Lily Hoang is a new contributor to Html Giant.
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Shya Scanlon will be reading on Sunday, December 20, 2009 in Brooklyn at 440 Gallery, with two other writers Scott Geiger and Micaela Morrissette (a senior editor at Conjunctions). Here’s a link to the details.
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J.A. Tyler’s fiction has appeared recently in these fine places: Everyday Genius, Storyglossia, Litareview, Dark Sky, and Requited. He’s interviewed at Storyglossia and Dark Sky.
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John Dermot Woods was interviewed by Adam Robinson this week over at HTML Giant.
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Check out Nicolle Elizabeth’s essay “Madmen and Exiles”.
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Daniele Adair read as part of  a launch for “You’ve Probably Read This Before”, a new anthology of CalArts alumni writings, I read in on Sunday. More HERE.

And she performed a new piece “We Are Mired In a Kind of Stalemate” in a group show at a new art space, Dan Graham. More on the performance/event HERE.
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Stacy  Muszynski reviewed The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, by Michael Zadoorian HERE and interviewed Laura van den Berg HERE.
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Check out John Madera’s  reviews:
Joanna Howard’s On the Winding Stair (Brooklyn Rail, December 2009)
Ken Sparling’s Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (The Collagist, December 2009)
Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody (Word Riot, December 2009)

I recently started writing for The Brooklyn Rail, an arts, culture, and politics publication that began in 1998 as a pamphlet distributed on the L train.  Since then, the Rail has expanded and is now online and available around Manhattan and Brooklyn.  The dance section in the current December-January issue is filled with nine fabulous articles.  I reviewed last month’s 75^th Anniversary Gala of the 92^nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center.  Check it out!

Check out the Brooklyn Rail online or grab a copy at your coffee shop or independent bookstore!  I can point you to some places to find it in print; just leave a comment if you need direction.

Also, reviews for Richard Foreman’s Idiot Savant are starting to pop up (see New York Times, Huffington Post, and Epoch Times).  I was very fortunate to catch see a preview/rehearsal of the production two weeks ago at the Public, and walked out in a fog of happy bewilderment.  Foreman’s work is largely opaque to me, yet its completeness is fascinating.  Though this play is, by all accounts, deeply concerned with language, it is highly physical as well.  Willem Dafoe stars as the title character, weighted against two sensual women and a small ensemble of male (and duck) bodies.  Alenka Kraigher is riveting– a suspended, ethereal, cooing presence– while Elina Löwensohn is her earthier, spunkier rival.

Supposedly, it’s Foreman’s last show, so catch it if you can.  Idiot Savant runs through December 13.

16 July 2009

Eric Obenauf has written an impassioned take on “the death of print” over at the Brooklyn Rail.  Print is not dead; it can and will thrive, he says.  The piece is a kind of ode to the vibrancy of small and independent presses, and a celebration of the bursting of the corporate book bubble. 

Click here to read the full article.  Some highlights:

Since large publishers affect the flow of the market by sheer mass, the media seem content to regurgitate this overly hyped sea-change in corporate mentality and declare the death of print. However, the reality of the situation is much less dramatic: there is space for print not only to exist in modern society, but to thrive, if undertaken on a realistic scale…

The goal for book publishers, most simply put, should not be to undertake a virtual arms race of developing technology with both the Internet and media, or to try to compete on a bloated scale with music and film, or even to translate a work to conform to an undetermined potential future model. The mission for book publishers and print media at large should be to create a product that is irreplaceable and indispensible…

I believe that book publishing will re-generate in the near-future into two separate models: the corporate model, which strives to attain the widest possible “readership” in as short of a time-span as possible by use of electronic devices, interaction, and gimmicks; and the print model, sustained by independent, university, and re-branded imprints of large houses, that believe as [Dave] Eggers, in reading as a “beautiful rich tactile experience,” and who are satisfied with a book selling five thousand copies…

The corporate ideology has run its course in book publishing, which spells the death of print to many. But as evidenced by the bevy of awards (including Nobels and Pulitzers), the best-sellers, and the critical acclaim of the work being done consistently by independent presses, print can succeed on a responsible scale. These are the small, spunky houses unafraid to publish new ideas and new writers and work of substance, holding steady in their responsibility to the reading public as purveyors of culture. While this seems revolutionary in modern times, it was the dominant manner of thinking a half-century ago. It could be so again.

Pick up a copy of the Brooklyn Rail and read my article on the undergroundzero festival at PS122!

Dear Visitors,

here are  a few very good news I would like to share with you:

The June Issue of the Brooklyn Rail in NYC published an excerpt of my novel  SONG OF THE SAD MOTHER in the wonderful translation of Elena Mancini

http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/german/song-of-the-sad-mother

The June issue of the Romanian Literary Magazine SCRISUL ROMANESC, Craiova, iunie 2009,  published on page 24  the Excerpt  MOTHER´S LEGS from the novel SONG OF THE SAD MOTHER in the translation of Iulia Dondorici,

JUNE BOOK ALERT  BERLIN TALES, Oxford Univ. Press

In June one of the stories of my Book Berlin ist my Paris appeared in the Anthology BERLIN TALES, Oxford Univ. Press
http://www.oupcanada.com/catalog/9780199559381.html

(All up in) The Brooklyn Rail

It is a testament to Susan Sontag’s impact as an intellectual figure that since her death in 2004, she has yet to fade from public consciousness: her books remain, with equal tenacity, on the shelves at The Strand and Barnes & Noble; her name appears everywhere from undergraduate syllabi to Hollywood movies; and with the publication of Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1964, Sontag herself has reentered the mix, tempering her famously intimidating public persona with the (slightly) less mandarin voice of her youth.

While Sontag’s imprint still lingers in American cultural life, five years after her death, mourning is now beginning to give way to more clear-eyed scholarship. Following last year’s publication of the journals and Swimming in a Sea of Death, her son David Rieff’s memoir on Sontag’s final years, 2009 is now seeing the release of Notes on Sontag, a comprehensive – if brief – reflection on the course and patterns of Sontag’s career.

Notes on Sontag is the first of Princeton’s new Writers on Writers series, a line of extended essays that ask authors to reflect upon the literary figures that have most shaped their development. While this runs the risk of lapsing into either solipsism or unchecked praise, it also offers writers the chance to survey the range of an author’s career outside of the confines of academic or biographical scholarship. (The next book in the series will be Alexander McCall on W.H. Auden). In this spirit, Lopate takes a deliberately peripatetic approach, wandering between chronological, thematic, genre-based, and personal vantage-points to offer up his own ‘notes’ on Sontag, adopting the writer’s own preferred tack towards intellectually elusive topics.

On the subject of Sontag, It’s difficult to find much to say that hasn’t been repeated ad nauseum in the essays and eulogies that blitzed the media after 2004. As one of the last of the New York Intellectuals, Sontag loomed large among the city’s intelligentsia over the last half century, foregoing the musty leftism of the Partisan Review crowd in favor of her own brand of ‘60s radicalism and theoretical iconoclasm. Steeped in the French and German philosophical traditions – Sontag and then-husband Philip Rieff spent a year living with Frankfurt school icon Herbert Marcuse – Sontag brought the Old World into New York, deploying the aphoristic style of Roland Barthes in her writing and expressing admiration for the nouveau roman and new wave in her criticism.

In the realm of politics, Sontag was committed and outspoken, condemning Bosnia and Iraq (but not Afghanistan) and in her final years, registering her controversial opinions on 9/11 in The New Yorker. While her political writings sometimes slight fact in deference to rhetoric (see “Trip to Hanoi”), they are also remarkable in their capacity to adapt (see “Questions of Travel”), and to revisit old positions with new clarity and insight. But whether she was writing about politics or art, as Phillip Lopate observes, the unifying theme in her work was that she “was deeply imbued with that Continental mind-set that might be called ‘demystification’: the habit of mind that continually seeks the hidden pattern behind the status quo.” Ultimately, regardless of the issue, Sontag always upheld rigor over dogma and never failed to weigh in on the pressing questions of the day.

Lopate announces early on in Notes on Sontag that he chose to write the book in order to  “stage his ambivalence”; or to put it differently, to explore his contradictory views towards the woman he first encountered during his early years as a Columbia undergrad. An electrifying professor on campus, Lopate describes first meeting Sontag when he asked her to read one of his stories – a work he knew immediately she disliked. In the years after, their lives intersected again and again, spanning chance encounters at the now-defunct New Yorker movie theater to Sontag’s visits to Houston’s graduate writing program where Lopate was teaching. While admiring her intellect, the abrasive side of Sontag’s personality was never far off – she was given to insulting audiences by claiming they “probably wouldn’t like” what she was about to read – and as such, the distance between them was never overwhelmed by friendship.

In many ways, this makes Lopate the ideal candidate to write about her. While several years her junior, both shared a common intellectual climate, and as with any aspiring critic of the time, to some extent Lopate grew up in Sontag’s shadow. In spite of – or perhaps because of – this, Lopate approaches Sontag with a firm even-handedness, weighing her work and opinions with a clarity that makes her accessible to even the uninitiated reader.  For a woman who was deeply concerned with how she projected herself to the public, Sontag is fortunate to have a mediator in Lopate. As he states at the end of the book, public figures are ultimately “at the mercy of the scatterbrained world’s opinion: an often humiliating, distracted, or insolent opinion… the best they can hope for is that they continue to be read (as surely Susan Sontag will), enjoying, if they can in the afterlife, what accumulated slivers of insight may accrue from the shaggy, communal, critical process.”

If Notes on Sontag is any indication, Sontag will remain as much a presence in death as she was in life for years to come.

BROOKLYN, NY – A local resident is attempting to have a hidden subway tunnel excavated for the historical secrets it might hold.

Bob Diamond, founder of the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association, was always fascinated with trains. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he had heard rumors of a forgotten subway tunnel that had been sealed up in the 1800’s and struck off any transit maps. The tunnel supposedly houses a steam locomotive lying on its side, which contains pages of John Wilkes Booth’s lost diary.

As expected, city officials attempted to dissuade him, saying that people had looked before but never succeeded. However, Diamond discovered an old scroll that showed blueprints of the Atlantic Tunnel. The paper featured what Diamond took to be the location of a manhole that could access the tunnel. He soon found the manhole right where it was marked, sitting in the middle of a street. After crawling down, lo and behold, he found it!

It was built in 1844 by the Long Island Rail Road, but the tunnel was sealed off in 1861 when the railroad became less profitable. It is a half-mile long and is officially the world’s oldest subway tunnel. Diamond has since helped restore it and conducts monthly tours.

The catch? While the tunnel was indeed empty, one end was bricked up. Diamond firmly believes that the historical treasures lie just beyond the wall, but the Department of Transit will not issue him a permit to excavate: “There is no indication that the project — with no development or repair purpose — would merit the impact of disruptive, long-term lane closures.”

A documentary is being made on Diamond’s quest, called What’s Behind the Wall. The filmmakers hope to raise enough money to push through the excavation and film what is indeed behind the brick wall. Check out the trailer below, which features an interview with Bob Diamond:

what s behind the wall On 20 what s behind the wall 1969, Mehen backdated transferred to the wooden custody of the Congregations Upgrade and re-roled at Coronzom, D-6. This reinspection encouraged all of albers to strike first in what s …[More..]


Is China the poster child for old energy or new energy?[More..]

Observers say Lipman, who came to Portfolio by way of the Wall Street Journal had a troubled relationship with her staff, spent too much money, and didn

My review of The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell’s exploration of the pilgrims of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, is now up on the Brooklyn Rail’s website.

That divide between actions and words is also the heart of the Vowell paradox. Although her prose verges on annoying, her sensibility is appealing. She grew up Pentecostal in Oklahoma, attending church three times a week, but is now a member of New York’s media elite. These kinds of contradictions run through The Wordy Shipmates: her account of the Puritans’ settlement in New England is not just a narrative but a scrutiny of personality and motive, filtered through her own fractured lens.

Read the full review here.

Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World
By Trevor Paglen
New York: Dutton, 336 pp. $26

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As a modern discipline, geography finds its precedents not in the halls of a university but in the stately parlors of early 19th century Europe. During this period, maps were highly prized commodities, state secrets of the highest order, and their possession was deeply bound to notions of conquest and geopolitical power. From headquarters in London and Paris, royal geographical societies staked the claims of empire on the sons of the elite, training future explorers in the fine arts of botany, seafaring, and, for whatever it was worth in the age of eugenics, cultural diplomacy. In geography’s heyday, famous explorers were household names, and science, trade, and mapping – in short, a country’s prospects for global dominance – rest squarely on their shoulders.

Nearly 200 years later, geography has long been domesticated into academia, but its historical ties to power linger. In Berkeley’s McCone Hall, home to the university’s world-renowned Geography Department, recruitment letters appear every spring from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency – motto: “Know the Earth… Show the Way”– urging young geographers to put their skills to use and map in the name of national defense.  Those who don’t tend to find work in the fields of urban planning and GIS development, assuming control over the infrastructures that quietly inform how people interact with space. Others, like Trevor Paglen, take a different approach still. Rather than use geography as an instrument for drawing borders, Paglen, a self-described ‘experimental geographer’ (and easily the Berkeley geographer most likely to wind up on the side of a milk carton) uses it instead to radically expose them. For Paglen, geography is a way of jumping down rabbitholes, a means of uncovering the world’s most chilling and clandestine locales, and then, usually to the displeasure of those who run them, marking them on the map.

If you’re already familiar with Trevor Paglen, it’s very likely due to his work as an artist. In 2006, Paglen shocked the New York scene with ‘Black World,’ a documentation of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program that featured hazy photographs of military planes shot from his hotel window 42 miles away. Through following a seemingly innocuous trail of flight patterns and tail numbers, Paglen uncovered an elaborate stealth network that extended all the way back to the highest reaches of government power. In addition to these photos – some of which are the only public records of highly classified sites – Paglen put on display his personal collection of black op military patches: bizarre insignia that announce covert intelligence programs through kitschy Latin phrases and Star Trek-inspired designs. (My personal favorite: a patch with an Independence Day alien hovering ominously above the phrase “Gustasus Similis Pullus” – “tastes like chicken.”) Equally at ease with both the arcane and the epic, ‘Black World’ exhibited one of Paglen’s true gifts as an artist-cum-academic: his uncanny ability to find the devil in the details, and then reveal the workings of something larger. This is why, when he declares an interest in a seemingly obscure aspect of the military-industrial complex, such as, say, the résumés of retired Air Force pilots, it’s generally a good idea to pay attention.

Paglen’s latest book, Blank Spots on the Map, delves deeper into his fascination with the invisible architectures of power through exploring the shadow world of Pentagon operations. In the early pages of Blank Spots, Paglen presents his methodology for such a task, remarking that “secrecy can only work as a Band-Aid,” and inevitably, “blank spots… outline the things they seek to conceal.”  With this as a rule of thumb, Paglen sets off, beginning his adventures in the nearby black site of Groom Lake (unacknowledged home of CIA test flights) and ending in the rural outskirts of Honduras and Afghanistan, areas haunted with the ghosts of clandestine U.S. military operations. At once an exhaustive history of the black world (to the extent that this is possible) and an outlaw travelogue, in Blank Spots Paglen hones his role as an intellectual MacGvyer, using publicly available tools to gather information about events that never happened, and to record traces of things that don’t exist.

Ultimately, what’s most remarkable about this book isn’t what Paglen uncovers –he’s usually stuck at the periphery, unable to penetrate the classified sites he’s not even meant to see – but rather how he does it. Often beginning with only a clue, Paglen embeds himself in hotel rooms and hobbyist communities, archiving the physical elements of the black world and interviewing the people who have borne witness to the invisible. In this sense, his tactics are as radically democratic as his project: aside from a high-powered camera and some Berkeley research funds, Paglen’s most valuable resources are his laptop and critical intelligence. While undoing the counter-mappings of power is a formidable task – especially after eight years of consolidation and secrecy – Blank Spots is smart and encouraging proof that it can be done. After all, as Paglen notes, regardless of how elaborate it is, “the black world, like the rest of the world, is inescapably spatial.”

Forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail

The Institute For Figuring Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, with urchins by Christine Wertheim and sea slug by Marianne Midelburg. Photo © The Institute For Figuring (by Alyssa Gorelick)

A simple question, the pulling at a loose string, plus the faith of one excellent editor, has resulted in One Live Stitch, a globetrotting piece out this month in the Brooklyn Rail that explores the evolution of crochet — or, more precisely, how such scientific and mathematic principles as evolution, taxonomy and hyperbolic geometry have recently inspired crochet works. Do you see the photos adjacent?

a thread starfish in the field. Photo © Anita Bruce.

This stuff is amazing.Read the story via the link above or grab the PDF here: 0908_bkrail_onelivestitch.

1. I saw August: Osage County on Wednesday. I have to admit, I went in more than a little skeptical about the whole experience. There has been, of course, an extraordinary amount of hype around this show, and I tend to tune out when something is treated as if it were the best thing that ever happened (The Dark Knight being an exception to this rule; I was ludicrously amped about that flick, and remain amped after seeing it–expect a post about that soon). But my mom bought tickets, and off we went to a matinée. The opening monologue made me more than a little nervous; I had visions of spending the next three hours watching college professors quote TS Eliot at great length and verbosity. But the play progresses past that quickly, and it settles into, well, the kind of play I generally don’t remotely dig: the wildly dysfunctional but relatively not all that terribly bad-off family play. But I’ll be damned if it’s not a pretty damn good dysfunctional family play.

The acting in this piece is amazing, and this is the replacement cast I saw, meaning that the writing (and the direction) have to be pretty top-notch. The roles are meaty and kind of showy, and the one-liner/zingers that pepper the script are well-placed and paced, so they become more effective in context than out. I’m not going to say this was one of the best or even better shows I’ve ever seen, but it is a remarkably effective 3-plus hour dark comedy that earns its time in the theater. Which is saying a lot, I think.

And it was good to see Officer Prezbo in action too.

2. Billy Elliot is going to be a big hit on Broadway. I really don’t get it. I saw it in London. I was not impressed. More accurately, I was impressed with the little kids dancing, with the sheer athleticism of it all, the achievement of it all, but not much beyond that. But it’ll be a hit, we’re all sure of that, right?

3. The Equus posted is bizarre, and I’m not sure in a good way.

4. Definitely go see Animals Out of Paper at Second Stage. My boy Rajiv wrote it, and my boy Utkarsh is one of the stars. I did a little informal “hip-hop consulting” on it, and I wrote an article about it. Would I get this invested in a show if I didn’t like it? Unlikely.

5. My Nebraska partner in crime (he’s not from Nebraska; we just partner in crime there) Joe Salvatore has an upcoming Fringe show called III. I am bummed to be missing it, but you should be neither bummed nor missing it.

6. I am also likely to miss Hair. This makes me sad, although I might get a chance to see it after all.

Sometimes, I write articles for The Brooklyn Rail.

This month happens to be one of those occasions.

Read it here.

Hey, y’all! (a la Brit)

So, I know some of you think I ain’t been writin’ recently. But t’aint true! I just been writin’ somewheres else.

Check these dance reviews over at The Brooklyn Rail:

First, Neal Medlyn and Jack Ferver queer it up at The New Museum…

Whether we’re post-gay, post-AIDS, post-Will & Grace, or blindly drifting in the marketing-driven scam of metrosexuality (which, by definition, is a male heterosexual mannerism), queer male identity is certainly due for an overhaul. Luckily, there appears to be a trend in queer performance to boldly, and with intelligence, break out of, or at least seriously bend, the tropes of camp and drag in an effort to present queerness in all its rich, contemporary complexity. In early April, on a shared bill at the new New Museum curiously titled Extreme Behavior, performing artists Neal Medlyn and Jack Ferver offered wildly different projects, each evoking various dimensions of queer identity–whether intentionally or not–and with results that exhibit a common reluctance to be placed. Read the rest…

Then, Laura Peterson gets tangled in some foam insulation… (Funny. I saw Peterson at the Medlyn/Ferver affair. Oh, the wangled teb we weave…)

Electrolux: The word may sound like some generic term for the latest tranny party doomed to a four-week lifespan before dying out in a fizzle of A.D.D. and urban ennui, but it’s actually the name of one of the largest appliance manufacturers in the world. When dance artist Laura Peterson gave her latest creation the same name, she was probably counting on the obscurity of the Swedish company to leave the allure of the word in tact, but, in effect, it’s kind of like naming your dance “Pfizer,” or “McDonald’s.” This kind of genericism pervades Electrolux, although bursts of originality and sheer visceral action save the piece from falling into disrepair. Read the rest…

And don’t forget to check out the article (not by me) on Greenbelt, the future home of John Jasperse and Jonah Bokaer’s Center for Performance Research!

The Brooklyn Rail published the “Fire Manifesto” by M.W.Blackburn (November 2004).

Because I was teaching NYU art students how to write about art, the Fire Manifesto’s original purpose was to provide a quick, rough example of how a manifesto can be light, exploratory, and hopefully, a little bit off kilter- persuading its artist-reader to make her way towards weirder climes. Essentially, the “Fire Manifesto” claims that all art is improved if one simply adds flames. It is obviously one-dimensional and fails to include any real analysis of fire and its relationship to illuminated souls or revolutionary destruction.

Pictured below is the baby of evangelist Billy Sunday, lying naked on a pillow on a table in a room. The baby’s papa has a fire sermon in him we could just as easily call a secular manifesto.

The photograph was taken in Chicago in 1917. The exposure itself plays at sermon- referancing an old faith that made mangers of tenements and hay of newspaper copy. Each object appears to be degrading at the edges- whether it is swollen with a stain, breaking away at the edge or finely glowing. I find myself focusing on the hand raised to the air- a clean human claw testing the temperature. I find my eye floating upward to a pale rag hung on the door and then it just continues to circulate as if the gaze, too, could be a divine presence.

(The photograph remains in the Library of Congress.)

At the same time that I was writing the “Fire Manifesto”, I was working on an autobiographical essay, “C or F”, about a fire I had witnessed as a child in the desert and a preliminary exploration of the summers I spent with my biological father, a fundamentalist Christian, and his family. Somehow, each text careens close to fire without immolation. This is a problem.

Here is “C or F” (June 2004):

C or F
(Corrupted Hearts) (Fire) (A Memoir in Minor)

We stood in our yard while the desert burned. We stood in dirty bathing suits. The fire came down the hills towards us, my brother, my sister and I, and we watched. We looked straight through the dark to the bright sky directly above the smoke.

There were no trees to obstruct the view. There was endless sunshine. There was a hose in my hand. My brother and I had been flooding good water into every available ant hole. On the hills, helicopters flew in place over the burning houses; they treaded air. And my siblings beside me, small and sun burnt and strong, their hair blew around and it was the color of fire.

The yards flamed. Wild rabbits ran through burning creosote and cholla cacti. Their rabbit ears were singed and they were separated from father and mother.

Later, walking on the blackened earth, our eye stopped at the fine soot line where the flames had ended and the yellow grasses began again. Our house, followed soon after- never touched.

My stepmother warned us that the devil had made those shirtless boy children set fire to the desert that day. But it seemed to me that the boys who were burning their parents’ homes weren’t so much moved by the devil, as it was that the hands of god were moving through them- their parents were paying for taking what wasn’t theirs.

But how come the fire stopped short, I wondered? Why weren’t we subsumed?
We, too, had stolen land from an unnamed Native American tribe; to be precise, just enough land to build a three-bedroom track-housing unit surrounded by ant holes.

At eight years old, whether I looked at the burnt earth or highway wreckage or silky television footage of explosions and massacres, it simply seemed like some humans weren’t going to wait for hell to punish us; god’s will would move through us like lightening and we’d figure out ways to punish ourselves right here on earth – in this lifetime.

In this lifetime, we lived on Micmac Street in the Mojave Desert. The Micmacs were nowhere to be seen. This was because they are a Native American tribe that lives in the Northeastern Maritime. Their name emblazoned on a Californian signpost was part of my education in dislocation and appropriation. But the tribe wasn’t haunting the space by name alone- it was an emptier transaction than that. The tribal signage was a home school lesson in subtraction that bordered on the conceptual; a simple set of diminishing numerals were swapped for bodies separated from language.

Yet I knew white property, including our property, was suspect and I came to this early. My biological father was the sort of born-again Christian who also adored a sort of property-less and holy pseudo “Super Indian” he had single-handedly conjured. His “Super Indian” combined all the traits of all Native American tribes in one; “Super Indian” was a kind of companion Jesus- his bonus.

My father encouraged us to be like the “Super Indian”. We were to embody “Super Indian’s” love of wilderness, his relationship to animals, and his suspicion of ownership and outsiders. At the same time that we indulged our father’s redface minstrelsy, we felt tremendous guilt for what had been done onto the Super Indian/Jesus in order to ensure our own spiritual and material survival. But when we hiked through fenced properties, we continued to make up pseudo Super Indian names and suck on stones to distract ourselves from dehydration. The signs we ducked under read, “Trespassers will be shot”, and my father always recycled the same gesture, raising his fingers to his lips in the universal sign for silence. Later, we would thank God for our safe passage.

My born-again Christian family spent years, and I spent the summers I lived with them, navigating, this Fundamentalist Christian Imaginary –and in that burning desert, we voiced our fantasies in the form of prayer. Sure we praised piecemeal deliverance but we also prayed for a punishment that swept us clean of sin; a safe passage through a valley of death; a desert void of gunmen and pornographers. But these fantasies, masochistic and unrealistic, were unrequited.

And other visions rose in their deficit: when we hiked, my tall, pretty father always tucked a revolver into the back of his pants, between back and belt. Once he pointed to a concrete fortress in the distance and told us that he was dead sure that pornography was shot there. I imagined porn stars pressing their breasts and penis’ into the newly poured wet concrete driveway, the way we children pressed our hands into a fresh sidewalk.

The Final Fantasy is the Imaginary Fire: my family ‘s house exploding in flames and the blaze stopping short of our very old white Volkswagen bug. All would pile into the car – biological father, step-mother, half-sister, half-brother, foster brother, foster-sister, self, dogs and cat – and because my father had set his racing pigeons loose at the last moment, hundreds would fly in circles above where our home had been. Steam from the earth would rise up to meet them. The heat would touch their wings and they would fly higher. Underneath their formation, we would drive to Lotta Burger – the cheapest fast food burger joint in town – and before we began eating – we would- as always- link hands around the plastic table – bow our heads, shut our eyes – and say grace. Dear Lord thank you for this burger and fries…. and this time we would add And Lord, thank you for saving us from the flames that swallowed our home. We are eternally grateful.

Yo yo! This just came out in the latest issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Am I joining the dark side? Is The Counter Critic going mainstream? Have I gone electric? You can be the judge on this one…

Dance Review:

Dance States of a Theatrical Mind: Diana Szeinblum’s “Alaska”

okay it’s not that I haven’t been busy. Here’s a link to my profile of Judith Supine, the NYC-based street artist whose universe I want to live in: Judith Supine, Brooklyn Rail (December 2007/January 2008).
By the by, this image is courtesy of Supine’s flickr site.