“My flag boy and your flag boy were sit-tin’ by the fire
My flag boy told your flag boy “I’m gon-na set your flag on fire”
Talk-in’ ‘bout, hey now hey now I-ko, I-ko, un-day
Jock-a-mo fee-no ai na-né, jock-a-mo fee na-né
Iko Iko by Barbara and Rose Lee Hawkins
”
Dr. Teeth and Dr. John in London on July 18, 2012. (Andy Sheppard / WireImage)
In the summer time, during the CoVid summer, or at least the first one, My family, as is our wont, was out at the cabin in British Columbia by way of the Kootenays. As, they say in Canada: anything goes out at the Cabin. We spend our mornings there working on our individual screens, then when the child is too worked up we take him golfing or more to his preference, to the beach. There at the boat launch, sunburned, rednecked, and sitting in lawn chairs (as is our cultural preference) we take turns entertaining the boy. Sundown comes, and I try and cook something with fake meat that our Maga parents might possibly enjoy. The day’s adventure behind us we sit to anthestheria ourselves with wine and theatre.
This night with the nine year old fervently engaged we reluctantly agreed to watch The Great Muppet Caper of 1981. Some of us were rather more enthusiastic in the choice. Honestly, I pushed for it. It is fairly innocuous, or so I thought, and wouldn’t lead to any more unfortunate hellscape discussions on Politics. Normally in a Symposia we would have lubricated our tongues and had a spirited discussion of the order of the day. However, we don’t dilute our vintage like the Greeks do. We take it whole. And, this is dangerous.
Anthestheria is a flowering wine festival cognate with the Indus Valley Soma plant andhus and likewise we were there in the TV room to tranquilize ourselves.
I do believe that any Muppet vehicle is wonderful farce always camped with scores of delightful cameos; both technically fascinating and hilarious, ideal for children and the older folks to all sit together. However this time, in the midst of it, I was seized by the buffoon Dr. Teeth. The piano player (as distinct from the moody Rowlf) is of course based on one of the finest jazz pianists in Louisiana’s beloved Dr. John. My wife, adorably, fell asleep under the coffee table; so with no one to speak too reasonably that night, I am here to jot down my notes on what is appropriate. And failing that, what is Good?
As a once native of New Orleans I have of course seen Dr. John perform and also miss him terribly. He is a singular musician, like Nina Simone and Garth Hudson, one of the few human individuals capable of playing two distinct melodies with either hand at the same time. Born with the colorful name Mac Rebennack, Dr. John found it entertaining evidently to sobriquet himself with the more voodoo styling as perhaps a Professor Longhair, who was his mentor. You might say he was born to it, but you could say there was some appropriation of what was down in the scene at the time in the 60’s. But, what is that? When the young people all pick up a fad? What is it when the thing feels Good?
Professor Longhair of New Orleans, and a young brother from Florida
To match the living spirit of the man, you might say Jim Henson created a kind of caricature. The color and the big teeth all are gross exaggerations of the actual person of course, but serve to create a recognizable sign of the thing. The reduction of Dr. John’s genius to this filthy low brow puppet is unfair. But, it is also great fun.
Every puppet on the show is a reduction of some facet of our social strata. For example Animal is a kind of oversexed, toxically male, and destructive Keith Moon character, Janice a dimwitted California Valley Girl (though of course blond, my wife is sensitive to this characterization), and Miss Piggy a self-obsessed corpulent glamour object whom you all know, and is now of course much more famous than those actors who appeared alongside her.
The word muppet in England, as I remember, is used to define a kind of gormless prat or feckless clown (Boris Johnson is a fine example of a muppet for instance) and is itself a portmanteau Henson created to describe a marionette and puppet sewn together. The puppet is a sign, you see. And all signs, like all words and paintings, are reductions of the thing represented. Though puppets, like Punch and Judy or even a Grimm fairy tale, can serve as a palliative for the child. The world complicated as it is becomes understandable.
Pulcinello of Italy, and here Professor Poulton’s Punch and Judy show in Brighton probably.
Punch himself is a reduction of the Pulcinello. This character arose out of the commedia dell’arte theater scene of the 17th century and as a social chameleon, like myself, he is incessantly trying to rise above his station. A helpful kind of Eurotrash birthed out of wedlock origin story for improvised sketch comedy.The Italian clown who is a reduction of our unfair masters whom are in dire need of a farcical impersonation. You see, what is risible helps us all alleviate our class resentments.
Fringe Festival 2016 Adapted and directed by Christopher Johnson
The commedia d’ell arte is neatly derived, or in linguistics they might say cognate (or cognac*) with Carnival. Mardi Gras should more properly be called Carnival as it is the whole of the thing and Mardi is simply the Tuesday before Lent. That’s hardly the whole thing. It lasts weeks. Streaming from hundreds of miles around, Midwesterners meekly peek into our city having readily costumed themselves with an attitude of indulgence that they are, to the naked eye, quite anxious to display. These meek are here to inherit the earth as they see it. And, certainly our streets were littered with their bodies.
As a child before the flood, our population was a half a million. In the Shrovetide it swells to a million and a half. And, that’s with us natives leaving for the upwaters of Mississippi mind you. “Gotta get out with these crackers in town.” I’ve heard said. Carnival does though encourage these street displays, and the circus, and the costumes and the masks. They all can let their hair down. They all in it together.
Finally
*Cognac is a form of Brandy, which is itself short for brandywine or burning wine and is the creation of spirits by distilling wine twice. Something almost essential to the creation of a colonial and cosmopolitan empire.. and like New Orleans, made possible by slavery.
March, 2020 CoVid Times in the Nouvelle Orleans Mardi Gras
These events are helpful. And, if you put a comedian or a jester in the same boat as a carnival then you would have to say the social service provided by mocking the week and powerful together would be universal.
So of course years later, I found myself quite at home, then, during the Hahoe tal (河回탈 및 屛山탈) mask festival in Andong, South Korea. (Where I taught English for a year in 1997.) The festival is a rich and diverse set of impersonations of the various classes in Korean society and also serve this innate purpose.. to reduce tension in society. We make fun of ourselves so that we are hopefully bothered less by intrinsic unfairness.
Muppets
Jang MikYung has this to say about the Hahoe tal:
( Journal of Symbols & Sandplay Therapy 2013;4(1):16-20)
The tals (masks) represent problems in Korea. Moreover, they also depict psychological aspects, which are not lived out, to achieve the wholeness of the psyche through their expression in the tals.
Professor Jang goes on to say that within the festival the problems of the group can be seen as belonging to the individuals. If for example, I am unable to pay my medical bills then this is a problem for all my neighbors. It is incumbent on them. We see that in America, a large segment of the population believing that if you smoke or if you are overweight then it is your problem, not ours. I wonder who put those thoughts there? Or as Leonard Cohen puts it:
“Now, you can say that I’ve grown bitter but of this you may be sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there’s a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong
You see, you hear these funny voices in the Tower of Song”
Jang goes on to say regarding the Tal that “culture’s, society’s, and individuals’ inner aspects have problems or parts that should grow or be integrated. These are the parts of us that cannot not “speak,” which do not have a real being because they are in existential states (unconscious states) where they exist but do not exist. (Landy, 1993/2010).
This is what being marginalized means, right? We exist in America, but we do not exist. On the street, but not seen. Or as Ralph Ellison put it the Invisible Man-- A negro who would come home from work and put himself in his lit room—a room with a hundred lighbulbs on just so that he could be sure that a Man could be seen. I was reminded of this watching Donald Glover’s production of Atlanta. There is a striving to be seen theme in the show of aspiring talents. Yet, what I also feel is Mr. Glover’s sense of absurdity of being black in America. And, so I see him finally.
A festival does something nice for all of us. And by festival, I mean a carnival. Which in the Latin means to put away the flesh. This is deliciously suggestive, but really means to put to bed, or bury the hatchet perhaps. And this is what comedy is for.. comedy soothes us. It enlightens and then we can finally rest, exhilarated, and quiet.
Chicago Reader, Gordon Parks, Untitled (Harlem, New York), 1952
As an aside, The White House Correspondents dinner is an interesting example of the powerful humbling themselves; and of course as an admired method for maintaining power. (Why and Who else sponsors and produces these masquerades?) Every year the press gathers with the glitzy twitterati to an occasion where all are publicly mocked. That Donald Trump famously stormed away from an evening like this where The President mocked him and later fixed his sights on assuming the mantle for himself; of course has since boycotted the event is intriguing.
That the power of comedy reduces the tension of the audience is helpful, that Trump does not seek this reduction, suspicious. It should remind the reader that the Empire of Japan—the Dai Nippon Teikoku, during its colonial rule of South Korea also stopped the Hahoe tal.
Cancelled it.
White House Correspondent’s Dinner 2011
I should ask here if have you ever done an impersonation? Have you pretended to be someone else? It is now a fraught exercise as I am sure you realise. As in our culture we are edging towards the act of reducing a person to caricature as something inherently inappropriate. Perhaps until the Orange baby reductionist is himself finally pilloried will we find it amusing to mock again? Perhaps we have evolved in response to this vomin of poor behavior.
The tension here is the upheaval of hierarchy. When Richard Pryor impersonates white people he is destabilizing the power locus of those he mocks. This is helpful and calms his audience. It exercises tension. An exorcist of tension.
Daniel Tosh upends this when he ridicules whitey impersonation in his standup. He makes an able caricature of a Richard Pryor or an Eddie Murphy impersonating a white person and says “I find that offensive. I don’t sound like that” And indeed he doesn’t. His tonality is less nasal by degrees. It’s just that his outrage is what is funny. Because the outraged oppressor can be risible when he is histrionic like this. So this self-deprecation calms the audience. His attention to the caricature could even be said to be encouraging. And here we have an extended festival of mockery that has good intentions. In that it is intended to calm our tension.
I must say, however, that the caricature of the Negro rapist, depicted by a white person in blackface in the 1915 film Birth of a Nation does nothing of the sort. It stokes the flame of bigotry. Likewise I agree with Hank Azaria’s assessment that his reduction of an Indian immigrant in The Simpsons—the character Apu is ultimately mean spirited. The Simpsons has become a locus of power and representation that belittles this minority. That the show lies within the spirit of a social festival where all social castes are caricatured must in this case be put to one side. The actor demeaning Homer Simpson is not himself Indian. There is no balance. Unlike say Mindy Kaling’s brilliant turn in the Office where we have diversity in the writing room. Her self-deprecation is her own creation and is fact an indictment of white female cultural norms.
What I would like to ask of us in the audience is to critically examine when a reduction of a person creates hate or is it Good?
“Long ago, there was a young man named Hur. He received a divine revelation from the protecting deity of his village to make tals in his dream. On the next day, he performed his ablutions, hung a straw rope in front of his house to prevent outsiders’ access to the house, and became completely absorbed in making tals.
At that time, there was a girl who loved Hur so much. She waited for Hur many days but she could not see him. One day, she pierced a hole in the window to see Hur. The Law forbids watching. She had violated it.
The young man who had been possessed by the tutelary deity immediately vomited blood and died.
”
And what then is Good?
I thought in my own way to travel to South Korea, as I wanted to experience otherness. I had just graduated with a degree in performance art. Undermining white privilege and patriarchy as a white man was, I thought, an interesting nexus for art making. Though I acknowledge a curiosity for, as Said puts it, Orientalism. Yet it was a sincere interest.
Any racism that I experienced in South Korea, and I was there to bathe in it, had less to do with my ethnicity and more so with, I think, contempt for my ignorance. In the way that a donkey is moved off the pavement I was also moved out of line (hundreds of times) by the elderly Korean. I told my mother then “If one more old person pushes me in the back I am going straight to the airport.” But, then I was a slow walker. I grew up country you see. Walking fast was never something I could convincingly assimilate in Big City America.
There is an argument that a white person cannot experience racism as they inherently benefit from colonialism in every situation. That’s understandable. I wonder if a blond female is experiencing racism or sexism when she is experiencing contempt? For me, and like other colonists out there, I had only go to the United Kingdom.
As a somewhat, but continuously educated man, I no longer believe in the concept of race. The science doesn’t support it. That does sound a bit like a Christian belief system, don’t you think? Do you believe in God? Begging the question here. Also try explaining to a Korean person that an American is not a race. It’s a status. You too can be as American as me, I said in the face of skeptical condescension. I felt again like a Jew in Louisiana listening to the astonished unbelievers. “You don’t believe in our Lord Jesus Christ?
So, to feel sure that you are held in contempt for your ethnicity, and that it’s not just for your own insipid nature, yes please, try England.
To be different is horrid in upper middle class Anglia. I would have been better off being a Negro as then at least I would have been given special consideration as a “crippled person.” Whereas, for my indulgent self-interest, I was simply derided as a brash American and therefore apologized for in constant. How curious that this same family would make braying donkey noises when subject to the curious affect of the County next door. Yorkshire, the East End.. their idiosyncratic syntax the object of constant derision. This you see is how conformity is made.
Perhaps in its own way, the southern English were expressing pride in their differences. Perhaps they would never discriminate truly against a northern County. Understanding that as Saxons they were always just two pints away from a cudgeling murder it is best to be polite, and then only tittle nervously at difference. To that end though, they were always British, and we were Other.
My efforts to conform were unappreciated. I would always be the Quiet American. My effort to speak with a “light accent” as Bill Bryson put it or none at all was in evidence considered superficial. What was sought rather was agreement on all things, or failing that, silence. So quiet over brash I wore as a mask.
What I was trying to do was an impersonation you see. As we said earlier the impersonation is only a caricature. And, doing so while the landlords were laughing hysterically at impersonations of the Other Counties. So I was nothing more than a buffoon to the English.
I did though study Sir Alec Guinness and his inflections, his length. I carefully examined Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Our Man in Havana, Smiley. Smiley and his people. I worked assiduously on dropping my nasal tones into my diaphragm to create as much of a round vibrating bass as this form would allow. Guinness is astounding at this ability. Such a slight man to have such a dripping bottom. You would have thought he was black.
Vagal tone helped as well. Relaxing deeply into feeling. Calming oneself, breathing into the belly. I would purposely lengthen the vowels and strove for nuance into each word. British artists slur and drawl each word into each other to impersonate Americans and so I consciously clipped and enunciated each vowel to do the opposite. My mother was very anxious that I would end up sounding pretentious, and she was quite right. I was pretending. The impersonation, ultimately, failed, and so never became assimilated into a whole. It could never become mine.
I saw our living national treasure Reggie Watts once at the Green Onion in San Francisco. I’ve seen him live a couple times now. Watts, if you haven’t seen him on Conan is very much a generational improv jazz artist who happens to be very funny. He has a couple of techniques that he turns too which allow him, like Robin Williams say, to spin freely. He will speak in Meta about what he is doing at the moment. “I am just going to put the microphone over here, and now, huh, just one inch over here.” He will pretend he is on a bad connection and speak, but you will only here every 5th word and that will be loopy rando as hell. Also between improvised musical interludes, he will speak about his condition but choose a modality of voice that surprises us: British, Southern, nerdy, valley girl, sometimes very black. Each time changing which part of his body that he speaks from.. the guts, chest, or nose. And then mention metacritically his change in modality.
He is a natural mimic and grew up in Germany for some time. I had the blessing to sit in the front row that night when he mentioned that he was from Montana, and the ridiculousness of that fact made me snort audibly. He then glared at me. My mouth dropped open and I gaped at him like a child inconceiving. And which set off the whole crowd in laughter, and rightly so.
This was the most perfect kind of public upbraiding of implicit bias. It was beautiful. How could this wild tomcat soul singer be from Billings? Of course, he is just as likely as I am.
Comic Genius Reggie Watts in GQ Magazine
On the last day of our Cabin Outing we watched A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. A tear fest for all of us wounded animals. Hopeless and alone there on the couch. Watching Roger’s Daniel the Lion speak to the Welschman Matthew Rys, in his perfect American accent as the lonely and broken Mr. Lloyd Vogel. He needed a friend. And Mr. Rogers reached him through a puppet. A reduction of our feelings into something understandable. Into love itself.. into Tom Hank’s pure raw intensity. Pure love so vast as to make human interaction unbearable. It is really.
A decade later I entered divorce proceedings. The first step is saying that nothing is ever good enough. I had enough of being apologized for.. of being excused for my being. When someone makes an excuse is that ever true? Is it not an admonition? “I’m sorry you got convicted.” But, you had it coming is the excuse. “I was drunk and my wife left me. That why’s I was driving.” Is that the opposite of an apology? Excusare in latin: to free from blame. She would say on cue “I am so sorry for my husband. He thinks he is a comedian.”
So truly in a tragic comedy I dropped the masquerade. I took off my mask of Englishness and mannerisms—the airs and graces they say. She said that she thought I was making fun of them with the mask on. She believed that my appropriation was a joke, that my impersonation was a subtle dig. Perhaps if my, I thought sincere, appropriation was Good, then it would have passed as real. Though how confusing it would have been for the Quiet American to sound authentic.
My ex-wife said to me finally after several days of loud honking statements, and perhaps this was success in its own way. “I miss my husband.”
I’ve heard that it is exhausting being black. Putting on the airs and graces for white people. Tampering sexuality. Toning it down for the tone police. I understand.
To appropriate is to make something yours. To make one’s own.
Otherwise it’s inappropriate.
late Middle English: from late Latin appropriatus, past participle of appropriare ‘make one's own’, from ad- ‘to’ + proprius ‘own, proper’.
Our audience today finds it disgusting and even malicious to wear a First Nation feathered headdress. Either at Burning Man or any other large festival where the young people gather and frolic and celebrate their youth. Evidently, the spirit of the intent to wear the feathers is insulting to the, let’s say the spiritual interest of the headdress. Spirare from the Latin to breathe. A spiritually minded person or a spiritualist would then be someone invested in breath. Knowing the culture of Burning Man by proxy I would say the prior attestment is offensive to those who have the secret mystic insight into the founding of Burner culture. Perhaps Coachella is the same.
Burners believe they are sinking deep into the creation of a newfound spiritually ecstatic culture. The feather headdress exactly symbolizes the efforts to create an anarchic society with no dependence on debt nor currency. Using the feathered cap to adorn the body for what is believed to be a prurient interest is antagonistic to values of cultural ownership. What if they do not believe themselves to be anti-prurient? What if sodden sexuality is intertwined with breath consciousness itself? I sympathize.
Muppets
And yet, I hear in the audience fury. These feathers belong to the Native American culture! To use them is an appropriation of that culture. It maligns and abuses them as further example of colonial imperialism. Well.. the feathers belong to the bird.
What is true is that in Sport to take on image of a sambo or a First Nation and sell it on cheap Chinese cotton is offensive comprehensively.
This same behavior is ignored when a lithe and voluptuous young kitty wears a nun’s costume at a Halloween party. Why this hypocrisy? It is also spiritual uniform. Could it be more insulting if a Jewish girl or Protestant wears the Catholic habit? No one yet cares. This might have more to do with the perceived power of the Church over colonized peoples. It is always in good taste to insult the powerful. (We are asked though not to insult our hosts.)
If you insult, today, the wretched, you better have a God damn good reason. With reason, then by all means.
The film Airplane from 1980 might very well be unforgivable or inexcusable. And yet it’s damn funny. The old white lady that speaks jive is a fantastic conflation of learning patois, our communal yearning to help those in need, with the risible notion of appropriation in the first place. It’s complicated humor and like the old white lady, well intentioned.
Airplane Zucker Brothers 1980
What is more troubling perhaps, is the scene where Ted Striker brings a basketball and hoop to the jungles of Africa. He shows the group of attentive tribesmen a simple free throw (off wide right.) He then steps off court to speak to Elaine for a moment, and behind him very quickly you see the men double clutching and jamming basketballs and dribbling like Harlem Globetrotters. Grotesque as this is, it does brings up interesting questions on the appropriation of culture. Basketball is Canadian you see.
We still play basketball like this in Canada
Sport is both problematic culturally and extremely good. It is a non-violent cooperative sport where tribes play out anxieties and mutual distaste through competition and good sportsmanship. There are rules. It is egalitarian. (that society is climbing pyramids in the first place is essentially bad.) Great Britain brought football to the world through empire and colonialism. There are many bad things about colonialism. However the appropriation of organized sport by indigenous peoples is Good. It is celebrated and brilliance is compensated. That billionaires exist and own things like clubs is a separate problem from the benefits that arise from appropriating colored laundry.
I myself feel a passionate kinship with black and gold jerseys and have followed them through airports and crowded city streets anxious for connection. #geuaxsaints
On Bob
The other day, my wife and I (the one I should have married) were reading a recent interview with Bob Dylan in the NY Times by Douglas Brinkley called “Bob Dylan has a lot on his mind.”
Reading it was a lovely interlude into Bob’s mind. Quite like that Netflix documentary on the Rolling Thunder Revue where Bob is so relaxed and cool and ancient it’s hard to remember a time when the elderly were deemed square. These post war kids had to really try and sound beat; they had to fake it to some degree before they got hip, and some really jumped into the deep end.
I noticed also when I changed my accent.. or I guess when I faked my accent that being affected also created an effect. Speaking with the diaphragm phlegmatically slowed the mind. It made us less reactive. And so when I spoke American I spoke louder and with more contempt and sauce. I was that. Perhaps for the boomers something like that happened when they became hip.
The interviewer had an unique take on the work of Bob. He saw Bob as Collage artist something like William Burroughs alone in his room cutting out newspapers and gluing them together to write Naked Lunch. Whereas I had seen Dylan as a Jack Kerouac figure writing continuous Whitman lines in a kind of genius. Whereas if you see Tangled up in Blue or Shelter from the Storm as a collage then ambiguous lines are simply intentional zen accidents. Dada creations. Any meaning derived is yours not his. As is responsibility.
Mr. Brinkly asked Bob about bluegrass wondering perhaps if this was a new direction. He mentioned the Osborne brothers and said:
““Bluegrass music is mysterious and deep rooted and you almost have to be born playing it. Just because you are a great singer, or a great this or that doesn’t mean you can be in a bluegrass band. It’s almost like classical music. It’s harmonic and meditative, but it’s out for blood.””
Bob gives himself a qualifying out here with the almost. Those adverbs are helpful. Like saying that Wilt Chamberlain is arguably the best basketball player of all time. There is no question that he is, you just don’t want to get into a hissy fit with championship fanboys. So Bob saying ‘almost have to be born to it’ means that I don’t get to say that Bob is a racist.
There is another ambiguous line between being a minstrel show and being a real good fucking blues band.. a thin blue line between black face and the Allman brothers is what I am saying. You can feel it. Just like you can feel the lack of depth in Eric Clapton, but you feel Duane Allman’s authenticity as a blues player. Duane is born to it. Duane’s nuanced slide guitar makes Derek and the Dominoes exponentially better. Whereas by himself Clapton is technical almost academic in his play. What I am saying is that Layla is almost garbage without Duane Allman.
My childhood friend Dr. Sumanth Gopinath of the University of Minnesota music program wrote on Bob Dylan. In his Highway 61 revisted:Bob Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World by UoM press he spoke specifically on Bob’s myriad vocal phrasing. And he touched on the kind of minstrelsy affectation that occurs in the early work. Blues was an affectation for Euro American culture. What I would proffer is that all culture is affected and appropriated until it becomes good. And then it is whole.
Turning the table here you have the banjo which is itself an object of appropriation. And yet now so clearly defined as an object of white inbred culture as to be wholly divorced from its provenance. Banjo is a bastardization of the Swahili word Mbanza. Pictured below.
Not an 18th century photo of Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta playing the akonting a version of the mbanza
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139880625/the-banjos-roots-reconsidered
Appropriation, I would suggest, as a concept is a form of nationalism. The histrionics in a discussion of ownership of cultural artifact is not dissimilar to when the French Academy insists on what is correct in French Language. Correct is an arbitrary construction. Does a saxophone belong to white people? Does it belong to John Coltrane? Does the basketball belong to Dr. Naismith? No, it belongs to the HMFIC.
The notion of ownership is what is risible. Human beings make these things and we should listen to them if they are good. To suggest otherwise is to let the fanboys win.
In 1996 I was dating pretty seriously a Jewish girl whose father was from Trinidad. Tamara DeSilva her name was, and that is pretty good melodic combination of identities. Tamara meaning the date palm in Hebrew and DeSilva meaning of the Forest in Portugese. Tamara was, as I knew her, very comfortable self-identifying as a Jew. And, I would say she was also comfortable identifying as African American. She was black. And actually my family had significant arguments to the wisdom of my dating a black girl. What was interesting is that her own father didn’t think she was black.
In Trinidad, Mr. DeSilva knew what a black person was. That was an African. There was a large population of Africans in Trinidad. But, he was brown. Indian perhaps. From India. Though he feigned surprise, we think, when informed that there was an Indian population of ex British Colonial bureaucrats in Trinidad. In the hampsted of Merrick, Long Island where Tamara grew up, however, she was black. And there is no getting around it in America.
In Great Britain Pakistanis are called blacks. In America you can blackfish- to spray tan and wear cornrows and otherwise pretend your provenance is African. Though to be hooked is at your peril.
For all of us our provenance is Africa, what we are talking about is do you share a cultural experience with the ‘hood or are you pretending? Aren’t we all though? A personality is a construction. It is a made thing that is impermanent Patanjali tells us.
1964 “My Fair Lady” WhiteFishing
So at this point I’m 19 wearing a Dashiki, listening to Bob Marley obsessively and I’m seeing the Abbyssians and other Reggae on the regular. Sure, some appropriation is going on. I’m wearing the cultural artifact that Bob Marley made popular. What is “popular” is a cultural activity that suits the taste of the general public. And failing that, Pop seeks to dramatically transform that Taste. It had the same effect on me as Keith Richards. We are both working class and both like country, blues, and folk music. And went after it. Richards heard Marley and moved there he liked it so much. He became Captain Jack Sparrow then of the islands.
Early in his career Richards and Jagger were derided as Plastic Soul. And so the Beatles titled their new album Rubber Soul. In any event a few haggard years later in his lonely bedroom Keith created the riff for Gimme Shelter and the world burned down. It is Real, and it has become sincerely good blues. It is actually a great thing.
So I had a taste for Reggae and dressed appropriately.
Later that year, ‘96 maybe, Tamara and I went to see a bluegrass group in Chicago. I asked the band to play Two Dollar Bill and they were delighted that I even knew the song. They played it SO well that it inhabited my body. I’m lit up. Tamara was watching me very carefully as she had never seen me quite so physically inhabited like this. I was a self-conscious Lover, you see.
She said “You need to follow that. You need to find that music.”
I can also understand wanting to change my makeup to attract this man’s attention. He is demonstrating wealth and power and drips virility. If I am a girl with nothing, I would want that too.
But, forgive me, I meant to include this title instead:
Suits are interesting. Cultural layovers from military couplets and uniforms (the military is now cool again.. though when Jimi and the Fab 4 wore it.. also cool. Because its pimped out) a suit demonstrates power and financial wealth. These men “appear” extremely organized and cooperative (and that is the point of appearances—to impress and deceive) and that probably would appeal to me as a desperate small town girl seeking a 30 year mortgage.
These ladies have pretty much the same motivation
Antithetical to what André Mare called Cubism and Camoflauge, but what the hell?
(in that they are not trying to hide!)
A couple years later after my little sojourn in South Korea Tamara and I moved to Austin, Texas. My brother denizened there and quickly introduced us to what was hip to Austin. That, so we could assimiliate quickly. I took to the Gourds right away and we eventually became quite friendly with the band, and I even thought of myself as one of the official Gourd Dancers. As there was a couple of us who danced ecstatically to their folksy interpretation of blues and country standards, Beatles covers, and intriguing Gospel Tom Waitsy beatnik sounds made possible by Bassist Jimmy Smith’s hip dada collage and Mandolin lead Kevin Russell’s sincere and fervent faith.
The Gourds. The fellow on the right is accordionist Claude Bernard from Louisiana and was arguably my best friend.
The Gourds were a band that I thought, with their powerful lean songwriting, every bit as good as the Beatles. It was unfathomable to me at the time that they didn’t share their wide acclaim. They seemed insurmountable.
And then they covered Gin and Juice and truly became a known commodity.. a real thing.
Kevin, far left, was authentically blackish. Ish is added to adjectives to indicate that someone has a quality to some extent. He was street country. Listened to Public Enemy as easily as he slid into Mahalia Jackson. In this country way, his experience was indifferent from being black in America. Though, and this is a big though, he mirrored the policemen rather more closely.
I was skittish around the Gourds. I believe I had a sense that Claude, the accordion player was the lowest on the pecking order and a kind of low hanging fruit. He had an ongoing relationship with one of the groupies I had also been intimate with Katie Pearl—a Jewess Theatre Director and my acting coach. So we could commiserate and getting close to the band was all I was after really. The other girls could screw them happily, but I am not sure what is more intimate, cavorting in bed or two men complaining about the same woman.
One time before a show in Austin I was backstage (And I have never been more giddy to write a sentence) Like young ibex they started to buck and slam their heads together. Kevin threw a chair against the wall and that scared me and I was also concerned about the tact of the action. A couple of deep throated yawps and yeehaws and they were ready to play, and I followed them out.
In the first set they played Trampled by the Sun. Which is a minute and half song and is more of a poem really. It’s a moment in ecstasy.
“Oh trampled by the sun
Oh sexless for days
Oh and I sweat gardenias
Oh sexless for days
I may be under valor’s feet
I’m ain’t scared to be a coward, no
Unless I’m drunk and missing for days
And I been drunk and missing for days
Got guts of crystal, yeah
That never saw, never say the sun
Oh and I’ll consider superstition
And the reason, the reason for Apollo
Oh sexless for days
Oh trampled by the sun”
I have only just now discovered that the song was Sexless for days and not Sex Lasts for Days. Which is quite different.
At any rate at the end of the song I overstepped myself and said: (my voice carries quite naturally, and fills a stadium when I project)
“Man, that song is too short.”
Claude, my friend, agreed with me on stage.
“Yeah, that’s a pretty short song, guys.”
Jimmy immediately glared death at him, as it was his creation, of course, but this broke the wall of trust in the band. We are competitors for attention, you see. A concert is combat. And, It was at this point of betrayal that our friendship petered out. I also called him an asshole for taking up cigarettes. I know that’s something you do to look cool, but I was outraged and a vegan, and we were going in different directions.
At the end of each concert the Gourds will play their signature song—Snoop Dogg’s Gin and Juice. Claude has never been crazy about it as he believes it disrespectful to women. The irony being that girls go crazy for it. Kevin’s arrangement into two ascending and blistering bluegrass climaxes is tough to ignore. There is something so inherently cool about the song that even my mother loves it. The energy builds from the first quiet bar and when Kevin finally belts out after the quiet bridge interlude the City of Compton the crowd universally loses their minds and becomes whole.. Dharana.. absorbed and unified. No longer aware of diffirénce.
“Later on that day
My homey Dr. Dre came through with a gang of Tanqueray and a fat ass Jay,
of some bubonic chronic that made me choke. Shit, this ain’t no joke
I had to back up off of it and sit my cup down
Tanqueray and chronic, yeah I’m fucked up now
But it ain’t no stoppin, I’m still poppin
Dre got some bitches from the city of Compton”
This video of Snoop Dogg himself rolling with the rhythm section is delirious. It is the kind of affirmation of cultural appropriation that transcends ethnicity. It is acknowledged as Good. The cover of the song is now not derivative. Though tradition is inherently derived from a source. Tradere from the Latin: to hold to. The song is whole and unto itself.
Good.. or making an Impression
Old English gōd, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch goed and German gut .
To make one’s own:
Aries Spears, who recently was paid $300 by my brother to wish me a very happy second marriage, said of Kay and Peale that their impression of Blackness leaves him cold. It strikes a chord of inauthenticity. To his ears the impersonation rings hollow likely as both Kay and Peale grew up with single white mothers in white neighborhoods. Their conerdiness and mutual alienation is what brought them together as friends. I wonder if they inspired the black character Lucas on Stranger Things? That they were slightly out of place in all areas of life, but that they were also sincerely nerdy. A piece of what makes Kay and Peale good is that their caricature didn’t have to be good. It just had to be funny. This is a different thing.
It is funny to whites, and that is the colonialism perhaps to insult the wretched. Perhaps, Aries feels that subtle layer of racism on his neck. Perhaps he senses that Kay and Peale are given a pass due to their features, but are actually so ethnically white as to be contributing to a problem.
Manet’s Olympia 1863 This painting has too much white.
Some things are better than others.. Impressionists tried very hard to allow the thing to be good. To look at and see if they could make a painting out of anything. And then, after the chips fall on the good or the poor.. then we are left to ask why? And here the answer is often the subject of what is interesting. But, it is the artist that makes the subject interesting, no? The internal construction makes any painting interesting.. and they make that construction. So Cubism pushes hard against this notion as converse to an impressionist. One is a mirror and the other a sponge
My drawing professor at SAIC John Rozelle, told me if you don’t like a painting figure out why.
Here you see Kurodo Seiki’s Lake Shore from 1897 From the Uniform Museum of Contemporary Japanese Art,
An artist living in France ostensibly to absorb that country’s gift to World Art, namely the notion of the avant garde. That somehow art progresses forward in some way. Rather than spin infinitely, like Coltrane’s matrix in the Lydian scale of harmony.
The tell here is that even the museum cut off the shitty parts of this painting. The edit improves it tremendously. The water is panel flat as is the landscape. The hand looks like it was carved by my 9 year old. And, he’s not good at that. The brick on the left is just dead white paste. Even the folds of the cloth are improved by editing as they had no weight in the first place. They have also softened the lens on the picture. and muted the saturation. Admittedly we are subject to the reliability of the reproduction. But, with all the mistakes in this painting I wouldn’t be surprised that this artist over shot the color and brightness with too much white. (how many times have we said that this year?)
Now, please. I am not trying to say that Japanese people do Impressionism badly. I am saying this artist does impressionism badly. And he is the most famous Japanese Impressionist. He is at the forefront of a vogue in Japan for all things French and Impressionist pre war. So I am saying that he is no Mary Cassat. No one is. No one besides Degas is that good. Good is rare.
But, what is it? What is Good?
I would offer these lovely little paintings by the Welchwoman Gwen John-- not opposed to Seiki, but certainly better. At the British Tate Modern in 2004 I viewed a selection of her Nun series which were alongside her brother’s paintings the rather more flamboyant Augustus John.
This first image I would argue is superior to Seiki’s. For one it needs no editing. She establishes the fifth line in the bottom right corner and draws the eye up the table to the hands and swishes our attention around her shoulder and hair. The ambient light is felt throughout as a kind of soft dusky air. Painting air should be the main concern for a perceptual painter. Constantly reminding ourselves that what we paint is the air in front of a thing as it comes to us, not the thing itself. Painting things is bigotry. Rather here we see in John a more receptive versus assertive stance. The weight under the tea kettle is heavy. That is, you can feel the mind picking up the thing. These are ineffable qualities, but serious ones for a painter of form. Lastly, John pulls all of this off with the flair of the alla prima. That is, it feels like she did it all at once, effortlessly. And like the Roman Cicero, it feels artless. In this way she is superior to Ingres, because it feels like we could do it ourselves.
(We can’t of course, or just barely.)
The Convalescent, by Gwen John © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
She is Good like Morandi is good. She is good like Chardin is good. The three of them take an object in light and then see the blasting of light on its surface as a thing in to itself. To this point, My father had me apprentice with him in his shop as a youth. A Mechanic is a fine profession and a skill that has saved me enormous sums and taught me to work methodically. One day he had me sandblast a door frame from an MGA. And the whole while I was absorbed in the history and beauty of the residue peeled away. These paintings remind me of that. The sense that the sun destroys these forms as it illuminates them. Which it does.
We are looking at dust catching light in front of things
So to finish, this painting is superior to Seiki’s in its light, painterly quality, form, and interior structure. The notion of a woman in repose is the same. So there is no superior theme nor text. The theme that perhaps that a man has cast his eyes upon her. And, perhaps Gwen is the same. Only that one is better than then the other is all. This is sometimes true. Sometimes the audience has a preference, but sometimes someone is just inherently better. Some are just more likable than others. Like Tom Hanks for example.
Jennifer Lopez was recently cancelled for a role as a drag queen. She is obviously not trans, of course. Neither is Jeffery Tambor, but JLo is someone queens aspire to be. She is a star, and she exudes puissant glam. That she was cancelled for this role is unfortunate, because if you can get the double bottom in a part (as the hedgefund set call her) than you have a got a superstar for your vehicle.
She is Good and Great.
Two paintings that I have imbedded below make another example of what is gōd. The two of them have the same format, though the first uses this fifth line that you can see in the Franz Hals that I have placed here. This is something that Hans Hoffman teaches in his notions of plastic space. A painting is a box. One plane in front of another plane. We penetrate the box with the fifth line and all the stuff happens there in that newfound space. The AbEx painters dispensed with these notions and pursued flatness as a kind of truth to form. Though Willem DeKooning and Hoffman have ten fold more space than Frank Stella’s early work. Something that Stella himself tried to rectify in his seminal text Working Space. That a surface is flat and therefore we should be truthful to that fact needn’t be a virtue. That is a mistake actually.
“The box” Frans Hals See the front plane of the chair as opposed to the back plane of the wall. In between is the Man. Hoffman here is playing exactly the same game. Ask yourself.. how does blue come forward? Doesn’t blue recede? J
Gwen John with Nuns
In the second picture, above, we see a peculiarity. And this is really a question of modernism or perhaps mannerism is a better term here. The perversity of this elongated figure, which her brother Augustus adored, is interesting. If this is a mistake then the picture is unforgivably worse than the other. If it is intentional, then the picture’s inherent mannerism is a more interesting modernist move. Modernism being the upheaval of outmoded monuments, or statues. Out with the old..
For me though still, worse than the giant panda hands and the elongated arms is the primitive face. It’s just not good. It has no form, and wouldn’t pass a second year drawing course. (They don’t actually test anymore) If John is pursuing folk traditions and primitivism than it becomes interesting despite its painterly quality. This is where the definition of Good becomes extremely important. In that it has consequences.
This incredible painting, which is not nice to look at; objectively much worse than Gwen John is by Picasso
Les Demoiseilles d’Avignon 1907 Pablo Picasso
This painting valued slightly higher then John’s at $1.2 billion is right in what should have been the natural middle of Picasso’s Rose period. Suddenly However, it was like he was gripped by the concept of Sign. In the quick of the night he realized that folk sculpture of the South Pacific was itself signatory of reality less then an observation of it; saw that Masks were Modern in their affect of taking on and constructing personality and immediately went home and fucked up his painting.
This convulsion of understanding is why this painting is valued as it is. It is an extraordinary insight in the history of the human race just as it is a symbol of Colonial and Cultural Appropriation and is also just fucking unpleasant to look at. I don’t need to explain why, do I? Can’t you just look at it? And, do you not feel like you want to look away?