« November 2019 | Main | January 2020 »
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 31, 2019 at 11:59 PM in Music | Permalink | Comments (1)
| |
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 31, 2019 at 03:43 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature, Translation | Permalink | Comments (0)
| |
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 30, 2019 at 05:52 PM in Jim Cummins - Mid West Correspondent | Permalink | Comments (8)
| |
December 1968
My grandmother and her sister live in a rent-controlled walk-up on East Fourth Street between First and Second. The Hells Angels are headquartered around the block. Through the school playground across the street, you can see the police station used for Kojak exteriors. Almost directly across the street is the campaign headquarters/studio of Louis Abolafia, an artist who recently lost the Presidency to Richard Nixon by more than 31 million votes (no matter, Abolafia at 27 was far too young to serve).
When I stop by Abolafia’s tiny storefront, I mention that my grandmother appreciates how he always smiles and waves. “Yes, the old people like me,” Abolafia says, but he is distracted. “I must have been out of my head to not show him that one.” He shakes his flowing hair in disgust and explains that he just showed a potential buyer several of his paintings but forgot one of his favorites.
Louis Abolafia: self-proclaimed Renaissance Man, the Patron Saint of Fourth Street, The Caped Crusader for Peace, and the Love Candidate for President. His nearly-nude campaign poster proclaims “What have I got to hide” but reveals a typical politician’s proclivity to conceal at least part of the truth.
The New York Times covered his campaign kick-off in May 1967, a marathon Cosmic Love-In at the Village Theater (later the Fillmore East) with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, The Blues Project, and Timothy Leary.
Abolafia is not new to the media piñata of the 60s. In December 1964 he was arrested for putting up one of his paintings on the balcony of the Metropolitan Museum.
Abolafia’s friendliness with the elders on the block is not the only way he bridges generation gaps. His headquarters also serves as the Runaway Clearing House, where Abolafia acts as an intermediary between runaway kids and their parents.
Today, Abolafia is hiding much more than on his poster, wearing a plain white turtleneck and brown slacks. He excuses himself to “make some bread,” and resumes sorting out the paintings he showed the buyer, still upset about the one he forgot. The phone rings and he asks me to take a message. I search for the phone amidst the unsold canvases, periodicals (from Life to the East Village Other), and half empty Coke cans. I know I am getting close when I come across a waste paper basket covered with telephone numbers. I add a new name and number and we start our interview.
I ask about his platform and he makes an Oh-that-again face. As he starts his rote answer (love means “being open hearted”), I mouth I’m sorry and he smiles. The rest of the interview is conversational. His campaign didn’t “make a move financially but did well spiritually,” and he garnered plenty of free publicity because “freakiness is almost as good as money on today’s market.” He did all the big TV shows (Merv Griffin, Johnny Carson) and was written up in magazines all over the world. At a party, Ruth Dayan—wife of Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan—asked his brother Oscar if he was related to Louis Abolafia.
Abolafia sees his political action as an attempt to counteract the tendency toward fascism in this country. It is not an ideological conflict but rather a philosophical one of love versus hate. He believes in a grassroots cultural revolution but feels that politicians should play a part. “A politician can voice the view that all men are really the same and brotherhood is beautiful and spread this message around the world. Cultural missionaries all over the world. Mix, marry, mingle. Break down nationalism. Prevent the spread of communism or any ideology. We’ll be part of an assimilated world. This is the only way you’re going to achieve world union.”
Notable among Abolafia's skeptics is Li'l Abner cartoonist (and right-winger) Al Capp:
Lou puts down the effectiveness of the revolutionaries, feeling that the beyond-expectations success of the George Wallace candidacy is evidence that reaction is setting in.
“Tell me, revolutionary out there, who’s winning? Every time I speak to a revolutionary they say, ‘Oh, we’re winning, we’re getting more people on our side.’ Well, if you cannot find a common bond between man, you’re gonna fight them, and I’m not sure of the intelligence of the hippie-yippie community to take over this country. I can’t see a bunch of ignoramuses running the country.”
We talk about the violence at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and I mention my recent visit with Abbie Hoffman. “Rebellion is going to cause reaction which is going to cause a lot of bloodshed. I can’t get into violence. I think it’s gotta be done through love or charm or straightening out our Karma, but it can’t be done through violence.”
Abolafia disagrees with Abbie Hoffman that the people going to Chicago knew there would be violence. “There were conflicting reports on what was going to happen. The L.A. Free Press wrote that they were going to have to give us permits because of all the people that would be going. I was at one of the big rallies and Allen Ginsberg started “Om-ing everybody to death. I pushed him aside on stage and I said, ‘Goddamnit, Ginsberg, stop Om-ing everybody to death and tell them they’re going to have their heads broken in!’ And he said, ‘Abolafia, Abolafia, Abolafia.’ And I said, ‘Ginsberg, shut up!’ This after he had fed me goat’s milk up in the country. But Allen’s all right. He’s a poetic rebel, right? He’s love.”
[A few months later at the trial of the Chicago Seven—originally the Chicago Eight—Ginsberg described Abolafia as “kind of a Bohemian trickster” who crashed the rally: “He just appeared from nowhere and got up to the microphone and started yelling into it. ‘The police out there are armed and violent. You are walking into a death trap.’ I went over and sat next to him, and grabbed his leg, and started tickling him, and said, “Hare Krishna, Louis.”]
So, how would Abolafia bring the country together? “I’m gonna do it by starting cultural centers in every part of this country. To bring out every talented kid and hope that these intellectuals and painters and artists will help the society.” His ideal cabinet would have “intellectuals, writers.” They would sit around and draw up offensive policies for “extending America” not defensive “what are you gonna do about communism” policies. “Take all the money from the war and buy out the ghetto problem. We have the greatest weapon in the world, economics, and we can do anything we want with it. We can make beautiful things happen. We have been brought down so much since the Second World War. We’re losing the greatest chess game in the history of the world.”
Postscript:
This post is based on contemporaneous notes.
At the 1967 Cosmic Love-In, you could buy a banana from an artist for 15 cents, and get 3 cents back if you returned the peel. At 2019 Art Basel, the price of a banana went up considerably.
Louis Abolafia relocated to the West Coast, where he co-created the Exotic Erotic Ball in San Francisco in 1979. He died of a drug overdose in 1995. He was 54.
Two people who make cameo appearances are still with us. Louis’s brother, Oscar Abolafia, has had a notable career as a photographer. Here he is at a showing of his work in July 2018.
And here is Ruth Dayan (who divorced Moshe in 1971) a couple of weeks ago, at the age of 102.
Posted by Alan Ziegler on December 29, 2019 at 07:12 PM in Alan Ziegler | Permalink | Comments (2)
| |
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 26, 2019 at 08:11 PM in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)
| |
In the Winter 2010 issue of the venerable journal, Pritchard reviews an edition of Graham Greene's letters (Graham Greene:A Life in Letters, ed. Richard Greene; Norton). It's an exemplary review -- well-written, enjoyably opinionated, tactful.
I love it that Pritchard thinks more highly of The Ministry of Fear (1943) than of The Power and the Glory (1940), though this reverses Greene's own valuation. What Greene called his "entertainments," such as The Ministry of Fear or This Gun fir Hire, are generally superior to his journeys into high despair, such as The Power and The Glory or The Heart of the Matter.
But the best things in the review are the quotations from Greene. The writer said that he traveled as much as he did -- to Cuba, Panama, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Vietnam -- not "to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity" to which the London blitzes had addicted him. I believe it.
Here's Greene's take on Havana, capital of luxury and vice, in the days before Castro seized control: "Havana has been a fascinating city, quite the most vicious I have ever been in. I had hardly left my hotel door before I was offered cocaine, marijuana, and various varieties of two girls and a boy, two boys and a girl, etc." According to Pritchard, the book's editor Richard Greene (no relation) seems to like his namesake, a refreshing change from Greene biographer Norman Sherry, who, in a display of "prurient absurdity," gave "a list of the novelist's forty-seven favorite prostitutes -- surely a new kind of labor of love on a biographer's part."
Now I will read the book.
-- DL [from the archives; first posted on April 24, 2010]
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 26, 2019 at 03:50 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature, From the Archive | Permalink | Comments (2)
| |
Paris by bike in a time of strike…
Passing by the Mobilier National warehouse, then swinging up under the elevated line... will actually shave a mile off my return journey, I pragmatically assure myself, slip the phone in my coat pocket, kick the pedal up and wobble off.
The reduction of my trip by a whole mile is much easier to explain than any product discount ever will be: distance is experience and, so, also elastic.
As I pedal along in my chosen city in its time of strikes, the usual nauseating taste of burnt petroleum byproduct gathering on my tongue, I am thinking that it is actually legal to make and sell and profit from whatever environmentally poisonous thing you want. Yet there are those who smirk and jeer at the naïve syllogism “distance is experience and experience is elastic”. Drôle de world, ours.
In no time at all, the Mobilier National (at 1, rue Berbier du Mets) slides into view.
Mobilier National keeps on keeping on, having improvised itself through changes of dynasty, epoch and régime, massacre and siege, real and farcical revolution, coups d’état, budget cutbacks and pension reform. So, now, in addition to moving around the trappings of government, it runs the renowned tapestry and rug manufactures of the Gobelins, Beauvais and the Savonnerie, along with the national lace works in Puy-en-Vélay and Alençon. And, since France has long been a very strong – maybe the strongest global player in luxuries and luxury equipment and technique – think wine or … perfume bottles or … food logistics – Mobilier National also encourages and supports innovation in textile conception and production.The agency is to France what the US federal General Services Administration’s “Department, Sub, for Furnishings, Historical” would be had GSA been founded to serve the needs of an improvised medieval court.
Housed in one of the finest and first examples of building with concrete (with an art deco style), Mobilier National is the state agency that provides classy furnishings to institutions such as ministries or embassies. Mobilier also develops techniques and technology around art conservation and restoration.
This past Fall, the innovation-support arm of the agency held its first public show of projects in hand: Prière de toucher le fil (“Please touch the thread”).
In addition to a monumental staircase (in case a medieval king-equivalent shows up, I reckon), false and real walls, corridors leading through architectural terrains vagues and discrete health and safety advice, there is sturdy three-tier shelving spread over three full walls. In the tiers, often wrapped in half an acre of bubble wrap, a visitor can’t help noticing – and wandering over to take a close look – at the love seats, chairs and occasional tables of well-upholstered eras past.Since 1, rue Berbier du Mets is a working warehouse, administrative center and now an arts de vivre showcase all in one, the exhibit space has an Ikea-on-Louvre air.
For those who fear President Emmanuel Macron’s monarchical tendencies, I can report that Napoleon’s seat – along with its imperial numen – remains unclaimed and undisturbed.
Prière de toucher le fil – three installations showing off fabric embedded with ultrathin copper threads that, basically, make a touch screen out of the fabric– brought together Mobilier National’s expertise in Jacquard-technique weaving and Google-sponsored innovation in capacitance and capacitor technology.
Amor Munoz’s “Notes and folds” turned around player piano spools whose format creates an axis on which computer coding, music production and tactility come together.
An interactive “meditation walk” combining touch & sound with light, “Tree of Light”, designed by the collective Oma Space (Jang Jiu, Daniel Kapelian & Gil Kyoung) opened exploration of the technology’s possibilities. Different musical chords marked the moment as, led forward by a firefly light, the visitor’s bare foot found purchase on, among many different textures, a bark or silk or straw step.
Chloé Bensahel’s “Words weave Worlds” closed the show with a meditation on words and touch – stroking, poking or touching words produced different sounds, with different emotional resonances to the word.
In a word, Prière de toucher le fil was something unique – a way to understanding technology through the esthetics of sight, sound and touch. I am waiting on Mobilier National’s second exhibition. And so should you.
All the installations were created in cooperation with Google engineers during a Google Arts & Culture artist residency.
Posted by Paul Tracy DANISON on December 26, 2019 at 03:11 PM in Beyond Words, Tracy Danison, Paris correspondent | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Alençon, Amor Munoz, Beauvais, Chloé Bensahel, Daniel Kapelian, Gil Kyoung, Gobelin tapestry, Gobelins, Google, Google Arts & Culture, Google Arts & Culture, GSA, Jacquard weaving, Jang Jiu, Mobilier National, Oma Space, Prière de toucher le fil, Puy-en-Vélay, Savonnerie
| |
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 26, 2019 at 01:30 PM in Feature, Mitch Sisskind - Correspondent at Large | Permalink | Comments (1)
| |
Playlist by David Lehman
Top of Form
Ace Boggess's review
Apr 07, 2019
I read this book in one sitting, interrupted only by a brief smoke break, and probably will read it again today. I enjoyed it that much. While Playlist purports to be “a poem,” each segment a meditation on the music of a day, I found it more a collection and, most importantly, a return to form for poet David Lehman, recapturing the magic of the daily poems from his books The Daily Mirror and The Evening Sun. These pieces thrum and muse. They dance. They mourn. The poems (or segments) are kinetic and playful. They carry the reader along at full speed but nonetheless with full stops in between. I've often said that one of the best aspects a poet can have is the ability to show reverence and irreverence for the same subject at the same time. Lehman is a master of this. In “12/21/17” amidst the sadness of nostalgia for deceased friends A.R. Ammons and John Ashbery, Lehman writes:
“and later that day I wrote
a poem for John Ashbery
let's have it, he said.
okay I said here goes
and John said he liked it
particularly the third line
(the poem was two lines long)”
This book is filled with remembrances of these poets, but also the joys of music and old movies. Playlist is such a wonderful book to read. I only wish it were a hundred pages longer.
by Ace Boggess
https://www.goodreads.com/
http://www.gyroscopereview.com/2017/07/843/
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 26, 2019 at 12:40 PM in "Pitt Poetry", Adventures of Lehman, Book Recommendations, Feature | Permalink | Comments (0)
| |
The painter Archie Rand has agreed to file occasional columns for us. On January 2nd, for example, we shall post six images from a collaboration Archie did with David Shapiro, "Kiss" (2017). Welcome aboard, Archie, whose birthday inspired Byron to dash off this poem:
The thirteenth of August
is way better than
"the Twelfth of Never"
as sung by Johnny Mathis
in the suburban cellar
where young people
made out in the twelfth grade
according to friends
who are into astrology
and argue that a man born
on the thirteenth of August
is leonine in nature, with an
expert eye and hand to match
(and I own one of his paintings).
Photo by Barney Kulok.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 25, 2019 at 05:26 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Archie Rand, Feature, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0)
| |
I hate to see the evening sun go down.. .
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 25, 2019 at 01:30 PM in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)
| |
It’s been 12 years since publication of the expanded edition of O Holy Cow!: The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto (edited by Tom Peyer and Hart Seely) and the ensuing scandal when the book garnered no major awards due to bias against Spoken Word. Consider this classic of architectural angst, which spawned the “Tighten it!” self-help craze (whose acolytes claim that those three syllables uttered repeatedly by world leaders can lead to peace in this shrinking world):
Alienation
I think my head shrinks a little
In this indoor stadium
I am...
The mike is getting bigger.
And I have to tighten it.
Now The Library of the Other America will be publishing The Dialogues of Rizzuto. This excerpt has already become a linchpin of Columbia’s updated Core.
PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Phil Rizzuto, Frank Messer
SCENE: A Broadcast Booth. The pitcher has thrown four consecutive balls, but the umpire called the fourth one a strike. The fifth pitch was called ball four.
Rizzuto: If you’re a fatalist, you would say he was meant to walk.
Messer: Is that what a fatalist is?
Rizzuto: I don’t know, I never could figure out what a fatalist was.
Messer: Is that a fatalist or a realist? A realist would say he was meant to walk.
Rizzuto: I don’t know, we could have a good discussion on that if we get some rain.
Posted by Alan Ziegler on December 25, 2019 at 12:50 PM in Alan Ziegler | Permalink | Comments (1)
| |
Great song by Mr. James Van Heusen
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 25, 2019 at 08:29 AM in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)
| |
“Abstract” rendering of an Assyrian leg, gallery 401. “Conceptual” 3D digital lower leg.
The Assyrians are often critiqued for their artistic expressions of violence. I see only strength and beauty in the style. I love the anatomical languages of the Near East, regardless of interpretation.
“The anatomical landmarks and contours of the leg muscles are prominently depicted in an exaggerated manner (just like a bodybuilder’s), to convey the powerful nature of the creature. The skin folds on the right patella and the hypertrophied calf are well expressed (had the sculptor studied anatomy?). There is (or what appears to be) a prominent superficial vein “beneath” the skin of the lower right leg.” - Osama S. M. Amin, http://etc.ancient.eu/?s=Anatomy&submit=Search
“Fools that you are; you do not recognize that the limbs of your ancestors are still present therein.” - Montaigne
Detail: Statue of Montaigne by Paul Landowski, Square Paul Painlevé, Paris, France.
“ON THE POLYSEMY OF THE FIST”
Left: Copper Object in the form of clenched fist, ca. Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (Turkmenistan), late 3rd–early 2nd millennium B.C., gallery 403.
Center: Abecedario - https://phmuseum.com/francesca_seravalle/story/the-fist-photos-on-the-polysemy-of-the-fist-d883b7a49
Right: “The tiny hands measure 1-1/4" long (right fisted hand) and 1-1/2" long (left hand open palm) with a forearm circumference of 1-7/8" and diameter opening of 1/2". If you have a project requiring (lots of) little hands, this is a wonderful find!” - Etsy
There is no understanding of this ancient clenched fist - not its use or any related information. My speculative fist research led me to contradictory semantics, including black power and white supremacy, to the Masonic fist of capitalism to the communist fist of the Spanish Revolution.
Babies clench their fists for the first few months of life. A surprisingly similar number of explanations are available, from the palmar grasp reflex to the immaturity of the nervous system to “evolution” (primates hanging from their mothers in the trees).
I had a collection of plastic baby hands. In those days the avant-garde considered any found object art. More contradictory semantics.
Cylinder Seals: Identity Theft & Immortality
Top: Cylinder seal and impression: winged horse with claws and horns, Middle Assyrian, ca. 14th–13th B.C., gallery 403.
Left: Cancelled check stub J. Paul Getty.
Center: J. Paul Getty’s French Driving Permit, 1930. J. Paul Getty Family Collected Papers, The Getty Research Institute.
Right: A cancelled check for three million dollars from J.P. Morgan to the Northern Pacific Syndicate, 1896
“Some seals depicted one's occupation but others . . . revealed one's personal identity, even one's name. The seal was used to certify important transactions. It is no wonder that people worried over the loss of their seal: it would have been as serious to an ancient Mesopotamian as the loss of one's personal identification is today and the threat of "identity theft" just as great then as it is now.” - Ancient History Encyclopedia, https://www.ancient.eu/article/846/cylinder-seals-in-ancient-mesopotamia---their-hist/
There are complete cuneiform protocols for the process of reporting and replacing a lost seal. The bureaucracy is phenomenally similar to replacing a driver’s license at the DMV.
These seals are the first tools and documents of commerce and individual traders. Both JPs, Getty and Morgan, personally collected ancient cylinders. Morgan’s collection has 1,157 Near Eastern seals (within a total cuneiform tablet collection of 3,000 pieces).
Both collectors have been described as “art addicts”. Getty’s philosophy of collecting, for example, “inextricably linked art to business and business to immortality.” These seals must have resonated well with our famous traders. . . “PAID IN FULL”
Hair-Loom
“Rayyane Tabet's great-grandfather left behind a goat-hair rug given to him by the Bedouin of Tell Halaf in 1929. It was his wish that the sixty-five-foot-long rug be divided equally among his five children, with the request that they in turn divide it among their children, and so on, until the rug eventually disappeared. As of today, the rug has been divided into twenty-three pieces across five generations.” MetText, gallery 400.
Storage Jars and Fainting Goats
Storage jar with mountain goats, ca. 4,000-3,600 B.C., gallery 403.
The myotonic goat, otherwise known as the fainting goat, falling goat, stiff-legged goat, and nervous goat is a goat that temporarily seizes when it feels panic. The fainting episodes are known as "bizarre attacks of stiffness and rigidity" upon locomotion. See https://faintinggoat.com. Despite fainting, they have been bred continually, going back to the earliest goat herding days, for their generally superior qualities: they are alert, good-natured, and heavily muscled.
Twenty years ago, I had a fainting episode. No seizing, no panic. This happened to be during a dispute over brush clearance methods in our California neighborhood. “Can grazing goats prevent wildfires?” “Or are they inefficient?” I was given the “tilt-test”, strapped vertically on a board to induce fainting. Very inefficient diagnostic. Some art is admired as memory.
Posted by Alec Bernstein on December 22, 2019 at 08:17 PM in Art, Beyond Words, Feature | Permalink | Comments (1)
| |
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 22, 2019 at 02:27 PM in Feature | Permalink | Comments (0)
| |
343: Darkness falls but stops just short of my shoes, so I dance home, light on my feet.
344: One night Greenwich Village early-1960s Fat Black Pussycat, Tiny Tim opens for Richie Havens. A buck cover and another dollar gets you a burger. Tiny Tim (who has yet to record “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” or get married on the Tonight Show) plays ukulele and sings both voices of Paul and Paula’s “Hey Paula.” Richie Havens (who has yet to open Woodstock or play Clinton’s inauguration) muses at length about the wonders of watching a helicopter take off and dazzles us with his thumb-fretted open chording.
345: After a rough weekend, and a few drinks, she looked me in the eye, kissed me, and said, “You’re good.” Her stare glared and she added, “Too good.”
346: Mid-1980s I am helping someone I don’t know very well move into a downtown walk-up. While taking a breather leaning against the van, an acquaintance passes by and points to the boxes. “Moving in or out?” “Actually, helping Gerard Malanga move in.” “Let me get this straight,” she says. “You are helping a cult poet and Andy Warhol collaborator move.” She nods and goes on her way.
347: In the late-1950s my father went to bed at 8 to get up at 2 for his milk route. He would often emerge, baggy boxers sleep-squinty eyes and, without a word, lower the T.V. volume and return to bed. He never lowered the volume before going to bed.
348: I have a blind date for homecoming weekend freshman year—football game, dinner, party. She’s not a student, lives in town with her family. I am smitten at first sight and throughout the game I try to impress her with my college wit. I walk her home so she can change for dinner. When I return and knock on her door, a man answers and says his daughter isn’t home. I fumfer that we’re in the middle of a date and he repeats with father sternness: “Young man, I told you she is not home.” But then there she is, nudging her father out of the way. “I am so sorry,” she says as she hands me a piece of paper as she closes the door. “This is my friend. Call her. She’s likes philosophers.”
349: In the 1970s I come across a small crowd in Central Park surrounding a man with a wagon and several cats. I love animal acts. I watch as he slowly convinces each cat to jump into the wagon. When they’re all lined up, he takes a bow, and then nothing. I ask someone applauding if I missed the act. She replies, “That is the act.”
350: One night Greenwich Village early-1960s Gaslight Café. The bill is John Hammond, Tom Paxton, and Phil Ochs. In the middle of Hammond’s set, he looks out at the audience and says there was a guy here last night, came up and played the harp with him. “Are you out there, John Sebastian?” Sebastian (who has yet to form the Loving Spoonful and write “Do You Believe in Magic,” one of the great rock songs) is indeed there, and the two harmonica-cats wail the blues.
351: Late-1960s Dow Chemical, maker of napalm, is a target of anti-war protests. Dow’s billing number for long distance calls gets leaked to the underground press. One night I call Vermont from a payphone and recite the code to the operator, who replies, “Compliments of the phone company! Far Out!”
352: Whenever I hear or think of Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday” (originally written for his suite Black, Brown, and Beige) I am infused with feeling, imagining a family dressing for church, peaceful from turmoil at this hour apart from time. “Come Sunday, oh come Sunday / That's the day.”
Posted by Alan Ziegler on December 21, 2019 at 05:47 PM in Alan Ziegler | Permalink | Comments (6)
| |
An Indian canoes a river, the industrial skyline behind him puffing toxic smoke. He kneels, his hands changing paddles, and spots a floating piece of newsprint as accusatory music speeds up. The fringe sways on his jacket’s sleeves as he keeps moving at a slow, steady pace. Once on shore, he steps over litter-strewn rocks. Just a few more paces and a freeway forces him to stop. A close-up of his profile—braids, a thick silver necklace. A voiceover telling us he has a “deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country.” A car whizzes by, a hand throwing fast food garbage out of the passenger window that lands at his feet, bouncing up to splatter his pants. French fries, a bite of burger someone was too full to eat. The Indian turns to the camera, a tear passing two under-eye wrinkles on the way to his cheek.
In 1971, I was ten. I soaked up the PSA that haunts me to this day. I never litter and if a trashcan is full, I crumple up my rubbish into my pocket or purse to dispose of later. In 1974, I wrote an impassioned letter to President Nixon, founder of the Environmental Protection Agency, begging the U.S. to ban aerosol cans—and they did! I thought anything was possible. In fact, I thought my letter postmarked from Woonsocket, RI, led the charge. Cultural appropriation—the “Indian” in the commercial was Italian—and Watergate aside, I had a sense that the powers-that-be would do the right thing when it came to the environment. I had a sense that everyone loved America, even that descendent of slaughtered Indians.
In 1971, I had no idea of indigenous activism, of the occupying of Alcatraz, of Indians wanting their lands back. I had no idea Pepsi and Dixie cup manufacturers subsidized the Keep America Beautiful campaign which worked against the failed “bottle bill” demanding beverages be sold in reusable containers. I had no idea Keep America Beautiful wanted to guilt-trip the public into thinking pollution was an individual’s responsibility after environmentalists drove a pickup truck full of used bottles and cans to Coca-Cola headquarters. So there I was—and here I am almost fifty years later—with my righteous guilt, a brimming recycle bin, and cloth grocery tote. The mills in my hometown have all moved to China, leaving widespread unemployment and the foul Blackstone River, which the EPA cites as "the most polluted river in the country with respect to toxic sediments.” No crying Indians canoe there now, though in the 1600’s three tribes—the Nipmucs, Wampanoags, and Narragansetts—made it their home.
In 2015, Purge 3: Election Year was filmed in Woonsocket’s depressed downtown. The dystopian movie imagines a US government granting one night a year in which all crime is legal—not just for corporations but for the rest of us too. Domino’s Pizza and New York Lunch, who had to send their employees home, lost a lot of business the two weeks Main Street was shut down. Timeless Antiques and Collectibles, Brook’s Uniforms, and Kiwi Mart fared better as the crew wanted to rent their storefronts. Variety called Purge 3“a squalid B-movie political horror film that plays to our most reptile-brained basic instincts, and also to our cartoon-noble ideals, and by the end you can’t separate the two…”
In the year I was born, in another Keep America Beautiful PSA, a little white girl Susan Spotless sings “Please, please don’t be a litter bug because every ‘litter’ bit hurts.” What a false sense of power she and I possessed. I didn’t realize the jingle’s cloying flattery—that sincere children could save the world by simply asking our parents to keep a trash bag hanging from the radio knob in the car. After all, Smokey the Bear reminded us “only you can prevent forest fires.” And so we thought we did. We sang the “please, please don’t be a litter bug” as we jumped double-dutch, unaware of corporations and their love of plastic. Surely our hearts were pure, spotless as Susan’s white headband and dress. Even now I can’t always articulate the duplicity—the forces against the likes of earnest Susan Spotless and me.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 20, 2019 at 10:45 PM in Denise Duhamel, Feature | Permalink | Comments (1)
| |
Monsieur Loyal commente
la ballerine s’évente
et pique la piste
en vrille
rouge banderille
(MC Gayffier)
– MC talktalking / ballerina / thrusting / redded blade /right through
The season of giving has come and, I expect, like hatchlings blindly looking for a behavioral model, you all’ll be needing something lovely – a little brain and eye toy – to fix on in the New Year 2020.
I’m glad to gift you with a glimpse of the work of live performance photographer Benoîte Fanton (www.facebook.com/BenoiteFantonPhotographies).
Judging from Fall 2019 retrospective shows hosted by both Mac Créteil, choreographer and activist Mourad Merzouki’s urban dance temple in suburban Paris, and the high-brow commercial Théâtre du Rond Point on the Champs Elysées, Fanton’s dramatic images speak not only to me, Karine, and my circle of esthetically circumspect performance gourmets, but to every kind of lover of the movement arts.
So it should. Fanton has specialized in capturing dance performance – photographing more than 2000 classic, modern, contemporary and urban dance shows in Paris and across France – for the last 15 years or so of her 20-year career.
The photographs offered above and below are from Fanton’s retrospective collection, entitled Sur quel pied danser. I reckon Sur quel pied danser means to be in some doubt as to how to go forward. As a collection Sur quel pied danser, Fanton writes, is dedicated to the notion of holding on (with aplomb) once you, as James Brown famously implores, Get on up.
Get on up, hold on: good advice for opening any year, but especially for this one which open out on to the last chance to do something serious about the climate emergency before it becomes so complexly exponential there is nothing we can do.
At Fanton’s shows, and in her photo book (also titled Sur quel pied danser), each photo is accompanied by a short meditation by MC Gayffier, painter and musician and, of course, poet. Gayffier’s lines admirably take on, fit to and gel with Fanton’s pictures.
I’ve interpreted rather than translated what I think of as Gayffier’s “New Parisian Loose Haiku”. In my mind, the mechanic of her writing was like that of a neo-realist painter than Zen-consciousness warrior: looking from the model to the words and back again. The interval between the focus points was where the poetry was written.
I’ve tried this same imagined mechanic in my interpretative effort of Gayffier’s work, swinging my focus from her lines to my visual sense of the photo, putting down the words that result. I hope my encounter with Gayffier’s sensibility makes her work shine through for you.
Get on up. Hold on.
Posted by Paul Tracy DANISON on December 20, 2019 at 06:58 PM in Beyond Words, Dance, Photographs, Tracy Danison, Paris correspondent | Permalink | Comments (4)
Tags: Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, art festival, Asobi (Jeux d’adultes), Bagneux, Ballet National de Paris, Benoîte Fanton, Bouzide Aït Atmane, Bouzide Aït Atmane, break dancers, choreographers, choreography, circus, classic ballet classic music, classical dance, Compagnie Kafig, Compagnie Les Ballets C de la B, Compagnie YZ, contemporary ballet, contemporary dance, creative retrospectives, Créteil, dance, dance Artists, dance choreographers, dance festivals, dance interpreters, dance new creation, dance performance, dance performer, dance-circus, dance-performance, dancers, Dans l’arène, Don Quichotte de Trocadéro, Elodie Chan, Emmanuel Gat, environmental collapse, MC Gayffier
| |
– for a lady
How do the Chinese tell time? By looking at the eyes of their
cats. Here’s how.
A lost missionary, afoot in a sleepy suburb of Nankin, had
forgotten his watch and asked a little boy what time it was.
After a moment’s hesitation, this street urchin of the celestial
Empire said: ‘‘Wait, I will tell you.’’ A few seconds later, he
reappeared with a very fat cat in his arms, looked into the whites of her eyes, and said, ‘‘It is almost but not quite noon.’’ Which was the case.
As for me, if I favor my beautiful Feline, so felicitously named –
the honor of her sex, the pride of my heart, and the perfume of my spirit, day and night, rain or shine – in the depths of her adorable eyes I can always tell what time it is, and it is always the same time, an hour vast, solemn, limitless as space undivided into minutes and seconds – a lingering hour no clock observes, soft as a sigh, swift as a glance.
And if an intruder came to disturb my study of this enchanting dial, if some malevolent genie, some demon of ill fortune, were to address me as a vain and idle mortal and say: ‘‘What are you staring at? What are you looking for in the eyes of that creature? Is time told there, and can you tell it?’’ I would reply without hesitation. ‘‘I know what time it is; it is Eternity.’’
Madame, is not this a most meritorious bagatelle, and as full of vain self-regard as your high and mighty self? Frankly, my dear, it has given me so much pleasure embroidering this pretentious piece of puffery that I ask nothing of you in return.
-- "L'Horloge" by Charles Baudelaire [trans. David Lehman]
from the Summer 2019 issue of The Yale Review, in which four other prose poems by Charles Baudelaire appear.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 20, 2019 at 02:44 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature, Translation | Permalink | Comments (0)
| |
Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife
He would have written sonnets all his life?
DON JUAN, III, 63-4
“Where do you see yourself five years from now?”
the eldest male member (or is “male member”
a redundancy?) of the committee
asked me. “Not here,” I thought. A good thing I
speak fluent Fog. I craved that job like some
unappeasable, taunting woman.
What did Byron’s friend Hobhouse say after
the wedding? “I felt as if I had buried
a friend.” Each day I had that job I felt
the slack leash at my throat and thought what was
its other trick. Better to scorn the job than ask
what I had ever seen in it or think
what pious muck I’d ladled over
the committee. If they believed me, they
deserved me. As luck would have it, the job
lasted me almost but not quite five years.
-- William Matthews
Ed. note: You still need to "speak fluent fog" to get anywhere in a university literature department.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on December 19, 2019 at 05:01 PM in Feature, Poems | Permalink | Comments (0)
| |
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman