Bill de Blasio's Victory (& Secret Weapon)

Dante, Chiara, Bill and Chirlane de Blasio
(© David Handschuh, New York Daily News)

Below I've posted bit of silliness from one of my little drawing notebooks, though this post is about the serious and very positive outcome of last night's New York City Mayoral primary, which was the victory (perhaps without a runoff) of Brooklyn City Councilman Bill de Blasio over his Democratic rivals Bill Thompson (the 2009 opponent of retiring Mayor Mike Bloomberg), City Councilor and Bloomberg ally Christine Quinn, disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner, former City Comptroller and Councilman John Liu, and several other candidates. De Blasio needed 40% of the vote to avoid a runoff against the second-place finisher (Thompson, who finished with 26%) and appears to have just crossed that line, but all the votes have not yet been counted so if his margin does not hold up, there will be a runoff election in three weeks. The possibility of this became Bill Thompson's chant last night.   Even if there is a runoff, de Blasio is leading in the polls, and will likely trounce the mumbling Republican victor,  Joe Lhota, former MTA head and deputy mayor to Rudy Giuliani. The three Republicans running together received fewer votes that third-place Democratic candidate Quinn, a portent of what the outcome will be in the general election.

Just a few months ago De Blasio was listing in fourth place behind Quinn, Weiner and Thompson, but the combination of increased exposure to Quinn's record, Weiner's disastrous scandal, and Thompson's waffling on the New York Police Department "stop and frisk" policy opened up a space for one of the two most progressive candidates running. (Liu's politics are decidedly to the left of the other Democrats, and he was an outspoken critic of "stop and frisk," but the whiff of financial impropriety, linked to his prior campaign and a major funder, kept him in single digits throughout.)  What boosted De Blasio's profile were his insistent push for economic policies that differed from those of the Bloomberg era, and the brilliant debut of a campaign commercial featuring a 15-year-old, brown-skinned prodigiously afroed young man named Dante, who speaks personally about the "stop and frisk" policy, and who reveals only at the political ad's end that he is, in fact, Bill de Blasio's son. Perhaps there was no direct correlation, but after the ad aired, de Blasio's star began to rise and it soared all the way to the campaign's end. It neutralized Thompson's support among black voters and reflected for Democratic-leaning voters a reality, embodied by de Blasio's family, of the city most of them live in; not just one brimming with hipsters and billionaires, but the largest, most racially, ethnically and religiously diverse city in the US. De Blasio also won over women and LGBTIQ voters from Quinn, who, had she emerged as the front-runner, would have been New York City's first woman and lesbian (i.e., openly gay) mayor.

De Blasio will face an array of challenges when he takes office. First among them will be negotiating both back wages and new contracts with the city's various unions. There will also be the issue of future pension funding, a responsibility that is the direct purview of the city's comptroller, a job that former Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer won over former governor and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, but over which the mayor will have some say. Another pressing issue will be to find a way, at a time of tremendous, increasing economic inequality and government complacency about unemployment and the housing crisis, to create more and better-paying jobs for poor, working-class and middle-class New Yorkers. Under Bloomberg the city has increasingly expanded its tech sector, but the job opportunities remain stratified, with little for average New Yorkers in a city that is already among the most expensive in the world. Whether De Blasio will continue the positive, visionary aspects of Bloomberg's tenure (quality-of-life improvements like the bike lanes; advance planning and transformation of the city's infrastructure in preparation for mega-storms caused by global warming, etc.) is unclear. De Blasio might have visionary plans of his own that will benefit a wide array of city residents and visitors. He inherits a city that works in many ways but doesn't in others. Building upon the former while addressing the latter are tall challenges, but de Blasio looks more than capable enough to meet them.

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Translation: Three Microstories by Alexander Kluge

Alexander Kluge
(from muni.com)

Obergrenze der Raublust
Ein Raubtier, das sich von Adlern und Löwen ernährt, braucht eine Heimat von der Grösse ganz Schottlands. So wie Macbeth und der "Zug der Schattenkönige", die er ermordete, eine Unterwelt brauchen, die von Schottland bis Gibraltar reicht. Dieser Raumbedarf setzt der Raubtiergrösse innerhalb der Evolution Grenzen.

Rapacity's Upper Limit
A predator that feeds on eagles and lions needs a home the size of all of Scotland. Just as Macbeth and the "pull of the shadow king" that he murdered need an underworld spanning Scotland to Gibraltar. This space requirement comprises predator size within evolution's limits.

***

Stufen des Lebens
Vier Stufen sind es vom Plankton zum Mörderwal. Die Stufe vom Wal zum massiven Walfangschiff in japanischer Bauweise erzeugt keinen zusätzlichen biologischen Tatbestand, behauptet der Analytiker T. Sachse, es sei denn, man betrachtet die gierigen Mäuler der Walesser und die Einfüllstutzen der Maschinen, mit denen Walöl geschmeidig und als Putzmittel geeignet gemacht wird (oder die Interaktion zwischen Greenpeace und den Walfängern), als eine Stufe des Lebens.

Stages of Life
There are four stages from plankton to killer whale. The stage from the whale to the massive whaling ship under Japanese construction generates no additional biological facts, the analyst T. Sachse says, unless one considers the greedy mouths of the whale eater and the filler pipes of the machines by which whale oil is rendered supple and as an appropriate cleaning agent (or the interaction between Greenpeace and the whalers), as a stage of life.

***

Ende des Lebens
Ein junger Russe des Jahrgangs 1929, der 1937  beide Eltern verloren hatte, übernachtete als 82jähriger in dem Berlin Hotel "Brandenburger Hof" und ging noch spätabends durch die Strasse des Scheunenviertels, die er als Soldat 1945 zum letzten Mal gesehen hatte. Steine des Trottoirs, unregelmässig geworden durch Kriegseinwirkung, lagen noch so desolat wie damals frisches Gras dazwischen. Während rings Neubauten prangten, zu denen er keine Verbindung mehr aufnahm.

End of Life
A young Russian of 1929 vintage who in 1937 had lost both parents stayed until the age of 82 at Berlin Hotel "Brandenburger Hof" and ventured out late at night through the streets of the Barn Quarter, which he had last seen as a soldier in 1945. The pavement's stones, having become irregular as a result of the war damage, still lay as desolate as the once fresh grass in between them. While all around blazed new buildings, to which he no longer held any connection.
--Copyright © Alexander Kluge, from Das fünfte Buch: Neue Lebensläufe, 402 Geschichten. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2012, p. 526, p. 528, 519 respectively. Copyright © all translations by John Keene, 2013. All rights reserved.

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Goodbye to the Summer / Back in Class

Rutgers undergraduate Paul Robeson
with fellow football players

On Tuesday, I resumed my old new fall rhythm. "Old," because I have been teaching for more than a decade now (though last year started at Rutgers University in Newark's campus); "new" because instead of my usual gearing up for hopping on a plane to return to a different home and readjust to a different city, I returned to my routine from last fall, and via public and bipedal transportation alone, was standing in front of my class, opening the semester.

As I was riding to campus I realized this past July marked the first time in 13 years--since 2000--that I had spent a continuous year at home (work-related trips excepted) in New Jersey. My prior dozen years weren't itinerant as Erasmus's career, of course, nor comparable to the experiences of numerous friends and colleagues, who have hopscotched all over the country for short-term and longer-term gigs, but it did sear into my consciousness that September equalled leaving home, whether for part of a week (as when I commuted to Providence) or a sizable chunk of each season.

Acclimation to the new rhythms perhaps accounts for why, for the first time in my career, I did not feel the blizzard of nerves that usually overwhelms me before my first course meeting. I still sweated through my clothing, got through only half my notes, and did not copy enough syllabi given the number of students who (since I have tended to assume that they will download it in advance, and my classes have tended to grow at Rutgers after the first week, rather than shrinking), but the flow of teaching went more smoothly, and felt less wracking too.

This was the case even though I am teaching a new preparation, "Foundations of Literary Studies", a required course for English majors, but I am excited about the opportunity to guide students through the material. As part of our first class we read and talked about two of my favorite poems Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Archaic Torso of Apollo" and Gwendolyn Brooks's "we real cool," and this weekend they will read an essay by Terry Eagleton before launching into the first nonfiction prose work (they are reading that genre, as well as poetry, fiction, drama, and graphic literature), The Travels of Dean Mahomet (which is free online at the University of California Press's website, if you want to check it out).

Another aspect of the fall is greater departmental responsibilities with one of my university homes. With two of my colleagues, including my chair, in African American and African Studies on sabbatical, I have been named as acting chair till January. I undertook a great deal of work related to this temporary post this summer, but there are still some major tasks to complete before December rolls around. One unexpected result of my spring AAAS teaching was an email I received this summer from a drama student at the Université de Lomé (in Togo) who has studied some African American literature, and had downloaded my course syllabus and inquired about some of the texts. I responded, sending him an essay by Richard Wright, but we have continued corresponding, and he passed on the names of some of Togo's leading poets, fiction writers and playwrights, only one of whom I'd heard of, so I look forward to delving more deeply in Togolese literature.

It's still difficult to believe the summer is over, even if not officially. This was one of my most productive writing summers in a long time. I completed a number of larger prose projects, one of which I continue to call a story but really is a novella, several of the others more clearly long short stories. Earlier in the year, as I was riding on the subway back from the Countee Cullen tribute event at Woodlawn Cemetary with Patricia Spears Jones and Rowan Ricardo Phillips and talking about having written a draft of what was essentially a novella after 10 years of intermittently leading the novella half of the year-long creative writing sequence to my Northwestern undergraduates, Rowan diagnosed my approach as "empathic composition." I think this is right in part; there is also the small window of the summer (this one without any travel) to complete anything, so I believe I successfully pressed rather quickly out of the scant grapes available.

I also finished revising and refining, with A Bolha Editora editors Rachel Gontijo Araújo and Stephanie Sauer the translation of Hilda Hilst's Letters from a Seducer, and cannot wait to see it in print later this month or early next. I wrote and delivered a short paper on the process of translating it, and perhaps I'll publish this at some point. The book will open, however, with a beautiful introduction by Princeton professor and Brazilian literary and cultural scholar Bruno Carvalho. I'm especially proud that I was able to accomplish this while teaching, though it would be wonderful to receive a fellowship to aid in future larger scale translations.

With the intense focus on my own writing and preparations for this fall I was unable to blog as frequently as I like. I hope to resume posting a bit more frequently. I still have unfinished posts in the queue, including a short tribute to Seamus Heaney, whom I have the honor of having kept from a good night of sleep--I'll say more about that soon--and perhaps some reviews, though my efforts in that area have tended to appear elsewhere (Drunken Boat among other places). Here's an exciting, productive fall for all J's Theater readers--and by "exciting," I do not mean another hurricane or tropical storm. Sandy was enough for a lifetime, or two!

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Random Photos

It has been a while since I've blogged, though not for lack of interest, but more because I've been trying to tie together the various loose threads summer has left with me, alongside preparing for the upcoming semester, which begins next week, that I haven't had an opportunity to focus much on anything but the briefest entries here. Several entries I've begun over the last few weeks remain to be completed, though I will try to complete them--or at least several--before classes start. Here are a few recent photos!

Breakdancer, with crowd, on 5th Avenue

Breakdancing crew, 5th Avenue

Inventive travel advisory (read it carefully),
Delancey Street Station

Edward Hopper "Nighthawks" installation,
Flatiron Building

741 Park Avenue (a key address in Alex Gibney's excellent
documentary on the American, Wall Street-fueled plutocracy,
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream --
h/t Reg Gibbons for recommending the film)

Flyer at Hoboken Station for Fiscal Cliff,
our 16-year-old neighbor's band

Rainbow over Jersey City
(note that it appears to end almost
at the Goldman Sachs Bldg.)

Caption: Heels? or Wedgies?

Artist working outdoors, Union Square

Chess game, Union Square

Near 42nd Street

In Williamsburg

The shell of St. Vincent's Hospital, soon to
be a luxury condo development

Inside reedspace, on Orchard Street

Looking at Orchard Street, from the reedspace
front window and door

Young homeless man, with his book
of stickers he collects, East Village

At the Essex Street Market

Jazz band, at Warehouse Cafe, Jersey City

Street fair, Midtown

In Williamsburg

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Quote: Sarah Schulman

Sarah Schulman
(photo by
Monica Simoes)

"At first we [she and Jim Hubbard, at the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, which they co-founded in 1987, the same year as ACT UP started] showed artists who were experimental. That is to say, they experimented. "Experimental" meant that each artist singularly tried out their own eccentric idea, their own imaginative way, and then they looked at each others' discoveries. They learned how to be artists by making art, talking about art, looking at art, being with artists. Whether or not one went to graduate school was irrelevant (and still is) to whether or ont one was really an artist. But at some point around the height of AIDS/gentrification this shifted. Those true experimenters who needed to earn a living in the rapidly shifting gentrification economy were channeled by inflation into teaching jobs. The increasing number of MFA programs became the only way that artists could earn a living beyond waitressing or copyediting at night at law firms. MFA programs became workfare for writers, as rents skyrocketed, as arts funding--already so elite as to be culturally damaging--was practically eliminated. It was like the role of the artist in society had devolved from WPA to NEA to MFA. Their students started producing inside a now established genre called "experimental". It wasn't actually any longer experimental, but it was a fixed set of derivative paradigms, invented by their teachers--many of whom did not have MFAs." (p. 102)

***

"Of course now that the noose has tightened even further, civilian artists are systematically excluded from teaching, as having an MFA [or Ph.D., for poets] has become mandatory for hiring. Being a product of MFA acculturation is now more important in determining who will influence students than what that person has achieved artistically. So, the frame of information and impulse becomes even more narrow and irrelevant and its product even more banal." (p. 103)

***

"Despite the fact that these programs are homogenizing and corrupting and bad for the culture, I feel that when I am advising working-class or poor students with talent, I have to insist that they go to them. There is simply no other way of getting into the system. As damaging as these programs are when they codify or elevate ruling-class perspectives and middlebrow practitioners, they become the only hope for outsiders to have a chance to be let in. It's a conundrum. Hopefully a talented person can emerge from these programs without a highly distorted sense of their own importance, and if they come originally from the margins this is more likely. But as far as I can see, MFA programs have done nothing to break down the barrier that full-character plays with authorial universes (not performance art, vaudeville, or stand-up) and authentic lesbian protagonists face in the theatrical marketplace. So although they do help certain minority voices who have had the support and sophistication to access and survive the system, overall they reinforce the dominant cultural voice, the clubbiness and repetition and most importantly, the group mentality that is, itself, counterindicated for art making." (p. 108)

-- Copyright © Sarah Schulman, from The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012, pp. 102-3. All rights reserved.

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Poem: Mabel Segun

WRONG DESTINATION

I hired an aeroplane
And put my thoughts on it.
"Take us," I told the pilot
"To that place where I believe
Thoughts can develop,
Watered by imagination,
Nourished in freedom."
But the plane was hijacked
And taken to a place
Where nothing grew but weeds.
My thoughts strove ever so bravely
To grow among the weeds,
But they were choked to death,
The weeds choked them, My God!

Now I'm without my thoughts;
They've given me new ones,
But we do not get along --
They're someone else's thoughts,
Not mine.
-- Copyright © Mabel Segun (1930-), from Conflict and Other Poems, Ibadan: New Horn Press, 1986.

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James Turrell at the Guggenheim

I did not see nor wait in line for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Rain Room" (nor have I queued up, beginning at 5:30 am, for a cronut--yet), so I cannot say definitively that James Turrell's (1934-) exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum is the most crowd-pleasing New York City art show of the summer, but I won't hesitate to urge anyone who is in anywhere near upper Manhattan, has a few hours, and wants to be delighted and lulled by Turrell's artistry to catch the show.

Afrum I (White), 1967 (iPhone drawing by John Keene)

Ronin (1968), Fluorescent light,
dimensions variable
© James Turrell / Photo: Courtesy the Stedelijk Museum

Running until September 25, and James Turrell's first exhibition since 1980 in a New York City museum, the show gathers together several differing and compelling examples of this artist's work, which employs and explores light, color, space, and the possibilities human perception. The show-stopper, which I had heard people rave about and thus had to experience firsthand, is Aten Reign (2013), his transformation of the Guggenheim's rotunda into a sublime oculus that fills and shifts with natural and artificial light depending upon the position of the sun and time of day, the weather, and perhaps other mechanisms I'm unaware of. When I entered the museum, the rotunda was a pale yellow, and I thought, pretty but ho hum, certainly an accomplishment but not worthy of all the hullabaloo. I preceded up the spiral to view the smaller light displays in the Annex-level galleries, about which I'll say a little more below, and was impressed, though the long line to see the topmost piece, a bit of a dud that plays deeply with one's sense of space and vision, did peeve me. I returned downstairs and decided to stand at the periphery of the oculus and draw it, since photography was forbidden. (I had been drawing in my sketchbook, so I decided to see if I could get away with using my phone.)

Aten Reign, 2013 (iPhone drawing by John Keene)

Rendering for Aten Reign (2013), Daylight and
LED light, © James Turrell / Rendering: Andreas Tjeldflaat,
2012 © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

As one of Turrell's famous Skypaces--and evocative in particular of his Roden Crater Project (1979-, the cinder cone crater he has remade in Flagstaff, Arizona), and of Meeting (1986), at New York's P.S. 1--Aten Reign demonstrates his sense of how to use light as a painterly and sculptural tool and device, in order to transform sensory perception. The rain clouds, which necessitated an umbrella, and late afternoon hour paid off, because by the time I had reached the rotunda it was beginning to dramatically and rapidly shift. Green, orange, yellow, and my favorite, an almost unbearably exquisite lavender that held for several minutes, before giving way to a tranquil, transcendent blue. I wanted to lie down on the mat that had been placed in the center of the floor to peer up at it, but there were no openings and none of the people there in deep thrall to the beautiful dance of light and hue appeared willing to move (I later read that the guards did cycle people in and out), so I walked around the periphery, drawing, staring up, in a reverie, just watching the unpredictable palette, until I decided to depart.

Prado (White), 1967

Curated by Carmen Giménez, Stephen and Nan Swid Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, and Nat Trotman, Associate Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and organized in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the show also included wall-sized backlighted pieces (Ronin, 1968) and projected light works: Afrum I (White), 1967) and Prado (White), 1967. There was only one real line to view one of the artworks, and it was a very long one, the line, that is, not the artwork, that stretched halfway up the final summit of the Guggenheim's spiral, and took about 45 minutes to get through (I stood for a longer period to see Christian Marclay's The Clock, but the payoff was huge), to see Iltar, 1976, an example of one of Turrell's Ganzfeld works, in which a volume of light exists without discernable limits and boundaries, and can produce equally accurate perceptions and interpretations of reality. In the Iltar room, which was divided, museum visitors stood in one space and encountered a "sensing space," a room or space that gathered its light energy from another area. In the case of Iltar, the effect was akin to peering into what looked like a cloud--only there was nothing there, no mist, no real light, only the production of an effect based on a structural device Turrell had created. It was intriguing, but ultimately, I thought, not worth the wait. Perhaps a smaller space--a gallery or several?--will host Turrell exhibits comprising a series of Ganzfelde--but make sure they're available for visitation for much greater hours than was the case to see Iltar.

The line to see Turrell's Iltar (1976)

The line to see Turrell's Iltar (1976)

Ultimately Aten Reign is worth the price of admission, or at least doesn't make shelling out $20 or so dollars that bad (though catch it on the Guggenheim's free day/night or use a student/elderly pass if you have one). And if you have to muscle--er, politely request that someone lift herself or himself off that circular pad so that you have an opportunity to stare up at the lightshow, well...I'm not counseling aggressive behavior, but when in Rome....

The entrance to Iltar (1976)

Iltar (1976), Tungsten light, dimensions variable
© James Turrell / Photo: Courtesy James Turrell

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