Category Archives: Culture

What I’m Reading. What I’m Thinking.

by

It was not natural. And she was the first…
A poet can read. A poet can write.
A poet is African in Africa, or Irish in Ireland, or French on the left bank of Paris, or white in Wisconsin. A poet writes in her own language. A poet writers of her own people, her own history, her own vision, her own room, her own house where she sits at her own table quietly placing one word after another word until she builds a line and a movement and an image and a meaning that somersaults all of these into the singing, the absolutely individual voice of the poet: at liberty. A poet is somebody free. A poet is someone at home.
How should there be Black poets in America?

-June Jordan, The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America

This the epigraph to Adrienne Rich’s essay, ‘History Stops for No One’ in her collection, What Is Found There.  I picked this book up again 3 weeks ago to reread days before she died. I can’t stop reading it. You should read it too.

More later.

however do you want me. however do you need me.

by

So I took the summer off from blogging and have been on my reinvention grind. This economy has been various degrees of unkind and kind to black girls (and yes, everyone). As of late I’m choosing to embrace a more positive dream (more on that later). Yet, these hands were not idle. There’s the summer issue of the litmag I edit with an awesome team of folks and a new issue to drop later this month. As well as confronting my oddball disdain for Herman Melville (my sole summer read), which has really revealed a misdirected love for his whole opus. That reads cryptic, I know. I’ll unpack that later gators.

dancebreak.

by

I don’t know about you, but lately, everything is coming up ’80s for me. 1980s. Bad economy, the ghost of Ronald Reagan, bad banks, doc siders, penny loafers, jelly shoes, skinny jeans, jeggings, acid wash jeggings, jelly bracelets (silly bands), flannel. That stupid article in Psychology Today calling me and mine ugly got me watching a pivotal scene from 1985 classic, The Color Purple. I needed to hear Celie’s declaration of independence, ‘I’m poor, black, I may even be ugly, but dear god, I’m here. I’m here!.’

Cornel West broke up with Obama y’all. On some silly bitch trifle over inauguration tickets and somesuch. He’s spewing some bitterness that makes me wince (translation = deeply uncomfortable) on some old black nationalist anti-semetic line that I hadn’t heard since the last century. I get that you’re sad that he doesn’t call anymore, boo but you ain’t gotta pit folks on some us versus them. Not when it’s the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides. And in an odd turn of events, I found myself trolling YouTube for Basia’s 1989 jam. It’s kinda a break up song, right?

But honestly, if we’re talking 1980s to 1990, this was the penultimate break up songs of all break up songs:

I’m also told that the Rapture is scheduled for this Saturday. And like any self respecting, skeptical and musical loving nerd, I queued up Blondie *and* KRS-One’s cover:

I’m just glad we got a soundtrack for this stuff. But really, I love everyone’s hair and the soft focus lenses, and the reverse grip of heartache. This is how I will want to remember the world before it all ends.

against appropriation, cont.

by

I still don’t have an answer to the dilemma of influence versus appropriation without attribution.  While I was re-reading Rene Ricard’s essay, The Radiant Child (Artforum XX, Issue 4 December, 1981), for other obsessive reasons (research) the following passage seemed especially poignant:

As much as undervaluation can kill, so can a false sense of the value of your work. Jean-Michel was advised to stop giving it away. But if your friends can’t have it, why live? Overprotection is deadly; the stuff has to get out there to be seen. Making money is something between artists and their stomachs. To turn one’s work into fetish that is almost indistinct from oneself, to overpersonalize and covet one’s own work, is professional suicide. Fear of rip-off is paralysis. One is always ripped off. Keeping work a secret is the psychology of the applied artist, not the fine artist who must live in a dialogue.

If you haven’t seen the documentary of the same name on the life Jean-Michel Basquiat, you should get on that.

against appropriation.

by

One would categorize this situation as a thorny issue:

Though he describes himself as a good friend of hers, the fashion and art photographer David LaChapelle has decided to settle his differences with the pop star Rihanna in a place where friends don’t usually end up: court. Mr. LaChapelle, known for his candy-colored, sexually over-the-top images, claims in a suit filed Monday in federal court in Manhattan that Rihanna helped herself to too many of the images in the recently released video for her sexually over-the-top song “S & M.”

The suit, which asks for at least $1 million in damages, argues that the video is “directly derived from and substantially similar to” photographs he has created and published that show, among other things, a dominatrix walking a chained man on a leash, a woman in latex headgear and another woman (Lady Gaga, to be precise) wearing only screaming headlines. In all, the suit claims, eight of Mr. LaChapelle’s images were used to create scenes in the video, which the suit calls a “willful, wanton and deliberate” infringement of his copyright protections.

It reminded me of Junot Diaz’s comments to a packed audience at the Union Square Barnes and Noble upon the release of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel back in 2007, where a young writer asked about Diaz’s influence or inspiration. Diaz instructed the writer to ‘steal that shit.’ We all laughed hard at that. Diaz seemed to be speaking specifically about mimicing style as a tool for one’s own creative process. Many reviewers compared Diaz to the late David Foster Wallace (well more like Patrick Choimoseau’s Texaco than Infinite Jest, but that’s just splitting literati hairs. Maybe…) And that comparison was assigned to Diaz because of his copious usage of footnotes (like Wallace, but also like Choimoseau, but also like Borges) as part of the novel’s narrative structure. Yet, we have to explore the knotty relationship between appropriation without attribution. Think back to the recently settled case of Shepard Fairey versus the Associate Press, where an image inspired art (and informed a movement) without proper attribution.

Looking at LaChapelle’s images and stills from the ‘S&M‘ video, the similarities are undeniable. Rihanna, who has worked with LaChapelle before, begs the obvious question: why did she not simply work with the director again? Rihanna’s collaborator, director Melina Matsoukas, acknowledges that she is influenced of the work other artists, yet neglects to mention them by name. This is the pair’s second offense. Certainly, we artists look to other artists and mediums from which to draw inspiration, inform and develop our own work, but at what point does it become all out thievery?

On the other side of copying issue lies Kanye West and Hype Williams. As others have charged that the pair has committed the offense of copying another artist, the filmaker Gaspar Noé, I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. Noé is obviously influenced by the Jean-Luc Godard, who has had decades long influences on some of our most celebrated filmmakers, photographers, artist that include giants like Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Mike Nichols, established newbies Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, (I’d argue the Joel and Ethan Cohen too) and this guy.  Obviously, me too (photography and writing). And I don’t love the West/Williams video, but I immediately recognize the nod to Godard (go back and look at Runaway, too, Godard’s influence is all up in that). Godard was more than likely influenced as we all are by the Lumiere Brothers. Why is it all out copying for West and Williams and not for Noé? Theft is a curious charge to me.

For LaChapelle, I feel RiRi and Matsoukas can’t argue influence when many of the images are nearly identical staging of the photographs. As for McGinley, the influence is evident for ‘Only Girl in The World‘, the staging is suspiciously familiar.  How’s that saying go: There’s nothing new under the sun. Right?

Right…

I’m not sure what the answer is. As a photographer and writer, I certainly draw influences from multiple mediums. My ridiculous paparrazo project is influenced by Fellini, Godard, hip hop, Nan Goldin, Basquiat, and my contemporaries. My soundtrack in my head when I shoot is Uproot Andy’s El Botellon’s remix (Seriously).  I’m certainly influenced by an artist’s aesthetic judgments, but ultimately, I need to determine my own vision for what I wish to show/say. West/Williams video may pay homage to a film director, utilizing a style that everyone and their mother has mimicked for decades, but I can’t say that it’s artistic theft. Derivative and trite is one thing, but copying is a whole ‘nother thesis ;)

same, same. but different.

by

Thinking about Saturday’s shooting in Tuscon, I remembered an Adam Gopnik piece from the 2007 New Yorker in the wake of the Virgina Tech Shooting. It’s worth a re-read as we uncover ‘facts’ and salacious details about the psyche and life of the alleged shooter, Jared Loughner. While we’re all trying to find space to engage in discussions about gun laws, mental illness, and political criticism (discourse versus rhetoric versus vitriol versus sedition), the excerpt noted below was particularly resonant for me:

If the facts weren’t so horrible, there might be something touching in the Governor’s deeply American belief that “healing” can take place magically, without the intervening practice called “treating.” The logic is unusual but striking: the aftermath of a terrorist attack is the wrong time to talk about security, the aftermath of a death from lung cancer is the wrong time to talk about smoking and the tobacco industry, and the aftermath of a car crash is the wrong time to talk about seat belts. People talked about the shooting, of course, but much of the conversation was devoted to musings on the treatment of mental illness in universities, the problem of “narcissism,” violence in the media and in popular culture, copycat killings, the alienation of immigrant students, and the question of Evil.

Some people, however—especially people outside America—were eager to talk about it in another way, and even to embark on a little crusade. The whole world saw that the United States has more gun violence than other countries because we have more guns and are willing to sell them to madmen who want to kill people. Every nation has violent loners, and they tend to have remarkably similar profiles from one country and culture to the next. And every country has known the horror of having a lunatic get his hands on a gun and kill innocent people. But on a recent list of the fourteen worst mass shootings in Western democracies since the nineteen-sixties the United States claimed seven, and, just as important, no other country on the list has had a repeat performance as severe as the first.

via Shootings : The New Yorker.

There’s our knee jerk responses to these mass shootings: the naming of the perpetrator (he inevitably has three -John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald– now this kid Jared Lee Loughner), the narrative of the ‘loner’, the mental defect or illness that motivates one to murder, the very definition of nihilism. This feels routine. We hope (swear) it will never happen again. It always does. And it always will. In reading the piecemeal narratives on Loughner today in Mother Jones, a friend’s view of the shooter’s motivation was curious:

Since hearing of the rampage, Tierney has been trying to figure out why Loughner did what he allegedly did. “More chaos, maybe,” he says. “I think the reason he did it was mainly to just promote chaos. He wanted the media to freak out about this whole thing. He wanted exactly what’s happening. He wants all of that.” Tierney thinks that Loughner’s mindset was like the Joker in the most recent Batman movie: “He fucks things up to fuck shit up, there’s no rhyme or reason, he wants to watch the world burn. He probably wanted to take everyone out of their monotonous lives: ‘Another Saturday, going to go get groceries’—to take people out of these norms that he thought society had trapped us in.”

A lot of us (me included) looked to assign blame to the far right and Tea Party for inciting this kind of violence on a Member of Congress. But now, I have to take a step back. Our conversations about these matters have reached a complexity that requires mature reasoning, and a news cycle that moves slower than 140 characters or less.

holding us back.

by

I don’t watch a lot of television. In fact, most of my television consumption these days is completely over the internet.  However, I have five shows that I’ve deemed essential: House, Community, Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Mad Men. Private Practice is a residual holdover because of my love for Grey’s.  I watch Grey’s regularly and at the conclusion of Season 6, Writer/Producer Shonda Rhimes took the show to a devastating turn. In last year’s double episode season finale, Rhimes unleashes a gunman on the staff of fictional Seattle Grace/Mercy West Hospital, opening with the shooting of one the key characters (Dr. Reid at point blank range in the head) leading to a day of mayhem and domestic terror.

Yes, it makes for great sensational drama, and while some of the extremes in the crisis and dialogue were a bit much, I can’t ignore that conversation that Rhimes and fellow Grey writers are facilitating about terrorism, trauma, gun violence, grief and recovery.

Clark: Five days ago when I bought this gun… Did you know you could buy a gun at a superstore?

I did not. In most states, one can acquire a firearm from a superstore like Wal-Mart, and wait five days for a license. A fact that I often take for granted living in the Republic of Brooklyn.

The 14 episodes between the conclusion of Season 6 through the mid point of Season 7 are deceptively complex. I’m fascinated that one of the most popular dramas on network television is exploring these themes. I had been watching Grey’s for so long, so familiar with the slow unfolding of the character’s personalities that I took the shooting personally. The writers researched gun ownership/control, and while it seems like gun rights and laws are political wedge issues, GA offers it’s viewers the opportunity to experience, if you will, through the lives of their characters the reality of gun ownership, regulation and use. They also present another face of terrorism that we take for granted.

The September 11th parallel is not lost on me. Some may scoff, but the show opens with a series of vignettes, a perfect normal, sunny day in Seattle, not unlike a perfect September day in New York, or perfect July day in London 2005. Katie Herzig’s sweet and haunting soundtrack juxtapose against the brutal images of another main character (McDreamy) shot in the chest at close range.  Additionally, I think about April 19, 1995 in Oklahoma City. It was a beautiful day in New York City then. I can’t remember if it was a beautiful day April 20, 1999 when two teenage boys shot up their classmates outside Boulder, Colorado. I do remember it was a Tuesday. Continue reading →

on huck finn.

by

Tayari Jones zeroes in on my feelings on the subject:

The revisions to “Huckleberry Finn” have been described as “politically correct,” but I disagree with this characterization. Political correctness is not about airbrushing history to allow us to remember our past in a way that more closely resembles our present. Though more honorable in intent, these changes are more in line with recent Virginia textbook scandal in which units of black soldiers were said to have fought for the Confederacy.

American history is a complex narrative that is by turns inspiring and shameful. If there are teachers and parents who would prefer that their children and students not to be exposed to the truth, that’s their call. The solution is not to fight willful ignorance with willful misrepresentation.

via Opinion: Scrubbing ‘Huck Finn,’ and Our History.

Erasing the word doesn’t erase racism in America or her history. So how do we engage in a smarter conversation about race in America?

1.1.11

by

One.

This year is a prime number. And according to this guy, the sum of 11 consecutive prime numbers:

The prime-ness of this year suggest one should do something momentous. So I went to Coney Island with my friends to watch a few hundred giddy people of all shades and shapes jump into the 38 degree waters of the Atlantic Ocean. I even got my feet wet. Not bad 1.1.11.  Bring it.