculous. (Fishbone and In Living Color were just around the corner.) Yet the BusBoys were remaking it. Hell, tell me again, what musical form did Chuck Berry, Ruth Brown, Little Richard, Fats Domino and other similar musicians pioneer? Thank you: rock & roll. The BusBoy's music even paid direct homage to this era. In a bit of reverse snobbery, I felt cool--like a "connaisseur," as we'd say--liking them and knowing they weren't a group everyone was into. When I caught them in the fall of my sophomore year of high school on Fridays, that hilarious, bizarre comedy sketch show starring Michael Richards and other comics that came on for three seasons in the early 1980s, I nearly flew up to the moon! The BusBoys performed "Minimum Wage," "KKK" and a third song I can't recall, though it wasn't "Did You See Me." This temporarily elevated Fridays far above Saturday Night Live in my eyes.

They really blew up when one of their songs appeared on the "Ghostbusters" soundtrack, then they appeared in "48 Hours." According to their site, they are still recording and touring, and performed at a New Year's Day Bowl on ABC. Brian O'Neal, the lead singer, was involved with Eddie Murphy's recent film "Haunted Mansion." A new BusBoy's album/CD is coming next year.

Anyways, even now when I think of this song, when it runs, as it does occasionally through my head, I think of those parties, and smile, and want to get up and dance: "I saw-aw-aw-aw you...."

William Pope.L

Another entry on the fly, since it's the last week of the quarter, exam time, meaning I have papers and stories to read and grade for days.

To bide my mind, I imagine a dialogue between Jn.Ulrick Désert, Adrian Piper and William Pope.L. Can you hear it? I almost can....

To capture that phantom frequency, we have to tune to the proper signals. Let's try:

Here (Art images)
Here (On Research Channel TV)
Here (Underground Railroad Crawl in Maine)
Here (The Friendliest Black Artist in America)
Here (The Black Factory)
Here (The Black Factory v. 2)
Here (The Africana Q&A)

Seems "some things you can do with blackness."

Let me know what you hear(d).

Sunday Quote: Hélène Cixous

"I have talked about these authors who are dear to me. Why do I feel a certain joyful love for them? Because they all inspire me with a feeling that resembles Genet's love for his "Le Funambule": they inspire me with fear and admiration. I feel fear and confidence.... Because what they reveal is audaciousness, which consists in saying the worst, in writing the worst, making apparent, naming the worst. I am not talking about religious people; these are poets. It's not about confessing oneself. This fascinates me, because confession puts into play something which seems to me impossible and terrible: erasure. Are we supposed to be amnestied? Confession treats ritually what is absolutely untreatable.

"It so happens that these authors emerged wounded and enraged from a scene of confession. Because there is no God in their texts, even when there may be some in their hearts. That's another thing. There is no religion. There is the human."

--Hélène Cixous, "The School of the Dead," from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

Rashawn Brazell Update

Larry, Donald and many others have posted important commentary on Rashawn Brazell's murder, the Sakia Gunn memorial, and related issues. Bernie has provided a list of five excellent ways to make your voice heard. For those who can make it, there's a call to action on Blackfunk's site.

On Sunday, March 13th, 2pm-7pm, Black Funk will be the site of a community gathering and ritual to (re)member Rashawn, offer healing and comfort to the spirit of Rashawn given the violence of his transition and the desecration of his body, offer healing to each other as we acknowledge the pain this murder has caused in the community, pray for justice, and discuss community action.

Please contact us at Black Funk for more information via email at Information or via phone at (718)636-0345.

Bring candles (white, blue, and yellow), sage, jasmine and myrrh incense, music to sing, drums, florida water, A STONE (about palm-sized), flowers, and any other ritual item you feel appropriate for the purpose of the ritual (see above). Of course you may bring food and drink as well.

Diary of a Mad Black Woman: An Afro-Christian Bourgeois Fantasy

Last night I saw the new film that's garnering considerable attention--critical brickbats and popular acclaim--Tyler Perry's Diary of a Mad Black Woman. (I keep wanting to type Blackwomyn!) A lot of the discussion of this film so far has centered on its opening weekend take, which was over $30 million, and Perry's prior popularity (and success, to the tune $75 million in receipts for his plays) primarily among Black audiences. In America, capital is king, er, president. But Perry is a hugely successful playwright, and Diary's box-office success is noteworthy. Also, Perry deserves more attention in the wider media culture; any white artist drawing as many fans and banking as much loot would be roundly celebrated by now (cf. Thomas Kinkade). To that end, he has now appeared on "Oprah" touting the movie, and I imagine it's only a matter of time before more of his plays and screenplays hit the big screen, with Hollywood's backing.

So what did I think? Well, let's start with the good. Perry's humorous portrayal of Madea (M'Dear), a quasi-archetypal, quasi-stereotypical Black Southern grandmother, made me laugh out loud more than once. Perry-Madea, in fact, carries the movie, and when s/he's on screen it's 100 times more interesting than when she's not. She packs a gun, cusses up a storm, cuts off her ankle-tracking bracelet, chainsaws her philandering grandson-in-law's furniture...I often found myself wanting a remote to fast-forward through the...well, I get to that soon...to the scenes featuring Madea. In fact, I realized half-way through the film that I wished Perry had completely structured the film around Madea, sort of like Martin Lawrence's Big Momma's House, whose traces lay all over this film, though Perry appears far more comfortable in his role and drag than Lawrence did: he is Madea, and I say this with praise. (He even appeared more at home as Madea than he did as the straight, devout grandson character.) Moreover, Madea's character served as a counterweight to the moralism of the rest of the film. In fact, she openly mocked the Bible and couldn't make it to church, a marvelous little touch of subversion I wish Perry had explored more. I hope a bona-fide Madea: The Movie (not just the videos he's already issued) is coming soon, and that in it Perry really lets loose.

Then, there was the performance of actress Kimberly Elise, in the lead role of Helen. She thoroughly worked what little she was given, managing to create a real and affecting character out of something far more stock and romance-novelish. I haven't seen a Black actress so lovingly and beautifully captured--and here I mean in sheer visual terms--on film in some time. Watching Kimberly Elise move through this role made me wish that there were more vehicles for the talented Black actresses (and other actresses of color) out there. Plus, Shemar Moore, with his beard and (fake?) cornrows, certainly looked delectable, and I'm not a big Moore fan. But he looked good and pressed his acting talents to their limits, which counts for something.

Now, for the bad: The movie was a tissue of clichés, with a hole-riddled plot which featured a number of implausibilities. (The court-shooting scene, however, was scarily prescient given the events of the last few days.) Maybe there are smart, attractive Black women who feel incapable of doing anything, but I have yet to meet one, so I totally could not buy this aspect of the Helen character's predicament. The script was often treacly (though some of the actors worked hard to overcome it), sentimental and melodramatic, bubblegummed up with trite dialogue. At times Diary, rather than echoing or riffing on other films, felt like like a bad patchwork quilt of them (The Nutty Professor, Misery [which was actually mentioned--as if we wouldn't get it...], Big Momma's House, etc.), and it didn't seem sure as to what sort of film it wanted to be. Many of its characterizations (the crazy old uncle, the drug dealer, the crackhead prodigal wife/daughter, etc.) verged on or were stereotypical--and not merely archetypal--to the point of approaching minstrelsy. On the other hand, the portrayals of reality were utterly fantastical (that was the cleanest "hood" outside of Los Angeles that I've ever laid eyes on!). On top of all this, it was annoyingly moralistic and evangelical--to the point of including a song that backslapped Buddhism and Islam, mind you!--and preachy. At more than one point, it was clear that although a even semi-sentient being could have grasped that it aimed to be a kind of Christian fairy tale (yep, irony alert), the scriptwriters still felt the need to have the characters actually mention the words "fairy tale" more than once. Thank you, we're all that stupid, come again.

More on the moralism. Now, I did spend a good part of my youth in Christian churches (Roman Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, etc.), so I'm quite familiar with the Bible and Holy Scripture, and I would imagine many of Perry's fans are too. So why was it necessary to hammer the viewer over the head with doctrine, to have characters uttering such obviously banal and dogmatic lines? At times, I couldn't help but laugh when these Sunday School moments came up, though the moment when Kimberly Elise's character noted in her diary that her "good Christian" proletariat (hmm....) rescuer, Orlando (Moore), gave her something better than lovemaking, he gave her "intimacy," pricked my ears: this expansive view of "intimacy" and tenderness struck me as one of the most interesting, non-Madea moments on screen. Because in fact what does "intimacy" really mean, even outside a Christian framework? What sorts of deep, spiritual, affectionate yet non-copulative, non-genital relations are possible between people, and why is it so difficult for our society, at least the adults among us, to address this topic without moralism? I don't think Perry was going there, but it fascinated me.

In truth, I admit to being ambivalent this movie. Why? Because although I could connect with it to a great degree based on my background and past experiences (or as Bourdieu might say, my shared habitus noir with its target audience), it felt at times almost like watching a foreign film. The hypercommercialism and bourgeois values at its heart; the moralism and prudery; the fantastic aspect of the romance; its redemptive trajectory and sappy happy ending--all of these elements felt alien to me and my life today. Well, not exactly alien, but I can't approach them uncritically, especially not in post-9/11, post-November 4, 2004 African-America. Though I know where the film is coming from and what it aims to do, Diary offers almost no intellectual or aesthetic challenges, especially at this moment of societal crisis, and Lord knows, right now we need some. It was, really, an intermittently funny, sometimes tedious, usually soap-operaish, but beautifully filmed Afro-Christian bourgeois fantasy. Thing is, this is definitely not my thing.

I cannot help but think of this film in light of Charles Burnett's 1990 treasure, To Sleep with Anger, a lambent but sadly underappreciated film that dealt, in an unforgettable way, with the complexities of a Black family's relationships, faith and the spirit (including the supernatural). The comparison made me lament that there aren't more works of the level of Burnett's artistry (or at least striving for it) and so many of the Diary kind. I applaud Perry's success and yes, I know, sometimes it's important to give the people what they want (and I'm not such a snob that I can't enjoy comedy of the likes of Friday or Barbershop, whatever criticisms I have of them). Or as my friend and fellow poet Tony Medina once harshly wrote, "Do the people love it?" Sometimes the answer is an unambiguous "No," and that's not a bad thing either.

Jn.Ulrick Désert

Back to conceptualism on a snowy Friday, a brotha's take: Jn.Ulrick Désert

Patriotic burqas, chocolate stigmataed babies' hands, "phat lips," teacups and saucers featuring enslaved women staring back at you, uncut German male genitalia. Get ready a bit of cognitive dissonance, or turbulence, as you will.

Or as he says on his Website:

"Jn.Ulrick Désert is a visual artist living and working between USA and Europe.

His conceptually based projects vary from Sculpture, Photography, Video, Prints, Performance and deal with shifts in perception and the fluidity of meanings."

Check it out. What do you think?
---
3.11.2004 / 3.11.2005 (Don't forget)

Sake pase nan Ayiti?

What's happening in Haiti?

A little reminder: last year, 2004, was the 200th anniversary of the Haitian Revolution, which created the first Black free state--and the second free nation after the USA--in the Americas. Haiti's remarkable self-liberation unleashed a chain of history-changing events. Among other things, it freed hundreds of thousands of enslaved people on the island of Hispaniola (which includes what is now the Dominican Republic); it directly contributed to the eventual decolonization of Latin American (Simón Bolívar received arms, supplies and fighters for his campaign to liberate what became Grán Colombia) and the rest of the Caribbean; and its presence pressured the European powers themselves to end slavery (Britain would emancipate slaves in its colonies two decades later). Haiti, both literally and figuratively, was to enslaved blacks across the Americas a beacon of possibility and promise.

Fast forward to 2004, which was to have been a year of celebration and commemoration, like the US's Bicentennial in 1976 (I was "John Henry" in a play that year). Haiti's democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had previously been overthrown in the early 1990s by a cabal backed by the US, then restored to power by President Clinton, was again overthrown by rebels who very likely had US backing. In fact the US and France, Haiti's historical nemesis and former colonizer, flew Aristide out of the country, and placed a puppet in control, as Aristide's supporters were gunned down and the rebel leaders, who included several known human rights violators, triumphantly rode and strode through the streets of Haiti's first capital. Aristide claimed he'd been deposed, the US denied it. Ignore him, we were told, this was the start a new day in Haiti; the intransigent opposition, which had claimed Aristide was dictatorial (though he was freely elected, mind you), was going to work with the new leadership, and everything was going to turn out well.

Only it hasn't. It's March 2005, and the U.S. media barely utters a word about Haiti, which remains in dire shape, unless there's a slaughter or hurricane damage; in fact, despite the presence of US troops and UN peacekeeping forces, the rebel leaders and forces remain armed and powerful. Aristide's supporters also are armed, and are demanding that he be allowed to return from his exile in South Africa. A vacuum exists in the country's executive branch, while its legislature is still at loggerheads, and its police force is ineffectual. Despite all the talk of "democracy" flowering in the Middle East, it has yet to be resown in Haiti, which in the meantime has been devastated by floods and the grinding poverty that withheld international loans and foreign aid over the last few years have only exacerbated. In short, the situation in Haiti, that beacon, remains grave, and the current administration is showing no desire or will improve things. The new Secretary of State is busy mending fences (or burning them) with Canada and Mexico. Does she even realize the problems her boss has created in Haiti (let alone anywhere)?

One of these days (soon) I want to go to Haiti, particularly when the political situation is a bit more stable. I figured I'd get some learning on in advance with Kreyòl. Actually, my amazing friend, polymath Ella T., who's the editor of Revolution/Revolisyon/Révolution: 1804-2004: An Artistic Commemoration of the Haitian Revolution (Liv Lakay, 2004), suggested I do so a few years ago. In fact, I even know some writers who write in Kreyòl, like Patrick Sylvain--and Haiti has produced some of the best writers (and visual artists) in this hemisphere. For a while I could only say about two phrases, "Sak(e) pase?" (Whassup?) and "Mesi [anpil]," (Thanks [a lot]). Then it was "M ap aprann kreyol."

Men kounye-a m kapab pale ak ekri piti kreyol. M kompran plis men vokabilè-mwen se piti. Premyèman m panse toujou mo franse yo! M konnen ki chemen sa a se lon ak gen anpil pou m aprann. Men ki chemen pa se lon? Lon oubyen brèf, plezi a se pam.

In the meantime, you can write your Senators and Congresspersons about Haiti and ask, "What are you doing to help the situation there?" Nou vle lapè men san plis san. [We want peace, but without more bloodshed.]

Wednesday Quote: Samuel R. Delany

"But there are social forces aplenty--and often the same forces that would take away the freedom of speech we vouchsafe for the arts--that, as they would deny that freedom to the arts, would redistribute it to religion and reportage--genres whose relation to that troublesome concept 'truth' I, at any rate, am fairly glad to see a bit more heavily scrutinized at the more respectable levels than, certainly, they are on the lowest and least sophisticated planes. It is not only the freedom to suppress what others say that is wanted, but the freedom to lie as well when necessary--because such lies are assumed somehow to be for 'everyone's good.'

"Art seems the best genre-set in which to allow total freedom of expressionn (the full range, as Kenneth Koch put it, of 'wishes, lies, and dreams') because that genre-set is the symbol-making engine for the culture."

--Samuel R. Delany, "Pornography and Censorship," from Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary (Wesleyan, 1999).

Adrian Piper's Out of Order, Out of Sight

This past weekend, I went on one of my now increasingly rare book-browsing excursions in Chicago. (Abe.com and similar sites have gradually replaced those gas-burning, hour-devouring jaunts.) At one of my favorite bookstores, a short walk from Wrigley Field, I came across a book that my friend Jerry W. had mentioned to me right around the time it was under preparation, the philosopher and artist Adrian M. S. Piper's Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992 (MIT Press, 1996). Like a kid spotting choice candy beneath a freshly burst piñata, as soon as I eyed it I raced over and snatched it up. No one else was leaving the store with this book, at least not without my arm attached!

Piper is one of the artists I most revere, and it was a delight to find this book, which I'd wanted so badly but couldn't afford back when I caught a retrospective of her work at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art back in 2000, I believe, with my friend Reggie H. Who is Adrian Piper, you might be asking? One of the most important artists of the last 40 years. After studying painting, she began her art career in the late 1960s as a rigorous abstract conceptualist before pushing her work in a range of different, though linked, directions: performance, drawing and collage, installation, videos, photography, sound art, cross-genre works, and many other forms. Since the mid-1970s, much of her work has turned on the themes of gender, race, racism, xenophobia, and ethics, to varying degrees, and has also drawn heavily on Piper's autobiography and personal experiences, though central to all of her artwork is her exploration of concepts and ideas.

Around the time that she began her conceptual art practices, she undertook the formal study of philosophy, and in due time received an undergraduate and doctorate in this field, her thesis focusing on rationality. She has gone on two maintain multiples careers, as an artist and art critic, and as an academic philosopher, specializing in ethics and metaethics, with particular emphasis on Kant (one of my favorite philosophers). She also started studying yoga while still in her teens, and is an authority on that vast subject as well. The stress of juggling so many careers, as well as the hostility she has encountered, for numerous reasons, has taken an extraordinary toll, and in recent years Piper has been quite ill.

In describing Piper thus far, I have attempted to talk about her in a way she might (or might not) find acceptable, which is to say without emphasizing two key facts about her, one of which is by now quite evident: that she is a woman; the other is that she's an African American. In fact, Piper is one the key female figures in 1970s conceptual art, and the first African-American to gain recognition (and lose it, for a while) for her work in this area. She also was, I believe, the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard, and later, the first tenured black woman at the institution where she still teaches, Wellesley College (that experience, however, has been nightmarish for Piper, as she makes clear on her Website). She is also one of the few African-American female academic philosophers, and one of the most distinguished. And yet, while Piper has repeatedly and enthusiastically articulated her recognition of these facts, she has also been very wary of labels, in part of their arbitrary and oppressive nature, particularly with regard to racial minorities. In fact, she could (and can) pass, and in fact has utilized this attribute (of physiognomy and external, social perception) as the ground (tropos) of a number of her artworks. (She also joined a Puerto Rican gang in her youth. I am wondering now how another artist or theorist might use some of Piper's practice to explore identity--particularly that of latinos, particularly afrolatinos, and other mixed peoples in the U.S.--more deeply.)

Her artistic practice has, in fact, grappled with the concepts of language and naming, identity and identification, marginality, and the socialization and social formation of perception, not simply from the female and black perspectives, but within the broader frameworks of ethics as they bear upon gender and feminism, and racism and racialization, which she has powerfully and relentlessly critiqued. (Subsequent artists, such as Glenn Ligon, for example, have riffed on some of her artworks, such as her "Drawing Exaggerating My Negroid Features.")

Her famous cards from the 1980s are indicative, to some degree, of her work: when she would overhear white people making racist remarks in her presence without realizing she was black (and she didn't follow one of several detailed strategies, such as reprimanding without "racing" herself; announcing she was black; announcing in advance that she was black; etc.), she would had them calling cards that read:

Dear Friend,
I am black.
I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to alert white people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative, or socially in appropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe that there are no black people present, and to distribute this card when they do.
I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.
Sincerely yours,
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper.

Just imagine the response! I look forward to exploring this book, and urge all to explore Piper's artwork (and if you have philosophical training, her difficult but revelatory texts on ethics) if and when you can. Now, I have to find Volume 2, which features her art criticism.

Rashawn Brazell

A different sort of post than the previous ones here: on February 17, 2005, New York City transit workers discovered the body parts of a beautiful 19-year-old Bushwick native, Rashawn Brazell, in a subway tunnel in Brooklyn. In subsequent weeks police investigators found more evidence of Brazell's grisly murder, and now are supposedly engaged in an active investigation. (The print and TV media, according to at least one news source, has stopped focusing on Brazell's death.) I was back at home in the New York area with my partner C. the night the news about Rashawn Brazell's murder initially broke, and I felt an immediate sense of grief and loss that lingers on.
Other bloggers, including destiny's bastard, anzidesign, and stevengfullwood have posted moving statements about him, and about their own feelings of anger, sorrow, loss. He has been discussed as if he were a piece of...meat. One news account, on a gay Website, has screwed up the date he disappeared. His mother has stated that "he had girlfriends" in response to the news that he had a boyfriend--that he loved men. And I worry that the police inquiry into his death might wane or dwindle or not be taken as seriously as if a white or straight (or straight white) person were found under similar circumstances. This post, then, is an additional memorial, and memento mori, and little beacon, on his behalf. I pray that they find his killer swiftly, before another person, another brother, another gay person (cf. Nubian Knight, a black member of the NY-area leather community also brutally slain in Brooklyn, about whom planetblack posted a year ago, or Sakia Gunn, stabbed to death in Newark when she refused the advances of a straight man), suffers this fate, of literal and symbolic dis-memberment. I also want to re-member this young man I never met, and again say the name the media is already forgetting, his name, y/our name: Rashawn Brazell.

Sunday Quote: Henry James

"We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
--Dencombe, in Henry James's The Middle Years

Ralph Lemon: Come home Charley Patton

Tonight I was fortunate enough to see one of the final performances of the third part of Ralph Lemon's dance theater Geography Trilogy: Come home Charley Patton. I saw it thanks to wonderful colleague who's a major scholar of dance and who participated in several events surrounding the show. She was able to get me a comp ticket, so I drove down to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art to experience Lemon and his troupe performing.

Come home Charley Patton is an emotionally provocative, wrenching and uncanny show. Wrenching and provocative because of the many tragic thematic threads (racism, lynching, suicide, the Civil Rights movement, etc.) than run through it, for two solid hours. Uncanny, because Lemon, in this work, enters into dialogue with the past, with the ancestors, with the spirits and the Spirit, with (our) ghosts, and he embodies these home-y and yet defamiliarizing conversations in the dances themselves, in the show's multiple screens (one showing a cartoon James Baldwin, the other scenes of Lemon in Duluth, where the lynching the show focuses on took place, but also in parts of the South), in the doublings and pairings and moves far beyond naturalism or the commonplaces of 20th century avant-garde dance practice--there's a moving mic stand, two (hidden) ladders (Nardi Ward's, but also the Jacob's, Puryear's, Cixous'?), two video panels, a table that horses itself forward....



Charley Patton is a collage, layers upon layers, a densely tissued dance-text brimming with parallels, correspondences, fractures: It begins and ends with Baldwin's speaking figure, which frames two scenes (in part) with water: the first is a screened video of Lemon "wading in the water," in a bayou-like setting, as he carries a teacup and tries to read a short story by Arna Bontemps, of a suicidal black couple who've lost five children (to the Great Migration?), while the second is a startling moment in which Lemon literally dances, struggles to, falls down, while being jetted by a (Southern) fire hose.

In between Baldwin and Baldwin, the wading and the waterhose, we get snippets of narratives, from which Lemon migrates through motifs that become the ground for individual and group dances: holding up (a wall), blues jigs, buck(s) dancing, whistling, circus performances, falling down. The Bontemps narrative shades into one about a man, Elias Clayton, who was lynched in Duluth, Minnesota. Lemon, on video, visits the spot where the tree stood, where a monument stands. He dances in commemoration, in echo, on screen. The quintet of dancers mirror his performance--hanging, leaning, lying down--and deconstruct it on stage. A counter-memorial. Woven into these fragment-currents are stories from Lemon's research travels, his encounters with aging blues musicians and their families, his grandmother's gun-loving boyfriend who mirrors a character in one of the stories, various songs (the Smiths, Rogers & Hart, Dumaine's Jazzola Eight, Giuseppi Verdi):

The screens, one high above on stage right, the other larger and moving from center stage to the wings, evoke documentary, spectacle, the media, the panopticon of history, law, society--what is being seen, televised, viewed (can I get a witness?) and what has been and is being lost, except to memory, mourning, re-membering, revival. The performance, as a show, as a series of dances is not only embodiment--in the strikingly beautiful figures of satin-shirted Ralph Lemon and his five fellow brightly clad dancers, two women (Gesel Mason, Okwui Okpokwasili) and three men (Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Darrell Jones, David Thomson), but also disembodiment--the videos, Baldwin's animation (by Lemon), his and other voices from offstage, whispers, lip-synching, hidden sets (visible only to parts of the audience). The simulation (video) becomes the real (the space/place of the performance and our experience of it). Ephemerality--no performance of Come home Charley Patton can ever be the same, no experience of our pasts, are ever fully isotopic with another, and yet the echoes, the traces, of our run through all we do. The spirit(s)=the thread=the dance(rs). What is communicated, translated, transferred, lost. Literally body moving. After Chicago, the troupe goes to Pittsburgh on March 19, to the African American Cultural Center there, and then this third part, and the entire trilogy, end.

Lemon conjures spirits, lets them stir and dance among the dancers, in them--Baldwin, Bontemps, Clayton, the couple, Aunt Tempe and Uncle William, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Jacques Brel, and so on--but plays with impersonation as well--Okpokwasili plays him, sings Nina, Roland Hayes "Liedering." Unfolding, unpacking, decomposing--the motifs, linguistic and performative, become the starting point of improvisation, repetition, revision, decomposition. The dancers literally fold, unfold, battle themselves, among themselves, before they can reunite as one. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. At times they are mirroring each other; at others, they are slamming body against body, falling (to the floor). Blacks and blues, bruises. Circles, patterns. Ladders--there are two, and no one can stay on them. The chair collapses: the trapdoor=hanged. The hoop becomes a skirt, a noose--no basketball, but a body, p[ress]asses through it.

(And here in Chicago, another significance: in every whistle Emmett Till's smiling, and later mangled face, Mamie Till Mosley's anguished and courageous voice.)

There were moments of obscurity, passage of the hermeticism Lemon himself has decried in his earlier work. In parts, a difficult [language] game and system, as all artworks are, though I felt I was able to enter this one even with reading the extensive notes in the program. At least once during a slowly and steadily unfolding, repetitive sequence, which I later realized was an attempt to make the audience literally squirm, I glanced at my watch and thought, "Is this show going to go for all two hours?" Then the dancers broke apart, sped things up, and we arrived at the fire hose scene....

"Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?"--Gauguin's greatest painting, yes, but also the questions Lemon is asking--who are we as Americans spiritually, socially, politically, aesthetically, ontologically, in the 21st century? What is memory, and what does it mean to re-member, to memorialize? He's answering, in part, through dancing. Paraphrasing Clyde Taylor, how can we be post-modern when we are still grappling with modernity? But then, Baldwin says (the one thing I was able to write down) at the very end of the show, of the presence of Africa (in us), "The center of the world has shifted, and the definition of man has shifted with it."

If you're in Pittsburgh on March 19, don't miss this astonishing work. If not, let's hope it's issued, at the very least, along with the first and second parts of the trilogy on DVD.
***
Addendum: After the show, through the graces of my colleague, I got a chance to meet Lemon, had him autograph my copy of Geography: art/race/exile (Wesleyan UP, 2000), and also speak to several of the dancers (Thomas, Mason, Gervais, Johnson). I have to say, Lemon and his fellow dancers--lean, lithe, bolt-upright--were as beautiful in person and presence as in their performance. The aesthetics of dancers: a topic for a future post.

Isaac Calderón's "Winterreise"

My former student, el baroquista Francisco M., introduced me via e-mail to a true daemon, the Valencia-based young wordslinger Isaac Calderón (1978-). In exchanging words and works, he sent me a copy of his (currently) unpublished manuscript, Menarchia del Ave Adolescente, or in English, Menarche of an Adolescent Bird.

Yes, the title is as fanciful and bizarre as it sounds, and the little collection, though brief, manages to do it justice: it is florid, fanciful, and freely ranging in its quotations and lyric exuberance, presenting an autolibretto of passionate surrealistic transformation that reaches, in its incantations (not to be sung, Calderón tells, us: no cantes) towards a sacred music beyond literal transparency as it desacralizes the poetic body. The "rot's dominion" of the winter journey below isn't an idle note.

Here then is one of the poems in the first section, "Música," which draws its title from the lyric song-cycle of Franz Schubert, followed by my translation. (As always, I greatly appreciate any suggestions for improving the translation!)

Winterreise: a journey for a winter Friday in Chicago.

***


El blanco es un silencio que de pronto puede comprenderse

Wassily Kandinsky

Escribo para que la muerte me encuentre vacío

Juan Ramón Jiménez

Winterreise*


Alma, me vacío: invierno la palabra invierno la palabra invierno
la palabra florece y el invierno es azar que la cercena es una virgen prócida el invierno
sagrado enterramiento de lo que es sagrado y aún refulge

yo vivo en el invierno de navíos nervados que se vierten
en la orilla del blanco del silencio blanco del silencio blanco
vivo en el navío del invierno

cuando la muerte hable desde la adolescencia de los árboles desnudos que aún duermen
-su cabello es el bosque, yo crezco en sus raíces- encontrará su eco,
porque flores futuras son las que yo espero, y flores dejaré sobre la tierra

cuyo latido sea contra el dominio de la podredumbre,
y el viento no será tan viento para poder arrebatarlas
y el hombre no será tan ángel para poder ajarlas

cuando la muerte cante dentro de mi invierno
me encontrará vacío como un silencio blanco
ondeado por la mariposa de los días

*Obra de Franz Schubert. Este poema encabeza la tesis doctoral de David Freudenthal

--Isaac Calderón, Copyright, 2005.


My translation:



White is a silence which suddenly can be understood

Wassily Kandinsky

I write so that death will find me empty

Juan Ramón Jiménez

Winterreise*


Soul, I empty myself out: winter the word winter the word winter
the word blooms and winter is the chance that the trimming is a death-seeking virgin winter
sacred burial of what is sacred and still glitters

I live in the winter of ribbed ships that are spilling
in the border of the white of the white silence of the white silence
I live in the ship of winter

when death speaks from the adolescence of the stripped trees which still sleep
--its hair is the forest, in its roots I grow—it will meet with its echo
because future flowers are what I wait for, and I will leave flowers all over the earth

whose beat stands against rot's dominion
and the wind will not be such a wind that it can weed them
and man will not be such an angel that he can stir them

when death sings within my winter
it will find me empty as a white silence
waved by the days' butterfly

*Work by Franz Schubert. This poem heads the doctoral thesis of David Freudenthal.

--Translation by John Keene, Copyright 2005.

The Sontag Blogwagon + Some Books

I hope to write something longer in the future about Susan Sontag's work, particularly the relationship between her criticism on fiction and her own prose fiction texts, but for now I'll defer to Michael Bronski's well considered article, "Notes on Susan," on The Gully, about the choices she made in terms of her public (sexual) identity.

(I know, I know, many blogs and critics have already flogged this point extensively, but as I say in my headline, it's a "bandwagon" I just had to get on since Sontag was and is one of my intellectual and political heroes.) Plus, I have long admired Bronski's critiques, so why not feature him in J's Theater when the opportunity arises?

I've amended this entry to add a link suggested by Reggie H.: Arthur C. Danto's loving tribute in Artforum. He calls Sontag an "aesthetician hero" (though shouldn't this be "aesthetician-hero?"). One interesting point I'd note is that two key figures in Sontag's thought that he doesn't mention, two "lovers," would have to be Friederich Nietzsche (especially the Nietzsche of The Death of Tragedy), and Walter Pater (of the famous "Conclusion" to Studies in the Renaissance). Nietzsche attempts to overthrow the tyranny of rationality, of cold Apollonian order, the "system" that goes all the way back to Plato and which Hegel codifies, for something more synthetic, dangerous, alive, that captures those dark and illimitable spaces in human experience and existence, and Sontag's criticism and fiction are many things but not systematic; while Pater urges us to live utterly in the moment, to capture each precious sensation, to make, as Wilde would formulate in another way, the life as the work of art, which Sontag definitely did. (Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Guy Debord, Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Adrian Piper, William Pope.L, etc., are other figures who've shown ways this might or might not work.) Sontag took both Nietzsche and Pater increasingly to heart, as I suggested to Reggie H., especially in her notion of "an erotics of art," especially as she grew older. An aesthetician-hero, and heroic figure, indeed.

***
A few books I've been looking at (not counting course texts) of late:

• The Rest of Love by Carl Phillips
• Neue Geschichten. Hefte 1-18 by Alexander Kluge (literally looking, as my German isn't sharp enough to read these narratives other than glacially, especially during a teaching quarter; New Directions has just published a selection of stories from his collection Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt [The Devil's Blind Spot], which I also will write about soon.)
• Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B. H. Friedman
• The Last Will and Testament of Señor Da Silva by Germano de Almeida
• Silence by John Cage (I return to this and several of Cage's other texts about once every few years)
• Polysexuality (Semiotext[e] #10), ed. Jim Fleming and Sylvère Lotringer (this one was sitting on my bookshelf, and several commentaries by Charles S. on his now-wiped blog (!) led me to retrieve it after having not opened it for almost a decade)
• The World Republic of Letters by Pascale Casanova (All it took was a stellar review in The Nation to get me to rush out and buy this book, which I cannot put down, and actually assigned at the last minute to one of my classes)
• Fourteen Female Voices from Brazil, selected and edited by Elzbieta Szoka, with an introduction by Jean Franco

Duelo/Duel by Edimilson de Almeida Pereira

Some beauty for a Wednesday: Here is my newest attempt at translating a poem by a Brazilian poet whose work I admire greatly and whom I've translated before, Edimilson de Almeida Pereira (1963-). The poem, "Duelo," comes from his collection Lugares Ares: obra poética 2 (Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições Ltd., 2003). A native of the university city of Juiz de Fora (Minas Gerais, Brazil), where he's a professor, Pereira is one of the most prolific and important Afro/Brazilian poets writing today. He's also a great correspondent. I chose this poem not only because it's so resonant in its simplicity, but also for my friend and fellow poet Reggie H., who is writing a wonderful series of poems on boxers and boxing.
__________

DUELO

Circulo o corpo
sem nome.

Os vidros brilham,
nada sei, nada capto.

Mas é silêncio,
oferecido, o ringue.

--Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, Copyright, 2003-2005.

DUEL

I circle the nameless
body.

Glasses are shining,
I know nothing, catch nothing.

But it is silence,
offered up, the ring.

--Translation by John Keene (2005)

_____
Any suggestions on improving the translation are welcome!

Interview with Marcelo Cerqueira of GGB

This past fall, I published this interview with Marcelo Cerqueira, the President of Grupo Gay da Bahia (GGB), the oldest LGBT and human rights organization in Brazil, in Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide (Vol. XI, No. 6). It appeared in G&LR Worldwide's International Spectrum Department, in slightly truncated form, under the title "Brazil: Organizing for Gay Rights in Bahia." Since the interview was not posted online (do subscribe to G&LR Worldwide, a wonderful journal, if you can), I thought I'd post it here.

***

"DIALOGUE AND LEADERSHIP": AN INTERVIEW WITH MARCELO CERQUEIRA OF GRUPO GAY DA BAHIA (GGB), BRAZIL

Introduction

Salvador da Bahia is perhaps best known to tourists as the most "African" city in Brazil. The administrative center of Bahia State, the third-largest Brazilian city (with about 2.4 million people) and the country's first capital (1549-1763), Salvador's people and culture embody the abiding influence of the African slaves who were brought there for over 300 years, beginning in the early 16th century. Travelers from across the world and Brazil flock to Salvador to hear Bahian native musicians like Caetano Veloso, Olodum and Ilê Aiyê; learn its martial arts tradition of capoeira; witness and participate in the Yoruba-derived rites of Candomblé; and enjoy one the country's three major and most singular Carnival celebrations.

But Salvador has also been home to one of Brazil's most dynamic and oldest LGBT and human rights groups, Grupo Gay da Bahia (GGB). Established in 1980 by visionary scholar and activist Dr. Luiz R. B. Mott, GGB has been a pioneer in advancing human rights and passing anti-discrimination laws, both inside and outside Bahia; in battling HIV and AIDS transmission in Brazil; and in promoting public acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. One area in which GGB has been especially vigilant has been anti-LGBT violence, an ongoing problem in Brazil, especially in the socially conservative northeast region.

During the summer of 2003, I conducted an informal discussion with Marcelo Cerqueira, the President of GGB. (He's also the Co-Coordinator of Quimbanda Dudu, the Black Gay Group of Bahia.) We spoke specifically about his personal activism, GGB's role in Salvador, its efforts to advance gay rights and human rights, and the specific role of black culture among Bahia's homosexuals, among other topics. Since then, LGBT activism has increased across Bahia, and Marcelo has continued to engage in a dialogue with other LGBT groups throughout Brazil, as well as with the Brazilian federal government, now headed by Worker's Party member Luiz Inácio "Lula" Da Silva.

(For more information on GGB, you may visit their Website. They offer basic information in English.)

THE CONVERSATION

John: Hi Marcelo. Why don't you start by telling me something about yourself?
Marcelo: I'm 34 years old. I was born in Salvador and teach history. After I entered college, I began to get involved in student activism and dedicated myself to GGB. For more than 10 years I've been an activist in the movement for the defense of homosexuals' human rights in Brazil. I also am the communications secretary for the Brazilian Association of Gays, Lesbians and Transsexuals (BLGTA).

J: What do you do at Grupo Gay da Bahia (GGB)?

M: In addition to serving as President of the organization, I'm currently dedicating all my time to the homosexual movement in Brazil, and at the same time, I'm writing for Websites, like Farofadigital.com, and newspapers.

J: Not long ago, in early 2003, you ran for public office. What led to your candidacy, and what were your priorities for the LGBT community and for Bahia?
M: I was a candidate to be a state deputy for the Green Party of Brazil, and our campaign goal was to guarantee representation for homosexuals in the country's decision-making centers. GGB has always been an enthusiastic proponent of including homosexuals in politics. That's because we're certain that homophobia in the various decision-making centers has been greatly enhanced by a rise in organized action by evangelical groups. I wasn't elected, but I got 5,445 votes, from those who shared my consciousness and desired a change. [Marcelo once again was a candidate in 2004 and has been involved in an effort called "Desire and Power" ("Desejo e Poder") to elect gay candidates in the major cities of northeastern Brazil.]

J: Returning to GGB, how does the organization serve the local gay communities?
M: GGB offers space for the promotion of health, of rights and homosexual citizenship. We offer health services, as well as specific items like condoms and lubricants, and we serve as an advocate for those who experience prejudice and need rapid action. But our work is especially aimed at forming a favorable opinion in [Brazilian] society on homosexual questions. GGB offers the opportunity for dialogue, but above all we assume leadership in a society that does not know how to live with differences.

J: What is GGB's relation to the other Brazilian LGBT and human rights groups?
M: GGB has the distinction of being the oldest functioning group of its kind in Brazil. It has existed for more than 22 years [Editor's note: now 25!], and we are a national clearinghouse in all kinds of areas, such as the promotion of rights, health, and homosexual citizenship.

J: Are there LGBT groups in the other large Bahian cities or in the smaller towns in the interior?
M: In addition to a community mobilization project and the creation of new leaders, we belong to Project Somos ("We Are"), a national and international organization that combats the spread of HIV/AIDS. In the various Bahian municipalities we are establishing gay groups and our goal is to launch these kinds of organizations in all the cities of Bahia.

J: What other cultural activities are you participating in?
M: The major event that we've achieved is the Bahian Gay Pride Parade. It's a really exciting event for GGB and for the city of Salvador.
[Bahia's 3rd Annual Gay Pride Parade and celebration, which took place in June 2004, drew its largest crowd ever, at over 80,000 attendees.]

J: How do you see LGBT life in Bahia today?
M: Here in Bahia it's very diverse. Young people here are sexually active very early, and that's good because it facilitates the process of coming out as gay. Also, many men here are bisexuals, so it's very difficult to be gay and have a fixed relationship, because many men are available for quick affairs and don't want any commitment.

J: In GGB's Webpages, I saw that the Gay Pride Parade in Salvador has a strong Afro-Brazilian cultural aspect. The parade even begins with a procession of Bahian women in traditional dress. How did that come to pass? What is the importance of Afro-Brazilian heritage for gay Bahians?
M: Salvador is the major black city outside of Africa. As a result, there's no need to state that black culture here is very strong. Candomblé is the religion of black Brazilians and it's also a very important religion for gays, who participate in great numbers, being priests, initiating others; it's marvelous. Sex is not a problem. It's a solution because it's part of the communion with the supernatural. In no way is [LGBT life] different for Afro-Bahians. The beachheads of music and black culture are very vibrant and everyone lives and experiences these aspects of our culture differently from sexual orientation.

J: In your view, how do Afro-Brazilian cultural and political groups relate to Afro-Brazilian gays?
M: With regard to cultural groups and institutionalized black groups, they do have some difficulty in inserting the discourse of the gay movement into their political practice. It doesn't occur on a daily basis because many blacks and mixed people relate themselves sexually with other men, be it for money or pleasure, without thinking about the gay aspect. Take soldiers for example; and I've even had diverse lovers, including some who are policemen. They don't assume that they are having affairs with a gay person. But military guys take part in fetish play and gay men give them what they want, they're even looking for this kind of hookup in the majority of cases.

J: One of the major issues black homosexuals (and African-American people in general) in the USA face is a rise in HIV/AIDS transmission levels. What is the principal issue for Afro-Brazilians? In Brazil and Bahia is AIDS a problem?
M: In Bahia there are around 5,800 people identified as living with AIDS. The profile of the PWA here is male, the majority are men. We don't have a breakdown by color or race. Condoms now have been absorbed into the practice of prevention. But among some people the myth exists that black men's penises are stronger, thicker and larger than whites'. Because of this they think that black men don't get infected by HIV; the majority of Bahians don't believe this, but the myth exists. GGB has already distributed more 2 million condoms.

J: Reading Brazilian Websites and books by Brazilian authors I see that so many aspects of Euro-American culture already are in Brazil: the "bear phenomenon," circuit parties, and now barebacking (sex without protection). What do you think about these issues? Are they the result of globalization or a new form of psychic colonization?
M: I think that the Brazilian gay movement is closely linked to the movement in the USA. And Brazilian gays are really turned on by our American brothers from the north. Sometimes everything is in English: parties (festas) here are called "Party," leaflets and fliers are called "Fly"; even the model of the "body beautiful," the "Barbie" [Brazilian muscle man], is an import. Gay men go to the USA and return crazed, including bringing back novelties like barebacking. It is the effect of gay globalization, of the Pride Parades, but outside the language issues and sex without protection, I don't see much that's bad in all of this.

J: Some Americans believe that Brazil is a country of greater openness and tolerance than the USA in terms of sexuality. But on the GGB site, you've documented many incidents of anti-LGBT violence. from attacks to murders. What is the reality in Brazil and in Bahia? What is the relation between class, homophobia, economics, inequality, and religion?
M: Brazil is a country that's learning pretty quickly to live with gays. Of course, inherent prejudices exist in poor countries. It's true that homosexuals are killed here. More are killed than in Mexico, more than in the USA, and it's a point of shame for us. Many gays are assassinated every year, the fruit of prejudice. It's very contradictory, because Brazilian men like to have sex with gays. Perhaps it's that they have a problem in acknowledging this posture; sometimes after the sex depression sets in. That happens in all places in the world. It's a question that requires ample reflection, an analysis of all the possibilities, including the question of poverty.

J: What are some other current objectives of GGB? What are your goals now?

M: The objectives of GGB consist of expanding the level of information in the general population about homosexuality and creating a culture of respect for differences. Our current goals are guaranteeing social space so that homosexual people can express themselves freely, equally placing the discussion about homosexuality on the political agenda and of human rights in Brazil.

J: Thanks so much, Marcelo, for your time.
M: You're welcome.

--John Keene (c) 2003-2005

Rilke's "To Music" and My "Ode: To Blues"

I hadn't realized, until recently reviewing a manuscript of my poems I've had sitting around for a while, that one of the pieces I'd written was in part a response to another poem that endlessly casts a spell over me: Rainer Maria Rilke's "To Music" ("An die Musik"). Rilke never collected this poem in a volume during his lifetime, in part because it didn't fit the programs of his various books and in part because it is so far out there in its abstraction and attempt to capture an "essence" (of music), to embody the thing itself. (Rilke (1875-1926) often went way out there, though; he's the poet who, let's not forget, after telling us that a "tree ascended there" in the first "Sonnet to Orpheus," has poor Orpheus sing: "O höher Baum im Ohr!" (O taller tree in the ear!) Hello? You know that hurt!)

But seriously, his "To Music" is a strange poem, a haunting one, for me indelible. In fact, it so haunted me that I ended up unconsciously writing a poem that, I believe, deconstructs it while simultaneously speaking directly to and mirroring it. (Ah mimesis, ah dialecticism, ah the agon.)

So here goes:

To Music

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,--
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translation by Stephen Mitchell)

Statues, paintings, stillness, where language ends, feeling that become landscape, which is to say, abstracted, into nature, art--pure, uninhabitable, except by the music itself. That's Rilke's take, and reminds me of another artist, his almost exact contemporary, whose later, 12-tone compositions actually do realize what Rilke's describing almost perfectly: Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). (Interestingly enough, Schoenberg set some of Rilke's early poetry to music, although Schoenberg set his most famous pieces with lyrics either to rather banal poetry by the likes of Albert Girard ["Pierrot Lunaire," "Gurrelieder"] or to quite accomplished texts he wrote himself ["Moses und Aron," "Ode to Napoleon").

*****

So back in 2000 or so, not consciously thinking of Rilke's poem, I wrote an ode (a commemorative poem that also sometimes marks a crisis, which this one did) to the musical form that underlines so much African-American art: the blues. But it's not in a traditional blues form, because I could not manage that; nor is it as abstract as Rilke's poem, I suppose because the blues are not abstract; Rilke was after "pure music"; my immediate aim was to reflect in some way a music that was "impure," rich, roiling, true to (my) (black) experience. So here's what I wrote, and the struggle remains in, is embodied in the poem itself.

Ode: To Blues

Blues: lived funk silence
                         bleeding.

Or: ancestral soul river,

brooding, bearing the lovechild

of sublime improvisation: jazz.

Fearless prophet of undertow, tones
blue and beautiful as welts, bayous,
the invisible routes slaves drew
and redrew on their dream maps.
Broken: renewed. Sung hard
and remixed, the trick's
in the shaping. Lover who leaves
and always returns. Sweet noose
cut loose, feet dancing over the coal
abyss, shout, beat, keloid, jig
and stolen jug. Dank cell and icy asphalt
road, shotgun shack cold as concrete
tower, cold bed where the heart lies
its diamond head unsure
it's gone rise again, back door
by which it slips away
when bad judgment hits
                      like a bullet
or a summons:  black

life, black art,

black life, black art,
this house standing
where the first one stood:
you could pass through, stay,
pass through. Stay.

--John Keene (c) 2000-2005

--John Keene (c) 2000-2005

Mine: life, blood, rivers, keloids, dancing, maps, love: you may keep stepping, but if you want to you can stay. Somebody's always building this house--the music does. All in all, I'll take both. I hope "Ode: To Blues" makes it into a book (the Indiana Review did publish an earlier version a few years ago), but even if not, it will continue to haunt me as much as Rilke's poem--it troubles not only his water, but its own.

The Gates

Well, Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates are coming down starting Monday, and must be completely down in a couple weeks. I was pleased that C. and I got to explore them up close. I tend to be a fan of Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's spectacles and had wanted to see the wrapping of the atoll, the bundled Reichstag, and those umbrellas in California. (Very unlikely.) There's a whiff of charlantry about them, which I tend to admire, as well as genius. I link them to landscape artists and those like Smithson and Tobey working with large-scale earth installations; the earlier conceptualists (from Duchamp onwards) to later incarnations, including the Fluxus folks; Clark, Pape and Oiticica; and spectacle-based artists who attempted to create public, participatory and liberatory experiential artworks; the anti-commodity and self-deconstructive art of Joseph Beuys; installation art; pop art; and the monumentalist traditions in art and architecture. Certainly there are many more possibilities. Aesthetically, I see Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's art aiming towards sublimity, through its scale and the participants' apperception, yet there is the issue of its banality, its kitschiness--of materials, color, and so on. Who all does this take into account? Kant, certainly, ethically and aesthetically, but also such figures as Hegel, Nietzsche, Pater, Dewey, Greenberg, Sontag, Lyotard, and certainly Heidegger (talk about "setting forth a world!"). I also see critiques of the contemporary exchange value of art which point to Marx and Engels, as well as to later figures like Bloch, Adorno, Bourdieu and Althusser. Capital, yes--but exactly how does it figure into the creation and experience of The Gates? Whose labor are we talking about? Don't the masses of people required to mount and break down such creations challenge (while also magnifying) the traditional atelier model? How does such a utopian-seeming, ephemeral work (which will, in eco-friendly fashion, be recycled) fit into the commodity system? Yes, he raised the money through sponsorship, though none of the gates were visibly "branded" as such by corporations; people were marching through the park with all kinds of food and electronic gear; it drew tons of out-of-towners, including yours truly, to Bloombergistan; and Christo maintains the copyright and rights to the images--or so I read--though not each person's memories.



At any rate, I wanted to approach the concepts behind them and my experience with as much openness as possible. No theory, just walking through a space I love, with a man I love (my partner C.), experiencing those bright-orange...gates. Actually, they reminded me more of staples or hurdles, though on a scale for titans (or Gargantua and Pantagruel). The saffron vinyl curtains were...orange. And the immediate effect upon entering the park from Central Park West was...a letdown. At first. Immediately, however, I noticed the throngs of people moving through The Gates and the way both these phalanxes and the gates themselves snaked before and behind us. Against the zinc Sunday sky and the blanched colors of the wintry terrain, with our own voices and those of children and adults and dogs and the ducks ribboning into the chilly air, The Gates were transformed into a breathing, orange, latticed sensorium. As we walked the paths, I made a point to glance upwards at the swaying curtains, and because of the wind patterns, none were the same. Above they might be flapping, while still several yards ahead, or vice versa; and they created a striking visual frame for the familiar, yet constructed world of that amazing park. They were both structures of limit, highlighting the already built walkways, but they also unsettled the familiar visual patterns. We crossed over to the east side, left to get some coffee and nosh, then reentered along the edge of the Reservoir. That was perhaps the highlight. A vast, silvery mirror, on whose western edges blurry orange fringes shimmered, like a necklace of otherwordly lights. I loved the effect, and the immensity of the Reservoir made me think of Kant's mathematical and dynamical sublimes connecting with Lyotard's "il y a" in a way that much smaller scale art (save Yves Klein's blue paintings or Ronald K. Brown's dances) does not. (Sianne Ngai's "stuplime" would be an apt partial description of my own response.) What clicked was the necessity of such vast (and already constructed) spaces for such artwork, which creates a shifting frame and both reconstructs and deconstructs what it adorns. I also fathomed how crucial perspective (in this case actually just being there, as well as other elements such as the weather, time of day, etc.) is in the experience.

I tip my hat to Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Charlatans perhaps, but geniuses as well. Now, when are they going to wrap the Pentagon?

Welcome and First Post: Jay Wright

Nothing would be more fitting to inaugurate this blog than to note that this past week, one of the most innovative and visionary poets in the American and African-American traditions, Jay Wright (b. 1935-) received the Yale University Library's extremely prestigious 2005 Bollingen Prize . The judges noted that, "Daring to extend the tradition of the prophetic voicework, Wright's poetry has for more than 40 years been nothing less than a sustained meditation on the various aspects - historical, spiritual, mythical - of which humanity is woven. The great ambition of his work has not only been to weave these strands into rich, complex, allusive poems but also, in his own words, 'to uncover the weave.'" (Let me add that the judges included two of the finest younger poets we have, Elizabeth Alexander and Carl Phillips.) Though Wright has previously received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the 2000 Lannan Literary Award, and the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, his poetry has not received widespread critical attention or acclaim. Previous Bollingen Prize winners include many of the most highly regarded American poets, including W. H. Auden, e.e. cummings, Louise Glück, Howard Nemerov, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, Laura Riding, Gary Snyder, and Wallace Stevens. Wright is the first African-American to receive the award in its almost 60-year history.

Indeed, because critics and readers have considered Wright's poetry "difficult," and because he often has published with smaller presses, he has been mostly passed over with silence (to echo Wittgenstein), though "difficulty" and/or small-press publication have in themselves not always barred public critical appraisal, as the cases of John Ashbery, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, e.e. cummings, Jorie Graham, Charles Olson, and Wallace Stevens make clear. Nor, I believe, is race the central issue either, though it factors in; Wright's chronological peer Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), for example, has not only received extensive critical examination (and rightly so), but is now considered a "canonical" American poet, particularly within the framework of the American, African-American and experimental traditions.

The key issues in Wright's lack of critical attention are the lack of a consistent critical champion (either from the scholarly or creative worlds), and in the nature of his poetry itself. With regard to the latter issue, his poetics are even in their earliest incarnations highly distinctive and original (yet accessible), though they connect in language and theme (family, African Diasporic traditions, spiritual grounding, and cultural hybridity and transformation) to Anglo-American and European poetic traditions (I see elements of authors as diverse as Herbert, Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Rilke, and Eliot in his work), as well as to a wide array of African-American and African Diasporic writers, including NoLangston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Countee Cullen, Nicolás Guillen, Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Henry Dumas (for whose posthumous collected poems Wright wrote an introduction), Clarence Major, Nancy Morejón, Ishmael Reed, Michael Harper, Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, and even Baraka himself. 

His poetry's aesthetic qualities, which include lyric dialecticism and rigor, and the employment of what would become his poetic signatures, historical, mythological, metaphysical, spiritual, linguistic, historical, and philosophical motifs and allusions drawn from a wide range of cultural traditions, including the pre-Columbian and sub-Saharan Africa (the Dogon, the Bambara, Yoruba, etc.), however, have made it hard to read his poems as transparent representations of the contemporary African-American (or more broadly) American condition, as expressions or statements of personal confession, or as experiments that might be solved or categorized by a simple or ready-made hermeneutics.

Nor are Wright's poems, his poetic opus in general, we might say, political or ideological in the usual sense, though their intense and extensive engagement with the "cross-cultural" imagination, to use the Guyanese novelist and critic Harris's term, is utterly political in the most profound sense, by which I mean that they plumb the very depths of language's capacity to represent being and becoming. But they do so insistently in a framework that draws directly from the experiences of African, Native, and even European peoples in the Americas, as well as from across the globe, from our rich and often mis-understood history. The poetry is capacious in its catholicity of reference, of forms, of statement: it is truly "liberal." One might respond then that few people out there possess the breadth of knowledge necessary to appreciate the work fully; and yet who among us, other than Harold Bloom or a few other extraordinarily erudite figures, for example, possesses the range necessary to grasp the range of allusions in Shakespeare, or Ezra Pound, or Gertrude Stein, or in the work of more recent poets such as Charles Bernstein, Ann Lauterbach, and Charles Wright? Has that stopped critics from reading and praising them?

Some scholars, such as Robert Steptoe, Vera Kutzinski and Harold Bloom, have championed Wright's work, and Kutzinski, in her important study Against the American Grain: Myth and History in William Carlos Williams, Nicolas Guillen and Jay Wright, links Wright correctly, I believe, to the great modernist American and the pathbreaking Afro-Cuban poets. Nathaniel Mackey, an extraordinary writer and critic in his own right, mentions Wright (though without devoting a chapter to him) in relation to such figures as Wilson Harris and Kamau Brathwaite, in his important study Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing. (Mackey's text also crosses the usual racial boundaries by discussing within its pages figures such as Major, Baraka, Creeley, and Robert Duncan). In addition, Charles Rowell quite admirably has devoted much space to Wright's genius in the journal Callaloo, featuring essays by Stepto, poet Gerald Barrax, Isidore Okpewho (an authority of African oral texts and Diasporic literature), Vera Kutzinski, and Wright himself. There have been some non-scholarly critics of Wright's work; I definitely hope that the upcoming issue of Obsidian III devoted to Wright includes critical appreciations and readings some of these writers and artists. But for the most part, Wright has lacked the sort of sustained scholarly or non-scholarly champion enjoyed by other "difficult" poets such as Ashbery (Bloom), Major (Bernard Bell), or Graham (Helen Vendler).

Lastly, Wright's work has hardly been static. As I have mentioned, the earliest work, which appears in the Homecoming Singer and Dimensions of History, is quite accessible, in terms of both form and content; the poetry of Wright's middle period, in the 1970s and 1980s—which includes the books Soothsayers and Omens; Explications/Interpretations; and The Double Invention of Komo, can appear at first glance forbidding. Some of the poems in these collections seem to work better to me than others, though I remain in awe at their overall magnificence and the aesthetic system they create. Beginning with Elaine's Book, and most especially in Boleros and the most recent poems that appear in Wright's collected volume, Transfigurations: Collected Poems, the work synthesizes Wright's philosophical and transcultural explorations with a dazzling and indelible linguistic music. Or, to quote Helen Vendler, in her recent New Republic review of John Ashbery's newest book:

John Ashbery, in a youthful review of Marianne Moore, cited what he called the 'almost satisfactory definition' of poetry given by the nineteenth-century French poet Banville: "[Poetry is] that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them." Poetry expresses ideas, the poet claims, but not by means of propositional statements. Instead it relies upon an underlying 'sorcery' dependent on a combination of sounds (arranged rhythmically, needless to say) that awaken sensations. If the sentences of the poem were written differently, the evoked ideas would disappear.

Certainly this is as true of Wright's unforgettable seguidillas and boleros as it is of Moore's or Ashbery's influential and beguiling lyrics. Wright's music not only aspires to, but achieves "the condition of music," to use Nietzsche's formulation.

All of which is to say, "Congratulations, Jay Wright!" I am not sure that this award will provoke a spike in new readers of Wright's work, but perhaps it might nudge someone at Princeton or some other prestigious institution with connections to the Swedish Academy to give Wright a closer (re)view. In my opinion, a Nobel Prize (and there are many deserving candidates, I admit) would not be out of the question.

***
I also want to note: Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the fulgurant Cuban wordsmith whose skill at punning in multiple languages always struck me as unsurpassed, passed away this past week. Cabrera Infante's works include the novels Three Trapped Tigers (in Spanish Tres Tristes Tigres), Infante's Inferno, and A View of Dawn in the Tropics, and the non-fiction works Mea Cuba and Twentieth-Century Works.