The Parkland Massacre & The Pressing Need for Gun Control

16 of the 17 fatal victims of the
Parkland school shooting
(From NBC News)

Another day, and extremely saddening and confounding to have to say, another school shooting, this one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas School in Parkland, Florida. Yesterday, on Valentine's Day, a 19-year-old expelled student, Nikolas Cruz, arrived on the school campus at 2:19 pm and, according to reports, began his terroristic assault  using a AR-15 assault rifle, ultimately killing 17 students and teachers, several of whom sacrificed their own lives to save others, and wounding over a dozen more. Cruz managed to escape with the fleeing students, walking to a nearby Walmart and then a Subway, but was later apprehended by police at 3:41 pm that same day as he strolled down a nearby residential street.

Reports suggest that despite Cruz's deeply troubled history at home and in school, the young man was able to purchase the AR-15 legally, in February of last year. Orphaned after the death of his adopted father, Roger Cruz, roughly ten years ago and his adoptive mother, Lynda, of pneumonia last November, he had been living at the home of a former schoolmate, whose parents apparently knew about the assault rifle and other weaponry he possessed. Cruz also had been working at a local dollar store at the time of the attack.

In addition to his expulsion, Cruz apparently was known for virulently racist and anti-Semitic postings online. Cruz has been pictured wearing a pro-Trump red cap, and a white supremacist leader also came forward to say that Cruz was linked to his group and had trained with them, though that assertion remains under scrutiny. One neighbor had videotaped Cruz firing off a BB pistol, and classmates stated that, before the murderous assault, they were concerned that Cruz might commit such an attack. Indeed, one teacher came forward to say that the school had been warned not to let Cruz bring a backpack onto campus. The FBI had received a warning about one of Cruz's disturbing social media posts on YouTube, in which he supposedly wrote that he wanted to "be a professional school shooter," but their followup produced no leads. The Bureau has since expressed regret for not being able to do more.

New York Times reporters Julie Turkiewicz, Patricia Mazzei and Audra D. S. Burch note in their roundup of news about the Parkland incident that "with this shooting, three of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history have come within the last three months." Since Adam Lanza's 2012 mass murder of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, 438 people--children, adults--have been wounded in over 200 school shootings, and 138 have died. Moreover, there have been eight school shootings through the first seven weeks of the new year; to put it another way, as the Guardian points out, "guns have been fired on school property in the US at least 18 times so far this year."

School shootings since Sandy Hook, in 2012
Gunshot victims in school shootings:
Red dots = killed; pink dots = injured
(from New York Times)

Under any measure, this is a horrifying and unacceptable situation, though the persistence of such attacks, going back decades (remember Columbine?), and the continued inaction of the US Congress in tightening a range of gun laws--or even severely restricting access to firearms--underlines why these mass tragedies have become almost routine. Indeed, Congress and many stage legislatures, in thrall to the National Rifle Association and similar groups, have moved in the opposite direction, to loosen gun laws, allowing concealed carry provisions, guns in college classrooms, and so on.

At the time of the time of the Newtown massacre, then President Barack Obama vowed to address the crisis with legislation, and received support from many Democrats in Congress. But Republican leaders and legislators in the House and Senate refuse to enact new strictures, or even reauthorize lapsed ones, like the assault weapons ban. Early last year, Donald Trump even signed away the gun check regulation President Obama had put in place to make it harder for mentally ill people to acquire firearms. I should note that while violent crimes have plummeted in the US since the 1990s, other forms of violence, ranging from police killings of suspects to these mass murder events have not slowed. The US remains more armed than some entire foreign militaries, and guns, especially ones than can kill large numbers of people, are too easy to sell and purchase.  One parallel I noted on Twitter was the US's barely discussed but extensive wars across the globe, which continue under Trump's watch as they did under Obama, who inherited a number of them from George W. Bush; these external, almost shadow wars mirror the ones occurring inside our borders, where certain kinds of violence and, as we witnessed yesterday, slaughter have essentially become normalized.

One difference this time may be the outspokenness of the young survivors, who have not been silence since this incident. From outraged parents to students calling out Congress, Florida's governor and legislators, and Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress, the outcry looks like it may have some effect. The key word, of course, is "may"; again and again after these unspeakable tragedies, which do not occur anywhere else in the world outside of wartime conditions with the frequency they do here, we have heard calls for regulation gun access, but the NRA and Republicans--and even some Democrats--stall meaningful legislation. Let's hope that this time is different, and that those slain and injured in Parkland receive at least one tribute they merit, which is to spur those in positions of power to do something, beginning with reinstituting sane gun laws and eventually going much further, to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to acquire a human-killing machine, in order to prevent any more massacres of this kind.

Obamas' National Gallery Portraits Unveiled

Michelle Obama, by Amy Sherald

Yesterday ago a public ceremony, former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama unveiled their official portraits for the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The artists who painted the portraits, Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald respectively, were present at the event, and, like the Obamas, each artist spoke about the process and experience of painting these works, which, as the images reveal, will not only honor the first African American US President and First Lady, but also mark a distinctive aesthetic shift in terms of the ways they represent these major historical figures. It should also be noted that Wiley is the black man and first out, black gay artist to paint a presidential portrait, and Sherald is the first black woman ever to paint one. Amidst the foliage surrounding him, Barack Obama's portrait contains flowers with specific reference to and resonance for the 44th President of the United States. Michelle Obama's image shows a dress specially designed by designer Michelle Smith, under her company Milly, for her Spring/Summer 2017 collection. The dress has the aura not only of a unique flag, but also evokes the long African American and American tradition of quilt-making.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images News/Getty Images

The Obamas selected the artists who painted them. As both Obamas shared, they had discussed their portraits with the artists before the painting process, so neither was a surprise. Each artist had two sittings with the Obamas, and from those the created the portraits revealed yesterday to the public, each taking roughly one year. Both portraits went on display today, though they will not be shown together. President Obama's will become part of the official presidential portrait gallery, while Michelle Obama's will be visible through November 2018 in the National Portrait gallery's corridor of recent acquisitions. Wiley, 40 and a native of Los Angeles, is already quite well known as one of the leading painters of his generation, with shows and work in collections at museums and galleries all over the US and world. Moreover, Wiley had already received a US Department of State Medal of Arts in 2015, which meant that his work would be displayed in US embassies across the globe. Amy Sherald, 44, is less well known, but has had an ascendant career in recent years, winning the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Gallery in 2016. She has suffered from congestive heart failure, which was diagnosed at the age of 31, and successfully received a heart transplant in 2012.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Barack Obama, by Kehinde Wiley

I don't have an elaborate critique of either portrait, but in the case of Barack Obama image, I wish it had featured his beautiful smile. The encroaching foliage also struck me as having the potential for parody, though I read it as symbolic of his steps, often forgotten, to address the pressing challenges of environmental conservation and climate change, both of which are targets of reversal by the current occupant of the White House. In the case of Michelle Obama's image, I understand Sherald's recourse to grayish color for black skin tones, which she has discussed in various interviews and profiles, but I do wish she had nevertheless mixed things up and featured the former First Lady's beautiful hues. The dress fascinates me; its flatness and intersecting planes remind me of Gustav Klimt's and Ferdinand Hodler's work, as well as other Art Nouveau artists (is there a resurgence of interest in their work?), and folk art in its muted color and solid background, and both paintings, in certain ways, put me in mind of the work of peer artists Mickalene Thomas while also harkening back to their earlier black predecessor Barkley L. Hendricks. In both cases, I think we have portraits for the ages, and new standards for all subsequent presidential artists to aim for.

Shakespeare, Plagiarist?

A page from the George

 North manuscript that

starts the poem about

Jack Cade. The last stanza

lists terms for dogs,

which Shakespeare used

in King Lear and Macbeth.

(New York Times)

In a field as deeply explored as textual studies of William Shakespeare's work, it might seem as there were little more to be said. But if you think that, you would be wrong, as independent scholar Dennis McCarthy demonstrated in conjunction with Professor Emerita June Schlueter of Lafayette College. In the forthcoming "A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels” by George North: A Newly Uncovered Manuscript Source for Shakespeare’s Plays (D.S. Brewer, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer, with the British Library), out next week, they discuss how they used WCopyfind software, which English, composition and other faculty members sometimes employ to find out whether students have committed plagiarism, to discover that the source of at least 11 of Shakespeare's plays, including several of his most famous, such as King Lear, Richard III, Henry V, and one of my favorites, the verbal and dramatic masterpiece Macbeth, was the eponymous tome by the obscure writer George North.

According to Michael Blanding's New York Times report, McCarthy does not believe that Shakespeare actually plagiarized North's unpublished work, which he somehow acquired, but as was the case with other sources of his borrowings, North's text served as a crucial guide and source, down to words deployed in the exact same order, but repurposed in style and often, it seems, meaning.  A self-taught Shakespearean and magazine journalist, McCarthy was inspired both by the idea of evolutionary development, which he had already written about, and practically by former ETH Zurich Professor Sir Brian Vickers' use of similar software in 2009 to establish that Shakespeare had co-written Edward III. McCarthy began sussing out the sources of Shakespeare's work, and followed that led him to George North's volume. Next, the Times notes

To make sure North and Shakespeare weren’t using common sources, Mr. McCarthy ran phrases through the database Early English Books Online, which contains 17 million pages from nearly every work published in English between 1473 and 1700. He found that almost no other works contained the same words in passages of the same length. Some words are especially rare; “trundle-tail” appears in only one other work before 1623.

In the past, some scholars have identified sources for Shakespeare from a few unique words. In 1977, for example, Kenneth Muir made the case that Shakespeare used a particular translation of a book of Latin stories for “The Merchant of Venice” based on the word “insculpt.” In recent years, however, it’s become rare to identify new sources for Shakespeare. “The field has been picked over so carefully,” [former University of Chicago Professor David] Bevington said.

I would add that back in 2013, I blogged about Saul Frampton's assertion that the Renaissance scholar and translation John Florio not only edited Shakespeare's works, but enriched them linguistically, adding to the Bard of Avon's already rich trove of innovative language. I found his argument quite convincing, and when I have taught the foundational course in literary studies, it is one of the essays I share and discuss with students.

Before Florio got to Shakespeare, though, Shakespeare was gleaning all kinds of gems from North, and polishing them up, McCarthy and Schlueter will suggest in their study. In the Times article, McCarthy points out how North's preface contains a unique series of terms, many familiar to us today--"proportion," "glass," "feature," "fair," etc.--to urge those who seem themselves as unattractive instead to create an inner beauty, against the stamp of nature; as it turns out, Shakespeare uses the exact set of words, in the same order, to make a different statement in the opening soliloquy of one of his unforgettable villains, the hunchbacked and unloved Richard III. What McCarthy and Schlueter divined was that this is not a one-off case; Shakespeare repeatedly not only borrowed exact terms from North, but also employed in similar series and scenes, as well as similar figures from history.

For example, in Macbeth, Shakespeare has his protagonist declaim,

"Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves, are clept
All by the name of dogs (Macbeth, III, 1)

In King Lear, Edgar says:

Tom will throw his head at them. Avaunt, you curs!
Be thy mouth or black or white,
Tooth that poisons if it bite;
Mastiff, grey-hound, mongrel grim,
Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,
Or bobtail tike or trundle-tail,
Tom will make them weep and wail:
For, with throwing thus my head,
Dogs leap the hatch, and all are fled. (King Lear, III, 6)

This list, McCarthy and Schlueter argue, is almost a mirror of North's text, with the ultra-rare "trundle-tail" a term appearing only in the source text, Shakespeare's play and one other early 17th century text. The playwright spins these borrowings out into something memorable in both plays. In another example, the reference to Merlin's speech in King Lear diverges from any previously known prophecy by the wizard, yet McCarthy and Schlueter found a version of Merlin's speech in North's text, and that it not only influenced what Shakespeare later wrote, but also the figure of the "Fool," who delivers it.

In Henry V, McCarthy finds many correspondences, as Quartzy demonstrates in the following chart:

 

According to reports, including one in Atlas Obscura, scholars have praised McCarthy and Schlueter's work, and it suggests that digital humanities scholars and students looking at texts might do well to utilize all the software at hand, including a tool often used to catch potential miscreants, to learn even more about the roots of key works of the past. Mr. McCarthy, it appears, certain intends to do so. His book hits bookshelves this Friday, February 16.

The Music of Florence Price

Florence Price

The treasures of the past may seem lost, but often enough, they are merely forgotten, or hidden. Such is the case with the music of Florence Price (1887-1953), an African-American composer whose work has never entered the mainstream canon, but which was very much in the current of the classical music of her time. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performer her "Symphony in E," making her black woman to have her work performed by a US symphony orchestra. Yet, as Micaela Baranello reminds readers in today's New York Times, Price probably never receive a reply to her repeated requests for consideration from Serge Koussevitzky, the famous conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and champion of new music, who commissioned or premiered works by the likes of Alexander Scriabin, Maurice Ravel, Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, Albert Roussel, Bela Bártok, and Leonard Bernstein, just to name a few.

All were white men; Price did not register on Koussevitzky's radar, nor on that of many other major conductors. Baranello states, however, that she was well known among the major African American intellectuals of her era, corresponding with W. E. B. DuBois, among others. She also set poems by Langston Hughes and Paul Lawrence Dunbar to music. Price's background, in fact, primed her for success as a member of DuBois's "Talented 10th." Born the daughter of a prominent dentist in Little Rock, Arkansas, she showed musical talent early on, and enrolled in the New England Conservatory at the age of 14. Because of the widespread racism of that era, she passed as non-black person, claiming that she was from Pueblo, Mexico, and studied with the head of the NEC, the famed composer George W. Chadwick.

Yet numerous struggles marked her life from this point forward. Eventually she settled in Chicago, where she continued her studies in music and other disciplines at a number of institutions, including the University of Chicago and the Chicago College of Music (now a division of Roosevelt University), and, after a divorce, raised her two daughters as a single mother and worked as an organist for silent movies and under a pseudonym, wrote advertising jingles for radio. In addition to pieces she composed on her own, she also collaborated frequently with her former student, fellow composer and pianist, and frequent collaborator Margaret Bonds. It was a first prize win and public recognition for her Symphony in E in the 1932 Wanamaker Foundation Awards that led to conductor Frederick Stock's premiere the subsequent year of her orchestral piece.

Though Price's music did receive performances during her lifetime, including Marion Anderson's delivery, at her landmark 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, of Price's arrangement of spiritual "My Soul's Been Anchored in De Lord," in the years after her death from a stroke, a good deal of her work was thought to have been lost. In 2009, as critic Alex Ross relates in his recent New Yorker discussion of Price's life and work, homeowners Vicki and Darrell Gatwood found a cache of her manuscripts in what was her former summer house, in St. Anne, Illinois, outside Chicago. This has led to a mini-resurgence in interest in Price's work, including new recordings and performances, among them Janacek Philharmonic's  premiere recording of her First Violin Concerto, with University of Arkansas professor and violinist Er-Gene Kahng as soloist.

Price's oeuvre draws from a number of aesthetic springs, chief among black spiritual and vernacular music traditions, as well as American and European early 20th century Modernism. Her Second Violin Concerto "reflects the richly chromatic language of [American] composers like William Schuman and Roy Harris," and, as musicologist Douglas Shadle recently learned, she even studied with Harris briefly in 1940. To quote Baranello:

Marquese Carter, a doctoral student at Indiana University who specializes in Price’s work, said in an interview that she “uses the organizing material of spirituals. You may not hear direct quotation, but you will hear playing around with pentatonicism, playing around with call and response, some of these organizing principles that African-American scholars like Amiri Baraka have pointed out as indicative of black musical discourse.”

“Florence Price is a representation in music of what it means to be a black artist living within a white canon and trying to work within the classical realm,” Mr. Carter added. “How do we, through that, create a sound that sounds our culture, sounds our experience, sounds our embodied lives?” 

***

“Everything she was doing was musically mainstream but at the same time idiosyncratic,” he said. “Her music has kind of a luminous quality that strikes me as her own. Our understanding of American modernism of the 1930s and 1940s is not complete without Price’s contribution.”

Price's compositions are numerous, and despite recent interest, the question remains: who will perform, let alone premiere, many of these works? Baranello argues, and I agree, that if US symphony orchestras are serious about diversifying not just their audiences but their repertoires, composers like Price and Bonds--and María Teresa Carreño García, William Grant Still, R. N. Dett, Adolphus Hailstork, Anthony Davis, Tania León, and many others--offer a direct and corrective option. According to Baranello, the Fort Smith Symphony plans to record all four of her symphonies for Naxos, but far more orchestras need to step up, now and in the future. Yesterday, NPR featured Price's Violin Concerto No. 2 on its "Songs We Love" page.

Here are YouTube links to Florence Price's music:

Excerpts from Florence Price, Violin Concerto No. 2 (1952), dedicated to Minnie Cedargreen Jernberg, excerpts with the Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra, Er-Gene Kahng, violin, Ryan Cockerham, conductor


Karen Walwyn, piano, New Black Music Repertory Ensemble, Leslie B. Dunner, conductor, from Albany TROY1295


New Black Repertory Ensemble, Leslie B. Dunner, conductor


Night by Florence Price, Amy Petrongelli, soprano, Blair Salter, piano, Kerrytown Concert House, Ann Arbor, MI

Black Lightning, the Series

Cress Williams as Black Lightning

When I was a pre-teen, I read comics avidly, but by the time I reached junior high, I shifted mainly to books, alongside movies and records. This preference has continued into adulthood, though I enjoy reading graphic novels and comics for adults, especially if they're formally experimental, from time to time. But the comic book character families, networks and lore that so many nerds and blerds    hold dear to their hearts were not really part of my adolescence, which probably accounts for why now in adulthood, I tend to be mostly uninterested in movies and TV shows based on standard comic book heroes or teams. Netflix's Jessica Jones (2015) and the subsequent Luke Cage (2016) were rare exceptions. Certainly Hollywood's formulaic approach to most of the comic book franchises does not help things, in my opinion, though I have occasionally gone to see some of the Batman and Spider-Man films on occasion, and loved the Batman TV series as a very small chill. Non-comics derived TV shows involving characters with supernatural powers sometimes do draw me in: Charmed was a favorite during its early run, as was Heroes. But speculative narrative shows and comics are two different things.

Black Lightning, DC Comics version

Black Lightning, the new series on The CW channel, is based on a comic book series, but intrigued me. I knew only a little bit about its origins: writer Tony Isabella and artist Trevor von Eeden issued the first Black Lightning comic book in 1977, and as it turns out, he was the first black superhero to have his own DC Comics book. A little more reading up on the forthcoming series let me know that the metahuman hero was middle-aged, as opposed to a youngster, which I found appealing, and it did not hurt that Cress Williams, an actor I remembered and enjoyed from many shows in the 1990s and early 2000s, including Living Single, Beverly Hills 90210 and Prison Break, and the film Doom Generation, was going to star in it. The basic storyline I could have predicted with my eyes closed; after a stint cleaning up his town, Black Lightning gave up his crime-fighting for a career as a principal and educator. More compelling was the fact that his superheroic efforts had destroyed his marriage and divided his family, leading him to retire in part to heal the frayed family ties. In addition, the show's creator, Salim Akhil, has a strong track record as a writer and producer. Husband of the prolific writer, showrunner and producer Mara Brock Akil, writer for Moesha and Sparkle, and creator of the popular show Girlfriends (2000-2008), the Akils co-developed the successful, provocative TV shows The Game (2006-2015) and Being Mary Jane (2013-). The show's alluring ads, I'll admit, did the rest of the work.

Jill Scott and Marvin "Krondon"
Jones III in a scene from Black Lightning

The Black Lightning series is set in an alternate universe (though filmed in Atlanta), and opens with the superhero, known in semi-conventional human form as Jefferson Pierce (Williams) serving as principal of Garfield High School. He lives with his two daughters, first-born Anissa (Nafessa Williams), who is in medical school and a part-time teacher at Garfield High School, and Jennifer Pierce (China Ann McClain), younger daughter, who is a student at Garfield and dating one of the school's track stars, Khalil (Jordan Calloway). Jefferson remains divorced from his wife, Lynn Stewart (Christine Adams), but they maintain a connection for the sake of their daughters. He seems eager to initiate a romantic rapprochement. As Jefferson, he attempts to guide his students on the proper path, but one result of his work as a principal and teacher is his acquaintance with many locals who have gone off the rails, including various thugs and dealers linked, directly or not, to the area's major criminal organization, The 100. Jefferson also stays in close contact with Peter Gambi (James Remar), his oldest friend and an inventor and tinkerer of Italian ancestry who serves as Jefferson's--and Black Lightning's "tailor"; Gambi creates the superhero's suits and devices, which he continues to improve as the series proceeds.

 Marvin "Krondon" Jones III in a
scene from Black Lightning

Black Lightning's and the town's major antagonists are Tobias Whale (Marvin "Krondon" Jones III), who heads up the 100, and, viewers learn in the second episode, Lady Eve (Jill Scott), a diabolical, platinum-tongued mortician who serves as a coordinating link for all of the major power interests in the city. In the third episode, she harangues Whale, who had previously claimed to have killed Black Lightning, to follow up and rid the town of the beloved superhero forever, threatening him with a dethroning, or worse. Krondon, a hiphop artist and actor in real life, is albino, a rarity on US TV, and one of the show's fascinating conceits is that he will only allow white or very light-skinned people to work for him. In other words, his malevolence is manifest in his colorism, yet surprisingly for TV, the series does not overtly state this, forcing the viewer to figure it out. Another of Black Lightning's antagonists is Inspector Billy Henderson (Damon Gupton), a police officer who also is friends with Pierce but has strongly opposed to the "vigilantism" of Black Lightning, blaming him for disruptions in the police force's ability to maintain order. As quickly becomes clear and perhaps as a subtle critique of the inadequacy of police, the citizenry hunger for Black Lightning's intervention because of the authorities' complacency and failures.

Cress Williams, in a scene from Black Lightning

I've given the background information about Black Lightning's world, but I have said little up to this point about his particular superhero powers. As his name suggests, his chief gift, beyond supernatural speed and the ability, it appears though it hasn't been stated outright, to pass through solid walls and leap onto roofs and ledges, is lightning-like electrical power, which can stun, disable or even kill his assailants. He also has the ability to create ionized fields, which can distribute the electricity in tiny zaps, and generate an electrical force-field, which can shield him from bullets, grenades, and even bombs. So far the series has not shown him creating a black thunder bolt, but when enraged, at least according to the comic strip, he can do so. Additionally, he is able to gather electrical force in his fists to create even stronger punches, perceive nearby electrical flows (and, in episode 3, with the help of new goggles by Gambi, all electrical currents in the area), and even absorb electricity or disappear into electrical wires or powerboxes, traveling like an electrical current. Given these powers, I have to wonder what could stop or at least blunt him; he does not wear a helmet, so he's vulnerable to anything happening behind him if he doesn't perceive it before it hits him. Viewers got a taste of this when during a peace march, despite Black Lightning's presence to protect his family, one of Whale's deputies shoots the march organizer, Reverend Holt, through the upper chest and paralyzes Jefferson's daughter's boyfriend, Khalil. My immediate thought was that had the gunman aimed a bit to the right, he might have struck the superhero dead on. I suppose we will see what measures Whale devises to bring him down.

Black Lightning stars Cress Williams, Christine Adams,
Nafessa Williams, and China Ann McClain

As in the original comic book, Black Lightning is not alone in his crime-fighting. At the end of the first episode, Anissa cracks off part of the bathroom sink, and then, in subsequent episodes, she comes to realize that she possesses unique metahuman powers, inherited from her father, though she is unaware, as far as the viewer knows, that he doubles as Black Lightning. So far she hasn't unleashed any lightning bolts or electrical sparks, but she can create soundwaves by stomping the ground, and can increase her body density to generate super-human strength, which she has used several times to fight off attackers, including a group of adult men selling drugs to teenage girls. We also learn that she is an out lesbian, which, as far as I can tell, makes her the first black lesbian superhero to appear on US TV. The show's approach to sexuality is refreshing and contemporary; when her parents discuss their concerns about her younger sister's Jennifer's announcement that she plans to lose her virginity, they acknowledge their earlier support, though not without tears and shock, for Anissa's coming out, and Akil and the show's writers have fully integrated her relationships into the fabric of the storyline. At a moment when an anti-LGBTQ backlash is underway, and a white supremacist occupies the White House and racism regularly appears in spectacular form, a show about a mature, middle-class superhero and his family, which includes a lesbian superhero daughter, fighting to save a predominantly black and brown town, makes a statement, without hammering anyone over the head.

Nafessa Williams, in a scene
from Black Lightning

Black Lightning

In some ways, Black Lightning feels like a figure conceived during and in response to the previous, pre-Trump moment. A mid-40-something model of flawed respectability, well-spoken and highly educated, a dutiful though divorced father of two smart daughters, a negotiator rather than a hothead, he at first comes off like a Barack Obama with secret superpowers he's willing to use, almost in spite of himself. (His daughters mirror but complicate this template.) Even the stakes, at one level, feel lower than what we currently face as a country and globe. Instead of a supranational or external power, like a fictionalized version of Russia, or against the current hyper-neoliberal/libertarian, overtly racist, misogynistic, anti-liberal political and economic threat, embodied by the Trump administration, the villain he faces is a mostly local crime syndicate. As with Luke Cage, the villainry he's battling is not the result of larger structural and systemic forces, but corrupt and corrupted black people. I understand the desire to depict an enclosed black speculative world, and, more so than with Luke Cage, it feels well built out. But in some ways, it also feels a little inadequate; can this parallel world open out into something that more fully resembles our own? On the other hand, given the current moment of overt backlash, a flawed black superhero family feels appropriate, and, to some degree, emotionally comforting. But is it enough?

What I am waiting to find out is when Jefferson and Anissa will recognize not only that they both possess superhuman powers, but that Black Lightning has a potential partner, if he is willing to accept Anissa--Thunder's--participation in crime fighting. When will Jennifer's powers manifest themselves? Will Jefferson and Lynn get back together? Will the writers allow Anissa's relationship with her Asian American girlfriend, Grace Choi (Chantal Thuy), last the entire season? What is behind Gambi's seeming duplicity in deleting a video feed of Anissa's demonstration of her power, and, in a confusing move, his deletion of Whale's image on a camera feed after the shooting of Reverend Holt? Will the cops work with Black Lightning or continue to see him as a vigilante? I also want to know how Whale's scheme to take out Black Lightning will resolve itself. What other smart, unexpected elements in the series plot and characterization will the writers introduce? Will the show end on a cliffhanger? But let me not get ahead of myself, because there are nine more episodes to go in the thirteen-episode first series, meaning there will be more than enough time to learn how things are going to turn out.

Skye Marshall and Cress Williams,
in a scene from Black Lightning

Tayari Jones' Novel Oprah's Book Club Pick + Elizabeth Alexander To Lead Mellon Foundation

A million congratulations to my Rutgers-Newark colleague Tayari Jones, on the publication of her new, fourth novel, An American Marriage, now out from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill! Tayari's novel has been receiving rapturous reviews (Entertainment Weekly, LA Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, SFGate, and USA Today, to name a few) since its appearance, as well as praise from readers on Amazon, Goodreads, and elsewhere. To add to the excellent news, Oprah Winfrey selected An American Marriage as her newest Oprah's Book Club pick, which she announced on CBS Morning News yesterday morning.

Tayari on CBS, as Oprah announces
her book as its newest Book Club selection

Oprah has said of the book, "I have to tell you, it is intriguing. It's a love story that also has a huge layer of suspense. And it's also so current and so really now that I could not put it down and I've already passed it on to lots of my friends and so I know – certainly believe – that you're gonna love it." On her website, Tayari, a writer of numerous gifts, offers a summation of An American Marriage:

Newlyweds, Celestial and Roy, are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is artist on the brink of an exciting career. They are settling into the routine of their life together, when they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unm oored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

I have had the pleasure of hearing Tayari describe the book as she was writing it over the last few years, and have now purchased my copy and intend to dive into it very soon! I also expect the praise to continue and prizes to shower this book too. CONGRATULATIONS AGAIN, TAYARI!

You can purchase a copy of An American Marriage here!

***

Elizabeth Alexander

Yesterday brought more good news: poet, scholar, critic, and generally extraordinary person Elizabeth Alexander has been named the next head of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation! Elizabeth will assume the Mellon presidency in March 2018, replacing Earl Lewis, who has served since 2013. Currently she is the Wu Tsun Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, and had served as Director of Creativity and Freed Expression at the Ford Foundation. Before this, she was the Frederick Iseman Professor and had previously held the post of Thomas Donnelley Professor and chaired the African American Studies Department at Yale University, where she taught for 15 years. At the Ford Foundation, Elizabeth "co-designed the Art for Justice Fund, a $100 million fund seeded by philanthropist Agnes Gund to transform the criminal justice system and all of its inequities through art and advocacy."

At Mellon, Elizabeth will preside over a foundation that has long been dedicated to work in the humanities and culture, particularly the liberal arts, from supporting scholarship to scholarly publication to the training and development of future educators, as well as considerable work in the museum world. It will be fascinating to see how her interests, as someone who has long promoted equality, social justice and civic participation in the arts and humanities intersects with Mellon's current agenda, and how she as its leader will guide and develop its focus. Inside Philanthropy offers five to consider in terms of Elizabeth's new tenure. Key will be defending not just the humanities, but universities and higher education in general, from those on the right and, to a different degree, from some critics on the far left. As Elizabeth notes, "The value of free expression, of arts and culture, is not something that’s always shouted from the rooftops, right now."

Elizabeth is one of the major American poets, serving as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, as well as on the boards of the Pulitzer Prize and the African Poetry Book Fund. She also is a prolific author and critic. In 2009, she was President Barack Obama's first inaugural poet, her poem captured in the volume Praise Song for the Day. Her 2015 memoir The Light of the World, a powerful tribute to her late husband Ficre Ghebreyesus, which was a 2016 finalis for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of six books of poetry, including The Venus Hottentot, Body of Life, Antebellum Dream Book, American Sublime, and Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems. She also has penned two collections of critical prose, The Black Interior and Power and Possibilities: Essays, Reviews and Interviews, as well as a book for children, with Marilyn Nelson, entitled Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color.

Congratulations to Mellon for making this superlative choice, and CONGRATULATIONS, ELIZABETH!

Adrienne Kennedy's He Brought Her Heart Back In a Box

Adrienne Kennedy's (1931-) published plays, all of them, unfold according to the logic of dreams. Striking imagery and language, juxtaposition and jump-cuts in time, associative connections between characters, scenarios, moments, actions, and uncanny instances of personae and scenes split into multiples, or recombined in unexpected ways appear in various forms in her work, from her brilliant debut, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1960), to her most recent play, He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box (2018). Avant-garde from the beginning, Kennedy's plays nevertheless are anything but formalist or art-for-art's sake; her source material, evident in all of them, is her life experiences, and those of her relatives and friends, as well as the social, political and cultural histories in which those experiences have played out, transmuted into art via her profound interior vision. The result has been dramatic works that are deeply unsettling and unforgettable, like vivid nightmares.

Her newest play, which is making its debut at the Theater for a New Audience, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, is no slouch in this regard. He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is the 86-year-old Kennedy's first new play in 10 years, and the product of her move, roughly half a dozen years ago, to the Williamsburg, Virginia area, to live with her son, Adam Kennedy, a sometime-collaborator with her, and other family members, as she confided to reporter Alexis Soloski in a recent New York Times report. Though she purportedly detests the sleepy atmosphere and the town's insistent Southern historical pageantry, especially after decades of living in New York City, she penned the play in only six weeks, in a fit of rage, and includes in her inserted program notes the following acknowledgement:

"This play. Could not
have been written
without the room
Facing the trees and the
iPad given to me by my
son Adam Kennedy
And his wife Renee in
their house on the lane.

Kennedy's play is brief as full of life as a budding seed. It officially runs 45 minutes, but gave me the feeling, when I saw it, of being both far briefer and yet, because of the style, form and language, of being longer. He Brought Back Her Heart in a Box is loosely based on the author's mother's accounts of family lore, and takes place primarily in June 1941 in fictional Montefiore, Georgia, and New York. Kennedy's white grandfather owned peach orchards near Montezuma, Georgia, and the play transforms him into the town's white patriarch, Harrison Aherne. Actor Tom Pecinka, who makes his TFNA debut with this play, convincingly inhabits both Aherne, physically represented by a seated manikin whose stiff and ghostly presence looms over all the proceedings, and Harrison's grandson and heir, Chris Aherne, who develops affection for mixed race Kay, based in part on Kennedy's maternal grandmother, a 15-year-old girl who worked in the orchard, and died young, under unclear circumstances.

The conflicting stories about Kay's mother's death up north in Cincinnati are one thread. Was she killed by her white father or did she commit suicide?  Another spools out from Harrison, whom the audience learns had fathered numerous children by several Black women and even created a separate cemetery for the deceased among them, to the dismay of his white relatives. The fraught context of segregated Georgia, with its own codes for racial mixing, and a larger world descending into fascism and war, envelope everything. Kay, played expertly by recent Julliard graduate Juliana Canfield, making her professional stage debut, is a student at a boarding school African American students. When the play opens, the students are performing Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris, a bizarre request by the school's white founder. Soon enough, Chris, who has been helping out the bookkeeper, is drawn to Kay, and their shared love of literature and songs from Noel Coward's operetta Bitter Sweet, binds them together. The Marlowe play and Coward operetta, however, are not idle choices; both tell stories of ruin; slaughtered Huguenots in the former, failed love in the latter. If the viewer did not already guess that this interracial duo's fate would turn out badly, the references offer a subtle but decisive nudge.

The play proceeds not by intimate scenes between the two, but via their intercutting monologues, which represent their inner desires being vocalized, as well as the stories they have heard from relatives and the letters they exchange being read aloud, the contents offering clues to Harrison's ethos and the thrall he holds the community in, the town's history, including Kay's own white father, like Chris's father and grandfather a member of a prominent family; Chris's desire for escape to the north and plans for a life with Kay; the strange circumstances surrounding Kay's mother's pregnancy, illness and untimely passing; and Chris and Kay's own dreams for their future, which includes settling in Paris, where, they imagine, they will truly be free. Director Evan Yionoulis keeps the pacing swift, while also allowing for those moments where Kennedy's poetry, or Chris's singing, or President Roosevelt on the radio, needs the space and time to root and beguile.

In Kennedy's singular memoir, People Who Led to My Plays (1987), the reader learns of the veil of silence Kennedy's beautiful, mysterious mother drew around her own mother, as well as the well of melancholy and sadness that sat at the center of her heart. While He Brought Her Heart Home in a Box does not resolve the enigmas the memoir raises, it does dramatize the racial, gendered and class power dynamics and the resulting traumas that early 20th century South inflicted on its black residents, and its white ones. The local racism and racial domination, Kennedy suggests, parallels the Nazi regime in  Germany and Austria. What the play also underscores is how power marks everything. The limits Kay, as a young black woman, faces are quite different from Chris's, as is his awareness and intermittent acknowledgement of his considerable privilege, but the desire for each other and a less constrained future is one they both share. That they do not speak or sing, as each does at various points, directly to each other for most of the play is the material correlative to the social and racial divide between them, and yet they do reach each other. Determined to halt anything that contravenes local white custom and his own control of this world, Harrison Aherne finally takes the most violent step possible, in a concluding moment that erupts as only a staged work can, ending with the two main characters walking slowly backwards down a high staircase, as if a vintage, sepia 16 mm film were being run in reverse. To call it a breathtaking finale hardly does it justice.

The set, designed by Christopher Barreca, consists of two levels, one the main stage and above it, at one end, a balcony, below a wall, split by that high staircase, which leads up to a door that could be the exit from the train tracks below or a portal out of this particular hell. The wall becomes a space for projections: the black children's choir, a gun, and more. On the main stage, four chairs rim the periphery, evoking both a train station and the isolated rooms in which Kay and Chris find themselves. The high stairwell and walls doubles as a film screen, with racing train tracks filling it at various points, again signifying the distances between Kay and Chris, as well as Chris's move to New York City, and ultimately Paris. Yet the dummy version of Harrison is always hovering nearby, including at the end, preventing any real escape or changes to the landscape he has long presided over. His silent patriarchal shadow, which has menaced every word uttered, rises, by pulleys, and, devastatingly for the characters and audience, demonstrates that patriarchy, then as now, intends to have the final say.

One unexpected but curious component of the play was a beautiful scale model version of the town of Montefiore, as Chris's father would have constructed it, which sat in a hallway a level up from the main stage. I almost wished there had been a way to project images of this, in holographic form, above the play before it began and after it had concluded. (I thought I took pictures of the model, but I unaccountably forgot to.) Many thanks to my former student Darise, who alerted me to the play's run, and to my other former students Aarthi and Angela, three very talented writers whom I attended the play with. I now want to read the play in print form, and see it again. Adrienne Kennedy did not attend, so I hope TFNA taped it, and will allow it to run on TV or the internet, soon. You can find much more information about Adrienne Kennedy, including an interview with brilliant young playwright Branden Jenkins-Jacobs; critic Alicia Solomon's reading of the play; and more, here.

 The play runs through February 11, so if you are in New York, do not miss it!

Quotes: Will Alexander

Will Alexander, Celebration for Bob Kaufman,
San Francisco Public Library, April 11, 2016

Living art can withstand the peril of the vitriolic via the extrinsic as propaganda, of the masses condoned as they are by critical misperception.

*

I am a spirit who exposes his mandibles in order to appear and disappear. This being a kinetics that spontaneously arranges ghostly collapse to appear as simultaneous visibility. The latter being an apparition that allows the mind to ruminate upon its circuitous connecting traces.

*

I work always knowing that one must resist carking exhaustion, always resisting its a priori inclination as did Alhazen, and in later times Rimbaud. One gains from this resistance impalpable nths of stamina so as to enact prolific creativity rife with palpable transmutation.

*

I think of Desnos rife with oneiric eruption, verbally fishing for oquassa. This being the inner work of extending lightning bolts from stark extremities of sleep. What follows are vocables that mimic proto-fires that condense in the shape of burgeoning aural seed. What then emerges are slivers from uncanny aural scarps that magnify and extend into strangeness.

*

I speak Gullah and cater to stored rats. As for me, there always exists abominable increase, dazed lepers, arachnids crawling through hair. As for hunting migrating forms from the inferno, I scour its satanic region, I take into account forms of unleashed fever, creating from my presence a brackish type of moth, soaring, yet all the while cadenced by telepathic inherence.

-- five selections from Will Alexander's Across the Vapour Gulf, New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #22, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2017. Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved.

Black History Month/Langston Hughes Day + Poems: Nicolás Guillén & Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes in Harlem,
1959. (The LIFE Picture
Collection/Getty Images)

Happy Black History Month! February ushers in the month on the US calendar when the history, culture, and experiences of people of African descent, African Americans and all other Black peoples, in America and across the globe, occupy the foreground. As readers of J's Theater know well, every day, every month, every year here offers an opportunity to highlight the artistry, past and present experiences, and rich cultures of Black people, and to the extent that I can do so this month as every month, I intend to.

February 1 is also the birthday of arguably the greatest and most prolific African American poet, (James) Langston (Mercer) Hughes (1902-1967), a Joplin, Missouri native whose poetry transformed Black American and American literature, and who was one of the central figures in the Harlem Renaissance and a link to many of the Black American and non-US literary traditions that followed. One of the many aspects of Hughes' career that has deeply influenced me is his work as a translator; he brought into the English the drama of Spain's Federico García Lorca, the poetry of the Afrocuban luminary Nicolas Guillén, and the prose of Haitian writer Jacques Roumain.

I've previously posted one of his translations of Guillén's poems from Motivos de Son (1938), the collection that made the Cuban poet's reputation. I shared it in conjunction with my trip to Cuba,  which though 9 years ago feels like it was just yesterday. Hughes visited Cuba three times, in 1927, 1930 and 1931, before the Revolution, and as Ervin Dyer discussed in a CBS News piece, the American poet played a role in helping the country connect to its African roots, engaging in conversations with and championing the work of Afrocuban artists and writers at a time when racial discrimination there, as in the US, was rife. One of the poets he met and whom he encouraged was Guillén, who interviewed him for Diário de Marina, according to Dyer. Many stars aligned: Hughes was already famous and being translated in Cuba, Guillén's career was ascendant, and the newspaper had a page dedicated to fighting racism. Hughes would go on to translate Guillén's poetry and cultivated their friendship to the end of his life. At the same time, his presence in Cuba and his art continued to galvanize an array of Afrocuban artists working across genres.

Here is Hughes' translation of Guillén's "Little Song for the Children of the Antilles," which I screenshot from The Translations: Federico García Lorca, Nicolás Guillén, and Jacques Roumain, by Langston Hughes, edited and with an introduction by Dellita Martin-Ogunsola, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.

And here is a poem Dyer mentions in his article, one of Hughes' tributes to Cuba, "To the Little Fort of San Lázaro on the Ocean Front, Havana." It is also a humorous and sarcastic critique of capitalism, especially of the predatory US kind, which had reached its tentacles deep into Cuba before Fidel Castro and the Revolution hacked it away.  We also might think of it as a fitting epigraph for a good deal of what gentrification and global capital are laying waste to today.

TO THE LITTLE FORT OF SAN LÁZARO

ON THE OCEAN FRONT, HAVANA

by Langston Hughes


Watch tower once for pirates
That sailed the sun-bright seas —
Red pirates, great romantics.

  DRAKE
  DE PLAN,
  EL GRILLO

Against such as these
Years and years ago
You served quite well —
When time and ships were slow.
  But now,
Against a pirate called
THE NATIONAL CITY BANK
What can you do alone?
Would it not be
Just as well you tumbled down,
Stone by helpless stone?

From The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: The Poems, 1921-1940, edited and with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. All rights reserved.

De Blasio's Donors, Luxury Housing on NYCHA Land + Comics (Dante's Magic Afro)

This is a rendering of the proposed building
 at 120 3rd Ave. in Brooklyn.
Two more major de Blasio donors
have been picked for the project.
(AUFGANG ARCHITECTS)
© via New York Daily News

Yesterday brought the news that two wealthy real estate companies that were donors to New York mayor Bill de Blasio's campaign last year, where he was re-elected to his second four-year term in a landslide, received New York City approval to build luxury housing on land belonging to the underfunded New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The numerous housing projects currently run by NYCHA continue to be plagued by a host of problems, but with neither the city nor state, let alone the federal government able to find or raise funding, de Blasio has turned to private entities as a way of purportedly raising support for NYCHA's existing housing stock.

According to The New York Daily News, the new housing, to be built by developers the Arker Companies and Two Trees, is supposed to include 500--or half of its total--"half-market rate" apartments, which in practical terms means that in addition to the luxury rentals, the landlords will be able to get $3,900 (or $46,8000/year) for two-bed apartments, or half-market rate, on public land. NYCHA will lease the land, for 99 years, in return for payments to address its extensive low-income housing problems. The Daily News points out that this is the second such sweet deal involving a de Blasio donor.

In recent years, I've noted often harsh dismissals of labeling of actions like the developers' deal as neoliberalism, but this strikes me as a textbook example of it. Instead of seeking and finding government funding, via taxes, fees, etc. to support a public housing organization, the government is turning to private entities, which will benefit its lease of government subsidized, lower-cost land, to support private businesses, with some peanuts thrown back to the government in return. This is about as far from the "Sandinista" tag, with which opponents associated Blasio during his first run in 2013, as you can get.

Meanwhile, as the The Daily News article also points out:

Two de Blasio donors have said they raised money for the mayor to gain access to City Hall.

De Blasio disputes claims City Hall intervened on behalf of donor Restaurateur Harendra Singh pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe de Blasio, stating that he gave to get favorable treatment on back rent he owed for his restaurant on city-owned land.

Prosecutors said a senior aide to de Blasio arranged a meeting for Singh “in an effort to pressure the agency to make its proposed settlement terms more favorable to Singh.”

Developer Jonah Rechnitz said he spelled out to a top de Blasio aide that he was giving money to gain access. After Rechnitz paid a fine over an illegal hotel he owned, the city stopped responding to another year’s worth of complaints about the place.

The Manhattan US Attorney chose not to press pay-to-play charges against de Blasio, however. Nevertheless, according to the paper, "Prosecutor Joon Kim...made a point of stating that his investigation had determined that the mayor had intervened or directed subordinates to intervene on behalf of donors."

Here's a comic I drew around the time that de Blasio was campaigning five years ago. I often joked with C about how de Blasio's teenage son Dante's afro seemed to be a talisman, working its magic on voters (and de Blasio himself), and then played with it a bit in the frames below. It is the "afro," not Dante, who's speaking.

If my handwriting isn't clear the frames (beginning with #3) say: 

VOTE FOR MY DAD!

HE'LL ADDRESS INEQUALTY & POVERTY!

HE'LL DO SOMETHING ABOUT STOP & FRISK!

HE'LL IMPROVE SCHOOLS & RAISE TAXES ON THE RICH!

HE IS THE ONLY PROGRESSIVE WHO CAN WIN!

& HE'LL HAVE MY SPECIAL POWER TO GUIDE HIM!

More recently, during the lead-up to the 2017 mayor's race, I revisited my Magic Afro drawing. At one point the younger de Blasio, now a student at Yale University, had shaved his afro off, but as the recent campaign picked up, and during recent appearances with his father, Dante has sported that spectacular afro again. 

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have any magic to work against neoliberalism, the real estate industry, inequality, homelessness, or any of the other ills plaguing New York City. But hey, Bill de Blasio has another four years to figure it out, no?

If my handwriting isn't clear the frames (beginning with #3) say: 

IT'S ELECTION SEASON. VOTE FOR MY DAD!

HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE PROGRESSIVE MAYOR OF NEW YORK

PEOPLE EVEN CLAIMED HE WAS LIKE A SANDINISTA!

HE'S BEEN THE BEST THING BIG REAL ESTATE COULD HAVE HOPED FOR!

CRIME IS DOWN, HOMELESSNESS IS UP, HYPERGENTRIFICATION RACES AHEAD. SO VOTE FOR HIM!

I'M IN NEW HAVEN BUT I CAN STILL WORK MY MAGIC DOWN IN NYC!