Resplendant Reflections/Roving Revistas

2004-01-03T21:22:00.000-05:00

????

2003-11-30T22:08:00.000-05:00

Me mueve--

I am moving. Keeping the archives here until I can figure out how to keep them there, but I am off to a new spot where I can post photographs--cut off toooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo long from upgrading. If anyone is still out there, FYI, it's now at typepad, which is a new easy to use service supplied by moveable type.

Blogger has been great, trained me, got me started--for which I am deeply grateful--but time to move on.

Ta-Ta!!! (That's http://resplendancies.typepad.com/, for you who didn't click on the blue.)

2003-11-18T23:26:00.000-05:00

So I monitor earthquakes...

But who can resist a 7.8 in the Rat (oui, raton, rata) Islands, part of the Aleutian volcanic chain, 95 km (60 miles) SW of Semisopochnoi Island, Alaska?

The region surrounding the Rat and Buldir Islands portion of the Aleutian arc is highly seismic. The largest earthquake known to have affected this region was the magnitude 8.7 event of February 1965, which was one of the largest earthquakes of the twentieth century. The 1965 earthquake ruptured an approximately 400 kilometer-long patch on the Pacific-North American plate boundary, and generated a tsunami that was 11 meters high in the Aleutians. Despite the large magnitude of the 1965 earthquake, there were no fatalities and only minor damage and flooding due to the sparseness in population in the epicentral area. (thanks U.S. Geological service et. al.)

While a tsunami warning has been issued for the coastal areas from Sand Point to Attu and from Kodiak to Sand Point, Alaska, according the NEIC's news release, the event has been kind.

2003-11-16T00:35:00.000-05:00

Yes, I do know what date it is....

I have been off blog--off world, as it were--meeting a very insistent deadline, the sleep-eat-type-work-type-eat-sleep kind with NO LIFE. Whew! C'est fini! In my absence, I note numerous and ferocious earthquakes, a world still in turmoil, in my dear confused city an autumn both unseasonably warm and swift as quicksilver. Entonces, my profuse apologies to any of you who have occasionally cliqued, wondered and gradually cliqued no more. Je suis ici--estoy aqui--you know the drill.

2003-09-26T00:41:00.000-04:00

When the earth moves at 8.0 and the sea follows,

it is not just a matter of idle interest. I have contacted Pure Land Mountain in Japan, but no word as yet. It is also not lost on me that Basho's Travels to the Far North went through Hokkaido. I hope for the best.

Edward Said has died of pancreatic cancer after an incredibly long battle, and that is terribly sad. There are, as Richard Wilbur said some time ago, no proportions in dying.

2003-09-23T22:24:00.000-04:00

Hot Dawg! I told you I would tell you!

This fall marks the first New York Butoh Festival, a festival celebrating the origins and the international evolution of this vital form. The festival runs from October 11-19, with performances, workshops, master-classes, and exhibitions at various locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn - including The Japan Society and Theater for the New City. Bhutoist Jeff Janeshewski has been working on this festival for the past two years with his friends at CAVE Gallery. I encourage you to check them out!

The festival presents performances by emerging artists and established masters from Japan, Sweden, Seattle, San Francisco and NY. Plus, there are a number of intensive workshops and master classes by the three main performers: Yukio Waguri (Japan), SU-EN (Sweden) and Joan Laage (Seattle).

For more information: http://www.nybutohfestival.org.

2003-09-22T08:28:00.000-04:00

Eeek!

It has been that long, huh? I shall have to post someting soon. In the meantime, please note the whopper in Myanmar--which, I am told, some persons want to call Burma. 6.5. And then today, on our side of the world, close to home and not particularly good news -- another estimated 6.5:

A strong earthquake occurred about 10 miles (20 km) north of Santiago, Dominican Republic or about 95 miles (150 km) north northwest of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic on Sep 22 at 12:45 AM. The magnitude and location may be revised when additional data and further analysis results are available, says the National Earthquake Information Center. Minor damage reported at Santiago, Dominican Republic. Also felt in western Puerto Rico. We hope for the best.

2003-09-10T00:51:00.000-04:00

For those of us who haven't seen Mars face to face yet...

I have a tin telescope--painted nail polish red--made at the Five & Dime and passed on to me by an old flame's nephew. I wish I could figure out the thing: you look into a small sighting lens on top, when you zero in on the object of your desire you immobilize the apparatus and look through the larger lens. Piece of cake, right? I have never been able to see squat through it; I have advertised on EBay to sell it to someone with more mechanical acumen than I; but there it sits. One more dustcatcher in an apartment which has needed a good spring cleaning for far too many springs.

But when I leave the bus and come up the hill, ducking under the linden trees on the side of the road which construction has stood still--when I stand up with the trees that persist and breathe in their oxygen, I now hear katydids and smell acrid composting leaf smell. Fall on its way, as best as it can in these troubled times.

I love my top floor eyrie that looks out over the treetops of my small corner of the city--New York City, mind you. That the god of war is swooshing closeby is not news. Better the planet, though; not its cruel avatar.

2003-08-27T12:40:00.000-04:00

The Virtues of Cats

Having received note of a 5.0 in Hawaii, I read in the Hawaii Star Bulletin the following:

In Kailua-Kona, Mike Stanton said the quake was one of the most significant he had felt in recent memory.

“The house was moving,” Stanton said. “It made the lamps vibrate and it made small creaking noises.”

The vibrations awakened Stanton’s five cats, who remained alert long after the end of the quake — which he said lasted about 12 seconds.

In case you haven't noticed, I have been on a slight [working] vacation for a few days: I will return in a little less than a week, oh my mystery readers (if, in fact, you do exist.) Pax vobiscum.

2003-08-17T22:07:00.000-04:00

About this darkness thing...

I will be brief. I got stranded in Jersey, described by pundit Garrison Keillhor as, "for a New Yorker, a near death experience." Actually a colleague and his household generously gave me harbour in a storm: a mattress on the floor with two amiable Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs to guard me--a nice big slug of wine to calm my noives--I call on Keillhor to revise that statement! The little--er, small but portly--critters, once they decided I was kosher, so to speak, flopped sideways on my toes: you are supposed to then rub they little belllies, esp. between the forefeet. The result is several satified snorts or, if you are really lucky, a small staccato eruption of same.

Friday a friend came into town, despite the Blackout. The fun part was trying to figure out how to pick him up at Penn Station (that is what Yellow Cabs are for, my dear) and then arriving breathless at the Gug[genheim] to see the latest, only to find a red sign: Closed. Due to no AC, gone fishin', due to no AC...all down museum row.

We wound up on the Lincoln Center Plaza doing the Handmade Instruments Show. How nice to see that despite high rents chasing so many artists off the isle, New York still has some boho edge! a mousecage cello, a garden of electronic tubes that hoo-ed melodically when you moved various parts (yours, not its) about them, water drums, a theramin-like set of squares that sounded in time to your hand motions...

The grand finale of this event was Donald Knaack on a rack of junk--old hubcaps, an upended rural tin mailbox, various kinds of plastic tubing, a gutted MAC shell, a conch, traffic signs, crescent wrenches suspended and ordered in decreasing size, rocks, an old gas can, the inevitable 55 gallon drum, old skateboards, diskbrakes... I wasn't entirely sure about how I felt when he played against, presumeably, his own recording of himself; but, as if he knew my doubt, he then banged out a few drumacapellae, then finished up with a "junk jam" consisting of the audience playing found objects in several different rhythms. "I was thinking," says my friend, "I was thinking how we hardly ever do that anymore."

"Mmmm." I am in a reverie of my salad days when folks would drop by and we'd break out the washboard, the guitar, spoons, tin pots and pans, warm up the old vocal cords. We would have been just fine in a blackout. ecoutez!

2003-08-13T19:26:00.000-04:00

Gregory Hines (1946 - 2003)

I used to see Gregory Hines lurching out from a side street near Sheridan Square, old jacket, jeans, lank and loose, but like all of us, off making his rounds: coffee, a roll, work, whatever else the day held. He never had that hangdog, one-jump-ahead-of-the-parapazzi look, never seemed to be hiding behind his shades--if he was wearing any--he was just going about his business. He'd even smile if you said hello.

I also have a dim memory of that truly dreadful film, White Nights, whose premise, the downing, and likely survival, of a Russian ballet dancer in exile over the then Soviet Union who just happens to bump into a left-wing, tap-dancing fool in exile from the U-S-S, U-SS, A. My first thought was, how could you? But soon the movie didn't matter, for oh, that man could dance! It just fell out of him; that music, that song, whatever drives the body like wind riffling through a willow tree, his body, his beautiful body and soul.

Now, willow, weep; weep for me.

2003-08-10T20:48:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Carlos Arribas:

As One Listens to the Rain

Listen to me as one listens to the rain,
not attentive, not distracted,
light footsteps, thin drizzle,
water that is air, air that is time,
the day is still leaving,
the night has yet to arrive,
figurations of mist
at the turn of the corner,
figurations of time
at the bend in this pause,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
without listening, hear what I say
with eyes open inward, asleep
with all five senses awake,
it's raining, light footsteps, a murmur of syllables,
air and water, words with no weight:
what we are and are,
the days and years, this moment,
weightless time and heavy sorrow,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
wet asphalt is shining,
steam rises and walks away,
night unfolds and looks at me,
you are you and your body of steam,
you and your face of night,
you and your hair, unhurried lightning,
you cross the street and enter my forehead,
footsteps of water across my eyes,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the asphalt's shining, you cross the street,
it is the mist, wandering in the night,
it is the night, asleep in your bed,
it is the surge of waves in your breath,
your fingers of water dampen my forehead,
your fingers of flame burn my eyes,
your fingers of air open eyelids of time,
a spring of visions and resurrections,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the years go by, the moments return,
do you hear the footsteps in the next room?
not here, not there: you hear them
in another time that is now,
listen to the footsteps of time,
inventor of places with no weight, nowhere,
listen to the rain running over the terrace,
the night is now more night in the grove,
lightning has nestled among the leaves,
a restless garden adrift-go in,
your shadow covers this page.
(Octavio Paz, A Tree Within)

2003-08-10T18:30:00.000-04:00

Yogi Jazz

My new friend, Mark, puts me to shame. Groovin at the Sonny Rollins concert with the assistance of a little white wine and hors d'ouvres, in turn the perks of having attended with a contributor to WBGO, my grasp of Rollins' saxiphonic niceties was a bit hazy. Not, mind you, that I dislike Rollins. Not atall atall. But I must credit my sources. I did not know, for example, that the reason Mr. Tall up there, oh saxophonist of the white hair and boundless energy at 70-something, oh Mr. rollin rollin rollin Rollins, has done yoga since he was a mere stripling of 30 and that, from that, he INVENTED circular breathin for mewsicians of wind. That's so you can go onandonandonandonandneverseemlikeyoutakin a breath--he did this at the end of his first set, too, up there on the bandshell of Summer Stage, our Central Park, drivin that wail home to wild cheers and oh yeahs.

Whew!

I did not know that his most excellent trombonist, Clifton Anderson, was his nephew. This second generation boppist--Rollins, not said nephew though he, Anderson, was no slouch I must tell you--Rollins played like a flash; but it was surprisingly melodic, not too late night riffic abstract, and with the addition of his percussion, more mellow than I would have expected. With three congas all differently tuned, a bongo, and a shimmering mini-curtain of metallic strips, Rollins' African drummer knocked out not a calypso, but an easy-to-listen-to, almost show-stealing solo in the first set: I was torn: oh you have succumbed to mere pyrotechnics, AP. Nope, not bad, not bad at all. I still don't know. But when I mentioned my doubts to Bajan poet, Kamau Brathwaite--"Is this the Caribbeanization of jazz, Kamau?" I asked.

"More African."

So I guess it's the Diaspora riffin on itself again.

2003-07-28T14:49:00.000-04:00

Cat People

I have been reading "place blogs" and musing on what "sense of place" might actually mean. Having been a gypsy most of my life--the longest I have ever lived in one house was when I was a child--six years--and the second-longest was a five year stint in a cabin in the woods at the end of a half-mile long dirt driveway, off a dirt road. (My, my, A.P. what have we heah? almost a run-on sentence?) A New England special, as it were. A friend's wife accuses me of single-handedly being responsible for the rent increases in New York City--I move, the landlords get to jack them up.

Roots? Perhaps they are a luxury or a life sentence; but I recall the time when I would flee to the countryside, the place of earliest childhood memories, for comfort. Now, I discover my inner urbanite, my eavesdropper, my read-over-people's-shoulder-er, my closet private eye.

Like Rattus rattus, I have set ways of seeking out refreshment, and each day after I dump my bags in my office, I trot back over to the local cafe for my coffee with steamed soymilk. I pass a low brick wall with a bird feeder suspended over it, generally a messy and contentious affair with pidgeons (pigs in feathers!) gobbling seeds under the attacks of a reconnaissance group of house sparrows. I peer into the cool of the adjacent small garden, green ferned and mossy, and note the low windows of the basement apartment that claims that lush spot. Now, I confess, I have unpremeditatedly seen through that window and spied: an older man sits at his table, sometimes reading, sometimes eating his dinner, and his companion, a given-to-portly white and orange cat, sits next to his plate. After the meal--and on my way back with my coffee--I see the man, slumped in his chair, snoozing, and the cat splayed out on the table next to him, also asleep.

This reassurance that the world outside me has a routine, a sameness and a rootedness that perhaps I lack--this tale has a postscript to it. One day I see the man, fully awake, watering his garden, and I stop:

"You have a cat, don't you?"

"Yes..."

I politely relate my accidental vision--he and the cat companionably settled into their evening. "Yes, she likes to be near me," he says, smiling. We exchange feline platitudes, for I, too, am a cat person. I go back to my office.

I pass by the next day and he has pulled down the blinds on his windows.

R. rattus

2003-07-25T20:34:00.000-04:00

On a jag

Never begin a paragraph with a parenthesis. (I shall have to ask LanguageHat where that jag thing, that expression, comes from--perhaps the rule, as well.) But, yes, it's a poetry jag, somewhat akin to the kind of feeling one gets after not having seen any paintings lately, no art, and then you get to wallow in it, sop up color, texture, edge... Entonces, poesia!

Dying in A Turkish Bath

Did you ever attend a public bath?
I did.
The candle near me blew out,
And I became blind.
The blue of the dome disappeared.

They relit the candle on the navel stone.
The marble was wiped clean.
I saw some of my face in it.
It was bad, something awful,
And I became blind.
I didn't quite expect this from my face.

Did you ever sob
While covered in soap?

©trans. Murat Nemet-Nejat

Rueing the most rue-able exclusion of modern Turkish poetry of the late 1920's through the early 1970's from Western anthologies, Nemet-Nejat begins a fascinating analysis of this poetry as "a godless Sufism." Forget those sodden translations of Mevlana Djelatettin Rumi, a Turkish poet who wrote in Persian, those collections of his work with dust jackets decorated with rug patterns that New Agers scarf up like the fat lady in front of a plate of cookies:

Though he is a very great poet, the choice is unfortunate. Rumi's images of "universe," "drink,", "dance," "whirling dervishes," etc., feed into the sense of the East (partly derriving from Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat) already existing in the West. Hooking on these already familiar images, translators miss the drastic changes English needs to assimilate the Sufi world sense and language.

In fact, I bet--just time it--that the minute this gets posted, ads for the latest translations of Rumi will find their way to the top of this page; I have seen them already on others' blogs. I never realized how much the general public assumes about the nature of Turkish poetry, just having read Rumi in English.

But I have been thinking about poetry like I haven't for years. Consider: a language that is declined and thus a swinging word order*, open or closed vowels--ahhh! Syntax that is rhythm, rhythm that is meaning, vanishing pronouns, nonexistant gender... Here is a poetry that, elusive, demands your attention, like a spoiled, expensive lover.

What Nemet-Nejat tells us is that the Turkish poetry of this era is deliciously, startlingly transgressive. We do not know that Rumi would approve.

Mo' better latuh--I am behind!

*As in if you ain't got that_______, then you ain't got that etc., etc.
--you know the drill.
And, of course, all © to the appropriate auteurs!

2003-07-22T00:20:00.000-04:00

Wanting a Suitable Title

this entry will simply have to join the party in "almost" attire: almost proper, almost correct, almost the same hue between the jacket and the rest of my get-up, shoes not quite right...But, quicksand of this blogcess, this one is not about soi-meme. No.

Aishe's Wedding Ring

My heart

is melancholy

a red

stained

memory

hangs

on the

peach

tree.

©Murat Nemet-Nejat

This is a preview for a later blog. But I will say this: Murat Nemet-Nejat is another poet whom I have just discovered through the indefatigable efforts of Ed Foster, and, in addition to writing his own poems, Murat has been working on translating contemporary Turkish poetry for a forthcoming Talisman Press publication--subject the same, of course.

Recently, I heard Nemet-Nejat's work at a poetry event, and upon my expressing admiration for them, he generously handed me his copies of all the poems he had just read; I stuffed them into my backpack. Days later, Ed Foster casually shoved a sheaf of zeroxes into my waiting paw: "here is an article written by Nemet-Nejat on Turkish poetry..."

"--and are ALL those poems attached translated by the author?"

Sigh. The pages in my backpack multiply...Just a glimpse as I scurry through my workaholic life--just a peek-- The anticipation is like that millisecond catch in your breath when you realize the person you are about to meet for second time is the person with whom you will fall in love.

2003-07-21T13:27:00.000-04:00

Mother

Nature, of course.

Earlier this month, I left a family gathering in New England, with my aunt at the wheel and, moi, therefore, with eyes free to roam. I have always been the person who spots the huge hawk staring impassively from a roadside branch, the shadow of a deer dappling into woods. I can even do it while driving.

"Look! look at the _________," I say

"Where, where?" (The respondent, not seeming to know how to scan, never sees what I see. You have to be quick!)

The car lumbered over the dirt road leading back out of my mother- and sister-in-law's cottage, past the pond the beavers, in their incessant chawing, build, dam, and re-dam when the humans break through to get a dry road again. Early July, sun eking its way through the clouds, the tiger lilies beginning, blue chickory tilting towards the roadside through the sweetgrass, and, then, there it was! Awkward, adolescent paws, sandy furred hide--a wild cat--not a bobcat (no eartufts), couldn't see whether or not it had a tail, but not small enough to be an adolescent lynx, not a ferile felix sylvestris but the real thing, a half-grown mountain lion. "Look!"

Kipling--or was it Tennyson--referred to mother as "red in tooth and claw". Oh give me claw!

2003-07-19T01:27:00.000-04:00

And a full week...

When I first knew Jeff Janesheski, he had shaved his head and went about performing in a dress. Okay, okay, it was Bhutoh. Unlike many gringo pretenders, though, Jeff had actually studied and worked at that art, enough to get a grant from the Japan Foundation to do more one year.

Several years later--and I think I said something about this in an earlier blog-- I was pleased to hear that he had made his pilgrimmage to New York: he will be preparing the First Annual Bhutoh Festival for our delictation this fall, I believe. He is also a grad student in directing at Columbia's School of the Arts. Just to walk in someone else's mocassins for a while, he turned playwright and knocked out a one-act play which I had the opportunity to see this past Thursday at Cherry Lane. Se llama THE JOSH WITTS SHOW: I thought it was going to be a comedy!

Ha! A mother from Hell--truly from Hell--played by Janet Bryant, pathologically obsessed with her son. Said son, played by Matthew R. Wilson--our verrrrrry own Josh! Witts!--out of his gourd: off his meds, seeing blood on the trees (they are dying), then-- Here We Are! Josh as a latter day Johnny Carson, turning his whole mania into a late-night talk show. A sister (Miriam Sirota) who appears, in the language of the helping profession, to be "high functioning". The three actors do not mess around--they are energetic and professional. Matthew R. Wilson is certainly a quick change artist; Miriam Sirota appears to have energy to burn; Janet Bryant makes Mommy Dearest look like a bull in a china shop.

I guess what I was most surprised about was young Bhutoh Artist, master of the silent and slow, writing all those well-crafted words. In a way the play was an unflattering portrait of claustrophobia-inducing motherhood that made every mother in the audience squirm, I am sure; but when the awful truth emerges, we sigh with guilty relief--most mothers, thank God, don't do THAT. Then, too, the piece deals with some rather egregious old chestnuts and recurring tragedies--nothing new under the sun, folks; it's all in the presentation. If I would tweak at all, though, I would err on the side of racheting up the absurd in the variety show scenes. I would also love to meet that young man's shrink somewhere down the line!

Ahh, I am looking in my crystal ball....I see a MacArthur in your future... Jeff...

2003-07-19T00:36:00.000-04:00

Descanza en paz

Celia Cruz, la Reina de Salsa, una "Grande Dame" de musica latina quien hemos perdida. Puede los angeles le cuida, Celia.

And, how could I?, Compay Segundo, who really didn't need Ry Cooder to make him famous.

2003-07-16T13:19:00.000-04:00

Requiescat en pacem

Benny Carter, "the King," much revered early jazz artist of the Big Band era who died this past Saturday, just shy of aged 96. If you can, tune in to WKCR FM, the Columbia radio station--they've been playing ALL his work and will continue to do so through midnight tonight.

2003-07-16T11:16:00.000-04:00

The Carlsberg Ridge

Where, dear reader, is THAT? To be precise, 620 km (385 miles) NW of Diego Garcia, Chagos Archipelago; 945 km (590 miles) SW of MALE, Maldives; 1650 km (1030 miles) SW of COLOMBO, Sri Lanka. When you look at the map of the world, it appears to be in the middle of the ocean the the left of the African continent and considerably below the Indian sub-continent. I have learned that is still called the Indian Ocean. Clearly a lulu of a plate moves there, and, by clicking on "World", on the right of the NEIC main page, then "Indian Ocean," you can get a nice map of the ocean floor, with a sulphur-colored ridge clearly marked. Aha, that must be it! Their Wednesday, July 16, 2003 at 01:27:50 AM, our Tuesday, July 15, 2003 at 04:27:50 PM (EDT) the escala Richter reading was 7.6, enough for the NEIC to state carefully that "a major earthquake had occurred." Then today, Wednesday, July 16, 2003 at 07:29:48 AM, our yesterday--Tuesday, July 15, 2003 at 10:29:48 PM (EDT), another smaller tremor occurred: 5.6 escala Richter. At a depth of a mere 10.0--I am not exactly clear on this--I think we have some high waves a-comin'. Now, my next question for all you budding seismologists and meteorologists, is, how does that interract with (and is it) monsoon season?

I have some other things to say about Foster and Turkish poetry, but for the moment I stand in awe of my planet. She is larger than the day.

2003-07-15T01:07:00.000-04:00

This is not a diary

by the poet, Ed Foster assures me, recalling with astonishment "how many people can't imagine a source for poetry other than the self. They miss the point, the whole thing, being more interested in diaries than in poems." He suggests, "For one main source for the poem, and many more in that book, hear music by Zeki Muran and/or Bulent Ersoy. I was listening to them CONSTANTLY when the poems were written."

Would that I could link them, but the amount of popup windows on the former was more than I have ever received in my life, and the other was, well, unattainable. Better the Foster poem instead:

The Night Bright Tellak Came a God

A sweater would do him good.
Rose, lavender, spice, dark-skinned
Kurdish sweat. Our light's indifferent
to logical display. I'd rather
take my strength in friends. How men
can be like this, I've never known.
He, I (and you?) can do it, though.
Dear Levantine: this Kurd is made
from images, a surrogate for me —
swell tight, bright anger in my bed.

(btw: © Copywrites for all work revert to its appropriate author. Period.)

2003-07-14T01:09:00.000-04:00

At 1 AM, the image of a bedraggled bird...

looms, this the quiet hour of the city, with only the hum of everyone's air conditioning, white noise du jour.

Caw.

My bird is bedraggled because the occasion for my reading The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, my recent trip to the ER mit mein angst of the rotator cuff, turns out to need a return visit. "Beware the orthopods, my son! The jaws that snatch... The frumious bandersnatch..." (Oh, how stress puts strange perforations in the brain! Poor Alice!)

Strangely silent, immersed in several other writing projects, my first thought is, "Yes, but can I type?"

I have words, too, words to loose on y'all.

2003-07-10T02:23:00.000-04:00

Edward Foster...

says,

"The critic, discussing the poem and not invoking it, loses the key,
and the critical work becomes discourse, weavings of conjecture.
The key itself is never lost."

...and he also says,

"...the critic is driven by memory, that which recedes."
- from ALL ACTS ARE SIMPLY ACTS

I desperately want to mourn my disheveled memory, unraveling with the stresses of not writing poetry myself these days and playing second fiddle to my beloved students' search for meaning amongst the shards of civilization on our miserable little corner of earth. I won't.

Conjure. How is it that language can trick you, make you feel, sometimes even without exactly understanding why--or how? As when the conjurer pulls a penny from your ear...

Jackets, motorcycles, all kinds of jackets, a boy, the word "boy," a parallel boy, two in/for one.

Alchemy subverted by reminiscence, he says, sold to pallid analogy, poor relation to all that magic steam of word, knowing in both the sagacious and in the Biblical sense, passion as in anger divine, divining again and criticism once more and poetry when No one listens to poetry, Jack Spicer says. (AAASA)

Praisesong: in the exposed brick vault of the Hoboken Historical Society, Foster, in blue jeans and t-shirt surprises me with his burst of--what? passion ? (yes) anger? (yes) arc of intelligence (awed, not surprised, by this muscle behind the work), its surprises? (yes, yes, yes.)

Alchemy:

Egyptian angles....

....Their steps

are golden, and I count them as I count
the clocks along the way where sphinxes walked
and dust collected in an angle of the sun --
it freshens me --
and, oh, I long for crocodiles, the ancient gods,
and temples in a final light.
(Marianne Moore in Egypt
for Alice Notley)

Like ashes

we become

our whirlwind in the sky.
(Watch Hill)

TBC (To be continued--oh yes!)

2003-07-08T00:40:00.000-04:00

I shall return...

Entonces, estoy eschuchando a la musica lo que un de mis estudiantes me daba--I am listening to a CD one of my students gave me to accompany a paper he wrote about the African influences on Merengue--

I wish my Spanish were as good as the music. Ah, well. I teach literature and cultural studies to budding engineers and computer scientists; and when they suddenly wake up, the light goes on, and they break out, I never know whether to cheer or to burst into tears! In this case, I prance about the room like the mythological one-legged sailor who invented this dance, wriggle my poor ageing behind and grin like an idiot, a little moist around the lids.

What kind of challenge, my colleagues sometimes ask, do I get from teaching students who aren't devoted to my subject, who don't challenge me with their brilliant interpretations of the latest lit-crit theories, their discursive acuities? Well. The snooty, oneuppersonship, the stench of privilege--real or imagined--is not there. I am challenged by their innocence, their unknowing, their lack of pretense, their desire to have their elders tell them, you are wonderful! just fine! --their maddening literalism, sometimes; their desire to lead the unexamined life--sometimes; their vulnerability to easy answers--too many times; their search for sense, meaning, love, in spite of all odds. They are NOT robots.

So what did my student, Victor Acosta, give me, other than a paper and a CD? Ahh, he gave me a lovely gift to give to a teacher: he gave me joy.

Muchissima gracias, Victor!

2003-07-04T01:11:00.000-04:00

Right. Terribly long.

All signs point to blog addiction. But I will be stepping off the set soon, I really will.

Let me go back a few years. Financially strapped, I move to a cheaper apartment, farther away from the center. Longer train ride, more oxygen, more time to write. Kind of isolated--why, oh why, did not the Almighty Watchmaker make me less garrulous of a human bean, huh? I still live my life downtown. Back then, though, it was the honeymoon period: surrounded by boxes of books, my worldly goods, I had cleared a space, attached my system. Pulled in WKCR, Columbia's FM radio. Poured myself a nice glass of vino. The couch faced the window, and there she was: fairy necklace strung across the dark waters of the Hudson, one illumined support, our mis-named GWB winking at me. A full moon like a Blue Plate Special.

Pling!

The purest gutstring plucked.... pluckpluckpluck plu-u-uu-k... Another, another. A minor sound--wistful improvisation, lush with longing, homesickness, emanating soudade. Were it a voice, it would be vibrato-less--like the untrained soprano whose innocent ease just breaks your heart in
two-- If you have never heard an oud, you are as one who has never tasted salt, or one who has never heard the mockingbird riffing on an early summer morning, or one like the poor blindfish in caves that has never seen.

Nothing happened that night--no fireworks, the love of my life did not suddenly reappear in my doorway, saying "all is forgiven, honey, willya take me back?"--but it was one of those quiet gifts...

The studio never answered my query--what/who was playing that night?

Long ago when I read Samuel Charters' Roots of the Blues I kind of poo-poo'd the idea that the roots of the blues, let alone jazz, were yanked from North Africa; listening to music from the "Near East," as it was once called, I am not so sure that Charters didn't have something going for him after all. The lone instrument, the solo lament, the improvisation, the return to the same initial plaint--was that not blues, jazz, thence the lead instrument, whether Miles playing "When You Fall in Love," or Billie electroshocking us with "Strange Fruit?" Or the Middle Eastern lute, lamenting the burdens of anonymous life, celebrating it's small miracles?

Now out the window milady's necklace does not wink. Only the light, warning --what? low flying aircraft?--blinks on top of the eastern supports. The heat of tomorrow is rolling in, in the form of fog, and all the high-rises are disappearing in the mist. Alla, a very idiosyncratic oudist, if I am to believe his reputation, plucks--pluckpluckpluck plu-u-uu-k...as if he were simply experimenting with the different sounds and combinations he could achieve on his instrument...his allbum is "no longer available", a casualty of the war, perhaps...

The fog and the heat, not yet arrived, is erasing the memory of buildings, skyscrapers, our gut-string ties.

oudlink

2003-07-03T11:47:00.000-04:00

It seems to be a lo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ng weekend. And I hope to be unplugged, out of range, mudo for a couple days, enjoying some genuine countrified 02, mud, mosquitoes, barbecue, ensalata, friends, family, the good old beginning-of-summer fest! Disfrutaste, Querido Lector!

Before I forget, the intrepid bikers for Habitat arrived in Portland, Oregon, two days ago: oh, mi cuerpo, why can't you get just a little springier?

2003-06-30T09:58:00.000-04:00

Jazz Me Surreally Do

To Robert Goffin

If the image of an airplane is
Count Baise's sparse piano touch
The propeller is oxtail stew for aardvarks
The fuselage of collard blues riffs
The bi-plane wings all B-flat minor
The cockpit of mulatto Jims crowing
The parachute of pangolin scales leeks
The landing gear substitute head-gear
The World War One goggles of worn biscuits
The wings painted in gravey of drumsticks
The tail spin Tommy Gun of pot likker
The rudder's strut in two-tone fisticuffs
THe windshield of saxophone reeds
The dive bombers smothered in chocolates
The gliding in behind okapi clouds
The bailing out in C-sharp major
The three-point airfields of landing solo
The hangar made of sweet potato fried pies
The pilots of women libation swung
The crash pad of jazz wisdom
If Count Basie's sparse touch is
Aeroplane

Ted Joans
April 1982 Parisin Double Trouble.
Paris: Revue Noire, 1992.

In Memoriam: a lovely, baaad, funny, generous, hip--oh verrrry hip!--
outrageous man.

2003-06-29T02:30:00.000-04:00

Requiescat in Pacem...

This is embarassing. Tonight I got a call from one of my mentors, inviting me to a poetry memorial for Ted Joans, who died in Paris on April 23, 2003. Crap--why hadn't I heard before this? It can't take that long for the news to drift across The Lake! Joans was an unregenerate black hipster, whom I had the pleasure of hearing last year--Lord, was it TWO years ago? my, my how time flies!--charming right down to the last. The Guardian's obit referred to him as "unusual in an unusual way." Fits, it fits.

2003-06-27T12:20:00.000-04:00

"Plant you now, dig you later..."

In response to a query on LanguageHat: Eureka! I found it! Okay, I didn't find as much as I wanted to, but it's a nice tidbit:

Dig v. (1690s - 1990s) from the word deg or dega, (Wolof/African); to understand; to call attention to; a call for attention or an expression of understanding; to appreciate. (Probably no relation to the 1880s white American use: " a diligent student.") "Plant you now and dig you later"; a common black expression.

The above is from the 1994 edition of From Juba to Jive; A Dictionary of African-American Slang edited by Clarence Major. I think the end-date on that should be " to the present," as a) the word is still bouncing around and shows up on state occasions, and b) the date of publication of the book kind of implies "up to now."

'later*

which, by the way is a shortened version of the "plant you now" phrase.

2003-06-24T02:21:00.000-04:00
A Rose is a rose is a rose is a Second Hand Wose...
What it really is, is a second hand record shop on 48 E. 12th St. now and newly kitty-corner from the Strand Bookstore, but on 12th. Now, as some of us have ruefully discovered, vinyl is where it's at, regarding recorded sound; and CDs, by and large, are the Muzac of the studio world. You know: the latter skip all the grace notes and have the highs and lows of a mental patient on Zoloft. Were they in a car wreck, their brain scans would be flat.
Forgive my grotesqueries; I am remembering with embarrassment how one year I let my across-the-hall neighbors con me out of a very good turntable, because I "didn't think I'd need one any more." The things we do for love: my love got me a cruddy CD deck which I hardly every use. Oh, if you record straight from the vinyl you have half a chance of mucho mejor qualidad; but, waaah! I miss the vinyl jazz collection I sold many years back to make my rent one desperate and dreadful year: a first pressing of Miles' "Sketches of Spain," for starters...
Anyhoo, vinyl is at Second Hand Rose* with a vengeance, and the collection is excellent, though not cheap. I spent the wretched, pouring rain Saturday we just had hanging out with Shelley and Gene and their daughter, Amanda, listening to old Jimmy Yancey records, Billie Holliday, and some Nina Simone. Something about watching the rain come down in sheets outside the shop door, and hearing Jimmy unravel tunes on his piano, so bluesy, so oddly comforting. People coming in for the first time--Oh WOW!, or "Do you have--" Suddenly the latter realize they aren't at Tower Records or their local reverbatorium and they flee, confused. Secondhand RECORDS?
Yup. And lots of conversation, a good story or two (ask Gene about the time Miles Davis came into the store when it was uptown, or about his ambivalent association with Chet Baker) and, more often as not, a greeting of "Oh, hey, I just found something that I think will be right up your
alley--" In my case I am like a hog in doo-doo: it's a bebopper's paradise. But you might be a Loretta Lynn fan (one did, indeed, wander in while I was there), a Classic rocker, a Motown Mama, a Soul brother or sistah. That's cool. After all, how many music stores can you wander into and wallow so freely in the stuff you love?
*Well, they still eschew the notion of having a website, but jazz fans, blues people, and other lovers of fine quality peoples' music can contact them by phone--212-675-3735--or email them at allmusic10011@aol.com. Oh, the Strand? Clique, as they say!

2003-06-21T01:51:00.000-04:00

Waitaminit!
Coming home on the train tonight, I had been casually observing a woman reading a book, ARE WE LIVING IN THE END TIMES?--I figure she was yet another of the loose canons swooping around about the Armegeddonists--and we both step out into the evening drizzle. What do I hear? "Oh, Sh-t, I am so sick of rain." Not very pious, if you ask me.
Well, later, I am innocently surfing this night and on MSNBC* (I know, not a very literate e-rag, by any stretch of the imagination), but there IT was, the book and the book club, the LEFT BEHIND PROPHECY CLUB, dedicated to (hold your nose, oh my Reasonable Ones!) helping the faithful "understand how current events may actually relate to End Times prophecy." A query on their page was even more creepy: "Israel's cabinet accepts U.S.-backed "road map" to peace. But does it block the path to Christ's return?" In saner times, mis amigos, a major news media would hardly be running ads for nutcases like these, but I am hearing that even in the santified halls of the gov'mnt, prayuh meetin's about this stuff are goin on--as we blog--and chuchanstate, having celebrated their nuptials, are about to snuggle up for a hot wedding night.
I am bruised and sore from pinching myself, dammit: this is still a beautiful world, despite what Certain People have tried to do/done to it, and this sh-- has got to stop!
*BTW this ad appeared on the news announcement about the shutting down of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya.

2003-06-20T23:55:00.000-04:00
P.S. on the Tectonic Shift:
Wonked again, shall we say! 7.1 hits Amazonia. A RARE occurrence. Were it not so deep it would have been a lulu, even in the sparsely populated area in which in occurred. It was, Dear Reader, 550km (340 miles) deep and thus not so lethal. But, if I can get this straight, the "... June 20 earthquake occurred within the Nazca plate, which currently underthrusts the South American plate at the Peru-Chile Trench, along the west coast of South America. As it descends from the west coast of Peru to eastern Peru, the Nazca plate is seismically active down to depths of about 170 km. Between depths of 170 km and 530 km, the Nazca plate beneath eastern Peru and western Brazil produces very few shocks. Beneath western Brazil in the region of the June 20 earthquake, the subducted Nazca plate is again seismically active between depths of 530 km and 650 km. The deep part of the Nazca plate, in which the June 20 earthquake occurred, took--" GET THIS! "10 million years or more--" YES, 10 MILLION! "to descend from the point at which it initially thrust under the South American plate."
We are talking, as my first ex- would say, glacial time--positively glacial. And here we little rattrap humans are scurrying over the thin crust of the earth as if we own it; and it took this long for the earth to move!

2003-06-20T20:31:00.000-04:00
Definitely a doozie!
I reproduce the comments on the Earthquake near the coast of Central Chile Friday, June 20, 2003 at 09:30:41 AM local time at epicenter (Friday, June 20, 2003 at 09:30:41 AM Eastern Daylight Time in our neck of the woods). It was a whopping 6.9:
Tectonic Setting

"This earthquake occurred in the Chilean subduction zone, in which the dominant tectonic process is the subduction and underthrusting of the Nazca plate to the east beneath the South American plate at a rate of about 8 cm/yr. The currently available location and moment-tensor of the earthquake imply that the shock occurred as a sudden slippage on the thrust-fault boundary between the plates. The hypocenter of this event is located within a segment of the plate boundary that was ruptured in 1943 by a magnitude 7.9 earthquake."

There was a rare earthquake in Brazil yesterday in the Amazon Region which may have been related, according to Reuters news service.

2003-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00
Fooey!
I recall an old Harrison Ford dystopic movie--you know, the famous one where, in the sepia gloom of the background set, it rained. Heavily. All the time. The implication was that we--humankind--had done something horrid that screwed up the weather and brought on this soggy state of affairs. 27 days out of 50? Hmmmmm.... As we are winding down this month of Nor'oester Norteamericano rainy season, I do wonder: Oh, Lord, what did we do to deserve this? (This alternates with an ever-so-Pollyanna-ish, "Well, at least it's not co-old...")
You see, we often say that weather talk is trivial. Au contraire, I think it is very important. I suppose you could argue that since Goretex was invented (did I ever tell you that Goretex was invented by someone living in my home town?)--I suppose you could argue that we have the power to defend ourselves against "ordinary" weather, that we are not, after all, cave men (cave persons?) who are at the mercy of snow, sleet, hail--all that now challenges modern mail deliveries. Weather talk forms the bulk of our interpersonal grousing--when is this heat going to break? when is it going to warm up? I AM SO SICK OF THIS RAIN!
Yes, but it's good for the crops.
Oui, think of the pervasive gloom that comes with prolonged rain; think of the ozone high we all get just before a thunder storm breaks; the way everbody and their uncle pours out onto the city streets when the sun finally reappears; think, even, of how everyone in the city walks out after a snowstorm, trudge, trudge, trudge, down the street talking to anyone, smiling, excited at the novelty Mama Naturaleza has once again bestowed upon us.
Frankly, I never want to complain about the rain in summer. I just want to know if the drought is over; if I can plan a picnic on the Fouth of July without a rain date; if the mosquitoes will miraculously develop good manners and obsequiously bow out of taking a bite of my arm this summer honeysuckle, late afternoon; and if, in my dreams, I can sprawl in my hammock under a tin roof as the rain clatters down, and puts me out like a baby...

2003-06-15T20:21:00.000-04:00
Ikebana
...is the traditional Japanese art of flower arranging. It has not been something I have sought out with any great passion, though I used to see a shrink who did Ikebana himself and displayed his works on the waiting room coffee table, in the hallways and other rooms in his rabbit warren of offices. He was a big, clumsy-looking guy with a bad haircut and a banker's bay window of a gut, not the sort you'd imagine easing a lily into calligraphic curves over a flat container of water and river pebbles.
As I was saying, I wandered up to Wave Hill in the northwest Bronx partly to sate my curiosity after receiving a postcard about a Contemporary Ikebana exhibit there, "Perfection / Impermanence," and partly because Wave Hill is just a really nice place to be on a muggy summer day. Sitting in one of their lawn chairs reading a novel under one of the spread's giant copper beach trees is, I can tell you, the cat's meow. I can look up and catch a glimpse of the Hudson racing flat and brown to the sea at the base of the Palisades. I can pretend I am former resident,Toscanini, with a young wife; or another famed occupant, Mark Twain, just before his wife became ill.
I can pretend to be an art maven and look in on their tiny Glyndor Gallery, see something usually related to nature in an off-kilter way.
And off-kilter it was, I must say. It was--pardonnez moi--part circus, part protest, part Buddhist-Shintoist footnote, on and sometimes off the mark. Circus???? Sorry, to me that describes Ryusada Matsuda's From Roses - three sisters in a house surrendering to the passage of time: we have three headless mannikins with evening gown-like dresses flowing on and around them. First the dresses appear pink and then they fade to a deep, though dull, red as, we are told in the program, the weeks go by. I caught it at the curdled blood stage, and the dullness of the material and its color made the fabric look sort of like the stuff cheap paper felt ribbons are made of. It was (here comes the circus part) virtuoso execution. You would never know the dresses were covered with crushed red rose petals, save for some red powder around each skirt--too well-done, so well-done that the faux-felt aspect was its all. Superb, technically; beyond that? enhh.
Out in the sun porch, though, was a whimsical conglomeration of various bright red articles of clothing stuffed into a wigwam-like frame, set on dead leaves, inside of which was an altar. Nothing like a sensahuma! I could even be a kid again, stepping into my secret hideout.
Another piece was a kind of grim, Eeyore's house, a pile of dead branches and camo stacked against the outside back porch of Glyndor House--"a reminder of the impossibility of concealing war," on the part of creator Gaho Taniguchi. The heavy-handedness of the camouflage, in my humble opinion, seemed a somewhat humorless way to use a form which, almost by definition, strives for subtlety.
Ima save the best two for the last. Un, Teika Itoh's installation--evidently nameless--was made entirely of ferns--steams, leaves, powdered leaves, its extended stems bound at their junctions by fern leaves, a delicate and bulbous spheroid thing hanging down, shapes as slight as a breath of air, which, amazingly, we were permitted to walk through. Wow!
Deux and en fin, or premiere, depending on how you move around a gallery, were Keisen Hama's two bamboo critters hanging from the ceiling of the entryway: they weren't dragons. But they could have been--the piece is titled Tokky Comes to New York - Kissho Dragon. They weren't serpents--they could also have been? Flying Komodo lizards? Of course they did not have to "be" anything; in almost Zen-like fashion they were the energetic essence of saurian grace. "Ki" the program explains--"Chi," Tai Ch'i-ists would say. I confess, I wouldn't mind having one of those in my living room.

2003-06-13T14:58:00.000-04:00
Playing Hooky...
(When asked, a colleague thought I should spell this word, "h-o-o-c-k-y.") This is not so. However, I was driven in turn to the Oxford Universal Dictionary, its pages rippling in the damp meat locker cool of my air conditioned office. No "hoocky," and no "hooky". Two definitions of "hooker" struck me, though: "One or that which hooks--" and btw, not one off-color definition of the verb, "to hook"--and either a two-masted Dutch fishing boat, a "one-masted fishing smack on the Irish coast, similar to a hoy [small Dutch coastal ship, loaded with passengers and goods, like a sloop--misread by this writer as "buoy"] in build," or finalmente also applied "depreciatively or fondly to a ship...." This latter definition is associated with the date "1823" (will someone please tell me why?) and seafaring: hence, the Lady of the Night who greets the Old Salt just docked in the harbor....
Where was I?
Well, this AM, sitting between a British ornithologist and a lank Texan escritor, both built decidedly on the vertical scale, both budding fans of Sumo--most assuredly a bit more horizontal in flava. Perhaps thoughts seafaring came from discussing the pre-Moby Dick Melville novel, Mardi, and the habits of birds in troubled times: "They hoodle," says mein freunde Ornithologistiche (imagine a Liverpool accent here), handing over a cookie with a puffin painted on it. Penguins Unite! Penguinos unidos, jamas [seran] vencidos! "Say hoy to the Hirish hooker who hoodles..."(Never mind--)
I goofed, bleeped up. Lo, it 'twas not Gary Giddings--but GIDDINS, la ultima "g" no hay--ningun, nada. Desculpame, or--I love it!--literally, "unfault me"--undo those chay-chay- chay-a-a-a-ains, those chains of ... Fo'give me. Still I do not recant regarding my concern about the proper libations to the appropriate bebop divines.
But I really AM playing hoo-ky and must to work. A'dieu, dear reader whoever, whereever, if you ever, are...
Avanti Populo...dada dadada da...

2003-06-11T01:39:00.000-04:00

Going Blogistic, or On Blogalinguistics
In my meanderings in the winkin and blinkin kingdom of blog, I ran across a nit pickin at the term itself, that is a pickin at the dear old clunky and very anglo-saxon--no, magyar-hungarian, um, slovenian, russo-turko-byallmeansnecessarian--word "blog". One person wrote-- my, my-- "I use 'weblog' whenever I can." Pardonnez-moi, but la-ti-dah.
I declare-'ear ye, 'ear ye!--'ere and meow! I d'eclai-uh, I loves the word blog! It has that clandestine feel, that slightly crepuscular, wee hours of the night with too many cigarette butts (would that I could but I can't any more) in the ashtray, a little too much amontillado, the heat not functioning quite properly--the tone sepia, the sounds brittle then still. Ahh! a selection of Andre Breton or maybe Vallejo on a low table...the smell of onions, garlic, forbidden flesh planked and sizzling... In the background, Astor Piazzolla lurches into Milonga para Tres... poor mad Bud Powell enters his Invisible Cage, Like Someone in Love...
Blog gracelessly does not end with a vowel, like French, or like Spanish. (Tis a poor thing but mine own.) Reminds me of "Vlad" a tall blonde transvestite radical who I used to see hanging out at the local coffee shop, primping. Is not respectable, vaunteth not itself up, misses the elegant, lets its slip show, belches at the dinner table, tracks mud into the house--whah Ah jes think it's fahn, jes the way youwah, hunney! A blogisablog isablog, une glob, une blogette, magog y bla-gog?

2003-06-08T00:37:00.000-04:00

How Tasty Was My Little Adventurer*
I have just finished watching KEEP THE RIVER ON YOUR RIGHT, a documentary about Tobias Schneebaum, artist, anthropologist, accidental cannibal--and, while he is at it, "Lifer," as he calls himself, having always lived in New York. At 78 he revisits people and places especially important to him. That included two tribes of headhunters, one located in the Indonesian part of New Guinea (Asmat), and the other in the jungles of Peru. In the latter, long ago, he ate human flesh.
Not to get too psychological, but in revisiting, he seemed able to put to rest some things that clearly haunted him all his subsequent life, though his capacity to tolerate, even understand, cultures different from his own seemed rather expansive to begin with. Such a fragile man now, but even in his slender youth, it was hard to imagine him trekking 8 days along a rainforest path to find his Peruvian group without getting jumped by a jaguar or nibbled on by some other creature in the rainforest.
He comments that he has done everything he wanted to do in life...Ahhh! that is yet another comment to store in that little pidgeon hole, along with the Edgar Lee Masters' headstone epitaph of the man with furled sail on his grave--he never got out of the harbor--and other less poetic admonitions to get on with it, even if 'it' is not so extreme as Schneebaum's. Oh you, inexorable Time--wait! waitaminit!

*I confess: title snitched, in paraphrase, from HOW TASTY WAS MY LITTLE FRENCHMAN, a film on a similar theme by Brazilian filmmaker Nelson Dos Santos.
P.S. Time, and time se mueve...
Speaking of which, I continue to marvel at the amount of time it takes to get halfway round that world. In Schneebaum's old haunts, Mom is mobile again: Friday, June 06, 2003 at 08:32:44 PM (EDT) - Eastern Daylight (New York, Toronto)--or Saturday, June 07, 2003 at 00:32:44 (UTC) - Coordinated Universal Time, Saturday, June 07, 2003 at 10:32:44 AM local time at epicenter, a whoppah: 6.7 in Papua, New Guinea. So cataclysmic events will always happen tomorrow in New Guinea, if one lives in 'the West'; and the West may pretend to being unduly miraculous and insightful. Indeed, prognosticative. Humphh!

2003-06-07T01:51:00.000-04:00

Doggies!
At 6:08:29:33 EST on Friday, June 06, 2003--07:29:33 AM local time--an earthquake of 4.5 hit Kentucky--KENTUCKY??? 20 miles SW of Paducah, KY. Too many mares pounding their hooves at the--get this--New Madrid Fault line? We are told we can feel that one miles, yea, many miles from the epicentro.

2003-06-06T23:01:00.000-04:00

Gift(s)
Last night, after the viewing and en route home, the cab driver talks on his cell phone in a language whose intonations sound vaguely like American English, but I know it is really an African language. So I ask. As it turns out, it is "a mix. Mandinga and French." AH...I light up, because--and I tell him this--in the Afro-Brazilian art of Capoeira, it is very special to have "mandinga" --sagacity, guile, street smarts. His gift in return is a story of how his country, Cote d'Ivoire, began. "The Woman Who Spoke Very Little."
This woman is with her group ("sa groupe"--he does not say "tribe" or "ethnic group") and they are being pursued by another to the banks of the River Komoe--"une flueve qu' s'appelle Komoe." The spirits of the river will not let them pass. She begs them.
"Non."
Finally, she holds up her infant son, "et les anges" agree to take him. The waters of the river part, leaving a dry path, the group crosses, and the waters return. Those who have crossed are "les fondateurs de la Cote d'Ivoire."
The gift of death. The gift of life.
Selah.

2003-06-05T14:23:00.000-04:00

Blogging Bhutoh and Beyond...Hur-ry, hur-ry!!
When I was doing nothing but writing about dance, I followed the career of a young Bhutoh enthusiast--a 'gringo', mind you--who had fallen in love with that Japanese avant garde dance form, gone to Japan and learned Japanese, sat at the appropriate feet, and returned all fired up about the connections between Bhutoh and Noh. He was on his way out to make his artistic pilgrimmage to New York City, when we connected in New England, had coffee, took a long walk, chatted at length. Right then and there, in my living room, he sang me a Noh song. Now he is at Columbia getting an advanced drama degree, teaching, performing, going at it with his customary gusto. Every summer, he teaches "Bhutoh and Beyond"--Bhutoh camp, I guess you'd call it. I reprint his email announcing his classes:
"BUTOH & BEYOND"
Workshops with Jeff Janisheski
(No prior dance or theatre experience necessary)

SUMMER SCHEDULE:
SERIES I: Tuesdays (June 17 - July 29) 6:00 - 8:00pm
SERIES II: Wednesdays (June 18 - July 30) 6:00 - 8:00pm
RES/INFO: Jeff @ 646-456-0547, jjanisheski@hotmail.com
FEE PER SERIES (7 sessions): $105 [Discount for past "Butoh & Beyond"
students: $84]

LIMITED SPACE AVAILABLE: Call/email to register before June 10th.

THE WORKSHOP:
BUTOH AND BEYOND is a fusion of the ancient and the avant-garde. These
workshops offer intensive training in both Butoh (Japan's revolutionary
contemporary dance) and Noh (Japan's traditional, ritualistic theatre)

INSTRUCTOR:
JEFF JANISHESKI has been performing Butoh since 1989, when he trained and
performed with Natsu Nakajima‚s Muteki-sha Butoh Dance Company at La Mama in
New York. He studied intensively in Japan for three years with Kazuo Ohno,
the ninety-five year-old master and co-creator of Butoh; he also trained for
over two years with Richard Emmert, a professional Noh teacher.

Since 1997, Jeff has been teaching his own Butoh & Beyond workshops in dance
studios and colleges, and has been a guest lecturer on Japanese dance and
theater at various colleges (including NYU and The New School). He has
received numerous grants and awards, including the Japan Foundation Artist
Fellowship to research the connections between Noh and Butoh. This winter he
was a guest artist teaching Butoh at NYU. In the fall of 2003 he is
co-organizing New York's first annual Butoh Festival.

2003-06-04T00:31:00.000-04:00

aha...
All quiet on the home front. Too quiet. The husband of a dear friend has died, and, as ambivalent as I have felt about the deceased at times--a dear friend has died. Tough guy, angry guy, bully, always trying to help--even shove help down your throat. A man who loved his children ferociously, not necessarily wisely or well, but with unstinting loyalty. It was difficult for my friend to be his wife. In the end, though, past the rage, rage, at the dying of the light, at the extinguishing of one's Self, one's Ego, one's I, he gave in to the enormity of his own heart.
Usually people are not changed by the knowledge of their coming death; but Jeffrey was. When I go over to the house, I keep thinking I'll find him sitting on the couch--weak, thin, but so happy to see me, suddenly more loving; and trying to understand his presence and his absence remind me how imperfect we are, and why it is necessary not to judge. Rather, I try to remember how hard it is to be a feeling person in this world. Perhaps even more so if you are a man.
It is their custom to sit with the bereaved for a certain period of time, to bury the dead within three days: I am not sure how long the sitting period is supposed to be, I only know what they have been doing. It takes up time--every night you go, you sit, you drink, you eat, you talk sometimes of trivial things, sometimes of the dead, of memories, then have another cookie or leap up and help clean up. You could be doing something else. Sometimes it even feels like a chore, an obligation, and it is. But when this is over, I, they, will feel as if we have genuinely put Jeff to rest. With respect.
Then my widowed friend must sit with herself. Alone. Now begins what Emily Dickinson called, "the hour of lead."

2003-05-31T23:37:00.000-04:00

Going over 20 MPH...
If I may depart from the usual scrutiny of things ahty and fahty, I want to tell you about what came in over the wires this week. A 23-year old Yaley, Marc Bush, has organized something he calls "Bike and Build" which, if I understand it correctly, both raises construction money for new houses for the homeless, and makes good PR for Habitat for Humanity. Mind you, this Bush went to work for a mere 4 months at Goldmann & Sachs, made more money than the average 21 year-old ever does (let alone the recipients of these house-building funds), and bankrolled it so he could develop the bike and build project. The idea is relatively simple: each participant raises $3750, then takes to their wheels for a two-month, 3,650-mile bike trek that started on May 17th from Virginia Beach, Virginia, and will end July 19, in Portland, Oregon. En route, the 20 participants, who have broken up into four or five teams, will help build Habitat homes for six days. In exchange for a night's stay, "each team will give a bicycle maintenance lesson and a presentation about the project," according to The Riverdale Press, Marc Bush's hometown newspaper.
Alas, the Press has no interactive website, so there is no link that allows bloggers to check it out, but the live link above will take you to Bike & Build's website. From there, if you click where indicated, you will be taken to their blog. The last entry I read was a rhapsody about biking along the nation's highways over 20 MPH.
I just love it! RRRRRRRReeeeee-uhd all aboutit! "Yale Graduate Quits Goldmann-Sachs--Doesn't Make a Million on His First Start-Up Project!"

2003-05-28T13:33:00.000-04:00

And all that jazz...
After hopping up and down about Stanley Crouch's dismissal from JazzTimes, I thought I was done with this! Stanley will teach Duke Ellington at Columbia next semester, and I will indiosyncratically track matters seismological. End of rant--right?
Wrong. Gary Giddings' remark in an otherwise not altogether awful review in the Village Voice of the Savoy collection All That Jive has sent me around the bend. (And I plead--I am only a fan.) I quote:
Yet Milkowski [Giddings refers to Bill Milkowski's "encyclopedia of jive," Swing It!] defines a jitterbug as "a swing fan," while many of his jivesters are devoted to bop or r&b. So clarification is in order. I suggest: a wacky, usually "inside" mode of humor associated with but not exclusive to African American musical idioms generated between World War I and the Korean War. Even that embrace, however, fails to account for the 18 tracks on the Savoy collection All That Jive. And neither does the subtitle "Jazz Classics With a Swinging Sense of Humor," unless straight readings of "Round Midnight" and "The Way You Look Tonight" crack you up.
I wish Robin Kelley were here to tell me I am wrong!
What (I hope) I learned from sitting in on his class at Columbia University on "Jazz and the Political Imagination" was everything Giddings leaves out. That is, a whole history of jazz during the period our a-historical Giddings just leaves out--poof! Just like that. To improvise, furthermore and IMHO, is to do a variety of things, not the least of which is to play with the listener. But if the listener is a boobus americanus, fugeddaboutit. You have to know what Diz is doing to get the joke. You have to know that bebop can do anything it damn well pleases so long as, at some point, it gets back to that next note in the tune--including pull yo leg, talk back to your sorry ass, celebrate, calibrate, calisthenixate, and soforth-ate. It appears, I might--oh humbly, of course--suggest, is that Giddings wants to whiten "his" jazz, to rip it away from its history--a large part of which is the black response to the e-rasism of racism--that Giddings wants to "not only" to death a mode of humor which, yes, dammit, IS exclusive to African American musical idioms. This humor comes out of the absurdity of being in a world where the white man cannot stand to be upstaged. And, I might add, ain't got no sense a humor. What allows other folks to laugh is that we have all been around this kind of enfant terrible before: that the humor is also history and people-specific, I say, should not be cause for one whit(e?) of qualifying ink.
Is Savoy guilty, then, in it's odd selection, for not wanting to offend the Great Upstager? if so why did Giddings not nail Savoy on some of these issues?
Still not better said: It don't mean a thing, if you ain't got that swing.

2003-05-27T23:45:00.000-04:00

M.I.O.T.M.A. (mother is on the....)

Crawling in late over the quake notification service: Momma moves at the Owen Fracture Zone 215 km NNE of Qalansiyah, Socotra Island, Yemen. This occurred at 5:46:06AM on Saturday May 23 but Friday 9:46:06 PM New Yawk time, 6:46:06 Left Coast time... What, dear Seimologists, is the "Owen Fracture Zone"?

2003-05-26T22:34:00.000-04:00

Mother is on the MOVE again...

Sadly, Algeria has been shaken. Then, give or take the 20-odd hours it takes to time to travel from all the way over there, to here, mother's been rockin and a' rollin in the Pacific: northern Japan; Minanao, Philippines; the Moluccas in Indonesia. That little red spider mite/star has been crawling all over the map again. Check my link at the left for more of de tales!

2003-05-24T22:42:00.000-04:00

PORTRAIT (WITH HORSE AND OTHERS)

Conceived and Created by Collision Theory

Text and Lyrics by Patricia Eakins
Original Music by Jon Madof

At HERE Arts Center
145 6th Ave (Spring & Broome)
NYC 10013
212 647-0202
www.here.org

Collision Theory's PORTRAIT (WITH HORSE AND OTHERS) is very daring to put up an apocalyptic vision. The End of It All is not a lightweight topic.

PORTRAIT's vision, further, is of a peasant world--and what, dear Reader, does a "peasant world" mean to an affluent Western audience in the 21st century? One assumes that it is an impoverished and malnourished one. Not always, but often. It happens there, as perhaps only a North American audience has the luxury of thinking, not here. Geographically and timewise, not here.

Indeed, Collision Theory, as CT explains:

"the success of this “peasant” world is in creating a neo-futuristic peasant world. Where history is referenced but we can clearly identify that we are in the future. They have gone so far into the future that they’ve gone backward. It’s so far into the future that some of it is like the past."

PORTRAIT's world is war-torn and like it's spiritual predecessors--Brecht's Mother Courage and at least in the staging of one production I have seen of Waiting For Godot--hope is less in evidence than a kind of inbred, animal persistence. Grimly, human beings go on because they are programmed to do so.

We must have relief. Thus, counterpoised to this is vigorous and well-executed dance, the music of Jon Modof, threaded with the plaintive echoes of kletzmer here, eastern improvisations, jazz, and good old rock and roll. But though the music is thoughtful, attentive to the themes, though Matt La Von's saxophone brilliantly converses with the actors singing, it is not cathartic.

Time is quite literally running out, as expressed in sand pouring down through a hole in the set upstage--set as hourglass--and the closest hope comes to putting in an appearance (always rooted in the future) it is a prophecy vested in a child (Moira MacDonald). Mother/whore (K Tanzer) delivers MacDonald to Granny (Tsuyoshi Kondo), a Mother Courage figure who holds no illusions about the child:

" Open your mouth. Open! Ah, teeth. I hope your mother taught you to bite. Are you a boy? Have you got a spigot? (Old Woman claws at the front of child’s clothing, looks down.) Feh! A girl! You might as well kill yourself."

The child's only toys are Granny's husband's bones.

As the piece moves on, through the war zone(s), bodies are cleared, former beauties recalled. Lyrics and music grow fierce:

"Four starv’d foxes in a field of ash,
Three empty cradles cold on a hearth,

Two wingless grackles, thorns through their beaks.

Mercy breath blown on the suffering world.
[blowing sound]
[blowing sound]
[blowing sound]

Mercy breath blown on the suffering world.

Strong men blow up the suffering world
BANG
BANG
BANG"

Books are burnt--is it censorship, or simply destroying the evidence?

“Burn tests and other evaluations performed under simulated battlefield conditions indicated that the health risks associated with the battlefield use of—“

The Librarian (K Tanzer) faces off the soldier (Jun Kim) who woodenly demands, as one might the sacrifice of 100 virgins in ancient times, books for food, fuel, dress… And yes, the Horse (Tsuyoshi Kondo) of the title, "prince of apples and carrots", talks. It and the soldier are in love.

Finally, the town gets hit, and this, THIS, is what it is like:

"This is like your soul is getting hit—all of you. The war is hitting your soul. The technology is so advanced that it attacks you in a more complex way than we are used to thinking of bombs, etc. It’s different kinds of warfare: psychological, spiritual combined with the physical."

Chaos.

Armageddon is bleak. The child brings dust, opened graves, and the visions are of what might have been. Only the prophecy holds out a faint promise, but not in this life:

"...our souls will fly up together, to the light."

To portray a world spiraling out of control within the humble confines of a black box performance area is, indeed, one of the hardest things I know to do. Balance is the challenge. Each element must behave, else chaos--and not the chaos demanded by its themes--will reign.

Seeing this piece in preview, I had my breath taken away by the text. Eakins' at times elliptical, very poetic language is another challenge to the performance; these words mean no fatootsing around. Period. Nothing less than a conscientious performance will do. In this regard, the work of Tsuyoshi Kondo, who plays both Granny and the Horse was outstanding. Kondo's physicality, as Granny, bore the weight of the world on those ancient shoulders and shed decades as the Horse. His concentration never faltered, nothing he did was superfluous.

Similarly, Moira MacDonald's Child was always the child, down to the last poignant moment when she walks away, suitcase spilling out a treasure of flowers, her absent mother's gifts.

Indeed, the physicality of the actors is what keeps us from being spirited away by the magic of the text. But it is much harder to balance live music (which can be overbearing just by dint of superior volume) and the actors' performance. I can't help but wish that the instruments were acoustic, though Modof's score was woven of the finest musical cloth.

This is work with depth, and well worth the trip downtown. (Fortunately, HERE's venue has a coffee and drinks spot right in the building, where you can stop. sit down and process what you've seen.) Do I recommend the it? By all means!

2003-05-24T20:20:00.000-04:00
Gallery-hopping with Leslie W., artista...

Staid Newjorquino that I am, I've spent two of the last 30 days being reintroduced to the world of contemporary art, in that reputedly vapid world of Chelsea Galleries. For one thing, it pays to go with someone in the biz.

AND I have a lovely cafe-acquaintance who is an abstract painter, another painter friend who is just getting back into it, a water colorist friend--we four have been visually feasting on paint--great brushfuls of the stuff laid on canvas with precise passion. The whole concept of not, I repeat, NOT, drawing but laying out a whole field of color and texture that is perhaps one thing close up and quite another as you reverse gears, back up, look from a distance... For one thing, looking more critically at what's up on those pristine white walls reaffirms the complexity, the subtlety of honest to god oil paints, as opposed to what I've always felt to be the kind of paint-by-numbers prefab colors of acrylic.

My fingers are itching--a sure sign that I have to dig out the art supplies!

2003-05-23T15:59:00.000-04:00

Take 2 Motrin and call your doctor in the morning...

Having had an unfortunate encounter with a flying commuter (he ran to catch the train right over your Intrepid, throwing moi onto the nice soft concrete of Columbus Circle station)-- Having had that said encuentro, I unexpectedly completed not only The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, but also the Tears of the Giraffe, the former's sequel. Waiting in the ER of a big city hospital, in the anteroom of a long holiday weekend, someone with only a mangled rotator cuff had best have something to read.

Anyhoo, back to the book. The No. 1 Ladies is a crime novel torte, layered with the sense of following a clue, overlaid with thoughts of the human condition, overlaid with the elaboration of ordinary people as characters, their stories, over, over. The set up is simple. Mma Precious Ramotswe buys a business with the modest sum left her by her father, Obed Ramotswe: it is a detective agency, and she sets out on this non-traditional career with quirky simplicity and grace.

Mma Ramotswe is a decent, "traditionally built African woman," with her own personal sorrows, who unearths infidelities of husbands (and wives, let's be fair), who finds the lost, averts simple disasters and tussles with her conscience when it comes to telling her clients their respective and painful truths. All the while we are absorbing the feel of Botswana, former British Protectorate (but never South African Bantustan), with the Kalahari Desert as its back 40, with its orderly ways, it's loyal citizens. For those of us who do not know thorn trees, we learn to see them, to smell the slight dampness of dawn, to sense when the October heat is coming on.

Now I am not even a crime novel fan--or let us say that I read few of them and I do not read them for the kicks of the crime(s) under investigation. My preference has been writers like Walter Mosley, Chester Himes, who write about people whose humanity springs up through stubborn soil, indeed, though not the same kind as Mma Ramotswe's. But next time you are in pain, relegated to a dusty corner in the ER as the knifing victims and coronary infarctions roll in, when you are too cantankerous yourself to submit to the mindless analgesic of the television set, and you are perhaps contemplating your own damage suit--visit the No. 1 ladies Detective Agency in the Republic of Botswana. You'll be glad you did.

2003-05-20T18:51:00.000-04:00
Giddy-yap lil doggie...
Having been made hideously late by a bumbling bus driver, I offer this account of the beginning of an early morning ride:
"Hang spring cleaning!" was, I believe, the clarion call of Mole in Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows: for his troubles, he got a rowboat ride down the Water Rat's glittering, adventurous river. Mole's wreckless buddy, Toad, responded to the call of the open road in his motorcar, to his later detriment. Without wheels or rowboat, I, alas, am subject to the slings and arrows of what passes for a public transportation system in this country. One flits up and down the Northeast Corridor via that adolescent androgyne with wings (it is dressed in green) or one takes The Dog. Neither offer schedules that suit anyone; and both, I submit, are not only dawgs, they are the dregs of dogdom.
One need only visit their kennels, for starters. At 5 AM, 42nd Street's Port Authority is now secured by orange netting and pipe-like barriers that funnel you in through the only entrance that time of the morning, past someone who runs after you--"Miss, oh Miss/ Mr./Ma'am, can I see your identification, please?" A sufficiently withering gaze, a quizzical "who are you?" and the pit bull at the gate slinks away, no doubt to go off and lick himself.
You're in. The place is filthy, and most stands are closed, draped with an excess of canvas, except for a newstand manned by someone from the Subcontinent and, further on, some kind culinary arrangement that would make the lunchroom at Attica Correctional Facility look like the Hotel Pierre. No women, just a few fat white guys and several men in do-rags and baggy clothes. "Aren't there any places where you can get some food around here?" I ask a man with a tin badge on his chest. "Everything opens at 5:30--" he offers. My bus leaves at 5:45, I mutter. I walk along the darkened counters filled with uncomplicated carbohydrates, chips, and day-old deep fried chicken parts for cholesterol loading--someone still eats this way? This is food I cannot even contemplate! (Ah, yes, food to be thrown to the dawgs!)
I am rarely first in line, but the gateway where the bus was due to come in seemed the only place to go. A man--yes, a fat white guy--sits on top of a huge duffle bag, propped up against the tiled walls, snuffling atop a protruding belly, like a Daumier etching. He sneezes and blows his nose, reaches into a huge black suitcase beside him and pulls out a paper napkin. He proceeds to tear the napkin in half, sneeze, blow his nose. And so on. And so on--you get the picture. A rather nicely dressed woman--in her sixties I would guess--has flopped across her rollaway suitcase. Her head thrown back, she is clearly in some kind of Kafkaesque dreamland. She does not stir as we passengers assemble--should I wake her? (I desist, but, climbing aboard, and all along the early morning highways, I wonder if I should have.)
The dog stirs. It lurches out onto the road again.

2003-05-19T10:02:00.000-04:00
Mother earth news:

Almost tomorrow, Monday, May 19th, at 10:43:22 PM (UTC), the Fiji region sustained an earthquake, 6.0 on the Escala Richter. That was early today, 6:43:22 AM EST in New York, even earlier--3:43:22 AM PDT--on the Left Coast. Immediately the National Earthquake Information Service marked a map of the region with a red-spider-mite-colored star at the epicenter, noting that it lay 1350 miles NNE of Auckland, New Zealand.

Some Californians know this already, no doubt, but in 1940 an earthquake of a magnitude of 7.1 shook the Imperial Valley in southern California, causing a horizontal movement that adjusted the international border between California and Mexico by several feet.

2003-05-18T13:45:00.000-04:00
Babble...

In the Do Renew Your Acquaintance With Department: The Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, between Bleeker and Houston or www.bowerypoetry.com . At the behest of Ed Foster, a fine poet, a tireless publisher (Mr. Talisman House Press himself) and a good friend--at Ed Foster's urging I went to a publication party/book signing/reading yesterday. Joe Donohue read from his new Incidental Eclipse and Leonard Schwartz read from his new The Tower of Diverse Shores. Both books are published by Talisman, btw.

Donohue presents himself as a quiet and reflective poet, but he flooded his audience with a spring thaw of imagery, with visions almost too complex to absorb in one swell foop. Thus, you scamble to get that book! I understand that Donohue is a bit shy, that reading does not come easily to him, and that he was unusually reserved this time. So be it. I will still return to that fuente, that book, to read some more.

But this reminds me that contemporary poetry, in somewhat adolescent gesture, often snubs the oral (and aural) in favor of print--that "recollected in tranquility" stuff of English Romanticism. My old mentor, Jim Tate, once said (though I would not want to hold him to it) that reading poetry aloud wasn't really all that important. Cripes! Were we on our collective poetic toes, the phrase "performance poetry," would be regarded as it should be--redundant--and should there ever be a book-burning again, we word mavens could still recite, nay declaim, our most cherished poetry by heart.

Schwarz's The Tower of Diverse Shores was beautifully blurbed by Bajan poet Kamau Brathwaite who himself combines the visual of print styles with oral consciousness. Oddly, I could almost hear Brathwaite tapping his lectern rhymically, as he does in his own readings: I could almost hear the sounds of Caribbean tongues lap at my ear as Schwartz read from his own very North American context. Schwartz reads well, interacts with his audience, and feasts the ear with his music. I submit:

( Pay attention to the labials; check the mike, please.)

The New Babel

"Babel is of course the fall of a Tower, followed by a vast, manipulated confusion of words.

"Babble is language's beginning, before it's a language, while it's still song.

"As Babel is both a ground and a zero, Middle English grund and Arabic zefir, cipher, Gallicized zero--let's call it Ground Zero.

"Babel is a defiance of the demiurge and hubris of the heart, ziggurat aimed at suns yet unborn, inside the mouth the mouth as desire: man creates gods."

"New Babel/Babble" did not wimp out at the end. It did not turn to sentimental ash in the mouth. It rang loud. It was not recited from memory, passed down (though it's references were) from generations of mouths, yet this poem could be memorized, freed from the page, ready willing and able to resucitate our collective memory for a long, long time.

Soon-soon: Preview of Collision Theory's PORTRAIT (WITH HORSE AND OTHERS), wordsmithed by Patricia Eakins.

2003-05-16T18:29:00.000-04:00
Hue and Cry...

Me, I confess, I am a beboppist. I have never been down with the jazz traditionalists who go to see jazz petrified and laid out at Lincoln Center Funeral Home. In consequence, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Stanley Crouch-ist.

Now let me also say that I read with horror of Crouch's recent firing from the Jazz Times. Conservative, curmudgeonly though he may have been--so what? That, dear Reader, is a critic. A critic, well, CRITICIZES. And, yes, sometimes he or she even snipes. Get out of the kitchen if you can't stand the heat.

Just what did Stanley do? Tsk, tsk. This African American critic had the temerity to contend that, in the world of jazz, born out of long years of black experience in the US of A--in jazz, white jazz critics have been elevating white musicians "far beyond their abilities" to "make themselves feel more comfortable about...evaluating an art from which they feel substantially alienated." In the May 14th Village Voice, Jazz writer Daniel King (himself white), points out that the field of jazz criticism is, in fact, dominated by white critics; and when you ask someone to name a well-known black jazz critic, only one name rushes to their lips--Stanley Crouch. There is smoke, there is fire.

Apparently Crouch also claimed, in a brilliant metaphor, that white writers born in "middle class china shops" ensure "the destruction of the Negro aesthetic" by advancing the mediocre ofay musician. (I believe we used to call that "co-opting" in the 70s, did we not?) Id est, if a writer scraps his or her white privilege and joins a black endeavor--out of love, admiration, and decency he or she dasn't don't toot they horn in favor of those whose horns haven't paid they respects, let along they dues. Crouch's bosses seem to have forgotten their history: a past when big bands shed their black members to go out with white people, as opposed to being able to dance the night away interracially in black clubs or over the radio waves where none of their white audiences could see their color.

Music, Stanley's bosses would no doubt contend, has no color; it's a universal language. Blah, blah, blah. Nope. Ignore its history and it will bite you! Yes, but the people who play it, promote it; yea, those who listen and get to tell others about it--being varied in hue, are treated variously, according to social perceptions of color and the practices built up around it.

Indeed, why send someone a pink slip just because he voiced an opinion which, if you actually examine the superstructure of institutionalized racism, deserves a more thoughtful response. Pink slip? why they sent him an email!

Imagine sending white critic, Nat Hentoff, a pinkmail!

2003-05-12T19:51:00.000-04:00
Hmmmm--soap operas...
No one who knows me would ever ask me to review a soap opera. For almost my entire life, I have not had a television set.

While I certainly applaud any attempt to be creative with celluloid, pixels, neon, digitized whatevuh, in my mind, video art does not equal TV and, therefore, it (the former) is forgiven. Turning to the latter (TV) I confess that I now have a small second-hand television, bought from a grad student who was going off to teach in Ankara, Turkey. The price of cable seemed frivolous, so all I could receive was three channels and a whole lot of snow. I watched the news on September 11th till it was clear that the one station--er, channel--was in a loop and was repeating itself, endlessly, endlessly. Click. I lurched out of bed in the wee small hours to watch the World Cup on Canel somethingerother (don't ask--just so long as it was in Spanish. Gringo stations still don't know how to cover soccer on the mini-screen!)

Then, I got hooked on Spanish language telenovelas--"soaps," to you, amigo. I thought it would mejorar mi español. People wearing fancy dresses and suits and ties flew from New York to Cancun to [Cuidad] Mexico: their public lives were powerful; their personal lives, smarmy. A goofy guy got a makeover, overnight becoming "muy guapo," incredibly handsome, attracting women like the brightest flower on the vine, and all the while, his wife was dying. One theme ran strong: when all else fails, Ophelia, you can get thyself to a nunnery: the fiance is lured away by your evil Papí and you are led to believe he has fallen out ot the sky in an airplane? Go bang at the convent doors! Want to spare your loved ones the chore of caring for you in your last ugly hours? Take those vows! Genuflect, genuflect--as the old sixties comedian, Tom Lehrer would chant--let's do the Vatican rag! At one point I went out of town, and, upon my return, I found my favorite character in a suspicious-looking stone courtyard, gazing upwards, clothed head to toe in--you guessed it--a habit. I don't mind telling you, I was on pins and needles waiting for her man to get her out of there!

My brief and tawdry fling, however, is over. Real life has intervened. The TV sits on top of a fake arts and crafts file cabinet with a piece of African kuba cloth artfully draped over it; the few videos I have purchased gather dust at a distance, on the bottom of the adjacent bookshelf. I watch DVDs on my computer.

Requiscat en pacem my soap opera watching career.

Amen.

But a friend has asked me to post this, FOUR POINTS ALERT (have I got that right?) for all you operas de sopa--soup opera--fans... I mean, escritores de jabon? Telenovelistas?

In all seriousness, friends, this is a worthy endeavor:

The Community Theatre Internationale is looking for writers with soap opera experience to contribute to a cross-border soap opera that takes place in both Kenya and New York. The script, performances and production is being developed now through community participation in both countries. The focus will be on characters and plot lines that highlight the myriad of issues raised by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Predicted to soon kill more people than all the wars of the 20th century, the globalization of AIDS raises fundamental economic, political, social and moral questions for the human race. For those of us bearing the brunt of the pandemic, the project offers an antidote to isolation and stigma. For those not in the line of fire, it is an alternative to paralysis and silence in the face of incomprehensible statistics of devastation.*

Soap opera, a genre beloved in both countries, promises to be a fruitful and entertaining vehicle for exploring the difficult and very intimate issues of love, sex and relationships in the age of AIDS.

The Community Theatre Internationale is dedicated to creating community through performance. across borders local and global. A non-profit organization, CTI develops multi-media, collaborative productions between community-based ensembles in different parts of the world. Mixing live performance with video and Internet technology, we create "stages" on which ordinary people from around the globe gather to make theatre and art. If you are interested, please contact Kate Gardner, Artistic Director, at kate@communitytheatre.org. In the meantime, please visit our website at www.communitytheatreintl.org .

*HIV/AIDS is part of daily life in Kenya-where one out of three people are infected. With life-saving drugs unavailable, an estimated 600 Kenyans die every day from the disease.

In the United States, HIV/AIDS has moved underground, striking the poor and excluded--with Black gay men and young Black and Latina women most vulnerable. CTI's home base, Brooklyn, is the epicenter of AIDS in America.

2003-05-04T12:32:00.000-04:00
(Actually, it's 11 May 2003)

Bienvenidos, Compañeros, Friends and Reader(s)!

Why am I doing this? A certain nostalgia, a yen for the old journalistic beat with reviews weekly, and my life organized around opening nights? The smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd? All the reflective pieces and offbeat reviews I wanted to do, but couldn't?

It just seemed like a good idea.

I notice that tomorrow of six days ago was el Cinco de Mayo (Ay-yai, yai-yai) so it seemed as good a time as any to catch that mariachi by the coattails with my little blogacita. Upon the occasion of Cinco de Mayos of yore, I used to celebrate Mexico's National Holiday at an appropriately designated restaurant with a certain friend, no more Mexican than I am, and fajitas and margueritas, fajitas y margueritas, molés y margueritas, flan y margueritas y margueritas, y margueritas... Those days are gone. The friend has disappeared into the horizon, someplace in Boston, I think, or into a twelve step program; and I, alas, no longer carry on in such a disgraceful fashion.

Entonces, imagine your invisible reflector, revistor, resplendant as Quetzal, feathers poking out from under a large sombrero, in white shirt and pants, a double magazine of fountain pens criss-crossed over my chest. ¡Viva Mexico! ¡Viva la Revolucíon!

¡Viva la reflecíon!

EN ROUTE: (An opening night--hot dawg!) For all Newjorquinos, please note that next week I shall sink my teeth into the following:

Collision Theory's
"Portrait (with Horse and Others)"

Conceived, directed, and choreographed by Stephanie Gilman and
K Tanzer

Song lyrics and texts by Patricia Eakins
Music by Jon Madof

A town beyond time. Talking bones, an edible library, and a horse that
thinks aloud. Collision Theory's fusion of movement, music and text yields
a potent theater of images that links the familiar and the fantastic. In
PORTRAIT (WITH HORSE AND OTHERS) the company presents a theatrical
meditation on love, war, and memory, featuring live music.

May 17th - June 7th
On the main stage at HERE
145 Sixth Avenue (between Spring and Broome)
New York City, NY
U.S.A.

Tickets and information 212-647-0202