ART HANDLERS

So I was in New York City last weekend to play a jazz gig (I'm a drummer) and a friend took me into Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle to show me two famous sculptures: Fernando Botero's "Adam" and "Eve," which are 12 feet tall, naked, and massively, bulbously erotic in Botero's style. Turns out, though, that Adam's protruding penis looks way more worn than the rest of him -- because it has become popular for passersby to grab his johnson and pose for photos. Some say it's good luck, although I'm guessing it has more to do with plain old sex play. A similar thing might have happened with the companion Eve statue except that her breasts are beyond the reach of anyone who doesn't play in the NBA. (Interesting to ponder why a woman statue's vulva does not attract public fondling in the way a penis does.) Anyway, my quick photo of a woman posing with penis in hand (guys do it, too, by the way) was out of focus, so above is a NY Post photo of the oft-repeated ritual act. Full pics of both the Adam and Eve sculptures are after the jump.

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Adrienne Rich died March 27th. Her righteously deep-sea impact as a poet is bottomless. Here is one of the poems that made her famous for breaking through silences about gender, among other things.

Diving Into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

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PHOTOS FROM THE 2012 BALTIMORE KINETIC SCULPTURE RACE

It's back. The 2012 Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race – a 15-mile race of human-powered sculptures over a course of streets, water, and mud and sand pits – was Saturday. Here are photos from the race website, where you'll find more pics as well as a link to additional photos uploaded by spectators. I've also posted more photos after the jump.

"The 1%"

"Lickety Split"

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BLACK MOSES BARBIE

What if Harriet Tubman were marketed as a Barbie? What if Ken and another Barbie were marketed as escaped Barbie slaves she was leading to freedom? What would the TV commercial look like? And what would it mean? Watch and see. Here is the first in a series of 3 "Black Moses Barbie" mock commercials by filmmaker, artist, and social activist Pierre Bennu. (Full disclosure: I am acquainted with Bennu, who lives in my town of Baltimore.)

This is National Poetry Month, a time when – like Black History Month and Earth Day – corporate culture blinks for a moment at realities it generally ignores. Still, a glimpse can reveal plenty. This month, in one of the main windows of the central public library in downtown Baltimore, the poem on display is "If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God" by Joseph Ross, which won the local Pratt Library system's 2012 poetry prize. The poem has to do with the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. If you're sketchy on the details, here is Ross's explanation of how Emmett's mother, Mamie, electrified the world by displaying her son in an open casket:

Mamie Till’s decision to bury her son in a casket with a glass top was a momentous one. In her words, she wanted the world “to see what they did to my boy.” In 1955, Mamie Till sent her son Emmett to live with relatives in Mississippi for the summer. One night, he was dragged from his uncle’s house, beaten to death and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was found downriver some days later. The image of her son’s beaten and distorted body were broadcast around the world. In the view of some, this murder was seen as the beginning of the civil rights movement. – Joseph Ross

I'll add here that Emmett Till wasn't just beaten. He was tortured, including having one of his eyes gouged out. I'll also add that a few years ago I met and interviewed Emmett Till's cousin, who was in the same bedroom with Till the night that white men burst into the house and took him away to murder him. I will never, ever forget it.

Here is a photo of how you'd see Joseph Ross's poem if you walked past the Baltimore downtown library this month:

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WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU CROSS A POEM WITH GUNTER GRASS, DAVE EGGERS, GERMANY, ISRAEL, AND IRAN?

This: Dave Eggers wins the $53,000 Gunter Grass Award for his book about American abuse of a Syrian-American humanitarian. And just before the scheduled award ceremony, Grass – who has admitted to having been in the SS in Nazi Germany – publishes a scathing poem about Israeli nuclear proliferation and aggression. Uproar ensues. Israel bans Grass from entering the country. And then Eggers announces he'll refuse to go to Germany to accept the award. He'll accept the money, though.

Kudos to Grass. His poem is truthful, and more intellectuals of his celebrated stature need to rise up and declare in public – against the waiting accusations of anti-Semitism – that the Israeli regime, since its birth, has in some ways become the wickedness against which it claims to stand. (Any psychologist who specializes in developmental trauma will tell you that awful suffering often later translates into exaggerated, delusional, or even sociopathic aggression.) Further, Grass's SS involvement as a young man hardly disqualifies him from condemning Israeli behavior. Grass has owned his shame and rightly been culpable for his actions. One can argue, in fact, that Grass's first-hand knowledge of obediently self-justifying groupthink informs his outrage at what he now sees in Israeli policy. Not long ago I had a conversation with an Aryan German, who came of age during the Holocaust, who now recognizes much of what he saw in late-1930s Germany in early 21st-century America.

The full text of Grass's poem is after the jump.

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BAD HEMINGWAY! BAD AUSTEN! BAD FAULKNER!

I knew there was a Bad Faulkner contest. I took second place in it one year. But I never knew until I looked that there were also Bad Hemingway and Bad Austen contests. And God knows what others. The idea is always the same: to do the best possible awful parody of the style of The Master. It's an honor, really, for an artist to have such an idiosyncratic style that people will compete to try to outdo it. Faulkner has always been one of my writer gods, and spoofing him is one hell of a party. I virtually never quote my own work in this space, but in this case it might amuse you. Here is my second-place-winning Bad Faulkner entry from way back in 1993, a parody of his novella The Bear:

The Hare

There was just the man this time, not the dog too, it of ears flopping and incongruous, howling in the unrequited fervor of one who must hunt and who must fail, the hound’s voice doomed but immutable in its comical inveterate reverberation, lost on each hunt in a forest of unseen laughter, ever thwarted and outdone before its frantic task but never, nonetheless, possessed to draw wisdom from its collaboration in its own caricature; not the dog too but just the man, Elmer, the hunter, bearing his rifle in a ritual older than any hanging moss or serpentine sycamore seeming to loom in the unreal half light of these impossible woods, older even than the old man himself, known only as Mel throughout the steaming conformations of this wilderness, his (the old man Mel’s) true hidden self a blank, forever incarnate in a voice said by legend to be that of this land and all of the creatures within it;

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Some of my favorite found art:



Parking lot at a highway rest stop



Wall outside the employee break room at a big-box store

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The Art of Lying

So it turns out that Mike Daisey, the Apple-exposé monologuist praised by many (including me) as a truthtelling artist, wasn't so truthful in his tale about his interviews with Chinese workers. You've seen the story; it's everywhere. In the space of a week Daisey has gone from being the patron saint of political art to being the poster boy for expedient fibs. The popular radio show This American Life's spectacular retraction of its broadcast of Daisey's monologue has triggered an avalanche of angst and anger about Daisey's dishonesty, the media's response to it, and the damage done by both. I had my say about all of this Daisey business yesterday in my blog. What a bloody mess. But as a performing writer myself, I can tell you that the aesthetic issue here is simple: If you present your real self to an audience and tell them, "This happened to me," it's on you to make damned sure that you then report only what actually happened to you. And if you feel the need to blend in some things that didn't happen to you, you say to the audience, upfront, "I'm blending in some things that didn't actually happen to me." That's it. That's all there is. Mike Daisey, after doing some denial dances, has finally acknowledged, in his March 25 blog post, that this is what he should have done. Good. But is it enough to outweigh the harm?

Sidewalk Illusions

The above – except for the two people in the "raft" and the crowd of onlookers behind them – is a chalk drawing on a sidewalk. There is no river, no waterfall, no raft, no alligator. It is all colored chalk on pavement. The artist who does this mind-bending work with depth perception is Julian Beever. Maybe you've seen photos of his sidewalk drawings. They have been all over the Internet for years. The only word I have for this kind of talent is "scary." What I love about it, in addition to its brilliance, is that Beever does it in public. It's a kind of shared visual performance art. No museum. No admission fee. More photos of his drawings after the jump.

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ART THAT MOVES YOU

Frog gets a push through the mud pit

Ever been to a sculpture race? I mean literally: a race where artists design and propel sculptures on wheels in a test of speed through the streets of the city to see who crosses the finish line first. The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore sponsors one each year. It is inspired and insane: a kind of loony art triathlon in which human-powered sculptures traverse a 15-mile course through city streets, a water loop in the downtown harbor, a sand pit, and a mud pit. Only human-generated power is allowed: no engines, no motors. There are prizes for first place and next-to-last place (making for a killer sprint between the last two finishers), a "mediocrity award" for finishing in the middle, awards for creativity and engineering, and general awe for finishing at all. Teams of artists and gizmo freaks work all year on their entries.

Above is my photo of one of the contestants from the 2007 race. Other photos from that race are after the break.

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Scat!

Awright. Before The Last Poets, before Gil Scott-Heron, before Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy and Queen Latifah and 50 Cent and Jay Z, there was scat. Voice as the ass-kicker of all improvisatory instruments. With or without words. Mouth as sax, piano, drum, dream, whatever. No instrument in your hand? No problem. If you can sound it, you've got an axe. Get ready for this mind-melter from the 1950s/60s trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross (check out how Jon Hendricks plays air saxophone with his fingers):

Assassination and Art

What happens when an artist puts up a large installation in Manhattan with a big sign out front advertising it as "The Assassination of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama"?

In June 2008, when this actually happened in the midst of the presidential race, what the NYPD did was pounce on it, shut it down, and detain the artist for questioning. The artist, Yazmany Arboleda, protested that the exhibit was actually a take on the racist and misogynist media assassination of the two candidates. One piece in the exhibit, for instance (see pics after the jump), a sweet photo of candidate Obama's two young daughters with their dad, carried the caption "Nappy-Headed Ho's" (as in Don Imus's infamous slur of a black women's basketball team). A truck-sized black penis on the wall was captioned, "Once you go Barack..." You get the idea.

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Outdoor construction walls are natural canvasses. I saw this one in New York City. I have no idea what it means. But I like it.

Agony, Art, and Apple

It is a cliché that artists are among the last-ditch truthtellers in a society. It is also true. These days, for example, as corporate journalists become less willing and less able to contradict the ruling script of American life (e.g., there is no alternative to 21st-century monopoly capitalism as a way of running our country or organizing the world), it is increasingly the artists who help break the actual news about what is wrong and what change is possible.

Who is passionately exposing lies and delusions on the part of both the Obama corporatists and the dog-whistle right? Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert -- comedians, for God's sake. Who wrote a famous open letter to Laura Bush declining her dinner invitation with the explanation that Ms. Bush had chosen to live in quiet harmony with a murderous and criminal regime? Internationally-celebrated poet Sharon Olds. And who, now, is sending chills down corporate and consumer spines with his little one-man show about the people who actually make your iPhone? An overweight, nervy actor and monologist named Mike Daisey, whose theatrical monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," brought audiences the story of Chinese workers leaping to their deaths from factory complex roofs to escape a wretched life in service to Apple. The New York Times and other corporate media have since picked up pieces of the story of how the electronics industry runs horrifically dangerous, hellishly abusive, city-sized factories. But it was a solo guy with a touring one-man show who told it.

It's one more reason why artists should have way more societal stature: they are among our default sources of truth when the official tellers choose to shut up. Read on Daisey's blog how Apple is now acting very, very afraid of these revelations. And listen here to an edited live performance of Daisey's monologue aired on the radio show This American Life.

Welcome to Tuesday Muse, the successor to A Poem for Tuesday. Think of it as "A (Poem + Painting + Spoken Word + Music + Performance Art + Sculpture + Noise + Mash + Animation + Story + Photography + Public Art + Multimedia + Theater Performance + Anything Art) for Tuesday." Today: Playing for Change, whose muse builds a song by having a crew travel the world to record one stellar musician after another, sometimes in remote outdoor locations, in such a way that each musician can hear and play to what the others have done while adding his or her own piece. It's like building a choir a person at a time while leapfrogging assumed barriers of geography, genre, and culture. It's also grown to be about more than songs: PFC is now building music schools in impoverished locales and is sponsoring social-change concerts. Founder Mark Johnson explains here how PFC's recording process works. And here is their version of Gimme Shelter:

Funny: even before Sean Paul Kelley announced that he needed to do something new, I felt I needed to do something different with A Poem for Tuesday. It's been working at me for a while now, and I'm happy to say that next Tuesday I'll do it. A Poem for Tuesday will expand to become Tuesday Muse: a space where I'll feature any and all creativity: visual arts, music, poetry, dance, performance, film, stories, animation, noise, you name it. No limits. If it's art, it will be here. (Feel free to send suggestions my way.) It's a big world. Let's celebrate more of it. To christen the change, here is something by one of the few poets who I've repeated in this space: the late, great Lucille Clifton.

fox

who

can blame her for hunkering

into the doorwells at night,

the only blaze in the dark

the brush of her hopeful tail,

the only starlight

her little bared teeth?

and when she is not satisfied

who can blame her for refusing to leave,

Master Of The Hunt, why am i

not feeding, not being fed?

– Lucille Clifton

Here is one by Emily XYZ:

STRONTIUM: It sits in your bones, it sits in my bones/and it will still be there long after we are gone, strontium/I wonder whose idea it was/Was it the government? Was it the Christian Scientists? Sometimes I wonder about them, strontium/Don't worry on getting drafted, don't worry on world war three/Everything that you're afraid of/is inside you already.

– Emily XYZ

Elizabeth Brooke Hazen says:

Why I Love Zombie Woman #6

Because she's stuck with stiff and stupid legs,
and decomposing skin, but perseveres;
because she sees without eyeballs, she hears
with oozing ears; because her organs, like eggs
dropped from their carton, hit the path with splats,
but still she trudges on; because her need
is clear, uncomplicated: she must feed;
because she barely notices the rats
that gnaw her ankles; because she doesn't stop,
even after the hatchet hacks clean through
her reaching arm; because she will pursue
her prey till they have nothing left to chop.
    Because when she lies in piles, inside out,
    she will not know regret, or shame, or doubt.

– Elizabeth Brooke Hazen, from Gargoyle Magazine #51

Here is one by Sarah Browning, written years before the fall of Tiger Woods, the Great Recession, and the alleged end of the Iraq War.

Falling for Tiger Woods in a St. Louis Airport Bar

Down we went, into flat America
like the golf ball on TV. Not much
hope, coming in, but now I've met
the wet promise of gin in an airport bar.
The white men around me
are talking Cardinals, golf, ketchup
that's clopping the bottle top.
Two guys down from me, Troy is talking
hip replacement, Walter Reed, Iraq,
15 years of service, heading to D.C.
for the hip, the Nationals, maybe
Amtrak to Fenway Park.

Tiger Woods loves me, I decide,
the gin settling in for the second flight.
Still, Tiger misses the shot, Troy leans
on his crutches, calls our flight time
to Tiger, calls to him to satisfy us,
our airport needs, all the America
we'll be leaving behind – the gin,
the white men, my love, Iraq,
Troy's hip, the ball that sits hovering
on the green and will not fall.

– Sarah Browning

Here is a poem by Cornelius Eady that gets to the guts of the matter.

Chittlin's

According to the chef,
At this small restaurant with its hazy view of the Pyrenees
Dizzy ate nine more of these than I will tonight
It must have reminded him of home, I think,
Whenever he passed through to play the summer jazz festival
In a neighboring town,
And assured him that he wasn't.
And when the dish arrives, hot, pungent,
Its workings disguised in mustard,
Cuisine instead of what's left,

I thought of a friend, who might have said,
When my nose reminds my brain of what I swallow,
Now taste where you come from,
And the sight of the man, waving for another plate,
The insulting stuff turned sweet, digestible: jazz.

– Cornelius Eady

Michelangelo wrote an extended sonnet kvetching about what a pain it was to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Yep. Who wouldn't in his position? In his case, he fired off the verse to his friend Giovanni. Seriously. If you don't believe me, ask former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, who wrote in Slate about the artist's pissed-off poem.

When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel

I've already grown a goiter from this torture,
hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy
(or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison).
My stomach's squashed under my chin, my beard's
pointing at heaven, my brain's crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy's. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!

My haunches are grinding into my guts,
my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,
every gesture I make is blind and aimless.
My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's
all knotted from folding over itself.
I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.

Because I'm stuck like this, my thoughts
are crazy, perfidious tripe:
anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.

My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.

Michelangelo, written in 1509 to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia, translated from the Italian by Gail Mazur

Let's revisit song lyrics as poetry. This time it's Lou Reed, painting one of the more painfully cynical romantic scenes you're likely to see.

Romeo Had Juliette

Caught between the twisted stars,
the plotted lines, the faulty map
that brought Columbus to New York

Betwixt between the East and West
he calls on her wearing a leather vest
the earth squeals and shudders to a halt

A diamond crucifix in his ear
is used to help ward off the fear
that he has left his soul in someone's rented car

Inside his pants he hides a mop
to clean the mess that he has dropped
into the life of lithesome Juliette Bell

And Romeo wanted Juliette
And Juliette wanted Romeo

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The Shamali Plains are in central Afghanistan, where your tax dollars prop up a brutally corrupt corporate-friendly regime against brutally regressive resistance. Here is a poem by Susan Terris.

How They Survive

On the broad Shamali Plains,
In the desolate village of Qhurqul

The enemy has cut down grape vines, walnut
And mulberry trees, felled the apple orchards.
And Amir? He has returned to a well
Dammed with rocks,
A house turned to rubble by mortar fire.
What has he salvaged? A tin box, a chair,
A tub without a bottom.
Now, in the char of the old kitchen,
He and his family camp out.
They have no grapes, no nuts or bright berries,
No apples to eat, but they do keep warm
Slowly burning what they have lost.

– Susan Terris

I don't know why I like this poem. But I do.

something that you should know

my secrets
appear on your window
when you fog the division
with your own warm breath;
you lost yourself in their presence,
in your search for
cheekbones on sunflowers
and night blades
by the moon's chin.
impatience hummed your fears,
and the absence you cherished
quickly dissolved.
the only way to know is
to
ask
nothing.

– Cecilia Borromeo