I am always flummoxed by the way people think about representations and reality; they appear to think that representations create reality, or that a novel or a movie can transform you and the whole world. Nowhere is the absurdity more apparent than on Black Panther, and I've never seen it more clearly expressed or displayed more clearly as implausible than by Anna Deavere Smith in the May 24 New York Review of Books. She portrays BP as being to this era what Malcolm, Martin and the Black Panther party were to the 60s.
'There is a conversation to be had,' she writes, in a core sample of her prose style. 'Filmmaking is collaborative,' she observes. 'The producers are essential.' Perhaps she's trying to lull us toward her vast conclusions/rhetorical questions by saying as little as possible for awhile. 'Killmonger [the super-villain] is competitive,' she claims. Like Donald Trump, 'he behaves with no decorum.' Yeah? Say that to his face, why don't you. Consider by contrast the Dread Dormamu, for instance, who always made etiquette his calling card. 'Women have commented on how thrilling it is to see a powerful black woman,' especially one who is 'fresh-faced in every way.' Cosmetics are going to be key, I feel, to Smith's new transformative Black-Panther oriented social movement.
The character Shuri "represents a new type of young black woman - a science genius who spends her days in the lab making inventions and powering what she invents with vibranium." That *is* a new type. She suggests - I don't think she's trying to be funny - that 'Wakanda Forever!' is to this moment what 'Power to the People' was to the '60s and 'No Justice, No Peace' to the '90s. I want you to picture people chanting that at the demo after the next police shooting.
'A sense of self comes from the mirror in which you see yourself - and it also comes from gathering information on how others see you. . . . What is it about the human condition that causes us to need to see ourselves in art forms? Is it that art forms are meant to be mirrors?' Or in other words, movies make the self. The 'mirror' of Black Panther is undistorted at last. That required a lot of CGI. If you can hold onto your sense of yourself as an invulnerable costumed superhero, I'd be a bit worried what happens after that, but go for it I guess.
She doesn't know whether Black Panther will change the way judges sentence black men; it's quite possible. She doesn't know whether it will transform schools and the children within them, but it just might. She thinks Shuri will lead to black female CEOs in Silicon Valley. If people didn't say things like that regularly, you'd just go 'have you lost your frigging mind?' She appears to believe that a billion-dollar blockbuster can have results comparable to the entire Civil Rights movement. Plus it can sell more cars than Malcolm and Martin put together.
Well, it was the same with Wonder Woman, the Lucretia Mott of our time, the final triumphant realization of feminism, who so transformed us all and demonstrably led to higher SAT scores for girls. And plus WW is super-hot in every way. I know a bunch of sexual harassers who just couldn't continue after they saw that movie. "There is a conversation to be had," one of them told me as we gazed at the screening with almost superhuman intensity.
as classical greece was the golden era of sculpture, the italian renaissance the golden era of painting, and 2016 the golden era of pharmaceutical advertising on television, this is the golden age of the written word. it's like living with horace and virgil, i mean living with them.
i know people who have spent decades bemoaning whatever the media situation was at the moment, often in apocalyptic terms. really, we've been declining since 1952. y'all need to love the world a little as it stands right now, alright?
over the decades, many a grad student or professor has said to me: oh, little crispy, what shall i do? i need to write! to which i offered various softened-up versions of my daddy's advice: then sit your ass down and start typing. but i should have responded like this: why do you need to write? for on the answer to that question turns the matter of whether you should write or not. maybe you should skip it.
zora neale hurston's essays are still radically undervalued. she is one of the great american essayists. in the canon of great expressions of american individualism i would place seeing the world as it is alongside emerson's self-reliance and thoreau's walking.
can i tell you a story? it's late '83 or early '84. i am living in poverty in london with my gf (eventually wife) rachael in a bedsit in chiswick. she is cleaning nice british people's houses illegally, i am busking on the tube and writing for melody maker (i'm in there like every week, sometimes with multiple pieces. but they are paying...5 lbs a pop or something? more for a big score like when i interviewed cyndi lauper, or would have interviewed chrissie hynde=my crush except she slammed the dressing-room door on (not in) my face at the hammersmith odeon. that only made me love her more, but made it 5 again.) anyway, they give me a plum assignment: fly to paris for two days, interview inxs and see two shows (they had the #1 right then i think), and see how far you can get inside the scene. ok, they were supposed to be these insane australian guys, the hardest-partying pretty boys the world had ever known. plus i actually thought they were a good pop band.
i was not necessarily the person you'd choose for this. i did drink and do drugs, but there was nothing i hated like some big party scene; i prefer to drink alone, actually, etc. this is fine if you're a record reviewer. not if you are doing big tour features and the like. but they were not only flying me to paris, they were paying me like what i'd made for the last 40 pieces or whatever. not saying no.
somehow i hooked up with the dude from new music express on the plane over; we might have known each other from gigs. he had gotten the very same rap: here are the passes. we talked to their people. do not go to the show and then back to the hotel. get the real story. he was this geeky-tall dude fresh caught from oxford. we actually looked at each other with some fear.
so, we cabbed over to the gig at a theatre. i think it was one of those things where the stadium-type band plays like five straight nights at a middle-sized venue. good show, just what you were expecting, very pro. michael hutchence was a pretty paradigm lead singer/showman/sex symbol type, kind of the next iteration of jagger and tyler. i was going to write about that. so, we go backstage. not only are they glad to see us, they were drinking whatever was the best champagne available in france and doing coke from these little mounds (if i had ever done coke, and if i had done it then, i would describe it as not quite like any coke i had ever done before, like if i had ever lived in bethesda with a coke dealer, say). that was trivial, but also there were a bunch of the world's most beautiful women in there, like nothing i had ever seen in my fucking life, seriously. and no other guys but my boy and me.
plenty to go around! said hutchence in his aussie thing. oh har har! i am trying to enter into the spirit of the thing, but to begin to form the picture think about how me and my boy look in this context. i was wearing clothes from london thrift shops (wait rumble shops? they had a term). i cut my own hair without a mirror before i came because the old lady down the hall would use the bathroom for two hours. i am 5'7" and not the very worst in maybe a gradschool context, but i am standing next to hutchence and co. with women whose sudden appearance would flummox any heterosexual man. i'm 22 (oops let's make it 24; i felt 14). also, just for the hell of it, sex was already not going well with my darling.
we split up into two limos? one crit to each limo with some band guys and plenty of girls? we hit multiple stops; i have no idea; socialites' special parties where there's margaret trudeau or something? it got to where we were the most hilarious thing ever, like they said, we brought our writing staff! they say they want to do a biography of michael! he's a redneck american! he was at oxford last year! he's 5 feet tall; he's 7' tall! aren't they scruffy? let's see how far they'll go! we did our part, because we were easily the most verbal people in the region and we were competing madly with each other; the whole way over it was music history trivia and assessments of the gigging bands in london etc. he was so wrong about everything. anyway: my god don't they talk! it's hilarious! let's see if we can shut them up!
after that it is a complete blank. i have this vague notion that they literally rolled me out of the limo in front of the hotel. both me and nme guy missed the gig the next night. but the paris paper said they played great (my boy read french, the fucker). we had collapsed into one room somehow and we sat there groaning, thinking about how to approach our editors. we had this notion that we could help each other fabricate stories that would like be long enough and seem plausible and still have some hijinks etc. we offered to write them for each other; oddly enough we each had little bundles of our own clips along, and we decided that - though each of us regarded ourselves as unique geniuses and disagreed about every pop act who ever played - our prose styles might be indistinguishable for general reader or editor. we thought it would be fun to try; well we were trying to comfort ourselves, like curling up and rocking back and forth for awhile. like we thought we'd tell michael, and he'd still think we were hilarious, and he'd invite us to the next tour, and we'd remember this time and write genius articles.
i think he had a girl who was still at oxford, or maybe u london. both were worried about our drinking, as i recall; maybe we'd both promised to be temperate and chaste. we had to figure out some fabrications there too, and we were helping each other. we could confirm each others' stories and meet each other's lovelies! we never did get any of the pieces to fit, like how we missed the plane, and why the stories looked wrong when they came out and so on and we just sort of gave up eventually over lunch in london. we were each engaged in covert self-examination for clues as to what might have happened with whom. then we drank a little more and passed out and missed our plane back in the morning, as foreshadowed.
i made 5, but he sent me out again as soon as i returned because he did like the review of the show. he just sat there shaking his head as i kind of vaguely drew the picture. he'd seen it before.
hutchence died in 1997, by auto-erotic asphyxiation. it has rather a mythological quality. that is the origin of my personal life telos, the single principle to which my very soul has been dedicated ever since, as often stated on this blog: never die of auto-erotic asphyxiation. the obits are excruciating.
To some, the bigoted nature of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons is clear. “It’s a racist publication,” Ms. [Francine] Prose, a former president of PEN, told The Nation last week. “Let’s not beat about the bush.” (nytimes)
since when is islam a race? not to beat around, or even about, the bush, but i always thought it was a gender.
i do think that shooting people over cartoons is a sort of hyperbolic pc: they kill you for caricature; we just exile you for using the wrong phonemes, thug. but people really do confuse being offended with being assaulted, which would indicate that, unaccountably, they have never been assaulted. no one has a right not to be offended, or else each of us has a concomitant duty to maintain absolute silence. christ i'm offended all day every day, for example by the words 'impactful', 'relatable', and 'proactive'. it feels like an attack on my family and my identity: i come from a long line of prose stylists. consider the latest ad for microsoft robotics: 'the real question that needs to be aksed is, what can we do that is impactful?' fetch me my club, b, and i'll show you.
i bet i have said this before, but my favorite contemporary writer on art, by a good long way, is dave hickey. such a bold and wild and and combative and hilarious writer, and also so sharp and right on many matters. (he doesn't have to be right about everything according to me to be my favorite writer.) i'm teaching his invisible dragon again in my beauty course, though i love some of the essays in air guitar even more.
If I said, "Beauty," they said "The corruption of the market," and I would say, "The corruption of the market?!" After thirty years of frenetic empowerment, during which the venues for contemporary art in the United States evolved from a tiny network of private galleries in New York into this vast, transcontinental sprawl of publicly funded, postmodern iceboxes? During which the ranks of "art professionals" swelled from a handful of dilettantes on the East Side of Manhattan into this massive civil service of Ph.Ds and MFAs administering a monolithic system of interlocking patronage (which, in its constituents, resembles nothing so much as that of France in the early nineteenth century)? During which powerful corporate, governmental, cultural, and academic constituencies vied ruthlessly for power and tax-free dollars, each with its own self-perpetuating agenda and none with any vested interest in the subversive potential of visual pleasure? Under these cultural conditions, artists across this nation are obsessing about the market? Fretting about a handful of picture merchants nibbling canapes in Business Class? Blaming them for any work of art that does not incorporate raw plywood?...
During my informal canvass, I untangled the "reasoning" behind this presumption. Art dealers, I found, "only care about how it looks," while the art professionals employed in our institutions "really care about what it means." Easy enough to say. Yet even if this were true (and I think it is), I can't imagine any but the most demented naif giddlily abandoning an autocrat who monitors appearances for a bureaucrat who monitors your soul.
i am gearing up to teach david hume's enquiry concerning human understanding in my modern phil class. in my opinion, hume is, first off, the best philosophical prose stylist ever to write in english. it's not strunk-and-white stripped-down plain-speaking, exactly, but through all its complexities it is at great pains to achieve clarity.
coming to it after teaching descartes, locke, pascal, spinoza, i am struck by the modernity of hume's voice: really maybe the whole culture made a turn to something more comprehensible to us in the intervening decades. but also hume's voice - personal and intimate and yet amusing and entertaining - is perhaps a bit more like the style of his novelist contemporaries than it is like locke or malebranche. obviously, he had benefitted greatly from swift and addison, as well as his own people like samuel johnson and adam smith and gibbon. it is not surprising that hume's great style could be turned to a variety of authorial purposes, and it sparkles still in his essays on various topics and in his histories.
and then he really is both a charming and a killer intellectual: swashbuckling, bold as hell, but more precise in his way than any of his predecessors and also more humble. he is disarming, genial, but devatsting. he will rip your concepts to shreds. here's a good example: the classic section IV, part II of the enquiry.
i'm working on a review of a book called british ethical theorists from sidgwick to ewing. admittedly, this is the sort of thing jeeves would hold up in front of his face just to intimidate bertie, and perhaps it is not primarily intended to provide amusement. however, it has got me reading things that i had long neglected or forgotten. i have to say, it's hard to imagine clearer or more solidly-constructed work in ethics than that of h.a. prichard or w.d. ross. one re-discovery: the very excellent five types of ethical theory, by c.d. broad. it is written with extreme confidence and a lot of flair.
when i did the index for obscenity, anarchy, reality in the early '90s, i thought i had invented the comical index, or at least had done the first one in an academic book, or for heaven's sake the first in an academic philosophy book. (you can actually check out the index in the look-inside bit of the amazon page; no one but randy auxier really noticed, though.) but frigging c.d. broad was there ahead of me. some sub-entries:
Bentham, Jeremy; tentatively compared to God, 160
God; may possibly be a Utilitarian, 81-82
Green, T.H.; his power of producing prigs, 144
Hegel, G.F.W.; was a philosophical disaster, 10
Paul, Saint; less widely appreciated than Mr. Charles Chaplin, 173
Russell, Hon. B.A.W.; his inordinate respect for psychoanalysis, 24
Socrates; less widely appreciated than Mr. Charles Chaplin, 173
etc. also this is an artifact of an era when a professor could actually express bold, slashing opinions definitely and amusingly. we long ago transcended that era.
one thing about authorship in the age of word processing: one definitely no longer thinks in terms of discrete drafts and revisions: the thing can grow from within with rolling revision. or you're working on two or more chapters simultaneously, while every so often trolling for corrections or obvious additions throughout. one suspects that this had just got to change the final product, though it's perhaps an elusive matter to say just how. you might dick around with all sorts of different organization, to the point of fucking your shit up or getting strangely fragmented. i have to say, i would much much rather write this way than on a typewriter, which is how i started. or i used to write on pads and then type. obviously there is something to be said for that, but how many writers would go back? for one thing, it's just a far more refined product; you've been over it dozens of times, though perhaps not with the same concentration as on the two stabs you used to get.
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