Bob Liss finished this report on LeBron James’s role in last season’s NBA playoffs a few days before James announced he was “going home” to play for the Cleveland Cavaliers next season. Liss takes in the news in his postscript to this piece.
Culturewatch
Existential Bugsquash
The costumes are wrong. They have to be discarded. We have to start out naked again and go from there.
Roger & Me
Ms. Levin completed a manuscript about her life as a tennis fan and player (Comeback) a few years ago. She picked up on the beauty of Roger Federer’s game early in his career and her text tells the story of her responsiveness to him. What follows are Federer-focused passages from her tennis memoir. Take it as her tribute to Federer in the wake of his inspired performance at Wimbledon this year.
Double-Happiness: Al Green and Zinedine Zidane
I
“Yo’r my pride and joy…Everything for a growing boy.” Al Green chuckles at his own double entendre (cum Marvin Gaye reference). “That’s extra,” he teases, adding a phallic riff to the polymorphous plenitudes of his 1973 live concert on Soul. The flow of the sexiest singer ever is beyond quid pro quos. Green embodies erotic variousness. He muses, sighs, cries, laughs, murmurs, shouts, baritones, moans low, skies for notes in his upper register. Miss this high drama and you’re missing a Mississippi—not a mere stream of consciousness. Thanks to Joe C. (who posted the 56 minute clip at Peter Guralnick’s website: peterguralnick.com) for allowing me to dip into this river again.
Mumblecrit
“I don’t care what any of these snobs say!” said my freshman-year Postmodern Lit instructor, not bothering to identify the snobs. “Titanic is a damn good movie, and ‘My Heart Will Go On’ makes me cry!” His line of thought, though tangential to the class discussion that day, didn’t come from out of nowhere, as it was early 1998, well within the James Cameron blockbuster’s imperial moment in global pop culture. Apparently, enough backlash had built up by then to provoke my instructor’s gratuitous but highly revealing outburst.
Rank Culture
My initial reaction to ArtRank (see below) was one of disgust—An every-day, 2k14 kind of disgust that also gets called forth when I see the ungodly short shorts of teenagers today, which are as discomfiting as they are fascinating when you think about the exact point at which an ass becomes a leg.
It seems every generation finds there’s always more cheek to show…
The Question of Taste: Bill Berkson
Bill Berkson is a poet (originally associated with the New York School) and critic who’s been writing about art since the 60s. His books include The Sweet Singer of Modernism and other Art Writings, which Dave Hickey called “an indispensable text for anyone interested in late-twentieth-century culture.” In this dialogue with Jarrett Earnest, Berkson digs into the democratic roots of his own taste:
When people like you and I were growing up we were immersed in what is often considered low culture, but one cultivated specific habits, tastes, within what was generally available. In high school I began to meet people who hated modern life and the culture that went with it. They wanted to live in the Renaissance; everything had been downhill for them since 1700 or whenever. They wanted no part of our modern vulgarity, whereas I was so deeply immersed in it I came to fine literature quite late. I read comic books and pulp novels if I read anything at all, and whatever was required for book reports, you know, and I watched endless movies, and it’s like what Creeley says in that lovely poem: I did, maybe still do, have “a small boy’s sense of doing good,” and “ride that margin of the lake.” A small boy’s notion is that of a knight on horseback by the sparkling water—in Idylls of the King perhaps, but no, it’s Robert Taylor in love with Elizabeth Taylor in a Technicolor Ivanhoe. To disdain such a homegrown culture would be untrue; instead you develop a taste for what’s great within it, according to what you really know and go for.
An Opening of the Field
Exploring the art and coteries of the artist Jess (1923–2004) and the poet Robert Duncan (1919–1988), An Opening of the Field celebrates the vibrant household of two extraordinary men who lived together as lovers and collaborators at the epicenter of the San Francisco Bay Area’s glory years of artistic ferment.
From Farce to Koan: Knicks Lure Phil Jackson Home
I. Follies and Foibles
Finding fresh metaphors for Knickerbocker managerial incompetence requires a stretch. Celebrity coaches and general managers like Larry Brown, Donnie Walsh, Isaiah Thomas, and Don Nelson have become distant memories, nearly absorbed into the long history of franchise ineptitude that Red Holzman’s great teams made everyone forget, and to which Pat Riley’s thug squads lent a different coloration.
The Anti-War of Harvey Kurtzman
In the early 1950s, Entertaining Comics was king of the ten-cent jungle. EC invented the horror comic (Tales From the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear). It issued the first “scientific” science-fiction (Weird Science, Weird Fantasy). It re-invigorated the crime comic (Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories), with a social conscience. And with the blessing of its owner, William M. Gaines, it packaged them with an unprecedented—and splendiferous—amount of sex and gore. Unfortunately, when a public outcry linking comics to juvenile delinquency—to the outraged, befuddled sputterings of Gaines and avid pre-teen readers, like myself—it was an antipathy toward and a ban on just such content that forced him to gut his line.
Black Mountains Beyond Mountains
First thanks Claudia Moreno Pisano for enabling us to reprint the following slightly compacted excerpt from Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters, which is edited and annotated by Ms. Pisano. This swatch of the correspondence between Baraka—soon-to-be-magus of Black Arts—and Dorn—Black Mountain poet—gets to the heart of their relationship in the 60s. Their calls and responses here were sparked by a disagreement over Castro’s Cuba that’s picked up new resonance since it’s easy to hear echoes of the Cold War in our time. What may be most striking now, though, is not the poets’ efforts to go international but their shared clarity about the depth (and width) of white supremacy in America.[1]
High Low Country: The Baraka/Dorn Correspondence
I’m sure you’re going to somehow manage to say the opposite but mean the same, which we two I like to think always do. It is a good necessity. I just hope we don’t get caught, isolated from each other, across the river, waving.
—Ed Dorn
…[R]isk is something I need…I don’t expect to be right, but it does profit my energies when I am. Moreover it’s the swing itself I dig, if I feel it. Ditto I think you go by that. But I do feel close to you, whatever I say or however.
—Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
The MLA: Singled Out for a Double Standard
In early January, the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association Convention—perhaps the largest and most influential academic gathering in the humanities—passed, 60-53, a resolution urging its members to “contest” restrictions on the freedom of travel for American students and faculty members of Palestinian descent to universities in the West Bank. Another resolution, urging solidarity with scholars supporting boycott, divestment, and sanctions, against Israel, was not brought to the floor, but referred to Executive Committee for discussion. The issues were aired at a tense session entitled, with cheerful understatement, “Academic Boycotts: A Conversation About Israel and Palestine.”
Beat Better, Beat Worse
Meltzer sent this piece, written a couple years back, in response to First‘s Call for remembrances of Amiri Baraka. It ends with a reflection on Baraka’s music writing. You’ll find that excerpt in our Baraka tribute. But the rest of this piece is echt Meltzer as well so here’s the whole enchilada.
Poetry and Money
Aram Saroyan considers the life of Lorine Niedecker and takes in the material conditions underlying the creation of poetry. (Oliver Conant follows up with a poem that speaks to what the French call “the social question.”)
Isaac and Isaiah
It is reliably said that during Isaiah Berlin’s youth his pampering mother used to rouse him from sleep with the question, “What are we going to do today?” To which the answer was: “Nothing.” Perhaps Marie Berlin became the nicest kind of Stalin in his subconscious.[1]
Bad Writing & Good Writing
Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavor, before he allows himself to be tempted by more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.
Confessions of a Spiritual Pornographer
You write. Your friends say, “I liked it.” They say, “You’re really a good writer,” like it still comes as a surprise. You don’t blame them. If everyone could say something memorable, everyone would be Oscar Wilde.
Anti-Fascist Art Class
The author gave this commencement address at the School of Visual Arts on 19 May 2013.
I’m not here today to offer advice or even encouragement. I’m here to talk about art and audience, about art and the people it reaches—and what happens when it does.
Going Pop: From Hirschhorn’s Folly to Macklemore’s Heist
The wiz behind the Gramsci Monument erected this summer—and now disassembled—in the center of a South Bronx Housing Project is no Oz. Thomas Hirschhorn is sincere about “doing art in a public space.” He was a presence at his creation, which was open every day this summer. The artist meant to stretch himself before and after his opening, living in the hood, hanging out at his Monument.
Ain’ Time Yet: Colliding Eras in Lebron’s Stormy Reign
I. Tim’s Late Spring
A summer’s worth of blockbuster trades has radically shifted the traditional power axes in the NBA, as franchises move either to rebuild (Lakers and Celtics) or to weld together groups of superstars, some of them aging (New Jersey’s Nets, the LA Clippers) to challenge the budding Miami Heat dynasty. It could be a time of upheaval, with outgoing NBA Commissioner David Stern preparing to ride into the sunset in darkest February, after his thirty year reign—wearing a baseball cap, of course, and smiling, of course. With the smell of beer suds now washed from living room rugs after the thrilling Miami-San Antonio Finals, it’s an apt time to look at the state of the league, now LeBron’s League, it appears; inevitably, inexorably, but how justifiably?