A Website of the Radical Imagination
It is estimated that 15 to 20 million Americans think violence would be justified to return Trump to office.
Set aside for the moment that anybody, let alone 20 million anybodies, is willing to commit violence, go to jail, die, for that guy. That is something most of us will never understand. Folks going to the mattresses for the most self-centered guy on the planet.
Think of Pablo Picasso. Think of Miles Davis. Think of Sugar Ray Robinson.
All three were artists in their chosen realms, who expanded those realms into previously unknown dimensions. All three were difficult and ambiguous and contradictory. All three answered only to themselves in the mysterious ways of genius. Tough nuts to crack.
Herb Boyd, with Ray Robinson II, has a go at cracking the diamond of a nut that is Sugar Ray Robinson in Pound For Pound, a Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson.
My mother’s maiden name was Claudette Winfield. Her twin brother was named Claude Winfield. She left home for college to attend Jackson State University and met a young man named Claude McInnis who was named after his uncle Claude Brown. That’s a whole lotta damn Claudes, which is why my Pops never intended for me to be a junior. My mother’s twin was her best friend until the day she died. As siblings, they argued and disagreed often. As siblings, no one else could say anything bad about the other one. So, when I learned Wednesday that my mother’s twin, my Uncle Claude, had passed, I realized that is the end of the Claudes. But, more importantly, that is the end of one of the most important people in my life.
A letter from from Fr. Frechette on the day of this year’s Feast of the Assumption.
“The poor will have hope, and the evil one will be made to shut his mouth.” (Job 5:16)
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.
Message to a nephew on the road to Florence…
O quick and true, the best pieces of art in the world — Michelangelo’s PRISONERS, statues fighting their way out of the stone that creates them and same time jails them, they are as renaissance and post modern and perfect as art can be. Just stand and weep.
LAST DAY TO SEE LARRY MADRIGAL’S EXHIBIT IN NYC!!!
Nicodim Gallery is tucked behind a temporary girder due to road work on Greene Street. It’s a little odd to open the door and walk right in on intimate scenes from Larry Madrigal’s marriage. Per the exhibition’s press release:
Over the course of creating Work / Life, the artist and his wife conceived their second child. He watched his wife’s body change while his pretty-much stayed the same. She is a mother, he is still Larry…
He’s out to make himself useful. Madrigal confessed somewhere — maybe on his instagram — that he wasn’t sure his massage below was doing any good, until his wife put her book down…
Originally published (along with August Sander’s “Photography as a Universal Language”) in the Massachusetts Review in 1978. This re-print is tuned to the Pompidou Center’s current exhibit, Germany / 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander.
Today marks the third anniversary of the El Paso Massacre, called “the deadliest anti-Latino attack in modern American history.” A shooter motivated by what he called a “Hispanic invasion” and the racist concept of “replacement” killed 23 people and wounded 23 more.
Review of The Auschwitz Album: A Book Based Upon an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, by Peter Hellman (Random House, 1981). First published in Aperture 89 (Winter 1982). Reprinted in Danny Lyon: American Blood: Selected Writings 1961-2020, (Karma Books, New York).
I’m out to write something fresh about Paris after going there with my wife for four days in July to visit my son who’s doing a summer semester in the city. (If you hear a whoosh, it could be the sound of a fool rushing in.)
William Kornblum’s Marseille: Port to Port is (per Howard Becker) “a new kind of travel book.” What follows are (slightly adapted) excerpts from Kornblum’s testament to sociological imagination and soulful uses of ethnographic method…
Claude McKay’s Banjo is a true life novel about a band of black and tan outsiders living by the sea in mid-20s Marseille.
The plan was to buy a Land Rover and spend three months traveling in Europe, Turkey and North Africa. It would take the money earmarked for my tuition to carry it off. So there was a sub-plan – a way to recoup the money with a victimless crime – to import some exotic hashish and Berber marijuana. We would be taking our dog Tina, a Siberian Husky with champion bloodlines. She had to be properly crated in order to fly with the other live animals that the airlines transport and that got me thinking, “I might be clever enough to build the perfect crate, one that would hold more than just the dog.” I felt compelled by the times to take the risk.
This morning in bed, during the tea service, Richard Toon echoed a concept he often considers and that seems especially plangent these days: “The past is invariably seen as a mistake.” To wit: You can’t believe what they used to think was true, or beautiful, or worthwhile! The idiots.
Sometimes I regret teaching you words,
my daughter laments when I use kin
and stan in a sentence
about Emily Dickinson. One perk
of having kids is stepping
into culture’s river at its current point,
Former US Attorney Brad Pigott, who was leading the Mississippi Department of Human Services’ attempt to investigate parties that had misappropriated funds earmarked for Mississippi’s most vulnerable citizens, was fired by Governor Tater Tot Reeves because Attorney Pigott had set his sights on bringing to justice some of the most powerful figures in the state, including former Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant and NFL Hall of Famer Brett Favre.
