Benj DeMott

I Write What I Like: Thinking About “What Nails It” and a Few Nice Things

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“A Mile from the Bus Stop,” 1955, By Jess Collins

Why start a piece on Greil Marcus’s What Nails It with Jess’s painting of Pauline Kael and her daughter in a Berkeley park?

Not only because I want its greens. Marcus devotes the second of the three chapters in his short new book to Kael who taught him what criticism could be. His felt tribute to his friend (and fellow Californian) lies at the heart of his book.

Marcus hasn’t been a confessional writer in the past, but What Nails It goes inward, probing what’s behind his drive to surprise himself with his own words. Composed fast—after seasons when he couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs and nearly a year of silence due to personal health crises—Marcus’s comeback is freewheelin’ fun.

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Dirty Hands, Doomy Doctors & Young Mr. Faye

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Three things are required which are very rarely found together. Genius and charm (do not imagine that the people can be made to swallow anything insipid, anything weak). A very sure tact. And finally (what a contradiction?) there must be a divine innocence, the childlike sublimity which one occasionally glimpses in certain young beings but only for a brief moment, like a flash of heaven.

I flashed on Michelet’s insight when the new president of Sénégal, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, denounced a “dog-eat-dog world” in his address at the UN last week…

https://youtu.be/ba5-H1SbD9w?si=sNpgQYY1wsgDEEu6

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Emergent

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Thanks to the Harris-Walz campaign, The Democracy is a deep far from where we were six weeks ago. There are countertruths implicit in this transition—lasting lessons about continuity and change that might even turn around exit leftists. (The breed who avowed earlier this summer: “We’re leaving the USA when Trump wins.”)

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Counterlife

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Green Border, which is showing until Thursday in NYC, is my idea of counterprogramming to the RNC. You won’t get out of the flic without tears, but it’s not for goodies only. While the movie leaves the implication that human beings may be “cured by altruism” (per Stanley Corngold’s First review), it also implies that such cures are not matters of opinion. What’s “good for body and soul” is “to risk your well-being in caring for others.”

One Brit critic had caveats and I’ll allow Green Border might not be a work of art that will work a century from now. Director Agnieszka Holland hasn’t come up with a genius metaphor for Fortress Europa. (There’s no cinematic equivalent to the hi-tech marijuana factory run by gangsters in the Dardennes’ immigration saga, Tori and Lokita.) But right here, right now — as I flash on the charmer Nur (a Syrian boy who drowns in a Polish swamp) — Holland’s humanism without borders is undeniable.

What follows is the soulful song that soundtracks a minute of joy in Green Border. A couple Polish teenagers nod their heads with three African refugees who rap along to Youssoupha’s testament…

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Weberian at the Gates (with “Haaretz” Interlude & Post-Bust Postscript)

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“My mind is closed,” said a protestor at one of last week’s anti-Israel rallies outside Columbia’s gates. Yet she flinched at her own words once they came out of her lips. (No doubt she’d meant to say, “My mind is made up.”) I repeated what she’d said back to her. While I wished she wouldn’t shake it off too fast, there was no gloat in my game. Maybe I had a clue I’d be playing gotcha with myself soon enough.

The Columbia building occupation on Monday night had me living in contradiction, twisted and turning. I started with a hard bias against the spectacle of Ivy guys with keffiyehs and hammers.[1] But I was slain by the occupiers’ choice to rename Hamilton Hall “Hind’s Hall” in tribute to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli tanks in the war against Hamas. Blunt force against property (not people) may be justified if the aim is to fix attention on the pain of others.

I wasn’t much more subtle than the window-breakers on the evening of the day last week when Iran’s regime sentenced rapper Toomaj Salehi to death for exposing the “filth beyond the clouds” of Islamism. It was my invocation of Toomaj’s case that provoked the respondent at the rally who copped to her closed mind.

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Emotionally Yours

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Jordan Poole got his comeuppance all over again this year — as he slumped for months and became the butt of a thousand jokes and memes — but he came through (as his bosses affirmed in their exit interviews)…

 [Poole talk ends at 30:00.[

I’m glad to find out Winger felt JP’s comeback, though I’m ambivalent about nice white managers of black genius. (Hi, Bob Myers.) It was on Poole to find his game once the Wizards’ other less talented point guard, Tyus Jones, went down with an injury, enabling JP to play his natural position. Haters aren’t done with Poole. He brings out the mean in recessives shamed by his fluency — “I’m an expressive person” — and physical gifts that enable him to show out like so…

And so…

JP heated up pretty often in games after the All Star break in late February, but what really counted were moments that led to a (rare) Wizards winning streak — an end of game strip of Giannis and this beautiful assist to Cory Kispert…

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Forces of Victory

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Today in Dakar, during the inauguration of Sénégal’s new president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye put on a heavy gold necklace signifying he was “Grand master of The Order of the Lion.” The ceremony made me think first of Les Lions — Sénégal’s national soccer team — but I also heard echoes of Shelley…

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number–
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you–
Ye are many — they are few.

Faye’s party won a landslide victory, though he was released from prison just ten days before Sénégal’s March 24th election (after eleven months in pretrial detention on a bogus charge)…

A few hours after the polls closed, partial results were already pointing to a first-round winner: Bassirou Diomaye Faye, the candidate of the most outspoken opposition to the incumbent government, and second in command of the African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity party (PASTEF). Faye will be the youngest and most unexpected president in the history of independent Senegal.

Before his presidential candidacy, Faye was little known to the Senegalese public, working in the shadow of party leader Ousmane Sonko. Sonko, also a former tax official [and another victim of a rigged judicial proceeding] … gained popularity, especially among young people, for his highly critical discourse on the traditional political class and for his promises of a radical break from how the country has been governed for decades.

I flashed on Shelley again when I saw this photo of the grey-haired Maitre Cire Cledor Ly at the inauguration…

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On the Road with R. H. Blyth

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I found the first book of R. H. Blyth’s four volume set, Haiku, (originally published between 1949-1952) in a used book store on St. Mark’s Place. If haiku seems no more pertinent to you than, say, heraldry—one more subject about which even an informed person “need not be ashamed to know nothing”[1]—you may be mollified to hear I had an excuse to check Eastern Culture since I was Christmas shopping for a nephew who’s on his way to Japan this spring. The book’s cover—“Oriental brown simple rough peasant cloth”—got me to open “the Blyth Haiku bibles” (pace Allen Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg). I fell in…

“Plop!”

To quote the last line of “the most famous haiku” with frog-and-pond as translated by Blyth—scholar-gypsy who brought the East to Beats and Salinger (see J.D.’s bow to Blyth in “Seymour, An Introduction”: “…haiku, but senryu, too…can be read with special satisfaction when R. H. Blyth was on them. Blyth is sometimes perilous, naturally, since he’s a highhanded old poem himself, but he’s also sublime.”)

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Sénégal on Fire

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Macky Sall — Sénégal’s outgoing president (Inshallah) — has played one Trump card after another over the past year, as he’s tried to retain power. Sall got brazen about his contempt for his country’s democratic process a couple years ago when he started hinting broadly that he would run for a 3rd term, though that’s illegal under Sénégal’s Constitution which only allows a president two terms in office. He prepped for what he assumed would be his permanent ascendancy by defaming and jailing his main political opponent, a young firebrand named Ousmane Sonko who’s been exposing corruption among Sénégal’s political class for more than a decade.[1] When Sonko and his partisans refused to fade out quietly, Sall came out as a petty Big Man trashing the country’s (relatively) free press, unleashing violence against protestors and conflating democratic dissent with Islamist terror.

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Invisible Republicanism (Redux): Greil Marcus’s Negro Problem (Circa 1998)

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I published the following piece in a tabloid issue of First in 1998 and then posted it at this website after Bob Dylan released Love and Theft in 2001.  I took it down once Greil Marcus became an occasional contributor to First. In the era of Substack, though, journos’ back pages find new readers and it seems timid rather than tactful to hide “I.R.” in a memory hole.

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Peter Linebaugh’s “Great Act of Historical Imagination”*

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“A commonist manifesto for the 21st Century…”

High praise for Peter Linebaugh’s 2014 collection of essays, Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, went right by me. I missed the book when it came out and only grabbed it last month to pass time on the subway. My commutes went FAST! Though I didn’t ride the book into the ground. I savored the essay “Meandering at the Crossroads of the Commons and Communism” with a Negroni at an Upper West Side joint that does a damn good job of cultivating commons. (Fam style Italian dishes bring in big parties — happy b-day sung every 15 minutes…) A meet spot to muse with Linebaugh even if dollarism is in the equation. I finished his book as I rolled around the city gathering Thanksgiving provisions. A perfect read in the run-up to a fam-and-friends fête. I’m sure you’d’ve been swept away too as Linebaugh limns (with a feeling) one-for-all-all-for-one struggles to preserve people’s rights and resist privateers and hierarchs.

The late Mike Davis’s summative graph is on point:

From Thomas Paine to the Luddites, from Karl Marx to the practical dreamer William Morris, who advocated communizing industry and agriculture, to the twentieth-century communist historian E.P. Thompson, Linebaugh brings to life the vital “commonist” tradition. He traces the red threat from the great revolt of commoners in 1381 to the enclosures of Ireland, and the American commons, where European immigrants who had been expelled from their commons met the immense commons of the native peoples and the underground African American urban commons. Illuminating these struggles in this indispensable collection, Linebaugh reignites the ancient cry, “Stop, Thief!”

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Table Music (Kierra Sheard; The Band; Lillie Mae; Tony Joe White; Smokey Robinson; JB, Bobby Bland & BB King; Ben Webster & Coleman Hawkins; Sugar Blue; Playboi Carti; JUL; St. Etienne; Obrafour)

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I’ve been stuck on Kierra Sheard’s duets lately. There are wonderful ones with Jekalyn Carr (on Sheard’s last album), with Tasha Cobb, and a couple with Sheard’s mother Karen Clark (of the Clark Sisters). One of those Mother-and-Daughter ones has an indelible moment where Karen gently induces her pregnant daughter not to go full-on. (The tale of what once happened to “Gimme Shelter’s” Merry Clayton shadows her maternal attentiveness.) What comes next here is great from the jump (catch the guy who starts hopping on one leg pretty early on) but it gets transcendent when Ms. Sheard and her chorus lock on their truth: “He’s holding me up!!!”

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The Witnesses (Formerly “Black Dialectics”)

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This post originally had a second half, which I’ve now restored since I got a “hard yes” from my final witness who agreed to join the conversation (anonymously)…

Ta-Nehisi Coates opened this Q&A by denouncing what he regards as cant about the complexity of the conflict between Israelis and Arabs. His argument had force. How can Americans — particularly those who identify with black people’s struggles for civil rights — support a country that’s waging war to sustain a status quo founded on “segregation”? There’s something fine and (small d) democratic in Coates’ determination to dump the idea that only PhDs in Middle Eastern Studies have the wit to comment on the horrors Over There. His will to keep it simple seemed admirable. Yet there was an odd avoidant turn in Coates’ testimony when he addressed Martin Luther King’s legacy.

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Better than “Heaven”

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Songs on the new Stones album might rev me up down the line, but I was put off by early hosannahs for the faux-gospel “Sweet Sounds of Heaven” which features Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder. Compare “Heaven” with live collabs between Stevie and the Stones from 1972, when they’d mash up “Uptight” and “Satisfaction.” (You can watch here — check Mick and Stevie’s dance — now that’s a throwback!)

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Amen Corner

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I want to thank C. Liegh McInnis for commending The Burial — the new movie streaming now that’s based on true events in the 90s. The film tells how Jeremiah Joseph O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) — a white Mississippian with a legal team led by a black lawyer, Willie E. Gary (Jamie Foxx) — sued Loewen funeral company, a Northern corporation looking to establish monopoly control over the death-industry in parts of the American South. Along the way, one of O’Keefe’s lawyers, Halbert Dockins Jr. (Mamadou Athie), amped up his client’s case by zeroing in on the full ugly of Loewen’s deals with clergy who sold overpriced funeral packages to black churchgoers.

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Come and See*

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From Thomas Hardy’s “Departure”

“How long…

Must your wrath reasonings trade on lives like these,
That are as puppets in a playing hand?–
When shall the saner softer polities
Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?”

***

***

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Fiesta

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For a long time I used to get up early on the day of the Annual Anti-Gentrification Street Festival. I’d join the crew that set up traffic barricades on Claremont, Broadway and Riverside and lug tables from International House—the dorm for foreign students on Claremont—down to Tiemann Place. I’ve tended to flake off lately though. My nephew Jamie and his gen seemed to have taken on the job after my brother Tom died—retiring elders like me. Yet this September I’d been more involved in prep since we’d arranged with our Councilman’s office and the DOT to schedule the “unveiling” of an official sign co-naming Tiemann Place “Tom DeMott Way” on Festival day.

Thanks to a prompt I could not refuse from an Irishwoman, Anah Klate, on September 16th I was up and out on the street by mid-morn (as grey went blue).

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Crystallize It

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A mind so fine no idea could violate it? Midway through Tori et Lokita – the Dardenne Brother’s latest film – there’s a sequence that brings home the flaw in T.S. Eliot’s noble praise-line. The Dardennes crystallize an idea that’s suffused with feeling. What happens on screen isn’t a reduction or an abstraction or a violation. It’s an act of imagination.

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Heat and Light (Hearing Playboi Carti in “First of the Month’s” 25th Summer)

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I’m in thrall to chaud bonheur – hot happiness? – a phrase I just learned from Stanley Corngold (who uses it near the end of his post in this batch). The burn flashed me back to my twenties when I locked on promesse de bonheur from Stendhal’s passionate NO to Kant’s el blando Germanic aesthetic: “That is beautiful which pleases without interesting.” Oh, please, please, please…

The rag you’re reading has always hoped to cultivate instincts for happiness. (When I recall my crew’s gone good times in the 80s and 90s, it seems sadly apparent to me that First has served as a sort of substitute for all yesterday’s parties.) First’s fun had never been tuned to disengagement. In our time your editor has invoked C.L.R. James’ “struggle for happiness” and Arendt’s “public happiness.” You can trace the stages of First’s happiness in the About section of this website where there’s an archive of mission statements. What you’re reading here may end up there since I’ve found myself looking backward in this summer of our 25th year in the game.

It’s Playboi Carti’s “Sky” that’s put me in retrospective mode. Carti repurposes a melodic line from a hip hop track by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony that gave First of the Month its name.

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Laughter in the Dark

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My first brush with the audience for Film Forum’s Ozu retrospective was a trip. I got off on the wrong block and ran into another Ozu-er who was lost too. As we found our way around the block to the theatre, he told me he saw Tokyo Story when he was teenager, which led him (eventually) to spend decades in Japan where he got married. His Japanese wife met us at the theater.

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