Nobody Knows His Name: A Note on Adam Scheffler’s “Heartworm” (& “Googling Myself”)

“Piss expressively.”

The onomatopoeic first line of Adam Scheffler’s poem, “Advice From a Dog,” hints at his virtuosity and his modesty. This guy ain’t too proud to pet and be petted. Another one of his openers make you wonder if he’s about to give himself too much credit: “She said my butt was a piece of art…” Not to worry:

…my greatest asset, if
you will, although come to think of
it she didn’t say it was good art
only a “piece” of it, as if it’s
not complete without her hands
on it…

Scheffler is careful about intimacies. I doubt he’ll ever go Lowell. There won’t be lines from a begging (or pegging) partner’s correspondence in his poems. Nor does this nice Jewish boy suffer from Maileria. He’s no wannabe macho.

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Standards (& Stadiums)

Stanley Corngold’s evocation of his first time in Yankee Stadium reminded your editor of a Q&A with another Brooklyn boy (and friend of First). When the late Jules Chametzky was in hospice last year his son, Rob, asked him if he’d ever seen Willie Mays play when Mays was in the minor leagues. Rob recalled their exchange at his father’s Memorial…

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“Rap is Clear, So Write Clear”

Toomaj Salehi has been imprisoned and tortured by Iran’s regime scum who hate how his lucid rap exposes “the filth behind the clouds.” You can find out more about the international campaign on his behalf here. Toomaj should be free as a bird, free as the Iranian woman he images, sans hijab, “…liberty’s mane blowing in the wind.”

The first rap song here has (imperfect) English subtitles.  There’s a translation below the second video (after “read more”).  A taste from its outro:

Don’t wait for a saviour, there is nothing on the horizon
You are the rescuer, you are the hero
If you and I unite…we are boundless
We are the saviours of eternity, we are the Imām of Time

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Tool of The People: Q&A with Ladj Ly

Les Miserables

Sight and Sound‘s Elena Lazic interviewed Ladj Ly soon after the UK release of Les Miserables in 2020.

Most people discovered you through Les Misérables, but you’ve been making films for a long time. Can you tell me about your work with the collective Kourtrajmé?

Kourtrajmé is, before anything else, a group of friends. We all grew up together. We’ve known each other since kindergarten or primary school.

The collective was formed in 1994 with the ambition to make our own films. I joined in 1996. I was close friends with Kim Chapiron as a kid. I started as an actor in his films, and then at 17, I bought my first video camera and began filming my neighbourhood.

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“Baraye Azadi” (Iran’s Freedom Song)

The single best way to understand Iran’s uprising is not any book or essay, but Shervin Hajipour’s 2m anthem ‘Baraye’ which garnered over 40m views in 48 hours (before he was imprisoned). Its profundity requires multiple views. (Translation by @BBCArdalan)

The lyrics are a compilation of tweets for #MahsaAmini that evoke felt life among the young in a modern society ruled by a geriatric religious dictatorship. The tweets speak “to the yearning for ‘a normal life,’ instead of the ‘forced paradise’ of an Islamist police state.”  [Per Karim Sadjadpour. More adapted tweets from him below the song.]

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Killer Storm

What’s above is the entry on Jerry Lee Lewis from Greil Marcus’s annotated discography to the collection of essays he edited: Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island.

 

“I said her name!”: Roya Hakakian’s Statement on Mahsa Amini & #IranRevolution2022

“Here’s my testimony [in English] before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a few days ago.

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“You’ve Got to Have Freedom” (Pharoah Sanders, Rest in Power)

Per Eric Lott: “A favorite instance of what Baraka describes in ‘The Screamers’ (1967), a ‘social tract of love,’ ‘the honked note that would be his personal evaluation of the world,’ watching us while he fixed his sky, no head and all head, no predicate, ‘the repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed riff, pushed in its insistence past music . . . hatred and frustration, secrecy and despair,’ spurting ‘out of the diphthong culture, and reinforced the black cults of emotion’ — ‘no compromise, no dreary sophistication, only the elegance of something that is too ugly to be described, and is diluted only at the agent’s peril.'”

May Pharoah wail again soon with John Hicks and Idris M. on the night shift!! B.D.

Before the War [& After Friday’s Murderous Assault on Rushdie]

In the spring of 2006, when Ellen Willis was battling the cancer that would take her life later that year, she emailed approval of  First’s pieces on the Danish Cartoon terror attacks. Struck by how much those pieces “echoed themes” in what she’d written at the start of the Rushdie affair, she wondered if we “might be interested in reprinting the editorial I wrote in the Voice as a historical affirmation of the bad road we are going down…” As Rushdie begins a tortuous comeback from the maiming that had him on a ventilator and seems likely to leave him blind in one eye, the piece of the past Ellen thought belonged in First remains horrifically prophetic.

Below “Before the War” is a passage from another First protest against Fatwas that’s still on time.

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Democracy and Education (Bill Russell on Film)

Despite the stiff narrator (Liev Schreiber) and stock footage from the 60s, Bill Russell: My Life, My Way is mind-full. You might start around 10:30 with Russell’s nicely calibrated recollection of how he felt when another (white) center was chosen as the best player in Northern California after Russell’s USF college team had won 28 of 29 games and a national championship.

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Mama Prestinary R.I.P.

My late brother Tom’s second mother (in law) died on Monday in D.R. Teresa Prestinary, of Monte Cristi and New York City, made 105. She had five children of her own but she raised plenty more on both islands. Per her grandson Jamie who told me that on vacays in D.R. he ran into hombre after hombre who thought of her as his own matriarch. I lived up the block from Mama Pres (when she was in New York rather than D.R.) and was often underfoot in her apartment or at my brother’s and sister (in law) Maria’s place across the street. In all that time I never heard Mama Pres say a cross word to anyone ever.  The last of 20 children she seems to have been treated as a late gift from God by her family in D.R. So she grew up to grace everyone she met. She had a special connection with my wife (who is the first of 20 children).  I can see them now shucking corn on my parents’ porch in the Berkshires, taking the breeze, and laughing together. Maybe they were talking about the odd DeMott fam they’d somehow got mixed up with. Or maybe they were recalling rites they’d performed to ward off witchcraft by Santerian drug-dealers who’d made my wife’s life hell when she opened a $10 clothing store on 140th and Bway back in the ’00s. (The two of them had tested my two year old son’s pee to see if it had prophylactic powers after my wife found chicken blood spattered on her store’s door.)

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P.A. Way Gone

A good friend lost his brother this week. They grew up in P.A. If only they could still go local together and hear Kurt Vile’s latest. While the video may be too twee even if my buddy wasn’t grieving hard right now, I’m hoping he might find some peace in Vile’s piece someday (soonish)…

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