Wednesday, November 29, 2006
The Benediction
That is the best way to call my feelings this afternoon after a crazy day at work. I was forgetful with my personal belongings, forgetting a check book in the company bathroom after changing this afternoon and getting caught behind the eight ball in terms of time management. I also almost forgot the book I was reading on the bus, an out of print gem of a book. Maybe it is sleep deprivation? Maybe it is the bird flu I got? Maybe it is a love jones that is faintly starting today after a conversation with a chef? Maybe it is the office politics I am trying to rise above?
The death of a young 23-year-old on the eve of his wedding in a fury of bullets has put me on edge I guess. Today my delivery guy was harassed by a cop if you ask me, and I can feel a certain level of self-editing happening in these situations. I don't like it. So, rather than loosening my tongues, I feel some part of my outer armour falling away -- where I was once all clad, I am now becoming uncovered -- naked and exposed one limb at a time. I don't want to live like this, always having a part of my person pre-occupied by a ghastly race deed of injustice, just to pretend that things are OK, when they really aren't.
So with that goes a benediction of self in a way. And I thought of DMJ today and his concepts of "things". I like this concept.
I bought some new pants at the Gap for 20 things. I noticed that everything at H&M is 40 things. I got some lotion, shampoo, Odor Eaters and Noxema from Duane Reade for 27 things and that was my day.
Came home. Waited for Blogger to comeback to life, and surfed the net after 2 days of non-stop action and work with Rat-mo.
Peace out.
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Another Battle With Flu
Reprieve!
MEME from my friend angryblackbitch.
1. When you looked at yourself in the mirror today, what was the first thing you thought? Do I have a clean shirt?
2. How much cash do you have on you? $47
3. What’s a word that rhymes with “DOOR?” S'more!
4. Favorite planet? Neptune
5. Who is the 4th per
6. What is your favorite ring tone on your phone? I don't have one. And I don't know the name of the one I have now.
7. What shirt are you wearing? A 10-year-old dark gray Banana Republic long sleeve knit with a whole in the bottom front left hand part.
8. Do you “label” yourself? Not really. I shop on the sales rack.
9. Name the brand of the shoes you’re cur
9.5. Bright or Dark Room? Bright.
10. What do you think about the person who took this survey before you? She is slick, tight on the blogophone and right on time.
11. What does your watch look like? No watch.
12. What were you doing at midnight last night? Typing, organizing, analyzing, planning, eating potato chips and listening to Maroon 5.
13. What did your last text message you received on your cell say? Minutes Remaining . . .
14. Where is your nearest 7-11? Like what the hell is that about? Probably Pennsylvania. I work and commute on all points of the Jersey Turnpike cousin.
15. What's a word that you say a lot? It's bananas.
16. Who told you he/she loved you last? My cousin Stanton Allen.
17. Last furry thing you touched? Dust ball in the storage room at work.
18. How many drugs have you done in the last three days? 2 Rolling Rocks, 3 glasses of Chardonnay
19. How many rolls of film do you need developed? None, I ain't got one of those old contraptions.
20. Your worst enemy? Those closest to my person who don't see the true me, yet I still look to them for validation for some odd reason. I guess I am complicit in the conspiracy too.
20.5. Favorite age so far? I would say 29.
21. What is your current desktop picture? A black bird looking into a window from outside, tens of stories high, in NYC.
22. What was the last thing you said to someone? Have a good trip.
23. If you had to choose between a million bucks or to be able to fly what would it be? I need the money.
24. Do you like someone? No. Still getting over a possibility that just wouldn't happen no matter how hard I tried, prayed, pleaded to the ancestors, etc . . . Finally, accepted that this mofo is just crazy, as in Beautiful Mind crazy . . . and I ain't a long haired brunette of a white woman. Time to float on. I am obviously being saved from something.
25. The last song you listened to? Bjork "It's Not Up to You"
26. What time of day were you born? 11:53 pm
27. What’s your favorite number? I have more than one. I like 8 and 13.
28. Where did you live in 1987? Nashville, Tennessee.
29. Are you jealous of anyone? Yes, a little.
30. Is anyone jealous of you? Don't know.
31 Where were you when 9/11 happened? On a train to Stuttgart.
32. What do you do when vending machines steal your money? Start kicking, cursing and shaking the machine violently (I am ashamed of my behavior, but it is true).
33. Do you consider yourself kind? I am kind but, I curse a lot.
34. If you had to get a tattoo, where would it be? I have three and working on others.
35. If you could be fluent in any other language, what would it be? Japanese
36. Would you move for the person you loved? I don't know.
37. Are you touchy feely? Always
38. What’s your motto? For now. Keep it moving.
39. Name three things that you have on you at all times? My cellphone, insulin, a wristband from Bahia.
40. What’s your favourite town/city? Don't know anymore. It depends so much on who is living there at that moment.
41. What was the last thing you paid for with cash? 2 egg whites, bacon, and cheese on whole wheat toast and a small coffee.
42. When was the last time you wrote a letter to someone on paper and mailed it? Application to a Foundation in Belgium for work.
43. Can you change the oil on a car? No. And if I ask now, people think I am a fag (I think there are other reasons to think that) cause I am so old. I will just have to ask another fag.
44. Your first love: what is the last thing you heard about him/her? She has a 3-year-old.
45. How far back do you know about your ancestry? 1807 for my mother -- for my father legend has it, our family started with a mother and daughter named Mariah and Mirandi. They traveled on the same slave ship.
46. The last time you dressed fancy, what did you wear and why did you dress fancy? Interviewed at law firm. Blue shirt, yellow tie, brown khakis, brown shoes.
47. Does anything hurt on your body right now? No.
48. Have you been burned by love? Burned? Not since 1994. Heartbroken, yes.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Turkey Day
I guess my Thanksgiving revelation is that I should not be so scared of Edith Wharton, she is more foreign than difficult, but somehow in my mind she is viewed as such. It could possibly be that anything that smacks to hard of an isolated high minded society or has worn a whole into the mighty sarcophagus of American letters should be held at hands distance and declared irrelevant by so many in my academic camp, Faulkner excluded. But I like Edith on film, so I must read her now, she writes about a world that I have had to deal with in so many ways, working publishing houses.
Otherwise Thanksgiving dinner was nice. I slept most of the day. I needed it. My father, stepmother, sister, grandmother and I ate together around 4:30. We cooked half and ordered the other half. The dressing was pretty chemically laded. But everything else was good. We will be eating this stuff for days.
I tried to start The Pilgrim at Home by Gonzalez Eschevarria but my family won't let me. My mother called, interesting conversation. Lots of talk about the family reunion. It is interesting because I had a dream where both sides of my family and I were eating at a table in Switzerland. All of a sudden, one half of my family got up and left the table, while the other half stayed. I think I know what that means and I am subconsciously waiting for it to play out.
I am starting to feel overwhelmed by this application to Presbyterian University. I have other things that I need to do for my survival and I am not really sure how to balance all of this. I think I am delving into Brass Band music as a natural alleviator of stress. Rebirth and Kermit Ruffin (thanks Catherine) have been my on heavy rotation, a sort of penicillin for this feeling that I am drowning in mediocrity and spicelessness as far as my future intellectual world is considered (more the PU visit than anything, not my friends), not to mention clubbing, drinking, eating and just enjoying life. Life in NYC feels like a long chore where there is no time to do anything but commute because friends blow you off and reschedule at a drop of a hat. That is the NYC way I think. So, big brass bands will be it for a while. It all makes me feel much better.
Happy Thanksgiving. Tomorrow is black Friday. Good Luck for you lucky shopaholics.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
The New York Review of Books, The November 30th Issue (A Work in Progress, Draft III)
I am really exhausted. I worked for several days straight after being attacked by a stomach virus that made it impossible for me to climb the stairs at Grand Central Station a couple of days ago. It felt like I had a tank of helium nestled between my solar plexus and diaphragm. Damn!
Then I went to the Ivory Tower, and let me tell you all, it is a walk through Oz. I missed the bonfire at this Presbyterian institution, all of my fellow coloureds didn't have a stomache for them, but I find beer and frat boys interesting. I never really experienced that world, but it did remind me of Tuebingen in a strange way.
And yesterday I picked up The New York Review of Books (November 30th, vol. LII, no. 19). I wanted to write a whole essay on this distinguished journal and the life it reminds me of, but with the onset of a graduate school application and the other things going on in my life, I don't have time to read the entire thing and write an essay that is tailored to my heart. So, I will write about what I have read so far.
I wonder if the Portuguese word saudade goes for terrible experiences as well as good ones. I think I am fascinated and in love with a struggle I have learned to recognize as part of
The review brings up that terrible symbiotic dysfunctional relationship of white folk and black folk -- that terrible assumption, which turns quickly into a need to help the Negro and my complicity in feigning helplessness. I was always thanked very graciously by the institutes that I roamed, re-shelved, interned at and performed minor tasks of maintenance on many a rainy Sunday afternoon in exchange for a piece of pauper’s bread and a place to sleep.
I look back at the mid to late nineties as part of a longer love affair with
The New York Review of Books of 2006 is a denatured landscape where not only its landmarks have been re-invented by fewer pagers, but its very components have changed like alchemical algebra. It has turned water into Italian soda – yes, it is a fountain in neoclassical style, but in a Willy Wonka land of intellectual proportions instead of a true reflection of the world we inhabit. It is Old Europe colored funny, not New Europe in shocking realism. Its perspective is ornate and wonderful to read, but its reach is not as curly and wavy as I once thought. It is just stubble unable to grow into a full beard.
The two articles I read dealt with two of my favorite subjects, Marie Antoinette and Gore Vidal.
Daniel Mendelsohn's "Lost Versailles" deals with Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. Its opening is absolutely perfect making me remember why I loved the journal in the first place. I found Daniel Mendelsohn's observations to be pretty good, and he confirmed what I suspected about the movie.
As a pre -pubescent historian, I have wandered far away from Hollywood renditions of the past Can we really know what influence great men and women have had on any of us in two hours? I understand the artistic exercise in rendering the decomposed bodies of our exalted in the cinematic flesh, but to condense true life into plot sequences, or combine real life people into composite characters, always hurts me as a historian, even if I understand that narrative and voice can override such literal interpretations. So, to know that this was a meditation on how Maria Antonia became Marie Antoinette devoid of the complete political and social context outside of
Mendelsohn pours over Coppala's three films with a fine tooth comb. He lays out the ways of Coppala's lost women and ultimately he gives the good points and the bad points in unequal measure to Marie Antoinette. Coppala seems to focus on showing what life may have really been like for a girl plucked from Vienna to rule on the French throne at a time when all pomp was Parisian and all of Paris had an eye on Versailles. Antonia/Antoinette must master a new language, a court culture that was very different from the Hapsburg's and the quirks and intrigues of a family that was much different than her own. The thing that is not explored in detail is how this woman's very presence was meant to solidify an alliance between
I will say no more about Mendelsohn's review, but I will say this about the premise of the movie though I have not seen it (I know not a good thing). As a historian I think there is a problem in assuming that just because Marie Antoinette was a 14-year-old Austrian girl figuring out 18th century French politics that somehow her story holds resonance with the 21st century. I am not sure if this is a feminist project of re-imagining, but the leanings of Coppala's project are revisionist none-the-less upon the premise that it must have been extremely difficult for Marie-Antoinette in ways that would have been recognized by us. First that is not true, the idea of a teenager is a 20th century notion, and the ways of European royalty are an extreme experience that made people not owners of their own person but both the embodiment of the state power and subject to all the restraints that the role of governance require. In other words, she was probably expected to do what we would consider very adult things by the age of 14, and the strata she inhabited included re-occuring themes of fratricide and impersonal invasions of private life that are not kin to our world today, even for the most followed rock star.
I think Coppala addresses these issues, but I wonder if her interpretation of Antonia/Antoinette measures up to the past, I know that she wants it to be part of our present. I am probably better off reading Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette from which Coppala gets her rendition of the famous/infamous queen to answer these questions. But in the end, Marie Antoinette was not very bright. Even her tutor used to write her lessons on trace paper so she could print them out on clean sheets of paper to show to her mother the Empress Marie Theresa. Did she possess the most basic intellect to know the social crisises in that moment of history, or to take heed of her mother and brother’s caution? Is this shown in the film? I will have to wait and see, since I have taken on the task of reviewing the film before seeing it. Stay tuned.
Bits of Gore Vidal are expected in every New York Review of Books. He is the great pontiff of American letters who, with age, is moving in what seems like measured steps; or, maybe it is simply my own ex-patriot experience that has cloistered him from my view. It seems as if all of
Larry McMurty's introduction smacks of those lofty questions that only those in Vidal's caste can ask. Who cares if you had only one tomb to pick as your constant companion on a desert isle? Vidal's complete opus is McMurtry's obvious pick and from there we are transported to Vidal's latest installment and sequal to
But I am getting too poetic.
There is much less to say about Gore Vidal than the Marie Antoinette project, his mere presence in this journal is enough to summon up the picture of our contemporary court culture. Vidal is a well adorned mascot, beautiful in many ways, sensational in most other, larger than life, charming, astute and half American in his gleaming observation from the class of people that have always looked at America from their summer villa in Capri where the weather and temperament of the locals envelopes their bruised soles and blistered hearts from a spring and summer pounding the pavements of New York.
So, I am seeing this part of
In the same issues, Max Rodenbeck's piece "How Terrible Is It?" exclaims that the rest of the world was skeptical of our accusations directed to
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Bullet Point Life
2. I have a meeting with some folk at a famous institution about my future tomorrow and I am tripping about it. This is big, but somehow I am not suppose to sweat it. It is kind of like the white people in Pride and Prejudice -- you are suppose to be cool about wanting Mr. Darcy, and it is considered to be in bad taste to express your desire too heavily. Anglophile Americans kill me.
3. I gotta haircut. I have not had a haircut since my stay with the Harlem Baker sometime in September.
4. I have been in the mist of a discussion on Clay Cane's blog concerning the now infamous "Bishop Incident".
5. Discussions about the Black Church and Gay Folk has revealed a lot to me about how people think on the other side of the fence.
6. There are a lot of papers coming out concerning New Orleans. Not sure how I feel about all this contemplation. There is a part of me that just wants to say that it is not that deep. Coloureds were drowning, America watched and demonized Black Folk for trying to stay above water in the Super Dome, whole towns are gone, nobody is going to get the insurance. The other part of me simply wonders if the steeple of my grandmother's church in Picayune, Mississippi was ever picked up.
7. Skip Gates needs more entries for his tome. 100 dollars a pop. If I write ten that is a thousand dollars.
8. Who am I kidding, I ain't writing shit.
9. Need to call Auntie who works in Slidel to see if she can get me some fresh file, I refuse to buy that vile pixie dust that has been sitting on the shelf for 3 years at Zabar's.
10. Time to look at the Police's Syncronicity concert on DVD in the morning.
11. My youngest sister and I have the same taste in music. I am starting to think that I am a total fag, or she is growing up to be a total fag hag. We need to figure this out quick.
12. My job is fun. Not taking it serious at all. Trying that for a change. If it works out it works, if not, then on to the next thing . . . I am already looking.
Monday, November 13, 2006
War Of Time by Alejo Carpentier
I loved War of Time. It is a collection of short story that plays with time and narrative underneath the cover of larger epics such as Ulysses, Noah's Arch, pilgrimages and voyages to the New World. As usual, soldiers, saints and sailors litter the stories with minutia that Homer, Virgil or the chroniclers of Columbus simply forgot. Carpentier is the master of creating endearing reflections of the everyday making specific points in time exotic instead of places. I liked the love scene of Penelope best and thought that the short story "Journey to the Source" was just a simple exercise, a beautifully one at that, but the unconsummated love of Ulysses and Penelope in "Like the Night" triumphed, in my opinion, what many consider to be his best work in Journey. Night's reasons, its truthfulness of a man and woman bare in bed, the failure of making love because of drink, a visit to a whorehourse or inner inertia combined into an embarrassing honesty that I don't normally read. Man-honest-truth is something that I like and wish I could read more of as I get older. While studying in undergrad and grad school, most of my professors were women and they just took for granted that I was reading or had read the male centered cannon. If I admit that I read Norman Mailer or Philip Roth back then I was usually stoned by the politically correct warriors. But that is old salt in an old wound. I am not so much upset about it, as I am always amazed when I read about the relationship between a man and a woman from a male perspective in literature and can identify with that failure. Miscommunication of the body is worse than words.
So in that vein, D.H. Lawrence is next on my list of completions. I am reading Women in Love. I started Lady Chatterley's Lover in the German translation but that book is not with me.
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I woke up this morning thinking about my friend Moa. He sent me a letter asking when I am coming back to Cologne. I miss Moa, we sung together in the tenor section of the Brazilian choir. I miss singing in the gospel choir too. But there is more to that and Moa and the gospel choir. He sent me the letter on the first day of carnival, November 11th. Hmmmmmmm.
I mention it because I have been sitting through the madness of a certain hip-hop magazine's reshuffling wondering about my writing and getting it on the page. But, I guess I am done with it. All the promises that many in my generation thought we were going to have fulfilled has not been and will not be. We are a decade out, the legacy is now established and what is done is done.
I also woke up hearing the groundbreaking of the King Memorial. Well, he should be deified. Oprah and Obama (they should run in 2006) were speaking, and Andrew Young was crying. While riding in the car with my father to the bank on on to the pharmacy to pick up my insulin, I sawthat we are more a like than I thought. He doesn't feel like he belongs with the party's march or procession of people claiming that a certain emancipation is done and fixed. He wants to play the game, even if he is a Democratic voting Black Republican this time around. I am the same. I am not really following the party lines, I got pushed out the game for being different too, I just prefer to play down on the Lower Eastside for now, and across the pond later. But, there is something I have to figure out in my hand about the pary line that lines up with Harlem, Black Studies departments and the destruction of New Orleans and the family and friends I have there.
I am rambling, I know. But I will flesh it out somehow.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Rumsfeld and the Rest of The World
We just have to wait for Virginia. I can't believe there was so much support for Allen. So, be it again.
I am crying over Tennessee and the senatorial loss of Harold Ford and the support for a marriage amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as that between a man and a woman. So for the record, I don't care if Nashville is popping right now economically and socially, I am still not feeling it. New Jersey is doing just fine by me. . . for now. Civil Unions could still come to pass in the land of Dixie, but I am not so sure.
That's all for now.
More later.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Blogging Blaaaahs
I think it is a combination of the following:
1. This freakin' election on Tuesday. CNN has had some interesting coverage on it, but there is a level of over kill. I enjoy the anatomy of a airline disaster feel to it, but honestly, why weren't people so discerning 3 years ago . . . or in 99 during the Gore/Bush campaign cycle?
2. Worried about my home state of Tennessee and Harold Ford.
3. Dealing with my conservative family that has lived in that state (one parent is religiously conservative and the other politically).
4. Father issues -- He is a black Republican -- I forgot how much of a big deal that is for people. And it is increasingly becoming a problem for me . . . there is more to that, cause he is not really going for the stuff that the Republicans are doing now, but certain fundamentals about being a Republican at heart puts us at odds in life.
5. The Ass Hungry Meth Addict of a Christian Fundamentalist Scandal.
6. Depression over sex and sexuality being such a central force in our public discourse. Can't the pastor just have wanted the dick. You can want "the dick" and be against "the gay marriage". That should not shock people.
It is a sign of immaturity, all these lines in the sand about desire and politicizing desire to such an extent. That is just my opinion. I need medical insurance for a chronic disease and I insulted that I have to endure this public spectacle concerning ass play instead of a true discourse on universal health care. There are thousands like me that watch the political landscape turn and boil with no solution in site. Medical problems are hypothetical to the ruling class. It is not hypothetical to me.
7. Depression over the use of New Jersey's gay marriage decision by our president as a "wedge issue". And greater depression over the American anti-intellectual slant that has John Kerry speaking in tongues, and the religious right spurring inaccurate information concerning the place of marriage in Western civilization to a mind numbed public.
8. Perplexity over Saddam Hussein's death sentence early this morning. The timing is so off (or on, depending on how you look at it) . . . just before this election? . . . come on.
9. I am in the middle of reading some Alejo Carpentier and staring at D.H. Lawrence when I should have been finished with Saussure a month of Sundays ago. But come on, admit it, Saussure is interesting, but kind of like calculus . . . and who relaxes with calculus?
10. New chick at my job has caught my interest. She doesn't like to party. I do. So, that leaves me wondering should we get started. Should I play where I work? I normally don't. Especially if there are a ton of women in the office, which there are, it is New York, there are always a million intelligent women everywhere.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
The Day of the Dead and Maryspotting
Today I have to get moving. I need a haircut, I have not had one for months and I have another little interview today. I also have to take some of my writing downtown for submission.
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I have been wanting to link this up cause George Michael is a trip. I don't know what this old queen is turning into, but it sure is damn interesting. He is caught on TV smoking a dooby while this other chick beats face. Fabo!