Culturewatch

Christy Martin: A Survivor’s Story

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On November 17, 2001, WBC world junior welterweight champion Christy Martin outboxed Lisa Holewyne over ten rounds at Mandalay Bay casino in Las Vegas, which was unusual because Martin was a self-admitted slugger, not a boxer. At the weigh-in, when Holewyne had wished her good luck, Martin answered, “Good luck getting knocked the fuck out.”

On November 25, 2017, the two women were married by a justice of the peace in Austin, Texas, where they currently live.

The marriage is one of the happier events chronicled in Fighting for Survival, by Christy Martin and Ron Borges. The book is subtitled “My journey through boxing fame, abuse, murder, and resurrection.”

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The Girl Who Fell to Earth

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One day, I’ll come out of my shell, I’m sure,” says Aldous Harding. She does not seem to be speaking to anyone in particular; her words seem directed mostly at herself. A few minutes later, she repeats those exact words as if she hasn’t said them before. Aldous Harding—real name Hannah Harding; her stage name is presumably taken from the author of Brave New World and even now produces a brief mental ripple of confusion every time I say it out loud—is from New Zealand, and this is the second time I have seen her. My dear friend Andi is with me; this is the third time she’s seen her. Harding is just that sort of singer, the kind you wish you could see every year.

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The War on Drugs: The Early Years

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(Based upon actual events,)

In the spring of 1964, even a BrandX University senior as hip as me, who had been one of six students not to walk out on Cecil Taylor’s first set in Grubb Hall, did not know anyone who smoked marijuana. So it was a shock when several undergraduates, – primarily Fine and Theater Arts majors, to be sure – were swept up in raids which extended to Cambridge.

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A War Is Coming

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I

. A scream on the border of consciousness. I feel the desire to vomit. You only talk about yourself, they say. I want to say something tender, but something else comes out (desire, vomit). They hang up on me. That’s the first time they’ve done something like that. The time between us grows unbearable. I wonder how you can go, in a month, from ineffable love to even more ineffable estrangement. You feel an instant and incandescent recognition, and then: a slow heatdeath of the heart. I go to the bathroom, look at myself in the mirror, hit myself in the face until the room starts to spin, dry heave into the toilet, reapply my eyeliner.

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Venturing Forth

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Fantasy #1

Maskless. Finally. Now I look like everyone else on the street, because only old people wear masks around here. Lunch with friends I haven’t seen since the day the earth stood still. They’ve aged—but not me. The cautions and coverings haven’t changed my face at all. Like Broadway, I’m back.

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Having a Ball on Tiemann Place (the Tom DeMott Way)

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Pallie Greene – the kid from our hood who dunked at our block party (above) – began playing ball late just like my late brother Tom, who didn’t get into the game until Jr. High school. Might be a life-changer for Pallie though. It sure made a difference to Tom. When I think about how he came to make his life on Tiemann Place (as he worked at the 125th St. Post Office), aesthetics and politics of b-ball – along with people’s soul musics – are keys to his story.  Tom was out there with Pallie – a spirit, not a ghost! – as our hood re-upped on the tradition he invented (with the West Harlem Coalition). The 34th Annual Anti-Gentrification Street Fair jumped off on a proud Saturday in September.

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Arlo in Memphis (& Brooklyn)

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Arlo McKinley (AKA Timothy Dairl Carr) made his great new CD, This Mess We’re In, in Memphis and you sense the lights up the river even as he gives it to you straight about the state of the white working class in Ohiopioid. The sound of This Mess is Memphis’s. Perfect weaves of country/soul/gospel with an inner power. Organ-and-fiddle melting into one another with the beat behind it as Arlo rolls on, strong as death, sweet as love.

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The Andy Warhol Diaries

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In March 2022, Netflix aired a six-part series, The Andy Warhol Diaries, based upon Pat Hackett’s 1989 book of the same title. Each episode was a hodge-podge of archival footage and photographs, current comments from people who were close to Warhol or who knew someone who was, recreated scenes, repeated current shots of places mentioned (such as Warhol’s house), and, throughout, an AI-generated version of Warhol’s voice, saying lines that almost never went beyond banal and trivial. Many also seemed familiar. I remembered that I’d read Hackett’s book when it came out and then had reviewed it for the Buffalo News (July 2, 1989). It was one of those pieces I did and promptly forgot, in part because the News arts editor mangled it, especially the ending, which he cut off after the first sentence of the final paragraph, so the piece just stopped rather than ended. I found the manuscript, which restores what I actually wrote.

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Sugar Ray: the Art, the Man

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Think of Pablo Picasso. Think of Miles Davis. Think of Sugar Ray Robinson.

All three were artists in their chosen realms, who expanded those realms into previously unknown dimensions. All three were difficult and ambiguous and contradictory. All three answered only to themselves in the mysterious ways of genius. Tough nuts to crack.

Herb Boyd, with Ray Robinson II, has a go at cracking the diamond of a nut that is Sugar Ray Robinson in Pound For Pound, a Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson. 

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For Uncle Claude: Clarksdale to the World

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My mother’s maiden name was Claudette Winfield. Her twin brother was named Claude Winfield. She left home for college to attend Jackson State University and met a young man named Claude McInnis who was named after his uncle Claude Brown. That’s a whole lotta damn Claudes, which is why my Pops never intended for me to be a junior. My mother’s twin was her best friend until the day she died. As siblings, they argued and disagreed often. As siblings, no one else could say anything bad about the other one. So, when I learned Wednesday that my mother’s twin, my Uncle Claude, had passed, I realized that is the end of the Claudes. But, more importantly, that is the end of one of the most important people in my life.

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Before the War [& After Friday’s Murderous Assault on Rushdie]

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In the spring of 2006, when Ellen Willis was battling the cancer that would take her life later that year, she emailed approval of  First’s pieces on the Danish Cartoon terror attacks. Struck by how much those pieces “echoed themes” in what she’d written at the start of the Rushdie affair, she wondered if we “might be interested in reprinting the editorial I wrote in the Voice as a historical affirmation of the bad road we are going down…” As Rushdie begins a tortuous comeback from the maiming that had him on a ventilator and seems likely to leave him blind in one eye, the piece of the past Ellen thought belonged in First remains horrifically prophetic.

Below “Before the War” is a passage from another First protest against Fatwas that’s still on time.

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Flo Jo

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Message to a nephew on the road to Florence…

O quick and true, the best pieces of art in the world — Michelangelo’s PRISONERS, statues fighting their way out of the stone that creates them and same time jails them, they are as renaissance and post modern and perfect as art can be.  Just stand and weep.

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Tactile Values

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LAST DAY TO SEE LARRY MADRIGAL’S EXHIBIT IN NYC!!!

Nicodim Gallery is tucked behind a temporary girder due to road work on Greene Street. It’s a little odd to open the door and walk right in on intimate scenes from Larry Madrigal’s marriage. Per the exhibition’s press release:

Over the course of creating Work / Life, the artist and his wife conceived their second child. He watched his wife’s body change while his pretty-much stayed the same. She is a mother, he is still Larry…

He’s out to make himself useful. Madrigal confessed somewhere — maybe on his instagram — that he wasn’t sure his massage below was doing any good, until his wife put her book down…

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Paris in the Present Tense

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I’m out to write something fresh about Paris after going there with my wife for four days in July to visit my son who’s doing a summer semester in the city. (If you hear a whoosh, it could be the sound of a fool rushing in.)

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