Not in My Name

Of course, right after that last post, he went right back on the air and fulfilled all our lowest expectations.  Supposedly speaking for America.

Nope.  Not in my name.

But some 30% of the population still seems to think this is all a-ok?

I guess that isn't (or shouldn't be) as much of a surprise as people are reacting like it is, because it's been part of the program all along.  Not the "line 'em up and shoot 'em" part, but the "everybody just keep feeding all the wealth and power this way and no one gets hurt" part.  This piece by Lindy West in the Times does a good job of calling it out to the Republicans who are responding, rightly, if only out of self-interest, to denounce the words of a president gone off the rails:

It is easy to denounce Nazis. Republican lawmakers, if you truly repudiate this march and this violence, then repudiate voter-ID laws. Repudiate gerrymandering. Repudiate police brutality. Repudiate mass incarceration and private prisons. Repudiate the war on drugs. Repudiate the fact that black Americans have still not been compensated for the unpaid forced labor that was foundational to white financial stability. Repudiate gun control obstructionism. Repudiate the Muslim ban. Repudiate the wall. Repudiate anti-abortion legislation. Repudiate abstinence-only education. Repudiate environmental deregulation. Repudiate birtherism. Repudiate homophobia and transphobia. Repudiate your own health care bill, which would have led to the deaths of thousands more people than a Dodge Challenger driven into a crowd. Repudiate your president.

Everyone else, wherever you are on the spectrum of humanity, this is a good moment for us to confront our own assumptions and biases, figure out what we need to work on to change and the best ways to do it. This is hard work, but it’s worth doing. Oh, and it goes on forever. 

One more quote – you’ve probably seen this one, but it bears repeating. It's Angela Davis, from a talk in Carbondale, IL in 2014.

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.  

Photo: Scott Olson

Fighting Mass Incarceration

So this weekend sucked something fierce. Literal Nazis figuratively trolling the nation, at the cost of at least three lives and putting at risk whatever dignity America has left. Taking ideals of justice and equality and pissing on them in the glow of burning crosses and tiki torches picked up in the garden supply department on their way to the white hood convention.

Not that anyone paying attention has a tremendous amount of faith left in the ‘justice’ system in this great land of ours.

My response [other than to tumble in to the Fbook rabbit hole for a minute and do some howling at the TV and at the walls of the apartment] was to go to Secret Project Robot on Saturday afternoon-into-evening for their benefit for JustLeadershipUSA under the name “Music Against Mass Incarceration.”

Think of it as a blow against the empire. Or at least the prison industrial complex.

Amazing set from Sunwatchers

My new favorite band, 75 Dollar Bill.  

Incredible performance from Brandon Lopez Trio (Nate Wooley on trumpet, Gerald Cleaver percussion)


Chris Forsythe & Solar Motel Band

Gold Dime

You don't need me to rattle off the stats - the prison system is out of control and in danger of spiraling even worse; it targets the poor and people of color, arguably by design.  That day, rather than get sucked in and take the bait of the King of the Trolls and his Address to the Nation - absolutely enraging though it was - I showed up, paid my admission, and engaged with some actual, living, positive creation.  For what it's worth, I recommend it.

Oh, Canada

We went to Toronto for the first time on Canada Day Weekend (which intersects with 4th of July weekend, as it happens).  Charmed as hell to see this guy as the plane flew into the city airport.  

This year celebrates Canada's 150th birthday, so recognitions of that were all over the place.

Not content to have one night of parties for such a big milestone, there were concerts and fireworks several days in a row - we caught one incarnation.

Our first stop after checking in was the SkyDome (which is now named after a cell service company, I guess) for a Blue Jays/Red Sox game.  We missed the first inning and change because, well, we were coming to the game from Newark, but that did not spoil our day. The dome was open when we got there, but some rain started a few innings in so they closed it mid-game.

Our next stop was a brewery/restaurant, where we grabbed seats at the bar and got as much info from the fantastic bartender as we could about places to go.  

We walked our asses off, like you do when you're in a city you don't (yet) know well. Great city, many fab neighborhoods, super friendly people, really good food and drink, good public transportation, great street art, robust art & performance scene all around.

On multiple recommendations, we went to the AGO and caught, among other things, a show focusing on Canadian artists, with a particular eye on indigenous artists [as you can imagine, the whole "this nation was formed 150 years ago! Woo hoo!" story plays pretty differently among the indigenous population and allies].  Also caught a retrospective of Rita Letendre, whom I hadn't heard of; the show was an excellent, necessary corrective to that.

So yes, Oh, Canada - you're not perfect, and your dreamboat of a Prime Minister has made some sketchy compromises and gets off super easy because of his disastrous counterpart to the south, but you are a (relatively) open society with an eye on human rights, and what appears to be an open mind about truth and reconciliation with the people who have lived on this continent for millennia.

Plus, Toronto has an airport you can get to via a 90 second ferry ride, which is pretty bitchin.

Tales from Three Cities

Not that I have necessarily been seeking them out, but stories about gentrification (and hyper-gentrification, which appears to be where we are now) have been increasingly crossing my field of vision.

Los Angeles (Boyle Heights specifically) - a group of tenant activists claim that an influx of artists and shops perceived to be art-adjacent (and arguably investment properties disguised as art spaces) are harbingers of community-eviscerating gentrification already in the works.

Photo: Timo Saarelma

San Francisco - a much less nuanced tale of landlords literally (allegedly) burning down dwellings in order to get rid of protected tenants. Appalling.

Closer to home, an event at the great Housing Works bookstore cafe in New York - drawn to that while hunting down information about the announced closing of the Sunshine Cinema.  It's a launch for the book version of the fabulous-while-infuriating Vanishing New York, complete with a performance by friend and fellow-traveler Penny Arcade.  This is happening next Thursday, July 27 - see you there.

Keep Your Eye on the Bali

SO much going on.

Covfefe distracts, while the Climate Agreement may actually be abandoned in a few minutes.  I mean, it's not a surprise, it's what he's said all along, and his policies - such as they are - have eroded environmental protections and will continue to no matter what momentary lip service the president ends up paying to international scientific rigor.  And the noise is such, that people seem not to be noticing that department after life-saving department is atrophying from neglect (or crumbling under abuse).  Not least - lest we forget - millions of our Fellow Americans continue to view such things as worthy of very slight consideration, if not cause for celebration.

This state of affairs has been, is, and continues to be intolerable, and I condemn it.  So there.

In other news, we lost a giant of world music this week.  David Lewiston, whose name might not be at the front of your mind, but if you are have listened to indigenous music of Asia, Africa, or South America, to Gamelan, Tibetan chants, sacred song from around the world, there's a good chance he recorded it, or inspired the person who did.



Photo: NY Times/Nonesuch Records

Censorship and Speech

I had composed a pretty good (if I may say so myself; at any rate it took some effort) entry for my first post after what I think has been my longest hiatus from this platform since I began, in recognition of Day 101 of the current presidential administration.  It covered some of the events since the election, including national and international reactions, and wrapped with a parallel to Orwell’s Room 101.   But that batch of writing and linking was lost to the vagaries of the internets.  And so it goes.

Rather than try to recreate that, what I’m posting today is a set of two different perspectives on free speech and restrictions to speech published recently in the Times. 

From the first piece, by insistent dissident Ai Weiwei

The most elegant way to adjust to censorship is to engage in self-censorship. It is the perfect method for allying with power and setting the stage for the mutual exchange of benefit. The act of kowtowing to power in order to receive small pleasures may seem minor; but without it, the brutal assault of the censorship system would not be possible. 

For people who accept this passive position toward authority, “getting by” becomes the supreme value. They smile, bow and nod their heads, and such behavior usually leads to lifestyles that are comfortable, trouble free and even cushy. This attitude is essentially defensive on their part. It is obvious that in any dispute, if one side is silenced, the words of the other side will go unquestioned.

And from the second, by Ulrich Baer, vice provost at New York University. 

What is under severe attack, in the name of an absolute notion of free speech, are the rights, both legal and cultural, of minorities to participate in public discourse. The snowflakes sensed, a good year before the election of (the president), that insults and direct threats could once again become sanctioned by the most powerful office in the land. They grasped that racial and sexual equality is not so deep in the DNA of the American public that even some of its legal safeguards could not be undone. 

The issues to which the students are so sensitive might be benign when they occur within the ivory tower. Coming from the campaign trail and now the White House, the threats are not meant to merely offend. Like (the president's) attacks on the liberal media as the “enemies of the American people,” his insults are meant to discredit and delegitimize whole groups as less worthy of participation in the public exchange of ideas.

Both are worth a full read.  I have tended to be something of a free speech absolutist, though maybe not exactly the variety branded by Baer; however, Baer's points (or more accurately, points he distills from decades’ worth of writing and public discussion on the topic) are valid, and essential to consider when forming opinions - and policies - concerning, for example, speaking events on campuses. Baer hosted a fascinating panel at the NYU Law School “In Defense of Truth” a couple weeks ago, concerning the concept of truth - not least, the durability of ideas that feel true, across any spectrum you care to name - as seen through the lenses of art, journalism, and the law. 

For now, I'll leave you with a few more images touching on surveillance, education, infrastructure, and public protections from the Ai Weiwei show we saw at the Tate Modern a while back.

Saturday afternoon, Hoboken, NJ

Chill afternoon doing some around-the-apartment stuff; mostly routine, with the extra addition of disconnecting the cable box in the penultimate step in my cable company cord-cutting.  

Ideas for the new slogan for the cable TV division of Optimum/Cablevision:

"Staggeringly poor service for stunningly rich prices!"

"Our team is perfectly friendly, just not actually helpful."

Used the time to do some reading & writing, and have a listening session for a couple new acquisitions:

Amazing.  You have no idea.

Adventures in Public Art

Couple items from HyperAllergic, which has fast become one of my favorite sources for news from the art world.

First this, (read it!) about the amazing Carol Highsmith's billion-dollar scuffle with Getty Images over them charging for images THAT SHE DONATED to the Library of Congress.

And then getting even closer to home, this one, about the controversy over some Mr. AbiLLity street art (commissioned street art, mind you) in Jersey City. This is a city dear to my heart, likely the place I'd move to if I were moving to the area today, but which needs to get its ish together stat.

photo: @lifeisamother/Instagram

Between this nonsense at the Newark Ave. pedestrian plaza, and the ongoing obstructionism over at the Loew's Landmark Theater in Journal Square... it hath made me mad.  I mean, ok sure: Getty Images, eff them, what do you expect? (let's hope the courts make them pay richly for their greed)  But Jersey City ought to be a place that looks after the people who live and work there.




I know Mayor Fulop has his hands full fighting with Chris Christie, and I won't argue with that, but come on - this?  Stymying the artistic voices - the local, homegrown or transplanted artists right there in the middle of the living, breathing city - that actually add to the community?  Step it up, JC.

Perspective/Focus

Vantage from one of the days I was shooting The Accidental Wolf.

Channeling Coppola via Columbus Circle.

The night before, I got to drive around Hell's Kitchen with this rig strapped to the passenger door.

Should be a very good series - I'll let you know as things are released...

Trifecta

Three Shakespeare plays over three nights, Thursday through Saturday.  One was free, one pay-what-you-want, and one was the opposite of free.  Each has something unique to offer to this summer's Shakespeare season (made a little extra juicy by this year's commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.)

Troilus and Cressida from the Public/NYSF at the Delacorte; As You Like It from The Cradle Theatre in Prospect Park; The Merchant of Venice, which is the contribution to the Lincoln Center Festival from Shakespeare's Globe.

As I've said before (and will say again), I'm an actor, not a critic; no desire to pick these shows apart.  Dan Sullivan (whom I've known for a while) takes a really good swing at the very tricky pitch that is Troilus.  The curveballs of love and politics, the high heat of war, the secret signals that hold together the batteries of diplomacy and military intelligence.  Homeric Greece and Troy find their way to an Orwellian present of perpetual war.

Rebecca Etzine (whose tumblr I've admired for a while, and whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the show on Friday) delivered an As You Like It that is even more distinctly of today.  A young company of young artists turned a wooded part of Prospect Park into the forest of Arden - a few extra twists of gender and sexuality, plenty of playfulness, and a healthy dose of irreverence result in a show that is compelling, contemporary, and - most importantly - alive.  They're moving camp to Ft. Greene this weekend; check their website.  Cory missed this one, sadly; hey, this heatwave is a real thing, and not everyone's appetite for Shakespeare is quite as bottomless as mine, especially given that on the docket for the next night was...

Last and emphatically not least, Jonathan Pryce was Shylock in what is of the most brutal, and certainly one of the best, productions of Merchant I've ever seen.  While the staging and design is firmly in 16th Century Venice, the anti-semitism conjures all-too-current outbreaks in Europe and America.  Never (in my experience) has Shylock seemed so justified, never has Jessica been so disdained (even after her 'voluntary' conversion and marriage to Lorenzo), never has Antonio been such an asshole, and NEVER has Portia been such a snotty, snobby, vindictive prig (while still managing to be the smartest person in the room).  The final, added scene of Shylock's forced baptism was bitterly piercing.

Not much visual stimulation for you today, but here are a couple shots of Shakespeare's birthplace from our trip.  [What?? A side trip to Stratford-upon-Avon when we went to London?  Hey, he'll only have a 400th Deathiversary once.]

A couple exteriors of the gables.

A shot of a little one checking out the signatures scratched into the birthroom window.

And - why not? - a couple shots from Anne Hathaway's cottage, including Rudy, Cory, and Mol checking out the epic garden.

Common Ground

  

"If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope.  If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world." - Noam Chomsky

Pride

Pride March this past weekend, with the Anti Violence Project's group, particularly with Cat and Cleo, Cheri & Sadie, and of course Cory.  A good vibrant, loving group of people, and supporters for miles.  

The news reports talked about the somber tone in light of Orlando, and I won't pretend there weren't moments, or that there weren't tears.  But Stonewall had also just been declared a National Landmark, and love is love is love is love is love.

Tonight I was reminded at a screening of Neil Gaiman's exhortation (reminiscent of Bernstein's): in the wake of adversity, make good art.  A gathering like this, with family, friends, supporters, allies of every shape and size, counts as some version of that.

Celebrate

Brooklyn, that is.  Not Brexit.  That's a whole other box of wine.

Last weekend we went to our 2nd Celebrate Brooklyn show so far this season [the first was the amazing Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings.]  The opener was the formidable Kristin Hersh, sans Muses, but fully loaded with guitar and growl.

Next up were the Violent Femmes in all their glory.  I managed my expectations pretty strictly, having last seen them way back when in Madison, (practically a home town gig for a Milwaukee band) at something like their height.  I was just a kid, but it was on the short list of highest energy shows I had seen, and the crowd responded in kind.  Gordon Gano told the (extremely) college-centric audience at the Civic Center something along the lines of "You guys are making us feel like we made it to the Final Four."

Might have been a line he used everywhere.

This show was a lot less collegiate, and the middle-aged family folk in the chairs up front kept their prospects parked in their seats almost until the end of the set, but Gano and Brian Richie put out plenty of wattage across a fabulous range of instruments along with John Sparrow on a variety of percussion including-but-not-limited to Webber grill, Blaise Garza on that gigantic contrabass sax among other things, and the mighty Horns of Dilemma.

All hail summer at the bandshell.

Now please excuse me while I have a cup of coffee and a Brexit Burrito and figure out what the hell we should do next.

This just in: According to the Times "Google reported a spike in (UK-based) searches for "What happens if we leave the E.U." And the question "What is the E.U.?" was the second most popular question in Britain"  In Britain.  If you're a little queasy, you're not alone.

Avant Garde

So this is kind of exciting.

All issues of Avant Garde Magazine have been made available for online viewing in their entirety.



It ran from 1968-71, 14 issues in total, published by the controversial Ralph Ginzburg.

Not universally beloved; there was particular loathing from some of the font fanatics (not to say fetishists) of the world (and support from others) against Avant Garde typeface created by art director Herb Lubalin.



You can view the issues online here, or download them courtesy the brilliant Internet Archive here.

After Orlando

The rational, measured, intelligent response that Obama gave to that gun guy at that town hall a couple weeks ago has been making the rounds an extra special lot in the last 48 hours.  Understandably.

Last night it came to me that there most certainly ARE some people who want to do away with all personal possesion of guns, or at least handguns & assault weapons: either repeal the 2nd Amendment or drive through the courts an interpretation that limits the right to bear arms to that well-regulated militia it mentions.  I don't happen to agree with them most of the time, although days like this make me step back and give them a little extra time to make their case, but these folks do exist, so we don't need to pretend that they don't.  Some of them are friends, and some of them are really smart.  

As far as I can tell, the "get rid of all guns" crowd is a pretty fringe-y minority, numbers-wise.  Important to be there though as a rhetorical balance to the other side of the scale, which is the "let anybody who wants one get as many guns, as powerful as they can carry, whenever they want to" crew.  I do not tend to lend them a friendly ear, nor do I generally have a great deal of respect for the "intelligence" at work in their reasoning.  ["More, and more deadly, guns in nightclubs will make things safer!" Right. Next.]  

Here again, I don't think we're talking about too many people in the "AR-15s for Everyone!" camp, although this wing of the argument is vastly more funded, and many many times more influential in terms of lawmakers and policy.  And here is where the anger gets hard to control.  Because it has been well demonstrated that a vast majority of the U.S. citizenry, including citizen gun-owners, wants some restraints placed on our current, nearly unfettered access to guns designed for the purpose of killing people. And yet the belief persists that limitations - which would strike most Americans as quite reasonable, not to say blindingly obvious - are actually intended to be the trickle that leads to the stream that leads to a gush to a flood of GUN GRABBING courtesy of the Feds.

Which it wouldn't be.  Did you notice we are talking about America?  How do you think that would play out?

But a trickle leading to a stream leading to a gush of being a lot more thoughtful about where and how and what kind of guns we want to have around might be a movement we could get behind.  Because as it is, we have a situation where - between this unprecedented civilian availability of assault weaponry with unprecedented speed, power, and capacity on the one side, and the literal militarization of local police forces on the other - we are in an arms race with ourselves.  And I for one am not the least bit interested in seeing how THAT would play out.

I could go on and on about the intolerance, the homophobia, the rush to link the murderer with a terrorist network that seems to have been barely aware of him, and by extension to a religion that would, and in fact already has, roundly condemn his actions, and much much more that is already being said out there. But one other thing I want to mention right now: please don't let the obsession with the perpetrator lead to ignoring the victims.  Let their names be known, let their stories be told, let their memories be honored. And while we're at that, please don't let the carnage at Pulse completely drown out the heartbreaking murder of Christina Grimmie, gunned down at the age of 22 by a fan while signing autographs and working the merch table after her own show the night before the Pulse massacre.  

Rough couple days for Orlando.

Reading Replacements

Last Saturday night we went to an event at Little City Books in Hoboken - a combination book release/signing, discussion, and concert, all in celebration of Bob Mehr's Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements.

The 'Mats are one of the all-time great bands as far as I'm concerned, and the I-haven't-finished-it-yet-but-so-far-it's-more-than-worth-the-effort book has drawn attention from some pretty fab people.

Michael Hill, who helped the band navigate Warner Brothers.  Or tried to.

The interlocutor was Bob Mehr himself, writer and raconteur extraordinaire.

Glenn Morrow's Cry for Help

Jennifer O'Connor

Freedy Johnson with Dave Schramm.  Take that in for a second.  Dave also answered Morrow's Cry for Help from the sidelines.

More Freedy

The Dead Wicks.

It's not a big place (true to form) but we packed it pretty good.

From what I could tell, they sold all the copies they had of the book, and gave away all the Replacements gear (in exchange for donations to the bands) too.  It was a superfun night; happy to have done it in Hoboken rather than the Strand - though it did mean we had to miss the 75 Dollar Bill/Little Black Egg show.  You can't do everything.