Special People Ep. #21: 'Arthur'

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My friend 'Arthur' talks us through the entire story of his marriage. And his divorce... after just one year of matrimony. This is intense stuff.

Hotline Bling

https://vine.co/v/e99JqpwFjZe I watched the new video three times, and there is zero difference between Drake and how my Dad dances at a wedding.

Special People ep.#20: Betsy Capes

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Betsy Capes is the founder of Capes Coaching. She helps artists and creative professionals achieve their goals. It's not a "trust falls and Scientology"-type deal. It's the real deal. She has a fascinating story. Here it is.

Just in case

"Perhaps the public have forgotten about my wealth, prowess with women, or ability to deal drugs. I should remind them." - every rapper

David Shields

Screen Shot 2015-10-06 at 6.19.32 PM I just got into this writer David Shields. I first heard him on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast, in a long interview about books, fiction, and culture. I loved the talk. I have a degree in English, and it was still challenging to keep up with. But it was the good kind of challenging, and a great example of two skilled writers blending esoteric takes on their work with practical considerations. Here's the podcast:

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Shields wrote a book in 2010 called Reality Hunger that apparently caused a little buzz in the literary world. I am 5 years behind in all my literary buzz. I have not read Reality Hunger yet, but they summarized it on the podcast. It seems Shields argues that "the novel" is is an ossified literary form that we keep trying to revive, when what we should be doing is moving beyond it and experimenting with different kinds of prose.  People like Jonathan Franzen are essentially trying to re-write the big, serious 19th century novels. Shields asks: why? Why is this the high water mark of the prose medium? Why are we just doing the same thing over and over again? Here is the Random House blurb for Reality Hunger, which makes me want to read it a lot:

Shields has written the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists in a variety of forms and media who, living in an unbearably manufactured and artificial world, are striving to stay open to the possibility of randomness, accident, serendipity, spontaneity; actively courting reader/listener/viewer participation, artistic risk, emotional urgency; breaking larger and larger chunks of “reality” into their work; and, above all, seeking to erase any distinction between fiction and nonfiction.

That's pretty pretentious. Which makes sense: it was written by a publisher. But the ideas Shields is playing with (spoken with his own words) are not. People want visceral experiences through art, not warmed-over Dickens.

I just read a book Shields wrote with Caleb Powell in 2013. It's called I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel. It's like a novelistic podcast. Two people (a literature professor - Shields - and his former grad student - Powell) spend three days in the woods arguing. It's part a Socratic dialogue, part-memoir blend of non-fiction and self-presentation. I read it in two days flat. There are few things better than being so into a book you devour it. Next up: a Shields-introduced collection of essays and prose called Life Is Short - Art is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity. God bless the New York Public Library.

 

 

 

O Superman

On Friday I saw performance artist Laurie Anderson’s latest work, Habeas Corpus. Performed at the Park Avenue Armory, it was a multimedia hodgepodge of lots of things, mostly music. It was broadly “about” Guantanamo. The Armory is huge. It’s a giant vaulted space the size of a 10,000-seat stadium. It was almost completely blacked out. It felt like a physical manifestation of the legal black hole those prisoners inhabit. There were two non-blacked out locations: a giant plaster cast white chair, filled with a generically sculpted, seated human figure, and a stage. Onto this figure was projected a live video feed of Mohammed el Gharani, a former Guantanamo inmate. He was captured aged 14 and served 8 years in the prison before being repatriated to Chad.

Laurie Anderson conducted a brief interview with him, and then played a recorded interview. He talked about his relationship with his prison mentor, Shaker Aamer. He broke down while taking about Aamer, doubled over in psychic pain.

Anderson cut the tape. Then Anderson read Allen Ginsburg’s poem “Song”. It's great. Read it if you like.

A theme of the night was developing. The theme of love. That love is the only thing that sustains us through horror. The love el Gharani felt for Aamer. The love that we all feel for mothers, fathers, friends. The love we felt for others in that space.

The band TuneYards – Meril Garbus and Nate Brenner - took the stage and sang/created (using loops) a strange, Middle East-inspired sound collage. It is strange to completely agree with the philosophical/political intent of a piece of art (“Guantanamo is bad, both for the inmates and for us”) and yet… not enjoy the art. I’m not going to say the sound collage was bad, because I’m not capable of judging the relative merits of avant-garde sound collages. It just wasn’t for me.

Then Laurie Anderson played O Superman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VIqA3i2zQw

O Superman is one of my favorite pieces of music. It pulls off the impossible, being at once totally original and totally accessible. It sounds as strange and without precedent as it did 25 years ago, despite decades of electronic music exploring some of the territory it opened. It also meets the definitive criterion for a masterpiece: I feel something different every single time I hear it.

It happened again that night. Superman: the American icon, the pop culture vessel that encapsulates our values. To sing about Superman in the context of Guantanamo felt profound to me. As did singing it in an Armory, a military building, not unlike the military installation of Guantanamo. One line - “they’re American planes” - hit harder than usual. If you like, all the lyrics are here.

I cried, like I always cry when I hear it. It was a gift. It was also very generous of Anderson as an artist to revisit and re-interpret an American classic in this context. It must be hard to "play the hits", and I am grateful.

Then Anderson and TuneYards played another sound collage. It was even more not-for-me than the first sound collage. I gritted my teeth and got through it.

Then they introduced a wedding singer-type dude from Syria called Omar Souleyman, and his beats dude with a keyboard. I felt horrible for him. This was the very definition of a hell gig. Souleyman plays up-tempo fun Arabian party music. This was a giant cavernous room filled with old jews in pleated khakis. He tried his best, and he cranked out the jams, but it was an awkward, stilted moment.

My feet hurt. My back hurt (we were standing the whole time on a concrete floor). I left the space and went to the bar.

I felt bad. I wish I could be all smarty-pants and say “in Guantanamo they have no liberty, so in the ultimate exercise of freedom I left the art performance dungeon to go drink Merlot”. But that would be cute bullshit.

I just felt dispirited. The continued operation of Guantanamo is one of the most awful crimes ever perpetrated by this country. Not in the scale of human suffering. We’ve made far many more people suffer. But in terms of conscious, bipartisan, and at times even joyful violation of the most basic stuff we’re supposed to stand for? There’s few things worse than Guantanamo.

And what can I do about it? Nothing. It’s a military prison, encircled by a military base, encircled by water, encircled by the communist Cuban navy. Through federal income taxes, I pay for it, but there is nothing I can do to close it. The majority of Americans, and two branches of Government, believe it should remain open.

I left the space full of questions. Questions without answers.

How do we make change in a world that refuses to do so? How can individuals (such as me or you) prevent or combat evil, and bend the arc of human events toward justice?

Is the answer “nothing”? I fear it might be.

I paid $50 for the ticket. I’m glad I saw and heard some art and poetry and music. But right now I feel that – as far as human progress toward closing Guantanamo is concerned – it was a total waste of time.

The Merlot was $9.

The Grand Stand

TOMORROW NIGHT: myself and Kyle Ayers take over the WEEKLY show at The Grand in Williamsburg. The great Jo Firestone, Mike Recine, Brooke Van Poppelen and Will Winner will be our guests. If you've been looking for an excuse to come out to a show, this is the one. You won't regret it. We're building something for the ages. Like a funny pyramid. Screen Shot 2015-10-05 at 9.53.01 AM

Tweets of the week

https://twitter.com/ComedyCentral/status/649259980076531712 https://twitter.com/ComedyCentral/status/649064379003052032

https://twitter.com/ComedyCentral/status/648950764925288448