Denise

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a writer is [someone] for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others.
Thomas Mann

…..Inside the café, from left to right, 8:20 AM.  Caucasian male, red hair, red beard, green sweater, in his 20s, working on a lap top. Asian woman, about 50, wide black-framed glasses, red quilted jacket, underlining in red a book about “Power.” Young Asian man, charcoal grey sweater, ear buds, working on his lap top. Indian/Pakistani male, 30-ish, horn-rimmed glasses, heavy white sweater, laptop. Caucasian man, 50-ish, grey hoodie over black racing cap, on his laptop too.

…..All silent.

…..All alone.

…..Working toward what they could not know.

…..

I am often interested in why people write and what it is they choose to write about.

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Cara Mia

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Irene Cara was the first Latina I saw in movies and television that not only looked like my family & friends but was also in my age range. (A pretty peer?  Who could act, sing and dance? The crush was instantaneous.) I well remember going with my younger male cousins to a screening of Aaron Loves Angela in da city. The movie was about the tensions between Black and Latin folk in El Barrio which became exacerbated by the budding romance between Kevin Hooks and Cara. The on screen friction quickly spread to my primarily Black & Latin — what else? — audience with racial insults being hurled back and forth with increasing ferocity throughout the theatre. I quickly informed my cousins that when — not if but when — the shit went down whatever side was winning the fight, that’s the side we’re fighting for until we reached the exit doors.

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Killer Storm

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What’s above is the entry on Jerry Lee Lewis from Greil Marcus’s annotated discography to the collection of essays he edited: Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island.

 

Dealing With Dave Chappelle

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Saturday Night Live isn’t having a great season. A largely new cast lineup turned out to be a limp imitation of the golden years, and the ratings have plummeted. If SNL is to survive, it must recover its edginess, and one way of doing that is to prick liberal pieties. No comic has a better aim when it comes to this mission than the host of last week’s show, Dave Chappelle.

In the annals of black transgressive comedy, Chappelle is distinct. His best work is profoundly insightful, in keeping with the masters of this tradition, such as Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, and Jerrod Carmichael. What makes Chappelle stand out in this storied company is his sadism.

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“Folk Music” (Amplified)

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Greil Marcus’s new book on Bob Dylan opens with a Dylan quote—“I can see myself in others.”—from a loose press conference with journalists in Rome in 2001. I recall listening to audio of that same rap session on YouTube and noticing another line that’s not at odds with the one that jumped out at Marcus. Dylan responded to a convoluted question with his own humorous query: “Am I an idiot?” he asked. This wasn’t a mid-60s prickly (Neuwirthy?) tease. While Dylan was playing to the crowd and encouraging them to laugh with him, he wasn’t coming hard at his questioner (who seemed to take his soft goof well). What struck me was that Dylan, even though he was only acting as if he was clueless, seemed entirely alive to how it might feel to be hopelessly at sea mentally. After all, he’s known what it was to be an unworldly Midwesterner at a Village party with an older generation of haute-bohos. (“I was hungry and it was your world.”) And that, in turn, puts him a thousand thought-miles away from heads who act like they’ve been tenured since they were ten.

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“New York: 1962-1964”

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“New York: 1962-1964 explores a pivotal three-year period in the history of art and culture in New York City, examining how artists living and working in New York responded to their rapidly changing world, through more than 180 works of art—all made or seen in New York between 1962-1964.”

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But Ugly (& Durham at the Bar)

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And so Paul Pelosi is attacked by a hammer-wielding right-winger looking for Nancy.

The governor of Virginia “jokes” about it. “Speaker Pelosi’s husband, they had a break-in last night in their house and he was assaulted. There’s no room for violence anywhere, but… ”

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Twin Flames

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Em says they see everything in advance, by a year, or two. I lost them in 2020, but I knew in 2019. I woke up in the middle of the night and texted my mom, take dad to the hospital, he’s having a heart attack, and I saved his life. After the IPCC report in 2018, when everyone kept going on with their lives as normal, that’s when I began to experience prophecy, etc. I believe my delusions operate on this level, too, outside of linear time. At worst, delusion is only what is not-yet, but will one day come true, since everything that comes from the heart will one day come true, at the end of time, the end that approaches every day.

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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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Decision

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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

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

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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

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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

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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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