Owning Your Racial Lens

I'm a little late to the party, but there was a pretty nuanced article in The Stranger a few weeks back about race and racism in Seattle that is definitely worth your time. As Graves points out, race is a particularly prickly subject in a city that prides itself on progressivism yet remains deeply segregated between white and brown. 

The conversation is long overdue, as far as I am concerned. For white liberals to feel guilty, however, is counterproductive -- and besides the point. Graves quotes writer and activist Tali Hairston: "As a white person, you have to own the development of your own racial lens. Because whether you're aware of it or not, you have one."

Thirsting for the Superfluous

One of the best defenses of art I've ever read is in the September/October issue of Orion Magazine. In "The Exile of the Arts," Jay Griffiths argues that, "one of the reasons for the hostility against the arts today is precisely that they are implacable witnesses against this terrible lie of our times: that money is the measure of all. Art refutes this lie, disentangles 'money' from 'values,' and argues with its deepest authority that there is another sky, intimate and boundless, open to all, where the poet can tow a star across the liquid river of night, like a child with a toy boat on a string."

This is all eloquent enough, but the genius of the article lies in Griffiths positing of art as a kind of moral alternative to consumerism. "Consumerism and the arts are both answers to the same yearning," Griffiths writes. "The human spirit thirsts for the superfluous, for overflow and abundance. Literalism wants that abundance made material, though, whereas metaphorical abundance resists any need for literal overconsumption. Metaphors of extravagant liveliness reduce a hunger for extravagant lifestyles. Stuck in literal abundance, however, a society is credulous to the monostory of money. While metaphor and the arts offer pluralities and different voices, literalism, from Plato onward, speaks in a political monotone, the one state ruling, top-down."

This is the thing that the liberal technocrats and politicos don't seem to understand: it isn't possible to convince people not to thirst. It is possible, with the right kind of education, parenting and community, perhaps, to persuade them to crave stories and photographs and poems instead of palaces.

Just Love

I am rarely compelled to write about music (last post excepting), but I do believe I have fallen in love. Charles Bradley, the "screamin' eagle of soul," is the object of my affections. 

I've known about Charles for almost a year (I organized up and down the Pacific Coast of Oregon listening to him in the car stereo), but I had the incomparable treat of watching him play live a few days ago at the Bumbershoot Music Festival. The atmosphere was electric. There was almost a religious feeling in the air. Such expansiveness in his voice, such pain and depth of feeling. We rode it into catharsis, let it wash over us like a palliating thing.

Charles Bradley makes you want to forget about history, about politics and terror, about your own pain and heartbreak. He makes you want to love. Love, love, love.

Here's a brief bio of Charles (turns out that he and I have lived in not one but two of the same places: Bushwick, Brooklyn, and Wassaic, New York). Here's a video of him doing his best song. Here's his second best. And here's him performing a fantastic rendition of Neil Young's Heart of Gold.

And, here's a picture of me, my buddy Piotrek and Charles at Bumbershoot two days ago. When I spoke to him, he seemed overwhelmed by the intensity of the crowd's response. He seemed humbled.

Drumming For a Good Cause

I had the great pleasure of seeing the Julian Lage Group play live at a Buddhist Global Relief event in Brooklyn last week. Improv jazz is not normally my thing, but these guys were great, especially drummer Tupac Mantilla. Check out the video below.

Taking Down the Help

A really interesting critical takedown of The Help (novel and film) courtesy of Roxanne Gay. I haven't experienced either, but Gay's perspective is powerful, her sense of moral outrage palpable. The essay is worth a read.

Power Over Distraction

         
"If the remission of pain is happiness, then the emergence from distraction is aesthetic bliss. I use these terms loosely, for I am not making an argument but attempting to describe the pleasure from recognition or rediscovery of certain essences permanently associated with human life. These essences are restored to our consciousness by persons who are described by artists...When you open a novel--and I mean of course the real thing--you enter into a state of intimacy with its writer. You hear a voice or, more significantly, an individual tone under the words. This tone you, the reader, will identify not so much by a name, the name of the author, as by a distinct and unique human quality. It seems to issue from the bosom, from a place beneath the breastbone. It is more musical than verbal, and it is the characteristic signature of a person, of a soul. Such a writer has power over distraction and fragmentation, and out of distressing unrest, even from the edge of chaos, he can bring unity and carry us into a state of intransitive attention."

Saul Bellow on "the distracted public" in his collection of non-fiction, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future.
       

Poem to a Black Dog

by Alex Gallo-Brown

Pink tongue,
black bearded body,
how you‘ve kept me sane these months
with your unerring smile,
even as your hips sag 

beneath my touch,
wilt like sun-baked flowers.
Poor creature, blessed
with short memory and superior smell,
your days must be only negligibly distinct,
a sputtering fountain of unorganized time.

Or perhaps this is what we believe
in order to make sense 

of your seemingly eventless existence.
Perhaps you are actually more attuned to each day,
their unpredictable waves, their subtle surprises--
a food critic endowed with a nuanced tongue
or a jeweler examining thousands of diamonds,
not one of them the same.

So that you might taste that closely,
see that clear.                

               RIP Chinook