Writer's Note: "Music and Friends" is a chapter in a proposed novel, A Stranger on Earth, a work-in-progress; and here is the beginning of that chapter.
Thomas had asked Mark to bring him his personal papers—banking records, insurance policies, pension records, mortgage papers, and other things, and though weak, Thomas read them, and read them, and read them again. Thomas made calls, he wrote notes, and he told Mark to remember certain things—Give people photocopies of this stuff, if they ask, and if they want to see an original, don’t let the original out of your sight. This is New Orleans—people will do what they can get away with. My father had a son with a woman other than my mother—I never knew the boy. If he or somebody connected to him comes ‘round, I have nothing for them. It’s in my will—they get nothing—no money, no thing, nothing. I have a niece in New York—there’s some money for her. She used to write me. She hasn’t written me in years, but I liked her letters. She was a smart girl—Sarah. I want her to have a little something. See that she gets it. It’s in my will. There’s a copy of the will in the courthouse. There’s a copy of my will in the bottom drawer here. There’s copy of it written on the back of a music sheet I sent to the congressional library—“The Blues Is Nothing but a Good Man Saying What He Saw.”
Mark heard what his friend had to say. He supposed he would not forget it, but he made notes when he left Thomas’s bedroom and went into his own. Mark did not know what he was going to do when Thomas died. There had been years to think about it—but he did not know, now, what he was going to do. Mark thought of their careers, of their lives. They were hardly more than boys, though each thought himself a man when they had met at the same audition. Mark had been the serious one, the one who thought that Armstrong and Gillespie were too much the entertainer and Parker and Coltrane bad examples for their use of drugs. He loved their music, but none was an icon for him—he was going to be his own hero. Thomas just wanted to play—he wasn’t about representing anything, and Thomas was the one who had the early success. Doors, wallets, and women’s legs opened for Thomas. Mark did the apprentice thing, learned under flawed masters, played in cheap clubs, and got small-time contracts—and that entire hard work ending up giving him some kind of legend he had not anticipated. By the time the big money started to come his way, he and Thomas had found each other again, weren’t so rude about each other’s differences, respected each other talents, and Thomas began to be sick—his body began to cave in on itself. Mark had come to help out a little until Thomas got better or until one of Thomas’s people came to take care of him—and Thomas never got better and the people who came wanted to help Thomas into the grave and Mark ending up staying for twenty years. Mark ended up saying no to the big gigs and big money and did small records for small labels that let him alone, or almost alone, to live his life—and he ended up taking care of the fun, shallow bastard who meant no real harm and had become his best friend.
Mark put the dishes in the sink. He let the water run. He poured liquid soap over the frying pan with its tiny grit of bacon stuck to the bottom, its slight brown fried foam of egg on the sides. He put his fingers under the flow of water, testing for heat. He thought about the hopes he had years ago for the music, the conversations about the music’s relation to folk, blues, and classical, literary and sculpture, to history and politics. He had wanted a high art that people would finding meaning and pleasure in. He wasn’t the only one—he thought of Abbey and Max, of Archie, of Anthony. He wondered if musicians weren’t the only people who really cared about the music, who really saw it as important. Weren’t the others just using it, using it for dancing, for easy fun, using it to justify a false idea of who they were, using it to intimidate people? It was a path to freedom, and they could not see it. Mark picked up the wash cloth and began to scrub the plates first. He went back and forth between using paper plates and regular dishes. The plates came clean easily. He scrubbed the forks, careful to remove the grease near the printing of the maker’s name. The music was for everybody, but who wanted it? Mark picked up a spatula and scrapped it against the bottom of the frying pan, then scrapped the sides of the pan, before washing the spatula. The children today were listening to another kind of music, simpler music, what somebody called music for morons. Why did things always have to begin at the bottom? Why did they often have to stay there? Why couldn’t you just hand the next generation the task as you had completed it, and let them go on and develop that? Mark looked up from his task and looked out of the kitchen window. He saw small garden of vegetables—potatoes, egg plant, string beans—and the few fruit trees (apple, plum, fig), and the garden chair next to the garden. He thought he might take a book and sit outside for an hour or two. Would Thomas be alright inside? Would he want to try to sit outside today? Mark wanted some fresh air. He opened the window. It was not enough. He looked down and scrubbed the frying pan. He reached below the sink and pulled out some powdered cleanser and sprinkled some into the pan. The scrubbing became easier. You had to have the right tools to make things come right.
(c) DG
Monday, February 23, 2009
Richard Wright, Author
Writer's Note: When I was very young, before I was 18, Richard Wright became an important writer for me, someone who wrote with honesty, intelligence, and passion about his life in the south and his own ambitions and conflicts as well as insightfully about the world... Here below are my comments on a biography of Richard Wright, and notes on Wright's career and reading interests.
Hazel Rowley. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York. A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt and Company. 2001. 626 pages. ISBN 0-8050-4776-X.
“Is this the dirt road,/Winding through windy trees,/That I must travel?” asked writer Richard Wright (1908-1960) in a haiku, #131, written near the end of his life. Wright’s haikus were not published in a book, Haiku: This Other World, until more than three decades after his death, and they are one more testament to what was not known about this famous writer while he lived. Wright’s lyrical and polemical autobiography Black Boy and his grim ideological urban drama Native Son may be well-known references in American literature courses but exclusive consideration of them have given us a narrow view of the author, who also wrote the comic, experimental fiction Lawd Today!, the existential novel The Outsider, and Savage Holiday, a novel featuring no African Americans, as well as books on Africa, Asia, and Europe—Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain.
Richard Wright, born to a sharecropper father and schoolteacher mother in Mississippi, endured a childhood of poverty, familial misunderstanding, religious dogmatism, and racial prejudice. He distinguished himself when young by writing a short story that was published, and being selected as a representative of his grade school class. Reading H.L. Mencken in the late 1920s introduced him to literary and social criticism, and to writers such as Dreiser, Lewis, and Anderson. Wright moved to Chicago, where he worked in the post office. He became a member of the John Reed Club and through it met other writers, and became also a member of the Communist Party—and then moved to New York, where he wrote for a party publication. Wright’s first book, the short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children, was published in 1938 and received good reviews. Two years later, Native Son was published and thus Wright became an important American writer. Wright married the white Ellen Poplowitz in 1941, published Black Boy in 1945, and visited France the next year and moved there with Ellen in 1947, where he would live, work, and die.
Hazel Rowley’s biography of Wright may not be elegant or eloquent—it is rather plain and slow-moving—but it is the most factual and fair, the most intelligent, biography of Wright that I am aware of, and it allows future generations to inherit a Wright who is whole, at once man, thinker, and writer. Richard Wright was handsome, likable, and hardworking, with a voice that ranged from high to baritone, a man with the cool confidence of a jazz musician—he liked to talk and laugh and be with friends, who included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. (One friend, Gertrude Stein, betrayed him by introducing him to a thief and then by refusing to acknowledge the theft of Wright’s property, which included penicillin for Wright’s daughter.) Wright was, surprisingly, a sexual swordsman who put his marriage to Ellen at risk. Rowley’s book is also interesting for addressing the rumors surrounding Wright’s death (CIA? Femme fatale?). Rowley investigates Wright’s medical treatment, which included the taking of bismuth for intestinal disorders, a prescription given by a doctor who made Wright’s friends uneasy. Oral bismuth was then popular in France, but would later be known to cause heavy-metal poisoning leading to kidney and liver failure.
Richard Wright’s legacy is a complex one—it is aesthetic, intellectual, and political. Intelligent interpretation is what Wright tried to provide in his own work, but not always what he received for his own efforts. Wright’s work was censored before publication—for instance the sexuality of Bigger Thomas was excised from Native Son, and after publication his work was sometimes misunderstood or misrepresented. A 1957 New York Times review of Wright’s White Man, Listen! called the book “argumentative, belligerent and often wrong-headed” and then went on to summarize how correct Wright was in many of his positions but reprimanded him for not understanding well-enough the threat of Communism (Wright, who joined then abandoned the Communist party). African-American novelist David Bradley in 1977’s Quest magazine said Wright seemed a “cold-blooded intellectual.” Feminists more recently have questioned his work’s treatment of women and his dismissal of Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. However, Wright was for himself and for others a one-man university system. Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and other women writers acknowledged his active support of their early careers; and Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Gordon Parks admitted his influence, although Wright’s tying literature so closely to politics may have become a burden to subsequent writers.
“All of my life had shaped me to live by my own feelings and thoughts,” Wright wrote in Black Boy (p.298, HarperPerennial, 1993). Hazel Rowley’s necessary biography of Wright is preceded by other books on the life and work of Richard Wright, resources that can help to place the efforts of this controversial writer in the most comprehensive of contexts, such as The World of Richard Wright and Richard Wright: Books & Writers, both by Michel Fabre, and Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah, Voices of A Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright by Eugene E. Miller, Richard Wright by Robert Felgar, and Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Arnold Rampersad. Wright brought not merely heat but light; he was, as in the words of one of his own haikus (#647), a fire: “Burning out its time,/And timing its own burning,/One lonely candle.”
Excerpt from "Iconography: Ideas, Images, and Individuals"
“Every time he thought he was going mad, he met somebody else who had already gone mad, but in a nice, sweet sort of way,” wrote Richard Wright about Cross Damon, faced with a woman allowing herself to become involved in a real estate scheme, in the novel The Outsider (HarperPerennial, 1993; 184). Wright was himself a man of intelligence and taste and, considering what he knew in the era in which he lived, his own sanity is nearly a miracle—except that we know his sanity was cultivated. Michel Fabre paid essayist, novelist, and poet Richard Wright significant respect by producing Richard Wright: Books and Writers (University Press of Mississippi, 1990), which provides an annotated bibliography of Wright’s library and also includes some of his sharp, quick-moving book reviews and other commentaries on literature. Richard Wright read the published (and sometimes unpublished) books of Peter Abrahams, James Agee, Sherwood Anderson, Hannah Arendt, Austen, Balzac, Djuana Barnes, Joseph Conrad, Rene Descartes, John Dewey, John Dos Passos, Dostoevsky, Dreiser, DuBois, T.S. Eliot, Emerson, Engels, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Forster, Freud, Gibbon, Gide, Goethe, Geoffrey Gorer, Gorky, Graham Greene, Knut Hamsun, Hardy, Hawthorne, Hegel, Heidegger, Hemingway, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Husserl, Ibsen, Joyce, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Kinsey, George Lamming, D.H. Lawrence, Camara Laye, Alain Locke, George Moore, John O’Hara, George Padmore, Edgar Allan Poe, Proust, Pushkin, Rabelais and many, many more, famous and obscure. The important events in a writer’s life—his perceptions, ideas, and discoveries of the uses of various forms—are identified not by considering the people he slept with, fights he had, contracts he broke, or alcohol he drank, but by identifying the books he read and wrote. It was famously said that Richard Wright could imagine a Bigger Thomas (Native Son), but Bigger Thomas could not imagine a Richard Wright. (Wright himself starred in a mid-century film of Native Son as Bigger Thomas, directed by Pierre Chenal; and a subsequent film version of the novel, directed by Jerrold Freedman and starring Victor Love as Bigger, was released in 1986.) Richard Wright could claim the broadest human inheritance for himself because he was aware of its full dimensions; and he was surprised to learn how rare this knowledge was, and where, other than in art, it might be found. In White Man, Listen! he wrote, “It has been almost only among Asians and Africans of an artistic stamp and whose background has consisted of wars, revolutions, and harsh colonial experience that I’ve found a sense of the earth belonging to, and being the natural home of, all the men inhabiting it, an attitude that went well beyond skin color, races, parties, classes, and nations” (HarperPerennial, 1995; 25-26).
All texts (c) DG, 2001 and 2006
Hazel Rowley. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York. A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt and Company. 2001. 626 pages. ISBN 0-8050-4776-X.
“Is this the dirt road,/Winding through windy trees,/That I must travel?” asked writer Richard Wright (1908-1960) in a haiku, #131, written near the end of his life. Wright’s haikus were not published in a book, Haiku: This Other World, until more than three decades after his death, and they are one more testament to what was not known about this famous writer while he lived. Wright’s lyrical and polemical autobiography Black Boy and his grim ideological urban drama Native Son may be well-known references in American literature courses but exclusive consideration of them have given us a narrow view of the author, who also wrote the comic, experimental fiction Lawd Today!, the existential novel The Outsider, and Savage Holiday, a novel featuring no African Americans, as well as books on Africa, Asia, and Europe—Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain.
Richard Wright, born to a sharecropper father and schoolteacher mother in Mississippi, endured a childhood of poverty, familial misunderstanding, religious dogmatism, and racial prejudice. He distinguished himself when young by writing a short story that was published, and being selected as a representative of his grade school class. Reading H.L. Mencken in the late 1920s introduced him to literary and social criticism, and to writers such as Dreiser, Lewis, and Anderson. Wright moved to Chicago, where he worked in the post office. He became a member of the John Reed Club and through it met other writers, and became also a member of the Communist Party—and then moved to New York, where he wrote for a party publication. Wright’s first book, the short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children, was published in 1938 and received good reviews. Two years later, Native Son was published and thus Wright became an important American writer. Wright married the white Ellen Poplowitz in 1941, published Black Boy in 1945, and visited France the next year and moved there with Ellen in 1947, where he would live, work, and die.
Hazel Rowley’s biography of Wright may not be elegant or eloquent—it is rather plain and slow-moving—but it is the most factual and fair, the most intelligent, biography of Wright that I am aware of, and it allows future generations to inherit a Wright who is whole, at once man, thinker, and writer. Richard Wright was handsome, likable, and hardworking, with a voice that ranged from high to baritone, a man with the cool confidence of a jazz musician—he liked to talk and laugh and be with friends, who included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. (One friend, Gertrude Stein, betrayed him by introducing him to a thief and then by refusing to acknowledge the theft of Wright’s property, which included penicillin for Wright’s daughter.) Wright was, surprisingly, a sexual swordsman who put his marriage to Ellen at risk. Rowley’s book is also interesting for addressing the rumors surrounding Wright’s death (CIA? Femme fatale?). Rowley investigates Wright’s medical treatment, which included the taking of bismuth for intestinal disorders, a prescription given by a doctor who made Wright’s friends uneasy. Oral bismuth was then popular in France, but would later be known to cause heavy-metal poisoning leading to kidney and liver failure.
Richard Wright’s legacy is a complex one—it is aesthetic, intellectual, and political. Intelligent interpretation is what Wright tried to provide in his own work, but not always what he received for his own efforts. Wright’s work was censored before publication—for instance the sexuality of Bigger Thomas was excised from Native Son, and after publication his work was sometimes misunderstood or misrepresented. A 1957 New York Times review of Wright’s White Man, Listen! called the book “argumentative, belligerent and often wrong-headed” and then went on to summarize how correct Wright was in many of his positions but reprimanded him for not understanding well-enough the threat of Communism (Wright, who joined then abandoned the Communist party). African-American novelist David Bradley in 1977’s Quest magazine said Wright seemed a “cold-blooded intellectual.” Feminists more recently have questioned his work’s treatment of women and his dismissal of Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. However, Wright was for himself and for others a one-man university system. Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and other women writers acknowledged his active support of their early careers; and Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Gordon Parks admitted his influence, although Wright’s tying literature so closely to politics may have become a burden to subsequent writers.
“All of my life had shaped me to live by my own feelings and thoughts,” Wright wrote in Black Boy (p.298, HarperPerennial, 1993). Hazel Rowley’s necessary biography of Wright is preceded by other books on the life and work of Richard Wright, resources that can help to place the efforts of this controversial writer in the most comprehensive of contexts, such as The World of Richard Wright and Richard Wright: Books & Writers, both by Michel Fabre, and Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah, Voices of A Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright by Eugene E. Miller, Richard Wright by Robert Felgar, and Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Arnold Rampersad. Wright brought not merely heat but light; he was, as in the words of one of his own haikus (#647), a fire: “Burning out its time,/And timing its own burning,/One lonely candle.”
Excerpt from "Iconography: Ideas, Images, and Individuals"
“Every time he thought he was going mad, he met somebody else who had already gone mad, but in a nice, sweet sort of way,” wrote Richard Wright about Cross Damon, faced with a woman allowing herself to become involved in a real estate scheme, in the novel The Outsider (HarperPerennial, 1993; 184). Wright was himself a man of intelligence and taste and, considering what he knew in the era in which he lived, his own sanity is nearly a miracle—except that we know his sanity was cultivated. Michel Fabre paid essayist, novelist, and poet Richard Wright significant respect by producing Richard Wright: Books and Writers (University Press of Mississippi, 1990), which provides an annotated bibliography of Wright’s library and also includes some of his sharp, quick-moving book reviews and other commentaries on literature. Richard Wright read the published (and sometimes unpublished) books of Peter Abrahams, James Agee, Sherwood Anderson, Hannah Arendt, Austen, Balzac, Djuana Barnes, Joseph Conrad, Rene Descartes, John Dewey, John Dos Passos, Dostoevsky, Dreiser, DuBois, T.S. Eliot, Emerson, Engels, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Forster, Freud, Gibbon, Gide, Goethe, Geoffrey Gorer, Gorky, Graham Greene, Knut Hamsun, Hardy, Hawthorne, Hegel, Heidegger, Hemingway, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Husserl, Ibsen, Joyce, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Kinsey, George Lamming, D.H. Lawrence, Camara Laye, Alain Locke, George Moore, John O’Hara, George Padmore, Edgar Allan Poe, Proust, Pushkin, Rabelais and many, many more, famous and obscure. The important events in a writer’s life—his perceptions, ideas, and discoveries of the uses of various forms—are identified not by considering the people he slept with, fights he had, contracts he broke, or alcohol he drank, but by identifying the books he read and wrote. It was famously said that Richard Wright could imagine a Bigger Thomas (Native Son), but Bigger Thomas could not imagine a Richard Wright. (Wright himself starred in a mid-century film of Native Son as Bigger Thomas, directed by Pierre Chenal; and a subsequent film version of the novel, directed by Jerrold Freedman and starring Victor Love as Bigger, was released in 1986.) Richard Wright could claim the broadest human inheritance for himself because he was aware of its full dimensions; and he was surprised to learn how rare this knowledge was, and where, other than in art, it might be found. In White Man, Listen! he wrote, “It has been almost only among Asians and Africans of an artistic stamp and whose background has consisted of wars, revolutions, and harsh colonial experience that I’ve found a sense of the earth belonging to, and being the natural home of, all the men inhabiting it, an attitude that went well beyond skin color, races, parties, classes, and nations” (HarperPerennial, 1995; 25-26).
All texts (c) DG, 2001 and 2006
Friday, February 20, 2009
Silence, Exile, and Cunning; or, Appreciations and Repudiations, Part Two
“The NEA will receive $50 million to distribute to non-profit arts organizations while the Smithsonian gets $25 million to repair its facilities,” reported The Art Newspaper, following President Obama’s signing of the stimulus package legislation, the recovery and reinvestment act (Helen Stoilas, February 19, 2009). There were worries, apparently, that the National Endowment for the Arts and Smithsonian might be cut from the legislation. There have been arguments, too, and elsewhere, for a cabinet post representing the arts, a secretary of the arts, the equivalent of a culture minister, an idea I’m sympathetic to, as culture connects with all aspects of American life, public and private; and having a culture secretary or minister could illuminate and support that: a culture representative and department could connect what is occurring across the country, in different states, and demonstrate how to incorporate culture in terms of education, the economy, and social projects.
“As President Obama begins to put his personal stamp on public debate, I think we can be hopeful that respect for the qualities that liberal education aims to foster — moral and aesthetic sensitivity — will rise. We can also be hopeful that academe, especially as an engine of opportunity and a site of scientific research, will find a friendlier partner in government. The provisional 'stimulus package' includes modest increases in federal support for low-income students and a good deal of money for 'shovel ready' construction projects on our campuses,” writes Andrew Delbanco in “A New Day for Intellectuals” in The Chronicle Review (February 13, 2009). Delbanco, after examining charges of anti-intellectualism in American culture and asserting that Americans are pragmatic regarding education and expertise, affirms the importance of self-criticism and social justice, as well.
The troubled economy continues to affect the world of culture and media: Borders Books is cutting twelve percent of its corporate workforce, according to Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly, February 19. The New York Times Company will not be paying dividends scheduled for this month, because of lower received newspaper revenues, the paper reports (Richard Perez-Pena, Feb. 19), the first suspension in four decades. Meanwhile Wall Street investors worry that American banks could be nationalized.
The singer and songwriter Santi White (Santogold) has generated interest and high regard among some music listeners, and she is scheduled to perform tonight at 7 p.m., for free, at the Apple Store in Manhattan, 103 Prince Street in Soho. I was disappointed last month to read an article titled “Janelle, Erykah, and Santogold Are the Afro-Techno Revolution, While Beyonce just struggles to keep up,” by Kandia Crazy Horse in New York’s Village Voice, available online (January 20, 2009), a piece in which the writer saw new music in relation to political context and found Beyonce’s work limited in emotional affect (“ice cold”) and complexity (“insufficient innervisions to triumph”). I have my own criticisms of aspects of Beyonce’s work, though I appreciate her beauty, talent, and success; and what worries me is that I suspect—following Village Voice writer Greg Tate’s comparison of Beyonce with Alicia Keys; and his contrasting supposed Eurocentric with Afrocentric artists—is that people are beginning to use Beyonce as a symbol, which may not be fair to her. (I recall how Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross used to be posed in certain arguments; and remember too that when Vanity Fair profiled Aretha Franklin in the 1990s, Ross gave her praise, and that when Ross was celebrated at the Kennedy Center recently, Franklin was there to praise her. Often, rivalries are in the minds of critics and lesser talents, rather than in the lives of major popular artists.) It is also true that the Village Voice has used ideas about "cool" and naked aggression as critical tools for years, under music editor Robert Christgau, and it’s unfortunate to see that tradition continued under editor Rob Harvilla. (Appreciating the serious exploration of culture, especially of literature and film, I have been a longtime reader of the Voice, even though its quality has diminished over the years, but I never liked Christgau's writing work, finding it abrasive, shallow, and desperately, all too desperately, self-promoting, the kind of relentless self-promotion rare for an established writer, suggesting a profound and possibly appropriate insecurity.) In discussing and evaluating artists, sometimes comparisons are useful; and sometimes harsh critiques are earned; however, it would make more sense for a critic to identify the qualities she or he finds of value in an artist, rather than to indulge in the construction of artistic demons to be vanquished. The other thing is that these comparisions sometimes rest, for their own effect, on the resentments that too many people have regarding successful people (so that success itself is seen as a form of wickedness: that is a petty and stupid kind of puritanism).
Sometimes late at night on south Louisiana television, sharing airtime with commercials offering health regimens, household equipment, and dating ads, is something called Jack Van Impe Presents, featuring Jack and his wife, featuring sheer lunacy: they discuss subjects such as whether Christ wanted to be a church leader or a king, whether the world will end in year 2012, when there is so much practical and social stuff that are problems for ordinary people that could be discussed. How does spiritual belief contribute to peace of mind and social well-being? The worst thing is that these concerns—the long-ago ambitions of Christ, and prospects for the end of the world—are only a little more weird than the deliberations that often go on in various religions. On Tuesday in Mardi Gras and soon after is the beginning of Lent; and neither event, one secular, one religious, is of positive interest to me. I am in a world in which so much of the dominant values are alien impositions. I recall now having a conversation with a friend last year in New York in which I said that I thought many of the interests of Americans involved business, family, religion, and sports and that those were not my principal concerns, which were more likely to involve culture, philosophy, or politics.
I have not seen as many of the past year’s films as I would like, but I do have some interest in the awards given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Oscars: I’m hoping that Sean Penn will win best actor, Kate Winslet best actress, Heath Ledger best supporting actor, and Penelope Cruz for best supporting actress (though I would be pleased as well if Viola Davis or Taraji Henson won for best supporting actress). Greencine Daily will host a live blog of the 81st Academy Awards presentation on Sunday, Feb. 22.
“As President Obama begins to put his personal stamp on public debate, I think we can be hopeful that respect for the qualities that liberal education aims to foster — moral and aesthetic sensitivity — will rise. We can also be hopeful that academe, especially as an engine of opportunity and a site of scientific research, will find a friendlier partner in government. The provisional 'stimulus package' includes modest increases in federal support for low-income students and a good deal of money for 'shovel ready' construction projects on our campuses,” writes Andrew Delbanco in “A New Day for Intellectuals” in The Chronicle Review (February 13, 2009). Delbanco, after examining charges of anti-intellectualism in American culture and asserting that Americans are pragmatic regarding education and expertise, affirms the importance of self-criticism and social justice, as well.
The troubled economy continues to affect the world of culture and media: Borders Books is cutting twelve percent of its corporate workforce, according to Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly, February 19. The New York Times Company will not be paying dividends scheduled for this month, because of lower received newspaper revenues, the paper reports (Richard Perez-Pena, Feb. 19), the first suspension in four decades. Meanwhile Wall Street investors worry that American banks could be nationalized.
The singer and songwriter Santi White (Santogold) has generated interest and high regard among some music listeners, and she is scheduled to perform tonight at 7 p.m., for free, at the Apple Store in Manhattan, 103 Prince Street in Soho. I was disappointed last month to read an article titled “Janelle, Erykah, and Santogold Are the Afro-Techno Revolution, While Beyonce just struggles to keep up,” by Kandia Crazy Horse in New York’s Village Voice, available online (January 20, 2009), a piece in which the writer saw new music in relation to political context and found Beyonce’s work limited in emotional affect (“ice cold”) and complexity (“insufficient innervisions to triumph”). I have my own criticisms of aspects of Beyonce’s work, though I appreciate her beauty, talent, and success; and what worries me is that I suspect—following Village Voice writer Greg Tate’s comparison of Beyonce with Alicia Keys; and his contrasting supposed Eurocentric with Afrocentric artists—is that people are beginning to use Beyonce as a symbol, which may not be fair to her. (I recall how Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross used to be posed in certain arguments; and remember too that when Vanity Fair profiled Aretha Franklin in the 1990s, Ross gave her praise, and that when Ross was celebrated at the Kennedy Center recently, Franklin was there to praise her. Often, rivalries are in the minds of critics and lesser talents, rather than in the lives of major popular artists.) It is also true that the Village Voice has used ideas about "cool" and naked aggression as critical tools for years, under music editor Robert Christgau, and it’s unfortunate to see that tradition continued under editor Rob Harvilla. (Appreciating the serious exploration of culture, especially of literature and film, I have been a longtime reader of the Voice, even though its quality has diminished over the years, but I never liked Christgau's writing work, finding it abrasive, shallow, and desperately, all too desperately, self-promoting, the kind of relentless self-promotion rare for an established writer, suggesting a profound and possibly appropriate insecurity.) In discussing and evaluating artists, sometimes comparisons are useful; and sometimes harsh critiques are earned; however, it would make more sense for a critic to identify the qualities she or he finds of value in an artist, rather than to indulge in the construction of artistic demons to be vanquished. The other thing is that these comparisions sometimes rest, for their own effect, on the resentments that too many people have regarding successful people (so that success itself is seen as a form of wickedness: that is a petty and stupid kind of puritanism).
Sometimes late at night on south Louisiana television, sharing airtime with commercials offering health regimens, household equipment, and dating ads, is something called Jack Van Impe Presents, featuring Jack and his wife, featuring sheer lunacy: they discuss subjects such as whether Christ wanted to be a church leader or a king, whether the world will end in year 2012, when there is so much practical and social stuff that are problems for ordinary people that could be discussed. How does spiritual belief contribute to peace of mind and social well-being? The worst thing is that these concerns—the long-ago ambitions of Christ, and prospects for the end of the world—are only a little more weird than the deliberations that often go on in various religions. On Tuesday in Mardi Gras and soon after is the beginning of Lent; and neither event, one secular, one religious, is of positive interest to me. I am in a world in which so much of the dominant values are alien impositions. I recall now having a conversation with a friend last year in New York in which I said that I thought many of the interests of Americans involved business, family, religion, and sports and that those were not my principal concerns, which were more likely to involve culture, philosophy, or politics.
I have not seen as many of the past year’s films as I would like, but I do have some interest in the awards given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Oscars: I’m hoping that Sean Penn will win best actor, Kate Winslet best actress, Heath Ledger best supporting actor, and Penelope Cruz for best supporting actress (though I would be pleased as well if Viola Davis or Taraji Henson won for best supporting actress). Greencine Daily will host a live blog of the 81st Academy Awards presentation on Sunday, Feb. 22.
Music and Writing
Excerpt from "Revelations: Notes on Music, Criticism, and Society..."
The people who write about music sometimes champion the work of those whose ideas and images closely mirror their own, in terms of class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, but some writers are more imaginative, more intelligent, seeking out the widest possible range of music and musicians. Some of the commentators on music whose insights have enlightened and/or entertained me are James Baldwin, Playthell Benjamin, Delphine Blue, Nate Chinen, Kandia Crazy Horse, Stanley Crouch, Angela Davis, Jim DeRogatis, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Christopher John Farley, Nelson George, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Claudrena Harold, Pauline Kael, Greg Kot, Will Layman, Wynton Marsalis, Michelangelo Matos, Paul Nelson, Sarah Rodman, Kelefa Sanneh, Gene Seymour, Armond White, and Carl Wilson. I always recall Baldwin’s comments on Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, and Pauline Kael on Streisand and the Rolling Stones. One of the more interesting music writers now is Christian John Wikane. I encountered his work on the pages of the web magazine Pop Matters, which publishes great commentary on books, film, music, and other disciplines and issues. (My own commentary on Annie Lennox and the band The Smyrk appeared there.) In his writing, Christian John Wikane has featured the work and personalities of Ashford and Simpson, Gnarls Barkley, the Bee Gees, Tim Buckley, Don Byron, Paula Cole, Donnie, Feist, Aretha Franklin, Kevin (Ké) Grivois, Deborah Harry, Jamiroquai, Chaka Khan, K.D. Lang, Bettye LaVette, Amos Lee, Annie Lennox, Paul McCartney, Mika, Madonna, Stevie Nicks, Rahsaan Patterson, the Pointer Sisters, Corinne Bailey Rae, Nile Rodgers, Linda Ronstadt, and Diana Ross. Wikane called Gnarls Barkley’s The Odd Couple “an emotionally and musically provocative album,” a recording that is an “alternately disturbing, comforting, and challenging exploration of the human mind” (PopMatters.com, March 25, 2008); and Wikane remarked of K.D. Lang’s first album of new songs in years, Watershed, that Lang demonstrates “a keen sense of how to record herself and lead her excellent unit of musicians” (PopMatters.com, Feb. 5, 2008), and he enthusiastically declared of the anthology Bee Gees Greatest that the word “‘greatest’ seems far too modest an adjective to describe this music” (PopMatters.com, October 8, 2007). Christian John Wikane’s love and respect for music and its makers are refreshing; and his commentaries—reviews of recordings and interviews with artists—are among the most complete responses to music available. His work is quite intelligent, but in light of his attention to emotion and sensuality in music, and the empathy and enjoyment he brings to encounters with musicians, I have thought that his work contains the beginnings of an erotics of art.
(c) DG, 2008
The people who write about music sometimes champion the work of those whose ideas and images closely mirror their own, in terms of class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, but some writers are more imaginative, more intelligent, seeking out the widest possible range of music and musicians. Some of the commentators on music whose insights have enlightened and/or entertained me are James Baldwin, Playthell Benjamin, Delphine Blue, Nate Chinen, Kandia Crazy Horse, Stanley Crouch, Angela Davis, Jim DeRogatis, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Christopher John Farley, Nelson George, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Claudrena Harold, Pauline Kael, Greg Kot, Will Layman, Wynton Marsalis, Michelangelo Matos, Paul Nelson, Sarah Rodman, Kelefa Sanneh, Gene Seymour, Armond White, and Carl Wilson. I always recall Baldwin’s comments on Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, and Pauline Kael on Streisand and the Rolling Stones. One of the more interesting music writers now is Christian John Wikane. I encountered his work on the pages of the web magazine Pop Matters, which publishes great commentary on books, film, music, and other disciplines and issues. (My own commentary on Annie Lennox and the band The Smyrk appeared there.) In his writing, Christian John Wikane has featured the work and personalities of Ashford and Simpson, Gnarls Barkley, the Bee Gees, Tim Buckley, Don Byron, Paula Cole, Donnie, Feist, Aretha Franklin, Kevin (Ké) Grivois, Deborah Harry, Jamiroquai, Chaka Khan, K.D. Lang, Bettye LaVette, Amos Lee, Annie Lennox, Paul McCartney, Mika, Madonna, Stevie Nicks, Rahsaan Patterson, the Pointer Sisters, Corinne Bailey Rae, Nile Rodgers, Linda Ronstadt, and Diana Ross. Wikane called Gnarls Barkley’s The Odd Couple “an emotionally and musically provocative album,” a recording that is an “alternately disturbing, comforting, and challenging exploration of the human mind” (PopMatters.com, March 25, 2008); and Wikane remarked of K.D. Lang’s first album of new songs in years, Watershed, that Lang demonstrates “a keen sense of how to record herself and lead her excellent unit of musicians” (PopMatters.com, Feb. 5, 2008), and he enthusiastically declared of the anthology Bee Gees Greatest that the word “‘greatest’ seems far too modest an adjective to describe this music” (PopMatters.com, October 8, 2007). Christian John Wikane’s love and respect for music and its makers are refreshing; and his commentaries—reviews of recordings and interviews with artists—are among the most complete responses to music available. His work is quite intelligent, but in light of his attention to emotion and sensuality in music, and the empathy and enjoyment he brings to encounters with musicians, I have thought that his work contains the beginnings of an erotics of art.
(c) DG, 2008
Thursday, February 19, 2009
John Cheever's novel Falconer
I have begun reading Iris Murdoch's novel Under the Net, having just completed John Cheever's Falconer, published in the mid-1970s. I do not think that I've read Murdoch before, though I have thought of it and her many times. I have read Cheever's short stories, appreciating the variety of situations and characters he presents and the honesty and sensitivity he brings to their portrayal, the sympathy.
One wouldn't expect a man like John Cheever to know all the hard things in Falconer. The principal chracter in the novel is a privileged and lusty man who killed his own brother out of disgust as much as anger. Set in a prison, the writer keeps bringing into the story memories of the past and the larger world. The book has a truthful and irreducible vitality; and gives knowledge born of private experience and contemplation, not just social studies.
What is fascinating about a good novel, such as Falconer, is how a writer creates, enriches, disrupts, transgresses and reconciles his own story: a novel is a digression with digressions.
One wouldn't expect a man like John Cheever to know all the hard things in Falconer. The principal chracter in the novel is a privileged and lusty man who killed his own brother out of disgust as much as anger. Set in a prison, the writer keeps bringing into the story memories of the past and the larger world. The book has a truthful and irreducible vitality; and gives knowledge born of private experience and contemplation, not just social studies.
What is fascinating about a good novel, such as Falconer, is how a writer creates, enriches, disrupts, transgresses and reconciles his own story: a novel is a digression with digressions.
The musician Seal
I have liked the musician Seal for a very long time, since the early 1990s when he released the song “Crazy” and I have been impressed by the unique quality of his voice, music, and image. Seal, whose full name is Seal Henry Olusegun Kwassi Olumide Adelo Samuel, was born in Britain to Nigerian parents in the early 1960s, and he has performed different kinds of music, but is identified with “techno,” an electronic dance music. I especially liked “Newborn Friend” from his 1994 album, which was called Seal, as was his first. He did a greatest hits album, featuring work from 1991 through 2004, in 2004; and in 2007 put out the danceable album called System, and last year released Soul, a collection of well-known rhythm-and-blues and soul songs, produced by David Foster.
For PBS’s program “Soundstage,” produced and directed by Joe Thomas, the musician Seal performed, in a Chicago concert, songs from Soul, including: “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” “It’s A Man’s World,” “Knock on Wood,” “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” “Here I Am (Come and Take Me),” “People Get Ready,” “Stand by Me,” as well as his earlier songs “A Kiss From a Rose” and “Crazy.” (The concert was broadcast last Saturday morning on LPB at 2 a.m., and is being rebroadcast tonight.) Seal opened the concert wearing a black suit with a white shirt and dark tie, possibly brown if not black. With a distinctive voice and passion, the mature performer sounded very good and his audience enjoyed him as I did. He had a large band with him, including violins, horns, guitar, drums, and piano, the resources of Euro-classical, jazz, and rock music. Seal took off his jacket for the James Brown song “It’s a Man’s World” and danced with one of his background singers on “Here I Am,” though he didn’t quite take the song from Al Green. Seal spoke of being inspired by the spirit of the 1960s and of how he relished the opportunity to sing great songs. He said, however, that he resisted David Foster’s suggestion that he sing “People Get Ready” but that it became one of his favorite songs on the album. I don’t think the music had as much “blues” as the original versions of these songs: there’s a sensuality and sorrow to the original productions, and I suspect that fact, regarding the lack of blues, rests with producer David Foster, whom Seal thanked, before beginning his short techno set, returning to his own earlier work with “A Kiss from A Rose” and “Crazy,” songs that released even more energy in the performer. Seal changed clothes for the second set, wearing white, a white short sleeve T-shirt and white pants; and he performed with a much smaller band, featuring nice piano detail, with Seal's voice having a near-operatic sweep.
For PBS’s program “Soundstage,” produced and directed by Joe Thomas, the musician Seal performed, in a Chicago concert, songs from Soul, including: “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” “It’s A Man’s World,” “Knock on Wood,” “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” “Here I Am (Come and Take Me),” “People Get Ready,” “Stand by Me,” as well as his earlier songs “A Kiss From a Rose” and “Crazy.” (The concert was broadcast last Saturday morning on LPB at 2 a.m., and is being rebroadcast tonight.) Seal opened the concert wearing a black suit with a white shirt and dark tie, possibly brown if not black. With a distinctive voice and passion, the mature performer sounded very good and his audience enjoyed him as I did. He had a large band with him, including violins, horns, guitar, drums, and piano, the resources of Euro-classical, jazz, and rock music. Seal took off his jacket for the James Brown song “It’s a Man’s World” and danced with one of his background singers on “Here I Am,” though he didn’t quite take the song from Al Green. Seal spoke of being inspired by the spirit of the 1960s and of how he relished the opportunity to sing great songs. He said, however, that he resisted David Foster’s suggestion that he sing “People Get Ready” but that it became one of his favorite songs on the album. I don’t think the music had as much “blues” as the original versions of these songs: there’s a sensuality and sorrow to the original productions, and I suspect that fact, regarding the lack of blues, rests with producer David Foster, whom Seal thanked, before beginning his short techno set, returning to his own earlier work with “A Kiss from A Rose” and “Crazy,” songs that released even more energy in the performer. Seal changed clothes for the second set, wearing white, a white short sleeve T-shirt and white pants; and he performed with a much smaller band, featuring nice piano detail, with Seal's voice having a near-operatic sweep.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Scholar Aram Goudsouzian on Sidney Poitier
Professor Aram Goudsouzian teaches in the department of history at the University of Memphis, and he wrote a comprehensive book, Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), which manages to be both inspiring and sad at the same time. He was recently kind enough, earlier today, to answer a question about Sidney Poitier and the actor's relationship to his own scholarship.
Daniel: What led you to write about Sidney Poitier and how do the issues raised by his life and work relate to yours?
Aram Goudsouzian: I am interested in how popular culture shapes our attitudes about race, and in how race shapes our perceptions of popular culture. African Americans have historically found voices in entertainment and sports that were suppressed in more formal political arenas, and Hollywood has such profound, if often unacknowledged, effects upon the broader culture. The arc of Sidney Poitier’s saga particularly appealed to me because it carries through this entire period of racial upheaval. His persona transcended black stereotypes as comic buffoons or faithful sidekicks, and his dignity resonated with an emerging generation of African Americans and liberal whites who challenged racial convention in the 1950s. By the early 1960s, he seemed to embody the principle of racial equality, winning worldwide fame while lending Hollywood its sole black icon. Yet Poitier’s onscreen characters had to be ultra-virtuous heroes who exhibited unique restraints, fettering suggestions of black anger or sexuality. So by the late 1960s, one decade after getting considered a cutting-edge progressive figure, Black Power radicals and college students had tabbed him an “Uncle Tom.” I think his life and work still shape our popular understanding of black public figures today, none more so than President Obama. He seems to fulfill the same white liberal fantasies as Poitier, only on the most visible stage in the world.
Daniel: What led you to write about Sidney Poitier and how do the issues raised by his life and work relate to yours?
Aram Goudsouzian: I am interested in how popular culture shapes our attitudes about race, and in how race shapes our perceptions of popular culture. African Americans have historically found voices in entertainment and sports that were suppressed in more formal political arenas, and Hollywood has such profound, if often unacknowledged, effects upon the broader culture. The arc of Sidney Poitier’s saga particularly appealed to me because it carries through this entire period of racial upheaval. His persona transcended black stereotypes as comic buffoons or faithful sidekicks, and his dignity resonated with an emerging generation of African Americans and liberal whites who challenged racial convention in the 1950s. By the early 1960s, he seemed to embody the principle of racial equality, winning worldwide fame while lending Hollywood its sole black icon. Yet Poitier’s onscreen characters had to be ultra-virtuous heroes who exhibited unique restraints, fettering suggestions of black anger or sexuality. So by the late 1960s, one decade after getting considered a cutting-edge progressive figure, Black Power radicals and college students had tabbed him an “Uncle Tom.” I think his life and work still shape our popular understanding of black public figures today, none more so than President Obama. He seems to fulfill the same white liberal fantasies as Poitier, only on the most visible stage in the world.
More Brief Notes
The Senate and House bills regarding the economic stimulus package supported by the new president have been reconciled by Senate and House members: the U.S. economic stimulus package now is budgeted at $789 billion, according to CBS News, the New York Times and other news sources (February 12, 2009). I suspect this legislation will form the foundation of Barack Obama's legacy. [Postscript: The Congressional Budget Office would revise the package's cost to $787 billion; and the president would sign the legislation into law on Monday, February 17, 2009.]
Politico.com (Feb. 12, 2009) has reported that Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius is being discussed to lead Health and Human Services for the president. She seems an interesting person and a strong candidate, smart and accessible, collaborative and independent, practical and progressive.
Finland is known as one of the best places to live on earth, but the Helsinki Times (Feb. 11) has disclosed that Finnish hate groups have made their presence known on Facebook, focusing on anti-Somali feeling, with the groups even suggesting that monies be raised to send immigrants back to their native Somali.
In his (Feb. 3) Butterflies and Wheels article “On Rights and Sexuality,” Alexander Park states, “The obsession with some on the left with the biological roots of homosexuality is, I think, a direct result of the Privacy Fallacy. Seeking to avoid a conflict over values, which are ‘private’ and ‘relative’ and therefore ‘uncontestable,’ the left has chosen to try to avoid the entire argument that must inevitably occur by hiding behind the possibility of removing homosexuality from a moral calculus via biological fate. But this move is merely delaying the inevitable, and avoiding important facts at hand.” I have found, often, that using nature to justify human behavior is questionable: it can be a justification for the lack of choice and freedom, and a support for prejudice, as much as an argument for individual rights and personal wholeness. What is unique about being human is the possibility of knowledge and choice.
The Notre Damn Philosophical Reviews site has new book reviews focused on texts exploring Kant, Spinoza, and Wittgenstein, as well as freedom, bioethics, and critical theory. San Francisco State University’s Tom Leddy discusses Yuriko Saito’s book Everyday Aesthetics, a 2007 Oxford University Press title: “One unique aspect of Saito's analysis is the stress she places on the moral dimension of everyday aesthetics. First, she stresses the social importance of everyday aesthetic choices. If people value the greenness of a lawn, there are environmental consequences. Second, she tells us about how aestheticization of certain phenomena can cause social harm: for example, the Japanese in the last century associated their native landscape with militarist nationalism. Third, she stresses the ways that people are judged both in moral and aesthetic terms. Only the last of these seems problematic to me. There are admirable people who are not committed to conventional middle-class values of neatness and order. Should they be judged aesthetically/morally in terms of those values? In this respect, it is surprising to find an avowed feminist sympathetic, as Saito seems to be, to Dickens' implicit criticism of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House as having allowed her house to become untidy because of her interest in social problems.”
Alexander Provan has an article on Kafka in The Nation, available online (Feb. 11).
In “Laughing Through the Tears: The Enduring Journey of Etta James,” PopMatters.com (Feb. 12) excerpts Iain Ellis’s book Rebels with Attitude. (The piece might give some insight into James, whose responses, such as to Beyonce, can be contradictory, volatile.)
Politico.com (Feb. 12, 2009) has reported that Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius is being discussed to lead Health and Human Services for the president. She seems an interesting person and a strong candidate, smart and accessible, collaborative and independent, practical and progressive.
Finland is known as one of the best places to live on earth, but the Helsinki Times (Feb. 11) has disclosed that Finnish hate groups have made their presence known on Facebook, focusing on anti-Somali feeling, with the groups even suggesting that monies be raised to send immigrants back to their native Somali.
In his (Feb. 3) Butterflies and Wheels article “On Rights and Sexuality,” Alexander Park states, “The obsession with some on the left with the biological roots of homosexuality is, I think, a direct result of the Privacy Fallacy. Seeking to avoid a conflict over values, which are ‘private’ and ‘relative’ and therefore ‘uncontestable,’ the left has chosen to try to avoid the entire argument that must inevitably occur by hiding behind the possibility of removing homosexuality from a moral calculus via biological fate. But this move is merely delaying the inevitable, and avoiding important facts at hand.” I have found, often, that using nature to justify human behavior is questionable: it can be a justification for the lack of choice and freedom, and a support for prejudice, as much as an argument for individual rights and personal wholeness. What is unique about being human is the possibility of knowledge and choice.
The Notre Damn Philosophical Reviews site has new book reviews focused on texts exploring Kant, Spinoza, and Wittgenstein, as well as freedom, bioethics, and critical theory. San Francisco State University’s Tom Leddy discusses Yuriko Saito’s book Everyday Aesthetics, a 2007 Oxford University Press title: “One unique aspect of Saito's analysis is the stress she places on the moral dimension of everyday aesthetics. First, she stresses the social importance of everyday aesthetic choices. If people value the greenness of a lawn, there are environmental consequences. Second, she tells us about how aestheticization of certain phenomena can cause social harm: for example, the Japanese in the last century associated their native landscape with militarist nationalism. Third, she stresses the ways that people are judged both in moral and aesthetic terms. Only the last of these seems problematic to me. There are admirable people who are not committed to conventional middle-class values of neatness and order. Should they be judged aesthetically/morally in terms of those values? In this respect, it is surprising to find an avowed feminist sympathetic, as Saito seems to be, to Dickens' implicit criticism of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House as having allowed her house to become untidy because of her interest in social problems.”
Alexander Provan has an article on Kafka in The Nation, available online (Feb. 11).
In “Laughing Through the Tears: The Enduring Journey of Etta James,” PopMatters.com (Feb. 12) excerpts Iain Ellis’s book Rebels with Attitude. (The piece might give some insight into James, whose responses, such as to Beyonce, can be contradictory, volatile.)
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Economic Stimulus Package Passes Senate
Yesterday, following a public event in which he spoke directly to ordinary Americans, Barack Obama gave his first press conference as president, answering the questions of a wide range of reporters, including those at National Public Radio and the Huffington Post. He spoke clearly, always intelligently, with intensity, and sometimes with wry humor. The principal subject was the economy, and he urged the Senate to pass a multi-billion dollar stimulus package, arguing that it is intended to create and maintain up to four million jobs and advance projects that are efficient and cost-saving over time. And, today, the Senate approved that $838-billion package with a 61 to 37 vote, mostly with Democrats approving and Republicans disapproving; and now the Senate and the House bills will go to conference for reconciliation of differences.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Grammy Awards, Reviewed
At last night's Grammy Awards, a small portion of the awards were broadcast on television (the remainder can be seen at the Grammy's official site at Grammy.com); and some of the awards were "Please Read the Letter," by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, for Record of the Year; Raising Sand by Plant/Krauss, for Album of the Year; "Viva la Vida" for Song of the Year; Adele as Best New Artist; Adele, "Chasing Pavements" for Best Female Pop Vocal; John Mayer, "Say" for Best Male Pop Vocal; Coldplay, "Viva La Vida" for Best Pop Performance by Duo or Group; and "Rich Woman" by Plant/Krauss for Best Pop Colloboration...Some of the awards we did not see on television included Duffy's Rockferry getting Best Pop Vocal Album, Alicia Keys getting Best Female R & B Vocal Performance for her song "Superwoman," and Al Green and John Legend getting a Grammy for the song "Stay with Me" (Best R & B Performance by a Duo/Group), and Al Green and Anthony Hamilton getting a Grammy for Best Traditional R & B Performance by a Duo/Group)....
The Grammy Awards television broadcast seems quite good when one considers it an industry award program: how many industry award shows could sustain interest and provide entertainment? The quality of the performances were probably better than could be predicted for a live program before millions; and I liked hearing U2, Kid Rock, Kenny Chesney, and the blues tribute featuring Keith Urban, B.B. King, and John Mayer. The u2 song captured different periods of rock history and was smartly presented with the lyrics as a backdrop. Whitney Houston received a warm welcome, a standing ovation, before she presented an award to Jennifer Hudson, for Best R & B album. (The audience may have been in a generous mood: others would get ovations--not only U2 and Houston but also Coldplay, Jennifer Hudson, Radiohead.) Justin Timberlake's performance with Al Green struck me as energetic but less good than Timberlake's later performance with T.I. (Green's voice seemed a little rough to me, though it smoothed a bit as he went on). I found the rock/rap colloboration between Coldplay and Jay-Z to be incongruous, though the song's third-part uptempo movement was an improvement. Carrie Underwood, performing in a short dress that showed her great legs, did some kind of noisy, soulful country thing that seemed both bad taste and very effective. Kid Rock, in dark glasses and a black suit, generated energy and interest with a song mixing rock, gospel, and rap and various contemporary references, before sequeing into two other songs; and it was a fun (and swaggering) performance, which ended with his taking his jacket off and walking off the stage. I thought the duet performance of Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus was just bearable, though I sympathize with the subject of the song (a young woman's vulnerable years). Jennifer Hudson's appearance was dramatic in many ways; it was among her first performances following the death of several family members, and she began singing offstage; and she sang something that seemed a love song that could be interpreted as a spiritual, and she was helped by a choir. It was odd to hear Stevie Wonder perform with the Jonas Brothers and to hear them repeatedly call him Stevie (was Diana Ross in the house? She could have instructed: that's Mr. Stevie to you). Metrosexual late night talk show host Craig Ferguson introduced Katy Perry, who performed "I Kissed A Girl" with costumes, dancers, and props, the kind of performance that goes back through Madonna and Cher...all the way to Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus. Estelle has a good voice though her duet with Kanye West was lost on me (also, her dress was little more than a glittery bag), just as the Paul McCartney/Dave Grohl performance didn't mean much to me. The female rapper M.I.A, performing with famous rappers, was a sight for sore eyes--and might have caused the sore eyes (I don't think I want to see a nine months pregnant woman perform again in such a transparent and clinging outfit, though I recognize this might have been some kind of transgressive breakthrough: score one for women; score ten for bad taste). I'm not a fan of Radiohead but I liked their performance. I like Smokey Robinson and wished he had been a bigger part of the Four Tops tribute that he, Jamie Foxx, Ne-Yo, and Duke Fakir participated in. Neil Diamond's performance was oddly paced, and brought to mind the Jewish Elvis moniker I used to hear (Diamond seemed pleased by the audience's attention and they seemed glad to give it but there wasn't a lot of energy: there was mostly nostalgia). One of the oddest combinations wasn't bad at all: featuring Lil Wayne, Robin Thicke, Allen Toussaint, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and Terrence Blanchard. These award shows, such as the Grammys or Oscars, are interesting often for reasons that have nothing to do with art, but to do with business and popularity and social values; but last night there were some good musical performances and the presentation of some attractive performers repaid some of one's attention--but, at three and a half-hours, it is still hard not to argue that time could have been better spent.
The Grammy Awards television broadcast seems quite good when one considers it an industry award program: how many industry award shows could sustain interest and provide entertainment? The quality of the performances were probably better than could be predicted for a live program before millions; and I liked hearing U2, Kid Rock, Kenny Chesney, and the blues tribute featuring Keith Urban, B.B. King, and John Mayer. The u2 song captured different periods of rock history and was smartly presented with the lyrics as a backdrop. Whitney Houston received a warm welcome, a standing ovation, before she presented an award to Jennifer Hudson, for Best R & B album. (The audience may have been in a generous mood: others would get ovations--not only U2 and Houston but also Coldplay, Jennifer Hudson, Radiohead.) Justin Timberlake's performance with Al Green struck me as energetic but less good than Timberlake's later performance with T.I. (Green's voice seemed a little rough to me, though it smoothed a bit as he went on). I found the rock/rap colloboration between Coldplay and Jay-Z to be incongruous, though the song's third-part uptempo movement was an improvement. Carrie Underwood, performing in a short dress that showed her great legs, did some kind of noisy, soulful country thing that seemed both bad taste and very effective. Kid Rock, in dark glasses and a black suit, generated energy and interest with a song mixing rock, gospel, and rap and various contemporary references, before sequeing into two other songs; and it was a fun (and swaggering) performance, which ended with his taking his jacket off and walking off the stage. I thought the duet performance of Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus was just bearable, though I sympathize with the subject of the song (a young woman's vulnerable years). Jennifer Hudson's appearance was dramatic in many ways; it was among her first performances following the death of several family members, and she began singing offstage; and she sang something that seemed a love song that could be interpreted as a spiritual, and she was helped by a choir. It was odd to hear Stevie Wonder perform with the Jonas Brothers and to hear them repeatedly call him Stevie (was Diana Ross in the house? She could have instructed: that's Mr. Stevie to you). Metrosexual late night talk show host Craig Ferguson introduced Katy Perry, who performed "I Kissed A Girl" with costumes, dancers, and props, the kind of performance that goes back through Madonna and Cher...all the way to Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus. Estelle has a good voice though her duet with Kanye West was lost on me (also, her dress was little more than a glittery bag), just as the Paul McCartney/Dave Grohl performance didn't mean much to me. The female rapper M.I.A, performing with famous rappers, was a sight for sore eyes--and might have caused the sore eyes (I don't think I want to see a nine months pregnant woman perform again in such a transparent and clinging outfit, though I recognize this might have been some kind of transgressive breakthrough: score one for women; score ten for bad taste). I'm not a fan of Radiohead but I liked their performance. I like Smokey Robinson and wished he had been a bigger part of the Four Tops tribute that he, Jamie Foxx, Ne-Yo, and Duke Fakir participated in. Neil Diamond's performance was oddly paced, and brought to mind the Jewish Elvis moniker I used to hear (Diamond seemed pleased by the audience's attention and they seemed glad to give it but there wasn't a lot of energy: there was mostly nostalgia). One of the oddest combinations wasn't bad at all: featuring Lil Wayne, Robin Thicke, Allen Toussaint, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and Terrence Blanchard. These award shows, such as the Grammys or Oscars, are interesting often for reasons that have nothing to do with art, but to do with business and popularity and social values; but last night there were some good musical performances and the presentation of some attractive performers repaid some of one's attention--but, at three and a half-hours, it is still hard not to argue that time could have been better spent.
Susan Sontag, Reborn
I have been reading John Cheever's novel Falconer and Susan Sontag's Reborn, a collection of journals, and it took me about three days to read Reborn, which I finished this past Saturday.
Susan Sontag's Reborn: Journal and Notebooks, 1947-1963
Reborn (Farrar, Straus, 2008) is an edited presentation of Sontag's journals, documenting her early consciousness, work, and life: art, books, and education; family; love and sexuality. Edited by her son David Rieff, the journals contain genuine philosophical speculations as well as great personal candor, illuminating Sontag's precocious gifts and intellectual ambition, achieving a passionate intensity when she expresses love for broken relationships. Sontag was a private person, and though this book is a raw revelation of some of her intimacies, (on first reading) I don't think it destroys her dignity or value or authority. It may expand her accessibility and range--and, certainly, her discipline and accomplishment are more clear.
Excerpt from "Human Conflict, or the legacies of superfluous men: Hotel Rwanda, The Merchant of Venice, Bad Education, The Woodsman, and Notre Musique"
Susan Sontag, who liked Emerson and Poe, claimed as models Nietzsche, Kafka, and Van Gogh, and also Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. Sontag admired, as well, the two Simones, Weil and de Beauvoir. A cosmopolitan thinker, Susan Sontag grew up not in New York or Paris but in Arizona and California; and, an energetic child and an avid reader, she was excited by a biography of Madame Curie by Curie’s daughter and Les Miserables, before turning to Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Eliot, Kafka, and Gide. She graduated high school at fifteen. She attended the University of Chicago, where she studied with Kenneth Burke and Joseph Schwab. Sontag, who did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard and Oxford, dreamed of writing essays that would be appreciated by informed readers; and that is what she spent her life doing. The philosopher Sartre said that freedom has no essence; and that there are descriptions that aim not at essence but at existence; and, with this in mind, I would say that Susan Sontag sought, found, and lived an exemplary freedom.
(c) DG
Susan Sontag's Reborn: Journal and Notebooks, 1947-1963
Reborn (Farrar, Straus, 2008) is an edited presentation of Sontag's journals, documenting her early consciousness, work, and life: art, books, and education; family; love and sexuality. Edited by her son David Rieff, the journals contain genuine philosophical speculations as well as great personal candor, illuminating Sontag's precocious gifts and intellectual ambition, achieving a passionate intensity when she expresses love for broken relationships. Sontag was a private person, and though this book is a raw revelation of some of her intimacies, (on first reading) I don't think it destroys her dignity or value or authority. It may expand her accessibility and range--and, certainly, her discipline and accomplishment are more clear.
Excerpt from "Human Conflict, or the legacies of superfluous men: Hotel Rwanda, The Merchant of Venice, Bad Education, The Woodsman, and Notre Musique"
Susan Sontag, who liked Emerson and Poe, claimed as models Nietzsche, Kafka, and Van Gogh, and also Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. Sontag admired, as well, the two Simones, Weil and de Beauvoir. A cosmopolitan thinker, Susan Sontag grew up not in New York or Paris but in Arizona and California; and, an energetic child and an avid reader, she was excited by a biography of Madame Curie by Curie’s daughter and Les Miserables, before turning to Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Eliot, Kafka, and Gide. She graduated high school at fifteen. She attended the University of Chicago, where she studied with Kenneth Burke and Joseph Schwab. Sontag, who did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard and Oxford, dreamed of writing essays that would be appreciated by informed readers; and that is what she spent her life doing. The philosopher Sartre said that freedom has no essence; and that there are descriptions that aim not at essence but at existence; and, with this in mind, I would say that Susan Sontag sought, found, and lived an exemplary freedom.
(c) DG
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Poem
Writer's Note: This, "Friends," is an old poem, written in New York in the 1980s, about friends taking a trip to Washington for a public event; and I thought of it again during President Obama's inauguration. I write with diverse inspirations, for various reasons; and this poem was written, partly, for a friend: it was a way of giving to her an ordered, sensible vision of the world, a vision that could be useful. When she first got the poem, she wasn't sure it was for her (she, like many people, may have preferred something even more crudely sentimental), but as time went on she liked the poem...
Friends
(Celebrating Martin Luther King Jr's Birthday)
Soft white winter light licking long black trees
Sky a pale storm blue, air dried of heat and summer promise
You drive, jolted by bumps, turns in the road,
shifts in conversation. I watch your back,
the throbbing neck muscle covered by dark cream skin.
I look at your short curly hair, your green canvas jacket,
but I see a distant yesterday when your hand reached
out to know my hand. Today, I silently thank you. Again.
Next to you, your lover's voice humming the same blues
as when we left our warm southern house,
Desiree, Eugene and I in the back seat,
slim brow hands counting my numbers
thinking I have bowed to mysticism
when I have bowed to his magic--friendship.
Short, small Desiree sleeping crushed
against a door, having fed us with wheat cakes
sweetened with raisins, goat milk, and vitamins.
We are traveling from lush lawns and magnolias,
Louisiana, to the red dirt hills of Georgia,
stepping lightly in thickly dark forests,
to the shining marble of Washington.
We are traveling from a single wish to friends' hope
to communal vision. From Saturday to Sunday to January 15th.
From hope to joy to wonder.
The capital, fresh snow cold, whiteness strangling
the thinnest neck of grass, under an axblade-blue sky.
On stone steps and iced lawn, there is a great rough quilt
of people--silk and leather blacks, sackcloth and satin browns,
velvet reds, lack and cotton whites, stitched together
with smiles, arguments, tears, touching. Anthems are sung.
The wind is blowing, frizzbees are flying.
Our conversations are slashed
by hawkers of buttons, t-shirts, and stickers,
their voices stabbing air:
Breathe revolution cook revolution dance revolution
fight revolution fuck revolution wear revolution
as we wonder which revolution? Our nerves tense
with premonition:
Bombs dropping, caressing flesh with pain,
sharp steel slicing arms and legs with kisses,
climaxing in bullets ejaculated by hung thick machine guns.
Doesn't it all begin and end with pain?
The organizer, a dark man cut of holy cloth,
calls this "a movement to clothe, feed, house and teach all."
The elders delicately unwrap memories
that the young have meshed from black-and-white films
of olden days, of protest streets, dogs, gushing hoses,
bloody clubs, of white and black people, black and white reasons,
white and black fears. We think, One never starts over.
There is no new purity. We stand carved by life,
aware and struggling, hopeful in fits.
My hand reaches out to re-member yours.
Afterwards, to car, we ride train in tunneled earth,
knowing this is the work and the traveling
we are meant to do:
Underground, under skin, under language,
becoming comfortable with rushing rivers,
dank sewers, slender blood veins,
the inner flowing of pain and pleasure.
(c) DG
Friends
(Celebrating Martin Luther King Jr's Birthday)
Soft white winter light licking long black trees
Sky a pale storm blue, air dried of heat and summer promise
You drive, jolted by bumps, turns in the road,
shifts in conversation. I watch your back,
the throbbing neck muscle covered by dark cream skin.
I look at your short curly hair, your green canvas jacket,
but I see a distant yesterday when your hand reached
out to know my hand. Today, I silently thank you. Again.
Next to you, your lover's voice humming the same blues
as when we left our warm southern house,
Desiree, Eugene and I in the back seat,
slim brow hands counting my numbers
thinking I have bowed to mysticism
when I have bowed to his magic--friendship.
Short, small Desiree sleeping crushed
against a door, having fed us with wheat cakes
sweetened with raisins, goat milk, and vitamins.
We are traveling from lush lawns and magnolias,
Louisiana, to the red dirt hills of Georgia,
stepping lightly in thickly dark forests,
to the shining marble of Washington.
We are traveling from a single wish to friends' hope
to communal vision. From Saturday to Sunday to January 15th.
From hope to joy to wonder.
The capital, fresh snow cold, whiteness strangling
the thinnest neck of grass, under an axblade-blue sky.
On stone steps and iced lawn, there is a great rough quilt
of people--silk and leather blacks, sackcloth and satin browns,
velvet reds, lack and cotton whites, stitched together
with smiles, arguments, tears, touching. Anthems are sung.
The wind is blowing, frizzbees are flying.
Our conversations are slashed
by hawkers of buttons, t-shirts, and stickers,
their voices stabbing air:
Breathe revolution cook revolution dance revolution
fight revolution fuck revolution wear revolution
as we wonder which revolution? Our nerves tense
with premonition:
Bombs dropping, caressing flesh with pain,
sharp steel slicing arms and legs with kisses,
climaxing in bullets ejaculated by hung thick machine guns.
Doesn't it all begin and end with pain?
The organizer, a dark man cut of holy cloth,
calls this "a movement to clothe, feed, house and teach all."
The elders delicately unwrap memories
that the young have meshed from black-and-white films
of olden days, of protest streets, dogs, gushing hoses,
bloody clubs, of white and black people, black and white reasons,
white and black fears. We think, One never starts over.
There is no new purity. We stand carved by life,
aware and struggling, hopeful in fits.
My hand reaches out to re-member yours.
Afterwards, to car, we ride train in tunneled earth,
knowing this is the work and the traveling
we are meant to do:
Underground, under skin, under language,
becoming comfortable with rushing rivers,
dank sewers, slender blood veins,
the inner flowing of pain and pleasure.
(c) DG
Monday, February 2, 2009
Comments: Appreciations and Repudiations
With his economic stimulus package, rejection of torture and plans to close Guantanamo, setting of government ethics standards, signing of anti-discrimination employment legislation and increased insurance coverage for children, President Obama and his government have made a good start. Yet, Benjamin R. Barber asserts in The Nation (“A Revolution in Spirit,” January 22, 2009) that larger questions and possibilities remain, and specifies some of them: “The crisis in global capitalism demands a revolution in spirit--fundamental change in attitudes and behavior. Reform cannot merely rush parents and kids back into the mall; it must encourage them to shop less, to save rather than spend. If there's to be a federal lottery, the Obama administration should use it as an incentive for saving, a free ticket, say, for every ten bucks banked. Penalize carbon use by taxing gas so that it's $4 a gallon regardless of market price, curbing gas guzzlers and promoting efficient public transportation. And how about policies that give producers incentives to target real needs, even where the needy are short of cash, rather than to manufacture faux needs for the wealthy just because they've got the cash?”
One of the most vicious critics of Barack Obama during the recent presidential election campaign was not a known conservative, but rather someone who styles himself a progressive, even a radical: Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report, a sometimes interesting online publication. Ford’s comments were often hateful, insane—and seemed to reflect a holier-than-thou or blacker-than-thou attitude, establishing the kind of standards that no real, complex person could meet, not to mention a man running for the highest office in the land and needing the public support of diverse constitutencies. (More recently, certain Republican party officials and members seem to have a difficult time wishing President Obama well, even if it means that if he fails many ordinary Americans will suffer; and the lack of empathy is telling.)
There is a book by Ellis Cose on the rage of bourgeois blacks: The Rage of a Privileged Class, which focuses on the opportunities and the prejudices and limits that educated, seemingly successful blacks still face and how they manage their feelings and professional responses (often they attain presence in an organization but not power). I think it's an important subject, one that refutes pretending that all blacks share the exact same experience.
It is impossible not to notice there seem to be a few more African-American journalists on television since President Obama's campaign, election, and inauguration. It will be great if they are able to affect the content of television programming.
The graphic destruction of the human body that television constantly displays is unsettling: and most recently, my stomach has been turned by an anti-smoking commercial that shows fat deposits in dissected human tissue. Disgusting. What can one say about television? More often than not it offers false associations, false memories, and a narcotic ecstasy. It consumes, fills, and trivializes time. It can offer us basic orientation in and to a new or different place, but the string of superficialities it is more likely to offer can convince us that the world is a lot more organized and a lot simpler than it is. Its appeal is too often primitive—a series of shocks.
I used to listen to radio a lot in New York, but there is less good radio in Louisiana, though even here there is a college station that has become a favorite. In the United Kingdom, Libby Purves, for the January 31, 2009 Telegraph (“Why We’re Still Ga-Ga for Radio”), writes: “Using only sound, radio stretches the imagination and makes the listener its partner. A humble plastic box can introduce you to writers, ideas, arguments, facts, music and atmospheres you might not encounter in two lifetimes. Speech radio, in particular, is a curious medium: more vivid than print, bringing ambient noise and atmosphere, conveying tones and breaths and hesitations and tension in the voice. It is indifferent to the artifices of appearance.”
I was introduced to musician Brett Dennen by the south Louisiana college radio station I like. Regarding singer-songwriter Brett Dennen’s album Hope for the Hopeless (Dualtone/Downtown), which Aarik Danielsen reviews for PopMatters.com (Feb. 2, 2009), the reviewer Danielsen declares that “Dennen’s music serves a bridge between the hippy-lite jams that pass for folk rock today and old-school folkies of the ‘60s and ‘70s who brought the goods as far as songwriting and social consciousness. It might not be an overstatement to say that Dennen could prove an important figure, hopefully turning younger listeners onto the goodness that can accompany thoughtful words and simple melodies sincerely sung.” Yet, the writer also states, “Let’s put Dennen’s socially-conscious lyrics in perspective here; he’s no Dylan or Lennon. But he does capture the spirit of a generation attracted to the hopeful promise they witnessed in the Obama candidacy. Dennen is a perceptive songwriter who sees injustice in real-world, black-and-white terms, yet also sees opportunities to right those wrongs.” When so much of music criticism fails the highest standards, PopMatters.com is to be respected, rising above gossip and hype to produce intelligent examinations of a wide range of music, as with the consideration given to Brett Dennen.
The hype that has welcomed new recordings by musicians such as Animal Collective and Bruce Springsteen reminds me of the investment that music journalists and publications have in the success of musicians—they promote aesthetic pleasure, meaning, and popularity, championing notions of “cool” and “relevance.” The glamour of the success of the moment is always being sold, whether the artist is new or old. We see this with U2 and Radiohead as well as with the Decemberists and Arcade Fire. (Whether one considers the dull respectability--and respectable dullness?--of Jon Pareles in the New York Times at one spectrum's end, or the indulgent trashiness of the web's Idolator at the other end, with the status-and-trend-chasing failures of Rolling Stone, the Village Voice and other publications in between, this time is far from an ideal moment for music commentary: many of these publications a critic or reporter might want to write for because of money and visibility rather than the creative company one would be forced to keep. When I saw the newest article on Springsteen in Rolling Stone, I laughed out loud and thought that if he died, the magazine would exhume and photograph his rotted corpose to commemorate a memorial anthology.) Too many journalists ignore chances to broaden the cultural conversation, the chance to go beyond current market offerings, and beyond merely fleeting topical concerns, to discuss serious ideas and prospects that are both timeless and urgent.
Sound and image can be mere distractions, or much more. There is nothing like standing in a museum contemplating a perspective in which care, color, craft, and thought have been invested. I have found peace doing that....The Art Institute of Chicago has free admission for all of February, 2009.
I have been reading Hamilton College history professor Aram Goudsouzian’s book about Sidney Poitier called Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon, published a few years ago by the University of North Carolina Press. It’s very good in pointing out how social matters can increase and decrease the appreciation for an artist; and explores the complex man Poitier is and dynamic times in which Poitier lived and lives.
Film Journal International (Sarah Sluis, January 29, 2009) reports that Mira Nair’s nonprofit film training project in Uganda, Maisha Film Labs, provides an intensive boot camp with experienced filmmaking instructors covering different roles in film production. Obviously it is a chance to nurture new talent and new stories.
There is a new Gerald Peary documentary, For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, and it is hard to know whether to be excited or whether to cringe: it is sickening that so often when the subject of film criticism is discussed Andrew Sarris and his acolytes make negative comments about Pauline Kael. Whatever Sarris’s value as a film critic (I read him first in The Village Voice and later in the New York Observer), it seems he may be a very pathetic man: he maintained a lifelong grudge against Pauline Kael and has extended that into a beyond-her-death grudge. While he and his minions continue to make questionable comments about Kael, the only ones diminished are they themselves. Admirers of Kael recall her work—books such as I Lost It at The Movies and Reeling and For Keeps…and think…and laugh with appreciation and pleasure.
One of the most vicious critics of Barack Obama during the recent presidential election campaign was not a known conservative, but rather someone who styles himself a progressive, even a radical: Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report, a sometimes interesting online publication. Ford’s comments were often hateful, insane—and seemed to reflect a holier-than-thou or blacker-than-thou attitude, establishing the kind of standards that no real, complex person could meet, not to mention a man running for the highest office in the land and needing the public support of diverse constitutencies. (More recently, certain Republican party officials and members seem to have a difficult time wishing President Obama well, even if it means that if he fails many ordinary Americans will suffer; and the lack of empathy is telling.)
There is a book by Ellis Cose on the rage of bourgeois blacks: The Rage of a Privileged Class, which focuses on the opportunities and the prejudices and limits that educated, seemingly successful blacks still face and how they manage their feelings and professional responses (often they attain presence in an organization but not power). I think it's an important subject, one that refutes pretending that all blacks share the exact same experience.
It is impossible not to notice there seem to be a few more African-American journalists on television since President Obama's campaign, election, and inauguration. It will be great if they are able to affect the content of television programming.
The graphic destruction of the human body that television constantly displays is unsettling: and most recently, my stomach has been turned by an anti-smoking commercial that shows fat deposits in dissected human tissue. Disgusting. What can one say about television? More often than not it offers false associations, false memories, and a narcotic ecstasy. It consumes, fills, and trivializes time. It can offer us basic orientation in and to a new or different place, but the string of superficialities it is more likely to offer can convince us that the world is a lot more organized and a lot simpler than it is. Its appeal is too often primitive—a series of shocks.
I used to listen to radio a lot in New York, but there is less good radio in Louisiana, though even here there is a college station that has become a favorite. In the United Kingdom, Libby Purves, for the January 31, 2009 Telegraph (“Why We’re Still Ga-Ga for Radio”), writes: “Using only sound, radio stretches the imagination and makes the listener its partner. A humble plastic box can introduce you to writers, ideas, arguments, facts, music and atmospheres you might not encounter in two lifetimes. Speech radio, in particular, is a curious medium: more vivid than print, bringing ambient noise and atmosphere, conveying tones and breaths and hesitations and tension in the voice. It is indifferent to the artifices of appearance.”
I was introduced to musician Brett Dennen by the south Louisiana college radio station I like. Regarding singer-songwriter Brett Dennen’s album Hope for the Hopeless (Dualtone/Downtown), which Aarik Danielsen reviews for PopMatters.com (Feb. 2, 2009), the reviewer Danielsen declares that “Dennen’s music serves a bridge between the hippy-lite jams that pass for folk rock today and old-school folkies of the ‘60s and ‘70s who brought the goods as far as songwriting and social consciousness. It might not be an overstatement to say that Dennen could prove an important figure, hopefully turning younger listeners onto the goodness that can accompany thoughtful words and simple melodies sincerely sung.” Yet, the writer also states, “Let’s put Dennen’s socially-conscious lyrics in perspective here; he’s no Dylan or Lennon. But he does capture the spirit of a generation attracted to the hopeful promise they witnessed in the Obama candidacy. Dennen is a perceptive songwriter who sees injustice in real-world, black-and-white terms, yet also sees opportunities to right those wrongs.” When so much of music criticism fails the highest standards, PopMatters.com is to be respected, rising above gossip and hype to produce intelligent examinations of a wide range of music, as with the consideration given to Brett Dennen.
The hype that has welcomed new recordings by musicians such as Animal Collective and Bruce Springsteen reminds me of the investment that music journalists and publications have in the success of musicians—they promote aesthetic pleasure, meaning, and popularity, championing notions of “cool” and “relevance.” The glamour of the success of the moment is always being sold, whether the artist is new or old. We see this with U2 and Radiohead as well as with the Decemberists and Arcade Fire. (Whether one considers the dull respectability--and respectable dullness?--of Jon Pareles in the New York Times at one spectrum's end, or the indulgent trashiness of the web's Idolator at the other end, with the status-and-trend-chasing failures of Rolling Stone, the Village Voice and other publications in between, this time is far from an ideal moment for music commentary: many of these publications a critic or reporter might want to write for because of money and visibility rather than the creative company one would be forced to keep. When I saw the newest article on Springsteen in Rolling Stone, I laughed out loud and thought that if he died, the magazine would exhume and photograph his rotted corpose to commemorate a memorial anthology.) Too many journalists ignore chances to broaden the cultural conversation, the chance to go beyond current market offerings, and beyond merely fleeting topical concerns, to discuss serious ideas and prospects that are both timeless and urgent.
Sound and image can be mere distractions, or much more. There is nothing like standing in a museum contemplating a perspective in which care, color, craft, and thought have been invested. I have found peace doing that....The Art Institute of Chicago has free admission for all of February, 2009.
I have been reading Hamilton College history professor Aram Goudsouzian’s book about Sidney Poitier called Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon, published a few years ago by the University of North Carolina Press. It’s very good in pointing out how social matters can increase and decrease the appreciation for an artist; and explores the complex man Poitier is and dynamic times in which Poitier lived and lives.
Film Journal International (Sarah Sluis, January 29, 2009) reports that Mira Nair’s nonprofit film training project in Uganda, Maisha Film Labs, provides an intensive boot camp with experienced filmmaking instructors covering different roles in film production. Obviously it is a chance to nurture new talent and new stories.
There is a new Gerald Peary documentary, For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, and it is hard to know whether to be excited or whether to cringe: it is sickening that so often when the subject of film criticism is discussed Andrew Sarris and his acolytes make negative comments about Pauline Kael. Whatever Sarris’s value as a film critic (I read him first in The Village Voice and later in the New York Observer), it seems he may be a very pathetic man: he maintained a lifelong grudge against Pauline Kael and has extended that into a beyond-her-death grudge. While he and his minions continue to make questionable comments about Kael, the only ones diminished are they themselves. Admirers of Kael recall her work—books such as I Lost It at The Movies and Reeling and For Keeps…and think…and laugh with appreciation and pleasure.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Brief Notes
The New York Times is reporting, January 30, that Barack Obama is reversing the previous president’s policies on labor, and he is supporting labor organizing and fair contracts; and, also, President Obama has signed an anti-discrimination employment bill into law (for fair pay despite gender and more opportunity to pursue legal means of handling being the victim of discrimination).
Arianna Huffington comments from Davos: “The widespread contrition permeating Davos is matched by an unnerving feeling of paralysis. The people here -- and we are talking about some of the most influential people on the planet -- seem confused, at a loss about how to attack the financial crisis.” (Huffington Post, January 29, 2009)
Greencine Daily (January 29) announces that a new film, Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for Melancholy, is opening in New York and soon elsewhere—(Detroit (Feb. 13), Seattle (Feb. 20), San Francisco (Feb. 27) and Los Angeles (Feb. 27)— and the film, a love story, is set in San Francisco and features African-Americans and cycling.
I have just received notice that “The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford will host the 2009 International Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 11-13 September 2009, at St. Peter’s College, Oxford.” The conference will discuss “Nietzsche philosophy of mind in relation to his philosophical naturalism”; and scheduled speakers include: Günter Abel, Brian Leiter, Graham Parkes, Peter Poellner, Bernard Reginster, John Richardson, Galen Strawson. The deadline is March 15, 2009 for those who want to submit (abstracts for) papers. Contact: Dr. Peter Kail & Dr. Manuel Dries, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford.
Arianna Huffington comments from Davos: “The widespread contrition permeating Davos is matched by an unnerving feeling of paralysis. The people here -- and we are talking about some of the most influential people on the planet -- seem confused, at a loss about how to attack the financial crisis.” (Huffington Post, January 29, 2009)
Greencine Daily (January 29) announces that a new film, Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for Melancholy, is opening in New York and soon elsewhere—(Detroit (Feb. 13), Seattle (Feb. 20), San Francisco (Feb. 27) and Los Angeles (Feb. 27)— and the film, a love story, is set in San Francisco and features African-Americans and cycling.
I have just received notice that “The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford will host the 2009 International Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 11-13 September 2009, at St. Peter’s College, Oxford.” The conference will discuss “Nietzsche philosophy of mind in relation to his philosophical naturalism”; and scheduled speakers include: Günter Abel, Brian Leiter, Graham Parkes, Peter Poellner, Bernard Reginster, John Richardson, Galen Strawson. The deadline is March 15, 2009 for those who want to submit (abstracts for) papers. Contact: Dr. Peter Kail & Dr. Manuel Dries, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford.
John Updike
Writer's Note: John Updike, born March 18, 1932, was a prolific writer--a novelist, essayist, and poet--and I saw him not longer after I first moved to New York at the 92nd Street Y, reading on stage from his work, many years ago; and I wrote about him briefly for a literary journal (comments below); and he, with lung cancer, died a few days ago, January 27, 2009.
John Updike. Seek My Face. New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2002. 276 pages. ISBN 0-375-41490-8.
John Updike’s novel Seek My Face is a fiction inspired by the painters Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and others, with Hope Ouderkirk standing in for Krasner, Zack McCoy for Pollock, and Guy Holloway as a combination of others. The story is told through an interview format, with a young internet reporter visiting Hope’s country house near the end of her life; and this allows for a comprehensive telling of twentieth-century American art’s development and the intensity of the complicated lives that produced it, but this structuring also gives the book a stiff quality, with most of the drama located in the past. The novel is, of course, thoughtful, well-researched, and observant, but it only came to life for me in the intellectual conversations between the artists in New York’s Cedar Tavern, the rude exchanges between abusive Zack and the intelligent, direct Hope, and the tenderness between Hope and her last of three husbands, a successful and loving businessman and art collector, at his deathbed. The exchanges between Hope and the admiring but interrogating reporter allow comments about the exploitive, scandal-chasing nature of the press (there were allegations that Zack had been involved in all-male orgies), brief commiseration between two working women of different generations over the ways of men, and intriguing moments of kindness when Hope feeds the reporter and attends to her comfort.
Sometimes Updike’s dialog is amusing, as when Hope says, “People speak of natural foods as if nature isn’t where everything bad ultimately comes from,” or, after lunch, when Hope takes issue with one of the reporter’s questions by saying, “Kathryn, the tuna salad has made you so oppositional.”
Reading the novel, I was taken aback by crude references to blacks (“long legged coons loping along A Hundred Twenty-fifth Street”) and homosexuals (“fairies”), odd references to Jewish characteristics, an unpleasant recounting of fellatio, small damning nods to jazz and contemporary art, and the many run-on sentences. (Hope’s aside regarding social justice concerns: “…I didn’t have the patience myself, it seemed very pretentious, with an undertone of violence toward the elected government that reminded me of Fascism, simple fallible government not good enough for fine spirits…” Another aside: “When you look at these Middle Eastern men, with these five days’ beards so they all look like terrorists…”) What is an accurate presentation of the vocabulary of the time, or an expression of a particular character, and what is Updike’s petty indulgence?
The title Seek My Face refers to divinity’s call; and art is sometimes thought an exploration of spirituality, and this was one of Hope’s artistic goals. Unfortunately, the appeal of the book remains historical and, as the history of the American twentieth-century art Updike focuses on most is well-known, the novel offers no significant surprises or satisfactions; and yet, it is descriptive, intelligent, and, even during its vaguely repellent moments, worth reading.
(c) DG
John Updike. Seek My Face. New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2002. 276 pages. ISBN 0-375-41490-8.
John Updike’s novel Seek My Face is a fiction inspired by the painters Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and others, with Hope Ouderkirk standing in for Krasner, Zack McCoy for Pollock, and Guy Holloway as a combination of others. The story is told through an interview format, with a young internet reporter visiting Hope’s country house near the end of her life; and this allows for a comprehensive telling of twentieth-century American art’s development and the intensity of the complicated lives that produced it, but this structuring also gives the book a stiff quality, with most of the drama located in the past. The novel is, of course, thoughtful, well-researched, and observant, but it only came to life for me in the intellectual conversations between the artists in New York’s Cedar Tavern, the rude exchanges between abusive Zack and the intelligent, direct Hope, and the tenderness between Hope and her last of three husbands, a successful and loving businessman and art collector, at his deathbed. The exchanges between Hope and the admiring but interrogating reporter allow comments about the exploitive, scandal-chasing nature of the press (there were allegations that Zack had been involved in all-male orgies), brief commiseration between two working women of different generations over the ways of men, and intriguing moments of kindness when Hope feeds the reporter and attends to her comfort.
Sometimes Updike’s dialog is amusing, as when Hope says, “People speak of natural foods as if nature isn’t where everything bad ultimately comes from,” or, after lunch, when Hope takes issue with one of the reporter’s questions by saying, “Kathryn, the tuna salad has made you so oppositional.”
Reading the novel, I was taken aback by crude references to blacks (“long legged coons loping along A Hundred Twenty-fifth Street”) and homosexuals (“fairies”), odd references to Jewish characteristics, an unpleasant recounting of fellatio, small damning nods to jazz and contemporary art, and the many run-on sentences. (Hope’s aside regarding social justice concerns: “…I didn’t have the patience myself, it seemed very pretentious, with an undertone of violence toward the elected government that reminded me of Fascism, simple fallible government not good enough for fine spirits…” Another aside: “When you look at these Middle Eastern men, with these five days’ beards so they all look like terrorists…”) What is an accurate presentation of the vocabulary of the time, or an expression of a particular character, and what is Updike’s petty indulgence?
The title Seek My Face refers to divinity’s call; and art is sometimes thought an exploration of spirituality, and this was one of Hope’s artistic goals. Unfortunately, the appeal of the book remains historical and, as the history of the American twentieth-century art Updike focuses on most is well-known, the novel offers no significant surprises or satisfactions; and yet, it is descriptive, intelligent, and, even during its vaguely repellent moments, worth reading.
(c) DG
New York State of Mind
Writer's Note: I haven't been in New York since September 2008 and I miss it, and miss it less than I thought I would, but much more than I can convey; and this piece, written about seven years ago, captures some of what I think there is to miss...
Memorial Day 2002
A Letter from New York: “Tomorrow Mountain”
On 13 Conversations about One Thing, Gosford Park,
Verve Remixed, Lena Horne, and Imagining a Changed World
I stood at the edge of a block looking down the street, trying to decide if I wanted to walk down this street to get to the main avenue on which I’d walk until I found a place where I wanted to eat. I stood and I watched the green car go slowly—certainly no more than twenty-five to thirty miles an hour—down the street when suddenly an East Indian girl, slim and in a purple top and black shorts, backed into the street to catch what looked like a spongy football. From my perspective she seemed far enough in front of the car to make it to the other side of the street…
I had expected it to be another quiet holiday weekend. I had made no significant plans; I rarely made significant plans these days. On Thursday, May 23rd, I saw Oliver Parker’s The Importance of Being Earnest, an entertaining movie with especially good performances by Frances O’Connor and Colin Firth, though not as well-made or as potent as Parker’s treatment of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. (I also found Rupert Everett meretricious in both films.) On Friday, I saw 13 Conversations about One Thing, a film directed by Jill Sprecher. The film unfolds in the form of interconnected cinematic short stories set in New York and focusing on the meaning of existence and the occurrence of happiness, love, and luck. One segment featured a manager in an insurance claims office who has a rather bitter take on life, played by Alan Arkin. The manager has been work-driven, and that alienated him from his wife and son, and so he now has an ex-wife and a son who is a drug addict, thief, and subject to legal prosecution. The manager has a conversation in a bar with a successful young lawyer, played by Matthew McConaughey, in which the lawyer disputes the notion of luck, and on his way home the lawyer hits a young woman, and leaves her, but suffers guilt. The young woman, a housecleaner who had previously believed her life had a purpose even though she wasn’t sure what it was, is played by Clea DuVall. The accident is one thing that forces this young woman to reconsider her positive perspective; another more important factor is her being suspected a thief by a man whose apartment she conscientiously cleaned. The filmmaking is austere, clear, and the conversations, direct and believable, contain daily details, observations, questions, feelings, and human contradictions. The conversations are part of stories that connect and flash back on one another to create an interesting puzzle-like form in an exploration of contemporary human existence, making this the kind of film that justifies and enriches my own film-going experience.
Saturday, I took the train from Queens into Manhattan to see a personal acquaintance perform as part of a band named George in the bandshell in Central Park, near Summerstage, not far from 72nd Street. The concert started a little after noon, and the group consisted of two guitar players, a harmonica player, a drummer, a lead singer and two backup singers. The music was uptempo rock with strong rhythm and blues and folk music influences (Native American, for one; and country for another, according to the lead singer). The show was part of a Memorial Day weekend celebration. There was military personnel in attendance, with men in camouflage clothes wrestling on a mat (their faces were bland and boyish, but their eyes had a kind of hypnotized glaze that made me wonder about repressed homoeroticism); and there was also a display of guns and artillery. I enjoyed the musical performance, then walked over and spoke to the wife of the guitar player who’d invited me. She and I had met when we worked for a nonprofit corporation in the early 1990s, and had become friends, a friendship partly rooted in my sense of her as more bohemian and radical than she actually was. I hadn’t seen her or her husband in about a year, and there was now a hesitant affection and attention when we spoke. When her husband joined us, he gave her a hug, hugged me, then he picked up their daughter. They are an “interracial couple,” she African-American and he an American of European descent, and their daughter is an obviously loved child. I told him I liked the show though the acoustics weren’t good, and he agreed that the bandshell hadn’t actually been built for that kind of music (electric music?). He went back to help pack up the band’s instruments, and me and my friend talked a little before I said goodbye.
I walked through a pathway designated as a poets’ walk; it is a broad walkway lined with benches, fences, trees, and beyond the trees are lawns; and it is one of my favorite places in the park. Nearby was a large sculpture in the form of a silver tree, the kind of thing that might be seen as ugly or vulgar, but I liked it.
I began to walk out of the park. I thought about the hesitance that had hovered over my conversation with my friend. I thought about the things within me that had sometimes made my own life difficult: my idealism, my shyness, my impatience with others, and my anger at perceived misunderstandings and stupidity.
Then, I delivered a package of journals featuring my published work to an older male friend who lived near by. He’d told me when we’d had lunch in the restaurant Josephina near Lincoln Center weeks before that he wanted to see the publications. I walked around before going to see Robert Altman’s Gosford Park for the second time, this time in a theater on the upper east side of Manhattan.
The film had broken and been crudely repaired since I’d first seen it—it’s been playing for months. However, it’s a very good-looking film, well-organized, with smooth pacing. The film is set in England on a large country estate. It is a comedy of manners, a melodrama of bad marriages and relationships, a critique of class roles, and a murdery mystery, with an implicit tribute to art in the appreciated piano and singing performances of Jeremy Northam as actor-singer Ivor Novello. All the film’s performances are terrific. I especially liked Ryan Phillippe, Clive Owen, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emily Watson, Kelly MacDonald, and Jeremy Northam. If the film has a flaw, I cannot see it. Leaving I asked the concession stand operator, a very young man, if he liked working in the theater and he indicated that it was a rather mixed experience. Walking away from the theater, it occurred to me that, unlike in the past, I rarely saw films on the upper east side of Manhattan. I used to see films all over the city often, and now I’m more likely to see films in Greenwich Village, the refurbished Times Square area, the west side of Manhattan, or in Queens. I thought how easy it is to develop habits and made a small promise to vary soon the theaters I visited.
I walked around the city, and I didn’t get home until late, and I read and listened to music before falling asleep: Verve Remixed, and Lena Horne’s Stormy Monday.
The Verve album provides an opportunity for contemporary dance music producers to give the voices of singers such as Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nina Simone new musical contexts, though it is a sense of emotional or social context that many of the songs lack thanks to these remixes. (The dance music is almost abstract, which gives it a likeness to some jazz; however, jazz has greater sonic texture, and one perceives more intellectual and emotional content, more humanity, in jazz.) One of the strongest productions on Verve Remixed is Dinah Washington’s “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” with a remix by Rae and Christian. Washington brings the world into the song in her attitude—tough, honest. The two Nina Simone selections are probably the best. Simone is an iconoclast, and her “Feelin’ Good,” remixed by Joe Claussell, has a jazzy ambience with percussion and tinkling piano. Simone’s “See-Line Woman” is remixed by Masters at Work. Ella Fitzgerald’s “Wait Till You See Him,” remixed by De-Phazz, is terrific, enchanted and enchanting, full of desire and admiration. However, Sarah Vaughan’s “Summertime,” remixed by UFO, has the greatest of singers hardly making an impression. Nor is the Shirley Horn (“Return to Paradise”), remixed by Mark De Clive-Lowe, or Billie Holiday (“Don’t Explain”), remixed by Dzihan and Kamien, noteworthy. However, Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” remixed by Tricky, has a blaring trumpet and drumbeats that offer nice accents to Holiday’s dramatic reading. Possibly this album will serve as an introduction of these singers to a new generation. (Must the preferred styles of the young be utilized to attract them or are talent, intelligence, and use-value enough?)
The Lena Horne record is a pleasure. First released in 1957, the album has just been re-released with ten bonus tracks for a total of twenty-one. The original album’s highlights include: “Tomorrow Mountain,” by Duke Ellington and John LaTouche, along with “Summertime,” by Gershwin and Heyward, “Mad about the Boy,” by Noel Coward, “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home?,” by Warfield and Williams, “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home,” by Arlen and Mercer, and “Just One of Those Things” by Cole Porter. The bonus tracks include: “Come Runnin’,” by Roc Hillman, “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” by Rodgers and Hammerstein II, and “Sweet Thing” by Walberg and Herget. Horne sings these songs as if they are part of her natural method of self-expression.
Many of these songs are love songs, and the secret, or the principal energy, in Lena Horne’s singing on this album might be eroticism. One of my favorite songs on the album, a bonus release, is “What’s Right for You (Is Right for Me),” written by Doris, Goodman, and Gluckman. Horne sounds charming, excited, and (to my ears) sexually greedy—she sounds almost masculine in her directness, in that usually one hears a man “on the make,” but not a woman—and it’s a funny, sexy, and wholly persuasive performance.
“Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” is an assertion of restless independence, but there’s a movement in the song when the music goes low and Horne’s voice turns contemplative. One hears a reflection on the lyrics, and of the self’s interpretation of phenomena, that evoke the mystery of personality.
Lena Horne was born in Brooklyn, New York, but I often think that I hear something southern in her very feminine voice. (Masculine? Forceful. Feminine? Pretty, sensitive. Horne’s singing is at once forceful, pretty, and sensitive.) Horne’s career began when she was very young, and she was performing in the chorus line at the Cotton Club by the time she was 17. She performed as a singer with several well-known bands, including those of Noble Sissle, Charlie Barnet, Teddy Wilson, and Artie Shaw. She starred in the films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. She was favored as a World War II pin-up among African-American soldiers. However, neither Horne’s career or glamour image prevented her from becoming involved in the Civil Rights movement, which she did as part of the National Council for Negro Women and as an individual. Unfortunately, her father, son, and husband died in the early 1970s and she withdrew from performing. She returned almost a decade later, co-starring in The Wiz with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, and starring in her own one woman show on Broadway, The Lady and Her Music, which received critical and popular acclaim. Her more recent albums, such as We’ll Be Together Again, exemplify her unique talent.
In “Tomorrow Mountain,” the song that begins the Stormy Weather album, Horne sings, “Just across Tomorrow Mountain there’s a happy city, they say.” It is a happy city where people are grand and every day is Christmas, with a “scotch and soda fountain” and “cigarette trees.” Kitchens are lined with gold, it rains Chanel No. 5, and there are diamond bushes. “Can’t you see Tomorrow Mountain? Can’t you watch it glimmer and glow? It’s a wonderful town, that’s upside down…and it’s full of easy dough. Won’t you pack your bags and go?” It is, of course, a utopia: nowhere; but Horne sings this song and the other songs on the album with an enthusiasm and intensity that make the album as fresh as morning coffee, afternoon sun, or evening coolness.
Sunday, I came into the city and had a late breakfast in a pleasant diner in the upper 40s on the west side. I walked downtown and stopped at Barnes & Noble on 8th Street and read from Robin D.G. Kelley’s The Black Radical Imagination in which he argues that love and hope, a vision of changed selves and changed institutions, not oppression and anger, have most inspired political thought and social movements. Then I sat in Washington Square Park reading from The Works of Plato. Reading Plato on Socrates, I thought how interesting it was that Socrates’ attempts at acquiring knowledge and providing philosophical critique were hampered by rumor and the personal vanity and resentment of others, as well as established tradition supported by the power of the state. How little and how much has changed?
I thought about things I have hoped for over the years: intellectual comrades, and financial security.
I slept in a little late on Monday, Memorial Day. I had dreamed that I was happily helping a female relative cook a holiday meal, a pleasant dream that caused me pain upon awaking—she has, in fact, been dead for five years.
I went out for a turkey breast sandwich and sat in a park, where I ate. I thought about how being disenfranchised (not part of established systems of effort and reward) is similar to being free in that one has the time to pursue one’s inclinations—though, unlike a state of freedom, one doesn’t have the opportunity or resources. I went home, and went to bed, listening to music, reading, sleeping. I read some of Jerry Rosco’s biography of writer Glenway Wescott and a newspaper article in which someone said people should take a moment from their shopping and barbecuing to remember that Memorial Day is intended to commemorate people who gave their lives in service to their country. I woke in late afternoon, did minor chores, then felt very hungry and went out.
I stood at the edge of a block looking down the street, trying to decide if I wanted to walk down this street to get to the main avenue on which I’d walk until I found a place where I wanted to eat. I stood and I watched the green car go slowly—certainly no more than twenty-five to thirty miles an hour—down the street when suddenly an East Indian girl, slim and in a purple top and in black shorts, backed into the street to catch what looked like a spongy football. From my perspective she seemed far enough in front of the car to make it to the other side of the street, but she was not. She was hit. A small crowd began to gather, and I began to walk toward the accident. The girl—about 13?—was in a semi-fetal position on the ground, mostly unmoving. The street was one block away from the one on which I lived, parallel to it, and I often walked here but I did not know the girl who was hit nor did I know the people gathering. Someone, after hesitating to watch, went inside to call an ambulance. The tanned woman in the car, middle age, attractive with dyed blonde hair, cried out, “You see, I stopped,” then “Would someone please call my husband?” She had an accent but I’m terrible with accents: was she Latino, East European, East Indian? There are no pay phones on the street, which is lined with private family homes. I watched for a time, but didn’t like the sight of the growing crowd. Were they concerned or was this entertainment? I couldn’t do anything. I walked away, and saw an ambulance coming.
I walked to a pizza place for a couple of slices. I thought of how quickly the accident had happened and wondered how anyone who saw it could be entirely sure of what he saw: was the girl’s top purple and her shorts black? When I got back to the scene of the accident, the girl, the woman in the car, the crowd, and the ambulance were gone. I asked a man on the street, “Did the ambulance take the girl to the hospital?” He said, “I don’t know anything about that.” Neither did I. We are simply unknown and unknowing neighbors.
(c) DG
Memorial Day 2002
A Letter from New York: “Tomorrow Mountain”
On 13 Conversations about One Thing, Gosford Park,
Verve Remixed, Lena Horne, and Imagining a Changed World
I stood at the edge of a block looking down the street, trying to decide if I wanted to walk down this street to get to the main avenue on which I’d walk until I found a place where I wanted to eat. I stood and I watched the green car go slowly—certainly no more than twenty-five to thirty miles an hour—down the street when suddenly an East Indian girl, slim and in a purple top and black shorts, backed into the street to catch what looked like a spongy football. From my perspective she seemed far enough in front of the car to make it to the other side of the street…
I had expected it to be another quiet holiday weekend. I had made no significant plans; I rarely made significant plans these days. On Thursday, May 23rd, I saw Oliver Parker’s The Importance of Being Earnest, an entertaining movie with especially good performances by Frances O’Connor and Colin Firth, though not as well-made or as potent as Parker’s treatment of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. (I also found Rupert Everett meretricious in both films.) On Friday, I saw 13 Conversations about One Thing, a film directed by Jill Sprecher. The film unfolds in the form of interconnected cinematic short stories set in New York and focusing on the meaning of existence and the occurrence of happiness, love, and luck. One segment featured a manager in an insurance claims office who has a rather bitter take on life, played by Alan Arkin. The manager has been work-driven, and that alienated him from his wife and son, and so he now has an ex-wife and a son who is a drug addict, thief, and subject to legal prosecution. The manager has a conversation in a bar with a successful young lawyer, played by Matthew McConaughey, in which the lawyer disputes the notion of luck, and on his way home the lawyer hits a young woman, and leaves her, but suffers guilt. The young woman, a housecleaner who had previously believed her life had a purpose even though she wasn’t sure what it was, is played by Clea DuVall. The accident is one thing that forces this young woman to reconsider her positive perspective; another more important factor is her being suspected a thief by a man whose apartment she conscientiously cleaned. The filmmaking is austere, clear, and the conversations, direct and believable, contain daily details, observations, questions, feelings, and human contradictions. The conversations are part of stories that connect and flash back on one another to create an interesting puzzle-like form in an exploration of contemporary human existence, making this the kind of film that justifies and enriches my own film-going experience.
Saturday, I took the train from Queens into Manhattan to see a personal acquaintance perform as part of a band named George in the bandshell in Central Park, near Summerstage, not far from 72nd Street. The concert started a little after noon, and the group consisted of two guitar players, a harmonica player, a drummer, a lead singer and two backup singers. The music was uptempo rock with strong rhythm and blues and folk music influences (Native American, for one; and country for another, according to the lead singer). The show was part of a Memorial Day weekend celebration. There was military personnel in attendance, with men in camouflage clothes wrestling on a mat (their faces were bland and boyish, but their eyes had a kind of hypnotized glaze that made me wonder about repressed homoeroticism); and there was also a display of guns and artillery. I enjoyed the musical performance, then walked over and spoke to the wife of the guitar player who’d invited me. She and I had met when we worked for a nonprofit corporation in the early 1990s, and had become friends, a friendship partly rooted in my sense of her as more bohemian and radical than she actually was. I hadn’t seen her or her husband in about a year, and there was now a hesitant affection and attention when we spoke. When her husband joined us, he gave her a hug, hugged me, then he picked up their daughter. They are an “interracial couple,” she African-American and he an American of European descent, and their daughter is an obviously loved child. I told him I liked the show though the acoustics weren’t good, and he agreed that the bandshell hadn’t actually been built for that kind of music (electric music?). He went back to help pack up the band’s instruments, and me and my friend talked a little before I said goodbye.
I walked through a pathway designated as a poets’ walk; it is a broad walkway lined with benches, fences, trees, and beyond the trees are lawns; and it is one of my favorite places in the park. Nearby was a large sculpture in the form of a silver tree, the kind of thing that might be seen as ugly or vulgar, but I liked it.
I began to walk out of the park. I thought about the hesitance that had hovered over my conversation with my friend. I thought about the things within me that had sometimes made my own life difficult: my idealism, my shyness, my impatience with others, and my anger at perceived misunderstandings and stupidity.
Then, I delivered a package of journals featuring my published work to an older male friend who lived near by. He’d told me when we’d had lunch in the restaurant Josephina near Lincoln Center weeks before that he wanted to see the publications. I walked around before going to see Robert Altman’s Gosford Park for the second time, this time in a theater on the upper east side of Manhattan.
The film had broken and been crudely repaired since I’d first seen it—it’s been playing for months. However, it’s a very good-looking film, well-organized, with smooth pacing. The film is set in England on a large country estate. It is a comedy of manners, a melodrama of bad marriages and relationships, a critique of class roles, and a murdery mystery, with an implicit tribute to art in the appreciated piano and singing performances of Jeremy Northam as actor-singer Ivor Novello. All the film’s performances are terrific. I especially liked Ryan Phillippe, Clive Owen, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emily Watson, Kelly MacDonald, and Jeremy Northam. If the film has a flaw, I cannot see it. Leaving I asked the concession stand operator, a very young man, if he liked working in the theater and he indicated that it was a rather mixed experience. Walking away from the theater, it occurred to me that, unlike in the past, I rarely saw films on the upper east side of Manhattan. I used to see films all over the city often, and now I’m more likely to see films in Greenwich Village, the refurbished Times Square area, the west side of Manhattan, or in Queens. I thought how easy it is to develop habits and made a small promise to vary soon the theaters I visited.
I walked around the city, and I didn’t get home until late, and I read and listened to music before falling asleep: Verve Remixed, and Lena Horne’s Stormy Monday.
The Verve album provides an opportunity for contemporary dance music producers to give the voices of singers such as Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nina Simone new musical contexts, though it is a sense of emotional or social context that many of the songs lack thanks to these remixes. (The dance music is almost abstract, which gives it a likeness to some jazz; however, jazz has greater sonic texture, and one perceives more intellectual and emotional content, more humanity, in jazz.) One of the strongest productions on Verve Remixed is Dinah Washington’s “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” with a remix by Rae and Christian. Washington brings the world into the song in her attitude—tough, honest. The two Nina Simone selections are probably the best. Simone is an iconoclast, and her “Feelin’ Good,” remixed by Joe Claussell, has a jazzy ambience with percussion and tinkling piano. Simone’s “See-Line Woman” is remixed by Masters at Work. Ella Fitzgerald’s “Wait Till You See Him,” remixed by De-Phazz, is terrific, enchanted and enchanting, full of desire and admiration. However, Sarah Vaughan’s “Summertime,” remixed by UFO, has the greatest of singers hardly making an impression. Nor is the Shirley Horn (“Return to Paradise”), remixed by Mark De Clive-Lowe, or Billie Holiday (“Don’t Explain”), remixed by Dzihan and Kamien, noteworthy. However, Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” remixed by Tricky, has a blaring trumpet and drumbeats that offer nice accents to Holiday’s dramatic reading. Possibly this album will serve as an introduction of these singers to a new generation. (Must the preferred styles of the young be utilized to attract them or are talent, intelligence, and use-value enough?)
The Lena Horne record is a pleasure. First released in 1957, the album has just been re-released with ten bonus tracks for a total of twenty-one. The original album’s highlights include: “Tomorrow Mountain,” by Duke Ellington and John LaTouche, along with “Summertime,” by Gershwin and Heyward, “Mad about the Boy,” by Noel Coward, “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home?,” by Warfield and Williams, “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home,” by Arlen and Mercer, and “Just One of Those Things” by Cole Porter. The bonus tracks include: “Come Runnin’,” by Roc Hillman, “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” by Rodgers and Hammerstein II, and “Sweet Thing” by Walberg and Herget. Horne sings these songs as if they are part of her natural method of self-expression.
Many of these songs are love songs, and the secret, or the principal energy, in Lena Horne’s singing on this album might be eroticism. One of my favorite songs on the album, a bonus release, is “What’s Right for You (Is Right for Me),” written by Doris, Goodman, and Gluckman. Horne sounds charming, excited, and (to my ears) sexually greedy—she sounds almost masculine in her directness, in that usually one hears a man “on the make,” but not a woman—and it’s a funny, sexy, and wholly persuasive performance.
“Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” is an assertion of restless independence, but there’s a movement in the song when the music goes low and Horne’s voice turns contemplative. One hears a reflection on the lyrics, and of the self’s interpretation of phenomena, that evoke the mystery of personality.
Lena Horne was born in Brooklyn, New York, but I often think that I hear something southern in her very feminine voice. (Masculine? Forceful. Feminine? Pretty, sensitive. Horne’s singing is at once forceful, pretty, and sensitive.) Horne’s career began when she was very young, and she was performing in the chorus line at the Cotton Club by the time she was 17. She performed as a singer with several well-known bands, including those of Noble Sissle, Charlie Barnet, Teddy Wilson, and Artie Shaw. She starred in the films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. She was favored as a World War II pin-up among African-American soldiers. However, neither Horne’s career or glamour image prevented her from becoming involved in the Civil Rights movement, which she did as part of the National Council for Negro Women and as an individual. Unfortunately, her father, son, and husband died in the early 1970s and she withdrew from performing. She returned almost a decade later, co-starring in The Wiz with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, and starring in her own one woman show on Broadway, The Lady and Her Music, which received critical and popular acclaim. Her more recent albums, such as We’ll Be Together Again, exemplify her unique talent.
In “Tomorrow Mountain,” the song that begins the Stormy Weather album, Horne sings, “Just across Tomorrow Mountain there’s a happy city, they say.” It is a happy city where people are grand and every day is Christmas, with a “scotch and soda fountain” and “cigarette trees.” Kitchens are lined with gold, it rains Chanel No. 5, and there are diamond bushes. “Can’t you see Tomorrow Mountain? Can’t you watch it glimmer and glow? It’s a wonderful town, that’s upside down…and it’s full of easy dough. Won’t you pack your bags and go?” It is, of course, a utopia: nowhere; but Horne sings this song and the other songs on the album with an enthusiasm and intensity that make the album as fresh as morning coffee, afternoon sun, or evening coolness.
Sunday, I came into the city and had a late breakfast in a pleasant diner in the upper 40s on the west side. I walked downtown and stopped at Barnes & Noble on 8th Street and read from Robin D.G. Kelley’s The Black Radical Imagination in which he argues that love and hope, a vision of changed selves and changed institutions, not oppression and anger, have most inspired political thought and social movements. Then I sat in Washington Square Park reading from The Works of Plato. Reading Plato on Socrates, I thought how interesting it was that Socrates’ attempts at acquiring knowledge and providing philosophical critique were hampered by rumor and the personal vanity and resentment of others, as well as established tradition supported by the power of the state. How little and how much has changed?
I thought about things I have hoped for over the years: intellectual comrades, and financial security.
I slept in a little late on Monday, Memorial Day. I had dreamed that I was happily helping a female relative cook a holiday meal, a pleasant dream that caused me pain upon awaking—she has, in fact, been dead for five years.
I went out for a turkey breast sandwich and sat in a park, where I ate. I thought about how being disenfranchised (not part of established systems of effort and reward) is similar to being free in that one has the time to pursue one’s inclinations—though, unlike a state of freedom, one doesn’t have the opportunity or resources. I went home, and went to bed, listening to music, reading, sleeping. I read some of Jerry Rosco’s biography of writer Glenway Wescott and a newspaper article in which someone said people should take a moment from their shopping and barbecuing to remember that Memorial Day is intended to commemorate people who gave their lives in service to their country. I woke in late afternoon, did minor chores, then felt very hungry and went out.
I stood at the edge of a block looking down the street, trying to decide if I wanted to walk down this street to get to the main avenue on which I’d walk until I found a place where I wanted to eat. I stood and I watched the green car go slowly—certainly no more than twenty-five to thirty miles an hour—down the street when suddenly an East Indian girl, slim and in a purple top and in black shorts, backed into the street to catch what looked like a spongy football. From my perspective she seemed far enough in front of the car to make it to the other side of the street, but she was not. She was hit. A small crowd began to gather, and I began to walk toward the accident. The girl—about 13?—was in a semi-fetal position on the ground, mostly unmoving. The street was one block away from the one on which I lived, parallel to it, and I often walked here but I did not know the girl who was hit nor did I know the people gathering. Someone, after hesitating to watch, went inside to call an ambulance. The tanned woman in the car, middle age, attractive with dyed blonde hair, cried out, “You see, I stopped,” then “Would someone please call my husband?” She had an accent but I’m terrible with accents: was she Latino, East European, East Indian? There are no pay phones on the street, which is lined with private family homes. I watched for a time, but didn’t like the sight of the growing crowd. Were they concerned or was this entertainment? I couldn’t do anything. I walked away, and saw an ambulance coming.
I walked to a pizza place for a couple of slices. I thought of how quickly the accident had happened and wondered how anyone who saw it could be entirely sure of what he saw: was the girl’s top purple and her shorts black? When I got back to the scene of the accident, the girl, the woman in the car, the crowd, and the ambulance were gone. I asked a man on the street, “Did the ambulance take the girl to the hospital?” He said, “I don’t know anything about that.” Neither did I. We are simply unknown and unknowing neighbors.
(c) DG
Thursday, January 29, 2009
United Daughters of the Confederacy
Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, and he is the forty-fourth president; and much has been made of him being the first African-American president, a distinction trumpeted so much on his inauguration day that it sounded like an official title. I thought the iterations of the man's ethnicity were a sign of how simple rather than how sophisticated Americans are, but days ago, I was in a south Louisiana library that is getting rid of some of its magazine stock and I saw copies of the United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine being sold for ten cents, and I looked through some of them and bought two copies as historical items. The United Daughters of the Confederacy publications are dated 1972 and they are reminders of how recently racism has been a proud fact of southern life.
The members of United Daughters of the Confederacy were not only old women whose fathers or grandfathers were involved with the American civil war on the side of slavery, but individuals who were very young, and both female and male, in 1972 (there are photographs of members in the magazine; and, I wonder, where are they now?). The September 1972 United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine issue features a "Beliefs of Our Forefathers" article on page 29 under the rubric "Children of the Confederacy," a regular feature of the publication. In the article on confederate beliefs, the writer, who goes by her husband's name, and styles herself "historian and news editor," Mrs. Charles L. Deevers, discusses a confederate "catechism" that includes a defense of states' rights, saying that what led to the war between the states was "the disregard of those in power for the rights" of the southern states, the right to self-regulation. She, Mrs. Deevers, asserts that the "people of the south did not believe that slavery was right, and many felt that the south could work out their own problems and would eventually free the slaves because they were becoming the white man's burden." The writer discusses the economic concerns of slave holders (the economic loss if enslaved Africans were freed; and the high tariff proposed by northerners) and the "historian" Mrs. Deevers insists that enslaved Africans were well-cared for because they were valuable property ("They were well cared for because they were important to their owners") and goes on to note the "many stories" of kindness shown to Negroes; but, she says the Dred Scott decision "caused more trouble" and Abraham Lincoln's election "was the final blow." These unreconstructed views are interesting to read, though repellent; and I am reminded--thanks to Wayne Parent's book Inside the Carnival: Unmasking Louisiana Politics, from LSU Press, 2004, that even after the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution were passed, the south resisted respecting Africans and African-Americans; and southern states passed laws to disenfranchise blacks and prevent voting and civic participation, an exercise of states' rights, matters that made necessary the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. (I recall, too, W.E. B. DuBois's commentary on the south's behavior after the civil war in The Souls of Black Folk.)
In the November 1972 issue of the United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine, in an article under the heading "Children of the Confederacy" on education by "historian" Mrs. Charles L. Deevers (page 27), the author Mrs. Deevers notes that there were no public schools in the south before the war, that planters' children were educated at home, that northern textbooks drove "intelligent" southern male teachers out of the teaching profession (just as later, southern boys were inclined to leave the classroom for the battlefied), that a southern or confederate teaching assocication was formed in 1862, that girls schools were expensive, etc. It is a rather feeble attempt to affirm white southern intelligence and education, the kind of thing that is rebutted with even small research or logical thinking. For instance, in the book The History of Southern Literature, edited by Rubin, Jackson, Moore, Simpson, and Young, from LSU Press, 1985, Lewis P. Simpson in "The Mind of the Antebellum South" and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld in "The Civil War and Authorship" discuss the limits of southern intellectual and literary life. The south did have artists, intellectuals, and scientists, but because of their irrationalism and pride--because of their commitment to refusing to register or respect the humanity of Africans, and the southern dependence on and defense of slavery--the antebellum south had few lasting or significant intellectual or literary accomplishments. It is a great example of how response to others can lead to self-betrayal: limiting the empathy and imagination with which we view others can lead to intellectual limits that curtail what we can think and do.
It was just a few years after 1972, when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated, an event I watched with my class: and one of the students, a southern white boy, said something on the order of, "Well, we have the niggers to thank for that." (It may have been the same white boy who wrote me, just weeks ago, wanting to get in touch with me, his old classmate. I wonder sometimes, more and more, if other people do not remember the things that I recall.)
Politics, the struggle over resources and values, a struggle that determines the social order, is a realm of compromise and reconciliation at its best; and Barack Obama is a figure of reconciliation. Obviously the election of Barack Obama is a sign of enlightenment, though it does not augur a perfect age or a perfect people: for one thing, the United Daughters of the Confederacy remains an active group, with an online presence, and its current leader states, "I am a member of The United Daughters of the Confederacy because I feel it would greatly please my ancestor to know that I am a member. It would please him to know that I appreciate what he did and delight his soldier love to know that I do not consider the cause which he held so dear to be lost or forgotten."
The members of United Daughters of the Confederacy were not only old women whose fathers or grandfathers were involved with the American civil war on the side of slavery, but individuals who were very young, and both female and male, in 1972 (there are photographs of members in the magazine; and, I wonder, where are they now?). The September 1972 United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine issue features a "Beliefs of Our Forefathers" article on page 29 under the rubric "Children of the Confederacy," a regular feature of the publication. In the article on confederate beliefs, the writer, who goes by her husband's name, and styles herself "historian and news editor," Mrs. Charles L. Deevers, discusses a confederate "catechism" that includes a defense of states' rights, saying that what led to the war between the states was "the disregard of those in power for the rights" of the southern states, the right to self-regulation. She, Mrs. Deevers, asserts that the "people of the south did not believe that slavery was right, and many felt that the south could work out their own problems and would eventually free the slaves because they were becoming the white man's burden." The writer discusses the economic concerns of slave holders (the economic loss if enslaved Africans were freed; and the high tariff proposed by northerners) and the "historian" Mrs. Deevers insists that enslaved Africans were well-cared for because they were valuable property ("They were well cared for because they were important to their owners") and goes on to note the "many stories" of kindness shown to Negroes; but, she says the Dred Scott decision "caused more trouble" and Abraham Lincoln's election "was the final blow." These unreconstructed views are interesting to read, though repellent; and I am reminded--thanks to Wayne Parent's book Inside the Carnival: Unmasking Louisiana Politics, from LSU Press, 2004, that even after the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution were passed, the south resisted respecting Africans and African-Americans; and southern states passed laws to disenfranchise blacks and prevent voting and civic participation, an exercise of states' rights, matters that made necessary the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. (I recall, too, W.E. B. DuBois's commentary on the south's behavior after the civil war in The Souls of Black Folk.)
In the November 1972 issue of the United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine, in an article under the heading "Children of the Confederacy" on education by "historian" Mrs. Charles L. Deevers (page 27), the author Mrs. Deevers notes that there were no public schools in the south before the war, that planters' children were educated at home, that northern textbooks drove "intelligent" southern male teachers out of the teaching profession (just as later, southern boys were inclined to leave the classroom for the battlefied), that a southern or confederate teaching assocication was formed in 1862, that girls schools were expensive, etc. It is a rather feeble attempt to affirm white southern intelligence and education, the kind of thing that is rebutted with even small research or logical thinking. For instance, in the book The History of Southern Literature, edited by Rubin, Jackson, Moore, Simpson, and Young, from LSU Press, 1985, Lewis P. Simpson in "The Mind of the Antebellum South" and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld in "The Civil War and Authorship" discuss the limits of southern intellectual and literary life. The south did have artists, intellectuals, and scientists, but because of their irrationalism and pride--because of their commitment to refusing to register or respect the humanity of Africans, and the southern dependence on and defense of slavery--the antebellum south had few lasting or significant intellectual or literary accomplishments. It is a great example of how response to others can lead to self-betrayal: limiting the empathy and imagination with which we view others can lead to intellectual limits that curtail what we can think and do.
It was just a few years after 1972, when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated, an event I watched with my class: and one of the students, a southern white boy, said something on the order of, "Well, we have the niggers to thank for that." (It may have been the same white boy who wrote me, just weeks ago, wanting to get in touch with me, his old classmate. I wonder sometimes, more and more, if other people do not remember the things that I recall.)
Politics, the struggle over resources and values, a struggle that determines the social order, is a realm of compromise and reconciliation at its best; and Barack Obama is a figure of reconciliation. Obviously the election of Barack Obama is a sign of enlightenment, though it does not augur a perfect age or a perfect people: for one thing, the United Daughters of the Confederacy remains an active group, with an online presence, and its current leader states, "I am a member of The United Daughters of the Confederacy because I feel it would greatly please my ancestor to know that I am a member. It would please him to know that I appreciate what he did and delight his soldier love to know that I do not consider the cause which he held so dear to be lost or forgotten."
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Draft: "Inaugurations"
Writer's Note: I scribbled these lines a couple of days ago, and I'm not sure what the sum is--verse or a story, or an outline for a short film, or all of those; and the intended meaning is fairly elemental--the difficulty of governing human emotion and impulse.
Inaugurations
The inauguration in Washington
of the elegant, smart man,
pale brown in an elegant, smart suit,
and watched by millions
will change everything tomorrow,
but now as the parade passes before him,
on a noisy New York street
a skinny boy with sandy hair waits
outside an apartment building
for a girl he likes, and likes too much,
to be sent to the corner store
by her mother,
and the boy is watched by a man
in shorts, with a rubber waist band,
despite the chill (he wears a jacket).
The man has seen the boy before
and cannot forget him--
is irritated by him--
and tries to scare him
but the boy won't scare.
Finally, the man gets the boy
to agree to share the girl's attention
and they both wait.
Unfortunately, the boy's mother
is not watching him,
but is watching men come and go
in a pornography shop,
and when the police carry her out
she explains that she'd prefer to sell coffee
but can't get hired
and as they carry the disturbed woman
past her son on the sidewalk
she is still explaining
and as her son calls one of the policemen Father
(she told him they soon would meet his unknown father)
and then as the boy calls her Mother
and asks where she is going
she is still explaining
and the boy follows
distracted from his girl
and the man in shorts and jacket waits.
Inaugurations
The inauguration in Washington
of the elegant, smart man,
pale brown in an elegant, smart suit,
and watched by millions
will change everything tomorrow,
but now as the parade passes before him,
on a noisy New York street
a skinny boy with sandy hair waits
outside an apartment building
for a girl he likes, and likes too much,
to be sent to the corner store
by her mother,
and the boy is watched by a man
in shorts, with a rubber waist band,
despite the chill (he wears a jacket).
The man has seen the boy before
and cannot forget him--
is irritated by him--
and tries to scare him
but the boy won't scare.
Finally, the man gets the boy
to agree to share the girl's attention
and they both wait.
Unfortunately, the boy's mother
is not watching him,
but is watching men come and go
in a pornography shop,
and when the police carry her out
she explains that she'd prefer to sell coffee
but can't get hired
and as they carry the disturbed woman
past her son on the sidewalk
she is still explaining
and as her son calls one of the policemen Father
(she told him they soon would meet his unknown father)
and then as the boy calls her Mother
and asks where she is going
she is still explaining
and the boy follows
distracted from his girl
and the man in shorts and jacket waits.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
I watched the inauguration today of the new president and vice-president of the United States, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden; and I thought it was a lovely, thoughtful ceremony, with the performance of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" sung by Aretha Frankiln and the closing benediction by Joseph Lowery, two people who embody history, and the classical piece by Yo Yo Ma and his colleagues, the inclusive poem by Elizabeth Alexander, and the very honest and intelligent speech by Barack Obama. It was good to see the greeting the outgoing president and his wife gave to the Obamas at the White House (following a church service and before the inauguration); and to see the goodbye that the Obamas gave to the Bushes following the inauguration. Barack Obama is an icon: he, handsome and elegant, represents intellect, political progress, and cultural complexity. He speaks now, as he has before, about the work we all must do together.
I am reminded of conversations I would have sometimes with an acquaintance in the city (there is only one city in the United States: all other towns aspire to it). We would talk about ideals and I would talk about what I would like to do: I felt as if our ideals should be lived in our own lives, must be lived in our own lives, if they were to live at all; and I think she thought of my speech as a kind of distinctive narcissism. I thought that our limitations and possibilities were the real limitations and possibilities, the kinds of things that any aspirant would face. Of course, not all of us get the encouragement or support for our dreams that we want or need: and so we may not achieve our goals, or if we do it is after long and lonely struggle and sacrifice, and sometimes the sacrifices are terrible.
When the new president speaks of the work that is to be done, I find myself hoping that a structure of support will be there for those who dare to dream: they will begin responsibilities but to complete those responsibilities, they will need help.
I am reminded of conversations I would have sometimes with an acquaintance in the city (there is only one city in the United States: all other towns aspire to it). We would talk about ideals and I would talk about what I would like to do: I felt as if our ideals should be lived in our own lives, must be lived in our own lives, if they were to live at all; and I think she thought of my speech as a kind of distinctive narcissism. I thought that our limitations and possibilities were the real limitations and possibilities, the kinds of things that any aspirant would face. Of course, not all of us get the encouragement or support for our dreams that we want or need: and so we may not achieve our goals, or if we do it is after long and lonely struggle and sacrifice, and sometimes the sacrifices are terrible.
When the new president speaks of the work that is to be done, I find myself hoping that a structure of support will be there for those who dare to dream: they will begin responsibilities but to complete those responsibilities, they will need help.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: News
Days ago president-elect Barack Obama met with the current United States president and all still-living former presidents, including Jimmy Carter. It was, apparently, Barack Obama’s idea that this meeting take place. It is, among other things, a way of being welcomed to office and being put in an official context, as well as an opportunity to seek counsel. Yesterday the president who is leaving office gave his last press conference: a sometimes rambling reflection on a wide range of issues, marked with some honesty and humility as well as some puckish humor and unrecognized anger. Many people are looking forward to the inauguration of president-elect Barack Obama, whose cabinet nominations have been impressive and sometimes controversial: and controversial because they are not radical, but are rather centrist figures. Obama has been said to be playing it safe; whereas I think he is shrewdly picking people of knowledge and power who can get things done—who can pursue his policies with success. (I'm not an admirer of all his nominations: I still have reservations about Hillary Clinton.) Barack Obama is not only intelligent, he has good instincts, and is drawing power—and the figures and symbols of power—toward himself.
In the January 12, 2009 Wall Street Journal, in an article called “All the Presidents’ Literature,” Jonathan Raban discusses Barack Obama’s writing in a rather close, dispassionate reading. Raban, in a more complimentary passage, remarks, “Obama is a skillful realist. By day, the I of his book is a vigilant listener and watcher, a hoarder of contingent details, who hugs his observations to himself, then broods on them late into the night. It's in the insomniac small hours when -- alone except for his burning cigarette -- he comes into his own as a restless thinker, figuring out his world in passages of eloquent interior monologue. Three o'clock in the morning is a recurring time in Dreams, the hour at which patterns reveal themselves, resolutions are made and the reader enjoys the illusion of unhindered intimacy with the author.” The article notes how many people are pleased to have an educated, literary president.
“Fiction Reading Increases for Adults” reports the New York Times’ reporter Motoko Rich, January 11, 2009. Rich's article states, “The report, ‘Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,’ being released Monday, is based on data from ‘The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts’ conducted by the United States Census Bureau in 2008. Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.” That is important news for many of us, especially editors and writers who have worried that the distractions and resources of contemporary life (particularly the internet and television) have made reading much less attractive and even less necessary to the general public.
With the election of the new president, it can be painful to realize how much work has yet to be done in terms of ethnic diversity and acceptance. I watched a Sunday morning television news program in which African-American issues were discussed—but discussed separately from the rest of the national and international news. (I found myself thinking that there should have been an African-American commentator participating in the national discussion and more people who weren’t African-American—say, Hispanics and Asians—participating in the discussion of African-American problems.) Just as African-American problems are segregated, so, still, are some African-American accomplishments, as with a new book of African-American essays: Best African-American Essays: 2009, edited by Debra J. Dickerson, from Bantam Books. The anthology is reviewed in the Asheville Citizen-Times by its books columnist Rob Neufeld, January 11, 2009. Neufeld likes James McBride’s piece on hip-hop music, included in the anthology; and notes Martha Southgate’s remarkable, telling piece there as well: “Martha Southgate, author of the novel The Fall of Rome, was motivated to write this essay by her experiences at writers' conferences, where she encountered far too few African-American literary writers in her middle-age bracket. There's a vicious cycle at work that makes lower promotion of black writers a business decision.”
“Black directors face frustration, hope and elusive success” is a headline in the International Herald Tribune, a headline above an article by Gene Seymour on African-American film directors (Spike Lee and others), January 11, 2009. Seymour reports, “You could now count on one hand (using two fingers) the number of black directors who can get their projects made and distributed at a steady rate. One is Lee, whose 19th theatrical feature, the World War II story Miracle at St. Anna was released last fall, while the other is Tyler Perry, the Atlanta-based, one-man multimedia conglomerate whose latest blend of low comedy and moral uplift, Madea Goes to Jail, is set for release on Feb. 20.”
For the online site NewsBlaze.com the culture reporter Prairie Miller reports in the article “Women Film Critics Circle Member Sparks SLUMDOG Brouhaha in Wall Street Journal.” The film Slumdog Millionaire has been getting a lot of very favorable response, from critics and audiences, but now there is controversy too. (The world loves controversy; insists on it. Don't we?) Prairie Miller states, “Women Film Critics Circle member Jan Lisa Huttner of Films For Two and HotPinkPen.com has been instrumental in a campaign to protest denial of screen credit recognition for major awards this year to Loveleen Tandan, as female co-director of Slumdog Millionaire,” January 10, 2009.
It can be frightening to be forced to realize again and again how important money fame and money are: they are sources of freedom and power, necessary resources. Whether or not a person or institution can pursue independently preferred tastes can be, and are, determined by such resources. The current financial crisis in the United States is a wonderful or terrible teacher, depending on one’s own perspective. The more esoteric arts will be affected, as The Art Newspaper reports: “A survey of art museums across the US has found that most institutions have lost at least 20% of the value of their endowments and directors are retrenching amid the worsening economic crisis. The survey of around 40 museums, conducted by The Art Newspaper in early December, revealed that nearly all directors had begun trimming between 5% and 20% of their 2009 budgets and were preparing for deeper cuts in 2010.” (The Art Newspaper, in an article by Jason Edward Kaufman, January 8, 2009, Issue 198.)
Meanwhile, ArtDaily.org reports on “Grey Art Gallery to Show Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion,” a new exhibit.
Excerpts: “The first exhibition to be jointly presented by the Grey Art Gallery in New York City and the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, Damaged Romanticism will run concurrently at the two institutions, opening January 13, 2009, at the Grey and February 7, 2009, at the Parrish.”
“According to Terrie Sultan, Director of the Parrish Art Museum and an organizer of the exhibition, ‘The artists in Damaged Romanticism do not belong to a style or school in the traditional sense, but they share an outlook that helps define the spirit of our times. Like the original Romantics, who so powerfully transformed the arts and society two centuries ago, they keenly feel the damage wrought by the forces of modernity and by our divorce from the natural world. But the fantasies of these damaged romantics are tempered by a pragmatic realism. Their sense of disillusionment and loss never stops them from clinging stubbornly to hope.’”
"Artists whose work is included in the exhibition are Richard Billingham (England); Berlinde De Bruyckere (Belgium); Edward Burtynsky (Canada); Sophie Calle (France); Petah Coyne (United States); Angelo Filomeno (Italy/UnitedStates); Jesper Just (Denmark/United States); Mary McCleary (United States); Florian Maier-Aichen (Germany/United States); Wangechi Mutu (Kenya/United States); Anneè Olofsson (Sweden); Julia Oschatz (Germany); David Schnell (Germany); and Ryan Taber/Cheyenne Weaver (United States).”
The site Qantara.de, which focuses on Middle Eastern culture and its relation to the western world and to Islam, has an article on Edward Said: “The Edward Said's Orientalism in Arab Discourse, Instrumentalised on All Sides” (January 7, 2009). It is by Markus Schmitz, and is translated by Katy Derbyshire—Schmitz is a University of Munster research fellow (School of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies); and Schmitz affirs that “The Palestinian-American intellectual Said overstepped the boundaries of his academic and national origins, his critique thus achieving recognition across the disciplines and around the world. Yet although his significance in bringing together previously separate debates is undisputed, it proves extremely difficult to determine Edward Said's precise cultural, political or theoretical locus.” The site also the covers Afghan director Siddiq Barmak (his film Osama won international awards) and his new film, Opium War, as well as Italian singer Etta Scollo and her engagement of the medieval Arabic poetry of Sicily for her new album Il Fiore Splendente.
Afropop.com's reporter Banning Eyre has conducted an interview with Vampire Weekend band member Ezra Koenig, in which Koenig says, “You know, sometimes it's funny when I see interviews where we get too intellectual about things, because the way we speak about things among ourselves, as probably is true among most bands, we start talking about vibes and all these very weird concepts that maybe only matter to people who listen to music. So to me, and this is fairly distinct from the musical side of it, I have always been very interested in kind of cultural connections. I spent a lot of time when I was in school taking especially literature courses about British India, which is in some ways a horrible time, but also important. To look back at that period helps you to understand why India is the way it is today and the way England is today, and even the way America is today. So in a cultural way, I don't think it's a paradox. This is not the first time in history that people are moving around the planet and meeting each other, and being exposed to new kinds of art.” The year 2008 interview is available now online at the web site of Afropop.com.
In the January 12, 2009 Wall Street Journal, in an article called “All the Presidents’ Literature,” Jonathan Raban discusses Barack Obama’s writing in a rather close, dispassionate reading. Raban, in a more complimentary passage, remarks, “Obama is a skillful realist. By day, the I of his book is a vigilant listener and watcher, a hoarder of contingent details, who hugs his observations to himself, then broods on them late into the night. It's in the insomniac small hours when -- alone except for his burning cigarette -- he comes into his own as a restless thinker, figuring out his world in passages of eloquent interior monologue. Three o'clock in the morning is a recurring time in Dreams, the hour at which patterns reveal themselves, resolutions are made and the reader enjoys the illusion of unhindered intimacy with the author.” The article notes how many people are pleased to have an educated, literary president.
“Fiction Reading Increases for Adults” reports the New York Times’ reporter Motoko Rich, January 11, 2009. Rich's article states, “The report, ‘Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,’ being released Monday, is based on data from ‘The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts’ conducted by the United States Census Bureau in 2008. Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.” That is important news for many of us, especially editors and writers who have worried that the distractions and resources of contemporary life (particularly the internet and television) have made reading much less attractive and even less necessary to the general public.
With the election of the new president, it can be painful to realize how much work has yet to be done in terms of ethnic diversity and acceptance. I watched a Sunday morning television news program in which African-American issues were discussed—but discussed separately from the rest of the national and international news. (I found myself thinking that there should have been an African-American commentator participating in the national discussion and more people who weren’t African-American—say, Hispanics and Asians—participating in the discussion of African-American problems.) Just as African-American problems are segregated, so, still, are some African-American accomplishments, as with a new book of African-American essays: Best African-American Essays: 2009, edited by Debra J. Dickerson, from Bantam Books. The anthology is reviewed in the Asheville Citizen-Times by its books columnist Rob Neufeld, January 11, 2009. Neufeld likes James McBride’s piece on hip-hop music, included in the anthology; and notes Martha Southgate’s remarkable, telling piece there as well: “Martha Southgate, author of the novel The Fall of Rome, was motivated to write this essay by her experiences at writers' conferences, where she encountered far too few African-American literary writers in her middle-age bracket. There's a vicious cycle at work that makes lower promotion of black writers a business decision.”
“Black directors face frustration, hope and elusive success” is a headline in the International Herald Tribune, a headline above an article by Gene Seymour on African-American film directors (Spike Lee and others), January 11, 2009. Seymour reports, “You could now count on one hand (using two fingers) the number of black directors who can get their projects made and distributed at a steady rate. One is Lee, whose 19th theatrical feature, the World War II story Miracle at St. Anna was released last fall, while the other is Tyler Perry, the Atlanta-based, one-man multimedia conglomerate whose latest blend of low comedy and moral uplift, Madea Goes to Jail, is set for release on Feb. 20.”
For the online site NewsBlaze.com the culture reporter Prairie Miller reports in the article “Women Film Critics Circle Member Sparks SLUMDOG Brouhaha in Wall Street Journal.” The film Slumdog Millionaire has been getting a lot of very favorable response, from critics and audiences, but now there is controversy too. (The world loves controversy; insists on it. Don't we?) Prairie Miller states, “Women Film Critics Circle member Jan Lisa Huttner of Films For Two and HotPinkPen.com has been instrumental in a campaign to protest denial of screen credit recognition for major awards this year to Loveleen Tandan, as female co-director of Slumdog Millionaire,” January 10, 2009.
It can be frightening to be forced to realize again and again how important money fame and money are: they are sources of freedom and power, necessary resources. Whether or not a person or institution can pursue independently preferred tastes can be, and are, determined by such resources. The current financial crisis in the United States is a wonderful or terrible teacher, depending on one’s own perspective. The more esoteric arts will be affected, as The Art Newspaper reports: “A survey of art museums across the US has found that most institutions have lost at least 20% of the value of their endowments and directors are retrenching amid the worsening economic crisis. The survey of around 40 museums, conducted by The Art Newspaper in early December, revealed that nearly all directors had begun trimming between 5% and 20% of their 2009 budgets and were preparing for deeper cuts in 2010.” (The Art Newspaper, in an article by Jason Edward Kaufman, January 8, 2009, Issue 198.)
Meanwhile, ArtDaily.org reports on “Grey Art Gallery to Show Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion,” a new exhibit.
Excerpts: “The first exhibition to be jointly presented by the Grey Art Gallery in New York City and the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, Damaged Romanticism will run concurrently at the two institutions, opening January 13, 2009, at the Grey and February 7, 2009, at the Parrish.”
“According to Terrie Sultan, Director of the Parrish Art Museum and an organizer of the exhibition, ‘The artists in Damaged Romanticism do not belong to a style or school in the traditional sense, but they share an outlook that helps define the spirit of our times. Like the original Romantics, who so powerfully transformed the arts and society two centuries ago, they keenly feel the damage wrought by the forces of modernity and by our divorce from the natural world. But the fantasies of these damaged romantics are tempered by a pragmatic realism. Their sense of disillusionment and loss never stops them from clinging stubbornly to hope.’”
"Artists whose work is included in the exhibition are Richard Billingham (England); Berlinde De Bruyckere (Belgium); Edward Burtynsky (Canada); Sophie Calle (France); Petah Coyne (United States); Angelo Filomeno (Italy/UnitedStates); Jesper Just (Denmark/United States); Mary McCleary (United States); Florian Maier-Aichen (Germany/United States); Wangechi Mutu (Kenya/United States); Anneè Olofsson (Sweden); Julia Oschatz (Germany); David Schnell (Germany); and Ryan Taber/Cheyenne Weaver (United States).”
The site Qantara.de, which focuses on Middle Eastern culture and its relation to the western world and to Islam, has an article on Edward Said: “The Edward Said's Orientalism in Arab Discourse, Instrumentalised on All Sides” (January 7, 2009). It is by Markus Schmitz, and is translated by Katy Derbyshire—Schmitz is a University of Munster research fellow (School of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies); and Schmitz affirs that “The Palestinian-American intellectual Said overstepped the boundaries of his academic and national origins, his critique thus achieving recognition across the disciplines and around the world. Yet although his significance in bringing together previously separate debates is undisputed, it proves extremely difficult to determine Edward Said's precise cultural, political or theoretical locus.” The site also the covers Afghan director Siddiq Barmak (his film Osama won international awards) and his new film, Opium War, as well as Italian singer Etta Scollo and her engagement of the medieval Arabic poetry of Sicily for her new album Il Fiore Splendente.
Afropop.com's reporter Banning Eyre has conducted an interview with Vampire Weekend band member Ezra Koenig, in which Koenig says, “You know, sometimes it's funny when I see interviews where we get too intellectual about things, because the way we speak about things among ourselves, as probably is true among most bands, we start talking about vibes and all these very weird concepts that maybe only matter to people who listen to music. So to me, and this is fairly distinct from the musical side of it, I have always been very interested in kind of cultural connections. I spent a lot of time when I was in school taking especially literature courses about British India, which is in some ways a horrible time, but also important. To look back at that period helps you to understand why India is the way it is today and the way England is today, and even the way America is today. So in a cultural way, I don't think it's a paradox. This is not the first time in history that people are moving around the planet and meeting each other, and being exposed to new kinds of art.” The year 2008 interview is available now online at the web site of Afropop.com.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Old Films
This past weekend on television I saw two films I had missed, Brian DePalma's Carrie (1976) and Ron Howard's The Missing (2003).
Carrie is about a plain girl of telekinetic ability with a religious, repressed mother whose teachings leave the girl ill-prepared for school or life; and, thanks to her own lack of proper orientation and the cruelty of others, the girl's talents are used for destruction rather than anything good. The fascinating thing is how horrifying the "normal" world is in this film: though warmly photographed it is dull, and full of small-minded, cruel people. The mother is more idea and symbol than real woman, though what she symbolizes is important in a small town, such as the one Carrie (Sissy Spacek) lives in.
Cate Blanchett plays a frontier woman, honest and tough, with a father who abandoned her to join the native Americans (Indians). When her lover is killed and eldest daughter abducted, her gone-native father helps her track the girl, who is captive to a male witch and his men (they plan to sell the daughter and other girls). There were some predictable things in this film, but its spirit still seemed large. (Both the frontier woman's father and the male witch are larger-than-life, stranger-than-life figures.) The story is about accepting the difficulties of other people's choices and about making amends. The land itself is an important element; and the film is set in a time in which the land is at least as dangerous, if not more so, than the people who walk it (while, arguably now, we humans are more dangerous than the land and the other living beings to be found on it).
Carrie is about a plain girl of telekinetic ability with a religious, repressed mother whose teachings leave the girl ill-prepared for school or life; and, thanks to her own lack of proper orientation and the cruelty of others, the girl's talents are used for destruction rather than anything good. The fascinating thing is how horrifying the "normal" world is in this film: though warmly photographed it is dull, and full of small-minded, cruel people. The mother is more idea and symbol than real woman, though what she symbolizes is important in a small town, such as the one Carrie (Sissy Spacek) lives in.
Cate Blanchett plays a frontier woman, honest and tough, with a father who abandoned her to join the native Americans (Indians). When her lover is killed and eldest daughter abducted, her gone-native father helps her track the girl, who is captive to a male witch and his men (they plan to sell the daughter and other girls). There were some predictable things in this film, but its spirit still seemed large. (Both the frontier woman's father and the male witch are larger-than-life, stranger-than-life figures.) The story is about accepting the difficulties of other people's choices and about making amends. The land itself is an important element; and the film is set in a time in which the land is at least as dangerous, if not more so, than the people who walk it (while, arguably now, we humans are more dangerous than the land and the other living beings to be found on it).
Home, and Homeless
Home is the place where we wake and sleep, the place in which we wash, dress, eat, drink, and rest, the place in which we reflect and imagine, and it is more: the place in which we find acceptance, foundation, support. It cannot be home without acceptance. Sometimes acceptance comes only through pretense: we pretend to a personality and purpose we do not share and are accepted; but false acceptance cannot be depended on--it is not for us, it is for what we are pretending to be, it is for our lie. Acceptance without truth leaves one homeless. Homeless people are forced back upon their own resources, whether those resources are many or few--and, too often, they despair and rage against the isolation and poverty and the quite limited kindness of strangers. Acceptance without truth leaves one homeless. If you do not feel connected to society through traditional, or conventional, relationships, art can become a connecting thing. Human secrets are better kept, and more eloquently and wisely revealed, by art than by anyone or anything else: and it may be that the only real secrets are the exact nature and dimensions of the individual human spirit. Art feeds the imagination, the spirit, and the mind. However, in a permissive public society, a society of crudity and vulgarity, a society in which standards and values hardly seem to matter, a society in which every indulgence seems possible, the impact of the symbolic freedoms that art embodies can seem, or even be, without importance. One can feel caught between private discouragements that wound and public permissions that fail to empower. I have thought of home as a place to be found in the future rather than as a place remembered from the past or enjoyed in the present: and, as a state of being; and yet, when I have thought of a particular place as home, it has been New York I have thought of, for the cultural diversity and personal freedom it offers, for the bookstores and theaters and galleries and museums and other enclaves and streets, rather than Louisiana, the state in which I was born; and, of course, the arts have been a nearly endless resource for encouragement and spiritual renewal.
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