Four days a week, I wake at 4:50 a.m. and start my exercise routine. Thursday is the only day that I don’t exercise. I still wake at 4:50 a.m., but I mow the yard and wash both cars. I’ve been doing that since I was in my twenties, when I was renting a house before I purchased my own home. The Thursday routine was instilled in me by my pops who always cut his yard on Thursday, mostly because his work as a juvenile youth counselor and a member of the Mississippi Democrat Executive Committee meant that his weekends were too busy for yard work. However, the notion that mowing one’s yard and maintaining one’s home is a primary responsibility of a citizen was instilled in me from the womb by my pops, grandpops, and just about every person in my Clarksdale and Jackson communities.
Heat and Light (Hearing Playboi Carti in “First of the Month’s” 25th Summer)
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.
Benificence
A couple of comments on Florida’s new history standards. I use the word “standards” loosely, of course.
But first a tweet that I give my highest compliment. I wish I had written it.
Larry Sabato: “So far Ron DeSantis has run a failing campaign. But here’s the good news: DeSantis has developed skills which, in some instances, can be applied for his personal benefit.”
Loss is More (Ali Siddiq’s Latest)
Ali Siddiq does some of the best acting I’ve ever seen in his new standup show. The whole thing is full of felt WTF’s that have made him America’s reigning ghetto existentialist. Like post-accident Richard Pryor, Siddiq consigns comedy to the ashes when he relives the loss of his half-sister, Ashley Rae Mitchell, who died when she was eight years old. Per Siddiq, her exit had a killer upshot: “I’m so dead inside I’m a fucking monster in the streets.” Siddiq isn’t being slick. He’s not out to excuse his own crimes even as he makes art out of collateral damage.
You can cut to the “chapter” where Siddiq recalls the death of his baby sister below (beneath the video of his whole show).
Watching “Extraordinary Attorney Woo”
At the risk of confirming the vicious aperçu of the Viennese senator in Karl-Lueger times who defined “Kultur” as “one Jew copying from another,” I will copy the words of Daniel Mendelsohn in his obituary paean to the editor Robert Gottlieb. Referring to the South Korean TV series Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Gottlieb found it, citing Mendelsohn, full of “honest intentions and stylistic conviction.”[i] I find them there too, and can do so because, again citing Mendelsohn, “he (Gottlieb) was trying furiously to persuade me to watch [it] when he fell ill,” and I’ve borrowed his persuasion.
Forget Barbenheimer — Go Back to School (and Life) with Tariq Saleh’s “Boy from Heaven”
“Oh! Al-Azhar! Inshallah” exclaims our taxi driver. This cabbie has realized he has no ordinary passenger, but a student of Egypt’s and Sunni Islam’s premier university. “Sheikh Adam” enunciates the driver, bestowing an honorific upon the rider and bringing home Al-Azhar University’s prestige to viewers of Tarik Saleh’s film Boy from Heaven. Our boy hero, Adam, has a common first day experience—crammed move-in, first brush with the library (where he floats through aisles, grazing precious covers softly), first bunk bed night. We catch an inkling of a smile as Adam lays himself down, tired body soon to rest. Beneath the minarets and shady arches, though, Al-Azhar is in flux. The institution’s presiding Grand Imam, a quasi-Pope figure in the Sunni world, dies—setting off a succession crisis between extremist Islamists and a more moderate, pro-secular government contingent.
Outdated Ghazal
To be reborn, break the caul of the past.
Take off the moth-eaten shawl of the past.
This moment’s open doors and empty rooms.
Portraits, mirrors line the hall of the past.
Cow blood on the sheet can save a bride’s life.
Danger of scripture, alcohol, the past.
Without Love
(a short excerpt from something very long)
..Without love (the mirror of love), I feel that I’m already dead, already extinct. I am part of the geological layer of plastic microparticles that will be the only evidence our species ever existed, if complex life were to evolve again from the bacteria that remain a thousand years from now. I am part of no story (biotic or abiotic). I cannot shake the counterfactual despair, the flailing wish that I had transitioned, had written these books, five years earlier, when the world could have received me, received my art. But no, this woman, this writing, could only have emerged right now, at this specific point in history, or where history cracks up, smashes against its bio-spiritual limit.
In My End is My Beginning: Seeing Double at “Philip Guston Now”
Philip Guston, the influential North American painter who died in 1980, has been on my mind lately. This essay is about why. It is also a belated thank you note to him. I say this because, half a lifetime ago, my awareness of this hero/bad boy of Twentieth Century art saved my hide. Or, more realistically, to take my grandiose appreciation of his efforts down a few notches, a job talk I gave at Purdue about Guston in 1994 clinched my unlikely shot at a permanent academic career in the humanities. (I am ashamed to admit that when I was thirty, landing safely on the tenure track felt like a life-or-death matter.) Can I recover what Guston’s art meant to me back then on a gut level? I can certainly remember the outlines of my precarious situation back then, and why Guston’s late trauma-filled work would have appealed to me on a deep personal level.
“Every Brain Needs Music” (Ren & Professors)
The camera shows an apartment with cracked and peeling walls, empty except for two old lamps that flicker, only deepening the gloom.
A masked figure pushes a wheelchair into the center of the room, then leaves. In it sits a young man dressed in a hospital gown, hunched over an acoustic guitar. A title card flashes: “Hi Ren.” Looking up, the guitarist begins to pluck out a flamenco-style tune, which, after a few bars, lingers on a bended note before sputtering into a series of dissonant arpeggios that climb the neck. The melodic line pivots again—now to a simple round of harmonious chords, the stuff of countless folk songs. And then the performer begins to sing …
The next eight minutes defy genre labels, although the song contains elements of hip-hop and punk, plus a little yodeling. It is a piece of one-man musical theater featuring two characters, both called Ren. (The artist is a young Welsh singer-songwriter named Ren Gill.) One of them is a musician, just barely back on his feet after years of a debilitating illness. The other is a personification of his anxiety and self-contempt, with a raspy voice full of needles and poison, who gets the best lines. The characters have contrasting demeanors and even play the same tune differently. Clearly they have been fighting for a long time. The healthy Ren wants to escape his doppelgänger, or even destroy it, but he remains at a profound disadvantage: you cannot escape your own shadow.
Ren & Band
“Hi Ren,” per Scott McLemee above, might be the best intro to the range of talents that’s made virtuoso Ren a trauma-stomper for his own gen and plenty of elders. (McLemee also twigs to Ren’s rap.) Right now, though, I prefer hearing our Rennaisance boy-prodigy play with Big Push, the band he’s busked with in recent years. Their live performances are shot through with plain joy in musicking. When they do “Paint it Black” or “Johnny B. Goode” or “Guns at Brixton,” I flash back to mid-60s battles of bands. Ren and Big Push haven’t covered “Gloria“ yet but I’m sure it’s in their future…
A couple videos of Ren and friends pushing the feeling:
Tony Ayala Jr: Chaos on Speed Dial
Don’t be put off by the opening of this post on a book about a bad man. The story on offer here isn’t pretty or uplifting but reviewer Bob Ingram has written a truth-attack that stands as its own justification…
Song of Ascension
Dear friends and family,
We found the five of them under a Mango tree last night, to which we had been led by bandits after a release deal was cut by their families.
We were the “guarantors” that the ransom given by their families would achieve their freedom. (This is, in fact, almost never the case, until multiple ransoms are paid.)
It was a dark 10pm, made up of many kinds of darkness.
The Student
At first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.
Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical academy, returning home from shooting, kept walking on the path by the water-logged meadows. His fingers were numb and his face was burning with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy. The only light was one gleaming in the widows’ gardens near the river; the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student remembered that, as he had left the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the floor in the entryway, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression — all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better. And he did not want to go home.
Creative Marginalia
From Simon Ley’s “Marginalia,” an essay included in his posthumous collection, The hall of uselessness (2013)...
Chekhov wrote some 250 stories — among all of them he singled out “The Student” as his favorite.
My Brother as Hunger Artist
Perhaps mad laughter, absurd laughter breaks the indulgence in suffering.
“These cookies?” There were a dozen Oreos and an equal amount of Lorna Doones scattered on the hospital tray. “Are you going to eat these?” Atop the cookies was a meal ticket stamped with a single word: bereavement. The floor nurse hovered, shifting her weight leg to leg, waiting on my response. “Do you mind if I take a few?”
It was against my better judgement to give up what little, in my brother’s dying hours, that this hospital had chosen to give back to us. The numbers mattered here. Over the previous two days, although Don was clearly dying—evident to the staff, his family, and most importantly himself—the hospital refused more than two visitors in the private room at a time. Two would come down and two more could go up. But these next two first had to stand in the guard’s line to secure a pass before heading up. Fine, but that whole process took more than twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, while my brother lay bureaucratically alone.
Forty days. Jesus fasted for forty days in the wilderness.
Nation Time
In his novel To Asmara, Thomas Keneally — the author best known for Schindler’s List — offered a compelling portrait of Eritrean caregivers amid an agonizing armed struggle for independence. I flashed on his fiction as I watched the short film (below) made by Times reporters embedded in a Ukrainian medical unit close to the front lines. The film is less romantic than To Asmara. Unlike the Eritrean heroes of Keneally’s novel, the Ukrainian doctors are not paragons. When they must care for a Russian prisoner of war, they do the job but…well, you’ll see. For now, let’s just stipulate the Ukrainians are not saints like Keneally’s fighters and healers. (Or, saying it another way that might speak to longtime First readers, there’s nobody like Fr. Frechette in this unit.)
Yet more evidence that this Supreme Court is the most corrupt in history
In his egregiously wrong Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action in college admissions, Chief Justice Roberts appended a sneaky little footnote exempting the nation’s service academies — West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy. Roberts doubtlessly thought he was being crafty when he noted that there are “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present” that necessitates exempting them from the decision. Earlier in his opinion, Roberts wrote that because the 14th Amendment affords citizens “equal protection under the laws,” it forbids discriminating between them on the basis of race. “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Roberts wrote.