by Ida Griesemer
2011
chair, string, xmas lights
installation
8/16/2011
First thing in the morning, I shave
by Matt Zingg
Let me start with this: a blind vulture
on the deadest of trees, a line of ants,
a baby rabbit like a wad of tissue
paper, a thin layer of flesh and the sky
underneath it all. Talking is a clump
of red dirt in a severed hand. Wait.
Let me steal this picture: my days
are orchid petals floating down
a river and at night, only the sound
of conspiring. This does not
belong to me. No matter. Cut the trees
close to the earth. Dam the river.
Close the earth, dam the rivers,
belong to me. No matter, cut the trees
of conspiring. This is not
a river at night, only the sound
of orchid petals floating down.
Let me steal this picture: my days
are red dirt in a severed hand. Wait.
Underneath it all, talking is a clump
of paper, a thin layer of flesh and sky,
a baby rabbit like a wad of tissue,
on the deadest of trees, a line of ants.
Let me start with this: a blind vulture.
7/12/2011
The Dove
by Sofia Greenberg
I was lying on the bed. It was too hot but opening a window would up the chances of more carpet beetles, the latest plague on my apartment. I was lying there in my briefs, moving my legs around to find cool areas on the blanket. I had that thing where just the backs of my knees were sweating, long streaks of sweat that I felt turn into beads at my calves and then fall. I couldn’t decide if I liked or hated that feeling.
I had just finished masturbating. I was always masturbating on hot afternoons. I was listening to a recording of an Indian man talking about spiritual matters. I was probably bored with it and that’s why I masturbated. He was saying, “there is nothing to be done about believing you are the eye of the universe.” Then I started fooling around with my dick. He said, “you see everything in a great hall of mirrors” and it was hard. It takes it about 9 words (spoken slowly in heavily accented English) for me to get hard. I guess. I was really stroking it when he said, “when I die, reality will rip in half like a sail in a storm.”
Right before I came, I remembered that I should be thinking about Angela, but all I could think about was how last time I saw her she had gotten little rhinestones glued above her vagina. It’s called Vagazzling. She had asked if I liked them and I said her pussy looked so gaudy I half-expected it to be chewing gum. She didn’t think that was funny, and maybe it wasn’t. That was what I was thinking about the split-second before I came and then the orgasm tore me out of my head, thank god. Orgasms never get old. Every time it’s like a goddamn miracle.
My whole life does not consist of masturbating. That’s just what I happened to have finished doing when this bird flew into my window. It was so heavy and white and intrusive that for a second I thought it was a snowball, and then my brain told me No. And then my brain told me Bird. I got up and felt rivulets of sweat fall down my calves. I wiped my cum off my belly with a shirt and stepped out onto the glaring balcony where the bird had fallen. There was a baseball-sized grease smudge on the window where it had hit. Probably Angela would think it was from a girl’s back and ask if I was seeing someone else and why I never fucked her against the window. I decided that if the bird was dead I should put it in my freezer for evidence. But it wasn’t dead, it was something very similar to alive, and it was a dove. There was a dent in its beak from which dark blood was beginning to ooze. I picked up the bird as gently as I could and carried it inside. It kept opening and closing its beak very slowly and I imagined a tiny voice saying, “Ham, haaaam.” I sat down on the couch with the bird in my lap and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark room. The bird smelled like dust and wood primer. “Hi,” I told it, feeling dumb and helpless. The word “mite” came into my head so I got a towel and put the bird on it. I noticed that its filmy little eyelids only met half-way when it blinked. The Indian man was talking about the ashes of history and I got up to turn him off. I heard a shuffle and a thud and turned to see that the dove had fallen off the couch and landed on its neck in a bad way. Panicked, I called Angela.
“Hellow?” she said the way she always answered the phone when I called, as if she had just stepped out of the shower and was still aglow with steam.
“Hi, Angela. Can you come over? It’s a crisis.”
“Is everything ok with your dick?”
She was terrified of venereal diseases and always eyeing my penis when she thought I didn’t notice, the way my mother used to eye my blackheads.
“Yeah, it’s just a bird. It might be dying.”
Angela showed up about three minutes after the bird died. I was still holding it, it was still warm, as warm as everything else in the stuffy apartment, but with more emotional weight. When I heard her shoes in the stairwell I wrapped the bird in the towel and put it in the shower so if any mites came off, I could deal with them fast. Angela came in wearing a white blouse and sunglasses. Her hair was as blond as anything and a little windswept. She said, “Hi.” I stood up and pulled her by the wrist (thin wrist, nice wrist) to the bed. I started fumbling around with her shirt buttons, which I could never successfully undo, and she pushed my hand away and did it herself.
“What about the bird?”
“Forget the bird. Died.”
"Oh," she said as I worked my fingers through the obstacle of jeans, underwear, and "Oh," again, as I touched the rhinestones.
6/28/2011
HOMEWORLDS
by Noah Fuller
HOMEWORLDS is an exploration of family secrecy that seeks to alter the limits of both family and archive. It constructs and complicates the story of my recently discovered family in Holland, resulting from my grandfather’s affair over 50 years ago.
In the process of learning about my Dutch relatives I recorded interviews, conversations, and letters with my family, friends, colleagues & therapist. Over 20 hours of audio were edited into small clips, and grouped in themes.
The physical installation involves five radios from different eras, each of which can be tuned through to find five radio stations onto which I've broadcast my audio recordings. The radios all play at once in a single room, creating a cacophony of voices. Viewers move through the space, spending time with different radios, tuning them through the full FM spectrum, and catch pieces of the family archive.
Below is an audio clip which recreates the over-lapping nature of the installation, followed by the separated tracks.
HOMEWORLDS
Bernard and Ruth Fuller, circa 1940
Letter From Annie Kluen
Bubbie
Dad
Therapy
Dutch family, circa 1980
6/14/2011
How I Wind Up Dating 50 Cent
by Maxine Lopez-Keough
I text my mom while she is at work and say: There will be a large black man in your living room when you arrive home this evening. Do not be alarmed, his name is Curtis. He is a friend of mine, and he needed a place to hash things out with his manager. Starbucks was too loud.
When she arrives home, I introduce them. I say, Curtis, this is my mother. She is a scientist.
Mother, I say, this is Curtis. He is a musician and an entrepreneur, you own his CDs. No, he is not Jay-Z. He is a different rapper, Mom, this is not Jay-Z, please stop crying.
From then on, things go well. My mom brings out a quiche, seemingly from nowhere, the way mothers do. We discuss the unusual amount of thunderstorms this summer, and what Beyonce smells like. When my mother asks him point-blank why so much rap is self-referential he writes down a list of artists and albums for her to try. Report back in a week, he jokes, and she promises that she will.
He shows her how to use her new iPad. She compliments his shoes, asks him how he keeps them so clean. Windex, he faux-whispers, and she mimes like she's writing it all down.
I say, Curtis, would you like to go for a walk—would you like to see the fountains? And he does, so we do. They are throwing water up towards the sky, reliably. This moves us. We discuss our movement.
Later we go to the Institute of Contemporary Art and get into a brief argument about Swoon's new show, which culminates in me standing in the middle of the gallery yelling I JUST THINK THAT ARTISTS SHOULD BE PAID FOR THEIR WORK, and suddenly we are laughing so hard that the docent asks us to leave.
We find a restaurant that smells like old leather and salt. The wait staff is primarily tanned twenty-something girls with small breasts and very muscular legs.
The menus are coated in plastic. We share a plate of fried clams. Curtis explains to me that for a while, he was so obsessed with fitness that he only ate Beige Meat: lean chicken, pork, something called tempe which sounds disgusting. We commiserate over the body public, and I ask him how many takes he needed to get that upside-down sit-up shot for the In Da Club video. He says he didn't even think they were filming, but we both know he is kidding.
I tell him one time I ran so hard I threw up, and he shakes his head knowingly. He shows me a picture of his son. We order another bottle of wine.
After a few weeks of bantering back and forth I get up the courage to ask him about Chelsea Handler—what she was like, where he thinks he went wrong. I tell him, sort of jokingly, that I don't mind extravagant gifts, since he says that was part of the problem. We talk about the evolution of the female MC and how it felt to get shot in the head. Chelsea was worse, he says, and I kind of believe him.
He shovels out my car in a snowstorm.
When I bring him home for Christmas he hands my aunt a pecan pie. I made it, he says, like that's all it takes, and it is, surprisingly.
Everyone has been briefed. My grandmother gets drunk, which is new. Later, she puts her hand on his hand and says You Are A Kind Man, and he actually tears up—real tears, I see one of them fall before he can catch it with the tip of his middle finger. He speaks Spanish to her and I don't understand a word.
We play board games with my little cousin. She asks about his jewelry.
When at the end of the night it becomes clear that grandma is having trouble getting down the stairs, he picks her up like she weighs as much as a handful of moss. He carries her down, two stairs at a time, and when they reach the bottom she whispers something into his ear. They share a knowing look. I watch the whole thing in a dress he bought for me.
In the car ride home I say, What is this? What are we doing? And he says, We’re doing us, like it’s the simplest thing.
I get to where he is. I say, if you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live? And he answers: Cincinnati, like it’s the funniest joke in the world. We laugh until we catch sight of the Garden, and I give him shit about loving Carmelo Anthony. He says No, he’s cool, and that I’d like his wife, and I don’t mention that I’ve secretly felt that way for about a decade.
It doesn’t work out, in the end, but it does for a while and I find a new appreciation for things like Connecticut and Rottweilers and the Knicks—not their team so much as their fans, which remind me of home.
I tell people: I dated a famous rapper once. I always said I would and then I did it. But the people who matter already know, and the people who don’t smile anyway.
5/31/2011
Paris Notebook
by Sarah Knowles
Introduction by Joanna Boody
In 2006, my best friend Sarah Lynn Knowles and I decided to go to France over Thanksgiving to visit a friend of mine. He offered to host us for free in his small flat within the Montmartre neighborhood in Paris, and it seemed like the perfect escape from New York City, our asshole ex-boyfriends, and our usual family holidays. But as we learned through this experience, there isn’t such a thing as the perfect escape.
First of all, it poured rain the whole week. The first night we got overly tipsy on jet lag and wine and quickly found out our host was not as welcoming as he'd previously seemed (without added detail, a huge understatement). It felt wrong to be in Paris and feel miserable, but it was happening. I felt grateful for the opportunity to roam the historic city, but beneath the clouds, drenching rain, and thick air of resentment I still felt trapped.
All three of us were fighting and felt like shit. For a week, I lived off white wine and cigarettes. I remember trying to stay as positive as I could, and then privately calling my Dad from a payphone to cry like a child. I worked hard to simply soak in the details of what I was going through, knowing that no matter what, this experience would shape me for the better somehow.
The following photographs are from a journal Sarah kept during the trip. Our feelings regarding the same experience aren't identical, of course, but these snapshots of her hand-written journal portray a personalized, artistic expression of our shared experience. These snippets brought forth a lot of memories of moments, and I am grateful she shared the trip and these photographs with me.
5/18/2011
the homie
by Zach Baker
sonic was an australian shepherd.
a herding dog, a shepherding dog.
they were all shepherding dogs at first, i guess.
before that, wolves.
but we had similar hunting methods, and traveled in packs.
so eventually the two species
—man and dog—
were like: “yo
you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.
let’s go hunting and we’ll all stay fed.”
that was backintheday. a lot has changed.
sonic was a child of the ‘90s, piece of shit hunter
but a nice guy. good guy. great friend.
it was a youngest sibling kind of thing—
you just want the best for him.
then he had this growth.
hell of a growth, grapefruit-sized.
then it was like,
“what you want? you want me to kill your friend?
or chop off his leg?”
my sonic’s growth was on his leg.
and it was like, “damn.
if it was me, would I want my leg off?
or my head off?”
and it was like, “hey man:
dogs are different.
they got 3 more. they adapt.
dogs are different.”
dogs rarely make it to the age of consent.
he was only 11.
if it was my sister, it would have been a different story.
a dog is a dog.
so it was like, “alright man,
yeah, take his leg man,
yeah,
take his leg.”
4/28/2011
Dolphins Into The Future Interview
by Ida Griesemer
On his site, Cetacean Nation Communications, Lieven Martens writes,
"My music is a landscape. A ku'ono for your mind to hike in. For the exploration of a personal jungle. For the atonement of a world out there, above there, in there. A spring of harmonies. A bay of sound. A natural and abstract composition, rooted in romance and subconsciousness."
Martens is a Belgian artist, based in Antwerp, who recently toured in the US with Monopoly Child Star Searches and Floris Vanhoof. Before his performance at Sarah Lawrence College on April 11th, we talked about his inspiration, process, sonic sources, and plans for… the future. Below is a picture of us ("You should be in it too - the interviewer is just as important," he said) and below that is our conversation.LL: Can you talk about your musical history; how long you've been with this project and projects you've done before that?
LM: I've been doing this since 2006 I think. Or 2007. That's under the name Dolphins Into the Future. But I've done similar stuff, but more deep manipulation, for I don't know, a bunch of years.
LL: More deep?
LM: Not more deep, but more… rusty. It was more just pure music. Dolphins into the Future is supposedly more centered through specific ideas and theories. It's not just music. It's more like a complete thing. The earlier stuff I did was just music; music of life.
LL: And your more recent stuff is informed by philosophy?
LM: Yeah. Theosophy. It's a movement that started in the mid-1800s. They do thesis of all the spiritual information in the world. She's called Blavatsky and she wrote a book called The Secret Doctrine. It's about, actually, just the past future and present of mankind. Mankind both in a physical way - like, we were born - but also in a ritual way. They use old pre-religious doctrine style writing. Pre-Christianity.
LL: As it relates to your music process, how do you bring in those writings?
LM: When I do an album - like I did an album called Music of Belief. Because I'm interested in how religious music is being created. You know, Buddhist music or even Christian music. For half a year I only read devotional texts. To see how that affects my brain, and what I make. And so that album sounds quite different from all my other stuff. But I have other albums. I made an album called Ke Ala Ke Kua. That's about the Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii, and all the things surrounding there. So it's not purely philosophical. It's one of the inspirations.
LL: What was it about that place that drew you to make an album about it?
LM: It's a heavy power stop for the Cetacean Nation. It just attracts a lot of activity around it. People who want to establish communication between man and dolphin. It's also just a place that looks like artwork from Caspar David Friedrich, the German painter. Just the colors and stuff and how it's all caved. I've been there. I did field recordings and camped there with a bunch of friends.
LL: Do you use your field recordings as your samples in your music?
LM: Yeah.
LL: Are all of your samples things that you've recorded?
LM: Mostly. Not all. But I started using them because I was interested in the musicality of - like when you record birds singing, instead of a surround-image it's a 2-D image. An aural image. And then if you listen to it, as a kind of music, there's a different, non-human, mathematic part to it. It's like classical musical done by an alien presence. A non-human presence.
LL: There's something mathematic to it?
LM: When you're a person and you write music it's mathematically like - you have octaves, or if you play certain notes and divide it, then it's another note… but birds their sound is a non-human mathematical sound. And it's just like listening to ocean waves, or birds, that affect me and how I start playing music. I try to create music that sounds more like it's coming from a non-human entity or whatever.
LL: Do you always start with some sort of sample from the natural world?
LM: A lot of times. Not necessarily always, but a lot of the time. I try to not overdo it, because when I look back through the last three years I've done music, it's been basically all filled with nature samples. I'm going to try to cut down a little bit on that. I mean, I don't want my music to sound like a formula or something. "Oh yeah it's that guy, with his ocean waves and eerie melody." I just think it's inspiring.
LL: So that's one of your aims for your next album is to move away from…
LM: I don't know. I'll just see what happens. It could be. But now I'm gonna go live in Portugal on these islands called The Azores and I'm going to record an album there. So I'm afraid it will be the same thing again, because it's surrounded by ocean and wildlife.
LL: Well it won't be the same thing…
LM: No, probably not. But definitely the latest compositions I made are purely only instruments. Not like the live show, because you will hear it's filled with that whole sound. Exaggeratedly.
LL: Your live show always is?
LM: No. For a while I didn't do it but now I'm more into it because a lot of times my live shows are disconnected from my LPs. So in this show I try to create almost the exact environment that I do on my records. Which is filled with animal sounds and water.
LL: Who is releasing your next record?
LM: There's a record with installation music I've made for the art of Ada Van Hoorebeke coming out with Aguirre in May. Beyond that I'm not sure. I have to be in the right mindset. Sometimes, for half a year I cannot make music. When you don't have ideas you cannot do it. Or at least have the strength to combine and finalize ideas.
To listen to a Dolphins Into The Future live set click here.
4/21/2011
Bingo
by Alex Fox
His fishing rod had been broken for months. He squatted, scribbling at the boards of his dock with a carpenter’s pencil. He had renamed himself Bingo Cartwheel when he was fifteen and didn’t tell anyone. He was thirty five now. Fishing was the only way Bingo could make sense of things. Writing about it was like lure fishing (spinners, jigs, cranks, plugs, spoons, buzzbaits, poppers)—which never worked for him—casting something made up out and hoping it came back with something real attached to it.
His limbs were long and didn’t look like they had been made for squatting like he was. His boots looked like a pair of anvils that had been welded to his spoke legs. His belt wasn’t holding up his pants despite the knot he’d tied it in after the buckle broke. He was going back over the letters with the pencil until the ruts of each letter shone with graphite.
In the shallows a little ways up the small river something was coming up to the surface. It was an oval the color of the moon but smooth like an egg. As it came ashore a bellybutton emerged, followed by limbs and a nose. He put down his pencil and walked over, boots sinking a few inches in the mud and making a sucking noise as he picked them up again.
He stood over a floating brown haired boy. Bingo looked at the face in the water. It looked like what happened to the boy hadn’t been so bad—his face didn’t make him look broken, just shut—like a closed book.
When Bingo still had the patience for books, he had read that there were deep sea vents—cracks in the ocean floor where heat and black poison gas from inside the earth escaped from twisted mineral chimneys. These vents were covered in plants and animals that had never seen the sun, and didn’t need it. They thrived on blistering hot, toxic smoke. He liked that, oddly colored, uncouth forms of life at the bottom of everything sucking up exhaust from the earth’s smoldering core. Creatures that would die if brought into the light.
The boy’s lips were purple and his skin looked like fresh, wet mozzarella with blue veins tangled in it. His expression made it look almost natural, as though this was just how he always looked. Bingo pretended that this was a special kind of boy who lived in the river and herded catfish. He pictured the boy standing in the river’s murk, watching catfish sift through the mud, or pulling them to a new pasture by their whiskers.
Bingo’s gaze wandered from the boy and past the shoreline trees and brush on up to the sky, all closed over with clouds the color of dirty snow. Though it wasn’t bright, the upward tilt of his head sent his eyelids closer together, like they were trying to whistle or play a trumpet. After a series of half thoughts that culminated in a slow wind he could feel blowing cold across his eyeballs, Bingo bent down and put his hands on the body’s shoulders and slipped the young shepherd back into the brown river.
4/07/2011
Snake Dance and Mountain Goats
by Stacey Rozich
Snake Dance
2010
watercolor, gouache, acrylic ink
15 x 21 inches
Mountain Goats
2010
watercolor, gouache, acrylic ink
15 x 21 inches
3/29/2011
...and Multiply
by David Winter
“He said: ‘Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.’”
-Genesis 22:2
As a father, consider the instruction.
Dream this growth of being, spoken
as castration, as deadened manhood’s
final, unexpected flower, kerosened.
Hear the built trust in the boy’s voice,
the pride he takes in bearing wood.
The smell of wool on his small hand,
of sweat slicking a rope. You know
even before this burning, how smoke
excites the nostrils, how knees need
the Earth to touch them. You know
the crimson of a creature giving life
to a just God, the prayers sung
by fearful throats of man and son.
The knife prepared above his neck
shears each of your boy’s prayers.
Walk down the mountain together,
eyes touching Earth, smoke hanging
in crimson wool, your boy no longer
bent by firewood’s weight. Your boy,
no longer.
3/01/2011
Watching The Girls Go By
by Mike Lala
At the Virginia Beach waterfront along the boardwalk, there is an old, wood bench facing the Atlantic Ocean. Mounted on the center of the backrest is a gold plaque with a dedication and inscription bearing the words “Watching the girls go by.”
I question:
the smooth pine,
a rigor mortis of armrests and backrests,
the ribcage beams forming the seat and legs
bolted into concrete,
watching.
In the neon sundown,
the rings of years and knots in the wood,
the cigarette burns and knife-carved initials,
the worn-down hearts in-between,
ingrained, shallow by wind and sand,
left by watchers and hand-holders,
the smolderers of youth sat
on a seat of rigid pine.
I question:
if sitting
on the worn surface of a wooden bench,
torn skin fused into scars on elbows and kneecaps,
the burns on the sides of palms,
the blemish of acne scars worn down by the sun,
the tattoo needle to the ribcage,
if I’ll have sat there,
beachfront,
anywhere,
watching the girls go by—
watching, in stillness,
sitting, in sea salt,
aging, pocket-knifed, impermanent, a
biding of
time,
I question:
if there’s any difference
between that and death—
if the sitter and the seat
become one on the boardwalk
under the neon night
that makes it so hard
to distinguish
the lurid outlines
of with’ring flesh, bolted pine,
when all the girls stop going by
and the waves pull driftwood out to sea.
2/10/2011
Introductions
by David Winter
When I meet a voice carving
masks I forbid that voice to leave
this book. When I meet my voice dressed
up for a disappointing night
when a mite crawls
into a forgotten megaphone, listening.
When I meet speaking out
of turn a voice who breathes best
by match-light. When I meet a measured
silence my voice peels daylight
from beneath her fingernails.
When I meet my voice I listen
to someone else's.
When I meet my voice,
a lost dog.
When I bark.
When I plead
from the knees
of a whale.
When I rummage
through the bones
of a star.
When I meet my voice at a funeral
I did not attend.
My voice who plucks out
three
tongues,
voice who returns to another's
prison, voice who resents the eye
of the undertaker, voice who does not speak
to me, if I un-strangle you
who
will breathe with me?
2/03/2011
Two Men and Millions of Mirrors
by Jesse Klein
‘How can I be like Michael Jackson, I can’t sing or dance!’ Kanye West recently exclaimed in an interview. This comment refers to the rumors that West crowned himself the new King of Pop after Jackson’s death in June 2009. This simply is not true; the publication Scrape (in the same vein as The Onion) created this quote, riffing on Kanye’s large mouth and super-sized ego. However, Kanye has made a number of comments that accomplish the same task, of putting he and Jackson in the same conversation.
He has compared the proliferation of his ‘Kanye Glasses’ to Jackson’s cultural presence. He told The Fader in ’08, ‘It's little pieces of what he had, his level of influence. And it's like that's either the one-off or it's the beginning of a lot of it.’ He references him in his music: ‘Got a light skinned friend, look like Michael Jackson, Got a dark skinned friend, look like Michael Jackson.’ And most recently, in his Thriller-esque experimental short film/music video Runaway, Jackson is the figurehead, literally, of a procession that includes a marching band, a black and red clad Klu Klux Klan gang, and a five-story blow up of Michael’s head circa Dangerous. Yeezy explained to MTV, ‘in relation to the Michael Jackson thing is not the KKK but the concept of cult.’ If you keep putting two words next to each other, over time they start to connect, to share meaning. Reverence becomes more comparison and less homage.
Essentially, Kanye is putting their names in the same sentence and then decrying his horror at having their names put in the same sentence. Self-promoter extraordinaire, he maintains the humility by denying the comparison, then reaps the benefits both ways: as the humble disciple, but one with shrewd eyes on the throne. And either way, it’s great press. Anyone’s name next to Michael Jackson looks good. After the fake story was published, and then reposted on numerous sites, West responded on his blog, ‘IT MAKES ME FEEL BAD THAT OBVIOUSLY I MADE PEOPLE FEEL THAT I WOULD BE CORNY ENOUGH TO SAY SOMETHING SO WHACK AFTER THE PASSING OF AN IDOL, A LEGEND AND MORE THAN THAT A HUMAN BEING WITH FEELINGS AND FAMILY’ (caps his). Other artists mention Jackson -- they can’t not, his legend looms so large in pop culture -- but Kanye does so more deliberately somehow, and cynically. Clearly, whatever Kanye is doing, or not doing, or doing by claiming he’s not doing though we know he’s really doing, is working.
Kanye’s sly allusions are factually inaccurate and morally reprehensible. To say that celebrity is a form of religion is not a new concept. There are faces, personas that are revered, recognized the world over. Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jordan, Madonna (and those are just the M’s) are omnipresent, known to toddlers, to those who have seen the images and heard the names even if they do not know who they are. Michael Jackson has one of the most recognizable names and faces on the planet, ever, and is the most famous entertainer of all time. 99% of people on the planet know who he is, have known for over thirty years. His best selling album, Thriller, has sold 110 million copies, nearly three times ACDC’s Back in Black, a distant second place. For these reasons alone, it is silly of Kanye to back-handedly draw the comparison. Jackson is a pop star come religious icon, if ever there was one. The idolatry that started with Elvis, then The Beatles culminated with Jackson’s celebrity, from his rapturous reception worldwide, including in developing nations, to his all-too-public private life. Sadly, it is this personal life that elevated him to a mythic and ultimately tragic status, and should prohibit offhand references such as Kanye’s.
Not to blaspheme, but on paper, a parallel can be drawn between the life of Michael Jackson and that of Jesus Christ. Both had demanding fathers. Michael’s father Joe Jackson infamously physically and verbally abused him. The issue of Immaculate Conception surrounded both of their lives: in an interview in 1993 with Oprah, at age 35, Jackson refused to admit if he was a virgin or not, because he was a ‘gentleman’. (Imagine another adult celebrity, ever, anywhere, making a similar claim.) He now has three kids and the issue of their conception has widely been debated. Also, there is an aspect of chosen-ness to Jackson’s career; thrust into it far too young by a controlling father, with a talent that he could not deny the world, despite his own personal best interest. But most crucially, both died for our sins.
No celebrity has been more scrutinized, more battered, has suffered for his fame, like Jackson. No celebrity (read: person), ever. From age eight, there was no private life, no ‘life’ in the way the average person understands the term; Jackson’s only existence was a public one, a performative one. And he was too fragile for it. He repeatedly said that he was most comfortable when performing. It was the part of life he knew the best, could do the best. His performative nature and understanding of his place in the world also defined his personal relationships, chiefly his romantic ones. They seemed public, for show. Jackson’s disposition was too delicate, too open to successfully have an adult personal life while being a superstar. He sacrificed himself so that he could give the world his body of work. Other celebrities, like Kanye, relish the attention, revel in it.
Kanye too thrives publicly but his tone is exhibitionistic, narcissistic. Where Michael came across as someone who was sharing a gift, Kanye appears to grab at all the cultural real estate available. Where Michael gave, Kanye takes. He thrives on attention, can’t live without a mirror of millions looking back at him. He performs, gladly, each minute of his waking life. This is why blogging and Twitter are so essential to his over-sharing, overblown, over-everything public persona. Kanye savors any opportunity to be the center of attention, and revolts when he isn’t (the 2006 and 2009 VMAs are textbook examples). He uses Twitter to proselytize his every word, to share his every thought with his fans. This is not unique, but the language he uses and the tone he employs is that of the oracle, of the chosen one. But a chosen-ness, unlike Michael’s, that is self-imposed.
After his recent Today Show interview with Matt Lauer concerning his George Bush comment in the wake of Katrina, Kanye went on one of his now expected Twitter rants which include, though are not limited to, the following comments: ‘I don’t trust anyone but myself! Everyone has an agenda. I don’t do press anymore. I can’t be everything to everybody anymore.’ ‘Maybe Mike could have explained how the media tried to set him up! It’s all a f-ing set up!’ and ‘I can’t be everybody’s hero and villain savior and sinner Christian and anti Christ!’ The first comment is a mere lie; the comment itself is press. The second statement is coyly confessional. He seeks advice from the departed Michael when looking at any aspect of his life is answer enough—it’s merely name-dropping. And the final comment has Kanye’s rapper narcissism shine through, his true colors as self-promoter. The opposite of Anti-Christ isn’t Christian…
Kanye is a self-anointed anointed one. He believes he is shouldering a burden, fame, that ‘everyone will see and understand one day’ (also from Twitter). But, really, he’s just working the game, and expertly so. No one is using the various forms of press better than Kanye. He is everywhere, extending to all the entrepreneurial outlets offered to rap stars, and now he’s directing films. Runaway is ambitious, an orgiastic symphony of every idea, image and feeling he can conjure, has ever conjured. It’s spectacular, but only because it’s laden with spectacle. He’s trying to out-Thriller Jackson, but while Thriller is entertainment at its purest, a landmark of not only music videos but of television, Runaway is pretentious, a series of half-baked thoughts infused with alleged High Seriousness.
It’s a shame, really. With a little less bravado (what would rap be without it?), a little more thoughtfulness, Kanye could be the figure he claims he is. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Family is SO GOOD (caps mine). His artistry and talent—his music—are more than enough. He doesn’t have to be Michael. He’s Kanye.
One of Michael Jackson’s defining traits was his selflessness; of course in his charity work though even his music was about others and otherness. If they were ever about himself, they described how his personal struggles could be applied to his listeners. He always sang from the inside out. Kanye is all outside in. He takes the world, internalizes it, is offended by it, and then sounds off bitterly, noisily. Michael Jackson did not feel scorn; he always forgave the press, his father, the world. The other figure Kanye constantly calls on was similar. He could learn a thing or two.
1/27/2011
INRI
by Mike Lala
A name is something
you can’t crawl out
from under.
It binds you
to yourself.
Is that what
Christ felt
in the garden?
Did his cup
say this
Is your blood?
“I am
what you say
I am.”
That was his
moment of Truth.
A name is something
you can’t crawl out
from under.
It is nailed above you
until someone
lets you down.
1/21/2011
General Electric
by Brian Correia
Lately, the rattle of my fridge has been keeping me awake.
Where I live I have to bring my own fridge
or rent one. You know
the kind with a microwave attached.
I have a tube TV.
I was prepared for a year of warm beer,
for doggie bags with early expiration dates.
“Sell by twenty-four hours after the meal.”
But Aaron, he lent me his fridge.
For two weeks I slept soundly
before it reared its ugly head. Bad vibrations.
Did I put it in the wrong spot?
Did I stick it with the wrong magnet?
I've removed, from its top, everything:
The clock radio, the plastic containers.
The clock radio still goes off.
The cold cuts still are cold.
The fridge rattles.
I put it at the foot of my bed.
In the middle of the night
I give it a kick.
Sometimes that does the job.
1/19/2011
1923
by Claudia Acevedo
he sits on a piece of wood
cracked as toenails
protruding, yellow glances of the Depression still in his cup,
which reeked of cranberries and vodka.
when I woke on Monday morning
his hands were copper and full
with grapefruits and melons he bought from his friend the domino player
and the Oldsmobile would ride proudly, coughing,
to school with me pressed and clad in blue polyester.
the hand wave sneaking through the car window
said so much about the brown in my eyes
and the sunflowers that grew in his garden.
1/07/2011
How to Make Mistakes
by David Winter
Don't do it the way you did
the last time. Inspect each bone
holding you upright. Remove
the most shapely one. Notice
its absence from your body
as you dance. Don't do what
you did before you were born.
No number of warm assurances
will protect you from sharp joy
or its precursor, a shadow
whose touch tints your cheeks
scarlet. Don't do it the way
you were told more than once.
Trust in your oracular organs,
so often silenced by facts.
Don't do it as these words
instruct. They are the silt
of a lived river, unheard
proverbs worn hollow by use,
a careful composition sung
in entirely the wrong key.
