Been going to a lot of art shows of late, and am simultaneously reminded of how much I love art and how much of it is a mountain of caca.
"Ask Chuleta," an occasional video project by Boogie Rican artista and curator Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, skewers and invokes identity politics, postmodernism, "post-black," art world snootiness, the "white box community," and the continuing exclusion of working class nonwhites from galleries, as audiences, artists, and critics. "I want to bridge the gap between the art world and people like us."
Our gangsta art critic, with hoop earrings big enough for a lion to jump through, defines the prefix "post-" in relation to the NY Post, eating pegao is given as an example for a subject for identity politics art, and the rejection thereof is rendered as "retro" -- "it's kinda like retro clothes, like the way the 80s style is in now..." -- and the return of minimalism:
"Google Donald Judd, and you'll know what I'm talking about."
More recently, Chuleta recommended the show "Bangin'" -- "kid, the show's called 'Bangin'!" -- which just opened at one of my favorite Bronx white box galleries, Longwood Arts. (Alas, the video is only available through Facebook, as far as I can tell)
Summer's not official for another month yet, but my post-semester break gave me a chance to catch up with West Coast friends and do the things I normally don't have time to: check random cultural events and read a frakin' novel.
Went to a screening of Smile Pinki, a sort of anti-"Slumdog" that won the Oscar this year for best short doc. Done by Megan Mylan, who also did the devastating Lost Boys of Sudan, the film is simple and deeply undramatic, and I mean that as a compliment. Basically, we follow closely a few families in Uttar Pradesh, India, helped by Smile Train, which provides free surgery to kids with cleft lips and palates.
Surgery to fix this birth defect is relatively simple. Not getting it can cripple a child for life. Pre-surgery, the kids in the movie can't speak properly, have trouble eating and drinking, and are kept from school to avoid ridicule and shame for the family. The arc of the film is simple: social worker locates children, parents take long trips (mostly on foot) to get to the hospital in Banares, surgery is done, child is rendered "normal."
Yet aside from the feel-good aspect of the film, what struck me was how this was about everyday heroics: of the social workers who don't judge families' reluctance to engage with authorities or their superstitions or fatalism; the families and neighbors who sacrifice a lot to get these kids to the hospital; the doctors who perform over 3,000 surgeries a year. Recognizing her own position in the larger situation, Mylan said in a Q&A after the screening, "What's important is empowering local doctors to be able to do the work using their own judgment."
The short will screen at MoMA June 7 as part of The New India film series.
And now for the coincidence. I arrived at the screening with a copy of Jeff in Venice/Death in Varanasi (the latter city is also known as Benares/Banares/Kashi), a dyptich novel (or a doubled novella) which is likewise deceptive in its simplicity.
I love Geoff Dyer and will read anything he writes, even a crazy letter (see comments) he submits as a non-submission for an anthology on literary mortification. Out of Sheer Rage was a painfully hilarious book about the impossibility of writing a decent book about DH Lawrence, and But Beautiful, about jazz, is one of my all-time favorite pieces of music writing. I was also touched more than I understood by his meditation on Camus in Oran.
So, this novel (which is infinitely better than the similarly pun-titled Paris, Trance) starts, duh, riffing off Thomas Mann. But Jeff Atman, the addled, jaded junketeer mag writer in the first half, like all of Dyer's entropy-seeking writer types, experiences the perfect love affair (perfect, because it only lasts a few days and has no room for disappointment).
Tucked into all the dismissive, louche party-hopping quips (he is in Venice for the Biennale with all the other art-fkrs) are committed, sincere immersions into art and its effects on the desiring viewer (kinda reminded me of the art-appreciation moments of Talk to Her and of my own encounters with pieces like Las Meninas). All while sniffing coke off a mirror used to view a Tintoretto ceiling. The vibe is light, silly, but sediments into melancholy, hunger, middle-aged panic.
And then there's the second half, about an unnamed writer (a later Jeff?) who goes to the ghats, the funeral pyres by the Ganga, on a travel mag assignment and just stays. Yet again, what could be a silly European man-goes-native cliché reveals unexpected depth, about what one needs in life, what constitutes fulfillment and how difficult it is to let go of desire.
Are Indians mere background? Yes and no. Because the writer's vague quest is, in the end, irrelevant to the people around him. He eventually blends into the background, and ends up either enlightened, fevered, insane or all of the above.
A stamp commemorating Martinican poet and anti-colonialist Aimé Césaire was issued by the French post office this week, just after the one-year anniversary of his death. Gotta love the stern, uncompromising posture, the refusal to smile.
No, not the dark Australian crooner, but the Chicago artist whose mesmerizing Soundsuits are everywhere, it seems. Costume, sculpture, fetish, furry, dance, found object, artesanía, locura? All of the above. I missed the New York showing at Jack Shainman, but am seriously considering heading west for the current exhibit at Yerba Buena.
As impressive as they are as objects, I think only seeing the suits in motion reveals their true splendor.
The Hungarian lunch lady at school was shocked after hearing a radio report on Vieques. "How could the U.S. have Puerto Rico as a colony for 110 years? How is it that people don't know?"
All day today, NYU is screening movies from the closest thing the island has ever had to a film studio, the DIVEDCO (División de la Educación de la Comunidad), a New Deal-spawned Puerto Rican government agency that produced posters, films, festivals and other multimedia materials to educate rural populations about civic engagement, health and community development.
Like the WPA, because the DIVEDCO had incredible artists working for them, the project produced some aesthetically stunning stuff. I'm more familiar with the posters produced than with the films, which toe that line between documentary and melodrama familiar from Italian neorealism. Beautiful stuff.
Samples of the incredible silkscreen posters here (skip the intro). And should you ever be inside the Hunter College library, they have lots of DIVEDCO posters hung in the stacks.
Below is a trailer from "El Tiempo," a short which revisits the sites and players from the Jack Delano-directed "Los Peloteros" 50 years later. Beautiful use of split-screen to show how much and how little has changed in towns like Comerío.
My interest in high fashion tends to begin and end with ANTM. Not a snob thing, just not my bag.
But the Fashionista pix and post of Arlenis Sosa (h/t to Giselle Rodríguez Cid) caught my eye. #1, she's got the mancha de plátano smack in the middle of that beautiful forehead (esp. when you see her more "natural" shots). #2, according to this NY Mag bio-chronology, her big assignments seem to be ones where she's figured as Black "African." (which, really, is just about the only way high fashion tends to see Black women anyway. Always back to Saartjie Baartman, in't?).
I am digging how African fashion (of Africa, by Africans, for Africans) has been getting more play on its own terms. Not that it means non-whites have any significant space on the catwalk, no matter what Vicki Woods says.
In the Models.com video here, Arlenis (her name alone is like a Quisqueya gang signal) represents Monte Cristi, far removed from the capital, bordering Haiti, as unlikely a place to grow supermodels as Siberia. I <3 the comments, where her cousins and assorted Dominicans pop up in all their untranslated beauty.
I'm a little late on my review of Medicine for Melancholy, which I saw a few weeks ago at the Waverly IFC Center. I had some strong reactions, some of which were totally opposite to most of the reviews I've seen, even those by trusted astute writer friends like Ernest Hardy and Elisha Miranda.
I was excited to see the movie, a 24-hour romance between two Afro-bohos in my former home of San Francisco. There were superficial elements that reminded me of She's Gotta Have It (more on that movie, which I caught again recently after many many years, in a future post) -- the monochromatic palette, the quirky romance, the space for artsy Blackness to just breathe. But like most shorthand, the comparison doesn't hold too far.
First, the good: the sense of place, and the romance of place, comes through clearly. San Francisco is easy to fall for, the pretty girl at the party to whom everyone gravitates. But the beauty in the movie isn't just the usual postcard vistas, it's more the sweet alchemy of low-rise housing + hills that makes you feel apart and in nature in Potrero Hill, Dolores Park, the Palace of Fine Arts.
The movie pays careful attention to where people live, what they're likely to cross rolling from the Marina to the Tenderloin, the intimate little corners of the not-so-new-anymore Yerba Buena Arts Center, the industria-era nostalgia of the Britex Fabrics sign. I have a personal map of my own favorite Mission District signs: El Capitan (torn down), 500 Club (my beacon home biking down from the Haight), Thrift Town (17 Reasons Why).
Place is nostalgia, for a San Francisco that was less white, less uniformly rich. The figure we get from Micah (Wyatt Cenac, who turns in a great performance, tensed up in his laid-back-ness, always on the verge of breaking his Buster Keaton demeanor to laugh or rage) is 7% African-American population, with the stronghold being Bayview-Hunter Point -- the "redevelopment" of the Fillmore as the city's Black displacement original sin. All true, all a tragedy -- one that fits in nicely as evidence of The Plan (go 31:45 in for the relevant segment) -- but not the whole story.
As Micah and his paramour Jo wander the city and talktalktalk about race, romance and redevelopment, they pass by an open storefront where a group of people is discussing gentrification. I think these are played by real-life housing activists. What I noticed is that everyone talking about displacement from San Francisco to the East Bay and further inland was white. Huh?
The most intense displacement of the past decade has been in my former neighborhood of the Mission and like neighborhoods, traditionally Latino nabes. The Latino population of SF has remained more or less steady since 1990 (14% of the city even as total population has gone up and down). But those who remain are poorer and more marginalized. How do you talk about gentrification in San Francisco and have it be strictly a Black-white conversation?
And for that matter, how do you talk about "alternative culture" -- one of the other subjects of contention for our blipster protagonists -- and yet again frame it strictly in terms of Black-white? At one point, the couple hits a "Soul Night" in a club I could not place (Elbo Room?) where, retro-Daptones style, most of the revelers are figured as white.
But I spotted a few Chicano-Filipino-looking people in there. The notion that "alternative" only means "white" is a false one, at least to my memory of 1990s SF. Or maybe the polyracial omnisexual bohemia of my memories only exists in LA now.
And I haven't even talked about the straw-woman that is Jo, with her opaque life, contrarian non-politics and fuzzy personality. All we can gather about her is that she is the kept woman of a globe-trotting art dealer/curator. Her "creative side" and politics is restricted to making t-shirts sporting the names of female filmmakers. Um, yeah.
Micah's race warrior position can be compelling even against a tougher interlocutor than the one he gets. I couldn't figure out what Micah saw in Jo aside from cuteness and checkered Vans. It's almost like Micah is having an affair with the ideal of a Black alternative woman rather than a flesh-and-blood person.
I really wanted to like this movie. But as lovely as so much of it is, it left a sour taste in my mouth.
["Medicine for Melancholy" still via allmoviephoto.com; "17 Reasons Why" pix via thelab.org]
In Mohsin Hamid's tight and compelling The Reluctant Fundamentalist, narrator Changez (the book isn't nearly as heavy-handed as the name suggests) reaches the point of no return in his alienation from the American imperialist dream (complete with high-power finance job and gringa girlfriend) in Valparaiso, Chile. He visits Pablo Neruda's home and finds a point of connection he's lost in post-9/11 New York:
...the home of Neruda did not feel as removed from Lahore as it actually was; geographically, of course, it was perhaps as remote a place as could be found on the planet, but in spirit it seemed only an imaginary caravan ride away from my city, or a sail by night down the Ravi and Indus.
To me, it's not just the "universal poetry" of Neruda or the mountain views from La Sebastiana that make it an apt place for Changez to have his epiphany. It's because he likely recognizes a setting where the connection between politics and everyday life is more direct and honest than in 2002 U.S., with naive "who me?" policies condemning some and secretly encouraging others. Latin Americans have long memories for that approach, and Chile especially so.
While the U.S. tries to mend relations in several parts of the world, Latin America is forgotten, except as a perennial source of slave cheap workers and scapegoats for current labor conditions. And in turn, Latin America is starting to think of the U.S. as a player among many, not the only game in town.
It also jumped out at me seeing a story about one of the most popular novelas in Brazil right now, Caminho das Indias, a caste-crossed lovers story with Brazilian actors speaking Portuguese but outfitted in saris and dropping Hindi. Partly filmed in Jaipur and Agra, it is a fantasia of an "exotic," "colorful" culture (pace O Clone/El Clon) and does stick to a lot of Orientalist clichés, but even the most realist novelas are high melodrama and require a broad brush, so I see it more as normalizing India as a source of power and glamour.
Check this matchmaking scene:
And last in my list of evidence of Global South nods to appeal to the Chinese-Indian economies is a literary magazine I was brought from Delhi called Vislumbres (after Octavio Paz's mostly annoying essays written during his time as Mexican ambassador to India in the 1960s).
Financed by the consulates in Spain and several Latin American countries, it's a gorgeous journal in red-black-white that vaguely recalls Soviet constructivist art. Trilingual (English-Spanish-Portuguese) it has work by Latin American writers about India and Indian subcontinent writers about Latin America. Some of the work is lovely impressionistic, some borders on mutual exoticism, but the effort was what fascinated me, the gesture to dialogue.
Not only was he a Latin lover and a tough guy (and sometimes Asian), but he was all that and a cleavaged white pompadour-rockin' superhuman in my favorite of his roles, Khan Noonian Singh (who despite his pan-South Asian name was clearly Latino -- just listen to him enunciate the one Latino crew member's name upon reanimation).
Check this Robot Chicken Italian opera claymation version of the movie, yet another on-point miniature marvel.
I'm a sucker for pastiche. The piece below by Río Yañez (who I remember as a little kid running around Mission District artists' parties) unites two icons, Batman & el Aztec Hi-Tech Border Brujo hisself, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who as he gets older is starting to remind me more and more of a Mission street character of the 90s known as The Red Man.
And speaking of pochos, there is a bit of a kerfuffle about whether Drew Friedman ripped off Lalo Alcaraz for his recent New Yorker cover. Several folks on the West Coast are convinced he did. I'm not so sure.
Obama's image has been endlessly remixed with several obvious icons: MLK, Malcolm X, Abraham Lincoln. George Washington I don't think is such a stretch. But the publication of Lalo's image predates Friedman's, and personally, I like it better -- it evokes the unfinished Gilbert Stuart painting as opposed to what most closely resembles a dollar bill. What do you think?
Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go So many friends raved about this. But I realized I get impatient with gothics. Must be the obligatory genteel reticence of it all.
Ed Park: Personal Days: A Novel A comedy of social manners for the cubicle age. Nicely plotted even when it dips into the absurd. But I could'a done without the tour-de-force punctuation-less email that ties all loose ends.
Hanif Kureishi: Something to Tell You: A Novel A bittersweet sequel of sorts to Buddha of Suburbia and Beautiful Launderette: What happened to all of us old brown punks now that we're middle aged.
