THE GIRL AT THE END OF THIS BURNING WORLD
…Leada came up from L.A. to escape the fires. She talked about electromagnetic fields, the ex-Mormon guy who gave her chlamydia, pyros and tweakers, the Rothschilds, the imminent Earthquake that would destroy everything, the entire state of California. She picked Leila up in her car that smelled of old Taco Bell and vape smoke and perfume and just drove, blasting different cloud rappers she’d fucked or tried to fuck or who’d tried to fuck her, who were too ugly to fuck, etc. Talia was in the front passenger seat. They crossed the bridge, weaving manically in and out of traffic, drove through the TL, ended up at Fisherman’s Wharf on a cold, desolate night.
I’m Not There: observations from the inaugurations
‘Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood / When blackness was a virtue…
I didn’t wake at 6am to face the winter’s dim dawn. I would leave the capital and its grand tradition of peaceful power to the deep chill of fridged temperatures and unforgiving winds. I pulled the bed covers higher and rolled over onto my left side.
Eight years ago I threaded my camera through the Virginia Avenue crowds to enter the mall and climb that shining monument on the hill. A crowd of hundreds (no more) ringed the giant vision. They clapped as their leader took an oath in light hard rain.
Martyrs Then and Now
Florida without sunshine is like a cup of bad coffee or scrambled eggs without salt or pepper, but we were stuck down there in the cold and the drizzle. To break the monotony my companion and I took a sleek little commuter train from Fort Lauderdale to Miami, with two amusements in mind — a seafood restaurant on the Miami River (Garcia’s: five stars!) and The Bay of Pigs Museum.
I think it could be easily argued that Florida itself has served as a laboratory where the agenda and tactics of our current administration were tested — from the cowardly war on woke, to epic grifting. It’s a state full of people who moved there because of the weather, a reason for relocation I find bewildering. I asked one old guy — he was my age! — if he missed his friends back in Boston, and he laughed and said he liked to think of them pulling their hats down to cover their ears while they shoveled their sidewalks. You would rather wear shorts than see your friends? I countered. Ab-so-fucking-lutely he replied.
Along with the sundowners you’ve got your Cubans. There are so many things that make Florida unappealing, it would be unfair and inaccurate to pin the woeful current state of affairs on Miami’s Cuban exile population, but once the Cubans left their expropriated fincas behind and repatriated to Miami, Florida suddenly had a reliable reactionary voting bloc that no ambitious politician could ignore.
The Stupid, the Incompetent, and the Ugly…
A possible title if Sergio Leone directed a film about Trump’s first weeks in office. Who knows? Clint Eastwood might even agree to star.
Urged by Evangelical Christians, The U.S. Returns to Her Rapist (January 20, 2025)
Free from the horrors of the next four years,
the quiet dead rot peacefully
beneath offerings of flowers.
Willie B. Wazir Peacock (We Will Remember You)
There’s one poem credited to Bob Moses in the grand online archive of Civil Rights Movement poetry here. Moses put his own spin on an Odetta spiritual as he bowed to one of the Mississippians, Willie B. Wazir Peacock (1937-2016), at the core of the Movement in the early 60s. Moses’s song calls out in all CAPS to his Brother Willie who went under the hill with scarcely anyone outside Black ‘Sippi knowing what he gave them and this fuct country…
IT WAS WILLIE
WHAT GOT FREEDOM
IN THE DEEP BLACK ‘SIPPI
Co-Existentialism
GAZA,1974
I
After dinner with the grandmother –
young wives of the household
are feeding children
and serving dessert to the men.
I am a guest, an English teacher
new to the Middle East,
without even the basic Arabic
most Israelis know
and I cannot play in pantomime –
like my daughter –
with the children and the goats.
I am placed in a bare room
with an old woman
who talks continually
as if eventually
I must understand
her native tongue
Because we are women.
Co-Existentialism II (Addendum on relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel)
I really didn’t want to write a piece for First of the Month about Arabs and Jews. Every article I’ve read talks about the terrible discrimination – even hatred – and I am burnt out on hatred and stereotypes. I’d asked Hillel Shenker what he felt about the change in relations between Arabs and Jews and he listed the organizations working for cooperation, and how there’s less in some organizations and more in others.
Sohrab Hura: “Mother” (At MoMA PS 1 Through February 17)
Click on Read More for a bigger screen.
Doing Our High School Teachers Proud?
A surprise turn into rooms at MoMA PS1 presenting Sohrab Hura’s oeuvre—far from art-wank—electrified our old friends’ winter break reunion trip to the museum.
The day was too good: arepas in Jackson Heights, Central Park night walk, a warm, free crib at the apartment where Dash was dog-sitting.
Now, we’ve come back together to mull over how Sohrab Hura’s work affected us that day and how he might get you going too…
Perception
The first-floor windows of the Life Sciences building sit one step above sidewalk level, flush to the floor. They are recessed far enough in from the outside edge of the building to allow an elderly woman in a heavy, hooded blue coat, a black “I (Heart) SF” sweatshirt, and a patterned dress over jeans to sleep there.
The woman sleeps surrounded by her possessions, which, so far as Goshkin can catalog from his seat in the café across the street, consist of a shopping cart, several stuffed large plastic bags, a yellow blanket, a rug depicting a horse on hind legs, an umbrella, two tubes of glittering steel pipe, and a crooked, leafless tree branch as tall as she is. Once she has awakened, the woman begins to move her belongings to the sidewalk.
She arranges them as if assembling a train. What connects the cars of the train is unclear. So is how it will move forward. She takes her time, sometimes removing an item from a shopping bag and adding it to the exterior, sometimes shifting items she has placed in one position to another.
Bob Dylan and the unfairness of genius
Bob Dylan puts on a song like a suit of clothes. He does it when he plays concerts, sings his old hits as if for the first time, frequently confounding his back up band with his changes. Through the magic of YouTube, we can listen to him in the studio, recording “Positively 4th Street” through 12 takes, each different from the other. You’re relieved when he hits the take that’s used on the record, but changing his approach, his tone, the attitude of his singing, doesn’t reveal any more about him than changing from a cashmere sweater into a plaid lumberjack shirt.
You can hear the deliberateness of the different takes. He is, and was, a professional musician, after all. He appeared to be trying to find himself inside the songs he wrote and sang, but maybe that was a put-on, like so much else he said for public consumption. In an interview for Newsweek done in February of 1968, Dylan said, “I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don’t believe that anymore. There’s myself and there’s my song.”
How to Mourn a Famous Friend
Recoil from the headline’s slap.
Scroll through all the phases of her face.
Dig up your own photographs. Decide the auspicious number means she died without pain.
Place your favorite – arms around each other, grinning like fools – on your body where it aches the most.
Hold her pet name for you under your tongue.
First Pomegranate
Which part of this crimson
honeycomb to eat? And how? Sun
highlights the knife’s blade, stripes the room
like prison bars.
I watch you scoop seeds, then copy;
savor sweet-tart bursts
as red pearls open.
Your food soothes me, your kind,
scratched-by-smoke-and-whiskey voice.
You must meditate, Sweet Pea.
Learn to let go. You’re just like me
at that age – beautiful and charming,
far too stubborn.
Not with you.
My 115th Dream & An American Family
WTF? Waking with an aching toe…left foot or right? The one I broke in the Bronx? Has the cold cut to the bone? Hope so. Huh? Well, IF it’s just this I.C.E. age, sleepy/creepy me will hibernate…
Then again, I might be at the mercy (all over again) of my own damn head. I’ve been getting worked over lately by a long manuscript. Upshot of a bad habit—call it “diligent indolence”? Years ago, I found I could cheat when I got stuck on an essay. Instead of hard-slogging through, if I’d been truly working—I could fade-to-bed and my brain would dream a solution to whatever was holding me back. All I had to do was trace the meander of the last dream I had after a natural wake-up. With piece-work, my mind wakes me up with the Answer after four or five hours. Lately, though, things done changed. I’ve been chasing a big bear of a book (?) and once I’m hunting, my head only lets me sleep for a couple hours and KEEPS waking me on the regular until I think I’ve taken my last shot.
All Gone: Garth Hudson R.I.P.
A homiletic organ part from Garth opens “Daniel and the Sacred Harp,” frames the song right away with weight, seriousness, the melody hinting at mortality with funerary allusions, surely, though Garth’s playing here takes me somewhere else, back to mass as kid, to those brief, well, I don’t have the technical terms for them, but those brief intros and outros to the segments of mass, intros and outros played on the organ, the pieces serving, I recall, as signals of transitions, this organ with just utterly massive pipes in rows that fascinated me as a kid, dozens of pipes in various sizes, many running all the way up to the high vaulted ceiling (maybe 75 feet), an entire wall of pipes behind the altar and sanctuary, so much bigger and, as I picture it now, seemingly out of proportion with the celebrant down there, to whom my brother and I were supposed to be paying attention, my own memory though being really specific now: warm and slow organ chords that somehow combined light and darkness in one, the overwhelming wall of pipes with no pattern or symmetry that I could ever discern, the organist not, I recall, ever visible from the pews, though you’d maybe catch a glimpse of her, stage left, depending on which line you were in for communion, so small-seeming, almost hiding there within the mountains of sound.
“Bob on Bob”…
is a brilliant collection of essays, short pieces, reminiscences, Rabelaisian lists, and so much more.[1] All devoted to (“The”) Bob Levin’s love for, and obsession with, Bob Dylan. I was struck by the book’s design. It reminded me of the early releases of Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books. Levin’s style is a smorgasbord of pithy observations and freewheeling narrative that makes reading him a pleasure. Every page is tasty.
Levin has attended more than a dozen live performances of Dylan’s, beginning in 1963 at Brandeis University, which in Levin’s telling was close to the center of one version of high American culture—a culture that Dylan would transform. It helped that Dylan was an outlier, hailing from Minnesota and born on the less than urbane side of the tracks—“Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac/ Like Louis and Jimmy and Buddy and all the rest…” He belonged among the un-jocked and un-classical—the artful strivers not the upwardly mobile conformists. Levin credits Dylan with making rock ‘n’ roll respectable to the culture’s next generation of cool rulers when he chose to go electric.
Per Levin, Dylan beats Hemingway (and every other artist of the last century) as a creator and character-shaper. It was Dylan’s shape-shifting that instantiated the counterculture’s previously unimaginable range of possible selves/worlds.
Shame Games (Reflections on the Election Sparked by Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right”)
Those election post-mortems that blame Democrats for not going on podcasts or hiring influencers too late, or that give Trump’s team more credit for tapping streaming media are missing the bigger picture. I want to offer a deeper point, drawing on the work of Arlie Russell Hochschild. Much of the time, we think about media consumption simply in the context of the attention economy. That is, humans have a limited amount of time in each day, and so it matters a lot what we focus our attention on. The rise of digital media destabilized the old attention economy, where just a few programs and people dominated. Now competition for attention is fierce, with influencers and other new media creators building audiences as big or bigger than the ones consuming legacy media. So, if a new format like podcasting or streaming video becomes the “place” attracting attention from sought-after demographics like right-leaning young men, it makes sense to figure out how to compete for attention there.
What’s missing from this whole conversation, though, is why the Joe Rogans of our changing media world are attracting attention in the first place. The medium is only partly the message here—new formats alone and the Trump campaign’s willingness to flood them with content are not why he won this election.
This is where Hochschild offers some very useful ideas, I think.