Et Als

A Train Story

Posted on 10 March 2012 | 3 responses

Email to a friend:

I’m on the train on my way back to NYC, and there are a couple of white boys in front of me, adolescents, who were giggling over something on the smaller boy’s computer when I came back to my seat after I’d gone to the bathroom. And as I took my seat (they didn’t see me for a second) I saw the screen: the smaller boy was pointing to a picture of a black woman and, next to that, an image of a baboon. After they saw me, the boy slammed his computer lid shut very quickly, but it was too late: the blood had gone to my head. I’m sitting here with another forty minutes left to the trip wondering if I should say something without being sent to jail once we get to the station, or not forget this and write it down again and again.

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Dig It, You Dig?

Posted on 21 February 2012 | No responses

Words of advice from the brave and singular Thelonious Monk, dead thirty years this month. Words that go beyond orchestration, an architecture for life. Art: just do it, just do it, just do it. And then watch how art does you. Why treat it as separate from life? What follows is a transcription of Steve Lacy’s notes of TM speaking. Happy Monk Days to us all. And bless Steve Lacy for the card. Oh, dear Thelonious, my beard is for you. You always make me feel like a hotel room, waiting for you to come home.

 

Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head, when you play.

Stop playing all those weird notes (that bullshit), play the melody!

Make the drummer sound good.

Discrimination is important.

You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?

ALL REET!

Always know….(MONK)

It must be always night, otherwise they wouldn’t need the lights.

Let’s lift the band stand!!

I want to avoid the hecklers.

Don’t play the piano part, I’m playing that. Don’t listen to me. I’m supposed to be accompanying you!

The inside of the tune (the bridge) is the part that makes the outside sound good.

Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined. What you don’t play can be more important that what you do.

A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.

Stay in shape! Sometimes a musician waits for a gig, and when it comes, he’s out of shape and can’t make it.

When you’re swinging, swing some more.

(What should we wear tonight? Sharp as possible!)

Always leave them wanting more.

Don’t sound anybody for a gig, just be on the scene. These pieces were written so as to have something to play and get cats interested enough to come to rehearsal.

You’ve got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (To a drummer who didn’t want to solo)

Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.

They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along and spoil it.

The Widow

Posted on 15 February 2012 | 12 responses

Snow can be a notorious memory stimulator. Last Saturday, when we experienced what felt like winter weather for the first time in a long time, I was having dinner with a gay female friend who works mostly in Los Angeles. We were just catching up, and had yet to order, when my friend received a text from a woman friend, also gay, in Los Angeles. Whitney Houston was dead. There was nothing to say. We looked out the restaurant window, and the snow began to fall. So did the memories, not in droves, but in flakes. Whitney Houston’s alternately powerful and bland resonance for us was not inseparable from our queerness. Indeed, the gorgeous star who had been circumspect about her personal life until she married the already played out but seemingly indomitable teen performer, Bobby Brown, in 1992, was less the author of a touchingly open, gospel-trained voice trying to find meaning in frequently meaningless lyrics, than the beloved friend of a woman named Robyn Crawford, who had been Houston’s closest companion since the singer was sixteen years old. (Crawford was also Houston’s longtime executive assistant.)

In the early nineteen-eighties, one sometimes saw Crawford in those places where women of color then gathered—the Duchess on Seventh Avenue South, say, or the Cubby Hole. In those small, self-protective-by-necessity worlds, everyone knew what everyone else did, and with whom, and Crawford was often spoken of in the same breath as the lovely Houston, who had modeled for Essence, and was the daughter of Cissy Houston, herself the cousin of Dionne Warwick. That was all we knew. But as Houston’s career overwhelmed her personality—every significant pop star suffers this fate; often they don’t live long enough to reverse the order—she was still “our” Whitney down there, near Christopher Street, in the West Village: a perforce closeted superstar who had to make a living because she knew gay didn’t pay.

This was familiar to us, particularly when it came to those black female performers, ranging from Bessie Smith to Ethel Waters to Billie Holiday, who skipped over the gay parts of themselves, let alone their milieu, in order to be someone’s idea of femininity, but whose? Whitney Houston always looked like a “femme”: coiffed and sleek, a Jersey girl who could be tough, but she had an even butcher personal assistant who could deal, if it came to that. Houston grew up musically and otherwise in a black Baptist church, where sin hangs heavy in the air, and on the heart, and queerness is the last thing an intolerant population cleaving to Jesus and “correctness” wants to deal with. To be queer is to question if not sully black conservatism, with it’s rather complicated relationship to heterosexuality as the paradigm of “real” love, while homosexuality is viewed as a white-bred or “European” perversion. And black conservatism shuts its eyes to uncategorizable flowers. That Houston was able to walk in that field as long as she did is a testament to her strength in her difference.

But the pop world is just as conventional as the black universe Houston grew up in; in both, appearances are considered deep because the world responds to the shallow. As Houston’s fame increased, and she was sanctified by marriage, she drove a wedge between the world she and Crawford inhabited together, becoming a martyr to heterosexuality. (At one point it was said that Houston would appear in a remake of “A Star is Born,” co-starring Bobby Brown. How much would the film have meant if it were about a female superstar who came out about her gay past without offing herself?) Still, Crawford, and what she symbolized, would not leave Houston alone. In 2002, Diane Sawyer interviewed the singer and her then husband in their Atlanta home. Sawyer asked about Crawford, and Whitney, looking double-crossed and angry, said to the camera, and presumably Crawford: “And I love ya.” Get over it. It’s interesting that Houston thought of the camera eye—her most consistent companion for decades before her death, and now forever—was Crawford, her no doubt most steadying love, and honest influence.

The Ultimate: Etta Without Tears

Posted on 23 January 2012 | 3 responses

The incomparable Karen Baccouche, sometimes known professionally as Karen Binns. Self-creation par excellence. Native of Brooklyn, New York, lately of London, a fashion stylist, publisher, and the fine possessor of a language one is not likely to hear from anyone else, let alone with crimson lips. I would spend the rest of my life being her Boswell if she would have me, but she’s fairly Swiftian-by-way-of-Lester-Young herself, so, why should she? She writes as she walks, in the air. She’s the strutting embodiment of what Truman Capote was trying to get at with Miss Bobbitt in his short story, “Children on Their Birthdays,” with a little of his “Miriam,” thrown in, too, but only Miriam’s white dress. But scribblers live less than Miss Binns. We grew up within moments of each other in East New York; I wish I had known her then, which is to say been the happy beneficiary of her utterly realistic and ever hopeful eye, which never shuts the truth out, along with her sideways way of talking. Had I known her as a child, I would have grown up braver that I was, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have hid my childhood notebooks filled with observations about our neighborhood in her presence because Karen would have saved me, I am always looking for her rescue, I always listen for the sound of her voice when she says, as she said to her client, Tori Amos, once: “Chile, let’s push past this moment of horror and have some mushroom polenta.” We met in the New York of the Odeon, lines on the table, lines to get into Madame Rosa’s, where Karen was the door person from time to time as she worked to establish a career as a fashion stylist. With it all, Karen has never been anything less than herself, the kind of woman who, blonde to blonde, would have mothered Etta with a sidelong glance and a “That’s dry,” or “Chile, please,” when Etta’s men started acting up, or Etta herself. The New York where we met: no one wanted to live in Tribeca, it felt like a world filled with bats, an ominous moon, a little drug hustle you’d rather forget. Cabs, and street lights that didn’t make anything brighter except the potholes, and manhole covers. In that world, Karen, a girl’s girl, and her late friend, Mercedes, an actress, rose above the steam that drifted up and out of those manholes, like gossiping ghosts, and those two New York City girls walked straight through those phantoms and didn’t take any shit because why should they? There were other things to stick to the heels of your shoes: the vibration of the music at The World, or Save the Robots, or late night dish over bistro food at Florent before embarking on the real work that lay ahead: taking off one’s make up, taking the phone off the receiver, to bed. I rarely see Karen these days, but continue to “live,” as she might say, when I have news of her. The last time I saw her was over on the lower East Side, and she was in the company of a friend who looked so much like Mercedes, I couldn’t help but comment on it, somewhat tactlessly. Karen thought about it for a moment, her freckles got darker, and she said, shaking her head and speaking for all of us: “Chile, I’m just trying to hold on.”

For Miriam “Marie” Dorothea Edwards Als

Posted on 21 January 2012 | No responses

Two songs that apply to her maternal philosophy. From the lyrics: “Something big is going to happen, my dear. Bigger than mountains. It’s freedom.” And: “Sounds. Of life. Are heard. Everywhere. Sounds. Of life. And love. And despair….You gotta keep movin’ on. So, make your choice. You go, and do your thing. You will find your grass will turn green. Believe.” I believe it all. Thank you, Mrs. Als. Welcome—and good-bye—and thank you.

On Janet Malcolm

Posted on 9 January 2012 | No responses

 

 

 

 

 

 

These comments were written on the occasion of Janet Malcolm’s show of collages, now on exhibition at Lori Bookstein Fine Art

VERY WELL THEN. Let us turn our attention to the question of fiction. And how it stands, presumably, on the other side of truth. And how the waters that separate fact from fiction are muddy, and always have been. And how that muddiness is the result of truth and fantasy living in rather close proximity to one another in our respective minds. We’re built that way, to hear all words as stories, but eventually our incessant internal moralizing insists we separate truth from legend, as if such a thing can be done, but we’re built that way, too, to not leave well enough alone, to categorize and moralize, separating that which we deem correct from that which we dismiss as wrong, because we must cut the world down to our size in order to manage living in it, but what does it mean to define this or that action as wrong or right? What does it mean to live anything as impossibly fucked and chaotic as life in a “correct” way? Of course, most of us exist with the compunction to be a good citizen. And that is the only right—to love, and to protect hearth and home. But how does correctness—the good citizen angle—get perverted by the need to label, say, this or that other form of love as “wrong”? Sometimes those good citizens define certain modes of thinking as being incorrect, and threatening, too. The imagination for one. Why is fantasy often regarded with distrust? Is living in the real and the good, and living in one’s imagination, mutually exclusive? Marianne Moore longed for “literalists of the imagination,” who could create “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” And yet so many of us spend our time trying to build real ponds to contain those frogs—when we’re not trying to kill them, that is. We reduce the world to a series of literal-minded propositions, the better to define or describe it, eventually coming up with what? Journalism and cant. But the waters that separate fact from fiction are filled with little fishes, and the little fishes have bits of mesmerizing glint on their tails, and sometimes in their eyes. You could call the glint lies. Or the shiny, inspiring catalysts that hook the imagination. When Daniel Defoe stood on the banks of the Orinoco in his mind, he saw the truth of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the fact that it grew out of several real lives, Alexander Selkirk’s for one. Selkirk was a Scottish castaway who ended up on a remote island in Chile and lived to tell the tale. And then there was Robert Knox, whose account of being abducted by the King of Ceylon was published in 1659. By the time Defoe, a former journalist, published his best-known novel—which is widely regarded as one of the first, “pure” fictions—the truth would not leave him alone. You may recall Robinson, and his desire, always, to leave England for the unknown—a world of waves, and loneliness, and paganism, and sand, and cannibalism, and slavery: a “sensational” tale filled with sensations. Like the best art, Robinson Crusoe is a collage, a marriage of fact and fiction, a universe of the real and the imagined that only a former journalist could have come up with, since journalists—certainly the smart ones—live with the question of veracity, always, and the question, always, of what makes a truthful account of anything. Journalism becomes an art when the writer dares him or herself to ask if reality itself is a form of fiction. Or, more specifically, how real is this or that, given that it’s being filtered through a decidedly subjective perception? Is the sky turning silver moments after seeing it, describing it, as blue mixed with white and flecks of gold as true as the blue sky one saw moments before? Are the “ums” and various hesitations that punctuate regular speech fictionalized when they’re cleaned up in a magazine? The waters that separate fact from fiction are muddy and filled with fish the color of kelp, and their gills are a brighter color than that fish’s green, particularly after one realizes that the most interesting art of the twenty-first century is based not on the truth or fiction winning out—which is to say documentaries or various forms of fabulation—but an admixture of both.

Janet Malcolm’s work as a journalist who writes about the fiction in real lives, and as a visual artist of the very highest sophistication, is at the center of the questions illustrated above. Indeed, her work in both mediums asked those questions much more astutely than most other writers have, or can. In our rapidly expanding world of truth in a second, no one can get away much with a lie. But it’s the human impulse to make things up. Appropriation—collage falls under that heading—is a fact-based art. Take Sherrie Levine for example. In the nineteen-eighties she re-photographed Walker Evans dust bowl era pictures, signed them, and made them her own. There was a collage of feeling in this seemingly academic exercise about originality. For starters there’s the artist who loves Walker Evans, and who aspires to “copy” him—a feeling no artist is unfamiliar with as they sit sketching a Renoir at the Met, aspiring to be Renoir. And if Sherrie Levine is not to your taste, think about Joseph Cornell, whose dreams of movie stars, of the glamour of silence, of women, inspired him to re-construct all that in his own work. One story about Cornell: In 1931, the “B” movie star, Rose Hobart, was featured in a very bad film called East of Borneo. But Cornell didn’t dislike the film, nor its narrative of adventure: Robinson Crusoe, but starring Depression-era Americans in pith helmets. Indeed, the artist found Hobart’s portrayal of a girl lost in the wiles of wild palm “exoticism” moving enough to recreate her. So, he re-edited East of Borneo, and put Hobart at the center of his imagination, a damsel not so much in distress, but more alive because of our attention. As a collagist of superior skill and feeling—indeed, could a collage not be regarded as a kind of film still, an outtake from a coming attraction on the screen of the artist’s mind?—Malcolm creates imaginary gardens but with real newsprint and letters and photographs in them. In her recent work, she also imagines other real life artists. A significant presence in these recent pieces is the German born Jewish artist Eva Hesse (1936–1970). In 1949 Lost Everything and Too Clinical, Malcolm uses copies of photographs of Hesse’s sculptures not so much to call attention to the sculptural elements in her own work—the building of layers with space as another layer—but as a visual element that recalls how Hesse’s early work came about: through appropriation. Living in the Ruhr valley in the mid 1960’s, Hesse found her voice as an artist when she started sculpting out of the materials she was literally living with in the factory she and her then husband shared: life as the event, with art as its record. Hesse—a Jew displaced by World War II, and then further emotionally displaced by her mother’s suicide—was, despite her past, an artist who was deeply engaged by, and admiring of, the art making process; her work conveys there is joy to be had in making things, and wit, too. But there is sadness shading the arched eyebrow: no artist ever feels they “got” whatever it is they mean to express, not completely. And despite the decisiveness of Malcolm’s line—one gets the sense that a piece’s various elements have only been put down after many, many drafts, and reconsiderations: time and revision as part of life’s collage—the space surrounding her images, and bits of colored paper, or yellowing paper, is filled with a quite deliberate absence, like something abandoned but not forgotten, not ever, like bodies we have loved but can love no longer. In this series, sex, one of life’s more ephemeral and intense activities, happens, but it happens through language—a doctor or patient describing what it means to his subjects, or a patient to himself. In one note a patient writes: “Shelley Winters—special charm in her face—no beasty feelings about her, just charming feelings—now for about four months.” But when does desire not bring out a “beasty” feeling, especially when it’s the performer’s job to seduce? One tries to repress one’s “beasty” feelings the better to be socialized. But into what kind of world? A world of repression with its arbitrary rules vis-à-vis what constitutes a lie, or the truth, or attraction? Malcolm’s desire to order the world is not so much the desire to re-create or control it as it’s an exploration of its various elements—those moments of being that are no more, and that were as true and fake as anything else. Grief and fiction are the central themes of her collages; the grief is real, the images are made up out of the real stuff of grief, which is to say artifacts from the past, a desire to not let go, and are the visual representations of the will to remember even as time erodes that will, and we are no more. But that’s not entirely true. The others that come after us remember us as Malcolm remembers her dead, or the not-known-at-all, their various fictions and facts intact as they swim in the muddying waters of what we erroneously describe as the real world. Read more

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