Various Authors

David Hockney’s Happy Phenomenology

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Hockney’s pictures have been derided as “merely decorative” and the late Peter Fuller takes up that criticism with the artist in the short clip posted below. Hockney’s musings link pleasure in his art to affirmations of his (gay) self: “We should like ourselves.” There’s another BBC program where the artist is sound-tracked by snatches from Stravinksy’s opera, “The Rake’s Progress,” which flashed your editor back to an 80s Hockney show that seemed largely about cruising. (Not that Hockney’s phenomenology of his intentional body in space is always so libidinal.) While gay liberation is on his canvasses, the splashy promesse de bonheure in Hockney’s art belongs to everybody everybody. It’s a 60s thing, though it evokes other avatars of happiness that deserve dap–Greeks who first depicted the human smile, young French revolutionaries who declared: “happiness is the new idea in Europe,” ex-West Africans who flipped the mask of tragedy even as their favorite color reminded them of their lost continent. It’s all about blue for Hockney too!

If you’re around New York, go see his show at the Met before it closes on February 25th.  B.D.

Canciones Para Puerto Rico

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Chatter about “Almost Like Praying”–the song Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote and recorded to benefit hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico–reminded your editor of this performance by the brothers Palmieri and salsero Ismael Quintana…

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Putin vs. King Remembered in Time

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDIlQ3_lsKE

The music video above, in which an African emigre duo who call themselves A.M.G. extol Putin, seems to soundtrack Nathan Osborne’s musings on the link between contemporary rap and Trumpery.  But there are (always) countervailing trends in the hip hop nation as you’ll see if you try videos in the body of this text by Big K.R.I.T.—a rapper from the Dirty South. He makes conscious music for our mess age: “I don’t rap, I spit hymns.” K.R.I.T. stands for King Remembered In Time.  (A.M.G.’s initials, OTOH, are associated with the Mercedes logo.)

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“Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself”

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The crew at Antidote magazine have translated this scary piece by European reporters Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus on Trump’s Big Data consultants, Cambridge Analytica.  First is re-blogging it below (though, per Antidote, we’ll take their version down if the piece, which was originally published in a mainline Swiss magazine, gets an authorized translation/launch in America). Please don’t take this repost as an endorsement of the authors’ implicit claims about the effectiveness of Big Data-mining and “psychometrics.” But we should all be alive to what’s being cooked up by numbers scum in Trump’s orbit.

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James Brown (Stay on the Scene)

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Get On Up, the James Brown bio-pic, has moved your editor to re-up on First‘s 2007 tribute to JB, which includes contributions from Amiri Baraka, Chuck D., Anne Danielsen, John Leland, W.T. Lhamon Jr. Michael Lydon, Charles O’Brien, Robert Farris Thompson, Richard Torres, Casey Wasserman, & Mel Watkins.

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Q&A: Scialabba & Smoler in the Court of Public Opinion

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What follows is an exchange between George Scialabba, essayist and editor of The Baffler, and longtime First of the Month contributor, Fredric Smoler. The subject of their debate (which was sparked by Smoler’s article “Democracy Now.”) is the controversy surrounding Michael Kinsley’s Times review of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

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Black Mountains Beyond Mountains

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First thanks Claudia Moreno Pisano for enabling us to reprint the following slightly compacted excerpt from Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters, which is edited and annotated by Ms. Pisano. This swatch of the correspondence between Baraka—soon-to-be-magus of Black Arts—and Dorn—Black Mountain poet—gets to the heart of their relationship in the 60s. Their calls and responses here were sparked by a disagreement over Castro’s Cuba that’s picked up new resonance since it’s easy to hear echoes of the Cold War in our time. What may be most striking now, though, is not the poets’ efforts to go international but their shared clarity about the depth (and width) of white supremacy in America.[1]

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Love Is the Message: Tributes to Lawrence Goodwyn

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This twenty gun salute to Lawrence Goodwyn—late, great historian of social movements and exemplary democrat—amps up echoes from the memorial celebration that took place at Duke University in Durham. There are texts here of talks given by those who honored him then along with reflections by many other comrades. The contributors are Donnel Baird, Terry Bouton, Elaine Brightwater, Dororthy Burlage, Chris Chafe, William Chafe, Benj DeMott, Thomas Ferguson, Todd Gitin, Wade Goodwyn, Casey Hayden, Jim Hightower, Wesley Hogan, Woody Holton, Max Krochmal, Ralph Nader, Syd Nathans, Paul Ortiz, Tim Tyson & Peter Wood. (F.Y.I.: Larry’s old friends Ronnie Dugger and William Greider have eulogized him in Texas Observer and The Nation.)

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Choosy Beggars: 2012

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Comments on the debates and/or the election by Bernard Avishai, Robert Chametzky, Benj DeMott, Carmelita Estrellita, Ty Geltmaker, Eugene Goodheart, Allison Hantschel, Casey Hayden, Christopher Hayes, Bob Levin, Barack Obama, Jedediah Purdy, Theodore Putala, James Rosen, Nick Salvatore, Aram Saroyan, Frederick Smoler, Scott Spencer & Patricia Williams.

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First Thoughts on OWS

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First writers and readers – Amiri Baraka, Jeremy Brecher, Benj DeMott, Diane di Prima, Mark Dudzic, John Fullerton, Dr. Donna Gaines, Ty Geltmaker, Lawrence Goodwyn, Adam Hochschild, Staughton Lynd, Greil Marcus, Deborah Meier, Dennis Myers, (AKA) Nolemonomelon, Jedediah Purdy, Aram Saroyan, Fredric Smoler, Tom Smucker, Scott Spencer & Richard Torres – comment on OWS.

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A Free Woman: A Tribute to Ellen Willis

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When the radical feminist and new journalist Ellen Willis died last fall, a black rock critic mourned her as “the Mother of us all.” Another well-known black writer – and notorious macho man – referred to Ellen as “God” when she was editing his pieces at the Village Voice. Ellen may have come to be identified with a distinctive bohemian nexus in the Village, but her work worked on people outside the Downtown milieu. Someone once compared Ellen’s 60’s talks pushing second wave feminism to the Howling Wolf tour of the UK that inspired a generation of British rockers.

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