artists & the arts

Struggling writers shouldn’t have to buy gifts during the holiday season - only get them. We don’t have the money and it’s too depressing. Our heightened sensitivities and imaginations only add to the pain. There’s no escape because all the bad things are happening in your head.

One relative called another this morning - early - to talk about the gift she’s getting me, and I had to hear it because the other relative lives with me. I was trying to go back to sleep. But there’s no hope. You can’t sleep through the whole month of December. Other people who have responsible things going on in their lives are waiting to give you gifts that cost money, whether you want them or not. Then they sit back to wait and see what you’re getting them. And if you’ve led a blameless life, like I have, you have dozens or hundreds of people who are getting you stuff and you’re supposed to get them presents too, including children. Even at five dollars each it adds up to about a quarter of my entire savings, and $5 won’t cut it either. These people want “real” gifts - like they got you. All I want is to curl up in a ball, listen to music and wait for the danger to pass. The prospect of going into a store and buying junk that nobody even wants - the Salvation Army gets most of the things I buy - is like serious evaluators charging into my life with the bad news. They’re coming in through the window, the telephone, the tv, the internet. Buy buy buy, with a smile on your face. Shop shop shop to show your love. I can’t stand it and you’re not allowed to be supine or on the other hand resist. The rest of the year is punishing enough without this climax of embarrassment.

Here’s the dog. She’ll get a handsome gift. But is she expected to donate? Of course not. How can I make that apply to me?

All of us join together in an Obama-like campaign, refusing to participate, except on the receiving end. You’ll notice that the Obama campaign asks for money. Nobody expects him to give anybody any money or gifts. He’s our leader and a great model of life and morals. We - the writers that nobody wants to read - should emulate him. We should have an internet cell-phone campaign all agreeing not to get anyone anything.

This is the true spirit of the holiday season for people like me for the foreseeable better future. Not giving. Laying low. Being excused. Quietly sitting down at the table and eating a big dinner with everyone else. Contributing charming conversation, more charming and clever than anyone else, but that’s all. And I’m not talking about being a curmudgeon either. Just get out of my face because I don’t have the money.

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last night i bent a tiny corner of the universe with my mighty will. or so it seemed/s.

i was scheduled to participate in a panel discussion organized by liveoutloud, which i’d been looking forward to, and had to get there by 7:30. my dayjob is on west 18th, i live on west 116th and the event was being held at the school of visual arts on east 23rd. yeah, enough time to go home after work, but only if i felt like spending an hour on the subway for no good reason. anyway, i’d had an unusual (and inexplicable) craving for fettucine alfredo all day long, so i found an italian restaurant on yahoo local and took myself out for a bite.

the fettucine was delicious! unfortunately, it was also contaminated. yes, another case of the SPLS’s seemed imminent, which i realized about half an hour after eating. in other words, just when i arrived at SVA.

i’ve had food poisoning before, and the odds are that you have too. it’s become more and more common as our food supply grows tainted. sloppy food storage and lax dishwashing techniques also contribute to the problem in this, our nation of slackers.

i once caught a case of food poisoning in the movies. four of us had gone out to dinner beforehand, and about 45 minutes into “wag the dog” three of us abruptly torpedoed toward the bathrooms. there’s that awful miasma at the onset of it: the world swims in a sickly haze, everything gone liquid and thick, head spinning and stomach roiling. i got so dizzy that halfway to the lounge i lost my balance and couldn’t immediately get up again. we’re talking the MOTHER of all food poisonings here. even in my misery, though, i almost laughed when one of the ushers rushed over shouting, “miss! is it your heart?” but i was afraid to actually speak. he ran off to get help when, really, all i needed was a hand to the ladies’ room. it took three awful, dry-toast-nibbling days for that attack to pass. the one member of our party who wasn’t affected was the only one who didn’t have any salad. the irony of being poisoned by SALAD in a sushi bar…

thanks to this and other memorable encounters with the underworld of food, i understood what was happening last night when that swimming spinning roiling thing started its little dance. not good! not fucking good at all, twenty minutes before i’m scheduled to do this preso.

it’s interesting how humiliating our common bodily functions are. i knew what was happening (or about to happen) yet i stupidly couldn’t bring myself to either ask for help or run screaming out of the venue and into a cab.

that’s when i commanded the universe to Make It Stop, and the universe obeyed.

please, i said to It, give me just an hour. let me get through this gig and into a cab and then bring it on, OK? one freaking hour. i drank a cup of ginger ale, tried to respond appropriately to preshow chitchat and introductions. there was an awful movie playing in my head (and it wasn’t wag the dog), one in which i fled the stage midsentence in a headlong rush to the ladies’ without quite making it. charming.

all of a sudden it’s time to start and i shakily take my seat on the panel. just as suddenly, i’m OK. really OK — the loudmouth wisecracking poet that had been requisitioned for this show arrived in full force and effect, and the whole event comes off really well. the students love us. when finally everything winds down almost two hours had gone by. i shared a cab uptown with aartie, the liveoutloud organizer, who was going my way.

i’m not in the apartment fifteen minutes when nature resumes the taking of its course. while dutifully erasing the day’s mascara with Clarins Gentle Eye Makeup Remover, my vision doubles. my left earlobe turns red and blows up twice its usual size. what the fuck, i’ve been wearing this butchy titanium stud for the last year, how is it bothering me now? then that whole side of my neck goes scarlet. now what is THIS?

well, who knows. best i can figure out is some kind of allergy combined with the food poisoning, which then proceeded to do its thing. you always think you’re going to die, in the middle of all that (and some people do) but usually you come out of it chastened and empty as a balloon (h/t to sylvia plath for that phrase) and more or less OK.

but here’s the thing: food poisoning (or ptomaine, as my mother used to call it) typically starts thirty minutes after consuming the contaminated meal, and has its way with you for the next couple of hours or days. there is no delayed reaction opportunity, no putting it off.

so, like i said, last night i bent a tiny corner of the universe using only my mighty will. i made a deal, and the universe kept its side of the bargain.

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regular readers of this blog know that i spent the past weekend in a writing workshop with ellen bass, who is my mentor, my teacher, and my friend. during the course of it, i wrote a poem for john mccain, of all the unexpected things. and then ellen, at a bowery poetry club reading on sunday night, read a brand-new piece of hers called “cocktails for obama“.

here is that performance:

this is the piece that i wrote for mccain:

Straight-Talk Express

the centrifuge of your tiny mind has swiveled on its pivot and you rage
against the death of a decades-long dream. You’ve watched our desire
dwindle then shift: away from you, away, like a day-lily
folding itself closed against the coming dark. You have become dark,
a slug on the underside of rock, greeting daylight with a shiver
as you try and try to slither from its reach. No good.
Nothing’s any good now—the sickly neon word “defeat”
signals nightly from your dreams: it’s over now.
Gentlemen, please turn off your engines.

You never wake refreshed, not any more.
Slitting a grapefruit for breakfast, a tremulous hand
betrays you: blood on the linen napkin, blood on the thin
and brittle wife. She regrets marrying you and you,
wrinkling in a Gucci robe, regret everything.
There will be no bailout for you, John.
You are locked out of that white house now forever,
strangled at the end of your Alaskan bitch’s leash.
“My friends,” you tell us, “I am just like you. I will keep you safer.”
But already the auditorium is empty and the lights
have been turned down. Here I am, suspended at the midpoint
between pity and rage, a place where nothing like compassion
can survive. Would I want to feel that for you if I could? Summon
some catechismic reserve to watch your cracked old face with
a semblance of love?
I would like to say yes, but then I’d be a liar: just like you.

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i am getting ready to have a GREAT day, as i’m workshopping all weekend with ellen bass, who is an incredibly inspirational writing mentor.

before i dash out of the house with my notebook and inevitable blue felt-tip pen, i wanted to  share a couple photos with you.

when i saw this cab, my thought was godDAMN he is not having a good day! to have to deal with this, on a friday, in the village? sheee-it.

but this guy, who reminds me SO much of the cover of jethro tull’s “aqualung” album, looks like all he ever has is a bad day:

maybe i’ll write about these imagined lives today.

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the carrying on that is done when unknown poets die unexpectedly in NYC is perhaps unmatched by anything but the extravagant grief of vivian gornick’s widowed mother. it’s almost a competition to see who can book the first memorial reading, build the first tribute website, send the most and teariest emails.

all this on behalf of someone who, often as not, got little more than a nod of recognition when encountered over the open mike sign-up list. someone about whom (tell the truth!) one had snickered.

by all means let’s give these poets their final fifteen minutes of stagetime, add a couple of entries to their google results and throw a party where all us other unsung poets can reminisce and swap quirky stories about the deceased. but spare us all the bogus bereavement, the hand-to-heart when speaking the dear departed’s name. and let’s not pretend we’re mourning the end of western letters either, for chrissake, because a lot of the writing simply wasn’t very good.

where does it come from, this apparently irresistible desire to idealize people after they’re gone? i don’t think it’s necessarily any more prevalent among poets than other social groups; it’s just that poets have more visible bully pulpits. the same type of thing happens in the workplace, where all the office harridan has to do for immediate conversion from scumbaggery to sainthood is keel over with a stroke, or where a brain tumor makes everybody a BFF of the mailroom guy they never even talked to before he got sick.

i suppose this is a strange way to start a remembrance of robert dunn, who passed away this weekend — but he liked strange, and with his deadpan and always-irreverent sense of humor i think he would appreciate a ball-busting post like this as my way of saying farewell. robert was a kind and generous curator, who organized readings at venues ranging from raunchy west village bars to a no-cursewords barnes & noble tucked far up the asscrack of queens. for some years he also co-edited the Medicinal Purposes literary journal with his crotchety friend thomas catterson. i don’t think he put an issue out after thomas died.

but what comes to my mind most clearly is the loving care that robert took of his mother. i met her at their apartment some years ago, in the middle of a blizzard, when i stopped by to help with a computer problem. stopped by is a nice way of saying that i took 2 trains and then a bus and then struggled several blocks through hip-dip (as i recall it) snow to reach their high-rise. i was surprised by the courtly woman in the wheelchair, as i’d taken it for granted that robert lived alone. we worked over his laptop in the kitchen while she watched tv, and when i stopped in the living room to wish her goodnight she very graciously thanked me for coming to rescue her son from the pc virus demons (which i hadn’t quite managed to do). i could have been — shit, i WAS — mightily annoyed at having undertaken such a shlep on such a night to fix a LAPTOP that could just as easily have made its way to me, but robert’s gentleness with her and his sotto-voce apology lest i detect the aroma of colostomy, softened me. i don’t soften easily, as you might guess. but i softened that night, and i stayed soft toward him, as it so happens, for the remainder of his life.

robert, i would be lying if i said i’m gonna miss you, because of course i’m not — lately we ran into each other only once or twice a year, and you just don’t miss someone you hardly ever see. but i must salute the irony of you bowing out in the selfsame gym where you lost a hundred-something pounds. you were looking better lately than you’d ever looked before; dapper, even, with that ubiquitous hat cocked sideways. i can almost imagine the poem you’d write, making fun of a guy who finally gets in shape only to drop dead on the health club floor. i can almost hear us laughing and applauding as you read it.

bravo for a life well-lived, mr. dunn. no sentiment, no schmaltz, no overhyped BS. just the way you liked it.

robert's artsig from poetz.com

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i am reposting this, in its entirety, as found on joy harjo’s blog.

1. Palin has attacked Alaska Native Subsistence Fishing

Perhaps no issue is of greater importance to Alaska Native peoples as the right to hunt and fish according to ancient customary and traditional practices, and to carry on the subsistence way of life for future generations. Governor Sarah Palin has consistently opposed those rights.

Once in office, Governor Palin decided to continue litigation that seeks to overturn every subsistence fishing determination the federal government has ever made in Alaska. (State of Alaska v. Norton, 3:05-cv-0158-HRH (D. Ak).) In pressing this case, Palin decided against using the Attorney General (which usually handles State litigation) and instead continued contracting with Senator Ted Stevens’ brother-in-law’s law firm (Birch, Horton, Bittner & Cherot).

The goal of Palin’s law suit is to invalidate all the subsistence fishing regulations the federal government has issued to date to protect Native fishing, and to force the courts instead to take over the role of setting subsistence regulations. Palin’s law suit seeks to diminish subsistence fishing rights in order to expand sport and commercial fishing.

In May 2007, the federal court rejected the State’s main challenge, holding that Congress in 1980 had expressly granted the U.S. Interior and Agriculture Departments the authority to regulate and protect Native and rural subsistence fishing activities in Alaska. (Decision entered May 15, 2007 (Dkt. No. 110).) Notwithstanding this ruling, Palin continues to argue in the litigation that the federal subsistence protections are too broad, and should be narrowed to exclude vast areas from subsistence fishing, in favor of sport and commercial fishing. Palin opposes subsistence protections in marine waters, on many of the lands that Natives selected under their 1971 land claims settlement with the state and federal governments, and in many of the rivers where Alaska Natives customarily fish. (Alaska Complaint at 15-18.) Palin also opposes subsistence fishing
protections on Alaska Native federal allotments that were deeded to individuals purposely to foster Native subsistence activities. All these issues are now pending before the federal district court.

2. Palin has attacked Alaska Native Subsistence Hunting

Palin has also sought to invalidate critical determinations the Federal Subsistence Board has made regarding customary and traditional uses of game, specifically to take hunting opportunities away from Native subsistence villagers and thereby enhance sport hunting. Palin’s attack here on subsistence has focused on the Ahtna Indian people in Chistochina.

Although the federal district court has rejected Palin’s challenge, she has carried on an appeal that was argued in August 2008. (State of Alaska v. Fleagle, No. 07-35723 (9th Cir.).) In both hunting and fishing matters, Palin has continued uninterrupted the policies initiated by the former Governor Frank Murkowski Administration, challenging hunting and fishing protections that Native people depend upon for their subsistence way of life in order to enhance sport fishing and hunting opportunities. Palin’s lawsuits are a direct attack on the core way of life of Native Tribes in rural Alaska.

3. Palin has attacked Alaska Tribal Sovereignty

Governor Palin opposes Alaska tribal sovereignty. Given past court rulings affirming the federally recognized tribal status of Alaska Native villages, Palin does not technically challenge that status. But Palin argues that Alaska Tribes have no authority to act as sovereigns, despite their recognition. So extreme is Palin on tribal sovereignty issues that she has sought to block tribes from exercising any authority whatsoever even over the welfare of Native children, adhering to a 2004 legal opinion issued by the former Murkowski Administration that no such jurisdiction exists (except when a state court transfers a matter to a tribal court).

Both the state courts and the federal courts have struck down Palin’s policy of refusing to recognize the sovereign authority of Alaska Tribes to address issues involving Alaska Native children. Native Village of Tanana v. State of Alaska, 3AN-04-12194 CI (judgment entered Aug. 26, 2008) (Ak. Super. Ct.); Kaltag Tribal Council v. DHHS, No. 3:06-cv-00211-TMB (D. Ak.), pending on appeal No 08-35343 (9th Cir.)). Nonetheless, Palin’s policy of refusing to recognize Alaska tribal sovereignty remains unchanged.

4. Palin has attacked Alaska Native Languages

Palin has refused to accord proper respect to Alaska Native languages and voters by refusing to provide language assistance to Yup’ik speaking Alaska Native voters. As a result, Palin was just ordered by a special three-judge panel of federal judges to provide various forms of voter assistance to Yup’ik voters residing in southwest Alaska. Nick v. Bethel, No. 3:07-cv-0098-TMB (D. Ak.) (Order entered July 30, 2008). Citing years of State neglect, Palin was ordered to provide trained poll workers who are bilingual in English and Yup’ik; sample ballots in written Yup’ik; a written Yup’ik glossary of election terms; consultation with local Tribes to ensure the accuracy of Yup’ik translations; a Yup’ik language coordinator; and pre-election and post-election reports to the court to track the State’s efforts.

In sum, measured against some the rights that are most fundamental to Alaska Native Tribes – the subsistence way of life, tribal sovereignty and voting rights – Palin’s record is a failure.
*********************************************
Kaltag:
https://ecf.akd.uscourts.gov/doc1/0231295649
Fleagle:
https://ecf.akd.uscourts.gov/doc1/0231254875
State v. Norton opinion:
https://ecf.akd.uscourts.gov/doc1/023086165
State v. Norton complaint:
https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/doc1/0451584225
Tanana:
[Alaska court system is not electronic]
Nick v. State
https://ecf.akd.uscourts.gov/doc1/0231352147
*********************************************
Lloyd B. Miller
Sonosky, Chambers, Sachse, Miller & Munson, LLP
900 West Fifth Avenue, Suite 700
Anchorage, Alaska 99501
Telephone: (907)258-6377
Facsimile: (907)272-8332

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yazmany arboleda, a 27-year-old artist from miami, was questioned by police on wednesday about the exhibit he was attempting to set up on west 22nd street. he had rented the vacant storefront to mount a show of his own work for a two-day run.

what do the police care about an art exhibit? nothing. in this case, they only cared about its name: the assassination of hillary clinton / the assassination of barack obama.

arboleda went voluntarily to the stationhouse for questioning, which he characterized as “an interrogation”, and was subsequently released without charges.

I’VE GOT NEWS FOR YOU, YAZ: when the NYPD interrogates you (and they do still interrogate people), you’re NOT walking out a free man. you will be charged with something (typically resisting arrest) and bundled off to central booking, where they take away your shoelaces and your belt and cuff your hands behind you until it’s time to see the judge.

WAS ALL THIS QUESTIONING NECESSARY? of course not. but it was an extremely predictable knee-jerk reaction by cops on the beat. “what? they’re having assassinations over there? holy shit, joey, better call for backup!” it’s common knowledge that NYPD street cops are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer — the sharpest knives don’t take jobs that start at $35k, they go to work in westchester, or for the FBI. it’s getting harder and harder for the new york city police department to find ANYBODY willing to do the job; there hasn’t been a full class of rookies in several years now, and a cop shortage is an eventual reality here unless something changes fairly soon. but i digress.

THE ART ITSELF HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ASSASSINATION — arboleda is quite insistent about that when talking to reporters, and it’s pretty clear that he’s never talked to reporters so much in his life. it’s also pretty clear that the opportunity to talk to reporters is the only reason the show is titled this way. he explains that the work is about character assassination. i can’t quite see how a giant painting of hillary’s face sheds much light on the character assassination that she surely has, over her career, been subject to, but then i am not very knowledgeable about modern art so perhaps there is a connection. however, if that’s truly the subject, why not title the show “the character assassination of…”? because then the cops won’t come and “interrogate” you and your name won’t be in the papers two days running, that’s why.

I AM ALL ABOUT FREE SPEECH AND FREEDOM OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION, and the genuine controversy that is often sparked thereby. but this show is neither genuine NOR controversial: it is a blatant example of an artist who manipulated public fears and police ignorance in order to get himself a bully pulpit, and i have no respect at all for such capers: politicans do this kind of crap all the time, with their bullshit photo-ops; i don’t tolerate it from them and i see no reason why i should tolerate it from this young man just because he conducted his p/r campaign under the umbrella of modern art.

that’s why i say yazmany arboleda is full of shit — and not the kind that chris ofili uses, either.

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it’s harder to format the damn blogs than it is to write them. you’d think there’d be some default setting to choose in terms of fonts and so forth but no-ooo (as you can see from my pathetically and widely variously randomly spaced and fonted posts to date). one i wrote mostly on my blackberry in a cab and in a psychiatrist’s waiting room, then finished at work (don’t tell the boss) and silly me for thinking all that was just plain text words, postable, compliant, ready to roll over and format for me. optimistic girl, thinking this part might be easy after my hands atrophied from frantically thumbing microkeys as the taxi slalomed down fifth avenue.

just spent an entertaining half hour trying and failing to get my postings to date to match one another using the available settings, and it seems there is no combination of choices that equals the default result that you get when you type in the annoyingly small box provided on myspace’s post page, which is what i’m doing at the moment. (5:30 am, no music playing, and of course i’m not reading a book, how the hell can you be writing a blog and reading books or watching DVDs at the same time, they may as well have included masturbation as one of the “what i’m doing now” choices.) (though perhaps that could be done…)

and, in other news from the sucks-to-be-me-sometimes department, YES this stuff matters, matters terribly to a person born with five planets in virgo. the fucking blogs must match, the way one’s pubes must more or less match whatever’s sprouting from one’s head (mine don’t, and it keeps me up nights).

i need some advice from the rest of the blogging myspace world about how to get this right.

and while i’m asking for advice, i may as well put this useless fear out there — what about posting poems? not something i’ve ever done, i still waste my time stuffing the fuckers into envelopes and mailing them out to disinterested editors, in order to appear in journals that no one reads. (admit it, poets, you don’t read them either, when your work finally makes it into Agni you just check your own poem to make sure wasn’t poisoned with typos, don’t you?) posting them here eliminates that other frustrating activity as a choice, and … i just might be answering my own question here… look for new blogpoems soon!

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in the last week two of my most far-flung friends (australia, arizona) have lovingly offered to macdaddy me. “i’ll pimp your blog, darling,” wednesday kennedy purred from sydney in her gorgeous bronze tenor. “the world needs your voice.” two days later gita writes to me about a “mild pimp” she gave my latest blogspot piece on her live journal.

it took me a couple days to wake up to the fact that i should not even have understood what the words meant; that these sentences, in fact, would have had no meaning whatsoever and could not even have come out of anybody’s mouth (or typewriter) just a few years ago. i couldn’t decide if this made me feel really old or really young — not only do i have clear and poignant memories of the unpimped preblog world, i even remember the world pre-ATM, pre-walkman (let alone ipod), pre-metrocard and pre-patriot-act (though pre-george-bush is a distant, barely recalled time).

with my beautiful pimps standing at the ready, what else can i do but deliver the blogs? like giving a blowjob on demand in a back-alley cadillac (yes, i am also pre-prius) (no room in a prius for a bj anyway, not if you’re going to do it right).

it might be cheating to double post a blog, but as i already have a readership here at blogspot and am now spending a lot of time working on my new myspace page (abandoning two other, earlier, pimp-free versions), i will for a while post the same blog on both sites and see what happens. send me hate mail if you don’t like the idea.

and ladies, pimp away!

visit my pimps:
http://myspace.com/wednesdaykennedy
http://genders.livejournal.com/

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