A Successful Art Career

Was the time you built

A tower from sticks

You found on the beach

Eight years old

A tyke in the sun

The indestructible things

Of the earth-mind

Found there

A successful art career

Is you wrote a song

In your bedroom

That nobody heard

Except the mice in the walls

Or that you wrote

Walking down the street

And later forgot

And later remembered

When you heard that

Pause and tone interval

Rise out of Monk’s piano

Like a magician’s white dove

A successful art career

Is being unable to focus

On your dumb money job

Because something about

That late Beethoven string quartet

From the old vinyl box set

With the blue cover

Grabbed you and did not

Release you

A successful art career

Was three sugar packets

Dumped into coffee

Some of it scattered

Across the formica table top

Between you at

Brady Street Pharmacy

Where it was always the 1970s

A successful art career

Is to live

To not die

In the face of it all

Against all that was built 

To stop you

Report from Brazil – 23 January, 2021 by Leo Gonçalves, tr. DH

Regarding the optimism surrounding what lays ahead for Brazil, I would ask you to consider the following:

If today Brazil is the country with the highest number of daily new cases in the world, that is a victory - the result of great effort on the part of the federal government.

If the country has more than 212,000 dead since the start of the pandemic, it is because President Bolsonaro has worked very hard to make it so.

If the vaccine is taking a long time to become available, this is the result of a great battle the president has waged to ensure that the vaccine never arrives – full of fighting, much advocacy for chloroquin and very little for the vaccine. Sabotage behind the scenes. Zero investment in research. Politicization of the vaccine. Arguments with governors.

The government does not care if we die. The truth is, it wants the maximum number possible of us to die. Given that, don’t think that things are going to get better anytime soon.

The policy they’ve adopted is the following: ensuring that the maximum number of infections occur and maintaining that illness in the population, occupying us, stressing us, as they ram through a wish list of neo-Liberal legislation.

***

(Sobre o otimismo relativo ao que está por vir no Brasil, peço para que vocês considerem o seguinte:

Se o Brasil é hoje o país com o maior número de casos diários no mundo, isso é uma conquista, resultado de muito esforço do governo federal.

Se o país tem mais de 212 mil mortos desde que a pandemia começou, é porque o presidente trabalhou muito para isso.

Se a vacina está demorando a chegar, isso é resultado de uma grande peleja do despresidente para que a vacina não chegue nunca, muita briga contra, muito esforço pela cloroquina e pouco esforço pela vacina. Sabotagem nos bastidores. Zero investimento em pesquisa. Politização da vacina. Briga com governadores.

O governo não se importa se mais gente vai morrer. Na verdade, ele quer que o máximo possível de pessoas morra no Brasil. Sendo assim, não pense que as coisas estão prestes a melhorar.

A política adotada aqui é esta: a de fazer com que haja o máximo de contaminações e manter a doença entre nós, nos ocupando, nos preocupando, enquanto ele passa a boiada).

Catholic Death Trip: Parts 1, 2 & 3

Part 1

I grew up Catholic but have always disliked the central artifact of its iconography: the crucifix. Specifically, I am repelled by the one that features a three-dimensional replica of the the lifeless body of Jesus of Nazareth hanging. I've long been been a person fascinated by symbols and deeply appreciative of metaphor and of signs laden with meaning. And yet, I find the crucifix to be over-the-top, gratuitous and even juvenile in its shock value. I have the same reaction to the crucifix that I have to Marilyn Manson -- that they are trying too hard and do not need to hit me over the head with the message. I was reminded of this tonight walking past a church rectory on Oak Park Avenue. There, hanging on the cream-colored walls just beyond the foyer was a 2' x 1' crucifix, with good ole Jesus lingering there in three dimensions, murdered and not yet delivered. I had the same reaction I've always had to that thing, since I was a little boy: it looks macabre, lurid and lacks any subtlety. I don't know if I exactly put it in those terms when I was eight years old – but I think that was what was behind my antipathy toward the crucifix. Compared to the powerful and mysterious Star of David; compared to depictions of Hindu deities like the radiantly blue Krishna, the multi-armed and bejeweled elephant god Ganesh or the teal-toned, proud and compassionate monkey deity Hanuman, the crucifix feels like a 1970s B-movie horror film, with the fun taken out.

Part 2

Even after being raised Catholic and having attended a Jesuit high school and 2 1/2 years of Catholic grade school, I still enjoy some Catholic iconography. The Jesus-hanging crucifix is just not one such piece. In the context of the Catholic doctrine I was force-fed, that particular icon reads as a tortured body hung from a noose or dragged through the street. One crucifix-related experience I had actually resulted in lasting trauma: The Stations of the Cross ritual. Hung at 12 spots across the church walls are depictions of different stages of the Nazarene's "passion" (the name of the Church gives to the extended torture the Romans gave Jesus of Nazareth). More than once as a young child, I was led by a priest or nun through each station as they detailed the relentless, bloody mutilation of the savior we were taught to love. And if there was one thing the Roman Empire was good at, it was concocting ways to physically aggrieve and finally kill a person. I never really recovered entirely from those delightful little tours. I continue trying to do so.

Part 3

The closest I have seen elsewhere those grisly, pain-fetishizing aspects of Catholicism are certain scenes from the films of Quentin Tarantino. And Quentin is as simultaneously dismal and sensationalist in his frequent scenes of torture, as is the Catholic Church. It does not speak well of Tarantino and Hollywood bad boy cinema, more broadly, that a recurrent trope in his movies is as unimaginatively repulsive as what the Church fathers were coming up with 1500 years ago.

West Rogers Park, 1/16/21

Bubblegum blue sky

Snow tracking the street

A young man in a parka

Walks beside the parked cars

Black brimmed hat

Prayer shawl peaking out

Beneath the hem of the jacket

And a book held open

In his right hand -

Prayers on the way

To the store

They Can Take the Rifle, We'll Take the Song

We were never american

We were never them

We were never he who dies

With the most toys wins

Not because we are special

But because we are not

A human a gift

A bear a gift

A raven a gift

A rose a gift

We were never their american

We were never them

We were louis armstrong

Hüsker dü

Antler

The yiddish anarchist

Lower east side

They can take the rifle

We’ll take the song

They’ll take henry ford

And rush limbaugh

They can take anger descending

A golden escalator

We’ve got sitting bull mavis staples

And henry threadgill harvey milk

We’ve got angels

They’ve got roy cohn

We’re from the other america

The one not mentioned

They can take the westward push

Into the oblivion sunset

Towers of buffalo skulls

The sepia sunrise

Take it all

We don’t want it

Take al capone

Take the drug war

Take clint eastwood

We don’t want him

We’ll take sunshine

And beehives

Silence on a beach

Years Worth of Hours in Right Wing Talk Worlds

10,000 hours. That's how long it takes for one to become expert or even extraordinary at a pursuit like the violin, basketball or chess, according to the thesis that author Malcolm Gladwell lays out in his book "Outliers." He examines the study, incubation and immersion pursued by the Beatles, Bill Gates and physicist J Robert Oppenheimer as examples of people who had this opportunity and blossomed as a result... I crunched some numbers and determined that if you listen to four hours of right wing talk radio a day and watch four hours of right wing cable "news" each evening, then – not counting weekends and major holidays - you will log 2504 hours of time on those activities over the course of one year. Within four years, you will have put in enough time listening to Rush-Sean-Bill-Dan-Tucker-Laura to equal the relentless day-and-night playing the Beatles did at strip clubs in Hamburg, Germany from 1960 to 1962 - playing that honed their skills into pop music brilliance. We are now dealing with the consequences of the apprenticeship of 40,000,000(?) people into right wing radio and TV that has occurred at a hyper-intense level. I really wish those Tea-Partiers-to-Trumpists would have been studying underwater photography or the clarinet or how to write a sonnet instead.

The GOP Is F'd

Republicans lost the popular vote by 3.5 million in 2016 and they lost it by 7 million in 2020. I would agree with Atlanta-based journalist Dr. Rashad Richey that we will probably not see the Republicans win another presidency in our lifetime. Obviously, what would secure that would be an abandonment of the arcane Electoral College system. In the meanwhile, the *majority* of the country simply does not support either the old guard John McCain/Mitt Romney wing of the party or the new, race-baiting Trump/Bannon wing. And it is the fact of this inexorable decline in popularity of the Republican Party - relative to the Democrats - that is driving some of the out-of-control madness and desperation that we are witnessing.

It is likely that only Orphan Maker, with his high-flying WWF BS showmanship, could have sold the race-baiting agenda so successfully. There is no other real estate tycoon, reality show star waiting in the wings for the GOP. Fascists of the grim Josh Hawley/Stephen Miller variety may step in to try to seize the brass ring. More clownish charlatans like Matt Gaetz or the hapless Ted Cruz will also try to assume the mantle of the new fascist wing of the party. They will all fail... because none of them has the chintzy, zirconium glint that Donald possesses. Frankly, the Republicans are fucked eight ways to Sunday.

The End Approaches

Donald could drop dead at any moment. All of these lunatic autocrat psychos appear immortal until they're not. It reminds me how a Jesuit priest who taught at my high school remarked that he could stay healthy all semester and then when break came, he would get zapped with a real bad cold or the flu. Or the addict who drinks and pops pills for 30 years and is finally able to quit and the sheer shock to the system of that purging of toxins knocks them into The Unknown like a bolt of lightning. The orbit Orphan Maker began in the early 2000s with his Apprentice con show reached its apex with his presidency and now Donald has a maximum of 12 days left until the final credits roll on that shit show. Donald looks to be headed for the mother of all emotional crashes. And his physical carapace for his enterprise of soul theft will crash alongside his spirit. He's been scrambling like a roach from Raid spray trying to dodge it, but the end approaches for his reign of idiocy. There is no greater portrait of emptiness and despair than a narcissist whose con has crashed. I reckon the wretched fool has two years left on his mortal contract, maximum. More likely, Donald will buy the farm within a year and his movement will decline greatly, as it is utterly focused and dependent upon his unique brand of unctuous, dime store cologne charisma.

"Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and the Wilson Shift

Last night, my partner and I watched “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” on Netflix, adapted by Ruben Santiago Hudson from the iconic August Wilson play and directed by legendary theater director and playwright, George C. Wolfe. Having settled in to our seats, early into viewing the film, we felt a gear engage. We could call this “The Wilson Shift.” This is when the dialogue in an August Wilson play crystallizes inside you and you enter into a kind of hungry trance. A trance - because you find yourself subsumed into the emotional trajectory, from joy to despair of the characters and the life and death stakes that the principal characters face. The hunger is born of the fact that the tones, rhythm, colors, and rising and fallings of the language ricocheting around the scenes is so urgently beautiful that you just want to go on hearing more, more, more of it! I’ve experienced a similar hunger borne of the sheer cascading beauty of something upon listening to Bach.

Had I been born in 1500, I would likely experience the hungry trance more often while watching to a Shakespeare play. Alas, early Modern English is sufficiently different from 21st century American English that the daring aesthetic liberties and poeticization that Shakespeare imparts to the everyday language of his time can go past the tipping point for me and form too many gaps for my mind to fill in. Fortunately, with August Wilson, the 20th-century African American English that he uses is familiar enough to me that I can take it all in and savor the beauty of the dialogue… even as the traumas and terror of being Black in 20th century America reveal themselves more and more as the drama pushes on.

I remember hearing an American Shakespearean actor remark that many contemporary theater goers can feel frustrated by the Bard’s refusal to use simple, direct language to say something simple. In the opening scene of Hamlet, for example, the night guard Marcellus says the following as he recounts the sighting of the ghost of Hamlet’s father from the previous night:

“When yond same star that's westward from the pole Had made his course to illume that part of heaven Where now it burns”

I’m pretty sure Marcellus is just saying, “At this time last night…” But that is not the point! declares the Shakespearean actor. Invoking the movement of the stars across the heavens and speaking of how they “illume” and “burn” is as much the purpose of the lines as is their prosaic meaning to indicate the time of the incident. US Americans, in particular, can get so accustomed to and invested in using language only to communicate practical things around business and work or to voice gripes or anger that we can forget that language is as capable of conjuring rapture and beauty as is a trumpet or a painter’s brush in the hand of a master.

And this is one of the many gifts that August Wilson, in his series of 10 plays (one for each decade of the African American 20thcentury) offers to us: the chance to bask in the extraordinary evocative power and poetic potency of Black American English. Yet, he does this somewhat stealthily. I remember hearing an actor say about Wilson’s dialogue that before you really tune in, it just sounds like regular folks shooting the breeze. Indeed, it does. But then the poetic gear engages and the “Wilson Shift” occurs and the heightening tension takes off together with the rhapsodic language.

This higher level of language that Wilson deploys so arrestingly was driven home for me this morning upon reading a quote by the French writer Edgar Morin which my friend, the poet and performance artist Ricardo Aleixo, posted on Facebook. My translation of the passage is below.

“Poetry, which is part of literature and, at the same time is more than literature, brings us into the poetic dimension of human existence. It reveals to us that we live on Earth, not merely prosaically – in utilitarian and functional ways - but also poetically, destined for wonder, love and ecstasy. Through the power of language, poetry puts us into communication with the mystery that is found beyond what can be said.”