Christy Martin: A Survivor’s Story

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

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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Decision

On John Lennon’s birthday,
a flood of tributes and grief. I keep
my it-could-have-been-worse relief
to myself. True, any homicide’s a tragedy, the loss
of a great talent even more so,
but it was Bowie who gave my odd
teenage self permission to exist,
hot starman I both lusted for
and yearned to be.
The killer got his list down to those two.

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The War on Drugs: The Early Years

(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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Common Sense: Meredith Tax’s “A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State”

Meredith Tax died of breast cancer last month. Obituaries in the Times and Nation and Washington Post aimed to do justice to her spiky life as a class-conscious feminist organizer and author, but they may have slighted one of her larger achievements. Tax wrote the book on Rojava and the Kurds’ war against ISIS. Her A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State (2016) has picked up new resonance in this season of protest in Iran. I hope Tax was able to take in the current uprising before she died. It should’ve been an experience of confirmation for her.  Imperatives of Iran’s protestors — “Woman, Land, Freedom!” — echo those of Kurds in Rojava. (The martyred Mahsa Amini was a Kurdish Iranian.)  What follows is a review of Tax’s urgent report from Rojava that was first posted here in September, 2017.

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“Stay with it”: Letter from a Disaster

Dear friends,

I write this letter fully aware of the continued devastation of the war in Ukraine, with so many serious consequences and even worries of nuclear war.

I am also very shocked and saddened by the tremendous destruction and loss of life by Hurricane Ian in Florida.

I am following with deep sympathy the destruction by the powerful storms devastating most of the countries in Central America, and the ongoing plight of so many refugees in that area and worldwide.

If you are reading this, it’s because the people of Haiti are also important to you, as they are to me. I have never in my life seen such a confluence of destructive forces as are afflicting the people here. There really are no words to describe what is happening.

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A War Is Coming

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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“I said her name!”: Roya Hakakian’s Statement on Mahsa Amini & #IranRevolution2022

“Here’s my testimony [in English] before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a few days ago.

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The Birth of Our Power

We’re honored to repost this (slightly adapted) excerpt from Kate Millett’s Going to Iran (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York 1982) — her inspiring, heartrending and newly relevant account of her time in Tehran witnessing women’s struggles against Islamist misogyny after the fall of the Shah.

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Venturing Forth

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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Aftermath

A few years back Lucian Truscott tried on a writer’s experiment, posting chapters (as he composed them) from his non-fiction novel/memoir, Dying of a Broken Heart, at a word press website (here). Your editor was doing due delving since I’d always enjoyed Truscott’s stuff when I bumped into the following piece of felt history in Heart‘s second chapter. I should probably wait for some Iraq War anniversary but reposting Truscott’s memory of “Mission Accomplished” boosterism feels urgent. I’ll allow his report seems like it belongs in First as a warning to be permanently wary of consensual wisdom. Not that I’ll cop to having been a lap-top general around the time of W.’s wargasm. Still, to the extent First countenanced power of powers-that-be back then – even as this mag busted anti-anti-Islamism – me and all y’all need to suck on Truscott’s truths (all over again). He won’t stop saying it plain, btw. After you read him below, try his substack newsletter here. B.D.

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

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)

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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“You’ve Got to Have Freedom” (Pharoah Sanders, Rest in Power)

Per Eric Lott: “A favorite instance of what Baraka describes in ‘The Screamers’ (1967), a ‘social tract of love,’ ‘the honked note that would be his personal evaluation of the world,’ watching us while he fixed his sky, no head and all head, no predicate, ‘the repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed riff, pushed in its insistence past music . . . hatred and frustration, secrecy and despair,’ spurting ‘out of the diphthong culture, and reinforced the black cults of emotion’ — ‘no compromise, no dreary sophistication, only the elegance of something that is too ugly to be described, and is diluted only at the agent’s peril.'”

May Pharoah wail again soon with John Hicks and Idris M. on the night shift!! B.D.

Monsters, Bees, Desires

The boy fears monsters, things that creep at night.
Beds half-empty, the widows weep at night.

I walk with my mother through a moonlit
town only accessible in sleep. Night

holds its prisoners tight. So does guilt. Too
much vodka – our clothes in a heap that night.

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