In Ohio, this Tuesday, voters in a special election will decide on a scammy state constitutional amendment. “Are you sick of constitutional amendments? Vote yes on Issue 1 and you won’t have to put up with them anymore!” Issue 1 makes the process of amending our state constitution significantly harder. Since 1851, proposed amendments to our constitution needed a simple majority to pass. Issue 1 would up the required majority to 60%. If you take supporters’ word for it, shadowy interest groups from outside the state have set their eyes on Ohio and our big, beautiful constitution. “They” seek to shred it so as to turn us into another Democratic shithole like Chicago or California. We need a special instance of living constitutionalism to protect the original intent of the constitution (or something).
Culturewatch
The Death of the Aryan Race
..A Verso article on the “downtown scene,” the fascist avant-garde, Yarvin and BAP, etc. I’ve been making “aesthetically alive art out of history’s flotsam” for years that takes in real brutality, not the overwrought racial/gendered disgust these people have at the symptoms of capitalism, but the mandarin left would rather talk about a bunch of liberal art school kids and failed models cosplaying fascism than look for anything genuinely new.
Yard Politics
Four days a week, I wake at 4:50 a.m. and start my exercise routine. Thursday is the only day that I don’t exercise. I still wake at 4:50 a.m., but I mow the yard and wash both cars. I’ve been doing that since I was in my twenties, when I was renting a house before I purchased my own home. The Thursday routine was instilled in me by my pops who always cut his yard on Thursday, mostly because his work as a juvenile youth counselor and a member of the Mississippi Democrat Executive Committee meant that his weekends were too busy for yard work. However, the notion that mowing one’s yard and maintaining one’s home is a primary responsibility of a citizen was instilled in me from the womb by my pops, grandpops, and just about every person in my Clarksdale and Jackson communities.
Heat and Light (Hearing Playboi Carti in “First of the Month’s” 25th Summer)
I’m in thrall to chaud bonheur – hot happiness? – a phrase I just learned from Stanley Corngold (who uses it near the end of his post in this batch). The burn flashed me back to my twenties when I locked on promesse de bonheur from Stendhal’s passionate NO to Kant’s el blando Germanic aesthetic: “That is beautiful which pleases without interesting.” Oh, please, please, please…
The rag you’re reading has always hoped to cultivate instincts for happiness. (When I recall my crew’s gone good times in the 80s and 90s, it seems sadly apparent to me that First has served as a sort of substitute for all yesterday’s parties.) First’s fun had never been tuned to disengagement. In our time your editor has invoked C.L.R. James’ “struggle for happiness” and Arendt’s “public happiness.” You can trace the stages of First’s happiness in the About section of this website where there’s an archive of mission statements. What you’re reading here may end up there since I’ve found myself looking backward in this summer of our 25th year in the game.
It’s Playboi Carti’s “Sky” that’s put me in retrospective mode. Carti repurposes a melodic line from a hip hop track by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony that gave First of the Month its name.
Watching “Extraordinary Attorney Woo”
At the risk of confirming the vicious aperçu of the Viennese senator in Karl-Lueger times who defined “Kultur” as “one Jew copying from another,” I will copy the words of Daniel Mendelsohn in his obituary paean to the editor Robert Gottlieb. Referring to the South Korean TV series Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Gottlieb found it, citing Mendelsohn, full of “honest intentions and stylistic conviction.”[i] I find them there too, and can do so because, again citing Mendelsohn, “he (Gottlieb) was trying furiously to persuade me to watch [it] when he fell ill,” and I’ve borrowed his persuasion.
Without Love
(a short excerpt from something very long)
..Without love (the mirror of love), I feel that I’m already dead, already extinct. I am part of the geological layer of plastic microparticles that will be the only evidence our species ever existed, if complex life were to evolve again from the bacteria that remain a thousand years from now. I am part of no story (biotic or abiotic). I cannot shake the counterfactual despair, the flailing wish that I had transitioned, had written these books, five years earlier, when the world could have received me, received my art. But no, this woman, this writing, could only have emerged right now, at this specific point in history, or where history cracks up, smashes against its bio-spiritual limit.
In My End is My Beginning: Seeing Double at “Philip Guston Now”
Philip Guston, the influential North American painter who died in 1980, has been on my mind lately. This essay is about why. It is also a belated thank you note to him. I say this because, half a lifetime ago, my awareness of this hero/bad boy of Twentieth Century art saved my hide. Or, more realistically, to take my grandiose appreciation of his efforts down a few notches, a job talk I gave at Purdue about Guston in 1994 clinched my unlikely shot at a permanent academic career in the humanities. (I am ashamed to admit that when I was thirty, landing safely on the tenure track felt like a life-or-death matter.) Can I recover what Guston’s art meant to me back then on a gut level? I can certainly remember the outlines of my precarious situation back then, and why Guston’s late trauma-filled work would have appealed to me on a deep personal level.
“Every Brain Needs Music” (Ren & Professors)
The camera shows an apartment with cracked and peeling walls, empty except for two old lamps that flicker, only deepening the gloom.
A masked figure pushes a wheelchair into the center of the room, then leaves. In it sits a young man dressed in a hospital gown, hunched over an acoustic guitar. A title card flashes: “Hi Ren.” Looking up, the guitarist begins to pluck out a flamenco-style tune, which, after a few bars, lingers on a bended note before sputtering into a series of dissonant arpeggios that climb the neck. The melodic line pivots again—now to a simple round of harmonious chords, the stuff of countless folk songs. And then the performer begins to sing …
The next eight minutes defy genre labels, although the song contains elements of hip-hop and punk, plus a little yodeling. It is a piece of one-man musical theater featuring two characters, both called Ren. (The artist is a young Welsh singer-songwriter named Ren Gill.) One of them is a musician, just barely back on his feet after years of a debilitating illness. The other is a personification of his anxiety and self-contempt, with a raspy voice full of needles and poison, who gets the best lines. The characters have contrasting demeanors and even play the same tune differently. Clearly they have been fighting for a long time. The healthy Ren wants to escape his doppelgänger, or even destroy it, but he remains at a profound disadvantage: you cannot escape your own shadow.
Tony Ayala Jr: Chaos on Speed Dial
Don’t be put off by the opening of this post on a book about a bad man. The story on offer here isn’t pretty or uplifting but reviewer Bob Ingram has written a truth-attack that stands as its own justification…
The Student
At first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.
Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical academy, returning home from shooting, kept walking on the path by the water-logged meadows. His fingers were numb and his face was burning with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy. The only light was one gleaming in the widows’ gardens near the river; the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student remembered that, as he had left the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the floor in the entryway, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression — all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better. And he did not want to go home.
Creative Marginalia
From Simon Ley’s “Marginalia,” an essay included in his posthumous collection, The hall of uselessness (2013)...
Chekhov wrote some 250 stories — among all of them he singled out “The Student” as his favorite.
My Brother as Hunger Artist
Perhaps mad laughter, absurd laughter breaks the indulgence in suffering.
“These cookies?” There were a dozen Oreos and an equal amount of Lorna Doones scattered on the hospital tray. “Are you going to eat these?” Atop the cookies was a meal ticket stamped with a single word: bereavement. The floor nurse hovered, shifting her weight leg to leg, waiting on my response. “Do you mind if I take a few?”
It was against my better judgement to give up what little, in my brother’s dying hours, that this hospital had chosen to give back to us. The numbers mattered here. Over the previous two days, although Don was clearly dying—evident to the staff, his family, and most importantly himself—the hospital refused more than two visitors in the private room at a time. Two would come down and two more could go up. But these next two first had to stand in the guard’s line to secure a pass before heading up. Fine, but that whole process took more than twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, while my brother lay bureaucratically alone.
Forty days. Jesus fasted for forty days in the wilderness.
San Francisco: City for Flâneurs
San Francisco is made for walking and walkers, though surely not for all times of the day and especially at night when it can be dangerous to walk on a dark and unfamiliar street. I know. I walk two or three miles a day for exercise and to reach a corner store to shop for groceries or a local restaurant like Mixto which serves Peruvian food where I devour the seafood stew.
Walking is probably the most democratic form of travel. It doesn’t cost anything to walk, stroll, or saunter and it doesn’t lift you off the ground and make you higher than anyone else.
Brief Encounter
Twenty, twenty-five-years ago, a Berkeley City College student started coming to the café where I took morning breaks. She was Mexican American, with pouty lips, a low-back tattoo, and a glorious torrent of black hair falling across and below her shoulders. She was a cousin of a barista, and soon was working part time behind the counter. When she returned a bracelet, I had lost, I offered to reward her, but she declined, so I left $20 in the tip jar.
Laughter in the Dark
My first brush with the audience for Film Forum’s Ozu retrospective was a trip. I got off on the wrong block and ran into another Ozu-er who was lost too. As we found our way around the block to the theatre, he told me he saw Tokyo Story when he was teenager, which led him (eventually) to spend decades in Japan where he got married. His Japanese wife met us at the theater.
L.A. Flashbacks
Persuaded by James to go downtown (from where we lived so close in Echo Park many years) first time in five years (shocked at new residential skyscrapers we were told are including formerly homeless), to The Broad’s superb “Keith Haring” exhibition which I had otherwise intended to avoid (given what I knew would be a kind of “euphoric fear flashback” to the even-pre-AIDS rough-around-town NYC 70-80 years before we moved to LA when we then really did swing into ACT UP action). Glad I went but no nostalgia.
Photos by James Rosen
Moby Nic: Your Load Management And Mine
I Early Thoughts: It’s All Really Simple
The NBA playoffs are always an overly long slog, not just a Manichean struggle.
Cleveland Rocks
Cleveland’s sports venues are now 30 years old. The franchise owners want to have either major upgrades to the facilities or brand-new structures. The current stadiums and arena as well as the former Cleveland Municipal Stadium were built with public money which establishes a precedent. On the other hand, the long-gone Cleveland Arena and the Richfield Coliseum were owned and run privately without taxpayer assistance.
Mussolini, Europe’s Prize Bluffer More Like Bottomley[1] than Napoleon
Excerpted from an article published by Ernest Hemingway in 1923…
…Mussolini is the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff. The shooting would be a bluff. Get hold of a good photo of Signor Mussolini sometime and study it. You will see the weakness in his mouth which forces him to scowl the famous Mussolini scowl that is imitated by every 19-year-old Fascisto in Italy. Study his past record. Study the coalition that Fascismo is between capital and labor and consider the history of past coalitions. Study his genius for clothing small ideas in big words. Study his propensity for dueling. Really brave men do not have to fight duels, and many cowards duel constantly to make themselves believe they are brave. And then look at his black shirt and his white spats. There is something wrong, even histrionically, with a man who wears white spats with a black shirt.
There is not space here to go into the question of Mussolini as a bluff or as a great and lasting force. Mussolini may last fifteen years or he may be overthrown next spring by Gabriele D’Annunzio, who hates him. But let me give two true pictures of Mussolini at Lausanne.
The Ambassador (Redux)
Ambassador Poole from the late great Golden State has been banished to a terrible team, The Washington Wizards. Since he was sucker-punched by an envious Draymond Green, JP has had a Jamesian education in a world of lies. Two days before he was traded, Golden State’s new GM, had assured journalists that Poole and Jonathan Kuminga would remain by the Bay: “We love having those guys here. Jordan, especially with his contract extension, we plan to have him here for 4 more years at least.” (That “at least” is priceless.) Poole is, per his own words, “a child of God.” As a Christian, he’s probably trying not to cultivate his vengeful side, but I’m under no effing obligation. Ca ira to NOT root for a team run by scum. And I’m not talking (chiefly) about the egotist who punched Jordan here. I’m talking about the pale scum, the thickest scum, the scummiest scum who never dared to stand up to Draymond Green.
What follows is the (anxious) tribute to JP I posted earlier this spring. May there be more Poole parties in his/our future!