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.

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.

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.

Bicycle Chandelier

More Ai Weiwei.  Who knows something about blogs.

Chandelier sculpture from the 2015 exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.

 Constructed from beaded bicycle frames.

 Medium of mobility, not-quite-pedestrian, quotidian symbol of China, dripping with faux crystal.

What Ai Weiwei Has to Say

Macbeth of the What, Now?

The question of why our show was called Macbeth of the Oppressed has come up several times, from several different quarters.  There was no evident reference to the work of Augusto Boal, and the idea of a near-future setting/forces of political correctness that showed up in some of the initial advertising flavor/promotion materials had fairly well evaporated by the time we got to rehearsals.



Now, I was simply an actor in this show, and the question was not addressed at length in the rehearsal room, at least not in my presence, but my thoughts on our arguably oblique title boil down to race, gender, and sexuality as they are presented/performed in civic and military life.



We live in a time and place where there is at least some kind of appetite for diversity in the world of creating theater. And while this impulse does intersect with the population in general, there is a decided lag in the public sphere.  We are still waiting for a female head of state in this country, and there are precious few out queer leaders of governments or military branches anywhere in the world.



Note that those links refer to positions held within the last single-digit number of years.  Note at the same time that some of the forms of oppression inherent in that fact would seem to have been absent, in some important ways, in the ancient world.  I contend that the title of our show asks what that might tell us about the concepts of 'progress,' 'power,' and, not least, 'oppression.'



And that's what I have to say about that.

Also, since we're on the subject of witches, Happy Halloween!

Metaphor is for Kids

Listening to the new Neil Young album, because of course I am.  It has taken a certain amount of heat in the critical community for being maybe a wee bit unsubtle, perhaps unartful in its lyricism.  And whatever, maybe they have a point.  But there’s something that downright tickles me about this particular crotchety grungy grumpy Old Man deciding to make a record themed around abuses in agribusiness and rampant capital and then come right out and name it “The Monsanto Years.” Whilst rocking as hard as he ever did.  Just sayin’.



In related news, Donald Trump continues to be a dipshit.

[And in related news of a different kind, I'm wondering if Southern Man has been getting a little more play lately...]

No Way Out

Not that I'm looking for one.  Just taking it slow.

Some nights you go out to a show, or another, or another, or maybe you catch J.D. McPherson at Music Hall of Williamsburg after a birthday dinner for a friend.  

Those are usually pretty good nights.

Went to bed after that show feeling great - McPherson & Co. were amazing - but I woke up with a sore throat and no energy and I've been trying to rally back ever since.

So... some nights you just stay in trying to shake a cold, reading, listening to Chocolate Watch Band, watching a documentary about Geraldine Ferraro, and trying to figure out what to order in for dinner.  

And sometimes you might feel like you do need a way out, when things are so unbelievably backward in Wisconsin and Alabama that it gets confusing which state is which.  But you stay with it, you celebrate Women's History Month with Beth Henley and Wendy Wasserstein and Geraldine Ferraro, and you know the only way out is through.

Notes from a Saturday Morning

Some quick thoughts while David Rothenberg finishes up this week's radio offering.

As usual, there has been lots of music/film/theater-going.  The Mike Daisey Yes This Man show at Joe's Pub was a standout, as was Casa Valentina.  Daisey has been at the center of quite a little storm on ye olde internets, stemming from the fact that his original title for this piece co-opted the #yesallwomen hashtag (which itself of course was a response to the misguided, not to say asinine, #notallmen hashtag that sprung up as a defensive backlash to the anger stemming from the Santa Barbara murders)  Some of the fiercest opinions came from people who seem [in my opinion] to have been blinded by the old Apple flap [missing the point and, at this point, boring] and/or driven to distraction by the notion of a white man weighing in on Women's Issues [completely understandable, necessary, and to a great extent the point of the show - and this is where it gets interesting: where does he get off doing this? Can anyone speaking from a place of privilege have something valid to contribute to the discussion? Where are the female, trans, queer, not-white-male monologists and performance artists taking on this topic at Joe's Pub? Or anywhere that gathers the kind of media attention that 1) goes along with the Public Theater or similar venues; or 2) seems to pop up when a famous, or semi-famous, man has something to say. Is he just a self-absorbed performer who needs to be loved?] Yes, I get the irony that I am a white dude making this commentary.  My opinions on this topic are extremely humble.  

And, it seems that some people are developing some strong opinions without actually seeing or hearing the work, which in my view is riveting, multi-faceted, and significantly more nuanced than some of the critical reaction would suggest. If you want to go to the crux of it, audio downloads of this and a whole bunch of Daisey's other work is free for the asking.  

Another worthwhile link is this old interview with the late, great Eli Wallach, departed a few days ago, who was a hero on a bunch of levels, and not just because he took time out of the goodness of his heart to talk to a friend of mine who was doing a Tennessee Williams role in Boston that Wallach had originated in New York about 50 years earlier.

Much happening these days.  Houseguest next weekend.  More to come...

Thoreau is Weeping

You may have seen some things about this on Jon Stewart or FOX News, but you want to take a look at this article, from the Times.

I know, it's from that East Coast Elitist rag, but no one is claiming they are misquoting Freedom-Loving Rancher and purported champion of Civil Disobedience Cliven Bundy when he held forth on “The Negro”:

“They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

You know Cliven, when y’all keep saying things like that while you’re waving guns around, people are going to start to think you’re downright unreasonable.

Of course, according to him, Bundy is just a Patriot doing the Lord's work. A confusing kind of patriot, in that he Really Really Loves America while simultaneously denying the authority of the Federal government over Federal land.  Go into the comment thread and banner ads of that article at your own risk.  Personal fave from my first glance: "What would you rather eat... Beef or Solar Panels?"  Yup.  Just keep raising the bar of discourse, guys.

Speaking of beef, lest you think I’m only unhappy with the right wing racist nutjobs out there, I've also got a beef with a quote in that Times article from Rob Mrowka from the Center of Biological Diversity:

“This should not be confused with civil disobedience. This is outright anarchy going on here.”

Well, sheesh Rob!  That’s just flat-out unfair to anarchists.

Nights in the Museum

Did a reading at MASS MoCA (which venue, in the larger sense, I've mentioned here many, many times) a couple Thursdays ago.  The American Premiere of The Interview, by Guillaume Leblon and Thomas Boutoux, to go along with Leblon's exhibition at the museum.

Photo by James Voorhies as far as I can tell

Photo by Art Evans

The experience provided me with a crash self-taught course in contemporary art, at the very least.  I sometimes feel like I know what I'm talking about when it comes to such things, then I'll run across a script like this one and realize that I don't know shit.  It was a great experience for me working on the piece with the artist, his wife, the other actor (plus the very game film intern we roped into being part of the show), and all the amazing, fantastic people at MoCA.

As if that weren't enough, we made a weekend out of it; I visited the museum exhibitions - most of them multiple times.  They're always good, you should go.  The Izhar Patkin work in the big room was especially moving, to me.

And we got to catch the residency/work-in-progress The Colorado, (also referred to as "Water Songs: Ha Tay G'am") a film and music project exploring the heartbreaking developments in the Colorado River Basin, and by extension the environmental catastrophes facing, umm, the entire planet.  Amazing.  Murat Eyuboglo is making the films; William deBuys is consulting on the science; a number of composers (Brittelle, Adams, Prestini, Worden, possibly others when all is said and done) scoring the music performed by the brilliant Roomful of Teeth; they all worked fast to put together the show we saw last Saturday.  I'm talking fast: they all showed up on Monday to talk, look at footage, write, and edit; the musicians arrived on Thursday morning; and the presentation was Saturday night.  The project won't be finished until 2015 (I think), keep an eye out for it.

Moving on from MoCA, I just want to mention the Cynthia Hopkins show A Living Documentary that happened at New York Live Arts this past Thursday.  Cynthia's one-woman theater/music piece about creating performance and trying to make a living (or even stay alive) doing it, in a universe where all the funds seem to go to production equipment and architectural 'improvements,' while shockingly little goes to the artists (arguably because the artists continue to give it away, or sell it cheap).  Lot going on there - funny, moving, creative, upsetting, exciting, inspiring, enraging.  It only played for a few days in that incarnation, glad I was able to catch it.

Serpentine Perspectives

In the wake of this weekends' amazing Neutral Milk Hotel show at BAM, and the fantastic Visual Aids Postcards from the Edge exhibition, which Cory has gone to the last few years, and which I experienced for the first time yesterday - really interesting, a combination of work that is moving, fun, poignant, provocative, and timely - here are a few shots from the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, new edition, circa All Saints Day, 2013.

Another day, I'll post some photos from the very good Adrián Villar Rojas show we saw in the gallery, but for now, these images of the Zaha Hadid structure.

And this, from the interior.

Hope you had a good weekend.  Enjoy the Grammys, if that's your thing.  [I may find a way to write the thousands of words warranted by the NMH and PfTE shows, but that won't happen tonight.]

As Essential as Groceries

The title of this post is paraphrased from Dr. Fowler's paraphrasing of Amiri Bakara in the opening moments of this clip (with thanks to Poets and Writers Inc. for drawing attention to that video).



The clip has about 7 minutes of interview footage, and includes great perspective from Baraka on the importance of speaking and hearing poetry, as well as simply reading it off a page.  Early on, it also has this pearl of Truth:

The reason they cut the arts always is because the people that run the world don't want you to be conscious, because otherwise you'd resist. You couldn't possibly be living like we live if you understood what they were doing, you know, you'd fight them.  So the arts is always expendable.  Anything that makes people conscious of what the world is, and what it could be, is always expendable.

Baraka goes on in this interview to discuss how an artist needs to live and work on this earth, in this actual world, the physical universe of people and things, rather than retreating into an imaginary, idealized, self-constructed cave or tower, of ivory or any other color.

This world has plenty that is nearly uncontrovertibly craptastic in it [which, in case it's not obvious by now, is one of the most important reasons why art and poetry out loud are as essential as food].  But one of the things I'd argue is good about these internets is that, in addition to the cat videos and endless rants, you can find a trove of material at a moment's notice about Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement, and delve into a rabbit hole of your own devising.

For now, I'm leaving you with a couple clips of Baraka reading his work.  One, a relatively recent live performance video with Rob Brown, courtesy of The Sanctuary for Independent Media.



And this other, even more powerful and controversial (if that's possible) earlier poem - audio only, with a still photo - Black Art, with Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Sonny Murray, Henry Grimes, and Louis Worrell.  Required listening.



Rest in Power.

Amandla Madiba

Been thinking about Mandela a lot the last few days (I think everyone has been thinking a lot about Mandela the last few days).

Photo 1961, Eli Weinberg

One of those people who has done more important work, more capably, more generously, more courageously, persistently, than it's even really possible for me to fathom.  It's scarcely original to say so these days, but I feel tremendously blessed to have been able to share time on the planet with him.

Thank you Tata.

Banksy in Chelsea

We're a few days into Banksy's New York residency.  I haven't been too engaged in the Painter Chase, but this piece is so close to Chome that I hunted it down.

Worth a look.  As all the press mentions, his pieces tend not to last too long before other taggers get to it.  If you review those press and online items, you'll notice that many of the images are different from each other in content as well as perspective: more or less in the way of images and verbiage, depending on when the taggers and photographers got to the spot.  You can see in the shot above that someone (who? a sympatico fellow tagger? one of the nearby gallerists?  Banksy himself?) has recently gone over "THIS IS MY NEW YORK ACCENT" to reinforce it, so that it is complete on the surface, above the other tags, at least for a little while on Friday morning.

And then there's the (slightly) greater context.  Again, this surface - like most un- or semi-sanctioned street art canvases - is continually evolving.  Some 'vandalizing' Banksy's attention-getting 'vandalism'; a Bronx record label making use of the attention; someone calling on (challenging?) Banksy to make use of his newly declared accent to use the megaphone of the attention to, you know, come out and say something; another stencil down left wondering out loud if the emperor's wardrobe is really all that impressive.  This could go on for a while.

What do you think?  Important urban art?  Commentary on the Gallery District/the Great New York Art Scene (now polished and sanitized for your protection and convenience!)?  A damn squit?

Look closer.  And keep looking - we should be getting more of these all month all over the city.

Sesame Street goes Upstate

This has been around for a few months, but I just ran across it recently.  Of course I'm behind on most things: it's a problem.  But in this case I feel more or less off the hook, in that, having no children and not likely to become a parent anytime soon, I don't feel much responsibility to keep up with the details of kid's TV.  But this is significant on a few levels, so I was impressed when I found out about it.

Meet Alex, a new character on Sesame Street (or at least an online version of Sesame Street) whose father is in jail.  It says something pretty important about the World We Live In that this platform is necessary – as this Pew Research article mentions, some 2.7 million American children currently have a parent in jail or prison.  That would be 3.6% of American children with an incarcerated parent.  Incarcerated, one might add, in a correctional system that is arguably ineffective, weighed down by misguided drug laws, and inescapably, profoundly, maddeningly racist and classist.  Oh, and well nigh devoid of any noticeable corrective element.

But this piece is for the kids.  And of course Sesame Street being Sesame Street, they find a way to deal with this unbelievably tough-to-even-wrap-your-mind-around topic with not just kindness and sensitivity, but with a "did they just pull that off?" sense of humor.

“What’s ‘carcerated,’ and why was your dad in it?”

Well played, Children's Television Workshop.  Well played.

'Prison-Industrial Complex' is one of those terms that rubs me kind of wrong, being that too clever for its own good brand of inflammatory.  But America is out of balance - way out of balance - in the way we handle corrections, and the penal system is so seriously in need of reform that I'm willing to accept the provocation.

More materials and more video is on the Little Kids/Big Problems section of the Sesame Street website.

A Modest Proposal

Because that would, you know, totally work.

Courtesy of Michael Stipe's Tumblr.

What Else Is to be Done?

“To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.” — Hermann Hesse

Gezi Park

This video is disturbing as can be, as is a lot of what's going on in Turkey. A friend of Cory's in Istanbul also reminds us that there is a real opportunity for positive developments too. She writes:

"it is nuts but it is also so exciting. we have been so depressed thinking nothing could be done about the spiraling hell..and now! so in general we are happy. just hope it causes some real changes." 

Keep an eye and some focus on that part of the world, please.