Politics + Yankees Win! + Se Pone Blanco + Kessler Lecture, 11/12 + iPhone Drawings

It's been a week since I dropped in here, and every J's Theater reader knows the political business that's occurred since then, so I won't rage. But the results in Maine, which stripped away equal rights and ended Maine's brief experiment with same-sex, i.e., equal marriage, were very disappointing, even though the pre-election polling showed a close contest, and the Roman Catholic Church, among others, poured a great deal of money and energy into overturning the new law. As the chart below (straight from Matthew Yglesias/Think Progress) shows, marriage equality will eventually be part of the American landscape, but it may still be a ways off for most of the country.


(Click on table to enlarge)

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On Saturday, the House of Representatives made history by passing a Health Care Reform bill by a 220-215 margin. Only one Republican, Anh Joseph Cao (R-LA), who represents convicted Democrat Bill Jefferson's former New Orleans-area district, voted for the bill, while 39 Democrats, most Conservadems, a few ultraprogressives (Dennis Kucinich) voted against it. The historic legislation, ushered through by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her leadership team, does include some great touches, such as removing the tax penalty for same-sex domestic partners on the same plan and a considerably weakened public option. It also will go a long way towards covering the majority of the 40+ million who do not have and cannot afford health care insurance. But doesn't allow for a single-payer system, and includes extremist anti-abortion language that could conceivably be used by insurance companies to deny coverage to women who have miscarriages. It also does little to address one of the major problems of US health care, which is we spend more than twice, and in some cases three times what nearly every other industrialized nation does on health care. That is to say, it does little to remove the profit incentive from health care insurance, or to help drive down the cost of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, or hospital care. President Barack Obama removed himself from the discussion several weeks back, and seems concerned only with having something to sign, as opposed to the best bill possible. Or perhaps it's Rahm Emanuel whose conservative pragmatism is guiding the White House's approach. It's hard to know, because the White House sends out so many conflicting signals and operates in such a frustrating passive-aggressive manner it's hard to know what the President and his administration really stand for. Such are vicissitudes of 11 months of Obamatude. Well, we did get Sonia Sotomayor, didn't we?

Now the bill heads to the graveyard of the popular will, the US Senate. Republicans are mostly united against anything approximating reform. The Democrats probably have 50 votes, now that Al Franken is finally seated and Teddy Kennedy's replacement, Paul Kirk, also is present, but the main issue is a cloture vote, and it's unclear whether nominal Democrats like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln, or tantrum-throwing neocons like Joe Lieberman, will sustain a filibuster and prevent anything viable from coming to the floor. The Democrats have one of the wettest noodles leading them, if one can use the term, Harry Reid, who seems incapable of exerting any real power whatsoever. Dick Durbin of Illinois, second in command, seems to do little more than whine and beg, to little effect. It's beyond pathetic. In fact, Reid has even spoken recently of not getting anything to the floor before the end of the year! Meanwhile, the GOP, which is now witnessing its lowest level of voter identification in decades, makes threats, commands the media, and continues to draw stricter and stricter lines, all to the end of gumming up the legislative process and destroying our Hamlettian head of government and state. I'll say this: if the Democrats fail to push through a Senate bill, and if they leave in Bart Stupak's toxic anti-abortion amendment, they very well may have their "Waterloo," even if the President hangs on to middling popularity by the skin under his nails. They appear to want to fail, and they're doing nothing to prevent it. Meanwhile, as has been repeatedly noted, 45,000 people die each year from lack of health care insurance or inadequate coverage, and as someone who dealt with the health care industry extensively last year, I can say that the US's system is seriously screwed up and needs help, immediately.

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Friday I joined hundreds of thousands (a million?) people who crammed into the narrow streets of lower Manhattan to cheer on the New York Yankees, who won their 27th World Series. Responding to an online query, I predicted that the Yankees would win--against the St. Louis Cardinals, who were out after the first round of the playoffs. The Yankees had everything they needed, on the mound and in the field, including some production from the pulchritudinous but perplexing and scandal-plagued Alex Rodriguez for a change. Last year's champions, the Philadelphia Phillies, just could not crack Andy Pettitte or Mariano Rivera, or keep Hideki Matsui and Derek Jeter off the bases. With the Cardinals out, I followed--and watched, sometimes with C--most of the Yankees' games, and thought they'd pull off a 4-1 series in Philly, but the return to and victory in the Bronx only made the victory sweeter.

The parade was, in my experience, one of those rare times, like last November on Michigan Avenue and in Grant Park in Chicago, when vast throngs of people gather together and, because they're united in a common cause, they behave very well. Just a few days before, I'd told C about a near altercation I witnessed on the 5 train, in which a wacko ranted on about everything nearly bursting his rage-swollen head in support of another nut who ran his bicycle wheel over one woman's foot and into another's leg. On Friday, however, and I don't think it was just the presence of enough New York police officers to form a human bridge to Weehawken, people were acting quite kindly towards each other. I saw this again and again as people were polite when pressing through the dense crowds, and on the subway, there were more "Excuse mes" and "Pardon mes" than I've heard over the last 7 months. One unfortunate thought I had amidst all the good cheer, however, was there might be more people in that narrow corner of Manhattan (and in the tunnels beneath and on the other side of the Hudson trying to get there) than voted last Tuesday. (Michael Bloomberg only won by about 50,000 votes, and only 1.1 million of 4 million or so eligible voters cast ballots; I've so far spoken to at least one who didn't.)

Photos and video below:


At the parade (it looks like I was far away, but not really--not!)

The confetti being dumped from the cornices--it turned out that some of the celebratory paper included people's vital records and bank documents. Oops!

New York's finest penning people in like cattle

On a very crowded train--and the young woman in the middle of the photo was diligently reading and speaking her Hebrew text...only in New York!

Among the many, the proud, the Yankees boosters

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Speaking of baseball, Chicago, blackness, racism, the not-so-proud, and so much more, I'll just present the photos. Ughhh and arrrgghhh. Sad and tragic doesn't barely scratch the surface.





Vitiligo it ain't!

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On Thursday, playwright, novelist and activist Sarah Schulman will deliver the 18th Annual David R. Kessler Lecture. Her talk is entitled "Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences."

The event takes place at the CUNY Grad Center, at 34th St. and 5th Avenue, in Manhattan, in the Proshansky Auditorium. It runs from 6:30 to 8:30.

If you're in New York, don't miss it.

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The iPhone drawing continues. I'm addicted. I don't think I've drawn--or thumbed/index-fingered?--this much from life in many years. My new approach is to do as quick a sketch as possible, then fill in the details later. I've also been experimenting with different drawing styles, though I seem to be locked into train portraits these days.

I haven't yet figured out all the intricacies of the very popular Brushes program and have instead been using Autodesk Sketchbook for most of these portraits, which now total 23, or about 1 per day, though some days I do 2-3 in one shot. I do want to learn how to use the layers function in the former app, because I love Jorge Colombo's images.

Now if only AT&T would provide service anywhere near equal to the performance of my iPhone's apps, I'd consider the device essentially miraculous.

Man on light rail train

Woman on PATH

PATH conductor

Man on light rail

Man on PATH

Elections Today + Congrats & RIPs + Lee Trains It + iSketches

It's Election Day, or Referendum on Obama's Presidency Day, or Republican Civil War Day, or something. I voted in a disorganized, mostly voter-free polling place in Jersey City for the incument, Jon Corzine, and his feisty runningmate, Loretta Weinberg (before Ms. Weinberg, he was considering Celebrity Apprentice-winner Randall Pinkston).

I felt he was the best of the three major choices, none of which was appealing; though he's been lackluster at governing, he is a committed social, political and ideological progressive, and his few legislative successes have come in this area. In terms of lowering the state's grotesquely high property taxes, he's failed miserably. He's also presided over--but not been linked to--the usual intractable corruption that has historically been endemic to New Jersey. Earlier this year a slew of local Democrats, and one Republican, were caught in a massive crime dragnet; a number of people here in Hudson County, including several people in and around Jersey City's mayor, were indicted, while Hoboken's newly elected mayor, as well as the mayor of Secaucus, were also forced to resign after bribery charges. The global economic collapse hasn't helped him either, though I see little sign that he's doing much to address it other than tacking close to President Obama's coattails. And Obama was here repeatedly, including just this past weekend, again.

But I doubt people in the counties Corzine needs to win heavily (northeastern and far southwestern New Jersey) are going to turn out as much as the middle-belt counties, which are more Republican. I also imagine that many suburbanites assume Christopher J. Christie, the Republican candidate, a Karl Rove protegé and W Bush US Attorney appointee who has been dogged by allegations of misuse of his office and repeated ethics problems, will be as socially liberal as New Jersey's last Republican governor, Christine Todd Whitman, who also turned out to be fiscally irresponsible, in typical late 20th-century fashion. She slashed taxes whenever possible, privatized as much as she could get her hands on and borrowed heavily, leaving the state in the woeful condition it's been in throughout the early years of this century. If he wins Christie will probably reprise this record, with th

The third major candidate, independent Chris Daggett, has offered some interesting proposals, and probably would have gotten my vote if I'd had any confidence that he could move his proposals through the legislature. So it was Corzine, who appears to be losing to Christie as I type this. Voter turnout in Hudson and Essex Counties, two in which Corzine needs to win big, appears to be tepid.

Update: Christie has won and is the Governor-elect of New Jersey. He received 1,132,689 votes, or 49% of the total, to Corzine's 1,026,899, or 44%. Daggett, the 3rd party candidate, received 132,181, or 6%. One wonders had he not been in the race whether Corzine would have eked out a victory?

Across the river in Manhattan, Democrat Bill Thompson, is running against Goliath himself, Republican-turned-Independent Michael Bloomberg. In addition to negotiating with the City Council to repeal the term limits law to give himself another four years, Bloomberg is spending somewhere near $100 million to return to office. And for what? To serve as a caretaker for a city that is visibly falling apart, with rising numbers of homeless families, empty storefronts, and crumbling infrastructure, after having spent 8 years trying to remake Manhattan into a playground for the super-rich, and before that catering to ? This is a record to run on? Were he running against any other Republican, I think Thompson could have won on the merits of his record as head of the Board of Education and NYC Comptroller, which Bloomberg and even New York's previous GOP mayor, the odious Rudy Giuliani, have praised. It does look like Bloomberg will win, but I am praying that the election is closer than anyone expected. I can say with certainty that John Liu will be New York City's next Comptroller.

BTW, it looks like the Thompson-Bloomberg race is closer than anyone thought. As of now--10:30 pm--it's Thompson 48%, Bloomberg 49%...

Update: Bloomberg has won, 51%-46% over Thompson. 50,000 votes separated them; only a little over 1.1 million people voted, out of possibly 4 million. Disgusting.

In the Virginia race, it looks like crypto-extreme right-wing Catholic Republican Bob McDonnell, who wrote a graduate dissertation decrying will defeat hapless Democrat Creigh Deeds, who initially ran away from President Obama to the middle and, it appears, right into the Chesapeake. As a former Virginia resident and voter, I'm not surprised; the state's voting trends concerning the governor's seat seem to swing from far right to moderate left, though never too far from the ideologically conservative vein. As I type this, McDonnell's victory is already being stated as fact.

Maine voters go to the polls today to decide whether to preserve equal rights for same-sex marriage; voters will have the option to ratify the legislature's and governor's passage of same-sex marriage, or to overturn the legislative decision. I think it's unfortunately going to be very close, but I'm hoping that despite the Roman Catholic Church's intervention, No on 1--to preserve marriage equality--will win out.

Update: Right now, the Yes on 1 is winning by a slender margin...

Lastly, two legislative races are unfolding today, though only one has gotten real attention. In New York's 23rd House district, moderate Democrat Bill Owens was facing RNC-vetted and socially liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava (a last name worthy of fictional treatment), until right-wing teabagger Republicans and libertarians decided to throw their support to Doug Hoffman, who'd gotten New York State's Conservative Party's support. This led a slew of high profile right wingers, including Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, to support Hoffman, sidelining Scozzafava, who withdrew and, in a mild shocker, threw her support to Owens. Though the district went for President Obama last year, it had not elected a Democrat to Congress since the 19th century! I am hoping Owens wins, just because it will throw water on some of the more ridiculous MCM punditry out there, which is casting every outcome unfavorable to Democrats as a referendum on the President, when it appears that local issues and the larger economic crisis, which the MCM has yet to address with any seriousness, are underlining today's voting trends. Speaking of local issues and important votes, California also has a special election today: John Garamendi, a progressive Democrat, is expected to replace Ellen Tauscher, a Conservadem, with ease, in a district that had been Republican since...the 19th century! Have you heard the pundits talk about this?


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Although I tweeted about all of these congratulations in real time (i.e., last week), let me congratulate once again all the recent recipients of Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Awards, including Professor Jericho Brown, a CC grad who was honored for his amazing poetry. Congratulations, Jericho!

Congratulations also go to prolific novelist Marie NDiaye, 42, who yesterday became the first black woman to win France's most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. NDiaye (at right, www.frenchculture.org/), living in exile of Berlin because of the conservative rule of Nicolas Sarkozy and his party, published her first book at age 17 and received the Goncourt Prize for Trois Femmes Puissantes (Three Powerful Women). Félicitations à Marie NDiaye.

Yesterday, two intellectual giants passed away: pioneering (post-)structuralist anthropologist and intellectual Claude Lévi-Strauss and anti-Francoite novelist and philosopher Francisco Ayala. Over the last few weeks, the world has also lost photographer Roy DeCarava, whose collaboration with Langston Hughes, Sweet Flypaper of Life, is one of my great inspirations; feminist artist extraordinaire Nancy Spero; Professor Ray Browne, the founder of pop-culture studies; Raymond Federman, one of the giants of experimental American lit, especially "surfiction," during my college years and before; and fashion photographer Irving Penn, among others.

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They are perhaps the best known song lyrics about a US city to appear in a movie. The movie was On the Town. It hit screens in 1949, was written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, who was one of its stars, along with "Old Blue Eyes," Frank Sinatra, and danceuse Ann Miller. The following four lines are unforgettable and, to anyone who's ever visited Manhattan and gotten lost, invaluable.

"New York, New York, a wonderful town,
The Bronx is up and the Battery's down,
People ride around in a hole in the ground,
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town."

And Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Cliff Lee, it turns out, took them to heart. After getting stuck in traffic in Harlem (Morningside Heights) during his taxi ride to the stadium, he hopped on the subway, switched trains at one point, and arrived with a good amount of time to spare to pitch and win the opening game last week against CC Sabathia and the New York Yankees. I can imagine they probably wish he'd been one of the fearful types who wouldn't deign to set foot underground.

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And I've kept on iDoodling, or is it iSketching? It's addictive. I think I'm up to about 1 a day at least. Are these copyrighted terms yet? A few more, all drawn on the iPhone, with thumbs and fingers:

Yankees Go to Series vs. Phillies + MR Daniel Music Tomorrow + Glissant at NYU

I haven't posted anything on the baseball playoffs since they began nearly a month ago. In part my silence results from the swift and ignominious departure of the Saint Louis Cardinals, who fell in 3 straight games, marked by minimal hitting and maximal errors, to the Los Angeles Dodgers. So the Cardinals are out. The Philadelphia Phillies, however, took care of the Dodgers after walloping Colorado, and now face the American League's best team, the New York Yankees.

The Boss's businessmen in pinstripes have played with great efficiency and pop since dominating their division, reminding me of their late 1990s run, when they reeled off four World Series wins in five years (1996, and 1998-2000). After a spate of playoff failures against the Boston Red Sox, and the annual post-season disappearance at the plate of A-Rod, the Yankees are again taking the field and games like champions. Their off-season acquisitions have also paid off, in particular the multimillion-dollar contract they offered to CC Sabathia, the 6'7", 290 lb southpaw powerhouse who after a bumpy start in April won 19 games for them with a 3.37 ERA, growing stronger as the months advanced. Sabathia has been dazzling so far in the post-season run, and was name American League Championship Series MVP.

Also working out well has been two other acquisitions: switch-hitting first baseman Mark Teixeira, who hit 39 home runs and drove in 122, tops on the team, and righthander A. J. Burnett, whose 13-9 record helped put the Yankees atop the AL East. While Teixeira has been a factor in playoffs so far, Burnett hasn't. Another factor in the Yankees' run this year has been lefthander Andy Pettitte. One of the Yankees' aces during the late 90s, George Steinbrenner let him go despite a 21-8 season in 2003 and a 16-9 playoff record, and during his absence the Yankees' playoff hopes fizzled. Pettitte returned two years ago, however, and with Sabathia, Burnett, and very young pitchers Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes, constituted one of the best starting rotations in the American League. Last night Pettitte pitched another gem, sending the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, who also sank themselves with onfield mistakes, back to Orange County, and setting them up for a battle with the Phillies.


My iPhone sketch of CC Sabathia

This matchup could be called the Original US Capital Cities Series, or the Original Major League Baseball Teams Series, or the New Jersey Transit Series, or the New Jersey Turnpike Exit series, or Competing Jersey Media Market Series, or the Two Cities that Dominate New Jersey Series, or the Two Cities Hosting Ivy League Universities Equidistant from Princeton and Rutgers Universities Series, or something else altogether. It's been 59 years since the two teams faced off in the World Series, which the Yankees, in their most glorious era, won 4 games to 0. The 2009 Phillies have very good pitching, especially in starters Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels, and a dangerous lineup, with good contact hitters like Chase Utley, Shane Victorino, and Pedro Feliz and a slugger for the ages in St. Louisan Ryan Howard. They more than match up well with the Yankees. They will also have the edge in the games played in Philadelphia, since the Yankees will lose a bat in their order, though Sabathia's very handy at the plate; neither ballpark is particularly pitcher-friendly.

I'm going to give my nod to the Bronx Bombers. If they can get outstanding pitching performances out of Sabathia and Pettitte, some offense from A-Rod, and close games out effectively under the Chamberlain-Hughes duo before future Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera has to take the mound, they will win. This is asking a tall order, but I think it's possible. I'm looking forward to watching every game if I can. (And if you have free tickets, you know, you can always share!)

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Tomorrow, composer-critic-brilliant person MR Daniel will be presenting work at Princeton University, at 8 pm, at
Taplin Auditorium, in Fine Hall.

The Celestial Mechanics vocal trio will be performing her new three movement vocal piece, My Father and I Are Playing. She writes of them: "I've known the performers in this ensemble for a couple of years, and I'm really excited by what I've heard of their approach to the piece so far. And they're really excited to be doing the piece--always a good combination!" I can say that I've heard some of her work live (in Chicago, and online), and I'm really excited to hear more.

Daniel be accompanying the vocal trio with a live visuals mix, and is part of the Composers Ensemble program at Princeton University. Celestial Mechanics is also performing work by "members Lainie Fefferman and Anne Hege, along with Michelle Nagai and Jascha Narveson, and piano works by David T. Little."

Here's another wonderful thing: if you can't make it to the actual performance there will be a live video stream with link available through the Princeton University Music Department's website. I also hope the performance is archived, because another event I'll mention below is taking place simultaneously, and also because I hope more people will get to hear MR Daniel's work.

Lastly MR writes, "(If you watch the webcast, please do let me know about your viewing experience--this is a new offering from the department)." Please do so if you can [go to the Princeton University Music Department link for more info].

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The other event (and of course there are many) occurring simultaneously (well, a little before) with the Princeton Composers Ensemble concert is the first of four panels devoted to the work of critic-author-sage Édouard Glissant, whose Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation are two of the bedrock theoretical texts of contemporary Black Diasporic and global post(-post)-colonial thought and practice. The events, sponsored by New York University's Institute of African American Affairs under the heading One World In Relation, will be taking place on the NYU campus over a series of weeks. I've had at least four different people send reminders, so I will let all J's Theater readers know about them as well. Here's the flyer:

Institute of African American Affairs

at New York University

presents

Édouard Glissant:

One World in Relation

Four Conversations with Édouard Glissant

whose path-breaking work, according to Gilles Deleuze,

“Ties the knot between philosophy and poetry at their deepest and purest level.”

Tuesday, October 27th

Wednesday, November 4th

Wednesday, November 18th

Monday, November 30th

Édouard Glissant is one of the most important thinkers of our time. In the 1980s, his theories of créolization, diversity and difference, as elaborated in the book Le Discours Antillais, were considered seminal texts for the emerging studies of multiculturalism, identity politics and minority literatures. In the 1990s and 2000s, Glissant’s work moved beyond the mere consideration of meanings as circumscribed by the relation of the signifier and the signified and the recognition of otherness. In his recently published book, Philosophie de la Relation, the concept is used to meditate on the new meanings of globalization, chaos, violence, equality and justice. Whereas in France and parts of Europe, Glissant’s work has inspired critics, poets, artists, museum curators, musicians, philosophers and politicians, in North America, much of its scope is still limited to the circle of Francophone literary theorists. It is now time to bring his ideas to a broader audience in the Anglophone world. With Philosophie de la Relation, Glissant points us to a possibility where our differences are no longer considered as proof of an irreconcilable fact, but as part of what relates us, makes us beautiful, complex and creative. These four conversations with Édouard Glissant will bring together philosophers, social scientists, artists and humanists to discuss his ideas across disciplines and for the larger public.

Opacity, Stupidity and the History of Unintelligibility:

The Right to Opacity as a Prerequisite for Politics and Philosophy

Tuesday, October 27^th, 2009 @ 6:30 pm

Panelists: Avital Ronell, Francois Noudelmann, Joan Retallack,

Sylvère Lotringer, Tracie Morris, Manthia Diawara and Denis Hollier (Moderators)
Location: Kimmel Center, Rosenthal Pavilion, 10^th Floor

60 Washington Square South, 4^th Floor, NY, NY

Diversity in the Black Night: Chaos, Créolization and Metissage

Wednesday, November 4^th, 2009 @ 6:30 pm

Panelists: Michael Dash, Ulrich Baer, Patricia Williams,

Kendall Thomas, Arjun Appadurai, Manthia Diawara and Judith Miller (Moderators)

Location: Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8^th Street, NY, NY

Roots & Imaginary Offshoots: Ecstatic Difference

Wednesday, November 18^th, 2009 @ 6:30 pm

Panel: Theory of “Relation and Difference”

Panelists include: Francois Noudelmann, Mary Ann Caws,

Breyten Breytenbach, Fred Moten, Emily Apter,

Manthia Diawara and Avital Ronell (Moderators)

Location: Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8^th Street, NY, NY

De-capitalization and the Way of the World: Religion, Secularism and Multiplicity

Monday, November 30^th, 2009 @ 6:30 pm

Panelists: Richard Sennett, Avital Ronell, Francois Noudelmann,

Craig Calhoun, Arjun Apadurai,

Manthia Diawara and Avital Ronell (Moderators)
Location: Kimmel Center, Rm. 914-Silver

60 Washington Square South, NY, NY

Free and open to the public

Please RSVP at (212) 998-IAAA (4222)

Presented by Institute of African American Affairs

Supported by: L’Institut du Tout-Monde, The Institute for Public Knowledge,

French Department and Comparative Literature Department

Sarah Schulman's Book Event

October is almost over, and it feels like it has raced by. It's been wonderful and at times disorienting to be back east for the entire month; usually I'm well immersed into the dizzying hive of the fall quarter, but so far I've had a chance to think and read and write (and yes, write letters of recommendation!) and go to conferences, with breathers in between every activity, and it feels almost unreal. But wonderful nevertheless.

Since I've been in town I've had an opportunity not only to see people I haven't run into in a while, but meet folks I've known of or even have corresponded with over the years but never met face to face. Such was the case earlier today when I attended a book launch party for author Sarah Schulman, someone I admire tremendously and one of my literary heros/sheros. In addition to writing novels, plays, and a variety of nonfiction work, Sarah has been relentless in her activism over the years, particularly around issues affecting women, queer people, people of color, and working-class and poor people. She doesn't just pay lip service to these issues, she writes and fights, to use Ishmael Reed's phrase. This year the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at CUNY named her to deliver the prestigious 18th annual David R. Kessler lecture, which she'll do on November 12. Its title is "Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences." She joins an illustrious group of previous eminents that includes Samuel R. Delany, Barbara Smith, Adrienne Rich, Cherrie Moraga, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, John D'Emilio, Edmund White, Isaac Julie, Judith Butler, Douglas Crimp, and Joan Nestle.

Sarah's new novel, The Mere Future (one of my September 2009 book picks, I believe) captures her critical and activist approach, in speculative, fictional form; despite its unassuming title, the novel perceptively and incisively extrapolates from present-day New York, with its luxe-mania and unhelpful bromides and megabillionaire mayor, into a dystopic Big Apple (and US), now run by proverbial "others" and which appears to be functioning utopically, at least on the surface, but which her protagonists soon discover is as rotten as the pilings underneath the FDR Drive. I'll write more about the novel when I've had a little time to think about it more, but it was great to see Sarah yesterday, and also to run into some fellow wordsmiths I hadn't seen in a while, like Doug Jones. I also met Jack Waters and Peter Cramer; I used to receive their emails for Allied Productions, Inc., and even caught some of their work years ago (they co-ran ABC No Rio back in the mid 1980s), but had never met either of them. Until yesterday. So that was great too. Please pick up Sarah's book and if you're around NYC in November, catch her Kessler lecture.

Sarah signing my copy of The Mere Future

Jack Waters and Dominic

Charles Rice-Gonzalez, whose first novel will be out next spring (2010) from Alyson

Doug Jones

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Despite Ronaldo mentioning it after his reading on Thursday, I misread an online note and thus missed the final day of William Pope.l's recreation of Allen Kaprow's seminal and oft-staged "Yard," an interactive tire sculpture that permits adults to become children and gleeful explorers again, at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery uptown.

In fact I've never seen Pope.l perform any of his pieces live, but I have been a fan of his for some time. (Interestingly I cannot recall if I've ever mentioned him on J's Theater, or just thought of him as I've expounded on someone else.) Here's a link to two YouTube videos which are about as close as I'll be getting to a real Pope.l performance for the near future. Enjoy.



And here's "jameskalm" participating in the interactive creation:

iPhone Drawings

In lieu of the many posts I've been meaning to write, here are some iPhone drawings I recently completed using the Brushes and Sketchbook apps. I'm still learning how to use both, but I decided to try both out as a way of not always defaulting to snapshots. One of the challenges is using my index finger or thumb instead of a narrower-tipped instrument, like a stylus or pen or pencil because the iPhone screen responds only to electricity. Another was figuring out how to erase, undo marks, and resize the screen to add details. I want to try darker backgrounds and more colors.

I know some artists have been using the Brushes app extensively; in addition to Jorge Colombo's much talked-about May 2009 New Yorker cover, David Hockney, one of my favorite artists, has begun to produce daily Brushes drawings that he mails out to friends and followers, and one of Jersey City the artists whose studio I visited last month during the big local open house festival had a worktable full of them. I don't know of anyone else who's using Sketchbook (perhaps a simple Google search would answer that question), but I find it a bit easier to use, and more powerful as well.

Here are five of mine (pretty crude, but they were fun to create):

Man on the subway (this was the very first one I tried)

Still life (Cup and book on coffee table)

C

Woman on the subway

Kitty cat

Poems of the Black Object Book Launch at T&W Collab

Last night I caught a really fresh poetry reading at the launch of Ronaldo V. Wilson's Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009). This collection, Ronaldo's second, is one of J's Theater's October book picks, and it's easily one of the sexiest and liveliest collections you'll find on bookshelves today. Teachers and Writers Collaborative hosted the event at its 8th Avenue offices, which I'd never visited before. (I had to cancel a Seismosis reading that coincided with university events during the first year I served as the undergraduate program director, and never was able to reschedule.) I really like the new space, which is roomier and has even more dramatic views (of the Hudson River) than the old Union Square offices.

After Futurepoem Books founder and head Dan Machlin introduced the book and described the process by which it was selected (Futurepoem Books has a revolving cast of judge-selectors), three outstanding writers--Frances Richard, one of the book's judges; Wayne Koestenbaum, one of Ronaldo's graduate school profs; and Meena Alexander, who also taught him at CUNY--spoke about Ronaldo and read and performed poems from the book before he came to the podium. This was a great set up that I wish more readings would try; each reader gave the poems different and distinctive shadings, while whetting the desire to hear the poet himself read them. Richard described hearing Ronaldo read in Provincetown like witnessing the ocean rush through a large glass background window into the room, and I would have to concur, both when he reads alone and when he's with his fellow Black Took Collective poets. Last night, like Serena he served up three straight aces.

I'd never met Machlin, Richard, Koestenbaum, or Alexander (in person), though I'd corresponded with the Richard and Alexander times over the years via email, and I have been known to quote Koestenbaum from time to time. (He wrote the best Bette Davis poem I've ever read.) I also got to meet Garrett Kalleberg, whose collection Some Mantic Demons was the first Futurepoem book I came across (via Chris Stackhouse). Also wonderful was running into fellow language-lovers Tonya Foster, Duriel Harris, Bakar Wilson, Erica Doyle, Khari Polk, and Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene, among others. As always, I took photos, which are below:


Ronaldo

Dan Machlin

Wayne Koestenbaum

Frances Richard

Meena Alexander

French Essay/l'essai français + Art & Project Bulletin @ MoMa

Recently I finished and sent off a draft of an essay I'd been working on for a good portion of the summer. I don't actually write that many essays, especially because I find the process very time-consuming and difficult, no matter how rewarding the final product, but what was significant and different this time was that the Canadian journal I wrote it for publishes in French only, and so after I was asked to submit something, based perhaps on my praise of and fascination with Taïa, I decided and then agreed to write it in French rather than in English, to be translated by me or someone else later on. It was, to put it simply, a challenge, or rather a series of them, and that, I think, more than anything else, made me determined to complete it.

The first involved reading and taking notes on the book, Abdellah Taïa's Une mélancolie arabe (Seuil 2009, Taïa at left, from thehumpdaycrew.blogspot.com), which hasn't been translated into English yet. (One of his earlier books, L'armée du salut is now available in English as Salvation Army. If I had the time, I'd be willing to attempt it.) Taïa's French fortunately is fairly straightforward and contains little slang, so getting through the book wasn't hard. Moreover, the novel, though sometimes exasperating in its protagonist's sentimentality and self-dramaticization, was nevertheless engagingly provocative and broached a lot of issues that would serve further discussion. The second involved constructing an argument in relation to the journal issue's theme, which was the Théâtre de la Cruauté, which I read as referring directly back to the original version proposed by French visionary playwright and activist Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). I'd read a little of Artaud's work before, and enough about him, primarily I believe via Susan Sontag, and I knew something about his successors, such as Peter Brooke, to have a general idea of what his two manifestos on the Theater of Cruelty were saying, but I figured I ought to read the actual texts themselves, in basic scholarly fashion, before I began trying to tease out a relationship between Taïa's novel and Artaud's ideas. I did so, first in French and then in English, to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding them, and what struck me as always was the slippage in meaning between the original and the translation, though the gist remains. In Artaud's case, I think the gist is what's most important, since he was trying to get away from texts in and of themselves, towards a more experimental, gestural and visual theatrical experience, one in which a deeper metaphysics, and thus, he believed, an authenticity, might be accessed.

I saw several routes into this connection between Taïa's novel and Artaud's (at right, Guardian UK, Getty/Martinie/Roger Viollet) theories, and worked through them, particularly around the frequent deaths and almost-deaths that occur in Taïa's book, every major crisis portending or transforming into a confrontation with la mort, and their links to la cruauté as Artaud defines it. But it wasn't until I came across some commentary by the critic Peter Sloterdijk that I was able to formulate a way of reading Taïa's work, via's Immanuel Kant's 3rd critique readings of the sublime (though Sloterdijk reroutes the Kantian reading, as Jacques Rancière does, via Jean-François Lyotard), to suggest a melancholic ethics of becoming that the protagonist was engaging in. Then there was the third challenge, which was the most difficult of all: writing an essay in French. I have to make clear that I haven't written anything beyond letters or email in French since I was in high school. In fact, the last time may have been one of those French essay contests that the local Alliance Française sponsored, and I believe I wrote one describing Marseille, a city I have still never set foot in. The gulf between a high school essay and one written for an adult journal, however, is vast, so I did take the added step of reading some contemporary French journal and magazine essays, in order to get a grasp of essayistic idioms, and I realized that it was going to be an uphill climb. For just as it is often a struggle for most native English speakers who find themselves at someone's college to write a coherent and convincing essay on a given topic in English itself, so it is in French, especially for someone who is not a native French speaker and who in fact when encountering French mainly is translating it into English. What I especially strove to do was think in French, as much as possible, so as to be able to put those thoughts, in idiomatic French syntax, on the page.

A challenge that arose out of this one was vocabulary, and in particular, the difficulty of selecting certain words that had differing shades of meaning in the two languages, or that did not exist at all in French. To give one example, French has two words for knowledge, la connaissance (from connaître, to know someone, to be familiar with, from the Latin cognoscere, to know, akin by root to English to know, but also the noun, ken, a vista) and le savoir (from savoir, to know something, know how, from the Latin sapere, to taste of, have the scent of, be wise, discern, akin to the English words "savor" and "savory," both of French (Norman) provenance) At several points, I had to decide that it was la connaissance, based in part of la reconnaissance (recognition) that the protagonist Abdellah had gained, rather than le savoir, even though my initial tendency was often to choose the latter term, in part because of past readings of Michel Foucault (such as his 1988 interview, titled "Le Gai Savoir," for example, with its ironic, double-entendre riff on Nietzsche). Abdellah's knowledge is a knowledge of himself, rather than a learning or a knowing how, though when the latter is salient, I use the latter term.

Then there are English words for which there are no direct French equivalents (and vice-versa, of course, such as double-entendre, which English imported wholesale). French, from what I could tell, does not have an exact term for awe, one of the emotions produced by the sublime (or the Kantian sublimes to be exact). French has words that combine fear and reverence (la crainte, fear, apprehension from the verb craindre, to fear, be apprehensive about, being one), and astonishment (l'étonnement, astonishment, surprise, quite close to English), but not one that captures the melding of the two. So I used a compound term, la crainte mêlé d'admiration, which doesn't exactly capture the condensed power of "awe," but approaches it. But then it wasn't so much the response generated by the sublime as the recognition in life of sublimity creating a deeper sense of our mortality and the consequent sense of the aesthetic and the ethical that I was after, so the exact translation was less important, perhaps, especially since the sublime is le sublime and the ethical and ethics are both l'éthique in French.

All of which is to say that I have finished the French essay (or at least a draft), sent it off to the editor, and now have a deepened appreciation for anyone who does this sort of thing regularly, as well as for Taïa's book and the French language. When the essay is published, if there's a link, I'll provide it, so that you can read it yourself. And perhaps I'll send it to Abdellah Taïa as well.

***

While I didn't manage to get to the pricey Museum of Modern Art before the In & Out of Amsterdam conceptual art show was there--the Monday I and a friend had planned to go, MoMa was closed, so we ended up at the Met--I did finally get up there, on Columbus/Peoples of the Americas Day, no less, and saw the tinier, residual Art & Project Bulletin show. The exhibit presents the Art & Project Gallery Bulletin's entire 156-issue run, stretching from 1968 to 1989, as well as artworks by the European, American and Japanese artists who'd appeared in its pages and within, without or on the gallery's walls, literally or figuratively. Some, like the controversial performance artist-photographers Gilbert and George (above right, Sydney Morning Herald) are now quite well known, though I hadn't realized how they'd begun their careers, staging live durational performances as human statues and causing a sensation as a result. Others, like Robert Barry, are less well known but should be central to any discussion of contemporary art practice, which draws heavily from the conceptual well. What the show makes clear is that Art & Project's founders, Dutch artists Gert van Beijeren and Adriaan van Ravesteijn, created a vital nexus in the translantic conceptual art movement, putting Amsterdam on the map alongside New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, and other important sites in the development of an important vein of artmaking that remains central to contemporary practice.

I should add that reading the In & Out of Amsterdam show catalogue, which picked up after the show, I learned that the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, that city's major venue for 20th century art and one of my favorites, was a key institutional site in the trans-Atlantic late 1960s conceptual revolution, much as MoMa, in its earlier years, had been for a much earlier generation of artists. I also hadn't known that it was MoMa's legendary black curator, Kynaston McShine (what a name!), whose 1970 "Information" show introduced conceptual art as a major contemporary trend, and later curated shows on Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, and Andy Warhol, among others. He is still there, now as Chief Curator at Large, and co-curated the 2007 40-year-retrospective show of sculptor Richard Serra's work. Some photos and a video.


The explanatory plaque

The bulletins on display

A Daniel Buren striped strip--seeing this made me smile with glee. Buren once covered large sections of the interior of the uptown Guggenheim Museum with these, and also placed them all about Paris, London, and other sites. This is the first time I'd ever seen one up close.

Lawrence Weiner piece

David Robilliard drawings (the ones on the right show Gilbert and George)

And a video of David Askevold's "Catapult" (1970), Super8 film transferred to video

And, as I said, I passed the parade, so here's a photo: