Category Archives: culture

RIP Gil Scott-Heron

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gil scott heron.jpg.scaled500 RIP Gil Scott Heron

There was a time in my life when I only wanted to listen to political music. It was then that someone passed along to me a cassette of Gil Scott-Heron. This was around 1999; tape players were already hard to come by. But I managed to wear out that tape in several months.

He was more than a musician, he was a poet that happened to be a multi-instrumentalist. He was a radical agitator with piano and bongo to sweeten his message. He was a visionary, but then again, in some ways he wasn’t: It wasn’t his intention to foster the forthcoming genre of rap. He created poetry set to music, in the tradition of Bob Dylan. He created poetry infused with Jazz in the tradition of Amiri Baraka. His style was never pretensious but always bold. I couldn’t believe that this amazing and diverse poet was undiscovered by most of the people in my social circle. I tried to impose it on everyone with the fervor of a newfound love.

Well, time passes and new loves come to you.  I just found out that Gil died this week. I don’t know what to tell you except that I hope you can take some time out of your day to listen to some of his work.

I know he recently released an album but I want to share with you some of the songs that inspired me when I was a teenager. I’ve also included one of the recent songs that Kanye West sampled him on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mp3 RIP Gil Scott Heron
Gil_Scott_Heron_-_Whitey_on_the_Moon.mp3 Listen on Posterous

mp3 RIP Gil Scott Heron
Gil_Scott_Heron_-_Whitey_on_the_Moon.mp3 Listen on Posterous

mp3 RIP Gil Scott Heron
Kanye_West_-_lost_in_the_woods.mp3 Listen on Posterous

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A Feminist Click Moment

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Or: How Feminism and A Love of Drink

Saved Me From the Perils of the Devil

I was a teenage satanist. Under the tutelage of Anton LeVay's The Satanic Witch, I didn't think women needed equal rights. Women were already the most powerful creatures in the world because they could get whatever they wanted through the subtle, irresistible guile of a woman's sexuality. You could not convince me that men got all the jobs and the money because Satanism had taught me that for one sniff of a woman's musk a man would change his mind about foreign policy and hand over the keys to his Porsche. We didn't need to be in charge, at least not officially. Of course by this view, the men immune to the stuff between a woman's legs, gay men, should've been at the pinnacle of the power pyramid. Nor did this view take into consideration how complicated sexuality and attraction are, nor numerous other aspects of inequality like vaginal mutilation, domestic abuse, etc. Satanism didn't address the subtle messages that young girls receive telling them they are princesses in need of rescue. Doubtless the message that all I needed to succeed was a cunning mind and a short skirt was ripe fodder for a cherry bomb raised on fairy tales. If Marilyn Monroe didn't need feminism why would I?

Going to Women's Center meetings in college didn't shake the feminism into me. On the contrary, the women present were all extremist stereotypes and I relished disagreeing with them. They told me women were silenced but so far no one had managed to shut me up. They spoke of empowerment but I didn't need to be reminded that women could be capable and strong because my mother told me I was these things and I was still only a girl.

No, the feminist seed was watered by copious alcohol. Specifically the game Asshole. If you haven't played it, a key aspect is that the winner of the previous game could tell anyone else to drink whenever they wanted to for the entire next round. As a Freshman at one of the leading party schools, I'd become an adept and frequent President, dishing out sips to jolly drunks. Many men who could game amiably threw temper tantrums when I came to the President position. It had happened enough times to become predictable, til it got to the point that I avoided playing the game with any man I was dating.

Back in class we were studying the feminist implications of M. Butterfly and Ibsen's A Doll's House. My feminist “click” moment came during one of those discussions where it was theorized that abusers were actually, deep-down-inside, insecure. I was rolling my eyes because that particular reversal of thinking has always struck me as a stinking cliché. It was right up there with “bullies are just scared” and “he pulls your hair because he likes you.” As if cruelty were perpetuated by helpless cute puppies. Such claims were brought with no evidence save wishful thinking. Yet where was I left but without any lunch money and an aching scalp? I'd seen domestic abuse up close and if those guys were insecure, they weren't any more so than plenty of other guys that don't beat the shit out of people.

We read an essay on the topic. It was either by Judith Butler or it began with a quote by Judith Butler (I regret that my googling was not able to come up with the essay or quote). It surmised that the insecure abuser has been taught that he is inherently superior to all women. What does a man do in this position when a woman bests him? How does it make him feel? It wouldn't be the same as being bested by a man. If you believed that women were inferior to all men then to be outwitted by a woman was in essence to be put not only beneath her but beneath all men. Either she was not truly a woman (or she couldn't have surpassed you) or he was not truly a man—and cognitive dissonance would lead most men to the former conclusion.

This rang true for me. It explained why otherwise ordinary men couldn't handle losing at Asshole. They were acting out the same seething rage the essay described. It wasn't merely that they didn't like being told what to do by a woman, it was that the orders were coming about because they had lost to one. I actually played with one guy who, gaining the presidency in a later round, insisted I shotgun an entire beer for every penalty sip. Of course I'm not suggesting this gent was a wife-beater, but his anger was real, tangible. He wanted to punish me for winning.

Why was this the “click” moment for me? Why did this essay linger with me and transform me into the totally bad-ass feminist writing here before you today? I think mainly, it felt fair in a way none of the Women's Center rhetoric had. Most of the feminist arguments I had previously heard made men out to be villains. It was easier for me to believe that women were secret satanic goddesses than to believe that half the population consisted of dickheads going out of their way to fuck over the other half. Besides, I'd met some dudes in my two decades and they weren't terribly menacing. Compared to my own foreboding demeanor, most of them were downright pansies.

But it was the quote that stuck in my brain. Again, regrettably I cannot reproduce it, but the gist of it was this: simply because men are the enforcers of oppression doesn't mean they aren't subject to its rules. Maybe men didn't want to be better than women. Just because they were born into the role didn't mean they had any desire to perpetuate it. Superiority is a lot of work, especially when it is a lie. And there were so many incompetent men out there! How exhausting must it be to be forced to interact with woman after superior woman? Here we satanic sex goddesses come along, minding our own business but being awesome all the same, and this guy has to feel like dirt just because it is so painfully obvious that he's our intellectual inferior. Surely it wasn't too unreasonable to think some of these guys would get angry at some of these women eventually. It was all very sad for all parties and the only cure I could see was for the men to somehow learn that it was OK for a woman to be better than a man. I had to recognize that as an inherently feminist position.

What is striking to me about the epiphany that led to me to entering the fight for women's rights was an interest in what is best for men. Perhaps the truth in the argument appealed to my sense of integrity (e.g. it was not about my self interest as a woman gaining something for women). The basic idea that men may not relish their role could be applied to many circumstances besides the domestic abuser. What of men who wanted to stay home with the kids? What of men who wanted to knit and sew? What of men who wanted to be pursued, protected, nurtured? Which is not to say that they had it worse than women—anyone could plainly see they got the sweet end of the candied apple. And if the system wasn't even in the best interest of men, who was it working for? The musky supermodels, turning themselves inside out to fit a generic high-impact sexuality? Hardly. When the final piece clicked into place, I could see that the whole framework of gender rules was at best unnecessary. Ah-ha and then some: feminism will liberate everybody.

Posted via email from Subversive Soapbox

The Day Of the Tsunami

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1687945456.jpg.scaled500 The Day Of the Tsunami

My mom awoke me at seven this morning. The first thing she said was, “I just want to hear your voice before you die.” She was a theater major in college so she has a flair for drama. She explained about the terrible earthquake in Japan and that CNN said a tsunami was likely to hit the West Coast in the next fifteen minutes.

What to do? At that point I was thoroughly awake, so I said, “fuck it.” We got in @Mirrorshade’s car and we drove to Lawrence Berkeley Lab, high in the Berkeley hills. There wasn’t a wave in site, but the vista made me realize something: even if there’s a hundred aftershocks and I die under the crash of a terrible wave, I will never regret moving to California.

I wish this photo taken with my camera could capture the beauty.

Jason Jaworski at the Noise Pop Culture Fest

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Jason%20the%20poet Jason Jaworski at the Noise Pop Culture Fest

Festivals like the Noise Pop Culture Fest are ineffective for becoming a better artist. The time with each presenter is too short, the instruction too thrown together. It is a great place to find inspiration, however.

Take Jason Jaworski. He’s not the first poet I’ve seen typing snippets of poetry on old typewriters and giving them away to the sources of their inspiration. But surely he has the most compelling delivery. While other street poets set themselves apart with dapper hats and gloves, Jason wears a prom dress and a wrap of silver crinkly fabric. His head is crowned with an unknown substance and a wreath of false (chicken?) feet. Moreover he sits not in a desk or a chair, but barefoot and cross-legged in a tiny house filled with countless baubles and trinkets and swathes of fabric. The traveling improvisational poet is a rare creature but Jason Jaworski sets himself apart from the rest of the herd.

In truth, I wish there were herds of these poets, legions armed with typewriters and cases full of correctional fluid. I wish there were one on every street corner in every city, waiting with fingers poised on the keys, looking into the eyes of those in line, waiting for a simple unedited poem. These poetry buskers provide an important service. Poetry is the twin sister to music, first formed among cavemen beating their drums around breezy campfires as people huddled together, searching for warmth and meaning. Now it is thought to be a dusty relic, a secret language only understood by MFAs and and smirking grammar dominatrices.

Whereas poetry is thought to be abstract, poetry buskers use the person standing in front of them to create their art.
Whereas poetry is thought to be disconnected from its audience, poetry buskers create a one-on-one relationship.
Whereas poetry is thought to be collections of overly dwelled upon minutia, these intrepid fellows will type out a poem in under two minutes.
Whereas poetry has certainly become narcisstic and static, these poets create hundreds of poems and give them away.

The last part is the one I would have the most difficulty with. Every poem I’ve ever lost lives in my imagination as the greatest thing I’ve ever written. But these poems aren’t lost, they’re set free. They’re created with a view of abundance, a belief that inspiration is as commonplace as fortune cookies. Who knows how many poems Jason Jaworski gave away at the Noise Pop Culture fest? Each poem was unsigned, whatever brilliance it brought became solely the possession of the person who inspired it. I’ve thought a lot about the ways our egos can get in the way of producing good writing. What could be a better way to do this than to write a hundred poems and give them away anonymously?

He never at any point told me his name. There’s no need for names in a simple exchange between a muse and an artist. I gathered that information from his website, which I had the fortune to reach because I asked him to type it onto my poem. I use his name here again and again, so I can remember it if I am fortunate enough to happen upon this gent again. Jason Jaworski. Jason Jaworski. Jason Jaworski. I wish I knew you; I’m glad, at least, to have met you.

Posted via email from Future is Fiction

I Do Nothing To Stop the Blaze II

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mp3 I Do Nothing To Stop the Blaze II
Very Busy People by The Limousines Listen on Posterous

I had a strange sensation the other evening. Riding on the Bay Bridge at night always makes me think of the time that tanker truck blew up and I saw a section of the freeway melt. The bridge is covered, so we couldn't see the tanker fire until we were right on top of it, flames suddenly shooting fifty feet into the black starless sky. That stretch of the bridge makes me metaphorical because it reminds me that there are situations where even if the fire you're facing is enormous, it is possible not to see it until it is too late. It is possible to be barreling down the metaphorical freeway, going 80, with few signs of the catastrophe ahead. I was reminded that the empire I was born into is riding the crest of a crashing wave, a tsunami taking down with it the salmon and the sturgeon and the grizzly bears and the polar bears, etc. 

I turned to the driver and in a dry voice I began to monologue about how lucky we are, not only to be born comfortably into the stack of nuclear weapons and Wal-marts that is the foundation of this nation, but also so lucky to have been born into this generation. To be born a hundred years ago in America would be to live before there were unions and women, men and children worked in unbearable conditions with no weekends for no end in site. But to be born a hundred years from now would be even worse: millions of environmental refugees, widespread ecological collapse, severe droughts and floods, starvation, famine—not to mention the largest extinction event in the history of the world. 

As he was agreeing we had won the time-and-place-of-birth lottery, I was thinking of an unfinished poem I wrote years ago. The poem, like the bulk of my work, is about the contrast between privilege and the knowledge that one's privilege comes at the expense of other creatures' suffering. It isn't surprising. I spent the first fifteen years of my life, for as long as I could remember, wanting to be a writer. Then I went to college, and, as my favorite professor Larry Isaacs put it, I "stopped living my own personal narrative and started living history." I felt a real imperative to change the world, even if it was at the expense of pursuing my dreams. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at changing the world. It seems my only real gifts are impractical things: writing, dancing, drawing. Despite that, I spent the next section of my life raising my fist at marches, running social justice campaigns, meeting influential activists, and generally being a hell-raiser. Now I've circled back to focusing on my writing. I live in a state where my vote is irrelevant, because everyone thinks the way I do. I'm happy and life is easy. But I still feel the pull. I still know the fire is coming. And this conflict is what I try to capture in my fiction and poetry. 

The poem that was running through my head ends: 

The indymedia headline reads: THE ELECTION WAS HACKED. I read it and cry and then corporate radio machine plays "Video Killed the Radio Star" and I dance in the sweet happy-face sunshine that I know is melting the polar ice caps.

And then an odd thing happened. I realized the song playing on the radio was my favorite song from 2010. Immediately I perked up, yanked on the volume nob and started to sing. The very thing that I had written about in the poem actually happened: I was distracted from contemplating the terrible situation we've gotten ourselves into; it was a mere abstraction compared to the immediacy of a simple luxury: a song I loved coming on the radio. What was even stranger was that the song itself epitomizes my life of luxury. The song, "Very Busy People" is about the endless stream of pleasure and distraction I was contemplating:  

We'll end up numb from playing video games and we'll get sick of having sex. And we'll get fat from eating candy as we drink ourselves to death. We'll stay up late making mix tapes, photoshoping pictures of ourselves while we masturbate to these pixelated videos of strangers fucking themselves.

The metaphor had become real. I was caught in a tangle of irony. I was caught in a loop, wherein no matter how hard the universe attempted to send me the message: Your luxury is an illusion, temporary at best, the message was always carried on the back of the illusion itself, ZOMG, I love this song, turn it up! Or perhaps it is the reverse: every moment I'm enjoying myself—knitting scarves, scrubbing my feet soft and masqueing my pores smooth, alphabetizing my CDs, laying in the orderly grass and drinking Saki—all of these things are clouded by the knowledge of my privilege. Even the passion for working in publishing is tarnished by the knowledge of the production cycle that produces millions of books every year. The experience was a reminder that no matter how hard we try, we cannot contemplate anything without seeing it through the frame of reference of our worldview. I felt like the cavemen of Socrates, realizing my reality was cast through the distorted lense of the shadows on the cave walls. And all this time, with the knowledge that I'd slipped back into the comfort of my lifestyle, I kept singing: my shoulders dancing, my mouth smiling, and the shimmering skyline of Oakland baring herself before me as we disembarked the bridge. I felt that I was wearing a mask. But which was the mask? The sulking me, that had so easily turned off when my song came on the radio? Or the smiling me, that dances in the sweet happy-face Oakland skyline?

Posted via email from Future is Fiction