Jean-Michel Basquiat. Catharsis. 1983.

Triptych; acrylic on canvas.

More on this legendary New York artist here and here.

From Time:

How she sat there, the time right, inside a place so wrong it was ready.
                                               — From Rosa, in On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove

We know the story. One December evening, a woman left work and boarded a bus for home. She was tired; her feet ached. But this was Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, and as the bus became crowded, the woman, a black woman, was ordered to give up her seat to a white passenger. When she remained seated, that simple decision eventually led to the disintegration of institutionalized segregation in the South, ushering in a new era of the civil rights movement.

Montgomery’s segregation laws were complex: blacks were required to pay their fare to the driver, then get off and reboard through the back door. Sometimes the bus would drive off before the paid-up customers made it to the back entrance. If the white section was full and another white customer entered, blacks were required to give up their seats and move farther to the back; a black person was not even allowed to sit across the aisle from whites. These humiliations were compounded by the fact that two-thirds of the bus riders in Montgomery were black.

She was arrested on a Thursday; bail was posted by Clifford Durr, the white lawyer whose wife had employed Parks as a seamstress. That evening, after talking it over with her mother and husband, Rosa Parks agreed to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery’s segregation laws. During a midnight meeting of the Women’s Political Council, 35,000 handbills were mimeographed for distribution to all black schools the next morning. The message was simple:

“We are…asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial… You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday.”

The trial lasted 30 min., with the expected conviction and penalty. That afternoon, the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed. So as not to ruffle any local activists’ feathers, the members elected as their president a relative newcomer to Montgomery, the young minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. That evening, addressing a crowd gathered at the Holt Street Baptist Church, King declared in that sonorous, ringing voice millions the world over would soon thrill to: “There comes a time that people get tired.” When he was finished, Parks stood up so the audience could see her. She did not speak; there was no need to. Here I am, her silence said, among you.

And she has been with us ever sinceva persistent symbol of human dignity in the face of brutal authority.

More here.

…
“All wars are breath-takingly the same, fought by greenhorns with a lust for life in a dance with death, with outcomes leading inevitably to dittos.” –Raul Guerre

A Break From the Bush
Yusef Komunyakaa

The South China Sea
drives in another herd.
The volleyball’s a punching bag:
Clem’s already lost a tooth
& Johnny’s left eye is swollen shut.
Frozen airlifted steaks burn
on a wire grill, & miles away
machine guns can be heard.
Pretending we’re somewhere else,
we play harder.
Lee Otis, the point man,
high on Buddha grass,
buries himself up to his neck
in sand. “Can you see me now?
In this spot they gonna build
a Hilton. Invest in Paradise.
Bang, bozos! You’re dead.”
Frenchie’s cassette player
unravels Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”
Snake, 17, from Daytona,
sits at the water’s edge,
the ash on his cigarette
pointing to the ground
like a crooked finger. CJ,
who in three days will trip
a fragmentation mine,
runs after the ball
into the whitecaps,
laughing

..

Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

There can be few experiences more disquieting than that of reading the opening pages of Benazir Bhutto’s Reconciliation, with its description of her homecoming on October 18 2007 – the jubilation followed by carnage. The details of the suicide attack are horrific enough within their own context, but when read as precursor to the attack that killed Bhutto 10 weeks later they acquire an even more chilling resonance. There is the sense of reading two texts: the first might well have been published during the early months of Bhutto’s premiership, its words a yardstick against which we would measure the effectiveness of her government; the second stands as the final testament of an extraordinary woman whose death added urgency to the already-urgent arguments of the book.

Bhutto lays out her own blueprint for the defeat of extremism by concerted efforts involving both Muslims and the west. Some of those ideas seem unrealistic. In particular, her suggestion that the oil-producing Gulf states “jump-start economic and intellectual development” in the rest of the Muslim world via a Muslim Investment Fund contradicts her own argument that states act in self-interest rather than as part of a pan-national religious community, and also ignores the dismal record of many oil-producing nations in promoting intellectual development within their own borders. She ends the book by acknowledging that her proposals “may seem daunting and even impossible. I make these recommendations because the times demand something more than business as usual . . . It is a time for creativity. It is a time for bold commitment. . . There has been enough pain. It is time for reconciliation.”

It may be tempting to think her death undermines her belief in what was yet possible, but it seems more in keeping with the spirit of Reconciliation to say that there are ways to counter those who use violence to further their ends. We just can’t wait until tomorrow to do it.

More here.

Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine:

On a drizzly Tuesday night in late January, 200 people came out to hear a psychiatrist talk rhapsodically about play — not just the intense, joyous play of children, but play for all people, at all ages, at all times. (All species too; the lecture featured touching photos of a polar bear and a husky engaging playfully at a snowy outpost in northern Canada.) Stuart Brown, president of the National Institute for Play, was speaking at the New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd Street. He created the institute in 1996, after more than 20 years of psychiatric practice and research persuaded him of the dangerous long-term consequences of play deprivation. In a sold-out talk at the library, he and Krista Tippett, host of the public-radio program ‘‘Speaking of Faith,’’ discussed the biological and spiritual underpinnings of play. Brown called play part of the ‘‘developmental sequencing of becoming a human primate. If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being, play is as fundamental as any other aspect of life, including sleep and dreams.’’

More here.

Danielle Trussoni in the New York Times Book Review:

If you believe you are by now immune to gory novels, here’s one with enough malevolence to give even the most hardened readers nightmares. “The Seven Days of Peter Crumb,” a chronicle of the final week in a psychopath’s life by the British actor and writer Jonny Glynn, is gruesome, obscene and utterly disturbing. It is also absorbing and well written. Reading it, I fought the urge to throw up. Needless to say, I was transfixed.

Mixed reactions are inevitable in the presence of one of the more repulsive characters in recent memory. Peter Crumb spends his days bludgeoning, raping and dismembering. He gets cranked on opium and horse tranquilizers and has a scatological obsession that requires him to give detailed descriptions of his bowel movements. In addition, his first-person account is interrupted by a second personality, egging him on. Crumb has little control over where his mind (and thus the novel) will veer at any given point. The result is an elegant contrapuntal stream of consciousness so brutally spiky and internal that the reader (like Crumb’s victims) wants to plead for reprieve.

More here.

Denise Grady in the New York Times:

If you have to come down with a strange disease, this town of 23,000 on the wide-open prairie in southeastern Minnesota is a pretty good place to be. The Mayo Clinic, famous for diagnosing exotic ailments, owns the local medical center and shares some staff with it. Mayo itself is just 40 miles east in Rochester. And when it comes to investigating mysterious outbreaks, Minnesota has one of the strongest health departments and best-equipped laboratories in the country.

And the disease that confronted doctors at the Austin Medical Center here last fall was strange indeed. Three patients had the same highly unusual set of symptoms: fatigue, pain, weakness, numbness and tingling in the legs and feet.

The patients had something else in common, too: all worked at Quality Pork Processors, a local meatpacking plant.

More here.  [Thanks to Daupo.]

From the Tate Modern website:

Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth is the first work to intervene directly in the fabric of the Turbine Hall. Rather than fill this iconic space with a conventional sculpture or installation, Salcedo has created a subterranean chasm that stretches the length of the Turbine Hall. The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between these elements that resist yet depend on one another. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically shifts our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture, subtly subverting its claims to monumentality and grandeur. Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built.

In particular, Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.

‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others.

More here.

Black Americans made the songs, but not the myth of romantic ‘authenticity.’ If white tastes and obsessions distorted their music, can we ever hear each other?

David Gates in Newsweek:

Forbes’s book is a biography of Broadway’s first black star, for whom Dunbar once co-wrote songs: in context, the poem inevitably evokes an image of Williams, a light-skinned Bahamian who always performed (often to whites-only audiences) in a grinning mask of burnt cork. Hamilton, a University of London historian, argues that the blues as whites have imagined it—a pure and primal musical utterance originating in the deep backcountry of the South—is less a creation of black musicians than of white esthetes. Folklorists and record collectors, she suggests, preferred blues performers to be downtrodden, decrepit and obscure—much as Broadway audiences needed Bert Williams to black up and talk in plantation dialect. Hamilton’s reference to Dunbar suggests a barely suppressed resentment of white condescension; she quotes the singer-guitarist Lonnie Johnson, who asked an interviewer in the 1960s, “Are you another one of those guys who wants to put crutches under my ass?”

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Fuchsia Dunlop, author of my new and beloved cookbook Land of Plenty, in the FT:

I had always believed that it would be easy to seduce a man with my cooking. My childhood role model was Zeralda, the heroine of a picture book by Tomi Ungerer, who saves a town from the menaces of an ogre by showing him that there are more delicious things to eat than children. From the age of seven I gazed at pictures of Zeralda devising recipes in her father’s kitchen, roasting suckling pigs, or icing a cake in a kitchen hung with hare and pheasants, and I longed to be like her. Especially because in the end she marries the ogre, who shaves his shaggy beard to reveal a handsome face, and they live happily ever after.

My own attempts to win men over with my cooking have been disastrous. It all began, I think, with the anorexic boyfriend at university. He was strikingly beautiful and great company but he had an uneasy relationship with food. He treated it like something dangerous, which he had to counter with long hours in the gym. Young and ignorant, I didn’t understand at the time why our dinners together always reminded me of those of Jack Sprat and his wife.

Later, while working in London, I cooked for another man I was beginning to like very much: a roast chicken, anointed with lemon juice and fine olive oil, sprinkled with herbs. It was one of the best roast fowl I’d ever cooked. But he, too, was neurotic about his weight, so he peeled off the crisp, golden skin, the most exquisite part of the bird, and left it at the side of his plate, where it slowly congealed. I think my feelings for him dimmed from that moment on.

Is Barak Obama turning into the liberal’s Bob Avakian? I kid of course, but a few friends have made  comments that are similar to an emerging “meme” in the blogosphere. There is a clear and rising chorus on the left-liberal side of the spectrum that expresses worry about a cult of personality around Barak Obama.  I’ve only ever really been a poputchik with any movement and personality, so I’ve never had to “recover” from anything. But I am intrigued by the fact of a chorus about this. Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

I know this is going to sound strange, but it’s not you, Barack, it’s me. Really it always was me, but now it’s really, really about me. I don’t know when we started to feel weird supporting you, but: My friend Hanna thinks it started with that “Yes We Can,” video. I mean, last week I was totally crying watching it. Now just thinking about how choked up I got gives me the creeps. I think I felt something at the time, but even if I did, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to feel it anymore. Feeling inspired is soooo early-February.

Or maybe it started when everyone began madly posting last week about how you are not the Messiah. And that got me thinking. Then, when commentators started accusing me of being a venomous drone in a “cult of personality,” I just needed to get out. I mean cults are soooo 1970s. And cults of personality? So totally first century.

Cult or no cult, this week I just started getting really confused about you. I mean, when people start to say that your strengths are actually weaknesses? That just makes sense, if you really think about it. I mean, what’s the point of being such an inspirational speaker if all you can do is give inspirational speeches? Do better, Barack. I mean, do worse!

In Prospect (UK), a profile of Charles Taylor:

Charles Taylor’s new book A Secular Age is well timed. Begun long ago, it is now published in the middle of intense public discussion about religion. But though the book reads like an argument with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, it won’t be joining theirs at the front of the bookshops.

That is a pity, as Taylor is arguably the most interesting and important philosopher writing in English today. It is also in some respects surprising. For Taylor has most of the attributes that the public look for in a philosopher. His work addresses the big issues. He is politically engaged—indeed, he is a leading public figure in his Canadian homeland. He writes appreciatively about thinkers—including Hegel, the French existentialists and Heidegger—whom most anglophone philosophers view as suspect, but whom many students and non-philosophers find attractive. He addresses himself not just to academics but to educated readers. Tall and handsome, he is a confident and charming public speaker. It has to be said, however, that at 850 pages, A Secular Age is not the Taylor book one would recommend to a novice.

What makes Taylor so important?

Maia Szalavitz in Psychology Today:

V. We Speed Up When We Put Our Seat belts On

We substitute one risk for another.

Insurers in the United Kingdom used to offer discounts to drivers who purchased cars with safer brakes. “They don’t anymore,” says John Adams, a risk analyst and emeritus professor of geography at University College. “There weren’t fewer accidents, just different accidents.”

Why? For the same reason that the vehicles most likely to go out of control in snowy conditions are those with four-wheel drive. Buoyed by a false sense of safety that comes with the increased control, drivers of four-wheel-drive vehicles take more risks. “These vehicles are bigger and heavier, which should keep them on the road,” says Ropeik. “But police report that these drivers go faster, even when roads are slippery.”

Judith Weingarten at her blog:

Why is Human Rights Watch petitioning King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to halt the execution by beheading of a witch who in 2006 was convicted of “witchcraft, recourse to jinn [supernatural beings], and slaughter of animals”? Fawza Falih Muhammad Ali is currently languishing in Quraiyat Prison having exhausted her appeals against the sentence. The illiterate defendant was arrested back in 2005, and allegedly beaten and obliged to fingerprint a confession that she couldn’t read.

More here.

Sokol: The word “pessimism” fits Schopenhauer, or today perhaps Mary Midgley, who preaches that man must reconcile himself with the world as it is and simply abandon responsibility for society and for the future. This is at best a sort of comfortable, and – forgive me – “Buddhist” way. But this is certainly not Nietzsche’s case. Wherever he attacks or assaults, it is always in the secret hope that somewhere he will find somebody who will bravely stand up for all those values and prove that they are not dead. Therefore, he was most depressed by those adherents, who rode after him and parroted his attacks, but without his deep anguish. For him, that is the worst expression of nihilism: Alles ist wert zu Grunde gehen, everything deserves to perish. Certainly Nietzsche considered the state of the world to be bad, but he never came to terms with this even slightly, and when his hopes were not fulfilled he fell into despair, and finally he broke down.

more from Eurozine here.

The iconic L.A. writer John Rechy has just published a memoir, “About My Life and the Kept Woman,” and he wants to make clear right away that he made stuff up.

“I consider writers a hierarchy of liars,” Rechy said on a recent afternoon, “and the autobiographer is the biggest liar of all.”

He was sitting in the dining room of the Beachwood Canyon home he shares with Michael Snyder, a movie producer and his partner of more than 20 years, surrounded by luminous black-and-white portraits of Hollywood stars like Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. Now 76, Rechy remains best known for the 1963 novel “City of Night,” a semiautobiographical window into the world of gay street hustling that has influenced artists as diverse as Jim Morrison, David Hockney and Gus Van Sant, who has long wanted to make it into a movie. (“Maybe I should talk to John about that again,” Van Sant wrote in an e-mail, calling the book “an American masterpiece.”)

more from the LA Times here.

On July 4, 1965, Jane Fonda and her husband-to-be, Roger Vadim, had a party in their oceanfront home in Malibu and brought together, probably for the first time, old Hollywood and what would come to be known as the new Hollywood. Henry Fonda roasted a pig on one side of the house while the Byrds, hired by his son, Peter, played on the other. The guest list ran from William Wyler and Sam Spiegel to the then barely employed Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper. Lucky attendees might have glimpsed Sidney Poitier and Gene Kelly instructing Vadim’s little girl in tap-dancing, or Darryl Zanuck and George Cukor staring dumbstruck at a barefoot hippie nursing her baby.

The surreal wonder of American culture at such a pivot point permeates Mark Harris’s “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood,” which focuses on the nominees for the Academy Award for best picture of 1967: “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “In the Heat of the Night” (the eventual winner) and “Doctor Dolittle.” Yes, you read that last title correctly. For Harris, a columnist at Entertainment Weekly, that array is not just a historical “collage of the American psyche” but also well beyond diverse, “almost self-contradictory”; a movie like “The Graduate” was seemingly designed to demolish the values on display in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” The generational divide could not have been starker, and the central issue was what an American movie was supposed to be.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

..
A Display of Mackerel
Mark Doty
 
They lie in parallel rows, 

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

……..

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

……

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soap-bubble sphere,

……

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

……

distinguished from the other

–nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

……

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfillment

……

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

……

at this enameling, the jewelers

made uncountable examples

each as intricate

……

in its oily fabulation

as the one before;

a cosmos of champleve.

……

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

……

of shimmer–would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

……

to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even on ice

……

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

……

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

……

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

……

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

..

From Time:

Pops. Sweet Papa Dip. Satchmo. He had perfect pitch and perfect rhythm. His improvised melodies and singing could be as lofty as a moon flight or as low-down as the blood drops of a street thug dying in the gutter. Like most of the great innovators in jazz, he was a small man. But the extent of his influence across jazz, across American music and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was the embodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity to internationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong supplied revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.

Armstrong was born Aug. 4, 1901 in New Orleans. He grew up at the bottom, hustling and hustling, trying to bring something home to eat, sometimes searching garbage cans for food that might still be suitable for supper. The spirit of Armstrong’s world, however, was not dominated by the deprivation of poverty and the dangers of wild living. He had some knucklehead in his soul too. While a genial fountain of joy, Armstrong was a street boy, and he had a dirty mouth. It was his shooting off a pistol on New Year’s Eve that got him thrown into the Colored Waifs’ Home, an institution bent on refining ruffians. It was there that young Louis first put his lips to the mouthpiece of a cornet. Like any American boy, no matter his point of social origin, he had his dreams. At night he used to lie in bed, hearing the masterly Freddie Keppard out in the streets blowing that golden horn, and hope that he too would someday have command of a clarion sound.

The sound developed very quickly, and he was soon known around New Orleans as formidable. The places he played and the people he knew were sweet and innocent at one end of the spectrum and rough at the other. When he was called to New York City in 1924 by the big-time bandleader Fletcher Henderson, Armstrong looked exactly like what he was, a young man who was not to be fooled around with and might slap the taste out of your mouth if you went too far. His improvisations set the city on its head.

The melodic and rhythmic vistas Armstrong opened up solved the mind-body problem as the world witnessed how the brain and the muscles could work in perfect coordination on the aesthetic spot. Apollo and Dionysus met in the sweating container of a genius from New Orleans whose sensitivity and passion were epic in completely new terms. In his radical reinterpretations, Armstrong bent and twisted popular songs with his horn and his voice until they were shorn of sentimentality and elevated to serious art. He brought the change agent of swing to the world, the most revolutionary rhythm of his century. He learned how to dress and became a fashion plate. His slang was the lingua franca. Oh, he was something. Louis Armstrong was so much, in fact, that the big bands sounded like him, their featured improvisers took direction from him, and every school of jazz since has had to address how he interpreted the basics of the idiom — swing, blues, ballads and Afro-Hispanic rhythms. While every jazz instrumentalist owes him an enormous debt, singers as different as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye have Armstrong in common as well. His freedom, his wit, his discipline, his bawdiness, his majesty and his irrepressible willingness to do battle with deep sorrow and the wages of death give his music a perpetual position in the wave of the future that is the station of all great art.

Armstrong traveled the world constantly. One example of his charming brashness revealed itself when he concertized before the King of England in 1932 and introduced a number by saying, “This one’s for you, Rex: I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You.” He had a great love for children, was always willing to help out fellow musicians and passed out laxatives to royalty and heads of state. However well he was received in Europe, the large public celebrations with which West Africans welcomed him during a tour in the late ’50s were far more appropriate for this sequoia of 20th century music.

He usually accepted human life as it came, and he shaped it his way. But he didn’t accept everything. By the middle ’50s, Armstrong had been dismissed by younger Negro musicians as some sort of minstrel figure, an embarrassment, too jovial and hot in a time when cool disdain was the new order. He was, they said, holding Negroes back because he smiled too much and wasn’t demanding a certain level of respect from white folks. But when Armstrong called out President Eisenhower for not standing behind those black children as school integration began in Little Rock, Ark., 40 years ago, there was not a peep heard from anyone else in the jazz world. His heroism remained singular. Such is the way of the truly great: they do what they do in conjunction or all by themselves. They get the job done. Louis Daniel Armstrong was that kind.

From The New York Times:

Tree Shaker: The Story of Nelson Mandela by Bill Keller.

“I have witnessed countless election campaigns in the United States,” writes Keller, who traveled with Mandela and covered his historic 1994 run for president. “Although the exercise of democracy always moves me, the political campaigns often feel phony. Candidates try to avoid controversial positions. Slick television ads take the place of real debate. Most voters don’t even bother to show up and cast their ballot. South Africa’s first free election, by comparison, was thrilling. … I often felt that the entire frustrated history of black South Africa was exploding before my eyes.”

With its striking layout, bright graphics and photographs on almost every page, Keller’s biography of Mandela vibrates with the feeling of history come alive.

The author — now the executive editor of The New York Times — describes how he arrived in Johannesburg as bureau chief for the newspaper in 1992, just in time to witness the complete transformation of a society. The Mandela motorcade “would roll onto a barren soccer field surrounded by rickety bleachers, and the township would erupt in delirium. The throngs hung from lampposts and clung to the tops of fences. They filled the bleachers with a blaze of brightly colored sun umbrellas.”

More here.