alias Bruce.

Foamy the Squirrel on Gay Marriage

Foamy the Squirrel shows Barack "now that I've thought about it..." Obama how to grow some, uh, nuts on the issue of gay marriage.

 

Thanks to Tina at The Agonist for sharing Jack Cluth's video. 

Racial torture, libraries, and poems.

This is National Poetry Month, a time when – like Black History Month and Earth Day – corporate culture blinks for a moment at realities it generally ignores. Still, a glimpse can reveal plenty. This month, in one of the main windows of the downtown public library in my town of Baltimore, the poem on display is "If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God" by Joseph Ross, which won the local Pratt Library system's 2012 poetry prize. The poem has to do with the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. If you're sketchy on the details, here is Ross's explanation of how Emmett's mother, Mamie, electrified the world by displaying her son in an open casket:

Mamie Till’s decision to bury her son in a casket with a glass top was a momentous one. In her words, she wanted the world “to see what they did to my boy.” In 1955, Mamie Till sent her son Emmett to live with relatives in Mississippi for the summer. One night, he was dragged from his uncle’s house, beaten to death and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was found downriver some days later. The image of her son’s beaten and distorted body were broadcast around the world. In the view of some, this murder was seen as the beginning of the civil rights movement.

Emmett Till, as I've mentioned, was not only brutally beaten but tortured, including having one of his eyes gouged out. As it happens, a few years ago I met and interviewed Emmett Till's cousin, who was in the same bedroom with Till the night that white men burst into the house and took him away to murder him. I will never, ever forget it.

Here is a photo of how you'd see Joseph Ross's poem if you walked past the Baltimore downtown library this month:

Photo: Robert Waxman

At a time when today's American brown shirts want for government's sole job to be the killing of infidels and the punishing of scapegoats, it's good to see a public library acting like a public library. My thanks to my friend Rachel for pointing this out.

Watch this video "mockumentary" in which child actors portray adult roles in the rampant violence, corruption, and suffering that is sweeping Mexico.

The video was produced by an assemblage of groups who want to shake things up in Mexico's public discourse. From the stormy response to the vid, they appear to be succeeding.

In its final scene, a young girl faces the camera and, speaking to candidates in Mexico's upcoming presidential election, says: "If this is the future that awaits me, I don't want it. Enough of working for your political parties instead of for us. Enough of cosmetic changes."

 

Thanks to Tina at The Agonist.

Gunter Grass, Dave Eggers, Germany, Israel, Iran, and "What Must Be Said."

So Dave Eggers wins the $53,000 Gunter Grass Award for his book about American abuse of a Syrian-American humanitarian. And just before the scheduled award ceremony, Grass – who has admitted to having been in the SS in Nazi Germany – publishes a scathing poem about Israeli nuclear proliferation and aggression. Uproar ensues. Israel bans Grass from entering the country. And then Eggers announces he'll refuse to go to Germany to accept the award. He'll accept the money, though.

Here is a link to the Grass poem, titled "What Must Be Said."

And here is what must be said about this whole conflagration:

1.) Kudos to Grass. His poem is truthful, and more intellectuals of his celebrated stature need to rise up and declare in public – against the waiting accusations of anti-Semitism – that the contemporary Israeli regime has in some ways become the wickedness against which it claims to stand.

2.) It is horribly ironic but not shocking that the Israeli regime, over its lifetime, has plunged into such a long moral fall. Any psychologist who specializes in developmental trauma will tell you that awful suffering often later translates into exaggerated, delusional, or even sociopathic aggression.

3.) Grass's SS involvement as a young man hardly disqualifies him from condemning Israeli behavior. Grass has owned and rightly been culpable for his actions. One can argue, in fact, that Grass's first-hand knowledge of obedient or self-justifying groupthink informs his outrage at what he now sees in some Israeli trends. Not long ago I had a conversation with an Aryan German, who came of age during the Holocaust, who now recognizes much of what he saw in late-1930s Germany in early 21st-century America.

4.) Grass's poem is lousy as a poem. It's barely a poem, actually; it's more like a proclamation with lots of line breaks. But that's not the point anyway. Nobody cares about it as a poem. We care about what it says. Presenting it as a poem in a publication, actually, was a good move on Grass's part: it assured that his message would be disseminated intact, in its entirety. Had Grass simply called a press conference and issued the message as a statement, it would have been sound-bited and paraphrased beyond recognition.

5.) Eggers's refusing the personal tribute while accepting the money stinks to high heaven. His excuse in published reports that the controversy had become too much about Germany and Israel and Iran just doesn't hold water. A response of integrity would be to either be okay with the moral context of the award and to accept the prize and the money, or to not be okay with it and to reject the prize and the money. You can't have both. Good luck washing those dirty little hands of yours, Dave.

What if there were reporters

who conveyed reality on a level beyond debate?

There are. They're called poets.

I am not being cute. I am not suggesting that deep verse is a substitute for gutsy investigative journalism.

I am saying, though, that poetry, done with integrity, is a kind of soul journalism. It is a kind of ruthlessly deep reporting whereby the witnessing eye does not blink, the ear does not flinch, and the voice does not falter. Poetry is a kind of truthtelling in which even if the poem's reported events or visions did not empirically happen or exist, the poem's story is true. And the reader or listener knows it is true.

Not that there isn't debate about poems and poetry. Hell, the field of poetry criticism is a regular food fight. Thousands of folks – including some who crave a nearness to poetry but are frustrated by their inability to create it – make a living by critiquing, debating, and teaching poetry.

But the moment when the poet (or the painter or the sculptor or the singer) emerges to publicly offer what s/he has found, and the moment when the reader/looker/listener feels the sharp clap of recognition, are moments of truth.

Take, say, this stanza from one of Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (Part II, 1):

Breathing: you invisible poem! Complete
interchange of our own
essence with world-space. You counterweight
in which I rhythmically happen.

If only CNN or The Washington Post had that kind of veracity.

After having read Mike Daisey's March 25th blog post about his Apple monologue disaster,

and after having listened, in its entirety, to the March 19 talk he gave at Georgetown University about the scandal; and having listened, also in their entirety, to the original show he did on This American Life and the later TAL retraction show on which he was doggedly questioned about his looseness with facts, a few things appear clear to me:

1.) Mike Daisey is a mess. I think he'd be more than willing to admit this. In fact he pretty much does admit it, especially in the Georgetown talk and on the TAL retraction show. I think most of us, in his situation, would be a mess. He has been all over the place in his responses to the scandal: he was shell-shocked and in denial in the TAL grilling on the rules governing his art; he was defiant and disingenuous in his March 19 blog post about how it was "art," not lies, that moved his audiences (I have only heard the monologue portion that aired on TAL, but the parts I found most emotionally moving – such as the anecdote about the man with the ruined hand and Daisey's story about his personally having met 12-year-old workers – now appear to have been fabricated or exaggerated); he is earnest, repentantly self-effacing, and politically passionate about the untold stories of Chinese workers in his Georgetown talk; and now, in his March 25 blog post – faced with a quote from one of his past interviews in which Daisey clearly lays out the rules for theatrical truth-telling – he openly admits how he broke them in his Apple monologue and he seems to have let go of the need to artistically defend the license he took. His trajectory seems to be toward acknowledgement of what he did and calling even more insistently for addressing the much greater cause of justice and media attention for Chinese workers. He clearly got in way over his head with TAL, and I'd advise pundits to take care in trashing him. You know what they say about glass houses.

2.) Daisey didn't need to lie or misrepresent his experience in order to succeed with his monologue. That's the awful irony of all this. Between the things he actually experienced on his trip and the known facts about incidents and outrages in Chinese manufacturing for Apple, Daisey could have constructed and performed a monologue that was riveting, devastating, and, as TAL asked of him, bulletproof against the predictable attacks and questions from Apple and corporate media. In his Georgetown talk, Daisey says about his panicked deception of TAL's producers, "I should have been wiser. There must have been a path that would have worked [in being able to air the monologue without misrepresentation]. I don't know what it would have been, though." I could be all wrong, but I have a suggestion: had Daisey been honest with TAL, they might have instead constructed a show about how a gifted writer and actor with a compelling story found himself getting carried away with the telling of the story, and how he finally came clean about this under the pressure of doing a national radio broadcast. And Daisey could have performed a monologue, on TAL, about what he truly saw in China and what he didn't see, and how and why he had gotten carried away in some of his monologue lines, and what is actually documented as happening in Chinese factories, and how as an apolitical privileged American techno-geek he found himself devastated, disoriented, and evangelicized by the raw power of what he witnessed and what he learned from others about where his iPhone comes from. Sure, maybe that idea wouldn't have flown. All I can say is, as a TAL listener I'd certainly tune in to a show like that. But in any case it's water under the bridge. What is clear, and what Daisey clearly knows, is that his monologue doesn't (and won't) need misrepresentations in order to work as theater.

3.) Daisey is a great talker. He is a brilliant talker. He is such a good talker, in fact, that, given the glibly convincing way in which he represented untruths as real events in his monologue, I am not sure I believe much at all of what he now says. I'm not sure I believe his explanations for things he still insists he saw in China that his translator says didn't happen. I am not sure I believe his tortured account of why he did what he did and how he now feels about it. I am not sure, actually, that I believe anything Mike Daisey says. This is a real problem for me; there is much of what he now says that I want to believe. But I'm having a lot of trouble doing so. I don't know what to do with this. But I needed to say it.

4.) When Daisey says that he should not be the big story – that Apple and China should be the big story – he is absolutely right. I do think he understands that his dishonesty in the telling of such a heart-rending, high-stakes human story has become a hugely emotional public event partly because his story itself so deeply rocked our world as spoiled American gizmo-users, and partly because a lot of us, including me, feel an angry sense of his having betrayed and manipulated both us and the issue of workers and Apple. But Daisey is correct when he says it's an atrocity that the news cycle is dominated by his scandal rather than by the human suffering embedded in electronics built for us by people in China who we will never see.

That is why, as Daisey suggests, you need to read the New York Times series on Apple's suppliers, and listen to the NPR story about an explosion at an iPad plant that workers say happened just hours after Apple inspected the plant, and look at the research by NGOs  regarding cruel working conditions and worker suicides at Apple supplier plants in China.

And that is why, unless there is something of huge public importance related to him in the future, I will not blog about Mike Daisey again.

"We breathe in and out,

and we just watch that. Nothing else. It doesn’t matter if we get enlightenment or not. It doesn’t matter if our friends get enlightened faster. Who cares? We are just breathing. We just sit straight and watch the breath in and out. Nothing else. We let go of our ambitions."

That quote is from Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, discussing a technique for Buddhist meditation.

I am not a Buddhist. I am not religious. I do, however, think there is a lot to be said for spending time unruled by reflexive intention, or what some Buddhists call "habit mind." Paying attention to breathing while allowing trained intentions to swirl around any way they want is a good way to loosen such habit. The funny thing is that the more you do this, the more your intentions and observations clarify themselves. You could call it mental Windex.

Breath – especially for those of us here in the clattering cast-iron heart of Western capitalism – is highly underrated. Breath lies close to the center of a mammal's actual life. I'd say it pays to consciously hang out there at regular intervals.

Here is what Rilke says:

Breathing: you invisible poem! Complete
interchange of our own
essence with world-space. You counterweight
in which I rhythmically happen.

Single wave-motion whose
gradual sea I am;
you, most inclusive of all our possible seas–
space grown warm.

How many regions in space have already been
inside me. There are winds that seem like
my wandering son.

Do you recognize me, air, full of places I once absorbed?
You who were the smooth bark,
roundness, and leaf of my words.

–Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 1

Thanks to Mushim.

Speaking of art and resistance,

Tao Seeger (center), Pete Seeger (right)

here is a piece on American musician Tao Seeger, who, to quote the lead-in, "speaks to Ahram Online on music and its important role in revolutions over the course of history, following his performance on the night of the Egyptian Revolution's first anniversary last month."

Tao, grandson of musical fighter Pete Seeger, says plenty in the interview that we need to hear right now, including detailing the ways (and the eras) in which art has always been a mainstay of dissent when the respectable classes go silent. Take a look.

Agony, Art, and Apple.

It is a cliché that artists are among the last-ditch truthtellers in a society. It is also true.

These days, for example, as corporate journalists become less willing and less able to contradict the ruling script of American life (e.g., there is no alternative to 21st-century monopoly capitalism as a way of running our country or organizing the world), it is increasingly the artists who help break the actual news about what is wrong and what change is possible.

Who is passionately exposing lies and delusions on the part of both the Obama corporatists and the dog-whistle right? Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert -- comedians, for God's sake. Who wrote a famous open letter to Laura Bush declining her dinner invitation with the explanation that Ms. Bush had chosen to live in quiet harmony with a murderous and criminal regime? Internationally-celebrated poet Sharon Olds.

And who, now, is sending chills down corporate and consumer spines with his little one-man show about the people who actually make your iPhone? An overweight, nervy actor and monologist named Mike Daisey, whose theatrical monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," has brought audiences the story of Chinese workers leaping to their deaths from factory complex roofs to escape a wretched life in service to Apple. The New York Times and other corporate media have since picked up pieces of the story of how the electronics industry runs horrifically dangerous, hellishly abusive, city-sized factories. But it was a solo guy with a touring one-man show who told it.

It's one more reason why artists should have way more societal stature: they are among our default sources of truth when the official tellers choose to shut up.

Read on Daisey's blog how Apple is now acting very, very afraid of these revelations. And listen here to an edited live performance of Daisey's monologue aired on the radio show This American Life.

The other night, at a jazz gig I played

as a drummer in a hot trio at a tony club, the club owner got very drunk -- something I gather he often does.

In the middle of a set in which we three musicians played our asses off for a packed and appreciative house, the bar owner walked up to the stage and, while everyone watched in shock, he launched into a long, loud, drunken rant about how the band was playing way too loudly and it was screwing up his business and it was all my fault. Me. The drummer. He stood squarely in front of me and my drum set. He shouted in my face that all of the volume problems started with me, and his patrons upstairs needed to make conversation, and the band sounded like a train running through the building, and he was the boss and I had better do something about it.

In a room where the audience had been giddy with our performance, you could suddenly hear a pin drop.

The rest of the details don't matter. Suffice it to say that I was both cool and blindly furious, and the crowd sided with the band, and the drunken club owner ended up making a meaningless apology, and I'll be damned if I'll ever set foot in his cursed little club again.

This is part of the turf that a jazz musician walks: Having the most intense art form that America itself has ever produced relegated to gin mills where people yak and drink too much; having this country's most creative musical intellectuals (and I'm not talking about myself, but about jazz musicians at the very top of the art, who as a threat to white superiority still face a certain stubborn denial and disrespect of their role in the culture) treated as mere entertainers.

Sure, I, or we as a band, may have been playing too loudly for the conversational upstairs crowd who felt our playing through the floor. But what is John Coltrane's music -- we played the seminal "Giant Steps" that night -- doing in a bar where a sloppily wasted white tavern keeper feels entitled to publicly lecture hard-practiced black jazz musicians? Why was the club owner trying to humiliate me when he could easily have avoided the spectacle with a private conversation? And who the hell was he to even play cultural critic in the first place? What is such compositionally and improvisationally brilliant music doing in a speakeasy, anyway? What was I doing there?

That's the problem with being jazz musicians in the United States. We have our hands on something that the dominant culture feels it can't afford to fully recognize: black creativity that is part Beethoven and part shaman. Over the decades, we have cleanly played our hand with our former slavemasters, seen them and raised them, upped the cultural ante on what they feel is their very best, and their response at the table has been a sullen silence, eyes averted, with the occasional self-comforting and inherently racist outburst about our being too primal for their company.

Talk about dysfunction and ingratitude.

This is precisely why Europe and Japan -- having less of a vested interest than America in undervaluing the breakthrough Afri-Euro aesthetic of the Louis Armstrongs and Josephine Bakers and Aimé Cesaires -- remain magnets for black American artists who want to be seen for who we actually are and for what we actually do.

Meanwhile, here on the 2012 American plantation of cultural production, it's still too often pearls before swine. But there is also this: the mere fact that this awful nightclub story isn't my typical experience as a jazz musician, and that the crowd stood with we musicians against the drunken owner, and that jazz and its audiences manage to thrive from corner bars to Lincoln Center, says a lot about the loving indestructibility of music and of humanness in the face of even the most wickedly pervasive machinery.

[2/8/2012 12:30pm EST: I re-edited the final paragraph to better express all that I see and feel here.]