Boomcrash

George Carlin on Michael Jackson

and that’s all i’m gonna say here.

New Democrat 3.0

Glenn Greenwald on Neda, Obama, Helen Thomas and the failure of some journalists to comprehend people power. Cutting off Helen Thomas for doing her job is more something I’d expect from Reagan or Bush – it’s just disingenuous, and in this instance, derisive as well. Since when is connecting the dots between U.S. behavior and the behavior of those whom the U.S. critiques off limits? Getting pretty tired of the double-talk, and not really interested in hearing about hope, either. As Bill Maher recently said, “He’s not your boyfriend.”

The “Zero respect for the dead” award goes to…

While I understand that CNN’s coverage on the unfolding events in Iran has improved, and that they’re not the only network that indulges in sensationalism, this is over the top. From Twitter:

@octavianasrCNN: You watched her die in front of your eyes.. Now MEET #NEDA! full report on AC360 #iranelection

I’m waiting for Howard Beale and Sybil the Soothsayer to enter stage left. Or perhaps those wacky revos on the Mao Tse-tung hour…

(Props to @cjdkc on Twitter for bringing this to folks’ attention)

Meanwhile, plenty of oppression in the U.S.

Just Jo Nubian reminds us all to keep under-reported stories about the murdering of African-Americans in the U.S. in mind, as the mainstream media continues to cover events in Iran.

Iran in 2009 =/= cold war

With props to Just Jo Nubian for “The powers = chess”, Davey D for covering this first, and Clay Shirky for the big picture. You all rock my world with your amazing selves. <3

Somewhat distressed over anti-Empire folks from both the progressive left and the anti-NWO right pointing to CIA involvement in Iran in response to recent events. Consider the following scenario, which is based on history + unfolding events; please read accordingly:

Ahmadinejad is asserting that the Iranian uprising is a result of U.S. interference, which is being further reinforced by assertions by anti-Empire activists in the U.S., who point to this history of U.S. intelligence involvement in Iran both historically and as recently as 2008. This argument -– CIA involvement = U.S. backed destabilization — harkens back to the cold war; and while said argument is a matter of record -– the CIA was actively involved in the 1953 coup which brought the Shah to power, for example -– what is also clear is that Iranians in opposition to the current leadership have their own agenda. The inference from some anti-Empire activists that the CIA may have had a hand in the uprising also infers a conflation of the actions of Iranians in opposition to the present leadership with the CIA’s interests — an assertion which is very possibly inaccurate as well as enabling of both Ahmadinejad’s assertions of U.S. interference and the neo-conservative utilization of the present scenario to their own means; in particular, it gives U.S. neo-conservatives an opportunity to attempt undermining of President Obama’s seemingly more nuanced approach, while furthering their own militaristic objectives in the region – hardly an ideal situation for people who are in opposition to U.S. hegemony.

While the legacy of CIA destabilization of regimes around the world remains to this day, the problem is that we’re not in the cold war anymore. Instead, what we have is a global matrix of power that encompasses multiple social forces, both governmental and civic, that are approaching any given scenario -– all with their own needs, desires and objectives, some of which layer over the top of one other. If the cold war is drawn in analogy to checkers, what we have now is chess, of which the internet is a small but very important part, and even more ubiquitous communication tools (cell phones in particular) are actively a part of as well. Losing sight of this means that you’re looking at a different situation, with predictable outcomes, many of which are anything but liberatory.

Lessons so far:

This is the Iranians’ struggle for a new system, period. All of us on the outside who care about that struggle are just the helpdesk, if you will.

The history of CIA involvement in Iran is clear; what is also clear is that there are multiple interests at stake here. Conflating things into a cold-war like form of bilateral detente/brinkmanship is a deeply flawed analysis of this situation, and if anything, reinforces both the current Iranian leadership’s anti-U.S. assertions, as well as the U.S. neo-conservatives’ anti-Iran ones.

Decentralized tools increasingly multiply the chances of decentralized action using those tools (Shirky, 2008, “Here Comes Everybody”). This reality turns an already highly complex global scenario into a vastly more intricate one. Chess, not checkers; and losing sight of that has potentially unfortunate consequences, both for the players as well as those impacted by the “game.”

Warm heart, cold Friday

Been busy doing background reading – Johnson-Reagon, Foucault, Hardt & Negri; looking towards next week for blogging on all that. In the meantime, here’s a somewhat sniffly wrap-up:

20 year anniversary of Do the Right Thing. I’d say read the Newsweek article on it, but it’s full of feigned praise, if not backhanded compliments. Who shows up at someone’s birthday and says, “That outfit makes you look great…for your size”? Much better fare is the New York interview with Spike Lee.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright has a hymietown moment. If you mean AIPAC, say AIPAC, alright? Can’t even claim privacy of conversation, he said it to a reporter. I think he got dogged during the elections, but “those Jews”? Come on.

Obama administration may be strong-arming potential swing votes on the war spending bill, which includes $100 million for the IMF.

A fabulous write-up from SexGenderBody on Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse as Gothic literature.

A very interesting lecture on “Evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality”.

That’s it! Off to rest, relax and make sure this cold doesn’t get the better of me. Much love, see you on the downbeat…

If Rains::pours then Friday==TRUE

There’s so much this week, it’s been a challenge to break it down to a manageable pile. If this keeps up, expect this at least twice a week, most likely on Wednesday as well as Friday. Here we go:

Obama’s speech in Egypt. Yes, it’s just a speech. Yes, it’s important. What, you haven’t read or viewed it yet? Text | Video | Analysis from Colorlines.

Obama on gay marriage – hmmmmn. Just a bit uptight, and uncharacteristically so. Regardless, as pointed out on Towleroad, all the more reason to repeal DOMA, and Pam’s House Blend makes it plain: “blind as a bat.“

Crooklyn cops brutally beat lesbians of color.

Oscar Grant’s killer to stand trial for murder.

RIP George Tiller. Thanks for nothing to the far right for cheering Tiller’s murderer on, while feigning horror because he acted on said cheering.

Military schools on the rise in the US. Why the hell are they in schools anyway?

Your fave social media site’s ever-shifting terms of service up on your nerves a bit? Thanks to EFF, you can now track TOS changes on a variety of social media sites.

That’s it, lovely peeps! Until next week…

Slamundrum

A reply to “Is Slam in Danger of Going Soft?”

I became reluctant of slamming – but not performance poetry, that’s in the mix to this day – when I realized how adept I was at pandering to the audience. As in slam-winning, audience in my palm adept – but I was risking sacrificing the poetry in my work for crowd-pleasing, which after spending decades honing craft and voice alike, is a form of creative soul death that I’d rather not have to live with. So I shifted gears into smaller, more open venues, which is where things remain. Now when I read my work, the message gets heard loud and clear (which is more than I can say for some of my less fortunate slam gigs) and more often than not, that message is understood with an equal clarity. Not that smaller venues are a letdown – at core, I’m a poet who spent years cutting her teeth in the sorts of postage stamp-sized dive bars that Marc Smith talks about, starting back in the mid-1970s. While I miss hitting up larger joints on a regular basis, it’s more important to have an impact as well as a crowd.

The challenge is how to hold forth in this size and sort of venue while not becoming obscure. This more than anything is the cross-generational curse of “serious poetry” – many a decent poet gets overlooked (or is completely off the cultural map) due to the semantic opaqueness of their work, not to mention their rather stunning ability to not be able to read in front of an audience. (While I love many modernist poets, I am completely with Marc here when it comes to Ezra Pound, and the failing of many poets when it comes to oration of their work in an approachable manner speaks for itself.) When you consider this in light of the reality that most beginning practitioners of any art form are lacking in polish, if not possessing a truncated relationship with their creative voice as well, it becomes very clear why slam arose – it was out of necessity as well as desire, as well as a wholesale need to break free of the constraints of overly academicized forms of poetic expression, which are notorious for being both obtuse and lacking in a requisite degree of performativity when misfortune strikes and well-heeled practitioners dare to foist said work on the public. In short: poetry had to break itself free if it was not to risk a tragic demise at the perennially dull and the as-yet inexperienced.

Despite my decision to shy away a bit from more mainstream audiences, when I do venture forth into larger venues, there are slights-of-hand that can be enacted to get the message into the mix, although I do tend to shy away from this approach whenever possible. One of the things that I learned from my bordering-on-pandering days is that it is possible to slip in a social change message into an otherwise standard “love is bullshit” slam poem. This approach requires playing a bit of poetic trickery, such as inserting an overtly political declaration mid-line well after the audience thinks all you’re doing carrying on in a fit of laugh-grabbing frustration about dating snafus and drunken one night stands – an admittedly devious (or at least somewhat awkward) form of cultural detournément. As such, I prefer the more direct approach mentioned above, even if it costs me some in terms of audience size.

It’s important to note that my present body of work came galloping forth not from continuing on with my poetic journey throughout the 1990s, but following years of neglect during that period, which thankfully wound to a grinding halt at the century’s close. In specific, the re-emergence of my poetic stride was conjured forth after seeing Saul Williams perform in the film Slam. (My sistas and brothas, that scene in the jail courtyard? Oh my god.) As such, it’s hard at times for me to wrap my mind around the seeming conflict here within the slam community between old and new – and let’s say it, post-beat and hip-hop – which while not racial per se in this case, is most definitely cultural, if not generational as well – while at other times, said conflict becomes painfully clear, in which case it’s ALL about race, don’t listen to anybody who tells you otherwise. Don’t even get me started on the relationship of queers within slam to slam itself.

That being stated, I will fight to the death for slam to be taken seriously as art, when in fact it is such a beast. The problem however is reflected quite succinctly by Marc Smith – the popularity of slam is turning it, at least in a noticeable number of cases, into a homogenized if not pandering form of expression. While some slam poems are amazing, life-transforming embodiments of personal expression that do, in fact, deserved to be called art – others are not quite the cat’s gravy. While the commercialization of slam has given rise to poets who juggle both art and popularity with amazing finesse – Talaam Acey, Patricia Smith, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Saul Williams – others compromise and settle for self-indulgent or simply mundane forms of audience ass-shout-kissing to get more points, which really serves nobody, including the poets themselves. It is simply not that case though that all slam poems are solipsistic drivel – I know, I’ve seen otherwise many a time. What slam’s critics (and in particular, slam’s culturally conservative critics) need to realize is simple: life did not stop after 1947, and neither did poetry. Furthermore, this kind of struggle has been going on for as long as there have been sanctioned (or archaic) schools of artistic thought and discourse; as such, it is somewhat disingenuous to act as if slam is the first movement to rebel against such constraints.

Nevertheless, it is true that there is a sort of watering down of intention in the transition from old school to new, at least in some cases. For example, regardless of all that I have been through in this life (quite a lot), I don’t fit neatly into some audience member’s predetermined entry price for authenticity – which is the lifeblood of being successful at slamming, if you’re not going to settle for being the popular kid with a mic in her hand. Everything I have ever heard about old school slams flies in the face of this sort of gatekeeping, which also happens to map to the experiences I had when I was a teenager. (While the venues I read at were not officially slam ones, they nevertheless were part of the rise in performance poetry’s popularity at the time, and any poet who actually gave a damn about the form – and in particular, about contemporary poetry of the past 30 years or so – was welcome.) Consider this: when I performed as a feature act at The Green Mill a few years back, I brought down the house – a very jaded, poetry-savvy Chicago audience at that – for keeping things real while being completely myself, warts and all, and as always, with the poetry first and foremost. But when I performed at a certain not-to-be-named popular venue that is more representative of many mainstream slam audiences these days? I could not get a chunk of them to stop laughing – and by this, I unfortunately do not mean “laughing with”. Intersexed queerdyke autonomist mixed-race latina experimental poets aren’t supposed to slam? I guess I didn’t get the officially sanctioned cultural inclusivity memo on that one. It’s their loss, but there you have it.

What remains to be seen though is if slam can continue to flourish creatively despite its popularity, or if it will gradually become a cultural footnote, as with many art movements that eventually became rote as they grew in scope. If that turns out to be the case, it will be poetry’s loss – but it most assuredly will not be poetry’s death, either. I for one will welcome the return of our beer-stained intimate venue overlords if that turns out to be the case, and will happily perform my work for whomever happens to show up, until a new generation of poets begin to wonder why everything sounds the same, and seek refuge within the underground hideaways yet again.