by Christopher Heffernan

The cult classic Trout Fishing in America, written by Richard Brautigan and first published in 1967, has been released in a new edition by Mariner Books, a subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.  The book has not been published on its own since the early ‘80’s when Houghton Mifflin began packaging Brautigan’s books together in single volume sets with Trout Fishing in America set together with The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar.  The new standalone edition, costing $13.95, and running 112 pages has a warm introduction from former poet laureate Billy Collins but also comes with a startling peculiarity.  For the original edition and the subsequent packaged editions after the covers had been a picture of Brautigan with a woman in front of a blurred statue of Benjamin Franklin.  It may at first seem like it does not matter but the first chapter of the book speaks directly about this cover, so it seems strange that Mariner decided to change the cover to the childlike drawing of a fish that was used for the dedication page and instead put the photo that is the theme of the first chapter called “The Cover for Trout Fishing in America” inside the book, just before the introduction.  Of course the book business demands that as time goes by and tastes change so must covers change but with a post modern tour de force that uses meta as one of its key elements and has the first chapter titled and dealing directly with the cover, it is self defeating to change it. 

The book is divided up into 47 sections or chapters, each with a title, and ranging in length from one page to roughly six.  It is a quick read and a fun read and it is a read you can always go back to as the undercurrents that Brautigan deals with offer a depth that lurks in the back of each chapter and the back of the reader’s mind so that there are always new connections to be made and new feelings to be felt.  The sections are split into different threads and themes with some recurring but with no over all coherent story, making it lyrical.  But this does not make it any less of a novel.  What engages the reader is, first, Brautigan’s prose style; smooth, light, with easily read and digestible sentences that move easily and naturally from one to the other.  Then there is the clash of themes where, here, drama does not build in the character’s lives, it is built in the reader himself as the different images and scenes, descriptions and events constantly push into and pull each other along.  And then there is the aspect of metafiction, fiction that reflects upon itself.  Brautigan takes it and puts in the first chapter and references the cover, as mentioned, a photo taken in front of a Benjamin Franklin statue in a park in San Francisco. 

The self referencing is important as it starts the function of building the book as an experience in the reader.  Good books make reading an experience so that the reader is not following a story but actually having emotional reactions to the work, is actually feeling and creating memories of feeling; so what Brautigan does by opening the book with a discussion of the cover is telling the reader that the event isn’t a story, or the book, but is actually the reader, as the reader must go back and observe the cover and now knows that the author who is now the narrator knows that he is writing a thing and he’s telling you he’s writing it so that like all good metafiction he points out that the thing is not the Thing but is a reflection of it and that the real Thing is life itself.  And then he goes on with the other themes, most particularly the degradation of America, as an optimistic description of the statue of Ben Franklin statue and the word WELCOME facing the four directions, are coupled with bums at a church across the street waiting for free sandwiches.  It is a scene of poverty and a clash with the manufactured image of America that moves throughout the book.  The image is then heightened by a Kafka quote that reads, “I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic.”

This degradation through its many facets, the rise of technology, loss of value, loss of a connection with something more natural or organic, etc, runs the length of the book and is paralleled and contrasted with the other large thread that is of pastoral scenes of fishing.  Many of these scenes involve a family, moving around from campsites in America, illustrating the splendor of the country and the depth of its natural beauty while at the same time reinforcing the book with the metaphor for fishing, sustenance, a theme as old as Christ.  What is remarkable about the book is that although Brautigan has forgone classic structure he retained one of the oldest themes, that of life returning life to itself with the symbol of fish.  That this lost connection with nature can be retrieved through fishing.  Over the centuries this theme often involved a redemption, usually of land or character but always in the end of life.  Brautigan knows this but does not state it.  Instead he gives the reader events and description so that instead of being told what the problem is it is made implicit and instead of being told what to do about it the book, being set up as an event itself, activates the reader’s own sympathy or empathy or even urgency.  This is one of the key elements that made it such a hit in the ‘60’s.  It was a true cry, a sign, pointing directly at the clash of technology and nature and that nature was loosing—as Brautigan points out when addressing the camping craze in America that the Coleman lamp has become the beacon of these people and that it is “unholy”; and as he points to the rise of consumerism which is wonderfully illustrated in the section titled “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard.”  In this chapter the narrator finds out about a place that sells streams for trout fishing, that you can go there and build a stream, paying for it by the foot, stock it with fish and even surround it with trees and shrubs and wildlife to make a perfectly manufactured natural setting.  Brautigan’s light style makes these few pages seem almost cutesy as the narrator is picking out what he wants and discusses options as if buying a car with the salesman.  But those Brautigan undercurrents begin to creep up and the astute reader will begin to realize that it is a simple but poignant and strong commentary on, what was at the time, a rising consumerism that is now our everyday way of life.  Though we do not buy trout streams by the foot, almost everything else in our society, including our health and our bodies, has become commodities for profit. 

What stands out in the book, though, as truly astounding, is the relationship that “Trout Fishing in America” has with the reader, that it is a thing, not only the book itself, but in the book “Trout Fishing in America,” exists as an object to be explored, a personification, an event and even an entity unto itself.  Brautigan begins this creation of Trout Fishing in America as an entity right in the second chapter where the narrator wonders about when he first heard about Trout Fishing in America and there is a response after his brief musings by Trout Fishing in America itself.  This sets the stage for Trout Fishing in America not being simply an activity or even a pastoral state of mind to be reached in the tranquility of nature, but an actual entity, running around out there.  It moves, it talks, it does things.  It is at the same time a hotel and a bum named Trout Fishing in America Shorty.  It is all these things and more and Brautigan does not waste his or the reader’s time by trying to define it or explain it so that the reader may on his own grasp it.  This is where his having the book as a true experience comes into play, because it is the event of reading all of the chapters and sections against each other where Trout fishing in America is all of these different things and exists as different things, undefined and explained in their relationships that, in the end, the reader must put it all together into the actual experience, the way that any person who lives through an event puts the pieces together for a full understanding. 

It is not all completely out of bounds.  In the end Brautigan brings the pastoral family of campers to the city and the park in San Francisco with the Franklin statue that starts the book, pinching the whole thing off almost as it had begun.  Here, with their little girl, they come across Trout Fishing in America Shorty who, old and broke and nearing death beckons to the child who at first pays him attention then with a flippancy and frivolity runs away.  It is a scene of contrasts and foils, of warmth and desperation, of family and loneliness that is offered to the reader, so typical of this book and Brautigan, with no implicit meaning other than what the reader can get from it with his own senses.  

Over all the book is short and accessible, easy to read, and easy to read on many levels.  It is an exquisite example of post modernism and a triumph of literary themes and explorations that edge into the prophetic.  It is almost sad that this book is a cult classic, that its association with the 60’s and the counter culture movement has basically trumped its validity as solid work of fiction.  Hopefully, now, enough time has gone by and with the publication of this new edition by itself the up and coming generation of readers will see Trout Fishing in America for what it truly is.

(crowd-sourcing)
Having met David Hammons twenty tears ago (if not more), I know his motto has always been, how to stay ahead of the game.

On a personal level, I’ve always thought of him as someone who never followed trends. His ideas about art have always been something new and different.

              For example, at one point he was selling snowballs on the corner of St. Marks and 2^nd Ave, and at another time he took telephone poles, and placed basketball goals atop the poles, which he showcased in an empty lot in Harlem. He called this piece, Higher Goals.

              Then, at one time, while sitting at an opening at a Gerhard Richter show at the MOMA, David said he wanted to do a show at Tribes. When I asked him what the content would be, David was quiet and said nothing. He instructed me to leave what I had on the wall, and said he would be by the next day.

              The next day he came by, took a newspaper, rubbed it against the wall where the frames were, producing an outline on the wall. This process took him less than an hour. He shook my hand and said, “I’m ready.”

              The next day, Robert Storr, who was the chief curator of contemporary art at the MOMA, and Jack Tilton showed up wanting to know, ‘where was the art. David called it invisible art. Unfortunately for them, there was no art to be taken from the walls.

              It was then six months later that he repeated the same process down at Ace Gallery, leaving the whole space devoid of art objects, with a woman sitting at a computer, next to someone playing the violin. That was the art.

              It was somewhere around this time that I introduced him to Mireia Sentis, who wanted him to do a show in Spain. He had no idea as to what he would show, or how much he could charge the institution. 

              She explained that his show would take place in the Crystal Palace in Madrid, which the Spanish had built to collect flowers from the Philippines. Meanwhile, Mr. Hammons had been invited to produce a show in Poland. He sent them a fax announcing the date of his arrival in Madrid.

              It was right then and there, he hit upon the Idea of the Global Fax Festival. Aside from A Gathering of the Tribes, David contacted an array of other galleries and institutions, which had shown his work over the last twenty odd years.

              And on opening night, during a thunderstorm in Madrid, he had people sending faxes from all over the world. The faxes rained in from fax machines which were suspended from the ceiling of the Crystal Palace, while Butch Morris was performing written and improvised music. The faxing went on for an entire month. That is, whenever artists, writers and musicians dropped by Tribes, we had them shoot a fax over to Madrid. The same was true for the other participating institutions.

Over the course, over 10,000 faxes were received. From those, a book was produced, including over 300 faxes from all over the globe. Some artists whose work can be found in the Global Fax Festival booklet include: Andrew Castrucci, Butch Morris, Sarah Fergisun, Giuseppe Gallo, Jack Tilton, Alecia Romero, Amy Ouzoonian, Amiri Baraka, Stanley Whitney, Elana Oscar, and many others. Pieces include drawings, prints, manifestos, news articles, poetry and more. One piece features a sketch of Dali’s famous mustache. Another is simply the word, BUSH! with the exclamation point illustrated as a noose.

              Originally, when Mr. Hammons got wind that the show would take place in a glass enclosure, he thought it would be a good idea to use sledge hammers and stones to destroy the entire space. But the Spanish government had disagreed. Global fax festival was plan B.

His latest foray; he was invited to do a show in Vienna. He came up with idea of smells. He would fill the space with various odors, and this would be the show.  Mr. Hammons has always been one who thinks of making art out of nothing, and nothing seems to be his forte.

 by Patrick Kosiewicz

From 1972-1975 Miles Davis and a band of warrior musicians
took audiences back to the furthest reaches
of human and earth history
with their elemental, organic, universal, and utterly spontaneous sound.

It began as a return to Africa,
site of the first human revolution,
radiated to the Indus Valley and the jungles of South America,
and then went further back in time
covering the expanses of Pangea, Gondwana, Panthalassa and beyond.

Michael Henderson set off massive tectonic shifts and stirred seas of magma with his bass.
Pulse of life through time and space ran through James Mtume’s hands.
The organic bounce of the biosphere sprang from Pete Cosey’s guitar strings and wah-pedal.
Miles’ horn was a rumble from the earth’s core, a terrifying message from the sky, the breath of man’s eternal state of the blues on this turtle-back world…

Warm mud bubbling up from a primordial land…warm blood running down the leg of primordial mother…the childscape of humankind where people spontaneously adorned themselves with spiraling hats of grass and blazing pigments crushed from earth’s color wheel…the secret dance of cellular procreation…a mass migration of mammoths with birds chattering on their backs…a giant butterfly landing on a naked child’s hand…the lost legends of man and woman told by a horn at a gathering of people around a fire….

Scholarly sources for the earliest planetary and human history abound, but this library of nature’s funk is just as rich a source for one seeking answers to the origins (and future) of man: On the Corner, Dark Magus, Pangea, Agharta, Live- Evil, Get Up With It. There is much that will provide you with radio-carbon-fortified facts and dazzling speculations, but little that will take to you to an original state of mind. The soundscapes in the above-mentioned albums reveal human beings’ deepest beginnings and most distant destinies.

On the Live - Evil album cover you will find a naked, gleaming African earth queen adorned with crimson samurai helmet from the future-past…a wall of archaic Arabic calligraphy that mirrors the topography of a microchip…a woman who is perhaps our ancient Ethiopian mother, perhaps a bronze mother of a future humanity…A people traverse badlands in sky-colored robes, wave of blood and fire with a human face arcing over them…

When this music was being made there was an outcry from critics who wanted Miles to forever inhabit the realms of Kind of Blue, Porgy and Bess, and Miles Smiles (they later praised the music and deemed it ‘ahead of its time’ and so on). These people were very much like some producer who once told Miles to think about slavery when playing his blues, and there are many still who prefer the safe, easily-fathomed Prince of Darkness. But to the brave ones, in the words of Miles: “Pack your toothbrush and your douche bag,” we’re going to Gondwana.

An extremely long and image-dense New York art fair report by Janet Bruesselbach

Everything I shot from Wednesday to Sunday is here.

FIRST COURSE: The Armory Show

I registered as press in advance for this and showed up about ten minutes after the press conference to pick up my badge. I briefly glanced at Pier 92, where they only show dead artists, or at least which consists primarily of resale by historical, museum-level galleries. While there’s much more interest in the first market of Pier 94, the historical gap is small.
Example:

Juan Genoves, Transcurso, 2006 detail. From the press balcony this looked like a photograph but it’s really thick impasto.

As press, I have exchanged my attention and goodwill for privileged access, and operate as free publicity for the show. But as a cultural consumer advocate in the attention economy, I now consider anyone non-VIP who pays for access to be a Sucker. If you have a blog or anything I recommend you write yourself an assignment letter or just register on their site and get in free.

Maybe my research-fu is weak but I cannot find an image of how the pier is laid out. It’s basically a T. I started on the right arm of the T and methodically went down the rows. Because there are an odd number of rows on the staff of the T you can end up redundantly walking along it this way (and thereby seeing the featured Berlin part twice), so it’s best to do the arms by row and the pier over the water in a zig zag with a little overlap in the middle. It’s easy to get distracted by something on the other side and overwalk. With the white lights and walls everywhere, my eyes got much tireder than my feet. One thing I found I ended up doing was lingering in a corner staring at a piece I found completely uninteresting, just to rest.

I felt I was coming into this one with preferences different from ones I would have other years or even other days. Some of my arbitrary rules, and why:
1. Galleries that are basically retail shops for pop art stars (Hirst, for example) aren’t worth discussing.
2. I’m sick of contempt for the audience and easy cultural critique. True, just because the economy’s down doesn’t mean artists should make collector-friendly work, but conceptual laziness just means you have nothing intellectually complex to talk about. It looks like some idiot has scammed the gallery and that’s just business.
3. I’m paying particular attention to class issues as well as ethnic politics. While the Armory is aggressively post- and inter-national, it began as an American exodus for the European avante-garde. Without contemporaneity entrenched in the Obama Era we’re just looking at aesthetic balloons.
4. Things that are difficult to transport or install are interesting. Animatronics, performances, digital media.
5. But contrary to (4), things obviously marketed towards a particular part of the market - either museums or collectors - aren’t as interesting as those that really work just for the Armory. It’s like admiring mall displays. I’m looking for what is essentially intimate public art without the effects of public funding.
6. Every year I am less and less inclined to like something just because it resembles my own field, figurative painting. There’s a lot of figurative painting that’s done either photographically or non-representationally that is to be considered more as conceptual.
7. Things that would appeal to people with no art background and anything that disregards the whole modernist project hold a certain fascination, if only because I find myself so willing to dismiss them. This also goes for “bourgeouis” or “kitsch” work aimed at a theoretical market solely about interior decorating. Many critics overlook this work because it’s boring, and it does take up the bulk of the show, but it’s the sanctuary for the many many artists who just want to make beauty. Escapism is practical.
8. I like computers and science. And environmental issues. Grids, numbers, language: these are things I look at because they’re not something I can do well. HOWEVER. I am, if not a dogmatic technophile, at least an anti-Luddite, and will dismiss anything that’s simply critical of technology/modernity/”synthetic”.
9. Unless it’s something new by a favorite, I’m not looking at things I’ve seen before, either at Basel or at last year’s Armory. There are actually repeat pieces, which looks like it would be embarrassing or at least appears lazy. It could be argued that the galleries are standing behind their investments but it’s a waste of time to a spectator.
10. I am not looking at other art blogs and I am trying to see things other art blogs don’t before I read them.

Ultimately it’s just what caught my eye, which has an average sort of attention bandwidth, and VIKI’s camera.

What struck me in particular yesterday was the sort of economy simplified by postcolonialist Ngugi as the rich stealing from the rich. Or rather, most galleries are investments by rich people who consider themselves smart enough to try to find the few stupid rich people, or to catch the rich in moments of irrationality. Hence the free flow of champagne for handpicked VIPs. I can barely speculate on what percentage of art sales are gallery to gallery. At the super blue chip level there’s little to firmly connect particular artists to particular galleries besides geography, and even that’s irrelevent when the fairs, especially in an art hub like NYC, consist of the fattest international ambassadors.

Lets look at pretty pictures now.

Okay, Ian Davis does these awesome wide-angle landscapes full of identical figures, commentaries on industrial science, but I can’t find the new ones he had up and the picture didn’t come through. Look out for “hubris” and “skeptics”.

I ran into Jack Tilton, and had a look at Roberts & Tilton, his L.A. branch, which had some Kehinde Wiley (who may have stepped on me) and Titus Kaphar, who deconstructs canvases to comment on race history:

“Nip tuck” (or “Lillian Dandridge”?), 2009, Crumpled canvas oil painting.

Markus Schinwald, Carola, 2009. 22×18cm oil on canvas. 19th century style portraits of cyborgs are a good direction (and many were made in the 19th century already)

Also at Yvon Lambert was one of those “difficult to reproduce” near-conceptual museum pieces by Zilvinas Kempinas, Serpentine, consisting of magnetic tape blown in a corner by a fan.

This is interesting because apart from context it’s illustration or at least kind of gross pedophiliac erotic art. It reminds me of Gravity’s Rainbow a bit. I apparently didn’t photo the attribution - if you know it, say it.

Muntean/Rosenblum: another of these paintings entrenched in photography, but there’s something about the children/escalator imagery and the discouragement of connection between photo and caption that has a poetic kick for me.

You know what? Because I’ve been just taking photos of labels (when they were there, because they weren’t always) to attribute, I may as well use those. Let’s try that.

It is a photo of a moon landing with the astronauts made black.
No, that method doesn’t really work.

The galleries that featured shows of individual artists seemed to be very proud of doing this - it was something they could afford to do, selflessly. It definitely paid off in attention to have an immersive, consistent space. A prime example is Adam McEwan’s “I Am Curious Yellow” installation at Nicole Klagsburn, which consisted of a series in only white and yellow, including blowups of Soviet German buttons, swastikas, and large prints of an article about an Olympic runner’s alleged gender fraud.

Peter Liversidge got a bright little room with two installations (”Come On In” of handpainted dice, and “little by little” neon) including the proposals for those installations.

The preponderance of high-hung neon was nicely deflated by a Japanese artist’s smashed neon sign near the ground.

I always like what Mizuma has, but if there’s a message to take from this show it’s that Orientalism doesn’t even work any more.

My bandwidth was shutting down in protest and I started favoring one-liners. I chatted with the Andrew Kreps assistant working under a painting consisting only of the words “tiny little microscopes” for a few minutes as a kind of high-stress palate cleanser. Kreps also featured a pro-choice piece by Andrea Bowers, consisting of a pre-Roe v. Wade letter from a shudderingly oppressed woman who had no idea where to get an abortion to a sympathetic (or maybe not) organization.

English mega-gallery White Cube featured this life-size bronze of a trans man by Marc Quinn.

What I find interesting about Benjamin Edwards (”Solo”, 2010 and already sold) is that 3-d is already, especially if done right, far beyond the glitchy emptiness he foregrounds.

Limning the differences between him and Justin Faunce is a quick exercise.

SCHNELL.

I love David Schnell very much.

I wonder if the title “world map of genreal hazards” is intentional. I rather like “genreal” better than “general” or “natural”. I don’t know who did the Scrooge McDuck but it’s excellently posed for this photo op.

South African galleries felt especially strong this year. This taxidermied farcegory had a live band playing incidental music that I saw VIPs covering their ears for.

I think that’s about all I can salvage. I don’t want to declare a judgment on the show overall, because it’s a lot of different galleries trying a lot of different tactics, and sometimes the good parts are just good and the bad parts are really interesting. I’ll do further posts on the many other venues that have sprouted up this week. There are qualitative comparisons to be made, and I’d rather not debate context or content.

Oh yeah. I nearly forgot Reid Seifer’s Forget perfume booth. They had spray, for forgetting. It didn’t work.

SECOND COURSE:Scope

I went to their offices first by accident instead of the Lincoln Center tent.
It turned out an hour was enough to go through the whole thing, though. The gallerists were friendlier but unlike its Miami incarnation this one did not provide free food and drink. Given the freebie culture of NYC, calorie constraint was wise - there probably wouldn’t be enough security personnel even with well-behaved, informed crowds.
That’s part of the sense I get of New York art conventions and fairs as consisting much more of people doing business than art tourists. Art tourism is a theme of a lot of the art, but in this city, that theme is a commodity rather than meta-commentary.

Are you imagining this? Doesn’t it taste great? David Stein’s absurd books, at Eleanor Harwood from SFO, give me an opportunity to mention the weirdness of SCOPE’s corporate identity, and the political paradoxes of art. People’s Revolution, Kelly Cutron’s PR and Marketing firm, arranged SCOPE’s VIP list and opening reception. There are multiple reality shows involving these people.

The entangling of leftist politics into the corporate intentions of a field about and for the rich is morally dizzying. The deliberate imagery of appropriation, the complications of the extraordinary inequality created by an abundance of artists of all different qualities of ignorance, layered into multiple generations of terrifying people and movements and strategies, is enough to make me wonder where I even got the principles I seem to have, and how best to shut them up so I can think about this more like the emergent poly-consciousness it has already become.

Bad boy scout making noises.

THIRD COURSE: Verge

It’s young and cheap and unlikely to rise to the prominence of the one-word fairs it tries desperately to emulate. Its problems are exacerbated by being held in a midtown hotel, which does not exactly have the best lighting. There are bottlenecks in the doors of the hotel rooms. Rather than adapting to the context and the claims of these smaller fairs to embrace “emerging” and “overlooked” art, this one resembled a particularly cramped craft market.

I left a terrific opening of sculptures by Sudarshan Shetty at Jack Tilton Gallery on the Upper East Side to go to this thing. I probably shouldn’t have - Steve needed me and Jack serves food. I was hungry. Verge in the Dylan Hotel was above Benjamin Steak House and the flesh made me crazy.

There seemed to be a lot of little Japanese outfits at Verge. There was at least a comfortable middle-class feel to the thing - watching Alex at Mighty Tanaka made opening a little art-selling business look fun.

Van Uxem projects, at first glance, was a sparse and intimate vanity project, but in retrospect, Heather’s was the best use of the hotel setting, and the least commercially desperate. She projected an abstract mouthlike video on a screen beside sex toys coated in wax. On the other side of the screen, of course, she sat exhausted while her son tried to sleep and strangers walked through looking uncomfortable.

Whereas Rebecca Leyche’s Vagina Doorknobs (exactly what they sound like) were slightly deflated by their sales pitch label.

FOURTH COURSE: Pulse

Rumor is this is the best fair. It was probably worth ditching both works. Tonight’s theme: Cybernetics.

Bill Smith Magnetically stabilized, air driven, computer interfaced, chaotic emu egg pendulum, 2010. Water, vacuum formed poly carbonate, carbon graphite rod, aluminum, stainless steel, brass, wood, clay, one emu egg, pumps.
Another reason to love PPOW. They just seem to show good artists. Bill was there and very nice, very able to deal with my chaotic conversation.

Erik Thor Sandberg at Conner Contemporary.
I think what people mean about Pulse being good is that, to be cliche, it has a large proportion of art that speaks for itself.

Here’s what I came for, at the invite of the superhumanly gregarious Charlie James, who runs a damn fine gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown.

William Powhida and Jade Townsend, ABMB Shantytown, 2010, 40×60 graphite on paper
Bill Powhida is art’s snarky political cartoonist. He’ll probably unseat and replace Koons (unless we’re really post-Oedipal, and I don’t think so). He’s been working incredibly hard this year, and I don’t know why he’s not the only art anyone buys. More on this when I get to the weekend’s dessert, #class - its strength is that it’s such a relief from all the other stuff, especially the less thorough institutional critique.
Detail: “Have you seen all these grad students coming out of this giant fucking hole?”

Walter Robinson, Safe, 2009, mixed media

ALICIA ROSS. Motherboard_7 (Sacred_Profane), cross-stitch on cotton & pearled needles, 40 x 90 in, 2008
Thank you, Black and White gallery, for either reminding me or introducing me to one of those artists that makes me envious. My mission has already been fulfilled.

Shane Hope, atom_name_wildcard, 2009. These prints are made from images generated using ridiculously complicated 3-d visualization software that uses biological data. Shane Hope is a posthuman from the current future. I’d already seen his stuff because Winkleman is hosting what I like to call dessert (see Part The Sixth).

Who did the hypervirtual photo that’s on the cover of Lethem’s Chronic City? Scott Peterman, that’s who.

Laurie Hogan, Myth and Empire, oil on canvas, 2010, 48″x60″ (Koplin Del Rio in L.A.)

DESSERT:

Sunday was to be the day I caught up with the last few shows. What I missed, in order of regretting missing it:
INDEPENDENT (in the X Project / former D.I.A. building)(Art Fag City comments)
The Art Show
PooL
Volta
Red Dot, Korean, some panel on art blogging, wev.

Fountain was like a sideshow consisting of all the desperate, sad parts of the art world that all artists should be warned is what they may look like. I don’t think it was just the old dock it was in. Even the few things I saw there that I liked look embarassing in retrospect.

So I ended up in #class, an experimental project by Jen Dalton and Bill Powhida at Winkleman Gallery. It’s ongoing with seminars proposed by various artists for the next few weeks and I highly recommend going there. It is fun. It is said that the classroom, particularly in teaching art, is a utopian assertion, and yes, I have a bit of an academic fetish, but this is mine. Dalton and Powhida have already captured my cynic’s heart, their institutional critique / Marxy-Feministy drawings (where drawings mean mostly-penciled rants, lists, and charts), seperately, are especially refreshing amongst the art fairs. This kind of inside joke doesn’t work without placing itself inside its butt. If all art was like this we’d get tired of it. But still.

There was a truly involving conversation on art, school, and economics on the green board walls in chalk that made me wish I could remember more of the smart things I’ve said, and also that I could be in school forever (but also remember I shouldn’t teach). Drawings are on silent auction and bidding involves an application form.
I gave a hasty interview to “social media expert”/attention economist and former finance guy Zac Cohen. We happened by during Open Gaming, and I ended up sucking at Catan with Jen Dalton’s husband and friends. Everyone’s kids were there. Powhida showed up midway through with some story about leaving a laptop at a strip club. It was one of the happiest hours of my life. I don’t think I could have gorged on any more fairs.

I’m made nervous that everyone else there had day jobs, but better-paying ones than mine.

This shit is bananas. S-H-I-T.

JUST KIDS –Patti Smith

Harper Collins, New York, 2010

279 pps.

Reviewed by Bonny Finberg

     Patti Smith has kept her promise to Robert Mapplethorpe to tell their story. By doing so through the lens of a generation of artists in New York at that time, she’s written our story as well. Her book could be subtitiled: “Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation,” the Pete Townsend song she covered as if she’d written it herself.

     The book opens when, as a very young girl, Smith sees her first swan gliding then taking flight from the Prairie River in Humboldt Park. The sight of it “generated an urge I had no words for, a desire to speak of the swan…its whiteness the explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings.” This prescient moment, almost allegorical, is later played out in her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe whose place in her life was in some sense that of a fairy godfather, transforming her from insecure, self-effacing duckling to magnificent swan with wings from whose powerful beating rhythm comes an artistry of overwhelming beauty. Ironically, and typical for the times, Smith makes the conscious pledge to herself to support her artist/lover by giving him the freedom of not having to hold a job while she does. She works at various jobs so he can develop his art and afford studio space, while in the evenings, accompanying him on their routine visits to Max’s Kansas City. Their first, decidedly uneventful foray into Max’s was in 1969. Andy Warhol was no longer a regular after being shot by Valerie Solanas, though his second string, so to speak remained. Hanging out in the right places in order to meet the right people, though extremely important to Mapplethorpe is only something Smith does for his sake. She describes her reticence and painful social awkwardness. They start out in the front room near the bar spending their time drinking Cokes and trying to figure out how to work their way into the back room where the art world stars drink and commiserate, engaged in repartee that resembles a Looking Glass version of the Algonquin.

     Despite her self-consciousness in the presence of the royalty holding court in the back room, she rises to the occasion, spurred on by Mapplethorpe’s relentless pursuit of entering their inner circle. After a self-executed haircut, she describes the attention and approval that finally delivers her into the sanctuary of their Mad Tea Party.

     Patti Smith’s early religious training redefined events in clearly revelatory ways. She saw art as her “calling.” Her first confrontation with art was on a family trip to the Philadelphia Art Museum. Like much of Smith’s encounters, this was an epiphany. After a short stint in a factory in South Jersey, where she lived at the time, she left for the bus stop to take the bus to New York. Her mother had given her a white waitress outfit, complete with shoes, to ensure her survival. (They ended up in the bathroom of the first and last restaurant she would ever work in.) The going was rough and she slept in the park and in doorways before finally finding a place in Brooklyn to share. Her first meeting with Mapplethorpe happened while working behind a jewelry counter. It’s the kind of meeting that romantic movies are made of and begins a deep and long relationship that spans over twenty years.

     Among other things, these two were drawn together by their commitment to art as primary over all other pursuits. They shared musical tastes, sometimes playing certain records over and over again, and supported each other’s vision. The happy balance between their differences was maintained by the admiration and recognition of the other’s perspective and method. Smith recalls the snowy Christmas night when, walking in Time Square, they came upon the billboard “WAR IS OVER If you want it. Happy Christmas from John and Yoko.” She remarks that Mapplethorpe was impressed by the idea of artists taking over 42^nd Street. She was struck by the humanity of the statement. “For me it was the message. For Robert the medium.” This was 1969. The end of the Sixties when Smith and Robert both turned 23. With the uncanny certainty and foresight he often shows in this story, Mapplethorpe declares at the beginning of the Seventies: “This is our decade.”

     Smith and Mapplethorpe’s days at the Hotel Chelsea provide one of the most compelling and evocative aspects of this book. Their time spent with Harry Smith, encounters with William Burroughs, Viva, Candy Darling and scores of others are funny and insightful. Even when Smith was not on intimate terms with some of these well known artists, her observations from her perch on a couch in the lobby opens a window into a time when the New York art world was an accessible, diverse universe for anyone with eyes and ears. She is privy to Shirley Clarke, Diane Arbus and Jonas Meekas, as they each pass through the lobby. Viva enters like an unapproachable diva in order to intimidate Stanley Bard, then owner of the Chelsea, so as to distract him from the fact of her outstanding rent.

     An interesting revelation about Smith here is that she was not so much the wild child that her stage persona suggested. She drank little, if at all, and never smoked dope. In fact, her descriptions of Mapplethorpe and Harry Smith readying to go out after smoking a joint is pretty funny. They try on various outfits and look for keys while she, having thrown some simple but hip outfit together, sits waiting impatiently. It isn’t until much later that after having smoked herself that she thinks back and understands their distraction.

     Smith’s development as a poet/performer informs some of the most fascinating sections. Her meeting with Lenny Kaye and their first performance at St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project is a Punk version of “A Star is Born” without the tragedy. There is little evidence here of struggling to become famous. It seemed that all who knew her were pushing her to go public. Once she did, she inspired adulation from the outset, and never stopped. She continues to give radioactive performances all over the globe.

     The larger part of this book covers a time of cheap all-night diners and five and dime stores full of cheap housewares, toys and kitsch that could be recycled into art objects. I’d forgotten some of these places until I read them in these pages: Benedict’s, Child’s, Lamston’s. It was a time when we made our own greeting cards and gifts by hand and paid rent that equaled about one week’s salary. It was New York at a time when you might have to struggle to survive and do your art, whereas now it seems more necessary to sacrifice your art in order to survive. It was a place where misfits from everywhere else could co-exist, if cynically, with those who came to make their fortune. You met people in the street or the park and were friends for life. You could work for two weeks as a waitress at Max’s (even if only in the front room where people got their own drinks and stiffed the waitress as I sadly learned) and make enough money for a cheap (illegal) charter flight to Europe. Pot was $15 an ounce.

     It all sounds so idyllic even in the writing of it here. Of course, being in your twenties and thirties makes any decade “the” decade. But this was before the AIDS epidemic, Rudy Giuliani, overdevelopment and, of course, 9/ll. So many were lost — people and places. But thanks to Patti Smith’s detailed records from journals and notebooks, photographs and drawings, we have them here for all time.

by Phaedra Pinkston

Staten Island, New York vocalist/guitarist Dorian Spencer can be seen performing live around New York City making the commutes around town a little bit more relaxing for the always-on-the-go New Yorker.

Originally born in Puerto Rico, the self taught musician was greatly impacted by musical legend Jimi Hendrix additionally, all of Spencer’s songs are originally composed by Spencer himself.

The soloist even has his own record label, Mode Records.

A Jack of trades in instruments, the singer/songwriter is also well versed in the piano, saxophone, and the trombone.

Spencer is frequently seen performing at Grand Central Station, Whitehall Street Terminal, Penn Station, and of course, Times Square.

To hear original tunes by Dorian Spencer please go to www.dorianspencer.com

Cheers

Two very young painters have a show together at a gathering of the
tribes. Both took their MFA’s in 2009 from the New York Academy of Art
in TriBeCa, where the emphasis is on training students to paint, draw
& sculpt figuratively, just like the Old Masters (and like the Royal
Academy & French Salon painters of the 19th century, and the academic
branch of surrealism in France in the 1930s). Both these young
painters appear to have learned their lessons, as can be seen in
“Philip J. Hardy/Michael Gibson: Language Paintings” (through January
29). Gibson is still struggling to find himself, although some of his
pictures display sound academic technique, among them “Enter the Red
Shirt” and “They’re Year Five Thousand.” Hardy has not only mastered
academic technique, but is beginning to have ideas about how to employ
it, utilizing a blond palette & fanciful themes that resemble an
ultra-contemporary version of say, Rene Magritte. In only one instance
(among the nine paintings on view) would I say that Hardy’s technique
is inadequate to convey his ideas, but many of his images are
haunting, including “Transcendent Cars,” in which small automobile
float amid clouds, “Flying Pig,” a porker with wings, and “Pigggy,”
which shows another pig, this one under a bridge, with a wheelbarrow &
foliage. Most impressive is “Toad Lover,” a symphony in greys and
browns. It depicts a monstrously large greige toad in a greige
landscape with a smaller greige toad on his shoulders, while strapped
to the head of the smaller toad is a little house with light shining
out of its windows.

Sam Shepard’s new book of stories, Day Out of Days, is a romp through the highways of America, through the personal history of the narrators, as well as through the historical past of the many areas of the States that the highways touch and pass through, that is often as brutal and violent as it is insightful and illuminating. Published by Knopf and covering 282 pages, this new work of fiction is broken up into 133 sections that range in length from a paragraph to ten or so pages with the majority of them being only one or two or three pages and mixed in with a few titleless poems (reminiscent of his earlier work Motel Chronicles) and nonnarrative based dialogues that go untethered to any particular character, a technique used in both of his previous books of short stories, Cruising Paradise and Great Dream of Heaven. Names are rarely used and a name for a narrator or narrators is never brought up so though the steady voice of the pieces holds without much variation one cannot assume that they are all being told by the same voice, in the same vein that one cannot assume that they are all different. There is an ambiguity to who is doing the telling, but it is not an ambiguity that stumps the reader or clouds the experience of the stories with being obtuse or opaque but rather enhances the themes and the overall structure of existential query and self reflection, and by not making it the personal journey of one man, or the shared experiences of many that can be compared against each other, he does both. By never explicitly stating whether the sections are linked by one or many voices the reader must digest the stories, the journey, as both, as though it is one man traveling the heart of America, traveling his past, and as the many, the multiple people whose emotional landscapes are inextricably tied to the shared experiences of what it means to be human. And for Sam what it means to be human (or at the very least, what this book investigates as the plane of the human living condition) deals tremendously with memory.

The first story, “Kitchen,” a lyrical piece, talks mainly of the past of the narrator who lists the things around him in the kitchen, many of which are photographs, that lay out a snapshot of his past as well as a dip into the historical past with references to Sitting Bull, Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. This story is almost an archetype for the entire book as it deals with memory, the past, horses, the historical past and isolation, as the narrator says now no one comes around and that they know better and alludes to having engineered this isolation that is the fulfillment of the way of life that the narrator describes as a sinking ship, by putting a pit bull out front to keep these visitors away. In the last story of the book, called “Gracias,” the reader finds a narrator who, after driving for miles ends up in a small town with an ancient church, “ . . . walking hand in hand with our children, . . .” where having gone down a narrow side street, the family hears a piano that, when it stops, they all applaud, after which they hear a small voice from somewhere in the house say, “Gracias.” The one paragraph piece ends with the line, “That was one of those days I remember.” So here, the reader is given many of the themes that run through the book but they have resolved. They have gone from a self inflicted crippling isolation to a simple scene of music and togetherness. But the path between these two is anything but straight.

The journey along this path is literally a journey for many of the characters in the pieces themselves. Many of the sections of the book are titled with place names designated with highway numbers, “Haskell, Arkansas (Highway 70)”, “Williams, Arizona (Highway 40 West)”, “Alpine, Texas (Highway 90)”. But these places, many times, serve no real importance to the narrator, they are truck stops and gas stations, they are diners, where the narrator through the weight or sublimity of travel has become self reflected and introspective, is grappling with the greater understanding of his own life through the desolation of the place or in some cases the historical significance, which in many cases is tied directly to Native Americans. Though the narrator(s) are not Native American, it is the theme of the struggle for life, as it is now instituted in the American cultural mythology that Native Americans were systematically wiped out, that they were smashed to pieces by an overwhelming force that when fought against destroyed them even more, that binds the narrative voices together in an understanding of an impending doom, of a death that will wipe out the individual. And with this exploration goes the idea of simpler tribal times, as the journeyman grapples with modern life and is often seduced by the noble savage ideology in order to combat this awful destruction that is not lurking, but is waiting, often, in plain sight, in the faces of those around him, in his own face.

The doom is signified in many cases by memory. Memory is a major component of the book, through all the themes, pieces, characters, narrators, they are all linked by their memory of their lives, not haunted by individual events, but haunted by memory itself, by the life once lived, by the path gone by so far in what has been lived, and tied to the dysfunction of memory as many of the narrations have an inability to either remember with accuracy or to know that things have been forgotten, or that they are not being recalled properly, which in many of the sections is itself a certain death; that not only does the breakdown of the memory signify the onset of age and the impending end, but that as the events are remembered inaccurately, or with a tremendous effort to bring back the tiniest pieces, as is the case in “Indianapolis (Highway 74)”, where the narrator cannot recall a lover who he had lived with when she is standing in front of him, enormous existential anxiety is created that often defines the narrator’s emotional landscape.

Fathers and sons find their way into many of the sections of the book, a theme that riddles much of Shepard’s earlier fiction as many times there are sons learning how to deal with the disappointment of an inadequate father and fathers dealing with the profundity and, at times, absurdity of being a parent. A striking example comes from the piece “Bernallilo” which mimics an older piece from a previous collection, where the narrator’s father is stumbling drunk out of a bar and is struck and killed by a car. Here the father’s death is framed in his inadequacy as he has ended up a drunk and the son must forever live with it as it has cost him his father and a small psychological disorder as he explains at the end that he is now forever afraid of being blindsided by cars. The violence with which this event occurs is wrought throughout the book. And it is not a violence that spreads itself against the action of a story in order that the characters or even reader learn from it, that it has some intrinsic value as to educate us in life or mature us, but is rather presented as simple fact, as what is a gross base part of life that has no value in growing consciousness but is simply one other thing that we as humans must digest. In dealing with this more specifically there are two running stories through out the book, though in their sections, they are more lyrical than narrative. One is of a decapitated head found on the side of the road and the other is of a mercenary. In the decapitated head thread the sections themselves do not have much violence but violence is the backdrop as the head had been violently removed from the body and the head, through an all permeating voice, gains the aid of a passerby to bring him to a lake and toss him in. It is the aftermath of the violence, the consuming horror of the ripples from the event that is concerned here as at first the passerby must deal with what is happening, then the narration moves on to the head itself and his concerns and regrets. The mercenary is straight violence, where this man is hired to kill a man, skin his face off his skull and bring it back to his contractors. He does. Later the mercenary becomes more self reflective, but never about the way he makes a living, the violence, as that is the sustenance of his life, not something to be derided or avoided. And between these two threads are the inevitable arguments and confrontations that lace every type of relationship of a tough and violent world where Shepard often delves into the historical past, of the battles and destruction that have shaped the landscape that is being driven through, observed and examined.

But the book is not all hardship and destruction, destitute anxiety and a meaninglessness that must be dealt with the best way a person can, there is also the triumph. Many of the pieces are lyrical, many without a specific narrative direction that lets the event portrayed unfold in what, at times, is close to being imagistic poetry. Here there are birds and rivers, there is the moon and memory is not something shot full of holes as it fades away, it is something not even considered as the world, many times with music, played or listened to, is exposed as a thing not destroying us with an inane and senseless self destructing rage, but a place, like many of those places along the highways of the American west, of a beauty that comes on unfathomable and satisfies some undefined thing in all of us.

Local bass musician is a graduate of the Sarah Lawrence College music department. Only twenty-four and McEvoy has already previously performed Lincoln Center and the BlueNote however McEvoy makes it a point to perform live once at month Tribes Gallery in the East Village of Manhattan. Heavily influenced by artist such as Jimmy Hendrix, Duke Ellington, and Hank Williams, McEvoy’s style of music is rather mystifying an cannot be put into just one one classification; it’s a custom sound in the making and anything but tame. It maybe considered chamber music with a fusion jazz twist and often improved with something little extra.

By: Phaedra Pinkston

the winter wind sits in the living room
so we huddle in the kitchenin our winter coats looking silly
and too cold to do anything
but light a candle eat melon seeds
as I wonder
what do we wear when we go outside?
— poem by Frances Chung, p. 25, 1970
from “Crazy Melon & Green Apples”

On November 8, 2009, I picked up the Village Voice because of its headline “The Great Walls of Chinatown Living in Cubicles @ 81 Bowery” by Elizabeth Dwoskin . It reminded me when while traveling through India, a rich X-boyfriend exclaimed, “How can they live like this?” (see photo-”A Delhi Untouchable”) I smiled & knew how & why because I grew up in Chinatown, NYC. Since then, after making me homeless, the X lives comfortably in Provincetown.

Meanwhile, reading the article, I find the writer makes landlord-tenant relations a Catch-22 even with the intervention of Dept. of Buildings’ evictions and judicial system’s re-installment of tenants. It’s a no win unprofitable game for the Chinese in America. Where are the low-income housings? Ms Dwoskin only describes the Bowery as its traditional vicinity for “losers”….never describing the evictions as a racist act benefiting the landlord. Obviously, it is a continuum battle for low-income families. Now, there is every reason for gentrifying the nabe.

An Untouchable in New Delhi, India © photo by Susan L. Yung

“Plenty” in her short life is what she wrote, knowledgably. She was emerging as a public figure to become a spokesperson for life in Chinatown, which is the Chinese immigrant story as reflected like the Jews of Lower East. In 1977, inside a “slum” ghettoized neighborhood, Frances prepared her first manuscript that she had “written a secret book entitled “Crazy Melon”. She submitted to various funding sources for publications and routinely, had been rejected. It would be a social class problem where at that time, (is the norm) … to be reckoned as amateurish writings by elite writers like Kimiko Hahn, graduate of Columbia University, or Kenneth Roth. Nevertheless, by 1980, Frances began to receive a poetry grant from New York State Council on the Arts-Creative Artists Public Service (NYSCCA CAPS) in 1980-81; A New York Times Co Foundation scholarship (1986); and a NYSCA Writer-in-Residence fellowship (1987-1988). This gave her confidence to submit her second manuscript, “Green Apple” for “conventional poetry competitions” such as the publication Walt Whitman Award sponsored by the Academy American Poets in NYC. Her brief poems, short vignettes and prose reflect her precise selection of words. Her sparse lines describes a single Asian woman’s (maybe feminist) subtle thoughts during the Ethnic (Black, Hispanic and Asian) Civil Rights movement of the 60s-80s. Her work is “not prophetic, but the creation of deeper silences in which to safeguard personal or community thought, feeling and relationships from the onslaught of real estate speculation, … exploitation by the garment industry, and the ideology of a nation at war against yet another Asian populace, the Vietnamese.” She never joined a union, a NGO organization or participated in Chinatown worker’s issues. Her sole participation had been in women’s writers groups of LES or whenever they had blossomed in the late 70s. Eventually, such women’s intellectual groups diminished in late 80s. Maybe, she lacked political motivations or to participate in any activities such as attending marches, rallies; demonstrations and other radical/revolutionary changes would stunt her career as educator.

In Frances Chung’s 40 years, she poetically, with a touch of sardonic humor, described the boundaries of NYC’s Chinatown from Canal St to the diverse culture of Lower East Side during the years of 1966-1990. She died in 1990. However, there is only one posthumously book that has been published by Wesleyan College and edited by Walter K. Lew, a poet and Korean-American scholar. He had total access of her two manuscripts to print this singular book entitled “Crazy Melon & Chinese Apple-the Poems of Frances Chung”. The book came out in 2000; 10 years after her tragic death and it took me twenty years later to find the book to peruse. By now, any trace of this poet’s qualitative experiences are forgotten and there are more writers of Asian American descent in NYC capable of writing about the same perpetual struggles as experienced in the 60s & 70s.

The paperback book has 144 pages of Frances’ poems, vignettes and prose writings with 30 pages of Walter K. Lew’s titles of “Commentary”, “About the Text” and “Appendix.” His intensive research and faithful chronology of her writings portrays the writer’s development from adolescent to a matured woman with speculative lovers as perceived by Walter K. Lew. He even directed her cover design that trivializes her manuscript into a small illustration. Frances’ intent is to utilize a Chinese wrapper’s design where she had scotch taped for her front manuscript, “Crazy Melon”. The wrapper enclosed dried sweet plums where Westerners are unfamiliar with its tart sweet taste and flavor. (Hard to explain.) I would prefer if the artwork had been blown-up full size to appreciate the candy wrapper’s artistry since it reflects the art of Asia. The cover’s design is important for marketing of the book’s contents especially if it is a foreign culture to an ignorant mainstream American culture.

Luckily, I had survived NYC’s various stereotypical labels and can enumerate or reflect the similar experiences as well as go beyond the melding compatibilities or incongruence of Eastern (mainland China) and Western cultures due to my various travels to third world nations. I seem to complete the cycle of growing up in a Chinatown and returning to the same ghetto/barrio problems that are also inherent throughout the world.

Frances and I were classmates in Junior High School and High School. I had moved into the Chinatown neighborhood at the age of 12 from 2 years in the Bronx and 10 years in Portland, Oregon, my birth state. NYC’s cultural shock had affected me grandly since my family in Portland, Oregon were the only Chinese living within a mile from another Chinese family. The NYC culture of finding Asian families of 7-10 people living in close vicinities crammed in three room apartments can be disorientating and especially in a classroom of 30 Chinese students who were highly smart with competitive grades. In addition, most of my classmates went to Chinese schools to learn reading and writing calligraphy as well as speak Cantonese from 3:30-5:30 at the Consolidated Benevolent Association on Mott St. Thus their capacities to be studious, smart, intellectually observant, lacking leisure time to enjoy competitive sports, artistic activities, attending social functions and events such as rock concerts, dating, dance mixers, and other social activities to mold and meld into mainstream culture. Instead, they became the model minority for other ethnic groups in NYC. These were high achievers whose parents were employed in the laundries, restaurant businesses and garment factories. There were some students whose parent’s were from Chinatown’s small businesses that lined the streets of Chinatown retaining the village traditions of Mainland China. Rarely, were their parents in the professional professions such as MDs, PhDs, lawyers, professors, architects, engineers, corporations, etc. Thus, the environment and experiences that Frances Chung grew up motivated her to be a role model for her classmates. Being a straight “A” student enabled her to escape a future of poverty. She expresses her hopes, childhood traumas, “observations” of the local, residential eccentrics and/or “eccentric.” happenings She traveled as a tourist or “was it a jet-setter lifestyle”? Upon her return to Chinatown as her home base, Frances makes comparisons of her world wind travels and her life in provincial Chinatown, as cited in the following lines:

The echoes of the night trucks
bouncing off the cobblestones
on Canal Street play on the
silences in my bones. Playing
games with the red and green
light on the corner of Mott and
Canal, we find an excuse to run—
we who know that those who are
brave cross Mott Street on a
diagonal. (page 4)

Her quick terse observations become humorously timeless. She purposely focused on her subjects depending on quick descriptions that embodies the brief moment, lingering the experience with unforgettable words different from her mother tongue. Her sensitive observations can, to a Westerner, be considered neurotic. She could be bipolar, a schizoid silently suffering the contradictions while developing a voice contrary to the Chinese traditions, as well as develop a vocabulary to emote feelings and subtly suggest a precocious mind.

…the young man stopping her in the street to say “Arigato” and then looking hurt when she explained she was not Japanese. And then the man whispered as she walked past on Mott Street “do you ever play with yourself? You and me … I could really sock it to you.”

Friends wrote from Europe wishing her a Happy Valentine’s Day. (p. 41)

…..blue mannequin eye. Some brides stood proudly without
heads, one-armed, even one naked bride with no nipples. (p. 34)

He will jump out of his hospital window. Before
you leave, he will ask you to bring toothpicks the next
time you come. (p.70)

the Mexican night
fresh smell of el campo
luciérnagas (p.118)

Her sharp wit encompasses the years of living in a confined, stifling community describing bitter hardships and taboo traditions that need broken as in:

There is a group of Chinese-American men who think of
themselves as Chinese warriors. They are beautiful
anachronisms. They study the martial arts, practice
calligraphy, consult the I Ching and go to sword flicks to
blow their minds. (p.61)

The reader can decipher double innuendos subtly expressed with select words as in

“…see her taking care of teacups in the
association. She seems imported.” (p.67)

These lines suggest the dormant domesticity of an immigrant woman. Frances abhors the servitude by highlighting the activity and ending in a simple statement. The word “association”, for a Chinese person, automatically indicates the family’s village name of colloquial China and their patriarchal history of migrating to America. It is the alternative social services provided in an insular community behind the gift shops, restaurants, & grocers familiar to tourists. However, due to the Exclusion Act of 1864 the sojourner men had to organize a methodology to legitimize a system of protection for their assimilations and survival in White dominating America. These family associations provided loans for small businesses, shelters for family arrivals, filed paper works for citizenships, provide translators, keep records of village members with same name sakes, locate separated family members, etc.

Often, Frances references the exotic teas, foods: Hispanic and Chinese as only some readers can experience due to their individual family upbringings. She reminisces her childhood of identifying peculiar actions as normal such as “banging on the kitchen table” and observing roaches scattering in seven directions which she states “I must reread “Metamorphosis”. She describes stealing a snail from a grocer’s stall and once in the apartment, “spraying drops of water from our fingers to see if it was home.” (p.28). These childhood memories are unusual little moments of joy for a ghetto child to ruminate.

Frances’ quick observant words express feelings that many Asian artists and writers lack. Most major AA writers only write about their ID crises whereby they are constantly dependent and too busy finding a role model to emulate. For example: for men it would be “Bruce Lee” and for women “Suzie Wong”. There are other occupations to be pre-occupying as filmmakers, photographers, writers, or musicians, poets etc. So in American history Asians will be portrayed or considered as some form of enemy as oppose to being just American. Maybe it is a rites of passage to call a Chink “Chink”, Japanese “Jap” and so on “whatever….” Thus we’ll be stuck as templates Bruce Lees and Suzy Wongs, the fundamental stereotypes for Americans to fall back on and thus stalemating the cultural definitions of Asian Americans. In the following poem, Frances indicates her rebellious attitude, minimizing the words:

We use newspaper for a
tablecloth. And when I
want to make my mother
sad I tell her that I’m
going to cook American
food when I get older. (p.52)

In the afterward section, Walter Lew did an intensive research of Frances short-lived life where many of her poems express the static turmoil of living/growing up in a ghetto and her desires to go beyond the boundaries of Chinatown as well as travel before settling into a sedate profession.

Frances had prepared two manuscripts for publications, “Crazy Melon” and “Chinese Apple”. The latter has “a richer conception of the scope and achievement of Chung’s writing” as described by Lew. He footnoted and charted France’s chronological progress of writing each poem, prose etc. This can be quite obsessive and stringently limiting for further interpretations since we will never witness Frances’ full maturity through her writings. Her early form of expression and early writings of an Asian American woman is obliterated by other living women writers. Frances Chung’s sensitive works precedes the west coast notables Maxine Kingston Hong and Amy Tan. These two women write about the first generation Chinese coping with an unfamiliar culture in a new country while Frances reflects the struggles of living in a ghettoized neighborhood. Her subtle words slowly stings with angry. Unfortunately, she never expressed it through participatory demonstrations, joined any grassroots organizations, be a political activist or bona fide artist. She just became a teacher in the Lower East Side and slowly submitted her ms to various funding sources. It took awhile for recognition but by then it became too late. To know the source of her brain tumor … was it from too much overuse in being a straight A student or the adult stresses of being Asian in a Hispanic community or never understanding a loved one?

In her poems, Frances’ last lines as experienced in the ghetto, constantly stings the mind with ironies that reaches a certain level of timeless miseries. Often it can be stifling and her escape route would be

“…every cockroach that runs across
my mind
whispers that I haven’t seen Peking.” (p. 44)

Here are a few other extracted last lines:

“everything in life being guesswork
cooking without teaspoons
eternal windowshoppers
we women were sometimes like children (p.60)

Chinese New Year …….Banners
across Chinatown. So many dragons to
follow. Oranges to cut. Shrimp chips
flowering. (p. 24)

When I went to JHS 65 on Forsyth St, many of my friends were fascinated with Frances’ straight A grades and her competitiveness to outshine their intelligences. I seemed to only surpass her with my math and history grades. However, I felt her quiet complacent solitude disturbing as an introvert incapable to speak out or make complaints as I became rebellious to NYC’s education system and often spoke my mind to various teachers. Even when we were in Washington HS, an all girl’s school, Frances kept to herself and achieved all the straight A’s. After graduation, she managed to go to an elite school, Smith College with scholarships while I attended Hunter College. After college, I participated in a non-profit cultural organization, Basement Workshop to become an expressive artist. Via this organization, with other peer groups of identical begrudges, we were able to culminate in a Confucius Plaza demonstration as our civil rights movement.

However, Frances shied from such demonstrative activities and would submit her manuscripts to the Basement Workshop in the hopes of publication. The organization was too busy dealing with internal logistics of mobilizing volunteers into a collective consciousness and administering an arts space to prevent street gangs rather than finance a publication. At that time, she had finished her 2 years foray in the Peace Corps situated in Central and South America. In addition, she taught in LES as a trilingual teacher, Spanish, Chinese, & English. Poetry became her outlet of expression and she taught poetry at St. Mark’s Project and Henry St. Settlement. She was able to receive 3 poetry awards: NYSCA CAPS (1980-81), NY Times Co. Foundation scholarship (1986) and a NYSCA Writer-in Residence fellowship (1987-88). Besides South America, she traveled extensively to Europe, Asia and Africa. Frances was slowly becoming acknowledged until she was overtaken by her brain tumor. Thus after her death does her poems become a significant testimony to a life style that is slowly disappearing due to encroaching gentrification of Chinatown after LES’s final gentrification.

I find myself falling into Frances’ affinities and identify closely with her struggles that it often becomes painful to reflect how our lives are parallel of self-destruction and resurrections. However, in the late 80s, Frances fell a victim of an institution’s negligence. Once diagnosed, she underwent surgery. While in a coma, Frances was injected with antibodies that the doctors had unknowingly been unaware of her allergies. During her unconsciousness, she died with the poison burning through her veins. I also had the same allergy reaction when recuperating from surgery and luckily; I was conscience to complain the burning sensation coursing through my veins. The doctors were able to counter the poisonous drug with the correct antibody.

As Frances relies on selected words to describe a lifestyle in Chinatown, I tend to record with a camera, stills and videos. Thus, I been able to also travel, record and compare similarities of foreignness and isolated observations on the hopes that social changes would be evitable, especially in the socio-economic improvements. However, little has evolved through such expressions in the arts to expedite these social changes. As Asians, we are still imbued with stereotypical labels due to mainstream resistances. Recently in the past year of 2008, there had been a rash of fires and evictions occurring in Chinatown. For example, in 2008, on a very cold winter night, prompted by a landlord’s complaints, the Department of Buildings evicted 50 Chinese men from their SRO rooms and relocated them up in the Bronx. These men were unable to read or speak English and were alienated in a Hispanic community. With the assistances of the young determined community activists of Chinese Americans Against Anti-Violence (CAAAV) and the rallying efforts of Chinatown Tenants Union (CTU), it took a year for the men to return to their familiar environment-Chinatown.

There are more Chinese bums
In the neighborhood now. No
one knows where they come from
but they appear with crazy
smiles and unshaven faces.
One of them looks like a poet. (p.19)

Did ALL these poems caused her brain to develop a tumor? Was it the wait and frustration of submitting her ms to publishing houses and the constant rejections? Or the wait until other Asian friends could print them in “another Asian” collective anthology every 10 years. She had been a member of Ordinary Women, Basement Workshop, St Marks Poetry Project, and Henry St Settlement. Like Iris Chang’s tragic suicide in 2004 (a well known published writer of Chinese American History who died at the age of 38. See my written article entitled: Iris Chang: A Deceased Role Model Minority). Both died in the same age range which can be suspiciously speculative. Frances’ goals were the same … to explain 20th century modern hardships in order to become an artistic entity as a writer & poet. In the 21st century, Chinatown is being gentrified where many prime properties are converted to skyscrapers leaving nothing to be preserved or become historic landmarks, to retrace and hide the miseries of the still inherent oppressions of an ethnic immigrant slum life.

Frances Chung subliminal speculative poems & prose writings describe the barrios/ghettoes like Jacob Riis’ photos of LES. She praises or glorifies no mentors, persons, or spiritual beings. The reader is introduced to a lifestyle that Luc Sante, writer of “Low Life”, might write if he was Asian. Frances might be described as the sweet, romantic Asian American “muckrakers” who unlike the anarchist, Emma Goldman, wrote about her present situation in the hopes of being published as a contemporary writer.

Like an American pioneer, Frances Chung’s writings are before her time. Her narrative voice preludes the writings of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Frances’ enduring words have historic significance as her voice transcends and echoes the 20th Century innocence of life in a slum/ghettoe/barrio during an era of restitution and reconstruction of an American eye sore called “oppression and racism” which leads us to our present situation of Age of Terrorism and Anarchism. As gentrification encroaches and eradicates areas of ol’ Chinatown starting from Park Row’s middle class neighborhood to Mott St’s small businesses, Frances words will haunt my generation while the next generation welds with the New Recession with unemployments, scapegoatings, glass ceilings, inflationary rent increases, lack of labor skills, lack of artists reflecting a minorities’ subculture.

RIP, Frances Chung

What is the relationship between the scorched drawers of a Nigerian bourgeois teenager and a hot Broadway musical dedicated to a Nigerian revolutionary musician? How did America evolve to a point where we cower at the potential of the former while warmly embracing the latter? Are we really simultaneously safer and more in danger than ever?

In the many hours I’ve spent listening to his records, the prospect of a Fela Kuti musical never crossed my mind. After witnessing the Magic of Broadway’s ability to transform his epic life into the smash hit Fela!, I’m confident that a Umar Farouk song-and-dance extravaganza is completely possible. Say what you will about this recession-strapped, Wall Street patsy of a nation’s prospects of survival, but please: spare me any doubts about American entertainment’s enduring power to package and sanitize. Even Fela Kuti can fit on the shelf next to Billy Joel in the aisle of the successfully marketed.

Two days before New Year’s Eve, and just four days after Farouk tried to destroy Detroit’s Christmas, the wife and I accompanied Steve Cannon to a sold-out performance of the smash hit musical Fela! A large crowd gathered before showtime on the clammy sidewalks outside the Eugene O’Neil Theater, a decidedly safe locale for all but the blind raconteur, who must climb three sets of stairs to the cheap seats and descend four to reach the basement at intermission. As the wife noted, O’Neil was a lifelong alkie who might’ve had a hard time navigating these ascents even with 2 good eyes. Eugene O’Neil Theater—get your exclusive house in order! We might’ve been killed!

Tonight the house is decorated to resemble the legendary shrine/nightclub in Fela Kuti’s Kalakuta Republic, a self-declared nation within the city of Lagos, Nigeria. Strings of white Xmas lights hang between the grand chandeliers; Afro-centric portraits of MLK, Malcolm, and Fela’s mother adorn the walls above the balcony seats, along with an odd painting of a purple elephant wielding a pistol, and a few stray disco balls. Onstage, the backdrop mimics the corrugated metal that is ubiquitous in the Third World, translucent and lit from behind and covered with rude sketches of geometric figures. A catwalk runs above the stage, and the band’s instruments wait underneath on a riser. Strung up along the wall behind us (we are in the last row) are the flags of the African nations. Cannon and I sit between Botswana and Madagascar. Projections of newspaper clippings shine in different spots around the theater, with headlines like “Let Army Oversee Presidential Election” and “Man Punished for Making Noise.”

The piped in music gives way to the live band, the musicians of Antibalas drifting into place as dancers emerge onstage from the audience and wings. The band sounds great, and the three of us stir and admire the acoustics and the prospect of 2 hours of high-quality Afrobeat, music you can’t help but move to. Cannon wants to know what the band looks like, and I say fairly young. What about the crowd? Eh, a bit hip, probably a bit more diverse than your average Broadway show, but well-coiffed, stylish, consistent with $55 -$110 price for tix. Tonight is a sell-out. More dancers appear onstage and then the lights dim and the band really hits it. Up in the top row, we’re feeling it.

Kevin Mambo plays Fela tonight. He appears center stage like a lead singer, and explains that this is the last night of the Shrine, that he is considering abandoning Nigeria altogether. Worsening neighborhood, attacks from the government, simply too dangerous. But for tonight, “Africans and non-Africans,” he will B.I.D.—Break It Down. The story of Fela, the history of the nation, the reasons why it might all end after this–he is gonna break it down for us.
Which he does. Through a running monologue and a medley of songs, along with his wives/dancers and the excellent musicians, Mambo as Fela explains his education at home and abroad; his relationship with an African-American female; the way High-Life and James Brown and Frank Sinatra and Black Power begat Afrobeat; the story of his mother, a key leader in the struggle for liberation from the British; his own political aspirations (Black President) and his imprisonment; his belief in reefer; the murder of his mother, resulting in his awakening to the Yoruba religion and the consequent decision not to abandon his homeland. Mambo’s posture and mannerisms are perfect and he moves the crowd with call-and-response and a catlike confidence that honor his subject. The performance is, as the quoted reviews rave, “a tour-de-force.”

But how did it make you feeeeeel? Cannon might ask. At points, I felt enthusiastic, other times impatient. The music emboldens you, makes you jut out your jaw. I knew the story more or less, so I paid attention to the audience’s collective posture (fairly stoic, might’ve been any show, methinks, except for the part where we were asked to stand up). And on more than a few occasions, the whole thing made me cock up one side of my mouth in a not-so-sure/wince/scam-protection wariness. I’ll try to B.I.D., this reaction that was not finalized simply in the cab ride home and remains ambivalent at present.

Admission: this was my first Broadway musical. I’ve been to enough plays in that neighborhood and once saw a touring production of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat…make of this what you will. The music was great, the dance was very high-quality, and the staging was adequate if a little hard to buy into (sorry, we’re in a Broadway theater, the opposite of a joint in Lagos, I suspend nothing). Yet it really was an amplified one man show, most of it with very little in the dance or staging to reflect the actions described. For instance, why did the oppressor never appear? Even in the semi-climactic storming of the Shrine by the military, we only see frantic dancers followed by projected mug shots of the band members and wives, with descriptions of their injuries. We know the British were defeated and that the post-colonial black government was a vicious, corrupt enemy of Fela, but we never see an embodiment of either. This felt like a lost opportunity to me. Too much of the show centers on explanation rather than demonstration, the telling of Fela’s story by the character Fela, rather than a full dramatic rendering of his life.

A creation of Bill T. Jones, the show featured forceful, bold dancers and the African movements and sounds were welcome in the halls of big budget showbiz. Yet because the dance was tied more to the music than the storyline, it became repetitive. And this repetition reflects a flaw in the endeavor of musical-izing Fela Kuti.

The brilliance of Fela’s music is its meditative, muscular persistence and, yes, repetition. Most anyone who’s heard it will mention the length of the songs, as that is a fundamental and necessary quality. The drums and horns begin to build, the keyboard drops in, the chants swell, the dancers are steely seductive, and then the leader steps to the front of the march and, uh, B.I.D.’s. After an angry sermon, Fela orders his band to chant, say, the name of the I.T.T. corporation for 15 minutes, so that you will not forget the villain’s name. Jagged saxophone solos give you time to consider the evil described. The subjects and hypnotic sound demand long listening, attention span, the spiritual allowance for deep impact on your political mind. The music of Fela Kuti is a complicated harmonizing of political and musical Pan-African elements, with all the surly pride of a disaffected youth beating his chest atop a garbage pile and all the intricate beats and weirdness of the greatest Parliament records. This is not to say that experiencing his music means long hours of study and familiarization with post-colonial theory; rather that the music leads to a trance that deserves time and surrender and, whenever possible, body movement.

From what I can gather, musicals require catchy numbers, memorable showcases for the stars and chorus to fill the stage with operatic grandeur, brightness and emotions, punctuated by whirling dancers and followed by explosions of light and applause. As much ground as Fela! covers, the show ends up forcing snippets of masterpieces upon a format made for jokes, brassy broads, and cute 2:00 pop numbers or ballads. However heavy the subject matter is here, the audience still gets the Magic of Broadway, where everything floats, glows, transcends to engage the imagination and please young and old. Moving staircases, shimmering transparent curtains covered by laser projections of crocodiles, and a long sequence under black lights felt like hammy simulations for a genius that defies this safe neighborhood, whatever its intentions. The stardust of Broadway falls too lightly on subjects like militias and Shell Oil, and for some reason fails to mention AIDS, the scourge that killed Fela and continues to plague his continent. In the haste to make sure we get to a grand finale, the show relieves itself of the true weight and magnitude of the great man, whose art and life defy the saleable narrative arc.

Finally, the whole thing must have cost and earned a fortune already. I can’t help it: I find this wasteful. The bar in the theater offered specialty $10 drinks like “Kuti Kula,” “The Black President,” and “The Zombie.” Think about that. Then consider the money or holographic seal of approvals handed out by the rap and film star producers, and how, if they really want to support the memory of the Shrine, they might consider building a few in the cities of our country or Fela’s to support the marginalized youth who could never afford these tickets but who remain the source for new music. Consider how that impact might counteract the mullahs. We might applaud an African story being told on Broadway, but surely we don’t think that fur-coat recognition translates to real help for the child in today’s Lagos. The divide between our well-intentioned gluttony and that child’s daily life renders the safety of 49th street fairly moot.

Still, the show is a safe bet for the investor. Is it cause or coincidence, the appearance in 2009 on the Great White Way of the man known as the Black President? Surely no one on the marketing side could complain if one were to point to Fela (the man) as a portent of Obama. Before FELA! hit the big time, someone had to put two and two together, i.e., “Well, now, look at that: a heroic musician known as the Black President brought back to life in the time of the real deal Black President! Ah-ha! Cha-ching!” Yes, money would agree that the political reality boosted earning potential of this production and likely factored in the elevation to the Eugene O’Neill Theater. How strange this America is: an African-American president contributes indirectly to the sanitized spotlighting of an African legend. How wily our merchants are! How resilient and crafty, this late capitalism!

In the cab ride home, Cannon gave it two thumbs up and we all three agreed we liked it, but…. Because for 2 hours we got to listen to Fela, as if we were at a sort of tribute show, and I’d do that any evening, though I couldn’t it afford it at these prices. As a concert, it worked. As a piece of theatrical art, I thought it was a bit narrow, basically a slight dramatization of Music is a Weapon, the French documentary filmed in 1982 and now available on DVD. And as a Broadway show, my first, I thought Fela was an ill-fit. His story is epic, and his greatness overflows comparisons, but he never wrote showtunes. The ability of Broadway to overcome these limitations, to sell this man’s work in the package of a musical–that is a clipping from the zeitgeist. As minor explosions fringe our cranky implosion, we can be confident that entertainment will go on undeterred, ever distracted, and highly expensive.

Welcome to the Labyrinth of multiple negatives. Books so bad they’re
perfect to pillory populate the latest Unbearables anthology, a
lavish production whose reach tries strenuously to exceed its grasp; but
nobody grasps like an Unbearable. The world is their oyster and it isn’t
easily digestible.
Even without counting graphic artists such as David Sandlin, Kaz, and
Ken Brown, over 70 contributors take pot shots at the books that bother
them, and they don’t waste time on trash. Each takes a tangent off the
concept and few look back, that’s not how they roll. Some state their
premise clearly like a survey response or an assignment, others go after
imaginary titles (Jerome Sala) or their own work (Ron Kolm). The work is
at its most enjoyable when core members wallow in self-mythologizing,
inventing characters out of each other. bart plantenga turns in a
novelesque tale of proofreaders driven too far, Mike Randall paints the
Unbearable Big Fish as “relentlessly cruising the shallow water for
talent that will cough up some ‘edgy’ material for less than scale.”
Tribulations of the writer’s life are the one keen constant.
Despite some targets being hit more than once, like the Bible, James
Joyce, and the Chicago Manual of Style, no two entries are alike. Some
of the Beats are back for another drubbing, along with their parasitic
hangers-on, taken out by Gerald Nicosia and Mike Golden, while Henry
Darger and Barbie hide behind Gertrude Stein. Lit pop-stars like Sedaris
and Chabon, icons like Ballard, Borges, Mailer and Calvino are roasted
as well, more for being distracting or disappointing than execrable.
By digging into the books that have riled them up, this pack of
writer/proles has levitated a pungent Pentagon of provoking prose out of
a hole greater than some of its parts.

Published by Autonomedia, paper, 16.95$