Farewell, Village Voice

For the last decade or so, I have only occasionally read Village Voice, mostly online, but once upon a time, when I was in my 20s and living in Boston, acquiring a copy of the Voice at one of the news stands there, and perusing it to find out what was happening in New York, was one of the highlights of my week. (Back then I also read the New York Times in print almost every day too.) The Voice provided a trove of news about politics, in New York and beyond, as well as some of the most invigorating criticism about art, entertainment, the broader culture and the world, that you might find anywhere. For me it constantly outmatched Boston's own Phoenix, that city's alternative paper, and was part of a national ecosystem of similar papers that offered fresh, often left-leaning and progressive but always counter-mainstream perspectives on the state of the world. Now, the Voice is gone.

It's where I first learned about New York's legendary Public Theater and its pathblazing directors Joseph Papp and George C. Wolfe; it was one of the mainstream places where I regularly found informative reportage, Andrew Kopkind, Richard Goldstein and others, about about HIV and AIDS. It was a regular-go to learn about the newest and less common films, books, music, theater and performances of all kinds. The Voice also brought to me and countless readers original photography (Sylvia Plachy, C. Carr, etc.), cartoons by Jules Feiffer, Ted Rall, Lynda Barry, Mark Alan Stamaty, and Tom Tomorrow, and literature (I recollect reading a story by the great poet Elizabeth Alexander's there, among other gems). I was enthralled by Greg Tate's, Joan Morgan's and Gary Indiana's criticism, and when my friend Scott Poulson-Bryant (now Dr. Poulson-Bryant, and a professor at Fordham University) secured an internship and then a job there, it seemed like an unimaginably wonderful thing had occurred. Other than Greg Tate, the one columnist I made sure never to miss was Michael Musto, whose tour through NYC's once inimitable queer club scene will probably never be equalled again.

When C and I moved to the New York area, the Voice remained a paper I rarely missed reading. I'd even looked in its ads section in my search for an apartment when heading to NYU. When Annotations appeared, a young writer named Colson Whitehead wrote one of the most insightful, praiseworthy reviews the book received, and it meant everything to me that it appeared in the Voice. When the Voice became free in New York in 1996--which I loved but also figured was a bad sign--I would grab a copy in Manhattan before heading back to New Jersey, where we still had to pay for them. Yet I also paid attention to the labor strife that was wracking the paper in 2005 and 2006, and again in 2013: editors fired or resigning, writers sharing their fears over decreased benefits and the new owners' tunnel vision, and worse. Even as its leadership changed, the Voice remained one of the rare news organs that seemed not to coddle the rich and powerful--I recall Wayne Barrett's extensive  reporting on Rudy Giuliani's administration, and the time it ran an article outing New York's conservative Catholic Cardinal Edward Egan--and continued to employ incisive writers like Steven Thrasher. Yet in the end, its most recent owner, and the shifts in the media industry, ensured its demise.

Established in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Willcock, and Norman Mailer, the Voice was the US's first alternative weekly, and received a wide array of honors over its 63-year existence, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Press, and George Polk awards. It survived a number of owners over the years, until it was sold in October 2015, by its penultimate owner, Voice Media Group, to billionaire heir Peter Barbey. In August 2017, the Voice announced it would cease to exist as a print publication, and its final print issue appeared on September 17, 2015. Although Barbey said that he wanted to save the Voice, and despite his considerable financial reserves, he claimed that financial exigencies required him to shut down the paper, even as he allegedly has been searching for someone to buy it. Yesterday, the electronic edition ceased publication, half the staff were laid off, and those who remain will assist for a limited period in archiving the paper's rich store of articles and materials. Yet the fact remains that one of the once truly vital organs of reportage, investigation and criticism, for New York, the US and the globe, is gone, and with it passes an era--many really--that we will somebody

Random Photos

It has been a long while since I've posted random photos. Here's a small sampling, from this past spring.

The Commons at the Atlantic Center for the Arts,
Stetson University MFA of the Americas 

Kameelah Janan Rasheed reading
at home field school day 2018,
MoMA PS1

The audience at the home field
school day reading 2018,
MoMA PS1 

home field school day 2018,
MoMA PS1 

home field school day 2018,
MoMA PS1

Poet Mai Der Vang, Rutgers-Newark
MFA Reading Series, February 2018

Marcus Samuelsson's B&P
Restaurant, Newark  

Portland, during my visit to Reed
College and Portland State University 

At Portland State

Near Portland State University

Spring in downtown Jersey City 

Irène Mathieu and Desiree Cooper at
the Jack Jones gathering, AWP

Fence-stallation, Jersey City 

Modeling, Warehouse Cafe,
Jersey City

Robert E. Lee's (yes, that one!) former bedroom,
where I participated in an interview with students
at Washington & Lee University; the aura
was almost unearthly, but the visit
was a wonderful one

The chapel housing Robert E. Lee's tomb,
Washington & Lee University (a site
of pilgrimage, as you can imagine, for
pro-Confederates); it was closed when I was there 

Washington state, Washington & Lee University

At South Station, Boston

On the street, Newark

Birds gathering, Penn Station, Newark 

Emerson Hall, Harvard Yard

Tercentary Theater, Harvard Yard 

Before the reading with Fanny Howe &
Eden McCutcheon Tirl, at Harvard 

Before the reading with Fanny Howe &
Eden McCutcheon Tirl, at the Woodberry
Poetry Room, Harvard University
(the great Jamaica Kincaid is in the far back, at right)

Fanny Howe, Vocarium Reading Series
at the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard 

Eden McCutcheon Tirl, Vocarium Reading
Series at the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard 

Fanny Howe (at right), with her grandson

Tree-cutting, Jersey City

Tribeca Film Festival, New York 

At the Tribeca Film Festival, New York

Heading towards the George Washington Bridge

At Arthur Jafa's show opening,
Gavin Brown's experience, Harlem

At Arthur Jafa's show opening,
Gavin Brown's experience, Harlem

Swizz Beatz, outside Arthur Jafa's
opening, Gavin Brown's experience, Harlem

Irises in bloom, Jersey City

Waiting for the PATH train, Newark

Changing the announcement chalk
board, Jersey City

Poem: Jorie Graham

When I think of the poetry of Jorie Graham (1950-), what immediate comes to mind is a dense, philosophically and phenomenologically infused lyric, ever searching, in pursuit of something--ideas, memories, experience--that lies just to the edge of where the language might take her. To me the acme of this approach in her work appeared in her early volume Region of Unlikeness (1991), which, when I read it, felt almost unlike any other poetry book I was reading at the time. (Jay Wright's poetry had a similar effect, but in a different way.) Its unremitting strangeness--"the sax pants up the ladder, up"--has stayed with me more than 25 years later.

Yet a few years before I had come across Graham's work, and what struck me was its mellifluousness, its sensuous quality. I am thinking particularly of Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, her 1980 debut, and Erosion (1983), in which she refined this style and from which I draw the poem below. By her next book, The End of Beauty (1987), she had shifted into the style and subject matter for which she is now very famous; this collection also includes the poems about angels, the poems with the blank spaces, and so on. "San Sepolcro" bears the name of the town where the Italian Renaissance Florentine artist Piero della Francesca (1415-1492) lived and painted, and references one of his most famous paintings, "The Madonna del Parto," which is in the Monterchi Museum, in the Comune di Monterchi, Italy.

"San Sepolcro" opens Erosion and sets the tone for all the poems that will follow. Its invitation is a seductive one, letting the reader know an adventure is beginning, guided by the poetic speaker, a cicerone of tremendous skill, that will require some work, some dynamic participation with the texts, the imagery, the books ideas. "I can take you there, / snow having made me / a world of bone / seen through to. This...." Just read those lines aloud, and note how the mind and tongue trip and then rebalance on that turn at "bone / seen through to." In fact, as the poem proceeds, it is clear that this will not primarily be a description of the Madonna del Parto" as much as a conversation between the artwork, the poem itself, and the reader, a step into contingency, interpretation, feeling.

"This is / what the living do: go in." That is exactly what we do when we read poetry or look at art or listen to a song, at least if we go at all beyond a superficial engagement, but then again, even if we think we're operating on the surface, as "San Sepolcro" suggests, some deeper process may be underway, a peeling away so that those multiple layers of meaning reveal themselves, briefly. Like the Madonna here, a relic, the poem carries the traces of the past it invokes, as well as the substrate of the poet's process of writing it and poem's coming into being. This brings to mind both theorizations about art and our encounters with it by very different minds, Martin Heidegger and John Dewey, chief among others. As I noted a few posts ago with Rainer Maria Rilke's and Francisco Aragón's poems, in the encounter we are altered, even if temporarily--or, as Aragón wittily asserts, made blind. And then, we see again.

At any rate, here is Graham's "San Sepolcro," which I think is best experienced when read aloud, or when Graham reads it.

SAN SEPOLCRO

by Jorie Graham

 In this blue light
     I can take you there,
snow having made me
     a world of bone
seen through to.  This
     is my house,

my section of Etruscan
     wall, my neighbor’s
lemontrees, and, just below
     the lower church,
the airplane factory.
     A rooster

crows all day from mist
     outside the walls.
There’s milk on the air,
     ice on the oily
lemonskins.  How clean
     the mind is,

holy grave.  It is this girl
     by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning
     her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
     to go into

labor.  Come, we can go in.
     It is before
the birth of god.  No one
     has risen yet
to the museums, to the assembly
     line--bodies

and wings--to the open air
     market.  This is
what the living do: go in.
     It’s a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
     from eternity

to privacy, quickening.
     Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
     forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
     is a button

coming undone, something terribly
     nimble-fingered
finding all of the stops.

From The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994, by Jorie Graham, published by The Ecco Press. Copyright © 1995 by Jorie Graham. All rights reserved.

And the image:

The Madonna del Parto by Piero della Francesca
© Comune di Monterchi 2015 – Monterchi Museum

Poem: Elizabeth Knapp

Elizabeth Knapp

Cindy Sherman (1954-) is one of the most important living American artists. I have to admit, though, that while admire her early Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) series, I used to find the rest of her work that I encountered be a bit repetitive and unengaging. For the life of me I missed why people raved about it and her. I've since seen more of her work, and read a good deal of theory and criticism about her particular approach to (self-)portraiture, its importance in the history of feminist representation and its challenges to female stereotypes, its critiques of the cis-heteropatriarchal male gaze, its play with subjectivity particularly under the rubric of the visual, its narrative force and relationship to prior artists working in a similar vein, and its influence on younger photographers and visual artists, as well as popular culture--think the selfie. More simply, I think I understand much more what she has long been up to, grasping the clear continuities and connections across her oeuvre.

One set of newer images she has been producing really do intrigue me, however. These are her Instagram portraits, a series of curated wgrotesques produced using mobile phone technology that manage to send up the selfie and underscore the insistently performative nature of this genre, especially on Instagram. Sherman has maintained that her staged self-portraits are not her, that they are characters created to interrogate the ways society and culture shape representations. In fact, she has stated that she "hates selfies," and yet, she is using the platform chiefly dedicated to them to turn them on their heads. Her portraits range from the absurd to the wonky to the experimental. They also include "plandids," or planned candid selfies, which she created specifically for W Magazine.

As the magazine put it last year,

Sherman’s project for W apes the social media phenomenon known as the plandid—the planned candid photograph, which is “like a newer, hotter version of the selfie on Instagram,” as one social media expert recently put it. They are carefully composed images of studious nonchalance; they capture subjects who are determinedly carefree. Presented here is a mise en abyme of looking: a woman—or should I say women?—posing for herself on her phone as she poses for another photo that she is pretending not to pose for. Perhaps we are seeing the same images that she is viewing on her screen as she tries out different visages on the fly, shuttling through an uncountable number of aesthetic options with taps and glides of her finger. These works have a particular charge at a time when we snap ourselves with the understanding that our image will ricochet onto any number of screens, devices, and platforms. We are all striving to get it right.

Sherman is characteristically humble, almost flip, about her new digital concretions. “All these Instagram images are, for me, just playing around,” she says. “I don’t think it at all competes with my serious work. They’re just fun, like a little distraction.” But while she says that these “silly sketches” have not yet influenced her art directly, she does seem to be enjoying the ease with which these programs function. “I’m not such a perfectionist with using the apps. If you can erase the background and add another background, I don’t really care if the edges are all clean, and if it looks kind of funky, or if things overlap in a not-so-perfect way. It’s kind of freeing me up a little bit and maybe making me more open to experimentation.”

What does this any of this have to do with poetry or the series of poems I'm posting here? As it turns out, poet Elizabeth Knapp has written a poem--there may be more--in which the speaker produces a self-portrait "as Cindy Sherman's Instagram Account." Except that this sonnet-length, stanza-long verse is not really a self-portrait or a selfie,  but like Sherman's photos, something aslant, the focus not on the artist or person herself, but on the platform, the medium itself. The poem's language sounds more graduate seminar theoretical than lyrical, the argument a series of questions, its focus as much on what the Instagram account is depicting and how it's doing so as much as whom it is sharing with world.  Who and what are those "million followers" consuming as they go from image to image?

It is yet another approach to ekphrasis, one engaging with one of the most dominant social media platforms of our time, and with one of the major visual artists of today. From what I can tell, Knapp, who is the author of an award-winning collection entitled The Spite House (C&R Press, 2011) and a professor at Hood College, has been writing a series of "self-portrait" poems examining various states of being, experiences by others, and so on, taking the very idea of the "self-portrait" into new realms. I hope she will conside new poems focusing on an array of celebrities, particularly ones who are innovating with the (plat)form and others who are buried so deep in their narcissism and self-regard that they may be missing the play they're engaging in.

***

SELF-PORTRAIT AS CINDY SHERMAN'S INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT



by Elizabeth Knapp



And why not Sherman herself, you ask?
Because in this instance, the inclusion
of social media denotes a postmodern
approach to self-portraiture, a Baudrillardian
hall of mirrors in which the self is projected
against a million anonymous eyes, all hungry
for a taste of her. How will she deform
herself next? Will she sport a new prosthetic
chin, her hair stand on end, electrocuted?
A Dr. Frankenstein in the lab with herself.
A million followers, and not one will ever
know her—nipped, tucked, and bruised beyond
all recognition. Das Umheimliche: an unhomely
home. A rubber crotch on a mannequin.

Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth Knapp. “Self-Portrait as Cindy Sherman’s Instagram Account” originally appeared in Kenyon Review Online. All rights reserved.


 Here are four images from Cindy Sherman's Instagram account, at @cindysherman. The fist looks like a drawn caricature of Julianne Moore, though it is in fact only a digitally enhanced (and warped) photograph of a bewigged and made up Sherman:

Brazilian Notes: Quilombo Decree Upheld + Borba's "Black is Beautiful (#BLVCKSBTFLL)"

The signs read, "Brazil is quilombo residents;
not one less quilombo"

All over the Americas, when fugitive slaves had the opportunities to escape and set up maroon (marrons in French, cimarrones in Spanish, maròn/mawòn in Kreyol/creole, etc.) communities, beyond the administrative and military grasp of the settler-colonial and slave system, they did so. These communities took different forms in different parts of the hemisphere, but their legacies continue, sometimes in name (palenques in Spanish, maroon towns or free towns in English), sometimes in traces and foundations that are mostly forgotten but still inspire the descendants. In Brazil, these communities were often known as quilombos, the most famous of which remains Palmares, in the interior of the northeastern state of Alagoas, north of Bahia, established by a group of fugitive slaves and warriors led by the great Imbangala (Angola)-descended Zumbi (1655-1695).

Quilombos, from the Kimbundu word kilombo, dot rural areas far from the major metropoles across northern and northeastern Brazil. As anti-colonial and anti-imperial, black-centered zones of resistance, they were targets of the Portuguese and later Brazilian governments in the colonial period, and the state's administrative, bureaucratic, legal, social, and economic war against them has not relaxed in the 20th and 21st centuries. From attempts to seize title to quilombo land to the murders of quilombolas (residents of the quilombos), these communities have had to engage in continual struggle to stay whole, and free. A ruralist coalition of lawmakers, some allied with agribusiness and other powerful interests, has repeatedly attempted to gain control of the increasingly valuable quilombo territory. In 2003, however, then-President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva signed a decree that expanded the quilombolas' rights to title and demarcated their land, empowering the residents to gain legal title in order to keep them.

Brazil's current president, the profoundly unpopular Michel Temer, took office after a soft 2016 coup in which he and the Brazilian Congress impeached and ousted popularly elected president Dilma Rousseff, Lula's successor, over technical budgeting violations. Temer subsequently began instituting a range of neoliberal policies, under the aegis of pro-market rhetoric, yet Brazil's economy has continued to sputter, and the once expanding lower middle class of the Lula years has increasingly tumbled back into poverty. Among Temer's actions that threatened the quilombos was an order to suspend the titling process for the quilombos, which are supposedly protected by the Brazilian Constitution, until the Brazilian Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal, or STF) could rule on the validity of the decree Lula signed, which the conservative Democratic Party challenged.

After over five years in court, an overwhelming majority of the justices voted, 10-1, to uphold the decree, finally leading the Democratic Party's leader, Senator Agripino Maia, from the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, to end his opposition. The STF ruling represents a major victory for the quilombo communities and Afro-Brazilians in general, as well as for indigenous Brazilians, who have seen their lands seized and rights threatened, and a significant defeat for the powerful conservative rural interests, and their allies, including overtly racist, homophobic leading far-right presidential contender Jair Bolsonaro (of Rio de Janeiro state), who have strongly supported Temer.

As Black Women of Brazil blog reported (translating a report from the Brazilian media site iG):

Members of the National Coordination of Articulation of the Quilombola Rural Black Communities (Conaq) celebrated the [decision].”This is a first step in the recognition of the debt that the Brazilian State has with the quilombolas, as it also has with the natives,” said Denildo Rodrigues, a member of the association at the end of the trial.

Conaq was one of many associations engaged in lobbying the STF in voting. Among other actions, it organized the undersigned “Not one less quilombo”, which had more than 100 thousand signatures requesting the maintenance of Lula’s decree.

“There is no motive, reason or circumstance today for the policy of titling quilombos to be or remain paralyzed. What is expected now is for the public administration to continue and complete the regularization processes,” said Juliana de Paula Batista, a lawyer at the Socio-Environmental Institute, also involved in the case.

It would be foolhardy to believe that this successful ruling will completely halt outside interests' attempts to gain control of the quilombolas' land, but it does give them an even stronger legal foundation to defend themselves in the courts, even as they battle ongoing violence and other forms of predation.

* * *

Photo © Thiago Borba

Black Women of Brazil Blog (BWBB) is always a trove of current, informative news about Black Brazil. One recent article I enjoyed featured the work of Bahian-born and based photographer Thiago Borba, whose current project, "Black Is Beautiful," so appropriate for Black History Month, is featured at Revista Trip. On that site, in an article entitled "A coisa tá preta" (The thing is black), writer Giulia Garcia discusses Borba's route to the project, which uses the respective English title and hashtag Black is Beautiful (#BLVCKSBTFLL). After turning to photography in 2006 and studying in Spain, Borba could find no jobs in Bahia, so he pursued a commercial career in São Paulo to make ends meet.

Photo © Thiago Borba

In 2016, however, he reconnected with an earlier interest in exploring the topic of blackness in relation to beauty, still so fraught in Brazil, and started a photographic project entitled Paraíso Oculto (Hidden Paradise), melding images of black beauty in human form and natural landscapes. As BWBB regularly points out, contestations over beauty, and valorization of Eurocentric standards, constantly play out not only in interpersonal and intrafamilial spaces, but in the Brazilian public sphere. A number of spectacular, overtly racist incidents, involving denigration of Afrobrazilians' hair, features, color, style, and intelligence, have occurred over just the last year. One irony in all of this is that Afrobrazilians now constitute a numerical majority in the country, with sizable populations in Brazil's north, northeast and southeast.

Photo © Thiago Borba

He returned to Bahia from São Paulo last year, and began focusing on images of Afrobrazilians, particularly darker-skinned ones, who remain the most discriminated against in Brazil--not unlike in the US, where colorism within black communities, and within the larger US society, persists. Bahia is the traditional African heart of Brazil, with the highest percentage of self-identified black ("negro") and brown or mixed race ("pardo") residents, but hierarchies of color, class and ancestry exist there as well. As the Brazilian saying goes, "Quanto mais preto, mais preconceito sofre" (How much blacker you are, the more prejudice you suffer"), as true in Bahia as in pats of Brazil far smaller black populations, like Santa Catarina, in the far south.

Photo © Thiago Borba

Photo © Thiago Borba

The new project centers "pretos retintos" (dark-skinned blacks), those people who are "mais preto," amid a range of hues; Borba draws his subjects mostly not from the ranks of models, but from his personal and broader social network. (Looking at the photos, though, any of these subjects could or should model, and some, like Vanderlei Nagô, clearly are modeling!) Borba began posting the images on his Instagram page, and from there they gained wider notice and were selected for the state of Bahia's Novembre Negro (Black November) campaign. (November 20 is Dia da Conciência Negra, a holiday celebrated since the 1960s and officially established as a legal holiday in 2003 to honor the death, in 1695, of none other than Zumbi do Palmares, mentioned above. In Bahia, the entire month is beginning to assume the cast of honoring black Brazilian history.)

Photo © Thiago Borba

According to BWBB and Revista Trip, one of the images was even promoted on billboards, on buses and in the metro, among other public spaces. For Borba, this expanded reach was important in helping to amplify, in the eyes of minds of Afrobrazilians and all Brazilians, the representation and representativeness of black people in Brazilian society. It is a battle we continue to fight in the US, in similar and different ways.

Photo © Thiago Borba

Photo © Thiago Borba