the amethyst pajamas

fare thee well, 2008

2008-12-30T13:34:00.002-05:00

key words: carnage, hope, opportunity found, opportunity lost, reunion, severance, death, making. it got too heavy for me to document here towards the end of this year, but i'll try harder in the next.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

2008-11-04T13:35:00.002-05:00

So, let's just take a moment here to acknowledge that if we wake up tomorrow with Barack Obama as our nation's next president, Oprah Winfrey will have played no small part in making that so. I have no small amount of issues with Oprah, but goddamn that woman can move mountains!

The Stats Aren't Just Cooked, They're Burnt to a Crisp

2008-10-31T15:16:00.002-04:00

I've written here extensively about the president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, Bush-kisser, right-winger, and fascist. Uribe has been haled as somewhat of an anti-corruption icon by the ruling American Republicans for consistently delivering numbers: narco-trafficking arrests, FARC arrests, famous people rescue efforts (in other words putting all those sweet sweet War on Drugs dollars to use). So some people have been puzzled at why all the anomie towards this man who was seems to be cleaning up the situation. Well, it seems like rumors of death squads have finally been substantiated. For the past few months, the Colombian military has been embroiled in a scandal involving hundreds, possibly thousands of murdered and disappeared peasants. The Colombian military, under tremendous pressure to produce the aformentioned numbers, has been slaughtering civilian peasants, dressing them up as FARC guerillas, and delivering the bodies to their superiors as proof of the efficacy of their skill in capturing and killing members of the left-wing guerilla group. In response to the scandal, the Uribe regime is publicly firing a few mid-level generals and denouncing these abuses, a common tactic in these situations. Word is that the pressure to up the numbers of captured and killed FARC soldiers was coming directly from the top, as in Uribe was calling people on the weekend on their cellphones at all hours, saying by any means necessary.

Errol Morris is a better documentarian than anyone should be allowed to be (and furthermore, Herzog was right to eat a shoe), Or uncovering lies

2008-10-29T12:05:00.009-04:00

Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure, his latest documentary on the subject of the Abu Graib scandal, is like a shock onion, just as one layer is peeled back another is exposed. Morris interviews the Military Police Officers that were put in charge of guarding the inmates at Abu Ghraib, officers like Lynndie England, who would become the face of American military abuses and brutality in Iraq. England and her colleagues tell the story of how they were given the green light by their superiors to humiliate and terrorize their Iraqi captors: taxi drivers, bakers, civilians of all stripes captured and taken back to the prison in night time raids of local villages, and how eventually they started taking pictures of these acts, pictures which were leaked to the media. I remember, when Abu Ghraid broke in 2003, seeing pictures of Lyndie England apparently dragging a man out of his cell on a leash and wondering at the callous monstrosity that war breeds and I watched S.O.A., in a way, to try to understand how and why such acts happen during war time. Yes, there is an aspect of Stanford prison experiment brutality to the pictures of the detainees in various stress positions wearing hoods and women's underwear on their heads(many of the officers interviewed still seem curiously insensitive to the fact that they actually caused prisoners great physical and psychological pain) but I came away with a quite different picture of what happened at the prison, that these abuses, as the officers claim, were the least of what was happening at Abu Ghraib, namely the secret murder of a detainee who died during a torture interrogation.

Morris highlights in S.O.A. how large of a role photography played in the scandal: how the pictures don't show who exactly was responsible for orchestrating these denigrating acts against the prisoners, how these acts were (and are!) legally sanctioned by U.S. military policy at the time, and how the pictures actually obscured the real Abu Ghraib story. What is so insurmountably weird about the case is that the officers who were in the pictures like Ivan Frederick II, Charles Graner, Sabrina Harman, Megan Ambuhl, Jeremy Sivits, Lynndie England, Megan Ambuhl are the ones who served time in jail while no mid to high level military officials who encouraged and promoted an environment of terror in the prisons even went to trial. What was legal was the humiliation and torture. What was illegal was taking pictures of it! Thanks John Yoo.

I really encourage people to see this movie, if you're reading this. Yes, you will feel moral revulsion, but maybe what we should be feeling as Americans right now is moral revulsion. It's kind of surreal to be standing at this point in time and be able to see the Nixon years, Watergate, Vietnam, as almost quaint compared to 2000-2008. It's weird to think these were the years that me and most of my friends became adults and even though we were opposed to the war, opposed to torture, opposed to almost everything Bush did in office, we couldn't do anything about it. No one could. The whole country, including the Democrats, the media, academia, think tanks, the center, the left, couldn't do shit. And most people, aka Americans didn't care or didn't know what was going on. And as we see the end in sight, of Barack Obama poised to win the election (my finger are tightly crossed), I just hope our triumph or triumphalism doesn't let us forget what happened in these past eight years. We're only beginning to uncover the lies we were told, the stories that were suppressed, the memos that made so many of these abuses legal, and hopefully these things won't fade too quickly out of our memories before the next conservative backlash sweeps the country with Jesus-fervor and Arab hate (or you know, the Other du jour).

The Reactionary Poems Has Arrived!

2008-10-17T16:04:00.002-04:00

Comrades,

My new chapbook, The Reactionary Poems, has been released on olywapress. The book features 25 poems by me and is contained in a handsome letter-pressed cover by book artist Jennifer Manzano. For eight dollars, all this can be yours. E-mail olywapress@gmail.com.

an excerpt:

TECHNOLOGY PLUS THE ABSENCE
OF LOVE

The morass, aging super-
models, mid-90’s danceable
soft rap and wading
through this–
Who’ll be the dirty
agonist in the future face
an oval Buddha to escape
the rain in a corporate
arcade

and there's a reading....

Saturday, October 25

at 8 pm

at Unnameable Books
456 Bergen St.
Brooklyn, NY

Please join us for a reading by Laura Jaramillo and CAConrad in celebration of Laura's chapbook The Reactionary Poems, just published by olywa press. Chapbooks will be available for purchase at a discount.

Bios:

Laura Jaramillo is a poet from the borough of limitless opportunity, Queens. She holds a BA from Bard College and a MA in Creative Writing from Temple University. Her poems have appeared in Pocket Myths: The Odyssey, P-QUEUE, Cross-Connect, Tribilingual, the Bard Papers, and For Godot.

CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He escaped to Philadelphia where he lives and writes with the PhillySound poets http://www.PhillySound.blogspot.com. He is the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX Press, 2008), The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2008), advanced ELVIS course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Press, 2009). He invites you to visit him online at http://www.CAConrad.blogspot.com

How to get there:

2, 3 to Bergen St

2, 3, 4, 5, M, N, Q, W, R, B, D to Atlantic Ave-Pacific St

C to Lafayette Ave

The (Other) Axis of Evil

2008-09-04T12:01:00.008-04:00

The announcement last Friday of Sarah Palin's nomination as McCain's VP was shocking. For one, it came out of left field–Palin being relatively young and definitely inexperienced. It was mostly shocking to me for being a really brilliant political move by the McCain campaign at a time when the Republican party is looking like a bunch of sad sacks shouldering some of the biggest international and domestic political failures of the 20th century (and the 21st!). And then comes the Palin nomination: what a way to capitalize on the American public's recent embrace of non-traditional (i.e. non-white men) candidates into presidential politics. Brilliant and tremendously cynical, since one Sarah Palin does not equal one Hillary Clinton, but to the average American voter who is not terribly informed about politics or candidates, this equation of the two women might just work. Although HRC is pro-choice, had an actual substantive policy platform, including extensive health care expertise, and Sarah Palin is anti-choice and has no policy platform, what a lot of people see is two women who are mothers and were tough enough to have careers in politics too. This may seem absurdly reductionist, but we are now at the stage of the presidential campaign where discourse plummets to just that level.

What Palin also does, besides standing as a really interesting and random trump card for the McCain campaign, is exemplify a certain strain of Idealized Republican Womanhood (henceforth known as IRW): the conventionally attractive, family-minded, hard-working, deeply conservative, wealthy woman who dedicates much of her energy working against what have traditionally been the claims of feminism: namely that women have the right to reproductive control over their own bodies. The Republican party has long had an antagonistic relationship to feminism, but there have been many anti-feminist and pseudo-feminist female iconic Republican ideologues: Peggy Noonan, Phyllis Schafly, Condoleezza Rice––smart women with terrifying ideas. These female Republican ideologues are, after all, incredibly complex in the roles they've played in the party , not just as public figureheads but actually as the party's producers of ideas (Condi is just an enigma wrapped in a riddle as far as I'm concerned). These women have not traditionally embodied IRW.

Sarah Palin is decidedly not an ideologue in this vein (her biography serving as the bulk of her credentials), as there is a dearth of ideas in her rhetoric. Yet there is more than a little of Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and Laura Bush (in all their shellacked, non-threatening femininity) in the way that Palin's being promoted. Palin fits very well into the Republican first-lady archetype of ladies who are strong but at the end of the day know their place (behind the main man). Indeed, there's something very wife-ly about her role in the McCain campaign: she gets to be the tough mother for the public, the protector of the family through her vow to work hard to ban sex education and abortion.

'The Wackness' Will Be Vindicated by History

2008-08-18T16:34:00.003-04:00

But seriously. I went to see The Wackness because my own dirty cynicism said, Go see Mary Kate's terrible movie in which you're sure she'll be terrible. Go see the way in which your generation is having its favorite music re-packaged and sold back to it by shameless panderers

What I actually saw surprised me quite pleasantly and upon further review could be some of the best screen writing I've seen in a looong time. The script captures adolescent longing, the awfulness of summer, middle-class downward mobility, gentrification, cocaine parents and a certain era of New York (before the hipster industrial complex took over) with great nuance and sensitivity. Contrary to the last decade's slew of 80's nostalgia mongering movies, The Wackness doesn't indulge in frenetic MTV editing–it's slow, mellow, and intermittently melancholy in pace and while the soundtrack is an important part of the movie, the score doesn't make the movie into a music video. Josh Peck, playing Luke Schapiro, is so many boys I went to high school with, except Peck humanizes that stoic shyness. Olivia Thirlby, the love interest, Stephanie, is complexly written for a teenage girl in a movie. She's pretty, self-involved, at the brink of perhaps becoming a more compassionate, nicer adult but still stuck in selfish kid ways. She's not the untouchable popular girl of so many teen movies.

Most interestingly for me, the movie's setting, New York in the early to mid 90's, is as much a part of the dramatic action as any other plot in the movie. The refrain "This city's changing," is heard over and over. It's a great contrast to 2008's "This city's changed." Does anyone remember the Giuliani with devil horns stickers plastered everywhere in those years, before the clean-up of the city was accepted and total?

Mugging and Preening

2008-08-05T17:11:00.005-04:00

So, Mussolini was a total clown. Watching footage of him, it's really hard to fathom how a man so clumsy, so obviously devoid of grace and intelligence became the architect of Italian fascism. Clumsy, yes, and hammy, but also possessing of an incredible physical self-confidence; a whole nation swept off its feet by the modern equivalent of an ugly male porn star, the ones that are cast so that dudes don't inadvertently get turned on watching straight porn. Mussolini mugs for the camera and for his audience in ways that are unthinkable for a politician–he moved like an oiled, tanned, body-building 70's era Ahnold (oh wait....). Is this odd kind of anti-charisma all it takes to rule the world?

Berlusconi is a fitting heir.

One Last Hurrah

2008-07-16T22:47:00.002-04:00

Molly's Bookstore in the Italian Market is closing, leaving a huge book-shaped whole in my heart.

so...come to the last reading

Molly Russakoff, Ish Klein, CAConrad, Brandon Holmquest, and I will give a final reading at Molly's.

JOIN US on
Sunday, July 20th
at 7pm

1010 S. 9th St.
IN THE HEART OF PHILADELPHIA'S ITALIAN MARKET

Immigrant Dream Palace

2008-07-09T14:31:00.002-04:00

I like how these people are all, "Why do they hate our beautiful houses?"

What would your immigrant dream house look like? Mine would have champagne glass shaped jacuzzis like in the 80's commercials for Beautiful Mount Airy Lodge lining the drive way and turrets! and a hedge of Miss Piggy topiaries.

Liberté, Fraternité....

2008-07-09T10:24:00.004-04:00

Ingrid Betancourt, kidnapped Colombian ex-reform party presidential candidate , was liberated last week, along with fifteen other hostages, from six years captivity at the hands of FARC. These recently freed hostages have been the FARC's major bargaining chips for a few years and the subjects of ongoing controversies––these were the hostages who Chavez was mediating talks about freeing between the Colombian military and the FARC. The official story is that the Colombian military rescued the hostages in an operation which involved soldiers disguised as FARC members and tricking the captives' guards into handing over the hostages to be taken to another FARC camp. There have been rumors circulating that the U.S. and Colombia secretly paid 20 million ransom for the hostages, although both U.S. and Colombian reps have vehemently denied that any ransom was paid.

Taking into account the usual bumbling incompetence of the Colombian military, it's difficult to pay no heed to these claims. Also, as I've stated here before, Colombia (as an unofficial colony of the U.S.) is a country so in tune with the vicissitudes of American politics that the release of these high-profile hostages could be connected to the upcoming regime-change here in the states. It's in right-wing president Alvaro Uribe's best interests that the Republicans win the 2008 elections. McCain visited Colombia July 1st (just two days before the release of the hostages) to promote the free-trade deal he's been trying to get approved by Congress (with strong opposition from Obama and other leading Democrats like Nancy Pelosi). McCain flew to the resort town of Cartagena to give a speech warning Colombia to clean up their (completely appalling) human rights record so that this free-trade deal could be passed. With so much of Colombia-U.S. relations being one extended p.r. campaign staged for the public to hide what deals are going on beneath the seamy surface, this really makes all parties involved look a little too photogenic.

Daughter of the Colombian oligarchy–Betancourt has gotten the lionshare of media attention since the hostages were freed because she was the most high-profile of the detainees, and her story has been particularly big in France. Betancourt is a citizen of both France and Colombia, due to her previous marriage to a French diplomat. On a visit to Paris to meet Sarkozy, Betancourt stated, “I owe everything to France. France is my home. You are my family.” Well, at least we know that she's still Colombian enough to consider herself French. The whole thing could not be any less maudlin.

So as to Avoid Anvils and Other Gravity-Ridden Things

2008-07-02T13:54:00.005-04:00

The last time at the Met, (Friday) I pointed out a della Robbia in the lobby to Brandon, its flat graphic quality, white ceramic against blue glaze, Renaissance though no foreshortening or perspective, flat-backed sculptures for wall-mounting, the city-dwellers' art. A della Robbia fell from its place above an archway at the Met last night, suffering extensive damage, now New York Magazine has a blog post up on its website, "Are Met Exhibits Safe?" Broken Link. My boss' boss signs her e-mails informing staff of a foreshortened day "be safe." People, it seems, care less now, than ever, about freedom and peace, although who "people" are or when "ever" was or how "ever" came to be right now is unclear; I've been an adult only once. People do care, quite a lot about safety. Is safety equal to freedom; could she have signed her e-mail "be free." What kind of message would she be sending out with an exhortation to her workers to seek freedom?

THIS. IS. ME.

2008-06-26T17:05:00.001-04:00

PISCES: Heaven is where we go when we die. Pisces, when you get there, it will be full of every drug imaginable, and no hangovers. There will be rainbows and small, really well made salads and soft, furry kittens that never get old. You will be able to collect whatever you want and distribute it among your friends, who will be there too. Everyone will loll around on many white pillows, and smile with unspoken gratitude for your generous presence because they will all be under the impression that heaven is something that you made happen specifically for them. The production design will be impeccable. There will be small, precious, delightfully surprising finishing touches on everything, even the drawer pulls. When you reach for a little mint candy pillow from the cut crystal bowl, you may be certain that there is no fecal matter on it. Dolly Parton will be there and let everyone take turns resting their heads on her bosom in between sets. Can we jump off a bridge together, Pisces?  

from Philebrity horoscopes.

Latina Enough

2008-06-26T09:51:00.005-04:00

Here is the audio file of the Latina Enough show, where I was interviewed by Arianna Martinez on Neighborhood Public Radio (installed at the Whitney) about being a Latina in the U.S. Latina Enough is a photo and interview documentary art project, where Latinas are asked five very simple but very revealing questions:

1) Do you consider yourself Latina? Why?

2) Has there ever been a time when you didn't feel Latina enough?

3) Describe a time when you felt too Latina.

4) What would you describe as your most Latina moment?

5) What if anything do you identify as [besides Latina]?

The interview was structured so that I would respond to a question and then clips of other respondents answers to the same questions were played, which was totally interesting for me because I got to hear the breadth of other Latina womens' experiences. I went into the project with a degree of fear and ambivalence because I couldn't honestly say that "Latina" would be a a label that I used to describe myself often or an identity that I felt like I fully owned, but in listening to some other womens' responses I heard a similar ambivalence towards the very fraught term "Latina," I heard my own dissonance and identification.

The final incarnation of Latina Enough is going to be an installation including audio of the interviews and photographs by Molly Stinchfield. More details to be announced.

p.s. in re-listening to my somewhat nervous yammering in that interview I heard the statement drop from my mouth that I started the Ladies' Misbehavior Society, which ignores the fact that the group was co-founded by Annie Maribona (fellow Latina) and Claire Sanberg. My deepest apologies in advance.

picture above from Nikki S. Lee's hispanic project

Corporation for Public B.S.

2008-06-17T11:13:00.004-04:00

I'd been hearing what I thought were rumors about the Republican takeover of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, though until recently I hadn't noticed very much of an ideological shift in PBS's programming, so I hadn't had a real reason to believe the rumors. But a quick google search reveals that it's true: in 2005, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's funding apparatus was basically handed over to the right wing on a silver platter. Eric Alterman's piece in The Nation is really informative on the matter. Yes, Bill Moyers (American Hero) had been fired and then eventually reinstated due to Bush administration pressures, but once this grave wrong had been righted, I thought things were copacetic again. The only channel I get at home with any clarity is PBS, so I end up watching it pretty regularly (just as in Philly the only TV I had was NPR, so I could tell you what was on at almost any hour of the day, even though NPR is basically loathsome too). If you're a regular watcher, you'll probably have noticed the quite odd law-enforcement turn the channel's taken, the FOXnewsification of PBS has been slow but insidious. Two weeks ago, I watched stupefied as Frontline informed me of the dangers that Mexican immigrants pose to national security, an argument whose rhetoric has always struck me as positively hilarious. A deep voiced authoritative sounding narrator states, "Just one illegal alien crossing the border undermines all of our national security efforts, yet more than five hundred aliens a day manage to pass the border patrol." When has a Mexican immigrant ever turned out to be an operative for a terrorist cell? In reality it's more like, "We must keep our borders safe from all these illegal Mexicans who might mow all our lawns and bus our tables!" The tone of this Frontline special was positively alarmist and the last thing I'd expect from a channel like PBS, except it was actually worse than anything you'd hear on an infotainment channel like Fox because PBS documentaries are cloaked in pseudo-factuality and trumped up "accuracy."

I'm Psychic, Yo

2008-06-12T15:16:00.003-04:00

Apparently, I'm 'putting literature in the quite the wrong place.' (originally linked from Silliman's blog under 'literary tattoos')

For more literary tattoos, click here.

Le Coeur et la Couronne

2008-06-09T21:22:00.004-04:00

They're not as photogenic as one would like them to be, but they're really quite snazzy in person.

Cinema is an unhappy art....

2008-06-09T14:31:00.004-04:00

Don't you love the European auteurs who can get away with saying shit like that without having to qualify it with knowing irony. Andrei Tarkovsky could say this with real sadness in his voice; he spent much of his life as a filmmaker being censored by the Soviet state-controlled studio, Mosfilm. Although to be fair to Mosfilm, films so strange as Tarkovsky's Solaris or Stalker would have never ever been produced, much less released by a Hollywood studio.

Last night, Brandon and I watched Stalker, Tarkovsky's 1979 science fiction film about a man who's selected from birth to be people's guide into a dimension called "the Zone." On the expedition chronicled in Stalker, he leads a scientist and a writer into the Zone to have their deepest wishes fulfilled in "the room" at the heart of the Zone. It turns out neither the man of science nor the man of letters has any respect or admiration for the mysteries of the universe.

When I went looking for Tarkovsky interviews on the internets, I came upon a European Screenwriters website, one of the links was "Copenhagen Cycle Chic"–a blog of pictures of fashionably dressed women on Dutch bikes, the bicycles of my unaffordable dreams. Enjoy.

A Conundrum Wrapped in a Riddle

2008-06-04T12:23:00.006-04:00

Friday night I was reading and article about Kenny Goldsmith in Bookforum and I came across the following:

Goldsmith’s current reading is focused on his work in progress, a rewriting of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project for twentieth-century New York. The parallels abound—he’s using Robert Moses for Haussmann and Robert Mapplethorpe for Baudelaire.

Three years ago, I wrote a long poem titled B using The Arcades Project, which draws parallels between turn of the 21st century New York and 19th Century Paris. I sent the manuscript out to a few presses and never got a response; I am young and wrote this poem when I was even younger, before I went to Temple, even. It's hard to get a press that doesn't know you to take a chance on a long manuscript by an unknown young poet. So it's been sitting in my apartment, many of my friends have read it, some have not. I thought, "Well, maybe someone'll publish it when I'm older or something....." (cue sinking feeling). But this Goldsmith thing is really upsetting, not because I anticipate great similarities between the end results of our work (we are vastly different poets with vastly different projects), but because it royally sucks to get retroactively scooped by someone older and more famous than you. I just feel like no one would take a chance on publishing B once this (sort of) famous guy publishes his.

Enter Brandon's argument: publish that shit yourself! Enter my money preoccupations: I can't afford it! But can I afford to let this work go permanently unread? I turn the question over to you dear reader: what should be done? Does it even matter if I get scooped?

Summer Time and the Livin Is Easy (hopefully)

2008-06-04T12:03:00.005-04:00

First off, I haven't been posting. For that, I'm sorry. I've been alternating between tired, woozy, content, dissatisfied, restless, etc. so much that I haven't had to time to clear the mindspace and commit thoughts to paper (internet).

In the interim though, I bought a bike and started bike commuting to work, got those Apollinaire tattoos that I'd been talking about getting for so long, collected several fabulous Springtime vintage dresses from various thrift shops and church sales, typeset my chapbook which is coming out soon, so soon, on Michael Nicoloff's olywa press (which I will announce here officially once it's been printed), did a reading with Khalil Huffman in Providence, was interviewed on Neighborhood Public Radio as part of Arianna Martinez and Molly Stinchfield's Latina Enough project (I'll post a link to the archived show once it's up), and started working on a tan.

My goals for the summer are try to: convince myself that the world is an ok place by virtue that at least there's seasons, two of which are warm, to go hiking and to the beach, and to try to take current events less personally (I currently take them quite personally).

Excuse me?

2008-05-05T22:36:00.003-04:00

Make English America's Fecal Language
Make English America's Officious Language
Make English America's Feral Language
Make English America's Office Language
Make English America's Orifice Language

Virtuosity vs. Mere Cleverness

2008-04-30T10:32:00.006-04:00

So, like many Americans I like violent, scary movies (though the line is really drawn for me at extreme amounts of gore). Lately, I've been watching a ton of horror/thriller films. When Funny Games, Michael Haneke's 2007 Austrian film was remade into an English language film starring Naomi Watts this year, I was desperately curious to see it, mainly because of Haneke's claims in promotional interviews for the film that he remade the film for American audiences because he wanted to confront Americans with their own violence. This claim sounded like a red herring to me from the get go. I went to see it expecting to be terrified, which I half was and half wasn't (I'm sure it didn't help that at every suspenseful moment in the movie, the man who had fallen asleep in the theater–whose snore sounded like a pig being slaughtered: loud, high-pitched, and punctuated with snorts–would ratchet up his snoring). The story is about a family who's held captive and tortured to death in their own home by extremely polite strangers. The movie is at times very suspenseful, but falls majorly flat in the the philosophical interrogation of the magnitude of human sadism department.

Naomi Watts is great in Funny Games; she's fast becoming a horror movie icon in her ability to play the hunted, haunted, fragile white woman that is so prevalent in the genre. Michael Pitt, who plays the psychotic leader of the Leopold and Loeb-like pair who carry out the home invasion is cruelly brilliant. But more than highly stylized art house torture porn it is certainly not. Why? Because the whole tone of the film is ruined by obnoxiously clever editing. For example, in one of the final scenes, Naomi Watts manages to snatch a shotgun off the coffee table and gun down one of her assailants in an attempt to rescue her husband from being murdered. As soon as the viewer feels a sense of relief, the film is rewound to the point just before Watts can get her hands on the shotgun and the torturers see her trying to grab the gun, take it away from her and kill her husband anyway. This kind of cleverness gives the film a tone of glibness. It's one thing as a filmmaker to tell a story of the unspeakable horrors of which people are capable, but when the character's lives are played with through the editing and formal aspects of the work in the way that they are in Funny Games, when no ethical weight is given to their lives or deaths, one questions whether the critique that Haneke is claiming to enact about our compulsion as Americans, as viewers, to watch violence is a really misplaced critique. One asks oneself, who lacks compassion, me as the viewer, me as the American, or him as the filmmaker for whom death is an exercise jokey post-modernism? Also, in light of recent events, one questions whether the types of horrors depicted in Funny Games are not actually more indigenous to the film's native Austria.

Seeing Funny Games kick started my recent obsession with horror movies, sort of an independent study in what constitutes an effective horror movie, what is horror and how is it made? The Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters (2003 directed by Kim Ji-woon) has done much to answer these questions. The movie succeeds in being actually suspenseful/scary and stylized without being glib ala the aformentioned movie. A Tale of Two Sisters centers around a family–two sisters, a father, and a stepmother. The story itself is not so remarkable, it's pretty much a classic gothic horror story of domestic tensions pushed to murderous limits. There's little character development and hardly any dialogue (most of the lines are delivered in screams). Everything you come to know about the family and all the thrills and chills are derived from the deployment of pieces of the story through editing. A Tale of Two Sisters is so masterfully edited and structured that it doesn't need to show you that much explicit imagery. It haunts you as much with what it shows you as what it doesn't. In one scene, a girl is visited in the middle of the night by a ghost shrouded in black which keeps coming closer and closer, but every time it moves closer, the camera cuts so that you see a series of closeups of slightly parting black fabric. The effect is chilling. More importantly, this film derives its depth through the psyhcological traumas that it enacts formally rather than through the cheap didactic tactics of a film like Funny Games. To me, there's is something irreducible, unspeakable, unknowable about horror which is captured in A Tale of Two Sisters. Somehow there's much less horror in the much more grim exercise of watching some vaguely unlikeable yuppies, American or Austrian, being tortured to death.

Another Part of the New World / New York

2008-04-24T12:01:00.005-04:00

April 24th 1982 was the day my parents first set foot in New York, arriving on a plane from Bogotá. They were on their way to Paris on vacation, but instead they stayed here. It was Spring time.

Vogue, I Really Must Quit You.

2008-04-21T16:21:00.006-04:00

I have been a faithful Vogue reader for years, since Alex helped me justify this habit to myself. Yes, Vogue, that bastion of capitalist pornography. But what can I say, I love high fashion. I've never been interested in the whiter teeth, thinner thighs, or the perfect manicure of Glamour nor have I looked to Cosmopolitan for better orgasms or the most uncomfortable thongs. Once upon a time, Vogue didn't preach to you; Ms. Wintour may have always hated fat people like the dickens but she would never stoop so low as to let the plebian masses in on her weightloss secrets because the magazine really should be about the almost criminal beauty of a Christian LaCroix (remember Noami Wolff's indictment of the French designer in The Beauty Myth?) dress that most readers can't afford anywho. And so maybe I can't afford ten thousand dollar dresses, but I can afford the five dollars every month to see a fantasy of chiffon and sequins perched on the highest heels imaginable. I love the unwearable fashions of haute couture, although I'll surely never wear them. And Vogue knows that there are many readers like me, who may never wear the clothes represented in their pages, but want to glimpse the beauty of the the clothes. While I don't believe that clothing is the ultimate expression of individuality, I do believe that clothing is densely coded with social signifiers, am fascinated by how clothing is both an architecture around the body, and how clothing can highlight the architecture of the body. In a funny way, the magazine is like a museum for clothing. Although in tone, the magazine is aimed at socialites, the income demographics of Vogue readers are actually lower than other fashion magazines like InStyle, which features very wearable, approachable looks for the extremely well-to-do woman. The loathsome term aspirationalism is used to describe the phenomenon whereby regular people buy magazines like Vogue, but this has always struck me as stupid marketing bullshit. So I've kept reading.......not because I aspire to anything, but because I love clothes the way I love paintings and poems.

But Anna Wintour has gone too far this time. Besides the incredibly racist cover of the April 'Shape' Issue, which featured James LeBron and Gisele basically posed as Godzilla and fair white kidnapee, respectively, the April issue contained a story about how Vogue called up the Rodarte designers, Laura and Kate Mulleavy and offered to help them lose weight. The magazine payed for the sisters to go on a diet that included a personal trainer and a chef. Laura and Kate Mulleavy have been producing eccentric, diaphonous gowns from the bedroom of their childhood home in Pasadena under the name 'Rodarte' for the past three years. Their meteoric rise to fame has been so satisfying mostly because they're soooo talented, but partly because they seem so humble and normal and secure enough in themselves that they didn't need to conform to the fashion industry's standard of thinness. I can't even wrap my head around how fucked up this is–as if the usual pressures of the fashion industry weren't alienating enough as a young and not-rail-thin designer, Anna Wintour calls you and explicitly tells you 'you must lose weight.' My jaw is still on the floor. Part of me wonders whether this has to do with the fact that Laura and Kate are young women so industry people like Wintour feel like they have the right to dictate something as personal as weight to these girls. I wonder if anyone would have dared to tell Karl Lagerfeld to lose weight in his larger years?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Reading

2008-04-16T10:49:00.005-04:00

Khalil Huffman's blog, Every Book Since January, on which he's been listing every book he's read since July 2006 has gotten me thinking about how many books I read a year. It's one thing to be a voracious reader, but it's another thing to document what your reading–it creates an interesting window into a person's intellectual life. It's made me start to document (in my journal), what I've been reading and the different ways that I read.

I realize that sometimes I will read the first ten to twenty pages of several books in what I call the "trial period" before I decide on any one book to invest my time in or that I very often read almost all the way to the end of a book then put it down and never finish it–Jose Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night–why did I read you to your 570th page only to not finish you? And lately, several books have been sharing my attention equally, a book for every situation: William Gaddis' The Recognitions for home (because it's big and heavy), The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (poetry for home), Jane Jacob's The Life and Death of Great American Cities (for commuting), and Jean Day's Odes and Otium for my lunch break (although I have to admit that mostly I end up carrying the book around in my purse rather than reading it, which has more to do with my shortish attention span than the quality of the book). Sometimes I am able to get a fair amount of reading done through this method of book-to-match-situation and sometimes not so much. One thing this method robs me of is the grand sense of accomplishment derived from long stretches of complete attention to one text. At the end of the day, my reading habits don't necessarily match up to my idea of myself as Serious Reader. In some ways, I am a serious reader, an immersive one. If I'm really into a book, I can spend a whole Saturday in bed reading, only getting up to do absolutely necessary things. But the whole apparatus of work and routine and social life interfere with the quiet and stillness demanded of that kind of intensive reading.

Yet somehow through this chaos, I've managed to read a few whole books this year:

Fredrick Nyberg's A Different Practice
Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
Bhanu Kapil's Incubation: A Space for Monsters
Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star
Chip Delany's Dhalgren
Julio Cortazar's The Diary of Andres Fava
Javier Cercas' The Soldiers of Salamis
Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Jack Spicer's The Collected Books

'Every Book Since January' has also made me wonder what other people have been reading since January. So, what have you read?

Check it

2008-04-15T10:25:00.003-04:00

Ms. Dumont's new blog A Vernacular Architecture is awesome.

Finally!

2008-04-06T20:13:00.002-04:00

Mark Penn has been fired.

Obviously too little too late, but at least it's something.

Collusion or Conflict of Interests?

2008-04-05T12:24:00.008-04:00

Mark Penn, Hillary's chief strategist met with Colombian officials to discuss a Colombian free-trade pact that Hillary opposes. Penn met the officials as part of his lobbying firm, Burton-Marsteller, not as a Clinton representative. I love how they're so cynical in the Clinton camp that they can claim with a straight face that a lobbyist working as an independent contractor for a campaign, can lobby against the interest of that campaign and that it's not a conflict of interest. What's more ridiculous is that Penn didn't even try to hide it; he just went and met with Colombian ambassador publicly. Above board is the new under the table.

This kind of situation begs one to wonder whether this is even a conflict of interest for Hillary or ultimately beneficial. Free-trade pacts are hugely economically beneficial (in the short- term to the U.S.), but lefty democrats and labor unions hate them because they promote human rights abuses in the countries where they go through and they ship even more American jobs overseas (witness NAFTA, everybody's favorite Clintonian Republicrat legislation from the 90's!). In order to bolster intra-party support, Clinton can't openly support the Colombian free trade pact, but she can keep the door open through her greasy, lobbyist director of PR, Mark Penn.

This free-trade pact, which Bush is pushing to go to Congress next week despite opposition from congressional democrats and labor unions, would ensure that that war-on-drugs money keeps rolling in and would expand the power that multi-national corporations like Coca-Cola (which has already racked up a tidy number of human rights abuses) have in the Colombia.

What Is Your Work Worth, Really?

2008-04-04T10:56:00.007-04:00

I am no economist, but a question which obsesses me is why the pay scale of American jobs is structured so that any worker who is involved in cultural work gets payed lower than any other kind of worker. I am completely at a loss as to why the more specialized reading, writing, editing, or teaching skills a job requires, the less you are likely to get paid. The fact that writing-related skills are so poorly remunerated strikes me as counter-intuitive, since at the high school and college level, most students struggle with writing skills, the economic logic of supply and demand would seem to dictate that people with good writing skills entering the workforce would be fewer, thus more valuable, thus well-paid. But in fact, the opposite is true: barely literate stockbrokers rule the world! The aformentioned fact is not terribly surprising to me because people who get paid to move money around have always been paid better than people who don't move money around; what's shocking and revealing to me is the difference in pay between the people who move money around in the humanities and the people who actually teach and write and do the actual cultural work of cultural institutions.

The presidents and directors of these various cultural institutions would argue that there's a simple economic answer: that jobs in sectors that employ people coming out of school with degrees in the arts/humanities are not the kinds of places that have all that much money to throw around in the first place: museums, libraries, schools, publishing houses, universities, etc. compared to a bank or General Motors or Enron. And while I see that yes obviously, most of these places can't afford to pay all of their employees six figures and stay in business, this explanation does not account for why a bureaucrat's starting salary at a large public university would be 50,000 dollars a year with full health benefits while an adjunct at that same university would be getting 2,500 per back-breaking section (that means you have to teach eight sections a year to make 20k before taxes, and that's without health benefits). It doesn't explain why an editorial assistant at a corporate publishing house makes a starting salary of 25,ooo dollars (living in New York City, no less!) while an entry-level job in the marketing department of that same corporation starts at 50-60k. These institutions with humanistic values would have you forgo health insurance and pay its board members 200k (and that's a low ball figure) for the most minor functions of being a board member. It's insulting. These situations are really instructive in showing us what our values are as a culture. Do we value culture, even in its most utilitarian form–education? No, we do not.

The utter monetary devaluation of cultural work is happening concurrently with changes in American class structure. A defining characteristic of American society, one which is deeply ingrained in the American psyche, is the idea that with hard work anyone can be upwardly mobile. But wages have actually stagnated since the 1970's. You're more likely now than at any time during the 20th century to be born and die in the same class, which additionally sucks because the underclass is growing and getting poorer. A college degree used to be the gateway to being economically middle-class but more and more, a college degree is a gateway to being culturally middle-class, but not economically middle-class because students graduate with such enormous amounts of student loan and credit card debt and go into careers which often don't offer much to help relieve this debt. This kind of semi-poverty is a terrible irony.

Too Objectivist for the Feminists, Too Feminist for the Objectivists

2008-04-02T13:06:00.004-04:00

RBDP always knows what the fuck she's talking about. Even if you (or I sometimes) disagree.

Laughing at Bad Art, the Critical Introduction

2008-04-01T11:04:00.005-04:00

When I posted my previous rant, a friend asked me why contemporary art was not on the list of irrelevant art forms. The reasons why visual are was not included in my original post and why it truly deserves its own post is that: visual art is still widely considered a powerful medium for communication, even by people who happen to not be artists (as opposed to say poetry, which no one besides other poets reads or cares about). But let's not confuse relevancy here with quality (because although, no one besides poets reads poetry, some of this writing is good, some astoundingly good, even). The gap between the amount of contemporary art being produced in the world and the quality of this art is quite large. Sometimes when you walk into a gallery, you have to get all Clement Greenberg on a bitch and ask, "Is this piece giving me any aesthetic pleasure?" Most of the time the answer will be "No, this piece is feebly attempting to incite some thought in me which its own maker doesn't even seem to grasp; this piece is brimming with historical references yet oddly ahistorical; this piece is collapsing under the weight of ideology; this piece is histrionic yet emotionally vacant." What's worse, the critical apparatus of art history and art criticism has been so absorbed and integrated into the art-making process that traditional critique is rendered moot. Today's bad art is like anti-biotic resistant staph infections–it knows the medicine you will level against it all too well. So what modes of criticism are left to de-fang this thing that passes for official visual culture in our galleries and museums? Laughter. Go forth and laugh at Bad Art. From your gut.

Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other

2008-03-20T23:50:00.004-04:00

I was napping earlier this evening when I was woken up by high-pitched strains of Puccini's Madame Butterfly playing on channel 13. I don't know much (i.e. almost anything, except for when my parents took me to see Carmen with them when I was six and I threw a temper tantrum because I was so bored) about opera but watching it in my extremely fuzzy state, I just thought woah the movie version of this with Jeremy Irons is wayyyy better. I'm a phillistine.

It got me to thinking about how ghettoized the different art forms are and how some arts are just irrelevant to most people except their practitioners. Sure poetry seems like the most important thing in the world to me, but that's only because I'm a poet. Then I scoffed and thought yeah, but nothing beats the arch silliness of modern dance but then I thought you're just as likely to meet someone who calls themselves a postmodern poet with a straight face as you are to meet a dancer who calls themselves a postmodern dancer. So maybe it's a toss up between modern dance and modern poetry.

But then, there's opera: opera is an art form that's so colossally expensive to stage that it's existence is bound to the conservative tastes and money of its patrons, so it hasn't really progressed since the 19th century. What's worse? The delusional, solopsistic, self-importance of postmodern art forms or the bourgeoise relic that is opera.

War Averted, People Still Dying

2008-03-17T11:17:00.007-04:00

The above picture is from a rally held two weeks ago in Bogota in protest of paramilitary violence during the week when it seemed that Colombia and Venezuela were definitely going to go to war. This was a tacit anti-war, anti-Uribe protest. Since the rally where this picture was taken, four of the rally's organizers have been murdered by paramilitaries.

In a previous post, I briefly explained the on-going Chavez/Uribe conflict. Since I wrote that post, many things have happened: the Colombian military bombed the Ecuador-Colombia border to kill a FARC leader encamped there, Chavez denounced this bombing as a violation of Ecuador's sovereignty, Colombia was on the brink of war with Venzuela and Ecuador, and then all parties retreated from their war-mongering and decided that no one has the resources or the energy to fight a war, at least for now. What was curiously absent from the coverage of the Colombia-Ecuador-Venezuela conflict was any mention of the huge role that paramilitary violence plays in the narco-trafficking/guerilla situation in Colombia, how paramilitarism perpetuates violence and guerilla terrorism. In Colombia, the paramilitary purports to combat the FARC. Paramilitaries are often ex-servicemen from the legit military that act as the government's covert anti-terrorism arm but they have more leeway for violence–they kidnap, torture, and murder the opposition (which includes non-FARC affiliated leftists, journalists, and civilians) without being held accountable because they are not officially connected to the state, only secretly sanctioned and supported by the state. The paramilitary is partially funded and armed by the government (therefore indirectly by the American government) and by various wealthy right wing Colombians.

Paramilitarism is not a uniquely Colombian problem, it's a Latin American problem: paramilitarism arises as a reactionary force against guerilla activity (which tends to be Marxist in flavor). Alberto Fujimori, ex-president of Peru has recently been extradited back to Peru from Japan on charges that he used paramilitary death squads during the 1990's to crush Marxist guerilla groups, the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru. The left in Colombia argues that paramilitary violence is just as bad as guerilla violence, that in fact paramilitaries often mask their crimes as guerilla crimes. In the great morass that constitutes the constant Colombian civil war, the paramilitary has played the role of blurring the boundaries between right wing Catholic ideology, state-sponsored terror, and narco-trafficking by partaking in all three and playing one side against the other. The left in Colombia recognizes that there can be no peace until not only the FARC and narco-trafficking is eradicated but until the paramilitaries are eradicated, yet the Colombian government and the media can barely admit that the paramilitary exists.

Happy Birthday, Hollis!

2008-03-11T14:27:00.003-04:00

I didn't actually know it's Hollis Frampton's birthday today–I just happened to look up his wikipedia page and there it was: March 11th, 1936. Fortuitous. In honor, I'm posting Nostalgia (1971), one of my favorite films ever. Hollis Frampton died of cancer in 1984.

(The embedded video above is only a clip from YouTube; for the high quality full version of the film, click on the Nostalgia link, which will take you to UBUWEB.)

Thanks, David Simon, for Ruining My Life

2008-03-07T10:14:00.003-05:00

I just finished the last episode of the fourth season of The Wire. If any one wants to have an epic cry with me about the impossibility of justice, the falling short of even the best intentions, the ugliness and sloth of bureaucracies, the mercilessness of the drug trade, and the utter failure of the public school system, please don't hold back.

"Who me I'm in the kitten / business"

2008-03-06T10:13:00.006-05:00

Philip Whalen and Aram Saroyan collaborated on this project called "The Children." Saroyan took the pictures while traveling around the world when he was fourteen, not much older than many of his subjects. Whalen wrote the text much later.

This to me, is a perfect example of a successful collaboration between a poet and a photographer, which is an extremely difficult kind of collaboration to pull off in the first place. In a photo/poetry collaboration you always run the risk of the poetry being explained by the photographs, but here the poems impose layers on top of the photographs, they deepen the mystery and whimsy of the pictures. There are pictures taken in Belgrade, in many towns in Italy, and in America. The poems that accompany the American pictures contrast in tone with the poems that accompany the Italy and Belgrade photos; they have the same playfulness, but a political urgency enters their tone and a considerable amount of innocence drops out of the poems:

I keep trying to figure it out
I spent one fortune getting
Dick Nixon elected,
I spent another one on the CIA
I borrowed money from the bank
to support our local police.
What the fuck is the MATTER?
Why don't I get anything
for my money?

Feelings are Facts

2008-03-05T10:37:00.007-05:00

On Saturday, I went to P.S. 1 for their Women in Experimental Film event. Films by Carollee Schneeman, Barabara Hammer, Marie Menken, Marjorie Keller, Peggy Ahwesh, Barabara Rubin, and Abigail Child were screened and afterwards there was a panel discussion featuring some of the filmmakers and contributers to the recently released Women's Experimental Cinema.

Most of the featured filmmakers rose out of the overlapping and interlocking American avant-garde of the 60's, the Warhol/Factory scene, the conceptual art movement, and the feminist movement. Some of the films were not my bag, but it was amazing to be able to see more Barbara Hammer and to be exposed for the first time to Marjorie Keller. Because a lot of the stuff that was shown was grounded in 60's experimentalism there was a lot of vagina iconography–Christmas on Earth, a film by Barbara Rubin, the first happening film, involved orgies between painted people set to a soundtrack of the Rolling Stones and Dylan with a close-up of a a labia super-imposed over every shot. While I think the use of this kind of iconography was probably really important for its time, I'm not really sure it transcends its moment. Robin Blaetz, the editor of Women's Experimental Cinema stated in her introduction to the panel that she didn't want to present female filmmakers in the book as engaging in one monolithic practice with a a unified aesthetic, and indeed there was much variety in the kinds of films that were shown. However, if there is an aesthetic that can be called "feminist and avant-garde" in cinema it wouldn't be so much in the aesthetic of the films, but in a certain way of using the camera to examine the world, exemplified to me by Barbara Hammer's and Marjorie Keller's films, an experimentalism grounded in emotional honesty.

I've been totally bowled over by Barabara Hammer films twice now, but because her films are distributed through the Film-maker's Cooperative and mainly screened at film festivals it's hard to catch her work. I saw Resisting Paradise at the New Paltz Feminist Film Festival some years ago, her experimental documentary about Cassis, the French seaside town where many Impressionist painters made their work and where many German later intellectuals took refuge during World War II. The film also chronicles the struggles of French Resistance members. One of the central narratives of Resisting Paradise is that of Walter Benjamin's passage across the Pyrenees from France into Spain, his attempt at escaping the Gestapo and his subsequent suicide. Hammer interviews Lisa Fittko, the woman who lead the ill Benjamin across the mountains and who helped many other Germans to safety. The film stunningly weaves together the lives of many people who fate brought to Cassis with photographs, found footage, contemporary documentary footage, and a technique which involves washes of water color over-layed onto the film. Hammer presents the history of Cassis in an impressionistic manner, through color and stories and music; her mode of story-telling is by nature meandering and ruminatory rather than presenting the totalizing sweep of history. I suspect much of Resisting Paradise was made using an optical printer (a machine whose inner workings I am not entirely familiar with but I do know that it magically turns still photographs into moving image images). Sanctus, screened on Saturday, is a film made using entirely found footage of human and animal x-rays and an optical printer: a body turns in an x-ray machine and you can see that it's a woman when white the outlines of breasts can be seen hanging around the ribcage, a skeleton drinks water and it quickly slides down the esophagus, a skeleton applies lipstick while looking in a compact mirror. The film is all about the color and music and editing; Sanctus is much more of a self-consciously experimental, non-narrative film than the documentary I'd previously seen, but seeing it foregrounded for me how much of a master of color and sound Hammer is.

Marjorie Keller's Herein is an experimental documentary about Keller's on the Lower East Side life after SDS (a group which eventually evolved into the Weather Underground), a loose philosophical editing together of footage she shot in her LES tenement: interviews with her neighbors telling stories about the neighborhood, the day to day movements of the drug addicts and prostitutes who move outside her building, and her own thoughts on what she was reading and what she was interested in at the time (Emma Goldman's autobiography). Herein is very much an essay film and emerges as a powerful document of Keller's own life (she died young at 43).

Neither Here Nor There, but.....

2008-03-04T10:11:00.003-05:00

So this is usually not the place I'd tell personal stories, but this incident that happened to me yesterday was so infuriating that I must share.

Yesterday evening, I'm rushing to get to the 68th street subway before the Steinway street Salvation Army closes because I saw some bookshelves which could have possibly been the bookshelves of dreams (they later turned out not to be). I'm crossing Park Avenue with a bunch of other pedestrians when a red light forces us all to stop on an island. There's a guy walking in front of me on his cellphone who was distracted and walking slowly in front of me in a way that permitted me to neither walk ahead of him or fall behind him completely. Anyone accustomed to walking during rush hour will be familiar with this "I will neither shit not get off the pot" attitude on the part of other pedestrians. The guy's a douchey well-dressed white man in his mid-forties. In my rush to get out of his way, I graze his loafers (I was wearing heavy boots at the time, so it must have felt to him like I kicked him). The next thing I know, I'm laying flat on my face in 0ncoming traffic in the middle of Park Avenue. I look up and the guy is running away and the other pedestrians who'd been standing on the island start yelling, "He tripped you! He did it on purpose!" Dazed, I get up, and start chasing the guy down the street screaming WHAT THE FUCK?! YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT! YOU TRIPPED ME, MOTHERFUCKER! The guy turns around and yells, "You kicked me" and keeps running, dodging me by running across 68th just before a bunch of taxis get in the way of me catching him (he did this while continuing to talk on his cell phone). Meanwhile, everyone on 68th has stopped to observe the spectacle and people are yelling at him "You did that on purpose!" and just as the guy is getting away by running back to 68th and Park, another dude starts yelling at the running douche, "You like to pick on girls, buddy?" and then I just gave up and stopped chasing him.

Here we witness the worst of NY humanity and the best of NY humanity: this rich smug fucking coward and the other pedestrians, a punk rock girl working as a dog walker and the random guy who both stuck up for me. Seriously dude, if you're so mad that I "kicked" you, asshole, why don't you say something about it, instead of endangering my life by making me fly into the middle of traffic? And if you're such a big strong man and you're gonna physically punk me out, don't run away! That's the worst fucking part: he ran away.

Censorship Is Real

2008-03-04T10:08:00.001-05:00

China and the U.S.

Work, School, and Utopia

2008-02-29T10:36:00.003-05:00

I've been absent from this blog for about a week now, taking an InDesign course, which is why I haven't posted. I've had this sinking feeling since I came back to work yesterday. My job's not bad in the grand scheme of jobs: I get along with my co-workers and the organization I work for has a noble mission. But I sensed there'd be a sharp contrast coming back to work after having taken a class all week. And that difference was that during the class, my mind was engaged from the time I sat down to the time I left for the day. At work, this is not the case. I experience long stretches of what feels like fatal doses of boredom. And I fear that this just might be the nature of the office job, or more frighteningly the day job.

During times like these, I consider the implications of getting my Ph. D. Mind you, I am not ready to do this. When I finished my Masters, I all but swore that academia had seen the last of me. There's an infinite amount of reasons why grad school was a very bad no good decision the first time around, including that I wasn't ready when I went, I happened to land at the worst of institutions and I had literally no clue how to deal with faceless, byzantine bureaucracies. But to me, the saddest part of grad school was not so much the feeling of not wanting to learn in an academic context (because most good students are good self-teachers), but of no longer having any desire to teach. This was the opposite of my college years in which I frolicked in daisy fields with the great thinkers of the western world at an institution whose name rhymes with 'Lard' (but this too had its ugly flip side: it was a bubble of privilege) and I thought for sure that some day I'd end up a teacher.

These two experiences left me with two very polar ideas of what school can be like, either a 40k per year utopia or a proletarian work camp for ideas. But at heart, I miss being in a place where ideas really matter. Unfortunately, I don't think the American university is the place where ideas really matter; I've come to see it more as the stock exchange of cultural capital, the place where ideas becomes things. I've done a lot of railing against theory in the past couple of years, but theory itself is not the enemy it's the use and misuse of theory that so angers me.

I don't think the academy of my dreams exists, but I do constantly think about a places like Black Mountain College, where the American avant-garde of the latter half of the twentieth century was fostered. The illustrious list of teachers included Charles Olsen, Buckminster Fuller, WCWilliams, John Cage, Willem deKooning, Robert Duncan, Josef Albers, Merce Cunningham, and the list just seems to go on and on. And it was run on almost no money. Students and teachers so wanted to take part in this utopian, interdisciplinary experiment that they slept in their cars. It's so beautiful it makes me want to cry. Can this exist under late capitalism or are we all too bogged down in credit card and student loan debt and the idea that the art world(s) is happening in big cities that cost too much to live in?

Miscellany

2008-02-20T11:39:00.005-05:00

1) Above is a picture from my dad's photoblog.

My dad is a photographer and filmmaker. He's always said he wanted to be a poet but ended up taking pictures instead. A lot of his photos represent the best parts of poetry to me.

2) The Savage Detectives has been banned from a Texas prison:

"Inmate No. 1385412, in Huntsville, Texas (below), ordered a copy of the book, but on its arrival, the prison mailroom intercepted it and sent it, at the inmate's expense, to a relative of the inmate's in Austin. The prison determined that the material could "encourage homosexual or deviant criminal sexual behavior" and was "detrimental to the offender's rehabilitation." (For what it's worth, the sexual and violent acts described in the offending passage are in fact between a man and a woman.)

Inmate No. 1385412 is seeking to appeal the decision. Failing that, he'll have to find something else to read until his projected release date of August 2009."

The prison censor only got to page 39.

Expat's Choice

2008-02-19T13:03:00.003-05:00

I google image searched "astoria park pool" and one of the results was this.

It seems that every urban place in America is going through the process of being condo-fied. And as more and more condos go up, developers turn towards more and more esoteric names. Condo names used to be accorded to developments on the basis of their fanciness-sounding-quotient, hotel-ish names like "The Wentworth" or "The Carlyle" were in vogue for much of the history of condo naming. Alas, there are only so many names with a fancy veneer to affix to the front of your "tower" or "estate." The function of the condominium name is to confer brand identity not only on the housing unit but upon the buyer. The buyer becomes not so much the owner of a fairly homogeneous apartment in a building called "The Carlyle," the buyer becomes "the type of person who would live in the Carlyle," and the buyer is distinguished from the buyer #2 who bought an identical unit in "The Wentworth" because the two names roll off the tongue differently. It's kind of a Machiavellian way of manipulating reality through language. In the traditional baptism condos, the main thing that is given to the buyer through the condo's name is (personal and consumer) identity. But in cities I've lived in recently, I've seen so many ads on public transportation and in other public venues for places like the Oro, the Aria, the Castings, the Beaux Arts Lofts, Lager House.......You won't just live inside an apartment, you'll live inside a big airy idea, with three bathrooms! And these places are so aggressively marketed that even a humble consumer like me who will probably never occupy an income bracket high enough to purchase one of these grand ideas can tell you what the amenities for the Oro are (a purple swimming pool, if you must know).

In the ad culled from the "astoria park pool" google search, "Astoria Park" towers are marketed to Americans living in Singapore through the website expatschoice.com. Here, potential Americans buyers are offered the chance to negate geographic specificity through this particular condo name.

So who are these shadowy superdelegates?

2008-02-14T11:47:00.002-05:00

Names, committments, and uncommittments of the superdelegates who will undemocratically determine our future in exchange for special appointments in the next administration. Who doesn't want to be the ambassador to Antigua?

Claire Tells the NYTimes What's What

2008-02-13T12:57:00.003-05:00

Have you ever asked yourself, 'Why does every major and minor news outlet have different delegate counts for Clinton and Obama?' This is something that's been troubling me for a while. Here, Claire Sandberg calls bullshit on the highly subjective (at this stage, anyway) science of delegate counts.

But also you should just visit Claire's new blog, cartographia.blogspot.com for your own edification.

Telecommunications Companies Granted Legal Immunity for Handing Over Phone Records

2008-02-13T09:34:00.005-05:00

FISA is one of the many reasons why our new slightly Democratic majority Congress has proved itself useless, again. Yesterday, another measure to strengthen FISA was voted into effect. Democrats had a chance to stop this, and they didn't; they've voted in favor of domestic spying before and they keep doing it. The bill was approved 68 to 29–the wide margin of votes in favor of extended wiretapping and surveillance gives you an idea of just how many Democrats are rolling over on this issue, still ceding to the Bush administration.

This bill does a couple of things:

-it extends the governments' rights to tap communications domestically (with the provision that American citizens will not be the targets) for six additional years, assuring that we will be living the legacy the Bush administration long after they've left office.

-it eliminates the need for the government to get a warrant at all in cases where the government deems surveillance necessary.

-it grants a degree of immunity to telecommunications companies for giving the government customers' phone records. Republicans are pushing for even more immunity for companies like AT&T in future legislation.

I want to post this because the big news today is that Barack Obama has finally gained a significant edge in delegates over Hillary Clinton and while this development is exciting and important, this bill is proof that even when while the whole country is talking about change, there are still measures being taken by both the Bush Administration and cowardly Democrats that are setting us back even further.

The Turn Towards the Cultural, Away from the Political

2008-02-12T12:20:00.000-05:00

There's been a controversy in the world of poetry blogs about an article in the Chicago Review by Juliana Sphar and Stephanie Young entitled "Numbers Trouble" that reminds me of everything that rubs me the wrong way about so-called "contemporary/avant-garde/innovative writing" and feminism. To sum up this long and tedious controversy over which much digital ink has been spilled: Jennifer Ashton wrote an article basically saying, "Wow, the gender gap in contemporary poetry has really closed, hasn't it?! [as judged by looking at anthologies and the like] to which Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young respond, "No, it certainly has not! We've rifled though anthologies! We've crunched the numbers! And the outcome? We women, share a foul cultural lot!" This is not a terribly interesting topic of discussion for me, but what I find striking is the shit storm of controversy it's generated on the inter-nets.

Striking and symptomatic the tendency of both poetry and feminism to argue passionately for cultural representation and confuse this with politics. I'm talking about poetry and feminism here as academic disciplines, as groups comprised of individual practitioners, as practices that spawn ideologies, and as ideologies that spawn practices. It's not that I think that the cultural under-representation of women is unimportant but I find the total focus of the poetry community on issues of representation, rather than issues of politics really troubling. Instead of crunching numbers and blaming nebulous sexist forces in the world of editorship, isn't it more useful to ask ourselves whether there are conditions in women's lives that keep them from existing in literary communities and publishing more? I would point out too that the question of publishing in the innovative/avant-garde context here is a very salient one because in contrast to other genres like fiction (although this is becoming less and less true of literary fiction), poetry is not only a gift economy but you're friends are mainly the ones who publish you, so that literary community and innovative writing exist in a tautological relationship to one anther. Aren't women still disproportionately burdened with all the chores of motherhood, full-time jobs, and housework even when in fairly equal partnerships? The material factors that would make a woman too stultified or too tired to write at the end of the day are the material of politics and those go curiously unmentioned in this type of discussion about cultural representation.

The Colombian National Tragicomedy, Continued

2008-02-07T15:43:00.001-05:00

These are pictures my dad took at the February 4th demonstrations in Bogota.

AWP: The Bookfair

2008-02-07T10:53:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Andrea Lawlor for these pictures.
1st picture: Megan's Kathy Acker Tattoo
2nd picture: Brandon Holmquest, Sandra Newman, me, and Megan Milks
3rd picture:same
4th picture: Sandra and I in simulated conversation.

AWP felt like a long-lost friend convention.

El Siniestro Horror del Fascismo

2008-02-06T12:30:00.001-05:00

The poster above says, "they also marched and they thought that they were doing it for their Country and they didn't know that they were supporting the sinister horror of fascism. I won't march on February 4th."

This poster was made in counter-protest to a multi-country demonstration organized by the Colombian president Alvaro Uribe against the FARC. (Being Colombian) I got e-mails from several Colombians urging me to join this absurd event in New York, outside the United Nations on the February 4th. The thoughts running through my head were, "An international protest against a terrorist group that carries out its terrorism only in Colombia? What are people in Switzerland gonna do about the FARC, who kidnap and harass the Colombian gentry? What the fuck do they hope to achieve, anyway? The Swiss really taking a stand against terrorism in Colombia? Or are Colombians just engaged in the national pass time of keeping up appearances–Believe us we hate terrorists!–except on an international scale?" The protest was not openly announced as being organized by the Colombian government and and it all seemed so poorly conceived and illogical that in retrospect, I should have known.

So many days after all these questions ran through my head, my cousin sent me this article from the Colombian indymedia site. Since it's in Spanish and there was no English counterpart on the American indymedia site, I'll give you a run down of what the article is about. As it turns out, a few counter-protesters did show up at the anti-FARC rally in New York and were basically attacked and called terrorists by the Uribe-organized gathering.

A very tiny bit of background (because to give the full story would be to recount a fifty year civil war in Colombia) of what has sparked this recent public relations campaign by the Colombian government: recently, the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez agreed to negotiate the release of few FARC kidnapped journalists and politicians. The negotiations were apparently successful as two hostages were let go, but then Uribe inexplicably pulled out of the negotiations. Colombia is one of the few Latin American countries that fully backs the U.S. foreign policy and is receiving tidy sums of money to keep up the war on drugs. The U.S. has been leaning heavily on Latin American presidencies to not support or form any alliances with the socialist government of Chavez. So it comes as no surprise that just as progress is being made in the release of these hostages, Uribe would punk out of the negotiations. This way, Uribe can keep the money coming in from the U.S. for the war on drugs, the money coming in from narcotrafficking, and the military support of the right wing paramilitaries (the sworn enemies of the left wing FARC). The February 4th protests were simply a way of keeping up appearances without having to actually do the work to achieve peace in Colombia.

Addendum to Fat Phobia and Fat Fancy

2008-02-06T10:32:00.000-05:00

I was talking to Brandon and he made a critique of the last paragraph of the "Fat Phobia and Fat Fancy" post, which I would like to share–he thought that the last paragraph sounded rote and abandoned the thoughtful analysis of the rest post for a kind of identity politics stance. In the spirit of clarification and more thoughtful analysis, I'd like to elaborate on a few things I said in the last paragraph of the post because while I think identity politics can be useful in mobilizing individuals to fight against discrimination they face as a group, I'm also really wary of identity politics because I think they negate the specificity and complexities of individuals' lives.

The urge to tie an argument up into a neat little bow is one that's easy to succumb to, but in this case, I would rather not: I make a super-structural argument that Americans are fat because food and the quality of life in this country is so bad and then at the end I say that people have the right to be fat without being judged. In some ways this comes off like I'm talking out the side of my mouth because I start by saying that there is a problem of obesity in the U.S. (a claim that a lot of fat activists deny as a paranoia spread by the diet and healthcare industries) and then I say there's nothing wrong with being fat. Admittedly, I do think that there's something in the water and the food here that's wreaking havoc on our collective pancreases and making us fat as a country. This becomes particularly apparent when you travel outside the U.S. and see just how full of terrible additives our food is and how low our quality of life is, compared to other countries (and I'm not even necessarily talking about western Europe, although yes western Europe). Additionally, we not only have a historical crisis of fatness, but a historical crisis of thinness so that not only are fat people contending with bad food, but with a much more punishingly thin standard of "normality" than ever before. But then, I do think that you can be fat and beautiful and healthy (the medical establishment has not been able to concretely prove one way or the other whether being fat or thin or "normal" is healthier) and that you shouldn't be discriminated against for the shape of your body. These two positions are perhaps slightly irreconcilable, especially if you hold either the public health scare stance or the fat activism stance strongly. But really, the original spirit of my post is that when the law starts to sanction discrimination against people based on what they look like, then we're in for dark times.

Fat Phobia and Fat Fancy

2008-02-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

Lawmakers in Mississippi are proposing a bill that would ban fat people from eating in public. This news is disconcerting to say the least, even if the bill does not pass, which it likely won't. I have never considered myself a libertarian or even really thought I had a libertarian streak, but the kinds of measures that are passing in legislatures across the country make me seriously question whether we are losing our personal freedoms as citizens–from smoking bans to this very extreme and hateful bill that would ban fat people from eating in public–these government incursions into citizens' private lives are not only totally frightening, but deeply flawed philosophically.

There is a strange chiasmus of the public and the private here: the "obesity epidemic" is a "public health" concern, and somehow by making fat people retreat into the private sphere, obesity would disappear? This logic is mind-boggling. The Mississippi ban places the responsibility for fatness squarely on the fat individual. The bill purports to protect the American people from the "obesity epidemic," as if fatness was a contagion that you could catch from sitting next to someone at a restaurant. The bill also ignores the role of structural factors in people's lives that contribute to the general weight gain of the American population that the government could actually take measures to mitigate, such as forcing processed food manufacturers to use real sugar instead of corn syrup (by not, you know, giving corn farmers subsidies all over the place). As opposed to trans-fat, which occurs naturally in some cases, corn syrup is neither naturally-occurring nor tasty–it's one of those things that exists solely to make manufacturing of myriad products exponentially cheaper for the manufacturer and shittier for the consumer. The government forcing manufacturers to uphold public health by making healthier products would constitute the government acting in its appropriate role, protecting its citizens on a large scale from industries that will do anything to raise their bottom line including drastically lowering the quality of their products. This would be a refreshing alternative to legislating the citizen's personal behavior. But it's more convenient to blame fat people for the obesity epidemic than to go after the Coca-Cola corporation. Yet, what the government can actually do to ameliorate public health in America is ultimately kind of besides the point anyway.

The terrifying heart of this bill that we must examine is that it's legally sanctioned discrimination against fat people. Exclamations of hatred and fear aimed at fat people are the final frontier of acceptable public hate speech. Not to mention that one of the biggest class markers in this country is the type of food you have access to: and if you're improverished, you're just not going to spend the five dollars for a smallish box of organic greens at Whole Paycheck (I've been in this position). I would further contend that fat phobia is a very acceptable form of classism (which is not to say that all poor people are fat or all fat people poor, but there are demographic correlations); fat is the intersection where class becomes visible. But even this class argument, which I would stand by as basically true, brings us back to the question of what causes fatness and how fatness can be cured, when the real point is that fat citizens are entitled to the same rights as non-fat citizens (that sounds like non-fat yoghurt to me, ha).

This issue is important to me on many levels: I've been varying degrees of fat in my lifetime (to quote Moe from Jezebel, 'I'm in no danger of being anyone's thinspiration'), I have fat friends who I love and care about deeply, and lastly and most importantly, I want to live in a world where an infinite variety of body types is free to live without shame or recrimination. I don't have a solution but I do know people who are fighting for increased fat visibility and cultural acceptance like my friend Annie Maribona, who started a fat vintage clothing in Portland called FAT FANCY. The road to fat acceptance looks stylish.

Commodification Nation

2008-02-04T11:45:00.000-05:00

Red Frida or Green Frida?

Pomes, Po–emmms

2008-02-01T11:34:00.000-05:00

My friend Joanne, who makes wonderful films and is very knowledgeable on the subject of film, asked me the other day what books I would recommend to someone who hasn't read that much modern poetry. So I endeavored to compile a highly subjective list of the stuff that I really love and think people should be exposed to if they haven't been already. As you can see, the list includes mostly stuff that's basically canonical in a counter-canonical way. It's all Anglophone and 20th century. Also of note, I didn't include anything hyper-contemporary and that's because I think that it's hard to understand a lot of very contemporary poetry without having read some of the earlier stuff:

-Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems

-Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works, especially the poems "Next Year, or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous" and "My Life by Water"

-Eileen Myles' Not Me

-T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (I know every one reads these in High School, but they never lose their dreary, apocalyptic awesomeness for me)

-Frank O'Hara's The Lunch Poems, especially the poems, "The Day Lady Died" (on the first day of grad school, I was stupid enough to say I loved this poem when the teacher handed it out. The second year students looked at me as if I was some kind of vulgarian quelle horreur! you don't come to grad school to love anything.)

-Alice Notley's The Mysteries of Small Houses

-Kamau Brathwaite's Trenchtown Rock

-Ann Lauterbach's On a Stair

-Charles Reznikoff 's Testimony: The United States (1885-1915) Recitative vol. 1 and 2

-Mina Loy's The Lost Lunar Baedecker, especially the poem, "Songs to Johannes"

-Lyn Hejinian's The Cold of Poetry, especially the poem, "Gesualdo"

-Ted Berrigan's (click to hear incredible Berrigan readings* of) The Sonnets and "Red Shift"

-William Carlos Williams' Spring and All

-Melvin B. Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

-Joe Brainard's I Remember (though Brainard mostly dedicated himself to visual art, he also wrote)

-David Antin's Talking at the Boundaries

*Actually, there are good recordings of most of these poets on PennSound, the vast audio archives of poets reading kept at the University of Pennsylvania and made accessible to the public through their extremely navigable website.

Democracy Later

2008-02-01T09:51:00.000-05:00

This is a transcript of an Amy Goodman interview with Imran Khan, former Pakistani cricket star turned political activist. Khan gives some interesting insight into the current situation in Pakistan, including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharaff. It would be worth your while to read the whole transcript, but the part where Khan highlights the problem of U.S.-backed dictators is of particular interest:

"And the problem with the U.S. is that, unfortunately, it always ends up backing military dictators or dictators at the expense of the people and unnecessarily alienates the people. I mean, when I spoke to the lawmakers, I asked them a simple question. I said, look, why would people in Pakistan—if you have a democratic government in Pakistan and back a democratic government which comes through free and fair elections, well, you do not pick horses. I mean, the U.S. backed Benazir Bhutto. I thought that was absolutely wrong. They should not interfere in the domestic politics, because if they back one party, then everyone else goes against the U.S. So if a government comes through free and fair elections, why would it not want to work with the U.S.? It’s bizarre. I don’t understand this. Why would a democratic elected government in Pakistan not want to work with the only superpower in the world? I mean, after all, we have to—if I’m a Democrat, I have to go to the people to get their vote, and if I don’t bring them prosperity, they’re not going to vote for me. And if I pick a fight with the only superpower, how am I going to help my people? So it’s so bizarre that they end up sort of picking one dictator, and this is our man, at the expense of and alienating the people."

Why do U.S. foreign policy makers never learn that this strategy of backing the dictators never works? This has been a consistent problem not only in the Middle East, but in Latin America, Africa, and Asian. When will we ever learn the pretty simple equation that U.S.-backed military dictatorships + suppression of real democracy = eventual formation of terrorist groups and hatred of America world wide? It's fairly obvious.

Being and Making

2008-01-31T09:41:00.001-05:00

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

2008-01-25T12:13:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-25T11:47:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-25T10:14:00.000-05:00

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)

2008-01-23T15:44:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-22T11:13:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-17T15:33:00.000-05:00

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)

2008-01-15T09:58:00.000-05:00

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!

2008-01-11T23:29:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-11T10:21:00.001-05:00

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

2008-01-10T16:10:00.001-05:00

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.

2008-01-10T15:24:00.001-05:00

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.