Being and Making

Several things that I've seen/read lately have been leading me to ask myself the question: how much does the artist's personality bring to their work? Is it unfair to take an artists' personality and biography into account in the judgment of a work? It's also a question I'd like to ask you guys because I am of two minds about this.

On one hand I feel that all that matters is the work itself and the work has a right to be examined along fair, relatively objective standards that don't involve the artists' biography. Because after all, why would a given artist's life even be significant to you, were it not for the work they were producing, anyway? I tend to believe, sometime against my more rational judgment, in the role of the personal in shaping artists' work because what a person does in their life, how they carry themselves in the world has a great influence on the kind of art that people produce.

Two vastly different people come to mind as example of the role the personal plays out in art. The first person that comes to mind is the painter Mark Rothko. Rothko was, by all accounts, a bitter alcoholic locked in his studio for most of his life, but in the presence of his paintings, I think it's possible to feel closer to the sublime. Would the at once vast and claustrophobic color blocks of Rothko's paintings be possible had he lead a more sociable, well-adjusted life?

The second example is the short story writer and poet Grace Paley comes to mind for me in this internal debate with myself. Besides being a writer, Paley was a passionate anti-war and civil rights activist since the 1960's, teacher, founder of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative (which is by the way, one of the few teaching resources companies that publishes intelligent, thoughtful, and relevant books about teaching creative writing–believe me, the rest is pretty much crap) as well as a dedicated mother of two. It's difficult to read her work, so inflected with empathy and a deep understanding of the daily struggles of life, and not think about Grace Paley, the person.

Incidentally, Paley was not such a prolific writer, though the work that she did produce was stunning. When I think of her small literary output I don't think of it as a short coming, I think, "Grace Paley was probably very busy being in the world and had she not been, perhaps, her stories wouldn't have been so excellent."

Is this too narrow a way of looking at an artist's work?

Herding Cats

The brilliant Melissa Lacewell-Harris on the actual economic conditions of African-Americans during the Clinton years or 'ow do you say? I told you so

Peter Gizzi is the new poetry editor at the Nation. This is the best poetry editing of any non-poetry magazine I've seen so far, let alone in a publication dedicated to politics. If only the New Yorker could get it so so right, but I guess then they wouldn't be the New Yorker. Here's one Jack Spicer poems of two in the last issue and an Eileen Myles poem from the current issue.

Brandon Holmquest of Calque, gives David Kirby's lazy, misogynistic review of Cortazar and Dunlop's Autonauts of the Cosmoroute the verbal smack down of all smack downs

The Future of Directions

When I started this blog, I stated in my first post that I'd be writing about film, which actually has not happened much. Instead, I've written about various things all loosely falling under the rubric of art or politics, or both. I realized that even though I love film (and do plan to write about is some), there are also really critical political issues that deserve to be discussed and in which I have no other venue to discuss them except at home and at work (and somehow that's not enough). However, I'll probably never want to stop writing about the various arts. So this'll be a hybrid thing because nothing in life is free of politics and life is barely worth living without art.

As the amethyst pajamas charges into the future, I will be inviting people to contribute to the blog and hopefully making it more than just a place to store my own thoughts.

It Really Is this Beautiful in the Mountains

Below is the most cogent critique of the War on Drugs that I've ever read. Most people in Colombia could easily tell you all of this, but I guess you're more apt to believe it from a journalist in a mainstream publication. Besides, when do you ever see a Colombian but in Scarface, right?

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17438347/how_america_lost_the_war_on_drugs

I've been loving you too long (and I don't wanna stop now)

Dear Barack,

It's seems like it's been years since Iowa when in truth it's barely been a month. Me and so many other people I knew held our breaths at around 9 pm when it was certain that you'd won that icy white state. Since Iowa though, there's been New Hampshire and Las Vegas, there's been Bill and Hillary, there's been dirty tricks and playing nice. I am worn from all of this and cursing every morning reading the news.....

I believe in your goodness, Barack in your gentle, almost equine face, as do many others, but you've gotta give us something more to hold onto than the bland centrist democratic stance that's slowly emerging from under your slogan of 'CHANGE.' Don't make the same mistake that so many other would-be Democratic reformers do of shrinking from the radical and transformative practice of truth. I know right now you're between a rock and hard place, the race card and the Clinton acrimony, but now is the time to really tell us HOW you will change this country. You know the Law and you know Language so please use it.

Or perhaps I overestimate you because I need to believe that we can transcend our sordid histories, that we can put eloquence and intellect in our seats of power, rather than crassness and arrogance. I need to believe that I might live in a better country than the one I think I live in.

Sincerely,

Laura

Vaginal Rejuvenation

I've been having a bad quarrel with feminism for the past couple of years after having identified intensely as a feminist when I was a teenager. The reasons for this quarrel are legion, but my final beef is really with how (maybe not in theory, but) in practice, feminism especially in America, is an ideology that disproportionately benefits upper-middle class white women. At the same time, I have deep roots in feminism and amidst my doubts about it, I ask myself "What can be salvaged from feminism? What is essentially good and constructive about feminism?" And for me the answer to this question has always been: feminism makes female friendship a political imperative. For me, friendship has been the single most important aspect of having been and still identifying as a feminist (albeit with more reserve).

Strong friendships between women lead to strong communities and support networks that are not as readily available in more hetero-normative frameworks, where the male-female partnership, a reproductive one, is considered the basic unit of community and same-sex friendships are relegated to second rung. Feminism posits female friendships as productive in ways that transcend traditional notions of family. My female friends have been some of my biggest inspirations and support systems and have provided the context for a type of creative play and adventure that I couldn't imagine embarking on if I didn't have their support.

I was reminded of this on Saturday when I saw a show, entitled "Vaginal Rejuvenation," by Amanda Ross-Ho and Kirsten Stoltmann at Guild & Greyshkul in SoHo. There were a lot of photographs and collage work. Many of the pieces conceptually hinged on the oft-used tactic in feminist art from from Judy Chicago to Lisa Yuskavage of reclaiming traditionally feminine/overtly girly iconography and inverting it so that the more menacing dimensions of these images are revealed. For example in the Ross-Ho & Stoltmann show, puffy plastic stickers familiar to any girl whose childhood was spent in the 70's or 80's, flank a canvas with a photograph of a sports car on it and rows of votive candles line the bottom of the canvas. Across the top in big dripping yellow letters is written "I WANT A DIVORCE." The layers of stickers (coded feminine and childish), the sportscar (coded masculine), and the declamatory statement (coded adult female) is a dense tangle of signifiers, the total effect is hilarious and pathos-laden.

What interested me about this show was partly the art but also that the show was the result of a collaboration between two female artists, that the show was premised on Amanda Ross-Ho and Kirsten Stoltmann's shared aesthetics, experiences of growing up female, and their friendship. It's very rare in art world that conceptualizes individuality and creativity as almost interchangeable to see a collaborative show by two female artists. The show was explicitly framed in terms of their friendship. The curator of the show Joao Ribas, left a really interesting leaflet at the front desk to accompany the show. The leaflet is called "My friend, there is no friend," and it tracks the philosophical and historical views of friendship. Ribas writes, "Friendship is thus suspect: it is incongruous with democracy, as the egalitarianism intrinsic to democracy is in conflict with the inherent bias towards the particular implicit in friendship. Yet how can a creative, fluid, and regenerative dyad not be socially productive? For collaboration is its close filial kin-and these two 'wills working together' dismantle the Romantic insistence on the expression of an individual will, that expressive monad that defines liberalism and finds its apotheosis in the mock-heroism of male genius, Wordsworth and Corbusier as the chief examples." This little scrap of paper that I encountered on my way out the door made me remember that friendship can be revolutionary (if friends endeavor to make revolution together, that is).

Revenge Against the Nerds: Jose Padilla Sues John Yoo

Before I started paying very close attention to the Bush Administration's interpretation of the Constitution, I would have had no reason to know who John Yoo is, so I'm assuming that for most people reading this blog, his name won't ring a bell. John Yoo is one of the theorists behind the so-called "unitary executive theory." The unitary executive theory is the idea that the president of the United States is endowed with almost monarchic powers, powers which transcend that of the judicial and legislative branches. This theory is behind much of the Bush administration's shenanigans in the wake of 9/11; it set the groundwork for the American government spying on its citizens and for the detainment and torture of suspected terrorists (to mention but a few). All Americans should be familiar with the unitary executive theory, not only because it lead to many of the actions that the current administration took un-beknownst to its own people, but because the theory has set up an extremely dangerous precedent with respect to presidential power. American presidents (democrat or republican) will now have vastly increased, unchecked, and largely covert powers.

So anyway, John Yoo, Yale law graduate is not only one of the authors of this theory, but he's the author of the torture memos, the documents that made torture just legally acceptable enough to use as a tactic in the interrogation of enemy combatants. Jose Padilla, one of the early villains in the War on Terror, is an American-born Latino, Brooklyn gang member who converted to Islam. In 2002, Padilla was arrested at O'Hare airport on the grounds that he was part of a conspiracy to plant a dirty bomb in the United States. The charges were later downgraded to Padilla having plans to blow up apartment buildings. He was labeled an enemy combatant and held without recourse to legal counsel, deprived of sunlight, deprived of human contact, and all the attendant indignities to which enemy combatants have been subjected in the War on Terror. Well, now with the help of the Yale Law human rights clinic (irony of all ironies), Jose Padilla is suing John Yoo, along with Rumsfeld and Cheney.

What's striking and sort of novel about Padilla's lawsuit are two things: a) Yoo is being sued for his contribution to the shaping of the ideas in the torture memos rather than for any action (in terms of the enacting of torture tactics, the responsibility lays much more clearly with Cheney) and b) Yoo is a hateful, hateful nerd. In law school, him and David Addington (another member of the nerd cabal), as members of the Federalist Society wore pins with silhouettes of Alexander Hamilton on their lapels. Hamilton was the most conservative member of the framers of the Constitution, the one most invested in the idea of monarchy, and the most resolutely undemocratic. John Yoo has been a relatively behind-the-scenes guy at the Bush administration, but as more knowledge of his involvements in the re-drawing of the boundaries of presidential power come out, you'll get to see his smarmy, doughy face on tv a lot more.

Top Somesuch of 2007 (inspired by Nicoloff)

So I've mainly dissed 2007, because I felt that 2007 had dissed me, and I looked forward to a more serene 2008. But I think credit must be given where credit is due. 2007 brought some good things, and in no particular order, they are:

1) The literature of Roberto Bolaño. There was so so very much critical hype around him last year since Natasha Wimmer translated The Savage Detectives into English for the first time, but the hype is all true and deserved. Bolaño wrote poems, novellas, short stories, and epic novels that have the quality I most admire in literature, the capacity to encompass all of life in a relatively minimalist prose style. Bolaño is particularly effective at chronicling the lives of writers–he gets the quiet desperation, the petty rivalries between poets, and the arc of history intersecting with individual writers' lives in perfect pitch.

2) The Holy Mountain is maybe the best movie I've ever seen. I can't even describe it further than that for fear of ruining for those who haven't seen it. Conrad and Brandon and I once stayed up talking 'til morning in our Philly living room, which is when Conrad recommended this movie. The next few days I couldn't remember who had told me about the movie, but I went as if in a trance to the video store to rent it.

3) Insoles in my motorcycle boots. It's like looking tough but walking on little baby pillows!

4) New-found freedom from a psychotic need for academic validation.

5) The Ike and Tina Turner Collection. When Ike died recently, that bastion of taste, the New York Post, ran the headline 'Ike Beats Tina to Death,' which I think pretty much sums up how their musical greatness has been obscured by their biographies. Tina Turner's over-produced , over-blown work from the eighties has also obscured the memory of the music that Ike and Tine once made in the 60's. I think both their later work shows how musically, they just weren't the same without each other. In her Ike and Tina days, Tina's voice was the centerpiece of their act. In Gimme Shelter, the Maysles' brothers documentary about Altamont that focuses mainly on the Rolling Stones, Tina goes on stage and out-performs the Stones by a factor of twenty. Later, Ike and Tina's cover of "Honky Tonk Women" similarly upstages the Stones. Nothing approaches the gut-wrenching rawness of Tina's caterwaling over the Ikettes harmonies in "I Idolize You," or the exuberance of the Phil Spector-produced "River Deep Mountain High." Which is not to gloss over the fact that Ike was utterly physically and psychologically abusive to Tina, or the fact that Tina's separation from Ike may have encouraged many women to break from abusive relationships of their own, but nothing documents the history of their disintegration more viscerally than the albums they made together. By the seventies, Tina's stage banter with Ike is all bile and accusation.

6) The Metropolitan Museum and the cheese pretzels they sell on the steps, as well as the soft-serve ice cream cones that the ice cream man parked at the steps sells late into the night during the spring, summer, and fall. This museum is somewhat overlooked, in favor of some of the city's flashier cultural institutions, but the depth and breadth of what the Met offers is really amazing: Contemporary, Modernist, Asian, Meso-American, Decorative Arts, American, Native American, 17th, 18th, and 19th Century Painting and Portraiture, and the list goes on and on. And they're open until 9:30 during the warmer months. It's really a place to sit and dream and get lost.

7) The Upper East Side. Haters can hate, but I'm sorry–it kind of rooools. The eighties between Lexington and third is home to many great thrift shops, shoe repairs shops run by grizzled old men, bagel places. Lower Manhattan is a shopping mall in which I feel like I am lost in a dystopian future at the most advanced stages of capitalism. Strangely, the UES's affluence has kept it from the crassness that the rest of New York is facing or imminently faces.

8) The poems of Jack Spicer. I had largely been turned off to the San Francisco Renaissance because Robin Blaser was the only one I had read and his work left me decidedly tepid. But Spicer hits you over the head with his strange greatness. The title of this blog is a fragment from "Billy the Kid." I don't know if it's possible to describe in language what Jack Spicer's poems do in my head. And I think that's what's at the root of their genius.

9) (stolen from Nicoloff's list) CHEAPLY PSYCHOANALYZING PEOPLE I BARELY KNOW. YESSSS.

10) When the dancer at the Republican did a routine to"Time after time" and every single person in the joint sang with her. Mid-summer.

Please listen to the man with the idiosyncratically-angled ears!

Kucinich is demanding a recount in New Hampshire.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7779

This is a link to an article about Dennis Kucinich demanding a recount in New Hampshire. A story about this was running on Drudge Report at 8:00 a.m. this morning and has now mysteriously disappeared. The above article is from a Canadian think tank.

Nostalgia will rot your teef

This election cycle has captured my imagination more than any election cycle since I was old enough to have a political consciousness. The current presidential race wells up complicated feelings for me about American politics, class, feminism and race. The Democratic party, in particular is really bringing it in terms of the stakes–the frontrunners–a woman and a black man. But not just any woman, and for me, certainly not the right woman: Hillary Clinton. And not just any black man, certainly not the demagogues of yore like Al Sharpton, but: Barack Obama. Obama, who no one could have seen coming eight years ago, as we were entering the dark night of the American soul that has been the Bush Administration. After Bush stole the election, it seemed like America had been cleaved into two starkly different ideological halves that could never be reconciled; it seemed like a Democrat could never win, even in a fair fight, much less a black or female candidate. And now it seems that there is a palpable chance that that our next president could be a woman or black man. Interestingly, for a brief moment during the gestation of this campaign season, it seemed as if this race was not going to be about identity politics. A ninety-eight percent white Iowan electorate had caucused for Obama, and by quite a large margin too. Of course, the pendulum swung back. Hillary narrowly took New Hampshire and identity politics finally came into play, in a race that had once seemed to include non-traditional candidates for their qualifications and abilities rather than for their identities. In New Hampshire, older white women and the working-class voted for Hillary (a base that Bill Clinton's campaign had appealed to in '92 and '96) yet voters told exit pollsters that they had voted for Obama. Many critics have suggested that there are racial undertones to why people told pollsters one thing and actually voted differently in private. I largely agree with this analysis. At a caucus, people are held accountable for their votes because caucuses are public events, while in a primary in the privacy of the voting booth, people's deep-seated beliefs about race get to come out, without people having to look like racists.

And why is Hillary not the right woman? My disdain for the Clintons is multi-faceted but one of the most difficult things for me to swallow about Hillary Clinton's campaign (next to her use of gender and feminism, which is the subject of another post) is the selling of this myth that the 90's were a magical time. The first election I can really remember clearly was Bill Clinton's first run. Me and every other fourth grade classmate watched Bill Clinton play the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show. In the months before the election, kids on the school bus would pound the seats and scream out the windows of the school bus "CLINTON/GORE." And later, I remember the scorn that Dole's limp, pen-clutching hand inspired in my fellow pre-teens during Clinton's incumbent race (although by then, his luster had faded considerably). I am also old/young enough to remember how the Clinton Whitehouse was not kind to the poor. Ironically, not too long after Bill's charisma, which had mobilized the young, the black, and the working-class to put him in the White House, Clinton cut welfare for thousands. America's "first black president" attacked the looming spectre of the black welfare queen by cutting thousands of families off the welfare roles. My family, my immigrant single mother and I, were affected by this legislation.

During the early to mid-nineties, my mother received welfare and Medicaid benefits for me because of my father's refusal/inability to pay child support. When these benefits were cut, my mother and I were left with no financial or medical recourses. We had no money, despite the fact that my mother worked a back-breaking 50-hour a week job as a nanny. From the time I was eleven to the time I was twenty-two (when my graduate school fellowship included health insurance), I simply could not afford to go to the doctor and have lasting, chronic health problems as a result. Though I still remember the early-90's Clintonian enthusiasm quite palpably, I have no desire to take part in the Clinton nostalgia that Hillary's campaign, whose message seems to be that voting for her promises a return to the safe, cuddly, prosperous mid-nineties. There is a scene in Werner Herzog's My Best Fiend where Herzog is giving a guided tour of the tenement building now turned luxury townhouse where both Klaus Kinski and Herzog grew up in post-war Germany. He tells the current owner of the townhouse, "We were not a part of the German economic miracle." This statement accurately describes how I feel about that Clintonian decade. My mother and I did not get to partake of the economic miracle. As we slide into a newly-minted recession, there is finally some talk of public assistance for the victims of unethical sub-prime lenders (though it's still too little too late), finally hints of compassion glint in the public discourse, but during prosperous times the rhetoric always turns back: what are the poor doing to help themselves? Why do they live hand to mouth? Why can't they just put some money aside in the bank?

Of interest: Fassbinder at P.S. 1

The exhibit discussed here ends on January 21st, so if you can, you should really rush to Queens and catch it.

I recently went to P.S. 1 with Christine to poke around see what was up. Their whole third floor gallery is currently occupied by an exhibit dedicated to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic Berlin Alexanderplatz. The exhibit is remarkable both for its content and for its curatorial decisions. Berlin Alexanderplatz, conceived as a television serial, is emotionally harrowing–we follow unsympathetic characters through a bleak German post-World War II landscape and visually arresting–in the middle of a damp grey and green and brown forest, a pink dress flutters on our disconsolate heroine, your eyes cannot resist it. It's equally demanding in its length: 15 hours.
The manner in which P.S. 1 is showing the series is equally interesting and raises many questions for me about how their presentation of the pieces affects your viewing of the film. In one room, the museum has built a giant complex of interconnected viewing consoles where you can watch each of the fourteen episodes individually. You can also stand in the middle of the circular complex and watch all th episodes playing all at once without sound. See here for images: http://www.ps1.org/ps1_site/content/view/281/63/. In another room you also have the option of watching the episodes playing back to back on a regular one-dimensional screen. I've never watched the film in its 15-hour entirety before, but I would bet that watching it at P.S. 1 more closely replicates the experience of watching it on television more than a straightforward continuous screening of the film would. Watching Berlin at P.S. 1, you get the noise of the gallery-goers, the interruptions of people going in and out of the booths, the inability to stay in the museum for fifteen continuous hours, which turns out to be surprisingly useful in this context.
On display are also Fassbinder's story boards for the films, his copy of the Doblin novel from which he adapted Berlin Alexanderplatz, and extensive restored and non-restored stills.

The how and the why of starting a blog in this blog-saturated age.

Because my critical glands run the risk of shriveling up and falling out if I don't start writing some form of critical prose again, I have chosen the blog as my not preferred–more like settled-on form–for communicating my thoughts to myself and (perhaps) a small audience.

On one hand, I write poetry, though I don't plan to write a ton about poetry in this space (I don't often call myself a poet because it reminds me of this cheap bordeaux I like called "Mouton Cadet," on the label it says the wine is produced by "poet and wine maker Baron Phillip De Rothschild"). On the other hand, I'm a cinephile so a lot of my posts will revolve around film, though subject matter here won't be limited to that subject.